Bringing Pokémon GO to life on Google Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/09/bringing-Pokemon-GO-to-life-on-Google-Cloud.html <comment><USER2> A bunch of the comments are already pointing out the launch issues Pokemon Go had, and it's well known that a rep from AWS was also throwing jabs at them during launch for their issues.

It would be naive for everyone to assume that a high traffic launch is all about the cloud underneath and only that.

The article didn't mention any of the technical details of the Pokemon application itself, for all we know the infrastructure was humming nicely and the application itself didn't scale. Or the other way around, or a combination of both or one of the other of thousands of moving pieces it takes to launch something.

<comment><USER3> > it's well known that a rep from AWS was also throwing jabs at them during > launch for their issues

That's pretty low. FWIW Simcity 2013 is on AWS and the launch was far more disastrous. Doesn't prove anything.

<comment><USER4> Programming architecture/problems in SC, yes.

I think Pokemon scaled remarkably better than any app many of us have ever dealt with, seeing the crazy demand spikes. You would run into a lot of app issues, data choices, a lot of things that don't just get solved from simple uses of autoscaling.

<comment><USER5> It scaled better than Twitter, it hit the same active user count (or close to it) in a month that took Twitter years to reach, and Twitter would sh*t the bed all the time with the infamous "fail whale" popping up for users constantly even with its steady increase in growth over time and time to adapt. Twitter was pioneering at reaching that scale, that many now use as guide/lessons learned now, so its forgiven, but how many companies see that much growth, that fast?

<comment><USER6> To be fair -- Twitter is a much harder architectural problem (significant fan- out and fan-in problems to solve).

Pokemon Go is less complicated in terms of the conceptual model. There are only a few pretty simple ways that different players can interact (gyms, lures on pokestops, that's about it).

<comment><USER7> On the other hand, Twitter is dealing with strings < 140 character. Pokemon Go is tracking all the trainers and Pokemon at all times, not to mention the gyms and lures.

<comment><USER8> Sure, but you can partition based on country, city and even block, it's clear how this should work.

None of Twitter can be partitioned like that because every user follows different people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Not everything was smooth sailing at launch! When issues emerged around the > game's stability, Niantic and Google engineers braved each problem in > sequence, working quickly to create and deploy solutions. Google CRE worked > hand-in-hand with Niantic to review every part of their architecture, > tapping the expertise of core Google Cloud engineers and product managers — > all against a backdrop of millions of new players pouring into the game.

IMO This is the most valuable thing in this article. It essentially says what others are pointing out. You can't just press a button and have scale. It's not that easy. You have to tackle many layers. Considering they 50x'd their worst case scenario it would have only taken a few bad queries to fuck shit up.

<comment><USER10> > You can't just press a button and have scale

Actually you can... if the system was designed for this purpose.

<comment><USER11> Technically true, but it doesn't make sense from a business perspective. Anticipating and accounting for every scaling issue costs a lot of money. Most businesses would decide that satisfying 90% of scenarios is sufficient.

<comment><USER10> Business is irrelevant once you're sure that the service will go into production AND will have some amount of users.

It's known that some things will break from time to time (e.g. servers, hard drives, networking). If you've designed the application poorly so that a single minor failure can snowball to the entire system, it's guaranteed that your site will fall apart periodically, costing you lots of money each time.

At this point, the best technical AND business converge to "pick an option that can sustain [minor] breakages". Either you've done it like that from the start, or you're in the process of rewriting/redesigning your site.

<comment><USER11> > Business is irrelevant once...

Not really. In the case described they had accounted for some maximum number of users and instead got 50x that number. It is reasonable to design a system which handles just some planned number as long as there is a strategy in place to manage a situation beyond those limits. In this case the strategy was to apply engineering effort. That seems like a valid risk management plan to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Currently on Cloud here at Google. I would like to elaborate "Google CRE seamlessly provisioned extra capacity on behalf of Niantic to stay well ahead of their record-setting growth."

Just because you have the resources does not make for a well scaling service. As outlined in the post, "Google CRE worked hand-in-hand with Niantic to review every part of their architecture, tapping the expertise of core Google Cloud engineers and product managers". Look past the chart, this wasn't just an estimate for Google, it was also for Niantic. You don't have unlimited development resources, not every aspect of an application may have had the time to flesh out a scale-able approach.

Netflix didn't scale out overnight. I'm sure we've seen their techblog about X extremely specialized framework/tool they've built out over the years. I'm impressed with how quickly Niantic achieved a playable experience.

<comment><USER13> > I'm impressed with how quickly Niantic achieved a playable experience.

I have mixed feelings about this, didn't they drop more than half their peak user base to achieve playable experience?

<comment><USER14> Where did you read that? Pretty sure peak was after all the problems.

<comment><USER13> I experienced it myself. There was chunks of 6+ hours where you could not connect at all, and you had to restart the app every 10 minutes (or every third pokémon), and wait while it was draining your battery like an hungry walrus on its bucket of fish.

However, it became perfectly playable after their "tracker patch" (which was the trigger for the massive exodus that followed).

<comment><USER14> What tracker patch are you referring to? They changed it several times and I hardly doubt there was any massive exodus due to any of them. The loud minority on reddit is not representative of the game's community in large.

When the game experienced the most instability it hadn't even been launched in most countries.

<comment><USER13> The first one, when they dropped third parties and removed the already-bugged step count under close-by pokémons.

It's purely anecdotic, but after that release, popular spots (with multiple pokestops and arena in one place) usually crowded with more than 50 people playing actively were down to one dude on a bench.

Sure the "loud minority" is not representative of the whole game's community, but they were it's core players. They shaped the game's community (and niantic didn't helped) from the beginning. And it didn't help when those people decided to stop playing.

Back to server's issues, Google CREs did a very good job during these times. They can't be blamed for trying to scale an app that was absolutely not designed to get this high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is pure marketing that might convince decision makers and execs that didn't play Pokémon Go.

No doubt, the CRE program could prove valuable. But in this case, they are congratulating themselves on a rocky and widely panned launch of a product on their platform. One might wonder, "If this is what deploying a viral app on Google Cloud Platform looks like when you have help from Google engineers, what chance does anyone else have of getting something right on their platform?"

I think that's probably the wrong takeaway, but it's not difficult for me to imagine that being the only conclusion one has.

<comment><USER16> "Niantic phoned in to Google CRE for reinforcements" -> Note this was post- launch on the world's largest ever mobile launch.

<comment><USER15> Article states that it was still prior to the US launch date.

<comment><USER16> "the next day". Looking on the graph shows there wasn't a lot of time between initial launch, and exceeding the world-wide worst case estimates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> From a user point of view it did not go nearly as smoothly as it is made to sound in this post. I would love to see a follow-up post about what went wrong along the way, and whether the hype surge might have continued longer and stronger if more people picking it up for the first time would've had a smooth experience (rather than lots and lots of errors talking to the servers).

<comment><USER18> Look at this chart:

[https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GLc5ve5_djc/V-ysZgW6uDI/AAAAAAAAD...](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GLc5ve5_djc/V-ysZgW6uDI/AAAAAAAADIY/-tVg2iC0qQcWBwjc0vBVBxVcJ9Yhbij6gCLcB/s1600/niantic-1.png)

The worst case scenario was 5x, which was a factor of 10 off. If you are that far off when you do your capacity planning, you can be pretty sure you've got problems throughout your entire stack.

<comment><USER19> That shows their estimates were _terrible_.

The article says (in one of the only bits of real information) that they blasted past their estimates with only Australia and NZ just 15m after launch.

Whoever came up with those numbers must have had some serious methodology flaws. I know they couldn't predict that it would become the biggest online game ever for a while, but the initial demand prediction was clearly _way_ off even before it started growing like a rocket.

<comment><USER20> >That shows their estimates were terrible.

Pokemon Go became the most-downloaded app in history within the first few days.

Are you saying that's the bar that people should estimate at launch?

<comment><USER21> It shows that they were over their worst estimate total volume in one day. Were they really expecting less than a few million user-days in total?

<comment><USER20> From the article, it seems like a few million users/day is a typical expectation, but record-breaking isn't.

>Throughout my career as an engineer, I've had a hand in numerous product launches that grew to millions of users. User adoption typically happens gradually over several months, with new features and architectural changes scheduled over relatively long periods of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I feel really bad for this article. It is the Kobayashi Maru of sales pitches. Working in IT/DevOps/Servers/Software Dev/Etc all my life, I understand that even if you have the servers, scaling can be hard and time consuming. I also can't even imagine supporting the number of people they have. So they did an awesome job.

However, the Pokemon Go player in me says "Wow, even with all of Google's resources, they still couldn't manage to get this remotely stable for several weeks?".

I'm sure there was many amazing technical feats that occurred, and from a deeply technical level this is a good sales pitch. I'm sure a good sales person could spin it even better "50x your expected traffic? Google Cloud can do that!". But beyond that... most people will probably see this as a failure.

</comment><comment><USER23> On one hand handling such huge amount of traffic is crazy hard and an amazing accomplishment however the tone of the blog is off putting because of just how much a trainwreck it was from the users point of view.

<comment><USER24> Yeah the graph indicates resource demand rather than user playability. This is why it's critical for KPIs/metrics to be grounded in reality. Reality being that data reflects your business objectives - which in this case is the user was able to enjoy the experience.

From watching my partner play the game (from Canada), the scaling issues went on for days and it serverly hampered her enjoyment of the game. This should be a cautionary tale of having worse case scenario planning at launch time, which a large organization like Nintendo should have factored in (when planning with Niantic).

This article doesn't fairly reflect that. But maybe they are acting confident now because they _will_ be better prepared next time? They can point to Pokemon Go to why you need experts who have been through the trenches of a rocky high-traffic launch.

<comment><USER25> It's probably because their KPIs/metrics are in fact grounded in reality, the reality of being the cloud platform provider. This isn't a blog post by Niantic.

<comment><USER24> Right the KPIs were Google's not Niantic... there's an interesting story here that's being glossed over as a result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > paid off when the game launched without incident in Japan, where the number > of new users signing up to play tripled the US launch two weeks earlier.

The "without incident" part is hilarious. The game was unusable for over a week when they added more countries. There were memes all over the place about Niantic execs ignoring the burning server and pushing to launch in more countries anyway. I wonder if any of them actually tried to play as a user on the public servers and spent hours trying to logon and it failing, or locking up soon after for a week.

Not to mention they never even got the original tracker functionality (1 footstep, 2 footstep, 3 footstep for anything nearby) working again after that, they had to replace it with a lower load knock off where you just see what is around a certain location that isn't very popular. So not only did they not even keep login working, they cut features too.

<comment><USER27> Those countries were all side-loading US APKs anyway, so not launching in those countries wouldn't have reduced load on the servers much.

<comment><USER28> There were no Pokéstops, arenas or spawns in Asia after beta and before launch so even if you had the APK it was of no use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> To those that played and were not impressed with game/system stability: okay, okay. I wasn't there, I don't know.

...But, according to the _nightly news_ , it was a tremendous success. The word 'ever' came up a lot.

PMG was the first successful overnight/viral planet-wide/client-side launch. People who had never heard of it saw it on the news and then visited their local app store in response.

And according to the googleblog, it took a tremendous expenditure of money, hardware, electricity, skills, and knowledge to pull it off.

Makes me wonder... Did some other game/app go almost global, but fall short for the want of those very resources described in the blog post?

Something for app devs to think about.

<comment><USER30> The broad consensus in the games press was that Pokemon Go is a great example of a strong gameplay loop overriding a massive technical failure.

Google's post is weird because they seem to think the game was a technical success. Google may have done great, it's impossible to tell from the outside, but the actual user experience is - or at least was when I played it - awful.

<comment><USER31> I think what this article is saying is that the game was relatively technically successful. It admits there were some problems but scaling your infrastructure to 50x what you expected is pretty amazing and most people would have expected more downtime for a similar situation.

So not total-success, but very successful for the situation at hand.

(disclaimer: I work at Google but not on GCP)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This was one of the most downloaded apps from all time. Went from zero to gazillions of requests in a single day. Nobody could have planned this. Com'on these guys are great.

<comment><USER33> Yeah the negativity here is overwhelming. Which, isn't surprising, HN's comment section isn't the cheeriest place on the internet. But seriously, for a tech news aggregator you'd think more of the users would appreciate at least the difficulty of scaling an app from nothing to THE most popular app ever, in a matter of days. Yeah they had/still have issues that they could've mentioned in the article, but it doesn't take away from what they DID do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I really appreciate this blog post. It gives a great insight into what is going on behind the scenes. I was really surprised by how low their their worse case scenario was. Absolute worst case would be every single person capable of running the game playing. Obviously this wouldn't happen, but for a brand with as much recognition as Pokemon, I think "What if everyone in the world started using this" is a good place to start. Obviously this won't happen, but it's important to think about why it won't happen. "What if everyone who has played Pokemon or wanted to know more about Pokemon downloaded this game?" is still unlikely, but it's less unlikely. It's probably not far off from what actually happened.

I don't want to criticize their model too much, because it's obviously simplified for our benefit. However, it appears that their worst-case scenario was "What if we become the next bejeweled or [insert popular F2P game here]?" It's a ridiculous assumption, because Pokemon has a much broader appeal than any other casual game, cause the IP is so insanely popular, and the game still appeals to people who just want a casual game. I know it is a lot easier to get fired for spending too much money than it is for not spending enough, but it's a stretch to say their launch traffic was beyond imagination. Niantic should start looking for new analysts now if their current analysts honestly thought this traffic was outside the realm of possibility.

I don't consider the server issues to be much of a problem though. It's hard to ensure everything will work perfectly under that kind of load. You have to accurately predict who will be playing, how much they will be playing, how they will interact with the game, and so much more. However, I do think they need to figure out their communication with the fan base. I know that there will be a vocal portion of any constituency that hates everything. That isn't a good excuse for communicating poorly. Good communication will help almost every relationship.

<comment><USER35> > I was really surprised by how low their their worse case scenario was.

There's no Y axis on the chart, so we don't know exactly what their estimate actually was. Regardless, I'm pretty sure Pokemon GO exceeded _any_ reasonable expectations of popularity, even accounting for the brand and marketing efforts behind it.

From my own experience, lots of people that never engaged with mobile games before started playing Pokemon GO within days of its release. My entire extending family was playing the game. Local bars have become arenas for Pokemon fights. The adoption of this game was absolutely _crazy_.

So even given the scaling problems, the features they had to remove from the game, and the bugs they introduced, I think this is still a solid win for Google CRE.

<comment><USER34> I'm assuming the Y-axis is to scale. Assuming it isn't, the numbers they give imply what actually happened is 10x worse than their worse case. Unless Niantic defines "worst case" as "1 in 10 chance of happening", being an entire factor off in a worst case prediction is really bad.

For example, one of the highest estimates of daily US users I saw was 25 million. That's way more than I would have guessed off the top of my head, but it's no where near 10 times what I would have guessed the "worst case" scenario would have been. Pokemon Red and Blue sold 9.85 million copies on gameboy alone. My worst case scenario would assume that literally everyone who played the game as a kid would want to check out the game as an adult. Our worse case is massively more accurate than theirs just using the Gameboy numbers alone, with the assumption that each cart sold was only played by one person.

The assumption that people who have never played mobile games before wouldn't be interested in Pokemon is kind of crazy as well. I can't think of another mobile game that has as much name recognition before it released as Pokemon go. It's a beloved franchise, whose popularity spans generations. On top of that, cellphones are far more ubiquitous than the gameboy ever was. There are people who are playing Pokemon go who have never been in to mobile gaming, but I doubt the number of people playing Pokemon Go who have never played another video game in their life is much, much, much smaller.

We had our team building event for my company at an barcade last year. Every single high score was set by someone older than 50. Literally every single person at the company had played Ms. Pac Man before, including some people who literally have never owned a cell phone. The people who don't own a cellphone are obviously not playing Pokemon Go, but video games are not niche, and have not been niche for a long time now.

I will give Niantic massive credit for recognizing how much of a problem this was going to be immediately. I'm sure I would have under-allocated resources on launch day too, and I don't see myself handling that issue as well. Still, there's no way in hell what actually happened would be 10x worse than my actual worse case.

<comment><USER36> >Pokemon Red and Blue sold 9.85 million copies on gameboy alone.

That was two games, and that was "by the end of their run".

>The assumption that people who have never played mobile games before wouldn't be interested in Pokemon is kind of crazy as well. I can't think of another mobile game that has as much name recognition before it released as Pokemon go. It's a beloved franchise, whose popularity spans generations. On top of that, cellphones are far more ubiquitous than the gameboy ever was. There are people who are playing Pokemon go who have never been in to mobile gaming, but I doubt the number of people playing Pokemon Go who have never played another video game in their life is much, much, much smaller.

You're aided by hindsight. PKGO grew faster than any prior mobile game or any previous pokemon IP, by a large margin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Nice, but it's disappointing that they do not mention any hard numbers such as concurrent players, requests per second, traffic, etc.

That makes the article a lot less interesting and worthwhile.

<comment><USER37> Or anything technical whatsoever. The article sounds very much written by a marketing person.

<comment><USER38> I would agree. No hard numbers are mentioned so it's hard to understand the context or scale. However Google did mention their new service offering, Google CRE, that gives you access to this same exact service that the post discusses.

So yes this is a PR piece. Not very technical at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> >... Google Cloud customer...

That's pretty misleading - I believe Google's parent company still own part of Niantic. So other customers shouldn't expect the (implied) same access to Google resources.

<comment><USER40> Google is just one of many series A investors in Niantic:

Alsop Louie Partners

Cyan Banister

Google

Lucas Nealan

Nintendo

Pokémon

Scott Banister

You & Mr Jones Brandtech Ventures

<comment><USER41> Yes, but being a spin-off from Google I imagine most of their employees are ex-Googlers and as such have a good network inside Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I can't be the only person who looked at that graph and burst out with a cackle that startled everyone around them. The deep and inescapable dread of that fire burning around you even as you make history must have been quite a feeling.

Or in the vernacular of youth: "This is fine. Everything is fine" as a scaling graph.

</comment><comment><USER43> So their estimation was that nothing would increase? I am not sure I trust the two parallels lines in the graph. The estimation should have been a spike at the release date a small drop and some grow over time, no?

<comment><USER18> It's just an upper-bound. "At its worst peak it'll be 5x"

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's easy to blame on the cloud where the application server probably had a lot of issues.

</comment><comment><USER45> Related: a similar story of scaling the mobile app "Draw Something", where usage was doubling every day.

[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/168799/Scale_Something_Ho...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/168799/Scale_Something_How_Draw_Something_rode_its_rocket_ship_of_growth.php)

<comment><USER46> Thanks! From a technical perspective this is a lot better written. And not so much marketing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Pokemon GO really disappointed me, i'm a big fan of Pokemon and this app really sucks. It is really buggy. I stopped playing two weeks ago because of the GPS instability. I hope they get it right some day. But i'm glad they fixed the server issues.

</comment><comment><USER48> Interesting read but a bit too positive overall. I think the biggest failure of the launch was not learning from the initial launch zones before launching the other zones.

The launch in Europe was a catastrophe imo (constant crashes and freezes). I don't know how much of this is to blame on the cloud infrastructure but I suspect it's not nothing. I feel they didn't provide nearly enough infrastructure given the data they should have had from Australia/USA.

All that being said I think they smoothed out everything and the system seems to be running very nicely now given the scale. It's certainly a positive engineering tale overall.

</comment><comment><USER49> Anyone know what kind of backend Pokemon Go is running on? I'm guessing Java or Go?

<comment><USER50> As the following aggregation states possibly Java and Google Cloud [1].

[1] [https://www.quora.com/What-server-infrastructure-is- Pok%C3%A...](https://www.quora.com/What-server-infrastructure-is-Pok%C3%A9mon- GO-running-on-that-is-performing-so-poorly)

<comment><USER49> Looks like it, thanks for the reply.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Software Scalability issues aside. I am not sure if Pokemon Go would ever be possible if it not on the cloud. How could you get instances up this fast. It had explosion of players in very little time. There is no way you could have planned this resources ahead of time. And it die down fairly quickly, which means you would have lots of unused server if it were not for cloud.

</comment><comment><USER52> Would be really interesting to read up on some of the bottlenecks they had identified and how they optimized them away. I know at some point they had to turn off the "location where a pokemon was caught" map and the radar to keep the thing responsive :)

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm really disappointed with Pokemon GO. Despite the issues with the launch I still had a lot of fun playing it initially. But the tracker breaking together with the lack of communication from Niantic killed it for me.

Interestingly, the one time they did decide to communicate was when they announced that they banned a bunch of third parties from accessing their server[1]. Of course, just like in this post, they show a graph with a missing y-axis which tells you very little about the traffic they actually received.

It's surprising that this wasn't mentioned in the Google blog, since according to Niantic it was thanks to this ban that they were able to launch in more regions.

1 - [http://pokemongo.nianticlabs.com/en/post/update-080416/](http://pokemongo.nianticlabs.com/en/post/update-080416/)

<comment><USER53> I don't do this often but I am confused so I will ask: can anyone explained why they downvoted this?

<comment><USER50> Unsure, it seems only posts that reflect the negativity of the application are being down voted.

Being this type of site I wonder if a lot of the employee's at Niantic have accounts and could be down voting?

Either way it would be nice to hear why other users are down voting these because the users comment is within the guidelines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> _When issues emerged around the game's stability_

I'm most curious about how they identified issues. Obviously crash reports are a thing, maybe traffic to a login error page, twitter complaints etc...

I wonder how they managed prioritizing issues.

</comment><comment><USER55> The article says containers were used, but the D word is not mentioned?

<comment><USER56> Kubernetes doesn't necessarily imply Docker.

<comment><USER31> IIUC it pretty much does. When I asked for the option to just run an arbitrary command on a host (instead of a container) the answer was pretty much to create an empty container that mounted the host root to the container root and pretend the container wasn't there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> the Pokemon Go Cloud story in Chinese. [http://www.ithome.com.tw/news/108719](http://www.ithome.com.tw/news/108719)

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm more interested in how far popularity has crashed.

I was previously interested in the game but Niantic has shown zero interest in being responsive to the community's concerns.

<comment><USER59> There have been a few numbers about the crash. It's there, but Pokemon Go still remains one of if not the most popular mobile game on a day to day basis.

Even with the servers stabilized the game has plenty of other issues that need addressing. The "nearby Pokemon" window is still broken and shows no sign of ever getting fixed. People in suburbs and rural environments are still stuck playing in extra grindy hard mode. The distance tracking has a speed limit that is way too slow (10.5kph) and noisy so it largely fails if you jog and or get on a bike. The gym battles are comically out of balance (slow defensive Pokemon are blatantly overpowered).

They shouldn't be hard problems to fix but Niantic doesn't seem interested. They toyed with a half-fix to the nearby Pokemon window, but only deployed it in their hometown and then seemingly forgot about it. It's clear the client has enough data to do the launch style footsteps (see: all of the PokeRadar apps on the store), but for some reason Niantic has no interest in re-enabling it.

<comment><USER60> > It's clear the client has enough data to do the launch style footsteps (see: > all of the PokeRadar apps on the store), but for some reason Niantic has no > interest in re-enabling it.

I've always suspected that was because they quickly realized that getting pokemon to not spawn in dangerous spots was an insurmountable task, so having tracking that encourages players to go to those locations was asking for even more lawsuits that what they face currently for that issue.

edit: added quote I was responding to

<comment><USER61> that's quite sad if we live in a legal environment that games that tell you "go here" basically can't be made. :-/

<comment><USER62> Or.. just don't point people to private property? Plenty of public space available.

<comment><USER59> Finding a map for the entire world that denotes what is public and what is private property is going to be difficult.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This is just a worthless advertisement.

</comment><comment><USER64> This all doesn't really matter when you lock out anyone who has a rooted phone, with no warning. Sure, a few people were cheating with them, but anyone running cyanogenmod or any other custom firmware, or anyone who wants to get rid of a god-awful OEM skin, is now screwed out of the game. Ironically, this hasn't stopped the actual cheaters or people using AutoMagisk.

<comment><USER37> Wait, they did that? That's like blocking anyone from playing any games when they have the administrator password to their computers. Being very pro- rooting (for independence reasons, how do you "own" a device that you don't have access to?) this is a good reason to boycott the game on any phone.

<comment><USER65> Yeah, they did that using a very aggressive Google-provided tool called SafetyNet designed exactly for that purpose, which downloads a program from Google's servers and runs it with system-level privileges to do the checks.

<comment><USER64> Incidentally, as I understand it SafetyNet is intended for verification of device integrity when you use Google Pay - i.e. as a NFC wallet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Also interesting that it said "WAS the biggest Kubernetes deployment". This tells me that they've tanked hard enough for that to no longer be the case.

<comment><USER16> When you write blog posts reflecting on something that happened you often use/think in past tenses. Don't try reading too much between the lines on things like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> It's been 10+ years since WoW launched, and that scaled better than Pokemon Go. It didn't need no fancy cloud or autoscaling or the few moore iterations Google got, and it's a game that you know.. actually has a use for networking.

You could make an offline Pokemon Go version and not notice any difference.

<comment><USER68> "OMG there is a Dragonair! Do you see it?" "Na, I'm not on your server.."

Blizzard scaled using appropriate technologies for its time. i.e. sharding basted on "Realm" and enforcing active player limits. This scaling mechanism was used by every MMO I knew about until EVE.

EVE pioneered the modern MMO. It is no longer acceptable for an MMO to be sharded by server. Even WoW has been aggressively trying to scale its architecture and infra such that it can re-connect these shards into more cohesive worlds. With the most credit to them, they have a lot of technical debt in this regard, but the fact that some servers are labeled "full" with wait queues to join, implies that they still don't have the technology to scale let alone connect all their servers[0].

[0] Note, there are also other reasons (i.e. in-game economical and political reasons) why they are not aggressively connecting more shards.

<comment><USER69> EVE still uses sharding in a sense. One system cannot scale over more than one server. So when you jump through a gate or bridge, you are probably connecting to another server. This limitation shows itself when a system suddenly becomes the flashpoint for a ridiculous battle, and CCP has to scramble and move the system to a beefier server.

<comment><USER68> Totally true. If it came across like I meant EVE has no sharding mechanism, my bad.

> One system cannot scale over more than one server.

In this regard, Blizzard's dynamic realms are really interesting. Ideally, we can move to a world, where even single "systems"/"zones"/"areas" are able to scale horizontally.

I have zero experience with it, so I don't know if it can practically scale to solve this problem, but [http://www.paralleluniverse.co/spacebase/](http://www.paralleluniverse.co/spacebase/) has a really cool set of features that MMOs could take advantage of.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Seamless would not be the word I would use. I would instead argue that what Pokemon Go proved was that Google's Cloud is not of the same quality, at scale, that AWS is.

<comment><USER71> What exactly shows that?

What it probably shows is that using the cloud isn't a magic bullet to making you scale indefinitely, you need to work on your code to decouple from the infrastructure too.</comment></comment>


Java can finally join strings - <AUTHOR> http://www.mscharhag.com/2014/03/java-8-string-joining.html

<comment><USER2> Apache Commons StringUtils#join does that same.

</comment><comment><USER3> Could've used joins in Java a couple weeks ago when I was doing the CCC (Canadian qualifier for IOI)!</comment>


Yahoo Finance has added over 100 cryptocurrency quote pages - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/cryptocurrencies <comment><USER2> God help us.

At this point the sane people are staying quiet. The madness is in full swing, a large number of fools are desperate to be parted from their money, and there is no point trying to stop them.

Even on Hacker News, there are no comments below saying "this is stupid". Just "how can I throw my money into this pit?" "I'm planning to build an AI algorithm to throw my money into this pit, can anyone advise?" and "if I throw my money in this pit, will it double or triple over the next week?" Good luck, guys.

<comment><USER3> The truth is nobody knows what will happen. Meanwhile people who have a risk tolerance and budget keep making money.

The 'sane' people have missed out on some of the best returns in history. There is more there than you think, and everyone should investigate for themselves rather than having a knee-jerk reaction.

<comment><USER4> > The 'sane' people have missed out on some of the best returns in history.

Are these actual returns (ie, BTC sold for fiat) or paper returns on an assumption of market depth at current spot?

Serious question. Most bitcoin enthusiasts I know are either still holding their bitcoin, or traded them for other cryptocurrencies. Few have crystallised their gains in fiat.

<comment><USER5> Everyone I know in BTC cashed out months/years ago. Makes them feel sick thinking about what they've missed out on recently. But I keep telling them they made a the same decision any rational actor would

<comment><USER6> and those I know who still hold BTC, the few that have tried to cash out so far haven't received a single dollar, euro, yen, or pound.

<comment><USER7> So if you transfer BTC into Coinbase, you can't get your money out?

<comment><USER8> $10k at a time, unless you make some kind of agreement.

There are also ATMs and other exchanges to tap. Cashing out a large sum is nearly impossible.

If you have millions worth of BTC, it's better to just auction them off at a discount to a large buyer.

<comment> etr-strike To be clear: You can sell 100 btc today for USD. Coinbase will hold your USD (and the balance is insured). They will limit your withdraws to 10k, however. To take out more faster, you'll need to contact them and speak with a human. None of this seems unreasonable.

<comment><USER9> It paints a bleak picture of bitcoin runs on insolvent and poorly insured exchanges when the bottom falls out.

<comment> etr-strike Coinbase is insured via FDIC, so I don't think "poorly" as an appropriate adverb.

<comment><USER9> Assuming everything goes smoothly in that regard, it's still a limited coverage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seriously everyone, please stop using bitcoin. The environmental impact of energy generation for mining and proof-of-work is totally untenable. I understand this is key to why Bitcoin works, but we absolutely should not be scaling a technology which so inefficiently uses energy. This is not an argument about the profitability of mining or other technical merits of Bitcoin. Even if all cryptocurrency mining were to use zero-carbon energy generation, we still should not use it: that energy ought to be used for more practical pursuits.

A few links about the insane amount of energy used for each transaction: [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin- mi...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywbbpm/bitcoin-mining- electricity-consumption-ethereum-energy-climate-change)

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin-m...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/27/bitcoin- mining-consumes-electricity-ireland)

Anyone know of cryptocurrencies which will not blow up our planet's carbon or energy budgets? I've heard of proof-of-stake algorithms, but don't understand that approach very well.

<comment><USER11> > that energy ought to be used for more practical pursuits.

I don't think you or anyone else should get to decide what amounts to practicality of energy consumption. Lots of people burn hydrocarbons all day long so they can live in the burbs and have their own driveway and nice big walk-in closets and not have to take an elevator or stairs up to their apartment.

> Anyone know of cryptocurrencies which will not blow up our planet's carbon > or energy budgets? I've heard of proof-of-stake algorithms, but don't > understand that approach very well.

They're not trustless, but they are a very interesting approach to the problem. If they indeed are superior, they might supersede bitcoin and other PoW friends at some point. But it's really hard to move past the fact that bitcoin is already "this hard" for folks to understand. Moving beyond it to new coin designs will be an interesting challenge.

Proof-of-stake is discussed in the peercoin whitepaper [1] in plain, understandable language. Best to start there IMO.

[1] [https://peercoin.net/assets/paper/peercoin- paper.pdf](https://peercoin.net/assets/paper/peercoin-paper.pdf)

<comment><USER10> We should be actively trying to discourage pointless energy and resource consumption, including people living in the burbs and having huge homes. I'd agree with the idea we shouldn't be making decisions about how people spend energy if and only if we could price in all externalities related to energy production adequately. This task, I believe, is more or less impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I feel obligated to post this comment:

Bitcoin is stupid.

It's a bubble. If you make money it will only be on the backs of massive losses on the other side, and potentially globally destabilizing / destructive effects.

<comment><USER13> You can say the same about art and gold.

<comment><USER14> Gold has obvious ornamental and industrial uses.

And art is a totally different market. Largely the players are the richest of the rich, who invest in below 1% of their net worths largely for decorating their castles. Other forms of art have recreational and entertainment and genuine uses.

Even tulips have their utility, Bitcoin too. The question here really is at what price?

<comment><USER13> > Gold has obvious ornamental and industrial uses.

Which contributes almost nothing to its price.

> And art is a totally different market. Largely the players are the richest > of the rich, who invest in below 1% of their net worths largely for > decorating their castles. Other forms of art have recreational and > entertainment and genuine uses.

There is medium priced art too and some people buy it as investment. You can also think about people buying collectibles if buying art is something you associate with decorating castles.

What entertainment value has unopened box with plastic spiderman figurine that would justify price of few hundred bucks? It has enteraiment value of me showing you I own it. Bitcoin has the same utility and it also doesn't justify its price.

Value comes from scarcity, durability and transferability.

<comment><USER14> Ornamental use of Gold is the primary diver for its prices. Ask women.

Art has its uses. Because we haven't yet automated creativity.

<comment><USER13> I guess that most gold in the world in the world must be in women's hands since their appreciation of ornamental purpose is the primary driver of price.

Do you think guys wear golden bracelets and chains because they look pretty?

Art has its uses, gold has its uses, collectibles have their uses and bitcoin has its uses but most of their price comes from scarcity, durability and transferability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Remember this quote from Greenspan, folks: "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"

Edit: oops, sorry, I stand corrected: it was Keynes.

<comment> etr-strike Sorry you can't see the value and potential of Bitcoin. I hear there's a new social media platform selling ads; you should keep your money with them.

<comment><USER16> You should be ashamed of yourself for this comment. This is the sort of discourse I would expect to see in the comment section of an article about something tied to identity politics, not a discussion about support for a digital currency.

Is it really impossible for you to believe that someone could see value and potential in bitcoin while believing that the current price is not a an accurate representation of it's value?

Maybe they are skeptical of any community that dismisses well-measured criticism with cries of "FUD". Maybe they see bitcoin as cryptocurrency v1.0 but it would be foolish to think that the first implementation of such a technology was the best possible implementation. Maybe they are skeptical of the way many bitcoin-holders seem to prioritize their personal net worth increasing over bitcoin's use as a currency. Maybe they think the future lies in a more extensible platform like Ethereum.

Bitcoin and the blockchain are very interesting technologies full of potential but I don't understand why their proponents seem to take everything so personally.

<comment> etr-strike Sorry, I don't believe proclaiming "Bitcoin is a bubble" is a "well-measured criticism" of Bitcoin. And people taking time out of their day to make such baseless claims are coming out of the woodwork lately.

When the iPod was announced, people frequently commented on purchasing apple stock, or how you can't go wrong purchasing apple. No one was calling apple a bubble when taxi drivers were making those statements.

Sorry for speaking up against people who make baseless bubble claims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A somewhat related question: If I buy Bitcoin for e.g. $1.000. If the price doubles, how much can I expect to actually get out? I reckon there will be some cost-overhead for the exchange service etc. Am wondering if we're talking about 1%-5% or more like 20%?

<comment><USER18> On top of the fees there's another point you have to consider: not all buyers will buy at $2k. You may be able to sell 0.1 BTC, but further buyers will buy at decreasing prices, such as $1950, or $1920 or further down. So for bigger volumes you get less than the current advertised value, which is the max you can get if you sold the minimum amount of BTC.

<comment><USER19> True, but the spread at GDAX BTC/USD frequently hovers around $0.01, and within $0.05 of the price there'll be 10's of bitcoin available.

A quick check right now had 5.2 BTC (~$86k) on either side of the $0.01 spread. Slippage has plummeted as exchange volume has gone up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What are the tax implications of playing with Bitcoins? (disclaimer: I have no desire to do so, just wondering about it). Say I bought some BTC a couple of years ago, and now sell them at some exchange like Coinbase or Coinmate or whatever. Do these exchanges report 1099s to the IRS? If not, how will the IRS ever find out? (I'm not proposing cheating on taxes either, but just curious about what goes on). What if you just keep the gains and keep quiet?

<comment><USER20> > Do these exchanges report 1099s to the IRS?

Not usually:

"With the exception of some business accounts, Coinbase does not provide 1099 forms. Coinbase does however provide a specialized Cost Basis for Taxes report which will help with filing your taxes." [1]

After this hypothetical transaction you will likely owe capital gains tax. It would be hard to hide any significant amount from the IRS if you actually want to convert it to USD, for example by transferring to a bank account [2]. Regardless, the IRS is definitely paying attention and going after back taxes on large exchange accounts [3].

[1] [https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/149...](https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1496488-taxes- faq?b_id=13521)

[2] [https://pocketsense.com/deposits-reported- irs-7557.html](https://pocketsense.com/deposits-reported-irs-7557.html)

[3] [http://fortune.com/2017/11/29/irs- coinbase/](http://fortune.com/2017/11/29/irs-coinbase/)

<comment><USER21> I always thought the $10,000 reporting rule was for physical cash deposits. Is it also triggered when you, say, transfer $10,000 from your online brokerage account to your checking account?

<comment><USER22> I believe that this doesn't trigger a mandatory report, however, it would be reasonable to expect that the IRS will ask every major bank for large incoming transactions from e.g. Coinbase, audit every one of those who hasn't listed any capital gains on their tax report, and charge the appropriate taxes+fines. Of course, they don't have to do this now, they'll start next year after everyone has filed their taxes, but they can review it a few years later if they wish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Where can one get historical and current prices of all crypto currencies as a downloadable dataset, even for commercial use?

<comment><USER24> Not all, but here's a start:

        https://coinmetrics.io/data-downloads/

You can also use the cryptocompare API:

        https://www.cryptocompare.com/api/

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone knows where I can sort cryptocurrencies by block time?

BTW anyone knows what is the cryptocurrency with the highest block time?

<comment><USER26> Random fact: Ripple, IOTA and Stellar Lumens don't use blockchains.

<comment> etr-strike Random fact: Ripple, IOTA, and Stellar Lumens are not decentralized and trustless.

<comment><USER27> Long term plans of IOTA at least are to provide a trustless currency. Right now it has a centralized coordinator which is a neverending source of issues. Hopefully it can be successfully removed in the coming years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Yahoo finance powers the stocks app on iOS. I haven't seen these new ones work there, fwiw.

<comment><USER29> It's because this article should be more appropriately titled: "Yahoo Finance Embeds Widget", which is [https://www.cryptocompare.com/](https://www.cryptocompare.com/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> IOTA is #4. I have a good feeling about that one right now.

I just put $275 into it. Too bad I didn't think to do that back in October.

<comment><USER30> Which exchange did you use to buy IOTA? You can't really buy IOTA directly with USD, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> this is great, much nicer interface/interactive charts than coinmarketcap. Good work, yahoo!

</comment><comment><USER32> wow that is one poor looking website, look like one big banner page with a little table in the middle.</comment>


Ask HN: What are best places to visit in the bay area for an entrepreneur - <AUTHOR>

I am going to the states this winter and I would like to visit the bay area. Where should I go to get a glimpse of that famous Silicon Valley spirit? <comment><USER2> Start here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor#mediavi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor#mediaviewer/File:IC_Plaque.jpg)

Why?

Read this: [http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/26/the-first-trillion- dollar-s...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/26/the-first-trillion-dollar- startup/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity)</comment>


5K App Developer Challenge: Genealogy App Contest - <AUTHOR> http://rootstech.org/challenges/overview

<comment><USER2> _If you've been thinking, "there should be an app for that," now is your chance. Solving that problem could earn you $5,000 and the admiration of millions._

I really hate these app and design challenges, they marginalize the profession and quite honestly I think people do it because they want to offload the fact that they cannot identify good developers. Therefore they create these challenges in the hopes that a good developer will rise up out of the ranks. Why developers who are worth far more than 5k choose to compete in these events that marginalize their career is beyond me, they only encourage the practice. IF I solve that problem I am going to earn far more than 5k because there is no reason for me to give away my hard work once the product is finished, I can find a guy to market it for 10% of the take and cut a company that wants to exploit my efforts out of the picture.

On an unrelated not, your guys logo is really familiar to a stock art asset that is for sale [http://depositphotos.com/4930811/stock-illustration- Circuit-...](http://depositphotos.com/4930811/stock-illustration-Circuit- tree.html) you may want to consider changing it, as gaining a trademark or signature mark on it will be very difficult given the prior art.

<comment><AUTHOR> We appreciate your feedback, kls. We want to assure everyone that the purpose of the contest is to spur creativity and collaboration among the developer community itself - not for us to exploit the eventual winner. The contest winner will have full ownership of their idea and can further productize it all they want. In fact, we encourage that, and if we are able to assist in the promotion of their great idea along the way, even better. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts with us.</comment></comment>


Scientists build army of a million microrobots that fit inside hypodermic needle - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/scientists-build-army-of-1-million-microrobots-that-can-fit-inside-a-hypodermic-needle/ <comment><USER3> Many here have commented on the lamentable weaknesses of this development in terms of size constraints and so forth, and on possible medical applications, which could indeed be fascinating and useful for saving lives, but what about the much darker potential of technology like this developing heavily:

Basically, if we're worried about modern mass surveillance, try to imagine a situation in which nano-scale surveillance is possible of large numbers of people, with devices that attach to nearly anything, are virtually invisible and could potentially even have the capacity to record location, audio and video of anything they're applied to, including both targeted civilians and large areas in which you could never be sure whether or not some government/police controlled army of microscopic bots is watching, tracking and listening. Don't tell me that exactly that wouldn't occur to both corporations and governments as this develops further.

<comment><USER4> I'm reminded of the novel The Golden Globe, by john varley. In that novel very powerful AI handle most day to day operations of society, and it is mentioned by one of them that - technologically speaking - they could create the single most despotic and privacy-eliminating regime in human history. A place where even an individual's thoughts and emotions are no longer secret, let alone snooping on every word they ever speak. The AI then says it could do this, but it will not, and has intentionally blinded itself to all such data streams. The central intelligence refuses to examine the incoming data as it believes doing so would violate its subjects human rights. In-novel this is why the AI doesn't just tell our protagonist where the big bad is, but I've found it an interesting possible trajectory for the future. Where every word we say is monitored, but it is strictly illegal to view said monitoring.

I wonder if that is the most realistic version of a future were we still have private lives.

<comment><USER5> > I wonder if that is the most realistic version of a future were we still > have private lives.

I think it's almost impossible for someone to build these data streams and not look at them. Look at the mass amount of surveillance every major country is participating in. Government officials in open and democratic countries have lied about the amount of surveillance they are doing, get caught, and keep the surveillance going. I think the more probabilistic future where we have private lives comes from futures where that technology is never built. This is to say, privacy is almost certainly dying.

<comment><USER3> Unless a still unknown counter-technology comes along to make privacy and individual empowerment much more concrete. Or, more conservatively, existing or near-extrapolation derivative technologies democratize enough to make surveillance far too costly for state actors without blowback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there anything besides ( _massive_ ) engineering challenges standing between more advanced devices like this physically eating away at cancerous tumors in the same way physicians use special maggots for wound debridement?

<comment><USER7> Calling those robots is a bit misleading, because they lack self-control. Control logic we know is large for very small robots. If you want a micron- scale robot you only get about 100 transistors for its "intelligence"[1]. There are certainly things it could do, but probably not autonomously navigate, map and recognize tumors.

We just don't have the expertise for those kinds of thing, at least not yet. A plethora of sensors (that can detect cancerous cells) and this sort of technology would be needed. We'd essentially be trying to create artificial cells, a monumental task nature took billions of years in refinement (even if we can find shortcuts sometimes) -- too many very complex systems (energy, better sensors, better movement inside the body, "cognition", etc.).

Maybe in 50 years of continued research? 100 years? I don't know.

[1] The state of the art is about 100 transistors per square micron. This assumes you could drive and interface with them adequately. Cells accomplish all they do without any transistors at all, it's all protein-based sensors and DNA-encoded behavior, I believe.

<comment><USER6> Maybe the route toward what I'm envisioning (and hoping for) is genetically engineered or enhanced cells. Modify and existing system that already does a lot instead of trying to recreate a cell from the ground up.

<comment><USER8> This isn't far from what immunotherapy is doing. Cancer can only thrive when it avoids an immune response, either by looking sufficiently like a healthy cell to remain below the radar or actively suppressing actions of the immune system.

Immunotherapy looks for ways to counteract this 'feature' and allow the immune system to do its job and murder the bastards.

We're still effectively in the early days of this approach to treating cancer and results are mixed, but it shows incredible promise and I feel that it ultimately will be the way we beat most if not all cancers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is awesome, but I think these will need an EOL/self-destruct mechanism. What happens if these things just linger in the body after performing a function like destroying cancer cells?

<comment><USER10> I wonder if kidneys could filter them out and just urinate them out?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Michael Crichton - <USER2> [https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0061703087/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_UHC...](https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0061703087/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_UHCsFb1DTZ93R)

<comment><USER12> Crufty links make my eyes twitch. :) Here's a cleaned up version: [https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0061703087](https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0061703087)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Imagine a beowulf cluster of these...

<comment><USER14> Eevblog had video on using $0.01 programmable chip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not the headline we need to quell the vaccine conspiracy theories..

<comment><USER16> By _vaccine conspiracy theories_ , I'm assuming you mean the aspect about microchips secretly being added to vaccines. But doesn't it actually add validity to the technological aspects of these concerns when a newly published paper details successfully adding 1 million microchips capable of injection into the human body? How wouldn't it?

Obviously this doesn't touch on the nefarious underpinnings of the vaccine debate, but in what other scenario would presentation of new research validating the technological capabilities of something be a reason to scoff at? Sounds like a classic case of cognitive dissonance where you've been presented with fresh evidence that adds support to something contrary to your beliefs but are disregarding what's actually been presented and instead are digging your heels in.

<comment><USER17> You seem to misunderstand.

Yes, it does add a tiny bit of validity to the technical aspect. Which is a _bad_ thing, because it encourages those people. Even worse, the headline _sounds_ like it adds much more validity than it actually does, so the bad encouragement is magnified based on their lack of understanding.

There is no cognitive dissonance in saying "ugh, those morons are going to act like this proves their entire claim right, when it actually takes the claim from being incorrect in 44 different ways to being incorrect in 'only' 43 and a half different ways". Nobody is disregarding the evidence here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Then problem is when people take headlines like these and use it as an argument against vaccination.</comment>


Show HN: Eddy Travels – AI travel assistant on WhatsApp with voice understanding - <AUTHOR> https://www.eddytravels.com/blog/2019/6/25/eddy-travels-launches-on-whatsapp-2 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone!

My name is Adomas Baltagalvis and I'm the co-founder and CMO of Eddy Travels.

Eddy Travels is an AI-powered travel assistant that helps people plan their trips more easily. Travelers can send text or voice messages to the digital assistant and receive personalized suggestions for the best flights, hotels, car rentals, and other services in seconds.

Some things you can try: "Flights from Toronto to New York in August" "Hotel in Berlin on September 21 - 27" "Italian restaurants in London"

And if you have any questions or feedback, please do share them with me. Thanks!

Adomas

</comment><comment><USER2> Tried it on whatsapp, pretty good in throwing up options, and as fast as a regular travel site. The good part is that (I guess) they try to show only the best options so you can choose quickly, instead of the hundreds that ticketing sites generally throw up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for checking it out! And yes, the system analyses hundreds of different flight options but only shows the best ones based on different criteria.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> are you the builder of this ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Lucas!

Yes, my name is Adomas Baltagalvis and I'm one of the co-founders of Eddy Travels. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to share them with me.

<comment><USER3> first: on a backend point of view, how did you manage to automate the questions answers on whatsapp front ? Do you guys have an authorized access to whatsapp API? or you hooked an android device with WA business and the device recieves/send and then bridges to somewhere else (your actual endpoint) ?

ps: im interested as fellow founder and avid traveller.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the questions, Lucas. It's a standard chatbot setup - and yes, we have authorized access. We had to apply and answer all kinds of questions about our business and use case to be approved by WhatsApp. The actual integration is done via Smooch.io. Does this answer your question?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't look now, but AWS might be a billion-dollar biz (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://gigaom.com/2011/10/26/dont-look-now-but-aws-might-be-a-billion-dollar-biz/ <comment><AUTHOR> Discussion from 2011 is also an interesting read: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3159382](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3159382)</comment>


SimpleHoney acquired to make digital currencies like Bitcoin go mainstream - <AUTHOR> http://blog.simplehoney.com/usability-for-all-we-are-joining-the-wave-of-change/

<comment><USER2> As friends of the team, I'm obviously biased... But they're a solid consumer thinking team and if the bit-coin-ish market is really going to go mass, it'll need some smart people helping drive the consumer train.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was always waiting for someone I trust to get into this game. I've always found the concept intriguing but never really trusted the Bitcoin system. Awesome work! #aloha

</comment><comment><USER4> Congrats guys!</comment>


Show HN: Remod, like chmod but for human beings - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/samuela/remod <comment><USER2> Really? What is hard about "u=rw;g=r;o=" etc - literally no calculations involved.

This "reinvent things that already work fine but in javascript" is getting old.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never felt the need for chmod UI, especially with ZSH's Tab completion ([https://asciinema.org/a/249373](https://asciinema.org/a/249373)), but… well, why not.

How does it handle multiple files?

edit: oh

        $ remod tmp/*
        Unexpected arguments!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi @helb, author here. ZSH's tab completion looks awesome! I'm not a ZSH user so I wasn't aware of that but I'm happy something similar exists in that ecosystem.

Re multiple files: I've thought about this a little, but I'm not sure how the UI would best represent the (potentially conflicting) permissions of multiple files. Open to suggestions however! In those situations I personally use remod to remind myself of the proper chmod command, and then copy-paste-run the chmod command with whatever edits are necessary.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Magic Sandbox – learn Kubernetes on real infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://magicsandbox.com <comment><USER2> I found Kubernetes to be easier to learn than the docs would suggest, and I wrote up a short article as a high-level overview. I hope it helps someone, and that it saves you a lot of time:

[https://www.stavros.io/posts/kubernetes-101/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/kubernetes-101/)

You may want to spend two minutes reading this before going into the post's website, as an overview.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a really cool platform, but it kinda exposes the extremely high barrier of entry to getting running with k8s. It's a very powerful and useful platform, but it doesn't seem to strike the right balance with it's abstractions to actually make intuitive sense to developers.

<comment><USER4> This is the problem I have with almost all container orchestration systems (DC/OS, K8s, etc.) None of them can go from 1 node running all your apps to 100, in an easy straight forward manner. I wrote about this not too long ago:

[https://penguindreams.org/blog/my-love-hate-relationship- wit...](https://penguindreams.org/blog/my-love-hate-relationship-with-docker- and-container-orchestration-systems/#zero-to-a-hundred)

I've also worked at both Kubernetes shops and DCOS/marathon shops and I honestly don't understand why people are choosing K8s. I'm sure a lot of it is the marketing and the power of Google behind it, but our DC/OS cluster had hundreds of nodes and could scale applications really well. Plus I found the marathon json files way less confusing. (Plus if you really want, you can use k8s to schedule containers on DC/OS, alongside marathon).

That being said, that DCOS platform team was 11 people and they had tons of custom scripts, wiki pages, labels and specific networking ingress/egress points that all worked together. (You could even use a label to specify if you wanted to run containers on the local VMWare cluster or in AWS; with nodes that auto-scaled out into AWS in high load).

I've met people at smaller startups who've gone the Nomad route instead, which seems a lot more sane in many ways, but still requires pretty careful planning and setup for large deploys.

<comment><USER5> So I'm heading a shop with some serious legacy deployment woes. I've got plans for everything but scaling. Now, we're likely to hire out Ops eventually, but for now I'd like to learn devops _(backend eng currently)_ and cut my teeth by getting the ball rolling on a slightly more robust setup.

With that said, what do you recommend? We're a small shop, and our auto scaling needs a very very minimal. We're non-public facing, so our user base is pretty predictable. Yet, I'd like to migrate us to a more modern and mature system. Naturally I was looking towards K8s because of the overwhelming support I see for K8s on HN/etc, but your comment makes me question that.

Honestly, it's the vast options that really screw with my head. There are just so many tools. And where they lack is not immediately evident from the outside. It's difficult to pick a direction. At the moment I'm reviewing Nomad, as it sounds interesting to work with our existing by-hand infrastructure.

<comment><USER6> What you are going through is why "Just use Heroku" is still great advice from wise people.

There are so many options out there that until you actually hit the point where Heroku is too expensive or no longer makes sense...Heroku is your best option (if AWS is an option).

<comment><USER7> Don't forget Dokku - [https://github.com/dokku/dokku](https://github.com/dokku/dokku)

Dokku is _extremely_ flexible Heroku alternative, and a good introduction to dev-ops. You can start-out treating it like a "dumb" Heroku host, but install plugins and customise to your heart's content. You can easily migrate from apps/buildpacks to Dockerfile's one app at a time etc.

Whilst it's great for getting your apps up and running, and learning basic dev-ops at your own pace. It's not really designed for scale/reliability. So if your small business/app/service starts to take off, you'll quite likely need to migrate to K8s, Docker Swarm, Amazon ECS, if not for scale, for redundancy/reliability.

<comment><USER2> I rented a 10 EUR VPS from Hetzner and put Dokku on it. It currently runs ~10 side-projects and I couldn't be happier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, we're really trying to keep up, but we've gone to 300+ servers in a few minutes. I'm happy to answer any questions here you may have

<comment><USER8> what does that mean? are you going to support more servers or you can't provide more servers?! Thank you for this. looks interesting. would love to get hands-on but it says "We are booting up your cluster!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey we hit our hard limit of 500 servers, I'm trying to shut down old ones, really sorry about that, but traffic is just crazy

<comment><USER9> Sounds like the good kind of problem! Let me chime in and say thank you for implementing and sharing this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much! Rationally I know this is a good thing, but doesn't feel that way right now

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is this different to www.katacoda.com?

<comment><USER11> I would also like to know. I initially thought it was katacode.

<comment><AUTHOR> we really love katacoda! we're a bit more oriented on trying to visually explain what's happening (not there yet) and we're trying to give you a very high level of interactivity

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Super interested to see how this works once the hug has subsided. This is potentially fortuitous timing; my employer wants me to cover most of this material by end of quarter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot, really didn't expect this kind of traffic. If you ever want to get in touch you can reach me at mislav@<website-domain> or through our slack that's on our landing page and inside console

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Will it be possible to contribute lessons to your platform? I find conferences a terrible place to share knowledge on K8s, this makes it a lot easier and hands-on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! I'm working on an editor right now, feel free to contact me at mislav at magicsandbox dot com if you're interested

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Super cool! Is only 1 level available right now?

EDIT: Further, the front page marketing and actual app don't line up 1:1 very well when it comes to listing lessons.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, sorry, we're still building it up, we didn't plan for this big of a reception, just wanted to test if there's any interest out there

<comment><USER15> Good problem to have. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> What do the Facebook Google Microsoft logos at the bottom of this page mean? Are these companies Magic Sandbox customers?

</comment><comment><USER17> Is this for someone who has no experience with any of this or is there prior knowledge required?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, we currently host only an intro course but we're building out advanced courses now. So no kubernetes prior knowledge is necessary, but we assume you're a developer with some experience

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > 1 year early bird access

> Get 1 year unlimited access to MSB Premium including all lessons and weekly > releases.

> This is a non-recurring, one time payment.

You probably need to fix this, or at least clarify? Is it a yearly sum or one- time payment?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, we're doing a presale with unlimited access for 1 year in one payment

<comment><USER18> That sounds good, but I would suggest clarifying this. Good luck btw!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can't find it on your site... where are you spinning up all these servers for the sandbox? GCP? Azure? AWS? Somewhere else?

<comment><AUTHOR> Digital Ocean currently. Just running minikube and kubectl proxy for the feed

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is awesome, I been looking for something like this.</comment>


Technology news aggregrator of aggregrators - github-cat http://www.pixelstech.us/application/techtrend/ <comment><AUTHOR> Neat idea, but that font isn't suitable for any serious webpage. While we're at it, the design could be much better. You/They have the right ideas with quick switches in the form of tabs, but the whole thing could be polished a lot more while retaining the original simplicity.

<comment> github-cat Thanks for the feedback. This is a weekend project and it will be improved along the way.</comment></comment>


Evil Bash Commands Explained - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/devmount/9-evil-bash-commands-explained-4k5e <comment><USER2> In this context, dd and /usr/bin/dd are not the same thing. While this alias "fix" might stop you from accidentally executing it in a Trojan script, it wont work if the path is included.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not really a fan of trying to make commands safer via aliases. I fear it encourages bad habits that could hurt you if you use an environment that is missing them.</comment>


What Is CompSci Equivalent to Federation of American Scientists - <AUTHOR> ML is the new darling of the defense industry and we're about to force Apple to set crypto precedent for the FBI. Are you planning to give up entirely or is there an organized movement to resist? <comment><USER2> Eff?</comment>