DNSSEC is Open for Beta - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/dnssec-is-open-for-beta/ <comment><USER2> "... because DNS, invented in 1983 before the public consumption of the Internet, does not perform any authentication."

Authentication of what?

An end point? No.

A domainname? OK, I'll play along.

And why would "authentication" of a dommainname be necessary?

Maybe because the end user is communicating with a shared DNS cache operated by a third party instead of using their own?

But I do not use shared DNS caches. I use my own cache.

Moreover I use CurveDNS which provides encryption of DNS packets in transit and is at least as good at "authenticating" the proper authoritative server for each domainname as DNSSEC.

How would DNSSEC serve me?

DNSSEC could be a way for certain groups to maintain control over the use of DNS. Similar to the way SSL CA system has been used to control the use of encryption. Both the use of domainnames and SSL certificates are each commercial in nature (pay to play). They do not have to be, but schemes like CA system and DNSSEC allow for this to occur via centralisation of authority.

<comment><USER3> Authentication of whether the records have been tampered with or not. That includes the very authoritative nameserver you fetched them from in the first place, which might have been compromised. This is why DNSSEC allows zones to be signed offline by the zone's owner rather than trusting the nameserver.

Even if you run your own DNS cache, some bad actor between you and zone owner (including the aforementioned authoritative DNS server) can still potentially provide you with bad data. DNSCurve gives you _encrypted traffic_, but DNSSEC gives you _accurate results_. They solve two different problems.

<comment><USER2> "They solve two different problems."

Well-known fact. And truthfully the most sensible approach would be to use both. Yet I never see anyone doing that.

Given the choice between the two problems, I know which one I consider more serious.

The results might be "accurate" when stored on the nameserver but if they get tampered with in transit went sent over the wire then they are not "accurate" when they are received. In that case DNSSEC does not give me accurate results.

Moreover I am not keen on the widepread sniffing of DNS traffic. Name lookups and other DNS requests and responses are just as important as HTTP traffic. Why encrypt one and not the other?

Finally, I could be wrong but I think getting redirected to a bogus nameserver run by a "bad actor" seems (easier for the bad actor and) more likely than accessing the correct nameserver without the knowledge it has secretly been compromised.

<comment><USER3> > The results might be "accurate" when stored on the nameserver but if they > get tampered with in transit went sent over the wire then they are not > "accurate" when they are received. In that case DNSSEC does not give me > accurate results.

Here's where you're wrong. A zone isn't just signed in isolation. If it was, then DNSSEC would indeed be completely useless. Rather, there's a chain of trust from the root nameservers up to the nameservers for the domain in question, and in each case you can request a DS (delegation signer) record to show that a zone served by a subordinate nameserver hasn't been tampered with.

Now, this has its own issues if you're not a fan of the hierarchical nature of DNS, but it guarantees that even though the data is sent in the clear, some bad actor can't modify it in transit without breaking everything.

DNSCurve is a nice bonus, but the guarantee that the records being served cannot have been tampered with given by DNSSEC is much more fundamentally important.

<comment><USER2> "Here's where you're wrong."

Are you sure? If the plain text packet used in DNSSEC is tampered with then how does DNSSEC ensure I get an "accurate result"? Are you saying failure is an "accurate result"?

How is this superior to encrypting the packet to protect against tampering?

"A zone isn't just signed in isolation."

This is why I do not care for DNSSEC.

Where is control being placed? This smells much like SSL and the CA system.

I obtain zone files from official zone file access programs and run them in my own authoritative nameservers, locally.

I can also get zone information from the scans offered at scans.io

"... if you're not a fan of the hierarchical nature of DNS..."

After many years of workarounds, I can deal with that. It's the hierarchical nature of "trust" in DNSSEC (as in SSL) that is a problem.

I guess we just differ in what we see as more important.

I find it rather absurd that you are actually advising someone running their own cache to use DNSSEC. The entire raison d'etre for trying to bring DNSSEC back to life again circa 2008 was cache poisoning.

There are commercial interests pushing DNSSEC. Its advocates will make any argument necessary to try to justify adoption. Alas, end users are not the intended beneficiaries.

<comment><USER3> > Are you sure?

Yes, very sure. Because I actually had to sit down and read the relevant RFCs way back because it's part of my job as somebody who works for a domain registrar. Here's a quick overview for anybody who hasn't had the time to

You can't tamper with a record that's been signed. It won't validate against the matching RRSIG record, and the only way you can generate those is if you have the private key. And how do you validate those? Well, that's what the DNSKEY record is for: it contains the public key, and is used to validate the signatures in the RRSIG records.

Now, assuming you trust that modern crypto works, all that assures that records published in the zone cannot possibly be tampered with, but it doesn't prevent two things: the insertion of additional records and that the DNSKEY record is legit. For the former problem, NSEC/NSEC3 records exist.

[I'm not going to go into how NSEC/NSEC3 records work, because they're without a doubt the single most complicated part of DNSSEC. The rest of DNSSEC is trivial compared them, especially the mechanisms in NSEC3 records that mitigate against zone enumeration.]

So far so good, but while all that allows you to verify the integrity of the records you've queried, an intermediary could strip all those additional records that allow you to check their integrity or spoof them. You need to ask somebody, and given the inherently hierarchical nature of DNS, that somebody is the parent zone, which is where DS records come in: they prove that (a) the zone is meant to be signed and (b) that the DNSKEY record in the zone is legit. The same process is used right up to the root servers, whose contents is verified using the trust anchors supplied with your OS.

> If the plain text packet used in DNSSEC is tampered with then how does > DNSSEC ensure I get an "accurate result"? Are you saying failure is an > "accurate result"?

Failure tells you that the results you've got back have been tampered with. And that's a good thing. If somebody's feeding you poison, you need to know that.

I'll take a denial of service over somebody draining my bank account, and even then it needn't result in a DOS if you choose to ignore the fact that you've gotten bogus data.

> Where is control being placed? This smells much like SSL and the CA system.

Your problem isn't with DNSSEC, but with DNS.

> I obtain zone files from official zone file access programs and run them in > my own authoritative nameservers, locally.

Which registries do you have agreements for zone file access with? And even if you have access to that information, you still have to get the zonefiles for the individual domains published in the registry's zone. How do you fetch those? I'm pretty sure that you don't have access to, say, the zones published on ns-22.awsdns-28.com, unless you happen to work for Amazon. So you're trusting somebody to fetch that likely incomplete that data for you from the _real_ authoritative nameservers.

What you're running isn't an authoritative nameserver, not in the normal sense. You might be using it in authoritative mode to serve some scraped data locally, but effectively you have have is a little more than sophisticated /etc/hosts file and a bunch of blind faith that the sources you got the data from originally didn't tamper with it.

> I can also get zone information from the scans offered at scans.io

In other words, a third party who happens to have gathered the data, but who may just have tampered with it, and you have no way of knowing. All you have is blind trust that they're giving you good data. They could be feeding you complete junk for all you know. But DNSCurve makes sure that junk is transmitted super securely.

> After many years of workarounds, I can deal with that. It's the hierarchical > nature of "trust" in DNSSEC (as in SSL) that is a problem.

It's _DNS_ whose nature is hierarchical. The hierarchical nature of DNSSEC is a consequence of DNS being hierarchical.

> I guess we just differ in what we see as more important.

Yes, we do. I want to make sure the DNS records being served to me aren't junk. You want to fetch them using a gold-plated pipe, even if they happen to be total junk.

As I wrote before, DNSSEC and DNSCurve solve two totally different problems. In an ideal world, we'd be using _both_.

> I find it rather absurd that you are actually advising someone running their > own cache to use DNSSEC.

When did I write that? The only thing I've talked about is the importance of being able to verify the integrity of the data you've fetched.

> There are commercial interests pushing DNSSEC. Its advocates will make any > argument necessary to try to justify adoption.

For what benefit? What do they get out of it?

DNS hosting providers don't get much out of it except having to serve more data. Registrar's don't get much out of it except of yet another EPP extension to implement that no registry implements the same way and yet another obligation if they're on the 2013 RAA. Registries don't get anything out of it except having to serve more data. Registries don't charge for DNSSEC, and it's no more in a registrar's interest to charge to send DNSSEC requests up to the registry than it is to charge for nameserver or contact updates. DNS hosting providers could charge, and some do, but given the choice between using using the likes of OpenDNSSEC and stabbing yourself in the eye with a pencil, the latter will typically win out. And if you're a masochist like me, you can use a hidden primary and treat all the visible authoritative nameservers as secondary nameservers, so if your DNS hosting provider allows zone transfers, you don't have to pay anything extra because the DNS hosting provider doesn't have deal with securing the private key and all the implied expense of doing so.

So, who is actually benefiting here? The manufacturers of hardware security modules? As far as I can see, they're the only ones who potentially win big from a financial point of view from DNSSEC.

<comment><USER2> You should read my initial comment. I wrote that I use my own cache bound to the loopback, and not shared with anyone.

I asked what benefit I would get from DNSSEC.

Also, registrars, in general, are not known for their trustworthiness. This is a system for disseminating public data (i.e., it should be very boring), yet it has been turned into a "business". This is a recipe for deceit and that's why it is such a headache for ICANN or anyone else trying to police registrars. Now, please do not misunderstand, I am not suggesting your employer is not trustworthy.

The sad truth, as revealed in com.zone and other large zone files, is that most of the domains registrars sell (rent) are garbage and only used for "domain parking" and serving ads.

Indeed, the people selling DNS hardware, not to mention consulting, are benefitting financially from pushing DNSSEC.

To me, that "gold-plated pipe" that I have full control over is far more important than any third party purporting to "sell" me an entry in a public zone file or to "authenticate" some public data on my behalf.

I can create, retrieve and manage my own data. What I cannot control is the hostile network over which it is transferred. I like software that is aimed at that problem.

<comment><USER3> No, no, I read it. The question is, where did you get that data in the first place, and how can you trust that it hasn't been tampered with between the authoritative nameservers and your local cache?

That's where the benefit of DNSSEC is: it allows you to detect tampering, and you don't have to trust any intermediaries to do so.

With DNSSEC, you don't have to trust the registrar, you don't have to trust the registry, you don't have to trust the recursive caches. In fact, you barely have to trust the root nameservers. The only individual you have to trust is the domain's owner. If any party along the way tries to play silly buggers, then you get a red flag.

> This is a system for disseminating public data (i.e., it should be very > boring), yet it has been turned into a "business".

It's been turned into a business because somebody needs to run those nameservers and, like it or not, that costs money.

> The sad truth, as revealed in com.zone and other large zone files, is that > most of the domains registrars sell (rent) are garbage and only used for > "domain parking" and serving ads.

If a registrar has parked a domain, it's because the owner has done nothing with them, or the owner themselves has parked them for revenue.

> Indeed, the people selling DNS hardware, not to mention consulting, are > benefitting financially from pushing DNSSEC.

Not that much: one of the strengths of DNSSEC is offline signing. The only _benefit_ is that DNSSEC requires more traffic, but not _dramatically_ much once a zone is cached.

> To me, that "gold-plated pipe" that I have full control over is far more > important than any third party purporting to "sell" me an entry in a public > zone file or to "authenticate" some public data on my behalf.

A gold-plated pipe full of slurry isn't much good. Again, all the encryption in the world isn't much good if you can't trust the data itself.

<comment><USER2> You seem to be assuming that registrars are exempted from this imaginary problem of "tampering".

Why should I trust the registrar's data? (Your data.)

Why should you trust the registry's data?

Why should we trust ftp.internic.net?

But I guess we can't be sure if ICANN's servers have been compromised, right?

The truth is I am not too worried about the zone files I download. Thousands of people download com.zone every day. Millions download root.zone.

And I do not care to play the "chain of trust" game that DNSSEC requires.

Every DNS admin nowadays disables AXFR.

They have their reasons.

But to me the principle of downloading zones still makes perfect sense.

I would not use axfr when ssh and rsync are available, but the point is the same.

Why get IP addresses piecemeal when I can get them in bulk?

Far more efficient. Not to mention reducing the number of opportunities for tampering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The use-case for DNSSEC is still far from clear to me. DANE is the closest thing to a valid use case and it looks like Chrome and others are exploring better solutions than DANE.

Moreover -- The lack of encryption is still a major issue IMHO. Validation is great, except that when a record fails to validate the end user experience is essentially NXDOMAIN which is not a very friendly user experience.

At least with SSL certificate failures, the application has visibility into the cause of the failure. In DNSSEC, it's hard to distinguish between a failed validation and any other kind of DNS resolution failure.

I just can't see a world where people enable validating resolvers that reject non-validating responses. And if that's true, then the entire point of DNSSEC is largely compromised -- with the possible exception of using DNSSEC to validate in-line verifications (a la DANE).

<comment><USER5> You can do all kinds of nice DANE-like things. For example keys for SSH, IPSec, OpenVPN, NFS, etc. "We already have something for web browsers" isn't a big counterargument.

I agree they should add confidentiality. That shouldn't be too hard since all the key handling is already taken care of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> DDoSers [1] around the world rejoice.

[1] [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.08.10/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.08.10/slides.pdf) [http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/forgery.html](http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/forgery.html) [http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.21/slides.pdf](http://cr.yp.to/talks/2009.03.21/slides.pdf) etc etc but also [http://ianix.com/pub/dnssec- outages.html](http://ianix.com/pub/dnssec-outages.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Why are people pushing DNSSEC adoption when it uses such obsolete crypto? What happens when 80% of the web adopts it, and then we find out 5 years later that all of DNSSEC keys can be cracked?

Upgrade the protocol first, then come back telling us how great DNSSEC is.

<comment><USER8> CloudFlare DNSSEC uses ECDSA on P256 and SHA256 exclusively. That's what modern TLS uses.

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/dnssec-done- right/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/dnssec-done-right/)

<comment><USER9> Haha Filo did you really call ECDSA modern?

<comment><USER8> Yeah. That's the best thing you can get for TLS certificates now, and most likely for the next five years. So that's what modern TLS uses, yeah.

I hate it as much as the next cryptographer, and I actually gave talks begging people to at least do deterministic ECDSA. But there's no EdDSA on the horizon.

Also, I think Thomas in the sister comment was referring to handshakes, but I was talking about X509.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough. I'm still hoping we'll see EdDSA (22519 and 448) sooner rather than later. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Unfortunately, still waiting on AWS Route 53. If only DNSSEC was a worthwhile enough feature to migrate DNS services.

<comment><USER11> Route53 is awesome, but yes it is missing at least two things a lot of people crave:

* IPv6 nameservers. * DNSSec support.

<comment><USER12> AXFR and/or IXFR? RFC 2136 / TSIG compatible updates?

Those would be my personal wish list items ie better interoperability/compatibility with published standards.

Those things may have been added recently though (I haven't checked in a while), but I doubt it.

<comment><USER11> AXFR is one of those things that is perhaps less valuable - after all _you_ put the data there, via their API, so you have it to-hand.

On that basis you don't need to do a zone-transfer to get the data out, just use your existing source of truth.

(In my case I upload to Route53 via a git repository and push, and regard that repository as the source of truth - [https://dns-api.com/](https://dns- api.com/) )

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's the use case? Thanks to TLS, you don't need DNSSEC for the Web. For email, if your DNSSEC-enabled domain delegates to a provider that isn't DNSSEC-enabled, you haven't accomplished anything of true value.

<comment><USER14> I was gonna reply how we need to prevent DNS queries from being eavesdropped. But it seems, DNSSEC does not support traffic encryption:

>DNSSEC does not provide confidentiality of data; in particular, all DNSSEC responses are authenticated but not encrypted. (From the wiki)

However, DNS poisoning attacks are still relevant because not all of the web is on HTTPS.

<comment><USER13> Addressing non-HTTPS Web issues with migration to DNSSEC instead of migration to HTTPS is totally bogus. It's especially bogus as a use case in the Cloudflare case, since Cloudflare had HTTPS first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> But will they control the keys? It would be pretty neat if they did not have to. Like their TLS thing where you still control the private key, but call out to you to use it.

<comment><USER16> This is actually a lot more managable with DNSSEC because it is designed around the idea of offline signing of records.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Cloudflare-ternet.</comment>


John Resig's Presentation on JavaScript Libraries from SXSW - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/more-secrets-of-javascript-libraries/

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's the continuation: <http://ejohn.org/blog/secrets-of-javascript- libraries-sxsw/>

</comment><comment><USER2> John Resig's presentation starts at slide 115.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is Nate, Andrew, Becky and John's talk, John was not the only panelist nor was he the only one worth listening to.</comment>


LulzSec Leader Betrays All of Anonymous - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/06/sabu-hector-xavier-monsegur-fbi-hackers_n_1325415.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Anonymous' story is fantastic fun to follow. This book 'We Are Anonymous' by Parmy Olson feels like the good fiction book, though it's a non-fiction.</comment>


Before upgrading to the iPhone 6s Plus, consider the new Moto X - <AUTHOR> http://www.networkworld.com/article/2984349/smartphones/video-review-before-upgrading-iphone-6s-plus-vs-moto-x-pure-motorola.html <comment><AUTHOR> Overall, the Moto X compares very favorably to the iPhone 6s Plus Apple announced earlier this month, but it costs a little more than half the price. Here's a breakdown of how the two compare in terms of specs:

</comment><comment><USER2> I bought the previous gen Moto-X and like it. The upgraded camera has me thinking of re-gifting my current phone to one of my kids and getting the new version though :-)</comment>


Ask HN: What's a better alternative to Passwords? - <AUTHOR> We had a huge issue come up at our company. We will have to ask all our users to change their passwords.
Dealing with this, I'm lead to the conclusion that servers should not contain login information the way we currently are. I think something like a public/private key pairing may be better. But I'm just swinging in the dark here.
What are some better solutions for Account Authentication? <comment><USER2> [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Authent...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Web_Authentication_API)

[https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm](https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> If losing all the user table with it's "password" column is requiring you to "ask all our users to change their passwords", you're probably doing it wrong - and switching to some less well tested auth mechanism without the expertise to get that right either is probably just trading vulnerabilities...

(If you're just requiring password changes out of an abundance of caution even though you're properly using bcrypt/scrypt/pbkdf2 - then my comment above is less relevant.)</comment>


Show HN: Open Source Boat Monitoring - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@floathub/open-source-boat-monitoring-7ea8b97c5acd <comment><AUTHOR> OP here: We recently released a software package that lets a boat owner monitor their vessel without any proprietary hardware. It's open source ([https://github.com/floathub/sfh](https://github.com/floathub/sfh)), and the above linked article is essentially a walkthrough of how to get it working on a Raspberry Pi. Thought it might be of interest here, please let us know if any questions.</comment>


Haskell Screencast for beginners - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHN8ovwEDiI&list=PLvj5k87ljYYHwOOcdGvS3qi85IvjOW--8

<comment><AUTHOR> I recently started a new screencast targeted at beginner Haskellers. Feedback is very much appreciated and I hope this screencast will help people get started with Haskell.

If you spot any errors or have suggestions please post them, thank you very much!</comment>


Service discovery and load balancing with DCOS and marathon-lb - <AUTHOR> https://mesosphere.com/blog/2015/12/13/service-discovery-and-load-balancing-with-dcos-and-marathon-lb-part-2/ <comment><AUTHOR> Is this compatible with mesos 0.25 (not DCOS) and marathon 0.14. I'm trying to run in my environment, but it is failing.

<comment><USER2> If setup properly, marathon-lb works great with Marathon 0.14. I use it with Mesos 0.26 and it works fine, but I'm testing the blue green deployment feature of it</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Preparing for the TechCrunch/HN Effect - <AUTHOR>

I'm a n00b when it comes to developing web apps, but the one I've been working on lately has gotten a fair amount of really positive feedback.
Again, I'm not a sysadmin or anything near the sort, so I'm quite unsure as to how to go about ensuring my app is robust. This has been a learning experience for me to develop a cool app from scratch, using RoR and Heroku. In the event that my app does go viral, I'd like my app to not crash and burn.
How could I ensure my app is robust and able to withstand thousands of potential users simultaneously? Even though getting featured on TC or other sites might be wishful thinking at this stage, I'd still like to prepare for the worst-case scenario in terms of handling unexpected traffic spikes etc.
Any pointers will be helpful! <comment><USER2> ) Stress-test your app by simulating loads of users performing realistic actions on your site. See what breaks first. Optimise that. Start again.

) Offload your static media to a CDN. The cheapest and easiest way to do this is to copy your CSS/images/javascript to Amazon's S3, then change your HTML to reference the new location.

) Put a caching server in front of your current server (which then becomes the "application server").

) Watch Jacob Kaplan-Moss' (one of the core Django devs) Deploying Django workshop [1]. While it is obviously focused on Django, there are loads of useful language-agnostic tips on deploying web/caching/DB servers.

[1] [http://ontwik.com/python/django-deployment-workshop-by- jacob...](http://ontwik.com/python/django-deployment-workshop-by-jacob-kaplan- moss/)

Edited to add: Forgot the obligatory "don't optimise too early" thing. The time you spend making sure your app can sustain a million uniques per day might be better spent elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> Investigate caching, both at http level (and put a caching reverse proxy, e.g. varnish, in front of your webapp) and at component levels.

Ask yourself which database queries are essential for the basic experience and which are for enhancing the experience beyond that. It may be worth doing without the second class of queries (or being more willing to use out of date cached values) when your website is under heavy load.

Ensure your sshd runs at a higher priority than your webserver/database/etc, so you have a chance of fixing things should your site actually crash and burn in the end.

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/03/16/scaling-php-up-out-and- aro...](http://blog.phpfog.com/2011/03/16/scaling-php-up-out-and-around/)

I want to share this article (which I wrote at PHP Fog) about scalability (in PHP but applies to all web apps) and the scenario you are asking about. I agree with travisglines (and everyone else on the thread), that this scenario you are talking about is in fact rare. It's one of those good problems to have. ("I have so much money, how am I going to spend it all")

Most people who I talk to care about scalability, not because they need it now, but rather because they want it as insurance. It sounds like you are in the same boat.

My recommendation is to pick a hosting platform that allows you to build your application the same way you normally would, but allows scalability if you do need it.

Heroku already does this for you for RoR; Windows Azure does this for .NET apps; GAE for Java/Python; and PHP Fog for PHP. Those platforms basically make caching and scalability really easy.

Other than scalability and caching, you should build your application with performance in mind; as having a fast site is important regardless of the number of users. mryan & mooism2 referenced some good resources for doing exactly that.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't assume that your app goes viral by default. In fact the chances of this happening are very slim. The guys that made breakup notifier almost went off the new page when they went viral.

What I would do is put it out there and be ready to take the steps you need to, to keep it alive if it does go viral. Planning too far ahead for this is probably a waste of your time as you most likely wont be able to see the weak points before hand. Just move quickly if it does.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't say that I'm assuming my app will go viral by default. In fact, there's almost a 100% chance that it will not, of course, and I'm very cognizant of that fact. And I definitely do understand that planning too far ahead would be a waste of time.

My issue is that I'm pretty clueless as to all this sysadmin stuff in the first place. If not for my current app, I'd at least like to have an idea on _what_ steps to take _should_ a future app go viral.

<comment><USER6> With this in mind, (price) scalable-CDNs are a good idea. Don't spend a lot of money up-front when you're not sure you'll get the traffic to merit it. I'm glad I didn't, because my site got all of five hits from HN... though, granted, it's not tech.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you have any recommendations (e.g. Cloudfront)?

My google-fu is pretty weak, it seems. I'm not able to find any examples of how apps built on Ruby on Rails and deployed with Heroku were ensured to be robust.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Father of the Digital Synthesizer - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-father-of-the-digital-synthesizer/ <comment><USER2> I really loved this bit, a great summation of the classic conflict between man and mechanization:

> _At the time, Stanford was far from the risk-taking institution it is lauded > as today — and its music program was especially traditional and rigid. As > Chowning had experienced in France, most of his college colleagues scoffed > at the unfamiliar, foreign concepts of computer music._

 _"It was against what the department said music was; they said I was dehumanizing music!" laughs Chowning. "My response was, 'Perhaps it's the humanization of computers.'"_

After all that disenfranchisement from his own program, that Chowning gracefully took up Stanford's belated offer of tenure instead of a massively more profitable industry career says a lot about his patience and ego.

<comment><USER3> I guess he was at home at CCMRA in a way he wouldn't have been elsewhere. He seems like a research guy, and although Yamaha had an external R&D stream for a while, it was never going to compete with what was possible at CCMRA and IRCAM.

Not to take away from Chowning, who is certainly up there with Moog for making a difference, but the real father of digital synthesizers is Max Matthews.

FM wouldn't have been possible without the Music-N series, and modern plug-ins are more or less direct descendants of those original card decks.

What Chowning did was classic innovation - taking an obscure and academic piece of code that had maybe ten or twenty users worldwide, putting together a killer practical application for a subset of it, and helping to commercialise it so it was used and heard by millions.

It's cool to realise how experimental it all was back then. Now it's completely mainstream, but that's only because Matthews and Chowning made it so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love it how he didn't know anything about electronics, computers or math, but ended up learning at the age of 30 and inventing FM synthesizers.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have a Yamaha DX7. Haven't played it in a while, interesting to hear its origin. Its a really heavy beast of a keyboard. Its impressively constructed (I got mine in the early 90s)

The sounds are good, but honestly its an 80s keyboard, so although it has a bunch of sounds, none really sound like they're supposed to (horns and pianos..) The stings and bells where the best sounds. Its fun though and has the all important midi. You can make your own sounds with the dx7. I actually modded it with a chip from a company called "gray matter". I could double the sounds and add some detune to make sounds "fatter".

The manual has made it online (thank you internet) and has some interesting reading on Fm systhesis including making your own sounds or "voices". They have a lot of diagrams on the top of the instrument to help you allong your way. Programming it was awkward with just a 2 line display a slider and a few buttons. The interesting FM stuff starts on page 9.

[http://www2.yamaha.co.jp/manual/pdf/emi/english/synth/DX7E1....](http://www2.yamaha.co.jp/manual/pdf/emi/english/synth/DX7E1.pdf)

Computer music is really interesing now. I've been poking around a litte in my free time. "pure data" and other software let you make sounds programatically.

<comment><USER6> For those unaware of "pure data and other software", these are programming languages and/or coding environments for the synthesis of music:

Pure data: [http://puredata.info/](http://puredata.info/)

Csound: [https://csound.github.io/](https://csound.github.io/)

Supercollider: [http://supercollider.github.io/](http://supercollider.github.io/)

Chuck: [http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/](http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/)

Overtone (Clojure using the Supercollider synthesis server): [https://overtone.github.io/](https://overtone.github.io/)

<comment><USER7> No Max/MSP?!

[https://cycling74.com/products/max/](https://cycling74.com/products/max/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's a great video where Chowning describes his discovery of FM: [http://www.aes.org/historical/oral/?ID=85](http://www.aes.org/historical/oral/?ID=85)

<comment><USER9> He says after he discovered FM brass sounds that there was "some importance" of his discovery beyond his interest in composition. What an understatement! He clearly was not interested in seeing where that discovery was going to go!

I admire his focus on doing what he felt called to do with his life and to leave the rest aside for others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I owned a DX-7. I bought it for $200, loved it for years, then stupidly lent it to a friend of a friend. They went on to form a moderately successful band [1]. I now can't replace it for much less than $2000.

The claim that you can recreate "any sound" is a probably true (I had some crazy patches), but you have to realise that most "sounds" are completely horrible and unappealing. This synth, unlike most (even analog) synths, had very few limitations on parameters. It was ridiculously easy to make horrible sounds on this thing!

For this reason, it will remain a classic. It's a true hacker's synth. The vast majority of it's output will be trash, but every now-and-then you hit gold.

You just need to remember to save it (and do a sysex dump) when you get something good!

[1]:[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PVT_(band)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PVT_\(band\))

<comment><USER11> > _The claim that you can recreate "any sound" is a probably true (I had some > crazy patches), but you have to realise that most "sounds" are completely > horrible and unappealing._

That is, if you don't like electronic music (EDM et al).

<comment><USER10> Nope, I love electronic music. Most of what you can create with a DX-7 is a-musical, and distinctly nasty. It's the edges of this realm that contains diamonds of sonic realisation :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Chowning was the beginning of an interesting cultural phenomenon that continues to this day: inventors of technology-based instruments. From him, you can path the distance to people like Christoph Kemper of Access Music, developer of one of the most popular DSP hardware-synths in the late 90's, to Paul Maddox of Modal Electronics, current developer of the new "New British Synth" the Modulus 002 which is a more hybrid approach. The inspiration is in the form of the mad genius musician who applies their technology background to music-making in ways that inspire others to do the same, follow their path .. or in some cases, go off the path entirely and discover new things.

</comment><comment><USER13> I played with several keyboardists back during my cover band days in the 80's, and they all extolled the virtues of the venerable DX7...it was pretty much the only keyboard allowed onstage that added a decent layer to our hair metal shenanigans and allowed us to play Whitesnake at the bars.

Well, maybe that isn't something to highlight too much :)

Saftware-only VSTi's like sylenth and Massive are popular modern day equivalents to the DX7 that take sound design to new levels, so thanks to all the pioneers that allow us today to explore such wonderfully deep musical frontiers in electronica.

[edits for being a dufus]

<comment><USER7> > VSTi's like sylenth and Massive are direct descendants of the DX7 and take > FM modulation to incredible levels

Not to be that guy, but neither of those are FM synthesizers. Sylenth is a basic subtractive synthesizer, and Massive is a wavetable synthesizer.

If you want a modern FM VST, you want to look towards the likes of Native Instruments' FM8 or Ableton's Operator.

<comment><USER13> Thank you for being that guy.

My misinformation on the subject was in great need of your help, and I sincerely thank you for the facts.

No wonder I had to keep ignoring the nagging feeling that I should double- check my info about those synths.

<comment><USER14> The confusion is somewhat reasonable given that many synthesizers (including straightforwardly subtractive ones) have an FM knob somewhere. It can produce some really great metallic and/or bell-like sounds.

A synthesizer in which FM is the main way of making sounds, though, is extremely difficult to work with, since you're basically just modulating sine waves with one another. Even some very famous electronic musicians will admit to not quite understanding how to work with them in a predictable manner. The DX7, certainly, left plenty of musicians totally flummoxed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh my, I have a DX7 in the garage that I've been trying to figure out what to do with. Anyone in the Palo Alto area want it? You'll probably put it to better use than I have!

<comment><USER16> I'm interested! I've been playing with music production this year and trying to get started with hardware synths.

<comment><USER15> Cool! Got your email and will follow up tomorrow! It would be great to see the DX7 put to good use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> FM synth stays to analog synth as vinyl stays to cd ;-)</comment>


Google uncloaks once-secret server - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

<comment><USER2> While searching for the actual battery patent, I ran across the modular data center patent: [http://www.google.com/patents?id=7TypAAAAEBAJ&printsec=a...](http://www.google.com/patents?id=7TypAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract) and also this power supply research paper abstract: <http://research.google.com/pubs/pub32467.html>

I was also surprised at some of the patents awarded. While the claims were very specific, the ideas were very generic, such as mobile payments via cell phone. Take a look for yourself: [http://www.google.com/patents?zoom=4&q=inassignee%3Agoog...](http://www.google.com/patents?zoom=4&q=inassignee%3Agoogle&btnG=Search+Patents)

If anyone finds the battery/server patent, I would be extremely interested.

<comment><USER3> Not filed under Google but under Exaflop LLC (one _quintillion_ floating point operations per second) [hat tip to: [http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/02/15/googl...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/02/15/google- files-patent-on-ups-architecture/)]

Patent application: 20080030078

"Each UPS includes a battery selectively connectable across a DC bus, and a AC-to-DC rectifier that converts an AC input voltage to a single output voltage on the DC bus. The regulated DC bus voltage may be close to the battery's fully charged voltage..."

[http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Se...](http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph- Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220080030078%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20080030078&RS=DN/20080030078)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This server appears to be from 2005; it looks like Google is still keeping some secrets.

<comment><AUTHOR> The hard disks are dated Nov 2007. The motherboard is from 2005, but it's got decent specs [http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Networking/Products_Spec...](http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Networking/Products_Spec.aspx?ProductID=1075) so they may still be using them.

Although I'm surprised they went with Xeon CPU's, and I don't see anything on gigabytes page about 12V only for the board.

<comment><USER5> I really appreciate the minimal "case" these are in. Saves material and makes the containers lighter.

<comment><USER6> The "case" is the shipping container. Again, economies of scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't see how they can patent battery per motherboard design. Isn't that how laptops work?

OTOH, this design makes a lot of sense. One of the biggest failure mode for rack-wise failure I've seen is human error from maintenance crews: trip over or unplug the wrong a power cord (I've seen this happen twice already from different companies.) This design completely shields this type of errors.

But, it should not be patentable!

<comment><USER6> The battery-per motherboard makes eminent sense. Between economies of scale driving down the price of small AGM and gel-cell lead-acid batteries (1) and the increased efficiency of having the battery on board, it's an obvious win!

(1) - ironically, this is probably because of retail and commercial sales of Uninterruptible Power Supplies!

</comment></comment><comment> cool-RR I don't understand: How can one battery per server be more efficient than a big, shared battery for all of them?

<comment><USER8> To hazard a guess I'd say it's to do with voltage step up/down efficiency.

<comment><USER9> I agree. Standard UPSes convert AC to DC and back, in order to power the server PSUs and these conversions are inefficient. If the battery is in the server (after the PSU), you can miss out these conversions and save a lot of power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> See how the hard drives are mounted back-to-back? I'm guessing that is designed to cancel the mechanical noise by putting the drives 180deg out of phase from each other, extending the life of the drives.

I believe that is patented (by Avid?) and that might be why Google was cagey about releasing specs.

<comment><USER11> I don't follow, if it's patented then didn't they already release the important details in the patent application?

<comment><USER12> I believe the implication is that "If it's patented by someone else, Google may have to pay if it comes out that they are using this technique"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Had the read the article carefully to see if i wasn't "getting" the joke. It's legit, and very cool that they were so innovative with their data centers.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The article _says_ the battery backup was a secret but: [http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-492779.htm...](http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-492779.html) and at the time at least, he had linked to a picture of the board (but it's down now).

</comment><comment><USER14> The battery integration is quite interesting, although I'd bet they are using it for purposes other than "having to buy one big UPS." One benefit I see to it is high availability, since the site UPS going out won't take down the servers, since they all have their own. Plus, I'd bet it makes the guys that work on the power buss sleep sounder at night, since its easier to work on without worrying about taking out the whole datacenter.

<comment><USER5> Since they're running the PSUs near capacity. the batteries probably provide some additional headroom under heavy load spikes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This seems real despite the post date.

<comment><USER16> I've been in data centers hosting Google systems. This picture looks very similar if not identical to what I've seen, so I'd say it is most definitely real.

<comment><USER17> Could you verify if Google still uses Hitachi Deskstar drives?

I recall reading an article about the testing Google conducted to find the most reliable drives, but they refused to publish the findings.

<comment><USER9> They did actually publish their results. It's an interesting read:

<http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf>

<comment><USER18> That paper does not mention any specific brands or models.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone got a link to the "video tour Google presented of its data center containers"?

<comment><USER3> It's a video of the official video but passable (until Google releases the official video shortly):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs3Et540-_s>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Article seems to no longer be available from the original link, but it's still up here: [http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html?part=rss&#...</a>

</comment><comment><USER20> Battery pack is a good idea. I have a UPS that is just about dead (~1 minute of backup, but I keep it for spikes and drops). I thought it would be great if the PSU had a built-in UPS. The space between the PSU and drive bay would be a perfect spot, no need for the heavy switching hardware since the PSU can deliver the 12 or 13.6 volts needed for the battery to charge.

</comment><comment><USER21> What battery chemistry are they using? It looks like a lead-acid package. Those are cheap, safe, and reliable. But they have very low energy density and there are disposal issues.

</comment><comment><USER22> Was it really necessary to patent the built-in battery design? That doesn't really seem original enough to warrant a patent.

</comment><comment><USER23> I for one am surprised that those are 2U servers and they haven't gone to 1U to double their space efficiency.

<comment><USER24> it looks like two of them may fit side-by-side, like this they get to use the big ram sticks and a cheap psu, as well as fans that will last a lot longer than those pesky 1u fans.

They may also use 'deep' racks to the machines have the PSU's in the middle and the fronts on the facing sides of the cabinets, one front, one back. That would make it twice as efficient as 1U, it would also explain why the cables go out the front.

<comment><USER16> I've seen them two deep side by side. They had custom racks that reminded me of those racks of trays of food you'd see in large production kitchens. There were four systems per level/tray.

<comment><USER25> The server rack that they have at the Computer History Museum has them stacked 4 systems per tray as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I dont think these are current.

</comment><comment><USER27> No liquid cooling? How efficient is the power supplies?

</comment><comment><USER28> One Server to rule them all</comment>


"Seven Amusing Things To Do With Bacteria" - Olivia Judson's last column - <AUTHOR> http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/so-long-and-thanks/

<comment><AUTHOR> She's fascinating! Those of you who haven't bought _Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation_ should buy it now and read it, it's one of the best books on evolutionary biology for us non-experts and super funny as a bonus.

Some of the ideas, she says, she has written on Post-its to explore further:

* Seven amusing things to do with bacteria?

* Funny methods? Find paper where scientist dressed as a moose. Also tickling paper tickle 7 orangutans, 5 gorillas, 4 chimps . . .

* Do sexually transmitted diseases increase sex drive?

* Oxytocin and diplomacy

* Painting the planet

* Taking names

To bad she's taking a sabbatical for a year.</comment>


'Flat design'-inspired Google Maps using the API - <AUTHOR> http://jsfiddle.net/Blunk/x8dSP/8/embedded/result/ <comment><USER2> For anyone who wants to experiment with styled Google maps, a good place to start is the Styled Map Wizard:

[http://gmaps- samples-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/...](http://gmaps- samples-v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/wizard/index.html)

(The UI is a bit odd; be sure to read the help panel before jumping in.)

Here's the documentation:

[https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/styling)

[https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/...](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/reference#StyledMapType)

Long-time Maps API developers may remember that using styled maps cut your free usage limit to 10% of what unstyled maps allowed. This is no longer the case; styled and unstyled maps have the same quota.

I found a more practical use for styled maps in the election results maps I made for Google, turning off borders and country names, fading out parks to a very pale green so they don't interfere with the result map colors, and keeping highways visible but faint so there's a sense of place without the distractions of a normal map. Example:

<http://www.google.com/elections/ed/it/results>

<comment><USER3> When it comes to map styling I think cloudmade did a much better job than google <http://maps.cloudmade.com/editor> . I use them along with leaflet.

<comment><USER4> I personally find that MapBox's TileMill (<http://mapbox.com/tilemill/>) is much better. The massive dataset of OpenStreetMap with complete flexibility.

<comment><USER5> This is beautiful. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google Maps is already "flat" in the sense that it doesn't use gradients or shadows. (The exception would be the controls in the corner which have a shadow, but that still exists in this example). The only thing someone did was switch up the color scheme and remove all the text, i.e. everything that actually makes a map useful. I fail to see the point of this. Could someone explain?

<comment><USER7> The other thing that is different is that the subtle borders around city blocks and things like that are gone. Those borders help increase contrast, making things easier to distinguish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I genuinely wonder why this was done. To showcase why flat UI doesn't work? Do show that it does? To parody the way people blindly use it for everything without giving it much thought? Because the creator thought it was a good idea and looked nice?

<comment><USER9> This is hacker news. People hack to hack. I don't understand your question.

<comment><USER8> Well, it could be a clever parody. I initially thought it was, as this is also the place people post that kind of material.

It could be a hack just for fun. People post that kind of thing here too.

It could be a proof of concept statement about how amazing flat UI colours are. People post that kind of thing here.

Either way it would be nice to have a sentence of commentary.

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted it after I found it on Dribbble and thought it was interesting.

It looks like it was made in response to a shot someone posted on Dribbble <http://dribbble.com/shots/1044275-Flat-Map>

It was rebounded and coded up, that happens quite a lot on Dribbble when devs see a design they like and have a go at putting it into css/html etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well that sure is pretty! If I zoom out long enough I can even realize that's New York! Amazing. Brilliant. Bravo good sir. _applause_

</comment><comment><USER11> How does one use the Maps API to change the appearance of the Map? I always thought Google maps served somewhat static tiled images and we (developers) could just place markers and other things at (x,y) coordinates.

<comment><USER12> Feel free to click the edit button on the upper right corner of this JSBin link and see for yourself. It's easy peasy and will amaze you in how simple it is to modify Google Maps! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's very much like Google+ design for Google Maps.

I _love_ this design.

Wish one will do such quality job for bootstrap (there are some attempts but non are yet high quality IMHT)

<comment><USER14> Wow. I saw this and thought "that's what's wrong with flat UI."

From this, I now gather that flat UI is a reduction tool. That's effective when you want to show something simple, and make that simplicity clear. But when you have something more complex, like a map, the bandwidth lost to the reduction is substantial and painful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I haven't been able to wrap my mind around the whole 'flat' concept. Could someone please explain what 'flat' really means. The only thing that I really notice about flat design that stands out is the color scheme and the don't-care-about-layers philosophy.

<comment><USER16> It used to be popular to make buttons 3D with gradient effects, gloss, and borders, both windows and buttons to have drop shadows, and also to use real world textures like leather and paper, and text labels and calls to action. This stems from a lot of research into user efficiency that showed users completed tasks easier and quicker and with higher satisfaction if the buttons looked like they stuck out and were pressable, had good labeling, etc..

Flat design basically gets rid of all this. It hasn't fared well in my own user studies. Users tend not to hit a button if it is just a flat icon tucked in a corner with nothing to clue them in that they should be hitting it or what it does. You are generally stuck in the first revision to put a tutorial overlay with a big arrow and text the first time the user comes to the screen.

The lack of text in this so you can't tell what any street is? That's very flat UI style. They hate text that clutters up their designs and tells people what things actually do. Proponents of flat design generally base their decision on the fact that it looks better to graphics designers looking at the app (instead of using it).

<comment><USER17> This. Flat design may look 'cleaner' but that doesn't mean 'easier to use'. I echo your usability findings -- usability tests are showing flat design is much harder to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cool idea & implementation. Ignore the haters.

</comment><comment><USER19> This looks cool and reminds me of the Stamen maps project.

<http://maps.stamen.com/#toner/12/37.7706/-122.3782>

</comment><comment><USER20> I can use maps that convey significantly less information. Just what I wanted. I know everybody hates skeuomorphism, but I'd take it any day over a map like this.

<comment><USER21> That's a little harsh for someone sharing their playing around. If you were going to do it as a thing, I suspect you'd make it more like Bing maps. Which is a really nice site and gets used when I'm on a computer - Just a pity they don't have an android app :p

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Neat, but speaking as someone who does _not_ have blue-green colourblindness, it's hard to distinguish that greeny-blue from that bluey-green.

<comment><USER23> as someone who does have blue-green colorblindness - I can't tell whether or not there are colors I'm not seeing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I had a lot of fun styling google maps for this project - voya.ge (still beta). Early versions were very minimal like the example posted, but as the project progressed the necessity for labels (street names, etc) became pretty obvious.

also, not to be a hater, but isn't this conversation about flat design getting kind of old?

</comment><comment><USER25>
      featureType: "road.local"
      stylers: [visibility: "on"]

otherwise this map is useless.

and that marker shadow looks weird.

<comment><USER26> > _that marker shadow looks weird._

Cognitive dissonance with the UI control shadows (light source, blur radius)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I like it and think it's beautiful.

Poster, do you mind if we borrow this and the marker images? I'd like to play around with it.

</comment><comment><USER28> I dropped a pin and wound up in an art gallery. Cool project and a pleasant surprise.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's a flat design and yet you still have to make it 3d (the shadow for the pin).

</comment><comment><USER30> Watch out, you just made maps for the next Grand Theft Auto.

</comment><comment><USER31> Pretty cool - although you may want to host your images somewhere other than Dropbox - I think they put a limit on it after x number of hits.

</comment><comment><USER32> Nice experiment!

</comment><comment><USER33> Just great

</comment><comment><USER34> "Flat" means "no text"?

</comment><comment><USER35> Of all the great and awesome demos today, this is not one of those.</comment>


Women (and everyone else, really) should do startups - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/posts/women-should-do-startups

<comment><USER2> He misses her point. It wasn't that women shouldn't be involved in startups, it was that women are quite capable of figuring out what makes them happy and harping on them to be founders isn't helping anyone.

Women have complete freedom in the modern workplace and the fact that some of them choose to stay home is not an indicator that they are broken. Why is it so offensive that many women have figured out what they enjoy and, more often then men, it's downshifting their careers around 30 so that they can focus on their families.

I am the husband of a woman that has decided to put her career on hold in order to stay home and focus on her children for a few years. And I'm quite certain my wife knows a hell of a lot more about what makes her happy than some kid at github.

<comment><USER3> I can understand why your sensitive about this considering your wife has chosen her path, but I don't think the author was directing it at her or other women saying they made the wrong decision.

He was making a simple point that the startup world can be uninviting towards women and instead it should be more inviting towards everyone, women included.

One point he discusses is clarifying the misconception that all startups look the same. That's a worthwhile point not just for women, but for a lot of men too.

I honestly can't see what is so upsetting or controversial about his statements.

By the way, I actually disagree with the author, I don't think startups are or should be for everyone. I am just making the point that his statements are not an attack on anyone's decision and his arguments seem pretty reasonable (even though I don't agree 100%).

<comment><USER4> while i don't disagree with holman's statements, i do think he misses the point. for me, trunk's article was about how the statement 'women should work at startups' is patronizing because it implies that they are less capable of making that decision for themselves than men.

advocating for a more equal distribution of startup awareness and technical training across demographics is a separate issue and i think holman and some of the commenters are confusing trunk's message as a denial of that. this is why her analogy of saying men should stay home and raise children is so apt. if they wanted to, they would. they don't need anyone's help or special attention to make sure they know all the opportunities for them in the stay- at-home-dad scene so that we have an equal number of men and women at home raising kids. maybe to some degree it's ok that different parts of society are skewed towards one gender or another since men and women are different.

we don't need to go around forcing our utopian vision of equality on systems as long as everyone has the opportunity to make the choice for themselves. whether or not women have that opportunity is a separate question. i think a lot of women do and it can be a slight to suggest otherwise based solely on their gender.

<comment><USER5> _this is why her analogy of saying men should stay home and raise children is so apt. if they wanted to, they would_

I'm trying to figure out if you're way more privileged than me (unlikely) or way more capable (possible!) but none of it really adds up. I'm wondering what world you live in where you think that people can just do whatever they want to, without resistance. "If women wanted to start companies, they would!" "If men wanted to stay home and raise kids, they would!"

I mean, I can get behind statements like "If someone really wants something bad enough... if it burns in their heart and their soul bears down on it like a million years of rock on a diamond, then they can achieve it."

That I believe.

But this idea that everyone is just doing exactly what they want to be doing, and that there aren't structural impediments that are unequally distributed across demographics... I mean, really?

I mean, read this article and tell me that the only thing stopping, say, American men from staying home and raising kids is that "they don't want to": [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht- sweden....](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/world/europe/10iht- sweden.html?pagewanted=all)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Zach completely missed the point. She never advocated that women avoid startups. She simply said that women are smart and capable enough of figuring out what they want to do by themselves. If they want to do a startup, then fine. If they don't then that is also fine. Quit patronizing them is largely her point.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Doing" a startup and working at a startup as an employee, especially after the money's been secured, are pretty different things.

</comment><comment><USER8> I encourage the people I care about (who are often women), to be confidently independent when it comes to work.

To me that includes a spectrum of behaviors:

\- assertively asking for raises at their current job \- aggressively negotiating for the best job \- consulting and setting their own fee \- ...and a startup would be an extreme end, for the right people

More generally, if you want someone to be successful, then you want to coax them down the path towards assertiveness and independence in their career, losing their fear of success, power, money, responsibility.

(I guess after startup, might come "incubator". But after that? Curious how pg will play it).

<comment><USER9> Agreed. I would also separate the arguments that "everyone should look at starting a business" from "everyone should look at working at a startup." The latter is a subset of the former. One's own businesses are a _lot_ of work. However, starting a micro-business gives tremendous freedom, and I think this freedom gives folks a greater opportunity than anything else.

With a micro-business you can do the things you like to do and work on the problems you want to work on. Could be coding against technical problems, interior decorating, catering, or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I agree with this:

"I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but hours are bullshit. You don't need to enforce 9-5 hours at a company. You don't even need a full 40 hour work week. Companies like GitHub, Heroku, Square, Simple… we're still in the minority, but I think it's safe to say that it's okay to be successful without working 90 hour weeks and forcing everyone to come in at arbitrary hours."

++

</comment><comment><USER11> I saw the initial article, saw this one and others, and had a lot to say until I remembered a rule of the internet. it is paraphrased here in a response article: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/12/stop-telling-women-not- to-d...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/12/stop-telling-women-not-to-do- startups-in-paris/) "And here's a piece of advice to women (or any other minority) in tech — Every time you get worked up over a dumb blog post, you're wasting time that you could have spent building a world-changing company, writing your own blog post and/or proving pundits like Penelope Trunk wrong. And that starts with voting with your feet (or pen even)."

Yep. I could discuss Zach's optimism. I could talk about why Penelope's wrong, or why she may have been misled by truths, but I'd rather prove her wrong. With my startup. It ain't tech, but just watch me.

</comment><comment><USER12> All seven billion humans should do a startup!

<comment><USER13> Maybe not. But _any_ of the seven billion humans _could_ do a startup.

<comment><USER14> Egalitarian nonsense. Different people have different capabilities. Many people, if not most, have no ability to run a company at any stage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it just me or have we had enough of this topic for a year now? Long story short, please stop talking about what people should do. Our 'job' as human beings is to just provide an equal opportunity environment for everyone. Not provide affirmative action.

<comment><USER16> Then please, tell us what we should be doing, in concrete examples, to ensure equal opportunity for historically disadvantaged minorities in this industry.

Honestly, I'm all ears.

<comment><USER17> Which minorities are disadvantaged? This is capitalism, discrimination has a cost and I don't believe many people are willing to spend much on their sexist/racist tendencies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The fundamental difference is between "let's start a business and make great things that provide value to our customers" and "let's start a business, dive into the hype cycle around some newfangled thing, and hope to cash out before we burn out," no?

If you're doing the first, you can work reasonable schedules (hard, yes, but not insane), and create value, and build your business. This is, in my view, what Github (where the author works) does.

If you're doing the latter, then you have to kill yourself because you need to cash in before everyone realizes what you're doing is either 1) actually worthless, or 2) not the coolest thing on the block anymore, and moves on to the next fad.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have a feeling this comment thread is going to be really productive and insightful.

</comment><comment><USER19> Less than 1% of people are suited to founding a startup.

</comment><comment><USER20> Women may be under-represented in startups, or tech. But so are a lot of my male friends. Who aren't techies. I would say the majority of my personal friends are outside of tech.

A lot of PEOPLE aren't willing to go through the extremes of becoming, and staying great at tech. Tech perpetually outdates itself.

They might instead choose to contribute just as meaningfully to the world in other ways. And dare I say actually do it instead of being in it for their own enjoyment.

Startups aren't for everyone. Women maybe (sometimes) for family or other considerations. Men, maybe (sometimes) for family or other considerations.

This isn't about gender to me. Or having children.

It's about risk tolerance, the price you pay to take the risk perpetually, and what what you miss out on.

All that matters in entrepreneurship is if we can learn to make a go of it... and what price we're willing to go to find out if we're an entrepreneur. That's it.

All the other entreporn out there is bs. Being a qualified entrepreneur means you were able to make money (profit) from a validated product or service, in any way. Until then you might be someone attempting entrepreneurship, but staying an entrepreneur is another thing altogether.

If you keep doing the same thing without improving results, that's up to you. I'm not sure if it's worth connecting it to what is, or isn't between your legs and what that might mean. What's in our head, heart and gut is far more important.

</comment><comment><USER21> It just sounds like an insane amount of work for a tenuous, or even nonexistent, payoff. I work for a company that does not limit my time off, that respects its employees, and generally provides a great working atmosphere.

Joining a startup seems like it would be throwing all that away for the joy of sleeping under my desk and finding out one day that my options are worthless. I would rather enjoy my life, I think.

<comment><USER22> I'm happy enough in academia. If I left it, it would only be for assured big bucks with job security. So, yeah, I don't think the startup life is really for me.

<comment><USER23> Academia also has wonderful vacation policies that are pretty near impossible to beat. My dad, a professor, hung out with his family for pretty much the entire duration of summer vacation. Multi-week vacations to visit extended families 400-800 miles away? Can do! Not a problem!

<comment><USER24> This is not normal for computer science academia, at least in my current department or my alma mater's. I've only met one professor who doesn't seem to work more than an average software developer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> A lot of people can be very creative and able to execute projects, but still not have what it takes to run a startup. Consider all the regular Joes and Janes being highly creative and structured in leading World of Warcraft guilds, for instance.

What is needed is some kind of gamified meta-startup, a giant sandbox for economic activity to take place with the low-level stuff of startups abstracted away. The day MMORPGs start to have real economic effects (outside of currency exchange) is the day the economic system will be radically transformed.

For the record, I didn't think of this myself. Credit goes to John Robb: <http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/robb20100318></comment>


Vitamin D supplements aren't living up to their hype - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vitamin-d-supplements-lose-luster <comment><USER2> Because just like almost all vitamins, more doesn't mean better, you only need to make sure you get a satisfactory level. If you eat fish regularly, if you drink a lot of milk, if you eat a lot of fortified foods, you already have enough vitamin D and more won't help you in any way.

If however you don't eat a lot of fish or dairy, and specifically avoid commercial fortified foods (like anyone on a 'natural' healthy diet prepared from scratch, doubly so for vegetarians), and live a modern life indoors without tons of sun exposure, you may have a deficiency and supplements could help.

It is far cheaper however to go to a doctor and get tested for vitamin deficiencies, and correct those specifically, rather than spend the rest of your life over consuming tons of vitamins you got sold on that aren't doing anything.</comment>


The Galaxy Fold is still extremely fragile, and Samsung knows it - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/9/20/20875771/galaxy-fold-extremely-fragile-samsung-video-durability-test-damage-display-dust <comment><USER2> I haven't even _wanted_ a new phone for several years, because so many of the new features are utter crap once you get past how pretty they are in ads and when they are fresh out of the box.

For example, I had one of the first Edges. It was stupidly expensive. But the screen looked _amazing_ and it was vaguely faster than my Moto G.

For a while...

Within weeks, it developed a crack. Then 3. Then I noticed everyone on the bus/subway that had Edges were also dealing with cracks.

Embarrassing. You spend well over a thousand to end up looking like you can't afford a _good_ phone.

So I trashed the Edge and went back to my Moto G, which I still use to this day, and which still has never cracked.

If the newest phones are to be seen status symbols, cracked screens (and whatever numerous problems present in these folding screens) are a serious antithesis to the grandiose expectations, and exposes a very sad reality about the whole cell phone business.</comment>


White House Blocked Intelligence Report on Climate Change to Stifle Impacts - <AUTHOR> https://www.ibtimes.com/white-house-blocked-intelligence-report-climate-change-effort-stifle-impacts-2799027 <comment><USER2> > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're > evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or > disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's > probably off-topic.

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

<comment><USER3> We're gonna start to see these kinds of posts a lot more. HN is a trusted site and nothing is more coveted by political campaigns than publicly trusted websites to exploit. It wouldn't hurt to simply allow political posts and maybe highlight them bright red to allow the rest of us to comfortably ignore them instead of letting them fall through the cracks like this one.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: YC Fellow applications - <AUTHOR>

Post for discussing their/others startups that applied to the first inaugural YCF batch. <comment><USER3> As a currently "retired" (i.e., downsized) Aerospace Engineer, I have applied for the inaugural YCF batch with my home-grown, prototyped idea, zejoop.com. The Zejoop story is told in the blog at blog.zejoop.com.

Having applied twice, unsuccessfully, as a single-founder to YC "proper" sessions, I was highly enthused and excited to hear about the offer of such an opportunity. My happy reaction was tied mainly to the advice, evaluation, counsel and network-expanding aspects of the YCF program. This is because I think those very aspects are EXACTLY what I need to make sense of where I am at. Whether that means, carry-on, commit to a giant pivot, or even abandon this idea, I know I'd benefit from the YCF experience. I need these because I lack a well formed community where I live in Santa Clarita CA. Although possible communities to fill that role do exist (Santa Monica and Pasadena) they are just far enough away to make them impractical commute-wise, on a day- to-day basis.

Also since the Y Combinator stake is lower in terms of cash outlay, and in lesser demands (that'd I'd place) for time and attention, I thought I'd be a better match to YCF, and I might have an easier path forward to acceptance than one of the highly competitive YC sessions. Basically Zejoop, and I, as a single-founder, are seemingly lower risk, and easier to take a chance on.

The prospect that YC hopes to create a 100-fold increase in entrepreneurship was also exciting - again, Zejoop seemingly a lower risk with such a big pool. Since submitting however, I am disappointed that the first batch will likely be on the order of 20 fellowship offerings. Gah! Sadness... Back to square one, with giant slabs of applicants and only a few slots.

Since no feedback is given during the YC Sessions application process I have no clue whatsoever if I simply, and outright, have a bad idea, or if the single-founder status is the obstacle that has been holding me back. I fully realize, and I am willing to accept that success will likely require me to find a co-founder; my current community is simply not providing any such candidates. I'd take a co-founder if I could find a good one.

Regardless, the YCF sounds like a great idea and I hope it is successful (oh, and also, that I am accepted!). There are scores of thousands of people exactly like me who have been prematurely displaced from Aerospace/Defense. People who have good ideas, lots of experience and wisdom to share, and who need a productive outlet for their energy, skills and creativity.

Wish me luck, and I'll do the same for you!

<comment><USER3> ...update; so this is anecdotal, but I just searched #ycfellowship and discern that there were ~6500 applications for 20 slot. Wow - more sadness - <USER2> energy spent on submission, and no feedback. Very impressive stats for YC though.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is this (S3 on GAE) something people want? - <AUTHOR>

As one of my side projects, I've written an S3 wrapper on GAE (google app engine). I had abandoned this based on lack of interest from the few people I contacted but thought I'd check with the community to see if anybody here would find this useful before sending it to the recycle bin.
The problem: You have super-critical data on s3 and want to have better uptime than s3 currently does because of the nature of the data (say medical records).
The solution: You now have another s3 implementation on another cloud (GAE) that you can seamlessly switch to (repoint dns). There will be periodic syncs between amazon's s3 and GAE's s3. You've essentially added a couple of 9s to the reliability of S3 and get to reuse the same code you have written against s3. The caveat is that it's not free since you've doubled your data storage costs (amzn + google).
There are some serious limitations with GAE (1 MB limit), reliability etc. But those should go away eventually.
I can set up a demo quickly if there is interest. I'll probably be working on another project fulltime soon. Let me know if you want to run with it too. <comment><USER2> I'll bet that there's more demand for GAE on AWS.

</comment><comment><USER3> Its an interesting idea. I'm working with GAE but before I started I had to choose what platform I wanted to use. It seems like if I needed S3 it would have been best to go 100% amazon.

I don't want to discourage you at all. Make a demo and let people see how it can be used. Maybe I'm just unique and not the target user</comment>


LLVM 3.9 Release Notes - <AUTHOR> http://llvm.org/releases/3.9.0/docs/ReleaseNotes.html <comment><USER2> Out of these, I found the ThinLTO [0] most interesting. It's an effort to solve issues with long build times and high memory consumption associated with link time optimization. Early benchmarks show perf results that are almost on par with full LTO and compile times near plain old -O2.

LTO is _the_ compiler feature I'm waiting to become mainstream. Without it you have to make compromises with translation units (put more stuff in headers than you'd want to) to get the performance you want.

[0] [http://blog.llvm.org/2016/06/thinlto-scalable-and- incrementa...](http://blog.llvm.org/2016/06/thinlto-scalable-and-incremental- lto.html?m=1)

<comment><USER3> Oh man LTCG on MSVC was brutal on build times. I remember we had to use it extensively in games since we'd usually be within 3-5mb of system limits on a release console.

If LTO is similar that sounds like a massive win and something to look forward to.

[edit] Looks like LTO is more about performance than perf+binary size. Still sounds like awesome stuff.

<comment><USER4> Just to clarify: LTO is what most other compilers (including LLVM) call what LTCG is in MSVC. ThinLTO is a very different LTO model than "standard LTO". The ThinLTO slides go over the various LTO models that exist.

Previously, before Google built ThinLTO, we built LIPO (and WHOPR) for GCC, [https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/LightweightIpo](https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/LightweightIpo) Google isn't going to use GCC as it's compiler anymore, and in fact, has mostly moved off it. We needed to replace LIPO, so we built ThinLTO.

The problem with LTO models in general (as the thinlto slides go over) is how to make it scalable. Part of that is memory, part of it is parallelization, part of it is optimization/analysis speed.

THe memory issues are about how memory efficient the IR is and how demand driven IPO is. IE can your whole-program analysis go function by function, without it taking a lot of time and memory to import individual functions (and throw them away if you need to).

Most LTO is slow because it tries to keep large parts of the program in memory at one time, and has no good way of being as lazy as possible about pieces of the program.

The parallelization issue is "what is being serialized to make LTO work". Some compilers parallelize the backend code generation, some parallelize nothing. There is often still a lot of serial stuff (global analysis, etc).

The CPU time issue is how fast you perform analysis and can generate code.

ThinLTO is meant to allow you to parallelize basically every step, import exactly the parts of the program you want at a given time in a quick and memory efficient way, etc.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the clarification and detailed breakdown. Makes a lot of sense.

Back when we'd use LTCG it was a ~30 minute link time penalty which prohibited it from all but the final release builds. Seeing this stuff move forward to be more effective to use is a great improvement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > _Clang can now self-host itself using LLD on AArch64._

So I've been having some "fun" with LLVM targeting AArch64, and was rather, er, disappointed when I discovered the toolchain didn't use GNU ld, but Mach's ld64.

Now in theory, ld64 is a next-gen linker that can link code not at the "module" (one compiled C file) level, but at the individual function and (global) variable level. Cool! More granularity! Except it doesn't support anything equivalent to GNU ld's extremely useful linker scripts, the stuff that says "put this code in SRAM, that data in Flash. etc..." and its command- line is... poorly documented. Also, it only works with Mach-O binaries, which is incompatible with objdump, that swiss-army knife of object code [1].

And anyhow, what does LLVM refer to as LLD? Because there are actually two separate projects under that umbrella: The ELF/COFF one ([http://lld.llvm.org/NewLLD.html](http://lld.llvm.org/NewLLD.html)) and the ATOM-based one ([http://lld.llvm.org/AtomLLD.html](http://lld.llvm.org/AtomLLD.html))

As I understand, the ATOM-based linker is still experimental, so they're referring to the ELF/COFF one?

TL;DR: LLVM doesn't hold a candle to binutils

[1] I recommend trying out using objdump to turn your app data into object data you can link directly into your application. This is what modern toolchains call "resources", but it's really interesting to test it out at the C/"bare-metal" level to see how it works. Bonus: you get to really learn the difference between pointers and arrays ;)

<comment><USER6> I wish somebody would just make binutils multi-target...

<comment><USER5> Assuming you're not being sarcastic: they already are, the purpose of libbfd[1] was exactly that. After all, they already support A.OUT, ELF, COFF, PECOFF, Linux on various HW targets, Windows...

...but not Mach-O, Apple's format.

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

[https://sourceware.org/binutils/binutils-porting- guide.txt](https://sourceware.org/binutils/binutils-porting-guide.txt)

[https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs-2.27/bfd/index.html](https://sourceware.org/binutils/docs-2.27/bfd/index.html)

<comment><USER6> I mean no longer pick a single target at compile time. It looks like one still needs to?

<comment><USER5> What do you mean by "target" in this case? For me, "target" means the machine you're compiling for. In which case, there is no reason to want ld/other binutils tools to generate output for multiple targets at a time.

And if you do need to build for multiple targets, you just run the binutils tools multiple times with the right options for each, because they're never identical.

<comment><USER6> I mean target in the sense of auto tools. LLVM for example is multi-target. LLVM binaries by default support every possible platform LLVM supoorts.

Compiling per-target toolchains is an annoying chore, and binutils is the last holdover bugging me with this when I work with Rust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ThinLTO sounds good in theory, but is still too hard to use in practice compared to gcc -flto=4.

While clang -flto can produce up to ~15% faster binaries than with gcc, it's still not usable for bigger projects which put a lot of their API into a shared library.

Some of those functions in a shared library are eventually inlined, but with clang -flto the exported copies of the functions are optimized away, whilst gcc keeps the copies additionally to the inlined variants. So you can try to keep those inlined API calls in the shared library with __attribute__((used)), but then they are not inlined anymore with performance regressions up to %50.

Not fixed in clang 3.8 and not in 3.9. I hope it will become usable in 4.0 as the performance benefits would be dramatic and the implementation efforts to keep the ((used)), i.e. exported copy, minimal.

</comment><comment><USER8> A couple more interesting components:

* [http://llvm.org/releases/3.9.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNotes...](http://llvm.org/releases/3.9.0/tools/clang/docs/ReleaseNotes.html)

* [http://llvm.org/releases/3.9.0/tools/clang/tools/extra/docs/...](http://llvm.org/releases/3.9.0/tools/clang/tools/extra/docs/ReleaseNotes.html)

* [http://llvm.org/releases/3.9.0/tools/lld/docs/ReleaseNotes.h...](http://llvm.org/releases/3.9.0/tools/lld/docs/ReleaseNotes.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand this fixed bug: [https://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=26774](https://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=26774)

How could foo() had ever printed "X"?

<comment><USER10> Both t0 and t1 loads are atomic, meaning you'll always get the whole object. But there's no synchronization between them and another thread can preempt the execution and change value of %ptr right after the first load.

<comment><USER11> and what is %ptr ? I'm having troubles googling it.

<comment><USER12> I assume %ptr is a generic "variable" name[0] for a pointer reference, i.e. the address of the value being loaded atomically. You can substitute %ptr in your head for any atomic address you might want to load from.

The code itself isn't well-formed because %ptr isn't actually defined anywhere—just pretend that it was. ;)

[0] Technically, LLVM does not have variables (as in, names you can assign to more than once), since it's in SSA form, but I don't know what a better name would be here. :)

<comment><USER11> Aight, I'll need to read their docs exhaustively, I had to anyway. Thanks nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Swift calling convention was ported to ARM."

Edit: simplify

</comment><comment><USER14> LDC got mentioned out of nowhere.

Looks like D is gaining some traction recently :)</comment>


Why Are Chinese Millionaires So Stingy? - <AUTHOR> http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/78049/chinese-philanthropy-bill-gates-warren-buffett

<comment><USER2> _Huff_ "Why don't people give their money away like I want them too?" _Huff_

"The busy Mr. Zong said he thinks philanthropy is a bad idea. He can do much more for society by running a productive business, the beverage billionaire noted. Not every Chinese tycoon is so cold-hearted, however. "

So the guy thinks he can do better for people by running a business and that makes him cold hearted. Just what exactly is going on here? Who are these people to tell other people what to do with their money? Who are these people that think they know better how money should be used? Who are these people and what's their cut?

People that want other people to give away their money to help other people are just as selfish as the people that have the money. They want other people to do good things so they can feel warm and fuzzy knowing that good things are being done and they had a part in it, without actually doing anything at all like earning the money that did those good deeds. It's the grasshopper and the ant all over again just pointed in a different direction.

<comment><USER3> Did you even read the rest of the article? It goes on to explain that one of the largest reasons for an absence of philanthropy in China is because of Government interference with charitable organizations; the necessity for a government sponsor, the inability for a non-sponsored organization to get funding because of the fear of government reprisal.

A lack of Government intervention is _apparently_ only good when it involves the accumulation of wealth by a few, is that right?

<comment><USER4> The Chinese gov probably wants to keep the "Tax-Exempt Foundations" from gaining too much influence. The Chinese are very paranoid about influence in their society. They shut down bloggers who get popular, even if they're just talking about stock tips or dating. They shut down talent shows and professional sports if there's any individual who is becoming too popular. That's why there is comparatively little sports and celebrity culture in China. When the average Chinese person looks out into eternity, the Chinese government wants them to see what the Chinese government wants them to see and not a bunch of celebrities and sports stars, as the average citizens of western nations do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/chinese- philanthro...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/chinese- philanthropist-donates-it-all/article1650447/) for another example - a Chinese philanthropist who donated his entire fortune (more than $1 Billion) to charity.

A quote from him " _If my children are competent, they don't need my money, Mr. Yu explained. If they're not, leaving them a lot of money is only doing them harm._ "

<comment><USER6> Hong Kong is a quite different place. It differs from Mainland China. It preserves Chinese traditional values while accepts Western values.

Traditionally, Chinese manages themselves according Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist views. Riches are encouraged to donate in order to secure better later life, reincarnation, lives of offsprings. Sometimes it was rewarded with some good "titles" from mandarin. Communist in Mainland Chines destroyed all the traditions while Hong Kong preserves it.

In Hong Kong, there are many international non-government organisation. Western type of charities can establish in Hong Kong. Some of them extends their charity services into China based in Hong Kong. Charity fund-raising happens all round the years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Charity is implicitly a critique of a government's inability to meet its citizens' urgent needs. I'm not surprised that an allegedly communist government doesn't like attention drawn to problems it isn't solving yet should be.

</comment><comment><USER8> This article was awfully condescending and insulting to the wealthy in China. I stopped reading a few paragraphs in.

</comment><comment><USER9> The author's remark on how it's impossible to become rich in China without being corrupt is extremely ignorant.

</comment><comment><USER10> The author overlooks the same factors that cause non-millionaire Chinese to have such a high savings rate: uncertainty about health, retirement, and social stability.

There's none of the social insurance that exists in North America or Europe; less than 50 years ago there were serious famines; the regime itself is only about 60 years old and the current era of economic liberalization only about 30 years old.

In such a environment, people will be a bit more clingy "just in case" they're going to need every last cent in an upheaval.</comment>


Ask HN: Best business advice for entrepreneurs - <AUTHOR> For those of you who made the jump to entrepreneurship, what is the one thing you wish you knew before starting out ? <comment><USER2> 1\. Save lots of money, more than you think you will need. This will take longer than you think.

2\. If you truly want something, you can probably accomplish it. The human will is stronger than almost anything else

3\. It will be harder than it looks, so if you feel like quitting or giving up, just know you're not the only one and that when you do not, if you do ever "make it" then people (including you) will not fully appreciate some of what you put yourself through.

4\. Be honest with yourself and those around you. If you're not careful you can fall into a reality distortion field and that can be very dangerous. Be honest about where you are in the business vs where you want to be.

5\. Have three sets of goals, The ones you tell investors should be goals you know that you can hit and hopefully blow past. The ones you tell yourself should be goals you think are achievable and the ones you tell your team should be goals that you know are a stretch but can keep everyone motivated for a stretch goal and keep rallying the troops as time goes on.

6\. No one owes you anything. Some people tend to feel like they are owed something from employees, investors, etc. when starting a company and this is just not true.

7\. It's going to be much harder than you thought, I used to tell people that starting a company is willfully becoming manic. Some days you'll wake up and feel like you can float out of the room, other days you'll wonder if you jumped off your balcony if you could feel it, it's a crazy ride.</comment>


Ask HNL: tips for new indie game-developers? - <AUTHOR>

It seems some people[1] actually manage to live off of donations, others from ads on their games' homepage, direct download[2] sales and so on.
But these all seem like fairly unlikely ways to actually make enough money to live off of.
Does somebody here actually make a living as an indie game dev?  Any tips for motivated young programmers trying to break into the field?
----
[1] http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=31614
[2] E.g. Steam, direct2drive, etc.. <comment><USER2> As a former indie developer who made games for free, here's the one thing I think you might take from my experience:

There are a _lot_ of people who make games. Pretty much any basic idea you can think of has been done before. The best way to stand out is to polish the stuff you make, because otherwise you'll be looked over. If something's polished it can rise above a more-featured game because more people will take the time to play it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did you do it part time or was it your main job?

<comment><USER2> I was a student: I did it entirely as a hobby, and I didn't do it particularly well. My advice comes not so much from learning how to develop a good game (in the time I thought of myself as a developer, I made nothing above "bad"), but more from playing lots and lots of indie games, and trying to figure out which ones were standing out the most in my mind.

Polish is tricky, but generally it entails playing over a game again and again trying to make things perfect. This showed up most in RPG development: when the battle system in every game is the same, you learn that what matters _isn't_ your system, but rather how you manage to use that system to constantly grasp attention. (In fact, if you ever have time to develop games without worrying about it for money, I'd suggest you download a standard RPG development kit: that'll teach you how to make addictive games despite having almost no control over your basic systems. That way, when you begin making your _own_ games, you'll have a feel for what's going to get at people and what they'll ignore as "yet another game system".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What kind of games do you want to make? For web based games there really seem to be three models ad supported like urban dead, freemium like mech quest, and portal paid like anything on Yahoo games.

In non web games it seems to mostly be try to get carried by enough third party distributors to make enough money at the 10-20 dollar price point.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would rather do non-web games (I've released a couple of small roguelikes) - think diablo on a smaller scale, with simple 2d graphics but more complex and interesting game play.

My older games were all several man-weeks of effort (1 week off from work to develop each + a couple of months of bug fixes and polish in my free time) and were received reasonably well.

If I do it full time and bust my ass I think I can produce fairly viable small games for about 6 months man work each.

I have enough money saved up for surviving ~1 year of zero income.

<comment><USER3> In that case look at the major inde friendly platforms. Most of the current consoles offer a market place for downloadable games, maybe the iPhone, green house, steam. I can't think of any other distribution channels off the top of my head but then I don't follow indie game development that much.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, steam was my first thought too (as well as the XBox store).

I haven't heard of green house and a quick google doesn't seem to bring up anything about the right type of green houses ;)

Do you have a link handy?

<comment><USER3> playgreenhouse.com Another that just occurred to me is startdock.com (the guys behind sins of a solar empire and GalCiv)

<comment><AUTHOR> playgreenhouse seem awesome, thanks a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-gam...](http://jeff- vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-games-i-sell.html) comments here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=521416></comment>