Australian researchers set record for carbon dioxide capture - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-06-australian-carbon-dioxide-capture.html <comment><USER2> There was an article a while ago asking why stock prices have not priced in climate change, and I think this is why. As much as we hate to admit it, the solution to climate change will be as industrial as the industries that caused it.

I'm planting trees whenever I can, but on a planetary scale I think this is going to be fixed only by manufacturing zero emission transport, and negative emission machines, all of which will increase stock prices of industrial companies with factories.

Fusion will be the ultimate solution to all problems if it happens – we'll have enough effectively free energy to scrub the atmosphere to our exact specifications with this or any other halfway efficient method, and enough cheap energy to flood all land including deserts with desalinated water.

We engineered our way into this problem, I don't think we can kumbayah our way out of it.

<comment> dan-robertson You don't necessarily need fusion or nuclear power to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. At least theoretically, you get more energy from burning hydrocarbons than is necessary to capture the released CO2 from the atmosphere. So you can (in theory) burn hydrocarbons while capturing the emissions and still producing energy.

<comment><USER3> > _So you can (in theory) burn hydrocarbons while capturing the emissions and > still producing energy._

I like this theory, any example of trying it in practice?

<comment><USER4> Theres working examples, however they use the captured CO2 to get more oil out of nearly exhausted oil wells, so its a bit of a non-solution.

We will probably need to capture carbon but it'll be cheaper to use renewables or nuclear to provide the energy than burn oil.

Even if you use fossil fuels as an input (say because youre capturing methane that would otherwise escape i to the atmosphere), you can do stuff like break them down into grapgite and hydrogen so you getha clean burning fuel and useful material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's the actual paper which has a lot more information including possibilities for improving the process. [https://www.cell.com/cell-reports- physical-science/fulltext/...](https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-physical- science/fulltext/S2666-3864\(20\)30023-0#secsectitle0065)

</comment><comment><USER6> Wait a sec.

Coal produces about 24 MJ/kg and this only takes 1.29 MJ/kg of CO2, or 4.73/kg of carbon. Even if coal were pure carbon this means we could burn coal to capture ~5x as much carbon as it generates. That's amazing!

I'm assuming there are significant energy costs in scaling production of these materials up to any scale at which it could have an environmental impact though.

<comment><USER7> With global CO2 emissions of 36 gigatonnes annually, it would take 1.4 terawatts or about 7% of total annual energy consumption (i.e. not just electricity) to absorb all our emissions. That's a lot but fixing a problem for just 7% of the energy we used to make the problem strikes me as pretty good.

A gallon of gasoline produces 9 kg CO2, requiring 3 kWh to absorb, at a cost of 30 cents. There'd also be capital cost.

Avoiding emissions will often be cheaper, but for many sectors that's not so easy, so direct air capture could end up being an important part of the solution. We've also got a lot of excess CO2 right now that we'd be better off removing.

Sequestering CO2 seems to be a solved problem by injecting into basalt formations, where it turns into rock in about a year.

<comment><USER8> Is the problem of injecting CO2 solved to the point where we can do it at a rate of 36 gigaton per year, indefinitely? And how much energy does that cost?

<comment><USER7> I'm not advocating we do that much, just that we use it for the amount of emissions that's less practical to avoid. There's enough basalt for a very large amount, and energy to pump gas underground wouldn't be a major factor.

Another option though is to turn the CO2 into liquid fuels. That wouldn't reduce ambient CO2 but to whatever extent we keep using liquid fuels (e.g. for airliners), it'd be nice if they were carbon neutral.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm amazed to see the organization that invented wifi is still pushing the envelope after suffering so many budget cuts at the hands of the "Liberal" (conservative) government.

<comment><USER10> In most countries, liberals are considered at least center, if not rightwing and conservative. I don't know about australian politics but it seems like its the same there. By Liberal they mean liberal economically (small government, no regulations) and conservative socially.

<comment><USER11> As someone coming from a political environment that doesn't use the term, I seem to periodically forget what is meant by liberal. Your concise definition is very useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am not a native English speaker and the article seems to use a decent amount of scientific language.

Therefore I've might have missed it, but what do they do with the captured carbon?

Can it be used for new materials or products, or will it need to be stored indefinitely?

<comment><USER13> Here are relevant links to Wikipedia on CO2 storage:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage#Seq...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage#Sequestration)

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

To curb global warming, the best option is likely to store it underground, e.g. in reservoirs previously used for oil or gas production.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A packet of seeds is 5$. I think what is needed is exact monitoring of emissions and policy to replenish it. I'm still not sure how efficient carbon capture technology is in terms of number of trees.

If we go by the most common sci-fi themes, the 0.1% can give little to two shits of the climate, escape to mars and use earth as a mining colony. The military sheep will serve the 0.1% and enforce the apartheid happily. This is exactly how the 1st world uses the third world anyways, earth would just be the third planet.

From a programming perspective ... how costly will it be to get rid of COBOL code ? Well machines that use oil are the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER15> Am I reading this right? 1.29 megajoules for one kilo captured? Uh, this doesn't seem feasible at scale.

<comment><USER16> 1kw of solar panels could do 5 tonnes a year. That seems feasible. 1000kw * 3600 * 5hr/day / 1.29e6 * 365

<comment><USER17> How does this compare with just planting trees?

<comment><USER18> Trees will die, decompose and release the CO2 back into the atmosphere. "Keep it in the ground" will need to become "Put it back in the ground"

<comment><USER19> My reading of the article is that actual storage of the carbon is not part of this work either.

<comment><USER20> Wouldn't this captured carbon be a burnable fuel? Surely if you put it back underground a mining company would just dig it up and burn it again.

<comment><USER21> No, this captures carbon dioxide. Turning carbon dioxide back into carbon is not part of the process. You still need a way to store the CO2 permanently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Tell me why this won't work.

<comment><USER23> It will never be cheaper than avoiding co2 in the first place (or at least catching at the source) so while it might have applications, it seems impractical for making significant progress towards saving the planet at this point.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean by "saving the planet"? Do you mean keeping the population numbers and saving the western way of life at the same time? What would make significant progress towards that goal?</comment></comment></comment>


Sitting straight 'bad for backs' - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6187080.stm <comment><USER2> Article from 2006, and submitted previously:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=185187>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1345938></comment>


The Geography of Radionavigation and the Politics of Intangible Artifacts (2014) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://history.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/2014%20rankin%20-%20radionavigation%20and%20intangible%20artifacts.pdf <comment><USER2> Thanks for submitting this.

I find the technology developed during WW2 to be quite advanced for the time, as I guess most secret/military technology is. When the Allies discovered the Germans attacking based on beams, they would either attempt to bend them or send in an attack following the beam back to transmitter.

With the use of 'Gee', until there were transmitters within France, the Germans would jam the signal such that shortly after crossing the French coast, the signal was obscured in what they described as 'grass' along the bottom of the signal trace. Navigators would also take star shots outside of Gee range.

Quite a few of the transmitter sites, chosen for their geography, are still in use for similar purposes today.

The development of H2S the ground mapping radar and also utilizing any radar return before it hit the ground gave them 'fishpond' which would display a return for an aircraft that was below them. That could either be another bomber in the stream or a night fighter coming in for an attack.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's a fun read.

The LORAN systems were the ones that really put a grid (or rather sets of intersecting hyperbolas) on the world, because they were so long range, usable out to 1500 miles from the stations. The article is mostly about the European theater, but navigation was a much more difficult problem in the Pacific, where the distances over water were great and the islands were small and easily missed. LORAN was the first system that put an end to being totally lost.

The US airways system predated radio navigation. The first US airways used very bright rotating beacons every 30 miles or so, so flyers on the airway could fly from beacon to beacon. Remnants of that system live on as the white and green beacons rotating beacons seen at US airports today. The radio system was an upgrade to the beacon system.

Beam type systems remain, mostly as VORs, VHF Omnirange stations. They're usually at airports, and they cover several acres and require clear space around them, much to the annoyance of people who would like to develop the real estate. The most visible one in Silicon Valley is at Trimble Rd and US 101, next to SJC. The basic signal it sends can be visualized as a big flash followed by a rotating beam. The time between the two gives the bearing from the station. VORs also have Distance Measuring Equipment, so they can be interrogated and will reply, with the return time giving distance. This is still the primary way aircraft find airports. With VORs, the error decreases as you get closer, so the accuracy is very good as you are lining up for the runway.

The FAA wants to shut down about half the VORs in the US.[1] The ones at major airports will remain, but some intermediate locations will lose their VOR. This worries some people, because it leads to over-dependence on GPS.

[1] [http://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/acf/media...](http://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/acf/media/Presentations/12-01_Discon- of-VOR-update.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you design websites? - <AUTHOR>

Here's how I design websites: http://twitter.com/#!/lukeqsee/status/28807917273
After using pen and paper to design several ideas, I'll put that into basic HTML markup, and get it functioning with jQuery. Doing that allows me to see if the interface is plausible and workable. Only after having most of the working HTML do I add any sort of graphic design. (I'm a horrible graphic designer anyways.)
What methods do you use to get from brain to product design? Start with a snazzy graphic design? Start coding and figure the design will come eventually? Use pen and paper? Tear up photoshop? HTML & CSS? All of the above?
We love to learn from each other's methods. Tell us your way. I'm sure it's the best. ;) <comment><USER2> While I'm quite terrible at design (I'm a coder, if anything at all), when I do end up designing websites, the first step is sitting back and figuring out what I really want: what kind of content will go there, who's the expected audience, what are my priorities (display speed, download size, bling, you name it).

Once I have that down, it's a lot easier to figure out a design. It's either pen & paper, but I can't recall the last time I actually drew a design on paper (I'm even worse at hand drawing than I am at design), or I fire up a tool I can make a mockup with: gimp, inkscape, dia - either works, and it depends on how detailed or how quick I want the mockup.

Once that's done, I convert it into HTML + CSS, and sprinkle it with javascript magic if so need be.

Meanwhile, since I do design iterations in bursts, more than likely, I will have the backend code ready aswell, and I will only need to convert the mockup to a template, and done.

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing I used to obsess over when I did freelance web design was getting the design perfect. Every site had to be a work of art...just the right size buttons, just the right radius on the round corners, just the right opacity for a drop shadow. Then I realized that for the most part, users don't care. If they did, there wouldn't be so many people using Internet Explorer. And the search engines really don't care (...yet). More important than having a pretty design is having useful and relevant content.

Now that I realize that, I take a utilitarian approach to design. As long as the design is clean and the information is presented logically, I don't really stress over design. These days I use a lot of templates from ThemeForest.net, or quickie templates my team in the Philippines can do in about 3 hours for about $12.

</comment><comment><USER4> When designing something from scratch, my process goes from a bit of sketch on graph paper to a Photoshop mockup. I'll let that stew for a day or so and tweak it here and there, maybe share with some friends for feedback, and then start coding it. I generally put all of the main elements into a structure and use FireBug to push things around to where I like them!

For redesigns of existing sites, it's more an exercise of rearranging elements that are already there so I -may- go into Photoshop and see what I come up with or I might just go straight into FireBug and move things around to get a general sense of where I want to go with it. This is especially helpful for proposing (quick) design changes to a client.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a newbie and have been designing from the code up. I'm starting to design pages now from a blank sheet with red pen and I agree with you, it seems to allow for more options.

</comment><comment><USER6> I try to do everything at once. It doesn't end well, so there should be plenty I can learn from in here.</comment>


Mystery blob found under the moon's far side - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/06/massive-blob-discovered-moon-surface/ <comment><USER2> Nazi secret base. :)</comment>


How the NSA, and your boss, can intercept and break SSL - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/how-the-nsa-and-your-boss-can-intercept-and-break-ssl-7000016573/

<comment><USER2> "If your company has set up the proxy correctly you won't know anything is off because they'll have arranged to have the proxy's internal SSL certificate registered on your machine as a valid certificate."

Yes, this is basically textbook MITM for SSL. This is why the NSA can't do this at "your local ISP", because it requires access to your machine...

<comment><USER3> And your machine doesn't access your local ISP and vice-versa?

<comment><USER2> Not for its SSL certs, no.</comment></comment></comment>


Psystar taunts Apple a second time (releases $50 'one-click Hackintosh' tool) - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2009/10/23/psystar-taunts-apple-a-second-time/

<comment><USER2> The comments on the original CrunchGear article do not sound promising. Many people downloaded the software and were unable to get it to work as advertised.

Also the software will only work for 2 hours in 'Demo' mode, then it won't work until you unlock the software.

</comment><comment><USER3> People with money to spend on getting their Hackintosh up and running can buy more compatible hardware. Sure it's only $50 but some motherboards aren't much more than that, and if you don't game you can get a fine Hackintosh-friendly video card for that price.

</comment><comment><USER4> Might want to check out this <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=899133></comment>


My Reddit clone so far. - <AUTHOR> http://vortices.appjet.net/

<comment><USER2> Dude, that's too impressive. Prolly the best looking Appjet app I've seen to date.</comment>


Governments Worry That Cryptocurrencies Could Be the 'Next Swiss Bank Account' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-29/crypto-as-next-swiss-bank-account-sends-governments-scrambling <comment><USER2> Governments worry that those 'Swiss Bank Accounts' aren't exclusive anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> Over the years, a lot of governments have outlawed offshore online gambling. They mainly do so by proxy, by making it illegal for banks or credit card providers to transfer money to unapproved gambling operations. In addition, to offer an alternative, most governments allow some kind of gambling to run in the country, but these are regulated and taxed.

I guess there are always ways to circumvent these government regulations and put your money in an online casino in Barbados or whereever but it takes a special kind of person to want to go through the hassle.

In very much the same way, governments could choke the flow of real money in and out of cryptocurrencies if they wanted to. They are probably planning to do so but it hasn't been on the top of their priorities just yet, the crypto bubble being more of an annoying mosquito than a threat to the economic stability. A government crackdown won't mean that crypto currencies will go away but it will be obvious to everyone that they'll forever be RPG play money, and only a small amount of enthusiasts will want to hold them. Prices will adjust accordingly.

<comment><USER4> A country can outlaw cryptocurrencies from their country, but the rest of the world won't simply follow suit.

With countries like Japan or Korea embracing cryptocurrencies, it's unrealistic to think they'll become "RPG play money".

<comment><USER3> I don't think any "real" countries have any interest in cryptos becoming a competitor to their respective national currency. That would be giving away control over the economy, and why would any government want to do that? Thus I think we'll see both South Korea and Japan taking an increasingly hostile stance towards cryptos alongside all other developed countries.

I could imagine, on the other hand, freeloader countries like the Cayman Islands adding cryptos as a supported way of stashing away money. Thus, they could become a gateway between the legit economy and the crypto economy in the same way that they are already a gateway between the legit economy and money raked in by tax evaders, drug lords, and dictators. Thing is, the crypto part doesn't really add any value to their offering. And the real question with respect to Cayman Islands etc. is why we don't simply outlaw bank transfers back and forth from these places.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can see only one reason why any government would ALLOW cryptocurrencies. While they could someday be used as a digital currency, right now they have very little positive value, and significant negative value. So the ONE reason I can see why government support them is for their own nefarious needs.

<comment><USER6> Bingo. Blockchain systems are ideal for tracking & control, even beyond credit cards and the like. Bitcoin is simply so much more accessible.

<comment><USER5> Blockchain is amazing. Its use in cryptocurrencies is just the cat that got out of the bag...

<comment><USER7> The centralized use case (not run by arbitrary nodes) might have some use cases but the decentralized versions run on untrusted nodes which are all the craze are ridiculously uneconomical.

Here is an article estimating Google (one of the most profitable software companies) hardware expenditure at 5 billion a quarter [0], or 20 billion a year. With their 20 billion in profit a year, a doubling of server costs would make one of the most profitable software companies uneconomical.

Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies rely on everyone processing every computation which is insanely cost heavy which is why bitcoin processes a fraction of what visa does but costs the electricity of a small country.

Google's server requirements would obviously be uneconomical with that architecture but can any architecture that relies on untrusted nodes to do the computation be economical when a company such as Google could not run on twice the infrastructure costs?

And thats just one of the downsides with decentralized cryptocurrencies of which there are many.

[0]: [http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/07/23/from-...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/07/23/from-112-servers- to-5b-spent-on-google-data-centers-per-quarter)

<comment><USER8> Cryptocurrencies don't require you to give away your computing power for free, the blockchain gives them rewards for securing the network.

<comment><USER7> That reward needs to be sold to pay for the infrastructure costs of running that node which comes from increasing the supply of your cryptocurrency which decreases the value of each cryptocurrency token.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Funny how that's what they're worrying about rather than the rampant penny- coins and essentially unregulated securities. Even if you don't invest in an ICO directly, investing in Eth or Bitcoin is essentially funding those ICOs and allowing otherwise unqualified investors to speculate on the ecosystem.

<comment><USER10> The government can worry about two things at once

<comment><USER11> As someone working in policy in DC, this often doesn't seem to be the case.

<comment><USER10> It's not like the SEC has been silent on cryptocurrency ponzi schemes though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Unlikely, since (1) the current top few cryptocurrencies are not anonymous, merely pseudonymous; and (2) they are not stable enough to reliably stash a few dozen million USD and expect to get them out a decade later on a day's notice.

<comment><USER13> I think one of the major misconceptions about cryptocurrencies is that people will want to turn their coins back into fiat.

There are billions being invested into cryptocurrencies in a grassroots manner. This didn't happen because people love fiat. Their speculating on a future where fiat is a minority currency.

<comment><USER14> I know a few people who put a huge stash into crypto because they don't want their spouses to know about their money when they get married.

<comment><USER15> Why are they marrying someone who they don't trust? That sounds like an awful state of affairs and likely those marriages will not last. Don't most wedding vows include a line about being honest? Yikes to those marriages.

<comment><USER14> Yes and no. emotionally, its a bad idea. Rationally, it probably isnt an awful idea to hedge against a marriage not working out

<comment><USER15> > Rationally, it probably isnt an awful idea to hedge against a marriage not > working out

That doesn't make sense. Rationally, hiding that money in secret is a reason that the marriage won't work out. Hide that money, tell lies, be a scheming and awful person, and there will be a self-fulfilling prophesy of that marriage not working out.

<comment><USER14> That may be true but most marriages don't work out and they are not self- fulfilling prophecies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Isn't the real risk that cryptocurrency becomes the new laundry service?

Buy FOOCOIN, spend FOOCOIN on asset, don't report to the IRS, repeat.

Other direction:

Sell asset for FOOCOIN, buy $ with FOOCOIN, don't report to the IRS, repeat.

<comment><USER17> If you by _large_ assets with FOOCOIN, the same rules apply for asset seller as if you paid in cash, i.e. they must report the transaction to authorities if it's above a certain amount (wasn't it $10k in USA?).

So either you're limited to small amounts, or you have to buy the assets under the table with the usual laundering problems.

<comment><USER18> Structuring your payments to be multiple below the $10K threshold specifically to avoid triggering AML reporting requirements is illegal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> ""We don't think this ecosystem can grow without regulation," Beck said."

Uhhh its already grown by leaps and bounds. Control for the sake of control. That's all they want.

<comment><USER20> Governments don't like black markets, untraceable transactions and people hiding their assets.

You may not agree with it but there IS a rationale behind this.

<comment><USER21> That's true but governments can only add friction to digital assets (e.g. eliminate exchanges) but cannot destroy them. Also, I think at least now they have some ideas about the volume of black markets. Even with blockchains like Monero you have an idea of usage.

<comment><USER22> Of course governments could destroy them, just force ISPs to leverage deep pack inspection to systematically cripple nodes in the network.

<comment><USER23> I'll take RSA for $500, Alex.

<comment><USER22> Cryptanalysis has been able to reliably identify traffic despite encryption for quite some time. No, they can't extract secrets (as far as we know), but they can certainly identify the type of traffic being transmitted.

<comment><USER23> You are talking about behavior- and inference-based traffic analysis. What you're talking about is definitionally not inspection.

It is trivial for a defender to 1) enforce whitelists, 2) defeat analysis with arbitrary use of Nagle's algo, 3) put bitcoind or other node services on non- standard ports with non-standard sender-receiver behavior, 4) enable other services with similarly non-standard configurations, 5) setup multi-homed constellations, where nodes transmit on one channel and receive on another, 6) do I really need to go on? There are dozens of things that can be done here to defeat traffic analysis.

There's billions of USD-equivalents invested in this thing. Hand-wavey claims like 'Cryptanalysis has been able to reliably identify traffic despite encryption for quite some time' evidently do not take into account competent defenders. Bitcoiners will buy time on, or even launch, their own satellites, if public nodes begin getting stomped on and there is in fact some usability issue preventing miners from relaying transactions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Governments are not going to be able to stop this from happening without massively invasive laws against what software people can run on their computers, public access to encrypted communication and private exchange.

Governments will hopefully be forward thinking about this and accept the changes that technology brings. Ultimately it's government's responsibility to accommodate social and technological trends, not vice versa.

Some of the worst chapters in human history came about when political authorities tried to resist the tide of change, like President Franklin Pierce who pushed back against the abolitionist movement pre-Civil-War by approving the expansion of slavery westward, and thus setting the stage for the war to come.

In recent decades Western governments have been reasonably enlightened when it comes to technological change, as in the case of abandoning export control laws barring wide dissemination of strong cryptography in the 1990s, and the institution of safe harbor laws, both of which facilitated the growth of the internet. I hope they carry that philosophy toward cryptocurrency.

<comment><USER25> > _Governments are not going to be able to stop this from happening without > massively invasive laws against what software people can run on their > computers, public access to encrypted communication and private exchange._

Hopefully they'll be able to stop this and other problems with emission taxes.

<comment><USER24> Whatever the tax is, I hope it is on some kind of physical consumption of scarce resources, rather than on economic transactions that are inherently private and increasingly out of the bounds of any jurisdiction.

<comment><USER25> Yes. In my imagination, a widely deployed CO₂ tax would rise electricity prices just enough to wipe the profits off Bitcoin mining and make maintaining the blockchain that much less profitable for people, killing the currency outright.

But then again, it might only delay the inevitable...

(And to be clear - I don't mind innovations in finance, new kinds of money, new mechanisms of social consensus, etc. I only dislike systems with huge energy waste, especially one unsustainable in long-term, as such systems grow.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well yeah, better start regulating them, and quickly. At least the exchanges.

Crypto currencies are ideal if you want to launder money.

Not to mention the volatility of it might keep doing damages.</comment>


The Texas Instruments TMX 1795: the first, forgotten microprocessor - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2015/05/the-texas-instruments-tmx-1795-first.html <comment><USER2> It's fascinating how many great stories there are from this wild west period of the computer industry, thanks for a great writeup.

I have to pick a nit with footnote 10 though, "There's no need for a processor accessing bits in parallel to be little endian" – there is when your data bus is narrower than the address bus, such as an 8-bit CPU performing indexed or relative 16-bit addressing. The simple pipelining of the little endian 6502 allows it to calculate the lower half of the target address while it fetches the upper half from memory, saving a cycle compared to the big endian 6800.

<comment><USER3> Also, wouldn't little-endianness generally benefit 16 bit arithmetic operations performed on 8 bit ALUs? Because (correct me if I'm wrong) a carry flag always carries over from LSB to MSB, processing the LSB before the MSB allows you to implement the carry mechanism more efficiently.

<comment><USER2> Yes, though few 8-bit CPUs supported 16-bit arithmetic. Most required two 8-bit operations with carry instead, an din that case there's no difference between little and big endianness - in both cases the LSB has to be calculated first.

The big endian 6809 supports 16-bit arithmetic, and is indeed punished for it: 16-bit ADD and SUB costs an extra cycle compared to a little endian design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-R1jlPIYh- nU/VUlaRlv9DnI/A...](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-R1jlPIYh- nU/VUlaRlv9DnI/AAAAAAAAm6g/9vPQCCV5rN8/w300/fourphase-trial-demo.jpg)

Are those SNES cartridges?

<comment><USER5> After carefully studying pictures of SNES cartridges, I think you're right. That's pretty funny that Boysel used game cartridges when creating the demo system for a patent lawsuit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's another TI processor that never really took off despite its usage in arcade consoles at the time. The TMS340 [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010)) series. 32bit in 1987. I assume it was just out of the price range of 8bit and 16bit machines. It was used in Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam games I believe.

<comment><USER7> I remember those (coincidentally 68020/2) back when I was working at Eicon's graphics group (now Eicon Networks). Ended up just using M68Ks with blitters for PostScript and HP PCL interpreters. In the end the HP version even lost the blitter chip and I had to write bitblt.s

<comment><USER8> How did you implement your blitter?

<comment><USER7> I can't remember all the details now. The main interpreter was MS C with CodeView in text mode was awesome. The routines were 68k assembly with pixel write modes, optimized character blt, and there was a scale-up routine. The only reason the sw implementation came close to hw was that the hw had quite a bit of setup which is quite a bit of overhead for small patterns which were typical (e.g. patterned horizontal rules).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Some people consider the Datapoint 2200 the first personal computer as it > came out years before systems such as the Apple II or even the Altair.

Programma 101 was being made and sold five years before Datapoint 2200: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_101](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_101)

<comment><USER10> Funny you mention Olivetti, I recently learned they were huge in those days. Very fine design and 'better world' goals, very similar to Apple today.

trivia: it seems Olivetti was forced out of the Personal Computer business by bad financial games from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_De_Benedetti](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_De_Benedetti) cutting funds at a bad time.

<comment><USER11> I think every typewriter/office machine company tried their hand at computers at some point. Royal McBee, Burroughs, Smith Corona (I don't think they did full-blown computers, but they did do some dedicated word processors), Remington Rand...

<comment><USER10> That was quite natural. Mechanical, electro-mechanical, mostly electronic.

<comment><USER11> Sure. The interesting question is why, out of all the office machine companies that tried it, only IBM managed to pull it off.

<comment><USER5> I think that gives the wrong impression, that office machine companies tried making computers and failed. Remington Rand, for instance, was IBM's principal rival in the 1950's, selling the UNIVAC. Olivetti had transistorized mainframes before IBM. I think the interesting question is why IBM survived while the rest didn't. My highly oversimplified answer would be the IBM 360 crushed them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> the size difference and design technique between Intel and TI is telling. Even though they are both of the same generation of chip Intel was just years ahead in efficiency. The TI almost looks like a "will this work" or "that will do" type design.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, and the vastly greater size fed directly into it not being commercially viable because of massively lower yield, all things being equal.

Add an unrealistic requirement for ultra clean power, and the thesis of the article is quite debatable; this chip "worked in the lab" but was not viable outside of it. Perhaps a good learning experience for TI, but hard to see more than that.

<comment><USER10> Interesting facts about realism. Being first is very relative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The pictured magazine article has a really modern layout for something written in 1971.

<comment><USER15> I was very surprised at that exact same thing as well. I thought I was the only one. I really thought for a second that it was some magazine from the 90s or even early 00s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My takeaway from this is that the author clearly documented the AL1 as the worlds first microprocessor. The arguments against are artificial; it doesn't matter that this wasn't the intended configuration nor that one essentially had to program it in microcode. The microcode ROM is nothing more than a compression technology which doesn't render it a more capable.

All that said, it's all arbitrary and the 4004 is the first _successful_ microprocessor. (I personally find it a more interesting question which alternative architectures could have been produced given the technology and constraints of the 4004 and 8080).

</comment><comment><USER17> So, can anyone make an open hardware version of this chip? Have the patents run out? It's been 45 years, and I understand they only last 25 years. A side question would be which CPU architectures are openly available now that are capable of running a modern Linux distro?

<comment><USER18> The patent situation is such that one could manufacture a 32-bit x86 processor without the various SIMD and virtualization extensions and not have to worry about patents on the abstract architecture. Implementation techniques up to and almost including the Pentium Pro (November 1995) would likewise be safe from patent threats. However, semiconductors get explicit treatment under copyright law ([http://copyright.gov/title17/92chap9.html](http://copyright.gov/title17/92chap9.html)), so you have to do your own layout until such time as copyrights start expiring again.</comment></comment>


How human mobility has changed over time, distance and energy use - <AUTHOR> http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/economic-growth/cars-and-civilization

<comment><USER2> "Because the maglev system is a set of magnetic bubbles moving under the control of a central computer, what we put inside is immaterial. It could be a personal or small collective vehicle, starting as an elevator in a skyscraper, becoming a taxi in the maglev network, and again becoming an elevator in another skyscraper. The entire bazaar could be run as a videogame where shuffling and rerouting would lead the vehicle to its destination swiftly, following the model of the Internet."

Well, I have to say I love that image. A national, physical implementation of something like TCP/IP.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting read. However, I was a bit disappointed that it didn't take neither cost nor flexibility of transport mode. Airplane tickets are much more expensive than a car trip, and road network is much more dense than railroad, airport or maglev is or ever will be.

<comment><USER4> > Airplane tickets are much more expensive than a car trip

In Europe it is opposite, thanks to petrol taxes and road tools, flight is often cheaper than car, and always cheaper than train.

<comment><USER5> Flying from my city in Poland to where I live in the UK costs me 50-100 pounds,depending on the time of the year. Taking a car costs 300 pounds in fuel alone + ~150 pounds to take the ferry across the sea. Of course the car works out better than plane if you have it filled with people,but that is not always the case.

>>and always cheaper than train.

That is the only thing where I will disagree with you - Europe is not one large country with the same rules everywhere. In the UK trains are absurdly expensive and sometimes it's cheaper to rent a car, fill it up,drive to where you need to be and back than to take the train. But again, in some countries, like Poland, the trains are state-owned and cost tiny sums(taking a 2 hour journey costs literally a pound, taking the longest, 10 hour journey from the mountains to the seaside costs slightly more than 10 pounds).

<comment><USER3> But that's just for you, alone. If you would travel with family, the picture would be the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is interesting picture of hyperloop in article: [http://breakthrough.turing.com/images/elements/A26.jpg](http://breakthrough.turing.com/images/elements/A26.jpg)

I wonder, why not just build regular bullet train? 380 miles seems like ideal distance. 1:30 minutes (center to center) would be great improvement. And it could be done in a few months.</comment>


Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-19/wireless-carrier-throttling-of-online-video-is-pervasive-study <comment><USER2> For both wired and wireless, it's time for legislation to address exactly what it and isn't permitted with regard to advertised speeds, throttling, and total usage -- both with respect to users, and with respect to peering.

It's not just an issue of policy, but one of _transparency_ too.

It's a fact of life that more people will want to consume data than a network can support. So where are we going to make the cut? Diminish everyone's usage proportionally? Provide a guaranteed minimum? A minimum per minute, per hour, or per day? Prioritize traffic based on type? Implement caps? Allow people to pay for more speed, higher caps, or both?

Some of these will be better or worse for different users. But since people often have little or no choice over which carrier or ISP they use and switching can be expensive, this is exactly where it makes sense for policy to be made democratically, as with utilities. And publicized.

When I pay for a carrier, I want to know what I should be able to count on, and what I can't count on.

<comment><USER3> It's a fact of life that more people will want to consume data than a network can support.

Is this actually true or is it just a matter of the isp not building the needed infrastructure required? Because if it is just an infrastructure issue then I would question why they choose to not expand to a better service. Is it because they can get away with providing crappy service as many people only have a single choice of what isp is available in their area? I highly agree with your final statement and it's true people just want to know what they can count on and not play the guessing game.

<comment><USER2> It's a matter of economics.

An ISP could build the required infrastructure to support everyone's peak desired simultaneous usage... but then they'd probably have to quadruple (or worse) what people are paying for it just to break even, which the market wouldn't support, so they'd go out of business.

The same way restaurants could invest in enough space to handle all demand for Friday nights and Valentine's Day... but would go out of business because they couldn't keep it full enough to pay the rent the rest of the week/year.

<comment><USER4> Didn't we already give the ISPs money to upgrade their infrastructure? Something like $400 billion.

<comment><USER5> No we didn't: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556).

Even if that number wasn't fictional, even by its own narrative it applies to money supposedly paid to telephone companies for fiber deployment. The gist of the argument is that by promising to build fiber, telephone companies got regulators to let them increase phone charges and depreciate phone infrastructure faster than otherwise would have been the case. That's where the $400 billion comes from.

These arguments are all based on the peculiarly of his telephone service was regulated before 1996 (and in the authors view the way it should have continued to be regulated—even though all of Western Europe went away from this sort of rate regulation around the same time the US did). That has nothing to do with cellular, which was always regulated under a totally different regime, and was built more than a decade after these events.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I keep thinking I see this on my wired (Comcast) connection too.

Stuff just behaves too strangely for it to be anything else.

One video provider will get slow. Switch to the mobile connection and it's fine. Switch to another site on the wired connection, that's fine too.

They've made it perfectly clear they're unhappy I won't pay them an extra $100+/month for 900 channels of crap over and over.

<comment><USER7> This is your ISP being sneaky, but probably not in the way you think. This is what Netflix has been complaining about for years.

Your ISP is purposely providing a too-small link to your video provider. So when a lot of people are using that provider, it gets slow. When you switch to another provider, or a VPN, you get to use a fast connection to that other VPN that isn't overloaded, and then a fast connection back to your video provider.

This way your ISP can claim they are not throttling traffic because they aren't inspecting the packets for traffic shaping, they are just using physically poor connectivity to certain providers for traffic shaping.

<comment><USER8> Not to mention, they can now go and ask that provider to pay them for the right to 'upgrade' their connection, to enable their customers to get what they are paying the ISP for.

<comment><USER7> Yup, and in Comcast's case, when Netflix finally paid Comcast's ransom, the problem was suddenly fixed a few minutes later, because Comcast literally just had to reconfigure the router and plug in a second cable.

<comment><USER9> In those days it was typical for the costs of peering to be borne by the sender, relative to the traffic ratio. This changed when Netflix and Youtube decided to use their PR and lobbying strength to bring the negotiation to the court of public opinion - and normal people started referring to typical peering cost-sharing agreements using emotionally loaded words like "ransom"

<comment><USER7> The ratio requirements are a red herring. If your ISP says you get a certain bandwidth, it is on them to provide the appropriate pipes to get to where _their customers_ want to go. How can the ISP on the other side of Comcast be responsible for maintaining ratios if Comcast's customers are the ones that are requesting the data?

<comment><USER9> How can Netflix claim to sell streaming video without paying for adequate bandwidth to stream that video?

<comment><USER7> They had sufficient bandwidth. Netflix paid _their ISP_ for sufficient bandwidth. Comcast just refused to connect to it, to the detriment of _Comcast 's_ customers.

<comment><USER9> Cogent (Netflix's ISP) and Comcast had a peering agreement which spelled out costs and ratios; Cogent sold Netflix bandwidth (probably very cheaply) that they could not provide without breaching their peering agreement. Cogent was unwilling to fulfill the financial terms of their peering agreement in order to provide the product that they had sold to Netflix. Somehow, people think this is Comcast's fault?

<comment><USER10> Netflix is a very popular company and Comcast is a _deeply_ unpopular company. Consequently people take Netflix's statements at face value while assuming that Comcast always lies, even in situations where the facts suggest otherwise.

But who's fault is any of this? I say you reap what you sow. Comcast has only themselves to blame when consumers are skeptical of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is an actual problem here, but wireless carriers use the actual problem of how to balance traffic as a fake cover for charging more.

However, assuming we bypass the garbage tiering, there is a legitimate reason to do this. Page-loads are simple and fast. Every one loading pages is not much of an issue, as they typically load at different times for a brief moment and then are done. This means for a rated connection speed, you don't need as much actual capacity.

Video streaming (or other downloads) are constant. To stream video at rated speeds, you must build to provide most users that speed at the same time. Problem two here is that in cases of high traffic, video streaming is _greedy_. If it's not going at full resolution, it will suck up all available bandwidth it is given. If more is given, it will raise quality (by default settings, at least).

A sensible solution to this is to stream video and audio over UDP and have the router just drop UDP when TCP needs bandwidth (to a point). The point is, requirements are different. People sending e-mails shouldn't have to wait a minute to send because you _really_ want to stream your netflix every where you go and in 4k.

Which reminds me, I thought mobile connections were for simple stuff. Light browsing, email, what-have-you. Even with "unlimited" plans, you're throttled after twenty-odd gigabytes of data per month. Why can't people just download netflix in advance? Failing that, I'm not sure why people expect to use a wireless internet connection in the same way as a wired one.

</comment><comment> awinter-py if I were legislating this I'd mandate transparency before I mandated neutrality -- maybe consumers would be willing to pay up or switch to a provider that provided neutrality for streaming.

one way for government to provide usable markets is to mandate good information without setting standards.

NFLX is over neutrality for home internet (not sure about mobile), they're in every server cage

maybe neutrality is the wrong policy

or maybe ISPs shouldn't be in the content biz

<comment><USER12> Most people do not have another reasonable option to switch to.

<comment><USER13> It surprises me that most people in the US wouldn't have at least one cable and one DSL option. After all, cable TV is available most places, and everyone has a phone line (or is at least wired for one).

Or is the issue rural locations which were never wired for cable because they all just got satellite dishes?

<comment><USER14> I live 3 miles from downtown Austin, which has numerous internet options (Google Fiber, Spectrum, AT&T, and Grande), but the options in my apartment complex are:

* Spectrum (up to 400mbps)

* AT&T (5mbps dsl)

I technically do have _some_ choice, but given that one of these is close to 100x faster than the other, and the pricing is fairly similar...

I think wireless isps and 5g are our best chance at disrupting this.

<comment><USER8> I used to live 8 miles from Madison, WI (technically, one exit south of their beltline interchange on I-90). My ONLY two choices were 2mb WISP for $65/month, or 4g hotspot, and all of them were VERY expensive for over 15GB a month. (I used about 20GB per month on the 2mb wisp because I had little kids who loved netflix cartoons, faster speed would also cause higher quality video)

There was NO cable or dsl. ATT always said DSL was available in our area, and that they would schedule the install, then 3 days later, the local guy would call, and say "oh, hell no, lol" and cancel it

<comment><USER13> I don't know if this was viable at the time, but nowadays I expect you could use an OpenWRT router to do per-domain/mac traffic shaping on the device displaying the cartoons. That would force it down to 480p (or whatever) and reduce your overall usage.

Another option that might not have been available at the time would be taking the Netflix device to a different connection (work, the library, whatever) and then pre-downloading a bunch of the cartoons for offline viewing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm reminded of a comment I read a few days ago from someone that has their own small isp that said bandwidth was basically an inconsequential cost for them. Throttling like this is penny pinching of the highest order. How do we get the benefits of competition if every company is doing it?

<comment><USER16> Shannon-Hartley is a harsh mistress. There is only so much wireless capacity especially when you have a bunch of phones close to each other.

<comment><USER17> > when you have a bunch of phones close to each other

Even when you don't apparenly...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Congestion is a real thing for LTE networks, so you have to throttle. There's only so much bandwidth over a shared medium.

<comment><USER19> I really, really hate to defend mobile carriers, but...

Congestion is a real thing. Mobile subscribers are now using significantly more data due to video streaming, and wireless carriers aren't expanding their capacity fast enough. 5G won't help for most of CONUS. Millimeter wave 5G, which will help, will only be deployed in urban areas. Mid-band and low-band 5G will only increase spectrum efficiency around 20%.

For now, carriers are throttling videos and introducing various deprioritization options. All the major carriers only offer plans with forced traffic deprioritization. For some plans, all traffic is deprioritized. For others, deprioritization happens after a threshold.

There isn't enough bandwidth in the US to support 240 million subscribers streaming Netflix 24/7.

<comment><USER20> Sure, congestion is a thing, but:

\- I feel like there should be some oversight or required transparency about how and when they're applying throttling. Can they throttle customers in under served markets all the time to save money? \- They're currently throttling sites not protocols or users. Why? Did some sites pay them off? If they need to throttle they should be applying that process equally among sites. "But AT&T didn't slow Amazon.com's Prime Video at all" \- I would be curious to see where bandwidth problems play out in terms of "carrier could build more towers, but hasn't" and "we've reached the actual peak of what's possible with current technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > AT&T Inc. throttled Netflix Inc. 70% of the time and Google's YouTube > service 74% of the time

> T-Mobile US Inc. throttled Amazon Prime Video in about 51% of the tests, but > didn't throttle Skype and barely touched Vimeo

> Choffnes says Verizon can't restrict his ability to publish research and the > companies that support him don't influence his work.

Yet, missing from this article: any %'s from Verizon

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't necessarily want throttling at the ISP level but I do want rules on what is "reasonable" for web sites on wireless. Data is expensive.

A big one: I often do what should be simple things data-wise, like tapping a link to "view article", and am punished. Is it my fault that the obnoxious target site decided on its own to download and auto-play a huge video with sound in a floating window, none of which was requested or required!?

I have the right to squash that crap to save my data plan and battery (and sanity). That has meant installing blockers, and it doesn't look like I'll ever be able to stop doing so.

</comment><comment><USER23> If these streaming providers would actually provide consumers with effective tooling to determine if throttling is taking place, this would get a lot more traction. I fought with CenturyLink for 18 months collecting stats on overall network performance vs. throughput to YouTube because it was clear something was going on. It was a giant pain in the ass trying to come up with figures for YouTube.

<comment><USER7> Check out [https://fast.com](https://fast.com) from Netflix. It's a speed test based off of Netflix's servers, so it will tell you your bandwidth _to Netflix_ at any given time.

Then complain to your ISP if that doesn't match your advertised speed.

<comment><USER24> When the advertised speed is "up to XX Mbps" and you occasionally do get those speeds, then what is the proper complaint? They are providing "up to" the speed purchased. It works very well in the provider's favor.

<comment><USER7> I guess the best you can do it test it multiple times and then complain that you've never seen over XX Mpbs and then ask when exactly you'll get "up to" the advertised speed.

FWIW, even if you don't complain, it will help Netflix gather data that they can use to complain on your behalf.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am going to say the obvious here but sometimes the obvious needs to be said. This is why we need net neutrality!

<comment><USER18> This is where net neutrality fails. I'm all for not letting vertically integrated carriers give their own services an unfair advantage, but if throttling a high-bandwidth user to improve the service of nearby users? I'm more ok with that.

<comment><USER26> But thats not whats going on.

This is throttling by content, not by user.

All video content gets throttled so that the html5 video player negotiates a lower video resolution. t-mobile literally touts this as a feature.

Net neutrality is the belief that isps should only be allowed to throttle by user, never by content, all data should be equal.

<comment><USER17> Not only that, but they advertise that they are giving you "10 GB of data at LTE speed" and that's not what you get.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Use a VPN in AWS to see the difference over the same line. It is interesting to say the least

Easy way to implement one to test with here

[https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand](https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand)

<comment><USER28> >VPN in AWS

at 9 cents a gigabyte, it's definitely going to be pricey.

<comment><USER27> Given the reduction in size streaming ... not really.

 _So that same 2 hour movie on Hulu may be as little as 1.25 GB - Yep, 1 /1200th of the original…. Or as much as 5–7GB for Netflix or Youtube._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't see an issue with throttling video at all - the idea that I can bang a 4K stream down on LTE, which might be limited to 100mbit from the tower for everyone, means that's necessarily going to happen.

That said, I use secure encryption to prevent the ISP from viewing my browsing habits. Throttling VPN use carte-blanche because you don't know what's in there would be overkill.

It seems to me that it's best to just throttle based on allowing burst usage and treating all bulk downloading including streaming video identically.

</comment><comment><USER30> The title should say "US Wireless Carrier Throttling of Online Video Is Pervasive: Study"

The article doesn't suggest that this problem exists outside the US. Perhaps it does.

<comment><USER31> The second sentence of the article links to the paper cited, which shows the international data.

<comment><USER30> Ah, thanks.

A cursory scan of the paper found table 4 which suggests that the problem is principally a North American one nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Here's a thought - just mandate that all carriers should have an API that returns true congestion rate and throttling rate of users at a given time. This way we can keep everyone honest and transparent. That way - If i'm unable to watch my Netflix show in HD without bufferring across LTE, Netflix app can call an API to see if the throttle is limiting them.

</comment><comment><USER33> I see a number of people who use YouTube just to listen to music on their phone. If you have an unlimited plan it's cheaper than paying for Spotify. So instead of a cheap 128kbps stream they are sending full motion video for someone who isn't watching anyway. I am curious what portion of streaming this represents.

</comment><comment><USER34> If companies were better about being up-front, I would have no issue. I usually can't tell when my phone's streaming resolution drops to 480p, so I really don't care. It's being sneaky about it, on page 13 in small text, that bothers me.

</comment><comment><USER35> How can they do this if the connection is over TLS? Or is this regardig real time UDP video?

<comment><USER36> other side's IPs? They are usually well known

<comment><USER35> I suppose without a CDN that makes sense

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have AT&T. Fast.com never goes over about 4Mbps. Any other speed test shows 20, 30, or more Mbps.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wireless is a medium that is severely limited because of the laws of physics. I 100% support QoS.

And by QoS I don't mean limiting video even if there's available bandwidth, I mean limiting it if other people are trying to use their connections reasonably.

<comment><USER39> Now, please explain why, in the case of contention, the user using video should get less than their fair share of the available capacity?

<comment><USER38> Because in case of congestion the user watching video is abusing the system. It's like going to a congested public road with a convoy of lorries just because you can. Really, don't be a dick.

<comment><USER39> > Because in case of congestion the user watching video is abusing the system.

Why do you think that a user that is using exactly the same amount of bandwidth as any other users (i.e., their fair share) is abusing the system?

What would you say if some user was watching a video stream that used only half as much bandwidth as their fair share? Would that still be abusive?

<comment><USER40> Because in case of congestion (let's say everybody gets allotted 50 KB/s) you can't even watch video. Dozens of users trying to watch video at 50 KB/s aren't even watching video; they're just launching a DDoS attack. I'd be very happy to throttle them to 1 KB/s so I don't have to wait 10 seconds to receive a picture through Whatsapp.

You're arguing against the laws of physics here, and you're arguing that stupid users should be able to screw everybody else. No thanks.

<comment><USER41> >You're arguing against the laws of physics here and you're arguing that stupid users should be able to screw everybody else. No thanks.

i think there is a misunderstanding here. he's not arguing that ISPs shouldn' be able to bandwidth-discriminate based on customer. He's arguing that they shouldn't be able to discriminate on the type of data. what would it matter to the other users if they were slowing down the network by html5 video, VNC, or playing a game over TCP?

I don't know a lot about networks, but i think a potential solution could be to discriminate between high-bandwidth and low-latency transmissions. For a video game or something you would want to have low latency, but you wouldn't need a lot of bandwidth. on the other hand, video streaming requires a lot of bandwidth but doesn't depend so much on latency as long as it has a big enough cache. images are probably somewhere in the middle. this would allow low- bandwidth applications to be prioritized.

<comment><USER40> Cool, so you're arguing for QoS. Thanks for supporting my argument.

<comment><USER42> If the customer _specifies_ QoS, why not? There are 6 reserved bits after HLEN in a TCP packet header, which could be used to annotate the priority of the stream - one for low-latency but also low bandwidth (=Whatsapp, messengers, gaming, VoIP), and one for bulk transfers (=high latency acceptable, high data volume).

Default would be the first so that networks may only have special treatment for apps that explicitly opt in to say "i'm ok to wait a bit" like Netflix, Youtube and friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> On the one hand, I can see needing the ability to throttle for network traffic handling because you'll always have that one person who goes into an all you can eat, grabs 10 plates and all the chocolate pudding because they have to feel like they got one over on ... well, everyone. On the other hand, doing this 24/7? That's just not right and I think this runs afoul network neutrality legis... oh, wait.

<comment><USER39> > On the one hand, I can see needing the ability to throttle for network > traffic handling because you'll always have that one person who goes into an > all you can eat, grabs 10 plates and all the chocolate pudding because they > have to feel like they got one over on ... well, everyone.

So, you want to allow companies to not fulfill contracts because the company has failed to fulfill contracts?

Mind you, if customers in this scenario of yours don't get to eat as much as they can eat, that has absolutely nothing to do with the other customer that happened to eat as much as they can eat, and everything with the company not being able to fulfill the contract that they entered into. It is the company's fault, and only the company's fault, if they enter into contracts with multiple people that say "N bucks for as much as you can eat", if they then don't have enough food to feed all those people.

<comment><USER37> No, that's not what I said at all. I want someone tending the eatery telling the person scooping out all of the chocolate pudding that, sure, they may have as much as they like, but let others have some now and we have more in the back that we're bringing out. You just need to wait a few moments, so have your one plate, _then_ come back for more.</comment></comment></comment>


Windows XP Makeover  - <AUTHOR> http://mithya.in/blog/tips-for-windows-makeover/

<comment><USER2> Maybe I'm a really odd person, but one of the reasons I use XP and dislike OS X (and ambivalent about Win7) is that I really do like the taskbar and start menu implementations in XP, over and above the equivalent implementations in other OSes.

That, and Windows Explorer, are the main reasons I never moved to Vista.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a counter argument to this, consider this blog post, called "Living with defaults": [http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/10/living_with_defau...](http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/10/living_with_defaults.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Going by that, even skinning your browser or adding a wallpaper will be called "customization". For people who do not change their computers that often, it is okay to customize to make your screen look prettier. I myself use 2 diff OS on 3 machines regularly, so not much customizations for me :(

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It slows down the system a bit though.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anybody need 16 years old front-end web designer? Hire me - <AUTHOR>

I am 16 years old font-end web designer. I love to design and then code it to HTML and CSS. I also love Twitter Bootstrap framework. I got some spare time and I want to build up my portfolio.
My last work:
- http://ewooy.com/img/streamio.png
- http://ewooy.com/img/edure.png
- http://ewooy.com/img/flare.png
- http://ewooy.com/img/enyo.png
- http://ewooy.com/img/karla.png
- http://ewooy.com/img/truffle.png
You can find my email in my profile.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Smaller businesses are easier to target and get the ball rolling. I started doing sites for as cheap as $500 just to be able to practice and build a portfolio.

Maybe there is a local business you like, build them out a site and show them. You get to sharpen your skills like wire framing and front end development. It's not sexy, but you learn a lot. What's great also is, you can use Twitter Bootstrap without being judged. Most of them could care less what you use.

Unsolicited Advice:

I started my first business at 16 and age should never come into the equation. Once you are looking to freelance, which is still running a business - you are judged as a businessman. No one gives you a break for being 16 nor should you give them a break. I am always impressed now at the age of 28 at how younger freelancers are unapologetic about their talent and age.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey,

I know what it's like to be a young web developer / designer looking for work. I think the best thing you can do during this time is work constantly to improve what you're doing.

In terms of general improvement, I suggest looking more at your typography, line-height, sizes, fonts etc. It'll really make your designs better.

Also, look into the use of negative space (whitespace) to give your designs room to improve.

In the beginning especially, break away from the grids and frameworks. Get the basics down and really learn the nuances of HTML and CSS. Work at it and you'll improve.

I suggest requesting an invite to Forrst, they've got some great people over there to give feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thakns for your support. I know, I will need to learn more about design.

<comment><USER4> But as a young developer (15 and 362 days old ;)) If you have any ideas you'd like to collab on, I'd be willing to give it a shot :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats nice. Hit me up on email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickables: \- <http://ewooy.com/img/streamio.png>

\- <http://ewooy.com/img/edure.png>

\- <http://ewooy.com/img/flare.png>

\- <http://ewooy.com/img/enyo.png>

\- <http://ewooy.com/img/karla.png>

\- <http://ewooy.com/img/truffle.png>

</comment><comment><USER5> It is really tough as a young person, especially as a front-end designer. I'm 18 now, but I started dabbling when I was about your age. A couple things I'd really recommend doing. \- Do NOT use a framework. They're really easy, and you learn nothing. Once you have enough experience in HTML5/CSS3 to code a responsive site from scratch without looking stuff up, then frameworks are beneficial. -Build yourself a portfolio site. Building my portfolio (<http://robs.im>) has taught me so much. If you want more on this, let me know. I have some snippets of JS/CSS/HTML from the first version of my portfolio site that you might be able to use, they're quite unique, but they didn't suit my purposes. -Forrst and Dribbble. My very first piece of work came in the day after I got into Dribbble. I'm going to be really honest with you right now. What you have is probably not good enough to get you into Dribbble. For tips on how to improve, email me. Link on my site. If you improve a lot, I have a Dribbble invite. -GitHub: Work on something on GitHub. If you're looking for a Project, I have a couple of side projects you could work on. Again, email me. \- Last tip: Don't lie about your age. The general opinion seems to be "If you do good work, I don't care how old you are." Take Jared Erondu for example. If you don't know who he is, look him up. He's 18, and awesome. Lying about your age doesn't work, I did it once, and that was the end of that project.

Hope this helps, Rob Sim

</comment><comment><USER6> I know it's tough to try to find work, and I hope you can get some good gigs.

A few tips - As Amarco suggests, Forrst might be a good place to post.

Did you post on the <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472748> thread? That's where people might look.

Finally, I know you're trying to branch out, but try to avoid spamming the forum, or the moderators might ban you. You've posted twice in the last week advertising your services - And while I admire the drive - It's kinda annoying.

Good Luck!

</comment><comment><USER7> One tip from experience, make disclosing your age part of follow up info when someone is interested.

I started freelancing when I was 15, I found that when told upfront, potential clients would bail very quickly. When I tried not disclosing my age straight away but only after talking over projects, giving suggestions and pricing (the things that make clients feel taken care of / comfortable), no one cared...

I think there was only one person who was a little annoyed by this tactic.

I'm a coder so YMMV with the different client requirements.

</comment><comment><USER8> Not to nit pick, but I was able to get the only image I looked at down to 1/3 of the size with no noticeable loss of image quality. I understand you're showcasing your work, but image optimization is a big part of the job. Just something to keep in mind. It was the first thing I looked at, even before the actual image. And if you're advertising yourself as someone who can code it all out, it'd be beneficial to be able to see your code. I know this might seem trivial, but it's something potential employers will look at.

</comment><comment><USER9> Giving your age probably isn't helping with getting hired...although I'm sure it helps with the vanity.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wish I was trying to get hired as a front-end designer when I was 16. Stay with it!! Everybody starts somewhere!</comment>


Show HN: A site I made to donate 10k mosquito nets to charity - <AUTHOR> https://giveanet.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I was researching charities a while ago when I came across this excellent presentation by the founder of the Against Malaria Foundation, Rob Mather: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5wr3u8Gjwg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5wr3u8Gjwg)

During the Q&A at the end, Rob mentioned an idea for a website that would make it really easy for anyone to donate just a single net. This is the result of me building that site + reaching out to AMF!

Also the source for giveanet.org is here (just vanilla js, go, postgres): [https://github.com/justicz/giveanet](https://github.com/justicz/giveanet)</comment>


All of the World's Money and Markets in One Visualization – 2020 Edition - <AUTHOR> https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization-2020/ <comment><USER2> Very nice! however the square representing the value of silver 43.9b, should be ~half 100b square. It looks more like a ~quarter.</comment>


Eric Drexlers classic on nanotechnology: "engines of creation" - <AUTHOR> http://www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Table_of_Contents.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Eric Drexlers classical book on nanotechnology.

Besides, of course, nanotechnology it also, as aswanson pointed out in a comment, describes the idea of the world wide web, forums, advertising and pagerank, in 1986, 4 years before Tim Berners Lee launched the world wide web.

If you haven't read you should.

<comment><USER2> A better reference for the non-nanotech stuff you mention is his "Hypertext Publishing and the Evolution of Knowledge"[1] (which clearly cites the prior work of Bush in 1945 and Nelson in 1978).

Discussion forums as we know them today have been around since about 1978 and ad-supported publishing predates the 1800's.

I can't seem to find any specific mention of what we today know as pagerank (i.e. the cumulative probability that a given user will arrive at a given page) at all in either work.

[1] <http://www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/Hypertext/HPEK1.html></comment></comment>


Handling Auto-Generated Lambda Expressions while C# to Java Conversion - <AUTHOR> http://codeporting.com/blog/csharp-to-java-conversion/archive/2012/05/30/codeporting-c2java-now-supports-lambda-expressions.html

<comment><USER2> I imagine the backend of this conversion must involve some heavy-duty type inference. Very slick feature!

<comment><AUTHOR> @fructose, we are still working on LINQ and more LINQ features will be ready for C# to java conversion in coming months.</comment></comment>


Is Apple trying to kill PWAs? - <AUTHOR> https://ionicframework.com/blog/is-apple-trying-to-kill-pwas/ <comment><USER2> Previous thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22686602)

Edit: it looks like this article's main point was discussed pretty extensively in the previous thread, including at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22688294](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22688294).

</comment><comment><USER3> They do stuff like this not because they want to kill the web, but because Apple will always do what it thinks is in the best interests of the company and its customers.

(Who comes first seems to depend on what the technology in question is.)

In the case of WebKit, it's clear they see these "privacy-enhancing" features as a benefit to both, and so they go all-in.

Like removing the floppy drives. Lots of people had good use cases for them but they believed it was the best move for everyone in the long term.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow, this was the ELI5 article that worked for me. Now I finally get it for the context of homescreen apps.

<comment><USER5> I still don't get homescreen apps. When I put a bookmark on my home screen, it just open safari to that page. It's not it's own app, all the other tabs are still there. /confused

<comment><USER4> It depends on how the app is written I guess. For example, make a bookmark of this demo PWA app on your homescreen [https://airhorner.com](https://airhorner.com). Notice that it opens itself in a full screen mode, no safari controls are shown.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! that's neat.

I found this:

> Set the apple-mobile-web-app-capable meta tag to yes to turn on standalone > mode.

[https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ap...](https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/ConfiguringWebApplications/ConfiguringWebApplications.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It still kills tools like Twine in browser though: [https://www.reddit.com/r/twinegames/comments/fp1ro2/ios_user...](https://www.reddit.com/r/twinegames/comments/fp1ro2/ios_users_stop_using_twine_2x_online_version/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Still waiting for web push notifications.... I rly hate apple.

<comment><USER2> Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.</comment></comment>


Show HN: CoderNews - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hodgesmr/CoderNews

<comment><USER2> Oh, please don't do this:

"Historically, these features [vote ups and comments] are hard to use on small devices and I want to make an app that is easy to use."

I understand that you want to make a minimal app (personal preference or laziness – doesn't really matter), but claiming that vote ups ("like buttons") are hard to use on a mobile device just makes it sound like you weren't able to build it.

It's your app, and you can do what ever you feel fit with it. There's no need to excuse your decisions with made up facts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, but I meant what I wrote. I'm a big fan of the HackerNode app, but I find it extremely hard to traverse the comment threads when reading with it. I've been contemplating for a while on better ways, but haven't come up with anything yet.

I also found that personally, I just want the stories. A lot of the time that I'm on Proggit or HN, I'm not even logged in. So I made an app that did what I want.

Same with voting. I made a reader, not a client.

However, forks and contributions are always welcome, so if you have ideas and are jonesing to contribute, feel free!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really like the UI you made. And the ability to change the number of days to keep posts is really cool too. Are you doing any checking for duplicate posts between sites?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! And yes! If you check out the CoreDataManager -- [https://github.com/hodgesmr/CoderNews/blob/master/CoderNews/...](https://github.com/hodgesmr/CoderNews/blob/master/CoderNews/Managers/CoreDataManager.m) \-- you can see that I'm checking by url and title. There could be improvements though, like parsing trailing slashes that sometimes allow for dupes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Won't run on my iphone, since it requires ios 6.1.</comment>


There are worse things than corn syrup - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/03/snl-high-fructose-corn-syrup-parody-video.php

<comment><AUTHOR> But most of them don't have industry trade groups astro-turfing for them...</comment>


Show HN: WebRender – Edge Deployed SSR as a Service - <AUTHOR> https://webrender.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm working with a startup that's using React for a site where SEO is really important, which means we need to do Server Side Rendering well.

We tried various traditional SSR solutions, but it always required front end engineers to set up and maintain servers. It was often quite slow in spinning up and generating responses, we'd lose flexibility in how we wrote our code, and it hampered our ability to ship features quickly. We'd need to deal with separate code paths for different user agents, and roll our own analytics to make sure we were sending the right thing to the right crawler. It was... non- trivial.

We tried some pre-rendering solutions, but they don't always come with built in caches, and if they do the first responses are always painfully slow. For a site that updates dynamically this is a deal breaker. In addition to that, users don't actually need to receive a server side rendered response most of the time. Only crawlers do. Making the experience slower for users.

So we decided to build something new. We combined really fast pre-rendering with a crawler and analytics service that pre caches the pages that search engines visit (with different user agents and devices), and shows you which user agents are utilizing your pages in different ways. It integrates easily with analytics services like honeycomb and can be deployed as an API on the edge (just send an API request on crawler requests), or you can CNAME a whole domain to it (we'll handle serving only to crawlers). It gave us the control we needed to not slow down our engineering teams, let frontend developers write frontend code without worrying about deploying servers, and give us the SEO insights and performance gains we needed to start utilizing React for a site where SEO is important. We also extended it for people who don't use react, as it'll work in front of any SPA.

It's finally polished up to the point where we can start letting people in off the street to kick the tires. Check out the demo on your own site and let us know what you think!</comment>


Ask HN: Can you recommend a Cloud host to us? - <AUTHOR>

We are considering either Rackspace or Amazon for cloud service. Does anyone have any experiences or recommendations good or bad for either.
Any problems with slow speed or outages, things of that nature.
Comments both positive and negative would be appreciated.
Thanks, <comment><USER2> I use all of Rackspace Cloud's offerings (Cloud Sites, Cloud Servers, Cloud Files) and I've been satisfied so far. I also use GoGrid for more advanced applications, as they offer free hardware load balancing and mountable cloud storage.

I'm assuming you're interested in Cloud Servers vs Amazon EC2? Depending on your usage (mainly bandwidth in/out), one or the other may work out slightly cheaper, but for the most part they are about the same price (although with Rackspace, support is free and very good). A huge advantage to Rackspace is that the instances can be resized on the fly, and they allow bursting.

For example, a 2GB Cloud Server (based on server RAM) is 1/8th of a quad core 2.4GHz server, but that is a CPU floor, meaning that 1/8th of the server's resources are guaranteed, but if you have a brief spike and there are sufficient resources on the host, you can burst to 100% of 4 cores. With EC2, you can never go above the allotted resources.

As far as outages go, Rackspace had some bad luck with their DFW datacenter this year, but I wasn't affected. The SAT datacenter seems to be more stable.

</comment><comment><USER3> The answer is - "It depends", on a lot of parameters like: 1\. Do you need a dedicated box or a virtual OS on a shared box will do? 2\. What are your avg monthly usage requirements- box and bandwidth? And how these requirements shall change of time. 3\. You want to customize you box's configuration before u rent it? 4\. You want to pay monthly or yearly or more? 5\. Will you need additional throw away on demand computational nodes? How often? 6\. Do you just wish to use servers or other services like S3, SDB, SQS, cloud- files(rackspace)? Many more ....

So I think if you describe you requirements and budget better, the suggestions provided will be better.

About problems like low speed, outages, etc. Yes both have their own set of problems, but still a more relevant answer can be given when you have illustrated you requirements.

I have been using EC2,S3,SDB for one of my projects(last 4 months) and Rackspace/Mosso cloudserver for another (last 3 months). Since the durations are short I may not be able to explain everything, but will try my best. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> We will be looking for a cloud server that we can self administrate, vs. a cloud site that the host administrates. The budget will be what it has to be to get what we want and need.

1\. Q. Do you need a dedicated box or a virtual OS on a shared box will do?

A. Virtual on a shared box will do right now.

2\. Q. What are your avg monthly usage requirements- box and bandwidth? And how these requirements shall change of time.

A. Currently we are still in development, so these are still to be determined. Part of our service will be serving video content.

3\. Q. You want to customize you box's configuration before u rent it?

A. Yes, we will need to mod apache and harden the OS.

4\. Q. You want to pay monthly or yearly or more?

A. Cash flow currently dictates monthly.

5\. Q. Will you need additional throw away on demand computational nodes? How often?

A. "Computational Nodes" as far a grid hosting no. I'm not a cloud expert but if it is handled by the scalability of the cloud probably. How often would still need to be determined.

6\. Q. Do you just wish to use servers or other services like S3, SDB, SQS, cloud-files(rackspace)?

A. Yes, probably except for SQS.

Just a note: We are leaning towards RackSpace because of their connection with LimeLight because of Limelight's focus on video delivery to the end user.

<comment><USER3> Most of you requirements except the need for SDB and S3 are well satisfied by Rackspace. Rackspace is also coming up with a new feature, similar to S3 called cloud files. But no equivalent for SDB.

Since you are in development Rackspace's low end boxes (like 256M with 512 bursts, etc.)charged nominally for bandwidth will do fine. Whereas Amazon has got fixed boxes with 2G or something as far as I remember, I took it like 5 months ago. For a dev box where there is no/not-much user traffic, a low end shared box from Rackspace if a good option. Its highly efficient on the budget. Once you have used it for dev phase you will have more knowledge and confidence on what Rackspace can do and what not. So you can decide whether to use it for prod or move over to something else.

Rackspace has got a monthly billing and anytime cancelling option. It works fine on budget as well as it gives you control over things if they are going beyond what you initially thought, as you can see the usage in real time (may be a few hours late at max). They had a money back policy too, about 4 months ago when I signed up, for the first month if the user is not satisfied.

About problems:

EC2: very less problems. But remember these are commodity hardware, measly boxes, the moment you start too many process (if doing any mutli processing) the box's response time mounts exponentially :-). Multi-threaded is fine.

S3 - have been using for storing images and haven't had a problem so far. You have options to save your EC2 image to your S3 space regularly to keep backup server images. That costs you in terms of the space required on S3.

SDB: I hope you are aware but will still iterate that this is a key-value datastore, not relational. I will say it is very much in the works. It does a lot good at most of the times, but lack of a group-by, only text data, only lexicographic sort (which forces the user to put even numerical data in special formats to sort on it), a bit ill defined mutli-valued attributes, number of attributes allowed to put at each request and overall number of attributes for a item are a few bumps in the road. But once you read the docs and be regular with the AWS forums most of these get solved.

Rackspace cloud server: Only problem I have faced SSH is slow sometimes.

Rackspace cloudfiles: haven't used. But I know that you can automate your cloud server backup to cloud files, that costs.

Again, as you mentioned LimeLight, that's another factor, that makes Rackspace more suitable for you.

So I guess you best bet is to start off with Rackspace for now and see how it goes.

Hope that answer helps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing to consider is that rackspace doesn't seem to have an EBS (elastic block storage) equivalent. You can not mount any of their NAS offerings to a cloud server.

This means a few things:

      1. Your cloud servers top out at 620G storage per
         instance.

      2. You can not scale the storage separately from RAM/CPU.
         To get more storage you have to buy the more expensive
         instance types, even if you don't need the additional
         RAM/CPU.

      3. You can not increase throughput nor reliability by
         doing a soft-raid over multiple mounted storage
         devices.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, this is the last info I got from rackspace.

<comment><USER5> True, but the reason Amazon created EBS is that on EC2 local instance storage is transient, so they needed something nonvolatile but lower-level than S3. Cloud Server's local storage is already nonvolatile and RAID-1'd.

/works for Rackspace

<comment><USER4> Well, I really like Rackspace and would love to find an excuse to use them - but this statement comes across as weaseling. :-)

What does it matter _why_ amazon introduced EBS here? It doesn't. What matters is that this is a serious constraint on the Rackspace side.

You brought this up, so I'll take the chance to add that I really don't like the way you spin this on your comparison page (under Bullet 01, no less):

[http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers...](http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers/compare)

Is Rackspace turning a Marketing-Company now?

A fair comparison would include EBS and the associated costs. EBS is an integral part of the EC2 offering, just like your NAS options are an... Oh wait, those don't work with your CloudServers.

The apple-to-oranges FUD you have there right now only leaves a bad taste in the mouth of an educated, potential customer. Smoke & mirror tactics like that are a big red flag ("Are they so insecure about their offering?").

<comment><USER5> > What does it matter why amazon introduced EBS here? It doesn't.

Sure it does, because the reason is precisely that EBS is the only option for non-volatile storage in the Amazon cloud. This comes free for nonvolatile storage comes free with every Cloud Servers vm, up to the limits you mentioned, instead of having to pay extra for EBS to get that feature.

All I was saying was this is a fine tradeoff for most users. No need to get defensive. :)

<comment><USER4> No idea how my statement could come across as defensive - the intention was rather _offensive_. And I must say I'm quite disappointed by the response.

Sorry if I acome across like an angry nerd by now but a) that's what I am and b) do you really think this is a good forum to play the smoke & mirrors game in?

Many of us over here build systems like the ones you are selling. False claims like "rackspace is giving their storage away for free" simply don't work for us.

I feel insulted when reading bollocks like that. Why do you try to treat me like an idiot?

The rackspace storage does ofcourse _not_ come "free". The cost was simply factored into the base-fee.

Let's compare the largest instance where we can make a match, shall we:

       Monthly fee |  Rackspace 8G Instance | EC2 "Large"
      </comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----
      Monthly Fee  |                $345.60 |         $288.00
      640G Disk    |                $0.00   |          $64.00
      </comment><comment></comment><comment>=^</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+</comment><comment></comment><comment>====
                                    $345.60 |         $352.00

Rackspace comes out ahead by a lousy $6.40 or 2%. That's your definition of free, yes?

Want me to make that comparison with a reserved instance? Ah, thanks for asking, I knew you wanted.

       Monthly fee |  Rackspace 8G Instance | "Large" reserved
      </comment><comment></comment><comment>-+</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----
      Monthly Fee  |                $345.60 |         $162.00
      640G Disk    |                $0.00   |          $64.00
      </comment><comment></comment><comment>=^</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>+</comment><comment></comment><comment>====
                                    $345.60 |         $226.00

Oops. By the means of a simple 1 year commitment EC2 suddenly comes out ahead quite a worthwhile $119.60 or 35%.

And know what, one great thing we could use these $120 saved bucks for would be to add 1.2T more storage! How's that? And what would the price for that be at rackspace anyways? Oh sorry, I forget, 640G ought to be enough for everybody...

Well, I'll stop already, you see where it's headed. :-)

For your own good, please refrain from bending facts the way you did above when speaking to a technical audience. Unless having nerds like me pop out of the wood and redact you in public is part of your marketing strategy...

</comment><comment><USER6> I've used and had good experience with both platforms. The only performance issues I've ever had were with SimpleDB when it was in beta.

For support the nod would have to go to Rackspace, in my opinion. The two times I've needed help I was talking to a real person in San Antonio within twenty seconds or so, which beats a post in the AWS forums that might eventually get answered from an employee if your lucky.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's what I'm doing at the moment:

Slicehost for web server, backend processing and db. This allows me to scale each major part individually. The processor agents store a bunch of stuff on S3.

I'm probably going to change this to using the backend systems on Slicehost just as schedulers and do the actual processing on EC2. The biggest concern here is transferring the data back and forth. If Amazon provided functionality identical to Slicehost at the same economics, I would switch in an instant.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone have any experiences with Rackspace Cloud Sites? Is it a good way to get scalable hosting without worrying about provisioning new instances and such?

<comment><USER9> Customer Support is good. Functionality is pretty meh. You have no SSH, no SCP, no gzip.

We host on EC2 and it's been really cost effective, and everything that we've needed EXCEPT multiple IPs to an instance. each instance can only have one IP, and therefore one SSL certificate (until.....SSL tech in browsers catches up with standards, and TLS is fully adopted in browsers and apache)

<comment><USER10> This is indeed a problem. The only solutions I've found are to use a wild card certificate if you just need to secure subdomains, or to use a SANS UCC certificate that allows multiple entries into the Subject Alternative Name (not perfect due to cost and the need to reissue the cert every time you add a domain).

Have you found any other workarounds to this problem?

<comment><USER9> I haven't. Right now, we're trying to figure it out. We work with many FQDNs. I've been talking to a local guy who says that in bulk I could get IPs for $3/mo at his datacenter. The price is good, but I'm then back to managing hardware, which I don't really want to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use Linode for my sites and haven't had any problems. I've heard that Slicehost has a better control panel (Linode has practically nothing apart from allowing you to provision your resources), but I didn't really need those. I just needed a VPS with root access that wouldn't break the bank, and Linode fit the bill.

</comment><comment><USER12> I haven't used Amazon myself, but a good friend of mine has done quite a bit with it. When I asked him about it, he said (IIRC) that one thing to be aware of what that you couldn't run a MySQL DB on one of their small instances--you needed a large instance. So, something to keep in mind.

(Please do verify this--I may have misremembered or the facts may have changed since I heard this.)

<comment><USER12> So that I know how to improve my comments in the future, why was this downvoted?

It's an important thing to know, and I admitted up front that it was second- hand knowledge with some uncertainty about it. Was the issue the second-hand knowledge, the lack of complete certainty, or what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently switched to Slicehost. For me, it's exactly what I want. A flat monthly fee for a server instance and easily upgradable as needed. They provide a choice of Linux systems, and from there you're free to build as you see fit. They offer reverse dns, which is vital for running mail servers and not available on Amazon( last I checked. )</comment>


Whatever Happened to Intrade? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/03/whatever-happened-to-intrade.html <comment><USER2> I think Betfair always had more volume on these political bets, and should therefore be more predictivce. Betfair just never got the press because it was sports focused and also closed to US residents.</comment>