Amazon Puts Your $1000 Kindle Library 'On Hold,' Apologizes, Shrugs - <AUTHOR> http://consumerist.com/2011/11/amazon-puts-your-1000-kindle-library-on-hold-apologizes-shrugs.html <comment><USER2> Note to google, amazon, paypal, _anyone_ with a feature that can freeze, ban, hold, or otherwise disable accounts containing things that are valuable _and especially paid for_ by customers:

 _You need a department that can take responsibility for account lockouts and resolve them! STAT!_ It is not acceptable for no one in the company to know why an account was disabled or how to go about reinstating it!

If piracy can be called "stealing" and no one bats an eye, I'm going to go ahead and call account lockouts with resolution refusal stealing as well. $1000 is well within the bounds of small claims courts in most jurisdictions.

<comment><USER3> > You need a department that can take responsibility for account lockouts and > resolve them! STAT!

They already do. It's called legal. I've been in this situation numerous times already with PayPal and a few others. They won't even look at the matter until your lawyer sends a nasty letter. At which point they'll look at it. And then either cut you a check or kindly tell you to go fuck yourself, politely.

<comment><USER2> Legal is what happens when the other functions of your company throw an exception that you've got no event handler for. Its the default handler that returns a meaningless "An error has occurred" as your program crashes.

If legal has to talk to your customers directly, your business is broken. Its an unrecoverable runtime error. Gurus are meditating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Buying DRM-ed content is a contradiction in terms. Period.

It should be made illegal for sellers to pretend this constitutes the purchase of the content itself. Call it a lease, call it a service, but stop scamming consumers.

<comment><USER5> If they called it Digital Permissions/Privileges Management, sales would suffer and we all know that's worse than the winds of Hell.

<comment><USER6> Digital restrictions management

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just received a Barnes & Noble "Nook SimpleTouch" (the basic, e-ink screen one), and while I like it, this sort of thing has me very worried about using most of its (limited set of) features. That is, while the Nook has something like 1 gb of internal storage for books, about 75% is reserved for content you have to purchase through Barnes & Noble. That leaves about 230 mb for your own files. (The Nook does feature expandable storage via microSD, but these don't get placed into your "Library" on the device in the same way files on the internal storage do). I'm sure many of these same concerns apply to the Kindle. (And more, since Nook books are EPUB format, while Kindle seems to use a variety of formats, including some proprietary formats & DRM).

I really like the convenience of an e-reader, and the e-ink screen really is fantastic, but so far I've only loaded files from Project Gutenberg and some e-books from Manning (who provides free pdf and sometimes EPUB format e-books when you buy the hardcopy). I'm already bumping up against the (artificial) 230 mb-or-so limit for books _not_ purchased directly from B&N.

I'd be more open to buying e-books from B&N if I wasn't afraid of a scenario similar to what's described in the article. As far as I can tell, B&N ships their Nook books with DRM, what guarantees do I have that I can still read those books if B&N goes under, or my account gets screwed up in some mix-up?

Edit: I must have phrased something in a confusing way. The Nook allows you to load 3rd party, non-DRM'd EPUB and PDF's (although as I mentioned, you only get about a quarter of the device's internal storage to use for 3rd-party content). My concern re: DRM was the books you buy directly from Barnes & Noble.

<comment><USER8> Anyone know if the Kobo has similar issues?

I've totally written off the Kindle because of similar 3rd party content issues - anyone have first hand experience with the Nook or Kobo when used with ePub (mainly) and PDF (rarely) files?

<comment><USER9> I have a Kindle 3, and I only use 3rd party content, i.e. none of the 100ish books on my kindle were bought from Amazon. None have DRM. I can read them fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So we've definitely arrived in Stallman's Right to Read future: <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> What happened to the books on his device? $1000 worth of books should easily fit on one Kindle, even if he can't login to his account - how did he get locked out of his content? Did Amazon remotely wipe out his purchases? Did he buy books on site and never synced them? Does he have access to them from some other app or device, but can't sync a new one? Is he using a device at all? Is he using Kindle for the Web? Or, can he still read all/some of his books?

Consumerist could really give us more details...

<comment><USER12> It's that an irrelevant technicality though? Say he reads only on his phone, and lost it. Does that make the case more or less important? What if some nice person buys him physical copies to replace the DRM'd ones? Does that get Amazon off the hook?

There's a principle here. The specifics aren't really the point.

<comment><USER11> In principle I doubt anybody thinks that "trick you into paying for books, close your account, and run away with your money" is Amazon's new business model. Obviously it is some sort of mistake/miscommunication and they will eventially sort it out.

It's the details that make the story interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This makes for a great story but how do we know it wasn't totally made up? There is no link from the consumerist article to a post from the original source (someone whose purported first name is Ryan). Searching for word-for- word sentences from the article on Google, I just find this consumerist post and pages that quoted from it more recently.

Even if Laura Northrup was really given this information by someone who is really named Ryan, how do we know that Ryan isn't making this story up? Or perhaps there's a part of it that is true but important parts of the story are omitted or exaggerated?

This kind of thing seems to be happening more each year on the internet - widely circulated stories considered credible just because it's widely circulated.

All that being said - I own both a Kindle Touch and Nook Simple Touch but have spent a total of $0.99 on content, for the same reasons cited by many in this thread. However, I'm very comfortable with a Netflix model. I've used the Nook to read in stores a little and I intend to use the Kindle Touch with my prime account to read borrowed books.

I predict that some day, Amazon or Barnes and Noble will come out with some kind of "content guarantee: you buy it, it's yours, forever." And I think this guarantee will quickly be copied by all competitors. The market for e-content will then be extended to nervous Nellies like me.

</comment><comment><USER14> He'd still have access to his books if he'd installed the Kindle desktop application and had synced all of them down to his desktop.

In fact, something is a bit weird here, because whatever books were on the Kindle itself should still be there. There's no mention of it having been remotely wiped.

Edited to add: I don't want to minimize this issue, though. Because being locked out of your account means you can't buy books or grab the freebies that pop up. Right now I'm suffering a bit like that due to account confusion I need to resolve with Amazon. Seems I have an older account they won't delete and from time to time Amazon gets confused and sends me to _it_ \-- and the first time that happened, I thought all my books were gone (the older acct never had books). A phone call straightened it out. And now I must do that again.

</comment><comment><USER15> i feel like there's a part of this story that we're not hearing. given amazon's excellent customer service reputation (including my own experiences) it's hard for me to believe that this could happen without there being a reason.

<comment><USER7> Amazon is a sufficiently large organization such that I'm sure this sort of thing actually happens more often than you think.

By the tone of your comment, I'm assuming the "part of the story we're not hearing" involves the customer doing something wrong, rather than Amazon? If that's the case, I can't really think of what that thing might be that would give Amazon the right to lock this guy out? Also, why would he bring this issue to light and risk exposure if he really had done something so wrong?

I find it much easier to believe that a large corporation allowed an individual customer to fall through the cracks than some fraudster launching an elaborate plan to scam Amazon out of $1000 in e-books.

<comment><USER16> I led a problem resolution team at a large company. If we ever knowingly received three calls from any client for the same problem (through any method of client contact source), or the complaint was vocal or serious enough on the first call (or first identifiable call), the incident would be forwarded to us and we'd deal with it directly. Rarely did the most complex issue take more than a day or two to resolve. On occasion it took a week or two if it was especially complex, but we'd contact the client directly and offer to give them a daily update so they'd know what was going on.

I'd be quite surprised if Amazon didn't have a similar team, even if just a dozen or two staff, if they are experienced, that's all that's usually required. The savings lost to poor public relations, and improved customer relations, easily make up for the cost of the team.

<comment><USER17> Out of curiosity, what would you do if the client got to this point, and your team determined that it was a fraudulent claim?

Obviously, if it's legitimate, you would have the ability to fix the issue right away. However, what if there were enough red flags that it didn't seem entirely right?

Not saying that this is the case either way, but I'm curious what the standard procedure is in that case.

<comment><USER16> In the case described in the posting, if I found it to be a valid claim and could not resolve why the problem was occurring within 24-48 hours, I would likely suggest that we create a new account for the client and populate it with the titles we knew he had purchased and perhaps provide a $100 or similar amount as compensation.

For this case, my team would have resolved it within 24-48 hours, based on the information that he's posted. It doesn't seem overly complex, assuming no fraud (or his account was mangled in a data transfer or deleted in someway and he hasn't mentioned that), and the resolution takes a few hours of someone making the new account and searching for titles to add to the account.

As a longer answer...

We didn't deal directly with public relations or issue press releases concerning significant public domain complaints, as to the best of my recollection, we didn't have a large PR nightmare to deal with while I was with the team. So that aspect I can not comment on.

If it was an issue of fraud, and we had several instances of fraudulent claims, we would clearly state that was our conclusion to the customer (or claimed customer). Our company did not actively pursue legal action against fraud cases, including a significant internal fraud case that was discovered, because of the possible negative publicity and loss of public reputation/brand quality.

Though through escalation, if I could not personally (as head of the team) find a solution to the issue and we felt it was fraud, we would offer to arrange an in-person meeting with the customer and ask that they bring their (or a) lawyer as the department VP, along with our legal team, would like to discuss the issue in detail. I don't remember more than one client coming in for a meeting in a two year period and we had security officers in the next room (with blinds down and listening in) in case there was a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Amazon usually has really good customer service all the times I've called. It seems like this really is a fell through the cracks thing. I'm glad venues like Consumerist exist to publicize this kind of thing.

</comment><comment><USER19> This, of course, is the difference between ownership and permission-to-use.

<comment><USER20> No ebook license (or any other "virtual" good) will ever have a license that confers 'ownership'.

A license can be more flexible and allow free transfer, copying and backup; but I don't think the law allows for a concept of the ownership of trivially duplicable data.

<comment><USER21> I'm not a lawyer, but I really don't see a fundamental difference here - photocopiers have existed for a long time.

You can own a book. You just don't have the _right_ to make _copies_ of that book. Why can't you own an ebook?

<comment><USER20> The way I see it: you own the book itself, but don't own the writing and story - the information - contained within it. In my mind, ownership as a concept for non-physical goods is much closer to the idea of copyright.

Oddly enough, I suppose every book I own here has legalese in it saying that I don't have the right to lend, sell or "otherwise circulate" it without the publisher's consent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is it safe to assume that eBooks will eventually go through a similar lifecycle as mp3s? Where, at first, publishers force DRM on items sold, but eventually give in because of customer complaints and demands regarding stuff like what happened in this article?

<comment><USER23> That is possible and also my hope.

Unfortunately, I think there are a number of differences that will make that harder with ebooks than regular books. Most significantly, people consume the media different. Excluding a few reference books and the Bible, I tend to read a book once and then I am done with it, and I think most people are like that. Even people who reread books only do it a few times with some spacing in between. With music, I keep adding to my collection, but I still have songs I found years ago in my MP3 player. I want to listen many times, so I have a big push to preserve every song for a long time and to be able to take them with me across multiple generations of devices. The push to have full control, while present, is much weaker for the average consumer.

Another lessor factor is that music was in an unprotected format (CDs) that could be easily made digital long before DRM existed for music. With books, the truly unprotected dead-tree form is difficult to digitize, so they have a different history in terms of consumer expectations.

<comment><USER24> >>I tend to read a book once and then I am done with it

This may be true for novels, but science, engineering and math books are usually used for a long, long time. I still have all of mine for reference and every once in a while I do come back to many of them.

<comment><USER23> I used to do that a lot with my math books and computer science books (I have a degree in math and work as a programmer), but I eventually found that while I prefer to use a book to learn new material, I virtually always use the Internet for a quick reference and only rarely refer back to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is how you "get things done" - complain online to get the most PR you can, the company finally listens, and will fix it within 24 hours.

It's too bad it has to come to that.

<comment><USER26> Except you need to do it _before_ charging back the past 6 months of purchases from the store. I doubt even going up a few levels of management can get that account unlocked after that. Even very big retailers have to treat chargebacks as an attack on their very ability to do business, since riding the 1% limit can be so hard. He's proven he's not a customer they can take money from, no matter the facts of the situation.

Once I read that line, my first thought was "chances are his account was locked by the fraud/risk department".

<comment><USER25> Chargebacks are not a quick process (at least in my business). It would take well over 1-2 months before the chargeback was completed, and with the volume Amazon likely has to deal with I doubt they are tied to his account already?

<comment><USER17> That's probably the reason that it's still locked. If he initiated a chargeback, Amazon should put a hold on his account while the entire process gets completed.

Chargebacks are supposed to be a last resort consumer tool, when every other option has been exhausted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Paging all e-book sellers, this is a chance to get great publicity for the one-time-only price of $1,000.

<comment><USER28> I do not believe that any other e-book seller has the selection that Amazon does. It would be terribly embarrassing if some seller tried to use this for PR and then realized that they do not have some of the titles.

<comment><USER29> Really? From a "rest of the world" point of view (I am speaking for France where Amazon is now officially selling kindles and kindle books, but it is also true for Germany), it is more the contrary: Amazon has the smallest selection of e-books compared to the other generalist e-book sellers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Whenever I buy a book from Amazon, the first thing I do immediately after the purchase is strip the DRM and store a copy of the unprotected .mobi file. I'm concerned about Amazon's new announced ebook format that I'll lose the ability to do this. If and when that happens, I won't purchase anymore books from them.

<comment><USER31> I was always very religious about backing up my music purchases, and generally removing the DRM, but had never done so with eBooks.

Your comment (and this article) just inspired me to figure out how to do this, and backup all me eBooks in a DRM-free format. Turns out, it was pretty painless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is why I back up all my Kindle purchases to my hard drive with Calibre. They're DRMed still, but I know I can crack the files if something like this happens to me.

<comment><USER33> This is why I do not buy DRM-ed things and rather become a criminal who has control over the things he "owns".

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't want to be the "yeah, same thing happened to me!" guy, but I had an awful experience with E*trade, back when their stock went down I decided to move some of my money to Bank of america... That wire took about three years to complete, only a few months ago they freed up my $100k account, which was not getting interests from them or anything, they could never tell me what had happened, they said "something" went wrong with the wire and so they locked my account.

Needless to say, I'm not doing business with them any time soon!

<comment><USER35> 3 years and for a fairly substancial sum of 100k? None of that sounds right. If it really took as long as you say, then a lawyer should have been called.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Simple solution. File a small claims court case for the cost the replace your library. The less offensive option that I've used in the past is finding the corporate contact from the Better Business Bureau and going directly to them. It works fairly often and fairly well because most companies value those reputations.

I agree with some of the comments here, simply because your company is an 'internet company' doesn't mean a 'Help' webpage is all you need for support. Actual personal support handling is virtually non-existent from large scale web companies and it's a disappointment.

</comment><comment><USER37> <https://www.xkcd.com/488/>

</comment><comment><USER38> moral of the story: if you're going to give money to a company that uses DRM, make sure the DRM is pwnable, and make pwning your own purchases a habit.

</comment><comment><USER39> You can backup the files from your kindle easily. I also hear it is pretty simple to strip the DRM.

I don't see why this belongs on the front page. There are no real details here.

<comment><USER40> With some technical knowledge and violating federal law - you can get access to stuff you already own?

That's like saying your banks' ATM network going down isn't news because you can always get through the vault door with some C4 and take your money that way.

<comment><USER39> That's not an accurate analogy. You have the books on your kindle (and in your backup if you made one). They're yours, you bought them. I have the right to access material that I own, even if that means removing the DRM from it.

The article is _really_ light on details. Without more information I really don't see why this story has legs.

<comment><USER40> "I have the right to access material that I own, even if that means removing the DRM from it."

Not according to the DMCA you don't. Accessing material you bought - what are you? Some kind of terrorist?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down - <AUTHOR> http://joyent.com/blog/if-i-was-your-cloud-provider-i-d-never-let-you-down <comment><USER2> With the lifetime account fiasco still ongoing [1], they should probably shut up.

[1] Joyent/Textdrive sold lifetime shared hosting accounts for a one time payment in the beginning. Those accounts would exist "as long as we exists". A couple of months back they sent an email that they are "discontinuing" lifetime accounts. After uproar from the community they offered refunds. Many people (including me) agreed to the refund, but then they decided to make another 180 degree turn, not paying out the refund. Instead they are now spinning off a new "Textdrive" that is supposed to "take over" the lifetime customers. No details about funding/general outlook/etc. of this new company has been provided so far. Questions to this end are shrugged off as "everything is perfect, just trust us, ..."

Incidentally, the new Textdrive Forum (discuss.textdrive.com) seems to be down at the moment...

<comment><USER3> "lifetime" "unlimited" "forever" etc products should always been looked at sceptically for that reason. Anything that is either finite or requires up- keep cannot be offered on these terms, it is just impossible.

I actually avoid unlimited products on purpose because I think a lie is a bad way to start doing business together. Be it web-hosting, broadband, or anything else. I would prefer they just be up front and then we both know where we stand (no ambiguity).

<comment><USER4> What Joyent forgot about was that by getting rid of the lifetime account holders (I was one) they were effectively silencing their greatest word of mouth sales. I would always recommend their services to others, and I would purchase many of their other products/services as they came out.

But by pulling out the rug under me[1], it left me distrustful of them. So let's assume that I got my money's worth, but what Joyent has now lost is the word of mouth. Even worse, instead of _not_ telling people about Joyent, I actively turn them away from Joyent.

While Amazon goes down from time to time, at least I have less unknowns with them. With Joyent, I don't know how they are going to fuck me at the last minute when they decide to pivot for the umpteenth time.

[1] Not once, but thrice. First, they cancel the lifetime accounts, forcing me to quickly move to another provider (thank you GAFB and Heroku). Then they say I can get a refund for the service, which when I asked for it they first denied that they gave it out and then told me that the offer was rescinded because the Textdrive service was coming out. Third, they keep calling me telling me that I need to move, even though if they spent 2 seconds checking for account activity they would see that no domain routes to them anymore, nor is any data stored with them.

<comment><USER5> Same here - I'll never recommend them, and have actively discouraged people from using or investigating them.

They may be great technically, but I always mention their spotty/inconsistent and poor treatment of me as a customer. Even if I'm not the most lucrative customer, how you treat every customer is important. You never know who, dispute being a low-revenue personal user, is a high-revenue business user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If this is gloating about the EC2 outage, then ugh. I can't find out if it is because the whole of joyent.com is actually down for me (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT)

<comment><USER7> Yep, same for me. Delicious irony in my opinion

<comment><USER8> If a company is actually stupid enough to say "If I was your cloud provider, I'd never let you down" then I immediately lose all interest in working with that company. Childish and they obviously have no appreciation for how hard it is to properly run a hosting company.

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure they have a decent idea of what's involved running a hosting company being as how they're a huge hosting company.

I think what they've done is _great_ , they're appealing to the users by showing they are users and they'll probably get a crapload of traffic because of it whether they land Reddit or not. It's already landed them the #1 slot on HN, a site where AWS staff post AWS updates!

<comment><USER10> In the professional tech world, not ALL exposure is good exposure. With this post they look like immature kids, and then when their post and entire site goes down, they look incompetent in front of the very people they want to convince.

An informative post explaining the hardships of uptime and reliability in simple words, and how they do their best to keep adding 9's, would have been so much better.

<comment><USER11> [http://joyent.com/blog/network-storage-in-the-cloud- deliciou...](http://joyent.com/blog/network-storage-in-the-cloud-delicious- but-deadly) [http://joyent.com/blog/on-cascading-failures-and-amazons- ela...](http://joyent.com/blog/on-cascading-failures-and-amazons-elastic- block-store) [http://joyent.com/blog/magical-block-store-when- abstractions...](http://joyent.com/blog/magical-block-store-when-abstractions- fail-us)

<comment><USER10> Exactly, they should have done more of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My new startup, Uptano (<https://uptano.com>), is a cloud provider (still hurts me to write "cloud").

..and we've had 100% uptime in our short run so far. Our systems are highly redundant and as decoupled as possible. Still, I wouldn't for one second claim that I, or anyone else, could do better than AWS on reliability.

AWS does a great job on reliability. I do think EBS is a terrible technology that should die in a fiery pit, but they do a damn good job of keeping everything _up_.

If they really do believe their 99.9999% claim, I'd love to see them make a bet. How about Reddit gets $1M if they move and it falls below that?

<comment><USER13> Could you please explain the tenancy/virtual servers mechanic of your service? The copy on the website isn't clear. (Also, OH GOD that font. OH. GOD.)

It's not clear to me whether I'm getting my own server (effectively dedicated?) for $136/month or not.

Further, what if I don't want multiple-tenants on the hardware? What does it cost me to effectively treat each physical server a single logical unit? Is that even possible?

I mostly want a more elastic alternative to dedicated servers. Is your service along those lines?

<comment><USER12> You're paying for a dedicated machine. Then you run virtual servers on your machine. You could run just one (treating it much like a regular dedicated server), or you could run multiple, that's up to you.

There is no scenario in which multiple users share the same hardware. Your hardware is your own.

The web site will improve ;-)

Feel free to email me with any questions: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> With a one-line pitch like "HIGH-PERFORMANCE CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE FOR REAL- TIME WEB AND MOBILE APPLICATIONS", what could possibly go wrong?

No, I don't hate Joyent. I can't even figure out what they offer. And I don't see "Python" or "Postgres" or "Redis" in their tech stack page, so what would reddit (a Python / Postres / Redis site) want with them? They seem to be mostly node.js / Mongo, which is a nice tech stack but isn't the one reddit is built on.

Clicking around their dev docs seems to suggest you can install your own stuff on their "SmartMachines" (are those Linux VMs?), but there's a heavy node.js bias to the docs.

<comment><USER15> Joyent is some former Sun guys who are still committed to "the OS is a differentiator". They use Illumos, their fork of OpenSolaris...

I'm pretty sure python, postgres, and redis all run on Solaris, but Joyent's value add is NOT at the application layer, but in OS features that facilitate application workloads better. Their SmartMachines (or zones), ZFS, dtrace.. Solaris is an epic environment to develop in.

I probably only know of a few other OS's that are as powerful (IOS XR, OnTap, Linux..), and only corner cases are more enjoyable to work with (BeOS, plan9, lispmachine).

Their difficulty in messaging is probably around not wanting to be labelled "post-Sun", but cloud! internet! not oracle! You should think of them as providing an OS as a service.

<comment><USER14> OK, so they use "zones" (beefed up multi-user, which should have less overhead than virtualization) and a fork of OpenSolaris (interesting features, reputed to be very stable).

I wish they'd just say that, as it makes their "Faster than VM" claim seem a lot less wild.

Shared hosting is actually more efficient than VMs, but it got a bad rap due to massively oversold hosts.

<comment><USER16> Sun engineered some amazing stuff but eventually got bought out by a company with weaker engineers but much, much stronger sales team. After being burned in this way I could see how a bunch of former Sun staffers might use their former technology but call someone else in and say 'look, we can't market for shit - you have a go'.

And that's my guess on why their marketing spiel might seem a little vague to a tech person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, that web-site is down, this couldn't possibly be more ironic.

<comment><USER17> and still down 3 hours later... ouch!

<comment><USER18> Disable https everywhere.

<comment><USER19> Why? The desired information has already been conveyed from the https servers: Joyent can't withstand load.

<comment><USER20> Well, or someone forgot to turn on HTTPS. How does the plugin know whether to redirect a given site anyway?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> After TextDrive's lifetime hosting encounters, I'd never trust Joyent again, cloud or non-cloud.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4391669>

</comment><comment><USER22> I do not want to be a jerk here, but the only reason I joined was the promise of "lifetime" - they can NOT just cancel our accounts does it does not suit them. Please contact me webmaster @ opendomain ORG if you would like to join the class action lawsuit. We already have quite a few people signed up.

</comment><comment><USER23> It should be "if I _were_ your cloud provider." It's a possibility and a wish of theirs, so it should be expressed in the subjunctive. [http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs- was-i...](http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/subjunctive-verbs-was-i- were.aspx)

<comment><USER24> They were referring to a Justin Bieber lyric, "If I was your boyfriend", which was parodied by the girl who became the Overly Attached Girlfriend meme, which is popular on Reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone remember Joyent's Strongspace service? [http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyen...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyent- services-back-after-8-day-outage/)

<comment><USER26> They got a free thumper from Sun through the "try and buy" program, loaded it up with customers, and ... failed to operate it properly. IIRC, it wasn't just a service outage - some data was irrevocably lost.

ZFS on Solaris was a non-beta, prime time product at that time, so it's not fair to blame it on "a ZFS thing". Deploying customers on loaner hardware is scrappy and admirable, in a way, but Sun wasn't giving those away two by two - there was no redundancy.

The joyent blog, in those days, alternated between enterprise cloud bullshit- bingo posts and facebook game development. I thought it was a clown operation back then and I suspect it still is.

<comment><USER27> ZFS was officially a non-beta, prime time product. In practice, apparently anyone who tested its robustness thoroughly before deploying it found that it tended to crash and burn at the first hint of trouble exactly like it did for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Unable to connect"

well that was rather ironic..

<comment><USER29> One of those things that is hilarious but not actually funny.

<comment><USER30> Ha, ha, only serious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > Lindsay Shaw is a member of the Joyent Marketing and Communications Team.

This says it all really, just a bit of PR to boost awareness of their product...and the HN community has taken the bait.

<comment><USER4> While I agree with you that no press is bad press, in the Internet realm you also have to be aware of keywords. HN comments right now are littered with none-to-flattering words for Joyent, which then get indexed by Bing/Google and can hurt the reputation for Joyent.

Worse yet, Joyent's PR may backfire and make them look like naive idiots for making claims they can't back up...especially when it comes to throwing rocks at the Amazon juggernaut.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ironically the site's SSL is not configured correctly... Doesn't work when using the "HTTPS Everywhere" extension unless you manually change it to not opt for HTTPS on the site.

<comment><USER33> Huh? There's no SSL on joyent.com. Their login form, however, has it, on a different domain: <https://my.joyentcloud.com>.

Not sure how this can be classified as "not configured correctly". It's HTTPS Everywhere who's incorrect there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I 've been using their vps for years, and they didn't let down (apart from less than a handful of reboots, the uptime was basically around 400 days). The thing is they kept their prices unchanged for 4 years which is odd.

</comment><comment><USER35> If I _were_ a grammar nazi, I'd be quite irate.

<comment><USER36> Don't hate the provider, hate the meme:

<http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/overly-attached-girlfriend>

<comment><USER37> They're actually referencing the Ryan Gosling meme, not OAG. There's an image of him right on the page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Uptime comes from how you design and build a system, not which IaaS provider you choose.

<comment><USER39> So if your IaaS goes down, that's your fault?

<comment><USER38> Yes. You are responsible for replication, failover, disaster recovery, etc.

<comment><USER40> The point of using IaaS is to outsource as least some of the responsibilities.

<comment><USER41> No, you outsource the work, not the responsibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Umm The blog post is down. If you can't handle traffic to a blogpost, I don't see how reddit would take your offer about "no downtime" seriously.

<comment><USER18> It's not a load issue. Disable HTTPS Everywhere.

<comment><USER42> > Disable HTTPS Everywhere.

It wasn't that either. It didn't work for me, and for many other people. See the thread for simple `curl <http://whatever-joyent`> failing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> If something "sounds" suspicious, it usually is. I had one of the early "truly unlimited" mobile data plans w/VZ. They actually honored it until I made the blunder of changing my plan. I was grandfathered in, but they kept sending me teasers to get me to switch. Once I did, going back was not an option. They got what they wanted . . .

</comment><comment><USER39> I read a post quite a while ago from the reddit admins bitching out EC2 after one of the last dramas, I remember they said it would be a huge migration to migrate all data across to a new provider so they would have to be solid.

I wonder how their current EC2 pricing would compare to Joyent?

<comment><USER44> During the second-to-last Amazon EBS outage (that affected our RDS instances, I started migrating our database over to Joyent. Before RDS was completely restored, I had a MySQL instance up and running and our production servers pointing to the new host via SSH tunneling. As far as pricing goes, they're competitive with EC2, but, you need to factor in the amount of time that it'll take to move off of Linux and onto Solaris/SmartOS (which isn't that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things)...

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Joyent, you so cray. Thanks for reminding us that "Never" and "Lifetime", "100% Uptime Guarantee" and "Fanatical Service" are all bullshit indicators. You've got a good cloud, you don't need to make promises that you can't keep.

</comment><comment><USER46> This from the company that patented the 8-day outage.

[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyen...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/01/21/joyent- services-back-after-8-day-outage/)

</comment><comment><USER47> Saying you have a more robust cloud than Amazon is laughable. It's really as simple as that. This is a joke.

</comment><comment><USER48> Sorry, and I really don't mean to be a grammar nazi, but it's "if I were". It's a subjunctive.

<comment><USER49> Let's add that to the list: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3658860>

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Meanwhile, <http://nodejs.org> is down. <http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/nodejs.org>

</comment><comment><USER51> "Error 102 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED): The server refused the connection."

The page is down.

<comment><USER52> They do not serve https for the site, what else are you expecting to see?

<comment><USER51> Notice to those of us running the EFF HTTPS EVERYWHERE... they'll force SSL and fail.

Not running SSL should be considered a bit of a Faux pas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Re: "We've given our other partners 99.9999% uptime."

That's neither technologically possible nor commercially feasible.

Companies need to stop saying that.

</comment><comment><USER54> were, not was. learn english modal verbs and subjunctive before soliciting business.

</comment><comment><USER55> Or switch to us-west-2 to immediately solve more than half their problems?

</comment><comment><USER56> If I were a serious cloud provider, I would check my grammar.

</comment><comment><USER57> They should send this open letter to Heroku as well :)

<comment><USER58> Historically, running Ruby on Joyent was an exercise in frustration. Heroku isn't _only_ Ruby these days, but operating as a stable ruby platform is still a requirement I think.

Among other things: Solaris threading libs with crashy bugs when you pop a new thread open. Took quite a while to figure that one out.

<comment><USER59> It is perhaps a difference in thread creation semantics, or something like that. But, Solaris threading has been rock solid for many, many years.

<comment><USER58> Not in my direct confirmed experience. pthread lib on Joyent's particularly weird version of solaris was f'd hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Am I the only one finding the post a bit sexist as well? Since when are successful 9gag memes like "Overly attached girlfriend" pc?

<comment><USER61> Those are reddit memes. Not 9gag memes. 9gag is a content stealing site. See oatmeal, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> because of all the "success" with twitter back in the days

</comment><comment><USER63> What, no ent jokes?

</comment><comment><USER64> There is no way they can achieve that uptime claim, nor should they try to say they have 99.9999% aka "six nines". That's 31.5 seconds a year, and even a well-designed network is going to have that much at some level. I mean, the VPSes might be distributed across hardware, but a failure of some component might mean that it's still "up", but _seriously_ degraded during the transition. How useful is that for "uptime"? It becomes a bragging right. How about if all routes to a large provider, like Level(3) are down for a reset period, or are re-routed through Cogent, which is maxed out on all peering with L3 at 99% packet loss levels? Is that really uptime? Sure, that's out of their control, but the situation with their own website being down for some people right now underscores that lofty claims are meant to be broken.

Now that they're beating that Joyent drum a little more: watch them fall down under a DoS attack that Amazon could bat away at this point. I'm by no means supporting Amazon, but Joyent is still a small company with big claims. I predict they will fall apart when Sun stops making hardware, and when their engineers argue over whatever trendy "wrong way to do it" Node-type technologies that they're jacking off over next.

<comment><USER14> When you are talking about "X nines, in retrospect, from a small sample" it's meaningless, and they know it. All it means is, they've had 100% uptime, because they've been lucky enough to avoid a crash. And by 100% uptime, I'm sure that's "100% of crashes weren't in our opinion our fault".

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Why is this the top post?</comment>


Netflix Cracks Down on VPN and Proxy "Pirates" - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/netflix-cracks-down-on-vpn-and-proxy-pirates-150103/ <comment><USER2> Not according to Netflix. In a response to Engadget, Netflix said that there is "no change" in the way they handle VPNs.

[http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/03/netflix-clamps-down-on- vp...](http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/03/netflix-clamps-down-on-vpns/)</comment>


19 Year Old Takes a Stab at Web 2.0 With a Social Site For Computing and Technology. - <AUTHOR> http://www.prleap.com/pr/72413/ <comment><USER2> Congratulations! You've got a great start - build on it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. Very nice comment.</comment>


The Generational Divide in Social - <AUTHOR>

JiveWorld11 had a number of interesting speakers and round table discussions.  One subject that came up in various forms was the generational divide with social.  It seemed there were two main contexts within which this issue arose.  One was that people at the conference in charge of their companies social marketing sometimes would say that their senior executives didn't understand it and therefore weren't as enthusiastic in supporting it as they'd like.  The second context was if social marketing was actually reaching decision makers as they generally tend to be older.
The default assumption that a lot of people at the conference, and the population in general have was that older adults weren't as tech savvy as the younger generation.  Being older myself,this seemed to be an unflattering stereotype. Then, in one of the roundtables, the head of social efforts of Cisco said that their CEO,so far as I know its John Chamber, initially wasn't very enthusiastic about the social efforts and tolerated them more then anything else.
Well it was hard for me to confront the stereotype and announce that actually I am tech savvy, I always thought I was, but I was confident that John Chambers is tech savvy.
Although I don't accept the stereotype I do accept that there is a generational divide in social. Why?
My new hypothesis, after thinking about this question for some time, is that the way my life is organized and that of other people my age is simply different then the lives of those that participate in the social cloud.  For me I would have to change my whole routine, basically live like a fish out of water to engage in the social cloud.  Contrary to the stereotype, people in my generation are actually tech savvy, they just have a different life style and work differently; actually better. <comment><USER2> > I do accept that there is a generational divide in social.

I don't. I think a lot of the issues can be chalked up simply to age. Today's 20-year-olds are not going to change generations. But in 20 years, they will be 40, and I expect that they will act a lot like today's 40-year-olds when it happens.

When you're 20, you don't have a lot invested in the world. You have few assets, no children, etc.; you don't have a lot to lose. If some random person barges into your life, then there is a good chance that person has something to offer you. And if they don't, then there isn't much they can take away from you. But when you're 40, you probably have kids, some assets, some property. And you've learned that the random person who barges into your life, is probably trying to rip you off. And they can seriously damage you if they do. That makes you much more protective of the entrance to your social circle, and much more wary about marketing of any kind.

Furthermore, for older people, life revolves around family much more. Keeping a family going, raising kids, etc., take a _lot_ of time and work. That means you probably don't have so much time -- or desire -- to interact with huge numbers of people in a cloud-ish setting.

But when social stuff meets the needs of older generations, then they're happy to use it. I thought we all knew that Facebook is quite popular among 40-year- old moms.

(By the way, FWIW, I'm 45. Also, I'm not a mom, but I _am_ a dad.)</comment>


Court ruling clears way for energy storage on the grid - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/edhirs/2020/08/02/court-ruling-clears-way-for-energy-storage-on-the-grid-who-benefits/ <comment><USER2> The cheapest grid "battery" is minute-by-minute pricing of electricity. Much of a home's energy use can be time-shifted if there was a point to time-shift - and variable pricing provides that point.

Your home is a "battery" as you can run the temperature of your hot water heater higher when electricity is cheaper, and let it "coast" when electricity is more expensive. You still have hot water on demand.

The same goes for the refrigerator, heating system and the cooling system. This can be made even more effective by increasing the thermal mass of the house, for example, with a pile of rocks. Pretty cheap for a battery, don't you think?

And, of course, there's charging your car when electricity is cheaper.

At last, we actually have a use for the Internet-of-things - an internet device on your hotwater heater to query the current price of electricity.

Pretty darned cheap for a grid battery.

<comment><USER3> > The cheapest grid "battery" is minute-by-minute pricing of electricity.

This works to the extent that it works. But one of the big applications for a sufficiently cheap grid battery would be to store generation from solar to be used at night.

A large fraction of the nighttime load is for heat and light, because night is when it's cold and dark. It can't really be shifted into the daytime.

And another obvious use for a grid battery is to take advantage of that same demand pricing by buying power when it's cheap and selling when it's not.

<comment><USER2> > It can't really be shifted into the daytime.

The heat can be. Heat can be stored in the thermal mass of the house itself, and thermal mass can be added in the form of rocks.

With the advent of LED lights, the lighting bill isn't that much anymore.

<comment><USER4> This concept was widely deployed in certain regions with "storage heaters": very heavy (~40 Kg) electric heaters that would accumulate heat during the night when electricity is cheap and release it throughout the day.

They felt out of fashion because apparently they were hard to use as you cannot control how the heat is released. Charge them too much and you will have to open windows the next day wasting energy, charge them too little and you will have to turn them on during the day when the electricity is expensive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One important aspect of this is battery capacity can be safely placed at the grid edge. Power infringement is built to handle the capacity of the peek days but statically these peeks only occur once in a blue-moon. By adding battery capacity at the edge of the grid significantly less long distance transmission infrastructure is is needed and the grid can be balanced in a much more targeted way.

</comment><comment> the-pigeon Who benefits? Pretty much everybody except fossil fuel power plant owners.

They create much more reliable power grids and eliminate the need for many natural gas power plants that are expensive to maintain and only run during peak power demand.

<comment><USER6> In growing communities I don't know that this is necessarily a problem for the incumbents.

What stops them from installing batteries in front of a base power plant instead of building more peaking plants? Wouldn't that be a cheaper way for them to keep up with growing demand?

You can also use energy storage for peak shaving on long distance lines (which might be to _our_ detriment, as they may avoid building needed infrastructure, resulting in brownouts)

<comment><USER7> You don't need batteries in front of base generation (which there isn't much left of as coal and nuclear phase out), and batteries allow renewables to generate more revenue per MWh as that power is now considered dispatchable (Callable on demand) by the grid operator.

Batteries are direct competitors against large amounts of legacy investments (coal, natural gas, and nuclear). They can charge from any (localish) grid power source when power is cheap, discharge when power is more expensive (arbitrage), and are stupid fast (hundreds of milliseconds) at providing frequency response services thermal generators have previously provided (single digit minutes, competitively, to get spinning metal up to a higher speed).

Peak shaving is definitely a use case (Tesla uses it to shave demand charges at some Superchargers for example), but that's a consumer (not utility or investor owned generator) benefit.

TLDR Old grid->new grid is happening rapidly and incumbents are going to get left behind.

<comment><USER6> At the risk of repeating myself:

High Tension power lines are not free. Some run at capacity, so batteries would help.

Battery power in front of base power means fewer peaking plants, which lowers the relative value of renewables to the entrenched (while only slightly improving emissions).

Many will be more comfortable with batteries than windmills. I'm not saying this because I think they should win, I'm trying to prepare you for the sort of pushback you should anticipate from policy makers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tesla installed batteries in South Australia and they've already proven themselves a few times.

[https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-big-battery-south- australia-...](https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-big-battery-south- australia-3-blackouts/)

[https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts- lumb...](https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts-lumbering- coal-units-after-loy-yang-trips-70003/)

</comment><comment><USER9> In Europe, and I can only assume that it's similar to the US, the energy market is actually running a surprisingly complicated auction system. For example, since power generation and consumption have to be balanced at all times, power generation capability that can ramp up and down quickly is more valuable than one with the same nominal power that can only be controlled slowly. As far as I understand, all of this is priced in, with separate auctions for different timescales.

What batteries allow you to do is to perform time arbitrage in this market. As with many other forms of arbitrage, this should lower average prices, though some specific current uses could suffer. For example, if this is deployed at scale, electricity might no longer be all that much cheaper at night.

<comment><USER10> Yes, this is sort-of the case in the US, with the quirk that we have 3 major grids: the Eastern Interconnect, the Western Interconnect, and Texas.

Within that are individual utility companies: some are traditional top-down utilities that own both generation and poles-and-wires, vs some utilities are competitively bidding generation (and sometimes bidding consumption). Layer on top of that many interconnected "power market areas".

[https://www.epa.gov/greenpower/us-electricity-grid- markets](https://www.epa.gov/greenpower/us-electricity-grid-markets)

<comment><USER11> Let me add some detail to your coverage of the interconnects in relation to the more granular power markets.

For example, ERCOT (Texas) has a 1:1 relationship with its market, but the rest are different. The Eastern Interconnect has many power markets made up of many many utilities. PJM, NYISO, ISO-NE, SPP, & MISO are the energy markets (called ISOs or RTOs) in the Eastern Interconnect. There is also the government owned TVA and Southern Company which is kinda like a large vertically integrated utility.

These markets perform some of the most complex MIP models on the planet in their optimization. FERC Order #841 addresses the incorporation of storage into these markets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > ...the fight generators and transmission companies have waged to prevent > wholesale market access for batteries.

just in case somebody still thinks that climate change is a technical problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> Lovely. Just got my own 6.6kW ground mount grid-tied array installed. During the summer here in NM, this produces roughly 4x more electricity than we need. Currently, it's just dumping into the (local) grid, and probably powering a few neighbor's homes, which is excellent.

But this just highlights the bigger more general problem: it makes little sense for us to have our own battery system, and bigger systems need to power storage if solar is to be able to provide overnight supplies.

I keep wringing my hands over whether I should have aimed for full off-grid status rather than grid-tied, but if/as the grid gains viably scaled storage, grid-tied becomes more and more clear as the right choice.

<comment><USER14> battery prices are far too high to be competitive with grid, even at crazy CA prices. I put in a 1.2kw carport array over my leaf ev so I can trickle charge it (720w is the minimum charge rate, needs a special charger to go that low). That also gives me enough juice to easily power my fridge and a large DIY air filter in the house when fires and outages come around again.

The panels are so cheap, even if I get only 2 charges per week it will pay itself off in a couple of years.

<comment><USER13> For me it's not about "competitive with grid". I'm already (I hope) at net zero for annual electrical consumption vs. generation.

The question is whether it's best to shunt the excess generation into my own storage (batteries) or the grid. Although practically speaking it likely makes no difference (my excess just flows into my neighbors' homes), conceptually flowing into a grid with and without its storage seems quite different.

<comment><USER15> I'm working towards solar+battery mostly because I feel that my electric energy costs are unreasonably high and I scored a residential battery for free. Had I not gotten it for free, I would probably have bought one anyway just to give PG&E the finger.

<comment><USER13> Depending on the size of your array, the problem with battery storage is that to actually capture the full output of a moderately sized array would require an enormous battery bank. So large that almost nobody would have one large enough. You'll just be throwing away generated power.

By contrast, being grid-tied gives the peak power output somewhere to go/something to do.

Now, if you live somewhere where your year round electrical needs are roughly constant, this is less of an issue: just size the array (and the bank) appropriately for your needs, there won't be much excess power.

However, here in New Mexico, my wife and I use very little electricity for 6 months a year, a bit more for 3 months and quite a lot for the remaining 3 months because we have heat pumps for heating during the (cold) winter. Consequently, there's a compromise involved in sizing the array, and in my case, I picked a size that ought to a little too small in the winter and a lot too big in the summer, with the goal of net-zero for the year overall. That means that in the summer, I've got oodles of excess electrical power. Batteries on site would be impractical to store it.

<comment><USER15> I will almost certainly remain grid-tied for quite some years to come, so excess will go elsewhere. But I want to pull in fairly close to zero. Also, I'm in the Bay Area and my electricity needs will track sun pretty well. Heating is currently gas and cooling is electricity.

I plan to end up with Mitsubishi ductless units sooner or later, at which point there will be more opportunity to balance out energy consumption. And I'm probably 1-2 years from owning an EV, given how our commuter car is holding together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the US how do your solar energy subsidies work?

In the UK where green energy isn't commercially viable on its own the subsidy is implemented as Contracts for Difference. What this means is that the government ensures you get paid a specific fee for your electricity (the "strike price" decided by auction when the project subsidy was agreed) say £58 per MWh - regardless. If you actually sell electricity for £12 per MWh during a glut the government pays £46 to make up the difference, but if you sell electricity when prices are £95 per MWh during a shortage, the government gets £37 back from that.

These CfDs are auctioned, thus providing a signal about whether subsidy is needed. If bids approach the actual market price of electricity then there's no need to have any further rounds of subsidy for this class of power - apparently financial backers are happy to build such generators at the price the market will already pay.

This fits nicely with the fact that all the obvious green options are capital dominated. A traditional fossil fuel power plant consumes fuel to make power, which means below some particular price it will shut off to avoid spending more on fuel than it earns from selling electricity. But this is never true for a wind farm, or solar farm, and it's only barely in principle possible for nuclear (Nuclear fuel is expensive, but a little goes a long way). So in fact you will always sell all the power from these sources, and the only question is how much for?

<comment><USER17> I'm in a process of building 1MW in Poland, and - at least here - it's not true that renewables are not commercially viable.

That is, if I finished building today and began trading on an open market, I would benefit more in the upcoming years (possibly overall), than through auctions.

The benefit of auctions is that since they guarantee the proce for the next 15 years, it's way easier to get financing for them.

Our estimates show that we would have way higher returns on the open market, but the risks would be much higher as well.

<comment><USER16> > it's not true that renewables are not commercially viable.

Ah, I think this is perhaps a language problem. Given you said in Poland I suppose that it's plausible English is not your first language. Here's what I wrote:

> In the UK where green energy isn't commercially viable on its own the > subsidy is implemented as Contracts for Difference.

Now, what I intended here is that "where" is a conditional constraint on the subsequent explanation. I can see what you thought I meant, and it's a valid reading of the sentence but isn't what I intended. What I was going for is roughly equivalent in meaning to:

> In the UK, if some particular type of green energy isn't commercially viable > on its own the subsidy for that type of green energy is implemented as > Contracts for Difference.

Thus, CfDs are no longer available for some proven plant types, it makes commercial sense to build these anyway, so no need to subsidise them. But for others subsidy is still very much necessary. Tidal projects are an example, you can make power from tidal forces, on the coast and Britain has lots of coast because it's an island - but right now all projects have a huge up-front capital investment that can't be justified by low electricity prices so a large subsidy is necessary if they are to be developed other than as small research projects.

You're correct that risk reduction means it can make sense to offer (and bid for) CfDs even when the strike price will be below expected market prices. And it's anticipated that a future UK government "Pot 1" auction for onshore wind will work out that way, there's no way new onshore wind needs £40+ per MWh but that's what you'd get on the open market today, however the risk reduction is valuable at a lower price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I get why the legacy plant owners are fighting it but why are the state regulators fighting it? Especially Texas where free competition is the norm ;) Ok, that was sprinkled with a pinch of snark.

Honestly, if it helps consumers why would states be against it? What are we missing here?

<comment><USER19> >I get why the legacy plant owners are fighting it but why are the state regulators fighting it?

Corruption. Namely, Regulatory Capture.[0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture)</comment></comment>


The Solo Hacker's Guide to Clojure - <AUTHOR> https://jacobobryant.com/post/2020/guide-to-clojure/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is basically just an outline of a course I'm planning to write. I think one of the main downsides of Clojure is just the amount of time it takes to get up to speed with it. So I'm trying to help out with that.</comment>


Ask HN: insomnia? - <AUTHOR>

What do you do when you have insomnia? <comment><USER2> Read & exercise.

It's the best thign for it (esp if your really not going ot get any sleep).

Steven Fry is an insomniac and he knows a _lot_ of crap simply from reading books when he couldn't sleep. I try to go the same way :D

</comment><comment><USER3> I follow my doctors' advice. Every doctor I've ever had has given me the same advice on insomnia. It's not rocket science.

1\. Go to bed at the same time every night.

2\. Get up at the same time every morning.

3\. Don't do anything in bed other than bed-related activities. No TV, no reading, no radio. (If you must read, just don't do it in bed. Get up. Sit in a chair.)

4\. Exercise more.

5\. Cut caffeine consumption.

This is common-sense advice. Your situation may be peculiar in some way. See a doctor.

</comment><comment><USER4> Find out what's causing it... there's something wrong. Usually it is stress or anxiety. Is something worrying you?

The easiest way to solve it: exercise and/or eat more. This reduces stress and anxiety. It's easier said than done... I find insomnia (and most things in life) to be a feedback loop. Less sleep means I'm more exhausted and not hungry. More quality sleep gives me more energy to exercise and I eat right. So you've gotta do something that changes in which direction you're regressing.

It should be noted there's a difference between insomnia and sleep phase disorders. One is actually whether or not you sleep soundly for enough hours a night, and the other is at which hours you tend to sleep.

But take my advice with a grain of salt.. it's 6:15 here and I'm still awake :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Watch TV for half an hour, then try to sleep again. Usually its because something is on my mind, so I need to put my mind somewhere else (hence, the TV).

However, I find that I sleep much better if I get off the computer early, say 9PM. That gives me plenty of time to wind down and get sleepy before a reasonable time to go to bed.

Otherwise I'll find myself still on the computer until 3AM, then I have no means of winding down, so I struggle to get to sleep all night, get up late the next day, and so the cycle continues!

<comment><USER6> I find TV and Computer the worst thing - I think the directed glow/light of the screen isn't good for your body clock... Try reading. Works much better for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hack. Or read Hacker News.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I'm doing both right now. I wonder whether anyone does something like jogging, play Go on KGS etc.

<comment><USER7> Oh, well I don't jog at night if I can't sleep. But I find that running during the day helps me sleep at night.

Here's my list: hack, play TF2, catch up on my stack of PragProg PDFs, plan out the next day, practice juggling</comment></comment></comment>


Which are the best osdev tutorials? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> So far, I've found the one by James Molloy quite good: [http://www.jamesmolloy.co.uk/tutorial_html/](http://www.jamesmolloy.co.uk/tutorial_html/)

If you have a Raspberry Pi, you might consider reading [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/) Note though that the one for the Pi only scratches the surface. Topics like memory management or task scheduling are not included.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing can beat this for a beginner.

[http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html](http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/xv6.html) \-- read thru src code of unix v6, polished for x86 as xv6

Once done with xv6, [http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs422/pios#](http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs422/pios#)! -- Build a modern multi-core os kernel

</comment><comment><USER4> [http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page](http://wiki.osdev.org/Main_Page)

[http://www.brokenthorn.com/Resources/OSDevIndex.html](http://www.brokenthorn.com/Resources/OSDevIndex.html)

[http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/)

<comment><USER2> Ah, thanks, I didn't know the last one.</comment></comment>


Want To Know Who Unfriends You On FaceBook  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdistance.com/2012/01/want-to-know-who-unfriends-you-on.html

<comment><USER2> Or, you could have self-esteem.</comment>


The New Copycats: How Facebook Squashes Competition From Startups - <AUTHOR> http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-markets/2017080910924/the-new-copycats-how-facebook-squashes-competition-from-startups.aspx <comment><USER2> _> Facebook uses an internal database to track rivals... The database stems from Facebook's 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users' privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones..._

WTF is this shady-ass sh*t. Way to "secure users' privacy," Facebook.

From the sound of Onavo's App Store reviews they are using deceptive marketing of the "Your phone is infected, install this now!!" variety. Yet they have a lot of positive but suspiciously brief reviews balancing them out. So Facebook bought a company that MITMs unsuspecting users for profit, using scammer marketing techniques and fake reviews to drive installs, then leverages that to knife babies. "Don't be too proud," indeed.

I hope there is cause for Apple to remove this app from the App Store (like deceptive marketing or exploitive practices). Or for a bunch of us good folks to leave negative reviews. These guys depend on informed people avoiding these apps and not leaving reviews.

<comment><USER3> This is more detailed data it sounds like but fundamentally how is this different than obsessively monitoring app Annie for which apps are gaining traction in your space?

<comment><USER2> Totally different. App Annie does not snoop on users.[1]

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20014123/how-does- appann...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20014123/how-does-appannie-com- get-app-rankings-to-1500)

<comment><USER4> App Annie acquired Mobidia [https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/06/app-annie- acquires-mobile-...](https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/06/app-annie-acquires- mobile-measurement-service-mobidia/) in 2015 which has an app called "My Data Manager" that is similar to Onavo Count.

<comment><USER2> Apples and oranges. I stand corrected about them snooping on users, but Mobidia is more upfront about what they do.[1] Onavo is deceptive, suggesting that they improve "security" and leveraging scammy marketing to drive installs.

[1] "Our goal is to provide you with a free, simple service without ads. To keep our service free, we provide research on market trends to help create better apps." [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-data-manager-track- your/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-data-manager-track- your/id477865384?mt=8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook is what Microsoft was in the 1990s. Using its existing market dominance to crush potential competitors by offering their distinctive offerings as mere features of its existing popular products.

This did lead to a lot of momentum to the anti-trust proceedings against Microsoft.

I wonder if that encourages Facebook to not do this so obviously in the future? Or maybe it isn't at all worried about anti-trust for the near term.

I am sure Google, Amazon and Microsoft continue to do doing this as well, but it seems that Facebook is doing this most successfully or at least most prominently with its total destruction of Snap.

I guess it is different in that Google and Facebook both have very effective means to accurately measure adoption trends of new successful market entrants, and thus can target these entrants better than ever before with total destruction.

This is just killer:

> In December, Facebook began its group-video-chat offensive. Its Messenger > app introduced the feature with the ability to see up to six people in a > conversation, compared with the eight-person rooms on Houseparty.

> In February, Facebook invited Houseparty users between the ages of 13 and 17 > to come to its offices in Menlo Park, Calif., to participate in a study and > keep a diary for a week afterward that they would share with Facebook, > offering as an inducement $275 Amazon gift cards.

<comment><USER6> I think people forget that the MSFT v US outcome had very little affect on Microsoft. They took it to appeals court and won.

 _Microsoft would settle the case with the Department of Justice in November of 2001 by agreeing to make it easier for Microsoft 's competitors to get their software more closely integrated with the Windows operating system_

[http://time.com/3553242/microsoft- monopoly/](http://time.com/3553242/microsoft-monopoly/)

<comment><USER7> In fact it had an extremely large negative impact on Microsoft. To know that, all you have to do is read / listen to [1] actual interviews from people that worked there through those days. It was very hard on the company and its employees.

The culture was forced to change substantially. Their behavior was monitored by the government for years after. They were no longer able to aggressively compete without chains on their strongest points of leverage. At a time when IE had conquered the browser market, they couldn't use that new monopoly point to attempt to crush Google as one example (which is exactly what they would have done in the late 1980s or early 1990s). It's the same type of restrictive blanket that was put on Intel by the US Government in exchange for allowing them to keep their monopoly.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2017-07-28/rich- barton-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/audio/2017-07-28/rich-barton-talks- about-his-startup-companies)

<comment><USER8> It may have been stressful for employees and Gates, but it was a slap on the wrist when compared to the dominant position the company had managed to attain. Most of the power they had gained they kept. Yes, they ended some of the more egregious practices like the per-processor fees, but they ultimately made it out relatively unscathed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Facebook has been buying all social networks it feels are a competitive threat to it. First it bought insta then it bought WhatsApp it tried to buy Snapchat wasn't successful so copied it in insta. One of the things I read a lot on hn is how Facebook has killed privacy and people try not to use it etc. But I personally stopped using Facebook not because of privacy concerns but because Facebook has been making an open web into a private web. And more and more stuff that in the past would have been on company websites is available on Facebook alone and sometimes not accessible without a Facebook account.

<comment><USER10> What struck me from the article was _how_ facebook knew what social networks are competitive threats. They're tracking what apps you use on your phone.

"Facebook uses an internal database to track rivals, including young startups performing unusually well, people familiar with the system say. The database stems from Facebook's 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users' privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones, these people say.

The tool shaped Facebook's decision to buy WhatsApp and informed its live- video strategy, they say. Facebook used Onavo to build its early-bird tool that tips it off to promising services and that helped Facebook home in on Houseparty"

<comment><USER11> To add context: Other companies, such as App Annie, offer free VPN services (under a different company name) in order to track this type of engagement data. It appears to be very valuable.

<comment><USER12> App Annie's service is "VPN Defender", apparently:

[https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/31/app-annie-fills-the- void-l...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/31/app-annie-fills-the-void-left-by- facebooks-onavo-acquisition-with-its-new-company-smart-sense/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _While getting acquired can be "a very good win for the founders, that might be at the expense of a more competitive landscape."_

I think about this a lot and at the end of the day a founder has to decide if they care about their own payday or the broader ecosystem/market of independent products.

If you fall into the latter camp, then assuming you are even successful in the market, you should prepare to die by your sword. Otherwise, the big 5 just keep getting bigger with more advocates and authority.

You could argue that joining them will be better in the end because you just bide your time and leave to start something even bigger, but the reality is you'll have the same dilemma in the future. So why wait to take a stand and try to compete?

The real question is if it's even practically possible to compete. Given that VC are generally too timid to fund anything which could get beaten by the big ones, there aren't a whole lot of options to growth fund something which really could compete.

<comment><USER13> >I think about this a lot and at the end of the day a founder has to decide if they care about their own payday or the broader ecosystem/market of independent products.

I think the solution has to be in fixing the system. As long as we're saying this is a competitive, free market but only so long as the individuals in it act in the interest of everyone and not just themselves then we're doomed. We need some wide ranging updates to the antitrust literature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm sorry but if your product can be easily copied by Facebook, you don't really have a product.

There was once a time when video chat was novel, but now since the technology is "done", there is nothing hard about developing these services from a technical perspective. Handling scale and various other things with these products used to be a challenge but now we have the cloud, API's and a mature ecosystem. The world really doesn't need more of the same kinds of communication apps, it all just becomes a gimmick and less of a utility.

So, most of these products will be successful based upon other factors -- such as the cleverness of their marketing, or whether or not they serve a niche that is lucrative enough and underserved enough on which to build a successful business, but not large enough to attract the attention of one of the goliaths.

The one advantage startups have over large corporations like Facebook is their size and speed at which they can move. Engineers at Facebook, like any large tech company, are encumbered by substantial process, political forces, and a reluctance to try new ideas. Your typical startup employee is also far more motivated than an engineer who just wants to be given their daily JIRA tasks. To be honest, why does a single app need a team of 500 (frontend) engineers in the first place? When a tech company gets large, it becomes more about business than technology, anyways.

So, it doesn't come as much of a shock Facebook is turning to the startup world to source their ideas and duplicate them, which is why I advise all my friends to steer clear of any of these "we're a better way to share/video chat/chat/message/communicate" startups. Only go to one if you have some burning technical itch. The one exception is if the founders aren't totally delusional and the company operates more under the impression of just getting an MVP built, with the idea of shopping it around to be acquired in short order. And in this case, know exactly how long that's going to take, take no VC funding, have no delusions of grandeur and as an engineer know exactly what cut you're going to get when the thing gets sold. I've only seen this work if the founders know someone at the big company and the thing has all been basically pre-arranged though.

<comment><USER15> >I'm sorry but if your product can be easily copied by Facebook, you don't really have a product.

Most things can be easily copied if you throw enough money and developer hours at it

<comment><USER5> > Most things can be easily copied if you throw enough money and developer > hours at it

I would argue everything can be copied from a technical standpoint (excluding patent issues.) Marketing and user adoption may or may not be successfully copied though.

<comment><USER16> For a great example of this, G+, millions wasted in a copy of Facebook that never worked.

<comment><USER17> FWIW, they did pose a competitive threat to Facebook, forcing FB to add features like choosing which groups of "friends" to show a particular post and letting people see public posts of people who aren't bidirectionally connected. If Facebook had refused to adapt at all, G+ might have grown more significant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Houseparty says its growth had been stymied by the app's crash, which slowed > its ability to introduce new features and attract new users.

This is why horizontal scalability should be a basic requirement in such a product. These days there's a blanket statement used throughout the industry that premature optimization is bad. It is bad if you're developing a website or a stand alone mobile app. But if you're doing something in communications field (or data, IoT, etc.) scalability is a must-have.

<comment><USER19> I think this is a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation though. Scalability doesn't come for free, in a small startup it usually costs you velocity (hence: "Do things that don't scale"), and with Facebook breathing down their necks that may not be a luxury they could afford.

<comment><USER18> But since video chat is quite commoditized building a scalable system from ground up would have helped them counter facebook by quickly building features on top of what they had. The article itself mentions that they had to stop what they were doing and scale the system.

My main point was that one-size-fits-all methodologies don't suit every software project. In some cases it makes sense to build the feature first and then worry about scaling but in some cases like this it doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This reminds me how important/relevant it's becoming for people to own their data, instead of giving it up to companies to profit from and eventually sell.

Big issues I see are the vast majority of people just don't want to think about it, and there aren't any good systems in place to empower (the majority of) people to retain their data.

</comment><comment><USER21> When FB bought Whatsapp, Whatsapp was handling 20 billion messages a day and was the #1 app on the phone pretty much anywhere in the world, except for US, China, and Australia (it still is). Not that they needed some tool to find that out.

FB did an amazing job in keeping their acquisitions fairly independent and let them keep grow. That's something really hard to do and they deserve credit for that.

It is easy to buy the #1 messaging app in the world, if you have the money. It is hard to make sure those people still stay motivated after the acquisition.

<comment><USER22> WhatsApp's secret was that they struck deals with many operators world-wide to provide their messaging for free instead of counting it as Internet usage (look at Brazil for example). Not sure how did they achieve it but that for sure propelled them to #1 in many countries.

<comment><USER23> Considering how text messages and smartphone data usage have become far more popular than telephone calls, transmitting those messages via HTTP alongside other data traffic is probably cheaper than building out & maintaining a bunch of extra SMS infrastructure to handle the load.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It is very difficult to make a significant social app these days, mostly due to Facebook's collection of apps. Almost impossible.

<comment><USER25> As opposed to what? A game, a music app, an education app, a commerce app? The mobile apps are a mature ecosystem in a fairly saturated market, the days of Yo and others reaching the tops of the app stores are long behind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> "Facebook uses an internal database to track rivals... The database stems from Facebook's 2013 acquisition of a Tel Aviv-based startup, Onavo, which had built an app that secures users' privacy by routing their traffic through private servers. The app gives Facebook an unusually detailed look at what users collectively do on their phones..." \- More Privacy Concerns

Wait!.. you mean an app(like facebook) where users voluntarily enter the intimate details of their personal lives doesn't respect their privacy? Sorry for the bias folks, but facebook users typically don't respect even their own privacy.

<comment><USER27> Facebook unapologetically breezed through every privacy scandal I can even imagine. It will be remembered as a prolific piece of Pop culture, just by virtue that few enough people stopped using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> How ironic, FB uses its data to squash competitors from an app Onavo (a company FB bought) that promotes itself to protect its user's privacy.

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm glad I'm not using Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER30> Putting to one side the slightly shady way in which Facebook found out about this new start-up for a second, I have a question.

There are examples of companies that made a success of focusing-in on one aspect of a larger successful company (e.g. the companies that split out the functionality of craigslist).

But, this feels like an example of what happens when you mistake a Feature for a Business.

How do you distinguish between the two cases?

</comment><comment><USER31> Neat hack: trick Onavo into thinking your app is more popular or more highly used than it actually is.

</comment><comment><USER32> Mark, if you're reading this, I want to fight you live on FB video.

</comment><comment><USER33> New? Isn't that what MS used to do in the 90s?

<comment><USER34> They changed their strategy?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Commend Houseparty for their resilience. Can't be easy while the cat is staring you down, planning your demise.

</comment><comment><USER36> so the question is: how does a new social app compete against facebook? how do you beat them in the end?

<comment><USER37> You could have a decentralized social app, like secure scuttlebutt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> For anyone stuck in front of a paywall: [http://archive.is/LUAA8](http://archive.is/LUAA8)

<comment><USER39> Yep, it would be nice if HN restricted pay walled articles...

<comment><USER40> Or the Atlantic. Apparently they restrict access if you are in Firefox private mode or if you block tracking. I get it they need to sell ads to survive, but me seeing an ad is much different that me giving permission to track or load third party JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Non-paywalled link: [http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us- markets/2017080...](http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us- markets/2017080910924/the-new-copycats-how-facebook-squashes-competition-from- startups.aspx)

<comment><USER42> Thanks. Changed from [https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-copycats-how- facebook-s...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-copycats-how-facebook- squashes-competition-from-startups-1502293444).

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's fairly trivial to get a list of potential competitive threats:

1> New apps with user base in the millions and monthly growth rate in double digit % 2> Significant VC/angel funding 3> Positive press coverage.

This data collection doesn't require violating anyone's privacy and can even be outsourced to a third party on a monthly basis for a trivial cost.

So, why are there accusations about monopolistic behavior? MSFT was trying to block competition via illegal means, like incentivizing partners to use MSFT products, or going after the competition with expensive (bogus) patent claims, but FB is doing none of that.</comment>


Why Go and Rust Are Not Competitors (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://dave.cheney.net/2015/07/02/why-go-and-rust-are-not-competitors <comment><AUTHOR> "Rust competes for mindshare with C++ and D for programmers who are prepared to accept more complex syntax and semantics (and presumably higher readability costs) in return for the maximum possible performance. For example, micro controllers, AAA game engines, and web rendering engines.

Go competes for mindshare in the post 2006 Internet 2.0 generation of companies who have outgrown languages like Ruby, Python, and Node.js (v8) and have lost patience with the high deployment costs of JVM based languages."

<comment><USER2> Curious, what are the "high deployment costs of JVM based languages"? Don't must standard workloads simply deploy a jar?

<comment><USER3> Most likely some old myth regarding the JVM.

Its actually trivial to deploy and updates are just pushing one file; your uberjar. This is so much better than anything node/ruby/python/php have to offer.

I also feel much safer running code in a VM on the server than directly native where a single invalid dereference brings down the whole thing in a rain of fire.

<comment><USER4> The unbelievable irony I'm observing with the Java-based things I need to deploy these days (Jenkins and Gerrit related) are that quite often they're _making me build something_ , which then fails due to weird maven issues I don't understand (since I haven't been a Java dev since the ant days).

The _entire point_ of java was that bytecode is portable, it's "write once, run anywhere". Don't make me build your stupid .jar and figure out all your dependency / build-time issues, just give it to me!

<comment><USER3> I don't think Jenkins is a good indication of modern Java :) If anything Jenkins is a hairy ball of mud you should try to avoid :p

I write exclusively Clojure on the JVM now; its like having all the advantages of the JVM and none of the inconvenients of Java!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> MORE of these headlines instead of "Go is slower than Rust" or "Rust has more bells and whistles than Go".

I develop in both Go and Rust.

I use Go as main replacement for .NET/Java web tier...no need for install specific Java or .NET run-time library.

I use Rust when there's heavy disk reads and writes...and I know it's a nightly job which should never segfault and never finish the execution since it crashed.

GO = useful for rapid prototyping and a good .NET/JAVA middle-tier replacement.

RUST = you CARE about performance.

You can use both with FFI/C - use Go as the carrier and use RUST where the functions should squeeze every bit of performance to do something...

<comment><USER3> If you want rapid prototyping I don't think you can beat Clojure, not even close.

Its really, really hard to beat the iteration cycle of a Lisp.

<comment><USER6> Python is not too shabby for this either. Command line + vim (substitute your $EDITOR) and ipython and python and things can fly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Go is focused on concurrency as a first class concept. That is not to say > you cannot find aspects of Go's actor oriented concurrency in Rust, but it > is left as an exercise to the programmer.

To be fair, concurrency is baked the Rust type system itself. It's certainly a first class concept. I think the better way to describe it is that Rust wants to make concurrency safe regardless of what mechanism it's based on (system threads, futures/asyncio, maybe other things eventually?), while Go wants to provide a particular (very convenient) mechanism as part of the language.

<comment><USER8> I do not see that concurrency is a first class concept in Rust at all. The only mechanism that is in the language are the Send and Sync traits, and is even partially out of it.

Rust do not have language constructs for any concurrency/parallel model, and this is a good thing. You can use fork-join, parallel iterators, mutex, rwlocks, channels (mpsc, mpmc...) or any other model as a library.

The nice thing is that, as you say, is the type system the component that guarantee a free from data race code in safe Rust.

<comment><USER7> Yes I think we're mainly using "first class" to mean different things, but we can both agree that Rust and Go have both been designed very carefully around concurrency :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the illusion of competition mostly comes from how Go was touted when it first came out. To quote the google announcement:

"For that reason, Some smart Google engineers decided that it's time to address the limitations of C and C++ by designing a new programming language: Go. [...] Go is based on the C programming family, one of the most widely used programming language trees in the world [...] Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++.We're hoping Go turns out to be a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing and object-oriented design, with some cool features like true closures and reflection."

I was there when it happened, so regardless of the way go is being used and what it's being touted for _now_ , in 2009-2011 it was all about Google's new systems programming language, set to replace both C and C++. And it was very clear that by "systems programming" Pike et. al meant any kind of job that was traditionally relegated to C/C++: [http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1623555](http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1623555)

Rust came out only slightly later and was also touted as a system programming language. From the the rivalry sprang out.

It turns out that Go's trade-offs and focuses (implementation simplicity, relative familiarity, static compilation, solid tooling, solid stdlib and easy concurrency) fit well for its eventual target demographics of web servers, networking and command line tools. These are all places where C/C++ had some foothold, but more often than not Go was replacing (or competing with) Ruby, Python or Node.

Rust, on the other hand, took over most of C++'s trade-offs and focuses (Zero- cost abstraction, expressive power and full control over memory management) while relatively neglecting I/O, tooling, ergonomics and the stdlib in the beginning. This attracted a very different crowd that looked to solve very different problems.

<comment><USER10> This.

People are move the goal post here.

Go has failed it's first goal. Rust hasn't.

But Go pivoted, and succeeded at their new goal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I actually think that in the long run Rust and Go will have a similar relationship between Ember and React. They'll have fundamentally different approaches, but they'll steal the best ideas from each other (for example, Glimmer is heavily influenced from React) and they'll both end up serving their domains better and maybe overlapping a bit more here and there.

<comment><USER10> lol, good comparison.

But what did React steal from Ember and what did Rust steal from Go?

<comment><USER11> There are lots of areas of speed optimizations that Ember introduced after switching to Glimmer that React stole. Plus their CLI is very, very heavily influenced by Ember's (which was influence by Rails).

<comment><USER10> They have a CLI?

I only knew about CRA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They are both being used, where C and C++ were the only alternative

Some of the points to be made here is that C and C++ are being used for a very wide range of applications

So if you do compare Go and Rust, you will find distinct technical advantages and disadvantage

Rust/Go are currently the C/C++ alternative

<comment><USER10> But it seems to me that Go is used especially by non C/C++ devs.

<comment><USER13> Of course it is and it makes sense. Learning safe and correct C/C++ is a big challenge. You _can_ do this, or write it in Go. It will be 80% as fast but take you much less time. It will also be safe.

Once you've learned all of the ins-outs of C/C++ then you don't have an incentive to use Go to replace them. When you don't need performance you can use a scripting language like ruby or python. I see this happen often.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Not sure I quite understand the premise that there is a strict delineation between programmers who are "prepared to accept more complex syntax and semantics for <...>" and otherwise. I can think of a lot of cases where I'd personally use either or (I've been looking into tikv contrasting it with cockroachdb's storage layer for e.g.), a lot of cases where I've used Rust's formalization of ownership/borrowing semantics to alleviate GC pressure in Go code. I'm hard pressed to find projects "for" Go that Rust wouldn't be a reasonable alternative to, and vice-versa.

</comment><comment><USER15> This sounds like an attempt to box Rust into a much smaller niche than is justified.

</comment><comment><USER16> Would the comparison have been more apt back when Rust used to have a garbage collector?

<comment><USER7> And green threads! But maybe that was all before Rust was prominent enough to count as a serious competitor?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> An article about rust from 2015? Not worth reading.

<comment><USER18> why not?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There will be some crossover since Go's AOT compilation and low latency pause times will make some things that needed to be done in C++ or Rust viable in Go.

<comment><USER20> >> make some things that needed to be done in C++ or Rust viable in Go.

like "micro controllers, AAA game engines, and web rendering engines"? I highly doubt it! Swift 5+ might have a chance but Go has none(as it is now).

<comment><USER21> Many controllers are not hard-realtime. Think e.g. of microwave ovens or smart locks. Often you might be willing to trade a 10ms GC pause of Go for much lower chances of memory corruption or crashing compared to C.

<comment><USER22> Many controllers have almost zero memory headroom meaning your GC pauses get an order of magnitude slower if not more as you have less than 2x your working set.

Also, most of the applications never allocate because they can't even afford the overhead of pooling/freelists that come with a stock malloc implementation.

<comment><USER18> is a gc all that relevant if you're not dynamically allocating in either case?

<comment><USER22> Garbage collection by its nature implies dynamic allocation.

You're using value types and raw pointers in those targets because even the memory overhead of a heap/freelist/etc can be too much. With things like AVR you're looking at 512B to 16kB of total memory(part of which includes the code you write).

<comment><USER18> > Garbage collection by its nature implies dynamic allocation

i'm not sure i follow - you're saying that a gc existing implies that one cannot preallocate and avoid dynamic allocation?

<comment><USER22> > preallocate

This will still use dynamic allocation to do the preallocation. You'll have a heap to track this which comes with its own overhead.

<comment><USER18> i guess i was using 'dynamic allocation' to mean allocation that occurs in the midst of the main control flow, likely in response to some conditional evaluation (vs upfront).

<comment><USER22> Yeah, if you allocate in the main loop or preallocate you're still going to pay the overhead of a heap to keep track of those allocation :).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there a website to generate resized/cropped images - <AUTHOR>

...based on what info you give it in the query string?
For example, you could do something like:

    <img src="http://website.com/?original=http://something.com/test.jpg&height=100&width=100" />
 And then website.com would take test.jpg and resize/crop it down to 100x100 and output it on the fly. Does something like this exist? If not, I want to make it. <comment><USER2> <http://www.thumbalizr.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> And there we have it. Thanks.</comment></comment>