Ask HN: Viable tech for hotdesking in software dev? - <AUTHOR> We're about to move into new offices and something that appeals is the potential for developers to work in smaller 'project' areas. Thinking semi-open-plan, with quiet rooms for getting stuff done, then as I say semi-partitioned areas (not closed room) with a few desks for those working on each project.
Anyway, part of this idea involves moving between areas or projects. Laptops are one obvious answer - possibly outfitting desks with additional monitors, equipment as necessary. However we build fairly chunky (large) enterprise systems and sometimes running databases, FE tools, BE tools and the app (which might consist of a few components/services) takes a lot of resources. In terms of performance, battery considerations, upgradability and cost, desktops have many advantages. Point being, for the cost of a killer laptop, the corresponding desktop machine wipes the floor with it and I'd favour the responsiveness and performance.
My question is, is there a viable tech solution to facilitate modern (backend/fullstack) software development using some remote access/terminal arrangement. In the same office - gigabit LAN etc - with dedicated machines hiding in a cupboard or rack somewhere.   BE/fullstack dev is currently in Windows land.
I guess for me that means working with multiple monitors and ideally multiple desktops.
In years gone by I've seen Citrix, terminal services, RDC, VNC.. but I'd like to know if it's viable for software engineering itself, and what kind of issues might crop up. Is the tech viable?
(Struggling to find an appropriate place to ask this question.  Forgive me if this is off-topic for an Ask HN, but it's about efficiency in a growing team of hackers.. if I can swing it that way!) <comment><USER4> From the Valve employee handbook ([http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)):

> _Why does your desk have wheels?_ Think of those wheels as a symbolic > reminder that you should always be considering where you could move yourself > to be more valuable. But also think of those wheels as literal wheels, > because that's what they are, and you'll be able to actually move your desk > with them.

> You'll notice people moving frequently; often whole teams will move their > desks to be closer to each other. There is no organizational structure > keeping you from being in close proximity to the people who you'd help or be > helped by most.

> The fact that everyone is always moving around within the company makes > people hard to find. That's why we have [http://user](http://user) — check > it out. We know where you are based on where your machine is plugged in, so > use this site to see a map of where everyone is right now.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've had a good experience running Windows 10 on Azure DevLabs VMs accessed via Remote Desktop from Mac and PC. Even with the VMs running in Ireland (I'm in London), they're very snappy and can happily use Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc. Even video and light 3D works well. I wrote up a blog post on it: [https://www.mcleodmoores.com/blog](https://www.mcleodmoores.com/blog)

</comment><comment><USER6> Inspired by Valve, here's the $15 solution we use:

[https://www.amazon.com/Mount-Adjustable-Universal- Computer-H...](https://www.amazon.com/Mount-Adjustable-Universal-Computer- Holder/dp/B01N1ZIGM9/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1510406800&sr=8-4&keywords=computer+case+caddy)

</comment><comment><USER7> Desks with wheels; each desk with an ethernet switch and a power strip so you're down to two wires when you move the desk. Moving is really simple.

Additionally, teams may want to rearrange desks (e.g., in a circle, or back- to-back, or whatever). There's no reason not to have flexibility here.

You'll find that most people will still accumulate stuff, and will need some kind of storage. People also get attached to their chairs and their working posture (sitting/standing, monitor height) as well as their particular keyboard and mouse brand, etc. -- hot-desking seems bad for this.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've often thought about this myself, and there's really no perfect solution.

The most practical option is just give people the hardware they need, then facilitate their comfort and mobility accordingly. Desktops and laptops being used simultaneously at the same desk is very common. I'd also suggest desks with wheels.

As far as remote solutions for your situation, I don't think there are any acceptable ones. Low-latency video streaming wouldn't even cut it. Personally I'd limit myself to solutions that actually run the display signal itself. There might be some clever things you can do with the latest versions of Thunderbolt/USB/HDMI/DisplayPort; I'm not fully up to speed.

If you do end up theorycrafting that approach, one additional point of consideration might be virtualization with direct hardware passthrough. You could probably do some cool things like assign one GPU per hotdesking location, and pool any unused GPUs as computing resources. Storage could be a similar story, with neat separation.

That said, running your own on-premises AWS can become very complicated and very expensive. I wouldn't go that route unless you're really, really set on the hotdesking thing.

</comment><comment><USER9> There is an amazon product to this effect but that's obviously not local. I know one team inside a very large engineering organization that used x2go to remotely access an eclipse developer environment with all the resources/separation of duty available. I also visited a developer site that was rigged with a windows terminal services setup and two monitors/keyboard on every desk and that actually worked fairly well since the true horsepower was in the VM farm in the lab. Active Directory allows for that profile roaming as part of the core functionality so it's easy to transplant yourself around the place.

Generally (I was on an interview bender recently) I see desktops with raised monitors ganged together (either displayport or hdmi supports daisy-chained monitors) and a keyboard and everyone is issued a lightweight laptop and defers all the beef to the cloud/vm farm.

I keep going back to windows remote desktop as really the best remote desktop solution. It supports multiple monitors, and if you are a Windows environment with an AD you can roam from desk to desk trivially.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, great to hear of people actually using that kind of solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've had good results in the past running a fairly complex VOIP + webapp call center from entirely custom code based on PXE boot and Linux. (Lots of universities used to use this in their labs, I don't know if it's still common these days.) This would also work for developers.

You can trial it quite simply. All you have to do is have user login network mount a home dir and you are in business.

In general laptops cost quite a bit, break lots, and people want to take them home which creates issues. I think a lot of companies just give developers laptops now. However, it can be quite nice for the developer to have "not at work = down time" as an option, larger screens and keyboards are generally smiled upon, and desktops are WAY CHEAPER. You can even go 100% diskless.

PXE is usually centrally supplied kernel vs. individual developer compiled kernel, though, which can be annoying if people want funky features. However, you can do this diskless as a default and just say those who want to sidestep the system can boot from an external SSD.

<comment><USER11> This is great advice. We do something similar with a terminal device running Linux which gets you a multi monitor Windows 7 session. Want to move? Lock your session and log in at another desk and you're back in business. We provide this for thousands of employees, both on site and working from home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you are considering hotdesking you don't care about developer productivity.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/07/a-field-guide- to-d...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/07/a-field-guide-to- developers-2/)

<comment><USER13> Not everyone hates hotdesking. Not everyone likes hotdesking. Why not give your employees the option and leave it at that?

<comment><USER14> Because hotdesking doesn't affect only the person moving. It affects everyone that person moves away from, and everyone that person moves toward.

If everybody cares, then as you note, not everyone agrees that it's good. If few or no people care, then why hotdesk?

Either way, someone has to set the policy. Even at Valve, with no structure, someone has to say "we hotdesk, it's our culture". Someone has to sell the haters on it (or tell them to take a hike).

And even if only one person hotdesks, depending on that person, that could still be enough to leave an impact.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Try it before committing, and if you do go for a remote access system make sure that _everyone_ is happy with it.

Have you considered personal workstations on movable desks as apparently used by Valve?

</comment><comment><USER16> Hotdesk seem a good idea until you have people that has to take kids to school, or you have someone that has a meeting with a customer at 9am and has to come later to the office to discover (s)he cannot sit anywhere.

Don't fall in the trap of voip phone systems that don't allow you to be logged in two places at once (usually for licensing reasons): someday you (or your colleages) will be hunting for the voip phone that someone forgot to logout.

For remote desktop, etc. This is a very mature technology: try to pick the tech that better blends with all the other tech stach at home. Citrix, for instance works great but it ecosystem is not _trivial_ the best part is they even have an integrated VPN (Netscaler) you can use.

On the hardware side, take a look at HP Moonshot servers. I bet there are equivalents our there from other brands, but those are worth seeing: 4.3U servers that can house 50+ physical desktops with own storage.

</comment><comment><USER17> Red Hat has something for this that's tied to their acquisition of Qumranet/Spice [1], but I've only seen a demo video so I can't speak to its reliability or suitability for any given deployment. I'm also not sure what the attached marketing terms are if you want to research a supported solution. Basically, each developer's "real" machine is a VM on a beefy server, and terminals are interchangeable. In the demo I saw, each terminal had a contactless smart card reader. When the card is put on the reader, the terminal connects to the corresponding VM. Take the card off, and the terminal locks or switches to a transient/guest VM.

[1] [https://www.spice-space.org/](https://www.spice-space.org/)

<comment><USER18> The marketing term is "VDI" and it's commonplace in Windows enterprise networks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Eclipse Che might be worth looking into. I'm not sure how mature it is, but it gives you a web interface to Eclipse running on another machine.

[https://www.eclipse.org/che/](https://www.eclipse.org/che/)

</comment><comment><USER20> Do the applications need to be running on the developers machines? A good deployment process that allows quick, one-click automated deployment of your latest changes to a testing environment can help a lot with that.

Otherwise, modern high-end laptops are quite powerful if you pick the _large_ models not 13 inch thin ones, and you can certainly run a bunch of virtual machines/docker containers/whatever on a maxed-out laptop while it still being perfectly responsive; but you might want to have people running _both_ a killer laptop and a beefy desktop if they're not deploying/running/testing everything on remote servers, the cost isn't that high.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes you're right, and we're part of the way there with automated, immutable deployments. Debugging locally is still common for us at the moment, and I'm looking for solutions for the situation we have at the moment. Of course you're quite right though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> A large proportion of the workstations at the company I work for are using Teradici (I'm not affiliated with this company at all) to implement the machines-in-the-machine-room idea you mentioned. They basically are remote units for providing keyboard/mouse/display connections over ethernet. In our setup each desk is always connected to the same machine in the rack, but I guess you could have them configured to change machine if you are changing physical location but want to use the same machine.

<comment><USER22> I just started wondering how effective a dumb HDMI-over-Cat6 system could be. (I have no idea how Teradici works.)

The main hassle would be switching everything; you _could_ build a signal switcher(/multiplexer!) using FPGAs, but that would be expensive and take ___quite___ a while to do.

<comment><USER23> We do that in broadcast. We can have a matrix on the order of 1000 inputs 1000 outputs, with any source and destination routes to another. These tend to be really pricey, even before factoring in the miles of coax cable.

In fact as an industry we're moving to IP - a modern video stream is in the 12gbit range, so that's a backplane of about dozen terabit, so that's not cheap either. On top of that, 1 lost packet and it's a big problem, so we dual stream it all.

<comment><USER22> Oh _wow_. I remember looking at tiny 16>2 HDMI multiplexers a while back, IIRC they were a couple hundred.

I think I've seen the coax pools for 1k>1k units in cabling pictures online... these would _start_ at 5 figures, I presume, with full installations probably even rolling into 6 figures?

And... double wow, 12Gbps. Is there nothing like a realtime, lossless, zero latency compression scheme that works for video? Hmm, Huffman coding would probably only chew off a few Mbps, and not make much of a dent.

It sounds like video transmissions run over UDP. That's kinda insane... but TCP wouldn't work either, I'm guessing the transmission format is probably so closely tied to the wire protocol that repeated frames would give everything major indigestion too.

This has been a cool TIL

<comment><USER23> UDP yes. Repeated frames introduce latency. Broadcasters are used to latency measured in lines -- that's microseconds. In the analog days an extra foot on your cable would mean the difference between out of sync or not in the chroma domain.

We use SDI rather than HDMI, but fundamentally it's a container, with an active picture frame in 4K video of 2160 lines, with 3840 samples per line. Each sample is a 10 bit sample of the luma, and every other sample gets 2 extra 10 bit samples of chroma (The eye being less sensitive to chroma). This is 4:2:2 sampling.

This means that a single 4K frame is 2160x3840x20 bits, and in the americas there are about 60 lots of 165mbit, every second. SDI adds various things like blanking thanks to it's legacy of a digitised version of PAL/NTSC. Audio is tiny, <15mbit/sec.

Normal HD, with interlacing, is far more reasonable, at 1080x1920x20x30ish, 1.2gbit (less in 25fps countries), but SDI adds another 300mbit a second on top of that (UDP/RTP also adds overhead too).

The cheapest SDI routers you can get tend to be blackmagic ones, which are fine. There's a lot of people in the industry that remember the days of analog routers, where they were legitimatly expensive. Since SDI came out thought the electronics is little more than a switch chip. A 40x40 matrix will cost about $1300, but prices increase exponentially.

On wan links we tend to use compressed video in the 5-30mbit range (5mbit from somewhere skanky with poor internet). We have forward error correction on that, but the standards aren't great at high bit rates (only coping with 25 lost packets). A 20ms outage on a line with that type of error correction causes on air disruption.

Using something like ARQ which allows missing frames to be repeated adds latency, on a link from Europe to Singapore for example it could add 600ms. That's on top of the c. 100ms propagation latency and 400ms encode/decode, pushing the latency from half a second to over a second, and people start getting grumpy. There's still no guarentees either - as if you were to lose 100ms of traffic at 30mbit, you end up peaking your traffic far higher than the 30kbit/ms that you normally send -- to retransmit that 100ms in 100ms, you need to peak at 60mbit.

As an example of how important latency is for two-way communication, I'm currently investigating replacing our 12 frame (480ms) latency encoders from a couple of locations in London with ones that run at about 1-2 frames (40-80ms).

With wan links sending the same packet on two links doesn't even work. I've seen outages of 20ms on both a private wire and two separate internet paths in the past -- presumably some common router in the subsea cable system does something. Currently using temporal shifting (and some receive buffering) as well.

The expectations that the broadcast industry place is somewhat different to the IT industry. 3 second end-to-end latency is nearer 'store and forward' than 'low latency'. Compression in a production facility is unacceptable, and increasingly we're moving away from things like 5:1 compression on wan links and bandwidth becomes cheaper. One broadcaster in the UK has just replaced the main in-country network with an uncompressed network based on multi-path 100gbit wavelengths running over dark fibre. Another has replaced it's core switching network with multi-terabit backplanes. Just getting 10gbit/second in/out through the kernel is a challange - doing it with nanosecond packet timing that the next SMPTE standard currently requires is proving even harder.

<comment><USER22> Ah, 10-bit 4K. That completely explains 12Gbps.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "1920x1080x20x30", particularly the "20". I take the "30" to mean 30fps.

SDI rings an "I've heard of that!" bell. Huh, 37MB/s of overheard - nice. :(

I get the impression analog routers/multiplexers were basically every input port physically wired to every output port, with a tiny switch to disconnect the lines that weren't being used. Yeah, those would be exponentially expensive, because even though you can't physically have more than one input going to a given output (outside of practical special effects, maybe?), you can't get away from physically wiring all inputs to all outputs. And then I'm guessing the sea of internal wiring was all super high quality and so forth to minimize line losses...

40x40 for $1.3k is _very_ impressive. But yeah, it's just a specialized ethernet switch (albeit with really high maximum internal throughput), so that makes sense. The switch from analog to packet switched routing does make sense financially.

Hmm. What did everyone use after everything went digital, but before the switch to packet switching? What video formats got used back then? What time period am I even describing? I just realized I've always been mildly curious.

TIL about ARQ, and what to call what I've been using in my own messaging system design ideas. I do wonder though... in the context of video distribution, if you just repeat the last good frame you had if you don't get the next frame in time - why does there need to be realtime acknowledgement at all? Instead of acknowledging every single frame (I assume this is how current systems work), either send periodic beacons containing the last eg 10 or 100 or 1000 last message IDs, eg [ 1, 3, 8, 9, 10, 13, 17, 20, ... ] so the sender compute the number of frames dropped, or even better, if frame IDs are guaranteed to be sequential, the receiver can compute the number of dropped frames and simply just ping back the packet loss percentage value. That would take care of the sender blindly going too fast a la TCP rate control. Then, on the receiving end, if the receiver doesn't get the next frame in time for playback system to show it, it just shows the last received frame until it has a new one.

I get the impression ARQ works a bit like Skype on a bad day, where the feed locks up periodically then the image jumps forward in time (if you will) when the next properly decodeable frame comes in - except I suspect ARQ only has very tiny such jitters and jumps. What I just described would probably be equivalent, but (unless I'm horribly mistaken, or misunderstand) with much lower latency.

Note - I realize the way things are already done were carefully engineered and there are good reasons behind the techniques currently being used. I presume that the above idea has very possibly been thought of and disregarded - <USER3> I'm curious what the reason was.

400ms encode/decode is impressive. 40-80ms even more so. But that sounds perfectly reasonable given that this uncompressed video; I expect the faster encoder simply has faster silicon in it :)

TIL about the info about the traffic peaking and retransmission. That was interesting to carefully read through a couple of times :)

Talking about encoders and distances, that reminds me - I'm curious about how good those cellular backpack things are, the ones that take umpteen SIMs and seemingly set up a load-balanced aggregate connection over all of them. I'm guessing the latency is somewhere north of "higher than planes fly"? :P

What did you mean by "temporal shifting" in the context you used it? I also wonder what the traceroute on the private wire would have looked like. I can't imagine the link was tunneled (haha!) so if nothing showed up that would be perplexing.

I remember when satellite links used to have 3 second delays to TV live news broadcasts, only around 2006-2008 or so. Hah. Wow, expectations have (perfectly understandably) moved forward.

Agh. I'm 100% sure that it's possible to losslessly compress video and get good speedups... but the realtime requirements really make it so incredibly hard :( I realize HEVC has a lossless profile, but yeah, definitely not realtime. The problem is that anything that compresses at realtime on current silicon (and not anything custom) will probably only shave off a few tens or hundreds of Mbps. :/

TIL about the network upgrades. By "network" here, I presume you mean at least the in-building LAN, but I'm not sure where/what else classifies as "production". Surely the lines to the TV towers aren't uncompressed? I see no need for uncompressed video there (but I may be sorely misinformed). And wow, multi-Tbps backplanes... I was reading about how Facebook had deployed that sort of thing a few months ago, TIL it really isn't that unique.

As for getting 10Gbps kernel throughput, I understand a lot of groups are just doing networking in userspace and skipping the kernel IP stack entirely. But 10Gbps at nanosecond timing... haha, when I hear that, I say kick out Linux entirely, because it doesn't offer hard realtime AFAIK. Well, my knowledge may be hugely out of date, but last I heard Linux didn't really like doing realtime "in production". At any rate I know of no projects using it routinely for non-specialist tasks (ie, some kind of everyday desktop-usage use case, not embedded/appliance use-case).

I vaguely reading about the SNABB Switch folks doing really really fast packet switching, and they were getting all their speedups by using assembly language and doing instruction/cycle counting. Problem with using Linux is that you have a massive bunch of overhead (the mechanics of C, basically) you can't really shoo out of the way - sure, you can optimize your own stuff in assembly, but what's the point when you have tons of C kernel code darting in and out of the L1/L2/etc caches in between schedules of your process(es)...

Hmm. I just realized... it would be so nice if you could tell Linux to give you an entire CPU core. Just don't schedule anything onto this or that CPU, and don't even run kernel code on it. Then you could use the excluded core like a discrete application processor, and run your own kernel on it. THAT would be COOL. But I don't know if you can actually use x86 like that.

Somewhat less drastically, I wonder if you could build FPGAs - or, if the chipsets in NICs are amenable and fast enough, just bespoke firmware - <USER3> teach the NIC to receive and buffer SDI video frames really, really fast, doing some complex processing in hardware before the kernel gets the data over PCI-e.

That reminds of something that may or may not be interesting: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13741975) \- it's a totally new CPU architecture (it seems that the CPU arch wars/competitions are starting to warm up - nice) that basically, uh, moves the MMU into LLVM, instead of putting it in silicon. It's an interesting idea, but the reason I mention it is because I understand they're already at the point where they're taking orders (and have taped-out silicon to actually deliver). FWIW I was i336_ in that thread (accidentally locked the account, heh) but apart from the interesting interaction I have no affiliation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What about getting desks that you can add wheels to. I know you can put castors on GeekDesks, but I'm sure other desks support them as well. Fairly low tech solution, and your developers can use whatever equipment they prefer.

<comment><USER25> Desks with wheels don't work if you have multiple story buildings or different buildings all together

<comment><USER7> Valve has 8+ floors and things work pretty well. If you've got multiple floors, you should have muscle with the building and be able to use the freight elevator.

I don't have a solution for multiple buildings, you're right about that.

<comment><USER25> Old buildings don't always have elevators

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you're using Windows, just use RDP to access the servers. Citrix and similar may end up being useful in time, but it's best to start simple.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, RDP is a damn powerful remote work solution. If you don't care too much about cost I think it's definitely the way to go.

<comment><USER26> > "If you don't care too much about cost"

Just to be clear, if you're already running Windows, RDP is free.

<comment><USER27> Normal RDP to a server or workstation sure, but if you want to use Terminal Service, VDI, and Remote App you have additional licensing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What is the value you expect to get from hotdesking?</comment>


Open in a public place; go fullscreen; mash random keys. - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackertyper.com/

<comment><USER2> I like it--but it types too fast to look real.

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome! Can I use this in a movie? :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I've never felt so productive in my life!</comment>


How would you run your company? - <AUTHOR>

Its such a simple question I've asked to many people and yet gotten blank stares or simplistic answers. Figured, you guys would give me much better answers. Before I started my own projects, I had many ideas, but then reality hit me and I'm struggling with even my basic ideas. What about you guys? <comment><USER2> What do you mean precisely? I can think of two totally different ways to take this.

One, how, physically, would you go about running a company? What would you do? Would you hire people or contract out work? Would you get office space or work out of your house?

Two, how would you develop your company's culture? What kind of expectations and rules would you have? How would you treat employees? What would the chain of command look like?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its your company it doesn't really matter. But I suppose I was leaning towards more toward second option.

<comment><USER2> Then I would say basically like the company I work for is run. The most fundamental idea (in my mind at least) being that employees are expected to be self-managed and are trusted with that task. Employees do what they know they should be doing and management lets them do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Follow the Golden Rule.</comment>


International visitors are already turning their back on Trump-era America - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2017/02/i-m-banned <comment><USER2> Hardly surprising given that international travel, especially for leisure is exceedingly sensitive to perception of the news. It takes a long time to build up tourist numbers, but a small incident can cause the sharpest falls immediately.

But I'd argue that even before the Trump administration, the USA was immensely difficult to travel to for anyone in a country that's not part of their visa waiver program. USA is one of the few places to require a transit visa even if you only connect at one of their airports and visa arrangements have exorbitant fees attached to them. They have a perception abroad of having stressful border control - even so for Canadians who arguably enjoy the easiest access to the US compared to any other country.

It certainly doesn't help to have higher minimum salaries for work visas and a possibility of being kicked out after completing a degree on study permits, which affect business and student visitors respectively. And finally, dealing with American companies from abroad can be a huge resource commitment as you often have to adopt American standards and clearances in parallel to other internationally adopted schemes or your own local one. But for a long time, the costs justified the prospects of visiting, simply because of the access you get to American markets. With Trump adopting "America first", a lot of people will just not bother deal with travelling to the USA anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _But there was a bigger concern: "Will the decree—easily interpreted as a > deep hostility to the world beyond America's shores—put off global > travellers?" Two weeks later, it has become clear that the answer is yes. > Hopper, a market research firm, looked at online searches for flights into > America, comparing the final weeks of the Obama administration with the > first weeks of Mr Trump's presidency. It found that these searches had > declined by 17%._ The overwhelming majority of countries studied showed a > drop in interest. The most notable exception was Russia, which has been > accused of meddling in November's presidential election in Mr Trump's favour > and colluding with members of his team. Searches for flights to America from > Russia increased by 88%. The overall 17% decline, Hopper found, was much > larger than the 1.8% drop that occurred between the same two periods a year > ago, leading the company's top data scientist to tell the Los Angeles Times > that it is "hard to see any other short-term significant events that could > be related," other than Mr Trump's assumption of the presidency and his > travel ban.*

As far as fluff pieces go, this is one of the fluffiest. A mere 2 weeks after the decree, based on internet searches and no actual numbers, not controlled with anything (except last year's results), and with the bs hint at Trump as "russian led" \-- whereas an explanation (assuming the numbers are correct" is much more obvious: that a President who is not openly cold-war hostile to Russia might bring in more interest for tourism from there.

<comment><USER4> I can assure you that the general feeling in South America is certainly doubtful, stories are coming in about families being detained and losing connections at the airport merely for having Muslim sounding surnames and similar bullshit, and I keep hearing about people giving up on US holidays until things calm down... which it doesn't look like it will for a while.

<comment><USER5> I was detained at an airport in South America and missed my connection, presumably because I was foreign. It's just an anecdote, but so was yours.

<comment><USER6> Here is another anecdote [0] - a well known British soccer player was denied entry into the US because he had a stamp from Iran in his passport, from a ONE DAY visit he did there to open a stadium.

All anecdotal - but enough anecdotal evidence gathered together becomes a groundswell action...

[0] - [http://www.perthnow.com.au/sport/football/former-sydney- fc-s...](http://www.perthnow.com.au/sport/football/former-sydney-fc-star- dwight-yorke-denied-entry-to-usa-due-to-iranian-stamp-in-passport- reports/news-story/f00d0b0210cb74afc34f2e01de427ec6)

<comment><USER3> And this has happened many times under Obama (and Bush) too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anecdotal of course, but I've travelled to the States multiple times per year in recent years, for work and especially for conferences. I'm planning to avoid the US entirely now since immigration there was already intrusive and unpleasant, and it's probably about to get significantly worse.

It's a shame, because most of the conferences I'm interested in are there or Europe, and Europe is very far from where I live. Unfortunately any measures that get pushed through now (e.g. requiring social media passwords) will probably take a very long time to get rolled back post-Trump, if they ever do.

</comment><comment><USER7> When I grew up, I was influenced by media like Knight Rider, A-Team, MacGyver and other TV shows. Oh and documentaries about the Great Canyon and other beautiful areas. I loved (american) English. I always had a dream to visit the USA. Not to live the "american dream" and get rich but just to experience the culture and scenery. During the past 10 years though this desire has completely gone away. This is due to the political climate and disrespect for foreigners privacy. I never went there even though I could do so easily. I travelled all over Europe (easy, being a EU citizen) and now traveling a lot in Asia.

I know of several businesses that have chosen not to send their staff to the USA anymore to trade shows or clients. My company used to send someone to a media summit every year. Last time they declined the visa for that person without providing any reason. It makes no sense. The focus is shifting: the US used to be the biggest market that everyone strived to cater to. Not anymore. Banks are more and more reluctant to use USD, Euro is preferred. When I go to a bank anywhere in the world I suddenly have to fill out a questionaire about not being a US citizen, having no phone number there, never having lived there and on and on. I have nothing to do with the US so why are they bothering me with this crap? Imagine if every country requested such a thing, you'd sit there a week answering questions. Oh and banks in Asia are starting to not take on US customers at all from what I heard.

When even people like Adi Shamir (the S in RSA) are having issues obtaining visas ([https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2013/10/shamir/](https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2013/10/shamir/)), something must be completely wrong with the way immigration is handled.

I hope the USA can turn this ship around, right now it looks like it's heading directly for the iceberg with full throttle.

<comment><USER8> > When I go to a bank anywhere in the world I suddenly have to fill out a > questionaire about not being a US citizen, having no phone number there, > never having lived there and on and on. I have nothing to do with the US so > why are they bothering me with this crap?

I believe this is because IRS went down on the US sections of international banks and fined them for their non-US sections having helped "US persons" to evade taxes. Remember that the USA are one of the few countries in the world that make people pay taxes anywhere in the world even if they do not have anything to do with the US besides holding a US passport or permanent residence.

Edit: It's called FATCA, more info e.g. here: [http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/102915...](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal- finance/102915/tax-implications-opening-foreign-bank-account.asp)

<comment><USER7> Yes. That's exactly why the banks are doing it. I currently reside in Thailand and when opening an account with a local Thai bank, I have to fill out this form. A local bank, which has no branches in the US (or really any other countries) and I'm not a US citizen nor have ever been there. Yet they get bullied into getting me into contact with the US burocracy out of fear of getting fined. I don't think that's ok. And it's just one example why the rest of the world is severely cutting their dependencies on the US whenever they can. Global scale e-spionage is another big issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, yeah. I've never been a huge fan of the US but would have liked to visit it some day - several snowboarding destinations and Silicon Valley would be nice to see, at a minimum. However I have no desire to spend my tourism dollars encouraging a science denying, racist, regressive, aggressive and generally delusional administration. I hope things soon change for the better. In the meantime, there are plenty of good ski fields in Europe :)

<comment><USER5> I wouldn't be too smug, elections in France, Germany and Netherlands are approaching...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I backpack since 1993 and always wanted to travel the world all my life (that includes the time that I raised 2 kids with my Japanese wife who never questions relocating to another country every 3 years because they realized how awesome an adventure life can be this way). Currently living in Eastern Europe which is the most awesome place these days (my kids speak 8 languages and us parents 5 as a result).

There is a lot of can-do here in Eastern EU compared to old-Europe. I had all sorts of jobs including diving instructor, then deep sea saturation diver and life support technician on offshore rigs in South East Asia. I made a boatload of money always doing what I loved and never listening to anyone else (especially not those who said it was better to lead a stable life in Austria). (I look back at these people today and can only feel sorry for them since they only know a life of fear (thanks to social and environmental conditioning that turned them into these sad characters they are).

If I look how the US treats their people with majority of the poor and black population incarcerated ... (and how they lock the middle class into their system with double taxation for those who dare to try their luck overseas) ... no thanks. The US is so badly broken that fixing it is not something that my generation will witness in it's lifetime.

I was supposed to relocate to Boston exactly now. But I changed my mind because I will not support this regime. My opinion is that if you are an American citizen currently not burning your flag in the street you are part of the problem. I would be totally the wrong person to uphold any of the fucking hypocritic values the US expects me to subscribe to when entering that country.

Also I threw the towel as engineering director in a Boston based Tech incubator for the same reason. I am not siding with racism/bigotry. The only way to have peace of mind is to ignore anything that comes out of the US as much as possible. I also make an active effort to watch what products I buy to ensure that as little money as possible goes from me to any US based business.

</comment><comment><USER11> Despite working for an American company (in Czech Republic, so we don't need visa), I would consider refusing to go on a business trip to the U.S., especially since they apparently started to ask for phone and social media passwords.

I also wanted to come in the U.S. again at least once or twice for tourism (once with my family to visit my old coworkers at the east coast, once with my coworkers to visit the national parks in the west), but I am also considering that, short-term.

<comment><USER12> > especially since they apparently started to ask for phone and social media > passwords.

And everyone wants to blame Trump for it, however, it started under Obama.

[http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/exclusive-homeland-security- rejec...](http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/exclusive-homeland-security-rejected- plan-vet-visa-applicants-social-media)

(first proposed in 2011)

[http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/san-bernardino- shooting/mor...](http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/san-bernardino- shooting/more-lawmakers-press-screening-visa-seekers-social-media- activity-n480631)

[https://fcw.com/articles/2016/09/19/social-media- immigration...](https://fcw.com/articles/2016/09/19/social-media-immigration- esta.aspx)

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/cbp-fails- meaningfully...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/09/cbp-fails-meaningfully- address-risks-gathering-social-media-handles)

It's only made bigger news in recent weeks.

CBP has been digging at electronic devices for years.

[https://www.elsevier.com/connect/what-are-your-rights-at- air...](https://www.elsevier.com/connect/what-are-your-rights-at-airport- screenings-and-checkpoints)

however, the US definitely isn't the only country doing this.

<comment><USER11> I couldn't care less which president caused the mess. I can somewhat live with search of electronic devices - when I travel, I usually don't take anything of importance on them, because they are prone to be stolen, lost or damaged. If I travel for business, I don't mind electronic device search, it's my employer's problem.

But asking for social media passwords, yeah, that crosses the line. Will they also want to visit my apartment?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> To be honest I had already cut out the US from my travels since the Patriot Act and all that frisking

</comment><comment><USER14> Meh, i didn't feel much need to travel there while Bush Jr was running the circus, and 8 years of "hope and change" didn't change my stance on that.

The only thing that will is the dismantling of this "security circus" called TSA.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'd like to see New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle, but staying out of the country until there is a more sane government. My partner saw his family in US the last time on Christmas and is also not going back until things get better. All my friends and family has been talking the same, so I guess the article might be right.

</comment><comment><USER16> i am not going to visit country where they wanna see content of my phone or laptop despite not being charged with any crime

one more reason to not visit amazing country where during transfer to third country through US airport you must pass through immigration

</comment><comment><USER17> Personally when I book an holiday I do that well in advance (4 to 6 months) trying to get a good deal. Most of the time cancel an holiday is expensive. Back in October I was looking for a ski holiday and looked at Denver, what put me off was not the possibility of Trump or Clinton be the president but the dollar vs pound. I do believe that one main reason for the decline in this period was the strong dollar appreciation against other currencies back in Nov/Dec. For many holidays travellers, economic reasons count more then political reasons when choosing the holiday destination.

Said that I'm going next week to Chicago.

</comment><comment><USER18> I was planning a road trip including an intersection with the solar eclipse this summer with my gf, but we've put it off in large part because of Trump. Anecdotal but whatever.

</comment><comment><USER19> I used to travel from France /Germany to the US for business about 10 times a year, and twice for holidays. It never was a pleasant experience at the border. Horrible in Chicago, barely tolerable in Phoenix. All of the people I discuss this with have the same opinion, so there is I believe a core problem with how people are welcomed to the US. I was one asked at the border why I will be staying for two days only (with an aggressive tone), to which I answered that I feel so welcome here that if I could squeeze everything in a few hours I would leave even earlier, not spending my money on local businesses. This cost me an extra hour at the airport but boy, it was worth it. No more Us travel for me before this "you are the enemy and we do not want you in the US" mentality changes.

</comment><comment><USER20> > [...] looked at online searches for flights into America, comparing the > final weeks of the Obama administration with the first weeks of Mr Trump's > presidency. _It found that these searches had declined by 17%._

I would have expected such a drop already after the NSA's various mass surveillance programs became public knowledge.

<comment><USER5> In the normal world, the machinations of the NSA have zero impact on the decision of someone to visit the USA. Zero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There's no way I'd visit the USA these days

</comment><comment> the-dude Me? Since 2001</comment>


iilwy guys know how to listen to feedback - <AUTHOR> http://iminlikewithyou.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm assuming more people than just me asked for some extra features, such as more distance searching options, sort users by game times etc. 3 times I've submitted feedback and 3 times my requests have been implemented within 36 hours.

Keep up the good work.

<comment><USER2> They've been very responsive to my feedback as well.</comment></comment>


Building a startup in public: from first line of code to frontpage of Reddit - <AUTHOR> https://levels.io/hoodmaps/ <comment><USER2> I love the "don't give a F let me broadcast all of it" mentality here. This is amazing. Starting a project much less a business has a lot of ups and downs. Putting a camera on top of you for all of it probably works wonders on morale.

<comment><USER3> I went through a 2 year period where I put every one of my experiments and side projects on github and tried to update at least one every other day or so.

Knowing that other people could see when I stopped motivated me a lot. The whole thing made me a better programmer too.

<comment><USER2> That's really interesting. Can you expound on this a little more? I've never done it but am thinking about it so that's why I ask.

Were you self conscious? How'd it make you a better programmer? Did you talk out what you were doing?

<comment><USER3> Yes I was self conscious, that's what encouraged me to keep fixing things so people would see me working rather than slacking off (it's similar to the IM client busy/away indicator at work.)

It made me a better programmer simply because I was doing it more, so I kept encountering problems and having to solve them. I learned why more experienced programmers do things and don't do things, I got better at using GDB and started using valgrind etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would be so paranoid of leaking information if I had to do twitch live coding. For example how do you handle copying and pasting api secrets? Or just pure privacy stuff like not showing other domains you own in namecheap (which he doesn't seem to care about in: [https://youtu.be/Tq1uoC- lxy8?t=528](https://youtu.be/Tq1uoC-lxy8?t=528))

<comment><USER5> I'm the writer of the post and yes I did expose my Google API keys actually! I didn't notice until they told me on Twitch chat. Had to revoke them quickly :0

The worst that could happen is that people see I watch porn. But everyone does, I wouldn't be that embarassed. Slightly blushing though.

I don't have much sensitive data on my laptop. I mean passwords are blocked off. So what can people see?

OBS (the streaming app) does let you limit the window to stream. I did use Incognito for most of the streams. I did also make a separate Twitch login on my OSX but it was such a pain to re-login to stream that I never used it.

There's definitely a risk here but yeah it's a trade off.

<comment><USER6> Funny, I'd say my Google API keys are a way, way, way bigger secret than the fact that I sometimes watch porn. Most people do, so it's not a big surprise that I might. I wouldn't much care if people saw me naked. It's just my flesh. Everyone has a body. It's easy to find pictures of naked bodies, and pictures of mine probably wouldn't be very interesting. But my API keys, they are unique and important.

That said, for random private-ish accounts I use Chrome user profiles. Safari does not have them.

Are you American?

<comment><USER7> According to the blog post, he is from Amsterdam.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I'm Dutch. But yes, I can't say I'm much embarrassed about much anymore. Being transparent on the internet helps with that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Gotta love your attitude: live coding, guerilla marketing, how you dealt with 4chan spammers, shipping quickly... Excellent write-up.

Ads seems the most natural business model if you get it big enough. hotels, flights, car rental, all have pretty ok revenue potential through affiliate deals.

However, before you get to that scale, try out selling it as a widget (or something like that, or a spin off product based on the crowd sourced data) to tourist offices of cities themselves. It wouldn't be huge business but I think with right pricing, some customization and support work for integration etc, you could make it 10-50k per deal and scale the workload pretty easily.

</comment><comment><USER9> I remember when this guy was the moderator of the very large, r/digitalnomads, where his digital nomad products were copiously promoted. Most people didn't know this (I didn't), until I guess an inevitable backlash one day. I can only tip my hat, he is a hustler (not a bad thing), and it's rare to see such marketing acumen in a programmer.

<comment><USER2> The first thing that jumped out at me when I was reading this was: "wow, this guy is devoting as much if not more energy to marketing the product as he is to building it"

Definitely a lesson a lot of the HN crowd (myself included) could take.

<comment><USER9> I had to lookup the name because I just remember his "Go Fucking Do It", which is one of the more ridiculous, low-effort, ingenious ways of making money from foolish first worlders enticed by a pretty landing page. "Set a goal, stake your money to it, and if you fail, you give your money to me; me, not a charity, and all of it to me, so you will have higher 'incentive' to succeed". The way it was spun as a "smart, incentivized way to accomplish your goals" was absurd, but I suppose enviable by other standards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pretty cool. Saw this when it was trending on reddit. It probably fits a similar niche as Urban Dictionary (which makes ~$50k a day IIRC). It's going to be interesting to see if and how Hoodmaps ends up being monetized.

<comment><USER11> Any write ups about Urban Dicitionary's $$$?</comment></comment>


This is the most regrettable college major in America - <AUTHOR> https://moneyish.com/ish/this-is-the-most-regrettable-college-major-in-america/ <comment><USER2> Implying that English as a major is bad does all stakeholders a disservice. English major's regret their choice because it's hard to get a good paying job with just that major. One of the pluses is that these graduates can communicate well using their skills. I would think that the fix would be to add a second major where their skills can shine. This gives students the benefit of studying something they love while getting some practical skills they will need. I can think of Marketing, project management and anything in the HR area.

I've even heard that English majors are truly outstanding when they learn to program.</comment>


The Era of E-Sharing - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/10/10/trendspotting-the-era-of-esharing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=trendspotting-the-era-of-esharing <comment><AUTHOR> Global GDP will take a hit if this trend takes shape in a meaningful way ...</comment>


Kosmix's new approach to search gets $20M - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/12/08/search-site-kosmix-raises-20m-from-time-warner/ <comment><USER2> an aggregate of API's gets 20m? This has to be some insider shit with only 200k hits a month, they must have some bigCo's ready to sign up for some sort of CDN</comment>


Ask HN: Should you tell the story behind your work? - <AUTHOR> I am making a portfolio website to showcase my work to employers. After having written the stories behind each application, I noticed that the story is nowhere near as glamorous as the bullet points on my resume. For example, 60k downloads, 20k in sales, etc. sound way better than the story of you failing at a million things to get there.<p>Should I just show the bullets instead of the story? <comment><USER2> I might suggest making the portfolio a a bigger version of the bullet points - stick to the positives but just elaborate a little more.

The story of how you got there might make more sense in a blog post. (You could even link to it from the portfolio.)</comment>


A super-thin slice of wood can be used to turn saltwater drinkable - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2212346-a-super-thin-slice-of-wood-can-be-used-to-turn-saltwater-drinkable/ <comment><USER3> 20 kg/m^2/h seems enough for a house near the sea to be self-sufficient. You could pump salty ground water and filter this through such a setup. A person uses about 350-450 liters of water every day. And 20 kg/m^2/h * 1 m^2 * 24 h = 480 liters. So one square meter is sufficient for a single person.

<comment><USER4> You are IMHO a tad bit optimistic, the process needs power, so - usually in remote areas - it is solar powered, and that - unless you add the complication of energy storage/batteries, limits the output to a much smaller number of hours per day.

See (as an example):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membrane_distillation#Solar- po...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membrane_distillation#Solar- powered_membrane_distillation)

On the other hand, 350-400 lt per person is on the very high side of water consumption in a very "first world" scenario (such as the US) a more real estimate is 150-200 lt per person per day this is UK:

[https://www.ccwater.org.uk/households/using-water- wisely/ave...](https://www.ccwater.org.uk/households/using-water- wisely/averagewateruse/)

Germany and Spain:

[https://water-for-africa.org/en/water-consumption.html](https://water-for- africa.org/en/water-consumption.html)

[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Water-consumption- liters...](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Water-consumption-liters-per- person-per-day-reprinted-with-permission-from-3-Copyright_fig1_267434851)

With a minimum of attention/care 100 lt per day per person can be enough.

And a large part of this is of course not drinking water, so it needs less desalinisation.

In a "built today" home, the water flushed from the basin/shower/bath (which is relatively clean) is re-used to supply the toilet and - in some cases - <USER2> washing machine.

Newish toilets have typically double flush at 6 and 9 liters each, so if you re-use only those it is likely to be in the 30 liters per day per person saving.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the detailed answer. I am from a developing country and my water usage is indeed closer to 150l than 400 l. Personally, this peaked my attention because I moved to a new city just three days ago; the city is on the coast and struggles with water supply. I was wondering how expensive such a system is today.

I did think of energy usage but didn't find easy number to quote. The wiki link suggests 6.5 m^2 of thermal concentrate and 75 W solar panel is enough for the energy needs of 150l/day in 2011. This is not that difficult for a remote or urban house, and will cost less than a few hundred dollars [https://kenbrooksolar.com/price-list/solar-water-heaters- pri...](https://kenbrooksolar.com/price-list/solar-water-heaters-price)

I don't know the capital costs of membrane distillation.

<comment><USER4> Well, if we use a "normal" (non solar) plant, using this as a base comparison:

[https://www.lenntech.com/applications/emergency-seawater- des...](https://www.lenntech.com/applications/emergency-seawater-desalination- units.htm)

it's 15 KW for 2000 lt/hour, assuming the efficiency scales linearly (I strongly doubt it does), a 40 lt/hour that would be 300 W (which I don't believe), it is more likely to be in the (not very accurate measure) "around 1 kW" range, which in laymans terms should mean some 6 or 7 sqm of solar panels, possibly a little bit more.

About the cost, you can buy today commercial systems (only the desalination part) in the US$ 5,000 range:

[https://www.echotecwatermakers.com/beach_house_desalination_...](https://www.echotecwatermakers.com/beach_house_desalination_systems.htm)

The smallest model has 5.4 A @230V which seems just in line with what we calculated above, around 1 kW.

If we assume that the cost of the needed solar plant (the additional part needed to supply the desalination plant) would be around 500 US$ or less, the price to beat is 5,500 US$, but considering that added solar power surface produces power that might be used, I would say that a more reasonable cost would be below US$ 4,000, which is still a lot.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the detailed answer again. Clearly, there exists a business opportunity to innovate on these systems, make them cheaper and sell them in my new city.

Both the systems you link to are reverse osmosis systems which require electric power to run the pumps etc. Solar radiation -> electric power is only 20% efficient. My understanding is that membrane distillation tech uses hot water (60 degrees in OP link), which can run on solar thermal systems + small amount of PV. Solar radiation -> thermal energy of water can be 80%+ efficient, so the price of the whole system might come down significantly from the $5000.

<comment><USER4> Yep, but it was a comparison aimed to the real world and costs, not abstract efficiency.

Given that you need for both 5-10 square meters of surface exposed to the sun and assuming (and it is not necessarily given) that solutions "A" and "B" have the same "current" (maintenance, spares, consumables) costs, I don't care if solution "A" is more efficient than solution "B", I only care if solution "A" costs less than "B".

If it does, then it should cost much less, as solution "B" might have a tangible advantage (once you have purified enough water the solar energy can be used for other uses).

Now, be nice, check the actual Solar Spring Gmbh site /the spin-off of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems mentioned in the wikipedia article ), and see how - strangely enough - they build/sell both "A" and "B" solutions:

[https://solarspring.de/en/products-and- services/#pg-356-2](https://solarspring.de/en/products-and-services/#pg-356-2)

[https://solarspring.de/en/solar- purification/](https://solarspring.de/en/solar-purification/)

In any case high efficiency - usually - means more sophistication, added components, and what not, so rarely exists a solution that is more efficient AND costs less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As always with filters, there's the question of longevity. FTA: _"The water vapour then travels through the pores in the membrane toward its colder side and leaves the salt behind"_

⇒ chances are that salt stops this from functioning after some time. How much time, and how easy is it to remove the salt, clearing the filter?</comment>


Raising Money, Some Data and Tactical Advice, Letters to Graduating YC Companies, Letter 2 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.xobni.com/asmith/archives/50

<comment><USER2> Adam, why is it bad to raise more than 10x your last round.

<comment><USER3> Isn't that around what the YouTube guys took on their Series A? I'm sure the circumstances are different for every startup, but raising an inordinate amount of money too quickly probably means you're needlessly diluting yourself. I agree with staying lean, as sometimes raising too much money can breed complacency.

<comment><USER4> Is YouTube unique with bandwidth requirements? I hear they were burning through millions even early on.</comment></comment></comment>


Network analysis of the credit crisis spread - <AUTHOR> http://arxivblog.com/?p=1097 http://arxiv.org/pdf/0901.1392v1 <comment><USER2> The paper is very short. He basically applies principles outlined in the first two papers cited to the market over the last year.

"Some distance properties of latent root and vector methods used in multivariate analysis" [http://biomet.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/53/3-4...](http://biomet.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/53/3-4/325)

"Hierarchical StructureinFinancial Markets" <http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond- mat/9802256>

The first is behind a journal wall, but if you're at a university you should probably have access. The second is free for everyone! Yay.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love this paper, only thing that blows my mind is the two formula's he came up with to calculate correlation matrix and adjacency matrix...anyone know where I can begin to learn such things?

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps this would help: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation>

I have only just skimmed the paper so far and can't really comment more on it right now.

In case anyone else is interested, this is the link to the paper: <http://arxiv.org/pdf/0901.1392v1>

<comment><USER3> Thanks hotpockets, I guess it's time to study now :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone know what kind of math is used for these network analysis? Linear Algebra?</comment>


Dr. Zev Zelenko Addresses Chloroquine/Zinc/ZPAK Critics - <AUTHOR> https://soundcloud.com/kmcradio/kevin-mccullough-dr-zev-zelenkos-chloroquine-critics-update <comment><AUTHOR> Zelenko's statistics to-date:

\- 1450 patients total:

\- 405 high risk patients, \- 3 drug treatment (chloroquine, azithromycin,zinc sulfate)

\- Results: 2 deaths, 4 on respirators who recovered, the rest survived.

<comment><USER2> Great for him, if true. He has not published data in the past[1], so we weren't able to verify his claims.

Assuming they are true, it's still not enough to go on when making decisions for other patients. For example, these drugs could result in lasting heart damage for some patients who were going to survive the virus anyway.

1\. [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zelenko-669-coronavirus- pa...](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/zelenko-669-coronavirus-patients/)</comment></comment>


About Liberland - <AUTHOR> http://liberland.org/en/about/ <comment><USER2> > Hi there friends . Our country is a new establishment . Many people are > asking me for citizenship. Our country is so small only 3.000-4.000 people > accepted. We are expanding to fill the Danube. Please; Syrian, Kurds, Arabs, > Russians and Chinese are not write me. Because we will not accept them.

A good start for a country called Liberland, I expect that it is just a trollish post

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't make sense, a libertarian country should accept any race.

<comment><USER3> They are liberals not libertarians.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are probably right, two very completely different ideologies.

<comment><USER4> There are a lot more than two ideologies in those terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "I have a football team, therefore I exist."

I'm sure Descartes would rephrase his famous though to something like the above, had he been contemporaneous of us (and tweet it as well).

These Liberlandeers need to create a proper national football team first to be recognized. Being between Croatia and Serbia, they should have no problem in getting good players.

Almost all of these European micro-states have national football teams which compete. Even Gibraltar has a team now (their home games are in Portugal). Vaticano doesn't have a team though, and I don't remember seeing Monaco as well.

<comment><USER6> Both Vatican and Monaco technically have national football teams, but neither are FIFA members and thus don't participate in international tournaments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It looks like its success depends on Croatian attitude. Basically, Serbs believe that anything West of the Danube in that area is Croatia, whereas Croatians argue that borders are more complicated (apparently following the old path of the Danube, which has long changed). As part of the complication, this territory is left unclaimed by Croatia because, following the disputed border, it would be Serb; but Serbia doesn't care about it, because it's West of the Danube and they're happy sitting on the Eastern bank.

Basically, the minute Croatia accepted the current state of things (which they will probably have to do, once Serbia joins the EU), they would likely take over anything West of the Danube, ending "Liberland". As it is, they have to decide whether maintaining their (likely doomed) claims is worth accepting this "Liberland" entity trolling on their border.

<comment><USER8> Why exactly do you think the Serbian claim has more merit?

<comment><USER7> I don't think it has "more merit", but pragmatically:

1) if Serbia joins the EU, borders disappear because of Schengen, it becomes a somewhat-academic debate, Serbia keeps control of the Eastern bank.

2) if Serbia does not join the EU, borders stay in place, no EU state is ever going to help Croatia go to war for a few square-km of Balkan swamps, Serbia keeps control of the Eastern bank.

From this point of view, the incentive for Croatia is to extoll the maximum amount of compensation it can as part of the EU membership process of Serbia, because it's unlikely it will ever get anything more.

Then again, this would assume rational actors, and the history of those lands is full of extremely irrational ones, so...

<comment><USER9> Rational actors do not need to resolve border disputes quickly.

For example, there has been a border dispute between Germany and the Netherlands for centuries about what part of the Ems-Dollart waterways belongs to whom. Even when, after World War Two, there was significant discussion about the border, resulting in small shifts of the border ([http://archive.law.fsu.edu/library/collection/limitsinseas/i...](http://archive.law.fsu.edu/library/collection/limitsinseas/ibs031.pdf)), this didn't get resolved.

Result is that, in 2011, Google maps didn't really know where to put the border ([http://www.thelocal.de/20110221/33241](http://www.thelocal.de/20110221/33241))

This conflict was finally 'resolved' in 2014 by deciding that the border will remain ambiguous ([http://www.dw.de/germany-and-the-netherlands-end- centuries-o...](http://www.dw.de/germany-and-the-netherlands-end-centuries- old-border-dispute/a-18020219))

<comment><USER7> That would be scenario 1 -- the border becoming an academical exercise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hello Liberland, welcome to the 21st century, where you can't call yourself a sovereign nation until you get your own first level domain. (and even then...)

<comment><USER11> Nowadays they probably could get one - all they need is $250k and a few servers. ".liber" is still unclaimed: [https://gtldresult.icann.org/application- result/applications...](https://gtldresult.icann.org/application- result/applicationstatus)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Start with prostitution, drugs and alcohol and you will see an inflow of cash to get it all started.

<comment><USER13> Ah, the mythical better state, with blackjack and hookers.

<comment><USER14> Netherlands, you mean?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wikipedia has some more info: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberland)

</comment><comment><USER16> The one thing that project fails to see is that no small nation can be independent without full and unrestricted access to sea or at least proper airport. Sounds like the idea was created by utopians or hobbyist rather than people that know anything about creating country. Or scammers, but hopefully thats not the case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Landlocked countries [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landlocked_country](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landlocked_country)

Some very small countries examples: San Marino, Liechtenstein, Andorra.

<comment><USER16> I didn't said it is impossible, I said it will not allow you to be truly independent. San Marino - under Italian influence. Liechtenstein - Germany. Andorra - Spanish/French.

If you would do research on them you would see how many things they are not allowed to do by their neighbor. And how many things the country is forced to do. If they would start making issues, they would be just destroyed by economical blockage.

MAJORITY of landlocked countries are dependent on others. Only countries with established history and reputation can to some extent be independent, like Switzerland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Third smallest sovereign state?" Atlantium would beg to differ ;)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Atlantium](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Atlantium)

</comment><comment><USER18> Why is there a Facebook logo in the footer, which simply links to Facebook?

</comment><comment><USER19> Get the latest news via Official Liberland News Facebook page. [https://www.facebook.com/liberlandnews](https://www.facebook.com/liberlandnews)

<comment><USER20> The official page is facebook.com/liberland

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oh, a Micron-nation. Not the first one though.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_micronations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_micronations)

<comment><USER22> I'd think a micron-nation to be quite different to a micro-nation.

<comment><USER23> A lot smaller, for starters.

<comment><USER24> So what is the theoretical population limit for a micron-nation?

<comment><USER23> I guess it depends roughly on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. (A micron is a micrometre, which is a thousandth of a millimetre.)

<comment><USER24> That's a hard point. What if the micron-nation is inhabited entirely by selfless individuals?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'll believe it when it is successful.

Running a country is hard, ideology or not.

</comment><comment><USER26> Will they be setting up a free market for children?

[https://mises.org/library/children-and- rights](https://mises.org/library/children-and-rights)

<comment><USER23> Well, that was an interesting read. There are going to be a lot of children with attachment disorders in such libertarian countries.

<comment><USER27> Are you seriously proposing that the primary reason that people invest in their children is that it is mandated by law?

I understand how people want to give the government credit for a lot of things, but are you really going to hand them credit for _your own care for your children_?

(I suspect this falls under the category of "being in such a hurry to say bad things about someone you disagree with that you don't stop to think the full implications of the insult through".)

<comment><USER28> I seriously wonder what would be the reason to have a child (or to keep a pregnancy) if a person don't want one and is not going to feed/care for one.

Guess, even the weirdest pro-pregnancy activist would figure out abortion would be a much more humane way of killing than starving to death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> :3

<comment><USER29> Honestly, I find a purely libertarian country to be an exciting and great project. Yet it may be too great to be achieved. With a territory of just 7 km^2 and with almost nothing at all already done (no people, no economy, no buildings, no services…) it pretty much seems as an utopic idea and like the country won't last too much. Just hope they get some progress soon…

<comment> Y-bar > a purely libertarian country

… which does not accept citizenship requests from Syrians, Kurds, Arabs, Russians and Chinese …

Not very libertarian in my opinion.

(Source: [http://liberland.org/en/forum/?threadID=5510225855311e5b0b0c...](http://liberland.org/en/forum/?threadID=5510225855311e5b0b0cf))

<comment><USER30> That was a troll post (see other comments in this thread).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Just for reference, this country is about the size of a soccer field [1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measur...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measurement#Football_field_.28area.29)

<comment><USER2> 7 km^2 doesn't equal 7.140 m^2, is is 1.000 times bigger

<comment><AUTHOR> It's bigger than the Vatican or Monaco.

<comment><USER32> As are, for instance, many college campuses, many business campuses, and of course lots of farms. The Vatican is microscopic.

<comment><USER33> The point was that it is larger than some existing countries.

<comment><USER34> And you can launder a lot of money in a soccer field.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Resources to understand mail servers indepth? - <AUTHOR> I would like to know how mail servers function and all the authentication mechanisms like DKIM, DMARC, SPF etc. What resources would you recommend?<p>I would prefer a book but excellent articles and tutorial series would also be great. <comment><USER2> Can start with the smtp standard [https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5321.txt](https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5321.txt) and follow the citations at the bottom to learn more about DKIM ect.

OpenSMTPD has a few presentations on the changes they made and explains architecture [https://www.opensmtpd.org/papers.html](https://www.opensmtpd.org/papers.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I will start reading the rfc asap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Come work for us at Oath (Yahoo and AOL mail). Free food and great learning environment.</comment>


President Obama on Patents - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ4Zo0XyNsw

<comment><USER2> I believe that is Limor Fried from Adafruit (a Raspberry Pi manufacturer) who asks the question, unless I am mistaken.</comment>