ONO sells for $9.5 billion and nobody cares - <AUTHOR> http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/general/ono-sells-for-9-5-billion-and-nobody-cares.html <comment><USER3> This has very little to do with national moods/prejudices and much more to do with boring/atypical industries vs. hot consumer ones. ONO got no attention largely because it's "boring" to a mass audience. There are plenty of examples of this domestically, e.g.

\+ Child focused ecommerce company Zulily filed a $2.6B IPO, but got very little attention.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740927](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6740927)

I'd also note that there are blinders even within the startup community. I've submitted plenty of stories about under-the-radar startups that die on the vine because the companies are more focused on execution that cultivating a PR rep that would earn media and upvotes.

\+ Wayfair, a bootstrapped ecommerce company raised $165MM in its "Series A" and barely got a notice here on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3625381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3625381)

\+ Here's another example of HN blindness: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3625381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3625381)

\+ Nearly a quarter of the top 20 projects on Kickstarter are board games—can you remember the last story you read about one? A couple have raised more than Oculus Rift or Formlabs, but get no attention because they're "boring," while these hardware cos earn magazine covers and lavish praise.

\+ Mailchimp is easily a $100MM+ in revenue company that was bootstrapped, but they're rarely profiled.

The reality is the tech news reported by most of the big names is just the most "exciting" tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of worthy stories that just won't generate page views and hence don't get the attention they "deserve," if coverage was apportioned by success measured in dollars or reach rather than pageviews.

<comment><USER4> I think that Martin is refering to the attention that the wasup adquisition had here in Spain and how little is getting in the spanish media, a Spanish start up that's selling for that amount.

<comment><USER5> It's easy to blame media "blindness" and inattention -- here, apparently both in Spain and on the wider Web -- but to me it just boils down to the economics of attention. If the author is right and "nobody cares" then the lack of press is pretty explainable.

In today's ad-driven world, journalists are tacitly rewarded (at the very least) for Web traffic. As such, the coveted beats are the ones that drive guaranteed interest -- Apple being the traffic gorilla when I was a staff writer. The stuff closest to consumers (porcelain) on the whole drive more interest than infrastructure (plumbing).

Starting out in the Valley I got beats like Seagate and storage (after getting the assignment, another editor joked that it was "borage"). I remember envying the consumer electronics writers for their traffic, but was always more of a pluming guy myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Europeans arent as unreflectingly captialistic and "frontier"sy. Americans have always seen success in business as an crowning achievement. Europeans have traditionally found this kind of pre-occupation with monetary success somewhat crass or trivial.

> Europeans don't realize that if a company that went from nothing to > connecting 7 million homes is not celebrated...

That's total BS. You dont need a culture of fanatical adoration of business success for their to be successful businesses.

> if a company ... is not celebrated ... we will not get young Europeans on > the right track

It really worrisome how these people have to go around reminding everyone how amazing they are. I think our children will do just fine without being propagandised by self-aggrandizing money-chasers.

<comment><USER7> Bullshit. What is crass is the perspective that Americans are unreflectingly capitalistic and pre-occupied with monetary success.

Most business owners I know started their business because they saw a need for something and they wanted to deliver what was needed. Financial success is important because it allows their organization to continue functioning but it's hardly the top motivator for business owners I've spoken with.

I will concede that there are a fair percentage of businesses that are unreflectingly capitalistic and pre-occupied with monetary success. However, to paint an entire nation with a broad stroke is ignorance at it's worst. It would be the same as saying "The Brits have terrible teeth" or "The French smell." It may be true for a percentage of people but is no way to address a body of people.

<comment><USER6> You have this thing called "The American Dream" and you have an entire cultural history tied to self-motivation, entrepreneurship and "pushing the frontier"...

Clearly every single american isnt subject to the same cultural pre- occupations, that's absurd.

But there are only certain cultural phenomena possible in one place or another. A right-wing party in the UK could not even begin to use any of the ideas or rhetoric of the republican party - they'd be widespread revulsion. We dont sing our national anthem in the UK, we dont "pleg" anything, we dont consider our country "Exceptional" (hence _American_ Exceptionalism). There hasnt been the suggestion that our prime minister is impotent for not interfering in Ukraine, at least, nothing like the inferiority-complex about Obama's lack of big-dickery.

The idea that the west is culturally homogenous is "Bullshit". As compared to anywhere in europe, americans are vastly more market-oriented, mistrustful of government, approving of business success, etc.

It is simply the case, insofar as I can see, that "business" isnt really a dream of any kind in europe. People dont grow up wanting to run/own/be in business in anyway, we dont really have an "explorer"/inventor dreams either.

A considerable amount has been written by the european experience of america and an almost ubquitious theme in the accounts is "the feeling of unlimited possibility", an ostentatiousness and pre-occupation with wealth, etc.

<comment><USER7> "The American Dream", self-motivation, entrepreneurship and "pushing the frontier" are all good things IMHO.

However, they aren't the same as "unreflectingly capitalistic" and "pre- occupied with monetary success".

I'm not going to address the rest of your America bashing because the response requires a nuanced answer that I don't have the time to write today. I'll leave that to others.

<comment><USER6> > However, they aren't the same as "unreflectingly capitalistic" and "pre- > occupied with monetary success".

They have become inextricably linked. Maybe early in the 19th C. you'd be right. After the rise of american industry and maufacture and its corresponding propaganda (edison, etc.) AND after the cold war, "capitalism", "democracy", "patriotism" all became intertwined. Such that today The American Dream is almost purely capitalist and pragmatic.

The American Dream has, to my eyes, for a long time been directed towards individuals - it is _their_ dream. A person achieves their dream. Once, perhaps, The American Dream was a dream for American _s_ \- a common enterprise, with common goals, something achieved for everyone or no one, etc.

The author of this article did not explain why ONO was part of a common enterpise, which its activity was making all our lives better and helping us achieve our ideals. He said,

"built originally by Eugenio Galdon and mostly by my friend Richard Alden between 2001 and 2011, is in the process of being sold to Vodafone for around $9.5bn, and nobody cares."

If that's doesnt read hollow and pathetic to you I dont know what could. It's complete mythologising of two people "building" a company, it's display of hurt feeling over the fact that $10bn doesnt impress people enough, its utter pre-occupation with self-aggrandizement and money.

The rhetoric in this article is almost suffocating its message and very few can tell - because this rhetoric has become the language in which we phrase our dreams today.

<comment><USER8> The extent to which you have littered your own biases throughout this thread, and then expected everyone to regard them as the true interpretation, is absurd and childish.

 _If that 's doesnt read hollow and pathetic to you I dont know what could. It's complete mythologising of two people "building" a company, it's display of hurt feeling over the fact that $10bn doesnt impress people enough, its utter pre-occupation with self-aggrandizement and money._

For example, this. I'm amazed you can't find one positive interpretation to agree with. The $10bn price tag is a reflection of the company's commercial success -- a reflection of the hard work, smart decisions, luck, timing and scale involved in that success. To an American it's obvious that two people didn't personally build the company, but it's also respectable that they undertook a massive risk to create opportunities for others to join in their effort and partake in the rewards.

The fact that you can only arrive at an extremely cynical interpretation really says more about you, and goes a long way to confirm the assertion of the article.

<comment><USER6> We'll I've commented three times thus far to direct replies.. I wouldnt say that was "littering".

> To an American it's obvious that two people didn't personally build the > company

Yes, but it's also obvious who gets the credit (, and who doesnt).

> I'm amazed you can't find one positive interpretation to agree with

Sorry I dont find the acquistion of wealth anything to celebrate in itself and that's the point of the article.. so no, obviously i dont think there's a positive interpretation here and it isnt "cynicsm": it's reading it without buying into its assumptions.

> But we should not blame Americans for this. Americans do the right thing, > they recognize and celebrate success. The blame is exclusively with > Europeans who are still uncomfortable and envious with big exits

Yes Americans do the right thing and "celebrate success", they try not to tax "job creators" and make sure "hard working risk takers" get the "credit they deserve". Ideological, all of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you primarily rely on sources of information in English (of which I'm guilty, too) then obviously you will be mostly getting information from the Anglosphere dominated by the US because it's, oh you know, richest and most powerful country in the history of the world.

This is not some "Americans cover their successes" thing. It's that they matter more. There is an underlying economic reality in which we are lagging far behind them. Not Africa-far but still far.

In a picture [http://cdn.static- economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecac...](http://cdn.static- economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/290-width/images/print- edition/20120728_FBC674.png) from [http://www.economist.com/node/21559618](http://www.economist.com/node/21559618)

<comment><USER10> " richest and most powerful country in the history of the world..."

not even close

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pre- modern_great_powers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pre- modern_great_powers)

<comment><USER9> Does any of those countries come close to the GDP of, say, Alabama ($160bn)? Sure, comparing the value of organic wine form Rome to a car from Detroit is not straight-forward but technological progress and compound interest generally ensure that powers of today absolutely dwarf those of even a hundred years ago, not to mention a thousand years ago, or two.

The ancient empires had troubles feeding their populations at times. Today, _most_ Americans are overweight.

<comment><USER11> The gross world product is about 72 trillion dollars. Alabama's share of that is 0.2%. In order to 'come close to Alabama', a historical power would have to be close to 0.2% of the world's GDP at the time. And I don't think any of the ones in that list went that low.

<comment><USER9> 0,2% of the world's GDP in 2012 is a good measure for a comparison of Alabama to _other modern countries_ in 2012, not a comparison of Alamaba 2012 to Rome 12 AD.

That's like saying that the last person on Forbes 500 is not really rich because they barely have 0.05% ($3 billion / $6 trillion) of the group's net worth.

<comment><USER11> Wealth is a relative measure, not an absolute one.

"That's like saying that the last person (blah)"

No, because relative to other people, they have more stuff. The proportion they have of the group's net worth is significant greater than almost all other members, who have generally have five or more orders of magnitude less wealth (0.0000005% and less).

The reason why you're having trouble converting from countries to individuals is because there's currently only 200 countries, but 7 billion individuals. That's why the individual's percentage looks lower.

Also, your comparison makes absolutely no allowance for inflation. GDP rises for everyone over time simply due to inflation. Your shekel could purchase more in the time of Herod than it could in the time of Netanyahu. Zimbabwe's GDP went through the roof in recent years in their own dollars; but it didn't as a comparison to the rest of the world's output.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A couple of weeks ago Actavis bought Forest Labs for $25b. A few days earlier Comcast bought Time Warner Cable for $42.5b. And before that Beam offered $16b for Suntory.

Huge deals that affect entire markets (and industries) happen all the time, but unless you follow that specific market you don't get to hear about them. The fact is ONO is a mobile operator in a small local market (from a global industry reference frame), and wholly outside of the tech-news-but-really- only-"startups"-and-only-SaaS-startups-at-that microscope that most of the tech press spend time looking through.

</comment><comment><USER13> No-one cares primarily because it's not a consumer product. If Pinterest was Spanish and sold for $9.5B, you'd know about it.

See also: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/03/zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/03/zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz/)

<comment><USER14> Also from the article:

        Google buys Spanish Ono for $9.5bn to start Google Fiber throughout Europe

Vodafone won't be rolling out ultra fast fiber networks. They'll be putting everything through a cost-benefit exercise to maximise profits. Essentially just a fish being eaten by a bigger fish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The mainstream don't care about telco markets and it's not major news in telco terms. A 10bn acquisition is a third tier telco M&A deal.

Think about it this way in 2012 "mobile networks revenues were larger than all revenue combined from mobile phone sales, PCs, online ads, books, recorded music, watches, Apple, Amazon, Google & Facebook."

</comment><comment><USER16> ONO really was an startup? I don't think that any startup, in the HN sense(garage startup), has the financial strength to become overnight a cable company.

Anyway, I haven't heard about this "guy", Eugenio Galdon, and it seems that he was the chief advisor of Calvo Sotelo, former president of Spain.

So, in my opinion, this is hardly news. This is a typical story of spanish success, where a "well connected" person, with the financial help of big investors, takes advantage of regulatory and (foreign) technological changes.

Panoramio, idealista... even Inditex are real spanish startups, much better examples of entrepeneurship.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ugh. Let's talk about media.

Commercially speaking, media has one goal - procuring eyeballs. Just because eyeballs aren't fixated on a particular story doesn't make it sad, it just means it's not a compelling story.

So why is WhatsApp a compelling story?

1\. Broke conventions - company only had 55 employees and valued at $19b. This isn't normal for us. A telecommunication company selling for $9.5b makes sense.

2\. Story of triumph - the founder of WhatsApp was "from a small village in Ukraine". You can't get any more American than this my friends.

You see, America is quite possibly the greatest marketing engine in the world. This is what separates itself from the rest of the world. We are engrained story tellers, not because of some magical gene inherited, but rather because we know good stories sell well.

</comment><comment><USER18> People in general don't care about telco acquisitions unless there's a major strategic consequence. The example the author gives "Google buys Spanish Ono for $9.5bn to start Google Fiber throughout Europe" would have huge consequences for everyone from consumers to device manufacturers to content providers throughout Europe. Normal telco consolidation is rarely anything other than the slow march of monopoly.

A 16 year old cable company is barely a startup, and highly unrelatable to the startup community at large. The same story about a US company wouldn't get coverage here unless there was a major strategic element. Kudos to the founders and funders, but it's not a particularly inspirational story for other entrepreneurs. The kinds of companies that get the most coverage here are very young and generally have a global reach. A regional company (which most telcos are) in say New England wouldn't get much coverage in the pacific northwest. This isn't a regional or even a cultural issue, just a significance issue.

</comment><comment><USER19> At the core of the problem is that the European market is not homogenous, so building a big company is way harder.

* There's a significant overhead in expanding across borders because of different laws, language, culture, etc. That could even mean having to hire lawyers and business developers for every country.

* The pool of potential employees is smaller. Perhaps there's someone that would be a perfect fit for your startup, but he lives in a neigbouring country, so he's less likely to apply / want the job.

* For the above reasons, the investments are way lower, because startups have lower probability of becoming big.

Do you think it's possible to fix or mitigate this problem? What can the EU do to make operating across borders as easy as possible?

</comment><comment><USER20> And E-Plus the third biggest German carrier gets sold to Telefonica for $11.8 billion. Did anybody hear about that?

Telcos wanna deny it but it's close to a commodity. This is mostly money shifting around. When was the last time they introduced a game changer? Google Fiber is something else, it's simply 50 times faster than the average Internet connection.

<comment><USER21> I mean, most people around here would prefer telecos to just be dumb pipes, with the most want innovation being faster speeds. Regardless, some developments I can remember recently:

\- 4G roll outs \- Essentially free SMS (in the UK at least) \- Psudo-phone leasing ([http://www.vodafone.co.uk/shop/pay-monthly/vodafone-red- hot/...](http://www.vodafone.co.uk/shop/pay-monthly/vodafone-red- hot/index.htm)) \- "Home Boosters" (i.e. [http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/mobile-accessories/sure- sign...](http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/mobile-accessories/sure-signal)) \- Stuff like WiFi on the underground ([http://www.vodafone.co.uk/shop/internet/wi- fi/index.htm](http://www.vodafone.co.uk/shop/internet/wi-fi/index.htm))

Sure, nothing that changes their core value proposition, but plenty of products that indicate a willingness to "innovate". Things like the home boosters stand out particularly to me; the vast majority of their customers will never need such a device, but for those who do, it will be invaluable.

<comment><USER22> Unencrypted WiFi on the Underground is a typical telco poorly executed "innovation". They actually promised mobile coverage originally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm Spanish, more or less watch the Spanish media (around 3-4 times per week during lunchtime, usually I don't check most news) and I wasn't aware. So not even our media cares.

<comment><USER24> I understand it should be bigger news, but I don't understand why should anyone be celebrating. Other than the ones who are making a killing out of this deal, of course.

The Spanish telecom market is not a competitive market, it's enormously rigged and regulated. Success in this market doesn't come from innovation or better business practices, but as a result from politics and power struggles. This is probably true for any other telecom market nowadays.

Also, who in his right mind would consider ONO a startup these days?

<comment><USER23> Me neither. If I had shares in Vodafone or ONO, maybe I'd celebrate.

ONO a startup? Ha! I think I've known about ONO before I even got a modem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That is really true. Facebook buys Instagram for 1B$ and everyone know. Google buys Nest and everyone start to discuss about "Internet of things", but no one cares about ONO.

<comment><USER26> Facebook's purchase of Instagram was big news because a lot of people thought of Instagram as an app that lets people post cheesy filtered selfies, and it seemed surprising that that was worth a billion dollars. Google buying Nest has a somewhat similar hook, in the sense that you can tell a story around "WTF is this company doing and why do Google think it's worth so much." Vodafone buying ONO is one telecommunications company buying another telecommunications company; it's not obvious why it would be interesting to anyone outside of the telecommunications industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe this attitude of nobody cares is more healthy.

Versus "look at that startup that got acquired! Look at his successful their founder is! And look at all the billions they have that YOU DON'T".

To me, THAT is more depressing.

</comment><comment> luka-birsa Similar to what the US is doing in terms of mobile market, thinking that they are somehow representative or "advanced".

We get millions of headlines for Apple launching video chat in the US market while they had that in EU 5 and in JP 7 years back.

At the risk of sounding overly condecending, if there is something that "ze Americans" do great is selling their supremacy (ie. we are the best).

BTW: Thats a good thing as they tend to fake it till they make it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Well the big difference between those two stories (Google buys ONO and Vodafone buys ONO) is that one would imply change (for the consumer - <USER2> founders both is of course a big change) and the other doesn't. Who cares if the corporate overlord at ONO is called Richard Alden (ONO "founder" in Varsavsky's eyes) or Vittorio Colao (Vodafone CEO)?

<comment><USER29> You nailed it. Vodafone acquiring ONO is just changing uniforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> "built ... mostly by my friend Richard Alden", wait what? The thousands of other employees don't count?

<comment><USER6> As I said, self-aggrandizing. People read this trumped-up BS every day in silicon valley and have started to believe it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder what is the point of caring? If I was a founder a multi-billion exit under the radar sounds like a dream come true.

Celebrating success as the author puts it is merely a symptom of meritocracy and individual responsibility. Of course, it comes with its own issues (less of a social safety net and income disparity).

</comment><comment><USER32> I won't call an MSO/Cable company news as boring. Why the American industry creates so much attention is due to the dominance of American Technology Sector and American media firms. The MSO sector has lot of potential for innovation with the rising sectors such as Home Automation, Gigabit fiber or to sum it up (Internet of Things). When it comes to technology, even Nokia the most respected handset brand of the pre-smartphone age, was acquired by Microsoft, an American firm. Unless Europe gets more flexible with its tech industry (like encouraging Kickstarter/Ycombinator type firms) they would never gather the focus like the US.

</comment><comment><USER33> I am wondering if the company name did not sound like a mistake in english if the news would have been be bigger - congratulations to them though.

</comment><comment><USER34> If I'm not mistaken ONO wasn't a public company so I'm wondering why should basically anyone care except the parties involved?

Reading about big acquisitions of non-public companies (or public companies whose shares you don't own yourself) can sometimes be nice entertainment, but I fail to see the significance of the lack of news coverage as assumed by the OP.

</comment><comment><USER35> I've been a ONO customer for more than ten years now. Honestly their internet service is the best around. Vodafone buying Ono isn't something for us customers to celebrate, because I'm sure the service will get worse. Mark my words.

</comment><comment><USER36> This article is just part of the propaganda for the coming european elections.

Spain has much bigger worries than the plebe not caring about telcos tycoons buying each other's companies for such astronomical amounts of money.

</comment><comment><USER37> Won't someone think of those poor non-english billionaires?

</comment><comment><USER38> I lost interest at "cable company"

</comment><comment><USER39> Because maybe it worths $9.5 billion and infrastructure and expected profits, while WhatsApp is worth nothing.

</comment><comment><USER40> Regarding the discussions of American dominance / influence / power:

Fortran, LISP, COBOL, PL/I, C, VB, Java.

</comment><comment><USER41> Why should people care if people care about a business changing hands?

</comment><comment><USER42> Nice complaint-brag

</comment><comment><USER43> What color shall the bike shed be?</comment>


Go ahead and break this robot's legs. It'll figure out how to chase you without - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/05/27/go-ahead-and-break-this-robots-legs-it-can-figure-out-how-to-chase-you-without-them/

<comment><USER2> >Whelp, now we're one step closer to indestructible killer robots! Just kidding. Probably. Maybe? Hopefully.

Let's open with fear-mongering! Why can't robotics/drone articles be more optimistic?

>Whelp, now we're one step closer to search & rescue drones that, if damaged by terrain or falls can continue to function.

Imagine a robot searching a tunnel where a cave-diver fell and injured themselves. The robot lost footing and one of the legs was damaged. Luckily, it can adapt and search the cave. The cave-diver is found and a rescue team is sent in to save them.

Or you know, death to humanity and all that jazz.</comment>


Play/review my crap game Rescue, and win a prize (Linux) - <AUTHOR> http://sam.ai.ki/rescue.html

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a total $200 prize pool, plus a 'mystery prize' if you can do the (almost) impossible and rescue all the 10 girls in the game. I will also pay fairly for any decent review / suggestions on how to improve the game. It may look crap, but I did put a bit of work into this game. I'd like to improve it to the point that it could be popular. The game is in the public domain at the moment.</comment>


OpenCV Washing-up Detector - <AUTHOR> http://imakethin.gs/blog/?p=2613

<comment><USER2> How about a couple of strain gauges mounted between the sink and the underside of the counter?

You could just weigh the contents of the sink instead of doing all this runaround to tell that something is in there.

OpenCV is cool, but do we really need it to replace simpler means of input?</comment>


America's national vacation problem - m-i-l http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34123906 <comment><AUTHOR> It's impressive how big cultural the gap is between people not taking their full vacation entitlement and people not taking their full salary.

I've had people try to hand back vacation days - but I've never had anyone try to hand back salary.

Personally I try to take all my vacation because, as a professional, I have an obligation to make sure the company could keep going if I change jobs or get hit by a bus. Doing routine tests for bus factor resiliency is as important as testing your backups restore and your backup power works right :)

<comment><USER2> Bankers in many countries are even required to take off two weeks in a block each year; and no communication with the office. That's to make the books harder to cook, but I am sure it helps many of them stay sane.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> All the people in the video who say they check in with work while they're on vacation 'in order to help out their colleagues' \- if you _really_ want to help out your colleagues, pick up their work when they're on vacation so they don't need to do work when they're on holiday.

<comment><USER4> Checking in with work like this is a sign you aren't well organised or the structure of the company isn't correct.

Why aren't you keeping colleagues informed enough to cope without you for even a week.

Why are you the only person contactable for certain issues. etc.

Drives me mad when schools shut for summer and the only person who can purchase things has sodded off.

<comment><USER5> It's not always easy or possible to have redundancy for every role. At a company with 20 devs, hiring 2pms, 2 data scientists and 2 DBA just to handle vacation coverage is not realistic. At MS or FB this makes sense, but lots of places are much smaller.

Sometimes the best business decision is not the most convenient one for the employees - life is full of tradeoffs.

<comment><USER6> So, how do you handle this in a country, in which you're legally obliged to provide vacation to your employees?

Just flout the law?

<comment><USER5> I'd just avoid hiring in such countries. India and the US have lots of great developers. I don't see a reason why I'd ever hire devs in Europe.

<comment><USER7> You're right, we should just move our businesses to whichever countries currently allow the most exploitation and abuse of workers and race to the bottom. Why not just cut to the chase and implement slavery already? It's the most economically efficient method of production after all.

<comment><USER5> Slavery is not economically efficient at all. The fact that economists pointed this unpleasant fact out is what got economics tagged with the phrase "the dismal science".

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

<comment><USER7> I think you misunderstand the article, the term comes from Carlyle rejecting the free market as a philosophical principle, not some efficiency analysis. And in fact his essay was a defense of plantation owners whose businesses were failing because they had just lost access to extremely efficient slave labor thanks to inconvenient regulations.

If the economy were a little more global back then, those plantation owners should have moved their businesses to different, more slavery/business- friendly countries rather than adapt to the new human rights the workers had been given, no?

<comment><USER5> Yes, the "philosophical principle" Carlyle was rejecting is economic efficiency. Slavery is not efficient because the world might contain a more productive employment opportunity for a slave, which the slave would freely choose if given the opportunity.

I have absolutely no idea why you wish to portray slavery as economically efficient. Is it truly your belief that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved? (I suppose this is not a particularly uncommon left wing view, but it's very rarely stated so explicitly.)

<comment><USER7> I think the ways we are using the phrase 'economically efficient' are different, and that's where much of the disagreement lies. In fact I'd reject the notion of the existence of a universal objective welfare function. If you include the welfare of slaves in your calculation certainly I'd agree that the system is inefficient; but since when has any slave owner done that?

It's actually an extremely uncommon (nonexistent) left wing view that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved. Literally nobody believes that and I certainly hope for your sake that you don't believe anyone believes that and are just trying to be incendiary. It is a very common view among most people (since it's the truth) that the welfare of /certain people/ is maximized with /certain other people/ enslaved. And then we can conclude if the first group has economic power and is subject to no regulation and act according to maximizing their economic welfare, they will implement it.

The contention is that your position, that businesses should refuse to operate in countries which regulate rights into existence since these rights have costs which hurt the bottom line of the business, if adopted leads directly and immediately to slavery. Slavery is unquestionably disgusting and reprehensible, so therefore your position, which leads to an unacceptable result, cannot be accepted.

So I'm suggesting that the /subjective/ welfare of people in a position to own slaves (wealthy business owners) is maximized under slavery. And from that I conclude the maximization of the welfare of wealthy business owners -- the natural result of unfettered capitalism -- is something to be categorically rejected. So we need fetters.

<comment><USER5> _It 's actually an extremely uncommon (nonexistent) left wing view that welfare is maximized with some people enslaved. Literally nobody believes that..._

Simply not true. Several elected officials believe or previously believed that, and some proposed legislation for that purpose:

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

[http://thehill.com/policy/defense/236365-rangel-renews- call-...](http://thehill.com/policy/defense/236365-rangel-renews-call-for-war- tax-national-draft)

[https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/hr5741/text](https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/hr5741/text)

[http://www.infowars.com/obama-camp-scrubs-website-to- remove-...](http://www.infowars.com/obama-camp-scrubs-website-to-remove- references-to-mandatory-community-service/)

 _And then we can conclude if the first group has economic power and is subject to no regulation and act according to maximizing their economic welfare, they will implement it._

Yet strangely, that doesn't seem to happen. Multinationals with huge economic power and subject to minimal regulation tend to treat employees _better_ than smaller and weaker local companies (at least in India, the US, and other places I'm familiar with).

I don't dispute much of what you wrote about why we shouldn't do business with those who practice slavery. I'd draw a very clear bright line: do workers agree to their terms of work? In India or the US, the vast majority of IT workers do. I guess you want to go further and tell my employer/me what work conditions are acceptable?

<comment><USER7> Okay, if you define a required short limited period of service for public good as slavery then sure most civilized and uncivilized countries implement it and many people support it. I'll concede this point, though I don't think there's very many people in this universe who would use the word 'slavery' to describe this so you may be a unique snowflake in this regard.

I think the reason multinationals treat employees better is because that since they are multinational, they are a single company subject to the laws of every nation: it is more efficient for them to treat EVERYONE by the same rights as the most stringent (Europe) whereas companies local to India or the US can abuse the lack of rights these countries give workers since they only deal with local workers.

And I would agree with you about consent being the big bright line. Except I think consent is very complicated. If you allowed people to sign themselves into slavery, people would consent to slavery. No matter how awful something is, if it's allowed, people will "consent" to it -- the most desperate in society are forced by circumstances to consent to it. I think the word consent only has meaning when there are other meaningful options available. Which I think is the fundamental difference: the definition of consent. We all agree if someone puts a gun to your head and demands consent it's not consent: but what if a faceless nameless system forces you to die or consent to whatever some collection of business owners demand and you agree: is this consent or not? I say not really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I personally am strongly against any kind of "unlimited" vacation days or other such perks. In my experience hardly anyone takes advantage of them because they are made to feel guilty. Even most places that claim to offer working from home rarely have people take advantage of it due to the culture (not at desk means you're lazy).

I prefer the employer just to be upfront and if I want to work from home then I'll negotiate to do that once a week upfront.

<comment><USER9> These are two different issues. What you have a problem with isn't the "unlimited", it's the "no minimum". Would you have a problem with "unlimited vacation days, four weeks a year mandatory minimum?".

As in, if you haven't taken any vacation when December rolls in, see you after new year's.

<comment><USER8> That is a reasonable point. It is definitely one way to fix that particular perk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So telling you that I have 30 days of paid vacation here in Germany wouldn't actually make a difference because you wouldn't take your 30 days if you had them? Btw, when I'm on sick leave that is also paid.

<comment><USER11> Also, I don't know how it's in Germany, but in other parts of Europe, your employer can _force_ you to take your vacation days. Most do it at the end of the year, because if you have unused vacation days and you quit, they have to pay you extra for the vacation days you lose by quitting. And as you noted, sick days aren't counted in that. In fact, I can take a one-day sick leave whenever I want without so much as a doctor's notice (company policy mainly due to the fact that taking a sick leave with a doctor's notice creates more administrative work which isn't worth it for a single day).

<comment><USER12> I don't know either if your employer can force you to take your vacation. But I heard that your health insurance may deny benefits for stress related issues if they find out that you didn't take all of your vacation days.

<comment><USER13> Here in Poland he can force you, and often does, because if it is found out that employees didn't take all of their vacation time the company can pay a substantial fee for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm a UK employee of a US bank and manage 3 employees based in NY. To be perfectly honest I've not noticed any significant pressure on my US colleagues and team to not take vacation days. If anything my own US based manager is frequently reminding everyone to plan their vacations and not leave too much of their allowance until the end of the year. So clearly this culture of not taking full vacation days isn't ubiquitous, and of course the culture may be different in other parts of the bank - I work on the tech side. Maybe it's partly because as a global organization the US side has absorbed some of the vacation culture from other regions. Don't know.

Having said that, contract employees are only paid for the days they attend, and they tend to take much fewer days off in the US than UK based contractors, typically maybe 2-5 or so per year. But that's their decision.

<comment><USER15> Banks are a slightly different entity... It wasn't long ago when bank employees were actually required to take at least 2 weeks straight off once a year. Of course, this wasn't for the employee's health, rather it gave the bank time to catch any sort of embezzlement or other such activities the employee may have been up to. These days there are more controls and technology has ended some of common ways to try and hide bad transactions (such as sending checks to the wrong processing center or structuring transactions such that they'll take longer than they normally would).

A lot of banks have removed this requirement now, but the culture of planning vacations remains in that industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What I found interesting in the past compared to the US:

"Why Germans Work Fewer Hours But Produce More: A Study in Culture"

[http://knote.com/2014/11/10/why-germans-work-fewer-hours- but...](http://knote.com/2014/11/10/why-germans-work-fewer-hours-but-produce- more-a-study-in-culture/)

</comment><comment><USER17> After moving to the Netherlands, my wife and I were astounded and rather impressed by the extraordinary attitude towards holidays here. Every single person we know on our street and acquaintances we have met since being here takes nearly an entire month off during July or August. Now that is quite refreshing! People actually leave work around 430 or five in the afternoon. The one difference however is that everyone is usually at work quite promptly no later than 8 AM.

<comment><USER18> The minimum leave in the Netherlands is 20 days, four weeks. So that would mean that those people take their entire vacation in one go, not having anything (or barely anything) left for the rest of the year (eg. end of December, ....).

<comment><USER19> How many professional only have the minimum leave in the Netherlands? Most people I know in Sweden have more than the minimum after a few years of work.

<comment><USER18> Cant tell how common additional days above the minimum leave are in NL (you'd need to know these numbers). But even if you consider the usual five to eight days it would come as a surprise to me if it really was common to take off an entire month in one go as even then one would be barely left with any remaining days (as compared to none before).

Some people will certainly do it, but not everybody.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've always been one to take full advantage of my vacation, since I don't define myself by my work. Everyone looks forward to the weekend, right? Then why not take a few vacation days to make your weekend longer, or 2 weeks off to totally refresh?

Downside is that one time I was "let go" while out of the country and told I didn't need to come back to the office. I guess sometimes the vacation days in your contract are more of a threat than a perk.

</comment><comment><USER21> Which is why work is a social contract. Well, it used to be but the pendulum has swung too far in one direction.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'll stand up for the US system. I personally like it. I don't like "vacations". What do you really gain just spending a couple weeks elsewhere? I don't even particularly care for weekends.

I'd far rather be able to really focus on work, really getting stuff done, not have to deal with coworkers all being on vacation, saving hard for retirement or whatever, and then every couple years, go off and do something completely different (paid or unpaid).

And I'm certainly not saying this from a "this proves American workers are the most hardworking" junk attitude. I simply find life more enjoyable this way.

Then, that's my young, single self talking. Perhaps with a family moderation is more important.

EDIT: People are misunderstanding my post, assuming I mean I don't do anything but work. On the contrary I've been to 30+ countries, lived in 5, biked across Asia, spent a year teaching English in Korea. This is difficult with just "vacation time". PLUS this style allows me to be really focused on / interested in my work when I'm in that phase of life.

<comment><USER23> Good for you, and maybe you're an outlier, but everything we know about work tells us that this is counterproductive.

It's good for productivity, health, and well-being if people get to disconnect completely from work. As a company, it doesn't even make sense to have people work like you do, because they are more creative and productive if they do take time off.

One study reported on here: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2014/02/28/take-a- vaca...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2014/02/28/take-a-vacation-its- good-for-productivity-and-the-economy-according-to-a-new-study/) – and there are plenty of similar results elsewhere.

But, by all means, if this is how you enjoy life then go right ahead. I and many other people wouldn't like that lifestyle though.

<comment><USER22> The odd thing is, I don't see how someone can disconnect completely from work for just a week or two. I recently took a two-week trip to BC and even ditched my laptop for the 2nd week, but nonetheless was thinking about work a good portion of that time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow. Work-life-balance reallys sucks in the US and A.

Get your shit together // Sweden.

</comment><comment><USER25> As a federal employee, I already know I would probably have a hard time adjusting to the terrible work/life imbalance common in American private industry. I don't think closing the pay gap (probably about $10k-$15k difference in my case) would change my mind much either.

I work a very honest 80 hours per two-week pay period, and use my 4 weeks of annual leave far removed (at least mentally) from the workplace. Seldom do I feel any push back on that, either.

</comment><comment><USER26> I may be the only one, but I see a difference between "vacation" and "vacation days." It's been a long, long time, since I took a "vacation," where I had a week to ten days off. On the other hand, I use all of the 26 vacation days I get. While I take a few days here and there, mostly I take Fridays off and make three-day weekends. (Sometimes four-day weekends.)

</comment><comment><USER27> Met a French woman who gets 4 months off a year. 4 MONTHS!!! Apparently 2 months is the minimum in France. I will note she hates her job (some kind of auditing). I don't hate my job but at the same time the more I hear about many European countries vacation policies the more I question the USA's typical policies.

<comment><USER27> WTF was this downvoted? What did I say that pissed people off so much they felt this was worth of a downvote?

First off 7 French natives have told me the minimum is 2 months. 3 work at Nintendo of France and brought this up in relation to their Japanese co- workers in Japan. Even though Nintendo is a Japanese company it has to abide by French laws for it's office in Paris. 1 works at a Nuclear Power Plant. She's the one that gets 4 months off a year. Yes, she actually gets 4 months off paid vacation. This is not a lie. 3 others are currently working in Japan, 2 in Kyoto, 1 in Tokyo, not working for French companies, frustrated at the lack of vacation relative to France. They might have been wrong but that's what they believe.

Second it doesn't matter if it's 40 days off a year or 25. That's still INFINITELY MORE THAN THE USA which is has a mandatory minimum of ZERO days off and still entirely makes the point that lots more vacation than is typical in the USA is at least something to be considered.</comment></comment>


Swarm vs. Fleet vs. Kubernetes vs. Mesos - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/10/swarm-v-fleet-v-kubernetes-v-mesos.html <comment><USER2> This is a pretty balanced article. Absent is Nomad, which claims the world but when you dig into the code pretty large advertised chunks are simply not there yet. Nomad seems like a much more straightforward implementation of the Borg paper, and one day may be interesting once they write the rest of it. A nice Kubernetes feature that is similar to what you can do with fleet is the "Daemon Set" which lets you run certain things on every node. Some cool Mesos features that are pretty new and haven't been talked about much yet:

* persistent volumes: let frameworks have directories on agent machines returned to them after an availability event happens, which is nice for replicated stateful services

* maintenance primitives: schedule machines to go offline at certain times, and ask frameworks if it's safe to take nodes offline. This will soon start being used for stateful services so that they can vote on when it's safe to take out a replica, and to trigger proactive rereplication when maintenance is desired.

* oversubscription: if you have an agent that has given away all of its resources, but the agent detects that there is still some unutilized CPU, it can start "revokable tasks" to fill up the slack up until it starts interfering with existing workloads.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cloud Foundry has a scheduler called Diego[1], which is now in public beta on PWS. Because it's built for Cloud Foundry, you get the whole PaaS as well. No need to roll your own service injection, staging, logging, authentication and so on: it's already built and integrated.

For me, the cleverest part about Diego is that it turns placement into a distributed problem through an auctions mechanism. Other attempts at this focus on algorithmic approaches that assume perfect information. Diego instead asks cells to bid on incoming tasks and processes. The auction closes after a fixed time and the task or process is sent to the best bidder. This greatly reduces the need to have perfect central consistency in order to perform bin- packing optimisation -- in a real environment, that turns out to matter a lot.

Cloud Foundry is large and very featuresome, so for those who want a more approachable way to play with Diego, try Lattice[2].

Disclaimer: I work in Pivotal Labs, a division of Pivotal. Pivotal is the major donor of engineering effort to Cloud Foundry. I worked on the Buildpacks team and I've deployed commercial apps to PWS, so I'm obviously a one-eyed fan.

[1] [https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/diego-design- notes](https://github.com/cloudfoundry-incubator/diego-design-notes)

[2] [http://lattice.cf/](http://lattice.cf/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you compare Diego to Mesos? On the face of it, this sounds like a similar system.

<comment><USER3> They're arguably symmetric. Based on my very limited understanding:

Diego works by auctioning tasks/LRPs to cells, which bid based on free resources.

Mesos works by auctioning free resources to tasks/LRPs, which accept or reject based on their own policies.

The analogy I got from Onsi was that Diego is "demand-driven", Mesos is "supply-driven".

They have different sweet spots. Diego is built to be the heart of a PaaS, so it aims for fast success or failure for accepting tasks and processes. Consumers can decide whether to build further scheduling intelligence, but Diego doesn't make it explicit.

Mesos exposes some of the placement/scheduling logic back to the client explicitly. For example, if you are OK with a gigantic batch job running intermittently, Mesos can more or less do that without fuss. The job will simply wait until enough free resources are available on the cluster. This is one of the observations that drove Mesos. Whereas Diego will tell you very quickly if that capability is unavailable currently.

On the flipside, Diego requires no additional configuration. It also doesn't require a central view of available resources to be maintained in order to perform placement. That said, Diego _does_ maintain a central view of tasks and LRPs that have been placed, in order to relaunch failed ones.

That said, I have sometimes been wrong about my understanding of Diego and Mesos, so YMMV.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, sounds accurate at least :)

<comment><USER3> No worries. If you want to learn more, I can put you in touch with the Diego or Lattice teams.

I should also note in passing that Diego can place and manage Docker containers, Windows .NET apps and classic buildpack-staged apps, with the architectural flexibility to extend to more kinds of managed resources (eg, with the right backend, it could manage unikernel apps). That alone sets it apart from the pack.

<comment><USER4> I think Nomad aims to be similarly flexible in the type of resources it can manage.

<comment><USER3> Yes, in a different way. Diego pushes the question of the underlying runtime environment down to Garden, so if you add a backend, Diego can drive it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One more thing worth mentioning with fleet is that you can schedule anything systemd can handle. This means you can have it schedule timers, for example, and if the machine your timer runs on dies, fleet will re-schedule the timer on another machine.

For fleet a timer is just another systemd unit - there's no special support for them -, so you get a simple "cluster wide cron" pretty much for free.

Fleet works fairly well, though it does have some minor maturity issues (I've gotten it into weird states when machines have left the cluster abruptly and rejoined where e.g. it refuses to schedule some unit afterwards; solution: change the name of the unit) . No idea ho well it'll scale in larger deployments.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have tried Swarm intensively and it is not ready at all, sadly! There is no support for pulling from private registries, there is no rescheduling if one of the nodes goes down and there is not intelligent way to manage volumes.

You are actually better of managing each server individually than using swarm.

(hard earned truth)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I should have mentioned in the article that Swarm is still heavily under development.

I'm still wondering if and how they're going to address the idea of co- scheduling groups of containers, like pods in Kubernetes. This is a common need, but Docker don't seem very keen: [https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/8781](https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/8781)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just wanted to throw into the mix Rancher. Rancher is a more recent comer into the space and still in beta. Rancher focuses on simplicity, flexibility, and pragmatic solutions for Docker based infrastructure. Rancher is different in that it can be deployed in conjunction with all of these systems mentioned or can be ran as a replacement. It includes a scheduler, load balancing, health checks, service discovery, application templating based on compose syntax, storage management, application catalog, upgrade management, github/ldap integration, UI, API, CLI, etc.

Disclaimer: Co-founder of Rancher Labs and chief geeky guy behind Rancher

<comment><USER8> Rancher looks really good. I'm going to try it out - can you guys add a launch guide for Rancher OS on DigitalOcean?

Also, I want to make a plugin/service that's dependent on what you've build solely for the pun "Huevos RancherOS"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> HN: Has anyone here worked significantly with SmartOS and its associated tools? I love the idea of a Zones/ZFS-backed container OS, but their documentation looks very sloppy. Does anyone here have extensive experience with it (who's not Bryan Cantrill - your BSDNow podcast interview is what got me looking)

<comment><USER10> Yes Joyent's Triton may be the best way to run docker containers, not only for ZFS, but for Illumos Zones, network virtualization.. You may be interested by this article from Casey Bisson, about running Mesos on Triton:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nomad is another scheduler released by hashicorp. This probably wasn't available when the article was written but I am curious how it would compare to the others.

[https://www.nomadproject.io](https://www.nomadproject.io)

<comment><USER12> Thanks for posting, Nomad looks really impressive. have you run it in production ?

<comment><USER13> Nomad is not ready for production. It's unfinished. Let's call it pre-alpha.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm leaning toward Kubernetes because that's what fabric8.io has chosen. The others may be great, but I'm not really interested in writing a lot of glue code to make them work well with Jenkins/Gerrit/Nexus/Slack/Docker/Chaos Monkey/OpenShift the way Fabric8 has.

</comment><comment><USER15> Only Kubernetes has facilities for hosting external services reliably. I'm not sure why these other lower level tools are being compared to it. Especially Mesos and Marathon, which are much lower level.

<comment><USER16> Marathon and Kubernetes are in the same level, why do you call it lower level. Mesos, yes, and Kubernetes can run on Mesos too.

<comment><USER15> Maraton schedules long running tasks, but doesn't offer any explicit facilities for binding a homogenous group into a relible responder set.

At least, last time I checked. I can see components in the Marathon API to help you build such a thing. But Kubernetes deals with a fundamentally more abstract set of primitives: groups of containers (pods), replicated pods, and automatically managed dispatch points to said groups called services.

The Marathon documentation literally recommends you hand-roll a periodically updated haproxy service to accomplish that last bit. While K8S introduces a fair amount of overhead to accomplish this feat reliably, that overhead pays off by having a very responsive and available system.

So yeah. K8s is working one level up the stack, as I see it. I think you can make something reasonable with only Marathon, and that thought is backed up by the reality of people doing it. But my own experience suggests K8S does more for you here. Hence my excitement about K8S-mesos.

<comment><USER17> I managed to achieve load balancing for a fleet of microservices using vulcand [0] and marathon callbacks [1].

It listens for marathon callbacks (for app create/update/scale), or when a task is killed/lost and updates the backends in etcd, propagating to all vulcand load balancers.

The tool is available on github [2]

[0] [https://vulcand.io/proxy.html#backends-and- servers](https://vulcand.io/proxy.html#backends-and-servers)

[1] [https://mesosphere.github.io/marathon/docs/event- bus.html](https://mesosphere.github.io/marathon/docs/event-bus.html)

[2] [https://github.com/kuende/kameni](https://github.com/kuende/kameni)

<comment><USER15> This is a good thing. Perhaps you could get the Maraton folks to stop recommending such an awkward solution in preference to your work?

<comment><USER17> Well, it depends. My solution is opinionated, using only one vulcand cluster for load balancing, multiple vulcand servers listening on one etcd namespace.

For a small number of nodes (< 100) and requests (< 8000 req/s on each vulcand server) this vulcand approach is ok. For large scale, HAProxy/Nginx supports a lot more req/s than vulcand, and I think it can also be configured using confd [0] using a similar aproach: listen for marathon events, update etcd keys, then confd will listen for changes and reload HAProxy/Nginx

[0] [http://ox86.tumblr.com/post/90554410668/easy-scaling-with- do...](http://ox86.tumblr.com/post/90554410668/easy-scaling-with-docker- haproxy-and-confd)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What is the threshold number of computers past which using this stuff is worth the tradeoff in complexity?

<comment><USER19> This is something we face in our environment. The OSes are pretty homogenous, but the application set is very diverse; 16 of these, 2 of these, 8 of those, and so on. It's made previous orchestration tools a bit more unwieldy, but of course manual control is unwieldy as well!

In addition, of course, the task of learning, implementing, and evaluating the options take a large amount of time on top of the time we already spend (mostly) manually maintaining infrastructure.

Articles like this are a great stepping stone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Would have liked to see Juju in this comparison. Maybe juju is too flexible, since it's not restricted to just deploying docker containers?

(disclosure, I'm a Juju dev)

<comment><USER14> Is there an easy way to try Juju on a laptop? Like a vagrant vm or something? Thank you :)

<comment><USER20> Sure, there's a local provider that uses LXC containers on your local machine (Ubuntu only), and we're working on a way to use LXD (which is a much cleaner local environment).

If you are running OSX, Windows, or a non-Ubuntu linux, you'd need an Ubuntu VM to run the local provider (we support Centos, Windows, and OSX for the juju client in general to control remote providers like Azure, Amazon, etc, just not for running the local provider).

[https://jujucharms.com/get-started](https://jujucharms.com/get-started)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Any thoughts on comparisons of these vs Amazon ECS? I know it's not open and portable, but still interested in understanding the differences.

<comment><USER22> We attempted to use ECS for a while before ultimately switching to Kubernetes. While its tight, built-in integration with AWS's Elastic Load Balancers and Auto-Scaling Groups made it fit well in the AWS ecosystem, we found that there wasn't enough visibility into the system. Containers would be stopped without notification or logging and not restarted.

We've found the Kubernetes primitives to be the easiest and most straight- forward to work with while still providing a very powerful API around which to wrap all sorts of custom tooling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am looking forward to the day when Mesos(or any other PaaS software) will be able to use Ceph to save application(app/container/vm) state. In such a setup applications could move around the compute cluster without loosing state.

<comment><USER23> Mesos does now have early-stage support for persistent disks. See [https://github.com/apache/mesos/blob/master/docs/persistent-...](https://github.com/apache/mesos/blob/master/docs/persistent- volume.md)

There's also technologies like flocker that will allow you do this with docker volumes (which can then be run inside mesos).

Both of these are in a pretty early stage of life, so there's some rough edges, but if you really need it, it's there.

<comment><USER4> Indeed you can cobble together such a solution, but baked in integration at the framework level would be more interesting. If state is exposed at the scheduler level, than its much easier for all scheduler frameworks to take advantage of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So the article seems to suggest that for smaller clusters use Kubernetes, for larger ones use Mesos.

Would people agree?

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I would say it's a bit more subtle than that.

If you have a very large cluster (1000s of machines), Mesos may well be the best fit, as you are likely to want Mesos's support for diverse workloads and the extra assurance of the comparative maturity of the project.

The big difference with Kubernetes is that it enforces a certain application style; you need to understand the various concepts (pods, labels, replication controllers) and build your applications to work with those in mind. I haven't seen any figures, but I would expect Kubernetes to scale well for the majority of projects.

<comment><USER25> The one thing I don't totally understand about the Kubernetes scaling issue is that you can ostensibly use Mesos as the scheduler for Kubernetes, which naively to me seems like it would allow Kubernetes to scale to the same size as Mesos, or is the DNS and Service stuff the part that doesn't scale as well?

<comment><USER26> Absolutely! We're actively working on this here at Mesosphere, in partnership with Google. You can check out the project at [https://github.com/mesosphere/kubernetes- mesos](https://github.com/mesosphere/kubernetes-mesos)

You might also be interested in a talk I gave at the Kubernetes launch in August about our work coming the two: [https://youtu.be/aXcdHwQ5GgQ](https://youtu.be/aXcdHwQ5GgQ)

<comment><USER27> Full disclosure, I work at Google on Kubernetes.

a1r is exactly right - Mesos does great in virtualizing your data center, Kubernetes is a framework on top of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone using Dkron? [http://dkron.io/](http://dkron.io/)

What I really need is a "distributed cron", first and foremost, with the additional requirements of: it being lightweight on resources, and it being multiplatform. Dkron seems to fit the description pretty well, I'm looking for any feedback from users.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is any of these platforms useful for a small company that wants to have a basic self-hosted environment for the usual stuff?

They are looking for services like e-mail (SMTP, IMAP, maybe webmail), website (static + maybe wordpress), source code hosting (Subversion) and reviews (?), CI (Jenkins?), devops, and CRM...

<comment><USER30> Kubernetes can be used to deploy anything that you can put into a Docker container, including support for persistent volumes (ie "mode 1" applications). I've been using it recently to host XMPP servers, gitlab, jenkins, etc.

I haven't installed Kubernetes directly, but I have setup and used Openshift v3 which adds a PaaS solution on top of Kubernetes. Setting it up is really easy, and they've release an all-in-one VM to demo it out: [http://www.openshift.org/vm/](http://www.openshift.org/vm/)

The other option is to use a hosted solution. Google Container Engine ([https://cloud.google.com/container- engine/](https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/)) is essentially hosted Kubernetes.

PS I work for Red Hat. OpenShift V3 is our product, and we contribute a lot to Kubernetes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anything to say about Flynn?

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

<comment><USER32> Flynn is a high-level platform that doesn't require you to think about low- level components like schedulers, overlay networking, service discovery, consensus, etc. Flynn does of course include a built-in scheduler and other components that accomplish many of the goals mentioned in the article.

(disclosure: I am a cofounder of Flynn)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How many people actually need this level of scale vs how many people are implementing this because its $BUZZWORD

<comment><AUTHOR> You need orchestration even at small scale (say more than 2 nodes). Otherwise you have to manually take care of container scheduling and failover etc.

<comment><USER12> Exactly, the biggest problem with running apps in Containers, is you need to ensure you dont have your entire cluster sitting on one physical node (or virtual node i guess), services can be restart, auto-scaled, etc. Even at a small scale some orchestration and management is required

<comment><USER34> >you need to ensure you dont have your entire cluster sitting on one physical node

Why is this the case? My understanding of containers is that they solve exactly this problem - restart, rescale only a fraction of the application (only an individual service).

<comment><USER30> Bringing up new containers will always take a finite amount of time.

If all of a cluster is deployed to a single host, and that host dies, then the recovery time is the time needed to reschedule the container elsewhere, load it onto the machine (if not cached), and execute it. This is all downtime, since every instance was lost.

If instances are on more than one host, then even in the case of a single host's failure the application is still available while the failed instance is rescheduled and started.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Also check out [https://containership.io](https://containership.io) as a scheduler. The core of the system is open source, has built in service discovery, dns, and load balancing.</comment>


Bootstrapping the Smartest Way - <AUTHOR> https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/286173 <comment><AUTHOR> "At that point, I was getting paid to develop the product even further while gaining deeper knowledge about the customers and the market."

This is basically the idea. Do consulting work while bootstrapping your company but try to do it by finding companies in your target market. This way, it is not only consulting, you are getting paid to learn the market.</comment>


Show HN: Enterprise company search engine for product outreach/sales - <AUTHOR> http://www.whatisnova.com

<comment><USER2> I like the simple home page with just a search box, and the idea of a way to find similar companies seems really useful.

1.) The site does not function without javascript. In most cases, this won't matter, but in some cases it will be a non-starter. This often causes significant accessibility problems for the blind.

1.1) I realize you're doing just about everything in javascript, but this means there is no way to share a link to a particular search. Using url parameters like most other search engines solves this issue.

2.) The modal and forced email entry when trying to "view more" and "view details" is unexpected and unpleasant. Though you certainly want to get email addresses from users, you're violating the principle of least surprise here, and many users will be uncomfortable with handing out their email address.

3.) The text/copy shown when forcing email entry is coarse and uninformative:

> _" Great! We're happy you're enjoying our product. Please enter your email > address to continue using Nova."_

Is there a reason why a user would want to give you their email address? If you can communicate a reason, it's a better approach.

BTW, you might want to remove the "firstname.lastname@example.com" address I entered for testing, and you might want to do some verification of entered addresses (not easy, but doable).

4.) After getting the "Thanks!" on email entry, the "view more" and "view details" links still don't work.

5.) Your database of businesses is too incomplete, and your similarity algorithm needs improvement. (Note: a small number of database entries may be entirely forgivable if you're just starting out and are looking at your lengthy todo list with lots of data you need to import ;-). I tried searching on two company names, [Rocket EMS] and [Information Handling Services] as well as the common abbreviation for the later [IHS]. The first (rocketems.com) is a newer and specialized local company, and the second (www.ihs.com) is very well known and has been in business for more than 50 years. You returned no results for the two company names, and mostly incorrect results for [IHS].

(sorry, reading Matt Cutts of Google and similar search related sites has me in the habit of using square brackets [] around queries)

You did locate one of the many subsidiary sites (brand names basically) of IHS, namely "IHS Engineering360 Media Solutions", but not the parent company. Though the subsidiary site does earn some of its living through "Marketing & Advertising" (this tag is most likely derived from SIC codes), it's not exactly correct or complete. Since you seem to be basing your "similarity" measure on SIC codes, the "similar" companies listed are very dissimilar.

I'm not entirely certain what I should have expected from the phrase, "find similar companies" so maybe my expectations were too high?

Well, it may be a little rough in a few places at present, but a company similarity search engine seems really useful to me, and I wish you luck with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> What data are you ingesting to build similarity and how are you creating your index? All the searches I did are way off.

For example, when I put in my company - Indicative - you identify us correctly, but I don't see any other web/mobile analytics companies, only a bunch of completely unrelated companies - everything from digital coupons to banner ad A/B testing.

<comment><USER4> We are working on putting together a more detailed category list so we can drill into deeper comparisons than "Internet" for software/internet companies. This is a difficult task since often that information is not readily available to be ingested via algorithm. Any ideas about how we might accomplish this are appreciated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> View Details always pops-up the dialog asking for email even after it has been entered.</comment>


Red, Yellow, and Blue - <AUTHOR> http://www.daveeddy.com/2014/07/01/red-yellow-and-blue/ <comment><USER2> Neat article, but I found it surprising that the author didn't go into a bit more detail about why RGB is used and where it's used. Saying that it's just how computers or televisions deal with it because of monitors only offers a bit of information.

While the explanation of additive and reductive color combining was interesting, I think it's important to note that it's because you're dealing with waves of light being absorbed or reflected.

I learned more about color theory and light in stage lighting classes than anywhere else. Teaching your brain how to combine colors correctly to get the exact shades you're looking for on the stage is hard. You really do have to forget a lot of what you learned in art classes to be effective. Understanding how colored light is absorbed, reflected, or otherwise changed on makeup, furniture, fabrics, and other surfaces added a whole different level of complexity not found in typical art classes.

Searching Google for "stage lighting color wheel" reveals more wheels similar to the one that you see at the author's really cool implementation[0].

[0] - [http://bahamas10.github.io/ryb/](http://bahamas10.github.io/ryb/)

<comment><USER3> > Neat article, but I found it surprising that the author didn't go into a bit > more detail about why RGB is used and where it's used. Saying that it's just > how computers or televisions deal with it because of monitors only offers a > bit of information.

It's our eyes. Our eyes are (roughly) RGB, therefore a RGB monitor is a best spectrum match for our eyes, therefore it's how computers and printers deal with it (CMY/K/ is just the inverse of RGB).

For many animals, even our best high end lifelike wide-spectrum display cuts out or inaccurately represents portions of the spectrum they can see.

<comment><USER4> > For example, while the L cones have been referred to simply as red > receptors, microspectrophotometry has shown that their peak sensitivity is > in the greenish-yellow region of the spectrum. Similarly, the S- and M-cones > do not directly correspond to blue and green, although they are often > depicted as such. It is important to note that the RGB color model is merely > a convenient means for representing color, and is not directly based on the > types of cones in the human eye.

It's not that easy though

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

> The cones are conventionally labeled according to the ordering of the > wavelengths of the peaks of their spectral sensitivities: short (S), medium > (M), and long (L) cone types. These three types do not correspond well to > particular colors as we know them. Rather, the perception of color is > achieved by a complex process that starts with the differential output of > these cells in the retina and it will be finalized in the visual cortex and > associative areas of the brain.

> For example, while the L cones have been referred to simply as red > receptors, microspectrophotometry has shown that their peak sensitivity is > in the greenish-yellow region of the spectrum. Similarly, the S- and M-cones > do not directly correspond to blue and green, although they are often > depicted as such. It is important to note that the RGB color model is merely > a convenient means for representing color, and is not directly based on the > types of cones in the human eye.

Also there are alternative color spaces like YUV: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV)

<comment><USER5> To elaborate on why the RGB color model is convenient for representing color...

The choices of RGB in trichromatic reproduction systems are such that the individual contribution of each minimizes the cross-cone activation in the eye, allowing greater fidelity (widest gamut) in color reproduction with only three sensors at input and three emissive colors at output. In other words, if you're going to use analog electronics and passive filters, it helps to make the selected primary frequencies as functionally orthogonal and isolated as possible.

Consider the quality of an absorptive filter and/or response profile of a pixel on CMOS sensor; so long as a it has a strong peak at the primary frequency, then we're not too concerned about leakage from other frequencies into it; nor are we too concerned that nearby colors could leak a little into the other two channels because this will mostly be correlated with overall luminance, which makes it very hard for the eye to discern upon reproduction (it looks a little more washed out).

This is why Young and Helmholtz initially identified red, green and blue as primary colors way back in the early 19th century. They tried to identify three specific color frequencies that could be used to mimic other pure frequencies through re-combination in test subjects, based on a theory about how the eyes worked. While these colors do not correspond to sensory peaks for each cone cell type, it turns out the retina/visual cortex's post processing (the "opponent-process" discovered by Ewald Hering) derives hue from the combined activation ratios, and is thus bypassed by using combinations of RGB to create hues as opposed to direct spectral activation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think don't even understand the point of the author.

For one, I learnt in school that the primary colours where red, green and blue, and later that the substractive primary colours where cyan, magenta and yellow. So nothing different from the RGB/CMYK colour wheels everyone uses.

Second, well nobody will ever be able to create all colours from mixing red, yellow and blue, plain and simple. Unless your red is actually magenta and your blue is actually cyan.

At this point, you have just created a colour picker that uses cyan, magenta and yellow with no easy way to change lightness (without the K scale, you will have to manually change every colour level to match the global lightness you want).

 _But_ his implementation has a brightness slider and uses "real" red instead of magenta, and "real" blue instead of cyan, which makes it a BMYK color wheel, and which prevents it from reproducing all colours. Even just setting brightness to the minimum gives a dark brown instead of black, because he's mixing colors from different models.

<comment> mark-r I imagine it has to do with how long ago you went to school. I remember learning that red, yellow, and blue were the primary colors, but that was back when TVs were black-and-white.

For me the RYB model just seems more intuitive. It just feels natural that green would be a bluish-yellow. It still seems odd that red and green can be combined at all, much less produce a pure yellow.

<comment><USER6> > _For me the RYB model just seems more intuitive. It just feels natural that > green would be a bluish-yellow. It still seems odd that red and green can be > combined at all, much less produce a pure yellow._

But that's just what the CMY(K) model says. The CMY(K) model is the meaningful one in everyday life. In actual reality, with human eyes observing physical light filtered by pigments, blue is just cyan with a little magenta in it, and red is just magenta with a little yellow in it. The truth is, in the real world, you will never be able to make cyan or magenta if all you have is yellow, red and blue paint. But you will be able to make red or blue if you have yellow, magenta and cyan paint.

I think this might just be a case of people insisting to use less precise but more familiar names for colours, maybe. Maybe in English "cyan" and "magenta" sound like strange colours while blue and red sound more familiar and comforting. But insisting on using blue instead of cyan actually restricts your ability to draw colours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I couldn't take the article seriously after the suggestion that he was producing colours that are not seen on a natural rainbow and that the rainbow is wrong. The spectra for sunlight is almost complete in the visible region apart from a few small gaps where various elements absorb the light. If you look at a proper spectrum for sunlight you can clearly see the colours he claims are missing.

<comment><USER8> Purple (distinct from violet) does not appear on natural rainbows.

<comment><USER9> This reminds me of the scuffle about pink. I can't find the original article linked to from HN, but a quick search yields some interesting disputes:

[http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/03/07/does-the-color-pink- exis...](http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/03/07/does-the-color-pink-exist- scientists-arent-sure/)

[http://gizmodo.com/if-the-color-pink-doesnt- scientifically-e...](http://gizmodo.com/if-the-color-pink-doesnt- scientifically-exist-why-can-1464266788)

[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/03/05/...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/03/05/stop- this-absurd-war-on-the-color-pink/)

If there's one saving grace, I suppose it's that we're not tetrachromatics, right? ;)

<comment> mark-r But some women are...

[http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with- supe...](http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with-super-human- vision)

<comment><USER9> Do be aware that it looks like it's an area that needs further study (and apparently the "fourth" cell may detect light between red and green). On average, humans are (generally) not tetrachromats. Poking around on a cursory search suggests that only one subject in that 2012 study expressed attributes that were definitive evidence of the existence of tetrachromacy in humans. Apparently there's some ongoing discussion as to whether or not the optic nerve is capable of funnelling an extra color channel to the brain, so that'll be of interest to follow.

Importantly, I was thinking along the lines of some insects and spiders that are capable of seeing into the UV spectrum for sexual signalling or locating food sources (e.g. flowers). Which reminds me that there's been some evidence that suggests those who've had cataract surgery may be able to see deeper into the violet spectrum without a UV-filtering obstacle in place. But that's likely just the function of the blue-sensitive cells.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I believe Red, Green, and Blue are the colors of light and Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow are the colors of pigment.

Apparently the common color wheels, Red Yellow and Blue, are based on Newton's prism experiments [1].

[1] [http://learn.leighcotnoir.com/artspeak/elements- color/primar...](http://learn.leighcotnoir.com/artspeak/elements- color/primary-colors/)

<comment><USER9> > I believe Red, Green, and Blue are the colors of light and Cyan, Magenta, > and Yellow are the colors of pigment.

Yes, because physiologically, that's how we're wired. We have receptors for red, green, and blue wavelength light. Everything else is just a matter of how they get excited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a rather restrictive approach to the problem of 'I want to choose from a more aesthetically appealing subset of the colors computers can reproduce' (where 'aesthetically appealing' is valid for some definition rooted primarily in experience with physical paints, stubborn adherence to school artroom dogma, and nostalgia). You could achieve the same effect with a color picker that only includes the colors traditionally produced by Crayola.

<comment><USER12> >You could achieve the same effect with a color picker that only includes the colors traditionally produced by Crayola.

Apple tried this, kind of.

[http://lowendmac.com/thomas/06/art1025/cpicker.gif](http://lowendmac.com/thomas/06/art1025/cpicker.gif)

<comment><USER13> It's still there in the latest OS X: [http://i.imgur.com/40DGTXo.png](http://i.imgur.com/40DGTXo.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you want to go down a reading rabbit hole about color theory for a while, check out [http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/wcolor.html](http://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/wcolor.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I stopped thinking in terms of the RYB "color wheel" shortly after middle school art class. RGB and CYMK seem natural to me.

If you're interested in a color wheel for a picker design that has perceptual evenness, check the Munsell CS ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system)) ... in a color picker it might be cool to select via projections of CIELAB as the refined version of same.

</comment><comment><USER15> What I always found fascinating which is not addressed here, is how the visible light spectrum is a straight line with other "colors" at its ends, yet somehow our brains cut out that segment of the EM spectrum, and manage to bend it into a circle, so that color "wheels" make sense to us and flow nicely, when in fact red and violet are quite separate on the EM spectrum. It's our brains that play a little trick

<comment><USER16> I've heard two explanations for this. The first is that the longer wavelength "red"-ish receptors in our eyes are also excited by the frequencies of light at the other end of the visible spectrum, so shorter wavelengths than blue start to appear red again. Unfortunately the graph produced to back this up is usually that of the CIE colour matching functions, which do indeed have an obvious lump around purple, but are _not_ derived from measurements. That lump was added to create a three-primary space which didn't require negative numbers to encode completely pure single-wavelength colours. That's a problem which otherwise crops up when you use three primaries based directly on measurements of the eye, because the three pigments in our eyes are not selective enough that a single wavelength only activates one receptor. Real measurements of the pigments don't really back up the idea of extra sensitivity to purple in the long-wavelength cones.

The second explanation (or suggestion, at least) is more psychological. In the distant past our eyes had only two colour receptors, and our brains measured the relative difference between the two, so we percieved colour on a one- dimensional line - e.g. more "warm" long wavelengths or more "cool" short wavelengths. At some point we evolved a third receptor, and our brains began processing this extra input as another perceptual axis orthogonal to the existing one, which could be described as purple/green against the original red/blue. Exploring this new 2D space results in a continuous rainbow around the edges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The RYB color model is fine for third graders and cosmeticians but if you want to understand how color works you need to understand RGB. And yes that goes painters too. Mixing paint is more complicated than just using a color pick on your monitor because there is a volumetric/dilutional component and the paints is rarely a pure color (i.e. red paint is 256,0,0). It is galling that their are still university level art professor who persist in RYB color wheel malarky. Nothing irritates me more than the phrase, "we are mixing paint, not color". You are mixing both!

</comment><comment><USER18> Cool article! I've understood the difference between additive and subtractive for a while, but hadn't thought about the discrepancy between RYB and CMY.

I also recommend watching this short video on the origin of ROYGBIV, and why Indigo probably doesn't really deserve it's own letter - but it got one, because of European music notation: [http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2014/01/why- roygbiv...](http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2014/01/why-roygbiv-is- arbitrary/283432/)

<comment><USER19> Anyone considering Newton's methods as 'mystical' (implied 'unscientific') gives modern institutionalized science much too much credit, and proper exploratory science much too little.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is no RGB value for the cavernous void reaching deep into a cliff, into which a dark crack gives you a glimpse, which gobbles the burning light of the noonday sun, or your brightest flashlight, and gives back nothing.

RGB is just 3 pixels of different intensities, next to each other and sitting on your desk.

</comment><comment><USER19> > the real color wheel below, in all of its glory, showing colors you will > never see on a rainbow produced in nature.

Magenta? sure, everyone agrees is a bastard color- but cyan is on the rainbow in the spot labeled 'blue', and _your_ blue is labeled 'indigo'.

CAN'T PROVE ME WRONG IMMA COLOR EXPERT

</comment><comment><USER21> Two semi-popular color picker extensions for Photoshop that already include RYB modes:

[http://www.coolorus.com/](http://www.coolorus.com/)

[http://anastasiy.com/colorwheel](http://anastasiy.com/colorwheel)</comment>


The Myth of Education - <AUTHOR> http://expressiveegg.org/2018/12/15/the-myth-of-education/ <comment><USER2> That's a lot of words without any evidence. I guess the learned are just oppressing the creatives by demanding their arguments be evidence based and logical? Another tiered competence that they just reject as a systematic way to control?

You know, maybe it is! And all the better to make sure, via the system, that humans don't come to false conclusions so easily and readily.

There is some strange deeper truths to this article that I feel I could argue for correctly, but they are sparse and the negative connotation is unwarranted, the rest is mere rant.

<comment><USER3> Interesting that you imply an equivalence between "evidence" and "education", when in my experience education was rarely about learning evidence-based ways of thinking and more about regurgitating a specific form.

A good example is the way the "scientific method" is taught, where you are given a canned experiment with a known outcome, told which pieces of "evidence" to collect and what relationship to expect between them, and finally how to format your summary of your proceedings. No actual instruction on method is involved, it's just a pantomime.

I've mentored many young scientists by now. None of them come in understanding how to do science, because their entire education - up through college at some elite institutions - has not prepared them for how to actually think their way through a problem. The only place people actually learn this is in graduate school, when you are finally put face-to-face with a real problem that no one else can give you a canned answer and methodology for regurgitating.

Education is bunk. I say this as someone who went through the very best educational institutions. I'm still recovering. I didn't learn how to be a good thinker as a result of my education - I had a good early dose because my dad was a scientist and made me think creatively. Then I had a long gap where I learned nothing until I had to do my PhD. That taught me a little, but it wasn't until later when I had to collaborate with other scientists and actually solve problems that I began to really learn how to think. Most people around me still can't do this - most of what I spend my day doing is helping other people break down their problem to the point where they are able to apply some more rudimentary skillset to it.

The real purpose of education seems to me to be to separate children from adults, and thus prevent them from learning anything useful until they re- encounter actual adults again, decades later.

<comment><USER4> > Most people around me still can't do this - most of what I spend my day > doing is helping other people break down their problem to the point where > they are able to apply some more rudimentary skillset to it.

This not only applies to sciene... normal engineering teams have similar problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The purpose of education is also to prevent ordinary people from being able > to communicate with each other.

Without education, a lot of people wouldn't be able to read the article (for the better?)

Without education, people would rely on their instincts and get tricked by this article, rather than critically analyzing it.

Without education, the author wouldn't have been able to use 90% of the complex vocabulary uses throughout the article... It's almost ironic to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean without _learning_. The 'education' presented in this article is schooled education, not learning. People do learn in schools, but they do so despite being there, not because of it.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I disagree that education isn't good for learning though.

Sure there could be perverse incentives here and there that make the education system look bad, and it's definitely not perfect, and sure there's some unspoken learnings that teach people how to behave in society , but I'd argue that being at school is one of the most effective ways to make humans learn. How would you learn everything learned from age ~5 to 18 without teachers and peers?

<comment><USER3> School is not one of the most effective ways to make humans learn. It is one of the LEAST effective ways. I will give you an example.

I know a decent amount of linear algebra now. I took a linear algebra course in college; I retained almost none of it. I remember learning something about SVDs and eigenvectors; I don't remember how to do an SVD.

So how did I learn any linear algebra? I had to learn it in graduate school, where I was trying to model evolution as a Markov process. I looked up some stuff in Numerical Recipes, wrote some C classes implementing matrix exponentiation and other such things. That stuck.

School is useless.

<comment><USER5> What you're describing is that you remembered something much better if you have a use for it. It doesn't mean school isn't effective.

How can you tell that undergrad knowledge didn't help you when you "looked up stuff in numerical recipes". In other words: would your younger self in high school be able to understand the stuff in Numerical Recipes, and able to write some C(++?) classes.

I know I wouldn't, and that undergrad education taught me some strong basics that would let me do it now. The end of class stuff where you take a toy example of how to use your learned basics such as calculating the SVD is just an attempt at giving some "real world" example which exercises the basics, and an attempt at grading you on this, and that can of little usefulness long term yeah, but the core concepts are useful if you pursue your education/career in a scientific path that requires those.

<comment><USER3> >In other words: would your younger self in high school be able to understand the stuff in Numerical Recipes, and able to write some C(++?) classes.

Yes, because my younger self used to read math books on the side for fun. This is also how I learned C.

While it is true that you may absorb some basic stuff from schooling, it is VERY thin. I was by all accounts an exemplary student, and I still retained a small fraction of what I learned. Meanwhile all of the real-world stuff I learned is still mostly there.

We would do much better to figure out how to integrate young people into real life earlier, like we used to - apprentice => journeyman => master. But we can't tolerate that, because adults need to be "maximizing productivity" or some garbage, and don't have time to train kids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reading through the prologue to the whole book, I get: Civilization is a sin; knowledge is a fraud; religion is evil, money is evil, etc., etc.

Hard pass. I doubt the author even believes this tripe; he's more likely to live in an "artificial" city than try to survive in the woods on berries.

<comment><USER7> Are you sure you get it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The purpose of education is to socialise human beings into a life of > complete institutional dependency. School teaches you that justice must come > from someone in institutional authority, that meaningful activity must come > from a 'career path,' that if you want to express yourself you must first > gain access to centralised speech platforms,1 that if you want to do > something, you must first of all gain a licence or a qualification and that, > above all, your own desires and instincts are invalid.

And also education is based on punishing errors and consequently stifles real learning because we learn by erring.</comment>