Cryptocurrency system using body activity data - <AUTHOR> https://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO2020060606&_cid=P20-K97WA4-38682-1 <comment><USER2> I don't understand what makes this a "cryptocurrency" instead of just any kind of currency token. I know that it's mostly a buzzword these days but at the very least I'd expect cryptocurrencies to involve some kind of cryptographic proof for transactions.

Here as far as I can tell it's just some centralized system monitoring user/guinea pig activity and issuing some token currency based on an unspecified algorithm. I mean isn't that effectively equivalent to store cards that reward you with store credit when you purchase certain products? Or videogame editors who give coupons to elected Steam users based on their previous purchases? Or credit card rewards?

> [...]verifying, by a cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the > device of the user, if the body activity data satisfies one or more > conditions set by the cryptocurrency system; and awarding, by the > cryptocurrency system, cryptocurrency to the user whose body activity data > is verified.

I can't continue this comment because the sound of the bullshit alarm blaring in the background is starting to get deafening. Excuse me, I meant cryptobullshit cryptoalarm cryptoblaring.

There have been many attempts at making a useful proof of work for cryptocurrency systems, the problem is that it's not enough for the proof to require work, it also needs to be trivially and "objectively" verifiable by any user of the system and it needs to reference the transaction data somehow to avoid reusing old proofs. If you get rid of these constraints I don't understand how you can claim that it's a cryptocurrency system or even that there is any novel aspect to it.

<comment><USER3> But this might find a fertile ground at those proponents of an universal basic income. So anyone doing exercise "good" for his/her health will be rewarded, perhaps the intrinsic value here is the saved indirect cost of healthcare.

<comment><USER4> If payments are conditioned on the completion of assigned tasks then it's not UBI. The beneficiaries still have to choose to participate and actually do the work, so it's really just another job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is not a "crypto currency system". It's a business method patent for shilling people with crypto when you do something.

The idea of "gamifying" physical actions has been around for a long long time, most notably Foursquare and Fitbit. These guys are just taking that concept and saying "we'll give you crypto instead".

I don't think this is patentable. It's too obvious. Even if it were to be patented, it can't be enforced for anything more than patent trolling.

</comment><comment><USER6> > The tasks include, for example, but not limited to, watching or listening > information (e g. advertisement)

Drink verification can to continue.

<comment><USER7> So, is it too early to think about how to block this technology?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> A while ago I had this idea for a "cryptocurrency" in which the proof of work would be a detailed image of a small part of the sky at a specific time of the year.

This in turn would be verified by telescopes watching larger patches of the sky, so obviously having a less detailed image of that specific piece, but enough to determine if the detailed image is believable.

<comment><USER9> How hard would it be to take that less detailed image of that specific piece from the verification telescope, and turn it into a believable fake of the proof of work picture?

<comment><USER8> I Imagine there to be more than one telescope and the picture would have to fool all of them.

Very possible and the reason I'm here commenting on HN and not having my ICO done in 2018.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Proof-of-Work alternatives that could distinguish between a human and spoofing attempts is an important problem.

This patent is about this problem but it does not put forward a solution. It's probably an attempt for patent trolling in the unlikely case that a feasible genius solution would be found.

<comment><USER11> There's already a "genius" solution: fiat currency which can be printed in infinite quantity for virtually zero cost. But, if you don't like the downsides of fiat then you're stuck with proof-of-work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sounds similar to the fictional tech used in a black mirror episode.

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

</comment><comment><USER13> Great technology. Can't wait to become a bot for a centralised server with a nice carrying admin!

<comment><USER14> I'm pretty sure Black Mirror covered this...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Will this require a chip to be inserted in such a body?

Also, couldn't this be misused to pressure people to do what that controlling system wants them to do?

</comment><comment><USER16> This looks like it's supposed to be a Bitcoin-like system that sends newly- printed crypto-tokens to users who exercise.

How does the blockchain know who exercised? The user's FatBat device tells a server that the user exercised. The server tells the blockchain who the newly printed tokens go to.

There are some big trust problems:

\- Trust the user not to attach their FatBat to a drill to trick its sensors into thinking the user's exercising.

\- Trust the user not to hack the FatBat device (physically controlled by the user) so the device lies about how much the user exercises.

\- Trust the communication channel between the server and the FatBat can't be proxied or intercepted.

\- Trust the server doesn't lie to the money-printing part of the blockchain about who exercised, or how much they exercised.

</comment><comment><USER17> The closest thing I have seen to this is motocoin, where the proof of work is represented by a procedurally generated game the user must win to mine the coin: [https://motocoin-dev.github.io/motocoin- site/Motocoin.pdf](https://motocoin-dev.github.io/motocoin-site/Motocoin.pdf)

Long dead now, though.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's lazy and cynical me makes a guess what it is reading just the title. It's a grabby data mining platform that hoards medical data and gives Stanley nickels in return. Something like Fitbit, but with crypto currency buzzwords.

</comment><comment><USER19> Incentivising exercise behaviour / data submission to insurers?

</comment><comment><USER13> "[0002] Several cryptocurrencies exist. Among these, the most well known is a blockchain-based cryptocurrency. Most blockchain-based cryptocurrency is decentralized in the sense that it has no central point of control. However, blockchain-based cryptocurrency can also be implemented in a centralized system having a central point of control over the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is one of the examples of blockchain-based cryptocurrency. It is described in a 2008 article by Satoshi Nakamoto, named"Bitcoin: A peer-to-Peer"

I'm speechless.

<comment><USER14> Why are you speechless? Your comment invites no conversation and provokes no deliberation. Please expand on it.

<comment><USER11> Because "centralized cryptocurrency" is an oxymoron

<comment><USER5> It's not an oxymoron. The first ever cryptocurrency was a centralized cryptocurrency. While the centralized aspect was the reason why it failed, the old systems from decades ago were indeed cryptocurrencies. Look up David Chaum.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Seems easy to game.

<comment><USER21> If the human activity involves doing something reCaptcha-/mechanical turk- esque then that's likely the point: incentivising development of systems that game this would likely result in novel AI models/tech

<comment><USER17> How would you turn that into a proof of work system, if the answer is already known beforehand?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a digital currency not a cryptocurrency.

</comment><comment><USER23> Revelations 13:17 So that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name.

Patent number is: 060606

Thats a funny coincidence.

<comment><USER24> Did Microsoft really file this or is it some kind of 4chan prank? Embedded microchips monitoring brain wave activity and releasing rewards for viewing advertisements (one of the many examples from the document). These seems too "out there."

I really hope this is fake.

<comment><USER25> > I really hope this is fake.

This is not fake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've pondered a design like this before—something to replace birth certificates.

Birth certificates are kind of problematic, in that each _legal person_ gets certain rights, and so if you can trick the state into thinking you are _multiple_ legal people (through e.g. identity fraud) then you get a multiple of the rights of regular people—you can vote in elections multiple times, for example; or in states with "negative tax" like Alaska, you can claim the tax credit multiple times. Of course, you can also use N birth certificates to pass through any KYC system N times, to create N entities in said system, against the system's wishes.

The problem with birth certificates is that they're a single assertion about a single instantaneous event: they just say "this person was born." It's very easy to forge a new one, or to steal+repurpose someone else's (especially if they're dead and this fact has never been recorded), because a birth certificate only needs to be "verified" once, at point of issuance.

An alternative scheme would be to have some device that's constantly doing life-logging of your biometrics (like what's discussed here), where each segment of _unique_ biometric data the device records translates to one "token" that can be put into any given proof-of-life _account_.

Such devices wouldn't have to be constantly uploading data to the cloud; they'd just be recording it and storing it. It'd be up to you to present these devices for data-collection and collation, just like it's up to you to present your birth certificate.

The key difference with such a system, would be that if you just put on two devices, you're not mining proof-of-life at double the rate, because the data segment collected by the two devices wouldn't be _unique_ between them—you'd only be able to earn one token per real human being per period, no matter how much machine-power you devoted to doing so. When the data from the two devices was collated, it'd be clear that there's duplicate biometric period data, and so you wouldn't earn a token for said duplicate data.

It wouldn't matter how you split up and rearranged the tokens generated by the devices. You could hold all your tokens in one "identity", or split them up across multiple "identities." But, if you split the tokens up, then each split identity would only have 1/N of the proof strength of the identity of someone who puts all their tokens in one basket.

With such a system, you could literally just have each token a person can present translate to a vote, such that everyone who's been alive for N periods gets N votes, as long as they can proof-of-life all N periods. (This would, of course, bias toward older people; but you can instead normalize the voting power of each token by dividing by the person's age. How to prove age? Record the "genesis" token of each device through a trusted timestamping system—i.e. activate each device online. Then the person's legal age would be the timestamp on the oldest genesis token they can prove ownership of, by proving ownership of the private key that was used to sign the genesis-certificate- request.)

I enjoy the fact that, other than the "trusted timestamping of genesis tokens" part, this system has roughly nothing to do with a shared ledger or "blockchain"; each device can just keep its own independent private log, and the only time those logs leave the device is when the person themselves commands the devices to export them. It'd also be up to you to wear or not wear a life-logging device. But, of course, in avoiding having your life logged, you'd be losing out on tokens for the periods you didn't log, and so depriving yourself of the things tokens translate into (voting power; federal tax-credit hours; state-public-healthcare-benefit time-spent-as-a-state- resident-proof hours; immigration time-spent-living-in-the-country-proof hours; etc.)

...and of course this is a weird and dystopian invasion of privacy. Attaching ankle bracelets to babies to ensure they get appropriately credited for their own infancy sounds like something out of Black Mirror. I never said it wasn't. It's a neat technical solution to a specific problem—not necessarily a _good idea_ ;)

</comment><comment><USER27> It is a shame the cryptocurrency phenomenon has been and gone, with just these quirky stories popping up now and again.

Imagine if the hype was in full swing now. Blockchain technology would be delivering us from the global lockdown, probably making early adopters rich along the way. HN would be full of stories about how blockchain startups would be solving the pandemic. People stuck at home could be playing the crypto markets 24/7 earning themselves vast imaginary fortunes that would 'pay' for the vaccines to be 'developed'.

<comment><USER28> How exactly would blockchain solve a medical problem? It's not like blockchain has died. All major currencies are alive and so are the speculators. What is stopping cryptocurrencies from solving something which they could solve in there "full swing" days?

<comment><USER29> That's the joke, I presume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anything's better than today's proof-of-waste cryptocurrencies.

</comment><comment><USER31> Since we're talking about gamifying physical actions to produce a currency, I've always wondered if there was a way to gamify sexual activity such that you can influence human breeding for collective societal goals. Might be interesting to combine the idea of such currency with dating networks as well to see what happens.

<comment><USER11> Great idea, just have to wait for China to try it out

<comment><USER31> IMO this doesn't require a government to roll it out. Any sufficiently motivated organization can attempt to influence human reproduction through social applications, even simple dating apps today play a role in reshaping demographics of couples.

We just need apps to implement some truly innovative gamification features, for instance imagine getting points for meeting with a person in real life and spending as much time as possible with them. Points can be assigned on a variety of attributes that a developer wishes to select for.</comment></comment></comment>


My theory: Patreon doesn't want to be a money services business - <AUTHOR> https://subfictional.com/my-theory-patreon-doesnt-want-to-be-a-money-services-business/ <comment><USER2> I don't think this is it. If Patreon is using Stripe, they are likely using "Stripe Connect" ([https://stripe.com/connect](https://stripe.com/connect)) - which was built specifically for marketplaces like Patreon to take in funds and pay out. The compliance/legal issues around being a money services business are automatically handled by Stripe in this case.

My hypothesis is that this is really around fraud risk more than anything. Batched payments are notoriously confusing to cc customers. If you made a bunch of small donations and got confused as to why you saw one $18.XX charge on your credit card statement, you might open a dispute with your bank, which would have the action of automatically reversing the entire charge with Patreon's processor (i.e. Stripe). Assuming Patreon is eating this and not reversing every donation that is currently batched, then the average chargeback amount (and therefore loss to Patreon) is much higher in the current scenario than if donations are charged individually.

In fact, they even wrote about chargebacks and "friendly fraud" in a blog post earlier this year -> [https://patreonhq.com/chargebacks-tips-to-fight- friendly-fra...](https://patreonhq.com/chargebacks-tips-to-fight-friendly- fraud-and-get-your-money-back-14647949d0e9)

<comment><USER3> I don't see the 'balance' issue as an inherent part of batched payments. Your hypothesis makes far more sense.

It's like a customer with a shopping cart of items from different vendors. The additional complication of some of those vendors also turning around to support others is interesting... That part I could see needing to be cut or at least discussed with legal. However if /that/ were the issue they could do much better PR by being upfront and public about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's rare to see a company destroy itself so quickly and thoroughly.

"Hey, our company does exactly one thing: saves people from paying a bunch of processing fees to send someone $1 a month. Let's get rid of that!"

That this is apparently an intentional move to get rid of small fry creators is icing on the cake.

"Hi, New York Yankees manager here! We only want superstars on our team, therefore, as of next week, I am disbanding our entire farm system. That's right! No more non-superstars on the Yankees payroll! I can't see any possible problem with this."

</comment><comment><USER5> Most of the patron outrage is because this change was done unilaterally (I don't think I had to click through anything to agree to the new fee structure).

There are two changes, one to pledge amounts and the other to payment schedule / batching. I'm only going to talk about the pledge amounts.

A much more palatable way to roll out the pledge amount change would have been:

1\. give more notice. I got an email on Dec 7th announcing that the new fee structure would take effect on Dec 18th. Unless there were some urgent circumstances for the company, this should have been more like 3 months between announcement and implementation.

2\. There seems to be at least two options for Fee Change Day:

a) increase 'base' pledge amounts so that the creator gets 95% of the purported pledge. That is if the pledge is for $1 / mo right now, increase it to $1.32 / mo (depending on payment provider) so that the creator gets the $0.95 / mo that Patreon says is "more clear".

b) The other obvious option is to keep the base pledge amount the same and the creator ends up with less money coming in.

I would have made 'b' the default and communicated a lot to inform patrons something like "We had to change fee structures to stay afloat and to make pledges less confusing for everybody. We defaulted everybody to paying the same amount because we don't want to bust anybody's budget. CLICK HERE to review your pledges and make any adjustments to make sure the creators you love get what you think they deserve." and then the resulting page has a super obvious pancake button on each pledge (and one for 'do it for all pledges') that adjusts their pledge to option 'a' above, but critically let them adjust it to whatever they want. I think over time people are more likely to increase pledges if they have the occasion to rather than decrease them, so Patreon could have actually come out ahead through the generosity of patrons.

</comment><comment><USER6> The reasons invoked by patreon were a bit different (see the update in their blog post[1]), they argued that

\- the new model would make it easier to understand for creators (they are now certain to earn 95% of each pledge, where they could earn less before)

\- it also makes it clearer for patrons, because now they are paying exactly at the date they made the pledge. And it also avoids double spend for CUF (charge up front) payments, where you could pay twice the pledge within a few days.

But your point is interesting, I hope patreon will give more details about this. If this is true, the business model itself is flawed, and competitors (drip, gratispay, liberapay) will face the same issue.

[1] [https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee- structure/](https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/)

<comment><USER7> > "the business model itself is flawed, and competitors (drip, gratispay, > liberapay) will face the same issue"

It's only an issue if the goal is to make the platform itself highly profitable. Some of its competitors are driven by a desire to support creators. Patreon used to be, as it was started to support YouTube creators, but clearly they've lost focus and forgotten the platform itself was only meant to be a means to an end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This argument is interesting, but I don't think it's true. The App Store batches payments to bill the card once every few days (making $0.99 songs and apps cost effective), and Apple didn't register as a money transmitter.

<comment><USER9> Amazon, Apple, Google, Intuit and PayPal are lobbying for national regulation of money transmitters to solve that problem. They have a lobbying front, "Financial Innovation Now", for this.[1] What they want reads like a giveaway to the "payday loan" business, though. They want federal preemption of state usury laws.

[1] [https://financialinnovationnow.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/0...](https://financialinnovationnow.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/04/fin-submission-crapo-brown-final.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This theory is plausible but I don't think it's a perfect explanation. Someone else has pointed out that Apple does the same thing and does not run afoul of money transmitter regulations. But I would point out that Patreon has faced a ton of heat for this decision, they KNEW they were going to, and they could easily have said "We had to do this so we didn't run afoul of money transmitter regulations."

My theory is that this is mostly making people angry because it addresses the pains of a different group of creators.

We know that Patreon exhibits a winner-take-all dynamic, in that the largest creators are orders of magnitude more successful than the average creator, similar to music, books, and other entertainment markets. (I _suspect_ that Patreon also has a "whales" dynamic, where a small number of patrons are responsible for an outsized proportion of payments, but that is not necessary for this explanation).

The largest creators on Patreon face a free-rider problem with the existing system. Someone can subscribe, access the back catalog of content, then cancel without ever reaching the batch date. The largest creators are probably giving Patreon the feedback that this is a major issue. Since the largest creators make up 80-99% of Patreons revenue, the solution for them is to make the first month an immediate payment, but to do that means you need to get rid of batching.

Small creators also face the free-rider problem, but most aren't doing it as a professional enterprise (by definition they don't make a living off it). They face less of an risk of piracy since no one is motivated to pirate everything, and they care less in any case since the stakes are lower. The patrons who support the small creators mostly are supporting many, so they will have to pay a much larger tax to PayPal and Stripe under the new system, but since this isn't really where Patreon's bread is buttered, their concerns did not control the product decision.

Other explanations (fraud, money service regulations, unwillingness to take on technical complexity) can explain why they didn't follow any of the obvious mitigation strategies (like prorating the second month) but they don't explain fundamentally why this change is being made despite the obvious harm it causes to vocal prior fans of the company.

The fact that Patreon is trying to put an altruistic spin on it is just normal business behavior.

</comment><comment><USER11> Honestly, if Patreon would just invoice me like everyone else does and let me do an ACH/electronic check payment to get current, they could skip the CC payment fees all together. ACH isnt free, but my understanding is that it's a lot cheaper than processing credit cards.

</comment><comment><USER12> I used to work in finance and this theory makes a bunch of sense to me.

One way they could address this is to focus bundling on the content side. The scenario. PatreonX then operates as a monthly online magazine with variable content (patronize/subscribe to the creators you like). Content from creators is held until the monthly publication date. Everyone is charged for the content they patronize on publication date. Creators are paid once the bookkeeping is done. The people who use Patreon to collect funds to support other activity could issue a monthly "progress report" as their content (a paragraph or two).

</comment><comment><USER13> Not hugely surprised. This is probably why many systems, like Steam, won't let you take money back out of your account.

On the other hand, it makes me curious. If you use Stripe entirely to handle the 'stored value' portion of the system, is it Stripe that assumes the role of being the money transmitter or the service? In Patreon's case, they go between systems, so they manage the balances of stored value - but Stripe is capable of managing per-customer stored value, and it is done for even basic subscription tasks such as prorating.

All in all, I find this subject interesting and will definitely read the Gratipay links when I get a chance.

</comment><comment><USER14> My ignorant speculation is that the VCs are pushing for them to _become_ a money services business, where Stripe and PayPal are currently external dependencies of theirs.

</comment><comment><USER15> I mean, if you want the billion dollars valuation, you should presumably be _bold_ enough to solve an actual problem, not to mention one that is so profoundly uninteresting to the customer.

Not to mention one that every app store in existence seems to solve that offer plenty of prepaid options.

<comment><USER16> The problem of "making patrons pay up front" is one that _is_ profoundly interesting to a certain vocal segment of Patreon's customers: creators who are using Patreon to create a paywall for their work.

As a creator who's been supporting herself via Patreon for a while, I'd _like_ to give Patreon the benefit of the doubt and assume that they do not, in fact have any hidden motives involving "making lots more money" and/or "running afoul of financial regulations". It's worth noting that "paywall-as-a-service" is not the problem Patreon ever set out to solve; they've always been about figuring out how to aggregate micropayments to support creators who are giving stuff away for free.

Sadly, the fact that this change _completely_ breaks the original micropayments-aggregation model makes this hard to do. And their continued insistence that this change is all about "giving creators more money" makes me trust them less and less.

<comment><USER15> I think we are in agreement. Patreons want the micropayments-aggregation. They are profoundly uninterested in whatever legal quagmire that puts Patreon in, and it is my opinion that this is presumably something a $1B company should work at solving.</comment></comment></comment>


What If Algorithms Could Be Fair? - <AUTHOR> https://humanreadablemag.com/issues/0/articles/what-if-algorithms-could-be-fair <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I follow their car crash diagram and explanation. They've laid out that one ethnicity might prefer red cars more than others, and drivers of red cars tend to get into more crashes, and that training ML with "red cars" as a feature would lead to a bias against that ethnicity. I got that part. What I don't get is how the creation of the "risky behavior" node can be assumed to have a completely uniform distribution of ethnicities inside of it. The author has no problem saying that an ethnicity can have one causal behavior (purchasing red cars) but not another (being riskier drivers). This seems logically inconsistent.

<comment><USER3> There is a strong push for "fairness", see e.g. "Toronto Declaration". I think all it would do is completely halt progress of AI and install bureaucracy to the lowest decision levels, paralyzing whole ML research. Nobody seems to think that we are in a clash of different cultures with different sensitivities and there is no single common platform for stating what is "fair". I am worried the loudest voice would set the trend and we will have some insanity enforced all the way down. There are even calls to ban "blackbox" ML, basically allowing only trivial parts in any kind of decision making.

If members of my nation get drunk more often than some other, while it's offensive to say I am a 34% drunkard, on average it might hold; instead of forbidding this type of inference I'd rather rely on more signals to figure out what kind of person I am specifically for individualized decisions. They bypass this problem by adding "risky behavior" not contained in the input dataset so they just decide to model it as a hidden variable of Bayesian inference, where "risky behavior" might be correlated with ethnicity and red car anyway, just not visible outside. So if my nation is 34% drunkard but neighboring is only 11%, the conditional probability will likely be higher for my nation anyway, but obfuscated by the use of Bayesian hidden state. I am not sure why would that improve fairness.

<comment> barry-cotter > There is a strong push for "fairness", see e.g. "Toronto Declaration". I > think all it would do is completely halt progress of AI and install > bureaucracy to the lowest decision levels, paralyzing whole ML research.

It would only paralyze those who paid attention to the Toronto Declaration. You're right because you can't make ML fair because the universe isn't fair, that's a property of human judgements about facts. The facts remain the same regardless of ones feelings.

[https://www.chrisstucchio.com/pubs/slides/crunchconf_2018/sl...](https://www.chrisstucchio.com/pubs/slides/crunchconf_2018/slides.pdf)

AI Ethics, Impossibility Theorems and Tradeoffs

<comment><USER4> Except any 2 humans don't have matching ideas about what's fair, which means that they're both unfair from eachother's perspective.

Humans are in reality much less fair than algorithms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook developed it's "Look Alike" platform, to advertise things to people who "looked like" their current followers. Then they deployed this to hiring, home loans, and housing. The "algorithm" here just amplified whatever biases the company had to begin with. It's pretty unbelievable that Facebook did not recognize this was a problem until they were sued over it.

Making a system fair at the very least requires people designing the system to be fair. It's pretty clear that still does not happen, so I'm pretty skeptical of those that claim it's just around the corner.

</comment><comment><USER6> Algorithms are based on statistics, or essentially stereotypes. The concept of fairness is something that can't be adequately injected into an algorithm because it completely depends on what "fair" means and how that changes over time. What is "fair" now won't be fair in 10 years.

It used to be considered fair to let people smoke when they wanted. Then it was considered fair to have smoking sections and non—smoking sections in restaurants. Now it's considered fair to ban smoking entirely in restaurants and most public places.

</comment><comment><USER7> If the algorithm charges higher car insurances premium to men, does it mean it is fair?

<comment><USER8> I think the whole point is that what causal relationships you assume matter, and they do not _have_ to be derived from correlations. And they _should_ not, in order to be "fair".

You have a choice of whether or not you believe being male causes car insurance claims. That is independent of the statistical correlations. Ten times a day people say correlation is not causation, but a hundred times a day, I see people implicitly insisting that it necessarily is.

<comment><USER9> It's not that people think correlation implies causation, as much as in many practical models, it's correlations you care about, not causation.

If I'm running an insurance agency and not a public policy advocacy, and my data keeps showing that men have higher accident rate than women, I can just ignore causation and build my actuarial tables based on that. I don't need a casual model here, at least not until the point I'd want to optimize my models further still, but there are diminishing returns on that.

<comment><USER8> This makes no sense to me. Everything depends on your causal model. You can't just not have one; if you don't have one, you are treating correlations as causative indiscriminately.

Suppose (just as a toy example) that being young causes accidents, and the population of men is younger, but being male does not cause accidents. You are going to charge mature men too much and lose that business to a competitor with a correct causal model.

This is quite separate from the correlational data.

The insight I get from the article is that the "correctness" of your causal model can incorporate social justice or political correctness, without being objectively mistaken, because causation is not defined by measured correlations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are there no fair algorithms? I urge the authors to at least give Bogosort another chance!</comment>


Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> I actually really like many of the blogs at Microsoft. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but there's some gems in there.

Raymond Chen's blog[1] in particular was good enough to get me to buy his book (which definitely did not disappoint).

Other ones I subscribe to are the Microsoft Edge Dev Blog[2] , Mark Russinovich[3] and Games for Windows and the DirectX SDK[4]

And there's a few that have unfortunately not been updated for a long time, such as Larry Osterman[5], or have come to an end, such as Rico Mariani[6]

[1] [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/)

[2] [https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/](https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/)

[3] [https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/)

[4] [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/chuckw/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/chuckw/)

[5] [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/)

[6] [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/)

<comment><USER4> Another one from a MS guy...

[https://www.hanselman.com/](https://www.hanselman.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Depends what you want to get out of them. I find some are mostly focused around some of the more unique/cool challenges they come across (Google[1][2], Slack[3]), and others are more about how they solve the engineering challenges they face through software and/or about their dev process (Uber[4], Twitter[5]). Some are mix of the two (Dropbox[6], Netflix[7]).

[1] [https://developers.googleblog.com/](https://developers.googleblog.com/)

[2] [http://research.googleblog.com/](http://research.googleblog.com/)

[3] [https://slack.engineering](https://slack.engineering)

[4] [https://eng.uber.com/](https://eng.uber.com/)

[5] [https://blog.twitter.com/engineering](https://blog.twitter.com/engineering)

[6] [https://tech.dropbox.com](https://tech.dropbox.com)

[7] [http://techblog.netflix.com/](http://techblog.netflix.com/)

<comment><USER6> Another one for Google that's really interesting is their testing blog: [https://testing.googleblog.com/](https://testing.googleblog.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What are peoples' thoughts on the marketing effectiveness of quality relative to quantity in blogging? We have recently started publishing what we consider to be very high quality material (the majority of them have front-paged on HN if that's any indication). Most of these have been published on [1] so far but we're in the process of transitioning to a more official company blog [2].

A close friend who really knows his way around marketing has been advising us to write more fluff pieces. We're really torn over this because we strongly dislike vapid content as consumers. I would be really curious to hear any anecdotes on the relative merits of the different strategies.

[1] - [http://sangaline.com](http://sangaline.com)

[2] - [https://intoli.com/blog/](https://intoli.com/blog/)

<comment><USER8> The answer to this depends entirely upon who you're trying to reach with your tech-blog-as-marketing approach. If it's primarily recruitment-oriented marketing, or you're marketing a tech product (apologies, I haven't checked the link - but it's not relevant for this general advice).

If it's recruitment-focused or you're a tech provider marketing to technical customers quality is probably more important. The intended audience is educated enough to spot and dismiss fluff outright and anyone that doesn't isn't a recruit or customer you want.

If your goal is marketing to non-technical people who buy your product a technical blog is probably irrelevant at best and potentially destructive at worst. If the customer is non-technical and doesn't understand the material you present publicly, they may be scared off. Fluff pieces that demonstrate knowledge with lots of buzzwords that appeal to middle-upper management will be more effective with this audience.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, that meshes well with my thoughts on it. We're less concerned with hiring right now than with acquiring more clients, but our customers are generally developers at small to medium sized startups. We fall into that category ourselves so we've felt like things that would appeal to us would also appeal to our customers (and vice versa).

<comment><USER9> See Codeship's blog for a consistently published tech blog for a product targeted to a tech audience. They do a really good job with it.

[https://blog.codeship.com/](https://blog.codeship.com/)

Disclosure: I periodically write for Codeship.

<comment><USER8> As an unfortunately ex-codeship user, I can vouch for this - and for the quality of their product/support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not an "engineering blog" in the traditional sense. Percona has been posting deep-dive high-quality pieces about database performance and the inner workings of InnoDB since around 2006, so more than 10 years now. If you've ever had to troubleshoot a weird performance issue in MySQL as an Ops guy or DBA, you've probably ended up finding this in your Google results:

[https://www.percona.com/blog/](https://www.percona.com/blog/)

Disclaimer: I am currently employed by Percona, although that is not my motivation for sharing this.

<comment><USER11> +1 on mysql internals and deep-dives

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd like to suggest my company blog: [https://blog.serverdensity.com](https://blog.serverdensity.com)

As an example, our frontend engineering team just wrote up a series of posts about implementing graphing in React, migrating from Redux:

\- [https://blog.serverdensity.com/time-series-charts-react- redu...](https://blog.serverdensity.com/time-series-charts-react-redux-d3/)

\- [https://blog.serverdensity.com/building-a-color-engine- for-g...](https://blog.serverdensity.com/building-a-color-engine-for- graphing/)

\- [https://blog.serverdensity.com/lessons-learned- implementing-...](https://blog.serverdensity.com/lessons-learned-implementing- redux-in-a-web-app/)

And I wrote about recent backend changes to our time series storage: [https://blog.serverdensity.com/time-series-data-opentsdb- big...](https://blog.serverdensity.com/time-series-data-opentsdb-bigtable/)

<comment><USER9> Server Density was always a great blog. Second this one!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I had asked a similar question on Quora [1] few years back. Here is the summary:

\- Facebook: [https://www.facebook.com/Engineering?sk=notes](https://www.facebook.com/Engineering?sk=notes)

\- Google: [http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/](http://google- engtools.blogspot.com/)

\- Twitter: [http://engineering.twitter.com/](http://engineering.twitter.com/)

\- Linkedin: [http://engineering.linkedin.com/blog](http://engineering.linkedin.com/blog)

\- Dropbox: [https://tech.dropbox.com/](https://tech.dropbox.com/)

\- Instagram: [http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/](http://instagram- engineering.tumblr.com/)

\- Netflix: [http://techblog.netflix.com/](http://techblog.netflix.com/)

\- Flickr: [http://code.flickr.com](http://code.flickr.com)

\- Etsy: [http://codeascraft.etsy.com/](http://codeascraft.etsy.com/)

\- Yelp: [http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/](http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/)

\- Heroku: [https://blog.heroku.com/](https://blog.heroku.com/)

\- Airbnb: [http://nerds.airbnb.com/](http://nerds.airbnb.com/)

\- Bitly: [http://word.bitly.com/](http://word.bitly.com/)

\- Evernote: [https://blog.evernote.com/tech/](https://blog.evernote.com/tech/)

\- Highscalability: [http://highscalability.com/](http://highscalability.com/)

[1] [https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-companies-that-have- some-...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-companies-that-have-some-of-the- best-engineering-blogs)

<comment><USER14> Haha, basically all the big names :) There are some gems spread out across them all for sure; such as "The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction" from LinkedIn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Digital Ocean has some quality posts I've found from Google, though I don't actively follow the blog.

[https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/](https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/)

<comment><USER16> Came here to upvote DO. Most of the companies mentioned here write articles about their products, infra & engineering marvels.What makes DO different is that their articles are written for the end user.They have some of the most helpful articles on setting up servers, from start to end, with examples. Although not all posts are written by their own engineers [1] (nothing wrong, just saying).

[1] [https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to- write](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Backblaze have a good one, with their annual drive failure survey being a highlight: [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/)

<comment><USER18> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> RiotGames: [https://engineering.riotgames.com/](https://engineering.riotgames.com/)

Autodesk Stingray (formerly Bitsquid): [http://bitsquid.blogspot.de/](http://bitsquid.blogspot.de/)

<comment><USER20> Glad you mentioned Riot Games. I stumbled on their dev blog this year and found their content to be excellent.

I personally really enjoyed their post about their messaging service: [https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/riot-messaging- servic...](https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/riot-messaging-service)

<comment><USER21> i've never been interested in video game development but one day i saw an article they posted giving a technical overview of their graphics pipeline [1] and i couldn't stop reading.

[1] [https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/trip-down-lol- graphic...](https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/trip-down-lol-graphics- pipeline)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> First blog I thought of, although it's not a company: Dolphin. [https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/](https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/)

As for actual companies, as an embedded dev I think Atomic Object ([https://spin.atomicobject.com](https://spin.atomicobject.com)) and Free Electrons ([http://free-electrons.com/blog/](http://free-electrons.com/blog/)) both do a good job.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you're interested in front-end development, there are a few companies which focus on that:

\- Apollo/Meteor: [https://dev-blog.apollodata.com/](https://dev- blog.apollodata.com/)

\- Auth0: [https://auth0.com/blog/tech/](https://auth0.com/blog/tech/)

\- Chroma: [https://blog.hichroma.com/](https://blog.hichroma.com/)

\- LogRocket (my company): [https://blog.logrocket.com/](https://blog.logrocket.com/)

</comment><comment><USER24> I really like the segment engineering blog. [https://segment.com/blog/categories/engineering/](https://segment.com/blog/categories/engineering/)

They run a pretty modern cloud stack using fun technology like terraform, which gives me serious envy as well as inspiration. They also have some ridiculously high quality posts with open source code included such as: [https://segment.com/blog/the-segment-aws- stack/](https://segment.com/blog/the-segment-aws-stack/) (highly recommended reading).

</comment><comment><USER25> StitchFix do lots of interesting ML stuff, such as Chris Moody's lda2vec. Their algorithms page is really cool: [http://algorithms- tour.stitchfix.com/#recommendation-systems](http://algorithms- tour.stitchfix.com/#recommendation-systems)

</comment><comment><USER26> Thoughtbot, in addition to having a really good blog, is at least in the running for one of the best names (Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots).

[https://robots.thoughtbot.com/](https://robots.thoughtbot.com/)

I love it because the articles are often small, one off tips re: vim, the command line, ruby, etc. Really neat stuff.

<comment><USER27> > Really neat stuff

Pun intended?

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Great design + engineering teams = Awesome products

Instagram ([https://engineering.instagram.com/](https://engineering.instagram.com/))

Stripe ([https://stripe.com/blog/engineering](https://stripe.com/blog/engineering))

Airbnb ([http://nerds.airbnb.com/](http://nerds.airbnb.com/))

</comment><comment><USER29> Does [https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com](https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com) or Kaspersky's secure blog count? [https://securelist.com/](https://securelist.com/)

<comment><USER30> Project Zero is always a great read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The Cloudflare blog is top-notch. If you skim past all their product and data center announcements, there is a ton of good technical content.

[https://blog.cloudflare.com](https://blog.cloudflare.com)

</comment><comment><USER32> OkCupid has great statistical into their data: [https://theblog.okcupid.com/](https://theblog.okcupid.com/)

<comment><USER33> we also have a tech blog that we are revitalizing!

[http://tech.okcupid.com](http://tech.okcupid.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Disclosure: I'm an Editor at the Toptal Engineering blog.

Toptal has extremely active and wonderful blog for developers[1], designers[2] and finance experts[3].

The reason I can make that claim is because Toptal's blog posts are contributed by members of our network, all of whom are verified experts in their fields, and we guide them through the entire process to help them write the perfect blog post.

We publish new articles almost every day! We invest a lot of love into maintaining our publication and try to publish the most useful content for fellow experts.

[1]: [https://www.toptal.com/developers/blog#contract-just- respect...](https://www.toptal.com/developers/blog#contract-just-respected- software-architects)

[2]: [https://www.toptal.com/designers/blog#contract-just- respecte...](https://www.toptal.com/designers/blog#contract-just-respected- software-architects)

[3]: [https://www.toptal.com/finance/blog#contract-just- respected-...](https://www.toptal.com/finance/blog#contract-just-respected- software-architects)

</comment><comment><USER35> I really like Stitch Fix blog :[http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com](http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com)

</comment><comment><USER36> GitHub: [https://githubengineering.com/](https://githubengineering.com/)

Really surprised it wasn't mentioned yet. They do really in depth posts and show metrics too.

Example: [https://githubengineering.com/how-we-made-diff- pages-3x-fast...](https://githubengineering.com/how-we-made-diff- pages-3x-faster/)

</comment><comment><USER37> in my biased opinion, the Cockroach Labs, Inc. blog[1] (the team behind cockroachdb/cockroach[2]) fares pretty well.

[1]: [https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/](https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/)

[2]: [https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach)

</comment><comment><USER38> My personal upvote for the Google Cloud Platform blog: [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/)

...a pretty mixed bag with some product & PR posts inside, but the gems inside (especially SRE / CRE life lessons) are pretty awesome.

Also, we're getting started ourselves with some quality tech material - <USER2> too much there yet, but our Debugging Postgres post got a lot of love from the community: [https://www.justwatch.com/blog/](https://www.justwatch.com/blog/)

</comment><comment><USER39> Etsy [https://codeascraft.com/](https://codeascraft.com/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Khan Academy's engineering blog is great if you're into Google App Engine, React, ...

[http://engineering.khanacademy.org](http://engineering.khanacademy.org)

</comment><comment><USER41> I am biased, I know, but I would like to recommend my company's three blogs: [https://medium.com/outsystems-experts](https://medium.com/outsystems-experts)

[https://medium.com/outsystems-engineering](https://medium.com/outsystems- engineering)

[https://www.outsystems.com/blog/category/tech- zone](https://www.outsystems.com/blog/category/tech-zone)

</comment><comment><USER42> Deis blog:

[https://deis.com/blog/](https://deis.com/blog/)

Especially @rimusz, who is not technically part of Deis engineering team (?) :

[https://deis.com/blog/2016/first-kubernetes-cluster- gke/](https://deis.com/blog/2016/first-kubernetes-cluster-gke/)

Partially self-serving post because I'm also published here:

[https://deis.com/blog/2016/cheapest-fault-tolerant- cluster-d...](https://deis.com/blog/2016/cheapest-fault-tolerant-cluster- deis/)

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an index of the posts on one page! There are links to relevant posts on the sidebar and both of those have good relevant links.

These guys I worked with for a long time, to get my post out! It kind of stung a bit when the v1 PAAS was officially deprecated before I got to put it online. But in terms of support, the newer solutions are only better. The lessons learned putting this post out are still valid, even if the specific product of the tutorial is no longer relevant. (I used this process to create my own CoreOS bare metal cluster, and I don't actually use DigitalOcean in my day-to-day work.)

But the other content on the blog really was a good, focused introduction to Kubernetes and friends for me. Deis is the team that created Helm and it was subsumed into Kubernetes (and Helm Classic, which was another iteration before it was part of Kubernetes proper.)

</comment><comment><USER43> Although I don't like them, Cloudflare have a really good blog.

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/)

<comment><USER44> Curious why you don't like Cloudflare.

<comment><USER45> One reason to dislike them is that they're the NSA's favourite MITMiddleman.

<comment><USER46> Do we have proof?

<comment><USER45> This is an American company that strips SSL from many, many medium value targets; if they aren't thoroughly owned then the surveillance state is being negligent.

A paranoid man would go even further than that and assume that monitored DDoS- proofing goes hand in hand with targetted, state-sponsored DDoS attacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> If you are looking for a database-related blog, SlicingDice's is a good one:

[https://blog.slicingdice.com/](https://blog.slicingdice.com/)

This series of posts below describes in details how they built their database engine from scratch and the data warehouse service.

\- [https://blog.slicingdice.com/slicingdice-uncovered- part-1-in...](https://blog.slicingdice.com/slicingdice-uncovered- part-1-infrastructure-f6bc8f270781)

\- [https://blog.slicingdice.com/slicingdice-uncovered- part-2-s1...](https://blog.slicingdice.com/slicingdice-uncovered- part-2-s1search-33d2240a96c1)

\- [https://blog.slicingdice.com/slicingdice-uncovered- part-3-s1...](https://blog.slicingdice.com/slicingdice-uncovered- part-3-s1search-in-depth-bb72f3955c27)

\- [https://blog.slicingdice.com/slicingdice-uncovered- part-4-in...](https://blog.slicingdice.com/slicingdice-uncovered- part-4-integrity-and-scalability-tests-28c165ca8e30)

</comment><comment><USER48> Pusher: [https://making.pusher.com/](https://making.pusher.com/)

Disclosure: I work there and have written articles for the blog.

At the moment we mainly blog about our experiences with Golang (our language of choice right now). But really it's open to any topic someone in our engineering team is interested in writing about.

We aim to keep things visual, interactive and example-based. For example Jim Fisher created an interactive animation of Golang's GC algorithm here: [https://making.pusher.com/golangs-real-time-gc-in-theory- and...](https://making.pusher.com/golangs-real-time-gc-in-theory-and- practice/#how-does-a-concurrent-garbage-collector-work). We also managed to embed Golang's trace visualiser within one of the posts: [https://making.pusher.com/go-tool-trace/#tour-of-the-go- tool...](https://making.pusher.com/go-tool-trace/#tour-of-the-go-tool-trace- interface) (using some pretty dirty tricks).

</comment><comment><USER49> Rising Stack blog: [https://blog.risingstack.com/](https://blog.risingstack.com/)

Ok Grow! blog: [https://www.okgrow.com/posts](https://www.okgrow.com/posts)

Differential blog: [https://differential.com/insights/](https://differential.com/insights/)

</comment><comment><USER50> Skyscanner's [http://codevoyagers.com/](http://codevoyagers.com/)

</comment><comment><USER51> Trivago: [http://tech.trivago.com/](http://tech.trivago.com/)

</comment><comment><USER52> The Caktus team has a great technical blog with many posts about Python and Django. I've also really enjoyed visiting with their people at PyCon over the years.

[https://www.caktusgroup.com/blog/](https://www.caktusgroup.com/blog/)

</comment><comment><USER53> Intercom have some great blogs:

[https://blog.intercom.com/](https://blog.intercom.com/) [https://engineering.intercom.com/](https://engineering.intercom.com/)

</comment><comment><USER54> Square have an excellent blog: [https://medium.com/square-corner- blog](https://medium.com/square-corner-blog)

Square put out a lot of fantastic libraries, and much of their output is basically essential for Android.

<comment><USER55> crossfilter.js is incredibly useful for building interactive dashboards

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> [http://www.fittedcloud.com/blog/](http://www.fittedcloud.com/blog/)

FittedCloud is a small start-up that does automatic cloud resource optimization. They post regularly and go into topics ranging from technical details of machine learning to cost optimization for AWS resources (EBS, EC2, DynamoDB, etc).

As far as I can tell, they are the only company around that can automatically scale up and down EBS resources in a way that the customer only pays for what he or she uses, rather than paying for over-provisioned, unused storage...all without downtime or performance hic-cup. These guys know a lot about the cloud and storage.

</comment><comment><USER57> I love Gitlab's open source culture.

They have a blog where they share many things, for example their database incident when an engineer deleted the backup _and_ production databases : [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/)

On a not-only-engineering topic, they also share a lot about what they do through their handbook : [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/)

</comment><comment><USER58> We recently started an engineering blog at Doximity [1] that I think is good (though it has less heavy technical content than others). I'd be really interested in what you all think is effective for both blogs-as-recruiting- tools and for giving back to the community. For our particular product, basically (users)∩(blog readers)=∅ so content is created solely for the software community.

[1] - [https://engineering.doximity.com/](https://engineering.doximity.com/)

</comment><comment><USER59> I really like Civis Analytics, which is here: [https://www.civisanalytics.com/blog/](https://www.civisanalytics.com/blog/)

</comment><comment><USER60> [https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering- blogs](https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs) is a good curated list

<comment><USER61> Why do people insist on calling these dumps of all links they can find/get submitted in PRs "curated"?! It has almost 600 entries, with no extra content or structure...

<comment><USER60> I tried to submit a few a while ago and they said they weren't rigorous enough, so that's curation enough for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> From time to time, I'v enjoyed Spotify's blog: [https://labs.spotify.com/](https://labs.spotify.com/)

</comment><comment><USER63> Some more good ones that have not been listed yet.

[https://code.facebook.com/posts/](https://code.facebook.com/posts/)

[https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering](https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering)

[https://redditblog.com/topic/technology/](https://redditblog.com/topic/technology/)

</comment><comment><USER64> The developer blog at StitchFix is excellent: [http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/](http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/)

Most Scala consultancies/companies have their own internal blogs and most are excellent, for instance, underscore: [http://underscore.io/blog/](http://underscore.io/blog/)

</comment><comment><USER65> Knewton (where I once led marketing) flew mostly under the radar as a tech company because (a) NYC and (b) education, but the data science shop it built up a few years ago was killer, and the people who left went on to top tier companies. As a result of that talent, the tech blog there -- modeled after Netflix -- was solid.

[https://tech.knewton.com/](https://tech.knewton.com/)

</comment><comment><USER66> Scylla's blog has some excellent technical content, though it's intermixed with lots release announcements. [http://www.scylladb.com/2017/01/02/top-5-blog-posts- of-2016/](http://www.scylladb.com/2017/01/02/top-5-blog-posts-of-2016/) has some of the highlights.

</comment><comment><USER67> Lift Engineering blog - not too technical but interesting b/c we all enjoy the product: [https://eng.lyft.com/](https://eng.lyft.com/)

start here: [https://eng.lyft.com/matchmaking-in-lyft- line-9c2635fe62c4](https://eng.lyft.com/matchmaking-in-lyft-line-9c2635fe62c4)

</comment><comment><USER68> [https://blog.jooq.org/](https://blog.jooq.org/) is excellent if you do any SQL

</comment><comment><USER69> If anyone here is a Feedly user, I keep a list of around 300 software engineering blogs in a shared collection: [http://feedly.com/karllhughes/Engineering%20Blogs](http://feedly.com/karllhughes/Engineering%20Blogs)

A lot of the blogs in this thread are in there.

</comment><comment><USER70> For a data science flavor, see [https://blog.dominodatalab.com](https://blog.dominodatalab.com)

For web dev, Netlify posts frequently and even has podcasts: [https://www.netlify.com/blog/](https://www.netlify.com/blog/)

</comment><comment><USER71> Awesome answers here. Some self marketing - I developed a parser for some engineering blogs. I did it for myself, and created a simple web app to serve content - [http://kubiq.co](http://kubiq.co). I'm going to add more companies soon. Enjoy!

<comment><USER71> Btw, I'm thinking to create iOS app as well. Anyone will use it?

<comment><USER72> Thanks for sharing! Search enhancement on web will be helpful. I will not use app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> General Electric are at the forefront of industrial engineering and quite good at blowing their own trumpet.

<comment><USER74> These two are in my bookmarks, and often have quite interesting reads.

[http://www.gereports.com/](http://www.gereports.com/)

[https://www.ge.com/digital/blog/blogger/ge](https://www.ge.com/digital/blog/blogger/ge)

Any other interesting G-E sites I'm missing ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> My co-workers at End Point write some pretty useful posts, with a lot of practical ones around Linux sysadmin and devops topics:

[http://blog.endpoint.com/](http://blog.endpoint.com/)

A bit self-promotional since I blog there too, but I'm greatly outnumbered.

</comment><comment><USER76> Shameless plug for my company's blog: levvel.io/blog

Lots of DevOps focus currently but also contains some stuff we're working on with machine learning, blockchain, and we are working on a much broader range of content.

Plus we'd love more feedback on the posts :)

</comment><comment><USER77> For those that have started a tech blog for your own engineering teams, how did you get people to write? How did you get buy-in from management?

I'm trying to get our tech blog off the ground but it's difficult to get buy- in from everyone.

</comment><comment><USER11> [http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/) \- By Amazon CTO Werner Vogels

Thinking further on this.. Apple is totally not in the picture or i do not know.

</comment><comment> happy-go-lucky [http://planetpython.org/](http://planetpython.org/)

It's not a corporate blog, but if you're interested in Python, go check it out for recent postings from Python-related blogs.

</comment><comment><USER78> Trail of Bits! Topics include software security, control flow integrity, reverse engineering, program analysis, fuzzing, compilers, etc.

[https://blog.trailofbits.com](https://blog.trailofbits.com)

</comment><comment><USER79> Awhile back I found this curated engineering blog list [https://github.com/sumodirjo/engineering- blogs](https://github.com/sumodirjo/engineering-blogs)

</comment><comment><USER80> Sophos (security software) [https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/](https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/) Not pushing their products. Sensible advice and news coverage.

</comment><comment><USER81> Sysdig has had a bunch of nice posts over the last 2-3 years:

[https://sysdig.com/blog/tag/technical/](https://sysdig.com/blog/tag/technical/)

</comment><comment><USER82> OpenCredo is a good blog to read:

[https://opencredo.com/blog/](https://opencredo.com/blog/)

On the other hand, Cloudflare, Stripe and Netflix have some awesome articles too.

</comment><comment><USER83> The pre-acquisition Ksplice blog was fantastic. Now available at: [https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice](https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice)

</comment><comment><USER84> I like the Recurse center codewords publication [https://codewords.recurse.com/](https://codewords.recurse.com/)

</comment><comment><USER85> [http://www.astronomer.io/blog](http://www.astronomer.io/blog) all of their technical pieces are pretty on point

</comment><comment> xjrk58-2 Zalando [https://tech.zalando.com/blog/?gh_src=kh6pjc1](https://tech.zalando.com/blog/?gh_src=kh6pjc1)

</comment><comment><USER86> I'm not impartial but I read every marmelab blog post:

[https://marmelab.com/blog/](https://marmelab.com/blog/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://zapier.com/blog/](https://zapier.com/blog/) is a good place to visit from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER87> My vote would go to Discord's blog -- [https://blog.discordapp.com/](https://blog.discordapp.com/)

</comment><comment> mite-mitreski Best one in the nordics [https://engineering.klarna.com/](https://engineering.klarna.com/)

</comment><comment><USER88> More geared towards front-end stuff - good stuff:

[http://blog.rangle.io/](http://blog.rangle.io/)

</comment><comment><USER89> I like Badoo tech blog: [https://techblog.badoo.com](https://techblog.badoo.com)

</comment><comment><USER90> Algolia : [https://blog.algolia.com/](https://blog.algolia.com/)

</comment><comment><USER91> I really like the packagecloud one: [https://blog.packagecloud.io/](https://blog.packagecloud.io/)

With posts like these one: [https://blog.packagecloud.io/eng/2016/06/22/monitoring- tunin...](https://blog.packagecloud.io/eng/2016/06/22/monitoring-tuning-linux- networking-stack-receiving-data/)

</comment><comment><USER92> I think they appeal more to the bootstrappers than to the YC startup crowd - but I like everything from 37 signals.

</comment><comment><USER93> [https://product.reverb.com/](https://product.reverb.com/)

This is a good one

</comment><comment><USER94> Jane Street:

[https://blogs.janestreet.com/](https://blogs.janestreet.com/)

</comment><comment><USER95> We just started a blog a few months ago at our company on a variety of topics such as mobile & BE development, as well as design [1]. Hopefully it's of use to the community :)

I also enjoy the Hacker Noon articles [2]

[1] [https://blog.picnic.nl/](https://blog.picnic.nl/)

[2] [https://hackernoon.com/](https://hackernoon.com/)

<comment><USER96> *Hacker Noon

<comment><USER95> Fixed, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Are there any good engineering blogs that are more hardware/manufacturing oriented?

</comment><comment><USER97> OpsDash's blog has some interesting technical posts, esp. on Postgres and Go:

[https://www.opsdash.com/blog/index.html](https://www.opsdash.com/blog/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER98> Have Blogs been superseded by Vlogs ?

<comment><USER99> Not for me or anyone else who commutes by train through areas where 4G coverage is limited and who has a limited data plan anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> I like Google's deepmind.

</comment><comment><USER101> Since there are a lot of examples here, I'll mention HighScalability [0], which takes many talks and writes it out as text.

[0] [http://highscalability.com/](http://highscalability.com/)</comment>


Show HN: HexoPress – a blog that syncs with your Google Docs - <AUTHOR> http://hexopress.com <comment><USER2> I think you've something bigger here than you realize. :-) If you would indeed:

1) introduce some opportunity for others to write stylesheets;

2) support custom domains,

then I would expect something like this to really take off.

I see many advantages: Not all kind of Wordpress plugins that have to be checked or maintained. Not explaining what can be adjusted, what not. Having a very simple user interface for people (Google docs) that just works. I foresee also some disadvantages, especially about customization: from SEO, to footers, contact page, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Regarding customizations, things like SEO, custom footers & pages are in fact very much possible. It's just that I didn't want to put in a lot of effort, with my itch being the only validation :)

I'll keep working on it, focussing on customization options :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The name is similar to the Hexo blog platform what may cause some confusion. [1]

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

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't see that coming!

I was about to buy a domain named - [http://hexo.press](http://hexo.press), which would have been a bigger bummer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hrm. You have my attention. Is there a demo blog up somewhere I could look at and does this support custom blog themes and post templating yet?

<comment><USER5> Thanks! Here's mine - [http://hexopress.com/@joe](http://hexopress.com/@joe).

Nope, I haven't started concentrating on making it all that customizable, except for a few basics. It's in the roadmap.

<comment><USER6> Wordpress also recently came up with the add-on to have your Google Docs saved up as blog posts. I see parallel here.

Interesting idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Comparatively speaking, there's this tiny little difference in perspective.

HexoPress offers a complete sync between a folder on your Google Drive and your blog. Wordpress doesn't. It just takes a given post from Google Docs, when you are done with it and puts it into its database. That's pretty much it.

<comment><USER6> Makes sense.

I'm not sure why I would use "your service" to do this (blog on my Google, only to have the document show up somewhere else). I see value in a service if such connector is available within Google for me to keep it within Google. Nothing wrong with your service, and it is a fantastic idea, but just saying. I think this idea is more feasible if it is available as an independent entity. I find it strange that neither Microsoft, nor Google cared to think about it, given that a word processor is a natural fit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good perspective. Wordpress is excellent at what it does. It makes complete sense, to go for it to do some serious blogging.

This project is for the rest of us, lazy bloggers who've gotten used to using Google Docs as a personal scratchpad and would want to blog right from there!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great idea - if I could change the style and some additional customizations, I would probably pay a couple bucks a month. Actually looking to start up a blog soon and starting to look around at the options.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very neat idea. Btw, don't forget to add .DS_Store to your .gitignore file.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops! Thanks. Will add it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is great. I just published my first post. Its been about 15 minutes. So far haven't seen it coming through. Is there a process that kicks every sometime?

<comment><USER10> It looks like you have to click the refresh button to get it to display.

<comment><USER9> Yes, that worked! Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any support for inserted images in docs? Just seeing placeholders currently with image dimensions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done. HexoPress now supports images from your Google Doc! Go ahead. Login & refresh the blog - [http://hexopress.com/login](http://hexopress.com/login)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So where will my blogs be published?

<comment><AUTHOR> Once you sign up, you'll have your blog served at hexopress.com/@<the_username_you_choose>

<comment><USER13> Any plans on allowing subdomains so people can use their own domains? Wouldn't mind a hexopress footer (similar to how PostHaven would do it) on the site in exchange.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, certainly. I'm short of prior experience generating dynamic subdomains. That's probably why I didn't put it in the first cut.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, if you could support custom domains, I'd definitely use this. Also, looks like we could self-host from your github code? By the way, you've come up with quite a brilliant, simple, and efficient idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll figure how to get that done!

The README there, isn't complete. I'll pack the README with more details on getting it to work on dev/prod machines. Hopefully, by evening :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It looks quite cool. How do you plan to monetize it into surviving?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Regarding monetizing it, I have no plans yet. On doing the math, looks like it can take up to a 1000 users, before it costs me anything significant.

If at all it goes north of thousand users(which is a really long way!), I'd give it a thought :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is great! Is there any way to update the stylesheet?

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad that you liked it. Updating stylesheet is not possible as of now. But, I'll be working on making a lot of it customizable, going forward :)</comment></comment>


Weaintfoundshit.js - <AUTHOR> https://nicosantangelo.github.io/weaintfoundshit.js <comment><USER2> I like the fact that it works with querySelectorAll! This is compatible with my projects in which I do:

        var qsa = function(sel){return document.querySelectorAll(sel)};

However, it does not work with:

        var subqsa = function(el,sel){return el.querySelectorAll(sel);}

<comment><USER3> If you're seriously wondering why is it so then, well, they're just replacing native methods of the document object, in order to get the same behavior from your second line, they'll have to replace Element.prototype.querySelectorAll as well, which is a bad idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks, there really aren't enough memes from Spaceballs these days.

<comment><USER5> Agreed, the world needs many more spaceballs memes! :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't understand at all. I clicked "I don't get it," then put ".arbitrary" in as a selector, and.....a message comes up saying "Wasn't that awesome?" Nothing else happened.

What am I missing here

<comment><USER3> I believe it's a joke. At least I opened these comments thinking it was a joke akin to VanillaJS framework[1]. querySelectorAll returns an empty array if there are no matches, you don't need fancy string messages or errors for that.

[1] [http://vanilla-js.com/](http://vanilla-js.com/)

<comment><USER7> > querySelectorAll returns an empty array if there are no matches, you don't > need fancy string messages or errors for that.

An empty NodeList[1] to be precise, which is sort of kind of like an array in that it has a length property and you can access its elements with index notation (`nodeList[0]`), but it doesn't inherit from Array.prototype, so it doesn't support methods like `forEach` or `map`.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/NodeList](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/NodeList)

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Though still, NodeList has the length property with which you can check for "emptiness" the same as with an array, that's what I meant to say.

Speaking of which, there are few features in ES2015 that make NodeList more palatable:

1\. Iterables. NodeList is iterable and you can use, among others, the for..of construction to iterate over its content.

2\. There is the Array.from method for turning array-like objects into true arrays. Not much different from our usual method of calling [].slice.call in this particular case, yet it's a bit shorter, standardized, and has a few additional perks, like accepting map function as the second argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is awesome! I wasn't expecting "I had enough" at all.

</comment><comment><USER9> Keep executing document.querySelector('.foo') several times in the dev console and eventually a new video comes up lol.

</comment><comment><USER10> This should be tagged with "Show HN".

</comment><comment><USER11> the mac keyboard shortcut listed should be Cmd+Option+i.

<comment><AUTHOR> Changed it, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Spaceballs!</comment>


Show HN: Programming language communities on reddit - <AUTHOR> http://redditlist.com/dir/1785

<comment><USER2> This doesn't show communities like r/iOSProgramming which get far more traffic than their language centric counterpart.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can add languages at the bottom of the table and more general reddits at the parent node (programming)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> missing r/node which is occasionally has interesting things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, added</comment></comment>


Cool C Tricks - <AUTHOR> http://www.endofunctor.org/~rpearl/blog/cool-c-tricks.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this for students in CMU's operating systems course, to try to give them a few more useful "C tricks" but I thought it might be interesting to others.

<comment><USER2> Was there any rationale behind choosing C99 over C89?

My university's microcontroller courses were all C89, which seems much more prevalent outside of GCC (in particular, Microsoft's C compiler). C89 might be seen as simpler and more bare-metal for an operating systems course owing to e.g. the inability to create runtime-sized arrays on the heap (despite the archaic refusal to accept variable declarations in for loops..).</comment></comment>


Burnout, and how to deal with it - <AUTHOR> http://www.jeremyhutchings.com/2009/12/burnout.html

<comment><USER2> Being a person thats currently dealing with this i found this a great read! There are a bunch of things i could use. It also made me realize that my state is more serious than i thought.

An addition to what you can do is reading. I recently picked up a few books and started reading. Its great for letting your self go and put work aside.

</comment><comment><USER3> These days when I feel a little too overworked, I picture this drawing in my head:

<http://www.awful-drawings.com/post/1086207904/life>

then I remember life should be fun and calm down :)

(disclaimer: drawn by my brother)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think it's a good article at its core, but the poor grammar & spelling really get in the way.

<comment><USER5> Indeed -- it's surprisingly hard to read as a result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> the guy needs an editor, or a proof-reader at least.

anyway, i think he made good points.

</comment><comment><USER7> Short answer (from the article):

Get some exercise

Take a break

Hang out with friends</comment>


The Kremlin Is Suddenly Obsessed with Cryptocurrencies Due to the Magnitsky Act - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/why-is-the-kremlin-suddenly-obsessed-with-cryptocurrencies?via=newsletter&source=Weekend <comment><USER2> This is my first time reading extensively about the Magnitsky Act -- isn't this very clearly a Bill of Attainder aimed at specific individuals? It also seems to be in direct violation of the fourth amendment, though I think it might be ambiguous whether it applies to foreign nationals.

At the very least it seems like each seizure should be individually heard and approved by a judge.

<comment><USER3> (IANAL) I guess the fact that they were out of the country complicates things a lot. The Wikipedia entry about the act does not mention seizures, but talks about preventing them from entering the country and using the banking system which the government already has lots of discretionary authority over.

My guess is that it is theatre. The US could already kept those guys out, and freeze the bank accounts without new legislation, but legislators wanted to be seen as doing something. And if the naming of individuals is out-of-order, then they can rely on those individuals not bothering to challenge it in the US courts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Could a committed nation state try to 51% attack a popular currency for nefarious purposes? It would seem to me (given these oligarchs' assets are frozen outside of Russia and that they are seemingly unbankable in the west), that having control of ethereum/bitcoin mining power would be a relatively easy way to move money around, obfuscate the movement of that money, and steal some in the process.

<comment><USER5> They could. However, they would risk making the currency worthless if detected.

I expect the only situation in which 51% attacks would be useful is when a party wants to deliberately destroy a currency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think money laundering and corruption narrative makes sense here. Since the west basically controls the financial system of the world, it's only natural for Russia to adopt an alternative that no one controls and take away some power from the west. The only weird part is that they actually figured this out.

<comment><USER7> It at least highlights the potential ineffectiveness of monetary sanctions on changing the political climate, which is the point of the Magnitsky Act.

I pretty much disagree with this point, however, until banks and hedge funds offer services denominated in cryptocurrencies. The Act is still a hurdle for those named to do any "legitimate" business in the West, hence Putin's relentless campaign to repeal it.

<comment><USER8> The Russians, the Chinese and the African tin pot dictators want their money out because they know it can be seized by the next government. If you end on the wrong side of Putin, you're shipped to Siberia and everything seized to pay the billions in tax debt, you all of the sudden owe.

Plus, now that they have money they want to be able to get some respect. What good is money unless you can spend outside Russia in places like Greece, Monaco...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always believed that the way crypto currencies will succeed is primarily for these reasons. In some ways it mirrors how porn pushed important technology. While it isn't nice that crypto currencies enable criminals in the long run I think this will benefit us as it will increase usage, add more services, keep liquidity etc.

</comment><comment><USER10> What I don't quite get is why the US government is so nonchalant about cryptocurrencies. The US owes much of its privileged financial position to the ability to siphon wealth from other economies by printing dollars. That's why it shits its proverbial pants every time China ever so slightly rebalances their reserves in favor of the Euro.

If, let's say, Bitcoin became an accepted unit of international money exchange, no one gets to ever print another dime. It's as close to a gold standard as possible without there being actual gold. You can't therefore dilute the balance owed, by quantitative easing or anything like that. And you can't pay back your debts with money you've just printed, because your ability to print is exponentially expensive

<comment><USER11> Cryptocurrencies so far have been a joke that pose no serious threat to the dollar and provide plenty of fun opportunities for seizing criminals' assets, so why would they intervene?

<comment><USER10> Key phrase is "so far". The math behind it all is definitely not a joke.

<comment><USER12> ...what if the US gov. already broke all those cryptos, and are waiting for the best moment to cash-out? dun dun dun...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> How effective is a named sanction? Certainly the Russian government could simply rename these people if they needed to. It's not like they're going to travel to the US where the US could apply biometrics, since they'd probably be arrested with or without this act.

<comment><USER11> I would imagine the post-2014 general sanctions due to the Ukraine stuff are much more effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> ZrCoin. Right.[1] Each coin is supposed to be exchangeable for a kilo of zirconium oxide. That's worth about $25. Since the coin is currently selling for $1.37, down from $75, the market doesn't believe this.

Bitcoin is getting big enough to be useful for large-scale money laundering. At last, a use case at scale!

[1] [https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/zrcoin/](https://coinmarketcap.com/assets/zrcoin/)

</comment><comment><USER15> This is great for the ICO market.

</comment><comment><USER16> Incredibly yellow writing from a journo not competent in both cryptocurrencies and Russian politics (LDPR is a far right party? LOL)

<comment><USER8> Just because he got the party affiliation wrong, doesn't mean that Russia isn't corrupt to the core.

EU screwed them really well during the Cyprus bank crisis, quite a few lost their hard stolen money. [http://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-21992745](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21992745)

<comment><USER16> It means low quality of the article, at least.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Render 3D GLTF Content as JSX in React and React-Native - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/0xca0a/status/1172183080452464640 <comment><AUTHOR> The reconciler that makes this possible: [https://github.com/react- spring/react-three-fiber/tree/3.x](https://github.com/react-spring/react- three-fiber/tree/3.x)

And the small node tool that converts GLTF blobs into reactive, declarative markup: [https://github.com/react-spring/react-three- fiber/tree/3.x/t...](https://github.com/react-spring/react-three- fiber/tree/3.x/tools)</comment>


Oracle Has Aquired Dyn - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/11/oracle-just-bought-dyn-company-brought-internet/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13005172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13005172)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wired is so sensationalist.</comment>


Why are 16 out of 30 front page submissions Erlang related? - <AUTHOR>

.....time to fork ycnews? <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145>

The problem cited could probably be solved by a fork, if you could make it more appealing to the general masses than Digg / Reddit / HN currently are.

I wonder if we could get a cycle going? As people jump from one to another, a few folks regress and reform at the base? I wonder how Kuro5hin is doing these days...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It will be interesting to see how many people upmod here without having read the previous link.

Either way, forking or tagging links would be a good idea at this point

</comment><comment><USER3> Just scaring off the new crowd with hard core hacker interest stuff.

Do your part, upvote some Haskell articles.

<comment><USER4> No. Erlang _only_ !!! FTW

<comment><AUTHOR> Favoring one particular language is hardly hacker-eqsue!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> HN content is just as much a joke as any other "news" site. Just pump it through a reader and quit wasting time on their erlang flooded homepage.</comment>


The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-racist-roots-of-fighting-obesity2/ <comment><USER2> "Prescribing weight loss to black women ignores barriers to their health"

If a doctor thinks a black woman should lose weight to improve her health, that is the advice he or she should give. Not giving patients the best medical advice because of race is racist.</comment>


My new web site has seen action - <AUTHOR>

Just wanted to tell HN - the web site I made for my mother-in-law's sealed-bid auction of her paintings has actually seen two bids!<p>I'm actually quite excited - sad, really. <comment><USER2> That sounds pretty interesting. Care to share the link? Any plans to turn it into a way for others to run their own sealed bid auctions?

<comment><AUTHOR> _> That sounds pretty interesting._

Thank you - also mentioned here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1410175>

_> Care to share the link?_

I was hoping someone would ask: <http://www.williamsonfineart.co.uk>

_> Any plans to turn it into a way for others to run their own sealed bid auctions?_

I've been thinking about that, and it shouldn't be too hard to generalise. No time now, but when the auction is over I can assess how it went, what I did wrong, and look at adapting it to do it "properly." This version was done in a few hours over a weekend.

<comment><USER3> Maybe you can build it up the way this guy did:

<http://mixergy.com/mailfinch-paul-singh-interview/></comment></comment></comment>


Why aren't U.S. engineers politicians? Does it matter? - <AUTHOR>

Hu Jintao, the president of China was a civil engineer. As are many senior government officials.
The former president of India from 2002-2007, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam was an aeronautical engineer.
So is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, from Iran.
Does it matter that I'd be hard pressed to see an engineer rise to the president in the U.S.? (Then again I would have said that about a black president in 2005)
Is there any useful information to extract from the oBservations that China and India have a significant amount of powerful leaders as former engineers? <comment><USER2> In China, I think you can look at some interesting historical contingencies which led to more engineers getting into politics. See also, the unique nature of CCP party membership and political life, etc.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinghua_clique>

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover>

<comment><USER4> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter#Naval_career>

It doesn't look good that two of America's worst and most hapless 20th century presidents were the two who were engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Is there any useful information to extract from the oBservations that China and India have a significant amount of powerful leaders as former engineers?_

Keep engineers out of government unless you want your country to be like India or China?</comment>


Startup that is trying to build an open-source satellite network - <AUTHOR> http://www.satellogic.com/#!home/c1sf0

<comment><USER2> I used to work in aerospace, specifically satellite data processing. A couple thoughts:

\- Their core team does not have anyone with space experience. Success and knowledge from other sectors (looks like they all come from the security sector) does not translate. Space is a whole different can of worms. There are totally different and more constraining hardware requirements, regulations, cost levels to name a few.

They have some advisory board guys with the right experience, but they will need to be heavily involved to be useful to a team of guys coming from a security background (probably more than just as advisers).

\- The costs associated with operating a satellite network are so stratospheric (badum-bum ding) that their claim about "democratizing access to data" is dubious. There is a very good reason satellite data is so damn expensive right now: it is so damn expensive to get in the first place.

They could lower some costs here and there maybe, but it would still be in the wrong order of magnitude. They would need to sell the data to a LOT of customers to be a profitable business, if they want to keep the cost of data low (this is what I assume they mean by "democratizing access). They have provided hints of some potential applications, but have they demonstrated there is sufficient existing demand for this?

Probably not. So they are essentially trying to create a new market while footing astronomical up front costs themselves. That is not an attractive risk proposition.

I hope it works because it could be very cool (space! data!). But, I remain very skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a pretty cool idea but I didn't see anywhere that it would be open- source. On the contrary I expect this to be super expensive, at least in the beginning. As a side note, open sourcing all of the software would be useful but not enough to get your own satellites up.

<comment><AUTHOR> They link to their Github page which has their software in it:

[https://github.com/satellogic](https://github.com/satellogic)

I agree though that just having the software isn't of much use to anyone. I just think it's very interesting.

Also, I don't know what their business model is going to be (I assume selling access to the data), but in my head I imagined time-sharing satellite access (which is probably way too complicated for them to do).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I know there are regulations for flying through airspace which require me to get permission depending on the type vehicle/altitude obtained. Are there similar regulations for space? Do I have to go somewhere to get permission to orbit in a certain plane or is it everybody for themselves?

<comment><USER5> IIRC, you do have to get an allocation from the UN for an orbit. There's the Space Law which restricts just about anybody from placing a satellite in geostationary orbit ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_law)), and there was another similar law which I can't seem to find atm. Not sure if LEO is restricted. IMO this law is ridiculous, no one on Earth owns space.

<comment><USER6> Not that ridiculous - there's a lot of important stuff up there, and it's easy for someone careless or malicious to accidentally damage it. Geostationary orbits in particular are very crowded, so it's not going to be easy to get an orbital slot, and if you don't follow fairly fairly exacting stationkeeping, reliability and end-of-life requirements your satellite will drift from its assigned location and disrupt or even damage the other satellites up there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's cool that they believe community can help getting better. [https://github.com/satellogic/canopus/blob/master/src/kernel...](https://github.com/satellogic/canopus/blob/master/src/kernel/FreeRTOS/7.4.0/Source/tasks.c)

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone have an idea of how fragile these 100lb satellites are? What is the potential negative environmentally of having thousands more of these satellites orbiting the earth?

<comment><USER9> Planet labs is doing the same thing with hundreds of 3kg satellites.

Yes having thousands of these satellites in LEO is going to make it crowded up there, especially as they break up over the years.

<comment><USER10> Is there even enough room in the marketplace for all of these upstart satellite imagers?

<comment><USER9> The price is going down by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Things are looking bleak for Astrium, Digital Globe etc. The sector has long needed an adjustment.

But whether space imaging is going to be worth anything for civil markets is questionable. If drone imaging can deliver less than $1 per acre then the satellites are going to lose. Hardly anyone is going to pay $0.01 per acre for 1m GSD when you can get 1cm GSD for $1.00.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who do you use for DNS? - <AUTHOR> This morning, I woke up to over 1,000 emails from various services notifying me that servers and services were down.
Using Ansible and my own internal monitoring, I quickly found that servers were fine, but DNS was all out of whack.
It looks like globally, many of my domains had invalid or missing records. And locally, using either my ISP or Google DNS, I would get responses sometimes, other times no. See, for example: https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/www.hostedapachesolr.com
I use Name.com currently, mostly because they're not GoDaddy (who I used 10-15 years ago, but never liked), but I'd like to move domains to a more reliable and transparent company... Name.com never seems to respond to tickets or Tweets in a timely manner, and when they do (a day or more later) the problem seems to have resolved on its own. <comment><USER2> For my own domains, I use rbldnsd on a couple of VM's in two datacenters with really high TTL's. No maintenance aside from the trivial yum update.

At my workplace we use Dyn and Verisign. I wanted to also have our own name servers, but folks didn't want to manage them.

</comment><comment><USER3> I use DNSimple [https://dnsimple.com/](https://dnsimple.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> we use Amazon's Route 53: [https://aws.amazon.com/route53/](https://aws.amazon.com/route53/)

It's ok so far.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use CloudFlare - free and fast.</comment>