Amazon API Gateway – Build and Run Scalable Application Backends - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-api-gateway-build-and-run-scalable-application-backends/ <comment><USER3> This is very interesting, and I am surprised it didn't happen a long time ago. The Lambda function integration opens up lots of new ideas when building API backends ready to be consumed by clients apps like, for example, a client-side Javascript application.

On the other side it seems like other extra functionality is limited and very AWS-oriented. If you are looking for an open source gateway that can be expanded with extra functionality, and potentially sit on top of the AWS-> Lambda integration, take a look at [https://github.com/Mashape/kong](https://github.com/Mashape/kong) (I am a core maintainer too, so feel free to ask me any question). Kong is accepting plugins from the community ([http://getkong.org/plugins](http://getkong.org/plugins)), which can be used to replace or extend functionality beyond any other gateway including AWS Gateway.

<comment><USER4> I think AWS is going after the Parse / Heroku market here, the combination of Lambda and this gateway make it more suited for that kind of implementation, they are missing out on the larger features that enterprise needs - the blog post doesn't really go into detail on how SOAP conversion works, and I doubt it's a cakewalk.

It's in legacy API services that places like Mashery and Apigee make all their real money, and I can't see large enterprises shifting their legacy services to EC2. It's quite forward looking. The satire on how EC2 may be deprecated is really not far off from where things are heading.

I always find it quite funny when only single OSS projects are mentioned as alternatives, there's so many more full-featured projects out there: Tyk ([https://tyk.io](https://tyk.io)) API Umbrella ([http://apiumbrella.io/](http://apiumbrella.io/)) and ApiAxle ([http://apiaxle.com/](http://apiaxle.com/)) to name some. For more fine grained approaches there's also Vulcan ([http://vulcanproxy.com/](http://vulcanproxy.com/))

<comment><USER5> apiaxle and apiumbrella have few features actually. vulcan is not for api management and beside that quality > quantity.

<comment><USER6>
      vulcan is not for api management and beside that quality > quantity

What do you mean ? With vulcand you can implement your own middleware similar to kong. Also, it is written in go and you can use all existing go libraries.

Also, how can you gracefully reload kong if you need to add/remove/change a plugin ? With vulcand you just replace the binary, and send an USR2 signal to the running process. It will fork, wait for all connections to drain, and remove the old process

For deployment, again, you need to sync all lua files, with vulcand you just ship a compiled binary.

Kong doesn't have a notion of servers for each API, you need to forward requests to a haproxy or another load balancer for this. Also, I can see that backends are added by their DNS hostname. In order to achieve HA (backend redundancy) is there any way you can do it, assuming that nginx is caching the upstream dns values ?

About performance, I can see you are advertising about 1000 r/s using kong, and you need 3 machines for this (kong, cassandra, haproxy). I benchmarked vulcand and obtained about 12000 r/s on a more modest hardware.

<comment><USER7> "What do you mean? With vulcand you can implement your own middleware similar to kong."

Nginx is not an API management layer, right? It doesn't have the necessary features, but it's extensible so someone could build them. Mashape did, and they released the result as Kong.

Vulcand is in the same position as nginx. It could be a good choice for building an API management layer on, but it doesn't provide one out of the box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've not tried very hard but I'm not sure I get it.

I've got an API already running. What does this buy me?

Caching? I can see some benefit there it's read heavy.

Auth and access control? Feels like that's part of my app code but maybe there's a benefit I'm missing

A lot of the other benefits also feel like it would be hard to cleanly separate them from my app code.

What's the elevator pitch and who's the target market?

<comment><USER4> API Managmeent market is quite big, makes sense for Amazon to get on board.

Imagine this: You are BigCorp USA Inc. and have a bunch of internal SOAP-based web services that are 10 years old and cost a fortune to maintain.

You hear someone will pay you to use them, but SOAP sucks. So you could either go and change your APIs (and probably break a bunch of internal processes) OR you could use a gateway to sit in front of them and translate in bound / outbound requests. Now you can charge people for your APIs!

Scenario 2: If you're an indie dev/ startup but dont want to run EC2 infrastructure, Lambda + Gateway = Cloud service, without any heavy lifting, servers and cost effective. It's development lego. Kind of like Parse.

Scenario 3: You have an API for your app, now you wnat third party devs to use it.Your API is not set up for that kind of access (multi-user security, throttling, quotas, analytics etc.) - solution: shove a gateway in front of it.

<comment><USER9> #1 is exactly what I'm working on right now; turns out there's a huge market for this sort of thing. We're using an API gateway (Axway/Oracle) to build an "API Mullet" (all SOAP in the back, all REST in the front), and while I have some qualms with the tooling, the _idea_ of an API gateway is very sound.

<comment><USER10> Heh, I never thought I'd meet an Axway product user on HN. What are you using? Gateway? Integrator?

<comment><USER9> Gateway, under oracle branding.

<comment><USER10> May God have mercy on your soul :o)

<comment><USER9> ;_;

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> AMAZON DEPRECATES EC2

November 3, 2017, SEATTLE

At the AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas today, Amazon Web Services today announced the deprecation of Elastic Compute Cloud as it shifts toward lighter-weight, more horizontally scalable services. Amazon announced that it was giving customers the opportunity to migrate toward what it claims are lower cost "containers" and "Lambda processes".

"We believe that the cloud has shifted and customers are demanding more flexibility," tweeted Jeff Barr, AWS Spokesperson. "Customers don't want to deal with the complexities of security and scaling on-instance environments, and are willing to sacrifice controls and cost management in order to take advantage of the great scale we offer in the largest public cloud."

Barr went on to add that since their acqui-hire of Heroku last year, AWS has decided that the future of the cloud was in Platform as a Service (PaaS) and is now turning its focus to user-centric SSH key and user management services like [https://Userify.com](https://Userify.com).

Amazon (AMZN) stock was up $0.02 on the latest announcements.

<comment><USER12> A little anal: Heroku is already owned by Salesforce.

<comment><USER13> Skype used to be owned by eBay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There goes the rest of my workday :D

I was looking for something like this. Lambda functions are _amazing_ but restricted because they weren't easily consumable externally. This is they key.

<comment><USER15> This is definitely a game changer. Probably 80% of our apps can move to API Gateway > Lambda and we can get rid of scores of EC2 servers.

<comment><USER16> In onl fly in the ultra-low cost ointment is caching

To put the minimum cache in front of your API costs more than running an EC2.micro

For my projected use where my volume are going to be so low that I will fall under the Free lamda tier and the very first API tier I don't need to worry about caching but for those that do the price will start to rack up.

<comment><USER17> As an interim step, you could always put a small/micro ec2 using whatever you like as a gateway to your lambda services.

I'm not sure about the costs involved with the caching options... just the same, I think this option is pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm working on ApiEditor.com, here's a screenshot:

[http://i.imgur.com/wSEKeVb.png](http://i.imgur.com/wSEKeVb.png)

I originally built it for the Swagger Spec 15 months ago, as the first visual Swagger Editor. Let me know if you guys are interested in using something like this.

Notice it has the code side-by-side. Also, it scrolls to and highlights the section of the spec you're editing. Notice the dropdowns are aware of custom models (e.g. "User", "Order") in the documents and suggest them to make it easy to use.

<comment><USER19> Also see [http://editor.swagger.io](http://editor.swagger.io)

<comment><USER18> I'm not mentioned on that site or their launch blog post, but my code to ApiEditor was shared privately with the Swagger Editor folks who went on to create that editor, also in AngularJS.

<comment><USER20> I built the Swagger Editor from scratch. I didn't use your code at all.

We used SwaggerUI for rendering in the beginning but that was replaced with it's own renderer. I blogged about it here: [http://azimi.me/2015/04/23/swagger-editor- talk.html](http://azimi.me/2015/04/23/swagger-editor-talk.html)

<comment><USER18> Hi Mohsen,

Interesting! Re: SwaggerUI, it already existed as CoffeeScript and Backbone.js.

I built "Swagger Editor" for Tony, the creator of Swagger, as a paid OSS project; the screenshot shows the Swagger Editor back in Apr 2014 before yours existed.

I notice that a month later, you created "Swagger Editor" using the same technologies I chose (Yeoman, AngularJS, Ace Editor, etc) and took over the name.

I imagine the people who shared the private repository, including your employer Apogee, saw how fast I made mine and wanted to do their own from scratch, but I don't know.

I just took a look at your slides, looks like you've worked on yours for a year since, and use AST to understand where errors are, nice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This looks incredibly slick. Speaking as someone who is implementing all the ceremony (security, logging, etc) around a new API right now I would use this in a heartbeat.

Of course, in a couple years, assuming success, the AWS lockin will suck. But given the odds of success I think I'd take the chance.

<comment><USER4> You could always use an open source gateway like Tyk ([https://tyk.io](https://tyk.io)) or API Umbrella (full disclosure: I run Tyk.io, and this news is... disheartening).

<comment><USER22> The analytics on Tyk look amazing, definitely a step up from the internal tools I've built.

Is Tyk HIPAA compliant? I'd definitely like to use something like Tyk, but I manage an API that transmits health data, so lots of tools have turned out to be off-limits because of HIPAA issues.

<comment><USER4> I shouldn't see why not. Tyk has a pretty small footprint and supports SSL end-to-end so transmission of data is safe. It obfuscates API keys so they can't be pulled if you keystore is compromised and all analytics also use the obfuscated keys so that security is ensured in log data.

However, we'd probably need to do an audit. Worth a check though.

<comment><USER23> HIPAA pretty much requires dedicated physical hardware. If my code is running on the same machine as someone else's code then I'm breaking the rules.

<comment><USER24> It appears to be open source and you can download and run it on your own hardware: [https://tyk.io/v1.7/download/](https://tyk.io/v1.7/download/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This looks really interesting -- I think the abstraction of the server away from a bunch of development cases is gonna happen pretty quickly.

We're hacking on something really similar to this at [https://stackhut.com](https://stackhut.com), where we are building a platform for Microservices which are powered by Docker, can be run wherever through HTTP/JsonRPC, and are really simple to build/deploy. Think "Microservices as a service"... ;)

To give you an example, here is a task which converts PDFs to images: [http://stackhut.com/#/services/pdf-tools](http://stackhut.com/#/services/pdf- tools), and here is the code powering it [https://github.com/StackHut/pdf- tools](https://github.com/StackHut/pdf-tools) which we `stackhut deploy`d.

We're about to open up the platform and would love to hear what, if you had a magic wand, you'd wish upon the product.

</comment><comment><USER26> Please can people give examples of what they're using lambda for. Everything I've seen has been really basic (like image scaling), but most things I think of require a database.

<comment><USER27> Compiling LilyPond scores ([http://lilybin.com](http://lilybin.com)). Usually we have at most 1 user at any time, but we can also handle bursts, like when a classroom of 30 students all use it at the same time. Ends up even cheaper than running one VM that can only handle 2–3 simultaneous users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Google has a similar offering for apps running on App Engine, called Cloud Endpoints[1].

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/endpoints/](https://cloud.google.com/endpoints/)

<comment><USER5> that's not similar. there is no API management in there.

<comment><USER29> What are you looking for in API management? There's key management, DDos protection, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I am surprised that Amazon did not add support to more API description formats like RAML or apiblueprint. It is such a key feature. If I wanted to use this service in front of existing APIs, even only one API, I would not want to go through the work of having to redefine all my endpoints through a web form!

Shameless plug: after working on several API projects, I have been researching ways to not have to "code" over and over again what goes into creating endpoints, it became so repetitive. Lately, I turned to RAML (Yaml for REST) and, with 4 other developers, we created an opensource project called Ramses. It creates a fully functional API from a RAML file. It is a bit opinionated but having to "just" edit a Yaml file when building a new API simplified my life. As a bonus, I also get a documentation and a javascript client generated from the same file.

EDIT: forgot the url [https://github.com/brandicted/ramses](https://github.com/brandicted/ramses) and url of a quick start tutorial: [https://realpython.com/blog/python/create- a-rest-api-in-minu...](https://realpython.com/blog/python/create-a-rest-api- in-minutes-with-pyramid-and-ramses/)

<comment><USER18> Check out this screenshot, what I may release as ApiEditor.com

[http://i.imgur.com/wSEKeVb.png](http://i.imgur.com/wSEKeVb.png)

It would be nice to have one place to edit routes with a good UI, better than what Amazon released today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> For heavy users of AWS services (not just EC2, but fancy SaaS/PaaS stuff) do you ever regret being locked in to a hosting provider? Does it restrict your ability to develop locally? Have you been bitten by problems that you can't resolve because you don't own the product? Or do you pretty much just love it?

<comment><USER32> We moved our whole stack from manually managed Linode instances to AWS Opsworks, Elasticache, RDS, etc. We are currently somewhat tied now to the AWS stack, though through a large collection of our own Chef scripts I imagine we could move to a manually setup chef setup ourselves.

Largely we've been very pleased with AWS, but the black box nature of a number of products (particularly Elasticache and RDS), has caused us some minor grief. Also, the higher frequency of single instance failures (which our stack can handle pretty gracefully) is somewhat annoying.

EDIT: We were also able to fairly significantly lower our bill with reserved instances while also significantly increasing our ability to handle peak capacity with AWS.

<comment><USER31> I would think Elasticache and RDS would be the least of your worries since they're just fully managed versions of readily available software. You can always host your own Redis and SQL database. Something like DynamoDB would be way more complicated.

<comment><USER32> Really the issue with Elasticache and RDS is that when they go down and fail over to new hardware, we have no idea what happened to cause an (admittedly brief) outage.

Basically, we just open a support ticket and say "what happened", and they just say "oh, the machine failed and was rebooted"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I get the web UI for understanding it, but this is often not how people want to work...

What tools are there to allow me to keep my code/API layouts in source control when uploading to this?

I'm sure they exist somewhere, so mostly curious about pointers. (A sample node project using this would probably go a long way)

<comment><USER34> The blog post mentions that you can describe your API using Swagger and then import that. I suppose it means you can keep your Swagger definitions under version control.

<comment><USER33> thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Seems like a great product to quickly get started with a mBaaS in a powerful cloud like AWS. The concept looks _really_ similar to StrongLoop's loopback [0] with a big difference: vendor lock-in. I like the openness that StrongLoop is bringing on this front... IMO the best solution is one that allows you to move your containerised API from cloud to another cloud.

That being said, having this as an option in AWS is pretty cool and potentially time-saving. I'll probably give it a shot soon.

[0] [https://strongloop.com/node-js/api- platform/](https://strongloop.com/node-js/api-platform/)

<comment><USER5> There is also api umbrella or KONG which is the most popular OSS API gateway: [https://github.com/mashape/kong](https://github.com/mashape/kong)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> One of the other benefits of using Cloudfront based endpoints is that your app servers behind it can avoid the TCP handshakes that add some latency. Amazon did an interesting presentation at re:Invent on the performance improvement from using Cloudfront ahead of dynamic requests that was eye opening.

</comment><comment><USER37> I wish Lambda would allow listening to a socket [it helps binaries communicate with node]. This would move our team to use this without any further doubt.

<comment><USER38> For me, I need either socket support or go support.

<comment><USER24> Go support? You can run binaries on lambda, as long as they're small enough.

[http://blog.0x82.com/2014/11/24/aws-lambda-functions-in- go/](http://blog.0x82.com/2014/11/24/aws-lambda-functions-in-go/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Would someone knowledgeable mind answering a few questions:

1\. What are the differences between this + AWS lambda and parse? Is there additional functionality or freedom with this route? Is it cheaper?

2\. What kind of savings could one expect hosting an API with this vs a heroku standard dyno?

</comment><comment><USER40> Isn't it yet another case of AWS doing a cheap replacement of existing company: [https://apigee.com](https://apigee.com)

I doen't have experience with their product, but on surface they look similar.

<comment><USER41> They is also [http://www.mashery.com/](http://www.mashery.com/). I've run across a lot of companies using Mashery to manage their API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> For those interested, the creators of Sails.js (a node-encapsulating framework) have created a sorta similar product called Treeline[1].

[1] [https://treeline.io/](https://treeline.io/)

</comment><comment><USER43> I just tried this out with a Lambda function; I was wondering why you can't serve HTML with this (Yes, I know this product is aimed at enterprise ReST API stuff... one can try at least).

Well, it seems that authentication for the client is mandatory. This makes it unsuitable for rendering markup and serving it directly to clients.

Can anyone confirm this can only serve JSON content? I suspect were anonymous requests allowed, I'd see my markup rendered as a JSON string.

<comment><USER44> If you absolutely must build a website on this, you can serve the bootstrap HTML page out of S3 and use the JSON to populate it, single page app style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> How do you develop for these kinds of services? It seems like you'd need to setup a whole development cluster instead of developing locally.

<comment><USER4> Therein lies the rub - if you are working with AWS' key-value store, and then also their Lambda system, then you don't really develop server side - <USER2> develop everything client side (mobile app) and just use the cloud as a dumb logic store.

<comment><USER46> Well, you are still free to write resource consuming operations and deploy it to an EC2 instance and call it from Amazon Gateway. Lambda is just an example.

Moreover I feel Lambda can do pretty good stuff. I am sure it will integrate with other AWS services pretty soon and once there is connectivity to an RDS instance, then it solves the use case for half the developer population out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I can't help but notice that this looks more like an enterprise integration tool (think mulesoft) than API management (think apogee.. or I think that is what they do).

Speaking somewhat from experience (webmethods, caml, spring-integration and various other enterprise integration tools) they always want you to use "their" DSL which is often not even stored on the developers filesystem (ie webmethods... you submit the code to the "broker" or "rules engine" or "router"... lots of words for thing that does the work). Which leads to very awkward development.

Consequently I wonder if they will have git integration because writing code even snippets in a web form no matter how nice gets old fast.

<comment><USER4> Prediction: Amazon buys a cloud IDE platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> API is an acronym, and the product is called "Amazon API Gateway". This submission title is bugging me more than it should. Sorry for the meta- comment.

Edit: The submission title has been changed since this comment was written.

<comment><USER49> > API is an acronym

Actually, its an initialism (an abbreviation from first letters where each letter is pronounced as a letter) rather than acronym (an abbreviation from first letters pronounced as if it were a word.) Were it an acronym, many style guides ( _particularly_ British ones, IIRC) would support presenting it as "Api" rather than "API".

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I had built a command line tool for a similar purpose to generate REST APIs running on the MEAN stack. It creates "user" and "account" resources by default with user and admin authn/authz built in. It then deploys to heroku - creating a mongodb instance and a web dyno. Putting this out here in case anybody finds it useful.

[https://bitbucket.org/avilay/api-labs/](https://bitbucket.org/avilay/api- labs/)

</comment><comment><USER51> [https://console.aws.amazon.com/apigateway](https://console.aws.amazon.com/apigateway) up and ok here :), great!

</comment><comment><USER44> Service as a Service - we've reached Serviceception!

</comment><comment><USER52> They say "If you already utilize OAuth tokens or any other authorization mechanism, you can easily setup API Gateway not to require signed API calls and simply forward the token headers to your backend for verification." It would be nice if AWS would stand up an authentication service that could handle oauth. Or do they already have such a thing?

<comment><USER3> Kong[1] is releasing OAuth 2.0 support in a week or so (when 0.4.0 will be announced). You will see it appear in the plugin gallery[2]

[1] [https://github.com/mashape/kong](https://github.com/mashape/kong) [2] [http://getkong.org/plugins/](http://getkong.org/plugins/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I posted a 10 minute video overview for those who'd rather listen than read:

[http://ratemyapp.com/video/VIqZFaU1PhQ/Product-Preview- Amazo...](http://ratemyapp.com/video/VIqZFaU1PhQ/Product-Preview-Amazons- newest-Gateway-drug-API-Gateway)

</comment><comment><USER53> It'd be cool if they'd use this to wrap their own XML-only APIs to provide JSON wrappers.

</comment><comment><USER54> Do some math. It's expensive. 100 r/s for one month is about $900. Plus your bandwidth and EC2 charges (unless your using Lambda). For simple Lambda functions, you can get 100 r/s on a micro for $9.

</comment><comment><USER55> [https://console.aws.amazon.com/apigateway](https://console.aws.amazon.com/apigateway) is down for me

<comment><USER56> Me too - 404 page

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Given the current market direction with containerization and decentralization, I think using something that is vendor specific is probably a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER58> I was trying this API gateway out, unfortunately there is no way to delete the API created..

</comment><comment><USER59> For someone who doesn't understand this that well, is this similar to firebase?

<comment><USER4> Not really, firebase is a database that has a RESTful interface (and events and all kinds of other cool stuff). with this you set up endpoints, point them at cloud functions that may or may not interact with AWS' DynamoDB and your own services to provide functionality but I think you need to worr it all up yourself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> How do you test these things?

</comment><comment><USER5> Smart move for AWS, but they are not innovating nothing here, just following. Late.

Companies like Apigee/Mashape/3scale/Mulesoft have been doing cloud API management in various forms since 2008. Even Microsoft Azure has an API management offering since two years.

Nowadays all those API gateway features are commodities and doesn't make sense to pay for it anymore. Indeed Open Source projects such as KONG [1] are getting tremendous tractions. Same things happened in search with all cloud solutions and then ElasticSearch came out and was game over.

[1] [https://github.com/mashape/kong](https://github.com/mashape/kong)

<comment><USER10> AWS has a lot of pull. And they iterate quickly. Plus AWS is probably still the most complete cloud offerings, and integration is always great.

<comment><USER5> the more complete is the integration, the more locked in you are.

<comment><USER10> That hasn't stopped people from getting locked into Windows, iOS, Internet Explorer, Office, MacOS X, etc.

There's value in integration and a lot of people want that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Okay, at Google I found that IAM abbreviates Amazon's _Identity and Access Management_.

So, the OP has an undefined three letter acronym.

Suspicions confirmed: The OP is an example of poor technical writing.

Why do I care? I could be interested in Amazon Web Services (AWS) for my startup. But so far by a very wide margin what has been the worst problem in my startup? And the candidates are:

(1) Getting a clear statement of the business _idea_.

(2) Inventing the crucial, defensible, core technology.

(3) Learning the necessary programming languages.

(4) Installing software.

(5) System backup and restore.

(6) Making sense out of documentation about computer software.

May I have the envelope please (drum roll)? And the winner is,

(6) Making sense out of documentation about computer software.

And the judges have decided that uniquely in the history of this competition, this selection deserves the Grand Prize, never before given and to be retired on this first award, for the widest margin of victory ever.

No joke, guys: The poorly written documentation, stupid words for really simple ideas, has cost me literally years of my effort. No joke. Years. No exaggeration. Did I mention years?

At this point, "I'm reticent. Yes, I'm reticent." Maybe Amazon has the greatest stuff since the discovery and explanation of the 3 degree K background radiation, supersonic flight, atomic power, the microbe theory of disease, electric power, mechanized agriculture, and sex, but if Amazon can't do a good job, and now I insist on a very good job, documenting their work, which is to be yet another layer of documentation between me and some microprocessors, then, no, no thanks, no way, not a chance, not even zip, zilch, zero.

What might it take me to cut through bad Amazon documentation of AWS, hours, days, weeks, months, years, then from time to time, more hours, days, or weeks, and then as AWS evolves, more such time? What would I need to keep my startup progress on track, 500 hours a day? More? All just to cut through badly written documentation for simple ideas, and worse documentation for complicated ideas?

First test: Any cases of undefined terms or acronyms?

Result: About three such cases, and out'a here. Gone. Done. Kaput. I don't know what AWS has, but I don't need it.

Sorry, AWS, to get me and my startup as a user/customer, you have to up your game by several notches. The first thing I will look at is the quality of the technical writing in your documentation. And, I have some benchmarks for comparison from J. von Neumann, P. Halmos, I. Herstein, W. Rudin, L. Breiman, J. Neveu, D. Knuth.

Amazon, for now, with me, from your example of writing here, you lose. Don't want it. Can't use it. Not even for free. I'm not going to invest my time and effort trying to cut through your poor technical writing. And, the next time I look at anything from AWS, the first undefined term and I'm out'a here again.

Yes, I'm hyper sensitive about bad technical writing -- couldn't be more sensitive if my fingers and arms were burned off. Whenever possible, I will be avoiding any chance of encountering bad technical writing, ever again. Period. Clear enough?

More generally, my view is that bad technical writing is the worst bottleneck for progress in computing. Come on, AWS, up your game.

I don't want to run a server farm and would like you to do that for me, but neither do I want to cut through more bad technical writing -- for that work, my project is already years over budget.

<comment><USER62> When you were a child you started out learning simple one syllable words, and speaking one word sentences.

When you were toddler you started stringing those words together, and learning how to form extremely basic sentences.

And eventually you learned to form complex sentences with complex ideas.

The same thing applies to learning computing terms. AWS is now 9 years old, and has 9 years of development and features to catch up on if you are just starting. Yes, it will take some effort to learn everything, and if you don't see the benefit in doing so then you don't have to.

But if you want to be an "adult" engineer rather than a "toddler" engineer it is necessary to be willing to learn some things, even if it isn't easy.

<comment><USER61> I strongly disagree: I'm under no obligation to have _followed_ AWS for the past nine years. Instead, in each field, we should write in ways as self contained, and make the minimum assumptions, possible. In particular, in technical writing, we should not have undefined terms.

The research libraries are awash with single texts that start with meager prerequisites and get to some quite advanced and challenging material. AWS can do so, also.

I've been in computing for a long time, but there's no hope for me to know all the jargon of all parts of computing. Mostly jargon is not conceptually difficult, and the solution to the challenge of jargon is simple -- just define it.

Parts of computing have long enjoyed having a closed _priesthood_ that spoke in three letter acronym gibberish. IBM used to do this with PCP, MFT, MVT, MVS, JCL, DCB, IMS, DB2, CMS, SQL, and many more. And there were some four letter acronyms -- CICS, DASD, REXX.

The concepts were mostly simple; the gibberish was a secret language. Once I gave a grad seminar on computing and had a lot of guests from industry. IBM talked in their gibberish, but none of the other vendors did. The students caught on: IBM wanted to intimidate people and otherwise invite people into their priesthood where they, too, would understand the gibberish. IBM was the least popular of the vendors.

<comment><USER62> AWS has documentation at varying levels. If you are looking for documentation that starts at the absolute basics, without acronyms then you are probably wanting the "Getting Started" section of their documentation site: [http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/](http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/)

The linked article is basically a changelog for devs who have already been using the ecosystem for years, so no its not newbie friendly.

<comment><USER61> Thanks.

They would have been doing better for their business if they had made that point clear.

Again, my gripe is, better writing is needed. Why? The writing now too often results in absurdly high costs for absurdly poor reasons. The costs to me have me torqued.

We're just talking about bad writing.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask PG: Has an applicant been accepted after prior post-interview rejection? - <AUTHOR>

There's plenty of startups that's been rejected after doing the interview. However, I can't find any case of the same team re-applying later and then getting accepted.
Has any startup ever been rejected post-interview, re-applied for a subsequent round, and been accepted?
Would YC consider a startup for a later batch that's previously been rejected post-interview? <comment><USER2> You might just email email@example.com but I am glad you asked, because the comments are very motivational. I could care less about the fact it has happened, because personally I have applied 1 time and never been interviewed, but the comments that said _yes_ and backed it up with stories are very inspirational.

For example, reading about a company that interviewed 4 times then was accepted, it just demonstrates the kind of persistence and courage to pursue goals (when others would likely criticize or give up) that we should all strive to emulate.

Finally, to the OP I read your profile and I wish you the greatest success, I hope you land your dream job or start the most successful YC company to date.

<comment><USER3> couldn't care less. if you could care less, well, you can care less and then you might as well remove stating that factoid.

<comment><USER2> (I) could(n't) care less. Inf. It doesn't matter to me. (The less bears the heaviest stress in both versions. Despite the apparent contradiction, either reading of this—both the affirmative and negative—usually have the same meaning... see:

<http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/could+care+less>

Could care less has been in use since 1955, the way I use it, see:

[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/10/24/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/10/24/i_could_care_less/)

Fcous on the ssbutnace oeitrwhse mbyae the gatreer mssegae mhigt be lsot to a peiercved garmimatcl erorr.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes and yes. I know one team that was accepted on the third try. You give the YC team's memory too much credit if you think they hold the fact that they already rejected you against you. They probably barely remember you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did the team you mention do an interview on the prior time they were rejected? My original question was specifically about applicants that had done an interview with YC before they were rejected.

<comment><USER4> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes. It's happened on more than one occasion.

(For example LightTable have mentioned it publicly here; and I'm personally aware of other companies who've had it happen but I don't know if its public in those cases)

</comment><comment><USER6> I would think teams rejected post-interview would have a better chance in subsequent batches than teams rejected pre-interview considering YC clearly saw something in the team they invited.

<comment><AUTHOR> It would also seem the team would be more comfortable in the interview having already gone through the experience and met the interviewers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> this happens all the time. some friends of mine run pagerduty.com and they were funded by ycombinator after 4 applications and interviews.

</comment><comment><USER7> I does happen. But not necessarily with the same idea, I believe Dropbox was funded on Drew's second attempt.</comment>


Ask HN: What is a better recruiting strategy, casting a wide net or targeted? - <AUTHOR>

This is a recruitment funnel:
Potential candidates
  -> contact and hope for a response
    -> phone interview
      -> on-site interview
        -> offer
          -> hopefully acceptance!
Each step has a conversion rate.  There are basically two strategies:
Casting a wide net: Mining LinkedIn, github, your networks, using external recruiters and so on. The point is to increase the number of potential recruits at the top of the recruitment funnel.  The problem is the conversion rates are usually very low, either because of a lack of response, low candidate quality, poor fit, unavailability, etc...
Targeted: This approach is the opposite of casting a wide net.  You instead trying to find the most relevant candidates with a given set of experience/skills for a particular role. For example, if you are building a web based CAD tool, you find the 10 people in the world who have built webGL modeling tools and explain to them why you would be perfect together.  You will have to spend a lot more time finding the right people and spending way more time on each one to convince them to join you, but hopefully the success rate is much higher.
In your experience, as someone who is building a team or as someone who has been recruited, which approach is more effective? <comment><USER2> As Peroni mentioned, Targeted is more effective yet difficult.

A good approach to this is something that I would call "passive targeted recruiting", basically implement policies as "always be recruiting" and having your doors open (office-hours work great for this), take 1 - 2 hours of your week to talk with people interested in knowing more about your company, etc. Also I would say enforce cultural fit over technical, I saw Polyvore's about page and see that you do a really good job selling your culture :).

We release recently an interview with Daniel Doubrovkine about office-hours <http://bit.ly/WFhVvo>, he also writes a lot in his blog about hiring [http://code.dblock.org/help-me-fix-tech-recruiting- become-a-...](http://code.dblock.org/help-me-fix-tech-recruiting-become-a- recruiter)

Hope it helps! I would be interested in discussing further about the subject if you want (email is in my profile).

<comment><USER2> Also there is this answer in quora which goes further in both approaches <http://qr.ae/1zV1S> :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I encourage everyone to read the Quora answer. It is quite extensive and well thought out.

<comment><USER2> Agree, actually Aline is a hackernewer too, I have seen her writing about recruitment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Depends on the type of role that is needed. Usually, there are generalists, specialists and some in the middle. If you are looking for a very specific niche/area/experience, then targeted recruiting is probably going to be more effective. If you need a more generalist role, then it might be worth mining the wider/generic sites.

</comment><comment><USER4> Targeted can be highly effective but it arguably takes longer and is significantly more difficult which is why the majority gravitate towards the wide-net approach.

</comment><comment><USER5> The guys at Somewhere are doing some pretty interesting things: <http://www.somewherehq.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> Recruiting is a market place. You need both candidates and positions. How do they get potential prospects to their service?

<comment><USER5> I think they have "Campus Days" in which they screen the prospects first.

<comment><USER2> Have you seen engager.io? ;)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Simple Keras-like neural network library in Python-numpy - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SuyashMore/tinyNeuralNet <comment><AUTHOR> Tried to Train on MNIST Dataset and it seems to have overfitted the dataset. Let me know how can I improve it further . i want to keep it simple for anyone to understand</comment>


On Luck and Entrepreneurship - <AUTHOR> http://paul.rosania.org/writings/general/on-luck-and-entrepreneurship/

<comment><USER2> I have felt this way about being successful for a long time. It does have to do with luck. However, without the right knowledge or experience, the lucky situation will most likely be meaningless to you.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you automate PostgreSQL? - <AUTHOR> It seems that every Postgres tutorial on the internet involves SSHing into instances and arduously setting up the database by hand. The setups are fragile, and if the server went down you would have to set everything up by hand again and then deal with data loss.
How does one automate the creation and management of a Postgres deployment? Does anyone use Ansible or Docker?
Services like RDS and databaselabs.io offer Postgres with automatic backups, replication, etc via a console - how do they manage it?
How do you manage yours? <comment><USER2> Anything you can do by hand -- you can do with a shell script. Anything you can do with a simple shell script can be done with ansible, chef, fabric, or whatever else you might want to use.

I use chef.

But years ago when before any of those existed, I used CFEngine. And before that, perl scripts. And before that, shell scripts.

They've all worked just fine.

Those tutorials are teaching you how PostgreSQL works. And you need to know that before you can effectively automate anything.

As my band teacher used to say back in school: "if you can't say it, you can't play it".

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want setting up and maintaining servers to feel more like writing and refactoring a codebase, wrote a step-by-step tutorial that you are probably interested in. It is over at [https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from- scratch](https://amfarrell.com/saltstack-from-scratch) And the git repo with a branch and tests for the start & end of each step is at [https://github.com/amfarrell/saltstack-from- scratch/](https://github.com/amfarrell/saltstack-from-scratch/)

It walks you through setting up local VMs, writing configuration files, writing integration tests for those configuration files, and deploying to DigitalOcean. At the end you have a mental model of how configuration management works that you can apply generally. You also have a django site running behind nginx on top of a Postgres database.

</comment><comment><USER4> I managed >1TB Postgres installs using not-fancy tools and we did just fine. The How:

Installing databases was pretty easy. We wrote DDLs for our databases and created shell scripts that would leverage pgsql via the command line to create the databases with all our desired extensions, plugins, functions, and schemas. Repeatable every time by even the least trained IT guy on the staff. Data loading was a little more finicky, but that was easily doable by using pgdump if we were coming from an existing database and it was executable by shell script.

Stats wise, we wrote stored functions in the database that would leverage the built in, and excellent, stats API. Our management system would execute a shell script that leveraged PGSQL to execute the stored procedure(s) and pass the resulting values to our graphing and system monitoring software. Standard setup on each DB box. Worked like a champ.

For managing configuration files, we preferred to be hands on and edit pgconf directly as each database box ended up being a little different in terms of needs and we would annotate the configuration file with notes to selves about why settings were the way they were.

How do other services do this via console? They interface with the database API directly (like you can do) and make an interface to trigger the commands they're executing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Vagrant with Ansible as the provisioner. All it takes is one command and the environment is ready. It would be good in your case (following tutorials) because you can destroy the box and start over without any consequences. I would also recommend pgAdmin.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like to use Ansible to automate a PostgreSQL instance / creation. Be it in a host or virtual machine or aws (rds)</comment>


Cyberpunk Anime: A Comprehensive List of Everything - <AUTHOR> https://exolymph.news/2016/06/04/cyberpunk-anime-comprehensive-list/ <comment><USER2> Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 - I distinctly remember almost giving up on that series because I couldn't see a compelling plot forming, but then around episode 12 shit hit the fan, hard. Seriously wild ride all the way to the end, highly recommend.

<comment><USER3> Last anime I watched where I experienced something similar was Steins Gate. It was a bore up until episode 12 and the story just took off afterwards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome list. I noticed it has Casshan on it, which I didn't know; what I do know is Casshern[0], the real life adaptation and one of the most WTF inspiring movies I've ever seen.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casshern_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casshern_\(film\))

</comment><comment><USER3> Very comprehensive. A lot of edge cases though. To my understanding the Memories compilation [1] consisted of 3 films (Magnetic Rose, Stink Bomb, Cannon Fodder), and while they were all sci-fi there's only one I would really consider to fit the genre (Cannon Fodder). Magnetic Rose is borderline and Stink Bomb just plain isn't for obvious reasons (lol). GenoCyber I wanted to watch but I've heard it is more a masterpiece in gore than anything remotely Cyberpunk.

A lot of these I have simply never heard of (& I thought I was an expert) so I will have to check 'em out. I always say that good starting off points are the Masamune Shirow films and OVAs (GiTS, Appleseed, Black Magic, Dominion, etc) and Psycho-Pass (a real gem).

<comment><USER5> Be sure to definitely check out Dennou Coil and Time of Eve, if those are new ones to you. They tackle augmented reality and robot-human relationships, respectively, in a way that really makes you think.

<comment><USER3> Nice, nice! Good call. I am surprised that I've never heard of Dennou Coil before now. Looks extremely interesting, as does Time of Eve. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone have any "top picks" from this list?

<comment><USER7> Psycho-Pass, Serial Experiments Lain, Neo Tokyo, Akira, Ghost In The Shell (1995)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is 'Reboot' really cyberpunk?

<comment><USER3> It is most assuredly not. Even its status as an 'anime' is rather tenuous.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you can expand on your argument, I'll consider taking it off the list.</comment></comment></comment>


Dustin Moskovitz: Work Hard, Live Well - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/life-learning/work-hard-live-well-ead679cb506d <comment><USER2> "The research is clear: beyond ~40–50 hours per week, the marginal returns from additional work decrease rapidly and quickly become negative."

I know this is an established fact for blue collar jobs, but I haven't seen similar research looking at white collar jobs. (Not doubting it's that different, just curious)</comment>


Hacker News Onion - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/hackernewsonion/ <comment><USER2> It's like a fake version of [https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says](https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says)

<comment><USER3> There is also [https://mobile.twitter.com/DEVOPS_BORAT](https://mobile.twitter.com/DEVOPS_BORAT). One out of ten posts contains actual actionable real world advise.

<comment><USER4> There is also [http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/](http://devopsreactions.tumblr.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like that the city for this account says "Mountain Dew, CA"

</comment><comment><USER6> My favorites:

       1. Self-proclaimed "visionary" seeks technical cofounder.
       2. Blue Screen Of Death As A Service
       3. "Node.js is a Ghetto" by Ryan Dahl and Zed Shaw

<comment><USER7> How about:

Obama – "The national technical debt is increasing at an alarming rate. We have to stop writing PHP."

<comment><USER8> PHP is not a partisan issue. And they should stop painting it as such.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You should also check out FakeValley - [http://fakevalley.com](http://fakevalley.com)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is great, but it should hit closer to home. People love The Onion because the articles almost sound true

<comment><USER11> Almost true like "God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule"? [http://www.theonion.com/articles/god-angrily-clarifies- dont-...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/god-angrily-clarifies-dont-kill- rule,222/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My favorites:

</comment><comment><USER13> This is so much better than we deserve.</comment>


Psilocybin shows success in medical trials - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2011/09/28/the_new_lsd_cure/ <comment><USER2> Heidegger posited that our society's anxiety over death was artificial. Not the instinctive fear of death, but the constant worrying. This also leads to massive denial of the reality of death in popular culture (at least your own death; death is something that happens to "other people"). He proposed that people would be happier if they stopped denying their own mortality and also stopped being afraid of it.

So maybe the LSD and psilocybin just cut through the socialized anxiety crap and give people a more natural or normal view of death, among other things.

<comment><USER3> You can reach the same insight by doing enough vipassana meditation. I've talked with people who, having gained this insight through LSD, psilocybin, or other methods, gain an interest in meditation.

Either way, it's not so much that it cuts through socialized anxiety. Another insight you gain from this kind of experience is realizing how much you participated in creating the socialized anxiety within you. The anxiety doesn't go away so much as you become less attached to it. Being less attached to it, you see how it no longer serves a purpose in your life, and you're free to pay attention to the stuff that is more important. Like experiencing what time you have left -- and make no mistake, whether you have a terminal cancer, or not (or whether we make it to technology that allows someone to transfer personality into silicon), you too will eventually die.

One day, I hope that we'll have socially sanctioned initiations, not just for treating existential anxiety in people facing terminal illness. It would cut away a lot of teenage adolescent bullshit, and a lot of midlife bullshit. Having experienced that "cosmic force" invites people to really connect with each other, something far more meaningful than our current crop of "social networks." So this isn't just about having a meaningful experience of death. It's about having a meaningful experience of _life_.

<comment><USER4> _You can reach the same insight by doing enough vipassana meditation._

If someone posted an article about a new supersonic jet that takes you from New York to Sydney in under 4 hours, you could make a comment about being able to do the same by foot. You would be technically correct however it wouldn't be a very useful comment, given the difference between several hours and a lifetime.

<comment><USER3> There is something interesting in the Taoist canon, though I imagine many teachers in other traditions know of this.

People don't know why they should be practicing mindfulness. And then for whatever reason they gain insight -- be that practice, or ritual, or psychedelics -- they get it. A lot of things open up. There's a whole layer of meaning in textual traditions that opens up, and you realize a _lot_ of people have been trying to say the same things. And you wonder how you missed it?

And then you want to go back. Now you jump into the practice diligently, to try to get back to that peak experience. The thing is, peak experiences are just that. Like all things, they come and go.

Coming through the psychedelics, it is easy to spend a lot of time taking hit after hit to get back to that peak experience. It was part of why people who have not been initiated into this fear it. They see people drifting out from the real world, and these people then say crazy things like, "well, reality is much bigger than you think."

The thing is, this happens in any mystical traditions. Someone who realized these insights while sitting on a cushion starts become uninterested in anything but sitting on that cushion.

Which is ironic because all of this is about experiencing reality, not escaping from it. That is another reason I pointed out the connection with vipassana. The point is to _experience_ reality, something that seems counterintuitive when people talk about psychedelics.

Usually, you have a sangha -- people who are cultivating with you, whatever the modality -- helps you stay grounded.

Generally speaking, once you had some psychedelic experience, you'd find meditating much easier. It's the journey, not the destination. Of course :-)

<comment><USER5> I get your point.

But isn't meditation more like "You don't get it, until you get it" kind of a thing?

I mean I haven't read anything so far that describes the process of mediation as do Step 1) -> Step 2) .. All I get is description of what meditation can do and even that too more or less put down like- "You will not know how it feels, until you feel it".

How to Meditate? I hope someday I get some clear answer to this question.

<comment><USER6> How to meditate: a simple, permissive, breathing meditation. A nearly- identical form of this meditation can be found in most 'meditation-based' systems. Its pretty universal.

What you do: 1) Sit in a comfortable position, without shifting around, in a quiet place, with your eyes closed 2) Primary Focus: to constantly feel yourself breathing 3) Do this for about an hour

Likely Contingencies: a) You "need" to shift around. Nothing wrong with that. What happens if you don't? Keep feeling your breath! b) You will start thinking. Nothing wrong with that. But can you think while constantly feeling your breath? Or are you multi-tasking now? Keep feeling your breath! c) a+b: You think about needing to shift around. Nothing wrong with that. Keep feeling your breath! d) You might wonder if the hour is over or not. Alternatively, if you set an alarm, you will wonder if its properly set, and if maybe you should check it. Keep feeling your breath! e) You might need to do a million little things, check the dog's water, the task queue, the pot on the stove, whatever. Keep feeling your breath! f) You will find yourself thinking about how you are now 'feeling your breath'. Oops, you probably just stopped feeling your breath to think that thought. Keep feeling your breath!

What does it mean to "constantly feel yourself breathing"? a) It means your attention/focus is completely on the feeling of breathing. Your conscious existence is the sensation of being 'a breathing thing'. b) Corrolary: you probably aren't 'thinking in language'. In my experience, its not common to multitask thoughts 'in language' with a focus on physical sensation. c) As you begin meditating (first several times? more? less? depends...) You will context switch back and forth constantly between 'thinking in language' and 'feeling your breath'.

Why is this meditation interesting? The best reply I can give is, "Isn't it interesting enough that you can't just do such a simple thing as watch your breath without thinking about a bunch of other things?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> David Nutt, former head of Britain's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, amusingly points out that "Francis Crick, who discovered the double helix structure of DNA with James Watson, and Kary Mullis, who invented the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), had both taken [LSD, another psychedelic], and attributed some of their understanding and insights to it". He also notes that "l'Avenue des Champs Elysees in Paris is named after the Elysian Fields in ancient Greece, where people went annually to eat psychedelic mushrooms"

Nutt was removed from his role for suggesting British drug classification needed to correlate more with drug harm. The absurdity is illustrated by the British people having the "ridiculous situation that if you find magic mushrooms in the wild you can sit in the field and munch them to your heart's content, but if you take them home you could go to prison for up to seven years, and if you give them to a friend you'll be supplying a Class A drug and you could spend 14 years in jail."

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Drugs-Without-Hot-Air- ebook/dp/B009KCL...](http://www.amazon.com/Drugs-Without-Hot-Air- ebook/dp/B009KCLHXI/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1360827484&sr=8-1) _Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimising the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs_ (2012)

<comment><USER8> Quick note - Nutt is incorrect. The Elysian Fields were a Greek domain of the dead. He probably means the city of Eleusis, which was the location of the famous mysteries, during which some (1) speculate that the participants did in fact use psychoactive substances, although I believe ergot is the most frequently suggested culprit.

1 - it's by no means universally accepted. E.g, I don't believe Walter Burkert thinks much of the idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think Salon's editor messed up the title of the article (and, by extension, the HN title). The article describes recent trials for psilocybin and MDMA, not LSD. There were certainly LSD trials in the '60s but if there have been some recent ones the article doesn't mention them.

<comment><USER10> I'm also curious about the facts, at one point he sates that 30mg of LCD was measured out, which is a pretty insane amount of LSD from my understanding.

<comment><USER11> _From a massive steel combination safe they removed a bottle containing one gram of synthesized psilocybin, the psychoactive agent animating the 200-member fungus family commonly known as "magic mushrooms."_

 _The Johns Hopkins team has identified the golden mean — between 20 and 30 milligrams, roughly equal to a good fistful of strong 'shrooms — to maximize peak experience while minimizing transitory anxiety._

The article said 20 to 30 milligrams of psilocybin which is the hallucinogen in shrooms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My only concern now is how do you find pure LSD/Psylocybin? As in, how do you know that you're buying what you think you're buying?

Obviously in a controlled, medical environment the problem is void.

NB: I am NOT advocating drug use/abuse of any kind. This is a legitimate question I've been asking myself for quite some time.

<comment><USER13> It's pretty simple with LSD. You should buy it in blotter form. A piece of blotter can only contain so much of active material (fractions of a milligram). It's too small a dose for almost any psychoactive substances to have any effect on you. LSD and DOB are rare exceptions to this rule. So if you have something on a blotter, it's either LSD or DOB.

Now, DOB is very bitter, and LSD has no taste. If you put a piece of blotter in your mouth, and it tastes bitter, just spit it out -- that's probably DOB. Otherwise, it's LSD, and it's pure.

<comment><USER14> The first part of your message is a rather dangerous misconception. Many, many drugs can and have been dispensed on blotter paper, often as LSD mimics. For dozens of examples, see DEA Microgram bulletins passim (<http://www.justice.gov/dea/pr/micrograms.shtml>).

The point about bitterness is absolutely correct though, and certainly any purported LSD blotter that tastes bitter should be suspect.

Interestingly, at least one non-psychedelic has been found distributed on blotter paper: alprazolam (See <http://www.justice.gov/dea/pr/micrograms/2008/mg0508.pdf>), for which I'd tentatively expect the bitterness rule also to work.

<comment><USER15> It's worth noting that you can buy LSD test kits on Amazon (with Prime shipping, even!): <http://www.amazon.com/NIK-Drug-Test-Kit-LSD/dp/B002ATUECS/>

<comment><USER16> Those only test for the presence of any tryptamine, not LSD specifically. So even if it tests positive you could still be getting DOM/DOB/DOI. Which is bad, since those can kill you or else have serious negative effects if you take too much.

<comment><USER17> DOM, DOB and DOI are not tryptamines, but rather psychedelic amphetamines. This is an important distinction, as it means that the most common test kit (Ehrlich reagent), will not confuse them for LSD, contrary to what you said.

It is however true that there are substances which both fit on a blotter, and are indole psychedelics - e.g. 5-MeO-AMT, or other (other than LSD, that is) ergolines, such as LSB, ALD-52 (though these are extremely rare and (likely) share the safety profile of LSD). The Ehrlich test is not capable of distinguishing between different indoles, so you may get a case of mistaken identity in this scenario.

<comment><USER16> Oops, didn't realize the DOx family were psychedelic amphetamines. Thanks for correcting this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> People should be free to take whatever soft drugs they like. We will not win the war against drugs with prohibition, just look at when alcohol was forbidden in United states during the 30ies that led to the rise of Al Capone and similar mafia organizations.

The solution is simple make it unprofitable for criminal originations to manufacture drugs by making them legal.

The current drug laws are also hypocrazy as long range bomber fighters are allowed to take light doses of Amphetamine to stay awake during long missions. So the state are allowed todo what its citizens are not allowed todo.

<comment><USER19> Citizens can be prescribed (meth)amphetamines for medical usage. Also, the air force has moved to Modafinil IIRC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> psilocybin != LSD

The modern study written about in this article uses psilocybin, not LSD.

They are entirely different substances, with different effects.

<comment><USER21> Interesting how they're using synthetic psilocybin, maybe for control purposes, but I thought it would be easier to obtain it from the original sources

<comment><AUTHOR> Alicia Danforth, research assistant to Dr. Charles Grob (who ran the psilocybin research study mentioned in this article) goes in to detail as to their reasons for using synthetic psilocybin in this recording of her talk at the Burning Man festival.[1]

The talk is also well worth hearing for the other details she gives of this important research.

[1] - [http://www.matrixmasters.net/archive/Playalogues/131-Danfort...](http://www.matrixmasters.net/archive/Playalogues/131-Danforth2007Playalogue.mp3)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Fear, depression, anxiety, misplaced energy, clouded perception, debilitating ego...

Yes, psychedelics can alleviate these problems. I could've told you that when I was 14, and I'm sure that many intelligent, creative, productive people will agree. Anecdotal evidence, I know.

Although I haven't touched anything stronger than caffeine for well over 7 years, I AM advocating the use of tryptamines and phenethylamines

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm a little surprised that science is so surprised that this changes people.

Basically, what it does is teach, rather than chemically alter. The chemical goes away; the lesson does not.

What I'd do a study on, if I was studying this, is combining it with "spaced repetition" - that is, treat the pill like a flash card, to maximize retention of lessons.

</comment><comment><USER24> 20mg is an awful high dose. The usual dosage is between 75-1000 micrograms. 1000 still being awful high. (and 20 milligrams, is a _lot_ more than that!) Wonder if its a typo, of it they are just going balls out.

<comment><USER25> That dose is referring to psilocybin, I believe. 20,000µg would be a psychosis-inducing dose of LSD.

<comment><USER26> Every psychedelic I've taken has had an upper-bound beyond which increasing dose didn't really do much. Granted I've never taken astronomical doses of LSD but a "heroic dose" of psilocybin will take you places a "heroic dose" of LSD can't.

<comment><USER25> I'm sure it's possible, but I haven't heard of anyone eating a sheet of acid who wasn't at least a little messed up afterwards.

<comment><USER27> In case you missed this article about monster doses of LSD, you might be interested:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5210596>

<comment><USER25> I did miss that— thanks for the rerun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> For anyone interested in this sort of stuff, The Spirit Molecule was a great read. [http://www.amazon.com/DMT-Molecule-Revolutionary-Near- Death-...](http://www.amazon.com/DMT-Molecule-Revolutionary-Near-Death- Experiences/dp/0892819278)

</comment><comment><USER29> >Huxley himself would famously request and receive a large intravenous dose of LSD on his own deathbed the following year.

No, it was intramuscular. His last written request (he was no longer able to speak) was " "LSD, 100 µg, IM".

<comment><AUTHOR> The story of Aldous Huxley's death and his wife's decision to administer LSD to him is very touching and well worth reading.[1]

[1] - [https://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/huxley_laura/huxle...](https://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/huxley_laura/huxley_laura_article1.shtml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Love seeing the rise in interest in psychedelics posts here. I have always had a strong interest in 'entheogens'. Its hard to write about such a subject matter due to their powerful nature. All I can say is early on it was about fun and partying, but over time the lesson I learned was they are powerful tools not to be taken because you have them but instead when you need them. Lately my interest has been in ayahuasca. Seems from what I have read its more of a healing tool.

</comment><comment><USER31> I tell you what, I'm not driving anywhere near "Medical LSD Dispensaries" :-)

<comment><USER32> No need, you can float :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> In case it wasn't obvious to anyone else, this post is from fall 2011.

</comment><comment><USER34> _This glowing report — based on a single dose of a naturally occurring, non- addictive, low-toxicity substance — sounds impossible. Surely one pill can't succeed where months of traditional psychotherapy and antidepressants usually fail. According to science, that's not how drugs work. It's foreign to the model._

Really? Have people consumed so much lack of common sense kool-aid that they believe humans know better than the Earth? From a purely birkenstockian point of view, it should be obvious that these _naturally occurring_ things are there to help us. Why else would endless species of plants/fungi/etc. happen to be hanging out at our feet?

The mistake we've made is that we're too skeptical. Instead of believing in what's right in front of us, we choose synthesized drugs and the ideals of people no more keyed into existence than you or I.

Be aware of what's around you and learn about why most of what they say is harmful or "illegal" isn't and shouldn't be. Start with marijuana.

<comment><USER35> The Earth is not an intelligent agent. The Earth doesn't "know" anything. Also, plenty of plants have evolved to be poisonous to prevent animals (including humans) from eating them, so you can't just blindly go around eating any mushroom or berry you find in nature. Natural does not always mean "good for you".

<comment><USER34> _you can't just blindly go around eating any mushroom or berry you find in nature. Natural does not always mean "good for you_

 _Of course_ it doesn't. That's not what I was suggesting. Rather, when people are told that something is illegal or cannot help them, for them to conduct research into it independently. Even better, seek out studies like the one mentioned in this article and participate in them.

Concerning the Earth as an intelligent agent, can we be so sure? It's been around for an awfully long time to not know a thing or two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wow, it only took us (the west) 60 years. That's what I call a progress! Not so fast please, a couple of billion people could live miserable lives before we stop the bullshitting around psychedelics and spirituality.

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting. I'm curious what measures they take to prevent a "bad trip"

<comment><USER38> I imagine that being able to carefully control the purity, dosage and the environment will go a long way. It is unfortunate that it is impossible to get illegal drugs of known purity, concentration, and quality.

<comment><USER39> If you can get approval to possess a Schedule I substance from the DEA, you can purchase drugs such as LSD and psilocybin from companies that manufacture them. They also come with certificates of analysis describing their purity.

[http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/etc/medialib/docs/Sigma/General_...](http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/etc/medialib/docs/Sigma/General_Information/deareq_usa.Par.0001.File.tmp/deareq_usa.pdf)

<comment><USER40> I've just read a very interesting book after seeing it mentioned in HN's earlier discussion of LSD. It's by Dr. Rick Strassman, who conducted the first trials of a psychodelic held in the US in 20 years (using a potent psychodelic called DMD). Even after his trial was approved by the FDA and DEA, he struggled to find a supplier for human-quality DMT, although he had already procured a sufficient quantity of laboratory-quality of DMT for testing purposes.

It's a very interesting book -- I highly recommend it [0]. He's not a strong writer in terms of narrative (I found the book's pacing to be jarring given the intensity of experiences described), but he's very precise and describes some very interesting work, and some amazing experiences had by his subjects [0].

0\. <http://www.rickstrassman.com/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why did the title get changed to "psilocybin" when the article is clearly about both psilocybin and MDMA and even mentions the original LSD title?

</comment><comment><USER42> The researchers deserve serious props for undertaking this research in this climate, and whoever approved their study proposals for doing so. The positive effects of halucinogens on depressed, dying, & addicted people have been "known" for quite some time but not rigorously tested. Hopefully this is as positive a sign as it seems.

EDIT: Here's an example - a meta-analysis in the Journal of Psychopharmacology shows that LSD seems to have a hugely beneficial effect on alcoholism [http://www.nature.com/news/lsd-helps-to-treat- alcoholism-1.1...](http://www.nature.com/news/lsd-helps-to-treat- alcoholism-1.10200)

<comment><USER43> I'm curious why you think these researchers deserve more props than any other researchers investigating helping people with terminal illness? And in what climate? now? 2009? 2010?

<comment><USER44> We live in a political climate where it is considered acceptable to have teams of soldiers attack civilian homes if there is even a suspicion that they are producing, transporting, or distributing the drugs described in this article. Our politicians firmly believe that propaganda promoting such approaches to drug policy should be forced down the throats of grade school children, and that those children should be asked to report their parents' activities to the government in the name of enforcing drug policy. That is a pretty rough political climate for a researcher investigating positive or medical uses for those drugs. There is also the issue of having to be careful not to tell the public how to manufacture these drugs in their kitchens, as Alexander Shulgin discovered after a team of soldiers attacked his lab.

<comment><USER43> Can you give more info on the soldiers attacking his lab? I have only found references to a raid on his home and lab by the DEA and local LEOs.

<comment><USER44> If men with assault rifles, body armor, grenades, who use military tactics in their operations are not soldiers, what do you call them? The DEA is a paramilitary force, soldiers in all but name.

<comment><USER43> I don't know why I did not pick up on that subtext. It must have been the _attack_ component that threw me off. It is nice to see that there are no rhetoric asymmetries in the "war on drugs."

"If men with assault rifles, body armor, grenades, who use military tactics in their operations are not soldiers, what do you call them? "

Usually a Special Weapons and Tactics team and in Canada I think they are known as Emergency Task Forces. Does the DEA deploy units with fragmentation and/or incendiary grenades?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Interesting, but we live in a country where the Mayor of New York (Bloomberg) is attempting to actively restrict the use of narcotics for people in pain in order to keep them out of the hands of abusers.

We live in a pathetically immature culture.</comment>


Virtual Phone System Profig (YCS12) Shuts Down Fewer Than 3 Months After Launch - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/09/yc-backed-virtual-phone-system-profig-shuts-down/

<comment><USER2> The original TC post about profig:

[http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/20/yc-profig-instant- virtual-p...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/20/yc-profig-instant-virtual- phone-system/)

The HN thread about profig:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4408037>

I'd like to know more about why they shut down. 2 mos. is an unusually short period of time for something like this to happen. Wondering if this was simply a case of another shiny ball opportunity being presented that was difficult to pass up or some other deal breaker problem.

<comment><USER3> Because their cost structures were ridiculous and not at all aligned with the industry they were trying to serve.

Source: I'm the community manager at 2600hz; a company that's giving profig's product away for free.</comment></comment>


Why Not a Bytecode VM? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dartlang.org/articles/why-not-bytecode/

<comment><USER2> There is one more reason not mentioned in the article: creating a bytecode VM would mean giving up Dart's biggest competitive advantage to Coffeescript, the language currently sucking up Dart's oxygen in the memesphere. With a viable bytecode spec to compile to, Coffeescript would be on an equal footing with Dart as a 'real' language.

<comment><USER3> Dart's biggest competitive advantage is that it has teams building compilers, VMs, libraries, apps and tools. It is not just about syntax sugar. It is also about better debugging and collaborating, improved development cycles and so on.</comment></comment>


Twitter bans anon_operation Visa Attackers (WikiLeak supporters) - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/#!/anon_operation <comment><USER2> Yikes. Hope Twitter is preparing for a DDOS themselves. These bot nets need to be shut down.

<comment><USER3> I thought the same thing. Twitter's asking for it.</comment></comment>


Brown eliminates GRE test requirement for 24 doctoral programs - <AUTHOR> https://www.brown.edu/news/2019-10-03/gre <comment><USER2> Cool (although not so cool for ETS). Note that MIT dispensed with the GRE requirement long ago, but presumably not for politicized inclusivity reasons. MIT's doctoral students have traditionally been so off-the-charts in IQ that a relatively trivial test like the GRE was a poor classifier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Encouraging relatively weak students to go to graduate school is a bad idea.</comment>


20 lessons about making viral apps I learned the hard way - <AUTHOR> http://agevik.se/post/72876032312/20-lessons-about-making-succesful-apps-i-learned-the

<comment><USER2> I'm about halfway through building my first (public) app and am trying to prep for launching it and this list seems pretty great, several things I hadn't considered. Anyone care to corroborate?

<comment><USER3> If you haven't started building your audience do so before the app is finished, or even before you start building your app. Nothing worse than building a better mouse trap when there's no mice. Best of luck on all your apps.</comment></comment>


Steve Jobs Worked on Apple Until His Last Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394927,00.asp#fbid=STqWIhLQlPv <comment><USER3> Alternate interpretation: Cook made up a cover story because Jobs' health wasn't public knowledge.

<comment><USER4> And I think your interpretation is far more likely. As much as I know everyone wants to believe that Steve was involved until the very end; I've seen people in the final week (and final minutes--my grandfather) of pancreatic cancer. They're not "working" on much of anything other than taking their next breath.

It makes for one hell of a story; but, I think the better story is to think of a man who spent his last 24 hours alive with those closest to him--his family.

<comment><USER5> This is kind of off topic, but isn't it a bit of an unchecked assumption that Steve actually died of pancreatic cancer? He _had_ pancreatic cancer, seven years ago, but it was operated on, and his more recent health problems involved a liver transplant. How do we know that it was a reoccurrence of pancreatic cancer (which wasn't supposed to happen, and which reportedly didn't happen when Jobs had his earlier health issues) and not some other problem caused by a side-effect or complication of the Whipple procedure or something?

<comment><USER6> Official Death Certificate: Respiratory arrest was listed as the immediate cause of death, with 'metastatic pancreas neuroendocrine tumor' listed as the underlying cause

<comment><USER5> Citation? I didn't know death certificates in CA were public records, though it is an obvious place to check.

<comment><USER4> Simply google "steve jobs death certificate" and you'll find copies of it everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When you love what you do it's not called "work" anymore.

<comment><USER8> If I know steve, he is a buddist. If one know buddism, he should not work for the world. If steve really worked till his last moment, he tried his best to enjoy his own life, and his life is a nature harmony, a beautiful flower.

Being a flower is much more important than being great, and most of the time works better than being charitable.

<comment><USER9> He should not work for the world? Are you saying all the products he help made is only for his own enjoyment?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know I will get downvoted for this, but _who the fuck gives a shit?_ These recent Steve Jobs articles are getting more and more ridiculous.

<comment><USER11> If you get downvoted then probably for the tone rather than the content of your post. I do share your general feeling though: Jobs didn't know he would die the next day. Apparently he was feeling well enough that day to talk to Cook on the phone, so why wouldn't he? If he died two days later, no-one would make such a big fuzz about it. But now all of a sudden this call is presented as an almost heroic act. Strange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Spoke to someone at Apple the day after Jobs' death and he said he was surprised as his team was getting product feedback from him on the Monday - <USER2> days prior.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think it shows how dedicated he was to his own cause, to create great products for those who followed apple. Do I think he done it for the money? Definitely not. As pointed out already he could have retired a rich man when he first left apple, instead he went onto to create next & pixar and eventually took apple from being what they were to one of the biggest companies in the world. Despite the fact he was a billionaire he lived rather modestly and never rested on his laurels.

The only thing I could say he gave in charity was his time, I know that after diagnosed with cancer the last thing I would have done is keep working, especially if i was in the same financial bracket as him. Regardless tho he worked on until the day he died, that alone gets my respect regardless of the great things he done prior to his death......RIP

</comment><comment><USER14> Regardless of whether this story is true or not, it's sad to see dedication to work and devotion to the company over all else idolized to such a degree. The only other place I've seen this is in Japan.

I'm pretty sure someone's taking the piss, but I won't be completely certain until I start hearing reports to the effect that his last words were "I wish I'd spent more time at the office".

</comment><comment><USER15> Dennis Ritchie was working almost until he died as well. But I don't see HN posts about him on the frontpage anymore.

I'm so tired of all these Steve Jobs posts. Please stop with them. Dennis Ritchie did far more than Steve Jobs for hackers. And if this really was Hacker News we would be talking about his contributions instead of Steve's.

Is it because Jobs was rich while Ritchie was just a researcher? Is that why you folks care about him more? Is it because he was more visible and presentable?

These aren't very Hackerish reasons in my opinion. But they probably explain why this community is more interested in Jobs than in Ritchie.

<comment><USER16> I don't know why some people keep trying to compare Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie. One created an extremely successful, ubiquitous, and powerful programming language and OS. The other was a driven, successful, visionary, leader, and businessman.

It's mainly people claiming that Dennis Ritchie did not get the attention he deserved. But I have also seen Steve Jobs' fans defending the attention he got because of the ways he changed the world.

To both parties: STOP TRYING TO CHEAPEN THE DEATH OF ONE OF THESE MEN BY COMPARING THEM TO THE OTHER.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Look, it's an incremental update to a phone.

Will it be loved by millions? Probably. But, seriously, it's just a phone.

I guess I don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Steve Jobs could have retired when forced out of Apple in 1985. He had $140million (or so, that's the figure I remember) in Apple stock. More than enough to live very well for the rest of his life. He could have even blown some of it on US festivals with Wozniak and still lived well.

Instead, he built NeXT, Pixar and then later, rebuilt Apple.

I think that his continuing to work is the most charitable act I've observed in my lifetime. He touched billions of people and made their lives better.

Sure, he got richer doing it, but it seems he never did it for the money. (I think he did it for the pleasure, personally, but the end result was massive human good.)

This is why I honor Steve Job's life.

<comment><USER19> > I think that his continuing to work is the most charitable act I've observed > in my lifetime.

Really? I doubt he did any of the stuff for our express benefit. Steve had a personal drive to produce good products, to achieve his personal goals, and he did that really well and is rightly admired for pursuing his internal drive and making it such a success.

Was his drive mainly for altruistic reasons? For the benefit of mankind? Come on - I'm all for admiring the guy, but let's not fawn over him. He's not a saint. If he is, I guess all those mega-rich CEOs of the Samsungs, Ford, General Electics of the world are also so admirable because they 'charitably' continue to work when they financially don't need to.

<comment><USER20> Please, altruism as defined your way does not exist. Altruism is at its core self-serving: We desire to feel better about ourselves, to feel we are good human beings. People admire different things, so their vision of how best to behave leads to different forms of self-satisfaction.

Rather than focus on whether Steve did great things because of his passion for excellence, or because he wanted to have legions of fans, or for whatever other supposedly saintlike or selfish reason, focus on what he accomplished: bringing computing to the masses. That is an amazing thing.

<comment><USER21> The way you define altruism, would be the correct way to describe what Jobs did. Even though he was ousted from Apple he continued to work on his passion. His actions were _at its core self-serving_. The side-effects were the good things he added to humanity.

<comment><USER22> Everyone is gushing about him like he cured cancer, abolished hunger or something.

He ran a successful computer company and led the teams that produced some really nice gadgets.

Get some perspective people !

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How was he "working" for the company after he had resigned?

<comment><USER18> He was still an Apple employee and Chairman of the board. He resigned the CEO position, but hadn't left Apple.

<comment><USER23> I actually wanted to know what he was really doing, since the article just says he wanted to talk to Cook about the next product. Had I known a simple question was grounds for reproof here I wouldn't have asked.

<comment><USER24> I think people took exception to the quotes around working which implied disbelief.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't plug leaks when you got no boat - <AUTHOR> http://www.humbledmba.com/dont-plug-leaks-when-youve-got-no-boat

<comment><USER2> TLDR version:

We were solving problems that hadn't occurred yet! And I see this all the time. You invest emotionally in a dream and begin to believe in it as if it's already happened. And if you let those big fictitious plans infect your product development process, you're in a lot of trouble. Product development is about figuring out the single most important problem that exists right now and doing that and only that.

<comment><USER3> Just to be civilized, here's an explanation of why I downvoted you: I go to HN to find interesting stuff to read and discuss. I don't like this new trend of posting the "TLDR version" (and I have a special loathing for those who request it). It annoys me to have people try to chew my food-for-thought for me.

<comment><USER4> You do realize that his posting the TLDR doesn't prevent you from reading the article and having your own opinion, right?

Many people do like summaries and I don't think anyone should be penalized for providing them... Assuming they aren't too off-base.

<comment><USER3> I guess that what puts me off is the "TL;DR" expression itself. It passes a judgment both on the content ("it was too long, so I didn't read it") and the readers of the comment ("since you don't read stuff that's long, here's what it's about").

I'm certainly not criticizing hammock's summary. As these things go, his is pretty accurate. But the best you can say about a summary is that it doesn't really add anything to a discussion -- that's what makes a good summary.

<comment><USER5> I'm sitting on an HN self post on this topic, which largely follows your logic and expands it a bit more (though not too much for a self post). Haven't been able to figure out if I should post it or not.

<comment><USER3> I at least would love to see it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> See also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_ain%27t_gonna_need_it>

But there's a fine balance to strike here. There's a massive spectrum of solutions to the problem of "Prevent the site from being swamped with spam and other inappropriate comments". Just because it isn't a problem now, because you have no users, doesn't mean it isn't going to be an _immediate_ problem as soon as you start acquiring them. And just because there's an arbitrary upper limit of the complexity of those solutions doesn't mean that there's no point in addressing the problem at all right now.

"Keep V1 as your minimum viable product" is the advice. And the V1 solution could be as simple as "have an emergency global off-switch for the commenting system".

<comment><USER7> Lack of any kind of arbitration mechanism can spell the death of a site like this. There's definitely a balancing act.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Don't carry around an umbrella, except if you are a banker</comment>