Ask HN: How do you come up with a good startup idea? - <AUTHOR>

I've been trying to unravel the process of coming up with an idea for a startup for a couple of weeks now but to no luck. Sure I have some ideas, but they're not targetted enough for my first startup.
I've read Paul Graham's essays and have lurked around here a little for the past few months as well. Technology wise, I'm ready to go. Coding it wouldn't be the hard part, that'd just take time.
Ive tried coming up with organic ideas but they don't seem to be quite good enough yet. Ive tried actively thinking up ideas but thy just isn't working.
Does anyone have advice for finding a startup idea? <comment><USER2> You've lurked for the past few months? Have you read these:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1974726> \- 6 days ago, 27 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750877> \- 71 days ago, 35 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1916801> \- 25 days ago, 32 comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1870456> \- 38 days ago, 1 comment

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1796372> \- 57 days ago, entire blog post.

You're asking the same question that's been asked a dozen times. Have you read the previous replies?

Try reading these:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996830>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1994998>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360665>

If you're serious about a startup then one thing you'll need is hard work, lots of time, and dedication. Start by showing some of those qualities. Read the above advice, find more, then summarise it properly. ON the way, ask yourself what you're finding annoying, awkward, tedious or painful.

There's your idea - solve that problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Really not sure how I missed these.. I wish I could search YC. Thanks for those links, taking a look through them now.

<comment><USER3> <http://searchyc.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another suggestion, which is something I have done- take your best idea that you have right now, no matter how bad it is, and start building it. Don't spend much money on it. It might turn out to be a great idea, but more likely that project will spin off more 'great' ideas than you have time to pursue.

Start doing something, even if it's stupid, and the ideas will start flowing n

<comment><USER5> this is best idea, but I would suggest do something in an area you either have a lot of knowledge in or are passionate in. Because you will that find its very hard and difficult, and will probably not get an easy win.. so you have to be passionate about whatever it is you start doing, and just keep going. Keep reading about other startups, and try to form connections and ask yourself what is the next step .. not just what is hot now.

<comment><USER4> Agreed- if it's not that great an idea but it's super fun to build, you're more likely to stick it out until a better idea comes to you.

And double agreed with your second Point- don't do something just because everyone else is. Just because everyone else is doing mobile local group buying checkins doesn't mean you shouldn't build that text to speech WordPress plugin you've been dreaming about (shameless castmyblog plug).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks to another HN comment, I recently purchased the book _Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation_ in order to answer just such a question. I'll leave that recommendation there, but I will admit that I haven't yet had a chance to crack the book--been too busy on my December project. I figure that's a pretty good excuse though, so I'm letting myself off the hook for awhile.

The most common and useful answer I've ever gotten for this type of a question is to simply find the smallest possible problem that you could solve, and solve it. I _personally_ find it easiest to solve a problem from which _I_ am suffering. This has a couple nice advantages, primarily that I can usually tell if I solved the problem sufficiently or not, and also if it flops, at least I've saved myself some trouble.

I launched <http://sleepyti.me> on November 8th because _I personally_ always wake up tired. I didn't really expect much out of it, but I'm averaging about 10k visitors per day and between $15-$20 in Adsense revenue per day. Maybe not "successful startup" money, but for a free webapp that only took me a few days to write up (and only costs $20/month to host on Linode, along with all my other sites/shells), I consider it a pretty big success.

I don't think that there's a secret that can foster brilliant, successful ideas, otherwise we'd all use it and be billionaires. For me anyway, it's just the tried and true combination of persistence and solving problems.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm looking up that book on Amazon in another tab now. I took a look at sleepyti.me and actually found it very useful as I also have a tough time with being tired in the morning. Maybe that'll help me get up at 6:00 AM if I follow its advice! Totally sharing your site on FB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, I havent had any successes yet, but here is how I come up with mist of my ideas- by mis-understanding an existing product or service, and thinking, wow that's a great idea. When I finally realize how the product works, i think "my way was better". This isn't something you can just make happen, but reading about as many great ideas as possible helps.

</comment><comment><USER7> Focus on a real problem. Especially problems for which people are willing to pay to solve. Design a solution for real people and not just yourself.

Solutions that create markets are very rare and are best tackled once you know how to create a solution to a real problem first.</comment>


Ask HN: Any embedded devs/hardware folks looking for a side project? - <AUTHOR> I'm starting a project to implement a really interest blockchain white paper I came across [0]. I'm looking to try and design and produce a low cost hardware device similar to "cold wallets" like Trezor [1], but with some really novel features; however, I don't have experience in that area.
I'm hoping there's some hardware guys on HN that have some spare time and are interested in helping me realize my goal or, if they're interested, being a permanent part of the project.
If that's you, please drop a comment and let's chat.
0: http://freepdfhosting.com/408e68e786.pdf
1: https://trezor.io/ <comment><USER2> Hi! I can do Firmware. Let's chat. Any preferred means of communications?</comment>


OpenWebRX Feature Overview and Raspberry Pi Setup - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuTxHFZStOc&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> What is OpenWebRX? I can't watch a video (not in a private area)</comment>


BitTorrent Chat: The Want For Privacy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/06/11/bittorrent-chat-the-want-for-privacy/

<comment><USER2> FWIW, I wrote my own version of it not knowing about BitTorrent chat: [https://github.com/chewxy/nanjingtaxi/](https://github.com/chewxy/nanjingtaxi/)

It doesn't use the BitTorrent kademlia though. If anyone thinks that should be the case, feel free to send a pull request

<comment><USER3> Is there Windows support in the works, or is this more of a weekend project?

I would offer to help but I don't know go at all.

<comment><USER2> Yup. Eventually. The first things I'm planning to add is some NAT and greater internet traversal stuff. Then using [https://github.com/andlabs/ui](https://github.com/andlabs/ui) I might want to add a UI.

Unfortunately my life schedule is kinda... complicated right now, so progress will be extremely slow

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this going to be open source ? Unless the code is verifiable by third parties and we have reproducible builds then trust is just transferred to Bittorrent Inc.

<comment><USER5> It's possible that BitTorrent's business model is going to change, but with the original BitTorrent, they kept the client closed source but the _protocol_ was open, allowing for a wider variety of BitTorrent clients. It seems quite possible that they'll do the same thing for BitTorrent Chat (if not for BitTorrent sync as well), at which point an open-source client will likely be created that's compatible with the original.

Either way, even if it were open source, it's _new_ software, not stable software. Chances are almost any new software is going to be fairly leaky and buggy for some time. At the moment, I would personally trust BitTorrent chat somewhat more than Google, Microsoft, etc. to not deliberately put back-doors in their clients (not to mention it's not like those companies are claiming their stuff is end-to-end encrypted anyway, as far as I know), and I'd trust them to write higher-quality software with fewer severe exploits than many of the nascent open-source alternatives out there at the moment. That said, in a few years, I fully expect to be using something open-source for this sort of thing, whether it's Tox or TorChat or an alternative BT Chat client, and for the moment I don't plan on using _any_ of the current "private chat" programs for anything important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Until there is open source and deterministic builds, this is just as functionally "secure" as Skype.

<comment><USER3> Well here's the thing though, skype isn't p2p anymore, they've switched to a sever based model, is in that sense this is slightly more secure in that only those involved in the conversation have access to it.

<comment><USER7> Skype was never purely P2P anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is it going to be fully Open Source or the same joke as Bitorrent Sync where no peer review is possible?

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TorChat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TorChat) is open-source... Not a tough choice for me.

<comment><USER10> That doesn't seem to have had much activity lately. Personally I use Torsion [https://github.com/special/torsion/](https://github.com/special/torsion/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think there should be mention of Tox as an open source chat alternative. I'm really excited for it!

[http://tox.im/](http://tox.im/)

</comment><comment><USER12> There's no technical info in the article. This one (link from the article) seems to be more resourceful on details: [http://engineering.bittorrent.com/2013/12/19/update-on- bitto...](http://engineering.bittorrent.com/2013/12/19/update-on-bittorrent- chat/)

The interesting part is their claim they somehow made DHT public key to IP discovery (mapping) "encrypted" and "secure". Sadly, I hadn't found any further details.

<comment><USER13> Using a public key to authenticate an IP address is trivial. You just sign the address (and a timestamp for how long it's valid) with the private key.

Making it private is the interesting bit. Obviously you can't have privacy in the sense that someone who knows your public key can't use it to discover your IP address, because doing that is the DHT's _purpose_. So what they're probably talking about is that somebody observing the DHT can't use it to learn public keys, IP addresses or both. But it would be nontrivial to do that in a way that isn't useless (e.g. storing under public key fingerprint instead of public key: now you don't have my public key, and having fingerprint is _totally_ different, right?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why talk about it again? We're waiting like... 8 months since they've opened the Alpha Signup? =.=

</comment><comment><USER15> if you want privacy you can simply encrypt your gtalk chat with gpg, another unecessary overhyped feature.

<comment><USER16> Disclosure: I am working on Bittorrent Chat.

There are a few issues with using GPG over gtalk, gmail, mail, etc:

1- The metadata still exists. If you use gpg with any email server, the provider of that service knows that YOU contacted someone (and they know who that someone is). They also know "when" this happened. In fact, if metadata is not a concern, there are other much simpler solutions than using GPG. Technically speaking iMessage (or many other messaging apps) should give you the same result (well, if you trust Apple to be doing what they claim to be doing). With Bittorrent Chat, there is none of that. Bittorrent Inc. does not know who is talking to whom at what time.

2- It's difficult to use GPG (or OTR, etc) with your friends who are not technical or just don't want to spend that much time on sending a message. Honestly, I have rarely used it myself because it's just too difficult to get right both on the sending end and the receiving end. A messaging app that intends to be private is not doing a good job if everyone doesn't like it (or don't know how to use it). Privacy should be accessible otherwise people who need it the most, cannot use it.

We are trying to create an app that is not only private but is in fact easier to use than other messaging apps. It has cool features (for technical users as well as non-techies) that everyone understands and can use. People should not have a "private messaging app" that they use for their "private" conversation and one that they use with their "normal conversations". Basically if you cannot say it on Twitter, it's private [to some extent]. Technical people should love it and use it with their non-technical friends and non-technical people should love it because it's just easier to use than other apps (and provides cool features that no other app is).

<comment><USER15> @1 Is the connection in Bittorrent Chat working the same way as in tor? And are you randomizing payload size + providing some kind of delivery delay? If not you are still susceptible to attacks. As for the configuration part, it's relatively easy to install appropriate plugin in ekg or pidgin.

<comment><USER16> Bittorrent Chat works differently from Tor. The protocol is not yet finalized but we'll make sure to have external security experts review it to ensure that we deliver on our promise.

Getting to how-easy or how-difficult the installation is, is an endless discussion and is very subjective. One thing that I should add though is that something that might be super easy for you might not be as easy for 99% of Internet users (which is bad for a messaging app specially since you are likely to have friends whom you want to talk to in the 99% category). Installing/configuring a GPG plugin is likely to be one of those.

<comment><USER15> You haven't answered my question, i was asking whether you've removed all the possible information leak cases or not.

Yes the message timing , payload size and ip you're connecting to is leaking some information aswell and can be monitored e.g on a ISP level.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Carleton student helps pin down largest known prime number - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/09/17/long-prime-number.html

<comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=307829></comment>


SANS: Make software development organizations "legally liable" for errors - <AUTHOR> http://www.csoonline.com/article/544163/Security_Experts_Developers_Responsible_for_Programming_Problems

<comment><USER2> Am I alone here in thinking how troubling this is? Many products are started for a few hundred dollars by people just getting started in programming. Financially punishing them does not solve this problem because they just fold up and shut down, leaving only the more wealthier organizations, which, of course, kills innovation. The other day, FEMA (a US Gov agency, for your foreign to that term) put out a contract where they want to hire an organization to help it with social media distribution of news, and one of those networks was Twitter. Think of that -- a massive government institution receiving millions every year, depending on code that is relatively simple in concept. Twitter was started on a prayer and a song. The idea of Twitter is one I cannot say a behemoth like Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Cisco, etc. would have created out of the blue. They don't think in these terms unfortunately, but boy don't they run to these companies to use them or to buy them up when they have a major "we should have built that" moment, don't they? If SANS/Mitre reviewed Twitter in its infancy and filed a lawsuit against it for security flaws, or if we web developers have to fear a class action suit every time we code something, then things like Twitter would never happen.

Instead, organizations like this would better spend their dollars working on education of the developer community on building secure, bug-free apps, where support is possible. This is one of the reasons why the GPL is fantastic. You can still make a profit from your software, yet the code is freely visible, can be changed and upgraded, and most often is community-supported and outstanding. When more developers can see the code, all bugs are shallow. Although this is changing in the past 6 years with companies like IBM and Novell taking the lead, the GPL is something that usually most behemoth software companies do not want for their code. So think of that, if lawsuits stifle innovation such that only the big behemoth companies are who we turn to, then this most often means proprietary code you cannot see, cannot fork, and cannot have widespread community-support for where code can be altered or improved. And that makes the problem worse.

<comment><USER3> An analogy could be made to selling a house: What if we made home sellers liable for selling a house that didn't have "sufficient" security. What if a rapist breaks into a house that didn't have bars on the windows? Should we make the home seller liable for not putting bars on the window?

<comment><USER4> However we also have home inspectors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Welcome to the $20,000 copy of windows.

Do you know how much an FAA certified GPS costs compared to the identical one in your cellphone - the extra margin is just the insurance against getting sued.

Would the users be required that the software was isntalled and by an engineer certified by the maker? Would you like to prove that you had used it in accordance with the instructions?

<comment><USER6> The opposing argument is: "If a company making a toaster can get sued for not putting in adequate security measures (such as a fuse) and hurting someone, what makes software so special that it is exempt of such responsibility?"

On one hand I like the fact that it's so easy to create software without having to deal with any bureaucracy other than itself (and I agree that a lot of security problems are very subtle and easy to miss) but on the other hand I see the mistakes some companies make that end up in, for example, the exposition of private information for some 50000 customers.

<comment><USER7> If only software bugs could be isolated down to something simple like "don't forget to include a fuse".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So... they're trying to legislate a big boost to the security industry? Who's heading this up? From SANS' website: "SANS is the best and most trusted source for computer security training." Ah, now it makes sense.

Seriously, though, this would be massive overkill. It should be regulated in life-threatening or economy-threatening industries (and I believe it is), but if applied to everything, this would kill a lot of innovation in the cradle.

</comment><comment><USER9> There is a huge distinction between being "responsible" for errors and "legally liable".

Responsibility is just good practice - own the problems and provide resolutions. But legally liable? No way.

Even the most mature products still have flaws. I cannot imagine trying to do a startup if "legally liable." -- "Release Early, release often, but carry a huge insurance premium." No. No, I don't think so.

</comment><comment><USER10> Caveat emptor. If the customer wants the vendor to be legally liable for defects then the customer should insist that be included in the contract. No one is stopping them from doing this right now. It doesn't require changing any laws or regulations.

</comment><comment><USER11> There's so much wrong with this idea. Certainly, offer a certification that lets you opt-in; as nradov pointed out, there's nothing to stop this from existing.

Why should software be treated differently? Easy: Software lets you go from zero to over-9000 in precisely no time flat.

In effectively _every_ other business, you need to produce before you can sell, which gives you a buffer time to see errors and fix them before they bankrupt you, or even to jump ship before the storm hits by never making enough. Plus, with software, can you _really_ prove they bought what you sold, and didn't pirate it?

If someone crashes a cheap-duplicate car, you can tell, and you're not liable. If someone crashes an application, the only chance to identify it is to check their account. And even then, they could've modified your application, and deleted the modified version, so checksumming the app after the fact isn't proof.

</comment><comment><USER12> The top 25 errors from last year: <http://www.sans.org/top25-programming- errors/>

Detailed list: <http://cwe.mitre.org/top25/>

<comment><USER13> Of note: the only language mentioned by name is PHP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What happened to personal responsibility? If you don't like my software, don't buy it, don't agree to the terms, and don't use it.

<comment><USER15> Minimum standards of personal responsibility don't protect you from your customers, they protect your customers from you. Customers are not in a good position (to say the least) to evaluate whether a software shop is competent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would argue that this problem has already been solved with contracts between companies. If you wanted Microsoft to be liable for bugs in their software, you'd probably gobs more money on their applications, which Microsoft would turn around and pay to insurance companies to limit their liability.</comment>


Ask HN: Analytics Data Integration - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone know of or use a product that does data integration of analytics?  I'd like to connect up data from Apple on downloads, Mixpanel for events tracking, and then some custom metrics. <comment><USER2> Hi

You can try <http://elastic.io> We are in private beta and still missing some of the components but it can be fixed rather quickly. Sign up for beta access and drop us a line on info at elastic.io

Renat</comment>


Running PostgreSQL on Compression-enabled ZFS - <AUTHOR> http://citusdata.com/blog/64-zfs-compression <comment> old-gregg Can this simply be an artifact of terrible disk I/O on AWS or overall difference between ZFS/ext3?

Do you think the results would have been similar if you were to use no- compression-ZFS instead of ext3 on a proper database hardware?

Basically trying to figure out if the low performance of uncompressed dataset is specific to AWS/ext3. Thanks.

<comment><USER2> Another issue is that ZFS is extremely aggressive with caching data in ram (L1ARC). That can eat up memory you'd rather give to the database heap and also tends to skew benchmarks.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but postgres' design in that area actually helps. Postgres relies on the OS caching the data tables for the most part. There is some caching in shared buffers, but generally that's not a huge portion of the memory of your db system. (10-25%, and not more than a few gigs)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wouldn't recommend doing benchmarking on a virtual server.

You have no idea how busy the real server is, (noisy neighbors, etc), so it's impossible to have comparable results from benchmark to benchmark.

<comment><USER5> FWIW, If you use one of the largest instance types (4x large or whatever), the VM will probably be on it's own host which would mean you're unlikely to have neighbors ;)

<comment><USER6> When benchmarking, it's best to remove assumptions based on "probably" though right?

<comment><USER7> It's cloud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The result doesn't really surprise me - many operations are bound by the available bandwidth. There is even a compressor named Blosc [1] that speeds up operations by moving compressed data between memory and L1 cache and (de)compressing it there instead of moving the uncompressed data.

[1] <http://blosc.pytables.org/>

</comment><comment><USER9> The Btfrs and Reiser4 filesystems also support transparent compression and might currently be a better alternative to increase Postgresql query speed. Btfrs supports gzip, LZO, LZ4 and Snappy and is in the mainline linux kernel, Reiser4 is still maintained and available as a patch on Linux 3.8.5 (latest is 3.8.8) and supports LZO and gzip (alternatively there are also the embedded NAND flash medium compatible filesystems F2FS and UBIFS which both improve on the JFFS2 filesystem and it's transparent compression). For I/O bound queries SSD drives (in your preferred raid configuration) also will speed up the system. Btfrs has built-in support for TRIM SSD already, Reiser4 TRIM/SSD support is being discussed among the remaining developers.

<comment><USER10> Reiser4 is in a weird place after the conviction of Hans. I'm not sure I'd want to trust a production system on it. And I've been less than impressed with BtrFS on the test systems I've ran it on (though I'm aware there's others who swear by it - I'm only talking about my experiences).

ZFS is a fantastic file system, but I can't help wondering if part of the issue is the fact that the benchmarking was conducted on a virtual machine. ZFS is better suited for raw disks than virtual devices (again, just my anacdotal evidence. I've never ran benchmarks myself).

<comment> iso8859-1 Btrfs is unstable too. Source: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5460449>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This isn't the first time benchmarks like this have been done and these results are consistent with the earlier ones.

It shouldn't surprise most people that enabling transparent compression gives these benefits. Why you ask? Well what is the largest bottleneck in a system? Disk IO - by far. So all ZFS is doing is transferring workload to a subsystem you likely have plenty of(CPU) from one that you have the least of(Disk IO/latency)

</comment><comment><USER12> Is it just me or is "Compression Ratio" a poor label for the graph in that article? Normally, when one uses "Compression Ratio", it is the opposite of those numbers, i.e. EXT3 storage would be 1:1, ZFS-LZJB would be 2:1 (not 0.5), and ZFS-gzip would be 3.33:1 (not 0.3). It's a small thing I know but it turns convention on its head in its current form. A better label would be perhaps "Storage Size Ratio".

<comment><USER7> I don't see a problem with them expressing the ratio as a decimal since it becomes a simple multiplier of the original file size 38GB x 0.3.

But it's downright misleading to show the vertical axis from something other than 0.0 to 1.0 when comparing ratios. They start it at 0.2. In reality, LZJB is saving 50% of the space whereas gzip saves 70%. But a naive glance at the graph implies gzip look roughly 3 times smaller/better than LZJB.

Classic "How to Lie with Statistics" stuff.* I would have expected better from an "analytics" database.

* Not saying they intend to lie here but it's representative of the classic text <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics>

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Believe it or not I originally had the compression ratio graph rotated 90 degrees, and had manually modified it to run from 0.00 to 1.00. Google docs for some god awful reason insists on starting at 0.2 by default. Anyway, when my colleagues reviewed a draft of this post they requested that I rotate the graph back, and in the process I forgot to reset the scale. Sorry for the confusion. It's fixed now. As for the definition of "compression ratio", I looked this up and went with the definition found here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression_ratio>

I agree that it's kind of counterintuitive.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps "file size on disk" would be an unambiguous way to put it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Would love to see these performance metrics on a powerful system with pcie or raided SSD's. Would be interesting to find the tipping point where the extra CPU time outweighs the IO reduction. Even if the DB layer performs better total application response time could be negatively impacted for CPU intensive work loads as the compression steals cycles from the application layer.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can someone give us an overview of the state of ZFS on Linux? Last time I had checked it was implemented over fuse. Has this changed?

<comment><USER15> There are kernel modules here, which is what I assume they're using:

<http://zfsonlinux.org>

The licensing problems only apply to distributing CDDL and GPL code that have been compiled into the same binary, not running a CDDL-licensed module in a GPL kernel - I think. My experience with ZFS (which is awesome, btw) comes from FreeBSD.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If I'm reading this right, with ZFS compression enabled I am seeing 1/3rd disk usage and 3x increase of speeds in query times just from switching the filesystem. Stats like that make me very skeptical. Does this mean that I can get a 3x increase in speed while cutting my disk space down by a third just by switching to ZFS? If so, why isn't everyone doing this?

<comment><USER17> The way I make sense of this is that you need fewer (slow) disk reads to get the same amount of data into RAM, so that might explain the speedup?

I agree that it sounds too good to be true though.

<comment><USER18> Your read is correct. Once CPU time spent in decompression became less than disk wait time for the same data uncompressed, the reduced IO with compression started to win — sometimes massively. As powerful as processors are these days, results like these aren't impossible, or even terribly unlikely.

Consider the analogous (if simplified) case of logfile parsing, from my production syslog environment, with full query logging enabled:

      # ls -lrt
      ...
      -rw</comment></comment></comment><comment>- 1 root root  828096521 Apr 22 04:07 postgresql-query.log-20130421.gz
      -rw</comment><comment>- 1 root root 8817070769 Apr 22 04:09 postgresql-query.log-20130422
      # time zgrep -c duration postgresql-query.log-20130421.gz
      19130676

      real	0m43.818s
      user	0m44.060s
      sys	0m6.874s
      # time grep -c duration postgresql-query.log-20130422
      18634420

      real	4m7.008s
      user	0m9.826s
      sys	0m3.843s

EDIT: I'm not sure why time(1) is reporting more "user" time than "real" time in the compressed case.

<comment><USER19> zgrep runs grep and gzip as two separate subprocesses, so if you have multiple CPUs then the entire job can accumulate more CPU time than wallclock time (so it's just showing you that you exploited some parallelism, with grep and gzip running simultaneously for part of the time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm curious of the rest of the architecture. Each benchmark needs to be tested separately, as ZFS is likely caching the reads in the ARC. We also need a benchmark of ZFS without compression enabled.

However, we're not showing how bad ext3 is, but that the end result still shows the stellar performance, compression or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> > as ZFS is likely caching the reads in the ARC

Each of the seven queries we used in our benchmark required a sequential scan of the 32GB dataset. It's unlikely that the ARC had any impact on the results since the EC2 instance had only 7GiB of memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I tried running Oracle on ZFS for a while, with fairly terrible results. A bit of examination showed that ZFS was fine for table scans but had bad performance with indexes. It may be possible to tune one's way around this, but I simply dumped ZFS in favor of Automated Storage Management.</comment>


Better Dictators than Elected Islamists - <AUTHOR> http://www.radicalislam.org/blog/better-dictators-elected-islamists

<comment><USER2> I don't think you can argue for democracy and then complain when the countries elect people you disaprove of.</comment>


Kansas Board of Regents restricts free speech for academics - Suraj-Sun http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/12/19/kansas-board-of-regents-restricts-free-speech-for-academics/ <comment><AUTHOR> Considering that it's the Kansas Board of Regents and not say the Kansas Legislature and Governor I'm not sure their right to free speech is being violated. What I mean is that every job comes with restrictions on speech, you shouldn't badmouth the boss, you shouldn't stir up dissent, you can't give away company secrets or violate an NDA you might have executed. None of those are in violation of the First Amendment since they're voluntary measures. These kinds of things have been going on in the corporate world for many years now.

The thing that's unsettling about it is that a paper getting published with fake data by someone at the university would make the university look bad. So they're saying that professors have to deal with those kinds of issues privately which is really unfortunate. Probably means issues like that simply won't be addressed at all and I do think that's a big loss for everyone, not just those scientists who are directly affected.

<comment><USER2> I think you're wrong on two counts: one practical, one theoretical.

The practical one is that state schools are arms of the state. Given that their governor sits on the Board of Regents, I'm not sure they're effectively distinguishable in the way you suggest.

The theoretical one is that universities are not like "every job". The whole point of universities is to encourage bold intellectual inquiry. Academic freedom is at the heart of what universities do. Whether or not they can legally get away with trying to treat professors like serfs seems less important to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I always thought that your right to free speech was as a citizen, not as an employee. For example if you work for the President and you badmouth him, he can have you fired. The distinction is that once you don't work for him anymore, you're now free to say whatever you want.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't know. If my mental model for how free speech works is wrong I'd love to find out. Especially if you can give me case law to look at.

<comment><USER3> Practicing free speech is a duty for an academic - there is this idea of "public intellectual". It's also the duty of the employer not to restrict it in the name of political expediency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is directly related to a professor's controversial tweet after the navy yard shooting:

[http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2013/nov/25/after-discord- cause...](http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2013/nov/25/after-discord-caused- professors-tweet-ku-journalis/)

[http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/19/kansas- regents...](http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/19/kansas-regents- adopt-policy-when-social-media-use-can-get-faculty-fired)

<comment><USER5> That's an absurdly low bar for controversy. If they're looking to police innocuous comments like that, this particular comment is just a pretext.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _The Kansas Board of Regents just adopted a new social media policy, which > allows Kansas state universities to fire (tenured and untenured) employees > for "improper use" of social media. "Improper use" includes inciting > violence (perhaps justifiable though potentially open to contentious > interpretations), posting confidential information about students (fine) or > posting things that are "contrary to the best interests of the university"_

If the OP's summation is correct, then this is quite a curtailment. Keep in mind that it's not about the "reasonableness" of the rules, it's about the actual implementation and more importantly, the chilling effect. In America, how Supreme Court has made it so that the media has a considerable amount of leeway when it comes to publishing falsehoods. This sounds absurd, but in practice, it has allowed the press to be far more aggressive in its examination of public figures (whether they are best taking advantage of it is another debate)

Consider it this way: your company says engineers are allowed to brainstorm and implement features, unless those features end up causing an "unreasonable" amount of harm to the customers or to the company. Otherwise, just stick to maintaining legacy code and having meetings. What effect do you think that'll have on the engineering culture?

<comment><USER7> > Consider it this way: your company says engineers are allowed to brainstorm > and implement features, unless those features end up causing an > "unreasonable" amount of harm to the customers or to the company. Otherwise, > just stick to maintaining legacy code and having meetings. What effect do > you think that'll have on the engineering culture?

Depends on the field. In software, there's enough competition between companies for talented engineers, so some companies might offer "you're allowed to work on harmful projects" as a hiring perk/bonus, for some definition of "harmful" (for example, not directly profitable projects).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Additional reading (links from the article):

[http://www.philnel.com/2013/12/18/kansasregents/](http://www.philnel.com/2013/12/18/kansasregents/)

[http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/19/kansas- regents...](http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/19/kansas-regents- adopt-policy-when-social-media-use-can-get-faculty-fired)

</comment><comment><USER9> Aaaaand this is why I'm developing an alternate, anonymous online personality.

<comment><USER10> Well good luck, 'Adam Wong'.

Don't forget to use separate browsers, so you don't accidentally do something with one account that you should have done with the other.

<comment><USER11> Don't want to do it the wong way, after all.

<comment><USER9> After 27 years, that joke is still fresh as ever. /s

<comment><USER12> As my last name is Rapp, I can sympathize...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Day Your Laptop Became a Micro-Datacenter - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@danaschwanden/the-day-your-laptop-became-a-micro-datacenter-97ba62c9e862 <comment><USER2> I also like the Mesos DCOS demo over here: [https://github.com/dcos/dcos- vagrant](https://github.com/dcos/dcos-vagrant)

Quite impressive;)</comment>


Are Posterous Fudging Visitor Statistics? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2010/12/are-posterous-fudging-visitor-statics.html

<comment><USER2> Our focus is on building the best product. It so happens to be that we are aware of the issue and recommend that you use Google Analytics for deeper insight into visitors and views.

Here is a bit of how-the-sausage is made, but you wouldn't believe how much of a negative response we got from existing users once we went to a fully JavaScript analytics system. So by sheer volume of user input we made the decision to return to the original http request method of counting views.

We are continuing to look at ways to improve this system, possibly with Mixpanel.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you not think the page view stats are completely misleading your users ?

There's absolutely no indication on Posterous that bots are likely responsible for thousands of the page views shown (which given the long tail nature of Posterous I imagine we're talking about the majority of the page views here for a lot of users).

One user even reported that GA was showing 14 visitors while Posterous was showing 9316:

[http://adamriggins.com/posterous-post-views-and-google- analy...](http://adamriggins.com/posterous-post-views-and-google-analytics- dis)

Whenever Posterous has given a response the focus has been on disabled javascript, etc. rather than the fact most of these views are likely generated by bots. For example the email you sent to the user here:

<http://www.creativenotice.com/how-posterous-stats-work>

Given the values are essentially meaningless why show them to your users at all ?

<comment><USER2> A few weeks ago we had some bugs in new batch processing code that caused some major errors there. These bugs have since been fixed. We are _definitely_ not as far off as 9316 vs 14 in normal operation.

These numbers are far from meaningless. At the end of the day the numbers reflect what our servers see -- they track something different from Google Analytics but they are useful as a simple ballpark for how interesting or visited your blog post was. Also, they're realtime, which GA does not provide.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're avoiding the question about misleading your users.

If the majority of page views are generates by bots then the number of page views you show isn't even a ballpark figure indicating how interesting/visited the blog post is. It's simply a semi-random number depending on crawlers/bot activity and nothing to do with real human visitors.

If you were simply off by 10% I could accept your answer, but you seem to be regularly off by a factor 200-300%.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just in case there was any doubt about Posterous not filtering out bots given that Garry hasn't specifically admitted it:

<http://twitter.com/#!/richiepear/status/13809170130149376>

      Rich Pearson (VP Marketing - Posterous)
      @imranghory No - we just don't filter out your own views
      and search engine visits

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> They're just counting views in a particularly unrealistic but technically not incorrect way.

Seems to be pretty much par for the course, like when twitter announces a billion new users, most of which are probably bots and/or quora.

<comment><AUTHOR> The test has to be what your users understand that value to mean. I'm betting almost all Posterous users think they're being read by significantly more people than they actually are.

If Posterous can't provide meaningful stats (and I appreciate that filtering out bots may be non-trivial) then they should just avoid providing stats altogether. Bad data is worse than no data as it's much more misleading.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you, but no company's going to leap forward and be honest about numbers, they're going to use whichever makes them look biggest/growing strongest to their users, investors and competitors, and all the numbers are "right" in _some_ context.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Our goal is to be 100% transparent with everything we do at Posterous, especially when it affects your blog and content" -Sachin cofounder, posterous.com

From: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309849>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They indeed fibbed during their campaign about how posterous is better than blog brand x.

Specifically, about tumblr not supporting an email posting option.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are many things that trigger a "view" for a post and a site: viewing the blog triggers a view for all posts visible on that page. In addition, a view will be triggered by the blog post page itself, bots and crawlers, and <http://posterous.com/explore>.

View counts are updated every five minutes.

Google Analytics is better at measuring visitors and filtering out impressions triggered by search engine bots, crawlers, or indexers.

See this page for how to set up Google Analytics on your Posterous site: [http://help.posterous.com/how-to-add-google-analytics-to- you...](http://help.posterous.com/how-to-add-google-analytics-to-your-site)

</comment><comment><USER6> I've noticed that as soon as I submit a new post to posterous, it gets about 24 views. I'm quite sure those aren't people.

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://help.posterous.com/how-are-site-and-post-views- calcul...](http://help.posterous.com/how-are-site-and-post-views-calculated)

</comment><comment><USER8> (Unrelated/offtopic: is "are" or "is" correct in the title?)

<comment><USER9> It's a cultural difference.

In the US, people refer to the named entity (is). In the UK, they refer to the collection of people that make up the entity (are).

<comment><USER10> Interesting, good to know.

How do UK speakers deal with non-named entities? For example:

My family is/are going out to the movie. The class was/were getting restless.

These are common gotchas on the SAT in the US; one of their favorite tricks is using plural country names, like "The United States of America (is/are) ...", where in US English "is" is the correct version. Cheap trick that really only tests whether you've memorized ETS's stance on that particular grammar point, IMO, but that's the SAT for you...

<comment><USER11> > My family is/are going out to the movie. The class was/were getting > restless.

In Australian English (derived from but not identical to the UK):

My family is going to the movie. The class was getting restless.

And the programmer's favourite: The data is corrupt.

<comment><USER11> Sorry to reply to myself, but I actually forgot to put my main point in, which was that British English generally refers to the group itself as the entity, whereas it seems that American English refers to the group elements individually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Terrible title. "Fudging statistics" and "not actively excluding bots" are totally different.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did actually check a dictionary before I used that term and the definition of "Present or deal with (something) in a vague, noncommittal, or inadequate way" seemed suitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Posterous is/are in touch with what users want from a blogging platform, but they seem to be out of touch with how users expect to be treated.[edit: grammar]

</comment><comment><USER14> Those counts actually includes hits by the spiders, too.</comment>


Cleveland Clinic's coronavirus testing capabilities will have results in hours - <AUTHOR> https://www.cleveland19.com/2020/03/12/cleveland-clinics-new-coronavirus-testing-capabilities-will-deliver-results-within-hours/ <comment><USER2> it's really great, that results will be in one hour!</comment>


Using ARM emulation on other Android x86 distributions - <AUTHOR> http://www.buildroid.org/blog/?p=198 <comment><USER2> It's funny that we're talking about "ARM emulation" on x86 chips. So far, if anything, x86 was emulated on other architectures. Times are changing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe Apple should have a look at this - if ARM emulation fast enough on X86, you could potentially run iOS and OSX on the same machine.

I wouldn't mind an Apple tablet with an optional bluetooth keyboard (and mouse?) running both iOS and OSX. The Win8 dual OS paradigm isn't perfect, but for now it works pretty OK - especially if you want something ultra portable for both work and play.

<comment><USER4> This wouldn't fly; a dual-OS situation is more complexity than Apple would like to expose. If anything, it's more likely that ARMs start popping up on the Mac. Remember that Apple has a reasonable amount of control over ARM, where they have to take whatever Intel gives them for x86.

<comment><USER3> OSX running on ARM? I don't think that would fly, not enough horsepower and you'd have to rewrite/recompile all legacy apps, exactly the problem Win8 RT has with ARM.

If x86 mobile SoC's do improve as much as Intel thinks over ARMin the next 1-2 years, will be interesting where that leaves Apple and iOS.</comment></comment></comment>


Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by Giant Mushrooms - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/07/long-before-trees-overtook-the-land-earth-was-covered-by-giant-mushrooms/ <comment><USER5> What an interesting idea, I can't help but visualize Zangermarsh[1] :-) Interesting question about what it might gain evolutionarily by being tall, perhaps more moisture exposure but as others have pointed out fungal mats get that by just being wide and covering a lot of area. Of course if you were competing with a fungal mat being tall might be one strategy.

[1] Its a World of Warcraft zone

<comment><USER6> The fruiting body of a fungus is typically a reproductive mechanism. Bigger mushroom = more spores (ie. size does matter).

<comment><USER7> And by taller than others the spores would be more likely to be carried over everything else by the wind and travel further distances. A short mushroom's spores might end up only traveling a few feet before hitting, say, another mushroom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Relevant Nature Future:

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7413/full/488690a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7413/full/488690a.html)

<comment><USER9> Powerful short (micro) story! Yet one must suspect that life would have found its own way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder what those fungus lived on? This was in the era before fungus could metabolize cellulose. Maybe, unlike modern fungus, they just grew bit by bit? The fact that dead wood couldn't easily be digested is part of the reason the Earth's O2 level was so high back in the day, and why you could get coal or oil deposits even without anoxic conditions.

EDIT: All interesting information above from friends who know way more about the subject than me, who I told about the article. Any mistakes are probably mine.

<comment><USER11> Was there really a lot of cellulose to consume that early? Remember, no trees so no dead wood to consume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This discussion has a pretty amazing number of references to fantasy or science fiction worlds. I count eight so far.

* WoW - <USER2>

* Elder Scrolls - <USER3>

* StarCraft - <USER4>

* Smurfs

* Mario Brothers

* Jules Verne - _Journey to the Center of the Earth_

* Miyazaki - _Nausicaa and the Valley of the Winds_

* Paul Stamet - _Mycelium Running_

<comment><USER13> Don't forget: * Minecraft - Mushroom Biome

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> That's awesome. It _must_ have been a giant mushroom, because that's the coolest possible outcome. It's like I'm in Vvardenfell all over again...

</comment><comment><USER15> Am I just a huge anime nerd, or did anyone else immediately think of the early Miyazaki film "Nausicaa and the Valley of the Winds"?

<comment><USER16> Nope, I thought the same!

 _Spoiler_ Good thing we weren't around to poison the Earth back then or these would be sprouting toxins like no one's business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> So... Jules Verne was right about YET ANOTHER thing? RE: Ancient giant mushrooms dotting the shore of the prehistoric coast in Journey to the Center of the Earth.

<comment><USER18> Of course, he was also wrong about a lot of things. I recall in 20,000 Leagues they travel under the Antarctic ice all the way over the pole... because there was no land there in 1870, I guess.

<comment><USER19> We don't know that there isn't a way to go under the Antarctic ice mass .. there may well be large enough rivers under the ice, navigable with fancy machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why is it assumed that these mushrooms would grow straight and tall? Trees grow tall to maximize their exposure to their primary energy source, which is of course light. But why would a mushroom need to grow really tall. Don't they obtain all their energy from the land?

<comment><USER21> Exposure to air. The higher, the windier, the farther the spores get.

<comment><USER22> Plausible, but not apparently a problem from most fungi currently alive. I would guess that the trade-off in terms of marshaling resources vs. increase in spore distribution would not be favorable enough. I expect that's why the lichen argument appeared - we can easily see why being tall is a plus for photosynthesis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Actually reading the article, came across:

"So science is messy, and despite more than a century of digging, we still don't really know, for sure, what these huge spires that dominated the ancient Earth really were."

So despite the link-bait title, we still don't know and they may not be giant mushrooms.

<comment><USER24> Sure, we're not certain, but giant mushrooms are our best guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Smurfs were real, and normal size! It's the mushrooms that were big enough to carve houses inside.

</comment><comment><USER26> Don't forget the huge Oregon Fungus, an Armillaria ostoyae which is the world's largest organism [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange- but...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true- largest-organism-is-fungus)

</comment><comment><USER27> Giant living spires? Better watch out for mutalisks then ...

</comment><comment><USER28> Interesting. Could fungi photosynthesize? I thought not. Unless the earth was covered as a marshland, it would be unlikely mushrooms covered earth. It is likely they are popular around coastal area.

<comment><USER29> No known fungus does--though there are "radiotrophic" fungus, that use gamma radiation as an energy source.

However, fungus are found with photosynthetic symbionts. Lichen, for example, are a combination of fungus and algae (or similar). It's possible the Prototaxites were giant lichen, which would allow them to live in non-fungus- friendly locales, rather like a tree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> As these broke down and broke down other things around them, they probably created _soil_ (as funguses still help to do) which enabled more advanced plant life to thrive. Love it

</comment><comment><USER31> I guess now might be a good time to mention John Marco Allegro's theories on the amanita muscaria and its role influencing major religions: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Allegro](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Allegro)

</comment><comment><USER32> Cool! I've often imagined alien worlds that had nothing resembling plants or animals, and they invariably ended up with giant fungi. Turns out many of the craziest life forms we can imagine have already existed on Earth.

</comment><comment><USER33> I first heard about this in Paul Stamet's book Mycelium Running.

Its too bad they include this period of Earth's history more prominently in high school.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's a mushroom, It's a fungus, And they're growing all around us and among us

</comment><comment><USER35> Makes one wonder if the pipes in Super Mario Bros. led to not where- but when?

</comment><comment><USER36> Dude in article pic looks like he's an expert on mushrooms

</comment><comment><USER37> The first thing that came to mind: Minecraft.

</comment><comment><USER38> har har morrowind har har...

</comment><comment><USER39> Back then, gravity was a lot less, so soft bodies can grow huge. Now they can't.

<comment><USER23> Seems there's no acceptance round here for the possibility of the Expanding Earth Theory...

<comment><USER39> Tech people tends to be close minded.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you live w/o a car (outside the US)? - <AUTHOR>

What city do you live in?<p>Has it ever been a problem not having a car? <comment><USER2> I live in Tokyo. Public transport is very extensive here, though quite crowded. Many people don't own cars. I'd say most single people don't. I used to commute by bicycle in my previous job.

It's rarely a problem not to have a car. Doing groceries can be slightly inconvenient, but I often order online anyway.

If you wanna travel by car you can always rent one.

I used to commute by car in Sao Paulo and it was really stressful. When I choose the next place I'll live, one of the most important factors is whether I'll be able to live without a car.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hong Kong, "Over 90% of the daily journeys are on public transport, making it the highest rate in the world" [1]

No, never been a problem. I'm looking to move, and I'll only do so where I don't need a car (waste of money)..thankfully there are tons of options.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Hong_Kong#Private...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Hong_Kong#Private_cars)

</comment><comment><USER4> No car. Simply because the upfront cost was too much, fuel just keeps getting higher and public transport/walking has been completely adequate.

Only time I've needed a car is when moving house, but even then a hired Van has proven far more useful than a car.

Also parking in Brighton (UK) is an absolute nightmare, residential permits cost <£150 a year, and that's after the queue for getting one.

</comment><comment><USER5> Bangalore. no car.

But I have to admit that I always feel like getting one because all the tech events happen on the other side of the city and I spend a lot of time travelling to these events.

</comment><comment><USER6> I moved to Toronto (from Melbourne Australia). Use to be obsessed with cars. When we moved we sold both our cars and I love not having to drive anymore. It helps that the public transport is a million times better in Toronto than back home.

</comment><comment><USER7> Zurich, Switzerland. Public transport is very good. With the car-sharing company Mobility it's easy to book a car by the hour if needed. That plus normal car-rental for longer trips comes out cheaper and more hassle-free than owning.

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice, France. No.

(Also true for where I've lived before: Berlin, Zurich, Prague.)

</comment><comment><USER9> Munich, no car.

It has never been a problem so far: public transport is quite good, decent bike infrastructure, a handful of car sharing and car rental companies with a lot of stations, lots of groceries.

</comment><comment><USER10> No car, Berlin.

Never had a problem in the city. Holidays are a different story (I like to visit remote regions in the alps), but then I can rent one. When I visit other cities, I go by train or plane.

</comment><comment><USER11> Gave up my car in Vancouver. (Used the money I saved on rent, and moved downtown where I walked everywhere.)

Now, I live in London, England. I bike everywhere or use the Tube.

<comment><USER12> I haven't owned a car for 29 years and have lived in Vancouver off and on for 24 of those. Having said that - our transit system is really quite disgusting and I am seriously thinking that 2012 will be the year of the car for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Oslo, Norway - No car, easy to walk everywhere, great transport, and city bike system.

</comment><comment><USER14> No. Currently in Milan, Italy. Yes, previously in Aarhus, DK and Amsterdamn NL.

</comment><comment><USER15> Amsterdam: no car. Ede (more, well, rural): definetely.

</comment><comment><USER16> No car. I live in London. Zipcar etc. work well.

</comment><comment><USER17> Bangalore. no car. Public transport is not bad.

</comment><comment><USER18> No Car. Edinburgh, UK. No problems so far.

</comment><comment><USER19> No Car in major cities of India .

</comment><comment><USER20> No car. London

<comment><USER21> Melbourne. Combination of bike and public transport (good overall but there are some deadzones.). Also fair few temporary hire car are around the city and surrounding suburbs</comment></comment>


IPhone is now as fragmented as Android - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/06/09/iphone-now-as-fragmented-as-android/

<comment><USER2> That is a stretch. The fact that all of the screens are the same aspect ratio is a huge advantage. Processing power is fragmented, yes.

I suppose the correct statement would be: iPhone is now more fragmented, but still not as much as Android.

</comment><comment><USER3> Given the pains Apple has taken to ease the porting effort for developers, this claim is not just a little bit exaggerated. Let's compare the significant sources of platform fragmentation from an app developer's perspective; we've got 1) input interface and capabilities, 2) output capabilities, 3) OS capabilities, and 4) performance capabilities.

1) The fragmentation of input capabilities for the iPhone is manifested by a regular addition of input sensors to the iPhone. The actual physical text and interaction input on the iPhone has stayed unchanged since the first generation, with the same virtual keyboard, home button and touchscreen size and shape. Since the original iPhone shipped with an accelerometer, the 3G added a GPS receiver, the 3GS added a magnetometer and video camera, and the iPhone 4 adds a gyroscope and front-facing camera. The input capabilities of the iPhone platform are on a steady path forward, never losing any previous abilities. This makes it so a currently written app will always work as expected on a future device, as it will have at least the same set of input capabilities.

Android, on the other hand, has a vastly different situation. Some devices have hardware keyboards of varying design, some have only a virtual one. Various devices also have different shape, aspect ratio and size touchscreens. Accelerometers are present on all Android devices, but anything beyond that is a bit of a crap shoot, appearing in some models, disappearing in later ones. Flagship devices will typically mirror or exceed the input capabilities of the latest iPhone, for example, but other models will leave some out. There is no expectation that any given input capability beyond accelerometers will be present in future devices.

2) The output capabilities of the iPhone platform so far have gone from a 3.5" display at 480x320 resolution to a 3.5" display at 960x640, exactly pixel- doubled with the same physical size. This means that your app written with a resolution of 480x320 in mind will display perfectly without distortion on the new devices.

The Android platform, however, is host to a plethora of screen configurations of varying size, aspect ratio, resolution, etc., essentially making you redesign your interface for each different screen in the market.

3) The OS situation is vastly different on the iPhone and Android. iPhone OS updates are made available to the entire installed base at the same time for free, and the installed base of iPhone OS users is very quick to upgrade to the latest firmware, with ~90% running the latest major OS version, and most of the remaining ones only one version behind, with only a couple percentage points of stragglers. This means that you can count on your entire target audience being running at least the previous major firmware version. This makes the developer's job much easier by eliminating the need to test against older, often bug-ridden firmware versions.

<http://metrics.admob.com/2009/12/updated-iphone-os-stats/>

On Android, we still have vendors shipping devices with the one-year-old Android 1.6 firmware, long after the major releases of 2.0, 2.1 and now 2.2. People who bought devices with older firmware often are not even offered updates to the latest version. Due to this, the portion of users running the latest firmware is a minority, and there are large populations stuck at various versions of the firmware. Since your target market is stuck running older versions of the firmware, you have no choice but to support ancient firmware revisions, with messy work-arounds for various bugs.

[http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform- ve...](http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform- versions.html)

4) Performance capabilities are mostly a wash, the only difference being that the iPhone is on a steady path towards increasing capabilities, while Android has a more scattered path, with high and low-end devices with different performance capabilities on the market at any given time.

As a developer, it becomes obvious that the fragmentation taking place on the iPhone is not of the same order of magnitude as that taking place in the Android platform. This is to be expected when comparing a single-vendor platform to a commodity platform, but that doesn't make it any easier to deal with for those targeting the latter.</comment>


Howl: a nostalgic homage to the brief, hazy era of "pure" London punk - <AUTHOR> https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/howl-punk-chris-kraus/ <comment><USER2> While I love capturing these moments of time to share with the world, I can't help but feel a twinge of sadness that these and many other vibrant, productive communities all eventually get swallowed up by the mainstream.

What are these groups called today? Where are the mini-Renaissances that play a massive role in generating culture? Will these happen less and less as everyone is exposed to the global stream of information?

<comment><USER3> Music is no longer a social movement. Back in the day being a fan of the Clash went far beyond music you were joining a social/political movement, something you believed in. Katy Perry might sing a catchy tune but its all about her personal ego, Joe Strummer say himself as a Che Guevara, a revolutionary socialist leader, a lot more than just a singer of hit songs. Songs became hits because they gave you a vision you could believe and participate in.

<comment><USER4> > Music is no longer a social movement.

Look harder, I'd say. See Bar25 in Berlin and the sound that is heard there (Katermukke label, etc.). Or Berghain and it's sound (Ostguton label, etc.). Hell yeah music and "social/political movement" are still as linked as ever. There's still a whole "roots" reggae/dub scene world wide that would besides social/political also come with an embedded spiritual and/or religious movement. Revolutionary hip-hip, like Dead Prez or Immortal, is still strong. In Europe there's still Freetekno. I could go on.

Hell no revolutionary vibes from K. Perry! But it's still there.

> Songs became hits because they gave you a vision you could believe and > participate in.

Yes. It's not advertised. They do not hit the charts anymore. So what. Shun the charts. We've got soundcloud, they've got ad-ridden radio and MTV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome to see a Zero Books published book here! Also, be sure to check out "Kill All Normies: Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right", another excellent book recently published on Zero Books.

</comment><comment><USER6> I always thought punk was a bit shit, it didn't seem to have any musical merit to me so although it was my era I ignored it.

I struggle to see why, a generation later, people look back at it with anything but disdain.

<comment><USER7> >I struggle to see why, a generation later, people look back at it with anything but disdain.

Because your frame of reference of musical merit is at best subjective and at worst, built upon nothing but raw prejudice.

Attacking that fact is what punk did. That's a freedom, and some people insist on freedom in art.

<comment><USER6> I hear the same thing from the art world, if you don't understand this art then it's because you are too ignorant. I think it's bullshit there as well.

<comment><USER7> >if you don't understand this art then it's because you are too ignorant

Maybe I'm not being clear. I'm not saying anything about ignorance. I am instead saying that some people demand freedom in their art and it necessarily follows that such persons expect their aesthetic standards to be challenged. Indeed, such persons usually enjoy or at least appreciate it when a challenge to their aesthetic appears.

Others, for whom aesthetic freedom is not an animating principle, do not make that demand, preferring instead to stake out a familiar set of aesthetic expectations and forms.

Avoiding challenge and preferring familiar forms and expectations is a very popular choice - it requires far less engagement with art because most questions about importance of the art are already answered for the adherent. This easier path is always available for persons who are more comfortable belonging than they are beholding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd probably rather re-read Please Kill Me: An Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil

<comment><USER9> Why? Was it so good that no other book on the same subject is worth reading? If so I'll have to check it out haha</comment></comment>


Don't worry about selling your privacy to Facebook. I already sold it for you - <AUTHOR> http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2011/10/dont-worry-about-selling-your-privacy-to-facebook-i-already-sold-it-for-you/

<comment><USER2> From what I've read, from the beginning Zuckerberg has been pretty clear in his desire to make everything everyone does public and on facebook. So this seems consistent with his vision.</comment>


The Computer as Music Critic - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/opinion/sunday/the-computer-as-music-critic.html

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this! It reminds me of 'The Axis of Awesome: 4 Chords' - we've hit on the chord progression that 'resolves' nicely and appeals to us...but it begs the question are we becoming too formulaic?</comment>


Anti-concussion collar draws inspiration from woodpeckers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-23/preventing-football-concussions-lessons-from-bird-brains <comment><USER2> People interested in how the NFL has been trying to ignore the concussion issue for decades should watch the Frontline program League of Denial. [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/league-of- denial/](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/league-of-denial/)

It ties directly into the film Concussion. Will Smith stars as the Dr. who first noticed CTE in retired NFL football players. Smith is not quite the box office attraction that he used to be, but, nevertheless, the NFL is probably not too thrilled about the release of this movie.

</comment><comment><USER3> This looks somewhat similar in idea to the HANS head and neck support device used in motorsport but a lot smaller. It was invented about a decade before its widespread, initially drivers thought it was clunky and restricting. It was adopted and officially mandated (in both, FIA and major American motorsports) after another preventable death from a basilar skull fracture caused by a rapid jerk on the head upon impact.

Some professional athletes sacrifice their health for the entertainment of others (in injuries as well as unheatlhy training regime and doping). I'm all for making sports safer but as the audience we should also align our expectations to reduce the demand for dangerous feats in sports and entertainment.

<comment><USER4> If you think about it, in principle, the best you could do is make a device that 1) controls the acceleration of the head assuming it will reach a certain displacement e.g. d=10cm with final velocity v=0 ) transfers the forces from the skull to elsewhere.

So the absolute best protection you could get would be some kind of cage around the head not linked to the head at all -- maybe you couple this cage directly to a vest akin the HANS device you mentioned, and actuate a separate mechanism smoothing the head movement, with the largest radius possible around the head to provide the least maximum acceleration ( a_maxmin = initial velocity^2 / 2 * d ). Normal head movement could be completely unhindered.

Now since this is a sport this could devolve into a bunch of people just bashing pieces of plastic into each other, which may or may not be desirable over the current situation; how much such a device would cost (not accessible to amateurs); and as others mentioned it's also possible their velocities will increase to compensate, maybe not changing the number of injuries at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wish guys weren't trained to hit so hard. I've played contact sports, and most hits to sensitive areas can be lessened. I accidentally clipped(once I knew I made contact in the wrong area, I instinctively pulled back, but the hit still stung the guy). And maybe even that semi hard, cheap hit was Freudian. Never liked the dude.

When Joe Namath knees were inflamed Cantalopues; even the hardest hitting, most aggressive plyers would pick him up, and put him down. As a kid I knew guys were treating him differently. As an adult watching the replays--I knew what they were doing.

If you claim you don't have the ability to pick and choose--get out of the sport. I've met some uncoordinated clods who shouldn't be playing contact sports.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't help but be reminded of the "Neckbelt Recall" clip.

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

The engineers will have to fight Murphy tooth and nail to make this safe.

</comment><comment><USER7> Will this not lead to even harder hits, just like the advent of helmets did?

<comment><USER8> Solution: light-up accelerometer helmets, and a new rule that if the helmet lights up it's a penalty (one designed so as to disinentivize both teams).

Football coaches and teams will very quickly determine the best way to tackle without rapid skull acceleration.

<comment><USER9> How do you disincentivize both teams in a zero-sum game?

<comment><USER10> In American football at all levels there are already severe disincentives for dangerous hits such as helmet-to-helmet collisions; these usually start at a 15 yard penalty and escalate to ejections and suspensions.

<comment><USER11> You can't give both teams a 15 yard penalty. How do you set up a rule so you don't incentivize teams to 'draw the foul'?

<comment><USER10> One question to ask is, given the history of the existing 'unnecessary roughness' / 'illegal hit' rules (which have been around for decades), why haven't teams been incentivized to 'draw the foul' already? (in the nfl, faking an injury at critical times is already disincentivized, see [http://static.nfl.com/static/content/public/image/rulebook/p...](http://static.nfl.com/static/content/public/image/rulebook/pdfs/7_Rule4_Game_Timing.pdf) section 5 article 4 page 18)

Also given how much time is spent going over videos of games after the fact (at all levels from high school on up), someone trying to draw the foul stands a pretty good chance at being caught out at it, which opens them up to, say, getting a multi-game suspension.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting parallel to occlusion training/KAATSU, which restricts veins during weight lifting and physical therapy.

</comment><comment><USER13> > A standard test in brain damage research involves dropping brass weights on > the heads of anesthetized rats, then inspecting their brains for tearing in > the connections between nerve cells.

Yeah, not nice.

</comment><comment><USER14> > He recruited about 60 high school football players, gave half of them > collars, and measured changes in their brains over the course of a season.

Incidentally, that will likely be evidence of child abuse.

<comment><USER15> Why? Because one group got protection but not the other?</comment></comment>


Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Piraha Don't Have Numbers (quicktime video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/everett07/everett07_index.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The Piraha, an Amazonian tribe with three numbers: one, two and many. [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_24_168/ai_n16...](http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_24_168/ai_n16029317)</comment>


Amazon Is Becoming the New Microsoft - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2017/11/17/15468/ <comment><USER2> In 2001, just 16 years ago, Microsoft was almost broken up because Internet Explorer was shipped with Windows. Think about that for a second, I'll wait.

Seems like small potatoes today, doesn't it?

When was the last time you've heard of anti trust litigation because iPhones come with Safari or a whole bunch of Apple services? What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones? And why can Amazon tie Kindle to _its_ book store and not get sued by competitors?

We are allowing these companies to integrate vertically to the point of insanity.

<comment><USER3> _Seems like small potatoes today, doesn 't it?_

When one takes at face value the extremely simplistic way you stated it, yes, it seems small. But that's not what happened. Microsoft was convicted of using their monopoly position in operating systems to extend their reach into web browsers. Practically speaking, the only consumer operating systems at the time ran on personal computers, either desktops or laptops, and in that market Microsoft held an overwhelming market share. There were no mass market smartphones (there was WinCE, but few I knew had them), Palm Pilots held the PDA market for a short while, but all a drop in the bucket compared to full- blown OSs.

 _When was the last time you 've heard of anti trust litigation because iPhones come with Safari or a whole bunch of Apple services?_

Go buy a turnkey Android phone if you don't like it.

 _What about Google and its software on any and all Android phones?_

Go buy an iPhone if you don't like that.

 _And why can Amazon tie Kindle to its book store and not get sued by competitors?_

Apple's iBooks has about everything you'll find on Amazon. Haven't used it, but I'd be surprised if Google Books wasn't close enough.

What were you going to buy computer-wise in 2001? A desktop or laptop that came with Microsoft Windows whether you wanted it or not. _That_ was your practical choice, and the courts found that though it was fine for Microsoft to own the OS market, it was _not_ fine to leverage that into driving Netscape out of business.

<comment><USER4> > Go buy an iPhone if you don't like that.

Or use LineageOS + microG [1]

> What were you going to buy computer-wise in 2001? A desktop or laptop that > came with Microsoft Windows whether you wanted it or not. That was your > practical choice, and the courts found that though it was fine for Microsoft > to own the OS market, it was not fine to leverage that into driving Netscape > out of business.

Yep, not only that, Microsoft insisted a computer should come preinstalled with an OS (an anti-piracy argument IIRC). So eventually, some vendors included FreeDOS. Also, if you wanted to run something else like Linux on a computer it would cost you serious work. An example is "winmodem", an onboard software modem instead of a traditional dedicated 'hardware' modem. Or WiFi drivers which wouldn't work because the drivers were closed source.

The main alternative was building your own computer. That's not feasible with a laptop though.

Also I recommend people not just look at only SCO but the whole Halloween documents (and do realise even those are a summary). For example, have a peak at one of the earlier Halloween documents which described how Netscape was driven out of business.

[1] [https://lineage.microg.org/](https://lineage.microg.org/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents)

<comment><USER5> > Or use LineageOS + microG [1]

Eh, that's like arguing that Linux was a viable alternative for the everyday consumer during the Microsoft days. While you _could_ do that in a practical sense most people don't have the know-how (as you mentioned in your reply).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Much of Microsoft's historical behaviour was objectionable. Amazon, however, has been troubling on a much deeper level from the beginning.

Their attitude towards labour has been nothing short of Dickensian. I'm not speaking so much of their habit of writing dystopian employment contracts and turning to legal intimidation when employees leave, though that is also a problem, as I am of their treatment of lower paid staff. Refusing dock workers adequate rest, hydration or cooling is indefensible.

However impressive the accomplishments and intellect of Mr. Bezos may be, we can no longer hold any faith he or Amazon will bow to even minimal concerns of human decency. The only levers are the threat of financial and regulatory consequences. The further Amazon's power places them beyond such levers the more dangerous they become.

[https://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons...](https://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_sick_brutality_and_secret_history_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers/)

> _The series revealed the lengths Amazon was prepared to go to keep costs > down and output high and yielded a singular image of Amazon's > ruthlessness—ambulances stationed on hot days at the Amazon center to take > employees suffering from heat stroke to the hospital. Despite the summer > weather, there was no air-conditioning in the depot, and Amazon refused to > let fresh air circulate by opening loading doors at either end of the > depot—for fear of theft. Inside the plant there was no slackening of the > pace, even as temperatures rose to more than 100 degrees.

> On June 2, 2011, a warehouse employee contacted the US Occupational Safety > and Health Administration to report that the heat index had reached 102 > degrees in the warehouse and that fifteen workers had collapsed. On June 10 > OSHA received a message on its complaints hotline from an emergency room > doctor at the Lehigh Valley Hospital: "I'd like to report an unsafe > environment with an Amazon facility in Fogelsville. . . . Several patients > have come in the last couple of days with heat related injuries."_

It's also worth adding that Amazon eventually did retrofit their facilities with cooling devices but only _after_ their practices drew international media coverage.

<comment><USER7> While this is terrible, is it worse than say Apple who offshore much of their labor costs to places with far worse standards?

<comment><USER8> Should Apple provide US style standards and pay for labor in China?

<comment><USER9> Depends if you believe that safe work environments are human rights, or just for Americans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is Amazon forcing us to install their products even if we don't use it, and crippling our OS if we try to remove it? No. Is Amazon taking control of small companies for their IP and then using it to sue competitors with frivolous lawsuits? (a la sco). Are they suing customers for using competing products? No, I don't think Amazon is doing these things.

That link only really gets into the fact that they have a large market share. That alone does't make them a 90s era Microsoft.

<comment><USER11> Amazon Stores doesn't sell competitor products. Try buying Google Home on Amazon. Whats worse? Searching for Google Home returns results for Amazon Echo.

You can find amazon apps on Google PlayStore though.

Amazon is definitely the next Microsoft.

<comment><USER12> Or, the next Safeway? Try buying another grocery store's brand of milk at Safeway! The bastards only sell theirs.

No wait, the next BMW! I tried to buy a Toyota and no BMW dealership would sell me one, can you believe it?

<comment><USER13> \- Safeway and BMW don't tout theirselves as, "Earth's biggest selection of books, magazines, music, DVDs, videos, electronics, computers, software, apparel & accessories, shoes, ..." like Amazon does. They don't even claim to be the biggest selection of groceries/autos.

\- Safeway and BMW aren't known as "The Everything Store"

\- You can buy Toyotas at a BMW dealership. They will be used, but they're there.

<comment><USER14> Do you claim anyone actually has a bigger selection of "books, magazines, music, DVDs, videos, electronics, computers, software, apparel & accessories, shoes, ..."?

<comment><USER13> Nope. That quote was lifted from Amazon.com meta tags.

If I were to guess at what companines might rival Amazon in having the biggest selection, my top 3 would be: eBay, Alibaba, Rakuten.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I alternate between being a real fan of Bezos and concern about the company's sprawling and growing power/interests.

Jeff Bezos is a true visionary, brilliant, and absolutely should be rewarded for that. We need more folks like him.

On the other hand, at what point has Amazon won enough? Selling things at a loss to drive competitors out of business verticals is surely bad for the consumer in the long-term no?

<comment><USER16> Interesting that you ascribe all good intentions to Bezos and all ill intentions to Amazon. How do you know that "Amazon's" growing power interests are not Bezos'?

<comment><USER17> Nobody knows anything either way which is why speculating about it is a waste of time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article assertion is very big in computing = Microsoft of the 90s. I can be wrong but there have not been any anti-competition steps taken at AWS yet.

AWS has been light years ahead when it came to cloud computing and now they are having the first mover advantage and the dominant position. But will it last very long? It is very hard to say, over the years companies which were thought infallible have gone down.

<comment><USER19> Try moving your data outside AWS. Store data, $0.023 / GB / month. Access your data outside of AWS, $0.090 / GB.

It's more expensive to transfer data outside of AWS once than to store it on AWS for a quarter.

Not entirely sure what you meed by "anti-competitive steps taken by Microsoft in the '90s", but holding customer data hostage is as anti-competitive as it gets.

<comment><USER20> Storage costs are cheaper than network costs. Oranges and apples.

<comment><USER19> Estimating bandwidth costs is fun. From Azure [0], "Within a given region, we can support up to 1.6 Pbps of inter-datacenter bandwidth.". Pretty reasonable to assume this is industry standard capability. Using 0.09 $/GB pricing, the sticker price for a second comes at about $16k, or about $41B per month. We're several orders of magnitude off a reasonable figure. Safe to say cloud providers are charging exorbitant markups for bandwidth, which coincidentally helps customer lock-in.

[0] [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-microsoft- builds-...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/how-microsoft-builds-its- fast-and-reliable-global-network/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> tl;dr - Amazon is coming Bad Microsoft... because AWS is a monopoly. And a whole lot of things that don't make sense.

It might just be too early in the morning for me.

> Part of the reason AWS is gaining market share is because Microsoft's Azure > doesn't boot virtual machines quite as fast.

Somehow I doubt the gap between virtual machine boot time (and this is mostly applicable only to EC2 vs. Azure Virtual Machines) is worth calling out. It might be due to existing developer buy-in and familiarity with AWS in addition to the continual investment in new services and price matching.

Why would I switch to Azure when AWS exceeds its offering and is priced just as competitively? These are complex platforms with real lock-in. Switching from AWS to anything else requires a substantial investment in learning new tools, technologies and best practices. So far AWS has made it so there's never been a compelling reason for most users.

> ... This too shall pass, but Microsoft will still be smaller. That's why > Redmond has staked out the Enterprise cloud market — alas, the segment most > sensitive to such slow boot times.

On-premise cloud and enterprise customers care about virtual machine boot times that much huh? I'd love an example or some citation.

> AWS supports most startups as well as all 17 US intelligence agencies — > taking 350,000 PCs out of places like the CIA, Thank Edward Snowden for that > one. They are enjoying great success, though AWS partners aren't enjoying > themselves quite as much. Put simply, AWS is a pain to deal with if you are > a customer big enough to be in personal communication and not just a credit > card number. This, too, is like the old Microsoft.

Anything at all to backup these sentences? I'm not sure they belong together. How does the CIA moving to AWs connect with AWS being a pain to deal with if you're a big customer?

> Tech companies behave this way because most employees are young and haven't > worked anywhere else and because the behavior reflects the character of the > founder. If the boss tells you to beat up customers and partners and it's > your first job out of college, then you beat up customers and partners > because that's the only world you know.

These two paragraphs are particularly ... cringely. Jeff Bezos in the vest with the muscular arms is imprinting on these young minds that they can treat customers and partners badly. I think. Somehow.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why is AWS so dominant and, surprisingly to me at least, gaining on the competition?

Google Cloud seems quite neat and in the same price range. OVH is much cheaper and uses OpenStack. Businesses in the Microsoft sphere should buy Azure quite easily. And there are many smaller, specialized providers for various needs.

Amazon's lead should be eroding not consolidating. Is it just that they were first and everyone standardised on their tools? Devops people choosing AWS on autopilot because it's what they know works?

BTW this has to be the best blog header in the business.

<comment><USER23> Disclaimer: I currently work in Azure. I've formerly worked inside of Google Cloud, and before that, AWS.

Google runs its own infrastructure on people food and then gives its customers dog food. Until Google is eating its own dog food, it will be a distant third in the cloud market. Amazon understands this. They eat their own dog food throughout the company. They take running their business on AWS to the extreme.

Microsoft is primarily hampered by the legacy of Windows. The modern cloud runs on Linux, not Windows. They're at 40% Linux VMs per recently announced numbers. If Azure succeeds, I think we'll see 80%+ Linux VMs.

I think current market share is misleading. The current market is less than 5% of what the total market will be in 5-10 years. What matters now is mind share not market share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think people like to blame companies for what are actually serious flaws in the models of businesses they run altogether. Even if Amazon was broken up, you'd still see the Chinese fake syndrome because that's more about how peer to peer internet based selling fails to work when gamed, and how cheap foreign manufacturing can be used to clone or game the market. Amazon made it worse mostly by comingling inventory, but there were big problems in the whole "yard sale" Ebay mode of internet business way before that.

Or with ebooks, the problem isn;t "Amazon is too big," it was publishers and authors choosing which standard is the least likely to increase piracy and drive sales, and the customers who actually pay for goods choosing the marketplace that best serves them. If not Amazon, it would have been Sony or Kobo, but it couldn't ever be Smashwords once authors found how often works were pirated from that open platform.

I think people look for scapegoats rather than look at the hard truths about how the internet as a whole isn't particularly working for many types of business models. A lot of the protections that have evolved around physical businesses simply aren't as easy to have or are even available in a net- connected global economy, and the net tends to try and revive a lot of the nasty unregulated models of work from the past as well. Piecework, and penny auctions for example.

</comment><comment><USER25> There's certainly a risk of AWS becoming a monopoly but too early to tell. Microsoft has a large enterprise user base and increasingly a "good enough" cloud product that combined with Office 365 is very attractive to those enterprises. On the technical side Kubernetes is making it easier to move apps among clouds

</comment><comment><USER26> I've never used AWS, but I keep seeing news about large companies or organizations, such as the recent Pentagon story [1], exposing all of their customers' data in plain-text.

Is Amazon making it _that easy_ to screw something like that up, or what is going on here? When you see a few random cases likes, you might think it's just an engineering making a dumb mistake, but this is starting to seem _systematic_ , like there's a UX/UI issue at play here that makes all of these companies that should know better screw-up so easily. Or maybe Amazon just needs to _make it hard_ to screw something like this up. So what's going on?

[1] - [https://www.pcmag.com/news/357465/pentagon-accidentally- expo...](https://www.pcmag.com/news/357465/pentagon-accidentally-exposes-web- monitoring-operation)

<comment><USER27> Speaking generally, most services offered by AWS are too low level to be blamed for problems besides outages or similar issues. They are computing and storage resources that behave exactly as they are configured to do.

For example, S3 buckets are not public by default. The Pentagon is entirely to blame for the data breach. Amazon can't make it any harder to make this mistake, because publicly accessible buckets are an extremely common use case, and it is already an explicit choice.

<comment><USER28> Amazon doesn't allow you to inhibit public buckets through AWS org and service control policies unless something has changed recently. Pretty big gap in that feature set.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Isn't Amazon also AWS' largest customer, followed by Netflix? And I don't know much about Azure but I wouldn't doubt Microsoft is their largest customer too. I don't know, this whole piece seems more like Cringely needing something to write about during his convalescence.

</comment><comment><USER30> Amazon is becoming the new Microsoft. Microsoft is becoming the new Apple. Apple is becoming the new Sony. I don't know what's Sony going to be..

<comment><USER31> Sony is becoming the new Yugo (as in cheaply-made Zastava Koral car). And, by the way, your statement chain is right on; nicely done!

[I'll disclose that I'm quite biased _against_ Sony. In fact, where possible, I avoid purchasing any Sony product at all...and it all goes back to the Sony rootkit scandal of early 2000s. I don't hold a grudge too often...but in this case, I still don't trust (nor wish to purchase anything from) Sony.]

<comment><USER30> Same here. Corporate degeneracy like that of Sony is destroying Japan's economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> These two aren't the same.

If I want, for any reason, to not use Amazon, I can do that easily (even if I will have to pay more, it is my choice) by typing any other online store or seller into my browser, or going to a local store.

For the typical person, they cannot use anything other than Microsoft if they want to use a computer, period. Except Mac, which many can't afford and which is limiting in what programs it can run.

<comment><USER33> I agree that the current state of Amazon's retail goods is not a monopoly. We will see if that remains true in 10 years.

Currently Microsoft does not have a monopoly on computer OS. They have practically no stake in mobile computers (smart phones). Mac has a decent share of desktop/laptop usage. Any claim that MacOS is "limiting in what programs it can run" is a 10 year old argument or so one sided (Windows is also limiting in what programs it can run....). The Microsoft of 20 years ago _did_ have a monopoly on computer OS.

<comment><USER32> I would say they do. For everything except using a few social media apps, the PC is used (not the mobile).

You may be speaking as someone techy. For most people, what I said still holds true.

<comment><USER33> Android has surpassed Windows as the largest share of web traffic[0], though maybe that means those social apps like Instagram, Facebook, etc. Stat counter also states that >35% of web browser traffic is mobile not desktop[1].

[0] [http://gs.statcounter.com/press/android-overtakes-windows- fo...](http://gs.statcounter.com/press/android-overtakes-windows-for-first- time)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#/media/File:Usage_share_of_web_browsers_\(Source_StatCounter\).svg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Doesn't the author mean to say that Amazon is becoming the old Microsoft?

</comment><comment><USER35> Reading just the post title makes me think for a moment that Amazon is releasing Amazon Linux Home Edition 2018 at its Re:Invent event.</comment>


Ask HN: Were You a Developer for Pogoplug? - <AUTHOR> The little widgets which Pogoplug made are useful as cheap (<$10) Linux boxes for hobbyists.
Unfortunately, now that Pogoplug Inc. is kaput, it is more difficult to root these devices with your own Linux install (you have crack them open and solder in a serial port connection).
Perhaps there is a backdoor in the software which would make this easier?  If you were a developer who worked on the software image used in these devices, I would be eternally grateful for any insight you might share! <comment><USER2> I remember rooting one of these things almost a decade ago. They were great!

I think a lot of what the Pogoplug offered for Linux box hobbyists can be replicated by the Raspberry Pi nowadays.</comment>