Bolivian fires have now destroyed almost 5M acre of forest and grassland - <AUTHOR> https://latinamericareports.com/fires-bolivia-political/2993/ <comment><USER2> outrage in brazil, silence in bolivia.

what is the difference between the two?</comment>


Apple releases newly designed Mac Mini  - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/macmini/

<comment><USER2> And in the UK the price has gone up to £649 for the base model. The last version was £510. That is ridiculous.

Mac mini was the cheapest option for iPhone and iPad app submission as fas as I knew. Now it just got a lot more expensive to do so.

<comment><USER3> The extra £139 is because it's prettier?

<comment><USER4> I realize that's sarcasm but why exactly would that not be a reason to increase the price?

<comment><USER5> Absolutely, this is how most markets work. Take women's fashion, for example.

<comment><USER6> No, that's not how women's fashion works. Maybe once upon a time, but price no longer corresponds even to prettiness.

Trust me, my ex was way into that stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like Apple has finally acknowledged what drives probably a very large percentage of their mac mini sales: Techies who want a mac-based bittorrent box hooked to their home theater. Now, if only it had Blu-Ray...

<comment><USER8> Mac Minis make terrible HTPCs. I replaced a Mac Mini + Drobo with a Windows Home Server + External DVD drive and I've never looked back.

<comment><USER9> Could you elaborate on why they are "terrible"? I've been quite satisfied with my Mini + Plex setup.

<comment><USER10> That's what I use, plus Vuze and FireFox (for Netflix watch instantly... because it's currently broken for me in Plex).

The only issue I have is most of my files are on an external FW800 drive, which isn't as quiet as the mini's drive. So, I put the drive enclosure into the cabinet under the TV. Also, Mac OS X is aggressive about putting the external drive to sleep, and because of this I had to set the cache seconds in Plex to 15 just to make there are no pauses in playback.

EDIT: forgot to mention that the superdirve in the mini is so loud that it can't really be used to watch a movie. Sounds like a 747 taking off. However, this is not a big deal for me, because I rip the DVD's to get rid of the menus and unskippable crap at the beginning of the disc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here is the deal: \- 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo CPU \- 2GB of RAM \- 320GB HD (no ssd afaik) \- HDMI out (finally) \- SD-slot (which is also very "un-mac")

In terms of computing power, its overprized. But as a product that sits in your livingroom, problably not making any noise and runs under 10W, then I will actually call this a fair deal. May I add that its ridiculously small.

<comment><USER12> How is the SD-slot"un-mac"? It's on almost every machine, and iPhoto comes bundled on all computers?

<comment><USER11> because the way I see apples products is not with a bunch of outputs and memory card slots of all kind. They are very conservative in adding anything in which they don't support all over their product-line. Apple got a very holistic product profile so of speak.

<comment><USER13> Apple intro'd built-in SD card slots with the last round of unibody Macbook Pros. The secret sauce is that the SD card is bootable -- you can install OS/X onto an 8Gb card, add some stuff like Techtool Pro, and use it as an emergency boot device.

Use case: your laptop's hard drive fails so you yank it, shove in a new one, boot off the SD card, and use your Time Machine backup -- you've got one, right? You're one of the Saved, right? -- to restore onto the new drive. Total elapsed downtime from hard disk crash to up-and-running again: 1-2 hours plus however long it takes to source a replacement drive.

(The fact that you can get photos off your digital camera is an accidental bonus. Because, hey, your camera is an iPhone in Apple-land ...)

<comment><USER14> > Apple intro'd built-in SD card slots with the last round of unibody Macbook > Pros.

Previous, not last (last is mid 2010, SD slot appeared on mid 2009 machines)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Speaking as someone not intimately familiar with Apple's desktop line, what's "redesigned" about it? From the website, I gather that it now has an aluminum casing rather than plastic, a less archaic GPU, and +$200 on the price tag?

<comment><USER16> Oh, and the power brick... what a monstrosity that was. Instead of an external power brick that was roughly half the size of the mini itself, the power supply is internal, which makes this mini much more conveniently portable.

<comment><USER17> That's a big deal when you're selling its design. I have the previous generation Mac Mini sitting next to my flat screen TV, and the power supply was a pain to hide. It's part of my living room. Design matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cheapest new model in Finland (and many other european countries) is now 799€. Previously you could get the cheapest one for 549€.

Apple seems to think that 150€ price raise won't affect the sales, but I think it will hurt them.

<comment><USER19> You could even get a G4 at 499€ in 2005

There's been a steady increase in the price of the Mini, unlike the Macbook. You had an iBook G4 for 999€ just like you can have a Macbook now for 999€. The Mac Mini went from 499€ to 799€.

The Mac Mini's pricing strategy is weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As I've said before, drop the dvd drive and gimme a 3x2x2" aluminum soapbar for $299 and it'll set the world on fire.

<comment><USER21> I don't think it's the DVD drive that is making this bigger. All those parts needed for a comp requires around 7 inches already and they may be just decided to have a DVD drive too.

<comment><USER20> Parts can be shrunk (see iphone, ipad) but a dvd has a fixed size you can't shrink so there you have the weakest link.

Btw, it was 3x2x1" what I meant. The perfect size.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why did they put the SD card slot on the back?

<comment><USER23> That was my first "wtf" reaction. Although they don't show it in the photos, the back of a mac mini isn't exactly a fun place to have to poke around all the time. Cables etc. Especially because (at least in older models) the cables tended to get loose after a year or so and could be easily knocked out. I wouldn't want to be reaching around there to pop the card in/out. It also limits the places you can mount the computer relative to where you're using it from. Seems stupid. They should've left it out. However, I guess it provides a good utility for doing occasional tech support (boot from SD etc).

<comment><USER24> How often would you slide a disc into it? Thus, just have the back facing front if you intend to access that part more. You'll need the back more too, it seems, since that's where On/Off is too.

<comment><USER23> Fair comments, but I'm still not liking it... I've had my existing Mac Mini for about 6 years and I don't really ever turn it off (it now mainly serves media). I would leave the back facing the front, but then I might as well buy a Dell.

I love Apple's visual and industrial design, but sometimes the focus on aesthetics impacts the user experience, which I think is more important (and generally something they completely nail). Example: the USB ports on my macbook are too close together to support most flash drives sitting next to any other USB peripheral. I think that this will prove to be another example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The inclusion of a HDMI port is interesting. Probably useless to most people (who have existing monitors or will buy a normal computer display) but does this suggest this might run the new Apple TV service?

<comment><USER13> You're absolutely wrong about the "useless to most people bit", but right about the Apple TV thing.

The point about HDMI and the 10w power consumption and the lack of a spare power brick is that this device is being positioned as a living room device, not a desktop machine. Add bluetooth keyboard and mouse, FrontRow, optionally an Apple Remote, and a big TV set and you've got: DVD player, Apple TV substitute for streaming movies/TV via iTunes, household iTunes streaming hub (streaming video to iPads in other rooms, streaming music to Airport Express- driven active speakers in other rooms -- controlled via Remote.app running on your iPhone), and if you enable internet sharing and use Cat5e to your DSL/cable modem you've got a servicable wifi hotspot as well.

This isn't being positioned as a desktop, it's being positioned as a replacement for the Apple TV box.

And for those of us who're into getting stuff done rather than sacking out in front of the telly, there's th slightly more expensive model with no DVD, more hard disk (RAID 0 or RAID 1, anyone: OS/X has software support for RAID), and a server-grade OS.

<comment><USER26> Im thinking Apple is not repositioning the Mac Mini to be an Apple TV replacement. It's way too complicated to connect a Mac Mini to a LCD TV and use a wireless mouse and keyboard to navigate when compared to the Cable TV experience. Not many in this post seem to be using a Mac Mini for such purpose (I am) and there is no way the avg PC/Internet user would ever think about doing such as it's too complicated over clicking power button on and channel up and down.

<comment><USER17> I have this exact setup. I bought a cable to connect my previous generation mini to the DVI input of my T. I have a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for the times when I need to do something a little more complicated than use FrontRow. iTunes has all my music and I have a 2GB TimeMachine with all of my video content. It's fast enough to play even 1080p movies over the network.

The new model would be even better for this application.

<comment><USER27> +1: I'm doing almost exactly this with an old Macbook, with a good quality outboard DAC to drive my amp/speakers.

So I appear to be target market for this product...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It looks really nice, I wonder how well it handles the overheating with its smaller size.

No SSD ? No intel I3/I5 ? That's disapointing.

<comment><USER13> Why do you need an SSD in a machine targeted at the media player/home hub market?

SSDs are good for boxes that are latency-bound or subject to vibration. For a box that sits under a TV set and spends most of its active life throwing 1Gb mpeg4 files down an HDMI cable, not so much.

<comment><USER19> Several reasons at random :

\- Less noise

\- Less heat

\- Smaller

\- Faster boot time

\- More bandwidth

<comment><USER28> Cost/benefit doesn't work out in this use case:

\- Less noise true, but peg a Mac Mini or MacBook Pro's hard drive to max and see if you can hear it from, oh, 5 feet away.

\- This isn't a mobile device, so heat with regards to user comfort is not an issue. Until it presents a reliability problem, heat is a non-factor for a desktop.

\- Smaller, and much more expensive per GB. _Much_ more. Shaving another quarter inch off the enclosure also seems like a paltry gain for a much more expensive storage device.

\- For a machine that reboots very rarely, this is moot. This is clearly meant as an always-on device (hence the low power usage to begin with) sucking down torrents all day or some such.

\- It's a media-centric device. It will download stuff, listen to music, stream video... what kind of bandwidth does it need?

SSDs in a Mac Mini would be a Ferrari in a school zone - cool, and done purely for the sake of style, but let's not pretend that there are significant practical reasons for doing this.

<comment><USER29> For an always-on device you would actually fare better with an SSD than a 2.5" laptop hard drive. Laptop hard drives are not meant to be always-on. The bearings tend to wear out very fast unless they spend a fair amount of time spun-down. 3.5" desktop hard drives, 2.5" server drives, and SSDs have much better mechanical reliability in that respect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Where is the kensington lock thing? I have a Mac Mini (the previous generation now) and one thing I absolutely need is a way to lock down my stuff. My last laptop was stolen directly from my office because it wasn't locked down.

<comment><USER31> Sounds like you need a new job too.

<comment><USER30> I'm in South Africa. I also carry a 9mm. But a 9mm doesn't work when I leave my office for 5 minutes and somebody comes in and grabs my computer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Their claim to be the most energy efficient desktop seems a bit unlikely, since you can get computers that are basically Atom netbooks in desktop form.

They footnote it with "Claim based on energy efficiency categories and products listed within the EPA ENERGY STAR 5.0 database as of June 2010" but I don't really know what that means.

<comment><USER33> I'd measure efficiency as energy vs. work performed. Their C2D at 10w is going to run circles around even the latest Atom processors.

<comment><USER34> Drives me crazy, Apple is the _only_ company that sells a computer at 10w with this performance. Not one big manufacture has something that competes. They are all stuffing atoms and calling it a day. So I am going to buy a mini to run linux on...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I like it, the internal power supply is a great feature also worth mentioning (the old one had a block attached almost as big as the device itself). What I don't like is the pricing, why do I have to pay 799 EUR (=$975!) here in the Netherlands when you can get the exact same device in the US for $699. That's a $275 difference!

<comment><USER36> The US price is without VAT while the Euro price is with VAT. Remove the VAT from the Euro price and the difference is only about $120.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It looks like the old Mini mated with an AppleTV; could this be a sign that Apple may be giving up on the AppleTV "hobby"?

<comment><USER38> It's probably safe to say the x86-based, Front Row-displaying AppleTV is over.

As for an ultra-thin, A4 ARM-based AppleTV running iOS... I'd watch that space.

<comment><USER39> It's amazing what they're doing. Just as the Newton has come back to beat Microsoft at their own game, maybe the Pippin will rise from the ashes of obscurity!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Still no ECC RAM on the server version, I see. Shame.

<comment><USER41> Intel only supports ECC RAM w/ its Xeon chips, in contrast to AMD where almost all of its chips support ECC (w/ the appropriate motherboard of course).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> One reason the Mac Mini might not have i3/i5 has a very poor integrated graphics chip. Macs are often hurt by their poor video performance, so that may be the reason we haven't seen the i3/i5 on Macs that don't have an additional graphic card.

<comment><USER42> But.. this Core2duo mac mini isn't using an integrated graphics card anyway? It has an embedded nvidia geforce.

<comment><USER12> yes, but its better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> So in order to have dual monitors on this new design one would have to have both a miniport to DVI and a HDMI to DVI adapter I take it?

<comment><USER36> Or monitors that have miniport and HDMI ports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's interesting that they ship a version with Snow Leopard Server, that wasn't available at this price point before, was it?

<comment><USER45> They released the server model in late 2009, with an extra harddrive instead of the superdrive and OS X Server.

<comment><USER46> Yup, and they've consistently marketed it on the website as a server option for small business. (That is, places that don't want to buy or support a full Apple Xserve.) From the site, "Mac mini means business. Small business."

I wonder what their numbers are for it. I see zero advertising for this option, but maybe I'm not looking in the right places. And the mention on the Apple site is clear, but not exactly huge. I imagine it's a niche market, but I wonder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Hmm... Looks like they made the memory easier to upgrade, but the hard drive more difficult.

<comment><USER48> I dont think they made it harder. In the old model it took a putty knife to open - now you just have two screws.

<comment><USER47> So those two hex screws they show in the circular access panel are the only things preventing the guts of the mini from being removed through the back? That sounds pretty slick, actually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> HDMI .. about time! now i can replace my Dell Zino HD with this for my HTPC.

</comment><comment><USER50> Ah, so this is why there was a line outside the Apple Store today. I didn't think iPads were still that popular.

<comment><USER51> iPhone preorders are why there are a line apparently, not this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> > And even though Mac mini is ultracompact, there's no shortage of ports.

I don't see any eSATA ports.

</comment><comment><USER53> I need to fork out another $100 to upgrade from 320GB to 500GB?? for 5400 rpm hard drive?

<comment><USER54> Welcome to Apple. If you upgrade the CPU and RAM too you'll be at $1049 in which case you might as well get the $999 model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> the biggest benefit of this upgrade is you can now (hopefully) drive 2 monitors.

<comment><USER55> AFAIK, you could already do this (mini-DVI out and displayport).

<comment><USER30> That's correct, I'm using the previous model of Mac Mini (2.53GHz 4GB 320GB) and two great 20" samsung widescreens. I have to say it's a really awesome way to work!

<comment><USER56> Hmmm, I tried putting 4GB in my Mac Mini, but it wouldn't boot (now running with 2GB). Did you have to do anything special to make it work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Finally, they changed the case! It is annoying having to support minis because you can't easily tell any of the different ones apart! at least this one can be easily differentiated.

All the same... nifty, but an extra $200 for an update they should have delivered years ago for no price boost? Not digging it.

<comment><USER57> Keep in mind that they'll use this case for the next four revisions...

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> that is 1 sexy looking machine. it'll go nice in the entertainment center</comment>


AppHarbor adds RavenDB support - <AUTHOR> http://blog.appharbor.com/2012/02/17/hosted-ravendb-on-appharbor

<comment><USER2> RavenDB is an excellent document database for those of us who still have to (or choose to) use .NET. Personally its one of the last remaining factors when I reach for .NET over other tools.

Combining RavenDB with AppHarbor will be a great development story. Even though AppHarbor's new pricing (IMO) does put off small projects and MVP projects, I still plan to migrate one of my bigger clients to AppHarbor and (hosted) RavenDB as running a VPS is a drag. Just need to get up the motivation to write some code to store PDF files onto S3 rather than the filesystem.

<comment><USER3> >> Even though AppHarbor's new pricing (IMO) does put off small projects and MVP projects

Their first instance (aka worker) is free so it can be easily used for small side-projects (but maybe not MVP's). The first instance has access to about half AWS ECU and 1GB of memory. A 20MB SQL Server Express database (on Shared server) is free.

I do agree however that their pricing (and that of cloud hosting in general) is a bit high for bootstrapped startups, considering the low cost of a VPS now-a-days. In many cases, it also takes a lot of time to make your app work seamlessly with cloud hosting, when you should be spending that time on finding customers.

Some issues (for us at-least) made us move to a VPS and implement our own CI environment for now (fully automated builds and deployments using TeamCity and MS Web Deployment). This is not to say that AppHarbor is not worth it, but we faced some issues:

1\. Lack of sticky sessions forces you to work with Memcache, when IMO it's not really required in the initial stages of a product.

2\. Another issue is the lack of persistent storage (file system), since AppHarbor (rightfully) wipes off the entire space on each deployment. It essentially forces you to design/redesign your app to utilize something like S3 right from the start. Again, 99% of the startups can live without worrying about all that in the initial stages of the product.

Every hour spent on pre-mature optimization and scaling without having any customers, is an hour wasted.

<comment><USER2> Yes, the pricing change is fine if I just want to throw up some private side projects, but for an MVP product, no. With an MVP product I would want to have a custom domain to make it look more professional and to share with the world. Sure $10 a month isn't a huge deal but I have two MVP products on a VPS at the moment that barely get any traffic whilst I figure out feasibility and if they will work.

Heroku doesn't charge for custom domains, but I would prefer AppHarbor went PHPFog's way of only allowing 3 free apps and charge $5 for those to have custom domains.

I've written three blog posts on the whole AppHarbor pricing change and just believe they are missing a whole subset of the market. In my final blog post on their new pricing I suggested someone could potentially fill this void by providing a subset of AppHarbor features as a kind of "baby" AppHarbor that is designed for small hobby/MVP projects that don't need features like multiple workers, load balancing rather just a better experience (git push) over shared hosting (ftp).</comment></comment></comment>


Encrypt/decrypt text or files online. Best tool I have found – JIXXIT.com - <AUTHOR> http://jixxit.com <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN".

Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this your site, or you only found it?

<comment><USER2> Perhaps "found" refers to "the tool for the job" rather than connoting something in the vein of Product Hunt or Medium or PR News wire.

That is it advice regarding a solution to a particular problem related to cryptographically securing content than those related to growth hacking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, you posted it 2 years ago also. Doesn't look like "you have found" it</comment>


Stonebraker:  Clarifications on the CAP Theorem and Data-Related Errors - <AUTHOR> http://voltdb.com/blog/clarifications-cap-theorem-and-data-related-errors

<comment><USER2> A quick summary follows the quick editorial and after that a quick new thought:

Editorial: Stonebraker is, imo, and as usual, Right Again. His biggest problem is that he's boring that way. He doesn't open his mouth in contexts like this but to be Right.

Summary: People say "No SQL is right because of the CAP theorem." The CAP "theorem" says of DBs that: Consistency, high Availability, or Partition- tolerance .... pick any two. Quite true! So one of the pro no-SQL arguments is that high availability and partition tolerance are often the priorities ... so toss out consistency! SQL assumes consistency. Thus you need No SQL. Stonebraker correctly points out that, hey, you know what? Partitions are pretty rare and tossing out consistency really didn't increase your accessibility average by much .... so you tossed out consistency for no reason whatsoever. If you think the Cap "theorem" justifies NoSQL... you're just wrong.

Stonebraker's rant is nearly boring because it makes such an obvious point.

New Thought: I don't think NoSQL is popular because of the CAP theorem. I think it is popular because it is easier to get started with (even if that means using it poorly) than SQL. SQL is a little hard to learn. It's a little bit awkward to use in some "scripting" language or other HLL language. NoSQL may be bad engineering in many of its uses ... but its easier. A lot easier. And, people aren't much asking about engineering quality until sites start failing often. Which a heck of a lot of them do but by then the NoSQL architects have collected their money and are out of town or else are still around but able to point fingers of blame away from the abandonment of ACID.

An ACID DB that gave a more simple-minded logical model than SQL ... including, sure, relaxing ACID constraints where that was really desirable ... could go a long way fixing the confusion around NoSQL.

p.s.: given a typical distributed NoSQL DB, one thing you could do is regard that as the "physical model", implement proper transactions, and build a library that gave you ACID properties. Build up a high level way of using that library so that you have a logical model of the data that is independent of exactly how it is laid out in the underlying thing.... and you've got a Codd- style DB. Great thing to do. SQL 2.0

<comment><USER3> Not all of the distributed NoSQL systems give up consistency. Notably, H-Base and, in certain scenarios, MongoDB, both offer consistent atomic reads and writes of one thing, be it a row, supercolumn, document or whatever.

You make a good point that NoSQL is about so much more than the CAP theorem. That doesn't mean there aren't a ton of people (some very smart) out there citing the CAP theorem as proof that you have to give up consistency to be "web-scale".

<comment><USER2> Thank you. I wasn't aware of that.

Yeah, there are three things in play (I would say):

1\. The language design of SQL is often icky. A different logical language could be nice.

2\. The logical / physical separation is sometimes right on and sometimes... not so much. At the very least, there doesn't seem to be One True Logical Model, hence exposing a physical model with transactions seems justified.

3\. Often, people are quick to give up consistency and while that is not always the wrong thing to do, it's done more than it ought to be. But... a lot of people hacking up big sites and similar these days... their standards are low and the "customer's" tolerance for resulting bugs and glitches is startlingly high (for now).

All three of those get lumped under the "NoSQL" heading and it is helpful (I think) to tease them apart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the comment I left on the post (still moderating):

There is an extreme case of partition tolerance that must be considered: disconnected operation.

For users at the edge of the network, latency can be the biggest performance killer. If it takes 1 second or more for each user action to be reflected in application state due to round trip time (mobile web) those seconds add up and users can be frustrated.

However, if you move the database and web application to the mobile device itself, users no longer see network latency as part of the user experience critical path. Latency has been proven to be correlated directly to revenue, because users engage much more readily with snappy interfaces.

Once data is being operated on by the user on the local device, the key becomes synchronization. Asynchronous multi-master replication demands a different approach to consistency, than the traditional model which assumes the database is being run by a central service.

The MVCC document model is designed for synchronization. It's a different set of contraints than the relational model, but since it's such a highly constrained problem space it also admits of general solutions and protocols.

It's my belief that the MVCC document model is closer to the 80% solution for a large class of applications. Storing strongly typed and normalized representations of data is an artifact of our historically constrained computing resources, so it will always be a good way to optimize certain problems.

But for many human-scale data needs, schemaless documents are a very good fit. They optimize for the user, not the computer.

<comment><AUTHOR> MVCC you mean multi-version concurrency? As in writers-don't-block-readers? Because most relational databases have that.

<comment><USER4> the idea that conflicts are detected at write time, so that applications will have conflict resolution capabilities.

eg if you get the Etag wrong CouchDB rejects the save.

(edited to add) the difference is that CouchDB makes the MVCC semantics visible to the client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> He seems to assume a lot in this post, for instance his 200 vs 4 node comparison assumes that you have 200 nodes because the poor performance of your DBMS requires that many nodes. If that's the case, great, use voltdb. If not, it's perfectly reasonable to think that 200 nodes would have more network partitions than 4 nodes which is why one would pick an AP system in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER6> tl;dr version: <http://files.jnewland.com/stonebraker-20101021-200946.jpg>

<comment><USER7> Also, <http://bit.ly/aD0TiH>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wherein Stonebraker misunderstands distributed systems engineering completely.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understood what he said as:

Solving the problems of distributed systems is incredibly hard and not necessary if all you need is scalability and high availability. Better think of your problems in terms of engineering trade-offs and not distributed theory and understand what you are giving up and what this gains you.

When you decide to give up consistency, your application can no longer assume consistency ever. Giving up availability in case of network partition means few extra minutes of downtime a year.

I don't think he completely misunderstood distributed systems - I think he decided to completely side-step the entire field.

<comment><USER8> > Solving the problems of distributed systems is incredibly hard and not > necessary if all you need is scalability and high availability.

Once one scales beyond a single node the system becomes distributed. Then by definition one must deal with distributed systems problems in order to achieve scale beyond the capabilities of a single node.

> When you decide to give up consistency, your application can no longer > assume consistency ever. Giving up availability in case of network partition > means few extra minutes of downtime a year.

Depends on the application. Giving up availability might mean cascading failures throughout your entire application. For instance if the datastore is unavailable for writes then any kind of queueing systems built around the DB (a common design pattern) run the risk of overflow during the downtime.

And I would make the argument that once an application scales beyond a single datacenter it cannot help but give up strict consistency under error conditions.

> I don't think he completely misunderstood distributed systems - I think he > decided to completely side-step the entire field.

If he didn't misunderstand them then he is purposefully ignoring the hard problems. Which is worse?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Once one scales beyond a single node the system becomes distributed. Then by > definition one must deal with distributed systems problems in order to > achieve scale beyond the capabilities of a single node

I meant that one doesn't need to solve the general problem of distributed systems. Sharding is a common way to scale avoiding most of the problems generally associated with distributed systems. Scaling within LAN is easier than across data centers. You can assume no malicious traffic between your servers and suddenly solving the byzantine generals problem is far easier.

Purposefully ignoring really hard problems can be a very good engineering practice.

<comment><USER9> I purposefully ignored the tornado and so it did not hit my datacenter, tear off a section of the roof, kill all power sources, and drench my servers. Hard problems: solved.

<comment><USER10> Thanks! My app was in that datacenter too. I mean, it had replicated mongodb instances, and well balanced app servers, and nodes going away have no discernable affect on users. Turns out tho, that with all that distributed engineering, I didn't find out that the hosting company doesn't put your nodes in various data-centers. That tornado would have taken down my service during peak hours.

I know you will try to write that off as a "you get what you diserve" but I challenge you to go ask people if their apps would survive a tornado to the data-center. Many of them will say "sure its in the cloud!" Then drop the killer question on them... "How many different data centers are your nodes running on right now". Most will say "i dont know". Some will say "My host has many data centers" (note this doesn't answer the question). A few will actually have done the footwork.

Also, the scenario you describe is as easily mitigated with hot failovers and offsite backups. This probably qualifies as distributed engineering, but only is only the same as the above discussions in the most pedantic senses.

<comment><USER9> As MongoDB did not exist at the time, it seems unlikely. Such things happen more than we might like, of course!

"Also, the scenario you describe is as easily mitigated with hot failovers and offsite backups."

This is a sadly wrong, though common, belief. There is exactly one way to know that a component in your infrastructure is working: you are using it. There is no such thing as a "hot failover": there are powered on machines you hope will work when you need them. Off-site backups? Definitely a good idea. Ever tested restore of a petabyte?

Here's a simple test. If you believe either of the following are true, with extremely high probability you have never done large-scale operations:

1) There exists a simple solution to a distributed systems problem.

2) "Failover", "standby", etc. infrastructure can be relied upon to work as expected.

Extreme suffering for extended periods burns away any trust one might ever have had in either of those two notions.

<comment><USER10> First and foremost, the opposite of simple is not hard, it's complicated. There is not a correlation between the simple-complicated spectrum and easy- hard spectrum.

If you don't regularly press the button swapping your hot failovers and live systems, you don't have hot failovers, you have cargo-cult redundancy. It's like taking backups and not testing them. If you don't test them, you have cargo cult sysadmining.

Distributed is complicated, but not that hard, there are well understood patterns in most cases. Sure, the details are a bit of a pain to get right, but the same is true of alot of programming. I have done distributed systems. Maybe not google scale, but bigger than a lot, hundreds of nodes geographically distributed all over the place, and each of these nodes was itself a distributed system. I've dealt with thundering herds (and other statistical clustering issues), can't-happen bottlenecks, and plenty more. But each and every one of these problems had a solution waiting for me on google. Further, each and every one of these problems was instantly graspable.

A lot of distributed stuff just isn't that hard. Sure, things like MPI and distributed agents/algorithms can get pretty hard, but this isn't the same as multi-node programs, which isn't the same as redundancy.

Keep the smug attitude, I'm sure it helps you convince your clients that you are "really good" or some crap.

<comment><USER11> You're talking to the guy who invented EC2. I think he knows what's hard.

<http://blog.layer8.net/ec2_origins.html>

<comment><USER10> Im not intimidated. If anything, he should be more far, far more understanding of the point then: A simple fail-over model for a smallish database is completely different than a full blown EC2. In fact given that EC2 is a freakishly large example of distributed system, I would put it in a totally different class of product than the average "big distributed system".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Soon, everyone can install and run their apps for free on iOS devices - <AUTHOR> https://developer.apple.com/education/

<comment><USER2> I have always found it profoundly offensive that I have to pay Apple so I can load code I wrote myself on an iPhone that I purchased with my own money.

However it's not clear that I would be able to provide free downloads of my app from my own website; my objection to using the app store for distribution is that inlinks to my app would point to apple's website not my own.

As I have decided that the product I've presently working on will be published under the Affero GPLv3, it will be a partial solution for others to build from the source I supply. But those who do not have the expertise to build my source will be left out in the cold.</comment>


Ruby Fibonacci Shootout - <AUTHOR> http://christopherroach.com/2010/01/15/ruby-fibonacci-shootout/ <comment><USER2> Based on this article, I would totally consider moving to Ruby for my Fibonacci number needs.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think this "CPU Intensive" task is the kind of CPU-intensive task you actually care about. I haven't done any formal experimentation, but I'm guessing this is a better test of how many instructions are generated for a call/ret sequence, and not how well normal CPU-intensive operations would work. I would think some code that did a fair amount of number crunching/lookups in a tight loop would be a much better test.

But, then again, it doesn't really matter. Is Ruby fast enough to work for most uses? Yes. If you really, really, really care about execution speed, would you use Ruby? I don't know. If you care that much about execution speed, you will probably do more benchmarks than I care to think of.

</comment><comment><USER4> I kept staring at this page, and yet despite its brevity, I could not find the results.

Apparently Firefox doesn't like the self-closing script tag?

<comment><USER5> Is that valid? Also the script is missing the "type" attribute.

<comment><USER6> both valid HTML5

<comment><USER5> Interesting, thanks. Looks like FF has some catching up to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ported this to scala (I know, I didn't do this functionally, this is a pretty straight port of the C example), ran in 4 seconds (of course, I've got about a bajillion other apps open right now, so take this with a grain of salt):

         object Main {
            def fib(n : int) : int = {
                if(n < 2) n
                else
                    fib(n-1) + fib(n-2)
            }

            def main(args: Array[String]) = {
                for (i <- 0 until 37) {
                    printf("n = " + i.toString + " => "+fib(i).toString)
                }
            }
         }

<comment><USER8> On my 1.4ghz core 2 duo laptop, which isn't a very powerful machine, the above scala code runs in about 1 second when compiled. If I let the code run once to to let the JIT warm up and only measure the execution of the main body, it runs in .60 seconds on average. By comparison, gcc with -O3 runs the program in about .57 seconds.

I don't know how you got 4 seconds unless you ran the program as a script and had a lot of other stuff running simultaneously. A simple scala hello world program on my machine has a startup time of 1.5 seconds when run as a script.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is it really a shootout if he misses most of the Ruby implementations?

</comment><comment><USER10> Recursive/iterative Fibonacci number generation is an interesting programming exercise but it's a bad example because in practice you'd be best to use an explicit constant-time formula.

</comment><comment><USER5> Huh? Where's the results? Or are readers supposed to run the code and send their results or something? But there's no timing check in the code he posted anyway.

<comment><USER11> They don't render in IE (tested in 8); it cuts the article in half.

<comment><USER5> Or firefox mac. OK, now I looked at it through safari and I can see it.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A lightweight fullstack boilerplate based on VueJS and Node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/yunhan0/koa-vue-fullstack <comment><AUTHOR> The admin password has been reset now. And the demo website will no longer be able to update the example admin password.

</comment><comment><USER2> >please don't change the password

lmfao what did you think was going to happen?

<comment><USER3> The project is pretty well documented, but that is just ridiculous.

Just remove the ability to change password on the demo...

<comment><AUTHOR> My mistake.. I will remove the function in the demo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> password changed!

<comment><AUTHOR> Noticed that, I will remove the function on the demo website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> really cool, I like it

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Geocities is now closed, the crawler is reporting 410s for lots of urls. RIP  - <AUTHOR> http://geocities.yahoo.com/index.php <comment><USER2> The end of an era.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I think that with this web 1.0 officially ends.

There is a great disturbance in the force somewhere, millions of 'under construction' gifs cried out simultaneously.

I really wonder how this will affect the google pagerank of lots of pages that have been around for a long time.

The 'average pr' of geocities pages was probably quite low, but collective it must have been enormous, especially the ones from before the spam era.</comment></comment>


Why I'm Working on Yarn - <AUTHOR> http://yehudakatz.com/2016/10/11/im-excited-to-work-on-yarn-the-new-js-package-manager-2/ <comment><USER2> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12684980](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12684980)

</comment><comment><USER3> No programming language ecosystem is safe from Yehuda's grasp. I'm looking forward to using one more well-executed tool with better repeatability, security, and performance.

</comment><comment><USER4> Does that man ever sleep? Great work Yehuda!</comment>


The new Google AdWords uses Dart – we asked why - <AUTHOR> http://news.dartlang.org/2016/03/the-new-adwords-ui-uses-dart-we-asked.html <comment><USER2> I have really been digging Dart lately. This is great news, too! Can't really get bigger validation than this.

Angular 2 with Dart is pretty incredible as well. It was a breath of fresh air not needing to worry about bundling/module loaders, etc.</comment>


64 Bits Ought to Be Enough for Anybody - <AUTHOR> https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/11/27/64-bits-ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody/ <comment><USER2> The accompanying source code is at: [https://github.com/trailofbits/sixtyfour](https://github.com/trailofbits/sixtyfour)</comment>


SoundDrown – Background noise to increase productivity - <AUTHOR> http://soundrown.com/

<comment><USER2> Is this playing a downloaded file that is looped?</comment>


Göttingen researchers identify existing drug with potential to treat Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.dpz.eu/en/home/single-view/news/die-vermehrung-von-sars-coronavirus-2-im-menschen-verhindern.html <comment><USER2> If it's not in clinical trials yet, it's not worth talking about. Pretty sure there's a few dozen in the same category as this drug.

EDIT: I don't mean that this isn't already approved for human use. But there's a whole list [0] of existing drugs being tested, and a lot of them are effective in vitro.

0: [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41587-020-00003-1](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41587-020-00003-1)

<comment><USER3> > If it's not in clinical trials yet

Only if its harmful. What if the drug has been in use for other disease with known side effects, will we still wait for clinical trials?

<comment><USER4> It depends on the risk profile. A loss of hair for a cancer drug won't be a big deal but might be problematic for common cold.

<comment><USER5> I won't have that side effect anyway

<comment><USER6> Took me a while, but i see what you did there ;)

<comment><USER7> Yes, same here - I'm the star of the Bald & Beautiful in my family, but I don't want to influence my receding hair choices to them, unless you plan on landing male role in future Fast & Furious, Die Hard, or any Rock-infused movie.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here is an official blog post by the authors: [https://www.dpz.eu/en/home/single-view/news/die- vermehrung-v...](https://www.dpz.eu/en/home/single-view/news/die-vermehrung- von-sars-coronavirus-2-im-menschen-verhindern.html)

<comment><USER9> Thanks! We changed to that from [https://techstartups.com/2020/03/06/german- researchers-ident...](https://techstartups.com/2020/03/06/german-researchers- identify-existing-drug-potential-treat-coronavirus-covid-19-drug-blocks-entry- virus-lung-cells/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Chloroquine Phosphate has also been shown to have high efficacy and has already been tested in over 500 patients in China.

Fortunately it's a drug that's been around for 50+ years originally for malaria prophylaxis and is easy enough to synthesize.

The downside, is that it is unlikely to be found in the US since we don't deal with malaria very much.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/32075365/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/32075365/)

<comment><USER11> At the dosage recommended here one could suffer acute drug toxicity. The national guideline has since moderated the prescribed doses.

<comment><USER12> What is the prescribed dosage?

Also, curious if there is any difference between chloroquine phosphate and sulphate, since I came across both while just reading up on it. Or, either works.

<comment><USER11> You can find Korean recommendation here [http://m.koreabiomed.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=7428](http://m.koreabiomed.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=7428)

Chinese recommendation is more aggressive and dependent on patient weight: [https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/coronavirus- treatment-p...](https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/coronavirus-treatment- plan-7/)

Beware these drugs have side effects and interaction with other drugs. A particular feature is that they stay in the body for a very long time. It goes without saying that they should only used under the direction of a knowledgeable physician.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some in here have been asking about risks and side effects. A quick google search turned up:

[https://www.practo.com/medicine- info/camostat-2499-api](https://www.practo.com/medicine- info/camostat-2499-api)

I'm just a layperson, but this looks like a run-of-the-mill prescription drug. Hope this helps to allay some concerns and keep the signal-to-noise ratio higher.

<comment><USER14> Well, testing is still needed to determine the appropriate dosage. If the dosage is lower or identical to the prescription drug, it's all good. If it ends up being much higher, this may be a big problem.

<comment><USER15> So to clarify: it can be tested directly on patients now, in the dosage it's already approved for in previous trials, without the need for (or at the same time as) formal trials?

And this should be the case for most such existing drugs?

Or are drugs only approved for specific uses so doctors can't do this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They tested this drug in mice with SARS/MERS in 2016 [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635421...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354215000248?via%3Dihub)

</comment><comment><USER17> From this article [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635421...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354215000248?via%3Dihub) the supposition would be that the dosages needed of Camostat mesylate - extrapolating from the dosage used for mice...would be quite large to have any effect. Any thoughts/speculations?

</comment><comment><USER11> The critical question here is the same with any other candidate drug: what is the level of concentration needed to achieve the desired antiviral effect and can it be safely reached at the targeted tissue?

</comment><comment> rv-de Any qualified opinions on Gilead and Remdesivir? Bought stocks just to see it decline 15%. Now its price is improving again.

<comment><USER18> I used to jog past Gilead's offices in Hayes (West London) all the time. Always reminded me of _The Handmaid 's Tale_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If it needs to be prescribed it needs to past trials, as with half dozen drugs already identified

</comment><comment><USER20> > _Moreover, their study suggests that antibody responses raised against SARS- > CoV could at least partially protect against SARS-CoV-2 infection._

Interesting idea. Infect everyone with the "mild" version of SARS to protect against the severe one.

<comment><USER21> SARS (SARS-CoV) is more lethal than Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2)...

You certainly don't want to infect anyone with SARS!

<comment><USER22> Aren't viral vaccinations typically a "dead" strain of the virus? Although I don't really understand what, exactly, that means.

<comment><USER23> That is one kind of vaccination, but it's not the only kind, right?

<comment><USER22> I dug around and found vaccines.gov which says that there are four vaccine types:

• Live-attenuated vaccines: these use a weakened (or attenuated) form of the germ that causes a disease.

• Inactivated vaccines: these use the killed version of the germ that causes a disease.

• Subunit, recombinant, polysaccharide, and conjugate vaccines: these use specific pieces of the germ — like its protein, sugar, or capsid (a casing around the germ).

• Toxoid vaccines: these use a toxin (harmful product) made by the germ that causes a disease. They create immunity to the parts of the germ that cause a disease instead of the germ itself.

[https://www.vaccines.gov/basics/types](https://www.vaccines.gov/basics/types)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Essentially... ""We have tested SARS-CoV-2 isolated from a patient and found that camostat mesilate blocks entry of the virus into lung cells," says Markus Hoffmann, the lead author of the study. Camostat mesilate is a drug approved in Japan for use in pancreatic inflammation. "Our results suggest that camostat mesilate might also protect against COVID-19," says Markus Hoffmann. "This should be investigated in clinical trials."

</comment><comment><USER25> This article has a little more insight: [https://techstartups.com/2020/03/06/german-researchers- ident...](https://techstartups.com/2020/03/06/german-researchers-identify- existing-drug-potential-treat-coronavirus-covid-19-drug-blocks-entry-virus- lung-cells/)

<comment><USER9> That was the originally submitted URL. Did you mean to recommend a different one?

<comment><USER25> Ops, no. I must've found this URL after it was already changed or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is the website down?

<comment><USER4> Here's a link to the paper

[https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30229-4](https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674\(20\)30229-4)

<comment><USER27> Ah, that's why this looked familiar. That link was posted 2 days ago and made front page: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22500063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22500063)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Vaccine is better.

<comment><USER29> And not having the disease exist is best. We do our best with what we've got and keep pushing every line of attack. Something is better than nothing.</comment></comment>


Introducing Teleport (modern SSH infrastructure management) - <AUTHOR> https://www.lvh.io/posts/introducing-teleport.html <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355976](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355976).</comment>


Road to Clojure Survey - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_thread/thread/d05837df1efe075/6e382d9b74bee86e

<comment> old-gregg A lot of folks seem to _like_ the fact that Clojure runs on JVM. It solves the libraries problem and takes advantage of probably the best implementation of VM available. But unfortunately that guarantees that Clojure will never be truly mainstream.

Why? Lack of shared libraries. This is why Java itself failed. Look at the list of your processes: they all have significant number of code shared _between each other_. VM-based languages don't share anything [the only exception I'm aware of is ngen-ed assemblies in .NET]. If you rewrite all your running processes in Java you RAM consumption will go through the roof. Or perhaps even rewriting openssl in Java will double memory consumption of all processes that use it. Python/Ruby are little better because most of their standard libraries are implemented in C so at least two Ruby processes share the same implementation of printf.

In short, that's probably the biggest reason why VM-based languages can't come close to replacing various dialects of C on OSX/Linux/Windows: they don't play nice with the OS they're running on.

And needless to say, I would _LOVE_ Clojure to become such replacement.

This brings me to a little dream: wouldn't be nice if Linux had a JVM-based userspace which would run all Java programs inside of just one big POSIX process, separated only by means of JVM without kernel involvement? Microsoft uses does something similar inside of IIS to host separated "application domains" for different web sites hosted by that IIS instance. If Linux did that, it would solve the following issues:

* Shared code!!! Loading a library once will guarantee that generated bytecode will be shared by all in-memory programs that use it. I.e. starting a 2nd instance of any Java program will eat zero plus process-specific local data.

* Instant startup times (JVM is loaded and all images can be pre-cached avoiding code validation). Caching of validated bytecode in a dump image AKA CL images is already a feature of JVM AFAIK.

* Seamless interop between processes since they're all running under the same garbage collector and share the same type system.

* Vastly increased productivity for desktop software programming. Not having to use dialects of C is awesome.

</dream>

BTW I heard of Microsoft's "Singularity" project which looks something like this, but for .NET. I wonder where are they going with it...

<comment><USER2> Hm, so you're saying that arguably the most popular language today has failed to become mainstream? Sorry, lost me at that assertion...

<comment><USER3> Java is popular for server-side applications, where one program runs on a cluster of machines. The RAM consumption issue arises on the desktop, where lot's of apps run on a single computer... and Java didn't get much market on the desktop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can't say I'm surprised that it devolved into a flame war by page two.

<comment><USER5> It started as a sarcastic flame, intended to mock a language (you have to be familiar with the characters to see it though)

<comment><USER4> Yes, I'm familiar; that's why I'm not surprised.</comment></comment></comment>


Online collaborative WYSIWYM latex editor Fiduswriter - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, there has been some discussion about making a server-side webbased implementation of Lyx in the past, and also the subject of making LyX more user-friendly to non-techs has come up. Now me and some friends have set out to create something like that: http://www.fiduswriter.com . We just launched the beta, and it will all be open source (AGPL) when we finally launch the 1.0 version it in 3-4 months. It's based on Biblatex rather than Natbib though. Anyways, just thought this may interest some people here.<p>For any ideas or requests don´t hesitate and drop us a line on fiduswriter.com <comment><AUTHOR> Fidus Writer was recently features on the adobe developers blog

[http://blogs.adobe.com/webplatform/2013/04/17/fidus- writer-f...](http://blogs.adobe.com/webplatform/2013/04/17/fidus-writer-foxy- css-regions-spotted-in-the-wild/)</comment>


Pan-Fried Instant Noodles, E-commerce, and Rural China - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/23/how-e-commerce-is-transforming-rural-china/amp <comment><USER2> How affordable are a pair of $90 shoes the author mentions a teenager picking up for delivery in these small remote villages? I assume the buying power / average salary there must be abysmally low.</comment>


Ask HN: Security showdown- Apple vs. Blackberry? - <AUTHOR> How do they compare? What are the nuances? <comment><USER2> blackberry can limit permissions based on if you are actively using the app or not. I get tons of notifications for whatsapp trying to use microphone/gps/contacts while the screen is off.</comment>


Ask HN: How can I go about designing and implementing a non-trivial project? - <AUTHOR> Are there any tutorial that describes how to go about designing and implementing a non-trivial project from scratch? I am feeling like I am getting stuck at the planning stage of technical things and have no idea how to start a project. So any thing that shows how to go about implementing a web-based project from start to finish including db, backend and frontend in any language would do. Thanks. <comment><USER2> In general I feel the same way. I cant cookup an idea that I find useful. I have made different calculators of a sort while learning diff lang. I usually have turned to taking something already made and transform it into my own. Its hard for me to focus on simple and incremental development until I make more complicated apps so I fall into reversing. Its been my hobby for 22 yrs. Eager to figure out how to get into a field that seems saturated with young folks and internationals that would probably live in front of a screen for a salary that I probably wouldnt be able to live off of with a blended family of 4.

edited for semantics and clarity ... and my first web project

[https://gitopanisadasitis.github.io](https://gitopanisadasitis.github.io)

[https://github.com/gitopanisadasitis/gitopanisadasitis.githu...](https://github.com/gitopanisadasitis/gitopanisadasitis.github.io)

</comment><comment><USER3> Might get something helpful from:

[http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/](http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Not a web app but pretty non-trivial!

[https://handmadehero.org/](https://handmadehero.org/)

</comment><comment><USER5> This subject gives students their first engineering experience in analyzing, designing and implementing a medium-scale software system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Which subject?</comment></comment>


Tell HN: false alarms from Pingdom - <AUTHOR>

We were changing some settings in the servers today when all of sudden Pingdom sent a flood of messages alerting that servers were done. I was like OMG-we-are-dead! Thankfully, it was false alarm. Just wanted to tell Pingdom users on HN to not worry about those false alarms. Although the irony of false alarms and non availability of Pingdom.com hasn't been lost on me.
PS: users tweets show the seriousness of this error. Sample a few:
> SysAdmins across the world are having heart attacks due to @Pingdom issues. #pingdom
> Thanks Pingdom. We haven't had a good fire drill in a while. I didn't need to finish lunch anyway. #pingdom @pingdom
> @pingdom - you're killing me with the false positive alerts @ 5am
> @pingdom just got an alert that my sites are down since Jan 1, 1970. My website is older than I am!
Because of this serious goof up, we are thinking of switching monitoring service. Do you know any good alternative to Pingdom? Heard Watchmouse is good. <comment><USER2> Any time you put your eggs in one basket you're setting yourself up for potential problems. Use Pingdom, but then add in either a direct competitor or someone else like Keynote or Gomez (no endorsements of any of the above by me, by the way). Then when one goes down, there's only momentary panic, and when they're all going off, you can panic for real.

I wouldn't jump off of Pingdom because you think someone else is good. Unless that someone else can provide some pretty hard evidence, their architecture may be just as susceptible to a hardware failure as Pingdom.

I would expect Pingdom to write up a report on what happened and write up what they plan on doing to prevent it from happening again. I don't see it anywhere on the Pingdom site, yet (I'm not a customer).

<comment><USER2> Here's Pingdom's response:

[http://blog.pingdom.com/2011/06/22/about- yesterday%E2%80%99s...](http://blog.pingdom.com/2011/06/22/about- yesterday%E2%80%99s-pingdom-outage/)

If I were a customer, I would think this is a good response. It's essentially, "Here's what went wrong, and here's how we're going to fix it." If I were Pingdom, I'd go one step further once they've made the changes they're going to make. I'd write another post that says, "Remember that outage? Here were the steps we said we would make. Today, we're announcing that 100% of those steps have been taken, and to prove it, we just did a firedrill that replicated that outage, and everything is fine."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just so you know, apparently Pingdom had a hardware failure at their datacenter, so the site is unavailable (though no data will be lost)[1]. And, if your site was down in the past hour, then you'll be getting delayed alerts[2].

[1] <https://twitter.com/#!/pingdom/status/83191625874018306>

[2] <https://twitter.com/#!/pingdom/status/83253096096088064></comment>


Ask HN: Real costs associated with a startup? - <AUTHOR>

Particularly web stuff, but I'd be interested in hearing about hardware/desktop software, etc.<p>Were there any unexpected costs? <comment><USER2> "Real" as in dollar, or "real" as in economic?

By far the biggest cost is opportunity cost, but that's also the least "real" in dollar terms. Two years that you spend working on your startup is two years of lost income (~$200K+ for decent software devs), or two years that could've been spent getting an MBA or grad degree, or two years when you're not partying and getting laid.

As for actual monetary costs - paying people to do things is the main one. Legal fees can rack up quickly if you want an actual corporation - easily a couple K for a barebones S-corp if you do it with decent lawyers. If you have employees - well, you know how much you could get paid, then increase that by 50-100% for overhead.

Software and hosting costs were essentially zero - for basically any web stuff, you want to be using free software anyway, and you can get cheap hosting for like $10/month ($80/month if you're doing something weird and need a dedicated server) that's perfectly adequate for trying ideas out. S3/EC2 also can result in really cheap hosting if you're not using much capacity. If you need to scale it'll cost you, but if you get that far you're doing so much better than 99% of startups that you'll welcome it.

Biggest unexpected costs for us, by far, were founder buyouts. My remaining cofounder and I each dropped a grand to buy out cofounders that weren't pulling their weight - and while it was totally the right choice from the POV of preserving the relationships (one of those bought out later led to 2 job leads for me when the startup folded), it would've been even better to not bring them on board to begin with. Be very careful who you start a company with, and make sure you each have the same level of commitment and goals for the company. Buyouts can be as expensive as divorce, and usually lead to the death of the company.

<comment><USER3> Regarding buyouts.. I can't recommend enough a vesting period on founders stock. Usually over 3-4 years. Then, if one of you leaves early, you only get a proportional amount of stock compared to your time invested. A lot of people just can't keep up with it in the long haul despite the best of intentions.

I would say if it's your first (or second) time starting a business there is an amazing amount of costly mistakes. You'll survive if you never make one big enough to put you out of business. We should collect stories about our biggest mistakes..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My biggest cost, by far, is AdWords, but I always planned on that. Its a "pay $1, get $2" situation, so I'll do that all night long.

The big unanticipated cost for me is freelancers. When I started, I did _everything_ myself, by hand. Turns out that most things are not worth my time. Freelancers are also a "spend money to make money" option for me these days, but I got a shock when I did my taxes last year and realized I had paid out the equivalent of about a month's salary on them.

[edit for context: one-man software business, 2.5 years old, produces roughly dayjob salary.]

<comment><USER5> Where do you get freelancers from? Have you tried Mechanical Turk?

<comment><USER4> I've had success with posting from my blog, using elance, and meeting people in real life. Egads no on Mechanical Turk -- I don't need semi-trained monkeys working for peanuts, I need professionals who either a) do stuff that I can't or b) do stuff that I can but at a fraction of what I charge per hour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> puzzle-out I ran an E-commerce company, and we had to fly in some of our products (jewellery). UPS were extortionate - they misquoted me on the phone, and my mistake was not getting it confirmed over email. DHL are fine, in my experience. In the long term, I should have been more organised so that I had time to ship the products in.

</comment><comment><USER6> An unexpected cost for me would definitely be CA franchise tax ($800/year) and registered agent fee (~$100/year).

</comment><comment><USER7> one of the unanticipated costs for me was marketing, I sell my webbased software to businesses and its not the kind of thing you can sell via search results & adwords campaign, so alot of brochures, trade shows and cold calling are required to sell subscriptions.

<comment><USER8> What business are you in?</comment></comment>


Magic Leap Settling Sex Discrimination Lawsuit with Former Employee - <AUTHOR> https://www.vrandfun.com/magic-leap-settling-sex-discrimination-lawsuit-with-former-employee/ <comment><USER2> "In IT we have a saying; stay away from the Three Os: Orientals, Old People and Ovaries."

In 17 years of working IT, I have never heard this saying and nothing even close.

<comment><USER3> I would report anyone that said that to HR.

<comment><USER4> I guess if your only metric is what people are willing to say in front of you then it probably works but you know what they say about metrics...

In general, going for the passive aggressive nuclear option and involving some external authority as your first step is almost never* the right thing to do if you want to actually solve the problem.

In the context of things that shouldn't be said in the workplace doing that creates distrust that prevents people from speaking freely which inevitably works its way into everywhere and affects performance.

*ignoring edge cases.

<comment><USER5> If someone hasn't realized by now that saying something like that is unacceptable, I have to call into question their critical thinking skills.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the complaint:

> ... the "Wizards Wanted" section of its website. Indeed, given that a > "wizard" generally is defined as "a man who has magical powers," and > virtually without exception images of wizards are male, Magic Leap's > recruiting verbiage contains a not-so-subtle "women-need-not-apply" message.

Ummm... technically there is an equivalent 'typically female' term for a woman with magical powers.

I think Magic Leap would still be in trouble if they had used _that_ term in their recruiting literature.

<comment><USER7> > Ummm... technically there is an equivalent 'typically female' term for a > woman with magical powers.

"Sorceress"?

<comment><USER8> "Magician"? Works for all genders, too!

<comment><USER7> "Magician" is gender-neutral and ideal, but not "typically female".

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately "Magician" doesn't sound like a person you would want messing around in your code base, though.

<comment><USER10> The company has "magic" in its name, I think they get a pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Magic Leap is probably one of the most secretive technology companies of our generation"??! It's no secret that they're a fraud. That cat's out of the bag.

I mean, come on: just watch Rony Abovitz's TEDxSarasota talk [1] that he so fittingly presented at the Ringling College of Art & Design [2], whose trademarked mission phrase is "Shattering the myth of the starving artist.™".

Yes, those very same Ringling brothers [3], whose colleague P. T. Barnum said: "There's a sucker born every minute." Send in the clowns.

Charlatans like these give the rest of the industry a terrible name.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_College_of_Art_and_De...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_College_of_Art_and_Design)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_Bros._and_Barnum_%26_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringling_Bros._and_Barnum_%26_Bailey_Circus)

<comment><USER12> The Ringling College of Art and Design is a reputable design school. Doesn't have much to do with clowns or PT Barnum.

<comment><USER11> In my mind, they're not as reputable after having given Rony Abovitz a platform to perform that "fudge". Just watch the video, if you can stomach it, all the way through. And read the comments, like this one:

\----

Nick Steele 2 years ago (edited)

This is a joke. Take it for what it is. They didn't want to say anything so they basically said "are you ready? READY? ... fuck you".

After a completely ridiculous intro which includes nano machines humping blood cells and two crack monkeys worshiping a massive block of "demented space fudge" which takes up 75% of the talk until 4:30, right after 30 seconds of literal silence, a spaceman says "greetings" and introduces today's "keyword" which is "fudge", then a guy plays terrible music out of tune and sings half- way into the mic. Then the lights suddenly go out and the crack moneys and space man simply walk away.

Keep in mind the audience thinks they are about to hear a billionaire explain his new "world changing" virtual/augmented reality technology, then they get this shit.

The best part is the audiences reaction at the end. :)

\----

And if that's not enough proof that Magic Leap is a fraud, then watch their completely fake demo, that they originally did not truthfully bill as a "concept video" but instead they falsely and deceptively titled it "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described it with the blatantly false claim that "This is a game we're playing around the office right now". But since then, the title and description have been retroactively amended, AFTER they got busted.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM)

[https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/8/13894000/magic-leap-ar- mi...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/8/13894000/magic-leap-ar-microsoft- hololens-way-behind)

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/09/magic_leap_neither_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/09/magic_leap_neither_magic_nor_leaping/)

[https://www.slashgear.com/magic-leap-video-may-have- involved...](https://www.slashgear.com/magic-leap-video-may-have-involved- more-magic-than-tech-09466957/)

[http://www.techspot.com/news/67342-reality-magic-leap- fake-d...](http://www.techspot.com/news/67342-reality-magic-leap-fake-demo- videos-delayed-technology.html)

[https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/8/13894000/magic-leap-ar- mi...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/8/13894000/magic-leap-ar-microsoft- hololens-way-behind)

[http://time.com/3752343/magic-leap-video/](http://time.com/3752343/magic- leap-video/)

\----

That last Time article above was written BEFORE they got busted, and it cites a Magic Leap company spokesman (and I'm pretty sure it was a man) mendaciously lying to the rightfully skeptical (and eventually vindicated) Time reporter:

It's unclear whether the video shows an actual game overlaid onto a real-world office space or just an artistic rendering of what the game might look like in the future. The way the gun rests so realistically in the gamer's hand certainly raises suspicions. _Still, a company spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that the video was authentic._

"This is a game we're playing around the office right now," Magic Leap wrote on its official YouTube account.

\----

The game they were playing (and still are) is called FRAUD.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > During Campbell's last four months at Magic Leap, Abovitz—who always had > been pouty and prone to temper-tantrums, began to dig his heels in even more > in the face of dissenting ideas and to explode ever more frequently into > child-like fits of rage, threatening retribution when he didn't get his way, > felt betrayed or was portrayed publically in an unfavorable light.

Ugh. It's just depressing how often you see people like this in positions of power.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, how do you think they got there? Stifling dissent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Senior Engineer Eric Adams sent out an email December 4, 2015 through a company email list serv for social activities for Magic Leap employees and their families, which email bore the subject line, "Board (sic) Wives at home while you are loving it at the Leap," which stated:

\----

Hello Leapers:

My wife is starting a Google group outside of the Magic Leap locked domain.

It is called "Magic Leap spouses" and should be findable as such.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/magic-leap- spouses](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/magic-leap-spouses)

It is sort of a social meeting place for all the spouses that have been displaced, alone in the daytime and are new to the area, would like to have lunch with or just to have someone local to hang out with when their significant other is slaving away at work thru-out the 12-Hr day. Or are they just nagging you because you moved here?

Please forward this Email to your wife if she would like to get better acclimated to South Florida. The group is not public and is reasonably private (by email invite/accept) as to not accidentally disclose any Magic Leap secrets.

\----

The gender-neutral reference to "spouses" notwithstanding, implicit in the subject line and the reference to "your wife" is the assumption — which is not too far from wrong — that all the employees were men with wives who didn't work outside the home and were "alone in the daytime."

\----

</comment><comment><USER14> This type of allegation is why we enjoy the particular character treatments portrayed in _Silicon Valley_.

<comment><USER15> Heck, even that AR mustache startup in season 2 looked more authentic then Magic Leap's secretive technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Eric Akerman, vice president of IT, is a high school buddy of Abovitz. He is a loud and outspoken and several misogynistic comments have emanated from his department and from him."

"Vice president of IT Akerman, on Nov. 8, 2016, told a large group of people who asked why he voted for Trump that it was 'because Melania is hot.'"

</comment><comment><USER16> Rony Abovitz gets away with corporate murder - most of the reputable senior executives have fled his his Plantation, Florida Jones town or being sued. He raised the money to waste on lawsuits, just look at the records and testimonies - there is no product, just Abovitz's bullshit. He is not capable of delivering a product. Google made a stupid investment, and with Sundar and Scott Hassan on their board they are still allowed to run a shit show with Google's approval. No other startup could pull one like this. Total Magic Shit.

</comment><comment><USER17> The complaint itself is interesting. Lots of inside information on not just the discrimination issue, but other critical commentary about the company.

One example:

 _" admonitions ignored in favor of her malecolleagues' assertions that the images and videos presented on Magic Leap's website and on YouTube were "aspirational," and not Magic Leap's version of "alternate facts.""_

<comment><USER18> It didn't occur to me anyone would think those were anything but concepts.

Some videos said they were shot through magic leap technology, presumably they were. The rest are mock-ups and concepts.

<comment><USER11> The most infamous misleading video that currently claims to be a "concept video" was originally deceptively titled "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap" and described as "This is a game we're playing around the office right now". Only AFTER they got busted, did Magic Leap retroactively change the title and description so they were not so blatantly false and misleading.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPMHcanq0xM)

Before they got busted and white-washed the lies, a skeptical Time magazine reporter didn't think it looked real, and asked Magic Leap about it directly. The official Magic Leap company spokesman mendaciously lied to him that "the video was authentic":

[http://time.com/3752343/magic-leap-video/](http://time.com/3752343/magic- leap-video/)

It's unclear whether the video shows an actual game overlaid onto a real-world office space or just an artistic rendering of what the game might look like in the future. The way the gun rests so realistically in the gamer's hand certainly raises suspicions. Still, a company spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that the video was authentic.

"This is a game we're playing around the office right now," Magic Leap wrote on its official YouTube account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I know it's settling a lawsuit, but isn't it nice that Magic Leap has actually done something for once?

More seriously, I'm continually annoyed by this "woman hired to combat sexism" thing. It's a special case of a scenario plenty of us will recognise: where a problem with your boss is somehow your problem to sort out.

</comment><comment><USER20> You can see why they settled. Those documents are brutal and they would have lost so badly.

<comment><USER21> There is also the fact that if the trial went public, she could seriously damage the company with NON-discrimination claims. For example:

"Campbell also raised concerns that what Magic Leap showed the public in marketing material was not what the product actually could do—admonitions ignored in favor of her male colleagues' assertions that the images and videos presented on Magic Leap'swebsite and on YouTube were "aspirational," and not Magic Leap's version of "alternate facts.""

That could kill investment. I'd wager her lawyers knew this and it's likely considered a "good" legal tactic to force a settlement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You know, it's honestly not that hard to not discriminate like this. I mean, I tend to do it all day. So why can't they?

<comment><USER8> I think it requires having respect for your co-workers as human beings.</comment></comment>


Apple Doubles the Price of RAM Upgrade on Entry-Level 13-Inch MacBook Pro - <AUTHOR> https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/30/13-inch-macbook-pro-ram-upgrade-doubled/ <comment><USER2> For comparison:

Lenovo charges $149 (regularly $170) for the same upgrade in the X1

Microsoft charges $200 for the same upgrade in the Surface Pro 7

It sucks that they raised the price (and I'd love to hear the story behind it), but it's on par with everyone else.

<comment><USER3> My question to Apple (and others) would be:

Why is in 2020 a "Pro" laptop coming with only 8 GB of RAM?

<comment><USER4> Apple's Sales Distortion Field. offer a must-have device without something it clearly should have, only to unveil that feature later as a new Apple perfection. It goes all the way back to copy and paste on the iPhone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 8GB of LPDDR3 costs about $30 retail. So they went from a 330% markup to a 660% markup. Nice.

<comment><USER6> Is it easy to install your own RAM in MacBooks these days? I used to do it all the time 20 years ago and I know times have changed.

<comment><USER7> impossible. It's soldered on the mainboard.

<comment><USER8> Never say never, sometimes someone with a hot-air workstation could swap chips for denser ones. Never an easy job.

<comment><USER9> Normal DIMM's have a SPD flash chip soldered to the board which identifies the ram/timing parameters for the firmware/OS. At least on phones, to save a penny they forgo this and frequently the RAM capacity is tied to the model via hardcoded tables in the firmware. It wouldn't surprise me if at least on some of these "laptop" devices with soldered on ram something similar isn't being done.

So, at a minimum your flashing new ram parms to a SPD, or hacking the device model number somewhere. AKA, even with a rework station its likely a lot more than just swapping the chips, if there is sufficient PC/etc linage you might be able to swap the SPD chip as well, otherwise its going to be more than a mechanical heat it up, clean the pads, and drop/heat the new chip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have been a faithful Apple/macOS since 2002. Always very happy and proud.

I have now switched to Windows on my Macbook Pro and I'm liking it. It's not as polished as macOS still, but I think (and hope) it's getting there. I don't think I'll ever buy another Apple machine. Windows has turned around since those times, I recommend you give it a try if you're thinking about it or you're unhappy with how Apple has become nowadays.

I almost feel free to choose whatever machine I want next and not pay a hefty price for it. Or pay it, if I want to, but it will be my choice, not imposed.

<comment><USER11> > It's not as polished as macOS still

But isn't this the most important thing?

Yes this RAM is expensive... but it's just a few hundred dollars for something I use every day for all my income and most of my hobbies and the alternative is something hobbled.

<comment><USER12> A single 8gb stick of ddr4 is ~$30-$40 on Amazon right now.

A single stick of ddr3 is $20-30.

Apple is charging $200 for that same stick of RAM.

It likely costs them $10 or less since they buy in bulk.

Their UI isn't work paying them a 10x margin. That's fucking ridiculous.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't matter what the margin is, to me.

All I care about is is it worth it to pay $200 more for a MacBook with 16 GB rather than 8 GB. Yes it is to me, because I can get that money back and more from the value it gives me.

I don't care how much you can buy the RAM for elsewhere, because what can I do with that? It's not of any use to me when it's not inside a MacBook, is it? It's irrelevant.

<comment><USER12> Fair enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In no way am I arguing Apple is right here, but could this have anything to do with a possible shortage in RAM due to supplychain/COVID-19?

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow. After >= 5 years of having a 8GB base model and expensive upgrades to 16GB (which are imho totally necessary today) i thought they finally improved a bit with the 2020 model by at least reducing the upgrade cost. Seems like they are back to 2015 again.

</comment><comment><USER14> Well I guess they were right. They do have a lot of courage

</comment><comment><USER15> Probably too many people went for base + 16gb. There's not too big of a difference between base 8th gen and upgraded 10th gen except for graphics.

</comment><comment><USER16> Does that mean the new 2020 Macbook Pro I bought with 16GB just became $100 more valuable?

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't really understand who's buying the two-port 13" MBP with its 8th generation CPU over the MBA or the four-port MBP, both with 10th gen CPUs. Now I really don't understand it. Maybe Apple is trying to guide people toward one of those other two models. You're at $1500 by the time you've upgrade it to 16GB. The four-port which comes with 16GB starts at $1800, but gets you a current generation CPU which is faster (2.0 Ghz vs 1.4 Ghz), has double the CPU, double the Thunderbolt ports, and double the memory. Seems like a no- brainer for $300 more.

I personally just purchased a maxed-out MBA. I went with the MBA because I prefer the form-factor and don't want the touch bar. If I'd been willing to accept those, I would've gone with the four-port MBP. At no point did the two- port MBP make any sense to me.

Edit: it's $200 to upgrade the RAM in the MBA as well. I wonder why the MBP was only $100 in the first place.

<comment><USER18> Could you please explain why you would choose an Apple anything over a much more reasonably priced and specwise better PC? Not trying to be a dick, I'm a sysadmin genuinely trying to wrap my head around it.

<comment><USER19> macOS, and great hardware.

I love the MacBook touchpad, no other laptop really compares in that regard. The screen is also amazing on the MacBook Pro.

I don't like Windows, and Linux is hard to get completely stable on a laptop (battery life, standby, webcam, touchpad gestures, etc.). Thus, macOS is the best alternative for me.

Not everything is about price to performance ratios for me. It's about the overall experience I have when interacting with the device. Plus, the 15" MacBook pro I have is more than powerful enough.

<comment><USER20> I agree with all of the above, but would also like to add the ecosystem to your list. With my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Pro I get some really nice integration of Keychain, Handoff, Continuity, etc.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, personally I use an Android phone so that stuff doesn't apply to me but it's definitely a big part of the value prop for a lot of people as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The price increase is actually a price correction, Apple told. The price to upgrade RAM from 8GB to 16GB is $200 on other Macs, including the iMac and MacBook Air, and this change is meant to keep the fee consistent. Apple says it will honor the earlier pricing for those who purchased the cheaper RAM upgrade before the price change went into effect.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro was refreshed last month. Though the entry-level design remains largely unchanged, it now includes Apple's Magic Keyboard, which replaces the maligned butterfly keys found on previous MacBook models. i also purchase a used mackbook pro 15 inch [https://www.asan.com.pk/ad/79849/macbook-pro-15-inch- early-2...](https://www.asan.com.pk/ad/79849/macbook-pro-15-inch-early-2011) 4gb ram, with installed graphic card AMD Radeon HD 6490M 256 MB, 2 GHz Intel Core i7

</comment><comment><USER22> By now this amounts to stating that Luis Vuitton doubles the price of the shiny lacquer upgrade on its entry range of handbags, i.e. more or less irrelevant since there is no direct relation between the cost and the imagined value of the object. Some will pay since to them the imagined value of the product justifies the price, others won't since they consider some factors to be less important, others to be more important in deciding the imagined value. Those who will pay the price tend to defend the rationale behind the price increase while those won't tend to do the opposite, i.e. the decision does not much to move the dividing line between those who are willing to pay and those who are not since those who value the brand will continue to do so.

<comment><USER23> > there is no direct relation between the cost and the imagined value of the > object

Try looking for an equivalent to this:

Apple MacBook Pro 16" silber, Core i7-9750H, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB, 3500€

Similarly specced models are either not available at all or be priced around 3000€ (eg HP ZBook Studio G5). So yes the MBP will cost a little more, but not outrageously so, and some of it can be explained by better components.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The fact that RAM cannot be upgraded, even on the 16" MBP, will keep me away from buying another Mac laptop. It is so nice just not having to worry about whether or not I have enough when I buy the machine.

I do wonder why so many manufacturers are moving away from user-upgradable RAM. Perhaps the failure rate is lower or it is easier from a manufacturing standpoint. It can't all just be to save space or to make more money by selling marked up RAM, can it?

<comment><USER25> Size, cost, and integration.

Size: SODIMM slots are huge. That space can be much more efficiently utilized when put onto the main circuit board. This potentially leaves more space for the battery, or making the laptop thinner/more aesthetic.

Cost: Supply chain optimizations drive down cost. The DDR chips they are using are likely similar to the ones they use in other hardware (think phones). This increases total volume, and decreases cost. Also chips aren't a finished good, so they are saving on the cost incurred in making RAM DIMMs in the first place.

Integration: They only have to make sure their hardware, firmware, and software works with the RAM they supply. Decreases the testing burden. No lookup tables to see what is compatible, and no guessing when you buy RAM that causes the BIOS to panic. It just works, and is highly optimized for the use case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> When the new Macbook's came out, I did think they were priced a bit too reasonably. Apple must have thought so too...

</comment><comment><USER27> Anyone know if this soldered Mac RAM upgrade receipe was genuine and if it's become harder since? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTsEJ49LLsQ&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTsEJ49LLsQ&feature=youtu.be)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm still running a 2014 MacBook Air. It's fast enough, but I do want a more powerful machine for video editing. Is there a Windows based machine that's likely to still feel as new and solid after 6+ years as an aluminum bodied MacBook?

<comment><USER29> Unlikely, but how much of you wanting to keep a machine for 6 years is BECAUSE it's so expensive?

<comment><USER30> I would say it depends on one's usage. My daily driver is a late 2013 MBP 15" and the performance is more than enough for what I do (mostly sysadmin / light dev for work and Lightroom / Photoshop for my own time).

As other comments have pointed out, a comparably specced PC is not that much cheaper and would be much more of a hassle.

During those six and a half years I knew I could count on this machine and I never had any annoyances with it. If I had gotten a PC which was unlikely to last as long, I would have had to change it at least once, which means going through a period of not quite broken but not quite hassle-free either. And two PCs with the specs of my MBP would have cost more. I'm also OK with paying a premium to not have to deal with those issues (noise, screen sometimes not working, ports failing, keyboards dying, etc — all issues I've had with "pro- level" computers, mostly HP).

There's also the fact that at the time a similar PC was extremely rare (maybe the X1?). I'm talking about a computer with thunderbolt, high resolution display, the ability to run a 4K display at 60Hz, fast SSD. Granted, all those are much more common today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Stop pushing me away Apple.

</comment><comment><USER32> Dammit, that's always the main upgrade I'd recommend to everyone.

I think I had previously noticed it was already $200 to go from 8 to 16 on entry level new MacBook Air -- at any rate, it is now too.

<comment><USER33> I agree, though with ultra high speed NVMe SSDs, not having enough RAM isn't the performance penalty it used to be for casual computer use.

<comment><USER34> The danger now without enough memory is that you're using the SSD for swap. I've seen web browsers eat 16GB of memory by themselves. If you only have 8GB, it might not be that slow anymore, but then you're going to wear out your SSD.

<comment><USER33> Is that a realistic concern for typical usage patterns?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Weird, I'd think you'd want 16GB at least to make it last.

I've actually upgraded my desktop to 64GB when I had the need (data analysis and compilers).

</comment><comment><USER36> They're probably selling more 8th gen models with 16GB of RAM than 10th gen models and they don't like it, as simple as that

</comment><comment><USER37> Hopefully you can do your RAM upgrade by yourself. In the end it's a "Pro" machine no ?

<comment><USER38> LOL! You haven't seen the insides of recent Macs (read: since 2010), have you? Everything is soldered to the motherboard, the battery is glued to the case, etc. They're the pinnacle of non-repairability.

<comment><USER39> It always makes me laugh when Apple (and their fans) talk about how Environmentally Friendly Apple is...

Reduce and Reuse is the best way to help pollution, yet Apple is known, famous for Planned Obsolescence and non-repairability

you can not be Environmentally Friendly and maintain the only solution to any problem is to just toss it and buy a new one

<comment><USER40> There is no "planned obsolescence" from Apple, and btw, that phrase is not capitalized in English.

There is a popular myth among the lazy-minded about this, but the fact is that Apple's hardware lasts a lot longer, and is intentionally supported for a lot longer, than competing hardware. This is true for Macs as well as iOS devices. If Apple is "planning" for anything, it's for their stuff to last a lot longer than others' stuff, not the opposite.

<comment><USER41> Not everything has to be black and white. Apple can be supporting old hardware for very long time, much longer than any other manufacturer, and yet simulatiously be shit at making sure their hardware is actually repairable if it does break down. Luis Rossman had a very good series of videos on this, consider this for instance - a chip that controls USB-C charging used to be just a regular chip made by some chinese company, you could order them by yourself for like $0.10 each, a tray full of chips would cost you few dollars at most. So as he runs a repair business, and those chips fail relatively frequently for <reasons>, he could repair a dead macbook for like $50-100(practically charging just for his time to take the chip out and put a new one in). But Apple doesn't like that - so they went to that manufacturer and specifially asked for that chip to be modified, so that it only works with their machines, and asked that they are the only buyer of that chip. So now if your macbook dies because this chip failed, you cannot replace it with a new $0.10 chip - you need to buy a whole new $1000 motherboard from Apple.

This is not planned obsolescence - this is going out of your way to make the repairs harder. I can understand when certain decisions are made for engineering reasons(like say, having the ram soldered on), but this kind of thing when Apple goes to the manufacturer and asks for a version specific only to them so that no one else can buy it, ever - that's just anti-consumer, and I hope the hand of the law will come on them super hard due to this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dis-sys Intel wants you to only have 4 cores Apple wants you to only have 8G RAM

what a huge surprise!

</comment><comment><USER42> They can double the price of the laptops and I'd still buy them. macOS is just ahead of the competition.

</comment><comment><USER43> macOS needs that extra 8GB due to all the bloat nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER44> You'll pay it.</comment>


Seeking the Gears of Our Inner Clock - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/science/seeking-the-gears-of-our-inner-clock.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10800707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10800707)</comment>


Ask HN: Could this be Elon Musk's Hyperloop idea? - <AUTHOR>

1. Elon Musk is the founder of SpaceX
2. SpaceX is collaborating with NASA
3. NASA has a futuristic transportation project called 'skyTran'
4. Elon Musk is working on a futuristic transportation project called 'Hyperloop'
5. Elon Musk is the founder of Tesla and interested in environment-friendly green technology
6. skyTran is an environment-friendly green technology that uses passive magnetic levitation
7. skyTran are driverless elevated pods. It is a lightweight high-speed urban rapid transit project. Unlike traditional maglev systems with skyTran there is no power used (wasted) to levitate the vehicles
8. skyTran is very "cheap", it costs a tenth of a traditional light rail system. It functions like a car and a train at the same time
9. The skyTran team - that is based at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley - said in an BBC interview in April 2013 that they are in discussions with a nearby city (hint: L.A.?) that hopes to be the first to test the system
10. Elon Musk wants to bring his Hyperloop to L.A.
11. Elon Musk is an investor in and the Chairman of SolarCity, the leading residential solar provider in the U.S.
12. skyTran's magnetic levitation system can easily be powered by clean energy sources such as solar
13. Here are three videos about skyTran:
a) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=echZPz4Pmig
b) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QT1CjKtGFZs
c) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F86hjy63bVA <comment><USER2> Seems unlikely, given the timeframe between LA and SF that Musk has hinted at.</comment>


Ask HN: While on Shutdown, what will happen if the USA is under attack? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> The same thing that would happen anytime would happen now.

The military isn't suddenly closed down - just the relatively benign and semi- tolerable parts of the government are neutered for political reasons.

Getting useless paperwork through the system isn't going to happen today, but you can be rest assured that the IRS will still be collecting taxes and the NSA will still be spying on you.

</comment><comment><USER3> The same things that would normally happen? Shutdown only applies to non- essential personnel. The only impact to the military are things like the training academies, or recruiting.</comment>