Ask HN: How do you stay focused on your side projects? - <AUTHOR> I have a full-time job, but I love nothing more than to come home and work on my personal side projects (sometimes at the behest of my girlfriend, but she understands). I have some solid ideas, but feel as though I have too many ideas. I have one idea I would like to complete which is a classifieds website. It's rather simple, I've designed it and have a bit of code written using the PHP framework Codeigniter. I however feel as though my enthusiasm for the project has dwindled lately (maybe I'm depressed or just over-worked) but I do want to finish it. I start coding it and then I start rewriting parts I think could be better (infinite scope creep). Don't get me started on my other project that I've been working on for 6 years either...<p>How do you keep focused on your personal projects in the midst of life commitments, work and the other curve balls that life throws you? I see some amazing side projects occasionally get submitted to HN and am jealous of people who manage to release things. I would love some tips and advice and some stories from fellow entrepreneurial HN'ers. <comment><USER2> "How do you keep focused on your personal projects in the midst of life commitments, work and the other curve balls that life throws you?"

How many hours a day/week do you spend on HN? Why not route news.ycombinator.com to 127.0.0.1 for a week and spend that time working on your personal projects? If you find that isn't enough time, you should figure out why you dont have at least a free hour a day. Usually it'll be something trivial like miscounting other entertainment times, which you can redirect.

</comment><comment><USER3> For me the best motivator has been witnessing the success of a good friend's side project [1]. That, and I've also found that it's really important to commit to imperfection. It's better to have something small out there garnering feedback than it is to build something in a vacuum for months at a time.

Try taking a planned weekend to scrap together the absolute minimum features of your project that might be useful to another individual, and publish them. Commit to actually publishing by the end of the weekend so long as at least one other person might find usefulness in your work. Publish no matter how imperfect it is. My side project's [1] plan is a gazillion times bigger and more interactive than what's implemented today, but what finally got it out the door was the exercise I just described.

[1]: <http://corkboard.me> [2]: <https://threadcheck.me>

</comment><comment><USER4> 1\. The test-driven idea above is a really good one. I find a combo of running tests and auto-docs to be Powerful in keeping me motivated. Python doctest, sphinx Are excellent

2\. MVP and focus - really choose one small thing and ship it Script your deployment process so you can in _one day_ write a function run the tests then push it live. That will seriously motivate you

3\. Outside help - know anyone else who might work with you? There is a very good reason pg says solo founders don't work well. The motivation levels needed are huge.

4\. Put time aside in the week to see your girlfriend (over a table, with a candle, just on the sofa does not count). Similar with family friends. Don't go mad on this try a date night each week and a friends night. Your social life may improve (depends where you are now I guess)

</comment><comment><USER5> Make your side project test driven or use bdd principles to lock down what it is you're trying to achieve. Don't change your code unless its tied to a required feature. That should stop scope creep and that feeling of being lost in the code without direction.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been working on a side project for about 6 months. It grew out of a need I saw in some friend's primary businesses and thought it was a worthwhile project. I essentially worked on it about 2-3 weeknights a week and about 4-5 hours on Sat and Sun as time permitted.

I stayed focused by setting small goals, achieve this function by the end of today, then call it quits. Before I knew it the code was finished to my satisfaction. I finished the code at the end of January and have some ideas for the next project.

I try to get one side project (One SaaS app I can sell to subscribers online typically) a year completed. This one took about 200-300 hours I think, thought that's just a rough guess.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have too many side projects, i'm a terminal project starter. My real "project" is learning to just pick one and follow through.

</comment><comment><USER8> Read <http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/1136623767/finishing-a-game>, and everywhere where he says "game", replace it with "your side project".

Shipping makes everything better.</comment>


3.8M-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor discovered in Ethiopia - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-49486980 <comment><USER3> >The reason for this likely elevated status is because we can now say that anamensis and afarensis actually overlapped in time.

This seems to be the rule, rather than the other exception, at least in human evolution. Erectus overlapped with more modern archaics, for example. Habilis overlapped with afarensis.

A lot of these are more about the semantics than the substance. Words like "species" get tricky, when you're dealing with chronspecies, introgression and such.

In any case, our evolution since speciating from chimps is extremely bushy. There are lots of species, and several families. The process involved lots of innovation/speciation and extinctions. Ie, The australopithecine family that this species may have founded produced many species, including at least two that formed their own families with multiple species of their own (paranthropous & homo).

I think this is characteristic of fast evolutionary processes.

<comment><USER4> My impression is that we just don't have enough _data_ to draw an accurate timeline, much less a tree, and are an order of magnitude away from being able to study second-order phenomenon like introgression. I think fewer than 10,000 early hominid individuals have been found, most with very partial skeletons. And they aren't distributed uniformly across time and space; you might find a dozen in one cave, then nothing for thousands of years, or nothing on an entire continent.

"You could fit it all into the back of a pickup truck if you didn't mind how much you jumbled everything up." \- Ian Tattersall

[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6578939-since-the-dawn- of-t...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6578939-since-the-dawn-of-time- several-billion-human-or-humanlike)

It also seems like every time they find a new fossil, they change their mind about how everything fits together. I am not an expert in this field, but if I had a small dataset and I fit a very complex model to it with literally hundreds of free parameters and I found that the model completely changed every time I added a few new data points and re-fit, then I would conclude I was dealing with a high-variance model that was overfitting the data and either use a simpler model or wait until I had collected much more data before trying to fit such a complex model.

<comment><USER5> Is it wrong to believe at this point that instead of macro evolution, we could be looking at several differing extinction points?

<comment><USER6> I think the point is that we know so little that we might look at a huge number of wildly different scenarios.

So... keep digging!

<comment><USER7> Or..that we need more faith to believe in evolution than to believe in creation

<comment><USER8> Maybe, but creation has zero evidence in its favor

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Regarding the multiple human ancestors aspect, here is an diagram of human species or groups if you want to avoid the "what is a species discussion" : [https://imgur.com/a/AfrYjqF](https://imgur.com/a/AfrYjqF) It is from a recent symposium [1] on human evolution The vertical axis is the age. The horizontal axis represent the geographical spread and the color represents the continent.

We can see multiples things:

\- Disregard the 2010, it is indeed up-to-date. These past few years new bars have been added regularly.

\- A single homo species is a new development and is an exception and not the rule

\- Not only did different species live at the same time they sometimes lived in the same places

\- There is no edges between the groups to represent ancestors as a simple "single ancestor" link is not easy to establish.

[1] [https://www.college-de-france.fr/media/jean-jacques- hublin/U...](https://www.college-de-france.fr/media/jean-jacques- hublin/UPL4439769573810557760_Jean_Jacques_HUBLIN___colloque_juin_2019.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Wow, that is an amazing chart!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The impression I got from a recent PBS Eons video on the non-existing missing link[0] is that interbreeding happened all the time and that a very realistic possibility for the answer is _" most, possibly all of them"_.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwW40Dj5Sro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwW40Dj5Sro)

<comment><USER3> At >4mybp, this species may have been genetically close enough to interbreed with chimp ancestors. If it overlapped with afarensis and other australopithecines, hybridisation almost certainly would have been possible. These guys were as closely related (at least in the earliest periods) to eachother as we were to Neanderthals, denisovans and the other undiscovered species who we know our ancestors mixed with.

Homo habilis started its career as an australapithicine, and could probably reproduce with "non-homo" species.

A lot of the classification only makes sense after the fact. If habilis hadn't produced the homo genus, it would just be an australapithicine, and we wouldn't consider it separate from them.

<comment><USER12> To what extent does number of chromosomes matter, here? I'm still confused about how species with different number of chromosomes can successfully interbreed without major problems in their offspring and thus I am still confused about the process of how a species can change its number of chromosomes (since the genetic problems that might occur with such crossbreeding would not likely be terribly helpful in survival). Is there any really good explanation for this that someone can point me to?

<comment><USER3> Having a different number of chromosomes is a hurdle, but not an absolute barrier to offspring reproductive viability. It's not necessarily an issue for animal health.

Horses & donkeys have a different number of chromosomes. They're also separated by an estimated 4m years of evolution, which is around the rule of thumb limit for large mammal hybridization so it makes sense that they're borderline hybridizable. They have shorter generations than us apes.

Anyway, mules are healthy. No survival issues. They _are_ mostly infertile, but not 100% of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How do {archaeologists?, paleoanthropologists?} even know where to look for these things?

"There's a whole bunch of land, let's dig... [throws dart at map] here."

<comment><USER14> The corollary of this is pretty awe inspiring - we find only a fraction of a percent of the fossil record that exists, and the fossil record that exists is only a fraction of a percent of everything that happened, all the species that existed, etc.

The fact that we can still derive meaningful knowledge out of that compounded fraction of fraction of a percent is amazing; and the quantity of mind blowing things that happened that we will never get to know because they weren't "recorded" is humbling.

<comment><USER15> It also seems to imply that as discoveries on the surface dry up, we could make many more with deeper excavations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why does it have to be only one ancestor ape, and not several that evolved human-like features simultaneously in the same environment?

We have Neanderthal DNA, that we inherited through interbreeding.

Why can't both we and the Neanderthals be descendent from a varied group of very similar apes that interbred as well? Isn't this the most likely scenario?

Sometimes I think scientists fall for the same simplistic patterns of thinking that the men on the street fall for every day.

Like, there is only one solution, there is only one cause, there is only one reason, when in fact reality is much more complex than that.

<comment><USER17> HN is such an amazing community. Where else could you find commenters that know better than the scientists authoring the Nature article in question, and can then identify exactly why their own thinking is so much deeper than of most other people?

<comment><USER18> > Where else could you find commenters that know better than the scientists > authoring the Nature article in question,

They don't _know_ better, they try to _understand_ better. Why not?

<comment><USER19> Does the comment strike you as "understanding" or even "trying to understand"?

It paints a blanket picture, with no qualifications (read a few articles at best), and belittles what the scientists in general "do".

<comment><USER20> Also the point the commenter thinks they're original in making is the main point of the actual article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Prof Haile-Selassie? Is Haile-Selassie a common last name or has he anything to do with the other Haile Selassie?

<comment><USER22> The naming conventions in Ethiopia are different than the western world. My Ethiopian friend explained it to me that the first name is their name, second is father's name, third grandfather's. I'm not sure about the hyphen though. See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_conventions_in_Ethiopia...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_conventions_in_Ethiopia_and_Eritrea)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The truth is far more complex and far more interesting. It tells a story of > evolution "trying out" different "prototype" human ancestors in different > places until some of them were resilient and clever enough to withstand the > pressures wrought by changes in climate, habitat and food scarcity - <USER2> > evolve into us.

To me this is the gist of the article as well of the stream of recent discoveries and papers released. It's also a pattern that permeates computer science nowadays, applying to different realms, from system design to DevOps to team collaboration.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is there any type of ultrasound-like equipment used by archaeologists that scans below ground and allows some crude-resolution view of whats below?

<comment><USER25> Yes, but it's "crude", and therefore not very high resolution. I've never seen anything high enough resolution to discover bone fragments. The same technology is used for oil and gas exploration.

See:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground- penetrating_radar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar)

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

[https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/energy-and- environment/tool...](https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/energy-and- environment/tools-and-processes/exploration-technology/discovering-hidden- hydrocarbons-using-seismic-imaging-technology-to-map-formations)

[https://www.pgs.com/imaging/](https://www.pgs.com/imaging/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if it is possible to extract some DNA from the artifact and use it for cloning?

<comment><USER27> I don't think it's possible unless the fossil is well-preserved in a way that some cells retain intact genetic materials[1].

[1] - [https://youtu.be/cQR5P_C2ElE?t=2373](https://youtu.be/cQR5P_C2ElE?t=2373)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting to see the intermediate nose shape as it evolved from ape to human.

</comment><comment><USER29> How did they determine its age?

<comment><USER30> > A fossil hominin cranium was discovered in mid-Pliocene deltaic strata in > the Godaya Valley of the northwestern Woranso-Mille study area in Ethiopia. > Here we show that analyses of chemically correlated volcanic layers and the > palaeomagnetic stratigraphy, combined with Bayesian modelling of dated > tuffs, yield an age range of 3.804 ± 0.013 to 3.777 ± 0.014 million years > old (mean ± 1σ) for the deltaic strata and the fossils that they contain.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1514-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1514-7)

<comment><USER29> ELI5

<comment><USER31> They found the bone in the rock. Scientists look at the rock and can tell the rocks age. They assume that the bone is about the same age as the rock it was found inside.

<comment><USER29> And how did they determine the age of the rock?

<comment><USER32> There are many methods of determining rock age. A common one is finding signature fossils that are known to only exist between certain ages. Putting the rock in a machine to record its magnetic field and correlating this with pole reversals on earth. Using isotope ratios (not just radiocarbon dating), chemical composition, identifying how the sediment was laid down by rivers or the sea etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Nature be damned, this has hoax written all over it.

</comment><comment><USER34> The concept of species is a construct of language.

<comment><USER35> Members of the same species can procreate fertile offspring. In some edge cases this definition becomes a little fuzzy, but it is clearly more than just a linguistic construct. A mouse and an elephant won't be able to procreate even if the word "species" didn't exist.

<comment><USER36> It's true the same species implies fertile offspring, but it does not go the other way as you seem to be implying. In other words fertile offspring does not imply same species. For some examples, chihuahuas and wolves can produce fertile offspring, as can lions/tigers, killer whales/dolphins, and many more peculiar pairings.

It's quite difficult to pin down a precise definition for species. Even genetic definitions don't work so well. Depending on how it is measured chimps hit around 99% genetic similarity with humans. Nature isn't so kind as to provide clean and concrete delineations for us, at least not that we're currently capable of measuring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Sure, this isn't a popular opinion around here but I find all of these theories such nonsense. Creationism, to me, is a lot kore logical than a random big bang - fast fwd apes / fast fwd humans. So many random events with hardly any logic attached to it. Humans have grown to be so full of themselves, especially in this tech age, where a lot of us find it hard to believe there's a more intelligent being out there that could have placed us here in the first place. Human arrogance is destroying us from the inside.

</comment><comment><USER38> What bugs me is the concept of "one point origin". Are we even exploring different angles? Also, how a 4m year old bone is so prestine? African ancestory hoaxes are so common that i just read such news for the sake of it. Doesnt chamge anything even if it were true. But i like the idea that we are sobriety special, even tho the opposite is also just as amazing.

</comment><comment><USER39> Evolution is simply not sufficient. Dr. David Gelertner, a CS professor from Yale, penned an essay in May that lays out the high level argument against Darwin/Evolution, including references to background material.

[https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up- darwin/](https://www.claremont.org/crb/article/giving-up-darwin/)

<comment><USER40> Ugh, no. Intelligent Design strikes again I see. Almost everything in that article is wrong (and also, the same tired pseudoscientific arguments), starting from the fact he claims "Darwinism" is a "credo". Also, Stephen Meyer is not brilliant and he is a quack.

Also, a Computer Science professor has no business arguing about evolution. Or rather, his opinion is as informed as yours or mine, i.e. not very.

<comment><USER41> Sometimes it's no harm to have eyes from outside a discipline have a look at things.

<comment><USER40> But this guy mostly took a look at things from widely discredited and dishonest Intelligent Design and Creationist sources (every single person he mentions in his article). ID organizations like the Discovery Institute (of which he quotes people related to) is known to be fundamentally dishonest in trying to hide religious beliefs and pass them as science.

So it's fundamentally dishonest. If this CS professor said "I'm a conservative religious guy [as is the case], I fundamentally believe in Creationism and mainstream science gets in the way of my beliefs" it'd be one thing. We could safely disregard his beliefs in evolution while acknowledging he was honest about choosing his religious beliefs over current science.

It should be noted that another lie of Intelligent Design is that it constantly re-invents itself as the "new thing" but it's as old as the science of evolution. It's essentially Creationism wrapped in new language, but even in this guise it's pretty old. It has been discredited again, and again, and again.

For someone "outside a discipline" to be worth paying attention to, he/she must:

\- Accurately describe the current state of the art in said discipline, and explain why they chose to pursue a line of thought at odds with it.

\- Take pains not to misrepresent the field they are talking about, and accurately address current beliefs and not outdated views. They must not engage in demolishing strawmen.

\- Explain how their current expertise relate to the field they are talking about.

\- Be honest about their intentions. If it's about religion, they should say so upfront, so people interested about science can decide whether they find religious arguments relevant.

\- Be honest about how they represent the fringe views purportedly backing their own opinion. For example, he claims "Stephen Meyer demolished Darwinism", but Meyer did nothing of the sort -- he is widely thought of as a fringe creationist quack, with no scientific reputation at all within the field of biology. He could instead have argued "Stephen Meyer, contrary to mainstream scientific thought, argues that [something]" instead of saying he "demolished" something (which a cursory search would reveal he didn't). This is a huge red flag.

<comment><USER42> Let me get this straight... a noteworthy CS professor points out some obvious and undeniable flaws in the current theory or protein 'evolution.' He also points out that is difficult to get serious researchers to grapple with this issue because Darwinism has turned into a dogma where people are viciously attacked if they point out some fundamental flaws with the idea.

Your response:

"Almost everything in that article is wrong "

"pseudoscientific arguments"

"Stephen Meyer is not brilliant and he is a quack"

" Computer Science professor has no business arguing about evolution"

"widely discredited and dishonest "

"known to be fundamentally dishonest"

"So it's fundamentally dishonest."

"another lie"

"fringe views"

"fringe creationist quack"

In short, you've proved his point. Your comments -- in any other area of discussion on HN -- would probably get you flagged.

<comment><USER40> > _a noteworthy CS professor points out some obvious and undeniable flaws in > the current theory or protein 'evolution.' He also points out that is > difficult to get serious researchers to grapple with this issue because > Darwinism has turned into a dogma where people are viciously attacked if > they point out some fundamental flaws with the idea._

All of this is wrong.

A noteworthy CS professor has zero relevance in a discussion about evolution or biology, particularly when he quotes people who aren't notable in the relevant field and tries to "demolish" strawmen. The word "demolish" is itself a huge red flag.

The sources he quoted are creationist crackpots linked to the Discovery Institute, a notoriously dishonest organization who disguises religion as science.

It is a mistake for the scientific community to engage with crackpots.

> _Your comments -- in any other area of discussion on HN -- would probably > get you flagged._

No, calling crackpots crackpots -- the mainstream consensus -- won't get me flagged. A big indicator of quackery is a persecution complex ("everyone is against me because of dogma", "they want to suppress dissenting views"). I think it's even in Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit. Sometimes people will call someone a crackpot because they've heard their arguments again and again, debunked them, and still that person insists, with a heavy dose of "the world is conspiring against me". It's ok to call that person a crackpot.

One last thing: in the US the term "Darwinism" (which the article uses) is almost always used by Creationists, and in a pejorative way. From Wikipedia ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinism#Other_uses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinism#Other_uses)):

 _" The term Darwinism is often used in the United States by promoters of creationism, notably by leading members of the intelligent design movement, as an epithet to attack evolution as though it were an ideology (an "ism") of philosophical naturalism, or atheism. For example, UC Berkeley law professor and author Phillip E. Johnson makes this accusation of atheism with reference to Charles Hodge's book What Is Darwinism? (1874). However, unlike Johnson, Hodge confined the term to exclude those like American botanist Asa Gray who combined Christian faith with support for Darwin's natural selection theory, before answering the question posed in the book's title by concluding: "It is Atheism." Creationists use the term Darwinism, often pejoratively, to imply that the theory has been held as true only by Darwin and a core group of his followers, whom they cast as dogmatic and inflexible in their belief."_</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Microsoft Band - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/Microsoft-Band/

<comment><USER2> "Band"? Didn't realize this was about a wearable</comment>


Ask HN: How to get people to talk to you? - <AUTHOR> Getting feedback and iterating is well understand to be important for getting a product to success. It relies on taking to industry people, potential and current customers and your network. Yet in my experience getting people to talk is outrageously difficult. I'm starting to believe there is a phenomena of deep fatigue around responding to anyone about anything.
By talk I mean respond in anyway: email, social media etc.
There are three groups that I expect to have different success rates:
1. Cold outreach. I expected this group to be the toughest and it is tough. I've discovered that even if you only reach out after extensively researching a person and know they will have at least minimal interest in the subject, don't expect a response, like almost ever to any question (remember this is not sales, just an ask for a question or feed back).  Some business books suggest if you just reach out people will be happy to talk. Nonsense in my experience.
2. Users of the product. You have a customer using the product but want to find out what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong. Or you have a user who spent several hours using the product but hasn't been back for a while. You want to know why. My expectation was that these people would be more keen to talk but the response rate may actually be worse than the cold outreach.
3. Your LinkedIn and direct social media contacts. This group includes people you have worked with in person, sometimes for several years. Not friends or family but certainly well known colleagues who definitely know who you are, what your face looks like, your voice, what you like to get for lunch. Expectation is these people will definitely talk. This one is the biggest shocker. They don't! They ignore messages as if they don't even know you.
Anyone else seeing this? Have you discovered you were making a big mistake with your approach and changed this up? We have more ways to communicate than ever but no one's talking. <comment><USER2> Just spitballing here, but it seems like you're not giving enough value to people for any of those cases you mentioned. You want something from these people (feedback) -- that thing has value -- give them something of value for it. IMHO:

1\. The trickiest group to "give" something for, because they're the most wary of scams from people they don't know/have no connection to. What you can give is less clear here, because it really depends on who you're trying to outreach to. Are you trying to find new users of the product? What do they have feedback to give to you on? It semes like the most value you can give here is either making something so cool (or presenting it as thus) that people want to give feedback, or promising some sort of rebate or coupon or something. Invite them to a "beta" user program, make it seem VIP, stuff like that.

2\. Kind of the same thing as #1, make a beta program, give them priority support, make them feel like VIPs. Give them discounts for what is quite valuable to you.

3\. Buy someone lunch/coffee/dinner/whatever and tell them up front you'd love to pick their brain on what you're working on. Trade them something for it -- ask if they have something they want you to test or look at as well.

I have no idea if any of the above is right, but I think I'm right at least in when I'm saying that the amount of value you're offering people for this thing you have a pretty high demand/utility for (feedback) is not being matched on your part.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this. A year ago, or even perhaps 6 months ago I would have said you're right and I'll try it. Now I'd say been there done that. Not to suggest your advice is wrong, I think it's probably correct but I think it's something else, beyond this.

What's your experience? Has what you suggest been enough to get YOU the outcome you desired?

<comment><USER2> I can't say I do much of #1 or #2, but my advice for #3, was worked well amongst my friendgroup. Though of course, we end up doing more than just talking about the product I'm trying to run by them, I generally get some decent feedback, even on little things.</comment></comment></comment>


WorkingClass – an human readable plain text todo list syntax - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TimKaechele/WorkingClass

<comment><USER2> Last week I started to test my own syntax in html, so it gets syntax highlight for free.

<goal title="Fix ajax navigation" start="08:50" >

      <task done title="check pushState has correct state" />
      <task title="check state is restored on popstate event" >
         <task done title="other subtask" />
         <task title="" />
      </task>

</goal>

There is a plugin for sublime to insert date/time that makes easy to insert the time when you start your task/goal. [https://github.com/FichteFoll/InsertDate](https://github.com/FichteFoll/InsertDate)

I like this structure because can be nested and folded unfolded with most html editors, then when you leave your task and you come back to it later, it's easy to know the steps you made, where you are, etc. It's cool to have when you have a problem that leads you to another problem that leads you to another that.. you know what I mean.</comment>


179 Artists Urge Congress to Update DCMA - <AUTHOR> http://pitchfork.com/news/66252-jack-white-trent-reznor-beck-more-join-petition-against-youtube/ <comment><USER2> I can't imagine a web without the safe-harbour provision, it it is a fundamental protection for services which would have no protection from trolling users.

Although, I'm interested to see what can be down to improve artist protections whilst retaining the intent of the original laws.</comment>


Fun with Software-Defined Radios: Mapping the Spectrum in the Mission, SF - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@BeepLabs/fun-with-software-defined-radios-d547c83a7492 <comment><USER2> If you try to estimate power spectral density using the intuitive unbiased estimator (the DFT), you are going to have a bad time. A vanilla periodogram has very high sideband leakage, which means that the energy of the signal at a single frequency will look as if it "smeared out" across neighboring frequencies. The standard solution to this is to use the so-called 'modified periodogram' where the implicit rectangular window is replaced by a different windowing function with lower sideband leakage. In general, there is a direct tradeoff between sideband power and center frequency power, and in this application, you would do well to use a different window, such as the blackman-harris, or hamming window. See [1] for more details.

In addition even the modified periodogram discussed above has asymptotically nonzero variance [2], which means no matter how many samples you take, you will still have 'noise' in your PSD estimate. If you use biased estimators of the periodogram, such as the welch-bartlett method or the blackman-tukey algorithm, you will get much better results.

[1] [http://www.ni.com/white-paper/4844/en/](http://www.ni.com/white- paper/4844/en/)

[2] [http://www.mathworks.com/help/signal/ug/nonparametric- method...](http://www.mathworks.com/help/signal/ug/nonparametric-methods.html)

<comment><USER3> In theory, everything you write is correct.

In practice, none of it matter in this case. The leakage of rectangular window is ~30dB at a distance of 30 bins, and they aggregate more than 30 adjacent bins together ("re-bin"), making the leakage no more than 1 bin. To make things worse, the dynamic range of their receiver barely scrapes 40dB (peak) or 30dB (SFDR/SINR) - rendering the use of a more sophisticated window a moot point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the $650 pricetag for the hardware described in the post leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you can use a fifteen dollar (including shipping) SDR from China[0] for basically the same spectrum coverage and utility[1].

[0]: [http://www.amazon.com/RTL2832U-Low-Cost-Software- Compatible-...](http://www.amazon.com/RTL2832U-Low-Cost-Software-Compatible- Packages/dp/B00SXZDUAQ/) [1]: [http://www.rtl-sdr.com/](http://www.rtl- sdr.com/)

<comment><USER5> Hi, author here -- I agree, the BladeRF is overkill for this kind of application. But, we were done with what we needed it for and it was just sitting around our lab so we decided to use it. I did use an RTL-SDR to poke around in the lower half of UHF, though.

<comment><USER6> Also check out the HackRF One! You can look at a much wider spectrum, as well as broadcast. The thing itself is 300$, and completely open. ([https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13001](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13001))

<comment><USER7> For those of you, like me, outside the US, be prepared for some interesting questions on ordering a HackRFOne (or I suspect the BladeRF or USRP or probably any other transmit-capable SDR):

Your recent SparkFun order contains 2x WRL-00705, 1x WRL-13001. This item is export controlled by the United States government. By law, we are required to gather the following information from you as the importer:

1) Do you intend to sell or send this item to anyone in any of the following countries: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria?

2) Will this be used in any military applications?

3) Will you be the ultimate end user of this item? If no, please go to 3.a.

3.a) If you are not the end user, who will this item be sold or transferred to? Please include full name, physical address, end use and confirmation that they will not sell or transfer this item to any party in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan or Syria.

4) What is the end use of this item?

5) Where is the location where the item will be used?

Response to all five questions is necessary before we are able to ship your order.

(I hate to consider which "lists" I'm now on...)

<comment><USER8> Quite a lot of things seem to be export-controlled, for example this microcontroller dev board is: [https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12646](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12646)

<comment><USER7> To be honest, I'm not at all surprised - considering you can use it to do stuff like this: [https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2023/DEF%20CON%2023%20pre...](https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2023/DEF%20CON%2023%20presentations/Lin%20Huang%20&%20Qing%20Yang/DEFCON-23-Lin- Huang-Qing-Yang-GPS-Spoofing.pdf)

(But then, you can use a hammer to bash someone's brains in, and we don't export control them...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have been interested in this stuff since I saw a presentation on SDR by the folks at Ettus Research (and their amazing SDR setup). I eventually bought a HackRF One from Greatscott Gadgets to play with and it, like the BladeRF can cover a lot of ground with a pretty wide chunk (its only 20Mhz bandwidth generally but this has not been a limitation so far). So far I've been looking at beacons and other iOT type things, and decoding the remote control to my ceiling fan (fun). Very fun stuff to look at the spectrum and see what is there.

</comment><comment><USER10> Essentially what you really want to build is the University of Twente SDR that's been up for a few years and you can listen in on over the web :)

[http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/](http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Love the penny antenna.

<comment><USER7> I would have (in fact have done) gone for a diy discone or logperiodic antenna for wideband reception like this...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to escape the vicious cycle of technical debt - <AUTHOR> At my company time is always running short which is the excuse for all kinds bad or short sighted decisions, IMHO. Obviously this slows us down and makes time short again. I try to raise awareness of technical dept and common anti patterns, but i don't come through. I talked to some of my coworkers and they see the same, but all of us seem unable to change a thing.
I wonder if anyone can give me directions on how to improve things. Especially with the product owners/managers that have less technical background.
Or maybe a piece of good advice on how to deal with that personally. I also considered if I was the problem - by somehow misjudging the situation or something - but i think like myself, so don't spare the criticism.
---
A current example of the type of problems we face.
A big move from our DC to a private cloud based solution is coming up because our hoster closes that location.
My coworker and I where charged with building the new infrastructure. We built a sweet CI/CD infrastructure using gitlab and kubernetes. We did in ~5 months which took ~10 devs twice that the last time. So things are improving actually - yay! All our newer services where easily migrated, new prometheus monitoring is a treat. There is the last big monolith tho - two people and a short hard deadline while maintaining all the other services. So we sat together with the relevant devs and decided to fix away all those doodads in nginx and varnish configs and make the software usable on the new infrastructure together.
Now product owners start to complain that their tickets don't get completed and some even started to pull rank and moved devs to other tasks - moar tracking. They seem unable to grasp that a site can actually fail when load can't be handled, so they don't get stressed like i do.
Currently the site takes ~20 seconds to render at some places. so there is no urgent need for improvements? I don't get it, should i just watch it fail and relax some? <comment><USER2> > Or maybe a piece of good advice on how to deal with that personally. I also > considered if I was the problem - by somehow misjudging the situation or > something - but i think like myself, so don't spare the criticism.

Before anything else, I really like and respect your attitude. As a developer, I would like to work with more people like you.

Further, as a developer, seeing an application take 20 seconds to render makes me physically ill. I would feel exactly the same way you do, and ask the same questions.

The 20 second rendering time needs to be fixed. But, in a situation like this, there are always two options. It should be the first priority, or other things are higher priority.

Sometimes, I think it's good for developers to look at a business as a predator. It doesn't particularly care about anything other than staying alive. It has to take in as many or more calories than it expends or it will die. And, in order to catch that many calories, it has to be ruthless.

Businesses are like that. If a business consistently spends more than it makes, it will eventually die. It has to maintain positive cash flow over a certain period, no matter what. (That isn't completely true all the time as tax planning can come into it, but just accept this as a helpful half truth.) This means that when it comes to fixing problems, it's not about fixing the bullshit, it's about fixing the most expensive bullshit first.

A 20 second render time is fucking atrocious, but maybe, at worst that will cost $5,000 a month. Whereas, maybe there is a feature that will bring in $8,000 a month. In that case, the new feature wins, technical debt be damned.

All isn't lost though because again, you have a good attitude and I'd bet that other people notice that too. If you are prepared to lose graciously, you can bring up your concerns to management.

However, it's important to speak their language. They likely can grasp that a site will fail under load, but they might not care. They might not care because either something else is more valuable to work on, or because they don't know how costly your problem is. If you want to win this argument, put together some numbers and go at it. But, always remember that a starving lion isn't going to pass up a sick gazelle because gazelle meat gives it gas...:)

<comment><USER3> That's a great analogy!

I want to suggest a related tactic, which is to relate your problem to a secondary goal that another part of the business has.

For instance, your marketing team wants your site to be ranked in the top 10 on Google for a certain key phrase where it currently ranks #100. Marketing can probably quantify the value of that improved ranking. But Google penalizes sites that run slowly.

Not to mention the studies that show most users bounce if a page takes more than a second to load; and a good marketing team will consider your (presumable) bounce rate atrocious and be trying to improve that.

The marketing team can be your ally in the fight for resources to fix this problem.

What's the cost per hour in customer service hours and in lost sales if the site goes down entirely? Quantify the likelihood of that outage based on current traffic rates. Recruit the customer service and sales teams to your cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> People here have already given good advice how to deal with product owners/managers. So I'm rather going to talk about the root, which is how to deal with technical debt in the first place.

As a developer myself, I know it's hard to review the Pull Request with good insight just by looking at the diff. What I want to say is that we sometimes might neglect some technical debts by not understand fully the high-level overview of the Pull Request. So in order to avoid that, you and your fellow devs might want to spend more times to review Pull Request and talk about the technical debt that will be introduced by those PRs. This will vastly reduce the amount of debt you have to pay later in my opinion.

Apart from improving it in a normal way, there's a tool for that called Softagram. What it does is that for every Pull Request you made it will analyze your PR and then post a comment with high-level overview graph (or picture) about that PR directly to your PR thread. So that it's much easier to discuss with your fellow devs about what decisions you should make regarding the technical debt. As a result, the process of reviewing PR is much more enjoyable, faster, and more secure. You can check out the tool at [https://softagram.com](https://softagram.com)

<comment><USER5> In the ideal world that's how it should be, in every pull request, the reviewers should check the architecture and implementation to fix issues increasing the debt. Instead to be fixed later with 10-100x costs.

<comment><USER4> Hi, thanks for your thought. You might want to checkout how Softagram can help you here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3OzOVIOmkQ&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3OzOVIOmkQ&feature=youtu.be)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > ...using gitlab and kubernetes...

It's not technical debt. It's recent, trendy and slow stuff. It seems some bad decisions have been made. If you're asked, start by saying that. You need to understand why it's bad before by yourself.

> Currently the site takes ~20 seconds to render at some places.

Make something custom to solve each case. Pick what you think is the fastest this time (not the trendiest). The fastest is static html when it's possible.

</comment><comment><USER7> You should read "The Phoenix Project", I thinks it explains very well how you could get out of some of your problems.

<comment><USER8> Can you add the high-level version of that explanation here so other HN users have an idea what it is about, and decide whether to check out the book?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> two devs and five months sounds like a waste of maybe $100k. Yes I would not touch perf if no one is complaining about it. On the other hand product "owners" routinely drive companies into bankruptcy.</comment>


Show HN: Is it conchable? Taking turns using a conch - <AUTHOR> https://conchable.com <comment><AUTHOR> Made this thing, curious if it can actually be useful to anyone.

A problem is happening at work with contention for a particular resource (a pre-production demo environment).

The developers have to continually negotiate taking turns to occupy the environment (to get their changes previewed just before they are launched). There's only one of those preview environments because it uses the same db as the main production system.

So I guess I'm playing with the idea of automating that conversation away. Also, the webhooks are neat; lets the person who adds themselves to the queue decide exactly how (slack/pagerduty/etc) they want to be notified.

SEIZE THE CONCH.

<comment><USER2> It'd be better if the lock (Conch, sorry!) was acquired when you request the resource, and automatically released. In that vein, you'd need to write bespoke code for the "pre-production demo environment". Maybe there is something on the machine that lets only one SSH happen at a time. It could use your very cool Conch API to broadcast that to the Conch website so people can check before trying to SSH in. However that custom code is probably to be written by the users not yourself. But what might be helpful is a shell script "conchrun" that will run a command if the conch can be secured, and then releases the conch once the command exits.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's sort of how it works. You request the conch, and if no-one else has it then it's yours.

Otherwise you're in the queue, waiting... always waiting, until finally the conch falls from your predecessor's grip - and you get notified via email or webhook.

Or as a last resort, by polling:

      while [ 1 ]; do
        if [ "$(curl -sfL conchable.com/bearer ...)" == "me" ]; then
          echo "THE CONCH IS MINE!"
          exit 0
        fi
        sleep 30
      done</comment></comment></comment>


Steve Jobs on Why Xerox Failed - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1rXqD6M614 <comment><USER2> His analysis works just as well for current Apple.</comment>


Outlook.com now lets you chat with Google friends – one more reason to switch - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2013/05/14/outlook-com-now-lets-you-chat-with-google-friends.aspx <comment><USER2> It would probably be worth switching if it wasn't just a rebranded Hotmail finally doing what GMail has already been doing since the dawn of time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Be serious, it's not a rebranded Hotmail. And at least it doesn't have a crappy compose window...

<comment><USER2> I can sense your anti-Google stance immediately there so I won't feed the trolls but if it's not a re-branded Hotmail, what is it? It's hardly a groundbreaking new concept. (Also, you can switch off the stupid compose window so where's the issue there?)

<comment><AUTHOR> I can sense your anti-Microsoft stance immediately there so I won't feed the troll, especially one in reality-denial mode.

Also, while you can switch off the stupid compose window now, soon you won't be able to....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Outlook/MSN <\--> Google chat interoperability means XMPP is alive and well on the Live Messenger servers right?

</comment><comment><USER4> Switch to what?</comment>


When Smart People are Bad Employees - <AUTHOR> http://bhorowitz.com/2011/01/04/when-smart-people-are-bad-employees/ <comment><USER2> I think most successful technology companies are going to have one (or all) of these types.

The urgency of the issues at hand in a rapidly growing company and the relief a bad, but smart, employee can bring to those issues often makes it incredibly difficult to make the decision to take strong action against the offender. This article is a great reminder of how short sighted that line of thinking is, and that the issue must be addressed - often (but not always) by letting them go.</comment>


Star Wars Empire Strikes Back hotline on Tropo - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tropo.com/2010/06/28/star-wars-empire-strikes-back-hotline-on-tropo/ <comment><USER2> may the voip be with you</comment>


Eric Schmidt Pegs Ice Cream Sandwich For Mid-Fall Release - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/07/googles-eric-schmidt-pegs-ice-cream-sandwich-for-mid-fall-release/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 yes, my last two posts have been about ice cream. What can I say, it's hot out in LA. <comment><AUTHOR> yes, my last two posts have had "ice cream" in the title. What can I say, it's hot out in LA.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is Gmail search so bad? - <AUTHOR> Compared to Google search, why is Gmail search so bad? I can rarely find anything, and searching chat history is impossible too. <comment><USER2> I don't think there is anything wrong with it.

It just matches terms literally and shows matching emails in chronological order. It doesn't do ranking and non-literal matches like web search does. I think this is the right way of doing it.

Also, the gmail team has to work with a lot of restrictions because of privacy. They are not allowed to look at user's email ever. That would make it hard to do ranking.

Maybe this helps: [https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not a search engineer, but here's my understanding.

Gmail search isn't bad, it just is using a less complete set of signals to intuit what you're searching for. It's more of a "garbage in, garbage out" model than a "we can intuit what you want based on how millions of other people have reacted to the results of this query." That's because you're the only one searching against this data set (your email).

What's an example of something you've had trouble finding via search? There might be better ways to conduct your search. I've lived for 10+ years with my primary organization strategy being to rely on Gmail search, and have found it extremely effective.

</comment><comment><USER4> Can you give examples of why its bad? While it isn't as contextual as it can be like web-search, I haven't found it to be "bad". Slack's search is what I call bad

<comment><USER5> ... or Trello

<comment><USER6> That one's the worst.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It may suck compared to Google search, but God forbid you need to rely on, say, Outlook 2010 for searching old e-mails...

<comment><USER8> I really love outlook as an email client, at least on Windows. On a mac it still needs some work. It's getting better as more features are added.

Must admit though, searching is always a bit of a pain, sometimes I can't seem to find emails that I know for sure are there, and after some browsing I'm able to find them.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. Most of the time I just resort to right-clicking an e-mail and choosing Find Related > Messages [from sender | in this conversation]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's so hard about searching chat history? If you just use in:chat, that works fine for me. For anything else, just using in:all usually surfaces threads with the relevant terms, although you can also filter out stuff in the social and promotion tabs if you don't want results from mailing lists or whatever.

There are a few advanced search operators that should be there that are missing, like finding the threads with the most number of messages. And the APIs are missing some functionality also, but overall it seems to work pretty well.

<comment><USER10> Related question: why is my chat history there? I never asked for that.

<comment><USER11> Maybe the vast majority of users expect GChat, which was traditionally inside of GMail, to be part of GMail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another example: why is Google Drive search so bad?

It seems like there is rich data to train a model on: graph of shares between the org, comment activity, time open, collective time spent writing, etc.

</comment><comment><USER13> Let me add some obvious failings since people seem surprised: The Android Gmail app clearly does separate searches for emails stored on the device and emails that are only in the cloud. The time for the cloud search is very variable, and if it the connection goes bad then there is no indication to the user. This means the same search will mysteriously return different things depending on the connection quality. And if the user is waiting for the cloud results to appear, there is no feedback whatsoever about whether they have almost arrived or whether gmail has given up.

The fact that is it literal matches only seem inexcusable. Sure, the magically ability to guess what your meant isn't going to be available when you're the only one searching your database and there are privacy restrictions, but even just basic spellcheck or near matches would be extremely useful.

</comment><comment><USER14> All the Google search sub-feature in their products that's not _the_ Google search product have pretty mediocre results. Gmail is no exception.

<comment><USER15> I agree. Youtube included. I frequently find myself using Google to search for a Youtube video. It is usually better than searching Youtube itself.

<comment><USER2> The YouTube search team works closely with the web search team and uses many of the same technologies. However, they optimize for different metrics and goals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It might help to search on terms that are actually in your emails. This never fails for me.

</comment><comment><USER17> Google seems to favour desktop search over mobile for some reason. I can't search chats from my phone (but I can from desktop), I can't even set up filters from mobile.

There are some search tricks you can employ from the desktop to help finding stuff easier (e.g. narrow by date) so I'd recommend you use these on desktop to try to locate what you need. When you find it, apply a tag to make finding it easier in the future.

[https://business.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-search- your-e...](https://business.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-search-your-emails- in-gmail--cms-27445)

</comment><comment><USER18> At least searching chat history used to work well back in the XMPP era of Google Talk. It feels like it the search quality strongly declined in last years.

</comment><comment><USER19> It works great for me.

</comment><comment><USER20> What? I love Gmail and Hangouts search. I'll be very upset when they get rid of Hangouts because it's so convenient to search. What's frustrating is that you can't search Hangouts on mobile without going to the desktop Gmail website.

</comment><comment><USER21> When searching old mails I get the distinct feeling they're gone, never to come back ever again. Yes, data loss. I can't prove it because I don't have those emails stored offline.

</comment><comment><USER22> Find Gmail search fine and use all the time as I am messy. It is super fast.

</comment><comment><USER23> Because your e-mails aren't saved on pinterest.com</comment>


Your Company's "Casual" Dress Code Is Just as Bad - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/c11c5171a9ee <comment><USER2> Don't necessarily disagree with the author's point, but the story seems to not really illustrate what he's trying to say.

Was he denied a job offer just based on his clothes? The way I understand the story the guy was pretty much saying: "man, don't feel obligated to wear slacks, nobody does, up to you". Was he told that wearing slacks was forbidden? Apparently he was explicitly told "Everyone wears what they want".</comment>


Don't Look Now, but the Great Unbundling Has Spun into Reverse - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/business/dealbook/bundling-online-services.html?ref=dealbook&_r=0&referer= <comment><USER2> The article seems to conflate the proliferation of music streaming services and of video streaming services. But the difference couldn't be greater: Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Music have a majority overlap in their catalogs. Apart from the odd exclusive, it would make little sense to subscribe to more than one of them.

Meanwhile, video streaming services have almost no catalog overlap, and genuinely _do_ represent the return of cable-style bundling. Even beyond Amazon- or Netflix-produced content, the world of general film and TV content licensing is such that it's rare for a film or show to even appear on two of the top-tier services.

<comment><USER3> I absolutely agree and would add the article seems to miss a crucial aspect "unbundling" which, for a lot of people, are spending less on "entertainment" a monthly basis. Netflix and Amazon haven't spun "unbundling" into reverse. If anything, they're contributing to the acceleration of the phenomena. I didn't sign up for Amazon Prime for the movies or the music. The value for my money was there just for 2 day shipping and would keep it for that reason alone, everything else is a perk.

The article starts off with "No longer would anyone have to buy a $99-a-month triple-play package when all they wanted was the History Channel." And ends with, "the bundle is not a decaying symbol of legacy distribution. Rather, it is the new network effect: a critical strategy to amplify scale in the hope of building or deepening a moat to protect against foes everywhere."

I guess business school elites, like the author, are having a hard time wrapping their minds around what is taking place. It is pretty simple for me; Consumers want more choice and want it for less money on a monthly basis. They are more realistic about how much time they can devote to watching and/or listening to content which reflects in the winners and losers of this space. Further, the proliferation of Android set top boxes, Fire sticks, Kodi boxes, Chromecasts, and Rokus together with youtube and other streaming/free content will continue to erode all of the above.

<comment><USER4> People's interest in movies might take a backseat to interest in people- generated videos, and with good reason.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. Over the last year an interest in woodworking has caused me to shift from almost 100% Streaming TV/Movies to maybe 40% Youtube and 60% TV/Movies (Netflix type services).

Youtube recommendations occasionally put me onto a new content creator/creation group that adds to my regular viewing. Much of this is both educational (how-to videos) and entertaining. Finding something with the right mix of educational impact and entertainment value is, IMHO, far rarer.

The rate of new (albeit shorter duration) content on Youtube seems to outpace the rate of content I want to watch from the TV/Movie streaming services.

<comment><USER6> Being interested in woodworking myself I wonder if you could recommend some resources?

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!

<comment><USER7> The craftsman: [https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulSellersWoodwork](https://www.youtube.com/user/PaulSellersWoodwork)

The engineer: [https://www.youtube.com/user/Matthiaswandel](https://www.youtube.com/user/Matthiaswandel)

And the madman: [https://www.youtube.com/user/stevinmarin](https://www.youtube.com/user/stevinmarin)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the really interesting point from this article is about why bundling is so attractive when marginal costs are close to zero, for both the consumer and the seller. In the digital world, almost all services have a near-zero marginal cost, so bundling has a clear advantage.

It is also interesting when thinking about WHY people get so attached to the idea of 'unbundling', even when it might not be in their best interest. I think most people look at some of the large cable bundles, for example, and think "man, I am paying for so many things I don't watch!" What they don't realize is that even if the channels they didn't watch were removed, the cable company wouldn't be able to charge them much less, since the marginal cost for additional channels is near zero.

<comment><USER9> Nobody ever looks at Netflix and complains "I never watch most of these shows, I shouldn't have to pay for them" because Netflix doesn't encourage people to think in those terms.

Cable companies caused the demand for de-bundling via a partial de-bundling. If you could get all channels for $50 then nobody would complain. But if they force you to buy half the channels for $25 and half the channels for $25, people start to wonder why they can't just get a quarter of the channels for $12.50.

<comment><USER10> No the problem is why do I have to pay for cable and still get ads every 20 minutes.

<comment><USER9> Well you don't have to. I've never paid for cable. I have this crazy thing called an aerial which picks up television signals out of the goddamn vacuum.

<comment><USER11> Many people (including myself) cannot pickup broadcast signals out of the vacuum (or the air) even in the general vicinity of major cities.

<comment> gm-conspiracy You mean the original intent of CATV?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cable is being unbundled in favor of on-demand. The traditional broadcast/channel model is annoying now that many homes have high enough bandwidth to stream what they want when they want it. Netflix is getting business from people who think cable is overpriced but they're also getting a lot of business from people who are sick of never finding anything on TV and sitting through commercials when they do.

I'd probably pay Netflix $100/mo if they could deliver everything I would want to watch in streaming format without commercials. As it is, I pay Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and HBO. I don't pay Comcast for cable but I'm paying nearly the same for all the services I subscribe to.

<comment><USER13> It's always been about the desire for on-demand content. It's partly about pricing, but what consumers want is freedom. They want on-demand content and content discovery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The magic of bundle economics allows consumers to get more for less

Sometimes, yes, but sometimes it's basically a scam that relies on consumers having few options and low negotiating power.

Companies always want to come as close as possible to charging you without providing anything in return. Phone companies prefer to charge you for _potential_ minutes for month, rather than actual minutes used, as then customers pay for the purely theoretical unused minutes. Cable companies prefer to bundle channels because you have to pay for the ones you don't watch.

<comment><USER15> It costs Comcast ~$0 whether you watch TV or not. They have no interest in how much or what you watch, only that you want the service. (It was exactly $0 before digital, when you got all the TV in your wire whether you examined the signal or not)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> How valuable is that bundling to Amazon, against Walmart's free shipping ?

Considering it's only $10/month, and there are a lot of digital services offered for this money, very little(maybe $2/month per user) is left to support the e-commerce business. Is that such a big deal, in a fight against Walmart, which itself can play that cross-subsidy game, using your grocery bill ?

<comment><USER17> Grocery margins are razor thin. Walmart does better than most because of their logistics, but they also have significantly lower prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> These trends could quickly change when Trump's FCC kills net neutrality and Comcast and Time Warner start taking their pound of flesh.

</comment><comment><USER19> And that's why I canceled my Sling and PlayStation Vue subscriptions -- in the end they just turned out to be crappier cable than cable. So now I just watch more Netflix, which is the only company that seems to have the future of TV (mostly) figured out.

<comment><USER20> I'm probably going to cancel my Sling subscription as well. The Fire TV app is buggy as all hell and doesn't even work half the time. The other apps are rarely any better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _> In music, the story is even starker than in television. At one time, consumers used to buy a collection of songs — on vinyl, cassette and then compact disc. It was possible to buy a single song or two in these formats, but the internet facilitated more and more people downloading individual tracks.

Yet, today, there is an inexorable consumer shift to all-you-can-eat bundles of music._

Well, music often comes out as thematic albums, I don't see a problem with that. There are good stores where you can buy albums, and individual tracks as well if you choose. Bandcamp for instance indicated they are gradually growing, so there is clearly a market for that.

</comment><comment><USER22> i know this article is talking about consumer services like cable but what does everyone think about unbundling a huge SaaS product with many (sometimes unrelated) features into smaller products each with its own price?

</comment><comment><USER23> Gotta get that recurring subscription money. A la carte sales are a real hard row to hoe in the 21st century digital world. Gonna need a bundle. ;)

</comment><comment><USER24> I would _love_ it for content bundling services to take off. Who wants to maintain 30+ subscriptions to content websites?

<comment><USER11> The problem is that, the challenges of assembling and delivering such a bundle aside, now you have a $200 monthly bundled sub that's effectively a next-gen cable bundle.

<comment><USER25> If the alternative is 20 $10/month subscriptions, one $200/month one has advantages: only one bill to pay, only one set of credentials to manage, a clearer picture of how much you're actually spending every month on content.

<comment><USER26> When was the last time you paid a paper bill? Or are you not using credit cards for some reason?

I do most of my streaming through a set-top device, so I add credentials once, and ... that's it. If I happen to watch through a browser, then there are password managers, which seems like an appropriate solution for the few that choose to do this.

If there were a 'manager' that streamlined all of this, that would be great, but a 'bundler' by definition doesn't let me pick and choose services.

<comment><USER20> > When was the last time you paid a paper bill? Or are you not using credit > cards for some reason?

Does it matter? Last I checked, the GP's criticisms apply to electronic bills as well.

Credit cards make the situation significantly worse, since now you're managing your credit card information (which expires every few years) across 20 sites instead of 1. That's 20 sites that could fall victim to database theft. That's 20 sites that you'd have to trust to not be the thieves themselves. At the very least, that's 20 sites where you'd have to continually update the card numbers and expiration dates and CVVs.

One can mitigate the credit card issue by using some "trusted" payment system like PayPal, but you're then still verifying 20 different bills each month, checking them against your PayPal/CC/bank statements, inspecting them for discrepancies, etc. That's made significantly easier when you only need to worry about a single large bill.

I agree that a sort of "manager" would be nice. Perhaps some sort of marketplace or metaservice for multimedia subscriptions, where it would combine each service's monthly (or perhaps yearly) cost into a single bill with a single payment method, all itemized and unified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> NYTimes is doing a subscription bundle partnership w/ Spotify: [http://m.imgur.com/ayk3hoX](http://m.imgur.com/ayk3hoX)

[https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8FRL9.h...](https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp8FRL9.html?campaignId=6KJUJ&gclid=CPD3uYaukdICFQ9EfgodGEMJFA)</comment>


Forbes Annual Powerful People Ranking - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/powerful-people/

<comment><USER2> I found this interesting because it lists Mark Zuckerberg as the ninth "most powerful" person in the world. It's impressive that a technologist would be listed before state leaders (such as David Cameron).</comment>


Wreck a Movie: Collaborative film making in practice. - <AUTHOR> http://www.wreckamovie.com/

<comment><USER2> I have been following the creators of the platform for a while. Currently they are working on Iron Sky (<http://www.ironsky.net/>).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> With all the talk about alternative models to Hollywood, I was reminded of the Wreck a Movie project. They're already up and running, I think the upsurge in interest in the idea could mean it is really the time to shine for concepts like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't get the intro movie to work in any browser (it doesn't even appear in IE9).

<comment><AUTHOR> That video seems to be down. Other videos on their site work though..</comment></comment>


Milgram experiment redone: crowd "tortures" man on fake TV show - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124838091 <comment><USER2> This whole "experiment" disturbs me profoundly, and for about a dozen of factors, of which i can only cite a few :

\- They take the appearance of science, name this an experiment, when this is much more of a sensationalist TV show in the very style of the ones it's supposed to denounce.

\- A (very big) flaw that the milgram experiment already had, but that this show suffers from even more, due to the context and to the size of the sample, is the fact that they're working on a sample that isn't representative in any way of the global population, but only of the people susceptible of answering the announcements -- in the case of this tv show, people willing to go on television, and that's probably not a small thing. Also this pretends to be a reproduction of the milgram experiment, while the conditions are very different. Obeying to a show hostess and obeying to a doctor isn't the same thing, and shouldn't be analyzed as being the same.

\- Going further in my first point, while this is supposed to be scientific, it obviously is not. But even the motivations of the show are unclear. Supposedly it's there to warn us about the dangerous power of television, while it's actually obvious that the show is using the very mechanisms it's supposed to denounce. People act shocked while they satisfy those very appetites of violence and voyeurism. How clever.

BTW I'm french, and watched a few extracts of the show, but i didn't have the occasion to watch it in full. It looks very fakeish, and very disturbing too. I guess the minimum the show director could do is display some proofs of the veracity of the show.

Sociology, and human sciences in general, ought to be something serious, in the process and in the display. Mocking it while playing on people's indignation (which is almost as easy to exploit as their appetite for violence) is disgusting.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps your argument is not coming through clearly, but this was not an _actual_ TV show. It was a documentary where the experiment was staged to be a TV show.

Obeying a doctor and a show hostess are indeed different. All things being equal, the latter is much, _much_ worse.

<comment><USER2> >Perhaps your argument is not coming through clearly, but this was not an actual TV show. It was a documentary where the experiment was staged to be a TV show.

"Perhaps your argument is not coming through clearly but this was not an actual murder, we did just kill somebody for the needs of the documentary."

It was a TV show. It's being displayed in large parts in the documentary. The fact that it has been sliced with pseudo scientifical comments doesn't change the nature of it.

> Obeying a doctor and a show hostess are indeed different. All things being > equal, the latter is much, much worse.

Agreed, but in case you didn't notice, i wasn't judging from a moral standpoint, but from an experimental one.

<comment><USER3> _> It was a TV show. It's being displayed in large parts in the documentary. The fact that it has been sliced with pseudo scientifical comments doesn't change the nature of it._

I do not understand your objection. Are you arguing against using a TV game show as a guise for the experiment or against showing the documentary of the experiment disguised as a TV game show* (because it cheapens "serious science" somehow)? Or that people who watch the documentary are not doing it because of the science but because they want to see the fake TV game show and therefore the documentary should not be shown, or that the experiment should not have used a TV game show because people who watch the documentary do not really want to see the documentary but the fake TV game show?

* Anyone else been watching "'Allo, 'allo" reruns?

<comment><USER4> I think what he is trying to say is that the experiment conducted for the documentary was not a robust peer reviewed phenomenon, but rather a for-pop- consumption "backyard demonstration". Real science takes a lot of effort (avoiding the before mentioned sample bias being one), effort which was most likely skipped in the creation of this "pop sociology" for-mass-consumption show.

Ironically, the fake violence of reality shows they decry is precisely what they are demonstrating - an unreviewed, unpublished study which concludes "4/5 of everyone around you is a potential murderer".

<comment><USER5> I'm sorry, this experiment has been reproduced numerous times and the initial study that produced this _WAS_ rigorously tested _AND_ peer reviewed. Milgram performed 19 variations of his experiment before his peer reviewed journal article was ever published, it studied the distance from authority, the distance from the subject and the authority level to measure what percentage of people performed inhumane acts.

The variables ranged from the authority being virtually over the subjects shoulder to being on a telephone. The proximity to the victim ranged from a one-way mirror to only being able to hear the person over a speaker. The level of authority went from a white coat to blue collar.

The subjects were initially polled to see how many believed they would administer the lethal voltage (1.2%), and also polled his colleagues (who came up with a similar percentage on how many people they expected would go all the way).

A later meta-analysis performed on multiple repeats of the study found the percentages to remain steady at 61-66%.

Zimbardo (who performed the Stanford Prison Experiment) made an excellent point: none of the participants who refused to administer the final shocks insisted that the experiment itself be terminated, nor left the room to check the health of the victim _without requesting permission to leave_.

Despite disobeying authority not to hurt someone, they still required permission of the authority to _help_ someone, which is quite possibly the more worrying aspect that is never highlighted.

<comment><USER2> That is what i've been saying :

\- The milgram experiment and this pseudo-experiment do not test the same thing, they are not the same,and do not at all display the same riguor. Hence you can't talk about them as the same experiment.

\- The milgram experiment is a solid experiment, that has got solid criticisms too, but i'm not at all implying it was fake.

<comment><USER6> > [they] do not test the same thing, they are not the same,and do not at all > display the same riguor

Ok, but I'm not sure who you're arguing with here. Is your beef with the word "experiment"? Nobody is submitting these results to a journal. If you prefer, call it a demonstration re-enacting a phenomenon that has been the subject of other experiments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/17...](http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/17/torture/index.html)

Glenn Greenwald compares this linking of television and torture to the swing of public opinion in America regarding our government's use of torture.

</comment><comment><USER8> Aren't most people aware of the Milgram experiment these days? I did participate in a psychology experiment once at university, and it was painfully obvious that the "person" in the other room I was playing against was a computer. I do worry about the validitiy of some of these experiments.

<comment><USER9> I don't think they are. I've mentioned it to my nerdy friends (who would be more inclined to know about these things) and THEY don't even know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is it really all that strange to find out that we aren't that different from how we were in 1960 with respect to authority? Back then we thought of authority as a government and the nation state, but today it's you and me, our entertainment, tvs, xboxes, corporations, and facebook that exert more control over us. In this case who is the authority? The game show host or the crowd? Is this the power of the perception that "everyone's doing" it has authoritative control over us?

Scary stuff still. Does anyone want to volunteer for the new TV show "Alcatraz" where we recreate Stanford prison experiment?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment>

<comment><USER11> Again I don't think this is about authority as much as it's about alignment with the perceived norm. People in positions of authority usually claim that they're merely upholding normal, necessary or desirable values, and others try to align themselves with that - often even without any explicit coercion, and especially if the authority is perceived to be of a higher social status.

<comment><USER12> One of the key things from milgrim's experiment was the notion of giving up responsibility, the "teachers"in the experiment were absolved of all responsibility by the experimenters (authority). I would expect the same dynamic in crowds. Some people seem to feel that they cannot be held responsible for their behavior when they are in a crowd -- and to a large extent they are right. Before modern technology it'd be hard to keep track of who did what and when.

Note: It's hard to take "studies" like this seriously, if you've ever read milgrim's book it's amazing the length they went to try and verify their results; whereas nowadays studies seem to be a lot less rigorous.

<comment><USER11> Although I havn't seen the show, I doubt that it could be considered a scientific experiment. At best it highlights the Milgram result to a modern audience who may not be aware of it. Experiments like Milgram's would be unlikely to get past any ethics committee these days, due to the potential psychological trauma caused to participants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Those interested in further examination of psychology of this subject should look in Canadian scientist Bob Altermeyer's work on authoritarian personality traits.

<comment><USER14> The classic work on the 'authoritarian personality' is Erich Fromm's _Escape From Freedom_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dupe ;) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1197224> On some level it's good to know source does matter (npr vs. yahoo)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm a little bit surprised and amused that people continue to be surprised at what horrible things humans are capable of doing. I mean, nearly all of us went to high school right?

</comment><comment><USER17> "They say they simply wanted to see if we would go so far as to kill someone for entertainment."

The ancient greeks built the Colosseum for this kind of entertainment. So it's not surprising really.

<comment><USER18> Romans, surely?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there still any doubt about the power of the television!?

<comment><USER20> While the show is about TV, the dynamics behind it have nothing to do with TV, as any amount of time in a school yard will show you.

<comment><USER11> Yes I agree that is isn't specifically about TV. It's about the power of peer pressure and the behavior of crowds. It's known that people try to align themselves with whatever they believe is "the norm" in any situation, even if this contradicts their prior beliefs.

<comment><USER19> I was merely referencing the article:

"Sociologist Jean Claude Kaufmann says the French version combines Milgram's use of authority with the power of live television."

The article clearly demonstrates the amplification of the pressure and stress because of television environment.

In this experiment, 80% of the participants kept on buzzing. In Milgram's experiment, 65% of the participants kept on buzzing.

A 15% jump, to me, would show that the variable of the "TV" played a part.

<comment><USER20> That's stretching correlation to causation.

First, the two studies are more than 25 years apart. Society has changed, and so have we.

Second while participants believed they we "on a tv show" it's a logical leap to believe that this would somehow be a extenuating factor than if they were at a gathering of some other sort.

 _A 15% jump, to me, would show that the variable of the "TV" played a part._

There is absolutely no evidence to support that.

<comment><USER21> I also think it's a leap to say television caused this. If they really wanted to prove causation, they could have tested it back to back in different regions. Instead, they settled on the answer they appeared to be looking for all along, that it's just TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "To thine own self be true." -- William Shakespeare

</comment><comment><USER23> Philip Zimbardo described this principle in depth:

<http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/459>

He discusses Milgram, and Guantanamo. How seemingly well adjusted good citizens can rapidly and without notice turn into little lucifers at the drop of a hat with the right social engineering.

<comment><USER5> I think Zimbardo's biggest contribution ever has been grossly overlooked. He made the point after Milgrams experiment that everyone who disobeyed authority and stopped injuring the victim still required permission (from the authority that just had them injuring someone) to help their victim.

It's not only that you can create little lucifers, but it's that you wholly prevent the good Samaritan ever appearing.</comment></comment>


Webapps for Data Scientists - Building your first CRUD - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kaggle.com/2013/01/14/webapps-for-data-scientists-building-your-first-crud/?repost=1

<comment><USER2> Google's AngularJS framework is in view in the post - and it really is useful to folks like Data Scientists (as opposed to GUI engineers/front-end developers). Automatic data binding and a set of directives (that look like HTML elements and attributes when invoked) make the language feel like HTML the way it should be in a world of responsive GUIs and Ajax. For Data Scientists (and others who don't have the time / interest to delve deeply into the latest JavaScript libraries and development practices) it is great to have a sort of and HTML-like-Domain-Specific-Language-Extension that is fully functional and maturing quickly.

AngularJS is not new to the mainstream JavaScript community - but it is to many others who can derive a lot of benefit from it. Good see to a tutorial to get such folks up and running quickly with it.

BTW - if you prefer text to video, here is a related post from the authors blog:

[http://jphoward.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/end-to-end-web- app-...](http://jphoward.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/end-to-end-web-app-in-under- an-hour/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the interest in my tutorial! I only started with AngularJS a month ago while I was on vacation. I tried a few of the newer JS MVC frameworks, but had no idea how special Angular is until I got in to it. Its ability to add features to HTML (using directives) is unique AFAICT.

I think the one thing holding it back has been the lack of a basic tutorial. I really found it quite hard to wrap my head around the concepts for this reason. There will be a book coming out later this year I believe; in the meantime hopefully this ongoing tutorial series will help get folks started.

I'll be posting part 3 of the video tomorrow. Let me know if you have any suggestions or questions.

<comment><USER4> I've been using angular for around the same time-period as you.

As a designer, the initial data-binding and directives felt like I was performing magic, although there was a steep-ish learning curve as soon as I left trivial examples.

I feel like there is a lot of momentum building behind Angular, and is a great model to start thinking about now for when browsers support web components ([https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcomponents/raw- file/tip/explainer/...](https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcomponents/raw- file/tip/explainer/index.html)) (what will that be HTML6?)

For someone coming to Angular fresh (with only some basic jQuery knowledge) I also found it easier to learn/work in coffeescript.</comment></comment>


Metal as a Service - <AUTHOR> https://maas.ubuntu.com/ <comment><USER2> We spent around 6 weeks trying to wrangle Juju and MaaS into a working state in August 2013. Skimming through my notes we surmised the following.

* Auto-enrollment of nodes was tough to get working.

* Overlay and config management was weak and better handled by Puppet. Though Juju beans were touted as able to handle this.

* Juju 1.13 and maas 1.3 do not support isolated juju environments in the same maas cluster. No idea what version it is at now.

* Juju charms "local provider" is potentially very compelling but wasn't in a workable state.

In the end we abandoned it.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for giving it a try. If you're ever thinking about trying it again, we (MAAS team) would be happy to help.

Truth is that the problems that MAAS is trying to solve are _hard_ , and it's taken us some time to solve them. We're spending a lot of time in this development cycle working on the robustness of the MAAS node lifecycle.

MAAS 1.5 is significantly better than 1.3, and getting stronger all the time. Similarly, Juju 1.18 and 1.19 are leaps ahead of 1.13 – the local provider is now in a workable state and gets used a lot internally.

We at Canonical eat our own dogfood as far as MAAS and Juju are concerned. We're using MAAS extensively in our DCs (though I don't think we use it for 100% of machines; I'm not privy to that knowledge) and the vast majority of our core services are deployed using Juju.

<comment><USER4> Maybe Canonical should stick to their core...

...and focus on Linux on the Desktop... instead of trying to be an "Everything" company. Get the core down solid and _making money_ , then expand into other markets.

<comment><USER5> I agree Canonical should stick to their core, but it's not the desktop. It's cloud.

They've demonstrated they do not have what it takes to make desktop net profitable for them.

They make most of their money by selling support for their cloud stuff — this is what they should focus on. Desktop has done nothing but lose them money.

<comment><USER6> Well, Canonical could always make their own laptops with perfect driver support and charge a premium for that. I don't know why they're not. As of right now the only laptops that consistently work well with Linux/Ubuntu are Thinkpads and Thinkpads suck for e.g. gaming. No one except Microsoft can make money selling an OS - and they can only do it because they have a massive advantage in user training and software ecosystem. They tried to sue their way to victory with Phone, but have eventually settled for the fact that they'll have to sell hardware as well.

<comment><USER7> Note that as of late both Apple and Microsoft are making moves towards "the OS is free" for certain markets. I hear tell that Microsoft are even paying OEMs to put Windows on phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Along with Juju, this is a key technology which (literally) powers the Ubuntu Orange Box - [http://www.ubuntu.com/cluster](http://www.ubuntu.com/cluster)

<comment><USER9> I wonder why they chose to use Intel NUC for this. It has dire price/performance. I built a cluster (see [http://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=cluster](http://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=cluster)) recently, and I used AMD hardware for it because (as of right now) the performance is unbeatable for the price. I have a 32 core cluster that cost me £1300 including everything except a metal box to put it in.

<comment><USER10> That's pretty cool. One of the goals for the orangebox was being robust and compact enough to throw in a suitcase and fly to a conference. The nucs win on compactness, and also via intel's vpro/amt can do remote power management (ie. ipmi light).

<comment><USER9> Nice -- didn't know that Intel now had a serious remote management offering. These AMD mobos do wake-on-LAN, and that's it. They don't even have serial BIOS.

<comment><USER11> Don't _even_ have? Apart from Soekris and boards that can use Corerboot, what x86 board does?

<comment><USER12> Every single Supermicro and Tyan board I've ever used. Also every Dell, HP, and Sun/Oracle server I've ever used (though those can be a bit more of a pain). Really, anything with a halfway-decent IPMI implementation.

<comment><USER11> We might be talking about different things. Soekris does this without IPMI.

<comment><USER12> The IPMI spec lets you send the entire console (BIOS through login boot cycle) out either the hardware serial port, or over a LAN for all those platforms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This would be a very good thing to try if you always want to guarantee some minimal level of performance. Say you are encoding audio or video or performing some other time critical things.

It eliminates the virtualization host layer and, most importantly, interaction from other guest VM machines.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is an interesting concept and a good addition to all the IaaS offerings around. Just one year ago, while doing my Master's thesis, I pondered the possiblity of creating an IaaS that didn't involve virtual machines but physical servers instead. This should be great especially for high performance and special hardware needs. Next step would be all sorts of mixed blends between virtual and physical servers: real CPUs and GPUs, but virtualized storage, networking or what have you.

<comment><USER9> Is this so novel? Both Amazon and OpenStack can provision and manage baremetal instances.

<comment><USER15> Amazon does not have a 'baremetal' instance type.

OpenStack 'can', but in practice the baremetal nova driver[0] has many issues, and the newer OpenStack Ironic Project[1] is not yet ready for production workloads.

Additionally, both baremetal and OpenStack Ironic have a focus on 'triple-O', or OpenStack on OpenStack[2] use cases -- that is using these projects to bootstrap an 'undercloud', for the hardware to be used by a higher level virtualized cloud.

[0] - [https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Baremetal](https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Baremetal)

[1] - [https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic](https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic)

[2] - [https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO](https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO)

<comment><USER9> Fair enough.

I was totally convinced that Amazon had baremetal instances available, but now I cannot find anything, so that could probably be a figment of my imagination.

<comment><USER16> All of Amazon's EC2 compute instances are run on top of Xen; there is an interesting Reddit AMA post with a lot of detail: [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e5o4p/iaman_exaws_eng...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e5o4p/iaman_exaws_engineer_ask_me_anything_about_the/)

<comment><USER9> That _is_ a very interesting thread, thanks. I think I was confusing dedicated tenancy with baremetal. Dedicated tenancy of course still runs on Xen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I set up MaaS in a couple of hours at home. I bought a couple of used Dell C6105's off ebay for a great deal, and they work out of the box with MaaS. Pretty nice to be able to remotely boot and image the servers, power them off and on etc all from my home office.

The installation was straight forward and easy.

</comment><comment><USER18> While this may not be in a easily workable state right now, this is really awesome, now people can run their own clouds even easier. This removes some of the value-add (and associated costs) of various VPS providers and cloud offerings.

I currently manage one VPS that hosts multiple sites/apps that I work on, and it's not the worst thing ever, but it could be easier. Right now I still SSH in and restart services by hand, but a web interface would make that much easier to manage.

If they allow for extensible plugins, we could see an explosion of nagios-like functionality being developed, as well as even better free server monitoring resources.

Really looking forward to seeing this progress

</comment><comment><USER19> I bet someone in marketing at Canonical shit their pants watching the WWDC yesterday.

<comment><USER20> Er, why? Apple stopped caring about the cloud and traditional server market a while back.

<comment><USER21> Because Apple used the word Metal to name one of their new APIs?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Quickly went through the docs:

* why do they require a "cluster controller" for each subnet (or vlan)? This seems like a waste of resources and added complexity. Is this a limitation because it's easier to set up for sysadmins than to request for a DHCP relay?

* how bad is the security? It seems that you approve clusters interfaces but MAC spoofing could do a lot of harm here.

Edit: I saw that the doc tells you to add network interfaces to manage multiple clusters from a single controller. Assuming you do 802.1q this works but what about multi-dc setups? Isn't this more complicated than a simple relay?

</comment><comment><USER23> I was disappointed to learn I can't RESTfully request the Sepultura-like cover of George Michael's "Careless whisper" that keeps playing in my head.

<comment><USER7> Jono Bacon was responsible for _that_ kind of Metal As A Service in Canonical - he's moved on to the X-Prize now, you should try there ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe someone with more familiarity can tell me how this differs from/expands on Cobbler?

<comment><USER7> Robbie Williamson, the man at the head of the responsible division of Canonical has documented how Cobbler and Puppet were used in the early days and how experiences there lead to MaaS being developed.

[https://ubuhulk.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/canonicals- office-o...](https://ubuhulk.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/canonicals-office-of- the-cdo-a-5-year-journey-in-devops/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I believe that Softlayer - Now Acquired by IBM also has this capability.

<comment><USER8> One key difference is that MAAS is free as in beer and free as in speech. It's great for private clouds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's like your own cloud, but with real machines. Combine that with juju (juju.ubuntu.com) and you can deploy complex services on bare metal just as easily as in the cloud.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, exactly! That's what we showed off at a lot of recent demos, including during the OpenStack presentation Mark did: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsYdIJrJRLQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsYdIJrJRLQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> How does this compare to something like Puppetlabs Razor?

</comment><comment><USER28> The docs say a minimum deployment is 6 boxes. :p

</comment><comment><USER29> OVH uses something like this for all of their newer server offerings.

</comment><comment><USER30> Too much Metal for one day!

<comment><USER31> I thought that this was related to Apples Metal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Metal as a service... \0/

<comment><USER33> > Metal as a service... \m/

FTFY :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Any infrastructure that is of a size needing this will already have in-house tooling (Google/FB/Amazon/etc) and everybody else should be using public clouds anyway. Ubuntu is grasping for relevance.

<comment><USER35> Wow, no. There's a ton of people that could use MaaS. People use the big public clouds because they're easy. With MaaS you can build your own cloud almost as easily, and skip the Amazon tax. It's great for big companies that want total control, it's great for any company that doesn't want their sensitive data in someone else's server room (there are a lot of these in finance and enterprise), and small companies that want the flexibility of the cloud without the huge monthly bills.

<comment><USER36> You're right, but honestly a lot of those enterprise rationalizations about their "sensitive" data are just defending headcounts and turf. Google and Amazon probably do a better job securing data than 90% of enterprise sysadmins.

<comment><USER35> I know that, and _you_ know that, but do they? In my experience, no. And also, does the SEC know that? Possibly not. There's a lot of laws about this stuff where if you screw it up, people can go to actual prison.</comment></comment></comment></comment>