Let's Build a 28-Core Raspberry Pi Cluster - <AUTHOR> https://ikarus.sg/how-i-built-kraken/ <comment><USER2> Hello, original author here. I saw a bunch of traffic from Hacker News and decided to drop by.

Thanks for sharing it here! I'd be happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER3> Hey there. Thanks for the article!

I wanted to ask you if it is worth it implementing something similar in the cloud to learn kubernetes. The hardware is prohibitively expensive on Brazil, so maybe a cluster of t2.micro on AWS running for the total amount of 750 hours could serve the learning purpose for free

<comment><USER4> I don't know how it is in Brazil but in Europe and the US offices frequently go out of business that have dozens if not hundreds tiny desktop computers in their bankruptcy auctions. They've got i5 cpu's 4-8gb of ram and 128gb SSD's and go for (much) less than a hundred bucks. Stack 3 of them and you have a kubernetes cluster that you could carry in one hand and I think outperforms the 7 raspberry Pi 3's.

Servethehome has a series of articles about the machines, though they're focusing on the slightly higher end ones.

<comment><USER5> I think it's lease companies replacing paid off business PCs. They rent boxes to offices on multi year contracts, collect and recycle them when the term is up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have to admire someone who spends their first paycheck on a pi cluster:

> The total damage my wallet sustained from Kraken was S$626.63 or in $449.73 > USD, which was virtually all I had left for the month after subtracting > expenses and education loan repayments.

<comment><USER7> All power to him.

Nobody got successful by playing it safe.

<comment><USER8> This is cash for joy!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's the actual use case for rpi clusters like this? If the goal is to learn docker or k8s using a realistic setup involving multiple machines, can't it be achieved by using multiple VMs on one physical desktop instead of using the cluster? The 7-node cluster has only 7GB RAM in total, which is not too much to ask on a desktop.

I don't know what people do with rpi clusters and I'm honestly puzzled why people bother building them. If you get a beefy expensive server, I can understand -- you care about performance. If you get a single rpi to serve files & media in a home LAN it makes sense too -- low footprint, low power and low cost. But I don't know what a rpi cluster excels at. Is it just a toy? Or a learning tool to make computer science & networking concepts concrete and tangible? Or just to get a computer system on a shoestring budget, much cheaper than even a single desktop or laptop?

BTW, computer hardware in Singapore is overpriced. $140 for a switch in Singapore vs $73 for a similarly-capable switch on Amazon. [https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Ethernet-Unmanaged- Rackmount-...](https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-Ethernet-Unmanaged-Rackmount-TL- SG1016D/dp/B004ELA0SS)

<comment><USER2> The initial point was to build it just because, there was no real reason behind building it. But at this point, I've found quite a lot of use cases for it, specifically hosting web services for family and friends. In the process though, I've learnt to work under extreme resource/budget constraints and that alone has been invaluable imo.

<comment><USER9> What storage do you use for the web services, given that SD cards are unreliable? Do you have one disk per node or let them share one disk over the network or something like that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of moot "revealing" the "datacenter" that hosted 4chan: [https://imgur.com/sBLRuZY](https://imgur.com/sBLRuZY)

I'm putting the air-quotes because I still sincerely hope that it was a joke

<comment><USER11> I'm more impressed he got trips, that's pretty amusing about the USB being as fast as an SSD. Technically SSD's are supposed to be based off SD card tech if I'm not mistaken, issue with a USB being based off the same tech is the USB speeds themselves vs a SSD can go significantly faster due to its connector (SATA or otherwise). Although I can see USB C being 'fast enough' instead.

<comment><USER12> > _I 'm more impressed he got trips_

There's probably admin tools for that.

<comment><USER11> I wondered about this, but sometimes people say it cause the previous post they see is 999 so they post it, sometimes you get lucky as heck haha. I doubt they'd screw with the admin tools just to do it.

<comment><USER13> On big boards there's so many posts per hour that it's impossible to really predict this way, it's very much luck.

I remember people used to run scripts to be sure to get the big gets (6+ last digits identical) but I suppose such methods don't work anymore with captcha and other anti spam measures.

<comment><USER12> Pass users don't have CAPTCHA though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So I was toying with the idea of something similar. I'm a programmer and not a sysadmin, but I've dabbled with Docker and had a specific use-case.

But so far I've not come further than this: how to deal with the host OS?

Like, I don't want to log into N computers and manually run "sudo apt update" etc. I want them to run the same OS but with slightly different configurations.

Network booting via PXE seems to be the best alternative, but not sure how to prepare the images for distribution.

Anyone got any pointers on how this is best done?

edit: I should mention I just found [http://cobbler.github.io/](http://cobbler.github.io/) but haven't had time to investigate it. A viable choice?

<comment><USER15> For the common base image, I just build a normal Debian image, customize it (chroot) and flash it directly. For customization, maintenance and operations you want some sort of CM (Ansible, Salt, Chef or Puppet). There is also Packer, but it's not that easy to use for bare-metal images for some reason.

You could also do something like userdata where you have a script or playbook that runs on first boot and performs additional setup.

I've been meaning to try out PXE booting but am yet to.

<comment><USER16> If you can, I'd suggest using unified kernel images, they get rid of the "whole PXE setup", you just send one file and you've booted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hello! I did it like this: [https://www.instagram.com/p/CC76bkADL-c/](https://www.instagram.com/p/CC76bkADL-c/) It costed about 3k euro for me.

And this one special for k8s: [https://www.instagram.com/p/CAqtrRBpNRH/](https://www.instagram.com/p/CAqtrRBpNRH/)

<comment><USER18> Is the design files available for the rack mounted version (in particular the clip/holder parts).

Been quite keen to build something similar (albeit less nodes) for a little while. I find the homebrew blade style cluster amusing for some reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "I started noticing the performance bottlenecks started when I tried to run Wordpress on it, where a single page load of a newly installed Wordpress blog takes about 10 seconds!"

10 seconds is probably not bad for an uncached wordpress page.

<comment><USER20> 10 seconds is terrible, a WordPress page should render in under 2 seconds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A slightly cheaper option would be to get a bunch of Pi Zero W devices. They're $10 + SDcards. They would rely on WiFi which might be acceptable if the use case allows having a few dozen radios chattering next to each other. If not, then a $5 Pi Zero + $5-10 ethernet adapter might work.

Since the goal isn't to achieve maximum performance, the slow CPU & RAM (comparable to a 20th century desktop) might not be an issue. And the lower price would allow more devices so you could test more complex configurations and server management options.

<comment><USER22> Zeros are borderline unusable for actual compute due to having a single core and only half a gig or RAM. They make for great beefy microcontrollers and single-purpose boards, but are not the kind of thing where you want to run various network services.

(I have a cluster running Pi 2s, which have 4 cores apiece, but are still too short on RAM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How timely... just today I received my _CloverPi_ which I backed on Kickstarter (no other affiliation), a "back panel to enable 4 RaspberryPis to be clustered".

Finally I can earn my " _My other computer is a Beowulf Cluster_ " bumper sticker from what feels like aeons ago (courtesy of the now-defunct _ThinkGeek.com_ ).

<comment><USER24> > now-defunct ThinkGeek.com

Noooo!! They had the best toys.

Unfortunately their shipping to Canada made everything double the price for me...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Am I understanding that he is storing web data on the SD cards of the Pis? Is that normal? SD storage is notoriously unreliable, especially in write-heavy applications.

<comment><USER26> Brand SD cards are quite reliable. If you configure your SW to avoid sources of needless constant write churn (eg. like postgresql stats collector), and use good power supply, they will last years.

<comment><USER2> You're absolutely right. I've running these SD cards for about 2 years now. I use log2ram to stream logs to a ramdisk and then sync that at regular intervals to disk, to extend the life of the SD cards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> "This build is for you if you:"

ahem, for 600 dollars I get a fine computer which can host all the kubernets and docker I ever want in a nice formfactor...

I mean, it's cool and all, but effectively utterly useless except for the blinking lights.

<comment><USER28> Very cool work! I wonder the same, for a 'cluster' I'm expecting performance and large memory for example for scientific computing. Other than that I couldn't think of any other use cases. If anyone could enlighten me? Cheers

<comment><USER29> They built a multi-thousand pi cluster to test the SMP and configuration stuff before running it on a super computer.

Virtualising thousands of CPUs on a single machine is still not trivial.

Never mind simulating real world network issues.

[https://www.bitscope.com/blog/FM/?p=GF19A](https://www.bitscope.com/blog/FM/?p=GF19A)

<comment><USER27> yes, if you want to optimize a worst-case MPI-cluster, then a Pi (4) might be optimal for you (because sadly, 4 measly ARM cores with 100MBit/s is a some magnitudes removed from 100 cores and 100GBit/s Infiniband). But then you can also use a stack of old desktops, which is cheaper and you can just throw in a standard image and everything (including CUDA and MKL) can work.

<comment><USER29> > But then you can also use a stack of old desktops, which is cheaper

If electricity and cooling is free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's a new carrier board with integrated switching for Pi clustering: [https://turingpi.com/](https://turingpi.com/)

</comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if there is something to be said for not using Ethernet in something like this? Perhaps it is possible to make a kind of IP over GPIO interface, or attach them all directly to a USB bus? It just seems to me like RasPi -> USB -> Ethernet (for less than 1m) -> USB -> RasPi has a layer or two more than necessary (and I believe the on-board ethernets on RasPi are USB interfaces to the chip too). Could be an interesting project...

<comment><USER32> It would be educational.

I'd say the most interesting way to approach this at the moment would be to use RasPi 4s and link them via the PCI express bus.

None of this stuff is more than educational, though. I admire this build because it's almost a rite of passage for nerds to build a cluster, but when you're all done and the cool wears off you've basically got a pile of obsolete hardware for which you need to find a home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> People wanting to torture themselves with k8s at home ... I still dont understand why.

<comment><USER34> Imagine that the jobs you are interested in want to see some k8s experience. Either you teach it to yourself at home or you justify implementing it at your current job (resume driven development basically).

<comment><USER33> I have played around and learned the basics of docker etc without never ever wanting to run my home stuff on it. Learning and experimenting is not the same as using it as the primary tool to run your 'production' services at home.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If you want to get more performance out of a cluster like this you can look at my distributed HTTP app. server + JSON database solution: [https://github.com/tinspin/rupy](https://github.com/tinspin/rupy)

It's actually usable for live services on RPi 2 and on RPi 4 it beats Intel on float ops./joules at 100% utilization.

And if you use multicast UDP you can make these behave cooperatively to scale horizontally beyond what's possible with a vertical solution at a fraction of the purchase/maintenance cost.

I think we are peaking at 2 Gflops/watt for CPU, so if you need silence (passive cooling) and small size this is as good as it will get, probably ever: [http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=8015986770003767235](http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=8015986770003767235)

I'm building a RPi 4 cluster with these heatsinks.

</comment><comment><USER36> Neat setup. An alternative would perhaps be a Pine64 Clusterboard with 7 SOPINE modules: [https://store.pine64.org/product/clusterboard- with-7-sopine-...](https://store.pine64.org/product/clusterboard- with-7-sopine-compute-module-slots/)

<comment><USER37> I cannot recommend doing business with pine64, their customer service is nonexistent. If you cancel your order, or need to get ahold of someone @ email@example.com for any exception, in my experience you may as well shout at the nearest wall.

\- Someone out $165 spent on a cancelled pinephone order, no phone and no refund, complete radio silence.

<comment><USER38> > \- Someone out $165 spent on a cancelled pinephone order, no phone and no > refund, complete radio silence.

Hopefully you've asked your bank/creditcard to reverse the charge?

<comment><USER37> Up until hours ago my pending PayPal claim seemed lost in a different form of silent purgatory, but the refund appears to have finally been authorized as of tonight.

I ordered the phone on 5/12, cancelled the order and filed a PayPal "item not received" case on 6/26, escalated the case to a formal PayPal claim on 7/16 (under pressure from PayPal's "close or escalate" automated ultimatum), and as of now it appears the claim finally got refunded on 8/12.

Not a _single_ email response has ever been received from numerous attempts to contact email@example.com throughout this total waste of time and frustration. They ignored requests for updates before I cancelled, seemingly ignored the cancellation, filed an "item shipped" update in the PayPal case on 7/8 despite my cancelling the order on 6/26.

YMMV

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > The maximum number of ports on a consumer-grade network switch was 8, enough > for 7 nodes and a cable to the router.

Are there laws in Singapore that delineate between consumer and business grade networking equipment based on port numbers or something?

Here in Yankey Land you can pickup a consumer grade 16-port unmanaged gigabit switch for $50 at the local Wally World. The going rate on switch ports is $3-4 per port.

<comment><USER40> It looks like it was more a question of price in their market. In the post he mentions a 16 port switch but it's 10x the price of an 8 port. I bet it's a question of there being fewer people in the Singapore market looking for an >8 port switch on the low end of the market.

<comment><USER39> The switches he references in his post are from two entirely different product verticals. One is from the unmanaged vertical, the other is from the managed PoE vertical. Not only is he ignoring that a 16 port switch exists in the unmanaged vertical, he's ignored an entire vertical of managed switches without PoE.

TP-Link makes a $40 unmanaged 16-port gigabit switch and a $80 managed 16-port gigabit switch.

He's created a False dilemma/dichotomy by pretending that other options don't exist. This is like saying "I'd like a Toyota automobile larger than the Yaris but I can't afford the Lexus LS".

<comment><USER40> It's entirely possible that those options weren't readily available in the local store he's using. I'm not familiar with Singapore in particular but a lot of Asian countries don't have the huge electronics box stores that are common in the US and Europe. I've seen quite a few videos where the best electronic source the person had was what would be a small sized store in a US mall (20 feet wide, one isle with a counter running down one side for example). Online shopping does exist but shipping times and cost can also be pretty large.

<comment><USER39> > I'm not familiar with Singapore

Singapore is a very small (~250 sq mile) country, so it would take less than 30 minutes to drive across.

It's very wealthy.

It has, almost dead center in the middle, an electronics mall called Sim Lim Tower that's like 10-20 stories tall.

They most certainly have options.

<comment><USER41> And you forgot the superb food and it's variety.

<comment><USER39> I hope you're not referring to durian. :)

I was just pointing out characteristics that would lend themselves toward sourcing a network switch (e.g. accessible, wealthy, giant freaking electronics malls).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Seems down, here's a google cache of it [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lIePhG...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lIePhGOXF9AJ:https://ikarus.sg/how- i-built-kraken/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER43> Thanks, I wonder if the site was hosted on the Pi Cluster?

<comment><USER2> Yes the site is indeed hosted on the cluster.

<comment><USER44> Seems to be down again now. Guess it'll be spotty until traffic settles down.

Maybe the traffic will provide an interesting exercise in optimisation?

eg move from wordpress to static content or something, maybe add some CDN pieces, then whatever else turns out to be needed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Nice! I tried this out a while back as well, though I did nothing nearly as snazzy.

Southampton had instructions here, I believe it was: [http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/](http://www.southampton.ac.uk/~sjc/raspberrypi/)

(Maybe still useful if you want to do without docker?)

</comment><comment><USER46> Personally I would not use pi's for this. Massive waste of money, the experience is worth it but other than that..

<comment><USER2> What would you use then?

<comment><USER47> 600$ buys you a considerable amount of time in a cloud vendor. For example you can have a 1vCPU instance in Hetzner for 3€/month, which means 600$ can buy you about a year's worth of 20 instances running 24/7.

If you don't need 99.9999 availability of your cluster and are only interested in firing up the cluster from time to time then those same 600$ can buy you a few years of cluster time

<comment><USER48> The 3€/month is a single thread (not even a core), and it's not even dedicated. The lowest dedicated instance is 2 vCPU (1 core) for 23€/month with 8GB or RAM. That's 276€/year.

8 of those instances is equivalent to an 8 core (16 thread) chip with 64GB of memory. Using, e.g., Supermicro AMD EPYC 3251 + parts, you could build an entire server for less than 1/2 that price. You could have _twice_ the compute for the same price the first year. Servers easily last 3 years minimum, so Hetzner has a 6x markup at the low end.

Admittedly, building your own server doesn't include transit, but transit is _cheap_. Assuming you have a fast home connection (a big if for many people), the hard part is access to static IP addresses. There are dedicated services that lease IPs over a VPN tunnel, or you can setup your own VPN into, e.g., Hetzner or Vultr using a handful of the cheapest instances. (Not sure about Hetzner, but Vultr let's you lease and attach 2 additional IPs to the same instance for $2/month/IPv4 address.)

Now, the above setup is probably far too much trouble for most people, and it has many downsides[1]. But the point is that if we're _just_ talking about CPU time, not even Hetzner or some other cheap VPS provider can come close to the cost of running your own equipment.

[1] Power and cooling are two downsides, but the 3251 has a TDP of 50W. Granted, it doesn't have the highest clock speeds, but there's a reason cloud providers don't normally advertise Ghz. Anyhow, rather than build 2x 3251's you could build a single 16 core rig using a higher-clocked and newer EPYC or Xeon for about the same money (definitely at or under 2200€ all-in).

<comment><USER47> > 8 of those instances is equivalent to an 8 core (16 thread) chip with 64GB > of memory. Using, e.g., Supermicro AMD EPYC 3251 + parts, you could build an > entire server for less than 1/2 that price.

Your choice of comparisons suggest you completely missed the whole point. If the author wanted a desktop I'm sure he would buy one for 600$ instead of spending that money to put together an underperforming cluster that's entirely unusable as a desktop.

If instead you are interested in gaining experience managing a cluster that runs distributed systems then yes you would do something like putting together a raspberry pi cluster.

Yet, if you seek to have the same experience (or arguably far better) without spendig a hefty sum as capex and having access to more computational resources for a negligible opex then cloud providers such as Hetzner are clearly a far better option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Wow, its wonderful.

</comment><comment><USER50> Until Raspberry Pi has native hardware crypto instructions (AES) it's useless for real work.

</comment><comment> daniel-s I think that there are a lot of use cases of Pis for which online cloud providers might be a better option.

Where does it become a better idea to just rent a few instances in Azure/EC2/Google Cloud?</comment>


D3.js: How to handle dynamic JSON Data - <AUTHOR> http://pothibo.com/2013/09/d3-js-how-to-handle-dynamic-json-data/

<comment><USER2> I'm just getting started with d3 myself, and I found this ebook, which is free online, to be a great tutorial for all of things mentioned in the OP's post, but in greater detail:

[http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000345/index.ht...](http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1230000000345/index.html)

<comment><USER3> It's definitely the best book there is, but you're going to need to practice a lot and read a lot of articles to really wrap your head around d3.js.

If I could recommend a way to learn d3.js:

1\. Read Scott's book (and code the examples).

2\. Think of some simple charts you want to make (and code them).

3\. Use #d3.js@freenode, Stack Overflow, and see if some of the articles at [http://www.d3noob.org/](http://www.d3noob.org/) fit what you're trying to do.

4\. Go to [http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock](http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock), be inspired, fork the code, and apply it to your own idea.

Repeat #3.

Ideally, find some kind of community where you can discuss with and help each other out regularly, but I don't really know of such a place, and it can be hard to find someone to do this with physically outside Paris, Berlin, NYC, and SF.

<comment><USER4> Should I learn d3 or three.js or raw canvas?

<comment><USER5> I would give different answers depending on what you're trying to do.

Do you have some data you want to visualize in an interactive way? Maybe try D3.js

Do you want to make 3d models or video games? THREE.js

Do you want to do custom 2D drawings that aren't suited to the previous two? Maybe raw canvas is for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not to be too much of a pedant, but the phrase

> SVG has an opposite y-coordinate system (0 is on top, height() is at the > bottom).

struck me as silly, since that's how the coordinate systems of nearly all computer graphics systems work, not really opposite....

<comment><USER7> Yes, but it's the opposite of math-convention, which many of us have been taught since ~6th grade.

Anyone who has done any amount of work with computer graphics knows that this is the norm; but a new programmer, or just one that hasn't worked with graphics, has 6+ years of math education telling them that the y-axis is backwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I actually wrote an AngularJS directive to assist in integrating D3.js with automatic scope updates: [https://github.com/beefsack/angular-d3](https://github.com/beefsack/angular-d3)

A little demo is in the repo too: [http://rawgithub.com/beefsack/angular-d3/master/example/inde...](http://rawgithub.com/beefsack/angular-d3/master/example/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Excellent tutorial. It really reminds me of when d3.js clicked for me and I had the very same mental process you're describing in this post.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you liked it, I believe d3.js can feel foreign since the separation between accessors and objects is really not obvious.

Everything looks functional until you dig in the source and realize that you are actually manipulating objects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> After spending the summer working on a project using Firebase, Angular, and D3, I definitely would have appreciated more articles on using D3 with dynamic data. Thanks for writing this up! I hope it helps some more people down the road.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why are there only 3 points in each graph when there are five items in JSONdata? I can't figure it out.

Also:

When you show the JSONdata object on the page, you've switched your </code> and </pre> closing tags.

and

By reading through the code examples, it seems like you don't add the circles' click handler and cursor style until the _Outside the current (domain)_ section, when it's really been there since the first example. That's a little confusing.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Why are there only 3 points in each graph when there are five items in > JSONdata? I can't figure it out.

Well this was a sneaky bug: There's an extra space at the end of the date in JSONData's last 2 elements(in the example and in the real code). This is why the last two were generating garbage value.

Wordpress is a real pain to work with when using code and it seems I introduced a bug when copying code over. It's going to be fixed shortly. As for the </code></pre>. Typo, my bad.

Regarding the CSS, I believe all the graphs behave the same way. Could you verify? I also can be reached @pothibo on twitter for further discussion ;)

I really appreciate your feedback.

(Edit: Gave the reason why the graph was only representing 3 data point instead of 5)

<comment><USER11> >Well this was a sneaky bug: There's an extra space at the end of the date in JSONData's last 2 elements(in the example and in the real code). This is why the last two were generating garbage value.

Thanks for that - my d3 understanding is tenuous, and I thought that it might have been even worse than I thought:)

>Regarding the CSS, I believe all the graphs behave the same way. Could you verify?

Not actually the css, but

      circles.enter()
       .append("svg:circle")
       .attr("style", "cursor: pointer;")
       .on("click", function(d) {d3.select("#demoAddRandom .value").text("Date: " + d.created_at + " amount: " + d.amount)

All the graphs do behave the same way, but that code isn't introduced in the examples until the first time you refactor refreshGraph. It's always there in the actual code of the graphs.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh wow, that was never suppose to be a part of the code I was showing. My apologies.

Wordpress is a real mess when dealing with code & text. Everything is part of the same big textarea and because there's no code highlighting, I have to read everything again and again and again.

Should be fixed now. Thanks!

<comment><USER11> I think that it's worth it to keep in the code examples - because it's simple code to understand, and if you omit it newbies will be wondering if it's something that d3 is doing automatically.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Creative Monopoly - <AUTHOR> http://nytimes.com/2012/04/24/opinion/brooks-the-creative-monopoly.html?_r=1 <comment><USER3> "Thiel argues, we often shouldn't seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists."

A better way to put this is to say that the starting point of competitive strategy is to start with a _sustainable competitive advantage._ "Competition Demystified" by value investing guru Bruce Greenwald covers this point in its first chapter (available free on Google Books -- [http://books.google.com/books?id=NZYuAyW8M-sC&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=NZYuAyW8M-sC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false) and summarized by me in a series on political strategy, where the concept also applies -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-strategy-primer-strategy> and with an important diagram here -- <http://joshuaspodek.com/the-first-step-in- strategy>)

Finding a sustainable competitive advantage doesn't require creativity, so Brooks's essay went astray at that point. But having a sustainable competitive advantage gives you the local monopoly he alludes to that allows you to avoid competing and, in business, charge higher margins without getting stuck competing on price and efficiency.

I highly recommend "Competition Demystified" to understand strategy.

<comment><USER4> > sustainable competitive advantage

I think this is what so many commenters struggle with when it comes to "the bubble" so many of us speak of now. We see so many companies' births and deaths without ever having seen a clear "sustainable competitive advantage" and wonder why these companies existed in the first place.

<comment><USER5> Well, from one perspective, each of these failed companies could have been testing their own "sustainable competitive advantage" thesis. A thesis that turned out to be incorrect. After all, you don't know your sustainable competitive advantage really is in fact sustainable and and a competitive advantage until you win. (e.g. Google. They were just another search company, and one that could have failed like so many others.)

From another perspective, each of these companies is wandering through, as the author puts it, the "wildernesses nobody knows" looking for opportunities and either didn't find one or weren't able to grow that opportunity quickly enough.

Some say we're in a bubble. Others say we aren't. Frankly, I don't give a damn. I just see that there's tons of innovation being funded. Some innovations may be evolutionary, others may be revolutionary. Funny thing is: you often don't know what will be evolutionary or revolutionary until you try.

I'm glad many people are trying.

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry, I feel I came across as making a broader point than I was. Probably because of the "birth and death" bit which really isn't what I meant to focus on.

I'm talking about a few specific examples that are astonishingly easy to clone yet are being assigned enormous value. Groupon is what I was thinking of especially, but I didn't want to "name names"... which is probably why I came across as making a broad point. Dropbox is now being challenged in this way, and many have been talking a lot about their sustainable competitive advantage since the whole Steve Jobs "feature" quote. Instagram.

I wasn't making a direct comment about tech startups in general, many of which are carving out real markets they want to crush.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What an _awful_ way to phrase a simple concept.

Rather than compete in someone else's market, create your own market. Manufacture, or identify a need that has not been met, and, having been first mover, use that to build an insurmountable lead over any possible competitors.

Whether it's mint toothpaste, or portable digital music players, this has been done for generations.

"Creative Monopoly" is a bizarre term for it.

<comment><USER7> I agree it is a strange term.

I do think however the article is well written and quite insightful based of course on Peter Thiel's ideas.

Inovation always wins, those that focus on just competing will lose. A country has to foster inovation. the countries that innovate in education could be the big winners.

To be fare to the US, some of there big colleges do that, but it does seem at the grass roots of the system it needs change and that applies to a lot of countries.

<comment><USER8> Product differentiation is in every first year university marketing textbook. As much as those textbooks try to use as many words as possible to describe a simple concept, their description of product differentiation is likely to be much shorter than the one in this article.

MBA's might not be good hires in a $100,000 startup, but they know more than we think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had the luck to understand this very early (being 17 years old). I've gone to math and physics competitions, and while I had good results I could see that there are the top level guys who are above my level: there is no point in directly competing with them. So I thought I should do something different and I became a programmer. Nowadays I also see this in programming. There are markets where competition amongst smart people is too high. Too much smart people want to work for the most famous companies, too much smart people create programming languages and frameworks, too much smart people want to start their indie game studios, too much extremely smart people wanted to win the Netflix prize... While I love these topics, so I sometimes compete in these very competitive markets, I know that it is/(would be) wiser to do someting different where competition/(expected value) ratio is not so high.

</comment><comment><USER10> Wired's fake McLuhan interview from many moons ago:

 _What's your take on media juggernauts like Microsoft? Should it be allowed to stranglehold electronic media?_

 _We fear that the owners of the monopoly will crush us, but this never happens. In a flash, the monopolist's products appear out of date, and competition in that particular industry becomes irrelevant because the whole basis of moneymaking has shifted to a new area. As the pace of technological change speeds up, shifts in economic power increasingly seem like magical flipflops produced by luck. The old logic of monopoly - <USER2> stranglehold - no longer works. The attention of consumers can shift instantly and make the most profound investments obsolete in just a few years, soon to be sped up even further. We will see economic empires crash within hours, and new ones arise just as quickly. _The task of the economic manager now is to try to hold monopolies in place just long enough for economic transactions to occur._ The capitalist understands that to improve competition, he must encourage monopolies._

      http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.01/channeling_pr.html

</comment><comment><USER11> What he's talking about has already been written about and is taught in many MBA programs.

Blue Ocean Strategy

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy>

Edit for the tl;dr crowd:

The blue ocean strategy is about creating your own market/niche/space in an new or uncontested area (blue ocean) vs. competing directly with established players in an existing market (red ocean).

The metaphor is the red ocean is full of blood from the sharks fighting over the same profits/market share while the blue ocean is open water full of opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is bizarre. Not for wrongness -- but because it is baffling that what is right about it should not be obvious and taken for granted.

Business is always, and _has_ always been, about _avoiding_ competition. One can start by recalling Adam Smith's comment on any gathering of industrialists inevitably leading to conspiracy against the public. Then simply look at what any business does or tries to do, legal or otherwise -- what is a patent, for example?

Competition between business is supposed to be good for the _public_ , not the competitors themselves -- hence business always wanting to avoid it. Competition is, broadly, destructive. It is only worth it because of other effects (spurring effort, creativity), and when it is limited and substantially supported by other cooperative systems.

</comment><comment><USER13> The central point theme of this piece (creation vs. competition) is the main focus of "The Science of Getting Rich" by Wallace Wattles, if anyone is interested.

</comment><comment><USER14> OK, so I should choose my battles, great. I thought this column had very little insight or utility.

<comment><USER15> Sadly, that's typical David Brooks. Between Maureen Dowd and Brooks, I think NY Times should be embarrassed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Both things are competition. One is competing with established rules while the other is competing creating or changing the rules.

</comment><comment><USER17> Years ago, I worked briefly for The Southern Company, which is the largest publicly held electric utility in the U.S (Georgia Power, Alabama Power, and a bunch of other ones).

While there was certainly a lot of expertise in electric generation and transmission there, it rapidly became apparent to me that their true core competency was maintaining and exploiting their legal monopoly.

It wasn't a pretty sight.

<comment><USER8> Sometimes governments resort to measures like legal monopolies to ensure infrastructure gets built.

Imagine a cash-strapped government 50 years ago in an undeveloped country wanting to build electricity infrastructure. The country's economic growth is stagnating because of a lack of infrastructure and there are few foreign investments because the country's economic growth is stagnating. If a foreign company DID choose to invest in electricity, and the investment was profitable, other foreign companies will jump in to compete; but if the investment was unprofitable, the company would just have lost a large chunk of cash. Therefore it was always more profitable to simply wait for another company to make the investment, and then see if electricity will be a profitable business in the country before making investment itself.

These catch-22's mean the government has little choice but to allow the first foreign company a local monopoly, at least for a limited time.

I'm just theorising all this out of thin air, though.

<comment><USER17> In the U.S., this legal electric company monopolies were more or less granted w/the proviso of providing universal access, sort of the same goal.

The past 20 years, the electric companies are trying to wiggling out from under this, turns out they really don't want to sell electricity to residential users, in a lot of cases their big customers are subsidizing residential users. That is why, despite the hype to the contrary, residential electric rates usually go up under deregulation.

The typical electric company strategy the past 20 years is to try "surrender" their monopoly in unprofitable areas w/a lot of happy talk about competition/choice/consumer benefits and attempt to keep their monopoly in the profitable areas (wholesale transmission, generation/cogeneration for large consumers).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article is backwards. As humans, we crave competition. As Humans we crave to be unique. Same concept, two different ways of saying it.

Both mean, "We want to stand out. Be appreciated and recoginized."

We will always seek ways to stand out. Whether its through one upsmanship, or through differentiation.

We see this in marketing. When you are first in a new category in peoples minds. They consider you the best.

Everyone wants to be considered the best. Its up to you how you get there.</comment>


The Simpler CSS Grid - <AUTHOR> http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/the-simpler-css-grid/ <comment><USER2> Summary: he made a 960-like stylesheet framework that increases the overall width, the size of the gutters between columns and cleans up the markup.

I've been using 960 for a few years and the markup detox is really nice. Adding clearing divs always felt like a dirty tradeoff for design consistency.

I'm torn about the extra gutter space though and I think I'd rather stick with 960's narrow 20px because it's more flexibile. You can group stuff together or break them into sections. For example, you can pack in related items real tight, like a row of thumnails in a gallery, or use the technique he described to pad out the 20px and create discrete elements like sidebars, containing boxes, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Agree completely with the gripes. I've been using 1kb Grid (<http://www.1kbgrid.com/>). Easier to use than 960.gs, lightweight.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the link, I started a thread for 1kb here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1737752>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll stick with the OOCSS grids - about the same size but a lot more versatile:

[http://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/blob/master/core/grid/g...](http://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/blob/master/core/grid/grids.css)</comment>


Ask HN: Just finished my dissertation, what language should I learn for fun? - <AUTHOR> After working so much on my PhD dissertation, I finally want to take a break and code some things for fun. I want to start by learning a new language (I have been using C#, Python, and JavaScript). I'm not looking for a job, just a fun and capable language for side projects.<p>Nim and Crystal have been getting a lot of praise on HN, but I am also considering Go, Rust, and Elixir. While there is no perfect answer, I am open to suggestions. <comment><USER2> +1 Rust, but be warned: the learning curve is high. I work with similar language to you and Rust not only sheds light on low level concerns and safety, but also has an excellent type system. Programming Rust by Blandy and Orendorff, the online Rust Book, and the Rust By Example website are all good resources.

Rust is a lot more verbose than a language like Elixir so it might feel like wading through mud for a while.

I'm also throwing out the suggestion of a Lisp. Homoiconic macros are interesting and difficult. I'm currently reading Let Over Lambda by Doug Hoyte and it's like there's a whole world of technique I had no idea existed.

</comment><comment><USER3> My votes go to Rust and Elixir. I'd say I've had the most fun in Elixir recently, but Rust comes a very close second - especially once the borrow- checker and I started seeing eye to eye.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll definitely look into Elixir some more. I don't have a lot of experience with functional languages so it could be a worthwhile choice for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My current curiosity is Pony. I read the early history[0] and tutorial[1] and was immediately hooked. At work, I would tend to choose Go for lowish-level applications but for personal exploration choose something with greater future potential where everything hasn't already been built.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14280565](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14280565) [1] [https://tutorial.ponylang.org/](https://tutorial.ponylang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Reading `Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs` and doing all the exercises in Scheme is quite fun.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you want something that's really fun then I would say Nim is a good choice (jobs are still rather rare for Nim, although they do also exist). If you've got a particular project in mind then I would happily give you some resources on how to implement it in Nim :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I just started going through the Nim tutorial! I'll let you know how it goes.

After looking at some projects on github that use Nim, I'm very impressed. Thanks for all your work on this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> since you haven't used any purely functional language yet, given your choices, i would recommend Elixir. Different programming paradigms ( procedural, oop, fp, declarative, etc... ) teaches different ways to approach a given problem domain, it's an useful skill to have.

</comment><comment><USER8> Learn something totally different from what you're used to, like PureScript or Haskell.

</comment><comment><USER9> Mozart/Oz

</comment><comment><USER10> done any assembly yet?</comment>


2010 INFORMS Data Mining Contest: participants predict stock price movements - <AUTHOR> http://kaggle.com/informs2010

<comment><USER2> IMHO this seems to be a lame effort, all the organizations involved in this competition aren't significant players in data mining or alg trading field. Its more of top coder rather than Netflix

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't like the binary view of things. In the real algo trading world, no one is forcing you to take a long or short position-- flat is a viable option.

<comment><USER4> Thanks Tansey, your comment helped me to fix a trading algo I've been working on for weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> will next year's contest be predicting predictions? my prediction for future stock prediction algorithms is approximately this: <http://www.ofb.net/~egnor/iocaine.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm told the 2012 comp will involve predicting the predictions of predictions.</comment></comment>


How Google Spawned The 384-Chip Server - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/seamicro-and-google/ <comment><USER2> _Today, Mozilla is using SeaMicro's older 512-core machines to handle downloads of its Firefox browser_

Can anyone comment on the accuracy of this? "Handling downloads" is pretty vague, but still it seems like a pretty braindead job, and I know Mozilla is leveraging lots of mirrors and probably CDNs for this.

<comment><USER3> "Today, when an end user running Firefox wants to download an update, addon or persona, the browser sends a URL request to Mozilla's download cluster. The servers running Linux, Apache, and PHP run a query to the backend database/memcache cluster and return an HTTP Redirect URL (also called an HTTP 302 return) back to the browser so that Firefox can fetch the desired file from the network of donated download resources."

[http://www.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/MozillaCaseStudy...](http://www.seamicro.com/sites/default/files/MozillaCaseStudy.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Let me get this strait, it's basically (request)>(redirect) for a few MB's of data. That seems like the kind of thing where a single CPU could handle ~100,000 requests per second. I know the Firefox team is not exactly well know for writing fast code, but there must be more to it than that.

<comment><USER5> This could be journalistic laziness and muddling of facts, but there is also something to be said for understanding the sub-millisecond performance considerations of a large professional effort, which may need an assured throughput even with known possible failures, and instantaneous hand off of each packet in as near real time as tuned with other devices, so as to not gum up the works subtly both down and up stream.

<comment><USER6> _and instantaneous hand off of each packet in as near real time as tuned with other devices, so as to not gum up the works subtly both down and up stream._

Wow. You make static HTTP-downloads sound like rocket science.

Honestly, this is as trivial as it gets in terms of scaling. No "512 core machine" needed whatsoever, unless they've started to fold proteins along with their downloads...

<comment><USER5> So you're saying Amazon S3 runs on a single CPU? :D I think we're talking about different things.

<comment><USER7> Network cards and storage adapters the limiting factors, not CPU, that is the point.

<comment><USER4> You have less than 1kb requests and less than 1kb responses on average.

Let's see how many requests a 1gb net card can do? Well it's bit's not bites, but it's also a full duplex so you have 1gbit up and download. 1gigabyte / (8 kiliobit) = 1,000,000 / 8 = 125,000 requests per second. Granted full TCP/IP has a fair amount of overhead, but if you use UDP you can get vary close to this.

Yet, they don't need to get anywhere near that performance, for every 100 million clients updating every four hours using a random second to connect is around 10k connections a second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note, as of yet due to its dependency on Intel's Atom line SeaMicro on only can't offer much memory per chip but they also can't offer parity or ECC, which is a much bigger deal killer for me.

</comment><comment><USER9> So all those folks who always say "memory is cheap" and who make fun of others who write small conservative programs might not be so smart after all.

Because they can't run their "feature-rich" unconstrained applications on wimpy nodes. And thus they can't cut their employer's energy and real estate costs.

Why did Google abandon its plans to supply its own energy?

<comment><USER10> > _So all those folks who always say "memory is cheap" and who make fun of > others who write small conservative programs might not be so smart after > all._

Your first hint that an opinion comes from a neophyte is that they make fun of others. Your second hint is that they have an un-nuanced worldview.

> _Why did Google abandon its plans to supply its own energy?_

They didn't. They shut down part of their alternative energy R&D efforts, then turned around and dumped about $100 million into new solar projects. And they've never stopped putting PV panels on their datacenters. Mass media somehow misinterpreted this as an abandonment of some grand strategy by Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My favourite in this field was SiCortex, who were killed by a cashflow interruption at the start of the GFC.

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone else find it odd that seamicro.com doesn't give you any way to actually _buy_ their product?

<comment><USER13> Not really. This product is aimed at large enterprises. The more or less expected behavior is:

\- you call them, fill in a form, or meet them at an expo.

\- their sales team contacts you to discuss whether you can 'help each other'/'find a win-win scenario'.

I have heard that second step described as "they figure out how much they can charge you for their product"

In some sense, this is the epitome of "do not price your stuff at what it costs, price it at what it is worth".

<comment><USER14> Kinda like asking $1000 for a glass of water from the man almost dying of thirst but accepting $3 from the man that's jogging and wants a sip.

The problem is I've always seen explanations where pricing is set my _the market_ demand. I'm curious how an economical model would look when there is no market, just this sort of individual negotiations with zero transparency.

Edit: This reminds me of the "how much is your time worth" sales question. Imagine how much a billionaire pays his maid.

<comment><USER15> As soon as another vendor tries to negotiate with you, there will be a market. Just because it's less convenient for the casual shopper doesn't mean that it's not a market.

<comment><USER14> What if they are selling an unique product and there is no other vendor? Is there a market when the same product is negotiated at a different price with each customer?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 384 isn't that much you can easily get 500+ full fat cores in a full cab for HPC systems and that is leaving 2U for the infiband tor switch

</comment><comment><USER17> Is nothing: in Soviet Russia, 384 servers chip YOU!

(I am so gonna get dinged, now :-))

<comment><USER17> Seriously, though, they might need to look at getting chip manufacturers to up the low-power-core count on each chip to make these packages fit together more efficiently.</comment></comment>


The UX of Language - <AUTHOR> http://alexsexton.com/blog/2012/03/the-ux-of-language/ <comment><USER2> Cant agree more.. Just a bit more code can make messages sound more human.</comment>


'Coldest place' found on the Moon @ 26 Kelvin - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8416749.stm <comment><USER2> >the coldest craters in the northern polar region can dip as low as minus 249C (26 Kelvin)

Um, do they mean 24K?</comment>


Machine Learning Data Set Preparation - <AUTHOR> https://www.seanmcwillie.com/2018/12/tutorial-data-set-preparation-part-1/ <comment><USER2> Title appears to be clickbait. The article contains no mathematical statements: it just shows a cat classifier failing when being used on data that is presumably different from its training data.

<comment><USER3> I think it's a joke title but genuinely cannot tell.</comment></comment>


UK Internet records to be stored for a year  - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/technologynews/5105519/Internet-records-to-be-stored-for-a-year.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Why aren't people up in arms about this? I don't get it.

<comment><USER2> because it's only going to be used for _good_ , of course.

...

 _sigh_</comment></comment>


Amazon Lightsail vs. DigitalOcean - <AUTHOR> https://blog.containership.io/amazon-lightsail-vs.-digitalocean <comment><USER2> I think this article misses a really important comparison point.

Does anyone know if Lightsail uses the same CPU credit system as t2 EC2 instances?

Details on what CPU credits are can be found at: [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instan...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/t2-instances.html#t2-instances- cpu-credits)

Basically if you use too much CPU for too long, AWS will throttle your CPU usage. This is detrimental to performance in cases where you're not just idling most of the time.

I've had plenty of apps on DO use 40-60% CPU 24/7 without any performance degradation or throttling. Will Lightsail do the same?

<comment><USER3> Another poster has referenced this: [http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_n...](http://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/posts/amazon_lightsail_1gb_is_no_match_for_10_vps_from_linode_do_vultr)

It seems to confirm your suspicion. I'm not clear on whether Amazon implemented it this way on purpose, or if it was just the quickest path to launch a product, and they'll fix it later.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the link. So basically Lightsail isn't even in the same galaxy as DO unless they drop this constraint.

Edit:

I feel like they did this on purpose. It's tough to imagine an oversight as large as this slipped through by accident. It's also something developers will figure out in a matter of minutes while running on their platform.

Hopefully they only have it constrained now to make sure their system doesn't tumble over and they will lift it.

I guess they avoided to mention it because this pitch doesn't sound too attractive on stage: "Introducing Lightsail, a VPS competitor platform where you can get a 1 CPU core machine for $5/month, but understand that if you use more than a few percent of the machine's CPU for any extended period of time it will result in your CPU being automatically throttled to the point where your application will likely become unresponsive, and to add insult to injury we're not really making you aware of this during sign up. On second thought, just forget about it, continue using what you're using now because this isn't suited for production in most typical web applications that developers produce -- it's odd though because that's the market we're trying to cater towards.".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The IO performance, CPU throttling, and price per resource lag make Lightsail a joke compared to DO.

But at least Lightsail comes with a cape. [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does- digita...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/does-digital- ocean-come-with-a-cape-and-a-motorcycle-like-amazon-lightsail)

</comment><comment><USER5> It took me a while to figure out how to minimize the share via social media bar that pops up on the left. Which for me seems to block the first 4 letters on the left hand side at my current screen width. Just a heads up. When I move to a larger 1080p monitor there is a space on the left so it doesn't block it. Look at your page with 1600 x 900. Not sure if this is an issue for you but I thought I'd mention it.

<comment><USER6> These things drive me insane. It's ridiculous. Do these people only check their sites on huge monitors?

<comment><USER7> Almost nobody checks their pages at 125% or 150%. Even though with higher resolution monitors these DPI settings are becoming more widely used.

When I loaded the page the first thing I did was highlight that stupid box and kill it with the developer bar. I'm at 1080p and 125% DPI.

As a general rule, anything that can hover over other content on the page (from share buttons to menus and beyond) are going to annoy someone and break someone's experience. No exceptions. If it isn't happening today it will happen tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really think Amazon is about to kill DigitalOcean with LightSail. I have already spun up a few instances from LightSail and its almost a carbon copy of DO but with the power of the AWS ecosystem behind it. I think its now the prefect platform for startups with still pretty minimal costs but the ability to have my Node app on LightSail storage resources on S3 and have a managed database with RDS is a no brainer. I think people are a little too worried about the difference of a few dollars between AWS and DO now and are missing the amount of traffic you could handle for less than 100$ a month with LightSail and the ability to more easily scale later on.

<comment><USER9> no! simply no!

DigitalOceans main selling point is not only the price and speed at which you setup a node. The main selling point is their freaking awesome support and their tutorial/help pages that help a lot of people with troubles that might have.

AWS, with its amazing stack size, cannot compare in those 2 departments IMO!

<comment><USER8> I don't have experience with DigitalOcean support but there tutorial/help pages are indeed very useful, I have used them a lot.

Its an issue for DigitalOcean that if someones trying to install MongoDB on Ubuntu they can still use any VPS provider they want. The instructions that DO provides are not platform specific to them.

I still do want DigitalOcean to succeed though, I think there great and still love there product. I think building an S3 competitor(Not expandable volume storage) would make them more competitive. Its still going to be really tough though, right now any side project is going to be default on LightSail.

<comment><USER2> Their support is remarkably good, even on the lowest tiers. The most I ever had to wait was a few hours for a reply, and usually it's 30 minutes or less to get an initial response.

Over the years I've opened up a number of tickets on $5-20/month droplets for all sorts of problems. Even problems that were my own fault, which I received answers through either blog posts they linked me to or step by step instructions on how to fix it.

On multiple occasions they helped me recover from catastrophic errors like having SSH locked down to only accept connections with SSH keys but the SSH service died because I ran out of disk space. In this case they can mount a recovery disk to your droplet which will let you get at your file system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the "Where DigitalOcean Beats Lightsail" section, you might add that the OS selection on Lightsail is extremely limited. I believe you can currently only choose Amazon Linux or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

<comment><USER7> And surprisingly no Windows on either one.

Which is a little odd as you can get Windows running on an EC2 instance (t1.micro) for $10.95/month. Although maybe the margins on Lightsail are too thin so Amazon doesn't want to pay Microsoft's licensing fees.

And before someone whines about Windows, keep in mind Windows Server 2016 now installs headless by default and will run on 512 MB of RAM (which is what the $5 Lightsail offering has).

<comment><USER3> You might like Vultr ... they let you install any OS via an ISO file. For Windows: [https://www.vultr.com/docs/windows-custom-iso-with-virtio- dr...](https://www.vultr.com/docs/windows-custom-iso-with-virtio-drivers)

Keeps the pricing down, since you're the one responsible for licenses.

<comment><USER7> A Windows Server 2016 license costs $350~700. There's absolutely no way that saves money on small instances over any reasonable duration. It would take tens of years to come even close!

The way Microsoft licenses Windows Server to Azure/AWS/etc is completely different to how they license it to you or I, and the pricing is hard to compete against at the lower ends.

<comment><USER3> YMMV. Saves me money since I already have a license. I assume many migrate to the cloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "In the performance testing section later on in this post, we'll see how those numbers hold up to stress tests."

I don't see it. Did I miss the performance testing section?

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops! Good catch.

Performance comparison is coming in part 2. Sorry! Editing.

<comment><USER11> Speaking of cacthes, one your headers says:

Pricing & Billing Gaurantees

should be

Pricing & Billing Guarantees

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed! Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> AWS currently not offering Lightsail/EC2 hosting within Canada, as well. DigitalOcean has been in Toronto for a while. Certainly not an important detail to many, but it was for me.

AWS has been saying they will open in Canada for quite a while... seem to keep pushing the date further and further.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've been a DO customer for years but all it would take to sell me on Lightsail at this point is if Lightsail performance beats DO. but from what i'm seeing, it seems like that's not the case?

<comment><USER14> It's not close. (I use both at work and have used both for a long time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I completely disagree that digital ocean has a loyal customer base, their customer support has been degrading across time and minor annoyances such as wp servers keep failing and you have to reset your instance, just minor stuff like that has been adding over the years and I've been wondering if a company will show up so I can move my stuff over there.

This looks like it will be it. They just got so annoying it was unbearable.

</comment><comment><USER16> A great comparison between DigitalOcean and LightSail. I was looking for this.

One small correction, AWS doesn't have any more the largest footprint when it comes to regions and revenue. Microsoft Azure now has more regions and DCs than AWS and Google combined. And for the revenue they reached 15B dollar mark by last quarter, making it the the largest and the most profitable cloud provider ever. Who would thought that is possible two years ago!

</comment><comment><USER17> When I looked at lightsail the last time, it only allowed me creating anything in Virginia. DO allows you to create droplets all over the world.

</comment><comment><USER18> I won't use Lightsale precisely because it exists.

While AWS is a great collection of services, it is needlesly complicated to use and at times very frustrating. Using it at work is fine since the span of services is so wide I can forgive the awful user experience, but if I have to vote with my feelings, I choose the service I use in private, when I pick what I like.

In this case DigitalOcean.

</comment><comment><USER19> wish they'd matched linode. Oh wait they have poor performance, never mind...though actually the bandwidth might be useful cost-wise still, relative to "normal" AWS bandwidth costs at least, until you reach the max, then apparently it's $0.09/GB, whereas DO is $0.02 per GB for overage (and I think they don't actually charge for it yet even LOL).

digitalocean is being attacked on all sides, interesting. Hard to believe that giant AWS is trying to imitate one of its upstart competitors...

<comment><USER20> Who has poor performance? Lightsail, DO, or Linode?

<comment><USER19> lightsail

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> DO must be unsustainably burning cash. Acquisition by a larger player keen on developer mindshare seems inevitable</comment>


Schemaed – apply schemas to semi-structured data sources - <AUTHOR> https://show.schemaed.com?hn <comment><AUTHOR> To understand how this works the best place to start is the getting started guide:

[https://www.schemaed.com/docs/content/getting- started.html](https://www.schemaed.com/docs/content/getting-started.html)</comment>


My frustration with files - <AUTHOR> http://societaslive.com/

<comment><USER2> Very often I think, how stupid these files and folders actually are. But I also think that Google Mail (with smart tagging and search), OSX (with an even better search, at least I'm faster with it) and Dropbox (automated versioning) already go in the right direction. I bet that some years later you don't have to worry about folders and files anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm excited for auto-save and versions in Mac OS X Lion for this very reason:

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/auto-save.html></comment>


The Invention of Money - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/the-invention-of-money <comment><USER2> These "evolution of money"-type stories always miss the financial instrument that enabled the gold standard to function in the first place: the Bill of Exchange.

A Hungarian math professor by the name of Antal Fekete offers a much more convincing explanation of the journey from gold to paper money: [http://professorfekete.com/articles/AEFMonEcon101Lecture5.pd...](http://professorfekete.com/articles/AEFMonEcon101Lecture5.pdf)

In essence, the Bill of Exchange was required for gold to work as money by it acting as a means of payment between producers. If one producer in the line of production of steel, say the producer who digs up iron ore, requires payment in gold when delivering iron ore to the steel producer, the gold standard does not scale as the division of labor increases, as more gold would be required (for payment of semi-finished goods) for each additional step added. The Bill of Exchange solves this by acting as a means of payment between producers of increasingly finished consumer goods.

<comment><USER3> Bill of Exchange is a form of paper money, and the article mentions Genghis Khan's grandson's paper money in the 13th Century.

<comment><USER2> The paper money of Genghis Khan has little to do with the Bill of Exchange. Most notably, bills are issued by private entities, and their acceptance as a means of payment is voluntary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Debt: The First 5,000 Years_ is my preferred introduction. Critically this New Yorker account is missing the word 'usury' which was largely agreed to be evil by early religions and societies that experienced its effects...

<comment><USER5> I read that book and mostly enjoyed it than I got to the last chapter and found it was riddled with errors I could easily spot like the in following sentence:

 _Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages._

Reading around, it seems like the rest of the book is similarly accurate.

<comment><USER6> That's a shocking amount of inaccuracy to pack into a single sentence!

<comment><USER7> It is!

I've been trying to think of a more compact/dense incorrect sentence for a bit now, and I can't really think of an alternative. (Although some of the political screeds from the election of 1800 might have been close, and I have yet to go mine twitter for examples)

<comment><USER8> This is a close competitor:

> For those who don't know how the Fed works: technically, there are a series > of stages. Generally the Treasury puts out bonds to the public, and the Fed > buys them back. The Fed then loans the money thus created to other banks at > a special low rate of interest ('the prime rate')...

Also from "Debt, The First 5000 Years".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Along the same vein, I can't recommend The Bitcoin Standard ([https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36448501-the-bitcoin- sta...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36448501-the-bitcoin-standard)) enough. The first 60% of the book deals with the creation and characteristics of fiat money and its effect in the World's economy.

<comment><USER10> The portion of the book on the history of money has very few references for its claims and makes numerous factual errors. If you're looking for a well referenced book on the history of money, this is not the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For a huge (huge!) fictionalized (but very entertaining) account of the invention of money & modern markets, read the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson.

<comment><USER12> Doesn't the Baroque Cycle have two approaches to banking in England - the Whig Bank of England and the competing Tory Land Bank (which used land rather than gold as the underlying asset)?

<comment><USER13> I thought (via "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds") that it was actually tied into the South Sea Bubble, and that the Bank's role was that of a central bank in a crisis: provision of unlimited liquidity, regardless of whether or not it's "backed" by anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you liked this story, I also highly recommend the YouTube Extra History miniseries on the South Sea Bubble, which is a very similar contemporary scheme in the U.K. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1kndKWJKB8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1kndKWJKB8)

<comment><USER15> Another video, this is about Marco Polo writings: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UiIpiV0P0M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UiIpiV0P0M)

And it mentions also the invention of Money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'd add "The ascent of money" by Niall Ferguson to a list of books to read to understand invention of money.

</comment><comment><USER17> Marco Polo's stories are not regarded by scholars as authentic because in in his chronicles, he failed to mention tea, the Great Wall, the writing system, and other notable things about China at the time.

I'm surprised the New Yorker would use him as a reference.

<comment><USER18> See footnote 83:

[https://books.google.com/books?id=iN9Tdfdap5MC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA...](https://books.google.com/books?id=iN9Tdfdap5MC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA463#v=onepage&q&f=false)

It would seem there is no consensus. Clearly some scholars think he went there.

<comment><USER19> Great reference, thanks. Possibly he went there but also fabricated and exaggerated.

<comment><USER20> Plus the book was actually laid down two decades later, by recounting memories to a jail mate who took note of it. Plus there were actually several retellings and rewritings of the book, so much that we're not even sure of the language it was first written in (French? Franco-Italian? Some Italian dialect?) So exaggeration, misremembering and lies are not only probable, but almost certain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://www.ancient.eu/article/974/banking-in-the-roman- worl...](https://www.ancient.eu/article/974/banking-in-the-roman-world/)

paper titles by themselves are quite old. the real innovation is to split them in smaller, standardized denominations to be composed into the desired amount, which came with the first travel cheques. the only jump from there to bills is that one come from and it's backed by private entities and the other come backed by a state, but in the case of the argentarii and mensiarii the line is blurred since those were state sanctioned.

</comment><comment><USER22> So if gold is the only real money (and everything else is just debt)... What does gold's year-long rally this year tell us?

<comment><USER23> Faith is the only real money. The only thing money measures is optimism about the future - both micro ("I am optimistic that you can repay this loan") macro ("I am optimistic this country's military spending and worker-hostile environment guarantees my investment will be protected"), corporate ("I am optimistic about the contents of this earnings call"), and specific ("I have more faith in this asset class than in other asset classes.")

Crashes are a manic-depressive devotional cycle. Collective optimism becomes stretched to delusional levels. Then it snaps, pessimism and debt paranoia take over, the central government has to make reassuring noises which reassure the right people, and the hype cycle can begin again.

Gold is a faith-token - valued because it's heavy and shiny and because there's a long tradition of valuing it when investors become pessimistic about more evanescent asset classes, not because of its relatively limited practical utility.

Fiat money is just faith-token money without a tangible base. The process by which it gains/loses trust is the same.

The tangible items that aren't primarily faith-based are land and housing, so they do well as reliable investments. But even they're not faith-free, because they will still lose value in an area if no one believes it has a future.

<comment><USER24> _Functionally_ , gold serves as a lack of faith in fiat currency - almost as a short. When you expect inflation in your local fiat currency, you start looking at gold as a way of preserving your value.

<comment><USER25> But that requires faith that someone will accept that gold in the future in exchange for goods/services. So, again, it's just faith at the root of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I did a somewhat similar bit of historical story-telling a few years ago: [https://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2013/04/money-the- ongoing-e...](https://greenash.net.au/thoughts/2013/04/money-the-ongoing- evolution/)

And came to pretty similar conclusions, in particular, that modern fiat money is quite worthless!

<comment><USER27> Send me your money then, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Before long, the banknotes were trading at more than their value in silver, and Law was made Controller General of Finances, in charge of the entire French economy."

This is super interesting. Does anyone familiar with the subject matter have an idea why?

<comment><USER29> I'm guessing here but the price of currencies or anything else tends to get set by supply and demand. According to Wikipedia at the time:

>The wars waged by Louis XIV left the country completely wasted, both economically and financially. The resultant shortage of precious metals led to a shortage of coins in circulation, which in turn limited the production of new coins.

So there may have been a short supply of money especially the metal variety. Someone selling say grain may have taken paper money representing not much silver because there were no alternative buyers with bags of silver available.

Bitcoin also trades for a lot despite not having much value because some people want them and there aren't many available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The Money as Debt videos by Paul Grignon are a fantastic watch: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nBPN- MKefA&list=PLmpODdsfpr...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nBPN- MKefA&list=PLmpODdsfprYH4Fhsso8PVPQBNxVDQSgb_)

<comment><USER31> Except that they are not based on real facts. A much better explanation of how money is related to debt, which actually relies on established facts from the historical record, is "Debt: The First 5000 Years" by David Graeber.

<comment><USER32> David Graeber also did an excellent BBC Radio Series on the same subject - Promises, Promises: A History of Debt: [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b054zdp6/episodes/player](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b054zdp6/episodes/player) \- (registration required / geo limited)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Money is not solving our problems any more. Adam smith argues that the optimal decision making structure consists of the entities executing the transaction. They have 'perfect' information on value and utility for themselves. This was clearly shown by the 'failure' of communism and central administration in an attempt to add 'fairness' across all members of the economic community who are not involved in the transaction. Today we are exploring the illusion of fairness with taxation and entitlements on an increasingly granular level with the help of deep learning, large databases and subscriptions. Still no one has addressed the elephant in the room - economic inertia. Even with perfect information and frictionless transactions there is a strong disincentive to 'improved' products and services. The profit centers are intent on maintaining the transaction patterns even tho they are destroying the infrastructure that they require - examples include the irreversible change of the climate through Using the short term decisions without modeling long term consequences as well as the homogenization and 'dumbing down'of our civilization through lowest common denominator strategies.

Even with perfect information and perfect short term utility, we are not mentally equipped to sense, evaluate and act on long term effects of our choices. Although this shortcoming has little impact in the 'linear' regime where we are a trivial component of the ecology, at current size and growth rate, humanity significantly destabilizes capitalism's ability to succeed.</comment>


The Grateful Dead's Wall of Sound - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-wall-of-sound

<comment> bjelkeman-again > "That's because the Wall was a PA of PAs—six independent PAs, one for each > instrument. Lead guitar, rhythm guitar, vocals, bass, drums, and piano each > had a dedicated PA, according to the official Deadheads Newsletter No. 19, > published in December 1974. This did away with having to mix everything > through a single set of speakers. The "single biggest thing besides the true > line array aspect" of the Wall, as Wiz told me, was how there was no need > for panning, or adjusting various sound levels on a mixing console."

Much of live sound today sounds pretty poor and a great sound tech and producer, Lennart Östlund from the ABBA Polar Studio, told us (small workshop on mixing) that the cure was exactly what the Dead did. A PA per instrument. If you can't do that at least split the vocals to a separate system. Which he had actually tried with great success several times.

<comment><USER2> In my experience it's not the PA that makes it sound poor but the 'sound guy'.

I also have a hard time believing that a separate system will make it sound better. You still need to adjust the level of each PA to create a good mix.

<comment><USER3> The separate PA thing means that you lose all phase related issues (providing the vocal PA is a mono single effective source, rather than a pair of speakers...).

You hardly ever pan main vocals anyway, so you're normally using your stereo pair to produce a mono sound. In other words, both speakers are producing the same sound at the same time. Since hardly anyone in the audience is an equal distance from both speakers, they'll hear a messy comb-filtered version of the main vocals, rather than them cleanly.

You can make a very good argument for not bothering with stereo at all for live sound (except for effect stuff, but then we're back into separate-pa-for- each-instrument grounds...). The trouble with that is how much harder that is to rig. If you're stacking stuff on the ground at all, then you can't really stack center stage, you need to stack to the sides. (Or behind the stage, with all the feedback issues that involves). If you do fly your PA, then you still need legs, usually. And a big PA is _stinking_ heavy, and flying it near the legs is a lot easier than near the middle, due to lengths of truss, loading points, etc.

I've never tried it personally, but people who's ears I trust all say that besides all of that, just using a secondary sound system for vocals still makes them come through a lot clearer and everything sound better.

One possible reason for that is that a speaker is essentially just a paper cone with an electromagnet on it. There are physical limits on what that one bit of paper can do in terms of vibrations. We like to pretend the world is a lot more digital and measurable than it really is. By separating out the vocals from the other instruments, you allow the speakers to _only_ move when the vocalist is singing. I can see why it could be cleaner. I believe the Chilli Peppers may be doing 2 PAs at the moment splitting off the vocals to their own mix...

You'll still always need a good sound guy, and you'll still need somehow to control the (vocals:instruments) ratio in the audience.

Ideally, bands would think of the sound guy as a member of the band. Kind of like the conductor of an orchestra is a vital member of the orchestra. A good sound guy is very similar. A bad sound guy has all of the same control, but none of the feeling.

<comment><USER4> For me one of the most impressive parts of this article where how they managed to eliminate feedback on the vocal microphones.

They did this by using two microphones, using one of the microphones for the singer, the other for the background noise. By inverting the phase on one of the microphones and then summing these two signals they filtered out the background noise. At least this was my understanding.

Sometimes it's really great how far we have come with technology and what tricks they've used in the past.

@good sound guy: you're absolutely right - but most of the good and / or big bands have their sound guy anyways.

<comment><USER3> Yes, absolutely impressive.

I always wondered if it still sounded natural, or if there was some kind of comb-filtering to the vocals that just didn't matter due to the style and volume of the music.

I've played with multiple out of phase mics myself (to try and reduce drum bleed from the main vocalist mics) but never found it as effective as I'd hoped.

I think the problem was just how stinking loud the ambient drums just in general were to the room. Maybe outdoors with a bigger rig it would have worked.

Still pretty fun to play with though.

There's so much mad stuff you can do when you start playing with out of phase mics, delay, etc. As a party trick I occasionally pull a mic up to the point of feedback, whistle until I have a stable loop, and then can whistle in harmony with myself.

You can tell what kind of parties I go to...

<comment><USER4> I think one of the guys in the article says that the sound was not too good. I think I've read the term "comically". Another problem was that it didn't work well if the singer was not singing close to the mic, so the ambient mic direct vocals on it too.

But I think it was a big improvement to what they had before.

<comment><USER5> IIRC they had the double microphone configuration in The Grateful Dead Movie (it's been a while since I have seen it). If I remember correctly, it sounds a bit different indeed.

It's probably on Youtube, so you can listen and judge yourself ;).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A group of my friends throw a 150-person mini dance festival every 4th of July weekend. In the past they've used Mackie SRM450s with a couple of subs, but this year we brought a pair of SR1530s, plus the same subs. Both are active systems with 100-watt HF drivers and 300-watt LF, but the SR1530 has an additional 100-watt midrange element.

The difference is astonishing - much more significant than you'd expect if you're used to thinking of volume as a function of power. It was an awesome wall of clear, clear sound, and we had to keep it turned down a fair bit in order to keep from driving people out of the dance area. 100 more watts doesn't seem like much, but separating sound-reproduction responsibilities among three different amps clearly makes a really big difference.

I did notice some of the problems the article describes with stereo, though. There were definitely parts of the field where you could hear one side but not the other, and it was distracting. We clearly have more to learn about this whole business.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ah, Owsley "The Bear" Stanley. He also lived on a fatty-meat-only zero-carb diet for some 50 years in decent health until he died in a car accident aged 75 in 2011. Quite the character: [http://www.thebear.org](http://www.thebear.org)

<comment><USER8> "Kid Charlemagne" by Steely Dan is a nice memorial for the man and the early LSD era:

      Just by chance you crossed the diamond with the pearl,
      You turned it on the world,
      That's when you turned the world around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Few years ago I've experienced dub sound system (Jah Shaka) for the first time. I've fallen in love with the concept immediately. It was entirely different from your regular rave, the culture and the musical vibrations that just move your body. Did not like the tinnitus for next few days, but that's why you need ear plugs.

If you never been in one, I highly recommend. Very different experience. They are usually somewhat underground so takes some research into what dub and reggae is.

</comment><comment><USER10> This article is not entirely unlike a Dead show: it's quite rambling and unfocused, but there's stuff to get your teeth into if you invest the time in the right frame of mind.

</comment><comment><USER11> If you liked this, check out Dave Rat's blog - [http://daverat.blogspot.com/](http://daverat.blogspot.com/)

He's the sound guy for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others, and it currently testing out a double line array system - with separate systems for vocals and instruments.

</comment><comment><USER12> In sort: sound is a complex vectorial field, and line arrays make that sound the field smooth, so that each frequency is properly represented within the audience volume.

</comment><comment><USER13> One of the coolest conversations I got into recently was with the person who designed the audio system on something called Kalliope (a GIANT, 75,000 watt sound system/art car).

Audio is _cool_ , and the rabbit hole on it goes really, really deep.

For instance, I learned that Kalliope uses something called a cardioid array for its subwoofers, meaning that some of the speakers are pointed forwards (towards the crowd), and some are pointed backwards (away from the crowd).

The result is that the pressure created by the subs pointed backwards is collapsed by the pressure wave created by the subs pointed forward.

(Alex, the audio engineer calls this a warp drive).

The amount of thought that goes into designing some of these things is astounding to me. Building PA systems is NOT a matter of plugging speakers into amps and pointing them where you want them, and making loud sound systems is NOT a matter of getting more speakers.

</comment><comment><USER14> > _They re-coned speakers that had blown or torn. They replaced tweeter > diaphragms as needed._

Explains why Garcia had no time to learn fingerings outside of the pentatonic box. :)</comment>


China factory workers heading home as global economy cools - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,600188,00.html

<comment><USER2> "At least until she was let go, Xiaoju believed that the day would come when she would make as much money as her boss. He was from Hunan and started out as a migrant worker, in a jewelry factory, before founding his own factory 10 years ago.

"As recently as the 2008 Summer Olympics, the Chinese economy was still bursting with energy, and no one expected the boom, which has lasted for years, to end anytime soon."</comment>


Node.js Mongoose - <AUTHOR> Just spent so much time debugging my code and turns out Mongoose is broken so I replaced my mongoose code using the mongoDB native driver. I was surprised b/c mongoose is such a popular module. Anyone experiencing the same problems? <comment><USER2> Yes. The docs are pretty bad as well. I've switched almost entirely to [https://github.com/Automattic/monk](https://github.com/Automattic/monk).

<comment><AUTHOR> I am thinking of just writing my own application-specific layer to communicate with the native mongoDB driver... Sad that Mongoose is not maintained</comment></comment>


P2P DNS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Mononofu/P2P-DNS <comment><USER2> Some historical context from 2010: [http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2010/11/fed-up-with-icann...](http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2010/11/fed-up-with-icann-pirate-bay-cofounder-floats-p2p-dns-system/)

Codebase has not seen significant recent activity.

<comment><USER3> So it predates Namecoin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Decentralized naming is an interesting problem.

There are several problems with this design though:

1) Cheap, permanent domain squatting is possible

2) Legitimate domain owners can't recover from key loss

3) Onerous storage requirements for every node

<comment><USER5> > 2) Legitimate domain owners can't recover from key loss

That doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle to me. You could devise a scheme where there's the option of a majority of multiple offline backup keys can be used to invalidate and replace the current online key.

Then it's up to the legitimate owner whether the domain is valuable enough to do that kind of key management and backup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Related:

* Namecoin [https://namecoin.info/](https://namecoin.info/)

* cjdns [https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns](https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns)

<comment><USER7> Cjdns is a p2p IPv6 network and doesn't do DNS -- I see how the name can be confusing though :)

(I'm one of the developers)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for clarifying that - I remember hearing about the project a while ago. I looked at the most recent documentation and it did seem more like a P2P network, although I just assumed there was also some concept of decentralized DNS within the project as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not that I'm criticising the work, but DNS is _already_ P2P; it is -by design- a federated system. However, -as Mononofu's project's README notes- it is not _highly tamper resistant_. [0]

I know that one could see this as a petty quibble, but just because something isn't tamper resistant doesn't mean it's _not_ a P2P system. :)

[0] I make _liberal_ use of this lack of tamper resistance to provide various levels of ad and tracking blocking for all systems on my LAN. BIND's RPZs (and mechanisms similar to them) are pretty great.

<comment><USER9> What about DNSSEC? Does this not add tamper proofing?

<comment><USER8> I'm not going to talk about DNSSEC [0], but I will make the argument that DNSSEC isn't DNS, but rather a DNS extension.

[0] Mostly because being able to intelligently talk about it is currently _way_ above my pay grade.

<comment><USER9> That's slightly like arguing that TCP is not IP but an extension of IP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The link to the .mu site is, slightly ironically, not resolving. Anyone got a different URL/</comment>


Don't allow popups during page unload - <AUTHOR> https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5989473649164288 <comment><AUTHOR> One by one, the Chrome engineers continue to chip away at the techniques in The Annoying Site [https://theannoyingsite.com](https://theannoyingsite.com) (warning: open in a secondary browser).

Talk video here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFZ- pwErSl4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFZ-pwErSl4)

Source code here: [https://theannoyingsite.com/index.js](https://theannoyingsite.com/index.js)

Well done!

<comment><USER2> the only way i got out was to

> killall firefox

that's pretty impressive

<comment> semi-extrinsic Hmm, on Firefox mobile I opened in private tab, and then just clicked "close tab" after it started playing the annoying voice and that stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Some very annoying features there, logging you out of all major websites and taking over a referrer window.

It seems like a good candidate for the new Windows Sandbox feature in Windows 10 ([https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel- Intern...](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Kernel- Internals/Windows-Sandbox/ba-p/301849)).

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't this very useful though... like you're about to close a page without saving changes?

<comment><USER5> I don't think removes the ability to have an unload prompt (navigating away will not save your changes are you sure?), it just removes the ability for the page to spam you with a popup in its dying breath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now they will just show the popup when your mouse leaves the page close to the exit button

<comment><USER7> They could realistically prevent calls to open popups in response to a mouseover event too. It really ought to only be allowed on "affirmative" interactions like a click. Of course, they can just make the close icon do something else.</comment></comment>