The Looming Bank Collapse - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/coronavirus-banks-collapse/612247/ <comment><USER2> It doesn't matter if the banks crash again if the Fed will just bail everybody out again and push stock market inflation even higher than it is now. It's clearly unsustainable, but the question is, how and why will the bubble burst?

The author posits one option, of political intervention precluding another bailout. But the Federal Reserve is non-political precisely to shield it from attempted short-term political machinations. Congress will complain to the cameras and the Fed will go right back to "rescuing" the market.

No, the bottom will only well and truly drop out when there's significant capital flight - when the dearth of real investment opportunities relative to currency glut becomes so acute that capital leaves American borders in search of real return. But to where? And under which circumstances?

<comment><USER3> Think you nailed it. The thing is, in order for capital flight to be a risk there needs to be somewhere else of comparable size and upside opportunity to the US that doesn't rhyme with "China" and it sure as hell isn't Europe. So we're back to square one in which absolutely massive sums of money are chasing returns with nowhere else to put money than the same places it already is. It's madness on a global scale.

<comment><USER4> This is the insanity of zero interest rate policy. It's so hard for me to understand why the economists and fed officials don't see this.

<comment><USER5> It's not that we don't see it, but we don't agree. I honestly don't have the energy to try to explain it here anymore -- the conversation always turns unpleasant, and I need a place on the Internet where I can avoid thinking about economics for a while.

<comment><USER6> >> the conversation always turns unpleasant

Rationalizing the irrational tends to be unpleasant.

I think it's a complete fabrication that people are dependent on the financial system and that we need economic stability. People enjoy drama and they are able to recover from any economic failure. Even total failure.

Too big to fail is total BS. If a solar storm wiped out all records of bank accounts and all records of all financial holdings, the economy would quickly recover. The number of new opportunities that this would create would be unprecedented.

From the perspective of most people, the best feature of capitalism is not its ability to provide sustenance (even communism can do that), it's its ability to provide hope for something better... Unfortunately these days our modern version is not true capitalism, it's crony-capitalism and it doesn't yield much hope - You are given a place in society and the only way you can get something better is by doing something deeply unethical and then earning hush money from your corporate masters.

We are heading towards a dystopian surveillance capitalist future. Even if the economy crashes permanently and never recovers, that future doesn't look so bad compared to what would happen if we stay on course with current monetary policies.

<comment><USER5> Oh look, the conversation has turned unpleasant again. How unpredictable.

<comment><USER6> Well I find it pleasant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We never "righted" the system after 2008 (or 2001). We just kicked the can down the road, making the problem worse for ourselves when we eventually do finally lose control. Our system is 100% entirely dependent upon ARTIFICIALLY low interest rates driven by Central Banks. It's the only still keeping this zombie of an economy moving, and it's the entire world, not just the United States.

Central banks are doing everything in their power to keep interest rates low because if they were to tick up even a little bit, the whole house of cards will come toppling down. They can't do it forever and we're all just playing chicken with hyperinflation.

<comment><USER8> > _Our system is 100% entirely dependent upon ARTIFICIALLY low interest rates_

There is no such thing as "artificial" or "natural" rates of interest.

> _Central banks are doing everything in their power to keep interest rates > low because if they were to tick up even a little bit, the whole house of > cards will come toppling down._

Why would, or should, they "tick up"? Capital is abundant. If rates were higher, things would be different, yes. But that is not the world we live in.

> _It 's the only still keeping this zombie of an economy moving, and it's the > entire world_

I love the idea that the _entire_ global economy is fake, artificial and zombie-like, because it doesn't operate the way you think it should. A reasonable person would take a step back and question their premises and understanding.

<comment><USER9> >I love the idea that the entire global economy is fake, artificial and zombie-like, because it doesn't operate the way you think it should. A reasonable person would take a step back and question their premises and understanding.

The new part is the _expectation_ that governments will prop up companies during bad economies.

This is bewildering to anyone with a naive view that believes America is a purely capitalistic economy. Surely if a company prepares enough for the storms, it's worthy of surviving them. Running thin savings is now more risky, but it means more profit. That's fair.

From another perspective, it's economic innovation where unpredictable disasters don't kill huge companies or industries. This can be a good thing, but it's not really capitalism any more.

So the person taking a step back will ask, "How far will the government go to protect large companies? How large do you have to be to get this protection? How does all of this work?" This is what we can't answer.

This is where people (rationally) start to believe things are fake, because the country's leadership gets to decide what happens to companies during these times.

Now this company knows the government is likely to bail them out, what reason do they have to plan for the worst any more? This gets even more uncomfortable when they get bailouts for causing the disaster themselves.

<comment><USER10> The only companies the government is propping up are the airlines and small businesses by mainly paying for their payroll to keep people employed through the CARES act [0]. In what way is the government protecting large companies?

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

<comment><USER9> Exactly, it's protecting large airlines from going under. This means there's less risk here than if the government had not intervened. Any future pandemic will likely result in a similar response, therefore, airline stocks have reduced risk of becoming worthless.

At a basic level, if you removed all demand for airlines, you'd say "well, airlines don't look like a great investment". But now the demand matters less during disasters because demand isn't actually keeping the company alive as in most businesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've long read about the following still being a problem (post-2009):

\- CDOs (although a new generation of them have a new name/initialism)

\- Frank/Dodd was partially rolled back

\- The definition of bank size-classes was changed to reduce the regulatory burden over most regional banks that were previously more regulated

\- No significant adverse event happened after Standard & Poors was identified as having significantly inaccurate ratings on CDO / mortgage bond

\- moral hazard all over the financial sector, multiplied by large QE rounds

\- shadow inventory of housing (not sure if this was sold off or if banks still hold lots of houses off the market)

\- lots of private unicorns have opted not to try to go IPO, despite Wall Street records over the past few years

(edit: I converted the indented list to individual paragraphs)

But given these assumptions, are the US financial markets really that healthy? It still feels like we have a few asset bubbles, especially in the assets which QE propped up.

<comment><USER12> As a head's up a huge fraction of HN's readers read on mobile where code formatting like you used here makes posts unreadable.

<comment><USER11> Yes, I've heard, but there isn't a suitable replacement format that I've seen for a bulleted list.

The formatting doc[1] is very short and doesn't include a list.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc](https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > The federal government stepped in to rescue the other big banks and > forestall a panic. The intervention worked—though its success did not seem > assured at the time—and the system righted itself. Of course, many Americans > suffered as a result of the crash, losing homes, jobs, and wealth. An > already troubling gap between America's haves and have-nots grew wider > still. Yet by March 2009, the economy was on the upswing, and the longest > bull market in history had begun.

This paragraph is conceding a point that should not be conceded. The system _did not_ right itself if many Americans lost homes, jobs, and wealth. 12 years later, not everyone has recovered from the 2008 collapse.

<comment><USER14> What criteria should someone use to judge 'righted itself'? No event can ever be completely undone, merely compensated for. Many of the people who lost homes should never have bought them leading up to '08 - they only were able to because of unrealistic (and sometimes predatory) underwriting standards and financing that NEVER would have worked out, and blew up shortly thereafter once the people bankrolling it figured out what was going on.

The overall economy recovered, but of course it looked a bit different. It was 4-5 years later.

<comment><USER15> Mortgages should have been heavily renegotiated, bailout given to the home owners to pay back the mortgage in a bottom-up bailout. Let's throw in existing homeowners as well, who had made proper payments in the mix, so they get some benefit from the situation.

Instead lots of money handed over to banks to fix their books and toxic assets handed over to the .gov. Lots of people losing their homes and jobs, no one in the financial sector really seeing any jail time or penalty for their malfeasance. Much of the financial sector actually made off quite well during/after the crisis.

We're seeing it again with big businesses getting COVID bailouts, meanwhile politicians are wringing their hands that unemployment insurance benefits are "too high" and "main street" needs to get back to work. Make sure "main street" is held accountable and/or penalized, but it seems there are a lot of golden parachutes and soft landings for big business and the finance industries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Meh, the article doesn't mention recovery rates. If a loan defaults it's not usual you are getting 0 back. Typically 30-40% is the assumed rate. That means if all the loans default then the top 30% of tranches shouldn't take a loss.

So now consider, most of the underlying loans have to default and the recovery rate has to be below battle tested assumptions before the top tiers get risky. This is very very unlikely to happen given the Fed and the US Govt. have done so much and are committed to do more to stave off a severe depression / recession. It's more like people were killing it buying the safer parts at distressed prices as over leveraged funds shed them on the back of margin calls in March.

<comment><USER17> It says this:

> We already know that a significant majority of the loans in CLOs have weak > covenants that offer investors only minimal legal protection; in industry > parlance, they are "cov lite." The holders of leveraged loans will thus be > fortunate to get pennies on the dollar as companies default—nothing close to > the 70 cents that has been standard in the past.

<comment><USER18> Also, a lot of people make 10x levered bets on AAA instruments, which means even a 10% loss can wipe you out.

The trick is "repo", or repurchase agreements.

(1) Buy bonds

(2) Use those bonds as collateral for a low-interest loan

(3) Use the loan money to buy bonds

(4) goto 2

See, e.g [1]

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-15/how- repo-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-15/how-repo- agreements-juiced-securitized-debt-leverage-quicktake)

<comment><USER16> The "haircut" on risky assets stops you leveraging it too much. I think it's about 5% for US treasury bonds. So for every 100 I want to finance I need to have 5 cash on hand. Itsuch higher for riskier assets and that keeps leverage down. Also when things start to get edgy banks demand a bigger haircut further reducing the available leverage forcing you to delever (e.g. March)

<comment><USER18> If you step through the arithmetic, you see that a 5% haircut can take you to 20x leverage. It's a geometric series.

That means that investors' internal risk limits are the binding constraint, not repo haircuts.

It's another way of saying that the financial sector sets its own leverage. Historically, that has not turned out well. It's why Dodd-Frank included a leverage rule for large banks.

<comment><USER19> > That means that investors' internal risk limits are the binding constraint, > not repo haircuts.

While part of risk, expected return is a larger binding constraint in most cases over risk limits. I'm probably not going to lever up 20x for an tiny expected return. On the other hand, I may very well lever up 5-10x on something 50x more risky than treasuries if the 10yr is yielding 0.725%.

<comment><USER18> In practice most PM's have a VaR limit and a battery of dollar exposure limits, which are all set by the risk department.

There is some credible research which suggests that large financial institutions act as if they are optimizing mean return subject to a VaR constraint [1].

[1] [https://www.nber.org/papers/w18943](https://www.nber.org/papers/w18943)

<comment><USER19> VaR is a fake number for way too many reasons to get into and anyone who paid attention to VaR these past few months would have lost a ridiculous amount of money. I only have experience working for hedge funds and how risk is managed greatly differs from fund/strategy/assets traded. Banks no doubt manage to VaR but banks also supposedly don't have prop trading desks anymore so they function much differently now.

<comment><USER18> The discussion seems to have shifted to argument for argument's sake.

But for the sake of argument: large bank VaR models affect hedge funds because hedge funds get their leverage through their prime brokers which are... large investment banks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> From an outsider living a long way from USA, for many years now I haven't understood how the financial instruments of USA work. It constantly looks like the country is merely printing more money to stay afloat.

<comment><USER21> US native here.

If I printed some $100USD bills, took them to the bank and tried to deposit them, they would have no value. The consensus is that you aren't allowed to print money.

The United States Government prints money all the time. This money has value because there is a world-wide consensus that it has value.

The simple fact is that there is and has been (for many decades) no safer place to park vast sums of money than with the United States Government.

There are limits, though it's not clear what they are. If the US Government printed 330 billion trillion dollars, and gave a trillion to each US citizen, then the consensus would be instantly broken.

The US Government printing 'a trillion here, a trillion there', at this moment in history, is not materially damaging the global consensus. This confidence is relatively easy to measure: when the US creates more debt, are there buyers? The answer is and has been for many decades 'absolutely yes'.

I'm not trivializing this borrowing, and I'm not vilifying it. It is a unique tool that should be used wisely.

<comment><USER22> > The United States Government prints money all the time. This money has value > because there is a world-wide consensus that it has value.

No the Government borrows against future taxes (consider that an accounts receivable), the borrowed money doesn't have value because of consensus it has value because it is backed by future tax revenue.

If the government did as you say and borrowed a trillion per taxpayer the system would breakdown but not because of some "consensus" but because the account receivable (future taxes) is insufficient to payback the borrowed money.

<comment><USER23> It is rather astonishing that rational people continue to believe that there is enough future tax revenue to justify this. It's entering dotcom-boom territory, where even the most optimistic future profitability can't justify this level of backing.

Part of it, I imagine, is that the US government is likely to benefit from future tech booms, as it has in the past (despite tax shenanigans from the tech companies themselves). It gets a piece of stock market profits -- a stock market whose own levels are also currently out of keeping with rational revenue expectation.

<comment><USER24> So what would a rational person do? Stockpile guns and food? Invest in gold?

<comment><USER25> Brace for impact. If and when the shit hits the fan, there will be no strategy _at all_ to keep the same economic levels. Everybody will suffer.

<comment><USER26> The assholes keep telling us this. If they believed it, one suspects they'd change their behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Idiotic article. First a CLO is essentially a portfolio of loans. You can call that gambling, and in a way, every financial risk is gambling, but it is the very job of a bank to take credit risk, and to lend.

Then, I don't know about Wells specifically, but it is possible that these CLOs may not even be external transactions, that the bank securitised its own loans so that it stands ready to post them to the central bank as collateral to get short term funding in exchange, if a liquidity crisis hits. If it is the case, it is actually a good thing.

The banking system is increadibly strong vs 2008, the amount of capital banks hold is a multiple of what they held in 2008, while having reduced the size of their balance sheets at the same time (ex Chinese banks). They hold huge amounts of liquid assets and have limits on how much short term funding they can rely on. In addition the introduction of bailin should protect tax payers in the case of a bank failure.

I would be much more worried about the financial impact of money printing. The amount of QE that the Fed has introduced is unprecedented, both in size and velocity, and they keep printing. And we are only at the begining of this downturn. This will massively distord the markets. And I don't believe it will not create inflation ultimately, which is a much bigger threat to savers than their bank credit risk.

<comment><USER19> Agree with a majority of this. US bank balance sheets are in a whole different universe than they were during the last crisis. CLOs are not only a minuscule portion of their holdings but they also hold a tiny percentage of outstanding CLOs.

Japanese co-op banks on the other hand have huge CLOs holdings and would be extremely exposed if these went sour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > I have a checking account and a home mortgage with Wells Fargo; I decided to > see how heavily invested my bank is in CLOs. I had to dig deep into the > footnotes of the bank's most recent annual report, all the way to page > 144... The total is $29.7 billion. It is a massive number. And it is inside > the bank.

To put $29.7B that into context -- Table 4 of the most recent 10K says that Wells has ~1.7 trillion dollars of earning assets. Tables 1 & 2 indicate they hold around 180B of shareholder capital buffer.

<comment><USER11> Your appraisal seems fair... of the data you are working with.

But how many other financial instruments they own are tied up in CLOs on the books of other banks?

The whole point of The Big Short and Margin Call was that the banks aren't resilient, independent silos. When one bank shakes or falls, it can impact the neighboring bank which causes a domino effect. They all invest in slices of the things that the other banks invest in, they all do it with lots of leverage, and they all think they've hedged against the downside risk, but that still didn't prevent the 2008 collapse.

<comment><USER29> that's literally herding behavior, which is the loss of independence among market participants, so that risks start to align, rather than cancel each other out.

it's disgusting that we haven't learned anything from 2008.

<comment><USER11> To be fair, I think every financial instrument works this way (the transitive property of assets which own assets) all the time.

Having regulations which restrict which companies are allowed to trade specific classes of instruments/services (eg. Glass Steagall) helps mitigate this, but doesn't even approach eliminating it.

<comment><USER29> it does work that way far too often, and that's exactly the problem. financiers are no smarter than other kinds of market participants, and that's what this shows.

markets _require_ relative participant independence for pricing and allocation to function properly, otherwise we get bubbles. and now, we get constant bailouts (of capital, not labor), so on top of that, there's no downside risk to provide any counterbalance. it's corrupt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Having just read both Liar's Poker and Barbarians at the Gates, the concept of CLOs sounds awfully familiar.

Loaning money to high-risk companies? Bundling a whole bunch of said loans into securities? High returns despite the risk of a significant fraction of defaults? Sounds like the world has been here before.

If this was a B-flick, it might well be called the return (or revenge) of the junk bond monster.

<comment><USER31> This sounds entirely the same and this time the industry probably thought they were so clever because companies are likely still less risky than individual consumers and then oops Corona!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So what? There is only one game out there and its called printing money.

We have bad loans on the books? Oops, nothing we can do here and can't have so many foreclosed lower valued assets. Print.

If anyone looked at billionaire net worths, they would know that hyperinflation is rampant. The only reason it doesn't show up in the cost of Milk is because the peasants (we the people) fight for scraps and are willing to take smaller slice of the pie.

In other words, the Bernanke trick of inflating assets in 2008 did its job. It inflated assets and the size of the pie increased. But 90% of the participants still have a lower share of the pie.

</comment><comment><USER33> How come no one is talking about the fact that a couple months ago our banks went from fractional reserve to zero reserve? If that doesn't scream disaster is expected I don't know what does. Literally anyone can form a banking org, get fdic insurance and print. money. out. of. thin. air.

If you aren't doing it yourself already, maybe you should. I'm gonna try and maybe make a medium.com post about it.

</comment><comment><USER34> > I ran my finger across the page to see the total for these investments, > investments that Powell and Mnuchin have asserted are "outside the banking > system."

> The total is $29.7 billion. It is a massive number. And it is inside the > bank.

What percentage of Wells Fargo's assets is that? It looks they they've 1.9 trillion in assets, so even they were worth nothing, would it have a material impact?

<comment><USER35> > The banks themselves may reveal that their CLO investments are larger than > was previously understood. In fact, we're already seeing this happen. On May > 5, Wells Fargo disclosed $7.7 billion worth of CLOs in a different corner of > its balance sheet than the $29.7 billion I'd found in its annual report.

There might be more?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If the banks aren't paying interest on deposits anymore, does it now make sense to withdraw some of the money and store it under a mattress somewhere?

Obviously there are theft, fire, and police confiscation risks that need to be overcome first.

</comment><comment><USER37> America can afford to prop it up for as long as the dollar is in demand for international trade, and she will use her naval superiority to make sure of that

<comment><USER26> OK now I'm worried. Our navy seems unequal to the task of not running into other ships by mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > "I have a checking account and a home mortgage with Wells Fargo"

Casting literally every inch of his financial judgment into doubt.

Or maybe we've just been pranked

</comment><comment><USER39> _" There are more than $1 trillion worth of leveraged loans currently outstanding. The majority are held in CLOs."_

To get some perspective, the FED recently added almost three trillion dollars of "not QE" to the balance sheet, mostly because of COVID-19.

They'll be bailed out.

 _" But this time, the bailout proposal will likely face stiffer opposition, from both parties"_

Doubtful. Everything can be blamed on the virus this time.

<comment><USER10> What part of the FEDs balance sheet [0] are you concerned about getting bailed out because it is pretty much entirely composed of the US government's own debt through US treasury securities and citizens homes through mortgage backed securities?

[0]: [https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/current/h41.htm](https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/current/h41.htm)

<comment><USER39> I'm saying the banks holding CLOs will get bailed out much in the same way as those holding mortgage-backed securities. I'd be concerned if this _didn 't_ happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It doesn't matter if CLOs collapse. The capital requirements that banks operate under will ensure that they will withstand it.

<comment><USER41> That's sarcasm right? The capital requirement has recently been dropped to zero.

Edit for source: [https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm](https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm)

<comment><USER19> Reserve requirements != capital requirements. Reserve requirements are vs deposits, capital requirements are vs balance sheet items. Big difference between the two.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The current economic system is fundamentally flawed. Unless someone has the courage to ban interest/usury, things will stay the way they are. We have known this for thousands of years now, but unfortunately greed and exploitation persists.

</comment><comment><USER43> Buried lede warning.

> _But there's another threat to the economy, too. It lurks on the balance > sheets of the big banks, and it could be cataclysmic._

(10 paragraphs later)

> _I ran my finger across the page to see the total for these investments, > investments that Powell and Mnuchin have asserted are "outside the banking > system."

The total is $29.7 billion. It is a massive number. And it is inside the bank._</comment>


Oops: Facebook caught planting anti-Google stories to press - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/12/facebook-anti-google-smear/ <comment><USER2> First mistake : attacking Google, also known as the overlord of the internet (as far as the internet has one) Second mistake : attacking a feature that was largely unknown. I just learned of its existence, thanks to this story ! Third mistake : getting caught Fourth mistake : When you're Facebook, you should never ever complain that anything is a violation of privacy. It's like a fast- food company claiming something is low quality food and an insult to taste.

<comment><USER3> Just as an aside, Carl's Jr. was involved in a campaign against McDonald's Chicken McNuggets ("Exactly what part of the chicken is the nugget? Eat Carl's Jr. all-white chicken breast"), which, I think, worked fairly well for them.

The point is, Facebook _should_ complain about privacy in PR, because it implies that they care about it (whether or not they actually do care). Anyway, I think your points are pretty solid otherwise.

<comment><USER4> Many times it is good picking up enemies, it's good PR, but the fight has to be in the open, not slimy, otherwise it can turn into a PR disaster.

Whatever negative PR they cold pull for Google, it's much less than the heat they'll be getting for this ... and when you're taking risks, IMHO, you need to make damn sure those risks are worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While the naive me wants to act shocked, the other part of me gets the feeling this is business as usual and mostly just a big deal because it leaked out. I wouldn't be surprised if Google had its own anti-FB plants doing their thing.

May be someone from the PR world can tell us how common/uncommon this type of "operation" is.

<comment><USER6> I've never been involved in this sort of PR, but basically the big deal isn't that it happens, it's that they got caught.

While it's behind the scenes it's hard to say how much it happens, but it doesn't really matter. I mean, the PR firm were trying to spoon feed a writer with information he could use to write a story, if he decides that information is worth writing, and readers decide it's worth reading, then fair enough.

But it's an important story because Facebook have failed to keep secret the fact that they are trying to attack Google, and that will have implications on politics between those two companies. Even if Google already knew that Facebook were doing this kind of stuff (more than likely), Facebook being outed changes how Google can act towards them with a different public reaction.

<comment><USER4>
        the big deal isn't that it happens,
        it's that they got caught

Big words, no references ... not wanting to do an ad-hominem here, although I could ;) ... at least provide some anecdotal evidence that software companies, in Silicon Valley, as public and as visible as Google are doing it.

Thanks,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Submission of Daily Beast reporting:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2539932>

</comment><comment><USER8> It's a low return high risk move. Low return because Social Circles is not a major player or a significant threat. Large risk because it's very likely you will be outted and it's a very large, public failure.

Why would anyone want to do this?

<comment><USER9> Having even a faint cloud of uncertainty hovering over a competitor (direct or not) is an advantage even if you don't have a specific product to promote in place. Think of this as more of a psychological war to win the hearts/minds of the consumer marketplace.

<comment><USER10> It's deflection

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It really felt good clicking the "Like" button ;-)

</comment><comment><USER9> So this isn't okay but Google hiring pro lobbyists to swoon politicians for favorable laws isn't?

We need to get over this ideal that just because a company is in tech it's somehow "above" the business as usual tactics that have worked for generations.

<comment><USER12> 1.Correct, a smear campaign is not the same as lobbying. Hence the outrage.

2\. How is a smear campaign "business as usual"? Just because Zuckerberg has low ethical standards doesn't mean that you or I have to. As strange as it may seem, it's quite possible to run a successful business without psyops and Zero-sum mentality.

<comment><USER9> I would argue that an element of lobbying is in fact the practice of "smearing" or otherwise clouding the perception of a competitor or opposing viewpoint.

I think your classification of Zuckerberg as having low ethical standards is quite a laughable assumption. Do you know him personally or did you just watch the movie?

<comment><USER13> "They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Facebook: Do some evil.

</comment><comment><USER15> Finally facebook has a counterpart, which is a lot more better since Google is now fully dedicated to innovate Google as a Social Networking Titan, this might have been a disaster for facebook. phone jammer [http://www.espow.com/wholesale-security-surveillance- jammer....](http://www.espow.com/wholesale-security-surveillance-jammer.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> How prevalent is this tactic of spreading FUD about competitors? And does it usually work in with blogs? Is every blog post we read a result of PR lobbying on the media/bloggers?

Inside facebook says it's an industry practice, but i dont trust insidefacebook, they always tend to kiss facebook's ass too hard: [http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/05/12/facebooks-failed- pr...](http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/05/12/facebooks-failed-privacy-pr- campaign-against-google-an-industry-practice-poorly-done/)

</comment><comment><USER17> <http://i.imgur.com/1DhKP.jpg>

<comment><USER6> Earlier today someone questioned a submission and its relevance to HN, saying submissions are becomming more and more like reddit, and "what's next, imgur links?".

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2539824>

In my reply I explained why he was wrong about that submission. And now, coincidentally, this is the first time I've seen an ingur link on HN. If only he hadn't deleted his comments, I'd know who he was and go apologise to him for downplaying his prediction.

<comment><USER17> You're welcome. Also: [http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+%22imgur.com%22)

<comment><USER18> One of the ten links on the first page is to a zero-content image intended for humor, and it's from six days ago. The other nine are content: screenshots to prove things, pictures of work environment, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: ServiceShop – Turnkey open-source application deployments - <AUTHOR> https://serviceshop.io <comment><USER2> Okay, so I can pick from three different sandboxes.

But I have no clue what those sandboxes actually do or why I might want one.

Maybe just throw up a website that only says "Fred" and call the job done?

</comment><comment><USER3> Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG

Firefox 57 / MacOS</comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite, mostly unknown book? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I don't think this is very well known:

[http://www.math.sjsu.edu/~swann/mcsqrd.html](http://www.math.sjsu.edu/~swann/mcsqrd.html)

Apparently, though, recently reprinted by Dover; might start showing up in brick & mortar bookstores near you?

[http://store.doverpublications.com/0486789705.html](http://store.doverpublications.com/0486789705.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Neurotic Styles by David Shapiro</comment>


Developers, you are the last line of defense - <AUTHOR> http://blog.nahurst.com/developers-you-are-the-last-line-of-defense

<comment><USER2> I understand the sentiment trying to be conveyed here, and I do agree that by speaking up a developer can help prevent a bad feature from being released while learning more about their product offering. However in the type of company described, where the 'natural set of responsibilities' places the developers as merely implementers of the vision created by the managment and product teams, the developers are not in a position of power at all and cannot be held responsible if a poor feature makes it to production.

Only in a company where developers ARE the product team and are a part of the decision making process can they trully be considered the last line of defense. In the scenario painted in the OP, the developer has not been empowered to play defense, and if they do so by not coding the feature they risk becoming unemployed.

I don't think you'll find a soul here that wouldn't sympathize with a developer in that position, and I definitely would not want to be placed in that kind of a situation, but it does exist and is quite the norm outside of the startup world.

</comment><comment><USER3> "One of the main reasons all of development isn't outsourced is that it's hard to replace an in-house developer's personal investment in the business, cultural understanding, and market understanding. Additionally, communication is typically orders of magnitude more efficient."

That is exactly why many development jobs should be outsourced. Many developers understand little beyond writing code.

<comment><USER4> Shops that operate like this, get exactly the code they deserve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> (And please excuse us if we sometimes punish you for trying to defend us.)

</comment><comment><USER5> I always smile when someone tries to simulate people flow diagrams. I like the underlying notion that developers are more insightful than everyone else, but I think it is "everyone's fault" if the product turns out bad.

<comment><USER6> If it's everyone's fault, then it often doesn't feel like anyone's fault. Diffusion of responsibility is a dangerous thing, and insidious.

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

If a product turns out bad, it is the fault of _each_ person who could have prevented that, but didn't. This is splitting hairs, but I think this is a psychologically important hair to split. Conversely, if you do your part properly, that's something to be personally proud of no matter what the outcome.</comment></comment>


The Collector's Fallacy - <AUTHOR> https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/ <comment><USER2> It's absolutely true that to be most useful, knowledge needs to be absorbed and integrated directly into the mind. But there's a large constellation of useful information and data out there too, and you can't and shouldn't memorize all of it.

I collect a lot of links to articles that I've read using pinboard.in. However, I fairly frequently end up searching through those bookmarks to find the article that I remembered reading. I suppose once or a few times per month. It's especially useful for bookmarking specific scientific studies, or papers presenting engineering techniques, etc., where it's useful to remember "I recall reading about that" and be able to get back to the original.

<comment><USER3> > there's a large constellation of useful information and data out there too, > and you can't and shouldn't memorize all of it.

Not only that, but also

> Just knowing about a thing is less than superficial since knowing about is > merely to be certain of its existence, nothing more.

Sometimes just having a sketchy map of the territory is infinitely more useful to learning than knowing nothing at all. Of course we should strive for more than that, but when push comes to shove, a person with a rough map will waste less time in learning what they must, than someone who has no map at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I definitely have hoarding tendencies. I have 100s of vintage UNIX computers, 1000s of books on CS and EE topics. I mostly find the idea of them inspirational, even if I rarely get to explore them in the depth I wish to. But the hoarding tendencies don't seem to show up in my work product, i.e. I am very deliberate and keep a small stack of active projects/tickets/emails. I guess I am good at compartmentalizing?

OTOH people often seek me out for pointers to code/libraries/tickets/books etc at work and in my circle of professional friends. I'm kind of like a librarian.

</comment><comment><USER5> This strikes a chord with me. I do the same with the hacker news posts. Every time, I open quite a few tabs with every intention of reading them. However, due to time constraints, I don't. Eventually I just "onetab"(firefox addon) them. This fear of missing out on information that might be valuable is troubling me a bit.

<comment><USER6> Much the same here. I have six windows open, while only a few of the tabs are Hacker News, one of them has more than 100 tabs in it and the others have about 40 tabs. That's just on this computer. My laptop has another dozen tabs open. Eventually, Firefox will crash and I will lose all my open tabs when "Restore Last Session" fails on me. Hundreds of PDF documents, about 25 on my reader, dozens of songs in sheet music some as much as half-learned.

I have a Commodore 64C, monitor, floppy drive, and a pile of disks, I've used that once. I've two ZX Spectrum machines (one in a dk'tronics keyboard, nonfunctional) and a Spectrum 128, with 50 or so tapes and one of those Microdrives plus some cartridges.

My father is the same with DVDs, he has a couple of thousand. The dad of one of my friends has double that. His lounge has a wooden shelf hacked together, that thing stands floor-to-ceiling along one side of the room, wraps around a corner, and is packed solid with DVDs. Babylon 5, Red Dwarf, Monkey, the Goodies, Paint Your Wagon ("Gonna paint that wagon, gonna paint it good, we ain't braggin', we're gonna coat that wood"), the list goes on.

To me, my collecting and never doing anything with the items seems almost like a sickness. I still have all my University texts - I justify it to myself by quoting a friend of mine who said "I don't believe in selling textbooks, they might come in handy some day." They won't, most of them are more than a decade old, but I still can't bring myself to get rid of these books that cost me hundreds. It was hard enough dumping those ISA cards that were no use to anybody - and I still have a stack of 500 megabyte IDE drives somewhere.

<comment><USER7> How do you get any work done. My pretty fast Macbook, 3y old, becomes really slow after only 15 tabs open in 1 window.

<comment><USER8> Do you use chrome or something? Firefox is excellent with hundreds and hundreds of tabs (on my 2011 linux machine)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the rationalizations I use for collecting books is that, by organizing them in a certain way, I can constantly reinforce my model of the structure of certain topics. On top of that, the physical presence of certain books is intermingled with what they contain in such a way that I think it_might help retention.

That said, I've given away a ton of books lately, and plan on keeping the books I own to a minimum until I have the means to construct a really strong library, which I do think is a positive endeavor.

Also, tangentially related, does anyone have any suggestions on a good org to donate books to? I've seen one too many awesome sets of books mangled in Goodwill bins, and am looking for a new option.

<comment><USER10> I believe public libraries are usually happy to accept book donations.

<comment><USER11> Which are often immediately sold to the general public in a used book sale.

<comment><USER12> I have no problem with that. Selling used books as an individual is hard, since people will not pay a lot of money for them (since brand new books are cheap), so at least for me I find its not worth the time to sell them. At least then the public library benefits from the donation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> On the other hand, if you save something to read later, this is a way to avoid reading it now. Might this be better than getting too distracted? Maybe you won't need to read it at all?

Also, it's a way of collecting things you _could_ read; a wishlist, if you like. Having a wishlist is fine for things you don't need to do.

A couple of things I do:

\- I don't buy books on Kindle. I just send a sample to my tablet. If I finish the sample, maybe I'll buy it. Otherwise, I avoided paying for it.

\- Similarly, for any purchase on Amazon that's not urgent, I just add it to the shopping cart. If I decide I don't want it later, I avoided buying it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Ironically, Umberto Eco (quoted in the article) had a library of 30 000 books at his primary residence and 20 000 books at his vacation home. He probably hadn't read most of them :)

<comment><USER15> And Nassim Taleb has a take on this fact that makes it a feature, not a bug.

[https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco- antilib...](https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/24/umberto-eco-antilibrary/)

<comment><USER16> But that "feature" was from an era before the internet and Amazon and Google Books, back when not-buying a book meant the information would likely be lost to you forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Books, as traditionally written, are too big for the amount of information which they typically contain. We need knowledge representation which is capable of coherently and consistently storing information in a more direct, relational format.

<comment><USER9> I've seen this sentiment many times before, and I usually respond with a variation of the following point:

If I took a book and stripped it down to the bare information, as you'd like, and then read this new information-pure skeleton, I wouldn't remember it as I would if I just read the book. I might only remember a few facts about Thomas Jefferson after reading a bio about him, but I wouldn't remember any facts if I just read the facts.

My hypothesis as to why this is true (disclaimer: this comes almost entirely from introspection): My mind doesn't store memories like a hard drive, you have to tell it a story (so to speak) to get it to remember what you said. My mind doesn't integrate purely relational data, it integrates narrative data. Yes, an important part of a narrative is context and relational information, but another key part of it is the cadence, the spaces interleaved between the stuff we remember. Unless your point was that we actually need a new architecture for our brains, I strongly disagree, albeit on a purely anecdotal basis.

<comment><USER18> You don't have to do away with the storytelling structure; just make it significantly shorter and designed for information retention. Quite a few books contain a good deal of filler to reach the 250+ page threshold for marketing purposes.

A longer book is correlated, in the audience mind, with more content, more research done, more of an investment to read it hence more of a payoff ("it's a book you have to study"), and also more time spent reading it so potentially more pleasure, even for non-fiction.

Unfortunately, when you read a lot, these propositions start to become cons, and you'd often rather have just the meat--granted, not in a plastic plate, to run the culinary metaphor, but not with the three-hour ceremonial of the (would-be) fancy restaurant either.

<comment><USER19> I agree to an extent, but I've come to believe that the 'padding', often just examples that are variations of each other, is much more useful than it appears at first.

When I think back to books that I've read that felt like they had too much filler, I have to admit that many of the memories are the concepts _via_ the anecdotes.

<comment><USER18> So perhaps the author shot a lot of anecdotes at you and a few stick, but another author could have done the same job with half as many pages. Again, I'm not against storytelling or anecdotes.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I don't disagree with that. I've all but stopped reading the books that are mostly anecdotes with about an A4's worth of actual information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Meh. This is certainly something that can happen, but on the other hand a well-curated and indexed set of bookmarks can serve a purpose that even Google with all the personalization it can muster can't touch. As in all things, you need to be honest with yourself about how your habits serve your goals.

<comment><USER21> Absolutely - just recently on two separate occasions I spent half an hour to an hour searching Google for particular website that I was a fantastic resource on a topic.

Yesterday that was <[https://www.homenethowto.com/>](https://www.homenethowto.com/>), where I eventually gave up on Google & DuckDuckGo and instead went to the home networking subreddit that I thought _might_ just have it because it really is a great website. They did (and its probably where I found it originally).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> How shallow are the books that the author of this piece reads, that he can keep their entire contents in his head? I am pretty sure I can't keep the entire contents of my personal library in my head. And I don't even have that many books. (Around 20, between CS and math books.)

<comment><USER23> I don't keep them in my head at all :) In fact, my memory is quite bad except for procedual stuff like programming techniques. That's why I process and store notes so extensively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not sure about a lot of these suggestions. They always sound like they're aimed at a specific group of people who only collect things, and never use them. What about people who collect things, and then use them just fine?

And me reading an article is not too useful if I can't find it later.

</comment><comment><USER25> While extremely guilty of this, I see it as a cache of good knowledge in different areas - I can generally remember what I've saved - their general titles and genres. If I need to dive deeper into something, I already have good starting points saved.

</comment><comment><USER26> This looks interesting. I should bookmark it for later.

</comment><comment><USER27> At one point I was buying/trying a lot of new stuff, shiny new hardware, gadgets, software, technologies, frameworks, etc. But now I don't care about learning/collecting new tools anymore unless I have a really good reason to do it.

For me, creativity seems to spur from mixing and matching a minimal amount of basic elements. Creativity is very close to mastering a computer programming language. In general, you only need to command a paintbrush well to compose great paintings. You only need to know 30 keywords to make amazing programs. It's better to make use of general purpose tools really well to my specific needs than to employ a whole bunch of specialized tools. Having specialized tools is the answer only when I need to copy and mass produce something.

One of the trends I have seen lately is some people have the tendency to branch out to make new gadgets and teach very specialized tools nowadays without merit. For example, the amount of javascript frameworks is absolutely mind-blowing, there seems to be a new javascript way to achieve the same damn result every minute. Someone recently bought me a sous-vide cooking device which both before and after having it, I still have a really hard time justifying having it in my home: What couldn't I do without it and with just a thermometer? I cook sous-vide exactly 0 times before I got it, and do it 3 times in 6 months since I had it. When I do it, I could as well enjoy and watch the thermometer instead of having download an app to my phone that I use once every 2 months to watch the temperature for me.

It's not just in tech -- I understand they need to sell shit. Even in education, there are courses of "data science in X" or "X statistics" offered at every university for every field. One of my friends (who is doing a PhD) recently asked me to help with one of her assignments for her course. Basically, it was just two hours of boring shit teaching her to use graphs with various examples in her field X, I just jumped in and helped with what I knew, which has nothing to do with her field X. Why can't it be just a general-purpose data science or statistics course?

With this rate, sometime in the future, we'll have sous-vide device just for 20-year-old blonde people who are married instead of just a thermometer that works for everyone. Rand's razor and all that.

</comment><comment><USER28> With things like Hackernews and Reddit, there's a lot of stuff we tend to skim. I tried more often than not to actually read a paper if the full text is available, but that can be difficult to do too.

I like writing, and sourcing things I've read into new work seems the best way to learn, retain and think critically. Essays from high school and Universities need not be an end. Having a professional blog where you organize your ideas and opinions means you have to put some real research into them.

[https://battlepenguin.com](https://battlepenguin.com)

Party conversation opinions are backed up with real stuff you look up, and you can feel more confident in expressing a critical opinion instead of parroting, inaccurately, something you may have read

</comment><comment><USER9> The author says we shouldn't keep books, we should assimilate books into our model of the world, and then dispense with the book. To an approximation, I agree. I also agree with the idea that sometimes collecting books and bookmarks can lead to a false sense of satiety with our intellectual progress.

I disagree with his point that notes actually do represent assimilated information in a way that the books themselves don't. Notes might guarantee a certain level of assimilation, but they don't qualify as "knowledge" in the way the author maintains. There's other good reasons to keep notes, but not because they're more a part of your knowledge base than the book itself.

<comment><USER23> I do struggle with the information/knowledge distinction as I never researched that field in detail. Would love to hear about some helpful alternative!

I can imagine a primary source that's important in your life becomes part of your knowledge, too, because you ... well, got to know it so well. But that really isn't the point, since mere collecting is the opposite of familiarizing yourself with the material.

<comment><USER9> My point isn't really about a distinction between information and knowledge. While high quality notes might witness the existence, or creation, of knowledge, that knowledge is not contingent on the notes' continued existence. Put another way: If the note-taking process results in the creation of knowledge inside my head, why should I keep the physical notes any more than I should keep the book?

Edit: I should say I thought your article was interesting and useful in general, and I don't think my disagreement takes away from the general message that owning things is pointless, what matters is engaging with the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sure sounds nice to have a perfect long term memory and have no need to use a quality source to refresh on any topic you ever once actually understood.

</comment><comment><USER30> I recurrently think about these topics and my opinions have adapted from:

No notes -> wiki -> searchable flat wiki(s) (TXT note on a text editor)

Collect most -> collect relevant -> collect relevant and recurrently digest it (manually throw away what became irrelevant)

Some extra thoughts: [https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder](https://github.com/galfarragem/superfolder)

<comment><USER23> I like that project status approach to filing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Old problem. The book "Too Much to Know" by Ann Blair is about how intellectuals dealt with information overload in early modern Europe: [https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much- know](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300165395/too-much-know)

</comment><comment><USER32> Makes me think of a t shirt I received as a gift many years ago. It said:

"So many books, so little time"

<comment><USER33> That's a Frank Zappa quote.

<comment><USER34> It's also not far off Hippocrates:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> To combat this, I've started going through all my old bookmarks and compiling my own repository of knowledge on a self-hosted Bookstack. I highly recommend doing this. I feel like I assimilate a lot more knowledge than before when I would just read something once on HN and then bookmark it for posterity.

</comment><comment><USER36> Bookmarked</comment>


The Linguistics of Writing an Email Like a Boss - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-linguistics-of-writing-an-email-like-a-boss/ <comment><USER2> Hey look, it's my paper. :-)

Dunno why this caught back on now. Paper is from 2012.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is fascinating. Unsurprised by a lot of the findings, as I see them on a pretty regular basis.

I really interesting technology offering would be an application of this used to map the "real" power structure vs. the org. chart. Imagine the power of that as a starting point in an organizational design?

Conversely, I know people who say, "Great thanks!" in threads in which they otherwise play no part. And I _hate_ those people.

<comment><USER4> Or gmail could introduce a 'make me feel powerful!' button that adds in more downward facing terms

<comment><USER5> > Or gmail could introduce a 'make me feel powerful!' button that adds in more > downward facing terms

Gmail, if you could introduce a 'make me feel powerful!' button that adds in more downward facing terms, that would be greeeeeat, mmmmmmmkay?

<comment><USER6> Google: I'll circle back with you on Wednesday

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is in fact a fairly old (1970s) linguistics theory on this subject. See e.g. Brown & Levinson on politeness theory.

You can build some fairly easy software that applies this on conversational data (1:1 emails, chats, phone transcripts, etc), and it works pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is fascinating but I would be even more interested in actionable advice. Where is the ballance between being polite and ass kissing? Is the male / female difference in openness productive or contra? I understand that it greatly depends on the company culture, but as a non-native speaker and programmer (geek?) I usually struggle to decide how much information is appropriate in a sick day request and all my emails (up/dow/sideways) usually contain multiple "please" and "thanks". Do you know any "communication in office for geeks 101"?

</comment><comment><USER9> Makes you wonder about the dynamics of Facebook's upcoming Facebook at Work. Can imagine the 'interest graph' of a lot of employees will be interest in pleasing their bosses. Will they spend a lot of time 'liking' their boss's posts instead of following 'useful' people? Blogged about this recently. [https://tmail21.com/blog/is-social-the-future-of- work/](https://tmail21.com/blog/is-social-the-future-of-work/)

</comment><comment><USER10> That was a great read, thanks!

<comment><USER11> Please forward me the same by EOD

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> #14 of "Phrases in Emails People Send to Their Bosses" is "shit". I'd like to see some examples of that usage.

<comment><USER13> Even more puzzling to me is #7 "kitchen".

<comment><USER14> Maybe it's from infrequent food-related announcements for events, sent by office-assistant types and received by many people?

"Project Iota launched! Pizza in kitchen"</comment></comment></comment>


The End of the Best Friend. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/17/fashion/17BFF.html?pagewanted=1&ref=homepage&src=me

<comment><USER2> This has got to stop. And by this, I mean psychoanalyzing every single aspect of childhood to the point of saying that having a best friend is "bad".

Seriously.

Stop it.

<comment><USER3> I would be alarmed by this if I thought it represented anything but one journalist's effort to manufacture a trend.

Here's the only piece of data in this article:

 _Most children naturally seek close friends. In a survey of nearly 3,000 Americans ages 8 to 24 conducted last year by Harris Interactive, 94 percent said they had at least one close friend._

Hm. Looks like that might indicate the exact opposite of this article's thesis. Fortunately, the journalist has found some really powerful individual anecdotes!

 _"I just really don't have one person I like more than others," Margaret said. "Most people have lots of friends."_

I'm no sociologist, but the problem with this datum is kind of obvious. Nobody but a social idiot would, using their _real name_ , tell a _newspaper reporter_ that "I have twelve friends, but only one of them is a really close friend". That's a good way to lose eleven friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article is infuriating. They're effectively trying to social engineer these kids to prevent a few side effects that are crucial in their development.

Why is it that we think that kids are somehow meaner now than they were at any other point?

<comment><USER5> To play devil's advocate for a moment, only addressing the point of bullying:

While you and yours may have the support structure and innate tendency to become stronger as a result of early-childhood bullying, I think the schools' argument is that the potential harm in a student being bullied to the point they hurt their future educations/careers is greater than the potential good of bullying for those who can withstand it.

Social fortitude is like any other aspect of development in that some children will obtain it sooner than others. Those that get there first become the popular kids and the kids that simply don't care. Those that don't arrange themselves into ``safe'' cliques or take what the other children say to heart and believe that they are stupid/ugly/weak and will never be able to change. If the parents are not available, the school would need to be able to provide individual support to nurture these kids to the point where they can stand up for themselves. This is difficult in public schools, so the alternative they are using is to encourage all the children to spend time together.

Now, devil's advocate aside, since I believe I can provide the type of supporting atmosphere that will help a kid toughen up, I would likely not send my child to a school like this. However, faced with the problem of unreliable parental involvement, I can somewhat understand the school position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yeah these kids had better learn to be friends with everyone, or else it's detention all year!

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting take on the NYT article here:

[http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2010/06/if-any-friendship- coach...](http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2010/06/if-any-friendship-coach-tries- to-mess.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> When I read this quote: _"I don't think it's particularly healthy for a child to rely on one friend," said Jay Jacobs, the camp's director. "If something goes awry, it can be devastating. It also limits a child's ability to explore other options in the world."_ My unfounded but immediate assumption was that nobody really like him when he was a kid.

But more seriously, there is an approach implicit in the article that I have seen quite often in schools and large businesses. Because leaders are unwilling to do the hard work of examining problems on a case by case basis and creating solutions (Often because they are unwilling to suffer the criticism that indiviual decisions create) problems are approached from rediculous and overly broad perspectives. (See for example Zero Tolerance policies in schools, airport security, etc.) Being unwilling to confront bullies in this case is leading to the deliberate elimination of best friendships. By making it a policy, it eliminates having to make hard decisions, one can now simply say, "Policy says...." and punt.

</comment><comment><USER9> Using twins as the anecdotal sample for whether children have best friends is another point against the thoughtfulness of the author. As a twin myself, I would argue that twins have a built-in best friend and thus rarely have another "best friend" like a singleton would, so they are a particularly poor choice to illustrate anecdotal evidence that kids don't have single best friends.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hey, I wasn't a weird loner. I was a trend setter!

</comment><comment><USER11> Looking at this from a networking scenario, will this create a mesh network of relationships, where a balanced trust is generated through each node, sharing information through the network replicating over each node... Okay now picture 1984, where everybody is equal, people can't have relationships, the government regulates everything... I don't know, something about this disturbs me. I have 3 friends I'd trust my life with, who'm I was best buds with in the respective areas/schools I went to (I went to different districts moving around alot). I haven't been diagnosed with anything other then to lose my college beer gut.

<comment><USER12> I think we should just replace humans with computers. Then you can program exactly who they talk to. And ban firewalls!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's the Brave New World, SWPL version.

</comment><comment><USER14> "increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should..."

This kind of meddling makes me sick. Dear educators, stay the hell away from my kids.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm getting tired of all this trumpeting of the end of this, the end of that, the end of everything.</comment>


Show HN: A new alternative to universal basic income: the universal job rebate - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jonathanabrams/a-simple-fix-for-jobs-in-the-new-millennium-ea712ea85c75 <comment><USER2> Yeah, there is nothing in the world that brings people a deeper more fulfilling sense of purpose, and meaning to their lives than work. Ask someone with a family, an artist, or a political activist, and they will surely tell you, "I love being a Human, but I really don't feel whole without having to perform labor for the financial benefit of another party at the cost of my time and energy."

Maybe I'm the only person who reads this stuff who has actually done construction work, landscaping, painted houses, washed dishes, etc. while what they really wanted to do was to be studying mathematics and computer science, but as such a person, I find the "let's try to find a way around universal income in light of the coming 'automated utopia'" conversation to be extremely offensive. You say (and I'm paraphrasing for dramatic effect) that 'these poor people love to work, without work they wouldn't even be whole people' Not quite as offensive as "Let's liquidate the lower-class when we no longer need them to perform rote tasks to further our objectives." but close.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear ya, but at the end of the day people still say they want jobs. Instead of telling people what they should want, why don't we listen?

<comment><USER2> You're referring to people who do not have sufficient access to resources. Those people say they want jobs because they don't have access to resources, and they can't envision said access without the intermediary process of having to perform work at a job to obtain said resources. They view the two concepts: jobs and resources, as inextricably interwoven facets of a single process.

As someone with a job, with friends and acquaintances who all have jobs, and parents who have jobs, I feel like I can safely speak for all of them when I tell you right now: We do not want jobs. We want access to a fair share of the available resources.

<comment><AUTHOR> But you don't speak for everyone. I like having a job, it happens to pay well, but even if it didn't I'd still want to work. I like having something to do. I like having people that depend on me to show up.

I also like vacations, but after a couple weeks I look forward to returning to work.

<comment><USER3> I don't think a Universal Basic Income implies that people stop providing value to society. The idea is that we are intelligent enough now that we would find more productive uses of our time than appeasing the financial cycle of wealth/interest/poverty. Job rebates are a nice idea if jobs are inherently valuable to society, but they are not always so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A surprisingly uninformed article.

The article does not consider these issues. The extra people:

1\. need to be trained.

2\. can screw up customer service, misfile things, enter numbers incorrectly, etc.

3\. Occupy space - there are limits to the number of people that can be in a factory.

4\. Create a distraction - (asking "beginner" questions)

5\. Diffuse responsibility for completing tasks. (If the same amount of work is spread over 2 people - who is responsible for a quality outcome)

\</comment><comment>-

Companies only hire people when there is a need. Sadly for the purists: the economy is driven by the true job creators - the middle class.

Focus on rebuilding the middle class and reduce the wealthy imbalance. (Yes this means the rich will have to pay up a lot of their wealthy in the form of taxes.)

Through out history, this has been shown to be the best way for a healthy economy.

P.S. you are welcome to disagree if you can talk about the 1873 bank panics (and through the 1900s), the Great Depression . Every example of wealth imbalance has resulted in a stagnant economy.

</comment><comment><USER5> The only thing this does for people who don't have jobs (who arguably are most in need of something like Basic Income) is it _hopefully_ causes more jobs to be created. But these are going to be low-wage jobs (e.g. expect to see jobs that pay exactly $30k per year). So basically, what you're proposing is to give people a chance at a shitty job (and remember, it's just a chance, it certainly won't drive unemployment down to 0%). That's very different from Basic Income. One of the big benefits of Basic Income is that, freed from the need to work just to have food/shelter, people can seek out more fulfilling things to do instead of having to work crappy jobs just to live. I guarantee you nobody feels fulfilled by working a minimum wage job.

<comment><USER6> One of my favorite jobs was minimum wage. Certainly more fulfilling than doing nothing.

I can't be alone in feeling the therapeutic effects of work.

<comment><USER5> Nobody said people on basic income have to do nothing. One of the big wins of basic income is it frees people up to do whatever they find fulfilling. This could be working the same job you have today. This could be going to school so you can do more than just flip burgers. Or maybe becoming an artist, or a musician, or whatever else you may be passionate about.

It's also worth pointing out that Basic Income certainly won't give people a very comfortable life, so they'll still want some form of additional income. But maybe they don't have to work two jobs to feed their family anymore.

<comment><USER6> I wasn't talking about basic income. I was addressing your "guarantee" that nobody is fulfilled working for minimum wage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting, though it does beg the question of it also will encourage work for the sake of work. An example is provided that one could be hired to write hand-written messages on products. But one could also be tasked to do something robots could do because you just artificially made human labor cheaper than your robots.

<comment><AUTHOR> > But one could also be tasked to do something robots could do because you > just artificially made human labor cheaper than your robots

Exactly, that's my main point. It gives humans a fighting chance against the robots.

<comment><USER7> I don't think humans being effectively modern mules is a good thing. If robots are better than humans at something, we should generally let robots do that thing. It would be more human labor hours to use screwdrivers for things, but we use power drills where applicable because power drills are better.

Now, there are things we have also started letting robots do that they are not better at doing than humans, mind you. I think Google has demonstrated how colossally bad algorithms are at providing customer service, for example. I could definitely see this model making it more palatable for companies to get rid of the reviled automated answering systems and similar processes, and put humans back in the customer service field, in particular.

I am concerned about enabling the former, I would like to enable the latter.

<comment><USER8> I Bad the same thought.

"give people purpose. how? lets give them mechanical jobs!"

wat?!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This doesn't solve immigration, just increases the fake employment.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't see this idea as being all peachy for businesses. They have a lot of extra expenses beyond the wage for each employee.</comment>


Haskell Researchers Announce Discovery of Industry Programmer Who Gives a Shit - <AUTHOR> http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers-announce-discovery.html <comment><USER2> Wait, doesn't Haskell support mutually recursive generic container types since, like, forever? I think Steve is wrong on that one...

<comment><USER3> Article was posted in 2010</comment></comment>


Notepad++ v7.8.1: Free Uyghur - <AUTHOR> https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/v781-free-uyghur-edition/ <comment><USER2> Notepad++ has a bit of a history in releasing versions in support of various campaigns, ranging from a "Je suis Charlie" edition to a "Tiananmen June Fourth Incident" edition.

I remember one edition included an auto-typing feature, where a new tab would be opened, and content start typing into it, which frankly was quite alarming for an update of a piece of software that you've been using for a while...

<comment><USER3> I believe the typing content was itself the changelog for that particular release and the flak received by the author will prevent it from happening again in the future afaik.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love it that they have a "this is how you can help link". I've read about so many issues that I would to get involved with, but there's I no mention anywhere oh you can actually do something about the problem!

</comment><comment><USER5> Does this message only show in the release notes? It would be cool to display a link to this on startup, like with Vim and the ICCF-Holland charity in Uganda.

</comment><comment><USER6> The author writes "The Uyghurs are not ethnically Chinese".

While that's true, it's only because nobody is "ethnically Chinese".

"Chinese" is a nationality, not an ethnicity. Within China, there are 56+/\- ethnic groups of which the Han group is the largest.

<comment><USER7> Thank you. Somehow is cool this days to write non-sense in tech forums. The Kurds are also a large ethnic group in Turkey, so is the author of Notepad++ will be adding a mention to them in the next release note? Native Americans in the US and Canada? Buryats in Russia? and the list goes on and on... but hey, I guess is too hard to do a little research before pretending to be cool.

<comment><USER8> "Somehow is cool this days to write non-sense in tech forums." \- Yes, that's what you are doing. Are about 1+ million of those groups you mentioned in concentration camps for just being from that group? No, so don't make such absurd comparisons.

Edit: Just saw: user: honest_tovarich, created:32 days ago, karma: -2 => [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party)

<comment><USER9> Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, and please don't break the site guideline against insinuations about astroturfing in threads. That's a major rule users need to follow here—otherwise the threads deteriorate severely.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> time to help Uganda, npp uninstall...

</comment><comment><USER11> Freedom is the most important value in software development. As a web developer in Hong Kong and loyal notepad++ user, I am happy to see the message!</comment>


Chinese Officials Hijacked My Company - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-chinese-officials-hijacked-my-company-11596233617 <comment><USER2> If the best source of capital you can find for your company is the government of a third-tier Chinese city, maybe your company isn't such a great idea in the first place.</comment>


Show HN: Berry – A go package for colorizing printed string on ANSI terminals - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tnclong/berry <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a blog about: 1\. improve go program performance 2\. user friendly api 3\. Refactor and etc. Re-inventing wheel is awesome! forwarding! Share your thinking. [https://github.com/tnclong/berry/blob/master/STORY.md](https://github.com/tnclong/berry/blob/master/STORY.md)</comment>


Give Me Bare-Metal - <AUTHOR> http://www.subbu.org/blog/2014/11/give-me-bare-metal <comment><USER2> The virtualization and containerization of computing is a long term net win, but there isn't a lot of huge benefits financially or otherwise for the scale most companies operate at.

For example, I witnessed a co-worker spend days messing around with docker to host incredibly simple PHP/MySQL and Ruby apps. Instead of renting a few VM's on say Digital Ocean or Amazon and spending probably $50 a month, my co-worker spent at least 50-100 hours of time to put everything on Docker and Puppet.

Let's say the net cost of that orchestration was around $10,000 in terms of billable time. You could rent a separate VM for every project and still come out ahead without trying very hard and still spend less time doing the project.

The total cost on that was way out of whack AND docker continued to be a source of bugs and ongoing overhead costs in terms of time.

My point is that these tools are great when they save you time, energy, and money, but a lot of people are overinvesting in tools like docker too early and they will never get a good ROI on their investment.

I don't know at what scale these tools start to make a lot of sense, but I imagine it is somewhere over 20 or 30 machines or projects before containerization shows itself to be a good investment. I'd be curious to see someone run the numbers on that.

<comment><USER3> > You could rent a separate VM for every project and still come out ahead > without trying very hard and still spend less time doing the project.

Doing the project? Yes. Running it - no!

These tools make sense at the scale of a single project with two hosts in my opinion. Here's what happens in my experience when developer with little ops experience takes care of a few VMs with small apps: (so a majority of services out there)

\- where are the logs and what's the available space for them? depends on which VM, some don't log at all, some log debug because they had some work done weeks ago

\- which hosts are running which app version and what's the upgrade procedure? likely every one has different manual steps

\- what's your system/libraries/application upgrade story? likely missing / different for each host

\- what's your DR story? likely missing

\- what's the state of monitoring and are all hosts covered to the same extent? unlikely

\- is the development and test environment at all similar to production? unlikely

For each of those items you're likely to go back and introduce something that docker/puppet would've either made easier or provided from the beginning. Knowing that you can consistently build the same host/app every time and that it's got the same options, utilities, tools, etc. available is a huge gain even on 2 VMs.

Yes, the huge benefits start at 1X hosts, but I've seen the benefits and I'm never deploying even one production machine without automation anymore. (salt in my case though) Not doing so is actually more work in a long run. And as soon as you deployed one app that way, you have your library of scripts - another app will likely look very similar and anything around it (monitoring, logging, backups, database deployments, ...) will likely be exactly the same.

So I think that you either pay that 10k for orchestration from the start, or you end up paying it bit by bit, every time something needs to be added or goes wrong.

<comment><USER4> Ah, I think you're missing the point.

What the OP was saying is that spending all that time to make _docker_ work was a bit pointless. Especially as a VM makes no real difference to the end user at this stage.

Your points about DR and the like are valid, however if you are going to use puppet, the difference between deploying n docker instances (and keeping the state in the correct way) and VM instances are negligible. (yes, yes, docker is a chroot, so inherits the host's state, but you'll still need to control the docker environment.)

I use cgroups everyday, to avoid memory exhaustion, (25k CPU render farm) and for that its grand. Running it on a public host? madness I say. For things that require high IO(even then its questionable, AUFS...), or low security perhaps.

<comment><USER5> > What the OP was saying is that spending all that time to make docker work > was a bit pointless. Especially as a VM makes no real difference to the end > user at this stage.

I disagree. Given that you operate a 25k CPU render farm, perhaps you are no longer aware of how poorly devops tends to be managed in small shops. I'd argue Docker buys you _more_ in those small environments, because in large environments you can build tools that works for your environment. In small environment, the traditional "solution" has been to brush these concerns under the carpet.

Just getting repeatable builds of an environment so that you can ensure the dev, test, staging and live environments continue to bear a resemblance to each other is a massive improvement for many of this type of setups. That is, assuming that there _are_ separate dev, test, staging and live environments - often you'll find all of it on a single server. Yes, really.

Basically, people that think like OP terrify me, because too often we've taken over operations of applications from people who think like that, to find that the operational cost is staggering. We have one customer, for example, that have over the last few years easily paid several times what it would cost to properly re-engineer their application from scratch in time spent for us on operational issues because they've refused to accept that it's necessary. (EDIT: Said customer pays for this time, so on paper it works out well for us; in practice it's bad for us as it leads to lots of tension with the customer over all the issues, and we'd much rather have spent that time making their app better, and help them grow their revenue from it - long term that'd be far better for our customer relationship). This is a "simple PHP and MySQL" application.

VMs aren't really a solution by themselves. It's not app-level isolation that "makes" Docker. It's the entire structure that encourages repeatable builds, a repository, and the light weight nature that encourages breaking things into smaller components. I agree that just Docker as isolation in a multi-tenant system is still scary.

I'm currently working on deploying an application in VMs. With Docker in each VM. The VMs gives us the isolation we need in a multi-tenant system. Docker lets us ensure that dependencies between each component is well documented (or the components won't have access...), and that we have a decent image repository, and that we have ways of managing the entire lifecycle of each component. The two are complementary technologies.

In a large enough environment you could solve the issues that Docker solves with process. In a small environment that process is usually non-existent or weak.

> AUFS

AUFS is not necessary. Btrfs or device mapper backends have been supported for a long time. And even then, for any data volums that needs high throughput you'd use a bind mount from the host.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bare metal doesn't mean what it used to.

<comment><USER7> You know, Unix has a pretty good abstraction already for managing resources: a process.

Nowadays it is fashionable to deploy applications consisting of hundreds of files in a complex structure, but this is fashion and not technology and that's easy to demonstrate: in the old days, a C application consisted of hundreds of files in a complex structure, that would compile into one self- contained executable. There's no technical reason you couldn't take a RoR app (for example) and "compile" it and manage it just like any other process. Start it, stop it, move it around, one binary executable and one plain text file for configuration, that's really all you need for _any_ application. Really.

I look at things like Docker and think, you are solving a completely artificial problem, and as soon as fashion swings the other way (10 years at most) people will wonder why people ever did this.

<comment><USER5> > You know, Unix has a pretty good abstraction already for managing resources: > a process.

And that's what Docker is built on: processes + namespaces to restrict what each process group can access.

> I look at things like Docker and think, you are solving a completely > artificial problem, and as soon as fashion swings the other way (10 years at > most) people will wonder why people ever did this.

Things like Docker will still have value with single-executable containers. Problems that people have had for years. Even with single-executables.

You still need to manage privileges. You still need service discovery. You still need to manage the network. You still need to manage data volumes. You still need to manage the environment.

Docker provides mechanisms that either solves all of that, or provides information for tools to hook into (e.g. ability to query what ports the currently running containers expose).

I agree with you that there is distinct benefit in self-contained executables, and I think you'll find a _lot_ of people working with Docker thinks the same. Partly this is part of what Docker gives us: We get to treat a bigger hairball of an environment pretty much like a single entity, even if we're not able to slim it down.

But partly, note that a lot of the adoption of Go within devops tools appears to at least partially be motivated by the simplicity of distribution and installation from getting static binaries (without having to use C). I prefer Ruby, and find Go to be a ugly, too low level, language, but I definitively understand the appeal Go has when it comes to simplicity.

Yet despite having those devops tools as single executables, people want to put them in containers to manage them properly.

If anything, I hope and think that things will move even further down this route. For my part, I'm containerising my desktop environment part by part. There's no reason we should not move to far more locked down process environments.

<comment><USER8> Couple of points/questions, at least from my perspective as a man of many hats to anyone passing by the above comment:

1\. Docker appears to only allow a single entry point per container. What do I do if I want to run a container consisting of say postfix and dovecot together? If this is possible can someone please point me at it.

2\. Go doesn't allow you to bundle resources with the executables (as say Java/C#) so you have to rely on 3rd party libraries to do this that aren't very good. I can't easily ship my templates with my web server for example as part of the "go build" process. Again if I'm wrong, please point me at a solution.

<comment><USER5> Personally I wouldn't run Postfix and Dovecot together under Docker. Instead, I'd export a volume for the mail store, and share that volume between a Postfix and Dovecot container.

But if you absolutely want to put them in the same container, the solution is to run a process manager as the entrypoint. E.g. base it on something like baseimage-docker [1]

Re: 2. I don't use Go, so I can't answer that part.

[1] [http://phusion.github.io/baseimage- docker/](http://phusion.github.io/baseimage-docker/)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the info. I'd have a couple of problems with exporting the volume because I need postfix to talk to a Unix domain socket that dovecot listens on for SASL auth. I'll go with the process manager solution - thanks for your suggestion!

Been trying to build a canned mail server for a few years so this is probably a nice solution if I can get my head around it.

<comment><USER9> Unix domain sockets work in docker shared volumes. A common use-case is to mount /dev/log into a container so that it doesn't have to run its own syslogd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Docker is written by developers of which there are too many. But it sucks to many of us who are sysadmins. Docker's networking isn't all that, and the storage is basically just nifty because of already-existent tech like AFS and BTRFS.

I think docker is nothing more than a hype from a new generation who wants everything hip, simple, fun, fantastic and awesuummm and the older and more experienced sysadmins like me have seen this coming years ago. It was inevitable, and now it's just a matter of waiting until the lazy generation finds out what we've been seeing all along: Docker is an abstraction of other technologies and you don't need Docker at all.

<comment><USER11> That's stupid. Developers want the ability to deploy applications easily, and keep them stateless. The tools to do that are of course available, and Docker builds on top of them to provide a much more effective interface than rolling an entire infrastructure from scratch each time. What the hell is wrong with that?

<comment><USER7> No, he has a point. Why are applications hard to deploy and manage? Because of how they are structured. If deployability was factored in at the time applications were being designed, they would look very different. You know there were entire 1000-page books written on how to deploy RoR applications? Why was it ever so complicated? Any why is creating a problem that never existed before, then solving it, considered a good use of anyone's time?

<comment><USER11> It is complex to deploy applications because applications are complex. They have dependencies, they require reproducible environments. We want them to be scalable, so we can easily fire up more instances as required.

Hand-waving this away as a problem that "never existed before" is nonsense. And increase in individual machine power and the demands of applications means that we now have—quite validly—more complex applications, and more of them running on each machine. Administration of this is objectively difficult, and Docker is one of the tools that will help to make it easier.

<comment><USER10> But you are not addressing what I am saying at all.

I am saying that this is convenient for developers, but for us sysadmins, who have to implement Docker apps in already existent systems, it is just not all that convenient, so now we have a surplus of happy developers.... and the sysadmin "should just stop being so grumpy".

Sysadmins are expected to cheer in the same happy way, but in my opinion, many of us already knew how to build the kick ass systems /without/ containerization that the new developers ("devops"... yuch) are so cheery about.

<comment><USER11> _Sysadmins are expected to cheer in the same happy way, but in my opinion, many of us already knew how to build the kick ass systems /without/ containerization that the new developers ("devops"... yuch) are so cheery about._

I don't think this is the case.

My goal as a developer is to be able to deploy applications quickly and easily, to be able to scale them, and to avoid worrying about dependencies. That's all good practice.

I still need a sysadmin to handle that infrastructure, so Docker et. al. are not a tool to replace sysadmins.

That being the case, why do you think there is pressure from developers to adopt these tools? If sysadmins are generally capable of building 'kick ass systems' that offer the same features but without using Docker, then why aren't developers happy with the situation?

Docker is a tool that allows sysadmins to provide these useful features without having to arse about building them by hand. It's a tool for sysadmins, and dismissing it out-of-hand in the way you do is totally stupid.

<comment><USER12> I'm a sysadmin in a place that's bringing docker on-board, and I'm finding that I'm having to write more stuff for docker than docker is solving, from an ops point of view. Developers don't care about where logs go or whether they persist. Or about managing SSL certificates (don't want those in the repo). Or starting/stopping things programmatically. Or a number of other things that the guys who have to make this stuff work in production have to care about. Docker is lovely for devs who can coddle their containers personally, but it's an entire new ecosystem with its own can of worms for ops people.

An example: I can't easily rename containers, so if I want to install a new container with a set name for programmatic use, I have to destroy the old container, so there's no quick rollback. Instead I have to have a tag system for the docker images, and track those instead, keeping aware of which current unique name is 'old prod'.

Another example: docker doesn't really support having one repo support two clients with their own config, not without a lot of faffing about. You get one dockerfile, it is always at the root of its tree, and it only builds one artifact.

Another example: until you set up your own base images and repos, you're taking an app that used to be a few megabytes, and turning it into an image that is hundreds of megabytes in size. We have an nginx image that uses a stock docker base, and it's over 400MB! For nginx! That takes a non-trivial amount of time to download on a base image update, a new dev machine, a newly provisioned machine... if the docker hub happens to be up and not slow (we had a couple of issues there recently). And if you do have your own base images, you now have an extra operating system image that you need to keep up-to-date with security patches.

Docker is nice and will 'get there' eventually, but in its current state it benefits devs at the cost of sysadmins. I would counter that dismissing sysadmin concerns out-of-hand in the way you are doing is totally stupid.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for making my point. English is not my first language, but this is exactly what I meant, and your examples are spot on, too.

One other thing that is annoying is networking. IPv6 is once again being ignored, and for the rest they offer either a simple NAT bridge (and who wants to NAT anyway?), or you're on your own for the stuff you cannot proxy with for example nginx.

I'm hoping that this will really improve because tools do exist already. Openvswitch is one of them.

(It's also ironic to witness in this discussion how matthewmacleod even helps prove my point - developers are usually not really aware of what sysadmins do, although the other way around, we know what devs are doing, that's for sure.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think a lot of people would be surprised at how many users and traffic you can really handle on a single server, or single pair of servers (web/DB).

<comment><USER14> Well yes, because a lot of hosting companies claim 100+ customer VMs per machine. Pretty sure Linode and Digital Ocean run somewhere in that neighborhood.

So if you just run on a beefy bare metal server yourself, you can probably serve 50-100x as much traffic as you could on a typical VM. I guess the issue is that your software is probably not written to make use of the full machine. You might have to start 50 copies of a process, which might be OK. Ruby, node.js, and Python will probably neat that treatment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure where folks decided there was a competition between containers and VMs. They solve very different needs.

> If I'm a front-end app developer, it's much more convenient for me to use a > container-based cluster management solution on bare-metal without dealing > with VMs.

If you're spinning up containers on bare metal, you need to manage bare metal systems, or pay someone to do it for you. Or, you could put your containers in VMs, where you manage the VMs or pay somebody to do it for you.

Bare metal gives you some advantages (like tighter control over the components and the ability to customize the hardware to suit up-front needs) and some disadvantages (harder to dynamically scale, spin up/down times are longer), and VMs have their own advantages and disadvantages.

VMs are here to stay, just like dedicated servers are here to stay. Containers change what we do inside of our systems.</comment>


Kinds of attention - <AUTHOR> http://enjoymentland.com/2009/05/25/kinds-of-attention/

<comment><USER2> Thoughtful article. I've always though of 'bottom-up' attention as a sub- conscious process - defining the context of our environment. For instance, the soccer player who knows the rules, the clock state, the position of his teammates on the field, etc. An experienced soccer player will absorb these things without active attention.

Top-down attention is when the soccer player has to take all these factors into account in order to exert focus on some goal-based action. For instance, focusing on dribbling the ball, or focusing on passing the ball, etc.

One is a sub-conscious process of external awareness. The other is an active process of focus on an internal goal. I think the right balance is dependent on experience in the situation.

<comment><USER3> For me, taking SCUBA lessons are an example. I spent the first, what, 10 lessons? getting to know the equipment, doing the math, etc. before we ever got close to the pool, let alone the ocean. In return, after a few real dives, dealing with the equipment became a background process that I no longer focused on. Instead, I focused on the experience (and my remaining air).

Same as operation of a car, especially a manual transmission.

Meditation, I'm told, is just the ability to reign the mind back in, as its focus wanders. Which can eventually be redirected to bringing the mind back to the task at hand...

Ooh, look, new programming language...</comment></comment>