Cheetahs heading towards extinction as population crashes - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38415906 <comment><USER2> Obligatory link to one of the most thought provoking Radio Lab episodes I've listed to: [http://www.radiolab.org/story/rhino- hunter/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/rhino-hunter/)

Corey Knowlton was eloquent, made his point well, and really made me reconsider my conservation views in light of my opinions about how the world actually works.

tl;dr: Without an economic justification, species are destined to go extinct. Ecologically managed trophy hunting (e.g. culling older animals) provides one such incentive. Hand wringing and then subsequently forgetting about {insert endangered news species of the day} provides zero incentive.

</comment><comment><USER3> >Another of the big concerns about cheetahs has been the illegal trafficking of cubs, fuelled by demand from the Gulf states, as reported by the BBC earlier this year.

<comment><USER4> Stay classy, petroprinces.

<comment><USER5> In terms of African wildlife getting screwed over the asia countries are much worse culprits than the petroprinces.

<comment><USER6> Indeed. Look at the boom in the illegal ivory trade in comparison to China's economic growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Humans are encroaching on forest lands. The recent Kurzgesagt video states that overpopulation is not a problem, which is fine statistically, but there are other implications like these.

<comment><USER8> Cheetahs don't live in forests, though I think your point still stands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> People say they're against animal cruelty and express concern for the environment, but they seem unwilling to back that up with action. Could economic pressure help?

Specifically, since this is being driven by the development of farmland, does anyone know

1 - Whether eliminating agricultural subsidies would have a noticeable impact, and

2 - How likely that is to happen?

<comment><USER10> Different people and different Ag subsidies. Eliminating subsidy in the west isn't going to make much of a difference to subsistence farming in Africa.

<comment><USER11> Yes it would. What many countries do with agricultural subsidies and exports is effectively dumping. It's to protect domestic farming which is a fine goal but doing this and taking crap about free trade is a joke, and it really screws undeveloped countries whose only potential competitive advantage is low cost of labour. Just look at EU farmers and all the support they get.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is the preferred charity for wildlife preservation among HN users?

<comment><USER13> My hometown of Roseburg, Oregon, USA has an AZA-accredited non-profit wildlife park dedicated to education, conservation and research, with an estimable Cheetah program:

[http://www.wildlifesafari.net/cheetah.html](http://www.wildlifesafari.net/cheetah.html)

"...Wildlife Safari began breeding cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) in 1972 and successfully produced a litter the following year. Since then, 178 cheetahs have been born at the park."

<comment><USER14> My grandfather lived in Roseburg and donated several old horses to the Wildlife Safari! Sadly, I've never been.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The loss of a significant species like the cheetah would be devastating to the world psyche. I hope we can do something to reverse this

</comment><comment><USER16> This article was as much about human population growth, however unstated, as it was about cheetah population decline.

If you want to see animal populations growing, look at rats, roaches, cows, and others that benefit from our lifestyles.

If you want cheetahs and other animals not to go extinct, recognize that our growth models fundamentally conflict with them. The carrying capacity of the earth for humans is higher without cheetahs than with them.

<comment> guard-of-terra But what can we do about growth models in Africa? That's where most of wildlife seems to be.

As far as I understand, European wildlife is quite boring ever since the glaciers, and then we humans killed most of remaining megafauna. I would definitely like to see some of those restored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Every time I visit my home Nairobi, I am grateful for the country not giving out wildlife land to make a quick buck. Seeing reserve parks the size of cities with animals in the wild is breathtaking.

But with big parks and poor Kenyans, it's fairly easily for someone to pay $10000 to kill an endangered animal. Rhinos, lions, elephants and now cheetahs.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there even enough population genetic diversity left at this point ? I understand that the point varies from species to species.

<comment><USER19> This may vary for cheetahs, but a good case study is european bison[1] who was restored after WWII from 12 animals, population now ~4.5k.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_bison](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_bison)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is an area where the startups and disrupting efforts completely fail. We read and learn from so many blog posts about "startup X is shutting down" \- but what about species? Would be nice to see wildlife and animals as priority (e.g. for Ycombinator). Also, movie makers like Disney who make fortunes from animating animals, should contribute. Otherwise, the only animals we will see is a Pixar movie.

<comment><USER21> The reason there's no interest is because the primary concern for investors like YC is generating a high return on investment. No matter what feel-good stuff Sam Altman might say about YC's goals in basic income research or other non-profit initiatives, at the end of the day, they have to deliver returns to their LPs.

<comment><USER22> But Governments can. They are already spending billions of dollars and a major chunk of that goes wasted due to inefficiency, corruption, red-tape etc. The kind of stuff that big organisations like IBM or HP had that startups came and disrupted by being more efficient and nimble. Imagine if Governments can setup and run a transparent organisation like YC whose sole purpose is to promote startups in those important areas like environment conservation and clean energy without worrying about profit.

I can imagine that many startups and founders are willing to let go of their unicorn dream and jump aboard (including me).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How bad of a thing would it be to place all ~7,000 into captivity, to preserve the species?

How likely is that to fail, and how detrimental would it be to individual cheetahs?

<comment><USER24> Theyde loose the ability to naturally hunt and over-trust humans.

Cheetahs aren't like pidgeons they're predators and the best place for them is in the wild.

The problem is this then that they go after life stock and be killed for it. In Namibia there are NGOs that for free, will take them off you.

Of course the problem remains you've lost your livestock and people want revenge. It's the same story for African wild dogs (perhaps the most successful predators).

<comment><USER23> Given that the alternative is their eternal absence, and the total loss of a species, options are quickly disappearing.

The best place is in the wild, but the worst place is as stuffed relics in museums. When their numbers dwindle low enough, I'd expect the species would be lost to unsustainable inbreeding producing compounded birth defects.

Incidental taming and domestication as a side effect of preserving the species might be better than no species at all. At least habituation to human contact is a reversible process. Rendering a species feral becomes an option, once their numbers are strengthened.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> this sounds pretty disastrous.

</comment><comment><USER26> a hyperbolic proposal: poachers of any endangered wildlife should be caught and released into wildlife enclosures without weapons where they can be hunted by animals for food. fund it by installing cameras and sell it as reality tv.

<comment><USER9> If you read the article, you'd know that the problem isn't poaching, it's loss of habitat. The article more specifically calls out farm land.

In that case, essentially all eater share blame proportional to the energy and land efficiency of the food type they eat.

<comment><USER26> true. I did read the article but it's more socially acceptable to want poachers to come to harm than to express an opinion of wanting expansion of human settlements in africa to cease.

<comment><USER27> _it 's more socially acceptable to want poachers to come to harm_

Interesting opinion. I agree that there's a common human tendency to look for someone to blame, so bringing poachers to justice might look like an easy solution rather than changing behavior. The article discusses ways of attacking the problem of range preservation.

Is the opinion of wanting poachers to come to harm (rather than be criminally penalized) one you share yourself? If not, do you have figures that back this up?

<comment><USER26> please note the use of the word 'hyperbolic' in the original post.

I guess my point was driven by thoughts around preservation of endangered animals in general rather than just this specific case. There are animals where poaching IS the major problem.

and I guess i don't want specific harm done to them, i would much rather they just didn't do it.

but what does 'criminally penalized' look like in your opinion when the poachers might have no assets to fine, no reputation to lose and no fear of prison?

<comment><USER27> Yes, you used "hyperbolic" to describe your proposed solution. Your justification of it (in your followup) shouldn't be, and that is what I was responding to. Attributing exaggerated opinions to others is one way discussions get derailed.

As for criminal penalties for poachers, I'd want to learn a lot more about the situation before weighing in. That said, prison can serve multiple purposes, one being a deterrent, and another, preventing future infractions by removing the individual from society. The latter is congruent, at least in part, with your desire that they don't poach.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple downloads ~45 TB of models per day from our S3 bucket - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/julien_c/status/1173669642629537795 <comment><USER2> "Almost everyone" working on NLP uses one of hugginface's pretrained models at one point or another, sooner or later: [https://github.com/huggingface/pytorch- transformers](https://github.com/huggingface/pytorch-transformers)

It's so damn convenient, and so nicely done.

And they keep doing neat things like this one: [https://github.com/huggingface/swift-coreml- transformers](https://github.com/huggingface/swift-coreml-transformers)

Kudos to Julien Chaumond et al for their work!

<comment><USER3> For anyone else initially confused, NLP in this context is "Natural Language Processing."

<comment><USER4> As opposed to?

<comment><USER5> neuro-linguistic programming, for one

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is probably apple's continuous integration tests, lazily written to download the whole thing every time someone merges a commit.

<comment><USER7> that's really stupid. I mean, I would have set a cache repository (SonaType Nexus maybe?), download everything there and use that repository. In the tweets the author says they've blocked the download from Apple IPs, so now their pipeline is broken.

<comment><USER8> I bet that 95% of all in-house CI would break if it doesn't have access to the internet. I also bet that 95% of those wouldn't need to have access if they were properly designed.

We rarely hear about CI servers being taken over but it has to happen frequently enough.

<comment><USER9> Most enterprises use Artifactory or something similar -- or should anyway. Once you start enforcing "no internet for CI" you start to see how poor some ecosystems are. I'm looking at you, Javascript ecosystem packages, with your hardcoded mystery URLs that you sneakily download artefacts from...

<comment><USER10> We had a situation at work where some developers really got attached to downloading npm modules at container start time to make builds fast. But then starting the containers took 15 minutes :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you host large, publicly available data in a cloud blob service, but you don't have a budget for it, one option is to use the "Requester Pays" feature that Amazon and Google provide. This makes the data available to anyone to download, but they need to pay the download cost themselves.

This is at the tradeoff of making your data significantly more irritating to access, as it's no longer just plugging in a URL into a program, plus everyone who wants your dataset needs to set up a billing account with Amazon or Google.

<comment><USER12> Or just post a magnet link.

<comment><USER11> Sure, that's a great option for helping to reduce the cost for well-meaning general use, but the other way makes your costs 100% predictable, which is great if you're on an academic budget (but, again, way more annoying for the downloaders unless they're also using AWS).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't have high hopes for his business prospects if this is how he handles one of the richest companies in the world clearly having a high need for something his company offers.

Maybe spend less time on Twitter and more on your business model?

<comment><USER14> They're basically bragging they have something Apple really wants. Now they have a bunch of people at least interested in what they got. I'll say that's not a bad PR.

<comment> joatmon-snoo Also a great way to throw out massive red flags to any enterprise user that cares about privacy and non-disclosure.

IP address data is pretty sensitive information, and throwing it out there like this, even in aggregate, is not OK because of what it shows.

No matter how much PR this gets, this goes both ways.

<comment><USER15> This isn't sensitive information. Anyone with a BGP session can have this information. [1]

[1] = [https://bgp.he.net/AS714#_prefixes](https://bgp.he.net/AS714#_prefixes)

<comment><USER16> Pretty amazing that a single company can own an entire block of IP space, if I understand this correctly. Approx how many addresses is this?

<comment><USER17> I used to work for HP and someone explained to me a select few companies got /8's when the internet was still young. HP got one, Compaq had one which HP now also owns. I was basically told if you had a /8 you didn't give it up because of how valuable and rare they now are (this was around 2010, too). GE, Kodak, Apple, and Microsoft were a few other names that came up in that discussion as well.

<comment><USER18> GE actually sold their entire 220.127.116.11/8 block off to AWS a few years ago.

It's a little awkward since a lot of internal software is still configured to whitelist all access from that space since it was a constant for so long.

<comment><USER19> We called this threxit internally. (Get it? Three dot exit? ;))

And as far as I know we haven't stopped threxiting — at least they hadn't when I left. It turns out unwinding IT systems that have had stable IP addresses for 30+ years in a year or two is tricky business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This looks kind of interesting:

[https://github.com/huggingface/pytorch-pretrained- BigGAN/blo...](https://github.com/huggingface/pytorch-pretrained- BigGAN/blob/6ae20a35a051816d66811d85597033623a8ac888/pytorch_pretrained_biggan/model.py#L29)

When you look further down you find:

[https://github.com/huggingface/pytorch-pretrained- BigGAN/blo...](https://github.com/huggingface/pytorch-pretrained- BigGAN/blob/6ae20a35a051816d66811d85597033623a8ac888/pytorch_pretrained_biggan/model.py#L253-L281)

And that's just a quick search for s3 in the repo. It would not surprise me in the least to discover a `from_pretrained` that points at one of the s3 resources being pulled. There's probably other stuff like that as well in the code that could be causing equally nasty heartache .. especially if non- persistent containers are involved....

(This is a WAG aka Wild A __Guess)

EDIT: Dug a little more and found:

[https://github.com/search?q=org%3Ahuggingface+s3&type=Code](https://github.com/search?q=org%3Ahuggingface+s3&type=Code)

Unless I'm mistaken here, there's a crap ton of code that could be downloading models at runtime ... Which seems significantly less than ideal ...

<comment><USER21> It's also possible it's part of a docker build step or similar. Even if they're aren't downloading models at run time they may be loading s3 if their pytorch-transformers lib docker cache gets invalidated frequently.

<comment><USER22> Docker builds are crazy wasteful in terms of bandwidth and compute. Right now I'm struggling with a project that builds ITK on demand every heckin time.

I'm working through how to best integrate apt-cacher-ng, sccache, and a pip cacher. It costs me nothing to hit apt or pypi, but like, somebody is paying that bill. A little perspective goes a long way.

I wonder if I could do something to just proxy _all_ requests and cache those on a whitelist and stick it on my CI network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A brief reminder: Whenever you publish code or documentation that might be used/scraped by the outside world, ALWAYS use a domain you own. If you're on Cloudflare you can instantly (and for free) create Page Rules to use Cloudflare as a CDN, redirect to another CDN, or black-hole or reroute traffic anywhere you want.

<comment><USER24> Not to mention that if Cloudflare CDN was in front of it this traffic would be free.

<comment><USER25> Not with this amount of traffic it won't be free. 45 TB per day lol Cloudflare will be disabling your account and in contact for payment in a hurry.

Go ahead and try, see how far their "free" tier really goes.

<comment><USER26> Just waiting for the Cloudflare CEO who lurks around to pop in here and offer it for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Well, you could contact them and make a very-likely-to-succeed case that they should pay you some money, or you could complain about it on Twitter.

<comment><USER28> Twitter will probably be a faster response than automated email inboxes at Apple

<comment><USER29> The executive team email addresses that can be easily found are monitored quite well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That's about $4000/month in bandwidth costs, assuming retail pricing.

FYI he is bragging, not complaining. There are a dozen ways to reduce or eliminate this problem.

<comment><USER25> > That's about $4000/month in bandwidth costs

You're an order of magnitude off.

45 TB per day is 1,350 TB in a month, or 1,350,000 GB.

Show me somewhere you can get a petabyte of egress inside a calendar month for 4 figures USD...

Let's suppose you even used the cheaper egress from Cloudfront rather than serving from S3 (lol @ your wallet if you serve 1 PB doing that).

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-data-transfer-prices- re...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-data-transfer-prices-reduced/)

The first petabyte costs an average of $0.045 per GB - $45,000.

The remaining 350 TB costs another $10,500 for a total of $55,500.

Serving off S3 directly? Yeah, that'll be more like $150,000.

<comment><USER31> > Show me somewhere you can get a petabyte of egress inside a calendar month > for 4 figures USD

Correct me if I'm wrong, but most colocation/dedicated server providers offer such prices. E.g. hetzner.com @ €1/TB, sprintdatacenter.pl @ €0.91/TB, dedicated.com @ $2/TB (or $600/month for an unmetered 1 Gbps connection).

But if you want S3/CDNs/<insert any cloud offering here>, then yeah, they're expensive.

BTW per Cloudflare ToS[0]:

> Use of the Service for the storage or caching of video (unless purchased > separately as a Paid Service) or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, > audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited.

[0] [https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/](https://www.cloudflare.com/terms/)

<comment><USER32> You confused cloudfront with cloudflare

<comment><USER31> True, I'm not that familiar with Amazon offerings (only ever used it for Windows GPU instances) and reading too fast got me. Too late for an edit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> If you don't want someone else to do something that costs you money, you're going to have a bad time if you don't prevent them from doing it.

<comment><USER34> Amazon has the ability to charge the requester. Pass the buck on.

<comment><USER35> i dont think this works on public files though, does it?

<comment><USER36> This is the main purpose of the oft maligned allauthenticatedusers permission in the s3 console - anyone can read it they just need an identity to pay

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What does hugging face do? Do they implement models from papers and make them available for free?

<comment><USER38> Yes. I don't know if that's all that they do. They often port new Tensorflow models to PyTorch as well. They provide straightforward APIs, nice documentation, and clear tutorials. I use their stuff pretty regularly.

<comment><USER39> Do you know their business model? Looks like they are open source company. How they earn money?

<comment><USER40> Their business model is someone like Apple buying them out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm guessing someone at apple internally distributed a dockerfile that pulls that down.

</comment><comment><USER42> In a few weeks he can just point Apple's IP range to a shared iCloud folder.

<comment><USER43> That'll get them them Apple's attention pretty quickly I'd assume.

<comment><USER44> Now that'd be a bit ironic to get a "your account is using excessive data bandwidth " and be able to respond with "incorrect, _your_ ip's are using too much bandwidth ".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Paid by requester is the feature they are looking for.

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/configure- re...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/configure-requester- pays-console.html)

<comment> martin-adams That's a very neat feature I never knew existed. I only suspect this will hurt their larger mission at helping many smaller teams and individuals to use the models.

<comment><USER45> Not really, if you are a small user your cost is negligible. You can calculate how much it would be for a small team but my guess is couple of dollars per month. Apple's use case is still very reasonable and the cost for them also not as bad. They could also split out different customers to different buckets and have big guys pay for it while smaller companies have it for free. There are many options.

<comment> martin-adams Yeah that makes sense. I was thinking in terms of ease of access. If a large organisation makes everyone pay, that means everyone has to arrange accounts and payment methods.

By splitting it out you have no guarantee that the big guys will just use the free one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I read the Twitter post but did not understand what is happening. Can someone please explain.

<comment><USER47> Apple employees are using their product, downloading lots of data, not paying for any of it, and the OP doesn't like it or can afford it.

<comment><USER48> I don't think it's employees as such — even Apple does not have THAT many machine learning people, and they wouldn't download models daily.

Maybe a server farm, where each instance downloads a model when spinning up?

<comment><USER49> In the last days of my time spent in the XML salt mines, I got in on a conversation with the web masters at w3.org.

You would not believe how many people and how many libraries pull from primary sources directly instead of using local copies of common resources. I found this conversation because I'd just finished fixing that in our code and taking about 5 minutes off the build process.

Let me restate that: We were spending 5 minutes just downloading schema files. In an automated build. Every time, sometimes on several machines at once.

At one point we were trying to convince him that intentionally slowing all requests down by say 500 ms would get the attention of people who were misbehaving. Anyone who was downloading it once and caching would hardly notice the 500 ms. Those running it once per task would be forced to figure their shit out.

<comment><USER50> I sometimes wonder about all the additional HTTP load to places like debian.org that must come from Docker builds; I don't have any kind of caching in mine, and every single commit causes CI to go and build images and run tests on them.

It's not an issue I really see, but it seems to me that CI infrastructure (Travis, ...) really should have caching proxies in place.

<comment><USER49> Several places I've worked have pushed Artifactory on us for various reasons from security to resilience to network outages to bandwidth saving.

It's not the worst fate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Isn't this a use case where BitTorrent would shine?

<comment><USER52> The problem here is "Someone's CI pipelines redownload the same models on every build"

I'd say there's only a 10% chance Apple's firewall would let BitTorrent through, and only a 3% chance the CI servers would maintain a positive seed ratio.

Possibly it might solve the problem because users would cache the resources themselves to avoid the hassle of getting BitTorrent into their CI pipeline...

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> If your CI/CD is re-downloading and re-building everything on every single run, you are not only being wasteful, you're actually more likely to have an outage due to not storing dependency artifacts needed for deploy. Use a local artifact store to be more resilient to failures of servers you don't control (and also save everyone money and time).

</comment><comment><USER54> Charge, them, money?

</comment><comment><USER55> Hosting terabytes of data on an S3 bucket where people would download 45TB per month ($0.023/GB == $1000+/month) sounds like a really expensive way to distribute your data to people...

<comment><USER56> You could configure buyer pays, if you wanted to.

<comment><USER57> That makes it harder for everyone though where companies like Apple should proxy and/or cache those requests to their own internal version rather than hitting that S3 bucket every time. Requiring requester payment would mean it would only really be used by corporations where the author clearly wants a service open to anyone without having to open an AWS account to pay.

<comment><USER58> Make the bucket buyer-pays, but offer Torrent links as well. Businesses doing CI will pay for S3 usage so they don't have to deal with torrents, end-users will get free torrent access, everybody wins.

<comment><USER59> I just skimmed AWS requester pays and it seems that you can't set the price, the requester always pays only the AWS's download cost, so why bother setting it as requester pays at all if it doesn't bring you anything?

<comment><USER60> It brings you the absence of GET requests and the bandwidth charges on your AWS bill. In this case, 45TB a day is going to add a lot to an AWS bill, you can shift that cost to the user that's downloading the files from you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> What's the backstory on this? (Is it something I should already know)

</comment><comment><USER62> Isn't it likely that someone wrote a script for testing some regression and it keeps running in a loop? I can almost bet that will be the case.

</comment><comment><USER63> Is this what they call product market fit?

</comment><comment><USER39> Looks like open source company. What's their business model? Does any one know, How they earn money?

</comment><comment><USER64> This is what success looks like if you charge money for a good or service.

</comment><comment><USER65> And now the twitter post is gone? I'm guessing the west coast woke up and someone at Apple said "Wait, you could infer some proprietary information with that information ..."

<comment><USER66> I can see the Twitter post without issues.

<comment><USER65> Yeah, the follow_up after clearing some caches it seems to work for me as well. Interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Are those full downloads or just HEAD or range requests from some CI?

</comment><comment><USER68> They're the ones that made Amazon get those Data Trucks lol

</comment><comment><USER69> Apple are probably doing "continuous integration" where all assets are re- downloaded from the Internet in each iteration. Tip: put your stuff on Github :P

<comment><USER70> With models that large you would be paying for GitHub's LFS credits. Those aren't cheap as I recall. Napkin math at $5/50GB of bandwidth per month for 45TB per day it would cost them $135k/mo to use Github. That's over 2x more than the S3 egress charges would be.

</comment></comment><comment> ajay-d Aren't all the authors of that paper from Apple?

</comment><comment><USER71> Why can't they use cloudfront?

<comment><USER72> cloudfront costs money too.

<comment><USER71> For some reason I thought the prices for transfer were much better than S3, but that doesn't look like it's the case. It's lightly better, at large volumes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> half-kh-hacker It's surprising that nobody here's mentioned Wasabi, since they have free egress.

<comment><USER73> There's no such thing as a free lunch.

Wasabi's own docs[1] mention a ballpark definition of "reasonable" as monthly transfer being less than total storage. Above that you'll get a call.

I'm sure they'd still be cheaper than AWS, but it's not going to be $5/TB/month to service the entire world.

[1]: [https://wasabi.com/pricing/pricing- faqs/](https://wasabi.com/pricing/pricing-faqs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> So these jokers at apple publish a paper by using code from huggingface.

</comment><comment><USER75> Need to distribute large static content? Looks like a good job for a torrent.

<comment><USER76> or ipfs using ipns ... so many good solutions, but people suggest bucket where the downloader is paying... or cloudfear /sic

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Have you considered cloudflair?

<comment><USER78> Backblaze B2 + Cloudflare = free outbound transfer (bandwidth alliance).

Making objects in S3 publicly available and then complaining about their extortionate bandwidth charges is...silly.

<comment><USER79> If you try to serve a petabyte of binary data a month through Cloudflare, they're going to shut you down.

S3 is very expensive, but averaging 4 gigabits 24x7 is not going to be cheap anywhere.

<comment><USER80> >averaging 4 gigabits 24x7 is not going to be cheap anywhere

A normal upstream (if you were in a colo or some sort of DC) will charge you about $0.50 per meg. So, 4gbps would cost you... $200/mo. [1]

I think people don't realize just how much more expensive IaaS providers are. We're literally talking orders of magnitude.

[1] [https://blog.telegeography.com/outlook-for-ip-transit- prices...](https://blog.telegeography.com/outlook-for-ip-transit-prices- in-2018)

<comment><USER79> $2000, it seems like you dropped a zero. And you're presumably going to need some burst capacity, so call it $4k for a 2:1 ratio if you care about not throttling at peak times.

The big cloud providers are very expensive, but you're getting impeccable bandwidth. Low packet loss, burst what you want even in peak times, fast transit worldwide, minimal variability.

What most people actually don't realize is that they're making that tradeoff implicitly. You're not being ripped off if you need all of these things, but if it's overkill you can get much cheaper bandwidth elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> If a company the size of Apple finds this that useful, perhaps you should consider charging for your service, rather than just complaining on Twitter about the free usage you appear to have willingly given away?

Or perhaps you have reached out to them, but are for some reason still complaining on Twitter to drum up PR or something?

Regardless, this posting is ridiculously context-free to the point of being click-baity. (But hey, good job, I clicked on it anyway.)

<comment><USER82> "It's your own fault if you didn't foresee a trillion dollar company exploiting the product you made free and open source to help researcher and now are incurring 15K$ bills per month"

And then people wonder why people don't want to make their stuff free/open source. Even when it's free people still think you're somehow entitled and overcharging.

<comment><USER81> I mean... yes? It doesn't have to be a trillion dollar company. You put tons of useful data on a public S3 bucket and publicize it, and people are going to download it. S3 data transfer isn't free, so I think it's reasonable to expect that, over time, the cost of serving the data is going to be prohibitive without funding it in some way.

> Even when it's free people still think you're somehow entitled and > overcharging.

I just explicitly advocated for the opposite of that, so I'm not sure where you're getting that.</comment></comment></comment>


Rejected from the app store for using Google analytics - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lazerwalker.com/blog/2014/02/09/rejected/ <comment><USER2> This is continuing on from stories that emerged last week - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7164630](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7164630)</comment>


Socrates: a simple, clean, markdown editor - <AUTHOR> http://socrates.io/#lLNgcaW <comment><USER2> this looks like simplified dilinger.io (whıch i like, thanks joe mccann!)with youtube but without the export options . If I want to include js files it can considerably slow down the "real-time" updating process, no?</comment>


Ask HN: How to Crack My Software? (Piracy Follow Up) - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
3 months ago I asked you how do you deal with piracy : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15003239
Following one of your advice, I decided to create a tutorial "How to crack my software". The goal is to attract potential customers to my website, explain to them the benefits of buying my software and the risks of pirating it (thus giving some basic advices to avoid virus).
Here's the post : http://autokroma.com/How-To-Crack-AfterCodecs-Without-Virus/
Please tell me what you think ! Thanks <comment><AUTHOR> How to Crack AfterCodecs Without Virus [http://autokroma.com/How-To-Crack- AfterCodecs-Without-Virus/](http://autokroma.com/How-To-Crack-AfterCodecs- Without-Virus/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> And the post, as advised, is not supposed to be accessible on the website, only by search engine</comment>


My ImpromptuDo reddit ad by the numbers - <AUTHOR> http://impromptudo.tumblr.com/post/3984362470/my-impromptudo-reddit-ad-by-the-numbers

<comment><USER2> add a list as well...not easy to see everything on the map...maybe like a list you can maximize on one side where you can see a short description of the event for you to see if it grabs your attention!

-neel devunlimited.com

</comment><comment><USER3> please change the name. ImpromptuDo is just hard to read or spell :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Really? The only feedback I've gotten on the name has been really positive.

Hmm. Thanks for the feedback though, I'll keep it in mind.

<comment><USER3> Just like Jason Calacanis says: "If you have to spell your name over the phone several times, then you need to get rid of the name."

But again, I am not American, so I might be missing something in the name.</comment></comment></comment>


PadMapper Apartment Search - <AUTHOR> http://www.padmapper.com/ <comment><USER2> I've talked to at least a dozen people who moved into SF in the last 16 months and every one of them used Padmapper, including me. It's great. If Craigslist ever made acquisitions... or added features... this would/should be at the top of the list.

They also made the SF Crime Map Overlay which was covered on HN: [http://www.padmapper.com/blog/2010/07/19/san-francisco- crime...](http://www.padmapper.com/blog/2010/07/19/san-francisco-crime- mapoverlay/)

<comment><USER3> Agree with everything you said. I also moved to SF recently and used PadMapper. There's no reason to use anything else.

Unfortunately, the crime map overlay is kind of useless as it's total crime, not per capita, so it makes dense areas look more dangerous than they really are.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I'm going to try redoing the overlay with homicides and other violent crimes pretty soon.

It's tough to normalize this kind of thing well, since there's an argument to be made that if there's a shooting on your block, it'll feel dangerous no matter how many people there are living there. Also, primarily commercial districts would get unfairly dinged if it was normalization per capita... would be better with foot traffic in that case.

<comment><USER3> A shooting is bad enough that it should show up regardless of the population density. But I certainly would feel a lot less safe if a shooting took place on a street where only 10 people lived, so density is still a valid factor.

I agree foot traffic might be a better metric than population, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can anyone give a synopsis on why CL hasn't shut them down like they traditionally do with every site that repackages their data? I must be missing a nuance.

(and yes, agreed, it's a very useful site)

<comment><USER4> My theory (I wrote PadMapper) is that as long as it's light on their servers, helpful to their users, doesn't bombard them with ads, and sends users back to them, they're fine with it. PadMapper's just a search engine for part of their stuff.

<comment><USER6> Any plans on moving to the newer Google Maps?

<comment><USER4> Maybe. There are some features missing in the new API that PadMapper uses (tabbed info windows, for example), the benefit isn't completely clear, and it's likely to be a pretty large amount of work, so it's not a very high priority. Any reason you'd want it to be converted?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At first glance it looks pretty cool, but I have a few questions.

How is this different/better than the existing <http://www.housingmaps.com/> ?

How is this different/better than Hot Pads? <http://hotpads.com/>

Do you have CraigsList's permission to use their listings? I thought they were against this sort of site and the Housing Maps creator had special permission to do what he did.

<comment><USER4> A lot of the advantages are pretty subjective, and I'm biased (I didn't post this, by the way, I just learned about it via twitter).

Housingmaps is great, and was probably the inspiration for all these sites. The reasons I wrote my own were its limited selection and inflexible filters, which were pretty painful to use in my search.

Hotpads was around, but I didn't like it very much when I started this. I think it used to be more big buildings/complexes, and I don't like the flash- based map (I'm on a mac). It's perfectly usable, though. If you give both a try, I'd love to get your impressions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This kind of things is cool, except the vast majority of apartments are not listed on Craigslist or Google or anywhere online.

One of these sites needs to use Mechanical Turk (or similar) to pay people to walk around and find "for rent" signs on the street, call the number, get the details, and data entry them into the site.

Then have a "did this number work for you?" thing on the site, and you don't get paid until someone successfully calls the landlord and verifies that it's a real rental. Or maybe do a double-check kind of setup where some AT users create listings and other verify them. Some way to handle fraud.

 _That_ would be an insanely useful apartment site. That site would become a household name.

<comment><USER9> My hunch is that in the Bay Area, most apartments are in fact on Craigslist. The exception that I'm aware of are apartments rented by primarily non-English speakers, such as places in SF Chinatown and other highly ethnic neighborhoods. There you might find listings in a local Chinese-language newspaper or on a bulletin board at a small store.

<comment><USER8> I've never lived in the Bay, so I can't say. But I've recently done apartment searches in San Diego and Phoenix, and by far the strategy of most landlords is just to put up a "For Rent" sign with a phone number outside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Padmapper's a great utility for finding apartments. I used it before while looking for sublets in NYC. The site has a great UI and adds a ton of value - it's there just when you need it, it's like your Dropbox for apartment- hunting.

The founder behind it is a sharp guy too, here's a good interview with him - [http://valleyloop.com/2010/10/11/qa-with-founder-of- padmappe...](http://valleyloop.com/2010/10/11/qa-with-founder-of-padmapper- com/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've used the site in the past and its certainly better than most real estate search engines that seem to be stuck in the 90s.

I did see a need for a more collaborative/organizational tool when apartment hunting a couple of years ago while looking for apartments with my fiancee. So worked on building <http://www.mapthatpad.com>.

Would love any feedback from the HN crowd!

EDIT: typo

<comment><USER4> Nice name ;-)

But yeah, there is more to be done on the organizational and collaborative fronts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> PadMapper is a very useful tool. I used it when I moved to NY. It filters results well, but the only problem I had was that it didn't always have the correct location. I assume it scrapes the link to the Google Map from Craigslist, so the inaccuracy might be from the advertiser who doesn't put in the correct geo-location.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, there are some issues with this, usually because the address is ambiguous or downright wrong. People throwing up stuff on CList aren't always very careful about their data entry, unfortunately.

Flagging helps with this somewhat, but that's dependent on high usage, which isn't the case in all areas. There is some automatic stuff that runs to filter obviously wrong things out, but I plan on looking more into that.

<comment><USER12> That's good to know. I thought I had found some real bargains in Manhattan but then realized the apartments were not in Manhattan, e.g. the address on Craigslist would simply be '34th St.' and PadMapper would plot it in Manhattan, but it is was actually 34th St. in Astoria.

It would also be good if PadMapper could scrape addresses from the title of posts (or from within the post) when there is no (full) address link at the bottom of a Craigslist post. This might be a bit more tricky since the way some of the addresses are written can't even be interpreted by Google Maps.

I still found PadMapper to be the best way to find apartments in areas I wanted to live, and it is a lot clearer than HotPads and Google Property search. One thing that I would really love is a more complete map that shows transportation and amenities like Google Maps. I often found myself having to re-search the address on Google Maps to find out what was in the neighbourhood.

My experiences are still fresh in my mind, so feel free to contact me if you want some more feedback.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, that'd be great if you could share (padmapper at gmail). I started recreating the google transit overlay, but it's pretty nontrivial to make a readable subway map programmatically and I got sidetracked on other projects.

If there's no map link, it attempts to infer based on that other info you mention and classifies them as likely inaccurate. Frequently it's the map link that's wrong, since people often file it in re wrong sub-CL and CL seems to modify the map link based on that info.

I'd be really interested if there were aspects you liked (or didn't like) about the others you tried.

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I agree with the other commenters, I love PadMapper. Helped me find a great place when I moved to San Diego.

Has CL shut down people who used their data but played by the rules of not overloading their servers or other API rudeness?

<comment><USER4> They shut down Oodle a while back, but who knows if they were playing nice. Seems like Oodle was also hijacking the listings and putting them on their own site, which I'd imagine is one of the things they don't like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh wow, this is fantastic! I'm moving soon and this is exactly what I need. Scanning down Craigslist text adds is just terrible. This is downright fun. Thanks so much for creating this!

</comment><comment><USER15> I love padmapper. Best of the craigslist mapping sites.

When transitioning to finding furniture on cl, I was really missing the mapping option. "Padmapper" for the other categories?

<comment><USER4> Heh maybe eventually as a follow-on service. The format doesn't make quite as much sense for most categories, but for a few limited ones, it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any chance at all of combining data from this and Mapnificent? I notice this has a commute time option, but it's walk or drive only.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I've been meaning to, actually.

<comment><USER16> Hooray! Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The palette-like user interface is really cool, but you're using the old Google Maps API.

Keep up the good work.

</comment><comment><USER18> I used this to find my current apartment. It made the pain of the apartment hunt bearable.

</comment><comment><USER19> why all real estate applications are pure text/image or pure maps with some text pop-ups?

I think the ideal real estate application is a perfect combination of maps and text/image

<comment><USER4> Actually, there are very few pure maps sites - most are hybrid maps/list sites. I don't really see the point, though - the location is what matters most, and you always have the other filters to weed out the stuff you wouldn't want to look at anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Ummm, this rocks. Simple as that. So great.

</comment><comment><USER21> I built a similar site (which I think pre-dates PadMapper): <http://cribq.com>

The iPhone app ( <http://cribq.com/go/appstore> ) is by far the most popular part of it.

The website hasn't been updated in a long time, although it still works well. I built the site because housingmaps at the time was not up to date enough, was very incomplete, and didn't allow drill-down into neighborhoods. I also added things like streetview, and the very cool Microsoft bird's eye view. My goal was ultimately to add all kinds of data to help people move, similar to what the YC startup Movity was doing.

According to Craig, he only goes after sites which cause too much load on their servers. I base that on a few comments he has made on Quora. Evidence points more toward him going after heavily commercialized sites, or mixing data with other providers.

<comment><USER22> My impression is that furthermore, most of the problem sites are those who are trying to _post_ ads. There are a million spammers and lazy businesses out there who would simply LOVE to be able to use Craigslist as their own personal ad bucket. Craig even calls them out specifically in the TOU as "third-party posting services."

Padmapper and similar can do their job with RSS feeds and occasional callbacks to see if ads are still alive, which I think alleviates a majority of load concerns. One area in which Craigslist has moved to shut down Craigslist search engines is where services have implemented multi-location search for sales items, which violates the Craigslist maxim of connecting people locally and introduces shipping and payment complications (Paypal) that they'd rather not be in the middle of. That Padmapper deals with a part of Craigslist that is necessarily localized may be their saving grace.

<comment><USER23> Some categories would love for CL to legitimize the third party services by charging and accepting bulk feeds (like CL does for real estate). Until the demand is served, third parties will innovate externally.</comment></comment></comment>


At Repair Cafes, 'Beloved but Broken' Possessions Find New Life - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/us/repair-cafe.html?contentCollection=weekendreads&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=c-column-middle-span-region&region=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region <comment><USER2> This is a lovely concept and I'm kind of sad that there isn't a cafe in my state of Washington (list of locations, in case you missed it from the article: [https://repaircafe.org/en/visit/](https://repaircafe.org/en/visit/))

Besides the obviously nice communal aspect of the entire thing, I think this evokes a question that will become more and more vital over the coming years: _how do we build an ethos of sustainability when the immediate merits of sustainability keep shrinking?_

<comment><USER3> You can't because if it's going to cost corporations money to make things more repairable then it's not going to happen.

There's always a tendency for technical folks to think that their world view is the view of most people and I submit that's not the case. I mean reality shows that people choose price and functionality over repair-ability.

There seems no rationale to me that would make me sacrifice all of the qualities that makes consumer electronics desirable - affordability, availability, functionality.

It seems mutually exclusive to rapid production of consumer goods.

<comment><USER4> Good points all around. I think that there are also non-technical people who remember when devices would last a very very long time. That is something tangible that consumers have lost to some extent.</comment></comment></comment>


Scientists traced a uranium cube to Nazi Germany's nuclear reactor program - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scientists-trace-uranium-cube-nazi-germany-nuclear-reactor-program <comment><USER2> Soo the real life tesseract!</comment>


The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-long-road-to-the-student-debt-crisis-11559923730?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> The statistics in this article aren't especially useful, and could easily have been made more so by breaking debt down by attainment. Students that leave postsecondary without a 4-year bachelor's degree on average apparently owe less than $10k; with a bachelor's, less than $25k; with a graduate degree, $45k.

Roughly 1/3 of all borrowers drop out, implying (I think?) that the majority of debt is held by people who complete degrees, a substantial minority of whom obtain graduate degrees.

If the student debt crisis is about rescuing people for whom college was of no benefit (for instance, because they attended a for-profit school and didn't obtain a bachelor's degree --- the overwhelming majority of low and middle SES quartile students at for-profit colleges do not), the intervention needed to solve that problem is radically different and less expensive than "forgiving all student debt".

<comment><USER3> The last point is key. There are so many options that provide relief for those who need it most that don't bail out New York Times journalists who paid $150,000 for a Columbia English degree or big firm lawyers who paid $250,000 for a Columbia law degree. And given how much of the debt is subject to income-based repayment, there is also a set of options for bringing relief to those who don't qualify to cap their loan payments at 10% of disposable income.

<comment><USER4> There is also a free and fair option, just let people go bancrupt on their student loans. We've already seen politicians bailing out loans to help their reach friends, but saying it's all for the people.

Don't let history repeat itself

<comment><USER2> The problem with allowing people to BK their student loans is that it creates a perverse incentive. If you BK over a car, it gets repossessed. But nobody can take your education back. A BK at 22-23 years of age is not a strong deterrent; you'll still be able to buy a house in your early 30s, which is when a lot of people plan to do that anyways.

You _can_ make loans dischargeable, but doing so will drastically change who loans are made available to in the first place.

<comment><USER5> For a long time people were allowed to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. Most people didn't because costs were reasonable and it hit your credit score.

If you suddenly made that allowed again there's be a bunch of initial bankruptcies because of pent up demand and the market racing toward equilibrium but it would almost certainly revert to somewhere near the level it was originally.

<comment><USER2> Two responses to this (we're recapping a previous thread at this point):

1\. Tuitions were _much_ lower when loans first started to be non- dischargeable.

2\. The provision to exempt them from bankruptcy was based on concerns that people were already ruthlessly defaulting on them.

As this article notes: the current disposition of college financing is part of a package of policy changes geared at drastically expanding access to college, and that package is generally viewed as being successful on its own terms.

<comment><USER6> Allowing for bankruptcy discharge would lead to less predatory lending (since all of a sudden the banks would have an interest in checking credit- worthiness), and that in turn would lead to universities losing many students if they don't lower tuition costs to reasonable levels again.

Not allowing defaulting on student loans was a huge driver in why tuitions are so high without any added value from the universities.

<comment><USER3> The only real lender of significance in the market is the federal government, which makes loans without regard to credit worthiness. That policy is not subject to change for policy and political reasons. What credit check is an 18 year old going to pass for a large unsecured loan? Especially 18 year olds from disenfranchised groups?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting that there is no mention here of the drastically inflated number of administrators in colleges as compared to say 30 years ago.

"literally nobody knows who these people are or what they are doing"

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureaucrats- and-buildings-the-case-for-why-college-is-so-expensive/)

<comment><USER8> Teacher salaries are the biggest factor in price increases. [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bl...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bloat- does-not-explain-the-rising-cost-of-education.html)

<comment><USER9> This doesn't work for all Systems. From the UC system for examples, administrative salaries increased 13x while tenure faculty salaries increased 1.6x, but faculty growth is less then the growth of student body, from 1964-2015.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The story makes some very good points, but completely misses two other reasons that tuition costs have risen so much faster than inflation:

1) State aid has dried up considerably. Public colleges used to get a a huge amount of their budget from the state. However, cutting funding to higher education has always been more politically palatable when tightening the belt than other areas. When I was in college, the funding was roughly 50%. Now it's about %25, and in inflation adjusted dollars is significantly lower than 20 years ago.

2) For at most of the past 20 years, there's been an arms race amount colleges competing for students. In that pursuit, enormously expensive new facilities from dorms to rec centers have ballooned capital expenses, covered primarily by bind issues that have interest to be paid and therefore necessitate higher tuition. To make ends meet.

These two items, along with easy financing, represent the three legged stool on which massive tuition and increased and student debt sits.

<comment><USER11> Any idea where this arms race comes from? Were the colleges holding classes with empty seats because they couldn't get enough students?

One would like to think that this would allow new schools to materialize that opt out of that race to the top, though of course the overhead is very high. I've been watching Signum University, an online-only school, work its way to accreditation over the past several years, and they're nowhere close. (A big bolus of cash would probably help; they're trying to do it with only small- donor donations.)

I feel like college has become not-worth-it in the three decades since my degree, though unfortunately that's not true: even with the ballooning costs it's still a net positive. It just seems as if they're raising prices to absorb as much of that net positive as they can, and in doing so the people on the left side of the return curve go from positive to negative. Since the schools get theirs up front, that's pure positive for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I understand that one is privileged to some extent to have been able to pay off student debt. But, I can't help but think it could be problematic to cancel all student debt and in effect penalize all those who worked hard to save and pay off their debt.

Only a couple years ago it was advantageous to pay off your student debt quickly to avoid interest. Now it seems beneficial to pay the monthly minimum only and hope that the debt gets forgiven by the government at some point...

Does any one know if any of the Democratic candidates have talked about this issue?

<comment><USER13> Not based on direct evidence, but based on the candidates' rhetoric and Democrats' typical platform goals, I'm thinking they will prioritize forgiveness for low earners, similar to how they limit write-offs for student loan interest payments to incomes below a threshold (I think it was 80k last year? I don't remember).

So if you're already in a place to pay it off without struggling, I'm betting your life won't change that much. I'll just be happy to see my loans gone. If I end up paying it off in 5 years and find out it all would have been forgiven regardless, C'est la vie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think a lot of the student debt crisis is self-inflicted. No one is forcing you to attend a 4 year straight from high-school, go to a community college and then transfer to a state school/4 year. (I spent 3 years at a CC, but I graduated from a UC and paid off my student loans within a year)

Yes, college is expensive, but there is an existing alternative that everyone seems to forget about and it boggles my mind.

<comment><USER15> No one is forced to take out any kind of debt; the issue is that typical debt is secured by an asset or dischargeable in bankruptcy. If you make severe mistakes with credit cards, you'll declare bankruptcy and the credit card companies will suffer. This imposes some market discipline on lenders. Banks are (ideally) not eager to make mortgages to people who are likely to become insolvent. Yes, I know about the Great Recession and this was part of the problem.

Severe student loans can be incurred starting at age 18 and aren't dischargeable. That's why they're uniquely pernicious. It's typically not possible to fuck up your financial life for decades via most debts, but it is with student loans. We don't know ourselves and the future is unpredictable, and that's why bankruptcy exists. Taking it out of the equation empowers predatory lenders and institutions.

<comment><USER16> > No one is forced to take out any kind of debt

In practice, I'm not certain this is true. In Massachusetts, a parent can be forced to pay for his over-18 child's college education:

[https://www.familyneedslaw.com/blog/2019/03/massachusetts- pa...](https://www.familyneedslaw.com/blog/2019/03/massachusetts-parents-can- be-ordered-to-pay-college-expenses.shtml)

I'm unclear as to whether or not the court can force a parent to go into debt to accomplish that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Honest question, why are Universities becoming so expensive? Is because these credits are available? Was estudying a degree cheaper before the credits?

<comment><USER18> Short answer: Because they can.

Longer answer, according to the universities: Because modern students demand more than just classes, they also want social services (on-site counseling, bias incident response teams, etc).

Longer answer, according to a cynic: Because universities are more or less guaranteed the money from the federal government, they've grown to spend the money on inflated administration. As costs go up the government allows students to borrow more and more to cover the costs, and universities find ways to jack up their prices to match the money on the table. While the government loaning poor students money to better themselves with an education is a great thing in theory, I think it's what directly lead to the current situation. I don't want to turn this into a long post against capitalism, but I think that the unfettered capitalistic worldview we have here in the US is the root problem.

<comment><USER19> A project will grow to fill the timeline, and departments will grow to fill the budget

<comment><USER20> The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. -Oscar Wilde (And Civ IV)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > After years of projecting big profits from student lending, the federal > government now acknowledges that taxpayers stand to lose $31.5 billion on > the program over the next decade, and the losses are growing rapidly.

Most civilized countries offer free or close to free education for their young population instead of trying to profit off of this segment of the population that barely knows what it wants out of life. If they can do it, I'm sure we could. How about bailing out the people for one and ending this for profit loan system once and for all? How about investing in the future generations of Americans for once instead of trying to profit from them? Or we could continue on the path we're on and see just how much worse things get for the masses here. I wonder just how much they will put up with.

<comment><USER22> Free education only works when you have a selection system where you are tested and then put where you fit(shoveling dirt, laying bricks, trade school, college, university).

In US any graduate from HS can go do 4 year degree in "something". Try that in Germany or Netherlands.

<comment><USER23> Well, if he's not capable to receive that education then why he's trying to borrow money for something he can't handle?

<comment><USER22> There are pile of problems with this.

1\. Testing 12-14 year olds to decide their lot in life is.. well unreliable. Not to mention brutal.

2\. In US race card will be played once it is apparent that proportion of people with different ski color that get free education does not line up with demogrphic proportions(political suicide)

3\. People WILL game it by hiring tutors to study to test, bribing teachers, teachers will cheat and give out solutions etc. In Netherlands they have what amounts to counter-intelligence apparatus to counter this. Good luck implementing that in all of the States.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Student loans can also be used to pay rent and meals, and living in an urban center is increasingly expensive. My alma mater is tearing down old dorms and building pricey new ones instead of making student life as affordable as possible.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why have the costs for healthcare and higher education been rising so rapidly? This article seems to blame government money and people wanting higher ed, but it doesn't back up any of its claims.

</comment><comment><USER26> So the government increased the cost of college by getting involved?

</comment><comment><USER27> Unlike houses students can't walk away though? And they're more resilient in a way - being young & on a upward trajectory.

The whole thing seems a touch more diabolically evil in a way.</comment>


What Makes a Great Coding Interview? Be Real - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitnative.com/2015/05/07/coding-interviews/

<comment><USER2>
       It's easy to create a simple coding test that
       asks the candidate to reverse strings, calculate
       a fibonacci number, or print fizzbuzz.  But as
       you can see from these links, they're worthless
       questions. They don't foster conversation, ...

Wrong. When done badly, as cargo cult[0][1] interviewing, _then_ they don't foster conversation. When done well they serve as the springboard to some great conversations.

Get to the "why" of the question - it's not pass/fail, it's not "tick this box and move on." It's a "starter for 10."[2][3][4]

Claiming otherwise is simply demonstrating that you've missed the point. Much of the article is good, but with regards the simple tests and "pen and paper" questions, it simply misses the point.

\----

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming)

[2] [http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english...](http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/university- challenge)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starter_for_Ten](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starter_for_Ten)

[4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Challenge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Challenge)</comment>


How to Take Three Years to Finish Your Side Project - <AUTHOR> https://www.markphelps.me/2019/04/how-to-take-three-years-to-finish-your-side-project/ <comment><USER2> Great write up, you should make a Show HN with your project

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Glad you liked it. I think I may do that this week!</comment></comment>


Icsplusonline in hsts but cert mismatch can be bypassed? - <AUTHOR> Icsplusonline.com appears to be in hsts yet has cert mismatch and connection reset when attempting to load http version. Does this make any sense?! Also my local chrome does not seem to see the hats and offers to allow me to bypass the cert mismatch.
Can anyone explain this nonsensical situation? Sorry, TLS newbie here.
https://pastebin.com/Q7t4pfyj https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=icsplusonline.com#whyNotTrusted <comment><AUTHOR> Update, now my local DNS won't resolve the domain at all. "DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN"</comment>


Why Arc is good for video games - <AUTHOR> http://arcfn.com/2008/06/why-arc-is-good-for-video-games.html

<comment><USER2> These two statements:

      "The game has no audio, since PLT Scheme doesn't have
      audio support."

      "I think it would have been considerably easier to write
      it in PLT Scheme directly, but the Arc implementation
      builds character."

really raise a red flag for me. The first one says the target platform is crippling Arc. The second one says Arc doesn't provide any benefits over the target platform (other than "character building", whatever that is).

That's like a C programmer saying it would have been easier to write something in assembly, or a Java programmer saying it would have been easier to write something in bytecode. (Except assembly and bytecode never crippled an app's audio support.)

<comment><USER3> Yikes. The second one sounds like a passive-aggressive jab more than anything.

<comment><USER4> To me it sounds more like a mix of pioneer's pride and sense of humour.</comment></comment></comment>


List of BYU Startups - <AUTHOR> http://www.adamchavez.net/blog/byu-startups/

<comment><USER2> Pretty impressive, especially since so many of those startups are by current students! It would be interesting to see similar lists for other schools as well (perhaps even my own).

<comment><AUTHOR> What school do you go to?

<comment><USER2> University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How complex is what you are working on? - <AUTHOR>

On a scale from 0 to 10, how complex would you say is the project you are working on? (0 being a hello world) Why?
Note: By project I mean, the entire project, not just what you are working on, but also what other team mates are doing. <comment><USER2> Some of the most complex projects are also the least sexy.

At Triggit we are building technology around how to buy digital media. What does this mean? It means a start-up with less then 20 people evaluates over 12 billion ad impressions, across hundreds of millions of user records, every day. Since we bid and buy these ads in in Real Time we get less then 100 milliseconds to leverage the data provided by the sellers (people like google), the data provided by our clients (advertisers), internal data, and 3rd party data to dynamically evaluate and bid on inventory. We look at about 150,000 queries per second with hundreds of different bidders. Because of latency restraints and load balancing issues we can't work in the cloud, which means we must coordinate this entire effort across four data centers on three continents.

We legitimately deal with big data - so much data that its not worth storing the vast majority of it. Hadoop sort of keeps up, Hbase breaks regularly and the guys at MapR are up to some pretty cool stuff.

Who said an online advertising start-up couldn't be interesting :) Check it out at triggit.com.

</comment><comment><USER3> 8, on a logarithmic scale. Our web app uses 100 EC2 servers doing data aggregation, a recommendation engine written in Java, a cms using Drupal, an API written in PHP, and a front end using JSrender. We're using Mule for eventing, APE for push notifications, and pretty much every AWS service there is.

<comment><USER4> what web app is this, very curious

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You've supplied the low-end of the spectrum (hello world) but not the high- end.

Asking people to describe the "complexity" of their product also seems to invite bragging about over-engineering - I _could_ make my blog require 3 datastores and a message queue (this seems to be popular in some circles), and then post about how I'm solving complex problems and you should come work for me.

For what it's worth, I'd describe what I work on right now as quite complicated from a UI/UX and "number of inputs" standpoint, but quite simple technically - so I guess it falls somewhere in the middle in terms of "complexity?"

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd say a 6. The project itself is a 2, add 2 for technical constraints and 2 for partner constraints.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd say 4 but to me it feels like 11 ;)

Just don't have enough time, money, or knowledge, and could do with some help actually!

</comment><comment><USER8> What would 10 be? I need some more context before I can attempt to answer this question.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, 10 would be the most complex software you can think of related to what you are working on. What in layman terms could be referred to as "rocket science".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would say around 8 because of NLP usage and complex algorithms. Checkout <http://diglig.com>

<comment><USER10> It isn't very clear from how you get from text mining to tasks.</comment></comment>


How to Learn How to Surf [video] - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/wn5KqWwP6uQ <comment><USER2> I did about 10 surf road trips last summer in a concerted effort to really "get" it. To provide some context - and at the risk of sounding like a jackass - I typically take to a new physical activity pretty quickly. Surfing? Nope. THE toughest sport I've ever attempted. I felt I wasn't any better at the end of the summer from the beginning.

The thing is, I eventually just accepted enjoying the experience. There's zen out there in the surf, whether you're waiting for a wave or riding one. Cold, salty water on your face, in your hair, down your throat, it recharges the body & soul. It can be very social too. Which, if I had never tried, would've never known.

It's a welcome - even "needed" \- break from the keyboard. And maybe just maybe while I'm splashing around out there, I'll eventually "get" it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't surf. I know people who do. I've known them for the 35+ years they have been. I think getting it ultimately means living next to a place to surf. All of those people have arranged some period of their lives around surfing by living where surfing before and after work was an option. Some still do.

Living at the beach seems part of the price of getting good at surfing.

<comment><USER3> > living where surfing before and after work was an option

Paraphrasing Steve McQueen, more like, where work in between surfing was an option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't really understand what's happening here.

Getting good at surfing is hard.

Getting up on small, mostly foam waves is not hard. Typically achievable your first time out, nobody I know that is remotely athletic has struggled to do that in 2-3ft surf. Once you get that first wave you are hooked and then its all nailing the timing. Which takes time.

Practicing the prone to standing explosive move on the beach 10-15 times before hand is helpful.

No idea why these people are so bad.

<comment><USER5> If you did not feel this way, well and good, but there are lot others who do and never learn to be any little good. Just too much focus on "learning" or thinking it is work....I think the video is about learning and not particularly surfing.

Happened to me learning to Ski, and I have pretty similar experience as they talked in the video. After two years of 'learning', the real improvement came only after I started to just let it go. Enjoy the time on the slopes, comparing small moves, figuring out balance and eventually figuring out to parallel ski.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you in terms of there are bell curves for innate athletic ability etc etc. but for the vast majority I would say that if it takes you more than a season to stand up on a surfboard or parallel ski then there is probably a fundamental blocker somewhere up the chain. Either a mental block or an area of training deficiency that can be much better remedied with a focused effort in that area.

In these cases I feel trying to do a complex, nuanced, full body sport is akin to doing Calculus without grasping Algebra. You can take that Calc I class 100x and you will still fail.

I am not trying to be critical of those who struggle to learn but suggest that there is often a way to shortcut that frustration. I love seeing people "get" a new sport and despite how inspiring their persistence it is really disheartening to see people fail unnecessarily for years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Strange. Trying to save this video for later viewing but instead get the following error:

> This action is turned off for content made for kids

How is that helpful? YouTube seems to actively try to make their site worse every day.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. Also because there's an easy workaround:

Like the video, and on the left panel should be your liked videos. Click that, and you'll see your liked videos. Add it to your playlists from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> i dont understand how he's surfed for so long and can still be so early in learning the fundamentals. the biggest variable is time in the water. w/ 20+ years he should be... better. the only thing i can think of is they go out very infrequently.

<comment><USER9> According to William Finnegan in _Barbarian Days_ [0], people who start after age 14 or so have close to zero chance of becoming proficient.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Barbarian-Days-Surfing-William- Finneg...](https://www.amazon.com/Barbarian-Days-Surfing-William- Finnegan/dp/0143109391/ref=mp_s_a_1_1)

<comment><USER10> That's wrong. I was surfing teacher, and regardless of age it takes 2-5 years to learn it. Some environments are easier, some are harder, but surfing is still both, the hardest and most dissatisfying, and then the most elegant and satisfying sport.

Many people started learning at 40, and it still needed 5 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This was amazing! I did not know Tom Sachs had a youtube channel, or that he still collaborated with Van Neistat. Now I'm making my way through his channel and all the videos I have watched so far have been incredible.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've heard a stat: Surfers are surfing waves only 1% of the time they are working to surf waves. I think that's the time in the water, not outside of it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Odd how underviewed this video seems to be.</comment>


The Third Party Web - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/patrickhulce/third-party-web <comment><AUTHOR> whoops [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19135199](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19135199)</comment>


Guy Kawasaki: Stunningly Awful Demos - What Not To Do in a Demo - <AUTHOR> http://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the-world/article/stunningly-awful-demos-five-things-not-to-do-in-a-demo-guy-kawasaki

<comment><USER2> Good advice generally, but generalisations have their gaps. I always ignore #2 here, about not having a 'Corporate Overview' early on. BUT:

\- Make sure you've already avoided #3 (Linear Demo) by agreeing with the pitchee what the agenda will cover \- Make sure your overview is very, very brief - it's really a positioning statement ("we sell software to telecommunications companies with over 500 employees") not a history lesson, and \- Make the overview interactive. "What have you heard about my firm?" or "Bob introduced us - can I ask what he told you about what we do?"

This last one shows how this step can be a great way to correct misinterpretations that can otherwise ruin a great demo. In situations where the overview can't be interactive (say, Demo Day to a room of VCs who have never heard of you) you want this step to be two sentences ... or less.</comment>


Israeli Scientists Say They Will Have a Complete Cure for Cancer Within a Year - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/robinseatonjefferson/2019/01/29/israeli-scientists-say-they-will-have-a-complete-cure-for-cancer-within-a-year/#37e3b9f73621 <comment><USER2> Submitted _11 times_ already.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cancer%20cure&sort=byDate&pref...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cancer%20cure&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER3> It was either Nixon or Ford who in the 1970's declared a cure for cancer would be found in 2 years.

It's hundreds of diseases though, that's like saying you found a cure for "organ failure".</comment>


Apply HN: Natch – Localized Farmers and Artisans Marketplace - <AUTHOR> An online farmer's market where individuals can buy and sell the things they produce to people in their local marketplace. Each locality will have its own local marketplace, and within it, anybody is able to open up a virtual local shop and sell any goods ranging from homegrown fruits and vegetables, to artisanal cheeses and jams, to craft drinks and snacks. As a shopper on the app, I would be able to purchase any of the available goods that were being sold by the independent producers in my local marketplace.
Within each locality, Natch will have a fulfillment center, where it will receive, organize and ship out orders - enabling anybody to do all their shopping from the app, and receive all the goods from the different producers in one shipment.
Why I wanted to make this idea is because I'm somebody who prefers buying goods from independent, local and artisan brands and producers. However, it has been difficult to access and consistently support these brands, because farmer's markets are infrequent and far from me, and buying products individually from many different online stores can be expensive and inconvenient. There was no common place for any startup food brand to try and sell to me whatever new artisan product they had made. So the idea behind Natch was to create a localized marketplace so that any independent and local producer had an open market where they could sell their goods, and where shoppers could more easily find and support them.
Live Local :) <comment><USER2> Interesting idea. I'm having the classic reaction that people had to Amazon when it was new (don't people want to shop in person, touch the stuff? what if stuff needs to be bought same day?) - but am not sure if this means you're onto something :).

How would a farmer and a buyer find out about this marketplace?

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that it may take time for some people to become acclimated to not shopping for things in person. Since this issue seems to revolve around picking produce, we hope that those people will find a myriad of other craft goods(drinks, snacks, cheeses) from Natch until they become more comfortable with the experience. However the growth in companies like Instacart and Amazon fresh, show that the willingness to shop online for food is increasing, and I think this trend will continue as the prices, technology, and options improve.

In regards to finding out about Natch, we plan to start city by city and reach out individually to the farmers and independent brands in the area to help them sell on Natch. In these areas we would have to target the shoppers that traditionally support establishments like farmer's markets and demonstrate that Natch provides them with an easier and better way to shop locally.

Thanks for the questions :)

<comment><AUTHOR> oh and for the same day comment, we plan to ship goods out the day of. Everything a user is able to purchase will already be at a local Natch fulfillment center.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What is Natch's advantage to farmers and artisans over existing options?

<comment><AUTHOR> The advantages would be that they will have the ability to sell to more people that traditionally do not have access to their goods. Currently it's difficult to shop locally or from independent brands because farmer's markets aren't frequent or nearby for many, and doing consistent shopping from many independent brands on multiple online stores is inconvenient.

The other main advantage I think Natch provides is that it will be an open marketplace where anybody can sell. If you are a startup food brand or grower, there is no common place to market and sell your products to the people around you. Natch will give these independent sellers the ability to sell directly to the consumers and develop their market without needing to get into stores.

:)</comment></comment>


Subtle Effect of Hidden Dependencies on the User Experience of Version Control [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/42942.pdf <comment><USER3> I read this and went "oh good, it's not just me then."

I will occasionally get my copy of a git repo into a state such that the quickest thing to do is not to understand and repair what happened, but wipe the repo and clone afresh. I know this is Wrong and I should Understand it ...

And goddamn. Who thought "Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'. nothing to commit, working directory clean" was a good idea WHEN IT'S A DAMNABLE LIE?

I have successfully preached version control to managers before - non-geeks who nevertheless work with documents all day. "Have you ever spent three days editing the wrong version of a document?" and of course they all had. Their eyes lit up at the prospect of a way out of that. That was in 2001. Why don't we have that yet? EDIT: I don't mean the technical side of doc files - <USER2> the blobs issue won't solve the _fear_ issue, per this paper. That's the problem I mean.

<comment><USER4> > Their eyes lit up at the prospect of a way out of that. That was in 2001. > Why don't we have that yet?

The companies making word processors make _word processors_. They don't make revision control systems. They don't make document management systems.

It's a failure of vision. Their vision is narrow, and doesn't match their customers work-flow.

Sure, Word has "track changes", but it doesn't have "merge two documents". Because that problem is hard, and the word processor people have no idea how to solve it.

The revision control people look at diff'ing binary files, and go "bleah, use text". So revision control systems don't work for binary blobs like Word files.

And never the twain shall meet.

<comment><USER5> Actually, Word does have Merge Two Documents:

[https://support.microsoft.com/en- us/kb/306484](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/306484)

If you could extract the changeset from that then you would be well on your way to supporting version control in Word. One problem I've seen is that people tend to conflate version control and document control, and so they end up using version control systems to prevent revisions to documents, rather than to collate revisions to documents into a history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A common problem seems to be fear of breaking things. That seems to be the opposite of the purpose of version control systems! I had the same experience using a CAD document management system. I wanted to not only backup the repository but also be able to extract files from it manually, both of which turned out to be very hard. I also kept local backups of files because I didn't trust the overly complicated system. Who knows what switch you might set wrong and destroy other people's work.

</comment><comment><USER7> My only complaint regarding the "hidden dependencies" is that it is actually a form of "hidden complexities to the problem."

That is, just because you can reduce the problem to a single simple sentence, does not mean that it is a single simple problem. I welcome research into making it simple, but I get worried when that research tends to gloss over many of the different use cases that drove the tools that exist.

Would be like complaining about how many different tools there are to cut things. And, seriously, can you believe that people actually use their butter knives to cut stuff at their dinner tables?! Some people just use the side of their fork!

<comment><USER8> My question would be along the lines of Alan Kay: is it really complex or did we just make it complicated?

<comment><USER7> My take would be that there are complications from the myriad reasons these related tasks may be taken. It is possible to have a general purpose tool that works in all cases. It may not be the best performer in all cases, though. Hence, my joke on knives.

My question back, do we have evidence that it is us making it complicated?

<comment><USER8> I think the things we want to conceptually do at least with code are not that complex, but the tools we have are. I don't know how to prove that without actually building better tools.

One example might be that sync is a complex problem, but Dropbox does a pretty good job of creating a simple tool to manage it. So even if source control is inherently complex, perhaps the tools to manage it do not have to be.

To continue with your utensil example, perhaps we should have one version control system for games, another for individuals and another for small teams rather than trying to make one tool do all those things.

<comment><USER7> It should be remembered that synchronization among yourself is actually not the source of many (if any) troubles. So, you say that Dropbox makes this easy, but only in the case where there is an understanding that only one person is making edits at a time. As that is the most common case. You put something in a folder for others to look at. Or in a folder so that you can access it somewhere else.

Contrasted with highly collaborative editing where many users are concurrently making changes and want to find a way to present them. Git provides tools not only to manage these combinations and operations, but to reason about and display them.

So, with my knife analogy, using a fillet knife is ridiculously useful if that is what you need. Likely to cause frustration if it is not. And training will help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mostly, I'm comfortable with the git CLI workflow (of course, I have often worked as a "lead" before, as well). However, we do use gitk at my current job to visualize the change history tree of a project.

Tools like gitk need a mode to auto-sync their visualization (BUT NOT your workspace) with the "origin", so you can quickly see what is going on in the outside world, as well as your own work, just like you would see in a centralized system. I wonder if gitk has a --show-origin flag or some such thing that I missed?

It's nice to be able to work off-line, but most of us at the end of the day are part of a work-group all trying to complete something together, and need to see the centralized view of project status/history.

<comment><USER7> For that, I have come to prefer a 'git fetch' workflow over a 'git pull' based one. I don't know what change that will cause in gitk, but otherwise it does basically what you are asking for.

<comment><USER9> Thanks, I will have to check out using "fetch" next week. I'm not sure what happens if I do a fetch while my workspace already has "master" checked out, but if I have a local working branch checked out, this looks like a safe way to peek ahead at what others are doing before I blindly start merging/pulling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tl;dr; tools like ungit provide a better gui then tools like github for mac/windows

<comment><AUTHOR> The paper doesn't even mention ungit tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> We have started to work with git about a year-and-a-half ago. Here are some of the lessons I have learned in that time:

1) _Get yourself a decent visualisation of the commit graph._

You should see at least:

* Labels for all local branches

* Labels for all remote-tracking branches ("origin/whatever" etc)

* A label for the HEAD pointer (i.e. what is currently checked out.)

I found the Git Extensions plugin for Windows pretty helpful in this regard, though I think gitk and the Eclipse and Intellij visualisations show them, too.

"git log" with default settings does _not_ show anything except your currently checked out branch, which can be extremely confusing.

2) _When in doubt, do "git fetch"._

This will synchronize the remote-tracking branches on your machine with the actual state of the remote repository. It will not include the changes into your currently checked out copy and it will not modify the remote repository in any way.

Therefore, if you are unsure if your local repository is correctly synced, calling "git fetch" is usually a good (and safe) way to be sure.

3) _Be careful with "git pull"._

"git pull" is basically an alias for "git fetch; git merge origin/<the branch you have checked out right now>".

However, what this means is that it will synchronize your "origin/..." branch with the remote repository, then immediately try to merge your local work with whatever changes just got downloaded from your repository.

A good analogy for this procedure is "trying to cross a road with your eyes closed": Because you have no way to inspect the changes that you are actually merging in, this can lead to unexpected conflicts and can be relatively counter-intuitive to undo.

If you are not entirely sure about the state of the remote repository, a better workflow is (in my opinion):

* Do a manual "git fetch".

* Inspect the "origin/..." branch using "git log" or a GUI and identify any relevant changes and possible conflicts.

* Do "git pull" or "git merge origin/..." when you actually want to incorporate the changes into your checked-out copy.

4) _All the history rewriting stuff creates copies._

Your old commits are still around, they are just not included in any branch and therefore hidden from most GUIs. However, you can still access them by calling any git command with their commit ID.

<comment><USER12> > this can lead to unexpected conflicts and can be relatively counter- > intuitive to undo.

git merge --abort. Perhaps not intuitive, but it's a single command.</comment></comment>


Google's Move to Software-Defined Networking - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=2856460 <comment><USER2> _" Basically, what I think Google and some other companies find attractive about SDN is the ability to affect policy more directly from a single location with one view of the network as a whole."_

That's "Software defined networking", which is a lot like virtual circuits. The first time A tries to send to B, a request is sent to some central server which decides if A can talk to B, how A gets to reach B, and whether it's desirable to listen in or MITM the conversation. The central server then sets up the routing, but doesn't handle the traffic.

This is amazingly like Tymnet, circa 1969.

Amazon has something like this internally, which they use as a big patchboard for their servers. This gives them freedom in allocating IP addresses. It's am example of "There is no problem in computer science which cannot be solved by adding another layer of indirection."

<comment><USER3> Everything old is new again :-) I read through the SDN specs and thought "Hmm, this reads like they are trying to implement ATM, badly." But one of the really fun things is that nearly all of the switching fabric patents from DEC/Tandem/Etc. from the 90's are evaporating and so we can actually build something like ATM now without getting bogged down in that mess. Because of that I'm pretty optimistic that it will make things a bit better than they were.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. While I am not a fan of everyone "doing SDN", I did enjoy this article. It seems that Google are doing interesting stuff, in so far as rejecting legacy protocols where practical (i.e their private WAN) and building something better, which hopefully will eventually seep into common knowledge and usage.</comment></comment></comment>