When is it too late to get into programming? - <AUTHOR> I'm 24 years old with a degree in business. I wasn't exposed to higher level math or programming until university and my interest in these subjects didn't really sink in until my senior year, after it was already too late in many respects.
I'm wondering at what age does HN think someone needs to have been exposed to an engineering/scientific field in order to have a realistic shot at making a meaningful contribution. I know that every situation is different and that generally it's best to try and make a living doing something you enjoy. Nevertheless, it seems that a lot of the most distinguished ideas come from individuals who started young, perhaps because the adolescent brain is more receptive and impressionable.
I believe Einstein said that if you don't make your contribution to science by age 30 then you never will. Maybe this is taken out of context, but I'd like to know where HN stands on the issue. Why is it that many profound scientific achievements come from people less than 30? And are there any notable exceptions to this rule? <comment><USER2> 24 is definitely not too late. I worked professionally in finance until I was 30 and followed my passion to be a coder. Programs like Thinkful.com are great to help u with a mentor to move things along (disclaimer: I'm a mentor on the site).

I saw an important key as a principal I took from a book called the Talent Code, you need to see programming s something you'd still be willing and interested to do when you're old. If you can see yourself as a coder for life you're going to put in the time, if it's just the next hobby interest for the next 6 months before you wanna do something else's you're going to struggle to justify to yourself why you should spend so much time learning to code.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most people who are programming for a living do not intend to and will never make meaningful contributions to an engineering/scientific field.

It sounds like you might want to know when is it too late to get into computer science?

<comment><USER4> Agree, I think that's what OP meant. When is it too late to get into computer science?

<comment><USER3> I think it was Linus Pauling who had a method of moving between relatively related fields, so that by the time he had reached the level of expert understanding in one field he could move to the next and thus start over as a neophyte. Doing this he was able to be contributing at a meaningful level until late in life.

Pauling's experience thus suggests that it is not the age itself that makes one unproductive in the field, but the inability to see things in a new light that experience in the field gives you.

However if you are trying to learn a very complicated field without any of the basics you are probably not going to make it if you are doing it after 30 unless you are able to do without anything that people often get at that age - like relationships, families etc.

Thus again Pauling's way of doing it (if indeed I remember that it was Pauling correctly). You know the basics because you are an expert in a related field. Then you can enter the new field.

Not sure what related fields would make one a good jumping off spot for computer science contributions: math obviously, logical philosophy, linguistics maybe, other stuff (maybe even programming)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> just dive in. the water's fine. :) whether you're 24 or 94.

and besides, you shouldn't make life decisions based on the likelihood of whether or not you will win a nobel prize...

edit, one more thing: being a programmer and being a scientist are not necessarily the same thing. are you considering a research career in academia? then you should consider it -- you are 24, you can pretty much go any direction you want career-wise at the moment. but read up on the tradeoffs of doing a phd and going into academia -- there are definitely _tradeoffs_ ; comments here on HN as well as articles on chronicle.com and elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> refer to the following [https://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/are-you- too-old...](https://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/are-you-too-old-to- be-brilliant/) which I just found on the front page. This would also explain Pauling's success, because he was really productive.

</comment><comment><USER6> Whenever you accept that there's such a thing as "too late".

</comment><comment><USER7> Never; I don't even know why it's a question.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it a good practice to provide open-source version of your paid app? - <AUTHOR> Hello hackers,
I am Prasanna, the founder of PrivJs (https://privjs.com) - Internet's first open-core software marketplace.
While building a few products, I was wondering if it could be a good practice to release a chunk of my paid software to the open-source community? Will that have any adverse effects on the product? Or will it benefit overall?
-Prasanna <comment><USER3> I think it will not harm. Usually, because people who cannot pay - will not. People/companies who need high quality products and/or have expensive labour will choose a paid plan.

For Example, Elasticsearch. So popular, fully open-sourced. Still, Elastic sells fully managed clusters. And, many companies choose Enterprise license.

If you want smaller example. 2 month prior the beta launch of NewsCatcherAPI ([https://newscatcherapi.com](https://newscatcherapi.com)) I decided to open source some code we've done ([https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher](https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher)). We ended up having 300 people fro beta sign-up. Then, 700 pre-launch.

So, I attracted lots of developers who already liked the field via open- sourcing

Edit: grammar

<comment><USER4> You're correct, but I want to emphasize a point from your comment: ElasticSearch only earns a lot of money because they have a very good monetization strategy for their managed clusters.

Open sourcing your product absolutely _requires_ that you have a proper monetization strategy in mind, it should not be an afterthought. I've seen too many startups fail because they were not able to capitalize on the momentum they have gotten with their opensource version; projects such as rethinkdb come to mind.

Once you have a solid plan, by all means, release an open source version. But remember, once that cat is out of the bag, it's hard to put it back in.

<comment><USER3> Agree

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It will substantially harm sales of B2C products, but it may make sense for B2B products that require support and training and aren't based on any substantial know how/trade secrets. In that case releasing as open source might even be beneficial. A good trade off is to release libraries as open source but keep parts of your final product (e.g. GUI) proprietary.

Even in the B2B market successful open source companies often use dual licenses and release the open source version as a sort of crippleware by keeping essential libraries and tools proprietary or under very restrictive open source licenses.

<comment><USER6> I think Kong* does this rather well. They have a usable open source product that has a lot of the core functionality and it more than enough for small businesses and hobbyists. They also provide enterprise support and a enterprise products which includes functions that are typically used by enterprises (like fine grained auth).

* [https://konghq.com/](https://konghq.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If I would ever would launch a product, I would choose AGPL for the open source side and provide a commercial license for those who need it. This has the advantage over MIT/Apache that if someone wants to build a business arround your free software, they have to provide their changes to everyone.

I discovered this for pgmodeler[1] and found it a very good way to monetize the development of the application.

[1] [https://github.com/pgmodeler/pgmodeler](https://github.com/pgmodeler/pgmodeler)

<comment><USER8> I think a better option would be "Source Available" rather than AGPL. AGPL isn't tested in courts, but the _last_ thing a company would want is all of their source being forced open because they used demo'd some tool internally. A "source available" option allows a company to review your code or even solve their own problems, but without risk of being sued by a third party.

<comment><USER9> That's the point. Companies will choose the commercial license, then, out of fear of getting sued. If they want to review the code and demo it, they can look at the git repository or use a hosted demo version by the author. In this case, there are no fewer capabilities than with closed-source software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you want to open all of your product's code, then you might want to use a public-private licensing model. [https://indieopensource.com/public- private/users](https://indieopensource.com/public-private/users)

Have a look at the Parity Public License and the Prosperity Public License. [https://paritylicense.com/](https://paritylicense.com/) [https://prosperitylicense.com/](https://prosperitylicense.com/)

Those two licenses allow others to read, modify and redistribute your code. Parity requires that users open source their code, while Prosperity only allows non-commercial usage. If a potential customer doesn't want to be restricted by the public license you choose, they can instead buy a private license.

Also see License Zero's private license. [https://licensezero.com/licenses/private](https://licensezero.com/licenses/private)

<comment><USER9> Note that the Prosperity, Parity and Licenze Zero licenses are not open source due to the restrictions they place on certain types of users, such as other businesses. This may be fine for one's usecase or as a business, but one must know that they are not in fact truly open source.

<comment><USER11> I'm not seeing where Parity discriminates against certain users, groups, or fields of endeavor. Clause 9 of the open source definition[1] seems a close thing, but the same reasoning for A/GPL applies.

[1] [https://opensource.org/osd-annotated](https://opensource.org/osd- annotated)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It shouldn't if you model it right. A lot of companies do very well with 'open core', which is sort of this. I think there's other successful ones as well.

For instance laravel has a hosted invoicing app: InvoiceNinja, but it's open source too, as in you can host it yourself, just it doesn't have any of the multi-tenant stuff baked in.

</comment><comment><USER13> You might check out Aseprite. It's a a software which binaries are paid, but source code is free and you can just conpile a program for free if you want.

<comment><USER14> Aseprite came to mind for me, too. Then again, Aseprite is aimed at artists rather than programmers. I'd argue that most people who use it don't want to go through the hassle of compiling it themselves – compiling software can be a daunting task. I have the feeling that a similar business model ("free on github if you're willing to put a little work into it, paid in stores if you prefer comfort") wouldn't work as well as it does for Aseprite if the software would be aimed at programmers.

<comment><USER13> True, this may have worked for Aseprite only because of the fact that the program was made for artists. So their sales haven't been hurt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well, I've been a user of a couple closed-source apps that have apparently fallen by the wayside and don't get any development anymore. Meanwhile, the open-source ecosystem doesn't have good native alternatives specifically in those areas.

So personally I'd like it if authors at least made provisions for open- sourcing their apps in their will, or in the 'life moved on' plan.

<comment><USER16> Out of curiosity, which apps are these ?

<comment><USER15> Disk Order is/was a fast and sleek two-panel file manager for Mac. However some bugs were never fixed. Releases just stopped, and the company site later disappeared. The primary alternative, Forklift, is just too slow in the version three. Double Commander works but doesn't integrate well with native OS features. (Total Commander remains a distant ideal on non-Windows platforms. Boy do I miss its speed and comfort.)

Hyperswitch the cmd-tab enhancement is still very usable and is updated, however the updates seem to be limited to resetting the 'beta' time limit. Not that it needs new features, but I think it does have at least one bug. I'm also baffled by the author's release model (the time-limited but repeatedly prolonged 'beta') and irked that among the couple dozen apps on this topic there aren't good open-source ones without some dubious features. Since Hyperswitch is fully freeware, why not make it open-source so others could fix problems they run into?

I think there were other ones, but can't remember them right now. Basically, if an app doesn't bring in plenty of money, why not at least let people make something better of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you wanted me to use and pay for your software, you'd need to provide the source. I have no problem paying for software - in fact when the price is fair I do so liberally.

However, if a copy of the source doesn't come with my purchase then I am much, much less likely to buy it. I'm obviously only one user, so take my anecdote with a grain of salt.

I use a model of "source-included" personally. This way I respect (most of) the freedom of my users, but not at my own expense.

I don't have a vetted license in mind tho. So far I haven't needed it. Someday hopefully I will ;-)

 _Side note: make sure you have build instructions for your users tho. I don 't like when I buy software that is source included but then building is impossible because `make && make install` (or whatever for that platform) doesn't work and there aren't any instructions. You don't want your buyers to have remorse.

_*Other side note: Thanks for thinking about this! It's really cool of you to think about community

</comment><comment><USER18> In a word: Depends. Microsoft for instance nailed it perfectly. For many years billions of devices ran cracked Windows copies and truthfully that didn't bother individual users in most countries. While illegal, realistically no one was going to bother with 15 year old Jimmy somewhere in the countryside. But they kept insisting on it. Until they figured out that locking and blocking was never going to work. So they adopted the WinRAR approach: "Hey you are running an unregistered version past your trial. This may have legal consequences."

But the thing is that while Windows has many alternatives (I'm saying this as someone who's been using Linux full time since the age of 11), for most people that really isn't an option: while you can get things like Photoshop to run on Linux, the experience is anything but optimal. I don't use Photoshop at all(or any graphics programs). But say my mum who's an artist - she practically has to use Windows. So in that sense, Microsoft has no benefit in open-sourcing anything, even though they have been doing that in recent years. I remember seeing a huge discussion on Twitter last year and several people said that at some point Microsoft will become a completely open-source company. Personally I doubt it, but who knows...

Now let's look at another example - Google, and Chrome in particular. As a browser, Chrome has a million and one alternatives, many of which are very good. So having an open source alternative is in their best interest - <USER2> of how many browsers [1] use and contribute to the chromium engine - it's a win-win situation for everyone: Big community, a thousand eyes looking into it's internals(and undeniably catching security flaws).

Then again, this isn't always applicable. Even more so with javascript and npm in particular, which has turned everything into an endless rabbit hole of packages, dependencies and before-after install scripts.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Active](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_\(web_browser\)#Active)

<comment><USER19> >Chrome has a million and one alternatives

I think after MS gave up on Edge, we're down to one - Firefox.

<comment><USER18> No doubt it is the biggest. From the prospective of a Linux user however I'm not complaining. IMO it outperforms firefox vastly in terms of performance and all the different chrome-engine based browsers have been incredibly reliable: Ever since the pandemic started, opera has been my go to for ssh tunneling, while keeping chromium clean. All I had to do is get used to some different shortcut keys and the red logo up on top, but that's it. Still, there are several other engines available but they are still nowhere nearly as polished as chromium. Hence my statement that this has been a successful, partially open-sourced product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If your marketplace is for "open core" licensed code it would make sense for you to use that model too.

</comment><comment><USER21> It may not harm you on the sales side of things directly, but going open source will make it easy for your competition to catch up, which might matter if you find traction with your product.

<comment><USER8> I think this is intuitive, but are there are real world examples of this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you care about the liberty of your users and ethics, you should release the all code as free software. Information is not property.

You can create your business around service providing rather than using state legislation to coerce people to not reproduce and alter information they know.

<comment><USER15> > _Information is not property_

I too have phantom nostalgia and longing for anarchist ideals, but that statement relates to life about as much as saying that matter and goods are not property because all molecules of a substance are identical and thus you could make the same things yourself. 'You could, but you didn't', as they say.

> _you should release all code as free software_

In exchange for your complete disregard for the value of the author's time and effort? Dubious arrangement.

> _rather than using state legislation to coerce people to not reproduce and > alter information they know_

Perhaps that's actually somewhat similar to when state legislation says you shouldn't snag matter just because it's lying around? You know, the 'natural' and primordial right of capitalist bros that somehow requires police force and surveillance for it to be implemented.</comment></comment>


Android will be using ext4 starting with Gingerbread - <AUTHOR> http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2010/12/12/android-will-be-using-ext4-starting-with-gingerbread/ <comment><USER3> One nice thing about well written, vetted, and regressed open source - <USER2> decision to ship Android on ext4 apparently occurred without discussing it with Theodore Ts'o, because there was really no need to. The product (in this case, a file system) spoke for itself, and primary developers only involvement is in their contribution - the file system stands on its own.

Compare this to deploying on a closed source/licensed product, in which conversations with the vendor regarding their future plans, support, and possibly code-escrow in case they went out of business.

</comment><comment><USER4> I assume this marks the end of raw nand flash devices in the next generations of Android phones ?

<comment><USER5> One of the comments clarifies that ext4 won't be used for the entire storage subsystem:

# 23 Brian Swetland Says: December 13th, 2010 at 8:35 pm Yup, our main motivation here was to select a filesystem to work on top of emmc which has built-in block rotation and translation and looks like a regular block device (similar to ssds on desktop systems). At this point ext4 seems to our eyes to be the most stable and performant option of the standard linux filesystems that support full unix permissions and semantics.

We use ext4 for the system image (read only), and the local user data and cache partitions (read-write). A separate FAT partition is used for media storage, since that's still the least-common-denominator needed for USB Mass Storage to "Just Work" with PCs and Macs. For post-gingerbread we're investigating alternatives to UMS which would allow us to stop using FAT for media/external storage entirely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This might be a good place to ask for a book recommendation: where can I read a comprehensive readable intro to linux, which would presumably cover things like types of file systems?

<comment><USER3> UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (now out in fourth edition) is a pretty good book. It combines a lot of introductory material, but also mentions broader unix topics - AIX/HPUX/Solaris all get an honorable mention. The topics they pay attention to are all pretty relevant.

<comment><USER7> A classic. There's a new version which just focuses on current Linux OSs, which the OP may find more practical. AIX and HPUX are fairly rare these days and the most popular version of Solaris (8) is in legacy support.

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Linux-Administration-Handbook-Evi- Ne...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Linux-Administration-Handbook-Evi- Nemeth/dp/0130084662)</comment></comment></comment>


Google 2FA mobile breached? - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/dwwdj <comment><USER2> Why do you suspect a breach and not someone that knows your phone number and gmail address? They can try to log in as you, triggering the 2FA message to be sent and then send you the reset message with sender spoofing.</comment>


Life is quantum - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/science/quantum-biology-the-uncanny-order-of-life/

<comment><USER2> The book "Biocentrism" is pretty awesome and goes into detail to propose a theory about life/consciousness and quantum mechanics</comment>


Vocito - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/vocito/ <comment><USER2> Can we have a more descriptive headline? Maybe something to indicate what Vocito does or that it's related to GrandCentral. I clicked on this to see what the heck it is because I've never heard of Vocito (or GrandCentral for that matter). I was disappointed to find out it's a very, very niche application of even further limited utility because it's Mac only.

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who gives out only my GrandCentral number... this is amazing. Even lets you create applications that call someone directly!

On second thought, GrandCentral better not go down, or at least let me buy my number from them...

<comment><USER2> The GrandCentral site says they've been acquired by Google and they plan to support uninterrupted service for all current customers. They're only accepting new users through the typical Google-beta-invitation-only scheme. There's no information about long term plans but it doesn't look like it's going down any time soon.

<comment><USER4> The invitation feature has been turned off AFAIK, I tried to invite a friend a while back and I could no longer find it anywhere in the UI.</comment></comment></comment>


Monolist: manage your Gmail (and everything else) - <AUTHOR> https://monolist.co/blog/product-updates/gmail/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! We posted a couple of weeks ago about Inbox being shut down and our hopes to build Monolist into a more powerful replacement. At the time we were still building our Gmail integration, and so our original title was changed. However, over 800 of you signed up to help us build that vision. We're happy to now start delivering on our promise!

<comment><USER2> This is a wonderful implementation - Congrats.

Other features that could be great (long term):

\- Inter-entity relationships. If there is an email that comes through related to an asana/todist item, can they be linked other than by tags? Nesting and bundling of items would be great.

\- 'Projects' alongside tags, so that users can collect items into finite-time groups

\- Export feature (to JSON or CSV)

\- Zapier integration

\- Reports, or integration with a reporting / sql / dashboard application such as PowerBI

\- Integration with Google maps / embedding maps / location attributes on entities

The above may be way beyond scope and not in line with your vision - However, I believe the next 10 years will see a consolidation in B2C tools not unlike B2B ERPs did to consolidate old micro services back in the day - Not to just an 'inbox' but more of a larger scope 'entity relationship manager'. Therefore users may want other entities represented and inter-related such as Areas (of focus), Tasks, Events, Locations, Goals, Items etc. Monolist could be seen as a step in this direction.</comment></comment>


Twitter – Keeping your account secure - <AUTHOR> https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/keeping-your-account-secure.html <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16989534](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16989534). I realize this one was posted earlier (sorry) and is arguably the original source, but the Reuters article contains marginally more info, and the corporate announcement posts about this things always feel like reverse press releases.

</comment><comment><USER3> What a benign blog title for such a non-benign security matter. Isn't the right way to handle this to force everyone to choose a new password?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you explain a social news site to computer noobs? - <AUTHOR>

So, I just launched www.cuuute.com.
It's a social news site ala reddit/slinkset/HN.  But my target demographic is going to be users of www.cuteoverload.com, www.catster.com and www.dogster.com, or http://petoftheday.com/talk/index.php.  (Think ladies who love cute animals and pets)
One of the problems I'm having is that noob users don't get social news sites _at_all_.  They think it's just a list of static links.
How would you explain how a social news site works to complete computer noobs?  I'm planning on making a video to explain it, but I'll take all suggestions.
P.S.  I know the site's a bit rough around the edges. I just launched 4 days ago. <comment><USER2> I run <http://cherrypeel.com> and we are redesigning to solve a lot of the problems we had with people not understanding the site.

You need to have a tag line right at the top saying: "my website does X". Check out <http://99designs.com> as they do a great job of this.

Often people don't view the arrows as a voting button, so either change the icon to a heart or cute bunny etc or have some explanatory text describing how to vote or both. I've got feedback from people saying they thought the voting arrows were rising/falling icons, such as on the top 40 chart when they say; "this song moved up 6 spots".

People don't understand why they should vote. Explain that the more then vote, the better the site becomes for everyone. You might need to give people incentives to vote, such as karma, a level system or special names based on involvement.

Make the site look cute. The design doesn't say "this site serves up cute animals". I also wouldn't forward it on to my girlfriend as I don't think the cutness jumps out at you fast enough, which brings me to my next point.

What about having a preview function? There are lots of sites that have lots of cute pictures so why would I want to visit one that each picture is behind a click?

Have you check out the cute sub-reddit?

I got off topic but I hope this helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I know the site design needs some work. The voting function needs to be explained and the preview function is on the "todo list". Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "you thumbs up stuff you do like, thumbs down stuff you don't"?

Do you think if you're struggling to explain your concept to your potential users, isn't that a rather large problem?

The layout isn't very cute. Where are the cute images/colours? Clicking the header "cuute.com" should take you back to the homepage.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're in the process of doing some design work on the site now.

And, the header taking you back to the main page is on the docket for today.

Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Maybe try for a more blatant voting queue, like "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" (you can just ignore any thumbs down votes if you so choose, but make the button tactile - choosing to either vote something up or not vote at all is rare outside of social news sites AFAIK).

I'm not so much as suggesting thumbs up and thumbs down specifically, more that the up arrow means nothing to me and I know what a social news site is.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. That's a good idea. I need to work on the "vote" button.</comment></comment>


DARPA-Funded HackRF Aims to Be a Wireless Swiss Army Knife for Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/10/19/darpa-funded-radio-hackrf-aims-to-be-a-300-wireless-swiss-army-knife-for-hackers/ <comment><USER2> More related news about HackRF:

\- A radio for all frequencies to rule the airwaves [http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/10/hackrf-...](http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/10/hackrf- sdr.html)

\- HackRF Jawbreaker Could Bring Low-Cost Wireless Hacking to the Masses [http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/hackrf-jawbreaker-could- br...](http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/hackrf-jawbreaker-could-bring-low- cost-wireless-hacking-masses-102212)</comment>


Hosting My Static Site - <AUTHOR> https://www.dajocarter.com/blog/hosting-my-static-site/ <comment><USER3> The author didn't even consider hosting on AWS directly, using S3? It's super cheap -- the biggest expense is buying a domain and hosting DNS. And HTTPS is straightforward as well, thanks to Certificate Manager!

I recently wrote a tutorial for how to get a static site set up with S3 and CloudFront: [https://www.davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/deploy-static- site-a...](https://www.davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/deploy-static-site- aws-s3-cloudfront/) I'm curious if others would find it useful?

<comment><USER4> Nice guide. I have my personal site on the same AWS S3/Cloudfront combo and I effectively only pay for the domain name ($12/yr) and certificate (~$35 for a 2 year?). AWS invoices me monthly for ~$0.05/month in fees with a credit that erases the charge, so I'm not actually paying for hosting. If you're unfamiliar with AWS it can be daunting, but it's mostly initial setup to get it working then uploading changed files whenever you update the site, which was a better choice for me than $5/$10/whatever each month for little or no additional benefit. I'd recommend it for anyone with a static site. I think you'd need a lot of traffic and/or updates to the site to incur $10/month in fees on AWS.

<comment><USER5> I agree with you, $10 in AWS fees sounds like a lot of traffic. That's also why Netlify has a free tier. We leave paid plans for people with more traffic. We event have a redundant DNS service for people that really really need it. For your needs is completely free of charge and hassle :)

PS: As I pointed below, I'm the CTO of Netlify.

<comment><USER4> I was just looking at your pricing. :) All in all Netlify does offer a compelling service for this scope. I'm also interested in the Pro tier being free for OSS, that's fantastic!

To be fair, setting up AWS for the first time is a real PITA and I happen to have had it all set up (IAM, buckets, command line, etc) already, so my barrier to entry was low. Had I known of Netlify when I first moved my site to AWS I probably would have gone with Netlify for the convenience and free HTTPS cert.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Literally ANY host that gives you an FTP drop works for static sites.

Bluehost

Dreamhost

Namecheap

Godaddy

Mom and Pop's Web Hosting Shop

etc etc

Not sure why such a topic needs more than about 1 paragraph's worth of commentary. Why does this guy needs support for all these fancy features? It's a static site!

Do people simply not pay attention to history? Leave it to the "hackers" to complicate something as simple as static hosting.

<comment><USER7> So static sites really have come a long way from the 1994 geocities versions. There are people that statically build sites with 1000's of pages. The idea is that you don't need to have the whole backend that we've all built before is growing (look at things like the serverless movement).

As soon as you have to do more than a junk website that you check occasionally and care about the actual user experience you need to start considering things like CDNs, cache invalidation (global consistency matters) and C/D integrations. This is why you have a growth of static site hosting services (and hence the article).

Some good references: [http://www.staticgen.com/](http://www.staticgen.com/), [http://jamstack.org/](http://jamstack.org/), [https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-static- websi...](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-static-website- generators-next-big-thing/)

also (talking about 1994 sites): [http://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm](http://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm) is alive

<comment><USER6> Those are ages-old issues that have had solutions before the creation of all this fancy tooling.

You can invalidate cache with fake (ignored) URL parameters ([http://foo.html?hello](http://foo.html?hello)) or HEAD section declarations.

CDNs are no different, your links simply point elsewhere. Presumably some finishing script could capture your CDN'd data and copy everything to the appropriate place.

How does continuous delivery integration even have anything to do with transferring files to a hosting drop? How is it that an FTP drop is insufficient for integration testing?

A static site host is simply a webserver returning the HTML file you requested, nothing more and nothing less. Everything relevant that the server returns is under the control of the developer who made the page. The things you describe are value-adds; or, as I like to call them: crutches.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely you can solve this all with your own code. It is totally reasonable.

But it is your own code. Which means dev cost & maintenance. Hence there are services for it. Could you set up your own DB? rack and stack your own servers? Absolutely, but AWS is way easier. It is about letting the developer work on the part that matters; not rote problems that have been solved.

To specifically address your cache invalidation. (1) you have to manually invalidate _each_ resource. And you have to do that atomically or you run into issues surrounding different versions globally. (2) you release each of your resources to a versioned destination (e.g.  -> ). Again, yes it is straight forward (not to say easy) but it it tedious, error prone and really just annoying to do. Because you _actually_ want to use something like the SHA-1 of the content (better cache hits). Again, you have an issue around the atomic behaviour of updating the site.

And then you need to make sure that you set your headers right (which I always screw up). This is your E-Tag and cache control headers. This is to force the browser to do a conditional get request.

And continuous delivery is about removing the person from pipeline of push -> deploy. That means that even if you have a script that does your FTP drop, you have to configure that. Easy enough in something like circleCI, travis, or (for the daring) jenkins. But you still have an issue surrounding the atomic actions. FTP uploads _take time_ if you're constantly serving traffic - <USER2> could lead to odd problems around "what does the customer see". Those are real issues for sites, usually unreported by the user (They just refresh - but it colors the "feeling" of your site).

The other part about this is that it raises the barrier of entry into website development. Should you need a neckbeard and CS degree just to make a site for your mom? Hosting services like gitlab, github pages, netlify, s3 and the likes try to make it easier.

Yes - you can solve this all yourself; there are a finite amount of checkboxes you need to...well..check. But like you don't really want to rack and stack all your own servers, do you really want to spend your time thinking about that?

<comment><USER6> I'll agree, cache crap was and still is a pain in the ass to deal with.

On the dev cost and maintenance bit -- again, we're talking static sites. If it needs a database it's not static. If cache invalidation is such a big deal, presumably because you need it a ton for something, then I would ask if whatever you are working on is really static? Or is someone just shoehorning dynamic behavior into prerendered HTML? Is the site just incredibly high- traffic?

My bigger beef is with this proliferation of unnecessary tooling, how little it actually does, and the amount of learning and knowledge required not just for the process the tool manages, but also for the tool itself and well as its problems. You have to practically be a neckbeard with a BS in big-company bullshit software engineering tools to make the right tooling choices -- not so different from the programming neckbeard (except she's closer to the metal --and the process).

As an example, code that I inherited was configured to deploy with Capistrano... which was great, when it worked, but it would fail and all it was really doing was copying files to a new folder, symlinking the "current" folder to this new one, and restarting Apache (by the way-- here's a solution for your atomic copies). Sure, Capistrano abstracted deployment details away, but really, how many were there to begin with? Changing a couple development techniques and reducing deployment to a carefully-written 8-line shell script has eliminated nearly every problem we had related to deployment, reduced the architectural complexity of a part of our operations that we really do not want to care about, and given us something that can be taught to (and reasoned about by) new users in a matter of minutes -- all because we teach and stick close to the actual process of what we're doing. (It is WAAAAY easier to open up the script and say, "so this is where we copy the files over, this is where it decides which files are in the CDN, here's where it looks up that criteria..." than it is to try and guide new technical users through the thicket that is CI documentation)

<comment><USER7> +1 on screw the absolutely necessary caching. :)

I couldn't agree with too much tooling can abstract what is usually simple - just serve some HTML. I think that the whole API economy and saas/paas stuff really has to be evaluated carefully. You have business considerations around lockin, time to integrate vs time to build your own, etc. I think that they work really well when you're building something simple, but there is a range of the size of your site where it is more of a hinderance. The decision to use a service should be about what it gives you, not because it is cool.

Aside: I have totally been that engineer that has made something "clever". I am sure there are other engineers that curse me for what I thought was a great tool b/c I looked at the site for 0.1 seconds (sorry!).

I really wanted to address the talk about static.

Let's take the instance of a blog (like any of the heroku/rails tutorials out there). Yes, you must have a canonical place for the copy to live. Be it in a db or flat files on disk or in your git repo. But you don't need to have the actual request go to the origin for that info and then jam it through some jinja/unicorn/etc template. Just to render a silly article to the end user. When you write that article, you know what that page is going to look like, _why dynamically generate it_? This is the way that static can work, generate all the versions of the content and rely on JS to do magic on the frontend ([https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and- death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript)). Removing the whole call back to the origin db for what is essentially static content. This obviously is going to be faster than a DB query + template render + network traffic, as well as more secure. It is an http GET ~ hard exploit vector.

Now does this extend into the arena of apps (react, angular, newest fanciest JS framework). The actual assets are also static, no? They should be served exactly the same as the HTML we have. Then it is up to the JS to query whatever service/API you want and automagically generate some HTML.

The big thing is that services like wordpress/drupal/rails have made it very easy for people to build sites in a classic LAMP stack, but that is kinda flawed in a lot of ways. Wordpress's plugin system essentially lets you remotely run _your_ code on _their_ servers. That is a dangerous game to play. All to do something that doesn't even need a server in the first place. Why risk it when you don't need to? And you'd get some nice improvements if you don't. People shouldn't even know what a LAMP stack is to make there business site.

Now is this approach right for every site? Nopezzzz. I don't believe in silver bullets, but there are a lot of sites that fit this mold. And it is a different approach to building your site out.

Either way - sorry to hear about Capistrano. Shell scripts ftw (though I have some that are terrible out there too).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> GitLab Pages does support uploading your own SSL certificate, unlike GitHub: [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/11/tutorial-securing- your-g...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/11/tutorial-securing-your-gitlab- pages-with-tls-and-letsencrypt/)

<comment><USER9> I've tried gitlab pages out and love it. I don't understand why I'd pay $9 per month for a static site when there's a myriad options that are free and great :(

Gitlab even automatically builds with any static generator you want and deploys it.

<comment><USER5> Netlify Pages is our free tier that offers a few things that GitLab Pages doesn't offer. For instance, we build merge requests for you and integrate them with commit statuses. So you get a real development workflow for your websites.

Check this blog posts out: [https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/20/introducing- deploy-p...](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/07/20/introducing-deploy- previews-in-netlify/) [https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/08/30/introducing- deploy-c...](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/08/30/introducing-deploy- contexts-in-netlify/)

<comment><USER9> Did you guys change it recently? I remember it being $9/mo the other day for a custom domain, which is pretty much a prerequisite for everyone. Your current pricing is much more attractive (of course, it's free)!

<comment><USER10> Hi StavrosK,

you're absolutely right :) We did change it recently. Now Netlify Pages (Free plan) includes Custom Domain and HTTPS. It also gives you Continuous Delivery. Again, completely free of charge.

Lastly, any open source project get's the Pro Plan (normally $49 per month) for free as well :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This whole things feels like an ad.

<comment><USER12> Also submitted by a "Customer acquisition consultant to B2B tech companies." (info in the profile) and 2 Netlify people are here to respond to questions within 20 minutes of posting. I could be wrong, maybe it's just a complete coincidence or maybe gk1 did submit a real/"natural" post for Netlify. But it does sound like an ad that misses quite a few of known host sites almost on purpose.

I mean, the 3rd link to "static site hosting" on google is amazon. (1st netlify)

<comment><USER13> Also suspicious is that the blog only has three short posts, the oldest of which is in June. Two of the posts are on static sites, one of which is the one in the OP.

There are also multiple issues with the Projects section on the author's homepage, including multiple sites with descriptions of "This is an example description," and one broken link.

EDIT: Looking at the OP's submission history, he has 6 submissions about or related to Netlify in the past 30 days.

<comment><USER11> Whats the policy for dealing with abusers? (Imagines poles and fires.....)

<comment><USER14> Previously, when I've noticed flagrant violations (e.g. HN account that has only ever submitted articles at example.com, never commented, participated, etc.), I've e-mailed dang (hn@) and those accounts have been taken care of pretty quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> AWS S3 with static website enabled. Put a Cloudfront distribution in front of it. The whole thing won't cost you even $1 USD/month. Infinite scaling. Great tooling.

<comment><USER10> I'm from Netlify. The point of the platform is that it's like 9 services in one. With free SSL that is renewed automatically and free hosting of Custom Domains. It also provides a specialized CDN that does Instant Cache Invalidation even while highly cached, atomic deploys, Continuous Delivery, Prerendering, Formhandling, and so much more. Perhaps you are thinking of static sites being merely tiny sites that have little or no updating, and doesn't need much of a workflow around it, and offers few features. There are solutions that's great for a small personal blog or a prototype. But if you are looking to do commercial sites, from smaller sites, to large enterprise sites with hundreds of contributors, multiple languages, and tens of thousands of HTML pages, then a viable and performant workflow is needed. This is what Netlify does. Integrates and automates all the services that goes in to deploying and maintaining a commercial-grade modern static site.

<comment><USER16> ..that sounds like advertising copy to me. Perhaps you would like to disclose whether you are, in fact, a co-founder of Netlify?

<comment><USER9> He did say that in his first sentence, to be fair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Surely HN knows how to host a static site without needing advice from the blogosphere..

</comment><comment><USER18> The term 'static sites' is somewhat misused, its a spectrum that goes from static pages edited locally that get 1 page-view a month to the front-end code for large corporations which get millions of page-views a month. All of those fall under the modern usage of the term 'static sites'. As you move up that spectrum your static site suddenly needs to get built using a bunch of tooling, its dynamic in the sense that it interacts with many backend services via JS APIs, etc.

If you have a single HTML page which you edit manually and enjoy uploading to S3 using Transmit then sure that's a legitimate workflow and I've used it for years before migrating all of my sites to Netlify. Once your front-end needs its own build process there's a huge benefit in utilizing a service like Netlify to run your builds for you. This also gets you into the workflow of using source-control for your front-end (you're either doing it already or editing HTML files locally) and its just so convenient when your commits trigger instant builds+deploys - one less thing to worry about. In fact Netlify's new Deploy Previews and Deploy Contexts which build+deploy as many of your branches as you'd like is enabling completely new workflows that are genuinely helping teams scale their capacity because they spend less time on the mechanics of everything.

Like some have mentioned Netlify is like 9 tools built into one service taking care of you all along the way, and of course there's a free plan which beats GitLab/GitHub Pages every day of the week because that's what the company is set up to do, its not just a side feature they are maintaining. Netlify serves small personal blogs and main sites for billion dollar companies and spends its resources further developing tools to make developers and devops people's lives easier.

So once you commit and Netlify builds it also does atomic cache invalidations, deploys to a CDN, offers integrated pre-rendering/form-handling, password protection, snippet injection and many more features to make life simpler. Can you do all these things manually on your computer or on a VPS? of course you can, but are we developers lazy and enjoy tooling and services that let us spend time coding as opposed to devops'ing what some have already commoditized? yep. If you prefer your own Git installation and don't see benefit in using Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket/etc then Netlify is likely not for you.

Disclosure: I'm a Netlify investor and avid user.

</comment><comment><USER19> If you need more than static hosting, there are quite good VPS that are very cheap. I regularly go to a blog which lists cheap VPSs called LowEndBox (you can easily find it using any web search engine, I don't want this comment to be an advertisement, even if the whole point of this thread seems to be exactly that).

For instance I recently purchased small VPSs at $11/yr (yes, per year) with the following specs: 1 vCPU, 768MB ram, 15GB disk, 3GB monthly bandwidth, 1Gbps link, 1 IPv4, 30 IPv6 (and "DDoS protection" whatever that means).

I use them for example to host various copies of my website (as a Tor Hidden Service (.onion), as a EepSite (.i2p), on IPFS, and on ZeroNet). I also have one that I only use as MX backup since I self-host my emails.

None of this would be possible even on multiples $ per month static hosting offers, or even on AWS as some suggest here, and yet it costs me less than a dollar per month :).

<comment><USER14> Good luck, but those VPSs are usually offered by fly-by-night companies, massively oversubscribed, running OpenVZ, and the company probably won't even be around a year from now.

There are decent providers on there but caveat emptor.

<comment><USER19> That may be a risk yes. But we'll see. For now the service is great and the support is quick to answer tickets :).

What is so wrong with OpenVZ? (Which is indeed the technology at use.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> To be honest, I hadn't heard of any of these static hosting providers. I've used S3/Google Cloud Storage with Cloudflare to get SSL. For low traffic sites this setup is effectively free and very easy to set up.

<comment><USER5> Hi,

Netlify CTO here.

It's great that a combination of those services works for you. Our initial tier is completely free, $0. No costs per traffic nor storage, unlike S3.

Please, feel free to send questions and I'll be happy to answer them.

<comment><USER21> Did you pay to have this piece written? It's suspicious that the author is so in favor of an overengineered solution for something as simple as static site hosting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I use nearlyfreespeech for most of my hosting.

<comment><USER9> I moved an eight year old PHP wiki I didn't want to pay $10/mo for there, and I've been quite impressed. They're very good and very cheap!

<comment><USER22> I use it to host my personal site, and I'm currently hosting a Django project on NFS as well. Paying less than $1/mo for both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Static site? Self host from home.

<comment><USER24> Do you use dynamic dns or pay for a static IP? Seems like more trouble than it's worth the first and more expensive for the second.

<comment><USER23> Comcast changes my IP about once per year. I notice within a half day or so and manually update the A and AAAA records for my dot com, publish an update for namecoin domain, and my Tor address doesn't need updating. I've been self- hosting for almost two decades now with no problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> for static site, can't you use any shared hosting and have 1000sites for 3$/month? Not sure I follow the logic behind the article.

<comment><USER26> I would have thought so too. Then you can get your simple deploy by adding your provider to ~/.ssh/config and setting an alias for

        scp -R ./public_html sharedhosting:

in your shell rc file .. seems much easier than all this! you can even stick `gulp build && ` at the start of your alias if it so pleases you!

Then again if cloudfront + s3 can indeed come in at under $1 per month then I can see why you'd go down that route. I'd like to see what kind of sites you can host for that cost.

<comment><USER25> Yes I'll definitely expand my cloudfront + s3 for my next projects - to see how that could help. The only + for shared hosting is that I offer free shared hosting email with any hosting for my clients. Email are getting to be an expensive commodities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What about Neocities? They provide HTTPS for every site, even without paying. I don't need it because I have my own servers, but I really think what they do is great. For example, each website they host is archived on IPFS :).

[https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/)

</comment><comment><USER27> [https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/](https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/) also provides a free tier of static assets hosting

</comment><comment><USER28> +1 on setting up an s3 bucket, cloudfront distribution, ssl sni, route 53 rules and simple "aws s3 sync" command with some cache-headers.

Initial setup might take an hour but further deployments are pretty instant.

</comment><comment><USER29> s3_website is just about the easiest blog deployment system ever.</comment>


Children given lifelong ban on talking about fracking - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/05/children-ban-talking-about-fracking

<comment><USER2> Choice quote right at the end of the article:

"He [a Range Resources spokesman] went on to tell the paper that there was no evidence that the Hallowich family was affected by exposure to gas development."

Well, except the $750k you just shipped them....</comment>


Anyone up to a Hacker News meeting in San Francisco in April? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone! I'm flying to SF from April 7th to the 17th of April. It would be great if we could setup some kind of informal meeting someday between those dates and have some pizza, beers and good chats/ideas exchanges/etc. Someone likes the idea and is willing to meet and have fun?
Send me a Twit (http://twitter.com/abarrera) if interested or email me at: abarrera AT neurosecurity DOT com
Hope seeing some of you guys there! <comment><USER2> We're planning on having a Private Beta launch party in April at our office (with a keg of free beer) in SF especially for Hacker News fans. Any suggestions on the best date will be appreciated :) (Would the 16th of april work for people coming to the startup school?)

<comment><USER2> How about Saturday night the 19th (after Startup school) in SF?. Our office (with wifi and a large conference room) @ 240 2nd street can hold about 35-40 comfortably.

<comment><USER3> I'd be all for that. Hoping to go to startup school and was hoping to find something to do that night. Bonus points if I can just stay up all night and put off sleep until the plane flight home the next day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ok so based on all comments there are some persons that will be around for the April 19th meeting and others that wont get to go to the Startup School and won't mind meeting the 16th.

For April 19th, gibsonf1 offers his office @ 240 2nd street

For April 16th any takers? Our friends from SF have an idea where we can hang up and have fun?

<comment><AUTHOR> As dbreunig suggests we can meet at the Blue Bottle next to SOMA for the April 16th meetup. It's on 66 Mint St at SF. Here is a link to the place: <http://tinyurl.com/2tvxa7>

Here is a link for Fred's office on 2nd street: <http://tinyurl.com/38lkfc>

Both places are pretty close so Fred, maybe you can come to the the first meetup and give us a sneak peak at your beta ;)

<comment><USER4> Blue Bottle has very good coffee, but it's a relatively small place, and there isn't that much seating room (plus it's often busy). If more than 5 people come, it might be a tight squeeze...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip neilc. I've never been there so I can't say. Any other places that might be a little bigger?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone up to start a likemind.us Coffee Friday for the Hacker News set? I could use a break from advertising talk, personally. <http://twitter.com/dbreunig>

</comment><comment><USER6> Me and my business partner are planning to go to Startup School on the 19th (if we get in). If our travel dates sync up we'll try to meet you out there.

Anyone else going to be in the area?

<comment><USER7> \+ 1 vote for making this happen the weekend of Startup School (especially for those of us who would be flying in to the Bay Area)

<comment><USER8> +1 vote from me too for the 19th -- Anyone here flying from San Diego?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> how about this gets done monthly? I'm going to be in SF May 1-8.. I'm at <http://twitter.com/Stammy>

<comment><USER2> We'd be up for hosting a monthly meetup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any early risers are welcome to join us at the Bootstrapper Breakfast Fri April 4 in Palo Alto or Tue April 15 in Sunnyvale. 7:30-9am everyone buys their own breakfast and we meet in a back room. Details at <http://www.boostrapperbreakfast.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> That's great! I'll probably go to the one on April 15th :D Thanks for sharing! I hope it's easy to get there because I'll have to commute from Berkeley as I have no car :(

Btw, the url is wrong, the correct one is: <http://www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For me it's ok with the 16th. It might be the best date so that people going to the Startup School can get on board.

I'm afraid that the app form for the Startup school is closed already so can't stay even if I wanted :(

Anyway, I'm sure we'll have plenty of cool conversations the 16th :D

<comment><USER11> Missed it here to. Can't believe it, I was hacking all night...

Anyway, 16th? Great, I'm there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Live and work in San Francisco, HN meetup sounds like fun. Happy to help with local logistics too, jbyers at gmail.

<comment><USER13> I live and work in SF as well. Would be glad to help out with a meetup in April.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm in if I get in to SuS; I suggest a meet somewhere with lots of whiteboards :)

</comment><comment><USER15> You are not staying for Startup School?!

(Apr 19)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd be interested in attending too, though I vote for "sometime after the 17th of April." How will we know where and when to meet up?

</comment><comment><USER17> I'll be in Palo Alto from April 17-20. <http://twitter.com/cthan>

</comment><comment><USER18> is there a twitter feed for yc news? it might help for things like this. twitter.com/jdavid

<comment><AUTHOR> Should we setup a google group to keep everybody informed?

<comment><USER19> Isn't that what this site is already for? How many sites do we need?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would be interested in going, but will be there the 18th-20th.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> jbyers that's greatly appreciated. I used to be at Berkeley so I don't know too many venues in SF. Any recommendation?

gibsonf1 how many people can we fit in you offices?

<comment><USER2> 35-40 maybe more. There is a large assembly room downstairs if we need it that holds 100+, but I doubt we would need that.

<comment><USER8> So the event is confirmed at 240 2nd street on the 19th? If so, I'm going to book a return flight the next day, otherwise it's just going to cost me (hotel + rental). I'm willing to stay an extra night since YC'ers are a fun bunch. Speaking of which, any lone travelers out here want to split a hotel or something?

<comment><AUTHOR> jayliew I haven't been able to contact Fred so I can't speak for the April 19th meeting. If anyone can get a hold of him please let me know.

Anyway, if you want to come around the April 16th meeting see the comments above :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Whatever day it is, count me in.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'll come.</comment>


Internet Explorer 11 - <AUTHOR> http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/ie-11-worldwide-languages

<comment><USER2> It only took 11 versions, but IE in my opinion is finally a decent browser. The amount of HTML5 and CSS3 features that it brings to the table are basically on-par with that of Chrome and Firefox. I can't wait until the minimum version I can support is 11, that'll be the day I am as happy as the day I could stop supporting IE6.</comment>


Hawaii's Final Sugar Cargo Departs Maui Aboard 'Moku Pahu' - <AUTHOR> https://gcaptain.com/final-sugar-cargo-departs-maui-aboard-maku-pahu/ <comment><USER2> TFA says the plantation took a $MM loss on their last sugar harvest, and intends to "diversify". According to another article about the company [0], this diversification is:

"""

• Energy crops: "HC&S has initiated crop trials to evaluate potential sources of feedstock for anaerobic conversion to biogas," stated the company's press release. The statement added that HC&S has entered into "preliminary, but confidential, discussions with other bioenergy industry players to explore additional crop-to-energy opportunities."

• Cattle: As noted above, HC&S is "working with Maui Cattle Company to conduct a grass-finishing pasture trial in 2016."

• Food crops: "A&B plans to establish an agriculture park on former sugar lands in order to provide opportunities for farmers to access these agricultural lands and support the cultivation of food crops on Maui." Former company employees would get preference in leasing lots.

"""

[0] [http://mauitime.com/news/business/as-the-sun-sets-on-maui- su...](http://mauitime.com/news/business/as-the-sun-sets-on-maui-sugar-we-ask- what-the-closing-of-abs-plantation-means-for-us/)

<comment><USER3> I'm coming in with very little knowledge of Hawaii, but having lived in Taiwan, beef was very expensive compared to back home in Texas because there isn't really any cattle industry on the mountainous island - it's all imported. Wondering if it's the same for Hawaii and thus they stand to make quite a bit of money selling locally? Or shipping to the relatively close Asian/Pacific Islands that also don't have cattle?

<comment><USER4> No. Pretty much the entire big island is a cattle ranch. However beef is expensive in Hawaii because due to state law, cattle must be sent out of state to the abbatoir before it hits your plate. Ranching on Maui probably seeks to take advantage of the infrastructure already available because of operations on the big island.

<comment><USER5> This doesn't appear to be accurate. Most of the cattle is sent to the mainland due to a lack of slaughterhouses, not due to any law restricting said slaughterhouses.

[http://www.hawaiibusiness.com/hawaii-beef-comes- home/](http://www.hawaiibusiness.com/hawaii-beef-comes-home/)

<comment><USER4> That is not what I was told at parker ranch! Or possibly I misinterpreted what they said. Thank you for the clarification. I do think that the overall result is more or less the same, instead of being an absolute ban, it's a licensure restriction that limits the number of cows that can be slaughtered locally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The range of sentiment here runs from "good riddance" to "dire economic indicator".

I used to be of the mind that food should fit under the standard economic principles of other markets (e.g., produce food where it's cheapest/best/most efficient). However, after seeing what happens during natural disasters/blights/global warming etc, I'm thinking that diversified food production is a national hedge, and wondering if government subsidies towards continuing local production is prudent here.

I'm reminded of a documentary on Jamaica, and the effects of forced open trade agreements as part of IMF loan conditions : [http://www.lifeanddebt.org/](http://www.lifeanddebt.org/)

Clearly, Hawaii is not Jamaica wrt international trade, but it does have some of the same themes :

1\. Open trade is not really fair, since subsidies are almost always involved for competing farms as well.

2\. The loss of large amounts of easy low paying jobs can be devastating to local economies, which carries additional costs

3\. Once gone, agricultural industry is difficult/impossible to restart (requiring large amounts of land, irrigation infrastructure, logistics, etc.)

<comment><USER7> Strongly agree -- resilience against catastrophe is an externality that the market general prices at $0, unless government intervenes.

Simple example: we all benefit from not getting hit by asteroids, but good luck trying to build a profitable business based on that fact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My grandfather owns a home in Maui. His opinion on the factory, even thought it brought jobs, it caused lots of pollution and only survived for so long because of government subsidies. If that is true, good riddance.

<comment><USER9> When visiting Maui, I was surprized how sugar cane spread like weeds in many places around the island. I don't think it was classified as "highly invasive" but it looked invasive.

But I didn't get a chance to ask any Hawaiians about it.

<comment><USER10> It's probably because sugar cane tends to grow in fields. In Hawaii, a field is already pretty much ecologically ruined. On the Big Island, there are fairly large efforts to reforest areas that were previously clear cut to produce fields for cattle and sugar cane farming. Coincidentally, the only place I've ever seen sugar cane spread like a weed is these clear cut areas, it doesn't seem to be able to spread into forests or diverse ecosystems. As such, it makes sense that it wouldn't be seen as being as invasive as something like a christmasberry tree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article manages to spell the ship's name three ways: "Maku Pahu", "Mako Pahu", and "Moku Pahu". Only the last way is correct.

<comment><USER12> It isn't even a terribly difficult Hawaiian name, either!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Aww, I still remember the old C&H sugar ads on TV when I was a kid. "C&H, pure cane sugar, from Hawaii..."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_and_Hawaiian_Sugar_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_and_Hawaiian_Sugar_Company)

<comment> mark-r Wheee!

Dang you, now I've got an earworm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> C&H has been violating the Clean Air Act since it was written. Thank god they're finally finished releasing tons of toxic chemicals into the air.

</comment><comment><USER15> BTW, the gcaptain website is an ongoing source of interesting ship related news.

<comment><USER3> For some reason that just strikes me as hilariously hacker-newsish. Every time I come here there's a thread full of niche experts fervently discussing yarn, clay tile roofs, or boats or whatever. "Check out this site, it's got cool boat news." Love it, love that it exists, love that people read it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My great-grandfather managed the C&H Bay Area sugar refinery. Life comes full circle.

</comment><comment><USER17> There has been a lot of interest in Breadfruit as a slow carb crop. A friend mentioned that demand exceeds current supply.

<comment><USER18> As I understand it, breadfruit trees produce seasonally, so that when they ripen, you've got a ton of breadfruit to deal with, and figure out how to preserve/freeze etc. And then, for the rest of the year, you have no breadfruit. I thought that was the barrier to its viability as a commercial crop.

Anyway, I'm glad I got to see the fields of cane growing out of the bright red dirt on either side of the highway from Kahului to Wailea. I even made a wrong turn and ended up in the parking lot of that sugar plant-it was about the most industrial thing I saw on Maui.

<comment><USER17> Hmmm, that's the first I've heard about limited season, maybe for a particular variety? There are so many kinds. Searching "breadfruit growing season" yields: [https://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/breadfruit.html](https://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/breadfruit.html)

I forwarded the OP to my friend from Global Manna. His opinion about the effects of cane on the Island biome were less fond.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From my perspective on Maui I think the fate of this factory shows a problem for any business.

Had they modernized their equipment and methods years ago when profits were good, they very likely could have continued to operate at a profit and with the support of the community.

Instead, they kept the field burning, the impossibly ancient mill equipment, and didn't adapt to the dropping price of the sugar to focus on more secondary goods like rum, organic sugar, etc.

By the time they realized they'd either have to change or go out of business they were too ingrained to change and didn't have the profits to invest in changing anyways.

It's a bittersweet change for Maui. The real fear is that all of this ag land will increasingly be converted to inefficient subdivisions as has happened on O'ahu and is happening at Maui Lani and up in Kula.

<comment><USER20> _The real fear is that all of this ag land will increasingly be converted to inefficient subdivisions as has happened on O 'ahu and is happening at Maui Lani and up in Kula._

Inefficient in what sense?

Edit: Thanks for the reply.

<comment><USER19> O'ahu has some of the worst traffic in the country hugely because of spread out neighborhoods/subdivisions rather than investing in density. We don't have enough land to build large enough highways, subdivisions, and the standard car-based strip-malls.

I will admit, from a certain economic standpoint, ag land in Hawaii is much less efficient than low-density housing. I do believe that the negative externalities not included in that point of view should be considered (e.g. environmental cost, harm to the tourist industry, the ever nebulous quality of life, etc.).

The economic pressures to build subdivisions are huge as the cost of housing is way out of proportion to the incomes of locals, but demand continues to outstrip supply and with as limited of land as we have, we're just not going to be able to ever reduce costs by trying to supply demand with subdivisions. Unfortunately, we also tend to pass laws limiting height and density and don't have enough mixed zoning areas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The way they harvested the sugar involved burning the fields (I believe after harvest, but could be wrong) which lead to unusually high levels of respiratory illnesses on Maui - I think this is net-net good, but like the rest of the country, more areas of job growth are needed.

Interestingly, Maui has one of the lowest levels of unemployment in the country at around 4%

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4596502/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4596502/)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=hawaii+unemployment+rate](https://www.google.com/search?q=hawaii+unemployment+rate)

</comment><comment><USER22> Where's the sugar coming from now? I assume they're not closing due to reduced demand.

<comment><USER23> I wouldn't be surprised if demand for cane sugar was down. Most foods substituted corn syrup decades ago. And of the sugar sold, it's not all cane sugar. Much of the sugar is sourced from beets.

<comment> mark-r Our government has been limiting sugar imports forever, to maintain a domestic production capacity. In the end all we ended up doing is providing the impetus for a substitute - the production is going away anyway.

<comment><USER4> Actually that's untrue. There's very little domestic cane sugar (beet sugar only can be turned into white sugar). Government has been limiting sugar imports with a tariff regime because a single family runs the Dominican refineries and they lobby Congress to keep tariffs up everywhere but there and thus secure a monopoly.

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

If you are a small household cook you may not know this but you should buy all of your white sugar in the fall when the Montana beet crop comes in and drops the price (though commodity options trading may have smoothened that out a bit in recent years)

<comment><USER24> It costs less than $1 a pound in small packages. It's probably not worth thinking about it unless you use quite a large amount of sugar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I believe the Maku Pahu will be headed to the scrap yard shortly. They had a recent availability for perspective bidders to shipcheck. The award has yet to be announced, and the rumour is they will cancel the project. No reason to repair a ship headed to a scrap yard.

</comment><comment><USER26> What a great example of the Aloha Spirit. Although I have long left my home state, it touches me deeply to know my fellow Hawaiians keep the Spirit alive.

</comment><comment><USER27> C&H produces 6 million pounds of sugar _a day_. I wonder where they get it from now?

<comment><USER28> I haven't found info about this company, but many countries from South & Central America, as well as Indonesia and the Philippines, are all major sugarcane exporters.

<comment><USER29> Australia as well.</comment></comment></comment>


106: KubeKhan, KubeCon, Etcd, Licenses, Securing Kubernetes, JFrog, More - <AUTHOR> https://devopsish.com/106/ <comment><USER2> Already submitted 2 days ago by the same account: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18692986](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18692986)

Who submits almost nothing but this website: [https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=oaf357](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=oaf357)</comment>


GNU Audio and Video - <AUTHOR> http://audio-video.gnu.org/ <comment><USER2> It's mostly Richard Stallman giving the same speech over and over again?

<comment><USER3> And under a nonfree no‐derivatives license, no less.

<comment><USER4> Stallman and the FSF have never considered derivative-works permissions necessary or appropriate for works of ideological expression, only for technical works.

<comment><USER5> This makes sense as giving derivatives permission to media containing political or ideological expression could make easier for adversaries to redistribute it after making subtle modifications with the intent of sabotaging the intended original message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 105 speeches, 101 RMS alone, 1 RMS & John Sullivan, 1 John Sullivan alone, 1 Abhigyan Singh alone, 1 VHSS Irimpanam School.

FSF is Richard Stallman. No discussion shall be entered into. Zero diversity of opinion. What RMS thinks right now is right and if you disagree you're not welcome.

The Free Software Foundation should change its name to reflect this fact. It's the RMS's current views on software foundation. It's alienating. Would I assign my intellectual property to the FSF when its really just RMS? Yeah I don't think so. If the FSF being just RMS's toy is wrong then how did this happen? How did the FSF impersonate an autocrat's fiefdom like this? Something is on the nose here, argue about what but it's not nothing.

<comment><USER7> Uhm.. If you look more than 2 seconds you can see that anyone can submit recordings of GNU related events.

And seeing RMS evangelizing for GNU/FSF is not strange, he pretty much started the whole movement and his/FSF's "agenda" has been publicly known for years, so whatever conspiracy you are thinking of doesn't exist.

<comment><USER6> ...and basically nobody has submitted anything, right? If you disagree with RMS about anything are you listened to or does RMS bully you out of the FSF?

It's not a conspiracy it's an observation. Who other than RMS influences FSF policy? Anyone? When they _disagree_ with RMS. The FSF _is_ RMS. But thanks for the "you're a conspiracy theorist" trope. Much appreciated. Sure doesn't make me feel bullied at all...</comment></comment></comment>


Why James Cameron did not win the Academy award for best director for Avatar - <AUTHOR> http://vivekhaldar.tumblr.com/post/441638726/why-james-cameron-did-not-win-the-academy-award-for

<comment><USER2> The mistake most people make, including this article, is thinking that Avatar was an "animated" movie. It was not animated, it was motion-captured. If you saw the making-of Avatar, which I think aired on HBO, you would see that Cameron did actually direct the movie. He was able to see a realtime 3-D representation of his actors and set using a special hand-held camera.

</comment><comment><USER3> Or maybe it simply wasn't very good? It need not be some prejudice against new technologies. I'd say that the Academy has a big soft spot for fancy new film tricks, so in this case, it's good to see they weren't dazzled into choosing it for best film.</comment>