Living in a Van - <AUTHOR> http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/32944888191/living-in-a-van <comment><USER2> This seems like a romantically bohemian way to approximate a pampered middle class kid's idea of how poor people live. If you want to save money, you can try what they actually do, which is move to a less desirable neighborhood and spend one third what you do on rent for an apartment.

You live in a crazy expensive neck of the woods? Nice to meet you; I live in Japan, cry me a river. There's old folks on social security and single mothers in your town. Most of them don't shower with wet wipes.

I can't tell if my revulsion for this idea is class disdain because I'm too well off to consider it or class disdain because when I wasn't well off we had too much pride to ever stoop to anything like that.

<comment><USER3> It is interesting also to note that the ability to lead any kind of normal or predictable life in this fashion is itself a privilege. People in the software business can get away with wearing the same clothes, coming in wrinkled, missing the occasional shower, and, for that matter, getting in a little later after having to move the van in the middle of the night. Our field is extremely accommodating.

Put yourself in the shoes of a call-center worker (and if you want to be mean to the issue, make that call-center worker female). These jobs have dress codes. They're also aggressively monitored during the day and require attentiveness and a cordial demeanor. And obviously, a typical call-center worker cannot depend on the idea of taking off in the van for a month, driving to some other city, and having the same economic prospects when they arrive. Most people cannot afford to be playful with the idea of job security.

It's weird to find yourself thinking, "must be nice to be an iOS developer who can live in a van". Especially when you think of the people who do it because they're forced to do it.

I found the article to be a little glib about its subject. Glib is the word I would use, for romanticizing a scenario that many Americans actually experience as an intractable nightmare. I found myself first thinking about how nice it would be to pull up to the oceanfront, lay down in my "living room" van, and doze off reading a book while listening to the waves... then I thought of the scene in The Pursuit Of Happiness (not a great movie, but a great scene) where Will Smith has to put his kid to bed in a closet in a train station.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you.

The one thing I can never figure out is why managers of some types of companies run them the way they do. Why couldn't a call center employee work with a headset from a van and wear whatever they please? There's all sorts of strange practices that some of these companies do. Never in a million years would I ask an employee to submit to a drug test before being employed for example- yet that's what things like call centers do.

I want my employees to be happy, because they are the people that make the company work. When I talk to a manager of a company like this - they act like I've never managed anything before and just 'dont get it'.

<comment><USER5> _Why couldn't a call center employee ... wear whatever they please?_

Presumably the managerial types are trying to help cultivate a "professional" environment.

 _Never in a million years would I ask an employee to submit to a drug test_

I understand the personal freedoms angle, but I can also sympathize with employers who are tired of discovering that guy they hired last week is actually a raging meth head.

<comment><USER6> What does it matter if their employees are meth heads, they shouldn't have to be tested.

If they are unproductive, look like shit, have poor time management, have mood swings etc then they are a liability to their employer because of those things, not because they "do drugs".

On the other hand if they are productive, are professional, [any other positive attribute] and contribute to their employer, does it matter if they are on drugs at the time?

Granted, I've never meet anyone that are actually functional members of society once they start abusing something like meth, but my point is that employees should be judged purely on their performance in the workplace or how they contribute.

<comment><USER7> You've never had to deal with someone who came to work while on drugs, have you?

Someone can go from comparatively normal to crazy enough to freak everyone out and maybe get someone hurt in no time flat. That's a bit of a problem, especially given that some people work at places where accidents like slitting one's wrist wide open, crushing one's hand and being killed by an item dropped by a forklift happen a little too regularly, even to people who are not thus impaired.

<comment><USER8> I think the GGP was referring mainly to workplaces that don't involve dealing with dangerous equipment. Besides there's a big difference between smoking some pot outside of work hours and coming to work under the influence of meth.

When I worked in low paid (mainly call centre) jobs, people coming to work high was a pretty common thing. The jobs were easy and repetitive enough that it didn't affect performance at all. In fact if they had started drug testing they would probably have lost many of their best employees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminds of a good friend. He got a job making six figures at Google straight out of college, and then lived in his van--in the Google parking lot --while saving every penny he earned. He took showers on campus and only ate free Google food. After a few years, he went into a mini-retirement and devoted his time to traveling around the world and volunteering.

<comment><USER10> I would have loved to save money right out of school, being as frugal as I am, but I was married when I graduated and the first thing my wife wanted after I got my first (low paying) full time job? A house.

So much for the life of a cheapskate.

<comment><USER11> Putting money into a house you'll presumably be able to live in rent-free once it's paid off may not be a drastically worse choice than putting your money into savings. Unless it was an impractically huge house, or otherwise somehow not a keeper, I wouldn't consider that a frivolous/non-frugal purchase.

<comment><USER12> Unless he bought in 2006-2007. Still not frivolous...just a mistake.

<comment><USER5> "Mistake" implies the person should have known better. There are plenty of little guys who got trampled by the crash who did nothing wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I lived from my car for 4 months in Silicon Valley while working on my startup. I got along just fine in a two door Honda Civic. I posted the details in an answer on Quora (even included a couple videos). [http://www.quora.com/Would-becoming-homeless-be-a-good- strat...](http://www.quora.com/Would-becoming-homeless-be-a-good-strategy-to- cut-costs-1/answer/Kurt-Varner)

</comment><comment><USER14> If you think you can handle some sweaty palms, Alex Honnold, one of the best free solo climbers in the world, lives in his van so he can easily get from park to park and seems to absolutely thrive off the lifestyle -- <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR1jwwagtaQ>

There is something that appeals to my personality to live out of a van and just move on a whim but I don't think I would ever have the guts to go for it.

<comment><USER15> Yes, this sort of living is pretty normal in climbing circles. I live in my truck part of each year while I'm on the road. I know guys who have been living in their vehicles for years, one guy for nearly two decades.

<comment><USER16> Yep. My family spends ~2 months a year living in our VW van, travelling to various climbing areas.

Though I do enjoy our time on the road, I also really enjoy coming back to my home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I just finished living the van life while running a company for two months. My goal was to wake up with a new view (and sunrise if I was ambitious) every morning and there are some fantastic ones in the SF Bay Area. (Little secret: the parking lot next to Chrissy Field is wide open and gets epic sunrises over Alcatraz.) It becomes naturally easy to go for a morning swim or hike before work. At least in San Francisco, there are a lot of people living out of RVs and vans and you start to follow their lead and find the good places to park. I bought a cargo van from an electrician and built a full size bed that converts into a seat and some shelves for my stuff. Coincidentally, I just put my van up for sale on craigslist yesterday, so if anyone wants to carry the torch, hit me up!

<http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/cto/3316494260.html>

</comment><comment><USER18> I spent two years driving from Alaska to Argentina, feelancing website design and code along the way.

For the entire trip, my monthly expenses were less than they were in the 2 years prior just going to work every day. Yes, that includes gas for 40,000mi. I lived in my Jeep/tent the entire way.

I plan on doing something similar (but bigger) again, and I'll be building a more livable vehicle with a sink, stove, fridge, better sleeping, etc. etc.

<http://theroadchoseme.com/the-price-of-adventure>

</comment><comment><USER19> Great time to be living. My wife and I sold most of our stuff and have been living nomadically the last 4 months while continuing to work full time. Though we are in an Airstream, not a van.

Started in Vermont and currently beach front on the Oregon coast. Truly awesome

<http://www.watsonswander.com/>

It is turning out to be just slightly cheaper than when we owned a house. Averaged $27 a night the last two months for campground fees and $20 a day on gas.

<comment><USER20> Hey, I love your Airstream. Been thinking dirty thoughts about one for a long time, but I've been reluctant to pull the trigger because of a lack of time to really put the work in. There are so many around to pick from it becomes bewildering which way to look.

You do know you've lowered the value by taking out all the original kit, right :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> My favorite "living in a van" story is <http://www.hobostripper.com/>

(I wonder how much worse a van is than a military trailer. Those range from 40x12 with private bathroom and nice furnishings down to 10x8 with a roommate and no bathroom. It's probably a lot easier due to everyone else around you doing exactly the same thing, and there being portapotties, shower trailers, etc. freely available.)

I lived in a car for a month or so around the Bay Area (mostly because it was easier than finding an apartment); I'd do a hotel once or twice a week (and stay from 6am one day to 4pm the next day), and a 24h fitness membership (showers, etc. nationally) is $10-12.50/mo through Costco. I really wouldn't recommend car living, though.

<comment><USER22> Would that scale for someone who wanted to do an extended visit to the Bay Area? (say a month or so)

I'd like to visit San Francisco, but, apart from the US Visa and airfare, accomodation doesn't seem cheap (I haven't researched much but it comes up all the time here on HN). Food, oddly enough, sounds cheaper than in my 3rd world country.

<comment><USER11> Have you researched hostels? They're still not cheap by the standards of developing countries, but when I stayed in SF a few years ago, a bed at a hostel could be had for a fifth of what a hotel would have cost me, and certainly beats sleeping in a car. On the other hand, I found food shockingly expensive, and I come from Germany.

<comment><USER22> Interesting. I've stayed in hostels, and they are indeed cheap, and no, I haven't researched at all, it was just a thought. I haven't seen AirBnB either :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My favorite is this RV built by 3 Japanese students:

[http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/tiny- tr...](http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/tiny-transformer- rv-camper-turns-from-truck-to-two-storey-house.html)

More details:

<http://www1.ttcn.ne.jp/~gyo/English/index.htm>

<comment><USER24> This is so cool. Will be great training for living on a spacecraft someday soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I spent 3 months travelling in a 1978 Dodge RV, which I bought in LA for about $3000, and spent maybe $500 on parts for. It looked much like the one pictured in the article. I tore out the broken toilet and put in a chemical one, repaired the plumbing for the shower and got it going, replaced the batteries and bought a new charger. They key to buying one of these is take your time, and try out all the stuff. While fixing engines is something any mechanic can do, you can't turn up to a mechanic with a malfunctioning water heater.

I dumped the 'black' water from the toilet at public dumping stations (many towns have these) and stayed in state parks, which are not only beautiful in most cases, but are also usually just $10 or so a night. When I needed to fully charge, replenish supplies and so on, I would pay for an overnight in a RV park.

I was on an extremely limited budget on the time, so free camped whenever I could, particularly so in expensive places like Monterey (bind : the most expensive places also have the most restrictive overnight parking laws). I never once got moved on.

My tip is to find a public building that is empty at night to camp in front of. Pick a school, a local sports club, a library something like that. Something that won't have a ton of security but is also likely to be deserted. Don't park in front of peoples houses, you never know when you're going to get a paranoid who will call the cops. But at the same time, don't drive down lonely roads and park up, you're asking for trouble.

You can always do the wal-mart thing, but only out of desperation. They aren't great places to stay, and because they are well-known, it's not a great idea if you're the only one.

Be prepared to packup and move on early in the day, and most of the time you'll be OK

Using this method, I saw 38 states & provinces, covered 11,000 miles and spent less money than most would spend on the average Las Vegas trip. A couple of buddies pitched in and filled up one of the storage areas with beer for me as a goodbye present.

When I was done I donated the camper to one of those charity car collection companies and they drove it away.

I think most young people should do something like this - living a frugal and simple life while enjoying travel is a great learning experience. Having since done a lot of travel in the 'modern' way of nice hotels, rental cars and the like, I still get wistful when I see a couple of scruffy looking youngsters making their way on a shoestring cash budget but a burgeoning enthusiasm supply.

<comment><USER5> _stayed in state parks... usually just $10 or so a night._

So, $300/mo?

 _covered 11,000 miles_

I'll be generous and say your 1978 RV got 10mpg. That puts you at around $4,000 in fuel costs, assuming this trip was in the past couple years.

 _1978 Dodge RV, which I bought in LA for about $3000... When I was done I donated the camper_

 _spent less money than most would spend on the average Las Vegas trip._

Good lord. Based on my estimates, you racked up $7-8,000; how much do people spend in Vegas?

<comment><USER20> You're a decade out. Fuel cost was $1.10 - $1.80 / gal

I also like big engines, the dodge had a big block and returned about 7 mpg. Stupid choice in hindsight but that's youth for you.

State parks were an occasional choice - the aim was for at least 50% free camping.

I forget the total amount now, you're probably not far off. If I had sold the camper at the end, it would have been better financially. I didn't have the time, there was no Craigslist then, and I was starting a new job so the cash wasn't going to be an issue.

The average las Vegas trip covers a lot of ground. It's a rhetorical flourish, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I lived in my van for about 6 months after I graduated from college in Portland, OR. I spent part of that time up in Alaska, working in the fisheries (unloading fish from boats with a great group of guys) and the rest of my time in Portland trying to find places to park overnight in the city and trying to get back to a more stable life.

There were good things and bad things. It definitely simplified my possessions and when I was in Alaska I could basically park my van anywhere overnight. But when I got back to Portland, it was a lot harder to find places to park where I wouldn't get harassed.

I used my college (as an alum) gym showers and spent time in parks. This was 1996 so I wasn't too worried about internet connectivity and there definitely weren't any free wifi hotspots ;)

</comment><comment><USER26> Not quite a van or RV, but I have always found the tiny house movement interesting.

<http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/>

Many of them are small enough that you can legally tow them anywhere.

<comment><USER27> Wowwwww !! These look absolutely beautiful. But one still needs to own a piece of land. What would be interesting though, is a bunch of people buying a piece of land (sharing the land/electricity/water costs), and living in half a dozen of these on the land. Don't know about the legality of it, but it would be awesome

<comment><USER28> I think what you're recommending is called a trailer park. A trailer park with a very strict community guidelines.

<comment><USER29> kind of. A typical trailer park trailer is easily 800-1000 square feet compared to these which are 80-120 square feet. Similar relationship to neighbors though.

Im actually founding a community similar to this right now. We have2.25 acres of land, and each house can have no bigger than 400 square foot footprint (though can be 2 stories tall). Land not occupied by houses will be shared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here. In the article I link to a 60 Minutes segment that follows around families in Florida that turn to living in their cars as a last resort.

Worth checking out as it offers a very different perspective on the experience:

<http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7389750n>

<comment><USER19> Your article is a good one, but the tone towards RV's and living in campgrounds is oddly negative.

>>An RV is basically a house on wheels and isn't particularly inexpensive or minimalist.

Our was pretty inexpensive, is more minimalist than most US based folks and will hold its value just like the camper vans you mention.

>>If you pay to stay at a campsite, it's most certainly legal, but then this lifestyle ceases to be inexpensive.

$25-$30 a night is most certainly cheaper than most mortgages or apartments.

<comment><USER30> I wouldn't say "most". $800/month may not go very far in SF or NY, but it's about what I was paying for a large two-bedroom apartment in Seattle, and flyover country is cheaper still.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For the frugal traveller who wants to live in a van but move around (perhaps while developing your web app or similar), we've started a community where fellow RV'ers (or people who just like RVers) offer their driveways to others to camp on for a night or two for free - <http://www.boondockerswelcome.com>. We're going to start charging a small annual fee to cover our costs, but for $25/year you can travel all over the continent and park your van for free. Of course, this doesn't solve the bathroom or showering issue, as most people aren't opening up their bathrooms to their guests. But my mom (who has a small Roadtrek RV, which is really no bigger than a van and has no shower), has travelled for 5 months at a time getting by with showers in the occasional truck stop or an outdoor shower that she uses when they're parked in the forest. (There's also tons of free parking for RVs in US National forests BTW, plus lots of other spots. My mom writes e-books all about the free "boondocking" locations she's discovered complete with GPS co-ordinates and interesting nearby attractions - find them at <http://www.frugal-rv- travel.com.>)

I know that this comment reads like a big advert, but if hackers here are actually interested in living on the cheap while launching their bootstrapped startup, these are actually viable options.

</comment><comment><USER32> It can go horribly wrong: [http://www.ted.com/talks/becky_blanton_the_year_i_was_homele...](http://www.ted.com/talks/becky_blanton_the_year_i_was_homeless.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> Obligatory Chris Farley: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nhgfjrKi0o>

</comment><comment><USER34> > Actually, you'd break even much sooner because your camper van is an asset. > If you bought a used camper van from the 1980s, it's unlikely to lose much > more value under your watch. If you fix it up, it may even have appreciated > in value when you look to sell it. If you resell it for anywhere near what > you paid for it, you break even in just a couple of months. If you found a > great deal on a van, you'd break even sooner. If you drove it around a lot > and had high fuel costs, you might not.

Random, slightly OT thought: I never thought about buying used vehicles from this perspective. I've always thought of an auto as purely a liability.

<comment><USER35> When talking with a lamborghini dealer, I was informed that some exceptionally rich people will purchase one of those, keep it for 3 years, and then sell it back at a profit because they depreciate so slowly. I thought this was interesting.

<comment><USER36> Unless they just leave it parked, they are unlikely to recoup the cost of maintaining it over that time:

[http://www.secretentourage.com/lifestyle/autos/cost-of- owner...](http://www.secretentourage.com/lifestyle/autos/cost-of-ownership-of- an-exotic-car/)

I was bit by this in my early 20s when I bought a really nice BMW, I hadn't considered that dealer servicing would end up costing so much.

But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.

<comment><USER37> I'm not much of a car guy, why are oil changes on exotics so much more expensive than on your average car?

<comment><USER38> Exotics have large oil pans. Your typical Murcielago requires 11 liters of oil to change, and that's synthetic, not dinosaur oil. Add to that an oil filter that is shipped from Italy. You're also changing the transmission oil, which also must be synthetic. There may be some other maintenance that the dealer likes to perform (brake fluid? spark plugs?) at the same time as an oil change. Add dealer markup and insurance to all of this and you're easily over $500.

<comment><USER7> I'm guessing that they also get gouged for being rich enough to afford it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I saved a link to my pinboard a while back about a couple who sold all their possessions and took a VW van through North/Central/South America and in and around Africa. Super interesting read: <http://www.vwvagabonds.com/>

</comment><comment><USER40> I'm currently living in a van! Me and my long term girlfriend have taken some time from the 9-5 to travel around Europe for a while. Been on the road for almost three months now and it's done wonders for my mental state.y mind is clearer, I'm calmer and I feel better. I'm still trying to work on small projects and I have an osx utility I wrote entirely on the road using my MacBook Pro and the solar panels on the van to power it.

It's not cheap, we are able to live on basically half of what we were living on before, but that's not the point of this journey for us.

If your interested in our travels our blog is here <http://www.wanderingeurope.co.uk>

</comment><comment><USER41> never thought i'd get a chance to promote foster hunting on hacker news, but et voila: the polar opposite of this article – something that would inspire you to _want_ to live in a van – can be found on this fantastic blog: <http://www.arestlesstransplant.com>

<comment><USER42> I concur. This is one of my absolute favorite blogs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> When I worked in Palo Alto and lived in SF, the daily commute felt tolerable for three days of the week and then became intolerable for the last two days of the week. After quitting my job and getting a trailer to travel the country, I figured out that a solution to the commute would have been to buy a trailer/van while in SV and park it permanently in one of the huge lots at work and overnight there when I didn't feel like driving back to SF. Like vans, some trailers, like Airstreams or vintage "canned hams", don't depreciate if taken care of.

</comment><comment><USER44> I met Steve Roberts [1] at a conference when he was riding his bike around the country (pedal power). And he was living this life by choice. When I moved to the Bay Area it was in the midst of a huge recession (chip companies were dying, fabs were closing). I thought a bit about it, and wondered what it would be like.

I've always wondered if, when flying high, folks might put together a 'bug out plan' which included mobile accommodations.

[1] <http://nomadness.com/>

</comment><comment><USER45> Regarding the topic of internet access, I wonder how many van dwellers resort to piggybacking on nearby homeowners' unsecured wifi networks? Seems like if you're trying to minimize costs, rolling up alongside an open network is a great way to get your Hulu and Netflix without going over your data limits.

<comment><USER19> Granted I've been in campgrounds the last few months and not near many residential neighborhoods, but my experience is that its more trouble than it is worth.

We have a wifi extender on the roof of our travel trailer. Finding an open wifi is fairly rare these days. Even campground offered wifi is hit or miss on speed. Our 3g data card rocks. 20gig a month gives us a little leeway on streaming. We make due with local news and a stash of Seinfeld and Sopranos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Don't worry honey, that "creepy" guy living in front of our house is actually just an entrepreneur!

</comment><comment><USER47> This guy goes one step further; living in a Honda Civic:

[http://www.quora.com/Would-becoming-homeless-be-a-good- strat...](http://www.quora.com/Would-becoming-homeless-be-a-good-strategy-to- cut-costs-1/answer/Kurt-Varner)

<comment><USER22> He's on HN and posted his link :)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4617792>

<comment><USER48> I have a friend who lived in a Honda Accord for three months. He says his goal was to save money but his friends (including myself) are convinced that he was just too lazy to look for an apartment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is common in the kayaking/climbing community.

Every paddler I know living out of a van gets an old Toyota Previa. Why? They're cheap, fuel-efficient, readily available, easy to gut the back, and deal with dirt roads fairly well.

</comment><comment><USER50> A friend of mine did this in LA for a couple years and paid off his school loans. He worked for a company that had a full kitchen and showers, so he was able to use the office frequently for those necessities.

</comment><comment><USER51> The van thing should resonate with a lot of entrepreneurs. As a bootstrapped 20-something entrepreneur I couldn't help but secretly think "live in a van" was my backup no matter how well things were going.

</comment><comment><USER52> Completely doable; even in a smaller vehicle. I spent the second half of grad school living in a Hyundai Elantra - take out the back seats, sleeping between the trunk and the back seat. Not the most comfortable living, but completely doable.

Mostly, the flexibility and minimalism appealed to me, the $ savings were a secondary benefit (and weren't that beneficial, as food costs go up without a refrigerator).

</comment><comment><USER53> It seems to me that a water reservoir with a tube going near the engine (for heating) and a small water pump, coupled with an inflatable bathtub could solve the shower problem.

I've never lived in a van, but my family used to go camping and we used a similar system (inflatable bathtub inside the tent) so that my younger brother could take a bath even if it was too cold outside for him.

<comment><USER54> It's far simpler than that for most of the year, solar powered showers are $20 and work really well (often, too well, I've been burned by one camping).

[http://www.amazon.com/Stearns-SunShower-showers-Capacity- gal...](http://www.amazon.com/Stearns-SunShower-showers-Capacity- gallons/dp/B000NVC1JY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Tynan lives in his van RV in SF and works on his startup full time. He's been living in it for years. If I was going to do this, I would get a roadtrek and remove the decals. They stand out the least.

<http://tynan.com/community/living-in-a-small-rv-introduction>

</comment><comment><USER56> I've never tried living like this, but we had a similar VW camper van that was our main car and also our holiday accommodation.

One thing to remember - when you stop in a layby for the night, you will get on average 2-3 people think it is HILARIOUS to drive past with hand on their car horn.

</comment><comment><USER57> Lore Sjoberg, all-around awesome and hilarious guy (anyone remember the Brunching Shuttlecocks?), is in a van. A random recent post: <http://loresjoberg.com/view/monkeyconversation/>

</comment><comment><USER58> Plenty of people living in vans and cars in western ND since housing is such an issue. Heck, I have relatives renting spots on their front lawn and an electrical cord for $900/mo to people with campers.

Their are plenty of interviews on the web about what that is like.

</comment><comment><USER59> Not receiving data on my end - here is the cached page:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.pr...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.priceonomics.com/post/32944888191/living- in-a-van)

</comment><comment><USER60> We spent our holidays as kids in such a VW and it was fantastic. That article made me miss those days. The holidays where always just a couple of weeks, though, so not like living in a van for good.

</comment><comment><USER61> I had this idea a while back to just travel the United States working on freelance ideas, but geeze...

</comment><comment><USER62> Didn't Chris Farley have something to say about living in a van, down by the river?

</comment><comment><USER63> I thought this type of living went away with the Grateful Dead. I can see it as some sort of strange counter-culture, but to do it for financial reasons just seems absurd. Unless you are truly destitute, it ultimately carries so many other burdens that will add to the costs.

</comment><comment><USER64> all i can think about is chris farley "living in the van down by the river"

</comment><comment><USER65> This will get much easier when robocars come out. You won't have to worry about police and zoning laws, the car can move every once in a while or continuously be moving. If robocar renting takes off you don't even the cash up front to pay for one. Showers and toilets can be separately moving robocars so this can all be done in small vehicles rather than large RV's. The fuel would electric (robocars recharge themselves from electric gas stations) so the costs of all this would be minimal as well. If this all plays out well, apartments, and even houses should see a drop in value (a good thing because too much of wealth is being plowed into the unproductive economy of land owning - it can instead shift to purchasing engineered products).

<comment><USER66> That would be an interesting future. Go to a bar at night (dropped off by your robocar/house). Get really drunk. Get picked up by your robocar/house. Wake up really hungover, shower, change and then walk out of your robocar/house that is parked right in front of your office. Go to work. Not sure why this was the first thing that came to my mind, but it would be pretty damn cool.</comment></comment>


Why Isn't OpenBSD in Google Summer of Code 2017? - <AUTHOR> http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=149119308705465&w=2 <comment><USER2> I'm a GSoC org admin for a few years now. To be honest, the bureaucracy that comes with GSoC is really negligible from my point of view. The application form is fairly short, the evaluations during the summer are literally done in five minutes... there really isn't that much overhead.

The part that takes a lot of time for us is mentoring students. You'll very likely invest more time into the student than it would take you to write everything yourself (which also would be more fun). Unfortunately, some students don't stick around, but if everything works out, you'll get fantastic long-term contributors (we did). The upfront investment on the mentor' side may not be everyone's cup of tea (and that's ok), but I think it's unfair to attribute that to bureaucracy. GSoC may just not be a good fit for OpenBSD in that regard.

<comment><USER3> "it was too much effort on the part of the foundation organizers mentors to deal with the bureaucracy involved, and we didn't really see enough return in terms of new developers to the project"

I don't think Bob's statement is a criticism of the bureaucracy itself, but rather that the amount of time spent on the GSoC project as a whole is better spent doing other things that need doing on the OpenBSD project. He explicitly says so shortly after the above quote.

I'm not sure why this is even an issue to be discussed. Are people here trying to figure out what GSoC could do better so that projects like OpenBSD might find it worthwhile to participate? Or is the purpose to criticize OpenBSD, or Bob Beck individually, or both, for daring to say publicly that they have better ways to spend their time and effort than participating in GSoC? Clarity on those questions would be helpful in determining whether it's worth talking about.

Incidentally, the thought I had when I saw this on the list is that if the person who originally posted the question on misc@ really wants to contribute to OpenBSD, he can begin the way other contributors begin without GSoC: port a favorite app that's not already available to OpenBSD, test patches that the devs post and provide meaningful feedback, propose a patch that provides a solution to some problem you have run into while using OpenBSD, etc.

I think OpenBSD offers a great environment for real mentoring while maintaining their high standards for correctness and security. Sure, a student doesn't get paid any stipend to do it, but what they can learn in the process of contributing something that has long-lasting value to a project with OpenBSD's standards will surely pay off in career development in other ways.

If OTOH they need money to pay the rent over the summer or to burnish their resume for their application to Google, apparently they'll be better off contributing to another project that has the resources to participate in GSoC.

<comment><USER4> From what I read, they applied 2 years in a row, and nothing happened. From the link it's not really clear what happened.

> we didn't really see enough return in terms of new developers to the > project.

It's not clear in just this context what the author means. Were they looking to add significant numbers of full-time contributors? If so, I don't really think that's what GSoC is about. Isn't GSoC geared towards smaller projects that can nominally be completed in a student's summer break?

I mean, seems to me that expectations on the 2 sides are different: OpenBSD was looking to recruit full-time (I don't mean full-time in the 40-hours a week sense, but rather year-round part-time contributors) vs GSoC looking to fund individual efforts on OSS projects for 3-4 months during summer break.

Am I misunderstanding?

<comment><USER5> Your impression that nothing ever happened does not align with the facts.

The project applied 2 years in a row, and mentored several students. Some developers mentored more than one student.

[https://www.google- melange.com/archive/gsoc/2014/orgs/openbs...](https://www.google- melange.com/archive/gsoc/2014/orgs/openbsdfoundation) [https://www.google- melange.com/archive/gsoc/2015/orgs/openbs...](https://www.google- melange.com/archive/gsoc/2015/orgs/openbsd_foundation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess that's a sign of a really unhealthy community if they have no process of getting hackers into their system so that they can get productive within 15 weeks.

I really don't buy the "too much bureaucracy" argument. Google is really transparent in terms of GSoC and I would say they're really well managed. I read that as a sign of OpenBSD's weakness, not Google's.

<comment><USER5> For this particular open source project GSoC brings no advantage to the table (yes, it may be great for other projects).

OpenBSD does not need GSoC to attract contributors. The project gets a good amount of new contributors on a regular basis, and they get onboarded quickly without causing much distraction, if any.

The mentor/student relationship is atypical for open source projects which are used to operating as a community of equal peers. Mentoring students who expect to be mentored takes a lot of time, and the vast majority of them don't come back. In my experience money is a key incentive for students in GSoC and that makes it hard to keep them as volunteers. Unless you are very lucky as a mentor and pick a student who turns out to be an open source enthusiast, they won't actually care about your project in the long term. And there is no way of knowing that during the application process. Unless in special cases where you already know the student, as I did in one instance, but that's an exception.

(Speaking as an OpenBSD dev, and as a former mentor of several GSoC students, over several years, at the Apache Software Foundation).

<comment><USER7> As a former student I would like to emphasize that it is not about the money. I would have worked on the same project in the summer even if I was not getting paid. There can be various reasons why students won't return or become permanent contributors. For example in my case being a double major in very distant disciplines I do not have the time to contribute when school is on. Then summer I will be working on my thesis at another university which again would leave me little time to make any significant contributions. I am still trying my best to help new people by reviewing requests and making small changes that don't take too much of my time. I plan (hopefully) to get back to contributing on weekends once I am done with school.

For a few friends I have found internships being another reason why they did not go back to their orgs. 5k$ seems like a big amount but it really isn't (even in India!)

Finally, one last reason I can think of is terrible mentors. I have been really lucky to have amazing mentors but I have heard a few horror stories from others.

<comment><USER8> Having been on the receiving side of GSoC students, I'd say 90% of them come from poor countries and are looking for the money. I've seen some that weren't students at all and seemed to be working for "consulting" companies already.

<comment><USER7> Can't really comment on this as I know no such people. The "consulting" companies part is hard to believe given the rules for GSoC. The new payment adjustment taking into account PPP is a welcome move in this regard even though I don't agree on the numbers they have decided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know exactly how big the OpenBSD volunteer team is but I think it must be substantially larger than most open source projects because of their user base. This is a weak argument to not participate in GSoC. There are multiple projects with a much smaller volunteer base than OpenBSD who participate in GSoC.

At the same time I do recognize that the effort involved for mentoring someone is huge and the actual payout is not much for the mentor (it was $500 the time I participated).

I think it is viable to see GSoC as a platform through which you can reward your existing student contributors as well - ask them apply through GSoC and they can get paid for their contributions. This eliminates the effort involved in onboarding new contributors and also provides a nice reward for the existing contributors.

<comment><USER10> > This is a weak argument to not participate in GSoC

Hey, at least have the courage and in integrity to tell them directly how to run their project. On the mailing list. Not here.

Open source drive-by project management is one of the most fascinating (and sad) phenomenon to me. How can people who have no association with some other group of individuals have the audacity to tell them how to spend their time and how to run their project. It's bewildering.

<comment><USER9> I guess I wasn't very clear in my comment. I don't use OpenBSD, I don't subscribe to their mailing list and I am not a contributor. Hence, it will be nonsensical of me to go and criticize their decisions there.

Also I can't tell if you are directing the last part of your comment towards me or towards Google, but I certainly respect their decision to not participate. They participated previously and decided that the payout in terms of new contributors wasn't worth it (and I agree with them there) - at the same time there is a second angle to look at GSoC from and that is what I pointed out in the last part of my comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> An open source project I am involved with had the same experience. We were expecting to get idealistic young people as students who had a passion for the project. Instead, we got people from poor countries who were doing it for the money and didn't care about the project at all. I understand that this money may do some good and I don't blame the students for going for it, but it really tainted the whole process in my mind.

GSoC also has this this weird master/slave (or if you like, employer/employee) dynamic that is very artificial. If you are a mentor, you are basically a manager for the student. You have to give status reports, feedback, evaluate how they are doing, decide whether to pass or fail them at the end, and so forth. It's very different from how a real open source project operates. If you want to know what being a middle manager operating an outsourced project feels like, then being a GSoC mentor is for you. If that is something you would run screaming from, then I would stay away.

</comment><comment><USER12> IMHO GSoC should be something like "hacktoberfest" where contributors for the projects get paid for squashing bugs not for making "new features" nobody needs.

<comment><USER13> That would be an interesting project. Have projects submit a list of bugs they would like some help with and then pay the selected students for each bug fixed (maybe with a base stipend). Probably teach quite a bit about the daily grind of software development.

<comment><USER14> Google CodeIn is what you're looking for, although this is for pre-university students:

[https://developers.google.com/open- source/gci/](https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/)

<comment><USER13> Nice project, but a version with college students would probably work better.

<comment><USER15> At that point it seems like a glorified version of a bug bounty list[1].

The convenience of GSoC is that the students get to intern with pay on open source projects. If squashing bugs is the only goal, then going through their bug bounty lists and getting paid for it really is just picking a company on that list and doing it yourself. However, with a Google program behind it and the company's agreement, I'm sure the amount paid will be higher and/or more consistent.

Including my old link [2] for security/bug vulnerability discovery as well, since you get paid for these by the companies based on bug fixes or discoveries.

[1]([https://www.bountysource.com/bounties/search](https://www.bountysource.com/bounties/search))

[2]([https://bugcrowd.com/list-of-bug-bounty- programs](https://bugcrowd.com/list-of-bug-bounty-programs))

<comment><USER12> The value of "mentorship" or "internship" at FOSS projects are overrated, most of this projects run without clear goals and improvements are made only by "interested parties" like intel wanting their technologies to run better on Linux or the devs at GitHub optimizing "Git" for the sake of their business operations but yet not a single improvement on the UI side (obviously because it will hurt their business if suddenly people realize how easy could be using Git without GitHub).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there some statistics out there for number of students whose code is still used and/or are now developers/contributors on the project the did GSoC for?

</comment><comment><USER16> On the other hand, i was discussing a gsoc project on Debian since last year (was very excited about it), and guess what, Debian was not accepted as a gsoc organization for this year, nice...

edit-> i'm a student and gsoc's stipend would help me a lot.

<comment><USER17> I don't know what the timeline for GSoC is so maybe it's too late, but Haiku (BeOS-inspired/compatible open source OS <www.haiku-os.org>) was accepted again this year and might be of interest to you.

<comment><USER18> +1 to working with Haiku. I submitted some patches, and they're a friendly and welcoming developer community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anyone interested in brainstorming how to make GSOC work, as it apparently doesn't?

The first thing that comes to mind is pay a stipend to the project and the student. So if the student gets $6K and 99.99% of them skip town at the end of summer no further contact, the project gets nothing but unmaintained code and wasted effort. However... what if the project ALSO got $6K of cold hard cash? Or credit for google services, adwords, donated hardware, who knows...

<comment><USER20> It didn't work out for OpenBSD. I wouldn't generalize so quickly.

Mentoring students does take work, some do try and game the system. That happens no matter if GSoC or not. With GSoC, you basically have a form of financial support for hiring students. The GSoC paperwork is also rather minimal.

If you can, going through local universities and colleges is also a great way to have students work on community-driven Free Software projects. On a project, we had 4 engineering students do the equivalent of an internship on our community mesh network project. They did really great work and it's nice to have ties with university communities. We also had profs in social science classes inviting us to give talks, or had networking workshops during the weekends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is sad.

It means that Google Summer of Code imposes too much bureaucracy onto Free Software projects. In other words, GSoC is only viable for those projects whohave enough spare volunteers to begin with.

<comment><USER22> I think in OpenBSD's case it was that, plus the fact that they got essentially zero code that was anywhere near their standards, or any devs willing to commit longer-term to improve it. If the results had been better, more mentors/devs would have been willing to step up.

GSOC promotes dumps of low to mid quality code that then goes unmaintained. After all its focused on relatively junior programmers doing it for a nice stipend as part of their school experience for a summer (or so).

GSOC is just a bad fit for the sort of quality and maintainership OpenBSD demands from its codebase and contributors. They have had a lot of years of experience with academic code mostly written as a proof of concept without an eye to maintainability that later rots in tree and makes everyone else's job worse.

<comment><USER23> How exactly is OpenBSD planning on getting more coders that can code to their standards if they aren't willing to teach anybody? NIH + an unwillingness to let anyone else into the house seems like an excellent way for a project to find itself facing the brink should 1 or 2 core developers leave the project for any reason.

>without an eye to maintainability that later rots in tree and makes everyone else's job worse.

...that's the whole point of the mentors. IF that's what OpenBSD is getting out of GSoC, it's the mentor(s) fault, not GSoCs.

<comment><USER22> They were willing to mentor people via GSoC, nobody stuck around (almost all the applicants do it for the money, rather than an interest in volenteering), ergo its not worth their time. Even in organizations that have a high priority towards onboarding new devs, GSoC retention rates are typically very low.

They have no issues attracting devs via other channels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Even if the current contributions are slim, wouldn't the long term benefit of perhaps gaining a permanent contributor outweigh the current effort to educate more people?

<comment><USER25> I think it depends on how slim, the mentors have to take out time from their own projects, so you'd have to detract that from the gain. You'd also have to factor in maintenance on new code produced by GSoC students that don't stick around.

Honestly I don't get why people are upset, the explanation from Bob seems completely reasonable. If the OpenBSD developers don't believe that they see sufficient result from their work, then nobody is forcing them to participate.

<comment><USER24> It sounds sad and short sighted to me. Maybe they are turning away volunteers because interest is so high. That would be a rare Open Source project.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Has Youtube been Hacked? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm getting the following message "500 Internal Server Error

Sorry, something went wrong.

A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation."

</comment><comment><USER2> They are changing UI. I guess.</comment>


Rabbit Holes: The Secret to Technical Expertise - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bityard.net/articles/2019/August/rabbit-holes-the-secret-to-technical-expertise.html <comment><USER2> The trick is knowing _how deep_ to go, which depends a lot on your goals. If you just want to learn for your own curiosity, rabbit hole forever! If you want to build useful, applicable knowledge, there'a a peak of usefulness after which there are diminishing returns. So being self-aware enough to know when to pull the plug on your rabbit hole is pretty important (professionally).

Also certain kinds of rabbit holes are way more useful than others. If you're rabbit holing into some obscure, arcane system, and the stuff you're learning isn't challenging you _fundamentally_ , you're probably wasting your time (I call these "rat holes"). If your rabbit hole will yield new fundamental insights into something important...now that's a good rabbit hole!

<comment><USER3> The best depth before you hit the knee in the curve is undergraduate-level textbooks. Sometimes you have to go deeper, but that's the level that is presented in a form that's easy to grasp and can be quickly applied without using too arcane language and abstractions.

Also: Handbooks. For instance, the Art of Electronics. And I recently picked up a mechanical engineering handbook, and the breadth of the topics covered at a level I can quickly understand is very refreshing. (I'm a physicist, but I mostly do mechanical engineering and technician work, with a bit of aerospace and electrical engineering and material science.)

And combined with youtube and Wikipedia, you can learn a lot very quickly.

<comment><USER4> >Art of Electronics

What would you suggest before The Art of Electronics?

<comment><USER5> Practical Electronics for Inventors [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/687619.Practical_Electro...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/687619.Practical_Electronics_for_Inventors)

Title is slightly wanky, but it's the best non-textbook beginner guide I've found, since it actually does contain all the math & theory a hobbyist will need. The explanations are very clear and most motivated people with high- school math should be able to follow along. It's not the best to read back-to- back, but has detailed explanations of lots of areas of electronics that make great primers/refreshers. I had it out last week for a quick refresher on notch filters. Doesn't go into tremendous depth, but more beginner/hobbyist friendly than Art of Electronics shich is similar (and excellent) but aimed at EEs instead of hobbyists.

For something even more beginner-oriented any of Forrest Mims' books (formerly published by Radioshack/Tandy) are great but a little dated, and don't cover anything more modern than discrete logic and don't provide much in the way of theory. Excellent introduction to electronics books though, many fun projects for getting kids into the hobby who want to dive a little deeper into electronics vs. hooking up modules to an Arduino.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Shortcuts is my personal mortal enemy. I talk to people that "really want to learn topic X" but: a) don't want to read any books, b) don't want to watch any training videos (from nuggets in the old days, to youtube tutorials now). They just want a quick and dirty solution to everything, always. That comes with a price.

People want shortcuts. I don't like or use shortcuts 99% of the time.

My experience is that when you go looking for X to serve a need today, you discover Y and Z and guess what.. Y and Z will come very handy tomorrow, when in a call/meeting about ABC, miraculously Y and Z are similar and you speak up a d impress everyone and get the job/contract.

<comment><USER7> I frequently get emails from people which follow a predictable pattern:

"I'm doing a PhD in .. I saw your blog post .. can you point me at a tutorial for advanced-subject?"

I often wonder why people don't do research, and what would happen if tutorials just disappeared. People would have to do their own research and learning. Maybe things would take longer, but I think the people would benefit from it.

<comment><USER8> Admittedly, I don't send personal emails, but on HN or Reddit, I'll often ask experts or people who are at least knee-deep in a topic themselves (or find previous instances where expert(s) was asked).

It's not about laziness, it's just that as somebody who doesn't know anything about established papers or books of a certain field or how it's structured, it can help a great deal to get started if somebody can point in a general direction of where to spend my attention (which is a limited resource). As somebody with dozens of interests across a bunch of disciplines, drawing on existing knowledge has been such an immense time saver and help that I'm always grateful for. There are a _lot_ of books and papers out there. And not all of them are particularly good. If other people have experienced them and share that experience, why shouldn't I want to draw on that?

Also, I've gotten a response as often as I haven't. And when I don't, it really isn't a big deal. You don't need to respond to every request.

<comment><USER7> > You don't need to respond to every request.

True, but I feel a little bad if I don't at least say "Please write a tutorial yourself, people would be pleased".

Sometimes useful discussion occurs, but mostly it feels like "please send me the codes / do my homework for me". It's hard anyway to judge intent.

<comment><USER9> I'd love to know what percentage of the population has any interest in self- directed learning.

It may well be smaller than we hope. And HN - probably software in general - is unlikely to be representative of the population median.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of how, as a kid, I tried to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. I didn't have a chance in hell, of course, but my attempts enabled me to learn a ton of advanced math and even finding on my own some results that turned out to be already well known (e.g., Euler's formula). It's one of the purest forms of learning but as an adult, I no longer have the time or freedom to do it to the same extent. Still, the basic approach is worth keeping. You just need to limit yourself a little so that you don't end up too deep in the rabbit hole, spending a ton of time on things that you really don't need to know.

<comment><USER11> I had a similar approach with the following equation:

What does the infinite series of 1/(k^2) converge to for k=1 to infinity.

When I was in high school, I spent weeks going down this rabbit hole of mathematics, failing to solve it. Years later I discovered that this equation is a special case of the Riemann Zeta Function, which was also first studied by Euler. His proof is really elegant. The funny thing is that with some math equations, sometimes you intuitively can see that there is something important or far reaching about an equation, even if you arent skilled enough in mathematics to discover it. Some kind of curiosity draws you in

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Or positioned another way, this is Yak Shaving:

Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on.

[http://yak-shaving.urbanup.com/1164318](http://yak- shaving.urbanup.com/1164318)

</comment><comment><USER13> The "right" solution to get a quiet login is to

       touch ~/.hushlogin

in your home directory.

It's documented in the login(1) man page.

There's also a global /etc/hushlogins file you can create to take care of all users.

</comment><comment><USER14> Rabbit holes are why I grew to love Haskell and pure-functional programming in general. For better or worse, Haskell (Agda, Idris...) doesn't let you compromise very often.

You could argue that this is terrible for productivity, and you might be right, but at the same time, means that a lot of people have done a lot of research on how to do things the "right" way in Haskell, and any project I've done with the language has led me to learning a whole slew of new things about type theory, category theory, and PL theory in general, which I can then take and apply to "productive" languages.

<comment><USER15> This aligns precisely with a memorable interview I gave to a PhD student who wanted to do an internship at a startup.

"The thing I love about Haskell is that even the simplest things become research projects"

However I understand where you are coming from. There's something to be said for environments that encourage learning.

<comment><USER14> Every now and then I get mildly embarrassed because someone has managed to summarize my long-windedness to a beautiful and elegant sentence. The line "The thing I love about Haskell is that even the simplest things become research projects" has done that. I'm going to steal that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article describes pretty much the entire reason I got in to software development, why I'm still doing it, why I'm here today, why I run Linux on my main machine, etc.

I have an undergraduate degree in Physics for largely the same reason.

I'm increasingly convinced that this is just a mindset you have or you don't.

For me, the world is a place to tinker about in, learn, build stuff, break stuff, etc.

I'm currently tinkering about with my homelab setup, tweaking the security, setting up redundancy, etc. Why? 'cos I can, and when you hire me you get all of that.

It's certainly served me well so far!

</comment><comment><USER17> As one who simply tinkers with Linux but is not a guru, I found this article quite inspiring! I had no idea just how deep that sort of rabbit hole can go. I feel inspired to try to delve behind the scenes for myself... The author has made my day :-)

</comment><comment><USER18> Yeah this is just overkill. I haven't edited /etc/motd in a while so this was news to me but this is just code creep and makes me sad.

<comment><USER19> Same here. My reaction at each step is "how do you delete this subsystem?" and "what poor person wrote this?"

Still, nice learning exercise for the author.

<comment><USER20> Exactly. I'm sure somebody wanted it at some point somewhere, but now it's on every system. No wonder people keep starting new minimal Linux distros.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is the reason why people who don't respect coding as a discipline end up producing terrible code.

In my professional life I've run into a lot of people who will say "the idea is already there, it just needs to be coded up".

They will then come across common coding issues like keeping things in version control, adding tests, network config, and language specific things. They decide they don't have time for this particular rabbit hole, because of course they already know what they want.

The good people will over time end up investigating everything, even if it doesn't seem relevant to your LOB application. And they produce much better code because of it.

<comment><USER22> As someone coding for my own business, I often find myself deep down a rabbit hole and have to get out and force myself to just use that ugly patch.

It's a balancing act, because it hurts me to just leave something without completing it "the right way" but I have found that if I try to do everything "the right way", I would get so little done.

I try to keep this in mind when reviewing or working on other's code. Some things will anger me at first glance but the problem is, they were probably just prioritizing different things at the time than I would have prioritized right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love this kind of stuff, it's the most pure kind of learning, no end goal but satisfying your innate OCD. I've gone down these rabbit holes in tech and alternative fields - politics, philosophy, cooking. It's crazy, but it lead me to some life long hobbies.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm not sure about "technical expertise", as most of the stuff you learn while doing this is highly specific, but perhaps the real expertise is having the toolset and determination to do this at all. To keep taking screws out of the system and removing the covers until you find out where the system makes a particular decision. Fortunately in this case you can go to the source; if you can't, or as a first attempt, strace will usually tell you where a particular program gets its information from. Harder to use here as you'd need to setup the login process itself with strace and there's privilege boundary considerations.

One observation I would make is how many layers of "plugin architecture" have been added here. Probably the original SysV login program just printed /etc/motd. Now we have PAM, and pam_motd itself also runs a bunch of tiny plugins, some of which also refer across to systemd.

I should probably write up some of my own deep-dive debugging stories, if I can still remember enough detail. The "why does structured exception handling sometimes not work on Windows CE" was a particularly time consuming one which involved disassembling bits of Windows kernel.

</comment><comment><USER24> There was drama about the MOTD two years ago.

Here is the summary from LWN, [https://lwn.net/Articles/726902/](https://lwn.net/Articles/726902/)

</comment><comment><USER25> So, blur the hostname in the SSH command, login to machine, where the hostname is ip-172.31.48.7.. Two things are funny here: First, the failed attempt, and second, the idea that anyone cares what the IP of your raspberry pi is.. If anyone cares to know, mine has 192.168.30.12.

<comment><USER26> haha, perhaps there was some profanity that had to be blurred out

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Rabbit holes and their implications aside...

As a software engineer, a part of me has died because of the hardcoded strings (in the pam_motd.c patch). Why aren't these defined as constants in the header file?

Hopefully there's a good reason...

</comment><comment><USER28> The metaphor critique paragraph seems to be missing the fact that name comes from _Alice in Wonderland_ , where the protagonist falls "through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice's_Adventures_in_Wonderla...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice's_Adventures_in_Wonderland)

I.e. it makes complete sense in context.

</comment><comment><USER27> Most of us have fell down these rabbit holes of learning before; the author does a great job of illustrating the concept, showing the solving of an "ultimate question" about how/why something works the way it does.

I don't know if it counts the same, but I once went on a weird journey to solve a particular coding problem that I was certain was already answered. I don't recall the details, but I do recall thinking to myself "This seems like a common problem; a quick google should bring up a solution..." \- so, one google search later, and:

[https://xkcd.com/979/](https://xkcd.com/979/)

At that point, I vowed to solve the problem - again - and post the solution (of course the fact that I can't recall what the problem was negates me being able to show you what I mean - my apologies - sigh).

I quickly found that to solve the problem, I first had to learn how to code X, which in turn meant learning about Y and Z, and also coding A, B and C. I ended up going down these rabbit holes; by turns learning and coding partial solutions, by others finding example code I could adapt to my needs (not always in the language I was working with, either). I spent more than a few hours on this task, but I eventually did come up with a solution.

And as I recall, I did post that solution to the thread where I encountered XKCD-979 - so future people wouldn't be inconvenienced.

</comment><comment><USER29> We use platforms and layers that are at the level of branches and leaves on trees, supported by abstracted away structures hiding complexity that make them simpler to use as a platform higher up the tree (or down).

A researching traveler can go down the branch, to the trunk with lots of time rings and layers, and then further down there are many root systems and rabbit holes.

All sorts of functionality is abstracted away in layers down there, all the way to machine code and binary and everything before the epoch 1/1/1970\. Epic programming and technology pioneer legends created it, they took complexity and made a simple platform layer for others to build on.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Unless you got into tech solely for the money (you monster), it's stuff like > this that we nerds live for.

I take offense to that! :P

The rabbit holes of my past are half of why my paycheck is where it is. (The other half is interpersonal skills)

</comment><comment><USER31> It seems like the difference between a complicated, difficult system and a simple, easy system is whether it changes over time.

I feel like a Linux kernel in a NetBSD userland might be the best sweet spot, OS-wise, but I haven't used NBSD in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER32> > * Keen to learn Istio? It's included in the single-package MicroK8s.

But this is a rabbit hole! His rabbit hole is about removing a rabbit hole.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm going to go meta with my comment and say that this article is a fantastic object lesson as to why linux faces extremely low odds of ever being adapted as a widespread replacement for windows or OS X. How many people (outside of your coworkers) do you know who would or could follow a path similar to the one laid out in this article?

I'm speaking as someone who has dabbled with linux since 1998. At that time, and now, there is a huge, confused ball of conflict between linux distributions, various levels of customization to those distributions, and documentation available on the web.

Here's a quick, recent example from my own experience. I decided I wanted to learn more about Emacs. I work in Windows at work, so I downloaded portacle. Great. Works great. Then you start watching youtube videos on how to customize Emacs, but most youtube videos are using Emacs in Linux. So you then have to find where portacle puts all the stuff that is in a completely different place than all the Emacs documentation and videos say it is. Great. And I haven't found anyone who talks about the benefits/costs and gotchas about whether to edit the init.el file, or the .emacs file, but now we're getting into the weeds.

So after that frustrating rabbit hole, I think, "I'll just install a linux distro in a VM." Next thought: "Which distro should I get?" Search engines are no help when it comes to finding the "best" linux distro because all I can find is superficial opinion pieces on the matter.

So back when I worked at an ISP in the early 00s, they used Debian, so I download Debian.

Try to install emacs in Debian, and I start getting weird errors about some certain package not being current enough, and apparently someone isn't maintaining/updating the install script for Debian. That's three days lost getting to that conclusion.

So I wipe that VM and download Ubuntu, because it seems to be the most widely used distro, and seems like a good distro for "normies" like me. Install emacs, no problem. Can customize by following youtube videos, no problem. Enjoying emacs now.

All of this comes at a high price, however. I've been messing around with trying to use emacs for a few months now, on my side time at work and at home, and it's only been in the last couple of weeks that I've been able to use the package in a way in line with the available training materials.

Normies have no kind of patience for this kind of ridiculousness. Techies justify these "rabbit holes" as enthralling and fun, and yeah, it feels good to finally figure some of this kind of stuff out, but overall, it's a massive distraction from actually USING the tools, rather than just futzing around, trying to get the damn tools to work in the first place.

<comment><USER34> If your're on Windows 10 you could've used LSW (Linux Subsystem for Windows), on older Windows something like Cygwin. When I have to use Windows for work, Cygwin is amongs the first things I install (actually I found a Cygwin derivative called babun pretty good, unfortunately I think it's now no longer maintained). I use Vim rather than emacs, but emacs works well too.</comment></comment>


Seattle startup Cloudvox sold, three months after launch - <AUTHOR> http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/technologybrierdudleysblog/2010841052_seattle_startup_cloudvox_sold.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Huge congratulations to troyd on this one! I've watched the development of cloudvox for a bit over a year now, and it's been a pleasure to watch it's progress!</comment>


How to Accept Bitcoins Without Fees - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nameterrific.com/2012/12/the-complete-guide-to-accept-bitcoins-without-fees/

<comment><USER2> > However, processing Bitcoin payments is a completely different experience. > There's no paperwork (just code), no set-up cost and everyone can get > started in no time.

So true. That's what I love about Bitcoin: once you understand the technical working, there is nothing to it. It's all simple rules instead of fees, interest rates and chargebacks. And all that you own is actually really and truly yours. No bank could possibly take it from you when they go bankrupt.

<comment><USER3> There's something rather special about effectively hosting your payment processor (the Bitcoin RPC server) yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Flagged.

zhoutong is a known scammer. Do not do business with him. He needs to be banned on HN as well.

Edit: I'll quote what I said in reply to someone else:

Zhoutong is a scammer, he operated an illegal bucket shop known as Bitcoinica and tried to hide the true nature of the operation just so he could close it down at its peak and steal several thousand BTC from customers trading futures on his platform,

He then tried to cover up the theft by selling it to the people who run Intersango and tried to blame them for the missing Bitcoins. He also tried to blame "hackers" for it.

In addition, users are suing him for close to half a million dollars for his lies. His defense is hes claiming he was 17 at the time (early 2012).

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/bitcoinica- users-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/bitcoinica-users-sue- for-460k-in-lost-bitcoins/)

<comment><AUTHOR> It's really unfortunate that the link you referenced contained too many wrong understandings and misrepresentations. A little research can make the following clear:

1\. Bitcoinica was a regulated financial service provider before closing down.

2\. I sold 100% of it in October 2011, ~5 months _before_ the first breach.

3\. There has been no conclusive evidence about the last hack.

4\. I was not a defendant of the said lawsuit. I have not provided any defence regarding the lawsuit.

You're a credible person, but I hope you have credible sources to post here.

I have tried my best to discountinue my involvement on Bitcoin projects while keeping supporting the currency. I'm genuinely creating value through startups and you should be able to see this through my effort in NameTerrific.

<comment><USER5> You're a con arstist.

Nothing more.

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not understand why anyone would use an account created 9 hours ago and named as a variant of my legal name to criticize me personally without conclusive evidence, other than in an attempt to destroy the reputation of an 18-year-old entrepreneur, who is also a victim of the mis-management of his former startup after acquisition.

EDIT: I'm open to any discussions about your opinions and ideas. Feel free to email me (email in my profile).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Worth noting that Coinbase also does not have a fee to accept merchant payments (and keep them in bitcoin):

<https://coinbase.com/docs/merchant_tools/payment_buttons>

If you decide to cash out to USD the fee is 1%.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Brian. Coinbase is really cool and I also recommend it to everyone who plans to accept Bitcoin online, especially US merchants.

There are many services in the Bitcoin world with highly similar features and it's great to see a healthy competition in such an early stage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Without Fees? Nice try. The article doesn't cover this at all. I think it means "Without the High Fees of Credit Cards". Bitcoin has fees and the article mentions this. If anyone would actually like to write an article about avoiding BTC fees, I'm interested in that.

<comment><USER3> Yes, Bitcoin has fees, but they're transparently, voluntarily paid separately by the customer, not automatically deducted.

<comment><USER7> In practice it's not easy to avoid the fees. Maybe I need a custom client? Not sure. But I know what you're saying is true. If someone could explain how that would be awesome.

<comment><USER3> IIRC you weren't forced to by the default client in the past. Fees are actually optional, but there is no motivation for miners to include your transaction if you pay none. Hence the client tries to make you pay a fee. If you pay a higher fee, that means it goes through sooner since miners will of course priorities high-fee transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recently moved my domains to NameTerrific, and I would definitely recommend them. I love the management interface and they're very simple. Much, much better than the bloated GoDaddy.

</comment><comment><USER9> This isn't entirely related but I'd be interested if anyone knows the tax implications of _spending_ bitcoins. What happens if you receive bitcoins when they're worth 10 USD and then spend them when they're worth 20 USD. What tax rules apply here?

<comment><AUTHOR> The same problem can happen with any foreign currency. So the normal foreign currency accounting rules apply.

IF you're operating as a business:

When you receive 1 BTC at 10, assuming your accounting currency is USD, you should record a 10 USD revenue and a 1 BTC cash inflow (shown as 10 USD in balance sheet).

If the value of 1 BTC rises to 15, for example, you need to make an adjustment to the Unrealised Foreign Currency Gains and Losses account to reflect the change. The BTC cash account should be shown as 15 USD in balance sheet (with the same 1 BTC holdings) and there's an unrealised foreign currency gain of 5 USD (a temporary contra-expense account in equity section).

When you finally spend the Bitcoin at 20 USD, close the "unrealised" account to the "realised" account, and increase the realised gains to 10 USD. Now you should have a 20 USD expense, 0 USD cash balance and a 10 USD realised foreign currency gain. That's 10 USD worth of "net" expense.

So, 10 USD revenue and 10 USD "net" expense. Everything is balanced. That's 0 USD closed to P/L.

IF you're a consumer:

It should be treated as 10 USD capital gain because you disposed the asset at a higher value than the cost base. Equivalently, you can claim a capital loss if you dispose the asset at a lower value than the cost base. However, whether this is acceptable in your country depends on your actual circumstances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> hey zhou, what % of purchases use bitcoin?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently about 20% of NameTerrific payments are made in Bitcoin. Credit card is expected to be the dominant payment method anyway.

<comment><USER10> thanks, thats higher than i expected

are you specifically targeting the bitcoin crowd with nameterrific?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really because there wasn't any advertising happening around the Bitcoin idea. However we did a soft launch within the Bitcoin community when the payment solution wasn't ready, and that gained some initial adoption (with 100% Bitcoin payments).

Domain market is extremely competitive. But for domain registrars that accept Bitcoin, I'm quite confident that NameTerrific is simply the best. That's probably why the adoption rate is quite high.

EDIT: Just to clarify, we're seeing much more credit card orders coming up recently so it seems that the market for Bitcoin is quite limited. I guess even the largest Bitcoin merchants (like WordPress) may not have a large absolute figure for Bitcoin use. However, to us, accepting Bitcoin is somehow a symbol of "geekiness" so it's a good thing to continue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ZhouTong is a thief and con man.

<https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=95738.0>

He WILL steal your money.

Do not trust him.

<comment><USER8> I don't understand this, it seems to be posted all over this thread, but it doesn't make much sense. Did anyone get it?

<comment><USER11> There's a lot in that thread to sort through, but...

The exchange that zhou founded had about 60,000 bitcoins stolen in two instances. Plenty of evidence pointed to an inside job, probably by zhou himself.

This link provides Zhou's explanation of what 'really' happened, where he claims a Chen Jianhai, Chinese multi-millionaire with ties to organized crime who hunts for ancient relics and artifacts in his spare time, was the 'real' thief.

<https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=95795.0>

I'll leave it to others to assess the plausibility of this scenario.

<comment><USER8> Ugh, now I font know if I can trust them with my domains. Too bad, I might have to move away.

<comment><AUTHOR> The events following the acquisition of my previous startup Bitcoinica gave me a big hit on reputation. This made really frustrated as well.

Basically I sold 100% financial interest in October/November 2011 and I stopped all involvement in the company after April 2012 when I started NameTerrific. The new management was unable to process refunds to affected customers and a series of chaotic events blew up. Many were made up (especially the insider job theory about the last hack) for profit (for example, the owner of the exchanger who wrote the story retained $40,000 funds illegally and refused to provide any information needed to reclaim the money).

Your domains will be safe as I had absolutely no intent to operate any unethical business. Bitcoinica was controlling at peak $1 million in assets during my management and nothing went wrong at that time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Organized Crime: The World's Largest Social Network  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_orgchart_crime/

<comment><USER2> Except, of course, "legitimate trade" is roughly as much a "social network" - and would be far larger.

<comment><USER3> I think underground economic organizations have a social cohesion that legitimate trade lacks, though. There's a reason that terms like "cosa nostra" ("our thing") are used, and why so many gangs inspire a fierce, blood relative-like loyalty, whereas you'd be hard-pressed to find that kind of strong social bonding in above ground organizations.

Except, maybe Apple.

<comment><USER4> I disagree - if you head out to any small or medium sized "town" (my own, for example), you'll see the same kind of social bonding, loyalties, and cohesion amongst the people at organizations and even between organizations themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How organized crime solves the social networking privacy dilemma:

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

<comment><USER5> Coincidentally, this is also the code of honor at school/kindergarten.

I wonder what the explanation could be behind this notion of opposing authority to help your peers even when it is costly to you in the short term. Does a game theory explanation exist?

From what I've read most nations occupied by an enemy force develop a similar code of honor in regards to the aggressor.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it exists in a lot of different sectors of society. Police have the "blue wall of silence", animal liberationists have "security culture", Baltimore gang members have "stop snitching", Marxists have "revolutionary discipline", it goes on and on.

I think if anything, the game theory response is determined by a distrust of the impartiality of authority. The Boondocks actually had a really good dissection about why "Stop Snitching" caught on.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUwvAqLvivU> (NSFW, Language)

Specifically, 1m 45s in. It also doesn't touch on that often talking to the police can be used by the police as pretext to crack down on unrelated crimes. So when you think you're doing good, next thing you know, your cousin is getting arrested for having a small amount of weed in their room.

I think any social organization that has something to worry about when it comes to loose lips learns very quickly that you either learn to keep your mouth shut and value your social relationships well, or your social organization ceases to exist.

In a way, social networking puts us all in that kind of situation. Many of us do illegal, socially unaccepted, or consequential things, although what we do may not be morally objectionable at all. We haven't learned yet what the criminal organizations have, which is to a) keep your mouth shut, and b) choose your friends wisely.

Instead, people tend to look towards technical solutions like cryptography.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: what are some good blogs about online advertising? - <AUTHOR>

I'm thinking more big-picture stuff about trends and its future, rather than how-to guides for Adwords users or those who want to make money from their Tumblr.<p>Is there anything readable, entertaining and forward thinking, perhaps along the lines of Seth Godin or Daring Fireball? <comment><USER2> affbuzz.com is an aggregator of all the affilate and internet marketing blogs. It's a relatively young industry, and the content creators are young as well. I expect you are seeking deeper intellectual content rather than how to make a quick buck, but you should find it interesting nonetheless. Searching through some of the blogs will find you many intriguing case studies, trends, and unexpected marketing avenues. The most popular ones are on top.

<comment><USER3> Among those, here's some with more case studies and content vs. just selling you something, talking inside baseball, or 'motivation': cashtactics.net, rileypool.com, mrgreen.am, finchsells.com.

A lot of the best content in this area exists as "stickies" on certain forums . . .

The general consensus is: keep looking. Don't buy ebooks. The best info is freely available but can be buried in mounds of crap -- usually paid content is the way to cut through the crap, but not in this arena (in 98% of cases).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All friends and acquaintances:

<http://reactionwheel.blogspot.com/>

<http://www.cogmap.com/blog/>

<http://mikeonads.com> (sporadically updated but good)

<http://ecpmblog.wordpress.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> I write a blog about "digital strategy" (the ad industry insider-speak for what you're talking about) at <http://www.joshklein.net>. Most of my posts are about big brand strategy from inside an advertising agency, but I also think startups should know about many of the same things.

</comment><comment><USER6> I subscribe to adexchanger's news letter which covers industry trends and what-not.

There is a lot of noise, but good coverage of the big players / industry level news.

www.adexchanger.com

</comment><comment><USER7> Rkgblog is a great resource for anything search-related.

</comment><comment><USER8> Rob Walker's stuff is very good.</comment>


Now available: auto-scaling PostgreSQL deployments - <AUTHOR> https://blog.compose.io/new-year-new-database-postgresql-on-compose/

<comment><USER2> On this note, what is people's favorite way of scaling out Postgres? I'm told Slony + master/slaves configs are good for scaling out read-heavy situations, but it seems that there are a ton of alternatives on the market.

Is there a comprehensive guide on the various options and tradeoffs for this kind of things? Good resources one could use to learn more about it?

<comment><USER3> Ugh, slony is awful. You use Slony when you have to do a live migration from one version to another (say 9.3 to 9.4) without any downtime. WAL replication is the way to go most of the time. I've used Londiste, it's better than Slony if you need partial replication, but still messy to use compared to WAL.

Personally I haven't used any of the others (i.e. Bucardo).

<comment><USER2> Would you be so kind as to provide context on why WAL replication is superior to logical replication? I'm very interested in learning more about it.

Also, what specifically did you hate about Slony?

Any resources you'd recommend on this?

<comment><USER4> WAL replication is currently the official and best supported mechanism for replication. If WAL replication does not suite your particular use case, then that is when to start looking at Slony, Bucardo, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great, but two things:

1) Where are you physically located? As I would want to move my API servers very close to the database for performance. Knowing which city and datacenter would help.

2) Please fix the logo in to the top left of your blog to go to your main website. It's a UI fail when logos do not go to the main website even when the blog is on a sub-domain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Postgres is currently in Ashburn VA (near AWS us-east-1) and Dublin, Ireland (eu-west-1).

Good catch on the logo, that irks me too.

<comment><USER5> It would be great if you had more locations that favour non-Amazon customers though I understand why you would prioritise that first.

I mostly use Linode [https://www.linode.com/speedtest](https://www.linode.com/speedtest) and the locations of AWS are generally good for Amazon but bad for other services. For example in London nearly all smaller hosting providers, as well as major peering connectivity, is based around the LINX locations such as Telehouse.

Latency to the database is key, but without moving to AWS (which I wouldn't want to do for price and performance reasons) I couldn't achieve a low enough latency here to consider it.

Another thing... "sign-up for free" quickly followed by "enter payment method". Which is it? I wanted to sign up, in part just to receive future notifications and also to get a sense as to the qualitative feel of your dashboard tools. For reasons outlined above, I'm not going to buy a service today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Great to see but I'd like some real numbers on the performance, in my experience AWS' poor storage performance has always been a show stopper for large database especially when trying to scale them if integrity is crucial to your platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't use AWS's storage — at least not EBS. We run on our own hardware and on the i2 instances on AWS that have high performance ephemeral SSD arrays. Our benchmarks of the i2s show their IO performance is quite good, as you'd expect of local SSDs.

<comment><USER7> How do you get persistence if all your storage is ephemeral?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not all ephemeral, the physical servers we run are old-school redundant (RAID-10, two power supplies, etc). Even ephemeral is persistent — it's just something that'll go away if you migrate your instance to new host hardware.

Deployments are on two servers and the write ahead log is streamed to both the slave and offsite secondary storage. Replication is async so there _is_ potentially a small window of data loss if a whole server goes. We are considering letting people opt in to synchronous replication, but don't have it available yet.

<comment><USER7> Ephemeral storage is just that - ephemeral. Amazon can decide to retire your instance at any time.

So your persistence plan is RAID 10 it sounds like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not many PostgreSQL DBaaS offerings out there. This is great news.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why should I choose this over Amazon's RDS?

</comment><comment><USER10> if you aren't going to tell me how the scaling is implemented, how it impacts ACID, and describe your edge cases well, then It's going to be hard to trust the solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't have enough content about this yet, but we run a very vanilla Postgres setup on big, beefy servers and scale resources vertically, similar to how we start with MongoDB: [https://blog.compose.io/how-we-scale- mongodb/](https://blog.compose.io/how-we-scale-mongodb/)

Scaling Postgres horizontally is not something most of our customers need right now. When we do release scale-out, it'll be obvious to customers how we do it — we might just make something from our good buddies at Citus Data available, for instance.

<comment><USER10> Got it. thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> First of all, this is great news - I use compose for Mongo and have been waiting for a PostgreSQL option. However, is the ram allotment similar to that given in the Mongo deployments - 1/10th storage? So, about $125/month for 1GB ram and 10GB storage. Making the obvious comparison to Heroku (which, granted, doesn't offer the autoscaling feature), Compose looks quite expensive. At a glance, it seems that on Heroku one gets the same amount of ram and 6 times the storage for less than half the cost of Compose.

<comment><USER12> People are paying $125/month for 1GB memory and 10GB space? I see how AWS is making so much money, those prices are just insane.

<comment><USER13> I sense you've never worked in a suit & tie enterprise...

If you have backups, upgrade, access to monitoring tools, etc. 125$ / month is just 2 hours max of developer time.

That's a _bargain_ and your standard Oracle admin should just feel threatened :-) (provided the company is willing to put its data on a server far away of its control room, which, I guess, doesn't happen so often :-))

so a bargain if you actually can make use of it...

<comment><USER12> People that use Oracle don't even read HN, it's another league.

<comment><USER14> Out of curiosity, what do they read?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's probably more accurate to say that people who buy Oracle don't read HN. Developers that use Oracle might read HN, and these are the people that are driving the future of databases. There's a reason most new DBs have an open source business model. :)

People who buy Oracle are likely reading management publications, and possibly Gigaom. They're not reading technical discussions of databases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> PostgreSQL wants to be web scale but it will never touch MongoDB scale. MongoDB is true web scale with full cloud compatibility and horizontal scaling like how clouds spread out in the real world. MongoDB mimics physics because physics is green technology. MongoDB is truly efficient with zero carbon footprint unlike PostgreSQL which is like diesel exhaust clogging up your network pipes when you try to shard upwards and outwards into the virtual scalable cloud atmosphere. PostgreSQL chokes your environment and doesn't support 10gen's new invention the MAPREDUCE which is the successor to outdated SQL. If you use PostgresSQL with auto-scale your will never support big data but MongoDB can scale up to even 100GB of big rich object data without relations so the data truly represents your client's needs.

<comment><USER16> This joke got old quite a long time ago.

(And no I promise it's not because I'm using MongoDB.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool, but why is it so expensive? $12 per GB per month? It is hosted on AWS so what does "high-performance" mean?

<comment><USER17> Presumably they don't also charge separately for requests, CPU cycles, or bandwidth, so the storage costs include that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Correct. Storage is just the easiest way to define a service that's sold as a usage based utility. The price includes all the hardware resources, our support staff, DBA tools, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm trying to understand why this is being upvoted so much.

<comment><USER19> I upvoted in the hope that I'll find out that "auto-scaling" means it automatically scales to large numbers of reads and/or writes, which would amount to one awesome service. Since pricing is based on storage, I'm inclined to think it only auto-scales to high storage needs. I'm hoping to be wrong. The part where they say release 9.4 brought them within reach technically of what they wanted to do gives me some hope that I'm wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> It automatically scales all resources based on data size. This means increasing IOPs, RAM allotments, and CPU capacity on the fly as the data grows. At 1TB of data, for instance, the DB would have access to 100GB of RAM, about 60,000 random IOPs, and 12 full CPU cores.

<comment><USER20> Is dataset size the only autoscaling criteria? I.E. my data set is relatively small but with very large transaction volume.

Additionally, do you have standard postgres modules installed? Specifically, at least for my use case, PostGIS?

<comment><AUTHOR> PostGIS is coming soon, the contrib extensions are all available to be turned on for DBs.

Autoscaling is currently datasize only. You can scale deployments up manually, however, for DBs where our 1/10 ratio isn't quite right.

<comment><USER20> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How well documented are the codebases you work on? - <AUTHOR> I'm playing code detective today, and it got me wondering how common good documentation really is. <comment><USER2> Usually very nearly zero.

The primary codebase I currently work on is typical. When I arrived here, the only documentation we had was a sorely out of date document about how to get a working copy running on an OS used by only a fifth of our developers, plus the very occasional inline comment.

We now have:

\- Up to date instructions on installation on the most common development platform

\- A couple documents about some of the more confusing corners of our codebase

\- A test suite with perhaps 20% coverage, which serves as documentation of intended behavior

\- More inline comments than before

\- More Python doc strings than before - not API docs so much as "purpose of this function" docs.

I would guess that about 5% of our code is commented. A bit more might not hurt. We're never going to go in and backfill commentary for half a million lines of code, but I'd like the team to get more into the habit of adding it as they go along.

I find standalone documentation to be more trouble than it's worth for small teams. It gets out of date too quickly, and nobody has time to keep it up. What's more valuable is documentation for frameworks and libraries. We rely on a handful of major open source libraries as well as SDKs for vendors, and we have a very strong preference for those with good docs.</comment>


How Amazon or Apple Could Cause a War with China - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2011/05/how-amazon-or-apple-could-caus.html <comment><USER2> It's important to note that the interesting scenarios described in the article still boil down to a headline like "Countries are still responsible for the misdeeds of their citizens in the networked world." All the scenarios involving war with China (or other countries named in the article) require hostile acts by persons in China (or the other countries) and an inadequate response by the national government.

<comment><USER3> What's also notable is the ease and scale that these events can unfold. It's substantially easier for a small terrorist group to exist in (the USA (e.g. Anonymous, by some standards), Russia, China, the Bahamas) and exercise its influence on other countries. There are no need for passports to get there, only an internet connection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think there might be a few service-people who would be disgusted at the use of the word 'war' for the App Store or AWS going down.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the author means it would be war if they went down. More likely, he means that if China attacked Amazon, it's possible that the US would retaliate in a way that escalated into something much worse. Losing the App Store isn't a war. Punishing the perps through increasingly militaristic actions might be though.</comment></comment>


Google Invests $450M in ADT - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/08/adt-will-exclusively-install-nest-hardware-in-450-million-google-deal/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not surprised that GOOG is buying a huge home security company. It advances the prevailing narrative in the US. One in which pervasive state surveillance of it's own citizens is normalized, and the line separating the corporate world from the government is increasingly blurry.

This is dark, and it is presented as inevitable. Which, I suppose, it is. Look at the synergy!</comment>