A web-based interface for dev-op tasks across remote servers using SSH - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/justink/commandoio-a-web-based-ssh-interface-for-dev-op-ta <comment><USER4> Let me make sure I understand this. I'm going to pay you to help you to develop a commercial software service that allows me to run scripts in written in my favorite open source programming language connecting over my open source SSH client to talk to my open source web server that makes connections to my open source database all which runs on my open source operating system?

I'll stick to shmux for these tasks thanks. It doesn't require me to hand you my SSH keys, runs on the command line, already supports parallell SSH execution, and is free both in terms of speech and beer.

</comment><comment><USER5> So, tell me - what would this tool offer over, say, RunDeck or mcollective? Why only use SSH keys? (What if I'm using LDAP across all of my machines?)

I'm not trying to knock your product - I really do hope you get Kickstarter funding! But I just wanted to say that, to me, as a systems engineer, I only see a pretty interface, but not much value add over the other two products mentioned above

I also feel that comparing Commando.io to Puppet, Chef, or even Capistrano is disingenuous - Puppet and Chef are configuration management systems that are meant to keep your systems 'in policy', and Capistrano is meant for repeated tasks over SSH (mainly for deploying software, but it can be used for other things too.)

<comment><USER6> (Creator of Commando.io here) - Thanks for the feedback. Commando.io is very young, and while currently only supports SSH, LDAP could easily be added. The alpha build is extremely minimal, and serves as a proof of concept. However future features are parellel execution, interactive sessions, scp transfers (maybe even Murder transfers [bitTorrent]), and provisioning.

You have to think back, when GitHub first launched, they probably had a minimal product. It takes a bit iteration to add the "eureka" features.

<comment><USER7> I applaud what you're trying to do, but I think you hit the nail on the head in your last sentence. You need more iteration in order to find something that sets you apart. I wouldn't contribute to this kickstarter because I don't see anything here that really differentiates you from your competition in a way that would make people want to pay for your service.

If you missed Alex Loddengaard's "One Year, Six Products," you might want to check it out. [http://alexlod.com/2012/07/10/one-year-six-products-what- ive...](http://alexlod.com/2012/07/10/one-year-six-products-what-ive-built- and-learned/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can't help but think that for a tool like this you are trying to sell to a crowd of command like jockey's. For this crowd, there is no better interface than the command line.

There are cases where I do prefer web interfaces to command line. The AWS web console is an example of this, but for me this is a case of balancing control vs convenience. Installing the AWS libraries to use the command line is a greater PITA than the need to use the command line.

With Git, I prefer the power of the command line over a graphical client. However, in this case there is little or no convenience in the difference because I have to install Git either way.

The only usage I would be able to get out of this would be to give my non technical managers, clients, co-developers, etc a way to do deployments if I'm not available. One scenario would be for contractors to be able to setup their own dev servers. So, I can see a situation where I could use it, but it's a bit of an edge case.

<comment><USER4> I work with clusters of hundreds of machines every day. When I watched the video I cringed, a lot. I can't imagine using a web app for this task. I thought there is no way in hell I'm ever going to enter in the hostnames of hundreds of hosts into a fucking web form. Lay off the bogus terminology too. I write scripts and programs, not 'recipes'. A script with a version number is still a damn script.

I watched most of the video, and I had a visceral negative reaction to the product and the presentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The real power comes from creating more complicated recipes.

This is my sticking point: if the power comes from the recipes, how does having a web interface help any of that? I think this is a great piece of work, but I just can't see what the advantages are over any of its competitors given that all the actual work is still being done in the same way (e.g. shell scripts).

I would add that you bring up GitHub a number of times as a comparable service, but I think that the key difference is that a number of core git features are actually implemented by GitHub (e.g. fork, log, pull) and although this all looks great it isn't the reason (IMO) why it's successful, it's because it makes a common operation easier (i.e. git repository management). I think that you would need to make common dev-op "recipes" easy to generate before the GitHub comparison is correct.

</comment><comment><USER10> This would be a better project if you sold a license to company and not a saas service. I don't want to put ssh-keys on my network from another machine I have no control over. If anyone ever got access to your service they could have a field day.

I would give it a run through if you offered it as software though.

<comment><USER6> What if we had an "enterprise" version like GitHub which you could run on your infrastructure? Compelling?

<comment><USER10> Yes like I said.. I would give it a try. If you do like what github does and offer up like a vm image or something or just a tarball with instructions.

<comment><USER6> Think that is likely. Probably an AMI. Appreciate the support if you are able on Kickstarter. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> OK one feature you should add and will make this stand out even more.

Two phase commit.

Admin enters commands, another had to enter same commands on another console and only then are they executed or passed to a third admin to approve actioning.

No more rm -f in root or other slip ups. No more silly mistakes. Added accountability and in that added security.

You would also get x10 the amount of backing from alot of institutions alone for that feature and even if you don't have it now, factor it in down the line as the quality of admins has gone down hill over the years and in that more mistakes get made. This will reduce that and the impact as well as protecting jobs as well as the machines from human shortcommings.

Logging aspect you have outlinesd is good. Get it robust by design and cater for remote logging servers and with all that you could go far.

Good luck

</comment><comment><USER12> Neat idea. I'd definitely donate if the whole thing was going to be open sourced so I could run it on my own infrastructure.

Currently we use csshX for this sort of thing, and it does the job. It's an open source tool that opens a bunch of ssh sessions and sends each character you type to each session. You can launch it with command line args that specify the hosts you'd like to connect to and optionally the commands to run, so it's pretty easy to set up scripts that mimic the recipes in this video. If you're working with less that 20 servers at a time (about the limit of what you can read on screen at once) it's a great tool.

<http://code.google.com/p/csshx/>

<comment><USER6> csshX works great for small tasks on a small number of servers, but it lacks a few main features. Commando.io stores responses from each server so you can traverse back and see exactly what was run and the response. Additionally, csshX does not have the concept of stored recipes which are fully versioned.

What if we had an "enterprise" version like GitHub which you could run on your infrastructure? Would you back then?

<comment><USER13> > What if we had an "enterprise" version like GitHub which you could run on > your infrastructure?

You might want to look into how c9 ( <http://c9.io/> ) does it. They have a similar stack to yours. The core of their product is open source. They accept contributions, which lowers their cost to develop. They keep a few choice features (integration with github, etc) for their hosted/paid version.

If you open sourced your core product and kept a few features for your paid solution (versioning, saved output, etc.), you may gain the momentum you need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is the difference to <http://rundeck.org/> which can be integrated with foreman or puppet?

It also looks like (not sure if i am right) but your worker/server has to have direct ssh access to the server. This means you basically have root access as most configuration management tools need root to administrate the server.

<comment><USER6> (Creator of Commando.io) First time we've seen RunDeck, its been mentioned a few other times here. Investigating now.

<comment><USER14> After looking at your video it seems the main difference currently is that your recipes are versionized (which is a huge plus)

<comment><USER6> Does RunDeck keep a log of every response? With Commando.io you can flip back through previous executions and see a snapshot of which servers got which recipe, and what the results were.

<comment><USER15> It definitely does: when I launch a job in RunDeck, I can see the live output (essentially a form of tail -f in the RunDeck web interface) and I can see the output of every previous job as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Feedback from someone that's previously (long before the devops scene exploded) looked at commercializing a system like this:

Your UI should integrate monitoring and control using an actually visual interface detached from any underlying model used for state collection or implementation of state changes (because this stuff changes constantly, regardless of how much myopic VC money is thrown at it). This means instead of talking about "recipes" and suchlike, you talk explicitly about the objects being managed: services, servers, racks, PDUs, switches, routers, coolers, links, and so on.

Make it visual, like actually beautifully visual. Let me specify a floor diagram that colours each rack according to the mean health of the machines it contains. Clicking the rack should show an exploded view of each machine coloured by the mean health of each service they contain, and those services' dependencies. Provide instantly selectable overlays showing different kinds of topological relations (application/network/power/trust/routing/OAM/TCP connection state(!)) existing within the view (complete with colouring).

I want a tool that lets me study a floor diagram and instantly notice a set of racks are down because they are in a row supplied by a single PDU. I want to correlate crashes visually due to cooling hotspots, preferably even by relative colouring due to temperature sensors in the machines. I want to batch shutdown a set of machines connected to the NFS share I just found 0day on.

I want a generic visualization of a service that displays a set of vital metrics (error count, load, cpu usage) and a set of generic actions (restart, stop). I want a simple editor that allows me to assemble widgets ("CPU load gauage", "requests/sec gauge", "dependency health indicator") into some meaningful representation of a service using nothing but a mouse.

Don't bake any topology into it: make it useful for systems as small as 2 cores, or as large as having presence in every country. Racks aren't first class objects, they aren't containers, they're relations with some useful attributes. Don't bake implementation or buzz technologies into it: your codebase could be less than 10,000 lines JS+high level language backend.

Don't freeze out keyboard cowboys: there's no reason a highly visual UI need require a mouse. An idiom involving a handful of standard shortcuts ("object select", "object query", "object manipulate", "back", "bookmark", "assign shortcut") are all that's needed. I imagined a system involving keys 0-9 being redefinable (think Command & Conquer, not Emacs) with a few letters preassigned (think Gmail/Google Reader)

I want a UI no less visually beautiful than Google's search globe ( <http://data-arts.appspot.com/globe-search> ) for monitoring the state of my service. I want to notice the bandwidth spike occurring on the dark side of the earth.

Prior to a system like this that can be assembled with a minimum of fuss, and can be integrated with existing data sources and systems (most medium sized companies already have an asset database, etc.), I'm not going to be impressed by some crappy Ruby on Rails jammed together with a bit of JS as a fancy editor for some DSL.

Give us something with wow factor, not just another bland excuse of crap offering zero benefits over a command line, that'll end up lying dead in a Github repo in a few years.

[Footnote: for anyone with cash interested in systems like these, feel free to get in touch. I can barely enunciate correctly when talking about this stuff, my vision for what devops should look like is so far removed from the current popular state that it pains me to pay it much attention]

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the feedback. Our goal is certainly to make a visually beautiful product. As far as floor diagrams, racks, and specific hardware, we want Commando.io to be used by everybody, including AWS, Rackspace, Linode, so building those specific features is probably over-scope.

Monitoring is a market that already has some amazing companies (ServerDensity, NewRelic). The missing piece is management, provisioning, automation of servers within a web-interface.

<comment><USER17> Nodes deployed in a virtual environment are still assigned to a location. Linode for instance provides different datacenters, AWS provides availability zones. A grouping can take care of most of this problem, however relations between the nodes need to be visualized.

For management tools do exist, just not fancy looking but get the job done... it should be a full package; monitoring and deployment, etc etc go hand in hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not sure if I'd want anyone touching my servers who thought that fabric had a 'steep learning curve'. That just sounds irresponsible.

<comment><USER6> Founder of NodeSocket, creator of Commando.io here. The steep learning curve was geared at Chef and Puppet, but wanted to list some other popular options.

<comment><USER18> I guess what I mean is, simplifying server access is great and it looks like you are doing that well. However, I guess I don't like the idea of marketing it because the other automated methods are too hard to learn; market it because it is convenient and provides a nice interface. Just my 2 cents.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, agree need to work on marketing and positioning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Did the creators of this use any of the tools in this domain? How does this compare to mcollective/capistrano/vlad the deployer/fabric/ssh and a for loop? It's a web app, how is that superior to something CLI based?

God, its Matriu AS ([http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/naterockhold/matriu- as-l...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/naterockhold/matriu-as- lightweight-and-open-source-it-automatio)) all over again.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the feedback. Right now, since Commando.io is so young I'll admit its not the most advanced tool. However, recipes are versioned and every execution and response is logged and stored for compliance and accountability.

When GitHub first was released, I am sure there was a skeptical group of developers who asked the same sort of questions.

Also, Matriu asked for $250,000. :)

<comment><USER19> Well, to repeat - how does this compare to tools in the domain? Why are you opting for a web interface driven approach over a command line interface?

Why are you opting to build the entire thing from scratch instead of using an existing orchestration tool and building an interface to that? Wouldn't that save you time and money?

I've most recently hammered on mcollective, and it can easily support multiple users, parallel requests, full auditing of all requests and responses, authorization, server discovery, etc. There's all your advanced features, already implemented.

<comment><USER6> In regards to the interface, our thought is this is what is currently missing from other tools in the domain. Imagine if GitHub had build just their API first without their interface. A fully RESTFul API with shell wrappers (node.js, python, perl) will come with time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like the idea of this but some visuals like graphs or meters would make it a lot more interesting.

I wrote a little monitoring tool like this for our servers. instead of the monitor using ssh command "recipes", it just hits API endpoints that return JSON. The monitor doesn't really care what the API is checking, it just expects that service to "neutralize" whatever metric it is checking into something that can be graphed. I think the same could be done if you have a specific data format that recipes are required to output. Those recipes that returned a common data format could then be graphed. Of course it takes a minor amount of programming to parse the output from "uptime" (for example) into formatted data, but once one person did it that could be available as a pre-buit recipe for all of your customers.

Our tool is pretty much hard-coded to our system but I had always thought it would be a cool thing to have. I've looked at other monitoring systems that seem to do that already but many of them are so complicated and none of us have the motivation to learn them. We're a typical team of programmers who have to be admins by default.

</comment><comment><USER21> I would use this tool & have backed it.

It looks like it runs very similarly to our current server management systems, but the web UI is a huge plus.

I agree that open sourcing it to run on your own infrastructure would be a big benefit - people tend to be a bit protective of where they put their root ssh keys :)

<comment><USER6> Thanks. If you can spread the word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sigh. Please actually use other tools in orchestration space before building another wheel.

A nice ui over pluggable backends is a great idea. Building (another) sub par orchestration tool seems like a waste of everyone's time. Mcollective has had the prototype REST bridge for what, 2.5 years?

</comment><comment><USER23> Have you considered to develop this on the top of chef-server?

I think most features (and more) you mentioned in the video are already covered by the chef-server (recipes, role, ohai, search, provisioning etc), and they have large community and more thoroughly tested.

However, their webui is too simple, and in particularly not extensible - <USER2> plugin mechanism so it is difficult to add some minor feature on the top of their webui.

So I think there is a huge market for providing a better UI for chef-server, especially they are one of the leaders in the field?

</comment><comment><USER24> Our company uses a combination of Capistrano and Puppet. It is actually pretty easy to get going with Capistrano and Puppet if you are comfortable with Ruby. Our Capfile specifies the server recipe which is propagated to Puppet using Environment Variables. The whole operation is easy to understand, and very little learning curve required.

<comment><USER25> We do the same, except we've started phasing out Capistano because it's model doesn't fit well with Tomcat. Once you have your keys distributed everywhere via Puppet, it trival to use your favorite scripting language to just SSH around and run commands.

This just doesn't seem like its so hard a problem that I need a cloud based solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> dev-ops for me also includes provisioning - and based on " ... you can use shell, perl, ruby, node.js ..." I don't see a strict system for that in place.

<comment><USER6> (Creator of Commando.io here) Commando.io is extremely early, and while no such provisioning features are built yet, they are certainly in the pipeline. The beta users will dictate features and direction.

<comment><USER26> > Commando.io is extremely early

Yes, and I think it's great, that people seem to be already interested in it on kickstarter.

Just one thought, but I'm far from a dev-ops expert. I worked with Chef and Puppet in the past, looking at salt now. There are two large benefits for me in dev-ops: 1) automation and 2) documentation - and still, chef, puppet and salt have quite some rough edges. And those are mostly command line tools - <USER3> just can't see, how a UI oriented system could simplify things and could come near those. But then again, I'm mostly thinking _idempotent provisioning_ \- for monitoring and similar, a web-frontend is a great plus.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> All of your SSH keys in one place? SPOF much?

</comment><comment><USER28> what is a devops task? I normally just call this work.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why not fabric? In what universe does fabric have a deep-learning curve?

Good lord.

<comment><USER30> But, but, but, those other guys got a million dollars!

<comment><USER30> Check that. 3.9 million and counting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm sorry but you call this an automation?, imagine you have 200 nodes, lol.

</comment><comment><USER30> > However, once we get the node.js SSH workers polished and ready for prime- > time, you may run workers on your own infrastructure.

Anyone who gives these people money is a fool.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps you could articulate further?

<comment><USER30> Using javascript on the serverside is madness. We have Python and Go and C++.

This app will suck.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the insightful response.

<comment><USER30> Oh I missed the part where they're writing the webapp bit in PHP. Amateur hour all over the place here.

<comment><USER6> You've succeeded in life in being a troll.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mark Zuckerberg Covers His Laptop Camera and You Should, Too - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/23/technology/personaltech/mark-zuckerberg-covers-his-laptop-camera-you-should-consider-it-too.html <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11949278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11949278).</comment>


Save important information from Internet in cloud - <AUTHOR> https://mybrains.org

<comment><USER2> Great service! I have already create a lot of notes there!</comment>


SpacyIRL 2019 Conference in Overview - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/spacyirl-2019-conference-overview-ivan-bilan/ <comment><USER2> Congratulations to the SpaCy team for growing a product succesful enough to have its own conference. Good speakers on the list too.</comment>


Show HN: Find books that help you grow - <AUTHOR> https://www.flowreads.com/ <comment><USER2> All book links are Amazon affiliate links (tag flowreads-20).

Plus, two Show HN submits in less than a day.</comment>


OneOps – Open-source cloud ops platform from Walmart - <AUTHOR> http://www.oneops.com/ <comment><USER2> "Accelerating product delivery in the Digital Economy through Continuous Application Lifecycle Management of Cloud-based Workload, backed by @WalmartLabs"

I think you could work on that elevator pitch a little - it seems like it's been workshopped by a committee, and doesn't really tell me anything.

<comment><USER3> I was just about to post the same thing. So much business-speak, no idea what in the world this could be.

<comment><USER4> You might want to brush up on business speak, that's the real reason for writing the vast majority of all software ever written or that will be written in this century.

<comment><USER5> The point is that it is possible to be able to pitch a technology to management without being overly opaque and sounding like a bag of buzzwords.

Also, keep in mind that different industries are accustomed to different sets of terminology. Engineers at tech companies don't usually use terms such as "product delivery" and "Continuous Application Lifecycle Management." To us, "multi-cloud orchestrator" is a much clearer way to describe this technology.

No need to be so condescending.

<comment><USER6> It's odd, I am an engineer at a tech company that works on the Salesforce stack so I use the phrase "product delivery" all the time and "continuous application lifecycle management" is a perfectly normal phrase to me. It's really all about different industries, even within "tech".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So walmart thought this startup was worth buying to manage all their different applications running in different clouds. Fast forward a couple years and they've now open sourced the entire product. That's pretty cool.

<comment><USER8> agreed it's great to see this sort of path, and that the tech has been open sourced

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been reading [http://oneops.github.io/admin/key- concepts/](http://oneops.github.io/admin/key-concepts/) to try and understand what it is. I still have zero idea...

<comment><USER10> Its a Multi-Cloud Orchestrator. It lets you abstract multiple cloud providers, so you can say use Azure, S3 , Rackspace Openstack, your own openstack and your own VMware all at the same time, and have unified management.

At the moment it supports any cloud with a OpenStack endpoint/integration.

Blog post: [http://www.walmartlabs.com/2016/01/oneops-now- available/](http://www.walmartlabs.com/2016/01/oneops-now-available/)

<comment><USER11> Thank you. Now that you've summarized this, this sounds like a great idea, a good way to kill lock-in on cloud platforms. I don't know why they couldn't write something so simple and concise...

<comment><USER12> ...kill lock-in, as long as everyone in the whole world acts like an OpenStack interface. Not interested.

<comment><USER10> So their is no standard on how to present your cloud to the world ATM. I think you would be happy that widely used open-source project like OpenStacks interface is being adopted.

I'm sure if you want OneOps to support a non-OpenStack interface that should be possible too, they already support Microsoft Azure for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The chef code that deploys all the apps is pretty old skool, copy pasta'd from opensource cookbooks in alot of places, will never pass food critic or rubocop, and has no tests. I wouldn't really want to run that code on anything.

<comment><USER4> Because opensource cookbooks are unreliable or people should only rely on your cookbooks? Or old skool isn't new skool so it should be wholly disregarded?

<comment><USER13> open source or not, they should follow the best practices, these don't. The fact is, really old open source cookbooks have been copy pasted, with the maintainers names changed, and hacked on top of. For example, the MySQL cookbook. This is against the apache2 licence that they were originally distributed under.

<comment><USER14> Sure, maybe at a company with enough resources to throw at code quality, but this is Walmart we're talking about.

<comment><USER13> How much profit do they make a year? :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Struggling to wade through the thicket of buzzwords. What is this? Looks a bit like OpenShift or something?

<comment><USER16> Chef heavy. Reminds me of AWS OpsWorks.

And by the way, it's not just OpenStack. Looks like it's also tooled for AWS.

<comment><USER13> Theres alot of really badly written chef code in there at that. :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's great to see established companies experiment with OSS. The issue I see is that they make their projects go live/public a little bit late to be usable 'as is'. By the time they open source their tooling, the stack maybe out of synch with the latest and greatest. Just the fact OneOps is using nagios checks for monitoring tells you a lot.

</comment><comment><USER18> This looks pretty complicated/heavy based on [http://oneops.github.io/admin/key- concepts/](http://oneops.github.io/admin/key-concepts/)

Has anyone seen anything talking about resource requirements for deploying this? The fact that Cassandra, ElasticSearch, PostgreSQL are all involved plus much more makes me think the requirements must be quite high.

Edit: nevermind [http://oneops.github.io/admin/prerequisites/](http://oneops.github.io/admin/prerequisites/)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm not sure my brain is up to wading through the site trying to figure out _what_ this is. Can someone break this down into it's purpose and components? Is it a code deployment system, container manager, open-stack, chef/puppet/fabric?

[http://oneops.github.io/admin/key-concepts/#oneops-system- ar...](http://oneops.github.io/admin/key-concepts/#oneops-system-architecture)

Side note, every-time I see an enterprise message bus, I throw up in my mouth a little.

<comment><USER20> It's a multi-cloud application orchestrator. OneOps lets you design your application in a cloud agnostic way (by abstracting multiple cloud providers). It manages your application's design, deployments, operations & monitoring. At the moment these cloud providers are supported - [http://oneops.com/integrations.html#clouds](http://oneops.com/integrations.html#clouds)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm kinda surprised by this. My impression was that Walmart Labs had great success in deploying a pure-openstack private cloud in record time which was immense in scale. Why would they want to deploy to other clouds?

[https://www.openstack.org/summit/vancouver-2015/summit- video...](https://www.openstack.org/summit/vancouver-2015/summit- videos/presentation/walmart-and-039s-cloud-journey)

<comment><USER22> theories:

* cloud bursting during high load

* disaster recovery

* putting things in geographic regions where they don't have their own hardware

<comment><USER23> Here is one:

Since Amazon is basically Walmart without brick and mortar and they make some compelling money from their AWS, why wouldn't Walmart be interested in getting in to that business?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Isn't labs just another way to say we are better and elite than the rest of the engineers who are working on run the business products?

</comment><comment><USER25> Are engineers the target audience or PHBs?

They should have put up a blog post with an overview like this one: [http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/11/global-continuous- delive...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/11/global-continuous-delivery- with.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> I think it's great that Walmart is posting OS libs, but this page design could use some TLC.

</comment><comment><USER27> "OneOps Open-Source PaaS now available!" January 25th, 2016 says their press section (scroll down): [http://oneops.com/about.html](http://oneops.com/about.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> This looks like oneopsmanship ..

</comment><comment><USER29> it's looks like just control panel for all your clouds. If you have only aws, i don't see any profit of using this.

<comment><USER30> As your business grows at some point it may be cheaper to run your own cloud (OpenStack or something else), and you can start migrating your workloads with a PaaS layer like this.

At my previous employer the loaded TCO for running in-house OpenStack was 45-50% of AWS (the company used both).

<comment><USER31> Are you sure about that? Did you factor in power?

<comment><USER30> "Loaded TCO" means gear, space, power, cooling, transit, people... Those are high-level, and I don't remember a bunch of things that went into the 5-year TCO model but it was complex.

If you have the talent and scale it's certainly doable, and like I said, we were at less than half of AWS. There are plenty of examples, one that comes to mind that is NOT hyper-scale is Server Fault.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is this what @joshu has been working on?

</comment><comment><USER33> Java/Tomcat

Why, for the love of God, why?

</comment><comment><USER34> No Python support. Moving on.

<comment><USER35> You might want to take a look at [https://github.com/StackStorm/st2](https://github.com/StackStorm/st2) if you want python support, chatops, UI, a GUI editor for writing workflows and a strong community.

Disclaimer: I am a programmer at StackStorm. I'd be happy to help.

<comment><USER36> I love stackstorm, and chatops, but don't quite see how it's comparable to this cloud project.

<comment><USER37> Fair enough. +1 to ChatOps enabled via StackStorm. Disclosure - I work at StackStorm. What we have seen is that over time event driven automation can play the role of any such opinionated approach to cloud orchestration and even as an alternative to heavy reliance on PAAS layers. Event driven automation like StackStorm tends to err on the side of flexibility (use your own scripts, click together the workflows, do your own IFTTT) whereas solutions like OneOps are more polished out of the box and more focused on a particular pipeline. Having said that - StackStorm for ChatOps and especially remediation is the most common way people adopt StackStorm and that use case is quite different than the Walmart project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> so is this is a tool like Ansible without using Python modules and taking the GUI driven approach?

</comment><comment><USER18> Check out [https://containership.io](https://containership.io) \- Also open source and works in any data center.

Edit: Full disclosure, I am the founder of ContainerShip.

<comment><USER39> You might want to add a disclaimer about your relationship to Containership.

<comment><USER18> Point taken! Added.</comment></comment></comment>


Riak's Bitcask - A Log-Structured Hash Table For Fast Key/Value Data - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/1/10/riaks-bitcask-a-log-structured-hash-table-for-fast-keyvalue.html <comment><USER2> To me this is all nice and straightforward except for the merge i.e. when does it happen? Magically in the background or only at restart.

In either case then the question is how does this affect the responsiveness of the system.

This paper <http://downloads.basho.com/papers/bitcask-intro.pdf> is a nice easy ready with another level of detail over the linked to article.

I suspect they could consider \- varint encoding of the key and value sizes on disk \- aligning some writes to disk block boundaries to avoid spanning 2 blocks

though both probably only have minor gains.

For more inspiration see Jeff Dean's comments on the SSTable data structure at Google: [http://osdi2006.blogspot.com/2006/10/paper-bigtable- distribu...](http://osdi2006.blogspot.com/2006/10/paper-bigtable-distributed- storage.html)

<comment><USER3> Riak has "windowed merges", ie you can schedule compaction at your off-peak times. Or not at all, I guess, if you never delete or modify existing data.

<comment><USER4> the window merge is a new thing in riak 0.14, i believe. and you are correct the merge is only a consideration based on your use case. if you are using riak as a pure dump of immutable data you will not need to merge. if, however, your use case consists of a number of edits you should consider a more aggressive merge strategy. As all updates/deletes are appended to bitcask and are actually writes, your dead bytes will start growing rapidly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Under heavy access load we've already seen Bitcask do well. So far it has only seen double-digit gigabyte volumes, but we'll be testing it with more soon."

<comment><USER6> So they've only tested heavy access load on a double-digit gigabyte volume? That concerns me a bit, as I'm considering migrating from HBase to Riak, which would be several TB of data.

<comment><USER7> Isn't it one storage space per vnode? If you have 256 vnodes in your cluster and each vnode is at double digit gigabytes, you end up with between two and 25 terabytes available in the cluster.

<comment><USER4> yes, afaik, that is correct. atm, there is one bitcask "cask" that is opened for each vnode. the number of vnodes (virtual nodes) each physical machine is responsible for is a function of the ring size, aka total number of vnodes in a cluster, and the number of physical machines in the cluster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related project: RAMCloud at Stanford.

<http://fiz.stanford.edu:8081/display/ramcloud/Home>

It's a _pure_ in memory key-value store, that aims to give the lowest latency access to data as possible (~1 to 10us for small bytes of data).

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't call it "related" or even "similar"… it's similar in that they're both key value stores, but there's no durability and Ramcloud stores both keys & values in memory; whereas bitcask only stores keys in memory as an "index" to the value on disk.

<comment><USER10> Your operating includes a page cache (in some cases it may have even more e.g., ZFS on Solaris with ARC). It can very effectively load these indexed values into memory. Of course your own cache and direct I/O may be more efficient if you're building a search index or a relational database, but for a key/value store the page cache should be very effective.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple shuts App Store affiliate program, imperiling recommendation sites - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2018/08/apple-shuts-app-store-affiliate-program-imperiling-recommendation-sites/ <comment><USER2> After record income and a new high of a market cap, these sites have now learned Apple wants to reclaim their microscopic slice of the pie. They relied on the walled garden and the walls just closed in on them.</comment>


Supreme Court Rejects NSA Case Without Explanation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/18/supreme-court-rejects-nsa-case-without-explanation/

<comment><USER2> The SCOTUS generally doesn't comment on cases they don't accept. At best it's a comment on issues with the challenge's standing. This isn't a nefarious scheme. This is judicial normalcy.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know the explanation : NSA to judges : Here's all the dirt we have on you, bring us down, we bring you down.

<comment><USER4> They could. But they wouldn't because they observe limits and have effective oversight. Right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> See no evil, hear no evil. Except for the NSA - they see and hear everything ...

</comment><comment><USER6> Without explanation seems to be how most things are declined. Notwithstanding the headline news, is this somehow unique (to this case)?

 _The justices gave no reason for rejecting the group's petition, but the unusual procedure of bypassing the lower courts probably played a role. Other, more conventional challenges to government surveillance programs are pending._</comment>


Ask HN: Best Fiction - <AUTHOR> One of my new years resolutions this year is to read more fiction, so to that end, I would like to hear what good fiction books the HN community is reading.<p>My interests tend to align most with these attributes: thought-provoking, comedy, or science-fiction; however, even if it doesn't fit these criteria, please post your best recent fiction reads below! <comment><USER2> I recommend reading pretty much anything written by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, David Wong, or Charlie Stross. (Stross is less recommended only because he writes a lot more and his quality level is less consistent; that said, at his best he competes with Stephenson's best and wins)

</comment><comment><USER3> Umberto Eco. Don't start with Foucault's Pendulum, his other books are shorter and probably more accessible.

I really like _The Island of the Day Before_ and _Baudolino_.

</comment><comment><USER4> I really liked The Culture books by Iain M Banks.

If hard scifi is your thing, Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.

And can't go wrong with the classics (Dune, Foundation, Hyperion)</comment>


Mapping the Growth of Disability Claims in America - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-16/mapping-the-growth-of-disability-claims-in-america <comment><USER2> Basically a grassroots UBI movement.

Will be interesting to follow these numbers when self-driving semi-trucks start taking over.

Edit: I meant similar to UBI in the sense that the group that views themselves as unemployable has found a way to get the government to supply a "basic income". I'm aware it doesn't fit the idea in other ways. It is clearly, though, being used by people that are not suffering a real disability.

<comment><USER3> I dismissed your comment before reading the article, but you are kind of right. The biggest thing holding back people on disability from finding work (according to the article) is fear of losing health insurance and that cushion. It sounds like allowing people to keep disability benefits, at least for a couple months, after finding employment would help significantly.

This sounds like you could get two paychecks for a while and potentially better for abusing, but remember the bottom line:

>Economists believe declining job prospects and an aging workforce, not fraud, explain the growth of disability claims.

<comment><USER2> >>Economists believe declining job prospects and an aging workforce, not fraud, explain the growth of disability claims.

That's an odd quote though. How would "declining job prospects" explain growth in disability without also implying fraud?

Edit: Both explanations below make sense, but 15 to 20+ percent of "all residents age 18 to 64" within a single county on disability benefits? I don't see how that could not imply fraud, perhaps with the exception of a mining heavy county.

<comment><USER4> Did you read the article? It specifically covers this question.

People who are in some sort of pain can still do work if they can find a job that doesn't aggrivate their pain. One example from the article was a woman who had a bad back, but could work a desk job like at a call center. Whent the prospects of that sort of job disappear from their geographical area, the person becomes eligible for disability.

<comment><USER2> >Did you read the article.

I did. That's one anectodal example. They also say _" Recipients are often hesitant to look for full-time employment because they don't want to risk losing the financial cushion and access to health care that disability insurance provides"_.

<comment><USER5> The reason is that the process for getting SSDI is a nightmare. It takes months or years and often requires a judgement by a law judge.

In the meantime, you're screwed. You can't work, have no money and end up in debt. If you don't have kids, you're a low priority for subsidized housing and if you lack relatives who can help, you're in a bad place.

<comment><USER2> This makes sense. The crop of "disability lawyers" is somewhat depressing. I wonder how much of your benefits they take in exchange for their services. I assume it's a big number, as they all advertise doing it on contingency..."you don't pay unless we get you approved".

Edit: Looked it up. It does get paid out of your benefits, and it can be a substantial amount.

 _" The fee specified in the agreement does not exceed the lesser of 25 percent of the past-due benefits or...$6000"_

[https://www.ssa.gov/representation/fee_agreements.htm](https://www.ssa.gov/representation/fee_agreements.htm)

<comment><USER5> IIRC, the government pays them a fixed fee for their services. That's why they advertise in daytime TV -- case volume is the only way to make money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> a-zA-Z This American Life did a good report on this a few years back. [https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/490/...](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/490/trends-with-benefits)

<comment><USER6> Something stuck me when I first listened to this: there was a little anecdote about how one of the radio producer's co-workers had an injured back, but continued to work at his office job with relatively little impact on his performance. The same kind of injury would be career-ending for someone who's primary job skills are in a field that involved manual labor (e.g., welder, plumber, or one of the many oil-extraction jobs). The growth of disability claims is often characterized as a case of people gaming the system to extract handouts from the government. But maybe what is happening is we're seeing aging boomers and gen-xers who work as manual laborers, and who's bodies are finally breaking down to the point that they can no-longer function at their jobs. That seems like genuine disability to me, and so isn't it appropriate for them to use these government services?

<comment><USER7> Do you have personal experience with this? For example I know someone on disability who used to sell cars, that hunts every day. Is hunting easier on your body then selling cars? I don't think so, but it is likely more fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In my view, the biggest problem with this program is it isn't based on whether you can work, it is based on whether you can work at any job available in your hometown.

If any job that the person could do is available anywhere in the country, then instead of perpetual disability payments, perhaps the government should help relocate people to places where there is viable employment. Otherwise, places where there simply aren't any jobs become perpetual resource drains on society and also aren't truly helping those people live fulfilled lives.

While you have a right to economic opportunity (and disability payments if you truly cannot perform any form of work), you don't have a right to opportunity or payments in a specific, random place in the country. The same people who want these handouts are the descendants of people who migrated from other continents in search of a better life. We should expect them to do the same and be willing to move to the more prosperous cities of our country.

</comment><comment><USER9> It seems pretty clear people are using disability benefits as an income safety net, perhaps while they wait to reach the regular social security eligibility age.

Also interesting the regions with the highest percentage of claims are in deep red territory, where the political climate and political agenda is strictly anti-safety net. I wonder how that will work itself out.

<comment><USER10> The only way the economy works itself out is jobs. If there are no jobs then the government has to do something about it. Government gets all of its money from business. So in the end you have an efficient market, where robots create everything and most of the profit that is generated from sales of items is confiscated by the government and given to people so they can buy things the robots produce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> People on SSDI are not counted as "unemployed", IIRC. Which makes the _actual_ unemployment rate much higher.

<comment><USER12> Retired people and children are also not counted because they're not part of the labor force. Why would you count people who can't work as unemployed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's interesting to note changes in the type of disability claims. It looks like there has been a dramatic decrease in disability claims arising from circulatory and nervous system illnesses, likely due to improving health conditions in the workplace. But those gains seem to have been eaten up completely by a dramatic rise in musculoskeletal and mental illnesses. There doesn't seem to be any rational explanation for these as I'm sure the modern work place is much less physically strenuous and much less mentally taxing that what existed in the 60s. Could these be explained by the dramatic rise in psychologists and chiropractors that have started diagnosing people that would not have sought or would not have been eligible for disability benefits in times past?

<comment><USER14> Are there jurisdictions where psychologists and chiropractors can make a diagnosis of disability?

<comment><USER15> There is no diagnosis of disability. One person diagnosed with high blood pressure could be on disability while her identical twin in precisely the same condition living in a different area could be denied it.

<comment><USER14> Fair enough, poor choice of words.

It is still the case that to qualify for SSDI in the US you need a diagnosis from a doctor of a condition that prevents working. I'm wondering if SSA would accept assessments made by chiropractors or psychologists, neither of which are medical doctors.

<comment><USER16> They send you to their specialists

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interesting to compare that map with the cause of death maps in this study in JAMA. [http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2592499](http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2592499)

</comment><comment><USER18> would love to see a cross reference with obesity rates and other negative health behaviors. CP is an odd one because it can afflict you greatly or little, but it still is life altering. Comparing similar to non permanent issues is a bit unfair to those who had no choice in how their life was.

anecdotal, the obesity numbers interest me because two relatives in a Midwestern state both are on SSID from obesity related issues.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just looking at the map, I conclude that a lot of people are going to be really surprised that the president they voted for, who stated among other things during the campaign his undying dedication to preserving Social Security, has appointed a Secretary of Health and Human Services who wants to cut its benefits 20%.

<comment><USER7> Which members of Congress will vote on that though? You can't get reelected if you cut entitlements.</comment></comment>


HN Frontpage yesterday - every link about Aaron Swartz - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/YwGPy

<comment><USER2> This unfortunately shows a certain weakness of the HN approach to covering news to me:

While it is completely understandable that the community mourns the death of someone it values greatly, this event has completely drowned out any other news. The (understandable) upvoting of anything related to Aaron Swartz made it nigh impossible to discover any other "hacker news" here for a day or more (it's slowly trailing of and other stories begin to appear again). Similarly the ensuing discussion is spread over a multitude of threads.

Slashdot's approach of covering news seems more resistant to a single event blacking out anything else: There is one story with a number of links and a unified discussion.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Last time I saw something like this was when Steve Jobs died: <http://hhn.domador.net/2011/10/05/23/>

<comment><USER3> Yep, and just as annoying. Hundreds of posts with the same arguments happening over and over.</comment></comment>


Twitter company email addresses why it's #BreakingMyTwitter - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/twitter-company-email-addresses-why-its-breakingmytwitter/ <comment><USER2> If you ban a conspiracy theorist, doesn't that give him credibility among conspiracy theorists? Suddenly he's right. Suddenly there is a conspiracy between facebook, youtube, etc, to ban him. Suddenly he's a prophet rather than a satirical nut. What he said would happen came true.

There seems to be a dumbing down of America, where we expect corporations to be the ones to decide things are right or wrong, rather than letting individuals make up their own minds and spot satire or bad will or exaggeration on their own. Anyone watching Alex Jones could laugh at some of his more ridiculous claims. Just because some people believed every word he said..

How is anyone better off now that he's banned? People who didn't watch him still don't watch him. People who did watch him still watch him ( maybe moreso because they downloaded his app ), and people who were on the fence maybe think he was right.

<comment><USER3> The concern isn't that his "followers" would find him more credible. Those followers will follow him to the ends of the earth, regardless if he was banned. Conspiracy theorists never needed to be right - so operating on a model that giving him hard ammo for his theories is worthless. Alex Jones can't be wrong in the eyes of his followers, so that he can't be proven right either.

What his removal on these platforms does is limit his reach. He's completely allowed to, in the confines of the law, to say whatever he wants. That doesn't also mean he is owed a loudspeaker to blast his asinine message to the entire world. This is about limiting the reach of a deranged individual. If you don't believe this works - look at what happened to Milo after he was banned from Twitter. The near weekly Milo articles simply dropped off the face of the earth. And it's likely Alex Jones' limited reach will prevent from amassing new followers who choose to harass the parents of the "false flag" sandy hook shooting. That, to me, is more than reason enough to ban him.

There's a huge line between the confusing, but relatively safe flat earth conspiracy theorists and the the one that actively riling up people to harass parents grieving over children.

<comment><USER4> You are correct that banning them from platforms limits their exposure, but why do you think it's desirable?

Why defacto monopolies should decide who is allowed to exercise speech and who must be silenced?

Do you feel this practice will never be turned against you? Do you disagree with the idea that if crazy people don't have freedom of speech, then nobody has freedom of speech?

And I know the common argument that sure, they can just start their own Twitter or move to another platform.

It's similar to how Republicans close all but one abortion clinic in a state and claim that whatever, you're still allowed to have abortions, but only in this one remote clinic and only on certain conditions.

<comment><USER3> > _but why do you think it 's desirable?_

For the same reason I'm not allowed to post porn on hacker news. Why aren't we talking about how Y Combinator infringes on my freedom of speech by deleting my posts on Big Wet Asses 7?

> _Why defacto monopolies should decide who is allowed to exercise speech and > who must be silenced?_

You should brush up on your definition of monopoly. What is the monopoly that is deciding who is silenced, and what market do they have a monopoly over?

> _Do you feel this practice will never be turned against you? Do you disagree > with the idea that if crazy people don 't have freedom of speech, then > nobody has freedom of speech?_

This is a very tired and poor argument. If you have "crazy" ideas, like for example, if you believe the earth is flat, you are fully welcome on Twitter/Facebook. What Alex Jones and his ilk are accused of is harassment and inciting violence. The day I start using Twitter to incite violence is the day this "power" will turn against me. Until then, I have nothing to worry about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Twitter made a clear choice many years ago to move away from realizing the potential of their platform as an ubiquitous message-delivery system.

Before everyone had a smart phone, I built a site ("app" in today's terminology) that relied on the Twitter SMS API. It was amazing to have the ability to interact with my backend on-the-go. After a couple years, Twitter stopped supporting, then shuttered SMS. That was the first step in directing the platform away from its potential as a utility service, and toward a marketing platform.

It's just sad that the technology had so much potential and is now just a corporate wasteland of noise.

<comment> yoz-y I think that app.net is an example showing that such a platform does not have a viable business model. Granted, it is a very small sample size.

<comment><USER6> App.net also made some mistakes (speaking as a subscriber). The biggest mistake it made was going freemium because it enabled a whole lot of post-only accounts that didn't have an investment in the platform. Limiting following didn't make a whole heck of a lot of difference for accounts that just wanted to make noise.

The social network I use is private and invite-only, and I make small regular financial contributions to it, which means I care about its health and the community. It's the only one I use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tangential: The opening to this article is remarkably bad.

This article opens by saying it's difficult to like Twitter because it refused to censor a conspiracy theorist.

We cannot in one breath say we are in favor of free speech, then in another breath say we want corporations to censor people whose views we don't like.

<comment><USER8> > We cannot in one breath say we are in favor of free speech, then in another > breath say we want corporations to censor people whose views we don't like.

Pretend you own a publishing company. You publish books by authors you like.

Then I ask you to publish my book, called "99 Reasons Why We Should Murder Puppies and Abuse Our Children."

If you choose to pass on my book, is that censorship? I would say, as a publisher, you have freedom of the press, including editorial discretion. The right to free speech isn't the right to an audience.

Now how is this different from Twitter? Well people say Twitter is not a publisher, but a platform. They take submissions from everywhere, so they shouldn't have the freedom to pick and choose who they want to publish on their site. It's more like a phone company than a publisher.

But I don't buy that argument. Here's why:

1\. For a long time, Twitter has made rules about what content belongs on their network. My phone company doesn't tell me who I can call or what I can say.

2\. Twitter is completely owned by a single company and tightly controlled. With phone companies, there is interoperability between networks.

3\. Twitter is not regulated like a phone company.

5\. Twitter has an editorial team which curates "moments," which further blurs the publisher / platform distinction.

5\. Twitter does not treat content on it's network in an equal way. Their algorithm determines the "best tweets" for you and displays them more prominently. They also make suggestions as who you should follow. My phone doesn't ring louder depending on who is calling. This is crucial, because when you see far-right content, it's not only because you have subscribed to it. In many ways, Twitter's algorithm is helping it spread.

\-----

So Twitter if not a neutral platform that has to cater to everyone. They have always tried to control their network - how it can be used, what you can say on it. As long as they do that, they bear some responsibility for what people say on their website.

If they don't want to do that, that's fine. But then don't censor any content at all. Open up your API. Stop recommending certain tweets and posts. Give users a chronological feed option, and make the "best tweets" algorithm transparent.

<comment><USER7> >> You publish books by authors you like.

Right there your analogy breaks down; Twitter publishes content it doesn't like. It publishes all content that doesn't break the law or its rules.

But it's beside the point. Do we want Facebook, Google, and other social media companies deciding what we can and cannot say?

If we are consistent in our libertarianism, we must answer no.

<comment><USER8> > It publishes all content that doesn't break its rules.

And some of those rules are about the content of what's posted (no nudity, no harassment). Therefore it's behaving like a publisher, with editorial discretion.

If you don't like the book publisher analogy, consider a newspaper that runs letters to the editor. They don't officially endorse the opinions in those letters, and anyone can write one. But the newspaper can still pick which letters get published.

> Do we want Facebook, Google, and other social media companies deciding what > we can and cannot say?

They aren't telling us what we can / can't say. They are telling us what we can / can't publish on their websites.

But to you, it doesn't feel that way. And me neither. Why? Because Facebook and Google have a near Duopoly over communication on the internet. That's the real problem. We need to break them up. We need to acknowledge that network effects create natural monopolies, and perhaps regulate or force interoperability on some social networking sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Twitter is doing a good job at making some people (including myself) realize how inappropriately dependent we are on their service.

I'm using their platform less so now.

</comment><comment><USER10> I can't wait for Mastadon to eat Twitter's lunch. 800k users over 1200 federated instances and steadily growing by the day.

<comment><USER11> According to this article[0] that's unlikely. It looks like Mastodon is engaged in the same sort of blocking behavior Twitter is.

I think it's more likely we'll see private, invite-only services take off instead.

[0]: [https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the- water-888c10e...](https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the- water-888c10e8abb1)

<comment><USER10> That's a half-truth: Mastadon itself can't and won't block anything.

In the Mastadon network, users live on instances which all talk to each other. Each instance can choose to block any other instance.

If a user doesn't like their instance's policies, they can join another instance with less, different, or no blocks. Alternatively, a technical user can run their own instance and federate with other instances from there.

Your linked article claims, "running and administering your own social server is friggin' expensive". This isn't true: a $5/month VPS can easily host a Mastadon instance for a dozen users, and requires less than a few minutes of administration per month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The authors complaints about the API are valid and I agree with other posters that we shouldn't rely on a service so much that we are highly impacted when they change it. The rest of this blog post reads like a rant about all the ways Twitter has changed over the years. People hate change.

</comment><comment><USER13> Soon enough we'll realize the world we (developers) created is one we are no longer a citizen of. Our voices are tiny in a world of social media avalanche and billion (and now trillion) dollar companies. See Macbook Pro, Twitter, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why was this flagged?

</comment><comment><USER15> Oh, "email addresses" as in "an email which addresses"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden- path_sentence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence)

<comment><USER16> Yeah, don't know what they were thinking here. I couldn't parse the title at all.

<comment><USER17> It's techcrunch, they weren't thinking.</comment></comment></comment>


GopherCon schedule - <AUTHOR> http://www.gophercon.com/schedule/

<comment><USER2> Is it just me, or did anyone else immediately notice the conference is in Denver? I'm anticipating a potential trend here :)</comment>


Ask HN: What can we personally do to prep for the coronavirus? - <AUTHOR> I'm guessing buy a bunch of non perishable food, a can opener, and a bunch of bottled water, so that we can hold up in our house if needed.<p>What else? <comment><USER2> Probably get in the habit of washing your hands as much as possible, not touching your face/eyes/nose/mouth, wear gloves when touching things in public places, and washing the gloves every time you wear them. Also, don't get too close to people. I've heard 1.5 meters is a good distance.

Just in case things get crazy, flashlights & batteries, candles, a backup cooking method like a fire pit or camping stove, first aid kit & maybe some paracord, and good knife (you don't want to end up using scissors or steak knives for everything). Maybe extra phone battery things/solar charger and a radio. Also, habitually keep your gas tank over a quarter tank if you can. There's probably a pretty good exhausting list somewhere by fema or something.

</comment><comment><USER3> Best food prep isn't just to buy "cans of stuff", but to buy things you eat anyhow that happens to be preservable. That way, rather than blowing a lot of money on stuff you may never use, you're merely forward-loading some food spending. The ideal is to get yourself into the habit of using that stuff on a relatively regular basis, but replacing it as you use it rather than when you run out, thus keeping a buffer. In particular, you want to _fight_ the idea that "this is my food reserve and I shouldn't touch it", because that's how you get old, useless reserves when you need them. You _want_ to use them, you just also want to replenish them as you go, then you always have things usable if necessary. Don't forget to use it as a queue, first-in-first-out, despite the fact the physical world tends to make a stack more natural by just putting the new stuff you just bought in front.

This is a good idea for the coronavirus, sure, but more importantly, it's a good idea anyhow. Society and civilization in general are more resilient against _all kinds_ of issues if people aren't generally starving from a single burp in the distribution networks. The coronavirus may turn out to be as much of a nothingburger for the US as SARS was, but _something_ is going to happen _somewhere_ to _somebody_ (who may be you) for which reserves will be very useful.

You probably can't prep for the total collapse of civilization and even those who think they have probably haven't. But you can and should prep for interruptions and extended outages of various bits of civilization, because they do still happen. Just this last summer, in an area with generally good power reliability, we had a very large, very powerful windstorm come through and cut the power lines in literally several hundred places in the area, and dropped a tree on our local neighborhood transformer. I was without power for 5 days. But it was really just an annoyance... we were pretty much ready for it.

For coronavirus particularly, I think food and any other supplies you may need (medicines, animal food) is the main focus. I wouldn't expect to lose power or water. (Water is the worst. I've got some backup plans against that if I need to, but they won't necessarily be a lot of fun...) The worst one for us would be some of the prescription medicines we have that they won't really let us get too far in advance. (For my family, none of them are life threatening, but could be a problem.)</comment>


Quick thoughts on Edge (Adobe's html5 keyframe animator) workflow & practicality - <AUTHOR>

Edge[1] is Adobe's upcoming html5 version of Flash. I just finished giving the free alpha a shake.
It uses a timeline and keyframing similar to what you see in the Flash editor.
It spits out a list of keyframes as as js list, which is then translated by edge's js into the appropriate series & combination of jquery animations.
Some of the reviews are overly pessimistic because the editor starts blank and all you can add are boxes & text. But you can also load up existing html and work on that.
The workflow to get anything useful to happen is kind of annoying, since it won't handle templates properly and you need to inline your css.

  1. Inline your css
  2. Load up the desired template in a browser
  3. View & save source to strip the templating
  4. Load that html into Edge
  5. Create animations
  6. Dig out the animation js object and add it to your project
 So that's pretty annoying for now! But the keyframe animation editor is a huge time saver compared to editing jquery animations by hand, so if you are using lots of them all in one place, the time savings might be worth it.
The biggest gain is going to be making slight tweaks to a complicated animation, since it's a nightmare to stretch, squeeze, and re-organize the timing of a long string of animations by hand.
A less common case which is also a huge win for Edge is if you're doing something like rotating, scaling, and moving all at once where the resulting coordinates are going to be non-obvious.
[1] http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/ <comment><USER2> Clickable: <http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/></comment>


Google Cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin Step Down - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/12/04/google-cofounders-larry-page-and-sergey-brin-relinquish-their-titles-and-step-down/ <comment><USER2> (2019)</comment>


Building With Workers KV, a Fast Distributed Key-Value Store - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-with-workers-kv/ <comment><USER2> I love it and want to use it, but two announcements of a new cloud hosted distributed DB and no mention of how consistency works or how conflicts are handled worries me a bit.

Maybe one of the cloudflare people that read HN can shed some light on this? What happens when I write to the same key simultaneously from multiple workers and/or multiple edge nodes?

<comment><USER3> They write it in the description: eventual consistency with global consistency within 10 sec.

<comment><USER4> That's rather vague definition. And is also wrong. They obviously can't guarantee global consistency within 10 sec, as that would require consensus which is impossible to guarantee in bounded time and they probably don't even use any consensus algorithm at all, as that would be pointless for a CDN.

<comment><USER5> Yes, in the presences of a network partition, propagation can take arbitrarily long. But, that would be classified as an outage. Knowing the typical non- outage delay is useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Reading values from Workers KV is designed to have the same reliability as > reading static files, making it much less likely to become unavailable than > a traditional database. It's designed to have the same performance as > reading a file cached within our network, close to your users, giving it the > speed of serving a static file as well._

I wonder how this kind of speed is achieved with an API that has to go over the network? Even if the round trip is short such as between two AWS services, there's always at least some latency.

<comment><USER7> Reading cached files goes over the network too. CDN servers share the cache load and have just 1 or a few copies per datacenter that are served by every machine there.

It's likely that this KV store is built on top of the existing cache storage layer, which would also explain the eventual consistency and high-reads with low-writes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fantastic development. Cloudflare is making some great progress recently with workers.

Listing keys in a namespace and/or TTLs would be nice with KV.

</comment><comment><USER8> Going a bit off-topic, I can't access this CloudFlare blog using a Tor browser (using the "standard" security level) without a CAPTCHA.

Didn't we discuss just last week an article[0] by CloudFlare where they said they'd solved this problem and Tor users wouldn't need to solve CAPTCHAs for CloudFlare-fronted services anymore?

What happened to that? I've actually seen way more CloudFlare CAPTCHAs through Tor since that article came out.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18031649](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18031649)

</comment><comment><USER9> So... A hosted Consul?</comment>


A fridge that is more tolerant of power interruptions - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcoexist.com/3029658/this-fridge-doesnt-need-electricity-to-stay-cool

<comment><USER2> The headline [This Fridge Doesn't Need Electricity To Stay Cool] seems like linkbait. It's a fridge that uses ice to keep cool - my grandmother had that technology and it was called an icebox.

One fridge that really does cool without electricity is the "absorption refrigerator", which burns propane and uses the heat to cool. I find the process pretty much incomprehensible, but it uses a mixture of ammonia, water, and hydrogen gas. The heat separates the ammonia from the water, it is condensed, and then when the ammonia evaporates it absorbs heat from the fridge. They are useful for recreational vehicles without electricity. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator)

And on the topic of random refrigeration facts, if you've seen air conditioners or chillers specified in units of tons, that doesn't refer to the weight of the equipment. It refers to the number of tons of ice per day required to provide the equivalent cooling. Measuring power in tons (1 ton = 3.5KW) strikes me as very strange.

</comment><comment><USER3> The title of the article lead me to expect a Fridge that doesn't use electricity. Instead it should have been something more akin to "A Fridge that can keep food cool for up to 35 days after a power outage".

I wonder how many days of cool you loose each time you open the fridge to pour a glass of milk.

The design is rather novel though and I'd love to see it in my home one day if they shrink it a bit.

<comment><USER4> Says right in the article that you can recharge it with ice instead of electricity.

<comment><USER5> Which is so very stupid. Really? You're going to have someone deliver ice?

Instead use an [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigeration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigeration) and deliver fuel - it will be much much lighter for the runtime.

Rural places still use commercial units based on this method - you heat part of the fridge in the fire in the morning while cooking breakfast and it will keep it cold the rest of the day.

<comment><USER6> As the article states, ice can be delivered along with the vaccines that it is meant to keep cool. So ice delivery is perhaps not so very stupid as it sounds in this case.

It can also be recharged if the power comes on for a short while.

<comment><USER7> 1\. It's much easier to deliver a small quantity of stable and energy-dense fuel, versus delivering a larger bulky mass thermally-below-equilibrium ice that'll be gradually heating up the whole time.

2\. Enough ice for transport doesn't mean enough ice for longer-term storage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To clarify: This is a machine that is more tolerant of power interruptions by storing cold, as ice.

<comment><USER8> We changed the title (linkbait, as many have pointed out) to use your suggestion. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm not in anyway associated with the company, product or people. I simply thought it would be interesting for the HN crowd to read about.

There are a couple of possibilities that I can see:

1) The inventor, the investors, and the Gates Foundation people who gave them $100,000 are all too dumb to know about propane refrigerators

2) There's more to this than the quick fluff piece goes into.

If you're one of the people who wonders "Why don't they do X?" instead of, "Those idiots - they should be doing X", I'd invite you to contact them with your questions at their site [http://www.surechill.com/](http://www.surechill.com/) or via Twitter @Sure_Chill

They ARE a commercial company, so I won't say more than that.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder why they don't use propane powered refrigerators. They use very little propane and a single 20 lb tank would last much longer than 35 days. I'm guessing it would be smaller and lighter than these too.

<comment><AUTHOR> propane will eventually run out. this is potentially "set it up once and never fuss with it".

It doesn't seem like portability was a major concern. Hopefully if this catches on, other improvements in size, weight and purposes will come about. This one seems to be for a very specific purpose.

<comment><USER9> How is this "set it up and never fuss" if the ice has to be replaced every 35 days? I would think delivering a small propane tank would be much easier than delivering ice.

<comment><AUTHOR> The ice will replenish itself if an electric source and can be found later. (for example, the ones with solar panels, or once it reaches a remote field hospital with a generator)

I think you are imagining it being used differently than what they have in mind

<comment><USER5> Ice replenishing by using electricity is a completely different topic than _delivering_ ice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is also pot in pot refrigerator ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot-in- pot_refrigerator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot-in-pot_refrigerator)) based on evaporative cooling, which does not use electricity. Although it will not work well in humid places, it is still a much cheaper option.

</comment><comment><USER11> I want a combo refrigerator and water heater. And maybe air conditioner too.

My local utility is strongly encouraging adoption of heat pump water heaters like the Geospring.

[http://www.geappliances.com/heat-pump-hot-water- heater/](http://www.geappliances.com/heat-pump-hot-water-heater/)

Neat. But why stop there?

<comment><USER12> Modern refrigerators are pretty cheap to operate. Getting your AC from a heat pump would probably be a bigger win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are other products which don't require electricity at all: MittiCool - [http://www.mitticool.in/product_detail.php?product_id=4](http://www.mitticool.in/product_detail.php?product_id=4)

</comment><comment><USER14> As long as you keep putting ice in it, it stays cool? What will they think of next? :-) Seriously, it's actually a fairly elegant way to keep vaccines stable over a long period in an environment with no (or unstable) power.

</comment><comment><USER14> In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vxHkAQRQUQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vxHkAQRQUQ)</comment>


How to save Radio Shack from certain death - <AUTHOR> http://harknesslabs.com/post/108193041064/radio-shack-is-a-bit-of-a-pickle-a-store-everyone

<comment><USER2> My co-workers and I have contemplated that Amazon.com should purchase them, or create a partnership of some kind. I think Radio Shack is the ultimate destination for amazon.com lockers, they are everywhere, unlike 7-11's locations, and Radio Shack has tons of locations, they could make every-other location a Locker, and the ones which are not, they become Kiosks to help education elderly on online purchasing, and maybe introduce some specialized sale products at their store outlets.</comment>