Flux OSKit: Reusable Components for OS Implementation (1997) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/papers/oskit-sosp97.html <comment><USER3> FYI: The main project URL listed on the site, [http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flux/oskit/](http://www.cs.utah.edu/projects/flux/oskit/), results in a "page not found" error.

The correct URL apparently is:

[http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/](http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/)

</comment><comment><USER4> 1997? The OSKit is old enough to go out and drink beer now, yikes.

They stopped development on it shortly after this, didn't they? Like within 4 years? It's easy to see why, given changes in the codebases that they pulled from (Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD) to support newer hardware.

It's been over 15 years but the impression I have is that the complexity and need for "glue" makes OSKit impractical for learning,and the dated nature of the drivers makes it impractical for cherry picking.

I wonder if we have anyone from the osdev community/forums here interested in commenting. It seems like the kind of thing they'd be very disapproving of[1].

[1][https://wiki.osdev.org/Duct_von_Tape](https://wiki.osdev.org/Duct_von_Tape)

</comment><comment><USER5> Reminds me of genode

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

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

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, I have fond memories from when we tried porting GNU/Hurd to this. Good times! [https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/microkernel/mach/history.h...](https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/microkernel/mach/history.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> > We built our system, called ML/OS, by porting the Standard ML of New Jersey > (SML/NJ) implementation [6] to run on a PC using the OSKit. SML/NJ is a > complex, Unix-based system comprising about 144,000 lines of code, in over > 1000 source files. The run-time model used by SML/NJ is fairly exotic - <USER2> > example, the system runs completely without a stack, using instead very > aggressive heap-allocation and garbage-collection techniques to manage > procedure frames.</comment>


"Memories" – 256 byte MSDOS intro - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Imquk_3oFf4 <comment><USER2> Love these demos. The best one I've found, also 256 bytes, is Pyrit by Řrřola (Jan Kadlec, a Czech developer). It's frankly incredible, something I wouldn't have believed was possible:

[https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78045](https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78045)

I ported it to a boot sector so you can run it with a single (rather long!) Linux command line in qemu:

[https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/pyrit-by-rrrola- incred...](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/pyrit-by-rrrola-incredible- raytracing-demo-as-a-qemu-bootable-disk-image/)

The source code for Pyrit is worth reading too (see first link). It's very clever and quite readable.</comment>


Email from a country in denial – observations on Sweden compared to the US - <AUTHOR> https://kvartal.se/artiklar/email-from-a-country-in-denial/ <comment><USER2> The author, in recommending attendance at a US university as opposed to a Swedish one, mentions cost almost as an afterthought. Higher education in Sweden is free. If you attend a U.S. university you come out not just with a degree, but with crushing student loans. This tips the scale in favor of Sweden.</comment>


50 year old NoSQL DB that is better than MongoDB - <AUTHOR> http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/mumps-the-most-important-database-you-probably-never-heard-of <comment><USER2> My favorite line from the article:

"If you've already mastered NoSQL and are looking for a competitive edge this is a vanishingly small pool of competitors."

Sure, IF I've already got experience in it.

The reality appears to be such that, if you don't already have experience in a particular technology, then companies aren't interested in you, even if you've worked with a plethora of other tech.

</comment><comment><USER3> Better than MongoDB, how? The article says nothing about MongoDB.</comment>


5G Mobile Networks: A Systems Approach - <AUTHOR> https://5g.systemsapproach.org/index.html <comment><USER2> As someone new to the 5G world I'm hearing a lot about health concerns. Can someone please explain to me the actual health concerns? My GF has been talking about it for a while now, but when I looked up health related studies of 5G on google scholar - I didn't get any meaningful hits. Is it a tin foil thing or are there really some concerns?

<comment><USER3> It's a tin foil hat thing. It's just wireless frequencies -- which may have some minor impact but it wouldn't be any different to 4G or 3G really and you can see that tech came and hasn't caused any major health issues.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, a statement like that, has just as much value as the conspiracy theory. Since 5G is a vastly different technology, the only thing we can say for certain is that we don't know the health risks at this point.

<comment><USER5> It's true that we don't have the full picture. Nothing is certain yet, but the most likely health effects will be indirect. Two areas of concern are effects on insect populations, which are already in collapse, and effects on bacterial development, including potentially causing resistance to antibiotics. These studies would be a good place to start if you're interested in more information:

[https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-22271-3](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-22271-3)

[https://doi.org/10.3109/1040841X.2012.691461](https://doi.org/10.3109/1040841X.2012.691461)

<comment><USER6> The bactericidal effects study is behind a paywall (but seems to be readable here: [https://www.academia.edu/10777146/Bactericidal_effects_of_lo...](https://www.academia.edu/10777146/Bactericidal_effects_of_low- intensity_extremely_high_frequency_electromagnetic_field_an_overview_with_phenomenon_mechanisms_targets_and_consequences) )

See also: 53GHz has some anti-microbial effects when combined with antibiotics: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265134435_The_Enhan...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265134435_The_Enhanced_Effects_of_Antibiotics_Irradiated_of_Extremely_High_Frequency_Electromagnetic_Field_on_Escherichia_coli_Growth_Properties)

Interestingly the antibiotic resistance is only seen in one particular number on a graph, whereas the other numbers show that EMF seems "beneficial" as it is slowing bacterial growth. Naturally the question is, what happens if you throw human tissue in the mix too.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the alert to the paywall and the comments. I had originally read it on Nature and included the reference provided on the article.

The lack of consistency in results is definitely an issue, and it's true that it may be turn out to be a net benefit overall, which is why I believe we still don't have a clear understanding of the situation. Considering that bacteria adapt to their environment, we may see further unpredictable effects. The risk as I see it is not knowing how it may turn out before deploying it on a massive scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've only skimmed through this but I wish there were more books and references written in such a manner. I typically find concepts like these harder to grasp but this lays it out in such a way that makes it easier to grok. Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER8> Can someone help me understand what is usually meant by "systems" as in "A systems approach"?

<comment><USER9> Systems as in looking at how the system fits together as a whole. This can often be as complex as the details of the individual parts. How do all the parts fit together.

Example: If you are assigned to build a road you figure out the pavement so it can support the trucks driving over it. If you are assigned the system of the roads you instead look at where the trucks are going: is the route the road is on a good one (including will it hit kids on the way to school, are there good stores, will it induce demand and make things worse...), but you assume the pavement engineers will make the road strong enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just started reading, very informative so far. Nice to see what comes out from distilling the hype.

This might help those that like to read on mobile like me:

      # from their git repo we can build arbitrary formats (requires python)
      git clone https://github.com/SystemsApproach/5G.git

      # generate an epub file inside of *_build/epub*
      make epub

</comment><comment><USER11> Well written, clear and clean presentation, very good material inside for whoever wants to read more about 5G and mobile networks in general. Highly recommended!!!

</comment><comment><USER12> Is there any hope of 5G providing internet service comparable to my current broadband offering? Competition for my home internet would be nice.

<comment><USER13> Speed and latency wise it should be manageable, but the bigger problem is spectrum licenses. Depending on your local legislation, it might be that new competitors cannot do last-mile 5G delivery because the existing telecoms have purposefully lobbied and bought out all available spectrum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Don't you think, that 5g is stupid idea, if masts have to by every, 200 - 300? meters, it will be terribly ugly, and how it's suppose to work in farms?

<comment><USER15> 5G doesn't need masts every 200-300m.

There are multiple different frequency bands you can use.

The lowest frequencies are around the same as 4G, so you should need similar numbers of masts to get reasonable coverage.

The highest are around 60GHz - these are pretty much line-of-sight and are likely to be used for shorter-range (but super-high-bandwidth) applications.

<comment><USER16> What he means is that 5G offers only a ~15-20% increase in thoroughput with it's new set of modulation schemes given the same frequency span using 4G. So the increase in performance has to come from new frequency use. They'll steal half of C-band from satellite uplink but then all that's left is millimeter wave to truly get more thoroughput.

And that does have the problem about the propagation characteristics.

<comment><USER15> 5G isn't just about bandwidth, though.

There's quite a useful diagram at the bottom of [https://techblog.comsoc.org/2017/03/02/itu-r-agrees-on- key-p...](https://techblog.comsoc.org/2017/03/02/itu-r-agrees-on-key- performance-requirements-for-imt-20205g/) showing the three key use cases.

As well as "Enhanced Mobile Broadband" (which does focus on increased bandwidth), there's also

* "Massive IoT", which focuses on reducing power requirements and increasing the number of devices that can be served in a single cell (assuming they all transmit very little data)

* "Low Latency", which focuses on better scheduling and quality of service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I heard the real reason we need 5G is to sell more new phones. Thinner and bigger and better cameras isn't enough anymore. However, mobile phones running 5G radios will deplete their battery far more rapidly than LTE, right? And that is assuming the 5G phone user is in a major metropolitan area where there is sufficient coverage to begin with.

<comment><USER18> You bring up some valid points. I traveled to China recently. Phones like iPhone 5 practically don't work there, because the specifications supported by these phones are phased out to such a degree that you're hard pressed to find coverage even in urban areas. I.e. 4G and 5G made the older specs obsolete, so you're obligated to buy a newer device.

Though, I guess it's possible that these bands were never supported in China. If anyone cares to chime in.

<comment><USER19> The Chinese telcos developed their own 3G standard called TD-CDMA.

Note that 3G refers to a family or classification of network technologies, and the same is true for the other G's. As an example CDMA2000 and UMTS are both competing 3G standards.</comment></comment></comment>


Putin wanted to interrogate me. Trump called it 'an incredible offer.' Why? - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/putin-wanted-to-interrogate-me-trump-called-it-an-incredible-offer-why/2018/07/26/7bb11552-90d2-11e8-b769-e3fff17f0689_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6955dc83cf00&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1 <comment><USER2> "Incredible" could be considered ambiguous. One can only speculate how it was meant.</comment>


Ask Patrick McKenzie (patio11) anything - <AUTHOR> http://www.anyasq.com/227-i-made-bingo-card-creator <comment><USER2> I used to poor, like seriously, food was an issue, poor.

Both of my parents and other close relatives started many businesses. They all failed. They are all intelligent people but they all suck, and I mean SUCK at running/growing a business.

I'm a pessimist. I have zero risk appetite, and I mean 0, zip, zilch, no thank you. And as an experienced software engineer, I make a quite a bit of money.....

....but darn it, Patrick's going to push me into staying up late, starting one side business after another, until one of them catches on, and I can quit my day job.

And I've never even met the guy!

Thanks Patrick!

<comment><USER3> You're welcome, and thank you. That kind of feedback makes me very, very happy.

<comment><USER4> In that case, I'll heap some more on.

I've been prevented from doing anything meaningful on a startup of my own for ~5 years, primarily because I was intimidated by the big picture of how much went into making a "real business". But in that same time frame (and in front of my over HN-ed eyes), Patrick has done great things and inspired me to refocus on small, incremental progress that adds up over time. Now I make sure I don't let a single week go by without doing _something_ to improve my technical and business situation.

Patrick is inspiring because he seems like so much more of a relatable Everyman that more developers can relate to. Plus he's a super nice guy!

<comment><USER5> What I like is that, even more so in the past, the financial figures are just so small in comparison to what we normally read. So many HN stories are about billion dollar valuations and million dollar investments, but with Patrick we see $30k presented in epic detail and with pride because for a humble side project I imagine it's been quite a journey. (I have a side project too that grew from a bit of mucking around to enough passive income that I could entertain a modest retirement, so I know where he's coming from.)

<comment><USER6> Could you tell us more about your side project? Your comment made me _very_ curious!

<comment><USER5> Catalogue of interior design photos for inspiration. Got lucky with SEO so I don't think there's much value in describing it in detail like Bingo Card Creator though - entire site didn't take much to put together. The parallel I wanted to draw was watching the numbers (sales, ad clicks, whatever) come through each week and sometimes pinching yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> His answer for why he lives in Ogaki is amazing. Excerpt:

 _By total accident, that job was in Ogaki. I'm not much of a poet but I would write love sonnets for this town. I love the air, I love the water, I love my friends, I love my community, I love my little church, I love the little sushi shop I've been going to for seven years where everybody knows my name, and I love my girlfriend.

Tokyo is a nice place. New York is a nice place. Chicago is a nice place. But I want to live in Ogaki._

<comment><USER8> Also this part:

 _I live in Ogaki. Ogaki is in Japan. If Ogaki were in Kansas, I would live in Kansas._

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see they asked you about writing a book. I've been waiting for you to write the definitive book on SEO.

Have you thought about bypassing a publisher and just producing a PDF and selling it directly? Then the only cost you'd have would to pay for a good editor and the rest would be profit.

I'd gladly pay $50 to learn everything you know about SEO. I'd bet you could sell a couple thousand copies on HN alone. Would that be enough money for it to be worth your while?

<comment><USER10> _I'd gladly pay $50 to learn everything you know about SEO_

I would too. The problem is, there are people that will gladly pay 500x that amount for some of what he knows about SEO.

<comment><USER9> Yet some of the most successful consultants have written books on the subject of their expertise.

Somehow I don't think a book would discourage consulting clients. They want him looking at their situation and data with the benefit of everything he's learned since writing the book.

If it gives him a higher profile it might actually result in more consulting gigs.

<comment><USER3> _If it gives him a higher profile it might actually result in more consulting gigs._

So if you take one gram of sodium and add it to a room filled with chlorine gas, you end up with a wee little pile of salt. Pumping more gas into the room does not increase the amount of salt you get, because the sodium is the limiting reagent.

The limiting reagent in the number of consulting gigs I do every year is not the number of people who wish me to consult for them. It is closer to "How many weeks do I want to spend consulting?" That number is about ten to twelve weeks a year. I can fill my dance card at that number without needing to work very hard on getting the word out to new people.

It might make sense if I wanted to scale a consulting business up by hiring employees, training them to be Mini Me, and then closing clients on consulting engagements with fulfillment to be done by the Mini Mes. That is an option. It isn't one which really fits in with my plans for life at the moment.

<comment><USER11> If you have too many customers for the time available, why not increase the price?

And about the book, you can write down a somewhat detailed point-by-point walkthrough and outsource the actual writing of the book. Then sell it as an info product on your website for, say, $150 -- it is easily worth the money, which you get to keep most of and you can A/B test it like crazy.

Heck you could dictate the book while traveling and never have to write a line.

<comment><USER3> _If you have too many customers for the time available, why not increase the price?_

:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh, Patrick's presentation on marketing to minorities is simply too awesome. (Linked in the answer about the female market; just in case: <http://businessofsoftware.org/video_10_pmckenzie.aspx>)

</comment><comment><USER13> For me, I can only sign in with my facebook or twitter account? Is that actually intended?

I am uncomfortable using those two accounts to sign in.

If I could sign in, the question I would ask patio11 is this: What advise would you give to someone who wants to run a solo software business so he/she can live anywhere and travel anytime?

<comment><USER14> Have you read Rob Walling's "Start Small, Stay Small"?

It's the best book of _practical_ advice I've read on the subject in a while.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YH9MMI?ie=UTF8&tag=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003YH9MMI?ie=UTF8&tag=dedasys-20&linkCode=shr&camp=213733&creative=393177)

<comment><USER15> Dude, disclose affiliate links on HN please.

<comment><USER14> Dude, I certainly don't participate here to get rich off of affiliate links, and am not going to foist crap off on people to make a quick buck (my reputation is more important than that), but I'm certainly not going to disdain a few dollars for more books to read.

If you don't believe in making money, perhaps this isn't the site for you.

<comment><USER15> I make plenty of money from affiliate marketing, but this isn't the place to use them without disclosure.

<comment><USER14> Just go ahead and downvote it instead of whining. Either the link was to something useful and relevant or it wasn't.

The fact that there's an affiliate link has no bearing on that.

If someone's spamming the site with affiliate links, they ought to be banned. If someone posts a link with one from time to time, I see absolutely no harm in it. I think it's pretty clear what's what.

<comment><USER15> I'm not whining, it's just in bad taste. I actually up voted your post because it was useful, and I DID buy that book this morning (just not through your affiliate link).

This isn't the place to be using undisclosed affiliate links. Had you disclosed it, I would have happily bought it through your link as it would be a legitimate referral.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Patrick- this part is especially interesting to me - "This might be shocking, but many of my software buddies _do not_ have fully automated fulfillment. If you buy their software, they get an email, and then they have to do something to get you what you bought. This is _insane_ in this day and age for commodity software purchases. BCC will automatically generate a Registration Key for you (for the downloadable version), and takes a variety of steps to automatically upgrade the software without the customer's interaction. If they ordered a CD, it uses an API at SwiftCD to arrange for that CD to be shipped without my involvement. Bookkeeping entries get made automatically. etc, etc "

Although some of that process will be eliminated as more "app stores" proliferate, it's still a huge and "non-core" part of the process for most software application providers which should be outsourced, as credit card processing has become. I remember the days 5 or 6 years ago where you had to write your own payment gateway, etc, etc.

If you are interested in reselling this as a package to startup software companies let me know, I would love to be involved, I think it fits a need.

</comment><comment><USER17> _I'm 29 today._

Ah, Happy Birthday then! Thanks for all the insights you share on HN and your blog.

</comment><comment><USER18> "It is a moral imperative that any job which CAN be done by a computer SHOULD be done by a computer, because the alternative is a waste of an actual human's life. We used to have clerks whose only job was to be MS Excel's summation function. Hour by hour, day by day, they summed columns of numbers. After Excel exists, the existence of that job is a sin: hour by hour, day by day, they are wasting their lives doing something when they could be doing something more important, more worthy of their talents, which uniquely added value to the world."

This is so true. Does that mean that unemployment is not so bad after all?

<comment><USER19> I think it has little to do with unemployment on the long term. Humanity has been "automating" jobs since the invention of the steam machine. Some might say even further: since the invention of the horse and carriage, since the invention of the wheel.

If you look at the amount of automation we've got going on compared to 50 years ago, 10% unemployment is surprisingly low. Apparently, our skill in automation is only surpassed by our skill in finding new problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there some ridiculous character limit for questions on anyasq.com? Most appear to be squashed, truncated or generally just tweet-like in appearance; for example:

      How do you create niche when you are entering a crowded
      market like travel..what would u hv done if thr ws bingo
      cc alre

      You've consulted with FogCreek and Matasano, some
      heavies(literally and figuratively).What was your
      gauge for success?

</comment><comment><USER21> If you want to release an e-book with a little less overhead (and keep a large fraction of the proceeds) you could go with lulu.com or createspace.com

</comment><comment><USER22> One thing that surprised me in the interview was the fact that Patrick went with a sole-proprietorship model. When I started my B2B service as a side project, I went crazy looking at all the possible angles (a business suing you for a bug causing them loss of revenue, not being able to have a merchant account without a proper LLC etc) and back then it made a lot of sense to stick with the LLC model to create that shield in case something happened. Heck, one lawyer I consulted with even suggested I buy insurance.

Either, I have too much to loose and I am not a risk taker or there is something wrong with the advice I have paid for/read online :)

But the lesson is learned, from this point on, I will go with a sole- proprietorship model and avoid paying over ~$1K for the LLC..

</comment><comment><USER23> patio11 Thank you for your all your advice and insight, it is truly motivational.

Have you always been so cheerful or is it a product of your environment in Ogaki, or maybe even your success?

</comment><comment><USER24> > If we stopped onanastically solving the non-existent problems of poor white > techy twenty-somethings and started producing actual value, nobody would say > word one about prices.

I spent a few minutes trying to figure out what _onanastically_ means. I was pleasantly surprised to learn it means "in a masturbatory manner", though I think it is spelled onanistically.</comment>


An Engineer's Explanation of the Fukushima Incident - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=11RJz6KCYjVa6M8urvzO0tYq1SjbgqQwW5zw8nquMshzBqSNxn2n3leC_O8hP&hl=en Probably the clearest technical explanation of what occurred at Fukushima after the recent earthquake and resulting tsunami. <comment><USER3> although not submitted separately, this was discussed a bit yesterday on HN, when plux posted it:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2411141>

it looks like the attribution is different for each presentation, though the content is identical

<comment><USER4> The attribution here is correct (Matthias Braun, Areva); the name and logos were stripped when it was released, apparently for some kind of legal reason. This is discussed at the end of this article:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/science/03meltdown.html?pa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/science/03meltdown.html?pagewanted=all)

<comment><AUTHOR> Beat me to it :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i'm wondering about the main design principle of the reactor cores - <USER2> default they are "hot", ie. producing heat/energy, so one needs to make effort to keep them "cold", ie. non-producing heat/energy. This hot-by-default principle was the main reason of Chernobyl catastrophe and here as well.

Why not reverse the principle and design the cold-by-default core? For example, instead of inserting graphite rods into the core to calm it down, one would need to insert additional uranium rods (or pump molten uranium salt, or move the 6-8-12 pieces of core close enough, etc...) for the reactor to activate and become "hot".

<comment><USER6> Control rod insertion is designed to be an entirely passive operation, effectively making the default state one where the fission reaction is not active. Your proposals are all different ways to stop the fission reaction but do not address residual heat.

What you're really asking for is a system wherein the cooling of the fuel after fission has stopped (this is where the problems occurred at the Fukushima plants) is entirely passive.

I'm sure somebody could get clever with siphons to make this happen but you'll need an absolutely massive amount of water to do so and/or a way to do the cooling such that the water itself is not exposed to radiation. This would allow you to, for example, safely take it from one side of the dam to the other.

An active solution instead allows recirculation of the same water (often borated) and can generally be a closed-loop (and radiation apathetic) system.

<comment> Tuna-Fish > What you're really asking for is a system wherein the cooling of the fuel > after fission has stopped (this is where the problems occurred at the > Fukushima plants) is entirely passive.

This can be achieved by designing the safe core temperatures to be much higher, which makes cooling easier. The very interesting small molten salt breeder design FUJI MSR <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuji_MSR> is designed to survive complete external cooling loss by shutting down fission (either under control, or by the heat physically destroying the neutron mirrors required for it's operation), and then dealing with the decay heat by conductive transfer to the environment and simply letting the reactor heat up.

The fact that the core is molten in normal operation, under no pressure and entirely chemically inert even at elevated temperatures makes passive safety somewhat easier.

<comment><USER6> And that was a fun way to spend an evening: new reactor designs are quite cool :). It seems like a lot of the innovation is occurring in parallel with both fuel types and containment approaches.

I too look forward to having completely passive shutdown of reactors, but from what I can tell (outside of a few small-scale test reactors) we're just not there yet. Someday...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It seems that it might be a good idea to design future nuclear reactors with pneumatic-powered robots in mind; purpose-built shafts and ramps could allow robots with minimal electronics into areas unsafe for humans. I say pneumatic instead of hydraulic, as based on my very limited understanding of nuclear physics, lightweight gases are less likely to become neutron activated for extended periods of time.

<comment><USER8> Getting robots in wouldn't help with the Fukushima incident much; the real problem there is getting energy out, not getting robots in.

<comment><USER7> They could have been used for monitoring inaccessible locations earlier in the disaster, possibly by using fiber optic cameras and lighting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am certainty no expert on nuclear engineering or containment design but it seems odd to me that the spent fuel rods are stored in above ground pools. I wouldn't even let my kids play in one much less store radioactive materiel that requires active cooling in one.

<comment><USER10> I've read It's an issue with manipulating the fuel: to do so, you unbolt the containment cap on the top of the reactor pressure vessel and fill the entire path from on top of it to the initial spent fuel pool with water. That allows you to safely transfer hot (thermally as well as radiatively) rods and it's pretty hard to get around if you're using this sort of reactor geometry (I understand it holds for both PWRs as well as these BWRs).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> All right. The Google URL's are different, so I'll _assume_ this isn't just another copy/pasta karma endeavor.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400790>

I don't particularly care about my own karma (or lack thereof; and after all I was reformatting someone else's URL, albeit to avoid the PowerPoint dependency (and risk)), but I do care about the contribution of repetition to the increasing volume of noise on HN.

That aside, it is an interesting slide deck.</comment>


Ask HN: How Many of Prefer Social Media Sign Up Over Regular Sign Up? - <AUTHOR>

I am developing a android based application and was thinking that now a days people prefer social media sign up over regular sign up. Am i right or you think other way around<p>Please share your thoughts
Thanks <comment><USER2> You should investigate this further based on the expected user demographics of your app. I would expect that most people who post on Hacker News avoid all social login as much as possible for privacy reasons, while many other user groups may prefer it to creating new accounts everywhere out of convenience.

Note that any Android phone which is able to access Google Play also must have a Google (GMail) account set up, and you can use this to authenticate the user with minimal effort: [http://developer.android.com/google/play- services/index.html](http://developer.android.com/google/play- services/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll go to great lengths to avoid social sign ups. I want nothing linked to those accounts. It mostly comes from distrust of app behavior. I don't want any app blasting anything to my entire contact lists. This might be an irrational concern but its real. I'll use Google account to sign up for any service BC I know Google won't let an app run wild w my contacts. Other services I am not so confident

</comment><comment><USER4> If HN isn't your target demographic, the answers here are going to be really skewed. Social signup is very much preferred (we have a number of iOS & Android apps targeting consumers) and social login makes up around 82%.

<comment><AUTHOR> 82% is really a astonishing number, i think now a days people don't want to fill up long sign up forms ( who has time for it ) that's why they prefer social sign up ....

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I prefer the opposite, I do not like being nervous about your app posting to my social media, nor do I want to have social media accounts forever.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for opinion

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I prefer no signup to both.

For me, if there isn't an obvious and strong value proposition, I don't want to be bothered by crap in my feed or spam in my inbox.

To put it another way, for any particular app, I probably don't care about it, so why would I want communication from it?

<comment><USER7> Totally agree with this point.

Asking users for too much information up-front will put them off your app before they even get into the first screens.

I'm working on a couple of projects where this conversation has come up. After some qualitative interviews with our target group, it became abundantly clear that this group (under 40 urbanites) are increasingly aware of privacy issues and social signups. They specifically cited Spotify as the culprit. Turns out there were some closed OneDirection fans, and Spotify outed them using social playlists.

So if you are going to ask for that info, please tell the user WHY that info is necessary, and WHY it will make a better user experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If a site doesn't offer an alternative form of sign up, I won't use it. Github and twitter oauth are exceptions though, all of that data is already public.

However, there is virtually no reason at all not to offer both - and then everybody wins.

</comment><comment><USER9> I rather strongly prefer Google Account integration to most other signup options ( _particularly_ for a specifically Android-based app), but I'd prefer service-specific signup to most "social" options.

</comment><comment><USER10> This would probably make a pretty good poll. You can create a poll at [https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll](https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll) if you have more than 200 karma (I don't :( yet)

If anyone does create the poll, it might be more valuable to have options to vote on individual social network.

For e.g. these could be poll options

\- I never sign up through Social Media

\- Twitter Only

\- Facebook only

\- LinkedIn only

\- Google Plus only

\- Any social media would be fine for me

<comment><AUTHOR> I too don't have ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> All of my social media postings are public and I disable permissions for apps to automatically post publicly, so I don't have a problem with signing up through Facebook. If it were something very private, I might think differently. I don't have a problem with my Yelp and Facebook account being associated, for example. Pretty sure everyone on Facebook knows that I eat food already.

</comment><comment><USER12> I prefer having both options. I first try out social media sign up and verify the permissions the app requesting. If the permissions scare me, I sign up with my, e.g. firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment><comment><USER13> I personally use a "dummy" email for whenever I sign up to something that looks interesting. Only after I might use my real e-mail. But to answer your question I prefer e-mail.

</comment><comment><USER14> Depends if I trust the app or not, and what that app is for (if using twitter/facebook makes the app experience better).

I've no problem signing up using social media accounts.

</comment><comment><USER15> I use Google signup, but none of the other providers.

</comment><comment><USER16> I prefer social media sign up</comment>


Seeing Like a Finite State Machine - <AUTHOR> http://crookedtimber.org/2019/11/25/seeing-like-a-finite-state-machine/ <comment><USER2> The title is a reference to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State) which discusses "legibility", the process of mapping messy reality into convenient categories for systematic control.

The characteristic item of legibility is "papers": ID cards, passports, and so on; but also things like title registers. In a transparent rule-of-law society the control systems enabled by these are generally to the public benefit, which is why they get instituted in the first place. But at every stage there's people and situations that don't "fit", and a huge temptation to hammer the square peg into the round hole. Impositions ranging from "no you cannot have the right gender on your passport" to wholesale ethnic cleansing.

And the stuff about the inability to correct mistakes in authoritarianism leading to scientific and technical error is spot-on. That's how the Soviet Union got Lysenkoism, and its space program only survived due to the personal political effectiveness of Korolev (who had already been in a gulag!).

<comment><USER3> Distributed thought policing can be just as effective in enforcing error as the centralized variety. In the west, there are many true things that one cannot say: who can say how much damage these prohibitions have done to our decision making?

As for the Soviets: their physics, chemistry, and mathematics education was very good. It was only in the softer academic fields like history, biology, and psychology that you saw widespread nonsense. These fields are the ones with direct political implications. Today, we struggle with these fields in much the same way for much the same reason: see the replication crisis in psychology.

<comment><USER2> > In the west, there are many true things that one cannot say

 _sigh_ such as? And what repercussions do you receive for saying them? I see a lot of people with books, TV interviews, and academic positions complaining about being "silenced" despite still being very audible.

> we struggle with these fields in much the same way for much the same reason

Evolutionary psychology may be the worst example of this. Or large areas of economics. Or the political implications of climate science.

<comment><USER4> > > _In the west, there are many true things that one cannot say_

> _sigh such as?_

Be aware that you are, in effect, asking for people to actually step in the bear trap in order to prove to you that it's dangerous.

Even pg's essay _What You Can't Say_ (well known around here) didn't mention any specific things, for obvious reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think there's actually a good point here. There does seem to be this scare mongering that China is going to become some sort of ultra efficient techno- totalitarian regime where their oppression is guided perfectly by technology. However, It's very difficult to get useful work done with machine learning. It's very easy to get absolutely rubbish results. The reason there's a massive arms race amongst the top tech companies for talent is because you need _really_ smart people to actually apply machine learning well.

So the likelihood is that a state like China is going to primarily to be getting rubbish results. The data they feed into their systems is going to be patchy, biased, often doctored. So when it starts locking people up and sending them to re-education camps they're not actually removing the disruptive forces in their society, they're just reproducing the great purges from Russia. Picking people more or less at random and attacking vast swathes of the population. And whilst they fail to solve their social problems they'll start creating economic problems as they start destroying their own workforce. At which point they either have to abandon these techniques entirely (unlikely) or just go more and more to the extreme, which is what we've seen time after time for states that engage in these behaviours.

<comment><USER6> China has a lot of smart people and a lot of money. I think they could do a pretty good job at applying machine learning.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, over a billion people, all loyal to the cause.

Machine learning is sloppy and imperfect now but if anyone is going to get out ahead of the pack first, it would seem to be China. Especially since they are not held to the same accountability as other nations due to the West's relatively weak influence, and they are more comfortable with locking up the wrong person just to make sure they catch the right one too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Machine learning doesn't have to be perfect (or even effective) to do its job in this context. It's like the Mechanical Hound in Fahrenheit 451 - as long as the public hears it's been let loose and then sees it catching someone, that's enough to reinforce its 'infallibility' and its usefulness as a tool of the state.

</comment><comment><USER9> The technological side does not matter. The modern AI renaissance is purely driven by wide availability of training data. The West is in the process of restricting this, China is putting it front and center.

The academic state of algorithm development (whether China is better or worse in this regard) is a minor rounding error.

</comment><comment><USER10> > The great advantage of democracy is its openness to contrary opinions and > divergent perspectives. This opens up democracy to a specific set of > destabilizing attacks but it also means that there are countervailing > tendencies to self-reinforcing biases

> These correction tendencies will be weaker in authoritarian societies; in > extreme versions of authoritarianism, they may barely even exist.

What does authoritarian vs democracy have to do with "openness to contrary opinions and divergent perspectives"? Do the courts of public opinion perform better than government?

<comment><USER11> One of the more interesting results from dynamic systems theory is that all simultaneously complex and stable systems are stable because they are stabilized by internal opposing forces.

As authoritarianism imply trying to shape the world through power and authority, the society must then either become unstable, stop being complex (?!), or respond with equivalent power by eg. overthrowing the government.

One could say that the courts of public opinion perform worse, and is thus better as it decrease the total amount of power/energy in the system. Ie, it's ultimately less lethal in most cases. Not to say that the public can't be terrifying, but on average it seems to be a much better bet.

Allowing large scale disinformation campaigns _is_ a problem for democracies, and it must be combated vigorously, or one could get into an situation where the disinformants have too much power, with _much of_ the same systemic results as an authoritarian leadership.

<comment><USER12> _" Allowing large scale disinformation campaigns is a problem for democracies"_

It does not have to be disinformation. Given how easily the majority is brainwashed by propaganda it is not that difficult to imagine mass postings that while being technically true are presented in a way that helps to form needed state of mind and just progress from there.

How do you fight that?

<comment><USER3> You don't. If the masses change their minds in a way that you don't like in response to true facts, either put out your own competing true facts or just accept that you make have been wrong.

A worldview that can exist only with the support of censorship doesn't deserve to exist at all.

<comment><USER13> I've always subscribed to the notion that while there is an objective reality, in many cases humans have no hope of finding it directly and instead only have access to it through cultural filters.

What this means is that cultural processes can change what facts are considered true over time.

<comment><USER3> That's postmodernist baloney. There is an objective truth, and we can asymptotically approach it. Humanity can access facts. It's nonsense to suggest that we can't distinguish between claims because everything is false.

<comment><USER13> That's rationalist baloney. There is an objective truth, and in many cases we can asymptotically approach it, but not nearly in all cases.

<comment><USER3> Which specific ideas are important enough to censor the public to enforce but not amenable to empirical verification? Sounds like religion to me.

<comment><USER13> Using the right pronouns for people in workplaces and schools. There is empirical evidence of improved mental health but ultimately it's based on a specific belief system — you have to believe that trans people are a group to care about, and that almost anyone who asks you to use a different pronoun for them is being sincere about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The central point of this garbage article is that authoritarian regimes that use machine learning will fail because they'll be misled by biased outputs. Titledropping Scott's famous book is just for flavor. As one of the comments says, the article equivocates between "bias" as injustice and "bias" as error. Authoritarian regimes can use machine learning just fine.

The rest of the comments are just bizarre, with claims like there's no difference between dictatorships and democracies because "totalitarianism" is just a "colonialist" category. And this blog wants to make the claim that it's China that's detached from reality?

Machine learning's real problem is in the west, which has a very difficult time accepting unpleasant facts even when fair ML systems produce them. It's the west, not a place like China, that's going to be misled by accepts to "fix" machine learning.

<comment><USER14> Downvoted ? Really ? Must have hit a nerve somewhere.

"Machine learning's real problem is in the west, which has a very difficult time accepting unpleasant facts even when fair ML systems produce them.'

For example, "proof" that bias exists in an institution due to a statistical difference between its distribution of identity groups and the general population. Will be interesting when these type of rules become part of our ML overlords.

True story: I took a science course in school a long time ago when my lab partner used the calibration knob in the back of the voltmeter to get exactly 5 volts out of the power source. Found this out only after we kept getting very odd results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> >Authoritarianism then, can emerge as a more efficient competitor that can beat democracy at its home game (some fear this; some welcome it).

false assumption that democracies cannot be authoritarian</comment>


Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://endler.dev/2019/maybe-you-dont-need-kubernetes/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19467067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19467067) (315 comments).

<comment><USER3> Also [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=don%27t+need+Kubernetes+](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=don%27t+need+Kubernetes+)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All these "maybe you don't need this or that X" posts die in an instant when the user already knows how to do X (when the learning curve argument is gone).

Let's get it right:

Kubernetes is really really cheap. I can run 20 low volume apps in a kubes cluster with a single VM. This is cheaper than any other hosting solution in the cloud if you want the same level of stability and isolation. It's even cheaper when you need something like a Redis cache. If my cache goes down and the container needs to be spun up again then it's not a big issue, so for cheap projects I can even save more cost by running some infra like a Redis instance as a container too. Nothing beats that. It gets even better, I can run my services in different namespaces, and have different environments (dev/staging/etc.) isolated from each other and still running on the same amount of VMs. When you caculate the total cost saving here to traditional deployments it's just ridiculously cheap.

Kubernetes makes deployments really easy. docker build + kubectl apply. That's literally it. Deployments are two commands and it's live, running in the cloud. It's elastic, it can scale, etc.

Kubernetes requires very little maintenance. Kubernetes takes care of itself. A container crashes? Kubes will bring it up. Do I want to roll out a new version? Kubes will do a rolling update on its own. I am running apps in kubes and for almost 2 years I haven't looked at my cluster or vms. They just run. Once every 6 months I log into my console and see that I can upgrade a few nodes. I just click ok and everything happens automatically with zero downtime.

I mean yes, theoretically nothing needs Kubernetes, because the internet was the same before we had Kubernetes, so it's certainly not needed, but it makes life a lot easier. Especially as a cheap lazy developer who doesn't want to spend time on any ops Kubernetes is really the best option out there next to serverless.

If learning Kubernetes is the reason why it's "not needed" then nothing is needed. Why use a new programming language? Why use a new db technology? Why use anything except HTML 4 + PHP, right?

BTW, learning Kubernetes can be done in a few days.

<comment><USER5> All of this glosses over the biggest issue with Kubernetes: it's still ridiculously complex, and troubleshooting issues that arise (and they will arise), can leave you struggling for days pouring over docs, code, GitHub issues, stackoverflow... All of the positives you listed rely on super complex abstractions that can easily blow up without a clear answer as to "why".

Compared to something like scp and restarting services, I would personally not pay the Kubernetes tax unless I absolutely had to.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. A year or so ago I thought, hey, maybe I should redo my personal infrastructure using Kubernetes. Long story short, it was way too much of a pain in the ass.

As background, I've done time as a professional sysadmin. My current infrastructure is all Chef-based, with maybe a dozen custom cookbooks. But Chef felt kinda heavy and clunky, and the many VMs I had definitely seemed heavy compared with containerization. I thought switching to Kubernetes would be pretty straightforward.

Surprise! It was not. I moved the least complex thing I run, my home lighting daemon to it; it's stateless and nothing connects to it, but it was still a struggle to get it up and running. Then I tried adding more stateful services and got bogged down in bugs, mysteries, and Kubernetes complexity. I set it aside, thinking I'd come back to it later when I had more time. That time never quite arrived, and a month or so ago my home lights stopped working. Why? I couldn't tell. A bunch of internal Kubernetes certificates expired, so none of the commands worked. Eventually, I just copy-pasted stuff out of Stack Overflow and randomly rebooted things, and eventually it started working again.

I'll happily look at it again when I have to do serious volume and can afford somebody to focus full-time on Kubernetes. But for anything small or casual, I'll be looking elsewhere.

<comment><USER7> At work we're building an entire service platform on top of managed kubernetes services, agnostic to cloud provider. We had already had bad experiences running K8s ourselves.

Going into it we knew how much of a PITA it would be but we vastly underestimated how much, IMO.

Would not do again -- I would quit first.

<comment><USER8> Fire and Motion [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and- motion/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/)

Written 18 years ago, so obviously not about Kubernagus, but it does explain the same phenomenon. Replace Microsoft with cloud providers and that's more or less the same argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am a one-person team running Kubernetes on Google Cloud. It costs around $62 per month before tax. (One n1-standard-1 node for $35.34 per month, HTTP Load Balancing $18.60 per month and SSD persistent disks for $8.50 per month). Kubernetes gives me the ability to scale up quickly when the need comes (which is soon, hopefully).

I evaluated AWS Fargate & Kubernetes, Azure and GKE before settling on GKE. Amazon charges $148 per month just for cluster management alone. Google and Azure charge $0 for cluster management. This ruled out AWS for me. AWS appears to be a reluctant adopter of Kubernetes. They seem to want you to use Fargate instead. I tried it and found it to be crap--very hard to get things running.

I was able to get Kubernetes running on Azure and GKE fairly easily. There were minor hiccups on both those clouds. With Azure initial creation of a AKS cluster failed because some of the resource providers weren't "registered" on my subscription. On GKE it was hard to get ingress working. Static IPs take a long time to take effect, and in the mean time you are fiddling with your yaml files trying to figure out what you may have done wrong, not realizing it is a GKE issue.

The awesome part of Kubernetes is that I didn't need to learn almost anything about Google cloud to get everything working. I only had to learn Kubernetes. If Google raises prices I can easily switch to Azure without learning any Azure technologies. My knowledge as well as my application is completely portable. I can't imagine doing any of this as a one-person team without Kubernetes.

<comment><USER10> Second the comment about ingress. By the way, if you have any idea how to get ingress to work without taking down the services that are in it while it updates that would be amazing. I think it would obviously work if we used a separate ingress/load balancer for each host, but that seemed kinda wasteful since we are ok with doing downtime in off hours scheduling with our project.

<comment><USER11> I believe the Kubernetes/Docker way is to not update in place but to create new instances. Can you spin up a new node pool/cluster and redirect traffic there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Kubernetes is here to stay.

What will change or what will be enhanced are: \- Minimum requirements to actually run it (see k3s) \- More managed services (gke, azure and aws exists but also digitalocean) \- More/better handling of stateful services \- Simple solution for write once read many (relevant for caching and for ci/cd)

At that pace we are already with such a jung project, yeah this is great. This is huge.

And no one needs to migrate already to kubernetes! But it already does a few things out of the box which reduces the complexity: \- easy cert management \- internal loadbalancing \- autoscaling \- green/blue deployment \- deployment

But you do see how the industry is struggling with certain problems: We are now with kubernetes moving into a cloud native area.

Everyone know has kubernetes available. There was no mesos managed service from google, azure and aws. There was no docker swarm from google, azure and aws.

<comment><USER13> > But you do see how the industry is struggling with certain problems: We are > now with kubernetes moving into a cloud native area.

We were were moving into a cloud native era way before Kubernetes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm usually fairly buzzword-adverse, and I didn't follow the NoSQL/Spark/Big- Data phase when it was hip. I was also hostile to kubernetes until I had to work with it against will for a project.

Since then, I completely changed my mind about kubernetes. This is a very good technology for only one reason -and it's NOT about container orchestration-. Portability. K8s is the missing piece that allows you to create a network of cooperating computers independently of hardware, OS, and even architecture.

If I have an home-made k8s cluster on my raspberry pies at home, it's not because it's lightweight and easy to manage -k8s adds a significant overhead-, it's because it gives me the ability to unplug one of them, take the sdcard, format it and plug another board without any interruption or configuration. I could plug my intel laptop to that network and have some pods running on it without having to change a single line in my configuration. Finally, I can zip a folder and email a bunch of yaml files to my friends (or have them git clone the repo), and they will be able to replicate an exact copy of my home cluster with all -or some- of the services. This is truly amazing.

<comment><USER8> I literally don't understand what you are achieving with your k8s raspberry cluster thing.

<comment><USER15> automatic failover obviously

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This post should probably have (2019) in the title.

I'm the Nomad Team Lead and can try to answer any questions. Since this post was made the team has expanded, and the task/job restarting issue they link has been (mostly) addressed. Also new since this post is our Consul Connect integration which can accomplish similar goals to k8s network policies, albeit opt in and with the actual discovery/networking code living in Consul/Envoy respectively.

<comment><USER17> I absolutely loved Nomad when I used it. We were stuck with both Windows, legacy apps and command line scripts and no time to learn Docker or anything like K8s.

We were already using Consul so bringing in Nomad to schedule _everything_ \- batch files, .Net executables, some legacy programs, etc was a godsend.

Unfortunately, as much as I loved the Nomad+Consul combination, I really couldn't suggest it today. It is so much easier to find qualified K8s people than Nomad+Consul people I couldn't in good conscience recommend it.

But this is all a moot point to me. While if I were leading another on prem project I would use K8s. We are all in on AWS+ECS+Fargate where I work now and we really don't care about the lock in boogie man.

Given a choice, I would still say at least if you're on AWS, use the native offerings. The value of hypothetically being able to migrate a large infrastructure "seamlessly" is vastly overrated.

<comment><USER16> > I absolutely loved Nomad when I used it.

Glad to hear it!

> Unfortunately, as much as I loved the Nomad+Consul combination, I really > couldn't suggest it today.

This is a fair critique and a problem any project living in a world defined by a strong incumbent suffers. You made me realize we need resources to help k8s users translate their existing knowledge to Nomad as many people looking at Nomad will have k8s experience these days.

So thanks for this comment. Maybe with the right docs/resources we can at least minimize the very real cost of using a non-dominant tool.

> But this is all a moot point to me. We are all in on AWS+ECS+Fargate where I > work now and we really don't care about the lock in boogie man.

This was me in a past lives/jobs! HashiCorp's entire product line (with the exception of maybe Packer and Vagrant) become much more compelling for multi- cloud, hybrid-cloud, and on-prem orgs.

<comment><USER17> In my world, there are two types of "architects" and "consultants". You have the kind that are "Smart People" (tm) and tell their clients that "this is the way that it should be done" and you have those that "will meet the clients where they are".

From my experience with Nomad and the little I know about K8s, Nomad is the latter. If you can run it from the command line, you can run it with Nomad. This in and of itself is a great value proposition.

But, Nomad does have the disadvantage, I posted about above and has to fight the "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". I was able to get buy in only after I told the CTO, "it's made by the same people who make Consul and Terraform".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel like a lot of the problems K8s solves are fake problems that we have because all our software links/imports so many libraries/packages it's impossible to tell what's going on. It feels like have built an entire infrastructure around hopefully capturing that one time we got it working and being able to reboot to that state when things go wrong.

<comment><USER19> You're not wrong but containerization is pragmatic - not idealistic. You can still write simple, clean software packaged in a SCRATCH container - but you can also isolate whatever crap you have to work with the get the job done. Both the elegant app and the horrible one now share a reliable init system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am very happy working with Kubernetes in a very small team, I really like the abstraction of the different entities and the declarative ways to configure them.

I think that the learning curve is not that steep if you already had to do the same than with Kubernetes with other alternatives, in my on experience I have been discovering a lot of features that are very helpful not just during production but also during the development environments that were a real pain before.

I am have a lab/cluster/blog running on Kubernetes, I am in charge of this one alone, it is opensource [1], I version everything that goes to the cluster so you can see the evolution of the kubernetes entities, the config, the containers and the code. I started this from scratch and improving it feature to feature, I think that this might be a big factor with my positive experience with Kubernetes.

I wonder if an issue with adopting kubernetes is to try to migrate a big system into kubernetes in a very limited time lapse and trying to push/force features as they were working/handled in the previous approach?

[1]: [https://github.com/vicjicaman/microservice- realm](https://github.com/vicjicaman/microservice-realm)

</comment><comment><USER21> A good friend and old coworker has been hitting me up for how to do stuff with docker since his job now uses containers. He has about 15 containers (on 2 hosts) that do not change to much and was asking about setting up k8s (it was a buzzword his manager heard). i talked him into just setting up swarm.

It took all of about an hour (over text messaging) to get it set up and all stacks/services running. They could not be happier.

It comes down to the right tool for the job. If you don't need all the bells and whistles, then keep it stupid simple. I realize swarm is not a 100% "enterprise" solution, however before they they were just issuing docker command after each reboot.

<comment><USER22> > i talked him into just setting up swarm.

Not contesting the heart of your comment but, given the current state of Docker, recommending Swarm to someone strikes me as bad advice. Nomad may be a better call.

Mirantis has openly said Swarm's future is a two year sunset with a transition path to k8s.

<comment><USER23> I agree, looked into swarm and routing was a mess, even discounting the bugs, lockups and moments of total disconnections, you had to rely on ugly dns hacks to know the live endpoints, making any kind of stateful service a nightmare to set up, while kubernet just give you an endpoint api, and even then, there were no guarantees for local services that swarm mesh would route the calls to the local instances, while in kubernet you can control precisely how services are resolved grouping them in pods, so that they don't needlessly clog the pipes.

I find very hard to find swarm use case that a wan, vpn, private segment or kubernet cluster can't handle better.

<comment><USER24> I've been using Docker Swarm in production for about 2 years now... processing about 1TB of data / month across 30+ containers. The networking and routing has been rock solid except for that one day that the Docker dev team, in one release, accidentally added random hashes to the internal DNS names of services. Ever since that day I've used the docker-compose network alias for internal routing [https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose- file/#aliases](https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/#aliases)

Discovering bugs in a technology you just started "looking into" actually sounds like the learning curve.

<comment><USER23> are you sure you're not mixing swarm and swarm mode?

<comment><USER25> Ok, there is a difference? Do you have links to docs of both? This sounds hard to search for online.

<comment><USER23> [https://sreeninet.wordpress.com/2016/07/14/comparing- swarm-s...](https://sreeninet.wordpress.com/2016/07/14/comparing-swarm- swarmkit-and-swarm-mode/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Yep, still doing plain old VMs.

Just like NoSQL, BigData,..., in a couple of years k8s will be slowly forgotten as everyone updates their CVs to the Next Big Thing™.

<comment><USER27> Never bought into the VM fad myself. The physical hardware is chugging along quite nicely over here.

<comment><USER28> Agreed. At this point HN could have a post about the merits of plain old dedicated servers and it would seem novel.

<comment><USER29> Just wait. In ten more years IBM and Deloitte will re-brand fat clients and on-prem infrastructure as something else and they'll start selling it to everyone. Replace "mainframe" and "dumb terminal" with "the cloud" and "web app" and we had this same conversation 40 years ago. Then in another 20 years we'll swing back to some version of consolidated+remote servers and lightweight client access portals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Agreed. k8s is too bloated at this point, yet alternatives like nomad and swarm are missing some fundamental features, so we have had to adopt to k8s unfortunately.

For example, swarm still have no fault tolerance and nomad relies on Vault, another product from Hashicorp and is also in the same limited state wrt. documentation

<comment><USER31> Try ECS on AWS. Rock solid and reasonably simple and does everything you need.

<comment><USER32> I dont think, the correct answer is to change your stack to fit some vendor

<comment><USER31> Its just docker, your containers remain exactly the same only the orchestration changes!

<comment><USER33> You are pushing ECS quite hard, but why so? It's nothing particularly amazing in my opinion, good for what it does but requires all your other infra too to reside in AWS. Which is not that cheap if you're really concerned with cost. Eg NAT is 5 cents per hour and you need at least two of them if you want to use private subnets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think this post misses the point of where kubernetes brings value the most: multi-team environments. If you are a single-team, then nomad, non-distributed docker, systemd units, etc is probably a better choice today due to the operational complexity of running Kubernetes (GKE,AKS,EKS do lower the complexity, but you still need kubernetes experts on call)

However if you are in an organization with multiple teams (as are the vast majority of developers) then Kubernetes provides a common language for deploying, operating and securing your applications which enables you to go from a process which could takes days, weeks or even months to provision and configure a VM to minutes or hours to provision a kubernetes namespace.

</comment><comment><USER35> It's funny we use GKE and coudn't be more happy, once your CI/CD is setup you don't have to think about it and makes your developper life much much easier.

I don't even think for one second to go back to uploading tar.gz or DEB / RPM using scripts / puppets ect ...

</comment><comment><USER36> I wish this article was titled 'Nomad is pretty great' since that was really the point being made here. Nomad is not a true alternative to Kubernetes. It does not support autoscaling out of the box, it does not have most of the bells/whistles that Kubernetes has.

However, it is just a single executable and it just works. Combined with Consul and Fabio, you can run a container orchestration cluster with very little fuss that has service discovery, internal load balancing and cluster- wide logging.

It is a feature-rich task scheduler with a pretty good CLI. I highly recommend it, but if you need stuff like autoscaling, you need to use something else.

<comment><USER16> (Full disclosure: Nomad Team Lead here, so I'm biased!)

> Nomad is not a true alternative to Kubernetes.

You're right! We explicitly try not to be a standalone dropin replacement for k8s. Our comparison page goes into this a little bit (but now I realize it's in need of a refresh!): [https://www.nomadproject.io/intro/vs/kubernetes.html](https://www.nomadproject.io/intro/vs/kubernetes.html)

\- Nomad relies on Consul for service discovery

\- Nomad relies on Consul Connect (Envoy) for network policies

\- Nomad relies on Vault for secrets

\- Nomad relies on third party autoscalers - [https://github.com/jippi/awesome-nomad#auto- scalers](https://github.com/jippi/awesome-nomad#auto-scalers) \- although there's more we can do to enable them.

\- Nomad relies on Consul Connect (Envoy) or other third parties for load balancing

\- Nomad does not provide any cluster log aggregation (although logging plugins are planned which should make third party log aggregators easier to use)

Nomad still has many missing features such as CSI (coming in 0.11!), logging plugins, audit logging, etc, but we never intend to be as monolithic a solution as k8s. We always hope to feel like "just a scheduler" that you compose with orthogonal tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's really odd that around 30% of the people who commented defending kubernetes are merely echoing stuff that the article itself mentioned.

Also, it's weird that the argument of another 30% of people defending kubernetes boils down to: "Using kubernetes is really easy, _just hire Google /Azure/etc to do it for you_."

Can't begin to wrap my head around that one.

But what do I know, I prefer to KISS and I like nomad. In fact, I'd be using swarm if its future wasn't spotty.

</comment><comment><USER38> I agree with the sentiment, but I think the hardest part of kubernetes is dealing the complexity of the resulting cloud. You end up having to manage that complexity no matter what you're doing; the upfront cost of figuring out kubernetes is that maybe it takes a couple days longer to learn than something else, but now you have a huge ecosystem of technology and people that are solving the same problems you have.

</comment><comment><USER39> docker compose and a jwilder proxy is all I need for most of my projects

</comment><comment><USER40> I see Kubernetes also being used for ML workflows, yes...while you haven't figured out how to run a ML pipeline yet, add K8s (KubeFlow recommendation) As a ML researcher solutions like KubeFlow has been very painful as I don't want to learn k8s, I need to continue focusing on ML work and figure out my pipeline before I deploy K8s

</comment><comment><USER41> There are lots of options out there. I'm currently exploring Cloud Foundry for our platform, since our core API is written in Spring Boot. This page from AquaSec has lots of links to articles comparing Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes. [https://www.aquasec.com/wiki/display/containers/Kubernetes+v...](https://www.aquasec.com/wiki/display/containers/Kubernetes+vs+Cloud+Foundry)

I also found this book to be helpful [https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07T1Y2JRJ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07T1Y2JRJ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_d_asin_title_o00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

</comment><comment><USER42> I think most Nomad users are well aware that Kubernetes can do all it can - and vastly more.

If anything is wrong with Kubernetes, it would be the complexity of it and that it has a steep learning curve.

It seems it's best to have a small team of people to manage it and to solve solutions to problems that arise.

We started using Nomad last year and one thing I can say is that it's relatively easy to use and works well for its intended purpose, especially for us hybrid-cloud folks.

</comment><comment><USER43> The part about all of this containerization technology I don't understand is that it was originally sold as a way (among other benefits) to unburden devs of having to think about ops stuff and just code.

Well, my experience with Docker, k8s, and related technologies, is that I now need to be an _expert_ with these things just to get through my day. It's exhausting.

</comment><comment> vi-mode Before I started with k8s, I've been checking Nomad many times but eventually went with k8s. Nomad's learning curve didn't seem to be better, docs felt sparse and the much bigger ecosystem with k8s shouldn't be undervalued.

</comment><comment><USER44> If you don't need container orchestration, you don't need kubernetes. If you need reliability and instead of using k8s, orchestrate your container manually you have issues.

</comment><comment><USER45> Given all the talk here about Kubernetes' learning curve, does anyone have any resources for learning it for those that haven't yet? Whether blogs, books, video courses, etc.

</comment><comment><USER46> What are you talking about, my blog that has an astounding 2 visitors a month (one or both of which are accidental clicks) definitely needs to be on kubernetes!

</comment><comment><USER47> I built a big globally scalable system without Kubernetes or containers.

It's very easy to understand and is highly reliable.

</comment><comment><USER48> Personally, I've found Chef Habitat to be a sane alternative. I don't have any experience with k8s, but if you are not using containers especially, Habitat gets you:

\- packaging

\- deploys

\- configuration management

\- supervision

\- service discovery

\- isolation

in a more classic "VM" environment, using unix jails. For anyone who isn't interested in learning k8s, but also wants a relatively modern, all-in-one solution to these problems, I recommend checking it out.

</comment><comment><USER49> Nomad is awesome. Just like the original author, our tiny team went with nomad for on-prem container orchestration instead of k8s. Since then we haven't spent much time on any nomad/consul maintenance, and all that time we got back - we spent on developing the product.

Basically, I agree with others that k8s is both complex and not fully mature yet.

</comment><comment><USER5> Anecdotally, about the worst place I've seen Kubernetes used is for CI/CD pipelines where every pipeline gets a fresh cluster. It's truly a special kind of hell--it takes at least 10 minutes to get a cluster up and running (depending on cloud provider), and it causes all kinds of indeterminism and frustration. You wait for a cluster to be spun up, wait for all of the extra services to be added, have one of them fail (completely unrelated to your PR), and have to do the whole thing over again. It's truly the new version of the "compiling" XKCD.

If you ever want to see how brittle and bizarre Kubernetes can be, use it in a 100% automated fashion and hope for the best.

</comment><comment><USER50> I heard the word Kubernetes one too many times from listening to podcasts put out by The Changelog. The overhype bit got flipped in my head and now I'm predisposed against it. Marketing kills!

</comment><comment><USER51> I know it's an unpopular opinion but I don't see the point of kubernetes. It's a complexity monster which is not providing any real advantage over _way_ simpler solutions.

Even pod to pod communication, which would be trivial to do using any sane solution is a _huge_ pain in kubernetes.

I would actually be frightened by running kubernetes in production. The simplest things are so hard to do that I don't even want to think about how to fix a weird issue when something goes wrong...

<comment><USER52> > I know it's an unpopular opinion but I don't see the point of kubernetes. > It's a complexity monster which is not providing any real advantage over way > simpler solutions.

The main selling point of k8s over any other tool is that it provides a single, unified, secured, multi-tenant API endpoint for managing all of production. Your developers updating their production app use the same API as a CI system that wants to spawn some worker containers, and the same API as an operator service maintaining a Redis cluster. All of this results in a single view into production. If things go well, the end result is that you swap daily interaction with a handful of different tools with disparate states (Terraform, Ansible/Chef/Salt/Puppet, shell scripts and proprietary tools) into just managing payloads on k8s.

> Even pod to pod communication, which would be trivial to do using any sane > solution is a huge pain in kubernetes.

How is it a pain? A pod behind a service provides a DNS name that allows running requests to it - this handles the bulk of production traffic. If you want to contact a particular pod that is not behind a service just use the k8s API to retrieve details about it (like Prometheus does via k8s pod service discovery).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Of course most software companies (ie, where most of HN work) don't need Kubernetes. At this point it's become a meme for wasted engineering.

Are you creating a cloud provider?

\- If you are creating a cloud provider, then yes you might want Kubernetes. If you are making your own cloud provider, you should question why you are doing that.

\- If you're not creating a cloud provider (for example, you're a software company), then use whatever VM / container / MicroVM / etc your cloud provider gives you rather than layering your own unnecessary complexity that adds questionable value on top of what your pay for from your cloud provider.

<comment> UK-Al05 Normally cloud providers provide k8s to their customers.

<comment><USER13> Yes, that's the biggest use of Kubernetes. Most cloud providers provide Xen VMs, containers (via whatever orchestration mechanism) or MicroVMs. Most people making software shouldn't care which. It's a box to run code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I get really sick of these types of posts because it helps to fuel a weird contrarian and/or fear based avoidance of these technologies. Then the company goes down a rabbit hole of inventing their own thing that basically is an in house version of kubernetes but worse. I think kubernetes is pretty easy, I'm not sure why companies are so against it other than wanting to be "even cooler than the cool kids".

<comment><USER54> To start: not everyone is a company. Not everything is about companies. When people bringing overly complex, mostly useless in this context, tech like kubernetes to a personal environment it's silly. But whatever, it's what they know.

But when they start telling other people to learn kubernetes because it's so useful then it's annoying. And there are _lots_ of people advocating for using kubernetes on small personal projects. When they get pressed they all fall back to the justification, "You should use kubernetes in personal projects to learn kubernetes." which is back to silly again.

That's where these kinds of critical articles come from.</comment></comment>


The New Aaron Swartz Documentary Looks Powerful. Here's the Trailer - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/04/29/_the_internet_s_own_boy_about_aaron_swartz_is_a_kickstarter_funded_documentary.html <comment><USER2> I hope Carmen Ortiz gets adequate coverage in the movie to expose what she is and has done. I know its a bigger problem and all that but she shouldn't be let off the hook that easily. And I don't care if that sounds vengeful/mean/trolling - he was basically driven to suicide because of her cornering and bulling him using overzealous prosecutorial overreach.

<comment><USER3> Id been under the impression that Carmen's actions were par-for-the-course for prosecutors in the US. Is this not the case?

<comment><USER2> I'm not familiar enough with typical prosecutorial practice in the US legal system. However, when a prosecutor's overreaching actions in a case, which clearly was not for a heinous crime, results in the death of a bright young man who was fighting for freedom of information, I think it warrants that all parties are put under the spotlight and their actions adequately examined. If corrective steps are to be taken to avoid such tragedies, people have a right to know what wrongs were done before they can voice their opinions via their lawmakers/voting etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I backed this movie & I am very excited about this movie! The trailer looks amazing as well.

Also- I would strongly encourage people to also look at Aaron's writing on making Wikipedia better (which has profound consequences for the internet) [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia)

====

So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple study to find out: he counted who made the most edits to the site. "I expected to find something like an 80-20 rule: 80% of the work being done by 20% of the users, just because that seems to come up a lot. But it's actually much, much tighter than that: it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users … 524 people. … And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." The remaining 25% of edits, he said, were from "people who [are] contributing … a minor change of a fact or a minor spelling fix … or something like that."

==== Curious and skeptical, I decided to investigate. ====

I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. I wrote a little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the latest version.† Instead of counting edits, as Wales did, I counted the number of letters a user actually contributed to the present article.

If you just count edits, it appears the biggest contributors to the Alan Alda article (7 of the top 10) are registered users who (all but 2) have made thousands of edits to the site. Indeed, #4 has made over 7,000 edits while #7 has over 25,000. In other words, if you use Wales's methods, you get Wales's results: most of the content seems to be written by heavy editors.

But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit — this one! With the more reasonable metric — indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study — the result completely reverses.

I don't have the resources to run this calculation across all of Wikipedia (there are over 60 million edits!), but I ran it on several more randomly- selected articles and the results were much the same. For example, the largest portion of the Anaconda article was written by a user who only made 2 edits to it (and only 100 on the entire site). By contrast, the largest number of edits were made by a user who appears to have contributed no text to the final article (the edits were all deleting things and moving things around).

<comment><USER5> This is really interesting. You should write a blog post and publish the source.

<comment><USER6> The source is linked int he beginning of his comment: [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia) . He was quoting it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm one of the film's backers and the operator of a site based on Aaron's work. We still need your help opening PACER.

[http://www.plainsite.org/asymptote/](http://www.plainsite.org/asymptote/)

[http://www.recapthelaw.org](http://www.recapthelaw.org)

</comment><comment><USER8> I made an Aaron Swartz Timeline some time back: [http://newslines.org/aaron- swartz/](http://newslines.org/aaron-swartz/)

</comment><comment><USER9> What happened to Aaron's law? Seems like it's been almost a year with no progress.

<comment><USER7> Congress happened.

[https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr2454](https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr2454)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I enjoyed it. Kind of a sad story though. What's with the other reddit guys refusing to be in it?

<comment><USER11> Probably didn't have enough positive stuff to say about him, so they opted not to say anything at all.

He lost interest in Reddit at some point and just got really flaky... not turning up for work and shit like that. Think he was going through depression at the time and there was a bit of drama around all that.

EDIT: It's a real shame he and Alexis Ohanian didn't get along better... it seems that thay could have made a great team, with him being the soldier and Ohanian the diplomat in a fight against govts/corporations (SOPA, TPP, etc) impinging on our freedoms online.

<comment><USER12> This ancient reddit thread covers most of the "drama" from both sides:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_cof...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_cofounder_aaron_swartz_discusses_how_he/)

<comment><USER13> Thanks! Any chance you could breif that? I'm curious but lacking time to read through and make sense it all.

<comment><USER14> Essentially he wanted to be a cofounder of something.

It was decided that he would 'merge' with reddit, but the reddit guys described it as him turning up one day and them having to deal with it.

He was flaky and got fired.

Yes theres lots of other details but thats the gist of it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The video doesn't play for me. Anybody have a youtube link?

<comment><USER16> Out of curiosity what is the monetary benefit of self hosting streaming video?

<comment><USER15> I dunno dude. I can't seem to play anything on slate. ghostery blocks it. So I disable ghostery and the video element loads. I click play and the video does not play.

YouTube works fine with ghostery.

I want to watch shit online without people watching me. I don't think that's unreasonable. Lots of sites try to make it really fucking hard, though.

/end rant

<comment><USER17> If sites embedding video would simply post links to the YouTube content, that would help markedly.

I had the same problem FWIW: absolutely nothing on Slate's page evidenced that there _was_ video let alone where it was hosted. Thanks HN for pointing out the sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> He wrote some really interesting articles too, aside from his activism. For all of you Dark Knight fans check the most recent one out: ([http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/](http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/))

</comment><comment><USER19> Saw it at the Toronto Hot Docs, great movie.

</comment><comment><USER20> Look's promising, can't wait

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if I'll be able to see it legally in my country.

<comment><USER15> Legally meaning right-to-stream? Or legally meaning uncensored?

Forgive my ignorance, I do not know which country you are in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am super excited to learn more about him and the case.

</comment><comment><USER23> I hit play and got a Google "sponsor message" for funeral cost insurance. Full marks for sensitivity Google...

</comment><comment><USER24> Here's my question. I don't know if the documentary follows this vein or answers it, but I'd like to know. Does Carmen Ortiz (or her bosses) feel sincere remorse? Or does she feel like she's a victim of who-knows-what?

Like Richard Fernandez [1], I can say the appropriateness of her behavior is beyond my competence to comment on, but the context of her actions is pretty interesting.

Carmen was being groomed for a potential run for Governor. Before her witch hunt blew up in her face, she was getting glowing media exposure [2], describing her as the protege of high Democratic Party officials, helping cement her story in the minds of voters.

Sadly, in American politics it's all about the story you can tell. Oh, your parents were born in Puerto Rico, and you grew up in poor areas of NYC? Well, dear, with your rags-to-riches story and our headlines, we'll sell plenty of birdcage liner, we'll sell your story to the masses, and good luck on your election.

The story is what matters ... and the _story_ of a US Attorney who grew up in a housing project while Hispanic and female makes a formidable political opponent. The "narrative" plays such an important part in public life these days that people can hardly go anywhere without it. From Lance Armstrong to Manti Te'o everybody seems to need an angle.

It seems to me like Carmen just needed a good scalp to hang on her wall, and if that meant charging Aaron to the moon and back (hoping for a plea deal to a tiny fraction of the charges) well you know what they say about eggs and omelets.

But ... Aaron was a human being. You can only push someone so far, before they behave in a way you don't expect. And how the mighty Carmen fell [3]:

 _Just days ago, speculation was rampant. Gov. Carmen Ortiz? U.S. Sen. Carmen Ortiz? Well, that's all over now. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz is done. Finished. Forever linked to bringing the full and frightening weight of the federal government down upon a 26-year-old computer genius — and a suicide risk._

So like I said, how does she feel? Another article in the Boston herald [4] mentioned she was terribly upset at Aaron's death ... but if you read carefully, the article says she was terribly upset at _being blamed for_ Aaron's death. Now that's something different.

I know where I stand. I suspect for legal reasons the film doesn't even touch this question, which is maybe even reasonable, I guess ... give her the benefit of the doubt ... but at the same time it's rather sad, since she certainly didn't give that to Aaron.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----

[1] [http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/01/17/crime- story/](http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/01/17/crime-story/)

[2] [http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/12/07/patrick- reported...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/12/07/patrick-reportedly- cites-prosecutor-vying-for-governor/0aEpGj5QqjvJfgSwgFNc7H/story.html)

[3] [http://bostonherald.com/comments/1062230411](http://bostonherald.com/comments/1062230411)

[4] [http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/01/...](http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/01/emotional_carmen_ortiz_terribly_upset%E2%80%99_over_swartz_suicide)

[also] [http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/01/17/ortiz-is- done...](http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/01/17/ortiz-is-done/)

</comment><comment><USER25> hope the movie is not as one sided as the long version trailer.

aaron knew about the current laws. aaron decided to break the law, absolutely no grey area there. trespassed, hooked his machine physically up where it did not belong. aaron tried to be a hero, just like ghandi or mandela. when he faced similar consequences like those - his weakened state of mind kicked in and he ended his life.

a little bit like a little kid touching a hot plate and then being surprised about the massive consequences and overwhelming pain. where were all his friends and peers during those actions? did nobody notice he was playing with fire? nobody told him to back off?

<comment><USER26> Aaron went into a place with public access internet (MIT) and had a python script download public documents that anyone on MIT's network had access (and the legal right) to download.

While an argument could be made that JSTOR didn't want people downloading so many so quickly they could have solved that other ways - nothing here was breaking the law. It was _technically_ legal.

An argument could be made that Aaron planned to publicly release them to everyone on the internet for free (I didn't get to meet him personally, but from what I know about him I think this is likely). That was never part of the crimes he was charged for and frankly I'm not sure if it was even alleged. JSTOR understood this, dropped charges and backed out.

He was then charged with 13 felonies:

      Wire Fraud - 2 counts
      Computer Fraud - 5 counts
      Unlawfully Obtaining Information from a Protected Computer - 5 counts
      Recklessly Damaging a Protected Computer - 1 count

Aaron was someone who probably would have been acquitted ($1.5 million dollars in legal costs later), who's actions weren't illegal that was bullied with multiple decades in prison and driven to suicide because he was trying to do the right thing.

When asked about the government's actions in pursuing him, Carmen Ortiz defended her (and the government's) actions as "appropriate".

Is that Justice?

Copyright law was originally intended as an incentive for people to create, a deal with the government for a limited time monopoly in order to generate content for the public's benefit. The original spirit of the law has been lost - along with our republic. [1]

[1] [http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html)

<comment><USER27> The MIT network isn't "public." They let guests use it with proper registration. You ignore MIT's repeated attempts to lock him out and his working around their countermeasures each time, leading to more and more escalation. If he had just run his scraper exactly once and then stopped the first time he was kicked off, no one would have cared.

He also wasn't facing "multiple decades in prison." This has been debunked so many times it's getting exhausting, but once again I'll point out that his lawyer was not a complete hayseed and understood that, even if Aaron went to trial and was found guilty on every single count, he would face at most a few years in jail, and quite possibly no jail time at all.

<comment><USER26> What is the distinction between public and allows public guest use without registration? Yes it's MIT's network, but they were basically allowing public access.

Being pressured with multiple years in prison, 13 felonies and a 7 figure defense cost is a difficult problem to face. Even if your lawyer tells you 30 years in prison is not going to happen and worst case you'll be in prison for a year -- Even if he wasn't actually facing it - he was still being pressured with it (that's essentially the purpose of stringing together multiple charges for a plea).

<comment><USER27> It's not "basically allowing public access." MIT was actively and repeatedly kicking him off their network, and it got to the point where Aaron gave up and resorted to physically trespassing to regain access.

Facing criminal charges is indeed difficult. You don't need to make up stuff to make the problem sound worse than it is.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can a company furlough or cut pay to employees on a work visa? - <AUTHOR> If a company has employees on a work visa, can the company furlough or cut pay to employes that are in the US on a work visa? <comment><USER2> There was an AMA from the visa atorney of YC ten days ago. Perhaps you can find something related there.</comment>


Literature-Based Discovery - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature-based_discovery <comment><USER2> There was a recent paper published in Nature about this applied to materials science: [https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613933/ai-nlp- scientific-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613933/ai-nlp-scientific- abstracts-material-science/)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's really weird that this has a name. Reading papers and deducing new knowledge is all theoretical physicsts do. The same goes for theoretical- anything-else.

<comment><USER4> Within a field it's what most scientists do. Between fields, or subfields, it's less common. When a field gets very large such that no one can keep up with it all, Literature-Based Discovery by machine is useful.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Would love to hear from anyone who experience actually using this.

<comment><USER5> There are quite a few machine learning projects focused on automating this. No idea how effective in practice. E.g. India recently launched a massive academic paper archive specifically for this purpose.</comment></comment>