On Medium - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2013/06/30/Medium

<comment><USER2> I've had two Medium articles get over 1.1k views and a 90%+ readership. I have about 6 subscribers on my WordPress blog that gets ~100 views a day.

Just putting that out there. Make of it what you will.

By the way, I once had an article get 10k views after a share on HN, then had that same article get ~120,000 after a republish on Lifehacker. The morale of all this? I don't know. Sure, it feels kind of good knowing that many people are reading your content, but the bigger picture is what are you doing with the viewership. I'm not so gung-ho on views anymore because views don't pay my rent, money does. Money is the ultimate metric.

Sure, viewership is nice, but only because of what it leads to: money and conversations. Medium is an okay place for conversations, and definitely is not a place to make money. I've yet to see an affiliate link or someone telling me to buy their book on the site. If anything, it's a place used to build your reputation -- it's like a nice outfit that makes you temporarily look good. I saw temporarily because it's a new site and has somewhat of a gated community feel to it.

I like reading. I like writing. But in the end, it comes down to making money.

yeah, I'm all over the place with this comment. It's Sunday night and I am a single guy that lives alone -- I got a lot on my mind!

<comment><USER3> Does it come down to making money? Writing is about getting a message accross, be it a "give me money" message or a different one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I get the feeling that a lot of people on this site dislike Medium, either consciously or unconsciously. I think part of it is the fact that it separates content from its creators; I think part of it is that it sprung up the same time as Svbtle, and grew conspicuously ubiquitous whereas Svbtle has remained pretty confined to the tech sphere.

The underlying value proposition by any sort of blogging engine (Posthaven, Medium, Svbtle, et al) is limited to a network, ease of use, and a good design. For most tech people, ease of use is a non-factor (you can extol 'distractions-free design', but you can put vim or Byword in full-screen mode) -- and I think the way people are reading is shifting away from individual sites and towards external services to the extent that design isn't a huge factor (everything looks the same in NewsBlur or Instapaper.)

This leaves the network/audience, which is a much more interesting concept: Svbtle is clearly going for a more curated approach (though the value of that curation is arguable), whereas Medium's trying a bunch of stuff at once (collections, editor's feed, etc.)

I can't help thinking that the winner of this nouveau publishing spectrum isn't going to be a hosting service, but a linking service. You might never get Patrick McKenzie to blog on your platform (because why would he?) but you can always link to his material.

<comment><USER5> > I get the feeling that a lot of people on this site dislike Medium, either > consciously or unconsciously.

I dislike Medium consciously, but not for the reasons you present. I dislike the site because I don't think its prominence here in HN was progressive, but rather very sudden (one month it was nothing special, and the next one it was always on the main page).

That tells me that either Medium is the website to end all websites, a site so popular that it took news sites by storm and whose news cannot be ignored, or that their marketing team is artificially pushing their content in HN to gain views. The fact that they have a main page article discussing how awesome the site is doesn't help either.

Of course, I have no evidence whatsoever of this, but that's how it feels for me. So as suggested by a fellow HN commenter, I just ignore everything from them.

<comment><USER4> I don't disagree with you whatsoever. It definitely felt more organic to me because I follow a lot of the Obvious Corp. folk on Twitter, but I think it's naive to think that any major tech-focused publication (and I'm being broad with the definition of publication here) doesn't specifically submit stuff to HN.

I have no idea how HN's ranking works, but I wish there was some sort of diminishing return bias against a given top-level URL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whatever publishers think, I've started using (medium.com) on HN as a negative content filter. Was quite impressed when I first saw it, but the last few times I've clicked on something on the front page of HN on medium it's been poorly thought out link bait. This isn't unique to medium of course, but I've gone from having a high-end perception of their content to a low-end one.

<comment><USER7> I've noticed that the posts tend to be well composed but on the fluff side in terms of content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> More bullshit SV circle jerking. I wonder if anyone's working on how to make public schools better, or a way to keep politicians more accountable, or a way to help close the wage gap, or...

I came here to change the world. And I feel like all I see are nerds blowing each other about The next minimalist uber for twitter.

<comment><USER5> > I came here to change the world.

Genuinely interested: what do you mean by "here"? HN, programming, life?

<comment><USER8> Silicon Valley. I grew up dreaming about Livermore Labs, Xerox PARC, Hewlett Packard (in its day), Apple. Now everything is in the city, and each start up as vapid and pointless as the last.

<comment><USER2> If you want to change the world, change yourself. You should never rely on others to change in the ways you'd like them to.

<comment><USER9> You should definitely never rely on others to change, but you can engage in a dialogue with the public through writing and speaking, which has the potential to change others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sometime back someone invited me to Medium and I am yet to try this out. I am still confused by to why I should try it out.

Some questions I have:

My domain (website) represents an exercise in credibility, branding and personality [1]. Why should I move to Medium?

Some people who write on Medium tell me the sheer number of views they get encourages them to write. Some have mentioned around 20K views in 3-4 hours. But this is a factor of "Editors pick" which will soon hit flooding issues and the rich gets richer issues in the front page. Can they ensure continuous coverage at this level ?

Some time from now they'll have to make money. They'll charge you, run ads or sell to another company. This might not be in sync with your ideology. I pay $6 on prgrmr. Cheap enough. Is this acceptable to you?

I agree maintaining a domain is more hard work than writing on medium but the feeling of "I own it" is incredible. Don't you feel the same?

If distraction free writing were the USP, I'd recommend my co-founder's iaWriter [2]. It does not publish directly and that's a big negative. Isn't this good enough?

[1]: [http://www.gigpeppers.com/](http://www.gigpeppers.com/)

[2]: [http://www.iawriter.com/](http://www.iawriter.com/)

<comment><USER11> This is completely off topic, but where did this "I am yet" nonsense spawn from? It's completely wrong, since you don't say "I amn't seen it yet", you say "I haven't seen it yet", therefore "I have yet to see it".

Is it one of those things that people get wrong to sound more educated, like overusing "whom"?

<comment><USER12> Interesting question - having always used the expression "I'm yet to do XXX" I didn't even realise how odd it might look to those unfamiliar with it. It's pretty standard English IMO, certain nothing I'd consider affectatious the way the use of whom absolutely can be.

Some discussion here:

[http://www.englishforums.com/English/Versus/djxxm/post.htm](http://www.englishforums.com/English/Versus/djxxm/post.htm)

including

"I am yet to..." and "I have yet to..." express exactly the same sentiment. The use of "am" in this context is a throwback to the now obsolete use of "to be" as the auxiliary verb in the present perfect conjugation of certain verbs. Eg, I am come. Languages such as German and French continue to use both "to be" and "to have" as auxiliary verbs. "I have come" translates in German to "ich bin gekommen" and in French to "je suis venu".

<comment><USER11> Hmm, that's interesting, thanks for the link. "I am yet" looks completely foreign to me, and it doesn't help that I haven't managed to find any definitive citation on the matter. However, it does appear from a cursory search that you are right, and the two have slightly different meanings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Initially I was very impressed with Medium: it looked good and had a high rate of good content - enough that I happily assumed that new content Medium was probably going to be good.

Now I'm very depressed with Medium. It's filling with trite, immature rants that keep polluting my otherwise quality feed of opinions. I no longer click the links and definitely won't be chancing upon the rare quality material.

The same thing happened to Quora, sadly.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm the co-founder of The Tech Block [http://thetechblock.com](http://thetechblock.com) and we sort of built something similar to Medium (before Medium existed) except it's focused on Technology and we pick and choose the pieces that go on our site.

Though it has similarities, the big difference is that our site is not a place where you'd actually type out your article. Instead, if it's housed on your site already, you can choose to cross publish to our audience of tech enthusiasts.

If you haven't heard of it, give it a look.

<comment><USER15> Love the look. Two things: 1) The author info gets in the way on the left, making it harder to read (remember we reading in F), 2) Those outgoing links, I would rather have you guys grab the content and reformatted nicely within the site for a unified experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Many articles on Medium have all external links shortened to bit.ly URLs. Is that an option in the publishing interface? I find it extremely annoying, you can track outbound links using javascript without hiding the actual url.

<comment><USER2> The last time I checked, that wasn't an option. And now that you mentioned it, I might start to do it, too (sorry).

I'm not sure how you can track links via javascript, but I do know how to make a bit.ly link.

<comment><USER17> You can theoretically set up Google Analytics to follow outbound links.

[https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1136920?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1136920?hl=en)

<comment><USER2> Seems too complicated.

<comment><USER16> This is something that Medium itself could set up for you.

If you want something simpler, just paste this into your page: [https://gist.github.com/5899046](https://gist.github.com/5899046)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I publish on Medium and parse my author RSS feed for display on my website. See it here, at the bottom: [http://grrrando.com/](http://grrrando.com/)

I think Medium is great. As is mentioned in the article, the editor is fantastic in its minimalism.

A key difference between myself and the author of this post is that I have no interest in creating or maintaining a blog (proper) of my own; I just want to write. I've wanted to write for a while, too, but the roadblock of setting something up and getting it looking decent prevented me from moving forward. For a while I thought Tumblr had been what I was looking for but text-based posts become utterly lost in the stream of naked ladies and pixel art (or is that just me?).

Stats wise, it's interesting to hear what an "Editor's Choice" pick on Medium can result in. I've got several posts on Medium that have 100 or fewer reads and they were posted to correct "collections". Which shows that Medium is not the place to build up an audience that you don't already have. Lacking the ability to "follow" an author – on-site at least, RSS is a non-advertised option – shows that Medium is more oriented towards "real time" (news cycle) longform than being a platform for authorship (for everyone besides maybe @ev and a handful of SV folks that always get featured).

My most popular article was posted about two weeks ago and has had around 2,000 reads. This isn't due to any Medium feature, though - just good old retweets and viral spreading. It was a satire listicle - prime viral material. Probably not what Medium was made for. Getting all of those reads, though, made me wonder exactly where all the traffic was coming from. I wish Medium had more in-depth analytics for this.

</comment><comment><USER19> As the author mentions, Medium seems best for the regular casual blogger. Bloggers with large followings are probably better served keeping their following and all the comments on their own turf.

<comment><USER20> I am always surprised how quickly individuals will give up control over their own content.

<comment><USER21> Agreed. I prefer all my content at a URL and server that I control. [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourWordsAreWasted.aspx](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourWordsAreWasted.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Each different sharing outlet provides a unique level of anxiety, ease of sharing, ego, and focus. The reason I like the concept of Medium is that it encourages non-attention-seeking people to write publicly about nearly any topic. The categories are a good structure, and the focus is on the content rather than the person posting it. It's not your blog nor your servers to maintain. It's a public feed and you're just a small fish. The barrier to entry is low, and the stats are nice to see.

</comment><comment><USER23> I can't see any mention here, but does Medium pay their authors for the content? Or is the pertinent question, how well does it pay compared to other article sites?

<comment><USER2> Medium does not pay a majority of their authors, however, I've heard that they pay some "big names" to help them gain traffic.

So unless you are a well known blogger/journalist, don't expect a check.

<comment><USER23> So sites like Medium are effectively driving down the pay of most authors (except some stars) by competing with other sites that pay for content. Bad news for authors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My big issue with Medium is branding. With Svbtle, you could atleast use your own domain name to link to your articles. With Medium, you always see the same _medium.com_ domain and the same black-on-beige background.

There's no sense of identity. How often do people read articles by the same author on Medium? How often do people _remember_ who wrote an article?

<comment><USER24> Medium is for writers who don't know how to brand. Medium essentially takes all the credit, traffic and recognition. And the writers seem to like that, weirdly enough.

</comment></comment><comment> workhere-io One thing I dislike about Medium is the fact that selecting text displays a Twitter/conversation thingy. A lot of people, myself included, have a habit of selecting portions of text when we read. Having that Twitter thing show up constantly while reading is annoying.</comment>


An Epiphany: Why I Kept Failing at GTD - <AUTHOR> http://www.gtdreviews.com/an-epiphany-why-i-kept-failing-at-gtd/

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone who has tried GTD on and off knows my pain. It can be frustrating when you feel the bliss that is a thorough brain-dump, but then fall off the wagon and see things starting to slip through the cracks. I had been on and off for years, then life hit me big time. Then came the epiphany.

I really hope this helps you out, and I welcome feedback, whether positive or negative!</comment>


Mister - <AUTHOR>

HOW DO I HACK INTO BANK ACCOUNTS <comment><USER2> Try emailing LulzSec.</comment>


GitLab Live Stream - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nc0hPGerSd4&feature=youtu.be <comment> hilbert- Kudos to the Gitlab guys. Keep up your hard work!

</comment><comment><USER2> This is truly amazing stuff. I think you should be commended for your openness.</comment>


Oh hurrow Koa.js - <AUTHOR> http://connorleech.ghost.io/oh-hurrow-koa-js/

<comment><USER2> I can't take an article with that title seriously.</comment>


The Uber-truth about the slavery economy - <AUTHOR> http://terrychay.com/article/the-uber-truth-about-the-slavery-economy.shtml?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tychay+%28The+Woodwork%29

<comment><USER2> For an alternative opinion: [http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2458816,00.asp](http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2458816,00.asp)

With Uber drivers making more than double what cabbies make, it seems that Uber is actually freeing the cabbies from the "slavery" of medallions.

<comment><USER3> A very good point. I was speaking to a cabbie in Vancouver, where a cab medallion is right about half a million dollars (Canadian). Cab drivers effectively have the choice of being indentured labor to the cab companies who buy medallions, or accepting massive debt and becoming indentured laborers for the bank.

Uber seems like a much better option.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well as far as exaggerations go, equating $15/hr freelance with "slavery" is much more disturbing than any exaggeratioms Über is making.</comment>


What's new with iGoogle? - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/whats-new-with-igoogle.html

<comment><USER2> I hate it.

Mine switched when I was out to lunch so it was a shock to come back to a totally different screen.

I really dislike the maximize,restore,minimize for the widgets. I have a multi-tabbed browser for a reason.

The left navigation leaves lots of wasted space.

The new Gmail gadget doesn't offer the option to show 0 emails. I only use it for new mail notification. I don't want the top message in my box to be visible to anyone who comes by my desk.

Clicking on a stock in the Finance widget, doesn't bring up the normal Google finance page.

I might have to find a new home page. :-(

<comment><USER2> replying to self:

They are getting tons of flack on their support group.

[http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Web_Search_Help- Person...](http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Web_Search_Help- Personalizing/topics)

I don't care how many focus groups it went through, it seems to be pretty well despised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I _loathe_ the new layout. Now there is all sorts of wasted space so that they could let their designers wank off with gradients.

It's a shame, because it was a very useful homepage. I'll be finding another one now.</comment>


Google Analytics Gets a Major Ugrade (AdSense, Custom Reports, API, Bubble Charts) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/22/google-analytics-gets-a-major-ugrade-adsense-custom-reports-api-bubble-charts/

<comment><USER2> Too bad the API is still "coming soon", but it is good news that they're working on it. I'd love to have access to that data without having to log in, and to build apps around it.

<comment><USER3> I want to see details on the API. I'm really hoping they let you provision new profiles with it.

<comment><USER3> Found this: [http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-enterprise- class-...](http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-enterprise-class- features-added-to.html) Unfortunately, it's a read-only data API.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I smell rushed push out of features to ward off defections to Yahoo's competing service. They even promise their API is 'coming soon', a feature that set yahoo's offering apart. Gee I love competition. Let's hope yahoo stays independent a while longer to cause a few more of these chain reactions.

</comment><comment><USER5> Finally...TC reports something useful.

<comment><USER6> AFAICT, it is just paraphrased from the announcement on the Google Analytics blog.

<comment><USER7> which is here: [http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-enterprise- class-...](http://analytics.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-enterprise-class- features-added-to.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can't wait to play with those, but of course they're not activated yet in my account. The Adsense integration is huge and will probably lead me to dynamically include ads depending on the provenance of users (Like, if it shows that Diggers never click an ad, why bother?).

Now if it could provide a real time list of the latest 100 or so visitors... it would be perfect.

</comment><comment><USER9> The bubble graph is way cool !

Besides it's a really good way of looking at data over time.

</comment><comment><USER10> Gah. I hate the new design.

new features are great though.</comment>


Cloud Storage for $2 per TB per month - <AUTHOR> https://blog.sia.tech/cloud-storage-for-2-tb-mo-8a34043e93bb <comment><USER2> I worked on the design of Dropbox's exabyte-scale storage system, and from that experience I can say that these numbers are all extremely optimistic, even with their "you can do it cheaper if you only target 95% uptime" caveat. Networking is much more expensive, labor is much more expensive, space is much more expensive, depreciation is faster than they say, etc etc. I don't think the authors have ever done any actual hardware provisioning before.

I didn't read all their math but I expect their final result to be off by a factor of 2-5x. Hard drives are a surprisingly low percentage of the cost of a storage system.

<comment><USER3> Author here. A lot of these numbers are drawn from experience in the mining world, where people realized that when cost is the ultimate bottom line, a lot of corners can be cut.

Sia systems don't need a ton of networking. I ran the networking buildout costs by some networking people, and again it comes down to cutting corners. If you only need 10 gbps per rack, if you don't mind having extra milliseconds added, etc, you can get away with very scrappy setups. The whole point is that it's not a highly reliable facility.

<comment><USER4> Here's the issue. We know that due to economy of scale and domain experience, AWS will always have the lowest cost (to Amazon) for storage -- whether that's totally-reliable storage, or sorta-reliable. If there was a demand for sorta- reliable, they'd build a sorta-reliable S3 and undercut you. Then, blockchain adds inefficiency. Therefore, it's basically impossible for any blockchain solution to have a lower total cost to provide storage.

<comment><USER5> Everybody with more money than you can always undercut you in anything you ever do so why bother ever trying to do anything

<comment><USER6> The point is not to do it cheaper but better.

<comment><USER4> ... better than AWS with its SLAs, that every major company relies on to some extent?

<comment><USER6> Yes. There's a reason companies like Digital Ocean, Heroku, OVH, ZEIT, Joyent, Rackspace, Linode, Cloudflare and many more have been able to survive and grow rapidly in an AWS-dominated space. None of them are competing by undercutting Amazon in price.

<comment><USER7> OVH is certainly undercutting Amazon in price. The free bandwidth included in each instance is already a dealbreaker if you actually use the instance for anything other than very heavy cpu-bound loads with small output to send back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I work in telecom/datacenter infrastructure and this is fanciful. The whole way they take the wattage load of one machine and then hand wave away all of the rest of the costs of either building and running a datacenter, or paying ongoing monthly colocation costs... Is just scary. I truly don't mean to offend anyone but this looks like a bunch of enthusiastic dilettantes.

Generators?

UPS?

Cooling costs?

Square footage costs for the real estate itself?

Security and staffing?

At the scale they intend to accomplish they will need at minimum several hundred kilowatts of datacenter space. Even assuming somewhere with a very low kWh cost of electricity, that much space for bare metal things isn't cheap. Go price a lot of square footage and 300kW of equipment load in Quincy, WA or anywhere else comparable, the monthly recurring dollar figure will be quite high.

And all of that is before you even start to look into network costs to build a serious IP network and interconnect with transits and peers.

<comment><USER9> They're not talking about a datacenter. Datacenters need to be reliable. Sia storage pools don't, because security and reliability is achieved at the global network level, not at the level of individual systems or storage pools. 95% reliability means you can be down for two whole weeks out of every year and still be well within acceptable uptime requirements.

Generators? Who needs those? Just wait for the power to come back on. UPS? Why bother? Square footage? Stick some wooden shelves in the cheapest building possible. Cooling? Locate in a cold climate and buy some window fans.

This isn't anything like the sort of infrastructure you're used to dealing with. Think Bitcoin mining farm, not Backblaze datacenter. Any corners that _can_ be cut _will_ be.

<comment><USER10> Who are the customers for such unreliable systems?

<comment><USER9> Sia is _very_ reliable from the customer's perspective. Its only individual systems and storage pools that have lax uptime requirements. Thanks to some clever network-level redundancy mechanisms (10-of-30 redundancy), 95% uptime at the storage pool level translates to 99.9999% uptime from the customer's perspective. See the "Uptime Math" section in the OP for details.

<comment><USER11> When you says Sia _is_ reliable, do you mean it could be reliable if hypothetical X, Y, and Z things happen?

Because according to the homepage (sia.tech) there are only 895 hosts storing a total of 206TB right now, which is a very, very small amount. Backblaze, a relatively small player as compared to the big cloud providers has 1.1 million TB of raw capacity as of last year (redundancy reduces the available capacity, but still) [0].

[0] [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats- for-2019/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/)

<comment><USER9> By reliable in this context I mean robust against hardware failure. (Including the failure of entire storage sites.) The OP explains the math and associated assumptions for how they derived that "99.9999%" figure, and acknowledges that since the calculated chance of data loss due to hardware failure is so infinitesimally small, other failure modes outside of what they modeled are likely to dominate.

As for the relatively small number of hosts at present, 895 is more than enough for 10-of-30 redundancy to work "as advertised". You really only need 30 hosts technically. The bigger issue I think is the relative immaturity of the software. Sia is still pretty new compared to most other data storage systems; and although I've never heard of any software bugs in Sia resulting in data loss, that doesn't mean such a bug will never be discovered. Be cautious, keep backups, and never rely on any single storage medium to store your data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> In 2018, I spent about six weeks running a series of tests to measure Sia's real world costs. At that time, storage cost ~$4.50/TB on Sia to back up large real world files (backups of DVDs and Blu-Rays).[0] Community members have re- run my tests every few months, most recently in October 2019, when the cost was measured at $1.31/TB, though it's worth noting that recent tests use synthetic data optimized to minimize Sia's cost.[1] It's also unclear how much the market value of Sia's utility token affects these costs, as the price of Siacoin has fallen by ~80% since I conducted my original set of tests.

The calculations in today's blog post account for the labor cost of assembling hardware, but leave out major other labor costs:

1\. You need an SRE to keep the servers online. Sia pushes out updates every few months, and the network penalizes you if you don't upgrade to the latest version. In addition, to optimize costs, you need to adjust your node's pricing in response to changes in the market.

2\. You need a compliance officer to handle takedown requests. Since Sia allows anyone to upload data to your server without proving their identity, there's nothing stopping anyone from uploading illegal data to the network. If Sia reached the point where people are building $4k hosting rigs, then it's safe to assume clients would also be using Sia to store illegal data. When law enforcement identifies illegal data, they would send takedown notices to all hosts who are storing copies of it, and those hosts would need someone available to process those takedowns quickly.

[0] [https://blog.spaceduck.io/load-test- wrapup/](https://blog.spaceduck.io/load-test-wrapup/)

[1] [https://siastats.info/benchmarking](https://siastats.info/benchmarking)

<comment><USER13> Another cost associated with your 2nd point is the collateral a host would have to burn to comply with take-down notices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm going through Sia's website now. It seems this article is meant to bolster the claim on their website which states "When the Sia network is fully optimized, pricing will fall somewhere around $2/TB/month." [1]

Call me skeptical but it seems that they aren't committing to building out this infrastructure themselves or providing a specific amount of storage at this pricing. They seem to be outlining a potential infrastructure that some enterprising individual (or corporation) could use to provide storage at that price to "renters" within their marketplace.

I guess I'll just wait until someone puts their money where their mouth is. Given that this is a marketplace, the fact that a theoretical setup could be built to provide some service doesn't necessarily guarantee it will be built.

1\. [https://support.sia.tech/article/thvymhf1ff-about- renting](https://support.sia.tech/article/thvymhf1ff-about-renting)

<comment><USER15> It's live right now though, the community has deployed the infrastructure [1] and the pricing is approximately what they claim [2].

1\. [https://siastats.info/hosts_network](https://siastats.info/hosts_network)

2\. [https://siastats.info/storage_pricing](https://siastats.info/storage_pricing)

<comment><USER16> That's the price being paid for the storage, but is it actually covering the cost of providing that storage? Or is it just 100-300 people who thought "Huh, neat, I'll toss a host online and see how it goes" ? I'd lean towards the latter and assume those storage costs are heavily subsidized by a few people satisfying curiosity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > That means about 2 hours of labor per rig. We'll call that $50

Does that seem low to anyone else? I don't really have any background in the area, but 25/hr cost _to the company_ would be less than 20/hr pay for the skilled labor. Other countries are different of course, but in US I could make that much flipping burgers in the right area.

<comment><USER18> It's outrageously low. They're also fancifully assuming cpu tdp = electrical power, cooling = 0w, and another 0w to the motherboard/network cards. And each box has 1 non-redundant, schmuck-grade $80 psu, as well as a consumer grade mobo. This would never be anywhere near their uptime.

<comment><USER3> CPU TDP is accounted for, the CPU linked in the blog post draws 65w and that is used in the electricity calculations.

I did realize that I completely forgot about RAM, when I get back to a computer I'll have to make some updates, but it won't materially move the numbers, there's 33% margin of error between the number in the spreadsheet and $2 / TB / Mo.

The $80 PSU is what I could link to from Newegg, I do have experience in industrial electronics, and I know from firsthand experience that you can buy a 10+year PSU at 93% efficiency for well under $80 at 300 watts. At that level, you're going to be able to request all the required cabling as well, which means you're getting a much better price than the $7 per cable linked in the post.

95% uptime means 18 days of downtime per year. Consumer grade PSUs and mobos do much better than that.

<comment><USER18> You included tdp but tdp /= actual electrical power. Intel approximates it from base clock (practically all consumer motherboards ignore the tdp/boost spec). AMD uses voodoo to calculate tdp, it's a pure marketing number with no basis in power usage. To make matters worse, motherboards typically go nuts with voltage on consumer boards, and power draw can vary wildly depending on what instructions you're using. There are a crap load of x86-64 extensions.

Yes, you forgot ram. And network chips, motherboard power delivery losses, motherboard power usage, cabling losses, etc. I'd guess it would total 50-100w, but feel free to current clamp the psu rails to get a realistic number.

As for the 95% uptime, I agree with you. I wasn't considering how much breathing room that actually provides, I was just going with my instincts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is way too much hand-waving and assuming going on this article. It is a load of BS that does not take into account real-world inefficiencies. e.g. sometimes buying in bulk is more expensive than buying at retail, esp when you need consistent supply. Sure, you may need only an hour of sysadmin time a day, but what sysadmin will let you employ them an hour a day? The buildout did not list a CPU. The assumptions about uptime are over-amortized, an outage given the resources they quote may average out to 95% uptime but their latency for getting systems back up is going to be absolutely terrible and I'd be surprised if outages were shorter than a day or two on average. They aren't factoring in cooling. They aren't factoring in the drastically reduced lifetime of drives in their ridiculously cramped and under-ventilated cubbies. They are completely ignoring diagnostic time, presuming they can only quote actual repair times, which is an absolute joke given the lack of smart hardware and enterprise DC management. They think they can average out throughout over the number of drives not taking into account per-channel limitations. They are not taking into account the extra time to build and dismantle systems in their hacked-together IKEA shelves. They are underestimating the costs of electricity at commercial rates. I could go on and on, but suffice to say that I would never, ever use their network for any purpose without another backup (which they don't finger into their costs, of course ;). I thought B2 was risky; this is taking it to an entirely different level.

<comment><USER20> > The buildout did not list a CPU.

It did, or does now anyway, the RYZEN 3 1200 for $95.

EDIT: Although the better option is the 3200G so that you can actually get a display output from the thing. Same price, so it doesn't really change anything, but it does cut the CPU core count down a bit if that matters at all.

That said the buildout still doesn't work because you can't actually plug the "sata splitter" cable they linked into the motherboard. Because the splitter was actually a 4-lane SAS SFF-8087 breakout cable, and there's no consumer motherboard with 8x of those connectors on it. Good luck finding even 1 or 2 of those connectors on a consumer board, and it sure as hell won't be at dirt cheap prices.

So you either need 4x the computers they calculated, or you need to budget for add-in SATA/SAS controller cards. Which, because they aren't used in consumer land, are not cheap. You could go used, but that's still going to increase the bottom line (and won't be a reliable source of parts)

They also aren't factoring in assembly time nor budgeting for that. Building these isn't going to go very quickly.

<comment><USER21> I have gotten away with cheap PCIex1 2xSATA2 adapter cards, for roughly 10-15USD at the time of purchase. They did work, but this assumes a motherboard with room for lots of PCIe cards.

Edit: to clarify on the CPU usage, could a potential build also get away with a cheap AMD Athlon 3000G?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I feel like backblaze has already done most of this and has it in production [1]. Whereas this is just done back of the napkin calculation.

[1] [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/storage- pod.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/storage-pod.html)

<comment><USER23> Backblaze has tried to make their datacenter as efficient as possible, and still only ends up hitting $5/tb/mo for their b2 service, as a point of reference.

<comment><USER24> Backblaze is _very good_ but they are definitely not efficient in $$ utilization.

Efficient $$ utilization is bread racks, built out data centers abandoned by the likes of PepBoys that landlords will part for $3/sq foot per year and Google using servers without cases and velcros to keep hard drives attached.

<comment><USER8> Abandoned pepboys stores don't usually have very good fiber connectivity. Backblaze and similar hosting/storage companies move enough traffic that they need to be topologically close to major IX points.

If all you want is cheap commercial real estate with cheap dollars per square foot figures, there are plenty of economically depressed areas within the United States that you could put things. Those areas usually have very poor fibre connectivity, fibre diversity, and choice of carriers.

I have previously explained this to a number of people who asked me, basically, why don't all of these gigantic abandoned shopping malls get converted into Data center space? Two reasons: poor connectivity, and nowhere near enough electrical grid feed capacity (as proper three phase service) in terms of watts per square foot. Bulldozing empty land in Quincy and putting up a tilt-up concrete on slab dedicated purpose datacenter structure is much less costly than extensively retrofitting abandoned, 30, 40, 50 year old commercial real estate.

<comment><USER24> > Abandoned pepboys stores don't usually have very good fiber connectivity. > Backblaze and similar hosting/storage companies move enough traffic that > they need to be topologically close to major IX points.

Not stores. Data centers.

It is typically cheaper to get long distance fiber links than metro fiber and midsize data centers do not consume that much power, power which is plentiful outside the major metros, especially in the old manufacturing areas.

The real reason why companies do not go there is because it is not sexy and non-sexy places do not get "ninja" employees that would be passing brain teasers on a whiteboard.

> Bulldozing empty land in Quincy and putting up a tilt-up concrete on slab > dedicated purpose datacenter structure is much less costly than extensively > retrofitting abandoned, 30, 40, 50 year old commercial real estate.

If you are doing it in a major metro then unless you get a big fat tax break your real estate taxes are going to kill you.

<comment><USER25> > Not stores. Data centers.

Honestly, it doesn't make much difference. Datacenters built for random corporations often only have connectivity to the local ILEC or MSO which is going to get you pretty poor pricing.

<comment><USER24> All of them are on net and all of them have fiber already to the premises. Most of them have not just local loops but termination point for long distance carriers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> One interesting point of reference is that backbaze currently charges $5 / TB / Mo. Assuming they haven't changed their profit margin of 50% from 2017 ([https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cost-of-cloud- storage/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cost-of-cloud-storage/)), then this would imply that they have a direct cost of roughly $2.5 / TB / Mo.

</comment><comment><USER27> Top of Hacker News and there's nothing clickable above the fold that takes me to the SIA website.

Content marketers and technical marketers - don't miss the opportunity on Medium and other platforms to at VERY LEAST link to your homepage in the first section.

In fact that is at the top of this awesome piece of content marketing is a "Sign Up" button for Medium . . .

<comment><USER28> I ended up at [https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia](https://github.com/NebulousLabs/Sia) and there's no activity in the last two years, the latest issues are a few "you broke my wallet with the update and my password doesn't work" from 2018.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, they moved to gitlab: [https://gitlab.com/NebulousLabs/Sia](https://gitlab.com/NebulousLabs/Sia)

<comment><USER28> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been using Sia for about three months to backup some personal files. Nothing crazy, but it seems to work well.

I'm looking forward to seeing this project mature as well as have some more layers build on top of it moving forward. I really wish the client offered synchronization or access across multiple devices. For now you have to try third party layers on top of Sia to accomplish this.

<comment><USER31> > I'm looking forward to seeing this project mature as well as have some more > layers build on top of it moving forward. I really wish the client offered > synchronization or access across multiple devices. For now you have to try > third party layers on top of Sia to accomplish this.

Yea I'd actually pick it up now and give it a try if it had this feature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Really smart people make this mistake a lot, so I'm wondering what Sia is doing to decorrelate failure rates. If hedge fund quants can turn mortgage tranches into a machine for massive correlated economic losses, can blockchain quants turn storage tranches into a machine for massive correlated storage losses?

Or if one of the major hyperscalers or datacenter operators decides to start selling storage to Sia, it seems likely that their control plane across datacenters could result in correlated failures. A networking outage for their AS could result in multiple datacenters appearing offline concurrently, for example.

</comment><comment><USER23> This analysis entirely omits the cost of a sysadmin to manage the storage servers. Even if sia is assumed to do almost everything, and even if we only want 95% uptime, you still need someone to deal with software updates, hard drive monitoring, etc etc.

The profit of $570/year/box is not enough to pay a part-time sysadmin and still have any useful profit.

</comment><comment><USER33> >If we assume that the 30 hosts go offline independently

I wonder how reasonable this assumption really is. For regular CPU-bound crypto-mining we see that it tends to centralize geographically in zones where electricity, workforce and real-estate space to build a datacenter are cheap.

Assuming that Sia ends up following a similar distribution, it wouldn't be surprising if several of these hosts ended up sharing a single point of failure.

Beyond that, if only copying stuff around three times to provide tolerance is enough to lower the costs to $2/TB/Mo, why aren't centralized commercial offerings already offering something like that? Just pool three datacenters with 95+% uptime around the world and you should get the same numbers without the overhead of the decentralized solution, no? Surely the overhead of accounting for hosts going offline and redistributing the chunks alone must be very non-trivial. With a centralized, trusted solution it would be much simpler to deal with.

Or is the real catch that Sia has very high latency?

<comment><USER34> I'm guessing there's not a lot of 95% datacenters that don't have heavy generators or UPS on site. You'd have to basically build a datacenter that has lower guarantees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wait, how are they connecting 32 drives to that motherboard? They seem to be implying they are splitting each SATA plug 4 ways, which as far as I know is impossible.

The adapter they're linking to is SF8087 to 4x SATA, not SATA to 4x SATA (which shouldn't exist). That motherboard doesn't have SF8087, it has 8 SATA3 connections.

Unless I've missed something big, SF8087 can not be plugged into SATA3.

<comment><USER36> It cannot. I assume there's an HBA thrown in the mix somewhere they did not mention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't think it is correct to say that the only options are "host failures are truly independent" or "world war three".

The hosts are not ever going to be fully independent. There will be hundreds, if not thousands, host co-located in the same location -- likely of the cheapest grade, without any extras like fire alarms or halon extinguishers or redundant power feeds. A single fire (flood, broken power station) has a chance of taking out thousands of hosts simultaneously.

And there is management system as well -- AWS has thousands of engineers working on security. Will there be one at this super-cheap farm? What are the chances there will be farms with default passwords and password-less VNC connections? And since machines are likely to be cloned, any compromise affects thousands of hosts.

... and all of those things are made worse by the fact that if you store hundreds of thousands of files, your failure probability raises significantly. If a data center burns down, at least few of your files may be unlucky enough to be lost.

</comment><comment><USER38> at a minimum the facility will need some power conditioning and/or insurance. you don't want a brief power surge to eat all of your capital, and lockup fees, in one go.

> For a 32 HDD system, you expect about 5 drives to fail per year. This takes > time to repair and you will need on-site staff (just not 24/7). To account > for these costs, we will budget $50 per year per rig.

will you not also lose 6TB (times utilization) of your lockup every time a drive dies?

> 8x 4 way SATA data splitters

you've linked to SAS breakout cables. they don't plug into SATA ports, they plug into SFF-8087 SAS ports.

they cannot plug into the motherboard you've listed. nor have I ever seen one listed for retail sale that has 8 SFF-8087 ports.

the cheapest way to get 8 SFF-8087 ports is with some SAS expander card, and a SAS HBA. even scraping off eBay that's another $50 per host, and two more components to fail.

there are also actual SATA expanders out there, but they last about 3 months before catastrophic failure in my experience.

<comment><USER39> Isn't a potential problem with "SATA splitters" also that all disks will share the same channel an therefore end up with worse performance? (Though I guess it won't make a difference for mechanical drives)

<comment><USER38> any of the expander (SATA, or SAS) things, yes, will be sharing bandwidth. but as you mention, it won't be a limiting factor for mechanical drives. and considering the latency involved in this sort of retrieval, probably isn't a problem regardless.

FWIW the break out cable they've listed is splitting up a connector that has 4 electrical channels onto 4 physically separate cables, so there's no problem with it. they just don't have anywhere to plug it in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Big deal. I charge $5 per TB per month and I'm not even trying to be cheap.

The economies of scale should make this much less expensive. Colocating your own machine in a real datacenter and hosting your own data shouldn't still be cheaper than practically all of "the cloud" offerings, but it is. What does that tell you about "the cloud"? It's marketing bullshit.

Sure, it's fine for occasional use, but anyone using the hell out of "the cloud" can easily save money by using anything else.

<comment><USER41> That's not really surprising, but people tend to forget about it. In the end somebody has to pay for ops. It's business as usual, like it was a century ago.

There are cases where you can indeed save money by doing more by yourself. But how much time does it cost you and how much is your time worth?

How much time do you need to research, purchase, and eventually build your hardware? How much time do you need to get a decent data center deal? How much time do you need to bootstrap your setup? How much time do you need to regularly maintain your infrastructure?

<comment><USER40> Those are all just "cloud" talking points.

My time is worth a tremendous amount to me, which means I want to use my own hardware. "The cloud" does not guarantee reliability.

Any company that does any project that even slightly regularly requires compute / storage can easily justify the time to do all the things you mentioned.

The fact that many companies have gone towards "the cloud" goes hand-in-hand with the fact that many companies use Windows. It's clearly not the best thing to use to get things done, but the IT people don't want to reduce their importance and the management people like the kickbacks and perks they get from buying certain thing from certain companies.

The savings look good on paper, but the reality is that they're based on leaving out lots of information. I've helped several companies move from "the cloud" back to good, local compute resources because of the amount of money they were hemorrhaging to "cloud" providers.

For the most part, it's all marketing bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> From their site: [1] Sia is a variant on the Bitcoin protocol that enables decentralized file storage via cryptographic contracts

[1][https://sia.tech/sia.pdf](https://sia.tech/sia.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't know anything about the subject, so no idea if these claims are realistic. But whatever, either they deliver or they don't.

My (or their, actually) problem is I don't really get what they are offering right now. There is an impressive landing page with big numbers and pretty pictures which explains pretty much nothing. Project seems to be in production for at least 3 years, there are some apps, but I don't actually see if I can use it to backup/store some data and how much it costs right now. I mean, they say "1TB of files on Sia costs about $1-2 per month" right there on the main page, but it cannot be true, right? It's just what they promise in the hypothetical future, not current price-tag?

The only technical question I'm interested here is why they actually need blockchain? This is always suspicious and I don't remember if I saw _any_ startup at all that actually needs it for things other than hype. It is basically their internal money system to enable actual money exchange between storage providers and their customers, right? So, just a billing system akin to what telecom and ISP companies have? Is it cheaper to implement it on blockchain than by conventional means? How so?

<comment><USER15> > but it cannot be true, right? It's just what they promise in the > hypothetical future, not current price-tag?

Here's the live pricing, right now: [https://siastats.info/storage_pricing](https://siastats.info/storage_pricing)

> Is it cheaper to implement it on blockchain than by conventional means?

It's more so that _anyone_ can join the network as a host. They don't have to have a financial or business relationship with anyone, they can just provide their storage service and charge for it. No way to do that currently in the world without a blockchain.

<comment><USER11> > It's more so that anyone can join the network as a host. They don't have to > have a financial or business relationship with anyone, they can just provide > their storage service and charge for it. No way to do that currently in the > world without a blockchain.

Maybe I misunderstand your point, but I could certainly install MinIO (a S3 compatible object store) on a home NAS and charge people for it without using a blockchain. I see your point about not having a financial or business relationship with a blockchain network acting as an intermediary, but I can assure you that the IRS and various law enforcement and regulatory agencies would tell you that you absolutely do have a financial and business relationship with whoever is paying you via the crypto-network whether you'd like to or not.

<comment><USER15> > I could certainly install MinIO (a S3 compatible object store) on a home NAS > and charge people for it

But how would that work? You'd probably make a website or app that had users sign up for an account, and then with that account they could associate payment information from a payment processing company, and then you'd provide them with credentials where they could log in to their Minio instance. Right?

Then, you have to go out and market your service, explain to people why they should use it instead of existing alternatives, convince people that you're trustworthy, build a reputation, and generally do sales.

In the case of Sia, you build your host, plug it in, announce it to the Sia blockchain, and then clients from all around the world start paying to use your storage.

Clients don't have to register for an account first, don't have to involve a third-party payment processing company, and don't need a sales pitch because they algorithmically test, measure, and rank hosts.

I remember at the outset of the web, a new thing was this user demand for services to become "self-serve", as in, you would no longer need to talk to a salesperson and establish a relationship in order to buy something — even something custom. I see this as the next step of that, where you want to be able to programmatically and algorithmically establish and dissolve those kinds of service agreements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> On a related topic, I've had a ton of problems finding a cloud storage system that will reliably handle files around 100-200gb. Does anyone have a recommendation for a service that can handle that file size with ease?

<comment><USER45> Any object storage system (S3, Backblaze B2, Azure Blob, GCP) should be able to handle those file sizes with proper chunking into smaller parts (limit details below per object store).

S3: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/mpuoverview....](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/mpuoverview.html) (Max object size: 5TB, Max single multipart size: 5GB)

Backblaze B2: [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/large_files.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/large_files.html) (Max file size: 10TB, Max single object size: 5GB)

Azure: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/rest/api/storageservices/un...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/rest/api/storageservices/understanding-block-blobs--append-blobs--and-page- blobs) (Max file size: 4.75 TB, Max single block size: 100MB)

Google: [https://cloud.google.com/storage/quotas](https://cloud.google.com/storage/quotas) (Max file size: 5TB, doesn't appear there is a lower limit for objects to be composed into a single object, docs could be better in this regard)

@khc: Terminology updated to be more clear for S3

<comment><USER46> I'd drop Microsoft from that list because the request for for something "reliable."

It's reliable enough, if you can get it to Microsoft's cloud. But for the last six months I've struggled putting very large files into Azure, using five different connections from five different providers in three locations. Small files are no problem. But large ones take two, three, or four tries.

<comment><USER45> I don't disagree Azure is hot garbage, just listing for completeness. S3 and Backblaze B2 are my go-to object stores.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> So no CPU (or APU, so you don't need a GPU), no RAM, and those breakout cables are actually for SAS, but no SAS card listed in the total. This does not inspire confidence in the project at all.

</comment><comment><USER48> Interesting article, but "black swan situations like world war three" may be underestimation. Software bugs are more likely and sometimes fatal.

I wonder why transfer prices are not included? As you explain every transfer is paid does it mean one has to pay for 10 uploads of every single object, right? But as equipment ages, peers go out of business then who pays for the data rebalancing transfers?

</comment><comment><USER49> It's probably feasible to reach these levels of cost. I certainly still keep NAS in two locations because even places like hetzner don't sell lower powered machines with lots of disk space. But the build they specify doesn't have a CPU or RAM and it's using a SAS cable to connect to a SATA motherboard. Depending on the requirements of the platform they may be able to get away with non-ECC RAM, a simple APU to not need a graphics card, and a few cheap SATA PCIe cards to get enough connections. It will probably add ~500$ or ~10% to the build though. I don't know if the other costs have similar issues.

<comment><USER50> Hetzner's super cheap "cloud" machines allow you to attach "block storage" volumes of whatever size you like. It's not particularly well advertised (searching for this sort of thing takes you to their dedicated storage offerings) but it's there and it's great.

<comment><USER49> From what I can see on the website that block storage consists of SSDs priced at ~50€/month/TB which is a non-starter. The cloud instances are incredibly cheap though, I may have a look at those.

<comment><USER51> Check out their storage box if using their cloud instances. [https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage- box?country=ot](https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box?country=ot)

€10 for 2TB and unlimited transfer within same datacenter (or 10TB if accessing from outside). You will get a 1Gbps or more transfer speed and many options for mounting the storage (SCP, webdav, etc). I used to use them as a intermediate backup location when I used their cloud instances and dedi servers.

<comment><USER49> That's starting to look quite interesting, thanks! 5TB of rsyncable storage for 22€/month could definitely replace one of my NAS boxes. The 10 concurrent connections are the only big limitation really. Not being able to run my own stuff is also not ideal. But it's the kind of thing I've envisioned to stop using a NAS and just point syncer at:

[https://github.com/pedrocr/syncer/](https://github.com/pedrocr/syncer/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I was expecting an ad based on the title, but it ended up being an interesting analysis of just how much storage ends up costing them with their focused hardware setup.

</comment><comment><USER53> Honestly, I'm a bit confused on who the targeted audience is for this article. I've been running as a host for Sia for months now. My rig is a raspberry pi and a 10tb external HDD I had laying around.

<comment><USER54> Do you make anything from it?

<comment><USER53> For the first few months, you'll basically have all of your Sia drained as your contracts start coming in and your host wallet gives them collateral. But yeah, my contracts only recently started to complete, and I've got the amount of Sia I started with at the very least.

So... Yes, but probably not very much? Particularly when accounting for the price drop in Sia.

Edit: If you do decide to host, it'll likely be about 5-6 months before your contracts start completing if your host settings go by the recommended 26 week max duration. And don't go out buying hardware unless you're in it for the long run, which makes me now realize the point of this article.

<comment><USER55> Can you share more info on cost breakdown and earnings? Also, how expensive is electricity in your area?

<comment><USER53> I wouldn't try hosting on Sia if you're trying to make a profit. I spent 20USD on Sia currency. And I didn't go out and purchase a RPi + harddrive for it. You likely wouldn't make a profit if you did. RPi's are great for costing next to nothing in electricity, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I worked for a p2p startup 15 years ago. We were exploring ideas and products in this space. We came close to partnering with a company doing distributed cloud storage. Their idea was to allow people to rent storage space in personal computers.

We decided to scrap the plan to do p2p storage, ended up using cloud storage. This p2p storage idea is a tough one. People are not willing to make a few dimes renting out their hard drive or CPU. The economic unit is too small to work. But good luck trying this idea. I wouldn't be surprised if someone tries again in 20 years. :)

</comment><comment><USER57> The IO operations amplification for 64 of 96 is pretty brutal, and particularly unfavorable in a world where capacity-per-IOPS keeps trending up. I wonder how they'll deal with that.

<comment><USER3> Each of the 64 pieces is fetched from a different host on the network, meaning all of the IOPS are happening in parallel at network speeds. You aren't going to be doing sub-millisecond updates for sure, but you can easily get under 100ms.

The reed-solomon also isn't even the most computationally expensive part, the computationally expensive part is computing and verifying the Merkle roots. All parts of the system though can go >1gbps on standard CPUs.

<comment><USER58> It's fine from the perspective of a single request but it seems like it reduces the overall throughput of the network. If Sia has, say, 1M hard disks and can do 100M raw IOPS then 10-of-30 gives 10M net IOPS but 64-of-96 gives only 1.5M net IOPS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> The most important thing not addressed here is demand. Last I checked (granted, this was a while ago) it simply wasnt there- Meaning if you built this rig you might only be able to rent out a small part of it.

If this has changed I would be interested in hearing about it-

One other thing I am not understanding is how this makes financial sense, even if the demand is there. If I am buying a rig for 4500 bucks to get 200TB, making "570 a year in profit" is nowhere near exciting enough. Practically any other use pays more. Renting a dedicated server for a game, web hosting, hell even GPU mining makes more.

(a single 1080ti can do about 1$ a day in gross revenue on grin/eth/etc - which can be had used for ~400 bucks- Or you can get a p102 which is the mining card version with no display output for 250 bucks) - Payback with power costs/etc.. well below the 10 year threshold of siacoin)

Now where it might be interesting (IF there is demand), is just adding harddrives to an existing infrastructure already in place. So if you are a GPU miner and have 1000 rigs already in place, just adding a single 4TB harddrive to each machine might not be too bad- They go for about $50 each used and according to this, will pay back $8 a month with minimal extra costs

<comment><USER59> So I did a quick look and it seems like the total usage of siacoin is not that large.

[https://siastats.info/hosts_network](https://siastats.info/hosts_network) Only 710 TB is in use. Or about $20k worth of hardware TOTAL for the entire network, according to the above URL.

Also, why is this a cryptocurrency at all? Wouldnt this business be drastically simplified by simply paying people out//letting people rent space with either USD or bitcoin?

<comment><USER60> > Also, why is this a cryptocurrency at all?

Do you even need to ask? Because they have minted a bunch of SIA coin and this is their effort to give it value out of thin air, making them all millionaires. Using someone else's currency, despite its obvious benefits, means no huge pre-minted pool under their control = no lambos.

Every single ICO project is like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> The website seemed okay and even useful until:

"Both renters and hosts use Siacoin, a unique cryptocurrency built on the Sia blockchain. Renters use Siacoin to buy storage capacity from hosts, while hosts deposit Siacoin into each file contract as collateral."

<comment><USER62> Until payment processing for regular money becomes free, peer-to-peer micropayments can only be done economically with a cryptocurrency. The need for a new unique crypto currency for this project is debatable, but I can understand that the people who work on this project full-time need to earn a paycheck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> See also Tardigrade

[https://tardigrade.io/](https://tardigrade.io/)

It is $10/mo/TB, but has different uptime, speed and security characteristics.

</comment><comment> rob-olmos How did they go from 8 SATA ports to 32 SATA devices? The linked cable uses a SAS host/connector. Was a SAS card left out of the parts list?

<comment><USER64> Using "8x 4 way SATA data splitters".

What i don't get is why they don't use 14TB HDDs, they are only 15% more expensive per TB. On the other hand they'd need 2.33x less PCs at $550 each, plus their power use.

So instead of every 7 PCs with 6TB HDDs they'd need 3 with 14TB HDDs.

PS: They could also use a mainboard with 10 SATA ports instead of 8. They are only $15 more than the chosen board. Adding one or more PCIe 8x SATA controller cards might also make sense, depending on the average load of a system.

<comment><USER65> > Using "8x 4 way SATA data splitters".

There's no such thing as a passive SATA data splitter.

<comment><USER66> it's probably a SAS/Sata controller, and the sas interface split to 4x sata.

<comment><USER65> They do link to the motherboard they are talking about, and it doesn't have SAS.

<comment><USER66> They mention 8 pcie slots with 48 pcie lanes... I'm presuming they are filling them with sas/sata controllers.

<comment><USER21> > 48 PCIe lanes

PCIe lane count depends on CPU support, for AM4 I believe it ranges from 6x PCIe 3.0 (cheapest AMD Athlon/Ryzen CPU-s with integrated GPU) to 24 (PCIe 4.0 for latest Zen 2 based Ryzen 3000 series).

The CPU they list in the article supports 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0 connectivity + 4 lanes for chipset (storage and other IO). Nowhere near the 48 PCIe lanes you mention, although you could argue that 20+4 lanes of PCIe 4.0 bandwidth is equal to 48 lanes of PCIe 3.0 bandwidth, but this would require a compatible CPU, which would increase the cost by hundreds of dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> We from croit.io operate Ceph based storage including everything from datacenter, power, switches, labor, licenses, all to a price point of 3€/TB.

No consumer ware

</comment><comment><USER68> There is one big problem that I've not seen anyone else point out with systems like this. I know because I did the calculation early on with Peergos and came to the conclusion that it doesn't work.

The problem comes when you want to store multiple files. If the corresponding erasure code fragments from different files are not stored on the same server then you don't have correlated failures. Contrast this with a typical raid scheme where a failed drive means the nth erasure fragment of every file is gone - correlated failures. If the failures across different files are not correlated, which is the case if you're storing each new block on a random node, then you are basically guaranteed to lose data if you have enough files. Depending on your scheme, this can happen as low as 1 TiB of data for a user. It is similar to the birthday paradox.

For erasure codes to work for a filesystem you need to have correlated failures.

<comment><USER69> totally false

ordinary raid has very slow recovery because it's concentrated on a hot spot of a new drive. plus recovery waits for a new drive to be inserted (double stupid).

when fragment placement is randomized, recovery is widely distributed and can happen in less total time so lower chance of data loss.

<comment><USER68> I didn't say anything about speed of recovery because it's not relevant. Recovery can't happen at all if enough fragments aren't online. The maths says that with unncorelated fragment placement, and thus uncorrelated failures, and with enough data, you are basically guaranteed to lose data. Try doing the maths for an entire filesystem, where each file/block is individually erasure coded.

<comment><USER69> We stored hundreds of petabytes on cheap SATA drives with random fragment placement using reed solomon 6+3 coding (half the space of 3 replicas but same durability). Never lost a byte.

Speed of recovery is crucial, because that's your window of vulnerability to multiple failures. For example. try raid 5 on giant drives. The chances of losing a second drive during recovery is very likely.

<comment><USER68> No need to be rude. EDIT: The offensive part was removed

What was the probability of failure of your drives? My guess is you just didn't hit the threshold for your failure rate. The maths checks out (PhD here). Seriously, do the calculation.

<comment><USER68> To clarify, the assumptions I'm making for the calculation are:

1) a Fixed probability of a server failing

2) a fixed erasure coding scheme used for all files

3) uncorrelated server failures

4) an erasure fragment is stored on a random server

<comment><USER68> It boils down to the following:

You can calculate a probability L of losing a given file.

Because we've assumed totally uncorrelated failures that means this is the same for all files, and that the probability of losing NO files if you have T files is (1 - L)^T

As you can see, this approaches 0, meaning Pr(losing a file) approaches 1 as T increases.

Using the probability of file loss in Sia, which I would say is is too low, but lets ignore that. They get L = 10^-19.

This leads to T = ~10^19 before you expect to lose data. If you're erasure coding on the byte level, then that's 10 exa bytes.

I expect your probability of failure is much less than random nodes on a distributed global network of volunteers. so yes, ~petabyte is below the threshold, but there is a threshold.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> This tech seems very cool, but with only 200TB stored I worry that it is destined to not pay for its overheads. No big project can survive on a revenue of $20/month!

When will the project grow some mobile apps like Dropbox or Google drive that you can just put a credit card number into, pay a few bucks and know your data is safe?

</comment><comment><USER71> That rack setup in the article reminds me of Gilfoyle's setup for Anton in the garage from Silicon Valley.

</comment><comment><USER72> This is pretty incredible both from a product perspective, as well as the potential to push the whole industry towards a race to the bottom. Equilibrium here pushes storage, processing, and availability towards distributed nodes, unless high availability is required for some unique business case

</comment><comment><USER73> Offtopic question : I went through their website, and I have no idea about blockchain. I have gone through the documentation and almost everything they are doing is possible without it as well. Cryptoproofs for storing data, smart contracts et al - not sure if it is different from regular encrypted deduplication done regularly with standard per hour/ per minute billing. Also, Siacoin for payment, not sure if it is the most optimal way. I think I am missing something, would be glad if someone can point me in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER74> You lost me on the homepage (sia.tech) there are only 895 hosts storing a total of 206TB right now. That coupled with the shady infrastructure.

You aren't touching my enterprise data, not even the cold storage logs.

</comment><comment><USER75> For people that use Plex... Do you think that it's a good place ? If we have several TB is it cheaper to use it's own PC with (let's say) 2x10TB HDD + 2x10TB HDD backup or it's better to go online today ? When I check the price, I feel that it's always more expansive.

For my backup, it's not sync in real time but I do manual backup every 3 months. I can loose some data but I feel ok with that.

</comment><comment><USER76> The website sia.tech required a Google captcha challenge for me to even load, clicking through from the article.

So.. that turned me off in an instant.

</comment><comment><USER77> I wish there was an easy solution that would allow me to plug an S3 or a virtual drive or whatever and mount it as a partition in my cheap 20gb VPS.

The price for additional "drive", like 5 bucks per month for 50gb or sthg, is insane. Especially when comparing with Dropbox or Onedrive pricing (or even physical drives sold over the counter).

</comment><comment><USER78> Where are these datacenters? I live in Ohio in the area of two of the points on the home page at [https://sia.tech/](https://sia.tech/) One appears to be a private residence or a farm. The other dot is literally on a golf course fairway, is a private residence, or a power substation.

</comment><comment><USER79> I have no clue how google stores my 35TB for $12 a month. They do at a loss and I guess they don't really care.

<comment><USER49> Where are you getting that price? Google Drive is 300$+ for that and GCP archive storage is 140$.

Edit: apparently that's the unlimited storage in GSuite for 12$/month/user as long as you have 5 users or more.

<comment><USER79> they say you need 5 people but its just me and i pay $12

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> I expected this title to be about [https://www.scaleway.com/en/c14-cold- storage/](https://www.scaleway.com/en/c14-cold-storage/) which already offers exactly that, Cloud storage for $2 per TB per month.

<comment><USER81> Sia isn't cold storage.

<comment><USER80> I think it's a lot more comparable to cold storage than to anything else. I assume you cannot serve directly from Sia? How long does recovery take?

(Does anyone know how long Scaleway takes in practice? They claim minutes but I haven't used them yet.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> zupa-hu Does any consumer grade motherboard have IPMI* support? When I tried to optimize my server costs one issue I ran into was that colocation providers require IPMI capability, which seems only available in server-grade motherboards.

* IPMI is for remote hardware management

<comment> zupa-hu To elaborate, while I like such optimization efforts, for this to work you'd need to run your own datacenter because the _ones I have found_ that offer cheap bandwidth require IPMI (to lower their labor costs).

Or you need to know some providers I don't know, in which case, tell me. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> I just saw IBM claiming to do 10TB at zero cost on twitter, how are you guys gonna beat that?

</comment><comment><USER83> > It also turns out that 32 HDDs only consume 200w, so the 750w PSU we picked > is more than sufficient.

Yep. Stopped reading right there. HDDs use ~15 watts when they boot up. I experienced this and I never allocate less than 20 watts / hard disk.

<comment><USER20> Staggered spin-up is a thing. That motherboard doesn't have it most likely, but they also can't plug 32 HDDs into it either. They'd need an HBA card of some kind, which is more likely to have staggered spin-up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> > over the long term, storage will be cheaper than $2 / TB / Mo

OK, but what is it today?

<comment><USER3> [https://siastats.info/storage_pricing](https://siastats.info/storage_pricing)

It's less than $2 / TB / Mo today, but relies on a completely different set of economics that don't scale beyond a few hundred PB. This article was aimed at people who understand why Sia is so cheap today, but do not believe that Sia will continue to be cheap as the network scales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> In addition to what other people mentioned, there is also a huge cost in managing all the metadata that you'd get from billions of files. This really even worse if you're using a crazy 64-32 encoding.

<comment><USER67> Yes, but with croit.io you can manage Ceph clusters with ease, reducing Laber costs and increase reliability.

We build clusters of low PB scale that have a TCO with everything from labor to hardware, from financing to electric, from routers to cables and can be run below 3€/TB. For that you can store data in Block(rbd, iscsi), Objekt(S3, swift) or Filestorage(CephFS, NFS, SMB), high available on Supermicro hardware in any datacenter worldwide.

Feel free to contact us or use our free community edition to start your own cluster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> This makes me want to buy storage just because I know exactly how it's spent.

</comment><comment><USER87> I was sexcotes to cancel all my storage subscriptions, but for some reason this article didn't convince me that that was an option yet.

</comment><comment><USER88> I wonder what it would take to build a frontend for this that uses other people's exposed S3 buckets for storage.

</comment><comment><USER89> So, $48 USD/year for 2TB? That's a little less than idrive, as they charge ~70/year for 2TB.

</comment><comment><USER90> one thing that bothers me about this system beyond the hand waving math is what would motivate me to give up control of my data being available? If I have no SLA and no ability to convince a bunch of down hosts to come back online with my data, why store it that way at all?

</comment><comment><USER91> I wouldn't even buy new hardware. I would buy retired hardware for a fraction of the price.

<comment><USER92> I would imagine that managing such a pool of dated and highly heterogeneous hardware would incur a lot of overhead. The procurement effort may end up being rather high as well.

<comment><USER93> yet a number of FAANGs have datacenters full of mismatched lease returns. So it much make sense at some scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> Looks super interesting. Can anyone who has used it share their experience?

</comment><comment><USER95> Durability? Availability?

<comment><USER96> Availability is the big one. Getting high availability makes systems incredibly more complex and expensive.

It's the same reason increasing redundancy and uptime to the next factor of nines is almost logarithmatically more expensive.

<comment><USER97> Increasing redundancy and uptime to the next factor of nines is exponentially* more expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> This sounds interesting, thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER36> Great writeup from David as always. Can't wait to see more!

If anyone hasn't seen the work being done on the skynet platform, I highly recommend taking a look. Amazing stuff.</comment>


Why a bunch of Silicon Valley investors are suddenly interested in basic income - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/1/28/10860830/y-combinator-basic-income <comment><USER2> Money comes from taxpayers. What if a majority of taxpayers decide they'd rather not work?

<comment><USER3> > Money comes from taxpayers.

Money comes from the government that issues it, actually. _Government operating funds_ come from a variety of sources, but largely, it is true, tax payments.

> What if a majority of taxpayers decide they'd rather not work?

If you mean "decide not to take actions that create taxable income" (UBI -- and government in general as increasing automation eats traditional employment -- only works with ending preferential tax treatment of capital income, so that "work" and "create taxable income" become even less the same than they are currently), then either:

(1) If UBI is variable in quantity based on distributing proceeds of a dedicated tax stream among the qualified recipients (i.e., the citizenry at large), then the UBI amount drops, and that decision because less attractive, leading to more of those able to earn taxable income in addition to the UBI choosing to do so; this is a self-limiting negative feedback loop.

(2) If UBI is _not_ variable, and is fixed in nominal value, the reduction in _production_ relative to the supply of money in consumer hands caused by that decision leads to increased inflation, reducing the _real value_ of UBI, leading to the same results as in #1. Again, a self-limiting negative feedback loop.

(3) If UBI is inflation-indexed, then you have a positive feedback loop that blows up the system. So, don't do that.

<comment><USER4> This is a tragedy of the commons problem. If there are 100 individuals, then if one individual stops working, average UBI payout would only decrease 1%. So, a rational actor would stop working.

Similarly, if 95 out of 100 stop working, then the other 5 have little incentive to work, because their income is basically funding everyone else.

This is the opposite of a negative feedback loop.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure which of the two cases you're addressing; I'll respond with one comment assuming each.

If you are talking about case 2 (fixed UBI, fixed tax rate, making up the difference - when there is one - by printing money or borrowing), then when one individual stops working the UBI payment does not decrease. If productivity falls when that worker stops working (presumably the case for most workers), then we would expect to eventually see some inflation. It may work out to 1%, with the proper assumptions; I'm not certain.

Still I don't see why it follows that _" a rational actor would stop working"_ \- some may, but only if they decide the small decrease in UBI _and large decrease in earned income_ is worth it.

At sufficiently high UBI level relative to earned income, that's pretty likely to be the case. At sufficiently low UBI level ($1?) that's pretty unlikely to be the case.

> Similarly, if 95 out of 100 stop working, then the other 5 have little > incentive to work, because their income is basically funding everyone else.

The same chunk of their income as ever is going directly to fund everyone else. A bigger portion of their income is being diluted by the money printed to make up the rest of the UBI. But as the currency devalues, presuming they are doing things people want, they are able to demand more money for their production. The UBI is diluted toward meaningless. At some point, other workers decide to get back in the game, because the (nominally constant but really much lower) UBI will not fund the lifestyle they want, slowing the inflating.

This is a negative feedback loop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Now I have some context so it makes a little more sense. Is society as a whole fund-able?

<comment><USER2> I can't see how. The government has no money if its own. It depends on taxes. Currently about 47% of working citizens pay no federal income tax at all. I like the idea of basic income, but I cannot fathom where the money comes from.

<comment><USER7> I think it will work fine for about two generations. People who've developed a career will probably still work, since much of the hard work is done. And there's a cultural push toward work.

But culture follows the facts on the ground. Over time the concept of a work ethic will erode away. I suspect once it becomes acceptable to not work a whole lot of people will be perfectly happy smoking pot and playing video games. It won't take _that_ many to break the system.

<comment><USER3> > I suspect once it becomes acceptable to not work a whole lot of people will > be perfectly happy smoking pot and playing video games. It won't take that > many to break the system.

If the system is constructed so that increasing defections from taxable- income-generating activity (which isn't just work -- capital income, after all, is taxed as well) decrease the real value of UBI (and, thus, the attractiveness of forgoing such activity in favor of other pursuits), then this tendency will be controlled and constrained within the ability of the productivity of the active economy to support.

As discussed in other subthreads of this thread, this kind of negative feedback is actually quite easy to build into a UBI system.

<comment><USER7> >As discussed in other subthreads of this thread, this kind of negative feedback is actually quite easy to build into a UBI system.

So you might end up with a situation where people who've never held a job and have no marketable skills find, in their late twenties or thirties, that UBI is no longer enough to make ends meet.

That sounds like a recipe for revolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Vox does an excellent job on their explainers.</comment>


Watch HN : The last lecture by dying CMU professor  [video] - <AUTHOR> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5700431505846055184#

<comment><USER2> It's good, but it's submitted time and time and time again:

<http://searchyc.com/submissions/pausch?sort=by_date></comment>


Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century - <AUTHOR> http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html <comment><USER2> I wonder if dynamically-typed languages are stable entrants in the IT ecosystem?

Charles Nutter (headius at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3372816>) recently wrote about _JRuby_: "I find it a bit of a dodge when a dynamic language has to go to static types for performance. That's not to say I haven't wanted to have that dodge available to JRuby users, but being unable (or unwilling) to unilaterally add optional static types to Ruby, we've been forced to find more creative options."

And Groovy is introducing static compilation ([http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GroovyJSR/GEP+10+-+Static+c...](http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GroovyJSR/GEP+10+-+Static+compilation)), having this year added special treatment for primitive types, perhaps encouraged by the Grails team to make Groovy faster.

Is there an overall tendency that once a software product/language has been successfully marketed, the next step is to make what's there faster, even if that means refocusing on static compilation instead of dynamic?</comment>


Show HN: (crocs) Python2Regex and Yacc-like. Parsing with no steroids in Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/iogf/crocs <comment><USER2> What do those 40 empty lines in setup.py do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Free hugs.</comment></comment>


CarsForaGrand.com: Simple idea that's generating big bucks - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1734-carsforagrandcom-simple-idea-thats-generating-big-bucks <comment><USER2> I think there is a lot of false hope in what the 37signals guys are telling their audience. Just because someone out there does very little to make a lot of money doesn't mean that's how the average jane or joe has to do it. Anecdotes to prove your case are easy to find, but the exceptions aren't the rule.

You _can_ go buy a lottery ticket and win too. The question is, how many people just like this guy and the plentyoffish guy, etc exist compared to those who attempt to find success on the internet?

I'm not saying don't try hard and don't take risks. I'd be a hypocrite if I did, but don't forget to be realistic about how really hard it is to build a company and make money. The traditional rules of business apply to the internet as well. Lots of people got lucky striking oil in the old days, but there were way more prospectors than there were Rockefellers.

<comment><USER3> Winston Churchill said it best: "All great things are decided not by machines or gadgets, but by willpower. Whoever has it, will finally prevail"

<comment><USER4> Winston Churchill said "gadgets"? Really? In what speech or book did he do so?

The old boy in his writings showed quite a healthy respect for the machinery of war (eg see atomic bomb). I don't see him saying such a thing in earnest.

<comment><USER3> Yeah that was one of those quotes that someone else had sent to me and I remembered it when I read the OP. I did a search but couldn't come up with any sources.

But the other part of the quote is this: "Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It's the tenacity and courage to continue that counts." And that seems to come up quite a bit as being attributed to Churchill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like this comment:

       Couldn't $9,999.99 be considered high six figures in the most literal sense?

</comment><comment><USER6> Illustrates that some people don't understand the concept of filtering search results. Here's the same thing from eBay: [http://motors.shop.ebay.com/items/Cars- Trucks_?_dmpt=US_Cars...](http://motors.shop.ebay.com/items/Cars- Trucks_?_dmpt=US_Cars_Trucks&_fln=1&_sacat=6001&_ssov=1&_trksid=p4506.c0.m282&_mPrRngCbx=1&_udlo=&_udhi=1%2C000)

<comment><USER7> People not understanding things is the reason for 99% of all business. You wouldn't call a plumber if you knew how to fix that leak yourself.

<comment><USER8> having the cash. lack of time. not wanting to pull apart a toilet. I can think of a few good reasons to call a plumber even if I kknew how to do it. (I can cook, but that doesn't stop me eating out - or even getting take-away sometimes)

<comment><USER7> Yes, but plumbers don't make their living from people who are too busy, they make their living from people who are ignorant. (In other words, lack of knowledge is far and away a bigger customer).

I didn't say though that it was the only way, just that it was the main reason most businesses exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very Neat. I like the concept of making money through ebay sales leads rather than cramming your site with full of ads.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not a bad return if $100K is real(could still be a PR stunt to get more coverage). Probably not a recurring thing though, since I don't see anyone coming back to a site that only has eBay listings

</comment><comment><USER10> 37s use specific examples to get across a general point: quickly implement a decent idea and let the market tell you if it's good or not. You don't need millions of dollars or years of effort, you just need a good idea executed quickly and well.

<comment><USER11> and free publicity from 37 signals blog, isn't too bad for your business either

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> how does this make money?

<comment><USER5> eBay affiliate id, someone goes to the site clicks open a car ad, sees its an eBay listing, and closes it. But the cookie remains, so when they come back to eBay a few days later to buy a TV the guy gets the affiliate credit

<comment><USER13> You get paid between 50 and 75% of your referees winning bid revenue, see: [https://ebaypartnernetwork.com/files/hub/en- US/gettingPaid.h...](https://ebaypartnernetwork.com/files/hub/en- US/gettingPaid.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Feh. Only has half the revenue of carsfortwogrand.com.</comment>


The Core War Game Implemented in C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/emilwallner/Core-War <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, we just finished the core war game in C. Here is some more background to the history of the game: [https://blog.codinghorror.com/core-war-two-programs- enter-on...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/core-war-two-programs-enter-one- program-leaves/) Let us know what you think and if you have any feedback. Thanks!</comment>


Nock – HTTP mocking and expectations library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pgte/nock <comment><USER2> I'd like to lodge a modest complaint about the name. [http://doc.urbit.org/doc/nock/tut/1/](http://doc.urbit.org/doc/nock/tut/1/)

<comment><USER3> I'm sure there's lots of namespace room! And if there isn't, then too bad for Urbit.

<comment><USER4> Or too bad for pgte

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used this for a few projects a while back and loved it, and looking through the README in Master it seems like a _lot_ has been improved:

\- Delayed responses. \- Delayed connections. \- Custom HTTP verbs for ones that don't have convenience methods. \- Nock Back

I believe recording had just been introduced when I was using the library, but Nock Back is seems like the last piece that brings it on par with the VCR lib I was used to using with Ruby / RSpec projects.

It's always nice to scroll through a project you've had a good experience with and see the README has been considerably fleshed out (in a good way).

</comment><comment><USER6> A lot of my current projects have Test Induced Design Damage from having HTTP functionality ripped away from any other processing. This would make my methods shorter and my tests cover more as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've used this library a bunch with decent success. Most recently on an API client for my current product: [https://github.com/yeller/yeller_node](https://github.com/yeller/yeller_node) (see [https://github.com/yeller/yeller_node/blob/master/spec/integ...](https://github.com/yeller/yeller_node/blob/master/spec/integration/yeller_node_spec.js) for the tests in question). Very happy with it so far!

</comment><comment><USER8> If you are looking for a browser solution (ajax mocking): [https://github.com/algolia/faux-jax](https://github.com/algolia/faux-jax)

</comment><comment><USER9> I have used this in the past with success. It does its job.

</comment><comment><USER10> nock is great and we use it for testing with great success.

Also a shout out for hock which gives the same API as mock but useful for mocking external services - [https://github.com/mmalecki/hock](https://github.com/mmalecki/hock).

</comment><comment><USER11> nock is good.. used it a few times..</comment>


Solving your startup's cold start problem... or not. - <AUTHOR> http://youruisucks.tumblr.com/post/9477202153/how-to-solve-the-cold-start-problem-and-how-not-to

<comment><USER2> Ouch.. was writing a looonng post here when my computer crashed... Rrrr murphy's law...

So well, haha, was writing I was not impressed by the article but the topic interest me a lot. And I was trying to figure out how facebook did? because imagine you come on facebook and there is nobody you know... It should have happened a lot at the beginning... Did the idea itself of facebook kept the people in it? Some kind of: "this site could be great" Really?

I also imagined that all first facebook's users were its own sales force. After a party: "Hey do you have a facebook account?" On a piece of paper: "Here is my facebook number cute boy"

EDIT: and also since facebook is very group-oriented, a member of a "group" (family, sport team...) would invite its mates to go on facebook.

Do you have any other suggestion to solve what is called here "the cold start problem"?</comment>