Traveling, Writing and Programming - <AUTHOR> http://alexmaccaw.co.uk/posts/traveling_writing_programming <comment><USER6> _The peculiar thing about programmers is that they're the one profession that can easily work remotely and travel, and yet they're the one profession that doesn't._

I believe that the ease with which one "can easily work remotely and travel" is affected far more by life situation than by profession. Modern technology has made it just as easy for non-programming electronic workers to do this, too.

"Life situation" is another matter. Just a few of the things that make it difficult for some people to do this:

      - <USER2>
      - <USER3>
      - spouse's job
      - <USER4>
      - caring for elderly parents/others
      - community commitments
      - financial responsibilities (mortgage, etc.)

As one who is tethered to his home and family, I thank you, Alex, for allowing me to live vicariously through your year for the past 5 minutes. The stories were interesting and the pictures were beautiful.

</BackToRegressionTestNumber127BeforeThePhoneRingsAgainAndTheCatNeedsFed>

<comment><USER7> _I thank you, Alex, for allowing me to live vicariously through your year for the past 5 minutes._

This comment made me perk up.

I've eliminated all of those things you mentioned from my life and replaced them with:

1\. Alcohol 2\. Traveling 3\. Triathletics

In the last 3 years I've been to over 20 countries, been to every continent (except antartica), boot strapped two companies in NYC and have completed a half-ironman (and on my way to do a full next year). I realize I couldn't have done any of that if I had any of those aforementioned responsibilities.

Random, but honest (meta) question: Would people be interested in reading more about this? I always feel like if I blog about these things it would just sound like bragging.

<comment><USER8> Hang on. You mean you've removed your marriage, children, pets and caring for elderly relatives from your life?

<comment><USER7> I guess I haven't necessarily removed them, I've just neglected to pursue them or don't have the burden.

Marriage - I've been single for 5 years, and adamantly stayed single, to the point where I've been in a couple of longer term "relationships" that I've simply cut off in pursuit of other things in life. In reflection I feel this may be a quite cynical outlook on life and will probably change in the near future.

Children - I wrap it.

Pets - Don't have the time nor want to spend the incredulous amount of money required to maintain one.

Elderly Relatives - All of my grandparents have passed and my parents (who are almost in their 60's now) are generally in very good health. I guess I'm very fortunate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been traveling the world and running my site, Scribophile, for a few years now. I just spent 3 months in Germany living with my girlfriend, and now that my EU visa is up I'm in Colombia for a few months enjoying the warm weather in Cali.

Whenever I tell people about my lifestyle, they 1) are shocked and awed, 2) enthuse about how jealous they are, and 3) assume I'm a millionaire. I wish I could just grab people by their collars to shake them and say, "We live in a marvelous time! With internet access everywhere, you too can do what I do! Plus, you don't have to be rich to do it--I probably make much less money than you do at your desk job!"

Nobody believes me, and if they do, they don't want to take the risk. (To be fair not everyone is able to do so, even if they wanted to.) So they stay jealous. It always makes me a little sad that people stay stuck in their situations often because they can't even envision an alternative, and a little happy that I somehow managed to make it happen myself.

<comment><USER10> Hyup. We definitely make a lot less money. But you can drink and smoke and talk to animals on the job. Guess it all depends what's important to you =) <http://www.unplggd.com/unplggd/working-from-the-road-082513>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe it is just the crowd I hang out with, but I know a _lot_ of technically inclined people who didn't quite get the memo when people were told to a) work for a big megacorp b) close to where they went to college.

There are a variety of ways to do it. They really do work. Plenty of normal, sane, well-adjusted people take advantage of them. There are avenues forward from them to either standard middle class career paths at home or continued success abroad, for a variety of values of "success."

</comment><comment><USER12> +1 for traveling and working remotely.

I was lucky enough to spend 2 months in Australia and Africa this year, and a lot of that time was 1/2 work and 1/2 fun. It's a great combo: working stimulates the body and exploring new places stimulates the spirit. (Ugh, that sounds way cornier than I hoped.)

I have a ~50 hour/week job, and I was I was surprised by how effective and pleasant it was to go do outdoorsy things from 8am until 2 or 3pm, and then work until 10 or 11 at night.

On a completely unrelated note: Alex, I'm really curious, how did you manage to get a book deal with O'Reilly at the age of 20?

<comment><USER13> There's no trick to technical publishing. If you write a solid proposal and sample chapter and there's a market for the book, you'll get an offer.

Edit: If you're actually interested in writing, let me know. In a past life I worked for a publisher distributed by O'Reilly. Happy to point you in the right direction.

<comment><USER14> You don't have any contact information listed

<comment><USER13> Updated. Sorry about that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Awesome post. And you can kind of do this even working for Megacorps - in fact if you are working for a Megacorp, have a desire to see more of the world, and are _not_ taking full advantage of the ability to internally xfr to another country while remaining in full employment... well you're missing a trick.

And it's never too late - I did the above from Sydney to London at the ripe old age of 33, and have seen tons of Europe and the Nordics over the past few years - with 5 weeks corp leave, 2 weeks public holidays and weekends, you can do lots of travel if you plan it a little. Sure it's not quite the same, but it's a bloody good compromise if you're more tied down / risk averse than an intrepid 21yo ;)

<comment><USER16> > 5 weeks corp leave, 2 weeks public holidays and weekends

Thanks for rubbing it in :(

/american

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I spent the summer road-tripping with my wife and have been working remotely. While we didn't travel around the world, we saw so much beauty in America. We bought an $80 annual national park pass, got a copy of the book "National Parks of the American West", and took off. So if you aren't quite ready for the round-the-world trip, try going to Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Arches/Canyonlands, Crater Lake etc.

<comment><USER18> The $80 national park pass is perhaps the best deal of anything I've ever bought. Loaded family in car, visited 13 national parks this summer. (Nice accommodations inside or near those parks are less appealingly priced, but worth it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Lovely post. The only thing I don't buy is the implied sentiment that if you're not traveling, you're a dummy. Call me jaded, but I can think of many more interesting, fun things to do with my life than visiting one pretty artifact after another. Live your dream, yes, as long as it's your own dream.

<comment><USER20> It's about people, experiences, fresh-air, and knowledge as much as artifacts... an inoculation against stupidity if you will. For example, when you hear someone bashing European healthcare, you'll not wonder but know they're full of shit. Simply put, if you endeavor to be well-rounded there is no substitute for travel.

<comment><USER19> There's something in what you say, but I've spent enough time in youth hostels to know that the connections you make with people while traveling, even if they appear very meaningful at the time, often turn out to be superficial. Travel is one way to end up a well-rounded human being, but there are many others. For example: [http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2006/11/how_to_be_...](http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2006/11/how_to_be_inter.html)

<comment><USER21> That's a pretty nice hack :)

I believe the point of that article is: Get out of your comfort zone.

When we get out of our comfort zone, we learn :)

Same with traveling I guess :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Planning on doing a post about the O-1 visa at all, Alex? If not, you should. There's not a great deal of info about them from a developer's perspective (I know DHH got one back in the day) and it'd be interesting to hear how the process works.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm not sure if "me too" comments are welcome here...

I'm a Software Engineer in my late 20s and just spent 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina, purely because I wanted to. Along the way I continued to develop / create which helped supplement my bank account immensely. Keeping an up-to-date blog helped keep me focused and my head in the game. (theroadchoseme.com) I'm back working a desk job right now, to rest and recuperate and bolster the bank account enough until I can set off again.

If you want to do something like this, you totally can.

<comment><USER24> I'm loving all the "me too" comments. thanks for sharing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Mine is a similar story; spent 10 years building a web agency in the UK, burnt out, then went traveling for a year and wrote a Web App book - <http://www.fivesimplesteps.com/products/web-app-success> \- during the process. I wrote a little about it here - [http://atrampabroad.com/the-trials- and-tribulations-of-writi...](http://atrampabroad.com/the-trials-and- tribulations-of-writing-a-book-while-traveling)

Everything turned out well for us too - my wife was headhunted by Facebook (thanks to the Content Strategy work we started doing freelance during our trip), so I'm now in San Francisco, creating apps for myself.

If you have the chance, do it.

</comment><comment><USER26> This lifestyle is ok for writers, not programmers. As the author states, he was writing a book, which is not a collaborative effort.

Typical programming is team work, with milestones and deadlines. Deadlines which are set in one time zone.

So, while I applaud this young man for doing what he did, it really is normal travel porn. If you have no obligations, great, do it. I bet in most cases you'll be under 30 if you can pull it off.

<comment><USER27> Agreed on this -- my work is all-remote and quite flexible, but I have to make it to conference calls 3-4 times a week, and I just missed most of one because the prepaid mobile broadband sim card wasn't all the way set up (and to finish it I had to figure out some Malay text in minuscule print). And the call was at midnight for me, because we have developers scattered across 16 hours of timezones, and that's the best time, all things considered.

I do travel somewhat -- I left the US for France (but basically settled there), and periodically spend up to a month or so back in the US, or Malaysia (where I am now... hence the sim card). But keeping working is always a hassle (even though I'm almost always staying with family, and I know my way around), and each time I switch locations there are days of productivity down the drain due to jet lag, internet issues, actually seeing all of the people I travel to see, let alone time spent on planes, in airports, trains, etc., where I can get little bits of work done, but never much.

We probably could travel more (and to more new places...), but it wouldn't be worth the stress of figuring out the same damn things all over again for each new place. Leaving your comfort zone is great, but leaving the same comfort zone in the same way over & over -- shifting to a new & strange place and sorting out the same basics -- isn't wonderful indefinitely. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Javascript Web Applications" is a must-read for all web developers. I have recommended or sent the book to dozens of people.

I hope there is a second edition.

And there is something about developers/hackers and being on the road. I spent 10 years from '00 till last year living out of a suitcase on 4 different continents and 7 different countries (living in fulltime, visited over 50). Loved it, brilliant experience and I can't wait to get on the road again.

</comment><comment><USER29> This doesn't help me at all at this point in my life, but I think I'll print it to PDF and save it for my son when he gets older (he's 8 now).

<comment><USER30> Why couldn't you travel and take your family with you?

Edit: I was homeschooled my whole life (grad 2005) and homeschooling via Khan Academy and other online education sites seems like it would be especially effective. Exposure to tons of cultures at a young age seems like it would be awesome.

<comment><USER29> Just for starters, the 2 year old and 4 week old wouldn't handle it so well, nor would my wife's medical condition.

Life gets exponentially more complicated as you get older -- something very hard to see before it happens to you.

<comment><USER31> Yep I have a 3 and a 6 years old and working from home is VERY difficult. Its usually worse when we travel.

ALso we did consider homeschooling but the kids really react differently when its someone else than their parents teaching.

<comment><USER32> I have a 6 & 10 year old and I work from home. I'll be the first to admit that it's not always easy, but with practice and realistic rules, it can be done.

With respect to the "travelling programmer" meme, I think it's less common for the older (say > 40 years) among us. As one who falls within that category, my priorities are far different now than ten or twenty years prior. I enjoy the stability of a permanent home, of watching my children build relationships in their schools and neighborhoods, of participating in my children's amateur sports teams.

Occasionally, my wife and I will fantasize about travelling the world, living experiences with our kids unlike those living "normal" lives, but we never do. I suppose for us, the "normal" life is good enough. We are together, and we laugh, and learn and live as a family. Not to say that our choice is right for everyone, but it's right for us. For us, uprooting our children from the only lives and friends they've ever known contains an element of selfishness that we're not prepared to swallow.

For me personally, I'm just as happy holed up in my basement office fiddling with BeagleBoards, or soldering together little electronic projects as I'd ever be doing anything else. I guess I'm simply a geek homebody.

But for those like the original poster and those that strive to attain similar, more power to you.

<comment><USER31> Thanks for the post.

Over the last few years I've worked from home or on travel a few times. I was able to make it work but it never felt very sustainable. As to working from home it is getting easier as the kids get older (they are able to control the urge to interrupt and they are able to understand that I am working). I remember I was on a phone meeting with about 20 people once and my son kept coming to knock on the door and shout, I was very worried everytime I was off "mute".

On the other hand, when we travel (a month or more during summer vacations), they get so excited that they tend to be very loud or litteraly out of control.

I totaly relate to feeling selfish about uprooting your kids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Hey man. I'm a programmer who's done a similar thing twice, both times sticking to just Europe. I didn't go the "write a book" route but rather just programmed here and there while CouchSurfing, hosteling, seeing new places, had a couple flings with gorgeous European girls, etc.

I, also, never ran into another programmer doing this. I live in SF now (moved from the midwestern USA) and work for a startup. Let's grab a beer sometime! Or maybe I'll see you at one of the weekly CouchSurfing meetups. They're pretty big here- 50 people a week is not unusual.

<comment><USER34> Can you elaborate on "programmed here and there"? Does everyone who talks about doing this mostly do freelance web design?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Whil etalking about traveling on Peru you wrote;

"The picture below is of one of the Colca Canyon's fabled Peregrine Falcons, taken whilst I was climbing down the canyon, the world's deepest."

it looks like a Condor to me.

<comment><USER36> yeah, that's no Peregrine falcon! Some sort of condor sounds about right

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> What is the best way for someone who has been in a reasonably successful corporate job for about 10 years to get into this 'on the road' sort of consultancy. I'd love to do it, but the idea of just quitting work scares me - I've no doubt I am good enough to be a consultant in my area of expertise (which is Oracle databases), but knowing where to start is the issue. I do blog a bit, and have experimented with a few app ideas, but haven't managed to get anything serious off the ground as yet!

<comment><USER20> I guess you're the perfect candidate for the "4-hour Workweek". No guarantees but there are some good ideas in there. One of them gave me the courage to talk the boss in letting me work remotely. That's the first step, I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Thanks for charging my battery a little. I've tried it for the last year and failed so many times with all sorts of projects and clients. Do you other working travellers actually find your clients online, or is it really all about having enough friends _who stay at home_ and are happy & well-integrated there?

If things go by my new plan, I'll spend the next year in Taiwan, China, Russia, Korea and some other places :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Hey, would you mind talking a little about the details of how you manage your work/in-front-of-computer time while travelling? Like do you tend to spend a couple of hours somewhere pleasant and do some hacking, or is it more structured? Do you allot time everyday for working and adventuring?

I've done some travelling and working (though not overseas), but feel like I haven't figured it out.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think this is awesome. I've bookmarked and I will share it all the young people I know.

One thing that bothered me a bit: "My message to fellow programmers is stop making excuses, man up and do it."

I am in a tiny minority here, but I just don't care to travel. I know in the day and age of Tim "Superman" Feriss we're all supposed to be pumped up supermen bouncing around the world with a supermodel in each arm. But honestly, I really enjoy the things I do where I live: reading, enjoying time with friends, working (yes I don't view work as something to be avoided - <USER5> I speak heresy against the cult of the 4HWW?).

In summary I just wanted to offer a counterpoint to this author (and others in the "travel at all costs" cult) that some people simply don't enjoy travel compared to what else they could be doing. Sometimes it's not about "manning" up and doing it, it's just about doing what you enjoy regardless of what bloggers and bestselling authors recommend.

<comment><USER40> _I am in a tiny minority here, but I just don't care to travel._

You have a friend in Emerson: <http://www.ryanholiday.net/emerson-on-travel/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Nice post! How much did the around the world ticket cost?

<comment><USER42> Old data so probably a bit useless, but I did a 24-country around-the-world trip in 03/04. We eventually had 37 flights all up, but the backbone was a 17-flight ticket which was about $3300. That gave us something like 4-5 continents including Australia, plus 3-4 flights within each continent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is exactly what I want to be doing in my placement year starting june!

Traveling and programming. How did you afford the trip Alex? Savings or working on the go? If you don't mind, how much did it cost too?

Thanks

<comment><USER44> I'm also interested in knowing how he afforded it at age 20. I'm 21, and just now finishing my M.Sc, and I feel like I would have to work a few years in a Megacorp in order to be able to try something like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Been doing something similar myself - Germany, China, North Korea, drove across America and launched a startup.. loving life!

Great post!

<comment><USER46> How was the firewall in China? Did it inhibit work at all?

<comment><USER45> It sucked. I set up a personal VPN before I left, but even then, the connectivity there is really spotty. Wouldn't recommend it. It's only really good for getting email, responding offline, then reconnecting to send it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> To the OP - thanks for that post! It's a very humble post and I hope people won't take it as self-aggrandisement. It's hard to make choices because we all only have one life. Make the best of it and I hope you use the perspective you gained in your travels to make twitter a better place for us users.

</comment><comment><USER41> To all those thinking about doing something like this, I would encourage you to give it a try. Honestly working and travelling isn't that hard and it's incredibly cheap to live in many places in the world. I have personally been doing this while working on artsumo.com for the last 8 months.

</comment><comment><USER48> I've been seriously considering this for ages.. I wonder what his setup for travel working is? I'm thinking a 17" Macbook would be too much of a pain / risk to travel round Asia with? A follow-up post on the logistics of the work side would be amazing!

</comment><comment><USER49> When you are in South Africa again, drop by Stellenbosch (40km from Cape Town)! Would love to hear some more stories.

EDIT:

I also travelled from Singapore to Bangkok (not all the way to Hanoi) this year. Great trip. Took the train. Beautiful countryside.

</comment><comment><USER50> He was travelling writing, programming and having the best time of his life. Now he is just programming....Is that supposed to be a happy ending or sad ending? I couldn't tell from reading his post.

<comment><USER20> He's working on the other side of the world, story continues. In a few years he'll be on the next adventure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Not everyone has a job that pays in dollars/euros/pounds...

I'll do this some day anyway :)

<comment><USER21> Well, we have to add to all that stuff a step 0) get a freelance / remote job that pays in dollars, euros or pounds.

That's what I'm looking forward to, at least :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Could you tell us what gear your where schlepping around? backpack, electronical equipment (cam, laptop, batteries,...)

what did you actually do about health insurance, if you don't mind me asking?

</comment><comment><USER53> One of the most attractive things about being a dev/designer to me is the ability to work pretty much wherever there's an Internet connection. Great Article!

</comment><comment><USER54> I'll just chime in, albeit two days late, to say that: Africa is a continent of 53 (54?) countries, experiences vary.

</comment><comment><USER55> Oh. My. God. This is the best thing I've seen on HN since I first discovered it!

I'm in my first year of business and after reading your post I see that I've made one huge mistake. I'm not working to reach a goal like you did. I'm working for the sake of working. It doesn't matter how successful I am because in the end all my work will still have been for nothing.

I think you make a great point (maybe you don't realize you made this point) about how we should be working to live and not living to work.

This has inspired me and touched me so deeply I cannot even describe it. This is going to sound lame and cheesy but your post hit a nerve with me and from this moment on I am going to set out to make a goal to live. Find what I love besides my work and go out and live. I'm going to work my ass of because I love my job but after the work day is done I must be able to tell myself that this work day has brought me just one bit closer to being able to go out and live. No more working 12 hour days so I can wake up and work another 12 hour day and pretend like work in and of itself is an end. It's just a means to an end. I'll always program and love it and I'm sure others are the same but im also sure that all of us also have other external motivations that make us human, not just our work. Just thank you for this. Thank you for reminding me why I'm doing what I'm doing. I feel like I sound like an over emotional... person. You're younger than I am by a few years and seeing you do this and the sentiment behind it really just lit a fire under my ass.

Thank you so much for this post. I hope everyone here can one day write a blog post along these lines. You are truly living. Congratulations and I wish you continued success.

</comment><comment><USER10> "The peculiar thing about programmers is that they're the one profession that can easily work remotely and travel, and yet they're the one profession that doesn't."

Not true! My gf and I have been doing it for 5 solid years (she's the designer). So far we've lived in Argentina & Uruguay for a year, New Zealand & Australia for a year, Thailand, Vietnam, France and Spain. I _have_ met a few others on my travels. We never plan to go back; there's no point settling down when there's so much to see and experience. Yes, a lot of people get angry or jealous and say it's the dream life, but it's also hard work -- not just coding and keeping in touch with clients 24/7, but also travel itself. It's exhausting. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

<comment><USER56> I did this for a year in Brazil, and it was the best year of my life, and my clients and I were happy. Then I went to Thailand, and the time difference just totally fubar'd my whole working arrangement, and I ended up losing a very lucrative contract. I took 6 months off after that and travelled around SE Asia, but now I'm broke and my freelance career is dead in the water and I'm basically starting over from scratch. There's really no way to communicate how crushing it is to go from that lifestyle to living in my mom's guest room (I'm 31 years old for crying out loud) for the last 3 months trying to scare up some contract work.

The moral of the story is, never lose your momentum, and always tell your clients how much you love them. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get drunk and cry.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for sharing your story and giving a different angle.

Don't give up and don't let yourself get down by a momentary setback.

If you were good for that contract, you probably still are as good or better now, and you'll get another one as good or better hopefully.

I'd advise against getting drunk but that's me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Great writeup, and fantastic adventure.

Do I understand correctly that the story currently ends by working on location at Twitter?

</comment><comment><USER58> This man has lived.

<comment><USER59> This.</comment></comment>


Is .com necessary for your app? - <AUTHOR> Hi guys, I've tried around 50 different catchy names for my app idea (applying to yc) and most of the dot coms are parked which is very frustrating. I'm wondering if registering a .com is necessary at this point? I don't really want to spend $50+ on .ly or .io domains at this point. Suggestions? <comment><USER2> No, it is not. may be in the 90's but this is 2015, we have search engine optimization, apps are not acessed on the domain, they run in the users device (case study [http://vine.co](http://vine.co) ). Read advice from co-founder twitter, founder of blogger and medium [http://evhead.com/2011/06/five- reasons-domains-are-less-impo...](http://evhead.com/2011/06/five-reasons- domains-are-less-important.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Examples of companies with cofounders starting together at distance - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [http://scrapinghub.com/](http://scrapinghub.com/)

Shane is from Ireland and Pablo is from Uruguay.

<comment><USER3> Wow, awesome, I hadn't heard of them, and I'm from Uruguay myself.

<comment><USER4> Not surprised, I'm pretty low profile :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> StackOverflow [0]

 _Second, I 'm a big believer in putting everyone in one office, because I think that face-to-face communication is crucial. But the people who set up Stack Overflow are scattered geographically: I'm in New York; Jeff is in California; and he manages programmers who live in Oregon, Arkansas, and North Carolina._

[0] [http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081101/how-hard-could-it-be- th...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081101/how-hard-could-it-be-the-unproven- path.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting...

I always thought that was a deal breaker and the very reason that people head to the bay area (or any Startup city).

I would be pretty easy to have an existing relationship move across the country/world and then still make it work, but I think it would be quite difficult to be able to find a stranger and build a strong working relationship.

I'm pretty sure that 37 signals started that way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the posting, I know 37S did. Do you know of others?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not a company, although they are spanning one out of it, but the team behind Julia (the programming language) started from different locations and didn't meet each other before a year (can't find the article about it right now, sorry).</comment>


Ask HN: User Signup As a Service services out there? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> To elaborate, I'm looking for something that provides a landing page, user signup, stripe integration would be nice, and an api that I can hook into. I'd pay for that. I don't want to mess with all that other stuff. I just want to focus on my app.

</comment><comment><USER2> u mean something like <http://launchrock.com/>?</comment>


Peter Krumins' e-book "Awk One-Liners Explained" - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/awk-book/ <comment><USER2> I think it's telling that almost every comment is talking about a different format than PDF.

Writers, this is something to prepare for!</comment>


Slicehost STL-A is down - <AUTHOR>

Just a heads up for long-time Slicehost customers, since I think we have a few of us here: Slicehost's original data center, STL-A, is currently down in a major way and has been for the last hour.
Slicehost says its a networking issue.  Meanwhile, their Slicemanager, which is apparently dependent on a component in STL-A, is accessible but not showing any slices in STL-A.
I'm busy biting nails because this has taken all my sites offline.  It's the middle of the night US time, so not the worst time in the world for extended downtime, but if their Rackspace migration stuff is FUBARed my ability to quickly move off of them is zero without either the DB backups or Slice clones... all of which are in STL-A.  (A decision which I am now rethinking the wisdom of, to put it mildly.) <comment><USER2> Yeah, I was freaking out a few minutes ago. What made it worse is that none of your slices show in your control panel, they're all just gone.</comment>


Show HN: Mud – Components for rapid c++ Apps/Engines Development (live web demo) - <AUTHOR> https://hugoam.github.io/mud-io/ARTICLE.html <comment><AUTHOR> For those that might remember a UI library called kiui that I shared a few years ago: it is the UI module inside mud (and is still usable independently).

It has also been completely revamped, and now follows an immediate/declarative paradigm that makes it much more straightforward to use, while still being entirely stylable and auto-layout.

The rest are new components I developed and refined in the mean time!</comment>


Titan's atmosphere oddity consistent with methane-based life - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/06/why-is-the-hydrogen-exiting-titans-atmosphere.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss <comment><USER2> One point I'd like to add is that you shouldn't get your hopes up about meeting bug-eyed aliens. Titan is _cold_ \-- so cold that even if this _is_ a metabolic signature, whatever reactions are running are probably so slow that nothing more complex than prokaryotic bacteria has had time to evolve yet since the formation of the solar system. And even bacterial life might be a bit of a reach.

(This is a guess, but based on what we know of terrestrial biochemistry. Just bear in mind that on Titan, the mean surface temperature is around -180 celsius -- methane runs like water, water ice is a rock-like substance, and so on.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yet again, Ars Technica shows that it's the only lay source worth reading on science topics. Thanks for the great article.

<comment><USER4> Wait, why does this strike you as a reasonable article? To me it seems like blatant pandering to the audience.

Sure, lay people _want_ there to be life out there in other places. But this inference doesn't actually hold any water as far as I can see. In the Bayesian formalism, the question to ask is: why do you have such a high prior probability to there being life on titan that mere methane emissions are enough to make that the maximum-a-posteriori hypothesis? Isn't it more plausible that there is some other non-life chemical process generating methane? Sure, the article gives a token acknowledgment that "the authors of the latter paper provide a variety of ways to account for the acetylene shortage that don't involve an organism"... but the title of the article is pretty clearly engineered to pander to the prejudices of a scientifically clueless audience.

<comment><USER5> Indeed. Either there is a relatively simple unknown process going on in the atmosphere of a planet we've never actually been to and have only the slimmest actual knowledge, or there's a fantastically complicated unknown process called "life". For better or for worse, the odds favor the relatively simple unknown process, until more data comes in.

(I say "relatively" because it probably isn't trivial or we'd have a good guess at it. But there's still quite a gulf between "we don't know what it is yet" and "it could only be life".)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The conservationist in me always cringes whenever I hear of hydrogen or helium gases escaping gravitational pull, because I know it's never coming back. I always have to remind myself that the planets are ultimately doomed anyway, and that there's a ton more gas than I can imagine, so supply is not yet in danger of exhaustion. (that I apply these concerns to another planet I'll probably never even get near, I have decided to simply take in stride)

Nonetheless, cool article. It's interesting how many theories are coming about anymore involving life on satellites rather than planets. I understand they are probably more common than small rocky planets what with the abundance of gas giants, but are they more or less suited to life? It seems like the presence of a massive body nearby (the planet it's orbiting) would have a big impact. Plus, the distance from the sun would increase and decrease (meaning light and temperature variations), and overall incumbent light would be minimal.

<comment><USER7> By the time hydrogen supply becomes a problem, though, we'll either be long gone, or able to harness it elsewhere. Probably true for other hypothetical civilizations. Hydrogen is, after all, ridiculously abundant - and, if nothing else, weighed down by other elements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> [ _panspermia_ ]

I think we're likely to discover, as our sensing and exploration improve, that rather than being rare, life -- at least simple life -- is common throughout the universe.</comment>


Startup idea: A Social Education Hub. Please help me with your feedback. - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys, I would please request you to help me with your kind feedback:
My team and I are developing a social education platform for college students where they get access to subject specific quality educational content and industry specific skills at a very affordable price. We are introducing social features like - "Group Study", "Summary", "Be My Teacher" along with a new revenue model - which is cost effective for students and high on revenue for publishers/content-creators
I would be immensely grateful to you if I could please get your feedback. <comment><USER2> That sound similar to what we've doing at Oplerno. Feel free to contact me through email: crompton at oplerno.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reverting. I see an opportunity there; will get in touch with you.

<comment><USER2> Look forward to it!</comment></comment></comment>


A linux module dependency visualizer - <AUTHOR> http://demos.thejit.org/example/rgraph/example1/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting presentation of information. Making diagrams focused on one locus is very powerful. I think the mistake of a lot of dependency graphs in GUI builders was the failure to provide very focused, contextual displays. Doing this can help you comprehend how an individual piece fits into a larger network without getting lost in that network.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it would be more accurate to call it a Debian package dependency visualizer. I was expecting something related to linux kernel modules.</comment>


Poetry – Python dependency management and packaging made easy - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sdispater/poetry <comment><USER2> I'm confused. Is this the same project? [https://github.com/sdispater/poet](https://github.com/sdispater/poet)

</comment><comment><USER3> See also Pipenv: [https://github.com/pypa/pipenv](https://github.com/pypa/pipenv)

</comment><comment><USER4> Can someone explain to me why dependency management seems to be an unsolved problem in Python?</comment>


Show HN: Neo.mjs, the webworkers driven UI framework - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/neomjs <comment><AUTHOR> I would like to highlight the neo.mjs framework once more.

First of all, thanks a lot for making it a top story on december 14th!

A lot has changed since then:

Chrome v80 got released => the neo dev mode online examples no longer require a flag to run.

You can now generate apps with the 1-liner "npx neo-app" & there is a default workspace repo in place.

Several enhancements on the core (e.g. state management) are in implemented.

Next on the todo list is finishing the real world app version 2 and afterwards create app examples which run inside multiple browser windows using shared workers for the Chrome v81 release.

As you know, Open Source relies on your feedback, so please take a moment and let me know what you like so far and what you would love to see next.

Thanks & best regards, Tobias

</comment><comment><USER2> I love the idea and concept behind this framework. It's genius. My initial test has been positive. Easy and fun to use.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey guys, who else tried this framework? What are your experiences? Anybody interested in an neo.mjs meetup? I would love to see a community grow around this framework.

</comment><comment> markus-droxit neo.mjs looks so promising. I've been through with all the examples and testing around with it. Can't wait till I get my hands on it for a real project soon. I'd love to see the community grow even more. Great work!</comment>


Ask HN: Is Hacker News Being Astroturfed? - <AUTHOR> I saw a comment on Reddit that said recently astroturfers have started using a pattern that you can pretty much see everywhere.<p>> [top comment]<p>> > [generic question about what to use/buy?]<p>> > > [link to a paid product that is very loosely related to the original subject]<p>(Sometimes even the [top comment] is left out if the astroturfers have figured how to make that second comment the top comment)<p>And I think that comment chain typically becomes part of a sophisticated upvote ring. <comment><USER2> If I see something like that, I flag it. If both the question and the answer come from accounts with no history of stories or comments, it's almost certainly spam. (They're not always newly-created accounts. Some spammers seem to let their accounts sit around for a while before using them.)

Fortunately, I haven't seen too much of this on HN yet.

(To flag a comment, click on its time stamp [e.g., "10 minutes ago"] and you'll see a "flag" link at the top, next to the "parent" link. If enough people flag a comment, it will get killed.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, been using Hacker News for many years and didn't know that's how you flag comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm sure this happens to some extent, but based on my experience as an employee who interacts with people on social media as part of my role I also think you are underestimating how many people legitimately ask questions on Reddit / Hacker News / Twitter etc. I'm sure that there are some bad actors out there that post a question as well as the answer and that use an upvote ring to boost their comments for visibility, but there are also employees that just respond to legitimate comments that they see on the internet.

As part of my role for Amazon Web Services I frequently respond to comments on platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Hacker News. When I see someone asking a question about an AWS service, saying something inaccurate about AWS, or who seems like they could legitimately benefit from some knowledge I can share with them then I'll post a reply. You can check through my comment history if you are interested, but here is a recent example of such an interaction: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19282477](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19282477)

There are quite a few people out there like me who monitor relevant discussions and interact with people on social media websites as part of their job role. I would never "astroturf", not only because its unethical, but also because there is plenty of legitimate and relevant discussion that I can contribute to when needed without needing to resort to creating artificial questions.

</comment><comment><USER4> With questions like this, what we need most are links. Links. Links!

Otherwise there's nothing to look at and nothing to crack down on.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't want to point at specific examples to see if other people recognized the pattern but here is a few of them (actually could only recall one... I will flag when I see them, but not sure it will get recognized as it's a series of comments):

My top comment being highjacked: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19410185](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19410185)

While you are here, this comment is just linking to a paid tutorial for no apparent reason other than self-promotion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416821)

I can only recall those because they are linked to my history, I don't remember which thread the others were on.

I didn't look at their history and saw many more, it's just that yesterday I saw a new one on a front page post and though it got out of hand.

<comment><USER5> The first one is just someone asking for a product recommendation, and someone else giving a recommendation. Nothing about that looks like astroturfing.

The second one is from an account who doesn't push their tutorial in most comments. A search for [author:vram22 gumroad] shows no submissions for that domain, and a handful of comments.

It's fine for people on HN to push their product, so long as they don't do it too much and so long as they're clear that it is their product.

If you really think something is being shilled it's far better to email the mods to let them know than it is to start meta-threads.

<comment><AUTHOR> The few times I emailed firstname.lastname@example.com I didn't get any responses.

Anyway, I just wanted to see if others thought Hacker News was being astroturfed, I never said those are sure case of astroturfing.

For example this one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19419362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19419362)

Ok looks like it might be, but then I have to check the comment history to make sure this user is legitimate, which look like he is legitimate. So I guess I have to check the comment history of every user that makes a link to a paid product... sounds like a pain that could be automated.

Also, like for the commenters weirdly supporting China, I think the comment history is made in such a way to disguise the nature of the account (otherwise it would be too easy to figure it out, basic spam gets killed very quickly on HN thankfully)

(edit: Looking at your history, your account is 4 years old with two comments in this thread and one comment 4 years ago, may be a highjacked account)

<comment><USER4> I only saw this now. I can't find any emails from the email address registered to your account. We're pretty meticulous about responding to everyone who contacts us with such concerns, so I'm wondering what could have been going on there.

The link you included here looks completely innocuous to me.

Your China comment here is close to nationalistic flamebait (not allowed on HN) and breaks the HN guideline against insinuating astroturfing without evidence (please review [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)). The overwhelming majority of the time, such insinuation are baseless—and they do harm to this site and to commenters being unfairly accused. If anyone wants a clear example, look at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358). This is why we have such guidelines.

Finally, attacking the person you're replying to like that by casting groundless aspersions on their posting history is a violation of HN's civility rule. People are welcome to post here at whatever rate they feel like. They're not incriminating themselves by doing so.

<comment><AUTHOR> > We're pretty meticulous about responding to everyone who contacts us with > such concerns, so I'm wondering what could have been going on there.

I'm talking about past experience with previous accounts.

> Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and > is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at > the data.

Ok, never saw this rule actually, thanks.

> Finally, attacking the person you're replying to like that by casting > groundless aspersions on their posting history is a violation of HN's > civility rule.

Yes, I never look at people's post history, not sure why I did. I also usually never reply to other people's comments and should be more strict about that.

<comment><USER4> It's possible your emails went to spam and we missed it. That's not so likely though, especially since you say there were repeated cases. We look through the spam bin and try to fish out all the HN-related emails.

More likely, if you emailed us repeatedly and didn't get a response, is that your previous accounts were involved in some form of abuse and we didn't believe that the emails were in good faith. Either that or it was 5+ years ago, when pg was running HN and didn't have time to respond to emails like we do.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was a while ago, I don't create new accounts for ban-escaping but for privacy reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How do I use this information or buy my own astroturfing?

<comment><USER6> In this article they mention some of the methods the astroturfers have used: [https://www.latlmes.com/tech/affiliate-links-swamp- popular-s...](https://www.latlmes.com/tech/affiliate-links-swamp-popular- social-discussion-site-1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think its very likely any social-engagement web space which has a low barrier to entry winds up being astroturfed. All of them.

The question would be how high (at any given point in time) the barrier to entry has to be.

</comment><comment><USER8> So... can anyone suggest a good paid alternative to Hacker News that isn't being astroturfed?

<comment><USER9> It doesn't directly compete with HN, but I'm really starting to like [https://pinboard.in](https://pinboard.in), especially with archiving enabled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a _big_ difference between astroturfing and self-promotion. The latter tends to get correctly downvoted.

<comment><USER5> Self promotion within limits is fine for HN. See, for example, this valued contributor who posts links useful content they've created. Most of these appear to have been upvoted, not downvoted.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:minimaxir%20minimaxir&s...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:minimaxir%20minimaxir&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

<comment><USER10> Rather in the context of the "link to a paid product" or a startup they own without disclosing it, as the OP was implying. I should have clarified.

For comments linking to my own blog/projects, I very intentionally a) disclose I've written it and b) try to only post it when it's extremely relevant to the topic at hand.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but Parent poster is linking to accounts who are also making the same disclosure. "Here's this product I ahve". And while I didn't look through the entire posting history of the linked accounts, the mentions don't seem too frequent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A similar thing sometimes happens in threads related to china

</comment><comment><USER12> Of course it is. YC is a business, not a charity.</comment>


Zim: open source desktop Wiki - <AUTHOR> https://zim-wiki.org/ <comment><USER2> I have one of these, almost feature identical that I wrote for Windows for personal use. I didn't think there was a market for these type of local 'notepads' ?</comment>


Font Awesome is switching to a subscription plan - <AUTHOR> https://fontawesome.com/6 <comment><USER2> Google's icons are Apache licensed, if anyone is in need of a budget friendly solution: [https://github.com/google/material-design- icons](https://github.com/google/material-design-icons)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Both the Free and Pro versions of Font Awesome 6 will be available in a couple of different formats." That doesn't sound much different from version 5.</comment>


The world's most multilingual cities - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20150928-living-in-the-most-multilingual-cities <comment><USER2> For those of us living in the UK:

[https://archive.is/ZiipD](https://archive.is/ZiipD)</comment>


Ask HN: do we need a pusher/seller/rainmaker? - <AUTHOR>

With my partner we plan to create a startup in the cloud security domain. While we technically complement each other perfectly and already worked together very well, I am afraid we are both a little too friendly, humble, judicious.<p>So my question: do we need to complete our team with someone energetic and emotional, who adores talking to people, convince customers at conferences or tradeshows, and even doesn't mind to aggressively and persistently try to sell our idea - the pusher/seller/rainmaker guy, the kind of charismatic arsehole ;-)? Or will we grow automatically in such kind of role? Any opinions, storys, examples? <comment><USER2> Yes. I infer that you are a little on the introverted side and need an extrovert. But you don't want someone perceived as pushy as in car salesman type. You said "guy", but I highly recommend thinking female. If you need CEO chest thumping, maybe a guy. For mid-level decision makers, I think women do better. In any case technical savvy is a must.

<comment><AUTHOR> there's no mid-level yet, only founders...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Google, Microsoft, GE, Salesforce.com, etc all have excellent sales and marketing executives who have driven their success and play a key part in relaying customer feedback to the organization. So, yes, you need the rainmaker if you feel you and your partner do not qualify. In my mind the technologist & rainmaker comprise the left & right hands of any company.......you need them both and one only suffers if their counterpart is not supremely talented.

Questions:

What stage is your product? Enterprise or consumer? Are you at $0 Gross Sales or $1+ and building? Are you building TNBT or seek to exit early? Are you bootstrapped, how do you compensate this individual?

<comment><AUTHOR> early stage product development, target customers are startups/SMEs/integrators, the development is financed in bootstrapping mode, goal is to grow organically - sales channel is the web, compensation would be to get him/her as co-founder

<comment><USER3> where are you located?

<comment><AUTHOR> in France</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Best Practices for Open Source Software - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/linuxfoundation/cii-best-practices-badge/blob/master/doc/criteria.md <comment><USER2> A similar document from Debian:

[https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide](https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. We added a link to that to our background document here: [https://github.com/linuxfoundation/cii-best-practices- badge/...](https://github.com/linuxfoundation/cii-best-practices- badge/blob/master/doc/background.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great list, I think we're following most with GitLab, if anyone has any suggestions of things we should follow but are not please let me know.</comment>


Everyone Thinks They're Right About Masks - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-pandemic-airborne-go-outside-masks/609235/ <comment><USER2> I would love to know what percentage of people are infected by touching their faces with their hands. My non-expert guess and I could be totally wrong, is that it is pretty low, but much higher to catch it by being near infected people indoors talking and breathing out the virus for an extended period of time.</comment>


It should be acceptable to use older versions of Windows - <AUTHOR> https://dendory.net/?b=53fb5e12 <comment> vezzy-fnord Cars and operating systems cannot be adequately compared, however. A car, at its base level, is a method of transport. Although motor vehicles are heavily computerized nowadays, they still have that explicit and relatively simple purpose.

Cars have a relatively standardized method of operation, and they don't have the same problems of forwards obsolescence. You're not going to have some new binary format stop you from changing tires, extensions or breaking changes to the API meaning you can't install a new air filter, or any of that.

Cars don't have the same level of being an indeterminate and chaotic system that operating systems do, as computation is fundamentally far more abstract and prone to such radical change than automotive engineering is, which is grounded on higher plane physics, mostly.

</comment><comment><USER2> Look, XP is fine to run as long as you keep it off the Internet. But running XP on a computer connected to the Internet now is analogous to refusing to vaccinate your kids. It makes life risky for both you and the people around you.

Not to mention the fact that you can't even _begin_ to expect modern web sites to support your IE 5 or 6.

That's just not going to happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author uses an example of old cars to support his thesis. But the comparison isn't valid unless old cars suddenly and without warning blew up as you drove them along the road.

A better comparison would have been raw oysters in a world without preservatives or refrigeration. How long can you keep raw oysters on a sunlit kitchen counter before they're no longer safe to eat?

> Software makers accomplished something car salesmen only dream of: make > using an older product socially unacceptable.

This reveals the flawed premise of the article -- dumping old Windows versions isn't about social acceptability or fashion, it's about security.

<comment><USER4> "But the comparison isn't valid unless old cars suddenly and without warning blew up as you drove them along the road"

It happens.

<comment><USER3> Indeed it does -- about 1% of car wrecks involve a fire. But not a spontaneous explosion -- well, not usually.

At the accident scene, an obviously distraught survivor of the flaming wreck said, "I'll get you hackers! You can run, but you can't hide!" :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The whole article is based around the argument that "old cars are acceptable why not old software?"

Am I the only one who thinks that whoever asks such a question shouldn't write about software and should (politely!) be given an introduction to software 101 ?

:)

<comment><USER6> Nope, they should have the relative ages of the industries shown to them and the comparative maturities of the technologies.

Then tell them about how old boilers on trains used to blow up. We're just getting past the exploding stage in software now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Old versions of Windows, such as XP, (mostly) no longer have security patches. That is a Big Problem™, not just for someone running it, but for anyone on the same network as anyone running it.

If you think there hasn't been an apocalypse, all that means is no-one's found a tasty-enough wormable exploit yet. But it's _going_ to happen, and when it does, please forgive me if I point and laugh at you.

Please let it die, already.

<comment><USER8> I think it's only a problem if the system is plugged into a network. Granted there aren't many uses for a non-networked system these days.

<comment><USER9> I don't imagine there are too many people who worry about what others think of the OS they are running on an offline machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Because undiscovered security holes in operating systems are so common, using any outdated OS quickly becomes like driving a Ford Pinto. Maybe you think your Pinto is "good enough", but taking it out on the road is dangerous to you and others.

The stigma of using an unpatched operating system doesn't come from anywhere irrational as some stigmas do. It is like the stigma of having poor hygiene. Pooping out in the open in your back yard has serious negative health repercussions. That is a much better analogy than the "classic car" one.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is dumb, car analogies are inherently dumb. Nobody wants their car to learn new tricks, they just want it to drive. Nobody is mad that their 10-year-old car can't post pictures to Instagram.

<comment><USER9> I think the analogy is a bad one, but I can't say your reasoning is 100% solid. Most of us certainly want our cars to have A/C, radios, and the like. A more modern comparison would be that more than a few folks enjoy their cars having entertainment for the kids, rear cameras (coming soon on all models in the U.S.), etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We're seeing a conflict in software. It is still evolving in its structure and architecture. In fact, visible changes are necessary to drive new sales.

On the other hand, users of that software are happy with the mature functionality it provides. There's nothing important the average office workers needs for their daily work in Windows 7 that's not present in XP. Most companies would be perfectly happy to stay with XP if it were still maintained. You wouldn't see so many holdouts otherwise.

Adobe has switched to a subscription model, Creative Cloud, for its Creative Suite. You can still buy the software, but the subscription costs less. The people in Redmond would be smart to consider that business model. It would maintain revenue, in fact make it more regular. By eliminating the feature treadmill, it will allow them to slow-feed gradual changes to the users.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's only a matter time before someone creates the next Blaster [1]. An unpatched system connected to a public network is virtually guaranteed to become infected.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(computer_worm)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_\(computer_worm\))

<comment><USER13> Blaster happened in 2003, 11 years ago. There have been worms since then, but after 2004, no huge worms like Code Red or Witty or Blaster or Sasser show up. Conficker appears to be the last major widespread worm, but it's pretty mysterious.

Is there any reason to suspect that the epidemic of worms we saw in 2003-2004 will ever happen again?

<comment><USER6> Might not be an epidemic, but I have a feeling that there are groups sitting on o-days that if they were released simultaneously, would have a spread similar to conficker or blaster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> No one drives cars with leaded fuel for their daily commute. Some technologies fall by the way side as the better ones replace them. Security and compatibility reasons are incentive enough to keep your OS up to date. No one is complaining that they can't use DOS 5.0 anymore, it just seems to be Windows XP and will probably be Windows 7. Some of the fault lies with microsoft for selling old licenses so long and for bungling Vista's and Windows 8 releases. But for XP users there is absolutely no reason to not be running Windows 7. Its a proven operating system that's been out for 5 years. If you want to stick with XP, like the leaded-fuel driving car owner recognize that support will be vanishing because you are using something that is well behind the times and you are burden on developers.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm sorry but I'm missing something. Cars are not software. One is tangible and one is not. Cars will still work in 20 years, regardless if the roads disappear or not. Software will not, I could go on and on but I think you get the picture.

I don't get this comparison at all.

</comment><comment><USER16> Old cars are regulated by federal, state, and local governments. Any car from the 1980s was manufactured to meet safety and environmental regulations of the time, and must pass regular inspections to maintain compliance. For example, old cars are not permitted to burn leaded gas anymore, even if they were designed to do so.

In addition, the private operators of cars are required to carry at least liability insurance, to cover the cost to others if their old equipment causes injuries.

Windows XP, obviously, was not and is not subject to any of these restrictions or regulations. Thus the only tool that we, the community, have at our disposal to protect ourselves is to shame people still running XP. So please, keep shaming them!

</comment><comment><USER17> I use WindowsXP to run some software that I can not longer use on windows 8. I have chess software and some old games that no longer work on windows 8 and it would not run well on a virtual machine as it needs real access to a hardware video card. I don't use Windows XP for anything else and I am ok with it . I only use it for games not for doing my banking , sending email or browsing the web.

</comment><comment><USER18> Car collectors actively work to keep their pride and joy in tip top condition.

People don't actively work at keeping their WinXP computer in good condition.

<comment><USER19> This is what the article misses.

I have a 1992 machine that's online via a SLIP connection. That's a good analogy to his collectible cars. It's not a risk to other network users - it's from the "not safe to share floppies" era.

If your precious '87 is dropping odd parts into the road, creating hazards to other drivers, no it's not acceptable either.

The difference between the two is that without vendor patches, it's exceptionally difficult to maintain XP-era software to a standard where it's not at risk of polluting the network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Let's rephrase this:

Quality software should not rot.

<comment><USER21> I am afraid I don't understand your point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If the timeline for the horrible cars analogy was compressed to the timeline for software, the cars he's talking about would from the Model T era, when top speeds were under 60km/hr, and starting required hand-cranking.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, if it's good enough for your local ATM...

<comment><USER7> God yes. (Anyone familiar with the work of Barnaby Jack would be chuckling about now.) Look out for printers, too.

They _might_ be running XP Embedded, which is actually still in-support. But they also very well might not be.</comment></comment>


Why GlusterFS should not be integrated with OpenStack - <AUTHOR> https://shellycloud.com/blog/2013/09/why-glusterfs-should-not-be-implemented-with-openstack

<comment><USER3> GlusterFS developer here. The OP is extremely misleading, so I'll try to set the record straight.

(1) Granted, snapshots (volume or file level) aren't implemented yet. OTOH, there are two projects for file-level snapshots that are far enough along to have patches in either the main review queue or the community forge. Volume- level snapshots are a little further behind. Unsurprisingly, snapshots in a distributed filesystem are hard, and we're determined to get them right before we foist some half-baked result on users and risk losing their data.

(2) The author seems very confused about the relationship between bricks (storage units) and servers used for mounting. The mount server is used _once_ to fetch a configuration, then the client connects directly to the bricks. There is no need to specify all of the bricks on the mount command; one need only specify enough servers - two or three - to handle one being down _at mount time_. RRDNS can also help here.

(3) Lack of support for login/password authentication. This has not been true in the I/O path since forever; it only affects the CLI, which should only be run from the servers themselves (or similarly secure hosts) anyway. It should not be run from arbitrary hosts. Adding full SSL-based auth is already an accepted feature for GlusterFS 3.5 and some of the patches are already in progress. Other management interfaces already have stronger auth.

(4) Volumes can be mounted R/W from many locations. This is actually a strength, since volumes are files. Unlike some alternatives, GlusterFS provides true multi-protocol access - not just different silos for different interfaces within the same infrastructure but the _same data_ accessible via (deep breath) native protocol, NFS, SMB, Swift, Cinder, Hadoop FileSystem API, or raw C API. It's up to the cloud infrastructure (e.g. Nova) not to mount the same block-storage device from multiple locations, _just as with every alternative_.

(5) What's even more damning than what the author says is what the author doesn't say. There are benefits to having full POSIX semantics so that hundreds of thousands of programs and scripts that don't speak other storage APIs can use the data. There are benefits to having the same data available through many protocols. There are benefits to having data that's shared at a granularity finer than whole-object GET and PUT, with familiar permissions and ACLs. There are benefits to having a system where any new feature - e.g. georeplication, erasure coding, deduplication - immediately becomes available across all access protocols. Every performance comparison I've seen vs. obvious alternatives has either favored GlusterFS or revealed cheating (e.g. buffering locally or throwing away O_SYNC) by the competitor. Or both. Of course, the OP has already made up his mind so he doesn't mention any of this.

It's perfectly fine that the author prefers something else. He mentions Ceph. I love Ceph. I also love XtreemFS, which hardly anybody seems to know about and that's a shame. We're all on the same side, promoting open-source horizontally scalable filesystems vs. worse alternatives - <USER2> storage, non-scalable storage, storage that can't be mounted and used in familiar ways by normal users. When we've won that battle we can fight over the spoils. ;) The point is that _even for a Cinder use case_ the author's preferences might not apply to anyone else, and they certainly don't apply to many of the more general use cases that all of these systems are designed to support.

<comment><USER4> 1) It is great that snapshots are on their way. I am looking forward to use them. All in all you cannot benefit from them in Cinder right now.

2) I dont claim that all bricks must be specified in mount command. I just point out that having let's say 4 bricks it is impossible to mount volume by specifing only 2 servers if both of them are down, yet still the rest 2 work.

3) Like I wrote. It only considers CLI.

4) I totally agree with you. Mounting volume from many locations is one of advantages. It is not supported by Openstack. I dont blame GlusterFS for that.

5) My intension was not to describe GlusterFS cool features but current state (and preview of Openstack Havana implementation) of integration with Openstack.

<comment><USER3> (1) You can in some configurations. If you use qemu there's a block-device driver in qemu and another on the GlusterFS back end (as of 3.4), which both allow snapshots via methods external to us. I meant what I said about it being a hard problem. We're determined to deliver a _general_ snapshot function. That's much harder than delivering snapshots that rely on an uncommon and/or unstable base technology, so it's taking a while.

(2) Yes, if you want to survive N concurrent failures you need N+1 mount servers, and currently released code only supports N=1. However, [http://review.gluster.org/#/c/5400/](http://review.gluster.org/#/c/5400/) has already been merged and will be available in the next release.

(3) IMO you should also have mentioned that the problem only manifests in a specific deprecated use of the CLI (from machines other than the servers). Nonetheless, this is a known deficiency which I've been personally pushing to fix.

(5) The current state includes many of these "cool features" (thanks!) without need for any specific OpenStack integration. That's kind of the point. Unlike some, we don't need to re-implement features for every access method or use case. 90% of that functionality would be available e.g. to CloudStack or OpenNebula _today_. IMO making a big deal of snapshots as a differentiator in one direction without mentioning myriad differentiators in the other doesn't leave people with the information they need to make progress toward their own decisions.

<comment><USER4> 1) Nobody says it is easy. I keep my fingers crossed for this feature.

2) Exactly. I have pointed out this ticket. When do you think it will be available and in which version?

3) Unfortunately, I have not found any document where setting authentication other than IP based is described. I would like to set it through openstack and by hand. Is it possible?

5) Of course it is great that most features do not require any specific OpenStack integration. I just wanted to describe those that need it. It mostly shows what needs to be done in Openstack.

<comment><USER3> (2) It'll automatically be in 3.5 approximately the end of this year. It will probably also be backported into the next 3.4.x, but I can't comment on schedules either for that or for the "downstream" Red Hat Storage releases.

(3) I don't know of any such instructions off the top of my head. Basically you'll have to edit /etc/glusterfs/glusterd.vol and add by hand the same auth options that are available for volumes via the CLI. I think there are (possibly hidden) CLI options that you'd need to specify username/password to work with that. If you try it and things aren't seeming fairly obvious, feel free to ping me via email (firstname.lastname@example.com) or Freenode IRC.

<comment><USER4> (3) I would definitely like to avoid modifying files by hand. I knew about this method but it just does not work for me. I am automatically creating many volumes with cli and modifying them in configuration file is not convenient. I guess it is also not possible for cinder devs to implement it reasonably well.

<comment><USER3> You're opposed to manipulating config files by hand, but you recommend Ceph over GlusterFS? Interesting.

<comment><USER4> Well, I am not opposed to manipulating files by hand. I just dont want to do that when I have CLI for everything else. Keeping the content of the file the same on all servers is more toilsome than simple command. Of course there are tools like chef but that is not the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Apparently there are nearly 20 supported storage backends for OpenStack, this article is discussing the shortcomings of one of them. Not sure why GlusterFS is singled out.

[https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/CinderSupportMatrix](https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/CinderSupportMatrix)

</comment><comment><USER6> If I understand this correctly, the complaints are:

\- Terminology -- Seriously? It's not a very strong complaint.

\- Snapshotting -- have to use qcow2 for this rather than native file system support for snapshotting an individual file

\- Have to use Layer2 separation for security -- but this should be done any way, shouldn't it? There's no reason to trust this to application level security, and I there's any need at all for this type of security, L2 is the only way to go.

Personally, I think Ceph is the future, and I also have personal reasons for wanting Ceph to succeed. Having dealt a bit with both communities, I think it's clear that Ceph is going to be the standard go-to destributed file system soon, and I hope to switch our gluster filesystems to it soon (come on POSIX FS layer!). So I kind of have it in the bag for Ceph.

However, I don't see these complaints as very strong. I'm only a dabbler with OpenStack, but fairly experienced with Gluster and its warts.

<comment><USER4> Terminology is not a problem:) It is just a little bit misleading when you start implementing Cinder with Glusterfs.

Complaints are mostly about integration of both tools. I dont intend to discredit Openstack/Glusterfs in particular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Compute node downloads such image, puts it on a local disk and boots a VM. > This method makes it impossible to use the highly desired live migration

That's not true. Live migration is possible both with glance images and cinder volumes.

<comment><USER4> Could you point out some docs about it?

<comment><USER7> It works by default. I don't think you need to do anything crazy about it. Base images will be downloaded by Nova during migration and libvirt/qemu will copy the differences. (assuming you use libvirt, I don't know about other supervisors)

See nova.virt.libvirt.driver:LibvirtDriver.pre_live_migrate - the code path for "if not is_shared_storage".

<comment><USER4> Are you sure that you are talking about true live migration? Is your instance available during the migration?

<comment><USER8> This is definitely possible, it is called block migration. Here is an example of someone showing usage (note the bug he mentioned has been fixed):

[http://www.sebastien-han.fr/blog/2012/07/12/openstack- block-...](http://www.sebastien-han.fr/blog/2012/07/12/openstack-block- migration/)

Note that there are some reliability issues using versions prior to qemu-1.4 and libvirt 1.0.2

To enable "true" block migration where the server remains live the whole time instead of being paused, you need to modify a config option:

block_migration_flag=VIR_MIGRATE_UNDEFINE_SOURCE,VIR_MIGRATE_PEER2PEER,VIR_MIGRATE_NON_SHARED_INC,VIR_MIGRATE_LIVE

(this adds VIR_MIGRATE_LIVE to the default flags)

Also, keep in mind the same caveats to regular live migration with this flag in that there are edge cases where the i/o in the guest is so great that the migration will never complete.

<comment><USER4> You are right. Block migration is definitely the way to go. Unfortunately it is poorly described in openstack docs for KVM. [http://docs.openstack.org/trunk/openstack- compute/admin/cont...](http://docs.openstack.org/trunk/openstack- compute/admin/content/configuring-migrations.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Manticore – Concurrent, Parallel, ML-Like Language - <AUTHOR> http://manticore.cs.uchicago.edu/ <comment><AUTHOR> Particularly interested if something like this or LinearML could help with Ocaml's multicore problem. That it's still not multicore for whatever reason inspired me to dig into concurrent or parallel ML's with Manticore being best I saw.</comment>


Put.io API design issues - <AUTHOR> https://miki.it/blog/2015/8/10/put-io-api-design-issues/

<comment><USER2> Yeah, cookie-based auth seems suuuper convenient, especially when you build a project that's something like a CMS based on a REST API and you don't want to send auth headers back and forth all the time.

But remember: as soon as you use cookies (or anything else the browser sends by itself automatically), you need to make sure that you know that _your user_ initiated the request, or else you get XSRF issues.

And combined with JSONP, this is basically game-over. However, when the cookie-based auth is removed, I see no problems with JSONP (for the server; the one using the JSONP has to have trust in the server to not set malicious code).

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell Basic CSRF. If you don't know what CSRF is and how to protect against it, any website you make is _probably_ going to be insecure. If you call yourself a web developer and don't know about CSRF, please, go learn it. I don't think I'd hire a web developer who couldn't tell me what CSRF is and how to prevent it. Even if your framework takes care of it for you, you still need to know what it is.

<comment><USER3> "If you don't know what CSRF is and how to protect against it, any website you make is probably going to be insecure"

A thousand times this.

I used to give a talk about basic web application security, and my favourite part of that talk was right after explaining CSRF when I'd point out that "... and if you don't have active protection in place against this attack, your app is vulnerable right now". You could almost see people's faces turning white in the audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This isn't great, but I do want to speak on behalf of Put.io. It really is an incredible service and I've always had great response time from them on customer service issues. I highly encourage anyone who isn't using it to give it a look.

</comment><comment><USER5> Stop using JSONP, please! Instead, just support CORS.

<comment><USER3> CORS will not protect you against CSRF - in fact, if you don't apply it with caution it will open you up to CSRF attacks.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I wasn't necessarily saying that CORS will save you, but more suggesting that there's no reason to use JSONP.</comment></comment></comment>


The Future of Subversion - <AUTHOR> http://subversion.wandisco.com/blogs/the-future-of-subversion.html

<comment><USER2> 10 years ago, Subversion set itself a goal: to replace CVS.

That is exactly what it has done, and it now finds itself in pretty much exactly the situation CVS was in 10 years ago.

That's quite an achievement, but it doesn't exactly suggest an exciting future ahead for Subversion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Truer words were never spoken: "Since conquering CVS, Subversion has largely drifted..."

As an example, I'm disappointed it took them as long as it did to add merging, especially since it still doesn't seem as easy to use as svnmerge.

<comment><USER4> My initial thought was "SVN changes?", as a post about its "future" wouldn't likely be about how it plans to stagnate and die, unless it were being abandoned (also unlikely).

While showing that I haven't used it much and don't know its history well at all, it _does_ reveal a fair amount of how they're perceived; I'm hardly a rarity in this. It's hard to make large / "real" changes to anything like this without effectively making something new (massively breaking changes, for example. ie, anything related to workflow). SVN is largely doomed, methinks.</comment></comment>


Tech Salaries in 50 US States – Where Would You Earn the Most? - <AUTHOR> https://www.venturelessons.com/tech-salaries-in-50-us-states/ <comment><USER2> > The salaries are also not adjusted for cost of living

Doesn't that make the list pretty much meaningless?

<comment><USER3> Yeap. It's a completely worthless article. The more important numbers are:

0) cost-of-living adjusted income (for daily living expenses)

1) housing to yearly income ratio (housing affordability)

Absolute yearly salary is primarily useful data for non-local inelastic demand and luxury items that tend to not track local costs-of-living, i.e., a Tesla (sans tax credits) or a Nest thermostat.

Better articles:

[https://qz.com/1195354/tech-salaries-in-austin-texas-are- eff...](https://qz.com/1195354/tech-salaries-in-austin-texas-are- effectively-66000-higher-than-in-nyc-thanks-to-the-cost-of-living/)

[https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-10-cities-with- the-...](https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-10-cities-with-the-highest- real-tech-salaries-in-the-us-adjusted-for-cost-of-living/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage chargeback fraud in SaaS? - <AUTHOR> We are operating in the marketing industry and many seem to be paying with stolen credit card. How do you stop this kind of fraud? <comment><USER2> Did you google fraud detection. There are some services for that.</comment>


Zai App: AI Interior Designer (Using AR) - <AUTHOR> https://zaiapp.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We're super early and this is our MVP to gauge interest.

</comment><comment><USER2> Can't wait for this to come out!!

</comment><comment><USER3> Can't wait to see this released!

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting concept

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool.</comment>


Project Orion is one of the stupidest, most wonderful ideas ever conceived in America. - <AUTHOR> http://lupoleboucher.livejournal.com/79874.html

<comment><USER2> _Project Orion_ by George Dyson is a decent book about the project. In addition to the historical narrative, it has some good and detailed (for a popularization, anyway) explanations of how the technology was supposed to work.

</comment><comment><USER3> An interesting story on Atomic Spacecraft here <http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=679>

</comment><comment><USER4> Come on, Project Orion wasn't stupid.

<comment><USER5> ...for certain values of "stupid."

<comment><USER4> We could build an interstellar spacecraft if our society took science seriously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> kewl.</comment>


How a Founder Turned a Slow Burn Rate into a Big Exit - <AUTHOR> http://firstround.com/article/This-Founder-Turned-a-Slow-Burn-Rate-into-a-Big-Exit

<comment><USER2> "The people who stayed longer are the ones who stayed with the company."

Oh, I have seen that couple of times. People who stay longer are the ones who stayed with the company -- but what's the reason? The implied reason is that because that people who stay longer do more, feel better, etc. However, in many-many cases people who go home earlier are pushed out by others who stay later -- not based on productivity, etc. At [insert big company here] I knew teams where everybody stayed until 10 pm every day, because that was the team culture. Other teams went home at 5, 6 pm. Were the former more productive? Not at all, just that became the norm.

"To this day, I fight any budgets for any part of the company. If you don't have one, then people's default is to be more conservative. It's like limitless paid vacation policies — people end up taking less vacation."

Etcetera. This writing is about 'how to burn out employees'. It might work out well for founders though.

<comment><USER3> That was the same gist I got.

"We needed people who would be with us at 2 a.m. committing code so that we could have it in front of AT&T the next day."

That's not about _good_ employees, that's about employees with no lives outside of work. _Of course_ the ones whose job _becomes_ their life will stay longer. It's far more traumatic to leave if you don't know anyone outside of work.

I'll take the four-day workweek start-ups any time over the death march start- ups. And I'll put my own short-week productivity up against anyone's 80-hour week.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, but I just don't buy this wishful thinking of low hour high productivity. Personally, I probably hit peak productivity around 60 hours although I rarely work for longer than 4 hours without taking a break to eat lunch/dinner or play with my daughter. People who hit peak productivity at 30 hours probably just don't like what they're working on as much and so of course founders select for the former. That said this only relevant if you're trying to be highly productive. I have nothing against people who choose to spend their energy on other things.

<comment><USER5> That's interesting, how do you define 'productive'? What can you do after 60 hours you can't do after 30?

<comment><USER4> I can get more things done in 60 hours. I'm looking at productivity over the long term. If I work 60 hours/week for a whole year I will accomplish a whole lot more than if I worked 30. But if I work 80 hours per week, I will only accomplish marginally more than 60 hours and maybe even less if I burn out. Everyone has different priorities and different breaking points, but I find it disingenuous when people claim more hours doesn't allow for more productivity. I'm certain there are people that can sustain much longer periods of productivity than myself and as a result accomplish more things.

Of course spending time alone does not mean you'll be productive, but assuming equal intelligence, someone who is able to sustain concentration over a longer period of time will accomplish more than someone who concentrates for a lesser amount of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I worked at Location Labs. I feel what this article doesn't capture is how Location Labs also takes care of its people. Like, there was one guy who was working crazy hours to get a product launched. So Tasso basically forced him take a good chunk of time off and paid for his ticket to go see his family (who lived abroad.) Nowhere is the perfect place to work, but I had a wonderful time working with these guys.

<comment><USER7> How was he taken care of, equity wise?

Something tells me even though that guy got a magical plane ticket home he also probably wasn't a participant in that "big exit".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like this call out quote:

""When you're all working in one big room, everybody can see each other come and go. It becomes obvious who the outliers are."

Doesn't make it sound like we are pretending that the open office plan is really about productivity maximization.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that struck me as especially stupid. That guy who leaves at 6pm might have been more productive than everyone else goofing off all day.

And besides, if you expect me to stay incredibly late then unless you're also going to give me a huge, huge chunk of equity (or, hey, pay me overtime), then I'm out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> While I don't agree with the founder's decision to not hire people with prior management experience, I do like his approach to conservative spending. This is something that often feels forgotten about in these days of spacious SOMA offices and massive refrigerators stocked with Japanese soda.

As long as my salary is not skimped on, I get a lot of satisfaction from working for a thrifty company. In my domain (infrastructure and ops), learning to do more with less is a lot more challenging than having a blank check for everything you want. Some of my best workplace accomplishments were made when we simply didn't have the cash to buy the big, expensive gear or software.

</comment><comment><USER11> Except what do you do if you have venture backed competitors who are willing to spend and lose huge amounts of money in the land grab for marketshare, and thus have far larger sales teams and development teams?

More 2am nights?

</comment><comment><USER12> Interesting view on not hiring people with previous management experience - seems clearly wrong to me. There's a difference between career middle manager MBA types, who might be deadweight at a startup, and other people who have management experience as a result of competence and natural career progression. Someone with experience managing a team should always be preferable, all else being equal.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Because we were so capital efficient we were able to focus all of our energy > on finding a profitable business model

This is the real secret. Lean is how they lasted long enough, but a profitable business model with actual customers is how they exited.

</comment><comment><USER14> This reads like a Burnout Cookbook.

</comment><comment><USER15> Damn, I was hoping this would be about orbital mechanics in Kerbal Space Program.</comment>


Creating SVG animations with Snap.svg - <AUTHOR> https://blog.10pines.com/2017/10/31/creating-svg-animatinos-with-snap-svg/ <comment><USER2> Difference to paperjs, please? Thank you! (short, sorry, tired...)

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks like paperjs is based out of Canvas whereas Snap.svg out of SVGs. This is important, because with Snap.svg you can create your illustrations with a designer tool (i.e. Illustrator) and animate their different parts through JS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Broken link methinks

<comment><AUTHOR> The link seems to be working :/</comment></comment>


Palestine's unique stretchy ice cream [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180815-palestines-secret-stretchy-ice-cream <comment><USER2> It's stretchy due to the addition of mastic gum. I had to look that up.

 _Mastic is a resin obtained from the mastic tree (Pistacia lentiscus). In pharmacies and nature shops, it is called "Arabic gum" (not to be confused with gum arabic) and "Yemen gum". In Greece, it is known as the "tears of Chios," being traditionally produced on that Greek island, and, like other natural resins, is produced in "tears" or droplets.

Originally a sap, mastic is sun-dried into pieces of brittle, translucent resin. When chewed, the resin softens and becomes a bright white and opaque gum. The flavor is bitter at first, but after some chewing, it releases a refreshing, slightly pine or cedar-like flavor._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastic_(plant_resin)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastic_\(plant_resin\))

<comment><USER3> There's also a similar stretchy ice cream in Turkey called dondurma. It uses both mastic and salep, a flour made from orchid tubers.

<comment><USER4> Dondurma just means "ice cream". What you mean is "Maraş Ice Cream" (Maraş Dondurması). It takes a lot of patience to get it from a traditional shop: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYNhiv5FJ9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYNhiv5FJ9Q)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's an ice cream shop of this style in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (because of course there is) if anyone wants to try it out first hand. It's called Republic of Booza.

It was worth it for the experience but I prefer normal ice cream better. The texture is ... unusual.

</comment><comment><USER6> Gum-added ice cream is something you can find around Aegean Sea -Turkish or Greek coast-. Especially around Chios and Izmir it is quite common and tasty, so you can try that out without going all the way to Palestine ;)

<comment><USER4> Also popular as "Maraş Ice Cream" in Turkey:

[https://www.google.de/search?q=mara%C5%9F+dondurmas%C4%B1&tb...](https://www.google.de/search?q=mara%C5%9F+dondurmas%C4%B1&tbm=vid)

It is of middle-east origin, as far as I can tell. It also comes with its traditional show, as you can see in the videos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Gum Ice cream like Booza (iirc the oldest "ice-cream" in the world) or Dondurma Maras is prevelant all around the region it's common in Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and the entire Levant and Aegean region.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not into politics, but what is the point? I neither understand BBC nor HN to publish a story like this one? It's notorious that Ramallah has shops like and other city, so in Israel, and people have normal life here. Just 2 month ago I got a interview for a company (freightos) which has both branch in jerusalem (west) and ramallah, so I suppose that people success to get their things together somehow?

</comment><comment><USER9> Unrelated, but am I the only one surprised that bbc.com is not not served over https?

<comment><USER10> Not surprised at all, especially since the news site has only recently made the switch to https [https://medium.com/bbc-design-engineering/bbc-news-on- https-...](https://medium.com/bbc-design-engineering/bbc-news-on- https-182b45ef60c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Random observation: I'm always fascinated by how poverty and development can co-exist in a lot of places on earth. During conflicts between Israel and Palestine, you always see photos of the insides of Palestinian hospitals and the lack of sanitation and equipment is heartbreaking. But then this ice-cream shop has high tech equipment, high sanitation standards, and a seemingly relatively wealthy client base. And the street looks like it could be any street from any other relatively stable, developed nation in that area.

I suppose it's also all a matter of the point that the media are trying to make with the article... A travel article is going to highlight the cool parts, while an article on the horrors of war is going to focus on the disasters.

<comment><USER12> You are mixing the Gaza strip with Ramallah, which is where this ice cream shop is.

Ramallah is actually a pretty developed and secular city in the west bank.

<comment><USER11> Interesting. I knew Gaza and the West Bank were geographically separate, but I didn't know conditions on the ground were so different. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Extension to track and optimize CO2 emissions with PG&E SmartMeter API - <AUTHOR> https://energylollipop.com <comment><USER2> Fitbit for the Planet, like it

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It's my co-founder twitter.com/katiepatrick 's main hypothesis for how to bring about change: give people a 2,000 calorie count, a fitbit 10,000 steps, and update them daily.</comment></comment>