Stepping into the Uncanny, Unsettling World of Shen Yun - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/stepping-into-the-uncanny-unsettling-world-of-shen-yun <comment><USER2> Embarrassed to say that my wife and I were duped into purchasing tickets to the show. We had thought it would be a highly choreographed, theatrical re- enactment of significant events in pre-Mao China, and had not done any research on it.

Instead, it was horribly amateurish propaganda (the entire "set" was a projected CG image). Heavy-handed plays for sympathy and the demonization of the Chinese state culminated in a spiritual Armageddon where a Christ-like deity leads his followers out of a world-consuming conflagration.

The audience lapped it up (this was Arizona, by the way). There were no misgivings or complaints voiced as we shuffled out of the theater. We felt suckered, and, to this day, share knowing looks of sheepishness and incredulity when we see billboards around the country advertising the show.

<comment> xkcd-sucks To be fair, Chinese propaganda comes off as heavy-handed to a Western audience, FG is putting on a propaganda show for literal survival, and FG has received the treatment which happens to "bad" groups of people. FG is a nutty cult, but (in my opinion) dont deserve to get organ harvested for belonging to a cult. Other "bad" groups might be Uyghurs now, Hui 5 years in the future, "intellectuals" fifty years ago, and lots more. The quote about "first they came for the Jews, and I was silent because I was not one" comes to mind.

<comment><USER3> Did you read the article? The organ-harvesting thing appears to be disputed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who don't know, Falun Gong is perceived like the Chinese version of Scientology in China, although a lot of injustice was done to Falun Gong followers and most of their assets frozen, there isn't much sympathy for them and they're typically regarded as a bit weird, believing in Qi, faith healing and all that.

<comment><USER5> is believing in Qi a fringe belief in China nowadays?

<comment><USER6> Someone once told me that the authorities in China are a bit hypersensitive to organized woo, mostly as a reaction to the boxer rebellion. I don't know what to believe.

<comment><USER7> More like the Taiping Rebellion...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion#Death_toll](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion#Death_toll)

<comment><USER6> Well both really, important point is that there is a history that influences the current ideology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, I guess my priors need a bit of tuning; they picked up from the pervasiveness of the advertising that this must be a funded propaganda push, but I assumed it would be from the Chinese government, not someone rather bitterly opposed to them.

(This is not an *-ist comment; that governments promote their cultures in other countries to create "soft power" is an established fact. I for one would love in many ways to live in a world where all our conflicts were solved with such soft power, rather than the harder kind.)

<comment><USER9> > but I assumed it would be from the Chinese government, not someone rather > bitterly opposed to them.

I have to admit, I thought exactly the same. Just yesterday saw a booth with a nicely dressed man in a suit, selling Shen Yun tickets and thought it must a troupe from China and wondered how much propaganda is in it. I was imagining something like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucius_Institute). Then today saw this on the HN front page.

It turns out yes, it is selling propaganda, but not the kind I thought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm surprised that an article like this does not mention the long history of religious-revolutionary movements in China. Just a few:

0184 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Turban_Rebellion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Turban_Rebellion)

1351 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Turban_Rebellion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Turban_Rebellion)

1794 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Lotus_Rebellion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Lotus_Rebellion)

These rebellions usually have a frame story of an ancient way of life founded on people's harmony with nature and one another. Because the government operates at variance with this harmony, the government is not legitimate and must be replaced.

Francis Fukuyama talks at length about the "Mandate of Heaven" concept and its impact on legitimacy in China in his recent books.

<comment><USER11> Don't forget the biggest of them all, the Taiping Rebellion

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion)

<comment><USER12> That one is the best. When I tell people about it they think it is too ridiculous to be true. A guy who thought he was Jesus's brother started a war that killed tens of millions of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My family and I went a couple of years ago. It seemed fairly benign, if a bit corny/garish. The whole "evolution is evil" thing kind of comes out of nowhere. Afterwards I looked up the group behind it and read about Falun Dafa. It won't convince anyone to join their group, but it probably raises a fair amount of funds for it. As entertainment it is moderately interesting, but I wouldn't go again.

<comment><USER14> I believe evolution is evil, too. Doesn't mean it's not true.

<comment><USER15> Natural selection is progress through suffering and death. Evolution can happen in many different ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "The fact that both Falun Gong and the Communist Party communicate via propaganda makes it almost impossible to understand what's really happening."

<comment><USER17> Generalized it for you:

"The fact that everyone in 2019 communicates via propaganda makes it almost impossible to understand what's really happening."

"Social media" is a bit of a whitewash. It should really be called, "Everyone Propaganda!"

<comment><USER18> American Idiot really was ahead of its time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Shen Yun was a Baader-Meinhof object: once I saw it, I started to see it everywhere._

More than that -- until I read this, I had half-convinced myself that I'd been seeing these posters since the early 90s, not 2007!

<comment><USER20> I love the next sentence:

> Shen Yun greeted me silently at the bus stop and loomed over highway exits, > following me around on the physical plane of existence the way anything you > shop for on the Internet starts to follow you around online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Jia Tolentino's pieces often resonate, in that particular way of things that are at the right distance to what they are talking about: close enough to understand them but far enough to show their place in time and space, culturally.

<comment><USER22> Her article on Juul is one of my favorites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I got duped into buying tickets to this show for my wife as an anniversary present a couple years ago. (This was in Atlanta, GA) We spent the first half in utter disbelief of the crap we were witnessing, and left in disgust during intermission. However we were definitely in the minority, and found that very puzzling. Maybe the political religious stuff was going over most people's heads?

</comment><comment><USER24> The other day I found a video about the "cultural war" between Falun Gong and Chinese govt., in the form of two disguised fronts (Shen Yun and Confucius Institute, respectively) within the US soil. This was made by a Western guy who's associated with neither of them. It's quite interesting. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tsXtk7psUc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tsXtk7psUc)

Here in Japan, I see that a few large private universities are affiliated with Confucius Institute, and I have seen a Shen Yun ad on YouTube. The cultural war is certainly going on here too.

</comment><comment><USER25> I urge anyone who likes weird stuff to not read this or anything else about the show and go see it immediately.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, I'm interested in seeing it in a "I like roadside attractions and pulpy weird stuff" kind of way, but not at the price they charge for tickets.

<comment><USER27> Hey, you might even get away with asking for a free ticket! I remember walking in by mistake and an old lady on her way out promptly asked if we wanted to see it - she was very excited. I was just there to check out the theater itself. Five minutes later we were in the theater, watching the thing, trying to find ways to leave without offending the nice lady who'd just given us free tickets to the show :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I often see it advertised at Chinese restaurants around town. Whenever I ask the proprietors if it part of Falun Gong, they all claim not to understand, or they just say no. I can't tell if they actually know what it is and don't want to admit it, or if they legitimately don't know.

<comment><USER17> _Whenever I ask the proprietors if it part of Falun Gong, they all claim not to understand, or they just say no. I can 't tell if they actually know what it is and don't want to admit it, or if they legitimately don't know._

Don't know, don't care, they got a restaurant to run! [1] They're probably just getting past your question and getting onto the next task. My wife grew up in mainland China. She thinks of them as wackos and/or somewhat like "carnies." If they can live and let live, and they don't do something like human trafficking, then they can believe what they want and make whatever art and dance they want, as far as I'm concerned.

([1] I used to work at a local midwest bookstore chain that Borders seemed to steal its ideas from. Customers got a totally relaxed vibe, even from the workers. However, being a worker there was a _workout_! I probably did enough walking for that one activity to qualify as a fitness program. So if you go to a restaurant that seems hectic, there's a good chance it's not just hectic, but that just getting through your shift is a heroic feat of endurance and optimizing on your feet. (I've also worked in restaurants.))

<comment><USER28> Fair point, though these restaurants are in a small, rural, southern town, so they usually aren't exactly "hopping" :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Chinese scientists with doctorates from prestigious American universities who practice Falun Gong claim that modern physics (for example, superstring theory) and biology (specifically the pineal gland's function) provide a scientific basis for their beliefs."

...

"For further information, consult your pineal gland."

</comment><comment><USER30> The Chinese government does not need or want a "Taiping Rebellion" equivalent to that of the infamous Hong Xiuquan -- which was the largest war in human history in terms of casualties and destruction. So to them, Falun Gong and it's leader represent that kind of threat, once it reached tens of millions in size. That is orders of magnitude larger than the student protests in Tiananmen, and that was brutally suppressed. Totalitarian regimes are going to be just that, brutal/monsterous and unforgiving.

<comment><USER31> The Taiping movement sprung up during the failing days of the Qing when governance was declining and life for the common people worsened, so maybe the PRC government should focus on fixing that first before torturing dissidents

<comment><USER32> The rise of Falun Gong was well correlated to a period of economic uncertainty in the late 90s, especially in the Manchurian rust belt cities where neoliberal reforms lead to massive unemployment and poverty. While the allegation of torture and organ harvesting are substantive, these acts were in no way targeted at FG followers or political prisoners in general. And FG's attempt at monopolizing such victimhood only comes off as disingenious.

Nowadays FG is very much a shadow of its former glory these days in China thanks to both supression efforts as well as improved economic prospects. Its influence has aged much better outside China because the Chinese diaspora's world view is more or less stuck in the 1990s, like it was the end of history according to Francis Fukuyama.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I live in the Boston area and they are very, very persistent when it comes to promoting the event. It seems like every local business has a Shen Yun poster in the window, and they go to door-to-door with flyers. There are TV ads on local broadcasters. And of course they are all over Facebook with ads. This reflects not only the zeal of the volunteers but a very large budget to do the broadcast ads.

The local media and most of the public seems to have no clue that it's a propaganda gambit.

<comment><USER34> They heavily blanket every metro area surrounding their home base in southeastern NY.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> For those interested in China, serpentza's youtube channel recently did a video about this. The youtube channel China Uncensored is also funded by people associated with Falun Gong. It is ridiculous anti-China propaganda, though some of it is warranted.

</comment><comment><USER36> What are good, non-cultish Chinese dance productions in New York or the Bay Area?

</comment><comment><USER37> Most Chinese people I know already have a clear understanding of how creepy and weird Shen Yun is, and view it in the same light as Scientology. But that message hasn't gotten out to everyone else yet. It's not a beautiful chinese art, culture, and dance show.

</comment><comment><USER38> My wife and I went a few years back and felt like we got scammed. Low quality acrobatics, with heavy handed propaganda and unexpected religious messaging. We didn't sign up for that.</comment>


RDJ wants you to donate money to charity for chance to watch Avengers 2 with him - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D86GOaIVIIY

<comment> xkcd-sucks Strange choice of movie for Richard David James... Oh, it's the less talented RDJ</comment>


Show HN: I made an extension that helps me type emails 2x faster - <AUTHOR> https://speechcomplete.app <comment><USER2> It would be helpful if it's a website, so I can use it for different purpose of input, not just composing email.</comment>


1500 people died in America in 2009 because not everyone gets sick leave - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/01/15/more-than-a-third-of-american-workers-dont-get-sick-leave-and-theyre-making-the-rest-of-us-ill/

<comment><USER2> The title of the article is "More than a third of American workers don't get sick leave, and they're making the rest of us ill".</comment>


Clarifications on Flash Player for Mobile Browsers and the Future of Flash - <AUTHOR> http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarifications-on-flash-player-for-mobile-browsers-the-flash-platform-and-the-future-of-flash/

<comment><USER2> As a purely strategic and tactical decision, I for one applaud Adobe's ability to make one of the most difficult choices in any endeavor: choosing to shudder something that has had success in the past. Chambers iterates this well and succinctly "the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops".

Time and again, we see tech leaders pour billions into platforms, systems, and toolsets whose writing may be on the wall, but whose previous success, market share dominance, and/or prior profit potential overshadowed its forthcoming pain and struggle (see: Nokia Symbian/MeeGo, MS Bing), and time and again, the inability to cut things off quickly have led to near catastrophic results.

Choosing to build something is a courageous admirable thing. Choosing to stop building something is equally so.

<comment><USER2> (Correction: "choosing to shuTTer something..", I meant. I often confuse those two, and it makes me shudder.)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not sure why I keep posting Flash related stories. Maybe it's a morbid nostalgia for the days that I did Flash dev work. Still interesting.</comment>


Show HN: Chad Free Zone – Automatically swipe left on forbidden names - <AUTHOR> https://www.chadfreezone.com <comment><USER2> This is probably the most intelligent piece of software ever written. We've reached the pinnacle of development. Shut your computers down, everyone.</comment>


Helpshift Gets $3.2M To Build The Salesforce Of Mobile CRM - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/30/helpshift-gets-3-2m-from-nexus-true-ventures-to-build-the-salesforce-of-mobile-crm/ <comment><USER2> Highly determined, most capable people with ruthless execution, who have a history of shipping quality products.

It has taken the team a few iterations to get the right product. This could be it.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great news and much deserved success for the superb team. I have lost count of apps that i deleted within five minutes of installing where one touch crm would have been of enormous help.

</comment><comment><USER4> Congrats Abinash and team. A highly committed and focused team. Finding help and engaging with app creators seems very important and I personally have found no way to send feedback or ask questions without the hassle of going on searching the app in the AppStore. This, in my opinion, is the holy grail of CRM in Mobile.

</comment><comment><USER5> Met one of the founders at their offices in my city, Pune. Mighty impressed with the product team & culture they have built.</comment>


Google shuts down flight search API - <AUTHOR> From email - not posted elsewhere yet.<p>Dear QPX Express API Customer, After careful consideration, we've decided to shut down the QPX Express API as of April 10, 2018. How this affects you After April 10th, you will not be able to access the API and will no longer be charged for this service. Until then, you will be charged a reduced rate of $0.02 per query for any queries beyond the 50 free daily quota. Next steps You don't need to take any action. However, if you are actively using this product you may want to find an alternate solution before April 10, 2018. If you have any questions about these changes, please don't hesitate to contact us at any time. Sincerely, The QPX Express API team <comment><AUTHOR> Disappointing that another Google service is being killed. This one was fairly useful for saving flight searches for use with alerts.</comment>


No. Saturn Wouldn't Float in Water - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2013/07/no-saturn-wouldnt-float-in-water/ <comment><USER2> Come on, you're sucking all the fun out of it. Also, 2013.</comment>


Obama administration joins critics of ICANN that oversees Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/28/AR2011022803719.html?hpid=topnews

<comment><USER2> > "One concern is that if the U.S. decides Syria is behaving badly, then they > could make all Web sites using Syria's country code domain - .sy - point to > freedom of expression sites, for example," said Avri Doria, an ICANN group > chairman. "Countries say, 'How can we subject ourselves to that?

Besides the fact that we haven't done this to any of the Arab countries currently in revolt, I haven't heard of anything like that happening to countries we've been in actual shooting wars with.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your experiences with remote support software? - <AUTHOR> My company is getting close to a beta release and we need (1) demo/webinar software and (2) remote control software for on-the-fly remote support. Specifically, we need to be able to take control of clients' computers to do installs and troubleshoot problems.
The two big players seem to be GoToAssist/GoToMeeting and WebEx. Does anybody have experience with them or other solutions? We care less about features/functionality and more about our customers having a seamless setup. (ie. No screwing around with client firewalls.)
Any suggestions or advice is appreciated. <comment><USER2> I like FogCreek copilot <https://www.copilot.com/>

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Works simply & beautifully. No firewall problems (works indirectly if it has to, directly if it can).

(It's just VNC with a nice native wrapper (both Mac and Win) that makes it painless for all involved.)

<comment><AUTHOR> "VNC with a wrapper" worries me. I've had problems getting VNC working across corporate firewalls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recommended <http://www.uvnc.com/pchelpware/index.html> You can customize it with your company needs and it's really fast.

</comment><comment><USER5> WebEx is the dinosaur, but I like TeamViewer <http://www.teamviewer.com/> \- it is inexpensive and works _very_ well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I checked out TeamViewer and really liked it. Simple, worked on all of my computers, and I like the idea of being able to buy a "license" instead of having to fork over a monthly service fee. But TeamViewer can't connect multiple people so I can't use it for presentations. Not for presentations involving more than one other person anyway.

This is still a possibility for support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use WebEx in my work environment primarily for sharing deployment sessions that involve a GUI or for remote low-framerate group presentations. It's relatively easy to use and does the job.

For remote support, I personally use LogMeIn (they bought Hamachi out I believe) for my parents' desktop. That is a great tool for remote control software, provided you don't mind installing the LogMeIn client on the target system.

</comment><comment><USER7> I used GoToMeeting as the customer (the other party was demoing to me), and it was pretty seamless. Worked out of the box, and was pretty easy to use.</comment>


Why does HN timeout so fast? - <AUTHOR>

If I dont use HN for a few mins it expires and clicking on next link shows an error message saying link expired. Why is this? Its a pain that I need to go and reload the main page and the click next to come back to the page i was on. <comment><USER2> I believe that there was a post about this before.

IIRC, the way that HN is set up, it re-distributes the "fnid=NSgN9i46gR" parameters at the end of the string to the first/second/third/etc. pages.

Reddit (a similar example) does this, but it also does it in such a way that the parameters "?count=50&after=t3_ihoin" fit into a SQL(/alternative DB) select statement.

This would probably be a better way for HN to do it, but they probably have a reason for why it's currently done this way .

</comment><comment><USER3> Could you at least change the error page to include a link back to the main 'new' page?

</comment><comment><USER4> It is brain-damaged that both Reddit and HackerNews do this.

Their next page URL's should either be page based ("show me page 4, even if page 4 has changed") or based on the next article ("show me the page that contains article 1234"). You might see a few duplicates are miss a few articles but you wouldn't get "unknown or expired link" errors.

</comment><comment><USER5> It does seem to vary a lot between about 2 minutes and 5 minutes of inactivity. Like I can read or even nicely skim 30 articles in 2 minutes...

<comment><USER6> My guess is that it depends on the amount of traffic.

Edit: I remember a few years ago it would take 30 minutes to an hour before it expired. Maybe it deletes the oldest tokens first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A while back, when the site was rather bogging down, pg made some changes to memory management (as I vaguely recall from one of his comments posted at the time). I believe part of this is more aggressive discarding of memory, and that part of the result was to succeed, or fail, more quickly without progressively tying up the server.

So, overall the server works better. When there's load, part of this include bailing sooner on your troublesome request. ;-)

In your case, this may include no longer having memory/context for stale pagination links. I deal with this by using a browser extension to load several pages of links at once. (Without a browser extension, one can achieve the same results by opening those links manually in new tabs and then working one's way through those tabs at one's leisure. I'd advise not overdoing this, though; no need to burden the server with requests you will seldom/never use.)

(I may be wrong as to the memory management. Again, this is just my vague understanding/recollection.)

<comment><USER8> What browser extension do you use?

<comment><USER7> Sorry to reply twice, but my previous reply was made quickly and I incorrectly recalled the wrong context. (I also recently mentioned using an extension to view PDF's in Google's Document Viewer.)

The extension I was referring to in my grandparent comment is:

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/repagination/>

(Note that there is another, older "Re-Pagination" extension that was abandoned. IIRC, this one picked it up and updated it.)

PLEASE BE CAREFUL if you use this extension. If you do not choose a limited page count, it is easy to unduly load or overload a server. This include the HN server, and such request behavior will get you cut off or banned (rightly so; please work to preserve HN resources).

I use it, infrequently, a time or two a day to load the first few top pages of results, which I then work through at my leisure.

I also use a bookmark to transform all the link href values to open in new pages/tabs. That way, I don't lose the browser-generated multiple-page page (as it were) by forgetting to right click or shift-click to open a link that appears on it in a new tab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Glad you mentioned it, I was beginning to think it was just me.

</comment><comment><USER10> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17675>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2677600>

</comment><comment><USER11> Yeah. It's pretty whack

</comment><comment><USER12> It seems ironic that the same people that sit around and obsess about what the latest groovy language is that you supposed to be using to make your web site with can not seem to make a very good web site for themselves. But then, I am addicted to Hacker News, so what does that say about me?

<comment><USER13> And me too...</comment></comment>


Experts on the Uber IPO and the Ridesharing Company's Future - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/experts-uber-ipo.html <comment><USER2> It's a fantasy to think Uber is a "platform." It's a relatively simple app that anyone could copy and several have.

Uber has no proprietary technology, no network effect, and no route to profitability. Is Silicon Valley so enamored of ordering cabs by pressing buttons rather than speaking into a phone that they really believe this company has value? It's nuts.</comment>


Don't Be Anti-Social During Meals With Friends. - <AUTHOR> http://www.konsumkultur.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of people got that video (I Forgot My Phone): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8) which shows a well known first world problem.

Maybe there is time for an mobile device (n)etiquette? Let's catch some rules and i will put them together ;)</comment>


Operational PGP - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/grugq/03167bed45e774551155 <comment><USER2> > "Subject: Your Cocaine Has Shipped!"

I'm using this for the subject line of all my emails from now on.

<comment><USER3> What could possibly go wrong

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most of these recommendations are pretty drastic. Not using keyservers and using --throw-keys for example - while the author's examples are valid, i fear that PGP needs more useability, not less, to strike a balance of "pretty good privacy".

Too hard to use means it won't be used right or at all, thus actually does not enhance, but instead reduces security.

I feel like that beyond this, improvements to the gpg cli, lib, et al. are necessary for it to be used securely.

</comment><comment><USER5> Legitimate question:

The whole "delete when you're done' practice is a pretty common tenant to secure communication. However, there are plenty of cases where having that historical data is really useful. After all, computers are excellent at storing archival data, and being able to search and reference that archive has saved me more times than I can count.

What practice, then, can you employ to maintain a secure archive of your messages for future reference? Is this something that is considered rude, or even dangerous and reckless, given that the mere existence of the archive introduces an attack vector, thereby compromising the effectiveness of encrypting the messages at all?

I understand that there are a lot of trade offs and sacrifices to be made in the name of security, but is maintaining a message archive one of those sacrifices that is expected to be made by all parties? Or is this one of those points that can't be covered with a blanket statement, and the retention policy is pretty much dependent 100% on the sensitivity of the content?

<comment><USER6> Yes.

<comment><USER6> To elaborate, the security precautions you take are entirely dependent on the threat you face (or believe you face). If you're Dread Pirate Roberts, creating a detailed diary of you criminal activities is a terrible idea [1]. If you're a 13 yr old girl, creating a detailed day by day diary is probably not a life threatening decision.

You should take the precautions appropriate for your threat model and risk appetite. I suggest deleting correspondence after a set period of time. I know people that do a yearly purge of all their sensitive mail for the previous year in January.

If you are encrypting for the sake of encrypting, as some people do (see: cover traffic), then you can keep archives of your mail because you face no negative outcome if your archive is compromised. There is no downside, so go for it.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBdGOrcUEg8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBdGOrcUEg8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >If you are going to go with option #1 then you should probably use an OpenGPG smart card. There are a number of vendors that sell them.

Has anybody been successful in buying one? I can never seem to locate a store that sells to the US.

<comment><USER8> kernelconcepts.de sells them and ships to the U.S.

<comment><USER9> What's to stop your card being intercepted and replaced by a three letter agency when it's shipped. That's why a physical store with tamper seals is useful, or better yet when something is manufactured locally - then you can check before you buy.

<comment><USER8> If you're expecting trouble from state actors, then yes, you may want to consider other options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Where possible, and relevant, take control over that infomation and unlink > it from data linked to you. For example, you can control the From field by > creating a new email account.

I genuinely wonder, what's the point of rotating different From: addresses?

If a message has been GPG signed, it is trivial to discover the corresponding public key. Thus, a form of identity — the public key, typically along with email, name, and/or other "user id" information publicly associated with the key — is available to an attacker rergardless of the content of the message.

The sender could refrain from signing the message, but then every time (s)he rotates a new address into the From: field, (s)he must communicate through some other trusted channel that the new address is associated with his/her identity and existing public key.

Then there's the practical concern that most gpg implementations are going to, by default, lookup in the keyring based on the To: address in the email and the user-ids of the keys in the keyring. This will fail, unless the new address is added as a user-id to the public key, which defeats the whole purpose of rotating the From: address.

<comment><USER11> I think this is why the author recommends NOT publishing public key identity publicly. Additionally, signing may not actually be necessary or desirable (e.g. given out-of-band transmission of the receiver's public key and a desire to avoid attribution).

<comment><USER6> Correct. There is a section that addresses signing. In short: don't do it.

OP: From addresses are not to be rotated. Each communications channel should be in a compartment. Compartmentation requires minimizing the amount of information leaked, not maximizing it by contaminating a large number of addresses.

For more information on compartmenting and unlinking relationships, see [1].

This guide is not a complete COMSEC plan. A complete plan would be tailored to match the circumstances and requirements of the actors involved. This is a collection of notes and best practices. They need to be adapted and actively applied for the situation.

A complete COMSEC plan would include things like setting up dedicated email accounts for correspondence, creating the corresponding PGP keys. The confederates would exchange contact information, either out of band, or via another exist secure channel. Information exchanges would be via PGP email with fixed subject lines and only relevant information inside the content. All emails would be deleted in a rolling 7 day window.

[1] [http://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/03/18/the-paddy- factor/](http://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/03/18/the-paddy-factor/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yikes, I did not know about --throw-keys being necessary to discard metadata. Kinda scary how easily you can leak information even with great tools.

</comment><comment><USER13> We at Lavaboom use PGP manifests to hide most email metadata inside the envelope [0] [1]. Inspired by [2].

0: [https://github.com/lavab/pgp-manifest-go](https://github.com/lavab/pgp- manifest-go)

1: [https://github.com/lavab/pgp-manifest-js](https://github.com/lavab/pgp- manifest-js)

2: [https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2014-11-21_To_PGP_MIME_Or_Not.h...](https://www.mailpile.is/blog/2014-11-21_To_PGP_MIME_Or_Not.html)

<comment><USER14> Interesting to know you took my idea and ran with it!

I'd love to chat with you guys about your implementation, the whole point of that blog post was to get people to discuss and interoperate... any chance I'll find you on IRC?

<comment><USER13> Sure, #lavaboom on Freenode is mirrored on our Slack. Hit us up anytime :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a bit tired, but can someone explain how "Publishing? Not a great idea" and "Deniable key exchange" fit together?

It seems the former says 'just hand our your key to persons that need it', while the latter seems to say 'make your key available ~everywhere~'? This part even lists key servers as one of the routes others can take to verify your key?

<comment><USER6> I am a public figure. If you want to contact me via PGP you can find my key easily. When you contact me, you encrypt your message and include your public PGP key. This eliminates the threat of a man in the middle attack. Only one side needs to be authenticated (mine) and it is done publicly.

If you and a friend want to discuss something secretly, then you can create new email accounts plus new PGP keys and exchange them out of band, e.g. via USB stick. This will allow you to remain somewhat anonymous in that neither email account nor key are linked to you. As long as you don't taint that compartment, it will be secure against compromising you.

That level of secrecy might not be necessary for your given threat model. It is up to you and your interlocutor how you want to secure your comms channel. This guide presents best practices that can be combined into a complete COMSEC plan.

This guide is not a strict HOWTO that presents a simple step by step solution for everyone. No such HOWTO can exist. Instead it presents a number of solutions to problems (and attempts to explain what problems they solve, why and how).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a relatively minor issue, but "PGP" and "PGP-Encrypted Message" are probably cleaner subject options. The message is obviously encrypted, so these titles don't leak any information.

</comment><comment><USER17> There is a lot you can get wrong when using PGP. A single mistake can cause you to be in a load of trouble.

I can't wait for the day when we have something extremely secure, simpler, and easier to use that has wide adoption.

<comment><USER18> You might want to look at this then:

[https://github.com/Spark-Innovations/SC4](https://github.com/Spark- Innovations/SC4)

It's not widely adopted (yet) but it is a whole lot simpler than PGP. We're in the process of fixing the issues uncovered by the security audit now, but it's already in pretty good shape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Key management is one of the toughest issues for secure email. Key management for an individual is hard enough but can you imagine how it would be for a corporation? PGP (the second incarnation that was bought by Symantec, not the first that was bought by RSA) had corporate tools for key management that worked quite well.

Quite a few companies used PGP's products. I'm not sure what the state of the customers are now that it has been bought by Symantec. I'm genuinely curious. (I used to work for PGP)</comment>


Centurion - A SASS & CSS3 Responsive Web Framework That Scales With Your Device - <AUTHOR> http://jhough10.github.com/Centurion/ <comment><USER2> I'd strongly suggest re-working this to remove the grid layout styling from the HTML. It inhibits the ability to properly control the layout for different sizes.

Recommended reading: <http://framelessgrid.com/>, <http://wail.es/post/really- responsive-design> (disclosure - I wrote this), <http://wail.es/opendaws/> (an example of the idea)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have to say that I am pretty happy to see some CSS frameworks are embracing SASS, but one thing that Bootstrap has is a large community of pre-made templates that are fairly easy to modify. I wish there was a slightly better ecosystem for the alternatives. I would totally do it except that I am a) a terrible designer, and b) I don't want to commit code base to alternatives that may not go anywhere. I don't mean that as a stab against this framework: I'm just not the early adapter type when it comes to new technologies. I really hope a viable alternative to Bootstrap comes along soon. The real challenge will be creating something that doesn't "look" like a Bootstrap or, in this case, a Centurion design.

</comment><comment><USER4> Is it just me or is The Grid example page broken? This is how it looks on Safari on iOS 6.0.1 on iPad mini: <http://imgur.com/3lIns> It looks similar albeit smaller on latest Chrome on Samsung Galaxy S3.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice, but why does it overflow the viewport between 920 and 950px? Is it deliberate?

Edit: This only happens if you resize the window, it never overflows when setting device width

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> via: [http://www.functionn.in/2012/12/centurion-sass- css3-responsi...](http://www.functionn.in/2012/12/centurion-sass- css3-responsive-web.html) [Check out www.functionn.in for more web resources].

It's a new responsive framework with the latest bells & whistles, worth taking a look at if you're into SASS and RWD.

Licensed under GPL.

<comment><USER6> Just a quick FYI if you didn't notice, "tsaking" might need a minor correction ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the heads up! Corrected :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess this shows how few people actually look at the source code. There's no Sass in the repo, just the compiled CSS.

</comment><comment><USER8> It feels very bootstrappy. Is there any major advantage to using this vs responsive bootstrap?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can read the author's thought on the 'why' of this framework here: [http://www.justinhough.com/writing-the- journey/centurion-3-a...](http://www.justinhough.com/writing-the- journey/centurion-3-around-corner) \- it seems to have same features as Bootstrap, just more lightweight imo.

<comment><USER8> That doesn't really justify using it for me at least. If I need light, I can pick and chose my exact components for bootstrap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> FYI, it's "Sass" not "SASS".

</comment><comment><USER10> Another shity CSS framework that doesn't do anything better than adding code overhead to your project. Go ahead people use Bootstrap everywhere then wonder why your product fails in the market. It's better to write some clean, yet minimal CSS than use any kind of framework for CSS. Do you need responsive designs? Just use @media at the end of your CSS file to restyle some of the elements for different screen widths or just hide them. That's all you have to do!

<comment><USER11> I have been using Bootstrap for this entire year on various projects at work. Nobody complained because I was using Bootstrap. In fact, I actually got a lot of compliments about how well the projects looked. The fact is, outside Hacker News, _nobody cares_ if you're using Bootstrap. They care if your project doesn't look horrible, and more importantly, they care if your project _works_.

Now sure, I could learn CSS and do all the stuff you put in the last four sentences. But designing a good-looking style with all the components I needed - grids, buttons, navbars, modal dialogs - would take _far_ longer than unzipping Bootstrap, dropping it in my assets folder, and actually writing the bloody code. Especially since I walked out of the office Friday after emailing my supervisor a two-and-a-half page list of stuff I _wanted_ to get done this year but couldn't.

<comment><USER12> You do care about overhead though, right? Bootstrap adds so much unnecessary code you will never use... which is fine for prototyping and bootstrapping, but not for production apps.

<comment><USER13> That's fine, but then you do pruning of the elements you don't need. It's a lot easier to prune than to create every single time. I think the overhead added by Bootstrap is easily covered in the amount of boilerplate coding you get to skip.

<comment><USER12> So you're going to add something only to prune out 85%? It's not likely youre going to keep any of the same styling, button styling, modal styling, etc...

I like the approach of just using one of the numerous form boilerplates to make your forms pretty (most time-consuming task I think), and roll the rest from scratch. You can make an entire site responsive in not much CSS at all.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Your personal Hacker News comment statistics - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/awalGarg/hn-personal-stats <comment><USER2> Cool. The point total doesn't jive with the way that HN shows it - I would guess that it is counting the 1 point that any comment starts out with, before it gets up/downvoted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops! Fixed: [https://github.com/awalGarg/hn-personal- stats/commit/d629a7d...](https://github.com/awalGarg/hn-personal- stats/commit/d629a7d6f1f0b189f68f87b81bdbc8c8d387a6d9)

Thanks.</comment></comment>


Looking for best practices on architecting Rails applications. - <AUTHOR>

I'm new to Rails though I've been developing system software (C/C++) for 5+ years now.
I'm learning Rails through building an application that is similar to Twitter but which charges for each post (I know this is contrived, but it's the next step from a simplistic example application for me).  I'm hoping this will teach me about authentication, integration with OAuth APIs, payment processing and overall Rails development.
I have been going through the http://www.railstutorial.org book and it's been very very helpful in understanding Rails basics.  However, I am constantly hung up on how to either integrate various gems (i.e. devise) or create my own functionality within Rails architecture.
What are some resources people here would recommend for transitioning from a novice Rails dev to an intermediate Rails dev?  I'm looking for guides, how-to's, etc. on architecture and patterns for developing an application using Rails; something that will talk about real-world experience(s).  Don't get me wrong, I like going through the made-up examples as a complete novice, I need that to be comfortable with the language/framework/API, but what comes after that?
Thank you <comment><USER2> For ideas on getting started visit <http://rails-bestpractices>.

That being said the only way to really understand best practices is to build a large app, with users and a live DB, then try maintaining it over time. Only then will you see how architectural decisions positively or negatively affect your application and your own engineering experience. You'll see why, for example, fat models and skinny controllers make your life far easier as your codebase grows.

<comment><USER3> <http://rails-bestpractices.com/>

bad link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We all learn differently but have you considered looking at actual Rails system as a source of inspiration and guidance? I generally find this the best way to learn.

There's the RailsCasts site which is open source:

<https://github.com/ryanb/railscasts>

And, shameless plug, I'm kinda proud of the code quality for the Mogade server (myself feeling i just did the transition you are seeking to make):

<https://github.com/mogade/mogade-server>

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.amazon.com/Rails-AntiPatterns-Refactoring- Addison...](http://www.amazon.com/Rails-AntiPatterns-Refactoring-Addison- Wesley-Professional/dp/0321604814)

[http://www.amazon.com/Crafting-Rails-Applications- Developmen...](http://www.amazon.com/Crafting-Rails-Applications-Development- Programmers/dp/1934356735/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1305614537&sr=1-1)</comment>


Show HN: Review my startup - Biographid - <AUTHOR> http://www.biographid.com/ Biographid lets you record events in your life, and automatically links other's events to you.<p>I made it during my spare time - let me know what you think. <comment><USER2> I like the layout and the cleanness.

However, not sure if I understand the concept 100%. It seems to be similar to a timeline for your life. I created an event and noticed that I can add other participants to it. I assume that the event will be visible to them. I guess that is pretty nifty.

For example, suppose I attended a bbq 4 years ago with 5 other people. I can create an event for that, and those people will also have it recorded that they attended the bbq.

I also like the privacy settings - very useful!</comment>


Video Games helping kids mental health - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/03/mightier-mobile-game-platform-kids-calm/ <comment><USER2> Now I just need a adult version that will help me deal with my tech interview anxiety.

<comment><AUTHOR> You and me, both!</comment></comment>


Delivering High Scroll Performance - <AUTHOR> https://code.facebook.com/posts/456535491190613?__tn__=H

<comment><USER2> What tool do you use for data visualization?

<comment><USER3> We use Scuba. [https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under- th...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood- data-diving-with-scuba/10150599692628920)</comment></comment>


SafeInt - <AUTHOR> http://safeint.codeplex.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I just learnt how much of a problem integer overflows are, from the author of this library.</comment>


Ask HN: How to promote my free html5 games? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
A few weeks ago I started a pet project: build one new html5 game per week [0]. I already submitted this project to HN, and got a lot of positive feedback [1].
My goal now is to get more people interested in my little project. I've posted about it mainly on reddit and here. Do you know any good community/blog/website that can be interested to talk about this kind of project?
Thanks for your help!
[0] My project: www.lessmilk.com
[1] Previous HN thread: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7036486 <comment><USER2> Cool project. I started something similar but other projects took my time.

IMHO, to get more exposure with a project, make it cool, that's all there is to it so that other people want to look at it or share it. The question is, what are they getting from looking at it? and that's how you get exposure.

If it gets hits on here and it's up on github or somewhere then it's going to get viewed if people see it as popular or worthy of sharing.

To be honest though and in my opinion, don't implement to get exposure, implement it for yourself and if exposure comes then that's great.

There was the person that did something like 160 apps over 160 days. That was cool so got a lot of coverage.

I'd maybe add links to tutorials on how you did each game or something or provide a way for people to learn as they go along. That would be helpful and then you'd get exposure.

Anyway, that's just my two cents on the issue.</comment>


Add a const here, delete a const there - <AUTHOR> https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/01/08/add-a-const-here-delete-a-const-there/ <comment><USER2> WARNING:

I believe the site has some malware injected in it. At least the mobile version of it. After a few second it redirected me to some site with a fake Facebook skin.

<comment><USER3> Once again, this demonstrates that blocking advertisements is a really good idea from a security perspective. It doesn't just reduce clutter and speed up page loading times, but also prevents loads of malware issues. See also [https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/62840155490772582...](https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/628401554907725824)

<comment><USER4> AdAway's Android host file seems to block it just fine, you don't even need a fancy adblock plugin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is begging for a C++ FQA style hate blog post. Paging Yossi Kreinin? Seriously, "Delete const three times to move 53,064 bytes to read-only data segment and save 729,168 bytes of code." WTF?

[1] [http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/index.html](http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/index.html)

[2] [http://yosefk.com/blog/](http://yosefk.com/blog/)

<comment><USER6> as others pointed out, its the compiler. but maybe this requires a Microsoft FQA. Maybe these compiler "bugs" are really more microsoft "anti-features" designed to slowly erode people's faith in C++ on MS platforms and nudging them toward C# or other .NET "solutions" ?

I just can't believe that one of the biggest monolithic organizations with unlimited budgets and decades of experience developing tools _for their own platform(!!)_ would make such careless mistakes or miss out on rather obvious optimizations. And it also sickens me that random devs out there are wasting hours of their lives doing completely unpaid MS product QA work. At least when jobs are outsourced to the third-world, the laborers are paid _something_.

<comment><USER7> Microsoft compilers are dramatically improved since the VS 6.0 days. The days before C# and vista. The days before herb sutter came in to save us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm interested in the possible security improvements in the change which didn't seem to be mentioned at all. Is all this data already in an NX area, or was it somehow already protected via some other means?

<comment><USER9> None of the pointers were code pointers so there are probably no security improvements. It might protect Chrome from a few hard to diagnose crashes because now if a stray write hits those arrays it crashes instantly instead of misbehaving later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For embedded systems that extra const can mean the difference between having that data in SRAM or Flash.

</comment><comment><USER11> Wow awesome! It's partly these little optimizations that keeps C/C++ going.

I've never considered that const might have a performance benefit (and mostly just use it as a compile time check). But will consider it in the future.

Would be interesting to see performance benchmarks for the changes made here, as well as applying const in general.

<comment><USER9> Ignoring the VC++ compiler bug/quirk, the benefits for adding const tend to be small and hard to measure. How do you measure the possible reduction in private pages? How do you measure the productivity gains from slightly fewer corrupted globals.

Usually you don't. You just tag your const globals as such and then get on with your day. Once you develop the habit the cost is zero so measuring the benefits isn't necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So will they put the consts back after the VS bug is fixed?

<comment><USER13> If all the of the things which have had 'const' removed are members of structs that are themselves 'const', then there is no need to re-add them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> MSVC is such a bad compiler. Yes, they are working on it, it's getting better, but this is apparently a fairly new regression.

<comment><USER9> Chrome continues to use MSVC on Windows because it generates better code than clang. So, MSVC is the worst compiler, except for the alternatives?

<comment><USER15> Would appreciate a reference on that if you have it handy.

Is this more of a whole program measured X% regression on some perf benchs, or specific target cases where the codegen is notably worse ?

<comment><USER9> I should probably take back my claim because I can't find the evidence to back it up and I might actually be wrong. I thought I remembered that there were some important cases where VC++ generated better code for Chrome, and some binary size advantages, but I can't find my references.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In my experience you should NEVER have const instance fields. Ever. If you want a const reference, just make a pointer to const. If you need a const value, just leave it mutable and access it through a const getter or work around it some other way. The language just doesn't seem to have been designed to make this particular feature actually worthwhile.

<comment><USER17> What's the drawback for a const member?

IMO `const` should be used liberally: members, locals and other declarations.

When you're on a team and you have a data structure that has const members, it should give that newer/unfamiliar team member pause when they get the compilation error because they added a method that modifies the `const` member. Now they have an opportunity to take a step back and ask "Oh, why was it designed this way? What other assumptions in the code are invalidated if I need to remove the `const`?"

`const` for locals is good for those notorious ten-line functions that over time multiply into a 150-line function. Yes, we should refactor that mega function into something easier to digest. But right now I am trying to figure out this bug: I can see that ^^ up there 'foo' was initialized as a particular value, and down here it looks like it must have changed. Instead of looking through all of the hundred lines of code to see who might've updated 'foo', I know right away that a likely explanation is stack corruption.

This is BTW why I love that rust has opt-in mutability. It feels almost a little silly sprinking `const` thither and yon when it's only a few select places that it's actually un-needed.

<comment><USER9> Author here. I'm a big believer in adding const everywhere - local variables, globals, member functions, etc.

Marking globals as const can move them to the read-only segment which has some modest performance improvements, but in most other cases const doesn't affect code-gen _at all_. Using const prevents programmers from doing certain things, and the compiler enforces that. That suggests that the compiler already knows whether or not programmers are doing those things - it doesn't need a 'const' hint to tell it. And in those cases where it can't tell, the 'const' hint is usually not sufficient for it to depend on.

In short, with the exception of moving globals to the read-only segment I am not aware of _any_ performance improvements from using const.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Offtopic sidenote: I wish more open source projects had instructions as good as [https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/debugging-on- win...](https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/debugging-on-windows)</comment>


GNU plotutils - <AUTHOR> https://www.gnu.org/software/plotutils/ <comment><USER2> An interesting tool. It does the right thing by default in ways that gnuplot doesn't. You shove data into it on stdin(or as a file) and it gives you a decent looking graph.

The bitmap font rendering is unacceptably bad though, and it seems awkward to do anything more than a basic 2d plot.

</comment><comment><USER3> The LZW patent expired more than 12 years ago, and I'm sure most people would rather be able to produce a fully-compressed animated GIF rather than an RLE- encoded one. I wonder if they are really holding on to their anti-LZW stance, or if it's just that no one has bothered to update the programs and the web page?

</comment><comment><USER4> Ah the less well known sibling of gnuplot. It really is a nice system and a quick way to get graphs, but the poor bitmap support is spot on.

</comment><comment><USER5> It's only been 7 years since the last update, too!

<comment><USER6> I was trying to find out where this suddenly came from and how this related to gnuplot.

A few sentences from the submitter on why this is news and why we should care would be in order.

<comment><USER7> Gnuplot is, despite its unfortunate name, not a GNU project program and not GPL licensed. The GNU plotutils are.

<comment><USER8> It's not just not GNU, it's got it's own license with non-standard conditions.

[http://gnuplot.cvs.sourceforge.net/gnuplot/gnuplot/Copyright...](http://gnuplot.cvs.sourceforge.net/gnuplot/gnuplot/Copyright?view=markup)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


IN SEARCH OF NO GROWTH COMPANIES - <AUTHOR> Where can one find ~10-50mm ARR companies looking for an exit? no/low growth fine.<p>Yes I've tried googling, and yes I've combed through the public companies that fit this criteria. I'm more curious about what do founders/companies do when they hit the scale wall (aside from just shutting the company down). <comment><USER2> Why would they shut it down if it works and makes profit? Just milk it.

<comment><AUTHOR> let's say gross margin profitable, overall not profitable. growth stopped and the outcome of business with sales and marketing cut to zero is still too low/small and doesn't produce liquidity for investors.

<comment><USER2> Well it's investors' problem, if the business is still able to operate and pay for itself, so yes cut sales and marketing and just milk it as long as it works, why destroying something that works, who's going to make or save any money on that?</comment></comment></comment>


Cloud-Services Company Cloudflare Discloses Potential Sanctions Violations - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/cloud-services-company-cloudflare-discloses-potential-sanctions-violations-11568152033?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> I was ready to buy shares tomorrow. Not sure what to do now.</comment>


Amazon Flexible Payments (FPS) with Ruby on Rails [Plugin] - <AUTHOR> http://www.paradoxica.net/2009/01/25/amazons-flexible-payment-service-fps-w-rails/

<comment><USER2> Does anyone know if FPS is like paypal or google checkout? I'm wondering if it means customers need to use their amazon user id to use it.

<comment><USER3> it's only feasible in the US currently.</comment></comment>


The Art of Engineering - Building the ultimate car for Larry Ellison - <AUTHOR> http://www.kirkhammotorsports.com/book_aoe/ <comment><USER2> Actually, I was really disappointed. The engine bay shot killed it for me, those K&N filters on top of the rocker covers, silly anodised aluminium pressure fittings and the crazy angled radiator support just lack symmetry and grace.

The whole thing says to me that it was a whole lot of work, for not a whole lot of excellence.

Still though, I bet it goes faster than my car.

</comment><comment><USER3> Should be required reading for any future Oracle customer.

<comment><USER4> Because Ellison demands perfection from his engineers or because then they'll know why Oracle software costs so much?

<comment><USER5> Are the people who make the decision to go with Oracle more impressed by his success than they are turned off by his opulence?

<comment><USER6> Larry made his money from scratch in one of the most brutally competitive marketplaces in the tech industry. So what if he wants to enjoy some of his wealth now? Same with Richard Branson - or John Carmack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hmm,

The whole description seems satisfyingly low tech. The engine is carburetted rather than fuel-injected but it claims a higher power to weight ratio than a Vyron.

It's interesting that this company's nearly hand-made cars cost _only_ three times the cost of a factory made Toyota ("Our cars start at $56,995 for the 427 models and $61,995 for the 289 models"). I would have imagined that the ratio was much more - a hand-made Pentium would set you back a lot more than 3X the cost of a factory built one.

<comment><USER8> A hand-made Pentium would be impossible to make, just like much other modern tech where building the tools and process to create the end product is more important and costly than the actual end product.

What I'd like to know is how much this custom made car cost.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. There was an article posted here not long ago about Dubai which included a photo of a solid gold Mercedes. This car is _understated_ by Dubai standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How many of you document your work in anything resembling this manner? At my company we do project books, but we also make physical products so there are a lot more physical artifacts to photograph. I can imagine screens of JS getting old after a bit.

That said it would be cool to see some documentation of software products. From concept to wireframes to UI to deployment with "director's commentary" on the code along the way.

The TapTapTap guys teased at this with their "Convert" UI video:

<http://www.taptaptap.com/blog/convert-design-evolution/>

If nothing else it would be extremely gratifying for team members and useful training tools for new additions.

</comment><comment><USER10> The book binding is awesome in and of itself... This particular example is a bit extreme, but if your going to make a physical book, make it worthwhile!

</comment><comment><USER11> Ultimate car is imho bit of an overstatement, but it's still extremely nice craftsmanship.

<comment><USER12> It's the _ultimate car for Larry Ellison._

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> $56,995 and no engine, ouch! impressive car but looks like a factoryfive to me

</comment><comment><USER14> Good grief. This reminds me of the SNL sketch where Trump is giving his wife a diamond encrusted front door. Point being, this is what you come to when you run out of stuff to spend your money on.

Why have this thing custom built when you could have a Tesla roadster for substantially less? Probably because he already has two of those I guess. To each his own...

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe a little nitpicky, but does the font they used in the book seem a little... plain? Maybe it's just the sans serif that's bothering me, but if I were designing a book about the ultimate engineering anything, I'd want to put similar thought into the font face.

</comment><comment><USER16> Speaking of building cars for celebrities, Did they ever find a suitable vehicle for Ellen Cleghorne?

</comment><comment><USER17> Larry's got lots of money from helping implement the coming police state in the USA. Just wait until our next 'terrorist action'</comment>


Show HN: Flute – my attempt at a better email API - <AUTHOR> https://www.flutemail.com/ <comment><USER3> Excited to check this out! Great work igrammarays. I really like how you split providers by from.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, founder here. I've been working on Flute for just over a year now. I got this idea after being utterly fed up with deliverability problems and lack of easily searchable logs on Mailgun, SendGrid, Amazon SES, etc…which one do you use? However, these established providers have been doing email for almost a decade, so I can't hope to beat them at the delivery game. SMTP/delivery magic is an ancient protocol with so many pitfalls and unwritten rules - <USER2> left me aghast. So instead of trying to build another SMTP relay, I tried to solve the problem by decoupling your email API from from the underlying servers and providers. I call these decoupled APIs "flutes": think of the air blowing in as your firehose of API requests, and the fingers of the flutist routing your email harmoniously through different servers. I propose these "virtual flutes" as a better way to manage transactional email in a load- balanced, provider-agnostic, failover-native, hot-swappable, exportable-logs fashion with full-text Elasticsearch for your data. The primary goal of Flute Mail is better deliverability - our secret sauce is making it easier to do proper segmentation and have more control over your email routing.

"Configurable routing" means your API can be configured to route your emails through a different provider or FROM address on-the-fly (or even load-balance them to save money by using multiple free-tier offerings). I'm super conscious about reliability, so Flute was designed from the ground up to handle all sorts of failure modes [1], from MTA spam bounces [2], mistaken IP/domain blocks, server downtime, queuing delays, and other sporadic problems that happen surprisingly often with email delivery APIs. I call this configurable multi-provider setup "Smart Failover".

Another unique feature of Flute is that we aggregate your email history and delivery metadata in an Elasticsearch cluster for fast analysis and easy customer service followups. If you're concerned about a third-party storing your data, we offer the ability to interface directly with your own Elasticsearch cluster, keeping the data off our servers. Email data can be highly sensitive, so I believe it should be kept on servers you control.

The business model I'm experimenting with is to offer all of these features for free to developers and small teams, because I know what a pain it can be to choose a good email API. I plan to monetize this service by charging bigger volume users.

Please let me know what you think!

[1] [https://status.sparkpost.com/incidents/ldv2gdc96hx5](https://status.sparkpost.com/incidents/ldv2gdc96hx5)

[2] [https://mailchannels.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/202191674...](https://mailchannels.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/202191674-Fixing-the-550-5-7-1-RBL-Sender-blocked-IP-or-domain- error)

<comment><USER4> Disclaimer: I don't know the emails.

I am immensely curious how you're achieving better delivery rates - I'm browsing through the site now trying to understand this. I say this because at the end of the day, I thought any failures reflected poorly on the provider (SendGrid/etc) which puts the provider and the customer at a sort of war.

> The business model I'm experimenting with is to offer all of these features > for free to developers and small teams, because I know what a pain it can be > to choose a good email API. I plan to monetize this service by charging > bigger volume users.

These plans scare me, fwiw. I appreciate trying to offer an affordable service to small teams where money is tight, but to small businesses like mine, our needs are often too big for the small tiers but too small to get value out of the next bigger plans. Many online services are _expensive_ for us, despite us having revenue. Our margins our thin, I guess. This isn't a critique, I'm just trying to I guess advocate for a pricing model that fairly distributes the pricing load. Since we _(my company)_ always seem to get caught in the middle.

Appreciate your work here, and I hope I find better understanding to eventually use the product!

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not as adversarial as it seems. I should clarify, we achieve better deliverability through a combination of 3 techniques:

1\. Making it easier to properly segment different kinds of emails (this is the #1 tip you'll find on all authoritative sources about email performance, including GMail's official guidelines for bulk senders)

2\. Allowing you to dynamically adjust FROM's and sender IP's to isolate domain/reputation issues.

3\. Catching provider failures, and retrying (Smart Failover).

Only #3 reflects badly on the provider, "putting them at war" as you say. But the majority of our deliverability benefits actually come from the first 2 techniques, which is not really fighting with the provider, just using better tools on top of them.

And thanks for the feedback about pricing. To be honest, my current pricing is a shot in the dark. We're going to have to figure out a better model as we go. Do you have any specific suggestions? Perhaps tying pricing to number of contacts/users instead of sheer volume?

<comment><USER4> > Do you have any specific suggestions? Perhaps tying pricing to number of > contacts/users instead of sheer volume?

No specific suggestions, unfortunately. In our experience, I at least preferred when a service was $X/unit for all tiers.. that is to say, we could either afford to use the service or not. I love those services, it's clear and on paper. So to your comment, I actually like sheer volume. I'm paying for units of your service, and I like that.

However the services I complained about above, were not $X/unit, it was $X/unit until Y units and then $Z/unit. A non-linear approach to payment. They also can feel more expensive, as the paying users prop up the free users. Though this may purely speculation.

Sometimes this meant better bulk rates, where it got cheaper the more you spent. Other times it got _worse_ , where we were seen as a bigger business because our needs were greater, and so we effectively pay more for less. Technically you usually get more features when you pay more, but in unit services like email, messages, w/e, we weren't upgrading because we wanted more features, we were upgrading because we wanted more units. So the pricing per unit got worse.

I'm not advocating you change _anything_ to be clear, you do what's best for your company - obviously. My comment was simply giving our side of the story on payment, and how non-linear models often put us in weird positions. Also, our story is probably atypical.

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes sense. I'm leaning towards segmenting my plans in a hybrid way that restricts advanced features to higher plans, but charges a fixed $X/unit for all tiers. That way you can pick a plan based on the features you need, while still being able to easily calculate whether $X/unit makes sense for your margin. Like you said, if you upgrade a plan, you rightfully expect more features.

The reason we can't do a flat $X/unit alone is because we are not an email API, but rather we see ourselves as a booster-pack for email APIs. We don't sell emails, we sell email delivery optimization tools. Yet still, the volume of emails that flow through our infrastructure really matters. Plus, some of our features, like an Elasticsearch integration, are really expensive for us to support, so it makes sense that we should restrict those features to higher tier customers.

Thanks again, super helpful comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks amazing. And the free tier is very generous as well. I wish you good luck with this project! I will consider it using in near future.

</comment><comment><USER6> Beautifully designed website!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Interestingly enough, my partners and advisors did not agree to the expenditure of a chunk of change (~$2000) quoted by the web designer, so I had to pull it mostly out of my own pocket, instead of the small group fund we had.</comment></comment>


Showing email inbox queue on contact page - <AUTHOR> http://ma.tt/contact/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is actually something I've been thinking about doing. I'm not sure if I would want it updating every minute though.</comment>


A Cold Take on IBM, Red Hat and Their Hybrid Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://www.platformonomics.com/2019/07/a-very-cold-take-on-ibm-red-hat-and-their-hybrid-cloud-hyperbole/ <comment><USER2> > But if the strategic logic is to "change everything" thereby "resetting the > cloud landscape", they're really paying over $34 billion for OpenShift. > Which is a vanilla container runtime. That is open source. That IBM already > had at least one of (as does everyone else in the industry, including the > hyper-scale clouds). And one that isn't a dominant brand or implementation. > IBM could have bought both Docker and Pivotal at a nice premium for a > quarter the price of Red Hat and gotten better assets if that is the > strategy.

So I guess the question is... why didn't they?

<comment><USER3> Because they tried and failed.

<comment><USER4> They attempted to buy Mobi/Docker? That's pretty sad if your company says, "We've not going to take this buyout, because we'd rather our platform survive than take your money and watch you kill it."

<comment><USER5> I think the parent comment warrants a <citation needed>

<comment><USER6> I refer you to the song "No one else was in the room where it happened" on the Hamilton Soundtrack. Not everything can be cited.

<comment><USER7> But then, maybe there was no room. There's no way to believe a random HN comment on such an important issue just on face value.

<comment><USER8> +1

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been giving this some thought because well who doesn't want to glue together cloud-y things.

The only version I can see is one that runs on generic nix. i.e. Spin up a VM on each cloud (and in house) and run a stack on that which software glues it together. Redundancy of sorts.

...however if that glue actually works I might as well do that with 20 sht tier providers and let the redundancy cover gloss over it. No competitive advantage for cloud providers - and each of the cloud's various competitive advantages are by definition not hybrid-able easily.

Scaling? You're now dealing with multiple cloud's worth of different approaches to scaling. Good luck scaling that hybrid style in a resilient way.

...and all of this is _just_ VMs. Add the 50 other offerings the average cloud has all with different scaling, quirks and the hybrid dream is deader than dead.

<comment><USER10> _Spin up a VM on each cloud (and in house) and run a stack on that which software glues it together. Redundancy of sorts_

The thing is that using a cloud as a glorified hypervisor for home-baked VMs doesn't work economically. Colo or even running a DC is cheaper. Cloud generally only makes financial sense if you are using the managed services. And of course the instant you do that you sacrifice portability to a greater or lesser extent. This is of course deliberate on the part of the cloud providers.

It makes sense to pick 2 clouds and go all-in on them using their native and managed services to the maximum. You will need to maintain two parallel skillsets to do this. Completely forget about any layer that promises to abstract it, they are all red herrings if not outright snake oil. Whether that's IBM consultants, or Terraform.

<comment><USER6> This advice is common (usually it's pick one cloud, pick two at least is a bit more sensible) but I really am starting to wonder about it being marketing propaganda of its own.

In one breath we hear that only three software vendors (Google, Amazon, Microsoft .. maybe DO?) have software worth consuming, and all other software vendors that ship this stuff "abstracts" them is snake oil... MongoDB Enterprise... Confluent Kafka... Elastic Cloud Enteprise... Pivotal CF, Red Hat Openshift, Hashicorp Nomad / Terraform / Vault etc - all of these provide valuable software that runs on any cloud, and often has a multi cloud control plane (that's increasingly Kubernetes based).

let's never use any of that, and screw the whole software industry for the cloud vendors because their stuff isn't just a proprietary veneer of automation around those products charged by the hour?

on another breath we are told that the cloud providers charge too much for their VMs. And we think they're not charging too much for their proprietary services?

Firstly, Most "managed cloud services" are not "managed" in the traditional sense. They're hosted, no different from Dreamhost or a bazillion other hosted offerings, often with similar tradeoffs. It's a testament to cloud marketing that people believe there is something magical about Amazon RDS for your Postgres instance. It's a nice automated setup of volume replicated active/passive Pgsql.

There are many, many other ways to do this with open source or proprietary software with varying degrees of automation - maybe you don't care, that's fine, but I'm not sure delta between running in a DC/colo vs the EC2 costs is worth it for some proprietary software bits by the cloud vendors. It's not magic, it's just software.

Similarly to say all abstractions are snake oil is fashionable but also hypocritical. Kubernetes is on fire lately because it is an abstraction for your work loads, a universal control plane, and universal cloud API. Is that snake oil? Serverless (the framework) makes developing on Lambda or other FaaS' sane - is it too snake oil? Heroku or Cloud foundry lets you push your apps and not worry about the plumbing on EC2 or the cloud of your choice (even on a colo/DC!)

But most importantly: You're not locked into lowest common denominator (what does that even mean?) with any of this - you can use any proprietary cloud service you want...the stuff you don't care about - the VMs, network and storage - is the stuff abstracted (and usually all the proprietary knobs like Azure advanced networking or Google metadata/DNS are all available).

Where is the problem? Are Elastic Beanstalk or Google App Engine really superior economically and functionality wise?

Terraform is not about the different codebases, it's about glue code in a standard language to assemble all these cloud services. Crossplane.io is trying to do this via Kubernetes CRDs. Would you rather use Cloud Formation and JSON, really?? I've seen some monster CF scripts - they're hard to maintain and debug compared to TF.

<comment><USER10> _what does that even mean?_

Let me give you a trivial example: GCP gives you a lot of flexibility with CPU and memory when creating a VM. Let's say your workload is ideally suited to some weird combo, like 5 cores and 13G or something. On GCP that's what you provision and that's what you pay for. AWS and Azure offer fixed sizes, so you have to round up to 8 and 16 (and pay for it). So if you want to be cloud- agnostic there's one cool but very basic feature you just can't use.

Once you start digging into this stuff this keeps coming up: something that's efficient (cheap) in one but not in another means: do I do it the same and pay more, or do I diverge and accept that I've got 2 configurations for this feature now, and save some money. Multiply this by 1000 special cases and then you find that trying to make one size fit all is a wild goose chase.

All Terraform really offers is doing this in similar syntax for the subset of each cloud's features that Terraform knows about, and extending Terraform yourself for anything it doesn't. Yes, I would rather use the native thing for each cloud, even CloudFormation. ARM Templates and DSC are actually quite nice once you get used to them!

<comment><USER6> The wild goose chase part I see as a major exaggeration.

It's interesting, I use BOSH + Terraform all the time, wherein BOSH exposes GCP's CPU/memory flexibility, the various Azure NIC/LB/availability set options, AWS' different disk types, etc. Those differences can be modularized, so that 95% of your configuration templates are identical across clouds, and the last 5% maps to specifics.

I'm sure it's not all that different from Terraform w/ modules, though my main problem with Terraform is that it doesn't constrain you into a "do the right thing" path, it's too easy to create a mess.

Anyway, IMO these kinds of differences really aren't hard to handle and it's valid to prioritize cloud-independent configuration if that's what you want/need. It allows the main configuration and installable software to be cloud-independent, dramatically easing testing. We're seeing this drive with the flocking to Kubernetes which enables cloud-independent networking, storage, and compute.

I think differing opinions on this are normal/fine, but i have to wonder why the single-cloud proponents use words like "snake oil" as if to completely discredit a different set of priorities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is total bullshit. Pivotal's stock is $10 now, how the hell does your "back channel source" claim they have more paid customers than Red Hat? At Summit Red Hat had 1000 paid customer references. This guy must be short IBM to put out this kind of crap.

<comment><USER6> And Red Hat's stock tanked due to multiple bad quarters as well. What's your point? It's hard to be a mid-sized ISV these days unless you also own the hardware or have a massive franchise. Red Hat's franchise was fading and OpenShift wasn't growing quick enough to offset it. Meanwhile IBM needed a major strategic shakeup.

Red Hat didn't report OpenShift revenue, it conflates it with JBoss, Ansible, and all other middleware products.

I have no doubt there are more paying OpenShift customers in quantity, but I wonder about revenues - Cloud Foundry always was larger than OpenShift, and if OpenShift surpassed it, that would be indeed news. Cloud Foundry is easily a $500m software business at Pivotal alone, not counting services.

It's all peanuts in the grand scheme of the industry so far - which is the point of this post. What does $38 billion actually buy IBM? A bunch of $150k-500k annual revenue customers? chairs on a bunch of Kubernetes SIGs? VMware got that with Heptio for $500m. Mostly it's the K8s and Linux brain trust , and maybe Whitehurst as a new CEO in waiting, but that's a hell of a price for an aquihire.

<comment><USER8> Small correction, it's ALWAYS been hard to be a mid-sized software company. We were constantly talking about the 5 or so companies that reached 5B with software only. They are rare birds indeed. Red Hat didn't make it without getting bought... (full disclosure, I work at Red Hat)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most large companies don't trust IBM anymore. RedHat has joined them in turning license audits into a profit center. Defending unfounded audits is a large cost of business with both vendors. Hard to imagine many folks trusting them on journeys with new technology.

<comment><USER13> > RedHat has joined them in turning license audits into a profit center.

If a company is using licenses it hasn't paid for, and so isn't entitled to, why is the vendor the bad guy for catching them out?

Maybe I'm the odd one out here as an individual in paying for the movies I watch, and the music I listen to; but I would expect a business to pay for the software it's using, irrespective of your stance on "big media".

<comment><USER14> Oracle makes their licensing model intentionally impossible to be compliant. It's not just "you run x number of instances you owe us y dollars".

It's "you enabled x feature on your database times y users oh and use this handy CPU core count chart to calculate how many cores you're using. Oh and you're running your database in a virtual machine with a clustered hypervisor so you owe us for every cpu core in your cluster".

Then they tell you how much they owe you but "it will all go away if you migrate some of your stuff over to our 'cloud'" and the process starts all over again in 2 years, or less.

Fuck Oracle.

<comment><USER15> Any other companies set their licensing structure like they are laying landmines?

<comment><USER16> I've heard Microsoft's is pretty complicated, they even have a certification exam to prove you understand their licensing.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/learning/exam-70-705.aspx](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/learning/exam-70-705.aspx)

<comment><USER17> It hasn't been that bad for me. I give them an updated user count and tell them what else I'm using once per year and they give me a bill. They've never pushed back on anything. We start with a conference call, I send over a spreadsheet and that's it. They have software I can run on my network, but they have always let me give them the numbers from my asset tracking system. Frankly, they're one of the easiest software vendors I deal with.

<comment><USER18> "User count" sounds so simple when you put it that way. That spreadsheet isn't trivial to build, and the situation on what's in it may be foreign to some readers here (it was to me).

A Microsoft shop needs licenses for each laptop/desktop running windows, but in an office using Microsoft Server to operate its LAN and the requisite services - DNS, DHCP, SMB file sharing, VPN, email, etc - basically any device that touches the Windows Server machine needs a Client Access Licences (CAL), which is available in user-based and device-based flavors.

Let's say the company operates a website and has developers. The development/QA environment requires an (expensive) MSDN account (or whatever it's called now) per-developer. In production, unlimited anonymous/unauthenticated users are allowed to hit IIS (web server). Authenticated access by employees to IIS needs a user CAL, authenticated customer access requires an External Connector (EC) license. But don't worry, the backing MS SQL Server database for the website _also_ needs to be licensed, with per-cpu-core-per-machine licensing available. Except everything's a VM theses day, so the servers sit on top of a VM host (Microsoft Hyper-V), so there's some additional licensing intricacy there to deal with.

On top of that, there's the Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) licensing model available for ISVs, but OEM licenses cannot coexist wth SPLA licensing on the same system (VMs + host).

Just to make it more fun, different Microsoft reps will have different answers on how some of the more subtle intricacies even apply!

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/product- licensing/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/product- licensing/client-access-license)

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/licensing- programs...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/licensing- programs/spla-program)

<comment><USER17> I don't know. I don't think it's that bad. I don't put together the spreadsheet from scratch. Been doing it a long time though. We start with what I had last year. I just have to fill in my numbers for each license. Then they come along and tell me I need an external connector because I'm doing this or that. I groan a little bit and pay.

They're pretty easy because you only have to do it once a year. It drives me nuts when a vendor wants me to manage individual licenses as people are coming on board. I end up having to keep extras on hand. At least let me reconcile quarterly or something. It's even worse when each seat has its own key.

Microsoft makes the license management and reconciliation so easy. The only negative about their licensing is they double dip with the desktop OS and CAL stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hug of death, here is cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R4qm2iW...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R4qm2iWPxwIJ:www.platformonomics.com/2019/07/a-very- cold-take-on-ibm-red-hat-and-their-hybrid-cloud- hyperbole/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-b-d)

</comment><comment><USER20> The best explanation I read was that IBM has bet the farm on Linux as a major dependency, Red Hat was a major contributor with successes they couldn't achieve, and IBM basically internalized a dependency on Red Hat to be in control with maybe other benefits down the line. Now the biggest, two contributors to Linux are the same company. I could see them doing a huge deal just for that.

<comment><USER21> I don't disagree that they're a major contributor to Linux itself, however RHEL usage is plummeting over the last 5 years as stated in the article. Being a contributor and owning RHEL is really no advantage at this point.

<comment><USER22> Redhat profits were growing for 4 years steadily 15-20% for each of last four years. I dont see the confirmation of redhat usage declining, more like very perspective and growing company.

[https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RHT//revenue](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RHT//revenue)

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RHT/financials?p=RHT](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/RHT/financials?p=RHT)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> AT&T sees it differently.

IBM snags AT&T as client in new cloud deal worth 'billions'

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/16/ibm-signs-new-cloud-deal- wit...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/16/ibm-signs-new-cloud-deal-with- att.html)

"As part of the agreement announced Tuesday, AT&T will use Red Hat's open- source platform to manage workloads and applications and "better serve" enterprise customers."

<comment><USER24> They also did a deal with Microsoft so not sure what to make of this.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/16/microsoft-wins- multibillion-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/16/microsoft-wins-multibillion- dollar-cloud-deal-from-att.html)

<comment><USER25> Well, the Microsoft deal includes M365, so that's Windows, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and such. There's probably Azure credits to move some employee-centered services into the cloud and more easily interface with AD/AAD.

On the IBM side, I can imagine they focused on pushing more of the back end systems into IBM's cloud. Possibly some of the monitoring and management systems for AT&T's hardware, and to make it easier to deploy systems for enterprise customers that don't require dedicated hardware.

Edit: this is obviously speculation. But based on the news articles I've read, that's what makes the most sense to me.

<comment><USER26> I'm saying the news articles are focusing on the wrong stuff compared to what we're actually doing internally. The news articles are PR pieces that don't outline the actual strategy in play.

M365 was already in place, that's not new at all every employee already had access to those capabilities.

IBM is basically taking over the internal cloud stuff that's not AIC - e.g. vmware and all of the employees that go with it and all the bare metal system support too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It seems to me technology goes in cycles, and while cloud has had a meteoric rise to dominance, if the pendulum swings back to self-hosted - IBM is now poised to own a substantial part of big enterprise data center technology. I do think at $34B it's a huge gamble, but as the author said, what other choice did they have? They aren't exactly centers of innovation any more (either of them.. and yes, some innovation comes out of redhat, but lets be honest, it's been tapering off for years now).

<comment><USER28> All AWS, Azure, and Google would have to do to respond is offer cut-rate VMware hosting.

There isn't a ton of moat in selling the lowest common denominator. I don't know that IBM has much lead on the other side either, from Rackspace, for example.

<comment><USER29> Azure already can run on-prem with Azure Stack.

<comment><USER18> AWS's "on-prem EC2" is called Outposts

[https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/](https://aws.amazon.com/outposts/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How did the author not quote the metaphor "tying two bricks together won't make them float"?

<comment><USER31> Just to be "that guy", concrete hulls are a thing ;)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_ship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_ship)

<comment><USER32> It's about the shape, not the material.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> RHEL will be around for a long time because the government demands something like it. All the other businesses stacked around it are dubious prospects at best.

<comment><USER34> While not untrue it would have been far more brilliant for a defense contractor to buy RHEL.

<comment><USER33> IBM is a defense contractor.

<comment><USER34> IBM is generally a _subcontractor_ to a prime. They are rarely a prime. IBM doesn't compete in fed at the level Lockheed or Raytheon, for example, do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> So basically its like a beach party where they have a bonfire and burn massive stacks of cash. How do the people organizing this not know what they are doing? Or is it like, any kind of large bonfire is good for their careers?

</comment><comment><USER36> Maybe they should of hosted their "cold take" on the IBM hybrid cloud?

<comment><USER37> How would hosting the site partially on-prem make things better?

Or do you mean "multi-cloud"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It makes me think of Sears buying Kmart

<comment><USER38> Kmart bought sears [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kmart#Headquarters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kmart#Headquarters)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> My guess is that after the GitHub acquisition, IBM was afraid Microsoft would buy RedHat to gain more control of Linux. I'm kinda surprised MS hasn't bought Ubuntu, but there's probably no hurry - we're still in "embrace".

</comment><comment><USER40> Hugged to death and don't see it on Coral Cache or Internet Archive. Anyone got a cache?

<comment><USER19> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R4qm2iW...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R4qm2iWPxwIJ:www.platformonomics.com/2019/07/a-very- cold-take-on-ibm-red-hat-and-their-hybrid-cloud- hyperbole/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-b-d)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Looks like the website cannot handle Hacker News traffic. Anyone got a mirror link?

<comment><USER42> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R4qm2iW...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R4qm2iWPxwIJ:www.platformonomics.com/2019/07/a-very- cold-take-on-ibm-red-hat-and-their-hybrid-cloud- hyperbole/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-b-d)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> IBM needs to do a take bids from MS Google and AWS to host mainframes in all their regions. Go with the lowest bidder and stay relevant.

</comment><comment><USER44> Ignoring the merit of the analysis, this text if very difficult to read. To many parenthesis, onomatopoeias and inside jokes. I know the author is well regarded for many books (I haven't read any), but I think he has to be more objective in blog posts.

</comment><comment><USER45> Pretty interesting. Probably right. So what's next? After flailing around for a while longer IBM will be up for sale. Who will be the buyer? That's easy: Microsoft!

<comment><USER46> Oracle, not Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't need anything they have. Oracle is already selling their (Oracle-rebranded) version of RHEL plus the Oracle database business ties in with the IBM mainframe business.

<comment><USER47> Maybe LBO? IBM still has some assets specialty assets like CPLEX for optimization where I believe they are the go to solution. I'm guessing if there was a buyout, some of the assets that could be adopted to a SaaS/cloud product could be sold off to the big players.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Full disclosure , I work at Red Hat, but IBM buying red hat is a big deal. Just go back 40 years and IBM vs Microsoft. Microsoft bought QDos (which became windows). Now IBM bought red hat, which has openshift and

<comment><USER49> QDOS became MS-DOS and not Windows.

<comment><USER48> Windows only became successful because of msdos backward compatibility

<comment><USER50> That's impossibly untrue. OS/2 2.0 had better DOS AND Windows compatibility/stability than Windows 3.1 at the time.

It still got its ass handed to it. Microsoft won because they got the OEMs.

<comment><USER51> I used OS/2 2.x, but it needed more memory than Windows 3.1 and on the machine I had, Windows ran faster even if OS/2 was more stable.

Later I tried Warp, but when Windows 95 came around, it was better too. Less stable, but better in other ways.

I like this article. It communicates the nuance and complexity of the issues at the time.

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/information- tec...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/information- technology/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of- os2/%3famp=1)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Required reading for Entrepreneurs: "Economics in One Lesson" - <AUTHOR> http://jim.com/econ/contents.html <comment><AUTHOR> This chapter is particularly interesting: "The Curse of Machinery": <http://jim.com/econ/chap07p1.html>

"The belief that machines cause unemployment, when held with any logical consistency, leads to preposterous conclusions. Not only must we be causing unemployment with every technological improvement we make today, but primitive man must have started causing it with the first efforts he made to save himself from needless toil and sweat."

</comment><comment><USER2> I love "Economics in One Lesson"---I've even bought extra copies just to give to friends and relatives---but I'm not sure it helps you all that much as an entrepreneur; understanding the Broken Window fallacy doesn't help you make things people want. Judging from their public statements, many successful entrepreneurs are simply rotten economists. (But then, so are many economists!)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is good, too: <http://www.introecon.com/></comment>