Venture Pimp: Feedlooks is an interesting spin on feed reading - <AUTHOR> http://venturepimp.com/post/729305547/feedlooks

<comment><USER2> This seems like a step in the wrong direction. I personally _like_ a uniform interface while browsing synopses of articles from various feeds. I will go out on a limb and assume that the popularity of Arc90's Readability bookmarklet speaks to this.

<comment><USER3> I was about to mention both Readability and Safari Reader. My primary reason for using a feed reader is aggregation; I can skim through a lot of content quickly through a consistent interface. Part of that is regularization of content presentation; it's mentally jarring switching from something formatted like Reddit to, say, Gruber's blog.

I've created an account, but I'll admit, the interface feels to be a bit jarring to me. Is there no way to actually view the content of the _feed_ , rather than the linked-to article?</comment></comment>


ROMhacking a Japanese game for an English translation - <AUTHOR> http://www.twitch.tv/effinslowbeef/v/24639788 <comment><AUTHOR> Context: the streamer (slowbeef) was also responsible for ROMhacking the English translation of Policenauts.</comment>


Accel, Khosla & Andreessen Horowitz Pour Another $30MM Into RockMelt - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/28/accel-khosla-andreessen-30-million-rockmelt/

<comment><USER2> I use RockMelt and I absolutely love it. I have almost every website I check streamlined in one place and the facebook sync is very convenient. That being said it is also highly distracting.</comment>


Ask HN: What's been your proudest moment since launching your startup? - <AUTHOR>

Was chatting to my Dad today about my little startup and we were looking at real time analytics together. He couldn't believe I had visitors from the States, and from Italy on the site. He asked where else people had visited the site from.
So I opened up analytics and to my complete amazement at least one person in every country in the world bar Greenland had visited my tiny startup! I make no money from it, I don't even get that many visitors. It's a labour of love but somehow it feels like it's been a worthwhile journey!
Anyone else had a similar moment where they feel like all their hard work has been worth it? What's your proudest moment startup wise? <comment><USER2> (mine is a side project, very localized - doplaces.com )

A co-worker was looking for meeting venues around a particular town within ten seconds I had a list of event centers up within a five mile radius of the town. Recently someone on facebook was looking for venues for a planned wedding in the counties where doplaces covers, replied to that with a single very useful link.

Just about any time when I got good local information with just a couple clicks. Having it easily do what I have envisioned is the proudest moment.

</comment><comment><USER3> I launched my startup ([http://write.my](http://write.my)) over the weekend and it would have to be the first paying client and the demand of freelance writers applying (we had 100+ applications in the first 3 hours which was really exciting to say the least).

</comment><comment><USER4> Looking forward to reading some more answers on this since proud moments seems to vary tremendously (social vs. monetary). Keep going. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Our first payment from a customer which meant we could pay our biggest supplier and each of our smaller ones.</comment>


Washington Post offers invalid cookie consent under EU rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/19/ico_washington_post/ <comment><AUTHOR> Ad-Tracking Consent & The Dilemma: Some Thoughts on the Washington Post Case: [https://mingli.me/2018/12/06/ad-tracking-consent-the- dilemma...](https://mingli.me/2018/12/06/ad-tracking-consent-the-dilemma/)</comment>


Our Professor's Views Are Vile, University Says. But We Can't Fire Him - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/22/us/indiana-university-eric-rasmusen.html <comment><USER2> "Professor Rasmusen, an economist who has argued that gay men should not be teachers, referred to women as "the weaker sex" and said colleges have lower standards for accepting black students than white students."

Selective colleges generally do have lower standards for accepting black students, justifying this in the name of diversity. Rasmusen's "weaker sex" statement in full is this:

"We should also think about the duty of the strong to protect the weak rather than look the other way when they hear rumors. Men have not protected the weaker sex as they should have, and this is part of a general decline in our feelings of duty towards women."

Rasmusen's site where he defends his comments is [http://www.rasmusen.org/special/2019kerfuffle/provost.htm](http://www.rasmusen.org/special/2019kerfuffle/provost.htm) .</comment>


Show HN: Hiring? Post a bounty to crowdsource your recruiting - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> When I click the link it just takes me to this discussion page, not an actual product. Link?</comment>


Mininet: Emulating a network on your laptop - <AUTHOR> http://mininet.github.com <comment><USER2> GNS3 is another tool for emulating a network. It is a graphical tool where you draw network diagrams, and nodes are emulated with Qemu/VirtualBox , Dynamips (Cisco hardware), or another emulator.

<comment><USER3> Seems like the major advantage of Mininet (vs GNS3) is that Mininet is based on light-weight virtualization, so that emulating large number of nodes should be more feasible. Of course the downside being that all the nodes are Linux- based

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Very very interesting. I had somehow not heard about OpenFlow before, which looks very promising (software + hardware based implementations), and network simulation is the easiest way to learn about all the tech. How does Mininet compare to GNS3?

Also, could you run virtualization software like Dynamips inside Mininet?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have not tried Dynamips so I cannot comment much. But Mininet uses features in Linux: veth pairs, bridge, OpenVSwitch, etc. to glue together a network. If Dynamips works with the above components, it's highly likely to work with Mininet as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I read some documentation and I don't think I entirely get the whole "emulate a network" thing. What can be done with that? What exactly is a network? What this project makes me think of is as if one would replace the internet with another substitute internet or intranet, but I don't think thats the case. Something that it makes me think of is the idea of downloading a website with something like sitesucker and then changing your host file so that you can browse the internet via saved pages on your computer. But I don't think that this Mininet project has anything to do with that. I'm interested in trying to "get-it" if anyone has a clearer more non-obscure definition of what this project entails.

<comment><AUTHOR> It can mean different things to different people.

If you're a distributed systems developer, you can use Mininet to create a topology and emulate the interaction of 100s of, say, bittorrent clients.

If you're a graduate student in networking, you can use Mininet to experiment with your new routing protocol and compare it against existing ones such as OSPF, BGP, etc.

You can also use it to put existing research papers to the test: <http://reproducingnetworkresearch.wordpress.com>

<comment><USER5> I really like the example you give and am starting to ge the academic usage. Thanks for this reply!

<comment><AUTHOR> You're welcome. There's a Mininet AMI too if you want to get started quickly!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I was studying networking we used a network simulation tool called cnet[0], which has the nice property that it can do network simulation at different protocol _layers_ as well as having different topologies. It can also simulate things like wide-area networks, noisy connections and so on.

Most of the assignments built around cnet were of the form of "Here is a network protocol that is half-completed. Write the transport layer", or "here is a fully completed network protocol that works with this topology. Now we introduce wireless nodes, modify the protocol to support wireless mobility".

[0] <http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/cnet/>

<comment><USER7> At the TU Ilmenau we used OMNeT++ (<http://www.omnetpp.org/>) which had the benefit of having built-in classes for statistics collection and looking at graphs while the simulation ran - mininet doesn't seem to offer such functionality (yet?). But then it sometimes felt like omnet had too many layers of indirection and C++ was not everybodys language of choice.

Our assignments were similar, I remember doing stuff with link state and distance vector routing, implementing parts of a tcp state machine and others.

<comment><USER8> It depends what you're doing with networks. These tools are good for calculating statistics on large scale configs.

If you want a "real" network GNS3 is so much better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems to be a good tool for teaching networking. Back in school we used to do that with VDN (which is still maintained <http://opale.u-clermont1.fr/vdn/wiki/doku.php>).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, Mininet is used for networking courses in Stanford/Princeton. There are a number of programming assignments readily available for Mininet: <https://github.com/mininet/mininet/wiki/Assignments>

<comment><USER10> Wow reading through these assignments I'm blown away this is for a first year course. At this time in my first year half of the class couldn't handle an if statement. Wish I could of went to Stanford.

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries! The Stanford undergraduate networking class was offered online last quarter. The videos are up here: <http://networking.class.stanford.edu>

<comment><USER10> Thanks. I'd found those but what I'm really interested in are the course assignments which only seem to be available for the actual course. The first two are the only ones I can't find right now

<comment><AUTHOR> The first two programming assignments can be found here: [http://www.scs.stanford.edu/10au- cs144/lab/reliable/reliable...](http://www.scs.stanford.edu/10au- cs144/lab/reliable/reliable.html). The 2012 assignments were the same.

<comment><USER10> Thanks your awesome :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've used this for classes at Stanford. We used it in conjunction with EC2 and it was very handy for creating specific topologies that could be accessed from anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is this based on FreeBSD's dummynet? I use to use that a long time ago and it was really cool.

I was kind of sad when Linux didn't really have anything close to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, but Mininet uses dummynet like features in Linux: netem [1], htb [2], etc.

[1] [http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networ...](http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/networking/netem)

[2] <http://luxik.cdi.cz/~devik/qos/htb/manual/userg.htm>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I kind of want to use this to build a hacking game. You get to use real world tools to uncover bits of story scattered across a virtual network. You could even write little "agents" that run on the nodes that cause traffic to happen between nodes, or react to things happening on the network.

<comment><USER4> Uplink with real (virtualized) servers? Count me in!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another cool project that Mininet uses to do some heavy lifting is this.

<http://openvswitch.org/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Obligatory: <http://xkcd.com/350/>

</comment><comment><USER16> how does this work under the hood? in particular, how are the hosts emulated? by separate processes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Virtual hosts are in isolated containers with their own pid and network namespace. So each host can have its own routing table, IP address, etc. without interfering with one another.

<comment><USER17> Mininet doesn't actually use PID namespaces yet. They warn that the PID namespace and host filesystem are shared: [https://github.com/mininet/mininet/wiki/Introduction-to- Mini...](https://github.com/mininet/mininet/wiki/Introduction-to-Mininet#wiki- limits)</comment></comment></comment>


Copyright and a Bit of Porn [SFW] - <AUTHOR> http://kukuruku.co/hub/media/copyright-and-a-bit-of-porn

<comment><USER2> Can a mod like dang put SFW in the title for this? It makes a lot of people hesitant to click it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated.

<comment><USER2> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


A New "Theory of Everything": Reality Emerges from Cosmic Copyright Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-theory-of-everything-reality-emerges-from-cosmic-copyright-law/ <comment><USER2> Per `dang's suggestion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7803158](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7803158), here's the link to the paper so that we may consolidate the threads:

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563](http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563)

Edited to steal more screenspace/add context:

Authors:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120402224250/http://193.189.74...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120402224250/http://220.127.116.11/~qubitor/people/david/structure/Documents/By%20Other%20People/PhilosophyNow.html)

[http://edge.org/memberbio/chiara_marletto](http://edge.org/memberbio/chiara_marletto)

You may also be interested in this paper:

[http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Deutsch_quantu...](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Deutsch_quantum_theory.pdf)

Also, [http://edge.org/conversation/constructor- theory](http://edge.org/conversation/constructor-theory)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a big Sir Arthur Conan Doyle fan, but I'm always bothered whenever this quote surfaces:

> Once you have eliminated the impossible," the fictional detective Sherlock > Holmes famously opined, "whatever remains, however improbable, must be the > truth.

This is terrible advice, even more so when mentioned in a scientific publication. This recommendation is the antithesis of what the scientific method is about and a text book example of an argument from ignorance.

You don't pick an explanation because you have run out of ideas to explain a phenomenon, for the simple reason that there might be other explanations you have not considered.

The time to believe something is when there is evidence to back it up.

<comment><USER4> The key word in that quote is "eliminated". Try this more modern translation:

"Once you have _falsified_ every other possible hypothesis, whatever hypothesis remains is the one we'll promote to a _theory_."

Holmes' is not saying you get to just make things up - he's trying to explain that instead of trying to prove something directly, inverting your perspective and falsifying as many incorrect interpretations ("the impossible") should always work - even if yo don't _understand why_.

That quote is an incredibly efficient summarization of the scientific method's core philosophy that (because you can't prove a positive), you falsify wrong hypothesis instead.

<comment><USER3> > That quote is an incredibly efficient summarization of the scientific > method's core philosophy that (because you can't prove a positive), you > falsify wrong hypothesis instead.

I disagree and I'll repeat what I said above: this is the antithesis of the scientific method. It's faith based and it opens the door to accepting hypotheses that have zero evidence to back them up. Follow this reasoning and you can just make things up.

<comment><USER5> In what way is that faith based? It seems to me that falsifying hypothesis until only one remains seems to be pretty scientific. Especially considering that (with regards to science, not solving a murder mystery) that means the world is forever stuck with whatever hypothesis was left at the end because we just didn't think of something else... the same principle or technique can always be used again...

<comment><USER6> The problem is that, in practice, there is no way to guarantee that you have actually eliminated every possibility. There are ways to constrain the answer within physics, but that doesn't always mean you have an explanation. Besides, within the scientific method (at least in my field of physics) emphasis is placed more on the predictions the answer can make, rather than the simple explanations. Simply eliminating other answers _might_ give you an explanation for a singular case, but it fails to give you the predictive power we demand from all theories.

<comment><USER7> You gotta admit it works with mathematical proofs by contradiction.

<comment><USER3> Not really. Proof by contradiction means starting with the negation of the hypothesis you're trying to prove and then reach an impossible conclusion, thereby proving your hypothesis was wrong.

It still involves a rigorous logical reasoning, not accepting something because you're running out of ideas.

<comment><USER7> If you're defining the technique as not using logic, merely running out of ideas, of course its not logical and wouldn't work in practice. I don't see how what you described as not being 'eliminating the impossible', personally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Always love to see new ideas from my apparently-alternate-universe, yet equally-named human copy. What a brilliant mind! Keeps reminding me to seek for deeper answers.

Really a shame that they went for such a strangely click-baity title for what was otherwise a good article, though. This has nothing to do with Copy _right_ and nowhere does the article even attempt to hold up the terrible metaphor.

</comment><comment><USER9> So if I understand this correctly, this seems a bit similar to how math is built upon a defined set of axioms, which the rest is then derived from.

Given that the axioms they choose are powerful enough, this approach should yield falsifiable results, because if a result turns out to be false, then one of the axioms will turn out not to apply.

</comment><comment><USER10> Lubos Motl has written a pretty harsh takedown:

[http://motls.blogspot.no/2014/05/constructor-theory- deutsch-...](http://motls.blogspot.no/2014/05/constructor-theory-deutsch-and- marletto.html)

<comment><USER11> I see he's still as obnoxious like always. He makes points, though I'm not qualified to say whether they are valid. I wish he could be more restrained.

That said, if someone like David Deutsch publishes such theories with grand predictions, they deserve criticism.

<comment><USER12> I scanned the paper and I feel like most of the criticism by Motl is more or less justified. They introduce non-standard notation for things that would probably benefit from a treatment within well established mathematical language. For example their discussion of non clonability of "superinformation", whatever that is, could probably be resolved by working within a non-cartesian monoidal category (which is a standard tool in Quantum logic).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > According to constructor theory, the most fundamental components of reality > are entities—"constructors"—that perform particular tasks, accompanied by a > set of laws that define which tasks are actually possible for a constructor > to carry out. For instance, a kettle with a power supply can serve as a > constructor that can perform the task of heating water .... "You simply say > that the task of creating energy from nothing is impossible."

Looks like someone is getting into OOP:

        // Defined
        (new Kettle()).boil(new Water());

        // Exception
        Universe.createEnergyFrom(null)

(yes, I'm joking with this post. But I did find the parallel to be funny)

<comment><USER14> I think it's more than a parallel.

<comment><USER15> The whole 'universe as simulation' idea is spooky.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well, I'd like to read the published paper. Anyone who is interested in quantum computing comes to his/hers analogies and beliefs of the underlying laws of the universe. The discussions on digital physics have been around since Zuse. I can't see why they claim that they have found something groundbreaking. In my opinion, this theory is closer to philosophy rather than quantum mechanics.

<comment> saint-loup David Deutsch, coauthor of the paper, is not without credibility in the field of quantum computing, to say the least. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch)

It's obviously a speculative theory, but it's a welcomed endeavor, since the field is sorely lacking conceptual frameworks to make sense of scientific advances.

Link to the paper: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563](http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.5563)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Can any physicists on here tell me if this new theory actually predicts anything? Is it falsifiable?

<comment><USER18> Falsifiability is so last century ([http://edge.org/response- detail/25322](http://edge.org/response-detail/25322)) =)

<comment><USER19> I don't really understand the argument here. It starts to explain a difference between "falsifiable" and "empirical", but then it goes off on an example that I don't understand at all.

Imagining an unobservable multiverse might be a useful way to think about a problem, and it might lead to an elegant way to make predictions, but all we can conclude from that scientifically is "the universe behaves as if there were a multiverse". There's no need to assert that such a multiverse actually exists, and to do so would seem to violate Occam's Razor.

If the article wants to argue that sometimes describing observable behaviour in terms of unobservable entities is neater than the alternative, that's entirely reasonable. But it seems to me that it's trying to argue that the existence of a multiverse is something unfalsifiable that's still scientific, and I don't agree with that at all.

But maybe I'm just misunderstanding something, I don't know that much about theoretical physics after all.

<comment><USER20> _" and to do so would seem to violate Occam's Razor."_

That depends on your particular formulation of Occam's Razor. If you're looking at "amount of stuff", it's hard to beat "my experience behaves as if there were a universe".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > "In principle, everything possible in our universe could be written down in > a big book consisting of nothing but tasks [and in] this big book will also > be encoded all of the laws of physics."

This is hardly a grand "Theory of Everything" and a lot more like a messy rule book of exceptions and edge cases, that attempts to cover all rules for classical and quantum systems.

<comment><USER22> So... The "just because" theory of existence?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I laughed when I saw that used the name of a C++ for the theory.

The word 'constructor' may have been used in niche places before it was adopted by the language but I've never seen it used outside of it.

<comment><USER24> Lots of languages have constructors. Some of them aren't even object oriented.

<comment><USER25> Indeed, the wording of the article even made me think of type theory and functional programming.

> For instance, a kettle with a power supply can serve as a constructor that > can perform the task of heating water.

kettle power_supply water : (water * heat)

> You simply say that the task of creating energy from nothing is impossible.

first_law : (Null -> energy) = _|_

> In principle, everything possible in our universe could be written down in a > big book consisting of nothing but tasks

This sounds like an enumeration (eg. a Goedel numbering) of programs, or alternatively of a (program, runtime) quarter-plane.

> The collaborators then go on to define the concept of a "superinformation" > medium that encodes messages that specify particular physical states—in this > case, one in which copying is impossible

Sounds like substructural type systems and linear (or affine) types.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone know what happened to Reia? - <AUTHOR> >Welcome to Reia (pronounced RAY-uh), a Ruby-like scripting language for the Erlang virtual machine (BEAM).<p>link: https://github.com/tarcieri/reia<p>>FYI: Reia is defunct. No additional work on it is planned. If you are interested in the ideas behind Reia, I strongly suggest you check out the Elixir language, which is now in a more mature stage of development than Reia <comment><AUTHOR> Was just thinking out-loud: "Why not run a cvasi-Ruby implementation on the BEAM?"</comment>


Ask HN: What's the state of the art in multi-platform client GUI development? - <AUTHOR> It seems to me that there's plenty of good options for writing everything but the GUI of client apps in a cross-platform manner. Just for example, one could write the meat of an app in C++, and it could be compiled to OS X, Linux, Windows, iOS and Android. With Emscripten one can even run it in a browser surprisingly well.
However, the GUI side of things seems to be split into three (let me know if I've missed a category):
1) Native to the OS (That's to say, using OS-provided widgets and idiomatic HIG) 2) HTML/CSS based (E.g. React in a Chromium environment) 3) Some kind of cross-platform widgets (E.g Java Swing/AWT, QT, even OpenGL)
I think the first option seems to be the most favoured, but option 2 still seems attractive to me (as a dev), given how well Spotify and Atom seem to work. Option 3, while practical for some applications, seems to be generally derided to the point of contempt.
I do wonder how much of how well option 2 performs is down to implementation, rather than a fundamental limitation of its approach. For instance, before Atom moved to using React, it was dreadfully slow to scroll.
Another way to phrase it is, what multi-platform apps do you admire, and what tech stack do they use? I'm particularly interested in excellent examples of cross-platform GUIs (Be they HTML/CSS or otherwise) <comment><USER2> The problem is way deeper than the UI itself. You think a socket, a thread and a file somehow magically become multi-platform because of c++ ? Chromium embed is 100Mb for a reason just like Java and Qt. The dependencies define the app and not hipster culture. Mocking UI is a sport for people who do not understand the underlying problem. Huge industrial sewer pipeline is too ugly for my living room, etc.

Apple, Microsoft and Google made three different phone UI API´s for the same problem just to lock people in. Apple and Google then beat Microsoft at their own game because they themselves defined the marked. Legal bullshit and patents is the main driving force behind all this non-standard API idiocy. Everyone claims to be unique and non-obvious.

Native apps on many platforms are easy when most of the work is server side. So native is now big because of servers, multi-touch dependencies and code signing complexity. Hybrid is big when the client does all the work. HTML/CSS works when you are showing a document, a list or a form.

<comment><USER3> wxWidgets does a pretty darn good job and it really isn't THAT big. I'm totally still willing to cry bloat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 1) Native is probably the best... obviously. As you said, you get to follow each specific HIG, so that's good.

2) This I think is a bit of a fad. It's just so bloated and honestly just a way to let people with javascript/web development experience make something the way they understand. I imagine that some parts of the workflow that make this approach popular will end up in the platform-abstracting toolkits. Things like reactive programming and more intuitive approaches to layout (XAML for instance)

3) Qt and Swing here seem to be what people are converging on. WX seems to be losing steam (I think? Can't tell.), and GTK just sucks completely. Lazarus seems to be stuck using Carbon on OS X, but a cocoa port is underway. The biggest endorsement of this approach IMO is Maya, which uses QT. Who wants to maintain THAT UI on different platforms?!

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm currently developing a small card game in Python that is completely cross- platform. Basically, if the OS has Python 3, my game will run without any issue. It has been tested with Windows and Linux so far. The GUI uses the Python Tkinter library, which is an interface to Tcl/Tk and is included in Python's standard library. The widgets actually blend in well with the rest of the OS in the more recent versions if the library.

So that's one way to do it, though I wouldn't recommend it for a larger app. Developing a GUI with Tkinter takes a fair bit of work. Also, I decided to learn the library by starting that project, so that probably made it a bit more tedious for me than it would have been to someone more familiar with the tools. It's a solid option for a small app, though.

An option I've considered for a future project is Kivy [0]. It's a cross- platform Python library which is supposed to allow for quick cross-platform UI development.

[0] [http://kivy.org/#home](http://kivy.org/#home)</comment>


We Can't See 'Star Wars' Anymore - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/opinion/star-wars-movie.html <comment><USER2> Despite George and Disney's best efforts, a scrappy team of rebels have pieced together a glorious 4K version scanned from original 35mm prints.

[https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/](https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/)

<comment><USER3> That's interesting, but even 2k scans of first gen film straight from the camera is far from razor sharp. What they have is probably a 3rd gen release print from the 70s, so 4k is likely not going to look fantastic by today's standards and definitely won't make use of 4k resolution.

<comment><USER4> The idea is to recreate the experience of watching it when it first came out, not to make it the absolute sharpest version. That it's in 4k is just to better be able to capture even quirks of film grain and so on, not to try to make it seem like a modern digitally captured movie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Mandalorian has done something that none of the star wars media has achieved since I first saw star wars as a kid in the 80s

It's reminded me how much charm the universe has, it's a loving homage to the original while not feeling like a deliberate homage.

The universe feels realer somehow and the score is appropriately epic.

If you haven't seen it, totally worth a watch.

<comment><USER6> I agree that everyone should watch and judge for themselves.

But I had a completely different reaction. To me it feels like a survey driven TV show devoid of compelling story or character development. As if they wrote every scene of every episode in a writing room with statisticians combing through data suggesting what fans might like and what toys they could sell.

The thing I dislike the most is that they added explanations and backstory to things that just didn't need it. Fans could wonder and theorize endlessly about things such as Yoda and his race... until now. It takes the wonder out of the universe which is directly against the ideas presented in this article.

<comment><USER7> > The thing I dislike the most is that they added explanations and backstory > to things that just didn't need it. Fans could wonder and theorize endlessly > about things such as Yoda and his race... until now.

What explanation or backstory did they add to Yoda and his race?</comment></comment></comment>


SSH tunnelling for fun and profit: AutoSSH - <AUTHOR> http://www.everythingcli.org/ssh-tunnelling-for-fun-and-profit-autossh/ <comment><USER2> I use sshuttle ([https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle](https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle)). It is super flexible and works as a poor man's VPN.

It also has much better performance when used over a flaky connection because it doesn't do TCP-over-TCP.

It doesn't really create a persistent tunnel like this thingy, but it seems worth mentioning to people who might find autossh interesting.

<comment><USER3> Alternately, "ssh -D 1080 user@host" will give you a SOCKS proxy on 127.0.0.1:1080 that forwards all connections out of the remote host. No download required.

<comment><USER4> Yes this works fine for most cases. Although I've had DNS-related problems I've never been able to resolve properly.

<comment><USER5> Can you expand on that? I've never seen any problems with -D

<comment><USER6> Well the DNS queries aren't routed through the proxy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For a persistent connection to a server, I like mosh ([https://mosh.mit.edu](https://mosh.mit.edu)). It works really well for roaming across networks and for intermittent or laggy connectivity.

<comment><USER8> Yea this looks like a terribly convoluted solution for something mosh has solved quite elegantly.

<comment><USER9> 1\. Mosh is about a decade younger than this ("why would anyone write this, when there would be a better solution in ten years?!" \- Mosh was a _response_ to the shortcomings of available programs, namely the combination of autossh+screen), 2. Mosh solves a slightly different problem (persistent terminal emulation across variable and unstable connection X persistent SSH connection - one has intelligent local echo, the other has tunnels)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used autossh for 2 years, several times a week, and it is absolutely robust (like never failed, ever) when it comes to restarting a broken ssh connection

</comment><comment><USER11> One thing the article glossed over is the SSH key. I set this up for remote access to a computer behind a NAT router that does not allow any incoming connections at all. For that to work robustly in case of a reboot, the private ssh key used by that computer must have no passphrase. That always makes me nervous, I ended up setting up the public computer side of this with a special user account that was as locked down as I could make it. All the ssh tunnel will do is forward port 2200 on the public machine to my computer's ssh port. Works great!

<comment><USER9> Or you could use a SSH agent (Pageant, ssh-agent): you enter your key passphrase _once_ when starting the agent, and it handles the key auth on your behalf.

<comment><USER11> How do I enter the passphrase when the computer behind the firewall reboots?

<comment><USER9> Ah. Now that's a problem I have no _solution_ for - only the same workaround as you describe (you have taken one more step than I did by having a dedicated _host_ for the SSH connection, instead of just an account - with today's virtualization, this is easier than ever :)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A challenge I've had with Autossh (and OpenSSH for that matter) is in getting the listen port during remote (reverse) tunnels when it is dynamically assigned via '-R 0:localhost:$SOMEPORT' where $SOMEPORT is on the machine originating the reverse tunnel, and 0 is a dynamically assigned open port on the relay/remote machine. It doesn't look like there is a good way[1] to get the listen port from the originating side (remotehost:$DYNPORT) without inspecting ssh stdout (complicated when using Autossh via systemd). Any ideas? On the remote side it is easy to find the listen port provided you have sudo access, but seemingly impossible without [2]. On the local side I probably just need to pipe stdout to a regex to find the right string and then redirect the captured port number to a file or named pipe, but it seems like it ought to be easier to get dynamic port assigned on the remote side from the local end of the tunnel.

1\. [http://www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/openssh-6.2-add- callbac...](http://www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/openssh-6.2-add-callback- functionality-using-dynamic-remote-port-forwarding/)

2\. [https://gist.github.com/tomkinsc/c2932097796155f4fd94](https://gist.github.com/tomkinsc/c2932097796155f4fd94)

</comment><comment><USER13> Assuming autossh is going just rerun whatever binary ssh points to, then you likely wont need a separate binary for this. Just run

      while true; do ...; done

and be done with it. The author does say that

 _... Some scripts use a while loop, others encourage you to run a remote command (such as tail) to make sure you don't run into timeout and various others. But actually, you don't want to re-invent the wheel and stick to bullet-proof already existing solutions._

but the only case where that makes sense, and where a simple while loop will fail you, is if the ssh command hangs. Only then will this start making sense.

<comment><USER14> I'd put a `sleep 5s` or so in there as well, in case your wifi is off or something, and it's looping "no route to host" over and over.

<comment><USER9> ...and a condition for this, and a bit of checking for that, and a SSH option, and a signal handler - and all of a sudden, you have replicated autossh 0.7, except buggier and in bash.

<comment><USER14> Replace bash with zsh and you have my life story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the example of the author creating a reverse tunnel for mysql, I can't decide if I love or hate these types of tunnels. On the one hand it's nice to allow SSH to do all of the encryption heavy lifting, and to punch a single hole through the firewall. It's also nice that somebody sniffing around from the outside doesn't really have any idea what services are running on the box.

On the other handle it comes off as much too hacky for something I'd trust my production services with. It also involves two levels of authentication (PKI + whatever is built-in to the system).

</comment><comment><USER16> Nice tool but not quite as reliable as I'd like it to be, especially on the reconnection-in-the-face-of-unreliable-transport front. I tried using it for my mailtunnel but eventually switched to a VPN over UDP.

<comment><USER17> you might take a look at zerotier.com. They provide tools/services to ease tun/tap much like docker eases lxc/containers.

<comment><USER16> For now openvpn seems to fill my needs but thank you for the reference, if I can't get this to work reliably over the longer term I will look at zerotier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems like pretty simple code. Could we not roll this into the official ssh client as a patch, but instead of port forwarding, use the existing keep- alive code and ssh signaling channel to check the connection and restart the session? Not only would this be cleaner (no need for wrappers), but we could use it on servers where port forwarding is disabled.

</comment><comment><USER19> I understand the fun part but somehow missed the profit aspect

<comment><USER9> Can't remember how many times a persistent autossh reverse tunnel to a jump host has saved me from several hours of a field trip. A few man-months, I'd guess - that's quite enough profit for me ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice tool, but doesn't play well with ssh_config ControlPersist, which is essential to my use cases :-(

<comment><AUTHOR> you could still append this option: `autossh -oControlPersist=yes|no"`

<comment><USER20> And then losing the advantage of ControlPersist; the ideal would be to have an always-on ControlMaster, but that would also be restarted once ServerAliveInterval*ServerAliveCountMax expires.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is pretty slick.

</comment><comment><USER22> This tool makes me afraid.

Anyone that can successfully use AutoSSH is not monitoring their private key usage. You should always need to approve each time your SSH key is used; whether via typing in your password, swiping your smartcard, or pressing the button on your yubikey.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not how it is meant. When you use AutoSSH/SSH and need to enter a password for your key anytime you do a connection (which probably happens every 10min as a system engineer/admin/etc) it is probably useless.

I have many different SSH keys, each with different long passwords.

What u are looking for is `ssh-agent` which can take care of all the password handling.

Also unattended rsync (over ssh) backups rely on no user interaction at all.

<comment><USER23> On top of that, you can always use a separate user for the tunnel that doesn't have a login shell. Obviously still a problem if someone gets the private keys but not nearly as much so, as they'll basically be limited to tunneling/forwarding.</comment></comment></comment>


Planning and Running Effective A/B Tests - <AUTHOR> When it comes to A/B testing, everything boils down to reducing guesswork  and making decisions based on hard data
Read more about best practices that should bring results to your e-commerce business:
http://bit.ly/ABTesting_article <comment><AUTHOR> [http://bit.ly/ABTesting_article](http://bit.ly/ABTesting_article)

<comment><USER2> There's quite a few problems in traditional A/B testing. See here for example: [https://volument.com/learn/problems-in-traditional-ab- testin...](https://volument.com/learn/problems-in-traditional-ab-testing)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with some points, especially with the time frame. Sometimes traditional A/B tests take too long. Global design changes, new product launches, brand refreshing, or new information architecture are more important.

On the other hand, doing A/B tests for small changes can also have a significant impact on your overall results. I think doing A/B tests is better than not doing them at all.</comment></comment></comment>


Silicon Valley tech foundation launches $1 million competition for safer guns - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3021232/silicon-valley-trio-launches-1-million-competition-for-smarter-safer-guns-exclusive

<comment><USER2> This is the usual "smart gun" bullshit, which wouldn't make an appreciable positive difference in the situation.

For one thing, it's telling they start out with a lie. Safety, if used honestly in this context, refers to preventing accidents, which are an "official" 600 deaths per year problem (scare quotes because I know criminal homicides that are scored as "accidents" for the usual political reasons; details on request).

The real issue is intentional homicides, i.e. guns being as designed. Note we're talking about a nation with > 300 million existing old fashioned guns in civilian hands, where in the last ~40 month every month except for last August has seen greater sales than the previous month a year ago, currently running at a million a month. Note that with a very minimum of care guns are functional for decades and decades: I would not feel inadequately armed with a Mauser 1898 (sic) rifle made in that year or soon after, and my teen centerfire hunting rifle was sporterized surplus Springfield 03A3, designed in 1903 (using a few Mauser patents :-) and manufactured during WWII. The 3rd most recent gun I bought was a M1 "Get Off My Lawn" Garand made a few months after Pearl Harbor (and boy does a part of me wish I hadn't sold that masterpiece of then cutting edge technology to buy a lighter rifle more suitable for my RSI injured arms).

The conceit that somehow these new, expensive and less reliable smart guns will displace the barest fraction of the above existing ones is ludicrous. Even if you take a long view, it would take centuries.

Then there's the laws, like fanatically anti-gun New Jersey's one that once there's a "smart gun" on the market, civilians will only be able to buy it. But, somehow, the Only Ones AKA the law enforcement officers who our betters insist are the only ones who can be trusted with guns ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6680266](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6680266)) will be allowed to retain their old "unsafe" guns. Perhaps because _everyone_ knows they'll be a lot more reliable.

In a county where almost every state has a shall issue concealed carry regime (obviously excluding most of California for now---the object lesson of Illinois should give you pause if you're happy with that state of affairs), adoption of these inherently more complicated and therefore less reliable guns would surely result more of the wrong people being shot. Although one could assume from how this is portrayed that to the extent the backers of this are engaging in rational thought they score all "gun deaths" as the same.

Let me make this as a bottom line closer: if you think there's fierce opposition to Obamacare, just try to push these on an unwilling population....

</comment><comment><USER3> So-called smart guns are not a workable idea, because the technology available is not capable of producing such a thing.

First, all biometric modalities, including finger print and palm print scanners, have a non-zero false accept rate (FAR) and false reject rate (FRR). A biometric system must be fine tuned to balance security with usability, which is fine for authenticating users of a computer system, but not acceptable for a firearm.

Second, consumer electronics in general are garbage and have nowhere near the reliability of a well made handgun. For any given electronic device, a significant fraction of them will fail every year. Firearms can last for decades or longer, provided they are maintained. Consumer electronics are not maintained, they are thrown out when they break.

Finally, what people like this don't seem to understand is that a safe gun must always fire when the trigger is pulled, as well as never fire when the trigger is not pulled. The first is just as important as the second. A legitimately held firearm, whether held by a soldier, police officer, or private citizen, is a safety-of-life critical instrument that must operate correctly when it is used, otherwise the user is likely to be killed himself.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do guns need to be lethal? If so, why?

<comment><USER2> For hunting and pest control purposes, essentially (details on request, but being humane is obviously part of it).

For dealing with two legged snakes, not _per se_. Ignoring high energy (not .22 rimfire) rifles (can address that later if you wish), for normal handguns in self-defense, what police and civilians can legally do is stopping a lethal threat. Killing is not and cannot be the objective.

And there's basically three mechanisms for that, only one of which is reasonably guaranteed to work with normal human marksmanship.

First, when shot once, a large fraction of people will stop their aggression, e.g. Trayvon Martin is the most recent famous example. For that matter being shot _at_ is often sufficient (browse YouTube some). But you obviously can't count on it.

Hitting the central nervous system, brain, or spine high enough, will do it. But those are small, hard to hit targets, we have strong instincts about threats to our heads, the brain is well protected with bone, etc. etc. ... and of course a hit to the brain is often fatal and almost certainly catastrophic.

Failing that, causing someone to lose enough blood they can't keep fighting is what you're left with---but that's dicey, there are many many incidents where e.g. heart function is outright stopped and the aggressor continues to be lethal for 10s of seconds to in some rare cases minutes. And this mechanism is obviously also hard to keep from going all the way to fatal.

One very special case for police snipers is the hostage situation where they have to hit the perpetrator's brain stem to prevent him from reflexively killing his hostage. That's invariably lethal (killed JFK), but still based on the, in this case, narrow legal distinction that the intent was to stop the perpetrator from killing a innocent 3rd party, not kill him _per se_.

Ah, I should add the deterrent affect. Being maimed or killed by a civilian is about the greatest fear of criminals according to surveys; the fact that the civilians will be using lethal guns is of course behind that. From that it logically follows that the _vast_ majority of the 2.5 million gun self-defense incidents in the US every year do not involve anyone getting shot, and almost always even a shot being fired (warning shots are pretty much never legitimate).

<comment><USER5> >First, when shot once, a large fraction of people will stop their aggression, e.g. Trayvon Martin is the most recent famous example.

Is this _really_ how we ought to be doing public relations?

<comment><USER2> Maybe not, but I decided to do a "Just the facts, Ma'am" posting ... and since so many are using the Martin case to attack the very idea of self-defense--- and don't say that's silly, for the U.K. effectively outlawed it in the courts in the '50s, by statute in the following decade or two---I don't think it hurts to repeat the well established fact that he was the aggressor using lethal force on Zimmerman when the latter was forced to shoot him.

If you want to dive into that case, it's also telling he only shot Martin once (because Martin immediately ceased trying to kill him). That doesn't really jibe with the bogus narrative.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AMD security flaw found in Ryzen, EPYC chips - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/amd-has-a-spectre-meltdown-like-security-flaw-of-its-own/ <comment><USER2> DUPE of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16576516)

<comment><USER3> Doesn't make much sense to have the link to the original source flagged off the front page and people submitting news articles about it instead, could we get some mod action here?

<comment><USER2> This whole thing is fishy. No CVE, no disclosure timeline?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> heres a link to the researchers site: [https://amdflaws.com/](https://amdflaws.com/)

[https://safefirmware.com/amdflaws_whitepaper.pdf](https://safefirmware.com/amdflaws_whitepaper.pdf)

these all seem to report windows credential guard exploits to be possible, so hypervisor breaches. No word if this is effective in Linux?

a TPM bypass is also noted...albeit im not sure how many linux servers employ the TPS for anything meaningful. most versions are shunned for their inherent security concerns.</comment>


Ideas Having Sex - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/14/ideas-having-sex

<comment><USER2> Single page link: [http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/14/ideas-having- sex/singl...](http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/14/ideas-having- sex/singlepage)

</comment><comment><USER3> "Technologies emerge from the coming together of existing technologies into wholes that are greater than the sum of their parts."

</comment><comment><USER4> If you want something along these lines, but better thought out, read Nonzero <http://www.nonzero.org/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Some interesting stuff in there but it's a bit scatterbrained and too obsessed with coming back to libertarian dogma.

There is a line of argument that says that most growth comes from innovation. While some of it surely does, I think interconnectedness is much more important. It's sad this just turns into ideas having sex in the article. But then again lots of stuff is important in how inter-human relations develop over time. It's foolish to obsessively attribute much of the growth of the economy to one thing.

For a scatterbrained, but much more interesting and less dogmatic, rethinking of economics theory I recommend Origin of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker.

<comment><USER6> Changes in institutions/networks/interconnectedness etc. as described in the Beinhocker book is innovation according to the economic textbook definition. I have read the summary of his books and he does not seem to contradict the essay. I'd be interested to see an explanation of how you think he does (assuming you do).

<comment><USER5> >Changes in institutions/networks/interconnectedness etc. as described in the Beinhocker book is innovation according to the economic textbook definition.

Innovation is hardly considered in economics at all. As is alluded to in the essay, it is considered an external variable. This is a huge point of Beinhocker's that economic theory is based on a physics of equilibrium. Bad idea.

Networks and interconnectedness are not considered at all in 'textbook' economic definitions. When agents already have perfect information, why do you need to meet others?

I'd love to see a textbook definition of innovation that comes close to what you have asserted here.

<comment><USER6> "Innovation is hardly considered in economics at all."

Well, you're wrong.* It should, however, be noted that the dominance of this kind of economics may be new to the mainstream. I have only been reading economics textbooks for the last three years.

"Networks and interconnectedness are not considered at all in 'textbook' economic definitions."

Of course they are, for example in every study ever written on globalization, the structure of corporations, corporate governance or insider trading. Or is there some special definition of the terms you're using?

"When agents already have perfect information, why do you need to meet others?"

None of the textbooks in economics (HS and undergraduate courses) or economists I have read assume this to be true, or even a useful approximation for most markets.

"I'd love to see a textbook definition of innovation that comes close to what you have asserted here."

Innovation is used in my textbook as it is in the description of the innovation economics theory. (I don't have it with me now.)

*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation_economics>

<comment><USER5> That there is a field called Innovation Economics basically proves my point. As it states in the linked it is fact quite different from standard economic theory.

You state in another post that English is your second language. When you say 'textbook definition' you are implying canonical usage, not there exists a textbook that I use that defines this.

>None of the textbooks in economics (HS and undergraduate courses) or economists I have read assume this to be true, or even a useful approximation for most markets.

That is really striking. You have never taken microeconomics? Never dealt with the efficient market hypothesis? Ever taken a economic theory class? This is possible since European approaches to economic education differ quite a bit from American ones. But it is extraordinarily difficult to have mathematical models of markets where participants have informational asymmetries.

>Of course they are, for example in every study ever written on globalization, the structure of corporations, corporate governance or insider trading. Or is there some special definition of the terms you're using?

These things are not economics per se. They are interesting things to study, and yes they involve networks. But just because they exist does not mean they are subjects in standard economic textbooks.

<comment><USER6> >When you say 'textbook definition' you are implying canonical usage, not there exists a textbook that I use that defines this.

I know. It seemed like the textbook definition because all the textbooks (and the economics related writing) I had read, as far as I could recollect, used it that way.

>European approaches to economic education differ quite a bit from American ones.

I don't doubt it. In Norway the education/social science establishment (who are pretty socialist) make sure you notice everything that may discredit arguments for laissez faire. Allegedly unrealistic assumptions about rationality and information are gleefully (and sometimes unfairly) ridiculed.

As for your other points it now seems like there is little factual disagreement. Discussing different definitions and interpretations of earlier comments further is probably a waste of our time.

<comment><USER5> I don't know if it is. It's pretty shocking to me how different these subjects can be. And the grass is always green on the other side.

>Allegedly unrealistic assumptions about rationality and information are gleefully (and sometimes unfairly) ridiculed.

These are more than allegedly ridiculous, they are ridiculous. But, I'm sure constant harping on this point would be very annoying.

Beinhocker's book is interesting because it lays out several different types of evolution that a taking place that contribute to economic growth. He also lays out some interesting mathematical models that people are using.

I'm am genuinely curious as to how much math you've been exposed to in your econ courses.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tools for spike traffic: what's out there? - <AUTHOR>

Here's what I'm looking for. It should be a trivial service - something like a .JS or .GIF I can drop on to the pages of my site. When I start getting DIGG or REDDIT traffic, it should send a message to my email/phone/pager within 15 or 20 minutes, telling me that I'm getting nailed, and I should keep an eye on things. It should also tell me the URL I've got incoming from.
It'd be nice if it, or a second service, would cache the pages which are being nailed, and show me how to do a redirect to the cached pages for whatever software environment I'm on (i.e. auto-generate a .htaccess line for mod-rewrite, or the appropriate incantations for other configurations.)
And, just out of curiosity, why don't things like WordPress have an option to automatically generate a redirect to the Coral Cache version of pages when they get nailed?
Spike traffic is a really here-to-stay phenomena, and I don't understand why the only effective tool commonly recommended is "build a ton of overcapacity and let it sit idle the rest of the time."
There's got to be room for new approaches here. <comment><USER2> Notification is not very interesting, as it doesn't help you withstand the spike, there is little you can do once the spike started to help. But something that will help you withstand the spike now thats an interesting question, there are tons of tool to help you withstand the traffic better but none that I know of are plug & play or leverage your capacity beyond what can be provided by your existing hardware. Maybe a distributed offsite cache application, maybe even a p2p approach i.e. a 1000 blogs subscribe to the service and the load of spikes is distributed among them. Both of these could be the basis of a good business model actually... Too bad the Winter 2008 deadline for YC applications passed.

But a well crafted website should be able to withstand a ton of traffic without any outside help, check out plentyoffish.</comment>


MIPS Joins RISC-V as Second Open Source Alternative to Arm - <AUTHOR> https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hardware/mips-joins-risc-v-second-open-source-alternative-arm <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18701145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18701145)</comment>


Why The Future Of Search May Look More Like Yahoo Than Google - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/28/why-the-future-of-search-may-look-more-like-yahoo-than-google/

<comment><USER2> This sounds like unabashed Apple fanboyism that hopes Yahoo will become cool again:

"Even Apple is acknowledging that this is where the world is headed."

"It makes total sense for Yahoo! to become the Apple of the web."

I think it's more likely for it to go the opposite way, for Apple to become the Yahoo of the computer industry.

Apple gained in the market because they made music devices a lot better than existing music devices. Then they noticed that phones sucked, so they made an awesome phone. Then they re-invented the tablet space using the principles that worked in the mobile space. They haven't made anything new since the iPad, only incremental updates to their existing devices. In the mean time, competitors have closed in and even surpassed Apple in some ways.

Apple has just been spinning its wheels and raking in the money recently. People will eventually realize that there are real competitors now.

That's basically what happened to Yahoo. Yahoo started as a search company, and added the "web portal" part the author speaks so highly of later. After a while, all resources were put towards better content, while search stagnated. Google steps in a shows the world that search makes a difference. This is what's happening to Apple. They've stopped innovating in hardware (where they shine) and started trying to get into software (new Maps app, iCloud, etc). If this continues, Apple will turn into Yahoo, albeit a bit better funded.

Search may change, but I don't think it will look anything like Yahoo. That has already failed.

</comment><comment><USER3> "But then Google came along and exploited the fact that the Internet was growing too fast for Yahoo! to keep up."

That's an interesting re-write of history. There were general-purpose search engines like AltaVista (1995) years before Google came along (1998).</comment>


Get Smart with SmartOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.admin-magazine.com/Articles/SmartOS-Cool-Cloud-Platform-Rises-from-the-Ashes-of-Solaris <comment><USER2> I'm running my most recent project partially on SmartOS via Joyent's public cloud, Triton. The experience is a mixed bag. SmartOS itself is absolutely fantastic (I also have a few Debian hosts left over, but I'd like to migrate those to SmartOS as well), and Triton is great as long as you avoid the web UI, which is unbearably hard to use if you have a slow connection (or even if you don't, but I use Terraform and Packer so I mostly don't have to look at the UI). The only real problem is that Joyent either doesn't document anything, or it's hard to find, and they don't maintain half the software they advertise (but also won't confirm or deny that it's not maintained or mark it as unmaintained, so good luck finding out what you should be using instead).

When it comes down to it though I prefer Triton to the other big cloud providers just because the firewall product is fantastic, bare-metal machines running SmartOS are fantastic, and best of all it's not Amazon (which is all I really want, if I'm honest).

<comment><USER3> Glad to hear that there are aspects of SmartOS that you enjoy, and sorry that it's been a mixed bag. More specifically, my apologies on the documentation: it's an area in which we've always been very short staffed, and our focus on documentation has necessarily been more aligned with our products than our projects.

As for maintaining software: if you can be more specific where you're running into issues, we can figure out what's going on. Generally, we don't have too much software that isn't maintained at all, but we also do reimplement components from time to time, and you might have run into an issue on a component that is being replaced -- but my apologies if or where we weren't upfront about that...

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the reply; the problem I've had is mostly with things on your GitHub and images you maintain. For example, I asked about the Postgres image and whether it was maintained ages ago and was told that you're not sure if you'll maintain it or not. This is fair, and I don't expect updates the next day, but it's still on Postgres 9.6 and doesn't mention if you plan on ever updating it again. If not, that's fine, but please mark it as such so we know if we should rely on that image or not (we're building our own right now, which is fine, but we'd rather know).

Also, lots of little things on GitHub like the examples of using Prometheus and others have PRs (some of them by me) which have never had any comments, no acknowledgement that they've been seen, but also no indication that the project isn't maintained or is just an example and that we shouldn't submit PRs.

All that being said, in general thanks for a great product.

<comment><USER4> Most of the application specific images have stopped receiving updates. This is because they were time consuming to create/validate, and were mostly just the base-64 image with whatever package pre-installed via pkgin. This was also happened around the time of the rise of Docker, so most people were opting for docker images produced by upstream maintainers.

In most cases, you can just make a base-64 image and `pkgin in` whatever package you wanted and it's pretty much the same thing.

The Prometheus stuff is heavily used by us internally, and while it's usable, it's pretty experimental (i.e., changing quickly). I don't see any pull requests or issues that are obviously from you, so if you point me at something I can take a look at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wanted to like SmartOS, but the documentation for Arch really had me spoiled. The Joyent/SmartOS docs are a mess of information for different versions that really aren't conducive to a confident first time user. That and it had problems with a pretty vanilla supermicro build. It did pick up my linux ZFS pool without a problem though, which was a nice surprise.

<comment><USER6> One of the goals of the openzfs community is to ensure feature compatibility when moving a zpool (a collection of disks that run a storage pool) across FreeBSD, Linux and Illumos (on which SmartOS is based). This was reaffirmed on the openzfs call that happend just 5 hours ago.

See: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w2jv2XVYFmBVvG1EGf-9A5HB...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w2jv2XVYFmBVvG1EGf-9A5HBVsjAYoLIFZAnWHhV- BM/edit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish SmartOS was more widely used, and had better hardware support. I tried SmartOS in a VM and loved it, but when I tried to install it on a Supermicro box it didn't support the hardware.

<comment><USER4> You may want to try it again. We (Joyent) are using some of the latest Supermicro hardware in our cloud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We've been running our private cloud on Triton / SmartOS with Packer and Terraform for a while now and for us its really working well. I do think however that Triton / SmartOS works best when used in a true cloud native fashion (meaning stateless containers). One could probably use it in a "classic" way but you might not reap all the benefits of the solution.

I also like that Triton has clear upgrade paths when new versions are released. Something that was usually the biggest issue with OpenStack.

I try to run everything as much as possible in native (ie. Illumos) zones since I like SMF better then systemd. But if I can't get it to work I use an LX zone (container with Linux ABI compatibly) with CentOS. Which gets me all the benefits of true containers (Zones) with ZFS and dtrace.

</comment><comment><USER9> I really wish I could use SmartOS, but I couldn't even install some common Python packages without getting a compilation error. Looking such problems up on issue trackers revealed old requests for compatibility with SmartOS, and no follow-up from the developers.

I'm not sure what the recourse is, I just don't know enough about C to fix this myself. I assumed this would be a common enough problem that the solution would be well documented somewhere but there seems to be nothing out there even mentioning the issue.

I'm happy to do all my work in LX-branded zones, and that's certainly better than the alternatives (for my purposes), but having two operating systems still kinda irks me.

<comment><USER10> I recommend using the package manager than building yourself. If something needs to be modified about the source, it will first be patched in the widely used package manager. convincing upstream to take in a patch & then waiting for a new version to be released with that patch takes time.

<comment><USER9> The problem is, I _am_ using the package manager (pip in this case). I guess because the wheels aren't built for SmartOS it has to compile them.

<comment><USER11> I'd guess they mean "use the _system_ package manager", given that they talk about patches not in upstream?

<comment><USER9> Ah, I see, thanks. Still, that's a non-starter. Many of the packages I use are not available through any system package manager, and it would preclude using virtualenvs.

OTOH, I desperately want to move away from Python.

<comment><USER6> Could you let us know which packages you're trying to install via PIP that cause you issues?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Love SmartOS! IMHO zones set the bar on containers back in the 2000's, and SmartOS is the evolved logical progression of this. It's truly a ferrari. However, it needs a paint job to accrete community. If you want a cohesive system, and want to become a paas provider, triton-sdc. But I think at the medium and low-end, smartos needs something like proxmox to compete where project fifo appears to be having a hard time. Any takers?

<comment><USER12> Let me clarify, proxmox (or the vsphere web ui for example), would be a fantastic management ui on top of the smartos engine that would bring some gravity to accrete userbase. Some organizations are just more comfortable with UI tools. Sure, your hairy-knuckled sa's and programmers will favor maintaining version controlled manifests for zones, and keeping things highly automated, using terraform, etc, but there's a huge base out there that will download smartos, stare at the console prompt, and lose interest unless they can treat it like a vsphere or proxmox machine, like they're used to, and are trained on. Project fifo...frankly, needs some good natured competition to breed better product in this space.

<comment><USER13> 'accrete userbase'? Yeesh, where did that bit of geek-speak crawl out from under? Put it back.

<comment><USER12> Do you hear that whooshing sound? It's the point I was making that flew right by you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> While I was using OpenSolaris (and Solaris before, till 9 6/06) as a personal desktop from SXDE->SXCE->OpenIndiana, I have tried many fork (Belenix, Damm small solaris, Nexenta, OI) I have to say that IllumOS is essentially dead as Irix was before and no one have enough manpower and FOSS culture to bring it back to life.

OpenSolaris nicest features like zfs (with IPS/BE, zones, branz on top), crossbow, SMF, FMA etc may remain or recreated for some time but the whole OS unfortunately is dead.

Irix legacy leave us with OpenGL, even if today nearly nobody know their origin, xfs even if is now EOL fs, STL, even if C++ now is well... Harmful. Many other good things including probably the best CDE out there but it does not exists anymore and it's hw with it. OpenSolaris will probably do the same.

I think people coming from traditional unix companies do not understand the hard lesson they get from Microsoft and GNU/Linux: today's student's, young aspiring users are tomorrow technicians. It doesn't matter how good your software is, if it's not good on their desktop will be marginal, the same for good big iron architectures. OpenSolaris itself start to be known thanks to Ian Murdock (Debian founder, hired by SUN, dead in unclear situation few years ago), not before OpenIndiana, simply because of the lacking of FOSS culture SUN has, even if OpenIndiana does not introduce, at least at start, any particular feature.

I still miss osol, I still hope for a real alternative to GNU/Linux, only to Linux to be more precise, I still hope to see a good architecture at a price and assembly that can be used as alternative to x86 on the desktop (I hope for OpenPower now) but nothing came to the horizon...

After SUN death I've tried to came back to FreeBSD: essentially a pain to use on modern desktop hw, even if I pry for many FreeBSD features from jails to geli passing through securelevel, freebsd-update, a base system consistent with the kernel, a damn simple init (despite raw compared to modern init's), good fw/network performance, rock solid stability, ... but still does not work well on commodity hw. I dream DragonflyBSD hammer storage but I can't really run Dragonfly as my desktop...

In the end I hope we as FOSS users, can came to a modern OS on free hardware and I fear our next desktop will be a kind of mobile-crap with lock-in builtin to the point of actual mobile crap. We need such free solution not only for IT but even for democracy.

</comment><comment><USER15> SmartOS looks interesting, but I've never had a good chance to try it on a real project. I do actually have an extra box at work that I suppose I could spin up in my copious spare time, but I'm not sure what I'd _do_ with it. Are LX-branded zones complete enough to run something like a build environment based around a vendor-dropped toolchain?

> The Unix-like operating system [...]

I know I'm late to this party, being a bit too young to have direct experience of the Unix Wars and "UN*X" snark and so on, but this really does grate. It feels like trademark law has been twisted toward requiring misrepresentation rather than preventing it.

<comment><USER16> _It feels like trademark law has been twisted toward requiring misrepresentation rather than preventing it._

There are technical differences, as well. Most of the time one will never tell the difference (hence "Unix-LIKE": you'll likely never know). But BSD is not Linux, and vice-versa. For a really poor analogy, kind of like the electric version of an ICE automobile. Looks a lot like the ICE version (well, the grill is kind of funny), operates mostly the same, but under the hood it's different.

<comment><USER15> I don't have a problem with people calling _Linux_ "Unix-like", I have a problem with people feeling like they have to call actual Unix descendants (like forks of BSD and SVR4) "Unix-like" while IBM gets to use "Unix" for z/OS.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Entrepreneurial Advice for Students? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I have just completed my bachelors in Computer Engineering from mediocre college in India. Planning to pursue masters in Computer Science from Abroad (probably US/Canada/Germany). I am confused whether to study ahead or start working in some Startup gain experience and start my own Startup?
Currently I do not have any hardcore idea for Startup but for sure wish to either work at some good Startup or start my own Startup in life.
Reading HN really excites me to shift to San Francisco because I see cool and exciting things are happening there. And only way to reach SF is via F1 visa which I can get only if I get admission in SF based colleges.
So please someone guide me what should I do?
Note : I have pursued remote internship at Intuit India as junior application developer and during internship i have develop various SMS applications for txtweb.com based on PHP. So you can say i do have little bit of coding skills.
P.S I wish to be Successful Entrepreneur at least before I die.
Thanks in Advance. Sorry for my bad English. <comment><USER2> Let me give you some realistic advice.

1\. Figure out if you actually want to work/start a startup. You can do that anywhere in the world.

2\. San Francisco as described in Hacker News is a biased glamorous view. The city is not paved with gold.

3\. Getting a Masters degree in a good school is a whole different ball game from starting a startup especially if you are an immigrant. The F1 visa is a student visa which means that you have to study.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for clearing about SF.

Yes i know F1 visa is study visa. But after studying in US its easy to get job and H1 there.

Is there any other way via which i can shift to SF directly ?

<comment><USER2> > Yes i know F1 visa is study visa. But after studying in US its easy to get > job and H1 there.

Again, you are not being clear here. Let me ask you a few questions (which are more really a thought exercise for yourself). Why do you think working as possibly a software engineer in a startup is different in San Francisco than in country X? What do you expect to get out of working as opposed to founding one? How do you think the latter is going to work out as a person on a visa?

> Is there any other way via which i can shift to SF directly ?

Are you a permanent resident or can you become a permanent resident really fast? In which case, yeah walk in, set up shop and try your luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) Seeing HN I feel like SF is the best place for Technocrats to flourish. You get to attend best in the class events. All world famous startup office can be found here, etc.

2) I am permanent resident of India. I do not mind in permanently shifting to SF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The asking of the question is your answer. Full-time startups demand every ounce of you. They are for entrepreneurial people with a high tolerance for risk and a vision of something they want to bring out into the world. Startups aren't for the timid or confused.

If you have any doubts at all (which you do), stay in school.

<comment><AUTHOR> I respect your view. But i am just confused about whether i should study ahead gain good knowledge and then jump into world of startup or start the startup directly.

I will not remain in confusion for life time. I just need proper guidance from the experienced Startupreneurs.

<comment><USER3> I don't know your exact life situation, but in most cases, people get into startups for three reasons 1) they have a burning desire to be their own boss and control their own destiny 2) they see an opportunity in the marketplace and/or have a product idea they want to bring out into the world 3) need money to survive (pay rent, food etc) and a startup could provide a quick income source.

If at this stage in life you are in constant need of direction and instruction, don't have a business idea, and you are getting financial support to further your education - stay where you are for the time being and ride out the confusion.

BTW, I am an experienced serial entrepreneur and probably twice your age.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the guidance. Hope i to shine out in life like you at your age.

<comment><USER3> You are very kind. If you need an outside opinion, don't hesitate to ask. You'll find my contact information on my website: [http://jasoncomely.com](http://jasoncomely.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. Will follow up. Thanks again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I discovered "Kids, don't believe the startup hype" on HN a few months ago...Read it!

[http://www.geekwire.com/2013/kids-startup- hype/](http://www.geekwire.com/2013/kids-startup-hype/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Do what you love [http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html)

Think twice about collage degree. Your view may be biased because of the environment.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm too looking for a guide for Starting in San Francisco, what are the possible ways, Indian Student's can go there and start on there own? How much money do we need beforehand to survive there?

</comment><comment><USER7> Do what your hearts says. Rest of the pecies will automatically fall in place.

Best of luck for your future endeouvers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot. But the problem is at the time of confusion even heart fails to say something. Let me still try out in peace.</comment></comment>