Meet the American Nomads of Walmart's Plentiful Parking Lots - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/11/walmart-parking-lots <comment><USER2> I lived in my car for three months this summer in Palo Alto as we were getting a startup off the ground, then when I headed back toward the Valley a few weeks ago for startup school I decided to relive it all again - from sleeping in my car to showering at the YMCA.

On the drive over from Utah I stopped in Elko, Nevada to sleep for the night, and as I had before I found my "spot" in Palo Alto, I drove off into a less populous street, crawled in the back of my Civic and tried to look inconspicuous.

This time, however, I woke up to a police officer shining a flashlight in my window. After I explained who I was and gave him my license to look me up, he said, "Really you should just go sleep in the walmart parking lot." Since I had to go to the bathroom anyway, I decided to do just that.

It was after midnight when I pulled in, and there were probably a dozen cars and RVs in the darker section of the parking lot. Having lived in a car, it's pretty easy to notice the signs of someone who is set up for permanent residence as opposed to an overnight stay. I got out of there early in the morning, but I estimate 10 of the 12 cars in the Walmart parking lot in Elko, Nevada were occupied by permanent residents.

Go to any parking lot (especially hospital parking lots) late at night and look for windshield covers on both the front and back windshields, curtains or rods for hanging clothes, ultra-portable bathrooms or cars full of clothes, and you'll realize the nomadic and/or homeless population is much larger than you previously supposed.

<comment><USER3> I'm not from the US but I plan on doing a cross country adventure at some point. Let me ask you this; If my vehicle of choice was a delivery van of recent vintage with an artistic decal of a well known soda brand, would that help with avoiding such encounters?

At worst I could claim to be an Andy Warhol fan, would that fly?

<comment><USER4> If you are stressed about it, there really are Walmarts pretty much everywhere. There's also lots and lots of campgrounds that are something like $15 a night (you can save that much fueling a smaller vehicle...).

<comment><USER5> Yes, campgrounds and also backwoods camping. Many of these are government run (state and national parks) and many others are privately run. If you want to live in the backwoods, most parks have rules you need to follow, such as moving your tent every so often, disposing properly of waste, restrictions on lighting fires, and obtaining hunting/fishing licenses (meaning: do not carry fishing rod without a license).

Also, on every highway there are rest-stops and trucker rest areas. Some of these have pay-per-use showers and most have a parking lot you can park overnight in and free toilets.

The national/state parks are beautiful and are very welcoming to visitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In 2001/02, my family spent two years travelling around North America. All four of us lived in a bus-style Monaco RV. Instead of middle school, I was home-schooled by my mom. We drove as far north as Alaska and as far south as Belize and had adventures---it was a great time.

I just wanted to say: Walmart deserves credit for being very cool toward travellers. We spent many nights parked for free in their truck spots.

Walmart gets a lot of hate here in the bay area, but I really like them. If I may wax philosophical for a minute... I see Walmart as basic infrastructure. They are everywhere; they're always open; they sell everything, nearly at cost; they employ 2.2 million people, many of which would otherwise be on welfare or disability; and when you need a place to spend the night, even if you find yourself in Winnemucca at 1am with a 40-foot long vehicle and no RV park reservation--they're always there for you.

<comment><USER7> > many of which would otherwise be on welfare

I get what you're saying, but Walmart employment is (alas) very compatible with being a welfare recipient, and rather than preventing welfare, Walmart is actually subsidized by it (at least according to a recently popular theory).

<comment><USER8> The local Walmart pays better than the local grocery store or any of the small businesses on main street. There is a reason that so many apply.

<comment><USER9> Sure, now that Walmart has crushed those businesses, it can afford to pay a little more than they can.

<comment><USER8> Those businesses are still around, it is pretty easy given what Walmart actually sells. Amazon is more a pain for a lot of those businesses.

<comment><USER9> The ones that are still around, are still around. There's been plenty of documentation of walmart's negative effect on small cities' retail, manufacturing and tax bases.

<comment><USER8> And that documentation would be (the manufacturing and tax base info would be interesting)? I see it quoted a lot, but I don't see much in the way of independent studies (and I am disinclined to believe union studies as much as I won't believe Walmart internal reports).

<comment><USER9> Walmart's practice of locating stores just outside of municipalities to avoid local sales tax affects sales tax revenues.

<comment><USER8> Got the statistics on that with the number of other businesses that followed the same strategy?

<comment><USER9> Alas, this is not something I actively research or claim to have expertise regarding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some people love to hate Walmart (and poor labor practices give good reason). However, providing a space to sleep and not get arrested is an example of something that is probably good for the nation's poor (as well as RV enthusiasts). Apparently Walmart is also one of the first places that half-way house parolees can get a pass to go. If Walmart is acting a portal for transitional people to rejoin or create there own (harmless) society, that is a tangible social good.

<comment><USER11> I'm taking the cynical route here and think that it's more of a ploy to get even more customers into their stores. What does it take them to keep the lots open/secured? Is that more than the money they would get from those people who will have to get water, food and other supplies in the morning? Most definitely. Would it cost them to kick out people and possibly turn this into a negative media campaign? Absolutely.

<comment><USER12> ploy noun 1\. a cunning plan or action designed to turn a situation to one's own advantage.

cunning adjective 1\. having or showing skill in achieving one's ends by deceit or evasion.

Does Walmart have to be considered evil in literally every action? I'd fully expect they're hoping they will make some additional sales from overnight campers, I can't imagine this wouldn't be fairly obvious to any non-cynical observer of the situation. And why shouldn't they - they make a profit from regular non-camping customers, so I can't understand how making the same profit from people who just received a free place to camp out for the night could somehow be considered worse. Seems like a classic win-win situation to me.

<comment><USER11> Oh I wasn't saying that it's not a win-win situation, just that some of the comments were saying how Walmart was being generous and good, while a pretty simple benefit analysis tells us that Walmart is making real money off of this, which in the case of such a big player and their history as an employer, self-interest is the only driver that counts.

<comment><USER13> Walmart's biz model is to be open 24 hours. Its stupid to kick out people in the middle of the night who are going be be shopping during the off hours period. People sleeping in a walmart PL are not there taking up space in isle 7 during rush hour shopping hours. So, from that point, its a ratinal thing to do. But also from a cultural point of view, its more common than you think, in remote areas, to need to come in to resupply (with say camping gear, food, clothes, etc). And if Wally world can save these people (like hunters, campers etc) 100 bucks for a hotel, they're probably going to increase the chances of them spending that 100 bucks inside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > _" €œWe sold everything we have and decided to find, as we put it, our > American dream," says Josiane Simpson. She, Jared Holfeltz, and their son > Gabriel are currently living out of their car._

The American dream is a delusion that makes people pursue wrong objectives.

<comment><USER15> Notice that she said "our American dream," not "the American dream." She's not talking about a picket fence and a dog, she's talking about writing her own life's story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I did much the same thing in Australia for nigh on 18 months. Good thing is, in the outback you can pull up pretty much anywhere, drive a little into the side of the road, watch the spectacular sunsets and go to sleep. Bad thing is, there are lots of brown snakes (deadly, but diurnal) and scorpions (very painful, nocturnal). In the big cities, I camped out near university campuses and truck stops for access to bathrooms etc. Most seaside towns have "surf livesaver" clubs with showers, sometimes with hot water. You could of course just swim in the ocean. I also fashioned a shower out of a hose that I would attach to the taps in public toilets if I was desperate for one. I miss that lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER17> This article doesn't seem to cover much but I'd be curious to know the implications of this. Is this very common? How long do people stay? Are these people making trips or living there? I've heard a lot about crime occurring in Walmart parking lots, does this have any effect?

<comment><USER18> "I've heard a lot about crime occurring in Walmart parking lots, does this have any effect?"

My parents RVed around the country when they semi-retired and occasionally got stuck at walmart (Reservations? Sir I am sorry but I have no record of you ever having made reservations... etc)

Real criminals like empty lots and good numerical odds, so its extremely dangerous to be in a deserted shopping mall lot completely alone except for the crooks at 3am, or at a park all alone, or anything like that. Its not just walmart, some campgrounds are pretty sketchy during the empty work week. On the other hand trivial "crime" is much worse at walmart if by crime you mean "turned the radio up a little too loud at 8pm to cover sound of having sex" which might technically be a noise violation, but its not exactly armed carjacking or murder.

RVers talk a lot to other RVers and from what I heard from my parents, the culture is very bovine, stay in the herd for safety. The more people in the lot sleeping, the safer the lot is by definition. You have to have serious guts, or be a police sting, to be the only vehicle in the lot.

I would imagine the homeless are about the same. They want/need a good nights sleep and a screaming crime victim is not going to help them sleep, so there's more than a little self policing. There's ten guys here sleeping every night, and tonight there's one outsider checking door handles and prowling, well, there's going to be ten really pissed off guys if the interloper succeeds, so you do the math on what happens to the one interloper...

There is also a lot of bias in that RV national park touring means visiting civilized rural areas not uncivilized urban areas. So that means a lot of hunters and concealed carry and an armed society is a polite society and all that stuff. So a rural Idaho walmart parking lot where 10% of the people carry is likely near infinitely safer than a Chicago walmart in the bad part of town where all the victims are disarmed. As such my parents experience visiting national and state parks may not be representative of urban ghetto walmart parking lots. The experience of a cow herd in the presence of wolves varies greatly if some random selection of the cows have razor sharp teeth and pointy horns vs a herd where everybody knows all the cows are completely defenseless so go have as much "fun" as you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I applaud Wallmart. They have been allowing this for awhile.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm an engineering tech (land development) who lost nearly everything in the crash. I "lived" (slept) in my truck, which has a custom cap made for the purpose, for four months this spring. It's not a cheap way to live. It takes fuel to get food, to take a morning dump, to go to a place to park for the night. If you're not somewhere you can cook, you're stuck with carry out. Still, it was an experience I in no way regret. I learned a lot about myself, which, for me, is a spiritual thing. (See other comment about "Sleeping the American Dream). Here are some tips: Pennsylvania numbered roads (PA & US) all have pull-over spots; I was never once harassed by the police in these places. The Potomac River, due to the National Park proximity, is absolutely to be avoided. Interstate rest stops are only good for one night at a time. There are also what I call "late in - early out" spots everywhere: bars with off- street parking, hotel lots, repair garages, state forests with hunters parking. A little imagination will give you other ideas. I've over-stayed my welcome with a friend (while I developed an idea that I could not seem to market successfully.) and will be back to daily pay ($42 a day) and sleeping in my truck for the winter. Its not really that bad. It can actually be an adventure at times; it all depends on your attitude.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've slept in Walmart parking lots more than a few times on my extensive road travels. There are few choices for brief naps out on the road, and while still somewhat dicey Walmart is safer than rest stops or random roadsides. If it's after 4 am, hotels won't even rent you a room (too close to checkout time, they say. And why can't they just let you check out at say, 6? Or a steady 15 hours after checkin?).

</comment><comment><USER21> My folks RV half the year. Walmart is their one night stopover destination of choice. There are books out there that tell you which Walmarts are best to stay at and the love it for quick grab some sleep before pushing nights.

They make great rest stops too. Dad hops in back to get a nap while mom heads inside to do a little shopping or get some food at the deli counter.

</comment><comment><USER22> In picture three, that chick in the green shirt is pretty hot.</comment>


NP is Hard - <AUTHOR> http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2018/02/np-is-hard.html <comment><USER2> Ack! My eyes!. Thank god for the Text Mode Chrome plugin to eliminate that awful background.

</comment><comment><USER3> At first glance I think the title is saying NP = NP-hard</comment>


What's so cool about Scheme? - <AUTHOR> http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg03242.html <comment><USER2> R5RS has a clean, small core designed with functional programming in mind. This is both: a boon and a curse. One must add all sorts of libraries to build a decent application. At the same time, it is better than Lua, if you're thinking of adding extensibility to your product. While using it as an extension language for a desktop product, I was irked by only one facet: threads. It really took quite a lot of gyrations to get the multithreaded implementation right. In all fairness, that is more of an implementation challenge, but still, one that must be overcome.</comment>


Ask HN: Tricks for choosing which features to charge for? - <AUTHOR>

In a freemium app, do you have any tricks to help you decide which features to include in the paid tier vs. the free tier?
Sometimes there aren't easy distinctions like storage limits, number of "projects" allowed, etc. Given a bucket of arbitrary features, how would you choose which to include in the premium tier?
Obviously, it's easier to "free" a feature than to start charging once it has already been free. <comment><USER2> An old trick from shareware folks: pick features they won't want to use immediately, like going beyond a certain size/number of projects. That way you're only targeting people who already know your service is valuable to them (or isn't).

</comment><comment><USER3> I struggled with this question as well in the past on UniversityTutor.com. Here are a few common ones from other sites that I looked at. Maybe the right one will jump out.

number of photos, highlighted listing (AutoTrader)

storage space (Evernote)

top listing in search results (Google)

top listing in search results, larger listing/photo, more photos (Haystack.com)

number of projects, ssl, storage (Basecamp)

number of faxes sent (FaxZero.com)

number of subscribers (Aweber.com)

Pro Badge, storage, num photos (Flickr)

receive messages but can't reply (Match.com)

send messages to full inboxes, racy photos, other stuff (OkCupid)

If you don't mind sharing the app we could probably come up with some other ideas too. If you literally just have a laundry list of features, then yeah maybe the best and most useful ones you give away free, and the ones power users will want you can make paid. That is the heart of the freemium model I think: a _causal_ user who might find it useful once a month should be able to use it free, and spread the word for you. A _power_ user who is logging in almost daily, or making money from it (for business), etc should be a paid user.

</comment><comment><USER4> As a consumer, I like being able to at least try _any_ feature, no matter what tier it's on. Just make it clear when something is a trial, as opposed to permanently free.

There's nothing worse than having to pay $10 more per month, or whatever, only to find out that something isn't worth it.

<comment><USER3> Not sure if this is what you meant, but an old fashioned free trial based on time (30 day free trial!) doesn't convert as well as a freemium based trial (first 100 subscribers free, after that $10/month) in my experience.

The latter is a good way to let people try it while avoiding the ticking clock. I think the 30 (and 60) day free trials rub people the wrong way since so many were used for borderline scams over the years, hoping people would forget to cancel in time, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> People will pay for feature $x a month, if that features helps them boost their earnings $2x; think of that: which features can make your client richer? How much? and charge!

<comment><USER6> You're discarding entertainment features, which is nontrivial when it comes to the webapp space.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Easiest Way to Patent an Idea? - <AUTHOR> I have been tinkering with an idea related to spam (as in, how to reduce/remove spam), and I'd like to explore the possibility of patenting it.
I have no familiarity with the system, and would love if any of you can shed some light on how to proceed with it, and what pitfalls to avoid.
My goals is not necessarily to minimize the cost of patenting it, but rather making it simple, straightforward, and the least time consuming.
Thanks in advance for any help!
p.s. If you have a personal story to share on something you patented, please do so! <comment><USER2> The simplest, least time consuming for you, and probably safest in terms of result, would probably be the way it works when your employer patents something that you've been working on as an employee (which is my experience): Hire a lawyer.

Process in a company goes along the following lines:

A specialised lawyer is hired. You write a document describing your invention. The lawyer reads it. You present it to them, they ask questions and take notes. They draft a patent, may ask you some questions along the way. They go through the draft with you. There may be a couple of iterations. If all is OK they apply.

A lawyer knows how to draft a patent in order to have it granted while maximising its coverage: A patent really is a legal document so the wording can have a big impact on its value, it should be clear but as wide and general as possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Do you think that a lawyer has enough competence to be able to do this, despite they might not understand the technicalities of the patent itself?</comment></comment>


Microsoft Azure: Functions - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/functions/ <comment><USER2> I mentioned this in the other thread ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11398402](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11398402)), I'm Chris from the Azure Functions team. Feel free to AMA. :)

<comment><USER3> Hey! Love this work, this is a model I've been very fond of for some time now. However, as a Python koolaid drinker, I do have to ask, is Python on your roadmap? (and if not, whyso?)

Edit: realized in hindsight that many of the posts in this thread are/may be about "do you support X" (as for any shiny new feature like this), I imagine you guys may have a doc to describe this so feel free to just drop a link and not waste time explaining (to me at least) if I missed it when reviewing the primary docs. :)

<comment><USER2> It absolutely is on our roadmap. You can actually try out an early experimental version via the portal, but it will change DRASTICALLY before we announce "full support" for Python. It's definitely high on our list.

Check out this article for a good overview: [https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/documentation/articles/fun...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/documentation/articles/functions-overview/)

<comment><USER4> I second Python!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd love to use Lambda, but the cold start issue[1] makes it a nonstarter for me. Anyone know if Azure Functions works around/solves this problem?

[1] documented here, e.g. [https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=181348](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=181348)

<comment><USER6> I have to admit that I don't get it either for most of these offerings (as mentioned elsewhere, there are offering from all the big tech giants incl. IBM). However, it seems to me that one could just use a $10/mo Linode that is always running and predictably costs $120/yr. There could be data transfer costs into/out of these cloud services that make Lambda-like offerings more competitive from a TCO perspective, but that seems unlikely and project specific. I would like to hear a valid use-case from an actual user.

Edit: typos/ punctuation

<comment><USER7> Not an actual user, but I know people who have used Lambda with success. I think the main use case is APIs for which traffic is extremely variable. It's less about cost and more about the ability to seamlessly scale up with traffic. For instance, if your site gets featured on Hacker News, services like Lambda and S3 allow your site to scale almost infinitely and handle all that traffic with ease, and yet they're super cheap when you don't get much traffic, so in those cases you get the best of both worlds. The equivalent using a traditional VPS is either to have a really beefy machine running 24/7 (expensive), or to build an architecture that allows you to spin up more instances at will and scale that way (really time-consuming and difficult to get right).

<comment><USER8> I think you need a cdn to scale s3. So probably s3 is not enough. The equivalent if your api is mostly for reading is to put varnish in front of it.

<comment><USER7> S3 can scale with traffic all by itself, so you don't necessarily need a CDN. The CDN just distributes your assets around the world, and also does a few other things like caching to help those assets load more quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> F#, Microsoft's FUNCTIONAL programming language, can not be used to write Azure FUNCTIONS? You can even see them borrowing from F# with the .csx files for writing C# functions. I'm a constantly dumbfounded at the way Microsoft neglects this wonderful language.

<comment><USER2> We had to make some tough scoping calls, but we are actively working on full F# support, based on our C# implementation. You _can_ use F#, but right now it is pretty basic. Check out this sample which you can also deploy via the portal (experimental category): [https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk- templates/tree/ma...](https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk- templates/tree/master/Templates/QueueTrigger-FSharp)

Thanks for the feedback!

<comment><USER10> Slight correction, F# support is broken right now. But its being fixed as we speak :) [https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk- script/pull/203](https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk-script/pull/203)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google Cloud Platform (GCP) had released similar offering in alpha called "Google Cloud Functions"[1] two months ago[2] as well.

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs](https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11066718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11066718)

<comment><USER12> ...and IBM announced OpenWhisk in February (and it's open source!):

[https://developer.ibm.com/openwhisk/](https://developer.ibm.com/openwhisk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A more distinctive name would have made it easier to search for.

Hopefully everyone who ever writes anything on the Internet about this refers to it as "Azure functions", which will make it possible to find information. This seems unlikely however.

Microsoft would have helped out everyone-with-a-question by giving it a slightly more distinctive name to search by, such as PureFunctions or something.

Search Bing for:

"problem with functions"

"functions won't initialize"

"how to write functions with functions"

"what sort of language can I use functions with"

"getting started with functions"

"error with functions"

"how to write lambda functions with functions"

"my functions function is not functioning"

The pain begins instantly.

<comment><USER2> The time I spent in meeting discussing this name... :)

Honestly, you're right that we're going to run into fun search engine issues, but Stack Overflow tags should hopefully help.

We opted for making it obvious what our product was doing and Functions was an logical evolution of our WebJobs SDK Functions concept, which is essentially what our product is - this is just a WebJobs SDK-as-a-Service.

Time will tell; I hope we don't have to rebrand someday just to show up in the search engines, but we'll do what we hope is best for the customer.

<comment><USER14> At work, we were guessing the name of AWS Lambda/Google Functions competitor by Azure and we were guessing Omicron, which comes after Lambda in the Greek alphabet and also has 'micro' in it.

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

Alright, any opensource lambda/functions clone can now take this name I guess!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> 2 questions. Does this work with Service Bus? Right now I have a console app sitting on a linux VM (written in C#) that connects to Service Bus, waits for messages, and handles it.

A lot of what I do in my app is write file to the local system, and upload it via FTP to somewhere else. Now, there's no requirement to write the file to anywhere locally (i do it more as a backup, and I could back it up in a database table i suppose), but its super convenient... how does the file system work in a system like this? Would it require Azure Storage?

<comment><USER2> 1\. We should have Service Bus support in the next month or so. You can see a sample of it in progress here: [https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk- script/tree/maste...](https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk- script/tree/master/sample/ServiceBusQueueTrigger)

2\. You can access the file system and all your functions share the same files because we're using a network file share.

<comment><USER16> And event hubs? Based on [https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk- script/tree/maste...](https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk- script/tree/master/sample/EventHubTrigger) I assume it's also coming soon?

<comment><USER10> Event Hubs support is already in there and we have a couple of basic templates. Make a new function and check the "Data Processing" scenario category.

<comment><USER2> We'll have some more templates and end to end samples out soon, as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks really interesting, I've been waiting for on-demand python since picloud shut down.

Is there any information on pricing? Links in various places say to visit the pricing page but the pricing page just says what's free and how it's billed with no actual prices.

What are the limitations? I assume there's some limit to the size of what I upload (data/code/dependencies). Is there a maximum runtime?

Edit - Given this is in the early stages, I'd love to request a manageable runtime limit. I understand why you don't want to have people complaining that they started 10k infinite loops, but I'd like to be able to limit things to either short periods for things I know really should complete in < 10s or longer ones as I've got a bunch of stuff that might take 10 minutes or more I'd also like to do.

This might be an issue on your side though, I can see it being an issue starting 10k long running requests rather than knowing you just need to schedule 10k 1 minute requests.

<comment><USER2> Our pricing is either the dedicate App Service pricing which is GA'd already or the new Dynamic tier which is FREE (as in beer) until beginning of May. We'll have pricing come out sometime this month.

You should have at least a GB of disk space to work with.

We don't have a maximum runtime, yet, but we're likely add a "timeout" feature in the near future so you can optionally time it out.

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the reply.

> Our pricing is either the dedicate App Service pricing which is GA'd already > or the new Dynamic tier which is FREE (as in beer) until beginning of May. > We'll have pricing come out sometime this month.

Sounds good, I'll keep an eye out for it. After seeing somewhere else in the thread that this took you < 3 months I would have been very surprised if you'd also settled on pricing already!

> You should have at least a GB of disk space to work with.

That's fantastic, a huge step up from lambda.

> We don't have a maximum runtime, yet, but we're likely add a "timeout" > feature in the near future so you can optionally time it out.

 _Very_ nice. These two bits of information make functions useful for far more tasks, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good timing. I was about to reccomend starting a project on AWS because Azure didn't have something like aws lambda.

Great job guys

</comment><comment><USER19> Surprised they didn't call it Delegates, haha.

<comment><USER20> More surprised they did not call it "Lambda for Azure, Cloud Edition"!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Azure Functions allows developers to take action by connecting to data > sources

Could I connect to a database on a socket, or is this for 'pure' functions without side effects?

<comment><USER22> From their page ([https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/documentation/articles/fun...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/documentation/articles/functions-overview/)):

> Write any function under a minute - either when you need a simple job to > cleanse a database or to build functionality that processes millions of > messages from connected devices. Use your development language of choice > (C#, Node.JS, Python and more). Pay only for the time your code runs and > trust Azure to scale as needed.

Sounds like you'll be able to connect to other stuff.

IMO functions without side-effects are useless in many contexts, I'd guess that this is one of them, as you probably want to use the results of your computation somehow.

<comment><USER2> Yup. You are sandboxed for certain activities, but you can certainly create outbound requests for talking to databases or APIs

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I'm Chris from the Azure Functions team. Feel free to AMA.

<comment><USER23> Are there any significant differences between this and AWS Lambda? I know this sounds accusative and I swear I don't mean it that way: Lambda is awesome and if this is more-or-less the same thing, this will be too. I just want to make sure I'm understanding correctly what the service is :)

<comment><USER2> You can see our full list of features here: [https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/documentation/articles/fun...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/documentation/articles/functions-overview/#features)

One feature I'm particularly proud of is our code-less integration that lets you output to various services without writing against their SDK, saving lots of boilerplate code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can you give some pros and cons of using Azure Functions vs Azure Service Fabric? What are some of the reasons you would use Azure Service Fabric over Azure Functions?

<comment><USER25> Those are completely unrelated products. Functions is a server-less philosophy kind of thing. SF is a cluster management and orchestration technology so obviously very server oriented (It manages servers)

<comment><USER24> When you look at stateless Microservices vs azure functions which you run all the time in app service, they both appear to overlap. My question was more focused here

<comment><USER2> So Functions could be treated as an opinionated, lightweight microservice framework, and thus you could compare it to other microservice frameworks like Service Fabric. Service Fabric is great for so many reasons. It can handle large, heavy duty applications. Functions is great for the opposite reasons, small & lightweight. You should be writing Functions like you'd write a unix tool; it should to one thing and do it well.

Cory is in the middle of a great talk where he helps "demystify" these services. (Which I can't find a link to right now...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> @crandycodes I have two questions:

1\. How does Windows sandboxing implemented in WebJobs?

2\. Do I understand correctly that all functions of the same Azure a/c may run in the same sandbox. I.e. you only sandbox users, but not individual Functions?

</comment><comment><USER27> Very interesting. Seems a lot easier to setup than in AWS (Lambda + API gateway). Now you just need support for more languages like Ruby :)

</comment><comment><USER28> is there a separate runtime that I can install locally (or in another cloud)?

<comment><USER2> It's possible today and we'll make it easier over the next two months. [https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk- script/wiki](https://github.com/Azure/azure-webjobs-sdk-script/wiki)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11398323](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11398323)

<comment><USER30> We merged them.</comment></comment>


Selecting a platform: JavaScript vs Elm vs PureScript vs GHCjs - <AUTHOR> http://mutanatum.com/posts/2017-01-12-Browser-FP-Head-to-Head.html <comment><USER2> BuckleScript (OCaml) [https://github.com/bloomberg/bucklescript](https://github.com/bloomberg/bucklescript) is the only one that produces reasonable output that doesn't require large runtime libraries all the time.

Koka [https://github.com/koka-lang/koka](https://github.com/koka-lang/koka) is a very interesting research language that focuses on explicitly specifying effects in types. It even deconstructs Haskell's notion of purity into "throws exceptions" \+ "may never terminate". Unfortunately, the code generation (which BTW exists for both JS and C#) is uh… not very good.

But honestly, I haven't felt the need to use a functional language in frontend development. JavaScript (ES6) is good enough, and it's actually supported in browsers, so you can develop without any compiling, and only use Babel to make production builds. If the project is not small, use TypeScript to add some type safety.

<comment><USER3> Currently I'm writing in Purescript but I'm constantly checking BuckleScript and I'm liking direction of it. What is OCaml polymorphism story? Does it have analogue of typeclasses? I'm currently using Purescript for writing build steps for webpack and I benefit from Haskell ideas like lenses, refolds and free monads. It would be great if I could transfer those tools. Maybe you could point me to some literature about transforming recursive data structures (ASTs) in OCaml? Maybe thera are some interesting tools and techniques?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is very cool to see different type safe Alt-JS compared, I made a gist here which includes Elm, PureScript, BuckleScript and ClojureScript, add your favorite one here: [https://gist.github.com/bobzhang/9f27a5a0bd730e8d3503bf5d058...](https://gist.github.com/bobzhang/9f27a5a0bd730e8d3503bf5d058a58a7)

<comment><USER5> I added Scala.js in the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "TEA is not composable, but through brute force. ... you are stuck building and maintaining some giant types, and writing a ton of boilerplate. The ways around this problem are fairly weak, and amount to, "don't write components" ..."

This has basically been my experience with Elm. But don't say that Elm is boilerplate heavy to any elm-acolytes, they will stick their fingers in their ears and go "nananananana"

<comment><USER7> Can you be more specific about what boilerplate is necessary?

<comment><USER6> Anything that is usually solved with something like typeclasses, or module functors, or inheritance can only be solved in Elm with typing lots and lots of concrete implementations.

Other things can't be solved at all, since Elm is so tightly coupled to TEA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Happy user of typescript here. imo, pure FP is just like pure OO: it's just not very good. Why constraint ourselves? The world is not pure, our programs don't become ANY better because of the IO monad (Task in Elm); Let's stop wankering or at least, just do it for the math and the research value but let's not kid ourselves it's very useful.

<comment><USER9> > The world is not pure

TL;DR: The 'impurity' of the world is an illusion created by our brains.

I have a physics degree and I completely disagree. The world IS pure.

Think of it like this: Time is the successive application of a pure function that takes the old universe as an argument and returns the new universe. All science models the real world like this. This is the foundation of mathematics. Nowhere in physics or maths do we mutate anything. Even quantum applies this perspective. This is what leads to the many worlds interpretation of quantum.

What's actually going on is your brain is such a powerful illusion machine that it has convinced 'you' that the world is composed of 'objects' that 'change'. This is entirely inside your brain. It is a side effect of the perception process inside your brain. It does not mean the real world is actually composed of 'objects' that 'change'.

This illusion is so strong that we then go on to model the real world inside computers with 'objects' that 'change'. This is a mistake that leads to no end of problems.

Once you realise the world is immutable, and that the process of time is a function, and that what we see as time is actually a succession of immutable 'universe-values', you then start modelling your problems like this. And then you realise what a better fit FP is for modelling the real world. And then you realise why science models the world using mathematics... that is functions and values... which are immutable.

When I argue this with OO developers I ask them "Is the real world mutable, or immutable?" When they answer mutable, I then ask them to go back to last Tuesday and change their lotto numbers. They can't. It's almost as if the past.... is immutable! And the present becomes the past the very moment it comes into being. And the future is unknown.

The present also cant be changed. We can affect the future by using our muscles to apply 'forces' to the 'universe-value' thereby changing the way the time-function of the universe returns the new-universe value (the future), but we cannot reach in and alter any of these immutable values directly, not the past, the present, or the future.

<comment><USER10> What physics class do they teach all this in? I must have missed that one....

"Many worlds" is more philosophy than physics, isn't the most accepted interpretation, and even going down that path leads to lots of edge cases that could still imply impurity.

Besides, if the world is pure, and OO is part of the world, then OO must be pure too so what's the problem?

<comment><USER11> Even calling any of this "philosophy" is too much credit. This is more like shit you say to your dog when you're stoned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In addition to the options identified in the article definitely take a look at ScalaJS and ClojureScript. I've used ScalaJS quite a bit and it's a more or less flawless experience.

<comment><USER13> How does ScalaJS compare to these other libs in terms of building browser UIs?

<comment><USER14> It compares pretty well. It is possible to define Scala bindings to JS libraries, so you can use them more or less seamlessly. Bindings to the most popular ones (jQuery, React, etc.) are already defined, and actively maintained. It is relatively simple to add your own. A nice thing is that, since Scala is a strongly-typed language, you get code-completion and refactoring "for free". However, if you prefer to use dynamic typing, ScalaJS lets you do that easily too.

Also, like the grandparent comment said, ClojureScript is a very nice language too, with powerful tooling.

The nice thing about ScalaJS and ClojureScript is that they both can run on the browser, and on a JVM backend. Scala also has an LLVM backend that is being actively developed, but on its early stages. (ScalaJS is very mature and performant)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd be very curious to hear about the OPs specific experience with Flow. I've found the opposite to be true of Flow vs Typescript with the added benefit that Flow is easy to integrate into an existing codebase.

<comment> lloyd-christmas > with the added benefit that Flow is easy to integrate into an existing > codebase.

I converted our Node codebase to Typescript and had no problems at all. I don't know much about Flow, but what is it that makes you think it's easy comparative to Typescript?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Purescript does have very workable solution for client and server sharing code:

[https://hackage.haskell.org/package/servant- purescript](https://hackage.haskell.org/package/servant-purescript)

I'm using this with Halogen and it works great

</comment><comment><USER17> > Here are some reasons to not choose JavaScript: It's JavaScript.

Was this really necessary? I stopped reading your post after I saw this because I got bored and no longer take you seriously.

<comment><USER18> From a functional programming point of view, the fact it is javascript is almost the opposite of everything you tend to appreciate about your functional language of choice. So that simply counts it out for some people. However you an still do functional programming in js, and making use of typescript and ramda is a pretty good base for doing it. (well, this is what I do anyways). I find this a much easier approach when blending all kinds of javascript libraries together than using a cross compiler .

<comment><USER19> It also makes the writer hard to take seriously. Low blows never shine brightly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > I'm not even going to consider a system valid without managing IO in some > way. So yes, all flavors of Lisp are off the table as well.

We're talking functional in the context of JavaScript, I think ClojureScript deserves more of an explanation on why it doesn't even qualify. That is, if you're trying to hold to the "neutral as possible" thing in the beginning.

<comment><USER21> Clojurescript doesn't have a way of managing IO (i.e. types.)

<comment><USER22> Clojure has something that arguably better than most static type systems, it has Clojure.spec

<comment><USER21> But it's not static. Pre/postcondition runtime checks can be implemented in a static language as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> When did every blog start having 22pt body and 62pt headers?

Those are the font sizes I used as a 4th grader trying to write a four page essay with 500 words.

<comment><USER24> Very distracting; makes me long for the academic style of sites like Kernighan's [1] or Stallman's[2].

[1] [http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall14/cos109/](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall14/cos109/)

[2][https://www.stallman.org/archives/2016-nov- feb.html](https://www.stallman.org/archives/2016-nov-feb.html)

They'd be even nicer if the text was inverted, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've recently used Elm for a real-world internal tool and was looking over the PureScript documentation today to see whether it'd be worth looking at PureScript in the future. I was disillusioned with the boilerplate of writing JSON decoders and encoders in Elm.

I quickly stumbled across this:

[https://github.com/slamdata/purescript- halogen/blob/master/G...](https://github.com/slamdata/purescript- halogen/blob/master/GUIDE.md)

This is pretty much the Elm Architecture, except fully understanding every detail there requires the reader to be conversant with some pretty hairy concepts, including free monads and the Free functor. That's not just something that's under the hood. It's built right into the user-facing API, and the user even has to tend to this free construction when writing `eval` functions by manually writing lines like `pure next` or `pure (continue value)`, which occur in the first example.

It seriously concerns me that the user will have to write lines that they couldn't truly understand without understanding free monads, because frankly nobody new to Haskell and PureScript is going to be comfortable with free monads until they've spent some serious time with the language.

I happen to be very well-versed in Haskell so this stuff is not an issue for me -- in fact the use of Free here is not only clever but kind of beautiful -- but I wouldn't really want to onboard someone onto a PureScript project who'd never used Haskell or PureScript before and didn't even know what a functor was. "Why do I have to write this `pure (continue value)` line? What does that mean?" \-- "Oh boy... grab a seat and clear your schedule."

Some boilerplate for JSON decoding looks pretty tame in comparison, to be honest.

<comment><USER26> Halogen is not the only option for building web applications with PureScript. There are simpler options like Pux and Thermite, which are possibly much easier to teach. Halogen is optimized for a different use case.

<comment><USER25> Thanks! Both of those definitely look more beginner-friendly or at least easier to teach. I'm going to have to look more into PureScript in the coming days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Can anyone explain what is meant by "managing IO" in the statement "I'm not even going to consider a system valid without managing IO in some way. So yes, all flavors of Lisp are off the table as well."? Is that like monads?

<comment><USER28> It means restricting to where you can perform IO actions, eg. printing to a log, writing to a shared area of memory, etc.

Haskell does this by representing IO actions as values, eg. "IO String" (something like "IO<String>", for people more familiar with that syntax), representing an IO action that, when later evaluated, will yield a string that you can use in subsequent actions.

Haskell's "main" (entry-point) function is a value of type "IO ()" (IO of a value representing nothing useful; you don't get anything out of it, so you just have a nothing placeholder). When a Haskell program is run, it ostensibly (hand-waving here) takes that IO value and interprets it, performing the action IO.

You have functions like putStrLn (print a line) that takes a String, and returns an "IO ()" . Accordingly, if you have

      main = putStrLn "Hello, World!"

... you have a value that lines up with the expected return value of main "IO ()". More complicated examples, like

      main =
        readLn >>= (\x -> putStrLn ("Hello, " ++ x))

... are doing the same thing (checking the types line up), just with more moving parts (the Monad thing you mentioned, which we're using to relate the "read line" function with the "print line" function).

The key bit is that it's just "IO Blah" values standing in for IO actions, and like jigsaw pieces, these IO-returning functions only fit together where the types line up, restricting how you can use them.

Monads are tangential to this; the type-checking of that jigsaw puzzle is what matters here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Excellent overview. I wonder if the author also had a reason for skipping tslint, other than perhaps not knowing about it?

Edit: Also, why do fewer and fewer sites have an RSS feed? :(

<comment><USER30> > Edit: Also, why do fewer and fewer sites have an RSS feed? :(

Bit sad, that. Somehow it happened that a critical mass of bloggers/readers moved over Google Reader while during the same period all those social-feed web apps kept gaining momentum, then Reader shut off.. things can change like that over a decade or so. A 20-year-old today was perhaps 7-10 when XML feeds were hot currency. I'm still content with my numerous working subscribed feeds in Thunderbird though, can't catch up as it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'd like to put forth Fable as a recommendation.

It was briefly mentioned in another comment, but was written off for it's lack of momentum, community, and libraries.

I'll respond to these important concerns one by one:

Momentum: The fable project began last year. There are still active discussions about tweaks getting it to v1.0, but already there is enough there to make complete applications. There isn't hackernews/reddit hype, but the gitter is busy and there are some using it in production already.

Community: I assume that the concern with the community is that it isn't large. F# has never had as large of a community in any of its incarnations compared to mainstream OO-first languages, but the community has always been there to help me out and I've never gone more than a day or two waiting on an answer to a library/language question (most fable related questions are answered very quickly on gitter). The latter fact alone makes it more impressive to me than some other communities. Community is also important because of the amount and variety of libraries that are created for a language. I'd argue that this isn't as important for transpiled languages as it is for separate compiled languages, where for example a ruby library can't be used in python, but I can use any javascript library in fable.

Libraries: Library usage is interesting when talking about transpiled languages, and mostly depends on the Dynamic and Foreign interfaces available. Because of Fable's dynamic abilities, I can dynamically call any javascript code I need to. I use this for a couple of libraries in the React-Native application I'm building using Exponent. The other method is Foreign interfaces, which is fantastic in fable because of how the F# type system (and inference) works in the first place. There is a utility to convert from typescript definitions to fable definitions (some will need tweaking afterwards for greater type safety) which adds a ton of libraries itself. I'd argue because of that fact that Fable has more libraries than any other functional-first transpile-to-js language!

Here is a example repo I put up earlier with full-stack F# with live-reloading on the client and server. [https://github.com/Banashek/Universal-FSharp- Samples](https://github.com/Banashek/Universal-FSharp-Samples)

I'm using a setup like this on a current project deployed with docker-compose to digitalocean.

Full-stack F# has been nice to work with so far.

One really nice experience I had was being able to reuse viewmodels and their validators.

Android/iOS -> Exponent

Web -> Fable-Elmish

Server -> Suave

I had viewmodels and partial validation functions which could sit in a shared folder and be referenced by all of the projects.

I change it in one place, and I can update all 3 instantly. All of the rest calls depend on the types definition, so I didn't have to do anything after adding a new property to the type and saving the document. The server reloaded, the frontend reloaded, the mobile app reloaded.

I'm not sure If I'll keep it that way, as coordinating production updates is something I haven't fully figured out yet, but for now it's neat to explore.

Would I recommend someone who doesn't know functional programming to switch their applications to fable? No. Would I recommend fable to someone familiar with functional programming looking for a better way to manage their ui? Yes.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I Quit the Job? - <AUTHOR> I have been working as customer service representative for over 7 years; recently I got promoted to team lead, however I am not feeling like leading team as I don't like office bureaucracy and politics. Some of team members are toxic, including manager.
How should I handle?
Should I quit the job? <comment><USER2> > I am not feeling like

> I don't like

You gave us some good insight to how you are feeling, but we should also consider what your needs are from a job.

Do you know what you would do for money if you quit? Do you want to be a customer service representative somewhere else, or are you considering a career change?

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're the breadwinner, it's complicated, and you'll have to think hard about your options.

If not, I'd start looking.</comment>


The Most Reliable Recession Indicator of the Past 50 Years Has Started Blaring - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/business/2019/07/yield-curve-bond-market-recession.html <comment><USER2> Economic field is a complete pseudo-science disaster. This is another example of it : « the most reliable indicator » is something that has happened 7 times in 50 years, nobody understands why this is an indicator, and the only explanation they give starts with « the market thinks ».

They should probably go back to reading tea leaves, or ask octopusos to choose a box like they do in football. They'll be more honest.

Europe is seeing negative interest rates for months now, which is supposed to be an anomaly. And there's still no inflation, which is also abnormal with those interest rates. New monetary theory explains that debt doesn't matter, and an internet company with 2 billion users is launching its official currency together with visa.

I think now would be a good time for people in the field to start to be honest with themselves and publicly declare what in their work is science, and what isn't.

<comment><USER3> I'm as happy as anyone to grant that economics is not a hard science.

But saying our only explanation for this predictor is "the market thinks" seems pretty off base.

\- Yields are based on demand

\- Yield inversion indicates heightened demand for long term safe stores of value, reduced demand for short term stores of value

\- This pattern maps well to our understanding of investor psychology

\- Recessions generally happen when investors are gloomy about short to medium term prospects, leading to a reduction in investment, leading to a reduction in aggregate demand

<comment><USER4> Your reasoning sounds really seductive, which is on point for economics. The next step is actually giving solid reasoning (preferably backed by hard evidence - this means numbers) for why this is the truth and not some other equally seductive line of reasoning. Without this, you're just reading tea leaves and explaining them well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I see way more worrying signs with much more immediate real world effects. All suggest the coming of the prophesized "long winter" in the tech industry:

1\. PCB makers deferring new equipment installation: [https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190702PD205.html](https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190702PD205.html)

2\. Highlights of the day: Semiconductor inventory piling up: [https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190626VL202.html](https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190626VL202.html)

3\. Chipmakers likely to post disappointing 2H19 results: [https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190702PD203.html](https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190702PD203.html)

This was for long talked about by economists in the "Big Semi," and I tend to trust those guys. The semiconductor industry employs very serious economists.

<comment><USER6> The first article mentions specifically weaker sales for smartphones (as well as US/China tensions) as the culprit. Makes sense that this industry is underperforming no? The (high-end) smart phone market has become saturated, and there is no need to buy smart phones anywhere near as quickly as phone manufacturers want us to, and especially not at flagship phone prices.

Seems more the case of market saturation than signs of a recession.

> However, network communication- and server-related applications are likely > to continue seeing growths, Lee added.

Other markets seem to be doing just dandy

<comment><USER7> So what is the difference between saturation and recession? To me it seems like you're going to invest and pile on until you hit saturation, in which case you have to cut back because the demand isn't there. That cut back is recession (for that market), no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Man, The Indicator is going to go nuts.

Seriously though, this boom has been interesting for me - because I don't feel like there's been a huge psychology feeling of "Times are really good". It still feels like we're being squeezed - which doesn't make me think we're at the peak of a bubble. But then you look at IPOs and the stock market and some of the more egregious examples of bubble style valuations (WeWork for example) maybe this recession is more focused on the stock market and less far reaching than the last one (as far as it can be). It'll be really interesting to see whether the deficit comes back as a topic in the US.

<comment><USER9> Not so positive other things to think about.

Auto loan defaults are near record and are bundled similar t mortgages in 2007.

Student loan debt is at record high with stagnant wages over the last 10 years.

Personal loan and mortgage debt is similar to 2007.

Stock buybacks and allocation of capital away from workers is spiking after the 2017 tax cuts.

Plus, those tax cuts are counter to some schools of thought on raising taxes in a good economic period to pay back the last or save for the next economic downturn. All this with increasing spending and record increases in the deficit. The deficit has become a left wing talking point no as previous deficit hawks have walked or are no longer the opposition party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I believe global economies have fundamentally changed post GFC, so previous indicators may no longer be relevant. Interest rates have already gone below historic levels so it's not clear how economies will be turned-around. One of the few suggestions I've seen is [https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/the- world-needs-shoc...](https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/the-world-needs- shock-therapy-20190629-p522i6.html)

<comment><USER11> This is one of the strongest arguments for a higher inflation target. Wealth concentration and an older population have driven interest rates down to the point where the natural nominal interest rate in goods time is near 0, and almost certainly sub zero for any type of recession.

A higher inflation target(3-4%) gives centrals banks the much needed wiggle room to correct a recession. Unfortunately once you're in a recession it's too late to adjust the inflation rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Early age CS, math, science enthusiast here that left undergraduate with 3 classes left. I have no respect for what passes as university education. Obfuscation and book burning is the MO - and it is most prevalent in these 'economics' classes (hint: always read the original works+history for your math classes) . Econ is not science or math - don't dare conflate the dogmas of modern science (or the copy errors of your mathematics curriculum) with the utter nonsense of university economics. It is pure gaslighting dogma of inconsistent and erroneous dogma. The courses serve nothing more than to demonstrate how not to build a model and how improper definitions and first principles lead to nonsense. This is the crown jewl of post modernist institutions:

1 Comoditize and sell shitty models. 2 rigorous tests to see if you remembered erroneous definitions and concepts. 3 refuse to acknowledge inconvenient evidence 4 worship figures that engage in plagerism and open dishonesty. 5 hide the true power in upper level math courses after brainwashing population to despise math. Bonus points if public university endorses purposefully confusing high school curriculum. 6 distract from the fact that real science is a constructive discipline - like CS without the cargo culting. Remove constructive math from high school and erroneously claim foundational texts such as Euclid's elements are obsolete. Back up said claims with dishonest translations. Don't forget to memorize the periodic table without question or further discussion. Define stupid shit like Electrons are point particles and make up some cloud bullshit. Always confuse territory and maps.

Edit: claim that the dragon book is obsolete. Never expose students to it's insights into logic, modeling, and language. \+ Attempt to have a discussion on economics without understanding banking and government. It's like trying to have a discussion of CS without discussing binary or other bases.

</comment><comment><USER13> "As of this week, the U.S. Treasury yield curve has now been inverted for a full quarter"

Just in case you don't want to be clickbaited.

<comment><USER14> I am surprised the inverted yield is not the natural state of affairs. In the options world, short expiry contracts pay a higher premium than long term contracts. Long term loans are like wholesale as short term loans are to retail. Shouldn't short term interest rates be higher ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Articles like this will be followed by "This time, it's different" articles. Here's one.

[https://www.ocregister.com/2019/07/03/inverted-yield- curve-a...](https://www.ocregister.com/2019/07/03/inverted-yield-curve-a- reliable-recession-indicator-may-fail-this-time-realtor-economist-says/)

</comment><comment><USER16> The news is that consumers are running out of money. That can be called a market warning if you like, but it is pretty damn obvious without a new economic analysis.</comment>


Rooftop solar power may be flooding the grid - <AUTHOR> https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/too-much-of-a-good-thing-solar-power-surge-is-flooding-the-grid-20180606-p4zjs7.html <comment><USER2> Renewable energy is quite predictable: there is sun during the day, and no sun during the night. Wind is a bit less but could be too.

Why not organise accordingly?

First, there are batteries: solar roofs should come with batteries, than will power the house during the night. Authorities could enforce that, and could also build larger energy storages with batteries at a region level (see recent examples from Tesla).

Then, this is mostly communication: why not make the grid and the roof "talk" to each other and the roof be turned off from the grid when there is no need for it? Is it because subsidies or some kind of mandatory buy from the grid that this could be an issue? otherwise there could be incentive to have this better integration with the whole system.

Otherwise, use bitcoin miners, during the day!

<comment><USER3> This is the part where someone points out why I'm completely wrong:

> solar roofs should come with batteries

The way I understand it, batteries tend to be bad for the environment if/when they need to be replaced, because often they are improperly recycled and/or there are no adequate facilities for that.

If this is correct, do we really want to have more of them around? Wouldn't an environmentally-friendly(ish) central plant be better in the long run?

<comment><USER4> Lead acid batteries are pretty easy to recycle. We already do this for car batteries. Lithium batteries are currently not as easily recycled, but that seems to be because there is little demand for recycled Lithium and they're not very toxic in landfills.

<comment><USER5> Stationary batteries have fewer constraints wrt to energy density, because they don't move.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a tough and awkward problem, because accounting for the externalities of a "good thing" would curtail progress towards a good thing. Meanwhile, the externalities of bad things get a free pass. Ouch.

The solutions are either very expensive, very counterproductive, or very unfair.

The expensive solution is grid energy storage, where the utility installs a bunch of storage to time-shift some of the generation to better match the demand. The unfortunate aspect is that this is capital intensive, and most utilities are already loaded full of debt to pay for capex. This will probably result in the increase of rates billed to consumers, which is ironic, even if the grid is now providing a more complex service.

The unfair solution is to legislate that onsite storage must accompany all residential distributed solar generation. This pushes the costs significantly higher, and forces homeowners to locally account for the added complexities of their green energy generation. But full suite of complications around other energy sources isn't priced into their cost.

One counterproductive solution is to force market pricing on all consumption and generation. The revenue on residential solar generation would free-fall, because all of it in a particular area gets generated at a time when it's most plentiful. It wouldn't be worthwhile for a small player to generate it anymore.

Another counterproductive, but simple solution, is to dump excess solar at the inverters at peak time, then run a bunch of natgas peakers in the evening once solar drops off. This is an environmentalist's nightmare, but takes no effort to execute.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am in my 5th year of a 9.8MW system. I have generated about 45MW of power and approximately 1/3 stays in my home and the rest is sold to local power company.

A couple of years after installation I started to see negative press for solar and eventually some action by my local power company. "Solar is no use to me", to quote the manager. Their actions finally killed new solar in our town. They used arguments like this, but we all suspected they were worried about revenue protection. There are 7 solar customers, a gnat's cock, so-to-speak, but they are/were scared. Local newspapers echo sentiments that solar customers have their hands in the pockets of non-solar and provide no balance.

My goal is to get a 10-15kWh storage (Tesla Powerwall probably) and then keep most or all of my power and pay the grid like a very low usage customer. I believed we could do better, but I don't see it happening.

<comment><USER8> > I am in my 5th year of a 9.8MW system

Do you run a power plant?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The same thing is happening in Europe. Energy markets need large reorganization for the transition and energy grid and storage technology needs to catch up big time. This takes lots of money.

Wind and solar turn spot prices negative when it's sunny and windy. Existing nuclear, coal can't be easily turned off for just a part of day. In free spot energy markets, the price of electricity must jump sky-high during low supply to pay for the rest of the time.

What is needed is load following power plants and large scale energy storage (flywheels and lithium ion are only solutions for very short fluctuations). In the North Europe there is possibility of using Norvegian hydropower to compensate for wind power as long as the grid capacity keeps up.

<comment><USER10> Just pass those negative prices to customers and they will solve the problem.

<comment><USER4> That requires "smart" meters everywhere.

<comment><USER11> In the Netherlands smart meters are the default now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reading this article, the first thing I wondered was, what does Australia have in terms of peaking power plants, which can come online—and, just as important, safely go offline—quickly to stabilize grid voltage?

The second thing I was wondering is, where are the bitcoin miners? Assuming electricity prices are not being held artificially high, then when they start to come down, miners will start coming in.

In fact, I could envision a two-tier pricing model, similar to what is used for EV charging. Combine that with something like Zellweger ripple signaling, and the grid would have a way to tell miners (et al) "Hey, we have excess, were reducing the rate so start mining!"

<comment><USER13> Australia is in the unique position of having abundant reserves of gas, coal and uranium but through what is probably blatant corruption the most expensive power prices in the world.

The gas is exported at a fixed cost to Japan and other countries where it can be resold to Australians at a profit.

Other issues are that no power company in Australia is willing to build a new coal power plant because the current coal subsidies are likely to go away with a change in government. The current government is very much pro coal. To illustrate how bad this is the current government Treasurer brought a lump of coal into sitting parliament and was waving it around showing how non dangerous it is. The coal lobbies are very strong and are running out of export options.

Australia is in this position due to a lack of bipartisan support towards any energy policy. Its also a problem because the power networks have been privatized and the incentives were set to guarantee returns on building infrastructure. The network as such is gold plated but the power it carries is very expensive.

While gas should be the answer to the network shortfalls there was a massive profit incentive to not do so initially wait for the spot prices to surge and then jump in and collect massive paychecks.

The result is that people installed solar. Which caused the electricity companies to raise prices which lead to more solar installs. The companies here are in a death spiral. They are insanely profitable right now, but the writing is on the wall.

However companies such as Tesla installed a massive battery to counter some of the issues and that project after 6 months is almost about to pay for itself.

Its a horrible situation to be honest, and I cannot wait for the power companies to fail due to their own hubris.

BTW if you think this is bad, do a quick check into the status of the National Broadband Network NBN in Australia. That's corruption on a whole other level and you should laugh at us Australians. No matter how bad your internet is I promise ours is worse, more expensive and despite billions of dollars not about to get better.

<comment><USER14> Australia does not need any more coal stations. Wanting to build new ones has weirdly become a strange infatuation by the conservatives, but there is absolutly no need in Australia for more baseline capacity. It's all in the peaks, which is all gas (which mostly of sets the benchmark price given where it sits in the AEMO stack).

So most of our price problems are just the price of gas, and the introduced reservation program has helped with that a little but does not go far enough. That, and the gold plating of the infrastructure (which alone is like 40% or something IIRC of the price rises over the last decade).

Most of the 'reliability problems' than the politician are on about are really just 'fears of possible future reliability problems', stirred up by the blackouts in SA that were mostly due to transmission lines being blown over in a massive storm while one of the interconnectors with Victoria was down for maintenance, and some wind turbines tripping out because of dangerously high wind speeds. There isn't really that much reliability risk apart from the fact that our coal stations are all pretty unreliable (the Australia Institute has taken to tweeting every time a generator trips out, it's pretty crazy how unreliable our coal stations are).

Perhaps we will need some more gas peaking stations but new pumped hydro and big batteries will probably take over some of that.

<comment><USER14> Sorry, should be ' _baseload_ capacity' in the first bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The ABC had a story today on pumped hydro storage: [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-07/how-does-pumped- hydro-...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-07/how-does-pumped-hydro-power- work/9843804)

The Snowy 2.0 scheme looks promising: 2 GW max power, 350 GWh max storage, A$3.8-4.5 billion. Online ~2024. Just approve the bloody thing already.

For comparison, Tesla's 'world biggest battery' aka the Hornsdale Power Reserve, is 100 MW max power, 129 MWh storage, and cost ~A$100 million. (cheaper per Watt, but about 60 times more expensive per Wh) Built in 4 months!

</comment><comment><USER16> So solar power is irregular and has a peak production (mid day) far from peak consumption (start and end of business day)? News at eleven, water is wet and all that...

edit: I should have said irregular through the day.

<comment><USER17> Solar power is not irregular at all, and is entirely predictable with a weather forecast. Unless Australia has an entirely different usage pattern to the rest of the developed world- businesses are perfectly aligned to use the solar power generated during the peak.

<comment><USER16> From the article: "the growing peak demand that comes at the end of the day, as the sun sets.". So the solar production of electricity peaks earlier than the end-of-day consumption peak.

<comment><USER18> There is a company in Australia that have improved flow batteries technology to the point where it can be miniaturised down to the size of a fridge freezer (previously they were the size of shipping containers) ten shipping containers full of them are able to store 3.2 megawatt-hours of energy and discharge a megawatt of power for over three to four hours which is roughly enough to keep 500-600 average homes going for the afternoon during the end of day consumption peak.

They are perfectly suited to be paired with solar/wind/etc where they can store up the days usage and discharge at a regular rate throughout the evening peak when generation is reduced. And as for reliability, unlike lithium-ion, flow batteries can last for 20+ years with unlimited cycles.

<comment><USER19> I assume you are taking about red-flow?

I head about them several years ago but haven't seen much since. Do they have the scale/ pricing to sell to the average consumer yet?

<comment><USER18> I am indeed. I think they got some press coverage three or four years ago. I personally discovered them by watching a documentary on YouTube that featured their technology and discussed its future.

I know that they recently raised some capital to invest in increasing sales. However I think a large proportion of their target market are grid scale and remote outposts for telecommunications/industrial applications.

That could be because their residential solution still cant beat something like the Tesla powerwall on price. However, I believe when investing in something that you expect to have longevity in the 20-30 years range it's better to go with something a little more pricey that is proven to last that long without degrading of performance, so on that point the flow battery wins.

It's like with solar panels, you can pay a premium upfront and get panels that will be producing the same output in ten years time like my parents did, or skimp on price and end up with a 30-40% reduction over the same time period like their neighbour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Interesting. In Australia do people regularly install rooftop solar installations without also installing battery units? What's the logic there? Just selling it to the grid?

<comment><USER14> Yeah, we had extremely generous feed-in tariffs for a while. It's generally net-metering too so pretty good value, even as the prices have come down. We have no shortage of sun most places, so it's pretty easy to almost wipe out your entire bill (except for the service/distribution fees, which have gone up a lot over the last few years, I guess to combat that).

<comment><USER21> A very relevant YouTube video from Dave at EEVBlog, where he goes through the numbers for his five year old solar installation, to see whether it has paid for itself. He also does hypothetical modelling of adding a battery, which proves to not be financially compelling at all.

[https://youtu.be/aQQE8V9NBXw](https://youtu.be/aQQE8V9NBXw)

<comment><USER22> This is because those "environmentalist" laws weren't created to satisfying national energy demand, but only the people's desire to roleplay environment- savers and get paid for it.

Similar government schemes played out in much of Europe. Install subsidized solar panels, and the government/electricity companies have to buy your electricity at unsustainably high prices whenever you produce it, regardless if they need it/can handle it.

Obviously, as far as I know, this didn't last very long, especially in the countries with more limited budgets. Eventually the sale prices dropped close to normal wholesale electricity prices and the subsidies were dropped. Those who installed the panels late in the bubble probably got out with a loss.

It was just a terrible idea all around. The grid isn't made for distributed production, energy storage isn't solved, and solar electricity is just not sustainable as rooftop photovoltaics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why don't Australians use Solar water heaters? It's the best ROI you can get from solar, Mediterranean countries and the sunny parts of China have absolutely massive capacities installed. It's direct thermal, so it's not a cool high-tech gadget, but if you're worried about the environment, it's "better" than solar panels when applicable. It also essentially includes on- site thermal storage, so no grid instabilities.

<comment><USER14> Lots of them around (especially in my state, Queensland, which has hot summers and mostly fairly warm days in winter), but you need to use a gas or electric booster to have hot water all the time. So in a lot of places it actually turns out to be fairly similar energy use to put in a high-efficiency heat- pump hot water heater.

I've just evaluated this because I want to replace the hot water system at my house, and I was initially thinking of solar because my parents have had one for years and it generally works well but the heat pump will be cheaper and I'll eventually get some PV anyway. So all in all it should be a bit cheaper and more efficient per square metre of roof space.

<comment><USER22> Solar panels mix well with heat pumps in hot and dry climates indeed, because of the happy coincidence that peak solar radiation=peak demand for cooling. In that case it's not a bad combo, especially if you have mild winters without temps deep in the freezing (which ruins the COP for heat pumps, assuming you use them for heating too).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Please note that there are powerful lobby groups in Australia that have interests in fossil fuel businesses and promote journalism that exaggerates problems with renewable energy. Eg see this:

[http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/climate-change- communication...](http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/climate-change- communication/files/2013/09/Newspaper-reporting-of-South-Australian-mid- latitude-cyclone-2016.pdf)

<comment><USER24> Just as there are powerful interest in solar and wind.

Edit: To the downvoters. What are you disagreeing with? Are you claiming that the wind and solar industry doesn't have special interest and that they aren't powerful especially when you look at the support it has politically?

<comment><USER25> People are generally familiar with the self-interest of the fossil industry, but you seem to be saying that everyone who supports renewables is _also_ in it for the money? Without evidence?

<comment><USER24> What do you want evidence for? Are you saying that those who invest in solar or wind do not have a self-interest in what they invested in. That seems to be a much bigger claim that the very obvious that any investment you make you have a self interest in.

Climate gate should have made it quite obvious that no one is excempt from bias. Thomas Kuhn wrote a whole book about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Much stabilization could be done by varying the price of electricity on a minute-by-minute basis according to the supply.

Then, electricity users can correspondingly adjust their usage for things like electric car battery charging and heating the hot water.

</comment><comment><USER27> An interesting alternative to battery storage opened in the UK this week - liquified air energy storage. I wonder if this may be helpful.

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/05/pioneering-...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/05/pioneering- liquid-air-project-can-help-store-excess-electricity)

<comment><USER23> >liquified air energy storage. I wonder if this may be helpful.

Let me answer this: No, it would not be helpful, because on pretty much all metrics (capital and operating costs, efficiency, flexibility, size etc) this technology is way worse than battery storage.

Unfortunately - today - a lot of money which could be sensibly used deploying cost effective technology such as solar and wind power (and to a lesser extent battery storage) is wasted pursuing fundamentally flawed concepts (such as compressed air energy storage, and now this liquified air), which have no chance of being competitive .

<comment><USER28> Horse stables were in their day a cost-effective solution to transportation, and those steam engines had no chance of ever moving a couple of meters on the rails...

<comment><USER29> I think there a physics problem there. The efficiency is way worse than charging almost any type of battery. So unless material for any type of battery becomes completely unavailable (including say Iron and sulfur or lead), the power free and you manage to build your Air Liquifier with less resources than batteries it will always be a stupid way to spend resources.

<comment><USER27> They are claiming efficiencies of 60-70% compared with batteries of nearly 90%

<comment><USER23> OK, I have thought about this a bit (I have worked on gas liquefaction plant design), and I do not believe this claim.

70% is about the maximum thermodynamic efficiency of any heat engine operating between -190 degrees and ambient. And the best efficiency you can expect in liquefaction, in a very complex and large plant, is circa 50% (1). Combined with storage losses, I think the overall cycle efficiency cannot be more than 25% or so.

Happy to review and comment on any back-up to their claim.

(1) see eg here: [https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=8933572137...](https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=893357213721903;res=IELENG)

<comment><USER27> Thank you for that thoughtful and informative reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> People finally starting to realise that energy systems and grids are more complex than just put a solar cell to your roof. There is minimum level of service has to be provided (even over night) and the balance of production and consumption has to be kept in balance otherwise very bad things happen.

<comment><USER31> It's called battery storage of excess energy

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ten Years of Analyzing the Duck Chart [https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2018/10-years-duck- curve.h...](https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2018/10-years-duck-curve.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> home appliances should be aware of the home's solar panels somehow.

you could fill a washing machine and have it wait a few days and turn on if the solar panels are at full usage.

other things could operate at peak hours (dishwasher)

you could also pump water into a silo when it's bright outside.

<comment><USER34> >home appliances should be aware

You mean IoT installed into wallplugs and whitegoods appliances, pool pumps, heaters, washers, heat pumps/air conditioners, hot water systems, etc.

Yeah. If there was only an IoT standard that worked to allow for usage to be monitored and devices to be switched on/off in a standard way ... sure.

There are "appliances" like HomeAssistant.io and OpenHAB and Domoticz out there to micro-manage these peripheral home devices and monitor consumption/excess/PV generation, and rulesets that can trigger responses and excess/egress of energy,

but it's too complex for the Inverter/Solar managers to take care of usually.

<comment><USER33> it's better to spend the energy directly than to sell it cheap now and buy it expensive later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Couldn't the problem be solved my publicly registering your solar panels (location and power output)?

The utilities could access that data and actual weather data and predict the demand curve in a better way.

<comment><USER25> Those on feed-in tariffs will be registered in order to pay them. Mine certainly are in the UK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If you're going to replace something and keep uptime then you're going to have situations where you have more than you need.

</comment><comment><USER37> Good opportunity to mine cryptocurrencies.

edit: [https://cointelegraph.com/news/even-with-energy-surplus- cana...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/even-with-energy-surplus-canada- unable-to-meet-electricity-demands-of-bitcoin-miners)

</comment><comment><USER38> Use the power for crypto mining (while it's still based on hashing), use returns for energy storage infrastructure.

<comment><USER14> Better just to use it for aluminium smelting or some other productive purpose instead...

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> "Monitor electricity 3600 times a second" in the video seem wrong, as AC is usually 50 to 60 HZ that would be measuring the consumption 60 to 72 times per period which does not really make sens. It's likely 3600/hour or 1/seconds. Immediately make me doubt the quality of the research.

Edit: DC -> AC. was tired.

<comment><USER40> *AC is 50 to 60Hz (DC does not alternate). Also I can see how it's possible that electrical fluctuations could happen at a higher rate than the utility frequency. 3600 Hz does seem like a lot though.

<comment><USER39> Oops. Fixed AC/DC. I know better. 3600Hz seem also quite a weird number while 3600 time an hour ends up being exactly once a second.</comment></comment></comment>


'More scary than coronavirus': South Korea's health alerts expose private lives - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/06/more-scary-than-coronavirus-south-koreas-health-alerts-expose-private-lives <comment><USER2> In the article a more negative perspective is expressed. Though while currently living in South Korea myself, the comments I've heard from other Koreans is "the people have a right to know". Sure it's an act of privacy invasion that's done for public safety. Avoiding the areas mentioned in the texts are a by-product that will eventually benefit society in the long-term.

There's a difficult balance between saying avoid an area or avoid an area because of 'x'. One allows you to fear the unknown while the other allows you to have a soft understanding of why. I'm sure there may exist more anonymous ways to approach informing the public.

I replied because how it's related to me in terms of living and experience. I think it's interesting to observe, having a background in Cybersecurity I think this is a valuable phenomenon.</comment>


OpenIndiana Hipster 2019.10 is here – openindiana - <AUTHOR> https://www.openindiana.org/2019/11/07/openindiana-hipster-2019-10-is-here/ <comment><USER3> I guess it's an OS? And this is what I got from poking around, which I only did because Indiana is where I grew up. I would have otherwise quickly given up and moved onto the next item on HN.

 _" illumos is a consolidation of software that forms the core of an Operating System. It includes the kernel, device drivers, core system libraries, and utilities. It is the home of many technologies include ZFS, DTrace, Zones, ctf, FMA, and more. We pride ourselves on having a stable, highly observable, and technologically different system. In addition, illumos traces it roots back through Sun Microsystems to the original releases of UNIX and BSD."_

<comment><USER4> Its convoluted history looks like this:

Solaris (proprietary) -> Open Solaris -> Illumos -> Open Indiana.

Sun open sourced Solaris, then Oracle bought them and closed sourced it again. But several forks remain of the open-sourced version.

They didn't help themselves by breaking with the solar/light-themed name either. Few people know the relation of "Indiana" to Solaris. But naming things is hard for some programmers I suppose.

<comment><USER5> > But naming things is hard for some programmers I suppose.

Naming things is indeed one of the exactly two hard things in computer science, the others being cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.

I'll see myself out.

<comment><USER6> Three! The three hard things are naming things, cache invaliCONCURRENCYdation, and off by one errors!

<comment><USER7> That's the joke.

<comment><USER8> 10 print "Read it again"

20 goto 10

RUN

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good things in open source Solaris:

ZFS implementation is rock solid

Excellent fault isolation - even on x64, I had some ECC ram that went bad; it isolated the bad bank, stopped using it, and continued. RAM showed as total minus the amount.

Zones as containers, great for many purposes

Excellent performance under memory pressure

Bad: documentation on some things, less hardware support, some aspects are quite different from Linux/BSD way

<comment><USER10> Is ZFS more solid than in Linux?

Linux does the same with bad RAM, and you'll often see that in large installations. (Monitoring should check you have the number of DIMMs and CPUs expected, modulo a fiddle factor for reported memory size, which depends on BIOS.)

<comment><USER11> _Is ZFS more solid than in Linux?_

Yes, considering ZFS was originally developed by Sun for Solaris. It's been 8 years since I've been a Solaris admin, but we ran production DB workloads on JBODs with ZFS with no problems.

Though I've not run ZFS on linux myself, I've heard that many of its issues stemmed around the fact that due to CDDL/GPL incompatibilities, they couldn't have ZFS in the kernel until very recently.

<comment><USER12> potato potato. They are using (some of) the ZFS on Linux code at this point anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For me, OpenSolaris and it's offshoots are much like BeOS in that they felt "right" from the first moment. Of course followed by great sadness from the lack of mass adoption.

</comment><comment><USER14> OpenIndiana/Illumos/SmartOS documentation is pretty rough - when I last looked about two years ago, the docs were all a hodgepodge of old wikis and few videos.

If you want widespread understanding and adoption, beginner docs need to be available and up to date.

<comment><USER15> I just read the Solaris documentation

<comment><USER16> Is there a solaris documentation online? I would expect Oracle to have put it behind a paywall.

<comment><USER17> It is indeed online, sans paywall: [https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating- systems/solaris.html](https://docs.oracle.com/en/operating- systems/solaris.html)

Of course, with some Illumos distributions/derivatives/whatever-we're-calling- them, things are different due to using different tools or otherwise deviating from upstream Solaris. Better to start with your specific distro's documentation and use Oracle's Solaris docs to fill in the gaps, adjusting as necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have some old SPARC hardware that I'd love to get OI running on.. so personally I'm excited about the imminent SPARC support that seems to be just around the corner.

Someone posted to their dev mailing list with links to working install images for SPARC!! [https://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana- discuss/2019-N...](https://openindiana.org/pipermail/openindiana- discuss/2019-November/022822.html)

edit: whoops that's the wrong link.. and I can't seem to find the right one... perhaps it's too new for the message thread to be in the archives, or maybe it was taken down for some reason.

<comment><USER19> There's also DilOS which is OpenIndiana + apt that is built for both sparc and intel

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

<comment><USER18> Oh very cool! Thanks for sharing, I'll have to take a look at this

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My first deep dive into the open source contribution community was Open Indiana in 2017. I really love how welcoming this community is to newcomers, and how well the communication is between members.

</comment><comment><USER21> I tried Illumos a while ago, and was pretty stoked for Solaris in general because it was where ZFS performed the best but at the time it was pretty darn hard to use because of the extremely scattered documentation (this was before ZFS on Linux even close to ready).

Any using OpenIndiana on the daily for anything? If so, what? You have any pro-tips or tricks for folks looking to dig in?

<comment><USER22> I "use it" daily but it runs on my Supermicro NAS. Has 30+ drives attached to it in several pools. Its fast and stable and just... Sits there working. Currently its at 75 days uptime but it did a year at one point.

Asides from some tinkering getting bonding working the way I wanted it to on two NICs I never have to screw with it or worry about it at an OS level.

Note that I dont like the "all in one" approach to storage or running anything but the bare minimum on my storage itself. So the fact that docker/etc/etc isnt available is fine. All this thing runs is NappIT (ZFS management, like FreeNAS), Monit and Smartd.

It has a bunch of things that are just so far ahead of Linux/ZoL. Big one is timeslider (auto snapshot management) and the sheer glory that is boot environments. Once you have those its hard to downgrade. Upgrade went bad/not working? Reboot to previous boot environment and done. Back to the previous version/working state. Like VMware snapshots but on the bare metal boot drives.

My one wish is for it to be more current with ZFS features. It was ahead of ZoL for so long... Now I just want ZFS encryption to make it to OpenIndiana so I can use that without changing away from OpenIndiana.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> it's pretty hard to tell what openindiana does. seems like they develop Hipster but what is that? there wasn't any clear info after spending a few minutes on the site.

<comment><USER24> It's a marketing and naming failure that people are asking what this is.

<comment><USER18> If you go to their main page (the post link is just an announcement) then you can't miss the big print "What is Illumos" etc. You're failing to look ;P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So, is it alive? I had the impression joyent gave up on solaris/smartos - <USER2> there still any serious support from companies using Solaris in anger?

<comment><USER26> SmartOS is still very much alive and it's a solid platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> According to the Solaris wikipedia article, it looks like Oracle has added major features/enhancements since going back to closed source. Do any of those features make it back to illumos/Open Indiana?</comment>


Norwegian bomber and Utøya killer Anders Breivik ruled sane - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/24/world/europe/norway-breivik-trial/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

<comment><AUTHOR> If the killer was not ruled sane, he could have been set free after his medichal treatment had ended.

</comment><comment><USER2> If he is ruled sane, then his killing 60 people is considered the actions of a sane person. his rationle and entire defence was not he did not do it, but that he did it to wake People to the awful democratic liberal open society - basically they just declared terrorism a sane response to democracy.

<comment><USER3> Drawing a line for mental health is hard. Where would you put it? Are religious people sane? Helicopter parents? Fanboys? People with fetishes? All that isn't exactly completely reasonable. It's been said that sanity is more about consensus, than rationality.

Terrorism itself surely can be a sane act. Sanity has nothing to do with morality. Spreading terror to win your battles has been practised since antiquity, war paint, bag pipes, guerilla warfare. I would find it hard to draw the line right here. Then it wouldn't take much to say that by definition, _every_ killer is insane.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely. Insanity would be considered in the medical sense in a court room, not in a societies preconceived notion of what insanity means.

Webster defines it as, "a severely disordered state of the mind usually occurring as a specific disorder (as paranoid schizophrenia)".

This means that they concluded that he committed the crime in a non disordered state, and his mental health did not point to any particular disorder. Just because someone holds extremely radical views (you mentioned religion, politics can also be included) doesn't mean someone is insane.

However, I'm sure it was a very close call.</comment></comment></comment>


Buddhist 'Iron Man' was carved from meteorite - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/09/buddhist-iron-man-found-by-nazis-is-from-space.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright, alright. Obviously the statue is not from space. Just the rock it's carved from.

</comment><comment><USER2> If there ever was an Indiana Jones worthy artefact, this is it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I smell a bad sci-fi horror movie in the works.

</comment><comment><USER4> Now thats how you write a title to a story!</comment>