The hidden costs of serverless - <AUTHOR> https://read.acloud.guru/the-hidden-costs-of-serverless-6ced7844780b <comment><USER3> I wish people are upfront about conflict of interest while writing articles like this. The author is the CEO of spotinst, which is listed in the last table as 2x-10x cheaper than any of the other FaaS options. The article is basically marketing copy devoid of technical details.

<comment><USER4> This isn't a conflict of interest. It's developer marketing. A Cloud Guru, the publisher, is a company that sells developer education / training - <USER2> they have disclaimers explaining that they make money by selling education before every blog post or comic they put out? Amiram is providing important contextual advice for developers, PMs and executives, and has the added benefit of _having a real product in market that will solve these problems for you_.

Most of HN is thinly veiled marketing supporting special interests. I think a huge part of the _value_ of HN is lowering the barrier to entry to build great companies by providing a platform to announce and promote your product / team / etc. as well as educate people with quality content. We celebrate "Launch HN" and funding events, and are going to criticize a founder for building something awesome and talking about it? That seems a bit silly to me.

<comment><USER5> > This isn't a conflict of interest. It's developer marketing.

> The article is basically marketing copy devoid of technical details.

So since you agree with OP that it's marketing, _perhaps_ it's not a stretch to suggest that it's a bit shady for the CEO of Super Cheap Cloud Product to author a marketing piece decrying the hidden costs of OMG So Expensive Cloud Products as though it's just helpful advice?

> I think a huge part of the value of HN is lowering the barrier to entry to > build great companies by providing a platform to announce and promote your > product / team / etc. as well as educate people with quality content. We > celebrate "Launch HN" and funding events, and are going to criticize a > founder for building something awesome and talking about it?

Apples and oranges. There's a big difference between "check out this thing I made" and "these products all have somewhat opaque problems _by the way I'm CEO of a competitor_".

<comment><USER4> Developer marketing != valueless. Every single $B dev co you know has invested millions of dollars in developer outreach and content. It seems the issue is that there's no "technical details" as if a post titled "the hidden costs of serverless" would be about anything but _costs_. Perhaps the original response expected "costs" in terms of technical debt - in which case, that actually is covered as well, making the criticism a little underwhelming.

If you don't agree with the article, that's one thing. Can you pick out anything in the post that's counterfactual? Look - I'm the CEO of a cloud product that, in some sense, could be considered competitive with Amiram. I've made _plenty_ of upvoted HN comments and Medium posts talking _directly_ about our company and what we do - hell, there's one posted here if you scroll down. I take a great deal of pride in it, and I'm very enthusiastic about the future of the space. It's for that reason I consider the criticism a little unfair.

If the criticism is simply, "be more direct with your marketing and assert yourself and your company" \--- that's totally fine. But dismissing an entire article because it's _actively providing advice and context_ because the CEO runs a company in the space (wouldn't that put him in the best position to understand the market?) is... well, like I said, kind of silly.

If the above is, in fact, the actual criticism - perhaps we should ask A Cloud Guru if they'd be more willing to allow promotional posts to feature partners and neat products. A big problem with content marketing (generally) is the people who control the flow of content often ask for pieces to appear as neutral as possible, where a huge chunk of motivated content producers are actually trying to push a product or service (platform, consultancy, themselves and their career, their open source, you name it).

<comment><USER6> Agreed. Ultimately we all want the best software to win. Which means we sometimes have to hear people out, regardless of whether there's self interest involved on the author's part.

<comment><USER7> I don't think we all want the best software to win. If you're the CEO of a software company then you want your software to win _even if you know it 's not the best_. You might choose to write articles about how the other software is actually worse because there are lots of hidden costs. If you did that then you'd need to make it very obvious that you have a partisan opinion though, otherwise it'd look quite dishonest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The hidden cost of all cloud based software. Even the cheapest cloud (seems to be Google at the moment) is 5x or more of the price of an equivalent dedicated server (2x for "compute", >20x for bandwidth, so 5x is somewhat average. And that's compared to "normal" dedi providers. Ok to use Leaseweb, Hetzner and OVH ? Make it 10x more expensive).

Since VPS's exist cloud doesn't even make sense for the smallest websites anymore. Ironically VPS's predate and are even the basis of cloud systems.

And there's the intangible technical debt that cloud imparts. Whichever cloud you pick, in the future you'll change. That's how the world works. Switching dedicated service providers is a complicated ops problem. Switching cloud providers is a full rewrite of everything AND a complicated ops problem. Just being on the cloud, by itself, forces you to put in serious technical debt.

I don't understand, even after using cloud at work, what those cloud systems provide that can't be done, better, cheaper, and with less relying on a single organisation, on dedicated service providers.

I mean Google's hypervisor is good (very good), but it still imparts significant costs compared to bare metal.

<comment><USER9> They provide many things:

\- managed systems like s3, dynamodb, etc, which are not trivial to run yourself

\- on-demand and flexible instance types which allow you to try something without committing

\- spot instances, autoscaling groups, access to job scheduling like kubernetes. At scale (thousands of nodes) technologies like this are extremely important

\- redundant and reliable service. It also gives you someone to complain too and blame (they provide slas)

\- powerful management tooling and APIs that are well documented and widely understood (you can hire an engineer that has used AWS)

\- security: audit trails, integrated single sign on, private networks, vpns, role based access keys

I could keep going. Also keep in mind that reserved pricing (or googles sustained use discount) lowers the cost.

<comment><USER8> > managed systems like s3, dynamodb, etc, which are not trivial to run > yourself

How many organisations need a database to scale like that ? Maybe 1000 worldwide, and at least 900 of them are forbidden by law to run them on clouds (e.g. banks).

Also, cloud is essentially outsourcing server management. If you're of a size that needs these sorts of databases, you need a big IT department, cloud or no cloud. At that point, cloud is just vastly more expensive without any monetary advantage.

And of course, if you use any of these, the lock in is ridiculous. Also known as "they have you by the b....", and if one thing is damned sure the result will not be saving money, complexity or effort. Or savings of any kind whatsoever.

> on-demand and flexible instance types which allow you to try something > without committing

And ever more management systems that let management "control spending", "control access", ... and so on, designed to prevent that. The problem with the old system was management and processes getting in the way of experimenting, and the only advantage cloud has is that it doesn't have decent support for such processes yet.

Every vendor is racing to build them in, and it's getting worse week by week. It won't be long before experimenting is impossible in cloud just like it is in owned datacenter and dedicated setups.

The problem with experiments is management in every company I've ever consulted for, and cloud doesn't change a thing, aside from, at the moment, management incompetence getting in the way of their usual sabotage. That will stop once current engineers that know cloud start getting a few promos and is already happening.

> spot instances, autoscaling groups, access to job scheduling like > kubernetes. At scale (thousands of nodes) technologies like this are > extremely important

There is no shortage of system supporting this sort of load on dedicated machines, servers, ...

> redundant and reliable service. It also gives you someone to complain too > and blame (they provide slas)

Have you read those slas ? They'll return 10% or so of what you normally pay (not in cash of course, in vouchers) if their service is out for 33% of the time or so. That's not an sla, that's just laughable. If they are out for 5% of the total time, I'd be so pissed I'd start a chargeback.

As for redundancy and reliability, there is no shortage of vendors with similar reliability track records, and it is well documented how to make server setups that provide reliability.

> powerful management tooling and APIs that are well documented and widely > understood (you can hire an engineer that has used AWS)

And dedicated servers are linux servers. You can hire engineers, I believe, that have used those.

> security: audit trails, integrated single sign on, private networks, vpns, > role based access keys

Yep, these controls are part of what's preventing that experimenting advantage that currently exists. In reality, all of this relies on well designed policies at the customer side, and I've yet to see that done properly for more than a single team in any company.

All of these are of course critically dependent on Google's network, tapped by the NSA as documented in the famous leaked "SSL inserted and removed here" slide, and for numerous privacy breaches, Amazon, famous for "somehow" finding out about how the businesses hosted on their cloud work and taking their customers away (apparently more than 100 court cases against Amazon currently going on), or Microsoft, famous for so many things, including pushing through centralization in Skype for the admitted reason of gaining the ability to spy on their customers. I'm sure their ethics in the cloud hosting department are much better.

And please don't even mention those "encrypted storage" assurances. They're not even worth being called bullshit. If I get to write the code that you use to encrypt/decrypt, I can obviously trivially break any key you use. If you don't believe me, I'll give you a webbrowser to download, and I assure you it encrypts all your passwords, then just log into your web banking a few times and see what happens (note: webbrowsers inserting "extra" transactions when doing webbanking are a common thing to find in security work).

So secure ... yeah right.

Sure, it can work. It won't, of course.

> I could keep going.

Yeah you could mention that cloud's real advantage is that engineers believe that if they get a web-based non-multiplayer version of minesweeper implemented on kubernetes, they'll get a $200k+ GOOG/FB job. Not true, of course, but nobody wants to tell em that. In fact, implementing a linked list in C on a DOS 1.0 C compiler will help them a LOT more.

<comment><USER10> Minor point but aws can be HIPPA complient, if it capable of that, bank software will be perfectly fine for complience. (although incredibly terrible for other reasons but I digress)

<comment><USER11> Indeed, Capital One is already moving to the cloud:

[https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/capital- one/](https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/capital-one/)

[https://www.computerworld.com/article/3145622/cloud- computin...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/3145622/cloud- computing/capital-one-rides-the-cloud-to-tech-company-transformation.html)

And they are even investing in cloud companies:

[https://www.geekwire.com/2017/trying-snowflake-computings- ne...](https://www.geekwire.com/2017/trying-snowflake-computings-new-product- wall-street-capitalone-invests-company/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My current work project is trying to switch to a primary serverless architecture. I'm trying to fight it but know I'm going to lose.

I don't have any problem with "serverless". Years ago I wrote a nginx handler that routed to .py files and ran them inside an lxc container, while at a hosting company. Fronted via haproxy, and documented with sphinx automatically.

My problem is the hidden costs. Sure lambda requests are low cost. But what about API gateway, dynamo/rds access. Then I'm writing a basic crud app. Low- performance low request rate, noncritical. There is this additional complexity, that just isn't necessary. Every day at my job I'm thinking to myself it doesn't need to be this difficult.

My usual route is django, django admin, and django rest. With an haproxy in front for load balancing. Dead simple and easy to work with. It's passe sure, but KISS. The alternative here is an api and a frontend. Several more projects to maintain. Tuning the projects to meet lambda size requirements/standards. The return on investment is minimal to me. If you can't automate managing a fleet of containers or vps instances then why're you here?

The vendor lock-in, is insane to me. You're pretty much at the beck and whim of the provider. They raise the prices, what're you going to do. You either go with the price increase or do a rewrite.

As I was sitting in these architecture meetings on moving too lambda. I was hearing several new packages/repos. New CI/CD, and configuration to maintain. During the meeting I scratched out a POC using EC2, Load Balancer, RDS and django to do what they were saying with half the code. But nope gotta be lambda.

<comment><USER13> > They raise the prices, what're you going to do.

In the 11 year history of AWS, I don't think they've ever increased prices for anything. I'm pretty comfortable with their ability to avoid it in the future.

<comment><USER14> An 11 year history is hardly worth betting what could be the future of your company on. Especially for something just slightly more convenient than what can be built in-house.

<comment><USER15> > An 11 year history is hardly worth betting what could be the future of your > company on. Especially for something just slightly more convenient than what > can be built in-house.

So you can build a globally distributed, redundant, eventually consistent object store with high availability easily and conveniently and without allocating developer time that could be better used building..oh I don't know, the actual business logic? Not to mention ongoing maintenance and its expense.

It's ridiculous to suggest that the entirety of the AWS offering is something that is just slightly more convenient than what could be built in house.

<comment><USER16> S3 is not globally distributed. Each region is fully independent of each other. If Virgina is nuked, you lose anything in us-east-1. I've confirmed this with AWS staff because of a prior HN discussion :)

The ease through which Amazon provides the ability to architect incredibly globally redundant applications is unmatched. But your business probably can't afford to implement at that scale, Amazon or otherwise (geographically load balanced DNS, multiple primary databases across regions and their associated followers, replicating S3 objects from all primary region buckets to secondary regions, instances for each application running multi-AZ in multiple regions, etc).

<comment><USER17> Of course, if a S3 region gets nuked, it can have repercussions in other zones too. Remember the S3 outage?

<comment><USER16> Coming from an tech|infra|dev/ops background, I remember all AWS outages painfully ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Cold starts. This isn't the time to dive in deep, but it's a main reason why > some companies decided against going Serverless.

Cold starts as an issue? I mean, all you have to do is create a CloudWatch event (or cron if you want an explicit server involved) to fire the Lambda function every few minutes and you're all good. Sure, if you get heavy traffic, I suppose you could have multiple containers running simultaneously? But that's also easy enough to handle w/ CW events.

<comment><USER19> Wow, sounds easy--almost as if it should be that way out of the box...

<comment><USER20> The economics don't work out if they keep them all hot all the time.

<comment><USER21> Woot can't they give a simple Boolean seeing for a slightly higher price: "always up"?

<comment><USER18> It's probably not as easy as that. Lambda functions run in a container. If you have a spike in traffic, you may have 10 different containers handling requests. So should they keep 1 container always up, or 3, or 10. I suppose you could have some ELB-type rules to "auto-scale" new containers...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Serverless sort of got taken over by people trying to push PaaS subscriptions. A real serverless architecture would be something like IPFS and CRDTs

<comment><USER23> When you think of it that way, in practice it really is the exact opposite of the "Serverless" buzzword - it's 100% definitely absolutely requiring a persistent centralized remote server.

Decentralized solutions 100% definitely absolutely do not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting, because as the Serverless space evolves there are two emerging sales and marketing tracks for the technology:

(A) This will reduce your costs (CIO Track)

(B) This will reduce your time to market (PM / Developer Track)

Amiram's article here clearly tries to deconstruct the argument in (A) and suggest, well, it's more expensive than you think (and Spotinst is the cheapest option - kudos to Amiram and team) which... is undeniably true, and API Gateway is a large part of that. It seems based on Re:invent 2017 in November that Amazon is moving to target the (B) track more aggressively, which is where we've been residing in a niche with StdLib since we launched [0].

Realistically I think both tracks are actually half-truths (as is all marketing), as Amiram even touches on re: lines of code written to maintain Serverless architecture. At the end of the day, Serverless technology is going to open up a world Simon Wardley [1] has painted a picture of: one of reliable, fault-tolerant, self-healing, predictably priced _service composition_ that can be performed by developers who are increasingly unaware of implementation details, and perhaps not even developers in the traditional sense.

It's been a neat exercise at StdLib trying to find the intersection between current development paradigms (old hat monoliths, etc.), the utility / lower cost / lower time to delivery of serverless tech, and the future of emergent, unexplored markets. As the marketing sizzle of "serverless" begins to fade (it hasn't peaked yet, but it will), and we see more challenges to the technology itself, it will be interesting to see what _business practices_ and _development paradigms_ pop up around serverless architectures, and how companies begin maximizing the utility of a new development canvas.

One day it won't be "serverless," it will simply be best practice for most companies to ship application logic directly to the runtime layer. What does that world look like, where will costs (/prices) settle, and how do all players in the market continue delivering the most value to developers and companies? It'll be neat to watch it all play out, to say the least.

[0] [https://stdlib.com/](https://stdlib.com/)

[1] [http://blog.gardeviance.org/2016/11/why-fuss-about- serverles...](http://blog.gardeviance.org/2016/11/why-fuss-about- serverless.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> > Like the jump from on-premises to the cloud, the move to Serverless is more > or less inevitable.

Speaking as a fan of AWS: neither of those is in any way inevitable.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is server less really as inevitable as the move to cloud? The extra moving parts don't seem worth it for garden variety crud app so far imo.

<comment><USER26> the extra moving parts aren't...but I think the point was to remove the existing moving parts (installing and maintaining a server instance). they just got it wrong.

it would save everyone a lot of time and energy to not have to deal with server instances, so its likely a better model will come along. persistent storage in the presence of scaling and concurrency is a bit of thorn though.

<comment><USER27> That's the thing though, how hard is it to manage a VM in 2018?

If you're using Terraform + modern config management tools I find it a breeze. I feel like this is a weak argument.

If developers are unable to understand how something like Salt, Chef or Ansible works then I'd be surprised.

<comment><USER26> its not that people cant understand [salt, chef, ansible, terraform], its just a non-trivial amount of human effort, error, and upkeep just to say 'run my program'. kind of a shame that every shop has to have one or a few devops people on hand to do that.

I guess it mostly stings when there is a critical openssl update, or something analogous. Despite the ideal of continuous integration and lightweight deployment - none of the shops I've worked at lately can make than happen in the 10 minutes its supposed to take.

<comment><USER27> With all due respect, I think it's laziness. Most of the good soft ens I know spend the one - two hours or so it takes to get familiar with these systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are more costs to Serverless than just CPU and RAM — and for many users, the additional cost categories of API Requests, Storage and Networking will be the major cost drivers.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think serverless basically just means sharing more with other customers. You don't juts share the same hardware running your own VM on it, you share the same VM executing a big program one part of which is your lambda-functions. This leads to better utilization of hardware resources.

It's not about a cloud vs. inhouse you might have the lambdas of your different departments running in the same VM.

"serverless" really means "shared program".

</comment><comment><USER29> Just don't use SQL databases. Lambda will knock over your DB

<comment><USER30> Could you expand on this? I'm trying to learn more about using Lambda as a serverless REST API recently and one of my projects has a SQL DB.

<comment><USER31> Traditionally, a web application creates a group of always-on reusable connections (a pool) to a database server since setting up the connection takes time and each connection uses up resources on the database server that could otherwise be used for computation. If there are more connections to your API that require the database than there are connections in the pool, those requests are queued and handled when the next connection is freed. These connections are then closed when the app shuts down.

The problem on Lambda is that you can't persist any application state beyond the function call itself, so you can't take advantage of connection pooling the way you normally would in a self-contained webapp. Without some kind of middleman, each database call will require you to open a new connection to the database and close it when the function ends. This becomes catastrophic for the database server as the number of requests scales up.

<comment><USER32> Yes you can. You are supposed to instantiate those connections outside the function call as per the docs.

Example: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/vpc-rds- deploym...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/vpc-rds-deployment- pkg.html)

<comment><USER29> Tried and failed

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> API gateway costs on AWS seems like a massive "gotcha", especially considering how access via HTTP is super important for those worried about vendor lock in.

This article was written by someone with a competing service, but I know there are a bunch of projects right now (including mine) that come out of the box with HTTPS, run generic/vendor-agnostic containers, and can even be self hosted.

Self hosted seems to offer the best of both worlds; FAAS with fine grained control over platform costs, at the cost of the devops work to setup and maintain.

</comment><comment><USER34> Just as with anything it's evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Serverless is GREAT at starting something, testing it and then evaluating if it's even worth spending time to work on actual server-based stuff. You can get stuff going immediately with little effort without the overhead of setting up a box, managing deps and all the nuances that come up standing up classic servers (even in the cloud). Is it a silver bullet? No, though I'd say it might be for fleshing out ideas.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm curious about the linear lines of code growth -- has anybody acually experienced that? What is causing it?

<comment><USER36> There's an interesting side effect I've seen that a serverless approach enables, which is that it is now much easier to logically separate your various routes and logic to "route handlers" or "services".

However, if you naturally extend your system with these logically separated handlers in a vacuum, which is easy to do, and you have not thought through your packaging and dependency management, you can quickly fall into a pattern of producing a lot of duplicate boilerplate and utility functionality that a monolith would have avoided. Basically, take all the pain points and downsides of SOA and make it really easy to make all the mistakes.

That said, when approached with foresight, it's a perfectly manageable problem and I wouldn't agree that it is linear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> "You will save time: No more [...] thinking about how your application will scale up or down"

What a dangerous thought.

</comment><comment><USER38> What is old is new again! Whoo-hoo.

Regardless it's still not server-less... The entire system is still running off a server...

<comment><USER39> Which you do not manage in any way shape or form, nor do you have the ability to.

<comment><USER38> I am not saying any thing is wrong with that. I am saying it still runs on a server...

So server-less is a misnomer.

<comment><USER40> Do you think that there are actual daemons in your computer? If you have to kill a process, do you only do so in self-defense?

<comment><USER38> Very funny. No, but what if I called a virtual machine CPU-less. Bad name? I would say that is. Also treating long running task as a little demon performing a task is more allegorical same with killing a process. I am not sure I would call it being server-less allegorical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> "Serverless" is a silly name because there are of course still servers. Peer- to-peer architectures could perhaps charitably be called "serverless", but I digress.

To me it sounds like this whole "serverless revolution" is just the product of Amazon's PR team who found a nice term to befuddle and bedazzle know-nothing CEOs.

<comment><USER13> Look, at some point, my "wireless" internet involves wires, but I don't really have to _worry_ about managing them, so it's wireless in the ways that matter to me.

<comment><USER41> That's a fair point, but wireless internet is a different mode of delivery to your house, whereas "serverless" is just adding a layer of abstraction, and I don't really think that these things are analogous.</comment></comment></comment>


The huge profits and profound suffering of the Manila Galleons - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/the-manila-galleons-that-oceaneered-for-plague-and-profit <comment><USER2> The value of human life is still measured in many places by how much profit can be extracted from them; thankfully more people realize how terrible it is to value money over the people necessary to create it. Even in the US chicken is often butchered by indentured illegals in deplorable conditions. While some things have changed for the better in the modern world some things remain the same.

<comment><USER3> Nitpicking, but: "Unauthorized" is better terminology than "illegal", given that deportation is an administrative process rather than a civil or criminal one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So exploitation begat exploitation?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you write math notes? - <AUTHOR> I'm asking those of you, who make notes on the math textbooks you read.
Are you noting down every definition, theorem etc. or do you have another style for comprehending math knowledge?
Do you combine your note technique with your reading method?
I'm searching for new ideas for learning math. <comment><USER2> When reading for any other reason than pure entertainment, I like to take notes by hand in a graph paper notebook.

I typically make an outline; when I'm reading a math book I tend to have a rule of "summarize this paragraph in a maximum number of bullets" (the number of bullets is a bit variable depending on the size of the paragraph). For me, I feel like the summarization is a good way to "digest" the knowledge...if I can summarize it concisely I tend to have an ok-ish understanding of it.

After that, I like to type up the notes with Vim in markdown and convert it with Pandoc. This is useful to me just as a way to a) get some repetition and b) notice mistakes.

In Pandoc, you can of course use LaTeX equations, which are relatively easy to type out once you get used to them. Once you're done with the notes it's pretty easy to get pandoc to render a pdf.

Here's an example of some notes I wrote a discrete math class last year: [https://gitlab.com/tombert/college- notes/blob/master/discret...](https://gitlab.com/tombert/college- notes/blob/master/discrete_mathematics.pdf)

I don't know if this is the best way to learn math but it is usually ok for me.

EDIT: When drawing charts/graphs, I tend to do them by hand and scan it in later (using an app on my phone called "CamScanner"), or use something like draw.io and render them as a png. I tried using tikZ but I felt like I was spending more time mucking with configs than actually working, and I figured that I'm not writing a textbook.</comment>


Ask HN: Corporation in a box website suggestions? - <AUTHOR>

Where does one go to get a corporation in a box, these days? <comment><USER2> If you mean in setting up a company, try legalzoom.com</comment>


Ask HN: Gracefully declining support for some major browsers? - <AUTHOR> In order to reduce the workload for a startup that I'm working on (mostly by myself), I'm considering declining to support several major browsers.
When loading the app, I'm thinking of having a screen that detects the browser type and either warns the user that the app is probably not going to work that well or simply does not allow the user to use the application with the unsupported browser.
Not sure if this is obvious, but the reason to block the user from using the unsupported browser (as opposed to just a warning) is because often the application will seem to work in the unsupported browser, but little things will be broken - such as a button inexplicably being missing from the page.
I'd like to support:
 * Chrome - (I develop in Chrome, so everything de facto works on Chrome)
 * Safari - (Doesn't give me many problems and probably runs better on iOS devices)
Decline support for
 * Firefox           - (often runs the app too slow)
 * Internet Explorer - (too many small annoying bugs)
 * Opera - (small user base)
Here is a demo of the app: Demo.EnterpriseJazz.com
- As you can see, the application is large and complex. Going through and fixing bugs for each major browser is something that would take a lot of my time that could be spent on other things that might help the startup along more.
I know this is not a clear-cut issue, but any thoughts? <comment><USER2> Your App loading speed is same in both Firefox and Chrome latest versions.

IMO, I would recommend you to support both Firefox and Chrome.

Let me give you an example, I had never heard of Polarr Editor. Then one fine day as I browsed the Chrome store I found it to be pretty good. It even has a web version for both Chrome and Firefox. But it lacks so much exposure.

Same goes for webflow.

Why lose consumers?

Conclusion, There are some Apps in the Chrome web store exclusive to Chrome that suffer from the inexposure to Firefox.

Most developers use both Chrome and FF alternatively as they wish. And FF's share of users is more tech oriented.

1% of web browser share equivalents around 1 million users or more.

Now, the math is self-explanatory.

Hope it helps.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, I agree. This app is actually pretty good. The iOS version even has brushing capabilities. I wonder if the only way to get exposure nowadays is via paid acquisition. There are literally thousands of excellent apps that you just never hear about.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would be happy to pay a little to get free users. Once I felt ready, I was planning on just calling mobile auto detailing businesses up and trying to get them to let me demo to application. I own a mobile auto detailing business myself, so I hope maybe I won't get blown off as much as normal because of the common ground.

The brushing capability took me 3 days to implement. I did it in sort of a "manic" phase of productivity. I like the way it looks, but I feel like I burnt too many cognitive resources on something that should have just been implemented in a "good enough" way. Not sure if that tidbit is interesting?...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Consider another approach and email users using unsupported browsers. It gives you an excuse to reach out where you can turn the conversation into what their needs are, pain points, etc.

However, if your app doesn't require signup to use, maybe an intercom like message.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really good idea since it does require sign up. Thank so much for this suggestion.

I was actually planning on calling them on the phone if they put their phone number in the sign up form. Its a boutique sort of app. Should end up having a low-ish number of users with high-ish revenue per user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Restricting the browsers you support will tighten your funnel.

Have you profiled your likely userbase? Many businesses run Windows and are, therefore, likely to be using Internet Explorer.

<comment><AUTHOR> What does tightening the funnel mean in this context?

The user base is people who own small mobile auto detailing businesses. So pretty specific. I imagine most of these companies will be way too small to have an IT department restricting their ability to install Chrome.

<comment><USER5> Tightening the funnel means that potential customers are less likely to go all the way through to signing up and becoming a regular customer.

[https://blog.crazyegg.com/2014/03/03/website-conversion- funn...](https://blog.crazyegg.com/2014/03/03/website-conversion-funnel/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's 1999 all over again, I guess.</comment>


Living on thin air: microbe mystery solved - <AUTHOR> https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/living-thin-air-microbe-mystery-solved <comment><AUTHOR> Paper can be found at [1]

[1] Atmospheric trace gases support primary production in Antarctic desert surface soil [ [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25014](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25014) ]

</comment><comment><USER2> To quote a movie "life finds a way". Provided an organism can scrape together enough energy and at least minimal nutrients it can survive. I've always been fascinated by the question of how such life actually got started there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting applications could be found, such as scrubbing noxious gases from atmosphere... If it is energy efficient enough in comparison to inorganic processes.

</comment><comment><USER4> God I love the tenacity of life.

<comment><USER3> Tenacity is a human value. (Maybe can be applied to higher animals.) What you probably meant is persistence.

Too much antromophizing can break a field... and then you get intelligent design in schools.

<comment><USER5> Another interesting human value is pedantry.

<comment><USER6> And parent comment's perseverance in propagating knowledge to educate bystanders even given the improbability of literally any return for himself.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Phages are making a comeback - <AUTHOR> https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/05/the-best-viral-news-youll-ever-read-antibiotic-resistance-phage-therapy-bacteriophage-virus/ <comment><USER3> Summary:

\- 68 year old male catches bacterial infection - Acinetobacter baumannii - <USER2> vacation in Egypt

\- Traditional antibiotics courses don't work

\- Wife suggested trying bacteriophages - aka "phages" \- which are baceteria- targeting viruses

\- Phages are not FDA approved, but can receive "compassionate-use authorization" — effectively an acknowledgment that nothing with an FDA license can save the patient's life

\- 23,000 people a year die from antibiotic resistant bacterial infections and phages are not necessarily on the radar due to their own bio-diversity (single phage for a single bacterium vs mostly catch-all antibiotics)

\- The male patient was treated with phages, which worked, and lived

</comment><comment><USER4> This treatment has always been popular / common in the (former) Soviet Union. Here is an article from 2014 on it: [https://gizmodo.com/soviet-doctors-cured- infections-with-vir...](https://gizmodo.com/soviet-doctors-cured-infections- with-viruses-and-soon-1587311881)

Also interesting is that medicine was never a particularly well paying job in the Soviet Union. At best it would be comparable to a civil engineer today; very much respected, but certainly not earning what a software engineer (or US doctor) would.

<comment><USER5> Why do you bring up the pay of Soviet doctors? Do you think the technology's introduction to common use was related?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kurzgesagt goes through bacterophages in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg)

I think this is the case mentioned by Kurzgesagt in the video, although he doesn't use names, so I can't be sure. Super cool, anyways!

</comment><comment><USER7> A lot of cystic fibrosis patients I know that have been colonized with bacteria, such as pseudomonas, resort to phage therapy. Typically they do it in Georgia (former Soviet Union state that was very active in Phage Therapy). Many CFers swear by phage therapy. It needs to be individualized, with adaptation to every individual.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting plot twist regarding the former Soviet Union:

"D'Herelle was a restless researcher who seems to have felt undervalued despite being awarded jobs in Paris and Vietnam and at Yale. That insecurity made him vulnerable to an offer he received in 1933 to relocate to Tbilisi in Georgia, home territory of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. With a protégé, Georgi Eliava, d'Herelle co-founded the Eliava Institute of Bacteriophages, Microbiology and Virology. Stalin showered the institute with attention and money because it offered something he badly wanted: a scientific achievement that he could portray as a pure product of communism. Antibiotics became the basis of infectious-disease medicine in the West, but behind the Iron Curtain, phages took their place."

"Eliava was murdered in a political purge in 1937, and d'Herelle died in 1949. Their institute dwindled, but it survived the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the Georgian civil war the following year. When the former USSR opened up to the West, physicians in the United States and Europe learned the Eliava Institute was one of the few places in the world where researchers were still studying and administering phages. That was fortunate timing, because antibiotics in the West were losing their power under the onslaught of antibiotic resistance."

It's interesting to consider how ideology (capitalist vs communist) contributes to different approaches to problem solving. Is there anything about bacteriophages--including their manufacture and use--that actually makes them more "communist"?

<comment><USER9> Lack of value of doctor labor and efficent labor in general perhaps? Since phages need a culture first to be sure the right one is selected. You can't just give broad spectrum phages. Which isn't just "laziness" or cutting corners on expensive labor but helpful for patient results so they don't get worse while waiting for results.

If I recall some accounts correctly Soviet doctors often depended upon grey market bribes to afford supplies if they weren't party favored. Phages were self replicating and needed fewer doses per patient if selected properly. However they are highly specific, and the phage banks need updated with every mutation which may happen mid-treatment. They are second in line for a good reason.

<comment><USER10> I remember reading a semi-biography of an old school doctor that went to med school in the 1930's.

Mentioned being a lowly resident late at night sitting next to a deathly ill patient with pneumonia trying to match antiserum to whatever bug the poor sap had. Nothing, nothing nothing, and then a match. Injecting the patent with the correct antiserum felt like magic.

Or the they would die anyways. Rarely they would go into shock and die.

Can imagine early antibiotics was so much easier. (big hammer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> there are a number of startups that have formed in the last year or two genetically engineering phages to treat disease. resistant bacterial disease is a common target, but given the growth in literature linking the microbiome to diseases from autoimmunity to cancer, there are companies trying to engineer phages to knockout bacteria implicated in non-infectious disease

eligo, locus biosciences, biomx have received venture funding and there are many earlier stage companies as well. engineered phage therapy for cancer will be a field to watch this year

<comment><USER12> There are some phages being marketed as prebiotics, I have been taking PreforPro[1], which does seem to have generally positive effects on my guts. Of course, that would entirely depend on whether or not any of the bacterial strains it targets happen to be present. But they being actively researched[2] so we should know more eventually.

1: [http://www.deerlandenzymes.com/preforpro/the- science/](http://www.deerlandenzymes.com/preforpro/the-science/)

2: [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03269617](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03269617)

<comment><USER13> Taking any anti bacteria medication on a regular basis will encourage resistance. I can not how that would be considered a good idea.

<comment><USER12> I don't take it daily, but obviously there's been an ongoing battle between bacteria and phages for millions of years, it is unlikely they'd be selected for too strongly in my gut (assuming the targeted species are even present at any given time).

<comment><USER14> In the article it is speculated the main patient didn't get better during the initial course of treatment because the bacteria infecting him resisted the multiple phages they used to treat him - they were all variants of the same vector of attack(that worked in the labs on the bacteria in question), and the researchers had to find different phages to continue treatment, so they came across resistant bacteria immediately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps this is a superficial comparison, but to me it's odd about the approval difficulty of phages considering that vaccines like the annual flu vaccine also rely on assembling new recombinations of flu strains every year too.

In general why do vaccines seem to be allowed approval to target specific strains only, but antibiotics need to be general purpose as implied by the article?

<comment><USER16> They don't. We are using vaccine technology from the 1940s. The FDA basically allows something that was developed before 1962 to continue, while anything it considers new (phages) have to go though the impossible FDA regulatory process.

The bottom line is if we didn't have a vaccine for the flu already it would be impossible to create one now.

<comment><USER15> The vaccine is new every year, some of the technologies for reproducing it are old, but the fundamental vaccine I thought are remixed annually. Otherwise it would not be effective vs constantly mutating wild flu strains.

Edit: added [https://www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/vaccine/how-fluvaccine- made....](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/protect/vaccine/how-fluvaccine-made.htm)

<comment><USER16> Yes the flu vaccine is updated every year (and occasionally they put the right strain into it), the technology used was developed in the 1940s. It is very crude, but thanks to the FDA no advance is practicable.

You might think this doesn't matter, but we now know how to make a universal flu vaccine that doesn't need to be updated each year. Apart from not needing to be jabbed every year, if we get another 1918 epidemic then we will find out how much we will regret not having a new vaccine.

<comment><USER15> The third method in that CDC link says it was approved in 2013. But I gather that's a new productions/replication method as opposed to a new method of selecting strains? But again, what is the difference between selecting flu strains to combat a given flu season, and selecting phages to combat a given resistant bacteria.

I'm excited for a universal flu vaccine too, and hope that somehow that vaccine gets funded and succeeds.

<comment><USER16> The difference is the flu virus keeps mutating while with phages you have a large collection and choose the ones that work on the infection the patient has.

The big problem with the flu vaccine is the lead times are so long (6 months) that the vaccine producers need to guess what strains will be circulating 6 months ahead. Since they lack a crystal ball they often get it wrong. The only real advance with the cellular vaccines is for people allergic to egg.

I am not that hopeful that a universal flu vaccine will get funded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Kurzgesagt video on bacteriophages released a few days ago.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3tsmFsrOg)

</comment><comment><USER18> Clickbai title.

<comment><USER19> The original title was clickbait, yes: "He Was Dying. Antibiotics Weren't Working. Doctors Tried a Forgotten Treatment". Yea, but for one weird trick, the patient would have died. I'm not sure who hates him, but I'm sure someone does.

Mods or OP thankfully changed it.

<comment><USER20> The bacteria hate him, obviously</comment></comment></comment>


Netflix Outage observations: database issue, not bandwidth/streaming related - <AUTHOR> http://listered.com/view/listered/Blog/3

<comment><USER2> I apologize for this being offtopic, feel free to downvote me for it, but are there any other websites like this one? (Follow lists instead of status updates).

I've been working on <http://thingist.com/> for a few months now (and showing HN along the way) and this website is pretty much a direct copy of it (down to having the name of the site as a dictionary word at the top of the page, which is what it looked like last time I showed anybody here)

I'm just asking because I think it's a cool idea (which is why I'm working on it) and am curious to see how other people are approaching it.

(I also think it's kindof a shitty move to copy something _that closely_ )

<comment><AUTHOR> Listered is actually my website. And the whole point is that it stores data as objects. You make up with a list consists of by defining the properties of the items in the list and then always enter data in that list according to that blueprint.

I never heard of thingist till now but it seems like its lists of text?

<comment><USER2> They're pretty much the exact same website, man.

A couple of tips, though: you need to make it easier to add things to the lists. I registered an account, and cannot figure out how to add an item, or how to then call that list back up.

It also seems to be presenting me with the landing page despite having already registered.

It is a nice design, though. Kudos on that :) (The things popping up at me as I was interacting with it was nice)

<comment><AUTHOR> Under "Lists" you can create a list and the properties of each item in that list.

You then add items according to those properties. Look at the example: <http://listered.com/view/cat/Articles/>

<comment><USER2> But where do I go to add a thing to a list?

Say I start at the website's root...what do I click on now?

<comment><AUTHOR> if logged in you click your username in the top bar. Then you have options, like Account, Lists, Add Item, Profile....

So you go to Lists. or follow this link <http://listered.com/users/edit.php/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> When was the site down? I was on the site and we watched many episodes of sponge bob square pants without issue.

Just curious if it was down later at night, etc.

<comment><USER4> I was unable to get logged in on my PS3 at around 2011/03/23 9:00 PM EST (last night).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just curious, had you previously watched the movie which you were able to play?

<comment><AUTHOR> No i did not. But Netflix is streaming technology anyhow, so it would not make a difference except for buffering time which isn't much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> They use Amazon SimpleDB as their primary database.</comment>


Purgecss – Easily remove unused CSS - <AUTHOR> https://www.purgecss.com/ <comment><USER2> This is neat. Few other tools that do the same job:

\- PurifyCSS [https://github.com/purifycss/purifycss](https://github.com/purifycss/purifycss)

\- Google Chrome dev tools [https://www.labnol.org/internet/remove-unused- css/28635/](https://www.labnol.org/internet/remove-unused-css/28635/)

\- Firefox [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/CSS_Coverage](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Tools/CSS_Coverage)

\- Penthouse a critical path CSS generator [https://github.com/pocketjoso/penthouse](https://github.com/pocketjoso/penthouse)

\- uncss [https://www.npmjs.com/package/uncss](https://www.npmjs.com/package/uncss)</comment>


MS uses AWS - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/cloud/for-windows-azure-aws-is-a-friend-not-a-foe/ <comment><USER2> I think that the title is misleading.

It implies that when Microsoft needs a server to run some service, they use AWS.

The article is a bit vague, but I don't think it's the case.

AWS supports running Windows Server on their servers. You have to pay a little bit extra (compared to running e.g. a Linux kernel from a free distro like Ubuntu). I don't know what the details of the arrangement between Microsoft and Amazon is, but Amazon couldn't just offer Windows Server without licensing it from Microsoft. What is most likely happening is that the surcharge that Amazon collects for Windows Server is remitted to Microsoft.

So when the Microsoft guy quoted in the article talks about Amazon and Microsoft being partners, he doesn't meant that Microsoft uses AWS to run their services but that Microsoft licenses Windows Server to Amazon so that Amazon can offer it as an option in EC2.

</comment><comment><USER3> Its very interesting that MS is running part of their cloud on AWS. Though Azure is really more a cloud-based service delivery platform where AWS also provides cloud-based server deployment with EC2. I am assuming that is the part that MS uses. For a non-windows-centric developer Azure is more or less useless to me. Thought it is a cool model to just deploy without needing to setup and control the stack. Bottom line, i prefer fully controlling everything, i guess im a control freak.

</comment><comment><USER4> Apple -> MS -> Amazon. When we read about Amazon storing stuff on iCloud, then we'll know it's all just bit kiting.

<comment><USER5> This will probably ruin the joke and I'm sorry, but could someone explain what's meant by "bit kiting"?

<comment><USER6> I took it as the bit equivalent to: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_kiting></comment></comment></comment>


The tech behind Felix Baumgartner's stratospheric skydive - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137521-the-tech-behind-felix-baumgartners-stratospheric-skydive

<comment><USER2> Non-swipe link: [http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137521-the-tech-behind- fe...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137521-the-tech-behind-felix- baumgartners-stratospheric-skydive?onswipe_redirect=never)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been curious for a long time why Ziff Davis devotes so much attention to spamming HN. And then today it clicked after I saw this story at the top or /r/technology submitted a couple hours after it was popular on HN.

HN provides a vector for popular spam submissions here to be legitimately submitted on _Reddit_ , without all the hassle of spam detection and moderators getting in the way.

</comment><comment><USER4> This podcast has an interview that explains the camera tech used <http://www.fxguide.com/therc/red_centre_073/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's a video overview of the (highly specialized) skydiving rig used: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SErtpdKLsM4#t=5m20s>

</comment><comment><USER6> i wonder what the final price tag on this was? has anyone seen a number put on it?

<comment><USER7> Whatever it is, I imagine it was well worth it for the primary sponsor, Red Bull. A lot of the tech was developed just for this jump, so it would be difficult to get a final price tag without including R&D costs (which are already tricky).

<comment><USER8> Yup, definitely worth it! Imagine almost 5 million people essentially watching an almost 3 hour long (very interesting and groundbreaking!) Red Bull commercial around the world.

I think if we did the math at base advertising/marketing rates - this project would still work out quite cheap for that kind of exposure!

Daring indeed!

<comment><USER9> Well, looking at the math I see them getting about $6,615,000 worth of ad-time (not counting news or social media, just the video stream)

The math: 7.35 average daytime CPM[1] * 5 Million (5,000 thousand) viewers, watching for an average of 90 minutes (* 180 30-second spots) each.

That is: $7.35 * 5000 * 180 = $6,615,000

Of course if the news coverage mentioned "RED BULL SPONSORED DIVER..." then my number gets blown out of the water.

[1] <http://infoacrs.com/a/tvads.html> Daytime, spot TV, CPM average</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Cloud Competitors Look Foolish At AWS Conference - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/13/short-shorts-and-long-buses-amazon-cloud-competitors-look-a-bit-foolish-at-aws-conference/ <comment><USER2> Is there a danger to the developer guild of possibly finding itself without a viable option to AWS?</comment>


Countries can thrive without creating tech billionaires [sign-up] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/82122018-0e62-11e4-a1ae-00144feabdc0.html

<comment><AUTHOR> "It is at a later stage that matters become risky. Britain has created plenty of tech millionaires, and politicians are easily smitten by these inspirational business people. But the question they should ask is not "How can I help this fascinating fellow become a billionaire?" but how "How can I stop him becoming one?""</comment>


Are We Too Close to Making Gattaca a Reality? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/2013/10/28/are-we-too-close-to-making-gattaca-a-reality/ <comment><USER2> Huh. I always thought Gattaca was a commentary on what we _already_ have. It seemed to me an allegory about poor minorities making it into the rich upper class.

The genetically engineered angle seemed like a small plot device, not a central feature. If we take health and wealth of the typical first worlder and compare it with that of the average third worlder, it already looks pretty Gattaca to me.

<comment><USER3> Good science fiction is almost always about the present, not the future. As Ursula Le Guin put in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness[1] "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. (...)Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying."

[1]Full text here: [http://somethingcompletelydifferent.wordpress.com/2011/02/15...](http://somethingcompletelydifferent.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/science- fiction-isnt-about-the-future-or-the-past/)

<comment><USER4> Sometimes it's about both. When I watched Gattaca, I was really impressed with how well they tied together a broad social commentary on the present with a more literal warning about the impending future.

<comment><USER5> It's about both because they are often the same thing. How we deal with the present informs us how we may react to the future, and how we view hypothetical future situations tells us something about our present, often by drawing parallels that point out the ways in which our assumed (often inherited) beliefs are often in opposition with our stated, rational beliefs.

It's always boggled my mind that some authors have such little regard for science fiction. In my opinion, it's one of the most powerful contexts you can use, when done well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Despite laws meant to prevent genetic discrimination, the world of Gattaca is a highly stratified one with two distinct classes: the valids—who have the right genes, the most prestigious jobs and the highest quality of life—and the in-valids, who were conceived in the typical fashion and are relegated to menial work and relative poverty. Eugenics also risks creating a genetically homogenous population that is far more vulnerable to disease and freak deleterious mutations than a diverse one._

Isn't their significant evidence that more diverse gene pools, even unexpected combinations of genes are usually more adapted in several ways, because of heterosis [0]. It seems foolish that this one new factor would make eugenics any more successful than its last phase of popular. Not to mention it the deeply-held 'moral repugnance'[1] aspect.

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

[1] [http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2624677/Roth_Repu...](http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2624677/Roth_Repugnance.pdf?sequence=6)

<comment><USER7> There is some history to be learned from the genetic variability problem of Ireland's potatoes in the XIX Century.

Apart from other -more serious- problems, obviously, but genetic similarity is not necessarily a good thing.

<comment><USER8> I was just going to mention that: given economies of scale custom babies will probably share a lot of identical _prefab_ genetic blocks for every specification since it would be far cheaper than engineering every trait from scratch.

At that point there would be enough GM humans walking around that a virus might evolve to attack only them, and it would spread like wildfire among the population given the lack of genetic variation, the only exception being old regular humans and maybe a few of those with parents wealthy enough to get them _tailor-made_ without any of the preexisting "parts" that the majority uses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes, I think it will happen. There is a market for this stuff, and, in time, when and why to say N-O will become less and less obvious.

There are problems with genetic selection. But I think the larger problem will be the personal toll of new found ways of negatively assessing ourselves, and pointlessly diagnosing our inevitable sundry personal weaknesses as medical syndromes.

</comment><comment><USER10> I know this might sound bad but I actually think the reality portrayed in Gattaca is not that bad. I mean, if you put aside the discrimination faced by that part of the population born the natural way, you have a society where almost everyone is healthy and will live longer than previously possible, and is of great contribution to the community. I think that's our future and it doesn't scare me that much, what actually scares me are the endless genetic mutations that result in a wide array of tumors and untreatable diseases.

<comment><USER11> One of the problems is that it will create an environment where individuals are strongly encouraged and pressured into pursuing a particular type of career or avoid XYZ other activities. Reminds me of the stereotypical asian parent forcing their children to become lawyers or doctors, when the individual would much rather pursue sports, arts or something else entirely. One of the most critical aspects of success is motivation and desire to accomplish X. When everyone around you is saying you should do Y because of your genetic makeup it could lead to a lot more dissatisfied human beings.

<comment><USER12> This is an interesting avenue to explore - one thing is features that are general improvements (say, not having some deadly disease); but there are many features that would facilitate specialization - helping you in one way while hurting in another.

A mild example in Gattaca is the six-fingered pianist - which in essence means that 'being a pianist' has to be chosen by others before you are able to think and decide.

And there are obviously horrible possibilities of specialization, like deliberately creating conscience-less embryos for military needs or autism- squared embryos for specialized uses (as suggested in Frank Herbert's Dune, for example).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Forget the custom-baby angle, did anyone catch this little nugget?

" Their tests cannot recognize every possible shade, but they are specific enough to distinguish between brown, blue and mottled brown-blue eyes, as well as brown, black, blonde and red hair. Such studies are intended to help solve crimes, but clinicians at fertility clinics could easily adapt the strategies for PGD. "

Sounds like a lot sooner (now?) law enforcement will be able to determine a lot more about a potential suspect with just DNA. Or am I not reading that correctly?

<comment><USER12> That's exactly what the're saying - law enforcement has had that ability (DNA -> likelihoods of visual properties, not 100% accurate of course) for some time already, and they can use it on embryos as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The 'science' in Gattaca is just an excuse for segregating human beings based on some arbitrary criteria. As others have pointed out this is nothing new.

What is extremely irritating is that people actually think that genetics works the way it is portrayed in the film. This is patently false. Yes, some portion of what an organism is is determined by the primary sequence of its DNA. It turns out that the contribution of primary sequence alone is quite small. Look at all the naive genome wide association data sets that have revealed that primary DNA sequences are in most cases very poor predictors of phenotype. This should't be surprising to anyone who has even a cursory understanding of evolution and the interaction between ecology and development. Yes, this is classic nurture vs nature stuff.

The fact that people want to claim that science could actually give us a universal, deterministic and predictive answer about the future should quickly alert us that the principles on which they are basing their predictions is not science and not predictive, but instead an ideology based on prejudice rather than evidence.

<comment><USER15> 'Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert "the genes for an elephant's trunk" into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There -are- no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals.' \- Academician Prokhor Zakharov, "Nonlinear Genetics"

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if say 50 years from now, we'll be like those religious conservatives who don't want to let women do whatever they want with their bodies (mainly talking about abortion here).

Will we also be the ones demanding that the new generations have _no right_ to design their children, while they'd argue that we should just "mind our own business" and that it's not government's place to decide how to effectively "create" _their_ own children.

I think this century will see a lot of interesting changes, and not just technological, but also societal. Can we design our own children? Can we marry robots? Can we change our gender? Should the government be able to monitor our thoughts to protect us from terrorism? Will we still have the nonsense "war on terror" even 50 years from now, or will we end all "war on abstracts" by then, just like we are about to end the war on drugs?

A lot of new questions will need a lot of new answers as new technologies start making all sorts of new things possible.

<comment><USER17> I don't see this as anywhere near the same argument as abortion and I think trying to tie it into the abortion debate will not be helpful or truthful for anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can someone give me a non-religious moral reason not to pursue this?

<comment><USER19> Here is one. Humans suck at predicting stuff.

What makes you think you know what is better for your off-springs than random chance?

I consider diseases and human frailties a great part of what makes us humans. If we all had sharp teeth and powerful bite, we wouldn't drive cars, we'd chase furry animals and bite them with our powerful jaws. Occasionally stopping to hang around in the trees and eat fruits.

<comment><USER20> > Humans suck at predicting stuff.

But surely humans beat randomness at many if not most tasks. This argument is not as much about whether we get sharper teeth or not, as it is about possibly saving a kid about a genetically inherited disorder. You may consider human suffering to be what defines humanity, but those who suffer most certainly don't.

<comment><USER21> The article explicitly mention that this is not the case. If anything, it poses the question of how much genetic engineering is too much.

And about betting randomness... I recall sometime reading about this certain ethnic group, which is taboo to single out and which has a disproportionate amount of Nobel prize winners (amongst other interesting features). The work describe how this people had both, compared to baseline population, higher than average IQ and higher than average propensity to some rare autoimmune disease that affects the brain. It turns out they had a higher incidence of several genetic mutations that each individually made you smarter (thus adaptive), but when found in the same individual made him sick.

Now, extrapolate this to a bunch of helicopter parents, micromanaging optimization to this or that characteristics in their own kids genotype. To me it sounds to much like a bunch of script kiddies merging commits to an arcane, critical, undocumented legacy system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _> If the past is irrelevant, then we are equally irrelevant to the people living in 2113. They don't care what we think about morality, public policy, fashion, economics, or anything else. It doesn't matter what we "decide" about designer babies or anything else. It's their world. They will view us with contempt. Or with pity. Get used to it._

[http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=24266](http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=24266)

</comment><comment><USER23> Culture and life (what you eat, how you exercise, how you live) weights more than genetics, unless you get visibly impaired by some genetic problem. For the by far big majority of people those are the factors that should be taken into account, not the base material, but how you grow up, what you learn, how you are.

Of course, if you have enough money to genetically design your children, probably have enough money to feed and raise them right, give them access to the best education, and probably have time to be with them, and is that what will make the difference, not so much to have the best of the best genes. But even without the designer genes, nor growing in a rich family normal people still have the potential to be great in whatever they do.

But is not designing the problem, is being discrimined later by people with access to your genetic info (something not very private as we leave traces of it everywhere), if that impairs your access to education or work, that will affect what you are too. Just labeling those that discriminate based on genetics as aryan race fans could put those practices in a negative enough light to avoid it to spread.

<comment><USER24> > Culture and life (what you eat, how you exercise, how you live) weights more > than genetics, ...

To what extent you have been outsmarted by robots is determined mostly by genetics. But if slum-dwellers were given basic income and a negative income tax, it would be impossible to farm them for votes, so they have been indoctrinated to believe that they are smarter than robots and have been cheated out of jobs. This keeps them voting for the next handout, keeping the welfare bureaucracy and its "leaders" in power.

We are living in a vicious genetic dystopia today.

Naturally you will read not a word of this in Scientific American. They are hyper-leftist and cannot imagine a future of automated prosperity without their kind to centrally plan it. (One of the reasons they continue to moonbat against Reagan to this day was his vast expansion of the negative income tax.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> My favourite line from the movie

Vincent: You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back.

</comment><comment><USER26> One reason why it might _not_ happen - lack of demand. Clearly I have a very small sample so it's merely an anecdote, but I haven't met anybody that wants this for themselves, even if they think other people will want it.

I know some people will want it, but it would need to be near universal for something like Gattaca to become reality.

<comment><USER27> If I had the financial resources, and the science was well understood, I'd definitely consider it. I hold no sentimental attachment to the "natural" way of doing things -- cancer is natural, but that doesn't preclude me from seeking chemotherapy. Similarly, why _wouldn 't_ you use new medical science to make your baby as healthy as possible? And, if you've accepted "screening for genetic defects" as an acceptable use of the technology, why would "selecting for the most desirable traits" not be?

Nature and nurture are just two factors that contribute to a child's wellbeing and success in life. If you'd be willing to send your child to a private school in the hopes of giving them a better education and a leg-up on the competition, why not give them better looks and higher intelligence (were it possible), as well?

I've yet to see any convincing ethical arguments as to why this would be wrong. So far, every argument made in opposition to designer babies seems to boil down to "it's not natural". Well, neither is agriculture, medicine, the Internet... as a species, we've gotten to where we are by changing nature to suit us. Why should procreation be any different?

<comment><USER26> I think this is a very big conversation for me to fire off a quick HN comment. I'm mostly ignorant about this, and my Christian faith probably clouds my judgement, so it's difficult to say whether I'm being objective and rational.

However, I'm not convinced that medical science is there yet, so my child is just an iteration for big pharma. Perhaps we produce a whole generation of intelligent children who develop Alzheimer's when they're 25. I realise that argument is made against every new technology (especially medical), but making an active choice somehow makes me culpable and it would be harder to live with it.

Also, there's the idea of what happens if this becomes universal. Since some traits seem universally desirable, all parents will choose to grant them. So if everyone is given the genes to be massively intelligent, is that a good thing?

Then there's the quality of life argument, which makes me deeply uncomfortable. Essentially, choosing a fully-sighted embryo over a partially- sighted one implicitly says "partially-sighted people are likely to have lower quality of life than fully-sighted ones", and that sounds wrong both ethically and practically.

This is a really difficult debate, though. Put in the hypothetical situation of having to choose, I guess I would end up choosing the best possible embryo, but I'd rather not have to make the choice to begin with.

<comment><USER27> > I'm not convinced that medical science is there yet

Agreed, but I think it's a matter of if, not when. As our knowledge of gene expression, epigenetics, protein folding, and the like increases, the set of things we can't do will shrink.

>Perhaps we produce a whole generation of intelligent children who develop Alzheimer's when they're 25

It's certainly possible that we'll leap before we look, but I'd hope not. We've had examples of that in the past, but the result of those tragedies is that research processes have improved. They're far from perfect, but they've certainly gotten better.

>So if everyone is given the genes to be massively intelligent, is that a good thing?

I'd say so, yes.

>choosing a fully-sighted embryo over a partially-sighted one implicitly says "partially-sighted people are likely to have lower quality of life than fully- sighted ones", and that sounds wrong both ethically and practically.

I think, on average, it's simply an objective fact that "full-sighted people have a better quality of life than partially-sighted people". I can't think of any way that astigmatism has improved my life, and it's something I plan on rectifying permanently once my finances allow it.

As for being ethically wrong, I don't see it. Just because someone is perfectly capable of living a happy and fulfilled life with a birth defect doesn't mean the lack thereof wouldn't be preferable.

>I'd rather not have to make the choice to begin with.

Keep in mind, not choosing is itself a choice. Just as you'd feel guilty if the procedure caused a birth defect, I think you'd also feel guilty if your child was born with a birth defect that you chose not to screen for or take steps to select against. That said, _there_ we finally find an ethical quandary: the nature of the procedure would mean choosing to select against that defect would mean choosing not to have your child, and that's not something most parents would care to think about when looking at their kid. There's a big difference between choosing which fertilized egg to implant and looking at your kid and wishing you had chose not to have them. I think most people would be okay with the former, but would likely (and rightly) recoil in horror at the latter.

<comment><USER26> > So if everyone is given the genes to be massively intelligent, is that a > good thing? > I'd say so, yes.

My thoughts on this are overshadowed by Brave New World. I realise how enormously snobbish and arrogant this sounds, but there are some jobs where having an enormous intellect would definitely be a burden. So either we have to automate those jobs (not necessarily possible), accept that some people are going to be very unhappy, or breed a specific group of people with lower intellects.

I guess this is a variation on the 'tragedy of the commons' \- something that's wonderful for your child and my child would probably be a disaster if it were given to everybody's child.

> Just because someone is perfectly capable of living a happy and fulfilled > life with a birth defect doesn't mean the lack thereof wouldn't be > preferable.

I think sometimes disabilities are part of what make them amazing people. Would Beethoven have written such wonderful music if he had full hearing? From what I've read of Dame Evelyn Glennie, she seems to say that her deafness taught her to hear the music in a different way. So I'm worried that removing everything we perceive to be a defect results in a rather bland human race. It would be better to work on improving society so that being blind didn't cause many people to become depressed, for example. Adding lifts and ramps to buildings as well.

> Keep in mind, not choosing is itself a choice.

I'd like that the choice is not even possible. If the choice can be made confidently by a large proportion of the population, then it would inevitably go this way.

Yes you're right, a lot of this does depend on what we're considering a defect and at what stage. We have obviously done the whole Down's Syndrome scan, and we had no idea what we would have done if it had come back positive. If I could have done this pre-conception, then it would be a more comfortable decision. But if the question was about being short-sighted (which both my wife and I are), or whether we'd prefer a more athletic child, then the question gets much harder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The eye-color part of the article must not be factually correct, unless there have been some very recent developments in understanding genetic influence on eye color. Craig Venter, the first human being to have his genome sequenced, pointed out in interviews[1] that even after the sequencing, no one could tell for sure from the sequence that he has blue eyes. Just in the last day, an article following up on last week's American Society of Human Genetics conference[2] pointed out that genetic studies have continually overpromised and underdelivered, and there are still many very basic issues of human genetics that are embedded in deep uncertainty.

As the article kindly submitted here points out, people are already demanding designer babies. They used to try to get those by looking for sperm donations from the Nobel laureate sperm bank,[3] but that project had disappointing results, and the sperm bank is no longer in operation.

Researchers on human genetics I know locally (who analyze the data from the Minnesota Twin Families Study) use a photograph of two identical (monozygotic) twins from Germany[4] (from a different source, I think the original medical journal source, rather than the blog I link to here) to show that although genes are certainly very influential on human development, environment, including differing choices of lifestyle, matters too.

[1] [http://health.usnews.com/health- news/articles/2007/09/11/cra...](http://health.usnews.com/health- news/articles/2007/09/11/craig-venter-discusses-his-genome)

[2] [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_genom...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_genome/2013/10/human_genetics_successes_and_failures_ashg_stories_of_disease_genes.html)

[3] [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4700156](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4700156)

[4] [http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto- and-e...](http://thesameffect.com/check-out-identical-twins-otto-and-ewald/)

</comment><comment><USER29> vaguely related - i recently read margaret atwood's _oryx and crake_ , which is another dystopian biotech future, and i rather enjoyed it. she's pretty cynical (and quite amusing at times) and while you can pick holes in many of her arguments the overall jaundiced view of stupid selfish humans screwing themselves over is pretty convincing.

(weirdly, some of what she predicted - about 10 years ago now - seems to be coming more true in software. you can't help but think of google when you read descriptions of the biotech corporations, with their compounds designed to isolate superior employees ;o).

<comment><USER15> A dystopian novel about some hip Silicon Valley company finding the secret sauce to objectively rank human beings with software, because of the difficulty in hiring good programmers, is just too painfully apt to imagine.</comment></comment>


Final Fantasy 7 remake coming to PlayStation 4 - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2015/6/15/8785689/final-fantasy-7-remake-ps4-square-enix <comment><USER2> This game helped me through some rough times growing up. Hopefully it will live up to its name.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh god this is something I've been waiting for the past decade.

</comment><comment><USER4> Man, so many hours over so many playthroughs of this game when I was a kid.

They really need Uematsu to compose the soundtrack or remaster the original.

In fact I'd be happy enough with the original.

</comment><comment><USER5> ShenMue 3 coming for PS4 and PC is bigger news, though, I think.

<comment><USER3> Well, they announced a kickstarter so funding is not secured and it might never appear. Also in terms of sales and amount of people who have been waiting for the game, I think FFVII beats Shenmue :P

<comment><USER5> Funding goal has been reached in less than 24 hours for ShenMue 3.

And Shenmue 3 beats FFVII anytime because it's a new game, not a remake. It's not about how many it sells. It bring closure. FFVII is great, but just more of the same thing.

<comment><USER2> "And Shenmue 3 beats FFVII anytime because it's a new game, not a remake". So you think the remake won't have any new content? Seriously? How about we wait until the games come out before declaring which is "better".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The man making puzzles for hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33817029

<comment><USER2> Somewhat related: Are there any puzzle subscription services out there? I think it'd be a really interesting business to receive an innovative, creative puzzle weekly or monthly that show some real effort and artistry. Maybe it would be a mix of physical and digital puzzles. Does that exist?

If not, I might have to do that :)

<comment><USER3> One such thing was [http://blacklettergame.com/](http://blacklettergame.com/) which I guess is being re-run (with new content) periodically.

Also there's P&A Magazine (pronounced "Panda"): [http://pandamagazine.com/](http://pandamagazine.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a puzzle...

Decode me 3 times or 64:

WW0wNFoyTklTbkJsYlZWbldtMDVlVWxJYkhaa1V6UTk=

winner gets the prize written in the message.

<comment><USER5> Got anything tougher?

<comment><USER6> Here you are:

      Vm0wd2QyVkhVWGhUV0d4VFltdHdVRlp0ZUhkVU1WcDBaVWhrYWxKc1d
      ucFhhMk0xWVVaS2MxZHVhRmRTZWtFeFdWY3hTMUl4WkhOWGJGcFhUVE
      ZHTTFaclpEUlpWMUpJVm10V1UySklRbTlVVmxwM1ZWWmtWMVZyU214U
      01EVjVWR3hhVjFWdFNrbFJiVGxWVm14YU0xbHFSbHBsUm1SMFVteGtU
      bEpHV2paV2JUQXhWVEZSZUZkdVRsaGhlbXhoV1d0a2IxVXhjRmhsUjN
      SWVVsUldXVmt3V2tOV01rVjNZMFpTVjFaV2NGTmFSRVpEVld4Q1ZVMU
      VNRDA9

SCNR

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In case anyone is wondering about the odd font on the yellow press pass, it's actually a phonetic alphabet for English called Shavian. It was a project of George Bernard Shaw, who was a vigorous spelling reformist. It didn't get very far, but there was a book published in Shavian and a more useful spinoff called Quikscript. If you're interested in a rare or cryptic shorthand for note taking, either might be for you.

</comment><comment><USER8> This sounds really cool. Anyone written about the previous puzzles?

<comment><USER9> Here's a pretty nuts write up from last year's winners: [http://elegin.com/dc22/](http://elegin.com/dc22/).

<comment><USER10> Same challenge, different team.

[http://potatohatsecurity.tumblr.com/post/94565729529/defcon-...](http://potatohatsecurity.tumblr.com/post/94565729529/defcon-22-badge- challenge-walkthrough)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: As data scientist, what annoys you? - <AUTHOR> What are your pain points and what are tools that you wish you had? If you are a deep learning engineer/researcher, is there anything deep learning specific? <comment><USER2> Hmm maybe something that can take care of ETL part of the workflow.</comment>


Ask HN: Code with what I know, or expand my horizons - <AUTHOR>

for the past 4 years, I have been coding in PHP, JQuery and MySql.
Recently, I got really bored of those being that I generally just made CRUD apps; nothing that really tickled my fancy. So I decided I was going to learn Ruby on Rails.
I am still learning RoR but I don't yet feel confident to build a whole app in it, but on the other hand I feel like I haven't built anything in awhile.
Should I drop RoR for a week or two and just build something in PHP. Or should I keep going with RoR even though I feel like I'm not really progressing all that much? <comment><USER2> It truly depends on what you are looking to do. If you are tired of PHP and want to learn a new language, build it in RoR. If you are tired of CRUD apps and want to build something more complex, build it in PHP. If you just want to mentally stimulate yourself and learn new things, do both.

Figure out where you are and where you want to go. Then, take the shortest path between the two. Note: it might just be that you need to get lost, wandering through the woods for a while. If that's the case, go nutz and build something crazy in a language you've only heard of in passing in an HN thread.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you can, I'd say a bit of both. Use what you know so has to make your development quick, efficient and not too time consuming but try to integrate one new idea/concept into each project.</comment>


Prisoner's Dilemma,Evolution of Inequality,Does Unfairness Triumph After All? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2012/06/24/prisoners-dilemma-and-the-evolution-of-inequality-does-unfairness-triumph-after-all/

<comment><USER2> I know it's a hot button topic, but my curiosity wants to apply this to higher education over the last 10-20 yrs. Do the assumptions of the problem allow for such an inference?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know.</comment></comment>


Europe must get tough with the US over NSA spying revelations - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/02/europe-us-nsa-spying

<comment><AUTHOR> Written by Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of the ALDE (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) in the European Parliament, I wonder how much impact a column like this, or his views as a whole, will have on the whole situation.

Surely he can't be the only member of the EP who feels like this?</comment>