Ask HN: Best resources for non-technical founders to understand hacker mindset? - <AUTHOR> Background: technical founder wondering what reading to recommend to a business focused founder for them to grok the hacker mindset. I've thought perhaps Mythical Man Month and How To Become A Hacker (Eric Raymond essay) but not sure they're quite right.<p>Any suggestions?<p>(In case it helps an analogue in the mathematical world might be A Mathematician's Apology or Gödel, Escher, Bach.) <comment><USER2> I have to admit, even I'm not sure what a "hacker mindset" is. As one technical cofounder to another, I think the most important thing is for you to understand the business side. Most importantly, how interpersonal skills matter and how emotions play out in a business setting.

Beyond that, a solid understanding of scientific approaches to understanding is the second most important. Being able to tease apart correlation and causation, and being rigorous about what you accept as real knowledge vs mere opinion or anecdote. The business world, and the tech world, has a lot of "opinion" that masquerades as fact. E.g. "well I did X and I'm successful so clearly X must work!"

<comment><USER3> "well I did X and I'm successful so clearly X must work!"

If they did something...and that thing was successful then by definition that thing they did...it works, right?

<comment><USER4> The broken thought-process there is mostly about when you take a shotgun approach that involves many different things that could all individually pan out (or not); or which could all be multipliers for one-another (or not.) If, in the end, you succeed, you end up believing that _everything_ you tried was a necessary part of your success. When, in actuality, you might have succeeded _despite_ some of those approaches, rather than because of them. They might have been actively harmful to your success, but just not harmful enough to overcome the other successful things you tried.

In another instance, people who try one main thing (e.g. applying to a particular college) but who succeed entirely through no effort of their own (e.g. through nepotism), will end up thinking that what they did mattered.

<comment><USER3> "The broken thought-process there is mostly about when you take a shotgun approach that involves many different things..."

This sounds like quite the qualifier...which is fine, but I think it's important to take your response/reasoning into a much more narrow hypothetical.

<comment><USER4> I mean, we're talking about advice for running a startup here—an entrepreneur would be an idiot to _not_ do everything possible to give themselves multiple independent avenues to success (e.g. do multiple forms of inbound advertising; attempt product-market fit with multiple markets; etc.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maciej Ceglowski has a good bit in one of his idlewords posts about how the "what makes hackers tick" genre is full of pieces that are really "how to be someone just like the author". There's probably nobody that remark applies to more than ESR, and ESR is probably not someone you'd want to work to resemble more closely.

So, in reality, if you want to understand your technical cofounders, it is probably not a good idea to take ESR seriously when he says that you should find a "real" Unix (your technical cofounders are, actuarially speaking, almost certainly macOS people), hand-write lots of HTML, or "serve" th "tribal elders of open source". And the idea that "attitude is not a substitute for competence" among hackers is both funny on a variety of levels, and also a singularly bad note for understanding software developers you work with.

The Mythical Mammoth doesn't have any of these problems, and is a great book, and one worth reading simply so you can have a sense of what building software actually entails (Dynamics of Software Development is another older book that has aged somewhat well --- as have all of Joel Spolsky's posts on Joel on Software; in fact, I'd probably start there). But while this stuff will help you understand the work that's happening on your team, it probably won't do much to help you with the mindset of your team members.

There probably isn't a substitute for just talking to your cofounders, a lot, and asking lots of questions.

<comment><USER6> I had to wiki ESR, I'd needed to remind myself who he was.

And, tptacek, guess whose name I stumbled upon while I was reading his wiki page? Incidentally, I think that section of the wiki is poorly written. I'm left even more confused due to lack of context.

<comment><USER5> I agree; obviously, I didn't write it. Feel free to delete it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A few tips:

Lots of hackers are introverts. They are wired differently from founders and ceos (who have gravitated towards a life full of constant interactions with people). Hackers don't mind being "in the zone" for hours at a time to work on a problem. Sometimes this means coding, but sometimes this just means having enough quiet time to just sit an think while they turn a problem over in their mind. This is required.

Another side to the introvert thing -- I believe "open plan seating" is a fundamental disconnect between extroverted decision-makers and introverted knowledge workers. It is not surprising to me that productivity has skyrocketed for problem-solvers working from home.

Another tip is to ask "what do you think?" then listen. Then wait even longer and listen some more. The absolute best business people I've worked with were masters of this. The worst would already have made decisions and questions were just checkboxes.

(this works everywhere in life, but is particularly relevant to the really smart people at the top of the tech tree)

also, hacker doesn't mean criminals who break into computers. Go with the original meaning (well, the one after carriage driver)

reading:

[https://stallman.org/articles/on- hacking.html](https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html)

<comment><USER8> > It is not surprising to me that productivity has skyrocketed for problem- > solvers working from home.

Do you have a source with data to back that up? The early indicators of the efficacy of WFH that I've seen have been pretty mixed.

<comment><USER7> Hmmm... I don't have proof, just anecdotal. And of course, everyone who likes working from home will mention that their productivity is up (self-selection).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the most important is the Managers vs Makers schedule: [http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)

I'd also recommend Peopleware

</comment><comment><USER10> Let me sum up all possible books about understanding the "hacker" (terrible word by the way, because of multiple meanings, which meaning are we talking about?) mindset, to a management perspective:

1) True "hackers" value knowledge over money.

2) True "hackers" value doing things once and doing them right, no matter how long that takes. (Compare to the business mindset of "we need it now", or "we needed it yesterday")

3) True "hackers" value taking ownership in their work, that is, whatever they work on becomes an extension of themselves, much like an artist working on a work of art.

4) True "hackers" are not about work-arounds. If/when work-arounds are used, it's because there there's an artificial timeframe (as might be found in the corporate world), and there's a lack of understanding in the infrastructure which created the need for that work-around.

But, all of these virtues run counter to the demands of business, which constantly wants more things done faster, cheaper, with more features, more complexity, less testing, and doesn't want to worry about problems that may be caused by all of those things in the future (less accountability) -- as long as customer revenue can be collected today.

You see, a true "hacker's" values -- are completely different than those of big business...

And business people wonder why there's stress and burnout among tech people...

<comment><USER11> I'm not a hacker if I'd rather hack together something quickly, even if it's a bit hacky? That would seem to violate your #2 rule for "true" "hackers". Or if I like hacking my way through a problem instead of doing it the expected way? That would seem to violate #4.

And I'm not a "true" "hacker" if I want to make money?

I thought I was a hacker. But if this is what hackers are, I'm pretty ok with being voted off the island.

<comment><USER12> You're still a hacker. The parent comment is conflating engineers (by which I mean, like the kind of people who design bridges and critical infrastructure - not just the title given to anyone who can code) with hackers. Think of it this way. Almost all engineers are hackers, but the majority of hackers are not engineers.

Tons of hackers don't give a flying fuck about the "right way" to do something. Hackers are just the people who decide to apply their personal agency and creative talents towards building, altering, breaking and fixing things. There is no unifying motivation for doing so (though admittedly, curiosity is more common than money as a motivator), nor any standardized way of engaging in the process.

<comment><USER11> I pretty wholeheartedly agree with your 2nd paragraph.

Regarding your first, I have similar concerns about this gatekeeping of "engineers". Civil engineers and the like have much more stringent regulations and much more weight put onto correctness, but they aren't required to prize correctness-for-its-own-sake, or think of their work like art, or be doing the work for its own sake rather than money.

I'm pretty confident that attempting to ascribe a unified motive to _any_ group is a mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think there is a hacker mindset. We don't all have the same experiences or motivations for why we build, tinker, break, and fix. We just all happen to do that stuff. Some of the most impressive "hackers" I've ever met were old HAM radio enthusiasts with thick country accents who live in the middle of nowhere. Those folks have almost nothing in common with the extremely educated liberal developers in SF. But both groups collect knowledge and apply it in the real world in creative ways.

So being a hacker is a practice, and in some cases it's a lifestyle (when you orient your life around hacking). But it's not a mindset. Some folks are compulsive hackers, some are methodical, some are opportunistic, others are hackers out of necessity - but they're all united by what they do, not how they think.

<comment><USER13> > But both groups collect knowledge and apply it in the real world in creative > ways.

so maybe use your hacker mindset to deduce this is the mindset then?

<comment><USER12> Well there are patterns in behavior, but I don't think it's enough to qualify as a singular mindset (with mindset defined as "the established set of attitudes held by someone.") Plus, the piece you quoted could just as easily be used to describe artists.

If I had to define hacker attitudes, I wouldn't use information collection and application as the standard. Some people carefully select subjects study them in depth, and others just passively pick up information through exposure to experts, and others collect knowledge as a by-product of trying random stuff and failing at it. Hackers (and non-hackers) don't necessarily need to prefer one method to the other. And everyone, even non-hackers collect information - so that's not in itself a special attitude of hackers. The application part is more unique, but how is that different from what artists do?

If I _had_ to choose particular attitudes that would enable someone to practice as a hacker, it would be:

\- high tolerance for failure and unexepected behaviors, or even joy in failure under certain circumstances.

\- Gains pleasure from novelty (learning new things, having new experiences, finding new applications of things). As a result, most hacker types place more value on things that are obviously flawed, but novel and unique vs things which are perfectly executed but familiar.

I think that second point differentiates hackers from at least some artists (ie, Chefs usually prefer to stick to establish culinary pattersn, musicians playing in a symphony find beauty in the same piece that has been played for hundreds of years). Other experimental artists who do seek novelty (noise music, etc) are basically hackers IMO.

Edit: but to my original point, if you have neither of the attitudes I identified, but do hacker stuff anyhow - you're still a hacker. Those attitude patterns don't take precedence over the actual reality of hacking. There just common in people who continue to do it over their lifetime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm with the people asking "why."

There is almost no real reason for a business side founder to "grok" a hacker mindset. If hackers/developers are the business' customer, then the business owner just needs to find ones to talk to.

Forgive the directness but what I hear in the way the question above is framed is that there is actually some communication misalignment between the tech founder- who considers himself to have a "hacker mindset"\- and the business founder, and the "hacker mindset" is a crutch the tech founder is using to protect against some fear or concern being probed by the business founder.

If that is the case, the solution is to drop the defensiveness and just talk about it, not point to some resource as though it is an authority that business people have to worship offering tenets for them to adhere to. A new business only has a chance to succeed if the founders succeed in building a relationship that permits each other to fail and recover, and where they grok each others' mindsets, not some caricature that Eric Raymond made up.

Happy to be completely wrong.

Cheers.

<comment><USER15> I don't think I agree with this. I think what the poster is looking for is how to help the more businessy founder understand the engineers that (s)he's necessarily going to be hiring and working with. That strikes me as a perfectly sensible and worthwhile goal and one that will probably help their start up have a healthy culture in its early months/years.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, could be, but if that were the problem, my guess is that the question would be different. How do I help my business founder understand what to look for and value when hiring, etc.

The issue is that OP question is an answer to the real question, which goes unasked.

Cheers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The word "hacker" has been re-purposed so many times.

IMO hacker culture includes but is not limited to computer engineering and science. It is about being so curious about a domain of knowledge that you end up learning it in its little details, and as result, you can bend that domain to your will. Hackers are often working on experimental stuff that have little to no commercial value but are still valuable in their own way. You can read a bit about computer hacker culture in the Jargon file.

Examples of (people I consider) hackers are (YouTube channels) Applied Science, cnhlor, and styropyro.

<comment><USER17> > You can read a bit about computer hacker culture in the Jargon file.

The Jargon File is an artifact of "hacker culture" as it existed in the 1980s and early 1990s. I would hesitate to recommend it nowadays -- it's rather dated, and could lead an unaware reader to some false impressions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The single most important thing that made me understand the hacker mindset as a teenager was the Jargon File. And the publications and conference videos of the Chaos Computer Club also had a great influence on me, as well as Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg.

Read books by hackers, watch conference talks. And ofc get to know hackers, go to hack spaces. Keep an open mind and be curious. That's a good starting point to see how hacker culture really is. It's mostly about unorthodox curiosity and having fun with machines and systems. Think of children playing with toys, who grew up and never stopped playing with toys.

Don't waste your time on pop culture presentations of hackers, like movies or reading articles about "great" hacks or hackers, it's misleading and not going to transform your mind to think like a hacker in any way.

</comment><comment> vertex-four Most technical people you work with, even in early startups, will not be "hackers" in any way, shape or form. Hacking doesn't usually equate to doing things that tend to make businesses lots of money. Sometimes it does, but not usually.

<comment><USER18> Yep, I think hacking became kind of a buzzword in the new economy. Facebook deciding to name their corporate grounds to "1 Hacker Way" is such an example of how tech companies have appropiated the term to mean something that doesn't really have anything to do with the hacker mindest. They just think it's cool and it attracts young talents. It's part of their brand marketing and hiring strategy.

The only connection between Facebook and hacking I can think of is that their software may have relied on "dirty hacks" and crutches in the past to make it work.

Hacker culture by nature is very anti-corporate, anarchistic and against subordinating everything under the dictatorship of profit maximization.

If the OP thinks "hacker mindest" equals being on a path to create the next big app or service, you are being mislead big time.

<comment><USER12> > Hacker culture by nature is very anti-corporate, anarchistic and against > subordinating everything under the dictatorship of profit maximization.

Yes! I came _this_ close to recommending "Steal This Book" by Abbie Hoffman for that exact reason. But I got the feeling that was not exactly the type of hacker that OP was looking for...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Worldview indoctrination is a fun game, I suppose. A mix of fiction and biography is probably about right:

Fiction:

Douglas Copeland's "Microserfs"

Neal Stephenson, "Snow Crash" and perhaps especially "Cryptonomicon" (the early randy chapters and anything about Eiphphyte in particular)

Real Genius (the film).

Nonfiction:

Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. All the elder gods are here.

Cliff Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg.

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe you could say a bit more about why you're asking. In some cases others would be right to suggest that you find material relevant to business for yourself.

The one case that I can think of off the top of my head that might apply to this situation is if there are disagreements re:product refinement/feature set/bug prevalence. (Basically, "why doesn't this work as seamlessly as X?") In that case you might do well to find the MVPs (and later iterations) of famous startups.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wild guess here. Think of your problem/goal starting from the other end.

(crass generalization) non technical people tend to see the "idea" they have isolated out of the sea of possibilities as the important thing.

Now that this important idea has been identified I just need someone to stuff some "supports" under it and we are done!

top down

From the other direction, great ideas are a dime a dozen. Enormous amounts of (outwardly invisible) time have been spent exploring the landscape these "supports" would need to sit on the down to the bedrock. There may be things that are just to obvious to consider explaining why that particular idea is not worth the effort. Maybe it is boring or sub optimal or infeasible, or just dumb.

A hacker (what ever that means anymore) would be more apt to consider what they had on hand and where they were and most importantly, how they could inject some cleverness into the building of their supports, then climb up and see where they had gotten themselves.

bottom up

All obvious gross simplifications for illustration purposes.

If you are endeavouring to address a disconnect, first of all kudos to you for making the effort.

Two paths that could help are

Better illustrator of "the idea". The everyday marketing of the idea to the masses is not going to help here. You would need to demonstrate the value added that would make what ever reluctance there is be set aside.

The other is experience what is causing the reluctance; get some blisters yourself.

</comment><comment><USER22> A lot of us technical folks think the "hacker mindset" is an unfortunate, childlike simplification of what we do. I personally prefer solid engineering to "hacking".

I strongly encourage you to make your non-technical folks aware of good engineering practices, instead of this "everyone needs to learn to code and have special snowflake hacker skills" mindset that has so permeated the industry.

<comment><USER23> I'm a "hacker" in my free time, doing projects to tinker, have fun and learn. At my job I am not a hacker. I am an engineer. I engineer solutions to corporate problems. It's not that interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> True spherical hackers in the vacuum want to be undisputable experts in complex topics and as this often mixes with sheer egoism, they like to flex with this knowledge and remind others how unsophisticated others are. But ideal spherical hackers are rare. Moreover, smart people like to learn new stuff not only about the tech side of things, so if they sniff you're trying to manipulate them, they'll pay you back with the same coin and you'll get a team of cynical snarky devs. If you want to become a leader for them, you'll have to earn their respect (again, a lazy attempt to earn it by slipping how you know some python will dump your rating that very moment, as that would be seen as a cheap manipulation). A leader for them can be a super knowledgeable jerk (e.g. Linus) or a super humble guy who sends the message "you know more than me, so I'll step out of your way". In other words, if you really want to step on their ego by telling them what to do, you'd better be an undisputable expert, or expect a delayed counter reaction.

<comment><USER25> The turn of phrase "true spherical hackers in the vacuum" is quite clever and entertaining, but I submit that it is unlikely to be grokked by someone who does not already have familiarity with hacker-isms/culture. :)

(And of course they likely wouldn't understand "grok" either").

<comment><USER24> Tbh, even I don't understand "grok" :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >... recommend to a business focused founder for them to grok the hacker mindset.

From 1000 ft, what's different between the two? It's all about solving problems.

The business focused founder sees a problem, a business/market opportunity. He/She needs to figure out how to solve it, how to come up with a way to satisfy that market. If a product exists, how do they get that product into the hands of the customer. If the product doesn't exist, how to get it into existence and then get it into the hands of the customer.

The hacker/developer/whatever sees a problem and He/She tries to develop a product that satisfies that problem based on the requirements they're either given or suss out themselves. The hacker mindset is an insatiable need for knowledge. How to do a thing. How to make a thing. How did others make a thing. Don't business people think that way, also? Probably one big difference might be that the hacker mindset shares knowledge. Business people are more protective of it. (Generally)

<comment><USER27> I would add that most folks who go into business are motivated primarily by seeing the dollars appear, while most "hackers" I know are primarily motivated by the rush they get when they've understood the new problem/solution.

That's painting with broad strokes obviously and a person can be motivated by both. But that's the axis I would draw the distinction on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's not that hard. Try to build / construct something. You will soon discover a layer of detail that you never anticipated. And then some more.

Hackers / programmers are trained to be cognizant of these details and complexities that aren't obvious on first glance.

Heck sometimes this weighs us down. I'd rather have someone ignorant and brave on my team. :)

</comment><comment><USER29> The book "Coders At Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming".

It is not a technical book.

It'll be as good as anything : ).

"Peter Seibel interviews 15 of the most interesting computer programmers alive today in Coders at Work, offering a companion volume to Apress's highly acclaimed best-seller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston. As the words "at work" suggest, Peter Seibel focuses on how his interviewees tackle the day-to- day work of programming, while revealing much more, like how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others, and what kinds of problems they find most interesting.

Hundreds of people have suggested names of programmers to interview on the Coders at Work web site: www.codersatwork.com. The complete list was 284 names. Having digested everyone's feedback, we selected 15 folks who've been kind enough to agree to be interviewed:

Frances Allen: Pioneer in optimizing compilers, first woman to win the Turing Award (2006) and first female IBM fellow Joe Armstrong: Inventor of Erlang Joshua Bloch: Author of the Java collections framework, now at Google Bernie Cosell: One of the main software guys behind the original ARPANET IMPs and a master debugger Douglas Crockford: JSON founder, JavaScript architect at Yahoo! L. Peter Deutsch: Author of Ghostscript, implementer of Smalltalk-80 at Xerox PARC and Lisp 1.5 on PDP-1 Brendan Eich: Inventor of JavaScript, CTO of the Mozilla Corporation Brad Fitzpatrick: Writer of LiveJournal, OpenID, memcached, and Perlbal Dan Ingalls: Smalltalk implementor and designer Simon Peyton Jones: Coinventor of Haskell and lead designer of Glasgow Haskell Compiler Donald Knuth: Author of The Art of Computer Programming and creator of TeX Peter Norvig: Director of Research at Google and author of the standard text on AI Guy Steele: Coinventor of Scheme and part of the Common Lisp Gang of Five, currently working on Fortress Ken Thompson: Inventor of UNIX Jamie Zawinski: Author of XEmacs and early Netscape/Mozilla hacker"

</comment><comment><USER30> Since it's actually about you and for that one guy, you should just tell him what it is that is set in your mind.

The thing about it though, is that mindsets are not readily transferable. They are basically worldviews which are formed slowly and because of their foundational place in cognition are remarkably resistant to change.

One challenge is technical debt. To start to understand it, find a tool that he uses regularly (assuming such a thing exists). Maybe it is Excel. Now have him solve some kind of problem with it. And then schedule a meeting with his friend the following week to review his spreadsheet. Then add requirements that his spreadsheet must handle. Tell him he must hurry so that those requirements are complete before his meeting. Ensure that there are too many requirements for the spreadsheet or that there isn't time to properly reorganize it.

In the meeting, explain to his friend that he has been the mastermind of this spreadsheet design. Have him first demo the calculation features of the spreadsheet. The have him walk through the design, show the formulas in the cells, explain his naming scheme.

The goal of this exercise is to demonstrate why engineers seem to be so concerned about their code organization and technical debt. Which is that they have their name on any mess they make in the code, and they have to maintain it as it changes. Without ever having done that part of it, it is difficult for a business person to really understand the developer's point of view.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think you need to make it clear that you are a maker and your limitations are more in the realm of physics -- what can work and what won't work.

Business people tend to be more social-oriented, people-oriented. And one of the pitfalls of that is that most such people think if you just make the right friends, find the right words, push the right emotional buttons, you can make magic.

And sometimes that's true. But sometimes what they want is a case of "Something cannot be both heavy and light at the same time. I can be light and large -- like a cloud -- but it can't be both heavy and light. Pick one."

I do a lot of studying of social things and I hate people who are manipulative. A lot of people with serious social skills are manipulative.

In short, many of them lie when it's convenient because they don't want to deal with negative emotions or whatever.

So I would have them watch the Jim Carrey movie "Liar, Liar." and challenge them to use their social skills to tell the actual truth in a more acceptable manner instead of fudging.

I would also recommend negotiating books. Hard skills when it comes to dealing with people helps make it possible to be both honest and diplomatic.

 _The Mind and Heart of the Negotiator_ is research based and very meaty.

 _Getting to Yes_ is also research based, but a quick, easy read.

</comment><comment><USER32> "The Jargon File" might be a good place to start. From there, maybe read one of _The Cathedral and the Bazaar_ , _The Soul of a New Machine_ , or _Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution_.

I read _Fire in the Valley_ when I was young and it impacted me, although there might be a better book that's similar. I might also recommend something by Jaron Lanier or Stallman if you don't might being a little political.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've been collecting things in an Arena channel, "Use, Misuse, Rugged Consumerism, etc." that might be helpful in seeing one aspect of what such a mindset might be.

[https://www.are.na/zach-rose/use-misuse-rugged- consumerism-e...](https://www.are.na/zach-rose/use-misuse-rugged-consumerism- etc)

</comment><comment><USER34> A 'Hacker' is just a technically literate 'Hustler'. There are likely more books or resources for developing a hustler mindset you can find. It's a more generic mode of thinking and can apply beyond just technical.

</comment><comment><USER35> Founders need to be technical about something. The idea of a "non-technical" founder is nonsense. I have seen it and they were basically a VC with expensive friends just creating a job for social reason to get them out of the house.

Technical _need not_ mean "code". It could be a medical expert working with a wide array of people to build something. Or a tax-expert. Or an employment expert etc.

Founder is what "product manager" should be. Instead it seems "product manager" is just some glue person at a large organization who is usually not great at accessing optionality and time and money costs.

</comment><comment><USER15> The answer's simple. You're looking right at it!

Don't give them Mythical Man Month or Eric Raymond or any of that stuff: dated and esoteric. My interpretation of your post is basically that the business founder is going to be (involved in) hiring, and will be working with several software engineers soon. And you want to help them understand what makes the engineers tick: the sorts of things they find interesting, the sorts of ways they talk about it.

So that's easy. Tell them to look at HN, pick an article with a technical theme that's getting a lot of attention. Read the article, and then read the comment threads.

</comment><comment><USER36> [https://try.newrelic.com/rs/newrelic/images/The_New_Kingmake...](https://try.newrelic.com/rs/newrelic/images/The_New_Kingmakers.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER37> What are you hoping for the business focused founder to get out of this exercise?

The reason I ask is that in my experience the "hacker mindset" is a very nebulous thing. There's sort of a "hacker ideal", but in practice actual developers, white/blackhats, makers, etc. come from all sorts of backgrounds, have all sorts of ways of thinking about problems, and are motivated by all sorts of different things.

Are you hoping for the business founder to better understand how to effectively work with technical people?

</comment><comment><USER38> Harvard's CS50 Intro to Computer Science. Available on various platforms like edX and YouTube.

[https://www.edx.org/course/cs50s-introduction-to-computer- sc...](https://www.edx.org/course/cs50s-introduction-to-computer-science)

Direct link to "Computational Thinking - CS50's Computer Science for Business Professionals 2017" \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2f9h_- _Fv4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2f9h_-_Fv4)

</comment><comment><USER39> Paul Graham's Makers vs Managers - [http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)

<comment><USER40> Wow that was very enlightening. I had been wondering why meetings used to bug me, and now I have no issue. Oh did I mention I am a manager now, I scheduled this in an appropriate time slot. I cannot wait to get back to hating meetings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> [https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0932633420/](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0932633420/)

The Psychology of Computer Programming

by Gerald M. Weinberg

Written in 1971, and still completely relevant. Topics include egoless programming, intelligence, psychological measurement, personality factors, motivation, training, social problems on large projects, problem-solving ability, programming language design, team formation, the programming environment, etc.

</comment><comment><USER42> I don't have any suggested reading material but my rule of thumb is to just assume that anything which appears simple to build is about 10x more complex for "reasons". The simpler a feature is to use, the longer it will take to develop. And any major change in scope/priority adds 2x to the original timeline.

If you want to understand the details behind these general statements, you'll need to spend the next several years in the trenches delivering dozens of technical projects.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think many here (and maybe you too) would find the opposite valuable.

How to understand the business/sales/marketing/leadership/political mindset. Without cynicism.

</comment><comment><USER44> I don`t watch these videos for entertainment, but this person has gained a little notoriety for this gig he started after his grandmother with dementia was scammed.

[https://kitboga.com/](https://kitboga.com/)

I was left agasp by some of the language (some is NSFW) and techniques ised by the scammers, but you would be the grandmother with dementia (non-technical user) vs someone who will say/do anything for money.

</comment><comment><USER45> I've found the book "New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World" really instructive on this point.

It focuses on the "rise of the developer," if you will, as an influential decision-making and budget-holding role within a company. It also includes lots of perspective on appealing to developers and avoiding marketing and business jargon.

As a nontechnical founder myself, it's been really helpful.

</comment><comment><USER46> Watch DEFCON and Hackaday talks? Not so much a mindset but insights into how people think and what people find interesting (to have been selected).

</comment><comment><USER47> "Masters of Doom" is a pretty demonstrative and entertaining bit of non- fiction that walks through the early days of id Software. Though not a manual or how-to, or anything like that, I'd recommend it to a non-technical founder or manager because it does a great job evoking the thrill of creation/breakthrough that is pretty central to the "hacker mindset".

</comment><comment><USER48> Maybe "Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas From The Computer Age" by Graham. As a bonus, some of the chapters are business-oriented.

</comment><comment><USER49> "Coders: who they are, what they think and how they are changing our world" by Clive Thompson, 2019. I think this is exactly what you are looking for.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44037236-coders](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44037236-coders)

</comment><comment><USER50> I really enjoyed this interview with Larry Wall (of Perl fame), and I come back to it from time to time. He does a great job illustrating the hacker mindset that you mentioned [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNAtbYSxzuA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNAtbYSxzuA)

</comment><comment><USER51> For me the mindset means a lot of different things.

1\. Go beyond what people tell you. Discover your own truth.

2\. The love for tinkering.

3\. The idea that what you bought is your own and you can do anything with it.

4\. To use something in a way that is completely not how it is intended.

5\. Deep reverse engineering dives.

6\. The guilty pleasure of picking digital locks.

I think I've books in all those directions.

</comment><comment><USER52> I would recommend Steve Levy's: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution: 25th Anniversary Edition.

</comment><comment><USER53> Hacker mindset to me is the predictable ability to swap between divergent and convergent thinking at will to discover optimal paths to desired outcomes regardless of means, context, biases, etc. — frequently just for the fun of it, to learn more, to be intentionally different, etc.

</comment><comment><USER54> Might be interesting to do a few hours of pair programming too; i.e. implement and ship a small feature

</comment><comment><USER55> Ghosts in the Wire, Kevin Mitnick

Made me realise that many just do it because they like the challenge.

</comment><comment><USER56> Steve Wozniak's biography, "iWoz". He perfectly explains how to combine off the shelf parts in novel ways so that 100% of R&D is focused on closing gaps unique to the business problem at hand.

</comment><comment><USER57> Perhaps "The Innovators" by Walter Isaacson. If nothing else, it introduces the reader to many of the pivotal people in the history of computing.

</comment><comment><USER58> I see how everything works. Humans, businesses, societies, machines, myself - everything. And I use that to have fun.

</comment><comment><USER59> Paul Graham's Hackers & Painters?

</comment><comment><USER60> Halt and Catch Fire seasons 1 and 2.

</comment><comment><USER61> ER is blacklisted in tech community. Finishing GEB is no easy task.

I recommend hackers and painters by pg.

<comment> dynamite-ready The book written by the guy who runs this site.

Skims on the painting part, I thought, but it makes for an interesting insight into the personal philosophy of someone who values both creativity and logic.

Many of his ideas are universal (probably why I'm here!). Others don't port so well (or are specific to his experience).

Well worth the OPs time, given the question.

Joel on Software is also a fantastic read. More concrete in talking about specific aspects of a software developers' working experience, and ideas towards technology in general.

A mentor of mine suggested I should read it alongside Hackers and Painters.

I can't thank him and his friends enough, frankly...

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I liked Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston, but it isnt clear what you mean.

</comment><comment><USER63> Eloquent JavaScript, even if you only go through the first few chapters

</comment><comment><USER64> read Hackers by Steven Levy. one of the best histories of 70s and 80s era of computing. gave great feel for how programmers think

</comment><comment><USER65> Elements of Programming Interviews (jk)

</comment><comment><USER66> The Hacker Manifesto

The Anarchist's Cookbook

Industrial Society and Its Future (the Unabomber Manifesto)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

</comment><comment><USER67> > I've thought perhaps Mythical Man Month and How To Become A Hacker (Eric > Raymond essay) but not sure they're quite right.

Please don't recommend Eric Raymond's work to people.

> technical founder wondering what reading to recommend to a business focused > founder for them to grok the hacker mindset

What does "the hacker mindset" mean to you?

If you ask me: The most important thing about a hacker mindset is that it must exist outside of technology. A hacker mindset is not a "techy" mindset, it's something far more sublime, and is portable across different fields.

Hacking is about creativity and problem solving, but not in a formalized way. That doesn't always involve computers and related technology. Hacking should be _fun_ , regardless of what industry or specialization it manifests in (which doesn't always translate well in business settings).

That isn't something that you're going to inject into someone by recommending them read a book. They have to seek it out for themselves. Without curiosity, hackers do not exist.

If they're going to be able to understand the mindset without having experienced it themselves, you might as well just share my comment here with them. If it sinks in, great! If not, I don't believe a few hundred pages of prose will have a different outcome.

<comment><USER68> What's wrong with ESR's work? I know the man himself can sometimes be controversial, but many of us came up on his works like The Jargon File, Cathedral and Bazaar, etc.

<comment><USER17> The Jargon File is almost entirely the work of others, in particular Guy Steele. ESR's contributions to it were largely self-serving, e.g. the addition of terms like "anti-idiotarianism" which had little usage outside right-wing political circles (including ESR himself, of course), and he hasn't updated it at all since the early 2000s.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Is Box Taking So Long to Pull the IPO Trigger? - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/23/why-is-box-taking-so-long-to-pull-ipo-trigger/

<comment><USER2> I think it comes down to the burn rate and the shaken confidence of investors. Cuban was quoted during TWIST that he didnt want to burn through hundreds of millions of dollars just to make a few dozen. It might be a bit of a case of between business models as well. Boris Wertz did a fantastic outline of the "Two Ways to Build a 100 Million Dollar Business"

</comment><comment><USER3> What's the usual amount of time between filing an S-1 and announcing the details of the IPO?</comment>


Arrington is completely wrong about women in technology - <AUTHOR> http://seldo.com/weblog/2010/08/29/arrington_is_completely_wrong_about_women_in_technology

<comment><USER2> Why do people love trying to make complex issues black and white? The fact that there are so few women in tech is an issue that is likely caused by multiple factors, some of which were addressed in this article, and some of which were addressed in the Arrington post. No one is wrong; each just seems to be arguing over which the greater factor is, but refuses to recognize the other.

Arrington cites factors dealing with biological and societal tendencies of women as reasons for them to not engage in risky lifestyle choices such as startups, or to not be interested in tech in the first place. I agree with this. This isn't 'bad' or 'good', but it's the truth. People need to stop ignoring that there ARE (on average) differences between men and women. We (women) just aren't as interested in tech or building our own businesses in general.

I'm just one data point, but based on many experiences, I would strongly argue that in general, women do not have the desire to take as many risks as males, or deal with day-to-day uncertainties. A vast majority of my female friends thought I was absolutely nuts when I first started doing startups. (They still think I'm a little nutty, despite being able to pay my bills now). The most common questions were, "What are you going to do for money if it fails?" (Answer: Get a job, or build something else), and "How do you deal with not knowing what you're going to be doing in the next [insert some time period]?" On the other hand, my male friends overwhelmingly asked about the technologies I'm building and admired me for taking a risk. Also interesting to note is that the reaction of female friends to my (male) co-founder was more of admiration than thinking he was crazy (but I was looked upon as crazy).

On the other hand, for the women who ARE interested in tech (or could be persuaded to be interested), there are certainly existing challenges within the field itself. Again, I'm just one data point, but I am always amazed at the reactions I get from males in the startup world when they find out that I code. They are SHOCKED. Not only because I'm a woman, but also because I'm a white, blonde woman who is reasonably attractive. Sometimes I really do feel like I'm not taken seriously by many people until I do something completely bad ass to prove myself. The other article certainly has a point there.

<comment><USER3>
      Why do people love trying to make complex issues black and white?

Because they love the resulting attention.

<comment><USER4> Also because most people find it very easy to convince themselves they've come up with a simple solution to a very complicated issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is such rubbish, and I hate that we're having this argument again. The last wave of resumes for a software engineer position came out to something like 97% male. The one female that passed the screening was really impressive with a degree from M.I.T. and a very impressive track record.

We couldn't afford her.

Arrington is not very often right, but he is in this case. Look around your average computer science classroom (from which the majority of startup founders originate) and tell me what you see. It's not because women aren't allowed, it's because they choose not to be.

<comment><USER6> Why can't both sides be true? I've never seen or heard of gender bias in the hiring process, but that doesn't discount the possibility that women aren't going into computer science for a reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> People make generalizations based upon the world around them. OK, so people don't expect a woman to be a programmer when they see her. Similar expectations didn't stop women from becoming lawyers or doctors or bankers, and now when you see a woman walking around a hospital or a courthouse she very well may be a doctor or a lawyer.

Women can and did overcome the same barriers to enter other fields. If you want to explain why women aren't in software, there's no explanatory power in explanations that equally apply to fields which women _did_ become a part of.

<comment><USER8> One thing is that it took a long, long time for women to break into medicine and start being taken seriously as doctors. Tech is still relatively young, so I'm hoping that we can start making movements towards that level of parity faster than then several generations it took medicine.

<comment><USER7> Sure, if you count from the beginning of the medical profession (though technically, women dominated some parts of medicine, like delivering babies, for millennia before men ever became involved, and then women broke back in).

If you count from the beginning of women-in-the-workplace style feminism, software should have had women almost from the outset. If a new profession or a new sector of the economy arose _now_ you'd expect it to have tons of women because as a culture we're used to women in the workplace, right? What about biotech--are there more women in biotech than software?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Here's how it happens: if a woman engineer starts talking, men will wait until she says something notably clever before they start taking her seriously. Men on the other hand are taken seriously by default, and only get dismissed if they say something notably dumb._

I was neutral to mildly positive on the post until this point. It is simply false. In tech, _nobody_ is taken seriously by default. I certainly never have been, and I'm a young tall skinny white guy with glasses (the very computer- geek stereotype if ever there was one). I have to re-prove myself every time. I've never observed anything different with regard to anyone else.

It turns out that there is one way you can get people to take you seriously from the get-go: "earn the respect of your immediate peers" (people take you seriously if it's obvious that everyone else does). I suppose it might _appear_ that this implies that the majority is taken seriously by default, because most of the people who have the respect of their peers will be from that majority by simple averaging.

Now, I don't mean to comment on whether or not it's _harder_ for women to "prove themselves". Never having been a woman myself, and not being a neutral observer, it's hard to make that comparison. My only point is that the amount of effort is nonzero for men as well.

<comment><USER10> Techies take nobody seriously by default.

But when it comes to non-technical management types, I think what he says is very true. As a clean-cut, twenty-something male who speaks articulately, simply me saying "I'm a computer guy" gives me an enormous amount of credibility, far more than a girl my age could get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Michael Arrington's real argument was:

Few women choosing to study CompSci\Engineering -> Few women in tech _startups_.

As long as you agree that a subset cannot be larger than its parent set, I don't see how you can disagree with that. It's as close to observational fact as you can get.

</comment><comment><USER12> Funny enough, I'm in the group that thinks EVERYONE is incompetent and absolutely worthless until they prove themselves to me. This might not be as big of a deal in the bay area where tech is a bigger deal, but here in LA there are posers everywhere.

We ask candidates in interviews to hand-code a front-end page, assuming that is the position they're applying for. Some will actually be able to write markup on a piece of paper, which is a pretty stressful test. "Code this page, here." (slides pen and paper) But a lot of people end up saying something like "Oh well I'd just throw a div here, throw a div there." It's literally a joke. I've had to stop laughing in meetings. We'll ask a rails developer what kind of stack he's familiar with, and they'll look at you like a deer in the headlights.

I don't go into an interview with a woman assuming she wont be nearly as good. In fact, right now the ladies are 1 for 1. Unfortunately she's no longer working with us due to some family issues. A lot of the guys we've interviewed are actually quite literally living in their parents basements and building porn websites with their buddies. I could care less what people do in their personal time but holy shit, make something of yourself.

Anyway, this doesn't really side with either particular argument in this whole man/woman debate, I just personally have gotten so jaded with worthless people who have no skills or drive whatsoever that their sex doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is the United States of America in 2010. It's not ancient Egypt. It's not feudal England. It's not even the U.S. in 1950. You can do whatever you want to do and be whoever you want to be. Nobody is stopping you but yourself. Might your climb to the top be steeper than mine? Sure. But realize that nobody who's ever made it to the top of their mountain complained about how steep it was. They just climbed. If you want to be the best, whatever that means to you, you have to go Jackie Robinson that shit. No matter what the douchebags throw at you along the way, you have to just smile back and hit home runs.

<comment><USER7> You should find some new material: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1643294>

<comment><USER13> If it can be used again, I'll use it again. No sense it paraphrasing just for the hell of it. You can't plagiarize yourself.

<comment><USER14> Imo, a good rule of thumb for when you're copy/pasting the same comment you've made before is to mark it somehow, e.g. "as I said the last time this same issue came up (perhaps link to comment here): [paste]".

A bigger question might be why you're saying the same thing over and over to begin with, paraphrasing or not. Is your one-paragraph comment filled with self-help-type platitudes _really_ interesting enough to spam in every relevant discussion?

<comment><USER13> You're right, I'll do that next time.

I didn't get the kind of discussion I was interested in last time, so I thought I'd try a second time. Not "over and over." A second time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You do realize that this is a Western societal phenom? I work with women who are from India and China. Quite a few of them in fact. What is different in their cultures that they have so many women in this field and we do not?

<comment><USER16> Yes I've noticed that in the "Women in IT" phenomenon. That doesn't really explain tech startups, though. All the Indian and Chinese engineers I know work for established, stable companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I must work in a really weird office then because I know 4 women engineers personally and several others in our office peripherally and no one in our office takes the attitude this guys seems to think is the norm.

Everyone I've heard in this debate argues from a subjective personal experience/viewpoint. I haven't really seen any hard data on the subject presented so it's strange that everyone is so certain they are right. (ok not really all that strange, human nature being what it is.)

</comment><comment><USER16> Men don't get taken seriously by default. Almost every man I know has to work pretty hard to be taken seriously, and in my experience reputation is the overwhelming factor anyway. If you've got a good reputation you'll tend to get a favorable bias, otherwise you won't.

</comment><comment><USER18> The WSJ article cited in Arrington's article:

[http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/08/27/addressing- th...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2010/08/27/addressing-the-lack-of- women-leading-tech-start-ups/)

It's one thing to aspire to focus on small-scale businesses that benefit a local area / community (as do most female entrepreneurs). It's another thing entirely to focus on some kind of ambitious VC-funded enterprise that's visioned to scale big / globally from the get-go.

Ambition is an interesting animal.

</comment><comment><USER19> _...offensively wrong..._

Why wasn't 'wrong' enough? Why should any honestly-presented, based-on- experience opinion like Arrington's generate 'offense'? Why not assume good faith?

<comment><USER13> It's "offensively wrong" because the author (a male) is striving for an _image_ of being genuinely sympathetic to The Plight. "Look at me, I'm so understanding."

<comment><USER19> So you think he's lying about his internal mental state and specific efforts in areas he controls?

Why not assume good faith?

<comment><USER13> I don't think he's lying to us, I think he's lying to himself.

<comment><USER8> I think that's a rather unfair assumption to make. Do you have evidence that he's being disingenuous?

<comment><USER13> 'Disingenuous' isn't quite the word I would use. I'm sure the author really does think he's contributing to The Crusade, which is precisely the problem. He can't just dissect the errors in Arrington's logic. No, that's not good enough.

He needs to put on a Crusader uniform and act like he thinks those people are supposed to act: offended. He can't just BE offended, he must explicitly tell you he's offended, and start swinging his sword around so you know what a noble Crusader he is.

If he were responding to a blog post offensive to men, would he have used that language? No, because being offended for yourself isn't noble, it's being offended for others. And telling everyone about it as much as you can. How else will people know what an altruist you are?

<comment><USER19> All this thread I thought you were criticizing Arrington as having been genuinely offensive!

(Note to self: avoid pronouns in replies, so anaphor collisions are recognized asap.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "... the expectation that women don't get into tech is what keeps them out of it..." Yeah well, how did this stereotype got built in the first place? and why isn't it the case with marketing? why this same expectation is not happening in sales? why tech?? The answer is clear: Women did it to themselfs. Men are not to blame. Women are not hackers by nature. It's usually a man who gets dirty. In my classroom, despite having the same teacher and the same lessons, it's always the boys who are trying to explain how things work to the "lot" of ladies who didn't get it. I personally can't imagine a lady creating C, Python, or running facebook on her dormroom. Ladies usually have guys over there, not data servers. I just can't imagine a bunch of ladies locked in a garage working on something. Whenever I think of a group of women, The only thing that comes to my mind is that they are talking about how cool is desperate housewives, or how great was Sara's date. This is not my fault, they are responsible for what we the men think of them. And don't tell me there's a white male controlling their brains to do such things. They just do them. face it. SO WOMEN, STOP BLAMING THE MEN and BE PROUD OF WHAT YOU LOVE. be it cooking or dating magazines or what ever. why do you want to hate what you love and force yourself in men things? are you ashamed of what you do? Why do you consider what you do as the work of a second class citizen? Women tend to love different things and I don't understand why people are trying to force them into tech. PEOPLE, women DID NOT ask for your help. Too sad for the ladies who have this computer addictivness syndrome, your group did not follow you, you are just an exception.

<comment><USER21>
      "Ladies usually have guys over there, not data servers."

     "Whenever I think of a group of women,
     The only thing that comes to my mind is that they
     are talking about how cool is desperate housewives,
     or how great was Sara's date."

Men don't spend a lot of time having women in their bedrooms? They don't talk about football or getting laid? Your language seems to be angry and aggressive towards women. Yet both articles you are responding to were written by men. I think your aggression is misplaced.

<comment><USER20> The difference is that for men, that's not the main activity. But for women, it tends to be it.

<comment><USER21> So you're saying that the amount of sex that takes place in colleges occurs predominately in the girl's dormroom, as opposed to the boy's?

<comment><USER20> Nop.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can FireSheep read passwords from mobile devices that use WIFI? - <AUTHOR>

If I use my iPhone / Kindle (with WiFi on) at a coffee shop, could something like Firesheep collect passwords as I browse with my device? <comment><USER2> If you want to do some digging yourself, here are some suggestions to get started.

How and Why to Sniff Smartphone Network Traffic [http://www.messagingnews.com/onmessage/ben-gross/how-and- why...](http://www.messagingnews.com/onmessage/ben-gross/how-and-why-sniff- smartphone-network-traffic)

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes, tried just a few minutes ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! That is a MUCH huger problem -- iPhone users don't always know/understand if they are on WiFi or cellular.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to deal with vendors who run outdated TLS? - <AUTHOR> Someone I know uses a custom point-of-sale system that is tied to their business. It does not only order management, but it also processes transactions and handles customer information.
Today I get a frantic message from this person that their browser says the site is insecure and refuses to load it. They cannot access their order information or process payments.
This person is runs a small (franchised) business. But they are worried about the security of the system that they are using.
I put in the URL for the POS system into the ssllabs.com tests and sure enough, it scores an "F", runs TLS 1.0, etc.
What makes matters more complicated is that there has been some chargeback fraud happening. It is probably unrelated to this, but it makes one wonder.
Given that there are PCI considerations, is there any recourse as a franchisee to something like this? They could refuse to use the system, but are afraid of losing orders or being accused of some franchise agreement breach.
My advice so far has been to yell as loud as possible, provide documentation,  make as much noise as possible, and use cash/check/PayPal to process payments until the provider get the issue resolved. The provider was frustrated that this person wouldn't just use Internet Explorer, since that's what they suggest everyone else to do.
Any advice here? What would you do? <comment><USER2> I've run up against this multiple times for apps that were hosted on shared servers. In both instances we had to move the apps to dedicated virtual servers so that TLS v1.0/1.1 could be disabled.

None of the providers would disable TLS v1.0/1.1 and won't say when they will.

Also realize that some enterprise security products are also starting to block or throw warnings due to the host having old SSL/TLS protocols enabled.

<comment><AUTHOR> If the headers being sent by the server are correct, then the software being used _should_ actually support TLS 1.2. Why they continue to persist in not allowing it is beyond me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Who is responsible for the PCI considerations? The POS system company or the franchisor?

Start looking at other POS systems immediately if possible. If that system's owners do not take security seriously, ditch them.

One option, which would likely hurt your friends business, is to go public about that entire franchise using insecure payment systems.

Put an ATM in the lobby/outside and go cash only.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is something I've often considered as well. It's not clear to me how it works because each franchisee has their own merchant account.

The other ideas, while valid, are not an option in this case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would move away to another vendor, as an outdated TLS version is just the tip of the iceberg. If you don't move away you are knowingly putting your customer's data at risk.</comment>


100 Years of Communism's Bloody Legacy - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/23/100-years-the-birth-of-socialism.html <comment><USER2> Focusing on one particular aspect of history to the exclusion of others is not a productive way to educate people.</comment>


Intel announces Edison, a computer the size of an SD card. - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/6/5282472/intel-announces-edison-a-computer-the-size-of-an-sd-card

<comment><USER2> Interesting.

The Quark core 32nm (14nm by end of 2014), x86, core power consumption under 100mW[1]. Assuming performance scales with size/transistor count, that's probably 1/5th-1/10th the performance of Atom (I'm guessing - they claim 400MHz as a max speed at launch).

That's very competitive with ARM at the same size, but ARM doesn't have this "complete computer on a board" at that size (AFAIK).

[1] [http://www.anandtech.com/show/7305/intel-announces-quark- soc...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/7305/intel-announces-quark-soc-a-tiny- soc-for-tiny-devices)

<comment><USER3> > but ARM doesn't have this "complete computer on a board" at that size > (AFAIK).

Knowing the industry terminology helps: [https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=arm+system+on+module](https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=arm+system+on+module)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that's not the same thing. Or rather, it _could_ be, but usually you need to do extra work (and buy extra parts) and then order a few thousand.

To quote:

 _Unlike SBCs, COMs [computer-on-module] typically lack real-world ports, and extend their I /O through a connector that supports compatible carrier boards based on standards like COM Express, QSeven, and SMARC. Others use proprietary connectors, often based on a 144-pin SODIMM layout, designed to work only with the company's own carrier boards._

[http://www.linux.com/news/embedded-mobile/mobile- linux/71255...](http://www.linux.com/news/embedded-mobile/mobile- linux/712557-10-new-linux-ready-embedded-arm-modules)

(Although, to be fair I am assuming that the original article is accurate in stating which ports are available on the Intel version)

<comment><USER3> As someone who's integrated several SOCs, SOMs, COMs, and SBCs, I promise the only special part about this is that it's x86. Pentium class power has been available in these kinds of form factors for quite a while.

Further, the OP doesn't really say anything about ports, or availability, and forget about "ports," really. The real difficulty with these is power management. PMICs are getting nice and small, and I'm betting there are a few LDOs on board for generating core voltages, but otherwise all of the real power management will be off board as there isn't much room for inductors on an SD form factor board.

$20 says this is just a cute reference implementation to give to their field application engineers so they can get the OEMs jazzed about Quark.

[Edit: The fact that this is an SD form factor is extra fodder for this argument. This thing doesn't go into an SD card slot, or speak SD, but because SD is something everyone thinks of as "tiny but huge," some marketer somewhere said "make it the size/shape of an SD." For example, the last SOM I integrated (for a computer vision application, built around a 466MHz ARM9 SOC) was of similar size, but of much more useful shape.]

<comment><USER2> _$20 says this is just a cute reference implementation to give to their field application engineers so they can get the OEMs jazzed about Quark._

I fear you are correct.

But Intel does seem to be attempting to build RaspberryPi competitors[1][2], so maybe this will be in the same line rather than an engineering sample which you can't actually buy.

[1] [http://makezine.com/2013/10/03/10-great-intel-galileo- featur...](http://makezine.com/2013/10/03/10-great-intel-galileo-features/)

[2] [http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2298580/intel-unveils- quark-b...](http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2298580/intel-unveils-quark-based- galileo-computer-to-rival-raspberry-pi)

<comment><USER3> Intel is silicon company. They are myopically focused on this, and this alone. They feed the OEMs and for the most part, try not to step on their toes. Intel will never, ever build something to compete with RPi because that's not where Intel plays. Intel might build something to compete with the Broadcom chips which power the RPi, but honestly I think the revenue stream of the entire hobbyist/educational market combined is just barely a blip on Intel's radar. They like the margins, but the volume just isn't there.

All that said, that doesn't mean that Intel's technical marketing departments aren't taking risks in areas such as the hobbyist market. Companies as large as Intel are often quite good at this. However, I wouldn't trust the longevity (and therefore future) of anything out of Intel that isn't a high volume silicon product line.

<comment><USER2> _Intel is silicon company. They are myopically focused on this, and this alone. They feed the OEMs and for the most part, try not to step on their toes. Intel will never, ever build something to compete with RPi because that 's not where Intel plays._

Counterexample: Intel NUC[1]. It's targeted at consumers, and you can actually buy it.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing)

<comment><USER3> Sure, there are plenty of such counter examples, but I'd bet my left shoe that each of them draws from some marketing budget or equivalent. Think of those as start-ups within the larger organization: they're risky, transient, and haven't gained acceptance to be a complete part of the whole yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hope the device is open and encourages hacking. But seeing that they're putting an app store on it, (I'm guessing for long term profit) they probably have little incentive to do so.

<comment><USER3> They're building an app store for the platform (Quark), not necessarily for this explicit device (Edison). Chances are they're using the app store to approach several major OEMs to say "use this SoC, it'll run your x86 software, and it even has an app store!"

There's nothing stopping you from taking one of these and loading whatever you want onto it, if you can even get your hands on one (you can't).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone working on pairing these small devices with keyboards, mice, tablets, monitors, televisions, glasses, etc? Everything has to be wireless, of course.

I'd like a keychain computer that I could drop next to whatever peripherals I happen to be near.

<comment><USER6> Would you trust whatever peripherals you're near not to keylog all you type and screenshot all you see?

<comment><USER2> What a pointless comment.

 _Of course_ there are always security problems around using untrusted peripherals. Hell, there are security problems around using _trusted_ peripherals.

That doesn't mean the possibilities shouldn't be explored.

(Incidentally, I don't think this is a very interesting use-case. We can already do that with phones, and I never see anyone doing it. But it isn't security issues that stop people doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Off topic : In the race of making processors faster and smaller, are we heading to the direction of more power efficient analog computers again?

</comment><comment><USER8> Technological progress have spoiled me, I was disappointed it wasn't the size of a micro SD card.

</comment><comment><USER9> If you are a Raspberry Pi fan or even an Arduino fan this is really big news. I'm already pausing to consider changing course on something I'm developing.

<comment><USER3> Sorry to sound like a curmudgeon, but this shouldn't even register on hobbyist's radar unless Intel also announces that it'll be selling this direct to consumers. These types of things are built to market new processor platforms to OEMs. That doesn't mean that some hobbyist-friendly OEM can't build something nifty out of this, but having dealt with Intel before, chances are for someone small enough to be hobbyist-friendly, the folks at Intel won't even chuckle as they ignore the ringing phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just put in a mouse, and add three more keys.

<comment><USER11> Ctrl-alt-del? No, this runs windows.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Thesounds.se - <AUTHOR> http://thesounds.se <comment><AUTHOR> A simple one page frontend to The Sounds of Spotify - for music discovery. As stated in the 'About':

"Some summers ago I discovered the user The Sounds of Spotify and as I was scrolling through all its playlists I thought it would be useful to be able to search for the name of a city or genre and find the associated playlist(s). This page is not endorsed by Spotify or any of their business partners.

Later I found out that the data comes from Glenn McDonald of everynoise.com, where an interesting map relating different genres can be found."

I have used it myself on and off behind a firewall, but I figured maybe it could be interesting for someone else. My latest discovery is The Sound of Russian Indie.</comment>


Ask HN: A good open-source community to contribute to - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It's Google Summer Of Code season again. [https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/](https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/)

Larger open-source communities publish project ideas. Those communities are usually somewhat organized because they need to prepare months ahead, assign mentors, got vetted by Google.

I'm biased so I point you to [https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/20...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2019/Project_Ideas) and [https://www.hotosm.org/get-involved](https://www.hotosm.org/get-involved)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can you be more precise, what are your interests? Skills? It's hard to answer such generic question, at least I struggle to come up with anything meaningful.</comment>


Carter Catastrophe : Calculating the Probability of Doomsday - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

<comment><USER2> Peter Coles has been applying Bayesian statistics to cosmology for at least fifteen years. In the following blog note he explains how Bayesian probability really is only a tradeoff by using Doomsday Argument as a pedagogical exapmle.

<http://telescoper.wordpress.com/category/bad-statistics/>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is actually used as a plot device in Stephen Baxter's science fiction novel: Manifold Time

<http://www.amazon.com/Manifold-Time-Stephen-Baxter> /dp/034543076X</comment>


Ask HN: Should one avoid leaderboards in a mobile game that is not popular yet? - <AUTHOR> Leaderboards would reveal the game's lack of popularity to players in an obvious way — and hence might discourage them from playing the game.<p>What do you think? <comment><USER2> Or mix fake data with user-data? Some "multiplayer" games (the .io kind) even fake player agents.

<comment><USER3> This. I play a mobile game that I'm 90% sure has its own 'bot' accounts to make matchmaking easier and more varied. I'm pretty sure I'd always match against the same players if they didn't do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I actually enjoy being ranked #5 in a game rather than #18291. Honestly, even in the low thousands, I don't normally check my rank.

I have very recently played a game with about 15 active players. I ranked quite low, but it was a lot of fun. There's nothing necessarily wrong with an unpopular game and it's sometimes nice to be "significant" in a small community. MUDs are still around and many have at most a dozen players on at any one time.</comment>


5 Reasons Why iWatch Will Be A Disaster For Apple - <AUTHOR> http://amistakes.com/2013/04/22/5-reasons-why-iwatch-will-be-a-disaster-for-apple/

<comment><USER2> From the authors that brought you:

5 Reasons Why the iPad will be a disaster for Apple. 5 Reasons Why the iPhone will be a disaster for Apple. 5 Reasons Why the iPod Mini will be a disaster for Apple. 5 Reasons Why the MacBook Air will be a disaster for Apple. 5 Reasons Why the Intel migration will be a disaster for Apple. ... ...

</comment><comment><USER3> Watches have gone through some changes since they were invented, and though for a while they were purely utilitarian (Casio), they are now almost exclusively a fashion domain. Apple has demonstrated that they are quite good at promoting technology to fashion, but they've failed at going in the opposite direction (capturing fashion).

Point #1 is irrelevant. Steve also didn't wear shirts with color. That doesn't mean they were obsolete.

Point #2 is valid. The utilitarian purpose of the watch is adequately fulfilled by your phone, which you must have. Also, everybody has a phone, and there are clocks everywhere. It's very unlikely that you _need_ a watch for utilitarian purposes.

Point #3 is weak.

Point #4 is practically an argument _for_ Apple. They have never originated a market. Instead, they enter a market with horrifyingly bad user experience and fix it. They almost never try to _create_ a market when they could instead _capture a young, but rapidly growing_ market. If this were a rapidly growing market, I would say this is a point for the opposition. However, I don't think it is a growing market, certainly not growing at the rate that would interest Apple in it, Pebble be damned.

If people suddenly decided they absolutely had to have a watch, I could see Apple trying to enter the market, but I doubt they would succeed simply because they tend to fail at fashion for its own sake.

Point #5 is the best one. Apple tends to be both aspirational and democratic. You may balk at spending $600 on a tablet, but it's unlikely that this price point is truly out of reach for the average Westerner. You're only balking at it because you know you can get a Nexus for $400 or whatever. But for the wealthy, who are basically the market for good watches, they are a status symbol, which means you either want something unique (the $5M watch) or you want something instantly recognizable as expensive (the $5K+ Rolex). Apple fails in both these markets.

I'd be shocked if Apple actually tried.

</comment><comment><USER4> No bias here...

...but that said, these are (mostly) good criticisms. I am not sure about the last one; wealthy people do often wear expensive watches, but I've also seen a lot of whimsy and individuality in watch choices. I've known millionaires that wear Swatches, their Dad's old Timex, etc.</comment>


Introducing E2, new cost-optimized general purpose VMs for Google Compute Engine - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/understanding-dynamic-resource-management-in-e2-vms <comment><USER2> Trying to find out how much cheaper these new E2 instances are, these are the Monthly prices taken from their Compute Pricing page [1]:

        Machine type  VCPUs Memory Price   Preemptible price
        n1-standard-2 2     7.5GB  $48.55  $14.60
        e2-standard-2 2     8GB    $48.92  $14.67

So how does E2 offer "31% savings compared to N1"?

Whatever it is, there seems to be some kind of disconnect as it's not obvious from their pricing pages and they should provide better transparency on exactly where these savings are.

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/compute/all- pricing](https://cloud.google.com/compute/all-pricing)

<comment><USER3> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

That should have been made more clear, sorry about that. On a per-second basis _without_ a sustained use discount (so for burstier workloads, autoscaling, etc.) the E2 is ~31% cheaper (therefore the marketing "up to").

Clarifying your example: n1-std-2 is currently 9.5c/hour (which would be $69.35/month without Sustained-Use Discounting), but e2-std-2 is 6.7c/hr regardless of how many hours per month you use it. Which is about 30%.

<comment><USER2> I'm not a fan of manual inefficiencies of AWS's Reserved Pricing but at least their pricing is clear.

I see all these different prices being floated around but I'm still not clear on how much GCP's compute cost for the most popular scenario of running a __website 24 /7 __would be.

It looks like AWS's t3.large may be the most comparable with 2x VCPU/8GB RAM which costs $426 for 12 months / $35.50 month.

Or for m5.large (2x VCPU/8GB RAM) the cost is $501 for 12 months / $41.75 month.

What would the n1-std-2 and e2-std-2 compute cost for 12 months be?

<comment><USER3> Sorry for the lack of clarity (I've tilted at this windmill, and failed).

E2-std-2 != t3.large. A t3.large only has a "baseline performance" of 30% [1]. That's more like our e2-small though they have more memory.

Instead, I'd compare e2-std-2 to m5.large like you started to do so. An m5.large _on-demand_ is $.096/hr => $70/month, while the e2-std-2 is $48/month. I think your $41.75/month is from the 1-yr Standard RI (a 40% discount). For that, the most direct comparison would be to use a Committed Use Discount on our side which comes with a similar percentage discount (I can't find this on my phone right now) so that's like $29/month.

Does that make sense?

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance- types/t3/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/t3/)

<comment><USER2> As stated I'm only trying to get a comparison of the cost for the very popular use-case of running a "Website 24/7 for 12 months". I use this simple basic core metric as a baseline for comparing hosting costs amongst different hosting providers.

This is trivial to work out in AWS, I just go to their Reversed Pricing Page [2], look for the total cost for an m5.large (2x VCPU/8GB RAM) instance for 12 months which is $501 (12 x 41.75).

I'd like to be able to do the same for GCP, I see the committed usage page [2] but I don't see any easy way to work out the cost for 12 months / 24/7, it mentions things like "discount is up to 57% for most resources like machine types or GPUs", what does "up to" mean? Is that the discount for running 24/7? So is the E2-Std-2 monthly price of a $48.92 * (1 - .57) = $21.04?

All I see back in GCP's compute pricing page related to "committed usage" is "1 year commitment price" of "$10.03 / vCPU month" but this says it's for "E2 custom vCPUs and memory", does this apply to E2-Std-2 instances? So is the cost for 2x VCPU = $10.03 x 2 + 8GB = 8x $1.34 = 10.72 for the total monthly cost of $30.78?

If it's not how am I supposed to workout what E2-Std-2 cost of 12 months / 24/7 is? It's frustrating that there's no clear/easy way to determine the pricing of a simple and popular hosting scenario like this.

[1] [https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved- instances/pricin...](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved- instances/pricing/)

[2] [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing- up-c...](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/signing-up-committed- use-discounts)

<comment><USER4> > This is trivial to work out in AWS, I just go to their Reversed Pricing Page > [2], look for the total cost for an m5.large (2x VCPU/8GB RAM) instance for > 12 months which is $501 (12 x 41.75).

Well, nowadays, you don't buy reserved instances; you buy compute savings plans. And be sure to compare the strengths and limitations of an EC2 Savings Plan versus a general Compute Savings Plan; they have differing characteristics concerning instance type convertibility, regional transfers, and applicable products.

And with Compute Savings plans, its not like an RI where you say "I'm paying for one instance upfront, give me 30% off". You instead commit to a level of spend, in Dollars per Hour. Then they convert that spend into fungible credits that have differing exchange rates depending on the instance type, region, and even compute product. Then, through the magic of the AWS Billing System, you save money.

Very rarely do you come out the other end of AWS Compute consumption with a good understanding of the exact trace of "dollar spent to which compute product?" With products like Fargate, its even worse. Don't get me started on Fargate and its billing characteristics.

I'm nitpicking here. But only because: Nothing is ever as simple as it seems. GCP is just different; I wouldn't classify it as more or less complex.

<comment><USER5> Isn't savings plans brand new? And can't you still just buy typical reserved instances?

<comment><USER4> Yes, and Yes. Though, as far as I know, there is no financial reason to buy RIs at this point. Check out this comparison table [1]; you get the same savings, but _far_ more flexibility.

AWS very rarely removes features. People may still buy RIs because they have corporate or technical processes in place where they make sense. But, from a pure financial standpoint, RIs are inferior to Savings Plans.

[1] [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/latest/userguide/wh...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/latest/userguide/what- is-savings-plans.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The technical details about the E2 instance class are really interesting:

[https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/understanding...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/understanding- dynamic-resource-management-in-e2-vms)

Rather than a guaranteed core and RAM as with N1/N2, resources for the underlying host can be dynamically balanced through live migrations, which GCP has already been using for years. Cool solution, and should work to save money for most workloads.

<comment><USER7> I wonder when we will get instances that can scale dynamically at runtime!

That would be so cool, just adding cores if the load goes up!

You would have to make sure your code has enough threads ready to fill those cores though! (if you use non-blocking async. stuff)

Or is this what they mean it already has?

Edit: thinking more about this it must be really hard and require kernel fixes?

I mean how would linux behave when you add/remove cores and RAM f.ex.?

<comment><USER8> CPU hotplug has been supported for a long time. I once managed some Sun boxes that allowed replacing/upgrading CPUs without shutting down... They don't build em like that anymore.

<comment><USER3> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Yes, _but_ most workloads are fairly unprepared for this sadly. And they're really not ready for _memory_ unplug. (I also miss the days of my multi socket boxes and plugging in CPUs and memory).

<comment><USER9> > And they're really not ready for memory unplug.

What do VM-guest memory-ballon drivers do right now when the host suddenly attempts to reserve more memory than the guest has free? I'd presume the kernel would just consider itself to be in an OOM condition, and start killing processes to free up the memory until it can return OK to the balloon driver, no?

Because, from what I understand, that's closer to the scenario we're talking about here: you're not abruptly yanking DIMMs (like physical memory hotplug); rather, you (the hypervisor) are gracefully letting the guest know that some memory is about to go away, and since you (the hypervisor) have your own virtual TLB, you can let the guest OS decide _which_ "physical" memory (from its perspective) is going away, before it happens.

<comment><USER3> Yep! I was just responding to the explicit "how come you don't do hotplug" :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks like the play here is to get a bunch of small, committed workloads that GCE can move around where they've got spare capacity. On-demand pricing is very similar to the existing n1 type, but 1yr committed discounts are 30%+ cheaper.

More details from when I was working through it: [https://twitter.com/fredwulff/status/1204861220165017600](https://twitter.com/fredwulff/status/1204861220165017600)

<comment><USER3> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Your analysis is close, but the on-demand (per second) pricing is also a lot less expensive. You should think of it as:

\- Less than a full month w/o commitment => E2 up to ~30% cheaper (particularly for say 273 minutes per month or something).

\- Full month w/o commitment => Roughly identical.

\- Full month with a 1-year or 3-year commitment => E2 ~30% cheaper.

<comment><USER11> I wish it was simply flat 30% cheaper. It is very misleading that 0.99% of month will be 30% cheaper than a full month, considering that Google Cloud is advertising sustained usage discounts everywhere.

<comment><USER12> Sustained usage has tiers. So .99% of a month would only be like 1% cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Since commenters are saying that the technical post is more interesting, we switched to that from [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/google- comput...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/google-compute- engine-gets-new-e2-vm-machine-types), which is the announcement post. Maybe we'll keep the original title so it's clear it's a new thing.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just because the page didn't actually include pricing...

E2-Standard:

\- 2x vCPU, 8GB: $48.92/month.

\- 4x vCPU, 16GB: $97.83/month.

\- 16x vCPU, 64GB: $391.35/month.

E2-HighMem:

\- 2x vCPU, 16GB: $65.99/month.

\- 8x vCPU, 64GB: $263.97/month.

\- 16x vCPU, 128GB: $527.94/month.

E2-HighCPU:

\- 2x vCPU, 2GB: $36.11/month.

\- 8x vCPU, 8GB: $144.45/month.

\- 16x vCPU, 16GB: $288.90/month.

I didn't list Preemptible Pricing because it is very workload specific/niche.

</comment><comment><USER15> The accompanying technical blog is more interesting than the announcement. It implies they may have ported or adapted Borg's antagonistic workload scheduling features to cloud. Huge if true, as they say.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Performance-aware live migration

Does this mean your VM getting dynamically migrated to a new server as performance issues start happening?

Sorry if it's a silly question, I've never dug into how VPS stuff works in practice.

</comment><comment><USER17> They say that the performance is similar to n1 and the price is lower, but they are not talking about preemptible price, that's more or less the same for both types.

</comment><comment><USER18> Both EPYC and Intel chips behind these?

So is there potential for much different performance between the same sized instance based on chance?

<comment><USER19> I would assume the better the core performance, the more vCPUs it can offer, vCPU being an arbitrary performance reference.

<comment><USER18> Ah, I've been assuming that a vCPU == a CPU hyperthread since forever, hadn't realized that changed.

<comment><USER3> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Your mental model is correct: vCPU means hyperthread (except for shared core things like the f1-micro, g1-small, etc.).

We had a different measure of "relative performance" called GCEU (GCE Units) but stopped publishing that as it's pretty meaningless for most people. We do our platform qualifications at Google to ensure that for users that "don't care" which CPU platform that they're on, that they get improving performance/$ and so on. But for GCE, we clearly document instead the platforms and base/all-core/single-core frequencies we use [1].

tl;dr: if you want to choose your processor, stick with N2/C2 and our upcoming AMD machine types. If you're okay with us deciding for you and want a big discount, give E2 a spin!

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/cpu- platforms](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/cpu-platforms)

<comment><USER19> Thanks for the correction. When did you stop using GCEUs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm imagining the average workload within GCP VM's to be 95 percent idle time. From oversized VM's, to machines sized for peak loads, to machines where the developer has just used a standard machine size for a 3 seconds per week cron job, to machines that are forgotten about and idle, to machines spun up as a hot spare, to machines part of build infra which are idle between builds and every weekend. There's a lot of idleness.

If machines really are idle 95 percent of the time, why is the price only discounted 30%?

<comment><USER21> > If machines really are idle 95 percent of the time, why is the price only > discounted 30%?

Because that's apparently what Google believe the market will bear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can somebody help me figure this out. I want a VPS, 2 cores 2-4gb of ram in europe. How much would it cost per month? Also how much does storage cost? And if i were to say put a minecraft server there. How would it be able to dynamically ramp the machine up and down if needed? Only via the interface? or after trying to connect to a specific port? I am not the typical target audience for these kind of server deals. But i want my small cheap server for myself.

<comment><USER23> You won't find a better deal than hetzner. I have my production server on their cheapest vps :)

Ovh is quite good too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I see these machine types have a virtio balloon memory driver so the host can reclaim memory from the VM.

What's at it for me financially to allow that? Why should I give up memory I've paid for unless I get a discount/refund? That memory will be useful even as caching of disk pages, so giving it up is making my application slower for no financial benefits.

<comment><USER24> That's why these instances are 30% cheaper.

<comment><USER20> Yeah, but I could just unload that balloon driver and get to keep all my ram all the time while still paying 30% less?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Strangely, the E2 type seems to be available when checked with "gcloud beta compute machine-types list", but not with "gcloud beta compute machine-types list --zones". Launching also doesn't work.

</comment><comment><USER25> If anyone from GCP is watching, are there updates about the following? \- Global load balancer for UDP. \- GCS signed urls for a prefix instead of only per object. \- Better latency between Europe and India.

<comment><USER3> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

I don't wanna distract from the E2 launch, but we definitely have gotten the message on all of those and they're at various stages of in-flight / complete. As an example, Policy Documents should let you do prefix-based matching for GCS: [https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/xml-api/post- object#po...](https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/xml-api/post- object#policydocument)

<comment><USER25> It seems that Policy Documents only work for uploads but I'm talking about downloads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> More opaque pricing... awesome.

As someone who just setup services on Google Cloud, I could not be more disappointed and outraged at their billing and performance. It's outrageously high for even small services (and I'm comparing it to Heroku of all places), and the documentation is even worse. Yes, there are examples but the docs are outdated, and make it almost impossible to relate what you're paying to what you're doing until you get the bill.

The $300 credit promo they offer is a joke, it's not $300 in the sense you'll get to try it out, it's that you're likely to rack up at least $300 is bullshit charges before you're even aware...

</comment><comment><USER27> Google cloud pricing and prediction is a complete mess I'm moving away from gcloud all our instances just because of this reason. Their billing prediction can jump up/down 1000% in few days with no use change. And they don't dare to say even sorry for that. But yeah they will invite Gwen Stefani and will drive you to Alcatraz spent tons of money instead of hiring engineers who can calculate basics for billing. Their CEO will tell a fairy tail about best AI for billing... and after one year it doesn't work at all. I just don't feel I'm ok with this customer approach and priorities.

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if they will make these available for GKE node pools at some point; sounds like being able to autoscale with these would make sense.

<comment><USER11> They should be available to GKE as soon as they are available for the usual VM instances. If you can't launch a node pool, I bet you also can't launch a VM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> But what do they cost? Isn't there a monthly price tag, so I can compare with other VPS providers?

<comment><USER7> old - f1-micro $0.0076 - .6GB 1 core @ .2 fraction

new - e2-micro $0.0083 - 1GB 2 cores @ .125 fraction per core?

Pretty cool if your code can use multiple cores efficiently, specially if each virtual core is guaranteed a separate physical core then this is really good! = if one core gets a congestion peak maybe the other won't.

For less than a buck/month you get better parallelism and .4GB RAM!

Sadly still no pre-purchased committed usage discount for the shared CPU instances!

\----

For those with big budgets:

old - n1-standard-1 $0.0475 - 3.75GB 1 core

new - e2-standard-2 $0.06701 - 8GB 2 cores (0.00001 really?)

I also wish we had some computation power comparison metric so that we could stop looking at apples and bananas without committing.

For monthly you multiply by 730 I think.

<comment><USER7> Replying to myself again: So you will NOT get two physical cores, both HyperThreads will be on the same physical core so no real benefits to having these smaller shared instances give you "2 cores"?

See my comments for feedback from AWS engineer. I'm guessing since both AWS and GCE run the same hypervisor now that GCE will have the same "feature"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What servers are they using with 200 physical threads?

<comment><USER15> Not sure but a 9200-series Xeon with two sockets would be 224 threads in a box.

<comment><USER31> 4 socket boards (or 8) make a lot more sense than those abominations, though. Two entirely separate CPUs in one package for a vastly increased price...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> does it have auto vertical scaling?

<comment><USER33> >Flexibility: You can tailor your E2 instance with up to 16 >vCPUs and 128 GB of memory. At the same time, you only pay >for the resources that you need with 15 new predefined >configurations or the ability to use custom machine types.

I didn't think so, but this sentence almost seems to imply that you pay for the performance ceiling when you're using it, but not when your application is idle. Would be nice to have this clarified if that's not what this means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> So cool!

</comment><comment><USER34> Go Tyler!!!!

</comment><comment><USER35> Still no ARM VMs? AWS is (still) out ahead of GCE.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm ignorant here. Why does it matter to you if your code is running on ARM or x86?

<comment><USER36> One advantage of Amazon's ARM is that it doesn't do hyperthreading, so when you rent a "thread" you actually get a full core rather than half a core.

<comment><USER37> Which ironically would probably prevent adoption of ARM. People care about and compare core counts.

Get a single core ARM instance for almost the price of a double core x86 instance. Not a great marketing speech.

<comment><USER38> No, it's the opposite. An ARM core is much cheaper than an x86 core so you can get more cores for the money. And an ARM core is cheaper than an x86 thread while providing more consistent performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It seems like this cements Google Cloud's lead in the hardware/infrastructure side. But the real problem with Google Cloud - the lack of software feature parity with AWS - is not addressed. If only there was a provider with AWS services and reliability and Google Cloud infrastructure.

<comment><USER40> What AWS products do you find to be missing on GCP?

<comment><USER11> MySQL 8, for starters.</comment></comment></comment>