A man who built a plane on his Mumbai rooftop - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-41813389 <comment><USER2> Isn't it true that in the US a homemade airplane is relatively easily registered without much hassle? Just remember reading about airplane kits and whatnot.

I don't understand the aviation minister's concern that "he'll crash". Is it fear of embarrassing the country or actual concern for protecting the guy's life? Or would the registration imply endorsement of safety and put others' lives at risk?

One of the biggest controls on recreational flying in the US for folks I know is the difficulty in getting life insurance coverage. It's a rather effective market restraint: if you're wealthy enough to afford the hobby, you're also likely keen on providing for your family.

<comment><USER3> The US has about 33,000 currently registered homebuilt aircraft. There's a lot of them!

For some years when I was growing up, five homebuilt aircraft were built for every one traditionally manufactured general avaition aircraft.

Most of these were built from kits or from plans, but there are still crazy people who make their own designs. My absolute favorite is the impossible Facetmobile[1]

[1] [http://www.facetmobile.com](http://www.facetmobile.com)

<comment><USER4> Just curious about your description of the Facetmobile as "impossible"... do you believe the video of it flying is faked?

<comment><USER5> Probably in reference to another faceted plane that basically was aerodynamically unstable, the F-117. Which was called the hopeless diamond.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "...PMO has pulled up top officials of the DGCA - aviation regulator -- and asked them to follow a procedure to clear Yadav's project expeditiously. After several meetings between the DGCA and Yadav on Monday, the regulator said it would register his six-seater aircraft and would ensure its air-worthiness without any further delay."

More: [https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation...](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation/airlines-/-aviation/after- rap-from-pmo-dgca-to-soon-clear-mumbai-pilots-plane/articleshow/61376986.cms)

</comment><comment> happy-go-lucky Just out of curiosity, I went to their website at [http://www.thrustaircraft.com/](http://www.thrustaircraft.com/). There's this quote that caught my attention: _Talk To Yourself Once In A Day.. Otherwise You May Miss Meeting An Excellent Person in this World_ \- Swami Vivekananda

</comment><comment><USER6> This is my favorite rooftop airplane:

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-74.0081902,115m/dat...](https://email@example.com,-74.0081902,115m/data=!3m1!1e3)

</comment><comment><USER7> > He has spent about $800,000 of his own, and his family's money, and has sold > properties and pawned family jewellery to fund his dream.

> "In India, innovation by commoners like me is not taken seriously. [...]"

<comment><USER8> Presumably he means "not well connected or from the right family / caste". It's a very class-driven society.

<comment><USER9> Its not class-driven, but caste-driven society.

<comment><USER10> That's quite a black and white view of things, which may have been true >100 years ago. Today there are wealthy people in the lowest castes and poor people in the highest castes. Money and power takes precedence over caste.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My very first question on reading the headline was, _but how will you get it down_

Then I read the article:

> Incredulous friends and family members asked the young pilot how he planned > to bring the plane down once it was complete.

Good to know I'm not alone!

Great article.

<comment><USER12> TL;DR according to image caption:

> The plane was dismantled on the roof and lowered down by crane

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder who the fugitive billionaire is who has his private Airbus parked in Mumbai airport?

<comment><USER14> Vijay Mallya.

[http://indianexpress.com/photos/picture-gallery- others/vijay...](http://indianexpress.com/photos/picture-gallery-others/vijay- mallya-airbus-auction-pics-cost/)

<comment><USER15> Either this website registers a new history with every scroll down the page or it hijacks the back button so that pressing back scrolls you back up the page until you've reached the top. I've never seen this functionality before.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, it's horrific

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of Peter Sripol, a young dude whose built one primarily of styrofoam.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6CS- YJ3_VU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6CS-YJ3_VU)

</comment><comment><USER17> Just a quick look at the design reveals the rear wheels are nowhere near the center of gravtity. This is important if you want to rotate on take off at reasonable speeds and land smoothly. He should know such basic stuff if he really flies for a living. Also the engine lacks cooling obviously. Cant't take such stories serious, as in some way they discredit real Indian engineers who build stuff, including planes, that are much more refined than this comedy. On a nerd level of course, I think I like this guy for not caring and just trying. Then again the article is framed as if he was some kind of bright example for India.

<comment><USER18> Not sure how you can tell the cofg just by looking at it. Looks to me like theyre in roughly the correct position. I wonder if the engine is watercooled.

<comment><USER19> It's also where the tail is compared to the main wheels. When you want to take off the pilot moves the elevator on the tail which pushes the tail down causing the nose to lift up pivoting on the rear wheels. If you look at a pic of a normal plane [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Cessna.f...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Cessna.fa150k.g-aycf.arp.jpg) you don't have to push down too hard on the tail to lift the nose.

In the Indian guys design the tail is closer to the wheels and the engine sticks out a lot in front so you'd need a lot of force [https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/14A54/producti...](https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/14A54/production/_98546548_img_7820.jpg)

It might still take off but you'd need to be quite fast to get enough downforce on the tail. I wonder if they'll get to try.

There's video of him driving it quite fast down the runway: [https://youtu.be/1dLAmhDWEE8?t=27s](https://youtu.be/1dLAmhDWEE8?t=27s)

<comment><USER18> Have you ever seen a 150 in real life? There's nothing in the tailcone. If you had a battery and some avionics boxes in there, the you could probably move the tail a few feet towards the front to achieve the same moment.

You simply can't guess the balance from a picture.

<comment><USER19> I learnt to fly in a 150. Yeah you can't tell exactly where the balance is from a picture and it depends where you've put the luggage and so on.

Edit: Pausing the video at 32s it seems he's pulled back on the stick and managed to lift the front wheel a few inches [https://youtu.be/1dLAmhDWEE8](https://youtu.be/1dLAmhDWEE8)

<comment><USER20> He fully deflected the elevator and bounced the nose gear. With zero passengers. You put 6 adults and a co-pilot forward of the rear gear and I bet even bouncing will be out of the question. But we don't know if the ground speed was even representative of take off, so we're all just guessing here. With regard to cooling you can see an evolution here in the BBC photos: the first two images show no cooling ducts on either side of the TAC-003 engine compartment, but later images show several. I think geff82 is probably spot on about the design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Has this plane ever flown?

<comment><AUTHOR> This plane cannot fly until the DGCA (aviation regulatory authority of India) registers it.

The PM of India has urged the DGCA to to clear this project expeditiously.

<comment><USER22> > This plane cannot fly until the DGCA (aviation regulatory authority of > India) registers it.

It is permitted to fly it under 20 feet without DGCA registration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Cant be too sure but there seems to be something off about the math in the dollar amount... The article says he spent $800,000. Lets assume the going rate of USD->INR is 1->60 (it is really 64 but I love easy math!) that would mean he spent 48mil Rupees making a plane, at that price he could have owned 16 or so cessna 172's. Just food for thought.</comment>


Ask HN: What are you using for quick mathematical modelling? - Max-20 There exists an app which I use for mathematical modeling: http://tydligapp.com
It allows you to simply drag and drop dependent variables in multiple formulas to quickly translate real world problems into actual numbers. For example: If I buy amount x of y I can create z which can be sold for $a each. How much do I need to sell to make $b total?
Is there anything like this for mac or linux? <comment><AUTHOR> Based on what you're looking for (dynamically updating calcs), I would say for most people a spreadsheet fits the bill (Excel, Google Sheets, Calc, Numbers, etc.)

The tool you linked to has an intuitive UI and is useful for simple calculations. I can see it being useful for every day use for folks who aren't that savvy with computers or math.

Spreadsheets however are a more much general tool (and only marginally more complex) that will let you do those calculations, but scale those calculations to much more complex models with almost no added complexity.

I have seen some really mindboggling things done with spreadsheets (and have done such things myself). But I can as effortlessly whip up the calculations on the demo page in almost the same amount of time.

I would say for most people, it would be a better investment of time to learn how to use a spreadsheet.

</comment><comment><USER2> I don't know of anything like this for Windows, Mac, or Linux, but there should be. For years, I used a truly excellent Palm app called MathPad. One great thing about it was that it had a magic integrated solver: you just entered the relevant equations and whatever variables and constants you had, and if you put in enough, it would solve for whatever hadn't been defined with the press of a "solve" button. This is way better than a spreadsheet that can't support ad hoc calculation of any term.

It could handle at least moderately complex systems of equations: I entered all the formulae for the algorithm of Oudin (used to calculate the date of Easter), and it traversed all the equations to reach a correct result. I'd still love to have something like that today, without paying $200! Sadly, I don't think it was open source.

</comment><comment><USER3> For Mac, I'm a big fan of Numi. You can assign results to variables, use those variables in more calculations, and if you go back and edit a definition, the changes immediately propagate to any other expression using that variable.

[https://numi.app/](https://numi.app/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Quickest? Just fire up a Python REPL ;) You can even use repl.it online in lieu of shell

For simulations, computational geometry, computational probability. I prefer Golang scripts. You can subdivide computation using goroutine workers. And it's blazingly fast

That said, there is literally no downside to gaining some proficiency with professional tools: Sage / Octave, Matlab, Mathematica, SciPy

</comment><comment><USER5> LibreOffice Calc or Mathematica

</comment><comment><USER6> DrRacket is amazing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Mathematica

</comment><comment><USER8> excel</comment>


Ask HN: Should machine learning be part of cs101 curriculum? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Absolutely. CS students should at least know the fundamentals and applications in the beginning of their studies so that they are exposed to it and can decide if it's something they want to look into further. In my CS education, no professor mentioned machine learning once. It was all classic software engineering and theory of comp.

</comment><comment><USER3> Machine learning deserves its own course. It should be in the 200 to 400 series. CS101 (Intro to Comp Sci) should cover the fundamentals of how computers work, Boolean algebra, how to program in at least one (imperative) programming language and a survey of applications of computers as well as a survey of advanced course offerings. Machine learning and the course offered for it should be mentioned as one of the applications. In 1962, I bought a book, "Thinking Machines" by Irving Adler and studied it. I did not actually see a computer until 1967, when I wrote my first program in Fortran IV. Most of my career has been spent writing code for embedded systems and machine learning would not have helped at all. My last job involved writing VHDL for FPGAs in embedded systems. I am now retired.</comment>


Ask HN: It it worth it to be second? - <AUTHOR>

I had an idea that I never finished it, now I saw a website having a good amount of users with this. Is it worth it to try to start it up now or am I too late? In other words first_strike > better_implementation ? Ok the site seems good so I'm not saying I will create something so much more awesome but I have a few ideas that I can add. <comment><USER2> Honestly, this is up to you.

Do you value doing it? Will it be fun, interesting, and challenging?

My advice is this: if you're only in it for the money, don't bother. Building something that people actually like to use is something that takes a lot of time, patience, and passion. If you're not totally committed, it won't be worth the time and energy expenditure.

Whatever you decide, good luck!</comment>


That $35 that scientific journals charge goes 100% to publisher, 0% to authors - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/hwitteman/status/1015049411276300289 <comment><USER2> They also don't pay reviewers. The costs for a journal are only the cost of sending a webpage (which they charge what, $30 for?), the paper journal itself (for some absurd amount each year).

They do not pay the authors for the content, they do not pay the reviewers (who are the "added value" they harp on about).

They're basically a tool that converts tax payer money (the vast majority of those people writing papers are paid in part or entirely by tax payer funds) into private money for the publisher.

<comment><USER3> I agree with what you've said - one thing that is sometimes overlooked is that publishers pay academic societies for the right to use the journal. I am on an editorial board for a small-ish society: we make about $5000 per year in member dues (they are low) and about $120,000 per year in publisher royalties. We use this to fund grant programs, scholarships, conferences, etc, so it is not all bad, but yes the publisher is probably making much more.

<comment><USER4> Well, academic societies like this are the problem.

When high journal fees are talked about an often over looked fact is that scientists chose this model. Scientific journals were originally run as non- profits by their members.

I guess it was considered too much hassle, and they decided to move production too an external company... that's when all this rent seeking behavior began.

My opinion really, is that scientists themselves should move back to the scientific society runs the journal model. It doesn't make much work to publish a bunch of PDFs in an archive anymore.

<comment><USER5> In physics, we do. The American Physical Society (APS) journals are the gold standard in my field.

I'm a huge proponent of open-access publishing, but one must also appreciate the importance of the journals to the health of the society.

Here are relevant passages from statements by both candidates for treasurer in the 2018 APS election:

Candidate 1: James Baird

 _For now, there would seem to be three principal threats to the financial health of the Society. These are:

1\. Open Access Publishing: Paid library subscriptions to APS journals constitute the largest single source of income to the society. Open access publishing threatens this subscription model. If paid library subscriptions disappear entirely, a new payer or payers will need to be found. Currently, this appears to be the author or the author's institution. APS open access journal, Physical Review X, and the open access opportunities offered by the other Physical Review journals, are an ongoing experiment. The treasurer will need to be alert to financial trends in open access publishing._

Candidate 2: James Hollenhorst

 _APS is in very good shape, both in carrying out its mission and in its financial health. Nevertheless, the Society and its membership face many challenges, not the least of which is the threat to the business model due to rapid changes in the scientific publishing field. Open access is the rallying cry from the government, the universities, and from the readers and authors of our journal articles; but someone has to pay for the added value that APS brings._

<comment><USER6> What is the "added value" the society brings? If there was enough value add _for researchers_ , then it could be incorporated into the membership fees. Conferences can be funded by commercial booths or higher attendance fees (most academic attendees are already paid for by grants); student conference scholarships can be paid for by a trust estabilshed by and promoted to senior scientists. The only other added value I can think of is political lobbying.

<comment><USER7> The society is a network of researchers with like interests. Political lobbying is also important for a lot of academic societies (like APS).

I find it interesting that you are advocating the removal of a current capitalistic/greedy funding model and replacing it with...another capitalistic/advertising model.

<comment><USER8> That post doesn't advocate for a new model; it just points out possible deficiencies in current conceptions.

>The society is a network of researchers with like interests.

So, the added value is for the researchers in the network, but that value is subsidized by the "payers", who are not the researchers?

> _Open access publishing threatens this subscription model. If paid library > subscriptions disappear entirely, a new payer or payers will need to be > found._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it strictly true that authors are allowed to send you their papers if you email them? Are they allowed to send the published version, or must they send a preprint? If they can send you the published version, why can't they host it somewhere? And if they can only send the preprint version, why not put it up on arXiv anyway?

I don't mean to cast doubt on the tweet's purpose (I agree with it), and for what it's worth I've emailed other researchers for paper access as well. I would just like to see some proper legal analysis behind these questions, because I see the same point repeated frequently by scientists who are _not_ lawyers.

It would be pretty cool if there were a platform that automated your request to get a paper from an author. I don't know how that would be plausible without hosting the papers though, and I imagine that would get into trouble.

<comment><USER2> The submission requirements explicitly require authors to not make any papers they submit available elsewhere.

<comment><USER10> I don't think that's normally true. Do you have an example of a journal with such a policy?

You might be mistakenly thinking of the requirement not to _submit_ the same paper concurrently to other journals. For example, ACM's policy: [https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/author- representat...](https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/author- representations)

And from ACM's "Author Rights" page: "Authors can post the accepted, peer- reviewed version prepared by the author [...] On Author's own Home Page" [https://authors.acm.org/main.html](https://authors.acm.org/main.html)

<comment><USER11> It's not common anymore fortunately, but as recently as five years ago most biology journals were _very_ preprint unfriendly and considered trying to publish a work already on a preprint server as a scam similar to republishing a journal article. Things are finally trying turning around, although preprints in biology are still very rare as opposed to those in CS or physics.

<comment><USER12> A shout out to biorxiv.org for doing a great job there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm getting fed up with the for-profit scientific journal system. I was recently invited to submit an article to a new journal on computer networking of some kind. They mine publications and just start mailing authors, soliciting publications paid for _by authors_. I don't even work in computer networking! Ugh so I wrote back:

Dear XXX,

I mean you no personal disrespect. However after reviewing your request, I believe your institution serves no purpose in today's publishing world and absolutely will not be paying it USD 1,250 for the privilege of publishing of a paper in a field in which I am not an expert. Such a contribution would in no way advance either Science or humanity, but instead only create more confusion by frustrating several fields' fledgling efforts to sift the wheat from the chaff using a proper scientific process.

Wishing your institution failure in the sincerest capacity,

YYY

<comment><USER14> The volume fake journal spam I'm getting lately is shocking. It seems they just trawl for emails form high impact journals.

<comment><USER15> The type of spam which has inspired one of my favorite papers titled "Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List": [http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf](http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No scientific journal of any repute pays its authors. Or reviewers.

Authors (more precisely, the grants we get to do our research in academia, or our employers in industry) pay the journal for the privilege of publishing there, and offer our services as reviewers for brownie points.

<comment><USER17> You might even argue that helps protect the integrity of the journals.

If journals paid authors for published papers, there would be a greater incentive for an author to tweak/falsify data to make the conclusions stronger, the paper more exciting, and more attractive to publishers.

<comment><USER16> we have this perverse incentive, but it's located at a different place in the chain: the grant agencies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Non-academic here: why distribute electronic copies of a paper through a scientific journal? I can see why publishers existed pre-internet (printing and distributing paper journals costs money), but seems outdated at this point.

What's the incentive for a scientist to hand over copyrights to a journal?

<comment><USER12> In many cases, it's a scientist's only way to advance his or her career.

<comment><USER19> This is the actual incentive, from a researcher's point of view. Even when there are plenty of outlets that provide quality control, archival, etc., researchers still submit to the same traditional journals because those journals' brand names are the stamp they need on their CV to advance an academic career that is already incredibly unlikely (due to their being far more applicants than positions).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> In this increasingly digital world, the printed and distributed journal seem less and less important. Of course individuals are still free to download and print a paper for convenience.

So what if the scientific community/industry focused on the real added value. Those are:

1\. Peer review

2\. Prestige

Because the pre-internet problem of distribution doesn't exist anymore (a basic web server to host papers is relatively cheap), that would allow to bypass traditional journals.

For that to happen, we would need a group of already reputed and respected researchers to review the submitted articles. But because the journal fees would be avoided, that means the money could be collected to pay those reviewers.

<comment><USER21> This. I hope more people start thinking along these lines so that we can find a solution that respects and exploits the useful boundaries and incentives in the system, resulting in better science.

> For that to happen, we would need a group of already reputed and respected > researchers to review the submitted articles. But because the journal fees > would be avoided, that means the money could be collected to pay those > reviewers.

Scientists are motivated by curiosity for their field, prestige, and having a stable job position were they can follow these motivations without fear. But they are not motivated by money (grant applications are a necessary evil). Due to this I don't think that you can start paying professors with stable positions, but you could start permanently hiring those many highly qualified mid-career academics who are still on the way towards a permanent position (and may never reach it). The review quality will be improved if people review full time, which can lead to journal prestige, faster review times, reviews with a broader look on science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fortunately everyone in my field puts our papers on arxiv anyway. Sure, the journal will format it differently and maybe catch some grammar mistakes, but the content will be the same.

</comment><comment><USER23> An interesting point is that if you email the author, they can send you their paper for free legally. Couldn't a platform be created (essentially an email autoresponder) where you send a formatted request to the author, and the platform processes the request and sends the paper to you on behalf of the author?

<comment><USER24> That's basically [https://arxiv.org/](https://arxiv.org/). The pre-print copyright (i.e. before editor/review comments) still belongs to the author so they can post it.

<comment><USER25> The IEEE recently revised their copyright assignment terms to explicitly permit authors to upload the POST-review publication to Arxiv, along with a few other outlets.[0]

[0]: [https://ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/publish-with- ieee/author-e...](https://ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/publish-with-ieee/author- education-resources/guidelines-and-policies/policy-posting-your-article/)

<comment><USER23> Would you know if there's an effort to backfill Arxiv with post review publications (superseding the previously published drafts)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> They have found a way to bottle prestige which is extremely profitable. It has negative marginal cost and only you can distribute it.

</comment><comment><USER27> Do the authors own the IP for their journals? I was under the impression that in most instances the IP was either public or owned by the university/instition.

<comment><USER14> The journal usually takes copyright but any IP should be protected before publishing. Generally all the IP owned by the author's employer.

<comment><USER28> IP should really be protected before publishing because publishing counts as a public disclosure and in the U.S. starts the clock ticking.

<comment><USER14> Yes, exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The rebellion against pay-walled research publications really needs to be holistically supported by all researchers. The big problem is that lot of "good" journals have also pay-walled publications that they pay nothing to authors but charge ridiculous amount per publication. This includes big names like Nature and several publications of IEEE.

</comment><comment><USER30> Every time stuff like this comes up I think of these guys [http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/post/40](http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/post/40)

This is the best model I've seen for modern publishing

</comment><comment><USER31> I agree it's become a problem and place for companies to milk the system.

What is the alternative? There will be costs. How _should_ it be paid for, which both maintains quality and is fair to authors?

<comment><USER32> There are lots of different ways to pay for it.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> why is this a surprise for anyone? of course you don't get paid for publishing in a scientific journal.

<comment><USER34> If Dan Brown sells 80 million copies of The Da Vinci Code, he has probably worked something out with his publisher that he gets some amount of money per book sold. If Michael Jackson sells 45 million copies of Thriller, he probably gets a cut of each sale. If, for some weird reason, a million people pay $35 to download the CRISPR gene editing paper, Jennifer Doudna is probably not getting a penny of that. It's surprising to many people not in science that the usual model of "I pay publisher $x for a bunch of bytes, then publisher gives y% of that to the person who came up with that sequence of bytes" doesn't apply in science.

<comment><USER35> Many papers in Nature can be found free.

Here is a paper from Doudna lab published in Nature. It should be free through PubMed Central.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5918688/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5918688/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "we are allowed to send them to you for free".

Keyword: allowed.

How can these smart and brave people, that push the boundaries of human understanding and knowledge, act so stupid.

<comment><USER37> what would be stupid about them sending someone a copy of their article for free?

<comment><USER38> I think that GP has an issue with the implication that the publisher is in a position of power to allow this behaviour in the first place and could also possibly deny it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> While this is sad, if the scientific journals end up paying the authors, it won't be 35$ anymore, it will be more(which I am happy to pay). The publishers I am sure won't be taking a pay cut though!

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone actually access articles on a per-article basis? I would bet the lion share of downloads (and revenues) are institutional subscriptions.

<comment><USER40> When I worked at an academic publisher I was surprised by this, often it's researchers at small or private institutions that don't have a library or one that pays lots of subs.

Also - used to be you'd set this to have a price context for reprints (printed version of the article with more logos) which were a much bigger & more profitable revenue source. Pharma companies would buy '00s to distribute at conferences.

<comment><USER28> The pharma companies still do, at least at the conferences I go to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Scihub

</comment><comment><USER42> Thank God for the arxiv and SciHub

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't see anything wrong with that.

</comment><comment><USER44> What a racket!

</comment><comment><USER45> Preaching to the choir and racking up some cheap karma, are we?</comment>


Ukrainian people ask Obama to ban Ukrainian President - <AUTHOR> https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/impose-personal-sanctions-president-ukraine-viktor-yanukovych-and-cabinet-ministers-ukraine-members/h58Fz30V The people of Ukraine have created a petition on wthitehouse.gov to impose personal sanctions on Ukrainian president and government. <comment><USER2> we are tired of being tortured by Russian regime</comment>


DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar Exposes Hidden Tracking - <AUTHOR> https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-tracker-radar/ <comment><USER2> I'm shocked 22% of websites had trackers from Adobe.

I've never heard of it before but it looks like this is the tool: [https://www.adobe.com/experience-cloud/topics/web- analytics....](https://www.adobe.com/experience-cloud/topics/web- analytics.html)</comment>


Ask HN: What are your contracting pain points? - <AUTHOR>

What are the things that you wish you knew when you started? I've only done a little freelancing in the past so I don't have a complete picture but even with that I experienced a few:<p>- Figuring out how to do payments. They wanted to use PayPal and I really didn't.<p>- How to word the contract<p>- How to get the contract to them<p>Thanks! <comment><USER2> Don't take Paypal, or credit cards. The fact that you'd even consider doing this indicates that you're probably charging way too little. Either way, don't take payments via any medium where your client can make one phone call and claw back your payment no-questions-asked.

Do invoices + checks, 20-30% in advance. Structure your work in milestones, with each milestone delivering something of value to the customer (this takes thought and effort), and bill on each milestone.

Just fax contracts.

As a contractor, you will rarely get to work on your own paper. Your clients will tend to have standard contractor agreements. If you want to live dangerously, eyeball them for noncompetes, nonsolicits, and bizarro acceptance clauses (ie, things that state client can withhold payment for N months while they do QA) and just sign the things. Else, get a lawyer and have them do contract review. If you're serious about contracting, you'll get the lawyer.

During contract negotiation, the thing you tend to have control over is the "statement of work", which is usually an exhibit at the end of the contract. Word this carefully, precisely, and in the light most favorable to your own work. The SOW is what's going to determine whether you've fulfilled your obligations under the contract. Don't use promotional language in your SOW, don't talk yourself up, pare back descriptions of functionality as far as you can reasonably pare them, write sterile and boring copy. Put yourself in the position of having to argue about the contract 6 months from now, and that argument centering around whether you've delivered every line item in the SOW.

</comment><comment><USER3> * In your statements of work, be as explicit and detailed as you possibly can in stating assumptions -- especially assumptions about what the _customer_ is supposed to provide and/or do. Drill down to a suitable depth, even if it seems silly --- if you're assuming the customer will have 110 volt AC power, consider saying so.

* Keep the customer informed --- no one likes surprises.

* Make a habit of sending short, just-the-facts-ma'am email summaries confirming oral discussions --- they can be incredibly useful in the event of later finger-pointing and "why didn't you tell me X?" accusations.

* In the same vein, seriously consider never deleting any email to or from a customer or otherwise relating to a job.

* Consider treating development of the specification as a separate, separately-priced deliverable.

* Consider providing an "extension of time budget" in the contract --- that is, you've got X days of extension budget that you can allocate to individual deadlines as you see fit, with a max extension of Y days for any single deadline.

* Watch out for IP-ownership provisions; try to make sure you get the right to continue using general knowledge, tools, non-customer-specific code, etc., for other projects.

* Be extremely careful using FOSS (free / open-source) software --- the customer will be really PO'd if it has to release the source code to its product. Microsoft had to do that a couple of years ago because one of its consultants included GPL code; see this blog posting [1] by Silicon Valley lawyer Mark Radcliffe for details.

* In the contract, try very hard to (1) exclude consequential damages, and (2) limit your liability to X or 2X or even 3X, where X is the amount you're paid. If the customer balks, you can respond that you're selling services, not business insurance, and that uncapped liability will have to carry a higher price.

* Investigate whether you can get professional-liability insurance (errors & omissions or "E&O"). If so, try to have a separate cap for your contract liability in the amount of your coverage --- that is, your liability won't exceed 2X, where X is the amount you were paid, or your policy limits, whichever is less.

[1] <http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=306>

<comment><USER3> Update: I posted an edited version of the above points on my blog at [http://www.lawnotes.com/bare-bones-contracting-tips-for- soft...](http://www.lawnotes.com/bare-bones-contracting-tips-for-software- developers-and-other-consultants/)</comment></comment>


CloudStack joins the Apache Elephant Graveyard - <AUTHOR> http://blog.justinsb.com/blog/2012/04/04/apache-elephant-graveyard/

<comment><USER2> I was wrong about Amazon not discounting below published volume discounts, apparently. It's still pretty rare, but obviously happens for their larger customers.</comment>


Another 10k Apart: Create a Website in 10 KB, Win Prizes - <AUTHOR> http://alistapart.com/article/another-10k-apart <comment><USER2> From the 5k challenge in 2000: "Indeed, the winning site offered a witty yet powerful critique of the current state of the web via a fully functional e-commerce shopping cart. In less than 5K. Bastards."

The winning site: [http://web.archive.org/web/20000510060852/http://www.sylloge...](http://web.archive.org/web/20000510060852/http://www.sylloge.com/5k/entries/182/index.html)

<comment><USER3> Where "fully functional" means "just a dummy, can't actually manage payment or shipping".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> >Build a compelling web experience that can be delivered in 10KB and works without JavaScript.

It's difficult to imagine what such an experience would contain, CSS animation trickery?

I'm very pro minimal UI code, my last hobby project didn't include any framework libraries and the front-end came in at 23kb including images, CSS, HTML and JS.

But without a back-end, and without JS (no SPAs), is this just a contest to build the best looking static page?

<comment><USER5> Looks like the 10KB can include a back end: [https://a-k- apart.com/faq#stack](https://a-k-apart.com/faq#stack)

<comment><USER6> You can use a back-end in Python, Node, PHP, or .NET Core. The size of your back-end doesn't factor in, just the markup, CSS & JS you deliver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I know a simple blog isn't the type of site this contest has in mind, but a couple years back I tried to shrink my blog's homepage. I got some good feedback and was happy with the result. Since I go long stretches of time without doing frontend, I felt it was a worthwhile exercise.

This is what I learned from the experience: [http://openmymind.net/Minimalist- Markup/](http://openmymind.net/Minimalist-Markup/)

<comment><USER8> Interesting link, but they don't seem to say anything about "what type of site" they have in mind or would find impressive. A blog probably "wastes" to much space with actual content though...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Woah now, everyone knows making a site with less than 10,000 dependencies isn't possible these days.

Wait, we're talking about bytes?

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool, but the contest page ([https://a-k-apart.com](https://a-k-apart.com)) is 204.5 K. Disappointed.

<comment><USER6> Disable JS and view on a small screen :-) It progressively enhances to that size. I'll be writing about the process and design in forthcoming posts.

Smallest view (240px wide) with no JS renders in 6.9kB (DOMContentLoaded hit at 94ms, Load at 119ms). Also in play: client-side caching with ServiceWorker and some localStorage goodies to speed things up on modern browsers.

<comment><USER8> Honestly, >10k google analytics doesn't sound like "progressive enhancement" from a user perspective, but I get why it's included. How would that be rated in the actual challenge? (Maybe do and publish a mock "grading" of the announcement page as an example, to make clearer how the rules work?)

<comment><USER6> I plan to write up how the site was built and give some hints as to how you can use lazy loading, etc. to your advantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is the 10kb limit per page? Per site(including backend)? Per content served to the user on a single page load?

<comment><USER12> [https://a-k-apart.com/faq#size](https://a-k-apart.com/faq#size)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> No Golang support :(

</comment><comment><USER14> Cue massive traffic spikes on [http://microjs.com/](http://microjs.com/)

<comment><USER15> No Javascript :-(

<comment><USER6> You can use JavaScript, but it needs to be an enhancement, not necessary for the user to do what they need to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Using tabs instead of spaces should help

<comment><USER6> :-)

Although minification & GZip should even those out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I got really excited until I realized I couldn't use JavaScript. Over the last year I got super passionate about making the smallest JavaScript bundle size possible with RiotJS or Preact.

I guess they really mean the old school 'website' (like the html 1.0 strict days), so maybe a html document with everything inline and no special fonts.

<comment><USER18> You can use JavaScript, just not JavaScript libraries.

<comment><USER19> Not true. JS libraries simply count against your 10kB. In the past, they may have been "free resources"

<comment><USER18> So what does this mean?: "In order to encourage folks to use native JavaScript functionality and keep their project as slim as possible, this year we've chosen to remove JavaScript libraries from the "free resource" camp."

<comment><USER8> You could previously include JS libraries and they didn't count against the 10k limit. now they do. EDIT: Somehow, since lazy-loading not strictly required stuff apparently doesn't? ([https://a-k- apart.com/faq#size](https://a-k-apart.com/faq#size))

<comment><USER6> You can lazy load libraries for sure. I would still keep those to a minimum, including only what you need. For instance, don't load all of jQuery if you only need one feature. And use native JavaScript code when you can get away with it—dataset instead of data(), querySelectorAll() instead of $(), etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What else is in Go 1.11? - <AUTHOR> https://talks.godoc.org/github.com/mvdan/talks/2018/go1.11.slide#1 <comment><USER2> Go is missing 2 things that I care about:

1) proper dependencies management system (the new module system might address this) and

2) gener... nah, just kidding -- actually null protection. I don't want to see another segfault or null pointer failure ever again.

If it had these two features, I'd probably stop toying around with Rust and Crystal and just use Go. Unfortunately, 2) is probably impossible without seriously breaking old code, and they're not gonna break old code.

<comment><USER3> Totally agree on 2. "Learn a language a year" they said. "Learning new languages expands your thinking" they said. What they didn't say was that once you use ADTs to model data, Maybe/Option types to avoid null, exhaustive pattern matching, etc, you want those features in all the languages you use.

I don't ask for much. I just want a GC'd Rust (one of the few modern languages that has option types in the std lib) or an F# that isn't tied to the .NET standard lib. Please?

<comment><USER4> > F# that isn't tied to the .NET standard lib. Please?

F# is basically OCaml on .Net, so… OCaml?

<comment><USER5> I just made this choice (learn fsharp or oval). initially I was leaning ocaml for the same reason as gp but then I tried a simple scraper (make a get request and parse the HTML) and couldn't get it to compile because of cabal hell. well obviously not cabal hell but dependency hell where I had to keep changing installing and uninstalling versions of cohttp and the compiler. in the end I said screw it and installed all the .net/mono/f# stuff and it worked flawlessly the first time. I don't understand how language developers don't prioritize package management in 2018 - it's simply a deal breaker when other languages get it right. yes I realize ocaml and haksell have a different perspective on dependency resolution than other languages but then they should ensure that it works (and yes I also realize dependency resolution is np complete).

<comment><USER6> It can happen if you happen to install a recent compiler and that package manager has not done the work(probably changing the bounds) to update in opam repo.

> I don't understand how language developers don't prioritize package > management in 2018

As you already know, Ocaml already has a decent package manager opam, this same situation will happen in any language where the packages get stale(e.g. in rust you installed something used nightly features that didn't make it mainstream).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Last release where _godoc_ has a command-line interface

What? Are they removing "godoc <pkg>"? I used that a lot as a man page. It's especially useful when you don't have internet access

Edit: it'll still be available in `go doc`, just that `godoc` will only be a web server. [https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.11#godoc](https://tip.golang.org/doc/go1.11#godoc)

</comment><comment><USER8> Plaintext at [https://github.com/mvdan/talks/blob/master/2018/go1.11.slide](https://github.com/mvdan/talks/blob/master/2018/go1.11.slide) if anyone else gets Chrome freezing for a few seconds navigating left/right.

<comment><USER9> Thanks! I am on my phone and it is impossible to read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a good way to view these Go presentations on mobile? I find them almost impossible to navigate on my smartphone.

<comment><USER11> Yes it's bad UX on mobile, here you go:

[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mvdan/talks/master/2018/go...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mvdan/talks/master/2018/go1.11.slide)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A change to gofmt like that is going to require a large formatting commit to conform. Presumably/ideally there are CIs that fail on invalid format, so it's not like you can wait until you touch the file again. Not a big deal, but still worth noting.

<comment><USER8> There was a change to gofmt in 1.10, too: [https://golang.org/doc/go1.10#gofmt](https://golang.org/doc/go1.10#gofmt)

"""Note that these kinds of minor updates to gofmt are expected from time to time. In general, we recommend against building systems that check that source code matches the output of a specific version of gofmt. For example, a continuous integration test that fails if any code already checked into a repository is not "properly formatted" is inherently fragile and not recommended."""

<comment><USER12> > For example, a continuous integration test that fails if any code already > checked into a repository is not "properly formatted" is inherently fragile > and not recommended.

As a frequent repo/commit spelunker, I'm gonna have to disagree here. It is better to have this changed all in one commit instead of tacking on that formatting change along with an unrelated change elsewhere in the file and doing that all over the place at separate times. What's inherently fragile (formatting wise) is making a change to a file that does not meet the current formatting requirements and then having it format on save/commit, messing up blames, code review diffs, etc.

<comment><USER13> Yep -- formatting for style is great iff it's done rigorously and consistently on every commit (which is what a presubmit check is good for). Ad-hoc reformatting mingled in with real changes plays havoc with change tracking.

Ideally the format would never change at all. An occasional change-the-world update is a reasonable compromise, but it should be done as a single commit with no logic changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Finally, I can keep my Go projects wherever I want.

<comment><USER15> I missed any reference to GOPATH. Does this release fixes Go's problem of forcing developers to specify source code directories through GOPATH?

<comment><USER16> That is correct. Now you can clone and build Go repos anywhere.

Note that support is still experimental, so if you want stability, it is advised to remain inside GOPATH for another release. This is a good post - [https://systemdump.io/posts/2018-07-22-go- modules](https://systemdump.io/posts/2018-07-22-go-modules)

However, do please feel free to try it out and file bugs.

<comment><USER15> The GOPATH nonsense was the reason why I've decided to take a hard pass on Golang, and instead pick up Rust. I'll stay away fron Golang until that braindead idea is officially dead and a thing of the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The "prove pass" is a nice step forward. As that is improved, more subscript checks will be optimized out.

</comment><comment><USER13> Huh, a change to spacing in gofmt? Won't that cause extra source control churn in a lot of projects?

<comment><USER18> It actually could cause bigger problems than that. Most Go projects I've seen have CI runs that check whether 'gofmt' complains -- and fail builds if they do.

Ultimately though I don't really care all that much. Everyone will fix it in a few commands, and everything will be green again.

<comment><USER13> I care if it makes it harder to browse version history and see which changes were made when, and why.

<comment><USER18> I don't think it would make it much harder if people just do all of the 'gofmt' changes in a single commit. After all, it's not like your entire codebase consists of such edge-cases, and if you hit a 'git blame' where the commit is a format change you can always just do 'git blame $THE_FORMATTING_REVISION^ $file'.

I have to do this all the time when 'git blame -wM' doesn't give me what I want when looking at kernel changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If anyone wants the recording, this is the timestamp in the meetup recording before an edited version is available: [https://youtu.be/RGeHsqj2RWo?t=2h16m11s](https://youtu.be/RGeHsqj2RWo?t=2h16m11s)

I can see that the slides alone aren't self-explanatory in some points, for example with the random byte reading or gofmt. I'll make sure to link to the issues/CLs in the slides next time :)

</comment><comment><USER20> > Kernel calls on macOS and iOS now go through libSystem.so

Well it's called libSystem.dylib :) but, still, good. It looks like this was only done in "runtime" but hopefully the rest can come in 1.12. [1]

[1] [https://github.com/golang/go/issues/17490](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/17490)

</comment><comment><USER21> > Some crypto funcs now randomly read an extra byte

Can someone explain how this is a feature?

<comment><USER22> It's to stop people misusing the crypto APIs, or making assumptions about them that the Go maintainers don't want to be stuck supporting.

[https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/64451](https://go- review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/64451)

> Code has ended up depending on things like RSA's key generation being > deterministic given a fixed random Reader. This was never guaranteed and > would prevent us from ever changing anything about it.

<comment><USER23> I respect agl a _lot_ , but this really doesn't make sense to me. Should I be able to rely on the RSA keygen being deterministic between versions, given a fixed random Reader? No. But should I be able to rely on it being deterministic between runs with the same version? IMHO, yes. This changes the signature of key generation from (Reader) to (Reader, internal random).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Last release to support GOCACHE=off

That's a bit disturbing, since Go's test caching can be a bit of a nuisance. I did some quick Googling, but couldn't find an explanation.

<comment><USER25> If you want to disable test caching, you can still do; go test -count 1

if you want to rebuild without cache; go clean -cache && go build

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here's a video of the talk by Daniel where you can see these slides explained: [https://youtu.be/mQYjjVCGVJ8](https://youtu.be/mQYjjVCGVJ8)</comment>


Show HN: We built a web application security testing tool for developers and SMB - <AUTHOR> http://beaglesecurity.com <comment><USER2> What's the advantage Beagle Security offers over a manual penetration testing procedure?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main problem small and medium businesses face is that a manual penetration testing procedure is too expensive for them to afford and it's a time- consuming procedure. Plus, new security vulnerabilities are being discovered daily and there is a need to be constantly testing your web applications to remain safe. So, manual penetration testing isn't the right solution for a constantly changing security landscape.

Automating web application security can be a huge lifesaver, saving you money and time in the long run. Our developer-friendly options make testing easy. The detailed test reports with proper mitigation techniques help you to accelerate the remediation process and stay secure from the latest security threats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can you explain how the "Domain Verification" works?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have a domain verification process in place to make sure that only the people with the right permissions on a website can initiate a security test. There are two methods in which you can verify domain ownership once you've signed up for our service:

File Verification - You can download a file from Beagle and then copy it to the root directory of your website. Only a person with write permission/access on the website directory will be able to verify domain ownership by this process.

DNS Verification - You can generate a key from Beagle and add it as a text entry in your DNS. Only a person with access to edit the Domain DNS records will be able to use this method

This helps us to make sure that any sort of misuse is avoided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> what makes it special when it comes to beagle security comparing it with other web pen-test platforms

<comment><USER5> Most of the other platforms does is a scan. but beagle does a penetration test. try for yourself.</comment></comment>


How we (kind of but not really) DoS-ed ourselves - <AUTHOR> https://www.domcomp.com/blog/how-we-kind-of-but-not-really-dos-ed-ourselves.html <comment><USER2> The comments on MongoDB JIRA ticket pretty much sum it up. A hard arbitrary limit sucks. They say the real limit would be RAM, maybe they should change to that. If there's a threshold which will impact performance, then just warn..</comment>


AWS Data Transfer Price Reduction - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-data-transfer-price-reduction/?sc_ichannel=EM&sc_icountry=global&sc_icampaigntype=launch&sc_icampaign=EM_128506540&sc_idetail=em_1778261631&ref_=pe_411040_128506540_12 <comment><USER2> It's great to see Amazon continue to push down bandwidth charges when they manage to get prices down. Bandwidth pricing can be incredibly expensive in some parts of the world. With AWS you basically get to take advantage of Amazon's negotiating team and clout while still being able to put nodes near the end-points.

(Basically bandwidth in Australia is ridiculously expensive and if you wanted to serve that continent it'd be a big headache, but now you can just spin up a machine on EC2 in that region and use Amazon's prices.)

</comment><comment><USER3> AWS and most other cloud providers have prohibitively expensive bandwidth compared to Linode's bundled bandwidth. With Linode you get a free server to boot!

Just yesterday I compared a VM with 8gb ram moving 4.4TB of data. With Linode you get 8TB for $80 a month. Yesterday AWS was $630 for the same server and the 4.4TB of bandwidth. For that price on Linode you can get 4 16gb servers, totaling 32 cores and 64TB of bandwidth. Even with the just announced AWS price reduction, it is still extremely expensive.

If you move a lot of bandwidth, check out Linode.

<comment><USER4> It irks me that every time AWS comes up people compare the pricing with simple VPS providers that only sell virtual machines and a few bells and whistles.

For starters, users that burn a lot of bandwidth probably don't do it by serving files from a VPS in a single location. In an AWS context, they may be using S3, Cloudfront and all the features and services that come with it. Setting all of that up on DIY VPS boxes (and maintaining it) may be fun for a hobby, but in business that's all costs. The cost of bandwidth is a trivial footnote.

Saying Linode's bandwidth is cheaper is like saying steak is cheaper at the butcher than it is at a restaurant.

<comment><USER5> That may be true, but try building a CDN on top of AWS and you'll be out of cash pretty quickly with their bandwidth prices.

<comment><USER6> It seems like a bad strategic decision to try to build a CDN on top of a platform that already offers a CDN while expecting to be cheaper than their economy-of-scale-driven CDN.

Not to say that you couldn't build a CDN on AWS, but if you're going to do it, wanting to do it for cheaper than someone who doesn't pay markup on the same instances (Amazon) isn't realistic.

<comment><USER5> This is true, but not all content is fit for CloudFront or other CDNs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The thing I love about pricing from organizations like Amazon, is that there is _zero_ pressure, incentive, or intent on their part to curb you from using their resources, or finding you in any way in violation of some implicit "Fair Use" restrictions.

For example, in Singapore, Bandwidth from EC2 to the Internet is $0.120 per GB for the first 10 TB. So, if I have a site that sends out 2 TB of data, my bandwidth charges are $240/month, and Amazon is 100% fine with me doing that every month, and I should have zero concern about any type of rate limiting, or restrictions.

On the other hand, Digital Ocean (who I _do_ have a VPS with in Singapore) charges me $10/month for a VPS with 2 TB/Transfer. I have no idea what they would do if I actually started using all 2 TB every month, but I can't believe it would end well.

I'm curious though - has anyone played around with using the cheap bandwidth of these VPSs to do a "roll your own" CDN? I.E. for $500/month you could purchase 100 Digital Ocean VPS @$5/month and, in _theory_ get 100 * 1 Terabyte, or 100 Terabytes of transfer to the internet a month.

I'm pretty sure Digital Ocean would frown on that, but I'm interested in whether anyone has done the obvious thing and tried.

<comment><USER8> Regarding DigitalOcean -- they would NOT frown on it

if you go over your usage, you are charged 0.02 cents per gigabyte over your limit

if you stay within your usage, nothing happens

(note, as of right now, there is no charges for overages. until your bandwidth transfer stats are available on the control panel, there will be no overage charges)

<comment><USER7> My suspicion is they would shut you down, or encourage you to move to a larger droplet. As is referenced by glomph later in this thread, their TOU states "3.3 You shall not: (i) take any action that imposes or may impose (as determined by us in our sole discretion) an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our (or our third party providers') infrastructure;"

Consistently using excessive bandwidth likely falls in the "unreasonable or disproportionately large load " category. And, regardless, $5 for 1 Terabyte is only $0.005/gigabyte, which can only be offered, as long _as people don 't actually use 1 Terabyte of bandwidth_ The cheapest price Amazon offers (after discounts) is $0.08/gigabyte, _after_ 150 terabytes which you've paid them $12,800 for.

In comparison, if we were to take Digital Ocean at Face Value, we could get that same 150 Terabytes for $150 * 5 or $750.

Do you truly believe that Digital Ocean is able to offer bandwidth at such a Discount to Amazon? Particularly when the price Schedule for Amazon in Singapore is graduated as follows:

       First 1 GB / month	$0.000 per GB
       Up to 10 TB / month	$0.120 per GB
       Next 40 TB / month	$0.085 per GB
       Next 100 TB / month	$0.082 per GB
       Next 350 TB / month	$0.080 per GB

You get a sense that their is a structural price floor around $0.08/GB that is hard for them to sell bandwidth for less.

The point I'm trying to make, and hopefully succeeding at, is DO and Amazon are in different business models. DO is profitable as long as the majority of their customers don't use the services intensively. Amazon, on the other hand, is profitable _regardless of how much of their services you use_ \- as a result, each of the companies incentives regarding account termination, and rate limiting, will likewise be aligned.

Please note, of course, that I'm saying this as a thoroughly satisfied Digital Ocean Customer. I've ceased using Amazon EC2 for pretty much everything, and have DO droplets all around the world. I love their service, and an am extraordinarily satisfied with both the performance and quality of their offering.

<comment><USER8> I work for DigitalOcean.

We would not shut you down.

Only gray situation is if you are flooding; amazon will send you a [bandwidth] bill, we send you a ticket

<comment><USER9> I have a DO VM that I use for a few hobby apps but mostly for a Tor relay. $10/mo plan. I've done my best to throttle the bandwidth usage within the plan bounds but can't say for sure whether or not I've been entirely successful at that. Nevertheless -> zero fuss from DO, nothing, not a single complaint or $.01 added to my bill. I don't think I (or the Tor user community) would have fared nearly was well with Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious how much margin there still is in the bandwidth charges of the big cloud providers. Hetzner only charges 1.39 € per extra TB (and the first 30 TB (!) are free), though the bandwidth quality probably isn't comparable.

[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/news/trafficpreis- dauerhaft...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/news/trafficpreis-dauerhaft- reduziert)

</comment><comment><USER11> Strong incentive to dive in to CloudFront CDN it seems. Transfer from AWS to CloudFront 'edge' caches is now free, and outgoing from CloudFront to the internet is nearly 30% cheaper all of a sudden.

<comment><USER12> cloudFront has been cheaper than S3 for as long as I can recall. And it makes sense with the way amazon does cost based pricing. Its cheaper to transfer cached bits fromthe edge of the network than pull it from inside of multiple datacenters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really don't understand this thing about charging bandwidth. In France we are used to the free and unlimited bandwidth for all providers and hosters (see OVH, Gandi, Dedibox... but also all ISP), and the rare cases when I had to pay my bandwidth (Hertzner), the service was quite bad (routes issues, ipv6 issues, and the throughput was very inconsistent).

It really seems to me like some providers are trying to charge for anything in order to extract value.

<comment><USER7> TANSTAAFL</comment></comment>


What If Urban Sprawl Is the Only Realistic Way to Create Affordable Cities? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/09/14/what-if-urban-sprawl-is-the-only-realistic-way-to-create-affordable-cities/ <comment><USER2> City "connectedness" is much more about time than space. So fast, affordable, convenient transport (a la Hong Kong) can make a big city feel smaller. Cars are the problem not the solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> Relax zoning so you can have more jobs near housing. Then you won't have hundreds of acres of homogenous tract housing that requires such a long commute.

Houston has no single major business district. It does have a serious lack of solid transit. But if you want to live close to work, that doesn't necessarily mean in the "downtown" area like in many cities. There are huge concentrations of offices and stores in the Energy Corridor, the Galleria, Upper Kirby, the Bush airport area and several suburbs/exurbs.

</comment><comment><USER4> It seems to me like the real solution to a lot of traffic and affordable housing problems is 'work-from-home' ideology. In the 1800s it was common for business owners to contract with homesteads to produce good for them, which is then picked up and sold in markets (i.e. shoes). These 'workers' were free to find work as they chose between seasons. Of course, a very different world now with scheduled mortgage payments and other needs, however there must be a tipping point. The 'sharing/contractor' economy seems to be an inevitable ideological revolution.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have this theory that autonomous vehicles will enable a resurgence of the suburb. If I can disengage from the transporting myself into being _transported_ , I can spend that travel time working instead of navigating. If I lived an hour away from work but I could spend 2 hours working via my car, I'd have no problem moving to the suburbs. But as it stands right now, the commute is the part that really freaks me out.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's not. I'd recommend Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" to anyone interested in a comprehensive picture of what it takes to make cities livable: [https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American- Cities/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American- Cities/dp/067974195X)

Also read up on all the work Singapore is doing to increase density without ruining their economy or environment while improving livability.

And some further reading on the dynamics of city growth: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013541)

I love thinking about this stuff, complex and fascinating :)

<comment><USER7> This is funny. Singapore is one of the most expensive places to live on the planet. Density there, people work so many jobs just to live in the smallest possible dwellings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> " . . . a website for contractors." I think that might be relevant. Not that I expect the WSJ to challenge the status quo. Any serious analysis would have to consider Copenhagen, Paris, Singapore, Austin at the least. And take livability analyses seriously, too.

<comment> vertex-four But it doesn't matter if everyone's miserable so long as they're working 9 to 5 (or longer) - why would you think it does? /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article fails to break out cost of building versus cost of litigating to be able to build. They mention the NIMBYs, but without putting dollar or % value on what costs they create.

Santa Monica and West LA are great examples - costs and rents have skyrocketed. However, much of the land is 1-2 stories, if that. Large portions of the housing stock is more than 50 years old.

If they were to make it 3-4 stories instead (hardly Manhattan density, or even SF), we could fit 2-3x people no problem. Unfortunately, between zoning, NIMBYs and rent control, you can pretty much forget about it.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's cheaper only because nobody pays the true cost of transportation. Make gas $8 a gallon to cover for the damage to the environment and suddenly sprawl won't seem so cheap.

<comment><USER11> In that case everyone in the burbs will just buy a Leaf, Bolt, Volt or Model S/X to bypass the cost of gasoline.

<comment><USER12> This is why municipalities are pressing higher order governments to move to comprehensive road pricing instead of gas taxes.

<comment><USER11> It's a good step forward, as long as the pricing scales with the amount of damage a car does to roads when driven. A heavy truck with skinny tires should pay much more than a 2 door convertible with fat tires. Base it on average recommended tire pressure, perhaps?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Few people outside of Manhattan picture a home as an office building with a doorman. A few (closer to 20 now that I looked) years ago, Atlanta had a mini- boom of hi-rise condo building. A couple of the properties did very well; they were mostly pre-sold, though probably to speculators. Some of the others had trouble selling all their units. Going vertical also brings a problem, mentioned by another commentor, of "viewing" rights (i.e. no blocking the views of established properties.) I think Trump had a similar problem with one of his projects.

<comment><USER14> There's an easy solution to this: remove all notion of "viewing rights". You have no right to your view, or your lack of density, or any such NIMBY invented property rights. This works great for Tokyo, and housing prices are very cheap.

[http://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco- housing-c...](http://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing- costs-tokyo)

<comment><USER15> NIMBY types vote. You try telling them that someone can put up a hideous skyscraper between their house and the mountains/ocean/etc... and they'll have you on your ass in the street come November.

Their parents bought that house. They've lived in it all their lives. Now you want to ruin the view and gentrify the neighborhood just because you think single family detached homes have no business being within a mile of the city center? Half of the legislature lives in those neighborhoods! All you are going to do is attract undesirables anyway.

<comment><USER16> If viewing rights exist they should be taxed (at a premium). The valuation should be greater than the loss of all the affected height-lines.

<comment><USER14> Easier still to take the Coasian view. Viewing rights (by default) do not exist. You are free to side contract with other property owners to ensure your viewing rights by paying them.

<comment><USER15> That's a risky position IMHO. You create a situation where it becomes profitable to threaten to erect a tall structure in order to extort money from the neighbors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The main obstacle to building upwards in American cities is the illegality of it. It's zoned, and coded and regulated to death, and can only be done in a small portion of the land around.

Suburban sprawl, meanwhile, remains actively subsidized.

So if your high rise builders are hobbled, OF COURSE more sprawl will be the only way to address increasing demand.

<comment><USER18> Downtown high-rise condos are always way more costly than the equivalent size condo 20 miles out.

Build a bunch of three story condos out on some cheap land and you don't even need an elevator or parking garages because there's room for covered outdoor parking.

Build a high rise and you have all sorts of cost with putting something 20 stories high. Just the materials cost more. It also takes longer to break ground and build.

<comment><USER19> If the condo twenty miles out is in the middle of nowhere, it may not be any cheaper, once you factor in the cost of building out infrastructure there and providing public services further out. Often times these things are subsidized though, so Americans don't realize how expensive things actually are.

A good example is when someone in a rural area is outraged when the cable company says it'll cost a couple grand to wire up their house that's a ways off from any main road. Like, did you think that stuff was just free?

<comment><USER20> > If the condo twenty miles out is in the middle of nowhere, it may not be any > cheaper, once you factor in the cost of building out infrastructure there > and providing public services further out. Often times these things are > subsidized though, so Americans don't realize how expensive things actually > are.

That's the textbook case of privatizing the profits and socializing the losses. The infrastructure you're talking about will be built by the city/state and the costs borne by everyone who lives up to the point of that condo 20 miles out.

When things are not subsidized, the developers only end up building luxury condos in urban areas, which is the case for most large metro areas right now.

<comment><USER19> > That's the textbook case of privatizing the profits and socializing the > losses.

Yes, agreed. And I'm not completely against socialization, but I see little reason to encourage it for this case. If infrastructure and services cost more further out, property taxes for those areas should reflect that.

> When things are not subsidized, the developers only end up building luxury > condos in urban areas, which is the case for most large metro areas right > now.

This tends to be true because SFH-zoned areas are held as sacred cows, and what increased density is allowed is constrained into small areas. This both keeps land prices high, so developers need to target the high end of the market, and it means that cheaper forms of increased density (say, building duplexes/triplexes/granny flats in existing low-density areas) are literally illegal.

I swear, people want developers to build huge towers and then offer up the units for cheap. Do you think it's cheap to build those towers? Hint: it is not. Brand new, inherently-expensive-to-build housing is always going to be expensive to rent. The solution is to a) permit cheaper forms of housing where possible, b) allowed increased density across a wide swathe of residential area (which can be done the same way as (a), really), and c) accept that new things always cost more than old things. The luxury units of today are the upper-middle class units of twenty years from now, the middle-class units of forty years from now, the working-units of sixty years from now, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article and the study it cites miss the point.

Cities exist to make it easy for everyone in them to meet or work with anyone else as cheaply as possible. They are markets for jobs, goods and services. When cities make it difficult to meet and work with others, as they do when they sprawl, they have effectively failed. In a sense, they are not really cities, but just agglomerations of many towns without a center. This describes many so-called cities in America, with LA being one of the most egregious examples.

One of the reasons cities have sprawled is because their development has been entrusted to, well, developers. Those are the contractors that Buildzoom addresses as its audience, and the website is flattering their sensibilities. They like a supply chain that involves suburbs with lots of cookie-cutter mini-mansions. Easy to commodify and sell, and someone else can worry about the commuting headaches.

<comment><USER19> Cities have sprawled because of zoning regulations and poor transportation policies that force them to, because they can't build up, so they have to build out instead. You could easily get the reverse effect with an urban growth boundary and relaxed zoning.

<comment><USER22> At some point you likely also need eminent domain (with a fair-ish system for compensating people whom it affects). Somehow we are really good at eminent domain for building highways, but not skyscrapers or trains.

<comment><USER19> I don't think you really need eminent domain for skyscrapers. Economics + property taxes generally provide sufficient incentive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This article is a load of garbage. It's not a dichotomy between towers and sprawl. There are cities that strike a balance between these, with mid-ride and high-rise depending on the neighborhood and the intended use of the properties.

You can have human-scale development, buildings 5-7 stories tall, moderate density that promotes local commerce, safe environments for children and other vulnerable groups, easy access to amenities, and much more.

<comment><USER24> Can you provide an example city built in this style somewhere in the US, to help me evaluate its success?

<comment><USER25> Washington, DC. It has one of the most dense downtowns in the U.S. and has no towers or skyscrapers (outside of NW though is relatively empty, and the massive commuter population makes the overall numbers smaller).

<comment><USER26> > outside of NW though is relatively empty

NW is the largest quadrant, but I'd hardly call the other quadrants "relatively empty." There are active neighborhoods and lots of development all across the city.

<comment><USER25> You're right, but they're nowhere near as dense. We're talking single family, row homes and garden-style apartments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Schneier on Security : Risks of Cloud Computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/risks_of_cloud.html?nc=11

<comment><USER2> Actually it's just Schneier providing a link to this New York Times article: [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/opinion/20zittrain.html?_r...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/opinion/20zittrain.html?_r=1)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it was a direct copy of the page's title tag. Note to submitters: if the title tag doesn't make sense for the article, please change it so that it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Jonathan Zittrain's definition of "the cloud" doesn't seem to be very nuanced.</comment>


Will Google stand up to France and Italy,too? - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jan/13/google-china-western-internet-freedom

<comment><USER2> It would be awesome to have decentralized social networking - no single point of failure. Same way email is decentralized - you can always run your own email server and enough people do to make it much harder to break or control email compared to, say, Facebook. FB is exactly one company, which make it a too convenient a target for overzealous regulation.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree. I think the biggest problems facing such a shift though are how to address "rendezvous" of the clients and the same critical-mass adoption that plagues a traditional social networking contender.

<comment><USER2> It's not just adoption - if distributed social network is impossible to control it's also nearly-impossible to monetize using traditional means, hence no one is likely to invest like they did into Facebook.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Online Screen Recorder - <AUTHOR> https://www.veed.io/screen-recorder <comment><USER2> It shouldn't immediately request mic/camera/screen access on the landing page. That's a complete put off for me.</comment>


CrunchBase gets a redesign - <AUTHOR> http://www.crunchbase.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> IMO, the earlier design was much better on the eyes and a lot easier to browse.</comment>


China refuses to guarantee open Internet during Olympics - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080508-china-refuses-to-guarantee-open-internet-during-olympics.html

<comment><USER2> I think china is sovereign right? can make its own rules? - whats the problem? yeah it sucks; but we have to respect other peoples culture and rules.</comment>


Ask HN: I'm one of many furloughed is anybody hiring federal employees? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Considering the fact that a government shutdown is always possible and that unless the government is going to collapse, you'll get back-pay once it starts up again.. why are you posting this and not just looking for a job the usual way without qualifying yourself as a victim of the shutdown?

I have sympathy for those affected by the shutdown, especially those living paycheck to paycheck, but I also feel that it is irrelevant when looking for a job.

<comment><USER3> It's possible for them not to get back pay, even though so far they always get paid. It's worth noting, however, that government contractors sometimes don't get back pay after being furloughed due to a government shutdown.

I agree, however, that it's a bad idea to bring up one's personal financial problems when looking for a job. I think there's a greater chance than not that employers likely to respond will try to take advantage of OP's desperation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The short answer is, yes. Many people are hiring many employees. But this is a rather empty cry for help. What do you do for the federal government? What would you like to do in your career? Do you have a resume or even better a portfolio? Give us more information! If you need help, you can reach me at my username at gmail and I would be glad to help you out a bit.</comment>


"Paranoid Mode" Compromise Recovery on Qubes OS - <AUTHOR> https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2017/04/26/qubes-compromise-recovery/#plan-b <comment><USER2> > …I don't believe that advances in so called "safe languages" or anti- > exploitation technology could significantly change this landscape. These > approaches, while admittedly effective in many situations, especially > against memory-corruption-based vulnerabilities, cannot address other broad > categories of software vulnerabilities, such as security bugs in application > logic, nor stop malicious (or compromised) vendors from building backdoors > intentionally into their software.

True. But never underestimate how common memory corruption bugs are. It's _fucking embarrassing_ just how common they are. Look at the Project Zero tracker. Just the first page of the newest issues: "double-free", "out-of- bounds write", "use-after-poison", "use-after-free", "kernel double free", "kernel memory corruption due to off-by-one", "kernel heap overflow", "kernel uaf due to double-release", "heap-buffer-overflow"… And it's _these bugs_ that often lead to the scariest situation for regular users, "I just visited a web page and my browser got pwned".

</comment><comment><USER3> An excellent point that applies to almost any system:

 _The inconvenient and somehow embarrassing truth for us – the malware experts – is that there does not exist any reliable method to determine if a given system is_ not _compromised._

<comment><USER4> Total bull. Take the filesystem offline and run Tripwire over it (assuming you did this after a fresh install).

We solved this problem in the 90s. Try to keep up.

 _sigh_

<comment><USER5> Right. And what do you do when the filesystem comes back clean because the malware resides in some re-flashed firmware?

You can almost get a pass for being condescending ("try to keep up") if you know what you are talking about, but being both condescending AND wrong just makes you look foolish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > True, there is a number of conditions that can warn us that the system is > compromised, but there is no limit on the number of checks that a system > must pass in order to be deemed "clean".

This is wrong. A computers behaviour, even if allowed to access "true randomness", can be determined in finitely many steps. Sure, the upper bound to the number of steps is unfeasibly big, but not without limit.

Practically, there might be no difference if you assume there is no limit, but excluding the possibility seems u justified.</comment>


Who says robots don't have emotion? - <AUTHOR> http://www.robcortez.com/post/3352866869/robotic-emotion

<comment><AUTHOR> A blog post containing thoughts related to emotion in artificial intelligence and how it is more than possible. If I thought of it, you know "they" did.</comment>