Did Lawrence doubt the bomb? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/09/04/did-lawrence-doubt-the-bomb/

<comment><USER3> A heck of a lot of people "doubted" the bomb, in the sense that they weren't _sure_ smashing N Japanese cities would prompt them to surrender. I've just finished _Now It Can Be Told_ , published in 1962 by General Leslie Groves, who was in charge of the Manhattan Project, and from various things including how he praises one guy for his confidence that 2 would do it, it's pretty clear even he wasn't sure.

The excellent _Five Days in August_ ([http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691168431/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691168431/)) the author recommends comments how after Nagasaki there was quite a bit of discussion whether to use the 3rd bomb, which if I remember correctly was being constructed in Tinian at the time, for another strategic strike or to reserve it for tactical use in Operation Olympic, the invasion of Kyushuu projected to start in 3 months. Which all but MacArthur had realized that absent the liberal use of nuclear or chemical was not going to happen, the Japanese had reinforced it too well, and had built too many kamikazis.

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought this was going to be about Lawrence's unhappiness with special relativity. Cyclotrons have an upper limit on particle velocity. As particles are accelerated, they have more mass, and the cyclotron's elegant balance between inertia and the containment fields is lost. This was the first time relativity had engineering consequences. Lawrence didn't like that, and doubted whether something as abstract as special relativity could affect his machines.

Nobody knew if bombing Japan was going to end the war, including the Supreme War Council in Japan. War Minister Anami wanted to go on with the war after the first atomic bombing, saying the Allies couldn't have more than one bomb. After the second bomb, he signed a surrender document and committed ritual suicide. There was a big Army pro-war fight-to-the-end faction, which tried a last-minute coup attempt to prevent the surrender.[1]

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Japans-Longest-Pacific-Research- Societ...](http://www.amazon.com/Japans-Longest-Pacific-Research- Society/dp/4770028873)

<comment> rational-future You are completely ignoring the other big reason for surrender - <USER2> declaration of war.

<comment><USER5> Another theory is that the bomb was used because the USSR was shifting its focus towards Japan.

In Europe, all allied forced descended on Germany, and Europe the region was divided between the west and east, specifically the US/Marshallplan/NATO and the USSR/Molotovplan/Warschaupact.

Had the war ended in Japan the way it did in Europe, with the USSR playing a major role in the final battle and the inevitable Japanese peace process, Japan (and the region) may have been divided much like Europe was. Japan might not have become an ally of the US, might not have been part of the gigantic US economic motor in the post-war era that heavily relied on Europe and Japan as (economic) allies, and Japan may have ended up as some kind of North/South Korean divide but between the US/USSR instead of US/China.

The theory goes then, that the nuclear bomb hastened the process to swiftly force a Japanese surrender before the USSR could exercise its influence in the region.

As such under this theory, the nuclear bomb is seen as the beginning of the cold war, which is normally recognised to have begun two years later. The bomb ensured the US its first major exclusive ally, Japan, in the cold war.

I haven't studied it but it seems like a credible theory in that it's plausible. Whether this plausible type of reasoning actually played a role in the bombings is another story, one I haven't ever taken the time to explore.

In contrast, the notion that the USSR's declaration of war made the Japanese surrender strikes me as implausible. After all, the Japanese had been viciously decimated for many months, the nuclear bombs were dwarfed by the firebombings campaigns of all major cities over and over again, and it was well known that the Japanese's military capacity was reduced to virtually nothing, and that as a country with few natural resources and reliant on imports, it was bleeding dry after every single one of its logistics routes (air, land, sea) were completely cut off. Finally it had no air supremacy left and was defenceless to bombing. My point is, victory was impossible and defeat inevitably, the USSR declaration changed very little from the Japanese perspective. But it changed a lot for the American perspective, which is why it's plausible the US wanted to force surrender quickly.

Beyond that, the cold war was very much, perhaps most powerfully characterised, by constant shows of power. Demonstrating nuclear power as the first nation must have played a role in the US's claim to hegemony. Any doubts there may have been that the era of European supremacy was over, and that the US had become the world's superpower, must have instantly faded. It's the equivalent of China overtaking the US in GDP, building a base on mars, dominating at the olympics and showing unprecedented military power and weaponry. In that sense, too, a show of power with the bomb was perhaps the first action of the cold war.

<comment><USER3> _it was well known that the Japanese 's military capacity was reduced to virtually nothing_

Not even MacArthur, the only one who still was planning on carrying out Operation Olympic as conceived, believed that. He had ordered up 1/4 of the Purple Hearts thought necessary (perhaps for it and Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu), _and we 're still using those_.

People who trusted our intelligence intercepts knew between the IJA reinforcements in Kyushu and the 8,000 ready kamikazes that the original concept was dead. Based on our apocalyptic invasion experiences culminating in the Battle of Okinawa, those who didn't know about the Manhattan Project were planning on liberal use of chemical weapons, those who did, using a handful of nukes.

 _My point is, victory was impossible and defeat inevitably the USSR declaration changed very little from the Japanese perspective. But it changed a lot for the American perspective, which is why it 's plausible the US wanted to force surrender quickly._

This thesis fails because the USSR didn't do it until after we'd bombed Hiroshima, in fact, they started on the day we bombed Nagasaki (or a hour or so before that day; I haven't seen a timezone adjusted timeline). By then we'd learned how totally untrustworthy Stalin was, and of course his eyes were on the prize of Eastern Europe.

In fact, if anything, I would expect the causality ran the other way. Prior to the dramatic results of bombing Hiroshima, and certainly prior to Trinity 3 weeks earlier, I would expect that Stalin believed he had plenty of time to gain what he wanted in the east, but those brought the distinct possibility the war would be over immediately, as indeed happened.

As for the threat of a divided Japan, exactly whose navy would have deposited enough Red Army troops on the Home Islands for that to be a concern?

<comment><USER5> Everything you said has no bearing on my point, which maybe I should've stated more strictly: 'Japan had no military capacity to win the war or subject other countries to its will'.

The fact they still had the capacity to fight to the last man and that this would be bloody is a truism that doesn't need to be stated. But my point is that they (1) had no capacity beyond their borders and (2) their defeat was inevitable. In that respect, the USSR's decision to go to war, too, changed nothing for them. That's my point. An anecdote about how a lot of purple hearts were printed because the end was expected to be bloody doesn't change that point. Of course it made Japan's case even more hopeless (in particular because the Soviet's would likely invade Manchuria, one of the remaining places for Japan to gain natural resources, although even those were effectively cut off as Japan's merchant fleet had been decimated).

For example the US Strategic Bombing Survey established by the secretary of war (1940-1945) established: > Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

Eisenhower says: > During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.

And he was joined by other generals, e.g. McArthur. The guy in charge of the , LeMay, who of course famously firebombed Japan in a way much more destructive than the nuclear bombs (death tolls between 200k and 500k, and destroying nearly half of all built up areas of 66 cities) who opined he had committed war crimes and that he'd be tried as a war criminal had the US lost the war somehow, said

> The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.

Fleet admiral Nimitz said:

> The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no > decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.

Fleet Admiral Leafy said: > The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

The fact that the end of the war might've have involved more fighting and that some campaigns had been planned that would have been bloody (again, an invasion wasn't the only scenario accounted for, the nuclear bombs proved at the very least that), doesn't change the fact that Japan had in essence already been defeated, whether they'd surrendered or not, whether the last mile would be painful or not.

> In fact, if anything, I would expect the causality ran the other way.

Your statement just supports the idea I raised, which is that the US threw the bombs knowing the USSR would at some point shift its focus towards Japan. I'm not saying that the US decided within 24 hours 'oh, the USSR attacks Japan, never woulda imagined that, took us by complete surprise, let's quickly drop the bomb'. Of course not, and of course that wouldn't make sense as you stated given the first bomb was dropped before that. My point is that with the war in Europe roundly settled, the USSR would very likely at one point have looked to exert its influence south of its borders, the region of Japanese influence, the US knew this and in fact the US was aware that the USSR delayed surrender proposals to make itself ready to shift its forces to the east. Given the above statements by top-ranked military personnel it's sensible to say that Japan had already been defeated, was dependent on imports, had no merchant fleet and barely a naval fleet that couldn't be refueled anyway. Thus an atomic bomb wasn't required to defeat Japan, unless you were on a timeline because at some point the USSR would shift its attention. The fact the USSR did shift immediately after the first bomb was dropped proves exactly their interest in being there for the end and playing a role in the peace process and aftermath. And indeed the very fact the USSR had the ability to invade quite quickly (much quicker than the Japanese had expected the Americans to invade), perhaps even caused the US to choose targets that'd show maximum damage (outside of Tokyo which was ruled out for obvious reasons), as opposed to using multiple nuclear weapons 'for show'. After all, the US would have the third bomb ready later that month, and the 4th in August, and others following, and was not at threat by Japan. Given a few months they could've continued to bomb with impunity, drop nuclear weapons for show with impunity, block off Japan's trade with impunity, and be strengthened by their Soviet allies.

> As for the threat of a divided Japan, exactly whose navy would have > deposited enough Red Army troops on the Home Islands for that to be a > concern?

The same fleet that allowed the 16th Army (100k strong) invade Sakhalin, or the fleet that facilitated the invasion of the Kuril islands, or the planned Russian invasion of Hokkaido which never happened due to the surrender. Don't take it by the way as a divided Japan in terms of two different countries on a militarised border like say Korea, but rather one like a divided Europe, in which the USSR has half of the influence. Unlike in Europe however, the USSR didn't acquire as much influence in Japan and Japan turned into a very strong US/Western ally, and one can argue sensibly that the atomic bombs may have helped the US in that regard, and that in turn this may have inspired the US to use the bombs in spite of a resolution to the war that would've taken longer.

<comment><USER3> Most of what you say moves the goalposts, from ending the war as soon as possible, i.e. with the least loss of life, especially non-Japanese, to the hypothetical of "defeat" equaling actual surrender, which things like the Battle of Okinawa make quite questionable, and could at worst set up another cycle of war (see ending comments).

After the fact statements by non-Air Force flag officers? Probably in the context of nuclear weapons being perceived as making their services obsolete (a mistake that took the bloody Korean War to start correcting, but before that see e.g. The Revolt of the Admirals)?

As for Sakhalin, it was an invasion of the southern half of the island. The USSR used an amphibious landing of a rifle brigade and a marine battalion in the effort, that's not the same thing as landing 100K, and the rest of the islands the took were quite small. Could they have taken a fair amount, or maybe even all of Hokkaido? Very possibly, but this is not hardly the same sort of thing as occupying Eastern Europe. Today the island has 4% of the total Japanese population; due to it having 1/4th of the home islands' arable land, I'd assume it was larger in proportion back then, but compared to grabbing most of what was traditionally "Germany", with a very long land border, plus almost all of Eastern Europe (does Austria count as part of it)?

Anyway, your thesis rests on the assumption our end of WWII leadership, ridden as it was with Soviet agents, was so bloody minded they'd casually slaughter 10s of thousands of Japanese merely to decrease Soviet influence in East Asia.

An extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof when the simpler explanation works so well. That the two atomic bombs ended up saving even more Japanese lives, 250,000 civilian lives per month in the rest of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and 10s of thousands of Allied military that would have been lost in the invasions.

The only debatable point I see here is that of unconditional surrender, which after WWI, after, as Tom Lehrer put it " _We taught them a lesson in 1918. And they 've hardly bothered us since then._", we were determined that we wouldn't go through another cycle. Which we accomplished; maybe Germany and/or Japan will once again threaten the world, but that's not in the foreseeable future.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


$40m convention cancelled due to San Francisco's homelessness and opioid crisis - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5914425/Big-convention-cancels-meeting-San-Francisco-citys-problems-homelessness-drug.html <comment><USER2> Yeah, SF is a shithole. I live downtown.

I've always thought that the analogy was Luanda, Angola.

Luanda, Angola, has, for over 10 years been the most expensive city to live.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/20/most-expensive-cities-for- ex...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/20/most-expensive-cities-for-expats.html) Luanda isn't expensive because everyone wants to live there like Laguna Beach or Beverley Hills; it's expensive because it's a boomtown shithole that people are forced to live in.

The Average 2-bedroom here in SF is $4,500 because we are so eager to live in such a paradise?

No, because we want access to those oil gushers.. you live in a shithole boomtown.

How do I know?

Because I grew up here and I'd be anywhere else if it weren't for the gushers.</comment>


Google's new logo was created by Russian designer in 2008 - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailytech.com/Exclusive+Googles+New+Search+Icon+Was+Created+in+2008+by+Russian+Designer/article37480.htm

<comment><USER2> The latter half of the article is interesting, but the lede about the "G" logo is inane. _Any_ minimalist rendering of a common shape like a letter is going to wind up looking similar to something else. Surely this is self-evident?

Incidentally the Tokyo 2020 olympic committee is in the late stages of a similar furore over their logo, a stylized "T" with some some adornments, which turned out look similar to the logo of a Belgian theater company:

[https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=tokyo+olympics+thea...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=tokyo+olympics+theatre+de+liege)

Equally silly in my opinion, but people then found more blatant examples of copying in the designer's past work so they wound up scrapping the emblem.

<comment><USER3> I agree. My first thought is that the makers of Uno would have a better case than Kortunov.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I doubt it's a rip. The capital G from that guy's design and the new Google logo are both from standard 1920's sans serifs like Futura or DIN 30640.

</comment><comment><USER5> The lack of article in this headline gives it away that the creator of that headlineis Russian ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> >I would argue visual evidence inarguably points to Google borrowing and making minor edits to Kortunov's concept.

I would certainly argue with "inarguably".

Kortunov created a really good icon design, but it's not hard to imagine other people independently coming up with something similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but looking at both logos, even the tiniest detail like squared corners and the overall shape looks suspiciously similar.

<comment><USER6> Kortunov's design is old, so other designers might have copied it, but look at these, anyway, because they all have similarities to Google's new icon, and they all predate it by years:

[http://freshtutorial.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Big- Goog...](http://freshtutorial.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Big-Google-Plus- Icon-575x402.png)

[http://takedesigns.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/free-2.png](http://takedesigns.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/free-2.png)

[http://designurge.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/09/g__by_mauxw...](http://designurge.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/09/g__by_mauxwebmaster-d420wxx.jpg)

I think it's just a case of parallel evolution. Mix up a blend of influences like Google's existing primary color-based design, Microsoft's Windows Logo, Google Chrome logo, and some aesthetic sense, and you'll get a lot of logo designs that look similar.

This article is interesting, but it has a terrible title and overly-confident conclusion, which is not supported by the evidence

<comment><AUTHOR> I do agree about the terrible title.

<comment><USER6> @HN/Dang: Could you change the title to something like "Google's new logo is surprisingly similar to one created by a prominent Russian designer in 2008"?

(And, maybe this is interesting. Someone independently derived a Kortunov- style logo from the new Google version. So there is a discussion among designers comparing the two logos: [https://dribbble.com/shots/2224596-Google- redesigned-G-lette...](https://dribbble.com/shots/2224596-Google-redesigned-G- letter-mark-icon-revised) )

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure the Google one is off center like that on purpose. It's kind of hard to explain but perfectly centering things is a good way of making a boring design.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sure they look similar but that doesn't imply one stole from the other, for all we know Google created this internally as part of their zillions of a/b tests years before. Google is also extremely rich and their logo is one of the most visible on the planet meaning stealing from someone would inevitably be worse than simply paying the guy for it.

</comment><comment><USER8> For simpler symbols it's very common for more than one designer to converge to the same idea. That said, Google should've done their due diligence and found this guy's sketch before going live with the redesign.</comment>


Department of Labor sues Oracle over discriminatory pay and hiring practices - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/18/department-of-labor-sues-oracle-over-discriminatory-pay-and-hiring-practices/ <comment><USER2> So they're accused of both (1) paying white males more than others and (2) favoring Asian applicants over others.

The two claims are not conflicting, but if this is going to a jury it would be a tough needle for the DoL to thread. The knee-jerk reaction (which is sometimes determinative in jury trials) is that Oracle couldn't be favoring both groups.

The DoL would want to show evidence that the first claim relates to non- technical positions (where there are fewer Asians) and that the second claim relates to technical positions (where there are more Asians).

Disclosures: I am a former lawyer and worked for Oracle a few years ago. While not typically relevant, I'd also disclose here that I am an Asian/white male, and I have no complaints about my pay at Oracle.</comment>


37signals' Chalk: a fun little browser-based app for iPad - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2637-introducing-chalk-a-fun-little-browser-based-app-for-ipad-inspired-by-our-new-office <comment><USER2> Seems like a remake of their Draft app with a chalky UI.

To really make a mobile web app be cool, it's still gotta work on the web. Otherwise, it's not cool. I'm making that a rule right now. Visiting a URL that says I have to be on an iPad is not cool. It's like saying I need to install a plugin that costs $500.

<comment><USER3> Its still a work in progress, but check out my project <http://blotjot.com> Its a collaborative whiteboard that works in any browser that supports canvas, including mobile safari on the iPhone and iPad. Runs on node.js + socket.io

Example: <http://blotjot.com/heyhn>

<comment><USER2> I made a little canvas demo app myself about a month ago. Works on web or mobile (least on Dolphin Browser in Android). I haven't tested a ton though.

<http://napnote.com>

It's more of a concept app to draw on Chipotle or Starbucks napkins than a serious endeavor. Some fellow engineers and I were joking about it at lunch one day and I promised to make a kick ass web 2.0 app that did indeed enable you to draw on napkins. Then I added some other backgrounds because it seems that whatever medium you draw on affects your thinking in subtle ways.

So yeah, it's more or less pointless. Google wouldn't even give me AdSense for it. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And here's the magic: <http://chalk.37signals.com/chalk.js> <http://chalk.37signals.com/stylesheets/chalk.css>

It's fun to look at this stuff, especially from the perspective of someone who hasn't gotten into HTML5 yet.

<comment><USER2> it would be super easy to add support for mouse events.

[tutorial]

They are attaching events using jQuery's bind method. Like:

canvas.bind("touchstart", ...

You can add multiple events into bind. To add support for mouse events, you'd just add in the requisite mouse events, like so:

canvas.bind("touchstart mousedown" ...

canvas.bind("touchmove mousemove" ...

canvas.bind("touchend mouseup" ...

[/tutorial]

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Cool little detail: the eraser actually removes a layer of "chalk dust" from the chalkboard as well. Very nicely done.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're wondering if this still works in a non-iPad browser... it doesn't. I was curious if I could still draw with the mouse.

<comment><USER7> I was hoping to swoop in with a "User Agent Switcher to the rescue!" message. However: switching user agents works in Firefox but the app layout looks broken [1] and it doesn't do anything; and switching user agents doesn't seem to work in Chrome.

[1] <http://postimage.org/image/1z21v9nhg/>

<comment><USER8> The events are touch-specific. Would be pretty easy to add in support for mouse events too, but they've clearly no immediate interest in that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I believe they're releasing this, as a fun way to test the water with HTML5, Javascript, etc.

I believe they're pissed off with iOS development, as it's significantly more hassle than their usual routine of web development. I think they're lining up HTML5 as their solution to mobile. So we'll see Basecamp,Backpack,Highrise, etc move to HTML5, this way they'll have iPhone,iPad,Android supported.

I believe this based on the snippets of JS they've generously released, and I believe there is more to come.

I think this is far more likely than it being a publicity stunt.

</comment><comment><USER10> For a 3 day side project this is pretty cool. Say goodbye to pen and paper at client meetings. I think it'[s cool that it looks like their office too.

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems to me like a free version of 37signal's iPad app Draft. Much simplier idea but still awesome.

<comment><USER12> > Much simplier idea but still awesome.

Why is this "awesome"? I don't have an iPad, so I haven't tried it first hand, but it seems to be a simple drawing tool disguised as chalk instead of a solid line. They're a dime a dozen.

I went back and re-checked it out to ensure that I didn't miss anything. This would certainly have been more noteworthy if it was collaborative in real time amongst multiple iPads (e.g. etherpad).

<comment><USER13> I missed the part of the blog post where they said "this will revolutionize the way you do work!" It seems to me that they called it a "fun little app".

<comment><USER12> Sure, but a "fun little app" is hardly news in my opinion, especially for a well established company like 37 Signals. We're one step away from having "OMG, DHH picked his nose" blog posts on the front page.

<comment><USER13> You don't think it's a bit d$*chey to compare these guys spare time project to DHH picking his nose?

<comment><USER12> I think it's pretty obvious that I was exaggerating. I really don't see anything of value here. If you do, fine, go have fun with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Slightly unrelated, but anyone know why they put chalkboards in their offices and not whiteboards?

<comment><USER15> See [http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662465/for-a-company-that- sells...](http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662465/for-a-company-that-sells- productivity-a-space-that-fosters-it) and find the part starting '"I can't stand whiteboards," says Fried.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is 37signals treading water? The frequency of these worthless blog posts attempting to draw attention to themselves has been increasing. They say they have a lot of customers but something feels wrong.

<comment><USER13> You seem to be looking for drama where there's none to be found. Two guys wrote an web-backed iPad app and wanted to share it. If I dinked around and came up with something like Chalk, I'd want to blog it too.

Yes, 37signals is wildly more successful than most people on HN, and yes, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between their "attempts to change the world" blog posts and their "look what I did with my 3-day-weekend" blog posts, but: it's a blog. They don't owe you anything more than blog posts. This is an _above-average_ blog post; it came with a new app!</comment></comment>


Never Sell "No" - <AUTHOR> http://unhustling.com/post/55159363997/never-sell-no

<comment><USER2> This is why I hate sales people.

They sell shit, which doesn't exist, because they don't have to carry the can for realizing it...</comment>


Move Over Moore's Law, Make Way for Huang's Law - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/computing/hardware/move-over-moores-law-make-way-for-huangs-law <comment><USER2> Huang said AlexNet is 500x times faster to train than 5 years ago. What people fail to understand about Moore's law is that it affects every components of a computer, not just "the computer speed overall", meaning AlexNet training speed has increased by 500x because multiple components have had a 2X gain over the last 3 years (Moore's law).

a 500x speed increase is merely 2^9, meaning if the main 9 hardware components that make up a computer had Moore's law progress incrementation (GPU, BUS, RAM, PORT SPEED, CPU, kernel software, drivers, etc...), then it all makes sense using Moore's law.

Note: Moore's law original statement was only referring to transistors, but it has been extrapolated to numerous hardware components (if not all of them)</comment>


NSA Can Spy on Smart Phone Data, previously thought secure - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/privacy-scandal-nsa-can-spy-on-smart-phone-data-a-920971.html

<comment><USER2> 2 hours have passed and this post got nothing but 7 upvotes?

Is this real life?

<comment><USER3> It is the weekend. I guess that is why it is so quiet.

The full article comes out on Monday in Spiegel Int., so I'm expecting a lot more detail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Time to get ready for Ubuntu Touch or FirefoxOS, I'd say.

</comment><comment><USER4> no Windows Phone?</comment>


DotJS 2013 announced on December 2nd at the Théâtre de Paris - <AUTHOR> http://dotjs.eu

<comment><USER2> I can vouch for @sylvinus' ability to organize great, inspiring conferences. Looking forward to this one!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks :) We will try to outdo ourselves this year!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This was great last year... sadly I can't make it this year :(

</comment><comment><USER4> Last year was really great ... @fat was amazing !</comment>


Carl Haber and the Earliest Recorded Sounds - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/05/out-loud-carl-haber-and-the-earliest-recorded-sounds.html

<comment><USER2> I recall reading a while back about an attempt to extract sound from the groves in ancient pots that were spun upon a potter's wheel. My recollection is that the attempt was unsuccessful, but wouldn't that be something to be able to hear sounds from potentially thousands of years ago.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> You can hear Alexander Graham Bell speaking at a bit after 9:00

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a podcast supplement to a New Yorker article [1] that is behind a paywall. There's also an earlier post [2] on the subject.

1\. [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/05/19/140519fa_fact_wilkinson)

2\. [http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/02/new-s...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/02/new- sounds-old-voices.html)</comment>


Tarsnap now accepts Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2014-03-27-tarsnap-bitcoin.html <comment><USER2> _I tell them I want to get paid X dollars in bitcoins, and they tell me how many bitcoins I should ask for and what address they should be sent to. Stripe then gives me the dollars I asked for (minus a small processing fee, of course)._

How much is the fee? Is it a fixed amount or proportional to the transaction value? How does Stripe set the dollar denominated bitcoin price? One easy way to make a bitcoin payment look cheap is to offer a low fee but offer a slightly inflated exchange rate and take a profit out of the difference between the rate used for payment and the rate you can get in the market (exchanges or dealers). It's hard to compare the economic value of dollar denominated bitcoin payments (relative to credit cards) without knowing these details.

<comment><USER3> We actually haven't figured out how the pricing will work yet. (We want to make sure we have the product right first.)

<comment><USER4> Will you be easing up on the "prohibited businesses"[0] restrictions for these Bitcoin transfers, since you aren't beholden to the credit card networks for these transactions? I've got a business that falls under category #2 that I'd like to use Stripe for but can't.

[0]: [https://stripe.com/prohibited_businesses](https://stripe.com/prohibited_businesses)

<comment><USER5> Why bother with Stripe if you just want to accept BTC? Use BitPay, Coinbase, or someone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> @cperciva, slightly off-topic: I had a curious question this past week about one aspect of the scrypt algorithm. If I recall correctly, it sandwiches the memory hard function between PBKDF2, and uses Salsa20 as the mixing function internally. In the spirit of reducing code, I'm wondering if it makes sense to replace Salsa20 with HMAC, SHA256, or just SHA256's mixing function? It would reduce the number of crypto primitives in the implementation. Not that it really matters much, but just curious (and partially curious if Salsa20 had specific properties that are useful in scrypt's design). Sorry if this is a dumb question; I was going to read back through your scrypt paper, but have been busy all week.

<comment><AUTHOR> Salsa20 could be replaced by almost anything -- the requirements for the mixing function are very very weak (basically just that there's no short-cut to iterating). But Salsa20 has an advantage in throughput, which matters for maximizing the amount of memory you can use in a given amount of time.

Asymptotically speaking the best function there is the one which maximizes [B/s software output]^2 / [B/s hardware output].

<comment><USER7> Can you elaborate a little on how you got to that maximization? I am not sure I understand why you're squaring the software level.

<comment><AUTHOR> ASIC cost ~ memory * time = (time_software * bandwidth_software) * (time_software * (bandwidth_software/bandwidth_hardware)) = (time_software)^2 * (bandwidth_software)^2 / bandwidth_hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Stripe seems to be the default payment processor for tech startups. Especially now they are going to support Bitcoin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. Stripe understands how to build clean and easily usable APIs.

<comment><USER9> After setting up Paypal and Google Wallet payment forms and being left wanting to shoot myself, Stripe was a fantastic breath of fresh air.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's strange that Stripe doesn't support paymentiframe.com's feature directly-- I'm sure many have similar concerns about embedding arbitrary JS into their domain.

</comment><comment><USER11> Hopefully it is a temporary thing but the iframe is not loading for me in any browser. "Server refused the connection"

<comment><AUTHOR> Accidentally ran paymentiframe.com out of swap space. Should be back now.

<comment><AUTHOR> And now I'm moving it to a heftier EC2 instance type.

<comment><USER12> Because it got slammed? Unlikely, but would be a nice surprise!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, because it got slammed. It doesn't take very much to slam a t1.micro when you're forking a CGI script on every page load...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is Tarsnap going to drop prices in response to the AWS S3 drop?

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been busy with bitcoin for the past few days -- I need to crunch some numbers on my AWS bills to see how much money this saves me; it's not as obvious as it sounds once GET/PUT costs and EC2 costs (which are mostly reserved instances, thus not affected by this price cut) are factored in.

But my first guess is that a price cut is very likely to be coming. ;-)

<comment><USER14> Please don't. Just pocket the margin. The prices should have gone up, anyway.

<comment><USER15> This is something that's repeated here, but I have a feeling mostly by folks that are backing up small amounts of mostly static data.

Even after de-duplication and compression, my company stores about 400 GB of data with Tarsnap. Tarsnap is a double digit percentage of our monthly infrastructure costs.

I think, perhaps, it's rather that the value that a business backing up a 30 MB database every day gets isn't radically different from the value that we get backing up several orders of magnitude more than that.

The question really is if straight utility pricing makes sense. I could imagine that a floor on the pricing, or a non-linear curve would probably do better than simply keeping the same model and raising the prices. There's also a question of distribution of total revenue -- if the revenue for the small accounts was increased by 10x, would it balance out a 50% loss of large accounts?

<comment><USER16> > The question really is if straight utility pricing makes sense. I could > imagine that a floor on the pricing, or a non-linear curve would probably do > better than simply keeping the same model and raising the prices.

The question is if the costs of running tarsnap correlate exactly with the amount of data that is stored, or if the number of users also have to be factored into the equation, ie. if each additional user has an added cost. I would say that in a business like this, with a low barrier to entry, the price should reflect the costs as close as possible. So if there's a constant setup cost for each user, the price shouldn't be $ _X_ /GB, but $ _X_ /GB + $Y.

Ideally, Tarsnap should make the same amount of money from a single user storing 100 TB and 100×10^12 users store a single byte. If this is not the case, the pricing structure is suboptimal.

<comment><USER17> Suboptimal in what way? I doubt that would be optimal for profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is great news. One quick suggestion: I recommend dropping the material on Bitcoin's unsuitability as a store of value or unit of account, or at least softening the language to sound less certain. It's possible that these views, which are shared by most mainstream economists, will prove to be true, but Bitcoin's design is a _test_ of the contrary position. It seems reasonable to concede that there's some uncertainty in the matter.

<comment><USER7> For what it's worth, my opinion on that is the exact opposite. Colin's blog post was enlightening and clearly just his own opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I do my best to put the "news" at the top of posts and the "rambling thoughts" later in case people aren't interested in my opinions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how Stripe is going to handle the tax implications of Bitcoins. It may not have an impact because they shouldn't be holding them, but it could be complicated.

</comment><comment><USER20> The IRS just ruled that Bitcoins are property, not currency, and are subject to capital gains taxes when they are spent. IOW, you have to keep track of your basis every time you buy and spend Bitcoins, just like stock.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/bitcoin-is- property...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-25/bitcoin-is-property-not- currency-in-tax-system-irs-says.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fortunately, I'm neither buying nor selling Bitcoins, so this doesn't apply to me.</comment></comment>


Facebook's endgame: Getting inside your wallet - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90395840/with-its-libra-cryptocurrency-facebook-wants-to-live-forever <comment><USER2> Tin Foil Hat Theory:

Step 1 - Create your own digital currency.

Step 2 - Assign everyone a social 'credit rating'

Step 3 - Get public services to adopt your digital currency.

Step 4 - Get government to adopt your digital currency.

Step 5 - Gateway certain public events/services depending on social credit score/pay with digital currency you can only acquire with a good standing social score.

Step 6 - Loans, services, ability to pay and interact with society depends on your social credit score and access to the digital currency.

Step 7 - One world cashless society with a privately controlled currency to keep citizens in line.

All kidding aside, I am sure they see value in becoming their own bank and not having to pay 3rd parties all the times for transactions. Heck they may convince employees to be paid in libra and other things which would cost them less in fees compared to using the traditional banking system.</comment>


The World's Sexiest Stove - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kymmcnicholas/2012/01/09/the-worlds-sexiest-stove/ <comment><USER2> No, it's not sexy. It's sleek, or simple, or innovative, but I really hope no one wants to fuck it. </petpeeve>

And please, please, _please_ stop saying "culinary enthusiast." In my humble opinion, if "[o]ne of the key consumer cues for induction is cleanability," that's less an enthusiast and more a lazy person with 5 grand to throw at a stovetop. I know a few people who actually work as chefs - the most enthusiastic of culinary practitioners, I presume - and I haven't heard any of them ever complain about the "cleanability" of, well, anything.

[Edit] Not to mention, the UI on that touch panel is totally uggs. Look at those pseudo-3D buttons!

<comment><USER3> Well, I'd imagine people working as chefs don't complain about about 'cleanabilllity' of their stuff, because they aren't ones cleaning them.

<comment><USER4> You know, while you're probably right overall, people can get very particular about the tools they use. I'm quite attached to my development environment and am snarlingly possessive about it; I wonder if there are any chefs out there who feel the same way about their stoves?

<comment><USER5> A good stove really does help by producing a greater range and diameter of heat more consistently. I think people do get attached to good stoves. At the end of the day, though, people are most possessive of chef's knives.

<comment><USER6> Exactly. Just going to a gas stove top helps a lot because it's so much easier to have exact control of the heat source.

<comment><USER7> However, most gas ovens have a MUCH larger temperature variance than an electric oven.

As my baking/roasting requires more exacting temperatures than my stovetop cooking, I go electric, every time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting; I love the "cooks anywhere" aspect and the touch screen that kinda showed where things were.

On thing I noticed about the video was the horrific parallax; it looked like the demonstrator was hitting the touch screen a good 1/2" away from what was being selected.

</comment><comment><USER9> One step closer to a monthly "Patch Tuesday" for every device in the house :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool design. Unfortunately, the "put the pots anywhere you want" concept requires induction to work. You'll have to pry my gas stove "from my cold dead hands" :P

<comment><USER11> Why? Induction is nothing like an electric cooktop. It's very responsive and very very fast.

They're also pretty cheap; a single burner cooktop from a good brand costs under $70.

My understanding is, gas is the gold standard in the US mostly because gas (cooking fuel) is so incredibly cheap here; induction is more common in Europe.

<comment><USER12> Gas oven with induction hobs are a popular choice. Natural gas is cheap (in the UK), but the efficiencies of induction are nice.

I did have trouble a few years ago finding a good quality pan suitable for use on induction hobs with a non-stick coating for my US sister.

<comment><USER11> You can get metal slugs that sit between any pan and the induction surface to transmit the heat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Induction is hardly new, and the touch screen interface is probably just going to piss you off massively. For an interface like this, you need input feedback and should be able to utilize muscle memory.

<comment><USER14> Exactly, the best interface for kitchen-ware is physical knobs. I hate all those touch-surface buttons that usually come integrated on stoves like this. They have no feedback and they fail to react more often than they do.

<comment><USER9> > Exactly, the best interface for kitchen-ware is physical knobs.

I disagree: the problem with the interface shown is the disconnect between the screen and the stove.

I'd like to see the stove itself as the touch screen.

<comment><USER11> If you cook all day, or cook lots of things at once, being able to reliably adjust power levels without looking at the controls is a huge win. That's just a fundamental problem with touch interfaces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ah yes, I can imagine moving a pot to the side and the thing asking with a popup:

"I detected you moved a pot, would you like me to set up a new cooking area? Confirm|Cancel|File Not Found"

<comment><USER10> Finally a reason to revive good old Clippy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> One problem with induction cooking is that you have to use cookware made of ferromagnetic metal. For other pots an interface ferromagnetic disk is required.

<comment><USER11> "Interface ferromagnetic disk" meaning "round piece of any metal efficiently heated by induction".

I think this downside of induction is wildly overstated; I have very few pieces of cookware that aren't "induction compatible", and I certainly didn't shop for them with that as a criteria. Any All-Clad pan works; my cheap-o omelette pan works; my enameled dutch oven works; obviously, my cast iron skillet works.

So much normal, good cookware works on an induction cooktop that it might make more sense to think about "induction incompatibility" as a liability of exotic (or particularly cheap) cookware, instead of a liability of induction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I guess it depends on the definition of sexy.

I find this sexier: [http://www.agaliving.com/our-products/classic-aga- cookers/4-...](http://www.agaliving.com/our-products/classic-aga- cookers/4-oven.aspx)

Though, I'll be honest and say that I have trouble finding something cast-iron 'sexy'.

<comment><USER7> I find that stove really looks like you like your kitchen to look cool, and never be used.

[http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&safe=off...](http://www.google.com/products/catalog?hl=en&safe=off&q=two+oven+ranges&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&ion=1&biw=1908&bih=1299&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=17310159887876987684&sa=X&ei=GUwLT9GzNs_ctwf-6vCmDw&ved=0CI0BEPICMAE)

does 90% of the stuff that cast iron behemoth does and won't make your house require a A/C in the winter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So you can get a relatively high-end induction stove from AEG for $1000 with a similarly minimalist design. Um, $3000 for touch screen?

</comment><comment><USER18> I like the idea of induction cooking, but I love cooking with cast iron pots and pans and they do not play well together.

<comment><USER19> I'm curious why they don't work together. I looked it up on Wikipedia and it seems to say cast iron should work fine. I have no personal experience with an induction range.

<comment><USER11> I'm assuming he's saying that because cast iron pans are extremely heavy, and because on a conventional cooktop you can be rough with them (you kind of have to be in order to, for instance, saute on one). Induction burners will shatter if you slam a cast iron pan onto one.

<comment><USER20> You really shouldn't be slamming anything into anything. You don't have to be that careful with tempered or borosilicate-style glass.

<comment><USER11> Dave Arnold seems to think they shatter regularly.

<comment><USER20> Tetsuya of <http://www.tetsuyas.com/>, considered one of the top chef's in the world, seems to love them.

<comment><USER11> Not at all surprised if we're both right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can't see it. How about a nice <img> tag instead of a plugin?

</comment><comment><USER22> If you can afford $5000 for a stove, you can afford to hire a cook.

<comment><USER23> How's the cook going to feel about getting out of bed at 3AM because I have a sudden craving for potato pancakes with bacon & sour cream?</comment></comment>


Why do serial entrepreneurs exist - <AUTHOR> http://avichal.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/why-do-serial-entrepreneurs-exist/ <comment><USER2> Although there are certainly some entrepreneurs who do everything in anticipation of a big reward in the end, this isn't true for me or for any of the entrepreneurs I know.

It's the work itself that's rewarding. It's creating something from nothing that's rewarding. It's having happy users and customers that's rewarding.

The "reward of a distant payoff" theory outlined in the blogpost indeed only explains serial entrepreneurs, not why people start companies in the first place. But this is strange. We have no concepts like "serial painter" or "serial poet". We think it's only natural that people who feel compelled to paint still feel compelled to paint 5 years or a decade later, and it's the same for nearly any other endeavor. Entrepreneurship isn't different, and I can't think of any reason why we would expect it to be.

So when successful entrepreneurs choose not to try again I expect this to be for other mundane reasons: wanting to spend more time with the family, to catch up on stuff they missed out on, to travel, or to pursue other dreams.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why do creators create..?

The same reason:

\- Why painters paint.

\- Why writers write.

It's nice to see some science behind this, I hope though it doesn't feed a habit of wanting to understand our own desire and need to create in lieu of creating.</comment>


Design Philosophy - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/design.html

<comment><USER2> "It's so obviously superior to the Cadillac that a child could tell it's better."

I won't argue that the 911 was a superior engineering feat, and probably driving experience, but presuming children aren't driving them he must be saying its so obvious it carries through to looks. If that is the supposition, I disagree. Nothing wrong with the 911, but that caddy looks baller. I would rather be seen driving down the street in that any day.</comment>


Help the Gnome Foundation Defend the Gnome Trademark Against Groupon - <AUTHOR> http://www.gnome.org/groupon/

<comment><USER2> It must feel good to build a business on open source software and then try to kill open source software. Way to go, Groupon!

<comment><USER3> May I quote you? :)</comment></comment>


DigitalOcean's quarterly report on developer trends in the cloud - <AUTHOR> https://www.digitalocean.com/currents/june-2018/ <comment><USER2> > Serverless computing is in a much earlier stage of adoption, with nearly > half of developers failing to clearly understand what it is.

I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue because 1) it clearly communicates what it is 2) there's not actually such thing as serverless since the functions are still running on servers. It's a made up term that isn't grounded in reality. It's not serverless any more than a Heroku Dyno is Serverless.

The first time I heard "serverless" I assumed it was a totally in-browser application.

<comment><USER3> > I've seen this called Function as a Service and honestly I think using that > term instead of Serverless would go a long way to fixing this issue

But "Functions as a Service" doesn't cover what it is, though.

The following AWS services are "serverless" but would not be "function as a service:"

* S3

* API Gateway

* SQS

* SNS

* Cognito

* DynamoDB

* CloudWatch (logs and metrics)

* Step Functions

In all cases, you are not provisioning or managing servers. Scaling is linear and costs are linear based on how much you use them, and typically based on what's actually being used (bytes stored, requests made, etc.) and not per- node. Because they're all hugely multi-tenant, they also cost almost nothing to use at low scale.

"Functions as a service" covers serverless _compute_ , but it doesn't cover the huge architectural difference (from the developer's perspective) between the services above and rolling your own (for example) S3.

<comment><USER2> All of those would fall under IaaS/PaaS.

If we're qualifying anything on a server that developers don't have to manage themselves as serverless than anything with an API becomes serverless...despite all of them actually running on servers.

<comment><USER3> OK. I guess to me categorizing those things in the same bucket as EC2 or Salesforce is missing a pretty fundamental architectural difference and benefit. I'm not claiming "serverless" is an ideal term, but I haven't seen the case made for anything better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Like the Stack Overflow survey, this one does not distinguish server- side/client-side JavaScript, making it look far more popular than it actually is when considering the data in context of server-side technologies.

If 100% of the servers were running PHP, the results would likely be 50% PHP, 50% JavaScript.

These survey writers need to modify their question, or add another one specifically requesting server-side tech so JS can be accurately compared with server-side only languages.

<comment><USER5> Do you think a lot of people are running JS in a container for frontend? I wouldn't consider a webserver container a "JS container", even it were mostly serving a React/Vue/Angular app.

By the way it's worded, it sounds like the question is specifically talking about NodeJS.

<comment><USER6> > Do you think a lot of people are running JS in a container for frontend?

Hold my beer. --Frontend developers

<comment><USER7> If the rest of a web app is running on containers, what's the downside to having the test/build process for the frontend in a container as well?

<comment><USER8> I like using containers as a reliable build context. I think it makes tons of sense.

Once the container's done building, throw it out, take what it built, and serve it.

I'd personally do this separately from the rest of the web app if possible, though. I keep frontends in their own repository.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting to see the disconnect between hiring managers and what people say they care about most when considering a job offer (salary). Hiring managers claim there is a shortage of talent and that they do not care about offering a higher salary. Perhaps that talent shortage would mysteriously disappear if they increased their salary offers.

<comment><USER2> The number one thing on that list is "limited pool with relevant skills" and not an actual talent shortage.

IMO this is more from asking for specific combinations of skills used at a company than anything else. You need these two programming languages, this database, this frontend framework, these devops tools and these other skills would also be beneficial.

Generally, you're better off hiring as "if you are competent with one of these and willing to learn the others, you should apply". The broader the stack the more learning curve should be assumed with the hiring process.

But it's not in a lot of cases. This also goes hand in hand with the professional development opportunities cited at the beginning of for retention sake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I realized recently that Serverless is to developers as credit cards are to college students.

Remember when VMs came out, and people were like, great! Now I can constrain the resources of my OS! I can run 10 OSes on one machine! I'll save so much money !

Then we gave individual teams access to create as many VMs as they wanted, and suddenly all the hardware was used up.

Now do that, but in the cloud, with unlimited resources.

<comment><USER11> In my experience, those VMs were used briefly then left to rot. Consuming a large reserve of resources while doing nothing. Serverless should at least reduce the overhead of orphaned projects out there.

<comment><USER10> There's a secondary problem: when there are more resources, application development becomes less efficient over time. Even though there will be less _infrequently used_ resources, the applications will use up resources more frequently in an inefficient way.

Example: I now need a minimum of 4GB RAM to browse the web, which is insane. 15 years ago my computer had 128MB RAM and I was browsing the web at approximately the same rate.

<comment><USER12> if you have the resources use them? 15 years ago your browser had a small fraction of the features a modern browser provides. this argument is tiring.

<comment><USER13> Which is the problem. Everyone knows that I have resources, so everyone wants to use them by packing in every feature without any consideration for how much memory it uses. It's fine if I _only_ wanted to run a browser or _only_ wanted to run an IDE.

It's not that everyone should always strive to have the minimum footprint possible. It's that no one cares how big the maximum footprint can be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the interesting learning for me:

 _While Kubernetes was most popular overall, the smallest companies (1-5 employees) use Docker Swarm more often (41 percent use Swarm vs. 31 percent that use Kubernetes)._

Did not know Swarm was this popular. Even overall Swarm is 35% to K8s 42%

However, there is a huge proliferation of hosted K8s services - AWS, GCP, Azure, Digitalocean, tons of others. Nobody seems to be making a hosted Docker Swarm solution though. I wonder why - is it because the market doesnt exist because of the simplicity of Swarm itself ? Would be interesting to find out.

<comment><USER14> Sadly Docker is replacing Docker Swarm by Kubernetes

<comment><AUTHOR> i think they are being very opaque about their plans and this is hurting their credibility.

They built the ability the launch k8s clusters through the docker tool. There are almost no tweets or posts about Swarm instead, their blog is full of kubernetes posts ([https://blog.docker.com/](https://blog.docker.com/)). Even their coolhacks section is about "kubeflow". Top rated session at Dockercon was kubernetes.

i really hope they open up more and talk about their future plans and engage with the community.

<comment><USER15> Um, I was a top rated session that was repeated on Friday and was 100% Swarm, and had a full house [https://twitter.com/BretFisher/status/1007099831783862272](https://twitter.com/BretFisher/status/1007099831783862272)

<comment><AUTHOR> Bret - this is not me that's making the claims. Take a look here - [https://blog.docker.com/2018/06/top-5-rated-sessions- dockerc...](https://blog.docker.com/2018/06/top-5-rated-sessions- dockercon2018/)

this is what is scaring us. We love Swarm and really respect all the dev efforts... but the corporate K8s bias in unmistakable. These are some of the kubernetes posts over the last 2 days from Docker's twitter account: [https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1016340701800431618](https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1016340701800431618)

[https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015620961712967681](https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015620961712967681)

[https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015535938678738950](https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015535938678738950)

[https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015475755428597760](https://twitter.com/Docker/status/1015475755428597760)

Number of Swarm posts in the same time ? Zero. In fact, I would be hard pressed to find a public tweet about Swarm in a long time.

This was the first Docker event in Lahore - [https://events.docker.com/events/details/docker-lahore- prese...](https://events.docker.com/events/details/docker-lahore-presents- microservice-architecture-using-docker-and-kubernetes#/)

Its Kubernetes everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I find it interesting (and perhaps predictable) that while only 11% of people had a top consideration when taking a job of "Quality of manager or management", 47% of people cited "Leadership / management was bad" as a reason for leaving a job.

<comment><USER17> Pretty hard to gauge the quality of management from the outset though.

<comment><USER16> I'm curious why you think so?

I normally ask questions about various non-tech topics including conflict resolution, team makeup, strategy, product management priorities, how they mentor junior team members, etc. Those discussions may not be able to tell the difference between a good vs. great leader, but they absolutely will raise red flags from a bad leader.

<comment><USER18> I disagree. Many bad leaders are very expert at _sounding like_ good leaders in a way that is hard to detect in precisely this type of situation. There's really only two options: seek advice from someone you trust who worked with those leaders, or else you just have to spend a bit of time working for them to find out. You cannot tell from interview questions, unfortunately.

<comment><USER19> Agreed, bad management usually shows up when there is a problem / stress point. That typically isn't the case in an interview.

Granted one time I did pass after an interview after talking to an inexperienced manager who had no clue....so sometimes, you can tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Something that puzzled me:

"the majority of hiring managers say they make no distinction between bootcamp vs. college graduates"

While the bulk of work at a lot of enterprises (banks, telcos, etc) are CRUD apps with some BPM, I did not expect a (hiring) manager to be unable to make such a simple distinction.

Hopefully it could be the case that 'we don't discriminate based on that' is simply the polite/legal thing to say, especially considering that the article goes to say that "48 percent have not filled any positions with a bootcamp graduate"...

<comment><USER21> > "the majority of hiring managers say they make no distinction between > bootcamp vs. college graduates"

Since the industry norm is "You're all equally worthless until proven otherwise" I don't find it all that surprising. They'll take in your resume and toss you into the pipeline / grinder and if make it through the crucible unscathed, well, congrats you'll get a job offer!

Being neither a college nor a bootcamp graduate, I've found very few places give a damn what you've got framed on your wall at home. What matters is if you can hack it in the real world. The only time I've been turned away for lack of credential was Booz Allen Hamilton, and they exist to arbitrage you to the government which still seems to care about proper documents.

> considering that the article goes to say that "48 percent have not filled > any positions with a bootcamp graduate"...

Well, that would mean 52% surveyed have hired a bootcamp graduate which is pretty surprising to me, personally, since the camp(s) in my metro seem to produce about two good candidates per cycle.

<comment><USER22> Yeah. The worst code camp people have been some of the worst programmers I've ever had to work with. But at the high end? The distinction in success rate is fuzzier.

Several of my most promising mentees came out of code camps. It convinces me of something I already 'knew': that good instincts don't come from a college education, they come from life. But a university _will_ weed out a lot of dilettantes...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >Ninety-four percent of our respondents self-identified as men, 5 percent as women, and 1 percent as non-binary/other.

Seems like this survey was highly self selective, so I'd take the entire thing with a grain of salt. There's no way the industry as a whole is anywhere near 96% male.

<comment><USER24> > There's no way the industry as a whole is anywhere near 96% male.

What do you think is the correct percentage? 96% seems reasonably close to the anecdotal gender ratio (~1/35 students being female) of undergrads from when I was in university a long time ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The pool of respondents are Digital Ocean customers? I'm assuming that would exclude employees of FAANG plus basically all really large "enterprise" businesses. Is that fair to assume?

If that is fair, I wonder how biased these results are. If we included FAANG and/or big corporations where tech is key but not a cultural staple (e.g. Walmart) I wonder what the results would look like.

<comment><USER26> It'd also exclude anyone who wanted to host their own site, anyone who stuck with traditional hosting companies/services, anyone who used a service like AWS or Azure to host their site/app, etc.

If so, that'd certainly influence the results a lot, and alongside your examples of FAANG employees and large enterprises, make the survey seem a bit too biased to be all that useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is a nice breakdown but the most interesting thing I see is keeping the statistics to themselves by posting them to the site as svgs, not images and not text. You can't highlight them for copypasting even though a screenshot will work but you can't right click for saving to an image either. Thanks for the technique.

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure that was the intention. It's easier to cater to different screen resolutions with a vector format. You can always take a screenshot if you want or link to the article.

<comment><USER27> I did make an assumption that shouldn't have been made, my apologies. I still think this is a cool effect that it can be used for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Has anyone chosen digital ocean over aws/gcp/aZure when building a scalable setup (for pricing reasons). Eg setting up your own load balancers/ private master slave dB machines / bunch of ansible to organize it all.

<comment><USER2> Fwiw, Digital Ocean keeps adding more and more options on the service front. Several storage options, load balancers w/ Let's Encrypt built in, etc.

Keeps growing. IMO the biggest gap for them is lack of a database service like RDS. There are providers of that service that can be deployed to DO...but the cost of those providers is high enough to disincentivize the price appeal of DO in the first place.

It would be really interesting to see them partner with a known player like Citus.

<comment><USER30> FWIW, I have found one of the best parts of using Digital Ocean is their fantastic documentation and tutorials. As a relative newbie, I was encouraged to deploy to a PaaS such as Heroku but grew frustrated at the black box aspect of what was going on underneath the hood. The tutorials on DO allowed me to learn and gain an understanding of how servers really work.

On your point about database services, I was able to set up Postgres on my droplet with relative ease and it has been serving me well ever since, again all thanks to clear and well made tutorials. I think if I could do it without any prior experience, most other people can too. So IMO, these providers aren't necessary at all.

<comment><USER2> Oh, I totally agree. That's actually how I learned this stuff. Years ago there was a company called Slicehost that was very similar to what Digital Ocean is now. It had a treasure trove of great documentation and articles.

Eventually they were acquired by Rackspace and folded into the Cloud Servers line.

Great company though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> _the majority of hiring managers say they make no distinction between bootcamp vs. college graduates_

Wow. Can this really be true? Maybe strictly a web dev thing?

</comment><comment><USER32> Interesting to compare the frequently used languages of those using containers to the Stackoverflow Dev survey.

\- Javascript 57% use vs 71.5% I had always thought JS was high on the Stackoverflow survey because it included people using it on the frontend. Not necessarily the case.

\- PHP was third at 36%

\- Golang was fourth above Java

</comment><comment><USER33> Would have been nice to see what scale these people were running.

Also, if they are only polling developers are these actually production loads ?

Are the developers now doing operational tasks ?

<comment><USER34> > Would have been nice to see what scale these people were running.

26% were in companies of 5 or less people and 50% in companies of 25 or less. So, this is highly skewed towards smaller scale companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> So it's the result of a survey? That's a bit disappointing. Quarterly report makes me think it'll be extrapolated from DigitalOcean's usage metrics. Surely some of the things, such as containers could be inferred from real usage.

Also, unlike stackoverflow, if the respondents were DigitalOcean users I would imagine some things would be considerably skewed - for instance the popularity of "Serverless". I assume that since DigitalOcean doesn't offer serverless products people who use serverless aren't on DigitalOcean.

</comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone know if the graphs and visuals in the post are hand made or are they using some kind of app with a custom theme?</comment>


Solve your team's productivity problem with StandupMail - <AUTHOR> http://standupmail.com/?hnn

<comment><USER3> nerdben, as noted by pdx, this looks a lot like idonethis, which I recently tried and found useful but not super useful (though it did alert me to one issue when a team member used the daily reply to rant about something - <USER2> was worth the monthly subscription fee).

At any rate, I thought you might appreciate some thoughts I had on that product and shared with them.

Can we get nesting, bulleting, etc., within a person's report? I was thinking about the dirt simple

* [space][text]

gets you bullet, that sort of thing.

Can reports be organized or grouped by sub-team? Org structure would have to allow for org-private permissions.

As manager, I'd like the ability to add tags to someone else's posts. (Commenting on items to add the tag is one step too many - I'd like to be able to add tags to items entered by my team, or by others in the company. The OCDishly organized among us will worry about the tags, the ones doing this because they were asked to can be given a pass....)

Eventually it would be nice to be able to sort of auto-generate a dashboard report using a template that would use tags to populate parts of the report. Just a thought.

On the report side, I'm wondering about prompting users based on (loose) structure provided by a manager or team leader. I think I am thinking in terms of having being able to tag people with tags, and perhaps with time windows, so the system could ask a person "we haven't heard from you on #A in while, any updates?"

Or something. I like the freeform nature of things, it allows people to capture everything, not just things they've been assigned, and I don't want to break that. But some way of being able to say "I need to hear about #A by yyyy/mm/dd" might be useful - though one could argue that's what a ticket system is for.

I also recommend you look at the integrations idonethis already has.

<comment><AUTHOR> PeterWhittaker, this is excellent feedback. Thank you so much for taking the time. I'll discuss all your points with my team.

Could you give me a little deeper insight on why you did not find idonethis "super useful"? What's the things that were _annoying_?

<comment><USER3> There were no particular annoyances, there was simply no compelling value. I could have hacked together a cron job and web site to send out a "what did you get done today" notification URL to a set of "enter your dones" pages, which would have been collated into a "digest" and I would have achieve the same value. It would have been fugly and lacked slickness, but the collated report would have been of comparable value.

I was hoping for more in terms of rolling up reports, helping me create dashboard reports, etc.

I know this isn't exactly an easy problem, but....

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool! Thanks for giving this further insights

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem is the benefit of the stand-up meeting is that everyone is in the room together. A daily email misses the interaction aspect.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true... It's not supposed to replace the standup of strict SCRUM tbh. - but in many cases, there is no strict SCRUM just elements of it being used without high discipline. Also, the concept is thought of to help many different kind of teams, i.e. sales teams, marketing teams etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like [https://idonethis.com/](https://idonethis.com/)

... but competition is good.

<comment><AUTHOR> hehe.. absolutetly

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting concept. It's basically a PPP report, I was used to do it with my investors. PPP stands for Progress/Problems/Plan. Would like to try it with my team to see if it's effective.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will let you know as soon as we spread public access!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> spam

<comment><AUTHOR> Proud I got your first HN comment! Wouldn't it solve a problem for you?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I got email asking to approve member to Facebook group,but I'm Not admin - <AUTHOR> I just got an email of the form:

  (name) asked to join (Facebook Public Group name)
 ... which is a genuine email from Facebook and not a phish (the clickable links are all genuine facebook.com URLs).
I am a mere member of this group and am not, and never have been, an admin.  (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)
The link underlying the "Respond to Request" button  brought me to the genuine "Member requests" page with this one request as its lone item.
I've never seen this failure before.  It's not a meaningful "breach" in itself, but if it indicates a broader defect in Facebook's auth process, yikes. <comment><USER2> My understanding is this is a setting for groups where Facebook allows the group to be set up to allow regular members approve new ones vs requiring the admin to do it. I believe it is up to the admin to change this.

</comment><comment><USER3> tell facebook</comment>


How Swift protocols and immutability impact database accesses - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/how-to-build-an-ios-application-with-sqlite-and-grdb-swift-d023a06c29b3#.mj7tk6pf0 <comment><AUTHOR> After one year in the making, GRDB.swift has acquired experience about the impact of protocol-oriented programming and immutability on the way applications can access SQLite databases. First, those new paradigms actually help avoiding some hard-to-reproduce concurrency bugs. Next, they are fundamentally incompatible with frameworks like Core Data and Realm, which rely heavily on both class inheritance and mutability. This has consequences on application architecture.</comment>


The Dark Path, or, What if I Don't Want to Quit My Job? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zdsmith.com/posts/the-dark-path-or-what-if-i-dont-want-to-quit-my-job.html <comment><USER2> Yeah. I want tests _and_ types (and static analysis tools, and...)</comment>


Obama Campaign Lies with Bad Math - <AUTHOR> http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath/2012/03/07/obama-campaign-lies-with-bad-math/

<comment><USER2> The server has apparently melted, so I can't react to the content. That said, HN is usually a fairly safe haven from political troll baiting. Would hate to loose one of my favorite refuges from that kind of nonsense. Let's keep our community out of politics, there's plenty of other noise out there for us to drive each other crazy over...

<comment><USER3> So when it's an article critical of conservatives it's fine, but when it's critical of Obama it's political troll baiting?

<comment><USER4> Maybe I'm guilty of selective bias, but I don't recall any recent articles openly criticizing the Romney campaign or its tactics like this...can you point to any examples?

FWIW, my opinion still stands that this sort of stuff shouldn't appear on HN. It's certainly not what I look for in HN content, in any case. Coming up on the last 150 days of the election, I feel it's important not to let the HN waters get chummed with political troll-bait. Stories like "X campaign uses Y technology in a novel way" are HN-appropriate but "X candidate is a liar/hypocrite/jerk" stories are not. There is enough of an outlet for the latter type of stuff outside HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not really bad math. The math appears to be perfectly accurate. Misleading by conflating disparate statistics, yes.

</comment><comment><USER6> I agree with others. I think this could really be an interesting story if you took out the name calling. I'm always amazed by the number of people who use mean in ways that make people assume they're talking about median (or mix the two).

</comment><comment><USER4> What bwoocelli said. With the caveat that "tech in politics" stories are interesting. But ya - no "x is lying about y", please.</comment>


Delphi Community Edition – Free Download - <AUTHOR> https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter/free-download <comment> irq-1 FYI, open source: [http://www.lazarus-ide.org/](http://www.lazarus-ide.org/)

> Lazarus is a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Free Pascal. It > includes LCL which is more or less compatible with Delphi's VCL. Free Pascal > is a GPL'ed compiler that runs on Linux, Win32, OS/2, 68K and more. Free > Pascal is designed to be able to understand and compile Delphi syntax, which > is OOP.

<comment><USER2> +1. Lazarus is also true multiplatform: one can run the IDE itself and compiled apps also on most small ARM boards that can run a Linux distribution.

Example: [http://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_on_Raspberry_Pi](http://wiki.freepascal.org/Lazarus_on_Raspberry_Pi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was a huge Delphi fan, jumping from Paradox straight to Delphi. I had been doing flat-file database apps in Turbo Pascal before I found Paradox and so it's like Delphi was made for me.

I used it for a very long time, but it was destroyed by the companies that owned it. A free version should have been always available, they could have taken advantage of all the Pascal hobbyists out there and given them a way to establish careers as business software developers.

I'm not sure whether it's too little, but it's definitely too late. Business apps I'm familiar with that were written in Delphi are either gone or nearing their end of life.

But I still haven't found anything as useful as Delphi for simple database apps. I've been doing .net for nearly 7 years now and it's just nowhere near Delphi for functionality. But desktop apps seem to be old-school, so maybe it doesn't matter anyway.

<comment><USER4> Not so old school.

I would put mobile native on the same basket.

And outside HN bubble there is still a thriving native UIs for infotainment, healthcare, factory automation, field machine control units,...

I have spent the last 4 years doing native UIs for life science labs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> 1 year license, no updates, ≤US$5000 revenue and ≤5 devs in the org (not just on the Delphi license, but total) only?

It's like they looked at VS Community license and said "lets do something like that for Delphi, but narrow the licensing enough that there is no real use case."

</comment><comment><USER4> Kylix is what could have made Delphi be the "Java" of the industry, with a good AOT compiler, value types, and all the RAD goodies.

Too many bad management decisions were taken since then.

</comment><comment><USER6> In a way it seems Embarcadero have their blinders on. But it is better than nothing. I think I would make the Delphi compiler free and charge everybody a pure subscription for the IDE at pricing levels comparable to Jetbrains, but without any kind of fallback to avoid competing with yourself. It would allow them to focus on making an excellent IDE to secure recurring revenue, at their own pace. But they seem to be wired to chase (existing) corporate accounts. Obviously they will be people who will develop tooling around their free compilers, but that helps build a funnel for a high quality IDE and greatly increases chances to become a platform again.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wish I didn't need to create an Embarcadero account just to download it. I can download VS Community Edition without needing to register.

<comment><USER6> It does not seem to work anyways. I created an account to download C++ Builder CE but after clicking Download, it sends you again to the registration page. If the goal of this initiative was to collect emails for mailing lists, it is brilliant. If the goal was that people get on board, the current sign up process is very, very ineffective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Man I always liked Delpi, it felt like what the VB6 interface builder should have been.

</comment><comment><USER9> "Got error 28 from storage engine"

Not a good sign!

</comment><comment><USER10> Finally, this is long overdue

<comment><USER11> Too little, too late, I'm afraid.

The only reason I've started with Delphi back in the day (and loved it) was because _everything_ was pirated in Ukraine circa year 2000, so nobody would even care about licensing/price point.

<comment><USER12> I used Delphi versions 2-7 many years ago when I was learning to code, some were free versions some were pirated ones. Then I moved to other web languages (PHP, JS, HTML, CSS) and then few years ago I discovered free Lazarus/FPC combo. It's stable and has single huge advantage - it runs flawlessly on Linux/OSX/Windows/FreeBSD and can compile binaries for other OSes and architectures even on ARM(Raspberry Pi). Lately I've found UniDAC database components by devart.com for Delphi/Lazarus and loved them instantly.

I also think Delphi Community version is too little, too late with such a good and cheap alternative.

I'm not affiliated with devart.com.

<comment><USER11> Lazarus / FPC definitely looks good, I'll check it out! (I still have Delphi 7 installed on one of the machines, so I haven't looking around for alternatives - for what it appears to be 12+ years now).

One thing I liked was how quickly one could bang out a simple GUI application. Sometimes, that's all I need.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Debt,eviction,hunger:Millions fall back into crisis stimulus safety nets vanish - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/23/economy-federal-benefits-low-wage-workers/ <comment><USER2> I have to flag this. Sorry, but everything is just so politically charged these days.</comment>


Tuesday Shouldn't Change the Narrative - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/07/tuesday-shouldnt-change-the-narrative/ <comment><USER2> I think this is only true if the election results are both fair (irrelevant levels of cheating or human error) and close.

Should Trump win by a significant margin e.g. > 4%, that _should_ cause you to ask whether systemic bias exists in polling. I think most of us in Europe concluded something like this when Brexit occurred. Some people were claiming the polling was accurate but the reporting was inaccurate, however when I doubled checked the polling I could see no discrepancy. Most of that weeks polls were very wrong and so were the bookmakers, the people with strong incentives to discern truth from bullshit.

Take a look:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum#Standard_polling_on_EU_membership)

It is really remarkable. Internet polls are accurate?!! Who knew! Depending on your reasons for believing in a significant prejudice in polling, that could indeed change the narrative.</comment>


What Happens When Algorithms Design a Concert Hall? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2017/01/happens-algorithms-design-concert-hall-stunning-elbphilharmonie/ <comment><USER2> To anyone who might want some context, this relates to the Elbphilharmonie, a new opera house in Hamburg, Germany. Intended to rival the other great opera houses of the world, as-is tradition it was 10× over budget and eight years late

        > The cost to taxpayers climbed from an initially planned
        > 77 million euros to 789 million euros ($835 million).

It had it's opening on 2016-01-11 and 2016-01-12. It's already had it's ticket system hacked (and fixed) and it's beautiful. [1] [2] [3]

[1]:[https://i.redd.it/ybs5ba59yt4y.jpg](https://i.redd.it/ybs5ba59yt4y.jpg)

[2]:[http://seasidemagazin.de/wp- content/uploads/elbphilharmonie_...](http://seasidemagazin.de/wp- content/uploads/elbphilharmonie_hamburg_foto_maxim_schulz-2.jpg)

[3]:[http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/media/thumbs/d/dbba6ff9beacb55...](http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/media/thumbs/d/dbba6ff9beacb55fddee04980cc1c528v1_max_755x425_b3535db83dc50e27c1bb1392364c95a2.jpg)

<comment><USER2> For comparison and context of my "as is-tradition" comment:

        > The Sydney Opera House cost $102 million and
        > was completed in 1973.
        > The original plan was: a cost of $7 million and
        > completion date of 26 January 1963.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> No mention at all as to how it sounds :(

<comment><USER2> See my other comment, but the place only opened yesterday!

Only one video I've been able to find so far, makes the place look exceptional, although doesn't tell us much about the sound quality. [1] apologies for facebook source.

Regrettably it's sold out for the next 6+ months, and tickets are on resale in secondary markets for 10-50x their face values.

[1]: [https://www.facebook.com/NDR.de/videos/1365568786826981/](https://www.facebook.com/NDR.de/videos/1365568786826981/)

<comment><USER4> Actually, your other comment says it's been open for a whole year :)</comment></comment></comment>


Liberalism and the Invisible Hand - <AUTHOR> https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/liberalism-and-the-invisible-hand/ <comment><USER2> 100% gas.</comment>


Show HN: Animate Drawing Text with SVG - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dboudro/AnimateSVGText

<comment><AUTHOR> I discovered how to do this while creating a website and thought others may find it useful for web-design projects.

Any Feedback would be GREATLY appreciated!</comment>