Why do engineers shake their legs behind a desk?? - <AUTHOR>

It is just me or is it that when engineers are programming and sitting behind a desk, they constantly shake their legs?? <comment><USER2> Geez... why would this have anything to do with "engineers"?

Engineers are not some special creature.

<comment><USER3> Whaat? I had a stint in college studying Mechanical Engineering. You have to basically chain yourself to a desk and become an actual recluse-hermit mutant creature if you want to get through. I'd say that's pretty 'special' - in a certain context.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a habit some people have. When I'm really trying to get a lot of programming down I am trying to shut out distractions so I can focus on what I'm doing. For me this means having everything just so, my monitors a certain way, programs laid on it a certain way, headphones on, music loud, some sort of snack and drink right next to me. Anything that seems off bothers me and I'm sure I do some weird things physically while I'm programming, likely move around to the music I'm listening to, but I don't really think about it. Thats just what I do when I'm trying to shut everything out. People who shake their leg likely aren't thinking about it, it just happens.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think it's a combination of factors, one of which might be that the lymphatic system requires motion to cause it to flow (it has no "pump"). So "fidgeting" feels good.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think leg shaking is mostly harmless, the habits I worry about are:

1) Constant muttering stream of expletives.

2) Unconsciously drumming along on my desk to whichever song I happen to be listening to while waiting for code to compile / servers to start / etc.

I don't think I actually do either very often, but I worry about it. ;)

<comment><USER7> I find that the first option mixed with an extreme amount of self deprecation is like taking a riding crop to the part of my brain that works really well. Unlike the rest which is a procrastitative mess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Amazing how you can almost always find a relevant xkcd: <http://xkcd.com/228/>

(also, why is this on the front page?)

<comment><USER9> Brilliant! How do you guys always manage to find the relevant ones? There's hundreds of them, and I tried a few google searches using site:xkcd.com and some related terms and couldn't pull up this one.

<comment><USER10> It's an art. You are either born with or have to learn it "the hard way". ;-)

<comment><USER3> Kinda like spitting (with high initial thrust and decent precision). Or doing a double-snap thingy with your thumb or other extremity.

I was born capable of all three. I still wonder if I'm destined for Great things, or just a freak

<comment><USER10> Either way you must have made a name for yourself in your circle and more. I envy you for the 'snapping' prowess. However, as far as spitting goes I might qualify to be a master _spiter_ (please read as in _sniper_ ).

By the way, just high initial thrust and precision are not enough you have to got to use the ammo in the right amount w.r.t. distance and all. Not to mention you have to mind wind conditions, otherwise the drop might land at someone standing/sitting/moving near by.

<comment><USER3> " Not to mention you have to mind wind conditions..." I can calculate the vector angle, wind considered, to almost 0.99% accuracy. Zero dot nine nine, my friend. While driving on the freeway.

"...otherwise the drop might land at someone standing/sitting/moving near by." But then there's no reason to spit in the first place, is there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't shake my legs.

Once in a while I scratch my balls (subtlety). I have found women in the office don't scratch their balls. They adjust their bra straps. Unfortunately I don't wear a bra, otherwise I'd join in. There do seem to be a lot of moles on people around here though. There also appear to be a lot of sex toys around (It's where I work, see my profile).

What I'm getting at is that you are asking an environmental specific question. You probably find that the 'leg shaker' has a higher metabolic rate or is possibly on the thin side (studies have shown some people are thin because even when sitting, they keep moving).

<comment><USER3> Did a survey once on the balls thing. We concluded that 100% of women don't ever scratch their balls

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It isn't just engineers... Everyone does this. It's just a habit that people have like pen clicking or nail biting.

<comment><USER3> I do it. I think it sort of gives me a sense of comfort. But it seems to run in the family - on my father's side. My dad shakes his leg. As do my brother and yours truly. My paternal grandfather is a leg-shaking champion. I can't say for sure, as he is dead, but I'm pretty sure my paternal grandfather's father would out-leg-shake us all combined.

And then, on my mother's side, nobody I can think of does it. My mother hates leg-shaking. I try to be decent about it when she's in the room. Fortunately, my wife - who doesn't approve of legshaking, and seldom shakes a leg - doesn't really give me grief about it. Guess she's written me off as a leg-shaker, and accepted it as one of "those" things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _It is just me or is it that when engineers are programming and sitting > behind a desk, they constantly shake their legs??_

It's just you. I've worked in several teams and maybe one in five does that. So no "engineers" as in "the majority of them".

Occasionally of course (once an hour or a couple of hours), all do it and SHOULD do it. For the same reasons you are told to do it in an airplane. Thrombosis et all.

<comment><USER3> Can someone pie chart this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Engineers usually drink a lot of coffee / tea, thus are hyperactive lots of the time. A lot of them are nervous, have a tick, find it relaxing. Sitting in the same position for hours on end also does not help.

</comment><comment><USER15> For me it's not only shaking legs behind a desk. It's also walking in circles when talking on the phone. It's also doing something with my hands when I'm not at the computer (preferably with some item like pen or phone or anything what's nearby).

I consider it as a soft version of light ADHD, but I doubt it has anything to do with my profession. It might be the other way around - I chose a profession where I create new things because of that trait (which might also be connected to me being easily exited about new things).

</comment><comment><USER16> nothing to do with being an engineer. My dad does it and he is not an engineer. I guess it is just a habit.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've made a google form to record every time my coworker sitting less than a meter away from me does something annoying (such as make "chugga-chugga- chugga-chugga" noises and whistle). I'm not proud of it but it keeps me sane.

Link if you're curious

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/gform?key=0Amo8gQTQJ0Nbd...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/gform?key=0Amo8gQTQJ0NbdFJqNnZ6RXNFT3lmd1pLQmxveU92TlE&gridId=0#chart)

</comment><comment><USER18> Venous and/or lymphatic systems use muscular contraction and movement for fluidity. It is specially important to counter gravity. The "need to move your lower extremities" is a natural instinct.

So it's not "an engineers thing". I'd say it's not even a "humans thing". Try "animals" (with lower extremities and veins and/or lymphs).

Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor or a vet.

</comment><comment><USER19> Nope, I don't do that.

I have a neighboring coworker who does, though, which can get annoying as it ends up making my monitor shake too.

</comment><comment><USER3> I swear, I was shaking my legs when I read this. I'm a "software engineer" - you didn't specify which type of engineer. I just had to comment because it felt like you were talking to me; like in some of those weird movies - "You! Yes, you - there's no one else in the room. YOU, the one leg-shaking. Listen up..." - kinda thing

</comment><comment><USER20> Their brains work at a high rate and it puts the brain on an additional task to slow their processing rate as not to cause a jam up in the firing of the neurons. They would shake their hands (and some do tap) but they use them for writing. This is not a joke, this is why some of them do this.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wondered about this for years - because I do it all the time.

The answer finally came to me from trial and error of something else. This is caused by caffeine - usually from coffee. Engineers dring lots of coffee, so often suffer from this. It is a type of "jittering".

<comment><USER22> Maybe that's the answer for you. I nearly never drink any coffeine and still do it since my childhood.

<comment><USER3> Gawd I love coffeine

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am surprised people comment on this "question" including me. Engineers are strange people.

<comment><USER24> Uh, engineers are just people. They aren't any different from other people in the wild.

<comment><USER23> That was sarcasm. I know we are just regular people. But the question implies we are aliens.

<comment><USER24> ah. sorry.

<comment><USER3> Are you available for hire this weekend?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I do, but I'm not an engineer. My brother does too and he actually is an engineer, though. I guess it depends.

I've noticed I'm more prone to nervously shake my legs (usually one at a time) when I'm being overly creative.

</comment><comment><USER26> My girlfriend does this and she's not programming or engineering-minded.

It's just a habit that people seem to have adopted lately – we see other people do it and pick it up because it's comforting.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's Klein syndrome. You can see a rather severe case at:

       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0L6t0xh-Dc

(Warning: video may not be suitable for all audiences.)

</comment><comment><USER28> No real answer to add, but when I was younger I used to play chess pretty regularly.

At every tournament there would be people shaking their legs like crazy under their tables.

</comment><comment><USER29> To burn extra calories!

You'd be surprised how much the energy required for such a small movement, performed continuously over longer periods, adds up over time.

</comment><comment><USER30> Some people have restless leg syndrome, some are more productive this way (think of a clicking pen for some), some have anxiety and need to diffuse it

<comment><USER31> Restless leg syndrome has some correlation with caffeine as well. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001810/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I do it mostly when I'm slightly stressed: close to the deadline or something like that. It's very unconscious.

</comment><comment><USER33> Don't do that. But I switch about once an hour between sitting down and stand up desk.

</comment><comment><USER34> I do - and most of my team do the same :) Funny that you mention it..

</comment><comment><USER35> I do it just because it helps me focus for some bizarre reason.

</comment><comment><USER36> IAMA under-desk leg jiggler, AMA. (P.S. I also chew pens.)

<comment><USER10> Yuck!

Or maybe okay. I chewed few when I was in school. Was spanked without mercy and the spanking got rid me of the habit. Can't complain.

Q: Any favourite colours or flavours? Fountain or ball pen?

<comment><USER36> Any pen that's going, really, other than if they're metal (impossible to chew) or seemingly poisonous (e.g. dry markers). No real preference, although I tend to regret chewing biros as they shatter into pieces easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I thought everyone did this, nuh? -_-

</comment><comment><USER38> someone's quitting smoking i see

<comment><USER22> I never smoked and still doing that sometimes. Think it's just a habit and it has nothing to do with engeneers. My dad does it too, but isn't an engeneer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't.

</comment><comment><USER10> Fret not. It's normal. I do it too. And I did it when I was not an engineer. As a primary school student and then as a secondary and then college student.

I think it's good for us engineers. It gets us little bit of movement for otherwise immobile ourselves.

I even move around my legs and I stretch it a lot and when stretching I forget that my workstation switch is right in the corner and I switch the entire damn thing off once or twice a month - that was the reason I had to get my (our corp) backup settings on my PC modified to a little more frequent period (15 mins from an hr).

Happy shaking!</comment>


The Worst Job - <AUTHOR> http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=32153 <comment><USER2> With respect, that's not the worst job.

Imagine if it was your job to spot videos of fathers murdering their children and making sure those are taken down or other gated so that you can't accidentally run across them. I think we all can agree that would be a much worse job.

In Europe, someone who hosts content for someone else can be held civilly and criminally liable for that content, regardless of how it got there or who put it there. So, anyone working at a European ISP could have the job of policing all content on their servers and making sure that there isn't anything illegal on their systems.

I worked at an ISP in Belgium, and my desk was close to that of Thierry (the webmaster), and he had that job. I can't imagine the amount of illegal kiddie porn, snuff films, and other crap he must have been exposed to, as a result of the job he was legally obligated to perform.</comment>


Ask HN: Stable API framework for Node.js - <AUTHOR> Hi, as I can see JS ecosystem is evolving very fast compared to other languages.
Currently I need REST API framework to be supported (active community, bug fixing) ~5 years from now for my new project.
I know there are sites like http://nodeframework.com/ but I would like opinions from community about battle tested frameworks used in real applications, raw stars on github are not good measurement for me.
Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> I think loopback is the framework to go if you are building an REST API. It's very easy to setup and very powerful.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think there can be a bias towards newness in the JS ecosystem, but Express is well supported and stable.</comment>


80% of the stock market is now on autopilot - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/28/80percent-of-the-stock-market-is-now-on-autopilot.html <comment><USER2> What does this do to the important justification for stock markets and financialization, the argument that stock markets distribute capital to the most important firms that can use the capital? What does it to to the importance of the Wall Street financiers, those who supposedly provide the intelligence to distribute the capital? What's up with that?</comment>


SpaceX just teased a photo of its highly anticipated Falcon Heavy rocket - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/spacex-just-teased-a-photo-of-its-highly-anticipated-falcon-heavy-rocket/ <comment><USER2> I look forward to the first launch of the Falcon Heavy and wonder a bit about the complexity. I get that 27 engines is a lot of engines, but the N1[1] experience was from before we had decent computers and materials technology. Today how much less reliable are 3 Falcon 9s than 1 Falcon 9? (I know 6x (n!) higher risk).

So three F9's, they all have to come to full power at very close to the same time to avoid stressing the rocket frame or the launch pad too much. At which point they need to burn fuel at a co-consistent rate so as not to move the center of gravity of the rocket too far off center. Then how do you land those boosters, can't really land next to each other on a landing barge.

A lot of deltaV though, very big payloads into orbit.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_\(rocket\))</comment>


The Caplan Thruster – approach to move an entire solar system - <AUTHOR> https://futurism.com/stellar-engine-move-solar-system <comment><AUTHOR> Extracts:

The machine would use a Dyson sphere to collect mass, separate out helium to push the sun, and fire hydrogen at the sun to avoid crashing into the sun.

It could push the Sun at a speed of about 50 light years per one million years.

Matthew Caplan from Illinois State University designed the machine at the behest of Munich-based YouTube channel Kurzgesagt. The channel then created a stunning video to illustrate the device, which it dubbed the Caplan Thruster, and a paper Caplan wrote describing the machine has also been published in the journal Acta Astronautica.

Video links: Kaplan thruster: [https://youtu.be/v3y8AIEX_dU](https://youtu.be/v3y8AIEX_dU)

Dyson sphere: [https://youtu.be/pP44EPBMb8A](https://youtu.be/pP44EPBMb8A)</comment>


Everything makes sense if David Kleiman was Satoshi Nakamoto. Here's why - <AUTHOR> https://seebitcoin.com/2016/05/everything-makes-sense-if-david-kleiman-was-satoshi-nakamoto-heres-why/ <comment><USER2> Seriously, this is at TV soap opera level now. And this...

"Whatever is happening is fascinating, it's a plot worthy of Hollywood."

...is terrible judgment. No, it's not a plot worthy of Hollywood. It's a known fraud continuing to make grandiose claims that people publish and debate for some reason. Now, he's concocted a trail of evidence leading to a person that's paralyzed, hospitalized, and maybe nearly dead. The type of person that can't fight a disinformation campaign effectively. And the crowds go wild! Internet soap opera...

Maybe I need to leak some emails that some other HN people and I created Bitcoin as a prank to see how many people would waste that energy and CPU when they could just use decentralized transactions with real currency. That I was holding onto my Satoshi stash out of regret for how far my prank would go. Then, a third-world bank invests its holdings in the scheme to save their economy from impending hyperinflation. The same country that previously canceled my contracts for locals due to bribes to their corrupt government. So, I go Bond villain and dump all my Satoshi bitcoins at once to drive the value to near zero. The country is begging IMF for a bailout the next day.

Or some other Hollywood-style bullshit that Wright wasn't bright enough to come up with. :)

<comment><USER3> > Now, he's concocted a trail of evidence leading to a person that's > paralyzed, hospitalized, and maybe nearly dead.

Klieman is dead since 2013.

As far as I understand, Wright "concocted a trail of evidence" last year, the "leaked" documents that point to Klieman, referred to by various online media are with great probability from Wright alone.

And he openly proved twice that he's able to construct false proofs (the PGP mails story last year and this "old signature" trick now). And he's quite capable when presenting them: whenever he just shows his "proofs" to only a few people, most people believe him. We have enough articles to confirm that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish HN had downvote post button (similar to downvote comment), all this "Who is Satoshi Today" soap opera is getting boring already.

<comment><USER5> As far as I understand things around here, there is a hidden "downvote post" button, and you just pressed it!

(May be wrong, but that's what I read once: The more comments a post has compared to upvotes, the faster it sinks.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How much do we believe that the Dorian Nakamoto denial comment on p2pfoundation was from the real Satoshi?

[http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open- sour...](http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open- source?commentId=2003008%3AComment%3A52186&xg_source=activity)

Because that was posted in 2014, and Kleiman died in 2013.

<comment><USER7> Not him

[http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/xn/detail/2003008:Comment:5527...](http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/xn/detail/2003008:Comment:55276)

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=775174.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=775174.0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Didn't the Satoshi Nakamoto account comment on the Newsweek article claiming Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto was the man?[0] That was in 2014. Since Kleiman died in 2013, then someone else would have had access to the Nakamoto account, right?

Indeed, I wonder why the Nakamoto account haven't made a comment on the Craig Wright claims.

[0] [http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/m/discussion?id=2003008%3ATopi...](http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/m/discussion?id=2003008%3ATopic%3A9402)

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of the mystery about +ORC back in my reversing days. I shortly talked to Francesco during a CCC but couldn't get more info on the topic :D

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

[http://www.home.aone.net.au/~byzantium/found/found4.html](http://www.home.aone.net.au/~byzantium/found/found4.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> It is clearly obvious that Craig Wright will be accused of identity theft by many if he really provides the crypto proof he announced yesterday.

Too many people prefer to think of Gavin Andresen as a complete idiot easy to fool with some stupid tricks or even a fraud one can buy, rather than to accept Craig Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto. They also think about Craig Wright as a complete idiot who gives false proof easily debunked in a matter of a few hours, when he never ever stated that his discussion of "Key Verification" was a proof of anything.

So if he is who he claims, which is something I don't know, then he has good reasons to try to proof it far beyond a signed message. The signed message, if it appears, won't settle things for him. Many people will just say he had the keys stolen.

<comment><USER11> It seems to me that there's two Satoshis to talk about here. One is the Satoshi that created Bitcoin. The other is the Satoshi that owns the private key to the genesis block, and also a whole lot of other bitcoins that are worth a lot of money.

Everything I've read about Craig Wright makes it seem pretty unlikely that he's the former. I just don't see enough in his CV to believe he created Bitcoin. This is the Satoshi I'd be more interested in actually learning the identity of.

As for the latter, all he needs to do to prove that is sign a message. That's pretty easy to do relative to the magnitude of the claim. Any proof beyond that isn't proof of identity, it's proof that he obtained that identity legitimately. I kind of don't care about who this Satoshi is unless they are the same person.

I don't think these two Satoshis have to be the same person, I don't think they need to be only one person, and I don't think they need to be alive, but right now I've personally seen nothing that makes me thing Craig is either.

<comment><USER12> > I just don't see enough in his CV to believe he created Bitcoin

Have you researched the guy? I would say his CV is quite impressive. [https://archive.is/HdKeA](https://archive.is/HdKeA) [https://archive.is/http://gse- compliance.blogspot.com.au/*](https://archive.is/http://gse- compliance.blogspot.com.au/*)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nobody suggested yet a scifi twist in the story like Satoshi Nakamoto was an AI project using deep learning. The project was dismantled and the keys can't be recovered. The model was trained with papers in cryptography.

Note to downvoters: think that every Satoshi story is hilarious until someone MOVES those F*ing prehistoric bitcoins on a transaction.

</comment><comment><USER14> Genuinely curious:

Why does anyone care about who Satoshi is IRL? Is it the mystery? The hunt? Is there a Bitcoin prize to be had?

<comment><USER15> It could be argued that if Satoshi is a person, and that person created Bitcoin on equipment provided by a workplace, during work time... and if those first 1 million bitcoins were mined on equipment owned by a workplace...

Then depending on the legal jurisdiction of that person...

* The employer have a claim on the IP and the initial licence was incorrect

* The employer have a claim on the bitcoins

* The employer could have a claim on any core patent that arises

This is just from a UK patent law based view where it is repeatedly made clear to employees not to work on side projects or other things on work equipment and time.

So there is a potential legal risk, if it's determined that Satoshi was working on this using his employers resources.

<comment><USER14> Well, shit. That's pretty heavy. I suppose I would want to remain anonymous if I was concerned about that scenario.

<comment><USER16> Doesn't matter if you did a good job documenting and proving that you didn't use work equipment. I remember a speaker once telling an audience something like don't even use the same brand pens or notebooks purchased by your employer to jot down your ideas and stuff.

<comment><USER14> Well, of course, as long as those are the rules and the scenario. The grandparent offered a bit different scenario.

The moral is quite clear, though: don't ever, ever use someone else's equipment and time to build your own thing.

<comment><USER16> And now I realize how heavy that scenario is too. Dang. That's heavy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Everything makes sense if I'm Satoshi Nakamoto. At least for today.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't give a hoot any more.

</comment><comment><USER19> Seriously what's with all this bitcoin propaganda on Hacker News these days?

Is this kind of stuff even interesting except to the few people that have money invested in bitcoin?

<comment><USER20> How is this bitcoin propaganda? It doesn't promote bitcoin in any way. Or are you calling anything bitcoin related "propaganda"?

<comment><USER19> We had at least 6 articles about bitcoin in the front page in the last 3 days and only 1 of them was about anything technical or factual. So yes, that's propaganda.

<comment><USER17> That's just tabloid-like excitement. People are eager to be the first to prove whether somebody is or is not the Satoshi. It's the taste of important mystery that gets people going, not propaganda.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How do you deal with information overload? - <AUTHOR> http://ryanwaggoner.com/2010/10/how-do-you-deal-with-information-overload/ <comment><USER2> it's funny that i would answer twitter because as much as twitter funnels interesting things from my network to me, it also brings all kinds of articles that i'd love to read, but just don't have ample time!</comment>


Airbnb Horror Story Points to Need for Precautions - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/your-money/airbnb-horror-story-points-to-need-for-precautions.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

<comment><USER2> A man is in Spain and calls his mother in US for help, and mother then calls an US company for help, who refuse to hand out client information for random people who call and claim that the client is doing a crime?

Instructing to call the police was definitely the best possible course of action, and the mistake they made was to hand out a local number for the police of Madrid instead of instructing the mother to instruct his son to call the emergency number of the country he's in, 112 in Europe. Had AirBnB sent someone visit the place, he would arrive there much later than the police could, and would still be unable to do anything but to calm the emergency number that he can't get in and a customer's mother in the US claims there's a crime going on.

<comment><USER3> I agreed with you up until "Instructing to call the police was definitely the best possible course of action". I really think AirBnB should have called the police, instead of shifting that responsibility. The article even says that they'll be making sure all staff know to contact the police directly in future cases like this.

<comment><USER4> The person in the apartment is absolutely the best person to call the police.

When he dials the emergency number he gets put through to the local handlers who will send a car quickly.

Calling his mother, who then calls AirBnB, who then call some other AirBnB office, who then call the police introduces a bunch of delay and missed information.

We don't want people to think that calling a private company is the right thing to do here, where a crime is being committed.

<comment><USER5> It would certainly have been better if the guy in the apartment had called the police, but airbnb should have called them anyway.

<comment><USER4> AirBnB certainly need better protocols for this kind of thing.

It's only hinted at inthe article, but a few people die by suicide in hotel rooms. AirBnB staff need to know how to respond better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My 60+ year old mother has a neighbor renting on Airbnb illegally.

The Airbnb guests have repeatedly scared her late at night by mistakenly trying to open her door, yelling, partying, etc. She doesn't feel safe in her own home anymore.

Airbnb support responded to her complaint but took no action.

It's wrong to even allow apartments or condos to be rented out, it hurts all the neighbors, but Airbnb chooses to hurt people in order to make more money.

<comment><USER7> Is that really Airbnb's fault?

Airbnb is the service provider in this case, but there are other companies with a similar service, or the neighbour could let it out personally to other people.

Assuming the neighbour is subletting illegally as you state, surely that's where the problem lies.

<comment><USER8> It's not airbnb's fault but if found to be true why wouldn't airbnb simply de- list them?

It's like being a CEO and finding out that one of your employees or contractors is engaging in illegal activity. They get fired. Simple.

<comment><USER7> Sure, if Airbnb have been given proof that the subletting is illegal, they should remove the listing.

But my point is that doesn't really solve the problem. What should be sorted is the fact that this person sublets the flat illegally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On the other side of the wall I'm typing this is an AirBnB.

39/40 people are fine. Sometimes strangers try and get into my house because they're confused, but that's about it.

A few weeks back hundreds of drunk teenagers threw a rooftop party (and also a hallway party outside my apartment). AirBnB has no official support mechanism for neighbours, and the carpet still has all the beer stains I asked AirBnB to clean.

<comment><USER10> >the carpet still has all the beer stains I asked AirBnB to clean.

Why do you believe AirBnB has the responsibility to clean the carpet?

<comment><USER9> Why don't you?

<comment><USER10> Because that would create 3rd party liability, it would be no different than holding Ford responsible for a Drunk Driver, or Smith & Wesson Responsible for a shooting.

I have a feeling though you support those things as well

<comment><USER9> No, but feel free to tell me what my opinions are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a terrible incident, and poor initial handling, but it sounds like a reasonable policy change on the part of the company.

I'm actually suprised though that host safety/security hasn't been a bigger issue. Last weekend my wife & I stayed at an apartment ("whole place") in a large US city. The host, a girl in her early 20s, probably quite new to the city, and who we didn't meet, left us her apartment keys (all of them): there was no combination lock on the door, i.e. nothing preventing somebody from duplicating the keys and having permanent access to the apartment. On top of that, all of her stuff was in the apartment - clothes, paperwork, jewelry - and as far as we could see (we didn't snoop beyond looking for an iron) she didn't have a lockbox there.

Obviously she's naive, but she's not alone; I've heard several similar stories. I'm not sure what I'd have airbnb do to improve the situation; at minimum, though, requiring the use of combination door locks with guest- specific combinations would seem like a good policy, although obviously they'd lost a lot of hosts by doing so.

<comment><USER12> Airbnb could partner with a lock company to allow owners to buy the cheaply. Then the access could be handled in the Airbnb app, and revoked after the person leaves.

<comment><USER13> That would limit access to app-users. Plenty of people use Airbnb only on the web.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I really feel for the boy's mother who must have gone through hell after her son called her. I was once in a similar situation myself where a dear friend of mine got in big trouble while traveling in Vietnam:

Since the country is a Malaria area my friend took prophylactic medication (Malarone). As an (infrequent) side effect these drugs can cause hallucinations and severe anxiety attacks, which unfortunately is what happened to her. When the symptoms hit her she was alone (as the only Western person) in a small train station in Ho-Chi-Minh city and became suddenly so scared that she hid in a corner, hallucinating and unable to call out for help. Lucky for her I called her up after she failed to send me a message as we had agreed on a few days earlier and found out about the dangerous situation. And while she was not able to speak clearly she was at least able to communicate where she was to me. So, I immediately thought about how I could get help to her and tried calling the local emergency numbers using Skype, my mobile phone and my landline. As it turns out, those numbers are usually not reachable from outside the country.

So what I did instead (and what I would do again in a similar situation) was to call the emergency number of the local embassy / consulate in the country. These always have staff answering the phone 24/7, but unfortunately even they are not always willing to help you. It usually helps to first get the name of the person who answered the phone and then explain to him/her that the person in distress is a citizen of his/her country and that he/she is in acute danger. Also, explain to them (in case they forgot) that it is their duty to protect the life of the citizens of their country abroad and to do anything in their power to get help to them as fast as possible. They will know better than you which number to call or how to organize help (in case the emergency response system is not very functional as was the case in Vietnam). Do not waste time trying to call the local emergency numbers.

</comment><comment><USER15> What a horrible story. Airbnb and Uber are both going to have to work through some rough patches with how they handle situations like these. While technically not responsible, they have an opportunity to make their services safer than the alternatives.

Personally, I have used Airbnb to travel all over Europe with mostly great experiences. A couple places have had things break that the host had to fix, but nothing that ruined my trip. Many of the hosts have been over the top awesome. I had great and unique experiences in both Hungary and Croatia directly because of the host.

Right now Airbnb is fighting a scam on their site where listings are put up with an email in the listing or you request information about the listing and the host emails a link to a site that looks like Airbnb but is just a scam to collect CC information. It would stink if this is marking the end of the VRBO glory days.

</comment><comment><USER16> The plural of anecdote is not data. There are more than 100k stays every night in an Airbnb. You could find a horror story for _any_ big company that does something 100k times or more. This article says more about NYT and its so called journalism than it does about Airbnb.

It's _obviously_ a horrible experience for the person involved. That doesn't make the story relevant to Airbnb, just like the MH17 crash doesn't say anything about Malaysia Airlines or flight travel in general.

EDIT: Accommodating nitpickers and straw men.

<comment><USER17> Holy a shit a man gets raped by a Trans-person, and Politically correct people like you are blaming the victim. In any other cases, a simple call leads to immediate police action.

Had the victim been a female we would have 100+ article stating that sharing economy is just another iteration of patriarchy, and PG gravelling and announcing startup batch for female exclusive sharing sites.

<comment><USER18> I don't see the poster above blaming the victim.

<comment><USER19> >EDIT: Accommodating nitpickers.

Maybe there's something we're missing?

showsomeempathy looks to have been created to post in this thread.

EDIT:

>EDIT: Accommodating nitpickers and straw men.

I think I made a straw man!

<comment><USER16> > Maybe there's something we're missing?

This is the charitable interpretation of the, albeit somewhat delusional, grandparent (showsomeempathy greenie). Since I support charitable interpretations, I'll respond to it. I generally don't see the point in responding to nitpickers and uncharitable readers, hence the previous edit.

While true that I could have removed something nasty from my original comment, the truth is more mundane. Aside from the additional second paragraph, the only thing I substantially changed was the sentence you quoted.

> I think I made a straw man!

No, you are the nitpicker :) Implicit in the 100k big scale sentence is that (a) it's 100k or more (b) relative scale matters. I would consider having 100k people / night for an accommodation service to be big scale. More generally, it simply has no relevance (just like this whole subthread ;) for the point being made, hence the nitpicker designation.

EDIT: Lesson: never, under any circumstances, engage with trolls.

<comment><USER19> It was interesting watching you edit the shit out of this comment. Iteration is great but, man, sometimes you should iterate alone.

And when you fuck up as badly as you did, own it. You'll do better next time.

EDIT:

Not so sure about "but, man, sometimes you should iterate alone." Others learn from our failures.

EDIT:

Hurt feels? "A troll, ignore."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Airbnb customer service really shat the bed on this one. There's really no excuse for refusing to call the police when you are told a heinous crime is in progress. Probability wise it was 1/800,000 for that evening but that single anecdote is really painful to hear.

</comment><comment><USER8> Anecdote: host from hell.

We stayed in an airbnb in Amsterdam. Looked decent. However, we spent the first evening coordinating getting the shower fixed as it was overflowing. C'est la vie, win some lose some. Ok.

After that, when trying to sleep, the boiler made a very bad rattling noise, so again had to call someone about it. Again, win some lose some.

After that first evening, we sent a legitimate refund claim to the owner saying we can live with the (by then partially fixed) situation because we didn't want to waste time looking for somewhere else. We requested a one day refund as it had been spent fixing stuff. We then went to bed.

Midnight rolls around and my wife and I are fast asleep. My phone rings and it's the airbnb host demanding that we vacate the property, and "not to worry, I will help you get a room at the hotel over the road". Why? Because we had the temerity to request a refund.

(Context: he later tried to explain his attitude with "we should have contacted him directly because if a refund claim is put through, his property is downvoted in the airbnb listings". I have no idea if that is true).

He jumps in his car and an hour later, we are arguing on the doorstep about it, us in our PJ's wondering the hell is going on.

Airbnb handled the situation fairly well. However, if airbnb was my company, or the host was an employee of mine, he would have been fired. That host is still happily using airbnb.

Since that and a couple of other sketchy airbnb experiences I only use the service now when the hosts/property come extremely or personally recommended. I completely discount the online reviews.

I like the variety of experiences offered by airbnb. I don't like the inevitable encounters (and extreme experiences) possible with asshole airbnb hosts.

And there is nothing airbnb can do about it, short of striking dodgey hosts off their listings, which they didn't do in this case so I wonder how many other situations like that there have been where nothing was done.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am a host for Airbnb, I did had a problem with one guest and Airbnb beside taking report they don't do anything else. I was very frustrate, they kept saying someone from Safety will call, they never did. In the Jacob situation I find so "Stupid" the fact that Airbnb hasn't done anything. All these Safety Promises that they have I don't think are real.At the same time, Jacob could text the address but I understand in a moment of panic. Are these people verified ??? Really?? How can a man had a woman name?? That's my question to Airbnb..

</comment><comment><USER9> This was inevitable. People will do things in their own homes they wouldn't dare do in a hotel room as the hotel would call the police. The only real surprise is that AirBnB investors don't see themselves as culpable.

I don't think this is the worst it will get either.

<comment><USER22> There are plenty of stories like this from hotels.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=sexual+assault+hotel&tbm=nws](https://www.google.com/search?q=sexual+assault+hotel&tbm=nws)

<comment><USER9> Yes, that doesn't contradict the point though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What happened to the guy with the XXX Freak Fest?

<comment><USER24> he moved out, Airbnb paid part of the damages and overall expenses.

<comment><USER23> Yeah I know about that part, but last I know he was on the street because no one would rent an apartment to him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I get that Airbnb is the darling of this forum, and I even had good experience with it. Yet the amount of victim blaming is unbelievable. Instead of a guy being raped by trans "woman". Had it been a female victim, Airbnb would be apologizing like crazy, instead we get this utterly dismissive reply. NYTime has also abandoned any sense of equity by refusing to name the perpetrator while splashing the identity of the victim while putting blame on him.

We allow flimsy standards in Campus Prosecution and hide the identity of the victim. While in this case we are watching the victim being re-victimized.

Where is accountability?

Where is the zero star review that's supposed warn potential users?

This entire incident is truly sickening.

<comment><USER25> Now that you mention it, the whole thing does seem to lack a certain appreciation for the gravity of the incident. A person got raped and the company's reply is:

"Oh, we're sorry. Security is our number 1 priority and we'll call the police ourselves next time."

And the debate here is "Well the victim should have contacted the police themselves. Doesn't he even know which emergency number to call?"

While I sincerely I hope the conversation would have been more serious if the victim was a girl, I am appalled at the current reaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> paraphrasing but "Caveat emptor"

</comment><comment><USER26> "Need for Precautions"

How about not staying in a stranger's house?

<comment><USER17> "How about not wearing revealing clothes"

"How about not walking in the wrong neighborhood"

"How about not looking anywhere but towards the ground"

<comment><USER27> I find this response pathetic.

I can legally go to downtown Baghdad if I wished. I have every right to as well.

But people shouldn't give me advice on how to minimise danger because that's victim blaming those who have been that have been hurt or killed?

<comment><USER28> As advice "Never accept the hospitality of strangers [even when bought and paid for via a trusted third party that publishes reviews]" verges on tinfoil hattery though.

I think downtown Baghdad is a few orders of magnitude more dangerous and I'd _still_ consider "how about not going to downtown Baghdad" an unreasonably snarky response to an article on victims of bombings.

<comment><USER26> I was commenting on the part of the headline that naively suggests that there's an option other than accepting the risk that comes with staying at a stranger's house or not accepting it.

Not sure how you got from there to rape victim blaming and bomb victims in Irak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Use an illegal (or soon to be illegal at least in Spain) service, get in trouble. I don't really understand what crosses the mind of someone who decides to sleep in someone else's house.

I like the "victim blaming is wrong" narrative. Taking a stupid risk is OK? Since when? Are we children?</comment>


SXSW: Location is the New Just Kill Yourself (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/09/location-is-the-new-just-kill-yourself/ <comment><AUTHOR> from last year but awesome:

"I'm totally serious when I say that you shouldn't go. Instead – while your rivals are distracted in Texas, pissing their money up the wall and ejaculating over their laptop stickers during yet another Evan Williams keynote – you should use the time instead to stay at home and work on building your start-up.

Your liver will thank you, your investors will thank you, and most importantly so will millions of real-world users who really want you to create something new and innovative rather than being sucked into the hype and churning out just a better, prettier Twitter-meets-Gowalla clone for the approbation of your peers."</comment>


Why the data center needs an operating system - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/12/why-the-data-center-needs-an-operating-system.html <comment><USER3> It's interesting and great to see this stuff take center stage more and more. Those lucky enough to work at places like Twitter, Google, Facebook and other large tech companies will have already seen how this kind of thing dominates the datacenter's there and has been at the core of their systems for many years. People on the outside though are rarely exposed to this concept of datacenter scale computing aside from things like hadoop and so the idea of leveraging a datacenter level API is hard to fathom. I believe it's still going to be a while before this truly becomes mainstream and really we'll see the historical two level forward shift whereby on one side we've previously achieved compute as a service with EC2 and GCE, while developing platform as a service on the other side with Google App Engine and Heroku. These service different demographics and we'll continue to see the level of abstractions occur providing SREs/Devops engineers access to Cluster As A Service and microservice platforms for developers/programmers to give them more flexibility.

Google SREs by last count were 1 engineer to 1000 machines. In 10 years the common devops engineer at a 200 person startup will leverage the same number of resources using layers of abstraction like Mesos and Kubernetes.

<comment><USER4> > Google SREs by last count were 1 engineer to 1000 machines

That number does not seem particularly impressive, if it is accurate. Even "traditional" well-run enterprise IT organizations are often in the 1 admin/SRE to 600-ish machines, so I have a hard time seeing that Google can only do ~2x as good at their scale and with their level of focus.

1 SRE to 5k machines, 10k machines, that makes more sense to me.

<comment><USER5> I don't know which kinds of enterprise orgs you're envisioning but when I think about "traditional" enterprise IT orgs, I'm picturing companies in healthcare, insurance, certain finance business units, non-profits, public sector, and defense, not any place ever mentioned a lot here on HN in a technical discussion. I've worked with a LOT of them and I'd be surprised if the ratio of ops engineers to servers was anything better than 1:10 as a ball- park number. Network guy, storage guy, DB guy, VM guy, automation guy, net-sec guy, system-sec guy... that's pretty typical for maybe a 20-server rollout and grows shy of sub-linearly with number of users (wild guess of O(n^1/2) ). If you mean specific to SRE-type of roles or auto-scaled groups in EC2 / GCE to count as servers perhaps that may be the case, but my idea of a traditional enterprise IT org is that it views automation with fear and hesitation preferring to add more people before trying to "disrupt" their business with automation tools and so will be stuck somewhere around 1:30 at best.

Admittedly, I probably have a bad impression of enterprise from consulting because who would pay for automation consulting at $$$ / hr when you do it pretty well with existing resources in the first place?

<comment><USER6> I think part of the difference is due to the fact that the business of administering healthcare, insurance, financials and other businesses are infinitely more complex than say, serving up search results or 140 character micro blog posts.

It seems much easier in my opinion to scale a single function (search or tweet) than the kinds of tasks that a healthcare company has to do like say...scanning faxes from doctors, applying OCR and properly placing them into a pharmacy order system.

<comment><USER7> The idea is that those services get commoditized, so the healthcare company gets them off the shelf rather than hires engineers to build them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article's premise is a poor introduction to the project. Sure, reinvent MOSIX if you want :) but don't pretend it'll serve more than a niche of a niche.

Firstly, "distributed computing is the norm"? It's just not. Most businesses & app authors will never need to care about ultra-distributed computing, with all its problems and trade-offs. You can move faster with "local-only" computing and scale vertically very cheaply compared to a few years ago - <USER2> dedicated CPUs + hundreds of gigabytes of RAM save programmer hours, and get your problem solved faster.

For light scaling issues (compared to Google) Redis, MariaDB and other abstractions over local files have some great options for future scaling, and are well-trodden, obvious choices.

Secondly, who cares about "wasted" resources of a whole underutilised server when reliable dedicated servers are so cheap, and in such plentiful supply?

Thirdly, "organizations must employ armies of people to manually configure and maintain each individual application on each individual machine"? - in the 90s maybe! Surely anyone with more than a few applications to worry about is on board with some basic configuration management.

Twitter-size scaling is a "nice problem to have". For all but the best-funded & bullish companies, solve them only when you start to have them.

(my bias: I run a managed service provider in the UK - we tend to help customers scale vertically by shovelling server images around with minimum down time. We say "underused" dedicated server capacity at fixed monthly costs is usually cheaper than chasing the phantom of "optimum" AWS usage.)

<comment><USER9> > Secondly, who cares about "wasted" resources of a whole underutilised server > when reliable dedicated servers are so cheap, and in such plentiful supply?

The people bankrolling Google / Facebook / Twitter's electricity bills seem to care quite a bit.

There is another trope that gets repeated often, (and this is not even remotely directed at you, just a digression hopefully somewhat on topic) "performant languages runtimes are an anachronism, a bog slow language in which a programmer can code fast is way more useful than any of the performance bull crap". Typically the person repeating that would a be a webdev. However, in these large scale scenarios core infrastructural code can save orders of magnitude more in money in running costs than saving days in software development. So yeah at the interesting places algorithms and efficiency continue to matter. A reason that Google always managed to be ahead is partly due to how successful it was in minimizing running costs.

<comment><USER10> At Google scale it matters, sure. But most companies aren't Google scale. Writing your single-company 100-user CRUD webapp in Java or C++ "for performance" is the ultimate false economy.

/I used to work for a company that had a big Java app. We laughed at our client who needed 60 Rails servers to deliver worse performance than our single-instance app. But they probably saved more on dev costs than they spent on servers.

<comment><USER11> A mid-market SaaS company might have a $1mm/mo Amazon bill. I think cutting in that half would be meaningful to just about anybody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This author talks about POSIX as if a bunch of people sat down and invented a portable OS API. The reality is closer to: a group of people at AT&T created Unix, a number of other companies and universities modified Unix, and then people sat down and said "how can we unify the APIs of the fragmented Unix world"

<comment><USER13> The Programming API layer is fragmented in the UNIX world. There's mostly only ANSI C, X, and gcc, which exist everywhere, but it's still not trivial to port between *NIX. The kernel API is the most useless fragmentation of them all. It's addressed by POSIX and UDI ([http://www.project- udi.org/](http://www.project-udi.org/)), but the differences between the most important UNIX kernels don't justify the problems they make.

<comment><USER14> Oh, we're completely cross-platform these days! That means it runs on both RHEL _and_ Ubuntu.

<comment><USER13> ha ha ha

<comment><USER14> ha ha only serious [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only- serious.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html)

It's VAXocentrism for the 21st century. [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/V/vaxocentrism.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/V/vaxocentrism.html)

<comment><USER15> Interesting to think that the assumptions of C as a language evolved mostly against the VAX architecture. It seems that if the VAX doesn't make a distinction, then C doesn't (tend to) have any concept of that distinction either. Examples:

\- Pointer types are basically fungible in C (otherwise there would be no void-ptr type)

\- There's no compile-time knowledge of the segment a pointer references to prevent you from dereferencing a pointer to an offset from segment A when segment B is loaded (compare this to Rust's parameterization of Box types by their allocator)

\- Struct padding is painful and tacked on

\- "unsigned char" isn't default even though it'd make much more sense for it to be (What "char"acter is negative? You can have a signed byte/octet, but a _character_ is—in 1979, at least—basically an enum/sum type.

<comment><USER12> Actually C disallows converting function pointers to/from void pointers.

<comment><USER14> Can you get away with that in pre-ANSI C? I wouldn't be surprised.

<comment><USER12> for pre-ANSI C most of these questions are answered by "it depends on the compiler" which is why ANSI C happened. Of course the answer is still "it depends on the compiler" for this behavior, since it's not defined what it does in ANSI C, just that it's not portable to do it.

<comment><USER14> I remember working on a Fujitsu box in 1993, which used some sort of weird System V Unix with pre-ANSI C and weirdly abbreviated man pages in Engrish. _(shudder)_ Yeah.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mesos doesn't run one big distributed app across servers in a cluster, but rather interleaves the workloads on nodes in the cluster to maximize the utilization of compute, memory, and I/O resources on the cluster. Mesos can run on bare metal clusters or on machines that have some level of virtualization on them to provide some isolation between workloads running on the same machine. Google did a lot of the original work to create control groups, or cgroups, a lightweight application container for Linux, which is the basis for all LXC containers.

</comment><comment><USER16> In light of all the excitement around Docker & containers, it's important to note that Mesos has been using cgroups / LXC (for isolation) since its inception.

Mesos paper: [http://people.csail.mit.edu/matei/papers/2011/nsdi_mesos.pdf](http://people.csail.mit.edu/matei/papers/2011/nsdi_mesos.pdf)

<comment> vertex-four It also supports Docker as of recently.

<comment><USER17> For reference

[https://mesosphere.com/2014/11/10/docker-on-mesos-with- marat...](https://mesosphere.com/2014/11/10/docker-on-mesos-with-marathon/)

[https://mesosphere.com/2014/12/03/docker-on-mesos-with- chron...](https://mesosphere.com/2014/12/03/docker-on-mesos-with-chronos/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Yes, we need new, standardizing APIs. However this made me cringe:

> Exposing machines as the abstraction to developers unnecessarily complicates > the engineering, causing developers to build software constrained by > machine-specific characteristics, like IP addresses and local storage.

It reminded me of the old RPC approach of making potentially any method call a remote method call. It didn't work out, simply because remote call latencies are orders of magnitudes higher than for in-process calls, so you need different (coarser) APIs for them.

By the same token, while abstractions are very welcome, they should still allow distinctions between local and non-local resources, for various definitions of "local".

<comment><USER19> While I take your point, "local" is a leaky concept inside a data-center. On a fast network, "in cache on the neighboring computer" can be closer than "on my hard drive" for most purposes.

It seems like what might be ideal would be a specification language that doesn't care where things are, an implementation that tries to deal with that automagically, and a way to specify portions (to all) precisely that is checked against the high-level specification.

<comment><USER20> Absolutely. In-core on a neighboring machine can be accessed in less than 1ms. On-disk on the local machine (or any machine) can take tens of seconds.

<comment><USER21> _" On-disk on the local machine (or any machine) can take tens of seconds"_

Surely you meant 10's of _milli_ seconds. But even so, fastest SSD random access latencies are in sub-millisecond ranges.

<comment><USER20> No I did not mean that. Contended local disk access under heavy random read/write workloads takes essentially forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This stuff is very confuse, and it confuses all the HN commenters even more.

There is no such thing as a datacenter OS.

Simplification: An OS is a kernel and it's associated base software.

The kernel drives the hardware. You need to talk to disks. Memory. what not. Kernel is needed. You need to talk to the kernel and tie these components together. You write software. Boom, you have an OS.

A datacenter isnt a disk and memory and devices. its a bunch of computers which themselves drive these devices.

If you invented a "datacenter" with a bunch of disks and an API to drive them, then a bunch of CPUs and an API to drive them, and so on, you'll end up with a supercomputer and a single, unreliable, unsafe OS (which is exactly why nobody makes super computers anymore. They make clutsters of computers. Cheaper, more reliable. Clusters. Ie... datacenters).

The only thing that could be needed is a universal API for resource access. Need a db? Here's an API. Need disk space? Here's an API. and so on.

This is exactly what AWS is and does. S3 doesnt expose the OS. Its just a filesystem API. ELBs arent an OS. They're a load balancer API.

It turns out that below that, there's an actual traditional OS because thats the way it works reliably.

You have other ways to interconnect these systems in smarter ways (see plan9) but its always running a "regular" OS in the end, too.

<comment><USER11> Is a 40,000 core disaggregated rack really that different from a 4 core laptop? Google pioneered this way of thinking [1]. tl;dr the datacenter is a computer and that computer will inevitably have an OS.

[1] [http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rxin/db- papers/WarehouseScaleCom...](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rxin/db- papers/WarehouseScaleComputing.pdf)

<comment><USER22> Indeed, ie the datacenter doesnt expose an OS but a set of APIs. There's enough differences between that and a full OS (which also provides its own API) to call bs IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One way to think about this problem is to look at components that people thought were useful in an operating system and then think about what a distributed version might look like.

E.g. for an OS we have:

filesystem

scheduler

cron

Then you can go look at the history of these primitives so the same lessons don't have to be relearned. For example, the Linux kernel has gone through many iterations of its scheduler with cgroups, cfs etc. Why did they do that? Why were previous incarnations not good enough? etc.

<comment><USER11> That is _exactly_ right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> While not a complete data center operating system, Mesos, along with some of the distributed applications running on top, provide some of the essential building blocks from which a full data center operating system can be built: the kernel (Mesos), a distributed init.d (Marathon/Aurora), cron (Chronos), and more.

Interested in learning more about or contributing to Mesos? Check out mesos.apache.org and follow @ApacheMesos on Twitter. We're a growing community with users at companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Hubspot, OpenTable, eBay/Paypal, Netflix, Groupon, and more.

</comment><comment><USER24> This sounds like the problem Plan 9 set out to solve

<comment><USER25> I was hoping I would see someone mention Plan 9 here. Solving that problem does indeed seem like what their goal was.

"The early catch phrase was to build a UNIX out of a lot of little systems, not a system out of a lot of little UNIXes."

[http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html](http://plan9.bell- labs.com/sys/doc/9.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> In my mind when I think of abstractions above the level of individual machines, I pretty much automatically go to Erlang as the only language that I know of that operates at the right level of abstraction for that.

It's the only (semi-mainstream?) language that I know of that includes the infrastructure in the language itself to make the individual underlying machines (OS / hardware) appear irrelevant and allow programming to seamlessly span a group of computers.

</comment><comment><USER27> I definitely wouldn't consider Mesos to be anything like an operating system for the datacenter. That's just marketing language and confuses things.

Mesos is basically an application scheduler. It doesn't manage the base operating systems or machine provisioning. Mesos is concerned with ensuring that one or multiple applications are launched and running on a cluster of machines.

The Saltstack framework is the only thing I know of that would provide all the primitives and control necessary for an operator to truly control a full 5-300,000 node datacenter from one station. It's the only thing out there that will allow for super low latency response to commands across the cluster. It also can do configuration management etc if you want, or a lot of people use it to just trigger existing chef/puppet jobs.

I've been using Saltstack in conjunction with Mesos to build out this full datacenter-as-OS stack. Works... :-)

<comment><USER28> > It's the only thing out there that will allow for super low latency response > to commands across the cluster. It also can do configuration management etc > if you want, or a lot of people use it to just trigger existing chef/puppet > jobs.

FWIW, Ansible also does low-latency communications through pipelining/accelerated mode. Ditto for the config management and triggering.

<comment><USER29> I don't believe even with Ansible's accelerated mode it can come anywhere close to Salt for large deployments. It is still agentless and has to run from a single source and using ssh which is going to be slower than 0MQ. Also using something like salt-syndic to create topologies can reliably scale to thousands of machines and still cope with the load.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> A singular OS that acts on well defined abstractions and interfaces making the number of resources the massive machine uses transparent. Software won't be the only thing changing to support this shift in large scale computing but hardware as well. Would this type of machine be autonomous with little user management? AI could assist the machine in optimizing configuration. Pretty soon it could interface with drones that repair hardware and even add new nodes. Zero configuration environment. The operator simply tells it what it should be running, until Skynet is unleashed.

</comment><comment><USER31> The thing I like about Mesos is that when you approach your problem you are planning for High Availability from the beginning. You don't get that with Docker. Docker let's you make your provisioning stable and repeatable, but you don't get any advantage on HA. You are on your own with Docker. But, Mesos guides the whole architecture of your app towards HA which is nice.

<comment><USER13> Docker aids software deployment through the automation of Linux Containers (LXC). While Docker has made the the life of developers and operators easier, Docker plus Mesosphere provides an easy way to automate and scale deployment of containers in a production environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Combined with rump kernels I can see this as a the data center of the future.. simply a micro-kernel running a specific application without the bloat of a full OS while an orchestration unit/OS such as Mesos does all the setup and tear down of such services providing resources on demand.. lovely.

</comment><comment><USER33> Mesos is just one piece of the puzzle. I think the Hadoop project proper will be the first to get there. Maybe v3 or v4. That said, given the diversity under the Hadoop umbrela I expect distribution to appear, like RHEL is a GNU/Linux OS there might be a (Cloudera ?) Hadoop OS.

<comment><USER34> I wouldn't be betting my marbles on Hadoop, or anything Map Reduce now adays. Spark beats it pretty handily for data processing although HBase isn't too bad.

<comment><USER17> With YARN, Hadoop has built a more generic scheduler comparable to Mesos.

[https://www.quora.com/How-does-YARN-compare-to- Mesos](https://www.quora.com/How-does-YARN-compare-to-Mesos)

<comment><USER34> Not sure about that (haven't used yarn however), YARN seems extremely Hadoop specific, whereas Mesos is a "closer to the metal" generic framework to build frameworks for scheduling things on.

If I was to compare the two, I'd call YARN an application scheduler and Mesos a more meta scheduler. You could build yarn ontop of Mesos. You likely couldn't easily build Mesos ontop of Yarn. It should be relatively trivial to make a YARN Framework, which someone has already done with Mesos:

[https://github.com/mesos/myriad](https://github.com/mesos/myriad)

<comment><USER33> True but Hadoop is the whole tooling and with YARN they are distancing themselves from Map/Reduce. IMHO, it looks like they are heading in that right direction but not quite there. That why it maybe v4 before we can think of Hadoop as an OS for datacenter.

Mesos is closer to the metal but still is only a piece of what is needed. Picturing it as an OS is misleading while picturing Hadoop V2 as a proto-OS is not that much in accurate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I feel like this is on the right track, but sadly fails to address the underlying problem. Until the network is virtualized everything else will suffer. If the cloud is to become the default platform for services (I think it will), then the user must be able to define their own virtual data center. This includes their own virtual nets. What the author writes about will be built upon these virtual nets, but until the network itself is able to be programmed we'll likely be drifting between optimal states of computing.

<comment><USER11> The DCOS supports network virtualization. Changes in underlying infrastructure can be manifested all the way up the stack to applications and their schedulers. E.g., the DCOS can rewrite network routing tables based on placement decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> So true; think about what multi-tasking and virtual memory have done for developer convenience _and_ system performance over the last decades. Bet we are going to see the same effects in this space too - there are so many interesting things to do in scheduling! Especially when you can distinguish between clever placement of long lived tasks vs fitting short-lived low- latency jobs.

On another note; next up: "data center_s_ need an operating system". Very interested to see the move towards multi DC/availability zones.

</comment><comment><USER11> The dataceneter == the new form factor

<comment><USER37> What makes you say that?

<comment><USER11> Datacenter and back-end apps simply don't fit on a single machine anymore. Every app of reasonable scale is probably a distributed system of some sort. That, and there are a new class of "apps" (or, more precisely, datacenter services) that were built to operate across fleets of machines from day one, such as Spark, Hadoop, Cassandra, Kafka, Elasticsearch, and so on

<comment><USER38> On the other hand, a single machine can get pretty big today, for example [http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/2U/6028/SYS-6028U-...](http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/2U/6028/SYS-6028U-TR4T_.cfm) is 2u, has 12 drive bays and can have 1.5 tb ram. You could do 24 bays if you are using 2.5" drives (most ssds). A lot of complexity can be avoided by getting many fewer, but bigger machines (doesn't help much if you need massive CPU though, but intels architectures are getting better every cycle)

<comment><USER39> The problem with this is that singular systems require a lot of engineering effort and produce interesting side effects when you attempt to make them reliable.

Any singular system is going to fail.

<comment><USER38> Ok, get two huge systems instead of a datacenter of small systems. You still have made great strides in reducing complexity.

<comment><USER39> and sharing state between them? or ensuring that only one is doing things when only one should be doing things? (STONITH needs to be implemented somehow)

the performance penalties you enjoy if you go down the shared disk path (which is still going to be a fun failure when it does fail)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This screams Erlang all over the place: "portable", common API everywhere, automatic aggregation of resources, processes spawning wherever there is a CPU too a little bit too idle, process isolation...

I'm no Erlang expert, but it seems to me all the fundamental bricks are here (and were for multiple decades!) to build this "datacenter platform".

</comment><comment><USER41> In 2005 I saw a demo of this product from VirtualIron called VFe, which did this on a smaller scale (maybe 10 servers) -- it looked amazing.

[https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2005/ols2005v2-pages-243-258....](https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2005/ols2005v2-pages-243-258.pdf)

<comment><USER42> Mosix, Virtual Iron, vNUMA, ScaleMP, etc. are variants of the RPC fallacy: making remote/slow/independent things pretend to be local/fast/fate-shared. [http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~waldo/Readings/waldo-94.pdf](http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~waldo/Readings/waldo-94.pdf) Successful distributed software tends to go the opposite direction, making asynchrony and unreliability the base case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This article feels out of touch to somebody who frequently types in _mpirun_ from a login node. It seems like the level abstraction is already achived by MPI and the task schedulers that come with it.

<comment><USER11> MPI will run on top of the DCOS. That is the point. It supports a multitude of scheduling models all running multi-tenant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Given that VMS futures, POSIX support, RMS features and programming, server and application scaling, and VM sprawl have all been discussed recently, this is really something else to ponder.

</comment><comment><USER44> Mesos!

If you want containers use kubernetes by google!

Was in the process of putting cassandra on mesos.

If you want to mess around with it, you just need a digitalocean account and head over to mesosphere they'll set up 5, 7, 10 clusters for you.

</comment><comment><USER45> isn't this what all the hype behind CoreOS is about?

<comment><USER13> Well the main idea behind Mesos is to create an aggregation layer that spans server capacity in local and remote datacenters. This aggregation does not tightly bind the servers into a shared memory system, but rather treats them like a giant resource pool onto which applications can be deployed. It is a bit like the inverse of server virtualization really.</comment></comment>


Don't Fear the Call for Papers - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/mattstratton/dont-fear-the-cfp-3mb1 <comment><USER2> Would have been interesting to hear about "what not to talk about", if there's anything.

I do think his point about talking to an audience adjacent interests is a good idea.</comment>


Beautiful vector icon set for programming language files - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/be5invis/vscode-iconset <comment><AUTHOR> Better link here but I can't edit: [https://github.com/vscode-icons/vscode- icons/](https://github.com/vscode-icons/vscode-icons/)</comment>


Slam Bolt Scrappers - <AUTHOR> http://www.penny-arcade.com/2011/3/16/#1300306912

<comment><AUTHOR> I submitted this because this story is very much about entrepreneurs who went through the sort of process that PG often describes: iterating on ideas until something finally clicks, and refusing to fail.</comment>


Musk Declares Tesla Free of Factory Hell with Targets Intact - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-04/musk-declares-tesla-free-from-factory-hell-with-targets-intact <comment><USER2> It certainly was interesting to see reactions to Tesla's announcement of last quarter's production and sales numbers. They had the best production numbers yet, thanks to massively accelerated production in the last few weeks of the quarter. But that meant that many cars were in still in transit at the end of the quarter, which don't count as sales yet, even though they pretty much all had a customer's name on them. Thus sales were down for the quarter, and even though it's obvious that this was just because of when the end of the quarter happened to be, the press was full of "Tesla sales are down, they're so doomed" stories.

I can never decide whether the people who write these stories can't be bothered to do even the most minimal digging past the first number they see, or if they're doing this on purpose. Probably a mix, I guess.

<comment><USER3> Tesla forecasted the production of 17,000 cars. They fell short by about 20%. I think the market was reacting to that more than GAAP figures.

<comment><USER4> No, they forecasted production of 20,000 cars. They forecasted deliveries of 17,000 cars. Substantial miss on both counts.

Source: [http://ir.tesla.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=A...](http://ir.tesla.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=ABEA-4CW8X0&fileid=889927&filekey=27EE2FDA-9C77-4D6A-8CEE-E8DFE45227BA&filename=Q1_2016_Tesla_Shareholder_Letter.pdf)

Edit: fixed link to correct source, as pointed out below. In this pdf, it's on bottom of page 3, under "Outlook".

<comment><USER2> Where is that info in that PDF?

Edit: I guess you mean this one: [http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/200707627...](http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ABEA-4CW8X0/2007076272x0x889927/27EE2FDA-9C77-4D6A-8CEE-E8DFE45227BA/Q1_2016_Tesla_Shareholder_Letter.pdf)

That does indeed say 20,000. They actually produced 18,345, for a miss of about 8%. They ramped up production from about 1,000 cars/week to 2,000 cars/week, so being short 1,655 indicates that their production ramp-up was delayed by about 10 days. Doesn't seem like a very big deal to me, and a slight miss of estimated production _increases_ is way different from the "sales are down, Tesla is doomed" that got reported.

<comment><USER5> Tesla added an additional assembly line at the Fremont plant.[1] This doubled production capacity. Cost about $100M. They already run two 9-hour shifts and six days a week.

[1] [http://insideevs.com/teslas-2nd-production-line-capable- pump...](http://insideevs.com/teslas-2nd-production-line-capable- pumping-3000-tesla-per-week/)

<comment><USER4> That article is two years old.

<comment><USER5> Good point. Do they have more final assembly lines now, or what? The info two years ago indicates the final assembly lines were maxed out.

Here's a long video of the assembly process in 2015.[1] This is useful, rather than the usual quick montage of cool robot scenes. There was a surprising amount of manual assembly in areas where other manufacturers are automated.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVCCroN7vS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVCCroN7vS0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some perspective... Tesla posted a loss of approx $1 per share. With a budget of $19.3B, I pay NASA $55/yr (assuming 350M taxpayers of uniform means) in "losses."

As a tesla shareholder (forget upside and commercial value), that's a small price to pay for funding a sci-fi future.

Not everything needs to be about ROI.

<comment><USER7> Maybe Musk should do what Steve Jobs did and say "If you're not a long-term investor, we don't want you."

The stock price would probably drop a bit after that, but it may be for the company's best interest in the long term. Tesla needs visionary investors, too.

<comment><USER8> That was Tim Cook.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/03/tim- cook...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/03/tim-cook-climate- change-sceptics-ditch-apple-shares)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's the call in its entirety btw.

[http://youtu.be/Oo07tHQe-y0](http://youtu.be/Oo07tHQe-y0)

Sounds like he is quite pleased with the progress of their autonomous driving algorithms.

</comment><comment><USER10> > _"Full autonomy is going to come a hell of a lot faster than anyone thinks > it will," he said. "And I think what we've got under development is going to > blow people's minds. Blows my mind."_

That's the money quote.

I still think the Model 3 will be fully autonomous without a traditional steering wheel. It will probably have some ability to take over very rarely.

<comment><USER11> > I still think the Model 3 will be fully autonomous without a traditional > steering wheel...

That seems highly unlikely; most regulators thus far have been (unsurprisingly) unwilling to let autonomous cars on the road without some form of manual control. Given how early we are in the technological development cycle for autonomous cars, this seems prudent and logical.

<comment><USER12> They're also pushing hard to convert Model 3 reservations into Model S purchases. I don't think they'd be doing that if they were going to release a revolutionary increase in AP in only a year.

<comment><USER13> Musk has basically said it's mostly a software problem at this point. And if new Model S's aren't already getting the Autopilot 2.0 hardware yet, they will be very shortly.

They're pushing reservation conversions because the more cashflow they can have now the better terms they'll be able to get financing as they move down their roadmap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's amazing to watch many commenters here try to justify the miss wasn't really a miss. Or if it was, it was so slight as to not matter.

What's the motivation here? Are people talking their book, or is it idolatry of Musk?

<comment><USER2> I assume you're probably referring to me with this comment. I didn't say it wasn't a miss, merely that the common interpretation of "demand is down, Tesla is dying" is completely silly once you look at all of the numbers.</comment></comment>


How Steve Jobs Infused Passion Into a Commodity - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/business/how-steve-jobs-infused-passion-into-a-commodity.html?_r=1&hp

<comment><AUTHOR> To me, design is the next frontier in technology, and Steve and Apple led the way. We are human beings afterall, and our appreciation of the artful and well-designed is intrinsic. Why can't great engineering have both and satisfy our needs and our eye, and ultimately our soul? The Golden Gate Bridge is an excellent example of what Steve was talking about - it's not a veneer, it's beauty goes to the bone. Same goes for the user end of a website. for that matter. The experience should be functional and beautiful.</comment>


RefugeBnB - <AUTHOR>

http://refugeebnb.org<p>Our goal is to identify a community of ordinary people who are prepared to act in the most extraordinary and personal way. To go beyond platitudes and literally open their doors and say 'I will help'. We ask you to join our register of people interested in hosting a refugee family to help them build a future. <comment><USER2> This is for a good cause, but sadly I cannot do more than just provide you an upvote! Goodluck</comment>


Ask HN: Which is better - Foundation, Blueprint, or Bootstrap? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I tried to use Bootstrap, but found I had to add too many extra elements...

</comment><comment><USER3> i used to like bootstrap ... that is ... until everyone and their grandmothers started using it</comment>


A different kind of link sharing for programmers (weekend project), realtime - <AUTHOR> http://dhaivat.webfactional.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This was a weekend project for me, done in about 3 hours, and I'm still fixing a few bugs, but, here it is.

Basically, I really love Hacker News, but, because there is a login and other such restrictions, a lot of content gets filtered and downvoted so I never see it, and I wanted something that would be almost too free to be useful, but, I did it anyway.

And, being realtime is really cool so I can have it on another monitor while working and not have to keep refreshing, and I also wanted to do it 'cause I wanted to do a realtime app with Flask (<http://flask.pocoo.org/>)</comment>


Tesla stock crashes after Elon Musk tweets: 'Tesla stock too high imo' - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2020/05/01/tesla-stock-crashes-after-elon-musk-tweets-tesla-stock-too-high-imo/ <comment><USER2> Brilliant move by Elon Musk.

Although I doubt many understand why its a good move from a strategic & business pov.</comment>


Some VPN apps and ad blockers have been spying on users' phones - <AUTHOR> https://www.androidcentral.com/some-vpn-apps-and-ad-blockers-have-been-spying-users-phones <comment><USER2> I've come to appreciate the lists and details from privacytools.io on tools related to user privacy.</comment>


Bumping into Stallman, again - <AUTHOR> https://www.fredericjacobs.com/blog/2016/02/02/stallmanism/ <comment><USER2> It is still valuable to ask people not to use the term "open source", and to explain why.

The free software movement is a liberation movement. As we have seen in the ~30 years since the movement started, when users are not allowed examine, modify, and share the software runs on their computers that software is used against them. Proprietary software is all about gaining power over users. It is not a theory anymore. It is an overwhelming, proved fact.

The "open source" brand was created to combat the liberation movement. The people who devised the "open source" name and promoted it oppose the free software movement. The "open source" founders set out to advance the cause of gaining power over users.

The free software movement fights for freedom. The "open source" instigators wanted to interfere with that fight, to distract people from it, and above all, to make it harder for the libre software movement to gain technical advantages over proprietary software.

<comment><USER3> > founders set out to advance the cause of gaining power over users

I'd argue that GNU set out to advance the cause of gaining power over developers. Specifically, to place arbitrary legal restrictions on software so devs who use it are forced to buy into the ideology of GNU.

The ironic thing about FLOSS is that it acts counter to the ideals of libre. There's no freedom in restricting how open source code is developed. In short, it enforces exclusivity.

It's intended for developers who want to maintain ownership of any/all development of the code they produce. To remain the de-facto benevolent dictators for life whether or not that is good for the health of a project.

RMS didn't create GPL out of some greater sense of altruism. Watch his talks about the early days before GPL. He created it in spite of the developers he worked with who moved on to industry. Stallman never moved on to industry and has spent a lifetime hiding away in academia and/or making a living off of awards and public speaking appearances where he preaches his ideology as canon.

You know who doesn't make a living from FLOSS? the thousands of contributors who helped make his projects the success they are today. Funny how RMS never acknowledges their effort.

Hurd will never deliver on it's promises and instead GPL piggy-backed on the success of linux to the point where (from a legal standpoint) both are essentially inseparable.

\-----

As for 'open source'...

True freedom is allowing others to extend/improve the code for their own uses. I _prefer_ 'open source' _because_ it fosters the degree of freedom that the GPL only superficially claims to promote.

If others find value in my contributions and leadership then they'll support my projects and the direction I take. If somebody comes along that does a better job, so be it. That just means I probably have more room for improvement.

Removing one's ego from the process creates something much more valuable. An inclusive environment where others can join in, grow together, and move on to better things in life if they find the opportunity.

<comment><USER4> > I'd argue that GNU set out to advance the cause of gaining power over > developers

Power that is shared equally is not held "over" anyone. Share-and-share alike is not power, its equality.

> The ironic thing about FLOSS is that it acts counter to the ideals of libre

According to which philosophy? John Locke (1632–1704) rejected several hundred years ago the notion that liberty should have no restrictions.

 _Thus, freedom is not as Sir Robert Filmer defines it: 'A liberty for everyone to do what he likes, to live as he pleases, and not to be tied by any laws.' ... Freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature. Freedom of people under government is to be under no restraint apart from standing rules to live by that are common to everyone in the society and made by the lawmaking power established in it. Persons have a right or liberty to (1) follow their own will in all things that the law has not prohibited and (2) not be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others_

Rules that are common to everyone are not power, and its not counter to the ideals of libre. Shield me against the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others, and I will have liberty. Proprietary licenses and DRM are frameworks that arbitrary limits who can modify the software, who can read it, and who can use and share it.

<comment><USER3> "(2) not be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others"

If you want to put it to the test, try creating a legal derivative work of a GPL/LGPL licensed project.

The license has enough grey area that the only guarantee is that the legal system could one day be used to subject you to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, and arbitrary wills of others. Via legal battles initiated by malicious actors and/or as a result of contributions by contributors who don't fully understand the depth of the GPL/LGPL restrictions.

I vote 'no confidence' in the GPL/LGPL license's purported guarantee of freedom. For the same reasons I wouldn't trust an enemy to always speak kindly of me behind my back.

The GPL/LGPL were bourne out of the desire to publicly spite others. They were initially accepted as canon because they were the first copyleft licenses.

I'll never feel safe or protected from legal recourse if I contribute to a GPL/LGPL project because I can never guarantee that the codebase is a completely original work. From a legal standpoint 'good faith' simply isn't good enough.

It's a personal choice. If you feel completely safe contributing under the terms, by all means, I'm not trying to stop you.

"Proprietary licenses and DRM are frameworks that arbitrary limits who can modify the software, who can read it, and who can use and share it."

By all means, I'm not advocating for proprietary licenses or DRM. I'm speaking strictly in terms of OSS (ex MIT) vs FLOSS (GPL/LGPL).

If a company or dev decides to use a proprietary license to protect their invested time/effort, that's their legal right.

DRM is... Well, I'm not going to touch that with a 20ft pole. Hopefully, one day we can find a means to make DRM completely irrelevant and/or unnecessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does Stallman realize that many a time, his jokes and comments simply _aren 't appropriate_? Making fun using the fact that someone committed suicide, especially so recently, goes far beyond crass. It's absolutely despicable.

Personally, I'm all for people having freedom of speech such that they can say what they wish. However, there is a time and place for everything. If Stallman (or anyone, for that matter), had said such a thing privately among a few of his like-minded friends and it had leaked out, it wouldn't really matter. However, when he is repeatedpy given a stage to say such things from, it looks as if event organizers either don't care about the image they portray (bad), or that they support such ideas and behavior at their events (worse).</comment>