Flowdock Tries to Help Turn Conversation to Knowledge - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/flowdock_tries_to_help_turn_conversation_to_knowle.php

<comment><USER2> We've moved 100% to Flowdock over the past week and I couldn't recommend it more highly. It's casual with normal chat, but it let's you get important emails out to everyone with a quick forward.

Bug report from a customer? Forward with a tag of bug and the version number you're working on. Someone mention a great idea in chat? Tag the chat message. Status works great, chat works gre,t forwarding works great it's just a fantastic system that beats the hell out of all the alternatives. Campfire + Yammer on steroids.</comment>


Jeison – An Emacs library for declarative JSON parsing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SavchenkoValeriy/jeison <comment><USER2> Related:

A utility for transforming JSON at scale written using the Rust programming language is bumblebee and available on crates.io.

The author of that package uses it internally for massive amounts of data on a regular basis, and he's a bit too modest to use a higher version number.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is useful for scripting things nicely when working with config files.

Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not a big fan of names that when you say out loud others don't know which one you mean.

<comment><USER5> This made me curious: in what accents of English are JSON (J-SON) and Jeison pronounced the same? To answer questions like this (as I'm not a linguist) I first turn to "lexical sets" ([1], [2]) but there I find the related vowel only in the "FACE" set, marked /eɪ/ in both RP and GenAm, with examples "tape, cake, raid, veil, steak, day" not all of which I pronounce with the same vowel. Searching further on the page revealed it's known as the _pane-pain merger_ [3], which says that they are pronounced the same in "most dialects of English":

> In the vast majority of Modern English accents the vowels have been merged; > whether the outcome is monophthongal or diphthongal depends on the accent. > But in a few regional accents, including some in East Anglia, South Wales, > and even Newfoundland, the merger has not gone through (at least not > completely), so that pairs like pane/pain are distinct.

And indeed just as in those accents, in my Indian accent too (influenced by spelling pronunciation [4] no doubt, and of course the fact that the distinct vowels exist in the phonemic inventory of Indian languages), I distinguish between the

* /ɛː/ vowel: face, tape, cake, steak, plane, lane, late, pane (and in the context here, JSON)

* /ɛɪ/ vowel: raid, veil, rain, maid, rein, pain (and in the context here, Jeison)

(Wikipedia lists _day /play/they_ with the latter for those accents, but in mine they go with the former.)

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lexical_set&oldid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lexical_set&oldid=895484546#Wells_Standard_Lexical_Sets_for_English)

[2]: [https://www.uni- due.de/SVE/SNDS_ENG_WhatAreLexicalSets.htm](https://www.uni- due.de/SVE/SNDS_ENG_WhatAreLexicalSets.htm)

[3]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phonological_hist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phonological_history_of_English_diphthongs&oldid=897492363#Pane–pain_merger)

[4]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spelling_pronunci...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spelling_pronunciation&oldid=901792901)

<comment><USER6> As a native American English speaker, I had no idea that there was a distinction!

(Also, [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhymes:English/e%C9%AAl](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhymes:English/e%C9%AAl) is interesting, because its diphthongal glide in accents like mine is much more pronounced than that in e.g. [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhymes:English/e%C9%AA](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Rhymes:English/e%C9%AA) ... human speech is so hard to parameterize!)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: BlackHole – Fast, free and encrypted file transfer for Windows and Mac - <AUTHOR> https://blackhole.run <comment><USER2> Why blockchain? Because there's one FAQ that you're obviously missing: "How do I delete a compromised/accidentally-uploaded file?" and I suspect it's because the answer is "You can't."

This would be the _last_ place I'd upload anything important. Once that URL/password get out, whatever "secure" file I've uploaded is exposed forever.

<comment><USER3> I'd say the primary use case is data which you want to keep public forever. Such as your legacy before you pass away (it is pay once, host forever, right?). Such as an encrypted insurance file for Mr. Assange. I can also imagine this would be interesting for copyright infringement (eventually with spliced files; e.g. with RAR .rar .r01 r02 etc), or for an activism, or whistle-blower. I suppose though that once that 'blockchain' has a too bad ratio of 'morally bankrupt content' (that'd be our jurisdiction's definition) it'd just be forced to closed down the hard way.

<comment><USER2> In that case, that should be part of the selling point of the service. If it were pitched like that, I wouldn't have even considered "can't delete it" as an objection as I did, more as a strength.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Without that selling point then I'd say for all non-sensitive content, the cross-platform (Python) magic-wormhole [1] should suffice.

[1] [https://github.com/warner/magic- wormhole](https://github.com/warner/magic-wormhole)

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems a nice project, but BlackHole point is to give nontechnical people a hassle-free way to send file without sacrificing privacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "We're sorry but web doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue."

This appears to be a static content site after I enabled JS. Why can't the site display static content without JS?

<comment><USER5> Because it's done in a JS framework without server side rendering.

<comment> core-questions "server side rendering", cool, I was doing that in 1995

<comment><USER6> What is a better alternative to server side rendering?

<comment><USER5> I think he's more referring to the fact that we were already at a point where it was normal to do server side rendering. Now it's an add-on that the JS framework may support ([https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/ssr.html](https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/ssr.html)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ugh. What a dismal experience trying to try this on my Darwin machine. I felt like I'm running into constant bait and switch moments.

> App added an icon to my menu bar and has no clickable menu to close it.

> The app opens up asking for a Blockstack login... no mention of this on the > website. I have one but are typically people supposed to sign up for > something seemingly unrelated?

> The 'x' button on the app minimizes it instead of closes it.

> The only way I figured out how to actually close it was by killing the > process from the command line.

<comment><USER8> Do you normally just install whatever you find on the internet, or are modern os secure enough?

<comment><USER7> It's no big deal if you sling around vms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What blockchain does it run on? How is it free? Who's paying the blockchain transaction fees?

<comment><AUTHOR> Bitcoin. It uses Blockstack DNS made on Bitcoin blockchain to give decentralized access to anyone. The PLUS plan is on the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You can have your own private web-based file transfer server in maybe around 100 lines of PHP where you have total control over file expiry and no need to trust any third parties except perhaps your VPS provider. If you need more secure than that, courier an encrypted thumb drive or something.

<comment><USER11> I can't tell if this is a reference to the infamous Dropbox reply or not.

<comment><USER10> What is the infamous Dropbox reply? Are you talking about the Steve Jobs thing?

<comment><USER11> Specifically this part from the linked profile:

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This service will be used by people who have a sexual interest in children to share images of child sexual abuse.

What processes do you have in place when law enforcement approach you for information?

<comment><AUTHOR> We do not store any info from the users, except authentication info getting at signup that Blockstack needs. BlackHole is not a social network or sharing service internally, see it like a secure post or a flash drive, whoever use it or post it publicly owns the responsibility, and where the links are shared, could be controlled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How does it work? Who is hosting the data and what incentive do they have for storing and serving unlimited amounts of your private data?

<comment><AUTHOR> Simply put, it works like this: -Check the file or folder you want to send -Compress it, if it is needed and wise -Split and Encrypt with advanced standards -Give you an optional choice to add a heavy layer of password protection -Give you a nice link to share -Upload the parts, in the meantime, the receiver can get the file as you upload them

We are using a Gaia provider, and give users a limited 512MB per file plan, that should cover most of the daily uses. But, you can make your own provider and set it at sign up, then all the files will be uploaded on that provider, and no files, key, or metadata will touch our servers. Also, PLUS plan is on the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looks like this is hosted on [https://blockstack.org/](https://blockstack.org/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Cool. Congrats on the launch. What's plus going to cost?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much! BlackHole is a young project, and PLUS plan will be available along the way. You should pre register, we will contact you with all the info. [https://blackhole.run/pre-register](https://blackhole.run/pre- register)</comment></comment>


Show HN: ChargeDesk – Billing Support for Startups - <AUTHOR> https://chargedesk.com/i/hn

<comment><AUTHOR> Would love any feedback! Support for PayPal & Help Scout is coming soon.

<comment><USER2> Deleting and reposting is against the rules and voting rings are really against the rules. Please don't.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I didn't realise it wasn't ok to delete and repost. Won't happen again!</comment></comment></comment>


Jacque Fresco has died - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/24/us/jacque-fresco-futurist-who-envisioned-a-society-without-money-dies-at-101.html <comment><USER2> I remember when I watched the Zeitgeist documentaries and had my first contact with this 'resource based" society. Weeks later I had dinner with a friend who was a director in a Spanish consulting firm specialized in the banking sector. I tried to impress him with what I had seen in the documentary. In the end, it was like having an atheist trying to convince the pope about his convictions.

<comment><USER3> I was also pretty juiced up and into the venus project for a while until I realized nobody is interested in living in such a world. Then I gave up.

<comment><USER4> People _are_ interested, they're just not interested in working towards it or giving up things for it.

Fresco paints a gloomy picture of the now and the future, but the facts are that "on average", humans are living better lives than they ever have. This progress has not yet stopped.

Hence, Fresco predicts we need to wait for the next "bust".

<comment><USER5> It's not just "on average", people are materially better off today than at any other period in history, _at all levels_. The poorest people today are better off than the poorest people at any previous era.

<comment><USER6> The poorest today and the poorest in this era are often slaves and often starving.

That hasn't changed. If you're referring to the poorest in your particular nation state, consider they're probably not the poorest in the world, which we're all using in some way.

<comment><USER5> No - I am explicitly considering the world. There are fewer people (as a percentage) starving and in bondage than in any prior era.

I don't think I have an overly rosy picture of the present. Rather I think your picture of the past is too romantic.

<comment> wu-ikkyu >There are fewer people (as a percentage) starving

There are more people (in real numbers) starving than ever before. Looking at this in terms of percentages is misleading

<comment><USER7> >Looking at this in terms of percentages is misleading

Um, per capita is the important metric.

If there are 2 million people on your planet and 1 million of them are starving, then in a few generations there 100 million people and 2 million of them are starving _you have drastically reduced the rate of starvation_. Malthusian predictions of the past have said that the rate of starvation/bad things happening would increase as the population increased. It has not.

<comment> wu-ikkyu >Um, per capita is the important metric.

The true number of starving people is not an important metric?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I remember speaking with Jacque in Miami at one of his lectures. He was a very honest and sincere man (but not to the point of trying to demean you to get his point across).

He will be missed.

Roxanne Meadows penned a lovely open letter concerning this: [https://www.thevenusproject.com/](https://www.thevenusproject.com/)

Their vision and ideology is an interesting one, but may take a few hundred years before viable for implementation. Too many growing pains still involved in earth culture.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think as a whole his vision is little too "non organic". I don't think society can be planned to the degree he wished. However disassembled there were some solid ideas, many of which are becoming realities today. He represents one of my favorite parts of the 50's and 60's. Which struck me as a time where people imagined that it was totally possible to just upend society, and rebuild it in a better way. The level of optimism where if you can accomplish only 20% of the vision, you've done something significant.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, the planning part seems to be the major culprit when designing "alternative economical systems". Anyone who would want to propose a serious "alternative to the capitalist system" \- which is kind of what it boils down to - would have to figure out how to out-compete the planning efficiency of capitalism.

My personal favorite would be something in the way of a Wiki-like consensus engine with "many-eyeballs" checks and balances. All planning is public, all planning can be corrected by anyone. Sabotage can be avoided by there effectively being significantly more 'reviewers' than editors or through some other mean of making sabotage harder than correction.

It works for Wikipedia, why not for societal planning?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "if property rights were respected by all, "humanity would become fantastically wealthy.""

This comment by Robert Murphy is a weird non sequitur apropos of not much in the article. If property rights are respected by all, some small fraction of humanity will indeed become fantastically wealthy, but the vast majority would be on the tail end of a very thinly tailed distribution as humans become worthless for production - leading to quite a bit of aggregate unhappiness.

<comment><USER12> When anarcho capitalists make the jump from the non-aggression principle (NAP) to property rights, they invariably switch from using deontological arguments to consequentialist arguments like everyone else:

"Look communism failed, capitalism produces more wealth"

"Well if everyone has everything they need, who's going to work?"

It sounds like the music industry asking who's going to record songs if copyright isn't strictly enforced.

<comment><USER13> I'm not an anarcho-capitalist, but I am a fierce proponent of private property rights, and I regularly make deontological arguments for them. My central argument is that self-ownership (the right to our person) implies a right to appropriate natural resources, since our bodies are constituted of natural resources that at some point we appropriated. That same principle should extend to non-biological appropriation, since there's no reason to give a different moral treatment based on how the natural resources were appropriated. Thus, our property is an extension of our self, which axiomatically we consider people to have an absolute right to.

What it ultimately comes down to is that the value you add to natural resources morally belongs to you. When you turn 100 lb of food into a brain, that produces Mozart's symphonies, you are converting matter into a higher value form, and you should be entitled to that value. Similarly when you convert a dead tree into a canoe, you should be entitled to that canoe, minus whatever value you're depriving society of by depriving them of the log. This is just and this is fair, and appropriately, it aligns with consequentialism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've met his followers in Berlin once, "naive" \- the best word I can find to describe them. In the end, they struggled to answer the core question: "Why would anyone take seriously a man, who can't prove his idea in a lean way?". Please, build a city where everyone is happy and everything is handled by the machines, show the rest of the world you're right! Reminds me of wantrepreneurs who can't scrape together 10k to build an MVP for their startup idea. If you can't find money to build a prototype, then no sane investor should trust you.

<comment><USER10> > If you can't find money to build a prototype, then no sane investor should > trust you.

Sounds like a circular argument to me? I would agree with the notion that the ideas seem naïve. But how could grandiose ideas not be that?

<comment><USER14> No, just put aside some money before quitting your day job and you're fine. Again, if you can't manage to fund development of your MVP, then maybe entrepreneurship isn't for you. I guess the same applies to the "Venus Project".

<comment><USER10> In other words, if you're not rich entrepreneurship is not for you.

edit: Sure I realize that you can start with something smaller and fund able by smaller means. But how long until you can fund what you _really_ want to create?

<comment><USER14> If you can't make money, entrepreneurship is not for you.

<comment><USER10> If you can't make money you can't build a better world?

<comment><USER15> Yes. Please rate the better world: World A (has food) or World B (does not have food).

Money isn't magic. Its an abstraction. Remove it and possessions become currency.

So if your better world does not make "money" (read: food, water, shelter, doctors, raw materials, etc.) then your "better" world will kill all of its inhabitants.

<comment><USER10> It's obvious that money is not a sufficient abstraction for resources and/or the usage of money eventually leads to world b. The "money system" is killing whatever resources it's supposed to represent.

<comment><USER15> > It's obvious that money is not a sufficient abstraction for resources and/or > the usage of money eventually leads to world b

Citation needed...

We had "resource based economies" for hundreds of thousands of years. In that time, millions starved to death.

Clearly a hidden variable exists... North Koreans starve under a monetary system. Americans waste billions of pounds of food every year under a monetary system. How could money be responsible for both outcomes? Surely there are alternative explanations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> He always reminded me of fellow utopian Paolo Soleri (who died in 2013) -- even though their ideas were impractical (at least in the short term), we really need dreamers like them to make people question whether current society is really as good as we can hope for.

<comment><USER17> Paulo Soleri was indeed a gem. I visited Arcosanti years ago... A group of friends rented some rooms in the complex and took the tour. Interesting bunch of older artsy types in a typical intentional community: compelling, but seemingly dying.

Then we realized there was a whole other "city" of young people living in the "temporary" construction housing down the hill. These were young people eager to move the vision forward, but were generally stifled because Soleri himself (or his supporters who were older and "full citizens" of Arcosanti) didn't want to deviate from The Plan.

I think this is what kills most of these intentional communities... They create a class structure where the in group has privileges the out group doesn't, which leads to inevitable ideological calcification, which leads to inevitable decline.

The solution, in my mind, is to build on the idea that every person is a potential contributor, but for health issues, and that we live in a time of plenty.

This changes "no that won't work young one" and "no get out of here bad man" to "how can we marshal the resources to do that too?" and "let's get you some health care services".

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> STAR TREK

Gene Roddenberry was inspired by Fresco's ideas. A world where people could focus on personal development and nobody would have to be in this rat race anymore, enabling a higher standard of living for all people.

Jacque was a great visionary, inventor and systems thinker - he will be missed.

You should watch his documentary Future by Design [0]. He was talking about 3D printed houses, holistic transportation systems, smart cities, etc

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1IXWnS6vwk)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a true loss for the world. Although his revolutionary ideas were IMHO by times a little over the edge, he envisioned and fought for a world without poverty and war, where earth's resources are not being depleted by hunger for money and power; A resource based economy.

Thank you Jaques Fresco for opening my eyes to this and RIP.

</comment><comment><USER20> This guy basically reinvented communism and gave it a fancy name and apparently city designs. What's so special about this, honestly?

I'm all for more people supporting socialism (even under a weird name), but I never understood the point...

<comment><USER21> > _What 's so special about this, honestly?_

Most people's experience with Mr. Fresco likely came from the Zeitgeist films, which were sort of a phenomenon and many people's first experience with the "vast, global conspiracy" (right as the world economy imploded in 2008). I count myself as one of those people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The world could use a few more Jacque Frescos.

</comment><comment><USER23> Marginal unit cost of production moving closer to zero, the sharing economy, AI replacing human labor, descentralized crypto-currencies, universal minimun income, autonomous transportation, clean energy, space travel.

Fresco was right on the mark.

RIP wise man.

</comment><comment><USER12> Far more interesting (to me) than a specific Venus project concept art was Jacques Fresco interviews and stories about his life. I once sent them to Noam Chomsky to listen as a fellow elderly guy and child of the Depression from a different perspective.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9IdujGy0U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7e9IdujGy0U)

</comment><comment><USER24> Once you realize politicians do an actual hard job running things by using deception, and when you realize money is just a tool we use to measure what goes where with accounting, then you realize we use money because even the best ideas don't work because humans are natural competitors. Money is not about corruption or running numbers, it's about counting sheeps in a complex human society. That's it. Currency is not bad in itself, it's just that the world is so large, and since it's not possible to organize such a large place, we use currency so that things self-regulate. People are already trying to not use money, and have more simple lives, but everyone realizes that we all are feet deep into our sweet comforts and we can't let it go.

It's great to have ideas, it's another to execute them. I felt a little more interested by what kind of city Fresco was proposing, and all the architectural details, than the leap of faith into less poverty and less war. By all means, if you have ideas to reduce poverty in any place in the world, and reduce conflict in Syria, I'm sure the UN and most western governments want to hear about what you want to say.

It's time to let the ideology go, and work on more fine-detailed, feasible objectives. Local politics or organizing a neighborhood seems much more realistic to me, than building new cities from scratch.

<comment><USER25> I think you don't know much about The Venus Project.

He did not believe human were competitive by nature. He believed competition is a product of scarcity. And he understood that while visiting the Tuamotu islands, where natives lived very differently than we do. Corruption in a monetary system is exacerbated. It's so easy to pay off someone that it became normal.

We do know how to reduce conflict. But we don't want to. Every country has interests to keep one of the factions involved in power. How can the conflict terminate if one country gives weapons to a faction while another bombs them?

In 2016 he was awarded by UN for "City Design & Community". And he may receive other awards post mortem.

If you look more deeply there is little ideology in Fresco's view.

<comment><USER24> > I think you don't know much about The Venus Project.

I learned about this project in 2009. It's idealist by nature. It's great, but it doesn't really account for the reality of how politics work.

> He believed competition is a product of scarcity.

Good luck keeping that nice living standard by removing competition off the table. Corruption is why we win.

> But we don't want to.

Geopolitics at play, there is so little people can really do about it. Ultimately, people will choose to be able to afford another lollipop to their kid, rather than maybe care about people thousands of kilometers away. We'd rather save 10 cent on the gallon of gas or get marshmallow than let our neighbor have shelter. Husbands will gladly shit in their neighbor's yard just to content their wives.

The intricacies are so complex and people don't really have time to really care at all, but ultimately, at the larger scale, we still are competitive because that's how the first world get comfortable. It's crazy how people can eat organic but won't try to be informed about the middle east and how the world is poor.

I have respect for his project, but it seems to make abstraction of the politics of what he is proposing. It says "beyond politics". You cannot remove politics from the equation. Politics is how the world works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's interesting to note that Jacque, while definitely a little out there on execution, has been warning us about the effects of automation for 50 years. His proposed solution of a planned economy will not work, but his vision of what the future will look like when we have robotics and automation as the main future forces of economy are spot on.

He also envisioned centralized (and distributed) computing and governmental computing systems, something that will have widespread implementation within the next half century.

</comment><comment><USER27> RIP Fresco. I really like him and his work. But I never understood why he was convinced about the Resource Based Economy. Shouldn't a RBE have the exact same problems as any Central Planned economy? Wasn't this refuted in 1920 by Mises? [https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Economic%20Calculation...](https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Economic%20Calculation%20in%20the%20Socialist%20Commonwealth_Vol_2_3.pdf)

<comment><USER28> I've had the misfortune of listening to Fresco on a podcast, and he came right out and stated that

1\. Humans don't have a capacity for reason

2\. If reason existed it couldn't lead to any truth

3\. That people only find scientific discoveries via chance

So I wouldn't expect him to be dissuaded by a rational argument.

He also believes in the blank slate theory, so not exactly up to date in the science world.

<comment><USER8> 1) Overall, yes. 2) Citation needed. 3) Correct, they react to stimuli.

I agree with you on the blank slate theory and that Fresco was not up to date on this. Genetics has an impact on skull formation, brain tissue, etc.

<comment><USER28> >Overall, yes

So the creatures who invented the conceptual framework of reason and logic have no way to use reason and logic. Got it.

>Citation needed

Here's one example of his opinions on reason: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0)

>Correct, they react to stimuli.

If humans didn't have a capacity for reason, then observing stimuli wouldn't mean anything and we wouldn't be able to transform observation to concepts. His example was people accidentally making a camera obscura by having a hole in the wall. Without reason, you

1\. Wouldn't be able to conclude that it was even the hole in the wall causing the effect

2\. Would be equally likely to attribute the image to the act of a divine power

And his failings on blank slate theory are not on the genetics side of things, but on human behavior. Much like the conception of the new socialist man, his thinking relies on behaviorism.

<comment><USER8> > So the creatures who invented the conceptual framework of reason and logic > have no way to use reason and logic. Got it.

Correct. Perfect example would be Casinos, a person knows the hard odds are against them but continues to not use logic and reason. Perhaps our individual concepts of the words "reason" and "logic" are not synced, thus causing the disparity.

> Here's one example of his opinions on reason: > [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQcYZpY9JI0)

I must have misunderstood your original stance on this. I believe we are actually in agreement on this topic. What part of this video do you disagree with?

> If humans didn't have a capacity for reason, then observing stimuli wouldn't > mean anything and we wouldn't be able to transform observation to concepts. > His example was people accidentally making a camera obscura by having a hole > in the wall. Without reason, you...

In his example of the hole in the wall, you claim it was not by accident and that they were purposely looking for the intended output in the configuration? It seems the information Jacque was attempting to convey was that through observation and "accidental" tries, output is generated. Edison and Tesla did the same exact thing, only difference being Tesla narrowed his "accident" tests down to less cases. It all comes down to if-statements. If a hand "accidentally" covered the hole, the picture disappears... then another if- statement executes in their mind... if another object obscures the frame, what happens? Everything evolves from these "accidents".

> 1\. Wouldn't be able to conclude that it was even the hole in the wall > causing the effect > 2\. Would be equally likely to attribute the image to > the act of a divine power

-Yes, what we call Science -Yes, what we call Religion

> And his failings on blank slate theory are not on the genetics side of > things, but on human behavior. Much like the conception of the new socialist > man, his thinking relies on behaviorism.

Behavior is mutable. Genetics plays a large factor as well. We both seem to agree that the blank slate theory is blown out of the water. His thinking can seem to rely on behaviorism, but more aptly he would refer to it as "operational conditioning".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> While Mr. Fresco idea seems very reasonable, I think his mistake is attributing altruistic traits to everyone. Not everyone is altruistic. If there's a computer system governing everything, there will be a strong incentive to build bias into it, or use for mass surveillance or even tyranny. Then, there are aspects in which radial cities would not be good:

\- Epidemiology: you have everyone in this nice dome sharing objects. But one of them has a serious infectious disease. Now the entire population is at risk.

\- Defense: An adversarial force including but not limited to extremists would just target the center dome, a place accessible by everyone.

You could argue that everyone would have what they need because of this egalitarian system, and there would be no violence. But take a look at communist countries and see what happens in practice.

However, it is true though that we are very inefficient and wasteful in terms of how resources are used.

<comment><USER3> Would be worth a try though, wouldn't it? The main idea is also to reduce manual labour as fast as possible so more people can afford to be altruistic.

<comment><USER27> Mao and Lenin thought it was super worthy of trying, the material outcome wasn't as cool as the imaginary vision.

<comment><USER3> I don't really think it's the same as communism though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Jacque will be missed. Fantastic communication, patience and ideas. I actually wrote Jacque in once as my vote for president as well as donated to the Venus Project.

This should be front page news, good to hear it at least is on HN and NYT.

He has said in the past he didn't think our current society would make it to his ideas in his lifetime and that it may take a 100 years or so. He knew he was playing the long game and was laying the ground work for society many years out. A true visionary unbound by the scars of modern civilization.

Jacque (and Roxanne) have deeply affected my life and direction. I will continue to strive towards the ideas brought forth by them.

</comment><comment><USER31> While I really thought that Venus Project ideas was interesting but a little bit naive, there is something going on with cryptocurrencies. They can save us from eternal deflation of our money as the Zeitgeist documental expose. That means that our central banking system (in every country) would have troubles trying to produce more money over thin air (causing inflation). An inversion of control could happen here. Who knows.

</comment><comment><USER32> >>Robert Murphy, an associate scholar at the Mises Institute, which promotes the teaching of Austrian economics, wrote in 2010 that idealists like Mr. Fresco were "wrong to blame our current dysfunctional world on capitalism or money per se." Instead, Mr. Murphy wrote, if property rights were respected by all, "humanity would become fantastically wealthy."

I read this sort of claim by the 'serious and sober' and realize they're even more gassed up than the 'idealists.'

<comment><USER33> I think this is the relevant piece:

[https://mises.org/library/venus-needs-some- austrians](https://mises.org/library/venus-needs-some-austrians)

I think Murphy is quite right.

<comment><USER4> I quote:

"What I am arguing, then, is that in a truly free world, where we all respected each other's property, the rise in living standards would be analogous to our hypothetical boy who moves from the streets of Calcutta to the suburbs of Maine. In that fantastic world, giving someone a "free" heart surgery might be as cheap as giving someone a piece of gum in our current society."

His whole article is a huge non-sequitur and I'm deeply concerned that these "Austrians" are regarded as "experts" whereas someone like Fresco is considered a Don Quixote.

<comment><USER33> He (and Fresco) is of course talking hypothetically but as he continues:

"If such a world really is technologically possible, we should cut the socialist dreamers some slack. Their fault lies not with their vision, but with their plans for achieving it."

From what I understand Murphy claim that if such a dream is technologically possible their's is not the correct way. I guess main point is that sooner or later Fresco's idea will require coercion and enter the pitfalls of central calculation issues, where as property rights approach does not.

<comment><USER12> Property rights certainly requires central calculation and coersion, too.

Look at all the activities undertaken in the name of copyright and patent enforcement. This is "property rights".

Look at cable companies suing cities to not give citizens fast broadband, while they maintain their cartel. This is central enforcement.

A company like Apple can be privately owned. The app store is privately owned. Facebook, Google, Amazon are all privately owned. Disneyworld is privately owned.

The only reason you don't see central enforcement on a huger scale in privately owned fiefdoms is because so far in the real world, people have collectively banded together to have democracies.

Property is a monopoly right to EXCLUDE others from use of a resource. It can range from excluding YOU from changing the color of your FB profile to exclding you from peeing in some woods.

The real relevant thing is how the thing is governed. Democratically (eg employee-run) or command and control (top-down)?

These corporations are technically owned by shareholders in a public stock market. Collective ownership is a major feature of socialism.

Alaska has one of the first basic income checks in the world as the citizens are considered all shareholders in the natural resources of the state.

This "private ownership vs The Government" is a red herring.

Governments exist in all organizations. Rights are those things the organizations recognize as worthy of defending with force, if the peasants are lucky, they codify a consistent policy and enforce them.

<comment><USER34> Indeed, privatization of public utilities for example have created more government bureaucracy, not less, exactly for these reasons. Market fundamentalists (the anarchist leaning side at least, less the Hayekians and such) seem to believe that institutional structures that emerge from non- coerced (if it were ever black and white) property owning individuals will carry their values in some immutable form and corruption only ever arises when agents "become social". I find this an extremely naive view of human group behavior. The entire underlaying theory seems to be based upon 19th century hard-reductionism (sadly still the norm in the economics profession) and really needs a post-complexity, post-behavorial update. As it stands it is firmly entrenced in the realm of ideology, I wouldn't even consider it soft science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> RIP Fresco.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think society values good intention way too much. This man fought his entire life for what amounts to Marxism with robots. His intentions may have been good, his heart in the right place, but his ideas were bad, and if implemented, they would be disastrous.

If we judge him by his intentions, he was a good man. If we judge him by what he wished upon the world, he was a horrible human being. Though we should keep good intentions in mind, I strongly believe that we should also judge the outcome of what people are proposing.

<comment><USER18> Can you explain how his ideas would be disastrous?

<comment><USER36> I'm having that discussion elsewhere in the comments. Here is my comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14425382](https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=14425382).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> the fire consumes all the fuel that it receives.

Although his concepts look nice on paper I dont understand what the solution is to stop people to breed exponentially. And then we are back to the same problem we have now.

<comment><USER38> > what the solution is to stop people to breed exponentially

In developing nations, large families are used as a kind of social security. Developed nations with good social security have population growth rates below replacement (modulo immigration). The best way to curb population growth is through universal education and long term economic well being.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> When I was about 14 or 15 my first exposure to different schools of social organisation was Fresco, I found him through the Zeitgeist documentary (which I was foolish enough to believe in conspiracies with). I then looked at the Venus project and various of his videos and interviews on Youtube. He seemed like a great man, and although I think his ideas didn't put much into action, I really admired them. For the past 8 years or so he had passed out of my mind, I barely thought of the Venus Project, and it was surprising and saddening to read this news.

RIP Fresco.

</comment><comment><USER36> You mean someone who understands the complexities of the markets and the financial system wasn't convinced by Marxism with robots? I can't imagine why.

<comment><USER39> It's worth noting that Fresco wasn't a Marxist, and the Venus Project has tried to distance itself from the Marxists. It's also worth noting that a Communist society as Marx envisioned it takes great advantage of automation anyway, but rather than being used to cut costs in the short term, it's used so that people have to work less on the whole, leaving more time for intellectual fulfillment.

And please let's not pretend that Marxian economists are economically illiterate, which seems to be the point you're making.

<comment><USER36> > the Venus Project has tried to distance itself from the Marxists

It has sure tried, but it can't, because it's Marxist at it's core, and it therefore shares it's same inherent problems. It can't calculate properly properly for one, and whether the heads of those systems are politicians or programmers, the failure points are the same.

> please let's not pretend that Marxian economists are economically illiterate

Marxism from a logical perspective, will fail because it can't calculate. Soviet economists had a joke that went "We'll take over the entire world, but not New Zealand so we can know how much things cost". To that point, remember that when China was communistic, they had brought in thousands of Sears catalogs so they could allocate their resources correctly. These are things we take for granted today, but it's an attribute of economic freedom.

From an empirical perspective, Marxist economic systems have failed catastrophically in all of the 20th century. The direct result of which has been a drastic drop in living standards to starvation. Soviet Russia, China, and even North Korea had to allow at least pockets of free markets for people to survive.

So while I'm not saying that Marxists economists are economically illiterate, they have a lot to account for. And from what I've read from Mr. Fresco and the Venus Projects, including debates I've listen to, they don't seem to have an answer to these questions.

Edit: For more on the calculation problem you may want to look up "The Use of Knowledge in Society" by economist Friedrich Hayek. Incidentally, Jimmy Wales has stated that that paper was central to how the wikipedia project is managed. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Society)

<comment><USER40> > Marxism from a logical perspective, will fail because it can't calculate.

That's very wrong. You don't need a Sears catalog to sum the costs of production/acquisition all the way to the start of the value chain. You may need input to predict the demand for a given product but that, again, supposes a market.

> The direct result of which has been a drastic drop in living standards to > starvation.

You seem to ignore the effects of embargos and arms races. The US can finance its colossal military expenditure by issuing long-term titles while the Soviet Union couldn't, but that won't last forever.

<comment><USER36> > You don't need a Sears catalog to sum the costs of production/acquisition > all the way to the start of the value chain

This was common practice for communist countries, because they couldn't calculate otherwise. Logically, you can't calculate like the market does since the price system (or lack of system) is able to communicate vast amounts of information that socialism just can't. See The Use of Knowledge in Society by Friedrich Hayek. It's in part why he won the Nobel prize in economics. It's a short essay that's free online.

> You seem to ignore the effects of embargos and arms races.

It doesn't come close to explaining the catastrophic system wide failure that Marxism produces.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to "open" a microchip and what's inside? - <AUTHOR> http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/how-to-open-microchip-asic-what-inside <comment><AUTHOR> I've got to add that this is pretty much how Intel's x86 processors were reverse engineered [1] for use in Soviet IBM PC clones like Poisk [2]. Most resources on the Web talk about clones of CPUs up to and including the 80286 but I am told there was at least one successful attempt at cloning an earlier version of the 80386. The smaller sub-1 µm process used by Intel for later 80386 and 80486 units proved too much, however.

[1] <http://www.cpu-world.com/info/exUSSR-chips.html>

[2] <http://www.oldcomputermuseum.com/poisk.html>

<comment><USER2> I am the one who have done all these chip photos.

I am still looking to find soviet 286 (КР1847ВМ286), but it seems it is extremely rare. If anyone have one - contact me ASAP :-)

Just to be fair - I didn't find that soviet "clones" were clones - layout was changed significantly. Centralized planning demanded 100% compatible chips to make near-100% compatible computers, that's the root of all evils.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for all the work. That was an amazing read.

I've always wondered how people map chip-die photos into something like this: [http://chip-architect.com/news/2007_02_19_Various_Images.htm...](http://chip- architect.com/news/2007_02_19_Various_Images.html)

or this: [http://chip- architect.com/news/2003_09_21_Detailed_Architect...](http://chip- architect.com/news/2003_09_21_Detailed_Architecture_of_AMDs_64bit_Core.html)

I can see how figuring out the cache and the internal buses might be doable, but the rest... Any insights?

<comment><USER4> Maybe interesting:

[http://www.righto.com/2013/01/a-small-part-of-6502-chip- expl...](http://www.righto.com/2013/01/a-small-part-of-6502-chip- explained.html)

<http://www.visual6502.org/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These images would be a fantastic resource on Wikimedia Commons (for use in Wikipedia articles). The licensing (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License) is compatible as per [1] and [2].

I've got things started with the 74HC595 die photo at [3] and [4].

[1] <http://zeptobars.ru/en/contacts>

[2] [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing#Well- kn...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing#Well- known_licenses)

[3] <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:74HC595-HD.jpg>

[4] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7400_series>

</comment><comment><USER6> Can't let a post like this go by without name-checking a couple of other sites:

Visual 6502 for taking such photos and then emulating, or should I say simulating, the cpu from the images - in JavaScript: <http://visual6502.org/>

Chipworks for commercial silicon analysis of big modern system on chips (source of some photos of recent apple silicon): [http://www.chipworks.com/blog/technologyblog/2013/01/21/the-...](http://www.chipworks.com/blog/technologyblog/2013/01/21/the- straight-dopant-scm-at-chipworks-2/)

</comment><comment><USER7> So if I get this correctly from the other comments, reversing a current-day modern CPU chip is much, much harder?

Is it at all possible? On what kind of budget?

Say there's a number hidden on a modern CPU chip, a cryptographic key. That's one of the things "Trusted Computing" architecture uses, right? Is there _any_ way to retrieve that key? With a really large budget? Or is it truly impossible, tamperproof beyond any macroscopic objects, not accessible without destroying the data itself?

Because if that is so, that'd be disgusting, and I understand one of Richard Stallman's paranoid precautions quite a bit better--afaik the netbook he uses has one of the few brands of chips whose design is "open". Of course if it's tiny enough, you still don't know if what's _in_ it is exactly what the design says should be in it (like running binaries instead of compiling from source), but I suppose that is the best one can do.

It's crazy then, that with our drive for faster and faster computers, at some point, we may lock ourselves out.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely possible, people reverse engineer parts of our chips and I'm pretty sure a well supplied failure analysis lab could do some of the work as well.

It's certainly doable to reverse engineer out a cryptographic key from a chip, but most of the people who could afford to do this wouldn't really need to do so. Secure elements are typically substantially more protected than standard logic. The structures can be designed in a manner to be very difficult to access without damaging them rendering them unreadable.

Such a cryptographic key would likely be scattered in pieces around the chip, delivered through winding busses below enough critical logic connections and power rails so that the chip wouldn't be as vulnerable to a focused ion beam attack or infrared analysis. This makes it difficult to observe without destroying enough of the chip that live examination would not be possible. There are also tricks that would be used to mitigate the risk of differential power attacks etc.

The bigger threats to secure elements are sloppy design with DFT/DFM (Design For Test) features. Most complex chips have at a minimum a mechanism of connecting a large number of the designs flops to what's like a huge shift register. If you knew enough of the design you could try to locate the output of a block which has access to the secure value, scan in a vector that makes it easy to recover the value (e.g. an XOR element you can force to XOR with 0's) and scan it out.

There are also other DFT feature like on-die logic analyzers, micro-breakpoint engines, code signing overrides etc. Virtually all of these features are physically disabled prior to volume manufacturing. If a company was sloppy this could expose things that shouldn't be exposed.

There are other attacks as well though. If you could compromise the signing keys for the microcode delivered to a processor like a modern x86 processor you could change the behavior of instructions. With custom microcode you could catch and override basically any instruction (for example you could change where a LOAD instruction stores data or make ADD do jmp etc). You could definitely use something like that in a malicious manner.

<comment><USER9> What is a "focused ion beam attack"? ( Is it as cool as it sounds?)

<comment><USER10> What's a focused ion beam?

Ions are charged atoms. In Vacuum you take a small inlet of gas (only very little), or heat up a small piece of solid until it evaborates, depending on what type of atom you want to use. Then ionize it (e.g. having a white glowing hot piece of wire in the vincinity) then accelerate it. With electrodes and coils (like, e.g. used in old CRT TVs/monitors) you can form have a narrow, focused beam you can move around. This all has to be done in vacuum, because the beams will stop in (dense) air immediately.

This is your "cannon" with which you can very precisely aim and shoot at a target.

Where is this done?

The microscopes used for the very delicate structures in modern microchips are normally electron microscope (not using light but electrons for imaging). They operate in a vacuum which is very handy, because in that vacuum the focused ion beams can operate.

If you want to buy, ask your dealer for a "Focused Ion Beam Workstation", e.g. <http://www.photonics.com/Article.aspx?AID=50359>. Have 100k€ - 1M€ to spend. ;-)

What to do?

So you have your chip in your electron microscope, and you know that buried below some other structure is a signal hidden from plain view (maybe on purpose on a secure chip, but maybe you are debugging your own design and it just happens that this is where you suspect the answer to why the chip is not operating as required).

So you set your ion-beam to "heavy noble gas, e.g. Xeon" and shoot particles to drill a small hole until you have a trench down to the interesting signal. But that trench is not wide enough to allow your (huge!) probe needle to contact. You you switch to "deposit metal" and, with much less impact velocity for your particles, like with a small brush, you put in a conductive trace from within the trench to some part on the (still intact) silicon-dioxide protective layer on top of the chip. This is where you put your probe needle that can then access the buried signal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was having flashbacks to my days and nights spent testing wafers at a semiconductor fab. Spend a shift using a misaligned microscope and walk outside and see THREE moons. But I have mad soldering skills from building probe cards.

</comment><comment><USER12> Silicon Zoo has some awesome pictures of interesting artwork found on microchips.

<http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER13> Even though the details may already be well known, someone with some stock could consider sending these guys a 'clipper chip' in celebration of its defeat. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip>

</comment><comment><USER14> Amazing how the insides of these chips are composed of similar looking traces and microcomponents to the PCBs that house them on a larger order of magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER2> FYI, I've just switched image hosting to OVH CDN, let me know if images are not loading for you. Thanks.

<comment><USER15> Which OVH cdn? Did you rent servers, or do they have a cdn service I don't know?

<comment><USER2> They have CDN service in beta test - <http://www.ovh.com/fr/cdn/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems like you could avoid the heating needs as much by using hydrogen peroxide with the sulfuric to make Piranha solution, which is a great and voracious organic compound eater.

<comment><USER2> Initially I was trying that, but 98% sulfuric acid and 40% hydrogen peroxide needed like 3 days to etch plastic (with like 10 fresh "mixes"). Now I can try that with higher concentrations, would be great if It could lower temperature.

<comment><USER17> How did you heat it up, microwave?

<comment><USER2> No, I use hot-plate and IR thermometer to control temperature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Beautiful!! Someone should make large posters out of this.

The process gives it an artsy mechanical feel, as if we could see the sign of time and efforts these little things put in computations.

<comment><USER19> Intel used to make posters available (back in the Pentium-II days) and they were really cool. I used to have one that I had to leave behind at a previous job.

In the current copyright environment, I'm not sure they could be made available. Which stinks, as just looking at them & trying to figure out what the sections did (ALU, cache, registers, etc) is sort of inspiring.

Intel, AMD, Freescale, etc. should partner up with art.com or someone else who can print out large posters (and ship them wrinkle-free) Maybe donate any profits to a engineering-for-teens program of some kind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> More of the same here: <http://microblog.routed.net/category/icf/> . Third post contains similar instructions on de-encapsulation.

</comment><comment><USER21> What do all the things inside do? Are they like miniature boards with dozens of tiny connections?

<comment><USER22> Basically, yes. Those are silicon chips, with alternate layers of glass (SiO2) and metal deposited on top. The metal layers connect transistors that were built in the silicon chip proper in the first steps of fabrication.

They are called _integrated_ circuits because, instead of using a board to connect many pieces of silicon, a single piece of silicon has the whole circuit. More at the usual place, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Incredibly cool! Thanks for sharing

</comment><comment><USER24> Beautiful. I think I just found my new desktop background.

</comment><comment><USER25> Pretty cool. Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER26> These are just gorgeous.

</comment><comment><USER27> It looked like maps from GTA</comment>


Show HN: Soldit, Selling digital products made easy - <AUTHOR> https://soldit.co <comment><AUTHOR> I designed this to be a simple Stripe-backend-as-a-service for people who want to sell their digital products with ease. The key differences between this and Stripe? What I gives you is - you don't need a server only a Stripe account!

If you use the old Stripe Checkout yourself, adding the widget to your front end is really easy - but you also need to provide some code in the backend that processes your form submission and then does the token exchange with Stripe to actually make the charge on the customer's account. If you use their new Checkout, you are redirected to their site where all the payment is taken care of and you no longer need a backend. But Stripe only manages the payment so you will need one way or another to provide your digital products to your customers. It will surely be necessary that you implement this or find a software or site which can do it for you.

So I come to provide a solution to this problem. You connect your Stripe account, then you can simply upload your product, enter the price and start selling on social media or your own website. SOLDIT takes care of file storage, payment processing and product delivery to your customers. Plus, you'll get paid right away on your Stripe account.

In the future, I intend to add features such as coupons and integrations with Mailchimp and this kind of service.

Bluebeel

</comment><comment><USER2> I don't understand the product. Why would someone use Soldit instead of directly using Stripe?

<comment><AUTHOR> I designed this to be a simple Stripe-backend-as-a-service for people who want to sell their digital products with ease.

The key differences between this and Stripe? What I gives you is - you don't need a server only a Stripe account!

If you use the old Stripe Checkout yourself, adding the widget to your front end is really easy - but you also need to provide some code in the backend that processes your form submission and then does the token exchange with Stripe to actually make the charge on the customer's account. If you use their new Checkout, you are redirected to their site where all the payment is taken care of and you no longer need a backend. But Stripe only manages the payment so you will need one way or another to provide your digital products to your customers. It will surely be necessary that you implement this or find a software or site which can do it for you.

So I come to provide a solution to this problem. You connect your Stripe account, then you can simply upload your product, enter the price and start selling on social media or your own website. SOLDIT takes care of file storage, payment processing and product delivery to your customers. Plus, you'll get paid right away on your Stripe account.

In the future, I intend to add features such as coupons and integrations with Mailchimp and this kind of service.

<comment><USER2> Are you the same as checkoutpage.co?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we can say that checkoutpage is one of my direct competitor. Checkoutpage offers more features than me (at least for now) but the big difference is that I wanted to focus on a feature and master it well. In my case, the sale of digital products. The whole application is focused on that.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for clarification! You should have a look at arengu.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> j-a-m-e-s Thanks, great design. Signed up for early access.</comment>


Docker Clustering Tools Compared: Kubernetes vs. Docker Swarm - <AUTHOR> http://technologyconversations.com/2015/11/04/docker-clustering-tools-compared-kubernetes-vs-docker-swarm/ <comment><USER2> Kubernetes is currently a pain to install, granted. Indeed, building a real- life (as opposed to toy) kubernetes cluster is pretty miserable. But other than that, it's a _really_ nice system.

The article complains that kubernetes requires installation but Swarm just runs a container. True, but kubernetes runs _atop_ docker, not _inside_ it (although the kubernetes components do run within docker). I think this is a better design, because it makes migrating off of docker easier.

The article complains that one must know everything in advance. That's not quite true: one _is_ able to add nodes. But yes, they don't add themselves. That's also okay with me, since kubernetes in general seems to take an intentional approach.

The fact that kubernetes avoids using docker commands is a plus for us: we declare what we want to do, and kubernetes does it, rather than us imperatively instructing docker what to do.

Contrary to the article, we certainly _don 't_ have multiple definitions of anything. We don't have any Docker Compose definitions; we use kubernetes throughout, whether it's single-node running on a local laptop or multi-node in integration, staging and production. Thus, 'in other words, once you adopt Docker, Docker Compose or Docker CLI are unavoidable,' is pure and total nonsense.

In our experience, kubernetes just does things right. The service abstraction, and service discovery, are exactly what we need. The way that replication controllers work is great. The idea of pods of containers, all of which can communicate on the loopback interface, is extremely useful. It's certainly not perfect (c.f. installation, supra, and there're plenty of other warts), but it's going in the right direction.

As an aside, given my experience with docker itself, I'm not eager to adopt any more software from Docker; I'm looking forward to when kubernetes supports rkt or some similar container format.

<comment><USER3> I agree with zeveb -- that has been my experience with Kuberentes. It is a pain to install. It is a really nice system once it is up and running. The abstractions are at the right level.

I have deployed with Docker Compose, and AWS ECS. Kubernetes solves a lot of the pain points I discovered when putting containers into production with Docker Compose or AWS ECS. A concept of a pod that has it's own IP address? Awesome. Replication controllers that uses pod definitions as templates? Very nice. Resiliency where -- if the kubelet on minions or the Kubernetes master / API server goes down, the cluster keeps functioning? Great! Add-ons that uses the K8S definitions? Cool!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At my company, we've set up our own Kubernetes cluster and moved our production applications over to it over the past couple months. While I definitely agree, there is a steep learning curve for getting Kubernetes set up and configured, there are several factually inaccurate things in this article.

> With Docker we were supposed not to have installation instructions (aside > from a few docker run arguments). We were supposed to run containers. Swarm > fulfils that promise and Kubernetes doesn't.

We run Kubernetes on CoreOS and every piece runs in a container. On the master, the api-server, controller and scheduler all run in docker containers. On the minions, the proxy and kubelet both run in containers.

> Another thing I dislike about Kubernetes is its need to know things in > advance, before the setup. You need to tell it the addresses of all your > nodes, which role each of them has, how many minions there are in the > cluster and so on.

The master does not need to know the these things. Minions do need to know the address of the master, but they can self-register with master and join the cluster anytime.

With that being said, it did take two of our senior devs over a week to get a cluster we were happy with. I'm a fan of docker compose, and hope swarm becomes a good competitor to Kubernetes. I don't think it's there yet though.

<comment><USER5> > We run Kubernetes on CoreOS and every piece runs in a container. On the > master, the api-server, controller and scheduler all run in docker > containers. On the minions, the proxy and kubelet both run in containers.

I don't think the direct complaint was that Kubernetes didn't "run in containers" but that it isn't as easy to set up as "just running some containers".

"With Docker we were supposed not to have installation instructions (aside from a few docker run arguments)". He was saying that the Kubernetes setup didn't fit the ease of setup touted by Docker.

<comment><USER3> It's a fair point -- Kubernetes is a pain to install.

But I think the author then translated that to mean that Kubernetes is also difficult to use. It's much easier to use than it is to install.

On the flip side, when I had started seriously using Docker, I quickly ran into it's limitations. Docker is easy to use... as long as you stayed within the playground. When I started using Docker Compose seriously, I quickly ran into problems it couldn't handle. This was about 12 months ago. I think the current networking and docker swarm expanded that playground ... but it doesn't bridge the gap into getting this out as reliable and resilient infrastructure.

<comment><USER6> I have a feeling Docker will get there eventually. It seems they are moving slower because are being very careful and deliberate with what they introduce.

Docker seems to go for solutions that are general and flexible whereas kubernetes is very opinionated.

<comment><USER3> I agree that Docker is careful about where they are going.

I'm not so sure that Kubernetes is being opinionated. They sit higher in the stack, and yet, it is built as a collection of building blocks.

Chances are, what Docker Swarm will turn into is reinventing Kubernetes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Kubernetes itself doesn't have a steep learning curve.

Setting up and configuring a Kubernetes cluster by hand does have a steep learning curve. I had spent more time trying to get Kubernetes up and running than I have actually using it.

Actually using Kubernetes is fairly straight-forward (once you get it up and running). It solves many of the pain points with seriously using containers in a development workflow. Though, I ended up writing a Ruby framework to bridge the gap -- but that's the point. Kubernetes exposes a set of primitives onto which I can build on top of. So I'm not entirely sure where the "opinionated" bit comes from.

<comment><USER7> We're working on making Kubernetes easily deployable on Ubuntu, we just had a session on this today if you want to check out the state of things: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj76OeBjxpk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj76OeBjxpk)

Our goal is to make the deployment bits production ready for 16.04, and I'm sure $your_favorite_os_vendor is probably doing the same thing.

<comment><USER3> That's great to hear. I initially installed Kubernetes via the hypercube containers on my dev ubuntu box ... but I have found that some key pieces really should be built in (flanneld, early docker). Of course, with Docker 1.9 out, you guys probably want to support that too :-D

For staging, I ended up using CoreOS. I didn't want to use any of the existing scripts to deploy k8s on ubuntu, and I didn't want to write my own Chef recipes. I was a bit intimidated by CoreOS at first, but it has been a great experience ... except when it wasn't :-D.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Kubernetes requires you to learn its CLI and configurations. You cannot use > docker-compose.yml definitions you created earlier. You'll have to create > Kubernetes equivalents. You cannot use Docker CLI commands you learned > before. You'll have to learn Kubernetes CLI and, likely, make sure that the > whole organization learns it as well.

That seems unfair, as as far as I can tell there are not "swarm equivalents" for most of kubernetes features.

Does swarm have any of the features that kubernetes does for scaling different containers or doing rolling upgrades?

It looks like [1] the swarm scheduler does not yet restart containers if a host goes down.

[1] [https://github.com/docker/swarm/issues/599](https://github.com/docker/swarm/issues/599)

</comment><comment><USER9> NB: I'm one of the founders of the Kubernetes project

I'd recommend anyone trying to install Kubernetes check out: [https://get.k8s.io/](https://get.k8s.io/)

Or the single node Docker based instructions:

[https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/docs/ge...](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/docs/getting- started-guides/docker.md)

Or boot2k8s: [https://github.com/skippbox/boot2k8s](https://github.com/skippbox/boot2k8s)

Or kubernetes on OS X: [https://github.com/rimusz/coreos-osx-gui-kubernetes- cluster](https://github.com/rimusz/coreos-osx-gui-kubernetes-cluster)

Or of course the "as a service" versions like Google Container Engine, CoreOS Tectonic, etc.

We're definitely also working on simplifying the install instructions.

I'd also like to expand a little on some of the features that differentiate Swarm from Kuberentes, namely:

       * Secrets
       * Replicated sets of containers
       * Rolling update from one version of code to the next
       * AutoScaling (Kubernetes 1.1, in Release Candidate now)
       * HTTP load balancing for autoscaling
       * Load balancing for sets of objects (e.g. Frontend)
       * Service discovery of those replicated sets (Swarm has discovery for individual containers, but no concept of Service)

In general, our goal is to build a system that makes distributed system construction easier.

I would also refer people to the discussion in [https://github.com/docker/compose/issues/1899#issuecomment-1...](https://github.com/docker/compose/issues/1899#issuecomment-134149958) as well as [https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/8859](https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/8859) on why we feel that the Node-based Docker API is problematic for a cluster level API.

<comment><USER10> I also work on Kubernetes.

To expand on what Brendan wrote, Kubernetes does a lot more than just run containers. It provides container-centric infrastructure and a platform for building robust automation.

[https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/docs/wh...](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/docs/whatisk8s.md)

[http://www.slideshare.net/BrianGrant11/wso2con- us-2015-kuber...](http://www.slideshare.net/BrianGrant11/wso2con- us-2015-kubernetes-a-platform-for-automating-deployment-scaling-and- operations)

In a VM-centric world, one wouldn't just use raw VMs in production, but would also use managed groups, load balancing, autoscaling, DNS, Spinnaker, etc. If one manually pins specific containers to specific hosts, IaaS APIs and tools can still be used directly. When dynamically scheduling containers, that doesn't work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> One big advantage of Kubernetes is that Google Container Engine is simply hosted Kubernetes, meaning if you are using google cloud stuff Kubernetes is already installed and all of that stuff is taken care of.

Of course if you are using AWS I believe their container stuff is based on compose.

<comment><USER12> AWS ECS is entirely proprietary. It's a whole different beast.

<comment><USER8> well, they might have meant that they support (most of) the compose configuration file.

So, if you are currently using docker-compose, it's pretty easy to start it up on ECS

<comment><USER13> It's easy to change the config file, but that is very different from actually swapping over to ECS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I work for Giant Swarm, a German startup. We are preparing to release our less opinionated container stack for public availability. Features include bare metal provisioning, flexible service discovery, user/org management tools, PaaS'ish interface for devs, and a nice CLI. We're now deploying this solution on-prem for large customers who were looking to run container technologies at scale, including Docker. If you are in operations and are interested, drop me a line @giantswarm.io. My username is the same same as here! If you are a developer, we have an alpha test going on and I'm happy to invite you to it.

</comment><comment><USER15> > "The negative side of that story is that if there is something you'd like > Swarm to do and that something is not part of the Docker API, you're in for > a disappointment."

Isn't entirely a fair exploration of the downsides of Docker Swarm compared to Kubernetes. I agree a lot of the wind is taken out of Kubernetes sails with Docker's new features but certainly not all of it.

This deserves a longer write up then I can give it right now as so few articles on the web right now really delve into the differences between these systems outside saying who maintains but for its attempt I'm pleased to see this article.

</comment><comment><USER16> Disclaimer: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

One of the biggest opportunities for improvement we hear about is just making sure getting it going is easy - there's lots of work in flight to make this better, most recently here: [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/16077](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/16077)

We would really appreciate your thoughts on this - it's an extremely active area on the project.

<comment><USER17> My biggest beef with Kubernetes as a prospective user is the AWS under the hood document contents. We use AWS and seeing a bunch of caveats in that document is very off-putting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have recently come to the same conclusion. Right now I am trying to figure out the best way to do service discovery and load balancing. It would be really nice if I could just specify some swarm constraints and create a load balancer serving the containers that match those constraints.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like an easy solution exists yet, but once it does I'm all in with Swarm.

<comment><USER2> > Right now I am trying to figure out the best way to do service discovery and > load balancing.

Or you could just kubernetes, which does them (mostly) right, right out of the box…

The way it works is that services are exposed as hostnames and environment variables; connexions to those hosts on certain ports are load-balanced to the actual backing services, transparently. It's really nice, and very Twelve- Factor-like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Articles like this that give _zero_ context for the arguments are annoying. A bit from the author describing who they are, what kind of projects are the building, the size of the company, (rough) size of code base, number of engineers would help immensely in evaluating their arguments.</comment>