Your doctor doesn't want you to see this -- diagnosis using AI - <AUTHOR> http://symcat.com

<comment><USER2> How does this use "AI"? Right now it seems like a less robust version of WebMD's multiple symptom checker.

<http://symptoms.webmd.com/coresc/landing#/introView>

For example, I can click Arm -> Armpit -> Lump or Bulge and see the possible conditions.

Armpit doesn't even exist in your system. Which would be fine if I already knew how to self diagnose a swollen lymph node. Of course, if I didn't, I would still need a doctor to tell me what search term to use on your site.

I can understand if the system is early in development, but if it doesn't do anything for the layman why would my doctor care if I saw it?

<comment><AUTHOR> We've started with the most common symptoms, but are building it out more. We'll add the armpit, thanks for the suggestions!

The AI component is the fact that we train our algorithm based on clinical data from real patients (started with CDC data -- 500k at the moment and counting as people use the site).

I've had bad experiences with the WebMD symptom checker like most people I've spoken to. Try typing in "chills" and you get "Lyme disease, acne, Bubonic plague" (no joke).

WebMD makes money on advertising, so they unfortunately direct you to the pages that are going to keep you on the site for longer. You may find what you have using their symptom checker, but it is really optimized to keep you clicking.

<comment><USER3> Expert systems have a history of being used very effectively in this domain. Have you considered incorporating one?

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd love to incorporate a DXPlain or QMR as a starting point, but the true value of this is in learning from additional use/data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This title is some of the worst linkbait I've ever seen on HN. It reminds me of so many low-quality ads on blogs going "one mom discovered this trick that doctors don't want you to see"; please consider not advertising your site this way.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. One of the things I love about HN is its general resistance to run-of- the-mill marketing techniques like this headline.

In fact, it makes me wonder if the submitter of this article is an affiliate for the site this story links to. His only activity is made up of 3 submissions that seem to be related to this site <http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=cmonsen>

It's an interesting site but it's sad to see HN being gamed like this.

<comment><USER6> He is apparently the founder of the startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I entered "lump on testicle".

I was surprised at the results. I was disappointed that there wasn't some gentle friendly persuasive advice about going to see a real doctor quickly. Yes, I know there's a disclaimer on the front page, but I feel this is a missed opportunity.

You're going to tap into that hard to reach market of people who _might_ have a serious problem but who are reluctant to see someone. You have a great opportunity to educate them; to let them know that there's probably nothing to worry about but that early intervention is crucial; and that this is what happens at these types of examinations.

But: It's a really cool tool, and I look forward to seeing how it develops!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we have about 1000 symptoms, but that is an example of one we haven't incorporated yet. We'll add it, thanks for your help!

That's exactly where we're going. We want to direct patients to the _right_ doctor/level of care and are incorporating triage guidelines towards that end.

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, fixed that. The results still need some work, but it should be much better than what you were getting before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I used WebMDs version of this last year, and then the page started flashing "Seek medical help immediately", my appendix was taken out that night.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear it worked out for you! Unfortunately, for every person that are helped by medical information, there are 5 who are caused unnecessary anxiety. We want to give patients access to data that lets them know when they should be concerned and when they should not be concerned. Microsoft has a great study on this (try Googling "cyberchondria microsoft research")

We're still building out our recommendations, so you can expect ours to also alert people to see a doctor when appendicitis is likely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The UK NHS has a pretty good expert system, like I assume this is supposed to be.

I entered (but do not have) "bloody feces" as a test case, it gave me 4 options for symtoms that they think I meant, none even anywhere close. Hint: if they're black and stinky you need immediate medical help, if the blood is red and sparse it's probably piles - THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE.

Is this an alpha test?

<comment><AUTHOR> Re: NHS Direct, I've seen it and agree that it's a cool tool. It's pretty much restricted to triage and doesn't give you a great sense of what you have, though. Also, only helps in the UK. :(

There's a good paper on it that explains most people feel that it just directs them to a primary care physician. We'd like to offer value to those people as well and match them to exactly the physician who can help them (ie OKCupid for patients-doctors).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This has the same problem as hypochondriac internet forums.

I put in "tired" and got a list of: depression, diabetes, hypothyroidism, atrial fibrillation,anxiety ,multiple sclerosis, congestive heart failure and gastroesophageal reflux disease.

If I click on "increased risk," I get: valley fever, muscular dystrophy, hemolytic anemia, intracranial abscess, thalassemia, gallbladder cancer, polycythemia vera, and autonomic nervous system disorder.

Nowhere does it ask me if I happened to get enough sleep...

<comment><AUTHOR> The data comes from ED and outpatient doc visits so it "assumes" a certain level of concern from the user at the outset. However, the algorithms can learn so that less severe diagnoses ("lack of sleep", "caffeine withdrawal", etc) will rise to the top as more people indicate that is the problem.

<comment><USER11> Couldn't you just add a prior probability that someone has any problem? Going to the ER is much more difficult than typing something into a web app, so you should use your expert knowledge to adjust that.

It would also seem like a better approach would be to have a prior that's much lower for the internet and is never updated based on user searches, then continue hand-entering real records for quality control purposes. Otherwise, sooner or later some internet community (4chan, SA, etc) will get carried away and start manipulating your system to make everyone think they're dying of elephantiasis.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, and that's a very reasonable place to start for conditions that are not challenging diagnoses but rather explanations for common symptoms (eg too little sleep, bumped my knee, etc).

WRT abuse, we're going to require the log-in and user consent before collecting any data and allow people to maintain, in effect, their own medical record. We can monitor for abuse (eg someone who seems to visit a hospital thousands of times / day).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At a bare minimum I would except the site to default to HTTPS (with no warnings). Got an "Untrusted Connection" when trying to use HTTPS. That's not a good sign if you want people to enter personal medical information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion. User privacy will be critical and we are making that a priority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been thinking about systems like this because I met way too many pretentious docs and on top of that lots of docs misdiagnose and the older they get, the less motivated they are to stay up to date on new drugs.

One word of advice though. Hating on docs might be a good idea PR-wise, but only if you're going after patients who hate on their docs, but that's not your market, your market is the docs. This industry is always going to be regulated and that's a good thing. So, don't try to fight them, join them and help them make money. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to know this could be a money maker for them.

You also need all the data you can get. Data on symptoms, diseases, drugs, side effects, off label usage, ... You need the FDA, you need the docs and you need the patients. While docs are all about sharing data, they only do so within their community. That's the part that needs to open up. And stay open. The patients are the easy part, they know sharing data is going to help them.

Docs aren't against systems like what you're trying to build. Systems like this are already being used when you get PET scans. There're hundreds, if not thousands of spots on the photos and an algorithm helps them narrow down the results. It's a huge time saver and it obviously helps the patient. The money's in making sense of all the data and offering solutions.

You will also be dealing with companies like GE. An example. The docs are your friend, so let's say they measure your bone density and they're willing to give you the results, what do you think GE is going to do about that? You're in their market and they will fight you with package deals! You'll be up against Google as well because they will offer the docs a free version of your product, ad supported.

Your system needs more data. I tried it but the diagnosis was wrong, stayed wrong and eventually no diagnosis was given. You need photos. You need all the help and data you can get.

<comment><AUTHOR> The evidence suggests that 15% of medical diagnoses are incorrect. Being 2 months away from finishing my MD, I have a sense that this is not because doctors are failing to do their job, but rather, because medical diagnosis is hard.

Most people believe that their doctor gives them a diagnosis and are 100% certain of it, but in reality medicine is a highly probabilistic domain. There's a great article about a family's story with misdiagnosis in their child ([http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/07/how_f...](http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2011/07/how_facebook_saved_my_sons_life.html)). The diagnosis was initially strep, but it soon became evident that the diagnosis was the much more rare Kawasaki disease. Symcat is an attempt to let patients know about both (ie "This is probably strep, but you should continue to monitor because Kawasaki disease can also cause this and the only way you know is if your symptoms persist").

We would love to get more docs on board and we've been working with physicians at Hopkins to make this as useful to patients as possible.

Completely agree that this lives on the quality of the data. We would like for users to contribute their data (a la patientslikeme). We also are exploring partnerships with health care providers and data stores for getting additional data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think "House" should end with him and his team being replaced by a computer. It will need to be a robot (like the one on Lost in Space, ideally), not a web page, but symcat has the right idea. It would also be cool if the robot was a master game-player, finally putting House in his place.

<comment><AUTHOR> I love House. I'm not sure I'm ready to replace him just yet.

<comment><USER14> You do know this is the final season of House? Would you rather see them continue to turn Chase into a Mini Me version of House (getting scruffy, painful injury, ignoring protocol) or witness a battle for relevance against a robot with smarts like the Watson computer? I'll take the robot battle.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know that. I have to get out (watch TV?) more. Robot battle it is, then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it amusing that when specifying a symptom of "Mass in scrotum" the website sees the need to ask me if I'm male or female.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, we're working on that. :)

<comment><USER16> Ditto with everything related to menstruation-- although actually I have a sister/brother who's transitioning from female to male and is still menstruating. So, uh, there's some complexity there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Needs SSL badly. I don't want my proxy administrator to know that it burns when I pee.

</comment><comment><USER18> You are right - she doesn't. My wife, a 4th year med student blanket opinion of self-diagnostic websites for the general public is they are trying to kill their customers. And more and more I agree.

If you are ill and you don't know what's going on, see a doc (or a nurse practitioner etc). Uninsured (yeah - that's me till 2 months ago.) - then it will cost a packet. Which is good as you'll be encouraged to figure out what's normal for your body - which is what needs to happen anyhow.

Remote diagnostics is a hard game even if a doc is doing it. A rules engine just isn't up to it. It's not just a game of checklists. This thing might be better (It's down right now) - but nothing is as good as being in a room with the patient, having some EQ, asking questions, and being able to view symptoms with your own 2 eyes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry that it's down. Getting a lot of HN traffic.

I tend to agree with your wife (I'm a 4th year med student at Hopkins), which is why I'm building my own.

I think it's easy for websites to just say "if you are concerned, see a doctor" but I also believe that to be the problem. Obviously, if it were costless (time, money, opportunity cost) people would go see a doctor, but they in reality are weighing those costs. We'd like to make it easy for people to weight the risk vs. the benefits of seeing a doctor.

Moreover, for too many people "seeing a doctor" means going straight to the ER. There they wait for 4 hours (nat'l average) and are frequently told to follow-up with a doc anyway. We want to let others know that there are other options (eg urgent care centers) and let them know when such care is clinically indicated.

<comment><USER19> As a doctor I think it is a great idea and I think there are many sources of automation that haven't been implemented in health care yet.

Learning medicine is all about learning diagnostic algorithms

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We're Hopkins med students with a new startup. Would love to hear your feedback.

<comment><USER20> <http://symcat.com/conditions/lumbago> does not seem correct to me. I typed back pain and got linked to "I may have lumbago" which talks about mastectomy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be fixed now. Thanks for letting me know!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I just had my appendix taken out a few weeks ago and I tested this out with my symptoms, but it said that I had a 0% chance of appendicitis. I went to the appendicitis page and added two of the recommended ones (fever and bloated abdomen) but it only raised it to 1%!

Granted, appendicitis is pretty rare but I would've expected something higher.

On the plus side, it would've coached me towards Diverticulitis with a "Call 911 and go to the emergency room now" which would've led me to the right place/right conclusion (at one point when I was in pain, I'd thought I'd sleep on it but decided against it -- lucky for me, I didn't and went right to the hospital ... when I got there, they said it was about to burst.)

</comment><comment><USER22> This should be targeted toward two groups: doctors (site) and EHR vendors (API). I also think you should get some expertise involved sooner rather than later. Do a serious search and find some docs, including all the major specialties, that are both good at their jobs and sympathetic to your goals. No armchair MD's, use clinicians.

I have a side gig helping docs transition to EHRs. I started by helping an immunologist family member back in 2003. She's on her second EHR now. So far, her transitions have been the first and second most difficult of the bunch.

Right now it looks like SymCAT has the same problem as every EHR I've seen: the immunology side of allergy/immunology must be considered explicitly in your design, or the system will never work well. In immunology, you get weird sets of symptoms, you get multiple problems presenting, you get unusual systemic interactions and feedback loops.

For example, I just cruised through a few of the signs a less articulate person (not a medical pro) with common variable immunodeficiency might mention, along with a history of asthma. When I also _include_ my "itchy scalp" (because you offered it in the "related" section) a bunch of potential diagnoses are _excluded_. None of them were correct, but a few were on the right track.

You're asking people to come up with their own symptoms and have a clue about which terminology will work. In practice, a big portion of the difference between a good doc and a mediocre/bad doc is the ability to construct a usable history from poor reporting. Via interview. Patients often do not have the tools to make connections (or ignore them) between symptoms.

That said, good luck. It's a great problem. If you get this right, it will be huge. Again, I'd encourage a public side for marketing and a different kind of input, but put your money on licensing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions! We are fortunate to have some great advisors including practicing physicians, medical informatics specialists, and health care entrepreneurs. We're part of Blueprint Health, a TechStars-affiliated health startup accelerator.

You point to a challenge for any patient-facing patient decision aid -- getting the language right. We are building on the work of the U of Utah and building a robust consumer health vocabulary based on query data.

<comment><USER22> Great! Sorry for adversarial tone; working in/around a lousy template implementation today.

<https://twitter.com/aheadresearch> doesn't seem to exist.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hoo boy, thanks for catching that! Was wondering why we weren't getting any follows. Fixed now.

<comment><USER22> Still not fixed as far as I can tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm sure that there is a great service behind this link, but I completely ignored it at first because of the "your doctor doesn't want you to see this" message. Seems like the acai (sp?) berry ads that are scattered all over the internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha. My co-founder and I went back and forth about the right message for our HN title. I completely agree with you but he won the argument. Does anyone know of a good A/B testing site for HN titles? ;)

<comment><USER24> I also ignored this at first because of the title.

It's a good title for gossip newspapers. It's not good for HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think its worthwhile to add some more self-consistency tests to this thing.

You can enter symptoms in the first question, and then move on to the second question. At this point, regardless of the timing selected, some of the symptoms drop off.

In my case, at the end, "What are my chances of having..." reported 0% for the correct diagnosis. This is not good.

What is worse: the condition is in your database and described perfectly there, including the details that would allow for a correct diagnosis.

Did you try starting from each condition, and measuring how often you get the diagnosis right? Correcting for the prevalence of each condition as needed - in my case its a common one so there didn't seem to by any reason not to get it right.

Also, it would be nice if the conditions page would tell you how often this condition happens (if needed by asking age group/sex).

<comment><AUTHOR> We did a standard 80/20 training/testing trial. We found that the correct diagnosis was in the top 5 of the generated possibilities 50% of the time.

What will be helpful is to update the algorithm from user input. I'd be interested in hearing about your particular case. We use symptom/disease prevalence in the calculations, so it is usually great at getting common conditions. Maybe you can leave a comment using the feedback form on the website and we can look into why it missed your diagnosis?

<comment><USER25> I entered the HIV triad.

It didn't ask me if I was MSM and/or had unsafe sex previously. As such, there was no HIV seroconversion illness mentioned in the diagnosis list.

The recommendation (to see a professional) was correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think it needs a lot of work. The interface is nice but it's missing a lot of symptoms and rules. I think it is repeating expert system work that has probably already been done.

In it's final result it should make a mention of urgency in seeking healthcare and what to do in the meantime.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll be adding symptoms based on user input analysis and building out the symptom synonym engine.

True, there has been a lot of work in medical expert systems. DXPlain is an old one that tends to come up a lot in our conversations. We have several Hopkins medical informatics specialists advising us and I would say that our algorithm is novel.

Moreover, past attempts have attempted to codify a medical expert's knowledge (eg let's ask this smart doctor we know to determine disease prevalence). We calculated it from clinical data and can continue to learn as more people use it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Whats the algorithm here? This is pretty neat--the future of diagnosis.

design needs some work

</comment><comment><USER28> Very cool, and good luck.

Who is the intended audience for the symptoms and conditions directories? Are the numbers next to the entries probabilities of having that symptom or condition for the general population?

And not that it's particularly important, but this entry doesn't seem correct: <http://symcat.com/conditions/arsenic-poisoning> (it discusses bacteria rather than the element).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Honestly, Google. We need to make sure that it is easily indexed and understood by crawlers. Some med students have found it useful though.

Will fix it, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The description of lumbago (low back pain) is mastectomy: <http://symcat.com/conditions/lumbago>

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Thanks!

<comment><USER30> The fix seems to have been to copy the definition of Chronic Back Pain. But those have different diagnoses in your system (I'm seeing Lumbago as 14% and Chronic Back Pain as 10% for the same symptoms)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I would recommend allowing a person to add multiple symptoms up front on the landing page instead of just one. Requiring a postback and then having it to calculate the probabilities under "I may have" after entering only one symptom when the person already knows they plan on entering 2 or 3 more is a waste of resources on the system end as well as a significant delay on the user's end.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fair suggestion. The question is if "rewarding" people with a list of diagnoses from just 1 symptom is worth the cost of resources. My fear is that in the process of having people enter an arbitrary number of symptoms and then having to click a "next" button, they will lose their interest, but we'll test that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is awesome! Looks like phone triage might be enjoying its last days. What inspired you to start this project?

<comment><AUTHOR> We started working on this during our ER rotation and were surprised how many people were showing up concerned about things that were ultimately minor complaints (eg cough, sore throat). Many of them had no primary care doctor or just didn't know there were alternatives to the ER. Very little info on the Internet helps these people so we're trying to fill that gap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is cool, but to be fair, the Rogerian psychotherapist version of this has existed since 1965.

</comment><comment><USER34> Combine this with Siri, and you have version 1.0 of the doctor for the Voyager (Star Trek)

</comment><comment><USER35> There are some bugs. I looked up some mouth symptoms I had and the entry on Tooth Abscess talks only about depression: <http://symcat.com/conditions/tooth-abscess>

<comment><AUTHOR> Should be fixed now. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Machine learning guy here. I'm curious: which AI model you chose on the back- end?

</comment><comment><USER36> Thought I would mention in Mycin (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin>) in the interest of completeness.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is even worse than the GP I had in my teens. At least he recognised that my headache came from a primary headache condition, and wasn't Hay Fever.

</comment><comment><USER12> For some reason I can't get to work in Firefox 10 or IE9 on Win7. Please tell me this is not another webkit only site.

<comment><AUTHOR> We've tested on both of them. What's your error message? This may be a traffic-related problem...

<comment><USER12> I wasn't getting any error message but now I am. Must be traffic. Clearly there's a lot of interest.

"Application Error

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I tried the site with some minor nuisances in my sit-upon. It thinks I have Crohn's Disease. This IS like Dr. House.

</comment><comment><USER38> this is pretty cool. The "find a medical practice" tool is a great use of data on care quality. kudos for making this data easily accessible to the general public!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. We're adding more medical practices this weekend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> good work folks. keep it up</comment>


Google Guy, Please Check Your Math. How Network Bias Predicts Sexism in Tech - <AUTHOR> https://code.likeagirl.io/google-guy-please-check-your-math-7ec36cf8fa69 <comment><USER2> 'technical enough' << I think managers (of projects, people and products) have a huge responsibility to avoid the 'technical scale' trap that inevitably come up either explicitly or implicitly. It is an easy trap to fall into as the too-technical team member who is rattling off technical details as solutions in meetings is perceived as reducing the risk of the project when they may just be limiting it. Managers (or whoever is running the meeting) need to watch for this as it blocks others from participating.

</comment><comment><USER3> His reasoned opinion has been bludgeoned into obscurity because he "wouldn't wear the ribbon". Everyone move along to the safe topics which get us no further in improving understanding of each other.</comment>


Android 4.4 KitKat and the Secret Key Factory - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/12/KitKat-SecretKeyFactory <comment><USER2> This link adds nothing to the original content, which can be found at [1].

Neither mentions that this will not break apps which were built for an older OS and are simply run on KitKat. In order the the app to break the developer must specifically change the API their app targets to KitKat without changing which key generation algorithm they use. I wish the docs [2] mentioned this change, but presumably if you're developing apps you'll be following the blog.

It would be very cool, and it's certainly within Google's capabilities, if Google emailed developers using PBKDF2WithHmacSHA1 to notify them. That would close the loop and prevent anybody from being caught by the breaking change.

[1] [http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/12/changes-to- se...](http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2013/12/changes-to- secretkeyfactory-api-in.html) [2] [http://developer.android.com/reference/javax/crypto/SecretKe...](http://developer.android.com/reference/javax/crypto/SecretKeyFactory.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> How does this kind of stupidity get in there in the first place? When making a secure secret key, who in their right mind would decide to only use the low 8 bits?</comment>


Quacks of Quedlinburg Deserves Its "Board Game of the Year" Win - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/03/quacks-of-quedlinburg-review-brewing-bogus-potions-never-felt-better/ <comment><USER2> I've enjoyed my games of Quacks but I grew fed up with it quickly. RNG plays a huge role in this game, it is a push your luck gambling game first. If you play enough you will play a round where the first three chips drawn from a bag of twenty are white and add up to 8. You've lost the round and probably the game.

RNG overshadows the strategy of ingredients you buy. I can't tell if the ingredients I bought worked well together or I just got lucky. Some ingredients are strictly overpowered and others are strictly worse. The blue birds in set 1 that allow you to look at 1/2/4 tiles from your bag and choose to play 1 is incredible and you should _always_ buy it.

The catch up mechanic is interesting but favors experienced players. First, if you go bust and create a potion with more than 7 cherry bombs you must pick between getting money to buy ingredients or getting points (instead of both). At the beginning of each round players with fewer points than the lead player will get a boost to their potion. Experienced players will bust during the first 1-3 rounds in order to get more money to buy ingredients, and get a boost to their potion the next round because of the catch up mechanic.

It's a fun game and it has been getting a lot of play time because it is fast, but I'm not sure how much longer that will last.

<comment><USER3> Along the same lines in theme with crafting potions for sale, you may find Alchemists [1] enjoyable as it's a game of deduction however you can still press-your-luck once you've reduced possible solutions into a tolerable risk. This allows for very methodical play to be rewarded but still allows those who are willing to gamble for leg up which can be a fun dynamic to balance.

One recommendation if you do play is to download the companion app. The game in essence requires a third-party player to validate potions with hidden solutions for the other palyers. The app takes care of role so everyone involved can be playing the game.

[1] [https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/161970/alchemists](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/161970/alchemists)</comment></comment>


Stack-checking a program... that will execute in orbit - <AUTHOR> http://users.softlab.ece.ntua.gr/~ttsiod/stackusage.html

<comment><USER2> These arguments never quite make sense to me.

The reasoning appears to be "since technique X can cause problems in some circumstances, it can never be used in software for domain Y (usually avionics, space, or similar)".

However, obviously _every_ technique could cause problems in some circumstances. Therefore I conclude it's impossible to ship software into space.

Since software clearly is shipped into space, it seems likely there is some problem with the above argument. My suspect is the "could cause problems? Can't use it!" line of reasoning is oversimplified for the purposes of explanation, and _hopefully_ something better justified is actually occurring.

<comment><USER3> I would think the reasoning would be "pick the low-hanging fruit to improve reliability".

Checking a programmer's claim that a program will not run out of memory is difficult (sometimes impossible) if you allow heap allocations and arbitrary stack usage. You could allow either, if the programmer supplies a proof that things are OK. But with such a proof in hand, writing the thong so that it can be mechanically checked is "just work" (tedious work, possibly, but for this application, that is not that important). Because of that, why risk that such a proof is flawed (or becomes flawed after a bug fix), if one can just as well prevent the problem?

Of course, the checking code will be buggy, too. That is OK; it will be written by a separate team, and will improve over time, just as the code it checks does.

I guess that, even with these checks, the program will still have some watchdog timer, a way to remotely reset it, and a way to upload new software, just in case it runs wild.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I guess that, even with these checks, the program will still have some > watchdog timer, a way to remotely reset it, and a way to upload new > software, just in case it runs wild.

Indeed.

As for the reasoning: couldn't have said it better myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would note that determining maximum stack usage is similar to the halting problem in some cases. One must carefully restrict how the program is structured for this analysis to be valid. As is stated, any sort of recursion or mutually dependent functions are out, and the use of function pointers could also cause issues.

This approach provides a good baseline. However, I'd highly recommend empirical testing as well. For example, create a sufficiently large stack, initialize the stack with a known bit pattern and then check the high water mark after fully exercising the program.

<comment><USER5> I agree with your first two sentences.

Why should recursion be out? You just need to be careful with it. Not having an infinite recursion is basically the same problem as not having an infinite loop.

<comment><USER6> Since with recursion you can have a large but finite number of calls that could blow the stack, but not have the same problem with a for loop.

<comment><USER5> Yes, you have to account for that. Also, tail recursion should be fine, if your compiler is smart enough. (I guess since the program is looking at assembly, it couldn't tell optimized tail recursion from a loop.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Static analysis to prove that code doesn't run out of memory is cool. However, completely refusing to use heap allocation, because of the possibility that some heap-using code will run out of memory, is completely insane. The ridiculous things you'll have to do with data structures to avoid using the heap will introduce more bugs than this prevents.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can try convincing space companies that they are in error; good luck with that :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not to burst any bubbles, but the static analysis technique shown is capable of detecting recursion only in static call chains. It doesn't seem to even have any handling (even to say "warning! unhandled call!") for something like function pointers. Feed this a C++ program with recursive virtual functions and it will, apparently, return "OK!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, function pointers are... not allowed in space SW.

And remember, this is just a hack I did - I wanted to show people the things one can do with objdump. From the article:

"This kind of functionality is usually part of far more mature tools than... quickly-hacked Python scripts. Don't use this to send your spaceship in orbit :-)"

<comment><USER8> Still misses the point. A quickly hacked script can be really useful if it shows real bugs (where a recursive call in this case is a "bug"). There's nothing wrong with the development methodology: who cares how ugly the code is that found the bug as long as it's fixed?

The problem is that the mathematical problem being attacked is undecidable. This script only approximates a solution in the case where function pointers don't exist. Even _that_ would be OK if you knew about the limitation and the script flagged indirect jumps as errors too. It looked like you didn't realize that though, so I thought it had to be mentioned.

<comment><USER5> You could send in a patch.

<comment><USER8> ... that solves the halting problem?

<comment><USER9> You're using the Turing Tarpit here. You do not need to "solve the Halting Problem" in order to make useful static analysis software.

When the software can prove X, return True.

When the software can prove !X, return False.

When the software can't do either, return Sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I generally also trace stack usage by filling the stack with a fixed pattern and watching it in my trace probe.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but that's a form of dynamic analysis. To prove its applicability, you need to run it for every possible input (or a reduction that comes down the same thing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Writing code to execute in orbit seems interesting. Do you have any further suggested reading?

<comment><AUTHOR> MISRA-C, for starters.

Developing safety-critical code is governed by extensive guidelines (like DO178-B) which dictate lots of things, not just about code (process of development, testing, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just rewrite the stack function to use heap (eg, a queue) instead of stack.

<comment><USER8> The application in question disallows heap usage. In "no runtime errors allowed" environment like this, everything is pre-allocated. This is easy for data structures (though it gets hairy once the usages start overlapping). This including the stack, which is hard to prove bounds for with traditional tools. So the author wrote some scripts to parse the disassembly.

<comment><USER13> What about having the heap allocation actually use the stack?

<comment><USER14> That kind of defeats the purpose. Heap allocation is meant for objects that persist for the long-term. Stack allocation is meant for short-term storage, and anything that is allocated on the stack is lost when the function returns.

<comment><USER15> You can always allocate stack space (static or dynamic with alloca()) in main() before kicking off the application.

<comment><USER8> In which case it's isomorphic to a static memory block (albeit one with non- zero initialization costs), so what would the point be?

<comment><USER13> Well the whole article seemed silly after he said this:

"First of all, you can't use heap - not when you're in orbit. Why? Because quite simply, if you do use heap, and malloc returns null... what do you do? You can't ask the user for help"

This is the OOM problem and is highly dependent upon the kernel you are using. Not bringing the kernel into the discussion means that the discussion is just silly. There is not much of a point to putting the heap in the stack as you said, but hey like the author we are just getting some ideas out there without bringing up the kernel.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you misinterpreted the article: the target is not Linux/x86, its a custom board with the SPARC/Leon processor running a custom embedded OS (RTEMS), launched in space :-)

The article is just an example of the notions used, and how objdump can be used to enforce them. Linux is used simply for demonstration purposes.

In your average PC with Linux/x86, it is clear that you fear neither stack nor heap error - you just restart the app :-)

<comment><USER13> I think you misinterpreted my comment. I didn't mention Linux anywhere in it, but specifically talk about how when dealing with OOM you must first discuss what the kernel provides. On RTEMS can malloc actually return 0 or does it never return 0 and there is a signal or some other event that is sent out from the kernel? These are _the_ most important bits of information in this problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hugo Dark Theme Website Generator - <AUTHOR> https://habd.as/code/after-dark/ <comment><USER2> Of all of the Hugo themes I have encountered, I have never seen anything as dogfed as this. Comes with a complete documentation. ironically it is not even found in themes.gohugo.io It's basically freemium. Plus it's got additonal free theme components you can add like image compression, gallery, and a #@&3ng monero miner!

</comment><comment><USER3> Indeed that's the most complete theme ever written for Hugo, still muted by Hugo team because of the optional miner module included and their stupid policy to allow only github or gitlab hosted themes! They removed it from their gallery although they allow others that grabbed after-dark's source...

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome and innovative theme, so good I even forked it ([https://github.com/guitmz/after-dark-green](https://github.com/guitmz/after- dark-green)). It is the best looking theme around with nice features and support</comment>


How did I aced the toughest technical Interview - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@maniksrr/thoughtworks-coding-problem-decoded-3f29b03f5890 <comment><AUTHOR> This post is about how did I approached domain modelling using Object Oriented Analysis and Design. Problem mainly revolves around Tictactoe(one of board game) solution in Java</comment>


Videogames at the Library of Congress – An Interview with Dave Gibson - <AUTHOR> http://www.nodontdie.com/dave-gibson/ <comment><USER2> What is the point of a library if "plebeians" cannot access its contents?

1.5 years ago, in 2014, they received a copy of an unreleased PSP game, titled Duke Nukem Critical Mass: [https://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/08/dukes- lega...](https://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/08/dukes-legacy-video- game-source-disc-preservation-at-the-library-of-congress/)

Reading the blog post, it seems they are not competent enough to actually run it, and the best they could do was to open the main executable (BOOT.BIN, the decrypted version) in a hex editor. Some commenters even tried to help them run it, of course without any reply. 1.5 years later, the files are still not available to download, and that disk is basically rotting away somewhere in the "library".

Please, if you are a game developer, and care about game preservation, don't submit your games to that library. Instead, upload them anonymously to a torrent tracker of your choice. The internet will do the rest.

copyright laws suck.

<comment><USER3> I worked on the project at the Library of Congress that led into the Audiovisual Conservation Center in Culpepper that the article cites. Our sample data was Thomas Edison's first motion pictures, wire spool recordings from WW2, and LPs from the 60s and 70s.

You are correct that it is _not_ a lending library and was not intended to be. The LoC is designed to be a preservation group, closer to a museum than anything else.

Also - you correctly note - about the problems in "preserving" games (or any media) long term is the ability to see or play them. That's one of the problems I was working to solve. And at present, it's still not solved. The _only_ approach we found for media - video, images, audio - was to have a high quality master in a lossless format and then store the original physical media is a safe location free of corrosive materials (like oxygen).

When a better format would come out, you then had the option to convert the high quality master (2nd choice) or to go back to the original preserved media and try to get another master (preferred). Of course, that assumes you preserved the physical media properly...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem is actual getting those games preserved? Systems fade out and vanish, the hardware went extinct, and the graphics drivers- basically lets plays is all that will remain from the most video games. Its sad, but backwards compatibility is bad for business.</comment>


If you want to start a webco and don't code, learn UX - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/naval/status/21273137811 <comment><USER2> I've worked for a company a few years ago that during one period had a small (3-4 person) true UX team for a large development crew (had something like 160 java devs all in same building). They produced the wireframes based on client services' input, tested with users in a controlled environment, did the heatmaps, produced the wireframes for the dev team, etc. However, the company axed it along with the initiative to centralize core functionality. Why? The primary reason was that it was hard to determine how it was helping the bottom line and the centralization and addition concern over UX was slowing down the overall pace. I still think that people need to spend more time thinking about UE/UX and spending time improving the UI based on real world data. However, what will they axe money for first when the s--- hits the fan?</comment>


Will Google NLI Kill the Market? Linguistic APIs Review - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/google-nli-kill-market-linguistic-apis-review-yuri-kitin <comment><USER2> No mention of accuracy here... Are any of these services worth a red cent?</comment>


Ask HN: Why Do 'Right Wing' Sites Seem to Struggle with Web Design? - <AUTHOR> Or just software engineering/technology in general?
Because from what I've noticed, it seems like the more left wing news sites and platforms tend to be a bit modern in their design, and use a lot more interesting technology in their tech stacks and what not. For example, compare something like the Verge or maybe Vice to the likes of Breitbart or what not. Or perhaps the Daily Mail/Sun/whatever to the Guardian or the New York Times. The right leaning ones always seem a bit more dated than their left leaning counterparts.
Similarly, quite a few articles have said how 'alt right' counterparts to popular websites were a bit clunky compared to their alternatives, like Gab or Voat or what not.
So why is this? Why do right wing sites seem to struggle to attract the web design expertise some of their rivals get? Is it actually a question of how extreme a site/service is, with the more fringe ones on both sides failing to attract as much tech/design knowledge as their more moderate counterparts?
Has anyone written anything about this? <comment><USER2> Many creatives likely lean left, IMHO.</comment>


Ask HN: Status of "self-driving" vehicles for mostly *highway* driving? - irregular-john Five to six times a year, I drive 800 miles round-trip to my childhood home. 99% of this route is effectively a straight line. Every time I drive this route, I think to myself, "Shit, I'm not even that great an engineer, and I could automate this," and proceed to loathe the remainder of the drive. What are my options for automating this portion of the drive?
I am a big believer in the idea of automating this "boring" 99%, and re-engaging a human for the remaining, much-more-difficult 1%. <comment><AUTHOR> I have a 2018 Honda with Lane Assist and Adaptive Cruise Control. I commute about 24 miles each day between the city and my home on a rural highway. I've also taken a few 2 hour late-night trips up and down the Interstate.

First off, it is awesome. It largely works remarkably well. As I mentioned, I've made a few of those 2 hour I-5 trips, albeit late at night when the traffic is virtually nil. But pretty much the only steering I did was a quick jiggle of the steering wheel to shut off the driver attention alerts.

It was utterly remarkable. The car autonomously drove itself for almost the entire two hours.

But it has its shortcomings. It is not a relatively simply engineering challenge. Roads have to be relatively well-marked for the Lane Assist to work well. LA gets confused when the Sun is low on the horizon and shining just right into the sensor. Heaby rain and ice often interfere with the sensors. Sometimes there's a weird marking or an on-ramp and LA wants to drive me into a barrier. I keep a mental catalog of the sections of the highways where this occurs. Also, the ACC sometimes like to brake way, way too hard or jerky. Most of the time it's good, but sometimes it really lays on the brakes.

Now, when I drive other cars, I feel minor annoyance at having to steer and maintain a safe driving distance. It's something that's super useful and an enhancement to driving. But I wouldn't dare trust it or take my eyes off the road.

A truly successful system would need a variety of sensor inputs (visual/mwave/ultrasonic/etc). You would need software that takes the data collected by all those sensors and correlates it into a bigger picture and then makes life-or-death decisions based on many, many highly-variable factors.

</comment><comment><USER2> There are plenty of cars with lane assist technology and adaptive cruise control ([https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/lane-departure- wa...](https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/lane-departure-warning- lanehttps://news.ycombinator.com/news-keeping-assist-guide/)).

It terms of how good they are I feel like you'd actually have to test drive it yourself. Maybe rent a car with the feature next time you go back home?

<comment><USER3> That link seems broken but there's also this list: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cruise_control_syst...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cruise_control_system)

For OP: jrayn49 is right. Just pick a car with both adaptive cruise control plus lane keep assist. Quality of both features vary by model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't that basically what adaptive cruise control is?</comment>


The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer (1983) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html <comment><USER2> For reference, there's a Wikipedia page about this [1]. Mel is believed to have been Mel Kaye of Royal McBee Computer Corporation. There's a picture of him here [2], and the article the picture is from here [3].

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

[2] [http://zappa.brainiac.com/MelKaye.png](http://zappa.brainiac.com/MelKaye.png)

[3] [http://www.librascopememories.com/Librascope_Memories/1950_-...](http://www.librascopememories.com/Librascope_Memories/1950_-_1959_files/560800%20Librazette.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> We have all met someone like it. A colleague who now works in accounting because of his dislike of all modern programming practices is maybe not Mel- class, but I have yet to meet anyone who can read hexadecimal with his speed.

In the late nineties he apparently found a bunch of optimization errors in the compiler the company used by spending an hour reading through the machine code. I have seen him read machine code once, and it involved him scrolling by holding the down arrow and stopping every 50 rows for 2 seconds. He not only found the error on the first try, but also found a couple of potential bugs.

<comment><USER4> Where do I sign up to learn how to do that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I remember reading this back when the "Hacker Jargon File" came as a package with the Debian distro (probably on the second CD.) I wonder if the Jargon is still maintained at all. With the current trend of constantly-changing overloaded terms it'd be quite the undertaking.

(Yeah, yeah... get off my lawn!)</comment>


Venezuela devalues the bolivar by 95% and pegs it to 'oil-linked' cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/venezuela-devalues-bolivar-and-pegs-it-to-cryptocurrency-2018-8 <comment><AUTHOR> Consider the implications of a 95% devaluation. That means any foreign debt, which was already problematic, just went up by 20x. It means your iPhone, which was already too expensive, just went up by 20x. WTF.

'Pegging' currencies is a problem, because the country loses monetary policy controls, but maybe they're smart enough to realize that's the problem in the first place ... it's smart to peg it to something petroleum based as the economy is effectively based on that. Perhaps it's a desperate attempt to restore faith in the currency, i.e. it's 'crypto' and can't be tampered with, and attached to something rational.

This might actually be the first hard case use for a good crypto: to basically provide 'integrity' wherein the underlying political system has none ... of course, the only way it can work is if the regime has enough self awareness to recognize this and accepts the limitations of the crypto, and the fact it's an admission that they are so incompetent that they screwed up the entire economy and currency.

Of course, any smaller nation may still very well simply opt to use USD as it's considerably more liquid and just makes more sense for so many reasons, political populism aside.

<comment><USER2> How did Maduro's govt mess up their economy? It was my impression that the US placing sanctions on Venezuela was the tipping point.

<comment><USER3> Chavez/Maduro style democratic populism was based on expensive social welfare programmes targeted at the poor, funded by oil revenues.

Some would call this well-intentioned socialism, others clientist bribery. But it doesn't really matter. What matters is that these programmes were affordable only when the price of oil was sky-high. When the price of oil collapsed a few years ago, they became unaffordable.

At this point, the government needed to make substantial cuts to the size of the state and its welfare programmes to stabilise its finances. However, such cuts are just not really possible for this kind of government: The entire basis of its power is a huge web of political patronage and self-enrichment, sitting on top of a mass of impoverished supporters. Money is the only thing that makes the system work.

Thus, the government attempted to maintain its spending through borrowing and enlargement of the money supply. Their hope was that, eventually, oil prices would rebound enough to restore the lost revenue and stabilise the economy. As they waited, their domestic and foreign opponents saw an opportunity to make the situation worse for them through measures like sanctions. However, the debt and printing of money would have lead to financial crisis sooner or later.

<comment><USER4> >expensive social welfare programmes targeted at the poor, funded by oil revenues.

If they'd stuck with that things could have gone ok. There was way more disfunction and crackpot economics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If they just changed the law so you could exchange bolivars at whatever rate you wanted and dropped import restrictions so you could import/export what you wanted and dropped price controls and subsidies a fair chunk of their problems would go overnight. Instead more weird disfunction seems to be continuing.

<comment><USER5> They would also have to return expropriated companies (at least in the food sector) and farms to their rightful owners.

None of that would make up for all the lost equipment (to theft, to disuse, to misuse, to lack of maintenance). Nor would any of that encourage new investment (how can you trust that the government won't go back to its old bad ways?). Nor would it bring back all the population that has left for Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil.

But all of what you said and all of what I listed, together, would be a good start. It would also help a great deal to abandon all the violent rhetoric, allow truly free and fair elections, allow the opposition to win when they do, and so on and so forth.

Argentina did all of what you said (well, they still have some subsidies), and it wasn't quite enough by itself. The primary budget deficit is still very large and the immediate driver of inflation there.

Large welfare state + underdeveloped economy + expropriation == no trust/confidence. Or, how to destroy your country in just a few steps and a just few years.

<comment><USER6> Argentina has unfortunately not changed is monetary emision rates even though they claim to have chanced monetary policy. Argentina is headed for disaster because precisely, it admires Venezuela.

<comment><USER5> Well, no, the _current_ Argentine government decidedly does not admire Venezuela's model (the preceding government did admire Chavez/Maduro). Their problem is that to rein in inflation they must cut the welfare state way down, including a variety of subsidies (electric, ...). Removing those subsidies is known there as a "tarifazo", which means "massive rate increase", and has caused previous governments to fall, which is why the current government is so scared to do it.

Macri's government hopes that they can slowly adjust things rather than go the shock therapy route -- if all goes well, it could work, but both approaches are risky, and it could all end badly again either way.

<comment><USER6> That's the narrative but the results show still rampant inflation, still high government spending, and same monetary base expansion. The current government is economically very similar to the previous, and substituted hiperinflation with external debt

<comment><USER5> I mean, the Macri government is clearly not at all like the Fernandez government. The problems you list are real, and they are making mistakes as they always do, but the Fernandez govt really did want to go the way of Venezuela. The Macri government just doesn't have the oomph to push through the reforms they want -- whether for lack of seats in the congress or lack of conviction or fear of a repeat of 2001, I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One important thing to note is that the _official_ rate that has been devalued, from 250,000 Bolivares/USD to 6 million Bolivares/USD.

The black market rate is already reportedly (as of the past couple of days), 6 million - 9 million Bolivares/USD.

<comment><USER8> There was a great episode of Planet Money a few weeks ago about the unofficial exchange market and how the government came after them and threaten their lives.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/03/635521893/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/03/635521893/episode-858-venezuelas- fugitive-money-traders)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> According to the article, the new Venezuelan sovereign bolívar is pegged to a cryptocurrency petro, which itself is linked to movements in oil prices. I know the basics of crytocurrency, but I don't understand how this works. Could somebody explain?

<comment><USER10> I say this with no sarcasm: I'm pretty sure it doesn't. I'm pretty sure this very much is just razzle-dazzle, hoping to fool people for just a little while longer.

Contrary to popular belief, even trotted out here on HN in about half our discussions on BitCoin, currencies are _not_ just something that some government said somewhere is worth whatever. They need to back to something. US currency backs to the fact that the US law enforcement and potentially military (if you're big enough) will come after you if you fail to pay taxes, which, while perhaps a bit brutalist and in violation of some of our more delicate follow-citizen's tastes, turns out to be enough to keep an economy humming along.

If the Venezuelan government is incompetent enough to have that same delusional view of how currency valuation works... well... behold its results.

<comment><USER11> > They need to back to something

Like, say, backed by international oil market?

<comment><USER10> Agreeing with others, I don't particularly trust Venezuela's own cryptocurrency to be an adequate backing for Venezuela's currency. There's still circularity there.

But I'd also add that there's more to backing that just saying "And this currency is backed by that." Go ahead; try it. Scribble some badlogninagain bucks down on some paper and try to get people to accept them for goods and services instead of dollars. When they complain, tell them that your badloginagain-bucks are backed by US dollars and see if that satisfies them. It shouldn't. For badloginagain-bucks to be backed by dollars, you need to be able to _produce_ dollars in exchange for them. That's what a backing is; something you can always exchange the currency for.

Exchanging dollars for people not busting down your door and taking your stuff is certainly more abstract that exchanging it for silver, but it seems to be functional. Exchanging Venezuelan currency for Venezuelan cryptocurrency doesn't seem to be making progress. At this point my faith and credence in that government is quite rationally zero that they won't screw with something under their control, which is, you may note, concretely backed by the rest of the world by the fact that the only assets in the world worth anything are also all the assets not under their control. I'll believe it's pegged to international oil markets when it's actually stabilized the currency and people have demonstrated the ability to convert the newest bolivars into oil concretely at will.

<comment><USER12> It worked for Tether. /s

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So this buys the economy somewhere between 1-3 months while everyone figures out how to game the new system effectively. Then they'll change it all up again!

</comment><comment><USER14> So the government just begged bolivar to the government's own cryptocurrency, the petro.

We already know that this does nothing.

Venezuelan government refuses to reduce the government spending to match the government income. In fact they just announced 3,000% wage increase at the same time. No matter what the name of currency, as long as it's Venezuelan government issued currency, it's going to lose value.

There is no way this peg will hold. They just alter the way pedro is calculated or do other shenanigans.

Is there betting market for this? I want to bet several thousands against pedro/bolivar.

<comment><USER15> Presumably there's some way to take out bolivar-denominated loans?

<comment><USER14> Incidentally that would have prevented Venezuelan currency and debt crisis in the first place.

I seriously doubt that any bank would give out bolivar-denominated loans with fixed interest rate that is below 100%. I could take a two year debt with 10% interest easily.

Venezuelans are already earning more gold farming RuneScape than actually farming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> However this turns out it's going to provide an interesting and multifaceted case study for economists in the future. As far as I'm aware pegging currencies tends not to work well unless there's consensus among countries (see bretton woods system). Further, pegging to an "oil-linked" currency sounds dubious at best. Even ignoring the CC aspect of this; I'm deeply curious to see what falls out.

</comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone have a cogent explanation of why they chose to go this way instead of a somewhat orderly default on debts denominated in foreign currencies? It seems to have worked for Argentina, so I'm always surprised when countries don't go that way. (Looking at you, Greece)

</comment><comment><USER18> This article is terrible.

 _> Devalue Venezuela's currency, the bolivar, by a whopping 95%. The new currency will be renamed the "sovereign bolivar."_

 _> Instead of an exchange rate of 250,000 bolivars per US dollar, it will increase to around 6 million._

This is not a devaluation by 95%. The math doesn't add up.

 _> The petro is valued by the Venezuelan government at around $60, or 3,600 sovereign bolivars._

So 60 sovereign bolivars are one USD? Previously it said _6 million_ sovereign bolivars are one USD.

 _> To make things more complicated, the new sovereign dollar will also be re- denominated, which will remove about five zeros from its unit measurement._

Oh, okay. I assume they mean sovereign bolivar, not dollar (did nobody proofread this?). That makes the above point make more sense.

 _> At the same time, President Maduro also announced a huge 3,000% increase to the minimum wage._

 _> So in the new re-denominated currency, a person on the minimum wage will receive around 1,800 sovereign bolivars a month, instead of 1.8 million._

Is that 3000% increase in bolivars? In real terms? And again, I can't see the math adding up, even taking the supposed 95% devaluation.

And I haven't gone into any of the cryptocurrency stuff...

There's probably a lot of stupidity going on in this new Venezuelan policy, but that article makes a total mess of it on top of it. It's context-free reporting, by somebody who doesn't seem to care to understand what they're reporting, and the numbers just don't fit together.

The best I can make of it is:

1\. The Venezuelan government still refuses to let the Bolivar float freely, which means that black market currency exchanges will continue to operate.

2\. The Venezuelan government is changing the official exchange rate of Bolivar to USD.

3\. The Venezuelan government is _replacing_ the bolivar by the sovereign bolivar, where 1 sovereign bolivar = 100,000 bolivar.

4\. They're increasing the minimum wage by an effective factor 100 in domestic currency. (The value of the minimum wage internationally will change by a different amount -- and not 3000% -- because of point 2, but any numbers you're getting out of the article are likely moot anyway because of black market exchanges.)

5\. They're introducing some weird cryptocurrency gimmick that isn't explained properly.

Edit: And here's a Reuters article with different numbers for the minimum wage (stating a 3 mio baseline as opposed to 1.8 mio.): [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela- economy/venezue...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela- economy/venezuelan-shopkeepers-alarmed-by-maduros-latest-economic-moves- idUSKBN1L30N4)

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone have the current Black market value of a 1 USD in Bolivares? Or a link to where I can find out?

<comment><USER20> [https://dolartoday.com/](https://dolartoday.com/)

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

<comment><USER19> Thank you

For anyone interested, after the devaluation we still have:

Official rate: 10V to 1$ Black market: 60V to 1$

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > According to Bloomberg, the latest measures are unlikely to provide a quick > fix for the economy, and there are risks that inflation will climb even > faster

The only thing that would help Venezuela is Maduro's government falling, the socialist experiment being called off and a lot of international help.

It's not just the corruption, you can't really cap the prices for the sake of socialism and pretend that business won't fail.

</comment><comment><USER22> Anyone know where you can buy Petro? News sounds incredibly bullish to me.

<comment><USER23> POTUS made that illegal for US citizens

<comment><USER24> Not everyone on HN is from the USA..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The conspiracy theory version of why the Venezuela economy is a mess, is that they started selling oil priced in something other than dollars:

[https://www.businessinsider.com/venezuela-publishes-oil- pric...](https://www.businessinsider.com/venezuela-publishes-oil-prices-in- yuan-2017-9)

The other leaders to risk doing that were Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi.

Selling oil for anything besides dollars is the real line in the sand the US will not let any country cross.

<comment><USER12> The timing seems off on that. That article dates from Sep 2017, at which point the Venezuelan economic crisis had been going for 7 years, and been serious for 4. Inflation was 69% by 2014, well before this announcement.

I think a more likely explanation is that Chavez instituted a number of policies that were extremely friendly to consumers and hostile to producers, with the result that the producers all _left_ , which meant there were no goods for consumers to buy, which sent prices through the roof and instituted a (un)healthy black market.</comment></comment>


AMD cpu bug (by Matthew Dillon) - <AUTHOR> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.dragonfly-bsd.kernel/14518

<comment><AUTHOR> for a longer description of the problem see this (amazing work): <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.dragonfly-bsd.kernel/14471></comment>


Anthos support for multi-cloud is generally available - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/anthos-for-aws-is-now-ga <comment><USER3> So what does "Google Cloud's fully managed Anthos" do in non-marketing speak? I'm not exactly sure what a "multi-cloud and hybrid application platform" providing "agility and flexibility" is supposed to do for me as a "born-in- the-cloud digital native or a traditional enterprise."

<comment><USER4> From my understanding it's a managed Istio service.

<comment><USER5> Thank you. Searching for anthos and istio got me the info I needed. Istio, when finally configured, is pretty fantastic. Leveraging it for multi cloud clusters is already possible so a service that streamlines that feels like a natural step.

Terrible blog post. Had no clue what I was being sold until you pointed it out.

<comment><USER6> > Had no clue what I was being sold until you pointed it out.

Unfortunately not even Googlers are immune to the draw to elite signalling by drowning your copy in industry jargon without ever getting to the point.

I see this a lot on hastily-composed GitHub Readmes and "rocket-launch" startup landing pages, but it's a shame it also happens to a company whose name is globally recognized.

<comment><USER7> > the draw to elite signalling

I don't _feel_ like that's why we all sometimes do this (though that might be an inside view and I might really be signalling along with everyone else.)

I feel like the internal thought-process that motivates this kinds of inside- baseball writing is twofold (depending on the stage of the project):

\- early on: "the only people who could possibly care about something this new are people with the _exact_ problem it solves, who stumbled onto it when jamming google full of enough keywords that there are zero other results; they already know what this does before reading; and they just want to confirm that it isn't fatally flawed. They're deploying this project _in anger_. (Of course they are; if they didn't desperately need it, they'd never rely on something so early in development!)"

\- later on: "We're selling this to customers. We've picked a specific target market that has specific use-cases and needs, and we try to think about things the way _they_ think about things 100% of the time, because talking to _those people_ is what gets us money. We don't do any inbound marketing—we aren't trying to passively educate anyone outside our target market to get them interested. We're having enough trouble capturing the pre-qualified part of our funnel with in-person conversations. Converting people who haven't even fallen into the funnel yet? Who cares! They might get converted by accident if someone who already uses us takes the time to explain our product to them; but otherwise, the only time they'll hear about us is when we reach out to slowly warm them up for a million-dollar enterprise deal."

<comment><USER8> Or they don't care about what you (the engineer) thinks as long as your non- engineer manager is impressed and convinced your team needs it to grow.

<comment><USER6> When the manager asks the engineering team about their thoughts on the product, the marketers are banking on the engineers to say anything above an "ehh, it could work I guess..." so the manager makes the purchase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's quite weird that a Google blog post about a highly technical product doesn't include a link to the actual technical details: [https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview](https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview)

<comment><USER10> They are trying to compete with Azure, which is sold in the boardroom - not to developers.

I know of at least one company where they had to blacklist AWS and GCP on corp cards because developers were still trying to use them despite the company having signed a multi-hundred million dollar deal with Azure.

<comment><USER11> >They are trying to compete with Azure, which is sold in the boardroom - <USER2> to developers.

Looks like an Oracle style approach (couldn't find that famous Larry's quote that developers don't grasp the concerns what he is discussing with the C-suites), and this GCP offering is the first big one under the new GCP leadership transplanted from Oracle. This is probably the new look and feel of GCP going forward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "At Plaid we provide real-time data analysis of over 6.8 billion online users" err what? Not even Facebook has 6.8 billion users. Or probably not even CloudFlare. Is this part of the Visa acquisition? Maybe they'd have that many users but I still kind of doubt "online users."

<comment><USER13> And they really don't provide real-time data analysis of 6.8 billion users. At any given time, there aren't even 6.8 billion people _awake_ on the entire planet. Their real-time analysis would be on a vastly smaller subset. Is this too much of a nitpick?

<comment><USER14> Them being asleep is still realtime data. The realtime aspect comes from finding out as soon as they wake up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd also position this as being up against openshift which is in the managed k8s/hybrid cloud space.

Hybrid cloud is definitely a thing as you scale up. For a big enterprise with a significant base load you're paying 5-8 times the cost of on prem for that in a public cloud, so being able to run your own infra for production base load but scale up to the public cloud for dev and burst is a real win.

<comment><USER16> The direct competitors to Anthos are whatever the other cloud vendors do here.

Anthos and OpenShift are trying to create a 'PaaS-lite', or maybe Orchestration++ is a way to think about it.

Alot of the K8s vendors are trying to build a complete experience: for both operators and developers. You can use the CNCF's capabilties (K8s, Prometheus, Istio, etc) to build a container orchestration and developer experience.

(Disclaimer - work in this area). Maybe the difference is that OpenShift is quite tightly bound, whereas Anthos is more modular. The complexity is how all the elements are plugged together and the overall life-cycle.

NOTE: Weaveworks builds application platforms built from CNCF technology so I definitely have 'opinions' in this space

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anthos is just managed Kubernetes.

And I thought I was being tinfoil-hat-y about Google's true motives in pushing Kubernetes so hard and the benefits of it being so popular. It enabled the first true cross-cloud experience, that Google just happens to be the creator of and have control over (no matter how much you hear that it's "community driven", the only project I've seen that is actually lives up to that is Rust). Yeah, Kubernetes is massively useful and I'm grateful, but that doesn't stop me from being very cynical about it -- the complexity and learning curve is a consultant's dream (disclaimer: I'm a consultant) and at this point it looks like a 5d chess move to improve their cloud offering by basically backdooring themselves into every single other cloud and the headspace of millions of developers.

Condolences to Crossplane[1]. Hyperbole yes, but I do not envy any companies that have to try and compete with Google in the current regulatory (captured) marketplace. If they didn't buy you but entered your space it's gotta be bad news on some level.

Luckily, the fact the kubernetes is open source and at least in some part community driven (i.e. the wide ecosystem of plugins) means that companies like Crossplane can still exist if they work hard to out-sell and out-market google, and there is a _slim_ possibility that the barrier to creating a "cloud platform" being lowered so much might mean that all the little mom & pop shop VPS providers and bare metal providers will get in on it, and force the bigger guys to compete on price _somewhat_ (we all know big enterprise is going to go straight to AWS/GCP/Azure anyway).

[EDIT] - I just realized that while I was harsh on Crossplane, they arguably just became an _extremely_ valuable acquisition target for every other large cloud provider that wants to buy their way in. Probably not Amazon but Azure/IBM/Orcale/etc probably.

[1]: [https://crossplane.io/](https://crossplane.io/)

<comment><USER18> I'm wondering how native Anthos integrate with other clouds. They are standardizing on Kubernetes level, i.e. you can schedule pods from on-prem GKE to AWS cluster. But are you able to use RDS similar to how k8s config connector makes CloudSQL available via CRs? Crossplane has the advantage of being equally integrated to all clouds.

Also, if the point of multi-cloud was vendor lock-in, aren't you now GCP locked-in when you use Anthos? It's not open source and may die any time like other Google projects.

<comment><USER17> Sorry I think I might be misunderstanding the specifics (since you work at crossplane) of the difference, but at this point I would assume that Google can dedicate engineers to taking any approach Crossplane takes. Basically the answer to how any of this will work is CRDs and Operators -- it becomes a grind of ensuring good ergonomics, good integration and marketing after that.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Crossplane introduces CRDs that paper over the differences between the provider (ex. `OmniDatabase`), rather than just offering CRDs that correspond to a platform's offering (ex. `RDSDatabase`) though I assume you can access those too, and I don't see why Google won't do _both_. That's the thing about being a monopoly player in the space -- unless a smaller player is doing something _so next level_ that you can't copy it, you can just offer underpriced mediocrity until they fold (forgive the cynicism and hyperbole).

Crossplane has a huge head start and probably the least buggy implementation of this concept, and was one of the first to innovate in this field (I saw a few talks from previous kubecons) so wishing you good luck in the future!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think that's a fantastic strategic move, even though I'm usually not a GCP/ Google fan. The idea that you have to constantly disrupt yourself, and even have to cannibalize your own revenue in business to stay alive, is well understood. An idea, that in my opinion, is generally not understood at all even by CEOs. Most would rather hold on to their last penny until getting disrupted and becoming insignificant.

</comment><comment> awinter-py > In business as in life, change is constant and unpredictable. When building > the platforms to power your organization, you can't be limited by > yesterday's technology decisions. Nor can the systems you create today > constrain your ability to act tomorrow.

was expecting 1st paragraph to be 'anthos is a'

But I like this too, it's like the philosophy cult ads on the subway

the first customer they quote is a 200 yr old bank. 'in my day kubernetes was a lunch place on stone st'

</comment><comment><USER20> "In business as in life, change is constant and unpredictable. When building the platforms to power your organization, you can't be limited by yesterday's technology decisions. Nor can the systems you create today constrain your ability to act tomorrow. In times of uncertainty, you need an architecture that gives you the agility and flexibility you need to help you weather change—or even take advantage of it."

Who are they marketing to??? I feel like I stumbled onto a well written blog aimed at SEO.

<comment><USER7> CTOs and CIOs of non-technology companies with IT departments, departments which have a bunch of legacy stuff they're just getting around to deciding how to deprecate/replace.

That's the target customer for a lot of the stuff the major cloud providers do, actually. It's the whole focus of IBM's cloud hosting (Softlayer.) It's a majority of what Azure does. Even on AWS, look at any services that aren't pure automagic-IT-for-devs services, but are instead e.g. data-science services (Redshift), or pure ops services (AWS Storage Gateway), or even "IT for non-developers" services (AWS WorkSpaces!), and you'll see the same "CTO- ese."

Any IT service that isn't grown through groundswell support by devs, is grown by top-down partner-choice by a CTO.

<comment><USER20> Maybe but I really dont think AWS comes off this way. To me, AWS seems like this massive complex system with a million overlapping services that engineers like. What if cloud adoption is bottom up and not top down?

<comment><USER21> AWS is sold bottom-up so Google/Oracle/IBM/Cisco/etc. are focusing on the top- down "let's force-feed steaks and strippers to the CIO until he signs" channel. Ultimately some companies buy one way and some buy the other but they will all adopt cloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

I'll try to translate this into something direct.

Anthos is an umbrella term for things in the combined ecosystem of Kubernetes, Istio, Anthos Config Management, Traffic Director, and so on.

Anthos [GKE] on {GCP, AWS, Azure, On-prem} is intended to be a consistent version of this deployed thing in each place.

There is an important historical wrinkle where traditional GKE already exists, but was "just Kubernetes" and sometimes "with Istio Add-on".

I do not agree with the lack of public pricing.

tl;dr: For most people here this is GKE "but wherever you want" (this announcement is "on AWS"), including Istio and friends.

<comment><USER23> Without public prices, this could be anywhere from really relevant and worth considering to overpriced and not worth your time. The price is an important feature. We need something for small and midsize at least.

Thanks for the info. I've been pretty happy with the designs (K8S, Istio) and services so far (GKE, Cloud Run).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can anybody find any pricing? I would love to find a managed on prem Kubernetes management thingy that won't break the bank.

<comment><USER25> The pricing is very clear: "Contact Sales."

<comment><USER26> Otherwise stated as, "how much you got?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Disclaimer: I work at Google Cloud, helping "developers" understand what Anthos is.

(If you criticize my comment, there's a decent change the marketing is gonna have a discussion with my boss about my employment. I'll try not to use as many marketing-y terms as the article.)

At a high level, if you're a solo developer or a small company, you probably don't need to understand everything going on there, many Anthos features/products are actually available a la carte, possibly under different names.

First, I'll agree that the blog post is written in a way that might be hard to grasp for hands-on practitioners (assuming I know HN enough, since I visit it 30 times a day). I'll start with an architecture diagram: [https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview](https://cloud.google.com/anthos/docs/concepts/overview)

You might still find this diagram difficult to understand (unless you live with the "cloud-native" stuff day to day) so I'll break this down for you:

\- Anthos GKE: This is basically the GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) you know. But it is now capable of running clusters not just on Google Cloud. If you ever thought "ahh, X cloud doesn't have good Kubernetes support", well Google can bring GKE quality to that cloud (AWS support is now GA, Azure is in preview) or to your on-prem datacenter, or AWS/Azure account. The GKE you know is still available with pay-as-you-go model.

I must note that this GKE on-prem/hybrid capabilities are probably the most critical part of Anthos stack.

\- Anthos Service Mesh: This is Istio (the open source service mesh), set up and managed for you. It helps you (1) connect your services, even if they're across different datacenters or clouds (2) automatically export telemetry like traces, metrics and set up SLOs/alerts with them (3) set policies for your RPC traffic at high level e.g. tcp retry policies should be like X (4) enable mTLS automatically without changing your code across ALL your fleet and without having to run a PKI. (If you're still not convinced about service mesh, you probably don't have a RPC-heavy infra like some companies, maybe you don't need it.) You can technically install/manage Istio yourself across your clusters, but with Anthos, Google does that for you.

\- Cloud Run for Anthos: This is actually hosted Knative (open source serverless stack on Kubernetes) for you. If you like rapid request-based autoscaling containers, you can have it anywhere (GCP, AWS, on-prem). You can install Knative anywhere, but Google does it for you and ensures it works properly with Istio and Kubernetes versions. I've written a blog post explaining what Knative does here: [https://ahmet.im/blog/knative-better- kubernetes-networking/](https://ahmet.im/blog/knative-better-kubernetes- networking/) Basically, this works like a CaaS (containers as a service) or build your own opinionated in-house opinionated PaaS with this.

We also offer Cloud Run as a fully-managed serverless product (not running on GKE, runs on Google's infra directly) if you're into that: [https://cloud.run/](https://cloud.run/)

\- Anthos Config Management: This is available to GKE users as "GKE Config Sync". It's basically a GitOps tool (though not a complete suite like some stuff like Weaveworks Flux etc). You point it to a git repo/branch, and it will go create Kubernetes manifests in that directory across your clusters. It has a pretty neat model where leaf directories correspond to Kubernetes namespace and there's inheritance to fanout Kubernetes policy objects to multiple namespaces etc. AFAIK many companies using Kubernetes at scale build similar in-house solutions to this. So we worked with them to create a solution for everyone. This product also has some policy enforcement features and monitoring to see if your Kubernetes objects are propagating properly to your clusters.

\- Other components: You'll find them on the page I linked. I think they are not as interesting to the day to day practitioners here.

Obviously I've oversimplified many of these, but the docs of each specific product do a decent job explaining, you should read if you're interested.

I'd say that if you are a practitioner, you don't need to worry much about details of Anthos. You can continue focus on the technologies you need to know (choose how low-level you wanna go: containers, Kubernetes, RPC or networking layer/service mesh, DevOps/GitOps) and continue to be successful.

However, if you work at a company which doesn't haven't gone through the cloud native application modernization (I'm hitting my head on the wall for you for saying this), Anthos can actually help your company use cloud-native stack WITHOUT having to go to cloud.

As you might imagine, a ton of companies out there are (perhaps happily) run on infrastructure stacks from another time. However, those looking to change it and try to use Kubernetes, they need to build a lot of in-house tooling, hire talent to manage Kubernetes. Google is decent (maybe more) at running Kubernetes clusters at scale for many customers, so Google can bring this service and all the listed above to you.

I'm not that familiar with pricing, though as you can see from [https://cloud.google.com/anthos/pricing](https://cloud.google.com/anthos/pricing) if you want to use these features on just on GCP, there's a $30 vCPU/month cost based on GKE nodes you're running. For other stuff, you need to contact support.

I should probably make this a blog post.

<comment><USER28> Will you tell the team that works on the Cloud Code IDE plugin that added the ability to deploy + debug Cloud Run services recently that I love them.

I submitted detailed feedback on two user surveys, praising the plugin and asking only for this a few months ago and it miraculously appeared.

Probably not related to my survey answers, but I like to think it was ;^)

(Also if you guys are sleeping on Cloud Run, it's basically the greatest thing since sliced bread. Knative and Serverless Containers are heaven)

<comment><USER29> Agreed Cloud Run is awesome, but still waiting on that Load Balancer to Cloud Run route (in private preview from what the Cloud Run PM said on twitter).

<comment><USER30> (Cloud Run PM here)

Hi, Thanks! You can fill this form to be on the waitlist for Load Balancer to Cloud Run: [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd5vTSeU00oSDT5Bxye...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd5vTSeU00oSDT5Bxyea3oTU1db- sZU8n6cBalbUmeJdDP7gA/viewform)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Interesting definition of general availability.

All the technical pages still seem to carry the message:

> This product or feature is in a pre-release state and might change or have > limited support

Pricing directs you to "contact sales"

If you do want to try it out, it seems you need to fill out a google docs form.

I don't have a great idea about what the product does, but it seems to require use of an active google cloud account.

A multi-cloud platform product, having a hard dependency on a single vendor, seems like a non-starter. Doesn't that defeat the main purpose of going multi- cloud in the first place?

<comment><AUTHOR> Anthos is built on Kubernetes, so if you don't like it, you can go run your containers somewhere else. The Anthos promise is that it makes it easy to have a managed Kubernetes service on any cloud or on-prem, with the same management UI and controls.

I'm also a bit curious what a multi-cloud platform product _not_ built by a single vendor would look like. Are there any credible OSS offerings in this space?

<comment><USER18> I think Crossplane[1] could be a candidate here. It allows cloud services to be provisioned via native CRs in your Kubernetes cluster and mount their credentials to workloads that can be scheduled to any kubernetes cluster, either provisioned through Crossplane or imported via Kubeconfig.

[1]: [https://crossplane.io/](https://crossplane.io/)

<comment><USER18> Missed the edit window.

Disclaimer: I am actively contributing to Crossplane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I was joking a few years ago now Kubernetes is a great layer to manage docker, and then in a few years we will have another layer to manage Kubernetes... Just in general this ever evolving complexity in software (and many other system, like law) is interesting, but often we solve one problem while at the same time creating 5 new ones. I understand it, and sometimes it is indeed the best path forward, but also feel a need for more simplicity sometimes. We see it in both hosting, but frontend development is also very good in adding layers of complexity.

</comment><comment><USER33> _Enterprises know they need the cloud to help drive cost efficiency and digital transformation._

I'm a cloud true believer and admitted AWS fan (and probably would be an Azure fan too if I had any experience with it), but even Amazon admits that only 5% of Enterprise workloads are in the cloud. "The Enterprise" is leery of the cloud.

Even once you can convince a large company to move some of their workloads off prem, most CTO's wouldn't touch GCP with a 10 foot pole. No one ever got fired for choosing AWS and many large companies would trust Azure because they are heavily invested in Microsoft.

Google is not exactly known for its great enterprise support or customer support in general.

<comment><USER21> _No one ever got fired for choosing AWS_

I think that's the point of this and similar offerings. You get to run on AWS but with even more handholding than AWS enterprise level support.

<comment><USER33> It's used to "manage virtual machines" to help avoid "lock-in". If all you're doing is hosting a bunch of virtual machines on your cloud provider, you have the worse of both worlds. You're paying more for infrastructure and you're still babysitting hardware.

Besides, if you are at any type of scale - you're de facto already "locked in". Infrastructure has weight. Data migrations alone are a pain let alone migrating your network infrastructure, you'd permissions (IAM$), auditing for security compliance, your DNS entries, etc.

Why add Google to the mix at all if you're all in on AWS and Azure? I bet few people have ever sat down and work with their project management team or IT people and estimated how long it would take or how much money it would cost to actually migrate to another vendor.

<comment><USER21> I think these kinds of offerings are for customers who want to use AWS but aren't skilled enough to use AWS directly. Anthos includes VMs and k8s BTW.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > One such early adopter is Plaid, a Japanese tech company providing real-time > visibility into user activity online. Plaid's customers rely on their > always-available analytics service to make changes in real-time and > continuously improve the user experience.

Edit: They're talking about a different company

Odd categorization of Plaid, they (at least primarily) provide an API for linking (logging in to) users' bank accounts and scraping information from the bank websites.

<comment><USER35> It's a different company: [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plaid- inc](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/plaid-inc)

<comment><USER34> Ah, my bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> GKE Ingress for Anthos (and possibly other stuff) requires Cloud SDK version 290 or higher which is not currently released, only 289 is. So it's not all available yet.

[https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how- to/ingre...](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/ingress- for-anthos-setup?hl=en)

</comment><comment><USER37> Are there any plans for Anthos to support the Oracle OCI cloud?

</comment><comment><USER38> If I have to ask for a price, I'm not going to ask.

</comment><comment><USER39> I feel like Rancher already does most of this for free

</comment><comment><USER40> The URL slug is the clearest bit.

</comment><comment> seph-reed So very tired of Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Firefox, and Apple release articles.

It's not that I don't understand they're important to a lot of developers and totally belong here. Time to search for a content filter though.

Edit: I mean look at it! It's basically an advertisement. It feels like Kardashians of coding.

</comment><comment><USER41> Is this product open source? I can't trust Google products since they end it up at any time. [https://gcemetery.co/](https://gcemetery.co/)

<comment><USER42> Not saying you're wrong, but I'm having a hard time finding GCP products that had paying enterprise customers at the link you provided, at least none with Greek names.

<comment><USER13> Not there yet, but Hades is a Greek name: They should name a product Hades and then kill is just so gcemetary has, you know, appropriate oversight & leadership.</comment></comment></comment>


2 Guys Made an App Called Channels for Android and iPhone: Post – Find – Chat - <AUTHOR> http://www.channelsapp.co <comment><AUTHOR> App: Channels App Website: www.channelsapp.co Twitter: @TheChannelsApp

What is Channels: Channels is a simple way to create posts about any topic (something for sale, event, trip, something funny, rant, etc) which is then automatically geo-tagged with your location or any location you choose on the map. Once its created, users can scroll around the map and/or perform tag & category based search to find channels they're interested in like yours, subscribe to that channel, and immediately group chat with you and all other subscribed users. Channels are therefore just location based posts with an embedded anonymous group chat.

How is it different: \- Most social apps require email, usernames, passwords and sometimes other information. This app is meant to be as anonymous as possible, so all we ask is for you to set a username, if and only if, you wish to chat with others or subscribe. - Channels was created to be simple and anonymous so we have no menus or ads or hidden ways to make money; just 3 screens that you can swipe between. - Rather than stick with the norm of comment based communication like other social platforms, we are chat based so each channel is actually a conversation. Just as if this was a messaging app, you can go between channels to chat with different people from all over the world anonymously about anything. - Channels is community driven. We made this app for the community so all posts are by real people, not bots or sponsored data. Upon request we can change this to add more features, but for now we want to make sure everything is community created.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sample Uses:

\- To plan a trip and chat with only the people who are going

\- To talk to other users anonymously that are at a venue you want to go to but would like to know what its like ahead of time or coordinate where to go next.

\- Alert the community to an emergency at a particular location (I made a Channel for an Amber Alert yesterday so people have a way to share information)

\- Advertise an event or something for sale (or find something for sale or an event)

\- To find a partner or group of people interested in something (i.e tennis partner, gym partner, people interested in sky diving, etc)

\- To explore a new area you've never been with the ability to talk to real people real time. Reminisce with friends or the world anonymously

\- To just talk about something cool, funny or interesting with other people. Who knows, you may meet a new friend!

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there a karma like system for people that answer a tag/question/channel? How do you plan to measure/incentivize good responses.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for your comment. No, there is no implicit karma/incentive system in place, at least not yet. We want this to be a straight forward platform, where you can create a channel about anything and geo-tag it anywhere, and just chat with others about that. I will be posting use cases in a minute to give you more of an example.</comment></comment>