A Warning from Europe: The Worst Is yet to Come - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/poland-polarization/568324/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> _By contrast, the polarizing political movements of 21st-century Europe demand much less of their adherents. They don't require belief in a full-blown ideology, and thus they don't require violence or terror police. They don't force people to believe that black is white, war is peace, and state farms have achieved 1,000 percent of their planned production. Most of them don't deploy propaganda that conflicts with everyday reality. And yet all of them depend, if not on a Big Lie, then on what the historian Timothy Snyder once told me should be called the Medium-Size Lie, or perhaps a clutch of Medium- Size Lies._

This is an interesting theory. The author says that for Poland, the "medium size lie" is that "a nefarious plot brought down the president's plane in April 2010". And for Hungary, "It is the belief, shared by the Russian government and the American alt-right, in the superhuman powers of George Soros, the Hungarian Jewish billionaire who is supposedly plotting to bring down the nation through the deliberate importation of migrants, even though no such migrants exist in Hungary."

What is the equivalent "medium size lie" for other countries? As an American, I'm particularly interested in what people think the lie currently is for America. Are there just two main lies, that each major political party believes about the other? Or are there combinatorially many, what each subfaction believes about each other subfaction? Can opposite answers to the same question be the same lie? I'm not interested in debating whether any particular lie is actually true, and more interesting to hear what people believe, and to try to understand why they believe it.

<comment><USER3> Candidates for the lies in the US would be:

That Obama was secretly a foreign born Muslim.

That Hilary Clinton ran a child abuse ring out of a pizza joint.

That school massacres aren't real but are staged by actors and the "lying" media.

That Hillary Clinton murdered Seth Rich.

That a deep state, also run by Clinton, is lying about Russian interference and fabricating evidence against Manafort, Cohen et al.

That the Puerto Rican death toll is just a fabrication to make the administration look bad

That Climate change is a Chinese plot to destroy American business.

<comment><USER4> Both sides on the gun debate lie.

<comment><USER5> ) ) That school massacres aren't real

) ) but are staged by actors and the "lying" media.

) Both sides on the gun debate lie.

How can both sides lie at the quoted example? Either there were people killed or not? How can both sides lie at the same time about it? Can a person be half killed? Even if there was a Schrödinger person, wouldn't fact checking collapse the state to either one?

<comment><USER4> Because one side perpetuates the good guy with the guy myth, and the other side drastically inflates the numbers of school shootings.

Hense, both sides lie. The mistruths end up being the biggest obstacle to proper gun reform.

We can't compromise when both sides aren't truthful or realistic. If you think your side is "right" then I suggest educating yourself about guns from someone without a political agenda.

<comment><USER5> I am curious about inflating school shooting numbers. Do you have links for that? Are you saying that there were fake deaths and there are crisis paid actors?

<comment><USER4> [https://www.npr.org/2018/03/15/593831564/the-disconnect- betw...](https://www.npr.org/2018/03/15/593831564/the-disconnect-between- perceived-danger-in-u-s-schools-and-reality)

That's NPR!

Seriously, gun control reform is very important. We just need the activists on both sides to start acting like reasonable adults.

(Begin rant)

On the right, there's the "good guy with the gun" myth; and the belief that responsible homeowners need to have a gun "for safety." Both are absurd.

On the left, there's this belief that bad guns can be banned, and good guns allowed. That's also absurd, because all guns are designed to kill! A hunter sitting in a tree waiting for a deer uses the same equipment as a man looking through a window waiting for his victim.

That's what I mean by acting like adults. The right and left are so unrealistic that they're going to get nowhere with real reform.

<comment><USER6> I'm not aware of a widespread belief that school shootings are more common now than they were in the 90s. That said, just because the rate isn't increasing, is that a compelling argument for not addressing school shootings? If your house burned down once this year, but it burned down 3 times in 1998, I think you're still having too many house fires. How is that an argument that there's no need to buy a smoke alarm, and maybe re-examine your lifestyle to understand why you're experiencing such an unusually high number of fires?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dupe of [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17995934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17995934), not sure how it got through the filters.

<comment><USER8> AIUI, the dupe detector takes into account whether or not the submission has gained traction. If a submission only has a few comments, a subsequent re- submission may not be considered a dupe.

<comment><USER7> Interesting, I didn't know that -- thanks for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> USA isn't Poland. Trump says dumb things, some BS, and is boorish but isn't Hitler nor anywhere close to it.

"The press and journalists" should realize when you push click bait then you give room for Trump and others like him to call you fake news, because sometimes you are

Enough of these scare mongering articles.

<comment><USER10> I encourage you to read a book on the lead-up to WWII. The similarities are amazing. When Hitler was in power in the 1930s, his propaganda was that he was a man of peace, he only wanted to help Germans (they needed "breathing room" at one point), etc. To the wonder of many contemporaries, much of Europe and the U.S. took him at his word and did nothing - the alternative apparently was too terrible to contemplate. Neville Chamberlain famously negotiated "peace in our time" with Hitler. I recently read a story of someone at the time who talked about everyone acting as if nothing abnormal was happening, a story I've heard many times.

In real life, the bad guy doesn't wear a black hat and doesn't stand up and say "I'm evil". You are never going to see stronger signals than what you see now. If what you see isn't enough, nothing ever will be.

<comment><USER11> Got any good recommendations for such a book?

<comment><USER10> Any serious history of the subject (WWII, Hitler, etc) that covers that time period would include it. It was integral to Hitler's foreign policy.

Remember that the purpose of propaganda is not to persuade people as much as to create enough uncertainty and confusion that there is inaction - like FUD in the computer industry.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Game that puts your sense of time to the test - <AUTHOR> https://cliclock.netlify.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> A simple game where the goal is to click 10 times at 1 second intervals. After you're done, it tells you how accurate you were.

 _Note:_ I read the guidelines, but I post here for the first time. I'm sorry in case I broke any rules.

<comment><USER2> Curious if you built it yourself, and if so, what technologies you used.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did. I used Phaser.js and store.js for the web version and Cordova for the Google Play app.</comment></comment></comment>


Tobacco increases work capacity (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://www.dengulenegl.dk/English/Nicotine.html <comment><USER2> Nicotine is great. I find it very useful. The claims about its stimulant effects are perfectly plausible.

But there is _zero_ need to consume/use _tobacco_ to get nicotine.

<comment><USER3> What methods do you recommend?

<comment><USER4> Use an electronic cigarette (vaporizer) or use the OTC nicotine replacement therapies (gum, lozenges, sprays).

<comment><USER3> Any good ones? I researched a year or so ago and all the brands seemed a little bit..sketchy.

<comment><USER5> eGo-T is amazingly close to actual smoking. Get a tank upgrade like the Vivi- Nova and boom, you get a hit so strong you might cough at first.

<comment><USER6> For non-smokers, less is more... nicotine is a pretty powerful stimulant, you don't necessarily want strong hits. My 2¢.

(I am a non-smoker; have tried 2mg and 4mg gum, and find 4mg similar in some ways to having a 'bad trip'. (Light-headedness, freaking out, nausea, time- dilation.))

<comment><USER5> true, as a smoker trying to ween myself to something a bit safer that lack of hit is what annoyed me with other e-cig solutions I tried. The nova tank though is a very tolerable substitute to actual smoking.

If I was a non-smoker though I would not start a nicotine habit at all. I wish I had never started smoking, it's a very difficult habit to reverse.

<comment><USER6> Anecdotal, but as a non-smoker, I don't find any withdrawal or cravings symptoms at all when I stop consuming nicotine. It's milder than stopping caffeine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You don't hear about the benefits of smoking because of the obvious downsides... I will contribute to the benefits. "Although tobacco smoke decreases life expectancy and quality of life, it may reduce the risk of PD by a third when compared to non-smokers" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_disease](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_disease)

</comment><comment><USER8> I've smoked on and off for about 6 years, with the past year being about 98% off. I can tell you that I do FEEL more focused and clear after a cigarette, but that all the negative side-effects that come with them are totally not worth it. If you really want a stimulant, stick with caffeine.

I've actualy been meaning to write a blogpost about it. Some of the things I've noticed from being on and off cigarettes:

Cigarettes (edit: nicotine, actually) are a depressant (EDIT: and a stimulant), they make the world feel less colourful (LITERALLY), less "noisy".

EDIT: I realize I'm being psuedosciency and imprecise with the previous statement. I'm not sure about the precise distinctions between stimulant/upper/downer, etc. What I CAN tell you is that cigarettes have the following effects for me and my smoker peers, as far as I've known ->

When I'm on cigarettes, my field of vision narrows, colours become duller, I'm marginally more focused on specific tasks, better able to "tune out 'random noise'". Whenever I go off cigarettes, the world feels a little overwhelming and chaotic for a while- my skin is more sensitive to the wind, my eyes are more sensitive to the light, the whole nervous system just gets overwhelmed (because the cigarettes kinda suppess them, in my opinion.)

The short-term gain in focus is nothing great. You can get it by sitting in silence for a minute, breathing deeply, psyching yourself up with a youtube video. Not worth the damage you do to your eyes, nose, gums, teeth, not worth the cough, not worth the smell, the taste... all of that is underreported because there's a "frog in boiling water" effect- the damage is so cumulative that it feels tolerable.

Yes, I remember when cigarettes helped focus my thoughts as a writer, or over conversations with friends... but honestly, taking a walk achieves superior returns, on both counts.

\--

Commander Shepard: "What's your opinion of this? The drugs, I mean."

Legion: "These substances enhance short-term performance at the expense of long-term platform survivability. It is fundamentally similar to "over- clocking" geth hardware. We do so whenever necessary. However, should our platform be damaged by overclocking, we can be repaired. Why an organic would choose this is puzzling."

<comment><USER9> Thanks for sharing and glad you've been almost off cigarettes entirely.

That said, nicotine is a mild stimulant, not a depressant, afaik. It's alcohol that's a depressant.

<comment><USER8> Thanks!

More anecdotal nonsense: I think almost everybody starts smoking (apart from the social factors) for the stimulant bit- for the 'kick'. It gets you more buzzy when you take shorter, quicker drags. It relaxes you when you take long, slow drags.

I think the net effect of smoking over an extended period of time has a "net depressant effect" (using term loosely), punctuated by the daily/regular stimulation. Very loosely, the opposite effect of exercising and eating healthily over an extended period of time.

That's just my experience, no science involved there. Curious if others relate to this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >The brain works better when it gets nicotine - almost like an optimized computer. Nicotine is a "work-drug" that enables its consumers to focus better and think faster. The brain also becomes more enduring, especially in smokers: Nicotine experiments show that smokers in prolonged working situations are able to maintain concentration for many hours longer than non-smokers.

the same can be said about meth or other ADHD drugs. "Magic comes with a price" :) (i was a smoker of cigarettes for a decade and quit more than a decade ago)

<comment><USER6> Meth is only prescribed for ADHD in the US. Is it prescribed for ... nevermind, you edited your post. (Original said something to the effect of "meth is prescribed for drowsiness in pilots," which is inaccurate for the US.)

<comment><USER11> Meth is quite hard to get, via prescription, unfortunately. Its bad rep in pop media has resulted in it becoming overcontrolled by the FDA. It's quite a useful - but little explored and used - therapy for AD(H)D.

You'll nearly universally get straight d-amphetamine at the doctor's office.

<comment><USER6> Really? I thought adderall (contains 1/4 dextro-) or vyvense (don't know which amphetamines it contains) were pretty common.

<comment><USER11> Adderall is a mix of d- and l-amphetamine.

Vyvanse is d-amphetmine bound to lysine, turning it into a prodrug (which means your gut chemically cleaves off the lysine and, conveniently, you're left with d-amp sitting in your gut).

<comment><USER12> Vyvanse was a wonder drug for me. Not only helped me concentrate it made me more outgoing and confident. Left me with horrible dry mouth though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cigarettes are a nasty filthy habit...

But I find a good cigar or pipe useful for clearing the mind when working on hard problems.

<comment><USER14> Red Bulls are a nasty filthy habit...

But I find a good espresso or americano to be useful for helping the mind stay alert.

[http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cigar- smoking/AN01515](http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cigar-smoking/AN01515)

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure the relevance of the link.. I never said cigars were healthier.. certainly there are risks involved. But there's a huge gulf between a pack a day habit and a couple day a month indulgence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If there's anyone on HN who actually believes this scientific study, please explain why. Right now I think this is complete garbage that I hope never reaches the eyes of young & impressionable people. Smoking is bad for you any benefit it may or may not have is completely eclipsed by the mountains upon mountains of evidence showing the damage to the human body.

EDIT: Removing quotes per comments below.

EDIT2: Ok, I guess even if there are 99 bad things that are caused by smoking it doesn't mean there can't be 1 or 2 things good from it.

<comment><USER5> nicotine is a stimulant. That's been known forever. People when tired prop themselves up with coffee and cigarettes. So it seems totally believable.

The study doesn't say the cancer and heart problems don't exist, or are outweighed in any way. It just says nicotine has some positive effects. Most drugs do ... that's why people take them.

I smoke. I don't want to die. So that's why I am trying to switch to a vapouriser. Every time I give up smoking, I get hit by a crushing amount of work at some point and then I start smoking again, _because_ it makes me more effecient and stay awake longer. If I could have the productivity without the cancer that would be brilliant.

<comment><USER8> Yep, I remember that I always smoked more when tired, sleep deprived, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Beautiful post, I know smoking always helps me!</comment>


The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/news/36157/the-us-army-spent-millions-developing-giant-six-legged-walking-trucks-in-the-1980s <comment><USER2> Oh, that thing. Back when I was into legged locomotion, I found out more about that machine than I ever wanted to know.

The designer was really into four-bar linkages. The leg mechanism is set up so that one actuator moves the leg in X, one in Y, and one in Z, with a four-bar linkage encoding that into the leg position. This simplifies the control problem, while complicating the mechanics. I suspect they wanted to be able to get the thing home by manual control of the actuators if the computers crashed. It's not towable; you'd need a crane and a flatbed.

It could only walk on flat ground. It was supposed to be able to cross a ditch, but that was manual. The driver had to drive it up to the ditch and stop. Then lock five legs, and, using a joystick, move one of the leading legs across the ditch and set it down. Then, with support in place, move the vehicle forward slightly with no leg lifts. Then lock five legs again, and place the second forward leg. Repeat until all six legs had made it across.

Cool, but not useful.

In the 1990s, a company in Finland got this right.[1] They built a six-legged walking timber harvester. It's impressive. Deere bought the company But it's not better than 8-wheel articulated timber harvesters [2], so it was never produced as a product.

[1] [https://youtu.be/CD2V8GFqk_Y](https://youtu.be/CD2V8GFqk_Y)

[2] [https://youtu.be/BwCTDXatIYA](https://youtu.be/BwCTDXatIYA)

<comment><USER3> About the timber harvester: I assume better here is meant from a economical perspective, because from a ecological perspective the walkers are superior, as they do not devestate the ground so much. But that is sadly not really a issue for most wood production, but I could imagine, with rising awareness for the forests, market demand for not so intrusive wood harvesting(along with advances in the field in general) could bring the walking timber harvester back.

I would very much welcome it. I really hate, having all the forests paths messed up in the wood cutting season.

<comment><USER4> Most timber today isn't harvested in natural forest, they are effectively tree farms, they have a 10 to 20 year growth cycle and since all the trees planted are harvestable, they basically clear cut the land, burn it, off cycle growth as needed, and do it again.

In those instances, there is no ecological consideration as the whole area basically gets wiped out.

<comment><USER5> That's not really accurate. It depends on the tree type, but the growth cycle is somewhere between 50 to 100 years for optimal results.

It's true that most forests today are not old growth anymore. They have been cut (usually clear cut) and then either replanted or just naturally reseeded and are now essentially waiting for the next cut. There are some areas where they are monocultural tree farms with not much else growing, but forest industry starts to realize that that's not the most efficient anyway. Most forests today, even those used for lumber (which are almost all) are integrated ecosystems. That's a great benefit to nature.

Clear cutting is quite bad for the surrounding ecosystem. Habitat loss, soil erosion, it's a pretty traumatic event for a forest. (Some shrubs really thrive for a few years after a clear cut though. In Sweden that's when you get to pick tons of wild raspberries, for example.)

An alternative is selective cutting where you only cut the oldest trees and leave everything intact. For that, such a legged harvester would be much better. The traditional method is to use horses, but that's too slow for modern forest industry.

<comment><USER4> I'm guessing you aren't from the U.S. but in the southern U.S. growing newer species of Pine (variants of Loblolly Pine). A standard lease is 20 years from seedling to harvest, some older variants can go 30 to 50, but you don't see that being planted any longer and that's all leases maturing.

And here, I can assure you they are very much mono culture, evenly spaced, engineered species of trees, almost nothing else happens on the land in that time period. (generally it looks pretty similar to this [https://a.rgbimg.com/users/p/pa/paparabbit/600/mwYGk8q.jpg](https://a.rgbimg.com/users/p/pa/paparabbit/600/mwYGk8q.jpg)) They do come and selectively thing at 5, 10, or 15 depending)

See the issue is, at least in the southern U.S. they clear cut nearly everything in the 1800s. There is very little old growth left.

<comment><USER6> Yes they used to do forestry like that in Northern Europe. They realised the methods described by the OP are more sustainable and more reliable (e.g. diseases will wipe out monocultures).

<comment><USER4> I agree with it being better for the world in a lot of ways. And I would like to see it change, but it isn't likely to, at least not for a really long time.

P.S. As for mono culture timber, there is a reason almost no one in the US knows what a curant is. They (are/were) illegal in the US, because they are for a vector for a fungus that can wipe out timber pines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Only_ millions? Amazing!

To actually deliver a physical, one-of-a-kind, working vehicle of that scale & novel function, for low-digit millions, seems pretty impressive to me - especially if the effort documented enough of their choices/discoveries/limitations to help inform later efforts.

<comment><USER8> yeah, a single M1 Abrams tank costs over $4 million, and we have 9000 of them.

DARPA R&D money always feels like money better spent than a lot of other military spending. We get future dividends, often civilian.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely this. With the culling of most corporate R&D groups over the last 20-30 years, DARPA pie-in-the-sky research projects seem to be one of the last real sources for investigating anything that can't be immediately and quickly monetized.

<comment><USER10> How much real research, as opposed to early-stage product development, has _ever_ happened at corporations? We can easily name a few specific examples (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) presumably because they _weren 't_ the norm. (And there were doubtless some others at companies that weren't as aligned with what's thought of as today's tech industry such as DuPont.)

<comment><USER11> Have a look at MSR.

<comment><USER10> What about them? They make nice gear. They've done some nice innovation around some of the gear they make. That seems different from pumping multi-millions of dollars into research that may never have direct commercial value--unless you're talking about a different MSR.

<comment><USER12> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have many books on on robotics and AI from Stanford and MIT from that era, back when I started to get deeply involved in the field. My son is about a year away from graduating with degrees in CS and Robotics. He was quite surprised to realize that much of what he is learning today isn't new at all. Tremendous work was done decades ago in both domains. Put simply, you can only get so far with neural networks when your only option is an 8 bit microprocessor with 64k-bytes of RAM and a a megabyte or two of non-volatile storage.

One of the key differences between now and then is the monumental improvement in computing power, sensors, hardware in general and energy storage. As a result the devices we produce today look far more impressive. Think about it this way: I don't think there's anything in a Roomba that did not exist in the 1980's other than far greater computing power at a very low cost.

It is an interesting exercise to look through the Old Robots site (www.theoldrobots.com). One of my favorite's (because I owned one and still have a couple of arms on the shelf) is the Hero 2000:

[http://www.theoldrobots.com/hero2k.html](http://www.theoldrobots.com/hero2k.html)

Check out the specifications here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(robot)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_\(robot\))

It took an Intel 8088 processor and 11 Z-80 8 bit processors to run this thing in the early 90's. That cost thousands of dollars. Today you can to a thousand times more with a $5 to $30 single chip processor.

<comment><USER14> > I don't think there's anything in a Roomba that did not exist in the 1980's > other than far greater computing power at a very low cost.

High energy density batteries as well.

My off-brand Roomba clone uses 4 18650 lipo cells @40-50g each, a total of ~40WHr for under 200g.

That 40WHr would need about 1kg of lead acid battery, or maybe 7-800g of NiCad battery.

<comment><USER13> Yup. Correct. I did mention high energy density storage in my original comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just watched an interview with Vijay Kumar who worked on that robot when he was a graduate student and talks about it for a few minutes: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYsLTNXMl1Q&t=0m58s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYsLTNXMl1Q&t=0m58s)

The whole 1 hour interview is also interesting.

<comment><USER16> Went to Penn and had no idea! On a related note Vijay's students are really bright, and he's quite a savvy administrator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> These are general purpose US funding of research which is done under the "Military spending" banner for various reasons.

I understand how people outside the US might not understand this, but it always surprises me complaints about "military spending" from educated Americans that don't understand these are actually enormous investments by the US government into general applied science.

The Army did not spend millions of dollars on a giant walking robot. The US government, by way of military spending, invested in research of the things required to build such a machine.

<comment><USER18> This is garbage nonsense.

You could just as easily manage this funding process somewhere else with different priorities. We've been moving university research funding out of the NSF towards defense budgets quite aggressively over the last two decades, and it's quite palpable how shifting control of this funding from pure science oversight to military oversight has reshaped priorities.

<comment><USER17> [https://www.csis.org/analysis/wtos-first-ruling-national- sec...](https://www.csis.org/analysis/wtos-first-ruling-national-security- what-does-it-mean-united-states)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I know someone who worked on a big radial hexapod robot for dod recently, and he said everyone involved in the project felt it was pointless (hexapods are just not a good platform for doing much of anything), but it was well-funded so they did their best.

<comment><USER20> > hexapods are just not a good platform for doing much of anything

Care to expand on this? There's an awful lot of insects with six legs that seem to do OK. Maybe I've watched too much Patlabor/GitS but I would have thought it a viable candidate for any number of mechanical platforms.

<comment><USER19> Every actuator comes with a lot of overhead in terms of cost, mass, complexity, and two more limbs don't offer much of an advantage over a quadruped. Interesting point about insects, but this was a largeish vehicle. How many large hexapod animals can you name?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Between the engine and the 18 variable displacement pumps [...] was a > 100-pound flywheel. It spun up to 12,000 rpm and could store .25 kWh of > energy. > The flywheel also allowed the vehicle to recuperate some energy > from the pumps when the ASV came to a stop […] and ensured a smooth shutdown > in case of a sudden loss of power.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder what they could do with modern computers and modern materials science. They would at least save a bunch of weight for the computers carried.

<comment><USER23> I would not be surprised if Boston Dynamics scaled up their dog to truck size rather sooner than later.

<comment><USER24> They did one the size of a large horse, but for the complexity and cost, it unfortunately didn't seem to have much practical benefit over a semiautonomous 6-wheeler.

<comment><USER25> Something like the Rheinmetall Mission Master was pretty much the expected outcome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hey, guys, you ever see that really old movie, Empire Strikes Back?

<comment><USER27> If you go to the Clone Wars you'll see vehicles with six legs that look a lot closer to this one!

<comment><USER28> they're called AT-TE for anyone who wants to google it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 485lb payload.

Regardless of the design, it makes sense why they scrapped it.

<comment><USER14> These days delivering that sort of payload with a hexacopter is only a "stupidly expensive hobby grade" project.

(Though I'm not aware of any homebuilt multi rotors up in the 485lb plus a ~170lb pilot range. Yet.)

<comment><USER25> These days? Car sized hexacopters have been vaporware for several decades.

<comment><USER14> Person carrying multicopters are common enough on YouTube videos (at least some of which probably aren't fraudulent).

Give me $30k, and I'll build you a multicopter capable of delivering a 500lb payload 1km away made mostly out of hobby parts. It's no longer rocket science.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been talking about this kind of stuff with some friends. You can't just tell reality from fiction by the news, anymore. Sometimes is a crappy politician who you wouldn't believe act / say / do the things the news report (I'm Brazilian by the way, I have grounds to say this). Some other times is this crazy sci-fi things no one in a bar conversation would believe you if you told them.

Go ahead, next time you're on bar with your friends (In a few months I think the bar are going to be open - hope) tell them this exactly headline and see how they react to it.

<comment><USER31> > Go ahead, next time you're on bar with your friends (In a few months I think > the bar are going to be open - hope) tell them this exactly headline and see > how they react to it.

I don't think many Americans would doubt our military has funded all sorts of crazy stuff. There are confirmed paid studies for mind control and attempting to kill goats using telekinesis by the CIA.

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

It's even been made into a Hollywood movie, so this stuff isn't that fringe. And the fringe stuff is _really_ weird.

<comment><USER32> Wow, that's up there with the premise of _Raiders of the Lost Ark_.

I tend to optimistically/pessimistically believe people are rational but devious, and therefore believe that goat-staring is likely a way to launder money that immediately leads people into talking about how silly attempted telecapricide would be, instead of asking, no, really, what did you totally not get compensated for not having done, the other 39 hours of the week?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23597523](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23597523)

Bonus track: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuduj0yeV4c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuduj0yeV4c)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Looks really cool and futuristic. I'm sure something much better and faster could be built today, but wheeled/tracked machines are still superior.

It's actually impressive how versatile wheels are - a legged truck would have to move _much_ faster and be able to cross some extreme terrain to be a better choice than something with 4+ big wheels.

</comment><comment><USER34> Uh, an early Metal Gear Rex?

<comment><USER35> Was just thinking how did Kojima not put this in a game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wonder if this was related to the DARPA/ArmsTech partnership back on Shadow Moses.

<comment><USER37> Came looking for this comment. Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> >I have contacted the University of Ohio's engineering department in an attempt to gather more information.

You probably won't get very far considering that is a different university.

</comment><comment><USER39> The DOD has also spent tens of millions on a web application to track biological threats that will never see the light of day. I work on it :(

</comment><comment><USER5> Anybody else thinking of the walkers from star wars when reading the headline? I was a bit disappointed seeing the size as it promises "giant" which does not really live up to star wars size expectations..

[https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Walker](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Walker)

<comment><USER40> Well, not that kind of "giant", but I was thinking about Ghost in the shell's tachikomas and fuchikomas.

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-IsysrqUlU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-IsysrqUlU) (original tank fight scene, may spoil it a bit).

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Man, now I really want one of those computer boxes. Looks like the boards are common, but the mil spec case might not be.

</comment><comment><USER42> ...and so Star Wars AT-TE idea was born? :D

</comment><comment><USER43> Ivan Sutherland worked on something like this. Seems related?

[http://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1983-six-legged- hy...](http://cyberneticzoo.com/walking-machines/1983-six-legged-hydraulic- walker-ivan-sutherland-american/)

</comment><comment><USER44> I love it. Tachikomas!

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm surprised no one had mentioned the "Spidertron" that was included the recent 1.0 release of Factorio.

</comment><comment><USER46> You know we're all thinking the same thing - where are the mechs?

<comment><USER47> Here: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/furrionexobionics/alpha...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/furrionexobionics/alpha- mech-pilot-program)

<comment><USER48> The "Hacksmith" recently spent time learning to pilot one of these, definitely interesting and worth the watch:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3xtVxPWf6M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3xtVxPWf6M)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Wild wild west...

</comment><comment><USER50> It's delightfully chonky and I love it.

</comment><comment><USER51> This looks like straight out of Aliens, loading bay scene. Fantastic.

<comment><USER52> Or Archer Crazy Cyborg vs. Space-Bot

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> All that money won't spend itself!!

</comment><comment><USER54> The things you can do when you don't have to tackle child poverty or provide healthcare for all.

Its probably because of my Euro socialist identity but all I see is wasteful spending.

<comment><USER55> The Eurozone (NATO) is protected from Russia and other aggressors by US military spending, and trades along sea routes which are kept open by US military spending, to list only two ways in which the EU benefits massively from our tax dollars here in the US.

If the EU decided to allocate a proportional share to their common defense, maybe the US would have less reason to be intervening overseas and could spend some of our money here instead.

<comment><USER32> Too much global warming, and some of that trade might divert to sea routes kept open (modulo Alyaska[1]?) by russian military spending...

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

[1] might this geomilitaristic argument fly as a US pro-environment domestic argument?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> That website is just awful, why is shit like this even upvoted here?</comment>


Reasons to expect the next 10 years to be more exciting than the last - <AUTHOR> http://www.hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/top-10-reasons-expect-next-10-years-be-more-exciting-last <comment><USER2> I can't wait for the next ten years -- it should be a blast.

Having said that, I don't think its going to be all roses. One commenter made the analogy that the previous decade was like 1900-1910. I kind of get that feeling as well -- rise of the mob, rise of anarchy, old structures not working like they should, vast amounts of change and upheaval in the air.

Overall, I think it's going to be awesome. But I would just be cautious, that's all. Not everything is going to be good, and there are going to be some really gnarly and ugly things we're going to see in the next ten years along with the great stuff.

I would note that the adjective "exciting" can be taken in many different ways.

<comment><USER3> My guess:

Expect raw capitalism to re-invade the world. However, this is not going to come in the way of political structure changing, but rather resistance to political structure.

It's not going to be headed by One Megacorporation by any mean. They're just along for the ride.

All the pieces are coming together. A radical ideology, a working knowledge of economic, a technologically sophisticated community, and a new kind of technology that the community can revolves around.

<comment><USER4> My counter guess: expect small and medium non-governmental _cooperative_ organizations to invade.

Currently the world is divided into those creatively make social structures happen (gee Bob, let's start a company -- who should we hire? gee George and Thomas, lets start our damn government on this side of the Atlantic -- how does one train an army anyway?) and those who subconciously seek to occupy them un-creatively (gee, should I become an Oracle dev or a Microsoft dev? Gee, should I join the revolutionary army or the royalist army?)

But the technology (DIY manufacturing) and the communication (internet plus math) and the culturation for everybody to become a little bit of the former is starting to seep everywhere, and there are huge payoffs for taking it up and organizing cooperatively(gee, why dont' we start GNU software and give it away instead of try to sell it?)

Oh -- just want to mention that I _don't_ see this as being nation state driven, and it is _not_ the big monolithic socialism of the past -- more a "free market socialism"

<comment><USER4> ... And in my more paranoid moments, I think that the reason public schools suck is that otherwise we would flood the world with self-disciplined people who can organize society for themselves and would grow very tired of working for and buying from the current owners of our world...

(yes, you can call me damn hippy!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The most exciting thing is that because of the accelerating pace of technological deflation, the cost of almost everything is asymptotically approaching $0.

Access to all information, global communication, books, entertainment (movies, tv shows, music etc), software, and even hardware are getting cheaper at an alarming rate. The entire body of human knowledge (art, history, science etc) is being interconnected into a global application that will be instantly accessible and practically free (in inflation adjusted dollars).

It will be interesting what effects this will have on our socio-economic system.

<comment><USER6> Umm, what exactly is approaching $0? Some examples please.

<comment><USER5> Let's see if I can explain it another way. The price of everything eventually reaches $0.

There is only a certain period of time from which you can profit from any particular good. If you make a hamburger, you have probably 2 hours to sell it before it goes bad and is worthless.

And likewise, if you create a cell phone, you have maybe 2 years to sell it before nobody will want it. And if you make a movie, you have a few months where you can sell the movie (in a theater) and make money from it. Once the movie hits the internet the ability to make money off it decreases (piracy will happen more in the future, not less). Make a new app for the iPhone and you have a few months where you can make money before a free alternative arises.

This is technological deflation. And the pace is increasing. The time you're able to make money is decreasing rapidly. Mathematically, as that time approaches 0, the effective price of everything starts reaching $0. Why buy anything today, when it'll be effectively free tomorrow?

<comment><USER7> This is bad economics. The price of everything does not trend towards $0. Specifically, goods that require a high labor input do not get cheaper over time unless they can be substituted with technology. Wages rise over time, so anything requiring a certain amount of labor will get more expensive.

A good example is personal servants. In 1910 a middle class family in England would be able to afford several full-time servants. Nowadays it's far more expensive, because the ratio between middle-class wages and minimum wages is much higher.

A similar modern example is education. The cost of education will rise over time unless we can provide the same education with less labor investment. But the cost of providing a given teacher-to-student ratio will go up over time.

<comment><USER5> * The price of everything does not trend towards $0.

I think you'd have to agree that any time you apply technology to a particular "problem", the cost of solving that problem goes down. As technology progresses, the problems become cheaper and easier to solve. And now I can go to Walmart and buy a chair for $5 instead of fashioning one out of oak. Or I can buy a $12 electric stand-up lamp, instead of burning whale-oil in a hand lamp.

So, although oak and whale-oil is never going to be free, the cost of sitting down and having light at nighttime, is essentially free at this point.

* A good example is personal servants.

This is not an example of technology. But alas, these days we do not require a servant when I can pop a TV dinner in a microwave and eat a meal in 5 minutes.

* A similar modern example is education. The cost of education will rise over time unless we can provide the same education with less labor investment

Ever visit <http://www.khanacademy.org/> ?

<comment><USER8> You miss lacker's point, labor intensive goods actually become more expensive as society becomes more productive. Check out Baumol's Theorem on wikipedia.

Basically, as technology makes us more productive in a lot of industries, the opportunity cost of work that cannot be easily made more productive become very high. So, we can expect the cost of things like nursing care to get more expensive over time.

<comment><USER5> I don't really argue with that theorem at all. Perhaps manual labor and and raw materials will always go up, while energy, information and technology will always go down.

But if nurses cost too much, once we start applying technology to that problem, we could probably find ways to dramatically reduce the cost of nursing health care. Eg, robots, tele-doctors, cheap home healthcare etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I grew up in the 90s. The shows on TV rocked. They are what influenced me to be who I am today.

I feel pity for the TV programming kids had to watch in the 2000s. What happened to all the brilliant writing? Pinky & the brain? Gargoyles? Disney? Animation with more than 2 frames per minute? We just got an avalanche of inane dubbing of japanese anime. "Hey, Ash, let's go into the forest and enslave little animal-looking things in balls and make them fight! I choose you Pikachu! Yay!"

The best thing to come out of the 2000s decade of children's shows is YuGiOh abridged :))

It can only get better from there.

Who's with me?

<comment><USER10> You're stuck in nostalgia-land -- TV has gotten a lot better over the last 20 years. And there's a simple reason for that. 20 years ago the only shows that had a plot line longer than a single episode were the daytime soaps. Now, in the age of >100 channels, DVRs and Hulu, plotlines are allowed to stretch over an entire season, giving much more room for depth and development.

<comment><USER9> I think you're not talking about kids shows. TV is definitely better in general, but animated shows really, really sucked in the last decade. (I mean shows for teens and children)

[http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/177-disney-will-stop- makin...](http://blog.movies.yahoo.com/blog/177-disney-will-stop-making- princess-movies-because-boys-think-theyre-icky)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a bad feeling about the next 10 years. 1900-1910 was a decade of globalization and affluence for certain classes and a big split between rich and poor, in fact rather like 2000-2010. 1910-1920 was not a happy period for anyone.

<comment><USER12> yep, we're due for a small WWIII (there are set of global problems - pollution, including green house gases, human rights, including ethnic cleansing, currencies valuations, intellectual property rights, Internet management - which can't be solved in the current framework of 180 states getting individually to agree to a treaty and after that actually obeying the treaty)

>10\. Political-Economic reorganization: [...] so I'm sure that people will muddle through and figure out some way to distribute it equitably...

he forgot

11\. rapid increase of number of countries armed with nukes

<comment><USER13> Well, he did say "exciting!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _By the end of the decade, expect voice and video quality as good as you might expect from HDTV._

Bandwidth wise, this is (at least technically) possible today.

<comment><USER15> You can download a full-length HD film to extant (but not-yet-sold) phones and output it via an HDMI port. The only problem is that doing so will burn probably $40 in bandwidth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Simply put: complexity increases over time ... this would infact lend itself to more and increasingly "interesting" things :D

GO HUMANS!

</comment><comment><USER17> The increasing power of motivated and intelligent individuals is a major force, which I feel the author missed. In modern times (particularly in the last 10 years) it has become easier and easier for the motivated and intelligent individual to wield ever-increasing amounts of power. Today, and even more-so in coming years, a few motivated people can wield power which would rival the super-powers of a few decades ago. SpaceX for example with their recent launch is on par with the early NASA progress.

I hate to reference wikileaks in yet another thread, but 20 years ago it would have been unimaginable that a small group of people could set themselves to rival[1] a super-power and be so effective at it. A similar argument could be made about Al-Qaeda, Anonymous, and many other organizations.

Further Reading: Vernor Vinge touches briefly on this trend and some of its implications in Rainbow's End.

Edit: [1] 'rival' may have been the wrong word. 'baffle'?

<comment><USER18> 9/11 could of happened as soon as airliners were invented and became a public transit system...

<comment><USER17> True, it _could_ have. But it _didn't_ until the organizational and persuasive ability of a small group of people could out-do the FBI, CIA, etc..

That being said, there is a lot more behind 9/11, and increasing power of individuals relative to super-powers is just one factor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Where is the evidence for better batteries (or capacitors)? Powering all the portable junk seems to rest on this hand wave.

Then again, I'm too pessimistic to believe in all this singularity stuff. Ironic that Vernor Vinge used the phrase "age of shattered dreams" in Deepness in the Sky, considering he is also associated with the singularity thing.

<comment><USER20> How is it ironic that a guy who wrote singularity fiction also wrote not- singularity fiction?

> Then again, I'm too pessimistic to believe in all this singularity stuff.

Uh huh. <http://lesswrong.com/lw/ym/cynical_about_cynicism/>

> Where is the evidence for better batteries (or capacitors)?

There's Lithium-Air on the horizon with a suggested 10x storage over Lithium- Ion, then there's the observation that large batteries once powered large mobile phones for hours and now small batteries power small phones for days, then there's fuel cell research, motion power (Seiko Kinetic watches, some footwear) solar phones (Samsung Blue Earth), body heat hasn't really been tried yet, etc.

<comment><USER21> As near as I can tell, the summary of your lesswrong link is something like:

"Some people disagree with me. But they're just playing games about social status!"

Which, I mean, is cool and all, but it's perhaps possible that maybe some people are just more cautious than others, for example. There have to be better arguments than fabricating someone's motives out of thin air and attacking those.

<comment><USER20> A summary is "some people disagree with things, but can't give any specifics of what things they think are mistaken and the evidence which makes them think that. I [the author] have to assume that instead of looking at the evidence and believing the most probable thing they can find, they are instead disagreeing for other reasons which have nothing to do with truth or accuracy or evidence based decision making".

 _but it's perhaps possible that maybe some people are just more cautious than others, for example_

Cautious is saying "I wont invest in xyz singularity technology until I'm convinced it works" or "I'm not planning my retirement fund based on living to 150 until I see people routinely living to 150 starting where I am now" or "I've seen 80 claims of new technology fall through, so this has to have extra strong evidence to convince me it's not in the same class".

Saying "I'm too pessimistic for this happy happy future world" isn't cautious, it's something else.

(Also: perhaps, possible, maybe, just, for example? I can't say why but you are strongly hammering into your post that you think someone is an idiot you have to speak down to. Me, or the article author, or both. That's the kind of social signalling you dismiss yet _you are doing it_ (and so am I. Everyone does).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Between increasingly repressive governments, a deep financial crisis that is in it's third year and nowhere near being solved, peak oil and a southeast asia that could turn _very_ ugly if the wrong events happen - I certainly don't want an exciting decade. I want a really boring one where as little as possible happens.

<comment><USER23> The classic (apocryphal) chinese curse:

 _"May you live in interesting times"_

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Still waiting for my flying car...

<comment><USER25> 5 years until we get there. I'm kinda pissed about my lack of time-traveling delorean. They said we were supposed to have these 25 years ago!

<comment><USER24> Actually, it's been even longer than 25 years.

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2550902895914120566#>

But I'll be patient.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _"Did your friends really enjoy that party? Yes, but based on their proximities to one another they split into 3 groups with little overlap. Maybe try to have separate parties next time, or set up some icebreakers. The following games and exercises have worked in similar occasions in the past. Sally has done some of them before so maybe she can organize."_

Michael...... Vassar. Just making a note of that so I can be sure I _never_ end up at a party at this guys house.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone notice how the author's picture is around 2.69 MB?</comment>


2 Biggest Mistakes By Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://amistakes.com/2013/04/14/2-biggest-mistakes-by-steve-jobs/

<comment><USER2> Well, that's pretty content-free. If you're going to assert that his biggest mistakes were essentially cosmetic (choosing the names "Apple" and "Mac") you should at least attempt to justify why they were bigger mistakes than e.g. getting John Sculley in as CEO.</comment>


YubiKey as a GCP Service Account Key - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dinvlad/yubikey-as-a-gcp-service-account-key-255b838a718a <comment><AUTHOR> As a fun weekend hobby project, I decided to solve a long-standing problem in secure handling of GCP Service Account keys and 2FA, and publish it as my first article on Medium.

Please let me know your thoughts.</comment>


Dino, an open source XMPP client - <AUTHOR> https://dino.im/ <comment><USER2> [https://about.riot.im/](https://about.riot.im/) seems like a great option nowadays. Mozilla recently switched corporate chat to it.

<comment><USER3> Riot is Matrix, Dino is XMPP.

<comment><USER4> Both are open source self-hostable federated chat. Also, there are bridges like [https://github.com/SkaveRat/xmpptrix](https://github.com/SkaveRat/xmpptrix)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Duplicate, this was just posted and discussed a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22185693](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22185693)</comment>


Over half your daily news is spin - <AUTHOR> http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/03/15/over-half-your-news-is-spin/

<comment><USER2> I thought the figure would be much higher, around 80-90%.

Maybe that's why nobody is reading them anymore?

Is the economist really the last bastion of interesting informative information or is it just me?

<comment><USER3> _The Economist_ interviews a lot of experts, all of whom have their own agendas. Which makes perfect sense. A sustainable journalistic organization needs lots of generalists; experts are only rewarded for putting their expertise to work. So the only way to get high-quality information is to absorb some opinion along with it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I actually stopped reading daily newspapers about two years ago. You can get the 'necessary' (differs for everyone) amount of daily information from the web - faster, cheaper and more relevant due to filtering possibilities.

Thorough analysis is in my opinion still best to be found in a select number of weekly and/or monthly publications. The time span involved leads to less noise making it. Finance & economics is the only exception I know of, notwithstanding The Economist. There are an immense number of really knowledgeable bloggers.

</comment><comment><USER4> This article is based on some faulty logic, mainly that a story started by a PR pitch is "spin." So if Paypal decides to partner with Bump to make a payment application, and the companies put out a press release, and a writer decides that is interesting, it counts as 'spin' in the study. Same thing if the White House announces something. Of course, journalists rely on press releases to find some of their stories. That doesn't make it spin. Things are much more complicated than that. Spin comes from simply accepting a point of view uncritically and not challenging assertions made by sources quoted in a story. Spin also comes in ways that aren't easily detectable, such as getting in with a source by being an outlet that is generally favorable to it.

Basically, this study doesn't mean anything. For instance, when Facebook decided to change its privacy policy in December it announced it to the press. Many published the changes and questioned their legitimacy and why Facebook was inverting its policy. But according to the study, all of those stores were "spin."

</comment><comment><USER5> When news-people use the word "spin" it's invariably in the same errand: To blame someone/something else for the fact that they don't do their jobs well.

Spin is your source biting back, and some of the sources are getting quite good at it. The response is to bite harder. Writing process-stories about how this or that was "spinned" is just whining.

Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Crikey and can't tell for sure if this applies to them.

<comment><USER6> _Disclaimer: I'm not familiar with Crikey and can't tell for sure if this applies to them._

Not really. Crikey caters to a very limited niche in the Australian market and is subscription only. It has a really strong presence amongst policy makers/politicians etc and is probably the best political newspaper in Australia.

Crikey is not read by the man in the street. To give you an idea, their subscription base is in the thousands (not the tens of thousands) out of a country of about 20 million (so ~ 8 million potential households or so). Those who do subscribe do so because it often has leaks/stories that the main papers don't carry.

It's also not a daily newspaper in the traditional sense, unlike the main newspapers. It's an email sent out around midday. You wouldn't subscribe to it to replace the dead tree that turns up outside your house each day. [1]

 _When news-people use the word "spin" it's invariably in the same errand: To blame someone/something else for the fact that they don't do their jobs well._

You're making a mistake here in assuming that the business of major newspapers is in producing news. It isn't. It's in producing entertainment. If it contains the veneer of news, all the better. On a mainstream newspaper, the news-people are doing their jobs well [2]; they're filling an advertising catalog with enough interesting looking fluff that people will pay for it and read through it.

[1] Although if you're reading Crikey and reading the mainstream newspaper your main motivation for the latter is potentially only to see what other people are reading.

[2] Yes I'm aware the Internet is killing major newspapers, but that's because there's almost limitless other entertainment out there, for free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If anyone is interested in a more academic (i.e., behavioral economics / information theory-based) discussion of "spin" or "slanting," I'd recommend this paper by Mullainathan and Shleifer:

The Market for News

[http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/shleifer/files/mark...](http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/shleifer/files/market_aea.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER8> No way !?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent> (Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky)

</comment><comment><USER6> Crikey is pretty much the best news in Australia, which is why it manages to make an online subscription model actually work.</comment>


Running a modern infrastructure stack - <AUTHOR> https://blog.barricade.io/running-a-modern-infrastructure-stack/ <comment><USER3> Hmm, this is the second such post I've seen recently that lays out the company's infrastructure stack and after a few points, it mentions how they've outsourced all their logging and alerting to DataDog who solved all their problems in that area. DataDog seems like a nice product, and I know nothing about it, but after seeing how ... aggressively they were marketing at re:Invent, color me skeptical that these stack discussions are entirely spontaneous.

<comment><USER4> > color me skeptical that these stack discussions are entirely spontaneous.

Author here, I suspect all this means is that Datadog's marketing is as effective as their product.

It's rare I give any software or service truly glowing praise. Rare enough that I'm pleased to do so at any opportunity I get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > To me, an orchestration system should control the entire provisioning > process, turning a plan defined in code into a production system. As a > result I (perhaps unhelpfully) don't believe anyone has built an > orchestration system

Stackbuilder!

[https://github.com/tim-group/stackbuilder](https://github.com/tim- group/stackbuilder)

The docs for Stackbuilder are still horrible, but here's an example stack:

[https://github.com/tim-group/stackbuilder-config- example/blo...](https://github.com/tim-group/stackbuilder-config- example/blob/master/stack.rb)

Assuming you have a compute fabric in place, running a script like that through the tool will provision and configure VMs for all the parts of a production system: it knows about Java applications (started with java -jar), Apache proxy servers, Linux NAT, IPVS load balancing, MySQL databases, Puppetmasters, and possibly other things. The fabric provides KVM for VMs, and BIND for DNS, controlled via some custom MCollective plugins. Configuration is done via Puppet, but Stackbuilder creates the Puppetmaster as part of the build. Application firewalls and Nagios checks get configured as part of the build, but i can't remember if it's Stackbuilder itself that does that, or some of the Puppet code.

BOSH is the same space:

[https://bosh.io/](https://bosh.io/)

Again, it requires an existing fabric, but that can be plain AWS or OpenStack (or VMware). It can then build anything you can write a manifest for; it operates at a lower level of abstraction than Stackbuilder.

<comment><USER6> Saltstack, with the cloud module, fits into this role rather well. It's more of a declarative setup and a discoverable setup, but I've found that to be acceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have you looked at Joyent's Triton service? They claim they can run containers securely on bare metal, since the underlying kernel is Illumos (but it can run Linux binaries and thus Docker containers). So the trade-off between isolation and efficient resource usage would disappear.

On the one hand, they don't have all the same higher-level services as AWS, like ELB, let alone managed database services. On the other hand, I don't think I'd sleep well running anything based on EBS ever again, since EBS is so notorious for cascading failures.

<comment><USER8> I got the chance to play with Joyent's Triton Elastic Container Service. Yes, the trade-off between resource isolation and efficient usage would disappear since they use SmartOS zones rather than Linux namespaces or cgroups to provide strong isolation between containers. They have forked Mesos[1] and added capability to run Triton containers as Mesos tasks[2]. Some of the questions which need to be explored:

\- Whether they provide some kind of built-in service discovery.

\- Whether all existing Mesos frameworks will support Triton based Mesos deployment since many frameworks make use of different networking modes, docker storage engine.

[1]: [https://github.com/joyent/mesos](https://github.com/joyent/mesos)

[2]: [https://www.joyent.com/blog/mesos-by-the- pound](https://www.joyent.com/blog/mesos-by-the-pound)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe I'm missing the right articles or I'm thinking about this the wrong way, but I can't seem to find any resources on how people run databases in these kinds of infrastructure stacks. I mean I have no problem understanding how I can deploy my 12 factor application on kubernetes for example and load balance to those, but persistence seems to be missing. Do people just use Amazons/Compose/etc Database offerings and don't worry about it themselves?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I sort of alluded to it in the article but didn't expand on it - we're doing a combination of things.

1\. Using AWS services where we can (DynamoDB)

2\. Provisioning more "traditionally" to instances, and managing those independently of the Mesos scheduler

3\. Experimenting with scheduler based solutions[1] (which are still pretty bleeding edge, but are promising)

As I mentioned, EMC are (to me) doing the most interesting stuff here[2] because they're leaning on a lot of existing production systems like EBS and Mesos' own scheduler.

[1]: [https://github.com/mesos/elasticsearch](https://github.com/mesos/elasticsearch)

[2]: [http://blog.emccode.com/2015/10/08/enabling-external- volume-...](http://blog.emccode.com/2015/10/08/enabling-external-volume- support-for-any-mesos-framework/)

<comment><USER9> I would love to see approaches similar to the attempt for elasticsearch for all major databases as out of the box highly available, that would make me sleep a lot better at night. For the mean time I'm just going to manage my databases traditionally (through a service or run by myself). It seems like its really a problem that needs to be solved, other than that I'm a huge fan of these infrastructure approaches.

<comment><USER5> Cloud Foundry has done quite a lot of this. Cloud Foundry is built on BOSH:

[https://bosh.io/](https://bosh.io/)

So you can write a BOSH 'release' which is a script for setting up a database cluster with all the necessary, like this:

[https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-mysql- release](https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-mysql-release)

However, you have to buy into BOSH and CF to make use of this

Also, most of the interesting and high-quality services are part of Pivotal's paid version of CF. Which might well be worth the money - many of the services are built by colleagues of mine, and i can assure you that they are of the finest quality! If not, there are a bunch of open-source contributed services. For example, a metrics service with InfluxDB and Grafana:

[https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/metrics- boshreleas...](https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/metrics-boshrelease)

A logging service with Logstash and Elasticsearch:

[https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/logstash-docker- bo...](https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/logstash-docker-boshrelease)

PostgreSQL:

[https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/postgresql- docker-...](https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/postgresql-docker- boshrelease)

I have no idea how highly-available and resilient these are, though. It's much harder to write an HA service release than a normal one.

<comment><USER10> Christ the amount of native advertising in these threads is getting annoying

<comment><USER5> And i'm not even being paid to do this! Sorry that it came across that way - <USER2> absolutely understand how it could.

In my defence, the Cloud Foundry services are the only serious attempt I'm aware of to package highly available database setups for deployment on your own infrastructure, and that's something I really want to see become commonplace. I'd be even happier if some other group came along and did it in a way not tied to Cloud Foundry or BOSH, Ansible playbooks or something. But as yet, as far as I know, they haven't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great post, and aligns with many of the practices we're following now. Also links to two other great posts from Segment and Joe Beda, and taken together the three are quite valuable.

On the subject of kubernetes and heterogeneous environments, kubernetes itself may allow a mix of instance types (node types) in a cluster, but as implemented in GKE for example it does not. I believe ECS has similar constraints. Our response has been to think in terms of separate clusters for services, edge routing, persistence, etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think these posts are not only good to see what other companies are thinking about infrastructure and the tools they use, but how many different levels of control one can apply to the problem of creating software in the cloud these days. Also the amorphous role of devops and new challenges and solutions that come up all the time.

I also appreciate the end where Ross talks about limiting the amount of innovation and trying to be practical whenever possible. Too many people are completely reactive to technology and using it only trades out one set of problems for another because it all has to work together.

The design on the blog and main barricade site is really awesome too. Great post!

</comment><comment><USER13> One question related to AWS is how to, or whether it is worth, segmenting access to resources for containers. If you are using single instances for each service you can use instance roles for this. These are great as they are temporary, tied to the machine, and most of the client libraries will detect them automatically.

If you are using containers, you need to create proper users presumably. Or you need to give all the permissions to the instance.

Maybe this isn't a problem in practice because people group related services together into separate orchestration clusters (i.e. a Kubernetes for each service grouping).

But it would be great to hear some real experiences on this.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great post. In terms of logging, check out Papertrail. They are super simple. Just setup rsyslog to point to Papertail, then update your services (nginx, postgres, mongodb) to use syslog.

</comment><comment><USER15> > [Logging:] I can't be the only one who thinks this area is lacking its > Stripe equivalent.

Can I ask you to expand on this a little? There are a bunch of cloud log management solutions, and I'm not sure what makes any of them Stripe equivalent or not.

</comment><comment><USER16> It might be worth checking out Canonical's Juju, we're working on deployable segregation (like security groups) defined in code!

<comment><USER17> Is anyone using Juju in production ?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why no Coldfusion love? - <AUTHOR> Honest question here. Coldfusion was the first language I learned for web development...in fact, I'm pretty sure it was one of the first (and most popular) languages for quite some time period. Don't quote me on that.
It's come a LONG way in recent years, and of course the Railo project exists now...so no more paying license fees.
I'm curious - why do I NEVER hear modern day devs talking about it or using it?
In my experience it's one of the most natural and fast (in terms of development time) languages I've ever used.
What am I missing here? <comment><USER2> I wonder a lot of the same things. I just started picking up CF since that's what we use at work. I consider it a character-building exercise but I don't hold out hope that knowing it will bring me enjoyable work in the future.

It seems a lot like PHP in some respects -- there's a lot of hacky CF code out there from the dark ages of web development, so maybe folks are just judging the language by that. Or maybe it's the Adobe association. They've got kind of an evil-empire vibe that I can't quite articulate (and could be imagining).

In 20 years, maybe CFML devs will be like those mythological COBOL folks who got lured out of retirement with huge contracts to prop up awful old enterprise systems once the kiddies stopped learning it.

</comment><comment><USER3> It was the first technology I learned for database driven web development in 2003 and I got plenty done with it at the time. It really made it easy to get started since it was simple to write and understand. But when I changed positions and stopped working in a "ColdFusion shop", I learned PHP and Python, and haven't seen a need to check back in to see how ColdFusion is doing over the past 10 years. I began freelancing, and people often want things like Wordpress and Drupal customizations, or for you to install a bulletin board, or want you to know Django or Flask. The demand for ColdFusion developers just isn't there so that knowledge has mostly been erased from memory.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think if the average web developer, who had never tried CF, took a look at how easy it is to interact with DBs in CF....they'd probably be a bit shocked at how stupid easy it is. Definitely a strong point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was heavily involved with CF back in the beginning version < 1, when it was an Allaire product, and at the time is had some good points, comparing it to perl, c or ASP of the time. But it has been blown away in nearly every segment but other languages and frameworks. Only think it might be better at is integration with flash, which no should care about...

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm curious about which bits have been "blown away" compared to other languages and frameworks.

I've done testing versus PHP for basically every sort of function related to web development (for my workflow) and can't think of an instance where one was better over the other in terms of speed...however CFML always won out in terms ease-of-coding (example: CURL -vs- cfhttp, db queries, REST API development, XML Parsing, etc.)

I can't say I've ever used Flash for anything on the web ever. I think it's nice that CF makes it easy, real easy, but I have never needed to use flash for anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Our internet ticket/support site is built in CF. We can never get enhancements or bugs fixed. We're just told that we don't have any cold fusion devs any longer, etc... Instead of getting some things fixed up, unfortunately we're moving to a salesforce system.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've given up worrying about it, think of CFML as our secret weapon OK?

</comment><comment><USER7> ColdFusion and XML are relevant. I have the proof: [http://i.imgur.com/QvtEhG6.png](http://i.imgur.com/QvtEhG6.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> HAHAHA, this is awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I talk about CFML all the time on my blog and Twitter. If you want to hear more chatter about CF, I suggest you start talking about it more too :)

<comment><AUTHOR> How can I find you on Twitter? Maybe I can join in ;)

<comment><USER8> I'm @bdw429s on the tweety pages and my blog is codersrevolution.com It's just as important that we're vocal outside of the little ColdFusion circles though. For instance, attend a non-CF conference and talk to people about CFML. I do :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure - because of some of the flack I've gotten as a CF developer I'm actually a bit self conscious about it. I'm glad you spoke up here!

<comment><USER8> That's not uncommon. I actually _like_ to tell people I program in CFML just to start conversations :) For some CF apologetics, see my recent response to a PHP programmer:

[http://www.codersrevolution.com/blog/cfml-good- discussions-a...](http://www.codersrevolution.com/blog/cfml-good-discussions- and-misinformation)

But to your larger point, non-CF devs don't talk about CF because 1) They aren't familiar with it's recent state 2) The CF world isn't doing cool stuff that catches their attention.

It's my belief that the more CF devs do cool (and modern) stuff with CF and then talk about it outside of their little microcosm, the more visibility it will get again and start to shake it's "legacy" label.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At the time Cold Fusion was the thing that made PHP seem like a better idea by comparison.

It'll have a lot of work to get away from that reputation.

<comment><USER10> Sounds like you might not have been around back then. PHP was the thing you used because Cold Fusion Cost $50,000 per server to deploy.

Apart from that, it really was the best of its breed (compared to PHP, classic ASP, Perl CGI, or Java Servlets).

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that was the main "better" feature :-)

And it turns out to have been the killer.

To bring back ColdFusion, you'd need some substantial useful tools written in it. The way PHP support is buoyed along by WordPress, forum software, photo site software, etc.

<comment><USER8> I actually happen to think the tooling around CFML isn't all that bad. (The link in one of my other comments elaborates more) Can you give me some examples of tooling that CF doesn't have? I've found a lot of people just aren't familiar with what's out there.

<comment><USER9> No I can't, but that I can't is pretty much the problem I'm stating: that people need to think of it as useful for things, not as "oh, that was that template thing they used in the nineties." I'm talking about public image here, not tawdry reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> David, I can't help but to feel like you are making a REALLY good point. CF only has a few outspoken advocates. Popular ones that I can think of I can count on one hand.

It's definitely not "cool" among the startup culture, which seems to drive a lot of the language popularity.

<comment><USER9> So it needs lots of "Show HN: Cool thing I made with Cold Fusion" and first comment lots of details as to why CF was _totally_ the right toolkit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Probably for the same reasons Flash and Dreamweaver aren't discussed at any particular length around these parts.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand the parallel. You mean, being that the three are originally Adobe products?</comment></comment>


Why I Refuse to Use Resumes and What I Do Instead - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/c8711736e116

<comment><USER2> How has plum.io worked out for you? What kinds of things does it test candidates for? I admit, from the front page: my impression is that it's less like Moneyball for hiring and more like Dwarf Fortress.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, that's funny.

The best way to use the test is to screen candidates to find the top 5 or so. Let's so you get 200 resumes. Instead of sorting through them all, you can have the applicants take the Plum.io test. Once the results come in, you'll have the candidates ranked from top to bottom. You don't have to make hiring decisions based on the result, but you can use it to narrow the five or ten you want to interview. That's the best use I've seen so far. It also helps to weed out people that have fluff on their resume. You'll know right away how intelligent they are from an IQ perspective and also how hard they work, in addition to other personality traits that will be useful.

<comment><USER3> _You don 't have to make hiring decisions based on the result, but you can use it to narrow the five or ten you want to interview._

It may or may not be wise to reject 95% of your applicants out of hand based on a psychological test [1], but it is _certainly_ a "hiring decision". Don't apply a selection criterion, then try to tell yourself that you didn't.

 _You 'll know right away how intelligent they are from an IQ perspective and also how hard they work, in addition to other personality traits that will be useful._

Yes, personality traits such as "willingness to jump through hoops, just to land an interview with the sort of boss who will ignore one's sales pitch and track record in favor of dubiously-relevant psychological tests." You've set up a very effective screen for this trait.

At least you do this up-front. I had a CEO spring a psychological test on me in a final-round senior-engineering interview, wasting more than a day of my time, not to mention his company's time. Absurdism at its finest: You go in prepared to talk about the business and how you might be able to use your existing technical expertise to score short-, medium-, and long-term wins in performance and revenue, and suddenly _your high-school guidance counselor_ shows up.

\---

[1] Ranked "top to bottom", no less. That _is_ disturbing. I would quote Mr. Spock and say that this phrase "reflects two-dimensional thinking", but it doesn't even get _up_ to two dimensions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Resumes are often flawed and imperfect, we get that.

But you might also think of the contemporary US style CV as a marketing document. By that measure, it provides valuable insights into individual writing, communication, and presentation skills. Intangible things we look for in good managers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I disagree. I think it teaches bad habits where you write in a "CV" style. Instead, why not have people write a one-page document with short paragraphs and bullet points for why they should get hired. This can include GPA, results, and experience, but I personally just want to see it in a different format than a dry, bullet-pointed resume.

<comment><USER4> >bullet points for why they should get hired:

The resume (CV used interchangeably) is merely a tool for guiding the conversation on background & experience. Treating a job-seeker as a supplicant is a turn-off to professional candidates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "or I ask for a one-page statement that uses short paragraphs and bullet points about why they're a good fit for the job and why I should hire them."

Sounds like a cover letter.

<comment><AUTHOR> In a way, yes, but with more emphasis on pitching why you're a good fit for the position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Excerpt:

 _Why do I ask for a one-page statement instead of a resume? Because I want to mix things up a bit. I want to find out what makes the candidate stand out for the position, and I also want to see genuine interest in the job being advertised. What I don't want is someone who's spraying resumes to every available job opening. That guy's not going to be a good fit for what I'm doing. But someone who's willing to write up a half-page or one-page explanation of why he's a good fit for the job, that's what I'm looking for._

Which is basically a resume by another name. I have sympathy for his position but everything I have ever read indicates that good resumes that get jobs are customized to the position in question, are typically one or two pages, and do not necessarily follow any particular format. Format varies depending on industry, individual, etc.

Yeah, I found job-hunting hard. I don't really expect to ever do that again. Normal jobs seem to be a poor fit for me. That's true for a lot of people. There are plenty of professions where a portfolio is the norm rather than a resume.

Also, the Fortune 500 company I once worked for gave me a battery of tests to see if I could actually do the things my resume claimed I could do, in essence. So his idea of testing candidates is not really new-fangled or something either.

Even after I was a company insider, I could not figure out the job postings the company listed online. I find the whole job hunting process incredibly illegible and loathe it with the burning of a thousand suns. I now do freelance work and have a few personal projects I am trying to develop. I doubt I will ever apply to a normal job again. That really is not all that strange.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that the whole process is flawed. In addition to the resume problem, job listings are ridiculous. They use inflated information about experience needed etc. and scare off people that might be a good fit.

<comment><USER6> From what I gather, that's true. When I was in GIS school, one of the administrators had an anecdote about how job listings were saying they wanted people with like 5 to 10 years experience -- with a product that had come out less than 5 years earlier.</comment></comment></comment>


CSS absolute centering for elements with variable dimensions - <AUTHOR> http://iclanzan.com/centering-variable-height-elements-both-horizontally-and-vertically-in-css/

<comment><USER2> This is a much better solution for non-trivial cases than any in the absolute centering article. The only competitor is the table-cell technique with vertical align center; but that requires more markup, and there is some tricky interaction with the outer display:table since table-displayed element follow different sizing rules (basically, you can't position:absolute them with 0 top/left/right/bottom offsets since their intrinsic size overrides such declarations).

In short: the ghost element technique works best :-).</comment>


This Fast-Food-Loving Ivy League Prof Will Trick You into Eating Better - <AUTHOR> http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/brian-wansink-cornell-junk-food-health

<comment><USER2> I see Mother Jones has fully bought into clickbait headlines.</comment>


'Fabric' would tighten the weave of online security - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Sept10/Fabric.html

<comment><USER2> Here's a link to the project website: <http://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/fabric/>.

It has a link to the paper as well.</comment>


Show HN: Ask Alex – Just, like, my opinion, man - <AUTHOR> http://indifferentalex.github.io/ask_alex/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting experiment/idea/project, I hope you get lots of messages, help lots of people and then tell us about it!</comment>