CLIP OS – France's cybersecurity agency's open source, secured operating system - <AUTHOR> https://www.ssi.gouv.fr/en/actualite/clip-os-open-source-secured-operating-system/ <comment><USER2> > It also provides partitioning mechanisms that make it possible to > simultaneously process public and sensitive information on the same > computer, within two completely isolated software environments, in order to > avoid the risk of sensitive information leaking onto the public network.

Just don't. Please don't. You can have the most sane architecture, but there's a whole pile of s..tack underneath. You can't even trust a modern CPU.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why it's deemed necessary to work with both public and sensitive information on the same device. This might have made sense when computers were much more expensive. Today, why not buy two computers and keep them physically isolated?

<comment><USER4> Yeah physical separation... seems like a large and ultimately good step. All the other efforts to logically separate things often have some sort of downside.

I posted a while ago that there was a customer (tied to the military) that forbid ANY outside electronics of any type to enter their facility (main gate where you parked was ok, but you still turned everything over) without approval, and no electronics could ever leave. They went so far as to keep and presumably destroy anything that entered... bring a laptop, it's gone, be stupid and carry a phone, gone (nobody actually did the phone thing as you were warned plenty of times).

Granted they paid a ton for it (for a laptop many times sometimes (other times they gave you one)) and it is mostly a policy only the military can be strict about.

But having said that this was before smartphones and etc, and honestly now a days that seems like what was an extreme policy, is actually a good policy for many such places. We're already at the point where we know we can't be sure about declaring any equipment "clean".

I was a little shocked to hear the White House was talking about banning smart phones in some places.... like how the hell haven't they done that already? A mic and camera on each person that wanders all over the world connecting to random cell towers and wi-fi and OMG, what a great attack vector!

<comment><USER5> What happens now people have wireless devices keeping them alive, heart controllers etc?

<comment><USER4> I don't recall anything in the policy that spoke to that. That's not a good answer, but it is all that I got. This wasn't a situation where you asked questions / got to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is no point in debating whether or not this is secure. The inclusion of that word in the title is going to derail all of the comments here. They are using secure from the point of a layman. We know nothing is secure, the folks working on the project know nothing is secure. The government folks and media outlets don't understand security and their use of the word "secure" should be disregarded.

It would be better (and create more interesting discussion) to pretend that one is reading a title that says "security enhanced" operating system, and evaluate the merits of incremental improvements offered, and not debate whether or not anything can be truly secure.

<comment><USER7> This is actually a mistranslation.

The original French text ([https://clip-os.org/fr/](https://clip-os.org/fr/)) says "système d'exploitation durci" ( _hardened_ operating system) and this has been translated as "secure" in the English version of that same page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fascinating! It seems like a cross-over concept of CoreOS and FreeBSD jails.

It seems as if it is just the base system for now (and a bit complex), but I think this kind of architecture is great for "IoT" use-cases when the source of the sensor data should be protected from the containers who are processing the data (i.e. in sealed environments). Can't wait to try this.

<comment><USER9> That's based on just a Linux namespaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _> Hardware-based mechanisms and isolation are assumed trusted, properly functional and configured. Here is a non-exhaustive list of hardware-based security and isolation mechanisms: UEFI firmware, Secure Boot ..._

Is firmware a "hardware-based mechanism" with comparable isolation claims to a TPM, MMU or IOMMU?

See the talk "Firmware is the new Software", on attack/defense of UEFI firmware vs auditable open-source firmware like LinuxBoot, [https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2018/speaker/hudson/](https://www.platformsecuritysummit.com/2018/speaker/hudson/)

</comment><comment><USER11> If someone has already looked at the source, would it be possible to get a high-level overview of what's special to this OS? Apparently, authorizations and isolation are not vanilla Linux, but that's all I manage to gather from the description.

 _edit_ Oh, I hadn't seen that document: [https://docs.clip- os.org/clipos/architecture.html](https://docs.clip- os.org/clipos/architecture.html)

So, container-based isolation between applications & users. I don't see anything about authorizations, though.

<comment><USER12> I am surprised that document isn't in French only...

<comment><USER13> French academics, researchers, and software developers publish a lot in English. You might be exhibiting an out of date stereotype. :-)

<comment><USER14> It is most definitely not an out of date stereo type that (a looot of) French people are not particularly fond of English. Go to any university and you'd be surprised about the amount of students that don't speak English, or can just muster a couple of words. It ingrained in the culture, from dubbing movies and series, having previously been the lingua franca of academics, culture etc, having a large part of the country in rural places, and (in some places) being seen as arrogant of you speak English or say English phrases.

Source: French girlfriend, French friends and having been there a lot.

<comment><USER15> Hi, source I'm an uni engineer in France, everyone in my 100+ lab speaks English.

What's more is there's a funny reversal occurring where people insert English phrases to be hip, eg in the middle of a French sentence, you hear a "yes" or a "let's go" or a "in z pocket" (I never understood that last one)

<comment><USER16> "in the pocket"? as in the literal translation of "c'est dans la poche" (meaning "I got this, it's easy")

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It seems that ANSSI has sponsored many open-source researches and development efforts. One day I was surprised that the most complete free and open source implementation of OpenPGP Card firmware on JavaCard was published by ANSSI on GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hmm, they says it's Linux based. I was kinda expecting/hoping for something more similar to BAE's STOP, which is a non-open/proprietary OS that originally sacrificed performance/speed for security.

</comment><comment><USER19> The concept also feels similar to Qubes OS.

<comment><USER20> According to [https://clip-os.org/en/](https://clip-os.org/en/) the differences with Qubes OS are:

1\. The main mechanism for environment isolation is different:

a) CLIP OS leverages Linux kernel primitives to create containers with the help of additional features brought by Vserver, Linux kernel hardening (grsecurity for version 4) and a tailored Linux Security Module (LSM). This approach allows a fine-grained control on the data exchanges between isolated environments (e.g., handling a notion of files, processes and sockets) and permissions (e.g., restriction to ring 3 features for malicious code, limitation on the allowed system calls).

b) Qubes OS leverages hardware based virtualization with an hypervisor (Xen), and a main virtual machine (dom0) which is a GNU/Linux system with services handling data exchange between virtual machines.

2\. Administrators have different roles and power:

a) Administrators on a CLIP OS system are not able to compromise system integrity nor access user data. They can only access a restricted set of configuration options.

b) On Qubes OS systems, the main user of each virtual machine is also the administrator of its own environment. The system administrator of the main domain (dom0) can change all the configuration options and may access all user data without any restriction.

<comment><USER21> So it seems closer to Subgraph OS (except for the Tor usage):

[https://subgraph.com/sgos/](https://subgraph.com/sgos/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The most unexpected part was seeing "Gentoo Hardened" as a part of state-level official documentation.

<comment><USER23> France is rather open-minded recently. "Matrix and Riot Confirmed as the Basis for France's Secure Instant Messenger App" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16933736](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16933736)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> >Based on a Linux kernel

Way to disappoint me. I was expecting some cool pure microkernel goodness, perhaps based on seL4.

<comment><USER25> Hypervisors are both older than microkernels and more secure.

(The people who insist hypervisors _are_ microkernels are ignorant of both technology and history.)

<comment><USER26> Common hypervisors like ESX and Xen definitely aren't like microkernels, though they'd be more secure _if_ they actually were.

ESX and Xen are more like monolithic kernels. The problem is that in _practice_ they've become mini-kernels with their own driver systems and increasingly large code surfaces, recapitulating the mistake of monolithic kernels.

seL4 actually can act as a hypervisor, and their build framework comes with support for building Linux guests into the bootable system image. I don't know if there are proofs of security wrt to the hypervisor, nor what the worth would be considering how complex the CPUs are these days, but I'd have much more trust in seL4 as a hypervisor and driver framework than in something using FreeBSD or Linux as the critical guarantor of system security.

If you're stuck with commodity x86 or ARM hardware and really want a strong architecture, seL4 is the best option unless you want to build from scratch. Apple uses another L4 derivative as the OS for its security chips; an in-house derivative that predates the seL4 project.[1][2]

[1] [https://microkerneldude.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/so-the- fbi-...](https://microkerneldude.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/so-the-fbi-cracked- the-iphone-with-a-zero-day-and-hardware/)

[2] [https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Mandt- De...](https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Mandt-Demystifying- The-Secure-Enclave-Processor.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> GitHub link: [https://github.com/CLIPOS](https://github.com/CLIPOS)

</comment><comment><USER28> It is a linux distro, not a new os

<comment><USER29> The terminology is confusing because for a lot of purposes every Linux distro can be considered a separate platform, so it may as well be a separate OS even though it uses the same kernel (and often the same everything, just arranged and configured differently enough to cause headaches).

That said, I am also disappointed that everyone who cobbles together a Linux distro these days insists on referring to it as a new OS, because I remember the days when people actually announced new OSs like Syllable, AROS, SkyOS, and Haiku.

Lately I've seen the term "Operating Environment" emerging as a way to further delineate an actual "new OS" from something that just sits on top of an existing kernel but is more different than just a new Linux distribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Trusting an OS from any government seems, to me, a foolish thing to do.

<comment><USER31> You don't have to, it's for French government employees who have no other choice. However it's easier to trust an open source government OS than a closed source one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> It uses gentoi hardened? Get ready for tons of breakage.

<comment><USER23> Google uses Gentoo as a base for ChromeOS IIRC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is there a design whitepaper somewhere? (Or similar)</comment>


Categories for Programmers: The Yoneda Lemma - <AUTHOR> http://bartoszmilewski.com/2015/09/01/the-yoneda-lemma/ <comment><USER2> This reminded of an OCamlers critique of Haskell [1], which I think raises a very good point:

 _Yoneda-crazy: I know Haskell, I know some category theory, but I am highly sceptical that teaching the Yoneda Lemma to C++ programmers is actually useful in any way. I am the first to applaud the idea of scientific curiosity, of learning fun stuff of unclear usefulness just for the fun of it, but I think that a few excellent writers and tinkerers have given the Haskell community as a whole (and the foreigners that receive some of its TV shows by satellite) the wrong impression that the theoretical underpinning of typed functional programming is category theory. I would say that (1) it 's a gross over- simplification of what the theory of typed functional programming is about, emphasizing a small part of it that has enabled some people to do very interesting things and (2) it is highly likely to be absolutely useless to an overwhelming large majority of the readers of such popularization material. Category Theory is fashionable these days, and I find the fashion aspect irritating -- it may be that I'm just bitter? I'm worried that we may have a backslash at some point when, you know, people realize that unless your initials are E.K. you are wasting your time thinking about the co-density transformation. On the other hand, this category circus has been going on for years, and I believe nobody has been hurt so far, so maybe it's just fine. _

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/ocaml/comments/3ifwe9/what_are_ocam...](https://www.reddit.com/r/ocaml/comments/3ifwe9/what_are_ocamlers_critiques_of_haskell/cugbbbw)

<comment><USER3> He was pretty directly referencing Dr. Milewski, I'm sure. He's a relatively famous C++ guy from my understanding who of late has been doing this whole category theory for programmers series.

Which is a shame because the whole series is gold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can someone kindly explain this in terms of word-sized chunks of data made of bits, grinding through a Von Neumann machine, perhaps illustrated using C code snippets?

<comment><USER5> Nope, can't be done. You'd basically need to build up an entirely different language for manipulating symbols to even make any sense of it. That new language would look very much like ML, Coq, Agda, Haskell, etc.

I think people forget that it's ok to not know any of this stuff. You can spend an entire lifetime writing nothing but Java and you won't miss out on anything.

There is no reason to understand this beyond the technical challenge of understanding it. It will never be useful in any actual day-to-day software engineering endeavor because whatever you can do with the Yoneda lemma you can do without it and the Yoneda lemma does not make the solution any better, it does not make reasoning about large scale dynamic systems any easier, and it will not make your software less prone to bugs.

<comment><USER4> > _You 'd basically need to build up an entirely different language for > manipulating symbols to even make any sense of it._

No problem:

      struct symbol {
        obj_base_fields; // macro
        obj name_string;
        obj package;
        // ...
      };

      struct cons {
        obj_base_fields; // macro
        obj car, cdr;
      };

<comment><USER3> Tbh, I find lisp to be a pretty annoying language for talking about this stuff. It seems to aim just slightly below the right level of abstraction by talking about symbols where you really want to have abstract binding trees.

I'd like to see a lisp where ABTs were given a more prominent frontline treatment. That'd complete the "locality" story that often gives people pause when implementing macros.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Started reading this, was confused, thought "WTH this is for programmers(not computer scientists)?". Then realized it is part 14. Oh well, guess I need to start at part 1...

<comment><USER7> Yes but it is fairly approachable and indeed it was written in progeammers in mind

<comment><USER6> Oh yeah, I wasn't meaning to complain really. It just made no sense to me because I hadn't already read part 1 - 13 I'm sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> a simpler introduction [http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/11/yoneda- lemma.html](http://blog.sigfpe.com/2006/11/yoneda-lemma.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Programmers, yo don't neda lemma.

</comment><comment><USER7> Quicker than me congrats :)</comment>


Huge spike in Google Advertising & Marketing Index since 22nd August - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/finance?q=GOOGLEINDEX_US:ADVERT

<comment><USER2> The top components of this index [1] are dominated by queries related to Jaycee Dugard [2]. A plot of these queries shows a jump from obscurity to popular starting on the 26th [3]. Why these are part of the advertising and marketing index is unknown.

[1: [http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=25&geo=US&...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=25&geo=US&date=today%207-d&cmpt=q) ]

[2: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaycee_Dugard> ]

[3: [http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=jaycee%2Cjaycee%20d...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=jaycee%2Cjaycee%20dugard%2Cdugard%2Cjaycee%20lee%2Cjaycee%20lee%20dugard&date=today%201-m&cmpt=q) ]

</comment><comment><USER3> These bundles of keywords are generally pretty imprecise and likely based on some of the AdSense lexicon clusters. Undoubtedly a few erroneous words, timed with something like a Coke promo or book launch or whatever would cause this kind of bump.

For example, if there was an author named John Lufthansa launching a book, that would likely also trigger a jump in the air travel trends, erroneously, as users search for just the last name.

</comment><comment><USER4> I bet the spike has to do with the changes in the FTC rules for robocalls. As of Sept 1st, pre-recorded calls require the telemarketers to have written consent from consumers or face a fine of up to $16,000 per call. I started hearing about this change on the news in the last week or two and I bet the spike is dominated by the "do not call" term as people are looking for more information on what kind of calls they can look forward to not getting. More info near the end of this FTC press release: <http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/09/twi.shtm>

[Edit] Should have taken a minute to finish reading the stats and not just look at the pretty graph. ynniv looks right about the Jaycee Dugard search being included. Why that's in these stats is a mystery of the google...

</comment><comment><USER5> _Looks_ anomalous, but there are 9 data points in the surge.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you look at the rising searches term on this page it looks like it was all because of some coke rewards program:

[http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=25&geo=US&...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=25&geo=US&cmpt=q)

lower right hand side.

<comment><USER2> You got the timescale wrong. Try a week or a month and you'll get very different results.

<comment><USER6> Ah, your right. I see now that your right with the Dugard thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well, that was the day my company's new site (smartpress.com) started its adwords campaign, but somehow I doubt that had anything to do with it.</comment>


Cool music maker - <AUTHOR> http://superlooper.universlabs.co.uk

<comment><USER2> Awesome! Just tried on my laptop and had fun :) I wonder if they talk about they accomplish this somewhere in the web. Are you involved in this project ?</comment>


The Last Format - <AUTHOR> https://reallifemag.com/the-last-format/ <comment><USER2> This premise is ridiculous.

Just visit [https://youtubemp3.rip/](https://youtubemp3.rip/) or any of the other thousand sites that do this.

Or, you can just record the music as you listen to it using Audacity for example, and save them as an MP3 or any other format.

Of course, these tasks require about a minute of minimal effort. In our fast paced modern world of music streaming, who has time to load up an audio program and hit Record? Or type in a Youtube URL and hit Convert? I'm sure the blog author cant be bothered with such things.

....I remember recording cassette tapes off of the radio! Sitting there as a child, waiting Hours for That Song.

How times have changed, and for the better!

<comment><USER3> I still have MP3 files in my collection that I recorded off the radio. I recorded them off the radio with a cassette tape while in junior high. In my latter years of High School, I digitized them by running an aux cable between the cassette player's headphone jack and a Windows 98 PC's microphone jack. I know which ones are recorded off the radio because they miss the first second or two of the song.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Holding music, either in your hand or on a personal hard drive, is a relic > of Obama-era music consumption.

How is this true in any sense?

<comment><USER5> While I am not a huge music listener, it is largely true for me.

Spotify launched in 2008. I signed up for an account in 2009. Since then I have bought physical/downloadable music only a handful of times.

I am an avid podcast listener which occupies a chunk of my phone hard drive most days.

<comment><USER4> That's not really the idea that I'm repulsed by. I'm repulsed by the bizarre notion that _music format_ eras should mention a political leader for any reason. It's like saying records really started declining after Nixon (or whenever/whoever is most appropriate, I'm not sure of the timing). It isn't necessarily incorrect, it's just categorically _wrong_ to bring that information into the same thought.

<comment><USER6> I first thought of the Japanese custom of naming time periods after Emperors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a problem common to ANY "personal interested data", it's the very same for videos, mails, messages, discussions, ...

The trend is lock even better people pushing them to offload their personal stuff and this trend unfortunately keep evolving really fast.

One of the last alarming thing I discover is from my bank (Europian, big well- known, not involved in any recent big scandal etc): they offer a digital sign service so I can do more operation via internet banking... Only the bank hold the key. They simply say you go to your personal page, type your OTP and a key pin we give to you in print and that's signed. WTF?! Unfortunately I think many IT-ignorant people will find this service nice...

</comment><comment><USER8> I still buy vinyl by the boatload and they come with MP3 or uncompressed audio cards, usually, so I've actually got a large collection of good quality MP3's. I understand I am the outlier here.

<comment><USER9> I had a huge digital audio collection of mp3's and various lossy and lossless formats, but last year I burned the ZFS raid with the collection by accident. After several month of grieving, i decided to rebuild my collection, but this time using physical media - CD's, vinyl records, cassette and reel-to-reel tapes.

It was a revelation. I found it so liberating to be able to listen to music "unplugged". I can get home from work, put on a record or cd and listen to music without having to open the laptop or mess with the phone.

It also changed the way I listen to music - no skipping tracks, listen to the whole album start to finish. I found that I missed out on a lot of music when I just skipped thru an album because I didn't like the first 2 bars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd settle for decent nested playlists and/or tagging coupled with reasonable discovery. Hypem used to be okay for discovery but has been gamed to death.</comment>


Ask HN: Trustworthy performance comparisons between C++ and Rust? - <AUTHOR> Hey HN,
I'm looking for strong benchmarks or comparisons between Rust and C++. I'm skeptical of a lot of benchmarks that are posted here as I know they can be gamed, so I'd appreciate it if folks in the Rust and C++ community who have reasonable expertise could post interesting demonstrations or research that compare the two languages for high performance computing.
I also would be interested in hearing from the community which features either language offers that are better than the other for performance (i.e. not security or library support).
Thanks! <comment><USER2> The information rustc can hand to llvm should allow for great optimization, but llvm's optimizer has bugs that mean rustc can't pass much of it, or the optimizer won't make a valid binary (it will crash). Also, llvm's optimizer is way behind gcc's (way way behind intel's)for hpc type stuff. So clang is probably on par with rustc, but GCC or ICC (and certainly ifort) will outperform rustc in the hpc arena until llvm catches up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I appreciate this comment.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Hummingbird – Design/HTML Previews to Target Devices in Realtime - <AUTHOR> http://vivekpanyam.github.io/Hummingbird/

<comment><USER2> This is a dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612156).

<comment><AUTHOR> That was the blog post. I took all the feedback I got and turned it into a Github site. Want me to delete this submission?

<comment><USER2> Hmm. Since you did this so quickly, I guess we can make an exception and consider it an adjunct to the original post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Safari Web Inspector: Styles Enhanced - <AUTHOR> http://www.webkit.org/blog/1463/web-inspector-styles-enhanced/ <comment><USER2> Although I've switched from Firefox + Firebug to Chrome + Web Inspector for dev, I still missed Firebug. Mostly because of CSS editing.

Considering that Chrome already had a huge speed advantage (and Firebug only made Firefox worse), these updates are just an added bonus.</comment>


Looking for Cofounder/CTO (San Francisco). Interested? - <AUTHOR>

luvThings is looking to replace our technical founder who had to drop out because of major life events. We have a prototype app in the iOS App Store and interest from VCs. Interested. Shoot us an email to: email@example.com. Email created specifically for this post.
Website http://www.luvthings.com/
App https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/luvthings/id943711578?mt=8 <comment><USER2> [http://whartoniteseekscodemonkey.tumblr.com/](http://whartoniteseekscodemonkey.tumblr.com/)

(OP's username refers to Fuqua, Duke's MBA program)

<comment><USER3> [http://www.luvthings.com/about-luvthings/](http://www.luvthings.com/about- luvthings/)

It looks like Fuqua is the CEO's surname.</comment></comment>


Year 2038 problem - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem <comment><USER2> From the linked Deep Impact space probe page:

The spacecraft was lost and: "the most probable reason of software malfunction was a Y2K-like problem. August 11, 2013, 00:38:49, was 2^32 of one-tenth seconds from January 1, 2000, leading to speculation that a system on the craft tracked time in one-tenth second increments since January 1, 2000, and stored it in a signed 32-bit integer, which then overflowed at this time, similar to the Year 2038 problem"

</comment><comment><USER3> Museums and old-computer enthusiasts will feel the pain of this; most modern systems have long moved on to 64-bit.

<comment><USER4> a lot of software uses 32 bit integers to store dates so it doesn't matter on what cpu it runs

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember Y2K (there was a weekend lost), and that 38 seemed a fair length of time away.

We're almost halfway there, now.

"Objects in mirror are closer than they appear."

(Context/origin of the phrase: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objects_in_mirror_are_closer_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objects_in_mirror_are_closer_than_they_appear) )</comment>


Show HN: OneSite – Free, unlimited web hosting with cPanel and support. Yep - <AUTHOR> https://onesite.co?source=HackerNews <comment><USER2> One major issue I see with free: there's no implicit contract and thus no expectation of long service life. Which is a real biggie when it comes to hosting.

Even paying a nominal fee for hosting (see [https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net)) is better than paying nothing. Because the exchange of money creates the expectation of services rendered.

The issue is security. Not in a technical, hardened web-server sense. But in the legal sense. A shared web host has root access to your databases. It has access to your API keys. It controls what files are served for your domain name. Paying for a service creates a business relationship, and at least the expectation of liability should a web host act maliciously.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, We've developed a sustainable business model. Without the free hosting, OneSite wouldn't make sense. Our main objective is becoming a high quality cheap web hosting. To do this, instead of spending a lot of money on advertising, we are providing free hosting, to reach the same point, at a lower cost. Free hosting is what will make OneSite make sense. We will make a profit with AdSense in our website and with paid upgrades. But we do not plan to discountinue free hosting, and I even believe it would be illegal to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's the catch?

<comment><USER4> Seconded.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, What we want to prove is that in this industry, paid customer acquisition costs are so high, that it's better to save these by increasing your server costs. We offer free web hosting, which essentially gets promoted alone. We have higher server costs, true, but it's still worth it. We earn money through Google AdSense on our site and through paid upgrades we'll soon be offering.

<comment><USER5> If it's "unlimited everything for free", then what sort of things could be upgradable with a fee?

<comment><AUTHOR> We could very well provide VPSes, cloud services, domains and/or SSD web hosting where you could also host unlimited domains (now you can host one domain per account)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just registered, authenticated my email, logged in, and now I can't do anything.

My Services -> Place a new order

Could not load any product groups.

Open Ticket

No support departments found. Please try again later.

Wonder what gives.

</comment><comment><USER7> Do you offer any email redirection/forwarding?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we do. You can set it up through cPanel :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The cPanel login should be HTTPS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, At OneSite, we use strict security measures to ensure that your information is always safe, and of course, we will never sell your information to third parties. Our servers are secure and the information you provide us through the whole [https://onesite.co/](https://onesite.co/) (including cPanel) is encrypted.

Our cPanel uses self-signed certificates. Self-signed certificates work exactly like a certificate purchased through an SSL Certificate Authority, except that they are NOT signed by a Certificate Authority. Instead they are signed by your server; hence the term "self-signed".

At OneSite, your data is always safe

<comment><USER8> Self-signed certificates are not secure as they are vulnerable to man-in-the- middle attacks.

[https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/8110/what- are-t...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/8110/what-are-the- risks-of-self-signing-a-certificate-for-ssl)

With free/cheap certificates widely available through e.g. Let's Encrypt and AWS Certificate Manager, there's absolutely no reason to use self-signed certificates.

The cPanel login page linked to in the footer isn't using any HTTPS, self- signed or otherwise. This means that anyone controlling the network can inject javascript to steal your users' passwords.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do you guys have a bug bounty?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, but this has been the most helpful comment so far! Do you think we should implement it?

<comment><USER8> Definitely.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have any examples so that we can base it on these?

<comment><USER8> GitHub - [https://bounty.github.com/](https://bounty.github.com/)

Google - [https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/reward- program/](https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/reward-program/)

Facebook - [https://www.facebook.com/whitehat](https://www.facebook.com/whitehat)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New cars make me want to Saab - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/8743/cars-are-ugly-now-i-miss-saab <comment><USER2> I had SAAB 900s from 1983 right through till 2008. The one I had the longest was from 1987 to 2001. I cried when I sold it.

I loved the SAAB 900s. The biggest advantage, apart from the safety and comfort, was that cargo-space. It had a low lip, a high roof, and a flat floor with the rear seat folded down. I could, and did, carry quite large pieces of furniture in there.

When I bought a three-door Mercedes Sports Coupe in 2002, it was a poor substitute for my SAAB cargo-carrying: shorter, lower, no flat floor.

If SAAB had continued with the _original_ 900 series+, I'd be driving one still today.

\+ When SAAB was taken over by GM in the 1990s, the SAAB 9xxx series were redesigned to conform more to the US vehicle fashions of that era.

</comment><comment><USER3> In Finland, there's a quirk of lawmaking coincidence:, cars older than 30 years can be registered as museum vehicles, and taxi operations were recently unregulated. As a result, some taxi operators run old vehicles. You may get to ride in a Saab 900, I've seen them around!

Retrotaxi: [https://www.instagram.com/p/B4lG2UOBzyx/](https://www.instagram.com/p/B4lG2UOBzyx/)

why Saab was so expensive: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9fw9nou_G8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9fw9nou_G8)</comment>


Office Hours with Sam Altman [video] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/office-hours-with-sam-altman/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for the taking the time to do this. It is valuable to hear Sam talk from his experience.

Some follow up questions came to my mind after listening to this. I am going to list them here. If you see this @craigcannon, please consider them for the next one.

1\. One disadvantage of being young is that they are usually inexperienced in managing people and conducting business. How would you recommend young people to improve their skills in people management and business? What kind of books should they read? What kind of habits should they inculcate? Is there anything else you would recommend?

2\. A non technical founder needs to be a product guy. It is also easy for a n00b to pick up coding skills as there are so many great resources on the internet, many of them operated by YC companies. The follow up question here is the converse: how can a technical founder learn product skills? What kind of resources are available and which ones would you recommend?

3\. Sam mentioned AI and computer security as two areas that he thought was important. With AI, we are already seeing hints of disruptive technology (deep learning). What is the situation with computer security in comparison?

4\. Stickiness of a new platform can be taken as an indicator of whether it is worthwhile to develop things on it. How would you rate voice platforms like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Apple Siri in terms of stickiness?

<comment><USER3> #3. Securing the Internet of Things.. Securing data in the cloud and on premise.. Automated cyber defenses.. You can apply these at the network level, the application level, the machine level etc... new ways to manage authentication/passwords.. new anti phishing technology, behavioral and outlier analysis. Tools to manage hacks effectively.

There's a whole industry here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The crowdfunding response is feels like common incumbentspeak. YC is threatened by crowdfunding so it seems like Altman can't see it straight. It looks like a major blind spot.

It would be great if YC actually did "eat itself" and usher in the crowdfunding era. This is certainly contrary to the exclusive club they are today but it beats being subsumed. And YC does have good things to teach people and is quite generous. It would be good for the world if they were the ones that did this. "Kickstart with equity" is clearly the model of the future. Indiegogo is working on it.

<comment><USER5> "YC is threatened by crowdfunding" Maybe, or maybe he actually thinks its not a great idea.

""Kickstart with equity" is clearly the model of the future. " Clearly? I would disagree.

<comment><USER6> Is crowdfunding the way to go for all new companies? No, but it's clearly a good model for some.

Crowdfunding seems to work well when you've already got an experienced team, have an advanced prototype of your product/service, and just need funding to scale up that prototype.

If you've got an inexperienced team, an MVP-style prototype, and could use extra guidance and support, then going with crowdfunding would probably end up being problematic.

<comment><USER5> What are examples of successful crowdfunded companies?

How does the crowd determine the difference between your type 1 and your type 2 companies?

<comment><USER6> >"What are examples of successful crowdfunded companies?"

I can talk about successful crowdfunded products, including products made by companies.

To give one example to start with, Formlabs has used crowdfunding to help generate money to manufacture their 3D printers:

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

>"How does the crowd determine the difference between your type 1 and your type 2 companies?"

I'd suggest it comes down to experience. With experience in crowdfunding you can spot the campaigns that are likely to succeed, and which ones are likely to fail. The main problem I see is when campaigns are too ambitious based on the background of the people involved. For example, high volume manufacturing in China without prior experience of working with Chinese manufacturing companies.

<comment><USER7> In formlab's case they had a 1.8MUSD seed round prior to the crowdfunding. They raised ~3MUSD from crowdfunding.

This probably helped give them some runway to put together a series A. However they still raised an additional 50MUSD.

So, I don't think they're a great example of a company bootstrapping from crowdfunding. It's more of a traditional play, with some validation (and some runway) from crowdfunding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great questions, great answers.

Sam's comments on Meetups mirror my experiences, though I'm not in a tech hub area. It depends really heavily on the person organizing and what kind of outreach they've done to people, existing groups, and organizations in the area. I've seen a few groups flare up really enthusiastically, then dwindle over a few months. I've also tried joining some existing meetups that feel most like people are sticking around more to hang out with the other people than because of value from the meetup.

Likewise for finding a technical cofounder. As a technical person I've spent some time thinking about the other direction, and (after a rough experience) there's no way I'd try to get funding with somebody I didn't know very well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to everyone that submitted questions!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13338805](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13338805)

</comment><comment><USER9> The room needs some sound treatment. Also I found Sam's constant vocal fry annoying and difficult to listen to. Sorry, yes, I'm OCD.

<comment><USER10> He has Ezra Klein voice. Or maybe it's called NPR voice.

<comment><USER11> Would Sam talk to someone higher status with a fry voice, like he couldn't be bothered to muster the energy to speak normally? No. Vocal fry is used to show that the speaker is higher status. Genuinely high status people don't use it because it's a passive-aggressive way to show higher status.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think Sam Altman might be the nicest guy in Silicon Valley. It seems like he really wants to do the right thing at all times.

<comment><USER13> I wouldn't come to that same conclusion based on a few things, but the biggest one was his behaviors around reddit: [https://www.fastcompany.com/3048521/fast-feed/ellen-pao- part...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3048521/fast-feed/ellen-pao-part-of-a- long-con-at-reddit)

<comment><USER12> What do you think he did wrong here? Joke around in the thread?

<comment><USER13> Given other accounts of Altman's persona, both publicly and from personal accounts to me, he seems to be rabidly competitive and cutthroat:

[1] "You could parachute [Sam] into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king"

[2] "But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to."

[2] "Graham said, "I asked Sam in our kitchen, 'Do you want to take over YC?,' and he smiled, like, it worked."

So in the context of Yishan's comment, it demonstrates to me that the "joking" was a subtle nod that he wouldn't have any qualms with back room dealing and manipulation to reach a goal.

While that might sound like a hit on him, it's actually not. I relate to that approach strongly, and think it's actually the right way to play it.

However I think it's actually a bad comparison to say he's the "nicest guy in the valley." That title goes to Steve Wozniak.

[1][http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html](http://paulgraham.com/fundraising.html)

[2][http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans- man...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest- destiny)

<comment><USER12> [1] There is more than one way to power. Sam seems to get there by consensus

[2] These are for survival in the case of an apocalypse, not aggression

[3] Graham loved Sam Altman, so he put him in charge of YC.

None of these really related to Sam making a joke about Reddit. Conde Nast is extremely happy with Reddit. It's growing (#7 site in the USA), and valuable.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Star Wars API Got a GraphQL Makeover - <AUTHOR> https://graphcms.com/blog/the-star-wars-api-just-got-a-makeover <comment><USER2> This is great! I use the star wars api all the time to demonstrate the power of GraphQL :-) Will use this endpoint going forward.

</comment><comment><USER2> Was this made entirely with GraphCMS?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, this is Michael from GraphCMS! The basic schema of the project was created with GraphCMS, which will give you the hosted GraphQL backend for your application. Having the initial project structure in place will allow you to easily create content via the rich editor interface. Since the generated GraphQL API also allows write operations, we created a short import script for the original Star Wars API :)</comment></comment>


From Software to Energy Efficiency  - <AUTHOR> http://www.energysavvy.com/blog/2010/05/25/from-software-to-energy-efficiency/

<comment><USER2> I made the jump from online advertising to clean tech. It was not easy to re- start my professional network and learn all the new domain knowledge, but it paid off in being able to work in an industry that I really care about.

<comment><USER3> I'm 6 weeks into the exact same jump and I couldn't possibly be happier that I took it. My impressions thus far is that the industry is growing unimaginably quickly. I'm thrilled to get to be a part of it!

<comment><USER4> Could you go into detail about what you're doing now and what you were doing before?

I'm a GIS (geographic information systems) developer working for the state government and I'm pretty miserable in my day job. I've been thinking about what I could do in the green tech sector.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's great to work at the intersection of technology and energy efficiency. You get the short-term warm fuzzies one gets when working for a non-profit org. but with the possibility of a significantly better upside long term. All kinds of wins in the clean tech space.

</comment><comment><USER6> If we apply the same level of innovation around cleantech as we have around optimizing the flow of information about Kendra's post-baby weight, we could turn the world around. Persevere, people.

</comment><comment><USER7> I feel exactly the same way. Online advertising is cool in that its fast moving and intellectually challenging. Which is not to sneeze at compare to other options. And yet. And yet. It would be awesome to wake up every morning and have both head and heart aligned and be so energized about what you're doing.

</comment><comment><USER8> As I learn more about running a startup, I can see what a great plan the EnergySavvy guys have in terms of generating leads for greentech contractors using their excellent software tools. I think it's something other entrepreneurs in any category can learn from.

</comment><comment><USER9> This post does a great job of highlighting how clean tech is more than just a new industry buzzword. There are real, interesting problems that software developers can help to solve in this space. Hopefully, more people will make the jump.

</comment><comment><USER10> love the post, and the variety of ways for folks to get involved -- seems like they're primarily tech/dev-related opportunities (per the title), but i'm wondering where product folks can/will have the biggest impact...

</comment><comment><USER11> You guys are in a great position to take advantage of the opportunity when energy costs take off (again!) and everyone starts looking for solutions and costs savings. Should add plenty of demand for your solution...

</comment><comment><USER12> Great new area for developers to enter. Especially if you want to believe and care about the work you doing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hot list of resources for energy hackers.</comment>


Humble Book Bundle – Win at Work - <AUTHOR> https://www.humblebundle.com/books/win-at-work-books <comment><AUTHOR> Are any of these books any good? I need to improve my standing at work and need some help.

Could anyone recommend any other books which are better.

<comment><USER2> I would suggest a book called "The Manager's Path", it is a very popular book suggested by the stack overflow community.

[https://toptalkedbooks.com/books/Ze2lQw/The-Managers- Path-A-...](https://toptalkedbooks.com/books/Ze2lQw/The-Managers-Path-A-Guide- for-Tech-Leaders-Navigating-Growth-and-Change)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I will check it out. Published by O'Reilly so that's a plus.</comment></comment></comment>


A critique of Accelerate (XLR8) by John Kotter - <AUTHOR> https://blog.coderbyheart.com/why-i-threw-up-in-my-mouth-when-reading-accelerate-xlr8-by-john-kotter <comment><USER2> I have a theory, and this commentary kind of backs it up. You ave so much mental energy to give and so much physical energy to give.

So you can either work staff really hard to get a project out and then accept an unproductive time to follow, or you can accept a more average effort over a longer period.

Personally the hardest mix is 9-5 of regular work and then having to come up with inspirational ideas and solutions. This keeps me up all night and burns me out.

This 150% nonsense sounds like trying screw an extra bit of work out of your staff in terms of innovation, without giving them the space to think.

Good blog OP

<comment><USER3> I also have a similar theory. I believe rewarding work (interesting projects of passion) encourages employees because it provides them with energy and unrewarding work (monotonous, boring tasks) discourages employees because it drains energy. Interestingly, one could also burn out on rewarding work because it eventually starts consuming energy due to the obsessiveness it fosters. That's when unrewarding work is welcomed.

The problem is that if you're not innovative you will never understand how to encourage it others until you change within. You will read books and attend seminars with the buzzword of the month and it'll all make sense in theory but the practice of it will allude you and you will fall into old habits. Companies that need to become more innovative have to start at the beginning and at the very top and make this a company-wide cultural shift rather than making it a few individuals delegated overtime responsibility.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are great books about making innovation your default culture. I highly recommend reading "An Everyone Culture" which is about creating Deliberate Learning Organizations: [https://blog.coderbyheart.com/an-everyone- culture](https://blog.coderbyheart.com/an-everyone-culture)

<comment><USER2> Books on management theory only work for people who already made the conscious shift and just want to _refine_ their thinking imho

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, everybody starts somewhere. And books greatly help (me) to get more input and some books (like An Everyone Culture) are so outstanding and unique, that it's worth reading them even if you are not in the position to change an organization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think that unspoken idea in the book is that people in corporations work half of the time they spend there to do useful things and the other half they just sit or walk around, suffering, bored out of their minds. I think the author just sees opportunity in providing them with something exciting to do during that time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, you could argue that in a hierarchy 50% of your time is spent with superfluous activity, like useless reports, endless meetings, and that you don't spend energy there … which you can put to good use within the network.

But this is a fallacy: if the hierarchy is your default you will never achieve your full potential working in a network organization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Isn't the idea of having volunteer super-employees exceeding the regular production literally Stakhanovism?

Most organisations above Dunbar's number have some level of unacknowledged problems in the "formal" system. It ends up not being as productive as the formal figures would indicate. So people use the informal system to back-fill their quotas. This means the informal system isn't available to increase visible-to-management production, because it's already being used to make up for the deficiencies of the formal system.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. He thinks that because having a very compelling and inspiring objective you will put in extra effort to contribute towards it. The "celebration of wins" also further incourages you to keep pushing.

What might happen is that once you achieve The Big Opportunity, you can get back to your normal 100% job in the hierarchy; but who would want that?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article is exactly right.

It sounds like XLR8 isn't wrong in that identifies the two main activities of a growing business: 1) Making their bread-and-butter work as efficient as possible and 2) Innovating to multiply opportunities and inefficiencies. In short, a company needs to streamline and explore. But, advocating that the networking and exploration required for #2 is an offline, voluntary activity is foolish, dangerous even.

I've worked in a variety of organizations of different sizes, in different industries and different states of startup or maturity and found one consistent pattern for failing organizations: They start to routinely tell people to "stay in their lane" at work and respond to new ideas with "Sounds great! As soon as these low value, high effort activities are done you can work on those high value, low effort ideas in your spare time." That's the beginning of brain death for a company. The body soon follows.

Instead, strong companies with strong leadership know that it isn't their employees responsibility to be more efficient and productive at low-value, high-effort activities. It is the leadership's responsibility to root out and eliminate those activities either by automating, out-sourcing or de- prioritizing them. The right way to streamline a business is to listen to employees and relentlessly cut, kill, and destroy routine or low-value work.

As you do that, you free up and empower employees and the organization to leverage high-value work in front of them and explore and pursue high-value opportunities on the horizon. In a healthy, growing organization those are everyday (during the day) activities not after-hours, side-projects that force employees to sneak time from work or steal time from their families.

</comment><comment><USER7> " _The second example works only because what is getting worn out during work in today's businesses are cognitive resources. Coming home from a computerized workplace working on spreadsheets does not affect your ability to creatively wield a hammer and a saw._ "

I work in a Further Education college in the UK (like a community college in US). We are seeing a lot of people paying full cost for evening/weekend courses on dress making, hairdressing/barbering, welding, decorating &c. Might try a questionnaire to see where the students are coming from in new year. Hypothesis: a lot of badge folk.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is/are "badge folk"?

<comment><USER8> A perjorative term for people that take a lot of courses is "badge collector". Usually for people more interested in the credentials than the material.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay. You might be correct.

But I think their motivation is different, they invest their spare time to advance their career, which serves a clear purpose and this is a great motivator. That is different compared to working over-time for the advancement of their employers.

Also, these courses have a clear timeframe and a clear defined curriculum which you can plan for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Asking your employees to think different for a better goal and simultaneously forcing them to follow the old, left-side methods, which the right-side is trying to get rid of, is nothing but insanity."

Well it's also the behavior of revolutionary heroes in a dystopian novel who inevitably get either betrayed, corrupted, or killed. So there is also that.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well sounds like instructions to modern slavery

</comment><comment><USER11> Interesting critique, but you close by recommending your own (supposedly superior) brand of management training and provide a convenient link--all of which is packaged in a blog post that you posted on HN.

I should have known better. As soon as I read your advertisement I felt like I had been had, like this was all an elaborate rouse to sell hr management services.

Bummer

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I work for a company that tries to change organizations to the better. The experiences I make doing that gives me a good insight on what actually works and what does not.

What would be your preferred way how I publish this kind of content?

<comment><USER11> If you are promoting your own blog posts, them I would add a quick disclaimer at the top of the blog post, simply revealing that you have a dog in this fight. That will either give authority to what follows, or not. Either way, the reader is afforded the chance to decide ex-ante.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've added a subtitle to the header below my role. That should make it clear.

<comment><USER11> You rock, thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unrelated: I like this blog's font

<comment><USER13> Is it consolas or something?

<comment><USER7>
        body{font-size:100%;font-family:"Ubuntu Mono",
        "Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif}
        .wc-container{width:90%;max-width:768px;margin:0 auto}

user below got there first.</comment></comment></comment>


Lessons from Launch - sprint.ly - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sprint.ly/post/14470010246/lessons-from-launch

<comment><USER2> Your homepage still doesn't say what sprint.ly actually does.

Surely you can sum it up in 1 sentence?</comment>


Don't use Hadoop – your data isn't that big (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/hadoop_hatred.html

<comment><USER2> _> If you have a single table containing many terabytes of data, Hadoop might be a good option for running full table scans on it. _

The author mentions this at the end almost as a footnote but in my experience, this is _usually_ the motivating reason for IT to use Hadoop. It's about processing _throughput_ and not just absolute data size. A lot of processing jobs can't use indexes (except for lookup tables) so a PostgreSQL 4TB db with a schema for OLTP workloads doesn't solve the issue.

A 4tb harddrive might be cheap for $150 but at 100MB/sec, it takes 11+ hours to read. However, a big data cluster with 10 nodes can each scan their local 400GB shard and the batch job gets done in 1 hour. Even newer 10TB mechanical harddrives with 150MB/sec (and multi disks RAID to saturate a SATA3 interface) isn't going to fundamentally alter this throughput equation. On the other hand, a potential 4TB SSD with 1GB/sec might be the sweet spot if the processing is not cpu-constrained. But then again, new technology enables the goal posts to move[1], and people will invent new workloads that require a 100-node cluster each having a 10TB SSD to solve bigger problems.

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

<comment><USER3> > A lot of processing jobs can't use indexes (except for lookup tables) so a > PostgreSQL 4TB db with a schema for OLTP workloads doesn't solve the issue.

What are the cases where an RDBMS can't use indexes on fact tables?

<comment><USER4> Searching within fields is one example.

WHERE street_address LIKE "%MAIN%ST%"

WHERE xml_blob LIKE "%<deprecrated_feature_node_name%"

to find documents that need to be updated when you remove that feature, etc.

"Just use Mongo" or "just use the latest pgsql and convert to JSON" or "just do XYZ" is often a less practical answer than "just query/analyze the database you already have".

<comment><USER5> If you're using PostgreSQL you can just use a trigram index for these kinds of searches.

\- [http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/pgtrgm.ht...](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/interactive/pgtrgm.html#AEN150325)

\- [https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html](https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp4.html)

<comment><USER4> LOL at the new account name, but thank you very much for the pointer to an index type I didn't know existed!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Previous comments (2013): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6398650](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6398650)

Also worth a read, "Command-line tools can be 235x faster than your Hadoop cluster (2014)": [http://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster- tha...](http://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-than-your- hadoop-cluster.html) | [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908462](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8908462)

</comment><comment><USER6> At my company, we operate on very large amounts of data.

Let's pretend, though, that we woke up this morning and had a 600mb dataset.

We'd still have hundreds of jobs running on that 600mb dataset. Most of them would ideally run as often as possible--we'd only schedule them periodically because of performance. Some of them would explode the 600mb dataset into several gigs. Most of them would copy the dataset several times over. Some of them would be memory intensive. Some of them would be CPU intensive. Some of them would be disk intensive. Many of those jobs emanate counters, logs, and metrics, which we want to track over time. We'd want to track the overall resource utilization of those jobs. We'd want the particular jobs to be killed automatically if they use too many resources. If the jobs are in danger of taking up too many resources in the system, we want them to be automatically queued and scheduled piecemeal. We'd want the jobs to be written in a variety of frameworks targeted to the particular task at hand.

Given those hundreds of jobs competing for scarce resources, we'd want to not have to completely rewrite the system if the 600mb dataset became a 1 gig dataset, or a 1 tb dataset.

Sure, we could put together a multi server ssh/bash job scheduling system, but in the end that's kind of what hadoop is, except having addressed a lot of problems that you don't even know you're going to have up front.

<comment><USER7> With a 600mb dataset you probably don't need batch jobs. You can afford to run ad-hoc reports when they're requested. You can process data as it arrives, streaming it into a structured representation in postgres or similar. You can afford to stop the pipeline when you get an item whose format doesn't match, and investigate, rather than having to tolerate a certain error percentage. You don't need a scheduling framework because if you ever have too many jobs running you can kill a few, you're not going to lose hours of work by doing so. You want metrics but IME hadoop isn't actually very good at that.

If you're doing enough processing that you can't do it on one beefy database server then sure, the concerns that go with that are similar to when you have enough data that you can't handle it on one beefy database server. But most people with 600mb of data don't want or need to do multiple cpu-hours worth of processing on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A lot of people probably run into problems from poor design, poor programming, or just inability to problem solve. For example (two real examples I've faced):

(1) Company xyz is having problems generating reports that pull from an sql database. They take too long, IT says it's because the data is too large and their hardware is old. Obviously this is big data! Wrong, re-writing the sql queries and indexing some fields solved the problem. Like, beginner-level stuff. Nobody had even looked at the code or structure of the database when initially trying to solve the problem.

or

(2) Company xyz can't load a dataset into memory to perform some computations on it, it's too large. Needs better hardware or big data solution obviously. With millions of rows and many columns, ok. Only 6 of those columns were even used by the processing job, and a fraction of the rows were relevant. There was no need to fit the entire dataset into memory in the first place, problem solved.

I could go on. Lots of companies just lack the skills and knowledge to do things right, and have no idea what's going on under the hood or how things work. So naturally, they are drawn to the marketing buzz surrounding big data, cloud computing, data warehousing, machine learning, etc etc etc.

<comment><USER9> Being a dba for a decade already, resolving issues similar to the ones you described, are the sweatest I've experienced in my professional career. Unfortunately, I don't believe that fixing the problem in the database by understanding and resolving it in a logical manner is the way things will be in the near future. You know, RDBMSs aren't sexy ... developers developers developers , web developers web developers web developers :) the newest API and/or language are much more important nowadays for the newcomers. I cannot believe it, it's out of my mind, but that's the reality. Noone wants to utilize the database at its fullness anymore, everything needs to be done at the gazilion of app servers by using java/.net or the trendy 3rd/4th generation language of the day.

My only hope is that the data is the thing that is not going away, and this forces us to think in a logical way about it(eventually devs/web devs will start doing the data maniplation and etc the right way, I guess you're pretty familiar with the approach in mind).

Thanks

<comment><USER10> I remember c. 2002-2005, it was RDBMSes that were the overused, overhyped solution. Basically every webapp had to be backed by a database. Everybody was moving to 3-tier architectures (even for things as simple as a TODO list), frameworks like Struts and Rails and Symphony and Django all sprung up to manage the complexity of talking to the DB, you'd see all these tips on blogs (themselves among the first database-backed webapps, even though they worked perfectly well as flat files) about how to normalize your schema and shard your data for scale and pick ID spaces and make your joins perform well.

Meanwhile, a small minority of people were like "Guys? GUYS! You can just use flat files and in-memory data structures for that. Why bother with a database when 3 hashtables and a list will do the same thing several orders of magnitude faster." They had outsized accomplishments relative to their shrillness, though: Yahoo, Google, PlentyOfFish, Mailinator, ViaWeb, Hacker News were all built primarily with in-memory data structures and flat files.

These things run in cycles. The meta-lesson is to let your problem dictate your technology choice instead of having your technology choice dictate your problem, and build for the problem you have _now_ rather than worry about the problems that other people have. For many apps, a hashtable is still the right solution to get a v0.1 off the ground, and it will scale to hundreds of thousands of users.

<comment><USER9> Fully agree with you - there are problems and problems, and 'use the right tool for the right job' should always be the way to go.

hashtalbe or flat files,huh, hard to believe this is going to be useful for a non-trivial app as 'data storage engine'(so to say). You will have to implement everything yourself: \- concurrency - several users updating one and the same entry \- data consistency - to return the data as of the start of the 'select' for the user,what about others who updated the entry but still didn't commit. \- security - fine grain access to specific data entries - what can be extracted by whom, what about auditing(who did what at what time and etc.) \- backup/recovery and etc.

More code most of the time means more bugs. Not everyone is Google , Amazon or Facebook to have the resources to create good custom solutions and support, improve them.

For most cases, a simple rdbms database will provide you with enough 'standard' functionality to not reinvent the wheel(think security,concurrency,consistency and etc.) = to code these on your own from scratch.

But in the end, it's again the nature of the problem(whether at all you'll need security, concurrency or consistency and etc.). It's nice to know what the database as a tool gives you , and I don't think this is the case nowadays - too many java/.net, and many other developers , have no idea what they can get out of a database. And I really hate when one spent several weeks to write something that could be done in several hours by using a specific database feature.

<comment><USER10> Most of the time, you can ignore all those concerns when you're starting out. Just run a single-threaded webserver and make one HTTP request = one transaction. You can keep your registered users in memory and store pointers to them in a list as your ACL, and log audit trails as a linked list. Snapshot data to a file periodically for crash resistance, and load it back in at system start.

Sure, you won't be able to run on more than one core, and this won't work if your data exceeds RAM. And I wouldn't do this for anything mission-critical; it's better for the types of free or cheap services where users will tolerate occasional downtime or data loss. But if you never hit the disk and never need to make external connections to databases or the network, you can easily do upwards of 10K req/sec on a single core these days, even in a scripting language like Python. Assume that you've got 10,000 simultaneous actives (this is more than eg. r/thebutton and most websites, and usually translates to around ~1M registered users), this is one req/user/sec, which is pretty generous engagement.

Hacker News is built with an architecture like this. There've been a couple massive fails related to it (like when PG caused a crash-loop by live editing the site's code and corrupting the saved data in the process), but by and large it seems to work pretty well.

<comment><USER11> Yup, I'm actively using this architecture, in Python, with gevent (so that calls to external services don't stall your web server). I spawn long running computations in separate processes. I've described it here:

[http://www.underengineering.com/2014/05/22/DIY- NoSql/](http://www.underengineering.com/2014/05/22/DIY-NoSql/)

It really achieves 10k simple requests/transactions per second on a single core (or a $5/month VPS). The software support for it might have been better though. I should really release some code that helps with things like executing a function in another process, or verifying that some code executes atomically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Contains the famous ``Too big for Excel is not "Big Data".''

</comment><comment><USER13> ...but resumes looks better after that :)

<comment><USER14> So do job / company descriptions. A company has to be doing Machine Learning, Big Data, Cloud computing these days to be "buzzword compliant" :)

<comment><USER13> Good to know as i'm about to be interviewed by one like that in SF :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pick a technology that can grow with your dataset. Take a look at Cascading or if you like Scala, scalding. They work on your laptop and on a 2000 node cluster the same way.

<comment><USER16> I honestly don't know why anyone would use Cascading or Scalding when Spark exists.

<comment><USER17> Huge spark fan here. Love the execution model, API, supporting libs etc.

Unfortunately, Spark doesn't scale well on large datasets (10TB+). Sure, it's possible (and has been done), but right now there are too many rough edges to make it a better choice than Scalding/Cascading for data processing at scale. Most of this boils down to fine tuning certain Spark parameters, which is a pain when you're dealing with long-running, resource intensive workflows.

<comment><USER16> You have any references to support that 10tb claim?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Look at R and realize your data can fit in RAM. Almost every data set examples for clustered could really fit inside of a computers memory.

<comment><USER19> What servers support, say, 64tb of ram, let alone the petabytes that a much larger company may have to deal with?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Using "big data" technology is more than just an factor of input size. If your operations making the data bigger, you might well need a bigger tool. You can start with a data set on the middle-to-high-end of memory-sized, but if you have an operation in there which combinatorially explodes the input data, Spark is going to start looking pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER21> I could be wrong here, but my sense of Hadoop is that it's going to prove to be a dead end in the long run. Granted, evolutionary dead ends in technology can be very lucrative (look at Cobol, or Java). They aren't exciting, but there's money in them. That said, the aesthetic compromises made to appeal to the Java community, scaled out over years or decades, tend to make things bloated and hard to use. I don't see people being excited to do Hadoop, or wanting to learn it on their own time. It's much more interesting to learn the fundamentals of distributed systems than to learn a specific set of Java classes.

Personally, I'm finding myself increasingly burned out on "frameworks" that appeal to out-of-touch corporate decision-makers (who are attracted to the idea of a packaged "product" that solves everything) but tend to be overfeatured while under-delivering (especially if time to learn how to use the framework properly is included) when it counts. I'm much more interested in the modularity that you see in, say, the Haskell community where "framework" means something that would be a microframework anywhere else.

</comment><comment><USER22> I upvoted this purely because of the title!</comment>


Design is a Side Effect  - <AUTHOR> http://dswillis.com/uxcrank/?p=480

<comment><USER2> UX is a science and visual design is an art. I think they are both equally important.

The UX guy is like an architect, but even if he comes up with a nice building layout, no one wants to live in wood and cement foundation. UX and visual design go hand-in-hand and both are needed to create something compelling. In web design, collaboration between the UX guy and visual designer is very important, as the things they do are equally important.

<comment><USER3> Visual design is only an art if you're doing it wrong. It's no coincidence that design is a synonym for fate. The goal of design to force the user to do something or feel something, and you can only do this if your design is incorporating predictable elements. Which is pretty much the opposite of art, where you're testing novel elements to see what change they produce in people.

<comment><USER4> Your remark makes me think of some show on HGTV where they were staging a property and the stager talked about using art and other visual design elements to maneuver people down the hall, right past the so-so kitchen, and on to the great view and living space at the end to make the place sell. If you know what you are doing, web designers can similarly direct attention, etc, of the user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This assumes that "design" should be narrowly construed as "decoration" that "solves a problem" (like: "what color should the header font be to make it stand out?")

On the other hand, the whole UX movement and firms like Adaptive Path have shown that, if we consider the real brand (customer experience) as a design possibility, and let traditional design methods drive not just decoration but also the complete architecture of how the customer interacts with us, we can find much better solutions. It isn't as simple as "find out what your customers want," especially in emerging markets.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know. I'm reading _The E-myth Revisited_ at the moment, and it claims that salespeople sell 10-15% more when they're dressed in blue than when they're dressed in brown. The OP seems to assume that most purchasing decisions are based on rational assessments of experience with the products under consideration, but results like the blue/brown experiment suggest that there is a lot more going on, and seemingly irrational factors can have a huge impact on customer decisions. If that's the case, the "froofy" aspects of design rejected by the OP can have a significant business impact and should not be ignored.

But it does make sense to subject those aspects to rigorous testing rather than just spend weeks talking about them, as described in the OP.

</comment><comment><USER4> The article makes me think of a principle from mapmaking: A good map is typically described as "beautiful" but a beautiful map isn't necessarily a good map. If you design/engineer it properly to do a particular job well, it tends to have a certain elegance and visual appeal. In contrast, adding all kinds of froo-froo crapola to the map may make it look like art but cease to function effectively as a map.

<comment><USER7> Principle.

Principals are people. Principles are ideas.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Fixed.</comment></comment></comment>


Genetics and educational attainment in 1.1M individuals - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3 <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.unz.com/jthompson/journey-of-1-1-million- miles/](http://www.unz.com/jthompson/journey-of-1-1-million-miles/) offers a short review.

"The sample size and the quality controls on the data will overcome doubts about the applicability of the results. That is, I assume that they will (some readers will wish to avert their eyes) and the excitement of this and similar papers will influence how we think about intelligence, education and heritability. It is part of an international effort to identify the biological causes of cognitive ability. "</comment>


$10,000 TeamSpeak App Developer Contest - <AUTHOR>

If you are interested in developing apps, test you skills in the Overwolf and TeamSpeak app developer contest! Only the best of apps, and the strongest of heart and mind will win from the $10,000 prize pool, including some kick-ass gear from SteelSeries.
Do YOU have what it takes to win, and have your app promoted on the Overwolf website forever? Head over to the official contest page to find out!
http://overwolf.com/teamspeak-developers-contest-2014/
The competition starts today, and ends on August 9th, so get your apps in!
Having trouble thinking of ideas? or maybe you have so many your brain might explode?! Check out our feature request page to see what our users want, or to post your own ideas!
http://feedback.overwolf.com/forums/235154-feature-requests/category/78411-teamspeak <comment><AUTHOR> Overwolf is an in-game overlay software that allows you to bring your favorite apps (twitch streaming, game capture, in-game browser and chat) into the game!</comment>


A Message To our Customers from our CEO - <AUTHOR> http://blog.postmates.com/post/61340672198/a-message-to-our-customers-from-our-ceo

<comment><USER2> Have you been in a chain grocery store and seen a store executive in suit discussing shelf placement with a supplier? They'll always take time to say hello to customers and be super-helpful and friendly. That's how good customer service attitude is propagated down from the top. When the boss disrespects customers in front of his team, that sets the upper limit for how well customers will be treated by the company.

As a CEO, if a customer can't be satisfied with your current offerings, you should sympathize with their frustration and wish them the best. And thank them for caring enough to try your service at all.

<comment><USER3> So, how does this square with the "fire your customers" dictum that seems to be pretty common in SV?

<comment><USER4> You fire them by telling them you unfortunately can't meet their needs at this time, not by telling them to F off.

<comment><USER5> Right. But "tell them to fuck off" is just an emotionally-charged, internal shorthand for "their demands are unreasonable, so using the normal niceties let them know we can't provide what's been requested".

Anyone so literal-minded to think such hyperbole is a actual request to tell a customer to "fuck off" is not qualified to be either a CEO _or_ a Customer Support Representative.

<comment><USER4> True, but a CEO should know not to send anything in poor taste in email at all. Stuff like this can happen, and not always by accident.

<comment><USER5> CEOs are people with frustrations and lapses too.

And some high-functioning teams use extremely ribald language internally. Composing every internal message to a "what if this become public?" standard is the _safest_ policy, but imposes such costs on clarity/motivation/speed that it might not be the _optimal_ policy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Using "ribald language internally" might be ok until you get into your first lawsuit with discovery. It does tend to rub a jury a bit wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Without seeing both sides, all I can really say is that whoever forwarded this to the customer is the one who unambiguously messed up here. The CEO of a company is allowed to get frustrated, in general, and he clearly didn't intend this to reach the customer. Whether his frustration was justified is really another question which can't be answered without more information.

<comment><USER7> The person who forwarded it to the customer clearly messed up, but (to paraphrase Steve Jobs) somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons for screwups stop mattering. In general, you should always write email assuming that everyone will read it. Email has a way of being forwarded and re- forwarded. All of us forget this from time to time. As a CEO though, you can't really afford the luxury of forgetting. A CEO's emails are _ripe_ for finding their way to other people in the company, journalists, investors, etc...

<comment><USER8> It reminds me a lot of learning why it's a good idea to not use profanity in code comments, even if you're _pretty_ sure it'll never end up in production code.

The basic idea is, even if it'll never end up in production code, if you're in the habit of writing profanity in comments, odds are, over enough time, at some point that code _will_ be seen by someone you'd rather not have to see it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This feels like TMZ. Other than critiquing and learning from the things he says in response to it, I see very little value in this. I also don't like fun; so there's that! :)

</comment><comment><USER10> original tweet [https://twitter.com/Erin_Boudreau/status/379294594866741249](https://twitter.com/Erin_Boudreau/status/379294594866741249)

<comment><USER11> Looks more like a pitchfork mob, to me; the guy can't even apologize for a misstep. I bet none of these people have ever said anything bad about another, in a private place! It shouldn't really matter if they are customers or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So... are we going to hear the other side of this? I mean, sometimes the 'customer is not always right' and I think it's fair to assume he is mostly sorry only because he got caught. But I want to know what the issue was that prompted such a forceful reply.

</comment><comment><USER13> Some customers are just ... not customers but pathological users. With "f--- off" he probably meant: issue the refund, delete account, and deeply apologize.

<comment><USER14> Or he meant, you know, "f--- off."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I assume the customer service rep that responded to this got fired? Yes, its unacceptable for the CEO to say something like this, but its a customer service reps JOB to ALWAYS respond calmly and friendly to customers.

If they really thought he wanted that message forwarded on to the customer, they need to find a new line of work

</comment><comment><USER16> I might be in the minority but I'd rather hear "go fuck yourself" than insincere statements about how much they care while basically telling me to go fuck myself. It's right up there with the "it was my pleasure" reply from customer service. You derive _pleasure_ from helping me? Well in that case come on over to my house and I'll give you an orgasm of work to do.

</comment><comment><USER17> Two weeks ago my wife and I were at a comedy club. We paid an extra $7 for reserved seating - meaning nobody would be sitting at our table. Next to our table was another couple that paid for reserved seating. Note that when I say "reserved table" you should know that the tables are practically touching each other and the room is wall-to-wall people.

Somehow this other couple with a reserved table ends up with two dudes being sat at their table. They're actually closer to me than the other couple though. The woman from the couple got up three times to complain to the manager. She literally missed half the show. Finally the manager comes up to me, hands me two free tickets for a future show and asks if I would mind if the two dudes sat at our table. I said no problem. Ironically, the dudes were further away from us at our table and closer to the lady complaining about them sitting at our table.

Some people are just so unbelievably difficult to deal with and are unsatisfied with anything to the point they will cut off their nose to spite their face. I don't know anything about this situation but I've seen so many customers deserve to be told to fuck off that I'm not surprised if one got told that.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow! If I understand this correctly, he asked customer service to write this response?

<comment><USER19> Clearly it was sarcastic. Someone just, intentionally or otherwise, forwarded it to the customer too.</comment></comment>


How Google's Autonomous Car Passed the First U.S. State Self-Driving Test - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/advanced-cars/how-googles-autonomous-car-passed-the-first-us-state-selfdriving-test#.VBEAr6CC8Qo.hackernews <comment><USER2> I really feel autonomous cars are a prime candidate for Next Big Thing over the coming 10-25 years.

Combined with transportation platforms such as Uber, I wouldnt be surprised to see fleets of robotic taxis exclusively servicing dense urban areas in the next 15 years. Its one of those great problems that can scale locally if an enthusiastic city council or government get behind it. Something like an extension of what London has done with their congestion charge: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge)

Just imagine the transition to an inner city driverless fleet. No more parking problems in metro areas. Massive swathes of real estate become available as parking bays are no longer required. Markedly faster travel from A->B as networked cars work together to ensure optimal traffic flow. Once all the meatspace human drivers are off the grid, you can remove traffic lights.

Australia is well placed from a rural transportation perspective - we have many small towns 500km apart and plenty of road freight. Accidents on these roads are usually from driver fatigue, speeding or hitting wildlife. These roads are 'easy' for driverless cards - long and straight, not many surprises (except the odd kangaroo which I think the cold heart of an AI would handle better - the worst thing you can do is swerve to avoid them and roll your vehicle).

I think when the kids of 2150 sit down in history class to study the 20th century, they'll laugh at the idea that every family invested significant money into 1-2 expensive hunks of steel for transportation. We fling these big dirty hunks of steel around at 100mph for perhaps 5% of the day. It can get quite dangerous! Then we waste huge amounts of land by storing them for the other 95% of the day. How bizarre is that?

<comment><USER3> I'm worried about the implications on the labor market. Here are some quick numbers from the BLS about US employment: There are 3.664 million motor vehicle operators with an annual mean income of $35,000.

That includes 158,000 transit bus drivers, 500,000 school bus drivers, 170,000 taxi drivers and chauffeurs, 1.6 million tractor-trailer drivers, 777,000 delivery truck drivers and 400,000 driver/sales workers (restaurant take out, newspaper delivery, etc)

By comparison, there are 3.7 million working in all computer and mathematical occupations.

[[http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#53-0000](http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm#53-0000)]

<comment><USER4> I believe that there's many many more jobs at risk but it doesn't need to be a bad thing. Once a robot can accept orders and cook a burger as well as a McDonalds employee, won't we lose them too? Many many jobs will be automated.

As a society we need to find a way to handle this so that people out of work have their needs met and aren't just left to starve but I'm not sure we can expect to keep employment so high.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The one thing that sticks with me in all of these automated driving demonstrations is the lack of operation in adverse environmental conditions such Rain, Fog, Snow/Ice. I would expect that any one of those conditions would post extraordinary challenges to an automated driving system.

<comment><USER6> Interesting, I have exactly the opposite view. The limited visibility that such conditions enforce, making them hard for humans to handle, have much lower effect on a system equipped with "vision" on multiple wave-lengths, for some of which the rain and fog are as transparent as air. As for the other effects (say, less tire friction) I don't see why a computer would do worse. I'm pretty sure the breaking distances are not hard-coded, but rather a very sophisticated feedback loop.

<comment><USER7> From what I understand, Google's self driving car is heavily based around the lidar sensor. The lidar sensor is used to image immediate surroundings in 3D in real time. Rain, snow and fog interfere with the laser pulses sent out by the lidar sensor, which basically renders the self driving system blind.

<comment><USER8> You are correct. The system degrades in functionality in dust, heavy fog, heavy rain, and snow. It isn't blind, per se, as radar still functions. Snow is the worst though - both visually obscuring and radar absorptive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I still think autonomous cars are far far away from being used on a daily basis, especially in other parts of the world - right now you need good weather, precise maps, well maintained roads and the cars are taken care of by a team of engineers. I just can't imagine such car, for example, in Italy - you would need to replace all cars at once, because people drive there like insane and an autonomous car wouldn't even move.

</comment><comment><USER10> What's interesting is that the reported test is from 2012. (Which they do say at the top, but didn't really register until the end.) I'm a bit surprised it was so competent back then.

</comment><comment><USER11> After getting my first traffic-camera ticket yesterday, I'm 100% behind self- driving cars.

<comment><USER12> I hate situations in which the traffic light turn red just before I cross the street.

Most cases, I made the correct choice, but sooner or later I am going to screw up.

But a self-driving car shouldn't get any hangup like that and the AI should improve each time it gets into an accident just like airline safety improve after each accident.

<comment><USER13> > I hate situations in which the traffic light turn red just before I cross > the street.

In the UK there are amber lights for this purpose. The light changes from green to amber, before turning red. Both amber and red mean 'stop', but you're not going to get a ticket for going through an amber light.

"You MUST stop behind the white 'Stop' line across your side of the road unless the light is green. If the amber light appears you may go on only if you have already crossed the stop line or are so close to it that to stop might cause a collision."

(From [https://www.gov.uk/using-the-road-159-to-203/road- junctions-...](https://www.gov.uk/using-the-road-159-to-203/road- junctions-170-to-183))

<comment><USER14> The US has the same thing the problem is it's not always followed. Many drivers don't view the amber/yellow light as "I should stop now" but rather view it as "I better speed up so I don't get stuck at the red light". There's also been much accusation (though I have no links handy to provide as proof) of townships implementing red-light cameras and then changing, without warning, the duration of the amber light to be shorter. Keeping in mind that the law states that you cannot be inside the intersection when the light is red, if you entered it while the light was green or amber is irrelevant [Edit - It's been correctly pointed out below that this law may vary from state to state].

<comment><USER15> That's not the law in California. It is perfectly legal to be within an intersection when the light turns red. It's only illegal to _enter_ an intersection while the light is red.

Source 1: California Driver Handbook

[http://apps.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/traff_lgts_sgns.htm](http://apps.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/traff_lgts_sgns.htm)

\- - -

Solid Yellow – A yellow signal light means "CAUTION." The red signal is about to appear. When you see the yellow light, stop if you can do so safely. If you cannot stop safely, cross the intersection cautiously.

\- - -

The "stop if you can do so safely" wording is safety advice, and sound advice too. But it's not a statement of law.

Source 2: California Vehicle Code

[http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi- bin/displaycode?section=veh&gr...](http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi- bin/displaycode?section=veh&group=21001-22000&file=21450-21468)

\- - -

21452\. (a) A driver facing a steady circular yellow or yellow arrow signal is, by that signal, warned that the related green movement is ending or that a red indication will be shown immediately thereafter.

21453\. (a) A driver facing a steady circular red signal alone shall stop at a marked limit line, but if none, before entering the crosswalk on the near side of the intersection or, if none, then before entering the intersection, and shall remain stopped until an indication to proceed is shown, except as provided in subdivision (b).

\- - -

Note that the yellow light is described only as a warning, with no mention of it being illegal to enter the intersection while the light is yellow. And there is no mention of it being illegal to be inside the intersection when the light turns red, only that you can't enter on a red light.

I can't speak for other states, but I suspect that the laws in many of them are similar.

<comment><USER14> Thank you for the correction. I'm in NJ and remember my instructor going out of his way to mention that it was illegal to be in the intersection when red. However upon investigation I can't actually find anything to back this up now. It would appear I may have been operating under false information all these years.

<comment><USER15> I guess that's not an unreasonable thing for a driving instructor to say, since even if it's not quite true, it does no harm to believe it and may well help someone err on the side of safety.

I had a similar misunderstanding myself until recently. I'd read the wording in the driver handbook and thought that the bit about "if you can stop safely" was the actual law rather than safety advice. It was much later that I got curious and looked into it a little further.

<comment><USER16> It's not quite as clear as that, the California Driver's Handbook states:

"Do not enter the intersection if you cannot get completely across before the light turns red. If you block the intersection, you can be cited." [0]

You might think this is only referencing situations where you are stopped in the intersection (i.e. blocking it) but there is no reference to speed here.

There's a question on the test: [1]

Q: It is against the law to enter an intersection when:

A 1: You can't get all the way across before the light turns red

A 2: The light is flashing yellow and you didn't stop first

A 3: The light is yellow and you can stop safely

The correct answer is 1.

So, when viewed by a normal person, you may assume that this only applies if you're forced to stop in the intersection (and therefore block it), but neither the driver's handbook, nor the test itself (sorry my link is just an unofficial practice test, but it's on the real thing too) make any reference to speed. Therefore I think it's absolutely reasonable for your "instructor going out of his way to mention that it was illegal to be in the intersection when red" [GP]

I haven't looked up the actual law to see if the wording makes it OK to be in an intersection with the light red, providing you entered legally (yellow/green) and have a clear exit path - but I'm guessing it does not.

[0] [http://apps.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/traff_lgts_sgns.htm](http://apps.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/hdbk/traff_lgts_sgns.htm)

[1] [http://www.elitedrivertrainingservices.com/tests/AdultPracti...](http://www.elitedrivertrainingservices.com/tests/AdultPracticeTest_1.pdf) (Q10)

<comment><USER15> Fortunately you can't be cited for violating a private company's example test question! :-)

If you block an intersection because there isn't room on the far side, you'd be cited under section 22526 of Chapter 9, Stopping, Standing, and Parking:

[http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection...](http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=VEH&sectionNum=22526).

\- - -

22526 (a): Notwithstanding any official traffic control signal indication to proceed, a driver of a vehicle shall not enter an intersection or marked crosswalk unless there is sufficient space on the other side of the intersection or marked crosswalk to accommodate the vehicle driven without obstructing the through passage of vehicles from either side.

\- - -

This section is known as the Anti-Gridlock Act of 1987. The reason this had to be enacted was that it was never illegal to be _in_ an intersection when the light turned red. If that were illegal, then officers would already have a section number to cite you under. They didn't, so this law gave them one.

Besides that, the only other relevant sections I could find are the ones I quoted in my previous comment. Here's another link in a newer format:

[http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xh...](http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xhtml?lawCode=VEH&division=11.&title=&part=&chapter=2.&article=3).

The rest of the Vehicle Code can be found through a link on this page:

[http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes.xhtml](http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes.xhtml)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Spying on the DOM – unit testing front-end code without a browser - <AUTHOR> https://blog.hellojs.org/spying-on-the-dom-d9c3d2beb2f8 <comment><USER2> Direct link to the jsdom repository: [https://github.com/andrei-cacio/jsdom- tdd](https://github.com/andrei-cacio/jsdom-tdd)</comment>


Bitwise patterns: shortcuts into the world of bitwise operations - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/biffures/part-4-bitwise-patterns-7b17dae3eee0#.qju148t9w <comment><AUTHOR> Aware subscript k is not displayed correctly on mobile, but formatting on Medium is generally not great when it comes to formulas</comment>