Ask HN: How many hours on the weekend do you actually perform on side projects? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to re-manage my time. I've found I may spend the whole weekend putting off ~4 hours of work. I may just build in a 24-hour free/break period, and do the work after this, as I've found that's how it ends up in practice anyways. <comment><USER2> 0

The way I see it there are only a few reasons that I would ever do a side project.

1\. To make more money now by freelancing.

2\. To make more money in the future by learning new skills or heck at the point, just to keep up with the technology to stay employable.

3\. A great idea that I think I can make money on.

4\. For fun

\----

Taking those reasons into account:

1\. We make enough now to be comfortable and I'm not willing to prioritize making more money over exercising or spending time with my family and friends.

2\. I try to make sure I have a job that lets me keep learning. I'll spend extra time at work trying to figure out a new to me technology to incorporate in my job. That's the quickest way to learn how something works in a real world environment.

3\. I really don't have any great money making ideas.

4\. I find coding and problem solving "fun" That's why I enjoy my job. If I'm not enjoying my job, it's time to get a new one.

But I do spend maybe 5-6 hours a week studying and watching tech videos in my downtime or when I'm working out in my home gym.

<comment><USER3> My gut feeling is most of us would be better off doing something completely different in our spare time, ideally something that doesn't involve sitting behind a keyboard.

<comment><USER4> Your gut wants you to exercise and take hikes looking at green things every once in a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it really depends on the type of side project.

Trying to start a small business in your free time? Probably a lot of hours. I wouldn't be surprised to see people spending 20+ on the weekend for this.

Trying to beef up your resume for an imminent job search? Less than the start your own business guys, but a good amount. Maybe 10 hours on the weekend.

Do you just really, really like programming? No limit here then. As much time as you can while still eating, sleeping, and keeping your spouse happy.

Is it just like any other hobby to you? Probably <10 hours in most cases. It's not like you have any reason to finish in a timely manner and you probably have other hobbies to get to.

Have a 9-5 tech job that you plan on staying in for a while? Most people in this situation are probably at 0 hours. For most people it's just a job. No need to bring it home. Also, once you have kids and other responsibilities side projects will be one of the first things to go.

Anyways, my point here is that unless you're trying to monetize it somehow, either by starting a business or getting a future job, just do it however much you feel like. 0 hours, 10 hours, 20 hours, it doesn't really matter. It's supposed to be fun. There's nothing wrong with sitting in front of the TV all weekend, or camping all weekend without any technology, or doing anything else you want on the weekend.

A lot of people on this website have drunk the productivity kool-aid, some for good reasons, but it tends to be a little extreme in my opinion. There are better things in life to be than productive.

</comment><comment><USER6> I spend 4 hours every morning and 10 hours every weekend and have done it for 4 years now. 3-5 hours is hard, and there are days I don't feel it or am just struggling.

What I find is that if I am irritated with my day job, I do better side work. If I am irritated with my side job, my day job work quality is better. There's like this pendulum of me wanting to escape and I found harmony in having 2 things I generally like that also piss me off enough to oscillate back and forth between them. Occasionally I get delusions that my side project is on the verge of a breakout, and reality might smack me around into appreciating my day job more.

You could say I'm in a stable state of general productivity throughput, but the project that benefits varies.

<comment><USER7> I feel pretty much the same way depending on how much my job bothers me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You'll have a strong bias in the answers—so here my honest answer:

2.5h in total, 1 of that on the weekends. At most. (because I also love my girlfriend, reading, culture, music and need to cook a bit, tidy a bit, relax a bit etc...)

</comment><comment><USER9> I usually do about 3-4hrs on the weekend. My routine is wake up at ~8:30/9:00 AM and work on my side project or in my case an Android nanodegree from Udacity. I call it quits around 12/12:30 PM, go to the gym and then grab a late lunch. I really like exercising after the couples hours I spending on my side project as it helps me decompress, forget about whatever I was working on and get into the "its the weekend. enjoy it!" mindset.

</comment><comment><USER10> On a good one 20hrs.

I sleep as less as possible on Fri & Sat, get about 6 hrs. 2 hrs additional on Fri, 6 hrs on Sat & Sun. Then get plenty of sleep on Sunday. I do house work, yard stuff, the usual run arounds and I've an infant. Where there is a will, there's a way.

On a bad one maybe 6 hrs.

</comment><comment><USER11> During the week: 1 hour before work and about 2 hours after work. Weekend with my family.

</comment><comment><USER12> It all depends on who you hang out with.

I move countries a lot, and so my group of friends changes with every move. So something I've realized is that if I have a group of friends who are into getting shit done, such as active enterpreneurs, then I tend to put a lot more time into my free-time projects as well. Conversely, when I have friends who like to spend time watching movies and drinking beer (nothing wrong with that, in moderation), then I tend to get a lot less done.

So the answer really depends on the circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER13> 4-6 hours per day on both Saturday and Sunday, sometimes more.

I am trying to learn as much as I can right now, and hoping to one day start my own company or build my own app.

</comment><comment><USER14> Depends how you define "side projects." I spend about 4 hours each Sat/Sun morning playing and practicing guitar and singing, rest of the time studying up on CS concepts missed to try and fill in the gap with not having a degree in case they are ever needed though doing fine on the job without in-depth theory. If I had more of a social life out here might be a little different.

</comment><comment><USER15> I spend most of my hours during the week.

Depending on what I'm doing and how much I want to get done, I'll usually spend a few hours each day between 10pm - 4am.

If it's a new project or a big feature, I'll carve out a large chunk of the weekend to work on it. Maybe start around 10am, work until 5pm... go get food or go to the bar after that. Do it again on Sunday unless I make other plans.

</comment><comment><USER16> None. I went part-time in my day job and now spend thu/fri working on my side project. It's good to have the weekend back.

</comment><comment> jon-wood This weekend I spent 1.5 hours on recreational coding - at the moment I'm working through NAND to Tetris. The rest of the weekend was spent with my family, watching TV, or reading.

I also do a 3 hour each way commute into the office once or twice a week which I'll often spend on side projects.

</comment><comment><USER17> I maybe manage 3-4 hours of work during the week on a good week. I probably put in 4-8 hours of work on the weekends.

</comment><comment><USER18> 0 - i don't even want to look at my phone during the weekends. Prefer to spend it with my family.

</comment><comment><USER19> None whatsoever. I'd rather read a book, go for a walk or learn to knit.

</comment><comment><USER20> 0

</comment><comment> cup-of-tea I spend 1-3 hours each day on side projects. Weekends make no difference.</comment>


Google on today's massive Google+ spam influx: "We ran out of disk space" - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/07/09/google-on-massive-google-spam-influx-we-ran-out-of-disk-space/

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Given the minimum size of a Colossus cluster I find the explanation Vic gives unsatisfying. That being said I'm pretty impressed with the overall product, it is the best attempt yet to unseat Facebook, and I predict it will if Facebook can't come up with a credible response quickly.

The killer feature is that its blended with Gmail, and since a lot of people keep gmail open all the time it means you get notified and you see stuff. Not as common to keep one's facebook page open.

<comment><USER4> _since a lot of people keep gmail open ... Not as common to keep one's facebook page open._

Do you have data on this? I'd think it would be close, if not the opposite.

Edit for clarification:

In my social circles, what you said is probably true, but I know many others use FB messages more than email (any email, not just gmail). Facebook has more pageviews total, and Facebook has probably around 3X as many active users (I couldn't find numbers at the same point in time, Gmail was at around 200 million last November as per the WSJ, Facebook was at 500 million last July and 750 million last week)

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you that G+ notifications in Gmail (and on Google Search!) is hugely powerful, and will mean G+ engagement among its users will stay quite high. But when you talk about "unseating" Facebook, you have to first come to grips with just how entrenched it is, compared to social networks that rose and fell before it. It is so entrenched that Gmail integration alone will not be enough - Facebook is substantially bigger than Gmail.

<comment><USER3> You are correct in that I was generalizing when I should not have been.

I've used Google Apps for work and since a lot of communication comes through email that means Gmail is open (or at least getting notifications with the talk gadget). I would not be surprised if you were correct that many folks leave Facebook open all the time.

<comment><USER5> it's worse than that: among my non technical friends email is used only for "serious stuff" as talking with teachers (or students, for my friends who teach) and for work. For the others facebook messages have supplanted email.

I am obviously not sure this is a global trend, but I keep using the test "who did you receive an email from, recently, who isn't work or a fellow technical person?". Results are somewhat scary.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, email is now the snail-mail of the mid-2000s.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, this means the spammers will have to change venues to reach that part of their demographic. That should be giving them something to think about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not so long ago hard disk space was abundant, then programmers realized hard disk space was abundant.

</comment><comment><USER8> Shouldn't there be a Beta tag on the Google Plus icon. Perhaps they left it on Gmail for so long they didn't think anybody would pay attention to it anymore.

</comment><comment><USER9> Some quick napkin math on numbers:

If you're to believe Eric Schmidt when he says 'millions' and put that at 3 million users (being generous), guessing that each user uploads 20 megabytes of content (again, generous) thats:

3x10^6 × 20 MB

6x10^7 MB or

60TB

Sanity check or does that not seem like a lot of resources to allocate to a project of this size?

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER10> 60TB? That's about a couple grand worth of space. Why would that be a lot of space to Google?

<comment><USER11> Even using 3TB consumer grade SATA disks you'd need 20 of them, an enclosure for 20 disks costs a _lot_ more than a couple of grand.

<comment><USER12> Not really.

[http://shopping.yahoo.com/721280117-supermicro- sc216-e2-r900...](http://shopping.yahoo.com/721280117-supermicro- sc216-e2-r900ub-system-case/)

<comment><USER11> That's a chassis for 2.5" disks so you'd be looking at 60x1TB disks, and that would mean 3 of those enclosures. Now rack them somewhere and add power - still much more than a couple of grand, we haven't even paid for the disks yet...

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I was a tad hyperbolic in just referring to the disks. I would expect the costs to be around $20/GB/year when you also factor in power - <USER2> drives are making a difference, but the other factors always cost more than the disks themselves.

It doesn't change the fact that 60TB is _tiny_ for a company whose every product involves storing enormous quantities of data and serving them at monstrous scale.

<comment><USER3> And according to the GFS paper their are three copies of every chunk in a GFS cluster so that is 180TB, and they probably don't depend on one GFS cluster to meet their availability guidelines so if you had two that is really 320TB (180TB * 2).

And the amazing part is if you are in an open event where Google is talking about their infrastructure in general terms you will realize that that has to be mouse nuts compared to the amount of 'spinning rust' they have going on at any one time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So I guess "field testing" is the new beta testing? Google watered down beta by applying it to finished products to the degree that they've had to invent a new term to fill its function.

</comment><comment><USER14> I still have this happen, and every time I tell myself right, today I'm going to put in a warning system that'll stop this happening .... and then I clear up a ton of space and move on.

HTTP.sys logging has been a real pain in my ass, every time I deploy a new server I forget to disable it and we do so much traffic it fills the drive completely overnight.

<comment><USER15> Sounds like you need to automate setting up a new server

<comment><USER16> Or at least automate the logging process. 5-minute log monitor that compresses old logs, and maybe moves them off the system onto a cloud server once space starts to run out, while also e-mailing the people responsible.

<comment><USER14> Yep that would help, notifications are built into about 1/2 my platform now ... gradually getting them more robust. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Running out of disk space is probably the single biggest category of server problem that occurs.

</comment><comment><USER18> Seems today and yesterday (for me and those I have invited anyway) there has been no issue with creating an account straight away. So I'm guessing this has sent the total users on the service up pretty fast.

</comment><comment><USER19> running out of diskspace is devops 101, it is high time these colossus startups start publishing which CMM level standard they meet

<comment><USER20> Are you joking?

<comment><USER19> no, I am pretty serious, down votes dont change reality. there are apps/services which are signing on 99.999% availability.

if after having a expertise in managing 200million+ gmail accounts, I would consider it a bad fumble at 5 million+ users

<comment><USER21> Mentioning devops undermines your credibility. What service is 5 nines? How is that measured?

In general, Google SRE just gets it done. Sometimes people screw up. It happens.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I'm Joining CloudFlare - <AUTHOR> https://words.steveklabnik.com/i-m-joining-cloudflare <comment><USER2> This is a genre of post that I've never really understood. Klabnik is great and all, but, ok? Sure? Were people really record-scratching over his totally reasonable decision to take a good-paying job at a big company?

It's obviously not just Klabnik. In fact, when we did Starfighter a few years back, I think Patrick did one of these posts as well. But: like every other post about Starfighter on HN while we were working on it, the whole thing was pretty uncomfortable. It's an experience I'd prefer not to repeat.

There are lots of excellent people taking all sorts of jobs at all sorts of places, and, unless those jobs involve, I don't know, mechanizing payday loans to squeeze poor people or hacking the phones of people the government of Bahrain doesn't like, nobody needs to justify them. Some of these posts seem like they might be good examples of content actually better delivered in a tweet.

It's possible that I just don't think Cloud Flare has earned the spotlight Klabnik is giving here. Who knows. But I felt the same way when Yegge announced his job at Grab --- just, "why am I reading this?" I'm sometimes reminded of the way Anthony Bourdain described the trailing years of Mario Batali's tenure at Food TV (Batali was a "lion" but not in a good way). Like: did you want to write this, or did Cloud Flare reallllllly want you to write this?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's cool man, not everything is for everyone.

> Were people really record-scratching over his totally reasonable decision to > take a good-paying job at a big company?

I actually anticipated a few people being confused because of a few reasons. It seems like, so far at least, nobody has actually been confused. It happens. But I've experienced a lot of that previously; so like, moving from "writing documentation" to "product manager" and "everything is MIT/Apache2.0 licensed" to "a closed source platform" can look like big changes from the outside.

And really, I have wanted to write this bit about edge compute for a while, this is just a good excuse to finally publish the piece. I've been talking to CloudFlare for a few months, and it felt slightly odd to write it before I told the world "hey I may have some bias here." Now that I've made my decision and that bias is clear, that helps further discussion.

<comment><USER2> Yeah just to be clear, you're simply at the leading edge of a phenomenon that's been puzzling me for awhile, probably starting with that Yegge/Grab piece (after which, from what I can tell, he was never heard from again). Don't fade away!

<comment><AUTHOR> :) <3

Oh, one last bit I missed:

> Like: did you want to write this, or did Cloud Flare reallllllly want you to > write this?

I brought up to them that I wanted to write a post about joining, and asked if they wanted marketing to look it over or something. They said "no need, we'll be happy with whatever you write."

I see it as a mutually beneficial thing, and always have, everywhere I've worked.

<comment><USER3> Are you concerned at all how the Wireguard thing is playing out vs your desire to see this stuff open sourced?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it depends on which "Wireguard thing" you're talking about, there were several semi-controversies.

If you mean "Warp doesn't support generic clients", I commented about that over on the Reddit thread: [https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b9sznr/im_join...](https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b9sznr/im_joining_cloudflare/ek6tp9w/?st=ju4db19o&sh=0bcb793e&context=4)

If you mean "CloudFlare pursued BoringTon outside of the general WireGuard project", well, I don't have any real insight into the specifics of why that was chosen, but it seems extremely open source to me. As far as I know, BoringTon is just an implementation of a protocol. There's a ton of reasons to want to do things on your own rather than work on upstream. And if anything, for protocols, independent implementations can be a good thing, more than a bad thing.

If you mean something else, well, I'm not sure, those are the only ones I can remember :p

<comment><USER2> Well, they took WireGuard, wrote a Rust implementation of it, refused to collaborate with Jason, who's been trying to get a Rust implementation of his protocol off the ground, then rolled it out as a proprietary offering that WireGuard itself is not allowed to connect to. This seems like the sort of analysis that would be pretty cut-and-dried among open source advocates (I'm not one of those, so I'm not saying it's cut-and-dried for me).

Your previous rooting interest in this story would have been for Rust itself. And Rust itself would have been been best served by having it host the dominant sanctioned userland implementation of WireGuard, not merely as an implementation detail for a commercial offering that also treats WireGuard as yet another implementation detail. Rust? Important! WireGuard? Important! Warp? Who gives a fuck?

So this is a bit of a surprising response to see from you.

 _Apologies for the late edit:_

I should lay my own cards on the table here.

First, it's not much of a secret that I'm no fan of big Flare. But just to be clear: good friends of mine have worked there, and several other people I deeply respect have as well, and I don't judge any of them for that.

Much more importantly: Jason Donenfeld is, to my mind, the hardest working person in show business, and he's set himself on one of the most important projects in network security, basically all on his own, and the momentum he's managed to achieve doing that is insane and a little inspiring --- especially given the amount of shade he's been repaid with by network security luminaries --- and basically the last thing in the world he needs is to burn cycles worrying what some giant corporation is doing with his work (which, sure, does not include this Rust implementation, but very obviously does include all the hard protocol design and validation work he's been doing over the last several years, which, if it were easy and straightforward to do, several people would have done before him).

I've done about as much serious technical work on WireGuard as you have --- to wit: none, though I am a loyal, diligent distributor of WireGuard stickers. My partners all feel the same way, so we've just been sending the project cash.

If your employer has done the same, and dumped a giant bucket of cash on Jason in exchange for having gotten so much mileage out of his work, that would be an _excellent_ rejoinder to this particular set of concerns.

Eagerly, therefore, awaiting my comeuppance on this thread! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> So, I'm hedging because I frankly know next to nothing about WireGuard. It's clear you know a lot more. But, without knowing more details, I can't really say if it's good or bad.

> then rolled it out as a proprietary offering that WireGuard itself is not > allowed to connect to.

So, I said this in the link, but the implementation of the protocol itself is, as Zack said, fully open source. To me, that's the high order bit here. And as I said on the reddit thread, it appears from the outside that this is more of a support issue than anything else. Maybe that's a lie, but I'm inclined to take jgc at his word.

On working with upstream, what they said publicly is this: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/boringtun-userspace-wireguard- ru...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/boringtun-userspace-wireguard- rust/#comment-4401651800)

> We communicated with Jason throughout the process and have a ton of respect > for him and the entire WireGuard community. In the short term, we need the > flexibility to quickly update BoringTun's code base to support the project > we built it for. That's harder when you need to coordinate with people > outside Cloudflare and when we need to move as fast as we plan to. However, > we really believe in Open Source and want the WireGuard community to thrive. > We licensed the code very openly (3-paragraph BSD) and WireGuard may choose > to fork it. If they do, we'll support it and plan to contribute any > improvements in our own fork back. Over the long term, I think we're very > open to merging this back into the upstream project.

This seems very reasonable to me. YMMV. I have no idea what requirements would cause this friction at the moment, but peeking at [https://www.wireguard.com/#contributing](https://www.wireguard.com/#contributing) it looks like they do the "non-GitHub server + mailing list" for development. I mean, I'm literally wearing a GitHub hoodie, but I know that I personally prefer the GitHub workflow to the point where if doing work via that system were an upstream requirement, I'd probably do my own thing on GitHub too.

Basically, it may be good, it may be bad. I don't have enough information to really pass judgement.

<comment><USER2> Hold on, you had no trouble judging whether it was good or bad on that Reddit thread. And, in case the subtext isn't clear: you've been at Cloud Flare for like, a minute. And as you said downthread: this is what you do: you advocate and evangelize. So this seems like pretty legitimate grist for discussion. Are you comfortable with your advocacy here, or having second thoughts about it?

:gif_of_homer_simpson_backing_slowly_into_the_hedge: is a totally legit response to this whole situation, for what it's worth.

(I'll reiterate: it would be amusing if your employer just smote me where I stand by revealing the large donation they've made to Jason's project).

<comment><AUTHOR> > So this seems like pretty legitimate grist for discussion. Are you > comfortable with your advocacy here, or having second thoughts about it?

My job isn't to be a PR person for everything Cloudflare does. Cloudflare has and does things I disagree with. It's a company with a lot of people working there, after all :)

All of this stuff is completely outside of what is going to be my job. And a job I haven't even started yet! I mean, sure, it's legitimate to talk about like anything is, but if you want to know what's going on, I'm certainly not the person to talk to about it.

<comment><USER2> ... right! I agree! So, again: why were you volunteering opinions about the norms-compliance of this Cloud Flare project on Reddit, rather than just saying, "huh, no idea, wasn't involved"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because, while it's a personal thing I am working on, I haven't yet totally learned to not write paragraphs of text when someone asks me a question. I'll get there :) I'll save this thread as a reminder for next time I'm tempted ;)

<comment><USER2> Totally legit response. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> All of this reminds me of a talk by Gary Bernhardt called The Birth and Death of JavaScript ([https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and- death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript)), which although farcical is actually a really compelling vision of the future of infrastructure.

Congrats Steve! Excited to see how this turns out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was lucky enough to be present for one of the times Gary gave this talk live. I've been joking that for the past few years, his nightmare is my dream. It, like a lot of Gary's stuff, has been very influential on me.

Thanks!

<comment><USER5> Just make sure you stay clear of the exclusion zone and you'll be fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I greatly enjoyed the "state of the union" summary on WebAssembly, and I liked how cleverly it was disguised as a new job announcement. This sounds like a dream job (at least for me), and it prompted me to look into edge computing and WASM/WASI more seriously. Thanks for the article, Steve, and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER7> Regarding the WebAssembly part, it seems to me that native Linux code sandboxed by seccomp would work just as well if not better, and has been available since 2005 (and there's also NaCL if you want in-process, as well as a bunch of VMs).

So I think the reason for "CloudFlare workers" not being available ten years ago has to be found somewhere else.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's pros and cons, like anything else. For some more details about why specifically Workers uses V8 and Isolates, I recommend this talk: [https://www.infoq.com/presentations/cloudflare-v8](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/cloudflare-v8)

Specifically,

> But the kind of scalability I'm talking about here is scalability to the > number of tenants, the number of applications that we can be hosting at one > time. The challenge with this is that, again, we don't want people to choose > one or two or five locations where their software runs; we want it to run > everywhere. We want everyone's code running in every one of our locations. > And some of our locations are not that big. Though some have lots and lots > of computers, but others have maybe a dozen machines. How do you fit- we > have 10 million customers- on a dozen machines? Turns out that the existing > technologies for this, the existing server-side technologies, don't live up > to the task. What we really need is basically 100X efficiency gain in number > of people we can host and 100X decrease in how many resources each one is > using.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really like Cloudflare's strategy with edge compute. It's kind of what you have to do if you want to leapfrog over what AWS has achieved. "Oh, you have all these data centers in convenient locations for datacenters? Great. We have them near the user." That's important because a lot of future things depend on low latency, like gaming in the "cloud" instead of on a $500 console you have to buy every few years.

<comment><USER9> \- AWS has an edge network. Microsoft and Google have _huge_ edge networks, with PoPs all over the place. Akamai also has a huge edge network. You also have to guess at the size of each PoP, which is just as important as having a PoP in a location.

\- CF still has a less sophisticated targeting system than these larger companies that have been doing this for a long time. Targeting is everything when it comes to CDNs.

\- Streaming games is totally different than serving web pages. It requires specialized hardware and targeting. It's basically a whole different business.

CF has a great strategy, but it seems to be focusing more on using their agility to adopt WA and Rust early and turn them into advantages.

<comment><USER10> > CF still has a less sophisticated targeting system than these larger > companies that have been doing this for a long time. Targeting is everything > when it comes to CDNs.

Do you have pointers to public data comparing services?

<comment><USER3> Just look up Maglev from Google. I mean, that stuff is years ahead of CF (don't get me wrong, CF is fine).

Argo from CF is a year or so old and that sort of stuff was done like 10+ years ago at Akamai. Cotendo had a great system that was more impressive 5+ years ago.

Stackpath don't have the sort of resources that CF has but have been doing edge compute for a while now (though not WASM).

<comment><USER10> This is why I asked for data: I was hoping someone might have some numbers for what this actually means in practice. For example, using the _very_ broad numbers at [https://www.cdnperf.com/cdn- compare?type=performance&locatio...](https://www.cdnperf.com/cdn- compare?type=performance&location=world&cdn=akamai-cdn,aws-cloudfront- cdn,cloudflare-cdn,fastly-cdn,google-cloud-cdn) shows that Google has the performance nod in North America but is slower in Africa, Oceania, and South America by over twice that margin where e.g. Akamai still has a substantial edge.

Those are also not numbers I'd want to base a serious decision on since when I've benchmarked CDNs in the past it usually came down to things like reliability and something like 90th percentile numbers since the median numbers were usually fast enough but the outliers were what made people mad. Similarly, some providers had surprisingly high DNS latency (500+ms!) in various parts of the world but delivered competitive performance after that, requiring some judgement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> FYI, AWS Lambda can, and for many things, does run on edge locations (166 edge points). So your comparison is not very accurate. The right map to use on that comparison would be a CloudFront map.

<comment><USER12> It's important to not confuse Lambda for Lambda@Edge. Lambda can be executed in a total of 18 AWS regions (if you don't count GovCloud). More importantly, actually running your code in every region would be somewhat tricky, their architecture is built around you deploying to each individually.

Lambda@Edge does run on their CDN nodes, but it isn't quite for general- purpose compute, there's a long list of restrictions you can find here: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/lambda- requirements-limits.html)

If you're interested in the performance differences, I ran some comparisons using Catchpoint a while ago: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/serverless- performance-compariso...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/serverless-performance- comparison-workers-lambda/)

Lambda and Lambda@Edge also deal with things like cold-starts which impact performance irrespective of the breadth of the network. You can see some of those numbers here: [https://serverless-benchmark.com/](https://serverless- benchmark.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is the second post I see about this edge functions, and while I appreciate the advantages (decreasing network latency should definitely have an impact), will this matter much if the database is still centralized? If most edge functions still need to talk to a centralized database, won't that be essentially the same, performance wise?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are 100% right. I said this in the post:

> My role as part of Storage will be to consider "what does data access and > storage look like in this world?" If your code is moved to the edge, but > your data is still in a central server, you don't gain the full benefit of > having the code close to the client. There's a lot of interesting stuff in > this space!

Fixing this problem, or at least coming up with the plan to fix it, is now literally my job :) (There is of course already a plan in motion, given that Workers KV exists today...)

<comment><USER14> FWIW, I think "edge compute but centralized db" is often not just "not gaining the full benefit of edge compute", it's actually "way slower than everything centralized." I've worked on plenty of systems where a single web facing endpoint results in 10+ db queries. With "everything centralized", this means 1 big round trip to the data centre, then lots of tiny/fast within-datacentre round trips. But move compute away from the db, and suddenly you're triggering tonnes of really slow db calls on every client request, and the whole system slows down tremendously.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, this sounds fair! For smaller things that aren't 10+ queries, I can imagine it not being that bad, but for that, yeah, that sounds much slower.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Welcome, Steve, but, uh, ...

        ^F^f

:-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I just did it in the post, but can't change the HN title, heh. My startup was "CloudFab", so I'm too used to typing "CloudF," I guess.

Really looking forward to working with you!

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I saw that the blog had it correct. Looking forward to working with you also!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> CloudFlare Workers look like a really interesting target for ClojureScript applications. I'm not sure if that's doable for now within their limitations, but would enable a whole new way of writing web apps.

</comment><comment><USER17> As you have decided to write a blog post about this, and post it to HN, can you tell us what your total compensation will be?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure how those two things are connected, exactly, but all I'd prefer to say right now is that I am quite pleased with it. Negotiating compensation was one of the parts of the job search that I was least looking forward to, but it was quite pleasant, actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> That sounds really exciting. Congratulations!

</comment><comment><USER19> This is why I go to HN comment section. Sometimes I even go straight to comments before reading the article. The amount of insight/ diplomatic bickering is so unique it doesn't exist anywhere else (by that I mean reddit) in the interwebz.

</comment><comment><USER20> Congratulations Steve :)

edit - Also there is a small spelling mistake in this line

> A lot of people see the realtionship

<comment><USER21> Funny how the brain autocorrects when reading quickly.. I had to look at your quote twice to see the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hey Steve, thanks for your work in the API world, good luck at Cloudflare!

</comment><comment><USER23> Reading this piece, it feels like the logical next leap is for someone to come up with "Personal Lambdas", where the lambda is able to run offline, with even lower latency than the edge.

<comment><AUTHOR> So, fun fact: Workers is based off of the Web Worker standard [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API/Using_web_workers)

As part of this, you have Service Workers: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Service_Worker_API)

> They are intended, among other things, to enable the creation of effective > offline experiences, intercept network requests and take appropriate action > based on whether the network is available, and update assets residing on the > server.

So yeah, you can already do something like this today!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What application/use-case really require a lower than sub-second(what we already have) latency? I can only think of cloud gaming. Are we betting future on cloud on just gaming?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a widely held belief that response times directly influence revenue. Lots of web pages don't load in less than a second. Every bit helps. Increased performance means that you can do more work before hitting your target, meaning you can deliver more complex things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm impressed that, when I search for "Butt" with Cloud to Butt Plus turned on, I only get results for product names. Bravo!

<comment><USER25> On that front, "ButtBleed" sounds a lot worse than CloudBleed, IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Congratulations on the new job!

</comment><comment><USER27> Radical politics, emma's quotes and...cloudflare

</comment><comment><USER28> Will you be rewriting Cloudflare in rust?

<comment><AUTHOR> Cloudflare is already using Rust in a bunch of places; no need to re-write.

<comment><USER28> My comment was tongue in cheek:)

Wish you the best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Wish you the best Steve!

</comment><comment><USER30> This wasm-at-the-edge stuff is so exciting!

It's always dangerous to predict the future, but one possible future for the web feels like it's starting to come into focus: javascript as the default language everywhere (frontend, backend, edge), plus the ability to compile lots and lots of other languages to WebAssembly.

A runtime that works everywhere (or, more accurately, a handful of partially compatible runtimes) will encourage moving processing around the network relatively seamlessly. Code will run on the backend sometimes, and in the browser and apps, sometimes, and in internet edge nodes, sometimes. This feels like the future we've been aiming for since we first added Java applet support to the browser.

There's a huge amount of toolchain and runtime work still to do to get there, of course. But it's a pretty cool future. Even (maybe especially) to language snobs like me.

The article describes the four eras of "how do I web server" as: physical servers -> infrastructure as a service -> platform as a service -> function as a service. Just to make that a little more anecdotal ...

I built my first websites in 1994. There really wasn't a commercial web, yet. To build a website in 1994 you probably either stuck some files in a special place under your home directory[0] (if you were at a university), or you downloaded and installed Apache to some machine of your own. Maybe an old machine you left running under your desk.

Then in 1995 Netscape went public and kicked off the "dot com" era, and Bill Gates wrote the famous "Internet Tidal Wave" memo. [1]

All of a sudden you could get paid to build websites! Big ones (or so we thought, back then). You probably needed redundant bandwidth, and a way to expand server capacity, and 24/7 power guarantees. There wasn't really a way to get that stuff except to buy hardware yourself and put it in a data center. You paid somebody with a fancy building a few thousand dollars a month (at a minimum) for a cabinet, and a committed "95th percentile" amount of bandwidth, a power connection rated to a certain number of apps, and a network drop. Then you bought a lot of machines from Dell or Sun (depending on your budget), spent a lot of time setting them up, and drove with them in the trunk of your car to the data center.

Then the first generation of "infrastructure as a service" (Rackspace) made the logistics a lot easier, and the costs a little better. Then AWS made the costs a _lot_ better. And now "platform as a service" offerings like Elastic Beanstalk have made the logistics even easier still.

But, arguably, the as-a-service evolutions haven't made it possible to actually do new things I couldn't do on my own hardware. Faster, easier, cheaper, yes, definitely. And those are really important!

But wasm-at-the-edge feels _new_ and, maybe, transformative.

I really like this paragraph about "the future" at the end of the Cloudflare announcement about supporting WebAssembly [2]:

"We're excited by the possibilities that WebAssembly opens up. Perhaps, by integrating with Cloudflare Spectrum, we could allow existing C/C++ server code to handle arbitrary TCP and UDP protocols on the edge, like a sort of massively-distributed inetd. Perhaps game servers could reduce latency by running on Cloudflare, as close to the player as possible. Maybe, with the help of some GPUs and OpenGL bindings, you could do 3D rendering and real-time streaming directly from the edge."

[0]-[https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/howto/public_html.html](https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/howto/public_html.html) [1]-[https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet- memo/](https://www.wired.com/2010/05/0526bill-gates-internet-memo/) [2]-[https://blog.cloudflare.com/webassembly-on-cloudflare- worker...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/webassembly-on-cloudflare-workers/)

<comment><USER31> You don't need WASM to deploy compiled binaries to a web server, so I don't understand the excitement. It may be convenient for the provider (CloudFlare), but not necessarily for the customer. Performance will be better without WASM and it's an additional step in the build pipeline, compared with CloudFlare supporting any x86 binary.

WASM's purpose is to compile languages to run in a web browser. A CloudFlare "worker" is a web server that runs at a data center close to the user.

<comment><USER30> It's useful to be able to write code that runs on your server, and in the browser, and in an "edge" thingy too (for some definition of "edge"). x86 binaries aren't going to be able to do that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> good for you

</comment><comment><USER33> This post has hit number one on the front page, so I assume I am out of the loop; why is this significant?

<comment><AUTHOR> For one, this post is more than "I got a job"; there's a lot of words spilled about the evolution of web application platforms.

For another, I've been posting here for ten years. [https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders](https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders) has me at #19. (I'm a fan of patio11's "this is basically an odometer" take on that, of course.) My "I'm leaving Mozilla" post got a lot of attention too, as well as most of my previous job change posts. I know I like hearing about what HN members are up to, and I guess other people do too.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, you've got enough name recognition here that I saw the headline and my reaction was, "oh, good for him." Same with patio11 joining Stripe. I don't think I'd call HN a community exactly, but there are still people behind the names and it's nice to see positive changes happening for them.

And your post was technically interesting too. I hadn't caught wind of WASI or WASM being run on edge services, so that's given me something to read more about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Of course the submission disappears in true corporate controlled fashion once uncomfortable comments appear.

Must be a fun place to work at. Is Cloudflare tracking this post?

<comment><USER36> Indeed. There were like half a dozen people from the company all commenting on this post including their CTO. And then poof, gone.

<comment><USER12> We certainly didn't want the post to disappear. It was flagged by HN (either the mods or people with enough karma to flag), we would happily have it be restored if it were under our power.

I've read through every comment on this page and there's nothing here I wouldn't stand behind, even if much of seems to be misunderstood as in this thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is a pretty genius move on CloudFlare's part. By getting Steve and investing in Rust before it and WA really takes off they get a seat at the table, and will probably have considerable influence and domain knowledge in both technologies compared to other companies when it becomes mainstream.

Rust is also hedging its bets on WA, and it's looking like Rust might be _the_ language of the future web on the server and client (thanks for all the fish Javascript). CF investing in Rust is mutually beneficial. Rust is still new, agile, and will let people write safe code, which is going to be critical when running modules in the end user's browser.

Hope they let Steve spend a lot of his time continuing to make Rust great, and hopefully Steve will encourage the other Rustacians at CF to make Rust better for the rest of us.</comment>


Cloudflare debuts a security solution for IoT - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/27/cloudflare-debuts-a-security-solution-for-iot/ <comment><USER2> So just like spam, malware and other shenanigans that would have been trivial to fix the root cause, we are instead going to wrap this with yet another business model?

More power to the CDN's that find new money on this old problem.</comment>


Realistic 3D reconstructions of physical spaces - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/Engineering/posts/10156364288407200 <comment><USER2> what paper is this?</comment>


Scriggle-it: the ultimate fan management solution for any musician - <AUTHOR> http://www.scriggleit.com/ <comment><USER2> Nothing with such a dumb name will ever catch on but it might be good buyout- bait.

</comment><comment><USER3> Holy smokes! I've been looking for something like this for ages! rawk

</comment><comment><USER4> Ruby on Rails? Check. Rounded corners? Check. prototype.js? Check. Buzzwords? Check. Home page includes a blog? Check. Yep, it's Web 2.0.

</comment><comment><USER5> The scriggler application is awesome. I have wanted someone to make something like that for years. Good-bye paper mailing lists at my shows.

</comment><comment><USER6> They haven't updated this site in a while!

</comment><comment><USER7> I really like they way this website is set up.

</comment><comment><USER8> web 2.0 and web s.3xy ...well sort of ;)</comment>


How I got 300+ HN points posting a 5yo+ link that made the front page for 20hrs - <AUTHOR>

I thought I'd share my story about the link I posted the other day, Free VMs of Windows to test older versions of IE (microsoft.com).  I never realized this link would be worth 300+ Hacker News points, but I thought the story around it might be interesting enough to share.
I was working on a client site that required the use of IE 7 to test a particular bug. I had installed VirtualBox in the past, but after doing a fresh install of OS X I was trying to avoid that whole process.  In fact I was even considering installing the old, old version of IE 5.5 that was actually released for the Mac platform back in the stone age.  So I went to Google and searched for "ie os x" and found this:
http://samvermette.com/256.  This was the first I heard of Microsoft releasing free VMs so I thought, "Hey cool, I'll share this on Twitter".  I posted the link, @stroughtonsmith retweeted it and before I knew it I had retweets and stars coming in at a consistent clip.
Through the retweets came a single mention pointing me over to https://github.com/xdissent/ievms which was quite useful for my case.  Knowing the original article was published in June of 2011 I knew this wasn't new information, but I figured I'd post the link to HN anyway. I figured somebody had to have posted it in the past, so I might get a duplicate link error or something.
Well that didn't happen and immediately it started to get points and comments, very helpful comments at that.  I chimed in a few times in the beginning and got bonus points for a couple of my early comments.
So a few things I learned from this: HN doesn't necessarily reward new, cutting edge information, chiming in early to a trending topic is worth a fair number of comment points, and you learn a lot more about a topic than you do posting a link to Twitter.  Finally I found HN points aren't worth anything toward my profile.  I got absolutely zero visitors to my website and I doubt anybody even clicked over to my profile to see who I am. <comment><USER2> _Finally I found HN points aren't worth anything toward my profile._

There is literally nothing in your profile to indicate who you are or what your website is.

All I can see is the following:

        user:	Hawkee
        created:	190 days ago
        karma:	344
        avg:
        about:
        submissions
        comments

<comment><AUTHOR> Well how about that. Guess I had assumed there was a website field on the profile.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One small detail I forgot to mention is that I posted the link late at night, around 11pm EST.</comment>


Don Draper doesn't carry anything - <AUTHOR> http://rocketships.ca/blog/don-draper-doesnt-carry-anything/

<comment><USER2> That's funny -- I've recently been thinking the same thing and making some headway on the subject. Perhaps we could start a list of products and services that are making this a reality? Bitcoin and Google Wallet allow us to make payments easily with phones. Services like Own Cloud and Android Web Key allow us to set up personal clouds that we can access from our personal devices. What else is there?

<comment><AUTHOR> Google Glass, obviously, though in the future. And syncing Dropbox with my Android phone and Mac eliminates both SD cards and connecting cables. It still blows my mind that Dropbox is actually reliable, as well.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I'd like to dabble with brain computer interface, recommendations? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for tutorials and what hardware to buy. A neuroscience online course for the layman would be great as well.<p>There's http://openbci.com/ but I was wondering if there's a cheaper way to get started. Thanks <comment><USER2> Be prepared for some noisy-heavy signals. I haven't experimented around with enough different acquisition methods to recommend a particular device, but each one is going to have their own challenges (either $ getting them or some negative signal quality issue).

Once you have a system there should be some basic demos with regards to observing a few EEG bandpower based estimates. Beyond that I would recommend looking at SSEVP (steady state evoked visual potential) as all of the conference papers/talks/posters/etc about that topic make it seem reasonably approachable compared to other tasks, being EEG (rather than LFP) friendly (IIRC), and it makes for some cool applications.

source - I spent a few years researching EEG/LFP recordings in the context of speech and sleep (separately)

</comment><comment><USER3> What do you want to do?</comment>


Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto-restoring.html <comment><USER2> I haven't used one of those in a long time.

Stanford had several Alto machines, but they didn't have Smalltalk, due to some licensing issue. They just ran standalone Mesa programs. When I was at Stanford, few people wanted to use the obsolete Altos, so time on them was available. So I did a small project on them.

Bravo was used as both the text editor and the word processor. The file format was plain text, then a control-Z, then the formatting info. The compiler stopped at control-Z. So you could use bold and italic in your programs, and make the source code look good.

As in the picture shown, the Stanford machines had the keyboard and display on top of the computer. This isn't required, and it's really annoying to type on. The keyboard is great; it's a massive casting around clicky keys.

Altos talk PUP, Parc Universal Protocol, over 3MB coax ethernet. Stanford had gateways to connect this to the wider world.

I think I still have some of the Alto manuals.

The vision statement for the Dynabook is in "Personal Dynamic Media"[1] This is worth re-reading every few years.

[1] [http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf](http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf)

<comment><USER2> I just looked in some boxes I haven't opened in decades. I have "Mesa Language Manual, Version 5.0, April 1979". If the people with the Alto need this, let me know.

If the world had used Mesa instead of C, computing would have been far less buggy. Mesa was a hard-compiled language, but it had concurrency, monitors, co-routines ("ports", similar to Go channels), strong type safety, and a sane way to pass arrays around. In the 1970s.

(I should donate this stuff to the Computer Museum. I just found the original DEC Small Computer Manual, many 1960s UNIVAC mainframe manuals, and a reel of UNIVAC I steel magnetic tape.)

<comment><USER3> Maybe Modula-3 is too distant from Mesa to make this a valid point, but if not, there's a discussion to be had about why the Mesa-influenced Modula-3 (or the arguably essentially similar Ada) didn't sweep all before it in the 90s.

Is it that the "small set of sharp tools" provided by C, and the "safe and somewhat onerous discipline" provided by Modula-3 represent two points on an evolution that's converging towards the ideal systems programming language? Or maybe the language level is the wrong level at which to be considering this, as if we were analyzing prose at the level of phonemes?

<comment><USER2> No, it's that Compaq bought DEC, and then HP bought Compaq, and that ended the DEC Systems Research Center in downtown Palo Alto. That's where most Modula-3 development took place.[1]

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

<comment><USER4> Lucky HP has kept all DEC stuff alive, so anyone that wants to delve into Modula-2+, Modula-3 and everything that was built with them just needs to dive into the HP Labs repository.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We've all been fans of Ken's blog for years, so were thrilled that he took an interest in this project. Not only is Ken doing these amazing writeups, he gathered together the master restorers and engineers, some of whom worked on Altos at the time, who are now working on this one. Seeing them set to it, inspecting the Alto and figuring out what would be needed, was a real lesson in self-organization. I felt honored just to watch from the side.

We have two goals. One is to have the restoration chronicled as it goes along, in a way the HN community can discuss and participate in. Obviously we hit the jackpot there, with one of the best technical bloggers in the world.

The other goal is to do something with the Alto that the community will find interesting once it's running. A couple ideas are to make it fetch and render the front page of HN (we'd happily write whatever code was needed to serve it in a suitable format, since HTML is probably a bridge too far), or if we could find a second Alto to communicate with, play Maze War on them ([http://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xerox-maze- war/#ma...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/games/xerox-maze- war/#maynard)). But we'll be eager to hear any suggestions the community comes up with!

<comment><USER6> I have a Symbolics XL-1200 that I've been wondering what to do with. Would YC like it? It worked the last time I turned it on, but that was 4 or 5 years ago, probably.

It's like triple-pizza-box size, not a refrigerator nor even the size of the Alto.

<comment><USER5> I think the answer to that is very likely: hell yeah! But we should wait until the Alto is running. Can we keep in touch about this?

<comment><USER6> Sure, no problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I used the Alto at MIT (and for fun when I worked at PARC -- we had more powerful machines by then).

There are two other things about the alto that have really stuck in my mind. First, the whole thing uses only 300 SSI and MSI TTL chips! No higher order chips (no LSI, much less VLSI).

The other is that the bus bandwidth was only 3/2 the screen update rate. Updating the screen was _really_ important: this was a user-centered, IO- focussed machine which was super radical for its time. If you wanted to do a lot of computation you could steal cycles from the screen update, causing it to go black (in just the bottom half or so IIRC which I probably don't).

Error in the article: I do believe the Alto was the origin of the BITBLT instruction, but it was based on the PDP-10 (PDP-6) block transfer instruction BLT, and the expression blitting was current before the Alto was developed. In fact PARC had a PDP-10 which was the standard research computer at the time -- homemade as well (clones) because at that time Xerox was in the computer business and wanted PARC to use an SDS. (Again this is before my time though MAXC was still running when I was there -- with an Alto as its front end!)

Also contrary to what the article says, the Alto display was _not_ unusual in being portrait mode -- most glass TTYs (think ADM-3A, Hazeltine, VT-52, and I believe the 3270 as well) were taller than they were wide, like a piece of paper. The Alto display was unique, as mentioned, by being bitmapped and black on white. Because of the Alto, bitmapped portrait mode was standard for workstations such as the CADR lisp machines, Bell's BLT terminal, three rivers PERQ, and of course the later PARC computers we used, Dolphins, Dorados (all ECL logic!), Dandelion (sold as the Star). I remember vividly the first landscape machine I used, the Symbolics 3600 in 1985. I didn't, and still don't appreciate the wasted space of landscape displays.

Three-button mice with the mouse buttons arrayed horizontally was also standard because of the Alto. The first time I saw the Macintosh mouse in 84 I was shocked: how could someone use only a one-button mouse? There was a lot of mouse (originally called the "bug") experimentation in the 70s on button count and layout.

The microcode of the alto was compatible with the DG nova as that was the computers used at PARC before the Alto was developed (before my time!).

edit: forgot to mention the origin of blitting.

<comment><USER8>
      > most glass TTYs (think ADM-3A, Hazeltine, VT-52, and I believe
      > the 3270 as well) were taller than they were wide

That's mistaken.

[http://terminals.classiccmp.org/wiki/index.php/Lear_Siegler_...](http://terminals.classiccmp.org/wiki/index.php/Lear_Siegler_ADM-3A)

[http://terminals.classiccmp.org/wiki/index.php/Hazeltine_100...](http://terminals.classiccmp.org/wiki/index.php/Hazeltine_1000)

[http://terminals.classiccmp.org/wiki/index.php/DEC_VT52](http://terminals.classiccmp.org/wiki/index.php/DEC_VT52)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3270)

Edit: Yes, I should have replied to the other comment…

<comment><USER5> (If you want to post a link to the comment you meant to reply to, we'll move it and delete this one.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We had some Altos (and a laser printer) at the Bureau of Standards, when I interned there in the late 1970s and early 80s. They had a number of games; one of them was written in SmallTalk, which you could break into, and then muck around in. Some screenshots from BYTE and a few papers gave us syntax hints, and we were off.

At one point we had some questions about SmallTalk-76 and called up Xerox PARC. Managed to get hold of Adele Goldberg, who answered our questions but was not terribly amused. I think Alan Kay would have been friendlier to us kids :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> My first impressions of it are that the portrait oriented monitor actually looks very stylish. There is something almost futuristic about it.

<comment><USER11> These days, some displays allow you to rotate them between landscape and portrait orientiation.

At work, I have a 24 inch TFT in portait mode which I use mostly for coding (and other tasks where vertical space is valuable). It is very nice, because e.g. in text processing, a whole page fits the screen nicely.

In a way, we have that with tablets and phones, too.

<comment><USER12> Operating systems and drivers will allow rotation of most monitors and it mainly comes down to a matter of mounting hardware if autorotation isn't a big deal. Monoprice has a stand for about $20.

[http://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=108&cp_id=10828&cs_id=...](http://www.monoprice.com/product?c_id=108&cp_id=10828&cs_id=1082808&p_id=5970&seq=1&format=2)

<comment><USER13> There is an non-obvious caveat to using vertical monitors on Windows though - ClearType font rendering doesn't support vertical subpixel arrangements, so you're stuck with naive anti-aliasing.

<comment><USER14> Color subpixel font hinting is on its way out. Windows 8 and 10 stopped using it for UWP (including the start menu / start screen); DirectWrite doesn't use it (font rendering in Edge and Firefox); Office 2013 doesn't use it.

Certainly screen rotation (with windows tablets and phones) would involve a lot of inefficient re-rendering. But i think the official reason was that since the subpixel colouring effect depends on the background colour, it's hard to animate transitions efficiently.

On a high-DPI screen, you'd be hard-pressed to notice the difference compared to greyscale hinting. Colour subpixels were a great hack, but high-DPI is the proper solution to this issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is a lot of documentation about the Alto. Are there also complete circuit diagrams? I am just curious because the processor was made in TTL at a time before the 6502 and Z80 were born.

Sooner or later the last functional Xerox Alto will cease to work (sadly). In that case it could make sense to replace the dysfunctional parts with modern retro circuits. I wonder if a project to build a functional Alto clone (with TFT as screen) would make less effort than the famous monster 6502 which was presented recently.

<comment><AUTHOR> All the Alto schematics are available at Al Kossow's Bitsavers [1]. If you want to understand how it works, start with the hardware manual [2]. The Alto processor could probably be kept running indefinitely, since it uses standard parts that can be replaced. The monitor is more difficult; the Living Computer Museum made some new monitor boards for their Altos, cloning the existing boards. The disk drives are another potential maintenance nightmare; I wonder if it would be possible to build a flash-based disk emulator.

Making a FPGA-based Alto clone would be a possibility.

[1] [http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/schematics](http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/schematics)

[2] [http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/AltoHWRef.part1.pdf](http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/AltoHWRef.part1.pdf)

<comment><USER16> LCM built MASSBUS adapters for their PDP-10's, its probably possible. (to be clear, the ALTO was built in total from COTS parts, the disks are of a known type used on many other minicomputers, including I believe the DG NOVA)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Total envy! There is an Alto in the Heinz-Nixdorf-Museum, but it is not functional.

Seeing one of these machines in action would be awesome. (Is there an emulator available?)

<comment><AUTHOR> The Living Computer Museum in Seattle has a running Alto, but I haven't seen it. I've used the Salto emulator: [https://github.com/brainsqueezer/salto_simulator](https://github.com/brainsqueezer/salto_simulator)

<comment><USER16> I have seen it, and used BravoX on it. I even gave a demo to standers by once I figured it out. Its a very interesting system, one that is clearly not too removed from a modern word processor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Xerox Alto brings back some memories indeed. I used one at CMU as a frosh to do engineering drawings for the Terragator ([http://gizmodo.com/5072167/25-years-of-strange-and- wonderful...](http://gizmodo.com/5072167/25-years-of-strange-and-wonderful- carnegie-mellon-field-robots)). Being new to computers, I didn't really get that a mouse and GUI were revolutionary. It just seemed so obvious. But that is the beauty of innovation done right - that to users it just seems obvious and natural.

</comment><comment><USER18> The restoration is also being documented in Marc's youtube channel.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/mverdiell](https://www.youtube.com/user/mverdiell)

</comment><comment><USER4> This was a great system.

The more I research into Xerox's papers and manuals for Interlisp-D, Smalltalk and Mesa/Cedar systems, the more I become convinced it was a big step back to the industry the adoption of inferior systems like UNIX.

Thankfully many traces of those ideas are now in Windows, Mac OS X, Android and iOS, Language Playgrounds and many IDE workflows.

<comment><USER19> I agree. UNIX has some brilliant ideas, like isolated functions (executables) connected by streams, but beyond that it made a lot of mistakes that we are still dealing with today.

The biggest one being a C-centric view of programming that has cost the world untold billions of dollars when dealing with untrusted data. It could have used a statically analyzable functional middleware of some kind, falling back to micro optimization only when needed - the way that Clojure works with say, JavaScript.

The other major failing that I see is overlooking ideas from ZFS, that the filesystem can act as a virtual tree over any storage medium, so UNIX wastes a lot of time on things like dependency hell, permissions, and distinguishing between file and socket streams or local and remote processors. It could have jailed each process in its own sandbox where copies of libraries are reference counted by the filesystem, running in a virtual storage and thread space. We're just now seeing the power of that with Vagrant and Docker (technically it took so long to get here due to virtualization resistance by Microsoft and Intel).

My other main gripe is more about approach than technology. UNIX (and LINUX especially) stagnated decades ago due to the RTFM philosophy. The idea being that to be proficient in UNIX, one had to learn the entirety of the operating system. This goes against one of the main tenets of computer science, that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. So I really appreciate how passionately the Alto tried to make computing and programming approachable to the masses.

I keep hoping someone will release a portable lisp machine that can run other OSs under virtualization and release us from these antiquated methodologies..

<comment><USER20> > The biggest one being a C-centric view of programming that has cost the > world untold billions of dollars when dealing with untrusted data.

That's pretty simple to explain: all those other options were just way too slow to get the kind of performance required out of the hardware available at the time. The difference was simply too large to be ignored.

It's all nice and good to theorize about how the past should have been, but without UNIX you probably wouldn't be writing any of this on the medium you're currently using.

It has its flaws and it is far from perfect but at the time it fit the bill nicely.

The real problem is that we are categorically unable to move on when better options are around. There is a large amount of silliness involved when it comes to making responsible choices in computing, lots of ego, lots of NIH. Those are the real problems, not that UNIX was written in C.

<comment><USER21> _The real problem is that we are categorically unable to move on when better options are around_

Every 10 years or so the industry just restarts the same loop it's been stuck in since the Amiga (actually the Amiga is probably the first loop starting with the Alto) just with different syntax and faster hardware. Software is stagnant; ALL progress in in hardware. And with the end of Moore's Law that is grinding to a halt too.

<comment><USER20> I have some hope that with the end of Moore's law in sight we will _finally_ be able to concentrate on the software for some progress. All that we've achieved to date seems to be prettier way to squander cycles.

And in a way that's a real pity. It could have been that if Moore's law had been a doubling in 30 years rather than 18 months that we'd have had a lot more appreciation for writing good software. As it was the crap won out over the good stuff simply by being bailed out by Moore's law just in time for the next cycle.

But in some alternate universe hardware progress was so slow that any gains had to come from better software.

<comment><USER22> > All that we've achieved to date seems to be prettier way to squander cycles.

And stack turtles.

Whenever i see a headline about unikernels, i envision doom running on DOS in a VM on top of Linux on top of some hardware somewhere. How many layers of (potentially leaky) abstractions are we looking at?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My uncle worked at PARC when this was being made. I probably wouldn't of gone into tech, if it weren't for him.

This makes me want to message him and ask him about his time there.

<comment><USER24> get him in touch with the restoration group!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > The disk drive at the top of the cabinet takes a removable 2.5 megabyte disk > cartridge. The small capacity of the disk was a problem for users, but files > could also be accessed over the Ethernet from file servers.

(...)

> The Alto was introduced in 1973.

2.5 _mega_ bytes of removable/swappable storage ? In the 70s? I'm amazed that users found it constraining! That's more than even the Amiga managed to fit on 3.5" floppy disks (Unlike the PC which generally were only able to format for 1.44 MB, the Amiga generally fit ~1.8 on the raw 2MB HD 3.5" floppies).

<comment><AUTHOR> Keep in mind that although the Alto disk is removable, it is a hard disk, not a floppy; the user normally kept it mounted for a session, rather than using a new disk every time they load something. Thus, the disk needs to hold everything you need. (Although you could access files over the network with FTP.)

The user guide describes in great detail [1] why Alto users found 2.5MB of disk limiting. To summarize, the disk starts with 4800 512-byte pages. Basic OS stuff takes 900 pages. FTP and the editor take 900 pages. Fonts take more, as well as other commonly-needed software. So a non-programmer's disk typically has 1600 pages (800kB) available to work with. Programmers require more tools, so the free disk space is tighter. It seems people ended up needing to manage their disk space closely, even though 2.5MB sounds like a lot.

[1] See pdf page 20 of [http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/stanford/StanfordAltoUse...](http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/stanford/StanfordAltoUsersGuideSep80.pdf) for a discussion of why disk space on the Alto was rapidly used up.

<comment><USER25> I see. That coupled with the limited RAM (as opposed to eg: the Amiga 500 which had 512Kb), or the Amiga 2000 which had at least a full megabyte -- I think ours had 4MB does make a big difference.

Interesting to note (as @pjmlp mentions) that 1973 + 15 years leaves us at around the time the Amiga 2000 was introduced. I remember ours (a model b IIRC) initially had a 20MB hard-drive, later upgraded with another 40MB for a total of 60MB of storage. It could fit almost all of my floppies on there!

Looking at the wikipedia page for the Amiga 500 I see the RAM latency listed as 150 ns. I'm not sure if that's the actual latency to read data from RAM - if so it's within an order of magnitude for accessing RAM today! (I'm also a little sad that while my i7 is a lot faster than that ageing 68000 that ran at 7.5 Mhz, it's still not easy to find a single core with 7.5+ Ghz of performance :-( ...).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There are so many points in the computer industry where one or a small group's decisions changed everything. After listening to "Dealers in Lightning" you wonder about quite a lot of decisions. One of the later ones got me to thinking, what would have happened if Xerox had not got rid of its pre-IPO Apple stock and allowed the Lisa team to license Smalltalk? I wonder the sequence at that point with the Mac.

<comment><USER27> Xerox did license Smalltalk-80 to Apple. It was one of the products promised at Lisa's launch, but it was never delivered. It was ported to the Mac and became available to registered developers (I got version 0.7 through a friend who was a developer). In 1996 this evolved into Squeak and Apple was able to release it as free software thanks to its license from Xerox. Some people complained about the Squeak license, so in 2006 Apple re-released its part of Squeak under the Apache license (and the rest was re-released under the MIT X11 license by each part's author).

Xerox gave the same license to Tektronix (which launched its 4404 and 4406 Smalltalk computers), HP (which created Distributed Smalltalk) and DEC. The DEC license was extended to UC Berkeley.

<comment><USER26> According to 'Dealers in Lightning' they did not license it when Apple asked the first time. They did when they licensed it to everyone else. This was all pre-Squeak.

<comment><USER27> The first Smalltalk-80 tape was delivered to Apple, Tektronix, HP and DEC on February 17, 1981. So in a way, they all had licenses at this point though it was more a contract to review the system and the book that was being written as well as dedicating at least two engineers each to try to implement it. Three more tapes followed (the last one probably early in 1982).

When Smalltalk-80 Version 2 was released all four companies got a free license for it which allowed them to do anything they wanted, including re-release it under a different license. Which is what Apple did (three times) with Squeak. The Version 2 license is from 1982 while the Squeak licenses are from 1996 and 2006.

But you are right - Xerox did not give Apple any special treatment compared to the other three, though it did compared to the world in general.

Note that Apple had several Smalltalk users involved in the development of the Lisa and the Macintosh, but they felt Smalltalk was too much for the machines they were creating. Steve Jobs felt that was still the case when developing the NeXT, which is why they used the Smalltalk/C hybrid Objective-C.

<comment><USER26> Thanks for the info. Now, if I understand the time line for Lisa, what you have said, and what 'dealers in Lightning' have said; the book must be refering to a pre 1980 decision (or the book is out to lunch)? When did Lisa actually start?

// sorry for the latency on my responses, I'm driving west on I94

<comment><USER27> A very good timeline for the Lisa using screen captures is:

[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Busy_Being_Born.t...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Busy_Being_Born.txt)

This contradicts some accounts which say that the Lisa was a text based minicomputer before the Xerox visit.

In practice both the Lisa and the Macintosh projects started in 1979. This is pretty amazing when you consider that the floppy disk for the Apple II had just been made available less than a year before and Visicalc had not yet been released. That the Apple III was in development at this time seems pretty reasonable, but these more advanced machines were pretty ambitious.

Jef Raskin was very familiar with the Xerox PARC work since he had visited there when he was a professor at UCLA before he joined Apple to work on documentation. He didn't like the mouse or windows, but had always been interested in a fully graphical computer. His ideas for the Macintosh can be seen in his later Canon Cat machine. Steve Jobs didn't like his project and kept trying to kill it. Jef thought that if Steve could see the Alto he would "get it" and leave the Macintosh group alone. That is indeed what happened. But not long after that Steve was kicked out of the Lisa project by the board who wanted someone with more experience to be in charge of such an important project. Steve joined the Macintosh project and reshaped it as a "Lisa Jr", which caused Jef to leave Apple.

In the Lisa timeline you can see the effect of the second visit to PARC (both were in 1979) in the form of windows, though these didn't stay like the Smalltalk ones for very long (this style reappeared in the BeOS for some reason). And the effect of the launch of the Xerox Star can be seen in 1981 in the form of icons which look very much like the ones on the Star.

The Smalltalk project at Apple was started in October 1980 and lasted 18 months. The system first started running on the Lisa in April 1981.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The original Macintosh really seems like it borrowed a lot aesthetically, in addition to the similarity in operation:

[http://lowendmac.com/1984/macintosh-128k/](http://lowendmac.com/1984/macintosh-128k/)

[http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto- resto...](http://www.righto.com/2016/06/y-combinators-xerox-alto- restoring.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not seeing the aesthetic similarity between the Mac and the Alto, except that they're both beige, have a mouse, and are taller than wide. What specifically do you see in common?

<comment><USER28> Monitors back then were wide then and the Alto turned the screen on its side. The Mac somewhat similarly had a screen that wasn't wide. The Mac mouse is also copied from the Alto's if you look at the shape.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not following you here - the Mac had a wide monitor, standard 4:3 CRT, totally unlike the Alto's portrait display. The Mac's mouse had one button, while the Alto's mouse had three buttons. Both had a rectangular shape, but that's the obvious shape to use (see Engelbart's mouse).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Did the Alto have a graphical chat system?

<comment><AUTHOR> As far as I can tell, no. The Alto had a program called Chat, but this was more like telnet/ssh, allowing you to connect to a remote computer, rather than communicate with a person.</comment></comment>


Elephants without tusks are a response to the selective pressure of poaching - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/how-an-elephant-loses-its-tusks <comment><USER2> I'm hoping that at some point in the future, ML + drones will make poaching a thing of the past. Unfortunately, some African countries, such as Zimbabwe and South Africa, have restrictions on drone ownership.

Also if you want to help, you should consider donating to the International Anti-Poaching Foundation[0][1] which fights these poachers. The founder, Damien Mander[2], is an Australian ex spec-ops sniper who is using his military experience to train the park rangers since they, unlike the poachers, tend to be poorly equipped and trained as well as understaffed. There is also the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust[3][4] which takes care of elephant and rhino orphans (most of them are orphans due to poaching). For $50 a year, you can become a sponsor of a particular orphan and they'll send you photos and updates about how your sponsored animal is doing. You can for example sponsor this little fella [5][6]. It's a great gift.

[0] [http://www.iapf.org/](http://www.iapf.org/)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti- Poaching_Fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Anti- Poaching_Foundation)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Mander](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damien_Mander)

[3] [http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org](http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org)

[4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sheldrick_Wildlife_Trust)

[5] [http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphan_profile.asp...](http://www.sheldrickwildlifetrust.org/asp/orphan_profile.asp?N=318)

[6] [http://instagram.com/p/sigT3IAUKb](http://instagram.com/p/sigT3IAUKb)

<comment><USER3> It would be much better to soak some ivory in cyanide or something stronger and get it into market.

<comment><USER4> Would the cyanide slowly leach out when people touch it or something like that?

<comment><USER5> Tusks are used in "traditional medicines", among other uses.

Even the threat of poisoned ivory would be a strong disincentive for that market.

Permanently stained tusks have been used to dissuade material use (e.g., statues or figures).

<comment><USER6> Would not stained tusks have an impact on the elephants perception of each other? We as human beings have all sorts of perceptions on obesity, skin colour, hair colour..

<comment><USER7> I think what eknkc suggested was that the cyanide was to be applied to ivory which had already been collected, not on live elephants.

<comment><USER6> I'm not referring to cyanide, i'm referring to the colour staining of ivory on animals that are alive. The colour stops poachers wanting to kill the animal, but does it not impact the animals life - that's the question i'm asking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find it sad to think that one day we will refer to the "Tusked Elephant" the same we way we now refer to the "Sabre-Toothed Tiger". Evolution may have found a way to survive humanity in this case, but it's reason for needing to do so is absolutely stupid.

<comment><USER9> Is this considered evolution? Maybe more like natural selection?

<comment><USER10> Natural selection is the mechanism, evolution is the result.

<comment><USER11> Selection, natural or artificial. Evolution doesn't care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is the saddest example of "natural" selection I've heard of.

<comment><USER13> Then I would say you haven't heard much. Natural selection is a horrific process whether or not humans are involved in it. By definition it implies the death and suffering of countless creatures so that a few are selected.

This is nothing. We're concerned about it because we like elephants, but as far as nature is concerned, there's nothing wrong with killing off ~75% of all species once in a blue moon. [1]

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#List_of_extin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#List_of_extinction_events)

<comment><USER14> I think the term natural selection is sort of a misnomer, makes it easy to misinterpret it as if many are let to die while few are selected. It just happens creatures that with certain traits are more adapted to survive and reproduce (not having tusks in this case), where as some other creatures are not and die. Hence those specific traits tend to be preserved in subsequent generations while the others just didn't survive to reproduce.

And, the extinction events, its not like nature is cruel and killed off most species. As you see in the list of extinctions, the reasons mostly are that the environment (or nature if you will), changed too drastically and quickly that most species couldn't adapt fast enough to survive.

<comment><USER15> > _its not like nature is cruel and killed off most species_

> _the environment (or nature if you will), changed too drastically and > quickly that most species couldn 't adapt fast enough to survive._

These are not mutually exclusive. Mass starvation caused by environmental changes is a cruel kill off. I'm not sure what the point you're trying to make is.

<comment><USER16> I would say you are a little too excited about the drama and morality of a statistical process, and it's occluding your understanding of what's actually going on.

<comment><USER17> That's a lot of emotional content to infer from a post with such a neutral tone. I'm also struggling to see evidence of occluded understanding.

<comment><USER18> I think the idea is that these events aren't catastrophic on an individual lifespan level. They're catastrophic in geological time.

Look at the holocene extinction event. It's been going on for over 10,000 years. It's only noticeable statistically, doesn't affect day-to-day life much if at all. Therefore it's not really cruel because for most species it's as benign as having a little too few babies to maintain the population.

<comment><USER19> It appears that, as expected, a young millennial is trying to blame this on human accelerated climate change. (not necessarily you, but someone in the above comment chain).

And yes, I agree that human accelerated climate change is causing faster extensions. However, I could care less. When does the new MacBook Pro refresh come out?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's an interesting comment about a similar thing happening with rattle snakes. It seems they evolve into silent snakes to better avoid human predators: [http://www.abc15.com/news/region-phoenix-metro/central- phoen...](http://www.abc15.com/news/region-phoenix-metro/central- phoenix/rattlesnakes-evolving-losing-their-rattles-expert-says)

<comment><USER21> Cats are slowly becoming undomesticated because humans sterilize most of the nonstray cats.

<comment><USER22> Bah, cats were never domesticated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Do poachers have an incentive to kill tuskless elephants too, then, so they don't become more dominant than tusked ones?

<comment><USER24> Collectively they do, but no individual poacher has much to gain from killing an individual tuskless elephant. It's like a tragedy of the commons, but one that works out well for the elephants.

<comment><USER2> They do kill them so that they don't try to track the animal again in the future.

<comment><USER25> Apparently they don't. Otherwise we wouldn't be reading this story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> AlJazeera has a nice documentary, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OsMdzrxQfA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OsMdzrxQfA)

It appears that tusks from African elephants are more valued in China than those from S/S.E Asia. Does anyone know why this is ?

</comment><comment><USER27> Pretty sad that human greed can force such an adaption.

With that out of the way I wonder how good nature is generally in adapting to human caused problems. This strategy seems a bit flawed as it should lead to a sharp decline in the male population and an overpopulation of females. That could in fact lead to even more danger for the elephant population. Before the damage was spread over both genders but it is now focused on just one.

I'd love to see a list of animal mutations that resulted from human intervention. Would be very interesting to read.

</comment><comment><USER28> Offshoot topic I've been wondering. Why aren't deer evolving to stay away from roads?

<comment><USER29> Complex behaviors are difficult to evolve. There is unlikely to be a "stay away from roads" allele, while a "no tusks" allele was already in the elephant population.

If they live in an area where there are lots of roads everywhere, completely avoiding them may actually be maladaptive, as not every road crossing results in a fatality and they could well be trapped in a small area without it.

If they live in an area without many roads it probably doesn't really matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Imagine what selective pressure could do in the future. Any non-human beneficial species is basically a pro. Eat poisonous algea and become un- eatable and you wont be hunted. Distribute Ambrosia near your living space, and human hikers will leave you alone. This would make a nice apocalyptic trailer speach: "They had miss-treated here and thought about making ammends, but she would have non of it. Mother nature is back, with a vengence! This year, outside of theaters."

</comment><comment><USER31> Wouldn't fighting poaching just increase the overall value of ivory? Drones, guns and enforcement will just cause x10 in price?

Seems like instead of following the "war on drugs" model we should stuff the market full of practically identical synthetic ivory? Or focus on mass elephant reproduction.

One of the comments suggests money to fight poaching - I fear again, wrong approach.

<comment><USER32> > Wouldn't fighting poaching just increase the overall value of ivory?

That implies that less ivory makes it to the market which means that more elephants make it through life without getting killed for their tusks.

Ivory isn't as easily produced as most drugs so the price of ivory is dictated by scarcity even absent any other controls.

You could make as much of most drugs as bulk chemistry or farming allows.

So the value of ivory going up as a result of being tougher on poachers would be proof that it is working.

<comment><USER19> > So the value of ivory going up as a result of being tougher on poachers > would be proof that it is working.

Have you taken Economics 101? You do remember what happens when the selling price of a good gets too high? Lots of profit to be made will encourage poachers to hunt. They will take even larger risks (e.g. Being shot by drone) to obtain ivory since the profits are too high.

<comment><USER32> > Have you taken Economics 101?

Yes, have you?

If the price of Ivory rises then yes, more people will be driven to poaching but unless the price drops to the previous level due to the subsequent increase in supply _still_ more elephants will make it.

Only if the price of Ivory drops relative to the baseline could you conclude that a program to target poachers has failed.

If what you write is true then we should simply not do anything about poaching at all... but ideally the price of Ivory would rise to incredible heights because _none_ of it makes it to the market because all poachers are caught.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> You should think a little bit ahead of that, give them fake tusks filled with poison gas (anti-human only). You aren't going to win this war being the passive one.

<comment><USER34> If Nature would be able to think ahead, it'd have already colonized the Solar System.

<comment><USER35> You could argue she has, and here we are on the cusp to do just that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Those poor elephants :(

</comment><comment><USER37> >While virtually no male elephants are tuskless (they need tusks to fight), about 2 percent of female elephants are naturally tuskless. Among female elephants in Gorongosa who were adults during the civil war, however, half are tuskless — the others were simply killed. But tusklessness is an inheritable trait. That means that, even though poaching levels have fallen, a third of Gorongos's young female population is tuskless today.

I think the correct term is survivor bias.

Update re downvotes: The title literally says "Elephants without tusks are a response to the selective pressure of poaching".

The body text says "2% of female elephants are _naturally_ tuskless" (emphasis mine).

So "Elephants without tusks" per se are natural.

"(Massive) Increase in % of tuskless offspring as a result of selective killing of tuskfull adults (given that tusklessness is an inheritable trait)" seems like a more accurate, yet obvious (almost tautologically so) observation. It seems to be true when the trait is inheritable and strongly discriminated against - the children of the survivors look more like the survivors than those who were killed because they (the killed) were different. You don't say!

<comment><USER38> Naturally meaning born without.

<comment><USER37> Yes.</comment></comment></comment>