Datadog raises $31M for cloud monitoring - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/28/investors-thow-datadog-a-31m-bone/ <comment><USER2> Datadog is great. I converted my New Relic monitoring over to Datadog without too much hassle. I was only using the backend monitoring part of New Relic so I didn't miss any of those features. The dashboards are much better, the event stream is really cool, the AWS integrations are great, and the front end is pretty speedy. And the best part, it costs about 5-10x less (which is what prompted the conversion to Datadog in the first place).

<comment><USER3> New Relic is second to none when it comes to being able to do deep dives into finding out which API call is causing slowdowns where, but Datadog aggregates data better than anything else I've ever used -- to me, the monitoring part is just a nice side-feature.

<comment><USER2> Only if you are running a supported language / server. That feature doesn't really work at all for .NET web-api apps =(

<comment><USER4> Product manager from Datadog here. Better .Net (and Windows) support is coming.

<comment><USER2> To be clear, I was talking about the automatic "deep dives into finding out which API call is causing slowdowns" part of New Relic. That is a useful feature, but it doesn't work at all on .NET web-api apps so it wasn't a reason for me to stay with New Relic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kudos to Datadog. I'm not a current customer, but when I took it for a trial run several months ago I found it to be visually appealing, reliable, and intuitive. It didn't have some of the advanced features that you would get with Hosted Graphite or Librato at the time, but it was a very strong contender. All of us will benefit from the high-quality competition occurring in this space!

<comment><USER6> What features of librato did you not find in Datadog? I'm a current librato customer and I from what I see datadog is better in most aspects. Also the datadog integrations are awesome. The collecd integration is just ok

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> We're using Datadog to monitor job stats on a busy RabbitMQ host and it's fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER8> We routinely pummel Datadog with massive amounts of data from hundreds of hosts and it does an amazing job of showing us the data we need and alerting us when something is wrong. Highly recommended.

</comment><comment><USER9> Datadog is very nice. Here's something I wrote when asked what value we were getting from it- [https://gist.github.com/sciurus/3a1cd4c203891c8d33b2](https://gist.github.com/sciurus/3a1cd4c203891c8d33b2)

# Why datadog? #

I would break it down into four pieces. Datadog is

1\. providing functionality

1\. we need

1\. in an easy-to-use manner

1\. that would be difficult to build and maintain ourselves

# 1) Functionality #

## The agent ##

It gathers system metrics, integrates with key software we use, and provides a standard interface to which our applications can send custom metrics.

## Integrations ##

Datadog has prebuilt integrations to pull data from almost every important service we use.

## Events ##

Through the integrations datadog generates a consolidated event stream that we can filter and earch as needed.

## Dashboards ##

Datadog lets us build dashboards that combine metrics from many different sources. We can combine and transform metrics to make them more useful. It also provides an powerful interface for interactive exploration of metrics.

## Alerting ##

Datadog has nice stream processing capabilities for generating alerts, and it can surface them in services we use like pagerduty and slack.

# 2) Need #

## The Agent ##

We don't get nearly enough insight from cloudwatch alone, we need an on- instance tool to gather system and app metrics.

## Integrations ##

There are lots of services with operational signficiance, but many of them don't provide a good way to access their data.

## Events ##

We would spend _dramatically_ longer investigating problems if we had to look at eash source of events in isolation. Many of our event sources don't even provide a way for us to view past events or to query them.

## Dashboards ##

Per-service and per-instance dashboards are important for investigating problems quickly. The consolidation of data from multiple sources is again a key feature.

## Alerting ##

We need to do anaylze trends in our metrics and alert on them.

# 3) Ease of use #

## The agent ##

The agent is deployable via a chef cookbook datadog wrote for us. It requires minimal configuration. It knows which system and application metrics are worth gathering.

## Integrations ##

Integrating with all the data sources is literally a few clicks.

## Events ##

The interface makes searching and filtering events straightforward.

## Dashboards ##

There are prebuilt dashbaords for lots of things we care about. Snazzy features like autocomplete and templating make building our own dashboards easy.

## Alerting ##

The guided steps and previewed outputs make creating alerts simple.

# 4) Hard to replicate #

Here I described a system of collectd, custom code to pull metrics from cloudwatch, custom code to pull or receive events from various sources (airbrake, cloudtrail, chef, pagerduty, jenkins, etc) influxdb, and grafana.

<comment><USER10> Very informative post!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Something worth noting: Datadog is currently the only monitoring service that provides a Dockerized agent (so you can easily stick it into a CoreOS cluster, for example).</comment>


Stephen Colbert crowns winner of Hacking Education developer contest - oliver-hh http://www.donorschoose.org/blog/2011/07/25/stephen-colbert-anoints-big-winner/

<comment> oliver-hh Check out the projects of the winner and seven other finalists at <http://donorschoose.org/winner>, and 25 additional contestants that wowed the judges and DonorsChoose.org staff at <http://donorschoose.org/showcase>.</comment>


Robinhood trading site seizes up, customers miss stock rally - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-02/robinhood-suffers-online-outage-with-market-advancing-after-rout <comment><USER2> I would love to get on RH put down train, but my not no name 401k provider had issues with their website entire Thurs morning last week.

It is kinda like a bank rush, only really well heeled institutions can survive everyone and their mother jumping in the fray.

Now.. the common question is whether the company should have an infrastructure that can support its customer load at times like this.

<comment><USER3> I think to answer your question, yes, the company absolutely should have an infrastructure that can support this kind of load. The product that RH is selling is execution of trades, and failure to do so has drastic consequences. They are not some social network that can afford to go offline for a few hours due to high traffic, the stakes are significantly different.

Another thing to consider is that there are so many great alternatives to RH that were online, despite encountering similar load. If the whole stock trading network went down that would be a different conversation, but users of other platforms were able to trade, and thus RH not being able to provide the infrastructure to handle the load is a huge disservice to its customers.

<comment><USER2> Believe it or not, I agree with you. In cases like this I point to ISPs and their ability to sell more bandwidth than they can reasonably handle. Brokerages for regular clients know that lost uptime equals angry customers, who can and will move their money ( if not more ).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I saw a tweet that showed they didn't 'account for' leap years.. And by account for I mean: use a standard date library to handle dates. I too have made this mistake when younger and tried to be smart with dates, but not on a f'ing multi million dollar service >_<

<comment><USER5> Could you stop spreading a hoax.....

<comment><USER6> >A hoax is a falsehood deliberately fabricated to masquerade as the truth

Perse probably didn't know it was a hoax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475019](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475019)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22468361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22468361)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465178](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465178)

</comment><comment><USER8> Quantitative hedge funds must be making an absolute killing these couple weeks from the number of individual traders trying to daytrade through all this volatility.

<comment><USER9> Individual traders occasionally do beat the market makers. That's why market makers need special rules to boost their profits... remember, nothing stopping individual billionaires from speculating in the market just like individual 9-5'ers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not a Robinhood user -- do they have guaranteed stop losses? This is something that could appease lots of users (assuming it's used correctly) even in this kind of situation (since _guaranteed_ stop losses exist pretty much for exactly this eventuality).

<comment><USER11> Stop losses are a feature you can use on the platform, but I don't know if they were executed on time if the whole platform was down...

<comment><USER12> Usually stop losses are an exchange feature, their atomicity is sort of the point. They wouldn't be impacted by platform outages.

That said I don't have any idea about how Robinhood implements them.

<comment><USER13> Stop loss and stop limit orders are brokerage features.

<comment><USER12> Interestingly when I was still writing trading platforms you would be dead wrong. But in the last few years at least nyse & bats no longer offer stops.

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2015/11/18/why...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2015/11/18/why- will-the-nyse-stop-accepting-stop-orders.html)

Lots of other exchanges still offer them [https://www.cmegroup.com/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?c...](https://www.cmegroup.com/confluence/plugins/servlet/mobile?contentId=78447015#content/view/78447015)

I'd be curious how brokerages actually implement stops on exchanges that don't offer them natively because synthetic stops have notoriously bad edge cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It was pretty easy to miss if you're in the habit of blinking.

<comment><USER15> This suggests the outage was short. It lasted the entire trading day, during one of the largest single-day gains of the last few years, during one of the highest-volatility spikes of the decade.

<comment><USER14> No, this suggests that the rally was short.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm pretty ignorant of investing services/brokers...

Is this a case of people putting all their eggs in one basket? Does Robinhood have a "guaranteed" 99.9xxx% uptime guarantee?

Sucks for a lot of people who evidently are putting a lot of money in the market and couldn't do anything due to a technical issue.

<comment><USER17> This is what $0 commissions gets you...

<comment><USER18> Most major discount brokerages are also at $0 commissions. They make their money off of net interest, asset management fees, margin, security lending arrangements, and order flow.

<comment><USER17> Well, it looks like they make money mostly through a product that doesn't work literally you need it most, but sure.

<comment><USER18> Robinhood is not a major discount brokerage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And this is why larger brokerages are worthwhile. Not to mention, if my bank's app freezes, I can call someone to place a trade if needed.

</comment><comment><USER20> [https://archive.md/2JRJK](https://archive.md/2JRJK)

</comment><comment><USER21> I've been following the reaction on WallstreetBets for my new project [https://topstonks.com](https://topstonks.com)

I was wondering why mentions of Robinhood blew up yesterday:

[https://imgur.com/a/iWxEZkS](https://imgur.com/a/iWxEZkS)

</comment><comment><USER22> Power Etrade was pretty sluggish today for awhile as well.

</comment><comment><USER23> Seasoned traders probably have a second account to hedge.

<comment><USER24> almost certainly...the issue is that RH claims to be for the beginner trader. The last two days will push a ton of customers away especially with how volatile the market has been and will continue to be. No one with any sense would continue to trade on a platform where you might not be able to touch anything for an entire day or two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> May be it was a good thing. The market drops again today. The rally was a dead cat bouncing.

</comment><comment><USER26> I get the feeling that the less RH is available, the less money their customers will lose.

<comment><USER27> Well in this case it saved me several hundreds of dollars because I wasn't able to sell my puts. Of course, it could have just as easily gone the other way and made me lose hundreds if the market reacted more positively to the fed cut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I checked one of their backend engineering job postings, using Python and Go... mostly python? Probably should have chosen something ~~boring~~ safe, like Java. A dynamic language like python/ruby doesn't seem to be a good choice for critical financial applications.

I'm know it can be done in python, but its about curbing any potential for human errors. Interested in seeing the RCA for this.

<comment><USER15> Why is an "exciting" (antonym to boring) language bad for this, and what makes a language "exciting"?

<comment><USER29> Static typing makes it easier to discover errors before the code is running in production.

<comment><USER30> Perhaps, but how does static typing make a language 'boring' or dynamic typing 'exciting'. I certainly consider Elm and Haskell more 'exciting' than Python or PHP.

<comment><USER28> replace boring with safe. you get the point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are press releases relevant anymore? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cborodescu/press-releases-are-bullshit-dont-feed-that-to-journalists-92ed91388f41 <comment><AUTHOR> This is my company CEO's experience with press releases. I can't decide if it's funny or dreadful, maybe it's both. What I don't know however is - <USER2> this an isolated case or the common case?

I don't know if it has been discussed or not, but if it has, please don't mind sharing the links to the discussions, I haven't been able to find anything similar.</comment>


Dark Side of the Ring: Pro Wrestling and Americana - <AUTHOR> https://spectator.us/pro-wrestling-great-americana/ <comment><USER2> I've heard about these issues in wrestling before, but is it just pro wrestlers? Is the rate of drug abuse higher in wrestlers than, say, other similar professions (boxing, MMA). Is wrestling doing this to its performers, or does wrestling attract people who have these problems?

There's calls for easier schedules, but as they say, the show must go on. You can't cancel a sold out arena if your lead person isn't feeling well, just like you wouldn't cancel a football game if the quarterback is sick.

(I'm not defending some of the treatment of wrestlers by their employers nor am I excusing their issues - I'm just asking do we know where these problems stem from? Seems easy to blame the boss, but is it their fault?)

<comment><USER3> There's two things that make wrestling different in kind, a party lifestyle and painkillers for dealing with the fast schedule.

Both of those have subsided from their late 20th century heights. The Ric Flair types got replaced by a bunch of athletic theater nerds, and painkiller abuse is understood as a thing in society.

>There's calls for easier schedules, but as they say, the show must go on.

It's not like there's a league setting the schedule. Wrestling promotions decide exactly how much they're going to work. WWE is sort of notorious that they work contracted talent balls-to-the-wall, where smaller promotions don't run as many shows in a week and independent wrestlers choose exactly how many bookings they take.</comment></comment>


How people talk about marijuana on Reddit: a natural language analysis - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@srobtweets/how-people-talk-about-marijuana-on-reddit-a-natural-language-analysis-a8d595882a7a <comment><USER2> Decent intro to natural language processing, but scientifically rubbish. I think using "cannabis" and "marajuana" skews heavily towards advocacy and serious discussion, since general chat about weed will use words such as, well, weed. Or pot, or hash, or herbs, or the maple leaf emoji, or a link to /r/trees. The problem with natural language processing on drugs is that the names people use for drugs are specifically chosen to be easily-confused with another, innocuous usage. That's the entire point of street names - to hide the fact that you're talking about drugs. I think you would need some kind of AI leagues ahead of our technology to accurately analyse people colloquially chatting about any drug, let alone one as popular and ubiquitous as weed.

<comment><USER3> Even more egregious than that:

> For quality control, I looked only at comments with Reddit score > 100

That's a non-trivial popularity score. Also, since it's an absolute score, it will bias against smaller subreddits, where 100 points on _any_ comment is a difficult task.

This is much less "how people talk on reddit", and much more "the type of comment that gets upvotes on the default subreddits"

<comment><USER4> Yikes, that sounds like a great way to bias your data away from controversial opinions about weed. That would be like taking an exit poll of only people wearing lots of political apparel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A quick note about using natural language/sentiment APIs: trained machine learning models must be used apples-to-apples on similar datasets; for example, you can't accurately perform Twitter sentiment analysis on a dataset using a model trained on professional movie reviews since Tweets do not follow AP Style guidelines. (e.g. for some reason, training Python's NLTK on the IMDb movie review dataset to predict the sentiment of Donald Trump's tweets is a oddly common Hello World, even though the results are misleading and may cause confirmation bias)

Reddit comments are _very_ idiosyncratic, and in this particular case, _even moreso_ than usual. As a result, I am skeptical of trusting the output of such APIs as gospel, even one trained on massive datasets. (however, training a model on a _Reddit-only_ dataset might be interesting, and is an idea I have in the pipeline.)

Last year, spaCy trained a model, sense2vec, on the Reddit dataset and got interesting results: [https://explosion.ai/blog/sense2vec-with- spacy](https://explosion.ai/blog/sense2vec-with-spacy)

<comment><USER6> This is a complicated problem and is I think best thought of as type of overfitting rather than a complete mistake. The independent or output variable, sentiment, does have an obvious generalisation from movies to politicians, unlike, for example, cinematography quality or trustworthiness. You are also overtraining when you test movie sentiment in the 2010s with reviews trained in the 90s as the concept of sentiment might have shifted if you look at it in that much detail.

(I don't disagree with anything you wrote, just expanding.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not directly related, but the podcast On The Media recently did a great episode on the origins of the war on drugs. One thing I didn't know? The word "marijuana" was actively popularized during the early days of the war on drugs to make the plant feel like a foreign import, despite the fact that it grew wild throughout the states.

[http://www.wnyc.org/story/on-the- media-2017-04-14/](http://www.wnyc.org/story/on-the-media-2017-04-14/)

</comment><comment><USER8> This seems more like a quick intro to some Google BigQuery and NLP capabilities using a keyword that will attract readers. Not a bad thing, but anyone expecting analysis of the topic in the headline should know it's really not about that.

However, it worked on me, I'll probably give these tools a spin in the near future.

<comment><USER9> I was hoping to see a little more analysis as well. We did a study[1] about people moving for marijuana and we were surprised to find people were fairly open about discussing the topic. But I'd be very curious to see more about how conversations online are forming around marijuana.

[1][https://www.movebuddha.com/blog/moving-for- marijuana/](https://www.movebuddha.com/blog/moving-for-marijuana/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 'Marijuana' is considered a racist term in the industry. The preferred word is 'cannabis'.

<comment><USER11> upvoted for truth. maybe people downvoting aren't familiar with the history.

so here's some history. the name "marijuana" was pushed by Harry Anslinger[0] as a way to trigger racial anxiety amongst conservative whites who held negative views with respect towards Mexicans. the other names for the plant being "hemp" (a non-psychoactive strain used as an industrial fiber crop) and "cannabis" (latin name for the genus of the plant).

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_J._Anslinger)

<comment><USER12> It has a Mexican name literally IN it. A conservative, white term would be Marijosepha.

<comment><USER13> _It has a Mexican name literally IN it. A conservative, white term would be Marijosepha._

logicallee, I think you've misunderstood the point made in the gp post. Harry Anslinger wanted it to sound strange and foreign to white conservatives, not familiar.

<comment><USER12> I mean that it has Juan in the name (which I contrast with Joseph). So Mari _JUAN_ a. Couldn't sound more Mexican if they tried.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Funny how marijuana was most mentioned with Donald Trump. I know the /r/trees subreddit thought Trump would be good for recreational Marijuana but doesn't look like that is true. The Trump subreddit (The_Donald) was also extremely pro marijauna and often boasted that Trump was better for legal marijuana than Clinton. Then enter Jefferey Bouraguard Sessions III.

<comment><USER15> I don't really understand why people would think Trump would be supportive of any kind of intoxicant. His older brother was an alcoholic and died before their dad (which depending on the source you're reading, had a big impact on him).

<comment><USER16> Many believed Trump to be a libertarian or even a closet Democrat, who supported saner policy for the practical reasons that many do, setting aside their personal beliefs about whether individuals should consume drugs.

<comment><USER17> More than a closet Democrat, he was an active Democrat who voted Democrat and donated to the party. Overall philosophically he's probably more 'opportunist' than anything.

<comment><USER16> Sure, in the past. If he's a Democrat now or in the past 8 years, it's definitely a well-kept secret.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is filtering by score > 100 a good idea? At least you might want to counterbalance that with negative-scoring comments, since people downvote to disagree, and it may be the Reddit audience are more likely to disagree with anyone thinking pot should remain illegal. In fact, why filter on score at all?

</comment><comment><USER19> Sometimes data is not beautiful, but very ugly. These results are based on a flawed premise. One red flag -- where is the word "dank" in your list? Where are words used by people who _actually smoke weed_? Also, is "where score > 100" a good heuristic for this kind of study? I would argue that "where score < 100" is a better heuristic.

For example, a shill or superuser (people getting top comment) will not be using domain specific language -- they will be using language that caters to a general audience. If this is true, you would end up squeezing most of the interesting language out of your study. Have you been to Grass City forums? I am guessing these people surely aren't using terms like "Donald Trump" in their everyday conversations about weed.

Reddit is a huge melting pot and probably isn't a _good_ place for insight about potheads. Grass City might not be either -- Grass City users are not typical potheads. The best place would be 10th grade high school social circles and college dorms. It really is amazing how _little_ data is produced by social networks, in the grand scheme of things. We are all so used to hearing about how _much_ data is produced by the internet. There are orders more data in the raw world just waiting to be scooped up.</comment>


Via Digg: How Many Visitors Does Your Site Need to Make You A Web 2.0 Millionaire? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/ebizmba25.html <comment><USER2> Well... depends, my startup is around position 20 in this listing about unique visitors / month but still I'm not rich ;) It is probably related to the nature of the deal we did and the fact our user base is in Italy, but what I mean is that if you don't get acquired and your business model is advertising 1,5 million unique visitors per month in a reddit-alike site will not make you rich most of the times.

For example assuming 5$ every 1000 impression, with an average of 3 impressions for unique user with 1 million of unique visitors a month you get from adsense 15k$. If there are two founders and bandwidth to pay this means you are making just about to survive.

In this web 2.0 bubble we are living this days I see very few news/technological sites where the business model is advertising and they are really profitable, or I'm missing something? Advertising tends to work only in services where your user base is the average john smith with IE6 clicking everywhere there is a banner. With smart users it gets very hard.

I'm not as experienced as many founders following news.yc but I suggest that if you plan to start a startup you should __try hard __to get an idea where there is a different business model than advertising, like PRO accounts or things like where there is a straight line binding user satisfaction with your earnings. In our new service we are trying this new model, even if this is also very hard indeed being the world full of free-everything-web-services :)</comment>


IFling: UCSD's Latest Ball-Flinging Robot Is 100% More Flingy - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/diy/ucsds-latest-ifling-is-100-more-flingy

<comment><USER2> The ball pickup is ingenious, but I'm not sure about 100% more flingy. The one shot they showed of it actually tossing the ping pong ball went straight into the ground a foot in front of the bot.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, this is version 3? Wouldn't that make it 50% more flingy?

I love the ball pick-up technique, but I'm not sold on the new throwing style. It seemed closer to spiking the ball into the ground - absolutely devastating to any small paper models of enemy combatants, but not much else.

</comment><comment><USER4> Neat. I bet some tennis players would want a scaled up model to pick up balls.

</comment><comment><USER5> 2011-11-12 - Apple issues cease and desist notice to UCSD

<comment><USER6> source?

<comment><USER3> Joke, based on the iName.</comment></comment></comment>


Yahoo's Bartz: most overpaid  - <AUTHOR> http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2010/10/11/yahoos-bartz-most-overpaid/

<comment><USER2> While I'm none too fond of Carol Bartz, the article and the source it's based on are ignoring the severe challenges a failing company faces when it tries to recruit someone. Its very common for such a company to pay a big premium and end up failing anyway.

I'd also want to look closer at the Micron situation, they're in a nasty cyclical business. And they need serious talent at the top if they want to stay in business.</comment>


What would TechCrunch look like today with NO iPhone/Verizon stories? - <AUTHOR> http://www.aviary.com/viewfull?fguid=c7bc61b4-1dc0-11e0-9c70-1231390ec091

<comment><USER2> I unsubscribed them from my Google Reader today. I have MG fatigue, he posts more often than necessary, and his article contents are repetitive, predictable, and rambly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Guess there's not enough cool startups they could be reporting on!

</comment><comment><USER4> Problem is you can see by the comment count how much people don't care about the actual startup news.</comment>


C, Golang, Perl, and Unix - <AUTHOR> https://blog.afoolishmanifesto.com/posts/c-golang-perl-and-unix/ <comment><USER2> Good read. Perl + Go seems like a great combo.

I've had some similar experiences when trying to learn Go, for non performance unixy stuff Perl just rocks.</comment>


Nissan says Leaf batteries will outlast the car by 10-12 years - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2019/05/24/nissan-leaf-batteries-outlast-car/ <comment><USER2> To say that this article is misleading is not enough. This article appears to be deliberately deceptive. Nissan Leafs are specifically known to have battery problems such that they lose a large percentage of their storage after a few years. The reason the batteries need to be recycled for other uses is because they keep having to be replaced, and they need to do something with the old batteries that are no longer useful for cars. Sure the battery might outlive the car, doing something else. Meanwhile, the car will need several battery replacements.

See [https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/29/nissans-long-strange- tr...](https://cleantechnica.com/2018/09/29/nissans-long-strange-trip-with- leaf-batteries/)

<comment><USER3> Reasons to lease an electric car rather than buy: the batteries degrade over time, and even if they did not people would believe they did.

A friend of mine recently bought a Nissan Leaf with low miles on it for $9k. It was less than 5 years old and it cost more than $30k new. The original owner lost way more money on resale than he ever would have spent on a gas car in 5 years, including paying for the gas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is 10 years normal for the lifespan of a car? Mine is 23 now, still works fine, and I feel is nicer than similar new cars in terms of interior finishes, hydraulic power steering, actual buttons for climate control that do their one thing well.

I don't drive much, but then I don't remember any childhood cars of my parents being at end of life at 10 years, and those were used in daily commutes.

Do the batteries decay over time? If a Leaf only has say 8k miles a year, will the batteries simply fail to hold charge after 22 years?

<comment><USER5> Environment matters a lot.

Road salt and Ocean Air destroys car bodies. The drivetrain can be fine, but the body just falls apart around it.

There's going to be an interesting time for Used Cars coming up, with all the electronics and complex parts. Where cars could be worked on in your garage or local shop, now need a trip to a dealer to work out the Electronic Wizardry.

Followed by the dying out of non-diesel ICE shops turning into just Brake and Tire places.

<comment><USER6> I've had good luck avoiding body rust in Minnesota, but on my last car (sold at 15yrs old) I ended up replacing every suspension and brake component over the last 3 years due to corrosion. My current car is 10 years old and I've already replaced a couple seized calipers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The data I've seen for Nissan looks terrible, enough to put me off until the do some active battery conditioning like other manufacturers. [https://pushevs.com/2018/03/20/nissan-leaf-battery- degradati...](https://pushevs.com/2018/03/20/nissan-leaf-battery-degradation- data-24-vs-30-kwh-batteries/)

<comment><USER8> Interesting bit on charging up to 80%. I guess it applies to laptop batteries as well... any tool/tweak for say, macOS or Linux?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Super. I hope all manufactures go back to building products for longevity instead of planned obsolescence, for the sake of the planet.

<comment><USER10> Here's looking at you, Apple. I will never buy another MacBook again until upgrading it is an option. Soldered RAM and especially a soldered hard drive are inexcusable, personally, much less the repair ability factor.

<comment><USER11> I don't really have much of a problem with that, but I would love the option to replace the guts of my mbp every few years. I keep waiting for Gibson's sandbenders to show up.

<comment><USER12> Yep. CPU's are barely increasing their performance (aside of increasing core count recently, but that's for very specific workloads). Motherboards is basically about CPU. Replace battery, optionally upgrade memory and SSD, replace broken components (WiFi card, keyboard) and it's as good as new. But that requires modular design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The average life of a car is only 10 years? Wow. I tend to use my vehicles much longer than that and I don't spend a lot on repairs.

Maybe this average is a result of accidents after a certain age. Almost any accident in a 15 year old car will cost more than the vehicle to fix professionally. I was surprised by the number though (which, to be fair, they didn't actually list).

<comment><USER14> It depends a lot on where you live. Cold climates with salt and ice destroy cars. Loads of rain can do it too. Where I live in SoCal cars last absolutely forever. You see people driving early 90s Hondas all the time and they've just gradually fixed stuff. The body is worn but basically good after almost 30 years. I imagine here a Leaf could outlast its batteries, but maybe not in Michigan or New York.

The battery is the most costly part of an EV but battery prices are falling rapidly. The rest of an EV is simpler and has fewer moving parts than a gas car and will probably last longer.

<comment><USER15> Yep, I drive a reliable but beat up ~300k-mi 90s car in CA and whenever I visit family in the west chicago suburbs by car I get viewed as white trash driving such a piece of crap and constantly checked out by city police. The salt destruction completely redefines what it means to operate such an old car there. The prevailing attitude is that only ghetto poor people drive old beat up cars because they can't get a loan for a new one, presuming everyone _needs_ to replace their car often.

When I'm in CA, people in parking lots often strike up conversations about the car like it's a classic and make offers to buy it. Police never take any interest in me since it's so common for people to drive old cars in a place they continue working just fine. The culture is completely different, I often wonder how much of it is due to the road salt alone.

<comment><USER14> Side note but isn't it sad that being poor gets you hassled by police? Not only is it irritating but it leads to the poor getting tons of extra nit picky tickets that end up costing hundreds of dollars.

It's also racial. I drove with a cracked windshield for almost a year when I was at University of Cincinnati. A black friend was amazed and said if he did that he'd get pulled over within days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I read the title, I could imagine someone at Nissan thinking "the battery is 10-12 years too reliable, can we make it cheaper so it doesn't outlast the rest of the car?"

This sort of "value engineering" is quite common today, especially since things like advanced computer simulation can make it easy to design the lifetime of a part within a surprisingly small tolerance. Before that, manufacturers would often err on the side of overbuilding to avoid premature failures.

<comment><USER2> They already did that. Their battery does not have a thermal management system like their competitors do, and so it gets damaged during heavy use or temperature fluctuations. It loses capacity rapidly and must be replaced after 5 years or so if the owner would like to keep a reasonable driving range. Therefore they need to figure out what to do with these bad battery packs, and as the article states they can use it to power street lights as it won't work for the car anymore. I'd recommend searching for other articles about the Nissan Leaf battery to get a better understanding of the situation.

<comment><USER17> Or for somebody to figure out how to add a mitigating thermal management system?

Or was this a cost decision that can't be explained by incompetence?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I got a leaf 6 months ago.

For me personally it's been an epiphany that I rank up there with the internet and the iphone.

My take these days is I select a chassis that is suitable, match it with a battery that covers 99 out of 100 trips and with apple/android car finally that differentiator is kind of gone.

The leaf could pack our double buggy/pram and three kids which is enough for 99 of 100.

Ideally I can drive it until the chassis is worn out, or the battery needs replacing.

</comment><comment><USER19> Nice. We'll need a lot of batteries for the transition to renewable energy.

</comment><comment><USER20> How do their batteries last in Phoenix? Air cooled is unlikely to work well.

<comment><USER21> Phoenix is bad for lead acid and lithium batteries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Meanwhile in France, a company or two are selling electric cars where you rent the battery, and it's on the manufacturer to replace it if/when it degrades beyond a pre-defines threshold.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd have kept my Leaf if I could have upgraded the battery pack when it came time to replace it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Seeing how many 2013 Altimas are just blowing up transmissions, Nissan/Renault appear to be estimating the lifespan of one of their automobiles as 5 years. I'm glad they've got their eye on long-lasting batteries, but, maybe build a car that can last as long as those batteries?

<comment><USER18> Well, I think that EV is the way to go here. Few moving parts in one of those which should in the end gain us consumers, but who knows. They'll find new ways to squeeze us!

An ICE is really a very complex piece of machinery. Lots of $ plowed down to get them where we are today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are these lithium ion batteries or lead ones?

<comment><USER24> Definitely lithium ion. Lead acid batteries are about the poorest option in terms of energy capacity per weight, which is important when you have to spend energy for hauling its own weight around.

They may be useful for permanent utility grid installations, but you won't see lead acid batteries powering electric cars.

<comment><USER19> I think lead-acid is not useful for grid installations because of the low lifetime. They're good for maybe 300 cycles. Their only redeeming quality seems to be their low cost.

<comment><USER24> Ah you're right. Looks like they're used for small scale off grid solar installations, not so much at utility scale. It's been done (link below) but even the one I found is moved over to lithium ion now.

[https://energy.ehawaii.gov/epd/public/energy-project- details...](https://energy.ehawaii.gov/epd/public/energy-project- details.html?rid=3--1750332b5038042)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


As a startup where would you host stuff? Dreamhost looks the cheapest? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I would not choose solely based on price and if you're looking at a shared server definitely not a place with ambiguous terms of service.

"If your processes are adversely affecting server performance disproportionately DreamHost Web Hosting reserves the right to negotiate additional charges with the Customer and/or the discontinuation of the offending processes."

Before you go with them call them up and if their capacities will work well for what you need to get started and always have a backup plan for scaling up immediately.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would get a Xen VPS since you get a guaranteed amount of CPU, RAM, disk, and bandwidth as well as full control of the kernel, firewall, software, etc. I've been very happy with <http://serveraxis.com> as well as <http://unixshell.com> but definitely do a bit of research first, <http://www.webhostingtalk.com/> is a great resource for that.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been leasing servers on 1&1 for a long time. They claim to be the largest hosting company in the world, and they are definitely not the worst. Unfortunately they dropped all their cheap server options last year and left $99 as the cheapest. <http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/Server>

</comment><comment><USER5> There were some good suggestions on this earlier thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18363>

</comment><comment><USER6> I am currently using Dreamhost right now for a staging server. The reliability has been terrible. I have never seen the uptime go over 24 hours.

</comment><comment><USER7> How about that Amazon stuff, is that hard to get started with?

</comment><comment><USER8> Dreamhost for early stages + proof of concept. Why? Because 1) they're as cheap as anyone, and 2) they give you more bandwidth than anyone else. For early stages, I think they'll work just fine.

Once you see a growth pattern, though, you'll want to consider VPS or dedicated hosting. VPS should work well if the ISP can guarantee host performance (CPU, disk, etc).

A few options:

\- Amazon EC2. This is cool because you only pay for what you use -- your bandwidth is measured and you're charged for what you actually use, not for a fixed limit. For disk space, it uses Amazon S3, where you also pay for what you use. The Xen machine specs are good enough for most of us. And, Amazon just lowered prices on S3 and EC2. Bad news, though: EC2 is still in limited beta. And who knows when they'll be out of that. :-(

\- Sun's deal with startups, which was posted here the other day, looks pretty good, especially the Joyant hosting deal @ <http://www.joyent.com/partners/sun/sse.> Only "problem" is that you're using Solaris. For some people that is not a problem.

\- actual VPS hosting: in my cursory search, I think Teknet unmanaged (<http://www.tektonic.net/unmanaged.html)> looks pretty good, as long as you're technical enough to handle the virtual server yourself. (And you should be.) Their most expensive pkg gives you more disk space than other providers seem to (80G), and more bandwidth (800Gb) -- to me those are big issues. That's for $100/mo, which is a good deal IMHO. Unix-only, CentOS, Fedora Core, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu.

<comment><USER9> I was a Tektonic customer for about a year but I started to have significant problems with them, both technical and billing issues. Email me for the gory details. It was about 2 years ago, so they might have gotten their act together since then.</comment></comment>


Real reasons why tech giants are hugging "Remote Work" - <AUTHOR> https://om.co/2020/05/23/real-reasons-why-tech-giants-are-hugging-remote-work/ <comment><USER2> It is a huge bet that productivity in the long run is equal to or greater than the savings in rent. When you do the math on the occupancy cost per square foot relative to the labour cost on a per square foot basis (using a company's occupancy numbers divided by square footage of the office), it works out to 4 - 7%. If you increase employee turnover slightly or decrease productivity in the long run by a small amount, you've erased the gains and destroyed your company culture in the long run. Oh, and if you give your employees a bunch of money to fit out their home offices and start paying for their internet at home and give them money for lunches and whatnot, you've just erased a portion of the savings in rent and further reduced the odds against you as employer will be net positive.

It is a hugely levered bet and to see all of these companies making this bet on the basis of a 3 month experiment with, to say the least, confounding factors, seems irresponsible.

<comment><USER3> The main potential savings is not from avoiding office leases, it's from hiring engineers for 1/3 of the cost or less from places like Europe, India, and Brazil.

<comment><USER4> What stops them from doing that already?

Facebook has offices in Brazil: [https://www.facebook.com/careers/locations/saopaulo/?p[offic...](https://www.facebook.com/careers/locations/saopaulo/?p\[offices\]\[0\]=São%20Paulo%2C%20Brazil&offices\[0\]=São%20Paulo%2C%20Brazil)

Why didn't they close down the Palo Alto office already?

<comment><USER5> Brazil is a big country, not everyone lives in São Paulo. Why would they close Palo Alto in any case? they want to _add_ to the talent pool, not exchange it. Also, not everywhere you see offices they have engineering teams. The same narrow-minded policies of having teams co-located prevents them from hiring engineers there even if they have offices there.

As a data point, I turned down an offer for FB Palo Alto, one of the main reasons being having to relocate from Toronto. They have offices in Toronto, but no engineering.

Bottom line, they _might_ have some presence in some major cities, but if they're serious about remote work the talent pool definitely grows significantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > So, you want to work remotely for Facebook? Great! All you have to do is > figure out your own office space (much like how an Uber driver is > responsible for the upkeep of their vehicle)

This 100%. But also - my own economic ideology position is that employees should be as self-empowered as possible. If your employer owns all your tools, your workspace, your IP, etc. then they completely control your access to the labour market. The means of production should be as widely distributed as possible to prevent huge power imbalance in favour of employers. Remote Work will mean that people can move companies easily (which means putting up with less shit since you can just move), be setup for freelance work already if they need extra income or want a break from working for somebody else, can learn more about their toolset due to being responsible for setting up an environment to work from home, etc. While there are some downsides, I think this is an overall positive.

</comment><comment><USER7> The real reason may just be the failure of a legitimate second hub after the Bay Area: Facebook needs to hire 10k more people this year and maybe tens of thousands more over the next decade. There is no single place they can do that, and by the time they tally up all the possible other offices it might just make more sense to shrug your shoulders and make it officially and literally "anywhere." In this version, it's likely the emerging technology hubs which lose to cities with simply great quality of life or low costs, and the Bay Area continues relatively unaffected.

</comment><comment><USER8> Working remote just makes so much more sense. My old routine was - get up, have some coffee, start dreading the one hour commute, then do the one hour commute, then get to work and spend an hour decompressing from the one hour commute... now it's get up, pour a cup of coffee, start enjoying working on stuff in my bathrobe. And the coffee is way better than what the office was paying for :-)

<comment><USER9> I'm sure we'll all come to love the new routine — get up, have some coffee, work until you go to sleep.

Even if you personally are capable of enforcing work/life separation there's zero chance an entire company will when so many people already fear the Performance Review looming over their head.

<comment><USER10> That's just not gonna happen. I currently work remotely as a software engineer at a BigCo (not a tech company) and the company policy has consistently been to great weekend work & long hours as a team & company failure.

I just don't see an every-waking-hour workday dystopia ever happening if the industry goes more remote.

<comment><USER11> And even if someone consistently cannot separate work from home life - 'traditional' employment will not vanish. Many companies will have zero WFH (or very little), while others will have a gradient between full-office worker and full-WFH.

I'm a "WFH Apologist", really, but I'll readily admit it's not for everyone. Many people genuinely like in-person socialisation at the office, others can't separate 'work' from 'home life', and we could go on forever on potential issues. Which is why no one will ever see me advocate for all tech companies to go as remote as possible normally - that would exclude a pretty wide pool of potential candidates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> All these analyses are forgetting one big reason: culture (and yes, cost too of course). The first office I built (out of 6 or so) was open plan, specifically because I was starting up a tech company in a conservative culture where the 'boss' was behind a close door (often a solid, non-glass door). Open plan meant not just more people per sq.mt. and cheaper construction (which it does, by an order of magnitude); it also meant that the boss was available for any question no matter how trivial by just calling out his name.

That was a huge step back then. I know it's almost expected now (which is probably why we're ready to move to remote/open cultures) but you gotta remember why open plans were revolutionary when they appeared and what cubicle farms meant for the company values, not just its lease payments.

</comment><comment><USER13> Cynical but in a dumb way. A moment of thought will tell you that lost productivity by being all remote outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs are saving. If they could just shovel that money they're saving to the employees to get that productivity back, they would.

A smarter cynical take would be that it's more likely that 1) they know their employees don't want to risk COVID-19, 2) they don't want to risk their employees getting COVID-19, but not for the reason he states but instead because that people worried about getting sick at the office are less productive, and 3) they want their precious little cash cow employees back producing milk at full speed as soon as they can.

<comment><USER14> > A moment of thought will tell you that lost productivity by being all remote > outweighs the benefits money that the FAANGs are saving.

Really? Three years working remote and I'm still more productive.

<comment><USER15> It's also a matter of culture. For remote employees to be fully productive, the company's culture needs to be heavily geared towards remote. You can't have 50% of the employees in the office having impromptu hallway conversations and whiteboard discussions while the rest of the team that is remote is half- isolated, separated from the in-office idea generation, and only gets to hear about what was decided by email. You'll effectively end up creating two classes of employees: the in-office superstars and leaders who are highly paid, and the cheaper remote workers who have a glass ceiling on their career progression and are mostly relegated to the execution of the in-office team's vision.

<comment><USER16> > the in-office superstars and leaders who are highly paid, and the cheaper > remote workers who have a glass ceiling on their career progression and are > mostly relegated to the execution of the in-office team's vision.

I went remote a few years ago, and last year, without even asking permission, I dropped the lease on my overpriced DC tiny condo and moved a few hours away where rent is half the price, and eventually I'll buy a real home for half the cost of DC.

While I definitely had more opportunities to network and hobnob with management while in the office, the reality is it didn't matter in the long run. My salary hasn't gone down since moving, and I save money on tolls, lunches, gas, and now especially rent which is pretty significant.

As a developer, I've never once been offered any sort of 'path' to anything other than continued code grinding and JIRA tasks. At best, I'm often give pseudo-promotions to 'team-lead' which includes more work on my end for no extra compensation, respect, or authority.

There are so many people who CANNOT code, I've never seen any company I worked for helping their developers move towards the business or management teams. In fact, it's almost as if they actively oppose it and gatekeep any knowledge that's related to sales, customers, revenue, etc. After all, what would they be needed for, if we could do their jobs, too? And if we knew what value we provided, we might get a bit more uppity when it came time for raises and bonuses.

Furthermore, most jobs of mine last less than 4 years or so, and if you don't move on you're not getting raises, nor are you accumulating more required buzzwords for the resume.

I kind of gave up on moving up the corporate ranks into a management or more respected, higher paid position years ago, and now I play for myself. That means I continue to accumulate money in investments, and hopefully, by about 45, I won't depend on any company's promises or continued raises, and instead can opt out of the corporate system, go live on a beach, and start my own small business. The odds that the stock market will continue paying 8% are far more likely than any company I end up working for will provide opportunities for more pay, authority, and respect, especially for engineers, regardless of how good of friends I am with management or happy hours I attend with them.

<comment><USER17> "While I definitely had more opportunities to network and hobnob with management while in the office, the reality is it didn't matter in the long run. My salary hasn't gone down since moving, and I save money on tolls, lunches, gas, and now especially rent which is pretty significant."

I think being in the office can be very beneficial if you have the ability to talk to management and be viewed as some with potential for promotions. I have tried this but somehow I don't have the ability. My path was always to deliver stuff without needing much guidance. So now I am remote. I will probably not move up much but I have carved out nice niche for myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> At least in Amazon's case they used their massive hiring power to force everyone into a small region of the city owned by Paul Allen, developed by Vulcan Inc. Then Amazon payed four times the market rate for the properties from Allen.

</comment><comment><USER19> > each employee in the San Francisco Bay Area costs an extra $20,000 to > $35,000 per year

This is where they lost me. I can make $140k working remotely for a job that is a minimum $200k in San Francisco. And that is just salary. It doesn't count rent, lunches, and other office costs.

</comment><comment><USER20> Its the new companies that build on a "remote first" / "work from anywhere" foundation that have a tremendous advantage here.

With a few more "cultural shifts", there will be little overlap left between 20th and 21st century work structure(s).

</comment><comment><USER21> "ok, no more dorms, everyone just go study at those cool, full of freedom off campus apartments!"

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm saying this for years now.

Companies burning billions for real estate alone, while all their teams are working remote in respect to each other anyway.

My hopes are, this will relieve cities from the huge burden these companies were...

<comment><USER23> How are cities hurting? The cities are the ones refusing to build. The landlords are profiting from this and so is the city. (Higher land value => higher tax revenue)

Do you really think this will "relieve" anything except push the problem onto other cities that also refuse to build? (And will inevitably push out people who already had to leave the big city due to the cost)

<comment><USER22> \- companies that settle in a city require office buildings

\- people working in these companies require living space

If fewer companies where in the cities, the space for offices and the space their employees need to live would be free.

The prices would go down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> TLDR cost savings for the company</comment>


Idiotic Realtek audio drivers on Windows 10 - <AUTHOR> http://www.noach.one/technotip/idiotic-realtek-audio-drivers/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I mind this feature... I hate when I plug in headphones, that I already have on my ears (I know), and my ears get blasted... it's not fun... if the audio resets to at least 39, that's not a bad thing imho.</comment>


How the Internet will disrupt higher education's most valuable asset: Prestige - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-the-web-will-disrupt-higher-educations-most-valuable-asset-prestige/2016/02/05/6bddc1ee-c91e-11e5-a7b2-5a2f824b02c9_story.html <comment><USER2> If I had attended Caltech remotely, I wouldn't have lasted a semester. I had a lot of generous help from others, mostly fellow students, and sometimes a professor.

Besides, being around a pack of intelligent, highly motivated people (what their admissions select for) 24/7 was incredibly fun. I mean, you're around people who build CPUs out of 7400 ttl chips, people who build stereo equipment from scratch just because it's fun, people who build a working railroad running through the dorms, and on and on. If you want to see what it was like, see the movie "Real Genius", which was based on events at Caltech. The movie exaggerates, but not as much as you might think :-)

Edit: I also have to admit that the embarrassment of failing was a motivator that wouldn't exist if I attended remotely, along with the shared camaraderie of working on and succeeding at something hard.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious what would happen , if we gather a few classes of intelligent highly motivated students , arrange them a cheap nice place to live , give them them great educational content(not the stuff you get out of today's mooc's , the good stuff that the UK's open university - an expert in remote learning - designed over decades) , give them some support and some tools(labs , parts, etc) , and connect them through the web to their respective communities.

Surely that could be much cheaper. But would be just as good ? maybe.

And as for prestige ? if you build the admission process on extremely high standards , and offer something unique that the big universities won't offer , maybe you'll manage to get extremely talented students. And that's the key for building prestige.

Makes sense ?

EDIT: one more question - once you're an esteemed graduate of this institution ,sort of a "navy seal", in this day and age where talent is the limited resource in making money(and surviving in business), how hard would it be to arrange the networking ?

Ans isn't all this kinda like what ycombinator did?

<comment><USER2> I think that still underestimates the effect the professor has on the students. There's nothing like a professor who is excited about the topic of his lectures. Take a look at some of Feynman's youtube lectures, and imagine hearing that stuff in person!

It's like the difference between listening to a CD and going to a concert.

<comment><USER3> Great teachers(not feynman's level, but still great) for standard subjects(math, physics, etc) shouldn't be that expensive. There are still a lot of savings to be had.

<comment><USER4> Especially if you select your teachers for actual teaching ability, as opposed to citation count on their papers. Teaching ability is undervalued by the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've become more and more convinced over the years that "higher education" is much more about signalling and not-so-much about learning, although of course part of the signal is showing your ability to learn on demand and just "show- up" and do what you are told.

Of course, networking has always been a big part of _the benefit_ being accepted to an elite university, so while I accept the learning part of it will be easily disrupted, I am not really convinced (yet) that the signalling and the networking can be replaced so easily.

[edits]

<comment><USER6> Networking is not a big part of getting accepted to an elite university. Harvard, Yale, etc, are chock-full of first generation or second generation immigrants who have little in the way of networks with the sorts of old-money institutional backers of those universities.

<comment><USER7> I think you're reversing the point. Networking isn't a requirement to get into an elite university. Rather, the ability to network with other people going to an elite university is one of the most significant benefits of being accepted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Title is misleading.

 _As the Internet chips away at the practical reasons for limiting the student population, the real reason Yale limits the size of its classes will become more obvious._

Decreased barriers to entry of getting a degree will draw attention to the fact that it is (and arguably always has been) 20% about what you learn, 80% about who you meet.

MOOCs are not going to disrupt prestige, they're going to make it even more important as a signal in an increasingly noisy market.

<comment><USER9> Yep...MOOC will disrupt community colleges and your run of the mill state school.

<comment><USER3> Just like in the UK , the open university is equivalent or better(because it shows self-motivation) than most schools , excepts the top , like Cambridge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The real reason class sizes are limited isn't to maintain an "air of exclusivity", it's because the social networks that allow kickbacks and mutual aid only work if they're limited to a certain size. "Prestige" isn't a naked payoff, it's a proxy for access to that social network.

<comment><USER11> I don't think that's true. The MBA class at Colombia is 700 people. Every year.

That's not _a_ social network. It's _a number of_ social networks. It's inevitable that you'll only connect with a smaller number of classmates, and AFAIK classes are even organized with that in mind (the whole generation is split into smaller groups that then have classes together).

<comment><USER12> They're pretty closely intertwined, though, in the sense that you can probably find people in your network who share a person or network in common with someone you're trying to reach. At least that was how it was at my small, elite liberal arts college of 400 people/year. I didn't know everyone in my class, but if someone went there at the same time as me, it's almost guaranteed that there is at least one person there we knew in common.

The whole point of networking is so you don't have to cold-approach someone and there'll be someone or something you have in common. The whole point of social networking tools (LinkedIn, Facebook) is so you know who that person is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This author seems to think the value of prestige arises from nothing; as if the fact that someone can get through one class on open courseware means they are equally qualified as any other graduate. One quote in particular stuck with me "few students are accepted to Yale but almost all graduate". What exactly did he expect? Why would admissions accept people they think are unlikely to be successful? The whole article is written as if candidates are chosen by a simple dice roll, uniformly taken across the population (mirroring those who now have access via the internet).

The value, from an employment standpoint at the very least, is not what you learned in school, but the reasons you were selected to participate in the community doing the learning. The elite institutions spend considerable time and expense collecting a curated group of top performers to a single location. From a creative and developmental perspective this is huge for the students. From a signalling perspective this huge for employers.

My prediction, perhaps as laughably misguided as I think this article is, is that the paridime shift will come from employers. As taboos against training wear away, and groups begin to see how much cheaper it can be to hire and train high school graduates the demand for college graduates will abate. This probably won't effect the Columbias, or the Yales of the world, but will likely eliminate most of the hugely expensive less prestigious institutions.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't think the internet has quite figured out _prestige_. Twitter, BuzzFeed, Quora, Reddit, and even HN have certainly figured out popularity, network effects, and buzz, but I don't think social networks can develop prestige, because there's so much elasticity about your social network presence and where you spend your time.

Prestige is such an interesting phenomena, in that it's a weird mix of purchasable brandname and non-purchasable exclusivity. I'm not even sure what the most prestigious website on the internet would be: wikipedia?

<comment><USER3> Why not ? at least before eternal september , wasn't the HN karma system pretty good ?

<comment><USER14> IMO voting based networks have some pretty big flaws, beyond obvious ones of gaming and a bias towards recency. Prestige partly works because it's technically hard to game or fake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Everyone has always known that paying for an Ivy diploma means purchasing the prestige and connections required to enter America's elite. The conceit that it was a superior education has always been, to some extent, a fig leaf.

MOOCs are tearing frantically at the fig leaves, but the underlying business model is entirely unharmed. The best students will still crawl over bodies to gain admittance. Tuitions will remain high. The alumni will still make extraordinary endowments.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not entirely true. Granted, you might be able to gain a lot of knowledge via MOOCs, however, I feel that the experience of human interaction with other students and the professor cannot be replicated via the internet. Additionally, I think the issue of prestige is a self fulfilling prophecy in that good schools get bright students and the interaction between them increases the overall intellect of the student community in that school.

<comment><USER9> I share the same feeling about MOOC in general (whether prestige, or not).

It's like saying online porn will replace sex - since at the end, you orgasm.

<comment><USER17> Someone should research the statistics, what percentage of orgasms are remotely induced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As long as the good ol boy's network exist - people will always want to go to Ivy League and other prestigious universities. It will continue till the top CEOss graduate from "Southern New Hampshire University"...and I doubt shareholders and board of directors want to nominate a CEO from "Southern New Hampshire University" so you probably want to be a founder.

<comment><USER18> Someone[1] commented on another, similar thread a while back that one important function of top private universities is to _launder_ the educations of children of the rich—that is, to ensure that, provided they can put in enough effort to not fail out entirely, they'll have credentials that look very similar to those of only the smartest and most-driven students from the other 99% of society. I'd never looked at it that way, but it makes a lot of sense. Fits right in with your "who wants a CEO from Southern New Hampshire U?" notion.

In exchange, I suppose, the poorer students get to network with the people who may later fund their business.

[1] Don't remember who, so I can't provide credit

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm seeing a large number of comments talking about the in person effects of traditional education. Not just as it relates to education, but also ongoing employment. The two issues seem to boil down to:

1\. Social status signaling. Including networking among alumni.

2\. An environment with interpersonal interactions among the top performers will push you further than working solo.

Rather than simply saying "MOOCs don't do 1&2", we should phrase it as "what will it look like when they do?". Clearly the internet can handle social status signaling. The internet can also organize groups around specific interests. There are unique social groups that exist now precisely because of the internet.

For now MOOCs are a web version of correspondence courses. Is that all they will ever be? I doubt it. If I had to bet on education 100 years from now, I'd expect it to look more like MOOCs than the traditional collegiate experience. Certainly there are gaps in what exists today, but I'd expect those gaps to close faster than traditional colleges will adjust.

</comment><comment><USER2> Online education is not new. Before the internet, you could get a college degree by taking correspondence courses. It's how my grandfather got a degree (he was too poor for college). He liked it so much he became a salesman for the online courses, and met my grandmother through selling her mechanical engineering courses. (In 1920. Yes, there were women engineers then.)

</comment><comment><USER20> To successfully compete with the Ivy league, onlines will have to provide a way for their students to signal two things:

1) I'm the kind of person who _can_ pay larger amounts of money than most for an education.

2) I know and am known by lots of people who fit into the group described by #1.

Until that happens I don't think any ivy covered bricks are coming tumbling down any time soon.

<comment><USER4> Compare [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11069197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11069197) : the universities also want smart people, even when they are poor. (They are offering financial help for that, especially at the Ivy league.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They're there to stop the other people." - Randy Pausch

</comment><comment><USER22> Thought I was reading The Onion for a moment. Nobody cites Frank Bruni as a source unironically, do they?

>"...it will be harder and harder for Yale to explain what it offers for all that money except a piece of paper that says you went to Yale."

Yale has been clear about that since roughly 1693.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it's pretty funny that MOOC's bought into the premise that the purpose of higher education was education. Seriously: what fraction of what you do on the job isn't something you couldn't have learned at a three-month company training course? Outside of highly specialized fields, it's probably not much.

I think the universities understand a lot better than the MOOCs that the point was never that Stanford had education you can't get elsewhere, but that it lets you tell people you went to Stanford and other people didn't.

<comment><USER23> What exactly are you signaling to employers with your Stanford admission though? It's not really clear to me.

Intelligence? That's pretty easy to measure on its own. Hard work? Hoop jumping?

I'm not really sure. And I say this as someone who hires programmers and sees a CS Degree from Stanford as a pretty strong positive.

<comment><USER6> I think it says something about both conscientiousness and intelligence to meet the SAT/GPA requirements for getting into Stanford. And when you look at someone's grades at a good college or graduate school, I think it says something that they managed to do well while competing with a bunch of other smart people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd consider the #1 to #5 (out of 10,000 students) in Ng's MachineLearning Coursera more compelling than 'A' from his on-campus class.

So by making it a national competition, MOOCs have an advantage for those companies seeking high quality candidates.

Also, they deliver a more standardized training experience: Even if you took some interesting but non-conventional AI class at Harvey Mudd, it might be better for companies hiring junior devs to just know you're competent at the basics from your online work.

</comment><comment><USER25> I dream of the day when prestigious PGP private keys are sold because of the prestige associated with them.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that bitcoin?

<comment><USER25> In a way, but I meant a day where one buys a PGP private key for its good name/trust/prestige. Like buying a newspaper company today so you can control the output message.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> YC is the only credible threat to elite higher education that I've seen come out of Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER4> Getting Facebook or Google on your resume probably also helps with getting another programming job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I checked a number of times. It seems that the article is from this week, but it sure reads like any number of articles from five or six years ago.

Just as a for instance, putting everyone in a MOOC proves to be more of a problem than it may at first seemed to some people.

</comment><comment><USER28> I may be in a unique position in commenting on this phenomena. I graduated from a well regarded university as a undergraduate (too man) years ago and have been working in industry for approximately 12 years or so. As my career evolved, I realized I wanted to specialize and I've always appreciated the formality and rigors of school.

But all those things that happen over 12 years of working made returning for a masters infeasible e.g. wife, kids, an appreciation for meals that do not involve ramen noodles and hotdogs... About a year ago I had the opportunity to apply to Georgia Tech's Online Master's of Computer Science program (OMSCS).[1][2] I'm currently 1/2 through the program.

I've taken online courses before and I consistently (2 or 3 times a year) attended local community college classes on various topics or refreshers. But I feel the OMSCS program is doing it differently and, largely, is "getting it right". I'll try to cover the most common critiques of MOOC's and how I think OMSCS can, hopefully, serve as a model for other universities to expand into remote learning.

Attending a University is as much about the culture/people/experience as the raw knowledge

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

I completely agree. However, GATech's program has made collaboration between students a priority. We're given a lot of tools including weekly group video conferencing with TA's, very active student forums, actively engaged/participant professors and TA's, and local study groups for students in the same general area. In some ways, I feel _even more_ connected to professors than I did when on campus. Generally the professor was available in class, office hours, and through email. Email response was often spotty or too a few days. I get responses from a professor, TA, or student within a day if not within hours on the forums. Student provided answers often receive a "+1" by TA's or professors or a correction/clarification if that is needed.

However, it's true that the 'flow' of conversation is not as dynamic and as a consequence can be less engaging as in classroom settings given the delay of forum communication. Also, I'm sure the on campus students have access to many of these tools as well. For me personally, I was less likely to leverage the other tools if I'd already sat in class that day.

Recruiters and employers look for the 'signal' that comes with a prestigious university program

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

I feel this is over played. MIT, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, etc. are obviously good schools. But anyone whose been interviewing and hiring for any amount of time knows they're not guarantees and much more goes into a good employee than simply making it through a rigorous academic program. But you it does carry _some_ weight. Just not as much as many imply.

One of the reasons I selected this program is the degree rewarded is indistinguishable from their on campus degree. The "signal" this provides for students and employers is the university is willing to put their full faith and credit behind the education I'm purchasing. If MOOC's are to succeed this is the only model that will work. Why should I pay the university if they insist on signaling that it is a lesser education through degree differentiation. If they are incapable of delivering the same rigor and quality, I'd rather just read a book or take a free course.

MOOC's aren't a threat to prestigious education, just community colleges and small schools

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

I'm not sure I agree. Community colleges are already very affordable. Georgia Tech is in the top 5 computer science programs in the country. That's a high degree of prestige. If they can deliver on their promise, maintain the quality of students & education their delivering, if they issue degrees indistinguishable from the on campus degrees, and if they can do so at higher volumes and good profit margins other high end universities _should_ feel very threatened. Particularly since since the margins are quite large. All the tuition goes towards the professors, TA's, and a smidgin of an amount toward infrastructure. And they can handle much larger student bodies.

That means more highly qualified STEM workers carrying your degree. Which incurs more prestige on your program and attracts more students...which you can actually accept if qualified.

1\. [http://www.omscs.gatech.edu](http://www.omscs.gatech.edu)

2\. Full disclaimer: I work for AT&T, a partner in the creation of the OMSCS program with Georgia Tech & Udacity, though I had no involvement in that process other than benefitting as a student.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think that the biggest effect of prestige in the college market is that it is a barrier to entry for new colleges and universities. Forget MOOCs for a second. Just think about new, regular colleges. If half the faculty of Harvard quit tomorrow and started a new university (say, "New Cambridge University"), accepting half the number of new students that Harvard did, even though the education would be obviously on par with a Harvard education, the new university still would not have the prestige of Harvard.

This effect is what is allowing the rent seeking behavior of administrators and contractors which is driving the increase in college costs [1]. The wages for professors, who provide the primary paid labor for the educational process, has not increased, and the move to reduce the cost of professors by switching to adjuncts has been extensively noted e.g. [2].

If professors felt free to simply start up a new college whenever they felt that the cost of administration was getting out of hand, they would be able to bid up the cost of their labor in step with the increase in tuition. But because the prestige effect is so strong, they have less power in the relationship than the administrators. Note that professors with star power reputations do not have this dynamic, as they have prestige of their own.

I think that MOOCs may be the wrong direction to look for a solution. Prestige is strongly correlated with the age of an institution. The Ivy League was originally called such because the buildings were old enough to have ivy covering their walls, unlike the newer colleges of the time. It is also correlated with the accomplishments associated with an institution. A MOOC is just asking for trouble in the prestige department! Just look at how people with a Georgia Tech online masters have to explain it as being equal in worth to an in-person experience. You don't need to explain to your mom why Yale is close to Harvard in prestige. Maybe someday that will change, but it's not an answer to the problem today.

Instead, a more low-tech but more likely to work answer is to restore control of the prestige to the faculty and take that power away from the administrators. This may take the form of internal changes to the existing universities, or maybe things will get bad enough that there will be a mass exodus of professors starting their own colleges.

[1][http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...](http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all)

[2][http://www.thenation.com/article/why-is-college-so- expensive...](http://www.thenation.com/article/why-is-college-so-expensive-if- professors-are-paid-so-little/)</comment>


Using Tailscale for Home Server - <AUTHOR> https://mrkaran.dev/posts/home-server-updates/ <comment><USER2> >Replaced Wireguard with Tailscale

 _facepalm_

So you replaced FOSS Wireguard with a rebranded yet paid Wireguard service? Also how is NodePort is considered "internal" service? The whole point of NodePort is to be accessed from outside the cluster which can be easily done with the real Wireguard.</comment>


Google CDN Beta is already one of the fastest CDNs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.speedchecker.xyz/2016/04/18/google-cdn-beta-is-here-and-it-brings-more-than-meets-the-eye/ <comment><USER2> > Cloud CDN is Google's own CDN solution for sites running in VMs inside > Compute Engine. It is designed and implemented a bit differently from other > CDNs, since it is meant to cache not only static content, but practically a > whole site in more than 50 edge caches globally.

I'm not seeing what's so special here. Other CDNs can do whole-site acceleration and caching (Akamai Sureroute, EdgeCast ADN).

> It is a whole new take in the concept of CDNs, going way further than simply > caching files, since it is directly integrated into their Load Balancing > system and it literally means that a copy of your site will be running and > serving from the closest location to your customers, with a single public IP > address thanks to Anycast.

This makes it sound like Google is magically making your GCE instances run in each of their POPs. What if those instances need to share state? What happens when a page does 10 SQL queries to a server halfway around the world?

<comment><USER3> That's definitely a misunderstanding on the author's part. I think our own landing page ([https://cloud.google.com/cdn/](https://cloud.google.com/cdn/)) actually makes this clear: there are caches at the edge, but we (currently) deeply understand your origin (our compute engine VMs) and don't require any funny modification to your setup (just click a button) or look any different than your existing anycast IP for L7 Load Balancing.

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine, not this (so I only sort of know what I'm talking about).

<comment><USER4> "We deeply understand" \- the worst thing I want to hear from a CDN. I want full control like Fastly allows me to use my own VCLs. "Deep understanding" is not something that I find as a plus as I read it as "we assume a lot of things (wrongly)". "Full control", "cache tags", "wildcard/tag purging", "sub-minute purges", etc. - these are the things I want from a CDN. I don't want another CloudFront!

<comment><USER5> The "deep understanding" is from a networking POV...

They're not trying to do those niche features (yet?). They're just trying to improve site perf for anyone using HTTP LB's on GCP already. You check a single box and your content is magically served from (or terminated on) a crazy number of POPs with zero configuration.

<comment><USER4> What "deep understanding" when it works with VMs within GCE only?! This is a marketing description, not a technical one. The features I mentioned are not "niche", they are basic among CDNs and both Google and AWS seem to offer the worse and totally impractical CDNs. Honestly, if Google Cloud offers a CDN comparable with Fastly, I may consider a move, but for a CloudFront copycat (well, a copycat of Gen. 1) - thanks, but no thanks! In general, this once again proves that Google Cloud is not a viable alternative, it's only been playing a catch-up game, it doesn't deliver pleasant surprises, and that AWS is the way to go. Okay, true, HTTP/2 is the only missing feature, but I'm sure Amazon is gonna deliver this anytime.

<comment><USER6> Google Cloud is by far the best Cloud. Beats Aws and other cloud providers by miles margin. Also keeping in mind that a service that just entered beta is the fastest by itself is impressive. I would say, let's wait a while before commenting on features.

<comment><USER7> Edit: retracted, after a closer look at your previous comments.

<comment><USER3> Aww, he's just excited! He really does work for Monsanto, not Google and if you go back far enough you'll see he's used AWS, GCP, and Open Stack (and seems to enjoy meditation). So he's not some sort of shill, just a happy customer!

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure if it's related to his work at Monsanto and the exposure to GMOs and herbicides, but based on his info, he is an obvious case of illeism [0]. I'm joking, of course. :)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "it's already one of the fastest" ... wouldn't we expect a _new_ service, with lots of empty cache tables and available free ram, to be faster than the established players?

<comment><USER9> Empty cache tables means lower hits so slower.

<comment> rkuykendall-com I think the parent meant the cache tables of each node are empty (not many users yet), so the tested apps will be able to have relatively large cache tables on those nodes, since they aren't getting LRU'd out by other users.

So the cache table for a tested app is fuller because the cache table overall is emptier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Google CDN looks very similar to what Cloudflare Free Plan offers. A no- Frills, fully automated setup with little or no control on how your content is being delivered. Main difference with Cloudflare being that Google forces you to use GCP as Origin and you have to pay for the CDN service (Bandwidth, purge, requests...) which Cloudflare offers for free and you can use any Origin server.

Not sure why someone would use Google CDN when you can get the same for free with Cloudflare. Moreover, Cloudflare provides Security up to L7 with WAF whereas Google Cloud has no Security features. Anybody know how DDoS (L3/4) mitigation works on Google CDN?

Now if you want control and the ability to set up your own policies (Cache Control Headers, redirect, complex cache key manipulation, etc...), Google Cloud is not going to be what you need, at least for the time being and you would be better of with EdgeCast or Akamai. Faslty is an interesting option too but their network is very small compare to EdgeCast or Akamai. Fastly is about 1Tbps of capacity whereas Akamai or EdgeCast are > 20Tbps.

PS: Akamai is not IP Anycast based

<comment><USER11> I don't know if Google does this, but because they control both endpoints (cache server and load balancer) of the longest section of the path they could accelerate it by replace HTTP(S) there with something like CloudFlare's Railgun. [1]

Since Railgun is only available at CloudFlare plans starting at $200/month, this could make the Google offering attractive for certain customers.

In any case, it is hard to beat free for most sites with moderate needs.

[1] [https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun/](https://www.cloudflare.com/railgun/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seems ironic that the linked site doesn't load (at least for me)

<comment><USER3> Nothing beats an uncached WordPress blog ;).

<comment><USER13> Even if cached, most self-hosted WP can't handle HN visitor volume :-)

<comment><USER14> It can if you dump it as static HTML and serve that instead ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can make a fast CDN too, if it doesn't have any users yet!

<comment><USER16> I was going to say that :) When you are starting and have very few users, you should be fast.

It is very hard to keep it very fast when you have millions of free users, like CloudFlare does. That is impressive.

<comment><USER17> I'd assume Google knows a thing or two about scaling content

<comment><USER18> I don't doubt that and I'm excited to see some benchmarks once the service is in full operation mode. But until then, this makes it sounds like they magically beat out everyone else when the fact of the matter is that there is no load to measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Question: How do cdns serve/shard data ? Meaning, in a pop, there are say 100 nodes, and all of them cache some data, say by hashing the path /ayb.jpg.

Does the loadbalancer (say, haproxy) know which node should-have the file cached ? Or there is random loadbalancing and each node get's the data from the other nodes (using the same hash)? Just like openstack-swift (there are proxy that serve http-requests, and data nodes that have files).

<comment><USER20> Probably each CDN does it differently... but the one I know about does the second.... so it goes LB, first webserver on random node, and that first webserver knows where to grab the content from the second webserver on the proper node that has the content.

<comment><USER21> Most CDN have a pile of patents that show how they do their cache hierarchy.

-Ex CDN worker

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Why don't you compare Google's CDN to CloudFlare?

<comment><USER3> I'm not the OP, but I'm not sure why they included MaxCDN and Fastly but not (at least) CloudFlare's free service.

Disclosure: I work on Compute Engine (though I had nothing to do with this service).

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here: You are right, CloudFlare would have been nice and in retrospect we should have added it. I think it would have fared quite nicely as during all the tests we do on regular basis its doing really well.

<comment><USER23> Irony = their site is on CF.

      $ whois speedchecker.xyz
      Domain Name: SPEEDCHECKER.XYZ
      Name Server: LEE.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
      Name Server: PAM.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM

<comment><USER24> I think the OP just added CloudFlare when the site was overloaded earlier...

<comment><AUTHOR> yes. That is true. We did not expected the post will get that popular. Unfortunately, it was all done too late. What helped us the most was that blog is hosted on DigitalOcean VPS. We scaled up to the most powerful instance and instantly the blog was back. Kudos to DigitalOcean, it saved our bacon big time today :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Of course, if it's in beta, and the infrastructure has been built out but not yet heavily loaded, the performance may be unusually good.

(We see this every time the cellular industry rolls out a new band nobody is using yet, and the review sites talk about how great the bandwidth is.)

</comment><comment><USER16> Would love to see CloudFlare added to the mix. In fact, I would love to see Incapsula, Sucuri and KeyCDN compared as well, to get all top players compared.

I guess I might be asking too much :)

<comment><AUTHOR> OP Here> yes, omission on our part. CloudFlare is very popular and even more so on HackerNews. We should have added it. There are simply too many CDNs to put into one post/chart and still make the article interesting. You can sign up to our blog to get more information which does not necessarily becomes trending on HN or elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment> Pirate-of-SV Would be cool if you could add an image of the table with average measured times by country for the selection of european countries. (Marked with double asterisk in the post)

I guess the difference between these countries could be noticeable.

Alternatively you could post it here. I'm mainly interested in the Swedish numbers.

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder if they're using Brotli. [http://9to5google.com/2016/01/20/chrome- brotli-compression-l...](http://9to5google.com/2016/01/20/chrome-brotli- compression-launch/)

</comment><comment><USER5> If anyone wants to poke this, I've set up 2 micro instances in each GCP zone and put the GCDN in front here:

[http://httpbin-gcdn.xyz/](http://httpbin-gcdn.xyz/)

It's quite smart and pushes traffic to the right zone:

[https://pulse.turbobytes.com/results/5716f2f3ecbe400cf7000ca...](https://pulse.turbobytes.com/results/5716f2f3ecbe400cf7000ca3/)

Very cool stuff.

</comment><comment><USER27> Something that is unclear to me here, can I origin pull from anywhere? or is this purely for compute engine now?

Regarding free SSL are we talking SNI here or is this free non SNI HTTPS hosting?

<comment><USER3> Right now it's just compute engine (Source: cloud.google.com/cdn). I'm not sure on the SNI part, but like you I assume that's the case.

Edit: Nope! A little birdie pointed out to me that since "each HTTP(S) LB gets its own Anycast VIP, so there's no need for SNI."

<comment><USER28> That's right, since it is based on the global load balancing tech, you get a single IP for all edge locations which means you can use your own custom SSL (without the need for SNI) at no extra cost (which would cost you $500/month on AWS CloudFront).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Mirror: [http://archive.is/HVpTz](http://archive.is/HVpTz)

</comment><comment><USER30> Don't use it if you have customers in China. They won't be able to access it.

<comment><USER31> are you sure? everyone has customers in China.

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure you understand his comment.

<comment><USER31> then explain it. what point is in a cdn that will do nothing for your chinese customers? or it will still work but be slower?

<comment><USER5> What s/he's saying is that because GCP runs on a Google network, it's blocked by the GFWoC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Anyone want to start a pool on how long until Google shuts it down when it doesn't end up as #1 in the market?

<comment><USER34> You can't have a convincing cloud story without CDN. I'm an Azure guy but Google's investment here is clear. I'll take that bet.

<comment><USER35> Sure it makes business sense for Google to do this, but you've gotta admit to having that same reservation for every new Google service.

Would you build a business model that relies on a brand new Google service?

Hell no - give it a few years, and wait to see if the "customer support" consists of hundreds of other suckers who've gone all-in complaining to each other on the public forums, with not even the original 20% time Gooogler bothering to read or respond to anything...

It's just happened too often. (And I know Nest and Revolv aren't "Google" as such, but they're definitely run by "Googlers" and are under the same adult supervision, so it's not even like you can say "sure, they _used_ to be like that...")

<comment><USER36> I felt like this about Google services for a long time now. However, we decided to go with GCE for some of our recent / less critical work and to be honest, I've been really happy.

We had decent support and even our requests through non official channels like slack communities or direct emails got responded / followed up. Services seem as stable as AWS. And most of the tooling is better.

I think they are doing a great work recently on Google Cloud. Granted, we built everything with "moving to AWS should be easy / possible in case Google fucks something up really bad" in mind, which proves your point. But locking in does not scare me more than it does about locking in to AWS at this stage.

<comment><USER3> Based on your slack channel comment, I assume you're using Kubernetes. That's a great choice for new development, and I'm glad you've had your questions answered! I can't tell though, did you also use one of our paid support tiers? ([https://cloud.google.com/support](https://cloud.google.com/support)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Good. Now when will Google shut down this service?

<comment><USER38> Never. As always. DVMB.

This is not green field, but as the neighbor's lawn next to mine, it may or may not be greener. Time and fertilizer will tell. Smell the dirt Spartans.</comment></comment>