FCC chair: An Internet fast lane would be 'commercially unreasonable' - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/05/20/fcc-chair-an-internet-fast-lane-would-be-commercially-unreasonable/ <comment><USER2> Maybe Wheeler's plan is to keep making confusing nonsensical statements until we get fed up with him and stop paying attention. Seriously, it seems like the FCC just can't be clear about what it is they actually plan to implement.

Just reclassify broadband as a 'telecommunications service' already. The court in Verizon v. FCC said the FCC had the authority to reclassify. So do it and stop wasting everyone's time with your vague contradictory incomprehensible statements.

<comment><USER3> I won't defend Wheeler, he's a jackass.

However, no one else _anywhere_ seems to be telling the truth. And we're never going to arrive at a solution that everyone enjoys or thinks fair if we continue to chant internet activist slogans.

In 1997, peering worked because we need a simple solution whereby dozens of private companies could hook their networks together without going through the complicated accounting of who owed who how much. Most networks sent as much as they received, there was little point in nitpicking the slight differences.

In 2014, this may not be the case. Level3 wants to send much more traffic to Comcast than Comcast would ever send to Level3. This is because Netflix (a Level3 customer) is asymmetric in nature.

Why is Comcast obligated to do this for free? Comcast doesn't offer its customers "Netflix service". Indeed, if it did, people would go crazy screaming net neutrality slogans. Comcast offers internet service, and they don't guarantee access to Netflix _especially_ when Netflix doesn't bother to acquire sufficient network connectivity.

This doesn't mean Netflix is evil. It doesn't mean that Comcast is anything other than evil.

But Comcast does feel cheated if they're forced to pay for the upgrades, and Netflix feels cheated if they're forced to pay for the upgrades (even though they are the ones who benefit from this).

This means that peering in general may not work anymore. That is the real problem that no one seems smart enough to address. And if it does not work, what replaces it?

So if you're suggesting Wheeler isn't smart enough to fix it... well, that sort of figures.

> Just reclassify broadband as a 'telecommunications service' already.

That wouldn't really fix anything though. It's very likely to have not only unintended consequences, but bad ones.

<comment><USER4> Why does it matter who sends who how many bits? It seems like that would only matter if one peer is sending traffic over another peer's network that's has yet a third peer as the real destination. But if e.g. Level3 is sending bits to Comcast because they're going to Comcast customers, then that seems entirely ok. These aren't bits that Level3 is forcing on Comcast. Comcast _asked for these bits_. Or rather, Comcast's customers did, but that's the same thing as far as I'm concerned.

If Comcast is asking Level3 for massive amounts of traffic, it makes no sense at all for Comcast to then turn around and accuse Level3 of sending them too much traffic. I suspect the real problem is that Comcast simply didn't expects its customers to actually use all the bandwidth Comcast promised them. They can't very well accuse their own customers of using too much traffic (for legitimate purposes, I'm ignoring BitTorrent here).

Comcast just needs to admit their equipment simply isn't up to the task of servicing their own customers, and they need to upgrade. Trying to charge Netflix for all the traffic is just pure greed.

<comment><USER3> >Why does it matter who sends who how many bits?

Because that's what peering is.

No one gets to connect to a network, any network, for free. But if you have your own network, the company that owns another network might decide to hook up to yours for free, and you to his for free.

Supposing, of course, that your networks are roughly equal. Why bill each other, if your bill to him will be about as much as his bill to you? Doing all that accounting costs money, so it's easier to just connect to each other for free.

But this only works if both your networks are roughly equal.

If some jackass walks up to you and says "I'm selling crap to your customers, let me hook up to your network for free!" you aren't going to agree to that. It'd be dumb.

I really, really have trouble making sense of why so many people are ignorant of peering. It's going to be a really big problem too, because ignorant people are screaming for politicians to fix it, and neither the people nor the politicians have any clue at all.

> If Comcast is asking Level3 for massive amounts of traffic

Comcast is a network. It doesn't ask for traffic.

It lets people who are connected to their network communicate with each other. If only one party connects to their network, it is impossible in a practical sense to facilitate communication between the two.

Comcast doesn't guarantee connectivity to any specific host. It is a best effort service.

> Comcast just needs to admit their equipment simply isn't up to the task of > servicing their own customers,

A kernel of truth in a turd of mistruths.

Yes, I suspect this too. But it's not their equipment... that stuff gets switched out every few years. It's their network itself. HFC isn't sufficient for a modern network.

Also, there's no point in them admitting this. That helps them not at all. And, since they're familiar with all the numbers, I also suspect that they know they can't afford to build a modern network.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure you've addressed eridius'a comments. I understand what you're saying about peering, but I think his/her point is that ISP customers pay ISPs not to care about peering.

I think that's generally the point that neutrality activists make, that in large par the internet works because users have equal access to any network, regardless of the asymmetry inherent to that access, and that users are willing to pay for the cost of that asymmetry.

If Comcast needs more money to properly connect it's users to Netflix, then that's fine, charge me more money. I'll gladly pay directly for real infrastructure upgrades. But forcing that revenue to go through Netflix first, you're fundamentally changing a key feature of the Internet.

The fact that these issues go away if there is no asymmetry (peering) doesn't seem so relevant.

<comment><USER3> > I understand what you're saying about peering, but I think his/her point is > that ISP customers pay ISPs not to care about peering.

Nothing in their contract with Comcast suggests that they've somehow bought "the right not to care about or understand peering".

So if they think they've bought that, then the problem really is one of "stupid customers".

Do you know that I absolutely loathe Comcast? I hate coming off like I'm defending them. I want the company abolished, its assets sold off at auction, its shareholders prohibited from ever investing in shares again, its executives sent to prison to rot for the rest of their lives.

There are many bad things about Comcast. We don't need to make up lies about them.

> If Comcast needs more money to properly connect it's users to Netflix, then > that's fine, charge me more money.

Then they're hit with accusations of violating network neutrality (if they only charge Netflix users), or of price-gouging if they charge everyone.

This was already taken off the table by the same people who are rabble-rousing everyone.

> But forcing that revenue to go through Netflix first, you're fundamentally > changing a key feature of the Internet.

By not forcing it, you're changing a key feature of the internet: settlement- free peering.

This is why my original, top comment explains how things have changed and peering may not work anymore. It's impossible to come to a resolution where all parties feel as if they've been treated fairly.

And that's a much bigger problem than anything anyone else is talking about. It's a problem that won't go away if we ignore it.

<comment><USER6> _Then they 're hit with accusations of violating network neutrality (if they only charge Netflix users)_

I'm not sure why you think this is a 'bad thing'.

Comcast sells users bandwidth (X download, Y upload). It doesn't sell "Access to static and dynamic web sites, but not video streaming services." If the customer is using less than X and less than Y, why does the type of traffic matter? If Comcast doesn't want users using the amount bandwidth they paid for, then they need to be more upfront about that in the plan pricing (lower the bandwidth, or increase the price).

That's what people are asking for. Just like I shouldn't expect my cell phone bill to increase because I called across state lines instead of local, I shouldn't expect my internet bill to increase just because I used the bandwidth for watching Netflix as opposed to something like seeding Linux distributions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish they'd stop calling it a "fast lane"\--it's the slow lane for anyone who doesn't want to pay up. Somewhere a cable industry Frank Luntz-alike probably focus grouped the term and now everyone in the media is using it.

<comment><USER8> The slow lane/fast lane propaganda is the small fight, they can have it. It's not about the speed, it's about equal access.

The ISP discrimination and censorship lanes are the real problem.

<comment><USER7> Sure. But phraseology shapes the debate, as is evident from "death tax", "health care rationing", "government takeover of health care", etc.

<comment><USER8> Exactly, my point is that the slow/fast phraseology is the wrong phrasing fight altogether. Whenever someone counters "fast lane" with "slow lane" they are promoting the premise that the issue is 'just' about the speed of the connections.

While I care about connection speed, it's not the critical issue at the core of net neutrality. The issue is that the ISPs can choose discriminatory speeds based on any criteria they like, including censorship. And because they are known monopoly abusers, this is an especially critical issue. slow/fast ignores it entirely. It's possible this is deliberate strategy on their part, instead of just a simple marketing attempt.

I propose we take the phraseology debate to them, and use phrases like "ISP discrimination lane".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This rule is _so easy_ to bypass. All it means is that ISPs can't "offer" _fast lanes_ anymore - as in premium access for certain companies, for which they would charge extra.

However, under this rule, they can still do what they're _already_ doing: _slowing down_ everyone's Internet, and then charging websites money to "get it back to normal". This way they didn't create a "fast lane". It's the same "normal lane" \- for which they now charge extra money, unless you want them to _slow you down_. Like this:

[http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this- hilarious...](http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/04/25/this-hilarious- graph-of-netflix-speeds-shows-the-importance-of-net-neutrality/)

Wheeler is either a fool, or playing ignorant, if he doesn't realize this.

<comment><USER10> > However, under this rule, they can still do what they're already doing: > slowing down everyone's Internet, and then charging websites money to "get > it back to normal".

It would be fairly hard to construct either the actual text of the proposal itself or Wheeler's statements of the FCC's intent in applying it to find any rule under which a "fast lane" would not be "commercially reasonable", but intentionally reducing the quality of service for normal use and paying to bypass that reduction would be "commercially reasonable". In fact, its hard to see how the latter is _not_ exactly the same as the former.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If they were to allow fast lanes, would there be any incentive for Comcast to upgrade regular peering connections?

\- They'd lose out on fast-lane revenue.

\- Increased peering bandwidth would just be increased costs.

\- Worse internet video experience supports their Cable TV business.

<comment><USER3> Peering was created because the two peers wanted to send each other nearly- equal levels of traffic.

If we have a situation where one peer wants to send alot of traffic and not receive anything in turn, this is a problem settlement-free peering cannot handle.

It's absurd to expect Comcast or anyone else to bend over backwards and pay for upgrades so that the other party gets to do this for free.

None of them are obligated to peer.

If we force this issue, we may get something that looks like a victory, temporarily. And then it will backfire on us.

I keep getting downvoted on reddit because I point this out. There are people who claim "but it's still Comcast's fault! Netflix offered them servers to relieve the load"...

Never mind the fact that placing servers in Comcast's own datacenters is something they rightly bill companies for the privilege of.

No one is being sensible about this, or so it seems.

<comment><USER12> The funny thing is that Google, Viacom,...etc already pay for ISP datacenter access. Why should netflix get a 'free' pass?

Totally agree on the peering aspect, and this is not a new issue. Comcast even posted a video explaining 'free' peering, but sadly took it down ([http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/how-internet- pee...](http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/how-internet-peering- works)).

As I've mentioned before though, imagine if you paid a per GB cost. Then Comcast would want more Netflix traffic, not less. Where-as in the current system Comcast could care less how much of your 300GB cap you use, hence them wanting to be paid to upgrade their peering exchanges.

<comment><USER3> > As I've mentioned before though, imagine if you paid a per GB cost. Then > Comcast would want more Netflix traffic, not less.

Unless the cost of handling increased Netflix traffic outweighs the minor profit of per-gigabyte billing.

Read my sentence above a few times if necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Finally, the FCC is hearing the demands of users/consumers of internet service. The fast-lane idea was terrible for businesses - other than huge companies who can pay the fast lane fees - and for users who already deal with pretty widely terrible experiences with ISPs.

</comment><comment><USER14> Too bad paid prioritization is last year's battle. This year it's intentional congestion.

<comment><USER15> maybe a class action lawsuit could solve intentional congestion (for not meeting contract agreements)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If internet access regulation can be compared to railway regulation it seems like providing a fast lane service is a fair option from the ISP point of view. The only wrinkle is when the ISP is a monopoly, in which case the definition of the tiers and the pricing in the individual tiers must be regulated.

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately, the Internet is very difficult to analogize to anything else. Bandwidth is not an exhaustible resource, so it's not comparable to power or water. Throughput can be increased without modifying the medium just by replacing equipment in a few locations, so it's not like roads or railways.

This makes it difficult to reason about the Internet without direct knowledge of its distinguishing characteristics, thus making it easy for entrenched interests to sway legislators and the public. We need to convince people that the Internet is special, that we need to think carefully about how we run it, and that we can't lazily shove its square peg into the round holes of ill- fitting analogies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Providing broadband connectivity to rural Americans should have priority over giving 'fast lanes' to those who already enjoy broadband service.</comment>


A Flipboard like web site for news - <AUTHOR> http://www.c-est-simple.com/inmag

<comment><USER2> pretty cool ! Would like more sources though

</comment><comment><USER3> Holy moly!</comment>


The Internet Is Controlled by 14 People Who Hold 7 Secret Keys - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.in/The-Internet-Is-Actually-Controlled-By-14-People-Who-Hold-7-Secret-Keys/articleshow/31232908.cms <comment><USER2> Um.. no? Those are DNSSEC keys, so they do not really matter. AFAIK, no one is using DANE yet, so what's the worst that someone with access to those keys do? Modify unencrypted traffic? Cause DOS attacks? This can be done without the keys already

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, allow me to retort.

[https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2016/10/27/14-dns-nerds-dont- con...](https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2016/10/27/14-dns-nerds-dont-control-the- internet/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Blockchain technology, and in other words, a distributed, decentralized record store shared across multiple participants, is the perfect technology to disrupt the heavy centralization of naming.

This is one of the few places the use of a blockchain will shine.

<comment><USER2> I highly doubt it. We'd still have a dispute process and law mandated domain transfers, so there would need to be a centralized regulator. The transparency is nice, but you do not need full blockchain for this - something like SSL's Certificate Transparency would work much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's time to move away from relying on DNS which is a glorified federated search engine for hostnames.

Just use non human readable names, like magnet links and Kademlia distributed hash tables for example.

If you really need a search engine to map something to these names, then share THAT magnet link(s) with them. Why have a monopoly on DNS?

<comment><USER6> > Why have a monopoly on DNS?

Because for now it's the only mechanism that we all use to do lookups. Magnet links are too tedious to give out over the phone - domain names are catchy and memorable and can be easily said over the phone. This is why people brute force Tor .onion addresses to something memorable, like Facebook's .onion [https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/](https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/) And I suspect if you start using magnet links that people will find a way to make them memorable too

<comment><USER5> Let's look at those reasons.

We will have a monopoly on X because that's what we all use and that's how we've always done it. No alternatives are needed.

\- Well does that reason work well in any other area of life?

"Too tedious to give over the phone" - usually you give a business card or email a link of sms a link. And all you can give over the phone is

      A easy to pronounce domain name
      With no ambiguities
      With a common tld

And even then, ALL you can do is give out the homepage. Any other resource deeper on your site — and you don't use your phone do you?

Do you use the phone to give out the URL of an article on nytime.com or video you posted on youtube? Thus the VAST MAJORITY of links you don't give out on the phone.

If you DO want to give something out on the phone then people can just google for it. Or use another search engine

DNS is literally the search engine with the least features. Google lets youfind any resource within your site, and even lets you misspell stuff. How is that not strictly better?

To summarize:

ICANN monopoly is replaced with search engines, which do far more than find your homepage from an exactly spelled domain

Magnet links can be memorable via search engines

Links are usually NOT to the homepage and are not really human dictated anyway (eg youtube)

Tunnelling an internet resource address through a phone conversation is pretty bad anyway, but better to allow innovation in it like searchh engines or just text the link afterwards (as most people do)

Links are usually replaced with nice-looking thumbnails and titles in UI

In Javascript and other languages, it's no big deal to hold magnet links in variables.

<comment><USER2> There is a second way to look at DNS: together with CA system, it proves the website identity. When an email sends me to payment page, I look at address to confirm: yep, it says "hsbc.com", I can enter my financial details there. Or: It says "ubuntu.com", I can download software from there.

For that to work, there needs to be a single registry, with human mediators and subject to legal process. I want to know that even if company loses control of their private key (like microsoft.com did once), the sitation will still be resolved very fast.

Note that strictly speaking, this is about CA system, not about DNS. But those systems are deeply linked to each other, so it makes no sense to replace one while keeping the other one around.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't seem to follow, in fact it just may be dangerous:

[https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital- imprimatur/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/)

Proving to X that you're Y doesn't have to involve a monopoly either. Who says someone can't bribe Google Places or a CA and say that a domain matches a restaurant. How do they reliably check millions of businesses anyway? Don't we rely on lots of third parties, network effects and our own experience anyway?

In short, X could use stuff like Verified Claims by Z to find out facts about Y. The collection of those facts make up its identity to X. None of this needs a centralized database.

[https://www.w3.org/TR/verifiable-claims-use- cases/](https://www.w3.org/TR/verifiable-claims-use-cases/)

When you lose control of a private key for your stuff, the solution isn't to run to some daddy corporation which also has it and could impersonate you the whole time. You can have eg Shamir Secret Sharing with 5 other people. You could have part of a backup key derived from a known passphrase or biometrics. And so on.

<comment><USER6> Glad you mentioned Network Effects[0]. I forgot to mention that in my original comment. So yeah; that's why DNS is popular & centralized; the more people that use the network, the more valuable the network.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google not liable for defamation in search results, rules high court (in UK) - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jul/20/google-defamation-high-court-ruling

<comment><USER2> FYI Train2Game is a complete con, £5000 for a 'course' of second-hand (read: plagiarised) materials and freeware tools, as well as offering 'loans' to help finance the course itself. They are notorious for spamming false PR pretending to be contented customers. I have a friend that almost fell for it, to the point where a salesman came round his house to sign him up; scary stuff.

[http://forums.digitaltrends.com/showthread.php?s=e0e28e34157...](http://forums.digitaltrends.com/showthread.php?s=e0e28e34157ec8c7d611c2a912b7a09d&t=16731)

Glad to hear the decision stayed on the side of common sense re: search snippets and censorship.

</comment><comment><USER3> "However, Eady did say that Google has a responsibility to block or take down content if it is notified with a legitimate complaint about libellous material."

More fodder for the chillingeffects database? Libel laws have no place on the web.

<comment><USER4> _Libel laws have no place on the web._

What is the difference of NYT publishing a defamatory article and huffington post? According to your logic the former should pay a lot of money while the later is free to be as defamatory as it wishes. I do not think that is sane, the public whether on the internet or wherever else has the right to maintain their reputation and not be injured unfairly.

<comment><USER5> The point of libel laws is that 50 years ago, the NYT could make libelous accusations against someone and they would have had no platform to defend themselves. Thus they were given a legal platform.

Now, if someone says mean things about you in a forum, you can defend yourself on that very same forum. You don't need a legal platform.

<comment><USER6> It shouldn't be my responsibility to defend myself in each and every forum in which I might be attacked, should it? Because if that were the case, whoever had the most posters and websites could say whatever they wanted about the people who didn't have those resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ..hmm, very interesting considering Justice Eady's track record. Read almost any Private Eye edition and they'll mention some bizarre ruling he has made.</comment>


Circuit Simulator Lets You Play Around with Electronics Components in Browser - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/circuit-simulator-lets-you-play-around-with-electronics-1769907355 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9896436](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9896436)

</comment><comment><USER3> neat! I love how you can visually see the current moving along the wires! That is something that I never got in spice in college days.</comment>


Where to trade Bitcoin with Leverage/Margin on this bull run - <AUTHOR> http://fuk.io/where-to-day-trade-bitcoin-on-the-bull-run-leverage-futures-spot-trading/ <comment><USER2> Margin trade now! It CAN ONLY GO UP! PARTY LIKE IT'S 1929!</comment>


The Deep Time of Walden Pond - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/60/searches/the-deep-time-of-walden-pond <comment><USER2> > Moments later, 33 inches (84 centimeters) of lake history break the surface.

> The results of previous coring studies suggest that this sample represents > about 1,500 years, which carbon-14 dating of the mud will later confirm. A > band of sediment that was deposited during Thoreau's lifetime lies 8 to 9 > inches (20 to 24 centimeters) below the surface layer of the core. I can > link the two strata with the span of two hands, a distance that will > eventually shorten down there on the lake bed as new, watery mud gradually > compresses under the weight of future layers. Thoreau's writings easily draw > your imagination back to the 19th century, but a sediment core such as this > pulls you even deeper into the past by encouraging you to ask "what happened > before that?" Seeing so many relics of Walden's yesteryears stacked one atop > the other in this manner exposes self-centered views of history for what > they are, reflections of our own minds that obscure our momentary positions > in an open-ended river of time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Walden is still one of my favorite books. Had a profound influence on me when I first read it in college. Thanks for this interesting article!</comment>


Cloudflare launches League of Entropy: distributed random number generator - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/league-of-entropy/ <comment><USER2> I love the general idea, but I'm not really impressed by some of the implementations. E.g. one of them uses /dev/urandom, another uses ChaCha20. So, e.g., how did the ChaCha20 generator get seeded? If you know the initial seed, don't you know the output for all time?

There's a guy on the net who has been generating hardware random numbers for perhaps 23 years, using radioactive decay. All things equal, I'd trust that method over ChaCha20. [https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/](https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/)

And when I saw EPFL (i.e. people from Switzerland) I immediately thought of ID Quantique. They are a Swiss company that sell an RNG that attempts to exploit quantum effects. They send individual photons at a semi-transparent mirror and detect whether those photons are transmitted or reflected. If the hardware is implemented correctly, that seems pretty darn random. [https://www.idquantique.com/random-number- generation/product...](https://www.idquantique.com/random-number- generation/products/quantis-random-number-generator/)

But the League of Entropy guys from Switzerland chose /dev/urandom instead of quantum mechanics. Exactly whose /dev/urandom output? Is is a desktop computer sitting on some guy's desk? The Cloudflare article linked to EPFL, not to the specific project. It's like saying "we get our random bits from MIT". Huh? MIT is a big school. Exactly where at MIT?</comment>


New Gel Coatings May Lead to Better Catheters and Condoms - <AUTHOR> http://news.mit.edu/2017/new-gel-coatings-better-catheters-condoms-0718 <comment><USER2> this groups releases a press release every few years touting their product, and saying it's going to be in everything. So far, I don't think there are any products that include it, though.</comment>


MySQL in the cloud at Airbnb - <AUTHOR> http://nerds.airbnb.com/mysql-in-the-cloud-at-airbnb

<comment><USER4> I run a fairly busy but normal implementation of MySQL on Amazon EC2 - <USER2> Master server and 3 read only slaves, with about 50GB of data spread between our portal database, a mediawiki instance, a forums database, a large dataset data for FCC license data, and a large core content database.

In initial testing of RDS after their recent updated release (we were excited about it!), we've found that RDS performance is significantly lower than running your own MySQL implementation with your storage being a 4 disk RAID-0 implementation on EBS. I suspect RDS uses a single EBS disk which is probably the root of the performance issues.

We didn't run actual benchmarks, but we quickly determined that RDS wasn't going to cut it from a performance perspective. In some cases, queries that take 3 seconds on our own MySQL implementation took well over 20 secs on RDS.

I see the value of RDS for many use cases, but in our case the performance of RDS is so significantly lower for a high-traffic use case that it wasn't going to work out for us.

Now, we still see performance problems when running MySQL on RAID-0 EBS - <USER3> we're considering going to an ephemeral disk implementation on EC2 and letting a single slave run on EBS and then snapshot from there often. If we lose an instance, we could restore from a snapshot quite quickly (within minutes).

In any case, regardless of our approach, RDS isn't going to be a part of it for now.

<comment><USER5> Assuming you use InnoDB, is your innodb_buffer_pool_size big enough to hold your data (or a significant amount of it)? It's by far the most important setting to get speedy reads, which form 95% of the queries in our case. When you did the testing, did you warm up the RDS instance before, for example by running a number of common queries? It naturally takes a while after booting until MySQL can make efficient use of caches and buffers.

I'm not sure if instance-local storage will give you better performance compared to EBS. From the EBS page: "The latency and throughput of Amazon EBS volumes is designed to be significantly better than the Amazon EC2 instance stores in nearly all cases."

There is a problem with the recovery approach you described: as far as I know you can't use an EBS snapshot to populate local storage on a new instance, so you would be forced to use EBS for the new master. Promoting the slave to be the new master would be the better approach, with less downtime and data loss, provided that MySQL replication didn't break unnoticed.

\- Tobi

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't imagine life without RDS. I'm a solo developer responsible for a large web app. Before RDS I hosted MySQL on dedicated hardware from Softlayer. I had a dedicated box for the master, one for the slave, and another for storing backups. The DB was about 100GB which made backing up a total nightmare. Mysqldump was too slow, I ended up having to use xtrabackup from Percona. Anyhow it got to the point were I was spending over 50% of my time maintaining the database instead of doing productive things, like building new features for my app.

Then I switched to RDS. I instantly fell in love with snapshots. I love that you can backup your database while it is hot. Sometimes, before doing a scary migration or query I'll take a snapshot just in case. I love that.

Even more amazing is the ability to scale up/down while the database is live. When I was with Softlayer and I needed to migrate to new machines there was always downtime and I always had to pay for both the new machine and the old machine for a small duration of time. Thus migrating would cost a couple grand in lost revenue and servers expenses, not to mention my Friday and Saturday night.

<comment><USER7> FYI: On Linux, you can do instant snapshots with LVM. This is pretty useful as it's possible to snapshot an InnoDB database as it's running without losing data.

<comment><USER6> This doesn't work at scale. The IO performance with LVM is terrible. I lost a lot of money trying to implement this. Percona wrote Xtrabackup as a replacement for LVM.

Documentation:

[http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/05/disaster- lvm-...](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/05/disaster-lvm- performance-in-snapshot-mode/)

[http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/24/xtrabackup- op...](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/24/xtrabackup-open-source- alternative-for-innodb-hot-backup-call-for-ideas/)

<comment><USER8> The _write_ performance with LVM is terrible.

LVM snapshots on read slaves or during times when you have sufficient write capacity work as advertised.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Okay, this justifies my HN-browsing once again. I was thinking about hosting MySQL-using application in the cloud literally thirty minutes ago, and then this caught my eye in the HN front page. RDS looks very promising, I think it will prove itself useful to us. Thanks HN!

<comment><USER10> Same here! I was on the fence about starting my app with RDS or moving to it later. This article puts me over the edge

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For anyone considering using RDS -- make sure you set your character encoding properly. Out of the box (at least in mid August), RDS used latin1_swedish.

Changing the database parameters is pretty painful, and the ec2 tool documentation is a bit misleading. Here are instructions, including how to verify your setup: [http://matthew.mceachen.us/blog/howto-configure-an-amazon- rd...](http://matthew.mceachen.us/blog/howto-configure-an-amazon-rds-instance- to-use-utf-8-925.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anybody how much Multi-AZ synchronous replication affects performance? I searched, but I couldn't find any benchmarks. Amazon's FAQ[1] says "You may observe elevated latencies relative to a standard DB Instance deployment in a single Availability Zone as a result of the synchronous data replication performed on your behalf" but they don't quantify it.

[1] <http://aws.amazon.com/rds/faqs/#39>

<comment><USER8> Since the hot standby can't serve read requests and is synchronous, I assume something like DRBD is being used on the block level to replicate the data to a separate AZ. I assume AMZN has adequate interconnect bandwidth between their AZs. Gigabit Ethernet has around 100-200μs RTT latency, and then there is the fact that you're writing the data twice...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would it be possible to get some figures of how much you pay amazon for this? And also db-size and queries per day or something?

Good post!

<comment><USER14> I suppose one could do a quick guesstimation using this <http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would have loved to have seen some actual perf numbers, especially in terms of how much of a cost the Multi-AZ writes entail. We're doing Postgres on EC2, which means RDS doesn't quite help, but Postgres 9's hot standby/streaming replication at least gets a bit closer (and could be easily extended to a Multi-AZ set-up if one of our hot standbys was in a different AZ).

</comment><comment><USER16> How does the scalability offered by Heroku compare to this? Does Heroku let you interface with RDS if you outgrow their db offerings?

<comment><USER17> It's the very first item on their add-ons listing.</comment></comment>


Invasion of the Robot Teachers - <AUTHOR> http://singularityhub.com/2010/03/03/invasion-of-the-robot-teachers-video/

<comment><USER2> Once robots are smart enough to replace human teachers, is there really even any need to require children to go to school anymore?

The (political) reason for compulsory education is to prepare young people to enter the work force. At the point that a robot is equivalent to a human teacher, doesn't that indicate that the singularity is upon us and almost all work can be performed as well or better by machines?

Considering that this is posted on "singularityhub," I am surprised that they did not address this possibility.

Of course, the fact that these current robots seem more a novelty than some significant improvement in education might have something to do with that oversight.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Online videos can coach you in defensive driving, Rosetta Stone will teach you almost any language without ever having to meet another human, and I'm constantly learning new writing tips from Clippy."

... that's sarcasm, right? I sure hope it is.

</comment><comment><USER4> _While each of these robots are far behind the capabilities of a human instructor, they showcase the potential for advanced automation in education. Give these guys some time, and you could see robot teachers become a staple of the classroom._

All you need to know from this lecture along with a nice metal-flake paint job and some tinted glass.</comment>


C2x: The Future C Standard - <AUTHOR> https://habr.com/ru/company/badoo/blog/512802/ <comment><USER2> > the first truly interesting book in years on this language was published

The linked publisher page indicates Seacord's book won't be published until August.

<comment><AUTHOR> But you can buy it already.

Also, I think they moved the date a bit.

<comment><USER2> Where did you buy it? It's a preorder on Amazon and on the publisher's page.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't :-) not yet, anyway. Waiting for the finalized version.

The early access pdf should be pretty complete though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pity, zero proposals to increase safety when using C is the only option for whatever business reasons.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd say that defer-like mechanism would help a lot with memory safety. But it's just a rumour currently.

<comment><USER3> I was more looking into adoption of any strings and arrays libraries, with proper bounds checking as well, now that Annex K is out of the table.

And stronger enumerations.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have yet to see any serious discussion around making the standard library less... Spartan.

Sometimes I question my own sanity because my love for this crazy little language :-)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, that is why POSIX exists, the unofficial C standard library.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow I love the #embed directive..

<comment><AUTHOR> True! Probably the only relatively big quality-of-life improvement so far.

Reformed error handling in it's current form is not there yet.</comment></comment>


Nature ENCODE: explore thematic threads among 30 ENCODE papers - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/encode/#/threads

<comment><AUTHOR> Essentially ...

"ENCODE, the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, is a project funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute to identify all regions of transcription, transcription factor association, chromatin structure and histone modification in the human genome sequence. Thanks to the identification of these functional elements, 80% of the components of the human genome now have at least one biochemical function associated with them. This expansive resource of functional annotations is already providing new insights into the organization and regulation of our genes and genome."

What used to be called Junk DNA is not junk but rather millions of switches that contextually control the expression of proteins by the other 1% of DNA. ENCODE is working this all out.</comment>


LastPass installs malware? - <AUTHOR>

From the lastpass download page, I installed the contents of https:// lastpass.com / download / cdn / lpmacosx.zip (de-urlized, for public safety)
My browsers were all hi-jacked, links taken over - lots of 'searchmadeeasy.com' linking (particularly on stackoverlow.com and viewing stackoverflow.com results in google searches) and http:// macsecurity-alert .com (de-urlized again), which is pretty obviously a malware phishing type site.
I never get caught by these sorts of things, and only downloaded lastpass on the recommendation of colleagues. Only by uninstalling lastpass were the issues addressed.
Anyone else seeing this with recent installs of lastpass? Infuriating that what I thought was a respectable company/product is desperate for cash to hijack browsers.
Edit: do tell me if I'm wrong on anything here, please! <comment><USER2> I can confidently say that this was not from the LastPass install -- we would never include malware (our reputation is based on trust built up over many years, this would shatter it).

The md5 of our download is 0290ce268f6e57b1ce26bb21748b12eb, it was last updated on Mar 4.

It most likely came from a different source.

<comment><AUTHOR> I absolutely agree - a reputation is easily shattered, which is why it seems incredulous that you guys were actually knowingly behind this.

Like I said, however - the issues disappeared upon uninstallation of the lastpass browser extension pack for OSX, and it certainly _seemed_ to appear on its installation.

For everyone's sake, let's all hope I was idiotic at some prior point and somehow had a different drive-by install...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been using lastpass for years, and haven't seen anything remotely similar.

Maybe their cdn got hijacked?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no idea - I've never used them before. I imagine if you've already got it installed, it's not an issue for you.

I don't think their product is affected, just what gets installed is <nasty>.

<comment><USER3> Do you mind posting the sha256sum for the zip file you downloaded? Then when someone from lastpass comes along they could at least compare it with their upstream.

I just downloaded:

0778d4528381917a8beaebfa3c033cc81157439fae01c082e8e7f33b51e37340 lpmacosx.zip

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks the same for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Instead of going to their download page, why not just install the extension from ${browser_name}'s extensions functionality? That way you're not dealing with the links on the developer's page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Probably wiser. However, I got looped into their on-site download funnel through a legit invite from a colleague.

<comment><USER4> Bah, no need for an invite when its free to use. :) But I see how you got there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

The only thing that I can come up with is that I happened across a malicious page that did a drive-by install of some malware that magically disappeared upon browser restart (which both the lastpass installer and uninstaller force in order to get their extensions registered).

At least, that's what I'm hoping, or I've still got malware on my system!

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been using it for the last few months; never seen anything like this.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have been using it for the last couple of years now and have never had any sort of issue like you are describing. Maybe the site has been injected with something or your friends invite was malicious?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've verified the invite was all lastpass.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Do you still have the original zip file that you downloaded? Could you check the MD5sum and post it here?

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted a response to a request for a sha256sum - I had the same sum as the one posted. If providing md5sum helps further, I will.</comment></comment>


Peter Thiel – Full Speech – 2016 Republican National Convention - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTJB8AkT1dk <comment><USER2> My explanation is here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12884413)

FWIW I predicted Brexit and Trump. I made 4 predictions this year.

1\. Irish same sex marriage would succeed. 2\. Brexit would win (with possibility of sabotage). 3\. Trump would win the presidency (with a high chance of being assassinated). 4\. Civil conflict would break out in Europe (2016-2017).

I'd like to be wrong about the 4th, but that's the one I'm most sure of.

<comment><USER3> What convinced you to make these predictions? And how far ahead of these events did you predict them?

<comment><USER2> > What convinced you to make these predictions?

I think this because I believe a great deal of what we call society is cyclical. We're at a point where I think many old ideas are about to be revived.

Talking explicitly about the last prediction will probably get me a hellban but my email is in my profile if you wanted me to elaborate.

> And how far ahead of these events did you predict them?

This is rough, I didn't keep a notebook for them. To do it properly like Scott Alexander I'd have to state a probability and some limit so a failed prediction couldn't be weaseled into a 'prophesy'. To the best of my memory it is this:

In the case of Brexit, at least six months, maybe a year. In the case of Trump, close to half a year. In the case of the same sex marriage, as soon as I heard it proposed, I don't remember when that was. And the civil conflict prediction is about 1-2 years old. Those are highly random difficult to predict events. I think I would have put it into a 'Five Year Plan', and 2016 would be Year 3, so that's 2 years 2 months to go. I increased my confidence when I found out the CIA had the same prognosis on civil conflict in Europe for the same time period.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great year for Thiel. First Gawker, then Trump.

</comment><comment><USER5> i prefer his most recent talk and q&a [https://youtu.be/ob- LJqPQEJ4](https://youtu.be/ob-LJqPQEJ4)</comment>


Repository redirects are here - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1508-repository-redirects-are-here <comment><USER2> Maybe now bootstrap can move out from under the twitter account, like they've wanted to.</comment>


Boeing Can't Fly its 737 Max, but it's Willing to Sell its Safety - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/24/business/boeing-737-max-survey.html <comment><USER2> I will fly a 737 Max after it's been on the market three years without incident.

<comment><USER3> I'm willing to wait to hear what the unions say. If they endorse the changes it will be something to strongly consider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm guessing once "customer education" fails Boeing, they'll make a few minor alterations and sell the thing under a different name. Hello "Boeing SFTY9000" or something.

</comment><comment><USER5> I will not fly in this plane.</comment>


IPv6 celebrates its 20th birthday by reaching 10% deployment - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/01/ipv6-celebrates-its-20th-birthday-by-reaching-10-percent-deployment/ <comment><USER2> FFS: MX records didn't take 20 years to get deployed!

This is crap. After twenty years, none of the problems with IPv6[1] have resolved, and when you get an IPv6 address from some places (hotels, mostly), much of the Internet turns into a unusable ghetto.

There's also _zero_ IPv6 at BT or Virgin Media, two of the largest Internet providers in the UK. We've been hearing we'll get it "next year" for a while, and I'm frankly tired of dealing with the incompatibility.

If IPv6 offered a _single_ user-visible feature it would sell like hotcakes: Mobile IP? IPSEC? All just as optional as with IPv4. Heck, if they even nailed auto-configuration or let multicast onto the Internet at least they'd have some customers.

Instead, it's sold a twenty-year clusterfuck of doomsday predictions about running out of IPv4 addresses, and the experience has been impossible to learn from because (a) it's spanning three decades now, and (b) everyone disillusioned by IPv6 can't come around without losing face.

I'm tired of IPv6 patting itself on the back; This was the worst deployment ever.

[1]: [https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html](https://cr.yp.to/djbdns/ipv6mess.html)

<comment><USER3> Bernstein's rant shows its age. It kind of proves the reverse of what you are trying to state.

The text starts with a question that undermines the whole text: "does every node need direct Internet connection?". Today, with P2P traffic on the uprise, the answer is a striking Yes. If, even with the hurdles of poor performing NATs, there is market pressure for P2P protocols, it's absurdly obvious the Internet must be symmetrical, not server-client.

The text then goes on about the impossible transition plan for IPv6. It's now obvious that moving servers to dual-stack, then clients progressively onto IPv6 (through provider address-space exhaustion) is a sound plan. It's happening, and it's approaching the critical point. 2016 starts at 10% IPv6 traffic, will end at 25% IPv6 traffic. No sound company today will launch its services in IPv4 only and eschew 10%-25% of potential traffic.

<comment><USER4> You're going to hit a wall with every ISP in the US and any country whose major telecos don't give a shit.

Fundamentally, why do they _have_ to support ipv6? Especially when they have monopoly power over their customers? Its not like the customers can see the difference, and if a website doesn't work for a network of millions because the site v6 only the only loser is the website.

I'd be surprised if we hit 15% this year. Web services are doing a good job supporting v6, but now you have to get _all_ ISPs to do it as well, and those ISPs are always ranked as some of the most consumer unfriendly companies in a lot of countries because they have no market pressure to improve or serve their customers well.

<comment><USER5> Comcast has spoken a bit about why they're implementing IPv6.

From: [http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_manageme...](http://meetings.ripe.net/ripe-54/presentations/IPv6_management.pdf)

 _In the control plane, all devices need to be remotely managed, so NAT isn't going to help us, nor is federated Net 10 islands…

IPv6 is the clear solution for us._

<comment><USER6> So they are managing devices inband as Sir Humphrey might say a "How very courageous"

<comment> X-Istence The devices are set top boxes, modems and more. Those devices only have a single plug that plugs them into the network, technically it is all inband.

It's only separated in that your cable modem gets a non-routable IPv6 address. It's non-routable within the internet but is a stock standard globally unique IP address. This is used for management purposes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note that adoption in the US is 25% (skewing the world average.) See [https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-c...](https://www.google.ca/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per- country-ipv6-adoption&tab=per-country-ipv6-adoption)

Many American ISPs distribute both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses to their users, and almost all mobile devices have some sort of IPv6 connectivity.

With Happy Eyeballs ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs)), and the other common transition technologies, IPv6 is largely transparent to most users and works quite well.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here in Germany (Telekom as ISP) IPv6 is now provided as a standard dual- stack. Your router/DSL modem gets a given IPv6 and another prefix to distribute IP to the devices. This is working surprisingly well, my last connection to the Cloudflare control panel resulted in a warning:

         Hi,

         Your CloudFlare account ... was logged in from an IP address we didn't recognize ...
         following IP address: 2003:72:4f0e:3600:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx.

I had first a kind of "is it a bug?" reaction because I did not catch the IPv6 address at first read. I was expecting an IPv4 address.

For the matter, the connection is reliable with no particular latency problems. I cannot distinguish between a site on IPv4 or IPv6 from an end-user experience point of view.

<comment><USER9> Why can't Time Warner, Verizon, BT do that?

Is there a commercial interest for different companies to keep IPv4?

<comment><USER10> Time Warner does exactly this in my area (and I suspect it's fairly widespread).

The issue is, the modems they hand out to many of their users are not DOCSIS 3 (unless the user is paying for a plan that requires DOCSIS 3 speeds).

If you bring your own IPv6 capable modem, or sign up for one of their higher speed plans, you'll get IPv6.

<comment><USER11> I'm a Time Warner customer in North Carolina and have IPv6 service. It works well, but the IPv6 networks aren't statically assigned, so I can't reach my devices at home reliably.

<comment><USER12> Does TW use DHCPv6-PD to allocate networks to customer sites? If it does, are you sure that your router is presenting the same DUID to TW's DHCPv6 servers?

IME, as long as you present the same DUID to Comcast's DHCPv6 servers, and your equipment renews its DHCP lease before the expiry time, you retain the same IPv6 prefix.

Hope this helps. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just realised something;

I've been developing web applications for a relatively long time now. Maybe in the last 10 years, I had my IP addresses stored in databases etc in IPv6 aware types just in case we had an IPv6 deployment in future. Better be ready.

Last month, I was working on something that needed to store IP logs. I packed them in 32 bit unsigned integers. Was not a well thought decision. I think I don't care anymore, just gave up.

Anyone doing the opposite of that? Maybe I was naive to jump on the train that early and these are better times. Felt like that 5 years ago too though.

<comment><USER2> I think a 32-bit hash of an IPv6 address will be fine for a long time, and remain much faster to search/sort than a 128-bit value.

I also think that if you _can 't_ upgrade your database you're going to have other problems as well.

<comment><USER14> > I think a 32-bit hash of an IPv6 address will be fine for a long time

Be careful with this, a 32 bit hash can see collisions with remarkably low numbers. A 50% chance of a collision is seen with ~75k entries: [http://preshing.com/20110504/hash-collision- probabilities/](http://preshing.com/20110504/hash-collision-probabilities/)

Depends on your application as to whether this is a problem or not.

<comment><USER2> 50% chance of _one_ collision. Be careful with those maths!

<comment><USER14> Yes, thanks for the clarification, it's what I meant with "a collision" but I realise that's ambiguous.

<comment><USER2> No worries, and you're absolutely right that it depends on your application whether this is a problem or not!

Estimating population sizes? "Unrecognised IP addresses?" Probably fine.

Interning the hash and using the real IP address in a database someplace? Probably not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Neither hackernews nor the linked article are reachable via IPv6. That is sad.

</comment><comment><USER16> 16% of home subscribers in Romania are connected to the internet via IPv6, most of them without even knowing it. This is largely thanks to the massive deployment effort led by the country's biggest provider - RDS. The connection is a dual-stack one. I've been using this for almost two years and it has worked very well. Most large sites support IPv6 without any hicups. This is a relevant read on how they did it: [http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case- stud...](http://www.internetsociety.org/deploy360/resources/case-study-how- romanias-rcsrds-deployed-ipv6/)

<comment><USER17> If you want to see up to date information about RDS IPv6 adoption divided by county in Romania: [http://labs.rcs-rds.ro/](http://labs.rcs-rds.ro/)

It also includes speed of each county.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Crazy idea. Maybe people just don't understand IPV6?

Is there any single good source (i.e. the minimal bullet points on a single page) that helps people make the switch?

<comment><USER19> You can't just "make the switch". Most devices already support IPv6 anyway. The problem is that ISPs and hosting providers don't support IPv6.

<comment><USER18> Right, fair enough but things I can do as a consumer are choose a particular ISP, and ensure i'm using up to date OS / network drivers etc.

I feel like saying there is nothing we can do to speed up the process is giving in a little too early when I've personally seen very little shared with the public that is understandable and helps people push this forward.

<comment><USER20> If you live in an area where you have a choice of ISP then at least inquire about whether they support IPv6. Chances are if you have a choice the factors other than IPv6 will make more of a difference. I.e. I'd have a hard time recommending an IPv6 enabled 6Mbit DSL connection over a 100Mbit cable one without.

I've certainly kept ISP choices in mind when choosing which community or neighborhood to live in. Ironically I find myself looking for places with Comcast because they've had solid IPv6 support for years.

If you are involved in a decision making capacity with a company that offers services over the internet, try to pick equipment, ISPs, SaaS vendors that use IPv6 where possible. With a few notable exceptions (rrrrrrr AWS) its not particularly difficult anymore. If you are at trade shows, quiz vendors about their IPv6 support.

Lots of ISPs have gotten on board recently at the cores of their networks but CPE equipment is often old (DOCSIS 2 modems, WRT54G bases). This holiday when I was visiting family I took a few minutes to swap out their ancient router for one that supports IPv6. As a result they'll also get faster and more reliable Wifi now so its often an easy sell for other reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Isn't it written that once penetration gets past 15% for most new technologies it starts to really ramp up. Putting the 'O' into Ogive.

<comment><USER22> I'm pretty sure IPv6 adoption will follow the standard S-shaped adoption curve [1]. If true, that sucks, because it means that the last 10% will take approximately as long as the first 10%.

Intuitively, I feel like that could in fact be the case. The last 10% to switch will probably be small ISP's without resources/knowledge, old devices that don't support IPv4 and old servers/webapps that haven't been updated in years.

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

<comment><USER23> But won't it reach a point where adoption is so high that major backbones and carriers simply retire their IPv4 equipment?

At that point you adopt or die.

<comment> X-Istence There are already carriers that are looking at taking IPv4 in at the edges, encapsulating it in IPv6 and then decapping it before handing it off to their customer.

Thereby the core network can be entirely IPv6 without any legacy IPv4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hey you, HN reader!

Do you run a website? Perhaps help to administer a website? Given you're on this site, it's not unlikely you do.

Well, does your site work over IPv6? If Yes, great! If you don't know, assume it doesn't. You may just need to add just a single line to your config file (e.g. `listen [::]:80;` for nginx). Go and do it. Beware that a virtual server you're using may not even have IPv6 networking enabled by default.

I finally decided to bring my sites into the modern age last month, and went and modified all my config files so I could use IPv6, TLS and PHP 7. Was worth it, I think.

<comment><USER25> And your code, and your load balancers, and....

There's a big difference between "it technically works" and "it does what you want it to do and works at scale"

<comment><USER24> Oh for sure. Don't just flip the switch tomorrow on your large site with a team behind. Even if it's a personal site, test it.

But at least try it out, see if it works, see what you need to do to get it working. Too many people stick with the defaults and lock themselves out from the IPv6 world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Jan 4. 2195 will be a glorious day.

</comment><comment><USER27> Since it's based on Google metrics - what are the stats like for countries where Google is not the most popular search engine? E.g China, Russia and Japan.

<comment><USER28> Is it really based on Google metrics? Google has been blocked by the Great Firewall on IPv4 networks since last year, but is still reachable via IPv6. So a Chinese who accesses Google either does it with a foreign IP (VPN or proxy), or with an IPv6 address within China. That would put the statistics close to 100% IPv6 usage.

<comment><USER29> Do any domestic ISPs offer IPv6 addresses?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What's the best way to test and deploy sites hosted on IPv6 addresses?

My office connection only has IPv4, and I'm loath to set things up blind.

(30 seconds of Googling isn't helping, I keep ending up on sites that test whether _my_ connection is IPv6 or not)

<comment><USER31> tunnelbroker.net, operated by Hurricane Eletric (he.net)

^Register, setup IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling. They can give you a whole /48 if you want to play with your network. Now considering you want to test other sites, all you need is IPv6 connectivity, so the default settings they provide are enough. I recall they had decent docs on how to set things up for all major OSes.

There were a few gotchas :

      * you need to make sure "ip proto 41" is not filtered by your firewall, or you won't be able to setup the tunnel

      * in the web interface, make sure you provide your public IPv4, and not your NATed address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I bet most of those users are on mobile networks. The need is very apparent: every mobile device needs to have internet access, and there's a lot of them with more being activated every day. Mobile providers don't have enough IPv4 addresses to support that and carrier-grade NAT is even more messy than IPv6.

Most residential ISPs that support IPv6 make you go through hoops to enable it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Isn't there a consequence to letting each "subnet" (and I'm not sure at what level this is defined... ISP?) have its own 64-bit prefix that every client uses, and then sharing 64-bit space underneath it?

Can someone help me understand the consequences of this, and how it ends up limiting the usable address space to some fraction of what 128bit would imply?

<comment><USER33> The /64 boundary is the standard boundary for each LAN. An "end site" (that is, a customer of an ISP) was originally intended to receive one /48 each, so enough space for 65536 /64 LANs.

You have to forget the idea that addresses are scarce. They were with IPv4, with IPv6, they are not. The whole point of the design is to make sure they are not scarce. Never, ever, anywhere. Conserving address space is not a virtue. Making sure that everyone has addresses available whenever they need some, with minimal delay and minimal administrative overhead, and with little fragmentation in routing tables, that is the goal of IPv6. And there is no real risk that this will lead to address exhaustion, there is enough space for about 40000 /48 per person currently alive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm still not convinced by the "NAT is Bad" arguments that people use when it comes to IPv6.

Having a public address for a device in my house seems like a potential security problem - it's leaking information about my network to the outside world. And it's a dream come true for traffic-tracking.

<comment><USER35> Think about a bigger picture. Before NAT we used to have a symmetrical internet. Everyone could consume content from other servers. Everyone by definition was a server and could produce content for others.

From a philosophical point of view this is extremely important. For example email used to be properly distributed. Nowadays the internet services are concentrated. For example gmail receives a big share of all emails. Amazon gets a big share of all http traffic, and so on.

In this centralised world the "client can be a server" attitude is in practice less important. NAT's are ubiquitous. Last-mile carriers don't give static IP addresses, etc.

But still, I would be much happier if the internet was truly decentralized. Even if it's not possible to decentralize all services, the internet, the addressing scheme and infrastructure just _must_ be symmetrical. Everyone connected to the net should be able to "publish" content without the need for anyones approval or infrastructure.

IPv6 addressing scheme, the removal of NAT's, brings back the democratization of the internet.

<comment><USER34> I don't disagree that people could be servers much more easily in the early days.

But my mum doesn't want to be a server. And I don't really want my TV being one either.

<comment><USER36> I don't see your problem. If you don't want your TV to be a server that's accessible from the internet then don't open any ports on your router's firewall to your TV. NAT routers accidentally acted as firewalls (and newer routers also acted as proper firewalls), but that doesn't mean we're going to ditch the firewall on the router now that we have IPv6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How good are IPv6 implementations nowadays? A few years ago there were quite a few bugs in them, no?

<comment><USER38> IP stacks have been fine for many years. There was some problems years back where some ISP's networks would have really crap internal IPv6 connectivity, so IPv4 routes had much lower latency than IPv6 - but that was mainly bad network design and operation.

All major operating systems have what's called 'happy eyeballs' algorithms to pick the best path for each connection. Apple updated theirs last year and reported that with most networks they tried, IPv6 was selected as the preferred option ~99% of the time it was available[1].

1\. [https://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/v6ops/current/msg22455...](https://www.ietf.org/mail- archive/web/v6ops/current/msg22455.html)

<comment><USER39> Apparently many vendors do not yet support RFC 6724, or support it poorly with regard to ULA addresses. As such, I get mixed results with devices that have both a ULA and a global address, with the device trying to use the ULA address (instead of the global address) for global network egress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm in no way an ipv6 expert, but I'm quite surprised it works bad for China.

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

<comment><USER41> I suspect that anything that does not have surveillance and censorship built in does not "work well" for China :(

<comment><USER28> IPv4 has no surveillance and censorship built in either. Those are red herrings when it comes to IPv6 deployment.

<comment><USER6> But v6 does :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Wonder if anyone has made a study about the IPv6 retardation as a market failure. Underbelly of network effect comes to mind (first mover ISPs get no advantage/payoff even though the change is sorely needed for the system as a whole).

<comment><USER43> Many have, as it's a staple assignment for technology management courses. Not sure if many have been published though.

Partly, IPv6 is currently a solution looking for a problem. Its killer features, larger address space and IPSEC, have been solved in different ways: IPSEC was retrofitted onto IPv4, NAT greatly surpassed its design intent -- it was intended as a stopgap measure only.

The other benefits of IPv6 are less critical, or less obvious. The increased direct address space enables much easier p2p solutions, but because of IPv4 we now have an Internet that is mostly client-server based. It is impossible to quantify what "could've been" without NAT. Automatic addressing and peer discovery have been mostly reimplemented, as easy-to-use DHCP servers in all consumer modems, and as UPnP/DLNA/APIPA for media devices.

Finally, it took until Windows Vista for ubiquitous consumer-side IPv6 to appear (yes, *BSD and Linux were faster). Until that time, there was zero market incentive for any kind of IPv6 deployment.

<comment><USER28> > It is impossible to quantify what "could've been" without NAT.

It is, because I have lived with multiple levels of NAT before and without NAT (with both public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses) nowadays. The ability to do P2P is truly amazing. Now I don't have to wait with the abysmal download speed when the server is highly congested. Also amazing is the capability to ssh into machines without any configuration or begging the network administrators who are nowhere to be found.

<comment><USER43> _The ability to do P2P is truly amazing_

No argument there. But that's not really a quantifiable statement either. In any case, that's not what I meant: I was referring to the different business and distributed computing models we might have had, instead of the heavily centralized models we have now.

Maybe we would have had technologies like bitcoin ten years earlier? Maybe IRC would have gained a P2P component, and Twitter would never have happened? That's the kind of things that "could've been" I was thinking of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why didn't we expand IPv4 to take 64 or 128-bit addresses and instead created IPv6?

<comment><USER45> Did you read the article? Every router... routes, so every router needs to speak the new protocol. If you tried to send packets in an IPv4-compatible way, what would you put for their addresses? They'd end up in nondeterministic routing loops which would be terrible to debug.

<comment><USER44> I'm asking why did the create IPv6 instead of a version of IPv4 with an expanded address (IPv4-version 2)? Why did they not do an incremental change instead of a whole new thing?

<comment><USER46> It's a distinction without a difference. Any protocol with addresses larger than 32 bits will necessarily be incompatible with IPv4, so what does it matter whether there's a "4" or a "6" in the name?

<comment><USER44> IPv6 seems to be a whole lot more complicated than just upping the number of bits used for addresses. Its like they were trying to solve a bunch of things in addition to the address range.

<comment><USER45> Per the article it mostly has the same headers. What other things are you thinking of? Stateless autoconfig is complex but IPv4 has that option too. Privacy extensions are complex but they are extensions, not the core spec.

<comment><USER47> IPv6 introduced several significant changes like dropping IP packet fragmentation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> That graph with china being red is worrisome. If you extrapolate the trends, in an other 15 years we will have 2 internets, one for China and one for the rest of the world, and you will just have to pay for any routing between the two.

<comment><USER28> That is already happening even within IPv4 networks. I have to use VPN or shadowsocks to reach much of the Internet outside China nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> So there's something that is worse than Python 3 adoption ;)

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm not a big fan of 128 bit addresses with ipv6, they are too long to read and write. Does anyone know why 64 bits was not good enough? 64 bit addresses aren't just twice as good as 32, but 4 billion times more numerous.

<comment><USER51> The main reason for 128 bit addresses is stateless auto configuration which wouldn't be possible with 64 bit long addresses: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autocon...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Stateless_address_autoconfiguration_.28SLAAC.29)

<comment><USER50> Hmm, I believe IPX could do that and had 80 bit addresses.

It still seems too large, but there's likely something I'm missing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> So basically: "IPv6 still totally unusable."

</comment><comment><USER53> Figures are like bikinis: they show almost all, except the essential.

This is a unique source from Google that is a stake holder in IPv6 deployment that has interests in you adopting this technology.

Does anyone else with critical sense would like to have more information to corroborate these claim?

Like, what is the top 100 AS percent of IPv6 exchange? What are the devices? (mainly android on 4G networks) What is the traffic per protocols? (is it only android phones pushing your secret data to NSA or does it have the signature of residential use too?) Could we have for TCP/UDP a distribution graph for speed of connection/failures compared to IPv4? How much SIP invites get dropped between v6 to v4 and the opposite? ...

One source of information, with only one metric does not tell us much more that google want us to know this.

<comment><USER20> Google is not the only group whose statistics show this trend.

Here are a bunch more, including measurements from CDNs, ISPs, network exchanges, RIRs, the US government, and other large content providers, as well as analysis of publicly available information like AS tables, DNS records, Alexa lists: [http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/](http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/) [http://bgp.he.net/ipv6-progress-report.cgi](http://bgp.he.net/ipv6-progress- report.cgi)

My own personal measurements support these claims. I worked on a small academic conference website not too long ago and the percentage of signups from IPv6 addresses approximately matched the traffic % that Google published for that time period. My own website statistics see a higher level of IPv6 traffic than Google shows, though it caters to a more technical crowd so I am not surprised.

10% global IPv6 deployment is not a Google conspiracy. =)

<comment><USER53> [http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2015-11/v6perf.html](http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2015-11/v6perf.html) I was talking about qualitative measurement like this

Quote :

These measurements show that in a large set of 1:1 individual comparisons where the IPv4 and IPv6 paths between the same two dual stack endpoints are compared, the two protocols, as measured by the TCP SYN round trip time, are roughly equivalent. The measurements are within 10ms of each other 60% of the time.

While the connection performance is roughly equivalent once the connection is established, the probability of establishing the connection is not the same. The current connection failure rate for IPv4 connections was seen to be some 0.2% of all connection attempts, while the equivalent connection failure rate for unicast IPv6 is nine times higher, at 1.8% of all connection attempts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> IPv6 looks like a the x86 64 bit architecture.

On the paper it is better.

In real life it brings only headaches that do not worth the trouble.

And for those who says memory, I answer that it is easy to make a 32 bit CPU with a 64bit memory adressing.

IPv6 still requires IPv4 to do MPLS. IPv6 has no de facto standard to make autoconfiguration. IPv4 CPE are already bloated and hardly work with a fair level of simplicity I hardly know any decent IPv4 sysadmin even in ISP. The IoT will imply constant connection from your device to the manufacturer while being connected to your internal network... this is a leak to me. I don't want my lightbulb to be able to sniff on my mails.

What IPv6 is good for? A lot of KPEX, concentration in ISP sector, a lock in effect... else I don't see.

<comment><USER28> x86-64 is quite successful as it is backwards compatible. Are you thinking about Itanium 64?

<comment><USER53> No I am thinking of the fact that code gets bigger, since assets get bigger, which results in execution is slower.

Actually there is a whole domain of application for which 64bits coding results in slower code.

Plus extending memory address space results in slower memory access. L1, L2, L3 caches are hardly accessible from python/ruby/...(ahhh using register is sooo fast).

Which in turn results in more watt/instructions.

Nowadays, the IT industry might be the leading one in its contribution to fossil energy consumption.

Do we need to add coal plants to support the cloud insanity bloating web pages to 16Mb for applications that are hardly more than 8 operation calculators to tell you how "green" you are?

I have a degree in ASIC design. Modern x86_64 architecture is insane. It has a lot of hidden complex mechanic built in that are de facto additional CPUs inside the CPU for on the fly optimisations (memory+OOP), "security", buses, plug n'play...

And who pays?

Actual IT industry is literally taxing the masses for something they neither ask nor need.

The IT is locking consumers in arbitrary choices that results in higher costs.</comment></comment></comment>


SmartDataCenter and Manta are now open source - <AUTHOR> http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2014/11/03/smartdatacenter-and-manta-are-now-open-source/ <comment><USER2> If I read this correctly, these components run on top of open source fork of Solaris, SmartOS?

Or SmartOS is using parts of Illumos, another for of open source Solaris, but it's not really a Solaris with its userland, but a container OS? Like Linux + Docker, but without the OS parts of Linux distribution.

The whole thing sounds very intriguing and really useful for a lot of things. I would like to do a Python Pandas DataFrame on top of Manta objects, for instance.

Hopefully someone could get a Vagrant box or something to try the whole stack on your own hardware. What I'm looking at now, I don't know where would I start building. Other option is to use their cloud services, but looking at their price charts [1] I get overwhelmed with options (and no free tier to take it for a spin).

[1] [https://www.joyent.com/products/public- cloud/pricing](https://www.joyent.com/products/public-cloud/pricing)

<comment><USER3> Briefly:

* Between Solaris 10 and Solaris 11, Oracle bought Sun and killed the open source efforts known as OpenSolaris. illumos started from the final open source bits of what eventually became Solaris 11 and has now significantly diverged. Solaris is effectively dead, illumos is very much alive.

* There are a number of illumos "forks", of which SmartOS is ours, but all forks still share the common illumos code (we merge daily) and contribute heavily back to the common base. Each fork may contain features which aren't yet ready for merging back, e.g. our work to port KVM[1] to SmartOS is not part of illumos yet, but other distributions such as OmniOS[2] have taken that work and integrated it.

* SmartOS is a minimal distribution, we have removed a lot of parts (desktop, shared storage, etc.) which do not fit in with our explicit design goals, and added tooling around virtualisation. You boot from USB/CD/PXE into a minimal live-image hypervisor known as the Global Zone[3], and then perform work in zones which are backed by local storage. To upgrade, you simply replace the USB image with a newer platform and reboot into the new live image.

* As for software, we provide userland built from pkgsrc[4], which gives you access to over 13,000 packages available under /opt/local, allowing you to use both the SmartOS tools as well as any third party software you may need (e.g. GNU stuff). There is even full desktop stuff provided, should you want to use it[5].

* In Manta, when running a job you are basically running in a zone with as many pkgsrc packages pre-installed as we can manage (currently nearly 9,000), so the chances are that the software you need is available. If not, you can easily build it yourself and the store it back in Manta to use later as an asset[6] for your jobs.

* There is definitely a free tier for Joyent zones (search for "free" on [https://www.joyent.com/products/public-cloud/pricing](https://www.joyent.com/products/public-cloud/pricing)), I thought there was also an additional free tier for Manta but I can't see it right now, however it will only cost a few cents to do some basic tests in Manta and get a feel for what it can do.

I primarily work on pkgsrc, but I know a number of other engineers will be reading this thread and can comment in more depth on SDC/Manta, so feel free to ask any more questions or pop onto #smartos or #manta on Freenode IRC.

Thanks.

[1] [http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2011/08/15/kvm-on- illumos/](http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2011/08/15/kvm-on-illumos/)

[2] [http://omnios.omniti.com/](http://omnios.omniti.com/)

[3] [http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/smartos-and-the-global- zone.h...](http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/smartos-and-the-global-zone.html)

[4] [http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/](http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/)

[5] [https://twitter.com/jperkin/status/348506063336783872](https://twitter.com/jperkin/status/348506063336783872)

[6] [https://apidocs.joyent.com/manta/jobs- reference.html#assets-...](https://apidocs.joyent.com/manta/jobs- reference.html#assets-assets-property)

<comment><USER2> Ok, thank you and others very much for your detailed info. I did use OpenSolaris for a brief time, but kind of lost track after Oracle came and took it.

In regards of the free tier, now I found it, but its mention is placed as the last line, after all the paid plans and the part about "Contact sales if your requirements exceed everything we've planned a price for" ;)

About Manta, I'd like to know about what kind of data objects it supports? Like having a matrix of time series data and making quick selections and sorts, near real time?

Docs talked about hierarchical storage and search, which sounds really useful, too, but what is search in this context?

<comment><USER3> Manta objects are effectively just files stored on ZFS, so you write anything you like. Maybe this example session will help:

* Perform a directory listing of a tmp directory in my public area. mls(1) is the ls(1) equivalent for listing Manta directories.

      $ mls -l /jperkin/public/tmp
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 jperkin        540751 Oct 23 14:19 bbc.png
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 jperkin         27237 Dec 13  2013 libreoffice.tar.gz
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 jperkin        132079 Oct 25 02:01 lx64.png
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 jperkin       2397256 Jul 09  2013 nas-workdir.tar.gz
      -rwxr-xr-x 1 jperkin       1626181 Jul 10  2013 nas-workdir64.tar.gz

* Log into a Manta zone using bbc.png as my input file. This creates a zone, and maps in my file which is stored on the same machine (you are always operating on the same host as your data is stored). mlogin(1) is a nice way to prototype jobs in an interactive session, and once you have it working correctly you can use mjob(1) to run it automatically.

      $ mlogin /jperkin/public/tmp/bbc.png
       * created interactive job -- f1a2e579-34f8-4dd4-da19-db33954a0772
       * waiting for session... | established
      jperkin@manta #

* At this point it's just Unix, so I can run any command on the file (which has been mapped in under /manta) I like:

      jperkin@manta # uname -a
      SunOS 0ae1c6ec-d47a-455c-9dd6-97eec16da31b 5.11 joyent_20140628T000418Z i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris

      jperkin@manta # ls -l /manta/jperkin/public/tmp/bbc.png
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 540751 Nov  7 11:41 /manta/jperkin/public/tmp/bbc.png

      jperkin@manta # file /manta/jperkin/public/tmp/bbc.png
      /manta/jperkin/public/tmp/bbc.png: PNG image data, 1680 x 940, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced

* Note that only the file I chose has been mapped in:

      jperkin@manta # find /manta
      /manta
      /manta/jperkin
      /manta/jperkin/public
      /manta/jperkin/public/tmp
      /manta/jperkin/public/tmp/bbc.png

* Let's convert it to a JPEG using convert(1) from ImageMagick and store it back into Manta in the same directory using mput(1):

      jperkin@manta # convert /manta/jperkin/public/tmp/bbc.png /var/tmp/bbc.jpg

      jperkin@manta # ls -l /var/tmp/bbc.jpg
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 504004 Nov  7 11:46 /var/tmp/bbc.jpg

      jperkin@manta # mput -f /var/tmp/bbc.jpg /jperkin/public/tmp/
      /jperkin/public/tmp/bbc.jpg    [</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>>] 100% 492.19KB

* This file is now available at [https://us-east.manta.joyent.com/jperkin/public/tmp/bbc.jpg](https://us-east.manta.joyent.com/jperkin/public/tmp/bbc.jpg) and ready for further Manta jobs.

Of course this is a simple and contrived example, the real power of Manta comes when you have say 1,000,000 log files stored under a particular path and want to grep them all for a particular string. To do that you'd do something like:

      $ mfind /jperkin/public/logs -n "access_log.*.gz" | mjob create -o -m "gzcat" -m "grep something" -r "cat"

This will scale to whatever size your Manta cluster is, e.g. if you have 10 hosts then the log files will be split up across those hosts and they each will spin up multiple zones to run "gzcat | grep" on the local data, before a final "cat" reduce job is used to collate the results from each map job.

<comment><USER2> Wow, thank you, again. I have to definitely take a look this. My use cases tend to vary so much that creating a Hadoop like system would require too much custom coding.

I wonder if it is possible to have compression and de-duplication, so that there could be a one big base dataset and lots of containers that only add what new data they generate.

Anyhow, looking at this it feels really approachable. What I have in mind are quick-and-dirty data-sciency scripts for ad hoc use cases, like diffing structured files and combing over matrix data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I saw a Joyent manta demo at a node.js roadshow/meet-up a year or so ago, and it was impressive. It's lovely to see the action (code)/object (data) relationship rethought, whereby they said "let's bring the tools to the data instead of lugging data to the tools." It's also cool, refreshing, and validating to see "the tools" being Unix. "Imagine you want to grep across a dataset and sort those records and pull out some key fields with awk..." No need to imagine: that could be your exact plan, using the familiar tools you know and love.

I'm looking forward to trawling (ha! more nautical theming!) this code for the education, and maybe some gems.

Edit: close quote, autospell fixing.

<comment><USER5> If anyone's interested in a presentation introduction to Manta (presumably similar to the one you saw), you may want to check out my FutureStack presentation from last year.[1] And if you have 90 minutes to kill and are in the mood for the true origin story of Manta, see my video from NYC DevOps in January.[2]

[1] [http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/future- stack](http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/future-stack)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY)

<comment><USER6> Thanks, that's a very amusing talk!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oh wow, my crush on Joyent just increased by two orders of magnitude. First, now (finally!) being open, manta is a viable alternative, and second, landing on MPL v2.0 seems like a very nice and pragmatic choice.

I highly recommend checking out the linked talk on Open Source anti-patterns for those, that like me, haven't seen it. I do think Bryan is a little quick on dismissing the GPL/CDDL problem (implying that RedHat didn't want dtrace) -- but I do see how the CDDL could evolve as _unfortunately_ GPL incompatible, rather than _intentionally_ so (he goes into this a little in the USENIX talk on OpenSolaris/Illumous).

Exciting times.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is unbelievably neat. So much good news coming out of Joyent recently.

LX branded zones revived, funding to make SmartOS Docker compatible and now SDC and Manta are open sourced. I love SmartOS.

It feels so elegant and well designed.

</comment><comment><USER9> See also comments on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8567620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8567620)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is cool. But, uh, how do I see the source to Manta? I read through all of the README on [https://github.com/joyent/manta/](https://github.com/joyent/manta/), and cloned it, and can't figure it out.

Is there not a meta fetch/build tool like Chrome/Android have? I have built those two projects from scratch with no problems.

Or do you have to start with the sdc repo?

EDIT: I just cloned the repos manually. I thought that there would be some automated way to start from the manta repo and get all dependencies.

<comment><USER11> FWIW, in the joyent/sdc repo there is an etc/repos.json so that you can do something like:

(mkdir -p repos; cd repos; json -f ../etc/repos.json -a git | xargs -n1 git clone)

We should add a etc/repos.json to manta.git as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Side-topic q: is anyone using Manta in production? And, do you think it could be used as a sort-of-graph-db?

<comment><USER13> We are heavily using it in production on [http://casinorpg.com](http://casinorpg.com) (not a common use-case, but it works well for us). Basically, when a player creates a new character, they are able to customize out of millions of unique possibilities. Since the game is HTML5, we must generate a unique PNG sprite for their character. We run Manta jobs to do this by generating the image, compressing it and then storing it directly in Manta (where it then gets picked up by a CDN).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does this compare to openstack?

<comment><USER5> Given that you're asking from a throwaway (and especially given your choice of nickname), you're almost certainly trolling -- but given how old this thread has become, I think it's safe to answer here for the sake of posterity...

OpenStack and SmartDataCenter address some similar problems: they both manage fleets of physical machines and provide orchestration (provisioning, monitoring, etc.) of standing virtual machines on those physical machines. But in every other regard, these two projects are very dissimilar: they differ in their goals, in their organization and in their technology choices.

Getting more specific, I (obviously) have a dog in the fight, so it's hard for me to look at this with an outsider's perspective -- but I think the most nonjudgemental way of phrasing the fundamental difference is that SmartDataCenter is opinionated where OpenStack gives architectural choice to the integrator and/or operator.[1] So in SmartDataCenter you don't pick the storage substrate (it's ZFS) or the hypervisor (it's SmartOS) or the network virtualization (it's Crossbow). While OpenStack deliberately accommodates vendor differentiation, SmartDataCenter deliberately rejects it: we are designed for commodity storage (shared-nothing -- and no RAID controllers, please!), commodity network equipment (no vendor-specific SDN) and (certainly) commodity compute. The upshot is that the integrator/operator needn't design the system themselves -- which we know from experience can result in greatly reduced times of deployment. (Indeed, one of the great prides of SmartDataCenter is our install time: provided you're racked, stacked and cabled, you can get a cloud stood up in a matter of hours rather than days, weeks or longer.)

That fundamental difference -- opinion vs. choice -- has many ramifications. For example, we have no interest in governance (sorry, democrophiles!); if someone has a good idea, we'll do what most open source projects do and let our user community make that determination. This is not to be overly controlling; anyone who disagrees with us (or with anyone!) is welcome to fork the project -- we have deliberately selected a fork-friendly license in MPLv2. We also have no interest (zero, none, nada) in legacy enterprise hardware vendors that are interested in cloud computing only as a vector for preserving their inalienable right to screw their own customers; there won't be "hooks" or "plugins" in SmartDataCenter or generally other such sheep-like wolves.

There are many differences, of course, but I think many can be explained by the fundamental difference in engineering principles of the two projects.

Anyone who is interested in the nature of the opinions asserted in SmartDataCenter -- or in helping form new ones! -- should check out the repos[2][3] (we try to document our thinking), join the mailing lists, and/or join us in IRC at #smartos on Freenode.

[1] This is a bit of a "pro-choice/pro-life" nomenclature in that I have deliberately picked nomenclature that I think these two projects would use to put themselves in the best light. More candidly, I would say that OpenStack seems to me to be a discombobulated mess -- and I'm sure to OpenStack, SmartDataCenter would seem supremely fascist.

[2] [https://github.com/joyent/sdc](https://github.com/joyent/sdc)

[3] [https://github.com/joyent/manta](https://github.com/joyent/manta)

<comment><USER15> Would you accept the characterisation that SDC is an "opinionated IaaS layer"?

<comment><USER5> I think that that's completely fair -- and in fact, it's in the "Design principles" section of README.md in the SDC repo[1]: "SmartDataCenter is very opinionated about how to architect a cloud. These opinions are the result of many years of deploying and debugging the Joyent Cloud."

[1] [https://github.com/joyent/sdc/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/joyent/sdc/blob/master/README.md)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Someone wants to buy my side project, How do I decide on the price? - <AUTHOR>

Few months ago I developed a real-time location service Shaloc.com, its a iPhone app that lets you share your GPS location with friends using a web link, your friends can check/track your real-time movement on any browser, with any login or app download. People have been using it in a lot of ways, its got 5 star rating in appstore. Few people have been interested in the service and creating new verticals.<p>I have moved on and working on another idea, but one guy is really interested in buying Shaloc.com, How do I decide on the pricing if I want to sell it? should I let him give a price or should I give him a price? <comment><USER2> Asking the potential buyer to name a price is a good strategy, as others have noted. However, if you want to stretch things out a bit, you can start by asking questions that lead up to him naming a number. For example, ask how he would determine a value? How does he expect to make money with it? How much money does he expect to make with it over the next year, two years, five years?

As you go through this kind of dialogue, you might find, if he has wildly ambitious plans for your service, that a combination of upfront amount plus an earnout amount makes sense. Maybe that includes your staying on as a consultant for additional money as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Basic negotiating strategy will tell you that you should force him to name the first number.

But consider a different way. Pick a price that you'd be happy to sell at, and name that price. If he takes it, try not to regret asking for more.

<comment><USER4> 1\. Pick a price you'd not be happy with. (say, 200$)

2\. Pick a price you'd be very happy with. (say, 1,000,000$)

3\. Now try to find the minimum price you'd sell it for that should lie somewhere in between those. (say, 5,000$ or $20,000).

4\. Ask for three times that. (15,000$ or $60,000).

5\. Negotiate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Your first move is to do some research. Find out why he's interested. If he's looking to build it out or into another service that he offers consider what it would cost him to build it in house and go from there.

If you can't find any info then it gets a bit more complicated. Letting him name a price is a risky play because he can set the "anchor" price low and cause the rest of the talks to revolve around his low price.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, great advice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Typically when someone offers to buy something that is not for sale, they will suggest a starting price for the negotiation. This gives you a slight advantage as you have something they want and you're forcing them to take an opening position.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://shaloc.com></comment>