Unplugging Once a Week - <AUTHOR> https://strideapp.com/blog/2013/07/unplugged-why-you-need-to-shut-it-off-at-least-once-a-week/ <comment><USER2> It took me a long time to figure out why I loved working out so much. I didn't realize that it wasn't just the endorphins, it was because I didn't have my damn iPhone with me.

I now make sure to go off the grid for at least an hour a day, usually by going to the gym. No matter how much work I have, or how busy I am. Easily the most relaxing hour of the day, every day.

What's funny is, by the 55-minute mark, I usually start to get excited/antsy about all the emails/texts I must have waiting for me and all the people out there in the world that have been anxiously awaiting my return - 7 archived junk emails and a Snapchat later, it's usually like I was never gone.

I love technology, and I love my computer and phone to death, but I love them more after consistent unplugging.

<comment><USER3> Whoa, what you have said has just turned on the big light bulb above my head. A couple of years ago, I would commute to work on my bike, a round trip time of about 90mins. I look forward to it every day, regardless of the weather conditions. I never really understood why. But after reading your item, it all make sense.

When I ride my bike, I don't have my phone on, don't listen to any podcast or music as I ride, it is just me, my bike and the bike path. I fully focus on the riding, that helps me to avoid thinking about work. This is my daily unplug.

Thanks for helping me understand. Now, where is my bike...

<comment><USER4> What you're describing sounds like flow: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_\(psychology\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> OT: "This page has insecure content."

Change this:

        <script type="text/javascript" src="http://static.bufferapp.com/js/button.js">

to this:

        <script type="text/javascript" src="//static.bufferapp.com/js/button.js">

</comment><comment><USER6> I like to get out for daily walks, sometimes (every 10 to 15 days) going for a short 2.5 to 3 mile hike in the forest to get a change of scenery and enjoy it.

I often put in 12 to 18 hours a day, so these hikes are a big help to unwind as well as get some exercise.

Sometimes I'll get away from work for a day or two, but I don't really follow any schedule.

</comment><comment><USER7> I rather prefer the idea of unplugging from the internet once a week. Some of my best hackings have been done without internet access. Aboard a flight comes to mind. Just me, vim and the terminal. But then of course, either a deep knowledge of the technologies at hand or a good offline documentation is mandatory.

As for winding down, for me two things suffice: exercising and socializing. During the week an hour-long religious barbell lifting session a la Mark Rippetoe is greatly savored by my mind (I find that tiring my body replenishes my brain) and on the weekends hanging out with friends.

<comment><USER2> [http://kapeli.com/dash](http://kapeli.com/dash)

Lifesaver for coding on flights.

<comment><USER8> If you have a mac, shame if you run anything else as everytime I see dash I wish it was multiplatform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm fond of occasionally leaving my laptop at work. It pretty effectively enforces no-internet (for the most part - still have phone) for the night.

</comment><comment><USER10> I make a point to do no work in the evenings after work and if I do decide I want to work on something I set myself a condition that if I don't produce anything good in an hour then have to stop.

Then at the weekends I have Saturday as my 'work on personal projects' day and Sunday as my relax, play games, go out and use no technology day (netflix, consoles and google being the exception!).

Forcing myself not to work evenings and Sundays I find myself that much more motivated when I can work so I get more done in the smaller amounts of time.

I've not been doing it long but already I'm feeling this urge to sit down and do some good work!

</comment><comment><USER11> Related to this is my post from two years ago about my bedroom: [http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/disconnected- bedroom.html](http://blog.jgc.org/2011/09/disconnected-bedroom.html)

<comment><USER12> i rewired our how last year, and just last week i finally flipped on the breaker for the master bedroom (was too lazy to move the dresser to wire a receptacle for all that time). for 16 months, no laptops, phone chargers, etc. just kindles and my wife's iphone (alarm clock). i'd charge my phone in the kitchen each night, so there was no temptation to reach over and check email/fb/hn/etc. i loved it. now, within a week of having functioning receptacles, my wife and i both have iphone / mbp chargers on our nightstands. i actually had trouble falling asleep a few nights back; it's been 5-6 years since i've had trouble sleeping. i think the freedom from temptation had a lot to do w/ it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The idea of unplugging at least an hour a day, a day a week, and a week a year seems very sensible.

I am very fond of this idea, but haven't been able to accomplish it yet. I feel like I will miss something very important, though statistically it doesn't seem to be likely.

Sometimes I think we work, read and surf so much that we start fearing solitude and our own thoughts. Maybe it is just vice versa?

<comment><USER14> David Foster Wallace had some interesting thoughts on the importance of boredom. I'm on a mobile so I can't provide links, but google that!

<comment><USER13> Thanks, will do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a great idea, I know a lot of religious people who do this and highly recommend it, even if you're just dropping electronics, they don't tell you to go to church, or synagogue or w/e, (though I'm sure they'd rather you did) but they praise the amount of mental rest they get from just ignoring all that nonsense for a 24 hour period.

</comment><comment><USER16> You guys, the 40 hour work week was fought for. Thank Henry Ford for your Saturdays off too. Your time is your time, you will never get it back.

Of course time off is important. It develops inspiration, and allows you to round yourself out in other interests.

Don't get me wrong, I love what I do and am very passionate about it. I also love my free time too.

</comment><comment><USER17> Unstability is my new startup name.

Seriously, though, this kind of work ethic is _terrible_. You need to give your brain room to be creative. Your work will be better for it.</comment>


Wayland & Weston 1.1 Released, with RDP support - <AUTHOR> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2013-April/008631.html

<comment><USER2> Does anyone reading this use Wayland for a significant portion of their web browsing?</comment>


Review my startup, cloudrino.net - <AUTHOR> https://cloudrino.net

<comment><USER2> Just had a play round on the base instance - first thing I noticed is just how slow the servers are.

Defining what I mean by slow:

\- The IOP/s limits make the server practically unusable for anything I tried, fio reports random 4k writes to be between 20-100 at most with very heavy fluctuation, I wouldn't consider anything under around 4K IOP/s usable for basic tasks for for databases I really want to see at least 10K.

\- The vCPU feels very over provisioned and I noticed a lot of WAIT even when the VM was doing nothing.

\- After starting the server for the first time it had 3438 failed login attempts - I'm wondering if it was properly erased or if you're actually being DOSed heavily already.

\- Very high latency from Australia with a 300-500ms RTA.

      test: (g=0): rw=randwrite, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=libaio, iodepth=64
      fio-2.2.8
      Starting 1 process
      test: Laying out IO file(s) (1 file(s) / 4096MB)
      bs: 1 (f=1): [w(1)] [5.6% done] [0KB/244KB/0KB /s] [0/61/0 iops] [eta 02m:14s]

      Last failed login: Sat Aug 15 21:35:27 EDT 2015 from xx.xx.xx.xx on ssh:notty
      There were 3438 failed login attempts since the last successful login.

</comment><comment><USER3> The initial screen doesn't make it clear you can scroll down for further information, a simple arrow might work, though on other websites I tend to miss them, too.

"Own a cloud server" might be over-promising since it's a virtual server and it's really renting. I would change the 'buy now' to 'sign up'. The buttons don't work and just point to the homepage without any indication what is going on.

Pricing doesn't make it clear if prices are per month. For storage it's unclear if it's SSD drives.

When I'm spending $100 with a company I want to see an imprint with full address and not just a contact form. Terms of service list 'Rs' as currently so I imagine the hosting is in Brazil?

The privacy policy doesn't have a section on Google Analytics (third party cookies, data being send to the US).

I see a link to your twitter ([https://twitter.com/koonktech](https://twitter.com/koonktech)) only after registering.

Good luck! I imaging much abuse with the free account, maybe I'm too pessimistic.

<comment><USER3> P.S. without submitting to [https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show) the posting will get too little exposure

<comment><AUTHOR> Can't :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> OSX 10.10.4, Chrome 44.0.2403.130 (64-bit), this is what I get when I scroll down and back to top. [http://cl.ly/image/0H173c1N3Q14](http://cl.ly/image/0H173c1N3Q14)

<comment><AUTHOR> Some issue with OSx/Chrome. Working on it. Thanks for taking out time to review it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which industry sector should I target? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I am curious if anyone could give any suggestions as to an appropriate sector within the software development industry given my interests.
My interests within the field is not what one would call narrow. Primarily though, I have a fondness for programming language theory, compilers, parsing and writing my own DSLs so that I can make powerful compile-time assertions regarding my code as well as generate tests automatically from the DSL itself.
My StackOverflow cv has an additional set of tasks that pertain to my interests, http://stackoverflow.com/cv/filipallberg.
Regarding my primary interests, the only relevant "thing" I have come up with is web-scraping, but I find it is a dull task as it is a trivial matter to me.
Machine vision is also something that I think a lot about, however most of my ideas are consumer-facing utilities and not something to build a business around. If I get a good idea I'd be willing to go into business myself. <comment><USER2> What do you want to optimise around? Stable job, 9-17, decent salary? Lost of money, caution to the wind? Be something [for one or more of several values of 'something'] to a lot of people? Fiddle with deeply intellectual CS problems, shielded from pedestrian worries about revenue and users?

I personally enjoy the knowledge of having solved a real (business) problem for real people, and being appreciated both financially and personally for this, even when the actual tech going into this isn't very complicated, and especially, doesn't tick off a lot of "hip" boxes.

I have also met good people who do not thrive in these circumstances, so it's hard to give generic advice as to what might make you happy.

<comment><USER3> I also enjoy this, but not for my current employer (for several reasons I don't feel like going into).

How do you do it, as a consultant or as a 9-5 job? Any advice on getting started as someone who graduated 2014?

<comment><USER2> I do it as an employee of a company, but it's a pretty sweet fit for consultants/freelancers (I used to be one).

I don't have any particular advice, beyond the generic stuff: You'll need a network of people who might (know someone who might) want to pay you to help them achieve business outcomes. Remember that you're selling business results, make sure every line on your invoice is part of a narrative that makes (or reduces risk of losing) money for the business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you like web-scraping, and you're not an idiot, you immediately have an information advantage for anything you decide to do. Do not underestimate this advantage.

I would suggest you leverage your interest in web-scraping and use it to customers in what ever niche you believe you can sell them something.

Collect your "beta" users through web-scraping, figure out a way to reach them at scale. Build/sell a product they want (you can leverage your information advantage to figure out what this is)

This is personally what I do and have created/worked on many bootstrapped companies over my career. Niche for me is fairly irrelevant, as long as I have a pool of interested customers ahead of time. I primarily use my information advantage to figure these out.

The additional skills you will need is:

* learn to think as a "user/customer"

* minor copy-writing skills (or at least understand what shitty copy is and how to improve it)

* UX

* Data mining & Analytics, Analytics, Analytics

* A/B Testing, Iterations, Incremental Improvements (see point above)

* Hypothesis Driven Development ([https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/how-implement-hyp...](https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/how-implement-hypothesis-driven-development))

My one suggestion is to avoid any projects which do not have a clear monetization strategy. If you're following my blue-print companies that don't make money from day will only incur costs as you reach your pool of customers at scale.

<comment><USER5> Can you provide an example or two of a project that involved web scraping? (without divulging client info) I can see how it could be used for price scraping in web retail, but am drawing a blank in other industries.

<comment><USER6> Address parsing from a large web corpus [https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal](https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal) The author uses [http://commoncrawl.org/](http://commoncrawl.org/) data, 250TB/3.6b URL and a 100 machine cluster of 8-core machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've worked 5-6 programming jobs in 5-6 different industries. Honestly the job is pretty similar in any industry. I'd recommend working for whoever pays best and/or a team you get on with.

<comment><USER8> YMMV. A cognitive load and inherent complexity can vary dramatically between industries. Compare web frontend development with, say, a mission critical CPU design.

<comment><USER9> You state this as if the answer was obvious... I recently switched back to front end development after months of developing a Bitcoin node from scratch as well as a custom BitTorrent server. I'd say among those three, modern front end is what I find most complex. The amount of technologies, protocols, tools and leaky abstractions to know about is just staggering and by the time you finally caught up, you are already behind.

<comment><USER8> Of course, if you're doing things the wrong way, you can create any amount of complexity out of nothing. I'm not considering this case. Why would anyone care about the amount of "technologies, protocols, tools and leaky abstractions" when the smart thing to do is to avoid them altogether and just pick the lowest common denominator?

<comment><USER10> And what would that be for web development? Or are you just saying "don't develop for the web"?

I've seen people who are great at diving deeply into a narrow field struggle greatly with the broad, changing knowledge needed for web dev, especially at scale. It's not clear to me that one is intellectually more challenging than the other. They often seem like different types of intelligence.

<comment><USER8> Same as with any other crappy set of APIs and standards - hide the complexity underneath a thin layer of DSLs.

I do not consider any area where this is possible to do (i.e., any area where complexity is artificial, not inherent) to be really complex and challenging, unlike the domains where complexity cannot be eliminated by simply removing the stupidity.

<comment><USER10> Are you really saying that the internet and web applications (and all their various components) are artificially complex? Or is it just whatever reification of "web dev" that you have in mind?

<comment><USER8> Yes, I'm really saying that a majority of this web crap is artificially overcomplicated for no reason at all, and it is mostly a product of stupidity rather than any sane design.

And stupidity got this funny property - it attracts even more stupidity, they stick together, they grow like a snowball, consuming everything around. Ill designed web standards, exceptionally, incomprehensibly shitty language (javascript) - of course it should have created tiers upon tiers of ill designed frameworks, ladders of leaky abstractions and a broken culture of tolerance towards all this shit.

The only sane way to deal with this kind of crap is to shield from it entirely, introduce a simple and clean design which should interact with a broken system, without allowing any of the underlying abstractions to leak to your level. It always works, with all kinds of broken APIs, and I cannot see why web should be any different.

Btw., it's amusing that web devs got so offended by quite an obvious fact that their work is nowhere near in complexity with the hardcore realtime stuff.

<comment><USER10> It's hard to argue your "fact", especially against such an insufferable amount of smugness and causal reductionism.

I find it _not_ amusing that people can assume things they don't participate in are simple, stupid, and trivial. It's the same type of intellectual closemindedness that leads to major problems in human existence. It's a mindset that deliberately ignores complexity in order to justify preexisting belief and prop up belief as truth while protecting the ego.

Personally, I enjoy working on hardware and working on distrubted systems. I also like building things that look beautiful. But to each their own, I guess.

<comment><USER9> There was an article on HN recently which I believe applies equally well to technical stacks: [http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep- fail...](http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep-failing-the- stack-fallacy/)

<comment><USER10> Which sources nobel laureate Philip Anderson in the paper "More Is Different":

"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe...The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles."

[https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~wktse/Welcome_files/More_Is_Diff...](https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~wktse/Welcome_files/More_Is_Different_Phil_Anderson.pdf)

<comment><USER8> Kolmogorov and Chaitin got a different view on this matter.

This is actually what science is all about - finding an information in data, or, in other words, measuring the complexity. If you can reduce a complex set of data to a simple algorithm, then this algorithm is all the knowledge that is there, and the rest is just a noise. By definition.

What Phil Anderson is talking about is a different kind of complexity, which is sort of irrelevant in this context. Yes, knowing the fundamental laws won't help you to explain, say, a protein folding, not without hundreds of years of a CPU time. But it does not matter. It does not make this science more "complex".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I want to suggest something that I would not normally suggest which is you should pair up with a non-technical founder. What you want to be looking for is someone with deep business experience (15+ years) in a narrow business field. Team up with them and work towards creating something amazing, but tightly focused.

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't have any specific industry for you to get into, but I have a suggestion on how you might be able to find it. Attend as many trade shows as you can and talk to the folks to get an idea of what they are doing, although some of them may be difficult to get to due distance, cost, invites etc.

For example, Embedded World in Nürnberg, Germany provides a good cross section of industry that has embedded engineering involvement in it. There will be a similar one for telecommunications, Automotive etc.

Good luck on searching for your calling.

</comment><comment><USER13> IMO your question isn't really answerable: you've listed tools and techniques you enjoy but "sectors" in the industry are primarily about producing results _using_ those. A similar realspace question would be, "I really enjoy building cantilevers and arches. What city should I look for construction work in?"

My personal recommendation would be to find people who are doing interesting things and talking about it in public - blog posts, conference talks, etc etc and reach out to them.

</comment><comment><USER14> Have a look at the legal industry. There are quite a few legal tech startups by now. Even web-scraping applications are rare in legal. The sector is famous for being profitable (high margins), rusty and inefficient.

<comment><USER15> Having worked at a fintech startup specializing in decision systems for regulatory compliance, I second this. There are interesting theoretical aspects stemming from the fact that domain is very tricky to model.

* There is considerable structural sharing inside finance regulations, but it is not hierarchical

* Regulations may be changed at any time, and these changes may be future-dated or back-dated

* Users insist on arbitrarily complex exceptions and overrides

* Nontechnical users (particularly legal) will insist on being able to vet and introspect

In my experience, anyone can do this badly, but to make it scalable and robust requires subtlety and a good understanding of formal logic, ontology and DSL design. It's a good fit for FP. Oh, and there's plenty of room for machine learning: Automated discovery, natural language processing, noncompliance detection, etc.

The problem of turning regulations into a expert system that is robust against future changes has not been solved, and there's demand for such systems from even the most sophisticated financial companies, even though everyone expects they'd be able to build such systems in-house.

<comment><USER16> That's interesting, may I ask which startup is that? Is it still alive?

<comment><USER15> Still alive, last I heard!

Droit Financial Technologies [http://www.droitfintech.com](http://www.droitfintech.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The technology to cost-effectively store massive amounts of raw metrics / data and quickly derive insight from it is still a relatively recent development, and so far we've seen turn-key tools to leverage that in just a few areas:

1\. Where developers themselves are the likely product users (think Google Analytics, New Relic, Optimizely, Appdynamics)

2\. Where there is a direct and immediate connection to $$$ (finance / quant stuff)

3\. Generic data science platforms (Cloudera, Hortonworks, Databricks)

I think there is still tons of opportunity for industry-specific turn-key data science tools. Especially for verticals where there is a low coincidence of skilled developers with industry domain expertise.

</comment><comment><USER18> Learn the art of writing gpu compilers. Software defined radio is another.

If you find web-scraping dull don't pursue it. Life is short.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd just suggest looking into something up and coming that interests you, and start learning whatever you can about that.

Industries that will have specific uses for machine-vision: autonomous driving cars, drones, robotics, augmented reality, internet of things

Others: crypto-currencies (specifically digital ledgers/blockchains), virtual reality, commercial space exploration, online education, voice recognition, (more as I think of them)

Tech that's already big and probably getting bigger: streaming video, instant stock trading based on algorithms,

Certainly one of those must be interesting to you. They're all pretty interesting to me.

</comment><comment><USER20> Whereabouts are you? If you're interested in PLT, DSLs and compilers, there are some small enclaves in finance that might interest you.

 _edit_ spelling

<comment><USER21> What small enclaves in finance are you talking about? I know that banks have small scripting languages that enable semi-technical users to describe a derivative product ("if condition1 then payoff1 etc.") but those are old and I doubt they are actively maintained and that banks are hiring people for that.

<comment><USER20> I was talking about banks. I work for one where we build stuff on top of essentially this paper:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/simonpj/Papers...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/simonpj/Papers/financial-contracts/contracts-icfp.pdf)

We're even hiring: [https://donsbot.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/haskell- developer-r...](https://donsbot.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/haskell-developer- roles-at-standard-chartered-london-singapore/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you are interested in huge bonuses up to 400k-1M a year for being a developer, then I suggest to you high frequency trading development. The problem is you'll have to move close to an exchange, but the finance industry rewards you handsomely and takes care of it's employees.

</comment><comment><USER23> Best of luck to you, I am not in the industry and cannot recommend from that perspective.

As a consumer though, augmented reality ( eg Hololens and Magic Leap) seems like it is about to become very big, and probably utilizes machine vision.

Can you recommend some resources for learning about web scraping?

</comment><comment><USER24> you should look at marketplaces. possibly even ones run by crypto currencies. There are alot of ways to configure a marketplace and it would be nice to abstract that from CRUD operations and such.

</comment><comment><USER25> You can do pretty well as a Google for Work reseller.

I can make 1 USD per account per month, at 10k accounts it is a pretty good source of passive income.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting proposition for a static income. I'll look into it

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> you're right, web scraping is dull ( it was a big, but important part of my job for a number of years ). The interesting, and non-trivial, part comes on how to use the data you have scraped.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm very much into DSLs, and I've been building and using them extensively throughout a very wide spectrum: database engines, CADs, hardware design and verification, compilers, device drivers, HPC (GPGPU).

</comment><comment><USER24> Which one are you talking about:

Damn Small Linux, a very small Linux distribution

Definitive software library

Domain-specific language, a computer language designed for a specific problem domain

<comment><USER27> DSL= Domain Specific Languages

<comment><USER24> sorry I left the non-technical terms in there I didn't mean to piss everybody off. Thanks for answering.</comment></comment></comment>


What's the point of a 1,000-year jail sentence? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-23495284 <comment><USER2> To drive Wolverine even more mad and crazy.

Generally speaking any sentence above 5 years is ineffective. It is very hard impossible to reintegrate the person after that.

Too bad that there aren't exiles and penal colonies any more. (I am against death sentence, think that life sentence is unbelievably cruel and that rapist and such should be removed from the society permanently)

</comment><comment><USER3> Its for the future once we become immortal! Law makers are already thinking about it! :-D

</comment><comment><USER4> It is important in case of an amnesty in future. The duration can be shortened.</comment>


Google.org Donates $14 Million To Prevent The Next Pandemic - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2008/10/21/googleorg-donates-14-million/

<comment><USER2> Google simply wants to lift it's image and prepare for the world gene data- base. nice move anyway. one day they won't be selling personalized ads/entertainment or job/hiring/mating recommendations, but health-insurance- relevant data from body to soul.</comment>


Duolingo podcasts are a casual way to learn a new language - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/07/duolingo-podcasts-are-a-casual-way-to-learn-a-new-language/ <comment><USER2> This article smells an awful lot like "native advertising."</comment>


Ask HN: Can a software ever be 100% bug free? - <AUTHOR> If we have so many great devs, and people constantly working on a piece of software. Why can't they produce 100% bug free software/app? <comment><USER2> Bug free isn't a requirement for the vast majority of applications. Attaining it is _very_ expensive, and most people/companies are not willing to pay the price.

Probably the closest the world has ever come to bug-free code of substance is that produced by NASA for their space shuttles, and it cost ~$1,000 _per line_. ([http://history.nasa.gov/sts1/pages/computer.html](http://history.nasa.gov/sts1/pages/computer.html)) This would make the typical YC app cost tens or hundreds of millions just to launch, and would put something like e.g. the operating system for your cell phone outside of the budget of _most nations_.

There are a host of other engineering tradeoffs that have to be made, too. In addition to prioritizing cost over bugs, shipping speed over bugs, feature set over bugs, being able to actually hire programmers over bugs [+], etc, are all important.

[+] Many programmers would consider the type of work environment you need to get bugs down to zero to be an oppressive place to work in. Among other things, it will quite literally try to crush any creativity out of you, turning you into an automaton which _exactly_ implements the specs given to you. Those specs were dictated by Really Important People. You're not one. Write your function. Your last function was non-compliant with rule 436 2a subsection b. Improve your performance or we'll find someone who is not a threat to our software quality.

</comment><comment><USER3> Programs that produce an output from an input and exit can get very close. See TeX as an example.

There is research being done on programs that can be proven to be correct and some progress has been made on practical languages. See Idris and Coq.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but remember that (Plain)TeX has very few features, so most people use LaTeX that is not bug free.

Moreover, it's very common to use many LaTeX packages that are slightly incompatible, or have to be loaded in a fixed order, or don't handle accented letters, or ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it can be formally proved that software that is non-trivial cannot be written to be 100% bug free in all cases, in all contexts, and I think that's a by-product of how software runs.

We have so many layers that software has to run on-top of: You have raw hardware, but a layer above that is the BIOS, and a layer above that is the OS, and a layer above that are the SDKs like .NET/GTK/Ncurses/Shell, and above that you have the layers that are built into software itself as abstractions, and on top of that ...

If _anything_ on _any_ one of those layers changes, you have the potential of introducing bugs. Not all interface contracts are honored by all developers/engineers. There have absolutely been cases where changes are made at one level and that has an effect on _everything_ that runs on top of it.

So even if you can reliably say that your program is 100% bug free for a specific OS running on a specific set of hardware at Time T, that has the potential to break during the next release of any of those products.

The software the Patio11 mentions (NASA systems) is running in a very specific context. It's running on hardware that has a high level of formal verification, and it's running on a RTOS or running directly on hardware, such that there isn't anything that can interfere with the software, because otherwise even the CPU scheduler could _introduce_ bugs into your system.

Anyway, that's my view of things, I'd love for someone to tell me if I'm wrong, since that's all based on observations I've made during my industry experience.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are methods that can be applied to software that formally prove properties of software so that those pieces are free of bugs. These are called formal methods and require heavy use of math. Some of them are ASM and Z.

There are provers that help as well, such as Alloy.

For the typically/average project put there, the mayor problem I see is that people still rely on code coverage as the one and only metric for quality of their tests (if they even implement tests at all). Code coverage is a lazy, flimsy and unreliable metric that has been subsumed by the more powerful metric called mutation score.

If devs utilized mutation analysis more, they would provably have much better quality software.

See this video: [http://confreaks.tv/videos/mwrc2014-re-thinking- regression-t...](http://confreaks.tv/videos/mwrc2014-re-thinking-regression- testing)

And here: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_testing](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_testing)

</comment><comment><USER7> You can mathematically prove whether a piece of code is 100% bug-free using formal verification techniques ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification)).

However, these techniques are often too computationally expensive in many practical cases. Moreover, formal verification requires one to very precisely specify how a piece of code should behave, as well as how the environment in which it operates may behave. (Think of OS, network I/O, user interaction, etc.) This is another source of often prohibitive complexity.

<comment><USER8> And then you have the problem of proving that the specification is bug free...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If we can agree that low-level hardware such as CPUs are essentially physical software, then it would seem that there are many bug-free software pieces out there. Many operating systems these days seem to have perfect or near perfect memory and thread management. Kernel mode drivers in general require a high level of quality since bugs usually mean death. User mode is where things get sloppy, and front-end Web Development is where things often get extra sloppy.

<comment><USER10> _it would seem that there are many bug-free software pieces out there._

I don't think that you can consider CPUs to be bug-free. Just to pick one, Intel got SYSRET wrong: [https://blog.xenproject.org/2012/06/13/the-intel- sysret-priv...](https://blog.xenproject.org/2012/06/13/the-intel-sysret- privilege-escalation/)

<comment><USER11> And don't forget the famous Pentium division bug in the 1990s:

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

<comment><USER9> I never said they were all bug-free. I am aware that there have been some problems over the years, but the track record seems much better with CPUs than with most things having what could be called advanced programming.

<comment><USER10> Having a game over user to kernel exploit available for who knows how long is not my idea of anywhere near bug-free.

And who knows what happens or what bugs are fixed when intel/amd push new firmware to the chip.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It probably has a lot to do with how many users you have. 10 users, then bug- free is possible. 10,000+ well that is a different story. The more users you have, the more weird scenarios they come up with on how to break stuff.

<comment><USER13> "Unfound bug" is still a "bug."

It doesn't have anything to do with users or weird scenarios.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It depends of the complexity of the software. The small Unix utilities like grep or ls are, AFAIK, bug free, because what they do is very simple, but something more complicated is more likely to have small bugs somewhere.

<comment><USER15> There was a bug in ls, long ago; it stuck around long enough that it became a feature. It was supposed to not list "." or "..", but instead it skipped all files starting with "."; which thus became the standard way to hide a file on *nix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> absolutely!!! look at the python code below :D

print "Hello World!"</comment>


User-space RCU - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/573424/ <comment><USER2> Facebook folly: [https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/synchron...](https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/master/folly/synchronization/Rcu.h)

Proposals for c++ standardization: [http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2016/p027...](http://www.open- std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2016/p0279r1.pdf)

<comment><USER3> How can this be okay if RCU is patented by IBM?

<comment><USER4> The patent it from 2004, so the issue becomes moot in 2024. At least for the C++ standardization that might be a reasonable timeline.

<comment><USER5> IIRC, although some variants might have been patented later, the original patent is form the '90s, so as long as an implementation sticks to what it is described there, it should be safe. IANAL and everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (2013)</comment>


Get Started with Blockchain Using the New AWS Blockchain Templates - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/get-started-with-blockchain-using-the-new-aws-blockchain-templates/ <comment><USER2> FYI: To get started with Blockchains from Scratch (Zero) coding / building your own in thirty lines of Ruby, Python, Go, JavaScript, ... I collect starter articles and free code samples at the Awesome Blockchains page @ [https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome- blockchains](https://github.com/openblockchains/awesome-blockchains)

</comment><comment><USER3> Based on my observation we are reaching PeakBlockChain(tm):

1\. Half of the posts in my LinkedIn use words block chain - they are not coming from usual P&D crowd. I'm seeing _lawyers_ post "Where are all the #ladies of #blockchain. So inspired by #blockchain diversity efforts!"

2\. I cannot go to a restaurant/bar/cafe/coffee shop in NYC without hearing someone next to me talking about blockchain and awesome stuff they are going to do to be riiiich riiich rich on #blockchain. Yesterday, I overheard two Mormon kids on a mission talk about blockchain over lunch.

3\. IBM's ads are all about blockchain.

4\. And now Amazon is jumping into Blockchain-in-a-box

<comment><USER4> 5\. Despite being 3 years old a compelling use case for smart-contracts has yet to emerge, nor has any use for blockchain become common place except as a clandestine currency.

<comment><USER2> CryptoKitties (Yes, cute little cartoon cats) that you can trade, auction, gift, breed and more with contract services on Ethereum might be the fun, fun, fun and compelling use case you're looking for, see [https://github.com/cryptocopycats/awesome- cryptokitties/tree...](https://github.com/cryptocopycats/awesome- cryptokitties/tree/master/contracts)

<comment><USER5> I sincerely hope I detect sarcasm. Reminds me of tulips. _takes shot for cryptocurrency bingo_ How's that beanie baby investment working out for everyone? ;p

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm really confused by this post. It seems to me like: a) the worst place to mine anything is in a general purpose cloud with resource sharing out of your control and b) burning as many resources of a specific type as available is (I'd expect) the worst kind of customer behaviour for AWS since underutilization and overprovisioning is free money. So why does this official post exist?

<comment><USER7> This doesn't have anything to do with mining. It's about templates to provision your own private/permissioned blockchain network.

<comment><USER6> > The template supports Ethereum mining, the EthStats and EthExplorer status > pages, ...

Literally the first use case mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Has anyone here benefited from deploying a private Ethereum network?

I'm struggling to brainstorm practical use cases for my projects, other than perhaps for smart contract confidentiality reasons. It feels like the cost of maintaining more infrastructure and the potential waste of computing resources through mining outweigh any benefits but I am likely missing some great use cases.

<comment><USER9> Yes, my company is using Quorum to build a permissioned blockchain amongst industry parties to exchange data for various value-add purposes.

We have done a lot of analysis and can see large benefits of using Ethereum based private network in this way.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2018/04/02/unitedhe...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2018/04/02/unitedhealths- optum-and-humana-in-blockchain-deal-to-improve-doctor- directories/#1b007eeb3998)

<comment><USER10> People keep coming back with this use case but it always baffles me. Certainly you need to have some amount of trust in these parties not to falsify data? If so, why do you need a Blockchain instead of basically anything else that would be cheaper and simpler?

I hoped to find answers in this Forbes articles but all I get are vague claims like:

>The use of blockchain technology will hopefully avoid the all too common problem that occurs when a claim comes through from the provider and it mismatches with the information the insurance company has in its provider directory.

>CMS found 52% of Medicare Advantage plan provider "directory locations had at least one inaccuracy."

How will the blockchain magically make sure that everybody updates all information? And if people suddenly somehow make sure to publish and update the info then why can't they do the same thing with boring old technology?

>"With increasing state and federal requirements relating to provider data maintenance and quality, tackling the high cost and redundancy in this space is a logical starting point"

Backups and redundancy existed before the Blockchain, also I'm sure nobody wants to publish private user data publicly for all to see so it's not like random users around the world are going to mirror your database.

So you end up with a "Blockchain" where only trusted people can access and contribute. What's the advantage over spinning up a PostgreSQL intance? I mean when you read the Quorum wiki[1] it reads more like a database setup guide than spinning a bitcoin node:

>The P2P layer has been modified to only allow connections to/from permissioned nodes.

And just like that the entire point of the Blockchain vanishes.

>'Proof of work' consensus algorithm has been replaced with 'QuorumChain' consensus, a vote-based consensus mechanism.

Surely I hope that medicare providers obey to some top-down rules to operate, not a consensus on a Blockchain. And given that all nodes are whitelisted anyway I'm not sure why such a voting is even required.

It's pretty crazy to me that when I read articles like this one on Forbes or the Quorum website I see pages after pages of hype and praise and yet so far nobody is capable of giving me one simple use case demonstrating the practical usefulness of the technology outside of cryptocurrencies.

The more I read about it the more I become convinced that the only real feature of the Blockchain is being a magic word that makes suits throw money at you. Maybe I'm just too dumb to understand it.

[1] [https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum/wiki](https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum/wiki)

<comment><USER9> The press release is vague for the same reason why I can't directly answer some of your questions/challenges.

However, the fact that we're using a permissioned network does not automatically say that trust is absolutely granted. In this case it is more of a wall for a rather large and weird garden and at this stage of development it is helpful to know at least who is walking around in the garden. What they are up to is a different matter.

Also, the press release mentions the problem of many provider directories existing and not every directory contains the same information. Provider data is a tent pole in the American healthcare industry and it is used in just about every area of it, from claims processing to personal health record management.

You ask why not just have a central database for it? Well, the answer is simply "why do you think there are so many directories already?" The field is littered with directories that aimed to be "The single master directory for everyone!" There is a large amount of "not invented here syndrome" and an equal amount of "we have 20 years of data models that wont fit your commercial directory." So every large payer ends up building their own and then spends a lot of time and effort maintaining the data in it. Other consumers/producers of provider data may also maintain their own directories or subscribe to a commercial product.

The network we constructed is not simply yet another provider master database but-on-a-blockchain. It goes beyond that and really does use key features of what most consider to be a blockchain's major benefits.

I apologize for not being able to share details of what I consider to be really neat stuff but more news is on the horizon.

<comment><USER11> > _You ask why not just have a central database for it? Well, the answer is > simply "why do you think there are so many directories already?" The field > is littered with directories that aimed to be "The single master directory > for everyone!"_

How does a block chain solve this better than any other solution? You still have to get all of the participants to adopt it, and that's an organizational problem that doesn't seem to me to be any easier than with any other solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Also on HN today: "Amazon was just granted a patent for tracking Bitcoin transactions and selling the data to the government"

[https://www.techspot.com/news/74246-amazon-granted-patent- tr...](https://www.techspot.com/news/74246-amazon-granted-patent-tracking- bitcoin-transactions-selling-data.html)

<comment><USER12> Cool, just got downvoted a bunch. The Amazon mafia takeover of HN is ruining this community.

<comment><USER8> Love your company. Don't get paranoid. Keep it up :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This has to be peak blockchain hype right?

Make it easy to use and let people discover that it's just not really needed for the cat majority of applications.

</comment><comment><USER14> That article lead is one of the oddest/funniest I've ever seen.

<comment><USER15> I wrote it, and great to hear! Did it make sense in the context of multiple uses for blockchain?

<comment><USER14> Sorry Jeff, just noticed this comment!

Yes, absolutely. I liked it a lot as it added whimsy to a subject that could easily be written in a much drier style.

Appreciate it!</comment></comment></comment>


Homebrew released a broken update that broke updating - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Homebrew/brew#update-bug <comment><AUTHOR> Broken: [https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/commit/11116c2467710c9b3df3...](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/commit/11116c2467710c9b3df37164dce2bb012a205d33)

Fixed: [https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/commit/99837fae4746db48b656...](https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/commit/99837fae4746db48b656da197c4f9d179d38321c)

</comment><comment><USER2> Updaters are probably the scariest thing I've written. It's like sending a space probe to another planet with the risk of losing it out there with no recourse, not to mention the security implications and inherent responsibility of effectively having access to tons of users machines. FYI a Raspberry Pi makes a great air gapped machine for signing such things.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the link! I knew something was wrong when days went by and there were no updates...</comment>


Open Source All-in-One Wireless Development Board - <AUTHOR> http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/LinkIt-ONE-p-2017.html

<comment><USER2> Something to be careful about - MediaTek has a reputation of being very hard to work with. As long as you're not trying to do anything beyond what Seeed Studio has already provided for, not a problem.

But if you run into something where you need MediaTek's help, you're out of luck.

Just hope I can save you that little discovery.

<comment><USER3> I know that a lot of documentation and support can be obtained from various Chinese sites, at least for MTK's phone SoCs. It's absolutely true that trying to approach them "through the front door" will not yield anything worthwhile, but the culture has found other means. If this one becomes popular, I expect the same to happen.

On the bright side, at least it's not Broadcom.

<comment><USER4> I start laughing when I saw the last sentence, in all my designs I tried to avoid Broadcom as much as possible. Same as Marvell, you don't get anything other than a two-page brief before you sign a NDA, and if you're not a volume player, you normally don't get a chance to even sign the NDA.

Marvell is getting slightly better with docs, but still light-year behind TI and Freescale, whose design docs are pretty much all publicly accessible.

<comment><USER5> Broadcom seems to be easing up a bit with their introduction of their WICED (pronounced Wicked) line of Bluetooth Smart and Wifi wireless modules.

\- $20 dev board keyfob that connects to an iPhone our of the box. \- lots of firmware source code examples \- available iOS source code \- _free_ compiler toolchain and USB programming \- open schematics and pcb files \- open forum: [http://community.broadcom.com/](http://community.broadcom.com/)

As a designer, I know it's easy to have a bad experience with a particular manufacturer and then avoid them like the plague in the future.

One time we designed in an Atmel TinyAVR into something, and as soon as we finished it went completely out-of-stock for 12 months.

We had to throw the boards and firmware away and start from scratch again using a PIC.

(We've never used another Atmel processor after that.)

But I try to remember that it's just a bias in my mind, and personal biases don't always jibe with reality.

Rationally, I understand that Atmel's not a bad company just because they had one supply chain glitch 7 years ago.

So my advice is: try to keep an open mind.

<comment><USER2> I absolutely agree. I'm kind of selfishly pleased that my comment triggered you to share your war stories.

But I do hope that by publicly sharing what manufacturers are like to work with it prods them to be more open to the community in the future.

Or if not, that at least I can steer designers toward those companies that are easy to work with, and let market forces do the rest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm assuming not, but does anyone know if the wifi/gsm/baseband code is open source? What benefit would having the GPS/SOC hardware data sheets provide if the firmware code is closed?

<comment><USER7> For GSM the baseband code is always closed. It is often loaded into the module. Part of a modular approval for PTCRB (as well as FCC/CE) is that the end user can't change the power and radiation profile of the device. This is one reason why the source is closed.

What you'd normally care about is the protocol to talk to that baseband. 9/10 for M2M applications it is the 3GPP AT Commands and PPP therefore you can pretty much use PPP dialer to talk to it.

<comment><USER6> Ahh I see. Thank you, you gave me a bunch of fun new things to google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recommend looking at the CELLv1 from SparqEE[1] if anyone is looking for a nice development board for RaspberryPi/Arduino. It supports 3G, not only GPRS as most of the other GSM boards available.

I received mine a few weeks ago and have been having loads of fun working with it.

[1] [http://www.sparqee.com/portfolio/sparqee- cell/](http://www.sparqee.com/portfolio/sparqee-cell/)

</comment><comment><USER9> LinkIt ONE integrates with 8 key features,ARM7 EJ-S™, GSM, GPRS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth BR/EDR/BLE, GPS, Audio codec, and SD card,which GPRS,GSM,Wifi functions can be used for IoT prototype,for wearables,BLE ,GPS,Audio are too important to without.I guess someone who have played Arduino can operate this board easily,now what I care is the software it supports.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps the resources column in linkit one page([http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/LinkIt- ONE-p-2017.html](http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/LinkIt-ONE-p-2017.html)) show us something to get started

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This turns your android into a the same type of shield.

[http://1sheeld.com](http://1sheeld.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> It diffrent from 1Sheeld, LinkIt includes GPS/GPRS and runs an RTOS. So, you can make it work outside.

<comment><USER10> I see. Both look worth having.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks really interesting for e.g. tracking devices

<comment><USER12> There are plant of those available off-the-shelf from your favourite Chinese e-tailer (or eBay): [http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=gps+tracker](http://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?SearchText=gps+tracker)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool

</comment><comment><USER14> Marvel! Name it Hunger ¡ jajajaja</comment>


Ask YC: Love to drive? Find the best routes. Check out my app. - <AUTHOR> http://www.mountainblasting.com

<comment><USER2> i like the concept, although i would've opened up to travel iterneraries in general. and then from there, more possibilities come into play.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Opening up directly to routes may be more confusing to the first time visitor in its current incarnation. A redesigned routes page may suit the purpose of an entry page better.

<comment><USER2> no problem. if you're worried about complexity, you could always open it up to people as they see themselves fit/ready.</comment></comment></comment>


New Chrome Beta release renders web pages as you type, screens downloads - <AUTHOR> http://chrome.blogspot.com/2012/01/speed-and-security.html

<comment><USER2> Blogspam.

Here's the actual announcement: <http://chrome.blogspot.com/2012/01/speed-and- security.html>

<comment><USER3> We really need a way of telling when the main link has been modified. The only reason I didn't downvote JonnieCache is because I know his name, because he is a regular contributor, and so I double checked that the url and his comment were the same. Then when I saw they were the same I trusted his comment more than the moderators actions: i.e. I suspect this story link used to go elsewhere.

HN needs tons more transparency on moderation for simple things like this, as well as some of the dodgy issues I've seen in the past. I know a lot of trolls are "rules lawyers", but frankly when I notice changes being done by a select elite for my own good with no accountability or properly outlined rules it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Especially when people complain of opinionated moderation and no evidence remains of it for me to make a determination myself as to who was in the right (I suspect the moderators are right in most cases, but if it's not there it's not there).

I'm taking a break from HN I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really going to fuck up your log analysis days...

Seeing traffic that never materialized.

Headers aren't part of any standard log format.

Every web-server configuration and every log analysis script will need to be modified, unless Chrome...

1\. Adds a GET variable to each URL to signify this is a preview pull (ex: GET <http://url/?ChromePreview=Background>).

2\. Hits the URL again in some way (ex: HEAD <http://url/?ChromePreview=View>) to signify that this is now a view.

( _edit: adding GET vars is a bad idea as outlined in comments_ )

Which will solve only half the problem, you'll still need to update your analysis scripts in a non trival way.

Headers won't work here well as these are not logged, and the only thing you could do with them is block the request, or have your Apache, IIS, Node.js, etc add non-standard entries into the log file, which creates more problems.

( _edit: headers are about the only way for this to work as outlined in comments_ )

Not to mention the extra traffic on the web could be doubled.

<comment><USER5> Headers are a perfectly reasonable way to signal this, and they're sending them. Adding GET parameters changes the URL fetched even though the browser still wants the same resource -- that would be wrong.

The fact that there are servers which don't allow users to do the sort of log analysis they need to do is not the fault of Google. Headers are the correct place to put the information.

<comment><USER4> 1\. Modify every Apache + IIS + Nginx + other configuration with non-standard log formats.

2\. Modify every analysis software/script.

Simple and easy!

<comment><USER5> The analysis software already needed to be modified. And if your Apache isn't already configured to try and find this sort of thing, you're also counting things like page prefetches as true views.

The header is the correct place to put information like this, regardless of whether the deficiencies of the server software.

<comment><USER4> > And if your Apache isn't already configured to try and find this sort of > thing, you're also counting things like page prefetches as true views.

Care to elaborate on how _your_ Apache configuration is already set up for this?

This is certainly not default/standard behavior.

I have no doubt that this can be done by detecting a header for the prefetch (if there is one!) and using Apache's syntax to mod the log, AND then accounting for this in your analytics scripts ... BUT what I doubt is that this will be a simple task to push to the other 100 million server and analysis instances that I don't control.

Not to mention some of those instances will not be like the rest, and the work required to handled this will be great.

<comment><USER5> I don't disagree that it's difficult for those running servers who want to filter this sort of thing out, given the state of the current tools. The fact remains that it's the right way to do this sort of thing, however.

As for me, I happily do not run any public websites other than my personal ones, and in that context I don't much care about analytics, so I'm afraid that I can't show you a good way to do this in Apache. For what it's worth, thought, I think the header for prefetch is "X-Purpose: prefetch" in Safari and Chrome, and "X-Moz: prefetch" (yes, really) for Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google did something similar themselves several years ago as an add-in to internet explorer. It was called web-accelerator or something like that. (correct me if i'm wrong, it might have been for firefox or even chrome itself).

It prefetched links you were likely to click on a website but it had to be abandoned because some GET-links also issued actions, such as removing blog- posts, on way to many web-pages causing havoc.

I fear this will have the same problem.

<comment><USER7> I believe pre-fetching of links is already more common in browsers these days, so I don't think that this feature will introduce these issues again.

Note that this new feature also _renders_ the page in the background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing that bothered me about instant, and will probably annoy me about this, was when using chrome to test REST api's. Hitting my local development server in debug mode with half constructed URL's used to drive me crazy. In general for surfing around - I think the feature is great, but I would love to be able to exclude a given site from pre-fetch/instant.

<comment><USER9> You could setup another profile and disable it in the options (or just disable it in the options while developing / testing and enable it back afterwards)

[http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...](http://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=177873) has instructions on how to disable it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I understand that Chrome will now start to fetch and display pages before you finish typing the url.

Google Instant is bad, but at least only Google supports the increased load on its servers.

Now Chrome is trying to build "Web Instant", which everyone will have to support.

<comment><USER11> The redundant pageloads provide a better experience to some of your users. Doesn't that make it worth it?

<comment><USER12> Not when it screws things up.

I have a REST API for placing automated phone calls, for example, which I regularly test using my browser. Chrome is going to start calling people when I've half way finished typing a URL because it thinks it knows what I'm going to type. That's not only not what I want, but costs real money.

Or what if I'm an administrator for some user-generated content site. I have a webpage that shows me a list of user accounts and lets me click a "delete all this user's content" link to fix someone's mistake by request. Now in the process of typing the URL to get to this admin area, Chrome thinks I'm trying to go to the "delete all" page and accesses it in the background...

This is a dangerous feature.

<comment><USER13> It would appear that you actually do not have a REST API. GET requests may not cause side effects in a REST API. This is an important feature of REST.

On the other hand, there are probably many HTTP based APIs that cause harmful side effects on GET, so the danger is still lurking.

<comment><USER12> It was an example; these APIs clearly exist in the wild, and side effects are not the only danger of prefetching API URLs. What if a URL that is meant to be accessed with a GET request that kicks off an expensive, long-running process is prefetched?

There's a front page story right now about Google AppEngine, where the linked discussion mentions mashing a link to start a MapReduce job every day that's costing $200-300 a day to run. What if Chrome autocompletes the URL to that job, costing you $300 before you finish typing something else?

<comment><USER14> _What if a URL that is meant to be accessed with a GET request that kicks off an expensive, long-running process is prefetched?_

Then the API owners will realize they shouldn't break the HTTP standard just because it happened to work before.

        In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods
        SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods
        ought to be considered "safe". This allows user agents to represent other methods,
        such as POST, PUT and DELETE, in a special way, so that the user is made aware of the fact
        that a possibly unsafe action is being requested.

        Naturally, it is not possible to ensure that the server does not generate side-effects
        as a result of performing a GET request; in fact, some dynamic resources consider
        that a feature. The important distinction here is that the user did not request the
        side-effects, so therefore cannot be held accountable for them.

This argument comes up every time there's a breaking change, but developers should be responsible for their actions. They broke the spec, they should be deal with the consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> we actually launched an extension for chrome which did the same thing in october 2010 when google instant search launched. it was a one night thing. i was in college. the adoption was not good.. so i kinda ignored the project. we actually did it with the omnibox api but it was an experimental api at that time.so i released it with an button ,which you can click and type to load pages instantly..

here is the link, [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nipkbmplhlokenofof...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nipkbmplhlokenofofabadcmppaklbhp)

it does not work anymore coz of an api problem. u can see the working video. never bothered to fix it. just wanted to say that i did that before Google :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Doesn't Chrome already do this to a certain extent ? I've seen server logs myself where Chrome has tried to fetch URLs that I have not finished typing.

<comment><USER11> Chrome currently has an option to start loading pages as you type (disabled by default) but this sounds a bit different. The current feature immediately displays pages as you type. It sounds as though this will instantly preload but not reveal until the query is submitted.

</comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell They should send a special HTTP request header along with pre-load requests so site owners can choose to block them.

Eg web browser sends a request with the header:

X-Page-Preload: Something

I configure my webserver to 403 any requests with that header.

<comment><USER14> Apparently they do, they send

        X-Purpose: instant

([http://www.google.co.uk/chrome/intl/en-GB/webmasters- faq.htm...](http://www.google.co.uk/chrome/intl/en-GB/webmasters- faq.html#instant))

<comment><USER17> But 3rd party JavaScript libraries (like GA or ours) cannot read such headers and will invariably get executed. How would Google Analytics recognize and discard such irrelevant requests?

<comment><USER14> I dunno, use the Page Visibility API[1]?

[1]: <http://www.w3.org/TR/2011/WD-page-visibility-20110602/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was pretty sure that Chrome already does this (maybe it was a flag though, actually). I switched it off after a while because it got irritating... luddite that I am.

<comment><USER19> I too think Chrome did that for a while - but it's gone in the current version. I definitely had it turned on for a while, used and actually liked the feature. Now it only works for search phrases and Google results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What will this do to web traffic? Sounds like this could result in a lot of additional traffic (if the the prefetched page is not what I'm interested in).

<comment><USER11> Increase it. Partially due to prefetched pages not being what users are interested in, and partially due to seemingly faster & more pleasant web browsing causing an increase in overall browsing behavior.

<comment><USER21> It will also increase CPU usage and decrease battery life, because the pages are also pre-rendered in the background.

It is nice to have the page appear instantly if you wanted exactly what was preloaded, but the overhead this adds in both network and CPU is kind of worrying.

<comment><USER11> Good point about battery life. Perhaps the Chrome team should consider turning this on/off depending on the system state.

It's the type of feature that I think most users would want on when they are at plugged in at home using a virtually unlimited internet connection. On the other hand, when using battery power and a 3g or tethered internet connection, it probably isn't so desirable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This would work exceptionally well on SPDY connections.</comment>


Are 'Test Tube Babies' Healthy? - <AUTHOR> http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/02/are-test-tube-babies-healthy.html?rss=1 <comment><USER2> "There's some vague evidence of difference, but we don't know one way or the other."

Which is the most common answer to medical articles with provocative question- titles like this.

<comment><USER3> "Next, a LocalNews 5 Special Report: Is Your Microwave Killing You?"

I miss all those special news bits, like how having high-tension lines near your house kills you, or how irradiated meat will make you glow in the dark, or how we are mere days from being overrun by BSE-infected zombie cows.</comment></comment>


Capsule Networks – A group of neurons which uses vectors to represent an object - <AUTHOR> https://theailearner.com/2019/01/21/capsule-networks/ <comment><USER2> This article is completely wrong. It's already been proven that unless you have the reconstruction penalty, capsules naturally don't capture orientation and work similar to bag of words models.

<comment><USER3> Can you pls give me the links where you have read this(Any research article or blog). Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please, please do not call activation functions neurons! A neuron is a name for a type of cell in animal brains which has several variants, many modalities of behaviour (chemical, electrical, temporal) and which we are making many new discoveries about as our technology advances.

<comment><USER5> Does it also bother you when people talk about using a "mouse" to move "files" to their "desktop?"

<comment><USER4> Only if they use the analogy to do things like convince people that mice carry little red lights on their tummies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first sentence:

> Since 2012 with the introduction of AlexNet, convolutional neural > networks(CNNs) are being used as sole resource for many wide range image > problems.

Um, CNNs have been around for 30 years as neural networks.</comment>


The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web - <AUTHOR> http://webtypography.net/intro/ <comment><USER2> This is a great guide that goes into exquisite detail but it is, unsurprisingly, not a great fit for the web. I lifted a few guidelines from the site (and added some detail) to give a better overview of what is most often overlooked and easily corrected in web typography. The ones I most wish would find a wide adoption:

There should be between about 45 and 75 characters in a single line. If there are not the user should at least be able to adjust the number of characters in a line.

Don't justify without hyphenation. Never justify monospaced typefaces.

Use a single space between sentences.

Don't letterspace lower case.

Pick an appropriate line height. The default is nearly always too small, especially for body text. Increase it but don't break it.

Use the non-breaking space for mathematical and numerical expressions (like 4 cm).

Use hyphens, dashes and quotes correctly. (Not on the site and not a common mistake in the past but today it is everywhere.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone else with a large monitor find that page difficult to read because of the dreadfully small font size?

<comment><USER2> That website is unchanged since at least 2006, probably 2004.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is really neat, although still a work in progress. I'd thought about doing this for ages, at least for my own purposes, but now I see it like this I think he should open it up as a community effort, or at least encourage comments and contributions.

</comment><comment><USER5> I cannot help but notice that this entire page uses serif fonts.

<comment><USER4> I'm not clear what your point is here. Perhaps you're referring to the common misapprehension that serif fonts are harder to read...

<comment><USER2> They could respect their own guidelines a little better but the content is great.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Anonymous marketplace to switch jobs at your desired salary - <AUTHOR> https://getwanted.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just launched this, thanks for checking out and comment! We are also launching on Product Hunt today where we have some additional info, check it out also!

We decided to build Wanted after being overwhelmed by InMails from recruiters on LinkedIn... It's impossible to cut through the noise.

On the other hand, we had a real hard time finding the best talent whenever launching a startup and working with those headhunters is crazy expensive.

So we created Wanted to solve both sides of this issue.

(1) Talents have to specify what salary they want, drop their resume / linkedin and that's it (equity, other package elements are coming).

(2) Companies commit to a salary for a posted position

The additional benefit of a set salary before the interviews is that employers won't be able to discriminate and offer less when negotiating because of gender, religion, ethnicity, or any other personal preference or attribute.

Please share your thoughts and feedback with us,

Balazs

</comment><comment><USER2> It could be possible to mis-match (or not match) employers and jobseekers who include and exclude the value of bonuses and RSUs when consolidating to a single number. Salary seems to mean "just base", but effectively RSUs for public companies are as good as cash on vesting.

A very simple/easy fix might be good to decorate your "minimum salary" field, telling users what exactly to include and exclude -- so everyone is on the same page. RSUs can be a big part of the negotiation, and a significant portion of FANG compensation.

Just because the base is agreed upon, doesn't necessarily guarantee there's a meeting of the minds on total compensation. Something to keep in mind.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree and the feature is coming! For the MVP we focused on bare essentials and look: no mater how great a job is, you won't take it if it doesn't pay the rent.

Bonuses, equity and other package elements are coming.

<comment><USER2> Your point in your other comment about overwhelmed with InMail totally resonates with me. Many low-quality offers out there, offering below-market wages. The signal-to-noise ratio is low, and it's an unfortunate part of the job seeking process.

I've tried a platform similar to this. Indeed has a product called Seen. I'm going to share my experience with Seen to provide insight.

Seen emails me saying employers want to talk, and included salary range in the e-mail body. Unbeknownst to me, the salary range was based on what I self- reported (many months prior), but based on the job title, it seemed too go to be true. Support had confirmed that the employer never saw my information, even though they sent me an e-mail saying the opposite.

Given the types of companies it tells me about, it's clear the product targets mid-market talent and not the top quintile. Which probably makes sense, since there are less people there. But it ended up having the same problem as InMail: an undesired signal-to-noise ratio. Sample size of 1, take my experience with a grain of salt.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I have many more examples similar to yours... Our CTO actually interviewed with Facebook over 8 rounds (!) only to find out at the end that they won't offer him the salary he was expecting and asking since the very beginning. But they dragged him along because for HR it's just a normal work day, but for him it was a gigantic waste of time.

Imagine a world without headhunters... Haha

<comment><USER3> That's a common negotiation strategy. They just drag it along and hope you're tired enough to accept whatever you get. Most companies don't do this (because their time is worth something too), but FAANG gets so many applicants they wouldn't really care.

I'm glad there are sites like this to make it salaries more transparent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Couldn't agree more... Transparency almost always helps and in this case it definitely does.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Convincing Your Employer to Relocate - <AUTHOR> We work at a small company in south San Jose. I personally live in SF, along with 4 of the 5 other non-owners, the fifth being even farther north. The three owners live in the Belmont/San Carlos/Palo Alto area (halfway of the 1 hour drive to the SJ office on a good day).
The job is engaging, meaningful, and the company is successful. Yet all of the non-owners, including myself, constantly gripe about the commute times (101 can be awful). The commute into the office can ruin your day. You could be excited for the day's itinerary, have a bad travel experience, and arrive with little to no motivation. You consciously know your productivity is diminished. You dread the drive (or public transit) home. Your negativity, even if you try to hide it, is evident and contagious.
Your bosses sympathize so much as to allow you to work in accordance with off-rush hours (arrive 10/11am leave 6/7pm), but this just hurts your ability to socialize normally during the week. They try to compromise with work-from-home Fridays, which 50% of the time become a rescinded privilege due to the necessity of face-to-face interactions.
The team comes together and suggests a move to a "middle ground" that does not impact the owners' commute time but drastically reduces the totality of employee commute times.
The owners are hesitant because they believe that proximity to clients (SV proper) is crucial in terms of business development and contract procurement, despite nearly all interactions being made over phone and email.
HN community, we implore you, what hard evidence can we provide to business owners that the success of their business is directly related to the happiness of their employees? What arguments can we make to convince the owners that their business does not rely on an office in the same general zip code as their perspective employees? <comment><USER2> In the end, you're probably going to have to vote with your feet, as in, move jobs.

Moving business addresses is not trivial, and real estate in S. San Jose, though also insanely expensive, is going to be substantially cheaper than mid- peninsula. Not sure adding the equivalent of one FTE in increased rent (which is how some may see it) is going to sell to your founders, though if you're going to make the case, point out they're already burning more than one full- time equivalent in added commute times.

Your curtailed ability to socialize can be seen as a feature, not a bug, even if that's pretty cynical. A lot of people are also what you might call "pathological commuters" whereby they enjoy staring at brake lights on the 101, which gives them what they consider a respite from chaotic home and work environments, and a chance to listen to radio or books on tape, or catch up on phone calls. I'd say the evidence lends itself pretty strongly that that's the kind of people you're working for.

Unless you've already asked and asked and the owners are getting testy from all the asking, try putting together a proposal as a group effort. Get lots of colleagues and coworkers to put their names on the proposal, and focus on the owners' upside and how you've figured out all the details- new location can be up in running by such date, new address is bigger and cheaper and in a better location, etc.

In the end though, it's their company, and it's your life, and the former seldom budges an inch for the latter.

</comment><comment><USER3> Your workplace has like 9 people. Why not just work remotely and schedule in- person time when needed?

If you don't need to be there specifically for 9am-5pm standard business hours, and there's no need to have frequent on-site client meetings, then maybe the owners could even downsize the office. Depending on where you think the office should move, the first thing the owners would probably do is check the commercial rent prices, so factor that into the location suggestion.

</comment><comment><USER4> Collect offers from companies in SF, and then proceed to either quit or take them to management.

I mean, I refused to work in the south bay when I lived in the bay area for this exact reason - if they started their company there, they are likely to engage in motivated reasoning to keep it there.

</comment><comment><USER5> Like other commenters I think you need to vote with your feet. If they don't have active plans to move offices the answer is no. The why's of you not being allowed to work from home on most Fridays or the office being in San Jose are irrelevant to your decision to stay or go. The needs of your bosses, and how much sympathy they have, are irrelevant too.

Is the job so great that the terrible commute is worth it for YOU? That's what it boils down to.

</comment><comment><USER6> First if all, try 280 to 85 instead of 101... and/or carpool.

</comment><comment><USER7> Show them Salesforce. They're not based in SV but pitch to all those start ups.</comment>


Cisco's Network Bugs Are Front and Center in Bankruptcy Fight - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/cisco-s-network-bugs-are-front-and-center-in-bankruptcy-fight <comment><USER2> 5-nines uptime means anticipating that the components (hardware and software) you bought from another company may fail in devious, correlated ways.

Failure to do so is simply incompetence.

Maybe the customer didn't read the fine print of their service guarantees, and that's on them. I would hope that doesn't happen often-- it would be very silly if service guarantees fell apart every time some piece of shoddy equipment (purchased and operated by the service provider) turns out to be at fault.

<comment><USER3> This.

The higher SLA system that I've created, was for a military project.

Physical network layout: I did choose a double port star topology, this is, every HP5300 modular swith, was connected to each other switch, with two "teamed" ports.

Usually if you only do the connections, you got a network loop. But with STP and VRRP in the HP 5300, I got an "always on" network.

The network did expand to +50 wifi access points with another proprietary wifi controller which also did have the capacity to gracefully failover connections from the APs, on network splits.

Servers behind the switches, where replicated in each segment. So you could at any time turn off (in order, or cutting the power switch suddenly) any rack (switch + servers) and the system did continue to work flawlessly. This was 5 identical racks/switches in star topology.

Acceptance tests did include to literally cut cables, literally turn off the UPS and RACK power, etc.

We could upgrade any firmware (the HP5300 cabinet, their hot swapable modules, or the servers BIOS/network-card/hard-disk firmware), without any service loss.

I'm happy with that result.

I've to say, all my other projects where I've work (+15 years), didn't have resources, neither did give any importance, to the needs of network firmware upgrades or downtime (because of a bomb?). In most cases, it was not because technical issues or handicaps, it was because of management.

Some projects did listen to me, and did contemplate the issue and planned it as a "maintenance window", or as what today is called "immutable infrastructure": prepare the new one, stop the service, replace, bring up the service.

I never did upgrade a switch/router firmware at $job, without having a backup switch ready and pre-configured, in case something went wrong. And preserve the backup one for a prudential time.

In my "always on" military project, firmware did need to pass acceptance tests in environments equal to production, before go to any production environment.

Edit: remove duplicated info

<comment><USER4> I remember explaining to a storage customer why they needed three very expensive switches at the core of their network. One to handle the traffic, another to handle the traffic when the first was busy, and a third which was in the rack, patched and updated to one release _behind_ the main switches, that could be swapped in by moving cables in under 5 minutes of operator time.

They initially thought I was kidding but then we did the fail tree on a white board. It was an interesting experience for them, understanding what it took to get what they took for granted.

<comment><USER5> You used the term "fail tree" which sounds interesting and I tried to learn more on the Internet but hit problems. Do you mean fault tree? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tree_analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_tree_analysis) If not, do you have a better search term and/or link I could follow up on?

<comment><USER4> Fault trees seem to be reasonably close. While developing my thinking and understanding on reliability analysis I came at it from an analog of decision trees. There were a couple of influential talks that got me started, one was by Sandia labs discussing the ways in which they insure that nuclear devices can't be detonated without approval (big requirement) through a process called vulnerability analysis, and another on how Citibank worked their network to insure uptime. The Chaos Monkey series from Netflix was quite fun as well. Google did something similar internally with its DiRT exercises (Diaster Recovery).

My "fail tree" (and I'll put it in quotes as unique to my conception of them) analysis consists of identifying a failure, the system response to the failure, a time to fix for the failed system, and a guess at the uncertainty on the fix. So for example "switch hardware failure" is a failure, with a fix time that varies based on "replacement part on hand" to "order/ship/install (replace) the entire switch". The first order is failure/fix tree with callouts of down time. The second order is mitigation/cost with mitigation strategies and their cost resulting in a new call out of potential downtime, and the third order is mitigation accelerators and their cost (which shorten recovery to non-degraded mode) which affect cost and possible down time.

Much of that you can do on paper, but sometimes you will have to run experiments to see how long things take to fix.

<comment><USER5> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm surprised Peak Web isn't responsible for bugs in its suppliers stuff under the terms of the contract. After all, it picked them, and can switch to alternatives if they don't measure up, while the game company cannot.

<comment><USER7> If they agreed to an uptime of 99.995% (~27 min/year), then that's on Peak Web. It sounds like they oversold their capabilities. For that level of uptime, they should have had much more redundancy in their engineering.

<comment><USER8> I furiously agree with you. Peak Web failed their SLA in the first month, before the Cisco issue even cropped up:

> According to Machine Zone, the hosting service couldn't make it a month > without an outage lasting almost an hour. Another in August of that year was > traced to faulty cables and cooling fans, according to the publisher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" Three people familiar with Peak Web's operations say the [10 hour] outage gave the company time to deduce that the troublesome command was reducing the switches' available memory and causing them to crash."_

Cisco Nexus devices log alerts for low memory/resource situations to syslog, the defaults being 85% minor, 90% severe, and 95% critical. Were they not reading their logs?

</comment><comment><USER10> You should be able to build a lot of redunandcy into your network on $4 million a month, but that would eat into margins, wouldn't it?

<comment><USER11> In networking, redundancy means two identical boxes with identical bugs.

<comment> X-Istence There are very few companies that are willing to purchase network gear from two different vendors and run two completely different network stacks.

Management would be a huge pain in the ass... but it would be doable.

<comment><USER12> We are a large regional ASN in a tech heavy market and run 3 different vendors of DWDM platform and both Cisco and juniper in the IP core. Diversity is good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Peakweb are idiots. With sufficient diversity and redundancy it is not that hard to run a five nines ISP. Ten hour outage is amateur hour. There are a great many terrible low budget hosting companies and colocation operators in the market.

<comment><USER13> Five nines is five minutes and sixteen seconds of downtime per year. That is an absurdly small amount of time, relative to an entire year. Saying it's not hard demonstrates your ignorance in operating a network.

<comment><USER12> You'd be surprised - I work for an ISP that sells five nines SLA on most of its circuits, and meets it. We spend money to do it. Having 1+1 redundant core and agg router sets at every POP, geographic diversity of inter-metro fiber, full A and B side power/rectifier systems, etc.

With the right BGP and ospf design you can absolutely meet five nines availability for an end user customer perspective. We have some places that are approaching six nines.

This article reads like they had 1+0 everything and ran into a nasty iOS bug. Running out of ram is amateur hour as well.

When we need to do customer service impacting maintenance that will totally take their segment off the net, the hit can be from 15 seconds to a couple of minutes. And that is in a case where a colo customer is single homed to a single aggregation switch like one of our 48-port 10GbE aristas.

<comment><USER14> Would you also encourage such a network be built with diversity of parts suppliers? I ask because it seems like you'd want to be able to also resist attackers exploiting a bug in a single vendor solution.

<comment><USER12> There are a great many ISPs successfully using a mix of juniper, Cisco, arista and other stuff. You will find extreme and foundry 1000baseT switches all over the place still. I would never encourage a monoculture of one model nexus 3000 or anything similar to that.

<comment><USER15> There's a lot of CCIE types out there who feel they have to maintain a totally Cisco shop regardless of equipment or diversity merits. This is finally beginning to fade, but I've seen it more than a few times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence MachineZone shouldn't have put all of their eggs in a single basket. Multiple hosting providers, and write your server side so that failover can happen to other datacenters/locations almost instantly.

<comment><USER16> Exactly this. The idea that MachineZone was willing to take a business that they advertised during the Super Bowl ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkaWyrm8EQg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkaWyrm8EQg)) and put it all in the hands of a single ISP at a single facility is questionable at best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My experience has been that Cisco hardware from the high end to the low end is crap.

</comment><comment><USER18> > The entire network often has to go down in order to patch—very disruptive in > the best of times

This is why Erlang has hot loaded code, since around 1986. Those who xxx are doomed to repeat yyy....

<comment><USER19> Hot-loading code works in many languages. But it's not practical to hot-swap hardware driver code, especially in order to fix a bug that initializes the hardware wrong.

Also, the bug in question caused memory exhaustion, which isn't necessarily easy to fix by hot-swapping code without some kind of restart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Apparently, it's five-nines week on Hacker News.</comment>


Moving Back to Lighttpd - <AUTHOR> https://chargen.one/high5/moving-back-to-lighttpd <comment><USER2> I don't think there's any reason to replace nginx. If F5 going to cause problems I guess that a fork can replace it as it happened with libreoffice.

</comment><comment><USER3> > We haven't seen a lot of open source projects doing well after the parent > company had been acquired.

Seems premature. Often the project gets forked when the parent project goes downhill. Right now NGINX is an excellent, stable, performant, flexible web server with lots of community support and documentation.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wish they would added a discussion on why.

<comment><USER5> The author states:

> There are some FreeBSD machines in our infrastructure which run NGINX. > _After the recent announcement of the F5 purchase of NGINX we decided to > move back to Lighttpd._

<comment><USER6> I don't find that satisfactory. They don't have to explain themselves at all, but it would be nice know why the F5 purchase would charter that decision. Also if the F5 purchase makes you want to leave nginx, why lighttpd? They don't have to answer either question, but we can still say it would be nice to have it explained.

<comment><USER7> The article is extremely clear on this point:

They were in the middle of a lighthttpd -> nginx transition and noticed that lighthttpd has now fixed whatever caused the transition to start.

Like all acquisitions, this one creates uncertainty, so they backed out the nginx deployment.

This seems totally rational on their end. Why fix what is not broken, and why depend on two things when you can depend on one?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> lighttpd is hardly comparable to nginx. For example, it still lacks http2 support.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Depends what you're doing. If you just want "http server" of some kind, then either is fine. Sure, features vary, but how much does it actually matter? Yeah, http2 is nice, newer compression is good, ... features _matter_ , but for a lot of uses it really doesn't make a noticeable impact.

<comment><USER9> If you just want a bare bones http server of any kind, nginx is probably overkill in the first place.

<comment><USER10> I would argue the opposite: _Anything but_ nginx is probably overkill unless you have specific requirements. I mean, sure, if you just want to serve some files from a development machine into the intranet _right now_ , `python -m http.server` will do the trick. But for anything that is either a productive system, or one serving content to the public internet, nginx is a sane default choice.

<comment><USER9> For a production system facing the public, lightttpd strikes me as inappropriate.

Any of the "I don't care how poorly it supports modern browsers, I just need something barebones that speaks http" usecases the person I was responding to seemed to be suggesting would typically be something like a local dev http server, or a barebones http server sitting behind a more robust proxy.

Which brings us back to, for those usecases, nginx is probably overkill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have no idea what their use case was, other than the lack of HTTP/2 support, if all you are doing is just serving lots of static files Lighttpd is still a very good choice.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wish nginx gets all the modules to be dynamic. I still keep a few Apache for lacks of LDAP and decent DAV support.

Haven't used Lighttpd in 15 years but I wonder how well it compares to nginx and Apache.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am using Caddy successfully

</comment><comment><USER14> WTF, a company gets bought, they switch from one free software to another after two days ... okay without any testing.

Doesn't make any sense, technical or other. Clickbait article.

<comment><USER15> It's not even an article really. It's a blog post and it seems targeted as a reference for other admins with chargen.one. Not sure why it got posted to HN.

<comment><USER16> Question is why it got upvoted by uses?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Lighttp is a dead project why would anyone use it.

<comment><USER18> Doesn't really looks dead: [http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd/repository/sta...](http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd/repository/statistics)

<comment><USER17> The commit history doesn't means much, the project died 10years ago when the creator went to work for Oracle.

<comment><USER10> So? Looks like it was revived. That's the magic of open source. It's not tied to any one person or company.</comment></comment></comment></comment>