School district builds own software to handle student data, defies doubters - <AUTHOR> http://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/saanich-school-district-builds-own-software-to-handle-student-data-defies-doubters-1.51944

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty familiar with this problem space having worked in both a state department of education and a school district.

I would not expect this to be a long term success. Virtually every district of reasonable size starts with a homegrown and maintained solution and ends up going with one of the big guys for lots of reasons.

1\. Security/liability. You have to have pretty damn good systems here and definitely want to point at someone else's assurances and contract that allows for recourse.

2\. Rapidly changing business requirements. This is everything from state and federal reporting requirements to the expectations of end users. It's hard enough to maintain these core systems and keep folks around who are good enough to do it. Now deal with changing technology (oh you want a parent portal? Oh, you don't want to use Flash/Java for iPads? Oh you want ...) and you really can't attract and retain the kind of software people you'd want to continually redesign, refactor, rebuild, extend, and expand. Development on these systems never stops, which is why it's often easier to just drop off the old and buy the new hotness. It's also why scale is so helpful with these systems. If your users want this, someone else already requested it or will shortly. A lot of the improvements in these systems happen because of how many users they have and can be made because the cost is spread across all those users.

3\. Interoperability with other systems. Most of these systems are not omnibus catchall solutions for the entire business needs of a school district. That's probably for the better-- the folks who try to do that end up doing it very poorly. But you will want your HR and payroll to talk to your student information system that should probably talk to your assessment system that should talk to your curriculum management system that should talk to your special education IEP case load management system, etc. It's hard to do this and even harder when your solution is built to work in one context. Standards here have only barely helped. Middleware is expensive, shitty work. Again, not easy to attract killer talent and it is a constant need. The big boys have everything else built and just focus on middleware and have probably already worked with and written what's required for all of the popular systems you are using in these other areas.

This is just the smallest fraction of reasons it's a huge PITA to write and maintain these systems. That's not to say that it can't be done but it is to say that this is not a small, well-defined problem space with just a few distinct end-user types and functional requirements that can be built once and then monitored and tweaked over time. Not if you want to do the real stuff that makes collecting and maintaining all of this data worthwhile.

<comment><USER3> While all three of your points are excellent concerns, I think you may be giving off-the-shelf systems a little too much credit.

The SIS systems I know (US, K-12) do a mediocre job of updating quickly to new technologies/requirements (#2) and do a terrible job of interoperating with other systems through APIs (#3).

<comment><USER4> Doubleplus agree. Have been working with a state department on a student registration system for the past few years, and now everything's going to be placed under one of the 'big commercial' players in this space. No interop specs have been delivered/offered, and the integration team seems wholly unaware of the complexities of the requirements laid out by the state for the types of processes we have to comply with. And talk about 'not adapting'? We have processes in our system relating to HR and the commercial team flat out said "we don't want to deal with that", but also balked at offering us any sort of integration service points (REST/SOAP/anything) to keep doing what we need to do next year.

<comment><USER5> Would you be willing to touch on what the reasons were behind your department deciding to switch to a "big commercial" player?

<comment><USER4> I've honestly no clue - from my perspective it was a statewide edict passed down last fall - there's probably more to it but I've not been filled in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've actually thought of proposing such a project for our school district. I'm not sure what we pay our current software, bu my thought was to develop a summer STEM program and give HS students the opportunity to participate is a real project with real consequences, etc.

Many of the school people (administrators/teachers) were very unhappy with the previous system, so I expected it to be a reasonably easy sale. Unfortunately I didn't have the necessary free time to pursue it much further than "thought experiment." Since, the school district has purchased a new system that school officials actually like.

That said, our school district (like most in Illinois) is facing some serious budget crunch due to the state failing to make payment on time (or at all), so maybe it's time to dial up this project again, and pitch it to the school board.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the big obstacles I see with this kind of model is the need to get security rock-solid. Any system that deals with student information is subject to federal privacy laws, and the consequences of a data leak would be pretty significant.

Any thoughts on how to deal with this? I am wondering if os projects like the one you describe could partner with an experienced mentor, but I still wonder what kind of structure you'd want to use to address liability issues.

<comment><USER6> See below. The accounting problem is a far greater challenge that security. Interestingly school information systems are notoriously bad at security, so hitting par won't actually be that hard. Accurate accounting may be a huge challenge, though.

Either way, mentoring would be key, and no system developed vy students should be allowed into production at a scholl without a complete review. But that that's part of the process. Even in a private company/OSS project, code shouldn't be allowed into production without a review. I do have access to many people with the right skill set to be able to develop such a system on their own (my self included) in addition to the fact that I work for an information security research institution, so I have access to folks who know a whole lot more about trusted systems than I.

Of course, HS students will make mistakes, but the mentors will be there to review the work, and make suggestions, while keeping "bad code" from hitting a production system.

In the end, I'm not sure that I'm convinced that a student developed system is any different from one developed by some outside company.

<comment><USER4> assuming that the majority of the work at commercial company X is done by people who weren't long-ago HS students themselves, often with minimal training and support at their company, I agree, there's likely very little difference, other than the mistakes will be more open and easier for people to see and fix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It is totally possible for school districts to develop their own software. I helped launch a similar project to create a mobile app for my school district when I was in high school. Quotes from ed-tech companies were much more expensive than our costs. We also made it open source so that other school districts could use it.

Edit: Links

[1] App (now also on Google Play): <https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ifusd/id454673943?mt=8>

[2] GitHub: <https://github.com/FremontUnified/>

<comment><USER8> link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've done similar when working for a non-profit.

Having the tech guys on campus helps drive the development you get access to the people who work with the data as well as updates on requirements of what is needed (there's always something people will forget in a spec... until some report is due and they mention it.) They can also bring in staff to test components as they are being developed.

My thing was child care related; student tracking is a whole new level, key things are relationships as in families, adults to children children to education, teachers to children to classes to teachers to credentials, etc. Plus whatever factors affect all that (social assistance qualifications, immunizations, gpas, etc.)

Though once you get the core data figured out and organized (which is the major bit) the rest starts falling into place.

It's not rocket science but it is a definitely a detailed data situation, which you need people dedicated to it for years to put it all together.

As far as anything like that being "done" not in the public sector... you got everything going then some new law changes and you need to adjust tracking/claims based on some new factor or add in an adjusted reimbursement calculation etc. so you have to restructure some data add some new entry methods, new reports, etc. Easier on an open system than a closed system.

Problem with "canned" software is it is usually developed out of one district with their own unique needs when it gets packaged as a one thing fits all it needs to be patched for other conditions and environments... It is usually geared for a specific administration staffing method, so buying something canned may mean you have to do administrative changes in order to work with the new system, etc.

It's good work though, and a nice challenge to sort out all the data and get it collected, properly managed, and accessible to the right people.

</comment><comment><USER10> For me, while it's absolutely no surprise, it's still quite depressing the clear lobbying that is/will occur to trample this project. As others have said, the cost seems quite realistic and I would put my money on the 8-person having a much better handle on the end-users needs over some big consulting- ware shop. But the big firms surely have great influence with those most able to appropriate the funds for whatever solution B.C. opts to implement. There's obviously maintenance, support, enhancement, etc. that must go on after initial launch, but that still should not get anywhere near the monster price from an outside vendor.

I hope their fate is not so dire. I will definitely be interested in updates on the school district's efforts.

<comment><USER11> It's a little amazing, when you think about it, that a lot of people think you need to spend $100 million to build software to manage grades and attendance.

Especially as geeks in the startup world often build far more complicated software on budgets quite a bit smaller than $5 million.

<comment><USER12> Even if all it did was grade and attendance. It is _not_ trivial to get that right. My own little pet project <http://gradezilla.com> took years of refinement before it could handle just those things. Tying in with other aspects of a schools system makes it many multiple more complicated.

<comment><USER11> That's fair, but it's still not a $100 million investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> $97 million for this <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCeSIS>. The BC government was milked. A system for a few thousand school administrators costing that much and could not handle the load? The ineptitude boggles my mind.

Awesome to see there are some smart people out there fighting back.

</comment><comment><USER14> In the late 90s the San Francisco school district was sold a PeopleWare system, whereupon they paid consultants millions of dollars to customize the package. 'Twas a failure; they tossed it all away.

I don't remember the details, though I was feeling their pain, having to deal with (a) the unbelievably horrid, steaming pile that is PeopleWare, and (b) the clouds of consultants that start calling you up and pumping you for money once it is out that you're doing an install of the pile. (Hint: You don't need any help from a high-price consultant to install PeopleWare. You need a can of gasoline and a match).

So the thought of a school district doing this on their own makes me smile. They could do worse!

</comment><comment><USER15> Technology and software in schools in one of the most corrupt, backwards, and destructive markets around. Schools must take charge of their own software and destiny with a robust open-source economy.

The Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philadelphia, runs on an open source SIS we've developed for under $100K and it has been in production for over 3 years. We are working now build an alliance between several like schools to share the maintenence and development costs of supporting a public release.

If this group is planning on spending $5 million, we're still dealing with enterprise salesman hiring amateur or out-of-date developers. Give me another $100K and I'll put money in hackers' pockets to build quality software and make sure no other schools _have_ to pay for the same thing twice. This is more of the same crap, there's a whole new generation of developers that don't have access to the school software market, and it's students that are losing out because of it. The developers that built all the sites and apps this community knows and loves wouldn't need anywhere near $5 million to build this SIS and it wouldn't look like it got left over from 1999

</comment><comment><USER16> 1.5 million, close to 2 years and a "small band" of programmers to deliver a specialized product working on-site with the end users. Call me naive, but this sounds completely reasonable to me.

<comment><USER17> I think the "doubters" are just not used to seeing that sort of thing. They probably think the approach is going to look more like this:

[http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organiza...](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/o/office_of_payroll_administration_nyc/citytime/index.html)

You know, the case where you hire a team of contractors to build something, and then that team totally screws up, goes years past the deadline, and charges you enormous amounts of money. Meanwhile, there are ready-to-ship products out there that can be bought for a yearly fee, which carry less risk but higher costs.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am watching this project pretty closely, because I believe pretty strongly that there is much room in education for some high-quality os software. I also believe this software has the potential to facilitate some pretty significant change in public education. I really want to see some high-quality os solutions become prominent in the education world.

The software development world has had numerous os tools for decades: vim, emacs, apache, to name just a few. I can't think of anything equivalent in education. Most teachers are still writing their lesson plans in Word or its equivalent, which is like writing your code in notepad without any coding- specific extensions.

There is lots of room to improve ed tech, and some of these improvements need to be open source to have any meaningful widespread impact.

<comment><USER18> " _Most teachers are still writing their lesson plans in Word or its equivalent, which is like writing your code in notepad without any coding- specific extensions._ "

There are plug-ins for Word that can produce quizzes, and most of the interactive white-board software packages (each dedicated to a make of interactive white-board) can import from Powerpoint or allow authoring of interactive content. What I as a teacher _don't_ need is someone telling me to use some huge IDE like package to build my lessons!

In the future I'd like to use a cheap tablet to scribe on and have what I'm scribing (or what I have prepared earlier) just appear on the projector and on the student tablets. I'd also like to be able to invite student A to 'show' something to everyone else. Then I'd like to be able to roll the whole lesson up and pop it somewhere like a Moodle course so the students can access the stuff later for revision.

The original article addresses 'back end' student tracking and data capture type software. More of a business application.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was talking about a different project that I would like to see happen, but built using a similar development model. To be more specific, I'd like to see a dedicated curriculum development tool built. I;d like it to be high-quality and open source, so it can see widespread use in schools of every economic level.

I am not envisioning a simple plugin to a word processing tool; I am imagining a dedicated curriculum development tool that manages things like importing standards, and connecting detailed parts of a learning plan to bigger-picture summaries.

I in no way imagine such a tool being mandated for anyone; I simply imagine a tool that is powerful enough that people will see it used well by experienced teachers, and want to use it themselves.

<comment><USER18> " _I simply imagine a tool that is powerful enough that people will see it used well by experienced teachers, and want to use it themselves._ "

Well, good luck, and if you have thought through the detail of this I would be interested to see the specification (in the Spolsky sense) for the system you envisage.

" _I in no way imagine such a tool being mandated for anyone_ "

Of course everyone will have to use it!

Edit: parent poster is also a teacher, so he must know that anything that is _suggested_ by management as a central tool will immediately become mandatory!

<comment><AUTHOR> I am hoping to complete my MEd in December, and I want to complete an mvp of an os ed tool as my masters project. I wrote a bit about the tool I envision previously [1], and I recognize that the next step is writing a proper spec. That will be part of the masters work.

Nice to see another teacher on here!

[1] [http://peak5390.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/why-do- programmers-...](http://peak5390.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/why-do-programmers- have-better-tools-than-educators/)

<comment><USER18> Good luck with the more detailed specification. I shall read it with interest. In the UK we tend to have many small outcomes per lesson, and a second document called a scheme of work tracks the large arc of a year's work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> " By taking a not-for-profit approach and using freely available open-source tools, Saanich officials expect to develop openStudent for under $5 million, with yearly maintenance pegged at less than $1 million."

They estimate that using their old software would cost $100mm over ten years. They're reducing that to roughly $15-20mm.

Government software is lovingly expensive. The state I live in spent over $30mm to rebuild a purchasing application. And it doesn't even work!

Go figure.

<comment><USER20> I am the Director of IT for the Saanich school district which has incubated this project. There is a lot to say about how we got here but this is a somewhat different project than most other open source student information systems (and all commercial products that we are aware of).

Firstly it is build from the ground up to work as an enterprise system. Meaning rather than just function for a district and its schools our system is architected to function at the provincial or state / district / school level.

The system is designed to accommodate cross-enrolment between schools within a district and between districts. As well it can accommodate continuous entry (year round schools) and is built for conventional as well as distance learning schools.

It is also has a sophisticated security model which considers users at the enterprise level, district level, school level or any combination thereof. In other words you can be a vice-principal at one school (with that view), a teacher in the same school (with that view) and a parent with children in another school district.

The system is also built to work in a distributed hosting model where the primary can be at one site and secondarys at other sites. With the next version of PostgresQL it will be possible to have multiple primaries.

There is so much that is different about this system from the standard SIS. With its capacity to function at the enterprise system it could accommodate an entire state or province.

Right now the system has been licensed under the Education Community Source license (modified Apache 2) to ensure that we have better control of the code but we are definitely looking for input and help into the system and it will be available to other jurisdictions when it is complete. Have a look at the documenation on our website and I will try and answer any questions or comments relating the the system.

Thanks for all the supportive comments.

Gregg Ferrie

PS if you wonder why this has gotten this much support in a relatively small school district we had already converted most of our servers and workstations to Linux-based diskless clients (approximately 2500 in 18 schools). All of teachers and students are used to using open source software including LibreOffice, Scribus, The Gimp and many more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oh man, how awesome would it be if a high school CS class were able to have a lesson where they learn how to contribute to an open source project that their own school uses? So cool!

</comment><comment><USER22> I hate to be Donald Downer but ... it's not done, yet.

' close to finishing the core version '

'expects to begin testing its openStudent software in elementary schools this spring, with a full launch to follow in 2014. An advanced version for middle and high schools is slated to roll out in 2015.'

<comment><USER13> True but I have a lot more faith in a tightly integrated 8 person team than some off the shelf bloat-ware customization project.

<comment><USER22> As would I.

I don't assume they _are_ tightly integrated - all the article claims is 'eight people'.

These could be crack coders. Or they could be '1 guy who kinda knows VB and 7 people learning OJT'.

<comment><USER20> Just to clarify our staff consists of myself (IT Director for the Saanich SD) - I am the project lead/sponsor for the district. The eight people include: project manager, product tester/quality assurance, stakeholder business analyst and 5 strong Java programmers, including one developer who is one of the original creators of the PostgresQL database.

gregg

<comment><USER22> Fascinating - thanks for the update.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder if they considered throwing their lot in with Schooltool:

<http://www.schooltool.org>

It has been around a long while now, is in use around the world, and should at least make a good starting point for further customization.

</comment><comment><USER24> I can't even load the BCeSIS website through all of the Java security warnings: <http://www.bcesis.isw-bc.ca/>

</comment><comment><USER25> We have something like this for years in Poland and it works very well: <http://usos.edu.pl/about-usos>

</comment><comment><USER26> There is where the federal government I think can help and step in to provide a hosted open source education system (wit a local appliance for caching and to survive outages). Not just for student registration and grades, but US-wide shared lesson plans, shared success stories, realtime metrics and for parents, etc.

</comment><comment><USER27> it's open? where's the code?

<comment><USER20> As our funding is completely from the school district we currently have the code on our internal Git. The code itself is based on the Education Community Source license primarily so we can keep the development relevant to British Columbia. Once we have completed the product we intent to release the code to be forked by other jurisdictions to modify for their own purposes.

Please feel free to have a look at the openStudent website for documentation about the system and please ask any and all questions.

gregg</comment></comment>


Coronavirus cure crowdsourcing? - <AUTHOR> I have a silly question to discuss: is there any chance that a Coronavirus vaccine can be found by brute force?
The world already has a pretty good infrastructure (Seti@Home) for that, and media all over the world already informed everyone about the threat. Participation in saving the world from the plague could be a very good motivation to join distributed calculations.
Or it makes no sense at all to try the brute force? <comment><USER2> Oh damn, I thought the question was whether the coronavirus could cure crowdsourcing...

<comment><AUTHOR> Somehow yes, btw. Success will be a great success story of crowdsourcing.

<comment><USER2> Solid point

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have a look at [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fold.it](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=fold.it)

<comment><AUTHOR> Have seen it right after the posting ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> both folding@home and rosetta@home are doing this kind of thing :)</comment>


NASA's lunar probe is sending 461 gigabytes of data per day back home - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/44529

<comment><USER2> They can get 100mbps from the moon but I can't get 8mbps from my phone exchange 1.5km away.</comment>


Rethinking Cron - <AUTHOR> http://adam.heroku.com/past/2010/4/13/rethinking_cron/ <comment><USER2> Meta point: I'd really like to see (non-www) subdomains added to the article title. I clicked through to the article thinking that Heroku had redesigned their Cron management only to discover something completely different. Subdomains are included in Posterous links; why not everywhere?

</comment><comment><USER3> I generally agree with the weak points that the OP pointed out regarding cron. That being said, throwing out cron, or any other built-in system tool, isn't always a great idea.

When you adopt a new scheduler, you're inevitably creating work for your enterprise. It's yet another thing that must be learned and documented. There may be a new syntax to learn, which will mean you're incurring training costs (and the cost of errors) down the line.

Programmers love to improve things, but there's a real world cost to change that can't be ignored. cron may be archaic and lacking power, but it's well understood.

As for enterprise schedulers, they've been around for years. Off the top of my head, I've worked with 'Autosys', and 'Appworx'. These were robust, enterprise-ready schedulers that supported conditional execution, locks, as well as their own scripting language.

<comment><USER4> To be fair he didn't say throw out cron. He said cron will have a place for rotating log files etc. Which to me is infrastructure type stuff and not application level.

So the sysadmins will still use cron to do the infrastructure type jobs. But when a programmer needs something in his app to be scheduled he can use the replacement, this also frees them up from asking the sysadmin to install a cron script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _And the subtle differences between a cronjob's shell environment and your command prompt's shell environment can be maddening._

This is my favorite thing to complain about with cron. I can't believe that there's still not a way to test run cron entries. So far I just add > tmp.out >> tmp.err, set it to run every minute, and wait.

<comment><USER6> [http://serverfault.com/questions/85893/running-a-cron-job- ma...](http://serverfault.com/questions/85893/running-a-cron-job-manually-and- immediately)

I completely agree that there should be a better, direct way to test cron jobs.

<comment><USER7> I used to do this by exec()ing a shell with no environment. 'Twasn't perfect, but it caught a lot of irritating little errors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> At Bizo (<http://dev.bizo.com>), we manage scheduled tasks via Hudson.

It works great for us. It's centralized, has a web interface, and is already familiar to everyone on the team (we already used Hudson for CI). It has a ton of plugins, so notifications, single sign-on, and a host of other desired features were no problem to bolt on.

Here's a quick post from a few months back on why we chose Hudson: [http://dev.bizo.com/2009/11/using-hudson-to-manage- crons.htm...](http://dev.bizo.com/2009/11/using-hudson-to-manage-crons.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> How about <http://upstart.ubuntu.com/>

<comment><USER10> Upstart is more for replacing init. Its less suitable for jobs that need to be started at particular times since its designed for starting and stopping services during boot and changes in runlevel.

<comment><USER9> I think long term plan for upstart is to replace cron[1](generating events at scheduled time ...)

And some more general information here [2]

[1] <http://upstart.ubuntu.com/faq.html#replace-cron>

[2] [http://www.netsplit.com/2006/09/01/upstart-can-now- replace-s...](http://www.netsplit.com/2006/09/01/upstart-can-now-replace- sysvinit/)

<comment><USER11> Hopefully they do a better job than Apple. I had a number of issues with their init/cron replacement.

<comment><USER12> so true! Every time i'm forced to deal with launchd for scheduling, I wish I was using cron.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll reprise my comment from the last time a new and better cron was posted here[1]:

While cron is clearly pushed way past its capabilities by many people (without always realizing it), this strikes me as a reinvention of something that's been around forever: the batch system.

If the goals are improved reliability, management, fault-tolerance, etc., you'd be better off using mature software that was designed to solve this problem, and already has good community support, like Condor.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=916737>

</comment><comment><USER14> I developed Whenever (<http://github.com/javan/whenever>) to at least make the Cron syntax more reasonable.

<comment><USER15> Whenever is awesome.

(incidentally, check your pull requests :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> OP wants a distributed operating system. Linux, FreeBSD and Windows by design are not distributed. POSIX specifically cripples this. How do you take into account an action that needs to be distributed but have a central return point? How will fault tolerance be handled? Expecting every application to handle this won't work, what's needed is a distributed operating system.

</comment><comment><USER17> launchd

<comment><USER18> I'm genuinely confused as to why launchd isn't part of this conversation. It is definitely a replacement for cron (and init) and seems to be a pretty good one. I haven't done an extensive comparison between it and cron, but it has definitely been easy to use and worked well for me. It is very flexible and you use it by laying out exactly what you want it to do in XML.

<comment><USER11> I had issues in the past with scheduling processes in launchd. It's been a while, but I remember having these issues at least two OS revisions _after_ Apple initially launched it. (The issue was related to starting a process and having launchd restart the process if it died. There were options to toggle this but it wasn't working for me, and I _was_ reading the Apple developer docs on launchd.)

Also, I personally don't feel that using XML as a config file format is necessarily an _improvement_ over what cron offers now. (I know that I'm skipping the fact that 'XML is self-validating,' but I don't really find a lack of a self-validating config file to be a major issue with cron)

<comment><USER19> One of the biggest gotchas I found was that launchd bails if the process takes less than 60 seconds to run. Putting a "sleep 60" at the tail of the script fixed a lot of problems for me.

At first I was kind of upset that this condition was there, but in retrospect it might have been a very wise design choice to stop runaway triggers.

<comment><USER11> Now that you mention it, I remember that quirk. I had an issue with _not_ being able to disable that quirk when running a scheduled process. launchd would stop scheduling a process that was scheduled to run every 5 minutes if one of the runs took less than 60 seconds. It really irked me because this 60-second-rule only makes sense when you are talking about re-spawning a constantly running process, and should _not_ affect the behaviour of processes running on a schedule.

> _At first I was kind of upset that this condition was there, but in > retrospect it might have been a very wise design choice to stop runaway > triggers._

It doesn't _really_ stop runaway triggers if all of the scripts have a 'sleep 60' at the end of them. And if you are concerned about runaway triggers you could always make the rule something like "bail if the process dies after <60s more than once in a 2-minute period" or similar since there _are_ legitimate processes out there that take less than 60 seconds to run.

<comment><USER19> Well, I didn't say it was _perfect_. =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> No mention in the article about Gearman for worker queues so I'll promote it here. I like its simplicity and language agnosticism. <http://gearman.org/></comment>


removed - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mbailey/openssl/issues/1#issuecomment-231695978 <comment><USER2> I like this guy, beeing as careful as needed even thought the others seem to ignore his concerns.

<comment><USER3> Really? Sounds like he is being unreasonable to me.

<comment><USER2> How so? He claimed the name in the name of security, it seems just reasonable to make sure it will still be used for security relevant purposes.

Not sure if you are familiar with ruby, but a lot of libraries include "OpenSSL" and refer to the internal library, if there would be a public one with the same name this could have disastrous complications.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Should I get U.S. citizenship? - <AUTHOR>

Gentlemen,
I'm a permanent resident and I have green card. I was born in Russia but lived my whole life in Ukraine. My parents had Ukrainian passport but no more as they have naturalized. I was over 18 so I didn't naturalize with them. So, I don't really have any passport of any country.
Should I start applying for U.S. passport? I'm sort of scared of being deported for something, is that a valid reason for getting a passort? <comment><USER2> Absolutely yes - if you are a permanent resident and have held your green card for at least 5 years (the qualifying period) you should apply for citizenship. The reason is that a green card is not permanent; you lose it when you leave the country for a year or more. So if, for example, you got a consulting gig in Russia for a couple of years and then wanted to come back to the US, your previous green card would not be valid and you would have to start from scratch.

If you can afford it, there is really no reason not to, even if you didn't have the additional complications with unclear other citizenships.

The only people who should be careful about applying for US citizenship are those from countries (like Japan) who are barred from having dual citizenships; otherwise if you can afford it, it is frankly a no-brainer.

Plus, if you are a citizen you can vote. I don't know about you, but living and paying taxes in a country where I don't have the right to vote kinda drives me crazy.

I am not a lawyer, but look on the bright side, my opinion was free.

<comment><USER3> Is it really a no brainer? You have to pay US taxes even if you leave the country. But if you are sure you are going to live there for the rest of your life I guess that won't make any difference.

<comment><USER4> If you are a citizen you can apply for non-residency. I believe the rule is that if you are out of the country for >= 181 days of the calendar year, you may apply to be income-tax exempt on those portions earned outside the USA.

<comment><USER5> It's the "foreign earned income exclusion", and it's only the first $91k exempted from US tax (plus a housing allowance, with some restrictions). To get it, you need a "bona fide foreign residence" or 330 days/yr out of the US. I'm actually going to spend the last few months of 2009 on vacation, using the savings in taxes to pay for it, since I'll be out 9-10 months in 2009 just for work.

The first 91k is basically 18k in taxes at current rates. They unfortunately changed it from LAST 91k (i.e. the income at your highest marginal rate, easily 33% or 35%) in 2006, at the same time as making it inflation adjusted).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_earned_income_exclusion>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My situation is very similar, I'm on green card here as well. The only difference is that I actually have valid Russian passport, so can go back there whenever I want.

After careful consideration of my personal situation I have decided to pass on citizenship. At least for now. There are just too few benefits. I don't think I'll get deported, I don't care about voting (electoral college would make my vote in presidential elections a lot less relevant in my state), I don't want to do jury duty, I don't want to pay exit tax should I decide to leave the country.

When they decide to rip me off with taxes (and I already paid millions), I'll just say "thanks, but no thanks" and move to HK or Singapore. :)

<comment><USER7> I think after you have green card, they will track down you for exit tax as citizen on tax.

One difference is if you marry a non U.S. woman. then you need to put her on waiting list for 5 years before she can come to U.S. because you are only a permanent resident. But since you have paid millions of taxes. I guess you are rich enough if this happens to do things in alternative way such as EB-5 for her.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure that exit tax is for citizens only. They'll have a hard time tracking down non-citizens and no leverage, except for threatening to revoke the green card and/or restrict entry into the US.

The marriage thing is a very good point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing that you must keep in mind is that if you get sick of high US taxes (and they only seem to be going higher) and you want to move someplace like Hong Kong, you will still need to pay US taxes, and you will even be forced to continue to pay them for 10 years if you decide to give up your citizenship.

<comment><USER9> That's the theory anyway. In practise a good accountant will reduce your US tax burden to practically zero.

<comment><USER10> And you'll pay him handsomely for the privilege.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With issues of this magnitude, talk to an immigration lawyer.

<comment><USER12> Or at least to an immigrant-rights center. There's sure to be one in any major U.S.

I remember in grad school I went to testify for my advisor (Korean-born), and they wanted to know that he really was married to his wife, and related nonsense (she also immigrated from Korea and they'd been married for 10 years).

In any case, there's obviously a lot of power to U.S. citizenship: not the least being the ability not to be deported to a homeland that is subject to vagaries of the latest dictatorial "democratic" government (reference to Russia, not Ukraine).

Best of luck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> You first need to be naturalized and then you can apply for a U.S. passport, but I am sure you knew that.

At the very least, you owe it to yourself to have a passport. In the meantime, you should to be asking one from the Russians as you ought to be or are still a citizen of that country.

</comment><comment><USER14> I was in a same boat as you are, and I think it comes down to being whether you feel grateful to this country or not.

In my experience, living in former Soviet Union was hell. It was, still is, and always will be a shithole, with about 95% of population idiot racist alcoholics.

So for me, when faced with an opportunity to get an American passport, I was more than happy to do that. I feel that voting, paying taxes and doing jury duty is the least I can do to give back to the greatest country in the world, that gave me an opportunity to make the life for me and my family permanently better.

Of course, that's my opinion and you should do whatever you feel like.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yes, but apply from Canada, just in case ;-)

</comment><comment><USER16> My wife and I joke that we collect passports and citizenships. So far we have UK, FR and US.

I don't have US citizenship, as my wife has that one (I have a Green Card). But if I wasn't married to a citizen, and had no passport at all, I would probably become a citizen.

It sounds like you must still be a Russian citizen too - ask them for a passport.

</comment><comment><USER17> There is some ambiguity in your question:

Are you scared of 'being deported for something that you've done' or are you scared of being deported for 'something unspecified at some point in the future' ? There is a huge difference between the two.

If the former then in some cases being deported is better than having to stay...

</comment><comment><USER18> Being an "immigrant" makes the passport issue a bit more important - but don't forget something like 60% of US citizens don't have one either (IIRC).</comment>


Ask HN: What's your backup setup? Manual or Automated? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> 1) I use a time machine drive at my desk. This is useful for quick recovery.

2) I use backblaze (with encryption) for continuous backups to the cloud.

Backblaze was super useful once when I had a drive fail as I was traveling. I was able to retrieve my SSH keys immediately and continue working in the cloud. It also provides reassurance that, if there were an event such as robbery or fire at my apartment, losing my laptop and time machine drive together would not be catastrophic.

A final tip - I use [http://tripmode.ch](http://tripmode.ch) to disable backblaze / dropbox / box / google drive / spotify backups while tethering, on bad wifi, on airplanes, etc. I find this tool essential to managing all of the services that continually sync in the background.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's what happens with manual backups:

Day 1: Let's test this! Hey, it works.

Day 2: Right, I should run this.

Day 3: This takes a long time.

Day 4: Maybe I should do this weekly.

Day 15: Right, time to do a backup.

Day 23: Weekly backup. This takes a really long time...

Day 45: I should do a backup next time I have time.

Day 421: Where are my backups?

Aesop says: only automated backups keep happening. Only backups that send you a message when anything at all goes wrong are worth having.

I say: nobody wants backups. Everyone wants restores.

</comment><comment><USER4> Attic ( [https://attic-backup.org/](https://attic-backup.org/) ) backups to my home NAS, then the NAS backs up to CrashPlan. I keep a certain number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots and the backup script prunes once a day and verifies once every other day.

I also like to encrypt my backups before uploading them to CrashPlan. Each machine has a randomly generated key and the list of keys are then encrypted with a master key. I back up the list of keys to CrashPlan as well, but the master key is not. Instead, I split the key using Shamir's secret sharing and left copies of the component keys in a variety of places. If something ever totally destroys my home and I lose my local copy of the master key I can recover it by recombining a certain number of the component keys.

<comment><USER5> I have been looking into both of these technologies recently.

Attic has the most attractive feature set of the backup management tools I have looked at (deduplication and compression, support for remote repos, built in encryption, ability to mount repo as a FUSE file system), with the main downsides being that it is fairly new (and so just doesn't have as much testing as some of the older options) and its development model is not ideal. It is solely maintained by the original developer as a personal project and so when he is busy development stops. Recently, a handful of active community contributors started a fork ([https://borgbackup.github.io/](https://borgbackup.github.io/)) because of this. The original developer still seems committed to working on Attic when time permits, but I'd prefer to see a team of capable developers maintaining something I was relying for the integrity of my data.

CrashPlan was the most attractive offsite backup solution because its price was competitive (similar to several other options, ~$6/month to backup one computer with no data size limit) and it provided cross-platform support for Windows, OS X, and Linux. I also like that it has a few different encryption options, including the option to generate your own encryption key that you do not share with CrashPlan.

I am curious about your decision to encrypt your data before uploading with CrashPlan. Are you trying to avoid storing any unencrypted data on your NAS because it is more exposed to the internet? Or do you not trust CrashPlan with your data? I would think that using CrashPlan with a custom key would be fairly secure. If you don't trust CrashPlan in that case, you probably shouldn't install it on your machine at all. The CEO of CrashPlan has commented on double encrypting data ([http://superuser.com/a/589686](http://superuser.com/a/589686)).

What is the restore process like when combining Attic and CrashPlan? I don't think CrashPlan has any file system mount option, so you would need to restore an entire Attic repo to recover any files from it, correct? I guess this is okay since you have the NAS to restore from for individual file backup and you only need to restore from CrashPlan in the case of catastrophic failure (the NAS dies entirely) when you would need to do a full restore.

My current backup solution is an rsync script backing up to a remote machine I own. I previously used Bitcasa for offsite backup but was unhappy with the service and with the way the company kept changing its business model (shifted away from consumer cloud storage to a business / app market). I'd like to replace my rsync script with something more sophisticated like Attic and use another offsite option like CrashPlan.

<comment><USER4> I encrypt the data before shipping it off to CrashPlan mostly because it's the most flexible. I have a small amount of "sensitive" data related to my research work. It's not really anything that is actually worth protecting IMO, but I'm obligated to meet certain requirements when storing it. Encrypting it before uploading lets me have more fine-grained control over how it's encrypted. I also like to use different keys for different machines. I do actually trust CrashPlan, but I like doing it this way. The NAS isn't exposed to the internet, so that's not the issue.

Restoring from CrashPlan is basically as you describe. Assuming my home NAS isn't destroyed, I've just restored from the appropriate Attic repo for the machine off the NAS. If the NAS was destroyed too, well I'd have to restore from CrashPlan. My backups are targeted though, so a full restore is only at most like a TB of data (basically, my documents, configuration files and music collection).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use BackupPC ([http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/](http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/)) on an always-on 8-watt Fit-PC2 ([http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/fit- pc2/](http://www.fit-pc.com/web/products/fit-pc2/)). BackupPC grabs twice- daily backups of my servers and once-daily backups of my personal machine, and emails me if there's any trouble. The backups aren't dependent on any third- party service, I don't have to worry about who else has access to the files and data on my personal system, and I habitually check its web interface for extra peace of mind.

I think it's hands-down the best cross-platform backup system currently available, but for some reason it's not a popular approach.

<comment><USER7> Seconded for BackupPC. I've been using it since I first saw a release announcement for it on Slashdot ~15 years ago. I combined it with automated weekly archival uploads to an off-site server (that I was also using for other purposes), as well as a manual monthly transfer I would make to an external hard drive (that would otherwise remain powered off, in case someone/something managed to get access to all of my live machines).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If your backups are automated, you need an automated backup checker in order to ensure your backups are reliable and will work the very day you'll need them [https://github.com/backupchecker/backupchecker](https://github.com/backupchecker/backupchecker)

<comment><USER9> But who checks the automated backup checker?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> No one at time of posting has mentioned standardized backup being stored in physical copy off site.

Low risk, high impact events do happen.

Copying my harddrive to USB and storing them in the same room doesn't protect against a lot of other failures - fire, theft, other social or natural disaster.

For a small company or startup: Code is often versioned. Is everything else? Perhaps buy a cheap USB stick for a dump of all admin files that could have an impact should they get corrupted? Make a copy each week and stick on a new USB stick to put in your car's glove box (hopefully getting full, as you have a stack of backups - the is super important for audits: as a manager you should be able to trace changes in office documents easily, something someone more naïve would assume is covered up - I've seen it happen).

Copying to the cloud puts a lot of trust in the cloud being there in the event of a failure. If the technological connectivity causes of failure for my business and the cloud are independent this makes a lot of sense. Not when passwords can be easily shared, floppy disk controllers introduce rooting vulnerabilities, etc.

An off-site physical medium makes a lot of sense for backups. Encrypt a USB stick and keep it in your car. If you have an office with multiple sites, send a USB/HDD/SD containing backups every couple of weeks.

Low probability, high impact events do happen. And they have an irrecoverable impact.

Have a routine. Then, as others have said, you have a recovery solution, not a backup.

</comment><comment><USER11> MacBook Pro (mine), MacBook Air (wife's). Both backup important data to CrashPlan's servers and also use the CrashPlan app to backup everything to my home server.

The home server is running Windows 8.1 with SSD for OS drive, a 2TB drive with other data (movies, tv shows, photos, home videos, downloadeds, dropbox, etc). Four more drives of various sizes and models (gradually moving to 3TB+ WD Reds) are pooled together using DriveBender with duplication. This drive pool is where the local CrashPlan backups are stored, as well as occasional full disk images before OS upgrades. The server's own OS and data drives are also backed up to the drive pool with CrashPlan and to CrashPlan Central

All home photos and videos are also backed up to Google+ Photos. All documents are scanned, stored in Evernote, and shredded.

All of the computer backup is automated.

The photo backup is automatic, but organization takes my intervention. My phone and my wife's both upload 2048x2048 images to our Google accounts. They also backup full res images to my Dropbox. Once a month or so, I transfer the full res images to the home server and upload any good ones (of our son) to Google+ in full res to share with our families.

Document backup is a pain in the ass. I just collect a bunch of mail and documents on my desk and every so often I use my Fujitsu ScanSnap to scan it all and it automatically uploads to Evernote. Sometimes I label them by date, but I've been to lazy to do that lately, they get thrown in an archive notebook and I rely on search.

I think this pretty well follows the 3-2-1 rule.

</comment><comment><USER12> Arq backs up my OS X machine and dumps the files into an S3 Glacier instance. Arq is inexpensive, and so is the S3 instance, so this setup works for me.

Arq has failed a few times without telling me, so I am not going to maintain a solely Arq-based setup in the longterm, but it's fine for now.

In the future, I'd like to add some redundancy, and backup to a location that I have physical control over. For now, however, I am pretty confident in this setup.

</comment><comment><USER13> I have a PowerEdge server at home with two different sets of hot-swap drives, a 6x500GB in RAID6 and 2x2TB in RAID1. It also has one top bay for easy hot- swap.

The RAID6 array is for nested-VM experiments with OpenStack, ESXi, etc., whereas the 2x2TB drives are in RAID1 and exposed to NFS and Samba. My Mac uses this share to store its Time Capsule data, plus just general crap I need to put somewhere and a full sync of my Dropbox and SpiderOak directories. I've got a cron job on the box that detects when a drive's been plugged into the hotswap bay and rsyncs from the RAID1 array to that disk around 3AM. It sends me a Pushover message when it's done the sync, and sometime during the week I cycle that drive out to my safe-deposit box and plug its alternate in. Occasionally I verify these backups by plugging them into my desktop's hot- swap SATA bay, but for the most part I'm confident in their success at this point so that's not an every-week thing.

I do cloud architecture and stuff at work, but for my own data I'm more comfortable knowing where, physically, my canonical copies are.

</comment><comment><USER14> Manual: Time Machine using 2 hard-drive (different models to lower probability of both going down at the same time), one at work, one at home (I sync mainly when Time Machine nudge me every 10 days), which takes care of "something burns down" scenario. Also, a separate hard-drive for sizable personal media (raw photos/videos I don't intend to use soon), which is the only weak point (I should research Amazon Glacier or similar technology)

Automated: all important work also lives online (Github for code, Google Drive for documents, Gmail keeps all conversation).

Apart from the media hard-drive, I think this follows the 3-2-1 rule for back- up:

\- Have at least three copies of your data. (3 full copies, fragmented data online)

\- Store the copies on two different media. (2 HD, 1 SSD, online)

\- Keep one backup copy offsite. (2 full copies at different sites)

</comment><comment><USER15> Both my server and my dev machine have RAID-1. In addition:

\- My server does an automated full backup once a week to OVH's free backup space (on a separate nfs drive), and an incremental backup once a day.

\- My dev server (a synology NAS) does a daily backup of my important stuff (basically all my code and documents) to a backup on the RAID drive.

\- Once every 2 weeks I manually download a full backup from my main server to my NAS.

\- Occasionally I upload the "important stuff" backup from my NAS to my main server.

I don't regularly test my backups, but occasionally I need to extract something (because I delete something by mistake), so that tests them. I also check my logfiles regularly, so I would notice any RAID failures, failed backups, etc.

I think my procedures are sufficient for my purposes. Having RAID really helps with peace of mind!

</comment><comment><USER16> Time Machine backup to my Synology NAS, then a time-honored offsite backup -- I clone my drive and physically leave the latest copy at my parents' house.

every time I visit I bring a newer drive and swap.

Simple, cost effective, foolproof.

</comment><comment><USER17> Automated Portion: Every morning at 7:30am, a cron job runs to rsync my main computer's /home directory to my NAS that is sitting in a closet. The NAS has two drives that are mirrored to guard against hard drive failure. Every Saturday morning, a homebrewed script will separately check to make sure all my backups are current and will email me to advise me that everything is current and OK. If there is a problem, it will tell me which days are missing.

Manual Portion: Once every couple months, I backup the portion of my /home directory that is not heavy media like video to a large USB stick, which I keep at my office.

I don't love this setup, particularly because (1) an offsite backup does not happen automatically, (2) my video is not backed up offsite, and (3) it is not resilient to natural disasters in my area, since both my home and office are within a half-mile of each other in downtown New York City.

Moreover, because I keep my NAS mounted even when no backup is in progress, my backups are vulnerable to malicious code executed even at the non-superuser level. For example, a while back there was a bug in some gaming software (Steam?) where a script executed that would rm -rf /* because of a badly written shell script. If that had happened to me, it would wipe my /home directory and my NAS backup.

Eventually, I'd like to set up a Raspberry Pi running in another area of the country and have rsync push daily backups over ssh to that offsite computer.

</comment><comment><USER18> Cron job backs our two PCs up to an encrypted USB drive overnight, every night, using rsnapshot.

Backs up Linux PC (where the drive is attached) and Windows PC (via rsync courtesy of Cygwin).

Rotate the USB drive with its off-site partner every Wednesday (cron job emails me a reminder that morning.)

Every January I replace the external USB drives with new ones.

That's the PCs.

For our phones, contacts are handled in OwnCloud and using CardDAV[1] to two- way synchronise with the phones. This also is really nice as I can manage and edit contacts on the desktop as I like to avoid data entry on pokey little phone screen keyboards if I can help it. (I also use the contact data for other things such as caller ID info popping up on the TV when the home phone rings, so a single source that updates everywhere is handy.)

Use Titanium Backup[2] to backup phones daily, and FolderSync[3] to SFTP said backups to the desktop PC periodically (along with two-way sync of photos on the phone).

[1] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.cardd...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dmfs.carddav.Sync)

[2] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keramidas....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.keramidas.TitaniumBackup)

[3] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.andro...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.full)

</comment><comment><USER19> I used to use BackupPC for onsite backups (which is a great product!), but wasn't comfortable with my lack of an offsite. I've since moved to Crashplan ([http://www.code42.com/crashplan/](http://www.code42.com/crashplan/)), mostly because they have a Linux client as well as Windows and also allow peer to peer backups.

</comment><comment><USER20> I use Time Machine. One thing I learned recently is there are a bunch of files that Time Machine doesn't backup - [http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/131399/what- folders...](http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/131399/what-folders-can- be-safely-excluded-from-time-machine-backup)

In my case, I use nvAlt as a note taking tool. nvAlt stores the interim changes (have not yet been persisted to the database) in ~/Library/Cache or something, which is on the exclusion list for Time Machine. Since I never really restart my machine or close the programs I use daily, the changes never really got backed up (I had months of notes that were not persisted). Long story short, I had to restore from a Time Machine backup, which mostly worked but I did lose some stuff.

I keep the time machine exclusion list pretty slim now because, frankly I don't care if my backup has caches and other garbage in it. I much rather prefer recovering things in a stateful manner that's least disruptive to my work.

<comment><USER21> I wish Apple did backups to the cloud (which would make iCloud indispensable and a lot more useful).

I hope one of the storage giants (Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, etc.) rolls out an automatic backup service that makes backing up your computer to the cloud really cheap. This could probably also be accomplished with a quick Python script.

<comment><USER22> Why don't you use Backblaze or CrashPlan?

<comment><USER21> Wow didn't know those existed, thanks! I think I will try Backblaze :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://www.backblaze.com/](https://www.backblaze.com/) when I was mostly using Windows. $5/mo or $50/year per computer with no limit on filesize! Seriously, I've had multiple terabytes on there and it never complained. And the upload speeds keep getting faster.

One limitation of Backblaze is a limited file history. If a file gets modified and you don't notice, the old version will eventually disappear. So I have my "important" stuff in a Dropbox account with "packrat" enabled for infinite history.

My Linux-based data is on a RAID-1 which is _not_ backup. But I can't find a cheap enough service to hold another 7.5TB of data.

(Also I'm going to plug Archive Team's backup of the Internet Archive. [http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/g...](http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK/git- annex_implementation) If you have a Mac or Linux box, put your spare hard disk space to good use.)

</comment><comment><USER24> I use a combination of LVM thin volume snapshots and btrfs snapshots. While i could do fine without btrfs snapshots i like to have the ability to browse old versions online in order to diff or restore them. The thin volume pool is mirrored using lvm's rather new raid1 volume types (not the mirror type). If the filesystem fails (which happened twice already) i can merge the working LVM snapshot back and loose at max a day worth of work. However if the LVM fails i have an offline copy with the same setup (LVM and btrfs) where i use btrfs send/receive functionality. But if this happens i will loose some days of work. If both LVM VGs fail im lost. The offline copy also holds more btrfs snapshots than the online one in order to reduce disk usage on the online storage. I do it all manually but i am planning to do the btrfs snapshots automatically. However, the LVM snapshots wont ever happen automatically as i don't want to snapshot a bad filesystem and i am unsure how to reliably detect filesystem errors without using the system.

</comment><comment><USER25> Windows desktop: has script to sync a handful of directories to Linux server. Run manually. Desktop has another drive that has images of the other drives and backups of game service downloads (Steam, GOG, etc.) that aren't anywhere else, to save space.

Linux server: has script to sync data drive to encrypted external drive. Run manually because drive needs to be manually connected and password entered (probably a way to work around this, but I'm lazy). I have 3 external drives that are swapped about 1-2 weeks to work, and 1-4 months to another state.

It might seem too manual, but I have a workaround. I host a podcast[0] where I say "don't forget that today is international backup awareness day[1], so backup your stuff" to remind me.

0: [http://thenexus.tv/category/cs/](http://thenexus.tv/category/cs/)

1: [http://blog.codinghorror.com/international-backup- awareness-...](http://blog.codinghorror.com/international-backup-awareness- day/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Mozy for personal (non-prod) computers. it's like $60/year. Set and forget, my computer was stolen last year, was up and running a day later, most of which was spent purchasing the new computer (Macbook)

Prod is more complicated, my company works with several multi-TB data sets (MongoDB) consisting of billions of swiftly changing kilobyte-sized documents. This can't be "backed up" in the traditional sense because it's impossible, barring custom hardware/great expense, to take a consistent snapshot of a multi-TB dataset distributed across dozens of machines. So we do the usual distributed replication across datacenters, put RAID underneath, etc. I worry more about corruption due to application errors than losing a disk for this stuff, though.

</comment><comment><USER27> Automated. My stuff syncs automatically with Seafile (I used to use OwnCloud but really highly recommend you not, since it eats files, and this is a known problem there) every night when I get home. And every night in the middle of the night, there's a cron on my home server that runs a partial, encrypted backup to S3, and monthly full, encrypted backups. I have been bitten before, and so something like this is extremely important.

On the business side, something similar, but nightlies and full weekly backups to S3 of our private docker registry and Gitlab content.

Basically, if a fire or something (knock on wood) destroyed everything I owned, including for some reason all the servers in all the datacenters, I could be back up and running in a couple of hours, I think.

</comment><comment><USER28> Automated:

Mac:

\- Arq (Highly recommended) to Google Drive (Unlimited) and Amazon Glacier

\- TimeMachine to two disks and a QNAP NAS

Servers:

\- Tarsnap

\- duplicity ([https://blog.notmyhostna.me/automated-and-encrypted- backups-...](https://blog.notmyhostna.me/automated-and-encrypted-backups-with- duplicity/))

</comment><comment><USER29> on servers i run a couple of homebrew shell scripts to do backups. on some i use the backup-gem ([https://github.com/backup/backup](https://github.com/backup/backup))

on my workstation/notebook (both apple computers) i use time machine with different external harddrives i rotate weekly.

all setups run automated, but sometimes i trigger them manually (usually right before and/or after some major change in configuration, or when lots of new data are on the drives (eg: i copy all the holliday photos onto my laptop)

i run regular checks on server backups, e.g. check if they "are there" and if i could restore them properly if needed.

</comment><comment><USER30> Backblaze: backs up main hard drive automatically

Arq: backs up photo library to S3 Glacier automatically

Carbon Copy Cloner: clones main hard drive to external once every two weeks and photo library to external (stored at parents' house) once every month

</comment><comment><USER31> I use rsyncbtrfs [1] (which I'm also the author of) to auto backup my OS, home and pretty much everything, daily. It's saved my ass on numerous occasions where I've deleted a file by mistake and could go back to the previous night's backup to restore it. Backup is where btrfs really shines. I have some 1200 timestamped directories, each of which represent a snapshot of my data at a certain date. I can just cd into them and look at the files.

[1]: [https://github.com/oxplot/rsyncbtrfs](https://github.com/oxplot/rsyncbtrfs)

</comment><comment><USER32> I use BitTorrent sync to sync smaller devices with a home desktop computer. The desktop computer has read only access to the smaller devices to keep it one way. The desktop computer has a windows storage pool in a raid 1 style configuration. Then that syncs with backblaze so I have an offsite backup. This setup doesn't deal with bitrot properly, and my large photo collection doesn't fit well with it either, so it's still a work in progress.

I'm thinking maybe doing something with camlistore, and eventually taking advantage of the 'unlimited' storage you get with onedrive.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wrote my own backup system, called Snebu ([http://www.snebu.com](http://www.snebu.com) hosted on github at [http://www.github.com/derekp7/snebu](http://www.github.com/derekp7/snebu)).

It works a lot like rsnapshot, but uses an sqlite3 DB for metadata storage and also does streaming compression (and encryption filter module is also coming soon). Client side resources are light -- just requires a system with gnu tar and gnu find, along with a bash shell for running the client-side script.

</comment><comment><USER34> Automated.

Macs: Time Machine to a NAS, plus Backblaze.

Windows: Genie (which sort of sucks performance-wise but all of the backup solutions on Windows seem to be terrible. I miss the built-in one from Windows 7.) to NAS, plus Backblaze.

Linux: rdiff-backup to NAS.

Servers: Linode backup.

<comment><USER35> I don't use Windows, but often found [https://www.bvckup2.com/](https://www.bvckup2.com/) quite satisfying when I set up backups for Windows users among friends & family.

<comment><USER34> Thanks! Looks really slick, I'm giving it a try. It's too bad there's no snapshots or restore/recovery but that's probably fine, with Windows those end up being pretty flakey anyways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm currently on Heroku so my code is all in git and Heroku provides free automated backups for Postgres. I'm eventually moving everything over to Digital Ocean though. In which case I'll probably have a bash script that runs on cron job to just rotate backups. Something like [https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Automated_Backup_on_Linux](https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Automated_Backup_on_Linux)

I don't have massive amounts of important data to manage though so a simple solution like this is all I need.

</comment><comment><USER37> Manual: Every now and then I run an rsync script to backup my stuff to an external drive.

Automated: I have SpiderOak set up the auto backup select folders. I have about 1 TB of offline storage for $12/month.

</comment><comment><USER38> Crashplan. Automatic incremental backups to local and the cloud.

</comment><comment><USER39> We set ours up for daily backups for all our employees. We set it to only use 25% of their bandwidth and it just runs in the background, invisibly to the end-user.

If there is a problem running the backup (three consecutive days missed), they get an automated email letting them know. And IT also gets notified, so we can reach out to the end user proactively to solve the problem.

Having automated backups has saved our bacon on more than one occasion!

Rich BakerRisk

</comment><comment><USER40> A script to open/mount an encrypted external hard drive, an rsnapshot script to do the deed, a third script to close/unmount the external drive. Run every three days our so. There's a fourth script to mirror to a second external drive, run every two weeks. Overall, it's three one-word aliases, one password input and a cron job.

</comment><comment><USER41> jwz backup:

[http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html)

I have a script that makes this a little more complicated and gives me incremental backups:

[https://github.com/krupan/incremental_backup](https://github.com/krupan/incremental_backup)

</comment><comment><USER42> Automated. Cron job on the ownCloud box, shipping PGP-encrypted backup nuggets to S3 via Duplicity. Gentle reminder for everyone here - TEST YOUR RESTORES! Nobody gives a rats about backups, they only care about restores.

[http://www.taobackup.com/](http://www.taobackup.com/)

</comment><comment><USER43> Since Attic is fast and duplicating I do hourly backups via cron at work. At the end of the day I prune them all and do a daily backup via systemd on shutdown. For offsite I manually sync via usb stick and unison, merge at home where daily backups are done as well. Rarely I update a backup hd stored at my parents.

</comment><comment><USER44> crashplan. Easy to set up and forget. Unlimited storage with history. Cheap family plan for 10 computers means I don't worry about rescuing my mother in law from a ransom trojan. Really happy about not having to fiddle with any custom setup like I did before.

</comment><comment><USER45> I use a shell script which I call with a keyboard shortcut at the end of the day and does the following:

\- rsync-based backup of a sub-home directory where I keep sources, documents, and other things I want to be saved in case of disaster

\- backup of all Trello cards via a custom python script

\- machine shutdown

</comment><comment><USER46> Automated. Hourly to two separate USB drives, nightly to NAS, both with the superb [https://bvckup2.com](https://bvckup2.com). The drives go to the bank safe when leaving for the long trips.

</comment><comment><USER47> Personally, I use Macrium Reflect incremental backups on my Windows machines, Time Machine on my MacBook and tar scripts on linux. These are copied to a NAS which is further synced with Dropbox.

</comment><comment><USER48> Automated

Backblaze for persistent cloud backup.

Semi-Manual (I need to dock my latptop and plug in the drives)

Weekly copy to external HDs (at home) using SyncBack

Manual

I backup by hand my FileZilla profiles, Google Docs, project management web app (XML file).

</comment><comment><USER49> Syncthing to synchronize everything between the laptops and two storage servers (one local, one remote).

Bup to snapshot the synchronized files every 5 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER50> I've been meaning to setup a backup plan for like the last 20 years. Maybe over the Memorial Day weekend.

</comment><comment><USER51> Automated. Fully scheduled and users will not required to worry backup will done in background Seetha

</comment><comment><USER52> Time Machine, plus Arq (which backs up to amazon S3 glacier storage).

<comment><USER53> Same, except I recently added Google's new Glacier competitor (forgot the name) for additional redundancy.

<comment><USER54> > Google's new Glacier competitor

Near line storage. ([https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/nearline](https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/nearline))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Automated.

I have Raspberry Pi, running always. And I use it as Time Capsule.

</comment><comment><USER56> Clone copy with SuperDuper whenever I remember.

</comment><comment><USER57> Automated.</comment>


San Bernardino DA says seized iPhone may hold "dormant cyber pathogen" - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/03/san-bernardino-da-says-seized-iphone-may-hold-dormant-cyber-pathogen/ <comment><USER2> Ooooh, pathogen, scary!

In that case they'd better be extra-careful about keeping it in a Faraday cage, never turn it on or analyze it, and maybe they should just completely destroy it rather than risk infecting anything else with this super-advanced cyber pathogen. Oh, they're not doing that? Ah, right, that's because it's just BS to bolster their argument that Apple should help them get access to the data on the phone.

<comment><USER3> This is Cyberdyne Systems Terminator chip level scary! </s>

Sad that politicians pull this Think of the Children BS when they can't subvert everyone else's privacy on a whim.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The local San Bernardino CSI department surely has a strange-haired hacker on staff that can type so quickly no cyber pathogen can withstand the onslaught. Problem solved.</comment>


Beautiful HTML e-mails easily - <AUTHOR> https://topol.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hey y'all, we have created this small tool to help you build your HTML e-mails.

If you have ever tried to build your own HMTL e-mail template or you don't like all the old WYSIWYG-like editors out there we're here to help!

With this drag-and-drop tool you can easily build beautiful e-mails in a matter of minutes. Simply choose a pre-designed layout and start building your own.

We are happy to listen to all of your comments, needs and suggestions to make our tool even better!</comment>


You're fooling yourself about sleep, study says - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/16/health/sleep-myths-facts-study/index.html <comment><USER2> Nothing about Caffeine in there surprisingly.

<comment> frosted-flakes Second to last paragraph:

> After all, there's no amount of caffeine that can help you deal with the > adverse implications of insufficient sleep, nor can you train yourself to > adapt to sleep deprivation, Robbins said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That was a refreshingly comprehensive list</comment>


The Pentagon System (1993) - <AUTHOR> http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/PentagonSystem_Chom.html <comment><USER2> Pretty good read.

The amount of interventionism, control and central planning involved in what and where gets spent, how tarrifs, and international agreements work is staggering. And this was of course written before the massive bailouts during the housing crisis.

There is also a need it seems to constantly protect the political and economic ideology. Cannot simply, for example, institute basic income, that's too socialistic sounding, and it would involved a lot of ideological backpedalling. So to keep it masked, have to first create a threat -- "Terrorism / Communism / Drugs / War", which creates an industry, then shuffle money that way. Then few friends on top pocket some of the money and the rest trickles down as "jobs".

> When asked to identify the largest element of the federal budget, less than > 1/4 give the correct answer, military spending

Well maybe it was true in early 90s' But today if you include mandatory (entitlems) or just discretionary spending budget in the pie. Mandatory spending is dominated by medical (medicare etc) and social security. So that part doesn't sound right. Anyone know more?

As a post script, another aspect that is interesting I think, I after reading this, depending on which ideology the reader subscribes to, they will come out with different conclusions. If they are more liberal -- they might say, we need to be more direct in helping out industry and have more transparent control of how money, power and policy gets distributed. Maybe have a New Deal type jobs program to repair infrastructure, or institute basic income, instead of these convoluted systems. But the more conservative reader, will probably look at this say, these manipulations are perversions and failures, had they not taken place, we would have had a more dynamic, faster, efficient system.

<comment><USER3> "Well maybe it was true in early 90s' But today if you include mandatory (entitlems) or just discretionary spending budget in the pie. Mandatory spending is dominated by medical (medicare etc) and social security. So that part doesn't sound right. Anyone know more?"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_bud...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_budget)

Defense was third, behind Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. So no, it's not right. They may have been interpreting discretionary spending as the whole thing, in which case defense is the largest single piece.

<comment><USER4> The DoD is the third biggest agency but does not include Veterans Affairs (3.7% of budget), the State Department (1.6% of budget), Homeland Security (1.5%), or the CIA (1.4%). I don't even include the DoE, which among other things handles nukes, or NASA which launches military satellites, has secret mission itineraries etc.

Then you also have to count that portion of the interest on the debt that was due to past military spending.

The amount of military spending the US government does is higher than what you are presenting.

<comment><USER3> If you're going to lump together everything even tenuously connected to the military (all of NASA? all of the State Department? all of the Department of Energy?), I'd feel entitled to lump together everything that sends out checks, and the military would still be smaller -- much smaller, in fact. Interest on the debt isn't going to help you either, as we'd have to slice out the entitlements portion of that as well.

And, of course, this doesn't even get into the question of whether the amount of military spending is right or wrong. "Look at this huge number! It's bigger than this other number!" isn't a meaningful argument. "This number is bigger than it should be, and here's why" is.

<comment><USER4> > If you're going to lump together everything even tenuously connected to the > military (all of NASA? all of the State Department? all of the Department of > Energy?)

I very clearly said I am not going to lump together NASA and the DoE. Now you're claiming to people, who can clearly read my post, that I did lump them in, when I explicitly did not lump then it.

I do lump the State Department in with the military, as it's all more or less the same thing, beyond even that the CIA etc. routinely uses the State Department for cover ( [http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy- talk/2010/06/state_dept...](http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy- talk/2010/06/state_dept_loses_round_in_cia.html) ). Foreign embassies that have the ambassador go out and threaten the other state's executive with US military intervention can't really be considered on the domestic social spending side of this military/social breakdown that is being discussed.

> It's bigger than this other number

The point is that military spending was being presented as smaller than it is - by saying veteran's benefits were not part of military spending etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Relatedly, recall that a key empirical study by the Princeton academics has this to say, " ... Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence." [[https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...](https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf)]

</comment><comment><USER6> The US was less centralized than the USSR, but not by as large of a margin as most think. It's always -- even going back to the days of Manifest Destiny and such -- been a planned economy where major economic moves and expansions are driven by edict and funded by the state or central banks.

I'm not really aware of a good example of a complex technologically advanced society that isn't centrally planned to a significant degree. Either it hasn't happened yet, libertarianism being a form of political futurism, or central planning is actually necessary to overcome the natural tendency of human societies and economies toward conservatism and inertia.

But you still have the mythology of America, land of the free, where everything is grassroots. You can even see this mythology at work in popular accounts of Silicon Valley. In reality most of the fundamental bedrock innovations that created the Valley were funded by DARPA, NASA, and other state sources in the 1960s, and the existence of the Valley as a concentration of tech talent dates from the concentration of radar and signals intelligence industries there in WWII. Look up a talk called "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" on YouTube. In more modern times there are still strong hints of a deep connection, such as the ties that may exist between large tech firms like Google and the state, though the extent of these ties is a subject of some controversy.

I'd actually be curious to hear an example of a major bedrock innovation (like semiconductors, ICs, orbital rockets, etc.) that has occurred in the past ~75 years and has _not_ been the product of either government research funding or a state-enforced monopoly (e.g. Ma Bell / Bell Labs). Only such entities have sufficient exemption from market realities to permit such long-sighted and high-risk investments.

Therein lies, I think, one of the big fallacies of the freedom myth-- that markets drive innovation. In reality I think innovation requires at least a period of exemption from markets, since markets mandate short-term thinking. At a smaller scale seed and venture capital allows companies to obtain a _short_ reprieve from the market that in some cases is long enough to allow some innovation to occur before everything has to answer to the god of quarterly profit. If markets get really good at providing such funding it's _possible_ that we could see a future of decentralized market-driven innovation, but this would require a further extension and broadening of the seed/angel/VC model and associated financial instruments that properly model the nature of this kind of investment. We need entities able to make 10-20 year investments in small teams of brilliant people to tackle insanely hard problems the way national labs and academic institutes can, but time frames like that are way outside the parameters of your typical fund turnaround time.</comment>


Oracle and Google File Paid Writers List - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120817151150419

<comment><USER2> To summarize:

Google: Nobody.

Oracle: Florian Mueller from FOSSPatents.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hugely unsurprising responses from both parties.

</comment><comment><USER4> Waiting for the same list for Apple vs Samsung/Motorola/HTC.... and Microsoft vs Android manufacturers..

</comment><comment><USER5> What? No paid Wikipedia editors? They're missing a good bet, there. <smirk></comment>


Ask HN: With all the talk of alternate DNS; How does IP resolving work? - <AUTHOR>

How is it fundamentally different to block an IP (or subnet, etc) from "the internet" as opposed to a domain name?
edit:  I should add, the wiki's for Internet Protocol Suite, and Internet Protocol do not address the issue.
Also, I found this shortly after submitting: www.3com.com/other/pdfs/infra/corpinfo/en_US/501302.pdf which says it's "Everything you ever wanted to know about IP addressing" <comment><USER2> Nice pdf followup, thanks!</comment>


Sketching the User Experience - <AUTHOR> http://sketchbook.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/ <comment><AUTHOR> More about Bill Buxton: [http://www.billbuxton.com/](http://www.billbuxton.com/)</comment>


GitHub for Mac 1.1 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/988-github-for-mac-1-1

<comment><USER2> Looks like a great update (line-by-line committing ftw). I mainly use GitX for git GUI duties, but this looks like it's ready to replace GitX.

It's very handy to be able to switch between projects easily from within the app, and the direct GitHub integration is icing on the cake. The only not- awesome thing I noticed is some general lag and flickering, but hopefully that'll get worked out soon. The team at GitHub is doing some fantastic work.

<comment><USER3> This is definitely a great update and it's getting close, but for me this still can't replace gitx. I absolutely need something that can show a tree- view version of the repo branches. Even the CLI can do this. The web UI has the network graph view which is ok but not great since it doesn't really show branching.

It's so tempting to use a list-view because it looks nice and simple, is easy to implement and it hides complexity. The problem is that I need a view into that complexity to use git. The git model is a tree (or graph even) and to not display it that way just makes things harder.

I think what gitx has is still the best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the simplicity of Github for Mac. It's a very clean interface. Still, it feels like it's designed for an iPhone screen, not a computer screen. I've been enjoying SourceTree* recently because it shows more on one screen--seems like a good package for when you outgrow Github for Mac.

* <http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/>

<comment><USER4> I didn't realize how many different Git GUI clients there are on Mac OS:

\- <http://www.gitboxapp.com/> \- <http://www.git-tower.com/> \- <http://gitx.frim.nl/> \- <http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/>

in addition to Github for Mac.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Two annoying things I noticed:

* Spelling correction in commit messages. * Option-Z commits instead of undos when entering a commit message.

<comment><USER6> > Option-Z commits instead of undos when entering a commit message.

Cmd-z. Opt-z types ohm: Ω.

I wonder why they did that.

<comment><USER7> That's omega, which is used as a symbol for ohms. It's also [and originally] the last letter in the Greek alphabet.

<comment><USER6> I see, thanks. I originally wrote omega (I knew it was the last letter, alpha/omega and such), but changed it after checking the character viewer in OS X, which called it an ohm.

<comment><USER8> Capital letter omega is U+3A9: Ω

Ohm sign is U+2126: Ω

They probably look identical in most (if not all) fonts, but they're treated as two separate characters in Unicode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wrote a simple plugin for Sublime Text that opens the GitHub app and it's been working quite well as a replacement for Textmate & Git bundle.

There's been a few rare times where I've had to drop back to command line because of crashes, but I'm glad to see it's being maintained and updated.

<comment><USER10> Mind making your plugin publicly available?

<comment><USER9> Done. <https://github.com/csytan/sublime-text-2-github>

Funny how writing the documentation took the same amount of time as writing the code for this. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They added line by line committing!

That is awesome, I've been using citool for that forever, even though it's ugly on a Mac. (Along with diffing, commit surgery is one of the few tasks where a GUI really scores big).

<comment> X-Istence Check out GitX, it has supported this for a while.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a big fan of the GitHub for Mac GUI, I still have to drop down to the terminal to handle a few specific commands (especially when the GUI gets stuck in a merge conflict loop), but it helps me quickly handle stuff and thumb through local repos, especially helping me visualize stuff.

One thing I've noticed is that GitHub's web interface often misrepresents the number of branches we have. The number count is correct, but master is the only branch visible. And it only seems to happen after merges with the GUI...

<comment><USER12> On the website, we only show you branches with unique commits. So if you merge a branch, it won't appear. This kind of sucks, but that page will get better with time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The interface certainly does look good, but man, I miss some consistency in navigation! And is it so hard to have mouse free control for application that is essentially GIT client?

<comment><USER14> Why would you expect "mouse-free control" for an application whose user experience is fundamentally designed around a pointer?

Of course, GitHub for Mac should leverage Mac OS X's Accessibility infrastructure so it works with assistive technologies like VoiceOver and full keyboard control (I hope it does!) but I suspect from your comment that's not what you're looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great stuff, but I'm just too addicted to Magit on Emacs. It's a great luxury to never have to switch out of your editor.

</comment><comment><USER16> I tried GitHub for Mac, but find that a combination of command line git and Tower for line-by-line committing works best.

<comment><USER16> And I'm being downvoted because some people here feel that a link to one application shouldn't have comments recommending another?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there anything like this, but for linux?

<comment><USER18> They are not GitHub GUI clients, but I like git-cola for preparing commits and Giggle for viewing revision history.

LWN article about Giggle: <https://lwn.net/Articles/390422/>

<comment><USER17> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Line Committing is a killer feature. Right now, I force myself to check in code for the smallest change because I want my commit to reflect a meaningful change. I could certainly save a lot of time if I had the flexibility to make bunch of changes in the file and then commit them in separate hunks.

<comment><USER20> You've always been able to do that via the command line (`git add -p <file>`) but it's definitely great to see it in a more user friendly form.

<comment><USER21> Sort of. -p considers consecutive lines a single hunk. Often, that's not what I want. Luckily, there is magit: <http://philjackson.github.com/magit/>

<comment><USER22> You can split the hunks into smaller ones.

<comment><USER23> And you can also edit the patch manually.

<comment><USER24> I resisted the edit option of git-add -p for a long time because I was afraid of messing something up with a low level tool... big mistake! So easy to use!

<comment><USER25> Plus if you make a patch that doesn't apply it will just error out and you can try again. And if you add anything extra by mistake you can easily back it out with something like git reset HEAD <file> or git reset -p

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sorry the stupid question, but: does this work with any git repo or this app is exclusively for github?

<comment><USER27> This works with any git repo. I've been using it with my personal git repos on my own server since the first release.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great update, I love the line-by-line committing. One thing that would sell me on this app, though, is having an interface for repo issues. Without that, this is more of a "Git for mac" than a "GitHub for mac", in my opinion.

Keep up the great work guys!

</comment><comment><USER10> The speed improvements are immediately noticeable and make a world of difference!

</comment><comment><USER29> I've been using sourcetree lately, really, really enjoying it - though line committing is pretty cool, I have apps hosted in places other than github though.

<comment><USER30> Github for Mac actually works with any remote repository. The link to Github is superficial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am a designer but I use Tower for mac for when I commit my code to the repository. Anyone know if I am missing out on something with GitHub?

<comment><USER32> From what I've seen, not really. GitHub.app saves you from needing to know what staging, push, pull, fetch are. If you're already productive with Tower then I think going to GitHub.app would be like putting the training wheels back on.

<comment><USER33> which would you recommend for a designer to use as an intro to Git and source control in general? I'm trying to get my partner into git to collaborate with me. Is this client still just as easy when using it on a non github repo? or is its integration with github its main drawcard?

<comment><USER34> I recommend Tower for designers, and SourceTree for developers. The github client has nice integration with github, but it is not as well-designed as Tower and not as powerful and workflow-efficient as SourceTree, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It would be nice if it handled issues. Their iphone app does that, but nothing else ... so one wonders whether they could combine the two.

</comment><comment><USER36> Now I want a mac

</comment><comment><USER37> download link <http://mac.github.com/>

</comment><comment><USER38> Version 1.1 is crashing like a pig on Snow Leopard for me. This instability looks chronic; Ground Control to Major Tom.

My mistake appears to be adding a repo that lives in a Windows 7 Parallels VM, something that Git Tower handles reliably with ease.

EDIT: two application force-quits and restarts later, it's working better. My crime may have been dragging a bunch of repos into the application window. There's no progress indication, buy Github Mac 1.1 may have been background processing and therefore seeming hung? Who knows. It's better now.</comment>


Introducing the Google Assistant SDK - happy-go-lucky https://developers.googleblog.com/2017/04/introducing-google-assistant-sdk.html <comment><AUTHOR> One interesting use of this I think is for people who are paranoid about Google Home recording them (and there's a lot of those on HN as showcased by the Echo Look thread). You get to make your own device, where you have full control of how audio is recorded and sent to Google, so you can be confident that nothing is being sent over without you knowing.

<comment><USER2> Will this allow some inspection of what exactly is sent? Assuming it's the same Google Assistant installed on Android it'd be possible to then know for certain the level of spying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Like I said, I'm fairly sure the sending is all done by you. It's an API that receives audio data, and sends back text + audio data. You're in full control of what happens on your end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was trying to find more info about their Term of Service for this, would I be allowed to build an Alexa/Google hybrid device? Would it be ok to sell the same device but with either option available? What other gotchas are there?

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting... Maybe this is the way to bring Assistant to the desktop? (and, perhaps, to Linux?)</comment>


Instruction Punning: Lightweight Instrumentation for X86-64 [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~rrnewton/papers/liteinst_draft.pdf <comment><USER2> The link seems to be broken.

</comment><comment><USER3> Link is broken..

        ERROR
        File Not Found

        Sorry for the inconvenience, the page you requested could not be found.

</comment><comment> purple-dragon This sounds pretty awesome, but has it been released for public use? In my cursory pass I didn't spot anything obvious.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is really cool.</comment>