Why Aren't There More Women Programmers? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jessitron.com/2013/08/why-arent-there-more-women-programmers.html <comment><USER2> Good post in whole, but part of #3 really caught my eye:

>>When I go to Kindergarten Moms Night and someone asks what I do, "computer programming" usually ends the conversation

I don't this is specific to women - I run into exactly the same thing talking about my tech job with friends, family, strangers, etc.

There's also always an underlying question that gets avoided in these types of articles - what's the "correct" percentage of people of a particular gender/race/whatever in a profession? Obviously we should aim for a society where no woman is pushed away from programming if that's what she wants to do, but is there any reason to think every job should match society demographically?

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I always wondered whether one of the main reasons why there are less female than male programmers is that, well, most women simply prefer other professions.

<comment><USER4> Simply prefer? That's a rug under which you can sweep quite a bit.

Suppose that 200 years ago you took a poll and most women "simply preferred" not to vote. What does that tell you about whether the womens' suffrage movement was right or wrong?

<comment><USER5> The comparison doesn't seem applicable here. Women's suffrage was about gaining a right that was, at that time, forbidden. Preference shouldn't play a role in basic rights, but it certainly plays a role in an individual's choice of career.

<comment><USER4> Voting is a basic right now, but apparently it wasn't then. That might tell you something.

But if you really can't get the point without a more specific analogy, try doctors. Or going to college.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So I went to an undergrad for engineering, and my freshman class was 72% male, 28% female, and my major was probably 85% male, 15% female. At my first job, we never broke two women out of a team that was maybe a dozen engineers by the time we left. At my second job, there was briefly one woman but the rest of the time it was zero out of 8-9 engineers.

My law school class was 55% male, 45% female, and my firm was pretty close to even.

My experience makes me believe that the reason that there aren't more women programmers is mostly that there aren't more women programmers. I think men and women, generally, interact socially in different ways. By the time I left engineering, I found the fairly homogenous and almost exclusively-male mode of social interaction rather tiring. It was refreshing to be in an environment with a diversity of people who had different ways of interacting socially.

I don't think most of the typical canards really matter. Yes, programming is a nerdy profession that rewards people who can work solitarily for long hours on detail-intensive work. But so is law, so is medicine, so is accounting, and those fields have almost even ratios of men and women. I don't think there is anything about the work that deters women.

<comment><USER7> Most of the good programmers are here by choice. Even if this choice meant being the nerdy kid in the room through school / life. To be fair - no one thinks of a doctor/lawyer as a geek, but our job comes with that distinct tag. It is just that we have learnt to ignore / live with it.

This is going to sound ignorant - but: Is it difficult / different for a woman to ignore that tag and still do cs (assuming she wants to)?

<comment><USER6> You don't need to be the nerdy kid in the room to be a good programmer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure on #2. When I was a teenager I had no idea about tech conferences, open source figureheads, and I barely noticed the gender of writers. Do boys? Mom not programming, and not having any female friends/relatives who do, seems more of an issue - and leads into #3.

I'm not arguing #2 isn't a problem, though. Sadly, I'm not in tune with how kids get role models these days to have any useful suggestions how to fix it. I was a mentor for Technovation, teaching high school girls Android development, but by that age perhaps it's too late.

I think there's also an aspect of not realising what programming _is_ , so not thinking you can do it because it seems a lot scarier than it really is.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's also difficult to make progress when you have certain self-aggrandizing individuals who are out there falsely claiming that software development is a den of misogyny. If you were a young woman considering going into software development and you read Jezebel earlier this year, you might be led to believe that female developers are subject to a constant barrage of sexual dick jokes and are fired if they complain about it.

</comment><comment><USER10> My entry into programming was through making website layouts as a teenager. This was back in the days of geocities, expage, angelfire. There were lots of girls around my age doing this kind of thing, making personal pages, fanpages, CSS templates for other people. Then livejournal appeared, and now tumblr. Some of us made the transition from CSS to learning Ruby on Rails, but not a lot. I don't know why. But I don't think it's fair to say that girls aren't interested in code.

<comment><USER11> Well, the exact numbers on the right-hand side are still unknown:

        [girls interest in code] = [interest induced by predispositions] +
                                   [… by unalterable social pressure] +
                                   [… by alterable social pressure] ± chance

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember when I went to interview to get into a computer repair class at the nearby trade school. Right before the interview a girl walked in and the instructor (who was herself a woman) immediately said "Oh my god, a girl!" (Or something else that was similarly disparaging. It's hard to remember now.)

After the interview I asked why she said that, and her reply was something to the effect of 'I have to prepare her for how the boys will act.'. It was a significant factor in my decision not to go.

</comment><comment><USER13> The problem of representation of women, isn't just in our industry. Nearly all branches of engineering are the very same. In fact I find software to be a far more attractive profession for women than other engineering branches.

In my total 4 years of engineering course. The branch with the least representation of girls was mechanical engineering, I say this because in all 4 years I didn't see a single girl take up mechanical engineering, same with civil engineering. Electronic and Communication was a little better, the best was Computer science, which seem to have only girls.

But that's sort of understandable, in the first year of engineering we had this subject called 'machine shop', you basically would have to build models with metal pieces, then there was a good enough amount of sheet metal work. You had to learn to use the hack saw, welding, soldering etc- there was also a good deal of carpentry. To give you a clue, even boys(most of them geeks and nerd types) from my branch(Electronics) found it exceedingly difficult to finish 40% of the models we were supposed to finish. They would be very physically tiring exercises, which we were never subjected to. Girls couldn't manage even 10% of them, in fact many of us helped them personally so that they could get passing marks.

Now I understand why no girl would ever want to get into things like mechanical and civil engineering. You have to work in male dominated cultures, where the work is almost designed such that a man could excel doing it- while you struggle to catch up. And you will be facing outright physical limitations. Now imagine doing this for years, Its a deal breaker to even begin with.

Coming to programming, the problem begins only when the going gets tough. I've seen a good deal of representation of women in large companies. The problem starts when you get into the rockstar culture, where you are expected put 16 hrs/day + traveling as a norm. When you start depicting whole night 'hackdays' as a sign of coolness. When learning new stuff needlessly happens just because its new etc. Now you are setting up a culture which is difficult for most women who have kids and family.

</comment><comment><USER14> Make it appealing to girls. Before it was independent career woman. The general appeal today is successful female entrepreneur. Next may be passive income hacker? Just need one show/movie to glamorize a self made woman via engineering and bam, you'll get more interest, though it may be superficial. Who knows maybe you will never get the numbers you want because it is simply less appealing to women, much like nursing and grade school teaching may never appeal as much to men.

<comment><USER15> Well, just don't make this mistake... [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is just a subset of the broader question of "why aren't there more women in tech?". I honestly think, in no small part, that the answer is "because the tech hobby community is so toxic to women". Note that I don't mean the professional industry, but rather more generally that women who may be interested in computers / tech in general get zealously singled out and demeaned. This drives women away from exploring their interest and in turn cuts off any chance they'd have taken at turning that interest in to a career.

It's sickening how toxic the community is to women. Misogyny is often a cornerstone of 'internet humour' (e.g.: comments about getting back in the kitchen) and people act surprised when women are marginalised and driven away from indulging their interest in technology as a hobby. It's so normalised that even other women repeat the misogynist comments. I'm sure there's a fascinating psychology paper here on 21st century stockholm syndrome.

I really don't understand how people can be surprised women are systematically driven from the tech industry when their exposure of it is so constantly toxic.

An excellent case in point: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Sarkeesian#Kickstarter_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Sarkeesian#Kickstarter_campaign_and_subsequent_harassment)

preemptive edit: Just to repeat, I don't think that the professional industry is systemically misogynist. It's the hobby community centred mainly around the internet (which is, let's face it, the primary medium through which interest in tech and programming especially is explored) which kills any interest in the field before it can reach the stage of becoming a possible career option.

<comment><USER17> > This is just a subset of the broader question of "why aren't there more > women in tech?". I honestly think, in no small part, that the answer is > "because the tech hobby community is so toxic to women".

I don't think that's the barrier you seem to think. If women really thought programming was a worthwhile way to spend their time, they would create their own software companies/clubs/whatever and enforce any behavioral and attitude rules they cared to have.

Can women program? Absolutely -- at least as well as men. Do women want to program? Apparently not.

> I really don't understand how people can be surprised women are > systematically driven from the tech industry when their exposure of it is so > constantly toxic.

Women are not being driven out of the tech industry, they're being driven out of male-dominated enclaves. Women don't like the testosterone-drenched parts of the business, and they don't care to create a more congenial atmosphere for themselves as they have in many other professions. No one knows why, but it's misleading and counterproductive to explain that women can't produce technically successful companies and environments because men won't let them. Men don't have that kind of power any more -- the only thing stopping women is women.

The bottom line is that gender equality is not something men give to women, it is something that women take, because it's their right. The only question is whether women will choose to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe it's our prehistoric roots. You could compare programming to hunting: no talking.

<comment><USER19> I'm pretty sure hunting a mammoth involved an unbelievable amount of teamwork and communication, actually. Whereas picking fruit can be done very easily without talking to the other fruit-pickers at all.

<comment><USER18> Mammoth has ears. Fruit don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why aren't there more <gender> <roles>? female bricklayers male seamstresses and on and on and on.

Is it really a problem? People do what they want, less women want to program, I see no problem with this.

<comment><USER21> > People do what they want, less women want to program

Fewer women want to program because they're taught from a very young age that they can't.

As a result, we're losing out on a bunch of great programmers, which I think is a loss. I also think it's sad that girls are made to feel like these things are off-limits to them. I think the world would be a better place if every kid thought they could do whatever job they wanted to.

<comment><USER22> Whose teaching them they cant?

<comment><USER18> I don't know. My programming teacher in high school was literally on his knees begging the last two girls to continue to the next level.

<comment><USER21> It sounds like you're suggesting that since one teacher is encouraging two girls to program that therefore everyone in every girl's life is just as encouraging to them as they are to the boys.

<comment><USER18> Is that true for anyone? If someone I really respect is encouraging me, that's very persuasive but there are so many forces at work when choosing a career, I don't think there's any way to quantify that decision. But of course teachers make a big difference, for better or worse. This particular teacher, I know one of his female students is a successful 3D graphics engineer, another classmate works at Intel, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Because maybe a lot of women know some things the OP does not!

Before we ask women to charge into programming, we should be quite clear on why there are so few women in programming now and just what will happen to the women who go into programming based on our encouragement based on our guesses of what the situation will be like and what the results will be.

It took me a very long time to get some understanding of women. A first lesson is, in both obvious and deep ways, they are not much like men. In a word, they are _different_.

Be careful.

</comment><comment><USER24> I agree with point #2 "seeing people like me do it" but even taken down a notch to exclude the difference in gender. Personally, I have two sisters both of whom do programming after seeing my dad and I both do it. The other variables in their cases are just like everyone else in this community which has the same percentage of women in cs than other places (i.e. not sv).

</comment><comment><USER25> *female

'women' is a noun, 'female' is an adjective. We wouldn't say 'men programmers', we say 'male programmers'.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's a lot that can be said about this but I want to give a personal answer to a question that has come up in this thread already, and that comes up often in these kinds of discussions.

It's usually framed as something like, "why do we care if there are more women in the programming world or not?" Here are a few answers that are true for me. Maybe these will resonate with some of you.

\- I often meet women or read accounts written by women who struggle to simply exist in the world of programming without feeling like they are being called out as women all the time. This includes everything from being assumed to be ignorant of concepts to losing out on opportunities to being sexually harassed. As a male programmer, this makes me uncomfortable and unhappy as well--I want my female colleagues to feel welcomed and to equally "own" the identify of "computer programmer" (or software engineer, or what-have-you). Having more women programmers would help this, in many ways.

\- I think it is possible we are missing out on some brilliant programmers coming into this field who could contribute things we haven't yet conceived of. Having more women programmers is not going to upset the balance in a zero- sum game; it's more for everyone. So having more women programmers could potentially help the world as well as provide all of us with more excellent colleagues.

\- I would like to have more women colleagues because I enjoy the experience of working with women. Yes, I think women are different from men--but this is obvious if only because women will always experience the world differently from men. So I think having this perspective can only enrich a project and provide a more fertile ground for a successful project or team to grow.

I want to add one more thing. I get the sense that a lot of male commenters on HN feel immediately defensive about this subject, and feel like somehow they are going to lose something if they acknowledge that there is anything wrong or anything that could be fixed, or at worst, acknowledge that there is something that they could have handled better in the past.

But consider this: working in development, a concept that comes up again and again is software having a "smell." It seems obvious to me that the constant issues that come up relating to sexism in the industry is a very strong smell, albeit within the social fabric of the larger programming community. And it's equally obvious that the defensive, knee-jerk reaction is not productive. Consider, how would you approach this if it was a bug, and just wouldn't go away? If you were a good developer, first you would spend serious time trying to understand the problem and dig into it deeply, before you started writing code willy-nilly, right?

</comment><comment><USER18> Maybe my statuesque coder arms need some sexy recursive algorithm tattoos to flex in her general direction ;-)

</comment><comment><USER27> oh great, it's this thread again

<comment><USER4> If you are a looking for a name for that feeling, it's "entitled". As in, "As a guy, I am entitled not to be bothered by the problems women have getting into programming."

To which I say: so what? Does it all have to be about you?

Me, I have a cousin. She's 7. At the family reunion, she saw me using a screwdriver to take something apart. She immediately elbowed her way into the seat next to me, and politely insisted on me giving her the screwdriver. She then helped me take apart, fix, and reassemble the broken thing. She's a born engineer.

With God (or, our local equivalent, Paul Graham) as my witness, I declare: I'm getting her into tech. She's a natural, and I want to learn about anything that might keep her from a STEM career. Anybody who thinks that isn't relevant on a site called Hacker News can fuck right off.

<comment><USER28> If you want to prove that fewer women than men become programmers because of obstacles, it's not enough to point out the obstacles faced by women, you also need to argue that the obstacles faced by men are less severe. I think you'll have a hard time arguing that, considering how nerdy guys are treated in school by both girls and other guys. Girls who go into programming don't take such a big hit in attractiveness.

<comment><USER4> Why would I have to prove it?

Given that "fewer women become X because of societal obstacles" has been proven true for many professions over the last couple of centuries, I think the burden of proof is on somebody who wants to claim that programming is some strange special exemption.

<comment><USER28> I don't think programming is an exception, it's probably similar to many other jobs where we haven't proved that societal obstacles are the reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> why aren't there more women ironworkers?

roofers?

plumbers?

auto mechanics?

machinists?

coal miners?

underwater welders?

oil riggers?

merchant marines?

<comment><USER30> I was just thinking along the same lines, but with pilots.

To flip the question somewhat, what is an industry which managed to successfully turn around its gender balance? From mostly men to a somewhat more natural ratio. What can we learn from that industry?

<comment><USER31> Medicine & Law</comment></comment></comment>


Recent Books on Dinosaurs - <AUTHOR> https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/12/19/what-were-dinosaurs-for/ <comment><USER2> If you have kids, I strongly recommend Abby Howard's graphic novels on dinosaurs and other prehistory (Dinosaur Empire, Ocean Renegades, and Mammal Takeover). [1]

They not only depict the current understanding of dinosaurs as feathered, complex creatures (rather than always showing raptors shrieking and attacking), but also dive into the science of paleontology, evolution, and ecological adaption. Plus the art is fantastic.

I cannot recommend them enough.

It's been super fun to see my 5 year old not only enjoy them, but also point out where older books on dinosaurs got stuff wrong.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Dinosaur-Empire-Earth-Before- Us/dp/14...](https://www.amazon.com/Dinosaur-Empire-Earth-Before- Us/dp/1419723065)

<comment><USER3> Cool, I just got the first one to check out.

No affiliation or referral, but bookdepository has free worldwide shipping with no minimum purchase:

[https://www.bookdepository.com/Dinosaur-Empire-Earth- Before-...](https://www.bookdepository.com/Dinosaur-Empire-Earth-Before- Us-1-Journey-through-Mesozoic-Era-Abby-Howard/9781419736223)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just finished Steve Brusatte's 'The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs' yesterday and found it to be very engaging. As well as detailing it's namesake, it also introduces many of the tools and methodologies that are used by paleontologists to come to the conclusions about dinosaurs that are in the book.

It also has a great "Notes on sources" chapter at the end of the book that breaks down the authour's sources for each chapter in the book.

</comment><comment><USER5> The book by Michael Benton is intriguing. I remember when I was a kid reading a dinosaur encyclopedia he wrote that I really liked. He talked all about the connection between birds and dinosaurs in it. Really engaging writer.</comment>


Who Is Rey? - <AUTHOR> https://adamserwer.tumblr.com/post/135932691418/who-is-rey <comment><USER2> Oh, give me a clone Of my own flesh and bone With its Y chromosome changed to X. And after it's grown, Then my own little clone Will be of the opposite sex.

Clone, clone of my own, With its Y chromosome changed to X. And when I'm alone With my own little clone We will both think of nothing but sex.

\- Isaac Asimov

<comment><USER3> That is a disturbing quote.

Was it something one of his characters said, perhaps a villain, or is that just Isaac Asimov being Isaac Asimov?

<comment><USER4> Why is it disturbing? Because he rhymed a word with itself?

<comment><USER5> Technically, he rhymed one word with its homonym, not with the same word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How old is this post? I thought it was established in the Last Jedi (spoiler ahead) that she was just a random person who was abandoned by parents who were nobody special.

<comment><USER7> Was it established? I think it was just Kylo Ren who said that, wasn't it? He might be mistaken, or lying. It wouldn't be the first time in the series that somebody lies about someone else's parentage or identity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a cool theory, but maybe somebody more versed in the details of star wars cloning technology (or even real-world cloning technology) could explain: wouldn't a clone have some visual similarity to the original? In addition to the obvious gender difference, Rey and Anikin don't really look all that similar. If Rey is a clone of Anikin in the force-using aspects, where did all her other aspects come from?

<comment><USER9> There is one person in the entire series that could be said to have a similar appearance to Rey: Sabé, Padme Amidala's handmaiden, played by Kiera Knightley, who posed as Amidala at various times. I don't know what that means in the end, but I would find it hard to believe that at casting they saw someone who was a previous character's doppelganger and decided to make them a main character without thinking about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's amazing people spend so much time theorizing about hack writing.

By all accounts JJ Abrams had drafts for Star Wars 8 & 9, but Rian Johnson "took it in another direction". There's not even coherent narrative here for people to theorize about.

<comment><USER11> They each basically tried to start their own trilogy so yeah, episode nine is gonna be tough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If she was Anakins clone, wouldn't she have to look exactly like him ? Just like how the clone troopers all looked like Jango Fett. I can see how she would be a clone, just not of Anakin. The whole clone thing would also explain the reflection/mirror scene in last jedi. Maybe she is the original clone and they discarded her ? And evil rey is like a trained clone version of her.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'd really lough when in the end she isn't actually related to anyone and they pull a spaceballs-like: "And what does that make us?"

</comment><comment><USER14> Yeah after what happened with Anakin, what's the next big idea? Let's clone him! Wow! Maybe this time things will be different. Oh what happened the last time? We lost an entire generation of Jedi! But this time, we got nothing to lose. I'm not buying this.

</comment><comment><USER15> J.J. Abrams is the man behind Lost...isn't a cohesive backstory and grand plan to Rey questionable?

</comment><comment><USER16> The Rey-Palpatine clone is just as compelling...

[https://youtu.be/hzG3m-ZW198?t=358](https://youtu.be/hzG3m-ZW198?t=358)

There are hints with the theme of the Emperor being played at times. The sounds of his laughter haunt her visions, along with her distinctive fighting style and power.

Abrams is a hack and he's just gonna say she absorbed the dark and light or something wacky.

<comment><USER17> The video you linked to ignores one glaring thing. Rey learned to fight with a staff, where a jabbing motion is very common.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Holy molly! Yes please!</comment>


Scaleway Global Expansion Starts in Amsterdam - <AUTHOR> https://blog.online.net/2016/10/27/scaleway-global-expansion-starts-in-amsterdam/ <comment><USER2> I'm loving this, I've been using scaleway as a host for a few months and they've provided great value during that time. As a Dutch national it would be great for my latency to see scaleway add some capacity to Amsterdam.

Their low end offering allows me to get up and running quickly with a new machine and experiment, without touching any existing instances or firing up a VM myself.

It's a shame transferring machines to the new region apparently isn't supported, but since I'm running on docker it shouldn't be too hard to recreqte my current instances.

<comment><USER3> That's another thing i missed, apart from not having ECC RAM.

<comment><USER4> Why do you think not having ECC Ram is a problem? I'm on scaleway, and I see zero harm coming from that. Different usage?

<comment><USER5> Row hammer exploits. Someone else running on that server can read and flip your ram and generally pwn you.

<comment><USER4> Combined with a working exploit and when not running on the bare metal server that might actually be a valid point. I know when they were released those attacks looked pretty scary, and ECC was supposed to maybe help. I'm not actually sure it does help completely, and that here aren't other measures already in place by now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm using Scaleway for some experimental stuff, and it's great value for that.

I did not like that I am bound to their kernel on bare metal. There are setups that require kernel modules they don't provide, like DRBD. I got the modules to compile and work in the end, but it was not fun and will probably break on some future update. This is not how I expected it to be on "bare metal".

Also that prevents you from using the Xen hypervisor, which again I would not expect from "bare metal".

You only get a single IPv4-Adress per system, which not only is a burden to virtualization, but also larger container-setups.

So I found little value in the "bare metal"-part, but it's still great value if you compare it to other VM offerings.

If you treat it like a VM (or use one of their VMs), you need to be aware that disks are not redundant and their content (or at least the changes since the last boot) are gone on a crash or hardware failure. You need to mirror or replicate it yourself, or design around it on a higher level of the stack. There is no option to attach a persistent disk that would survive a hardware failure and could be attached to a replacement host/VM.

So in the end scaleway is a weird mix for me: for rented VMs I expect the platform/provider to take care of some basic reliability and redundancy stuff. For bare metal I expect to be able to setup all of that myself without trouble.

</comment><comment><USER7> Scaleway is probably my new favorite VPS provider atm.

It's console is way simpler than AWS.

The only things that bother me are the limited availability of ARM nodes and being unable to ~~experiment~~ use SIS.

But even with that it's still way more fun.

<comment><USER3> Except AWS have ECC RAM, Scaleway doesn't.

<comment><USER7> Well, for one I don't care much, I run my hobby stuff on there, not my mission critical services, so cheap is good, even with some really minor drawbacks.

Secondly, I could not find a source if Scaleway uses ECC or not...

<comment><USER8> I actually asked them directly, and they told me their ram doesn't have ECC

Furthermore if you look at what CPUs they use, especially for the x86 solutions, the cpus themselves don't support ECC.

<comment><USER7> Interesting...

I guess I'll use more hashes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was really excited about Scaleway until shit started going wrong with my test C1 box there. They sent an email asking me to update my "boot script" (kernel version). You can only do this, it seems, when the box is shut down, except there is no power management on the box. The only option they have is to copy the contents of the box to cold storage. Great. It took 4 hours or so.

When I brought the box back online it would stay online for about a day and then lock up for no reason. I spun up a new one, copied the data from the old volume to the new one. Why can't I clone or detach a volume from a running box? It was a read-only data-only volume. The copying between two boxes was at 12Mbps... In the end, the new box had the same lockup problem. Not it's not my software. It had been running without changes for 6 months prior with no downtime. Oh and in the end it locked up again and when it came back online in rescue mode, it was basically a brand new install. My home directory was gone, root password had been reset, all the configuration was not there.

Also no IPv6 for bare metal ARM boxes.

tl;dr: I moved on because of inflexible control panel and random hardware issues. Really wanted to like it.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was checking out their terms of service ([https://www.scaleway.com/terms/](https://www.scaleway.com/terms/)), a few clauses in there seem pretty restrictive, such as:

>Users are required to use decent and respectful language. All abusive, violent or hateful sentiments are totally prohibited.

>The propagation of data, images or sounds that may constitute defamation, an insult, denigration or an infringement of privacy, image rights, good morals or public order.

Does anyone who knows this better than I anticipate that this would cause problems if one wanted to host, for example, an internet message board with this service?

Obviously one would comply with DMCAs, delete illegal content, etc, but I can't imagine forcing all users to use "decent and respectful language", for example. Is this something you just generally ignore until a specific problem with the provider surfaces?

<comment><USER11> >Does anyone who knows this better than I anticipate that this would cause problems if one wanted to host, for example, an internet message board with this service?

Probably anything illegal in France or Netherlands. The sentence sum the most common thing you could do that could get you in legal troubles if you cross some lines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I actually love Online.net and Scaleway. The problem is just that I personally prefer to have one strong core and not 8 slow cores since single thread performance is still the most relevant thing. Even though you get 2GB RAM for 3 EUR they are still shitty CPU cores. I mean you can't expect a lot for that price but I'd prefer a shared burstable E3 or E5 core over Avaton cores. Sicne Scaleway only offers these slow cores it's not useable for me even though I love them.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why is Scaleway so cheap compared to for instance: DigitalOcean?

<comment><USER14> We design and manufacture our own server hardware so we can optimize our cost. We select each component of our servers to get high quality servers at the best price and remove all unneeded components. The result is that you get a server with the best price-performance ratio.

<comment><USER15> Whereas the competition enjoys paying extra, and carefully tries to find new unneeded components? Yeah, didn't think so...

I guess the truth is a mixture of "larger willingness to cut corners" and "aiming for a lower margin". That's not a bad thing. It's just that in a market as transparent and competitive as this, it's really hard to be better along every single dimension.

<comment><USER16> Since we design our own hardware, we put exactly what we want and need into them. We share some components like power, network, and casing.

This means for example :

\- one integrated network switch/router for 18 servers; no need to buy an external cisco/juniper/whatever

\- one dual power supply for the whole gang instead of 19 (18 servers + switch)

\- less metal/plastic parts

We try to reuse hardware designs and software from one iteration to another when possible.

In short, we do have less "unneeded components". Equivalent designs (thinking at moonshot for example) are expensive, so to achieve same density it's more expensive to buy existing solutions than what we design & build.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been loving Scaleway. It's a great service and I'm glad to see they're expanding. Hopefully they'll come to the UK and North America next.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been a Scaleway user for a very long time (I cancelled recently in an effort to cut frivolous personal expenses). Their cheapest offerings are very slow, but they are perfect if you're looking for something extremely cheap, dedicated (with your own IP), and with unlimited traffic (!!!). Also, as people noticed here, their web console is pretty great. They even have preloaded images, I had a personal torrent server up in 2 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER19> So does Scaleway support machines – well, snapshots or volumes – transfer across regions? That would be nice.

<comment><USER14> It's not supported yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a reason for not supporting C1 instances in Amsterdam? I was an early adopter before Scaleway started offering virtual instances, and liked the idea of running bare-metal for such a low price, but it seems it is not available in Amsterdam.

</comment><comment><USER21> How do scaleway cores compare to digital ocean?

<comment><USER22> I'm using a VC1S for 2,99€

2x Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C2750 @ 2.40GHz

The ARM cores are slower - there was a thread a while back: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309459](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9309459) the X86 servers are not very fast either: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11251671](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11251671) but if you look at the numbers in that thread it's likely that DO overbooks their machines and if you are unlucky you can end up with slower performance than on Scaleway.

But for me it doesn't matter. I'm not doing heavy computational lifting and for nginx + some database it's fine and 2GB memory is pretty nice to have.

A minor annoyance is that you can't choose the kernel version and you are stuck on 4.5.7 at the moment - I guess if you care about local security priv escalation bugs it's a no go.

But docker seems to work and you can select a kernel flavour in the admin menu.

Another annoyance is only a /128 IPv6 address for the VPSs - but IIRC the dedicated boxes get a /48

But for 3€/month I'm more than happy - you usually only get OpenVZ VMs with ancient 2.6.36 kernel for that price if at all.</comment></comment>


Four Million Commutes Reveal New U.S. 'Megaregions' - <AUTHOR> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/us-commutes-reveal-new-economic-megaregions-map/ <comment><USER2> Coming form the mid-Atlantic region, I'm continuously surprised at what a non- entity Baltimore has turned out to be. It seems to have been entirely subsumed by its more well known neighbors: D.C. and Philly -- yet being so near to those two seems to have almost entirely escaped the economic and social revival that's happened in those two major regions as well.

One other thought, the artificial, and somewhat arbitrary drawing of state boundaries has also made urban planning needlessly complex. If the U.S. had a method to redraw state boundaries every 20-30 years, these regions would be _just_ about the right size to be states, and this would greatly simplify the planning and coordination of everything from transit to education delivery.

Instead, most of these regions cut across these administrative boundaries and medium sized 5 year projects turn into multi-decade, highly wasteful, high friction programs with an extraordinary high chance of failure.

<comment><USER3> US states are not merely administrative divisions (like provinces in other nations) but are literal independently-governed _states_. Would you also propose re-drawing the borders of every EU nation every 30 years to reflect population movement?

This misunderstanding (provinces vs states) leads to much misunderstanding of the US federal system in general, the electoral college, role of the federal government, etc.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I'm not sure how people would handle having half of their guns made illegal, having to learn new traffic laws, having you taxes completely change to the point where your state income taxes can go from 0% to 15%, your house becomes illegal because of different building regulations, public schools become charter schools, marijuana suddenly becomes illegal and you're a marijuana farmer, and this happens every 10 years or so. It would be chaos and require a fundamentally different kind of government organization.

<comment><USER5> Those would solely be rural problems, and we have a long tradition of support the urbanite and crush the ruralite whenever possible, so it would be politically consistent to do exactly that.

<comment><USER4> Eh, rural areas actually receive more in federal funding than they pay in taxes while paying less in taxes anyway due to decreased costs of living. Additionally, the US heavily subsidizes farming and funds infrastructure development for rural areas that are not available to more populated states and areas, such as gas, electric, and internet services. Economically speaking, rural areas also disproportionately benefit from projects like interstate highways, public water infrastructure, and bridges. Additionally, rural areas also consume, by far, the most in entitlement resources. And finally, rural areas are disproportionately represented in government, to the point that someone in a city like New York gets nearly half the amount of votes as someone in Montana, and also greatly suffering in the Senate which is not awarded on the basis of population. To sum up, rural areas pay no net taxes, receive economically beneficial subsidies and policies, and are given more political rights than people who live in urban areas. The idea that they're being screwed in a nation where they're the ones with all the control is absurd.

<comment><USER6> I think the key observation is this: everything you say is true, and yet _many rural areas still have terrible economies_.

It's hard to square that circle -- that rural areas are heavily subsidized but yet still economically depressed and under-served. Hence, comments like the one from VLM above.

Of course, it all boils down to economic fundamentals: cities and metro areas create a network effect that's difficult or impossible to compete with, no matter how well subsidized rural areas are.

The fact that rural areas suffer _in spite_ of their greater representation and massive economic subsidies is a difficult pill for a person from a rural area to swallow. A "they are screwing us" mentality is a much more compelling narrative.

<comment><USER7> Are the subsidies over-rated? We have energy coops (which we pay for entirely); we have a road system (the most expensive parts used by everybody); there are some agricultural supports (insurance programs?) but only a tiny fraction of rural residents are in farming. What else?

<comment><USER6> _> Are the subsidies over-rated?_

First, I don't think so. Second, an over-rated subsidy is still a subsidy. So even if they are over-rated, that's still no proof of VLM's statement -- it's more just looking the gift horse in the mouth.

 _> We have energy coops (which we pay for entirely)_

This isn't true everywhere.

 _> we have a road system (the most expensive parts used by everybody)_

Perhaps for the interstate system you could make this case. I'm not sure. Certainly there are cases where the interstate system inconvenience cities for the benefit of an extremely tiny but politically powerful rural district. The same happens with state highways.

But at the state level, rural roads _are_ heavily subsidized. State highways are typically extremely important to rural areas, and those are mostly funded by urban and suburban tax bases.

 _> but only a tiny fraction of rural residents are in farming_

But farming is still very important to local economies in rural areas, even if it's no longer a major employer. Also, "some" is a bit of an understatement -- half a trillion in federal funds over half a decade. And that's just the main farm bill -- excluding other federal and state assistance programs.

 _> What else?_

* Schools for sure. Most states _heavily_ subsidize rural schools in their funding formulas. States and the federal gov't also subsidize rural schools through programs that are not even accounted for by these funding formulas -- e.g. tuition waivers and sometimes even salaries for teachers that teach in rural schools.

* Federal and state entitlement programs -- this one isn't even close to debatable.

* Political representation. Again, not even close to debatable. I consider this independently of all of the other indirect economic benefits that stem from the representation for a lot of reasons. To give one, the conservative social agenda disproportionately targets and complicates the lives of the non-white non-christians concentrated within cities.

<comment><USER8> >half a trillion in federal funds over half a decade

Don't multiply to make it sound like something. That works out to less than 100 million a year. To three significant digits that is 0% of the budget.

<comment><USER9> Half a trillion over half a decade is 100 _billion_ per year.

I make no claim to the accuracy of the original statistic, but if that is the case and the federal budget is 3.7 _trillion_ [0] that is 2.7 percent of the budget.

0: [https://www.cbo.gov/publication/51110](https://www.cbo.gov/publication/51110)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The arbitrary choice of 50 regions results in some fairly generous interpretations of 'regions'.

Namely, this method produces two kinds of regions: ones that are clustered around a single metropolitan area that has a higher-than-average commuter pull around its hinterland, and ones that are slightly too far from a major metro and lump together a chain of areas that form a loose "commuter continuum" of areas where commuters have two or more equally plausible choices to commuter to -- this chain then hops along interstate highways, grouping unrelated towns across hundreds of miles into the same region.

Take the one that they call 'Corn Belt', encompassing Des Moines, Davenport/Moline, and every single city in Illinois on I-74 (including Urbana- Champaign!). In no universe do people commute hundreds of miles along I-74. In truth, this is a polycentric area with many distinct loci which attract their own, distinct set of commuters: Des Moines/Ames; Cedar Rapids/Iowa City; Quad Cities; Peoria; Urbana-Champaign. The "cohesiveness" of the region exists solely in contrast to its neighbors: that more populous metros on the region's fringes are all too far out of sane commuting distance.

Or the Appalachians: Roanoke in Virginia forms a vital locus for much of west- central Virginia and yet is swallowed into a much larger region including Greensboro, Raleigh, and Wilmington(!), because people living midway between Roanoke and Greensboro (like in Danville, VA, or Martinsville, VA), have two equally plausible larger job centers to commute to. The same can be said about Charleston, WV, which forms a job hub in West Virginia, but is grouped together with Columbus and most of Ohio because smaller towns along the Ohio River are roughly equidistant from either.

It helps me to look at each of their regions and think "people rarely commute outside of their region", rather than the more natural interpretation of "people commute along their region".

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I had the same thought when I saw my own region, Chattanooga, TN. This map shows our whole city as commuters to Atlanta. Almost no one commutes to Atlanta from here. It's a 3 hour drive without traffic and a 5 hour drive with traffic, and the only time Atlanta doesn't have traffic is 3 AM in the morning.

<comment><USER12> I hear it's not much worse at 3 AM at night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I really don't get what this is supposed to represent, exactly.

No one commutes from Ashland, Oregon to Portland Oregon - it's a 4+ hour drive. Yet they're in the same pink area. Meanwhile, no one really commutes from Bend to Portland either (2.5 hour drive in good weather), but we're brown over here.

There's certainly some more cultural affinity between cities in Oregon's Willamette Valley than with the more conservative central and eastern part of the state, but even that only holds for the larger cities - there are plenty of pretty 'red' places down the I-5 corridor.

<comment><USER14> Oh i'm sure people commute. A 4 hour drive is fairly reasonable. I live in Denver and commute to Kansas City (8.5 hours) once a month to visit my folks. If you include gas prices and the price of rentals it comes out to be cheaper than flying and renting a car in KC. With shorter distances this would probably be a huge factor for many. For example, most folks in KC drive to StL which is a 3.5 hour drive. I don't think anyone I've ever known in KC flew to StL.

<comment><USER15> When I think of a commute, I think of a daily activity that takes someone back and forth to work. Given that definition it seems totally unreasonable for someone to spend 4 hours going one way.

<comment><USER16> A small number of people do stuff like this.

I worked with a consultant who lived near Scranton so he could commute to a large number of places. (Syracuse, Albany, NYC, Jersey, Philly)

Drove 3 hours a day one way!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This sort of thing is fascinating to me. I think that somehow, humanity needs to transition to a political structure where cities are the primary unit of governance, rather than nations. That won't happen quickly or soon, but someday...

More immediately, it's becoming increasingly clear that the "polarization" that we're seeing in U.S. politics isn't really between left and right or Ds and Rs. It's between the urban and rural. I'd love to see a version of this that drew boundaries between urban centres and the countryside. That would give us a way to start thinking about how to craft policy that recognizes the differences between them.

<comment><USER18> Your notion, shared by Clinton, cost her the election.

<comment><USER19> But not, by a long shot, the Popular Vote.

<comment><USER18> Spending much more than Trump, campaigning in the wrong places.

Winning the popular vote big and losing the election is a manifest sign of a failed campaign.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> From personal experience (I've lived in 3 places in the US), some of these make sense and some don't at all. For example, the little light green region over Idaho Falls/Pocatello area makes sense as a region and looks nice. But Burlington and Albany being one region? They're three hours apart, separated by a whole lotta nothing - I know because I lived a bit east of that nothing. Or the adjacent "economic area" (in green, covering Boston/NH/Maine), which also makes no sense. There's no way that far-north Maine, western NH, and Boston are one economic area.

And aside from making connections that aren't there, there are some connections that should be there that aren't. The Upper Valley is definitely either one economic region (or a a subset of a larger region) and it's literally split in half, in two separate regions. It's pretty funny, the way the map splits the economic zones down the Connecticut river you'd think we didn't have bridges.

Fun unrelated fact: Pocatello has "the worst flag of North America" according to the North American Vexillological Association: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_Pocatello_Idaho.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_Pocatello_Idaho.jpg)

<comment><USER21> Reading the article makes it clear what's going on here, although you have to get to the end. I had the same reaction to the idea of Tahoe and SF being considered part of the same "megaregion", since while someone may drive from Tahoe to SF on an irregular basis, the number of people doing it everyday must be miniscule. So I read deeper to try and understand the basis of these things.

TL;DR -- they arbitrarily chose 50 as the number of regions to consider. Everything above a certain threshold gets associated with some sort of region, and then they did basic clustering to see which commutes get assigned to which region. So in my Tahoe example, more people are commuting from the Tahoe area to Sacramento than to Reno, so Tahoe ends up associated with the entire SF Bay Area megaregion instead of with Reno, which it's geographically much closer to. If there had been more regions, Sacramento would have gotten its own region most likely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think it shows us once again how clustering algorithms fail which isn't very useful. I can think of several methodologies that would make for a better analysis for urban planning.

However the one thing it did suggest is that Google would be in an interesting position to create such data sets using their maps navigation data. Take every commercial address in a region and the compute the commute time to and from every residential address in the same region. Pick some arbitrary one-way commute cut offs like 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, and 120 minutes. Then plot them on a spectrum from based on the weighted average of commute times (so if a site had 6,000 30 minute commutes, 40,000 60 minute commutes, and 250,000 90 minute commutes it would get one score higher than a place that only had 1000 30 minute commutes and 300,000 90 minute commutes.

<comment><USER23> > it shows us once again how clustering algorithms fail

What do you mean by 'fail'? It looks like the algorithm ultimately did what they wanted it to, so do you mean some sort of relevance or practical failure?

All clustering algorithms do is propose groupings in which intra-group links are stronger than inter-group links. The researchers measured the _modularity_ of their clusters, where 0 is 'no better than random' and 1 is 'networks with strong community structure', and scored over 0.9 (though they had to make some changes to eliminate long-distance linkages).

I agree that Google would have much better commuting data, if they chose not to anonymise their maps data collection, because they could determine where your phone usually spends the night and the middle hours of the day... as well as the route taken to get there and back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A couple points of clarification for those who found this interesting:

[1] Data around commuting time can be found in the American Community Survey (ACS), which is released annually with 1, 3, and 5 year rollups (for general blending of accuracy vs. recency). [2] This data is looking specifically at work commute times, not any personal travel.

I've been taking a couple months off between jobs, and learning the ACS has become a hobby during that time. Lots of interesting and fascinating data that we collect on ourselves as a country.

Reference: [https://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/](https://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/)

<comment><USER25> I work with ACS data as well. I'd love to chat about your interests sometime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> You can call this "research" but it's not science. When you do science you can't just run your data, decide the numbers don't look right, and then tweak them until the picture produced looks publishable.

That is a way to make art that reflects your worldview, but it won't have any science content left in it.

If they wanted to do science they would need to devise a model of megaregions, form hypotheses, design tests ahead of time to confirm or refute those hypothesis, and only then run the data.

</comment><comment><USER16> Cool maps that correlate with my acendotal experience.

When you take the early (5-6 am) morning train from Albany to Penn Station regularly, it's easy to spot the small number off small number commuters from the more typical government workers, lawyers and salesmen. It's about a 50/50 mix of construction guys and attorneys.

I sat with one of the constructions guys once and we chatted. He was an electrician and actually drove another 45 minutes from his home to the train. Had a big family and couldn't afford NY metro costs. Claimed that a majority of the guys he worked with either lived in the Hudson Valley or Pennsylvania for the same reason.

That really says a lot... I think a commuter pass costs like $800/mo for that trip!

</comment><comment><USER27> "And I'm not convinced the Bay Area-Sacramento megaregion where I live should extend all the way to Nevada."

I agree with this. I live in Truckee, and would be much more inclined to commute to Reno (which is 30 minutes away) than Sacramento (which is 1 hour 30 minutes away). The more likely border would at the very least be near Donner Pass.

The algorithms used are likely being influenced by the Sierras (and particularly Tahoe) being a popular tourist destination for Sacramento and Bay Area residents.

</comment><comment><USER28> The Northeast _Boswash_ megalopolis[1] is a narrow 400-mile strip of land that encompasses a population of over 50 million people.

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

</comment><comment><USER29> Looking at the map that shows Santa Cruz, I can't help but imagine how many more commutes there would be "over the hill" on Highway 17 if there weren't such a hilly, windy road via that commute. Eventually it might become economically feasible to physically "move mountains" so to speak for the purpose of unlocking greater personal transport... I wonder how much terraforming might affect future projects across all the world, let alone Northern California.

</comment><comment><USER30> The lack of a name in the giant section in the northwest on the final map is... interesting. I think I get why it has no name. Still odd.

Similarly, the "deep south" feels like a shoutout to Futurama. (Though, Atlanta is already named. I guess it is "pre move to the ocean." :) )

</comment><comment><USER31> Why don't they give the map in high resolution? Really irritating.

</comment><comment><USER32> I want to meet the people who are supposedly commuting to Phoenix from north of the Grand Canyon. Do they commute by helicopter?

</comment><comment><USER33> I live in Menlo Park in the Bay Area, and have given specialized jobs to contractors that drove 2 to 3 hours to fix my house. These guys target this area, despite being so far away, and use phablets to stay connected and maintain their Yelp presence.

</comment><comment><USER34> Oh look they published the future Hyper-loop map. How nice of them.

<comment><USER35> Long before a Hyper-loop will be viable, this is the map of where all our high speed rails should have been placed.

Currently, only the California high speed corridor is under construction (Florida has stalled and I'm not sure if the Cascades ever got funding).

We are decades behind the rest of the world in viable rail. To people who say rail can't work in the US, just look at this map. Only the NE section has decent rail and it's saturated for commuters. Building out the rest of the rail infrastructure we need will reduce the need for cars and help deal with pollution. Once cities are connected, I think we'll naturally see the expansion of urban/commuter rail to solve the last mile problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There is the landfilling trend in san francisco- i wonder- is there a point where its more economical to extend a city in underwater suburbs?

</comment><comment><USER37> The big takeaway here for me is that a lot of people travel far too great a distance to get to what's most likely a terrible job.

</comment><comment><USER38> Rapid City gets a region but not Austin? Uh?

</comment><comment><USER39> somehow it is not mentioned which software was used to generate the graphics; not even in the original article: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166083)

</comment><comment><USER40> Lubbock, Spokane...looks like it's mostly around universities in the "nowhere land" regions?

</comment><comment><USER41> This information would be useful when planning the next-gen transportation network..

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm reminded of what Christopher Alexander et. al. wrote in _A Pattern Language_. Made up of 253 patterns organized by scale, the largest scale discussed (and therefore Pattern #1) is "Independent Regions:"

 _Do what you can to establish a world government, with a thousand independent regions, instead of Metropolitan regions will not come to balance until each one is small and autonomous enough to be an independent sphere of culture._

 _There are four separate arguments which have led us to this conclusion: I. The nature and limits of human government. 2. Equity among regions in a world community. 3. Regional planning considerations. 4. Support for the intensity and diversity of human cultures._

 _I. There are natural limits to the size of groups that can govern themselves in a human way. The biologist J. B. S. Haldane has remarked on this in his paper, "On Being the Right Size":_

> _...just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for > every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens > could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of > legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest > possible democratic state. . . . (J. B. S Haldane, "On Being the Right > Size," The World of Mathematics, Vol. II, J. R. Newman, ed. New York: Simon > and Schuster, 1956, pp. 962-67)._

 _It is not hard to see why the government of a region becomes less and less manageable with size. In a population of N persons, there are of the order of N^2 person-to-person links needed to keep channels of communication open. Naturally, when N goes beyond a certain limit, the channels of communication needed for democracy and justice and information are simply too clogged, and too complex; bureaucracy overwhelms human processes._

 _And, of course, as N grows the number of levels in the hierarchy of government increases too. In small countries like Denmark there are so few levels, that any private citizen can have access to the Minister of Education. But this kind of direct access is quite impossible in larger countries like England or the United States._

 _We believe the limits are reached when the population of a region reaches some 2 to 10 million. Beyond this size, people become remote from the large- scale processes of government. Our estimate may seem extraordinary in the light of modern history: the nation-states have grown mightily and their governments hold power over tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, of people. But these huge powers cannot claim to have a natural size._

54 regions, total population 318.9m. So that averages 5.9 million per, right smack in the middle. A more complete analysis with a histogram would be interesting.

</comment><comment><USER43> See previous work by Munroe: [https://www.xkcd.com/1138/](https://www.xkcd.com/1138/)

</comment><comment><USER44> So this is where people live? [https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/)

Nothing going on Montana?

<comment><USER45> Not a lot of people in the Rocky mountains or the plains.

<comment><USER46> I would imagine their commute data finds the area problematic.</comment></comment></comment>


Personality Tests and the Downfall of Democracy - <AUTHOR> https://words.werd.io/personality-tests-and-the-downfall-of-democracy-9a4fe2e835e5 <comment><USER2> Maybe it's time to move beyond the "optimize for stat X" phase of business and society and start thinking about bigger problems.

I mean I get that the MBA programs and stats professors will be upset, but I think we're due.</comment>


Teaser of cross-platform 2D game dev in Swift - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8ftI9mpGdY&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> Hello, I'm the person who made the video. I've been developing a new SDK called Blurrr. I wanted to share this video showing a cross-platform development scenario using Swift language to make an app for SteamOS (Linux), OS X, iOS, and Raspberry Pi 2, all sharing the same code base and unified build system.

Under the hood, SDL provides the common platform layer. The build system is built on top of CMake. I have been adding Swift support to CMake.

Even if you aren't interested in my SDK, I thought it would be interesting for people to see how much is already possible with Swift today.</comment>


Joyent us-east-1 rebooted due to operator error - <AUTHOR> https://help.joyent.com/entries/40957424-Transient-availability-issues-in-US-East-1-data-center Due to an operator error, all compute nodes in us-east-1 were simultaneously rebooted.  Some compute nodes are already back up, but due to very high load on the control plane, this is taking some time.  We are dedicating all operational and engineering resources to getting this issue resolved, and will be providing a full postmortem on this failure once every compute node and customer VM is online and operational.  We will be providing frequent updates until the issue is resolved. <comment><USER2> It should go without saying that we're mortified by this. While the immediate cause was operator error, there are broader systemic issues that allowed a fat finger to take down a datacenter. As soon as we reasonably can, we will be providing a full postmortem of this: how this was architecturally possible, what exactly happened, how the system recovered, and what improvements we are/will be making to both the software and to operational procedures to assure that this doesn't happen in the future (and that the recovery is smoother for failure modes of similar scope).

<comment><USER3> I feel bad for the person who made the mistake. Even though its obviously a systemic problem, and highly unlikely to be an act of negligence, Im sure he/she doesnt feel too hot right now.

<comment><USER4> My thoughts exactly. Poor fella.

I've seen worse though. A newish officer spilled his morning coffee into the circuitry of a device worth over 10 zeros. Immediately short circuited.

<comment><USER5> You know you could build five space shuttles with ten zeros, right? Are we talking dollars or Yen?

<comment><USER6> Why are you using a throwaway account? Ohh, I just saw the "dollars or Yen" remark. TIL we use throwaway accounts for the times we feel like being assholes, so the non-elites can't track it back to our physical neuroprocessors.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure why I'm dignifying this Reddit drivel with a response, but my karma and account age should be your hint that you're barking up the wrong tree.

<comment><USER6> "check my previous responses and my credit score for how you should treat me" ohh what an old-man response. It's too bad the Imgur "downvote everything they ever posted" script doesn't work here on HN, now isn't it?

My account's karma and history exceed your account's on this site, and even worse, this individual comment bears more value than yours! Ooh burn!

<comment><USER7> Haha, this is a pretty spectacular amount of cognitive dissonance you're demonstrating here.

Let's post-mortem this lunacy:

1) You misinterpret jsmthrowaway's initial comment as vaguely racist (or something), notice the word "throwaway" in his user name and get really excited that you can stand on your high horse and call him out for hiding behind the shield of internet anonymity when he wants to be a (you think) racist idiot. Even though his comment is a legitimate currency conversion remark. See: [https://www.google.com/search?q=1+usd+in+yen](https://www.google.com/search?q=1+usd+in+yen)

2) He explains that clearly you're mistaken (which, really, seriously, what a kneejerk response from someone who just wanted to show how clever they were, calling out an "asshole") and further explains his account isn't even a "throwaway" in the traditional, trolly sense of the word, citing his account age and the fact that he regularly actively posts to the account.

3) You, caught perhaps in a moment of clarity, though I think I give you too much credit here, realize you were too eager to pounce on the "asshole" for his "Yen" remark, and perhaps you misread it. Your latent erection fading, you counter by explaining that your history and karma are even _more_ impressive, somehow completely avoiding taking responsibility for a completely nonsensical leap in logic and accusation of wrongdoing, while doubling down on your cognitive dissonance.

4) The Aristocrats!

<comment><USER8> It seems he has a bit of misplaced sensitivity when it comes to the Japanese: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7555232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7555232)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mandatory DevOps Borat

"To make error is human. To propagate error to all server in automatic way is #devops"

and my fav "Law of Murphy for devops: if thing can able go wrong, is mean is already wrong but you not have Nagios alert of it yet."

</comment><comment><USER10> Joyent's messaging about "we're cloud, but with perfect uptime" was always broken.

It's mildly gross that the current messaging sounds like they're throwing a sysadmin under the bus. If fat fingers can down a data center, that's an engineering problem.

I care about an object store that never loses data and an API that always has an answer for me, even if it's saying things that I don't want to hear.

99.999 sounds stuck-in-the-90s.

<comment><USER11> Sure blame on the engineers. You give power, people use it badly blame the engineer for giving too much power. You don't give enough power sysadmins/users bitch and yell why don't we have enough power, we're not children.

Its always the engineer fault. :(

<comment><USER10> Systems engineers, software engineers, architects, whatever. We're all in the same gang.

My point is that the problem in this case is likely the system's design, not one engineer's typing abilities.

<comment><USER5> This comes down to operational philosophy, in the end. The point you're dancing around is whether the system should permit grave actions that don't make any sense when you're designing the system.

By the rules, every single system on a commercial aircraft has a circuit breaker. Pilots make the "what if X catches on fire?" case, which is actually pretty compelling. However, that also means there are several switches overhead that will ostensibly crash the airplane if pulled. Pilots lobby very strongly for the aircraft not to fight them in any way because they are the only ones with the data, in the moment, now. They have final command over the aircraft in every way.

I use this to point out that as you're designing systems for operations people -- something we're increasingly doing ourselves as devops/SRE takes hold -- you might think you can anticipate every scenario and design suitable safeguards into the system. However, sometimes, when Halley's Comet refracts some moonlight into swamp gas and takes your fleet down, you as an operator have to do some really crazy shit. It's in that moment, when all hell has broken loose, I'm at the helm, and based on the data available to me I have made a decision to shoot the system in the head: if the system fights me and prolongs an outage because we argued about whether we'd ever need to reboot a fleet all at once, I'm replacing the system as the first item in my postmortem. If you make me walk row to row flipping PDUs, we're going to have words.

That's just my philosophy. Give the operators the knives and let them cut themselves, trusting that you've hired smart people and understanding mistakes will happen. Your philosophy may vary. By all means, ask me to confirm. Ask me for a physical key, even. But if you ever prevent me from doing what I know must be done, you are in my way. I have yet to meet a system that is smarter than an operator when the shit hits the fan ( _especially_ when the shit hits the fan).

There's probably a broader term for operational philosophy like this.

<comment><USER10> I tend to agree with you, with the caveat that you can't have this philosophy and sell your customers 99.999% uptime[0].

[0] [http://www.joyent.com/products/compute- service/features/linu...](http://www.joyent.com/products/compute- service/features/linux)

<comment><USER5> I disagree wholeheartedly. Your operational philosophy complements your SLA goals, it doesn't force them.

<comment><USER10> I can't figure out how your comment that "understanding mistakes will happen" is compatible with 99.999% uptime.

I'm of the opinion that 99.999% for an individual instance isn't particularly achievable in a commodity hosting environment. That kind of uptime doesn't leave much room for the mistakes that you and I both anticipate.

I do think that 99.999% is doable for a properly distributed whole-system across multiple geographically-dispersed datacenters.

I think Joyent has gone wrong in promoting individual instance reliability.

<comment><USER12> Always ask how numbers like that are computed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The 'devops' automation I made at my last company (and am building at my current company) had monitoring fully integrated into the system automation.

That is, 'write' style automation changes (as opposed to most 'remediation' style changes) would only proceed, on a box by box basis, if the affected cluster didn't have any critical alerts coming in.

So, if I issued a parallel, rolling 'shutdown the system' command to all boxes, it would only take down a portion of all of the boxes before automatically aborting because of critical monitoring alerts.

Parallel was calculated based on historical but manually approved load levels for each cluster, compared to current load levels. So parallel runs faster if there's very low load on a cluster, or very slowly if there's a high load on a cluster.

One way or another, most automation should automatically stop 'doing things' if there's critical alerts coming in. Or, put another way, most automation should not be able to move forward unless it can verify that it has current alert data, and that none of that data indicates critical problems.

</comment><comment><USER14> DevOps means being able to take out an entire datacenter with a single keysstroke...

<comment><USER6> As a Devops, I can't justify building any automated way to down or restart all of my systems at once. We've only had to do that to resolve router reconvergence storms when changing out (relatively) major infrastructure pieces, such as our Juniper router.

<comment><USER15> You don't intentionally build an automated way to take down all your servers at once.

You build a way to automatically perform some mundane standard procedure, like propagating a new firewall rule to all your systems at once. Then you accidentally propagate a rule that blocks all inbound ports. Huh, when I tested locally I didn't notice that.

Or you build a way to automatically delete timestamped log files more than a month old. And when it runs in production, it also deletes critical libraries which have the build timestamp in their filename. Ah, the test server was running a nightly build instead of a release so the files were named differently.

Or you build a way to automatically deploy the post-heartbleed replacement certificates to all your TLS servers, and only after you do that you find you didn't deploy the replacement corporate CA certificate to all the clients. Hmm, the test environment has a different CA arrangement, so testers don't get the private keys of prod certificates.

Or you build a way to retain timestamped snapshots of all your files, every five minutes, so you can roll back anything - then find that huge log file that constantly changes gets snapshotted every time, and everything is hanging because of lack of disk space. Oh, production does get a lot more traffic to log, now I think about it.

Or you do any of a hundred other things that seem like simple, low risk operations until you realise they aren't.

<comment><USER16> Once I typed

      rm -rf logs_ *

instead of

      rm -rf logs_*

<comment><USER17> Our less-than-savvy Financial Director took it upon himself to restore from tape the bought ledger files to a live system after a slight mishap. Unfortunately, the bought ledger files all started with a 'b' and he managed to restore them to the root of the -nix system instead of the right place, so he mv'd b* to the right location.

All was well until a scheduled maintenance restart a few weeks later and we (eventually) discovered that /boot and /bin were AWOL.

Edit: He had access to the root account to maintain the accounts app (not my call)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Let this be a lesson to linux admins. Re-alias shutdown -r now into something else on production servers. I once took down access to about 6000 servers because I ran the script to decommission servers on our jump box when I got the SSH windows confused.

<comment><USER19> I once put `shutdown -h now` (halt) instead of `shutdown -r now` (reboot)

Once I realized what had happened on the production server I ended up calling OVH (and they were helpful but not immediately acting).

It's not a good feeling.

<comment><USER20> This happened to me once; I don't know if this works on all linux distros but if you quickly follow a halt/shutdown with a "sudo init 6"(reboot) before your ssh-session gets SIGTERMed/KILLed, the box comes back up. This at least worked on some Ubuntu version a few years back.

Give it a try on some system that's not critically important :)

<comment><USER19> Yeah, but the problem is when you honestly didn't realize calling a halting shutdown until the server doesn't come back 5 minutes later and then you review the terminal

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> salt '*' system.reboot

<comment><USER22> > hubot restart all on prod

oh shit i meant stag fuckfuckfuckfuck

<comment><USER23> So have hubot second guess any changes to production unless you specifically told it you were messing with prod beforehand. Have it wait a few seconds before doing something important and listen for sounds of regret.

>hubot restart all on prod

hubot: > say "Hubot isn't responsible for hosing production because I actually meant staging"

>Hubot isn't responsible for hosing production because I actually meant staging

hubot: okay, don't say I didn't warn you.

>oh shit i meant stag fuckfuckfuckfuck

hubot: I hadn't started yet, but I'm doing it anyway just to teach you a lesson.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like the janitor needed somewhere to plug in the vacuum cleaner again...

<comment><USER25> I assume bash.org?

<comment><USER26> He might be referring to The daily WTF (worse than failure):

[http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/I-Didnt-Do- Anything.aspx](http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/I-Didnt-Do-Anything.aspx)

Unintentional Mishap while Contractor Unplugs X to fix/maintain Y is a relatively common theme on their list of horror stories.

edit: I think he might actually have meant this one: [http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/I-Told-You- So.aspx](http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/I-Told-You-So.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Joyent has been having some serious issues over the past month or two. I am not sure if it is growing pains, bad luck or what is happening, but we had already lost faith and trust in their Cloud prior to today. This is the nail in the coffin from our perspective. Moving on...

<comment><USER28> Howso?

<comment><USER27> Thanks for asking rather than just down-voting. I wanted others to know that this isn't isolated. We have been having issues with their service for a few months now. They never know when there is a problem with hardware, for instance. Joyent support will gladly tell you everything is fine. After you insist, and insist they will actually have someone look at the underlying infrastructure. Eventually they will acknowledge the problem and fix it (maybe). I believe the monitoring and reporting for their team is flawed or incomplete which leads to more downtime of affected systems. Just one observation, but we have had three incidents over the past month and a half. Two within a week of each other.

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry to hear about your experience; we pride ourselves on being able to root-cause problems regardless of where they might be in the stack, but it sounds like your problem didn't get properly escalated. If you want to reach out to me privately (my HN login at acm.org), we can try to figure out what happened here -- with my apologies again for the subpar experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "What's this button do?"

</comment><comment><USER30> As I've always said, "You can never protect a system from a stupid person with root".

You can limit carnage and mitigate this type of thing, but you can't fully protect against sysadmins doing dumb things (unless you just hire great sysadmins)

<comment><USER31> So don't give anyone root _on an entire data center_.

<comment><USER32> Is this like Captain Planet? It's a bit exceptional to divide access servers of similar type between administrators such that individuals have full access to a portion of the fleet. Do they meet up and put their rings together to roll out updates? What if one of them goes on vacation?

<comment><USER33> There are keysharing protocols; you can do something like 5 sysadmins have a split of the master key such that any 3 of them can access the master account.

<comment><USER32> For day-to-day maintenance of systems, that's crippling. If I need 2 cosigns to run "date" across the fleet while I'm troubleshooting an NTP issue, and then 2 cosigns again to run "service ntpd status", and so forth, my coworkers will have lit my desk on fire long before I fix the clocks.

There are definitely use cases for keysharing systems like you describe: if we're talking about getting access to a database with sensitive information, or signing a new cert that all our systems are about to put their full faith in. But for the day-to-day administrative efforts, it's overkill and ends up being counterproductive: after a certain point, Alice and Bob write scripts that let them hotkey signing off on my requests.

<comment><USER34> I'm not worried about how crippling that sort of scenario is on a day to day basis, because presumably the company doesn't mind paying a fortune for a bunch of people to sit around to hold one anothers' keys.

I worry about those policies when the shit hits the fan and you're trying to fix a production problem hobbled by an inability to do stuff without three fingers on every keystroke.

<comment><USER32> Agreed. Ideally, whatever system is in use for managing infrastructure provides sanity checks while I'm working, but either gets out of my way or can be sidestepped if need be. I don't want to be crippled by technical red tape when things are on fire.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Color in your browser console - <AUTHOR> http://jbail.github.io/lumberjack/

<comment><USER2> I like this a lot. Here's clickable link to the github repo: [https://github.com/jbail/lumberjack](https://github.com/jbail/lumberjack)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out!</comment></comment>


Almost fired from Facebook for getting into email flame war with Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/joehewitt/status/870753848448532481 <comment><USER2> interesting, but not much substance. its a tweet.</comment>


The problem of fake gold bars (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/03/25/the-problem-of-fake-gold-bars/ <comment><USER3> _Update: I forgot that gold is actually used, once in a while, to make things like jewels — which means that bars are melted down pretty frequently. If there was_ [sic] _a significant number of salted bars out there, we'd know about it, since you'd notice when one of them got melted down. Which isn't to say that there are no salted bars at all, but it certainly does seem to imply that there's_ [sic] _nowhere near 1.3 million of them._

<comment><USER4> That is, unless it's the owners of gold reserves who are salting their own bars to inflate their apparent net worth.

I wonder if the acoustical properties of a fake bar would be easy to distinguish from solid gold.

<comment><USER5> Just do what Archimedes suggested. ;)

<comment><USER4> What, run up and down the street naked, yelling Eureka?

Actually, I'm agreed that you could measure the density, but somebody could fiddle with the density too by adding just a touch of this or that to bring everything up to the right weight.

<comment><USER6> Where 'this or that' can only be something more dense than gold, which are not cheap: [http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+densest+elements](http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+densest+elements)

<comment><USER4> Aha, I didn't look up the densities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Say you found your $100M worth of gold is salted. I am guessing you wouldn't advertise it in public too eagerly. You'd probably want to offload it and turn it into some other asset as soon as possible and make it someone else's problem.

<comment><USER8> I suppose that depends on your ethics… Though most people's ethics would be tested when it comes to $100 million. Hopefully, anyone discovering fake gold would file a lawsuit or report the fraud to law enforcement.

<comment><USER9> Selling a gold bar you know is fake would be very unethical indeed. However I could imagine people would avoid testing gold they already own, as nothing good can come of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "If you can weigh the bar accurately, then you can test for purity by essentially dropping it in a bucket of water and seeing how much the water level rises: a gold-covered tungsten bar will displace more water than a pure gold bar. "

I'm afraid that either myself or the author doesn't fully understand fluid displacement.

<comment><USER11> Gold density is 19.30 g/cm3, Tungsten is 19.25.

Given two gold bars, one adulterated with Tungsten, and one not, either the weight will differ or the volume will differ. So, given equal weights (i.e. standard 400oz bars), you can check the displacement to establish purity.

If you use a container that is filled up to a spout, and you measure the displaced water by collecting it in a measuring cup, you can just directly calculate density, and then compare it to gold.

<comment><USER12> you can't just check density like that, come on. platinum (which apparently trades around the same price as gold) - has a density of 21.45 [1] which more than compensates. If you want 100 grams of a tungsten-platinum mix to match the weight/volume of 100 grams of gold, this is how many grams you get to use of tungsten:

19.3 * 100 = 19.25 * x + 21.4(100-x)

gold is left, mix is right (a sum of the tungsten and platinum parts). I solve for 100 grams because voila, it's now a percentage. That solves to x = 97.7273 (you get to use 97.7273 grams of tungsten) or you just need 2.2727% platinum. (which recall costs about the same as gold.) so if this were a great test people could just use an alloy, which apparently exist:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=tungsten+platinum+alloy](https://www.google.com/search?q=tungsten+platinum+alloy)

and target the exact same density as gold. tungsten alone seems close enough for them, at least, according to the author.

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

<comment><USER11> Yeah this looks viable. This would make the best fake bar. I don't think the metal even need to be alloyed, you can just pour in one first, then the other.

<comment><USER12> I didn't mean it to be a viable suggestion - I don't think it is one. If you're testing density to within 2.7% you are doing other tests (suggested elsewhere by others in this thread). All I was saying is that although I do think the author is wrong (there is no problem of fake gold bars), the existence of a simple density test isn't why...

<comment><USER11> yeah, this machine seems to be able to do it: [http://www.ebay.ca/itm/GoldXpert-SDD-Portable-Countertop- XRF...](http://www.ebay.ca/itm/GoldXpert-SDD-Portable-Countertop-XRF- Analyser-/201085598918)

<comment><USER13> The first sentence of the original article states that XRF won't tell you if the core of the bar has been replaced with a different metal: _" You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to find this worrying: a 1kg gold bar, certified as 99.98% pure by XRF (X-ray fluorescence) tests, turns out to have been drilled out and largely replaced with tungsten"_

The article also says that a micro-ohm meter can detect such replacement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article would be more useful if it contained any sort of facts about or reasonable estimate of what the frequency of fake gold bars may be.

As a glass flameworker, I and my colleagues buy gold, cut it up, stick it on rods of glass, and put it on the flame to deposit gold vapor onto glass. We would notice fake gold right away, but I haven't heard of that happening.

(Though, the typical flameworker doesn't buy whole 1kg gold bars!)

</comment><comment><USER14> Well, banks are not stupid, and it is cheap for them to certify gold bars in quantity.

There are certification authorities that do exactly that. Here in Spain you can hire them, and they will melt the gold in front of you and use expensive instrumental to know how much gold a gold bar has.

We also have the concept of "notary" that is a person whose job is to certify something by law. They are trustworthy.

It is individuals who should be afraid of being tricked. But you have at your disposal cheap microbalances, micro ohm meters(I made myself one for like USD30), 3d scanners(to calculate the volume as using water is tricky because surface tension of water), quartz transducers to measure speed of sound.

</comment><comment><USER15> The bigger worry should be the paper market. It's speculated that governments buying huge quantities of physical gold will sell non-existent gold on paper to keep the price of gold stable during their purchase.

</comment><comment><USER16> This same problem happened to the Ethiopian central bank. One batch, which had been bought from a trader, was discovered to be fake fairly quickly; another batch of faked gold, seized from smugglers, had been in their vaults for years.

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7294665.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7294665.stm)

</comment><comment><USER17> One option is to only buy directly from a government owned mint that pours its own bars. e.g. [http://www.perthmint.com.au/investment_bullion_bars_coins_ba...](http://www.perthmint.com.au/investment_bullion_bars_coins_barspage.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER18> Or just buy gold coins. Buy some Krugerrands, some Maple Leafs, some Double Eagles, etc. Yes they can also be fake, but what are the odds that you'll buy fakes of all those different coins?

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd be more worried that your gold bars weren't actually in your bankers vault anymore. Look what happened when Germany tried to repatriate their gold from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

<comment><USER20> They didn't "try", they are doing it, partially, piecemeal.

Which may be because the Fed didn't actually have all that gold available, nicely separate in a vault labelled "Germany", but even if that is true, the case is rather more complex than just "The Fed embezzled the gold that Germany gave them for safekeeping". Because Germany never _gave_ that gold - <USER2> never actually had it. It's in fact the German export surpluses from the time before the USA went off the gold standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ah! An area where bitcoin is superior to gold!

</comment><comment><USER22> This is from 2012.

<comment><USER22> Seriously - downvoted?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you feel if Apple open-sourced all their software tommorow? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Tomorrow? Nothing. A few months later however - after all the security holes have been fixed and malware attacks have died down - I'd buy a Mac.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mostly indifferent: I'm perfectly happy running Ubuntu. Of course, I'm always happy to see previously-closed source become available.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sweet! I'd immediately snag some of their code for use in my own projects. There would be so many feature requests and patches written by other people. I'd probably make a custom build of the OS with some of the interesting mods.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd be looking forward to being able to run my favourite desktop on 'proper' linux on hardware of my choice. Once someone's finished creating the inevitable Obuntu distribution that is.

</comment><comment><USER6> Incredulous, this being one of the most locked-down ecosystems. I'd suspect a legal trap, incompleteness (see: nVidia) or obfuscation.

</comment><comment><USER7> Few would continue to overpay for Apple hardware.

<comment><USER8> I call bullshit. High end Sony and ThinkPad laptops are the only laptops that match up to MacBooks in terms of screen, size, battery life, keyboard, trackpad, design, and durability. They are not cheaper.</comment></comment>