Microbiological and Nutritional Analysis of Lettuce Grown on the ISS - <AUTHOR> https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2020.00199/full <comment><USER2> After reading this study I was curious whether or not the astronauts had eaten the lettuce.

Then I came across this NYTimes piece, which says, "In 2015, the astronauts wiped the leaves with sanitizing wipes before eating them."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/science/space-lettuce- ast...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/science/space-lettuce-astronaut- food.html)

So it sounds like there's definitely lots of future work still to be done.

<comment><USER3> Thanks, I was really only looking for a picture of the space lettuce

<comment><USER4> > Thanks, I was really only looking for a picture of the space lettuce

This is Veggie, the apparatus on the ISS used to make the lettuce for the studies seen in the article:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9aR2-7sOjg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9aR2-7sOjg)

I'm deeply fascinated with the food supply/chain in longterm Space Travel and colonization. Lettuce is low hanging fruit, I hope that we see a vast amount of innovation in this space that allows for greater (ideally autonomous) modular growing spaces. This is a critical component to having a permanent settlement on Mars, having to rely on re-supply missions from Earth (Starship will drop the cost significantly) is untenable when you start scaling the population beyond an outpost.

If you're interested check out the talks from Mars Society convention(s) here:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/TheMarsSociety/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/TheMarsSociety/videos)

<comment><USER5> >>"I'm deeply fascinated with the food supply/chain in longterm Space Travel and colonization"

You could be interested in these guys[1]. They are collaborating with ESA in that subject. The Youtube interview[2] is really interesting.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Foods) [2][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Iv0857U3UE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Iv0857U3UE)

<comment><USER4> Pretty cool, the developments of getting edible protein from atmospheric elements sounds really rad, especially if they're targeting using renewables.

Personally, I think for terrestrial use it will have limited applications as Ag can deliver plant proteins with great efficiency, animal less so, but if given a choice over a soylent-green type slury or an egg piece or grilled chicken I think I'd opt for the egg/chicken every time. My diet is already optimized at a 7:1 plant to animal protein ratio, I don't think I can go any higher on the plant side without compromising my strength training as I need lots of HDL fat to recover.

However, I wonder how this tech would work on the way to Mars and once there since there aren't any external sources to derive them from? Martian atmosphere is ~3% N, as opposed to ~78% on Earth. I understand they want to create a closed-loop system with re-utilization, but I wonder if they will need to develop some sort of tech to efficiently extract the N from urea when re-processing the water and then use it that way. That';s my best guess, because its about ~6 months to Mars and there is no way a payload with Humans, equipment, supplies, water can sustain them for that long.

Either way, I bookmarked there site and will periodically check it out, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This guy has been involved in all the NASA food experiments.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISAKc9gpGjw)

</comment><comment><USER7> tldr: space lettuce is still lettuce

<comment><USER8> yes :) "Flight and ground tissue showed differences in Fe, K, Na, P, S, and Zn content and total phenolic levels, but no differences in anthocyanin and ORAC levels. _This study indicated that leafy vegetable crops can produce safe, edible, fresh food to supplement to the astronauts' diet, and provide baseline data for continual operation of the Veggie plant growth units on ISS._ "</comment></comment>


AWS CloudFront: can you choose to serve content (or not) to specific countries? - <AUTHOR> https://cloudacademy.com/amazon-web-services/cloudfront-geo-restriction/

<comment><USER2> Does that mean I can stop all those brute force login attempts coming out of China?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really, unless you store the whole site on S3/CloudFront.

Although not being able to access your JS resources might be enough to hide your submit URL.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Millionshort, 3 months later - <AUTHOR> http://www.millionshort.com/about.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Any feedback would be awesome.

<comment><USER2> No HTTPS? Would that be difficult to add?

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll be adding https shortly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Search field after a serach doesn't handle international characters.

Try sjösäkerhet for example

</comment><comment><USER4> duplicate

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3910304>

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really duplicate - that was the intial post 3 months ago. The site has gone through a complete overhaul with new features/functions like News Search, Image Search, Inverse via MillionTall.com etc. etc.

<comment><USER4> You are right. difference is :

        UPDATE June 15, 2012: Added search term highlighting (don't know why we didn't add this from day one)
        UPDATE June 29, 2012: Million Short gets a facelift - a new design.
        UPDATE July 3, 2012: News and Image search added - two of the most requested features.
        UPDATE July 3, 2012: Million Short gets mobile and tablet update.
        UPDATE July 4, 2012: We launched Million Tall - the inverse of Million Short.</comment></comment></comment>


The astronomer and the witch – how Kepler saved his mother from the stake - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/the-astronomer-and-the-witch-how-kepler-saved-his-mother-from-the-stake-49332 <comment><USER2> It's interesting to note that even though Kepler is exclusively remembered today for his three laws, Kepler himself considered them a somewhat minor result. Most of the book in which he describes his third law, Harmonices Mundi, is concerned with astrology, music theory, and (for lack of a better word) mysticism.

An excerpt from the Wikipedia article gives a flavor:

'''

While medieval philosophers spoke metaphorically of the "music of the spheres", Kepler discovered physical harmonies in planetary motion. He found that the difference between the maximum and minimum angular speeds of a planet in its orbit approximates a harmonic proportion. For instance, the maximum angular speed of the Earth as measured from the Sun varies by a semitone (a ratio of 16:15), from mi to fa, between aphelion and perihelion. Venus only varies by a tiny 25:24 interval (called a diesis in musical terms).[6] Kepler explains the reason for the Earth's small harmonic range:

"The Earth sings Mi, Fa, Mi: you may infer even from the syllables that in this our home _mi_ sery and _fa_ mine hold sway."[9]

The celestial choir Kepler formed was made up of a tenor (Mars), two bass (Saturn and Jupiter), a soprano (Mercury), and two altos (Venus and Earth). Mercury, with its large elliptical orbit, was determined to be able to produce the greatest number of notes, while Venus was found to be capable of only a single note because its orbit is nearly a circle.[6]

At very rare intervals all of the planets would sing together in "perfect concord": Kepler proposed that this may have happened only once in history, perhaps at the time of creation.[10] Kepler reminds us that harmonic order is only mimicked by man, but has origin in the alignment of the heavenly bodies:

"Accordingly you won't wonder any more that a very excellent order of sounds or pitches in a musical system or scale has been set up by men, since you see that they are doing nothing else in this business except to play the apes of God the Creator and to act out, as it were, a certain drama of the ordination of the celestial movements." (Harmonice Mundi, Book V).[6]

'''

We had a very interesting colloquium in my astronomy department a few years back by someone from the music department who had studied Kepler's musical theories in great detail. Evidently his musical theories have inspired a few modern composers. Here are two such compositions:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neJ9qViszVs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neJ9qViszVs)

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

</comment><comment><USER3> Kepler became a founding father of the scientific method, with his Christian conviction that the material universe should necessarily be ordered and not chaotic and have laws for mankind to discover, if it was indeed created by the LORD of the Bible.

Interestingly, Kepler was also a student of the brilliant Greek scholar Melanchthon who was himself a student of Martin Luther.

<comment><USER4> The intelligibility of the universe has been an important theme in the Western Christian intellectual tradition from the earliest centuries of Christianity. You'll find it in the writings of major figures, such as Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo, and many others besides. That being said, I certainly don't mean to downplay Kepler's achievements and contributions.

<comment><USER5> Yes, intelligibility of the universe. People tend to forget that science is based on faith. A.N. Whitehead (in Science and the Modern World) considered the contribution of medievalism (to science) was something we take for granted - the 'inexpugnable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kepler is a fascinating historical figure. As a non-Catholic, he had interesting and fruitful relationships with some of the early Jesuit scientists, at a time of great religious tension between Catholics and Protestants.

See, for example: [http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/sj/scientists/guldin.h...](http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/jmac/sj/scientists/guldin.htm)

</comment><comment><USER6> i find it fascinating that you could stand the trial against accusation of witchcraft and win it; this makes the middle ages much more liberal than the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century; so progress is not that progressive - if you look at it in the long run ...

</comment><comment><USER7> While it's disputable that Christianity was necessary for the birth of modern science (there were ancient Greek, middle eastern, Chinese, etc. students of the universe as well), it's kind of amusing that, if true, Christianity gave birth to its own demise.

<comment><USER8> Last I checked Christianity is far from dead.

Christianity's mission statement was never being the means of explaining natural phenomena. It's telling that people who make that claim usually will defend it by mentioning Galileo or modern American creationists. They just don't have a lot of other support for their belief.

<comment><USER7> _Last I checked Christianity is far from dead._

In the US, nearly all Christian sects are declining in membership, while the "None" category grows faster than any other. That's not dead, but it's certainly dying.

 _It 's telling that people who make that claim usually will defend it by mentioning Galileo or modern American creationists._

You know, it doesn't matter what theologists say "Christianity" is if tens of millions of believers all say something different. Even the ancient scholars disagreed on the amount of literalism in the Bible.

An aside: isn't it blatantly hypocritical for believers to stomp all over preaching their mutually conflicting beliefs and expect total acceptance, while they throw a fit if anyone mentions the possibility of nonbelief?

<comment><USER9> Please do not conduct religious flamewars on Hacker News.

We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10472208](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10472208) and marked it off topic.

<comment><USER7> I apologize for my previously elevated tone, but isn't [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10472208](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10472208) and the comments that follow already pretty far off topic? Replace "amusing" with "interesting" in my original comment and I don't see how my first comment would be any different in subject matter or tone.

<comment><USER9> It's sometimes a little arbitrary where we cut the branch, but I would say no: although that comment does contain religious flamebait (like capitalizing 'lord'), it's saved by substantive historical information.

If we can't talk about religion historically without getting sucked into the black hole of religious dispute, then we can hardly talk about history at all. That would not be ok, because history is interesting. So everyone has to exercise some discipline here.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the clarification, and I agree. If I feel the need to comment on this topic in the future, I'll work on engaging with the history in a more constructive way.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Secrets of TV Pitchmen Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/03/magazines/fortune/okeefe_infomercial.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009040610

<comment><USER2> A tiny bit on topic: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9g3b65yi0g>

</comment><comment><USER3> For some reason, I can actually respect these guys. I would never buy any of the junk they're pushing, but I must admit to enjoying the show. Especially Vince Offer. Normally that nasal 'yankee' voice sickens me, but I guess it's part of the charm in this case.

Ronco is interesting--I'd forgotten that Ron Popeil actually invented a lot of the stuff he sells. (Didn't he have a daughter that sang with Frank Zappa in a concert or two as well?)

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought it was a joke that these pitchmen would get their own "reality" TV show, but apparently it's true. I can't stand any of their commercials and can't hit the mute button fast enough on my TV, so I can't watch a half-hour of Billy Mays shouting at me. The psychology of selling is interesting, but I'll have to read about it rather than listen to these obnoxious people.</comment>


Layers – WordPress Site BuilderLayers – WordPress Site Builder - <AUTHOR> http://www.layerswp.com/ <comment><USER2> dupe...der.it.is

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure I understand what you mean? Are you saying this is a duplicate submission?

<comment> jack-r-abbit Perhaps they referring to the duplication of the site title. And looking at the source code, the title tag is in there twice and each one has the title text in there twice. These are the things that make _some people_ wonder what other little landmines are hidden in a product that misses such simple mistakes.

Edit: nope... probably talking about it being a dupe of this one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9080069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9080069)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. Unfortunately I can't delete it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


87% Android devices insecure because mfrs. fail to provide security updates - <AUTHOR> https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2015/10/08/87-of-android-devices-insecure-because-manufacturers-fail-to-provide-security-updates/ <comment><USER2> Textbook failure of the "free" market. People being sold stuff that they don't understand, and being taken advantage of as a result. But it's hard for the companies to buck the trend when their competitors can cut corners and be rewarded for it.

<comment><USER3> > Textbook failure of the "free" market.

That's because when you buy a mobile, you don't own it. You typically can't load a newer or different OS to it by yourself, and even if you can on technical grounds, you'll void your warranty.

It's like depending on your desktop's producer to release updates to OS you use.</comment></comment>


YCNYC discussion thread - <AUTHOR>

Didn't see one, so maybe an area for comments, suggestions for the next one, meetups, desperate pleas for co-founders! <comment><USER2> Was anyone else expecting that many people? I was very surprised. I overheard one of the ushers say something like 800. Does anyone know the actual number in attendance?</comment>


When Proton Meets Monopole (1983) - <AUTHOR> http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw01.html

<comment><AUTHOR> By John G. Cramer, professor of physics at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Found in a comment by [http://slashdot.org/~somepunk](http://slashdot.org/~somepunk) on [http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/01/30/1343238/amherst-r...](http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/01/30/1343238/amherst- researchers-create-magnetic-monopoles) : Amherst Researchers Create Magnetic Monopoles</comment>


Dart and Google Cloud Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.dartlang.org/cloud/

<comment><USER3> More specifically, Dart on App Engine via Managed VMs. (Dart was already runnable on Compute Engine instances.)

App Engine is a subset of Cloud Platform services and is a platform-as-a- service (PaaS) offering – auto scaling, a scalable datastore, logging and other managed services and guarantees that aim to substantially reduce your DevOps.

By contrast, Compute Engine (and its closest competitor AWS) is more an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering – provision your instances and run anything you'd like on it, as well as choose from available resources like load balancers and firewalls to meet your needs.

Managed VMs attempt to offer the best of both worlds: the managed scalability of App Engine with the choice and flexibility of Compute Engine. Through a Docker-based container approach, App Engine scalability guarantees are still kept while allowing you to run your own language, like Dart or Node.js, and services.

My Dart app, [http://woven.co](http://woven.co), has been running on Compute Engine, and I plan to move it to App Engine.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is good news; I'm still waiting for the DartVM to get integrated into Chrome.

<comment><USER5> realistically, this is unlikely to ever happen for both technical and political reasons.

Theres certainly no immediate path forwards towards that end goal at the moment.

Dart2js, atscript and other compile to javascript things are where its going to be at for the forseeable future.

<comment><USER6> Care to elaborate? I believe it has been publicly stated in the past by the team that this is something being actively worked towards once OilPan (or whatever it's called) is finished? Has this changed?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking forward to play around with this over the weekend. Great to have a low-maintenance way to run a full Dart stack.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is exciting news!

</comment><comment><USER9> "Runs best in Chrome", coming soon to a browser near you.

The spirit of IE lives!

[https://twitter.com/jashkenas/status/525024739816116224](https://twitter.com/jashkenas/status/525024739816116224)

<comment><USER10> For a less snarky explanation of what's going on: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495498](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495498)

We are working on it. Inbox was designed to be 'mobile first' and use "Material Design" animations, and pulling off 60fps animations of that style in an app like Inbox is very complex, in fact, each new version of Chrome broke assumptions and broke animations we had running previously. The Web, as a platform for competing with mobile-style interfaces, is in a rickety state at the moment, where performance is non-deterministic not only across browsers, but across versions. We often have to work with the engineers on the browser layout engines directly to resolve these issues. We're working full time on Firefox now, with Mozilla engineers helping, which is a lot easier to do now that the project isn't secret anymore.

I do think it is unfortunate that the error page advertised Chrome. I think we could have handled that better by saying "Firefox is coming soon, we'll email you when it's ready, click here" or some such, rather than putting a 'Download Chrome' link.

<comment><USER11> Isn't this still fundamentally a problematic approach, though? Yes, being Chrome-only at launch was a bad idea (and the predictable response was that tweet and its thousands of retweets), but even if it were "Chrome + a notice about Firefox soon", and some time later it does run on Chrome and Firefox, that still leaves out all the other browsers!

I understand that you want 60fps flawless performance for your new product. But if you need to work in close cooperation with a browser vendor in order to enable that, then either you work closely with all the browser vendors - <USER2> might be possible in theory, but unlikely in practice (you don't have enough resources/interest, they don't have enough resources/interest) - or your product will not run on all browsers.

I honestly think this approach is not a good one. Alternatives which are at least less bad are

1\. Let everyone run the app. Yes, some browsers will not hit 60fps. That's already true - even if they run it on your choice of browser, it may be on a slow machine. In this approach, some browsers will do less well, and one may be tempted to write something to the effect of "best experienced in X" but that's just getting back to that tweet (which while snarky, had a valid point). The best you can do here is proactively test on other browsers and file perf bugs on them. Reduced testcases can be filed before your product is public.

or

2\. Rely less on browser optimizations. As your linked comment correctly mentions, how browsers do layout, create layers, upload them to the GPU, etc. differs between browsers. But the web is no longer limited to that. You can use WebGL - now present even in modern versions of IE and Safari, which means in all browsers - which gives you explicit control of how to create layers, when to upload to the GPU, etc. Of course, this is no guarantee of 60fps performance everywhere (nothing is, there are slow GPUs, etc.), but it has a far higher chance of running at a predictable and high frame rate than letting the browser's layout engine guess for you.

<comment><USER10> If we had the resources and didn't have constraints to co-launch with Android Lollipop and iOS, making it work on all the browsers out launch may have been feasible. We had bugs filed for most of the issues in our internal tracker, but we ran out of time before launch.

This is a problem at big companies like Google and probably Apple, is that we time major sets of released functionality for 'big impact' launches like Google I/O, or other media events, and the poor engineers are left working late into the night to meet the deadlines.

As for just rendering everything with WebGL or Canvas, we could do that (Google Sheets uses Canvas), but it kind of rubs me the wrong way, it doesn't feel "webby". You end up reimplementing tons of stuff: Bidi/I18N text handling, A11Y, system behaviors like text selection, clipboard, it just seems like you're making your own Flash runtime in JS, an alien hybrid that displaces the entire browser engine.

I hope apps like Inbox, and the new focus on mobile web performance by both Google and Mozilla can fix many of these layout/rasterization/composite hazards, either at the spec level (e.g. will-change), or at the implementation level, so much like there is a 'war' on JS performance, there can be a 'war' on layout and paint performance.

Long term, if we want the web to succeed and not be destroyed by mobile native apps, we need it to work -- as the web --, and not as simply opaque WebGL + JS, that's basically just a native app model with a different VM.

<comment><USER11> I get what you're saying about i18n in the alternate approach. It's harder to do those things there.

But isn't "designed for Chrome and Firefox" just a marginally better thing than "designed for Chrome"? It's still tailor-made for specific browsers, just 2 instead of 1. That's very un-"webby".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Robert Scoble rips into Color - <AUTHOR> http://www.cinchcast.com/scobleizer/194769

<comment><USER2> TLDR:

 _There are no second chances on app stores. If you launch, get featured (top billing & visibility in app store), and have terrible initial reviews (1,2,3 stars), odds are you won't get featured again, which will make it extremely difficult to gain traction organically as your app improves, since you're now competing with "five hundred thousand other apps" for eyeballs down in the pile.

First reaction to your app is hugely important now, not like a website 'where you can come back and come back again'.

He compares to Path and some other apps, Path had same problem - bad first experience. No one else in Half Moon Bay using these local photo apps yet, so useless there on launch (and presumably anywhere else there aren't many initial local users). Foodspotting on the other hand had pics from the middle of Montana.

Problem when you take so much money ($41 million for Color.com), too much pressure to go large on first night, leading to disaster in this case. Should have done what Foursquare did - limit launch to SF and NYC, make sure it works, get alot of content and traction there, then scale it out.

Hundreds of entrepreneurs emailing Scoble with competing apps, most of which are better._

<comment><USER3> Thank you for the summary. With all due respect for Robert Scoble, he's got a voice for blogging. Is Cinch a project in his portfolio? I'm trying to figure out why such a prolific writer and investor would choose audio as the medium to publish this message.

<comment><USER2> I was tempted to mention the same thing. Sounded very whiny. A good reminder that proof-listening your recorded audio is just as necessary as your proofreading your writings before publishing/sending them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, $41M of VC investment in a photo sharing app. $350K just for the primary domain. Tech bubble, anyone? Is there any sane reasoning behind that kind of investment?

<comment><USER5> Step 1. Assemble fantastic team, Step 2. Take what should be a feature of Facebook, develop it, Step 3. Be acquired by Facebook for stock, all get roles within the rapidly growing beast and watch your stock grow beyond your wildest dreams

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For the amount of money they got, they really could have made a fancy video better explaining what its use case is.

Adam Lisagor needs to eat too, you know.

<comment><USER7> Maybe they did. The general public has no way of knowing what Color's investors have seen.

<comment><USER8> I think jschuur's suggestion is that they should have made a video targeted at the general public. The use case of many of these mobile services and apps is not inherently obvious, not the the general public anyway. Compare the information you get from Color's website to the information you get from the lonelysandwich video promo for a similar app - Everyday, on its website: <http://everyday-app.com/>

<comment><USER6> Yep. I was thinking specifically of a lonelysandwich style video like Adam did for Everdyday. Or even one of those animated paper ones that Google used to do.

Have your web site evangelize your product better at launch, for the users benefit. Don't just ignore it because you're already getting funding and press.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does cinchcast offer a transcription? It's rare that I have the time to listen to audio.

tl;dr would receive my upvote

<comment><USER10> That would have been a great way for Cinch to make some money actually. They should offer pro accounts for a couple of dollars a month providing a quick and painless (no action from the user required) transcription service.</comment></comment>


American Summer: Before Air-Conditioning (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://newyorker.com/archive/1998/06/22/1998_06_22_144_TNY_LIBRY_000015831 <comment><USER2> I see people conveying their tales of the hot weather - where the temperatures rose to 95 to 100 degree fahrenheit - just around 35 to 40 degree celsius - for a brief few days each summer.

The truth is, this is a little more than moderately hot for many parts of the world. Here in India (in the parts around the capital), you're lucky if temperature keeps on the lesser side of the 45 degree mark. And this happens for weeks on end, not just for a few days. Just before the arrival of monsoon, it is _both_ extremely hot and extremely humid - humid as in _drenched_ humid.

Now imagine this - you've got a 45 degree blazing heat on top of the 98% relative humidity. The fans just don't seem to work and you're sweating profusely from the minimal of exertions. Add to this not having an AC and you get an idea how most of us lived for the past decade or so. It got so hot that you felt a physical pressure pushing you down and all we could do was lie down on the cold floor as we waited for night to bring some relief with it.

Things are changing though and most people are getting ACs now. The floor is no longer cool.

<comment><USER3> >> The truth is, this is a little more than moderately hot for many parts of the world.

Or the American South for that matter. The article was written from the perspective of New York. Here in Texas we get weeks of 100+ degree days pretty much every summer.

<comment><USER4> Texas is fairly dry, though, yes? The heat combined with humidity is the real killer.

<comment><USER5> Even at 0% humidity (which is virtually never; right now in 76148, or the suburbs north of Fort Worth, it is 95F at 16% humidity. Tomorrow has a forecast high of 101F at 22% humidity), temps above 100F are unbearable. I say this as someone who was born and raised in Texas. We planned our days around A/C, our parking around the afternoon shade, and it's gotten so bad now that high school football (a religion in Texas all its own) is restricting practices outdoors between 2PM and 6PM (the hottest part of the day) between mid-May and mid-September.

Yes, it's not as hot (115F on average) or as humid (80%+) as some parts of the world, but for us, it sucks. Especially since houses built in Texas since the mid-60s are built to have air conditioning. They don't have whole-house fans and they don't have large windows that open. Fancy houses have bay windows that face the southwest that don't open so the house is like a glass oven. Radiant barriers in the attic and high-efficiency A/C provide some relief, but most summers it's just a beating.

In 2011, the local news stopped counting the number of consecutive days above 100F and just kept count of days above 105F. Several days that summer broke 110F...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This piece was written by Arthur Miller[1], the famous playwright who wrote "Death of a Salesman", "The Crucible", etc.

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

<comment><USER7> and was once married to Marilyn Monroe

<comment><USER8> Who, in turn, starred in the movie "Some Like it Hot."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here in Germany, private households generally don't have an AC either. Office buildings do though, thankfully, as even those sturdy ancient stone monsters do heat up quite a bit.

The thing is, while there is an intense heat wave in almost every German summer, most of the time it's too cold rather than too hot.

When I bought my house two years ago, I decided to put an AC in. Not only because it gets ridiculously hot sometimes, but also as a general heat pump (the electrical heating system used in it before was _really_ inefficient and expensive). I'm very happy with that decision, but as far as I can tell this is the only private house with AC in that part of the town. Not even luxury houses have them, though some probably do have ground-based heat pumps.

Instead of real split/wall-type AC Germans do buy a lot of mobile AC units seemingly not realizing how limited they are.

On the whole, this is surprising for a country with extreme temperature fluctuations, especially since it's common here for people to live in roof apartments.

I think it's cultural. In the Philippines, where I spent some time, every building (lower middle class and up) has air conditioning. The temperature extremes aren't nearly as bad as in Germany.

<comment><USER10> I've had several Germans tell me AC makes them sick. Some complain that the air is stale. This is a big deal to Germans; most will open windows for fresh air every few hours even in extreme heat or cold, claiming that the air is unbearable to breathe otherwise. Some complain that the rapid change in temperature when transitioning from a hot outdoor environment to a cool indoor one (which I find pleasant) is unhealthy.

<comment><USER9> There is a ubiquitous phenomenon in Germany, called "catching a draft". It's a real thing which as far as I can tell only befalls Germans, with physical symptoms and everything. On top of that and somewhat paradoxically they do believe you _have to_ open the window every hour or so, even if the building is sufficiently ventilated in theory, otherwise they get headaches, complain of unbearable CO2 levels and/or a stinky atmosphere. For something to be unhealthy, it is sufficient to _believe_ that it's unhealthy.

Even though I was born in Germany, I never really understood these compulsions, but they do seem to run very deep (I'd say 50% of my German friends exhibit them on a level that can become disruptive).

I suspect in theory the temperature variation experienced by going for a swim in a lake during summer (which is an activity generally enjoyed by Germans) should be larger than what you get from moving in and out of a properly air conditioned building. It probably depends hugely on individual lifestyle, but I think ubiquitous air conditioning would in fact reduce the temperature variations a person experiences during the day. Even in a country like Germany, people do tend to spend most of their time indoors or in their cars.

<comment><USER11> Sounds like Korean "fan death."

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

<comment><USER12> Sounds like Western "MSG allergy" :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me of where I grew up (no air-conditiong). Sometimes it was so hot and humid that we could not do any other than just lie on the veranda and sweat. The amount of water you would drink a day was staggering. I can't say I miss that sort of weather.

</comment><comment><USER14> Back in Switzerland we still rarely have AC in homes and offices. My parents still work in an office that can get 40C/104F for two to three weeks in summer. Everything is built for winter.

<comment><USER15> I live in CH now, and I noticed that most buildings have massively thick exterior walls which seem to insulate against the blazing sun during the day, so that at night things are tolerable.

In my office in Zurich, we break out the electric fans during a hot day, and people take off their button shirts and walk around in flimsy undershirts. Most large stores have A/C though.

I honestly don't miss A/C at all, I remember living in NYC during heat waves, and dreading the shock transition from extreme hot to cold that happened when you entered or exited a building.

<comment><USER16> I live in CH too (for more than 20 years now) and although in can get hot in the summer, the humidity is normally much lower than the US east coast and southern states.

I used to regularly travel to North Carolina from Basel (normally warmer than Zurich) and could really feel the difference, even though the temperatures were similar in the summer. In NC, A/C was essential; in Basel not so much.

<comment><USER17> pharma/biotech?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm sitting on the floor by my window in my top floor apartment in Seattle, which is not air-conditioned. I've lived in Seattle for over 5 years, and I've noticed the summers getting hotter. Air conditioning used to be a rare thing in this city, but more and more people I talk to are caving this July.

I've always been sensitive to the heat, sleep being hard to come by in the "pall", as Miller calls it. It's nice to commiserate with the past, because my wife can sleep through anything.

<comment><USER19> you are empirically incorrect. Pull up the values. in 2010 it got up to 98, 2011, 2012 it didn't break 90, last year it hit 92 for 2 days. This year it still hasn't broken 90, though the insurance building in SLU said 92 at the peak today but that sign is in direct sun by their solar panels which are also hooked to the sign. Also that sign was reading higher solar output (5.8 vs 3.2) earlier this year when it was cooler which shows the effect of heat on solar panels.

<comment><USER20> We're about to have five consecutive days of >= 90º weather[1]. Also hacknat was lucky to miss the Worst Week Ever in Summer 2009 when the temperature peaked at 103º[2]

Meanwhile, I'm unlucky enough to be heading down to Portland for the weekend, where temperatures are expected to peak at 95º and 98º. Yuck.

(Also, I broke down and bought an air conditioner last year, as I had a south- facing apartment and a brachycephalic dog[3], who couldn't deal with the heat. I have the AC running and my apartment is currently a glorious 68º :D)

[1] [http://www.weather.com/weather/5-day/Seattle+WA+98122:4:US](http://www.weather.com/weather/5-day/Seattle+WA+98122:4:US)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Pacific_Northwest_heat_wav...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Pacific_Northwest_heat_wave)

[3] Moxie: [https://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst/8590965099/in/s...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronbrethorst/8590965099/in/set-72157630593075360)

<comment><USER21> I didn't realize Seattle was so slow to cool at night. I believe Seattle and Kitsap County had about the same highs today, but by midnight we were down to around 59º here on the Kitsap side, whereas the weather sites are telling me Seattle was still around 72º.

<comment><USER11> Seattle usually cools quickly at night. I'm a bit stumped by this also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > A South African gentleman once told me that New York in August was hotter > than any place he knew in Africa, yet people here dressed for a northern > city.

Well what is often forgotten is that humidity is just as big of a culprit as the temperature of the air. Hot but dry air can be tolerated much easier than colder but more humid air.

US on the East Coast has humid air. I remember the first time landing in NY flying from Europe. The air felt like a sauna, it was almost hard to breathe.

> Given the heat, people smelled, of course,

Hehe. It is really interesting how in some cultures people deal with smell of sweat different. In some countries the "body" smell (don't want to call it b.o. as that automatically negative in American English) mixed with some perfume or cologne is not considered that terrible.

<comment><USER23> > Well what is often forgotten is that humidity is just as big of a culprit as > the temperature of the air. Hot but dry air can be tolerated much easier > than colder but more humid air.

I hear this a lot but my experience is different.

Humid weather is annoying because it makes you sweat more. However, spending a few minutes at 35C in Beijing (where the air is extremely dry) I would like I'm about to burst into flames and can't breathe. At over 35C in Thailand I would only be annoyed with the weather if I had to spend significant time outside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Someone I know who spent a few years in the southern US had lots of fans in the house rather than air conditioning. His rationale was that AC made the contrast between indoors and outdoors too great making it harder to acclimatise.

<comment><USER25> I live in Australia. My dad won't get air-conditioner because he knows it cost at least $1,200 to add another A/C to the grid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> One thing's for sure, today's air-conditioning is one of the most energy- wasteful indulgences among electrical appliances.

Growing up around Tampa, as a native in the old days not only did very few residences have A/C, but most businesses did not either. Mainly just banks and supermarkets.

Most people were from up north anyway, and among them there were two interesting extremes.

"The Adaptable" good life lover. They retired or moved to Florida because they wanted the clean air, slower pace, and natural beauty of the sub-tropical resort environment. They let the fresh air in all the time, and only complained slightly when there was a heat wave and they had to use window or ceiling fans around-the-clock. They weren't about to consider air-conditioning though since they had worked all their life for the resort atmosphere to begin with and had strong desires to get what they were paying for.

"The Snowbird" migratory variety. Can not conceive of adapting to the sub- tropical environment very much, so they only spend winters that far south, generally while it is freezing up north. They didn't need A/C either since they weren't going to be there in the summer.

Kids love A/C though. We would plan our bike routes to include stops for rest at the buildings having A/C, where they had lobbies for us to gather with the retired people to cool off before heading back out.

Even as kids we knew Houston was the most air-conditioned city in the world at the time, then when the Astrodome was built it just emphasized so much the excesses that oil money can make possible.

Anyway, after being in Houston now for over a dozen years without A/C, I can't complain since I've adapted OK myself.

For me it's a no-brainer, I simply can't afford waste, especially wasting overpriced energy. Even Houston natives sometimes have an incredulous reaction and think I must be suffering, especially on 100 degreeF days like this. So more to satisfy them than myself, I invented a solar A/C where "the hotter it gets the cooler it gets" would be my trade or service mark. Don't expect to be building a prototype any time soon, with other inventions more pressing, but it's going to be a good one when the situation is right.

</comment><comment><USER27> _A South African gentleman once told me that New York in August was hotter than any place he knew in Africa_

That's surprising, since it sometimes seems that the only bearable place in the South African summer is Johannesburg, because of its altitude. Even in other cities, I've never heard of people sleeping on balconies or anything, despite aircons being a bit of a luxury item still, in residences.

I wonder if the annual temperature swings in climates like New York's make the heat seem worse than it is.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is it just me or is this the 2nd or 3rd time this has been posted on HN? I read the same article (which was/is great) last year from a similar post on HN last summer.... Maybe its just me I don't know.

<comment><USER29> I'm pretty sure it was here before.

<comment><USER30> 359 days ago. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062738](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6062738) .

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How much does the use of AC in the US contribute to overall energy usage I wonder? Solar powered AC FTW I think.</comment>


Show HN: KPCB Edge Office Hours - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/kpcb-edge-office-hours/id1018492359?mt=8&

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! We've been using this within our portfolio for a couple of weeks, but excited to open this up to the world today. Here's some more info on why we built it: [https://medium.com/@kpcb_edge/introducing-edge-office- hours-...](https://medium.com/@kpcb_edge/introducing-edge-office-hours- bd36711fd31f)

happy to answer any questions/discuss any feedback you have here

<comment><USER2> interesting and great that you open up communication lines, but why an ios app? why not a simple web version?

and what's the relationship between kpcb and kpcb edge?

<comment><AUTHOR> good question - iOS was mostly a function of our team's expertise. admittedly, its the higher order problem, since we now have the infrastructure to roll out a web app - which we might do, given the amount of activity we saw on there.

edge is a seed fund backed by kpcb - so the capital was committed from a kpcb venture fund (and no other investors).</comment></comment></comment>


Monitoring Cloudflare's edge network with Prometheus - <AUTHOR> https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzRE_fwreoDQNzUybnRFOHpWZTA/view <comment><USER2> Prometheus is an escaped implementation of Google's borgmon, which is seen inside Google as a kind of horror show, and alternatives have been developed. It is kind of frightening that it has got out in the wild and people like it.

<comment><USER3> Why is borgmon considered a horror show? Is something fundamentally flawed in the model? How do the alternatives differ from the original borgmon?

<comment><USER4> Google has an alternative that they gave a talk on back in December. Sadly there aren't any papers on it yet. It's called Monarch and it's what backs up Stackdriver.

It's config language is less crazy (Python based) and operates globally.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlvJdK1xsl4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlvJdK1xsl4)

Edit: Monarch config isn't sane, it's just different and at least not in the crazy languages that borgmon uses.

<comment> alin-sinpalean I will point out that borgmon's language (minus macros) is almost a 1:1 match with Prometheus. You can judge for yourself how crazy that is, but I feel that it's close to as simple as you can get for the power it gives you.

As for Monarch, it's a very different beast. For one, it stores all its rules in a protocol buffer format, so it's more structured. But then you have to write Python code that generates the protocol buffers and pushes them to storage. It looks similar but not the same as the ad-hoc query language. I wouldn't go as far as calling it sane.

It is also a service and it's optimized for Google's network architecture with datacenter local and global nodes and the language itself is aware of this distinction and some computations are done locally, others globally and so on.

For your local monitoring needs (or even global ones, if you're willing to put in the effort), Prometheus is a solid choice.

<comment><USER4> I'd agree with you after thinking about it some. I haven't really written either, mainly either copy/paste or using tools to assist in creation. So I can't really judge either monitoring language on their ease of use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here is the video if you want to watch the full talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHtY7TUsLzk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHtY7TUsLzk)

<comment><USER6> The talk originally given at PromCon 2017: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypWwvz5t_LE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypWwvz5t_LE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't get the hype around Prometheus.

What makes its pull-based mechanism superior to push-based ones like statsd?

And using exporters sounds clunky - instead of directly querying a metric and sending it to your metrics collector, you have an intermediate component which exposes them for collection.

<comment><USER8> Prometheus _does_ support push. It's just that it's considered such an antipattern that it's been moved into a separate module (the Push Gateway) that you need to run separately.

Pulling has a few technical benefits, though. For one, only the puller needs to know what's being monitored; the thing being monitored can therefore be exceedingly simple, dumb and passive. Statsd is similarly simple in that it's just local UDP broadcast, of course, which leads to the next point:

Another benefit is that it allows better fine-grained control over _when_ metrics gathering is done, and _what_. Since Prometheus best practices dictate that metrics should be computed at pull time, it means you can fine-tune collection intervals to specific metrics, and this can be done centrally. And since you only pull from what you have, it means there can't be a rogue agent somewhere that's spewing out data (i.e. what a sibling comment calls "authorative sources").

But to understand why pull is a better model, you have to understand Google's/Prometheus's "observer/reactor" mindset towards large-scale computing; it's just easier to scale up with this model. Consider an application that implements some kind of REST API. You want metrics for things like the total number of requests served, which you'll sample now and then. You add an endpoint /metrics running on port 9100. Then you tell Prometheus to scrape (pull from) [http://example.com:9100/metrics](http://example.com:9100/metrics). So far so good.

The beauty of the model arises when you involve a dynamic orchestration like Kubernetes. Now we're running the app on Kubernetes, which means the app can run on many nodes, across many clusters, at the same time; it will have a lot of different IPs (one IP per instance) that are completely dynamic. Instead of adding a rule to scrape a specific URL, you tell Prometheus to ask Kubernetes for all services and then use _that_ information to figure out the endpoint. This dynamic discovery means that as you take apps up and down, Prometheus will automatically update its list of endpoints and scrape them. Equally importing, Prometheus goes to the _source_ of the data at any given time. The services are already scaled up; there's no corresponding metrics collection to scale up, other than in the internal machinery of Prometheus' scraping system.

In other words, Prometheus is _observing_ the cluster and _reacting_ to changes in it to reconfigure it self. This isn't exactly new, but it's core to Google's/Prometheus's way of thinking about applications and services, which has subseqently coloured the whole Kubernetes culture. Instead of configuring the chess pieces, you let the board inspect the chess pieces and configure itself. You want the individual, lower-level apps to be as mundane as possible, let the behavioural signals flow upstream, and let the higher-level pieces make decisions.

This dovetails nicely with the observational data model you need for monitoring, anyway: First you collect the data, then you check the data, then you report anomalies within the data. For example, if you're measuring some number that can go critically high, you don't make the application issue a warning if it goes above a threshold; rather, you collect the data from the application as a raw number, then perform calculations (e.g. max over the last N mins, sum over the last N mins, total count, etc.) that you compare against the threshold.

In practice, implementing a metrics endpoint is exceedingly simple, and you get used to "just writing another exporter". I've written a lot of exporters, and while this initially struck me as heavyweight and clunky, my mindset is now that an HTTP listener is actually more lightweight than an "imperative" pusher script.

<comment><USER9> But why is it simpler for Prometheus to have to query Kube to discover all the endpoints in order to collect the data, versus the endpoints just pushing out to Prometheus?

Obviously endpoints already need to know how to contact all sorts of services they depend on. So it's not like you're "saving" anything by not telling them "PrometheusIP = X".

Let's say you want to cleanly shut-down some instances of your endpoint. They are holding connection stats & request counts that you don't want to lose. With push the endpoint can close its connection handler, finish any outstanding requests, push final stats, and then exit. With pull are you supposed to just sit and wait until a Pull happens before the process can exit?

<comment><USER8> Because it shifts all the complexity to the monitoring system, making the "agents" really, really dumb. There would have to be more to push than just a single IP:

* Many installations run multiple Prometheus servers for redundancy, so to start, it'd have to be multiple IPs.

* They would also need auth credentials.

* They'd need retry/failure logic with backoff to prevent dogpiling.

* Clients would have to be careful to resolve the name, not cache the DNS lookup, in order to always resolve Prometheus to the right IP.

* If Prometheus moves, _every_ pusher has to be updated.

* Since Prometheus wouldn't know about pushers, it wouldn't know if a push has failed. As Prometheus is pull-based, you can detect actual failure, not just absence of data.

There's a lot to be said for Prometheus' principle of baking exporters into individual, completely self-encapsulated programs — as opposed to things like collectd, diamond, Munin, Nagios etc. that collect a lot of stuff into a single, possibly plugin-based, system.

Don't forget, a lot of exporters come with third-party software. You want those programs to have as little config as possible. If I release an open- source app (let's say, a search engine), I can include a /metrics handler, and users who deploy my app can just point their Prometheus at it. It's enticingly simple.

As for graceful shutdown: The default pull frequency is 15 seconds, and you can increase it if you want to avoid losing metrics. Prometheus is designed not to deal with extremely fine-grained metrics; losing a few requests due to a shutdown shouldn't matter in the big picture. But for metrics that _are_ sensitive, it's easy enough to bake them into some stateful store anyway (Redis or etcd, for example), or computing them in real time from stateful data (e.g. SQL). For example, if you have some kind of e-commerce order system, it's better if the exporter produces the numbers by issuing a query against the transaction tables, rather than maintaining RAM counters of dollars and cents.

<comment><USER10> How do you handle aggregated metrics, e.g. request count? What does the instance (either server/container) expose at localhost:9001/metrics?

<comment><USER11> You would expose a counter with the total request count. Summing those up across all nodes known by Prometheus will give you the total amount of requests currently visible to monitoring. With "rate()" you could calculate the requests/second.

But yes it is possible to miss some requests if a node goes down without Prometheus collecting the latest stats.

But as the parent said, if you need such totals it might be better to store them persistently. Also I do not know a scenario where the total number of requests will trigger an alert.

<comment><USER12> > But yes it is possible to miss some requests if a node goes down without > Prometheus collecting the latest stats.

The rate() function allows for this, you'll get the right answer on average.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Working with Prometheus for a while. Only sticking point has been the 15 day storage of metrics. Anyone know why this is the limit on storage, or any strategies for long term storage of metrics?

<comment><USER14> As lobster_johnson stated, Prometheus storage retention is a command line launch option.

Prometheus is not intentionally designed as a long term cold storage option for metrics. You _can_ store metrics for as long as your storage allows, but Prometheus is not going to replicate or manage that data to prevent long term degradation. Depending on your long term needs, the preferred pattern is to roll data off Prometheus into a metrics store that better handles data over the scope of months. Rolling data off of Prometheus is done with an exporter and documented [here]([https://prometheus.io/docs/operating/integrations/#remote- en...](https://prometheus.io/docs/operating/integrations/#remote-endpoints- and-storage)).

In most use operational use cases I've come across, we've only needed about a month of data, so keeping it in Prometheus was kosher. YMMV.

<comment><USER9> What if you want to keep time-series data for accounting purposes forever?

Right now I use graphite but would love something that also handles replication/redundancy with a good query language & enough performance to also use it to fetch the underlying data used to render front-end graphs for _users_.

<comment><USER14> The answer to these kinds of questions is very, very dependant on requirements and available resources. And there are rarely easy, out of the box answers.

The big questions to ask are: \- what data is of interest \- what are the requested ingest patterns (how is data getting into this system? How frequently? What rate of ingest is expected?) \- what are the requested query patterns (who is doing queries? What do those queries look like specifically? Are people querying over unbounded time ranges or are people doing more focused queries? Do queries regularly involve aggregations or not?) \- what is the requested SLA (i.e. how much partial down time is okay? How much full downtime is okay? What kind of query response time do you need to target?) \- what resources are/will be available (money, man power, compute, storage, tech on hand)

It's possible that a time series data store might not be the correct system choice once these questions are answered. It's not unusual to see data split or copied into multiple systems to answer all requirements.

<comment><USER9> The most important consideration is the scale. A low scale system will not require an optimum solution, merely a correct one.

So I would say, the system is 5 minute ingest of about 1 million metrics. This is spread out over a half dozen locations, each which currently records in their own silo.

And aggregate metric is calculated with a 5 minute lag, which reads all the just-written data points and aggregates into sum-totals which are themselves stored and cached in one place. This is another million metrics basically stored separate from the rest.

But it doesn't really change the character of the system. In the end I'm trying to; Write batches of mostly numeric data Queries over time against those numbers Aggregate data over different blocks of time; 5 minute, hourly, daily, monthly Store it efficiently Ensure redundancy, integrity

Seems like a simple and common enough problem to have been reasonably "solved" for orders of magnitude higher scale than I'm operating at.

<comment><USER14> From what I've seen, each solution has been pretty specific to the situation. I've rarely seen one tech stack prevail at low to reasonable scale.

At reasonable scale, I've seen people get really far with pure graphite setups by utilizing tools like [carbon-c-relay]([https://github.com/grobian/carbon-c- relay](https://github.com/grobian/carbon-c-relay)), [carbonate]([https://github.com/graphite- project/carbonate](https://github.com/graphite-project/carbonate)), and high integrity filesystems like zfs underneath. It's a very hands on operation though. Things like growing the cluster are hard to do without downtime.

If constant growth and uptime is a concern, something like openTSDB might be a great choice. The complexity of setting up a Hadoop + HBase cluster is a pretty big upfront cost, but man is this thing the cockroach of time series data stores. Adding storage is just growing the HBase cluster. Querying across years of data is pretty simple and straightforward. For the complexity involved, openTSDB is worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >"Monitoring Cloudflare's planet-scale edge network with Prometheus"

Is "planet scale" better than "web scale"?

<comment><USER16> It's just Cloudflare trying to make themselves sound bigger. Still nowhere near Google or Amazon.

<comment><USER17> They are similar in terms of users, requests and bandwidth.

<comment><USER15> Do you have a citation for that claim?

<comment><USER17> They serve 10% of the internet traffic and have over 1 billion users. They receive more than 5 million requests per second in average.

<comment><USER15> That's not really a citation. Where are these figures published? What does that mean "10% the internet traffic?" By bandwidth? By request volume?

<comment><USER17> You could start by reading the article you are commenting on. The traffic is by requests.

You may not be aware but yes, cloudflare is a significant internet company.

<comment><USER15> Its not actually an article, its a slide deck with a bunch of marketing on it. And I did read it. These are unsubstantiated numbers. 10% of total daily HTTP requests? Where is the total daily number of HTTP requests on the internet published? Cisco's VNI approximates bandwidth but I have never seen any number for the total HTTP requests on the internet.

I am aware that Cloudflare is a CDN, most CDNs are substantial internet companies. However I've worked at a couple of CDNs and they all throw a lot of marketing numbers around.

<comment><USER18> If memory serves, the 10% isn't based on some kind of global estimate of HTTP traffic. It's based on what percentage of active IP-space they see on a daily basis.

<comment><USER15> Now that's a marketing metric :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


As the North Rests on Its Laurels, the South Is Rising Fast - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/17/as-the-north-rest-on-its-laurels-the-south-is-rising-fast.html

<comment><USER2> Among other factors for the South's rise is one that's often overlooked: air conditioning.

It's nice to not have to deal with snow, but the South's wet heat can be _miserable_. Before A/C it was easier to heat than cool, so most people wanted to live up north. Now it's quite easy to cool, so the South becomes much more appealing.</comment>


Intel Raises $6 Billion in Bond Sale to Buy Back Stock - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-04/intel-plans-three-part-bond-offering-to-repurchase-common-stock.html <comment><USER2> Tax would also be a big reason. Effectively they might have a reduced tax scenario after this buy back

</comment><comment><USER3> Could someone explain to a market novice what the rationale would be for this? I thought buybacks were a way of delivering value back to existing shareholders, but why take on debt to do that?

<comment><USER4> Current share price is about $20. So for the $6 billion you retire 300 million shares. There are about 5 billion total shares outstanding so you retire 6% of your shares.

Effective interest rate on the $6 billion in bonds is approx. 2.4%. The stocks dividend is 0.90 cents per share which equals a dividend yield of 4.6% .

Think of it as a small company where you own 94% of the company and a partner who has a 6% share of your company. You can take out a loan for $100k and pay 2.4% ($2,400 per year) to the bank. or keep paying him a dividend (his share of earnings) at $4,600 per year. Kind of a no-brainer in terms of immediate cash flow. Plus after 10 years when you've paid off the loan you now own 100% of your company.

When you think of it that way it's really a slam dunk for Intel.

For Intel, their cash flow for 2011 was approx. $20 billion so they can obviously afford to pay back the loan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Buybacks usually mean the company thinks their stock is underpriced. However, x86 is currently being disrupted by ARM, and the prognosis does not look good. For example, they've finally got their power consumption to around ARM levels, but the entire mobile industry is based on ARM - ARM is now the incumbent.

Is this Intel hubris, or do they know something we don't?

<comment><USER6> _Buybacks usually mean the company thinks their stock is underpriced._

Everyone gets this wrong.

I blame crappy financial journalism for the widespread belief that stock buybacks are supposed to increase the price of the company.

According to financial theory, a stock buyback destroys cash on hand and outstanding stock at the same time. This reduces the value of a company by EXACTLY AS MUCH as it reduces the outstanding stock. Therefore the stock price should remain unchanged to first order effects.

Therefore a stock buyback in theory is just a way of returning money to investors with different tax consequences than a dividend.

So all that you should read from "stock buyback" is, "excess cash is available to distribute to the owners".

In this case excess cash is being raised by taking on debt. But the Modigliani–Miller theorem also says that the structure of financing of a company has no correlation with its performance, so that shift should not matter much.

<comment><USER7> Short: You are right that a stock buyback is a technique, like dividends, to return capital to existing investors. However, stock buybacks are also a technique used by firms that believe their stock is underpriced, and is likely what is happening here.

Long: To say that a firm's equity is "underpriced" is to say that the firm believes it is expensive (risk-adjusted), compared to it's debt.

This implies a two things:

* Asymmetric information - that the firm knows something the market doesn't.

* That the firm is at a sub-optimal weighted average cost of capital, and can reduce the cost of its capital by restructuring.

As found by MR Leary at Duke and cited by 600 others[1], firms resolve this situation by rebalancing their capital structure. One way to do this is to issue debt at a low interest rate to buy back the firm's "expensive" stock.

The Modigliani–Miller theorem that you reference does indeed argue that capital structures don't matter and that rebalancing shouldn't need to occur. However the theory doesn't apply in practice since it assumes the absence of asymmetric information, taxes, and the presence of an efficient market [2].

1\. [http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=179408952930709446...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=17940895293070944684&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5)

2\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theor...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theorem)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There seems to be a lot of confusion about why they would do this, the text books say it indicates that the company thinks its stock is undervalued and that the management have the best information on the company so they would know. In this case I think it is a cost of capital vs interest rate decision. tl:dr Interest rates are low</comment>


How Tech Companies Can Help Upskill the U.S. Workforce - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2018/02/how-tech-companies-can-help-upskill-the-u-s-workforce <comment> shaki-dora "Upskill"? Really?

<comment><USER2> You don't get to be a partner at McKinsey by just saying people should learn new things.

If you did that then who's going to run their Upskill Empowerment Bootcamp?</comment></comment>


How To Ask Questions The Smart Way - <AUTHOR> http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

<comment><AUTHOR> One more from the same website: <http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker- howto.html></comment>


Answer to What's the difference between UI design and UX design?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-s-the-difference-between-UI-design-and-UX-design/answer/Xianhang-Zhang <comment><USER2> This is brilliant. That's exactly the difference.</comment>


How a TV Sitcom Triggered the Downfall of Western Civilization - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/how-a-tv-sitcom-triggered-the-downfall-of-western-civilization-336e8ccf7dd0 <comment><USER2> This is a strange article with a regular message but a clickbait title just to grab attention. I feel like either the author doesn't really understand mainstream humor of a primetime TV show like 'Friends' and/or is trying too hard.</comment>


Executive Order on Addressing the Threat Posed by WeChat – The White House - <AUTHOR> https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-addressing-threat-posed-wechat/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24077339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24077339).</comment>


Science Fiction by Scientists - <AUTHOR> https://www.humblebundle.com/books/science-fiction-by-real-scientists <comment><USER2> I recommend "Blindsight" by Peter Watts, who was a marine biologist before he was an author. He's the only author I can think of who uses academic style citations for hard scifi credibility. You can read Blindsight online or download ebook versions here:

[http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

He also shared his Rifters trilogy, which I enjoyed although it's not as good as Blindsight, as well as several short stories:

[http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm](http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm)

<comment><USER3> I usually agree with other posts here that too much science makes for fiction that I enjoy less. Blindsight was an exception for me. I liked the science ideas and the fiction.

If you like this kind of thing you may also like Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear. He wrote an article about the science ideas here: [http://gregbear.com/pages/newbiology.php](http://gregbear.com/pages/newbiology.php)

I didn't enjoy this one as much, but the hard-science part was done fairly well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder if other people share my perception that most science fiction written by scientists is not excellent fiction (especially when the first desire is realism).

It seems to me that crafting a story is a quite different tool set from being an engineer, physicist, etc., which is why at least seems rare to find a great physicist who is also a great writer. Perhaps the best balance, then, would be achieved by someone who writes stories deferring to actual scientists for review...?

Also, I'm interested in being refuted here. These are unexamined perceptions I'm writing out here.

<comment><USER5> What no love for Knuth's Surreal numbers? [https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/sn.html](https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/sn.html)

I think if you're not into sci fi, you've discovered what most call the distinction between hard and soft sci fi. Soft sci fi is the usual boring eternal "human condition" story thats been told a million times before, but maybe if I put space ships in as my gimmick I can sell more copies. Hard sci fi is what if this really thought provoking component datasheet or speculative theoretical physics paper were true, maybe I could sell more copies if I put some humans into the story as filler for my gimmick. I'm personally pretty bored with human condition stories; I've read them all or lived thru the experience myself over the decades, but sci fi still delights me with glorious creativity even if the bolted on characters are sometimes one dimensional cardboard cutouts.

The system you suggest of a human story teller deferring to the scientists is usually screwed up by one side or the other; when it isn't, its noteworthy. One example of an English Lit major not screwing up the science would be KSR's famous Mars Trilogy from around the turn of the century. That's a really good trilogy! Proving that at least theoretically your system is possible, having been successfully implemented at least once historically.

<comment><USER6> >soft sci fi is the usual boring eternal "human condition" story thats been told a million times before, but maybe if I put space ships in as my gimmick I can sell more copies.

This is a pretty unfair description of the category. Soft scifi is a story that has fantastical tech/physics that aren't completely explained. The tech is usually crucial to the story in some way, but the _how_ of the tech's functioning is left unsaid. I find it unlikely that you've somehow lived through the entire range of events and emotions that can comprise the "human condition", but that aside: a lot of the soft scifi stories out there are focused around hypothetical _inhuman conditions_ for which the fantastical tech is crucial. _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ is focused on whether artificial sentience is less worthy than organic, Whedon's _Dollhouse_ on the potential personal and societal ramifications of being able to save/load our brains digitally, _Ancillary Justice_ on what it might feel like to have your consciousness simultaneously inhabiting multiple bodies, "The Measure of a Man" from TNG on what it means to be sentient and if artificial sentience is possible (or even possible to measure once achieved), _Her_ exploring how a truly sentient AI would relate to humans and impact our society. There are a lot of vague stories out there that use spaceships as an attention-grabber, but that isn't what defines the genre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure how I feel about such marketing. A more believable sci-fi novel does sound more interesting, but isn't it like promoting a movie involving a plane crash as "directed by aviation personnel".

<comment><USER8> Stating a movie is based on an actual account from witnesses/survivors/etc generally makes it sell better.

<comment><USER9> > Stating a movie is based on an actual account from witnesses/survivors/etc > generally makes it sell better.

Although, which is perhaps egeozcan's point, it doesn't necessarily make it _actually_ better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Try this writer: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Forward](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_L._Forward)

<comment><USER11> I recently read Dragon's Egg - quite thought-provoking and well-written, except for the somewhat clichéd human characters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Has anyone read any of these? Are they any good?

<comment><USER13> I would like to think that I am exceptionally well read in SF... and I have never heard of any of these folks.

They may be great. I dunno.

I was expecting:

Asimov (biochemist), Sagan (physicist), Brin (astrophysics, space science), Forward (physicist), Czerneda (biologist), Watts (biologist), Benford (astrophysicist), Taylor (physics, space science), Brotherton (astrophysicist), Asaro (physics and chemistry), Kondo (astrophysicist), Landis (physics), Rajaniemi (mathematical physics)... those are the ones off the top of my head, I'm certainly missing many.

I can vouch for all of the above authors being able to tell a story.

<comment><USER14> > I have never heard of any of these folks

I also read a lot and I haven't heard of any of them either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Revelation Space - by Alastair Reynolds – 2000

An epic volume 1 Volume 2 - Chasm City - brilliant with a dark and heart stopping culmination

Reynolds is a British astro-physicists I dont know if he is popular in the US as he is in the UK

<comment><USER16> Revelation Space is excellent! I came here to recommend it.

Chasm City is good but it almost felt like a mediocre action movie. The hero wielding the big guns, flat dialog, an obligatory and passionless sex scene... but the environment and society really make it interesting.

<comment><USER15> I agree Chasm City feels very pedestrian and long. But i got a real thrill when it finally converged.. It was well worth the wait ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm working on a similar project, [http://rationalfiction.io](http://rationalfiction.io), where you can read hard scifi written mostly by hackers.</comment>