Illegal Pot Grows in America's Public Forests Are Poisoning Wildlife and Water - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/11/12/773122043/illegal-pot-grows-in-americas-public-forests-are-poisoning-wildlife-and-water <comment><USER2> _> carbofuran, an insecticide banned by the E.P.A for all legal purposes. Carbofuran is produced in the U.S. by Pennsylvania-based FMC Corp, which exports the product to Mexico, India and other nations. The EU, Canada and Brazil have full bans on carbofuran_

The fact that the epa doesn't have the authority to shut down production of this stuff is insane. Most things that are banned multinationally also face production bans for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER3> > _The fact that the epa doesn 't have the authority to shut down production > of this stuff is insane._

How? It's not even anywhere near in their purview.

> _Most things that are banned multinationally also face production bans for > obvious reasons._

The chemical is also produced _in Mexico_ (AFAIK by Viakem and Pyosa) and Brazil (by FMC Quimica do Brasil), and elsewhere. It is imported illegally from outside the country for these ops as far as I'm aware, so whether FMC Corp is producing it or not is immaterial to its availability in the U.S. for these ops.

<comment><USER4> Regardless, it should not be manufactured here in the US if it's not even legal to use it in the US. This reeks of lobbying efforts by FMC Corp.

<comment><USER5> Ehh, I think that is a dangerous view. It could be used for other purposes, like as an intermediate reactant or for research. Similar thinking is why it is so hard to conduct chemistry or microbiology research as a normal person. Obviously dangerous things can't be sold to plebs and everything with a chemical formula is dangerous.

Consider that many people wish to ban animal cruelty -- sounds fine, except these laws tend to boil down to "every animal must be treated as a pet" even though that is not an economical proposition for the vast majority of animals that exist. Even if you just ban "killing puppies" now dog breeding is essentially illegal as the most effective way is to kill the young you don't want.

<comment><USER6> > Even if you just ban "killing puppies" now dog breeding is essentially > illegal as the most effective way is to kill the young you don't want.

That really wouldn't be such a bad thing, IMO. Dog (and cat) breeders, by and large, exist to produce animals to maximize certain aesthetic norms, often to the detriment of their health. Given how many unwanted animals are killed in shelters each year, it wouldn't be such a bad thing to limit their production a bit

<comment><USER5> I agree that a lot of show breeds are not humane endeavors but there are lots of working breeds as well. Making it illegal to "kill puppies" with no exception means the breeds we have will be more or less the breeds we will have for thousands of years to come.

I write these posts because there is a lot of sentiment here and elsewhere that is frankly anti-science. In direct relation to the example, anti-GMO advocates _and the FDA_ have strongly resisted the DNA modification of dog breeds and other nonconsumable organisms so frequent litters and culling is all that is left. Looking further back you see the same thing with chemistry and biology kits, with electronics kits, etc; the end result being if you do anything more than go home to watch TV or play golf you are assumed to have some fantastically dangerous hobby that gives babies cancer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not emphasised in this article: US corporations are making these poisons that cannot be sold in the USA or EU and exporting them to poor countries. From which they are returning in the hands of criminal gangs.

Have you considered banning this shit, America?

<comment><USER8> Carbofuran is not technically banned in the US. Its use on foods is banned, making it a de facto ban for large scale agriculture.

>Traces of the pesticide carbofuran can no longer remain on food sold in the United States, whether domestic or imported, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced today.

[http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2009/2009-05-11-093.asp](http://www.ens- newswire.com/ens/may2009/2009-05-11-093.asp)

You can actually buy it right here:

[https://www.chemservice.com/carbofuran-n-11405-250mg.html](https://www.chemservice.com/carbofuran-n-11405-250mg.html)

<comment><USER9> This article is a good argument that it should be banned.

Also, the US has a lot of influence. They could get chemicals outlawed in other countries if they really wanted to. I mean, they got the whole world to adopt biometric passports, and they managed to get banks worldwide to agree to their reporting requirements.

But when it's about dangerous chemicals, they throw their hands in the air. Presumably because the industry needs some place to buy their poisons.

<comment><USER7> Industry could just make something else. There's a cold callousness to trading off human lives against mere _sunk costs_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> California really needs to get a grip on the Legal Market of Marijuana. The State Governments effort to extract as much money as it can from legitimate businesses (growers/dispensaries) has made the cost of buying and selling so costly that the illegal market is 3 times the size of the legal one. These legitimate businesses are going broke, do to the high cost of regulation and taxes. Until the state government can control their appetite for gouging the industry and creating as much red tape as they can, they encourage the illegal operation of these cartel grow ops.

<comment><USER11> The issue goes far beyond the taxes. Last I read, even without taxes/overhead California produces far more cannabis than it's domestic market can consume. The only long term solutions seem to be; crack down on illegal growers or wait out until it's legal at the federal level and interstate commerce is allowed. Cracking down on illegal growers seems unsavory since the government was looking the other way for decades while it was completely illegal plus (my theory at least) the tax revenues on (one day) being the largest producer of cannabis in the US are too appetizing to warrant constricting the industry.

<comment><USER12> Actually, the bigger issue is Banking.

If most businesses had to deal with the myriad of weekly/monthly legal changes and expenses that those grower/dispensary owners do most would just pack it up and exit, add to that they have no real choice in banking and remain largely a cash based business.

The thing is, as we have seen with Canada, even if it is legalized at the Federal Level access to banking will still not be a sure thing. Most dispensaries still cannot have normal bank accounts to pay vendors/staff/bills etc... this kills their productivity.

Honestly, their is no cure-all to it, unless you see a massive resurgence in community based gardens specifically for cannabis, which would be my personal ideal situation.

But, Career politicians backed it despite having a very good Medical system in place, in order to get as much tax revenue from what was otherwise an illegally sourced substance.

If anything, I think they'll continue to tax more as they will have to pay for 'task forces' to monitor and stomp out these 'illegal' grows. Businesses will have to continue to add Value Added services to compensate for the added expenses and you'll have am eventual race to the bottom and consolidation (like in Colorado) of Market Share from a handful of players/cartel which may fall into the hands of a Phillip Morris type conglomerate--think juul vape.

CA had proposed a novel system in place that would, on paper anyhow, protect the Mom and Pop shops; but the taxes and regulatory framework and legal landscape is not hospitable to a small business venture unless you have substantial financial backing anymore.

I was against recreational being legalized for that reason in CA, and I preferred it stay Medical only. It wasn't a perfect system, but it allowed for competition with existing and mature legal framework enabled by the Compassion Act in 1996. The only thing it seemed to offer was some degree of protection from the DEA raiding a legal and compliant business, but I'm doubting this may be the case anymore as these task forces will need something to do to justify their existence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _" These growers are trying undercut the legal market by about 50 percent and of course a lot of the product that they're growing is filled with these poisons," McIntryre says, "and it's likely finding its way into the market in various forms - flower, oils and vape pens."_

The legal market in California is too expensive (due to taxation) and this is a symptom.

California's illegal market prices are equivalent to legal prices in Colorado.

<comment><USER14> If the overhead of keeping an entire real-world manufacture & sales operation secret over the long-term is less than the overhead of simply paying taxes, then something is seriously wrong with the taxes.

<comment><USER15> If by "real-world manufacture & sales operation" you mean an operation where there can be no guarantees of the quality of ingredients and processing/storage, you would be right.

Like some pesticides or mold with your bud? How about some vitamin e in your vape juice? Those taxes pay for something, and as a consumer I want to know I'm getting what I paid for and nothing more.

We will see a lot these articles ranting against California taxes in the lead up to the elections by the conservative media because they are beginning to hate how much better the state does towards its residents with funding to provide services. Don't forget that almost all the social progress we're seeing in this country is from that state.

<comment><USER16> California sure can wag the rest of the dog.

> how much better the state does towards its residents with funding to provide > service

This is surely a joke, however, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> California now has the biggest legal marijuana market in the world. Its black market is even bigger

>"The illegal market is competitive because legal marijuana is so expensive to produce under Prop. 64," said Dale Gieringer, director of Cal NORML, which supported the initiative though it preferred other regulations.

[https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-14/californ...](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-14/californias- biggest-legal-marijuana-market)

<comment><USER13> $60 for 3.54g.

<comment><USER18> 50-60 for an eighth is what I've paid my entire life living in NY, Philadelphia, and Orlando. I moved to Texas a few years ago and now have a regular guy who sells eighths for 40. It's the lowest I've ever paid for high grade bud. I thought I was getting a deal but apparently this is normal?

<comment><USER19> That's pretty normal for black-market prices. But at least in Colorado, you can get an ounce of top shelf for $120-$140 after taxes (which are 25%). Eighths go for $20-$30. Street prices are even cheaper, but unless you know the grower personally, you obviously don't really know what you're getting.

<comment><USER18> Wow. I had no idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Joe Rogan interviewed John Nores, the ranger that first discovered these grows in the Bay Area and developed a lot of the detection and remediation efforts: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avZpWVEpiV8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avZpWVEpiV8)

<comment><USER21> Steve Rinella also talks to him in an episode of his MeatEater podcast. Its a good listen if you have some time to kill. Episode #179 if anyone is interested.

<comment><USER22> Agreed, that was a great episode. Here's a direct link for those interested: [https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater/ep-179-the- wee...](https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater/ep-179-the-weed-warden)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The clickbait headline might more accurately read "Toxic pesticides and chemicals are poisoning wildlife and water in America's public forests."

<comment><USER15> Or an even better one: "American manufactured Toxic pesticides and chemicals are poisoning wildlife and water in America's public forests."

<comment><USER24> Banned pesticides manufactured by FMC in Pennsylvania are poisoning public forests, wildlife and black market pot in the USA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It seems like the taxes on marijuana are too high. Legal marijuana has taken over about a quarter of the market, which is great because it means a quarter less illegal operations like these. But the legal producers could just put these guys out of business if they were allowed to.

Anecdotally, taxes approximately double the cost of marijuana in California. There's some benefit in taxing things that are bad for people, because you discourage the behavior, but it seems like wiping out organized crime by lowering taxes on the legal market here would be a bigger benefit.

</comment><comment><USER26> Does this mean that "Ecologically Ethical Cannabis" could be a premium offering and that pot lacking such certification could become despised like "blood diamonds?"

<comment><USER27> What do you think I'm buying now? WA tags that stuff from grower to retail, and I'm pretty confident that the local growers aren't doing it out in the North Cascades someplace. I would think, and maybe I'm wrong, that if some well-known brand were found buying weed from someone dowsing it in pesticides in the forest, they'd lose a lot of customers and the state would be swooping in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> this article is placed in the public view right AFTER well-publicized, large- scale enforcement efforts. The cynical view is that this article names a long- term problem in the public venue as a pre-cursor to yet another budget "ask".. and the budgets are already very, very large.. a working tech person would be shocked at the stability of money flowing to a small'ish group of uniformed people and their contractors.

<comment><USER29> I downvoted you because that's not how the US Forest Service works. Their enforcement budgets are far too small. Their police force is internal, not contracted out. They definitely need more money for enforcement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> As opposed to, say, the centuries of poisoning of US forests by legal mining and logging operations? 'Illegal pot grows' isn't the problem, the Earth's being doing 'pot grows' for millions of years. OTOH,'illegal pot grows' are now a primary worry for a new 'industry' of legal pot-growers.

Now that NPR's gotten so commercial (listened to Science Friday lately?) should we expect more of this kind of spin? Sad, NPR, sad.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 Sounds like a good reason to give more power to EPA to act on these polluters, and to properly legalize the stuff and get rid of another reason to hide the production.

</comment><comment><USER31> One more reason for me to stop smoking pot.

</comment><comment><USER32> Fruits of unmonitored southern border.</comment>


Uber, Lyft get DMV approval for 12:01 a.m. launch in NY - <AUTHOR> http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/politics/albany/2017/06/28/uber-lyft-get-dmv-approval-1201-m-launch-ny/103264592/ <comment><AUTHOR> Confirmed this this morning in the Uber app. Already in my small town there are 10-15 active Uber drivers active right now according to the car map. Have not checked Lyft yet.</comment>


Man arrested, iPhone video deleted after recording police breaking up fight - <AUTHOR> http://newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/videotaper_arrested_by_top_police_brass/id_31144

<comment><USER2> Is live broadcasting considered recording? (That's not what happened here, I'm just wondering, given police erased the video in this case)

<comment><USER3> Probably. I don't think the reply to "quit filming us!" of "I'm not, I'm live broadcasting" will help your situation out much if ever in the same scenario. I _do_ think that if you are going to record something where preservation of the video could be vital, live broadcasting that persists is the way to go. I've never tried such services (like Qik). Do they save everything you broadcast?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If he was clever, he'd have avoided using the phone (to avoid overwriting the actual footage files) and then sucked the files off of the internal memory using an undelete tool or dd. That could be particularly interesting.</comment>


How To Be A Female Founder - <AUTHOR> http://genjuice.com/2010/06/10/katrina-razavi-on-being-a-female-founder/

<comment><USER2> Step 1 be female Step 2 found a company

I think it's the same for men except step 1 is be a male

<comment><USER3> and step 1 is already done for you</comment></comment>


When AWS Autoscale Doesn't - <AUTHOR> https://segment.com/blog/when-aws-autoscale-doesn-t/ <comment><USER4> The way I've been happiest using EC2 Auto Scaling was to have a single cron- job continuously calculating how many instances I should be running, and it sets the desired capacity manually with the Auto Scaling API[1]. This may seem to defeat the purpose of Auto Scaling, but it's actually much more convenient than spinning up/down EC2 instances with the EC2 API. You get to precisely control how to scale, and won't be at the mercy of the Auto Scaling heuristics.

[1] [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/as- man...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/as-manual- scaling.html)

<comment><USER5> So we had this cause a spectacular outage a few years ago.

We were doing exactly this - but we had a flaw: we didnt handle the case when the AWS API was actually down.

So we were constantly monitoring for how many running instances we had - <USER2> when the API went down, just as we were ramping up for our peak traffic - <USER3> system thought that none were running because the API was down - so it just kept continually launching instances.

The increased scale of instances pummeled the control plane with thousands of instances all trying to come online and pull down their needed data to get operational -- which them killed our DBs, pipeline etc...

We had to reboot our entire production environment at peak service time...

<comment><USER4> That's not the right way to do it. You shouldn't monitor how many instances you're running. You just need to determine how many instances you should be running based on your scaling driver (cpu, # of users, database connections, etc). Then you call the Auto Scaling SetDesiredCapacity API with the number, and it is idempotent[1]. If the AWS API is down, your fleet size just won't change.

[1] [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/APIReference/API...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/APIReference/API_SetDesiredCapacity.html)

<comment><USER6> > That's not the right way to do it.

The poster is aware of this, which is why they talked specifically what they did wrong.

<comment><USER7> While the poster was aware of it, he did not provide a solution whereas DVassallo provided a valuable step by step on how to do it properly. Which may help others in the future.

Think long and hard why you felt it necessary to make your comment and what value it actually provided.

<comment><USER6> > Think long and hard why you felt it necessary to make your comment and what > value it actually provided.

Yeah, that's what I was telling the other poster in a nicer way. Same goes to you. You can provide advice without repeating criticism for no reason when the person specifically said they did something wrong.

And save me the lecturing on "long and hard." My comment has 15 upvotes, so it's pretty unlikely I'm the one off the mark in this conversation.

<comment><USER7> > You can provide advice without repeating criticism for no reason when the > person specifically said they did something wrong.

That statement is a joke, here it is reworded:

> A person should be invulnerable to criticism as long as they make a humbling > remark.

Doesn't sound so great now does it.

Also, I'm not surprised you got 15 upvotes. This place has ceased to be a hacker forum for many years now. Too many eternal politically correct Septembers.

<comment><USER6> A strawman argument + when your view is not popular, the environment must be the problem. Classic undefeatable argument. I'm surprised you have problems getting along here.

<comment><USER7> > when your view is not popular, the environment must be the problem

You were the one using upvotes to validate your argument when it's a fact that posting a political opinion in either a left and right forum will net highly different responses. Of course the environment plays a part.

Won't even bother dissecting the first shot. Your arguments have been weak at best till now this final one was the final straw, man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are many limitations that you need to "read between the lines" with AWS auto scaling.

For example, we have daemons reading messages from SQS, if you try to use auto scaling based on SQS metrics, you come to realize pretty quickly that CloudWatch is updated every 5 minutes. For most messages, this is simply too late.

In a lot of cases, you are better off with updating CloudWatch yourself with your own interval using lambda functions (for example) and let the rest follow the path of AWS managed auto scaling.

There is also a cascading auto scale that you need to follow. If we take ECS for example, you need to have auto scaling for the containers running (Tasks) AND after that you also need auto scaling for the EC2 resources. Both of these have different scaling speeds. Containers scale instantly while instances scale much slower. Even if you pack your own image, there is still a significant delay.

<comment><USER9> Out of curiosity, what's the use case for running ECS on EC2 (instead of using Fargate) these days?

<comment><USER10> AWS employee here. If you are able to achieve consistent greater than 50% utilization of your EC2 instances or have a high percentage of spot or reserved instances then ECS on EC2 is still cheaper than Fargate. If your workload is very large, requiring many instances this may make the economics of ECS on EC2 more attractive than using Fargate. (Almost never the case for small workloads though).

Additionally, a major use case for ECS is machine learning workloads powered by GPU's and Fargate does not yet have this support. With ECS you can run p2 or p3 instances and orchestrate machine learning containers across them with even GPU reservation and GPU pinning.

<comment><USER11> I'm not totally up to speed on ECS vs EKS economics but it seems like EKS with p2/p3 would be a sweet solution for this. Even better if you have a mixed workload and you want to easily target GPU-enabled instances by adding a taint to the podspec.

<comment><USER10> Kubernetes GPU scheduling is currently still marked as experimental: [https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/manage-gpus/scheduling- gpus...](https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/manage-gpus/scheduling-gpus/)

ECS GPU scheduling is production ready, and streamlined quite a bit on the initial getting started workflow due to the fact that we provide a maintained GPU optimized AMI for ECS that already has your NVIDIA kernel drivers and Docker GPU runtime. ECS supports GPU pinning for maximum performance, as well as mixed CPU and GPU workloads in the same cluster: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/ecs- gpu.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Auto-scaling is depending on startup time. If your startup time for a new instance/container is 5 seconds, then you need to predict what your traffic will be in 5 seconds. If your startup time is 10 minutes, then you need to predict your traffic in 10 minutes.

The choice of metric is important, but it needs to be a metric that predicts future traffic if you want to autoscale user facing services. CPU load is not that metric.

The best way to do autoscaling is to build a system that is unique to your business to predict your traffic, and then use AWS's autoscaling as your backup for when you get your prediction wrong.

</comment><comment><USER13> Having used ECS quite a bit, I do not recommend anyone building a new stack based on it. Kubernetes solves everything ECS solves, but usually better and without sveral of the issues mentioned here. Last time I checked, AWS was still lagging behind Azure and GCP on Kubernetes, but I have a strong feeling they're prioritizing improving EKS over ECS.

If you're already invested in ECS it's a different story, of course.

<comment><USER14> I think that Fargate is the "improvement" for ECS. I never understood the appeal of ECS in the first place, seemed (and still does) really half baked.

<comment><USER10> AWS employee here. Sorry to hear that you feel ECS is half baked. Feel free to reach out directly using the details in my profile info if you have any feedback you'd like me pass on to the team.

To clear up the confusion on the relationship between Fargate and ECS, think of Fargate as the hosting layer: it runs your container for you on demand and bills you for the amount of CPU and GB your container reserved per second. On the other hand ECS is the management layer. It provides the API that you use to orchestrate launching X containers, spreading them across availability zones, and hooking them up to other resources automatically (like load balancers, service discovery, etc).

Currently you can use ECS without using Fargate, by providing your own pool of EC2 instances to host the containers on. However, you can not use Fargate without ECS, as the hosting layer doesn't know how to run your full application stack without being instructed to by the ECS management layer.

<comment><USER14> From my perspective Fargate offers the functionality I would have expected from ECS in the first place. What ECS provides OOB requires too much janitoring and ultimately isn't terribly different in effort compared to running your own k8s or mesos infra on EC2 instances you provisioned yourself. You still basically needed an orchestration layer over ECS.

Which is why, I assume, Fargate is now listed as an integral feature of ECS on the product page.

<comment><USER10> Yeah to be clear the Fargate container hosting was always the vision for ECS, from the very first internal proposal to build this system. But its necessary to build something that keeps track of container state at scale first, and that is ECS. We built ECS so that it can keep track of container state both in Fargate and containers running on your own self managed EC2 hosts. This gives you the most flexibility if you have really specific needs for your container hosts that Fargate can't cover for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm surprised I didn't see application performance monitoring mentioned here. A lot of applications are complex and in those cases adding containers is only effective until you reach the next constraint.

Having two resources (such as DB and app) scale in concert can be exceedingly difficult.

<comment><USER16> > Having two resources (such as DB and app) scale in concert can be > exceedingly difficult.

This means your resources are too tightly coupled. If they are so tightly coupled that they need to scale together then they are not two resources and you should look into restructuring them into two actual resources or bind them more closely to make a single resource.

<comment><USER15> In my example of DB and backend: How could they be decoupled?

<comment><USER16> As far as runtime, applications and DBs are already decoupled. You have N application instances mapped to M database instances. Applications can usually scale pretty much with load. Databases vary wildly in how they scale and it depends on the DB type.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Vertical autoscale is on my wish list. Some way to automatically scale instance size for those things that don't scale well horizontally.

<comment><USER18> Jelastic claims to do this, and the marketing made it sound so cool. [https://jelastic.com/](https://jelastic.com/)

But when I tried it, it turns out the docker support requires very specific base images.

Not really docker then is it?!?

<comment><USER19> Hi, Jelastic founder is here. Thank you for mentioning our product. Vertical scaling is not a marketing :), it's reality.

Jelastic public cloud providers offer automatic vertical scaling with pay-as- you-use billing model (please do not confuse with pay-as-you-go). Except this our team helps related technologies to become more elastic, for example Java [https://jelastic.com/blog/elastic-jvm-vertical- scaling/](https://jelastic.com/blog/elastic-jvm-vertical-scaling/)

Regarding the docker support, there are two flavors inside Jelastic: 1) Native Docker Engine - you can create a dedicated container engine for your project in the same way as you do on any IaaS today, for example "How to run Docker Swarm" [https://jelastic.com/blog/docker-swarm-auto-clustering- and-s...](https://jelastic.com/blog/docker-swarm-auto-clustering-and-scaling- with-paas/). An advantage here is the vertical scaling feature. In Jelastic unused resources will not be considered as paid while at any other cloud provider you will have to pay for the VM resource limits.

2) Enhanced System Containers based on Dockerfile - there is no need to provision a dedicated docker engine or swarm. This solution provides even better density, elasticity, multi-tenancy and security, more advanced integration with UI and PaaS features set compared to #1. It supports multiple processes inside a single container, you can get an SSH access and use all standard tools for app deployment, write to local filesystem, use multicast and so on. It supports traditional or legacy apps while images can be prepared in the same familiar Dockefile format. Unfortunately it's not fully compatible with Native Docker Engine due to specifics limitations/requirements of docker technology itself.

Thank you for pointing out this issue. In the upcoming release we will clarify the difference between two and provide more tips which one is better to use in various cases.

<comment><USER18> Regarding 1: Any easy set up guide for native mode?

Regarding 2: Is there any fundamental reason why full compatibility will never work?

<comment><USER19> 1 - An easy way is go to marketplace and print Docker in the search field, choose Engine or Swarm, press install. There is one more article that will be helpful [https://jelastic.com/blog/docker-engine-auto-install- connect...](https://jelastic.com/blog/docker-engine-auto-install-connect-ssh- portainer/)

2 - As Docker, Open Containers and other related technologies evolve the difference between system and application containers gets slimmer over the time. As an example well known issue with memory limits [https://jelastic.com/blog/java-and-memory-limits-in- containe...](https://jelastic.com/blog/java-and-memory-limits-in-containers- lxc-docker-and-openvz/) now can be solved with help of lxcfs [https://medium.com/@Alibaba_Cloud/kubernetes-demystified- usi...](https://medium.com/@Alibaba_Cloud/kubernetes-demystified-using-lxcfs- to-improve-container-resource-visibility-86f48ce20c6). I hope at some point we will be able to use benefits of both in one container engine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've also been deploying services on ECS for close to a year now and would like to address some inaccuracies the author seems to have made: 1) in 'Surprise 1' the author offers examples of CPU Utilization (or target) is between 80% and 95% _without_ mentioning the reserved CPU/memory (aka size) of those tasks (under the assumption that he's using the Fargate launch type). The 'size' of a task also influences the average CPU target utilization. For instance, if a task requires the reserved CPU of 4 vCPUs, then a spike from 80% to 95% is handled differently than when a task reserves 1 or 2 vCPUs. The same goes for memory. In an example setup I'd use 1-2 vCPUs sized tasks with a _service-wide_ target avg. CPU Utilization of 70% along and a StepScaling policy which adds 10% more tasks if the service avg. CPUU falls between 70-80, 20% if between 80-90 and 25% if above 90. My strategy has been being smaller- sized tasks, lower service avg CPU utilization (compared to 80%-90%) and shorter evaluation periods/datapoints for the scale-out CW alarms (minimum being 60 seconds IIRC). The short evaluation periods/low number of datapoints of the CW alarm allowed me to handle spikes reasonably fast.

2) in 'Surprise 3' the author claims that the Terraform's aws_appautoscaling_policy 'is rather light on documentation'. Since I am a user of Terraform for several years, I find it inaccurate mostly because of the several examples available in the documentation [https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/r/appautoscaling...](https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/r/appautoscaling_policy.html) as well as many more when doing a Github exact search for "aws_appautoscaling_policy" language:HCL will reveal many, many more examples from open-source repos (some with permissive licenses too). I'd created a custom ecs-service TF module which creates for each service (optionally) an ALB along with listeners and the attached ACM-issued TLS certs and TGs, the scale-in/out CW alerts with configurable thresholds/policies, SGs, Route53, etc. allowing one to quickly configure and launch an ECS service fast and reliably.

Regarding the scale-in, I typically also have that at intervals between 5-15 minutes to avoid an erratic scale-in/scale-out 'zig-zag' happening even at the cost of briefly over provisioning.

</comment><comment><USER21> The biggest scaling issue I always run into is the database is the bottleneck and there's not a lot of options for most databases to auto scale them.

<comment><USER22> Yup. Your DB usually has to be over-provisioned for peak WRITE capacity.

Read capacity is easy to skill to infinity with caches. But if a DB can only write 1000 updates per second, nothing will change that.

In many cases - it's ok to not process EVERYTHING right away. Process the important stuff RIGHT AWAY. Slowly process the unimportant stuff in your spare time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The biggest challenges I've had with auto scaling have been slow scaling time and default metrics not being a good proxy for scaling needs. One thing I was mildly curious about: if you're going to build your own metrics and scaler, what would be some of the downsides of having it scale down by just putting instances in the Stopped state, then scale up by starting them? In my experience starting takes seconds while launching new instances takes minutes.

Having to deploy updates to stopped instances would be complicated and you'd have to pay EBS costs for stopped instances, but I'm curious if there are other issues. Launching an instance from an AMI, even after the instance comes up the disk tends to be very slow for some time as if it's lazily loading the filesystem over the network.

</comment><comment><USER24> AWS needs to glue EC2 and ECS scheduling together. Today the schedulers are separate. So basically the feet does not know what the arms are doing. That leaves fixing this scaling up to the client meaning duplicate code effort solving the same thing for each AWS customer.

<comment><USER10> AWS employee here.

This is a feature that is currently on our public roadmap for container services, in the "Researching" category: [https://github.com/aws/containers- roadmap/issues/76](https://github.com/aws/containers-roadmap/issues/76)

Feel free to drop a thumbs up on the roadmap item to show your support and boost its priority on the roadmap, or leave a comment to let us know more about your needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Quick question for the AWS employee solving inquiries: I used ECS in 2017, and back then there was this weird issue where sometimes tasks would switch to new versions in like, a minute (if that), but sometimes, like 2/10, it would take like 10-12 minutes just for it to start killing old Task containers. Back then there wasn't any timeout option or anything to force the killing. Do you know if now there is? The project was killed for different reasons, but I really liked everything else on ECS. Thanks!

EDIT: I meant killing containers, not the Tasks themselves. Sorry.

</comment><comment><USER26> An incredible amount of software and infrastructure is written precisely for analytics data gathering workloads.

I'm pretty confident AWS's product for this use case would be Lambda and the new on-demand DynamoDB.

Is there actually a use case in analytics that requires a server that accepts connections from multiple clients, and then has to have <60ms latency including state over the wire and executing sophisticated business logic, between those clients, for time periods longer than 5 seconds? I.e. something that resembles a video game?

Because if there isn't, if your goal is to scale, why have containers at all?

<comment><USER27> Batching incoming requests, for one. Kinesis only allows 5 write requests per second per shard, for example. As well, Lambda have limits regarding concurrent executions and are very slow (10s) if needing VPC connectivity (in this case the default concurrent lambda limit is 350 due to ENIs)

<comment><USER28> Hmm... I don't see anything in the docs implying that - Kinesis API docs say it's possible to ingest 1000 records or 1MB per shard per second. There's a 5/s limit on reads however but those deal with batches of records anyway.

We have one service running that consumes data to a Kinesis stream published as an API GW endpoint. Preprocessing is done in Lambda in batches of 100 records and the processed records get pushed to Firehose streams for batched loads to a Redshift cluster for analytics. So far we've been very happy with the solution - very little custom code, almost no ops required and it performs and scales well.

<comment><USER27> Yes, sorry, i confused it with GetRercords limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > _For example, the maximum value for CPU utilization that you can have > regardless of load is 100%._

I'm surprised it can't use load average to estimate the true resource demand.

<comment><USER30> You can, but it's not visible to the hypervisor (it's an OS concept) so you have to publish that metric from an agent on the machine. Then you can use it for autoscaling.

<comment><USER31> But even then, "load" doesn't work well for all workloads. [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-08-08/linux-load- avera...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-08-08/linux-load- averages.html)

The number of switching tasks may be very high for a number of reasons, including a very large number of threads which do very small chunk of work each and yield.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I got bit by this! Even worse is that one of the servers crumpled because we didn't scale up fast enough - so AWS killed it because of the health metric. Which then took out the remaining two because they were then far, far over capacity. I got the pager duty alert and found a total cluster and just manually set it to scale up way bigger. Now for all big events we manually bump minimum server counts for that period :\

</comment><comment><USER33> >So, if you're targeting 95% CPU utilization in a web service, the maximum amount that the service scales out after each cooldown period is 11%: 100 / 90 = 1.1

How many errors are in that sentence? The 95% -> 90 mysterious conversion. 100/90 is actually 1.111(repeating of course), not 1.1. And if it did equal 1.1 it would be 10%, not 11%.

</comment><comment><USER34> > .. the ECS dashboard does not yet support .. Terraform ..

They haven't yet matured enough, it seems. Cloudformation is the right way to code your infra, not web Console or anything else.

Good sign, though, is they use ECS, not Kubernetes :)

</comment><comment><USER35> That's why you don't use AWS 'auto' scaling. Every application has it's sweet spot and it's simpler to roll your own when you know best.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think most people want to write this kind of blog after slogging through the AWS learning curve. Then they figure out how to use it and the urge goes away.

</comment><comment><USER37> _°whispers°_ cloud native...!</comment>


Ask HN: What does the first 90 minutes of your day look like? - <AUTHOR> Insured by Daymond John's ansewer on reddit, how does the first 90 minutes of your day look?<p>https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/7s8wup/comment/dt2ygg2 <comment><USER2> Wake up, drink some water/coffee/queal [https://queal.com/en/](https://queal.com/en/) , walk to work room at my home to my Linux laptop, code some bash/javascript/go for [https://wekan.github.io](https://wekan.github.io) and Linux servers using nano or Visual Studio Code.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Late last year I started getting up at 5:05, driving to the gym while listening to scripture, swimming, showering, driving back, and then starting coffee for the wife, breakfast for the family, and lunches for the kids. The exercise and alone time really feel like they slow time down and let me get a lot more done for the rest of the day. But it is hard to get up that early.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wake up, daily ablutions, start emacs, code.</comment>


Videogame Companies Are Your Friends - <AUTHOR> http://www.dorkly.com/comic/42862/videogame-companies-are-your-friends

<comment><USER2> This was alarmingly accurate.</comment>


Why I Don't Want to Live in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://www.yegor256.com/2018/12/18/silicon-valley-criticism.html <comment><USER2> I find this a fascinating foreigner's view on something that you hear little about otherwise.

The paragraph about not being able to joke about certain "categories of people" is somewhat... questionable though (i.e. I don't understand why people feel the need to joke about them).</comment>


A Driving School in France Hits a Wall of Regulations - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/world/europe/a-driving-school-in-france-hits-a-wall-of-regulations.html <comment><USER2> Oh man, the whole driving school process in France is so dumb and painful. It is layers of bureaucracy upon layers of bureaucracy. It is the worst in Paris, where you are going to have to wait longer and pay more to get a license. I have an increasing number of friends in their late 20s/early 30s who live in large French cities and don't even have a license - they live and work in the city, so it's not a problem for them.

When they do need to visit family in the more rural areas, they either take the train, or use a carpooling service (the most popular one is blablacar.com, which has been taking off like crazy in the recent years. The vast majority of French people I talk to when I go back home have heard of it- one of the few innovative French startups).

In France, I spent a year and half and about 1500 euros in driving lessons related stuff and didn't get my license. When I first moved to the US (southern state), it cost me something like 30 bucks and 30 minutes of my time. The test consisted of driving around the block, and parking the car (only snag: the inspector by my side, a rather overweight lady, told me that I'd lose points the further away I parked from the DMV's front door. I thought she was joking, but she wasn't).

The conservative French people say that more expensive, stricter, longer times for obtaining a driver license leads to safer roads; but if you compare US driving fatalities to French ones, there's not much of a difference- and people in the US drive way more than they do in France.

Like many other aspects of French culture, it's ridiculous how deeply legislated it is, and how the only ones benefitting from it are the ones making the rules. I find certain aspects of the US driving culture a little too much on the other extreme of the spectrum (learner's permit at 14? the driving test being just a drive around the block? the written test being a multiple choice questionnaire with the answers available on YouTube?), but France is worse by far, and it's hurting young professionals (my brother is without a college degree, and when he was unemployed he found that most jobs in rural areas require a car- but getting a license takes forever and is expensive. So that was a few months where he could do little but wait to get his driving license).

<comment><USER3> > it cost me something like 30 bucks and 30 minutes of my time

It cost you 30 bucks and 30 minutes of your time to _pass_ the exam, not to _learn_ how to drive. That's what is costly in France, because it costs ~€50/hour to have someone teaching you how to drive. People usually take at least 20 hours to learn, which is 20x50 = €1000. If you already know how to drive you can bypass the whole process and pass the exam as a "candidat libre", which is _free_ [1] (but it's hard to get a slot).

[1]: [http://vosdroits.service- public.fr/particuliers/F2825.xhtml](http://vosdroits.service- public.fr/particuliers/F2825.xhtml) (in French)

<comment><USER4> Where I learned in the US, we had a few weeks of driver's ed classes in HS, then practiced with an instructor for a bit. After that, getting a permit then a license was simple enough. At this point, I don't get anything more than vision tests and I don't actually have to renew my license until I'm 60 or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a 29, unemployed, native french man, this shows perfectly how france has many examples of over-regulations. I'm currently doing driving lessons, the unemployment institution, pole emploi paid for 90% of the cost. It cost something like 30 or 50 euros per hour. It's crazy when you think how important transportation is in a developed country.

I'm usually for socialism in general, but not if it completely hinders the economy and reduce opportunity, and sets in monopolies.

The government recently did a study, and it showed that small but important local businesses like pharmacists, bakeries, notaires (civil law notaries), tobacco sellers, alcohol resellers, kiosks, doctors, and many more, are heavily regulated, and tend to be monopolies because the government don't deliver that many licenses.

It's weird because I tend to have leftish beliefs when it comes to politics, but you can't deny that you need to relax the rules if you don't want to have those kinds of situations.

I never worked more than 2 months in total in my life, I just wish I could just pick a shovel and do any kind of demeaning work for a change, just for the sanity of waking up in the morning to do something. It's just not possible because of labor laws and a high minimum wage. France is anti-liberal in many aspects, and it's not just sad, it's just depressing. I just can't like my country. I like many things, but in terms of economic opportunities, it's soviet-like. People just receive welfare, stay unemployed, get unmotivated, and this settles in, and there's nothing concrete you can really do for a change if you don't have a network.

At least in the US, there are shitty jobs by default. In france, the only one negociating are the unions. Companies can't even fire people unless they did real damage to the company. Nobody gets hired because of that.

Sometimes I honestly believe I could try to just become an illegal immigrant and go to places where they give work to strangers, but it's hard to give up comfort.

It's a life of being rewarded for being lazy. It's weird.

<comment><USER6> You're young, clearly you don't like the status quo, what's keeping you there? I find it hard to feel sympathy, but I don't know whatever situation you may be in. Don't let the structural problems of your country hinder you, be part of the change.

<comment><USER5> > what's keeping you there?

Zero work experience. You can't really change country without finding a job first in another country, or at least having a plan. I would gladly work any job to become an US citizen or canadian citizen. Sweden, Norway, Finland, any cold country.

I don't know how to search for a permanent job abroad. I don't want to just do tourism and work abroad for one year. There always seems to be tons of discouraging paperwork. Canada requires you to have 2000 euros or more if you want to go there. With 9/11 the US will be a difficult place to go as I don't have any job experience.

> I find it hard to feel sympathy

I don't care about your sympathy, I'm not asking for it. Nobody has sympathy anyway. What do you mean by that anyway ?

> be part of the change

What does that even mean ? I don't care about change, I just want to get out in the morning, do anything that can be done, and go back home.

Like I always say, where can I pick a shovel and start working ? Job applications are stupid too, there are always requirements, and nothing about the real supply and demand of the job market for that kind of job.

<comment><USER6> Hey jokoon, you're clearly in a rut, and it's clouding your thinking and decision making. Your attitude needs to shift from where it is because, presently, it's so negative that it amounts to self-sabotage. I would suggest seeking some help, any help. It'll be lousy, and you'll have to wade through a different morass of bureaucracy, and unhelpful people, but eventually I strongly feel you'll be able to shift yourself from where you are.

Things don't magically get better in other countries. Each has it's own set of crap that people there have to deal with. But you know this.

Bonne chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No wonder I meet so many French programmers in Silicon Valley.

They always seem to pine for France, but they still stay in California. Its also really weird how fond and romantically they look upon such regulations. You'd think that they would be furious at the thought of such regulations in America, but they are actually pretty sympathetic about them. Even though such regulations have tied up the job market in France so much that they have been driven to a new continent, they still have faith in the State to fix things with rules.

That is one of the reasons I think libertarians can never win in the long run. Even very smart engineers have boundless optimism for the capacity of human managers to micromanage complicated systems like entire national economies. They also have boundless faith that bad actors and inside players can be prevented from manipulating regulations for their own benefit.

<comment><USER8> Libertarians can't win for the simple reason that free markets tend towards oligopolies without a system to break them up and because "free markets" suspiciously never account for externalities.

<comment><USER9> Libertarianism is a sliding scale. Many libertarians are ok with some government regulation and things like anti-monopoly laws. Others believe they aren't necessary and that most monopolies are created _because_ government regulation rather than in spite of it.

<comment><USER8> I have never, heard any libertarian publication in the internet advocate for anti-monopoly laws. And the second position is fantasy, because every single economic theory (including those by Von Mises, Friedman and other "heroes" of libertarians) can describe the existence of natural monopolies quite well.

Doesn't take a genius to know that these extremist positions are the result of ignorance in the way money and power flow through society. Unfortunately, it's the sort of ignorance that reaches into the "not even wrong" territory.

<comment><USER9> There's no need to advocate for anti-monopoly laws because they already exist. They just don't spend time advocating against them.

Natural monopolies are a different issue (anti-trust laws can't affect a true natural monopoly because it's by definition impossible to break up.) Some libertarians dispute that they are an issue at all, more on that position here: [https://mises.org/daily/5266/](https://mises.org/daily/5266/) Others believe the government should handle things like public utilities, just nothing else.

Accusing others of ignorance is never helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is my French driver's license horror story. I was an American expat living in Paris for 2 years. Fortunately, I had a Texas driver's license which is apparently one of a few states with reciprocal privileges, so all I had to do was exchange my Texas license for a French one, no class, no test. However, it took me 5 trips down to the French DMV, each time taking a number and waiting an hour. Each time, the clerk would find something else wrong with my application, even though my company had a French attorney assisting me, and I usually had a note from the previous clerk saying all I needed was one thing. Finally, all I needed was a copy of my Texas driving history. Texas does not provide a certified copy since you are able to download a copy from the website. Of course, France did not accept this. So, I wrote Texas DMV and asked them to mail me a certified copy. They sent me basically the same download. France did not accept it, but said the cover letter was certification enough, if I had it translated. Taking a number and an hour later at the US embassy, I had my translated document, which France finally accepted and issued my a license in exchange for my Texas license.

Then, 2 weeks later, I get a letter from the French DMV. They were not going to accept the letter and said I needed to come down and turn in the license they had issued me and bring in a properly certified driving record from Texas.

I gave up. I did not comply with this letter and kept the French driver's license. Fortunately, I was never pulled over and did not have any problems. When I left the country, I went back to exchange my French driver's license for my Texas one. I got a nasty scolding from the clerk, but I just played the dumb American and she eventually gave me my Texas license back.

I have to say, the absurd bureaucracy in France was not limited to the DMV, and I have more horror stories about the government regulations and bureaucracy there.

</comment><comment><USER11> It reminded me of this[1] recent Tyler Cowen article that is basically arguing that France and other European countries will have long-term negative growth, mostly because they are over-regulated and hence cannot adapt to changes.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/upshot/lesson-from-old- ind...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/upshot/lesson-from-old-india-when- an-economy-just-doesnt-get-better.html)

<comment><USER8> I honestly fail to see why this is a problem.

Growth for growth's sake is an irrational obsession. If people's standards of living are satisfactory, technology leads to reduced consumption without compromising standard of living, and individuals lead a good life, what more is there to it?

<comment><USER12> they still haven't discarded the requirement that everyone needs a job to have an acceptable standard of living, so lack of growth leading to unemployment is definitely a problem

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Disclaimer: I am from France and now, I am living in the U.S. since 2 years.

This article rings true. Driving in the U.S. is 100 times easier than back in France. The driving test is easy, if there is one! (I lived in Austin, Texas doesn't have anything OR at least doesn't have almost anything that looks like a driving test from a french perpective.)

I've spent something like 3,400 Euros to get my permit back in France, and I've waited maybe 9 months. It's true they are not giving away easily spots for the tests and it's also true that they try to get you doing as much as hours as possible.

<comment><USER14> Texas most certainly has a driving test (I know, I took it when I was 16 years old). If you gave the Department of Public Safety a France-issued license, Texas deemed you to already know how to drive so it did not require you to take the state test:

"Individuals who hold a valid, unexpired driver license from another U.S. state or U.S. territory, or from Canada, _France_ , South Korea, Germany or Taiwan (the countries Texas has license reciprocity agreements with), do not have to take the knowledge or driving tests."

[http://www.txdps.state.tx.us/DriverLicense/movingtotexas.htm](http://www.txdps.state.tx.us/DriverLicense/movingtotexas.htm)

<comment><USER13> Paying $50 for 20 minutes of test where they check ur abilities to put an automatic on D is not a test.

<comment><USER14> I don't mean to turn this into an argument over the quality of Texas' driving test, just point out that I, too, hold a Texas license and it is my first license. The driving test consisted of approximately two hours of driving near my local DPS office. I had to go through different types of intersections, parallel park, merge onto the freeway, make legal U-turns, signal appropriately (which is to say, all of the time, and is a skill that apparently didn't stick with most of my fellow drivers), stop at the appropriate spot, and so on.

My original point was that if you gave the DPS clerk a French license, you didn't have to do any of that because Texas considers it a license transfer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Less new drivers a year, selection of the best, many hours of practice, no easy passing, hell, this sounds like a dream!

They have half the rate of traffic accident as US or my country (Poland), so here's one obvious gain. I'm curious about the public and private transport infrastructure there - there seems to be an economic incentive to develop it.

I see the obvious injustices described in the article, but overall, this time it seems to have a positive effect. What the world needs is definitely not easier ways for people to get driving licenses.

<comment><USER16> > I'm curious about the public and private transport infrastructure

If you live near Paris(or a big city), you dont need a car.

If you live anywhere else you absolutely need a car! (or a motorbike, scooter ... ).

The infrastructure is good,but the train is extremly expensive today,(wasnt the case 10 years ago) and railways are crumbling.

Up unti recently you couldnt cross regions by bus in France,it was forbidden to preserve the train monopoly.Today people use ridesharing a lot,because taking the train is such a ripoff.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, in most situations planes are cheaper than trains in France (e.g. Paris- Biarritz is 5h20 by train for €110 while it's 1h30 by plane for €70).

<comment><USER17> It's cheaper sure, but you're not in the center of town, you have to get at the airport way sooner so you don't really save that much time in the end.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but you save money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't exactly see the wall of regulation. In France, as in Germany, you have to learn driving through an instructor, you can not do it in your parents car as it most likely lacks the necessary emergency controls for an actual licensed driver. Hence the cost, mostly paying for 20+ hrs of an instructors time.

There is only a limited amount of exam slots, and they are assigned based on previous pass rates, ensuring you don't waste it on unprepared students. That seems like a perfectly sane policy when there's only a low fixed amount of exam slots. In Germany, you pay a fee (to the government) for the exam, so its possible to add more tester.

<comment><USER19> >There is only a limited amount of exam slots

Why?

<comment><USER20> Fixed amount of money and therefore instructor labor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't want to throw away all regulations. If France has a good cheap internet and reasonable prices (compared to the US) and contracts terms for communications, it's thanks to heavy regulations. There are heavy regulations in consumer protections that I really miss in the US, where you never know what something will cost (taxes and tips are never on the sticker price), the contracts can be and routinely are leonine, and everybody is trying to rip you off all the time.

<comment><USER22> The exclusion of taxes on prices in the US is so infuriating and backwards. Having to manually calculate every price when you're in a store is just a pointless waste of effort. If you have to pay the tax it's part of the price so just regulate that that is the sticker price.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is great news actually, hopefully with the economy in France becoming worse and worse they will finally be forced to change - it was possible to bail out Greece and to some extend Spain, but there is no way, shape or form where we actually bail out France, not even partially.

Deregulation and freeing the economy worked for Germany (they used to be considered the sick man of Europe) there is no reason it couldn't work for France.

<comment><USER24> Germany is really a special case: Around 1990 the first world western part merged with the second world eastern part, while giving all citizens of the eastern part around 2/3rd (I think, correct me if I'm wrong) of the western level of social benefits.

It's a little like if the U.S. would merge with Mexico and give all Mexicans huge social benefits.

So I would be careful with an analysis why the economy has improved exactly. After all the regulated economy had worked fine in the West until 1990.</comment></comment>


State of Cloud sync for Things - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/#!/culturedcode/status/17337071328829440 <comment><USER2> Some how this all sounds like they are gearing up to develop a Things specific sync service. Last thing I want is another service I have to pay to sync my data. Already paying for Dropbox and MobileMe.</comment>


Freelance Developers, you are the future, don't mess it up. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.koding.com/2012/08/freelance-developers-you-are-the-future-dont-mess-it-up/

<comment><USER2> Good summary of Dos and Donts!</comment>


Jar Hell Made Easy – Demystifying the Classpath with JHades - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jhades.org/classnotfoundexception-jhades-jar-hell-made-easy/

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of the hardest problems a Java Developer will ever have to face are classpath errors: ClassNotFoundException, NoClassDefFoundError, Jar Hell, Xerces Hell and company.

In this post we will go through the root causes of these problems, and see how a minimal tool ([http://jhades.org](http://jhades.org)) can help solving them quickly.</comment>


Software used by Studio Ghibli and Futurama will soon be Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tech/toonz-software-used-studio-ghibli-futurama-made-free-open-source-138111.html <comment><USER2> dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11322070](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11322070)

<comment><USER3> This has a much better title, though. When I saw that earlier link, I thought it was about some music library! While this tells me that it's animation software, in use by major commercial players, and not some obscure software no one cares about.

<comment><USER4> If it were called 'Tunez', then I could see how someone might mistake it for a music library.

But it's called 'Toonz', so I'm guessing the majority of people that see that name immediately associate it with the word 'cartoons'.

EDIT: I'll also add that the title of this submission is not better than the other one because it doesn't even reference the name of the software in the title.

The actual title of the article would be better than this one. "Toonz Software Used by Studio Ghibli and 'Futurama' Being Made Free and Open Source" is better than "Software used by Studio Ghibli and Futurama will soon be Open Source"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "...and for a period of time was part of Microsoft's Softimage arm, which later became Autodesk." Weird phrasing. Softimage was aquired by Microsoft, then later sold to Avid, which then sold it on to Autodesk.</comment>


Ask HN: Should we agree that this account will submit all Who is Hiring posts? - <AUTHOR> I will use this account to submit

  Who is Hiring (Month YYYY)?
  Who is Hiring Remote Workers (Month YYYY)?
  Who is Hiring Interns (Month YYYY)?
 posts on the 1st of each month at the start of the business day in the United States.
This could put an end to our peers competing to put forward Who Is Hiring threads by submitting them increasingly prematurely.
edit1: This idea seem to be well received, so expect the posts tomorrow morning around 9 AM Eastern time.
edit2: I will write a script to automate these posts and run it on my server for the foreseeable future.
edit3: I will send the script as well as the password for the 'whoishiring' account to several prominent HN users (tptacek, patio11, edw519 and pg/nickb) for safekeeping. <comment><USER3> I like this idea. It would also make it easier to see past who's hiring threads as well. Just go to:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring>

and look at the submissions. Beats crawling through results on searchyc.com.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't the jobs section be used for that?

<comment><USER5> Jobs section is used for YC companies only. It's a fair reward for accepted companies to get prominent status on HN.

<comment><USER6> I think it's just mistake. More people would check the job board if there were more jobs there. YC company jobs could just be sorted to the top automatically to give them a leg up.

<comment><USER7> This is a really good point. Being the only ones there _decreases_ the YC companies' prominence, because unless people are specifically thinking, "I want to be an employee at a company backed by Y Combinator," they're probably not going to check there very often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why do all jobs have to be posted at one time once a month? There is already a "JOBS" tab at the top of HN. Why not just let other companies post to that page. You can still emphasize YC companies, stick them at the top for 30 days, and then everybody else below it. For that matter if PG ever wants to monetize HN adding paid job ads might be the best/easiest way to do it.

<comment><USER9> Pragmatically, the answer is: we don't have to convince PG to have a "whoshiring" account automatically post a thread every month, but we do have to convince PG to change how the jobs tab works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I completely agree, but you should fill out the account information - something like 'This is a bot to post the monthly "who's hiring" thread. If there are any issues, please contact <foo>@<bar>.' - that'd also let us know who's behind this account.

</comment><comment><USER11> Love this idea. I vote for this. Or maybe if anyone can actually edit the HN source and make the app self-post when it is first of every month (IMO keeping it automated will be easier...)

bigsassy's point about searching is right. It surely makes it easier to browse these threads when you have a dedicated whoishiring user account.

Whoever is posting this, please mention the format of the job posts clearly on every thread (whatever format... this thread <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057704> says location first. It's description is a good example).

<comment><USER12> Sharing a password is an uphill battle with the problem of the commons. Automating one account would seem a lot easier.

<comment><USER11> Ya, after posting the comment I started wondering about the worst case - <USER2> if the person who owns the account forgets to post coz he's busy or even worse... is dead. We'll end up creating accounts like whoishiring1, whoishiring2, etc which totally beats the advantage of being able to keep the hiring threads in one place.

I finished the Racket-lang intro guide today. I thought I could pitch-in with some code by adding the automated post feature to news.arc (in arc3) and sending a diff. Sadly news.arc is 2610 lines of lisp in one file. Scared me :)

<comment><USER13> Like a good programmer, you're worrying about edge cases :) Let's just do it. We can fix potential problems later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> You should also def include a Who's Hiring H1Bs as we saw in February if I remember correctly.

<comment><USER15> It may be better to consolidate all of these categories into one post and ask commenters to include a leading line of keywords (like FT, PT, REMOTE, INTERN, or H1B) that indicate which sorts of applicants are welcome.

<comment><USER16> Trying to find remote opportunities in today's post is difficult, since many employers put "no remote" in their posts. Same issue for H1B ("sorry no H1B at this time"). However, I'm sympathetic to employers who might not want to post in both threads if they're looking for both local and remote, and I'm all for not cluttering up the front page with too many job threads.

Perhaps we should implement a more easily-searchable remote keywords, like REMOTEOK, H1BOK, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm fine with the idea, but I'd suggest also adding a

      Who is looking for a Co-founder (Month YYYY)?

to the list.

</comment><comment><USER18> Probably should include one more, Whose hiring freelancers edition, that way we could get all the "I need someone to build X" wrapped up under one section.

</comment><comment><USER19> It should be posted mid-week. I run a developer job board, traffic on Monday/Friday/Weekends is much lower than mid-week.

For whatever reason developers look for new jobs primarily tuesday-thursday.

<comment><USER20> Probably while they're bored at their current job...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is this really needed when you can simply use <http://searchyc.com> and find all the posts and even relevant job descriptions from previous posts?

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm worried about the first of the month falling on a Friday such as tomorrow, April 1st. Will the weekend squash the popularity of a Friday 'Who's Hiring' thread?

<comment><USER23> I don't think that has much to do with using a separate, automated account to make the posts.

If weekends turn out to be an issue, the person running the posting script can just edit the post date (e.g. set it to "the first monday of the month") or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> First, I'm a little unfamiliar with this problem--why this bad:

"our peers competing to put forward Who Is Hiring threads by submitting them increasingly prematurely"

Maybe this suggests that >1 submission a month is better?

Finally, perhaps it'd be best to stagger the three post types throughout the month so they don't compete with each other for attention?

<comment><USER25> >1 submission a month is a bummer. It drives the quality of the posts down, and turns into the same employers that are always hiring (guilty, here) into spammers :)

1 good quality, well organized hiring post a month is awesome..

<comment><USER16> If you miss the hiring posts when they're on the front page, you have to trawl through multiple posts (one early one that has some employer posts and a thread about "don't post early). Inconsistent naming could cause you to miss a thread.

And this isn't just about making it easier for job seekers -- we want to make this easy for employers to encourage them to come here when they're looking for talent.

<comment><USER25> I totally agree, but I don't think multiple posts is the answer.. Either a new tab like 'Ask HN' that keeps these in a longer-lived list.. or an external site. I know a number of HN'ers have stood up external sites for this.. but I don't think anyone's done a good job keeping them simple, and getting the word out.

So yeah.. first choice for me would be a top level HN link like 'Ask' or 'comments'.. second choice would be someone write something external that people could always go to for HN job posts.. I'd probably go as far as to karma-wall users posting on the site too..or at least allow users to filter by it.. or just rank job listings by karma achieved in the HN hiring threads. I dunno. But yeah... once a month on actual HN is plenty, IMHO

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wrote a simple script generating rss feeds to follow these postings more easily from my rss reader. The url for a feed is in the form of <http://whoishiring.heroku.com/rss/post_id>

e.g <http://whoishiring.heroku.com/rss/2391828>

It captures the parent comments. Maybe you can include a link as well in your posts?

</comment><comment><USER27> Great idea, some questions...

Can we have a vote on this?

How will this be enforced?

What's PG's take on this?

</comment><comment><USER28> I vote no. Its valuable to see the HN name of the people submitting open jobs. For the most part, people aren't only interested in a company name. They're also interested in the people they could end up working with. I want to see the submitter's voting and commenting history.

<comment><USER29> I think this is in reference to the actual "Who is Hiring?" submissions, not to those who post jobs under those threads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I guess my recent post <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391491> opening one more category is what prompted you to post this?

<comment><USER15> I didn't see this posting, but I do think it is a bit too much.

<comment><USER30> Then at least include a small note suggesting all the possible jobs people are looking for. (including data science, machine learning)

Technically who's hiring should encompass everything, but I guess it doesn't occur to people that they can post remote workers in that thread. Similarly I suspect those threads are not attracting data scientist/machine learning engineering since the majority of the posts are not of that category. which is why I started this one. But I do agree that fragmentation is a big problem.

<comment><USER15> Good idea. I will do this

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This would be super. I always want to post in these threads (because youDevise is always hiring great hackers) and have trouble finding them reliably. Thanks for suggesting this!

</comment><comment><USER32> You can subscribe to RSS feed also

<http://rss.searchyc.com/Who+is+hiring>

</comment><comment><USER33> Centralizing it so it's under one person's control? That doesn't make much sense at all.

<comment><USER34> Can you explain what might go wrong? The worst thing that I can think of is that the posting script might fail one month, which is easily fixable. If there's any abuse, the moderators can put a stop to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Simple, single point just _works_. Yes.

</comment><comment><USER36> part good, part bad. there needs to be room for new kinds of categories...

</comment><comment><USER37> great idea. but ... where are the posts?

</comment><comment><USER38> I vote yes</comment>