TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S. - <AUTHOR> https://www.tsmc.com/tsmcdotcom/PRListingNewsAction.do?action=detail&language=E&newsid=THGOANPGTH <comment><USER3> Actually, this is true. The big question is what's going on behind the scenes. China has been busy building up its own supply chain after the U.S. closed off shipments of any U.S.-based R&D to Huawei last summer. It also has made statements that Taiwan is part of China since then, which has left the U.S. without an advanced-node fab. Intel is at least a node behind both Samsung and TSMC, and the U.S. has no trusted foundry on U.S. soil capable of 7nm volume production, let alone 5nm or 3nm.

For the U.S., this is a potential disaster. If China marches into Taiwan, the U.S. will be left with no advanced-node manufacturing and it will have lost the technology race. It would take at least four to six years to recover, and by that time China would own the market. This is very scary for the U.S., which needs to develop AI chips at the most advanced nodes because density equals more accelerators and other types of processing elements. Even that isn't enough, which is why companies developing AI chips are stitching together chips that are larger than a single reticle. ([https://semiengineering.com/the-risk-of-two-supply- chains/](https://semiengineering.com/the-risk-of-two-supply-chains/))

It goes further than that, too. The DoD needs AI chips, too. In the past, the DoD relied on older nodes. That's changed because it needs transistor density for AI. More MACs equals more performance. On top of all of this, TSMC owns the bulk of the fabless market. So this will happen. The big question is who's funding this move.

<comment><USER4> China marching into Taiwan would be a losing move. Never mind the civil unrest, the entire world would bail out of China. Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand + India would be even more alerted than they are right now with HK situation. The narrative in these countries is quickly evolving. CCP is over playing their hand by engaging in asymetrical trade.

<comment><USER5> > Never mind the civil unrest, the entire world would bail out of China.

That is not clear.. at all. Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand -- the non- US western allies -- have all known exactly what China's end goal is and have down jack diddly squat to put pressure on them.

The only thing preventing China from taking out Taiwan is the United States. Europe and the rest of the world is too cowardly to even do anything, which is really unfortunate.

<comment> type-2 Russia took crimea without any issue. Do you really think anything will happen if china took taiwan by force? It's a matter of time before china takes taiwan.

<comment><USER6> Another aspect of Russia taking crimea is that the people living there to a large extent welcomed it.

There are some that are pro-unification in Taiwan, but it's a minority. Most people are pro status quo, and the number that are for declaring independence is growing. The ruling party is very pro-independence (ideologically speaking, in practice they have to move slowly and maintain status quo to some degree), meaning releasing their claim over mainland China, changing name from "Republic of China" or "China" to Taiwan, seeking UN membership etc.

The other big difference is that Taiwan is quite capable of defending itself to some extent. China will win eventually, but not without devastating the island. This will affect everyone economically. China and the world. If TSMCs factories in Taiwan are destroyed, it'd have an enormous impact on world economy. The production of high-tech electronics would be stunted for years. Russia annexing crimea had absolutely no practical effect on the world.

The fact is that everyone, China included, is relatively happy with the status quo. The CCP has to make a scene now and then to appease the fragile ego of a large portion of the mainland chinese. But I really don't think they actually care that much about invading Taiwan.

<comment><USER7> > Another aspect of Russia taking crimea is that the people living there to a > large extent welcomed it.

Man, are saying this in your right mind? Where do you read this stuff?

People there abandoned their property, and ran! This is what they did.

Nobody openly welcomed it in their sane minds, besides few thousands elderly ex-party members, and alt-right weirdos.

The fact that I hear sentiments like this in the West is the direct proof that Russian psyops truly work.

<comment><USER8> I have visited Crimea last year as a tourist and talked with Crimeans personally (in Massandra and Alushta). Where do you get your information? In my experience people are mostly happy with the Russian rule and with changes it brings (simply compare investments before 2014 and after). Of course, those who work in IT, have to virtually reallocate via VPNs to circumvent western sanctions, but they don't blame Russia for that (and VPN is a must-have either way for tech savy due to the Roskompozor). One common complaint was somewhat higher prices, but situation got a bit better after the Crimean bridge got put into operation. Also another complaint which I heard is that new government is much stricter about tax collection and preventing illegal business. Yes, Crimean Tatars a bit less happy with the Russian rule on average compared to ethnic Russians, but I think it mostly can be attributed to the lost profits from illegal businesses, significant amount of which was traditionally operated by tatars (see the issue of illegal construction). But it's important to note that they got much more freedom in respect of cultural autonomy than they had in Ukraine (their language is now official republican language on par with Russian and Ukranian). Only after Ukraine lost Crimea they have started to talk about an autonomy for Tatars, which is quite pathetic in my opinion.

<comment><USER9> > Crimean Tatars a bit less happy with the Russian rule on average compared to > ethnic Russians, but I think it mostly can be attributed to the lost profits > from illegal businesses

It's a bit more complicated than that. The historical and relatively recent mass starvation, persecution, mass murder and forcing into gulags is likely relevant. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Tatars](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Tatars)

<comment><USER8> Note that not only Tatars have died from mass starvation in 30s and 40s. It hit equally hard Russians, Ukrainians and other ethnic groups (e.g. it had consequences as far as in the Volga region), so Tatars (as well as Ukrainians) weren't an exclusive target here. AFAIK Tatars weren't forced into Gulags without proofs of collaboration with Nazi forces (the number is estimated around 15k, which is only approximately 5% of the total Tatar population). And while the deportation is indeed should be condemned, as the significant death toll which was a consequence of it (though I wouldn't call it a "mass murder"), I don't think it's correct to attribute Soviet deeds to the modern Russia, especially considering the Russian rehabilitation law specifically targeting Crimean Tatars.

While I will not deny that a certain amount of bad blood still exists due to the deportation, I think most Tatars more concerned about their current livelihood (though I have talked only with 2 tatars, so my sample size is quite small).

<comment><USER9> The Wikipedia article states that 191,044-423,100 Tarters were deported, depending on which source is used (this doesn't mean they all went to Gulags, but hard labour in Uzbekistan was what most did). It's described as ethnic cleansing and mentioning the Tarters was banned. Baria and Stalin's actions killed 34,000 to 109,956 Tarters during this time and 80,000 homes and farms lay empty.

You have 2 more personal sources than I do.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_T...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_Tatars)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Important detail: This is not GIGAFAB facility.

Only 20,000 wafers per month is between mini- and megafab for TSMC. I suspect the production goes to US defense applications. Pompeo tweeting about it seems to confirm it.

[https://twitter.com/SecPompeo/status/1261143980634509318](https://twitter.com/SecPompeo/status/1261143980634509318)?

>Secretary Pompeo >@SecPompeo

>The U.S. welcomes TSMC's intention to invest $12B in the most advanced 5-nanometer semiconductor fabrication foundry in the world. This deal bolsters U.S. national security at a time when China is trying to dominate cutting-edge tech and control critical industries.

<comment><USER11> Seems like the most of the discussion here totally missed that part - <USER2> would be no consumer grade chips and likely the prime client would be US military.

20k wafers (perhaps 450mm ones?) with unknown yield (likely 80ish) is quite low. For reference AMD 5700 has die area of ~250mm.

<comment><USER10> I don't see how that big investment for relative low volume production would make sense for consumer products.

If the fab is located inside the US, AMD and NVIDIA can bid for many US government contracts that would go for Intel. After GlobalFoundries quit the race, US defense contractors have only Intel as supplier for many components.

<comment><USER12> > I don't see how that big investment for relative low volume production would > make sense for consumer products.

If the consumer product is a toy then sure. If it's a medical device then it could make sense. It's all about margin.

> After GlobalFoundries quit the race, US defense contractors have only Intel > as supplier for many components.

Maybe. If you want millions of chips a quarter then sure. But if you want 1000s a quarter then there are many options, depending on the node I guess. I'm not going to Google a complete list but one obvious example is Texas Instruments.

<comment><USER13> You can seriously get small run chips made on 7nm in the US? I just don't believe it.

<comment><USER12> Was 7nm a requirement? I didn't gather that from the thread.

Small run 22nm is certainly available. These are fabricated in the US, albeit at an Intel site. [https://www.mosis.com/pages/intel_sponsored_fab](https://www.mosis.com/pages/intel_sponsored_fab)

<comment><USER13> I mean the article is about them building a 5nm fab in Arizona, so i assume they do need it if they want to build fast AI chips that compete with China should it invade Taiwan.

<comment><USER12> What's a fast AI chip? :)

What process node Google uses for TPU, one possibility for an AI chip, is not in the public domain since v1 but it's very unlikely this chip is on the bleeding edge. Cost/benefit is likely not there for this use case. But only Google knows for sure since they run the cloud and get to define "benefit".

[https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/10/tearing-apart- google...](https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/10/tearing-apart-googles- tpu-3-0-ai-coprocessor/)

<comment><USER13> As I understand it there are reasons you want to not be behind in process technology as it makes your chips much faster. If your economy wants to keep pace I think this is a clever decision by the US government to entice TSMC to build a 5nm fab in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How much software depends on Apple, AMD, Nvidia, or Qualcomm chips? TSMC is an indispensable part of our industry's supply chain.

Most of its chips are produced in Taiwan and over 75% are sold to customers in either the USA or (mainland) China, so TSMC understandably tries to remain neutral in trade disputes between the two. Tim Culpan at Bloomberg recently predicted that this neutrality may not hold for long, and TSMC will be forced to move some production to the USA. [1]

Especially if Intel continues to decline, increased investment by TSMC could be good news for American chip fabs and the communities that depend on them. On the other hand, the factory isn't built yet.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-11/tsmc-m...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-11/tsmc- must-pick-u-s-in-chips-battle-while-intel-gets-an-opening)

<comment><USER15> Why mention "mainland" China when Taiwan is an independent country?

<comment><USER16> Taiwan's official position is that there is only one China and Taiwan is the one.

>[Taiwan] considers "one China" to mean the Republic of China (ROC), founded in 1912 and with de jure sovereignty over all of China. The modern-day ROC, however, has jurisdiction only over Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu. Taiwan is part of China, and the Chinese mainland is part of China as well.

Taiwan is de facto independent, not formally independent. Formally there is still unsettled civil war going on where each side claims the whole China.

Taiwan satisfies three of the four requirements of statehood at international law as stated in the Montevideo Convention.

<comment><USER6> There was just a proposed amendment which would change that. But it was withdrawn. Probably because they're worried about upsetting China too much.

The current government is very pro (formal) independence. But it's a bit hard to declare China and Taiwan to be seperate when China is threatening with invasion.

<comment><USER16> It does not help that US long term policy is strategic ambiguity and one China policy as well.

The goal of ambiguity is prevent unilateral declaration of independence by Taiwan and an invasion of Taiwan at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Has been under discussion for some time: "Mark Liu, the chairman of TSMC, said he had recently discussed options for a new factory in the United States with the Commerce Department. The stumbling block was money; major subsidies would be required, he said, as it is more expensive to operate in America than Taiwan." ([https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/technology/pentagon- taiwa...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/25/technology/pentagon-taiwan-tsmc- chipmaker.html))

<comment><USER18> What makes up the price differential?

<comment><USER19> Having to ship the raw material halfway across the world. More stringent environmental protections--fabs generate many tons of hazardous waste. Higher healthcare costs for the workers. Plus they use lots of water which is more expensive in Arizona.

<comment><USER18> Considering how the low cost of shipping enabled globalization I doubt the shipping costs matter much. I'm also not sure if environmental protections are that much more stringent in the US than in Taiwan. Higher healthcare costs and water might make sense, but the bulk of the water cost in semiconductor manufacturing is probably due to the purification processes required than the volume of water used.

<comment><USER20> Shipping costs matter some when you go from being right next to the factory that makes your raw silicon wafers to having them be halfway around the world. In general it sounds like a big factor is cost - you've got to get talent that just doesn't exist (or isn't as widely available) in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This would be an interesting turn of events if it came to pass. It would certainly add good data to the argument that TSMC chips are cheaper because of the economics of east Asia.

The geopolitical aspects are, to me at least, a bit over blown. Yes there has been growing concern about the integrity of the supply chain for critical resources, but that is the whole globalization problem in a nutshell. I find the calls to re-vertically-integrate the US to not be very persuasive in terms of practicality. Maybe if Canada and Mexico join the US in an economic union similar to the EU? Chips are just one part of a much larger puzzle and fabs are just one part of a supply chain that includes stops in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam for packaging and testing.

I do think it has been made abundantly clear how interdependent the world is these days. It is possible that the new clarity has caused some powerful forces to reconsider their world view. But has it changed it enough to create real and meaningful policy change? (For context, I see globalization as a means of maximizing profits, not about politics)

To my way of thinking, real change would be the ability to economically stand up a 100mm 5nm fab line profitably. That would allow the production of "jelly bean" chips (general purpose < 100M gates). That would be a pretty seismic change in my opinion.

<comment> YinLuck- >(For context, I see globalization as a means of maximizing profits, not about politics)

Globalization is just a euphemism for hegemony. First it was the British Empire, then the American Empire.

<comment><USER22> And now is the Chinese turn?

<comment><USER23> To be honest the chinese even study its raise up and have a long tv series about it — war is inevitable. Hence the peaceful raise of china is the slogan. They know you do not. Nearly 20 years of sending in students, researchers, 1000 person scheme etc. They win if it is not Xi, you may not even know until too late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is interesting. Right now TSMC seems to provide Taiwan with guaranteed US protection because they are so far ahead technologically. Apple, AMD, and the defense industry have little alternative if they want a cutting edge node. It's unclear how long they will maintain this dominance.

Maybe the long term US-Taiwan ties of factories in the US will make this worth it strategically.

I assume that all R&D will remain in Taiwan. I think this might still be a good move in the long run since it'll give more politicians stake in what happens to Taiwan (Arizona senators, etc).

<comment><USER25> What does the defense industry need a cutting-edge node for? Better drone battery life?

<comment><USER26> Imagine how much processing power is needed to analyze radar signals or camera images. If you can process more efficiently, your cooling system and electrical generator can be smaller, which saves mass for more fuel or more payload.

<comment><USER27> And they can afford to fund NRE costs that would be grossly uneconomic for most other (niche, non-mass market) applications. There aren't many industry sectors where that is the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> An earlier thread, before the official announcement, was [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23183850](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23183850). But we've merged most of the relevant comments into this thread.

<comment><USER29> But now a lot of the comments from old thread are speculating whether the move was right. When the actual news here is the confirmation of the move.

I find that a little confusing just reading the comments.

<comment><USER28> People would be posting about that anyway. No discussion colors strictly within the lines of the actual news; it always hops to adjacent questions (which is usually fine) and inevitably to whatever generic themes people associate it with (which is usually not fine: [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20generic%20discussion&sort=byDate&type=comment)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Only a few days ago they were saying they had no specific plans for a US fab ([https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20200512PD202.html](https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20200512PD202.html)).

Nice that Intel will have more local competition.

</comment><comment><USER31> I suspect this is the result of DARPA's big interposer push and it's leaking now because of the change in leadership there.

Specifically TSMC has breakthrough CoWoS interposers, can't meet demand, and the military is bottlenecked without a chiplet path made in the USA.

<comment><USER32> Something like that seems to make sense considering the investment is relatively tiny and that the factory is gonna be about 1/5th the size of the usual TSMC factory.

So it does appear like this is intended for a specific chip for a specific purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Excuse the naive question, but what technology does a fab bring to the table? As I understand it, TSMC buys most (all?) of their equipment from ASML (or a competitor), and the chip design is done and owned by their customers. What's left, aside from a giant cleanroom and some specialized operators?

<comment><USER34> Good question. There there must be something material otherwise TSMC wouldn't have such a lead on their competitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I hope to see a thousand silicon startups on the West Coast. This is a great time to join Chris Lattner at SiFive.

<comment><USER36> He works there now? Cool!

<comment><USER35> You going to apply?

<comment><USER37> I will if he recruits

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This surreal, and this is a bombshell. TSMC is to build a second 5nm plant outside of their strategic roadmap, and has to get money for it out of the blue.

How will it work out with their investors, only god knows.

And this has ultimately to pass by Taiwanese government, if it didn't already.

</comment><comment><USER38> Right next to the Foxconn plant. /s

There is precedent for fabs though, so its not totally out there.

<comment><USER39> Yeah Intel has quite a few I hear

<comment><USER40> GlobalFoundaries (ex-AMD) too. And, uh, TSMC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Is this going to be a repeat of the Foxconn-Wisconsin debacle where the state pays a company four billion dollars to buy a bunch of empty buildings and employ nobody?

<comment><USER42> Morris Chang != Terry Gou

<comment><USER43> Morris retired a few years back

<comment><USER44> he left TSMC with a good management and more trust worthy than Foxconn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> As someone else mentioned in the other thread, it's a bit odd that they're aiming for 5nm production at this fab in 2024 because 3nm should be ready to go by then. You'd sorta think that since they're already breaking ground on their 3nm fab in Taiwan that any other new builds would be 3nm as well.

<comment><USER46> I'm not exactly a chip manufacturing expert, but:

1\. By the time this fab is in major construction a lot of the lessons learned for 5nm will be known and can more readily be implemented in the USA without splitting precious engineering resources to other countries.

2\. 3nm will be the most expensive parts and sell at a premium, which will limit demand.

3\. This carries some risk, so giving up the bleeding edge tech might not be the best idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Hopefully this goes better than Foxconn in Wisconsin.

</comment><comment><USER48> I thought there was an interesting point in this economist article: [https://www.economist.com/business/2020/05/21/americas- lates...](https://www.economist.com/business/2020/05/21/americas-latest-salvo- against-huawei-is-aimed-at-chipmaking-in-china)

"tsmc could equip the Arizona foundry with American gear from its existing factories, freeing space in its Taiwanese operations for brand new non- American kit that can freely serve Chinese customers"

</comment><comment><USER49> I wonder how they are going to make up for the economic reasons this isn't generally done in the US?

</comment><comment><USER50> At least one component of the "America First" strategy I can fully get behind is bringing manufacturing back to the US mainline. If anything that last few months has taught us, it's that we must not lose our ability to produce quality, vital products. Semiconductors definitely falls into that category.

I don't care how it's accomplished, either carrots (tax incentives) or sticks (tariffs). Do what's necessary to bring the production of these vital components here.

<comment><USER51> Consider for a moment that less reliance upon foreign supply chains makes {trade, cold, shooting} war more viable.

Right now the world is peaceful and I stand in North America with an iPhone 11 Pro in my pocket and an advanced Nvidia GPU in my workstation. I'm not sure I see a problem with that state of affairs.

Reducing interdependence reduces the downside to stupid, selfish nationalistic moves. I don't want that at all.

<comment><USER52> More foreign dependence makes you more vulnerable in a war, and definitely doesn't prevent war. It makes you an easier target.

Also what you see as peaceful, others see as a stalemate unfortunately. Hopefully it lasts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rough-sea Why are fabs being built in az?

<comment><USER53> Other Fabs are already located in the area, and in general the state has been good towards businesses. Also ASU is nearby so they have a talent pool of new engineers to pull from.

Anecdote, since I've moved to AZ myself 5 years ago I've noticed massive growth in tech businesses in Phoenix and the surrounding areas. Cost of living for people here is also cheaper compared to to other cities I've lived in, and many people I've met who moved from California have told me how its cheaper here. Commuting is not too bad depending on where you live, and there are options which promote commuting or carpooling such as HOV lanes, Bike Lanes, and the light-rail system (the light rail is hit or miss depending on who you ask).

<comment><USER54> Mesa Checking In... /wave

<comment><USER55> Hi neighbor

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think Europe would do well to thing about getting TSMC to build a fab in Europe, especially as a lot of the tools are already built here.

Good to see the American government still functions in one way or another...

</comment><comment><USER56> What is the environmental footprint of a typical fab? From what I understand, modern chips are free of conflict materials, but are there toxic byproducts which would cause trouble with the EPA?

<comment><USER57> Modern chips are free of conflict materials? How do you even start to come up with a basis for the statement? I also don't understand the connection between "conflict materials" and toxic substances. I thought it was common knowledge that making chips involves lots of extremely toxic chemicals though.

<comment><USER58> The amount of rare elements used to dope semiconductors is orders of magnitude less than what's used in the capacitors next to them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> They already operated design centers and the fab wafertech in Camas, Washington.

It's not wildly surprising, given that all major USA chip players will now be using TSMC, including Intel.

</comment><comment><USER60> It would make a lot more sense than UBI if the US would chip in part of the salary, ie (cost of American worker - cost of Taiwanese worker), so that this sort of factory would no longer be disincentivized just because of the cost of American labor.

<comment><USER61> This effectively happens already by the massive property tax incentives for factories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is really good news! There are also supply chain opsec implications, esp. given the ... complicated relationship between Taiwan and the PRC.

</comment><comment><USER63> Some competition with Intel in their home turf I see.

<comment><USER64> This is an excellent strategy if you want to decimate the talent pool of your competitors and simultaneously ramp production without having to build local staff from zero. With some aggressive incentives, they could probably snipe a lot of talent from across town.

Worst case, they will just fly in hundreds of existing, trained employees from Taiwan until the local workforce is stabilized. This is how Samsung bootstrapped their ATX factory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Happy to see manufacturing coming back to the US. I'm writing this before I read the comments and have my hopes dashed

</comment><comment><USER66> The high paid jobs from Taiwan and Korea are what US wants, not the low pay assemble jobs from China. Good move!

</comment><comment><USER67> Interesting. Are they planning to use some kind of alternative energy sources for their plants?

</comment><comment> gjsman-1000 Woah ho ho, the rumors were TRUE!!!

<comment><USER68> I was skeptical. But it's official now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Next we need a proper embassy. No more erasure of the true Chinese Republic with actual human rights, freedom, and prosperity for the many and not the connected few of the few.

</comment><comment><USER70> Didn't AMD have a big fab in Arizona once?

</comment><comment><USER71> Welcome to USA. Smart Move TSMC and Taiwan. You have earned a friend for life.

For the doubters, this is just the beginning of Re-industrilization of America.

<comment><USER72> > Welcome to USA. Smart Move TSMC and Taiwan.

They've operated in the US for a while now.

From the press release: "In the United States, TSMC currently operates a fab in Camas, Washington and design centers in both Austin, Texas and San Jose, California. The Arizona facility would be TSMC's second manufacturing site in the United States."

> You have earned a friend for life.

What a bizarre comment. If they leave, are they your enemy for life then?

<comment><USER73> If you know anything about the geopolitics behind this, this was a forced move which TSMC wouldn't have otherwise done. If TSMC didn't do it, then US State Department would have funded Intel to produce their 5nm fabs here.

So yeah, educate yourself and then behave reasonably.

<comment><USER72> > If you know anything about the geopolitics behind this, this was a forced > move which TSMC wouldn't have otherwise done. If you know anything about the > geopolitics behind this, this was a forced move which TSMC wouldn't have > otherwise done.

I know. Where in my comment did I say otherwise?

> So yeah, educate yourself and then behave reasonably.

Okay, thanks?

Did you by any chance respond to the wrong comment? Such bizarre comments in this thread.

<comment><USER74> It's rampant nationalism all up and down this thread. Facts be damned.

<comment><USER73> What are the facts? That TSMC willingly and strategically made this move? The writing was on the wall on this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> I hope they build it across the street from Intel.

</comment><comment><USER76> Someday I would really love to buy an iPhone that says "designed and built by Apple in California"

Stuff like this is just one step closer to that. I would happily pay a premium for it. Excellent news.

And to all of you currently looking at your rent in SF and wondering if you should stay there now that you can work remote: AZ is a pretty awesome place, and more and more it's looking like it actually could become a hardware hub in the US.

To be clear on my point about rent in Phoenix, btw: I am currently sitting about 400 yards from ASU (I live across the street from campus). I rented this house for about 10 years for <$1000/mo (2br, 1ba, now I own it), and there are still apartments/condos in this neighborhood for that price. We don't have an ocean, but we have some of the most beautiful hiking in the world, the city is extremely cycle friendly, and almost every biome you could want is a few hours drive max from here. It's really a great city.

<comment><USER77> Unless you care about the environment of course. Arizona is an unsustainable amount of air conditioning to fight against deadly temperatures.

<comment><USER78> Is Sweden using an unsustainable amount of heaters to fight against deadly winter temperatures? Air conditioning is much more efficient than a heater. Arizona will usually only get more than 15 degrees warmer than a comfortable indoor temperature. In places with cold winters, sometimes temperatures will get more than 25 degrees cooler than a comfortable indoor temperature.

<comment><USER11> >will get more than 25 degrees cooler than a comfortable indoor temperature.

Saying comfortable to be 22-24C, 25 is just barely below zero. North Europe standard winter conditions are far lower...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Well that's the quickest I've ever seen reality prove itself stranger than I could have ever imagined:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186174](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186174)

I'd be taking bets on how quickly this is going to turn out poorly, but my last tiny ember of faith in any corporate actor being capable of rational thought just got extinguished, so I could be really wrong!

<comment><USER73> What a useless comment. You have no explanation and are just relying on your ill conceived gut feeling, which has been clearly proving wrong, to say this doesn't make sense. Why should anyone trust you?

<comment><USER79> I am an Internet commentator. You don't have to trust me. That's the beauty of Internet discussion sites!

I have an actual reason, and it's in the thread I linked, and in my reply to another response to this comment.

The above comment was for two reasons: one, to publicly acknowledge that a guess I had made just a small time ago was wrong (that TSMC executives were rational actors, or if nothing else, not drastically short-sighted), and secondly to exclaim that I still believe that this is an incredibly short- sighted and quite frankly stupid decision.

EDIT: changed some words to be more generous to TSMC's executives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> part of me is curious if this is a way to appease the administration due to high pressure [0] and wait out the next election cycle. They are talking about 2021-2029.

Even if Trump is reelected, I could see them leasing an existing fab and have a ribbon cutting ceremony for Trump to get his photo-op and then just weigh their options with minimal additional expenditure (they've already commented on opening a fab in US won't be economical [1]) with the thinking that a few $million spent on a lease and avoiding antagonizing Trump might all be worthwhile in any kind of tariffs on their business.

[0] [http://archive.is/XYzCd](http://archive.is/XYzCd)

[1] [https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/TSMC-weighs- new-...](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/TSMC-weighs-new-US-plant- to-respond-to-Trump-pressure)

edited my post by adding these articles as well as editing the text to better reference the links

<comment><USER81> The thing is WI is already mad at Foxconn for doing that. AZ is even more of swing state so I don't know if same trick will work twice

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> > This facility, which will be built in Arizona, will utilize TSMC's > 5-nanometer technology for semiconductor wafer fabrication

Wow Intel can't even get 10 nm working. Big win for Apple and AMD tho.

<comment><USER83> Isn't Intel's fab always better than TSMC's? Intel 10nm competes with TSMC's 7nm

<comment><USER84> By the time Intel gets anywhere near the 10nm production volume that TSMC does on 7nm right now, TSMC will probably already be moving to 5nm.

Its also difficult to say that "Intel 10nm competes with TSMC's 7nm" because in so many ways, it doesnt. Ice Lake server was supposed to be out this year with a new microarchitechture (the first since Skylake), but still is nowhere to be seen (though it certainly seems likely the big cloud players already have early silicon).

<comment><USER85> Intel's 10nm as originally planned would have been superior to TSMC's original 7nm, if Intel's 10nm had actually been functional. But it didn't work and got cancelled and what they're calling 10nm now is what would have been called "10nm+" if they hadn't renamed their entire roadmap to cover up the failure. I'm not sure how close Intel's _shipping_ 10nm comes to TSMC's original 7nm, but that's rapidly becoming irrelevant now that TSMC's 7nm+ with EUV is up and running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> I'm excited to see a hedge against China in the form of better foreign relations with others and a revival of domestic manufacturing.

</comment><comment><USER87> I can see some American politicians are celebrating this as a blow to (communist) China.

But is this not hurting Taiwan in a major strategic long term way? And risks turning the whole island towards mainland.

And for the ones celebrating "Re-industrilization of America". Is the America you envision really a America which does not have anything of importance produced outside America. Even if outside means traditional allies such as Germany, Japan, Taiwan ... ?

<comment><USER88> Taiwanese people probably wish to not be strategic in a China-US battle.

That only means the destruction of that island.

<comment><USER87> Taiwan is strategic to the US-China battle because it is strategic to China; if Taiwan reunites with China, China will have full access to the Pacific.</comment></comment></comment>


Here are the jobs automation will kill next - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2015/05/20/here-are-the-jobs-automation-will-kill-next/

<comment><AUTHOR> "Those at what he called the highest level of skill—the engineers and scientists who actually build and fix stuff— and those at the lowest level— plumbers who also actually build and fix stuff—will be safe. It's those in the middle, the lawyers, financial advisors etc. who are at risk."</comment>


Overrated and underrated cities: A subjective look at 57 cities in North America - <AUTHOR> https://westnorth.com/2018/09/07/overrated-and-underrated-cities/ <comment><USER2> This would be a better article with more description of what the author is looking for in a city.</comment>


Facebook Survey - <AUTHOR> http://cmelbye.wufoo.com/forms/facebook-survey/

<comment><AUTHOR> I made this quick survey about Facebook to see what people's problems are with Facebook. Perhaps there's room for a startup to come in and do something that Facebook isn't doing well. If you could, take a few minutes to fill it out. All fields are optional, but the age and school questions are probably the most important.

<comment><USER2> upvoting for honesty and resourcefulness.</comment></comment>


Uber's reason to block tipping?  Racism - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/uber-wants-to-save-us-from-racism-84b69924ca3a#.d52jic57k <comment><USER2> I'd prefer to pay a higher price than tip.

When I book a service I want the transaction to be as straightforward as possible. I want to know the price at the time of booking, and I want that to be the price I pay.

The problem with tipping is that people take it extremely personally, they also try to encourage tipping through awkward conversation. I don't want to have to deal with that.

Plus these kinds of apps/services allow me to review the experience directly. I don't have to use money as a way to review the quality.

If they absolutely insist on tipping, it should all be in the app, with pre- set amounts that I can just mash without too much thought, and that I can calculate into the cost before the car even picks me up.

I really really hate American tipping culture. Even after living here a while it just seems so pointless, is completely arbitrary, and makes simple transactions more complicated.

<comment><USER3> The point of tipping is to empower the customer and measure their satisfaction. Because the customer has a considerable portion of the bill at his discretion, staff are going to be focused on making his experience as enjoyable as possible. This is what the restaurant owner wants but couldn't feasibly accomplish through direct management.

I used to be very uncomfortable with this power over people's pay; who was I to determine how much money someone was _worthy_ of? But it's not about that. It's about rewarding good service and having a good incentive structure. It's about making sure that the customer comes first.

In this day and age I imagine tipping is also good documentation for performance, should someone need to be fired. Otherwise, the owner might find himself on the wrong end of a bogus discrimination law suit.

<comment><USER4> But the "base" tip is still kind of mandatory even if the waiter just does the very very bare minimum. Why should I have to give a tip at all just for someone bringing a dish to my table? That's what you are paid for, it's not like I can opt out of your service anyway so why not just include it in the price. And if your service is very good then I might give a tip.

<comment><USER5> It gives you room to go down, if the service is sufficiently sub par.

<comment><USER6> But is this an issue in areas where tipping is not common? This sounds like it's solving a problem that doesn't really exist.

<comment><USER5> > This sounds like it's solving a problem that doesn't really exist.

It may well be, but that's a question that would deserve addressing in the parent's rant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate tipping. It makes me uncomfortable, so I always tip really well, and I feel like I'm paying a niceness tax when I do it.

I will probably consider uber less of an option for short trips around town if tipping is baked in as an optional part of it. The negative feeling at the end of the ride will negate some of the uber convenience, and I'll walk or ride the bus.

That said, I already tipped uber drivers in cash if I was installing a car seat in their car and they were polite about it.

<comment><USER8> I agree that it is a niceness tax, and would go further and say that tipping has come to mean more about the person tipping, and less about the service you receive.

When a waiter (or Lyft driver) gets a poor tip, or no tip do they think, "I really should have provided better service to that customer", or do they think, "that guy is cheap."

<comment><USER6> And, to be fair, most of the time _it is_ "that guy is cheap". Anyone that's had a job dealing with the general public knows how fast you get jaded. Waiting is a tough job, and usually the waiters get the short end of the stick

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rm_-rf_slash Generally I think it's a bad idea to mix tipping and customer ratings.

If you buy a $4.50 coffee with a $5 bill and don't put the fifty cents in the tip jar, the worst that happens is that the barista looks at you uncomfortably for a second or two. Then you get on with your day. If they rate you along with other baristas (or coffee shops) you'll have a reputation before you set foot through the door.

Growing up in America, I didn't understand how absurd our tipping culture is until I visited Europe. There, wait staff don't bother you every five minutes to "ask how you're doing," you call them over when you need them, and if at the end of the meal you enjoyed your service, you can leave a few euros as an extra, not a semblance of a living wage because the employer refuses to pay it.

Still, if it's really that important to you to tip your Uber driver, use cash.

<comment><USER3> My experience in Europe (edit: Spain and France in particular, England to a lesser extent) was that customer service was not very good. There was a general bad attitude toward customers, treating them more like a nuisance than the lifeblood of the business. It really made me appreciate the way we do things on this side of the pond.

<comment><USER9> Just a heads up: you're trying to judge continental European cultural practices by Anglo-Saxon cultural norms, and that's pretty much always going to lead to nothing but misunderstandings. There are many things (like a waiter not coming to your table unless called) that are considered polite in e.g. Germany that would be considered rude in America, and vice-versa. (Source: I've lived in both of those countries.) It's part of the joy of travel to discover which parts of your culture aren't as universal as you assumed.

<comment><USER3> I think I generalized too much by saying "Europe". I really meant France and Spain. England was all over the place, good service in some spots, French service in others. I haven't had the pleasure of traveling to Germany yet.

This conversation makes it sound like I walked around being bitter about customer service or other things that I think are better here. That would be a terrible way to travel! Everywhere I went in Europe really was lovely and I intend to go back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Tipping is a crummy form of compensation at the root, in my belief. I don't mind playing guitar on a corner for tips, sure. But it's a hard way to make money sometimes, as I learned first-hand.

After reading the article, I was wondering which direction the "racism" label might be pointed. Apparently it's being directed toward the drivers, and using waiters and waitresses as an example. I've worked as a waiter on several occasions, and the article mentioning that women fare worse than men (according to a study) does not ring true in my experience. Men make more in tips than women? Really? Uhhhh...

I'm going to be careful in how I phrase it, because it might not be universal: In my experience, most of the racial overtones in regards to tipping were mostly directed at the customers, not at the waitstaff themselves. As in, the race or gender of the waiter/waitress was less thought of as the race or gender of the customer, or their nationality, considering some Europeans may be familiar with the custom of tipping but decide not to do it anyway as they drown their fries in Mayo.

</comment><comment><USER11> The lack of tips is definitely one of the better aspects of the Uber experience. Tips are awkward and complicate things.

I'd _much_ prefer for the base rates to just go up. I don't want to have to think about tipping.

</comment><comment><USER12> If Uber is not going to allow tips, but drivers are going to pressure for cash tips, I might as well take a regular cab.

At least in a regular cab, tipping is expected AND I can add the tip in on my credit card. So with Uber, now my choices are either to tip make sure that I am carrying small bills so that I can do so, or not tip and risk getting a "low rating" (whether I should care about that is another question.)

No thanks. Uber should either crack down on tips, or just put them in the app. Of course, cracking down on tips would probably require that Uber actually allow drivers to make decent money, which they are not interested in.

</comment><comment><USER13> No tipping is one of my favorite features of Uber.

<comment><USER14> Agreed, and at least with the black car service it makes the experience feel much more professional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I will never, ever tip my Uber driver. It's one of the banes of Western living and I'm so happy that Uber doesn't include tipping in the app, if they did it would make it far less valuable to me. Feel free to not drop prices so aggressively, but please do not add tipping.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm for eliminating tipping in favor of just paying the people as part of the service. That said, there's one angle these kind of articles never mention: the oft-repeated claim that black people don't tip as often, which would hurt drivers too. Almost every waiter or waitress I know down here says this. A good chunk are black men or women. Rather than _never_ tip, they say they're less likely to tip and often for less money. The exceptions (and job security) keep them delivering good service where they can. They just don't expect anything to come out of it. Strange that I never see that angle on public sites covering discrimination but hear it from black waiters all the time.

I'd like to see a survey of various areas with careful questions on the subject to see how true it is, in what areas, and what combinations of race/gender for both waiter and table. Also, if it's more or less likely with groups vs single seats. Anyone know a study or hear similar things from your waiters locally? Or is it better in your area?

</comment><comment><USER17> Tipping is some of the worst form of payment in existence. It's completely unregulated from a consumer standpoint, and is therefore subject to _every single_ bias one can think of - sexism, racism, "attractivism"? Literally every single little thing that people use to incorrectly assess another person's performance or behavior will be calculated into a tip. Don't like a person's nose ring? Lower tip. Don't like a person's haircut? Lower tip.

If a company were found out to be basing salaries on these things, they'd be sued so hard and so fast, their HR department would catch fire from the friction.

We _laud_ restaurants when they do away with tipping [0], what's up with the two-faced response to Uber and their tipping stance?

Tipping sucks. Tipping absolutely sucks. I'm _begging_ you nice people to not push Uber into a tipping model just because you hate Uber. Tipping is the _much_ worse evil here.

        [0] - https://goo.gl/0oFRei

<comment><USER18> Is there a two-faced stance? I haven't seen it. Everyone in this thread, as well as everyone I've talked to personally, loves Uber because you can't tip. It's literally the only reason why I personally never take Lyft, despite it being cheaper.

<comment><USER17> This article seems to give _way_ more credence to the option of being able to tip Uber drivers than I think is warranted.

Just to add on for folks in other parts of the world, in the US, if you work a job that gets tipped, you usually can legally be paid _way_ less as a base wage.

> The American federal government requires a wage of at least $2.13 per hour > be paid to employees that receive at least $30 per month in tips. If wages > and tips do not equal the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour during any > pay period, the employer is required to increase cash wages to compensate. > [0]

Uber _will_ take advantage of this, if they can. Tipping is a trap!

        [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage_in_the_United_States

<comment><USER19> Uber drivers aren't employees so don't get paid minimum wage (or anything, really) by Uber in the first place. They get paid their fares minus Uber's vig.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why do you need tipping in an app, going through the official channels? The driver is paid to bring the customer from point A to B, the customer pays. Why is there a need to pay again/more?

<comment><USER4> Isn't one of the reasons for the crazy tipping culture to avoid tax since it's in cash and not declared as income? How would that work if it's done through a controlled system like uber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Uber's _stated_ reason to block tipping. But really, it means passengers don't need to care about working out the tip, feeling bad if they don't leave one or don't leave enough, don't need to carry cash, etc etc. It lowers the friction of taking an uber and means more business.

</comment><comment><USER22> I live in a country where tipping basically doesn't exist. It's such a foreign concept to me that I'm afraid of going to the states. It's almost like removing all price tags and having to guess what things cost, with repercussion if you pay too little.

</comment><comment><USER23> Well, here's my proposal then. Give uber users a 'living wage' option. Where when you use the app you pay at least 1.5x pricing as a floor. The prices for uber around here can't be livable, and no one pays cash.

<comment><USER15> I don't know where you live, but almost every single Uber driver I've talked to say they make more money than the job they had previously with far more flexibility, so they're pretty happy. One Uber driver said he made over $80k last year and he loved it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This title seems editorialized: the title here on HN is ambiguous about whether the "reason" is "because of" or "to prevent", while the title of the actual article makes that clearer.

If drivers aren't getting paid enough to want to drive for a particular company, they should build the "tip" into the price, to make sure everyone gets paid enough. But the right response to good/bad service is a rating, not a tip. A field for a tip implies that the "real" price is higher than advertised, because only a monster wouldn't tip, and that bad service just means a lower tip. A rating system makes sure that _all_ drivers must provide good service, and the company should be making sure they get paid accordingly.

Transportation isn't a service where it's acceptable to have good drivers who get paid more and bad drivers who get paid less, no matter what mechanism implements that pay differential. There should only be "good" drivers.

<comment><USER25> _> Transportation isn't a service where it's acceptable to have good drivers who get paid more and bad drivers who get paid less, no matter what mechanism implements that pay differential. There should only be "good" drivers._

Of course, there's no universal authority on what "tipping" actually _means_ but I think many people (both the riders & drivers) understand that tipping is for the "service" portion that's not related to the driving. E.g. carrying the suitcases, pointing out the landmarks like a tourist guide, etc.

The "driving" component of getting from point A to point B in a safe manner, without making incompetent U-turns, etc is the _baseline_. The tipping isn't for that.

E.g. I usually don't tip the Hertz/Avis car rental bus driver but if I'm trying to carry 3 bags and he helps me with them, I will tip him.

All that said, it's possible that some Uber drivers want extra tip money just for the sake of extra money.

Like others, I also prefer transactions where there is no tipping expected. It would be annoying to scramble for some loose dollar bills to tip the flight attendants as I try to rush off the airplane to make a connection.

<comment><USER24> > The "driving" component of getting from point A to point B in a safe manner, > without making incompetent U-turns, etc is the baseline. The tipping isn't > for that.

That's how it _should_ work, yes, but once tips become an option, tipping culture takes over in awful ways. Consider that the expectation in US restaurants is a 10-15% tip at minimum, for baseline competent service, and anything less suggests that your food came with extra saliva. That's not a healthy process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The article admits that information from eight drives is "a hopelessly anecdotal number"... then goes on for several paragraphs to imply that these eight drivers are evidence to systematically disprove Uber's claims about racism and sexism.

Completely bogus.

</comment><comment><USER27> I liked seeing that the author clearly pointed out that the data they collected was not anywhere near statistically significant...

> Eight drivers sent me a report covering all their rides during a week in > April, a hopelessly anecdotal number, but enough to learn more than [Lyft] > will release.

But then a few paragraphs later...

> These results don't look great for Uber's hypothetical claims: the one > female in the lineup made the best tips. And the black driver, so disfavored > in all the academic studies, emerged a bit below average.

No, no, no!

A "lineup" of 8 people carries no weight at all against Uber's claims. It's frustrating to see articles being shared that have blatantly wrong conclusion- drawing practices like this.

</comment><comment><USER28> > passengers will now feel a "Tony Soprano-like veiled threat" from drivers: > "Pay up or I'll give you a poor rating."

Is that really a problem? I honestly didn't even know Uber drivers rated the passengers! I would imagine a driver getting a bad rating for being forceful about a tip would be much worse for them than a passenger bad rating would be for me. I can take a Lyft, bus, tube, etc if I can't get served with Uber. Heck, in a lot of cases I can just walk. A driver can only drive for so many companies before they're churned out of the business

I really doubt that is, or would become, a thing.

<comment><USER24> The last Uber ride I had, when traveling, I got a ten-minute diatribe on how terrible Uber was, how much better Lyft was, and how passengers could tip in cash, _hint hint_. Not enjoyable at all.

<comment><USER28> Wow. Every time I've used Uber the driver has been quiet outside of friendliness and greetings until I engaged them in conversation (London, so maybe not as fussed about tips/pay?)

I think I'd have to tweak my 5-star-unless-we-crash rating system if I had someone ranting against the company they're driving for

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Tipping is a barbaric practice. If drivers aren't making enough they should be advocating for higher wages instead of complaining that Uber doesn't make it easy enough for them to take bribes.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm not much of an Uber customer. Maybe five trips a year when I am in the city where Uber is big. So maybe people like me don't matter. But:

Tipping would make the whole thing much worse. I would be much happier if they would raise their rates systemwide by whatever percentage is warranted, and pay appropriately. If I wanted a bad experience, I would take a taxi.

If they go this route, among other things they are opening the door to be Ubered by the next Uber.

<comment><USER31> They're not going to raise rates, and they're not going to raise what they pay drivers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> While yes, the issue with disparate tipping dependent on race is probably an issue, I'm pretty sure Uber is just using it as a cop out here.

<comment><USER33> I don't think so. If Uber allows tips through the app they collect data on their drivers suffering pay discrimination.

Eventually it will wind up in court and jury will side with the drivers forcing Uber to pay the difference.

<comment><USER34> Lyft allows for tipping via the App. I do it often, when a driver goes above the bare minimum of Point A -> Point B.

Having water bottles available in the car, good music or ability to put something of my choosing on, a good conversation, friendly driver, driver who looks for short cuts to cut down on the fare, etc.

Some drivers act like you're not even there, or don't have good "people skills", and it can sometimes make for an uncomfortable experience. Supporting those drivers that go above and beyond the minimum is something that encourages a better experience for me.

<comment><USER33> Lyft will eventually have to speak to the reality that how much money you make per ride as a Lyft driver can be predicted by skin tone and sex.

<comment><USER34> > Lyft will eventually have to speak to the reality that how much money you > make per ride as a Lyft driver can be predicted by skin tone and sex.

Do we actually have data on this, or is this some sort of assumption?

Uber is using this as an excuse to not even try a tipping system, but without data, it's just a hollow excuse.

I tip based on experience. I'm sure most of us do... not based on what color your skin is or your sex.

<comment><USER33> >I tip based on experience. I'm sure most of us do... not based on what color your skin is or your sex.

I'm not sure how you tip based on experience, do you interview them on their job history?

Most people are tipping based on pretty fuzzy criteria, and they wind up tipping people that are familiar to them more.

<comment><USER34> > I'm not sure how you tip based on experience, do you interview them on their > job history?

Oh no, I didn't word that the best way. I didn't mean "experience with that person"... I mean I tip based on the experience I had while dining for that particular meal. Was it good or bad? Was my drink refilled without me having to ask? Was the server attentive and friendly, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Something related, tho not something I've previously heard or read about, is whether Uber is rationally deciding that its current 'low' prices/fares are optimal, from the perspective of maximizing profits.

In a lot of comments on this thread people claim to prefer to pay a higher price than tip. If driver's are upset at poor pay, I'd expect Uber to care – all else being equal.

And if Uber could increase its profits by raising prices, I'd expect it do so. I wouldn't expect _all_ price increases to _fully_ benefit drivers alone. So, given that Uber seems to be applying significant pressure to keep prices and fares low, why are they doing so if not to maximize their long-term profits?

<comment><USER36> As a customer accustomed to being catered to by Uber, you might indeed expect Uber to care.

In actuality both Uber and Lyft have been _relentlessly_ driving employee wages ("contractor rates") down to the lowest possible sustainable level. That's their business model of course: colonize a regulated industry and make hay as long as possible using technology to dodge established regulation while externalizing as many costs as possible.

Works out great! Except for the employees. My mother drove until last week for both Uber and Lyft in the Bay Area.

Over the last 18-20 months her take home earnings were reduced to about _one third_ what they were when she began.

So she gave it up.

Personally I cannot _wait_ for regulation to catch up with these companies. Of course, they might completely eliminate their driver base via self-driving fleet vehicles before it does...

...though I suspect their business model if they're still around at that point (or that of whoever 'disrupts' them) will be leasing self-driving cars from private individuals. Why maintain a fleet when it's clear asking subcontractors to do so for you is so profitable?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> When I use Uber, I frequently ask the drivers how often they get tips. They tell me that about one third of the time, the rider gives them some cash. (This is anecdotal of course, but I've asked roughly 30 drivers. Some drivers say they never get tips).

FWIW, I have found that Uber drivers are frequently eager to talk about their experience with Uber and their opinions. I've heard a wide range of feedback from "Uber is evil but I need this job" to "Uber changed my life".

But all drivers seem to agree tipping should be built in.

</comment><comment><USER38> I admitted that tipping gives a good incentive to the person providing the service as I myself felt before. But I dislike tipping as I see people react differently whether you tip or not and the amount you tip. It was quite hard for me to really know what percentage to tip the person happy and to continue a good service. How do you gauge the quality of the service to tip 15-25% or even higher? That's just playing with our emotion.

</comment><comment><USER39> I remember when i was working at a fruit stand company, they said we could not be tipped... However that did not stop this guy from New York from tipping me, i recall he said, "For the service you provided i could not asked for anything else, where I'm from if you get good service you tip" I find it funny because it's directly against that whole "racism bit"

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't like the practice of tipping. I want the total price baked in.

So, I agree on the no tipping policy but painting tipping as racist because people may tip along racial and gender lines is ridiculous. That's the same as saying when people date and marry they are expressions of racism because people typically intermarry.

So it dilutes the whole meaning of racism and reduces it to a politically weak tool.

</comment><comment><USER41> Interesting look at lots of research on tipping: [http://freakonomics.com/podcast/should-tipping-be-banned- a-n...](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/should-tipping-be-banned-a-new- freakonomics-radio-podcast/)

(You will agree that tipping is racist by the time you finish listening.)

</comment><comment><USER42> Tipping is too personal and needs to go in general. I think tipping does lead to classism, racism, and an overall awkward experience. Going to other countries where tipping is not expected is really refreshing. I vote to pay more than to be put into a tipping situation.

</comment><comment><USER43> [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325502/Map-shows- wo...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325502/Map-shows-worlds- racist-countries-answers-surprise-you.html)

</comment><comment><USER44> "...Yet the fact that she had just sued her former venture capital firm for discrimination tends to prove Pao is all-in on this egalitarian thing."

Is that sarcasm?

</comment><comment><USER45> Tipping would mess Uber's reviews. The drivers would give a good review just for who gave a big tip.

</comment><comment><USER46> I have often just tipped my drivers cash.

<comment><USER18> Why? Do you often tip other random working-class people when it's not expected, like cashiers in grocery stores?

<comment><USER34> > Why? Do you often tip other random working-class people when it's not > expected, like cashiers in grocery stores?

Generally you tip when someone provides you with a service, and especially when they've gone above and beyond the base "experience".

A cashier isn't really providing a service... they're collecting money for the store.

Baggers, however, provide a service, especially if they walk the bags to your car. Servers in restaurants provide a service, as they are in charge of your dining experience. Handymen that fix things in your house provide a service, etc.

In theory, you tip because you got an excellent experience. The chance of a good tip is, in theory, what motivates service providers to go above and beyond the bare minimum. If it's a repeated service (like you dine at your favorite restaurant often), and the service provider knows you tip well for good experiences, it provides a good incentive to keep providing excellent experiences.

<comment><USER47> What about the novel idea of incentivizing the restaurant to provide excellent experiences through charging a fair market rate for a reliably excellent experience? You can show your support for this restaurant by being a repeat customer because you think the value proposition that they provide is one that meets your standards.

<comment><USER34> This idea has some merit. However, it's not the restaurant that's providing the experience, it's whoever your particular server happens to be.

By paying a "fair" wage to the server, you do remove some problems, but you may introduce others.

When I was younger and worked as a server, it was commonplace for fellow servers to end the night with $150-$200 in tips (in addition to minimum wage, as this was California), which is decidedly above a "fair" wage for maybe 4-5 hours of work. It was a bad night if you didn't break $100 in tips. Changing to a salary system, for some, would mean a net pay decrease (or far more expensive food, which may decrease patronage).

In addition, many feel a salary system would remove any incentive to deliver excellent experiences above the bare minimum. If you're a server, and you know no matter what happens on the floor tonight, you get paid exactly the same... perhaps you don't refill drinks quite as often... or you don't put on your best friendly face when taking orders... because it doesn't matter (think of your Fast Food experiences, where employees don't really care about quality in any regard, food, service, cleanliness, etc). We worked hard for those tips, because it produced immediate, tangible results.

I know this is partly anecdotal, but for me back then as a server, I prefer tips over salary.

<comment><USER47> If you increased the price of the food to include the average tip and distributed that increased price among your workers you've just provided that same incentive (a wage decidedly above "fair") to your servers and the experience remains constant for your customers. Now if the servers decide that means they can slack because the "tips" are guaranteed, they can find another place to work for those kinds of wages. Especially with feedback systems being easier to implement through recent mobile technology, the problems are not intractable.

<comment><USER34> I kind of agree, but high wages does not imply good service.

Also, in California, servers must be paid the state's minimum wage - this is not the case everywhere in the country.

Many states have an alternate minimum wage for the service industry. If food prices were increased to compensate every wait staff say, $30k a year, food prices in these areas wouldn't be going up only $5-$10... in those cases, food prices may double or triple in order to support this significant wage increase. This will undoubtedly cause a reduction in patronage, which ultimately means fewer staffers on payroll.

This brings up an interesting thought experiment, and is very relevant to the minimum wage issue in general:

Is it better to have fewer people employed at a higher wage, or more people employed at a lesser wage?

On one hand, a percentage of the workforce will enjoy a more comfortable living - on the other hand more people will be left with no living at all.

<comment><USER47> I don't get why raising the wages implies that food will go up more than the average amount of tipping (~10-20%). Currently, if it's legal for their wages to be lower granted that they are supplemented by tips, if we raised the price of food at establishments with waitstaff by the average tip amount, the amount of money that the customer pays for food would be exactly the same (on average) as it currently is. Now if that money was diverted directly the the waitstaff (as it currently is) then we would have higher wages being paid to the waitstaff.

I recognize that some restaurants might raise prices by more than the average tip amount in order to increase profits, but that seems to be a separate concept from the one that I proposed. My proposition in no way requires that any restaurant raise the current cost that the customer pays (net money outflow from an average customer).

As for high wages not implying good service, I agree, and it's also a core axiom of why I believe tipping is inefficient, outdated, and cumbersome. But if we operate on the assumption that a good server gives good service in order to earn higher wages through tipping, I think we can also assume that a good server will give good service in order to _continue_ to make his wage and not be fired as a result of treating customers poorly out of laziness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The king of algorithms?</comment>


Kibi.js: a client-side web framework in 1,024 bytes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jed/kibi

<comment><USER2> It is both wonderful and terrible to see so many js frameworks. Wonderful that js has taken off and is so easy to use that so many people can build useful reusable components to share with the world. Terrible in that all of the discussions I've seen comparing these frameworks center on "features" or "size" instead of the important parts of day-to-day use.

For example, I often see Spine and Backbone compared, and Spine is said to "use a Backbone-like API" but be "lighter." Now I've used both to build fairly substantial apps, and I can tell you the day-to-day experience is very different.

So let me give you an example of where the two APIs differ, in a way that a naive inspection doesn't catch, and that I haven't seen publicly discussed anywhere.

The biggest difference between them is managed attributes in the models.

Spine uses a Rails-like API, where you can change your model's attributes as much as you like, by saying this.name = "whatever", but it's only when you call this.save (or updateAttributes) that the change is "committed" in the sense that a "change" event is sent to the controllers and other objects that want to observe the model. And this event is very coarse, you just know the object changed, not what about it changed.

In contrast, Backbone uses managed attributes, so you say person.set("name", "Adam") and this immediately fires both a "change" and a "change:name" event. So controllers can observe models in a much finer-grained way and respond to only the changes they want. And there's no business about "saving" locally just to fire changes in the UI, you just save when you actually want to store the data (in local storage or on a server).

In my experience, the Backbone way is far preferable for building responsive event-driven UIs. And note that the implementation of attributes is so short it has nothing to do with Backbone being "bigger" than Spine. It's just a very meaningful API difference no one ever talks about.

Maybe you disagree. Maybe you like another js framework for other meaningful API differences. Let's discuss that carefully, rather than just making more frameworks and labeling them.

<comment><USER3> Thoughtful and correct.

The ecosystem has exploded, and there may need to be an extinction event... or not. JS is more open than other languages' frameworks. There are so many non- public horrible and wonderful backend frameworks that just weren't part of OSS/github social coding.

Also, simply lighter frameworks should exists if they take a week to create. Calling them a "framework" might be an apples to oranges in some cases. (e.g. YUI vs. Spine)

At worst it's exposed chaos that's always existed and hopefully a community learning phase. Before jQuery and the like, how many "libraries" existed on relatively equal footing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats on the framework. Quick tip... I don't see size being a selling point these days. It's almost meaningless. It would be interesting to find something new like how much time it saves compared to the status quo. Just an idea...

<comment><USER5> To me the important part of being "lightweight" is memory consumption and speed. The page performance is much more important than initial load time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Underwhelmed by the demo app. Can anyone explain why this is good/useful?

<comment><USER7> The whole app is contained in the source of <http://kibi.herokuapp.com/>

It looks like each page is defined inside a <script type='text/plain' data- kibi='{pathname:'',id:'',location:''}'></script>

Where data-kibi is metadata to specify when, with what data(jsonp) the content inside should be rendered?</comment></comment>


Horrors of Using Azure Kubernetes Service in Production - <AUTHOR> https://movingfulcrum.com/horrors-of-using-azure-kubernetes-service-in-production/ <comment><USER2> My $DAYJOB is leading a team which develops applications and gateways (for the 1k+ employee B2B market) that integrate deeply with Azure, Azure AD and anything that comes with it. We do have Microsoft employees (who work on Azure) on our payroll, too.

I can tell you, as I'm sure anyone in my team can, that Azure is one big alpha-stage amalgation of half-baked services. I would never ever recommend Azure to literally any organization no matter the size. Seeing our customers struggle with it, us struggle with it, and even MS folks struggle with even the most basic tasks gets tiring really fast. We have so many workarounds in our software for inconsistency, unavailability, questionable security and general quirks in Azure that it's not even funny anymore.

There are some days where random parts of Azure completely fail, like customers not being able to view resources, role assignments or even their directory config.

An automatic integration test of one of our apps, which makes heavy use of Azure Resource Management APIs, just fails dozens of times a week not because we have a bug, but because state within Azure didn't propagate (RBAC changes, resource properties) within a timeout of more than 15 minutes!

Two weeks back, the same test managed to reproducibly produce a state within Azure that completely disabled the Azure Portal resource view. All "blades" in Azure just displayed "unable to access data". Only an ultra-specific sequence of UI interactions and API calls could restore Azure (while uncovering a lot of other issues).

That is the _norm_ , not the exception. In 1.5 years worth of development, there has never been a single week without an Azure issue robbing us of hours of work just debugging their systems and writing workarounds.

/rant

On topic though, we've had good experiences with these k8s runtimes:

\- GKE

\- Rancher + DO

\- IBM Cloud k8s (yeah, I know!)

<comment><USER3> My company uses Azure quite heavily, but not Kubernetes.

No crashes, ever. Way more reliable than AWS ever was. (GCP is our failover.)

So it seems that your experience is, from my POV, the exception. Maybe there's something wrong with the way you guys have Azure set up?

<comment><USER4> Which provisioning model are you using -- ASM or ARM? The last time I used Azure we used the (deprecated) ASM model which was pretty stable instead of the newer and often broken ARM model. We ended up staying on the deprecated model until we moved to AWS (for unrelated reasons).

<comment><USER5> Wow, our experiences were different. I found ARM to be a great tool compared to ASM.

The moment I removed the last ASM bits, my entire infrastructure became reliably versioned and deployable.

<comment><USER4> That's really great to hear!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (Eng lead for AKS here) While lots of people have had great success with AKS, we're always concerned when someone has a bad time. In this particular case the AKS engineering team spent over a day helping identify that the user had over scheduled their nodes, by running applications without memory limit, resulting in the kernel oom (out of memory) killer terminating the Docker daemon and kubelet. As part of this investigation we increased the system reservation for both Docker and kubelet to ensure that in the future if a user over schedules their nodes the kernel will only terminate their applications and not the critical system daemons.

<comment><USER7> Does it seem weird to anybody else that a vendor would semi-blame the customer in public like this? I can't imagine seeing a statement like this from a Google or Amazon engineer.

It also doesn't seems to ignore a number of the points, especially how support was handled. I think it's bad form to only respond to the one thing that can be rebutted, ignoring the rest. And personally, I would have apologized for the bad experience here.

<comment><USER8> While it might be phrased in a way that implies the customer is partly to blame, the actual details would indicate the main problem was with Azure Kubernetes Service. Critical system daemons going down because the application uses too much memory is not a reasonable failure mode (and the AKS team rightfully fixed it).

<comment><USER9> ...and apparently forgot to notify customer of it, and in general communicate with customer better.

I think this is the main reason for AWS lead. They simply treat customers right (well, better than G and MS anyway).

<comment><USER10> Yet Azure is the top cloud provider, and AWS is #2.

<comment><USER11> They are number one because Microsoft doesn't break out Azure and Office 365 revenue.

<comment><USER12> My understanding, which may be incorrect, is also that they consider all SPLA revenue as cloud revenue as well.

(SPLA is the licensing paid by service providers to lease their customers infrastructure running Microsoft products. So if you pay some VPS or server provider $30/mo or whatever they charge for Server 2012, and they turn around and send $28 of it to MS or whatever, MS reports that $28 as cloud revenue)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Worth nothing that both Microsoft and Amazon's Kubernetes offerings are very new (literally _weeks_ since GA). While "officially" ready, it is pretty naive to rely on them for production-critical workloads just yet, at least compared to Google Kubernetes Engine which has been running for years.

If you absolutely need managed Kubernetes, stick to GCP for now.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here's a fun fact about Azure Kubernetes:

1\. Deploy your Linux service on k8s with redundant nodes

2\. Create a k8s VolumeClaim and mount it on your nodes to give your application some long-lived or shared disk storage (i.e. for processing user- uploaded files).

3\. Wait until the subtle bugs start to appear in your app.

Because persistent k8s volumes on Azure are provided by Azure disk storage service behind the scenes, lots of weird Windows-isms apply. And this goes beyond stuff like case insensitivity for file names.

For example, if a user tries to upload a file called "COM1" or "PRN1", it will blow up with a disk write error.

Yes, that's right, Azure is the only cloud vendor that is 100% compatible with enforcing DOS 1.0 reserved filenames - on your Linux server in 2018!

<comment><USER15> The only way this would make any sense is if you were using Azure Files, rather than Azure Disks. There's virtually never a time when it makes sense to use Azure Files over Azure Disks, and even when it does, a change in the application would be better advised than using Azure Files.

>Yes, that's right, Azure is the only cloud vendor that is 100% compatible with enforcing DOS 1.0 reserved filenames - on your Linux server in 2018!

This is hyperbolic bordering on flatly false. This is more reasonable and accurate:

"Azure is the only cloud vendor that serves their Samba product from Windows boxes, and thus leak Win/NTFS-isms into their Samba shares [that shouldn't be used anyway]."

How would an ext4 filesystem, mounted under Linux, attached as a block device to a VM, be subjected to Windows-isms? What you're implying _doesn 't even make sense_.

<comment><USER16> I really would have to disagree with the statement one should never use Azure Files over Azure disks.

1\. Most Azure VM types have very stringent limits on attached disks; a K8s worker can easily blow past this limit.

2\. You have tremendous complexity to deal with: pick Azure managed disks vs unmanaged disks on storage accounts (you can't mix them on the same cluster). You have to understand the trade of of standard vs premium storage and how they bill (premium rounds up and charges by capacity, not consumption). And you need the right VM types for premium.

3\. Managed disks each create a resource object in your resource group. A resource group last I checked had hard limits on the number of resources (like 4000?). Each VM is minimum 3 to 4 resources (with a NIC, image, and disk)... at scale this gets difficult.

4\. Azure disks require significant time to create. , mount and remount. A StatefulSet pod failure will sometimes take 3-5 minutes for it's PV to move to a different worker. And worse when your Azure region has allocation problems. Azure files are near instantaneous unmoubt/remount.

5\. Azure disks are block storage and thus only ReadWriteOnce. Azure files are RWM.

So, sure, if you're running a cluster database with dedicated per node PVs and limited expected redeployments... use Azure disks. If you need a PV for any other reason... especially for application tiers that churn frequently.. use Azure files.

<comment><USER15> This is all true, I sort of forget that I still have a sort of Azure Stockholm syndrome. I'd say it's good feedback but it's nothing Azure doesn't know about.

Maybe Azure Files performance has improved to the point where it's more usable for storage scenarios. I suppose it probably comes down to the use case and application behavior.

It would be good if Azure had someone testing out these scenarios and interfacing with the larger k8s community, maybe through the SIG, for these sorts of musings and questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I believe this is a cultural problem with Microsoft. Probably similar to other companies but it was very evident at Microsoft. People responsible to allocate resources (The management chain) rarely dogfood the product.

While the Engineers and PM would complain a lot about quality issues, management wants to prioritize more features. It was a running joke at Microsoft: No one gets promoted for improving existing things, if you want a quick promo, build a new thing.

So when you see a bazillion half baked things in Azure. That's because someone got promoted for building each of those half baked things and moving on to the next big thing.

Going from 0-90% is the same amount of work as 90-99% and the same amount of work as 99.0% - 99.99%. Making things insanely great is hard and requires a lot of dedicated focus and a commitment to set a higher bar for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER18> I joined a healthcare startup in 2014 that had a small infrastructure on Azure. Back then AWS weren't signing BAAs and Azure was the only player in town. Being an early startup, the company didn't purchase a support plan from Azure. One day Azure suffered a major outage (may have been storage related) and over an hour later, I reached out to Microsoft for written confirmation that we could forward to customers. Since we didn't have a support plan they flat-out refused to provide any documentation whatsoever about the issue. They wanted $10,000.

Azure - never again. Company moved to AWS within a quarter.

</comment><comment><USER19> FWIW, Amazon's hosted Kubernetes offering (EKS) isn't stable either (DNS failures, HPA is known to be broken, etc.).

<comment><USER20> I know HPA is a legit issue but DNS failures seem to be fairly normal in kubernetes. Scaling up kube-dns has helped us resolve that particular issue as well as moving away from Alpine and into minimal Debian images. Alpine has its own DNS issues that caused us much pain.

<comment><USER21> Kube-dns (or CoreDNS in newer clusters) is pretty stable in my experience. It's still a very good idea to run more than one replica so that you can tolerate a single node failure, but if DNS failures are "fairly normal" that definitely warrants some additional investigation.

<comment><USER22> Most dns problems in kubernetes, in my experience, can be traced to udp failures due to the iptables kubeproxy backend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is sad. From what I hear, one of the founders of k8s works on AKS.

Only a matter of time before GCP becomes the #1/2 cloud provider.

<comment><USER24> I've seen at least 4 "founders of Kubernetes" by now. How many are there in total?

<comment><USER25> At least three to five.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubernetes#History)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Had a similar experience with azure cosmos graph API. The API is half baked. Doesn't support all gremlin operations. Even supported operations give non standard output. Switched to aws Neptune immediately when they launched

<comment><USER27> > The API is half baked

Doesn't surprise me. Cosmos was too good too be true :

\- Serverless \- Infinite Scalability \- Mongo API or Gremlin API or SQL API

It's obvious that it can't hold up to all it's promises.

<comment><USER28> "Noone can give you what i can promise you"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> There are definitely growing pains with using Kubernetes on Azure. I've wondered a few times if other platforms have similar issues and have seen more than a few complaints about EKS.

Microsoft has some great people working on Azure, but I do feel like AKS was released to GA too soon. Without a published roadmap and scant acknowledgment of issues, I'm not sure I could recommend it to my clients or employer. It's disappointing, because I've had few issues with other Azure services.

Full disclosure: I receive a monthly credit through a Microsoft program for Azure.

<comment><USER30> > I've wondered a few times if other platforms have similar issues and have > seen more than a few complaints about EKS.

I can't speak to EKS but we've been running production workloads on GKE for over a year with very good results. There have been a very few really troublesome "growing pains" type issues (an early example: loadbalancer services getting stuck with a pending external IP assignment for days) but Google has been awesome about support, even to the extent of getting Tim Hockin and Brendan Burns on the phone with us at various times to gather information about stuff like the example I gave above. I give them high marks and would recommend the service without hesitation.

<comment><USER23> Brendan Burns is the lead engineer on AKS AFAIK

<comment><USER31> Brendan Burns was the Lead Engineer on Kubernetes at Google around 3 years ago, then went to Microsoft to lead this entire AKS/ACS/Container effort.

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan- burns-487aa590](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendan-burns-487aa590)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Hmm, this isn't great. Currently using Azure Kubernetes Service and we haven't had many issues so far, but we just made the shift.

Hope I don't have to move over to Google cloud.

<comment><USER33> Why? GKE works perfectly over there.

<comment><USER34> Many people (me included) don't trust Google to stay with any business besides advertising. There's been too many times that they have ended services with not much time to get off.

<comment><USER35> The Cloud products follow a Deprecation Policy documented here: [https://cloud.google.com/terms/](https://cloud.google.com/terms/)

I can understand being upset about their consumer products but it doesn't really apply here.

<comment><USER36> This is what always puzzled me about the Google-Alphabet strategy, specifically the idea of having all the assets under a single share ticker (GOOGL).

The more services you put under one banner, the more the stink of one disaster is going to linger, and hinder adoption of the successes.

To me, a far simpler proposition would be a new brand & share issuance for each new sub-company (eg. Waymo), with existing Alphabet shareholders getting pro-rata shares in the new company.

<comment><USER35> I'd bet on it being about the recognition that Google has been a pioneer and thought leader in the scalable systems/hosting space and they didn't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> DNS failures were almost certainly related to all the k8s system services on the cluster not having CPU or memory reservations, and KubeDNS was flaking.

In general AKS is a vanilla k8s cluster and expects you know what you're doing. MS arguably should enforce some opinions about how things like system services have reservations, etc, but none of this is vanilla. The trouble is that K8s defaults are pretty poor from a security (no seccomp profiles or apparmor/se profiles) and performance perspective (no reservations on key system DaemonSets).

We've had this interesting industry pendulum swing between extreme poles of "we hate opinionated platforms! Give me all the knobs!" And "this is too hard, we need opinions and guard rails!". I think the success of K8s is exposing people to the complexity of supplying all of the config details yourself and we will see a new breed of opinionated platforms on top of it very shortly. It reminds me of the early Linux Slackware and SLS and Debian days where people traded X11 configs and window manager configs like they were treasured artifacts before Red Hat, Gnome and KDE, SuSE, and eventually Ubuntu, started to force opinions.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is probably why they're releasing OpenShift on Azure. To let Red Hat engineers manage the kubernetes part.

[https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/openshift-on-azure- th...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/openshift-on-azure-the-easiest- fully-managed-openshift-in-the-cloud/)

<comment><USER38> I like openshift, I am not sure why developers are not hot about it.

<comment><USER27> > I am not sure why developers are not hot about it.

Because it's designed entirely for enterprise customers. If you have a startup you have very little reason to choose OpenShift compared to Heroku or AWS honnestly.

I still love Redhat tho.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> We have a larger migration project going on for months. So far not a single failure occurred and our TEST environment is already fully migrated (quite responsive and rock solid) since 2 weeks.

However, I do share that Azure indeed has released a lot of half-baked features and services lately (last 1.5 to 2 years). I hope this trend does not continue.

</comment><comment><USER40> Couple of questions to the OP:

1\. What version of docker / container runtime is being used?

2\. What base image for your containers is being used? eg. alpine has known DNS issues [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnW3k6m5AY8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnW3k6m5AY8)

</comment><comment><USER41> Side question : what are the best practices for development ? Are you suppose to run a local kubernetes deployment ( it looks like it's pretty hard to set up) , or do you run everything outside of containers when developping and then deal with k8 packaging and deployment as a completely separated issue ( which looks like it could lead to discovering a lot of issues on the preproduction environment) ?

</comment><comment><USER42> Azure is not bad but there are definitely some rough edges. We're having trouble with their Bizspark Sponsorship biling [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17698948](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17698948)

</comment><comment><USER43> Key Vault (their HSM product) is even worse.

</comment><comment><USER44> interesting. thanks

</comment><comment><USER45> It's a very new offering, the Linux App Services are still in beta, I have no idea why you would roll it into production expecting no hiccups. AWS is also new on this. Give it 6 months and let the kinks work out before migrating workloads. Seems like common sense.

<comment><USER46> App Service on Linux is an unrelated service that actually runs on top of Service Fabric (a stateful microservice and container orchestration platform).

<comment><USER47> App Service on Linux is not in Beta, it is GA product for over year now with SLA of 99.95%. It does not use Service Fabric in backend, it uses it's own custom Orchestrator (which essentially removes the quirks of learning about orchestration away from the user)</comment></comment></comment>


This Bottle Turns Air into Water as You Ride Your Bike - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/11/17/water-from-air-fontus_n_6160136.html

<comment><USER2> Most of the discussion is here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8541997](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8541997) (distractify.com)

More discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8606715](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8606715) (grist.org)

Another submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595563](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595563) (citylab.com)</comment>