Ask HN: Replacement for BitTorrent Sync? - <AUTHOR> I first moved to BitTorrent Sync when it was announced from Dropbox because I did not want a copy of my data in the cloud.
Initially, things worked pretty well with some hiccups along the way which isn't too surprising for a 1.x product.
However, the straw that broke the camel's back was starting with version 2, BitTorrent decided to start making certain features premium. While it's entirely within BitTorrent's right to do so, they chose to do it in a way that legacy installs of various vintage across multiple machines would break in a fashion that would require a reinstall. And lo and behold, a reinstall causes further breakage.
So if one wants to see how not to incrementally update (notice I do not say improve) a product over time, look no further that BTSync.
Even worse, recently I discovered that I actually suffered from data loss due to some strange idiosyncrasy of their sync algorithm.
That said, I'm now looking for suggestions for a product that I could use to synchronize across Windows and Mac for both 1Password and regular files. <comment><USER2> There's syncthing, they came out around they same time as BTSync and the source is available on github.

[https://syncthing.net/](https://syncthing.net/)

</comment><comment><USER3> You could try Seafile.</comment>


30 Mobile Apps in 30 Days - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@gpj/30-apps-in-30-days-6686a570e90

<comment><USER2> Pretty inspiring - would love more details about what apps were accepted in store the store etc.</comment>


A Stoic Meditation on the Non-Existence of the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://techno-anthropology.blogspot.com/2011/05/stoic-meditation-on-non-existence-of.html

<comment><USER2> I love the basis of this article, and I adore the internet. I'm about 35 and spent half of my life with no internet.

Guitar magazines taught me that Harmonic Minor scales sounded exotic and dark.

People I knew in person helped me get jobs, like teachers.

I met people in classes, parties and through other friends.

And, I published my work in my journal, zines and the school newspaper.

He's right, the internet is fantastic and improved all of these activities - mostly. Life back then wasn't all bad, to be sure. I love the amazing ability to connect to people on the internet, and the vast amount of information at our fingertips. However, I do somewhat miss the slower pace of life 20 years ago.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm in agreement that life was life, and it wasn't so bad. You're right.

Some of the specifics, though, of my case, would be impossible without the internet. I'm sure I'd have a job. But remotely writing textbooks for a Korean company probably wouldn't have happened. (How could it have! How would we have even found each other!) I would have never developed my friendship with my bff Anissa. A lot of the most important things in my life would not have been possible before the internet.

BUT - that's probably not true of everyone. I may be a weird case.

<comment><USER2> I work at home and on vacation seamlessly, which is marvelous, and also have made amazingly close friends across continents. I have no idea how I ever would have met those people if not for the internet, and I surely couldn't be spending hours a day on the phone with people in Russia and the UK with the old phone system!

No doubt your example isn't isolated... this sort of global connection making seems to be becoming more common. I think it's going to be a really amazing force for cultural change in the next 20 years.</comment></comment></comment>


Analyzing 50k fonts using deep neural networks - <AUTHOR> http://erikbern.com/2016/01/21/analyzing-50k-fonts-using-deep-neural-networks/ <comment><USER2> Site's down for me. Archive link: [https://archive.is/20160121051229/http://erikbern.com/2016/0...](https://archive.is/20160121051229/http://erikbern.com/2016/01/21/analyzing-50k-fonts- using-deep-neural-networks/)

<comment><USER3> (author here) not sure what happened, but the site is up again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is fun, but I wish he spent more time on the representations.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, some more exploration of clusters would have been interesting. Like "this blob here is all the serif fonts, these are the sans-serif, etc."</comment></comment>


Is this the end to my entrepreneurship dreams? - <AUTHOR>

This is serious and I must accept that I acted foolishly. A year ago I left my job to start a small business and it turned out I never planned it well. It failed! I still believed in the idea and i thought a part-time job would help cushion the cost of living. Again I failed to find a job. I started a business buying vehicles for other people online with a view to earn a commission and support my family. The biggest problem began a few months when I lost money for a friend's car and foolish enough (I just realize it now) I kept quite with a view that I will replace it. I tried borrowing but nothing helped.  I tried to explain to my friend about what happened but he couldn't buy my story (I don't blame him if only I told him there and then). As I write this post, this friend reported me to Police and tomorrow I have to either take myself to Police and get arrested for failure to deliver his vehicle as agreed. I feel bad to see my once united and happy family (my wife, two children and 3 dependants separate) all because of my foolish decisions. As once a respected person in our community I have now been turned into a laughing stock. The painful thing though is that after sacrificing so much for to start a business all I have to get at last is PRISON. To all those who have successfully managed to grow their business I salute you. For now I have only about 12 hours to think what next? <comment><USER2> You have to get a lawyer's advice.</comment>


A.I. Wants to Know How You Plan a Trip - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/04/business/ai-technology-travel-planning.html <comment><USER2> > Through user testing [..] customers were most interested in learning about > the cheapest flight, the shortest flight and the flight that offered the > best combination of saving time and money. Displaying search results based > on this information, even though the changes were small, made a big > difference in sales...

No-one could possibly have expected consumers to care about those things <rolls eyes>

Seriously, is this the best we can come up with? "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" springs to mind.</comment>


Submit Your Claim in the Equifax Breach Settlement - <AUTHOR> https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/ <comment><USER2> It would become a legendary case study if this site turned out to be an information phishing site. (This one is legit but I expect it to happen someday. I'm surprised it hasn't already.)

After all this site links to the law firm JND, but nowhere does JND mention _this_ site. So any of us could have made this site.

 _Use the form below to find out if your information was impacted and if you are a class member._

 _Last Name_ _______

 _Last 6 Digits of Social Security Number_ ________

<comment><USER3> Your comment inspired me to take a look. I compared the SSL certificate and the whois information to equifax.com. The settlement site uses a different company for the certificate. The settlement site uses Starfield Technologies vs DigiCert for equifax.com. The settlement site uses GoDaddy for their DNS vs UltraDNS for equifax.com. It's not impossible that a division in the company or a different law firm uses different SSL certificate provider and DNS provider, but it may point to some caution.

Edit: As another commenter pointed out, this site is linked to from the FTC site about the breach.

<comment><USER4> Why compare it to Equifax? I'd just assume it's an unrelated malicious opportunist. I'd rather compare it to JND to have evidence towards proving that it's legit. Anyway it is legit since it's mentioned on the FTC site.

<comment><USER3> I made a faulty assumption. As others have pointed out, the settlement site is run by a third party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't want money. I don't want free service. I don't want any compensation.

I want Equifax as a company to be dissolved for incompetency with private data, and I want a way to legally opt out of other such companies collecting and aggregating private data about me.

<comment><USER6> "I want a way to legally opt out of other such companies collecting and aggregating private data about me."

The problem is this also means you will be completely opting out of the credit system. No more morgtgages, no more credit cards, no more car loans.

I'm afraid it's kind of a necessary evil.

<comment><USER7> It's a convenient evil.

Finance isn't the only area that uses reputation judge people. I imagine we've all been asked for references when applying for a job or an apartment. Jobs and apartments manage to get by without a centralized score.

Mortgages predate credit scores by centuries. It's demonstrably not necessary.

<comment><USER8> Many, if not all medium to large companies do in fact pull a limited credit report as part of the screening process. Also, there is far more regulation on mortgages these days. E.g. I can get a massive home loan from a banker I've never met before because of credit bureaus.

<comment><USER7> Many do, many don't. And they'd keep on hiring just fine if they couldn't.

As for getting a loan from a banker you've never met, my point exactly. They're a _convenient_ evil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 5-second glance at the the stuff in the <head> shows pixels for: Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, a bunch of other slimy stuff.

What the actual F. Who does that?

Edit: also, no content security policy, no subresource integrity for 3rd party scripts. Is there such a thing as filing a class action against the party handling the class action? This is downright irresponsible.

Edit: I see a couple of the 3rd party scripts have integrity, but most don't.

<comment><USER10> What he's saying is that even if www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com isn't using the 5 digits of your SSN for nefarious purposes, Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, and other slimy companies are collecting this data. Even if FB, Twitter, Google et al aren't using this data, it might be available to marketers who use these Ad platforms.

Please correct me if my explanation of the parent comment is wrong here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Some tips:

Note that many free credit monitoring services exist, and most credit cards nowadays have this feature available. These qualify you for the $125 payout.

Up to 10 hours effort ($250) can be claimed without documentation, for time spent battling or preventing ID theft. Preventing is probably key here, and could cover a lot of activities.

<comment><USER12> The $125 and $250 come from a maximum fund of $31M each, so there is almost no chance anyone will get $125 or $250.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> By comparison, here's somebody who sued them in small claims court and won $8000:

[https://blog.legalist.com/i-won-8-000-from-equifax-in- small-...](https://blog.legalist.com/i-won-8-000-from-equifax-in-small-claims- court-heres-how-you-can-too-f0ce6925c079?gi=6cf7765790c2)

an update about winning the appeal afterwards (edit: apparently they got it reduced to $5500):

[https://blog.legalist.com/i-fought-equifaxs-lawyer-in- court-...](https://blog.legalist.com/i-fought-equifaxs-lawyer-in-court-and- won-here-s-how-a16930c53af3)

<comment><USER14> Really interesting! Does submitting a claim here prevent you from suing Equifax in small claims court? It seems possible that a $5000 may be worth my time.

<comment><USER15> Not only does submitting a claim prevent you from suing Equifax, the only way to preserve your right to sue is to actively exclude yourself from the settlement. See FAQs 19 and 23.

19: [https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/faq#q-19](https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/faq#q-19)

23: [https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/faq#q-23](https://www.equifaxbreachsettlement.com/faq#q-23)

<comment><USER13> That can't be legally binding

<comment> kube-system It appears that rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure binds even unnamed parties of a class action suit, unless they exclude themselves from an eligible suit.

[https://civilprocedure.uslegal.com/class-action/binding- natu...](https://civilprocedure.uslegal.com/class-action/binding-nature-of- class-actions/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases- proceedings/refunds/eq...](https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases- proceedings/refunds/equifax-data-breach-settlement)

It's mentioned in the FTC site.

</comment><comment><USER17> If this breach affected 147M people (which is what I can find from various articles), and $700M was set aside (before attorney fees), and most claims will be $125, that's only ~4M people who will get $125.

Are they expecting very few people to file claims? Or what am I missing?

<comment><USER18> It sounds to me like they'll give you free credit monitoring, UNLESS YOU ALREADY HAD CREDIT MONITORING, then they'll give you $125. Most people don't have credit monitoring, I think. Personally, I've found the free credit monitoring that they gave me pretty useless. I get an email regularly telling me my score changed. I have to go log in and find out I went up 2 points because of an algorithm change. Thanks for looking out, Equifax! Then I go to a dealer and they pull my credit and it's dramatically higher than what Equifax has been telling me. The whole system seems silly to me.

<comment><USER19> It is either-or, not both. If you want the money you have to promise you have credit monitoring from somewhere else. Credit Karma (for example) counts as free credit monitoring and you can easily make an account before making the claim. Many credit cards come with monitoring too.

<comment><USER20> I believe NerdWallet counts as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They can keep the $125 (although, I wish I could direct it to a charity). I don't want to submit all of this information to an entity who's data security is probably worse (hard to believe) than Equifax!

<comment><USER22> I'm sure they have it all already.

<comment><USER23> Of course they do, they have to verify you're a member of the class.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's turbo BS that you're not entitled to cash payout unless you already have a credit monitoring service.

<comment><USER25> I wonder what counts as a credit monitoring service. Can I choose what service I use? ...Can I monitor it myself?

<comment><USER26> There are two reasonable answers, ignoring whatever is specified in the legalese which of course takes precedence:

1) It must be a third party service that you have entered into a business arrangement with, where the arrangement in clear and specific terms provides you with credit monitoring.

2) It must hold up in a court of law if challenged.

That second one is the anti-loophole provision of law, and protects against the kind of loopholes people try to find to get around the clear intent of the requirement.

You can choose to use any service that would hold up in a court of law. There are no clear answers on whether "any" service would. Time established, diversity of customers, active or inactive business, frequency of credit report inspection; all could be factors in a judicial evaluation of whether you complied with the terms or not. Capital One? Yes, they plausibly do offer credit monitoring as a service. Joe Bloe's Credit Woes? Entirely possible, if they've been around a while and can demonstrate that they pull credit reports on a regular basis and audit them in some manner.

Can you monitor it yourself? Only if you already operate a credit monitoring business. Otherwise, it'll fail the plausible test, and you lose your $125 + lawyer fees + risk angering a judge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Reddit thread with detailed information on claim submittal [1].

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/ch9tcj/cla...](https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/ch9tcj/claims_are_now_being_accepted_for_the_2017/)

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm feeling a bit cynical, and I wonder if this will bring real changes? I happen to have a good friend at ReliaQuest, so I know that, after the data theft, Equifax hired ReliaQuest, and has slowly expanded that contract, giving more and more responsibility to ReliaQuest. My friend is an awesome engineer and ReliaQuest is a very good outfit, but still, I'm frustrated by the idea that the CEO of Equifax can simply outsource security and then not think about it any more. For companies that hold people's most sensitive data, I'd like the top person to be obsessed with security 24 hours a day. I wrote about this previously:

" _If a company handles people's sensitive financial data, then I would like the CEO to be the type of person who wakes up in the morning thinking about security, goes to sleep at night thinking about security, and never has security far from their mind during the day. So to hire a security company, and then act as if security is a solved problem, is troubling. There are many other ways for a company to be hacked. Social engineering is a danger, and most company hacks are inside jobs. Hiring a firm such as ReliaQuest does not protect you from having one of your own employees steal data and sell it to the Russians. Protecting against internal attacks requires hard thinking by the top leadership of the company. The job can not be outsourced._ "

[http://www.smashcompany.com/business/if-a-company-is- serious...](http://www.smashcompany.com/business/if-a-company-is-serious- about-security-then-who-in-the-company-is-serious-about-security)

<comment><USER29> No. A CEO runs every aspect of a business. While it might be a bad call outsourcing everything, they obviously want expertise rather than having to either rely on their current team that fucked up (which would be viewed as negative), or take some time to hire new people. Hiring new people takes time & isn't reactionary. Everyone will want them to be seen to be doing something. Hiring an external company is possibly the best short term thing they could do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> My anti-virus software flags the "File a Claim" page as a phishing site.

</comment><comment><USER31> And to file a claim I have to submit all my personal information over again; Oh the irony...

</comment><comment><USER32> CreditKarma offers free credit monitoring.

</comment><comment> non-prophet I completed the request with specified damages from the breach. I recently received a letter saying my claim was denied as I had "failed to mail the documentation," however, there was no notice on the webform that I completed that required mailing the documentation.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is the first time I've seen cash vs. the useless credit monitoring as a compensation offer.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can only claim the $125 cash if you affirm that you're already paying for credit monitoring. While I don't expect anyone to confirm your claim, you do have to sign your name to a legal document stating as much. You can make additional compensation claims if you suffered actual damage or spent time dealing with the breach, but as I could not honestly claim such, I don't know what that part of the process entails.

<comment><USER34> but this is stupid. Individuals keeping an eye on their credit history and every change should be counted as credit monitoring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Class Counsel will ask the Court to award them attorneys' fees of up to $77,500,000 and reimbursement for costs and expenses up to $3,000,000 to be paid from the Consumer Restitution Fund."

The lawyers are the real winner here.

</comment><comment><USER36> What can Canadians do?

</comment><comment><USER37> what's lost? my SSN/name/address/phone? or what? what is exactly lost?

if SSN/birthdate/name is gone, then anyone can fake me online, apply credit card under my name.

am I missing something? what was stolen from me?

so yes I can say I worried for 10+ hours and Equifax will pay me $250 no questions asked, but this is not exactly what I want to have.

</comment><comment><USER38> Hmm - I had to disable uBlock Origin on that site in order to submit a claim. Hate it when that happens.

<comment> sh-run Do you have custom rules enabled? I'm running the default uBlock Origin (version 1.18.6) on Firefox (60.8.0esr - company machine) and didn't have any problems. uBlock reports that it blocked seven requests to four domains (ads- twitter.com, bing.com, facebook.net and googletagmanager.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Just another way to submit your PII to a bound to be leaked repository.

</comment><comment><USER40> How do I know if I get something from this?

</comment><comment><USER41> Is this spam on HN?

</comment><comment><USER42> equifaxbreachsettlement.com Registered anonymously with GoDaddy for 1 year.

This is scam

<comment><USER43> It is officially linked from the FTC.gov website.

[https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases- proceedings/refunds/eq...](https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/cases- proceedings/refunds/equifax-data-breach-settlement)

So I strongly doubt it is a scam.

<comment><USER44> This is official, but remember what happened when we assumed that links from official sources were official.

Healthy paranoia :)</comment></comment></comment>


Social Media and a Case for Radical Authenticity - <AUTHOR> http://throwww.com/a/1ym#

<comment><USER2> Great write-up and clever marketing from mcdonnald's. I too believe that more honesty is better. People can relate to you more when you admit you screwed-up or made a mistake. Trying to always be perfect perhaps paradoxically detracts from your appeal and people will do their own thinking and probably conclude that you're disingenious. I think the same goes to us all as people communicating with each other, as it does to companies communicating with our customers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yah, I actually started formulating the idea when I was thinking about a local business owner in Vancouver - Vikram Vij. The guy _is_ the brand. What draws people to him and his stores is his incredible authenticity. His interactions with people and his business practices are all products of his authentic self. It's really amazing to see. The guy doesn't advertise or take reservations at all and has one of the most succesfull restaurants in the city.</comment></comment>


We should improve email protocol to allow userless addresses - <AUTHOR> There should be a way to email business/individual according to their domain name and not knowing email address user prefix.
If you want to contact business.com there is either email@example.com or firstname.lastname@example.com or some other arbitrary prefix. These are not intuitive ways to contact the businneses or individuals owning domains.
What if we could send emails directly to @business.com? I believe this would make email a much more powerful tool. <comment><USER2> Like RFC 2142? [https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt)

</comment><comment><USER3> Powerful for who, spammers? I don't think it is particularly useful, but if it is for some, it will definitely need to support blocking email at the generic domain.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that blocking would be needed. However if you are a business or individual that has email posted on the website it is not much harder for spammers to get it anyway.

Another usecase. Let's say I buy a domain myname.com for personal use. I might want people to contact me directly via @myname.com without having to create an unnatural sounding address like firstname.lastname@example.com. I have seen people buying @surname domains and then creating emails name@surname, which is pretty weird too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ...or you could just use Twitter which does exactly what you're asking for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Twitter is centralized platform where people down own their data. We need to think how to make open protocols better in order to improve the decentralized web

<comment><USER4> As if email is any better? Just because you delete all your mail from your inbox, doesn't mean the requisite copies in your sender/recipient inboxes are deleted. Decentralized doesn't necessarily mean data ownership.

<comment><AUTHOR> Data ownership is just one aspect. However i don't think twitter is good comparison to email at all. Email is for private communications and twitter is public social network.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Toronto eyes plan to crack down on Airbnb-style rentals - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestar.com/news/city_hall/2017/06/12/toronto-eyes-plan-to-crack-down-on-airbnb-style-rentals.html <comment><USER2> I stayed in an Airbnb in Toronto last year. It was a beautiful new building in a trendy neighborhood. The unit was very clearly setup for continual airbnb rentals and wasn't anyone's primary residence.

Only after booking was I given very specific and careful instructions on how to avoid any interaction with other residents or building security, entering and leaving through the parking garage.

During my stay I felt like a criminal, even though I quickly figured out that this was a pretty normal thing in this particular building, which was known for loud parties and inconsiderate visitors.

What a terrible experience for me as the guest and the people who have to put up with strangers constantly coming and going.

Airbnb is cool when we're talking about a vacation home or occasional rental of your primary residence - not as a clandestine hotel. I'd be willing to bet that most people, homeowners or responsible renters agree with that, Airbnb's growth goals be damned.

<comment> 52-6F-62 There's a high probability that's my building. It's known for all of those things, and AirBnB stays have long been against building policy for that reason.

I could care less -- I'm a renter, not an owner here -- but the parties do get real stupid and leave the place a real mess. I'm talking urine in the elevators on a Monday morning stupid.

Most days there are people coming in and out with luggage. It's kind of ridiculous.

<comment><USER2> This was the place -

[http://globalnews.ca/news/2080213/two-people-shot-in- toronto...](http://globalnews.ca/news/2080213/two-people-shot-in-torontos- west-end-possibly-fatal/)

"She called it a 'party unit' and said it seemed like there had been a party going on for three days straight."

<comment> 52-6F-62 Well, nope. Not mine. I guess it's not such a rare occurrence anymore.

Funny, I used to live in a less trendy neighbourhood and I hardly ever saw AirBnB-ers...

I live in Liberty Village now, as a result of getting the boot from my last place because the owners wanted to take it over. They visited for the first time while I lived there. The buildings down here that aren't the million- dollar lofts seem to be rampantly used for AirBnB stays -- mainly as a party location -- often with people from the city who just wanted a place they didn't care about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There's a lot of cities trying to figure out how to handle Airbnb -- Barcelona for example is cracking down on unlicensed AirBNB's -- and the reason is the resulting rent increases.

Like taxis and taxi cab companies taking their hatred out on Lyft or Uber, I do believe that technology changes economies and that this will be another example of a misled attempt to prevent a technology from changing a city's economy. I also believe that many times these preventative measures are led by lobbyists by the very industry that is being hurt by the technology, and in this case it's likely hotels -- but then blaming it on rent prices.

It'll be great to see where all this leads, but making it illegal and taking it out on owners or drivers is going the wrong direction.

<comment><USER4> Not sure if ride sharing and home sharing are the same thing.

Ride sharing disrupted the cab industry, gives a large amount of the population access to cheap and plentiful transportation, and cars are plentiful too. The loser is the cab industry and the winner is the general population.

Home sharing is disrupting the hotel industry, but its customers are tourists and non locals, and housing stock is very limited. So city populations are going to be paying higher housing costs since they are now competing with entrepreneurs (serving tourists and non locals) for the same units. In theory, rents may continue to increase until they find a balance with hotel rates. Here the losers are hotels and long term renters and the winners are short term renters, property owners, and entrepreneurs.

Different economics at play here.

<comment><USER5> There's also the externalized cost of disrupting communities. AirBnB is significantly changing the dynamic of where these people live and they get nothing in return for it.

I find it interesting that people who normally are so pro-contract (you can contract away your right to sell a printer cartridge) seem to be in the other camp when it comes to dwellings (well of course you don't have to abide by the contract saying you won't rent it on AirBnB) or just silent on the issue.

<comment><USER6> I'm failing to see how this relates to contracts in reference to home sharing. When someone buys they're home, did they sign a contract saying"The undersigned agrees that nothing will ever change within 10 miles from the property."? Or are you talking about people renting against actual contractual prohibitions against short term rentals and subletting?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The solution to the "Airbnb problem" of rising home costs is less regulation, not more. It's the same situation in virtually every other city: housing regulations preventing increased vertical development are the true culprit, not services like airbnb which in my opinion are a positive force for home prices due to them adding "housing liquidity" to the market. Sure, in the immediate short term an airbnb rental property buying spree could raise house prices, but once housing prices are high enough, real estate developers will realize that they can just build bigger/more buildings.

That said, I do think it is fair for airbnb rentals to be subject to the same taxes and regulations as hotels.

Edit: I don't mean that housing liquidity raises or increases home prices. I think that would be tough to say. I just mean that it's good for the housing market from a consumer standpoint: it creates a kind of flexible vehicle for dealing with short term housing needs. It's better as a society for us to have a way to rent somewhere for a week than to not have such a way to do that (and hotels only offer a very specific kind of residence, which is not to everyone's taste).

<comment><USER8> While Toronto does need to cut back on development regulations, we've been developing like crazy. A good deal of speculative money had pumped housing prices above what most people can afford in a very short period of time. AirBnB is part of that problem.

In Toronto they estimate you need to make ~130k / yr to afford a home (any home). Bear in mind that a software dev in Toronto makes ~80k / yr. Up until very recently, our lower wages matched a lower cost of living in the city, but this has been blown up by things like foreign investment, and locals taking out a line of credit on their main home to put a down payment on income generating properties. __No other sector in Toronto has seen price inflation like this, it 's only been housing. __

The problem with the deregulation thesis is that you now have to compete with a lot more people for resources. In the housing case, you now are competing with people who live in completely different economies or have substantial economic advantage over you. As an example, a Toronto home is extremely inexpensive to a bay area software dev making ~150k / yr (CAD ~200k). As a side hustle, this might seem like a good investment, and locals simply can't compete.

(I realise bay area rent is insane and this isn't likely fair without taking bay area cost of living into account, I just wanted to use a relevant example).

<comment> 52-6F-62 Where are you getting the ~80k salary figure? (edit: sincere question!)

My experience sees an average of 10 to 30k less than that within the city save a couple of outlets (at the developer level).

The rest of what you're saying is totally valid. Most of the places I've rented have been owned by people living at (put mildly) great distances from the city. This seems to be a common experience.

<comment><USER8> To be honest the number is sort of hearsay. I didn't mean 80k as an entry- level pay, but it seems to be about right in my experience (downtown core jobs).

<comment> 52-6F-62 I'd classify you as lucky, but maybe that's just from my position. I make significantly less working in the downtown core as well. I'm not a senior staff member, but I'm not entry-level either. Either way, I guess it leaves me with some hope.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem with AirBnb is that if you live anywhere in the downtown core (particularly King West in Toronto), you're likely to encounter AirBnbs being rented out to parties. And especially on a consistent basis. It's extremely annoying in condos when you have loud obnoxious guests who rent it for a weekend night not just in their units, but in the hallways.

Not to mention, that consistently in a condo that my family owns, we consistently see weekend warriors leaving empty beer bottles and garbage in the elevators and condos.

Yeah, it's not technically AirBnb's fault or even necessarily the condo board's fault. It's partially a result of living in an area with irresponsible young people combined with short-term renters who don't care. But when rules, bylaws, and laws have no real teeth, people aren't incentivized to actually deal with the problems that neighbouring tenants face.

</comment><comment><USER10> At least the proposal allows for full apartment rental any x months of the year, it's just you can't be an AirBnB landlord and snap up a bunch of units you don't live in.

Still true to the spirit of AirBnB without housing market externalities. Sounds like an ideal model for cities.

</comment><comment><USER11> How would a city officials detect when a home is being used for rental , versus having guests over

<comment><USER12> You don't have to catch them all, just enough to make some examples. If you're not doing some kind of greyball uber shenanigans, one semi-competent police officer can close the circle on _somebody_ pretty easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm from Toronto and work in the apartment rentals industry, and I think it's pretty clear that nobody actually believes that Airbnb rentals are having any sort of real impact on home prices and rents in the city. Since Airbnb listings in units people purchased just to Airbnb make up such a tiny portion of the housing stock, it's not sensible to think that this regulation is really targeted at impacting rents.

It's also worth mentioning that unlike NYC and SF where this may actually be a real issue, buying a place just to put on Airbnb in Toronto is hard to do in a profitable way. Airbnb rents in most parts of Toronto make it impossible to turn a profit worth the hassle, and most I know who have considered it decided not to based on the economics.

I suspect the political motivations are the mayor (who is generally sensible) wanting to be seen at least doing "something" to address rising rents, as well as catering to the various industry lobbies and other politicians who are generally uncomfortable with any industry operating in a largely unregulated way.

<comment><USER14> "...buying a place just to put on Airbnb in Toronto is hard to do in a profitable way..."

So you are saying it is more profitable to rent out longterm than short-term? Totally not my experience. Hosts on Airbnb easily make 3x to 4x the usual rent (Munich, Germany), even far outside the city center. But might be purely city related...

<comment><USER2> Looking purely at cash flow, it isn't profitable to buy and rent out an apartment in a lot of American cities at least.

<comment><USER13> Agree. I have investment properties in a few cities, and consider airbnb only as an option of last resort to fill vacancies. The daily rates seem high on the surface, but the turnover, vacancies, risks, management costs all eat away at the profits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I mean, they cut a deal with Japan that legalizes Airbnb rentals and allows for local regulation-- why not Canada?

<comment><USER15> Different sovereign entity.

You could just as easily say 'why Japan?'.

<comment><USER12> The issue with cutting a deal with Japan, as I see it at least, is that there are all these other countries where you now have to answer the question "Well, if you were willing to deal with _____, why not me?" As it appears that Japan has a deal that Canada, or America for that matter, can't get, now Airbnb is going to have to explain why, beyond being (so far) successful in playing different sides against each other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Alternate perspective on perma-rented AirBnB listings (that is, properties exclusively used full-time for AirBnB rentals): it is an externalization of unaccounted for costs in the degradation of the commons, and raising overall risks upon permanent residents. This is currently an unsolved problem, messily left to the permanent residents who are adversely-impacted to handle on their own. I'm not personally affected, but read about these points raised in municipal ordinance discussions about banning short-term rentals.

The stories about trashed public areas, even frequent instances of vomit, urine, and feces found in stairwells and elevators, are common, and some are even brought up in this thread. Who bears the cost (materials, time and/or labor) of clean up?

When the guests stay only 2-3 nights, and hold a raucous party on the last night that keep waking up the next door neighbor's infant, that degrades the commons. Sure they're gone by the following morning, sure the owner can ban that specific renter from ever renting the property again, but the key difference between a permanent resident and a short-term renter is the next door neighbor no longer has the assurance of reasonably-consistent behavior. The owner can even be well-intentioned, but let slip partiers through their screening enough that there will never be a season when the next door neighbor doesn't have to work with the police on a noise complaint. Always with new people they've never met before so there is no common base to work from.

Every time a short-term renter comes through, there is a nearly-imperceptible increase in the risk to the surrounding residences. Even in places where neighbors barely know each other, knowing by sight still represents a kind of commons. Even discounting the crime risk, there is the natural human instinct to put up your guard around "the other"; there is a small element of stress raised around this constant flow of short-term renters through a residential area. Years of crime data definitely prove relative anonymity raises risk profiles, but no hard metrics have been teased out of that to my knowledge, sufficiently to allow us to build predictive models around short-term renter effects.

It is easy to flippantly say the courts will handle these issues, but that is a tacit acknowledgement that the issues are a systemic pattern, not one-off freak occurrences that fall way off the edge of a Monte Carlo chart. When it is a pattern, then that is a cost externalization by the business. I'm seeing _a lot_ of this behavior by businesses of all stripes, trying to gain an edge by monetizing any behavior that cannot be readily accounted for, especially in individual cases, yet in aggregate over time yield benefits to the business with asymmetrical costs borne by bystanders. This concentrated-benefits- dispersed-costs problem has been discussed [1], but to my knowledge no definitive solution exists yet, and in this case the challenge is even greater because the costs like increased, inconsistent and chronic stress, are difficult to assess.

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

</comment><comment><USER17> Constantly amazed by how many people rock up here, like clockwork, to defend an the unlimited take on this business model: "Oh, it's just the hotel industry that hates this", "If only we just built like crazy Airbnb wouldn't be a problem". Riiiight, all we need to do is live in unregulated megacities and the magic of the market will deliver.

Here's the thing: a lot of people out there bought homes and apartments in countries that had these funny things called 'laws', where they expected that they were going to live in communities, not surrounded by rentiers running random hotels sans staff and regulation. A lot of apartment buildings in Sydney are essentially now completely fucked by this - you buy an apartment and find out you're living in party central and your neighbours are a never- ending collection of randos.

I think it's pretty clear from the extent that these companies go to obfuscate the actual addresses of the houses that they are not working with clean hands here. That aspect of the business model should be flat out illegal. Oh, you're going to operate a hotel, but you're not going to tell anyone where it is?

<comment><USER18> AirBnB provides an invaluable service. Without them, it would be completely impossible to move somewhere for a month or two to find out if you want to live there. Without AirBnB there is no short term rental market. No one outside of AirBnB will give you a lease of less than a year. I have no idea how people moved to other cities for a short period of time before AirBnB.

<comment><USER19> Before AirBnB, people would sublet their apartments - I've never personally had trouble finding one to three month accommodations.

You're correct that the extremely short term rental market (2 weeks and below) didn't really exist before, and AirBnB did streamline the entire process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hypothesis: The partiers urinating in the elevator and the HN posters who are utterly unsympathetic are one and the same.

<comment><USER21> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14541852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14541852) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get an internship as an international student in the USA? - <AUTHOR> Basically, the big companies only recruit the best top 20 Computer Science university students, but how about the rest of us? I mean, some of us are also good, but we do not get even an interview chance. Are there any good strategies I can use to get an internship? Thanks for any suggestion. (PS: I get two-year working experience in my own country) <comment><USER2>
      the big companies only recruit the best top 20 Computer Science university students

This is not true. _Source_ : I'm not a 'top 20 Computer Science student' and just signed my offer at a major company.

My advice would be to find a professor at your university who's research and attitude you admire. Talk to him/her about your goals of doing an internship in the US and don't be shy to show some enthusiasm. Show that you're willing work hard. If you build up a good relationship with the professor, he/she will likely introduce you to some contacts. Find a good balance between not being too picky on the position or just blatantly accepting anything.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Sorry for the late reply</comment></comment>


Show HN: Top domains posted on Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://www.find-me.co/domains <comment><AUTHOR> Working on an app to connect content creators with advertisers, and in my search for content creators I've been pulling a lot of reddit data. Thought this was fairly interesting so dropped it into a table. Unsurprisingly, ~75% of top posts are from image/video hosting domains.

</comment><comment><USER2> Cool idea. Have you considered applying it to a HN data set?

With several of these sites being image hosts, I'm also curious to see how this will change as Reddit rolls out its own photo/video hosting which I believe is still in beta on limited subreddits today.

</comment><comment><USER3> What about top urls posted on reddit each month or each day?

<comment><AUTHOR> This essentially shows the top urls posted each week (since it's a weekly refresh cadence pulling from the 'top monthly' in reddit, which refreshes daily).</comment></comment>


Himalayan glacier melting doubled since 2000, spy satellites show - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/19/himalayan-glacier-melting-doubled-since-2000-scientists-reveal <comment><USER2> This is really happening, right?

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

<comment><USER3> It is still controversial [1]. However, newest data on permafrost melting suggests that we will find out the validity of this hypothesis quite a bit sooner than expected.

[1] [https://doi.org/10.1146%2Fannurev- environ-102017-030154](https://doi.org/10.1146%2Fannurev- environ-102017-030154)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Syria's population was about 20 million people before their civil war, with about 5 million of those becoming external refugees. That prompted a refugee crisis.

Climate change on the subcontinent is going to make that seem like a tiny dribble.

</comment><comment><USER5> > _The accelerating losses indicate a "devastating" future for the region, > upon which a billion people depend for regular water._

And this is with just one degree increase of average global temperatures. Politicians do nothing to limit heating to two degrees or less, as per the Paris agreement. Global GHG emissions are still rising.

<comment><USER6> It would cost around about as much spent on the pointless military genocides/cash grabs in Middle East to return CO2 to pre-Industrial levels (290 ppm ± 10). CCS at scale is proven. There's no political will and omnicide/suicide is the de-facto majority policy.

<comment><USER7> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary sources ...

(for sure the money spend on the wars would have been better spend on green tech, but ... I think the amount of money to change the whole industry to preindustrial exhaust levels ... is a bit higher)

<comment><USER5> US primary energy consumption: ~30 trillion kWh/year. You can probably cut this at least in half when switching to renewables because of power plant inefficiencies.

Wind power: ~1500 Euros per kW (solar is similar)

1 kW of Wind power produces at most 8760 kWh per year, lets add some inefficiencies and say 3000 kWh per year. So you'd need 5 billion kW of wind power

So you'd need 7.5 trillion Euros. The Iraq war cost about 1.1 trillion dollars ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War)).

Given that this is just napkin math, it is surprisingly in the same ballpark.

<comment><USER7> And how is that bringing us back to "preindustrial CO2 levels"?

There are some more contributers to CO2 than plants. Also, cars? Also, energy storage?

Also non scaleable of wind?

...

So yes, it was just napkin math. Not helpful.

<comment><USER5> Primary energy consumption includes all forms of energy. Electricity, but also fuel, heating, etc. If you make it fully renewable the country becomes pretty much carbon neutral, save for things like metallurgical coal.

Energy storage raises cost a bit, but not too much, depending on the quality of the electric grid. You don't very much storage if your grid is good because it's always windy somewhere. Excess energy can be converted to Methane via power-to-gas and stored in the existing strategic gas storage facilities.

Better informed people than me wrote long papers about this, and also looked into scalability issues. It's a bit hard to reproduce in HN comments.

<comment><USER7> Trust me, I am informed on that topic.

And I am all for a green Energy base. And there are countless other options than just methan or hydrogen for storing energy around or in develepoment.

But it is still hard and expensive. Did you factor in redesigning of the energy grid? Renewables need much more flex .. the current system is designed for huge plants, giving constant energy, not many small ones fluctating. Did you factor in, replacing all gasoline engine in cars? Did you factor in designing and replacing airplane engines? (And with what, running then on hydrogen? maybe. Would be awesome, but the tech does not exist yet)

And even if we achieve 100 renewable ... there are still lots of industrial processes that release CO2, like concrete production, that reaching preindustrial CO2 levels is a very, very hard and therefore expensive challenge. So maybe be careful with your claims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Lot of areas in north eastern parts of India does not have any big infrastructure and dams for water storage because they heavily relied on water coming from Himalayan glaciers. In future if Indian government does not do big projects to develop water storage it will be a huge problem to sustain big population.

<comment><USER8> I also find it super interesting on how US government would monitor natural resources of other countries for decades without anyone knowing about it

<comment><USER4> They weren't actively doing so. Scientists just used the declassified photos as data for a modern analysis.

> The scientists combined declassified US spy satellite images from the > mid-1970s with modern satellite data to create the first detailed, four- > decade record of ice along the 2,000km (1,200-mile) mountain chain.

> The spy satellite photographs used in the research had lain unused in > archives for some years. But a computer tool developed by Maurer and > colleagues enabled these 1970s photos to be turned into 3D maps.

You can be damned sure they monitor some natural resources, like oil. Water's probably on the list now, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> People living on the correct side of mountains are probably situated pretty well compared to people in shallower regions where rainfall will become rarer. Parts of Africa currently have some of the worst droughts ever. These are the regions the we will probably loose first.

A while ago I was certain that we could need more hydroelectric power stations... well, if the rainfall can replace melt water...

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global- snow/201902](https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global-snow/201902)

NOAA indicates that the global ice levels are increasing, and ice is growing in areas that previously did not host such a large amount of ice before, ie, the ice is moving to new locations as the climate changes.

This is mostly related to the increase in variability of NAM and SAM (as in, the increasing change of the jet streams from their usual positions) due to decreased solar heating of the Earth.

[https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/solar-activity-forecast- fo...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/solar-activity-forecast-for-next- decade-favorable-for-exploration)

NASA has predicted that the solar cycle starting this year, or the next cycle, is highly likely starting another grand minimum and will last for at least the next few cycles; this is the lowest activity in 200 years (or since the previous grand minimum).

The previous grand minimum was the Dalton minimum, and lasted from 1790 to 1820, and lasted 30 years, and was considered mild based on what we know of previous grand minimums. During the Dalton minimum, the "Little Ice Age" occurred, which lead to massive crop losses in Europe and North America, including unusually long and wet springs that delayed the planting season (just like this year).

So, I'm going to consider this Guardian article at least partially debunked. Although this is a disaster for the Himalayan region, NOAA and NASA's interpretation of the data does not favor the rather opinionated and biased language in the article.

<comment><USER11> I looked at your NOAA link. I could be mistaken, but I think it said the _snow cover_ extent increased.

Ie was there snow on the ground in a given area. Snow that melts come spring.

This isn't ice. Is there something in your link that suggests _ice_ is growing? The sea ice portion showed it to be shrinking.

You're claiming new glaciers are forming somewhere, basically.

Your timeline of the Maunder minimum is completely wrong. This doesn't lend confidence to your interpretation of the NASA report: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, the NASA article says, "it will be the weakest of the last 200 years." It does not say, "it will last 200 years". Those missing words between "will" and "last" are rather crucial.</comment></comment></comment>


Unbiased Randomization with the Fisher-Yates Shuffle - <AUTHOR> http://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/08/11/fisher-yates-shuffle-randomization-algorithm/ <comment><USER3> Fisher-Yates is only unbiased in the event of a "true" RNG as opposed to a PRNG with a less than absurd seed length.

In practice, say you're shuffling a 52-card deck - that's 52! orderings. Even if you have a 128-bit random seed, that's still nowhere near enough. You need at least a log2(52!) = 226 bit seed to cover all orderings, even assuming every seed produces a unique sequence of numbers, by the pigeonhole principle.

And it's even worse than that. Say you have a 226 bit seed. Well, you _still_ won't have a uniform distribution. Why? Because 52! does not evenly divide 2^226. Even assuming a "perfect" PRNG (again: where every seed produces a unique sequence of numbers), you'll end up hitting some deck orderings less than others. In this case, it's a difference between some deck orderings being hit once and others being hit twice - which can make a big difference! You can mitigate this by either discarding and reinitializing your PRNG if the initial seed is >= 52!, or just choosing a bit length long enough that the effect becomes minimal.

It's like trying to pick a number between 0 and 45 with a 100 sided die - <USER2> you just take the number rolled mod 45, you'll end up with 0 through 9 picked more often than they should be. Instead, you have to roll until you get a number between 0 and 89, inclusive, then take mod 45.

(Oh, and as for the response of "just pick a larger seed", say you have a card game played with 4 decks (for example Shanghai rum with a bunch of players). Then you need a seed length of >=1307 bits. I cannot think of any PRNGs with a seed that large.)

<comment><USER4> Python's Mersenne Twister was first seeded with 32 bytes, changed to 2500 bytes here:

[http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/7b5265752942](http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/7b5265752942)

<comment><USER3> /dev/urandom on Linux only has an internal state of 1024 bits [1]

As Python's Mersenne Twister is seeded with urandom...

[1] [https://pthree.org/2014/07/21/the-linux-random-number- genera...](https://pthree.org/2014/07/21/the-linux-random-number-generator/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are using Python, you should use the standard 'random.shuffle' which does use the Fisher-Yates algorithm.

<comment><USER6> There's value in knowing how it's implemented.

<comment><USER7> Further, there is value in knowing what makes the incorrect ways incorrect. :)

Also, even in the article it noted to use a library if your language allows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> On second read, I realized that OP didn't even prove Fisher-Yates. I blogged about this several weeks back, and here is an excerpt from it. Some of you might find it useful.

"This is easy to verify for N = 2: You are just flipping a coin to decide if you swap 1 with 2. For N > 2, you just need to show that each of 1 through N has an equal chance of getting the k-th slot for 1 through N. In the first step, every number has a 1/N probability of getting into the first slot. For all other slots: the number has (1-1/N) chance of getting/staying there, then by induction, all slots are equally likely, hence (1-1/N)*1/(N-1) = 1/N. This completes the proof."

</comment><comment><USER9> List::Util [1], part of Perl 5 standard library, offers shuffle function which implements Fisher-Yates [2].

[1]: [https://metacpan.org/pod/List::Util#values-shuffle- values](https://metacpan.org/pod/List::Util#values-shuffle-values) [2]: [http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1869](http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1869)</comment>


Ask HN: I miss whiteboarding with my team during remote work, any solutions? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://miro.com/](https://miro.com/) or even better: [https://excalidraw.com/](https://excalidraw.com/)

</comment><comment><USER3> We are happy with using jamboard.

[https://jamboard.google.com/](https://jamboard.google.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> my colleagues are quite keen on Mural: [https://www.mural.co/](https://www.mural.co/)

also, BigBlueButton has a Whiteboard as part of its package: [https://bigbluebutton.org/](https://bigbluebutton.org/)</comment>


RFC 1178 – Choosing a name for your computer (1990) - <AUTHOR> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178 <comment><USER3> This reminds me of the Pets vs Cattle analogy [https://www.engineyard.com/blog/pets-vs- cattle](https://www.engineyard.com/blog/pets-vs-cattle)

With a pet, you obsess over the name and meaning of the name. With cattle, as long as names don't collide or cause problems, you couldn't care less about the name.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Depends how you mean that; I would rather a machine be named prod-app-web-7 than af74b9c. At least mark the cattle by breed!

<comment><USER4> That goes against the paradigm. I prefer that my hostnames are ambiguous, that way I'm forced to write tools to automate administrative tasks.

If I know the hostname I or my team will be tempted to make one-off changes, breaking the whole "cattle" idea.

<comment><USER5> It is still helpful to have decent names even if you're treating your machines like "cattle" instead of like "pets".

Inevitably, some bug will occur, and in my experience, it usually happens to occur on a machine (rather than all of them at once; I'm not saying this machine is _special_ — the bug _could_ have happened on any of them, and likely exists on all of them because they're all running the same code, but this particular machine ended up being the lucky one to serve that slightly unusual request).

Getting in and debugging the state of that machine, pulling logs, directing a coworker to look at CPU detail "frobnozz", etc. is all easier if I can easily speak or type out the machine's name. "3.dev.microservice" is much easier to type/speak than say, an IP address, an EC2 instance ID, etc.

(I _fully_ agree on not making one-off changes, and not treating machines as pets. But I think that even after that, decent naming has a place.)

And even with cattle, the other way, I still think it's useful for the name to provide _some_ information. I.e., 3.prod.microservice being the third or fourth instance of the production setup of "microservice" is better than say, some random entry from the periodic table of elements.

<comment><USER6> If you have to say the name of an instance you already lose.

<comment><USER7> If you do anything to the point of dogma, you've lost. Being a good sysadmin is all about being pragmatic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I stopped reading halfway through the shop example. When you move the machine out of the shop and give it a completely new role, rename it. I call my webserver webserver.

I never get why there's such a huge gap between admins and programmers on this. Programmers have sane, intelligent naming conventions beaten into them, and yet when I ask a sysadmin what server the Wiki is running on, half the time the answer is something like "legolas". That name would never make it through my code review.

<comment><USER9> > I call my webserver webserver.

Agreed. Nothing confuses me more than finding a network with a bunch of machines named for roles that they don't fulfill.

Even more infuriating is when you have a network like that, but the new machines have names that refer to the old ones -- so for example, the webserver may be "webserver," but the new replacement may be "real-webserver" and then the replacement of that may be "real-webserver-replacement."

<comment><USER8> Imho, there's nothing wrong with throwing a number on the end to denote our 3rd webserver. And obviously, the name is only its primary function. If a sever wears 2 hats, maybe the secondary function isn't in the name. That's still more infromative than "the git repo is on huitzilipotchtli".

<comment><USER10> I'm on laptop06, desktop06, phone06, printer02, htpc02 and nas01 at the moment, incrementing the suffix when I replace a machine or add a new one.

I tack on "-linux", "-windows", "-android" and so on when appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My dad used to name computers after characters from Greek mythology. I took the idea and name my computers and devices after Norse mythology.

You get some cool names, but there is a fairly critical downside in that a lot of people struggle with spelling the names. Most people probably can't spell Odysseus correctly on the first attempt, and it's even harder to spell Jormungandr correctly.

I think that cutesy names like this are fine for personal use, but for commercial use you're better of using a more standardised schema for naming.

Another place where companies seem to love cutesy names is meeting rooms. Maybe it's because management wants to sound interesting, or maybe they just like painting bike sheds, but often they like to give non-standard names to meeting rooms, like names of native birds or something else that doesn't describe the room at all. It just makes it hard to remember which room is which. How am I meant to know which room is the Tui room, and which is the Moa room?

Either name them by location (e.g. Second Floor, NW), or by distinguishing feature, at one job we had a meeting room with no windows, so we called it the bunker.

<comment><USER12> I actually do this for my personal servers (I'm not your Dad btw).

Two decades ago when I only had a handful of servers it seemed a great idea to name them after Greek Gods (on the Zeus family line). I actually stole the concept from the DEC VAXcluster I was working with at the time. Fast forward to present day and everything being virtualised, it's trivial to boot up a new server from a template, and naming each new one has become a massive pain. As I apply a no-reuse rule, I find myself delving deeper and deeper into Greek mythology. I also try to match the name with the purpose, so the God of Messaging (Hermes) is my Mail Server, Zeus is the Hyper-V host for all his offspring etc.

It all made sense at conception, but now I've got ~40 servers doing various things, and half the time I can't remember which is which. :(

However...

In a professional environment[1] I have lost SO many hours in pointless 'naming convention' arguments. Everyone has a different view as to how it should be done. My view is to pick the defining characteristics of the servers; Is location important? Are they single role servers? Are they lab or production? Do they belong to specific part of the business?

For example: 'LDNTCADSP001' breaks down into {location}{datacentre}{role}{lab/prod}{unit-number}

* Don't use wasted character like dashes as depending on your systems you've only got X characters to play with.

* Sysadmins should always be able to identify at a glance what the server does, and where it is _without_ having to fire up a CMDB.

\--

[1] I've held senior roles in several major global Banks, where my teams managed several hundred servers on average. So this is a real-world viewpoint.

<comment><USER13> LDNTCADSP001 - I hate names like this.

It's untypable on a command line since you have to shoot all over the keyboard, and it probably won't auto-complete until you get to the last number.

There's other subtle problems to: its not sparse enough for the same reason. You're putting a lot of stock in an operator always seeing the right sequence of numbers, especially if your fleet grows and you now have a LDNTCADSP101 and LDNTCADSP110 for example.

They're also unpronounceable - you can't communicate them to other people verbally quickly or reliably.

The best thing we've currently done at my work is assign single-use mnemonic names to all the servers (and, I'm pushing for it to be everything) - so we have "subsidy", "until", "wedding", "opulent" as server names. Easy to remember when you're debugging, easy to say, and a sparse namespace - you're exceedingly unlikely to mistake one for the other, and they'll autocomplete easily. It plays right into the human associative memory too.

<comment><USER14> >They're also unpronounceable - you can't communicate them to other people verbally quickly or reliably.

This is my recent life as I started a (hopefully temporary) phone support role and the place I work has desktops with names like that but also, inexplicably, using all the hard letters in to hear well over the phone.

Ex: HPDHHPDEDPD-TS

Thanks goodness the folks I'm talking to can use a semblance of the phonetic alphabet.

<comment><USER12> It's 'horses for courses' \- what works for one organisation might not work for another. Scale is also an issue; you can't use clever word based names when you have 50,000 desktops on the estate.

Again, in my view (based on several years as a support monkey at the beginning of my career), desktops/laptops should be named based on their asset tags, LT891334 or DT993115 etc. That way, when you ask the user 'what's the machine name' and they have no idea, you can say 'read me the number that's on that big white sticker on the lid'.

<comment><USER14> >Again, in my view (based on several years as a support monkey at the beginning of my career), desktops/laptops should be named based on their asset tags, LT891334 or DT993115 etc. That way, when you ask the user 'what's the machine name' and they have no idea, you can say 'read me the number that's on that big white sticker on the lid'.

I wasn't disagreeing with you at all and I really like your solution. I was trying to provide an example of desktops I deal with now that are sometimes impossible to distinguish on the phone without going full NATO alphabet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used to do sysadmin consulting, and one of our clients had a new director of IT come in. One of his first orders of business was to have us rename all the hosts (around 100 of them) from role-based names (db01, web01, storage01) to city names.

So when an alert came in at 3am that "mulhouse" is down, you had to know that Mulhouse is a French city _AND_ France denotes database machines. And the city names were often fairly obscure, of the 100 names, I had only heard of a handful of them. "Is that name Icelandic or Finnish?"

That director of IT didn't last long.

</comment><comment><USER16> When I worked at Yahoo, all personal machines were given a simple two- dictionary-word name. e.g. My desktop was sawbeauty. I always thought this was pretty elegant. All the names were pretty short. There was minimal ambiguity. And it scaled really well.

<comment><USER17> An aside re: Yahoo -- Somewhere I have my website logs from the 1995-96 timeframe. I'll have to try to dig 'em up. I remember the day the site got listed on Yahoo, however. I got hits from machines with names like "scabies.yahoo.com", "ratbastard.yahoo.com", and "srinija.yahoo.com". There were some others, but I can't remember them (scurvy, maybe?). (I remember reading the Wired article about Yahoo in '96, seeing the name "Srinija Srinivasan", and figuring out what that last hostname meant.)

<comment><USER16> That's well before my time at Yahoo. By the time I joined, their IT group preinstalled and named every device with a two-word nonoffensive moniker. By then they weren't giving out 3rd level domains anymore either. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This doesn't exactly abide by the RFC but I name all my computers after dead rockstars e.g. "david-bowie", "george-harrison", "jimi-hendrix", "elvis- presley" It's become a tradition of mine :) The lab computers at Rutgers use design patterns, unix commands, and programming languages for the names: [https://report.cs.rutgers.edu/nagiosnotes/iLab- machines.html](https://report.cs.rutgers.edu/nagiosnotes/iLab-machines.html)

<comment><USER19> I use dead Austrian economists: "mises", "menger", "hayek", "lachmann", "kirzner".

<comment><USER20> ... but what if supply can't keep up with demand??

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A guy I worked with would name the machines based on the atomic number of the last part of the IP address, i.e. 192.168.1.2 would be helium.

Eventually it becomes really annoying, don't do this.

<comment><USER22> Why is it annoying? Isn't it easy to tell the IP address?

<comment><USER23> Only if you know the periodic table blind, but this could be a good approach to actually learn it. I'm just not that sure many people want to learn chemistry while administering the IT.

<comment><USER22> Hummmm, in Asian we can't graduate high school without memorizing the whole damn thing.

<comment><USER24> What a useful skill...

<comment><USER25> My High school forced 2 dead languages on me (Latin, Greek) for 2 years.

Think I'd rather have the periodic table.

<comment><USER24> I suspect people living in Athens may be rather upset by the assertion they don't speak Greek!

(Yes, I assume you meant ancient greek)

High School teaches tons of crap. I spent 5 years doing French, and while I remember "J'ai joue le foot" (which was a lie), that's about it, I could pick up more French in 3 months worth of weekly evening classes.

Even the French I know doesn't help - I went to a kiosk at Gare du Nord, having just got off the train from Brussels. "Je Voudrai une cafe sil-vou- plait". "Three-fifty" comes the response. Bloody French.

High School languages in the UK (and other English speaking contries) would be far better giving a smörgåsbord of the basics of French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, and Portugese. Being able to say "Hello, good to meet you", "Thank you", "Excuse me, where are the toilets", "Could I have the bill please", understand a few phrases (tickets please etc), and have a fighting chance at reading and ordering from a menu, etc, in most countries of the world would be very beneficial. 4 years, 2 languages per year. Perhaps more important than the language specifics are the customs, even things like composting train tickets,

(Of course with translate apps, map apps, etc the menu/map problem is going away, but the customs and some language overview would go a long way - <USER2> train tickets neet composting, when tipping is required (USA), not required (most countries), and actually an insult (many far east places). Being able to recognize which toilet to go in - W or F - is helpful).

Wider cultural education would be a massive benefit to Americans in general, who on the whole don't get the chance to travel that say Brits do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm a fan of the names of the "First Generation" computers like ENIAC, EDVAC, ILLIAC, etc. My Raspberry Pi honors Pi inventor Eben Upton and is named EBENAC, the Economical British Educational Networked ARM Computer.

<comment><USER27> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANIAC_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANIAC_I)

 _Metropolis chose the name MANIAC in the hope of stopping the rash of silly acronyms for machine names,[2] although von Neumann may have suggested the name to him._

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.

One thing to keep in mind here is that naming should be done with a lifetime matching the thing being named. If a given machine might have many roles in its lifetime, asset names ought be separate from role names. So calling a _machine_ db2 might not be a good idea unless you have 100% confidence it will only ever be a database machine.

So a62848 could be asset 62848, which then can have all kinds of exciting metadata and services pointing to it that may change over the asset's lifetime without needing to update the host name.

Baking metadata into a name is usually going to lead to sadness when later attempting to rename.

(While I'm the product manager for Google's datacenter software team I'm not speaking for Google here.)

<comment><USER29> Great points!

One of the nice side effects of using the cloud is production systems don't normally change name anymore.

I can name a machine db2, and if I don't need it anymore, it's quick to destroy it, and create a new machine of the same size named appserver15.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's kind of sad this task has mostly gone away for large datacenters, where choosing names for the thousands of servers is impractical. h223-16-32a just doesn't have same cachet as the carefully selected names.

<comment><USER26> NASA has a rigid host naming scheme that is based on the center, the org code, and the property tag number. Fortunately, we can use aliases, or I would go mad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is my favorite naming scheme, although I usually skip the codenames and assign functional names to everything:

[https://www.mnxsolutions.com/devops/a-proper-server- naming-s...](https://www.mnxsolutions.com/devops/a-proper-server-naming- scheme.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting - the author, Don Libes, is also known for Expect:

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

</comment><comment><USER33> With multiple computers on the same network, it's fun (if not productive) to come up with names within a theme (e.g. characters from a novel, place names from some country etc.)

<comment><USER34> I use elements from the periodic table. The ones that sound cool!

Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Neon, Tungsten, Helium, Sodium, etc

Wifi names are after noble gases.

PC hardware are all stable metals.

iPhone/iPad accessories are all non-metals.

and finally, random IOT devices are radioactive elements.

<comment><USER35> Me too on the periodic table names, but with a bit of creativity related to the machine too:

\- Helium - my Surface 3, because it's light

\- Lead - my heavy Linux laptop

\- Lithium - the Mac Mini I bought to keep from going crazy using a decade old Macbook Pro for iOS development

\- Caesium - my Dell "workstation" Windows laptop, because I bought it to save time (compared to running Windows + Visual Studio in a VM)

\- Uranium and Thorium - the beefy Xeon workstations that run a bunch of VMs and things - named because they put out so much heat that they might be radioactive

<comment><USER36> It's quite funny that we share the host names Helium and Caesium. My Linux machines are radioactive because I tinker with them a lot and am bound to reinstall every few months.

<comment><USER35> Heh, yeah, there's that too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> See RFC 2100 for additional commentary on naming host:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2100](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2100)

</comment><comment><USER38> One shop I worked at briefly went with "female serial killers" for their naming convention. So you can just imagine the type that worked there.

</comment><comment><USER39> Quote from RFC: "Just because a person is named "Don" doesn't mean he is the ruler of the world (despite what the "Choosing a Name for your Baby" books say)."

If only the RFC knew what we know now.

</comment><comment><USER40> I like following a naming theme. I used to be a ballet dancer so I use ballet steps for my machine names: Enterlace, Revoltade, ... They are all single words that are super uncommon outside of the ballet world

<comment><USER41> Good luck getting someone who is unfamiliar with those to spell it out from sound alone. Though with the prevalence of text communication (not seen at the time) this is less of a problem than when this was written.

<comment><USER42> I ended up with a scheme by accident that is hard both to spell and speak for most people. I don't have many problems with names like mictlantecuhtli, xolotl, or macuilxochitl (well, except for the fact that I can't pronounce consonant final tl and end up with /təl/ instead), but I totally see why others have problems with it.

On the plus side, if I ever get one of those "you have a virus" scam calls, I can probably string the caller out for a while trying to get them to spell out the name of the computer that supposedly has the virus...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> My family's machines at home are all named after fictional robots, names don't get recycled when the boxes die which makes it a fun challenge when a new one arrives. So far we've had:

johnnyfive marvin katya gerty kryten robbie

Doing our best to avoid dipping into Star Wars laziness. (And HAL is verboten too.)

<comment><USER44> I've been using "Words that start with Q" since High School and surprisingly haven't recycled a name yet for a machine, and I've gone through nearly a dozen or so.

quiddity quilt quasar quantum quack quiz...

It's funny how a silly naming rule like that winds up sticking for a couple decades.

<comment><USER43> Oh that's good. I hope you ban yourself from using dictionaries to help.

Our main constraint is that it has to be a robot that my wife, a devout sci-fi sceptic, has heard of. Probably it would make more sense for her machines to be named after obscure British Jacobeans and mine to be robots but since I've paid for all of them, I get to choose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> We went with Dakota (not Lakota) names for numbers. Admittedly we might have skipped some of the longer names. Recently we added some named after color. Every department was supposed to find a way to include the language somewhere. [edit: servers only, PCs get names based on room / building]

</comment><comment><USER46> I registered island.nu when the TLD launched. .nu was the first TLD that you could register under that wasn't a com/net/org or my own country's TLD.

All of my machines are named after islands:

Mauritius Sable Padre Nauru Jarvis etc.

</comment><comment><USER47> Related: If you want to name things this Wiki has different proposals: [http://namingschemes.com/](http://namingschemes.com/)

</comment><comment><USER48> yeah, when I proposed we change to more sensible names for our servers, our admin asked for examples whereupon I answered "i.e. we could name them after planets"

his face lights up and says "yeah! like planet01, planet02, planet03.."

</comment><comment><USER49> Some fun CMU computer cluster name themes from the past:

      * Prisons (statesville, graterford, etc.): Macs
      * Astronauts (resnik, white, aldrin): DECstations
      * Disasters (flood, famine, humanity?): More aged DECstations
      * Climates (tundra, steppe, island): SPARCstation 5s
      * Characters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
      * Wood (elm, pine, smoke): Printers

<comment><USER43> I had a personal SPARCstation 5 at university. I named it 'sparky'. I probably could have done better.

<comment><USER50> Long ago I had an IPX. It was called ... ipx.$domain. Then I got another one. And it was called ... ipy.$domain.

You'll never guess what the third one was called...

<comment><USER49> Bit nasty to name the machine after an obsolete layer 3 protocol, innit?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> personally, I _really_ hate the "name the machine something cute / funny / in joke". In a previous company, everything was names after Italian towns, and while the IT staff knew what "rome" was, the rest of use had issues decyphering what the hell was happening.

This was applied to both VM hosts and VMs, so you had to remember that "livigno" ran VMs x,y,z, and was actually in the backup DC.

A later company had a better scheme:

Hosts: <service>-<role><number>-<data center>-r<rack ID>-u<rack U location>

e.g.: nova-compute0042-uswest-rF20-u23L

VMs: <service>-<role><number>-<region>-az<availability zone>

e.g. designate-mdns009-uswest-az3

This really does help debuging issues at a glance (e.g. you can see that all VMs in uswest az1 are down at a glance), or directing people to a failed node (replace disk 5 in nova-compute0042-uswest-rF20-u23L is very clear what machine needs maintenance - in the us west DC go to rack f20, and the left hand blade in u23 needs disk 5 swapped).

<comment><USER13> The need to overload hostnames like that to me just says you haven't got your inventory system in order.

For the price of actually using my asset DB, my alerts can be sliced and diced exactly by the datacentre/rack/whatever because I'm properly tagging everything.

Whereas for all the times I've heard "oh we won't move servers and if we do we'll re-image them..." just last month (and still ongoing) people have been dragging racks between floors, plugging them in and that's it - so fixed names like that get stuck.

<comment><USER51> Sure - but from the easy of human pattern matching looking a list of hostnames in a monitoring system without needing to click to a different page I think it is worth it.

If you are in the habit of moving racks, then I would agree keeping it only in an inventory system makes sense, but that also requires the asset system to be updated when a rack moves - at which point changing a hostname (which can be autogenerated by dhcp based on that system) an easy step to add.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Somewhat dorky things like this are pretty common in computing and I love it!

</comment><comment><USER17> There was an ISP / hosting provider in Dayton, OH, named "donet.com". For years and years their DNS was available for public zone transfers and they had wonderful computer names like powdered, glazed, chocolate, and my favorite, dayold. (Looks like some of those names are still around, too, even after they "rebranded"...)

</comment><comment><USER53> I use space missions. Soyuz--MS-02 for the one I'm currently using.

</comment><comment><USER54> The worst choice we've done in terms of host name was for our server at my uni's robotics lab. The lab itself has a strong Tintin theme, and the various computers continue this tradition, with the (french) names Tournesol, Milou, and... Dupont for a random lab computer, while the production server got Dupond (the english equivalents are Thomson and Thompson). While funny, this isn't extremely practical, especially the first few months, while getting accustomed to it.

Nowadays, we prefer to name them after something more meaningful, like Archibald [Captain Haddock's first name, fitting for an Arch machine], Winry, or Delphine (Windows and Debian, respectively). This makes easy to identify the machine and its operating system, which I like including in the host name.

Overall, I find that having a clear theme helps (to know we are talking about a computer's name), and clear rules for the naming scheme also help, both for picking the name, and guessing its function/characteristics from the name.

I would definitely go with some DNS-based convention like the one @zrm mentioned when having to manage bigger clusters or geographically disparate pieces of equipment, though.

I would also disagree with something in this RFC: I don't mind tying a hostname to the host function, as I usually reimage/reinstall the operating system when changing it, making it easy to rename it. This also helps with keeping everything modular enough that it can be quickly installed on a new machine, and prevents "ossification" of the various configuration files. This includes giving a replacement computer the same name as the one being replaced.

Finally, when managing a truly dynamic cluster (computers that boot a PXE image with little to no local storage, and take their jobs from a control server), I don't even bother naming them, and will choose something semi- random like the MAC address (even a link-local/DHCP address, or the md5 of one of these). As those are temporary identifiers, they are managed dynamically, and do not need to be remembered.

</comment><comment><USER55> In the past I have used stringed instruments: "lute", "banjo", "dobro", etc. Recently it seems I just have a single Linux box at each location, which server is named "box".

</comment><comment><USER56> My favorite theme was Japanese terms from the game Go (wei-qi). Joseki, fuseki, sente. It was educational as well as distinctive. The spellings are also easier than my other theme of Polish delicacies.

</comment><comment><USER57> I've been running through names of Greek and Roma deities for my machines, which work super well. They can even be themed (all mobile / wireless clients are named after dieties of death).

<comment><USER58> Do you mean Roman or Roma? I know nothing of Roma folklore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> For the FarmShare cluster, systems in version 1 of the cluster were named corn/barley/rye plus some number, for login/compute/GPU systems.

The current version of the cluster is named rice/wheat/oat plus a number. It lets us combine some originality in with automatic naming.

We're already thinking about what to do for the next generation. And when we move all of the administrative systems (like the job schedulers) into VMs, we're thinking of calling the underlying physical hardware quadrotriticale.

</comment><comment><USER60> On the subject of themes, I've always wanted to name a collection of computers with genericized trademarks: like bikini, popsicle, kleenex, or my favorite, thermos!

</comment><comment><USER61> >> For example, a distributed database had been built on top of several computers

This is 1990, amazing awareness of what computers are capable of already.

</comment><comment><USER62> Name things that are the least likely to be misleading.

i.e. the thing least likely to change. Which is almost always the physical location. eg. usa-sf-23

</comment><comment><USER63> One exception where it's actually pretty useful to have a location-specific name: printers (or any other resource where people really need to know the physical location of the device, like DVD burners, 3D printers, or whatever). It's nice to know what room to go to to find your printout. :-)

Of course then you do have to make sure to rename it if it gets moved.

</comment><comment><USER64> There are enough Pokemon to name my servers. ;)

</comment><comment><USER65> I don't think this is the original post that I remember from years ago, but the StarCraft convention has always intrigued me: [https://slifty.com/2011/03/starcraft- network/](https://slifty.com/2011/03/starcraft-network/)

</comment><comment><USER66> I use mythological gods when naming my devices. For example: loki, odin, thor, and zeus. I like short and easy to remember names.

What naming conventions do people use for storage devices? I recently created a zfs pool and ended up reusing the computer name, but it becomes a bit awkward to say you're opening foo on foo.

</comment><comment><USER67> I have been using starship names from Star Trek since basically forever.

enterprise, voyager, relativity, defiant etc

</comment><comment><USER68> Have worked on a cluster where an explicit prohibition in these guidelines was violated ! The admin decided to name machines after quarks, hence "up", "down", "charm" etc. Can't say it caused any particular issues.

</comment><comment><USER69> I've used norse mythology (using danish versions of names) in the past. The DNS servers were "odin" and "mimer". Webservers were "valhalla" and "udgaard", the DHCP server was "Yggdrasil". Etc.

</comment><comment><USER70> I encountered an otherwise ordinary pizza place yesterday that had all its pizzas renamed after stellar objects (stars, star signs, galaxies).

Quite amusing except my internal dictionary of well-known pizza names had to be replaced by a linear lookup.

</comment><comment><USER71> I used to name my pets after my pets. Thing is, the boxes outlived the animals.

At that point the names become memorials and it's nice to ssh into them. The only glitch so far is it's difficult to decommission the roles.

</comment><comment><USER72> For as long as I can remember, I've used ship names from Battlestar Galactica, which are mostly just names from Greek mythology. Galactica, Cerberus, Triton. Pegasus, Valkyrie, Celestus, Prometheus, etc.

</comment><comment><USER73> > _For example, amorphous names such as rivers, mythological places and other > impossibilities are very suitable. ( "earth" is not yet a domain name.)_

This'll probably be changing soon...

</comment><comment><USER74> The first time I rented a server I was looking around my room to think of a cool hostname and saw "yavapai" on my backpack. Since then I've just been using names of Native American tribes.

</comment><comment><USER45> Also, don't use automatically generated names based on a person's name without a review. Sharon Hiterman[1] will not be amused.

1) not a real person, but a real family name paired with a common first name

<comment><USER75> We did this at a former employer and had a librarian with the username "scatt".

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Neat. I use the names of moons, like Europa, Io, Callisto, etc.

<comment><USER63> If you needed to name a _whole bunch_ of machines, you could use the list of named minor planets ("asteroids"):

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

1,479 just in the letter A.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> I've always named mine after Red vs Blue characters.

Laptop=sheila. Desktop=tex. Server=lopez. Names are recycled when the machine is replaced.

</comment><comment><USER78> > Random strings are inappropriate for the same reason that they are so useful > for passwords. They are hard to remember.

"useful" :)

</comment><comment><USER79> I use uncommon female names that are at least six characters in length.

Cirocco - from John Varley's Gaean trilogy

Lorelei - from the Styx song

</comment><comment><USER80> Interesting how much of this doesn't apply in the configuration based cloud world, and how much of it does :)

</comment><comment><USER22> The Japanese lab I was at name all the machines by Pokemon names. we get to pick which Pokemon we want.

</comment><comment><USER81> The second hard problem, naming things

</comment><comment><USER82> Fwiw I don't think this advice applies well to virtual machines created by things like docker.

</comment><comment><USER83> When I was at Google I named my machine Myriad. No one seemed to appreciate the subtlety. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER84> I use rivers of hell from Greek mythology. Cocytus, Acheron, Lethe, Phlegathon, Styx.

<comment><USER85> Unsurprisingly, I've done this in the past.

<comment><USER84> Username checks out

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> I was really looking to see if it was April 1st thing back at the time. The RFC was so funny it reminded me of standard random number = 4 [1].

[1]: [https://www.xkcd.com/221/](https://www.xkcd.com/221/)</comment>


SkyWater-PDF Plans First 130 Nm Wafer in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2020/06/30/your-own-open-source-asic-skywater-pdf-plans-first-130-nm-wafer-in-2020/ <comment><USER2> There's an LLVM analog called LLHD (LLHD.io) that's coming in-line, right now. It's be neat if these two projects could kiss.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am currently a PhD student and have been wanting to get into IC design so this seems immensely exciting. I do power electronics, so hopefully they post info on the analog parts of the PDK soon.

An open source DC/DC converter that can be integrated into other projects seems like it would be an interesting candidate for one of the first fab runs.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is exciting news. How about new replacement custom chips for example the custom chips used in Amigas? New 8086s? New 68k processors?

<comment><USER5> At 130nm, you could fit at least a couple of 68k's worth of logic in a square millimetre of silicon. The limitation is you can't fit that many IO pin connections on a chip so small (pad limited). You might as well chuck in the rest of the Amiga while you are there!</comment></comment>