Show HN: Ember Table by Addepar - <AUTHOR> http://addepar.github.com/ember-table/

<comment><USER2> Congratulations to the guys at Addepar on releasing this. They have been contributing an amazing amount of stuff to the Ember.js community—not least of which is helping us build Ember Data.

Probably my favorite thing about Ember is that it isn't built by academics toiling away in an ivory tower; it's driven by real-world problems that web developers are facing.

Our goal is to provide a set of tools that allow developers to build apps and not have to solve the same problem over and over. Displaying large sets of data is one of those problems, so this dovetails nicely with the mission of Ember.js. Thanks guys!

<comment><USER2> As a side note: if you're interested in this kind of stuff, we'd love to see you at the first Ember Camp, next February in San Francisco. You can even meet the guys who wrote this.

There are still some tickets available here: <https://tito.io/tilde/ember- camp-2013>

<comment><USER3> You can also come meet us at our office in Mountain View. We have food and beer and can show you some cool Ember things we are working on(we are also constantly hiring, my email is in the profile).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks great. Can anybody recommend a similar library (i.e. lazy-rendering table component) that either doesn't depend on a JS framework or uses backbone.js? I know Slickgrid but find it a bit too clunky on the whole, and re-styling it is awkward since its DOM isn't exactly straightforward.

<comment><USER5> Coincidentally, I just finished a similar table using backbone. It isn't nearly as feature-rich, but it has sortable, movable, resizable columns, and a mechanism for adding filter fields. It was built for a specific purpose in an existing project, but I was actually going to work on turning it into a standalone library and writing a blog piece on it after work today.

<comment><USER6> Please do so, the more the merrier. I'll read it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A feature rich, reliable table view in SproutCore (from which Ember was forked) has been a highly requested feature for at least 4 years. I'm glad that someone has finally done so, but I am also disappointed that it was so difficult.

<comment><USER2> This is incorrect. Ember.js is not a fork of SproutCore, and they share no code. Ember.js just borrows some of the best features of SproutCore, like bindings and computed properties.

Additionally, the Addepar guys put this together in a few weeks. I'm unsure where your claim that this was difficult is coming from.

<comment><USER7> Perhaps they no longer share code, but they share architecture which was responsible for the lack of table view in SproutCore. The history of the two projects is long and complicated, and most of the people working on Ember were SproutCore developers. Ember was even "SproutCore 2.0" for a long time.

SproutCore's current table view demo still stutters and lacks the features of the table view featured here[1]. If the Addepar guys put this together quickly, it's because there are no longer architectural road blocks preventing them.

[ 1 <http://demo.sproutcore.com/table_view/> ]

<comment><USER8> Tom is one of the two main developers you're talking about when you say "most of the people working on Ember were SproutCore developers."

I think the "lack of architectural road blocks" is called ember.js. If you're working with Sproutcore and haven't spent time with ember.js, you should take a look. It has a bit of a learning curve but it's very powerful once you get past that. The guys who built the table would tell you that instead of being an architectural road block, ember.js was the power that made the table possible. That's why it's called ember-table.

<comment><USER7> I am well aware that he is, but since he didn't say so it sounds accusatory if I point that out. If you read my original comment, I said that SproutCore has been missing a table view for years, and that it wasn't an oversight but something that people attempted to fix a number of times. So if Ember has solved the problem, I am glad it has finally happened. But as someone who has been trying to build projects on SproutCore for years and finding roadblocks, this was long overdue. Perhaps Ember has attained the maturity that SproutCore never seemed to be able to find.

 _The guys who built the table would tell you that instead of being an architectural road block, ember.js was the power that made the table possible._

That's what it means to be a roadblock... if you don't run into one, you would never imagine that there could have been one. A roadblock is what happens when you attempt to do something logical and find out that due to something outside of your control, it's realistically never going to happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very nice, but you should add some "loading..." text until it's ready to display; on my iPad there were several seconds of a blank white screen and I thought something had gone awry.

<comment><USER10> Same here. I wasn't sure if chrome crashed or something since there was no content on the page

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very cool.

Only problem that I had was that I couldn't grab the scrollbar to go down the table faster (for the million table example). Great work though!

<comment><USER12> Yes, this is use case is a strange omission considering the solution presented.

<comment><USER13> I was able to. Maybe it's a browser issue?

<comment><USER14> It's an issue for Mac OS X for people who have invisible scrollbars enabled. Issue is being worked on, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice. One issue is that the common idiom of cntrl+f is going to be broken with this. Would be awesome if the table supported a search box of some sort.

</comment><comment><USER16> Very cool - any chance of getting a blog post about how you structured the lazy rendering part within Ember.JS? I have an application where I need to do something similar.

</comment><comment><USER17> They implemented a scrolling list by recycling the views. This is done in native ios or android apps. So they should write a more generic component which could do that (wihtout the scrollbars and stuff)

I think this is exactly what was done in the fastbook app from Sencha.

Nonetheless its nice work! Hooray for opensource!

</comment><comment><USER5> This is cool, and I kind of wish it was released a few months ago. I've been building something like this from scratch for a work project for a little while now. Did you guys look into using an actual <table>, or did you go with divs form the start?

<comment><USER3> We were using Slickgrid for a while and that was a very painful experience as the code was very complex, didn't do frozen rows/columns and didn't interoperate with Ember nicely. I think we wrote this with div's from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Your table looks very nice, thanks a lot for sharing. We have one in our app that is pretty similar, but not as well developed. I am considering replacing the one in our app with this one.

My only reservation is adding underscore.js to our codebase. Not that I have anything against underscore, but we already Ember, jQuery and jQuery UI. I'm hesitant to add another major dependency. How hard of a dependency is Underscore.js? Could it be easily separated.

<comment><USER2> It seems like the only thing they are using from Underscore that's not already in Ember.js is Function.bind; I'm totally open to adding it to Ember.js proper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Awesome. Minor issue: there's some stuttering when flicking on a mac touchpad with Firefox. If I keep my fingers on the touchpad while scrolling, the scroll seems to follow just fine without stuttering. But if I flick it up/down fast there's a delay as soon as my fingers leave the touchpad - and then 200-1000ms later (depending on how fast I flicked), it starts scrolling again. This doesn't seem to happen in Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER20> Pretty laggy for me with chrome stable (my default browser) and my 2012 13'' MacBook Air. I suspect it was probably because there were half a dozen or so million-row tables -- some with complex graphics. But for basic tabular data, this looks awesome. Good work!

</comment><comment><USER21> This doesn't work quite well - if I scroll fast enough, my browser (Chrome) thinks I've finished scrolling and goes back to scrolling the screen. As a fan of scanning through data extremely quickly, it's a very annoying interface.

<comment><USER22> Which kinda makes me think that that particular example, while very cool, is not actually worthwhile. I mean... whats the usecase of being able to scroll through a table with 1000000 rows? I mean... what are you even doing/looking for when you're scanning through tabular data quickly? Wouldn't it be far better to just search or have the data visualized or filtered in a meaningful way?

<comment><USER21> oftentimes when i'm searching through large datasets it's not for a particular reason - if i have a very large dataset whose contents is fairly ambiguous, my first step is to get acquainted with it. i like to do that by just check random rows, seeing if there are any patterns in the data, or something else that might spark my mind towards how i want to use the data

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is really cool; it'll be interesting to see it's application to feed style content as opposed to tables (in the discussion on the html5 version of facebook mobile rendering the feed was a major bottleneck)

</comment><comment><USER24> To copy and paste from Excel/LibreOffice Calc to an html spreadsheet, I found this quite helpful:

<http://labs.nereo.fr/slick.html>

</comment><comment><USER25> Congrats to the Addepar team. Love what you guys are doing :)

</comment><comment><USER26> The fastest table I've seen was this <http://ukijs.org/examples/core- examples/table/>

<comment><USER27> To be fair, that table is less than 1/100th the size. I'm not surprised it's faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> 500kb transferred? 2 seconds to load all the CSS and JS files? 4.5 seconds to load everything?

Way too much overhead for a static page, IMO.

<comment><USER29> This seems like the classic compile-time run-time trade off. On the one hand it does indeed appear to take a while to load the page. The upside of this though is obviously smooth scrolling for very large presentations of data. Since the sort of use-case this kind of table would be used for could potentially be long and drawn out this trade off becomes totally reasonable in my opinnion.

<comment><USER30> True, but perhaps more could be done to trim the fat. There are quite a lot of dependencies, and jQuery UI is quite a large library. Am on my phone so can't dig down to see how necessary it is but I'd hope the authors will be able to streamline the dependencies in the future

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sorry but if the project doesn't even mention SlickGrid (e.g. how does compare to it) I can't take it seriously.

<comment><USER32> I agree. I looked at the source and it seems to me that the design is overconstrained (like ORM) and some of the issues people are talking about are likely to persist, unless they start using Ember differently. There are many reasons for SlickGrid being built the way it's built.

<comment><USER8> Feedback is more than welcome! Please get in touch on github. Let Peter, Louis and all the other developers know what can be done better. I know Peter is hard at work fixing some of the issues already identified here.

Also Igor mentioned above that they built this because they weren't happy with some things in slickgrid. Maybe he can do a blog post or documentation in the future comparing them.

As far as using Ember, the team works closely with the core developers but if you have ideas about how to use it more effectively I think everyone would welcome it. Ember is new and we're all learning (me especially cause I only get to play with it during hackathons. :p)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Cool! I was looking for a table with OLAP capabilities to use in examples in my BI course.</comment>


The database that stays up even when you command it to remove the last replica - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fauna.com/fauna-topology-operations <comment><AUTHOR> This is about the FaunaDB operational API and how its commands are designed to take the risk out of topology changes.</comment>


Memory savings with magic trampolines in Mono - <AUTHOR> http://www.advogato.org/person/lupus/diary/24.html

<comment><USER2> Cool! Paolo, 'lupus' Molaro is a super-smart hacker who lives in Padova, and is an ex-colleague of mine.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I especially like the trick he describes to use a single magic trampoline for all vtable slots. That's clever!</comment>


Be Careful When Comparing AWS Costs...   - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/02/be-careful-when-comparing-aws-costs.html

<comment><USER2> EC2 is about 10-20 times more expensive than dedicated hosting. Even if reserved instances save us 22% over 3 years, it still doesn't even come close. Reserved instances also force me to commit to using a certain type of EC2 instance for 3 years with lots of money upfront. Moreover, IO is ridiculously bad on EC2 and there's nothing that can be done about it. Even RAIDing a gazillion EBS volumes together doesn't do much.

I'm glad the truth about how expensive EC2 really is is starting to come out. Hopefully it will force them to revise their pricing, or at least offer more processing power for the same price.

I ran some benchmarks a few weeks ago that show how expensive EC2 really is [http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically- one-...](http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-big- ripoff/).

That said, I _love_ the flexibility of AWS. RDS, S3, EBS and the whole ecosystem is really well thought out. I just wish I could get real performance out of it.

EDIT: 10-20 times more expensive, not "orders of magnitude"

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry to see you're being down voted. For one of my comparisons, Amazon is orders of magnitude more expensive (because I get bandwidth for free as part of the dedicated server package while Amazon charges... even though the dedicated server is both cheaper and significantly more performant than EC2 instances.)

You made a good argument, made some good points, and you linked to a blog article with real data, so naturally you're getting down voted.

I think its a shame that people apparently fall of the "amazon is a tech company" propaganda. I've worked there. It was like working for walmart. Its not like working for Microsoft (worked there too.) The Amazon hype machine is very strong, but people don't seem to realize it, and the amazon hype isn't strictly honest. (EG: They claimed AWS was "running Amazon.com" at a time when none of Amazon.com was running on AWS. They "leaked" the kindle fire to build hype, and brag about how its selling so well, but never release honest numbers, only bundling the fire with all the other kindles in the few numbers they've released. Lots of puff pieces clearly orchestrated by PR firms trying to paint bezos as a visionary, etc. etc.)

<comment><USER4> > _trying to paint bezos as a visionary_

I read about Bezos in Google+ (it was by Steve Yegge, I suppose) and from that, it seemed like he is a jerk but more importantly, a visionary, not unlike Steve Jobs.

What's your take, if I may ask?

<comment><USER3> I've been in the same room with both, and I think they are polar opposites.

Jerk: Steve Jobs is not a jerk. He's opinionated, and I think many people can't stand that. But at his core, his biggest crime is probably being too honest (e.g.: being honest about what he thinks.) Jeff Bezos: He is a jerk. He's been a jerk to me. For him, being nice is a facade, but in reality, he's got no consideration for other people-- to him other people are ... things to be used for his own benefit. He doesn't have compassion. I believe Jobs has compassion at a very profound level.

Visionary: I don't ilke this term. Steve Jobs though probably does fit, because he focuses on the future, he focuses on the product. He is extremely product focused, product obsessed, and thus he manages to bring about products that have a huge, significant impact. Again, I think Bezos is the opposite. Amazon does hundreds of initiatives each year. The main thing Bezos seems to want out of a product is a press release. I think this is true of even things like AWS. They just throw things on the wall. All of the engineering at Amazon is half assed. (their software was out of date 15 years ago, and is poorly engineered.) They do movie reviews, they do movie show times, they scan restaurant menus, they do a search engine, they have e-readers, now they're competing on tablets, they're a retail operation, they are expanding internationally (yet in many countries outside the USA they haven't done squat because "expanding internationally" played really well on wall street during the dotcom boom but isn't so important now so they don't care so much.)

The only redeeming quality Amazon has is that they treat their customers well (not their employees, not their suppliers, not their partners, not anyone, just customers.) They also had good timing and got into commerce at a brilliant time.

Jeff Bezos is a failed financial analyst who parlayed connections and a lot of dumb money in the dotcom period into the biggest stock scam ever (I think Amazon is still a stock scam-- it has a real business but its stock is massively overvalued and I really don't trust their accounting.)

Here's the proof: Jobs did not seek out publicity for himself, except when he wanted to sell a product. The product was always Apple's latest-- then he'd appear on magazine covers. Bezos is the product, and he, and his PR firm, are pitching him as a visionary-- this is all smoke to get investors to continue to allow Amazon to operate at essentially a loss because its core business is just retailing. Apple is a high tech company that invents totally new technologies-- Amazon is a retailer pretending to be a high tech company.

I have worked for Amazon, but have not worked (as an employee) for Apple, though I have worked with Apple in other capacities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> AWS should have shaved down the cost of the dedicated unit as well, if we are in cost cutting mode. Those prices would look very different if they just used some plain jane boxes from 100tb.com or leaseweb.

In order for AWS to make sense, you need to utilize the hourly billing. If you use EC2 and leave you server on 24/7, you are going to be paying more for less powerful hardware than you could with dedicated. Yes, they have a fancy datacenter and instant provisioning and cool backups. You are still paying more. Way more in some cases.

*This does not apply for tiny websites. If your hosting bill is 100$ or less a month, amazon is likely fine for you and maybe the most effective cost saver. Once you go above that mark, Its almost always more effective to be on dedicated unless you are one of the very few people who has truely hourly based service (Think, a seti@home where you only crunch data once a month) - Any normal "website" will do better with dedicated.

Finally, to summarize the above. EC2's main, most important, if-you-arent- using-it-you-are-doing-it-wrong, feature is HOURLY BILLING. If you dont constantly switch on and off from different sizes (and you spend a decent amount of cash) then dedicated is likely better for you.

Dont get me wrong, EC2 is great. But use it for overflow. Or use it for the bells and whistles. Or use it because you have more cash and you would rather not deal with the issues and you like simpledb and yadda yadda yadda. Use it for whatever reason you like. Just dont use it because its cheaper. Because its not.

<comment><USER6> "*This does not apply for tiny websites. If your hosting bill is 100$ or less a month, amazon is likely fine for you and maybe the most effective cost saver."

I was going to say this. Using an US-East micro instance reserved for 3 years is cheap as hell for my screen/irssi and occasional VPN needs. The cost per month is something like the change I currently have in my pocket.

<comment><USER7> It's still not your cheapest option in many ways, but sometimes. Cheap enough is good.

<comment><USER8> Actually, for this precise use case, it might well be among the cheapest.

With a 3-year reserved instance, using the "intensive usage" pricing (since it's always on), and in the cheapest availability zone. I get a price of 6.42$/month. I guess in practice, even for an personal thing, around 10GB of storage would be required (1$) (does the installed OS counts towards this number ?). Add 10GB of transfered data (1$), as a vpn/screen server is unlikely to have huge amounts of incoming data.

The final price is 8.42$. Which, for a 600MB ram server, is quite competitive. If I didn't forget something.

This is about the only use case where I would recommend AWS, though. Starting at ~25/30$, there are way better alternatives (including cheap dedicated). And if you need more bandwidth, cheap VPS tend to come with 20 or 100GB/month at least. But you'd get less RAM.

<comment><USER9> For my ssh proxy needs (primarily, routing around geo-IP locating me in the UK, and instead appearing from a US IP), 600MB is overkill. As a result, I pay 36 USD a year for a Xen virtualized box with 128MB ram and allegedly 300GB data a month (though I never get anywhere near that). That's 3 USD a month. And if I was buying a new similar server today, I could probably get something better and cheaper.

If you don't need much, <http://www.lowendbox.com/> is a good site to see what's out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This was disappointingly dishonest: they shave the AWS numbers down to a few grand under the self-hosting cost and end on a note saying these analyses should be done apples-to-apples, but neglect to point out the far more expensively flawed methodology in the self-hosting cost: _buying_ and colocating 131 _dedicated_ servers based on the peak requirement of 131 _leased_ EC2 _virtual_ servers.

For those interested it's Amazon's rebuttal to the story discussed here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3580273>

<comment><USER11> I don't understand why the methodology is flawed: the objective isn't to price N servers. The objective is to serve all the load at the best price. If you need 131 during peak and 20 during off-peak and can not pay for the delta- yay!

My company works in the media space and I love EC2- during the week our loads are low but when it's Superbowl Sunday or the GRAMMYs, the ability to spin up capacity is huge. But the fact that I'm _not_ paying for that capacity 24/7 is even bigger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The cost that everyone fails to recognize is the cost (performance-wise) of virtualization. Simply comparing X instances of EC2 to X instances of bare metal ignores the fact that a bare metal instance could range anywhere from 1x to 50x more performance for equivalent specifications. For memory bound applications you might get equivalent performance for the specs but for IOPS- bound or CPU-bound you'll probably take an order of magnitude performance hit for the same specification of hardware when virtualized.

Any analysis like this needs to first find a set of comparable servers that have performance parity (for the given application) first instead of merely specification parity.

<comment><USER13> You are correct in that you need performance parity for two items to be comparable.

You are incorrect in saying that you take an order of magnitude performance hit when Virtualization, especially for CPU bound tasks [1].

In terms of disk you are slightly more correct, you can lose substantial performance, however it's still not an order of magnitude.

[1] [http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2011/11/29/baremetal-vs-xen- vs...](http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2011/11/29/baremetal-vs-xen-vs-kvm- redux/) (A series of benchmarks showing a disparity of ~1% off bare metal on CPU bound tasks.)

<comment><USER12> A better comparison might be dedicated hardware versus virtualized in EC2 than virtualized on stand alone hardware as EC2 is a shared environment.

I understand that technically there shouldn't be much disparity for CPU bound tasks (because most instructions are translated directly), but our benchmarks show a 40x performance hit for heavily CPU bound, single threaded tasks between a large EC2 instance and an entry level softlayer dedicated box (doing computer vision work). Perhaps it's a caching issue caused by Xen and other VMs sharing the hardware or perhaps its the fact that EC2 is built on older hardware that might not support some of the more advanced CPU features. Regardless, core for core on a anecdotal level, we have seen a stunningly large impact by switching to dedicated hardware.

<comment><USER13> Keep in mind that EC2 is simply one _very_ specific case, and you can sum up a good portion of its problems with "It's designed to be cheap to build".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> About a month ago I did a bit of pricing for having a permanently-on dedicated virtual server through Amazon:

Micro - $105.80/yr (reserved instance)

Bandwidth - $0.00/mo (light transfer usage)

S3 - $0.20/mo (combining storage and transfer)

CloudFront - $0.20/mo (combining requests and transfer)

After a quick glance around I found that it was going to be impossible to beat that price, most especially for the services gained by using AWS (CloudFront, S3, CLI interface + tools, ability to spin up an instance behind the scenes and swap over to it once properly configured...)

The moral of this story is to _make sure that you price out the cost of using any platform for your particular usage profile_.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is the biggest, most dishonest, load of shit I've ever read by Amazon.

Yes, there are interesting aspects to AWS. But I could host servers at SoftLayer with 10x more power than AWS instances at a 5-10x price reduction.

Even hosting at an overpriced "managed" dedicated provider like Rackspace would run you less than AWS.

<comment> X-Istence It's a shame that Softlayer bought The Planet. I used to host with the The Planet at their bargain brand Servermatrix and they used to have some very good deals, these days Softlayer is charging higher and higher prices, pricing them out of my range.

I wish I could find a good DC that sold me unmanaged servers for cheap. I just need someone to keep the power on, the BW flowing (preferably no Cogent) and when hardware breaks to replace it. I'll take care of the rest.

<comment><USER4> > _I just need someone ... when hardware breaks to replace it_

I'm not a sysadmin, so I might be terribly wrong here, but isn't this the very definition of managed hosting?

<comment> X-Istence managed generally means that the datacenter/provider also takes care of OS upgrades, installing patches, installing software as required. unmanaged generally means hands off except for hardware related tasks, and generally if it is the fault of the sys-admin then they might charge and hourly fee for it.

<comment><USER4> So can it be possible that some providers use these terms interchangeably? One says "it's managed because we take care of the hardware", the other says "it's unmanaged because we don't take care of the software." Seems confusing to me.

I definitely understand why you would want to take responsibility for OS upgrades and the like.

<comment> X-Istence If I am leasing the machine I expect it to be "managed" in that someone takes care of the hardware. I expect it to be unmanaged when it comes to OS, software and all that fun stuff.

This seems to be fairly standard throughout the industry, when you look at unmanaged hosting you get no OS support but do get hardware support. And when leasing a server that is what I expect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We have thousands of users who run their servers on Amazon using one of our AMIs (<http://bitnami.org>) Whether EC2 is more or less expensive than the alternatives is a complex topic highly dependent on your particular requirements. Having said that, our perspective is that you need to consider the overall value you get for your money. There are features like the ability to take incremental snapshots of your entire machine for backup or cloning purposes that have no match by other hosting providers. That feature alone saves us innumerable hours of development and system administration. Our staging servers are not setup like or production servers, they can _be_ exact copies of your production servers, on demand. How many bugs/issues do you think we avoid with that? For us, enough of them that any price difference with a "traditional" setup is not worth it

</comment><comment><USER17> We at Fotki were approached several times by Amazon, and they tried to make us switch, and every time we calculated, we were getting around $75..100K per month just for storage, not including traffic and other stuff... It is pretty much true that their price is 10x or 20x of owning your own hardware.

</comment><comment><USER18> I would say, everything considered (thus inevitably comparing apples and oranges at least in some respect), hosting options ordered by longer-term cost from lowest to highest:

1\. colocation w/ yours or your admin team physical access

2\. AWS

3\. normal hosting

And I've put AWS on the 2nd place only due to the ability of replacing or scaling your hardware in minutes.

It's good to know that for $11k a year (paid upfront) plus traffic costs one can run their biggest GPU instance on 10GigE connection, or a 60 GB RAM machine on a normal connection.

I think AWS is absolutely unbeatable for startups where you are not sure about the success upfront.

Also, I'm running my Node.js sites on a Micro instance which I have free for the first year, and $16/mo onwards.

<comment><USER18> I wish the downvote action here on HN included a mandatory reason textbox where you'd have to write why you have downvoted, and this action itself would be downvotable. So much political bullshit going on here.

<comment><USER19> I would expect that any downvotes are because there aren't many scenarios where amazon is cheaper long term than leased dedicated servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think a fair comparison is very complicated and depends a lot on: do you need to occasionally ramp up the number of servers, do services like Elastic Map Reduce work well in your system for occasional data crunching, do SimpleDB and DynamoDB fit in your architecture, does EBS with high durabilty but slower IO performance meet your needs, does having lots of cheap S3 storage with free inner-data region bandwidth save you money?

If enough of these considerations match your needs, then AWS looks great, otherwise look to dedicated servers.

<comment><USER3> If those considerations matched my needs, AWS wouldn't look great because I don't want vendor lock in. That's why they're able to charge high prices-- once you build on their platform, you can't easily migrate elsewhere.

I want to save time by not having to learn Amazon specific APIs (which seem to be terribly engineered, cause every time I want to throw a small project that way I find myself in a morass of poor documentation and way too complificated configurations.)

So, I see that really as an added cost.

<comment><USER21> You are only locked in if you use SimpleDB, dynamo, SQS, etc.

Most of the standard infrastructure is quite replaceable. S3 can be easily replaced by more or less any file storage system (in Django it's 1 line of configuration), ELB can be replaced by any load balancer, ec2 by dedicated servers, etc.

Admittedly, some code changes are required, but nothing architectural (e.g., S3BotoStorage -> RackspaceStorage in django). For anything bigger than a hobby project, it shouldn't be a major barrier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am surprised I don't see the geographic distribution of AWS as a huge appealing aspect of the service.

If you are trying to deploy a global solution, I don't know any way as cost effective as rolling out images to all the regions you need and rolling out the same scripts, knowledge, strategies to each region to get your service up and running.

Opening accounts with dedicated providers in each country as an alternative sounds infinitely more painful.

</comment><comment><USER23> AWS is cost effective in some scenarios while not in others. It really strongly depends on actual needs, what resources are needed, in what proportion, etc. There is an article which tries to answer if Amazon is really the cheapest provider: [http://blog.cloudorado.com/2011/08/is-amazon-cheapest- cloud-...](http://blog.cloudorado.com/2011/08/is-amazon-cheapest-cloud- computing.html)

You can compare the prices with custom configurations of multiple providers with Cloudorado - <http://www.cloudorado.com>.

</comment><comment><USER24> In order to be competitive with dedicated hosting, AWS should introduce per- month heavy utilization pricing option. 1 and 3 years is too long to commit for startups.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've never contracted out for bandwidth but do they charge you extra if you under commit?

<comment><USER26> A commit is just that a commitment to buy "x" amount of bandwidth.

If you have a commit for 500Mbps at $1 a Mbps on the 95th then you will pay at least $500 a month regardless of how little you use. If you end up using 1Gbps then you will pay $1000 a month.

As far as I'm aware there are no extra charges beyond the price for the commit and any MRC (Monthly Recurring Charges) your account may have. Though my boss takes care of that paperwork so I might be mistaken.

<comment><USER27> I'm generally right in the middle of said paperwork, and you've got it right. The main caveat is that overage cost is often (though not always) higher than the commit.

(The other caveat is I've never seen $1/mbps transit, if you find it, let me know. :))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> One thing I've always thought about the three-year reserved instance is what happens if AWS lowers the price on the configuration, you've already lock in on the higher price. Three years is a lot of time, technology advances quickly and prices decrease, but if you lock in on the three-year contract, you won't see the benefits of lower costs. Actually, now that I write this, maybe this is how Amazon justifies the lower price for longer contracts.</comment>


Securing Software Together: GitHub and Semmle - <AUTHOR> https://blog.semmle.com/secure-software-github-semmle/ <comment><USER2> Here's the broader security strategy post from Github, "Securing software, together": [https://github.com/features/security](https://github.com/features/security)

It looks like Github is making a definite play into the security space. The above post mentions vulnerability detection (a la SourceClear or r2c), collaboration between reporters and maintainers (a la HackerOne), automated dependency updating (a la PyUp and others), automated token scanning (a la TruffleHog), CVE creation and more.

This makes sense as Github is unique positioned to do a lot of this work better and more efficiently than the disparate set of tools and companies relying on their functionality. This feels like a page out of the AWS playbook as far as letting others build on top of your functionality, see what people like, then doing it yourself, but better.</comment>


Ask HN: Can I buy a soundproof box to stick my server in? - <AUTHOR> I've got a laptop working as a server running from my room but I turn it off at night because it's loud. Do they make boxes that I could stick the thing in that would muzzle the sound but still keep it at a good temperature?<p>Thanks! <comment><USER3> Have you considered buying a silent computer? I think it would be cheaper than an enclosure. Depends what type of power you need though. Mac Mini is good for this or maybe ATOM if you can get by with it. An easy solution I've used before is to stack a small wall of books in front of a loud device. Don't fully enclose it just make a little wall between yourself and the laptop. It may not erase the sound entirely but it will definitely smooth out the higher frequencies.

<comment><USER4> Here's another reseller of such cabinets: <http://www.acoustiproducts.com>

But I second what jsz0 said, the pricing is normally prohibitive for personal use. Their cheapest offering (the orion) starts at around 650 USD - and that generally seems to be about the starting range for these things.

That money is better spent on a Mac Mini, or if you need more extensibility from your server then have a look at your local "silent pc dealer" - <USER2> levels of noise reduction can be had, from dampened cases to completely passively cooled systems.

Personally I can recommend the stupendously awesome products from <http://www.hfx.at/>. Reasonably priced, absolutely stellar build quality - and no fans (heatpipes for everything).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think "my laptop is noisy" is the symptom, not the problem. The problem is that you have a server in your bedroom. You can address your problem by renting a cheap VPS or low-end dedicated server. You'll never hear it or worry about temperature again, you'll have increased reliability, and you'll spend less of your valuable time keeping the server alive when you could be doing more important things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry I should have added more info. I have many cloud servers, this one is for a personal project that is running on Windows, and I have never worked with a hosted Windows server before and am not sure if I want to. So for now, I'm just running it from home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a laptop, try using one of those little $100 fridges from Home Depot. Try putting it in there. That might work for you, plus you can keep something cold to drink close at hand too.

<comment><USER7> really interesting idea actually. Would there be a problem with moisture inside a fridge?

<comment><USER8> Even if you do, you won't have a problem in the computer. It will be warmer than the refrigerator so any dew activity will be elsewhere.

Getting the power cord in will require some creativity.

And frankly, I have no idea if a small refrigerator can keep up with the heat output of a small computer. It would be an interesting duel.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> <http://acapella.harmony-central.com/showthread.php?t=1578901>

<comment><USER10> Here's the schematics: <http://nearworlds.org/stuff/soundproof_box.jpg>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Put it in someone else's room.

</comment><comment><USER11> I put mine in the closet, and run long video/keyboard wires to my desk. Works fine.

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe your fans are old and you could clean them/lube them/replace them? Maybe you could disable the fans safely (might reduce lifetime or something, but maybe not kill it) if you watch temp.

<comment><USER6> Do not ever disable the fans! It's probably not a hardware problem with the fans. If it has a server OS running on it the bios on the laptop is probably not server friendly. Plus if the OEM had some kind of temp sensing application on the laptop to spin the fans up and down as needed the server install might have wiped it out. Net result the fans run wide open all the time making the laptop seem noisy.

<comment><USER13> What differences in CPU power management do you think there are between a server OS and a desktop OS? (Operators of server farms try even harder than laptop users to save power. Hot servers sucking down a lot of power require very expensive infrastructure. Reducing power consumption and heat production makes the infrastructure cheaper.)

<comment><USER6> It is not a power management issue, but servers are optimized to run certain _server_ operating systems. Laptops lack this _server OS_ optimization. For instance our Dell PowerEdge 1850 has different fan drivers depending on if we load it with RHEL5 vs WinServer 2008. The drivers control the fan speed and are OS specific and work with the _server_ bios. If we loaded XP Pro or Ubuntu as an OS the box would probably light up and function but would lack the fan speed control (and some other management features), plus the Bios is not optimized for a non-server (non-supported) OS meaning possible loss of USB functionality (This is the voice of experience).

<comment><USER13> Fan speeds are often a software-controlled feature. There's a daemon running in the background that gets temperature inputs, and sets the fan speed output as a result. If this daemon (not "the OS") doesn't step in and do something, many mainboards will just turn all the fans to "high" just to be safe.

The is not an OS issue, but rather a userspace configuration issue. Install your favorite Netbook OS, install the userspace fan-control daemon, and enjoy quiet fans from your server. It has nothing to do with the OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> <http://www.silentpcreview.com>

My reference for silencing computers. The guys there take their noise VERY seriously. I was among them at one time :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Would it be cheaper to buy noise-canceling headphones?

</comment><comment><USER16> Search for 'kell systems' for a high-end option to address this need.

</comment><comment><USER17> This company used to appear a lot at LinuxWorld & Mac World touting rackmount enclosures for acoustically sensitive areas like recording studios.

<http://www.xrackpro.com/>

</comment><comment><USER18> I had this same problem, except I didn't have a laptop making noise I had 5 Dell poweredge 2650's (yes i realize how outdated they are) plus 4 other home brew servers. I rewired my network, and placed them in a closet. I'm at the point now where the hum actually helps me sleep better.

on another note, the servers keep the closet a comfortable 70º on average (I leave the door open during the day, so air circulates) which is the perfect temperature while my homebrew is fermenting, I'd like to think I have a wonderful nerd eco-system.

</comment><comment><USER19> Try one of those plug computers like <http://www.tonidoplug.com>. It runs ubuntu though.</comment>


Farthest galaxy group yet identified: EGS77 dates to 680M-year-old universe - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.00873 <comment><USER2> Actual title: Onset of Cosmic Reionization: Evidence of An Ionized Bubble Merely 680 Myrs after the Big Bang

(The universe is _way_ older than 680Myrs)</comment>


The Americans of the Panama Papers have been exposed - <AUTHOR> https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/search?c=USA&cat=1&e=&j=&q=&utf8=%E2%9C%93 <comment><USER2> If you click one of the names, it displays an important message:

 _Please read the statement below before searching

There are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts. We do not intend to suggest or imply that any persons, companies or other entities included in the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly. Many people and entities have the same or similar names. We suggest you confirm the identities of any individuals or entities located in the database based on addresses or other identifiable information. If you find an error in the database please get in touch with us._

<comment><USER3> Any system that can be exploited will be. You can either blame that people who find loopholes or blame the system for allowing them to exist.

I suspect the majority of the blame goes to governments who favour extremely complex tax law. As any hacker knows the bigger the attack surface the more vulnerabilities exist.

Sadly the solution many countries are now calling for to confront the prevalence of shell companies is to add more regulations and reporting laws to identify stakeholders at the time the money is being used at the final destination. This might be effective at weeding out the bad players but further increases costs for the honest businesses and diminishes their right to privacy.

Surely there must be solutions that allows for privacy of transactions among private individuals to exist while still ensuring that appropriate taxes get paid.

Typically it's the source country that's the problem. For example, tons of money is siphoned out of African countries via "transfer mispricing" [1] which is largely a regulatory failure in those countries and tax haven middlemen. Whereas the burden of uncovering the stakeholders is largely left to the countries at the end of the chain, which face a much more complex and difficult task of uncovering the players, than it would be stopping it at the source.

Simplifying tax law at the destination country to make tax obligations explicit plus shifting costs to the source/middlemen to incentivize reducing corruption in their own regulatory systems - instead of adding more burden to honest businessmen in the destination countries. Basically focusing energy/resources onto the source countries systems rather than just blindly throwing more aid money at corrupt governments which simply fuels the siphoning. The US and other western countries should be setting an example and fixing their own tax flight issues for other countries to follow.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_pricing#Fraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_pricing#Fraud)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> An interesting (but superficial) observation of the list of Canadian officers is how about 30-40% of the names sound Chinese while they represent only about 10% of the total population:

[https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/search?c=CAN&cat=1&e=&j=&q=&u...](https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/search?c=CAN&cat=1&e=&j=&q=&utf8=%E2%9C%93)

This must be a common tax/business strategy among Asian communities in Canada. Possibly due to the very large amount of Chinese real estate investors in Canadian properties in Vancouver and Toronto.

I suspect this would be enough to throw off recent statistics I've heard that claim the Chinese real estate investor boom is a 'myth' [1]. It's possible they just route the transactions through local shell companies so any surface level investigation into the buyers would make it appear that they are local.

[1] > In Canada, realtors do not tally foreign investment in residential real estate. However, the _limited data_ compiled by research firms suggests the impact is negligible. [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british- columbia/scant-e...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british- columbia/scant-evidence-behind-myth-of-vancouver-real-estates-foreign- buyers/article9000860/)

<comment><USER2> I don't agree that eyeballing a list of one law firm's clients says something about all Canadians of Chinese descent. If the data matches your eyeball estimate, it says something about only that law firm's clients.

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's what he's saying, and if any attempt to talk about the behavior of China's nouveau-riche -- a small, but comparatively very wealthy subset of Chinese investors in Canada -- is reduced to race-baiting about something which nobody seriously believes is characteristic of all Chinese immigrants (and which is the product of China's government's policies, not the investors' disposition) or for that matter even most of the recent ones -- after all, the vast majority of people are not wealthy -- then how can we ever reasonably discuss it?

<comment><USER2> > race-baiting

I didn't say or even think anything about racism.

> I don't think that's what he's saying

Then what do you think he/she is saying? Also, whatever group the commenter is talking about, my comment stands - this isn't really data about the larger group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sanford I. Weill is the biggest name I've spotted so far. I'm sure there are many more. [https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/12116280](https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/12116280)

<comment><USER6> For anyone else wondering who that is: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_I._Weill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_I._Weill)

<comment><USER7> r3bl: Any chance Wikipedia links could be associated with the records?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like there's a big hollywood name in there. Hint: His brother and dad changed their names to sound more 'American'.

<comment><USER9> Emilio Estevez? [https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/12121491](https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/12121491)

<comment><USER6> If you're trying to fly under the radar, I can't think of a more generic name than BUSINESS & CORPORATE SERVICES, INC.

<comment><USER10> Usually, at least in jurisdiction where this takes some time, companies will be pre-registered under a generic name and there's no real need to change it if you don't use it for trade.

[https://www.apintertrust.com/offshore_company/shelf_company_...](https://www.apintertrust.com/offshore_company/shelf_company_list.htm)

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

<comment><USER11> > Not to be confused with "shell corporation".

which is nearly identical but one key difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do we have proof of wrong-doing here? I may have honestly missed it if there is some.

From what I've seen, we have a group of folks who have used the laws of the land to their advantage. If that's the case, there's nothing wrong with that, and it would be fairly dumb to not use the laws to one's advantage.

It's not patriotic to pay more in taxes than one is legally obligated to pay.

Even us "mere mortals" do the best tax dance we can come April, cramming in all those extra credits and deductions, sometimes even fudging the numbers here and there. Our only disadvantage is we cannot afford to hire professional companies to do this tax dance on our behalf.

I'd argue, if folks are upset by the current tax laws that allow (and some may even argue, encourage) this behavior, then we ought to change the laws, not get upset at those capable or smart enough to use them to their advantage.

<comment><USER13> "I'd argue, if folks are upset by the current tax laws that allow (and some may even argue, encourage) this behavior, then we ought to change the laws, not get upset at those capable or smart enough to use them to their advantage."

Can't we do both. Personally I like to multitask.

"It's not patriotic to pay more in taxes than one is legally obligated to pay."

No but its stingy and crass for those who doing well to skip out on paying their share because they can. Can we admit their is a qualitative difference between filling out a form to take a credit and hiring a team of lawyers to hide your money in a foreign shell company?

"sometimes even fudging the numbers here"

So you regularly commit felonies in order to avoid paying your share?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> an article about some of the americans: [https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160509-american- fraudsters-o...](https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160509-american-fraudsters- offshore.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> Interesting this was banished from the front page. Any insight into why that would happen?

<comment><USER16> People probably flagged it as a duplicate of yesterday's submission: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11664322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11664322)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The site was posted yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11664322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11664322)

</comment><comment><USER18> Does anyone blame these people for hiding their wealth when they know how wasteful government is? Shouldn't we be looking deep underground in government waste and political misconduct?

<comment><USER2> Yes. Why should I, and everyone else, pay more taxes to cover their fair share?

I definitely want government to be less corrupt and wasteful (though I think the situation is greatly exaggerated, and the U.S. government is among the least corrupt), but somehow we need to pay for those services.

If they want more or less services from government, they have a chance to convince their fellow citizens to vote for what they want. But an essential part of the deal is that, once the law is written, like it or not we're all covered by it. Majority rules.</comment></comment>


Relax, We'll Be Fine - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/opinion/06brooks.html

<comment><USER2> From the article: "Over the past 10 years, 60 percent of American adults made more than $100,000 in at least one or two of those years, and 40 percent had incomes that high for at least three."

Am I the only one shocked by that statistic? That is far more people making six figures than I would have imagined. I can see one year by virtue of selling stock or real estate or even inheritance, but the 40% with that income continually paints a different picture of America to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> I read the book reviewed in the article "The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050." It's a horrible, pollyanna-ish book. It simply hand-waves away every possible problem. It talks about how fantastic the suburbs are and ignores how dependent they are on cheap oil for transportation. It literally just says that oil dependence isn't an issue and everything will be SO AWESOME!1!

A more facile book could not be written.</comment>


Gogo Inflight Internet is Intentionally Issuing Fake SSL Certificates - <AUTHOR> http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/gogo-inflight-internet-intentionally-issuing-fake-ssl-certificates <comment><USER2> Okay I've never commented on my affiliation before because I don't want to advertise but this is ridiculous.

I am the one who wrote the first article and 'broke' the story about Gogo's snooping [0]. Plenty of publications also reported on it after it reached high notoriety on Reddit. Some copied parts of my article, some didn't give a source or via to me, some made it appear like they were producing original news. That's fine, I don't really care: it happens to almost every single original article I write (one time I took a screen shot of my own Desktop as an article image and the other websites copied that too with no source) and I've grown use to it - I was just happy that it was making waves and forcing Gogo to reconsider their position.

But in this case, Symantec has copied my original title verbatim. If you're going to literally copy my title verbatim, at least give a link back to it. Ridiculous. It wasn't even a good title.

[0] [http://www.neowin.net/news/gogo-inflight-internet-is- intenti...](http://www.neowin.net/news/gogo-inflight-internet-is- intentionally-issuing-fake-ssl-certificates)

<comment><USER3> You need to list all that copying that was done on your resume. What better way to prove your skills than to show how much people are copying you.

<comment><USER2> If I was a career journalist I'd probably be more concerned, but I'm a software engineer and write just because I enjoy tech.

<comment><USER4> Original research cited by major news organizations puts you on a whole new level above just "software engineer" for salary purposes. It's resume-worthy if you have a section for academic-type accomplishments.

<comment><USER2> That's actually a really salient point. I've never considered it as 'research,' my mind just never made that connection for whatever reason. I'll keep it in mind from now on - thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Slightly OT: CDNs basically perform a MITM to do what they do. The destination site's certificate (www.destination.com) is deployed throughout the CDN's servers and when DNS lookups are performed, the end user is directed to the IP address an optimal edge server where the certificate is waiting to greet them warmly. On the other side (first mile), the CDN then connects via a second SSL certificate (say, origin-www.destination.com) to the origin's datacenter(s) to retrieve the necessary data.

When I worked at a CDN company, we frequently got inquiries from customers saying that a security audit they ran threw up a red flag for MITM. And it was my job to tell them why it wasn't anything to worry about.

PS, most origin-www.destination.com origins are extremely vulnerable to DDoS since, at that hostname, there is no CDN to protect them.

<comment><USER6> While what you explain is correct, willfully giving/deploying your certificates in another server probably doesn't count as MITM

<comment><USER7> Agreed. It's only MITM if it's unauthorized IMO. If I deploy my cert to a CDN its just legitimate handshakes so I'm not sure where the man in the middle comes in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the two scariest discoveries with Superfish are that Microsoft allows an OEM to ship a retail Windows computer with additional root certificates, and that Chrome is trusting the root certificates stored by Windows -- Firefox does not.

My proposed actions:

(1) Microsoft should immediately update their OEM agreements to ban all manipulation of root certificates for computers sold at retail. Further, the root certificate store should be cryptographically signed by Microsoft and this signature validated during Windows OOBE.

(2) Google should follow Mozilla's lead and have Chrome securely manage its own root certificate store. (It could be disabled for legitimate corporate deployments, but never with the regular end-user Chrome installer.)

<comment><USER9> Devil's advocate: But then if an OEM wants to install themselves as a root, they cannot. That's anti competitive. Why should MS be especially trusted over the OEM?

Slowly and way too late, MS has been learning that their "partners" mostly suck and hold a lot of responsibility for MS being so far behind today. MS shipped tablet PC how long before Apple? But they figured "yeah HP and Dell will handle our customer experience well, sure".

Also, how is Chrome gonna determine a legitimate deployment? Cause then the dev just needs to convince Chrome it's in a corp environment.

Or... Just ship a patched version of Chrome/FF/whatever that doesn't do cert validation.

<comment><USER10> Devil's advocate on your devil's advocate: what legitimate reason could an OEM have for installing a root certificate?

<comment><USER9> Same as MS? Maybe they feel they have a better idea on who to trust and thus add and remove certificates as necessary. Maybe they want to sign their own hardware drivers (though, I think those don't use the system CA store). Perhaps they want to offer signatures to customers or software vendors and feel current MS provided CAs are lacking.

More mundane, perhaps there's a cheaper CA that's accepted by some trusts, but not MS. Why should MS be trusted more than $OEM?

OK, fairly weak arguments, but the freedom of doing so is important. Just as it is important that users be able to verify and undo and choose their root of trust.

The concept of a global root of trust breaks down pretty fast. And the OEM can already compromise anything anyways.

<comment><USER8> > Same as MS? Maybe they feel they have a better idea on who to trust

How would the consumer know who they're trusting?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are a lot of places which "spoof" or provide their own public in the TLS handshake. Top of mind is every single hotel I've ever stayed at which requires the entry of my last name and hotel room number via a captive portal. Of course in those cases the captive portal authentication page isn't the site I was originally going to visit, although some don't redirect and do leave the original destination in the address bar which is always an interesting trust issue, especially if the captive portal is asking me for my ISP password or a credit-card.

<comment><USER12> Regarding hotel portals, this is relevant: [https://securelist.com/blog/research/66779/the-darkhotel- apt...](https://securelist.com/blog/research/66779/the-darkhotel-apt/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Pretty sure I remember PHK warning that (paraphrased) if you encrypt cat videos along with everything else it's just going to cause more effort to break and get around the encryption. Maybe httpbis should have actually listened to him.

</comment><comment><USER14> Gogo is old news by now though.

<comment><USER15> I hadn't heard of it. Glad to hear about this -- MiTM attacks & SSL spoofing is an important problem in today's internet security.

<comment><USER16> They don't successfully spoof it; that would require a cert signed by a root CA the browser trusts, and they don't have that. So what you'll actually get is not a web page, but an SSL cert error warning from your browser. If you're technically inclined enough to click your way through to see the actual page, I think all you get is a generic "YouTube is blocked" (and blocking YouTube is the reason why they do it -- they don't have the bandwidth to support it or other streaming video).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is very different though, because it would throw an error.

<comment><USER18> It's training users to ignore the error, and that's bad, but yes, it's not as bad as komodia</comment></comment>


Seth's Godin: How to make a million dollars - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/06/how-to-make-a-m.html <comment><USER2> While I agree with Godin's general premise, the obvious (at least to me) implication of this to hackers is to make "enterprise" software. This is rather unfortunate. The sales cycle for such systems tends to be very drawn out, and large companies decide to purchase from vendors in a manner that seems rather arbitrary using criteria that is often non-obvious e.g. the long term survivability of the vendor is frequently at least as important as the quality of the product they provide.

<comment><USER3> Why is that the obvious implication, especially whith the two home-run examples he gives?

Starbucks and Microsoft are built on smaller transactions than one would expect from enterprise software. Starbucks does it $3 at a time. Microsoft established itself selling desktop software for for a few hundred a pop, and for quite a while, it was selling a couple of copies at a time until they gained enough momentum to sell their desktop software to whole departments and later even whole enterprises.

Interesting to consider that the average annual revenue Starbucks gets from a regular customer, is probably similar, or even a bit more than the annual revenue Microsoft gets per-seat from its best enterprise customers. A reminder that one should balance the difficulty of acquiring a customer against the lifetime value of that customer.

Getting $1 from a million people might be a tough business, but getting $20/year from 50,000 people one dollar at a time is conceivable.

Flickr might be a good example (though a little on the big side). When they were acquired by Yahoo, just a little over a year from their debut, they already had ~400,000 registered users. Within a few more months, they had a million, and a few months after that a million more. I'd postulate that nearly all of that post-acquisition growth (and much more) came from existing momentum rather than their association with Yahoo.

I don't know if the same ratios held back then, but when I looked a few months back, about 15% of flickr accounts were flickr pro accounts bringing in $24.95 in annual revenue. Thats 300,000 x $24.95, or $7M in annual revenue, just from pro accounts.

Margins were low, or negative, because they were going for growth, but they had various knobs they could twiddle. First off, a little after the Yahoo acquisition they cut the pro subscription price (by half, I believe). In addition, they controlled the amount of storage and upload bandwidth available to both free and pro account holders. Taken together these variables gave them latitude in picking margins. Even a relatively paltry 13% margin would have generated $1M in profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Start with $100 million, and start an airline.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ad-based startups take note.</comment>


Ask HN: Get paid cash to get shit done?! TaskUp, the task list that does. - <AUTHOR>

Task / To-do list suck at motivating users to get shit done.
After contemplating the idea of task-based incentives, here's a cash-based strategy we propose:
1. monetary rewards the customers upon timely task completion and
2. penalties when tasks become overdue
Every completed task is rewarded with $0.10 and every task that becomes 'overdue' is penalized at 3x the reward.
For instance, creating 8 tasks in the morning that are due today and only end up completing 7, the day end balance would be $0.40.
In other words, you would get paid $0.40 that day:
Completed Tasks: 7 * $0.10 = $0.70
Incomplete Tasks: 1 * $0.30 = $0.30
Day Total = $0.40
(Considering 20 business days) Total customer gain = $0.40 * 20 = $8/month
Question 1: Would you use a task app that has a simple and intuitive workflow, incentivizes you with $$$ to get shit done, and has NO monthly subscription fees?
Question 2: As far as the reward/punishment multiplier, the 3x multiplier is just a starting point. We're also exploring a self sustainable model in which incomplete task dollars are used to reward completed tasks. Also, instead of community redistribution, we could also base the multiplier on the amount of money that the user him/herself has given to us, giving customers a chance to make up more money faster as they get more behind on tasks, motivating them to get on track faster.
Question 3: Are there any downsides to the revenue model proposed whereby our best case is when our users have all incomplete tasks and lose a bunch of money? We are looking this from an ethical lens, and a long-term company strategy. <comment><USER2> I really like the idea of gamification when it comes to business and love this approach. Rather than asking HN if you would do this, build a light weight version and test it - even if it sites at another domain - throw some paid at it and see if you can get 20 people to opt-in.

As for rev model and long term - what other things could you incoporate/affiliate like [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/18/maneesh- sethi-blogg...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/18/maneesh-sethi- blogger-hires-craigslist-slapper-to-hit-him-unproductive_n_1980274.html) \- could something like this scale?

Or partner with <http://www.fancyhands.com/> as a lead-gen model for them - help move tasks into outsourcing

<comment><USER3> I really enjoyed that huffingtonpost read, and I often struggle with keeping myself accountable and that's why I now either a) Work very closely with my manager/director so I have the pressure or b) Sign groups of people up to do stuff that I want done i.e. Gym classes.

The model described above definitely addresses the topic, and I'd be willing to give it a try.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For the full post and preventing misuse cases, check out the rest of the post in our blog: [http://blog.taskup.com/index.php/2012/10/get-paid-to-get- thi...](http://blog.taskup.com/index.php/2012/10/get-paid-to-get-things-done/)

</comment><comment><USER4> So they put their own money up and when they complete a task they get their own money back?

What's to stop people marking tasks as done (when they're not) to avoid any losses?

<comment><AUTHOR> We would start off all accounts with a nominal positive ($1-$5) balance to minimize friction and get people more comfortable with it. We would be paying users, in the long term from their own money that they put into the system.

We blogged about some of the cases to prevent misuse, here they are: Case 1: What if users create hundreds of tasks and just check off tasks to cash in without actually being more productive? We could limit rapid fire task creation to a few tasks per minute. Some backend NLP process would assign a spammer rank to new tasks, allowing us to temporarily suspend rewards if we believe the customer is just trying to game the system.

Case 2: Even so, users could easily make hundreds of dollars each week if they just create tasks and check them off at regular intervals. How would you prevent that? We could cap weekly rewards to around $10/month and penalties to $20/month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very basic question - who creates the tasks and who is supposed to work on them? Who are these people, colleagues, friends, strangers...?

<comment><AUTHOR> The account holder would create tasks for themselves, as well as checking tasks off. Shortly, we'll add options for accepting/rejecting tasks being created for customers by others (collaboration), but we're still working out the permissions for that piece.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Check out our task list app at <https://taskup.com></comment>


The Null Process (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.kateheddleston.com/blog/the-null-process <comment><USER2> Interesting article. The Null Process seems at least somewhat analogous to the phenomenon described in the essay "The Tyranny of Structureless" [1] (that when people claim there is no hierarchy/structure in a group of people, in truth there is an informal but very powerful hierarchy that's hidden from you and whose rules you are not familiar with). If there are "no processes" in truth there is a process and you don't know its rules because they aren't stated anywhere. Aka the "unspoken expectations" mentioned in TFA.

\----

[1] [https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

<comment><USER3> This is all reminding me of the murmurs from Jeri Ellsworth and friends about the shadow government at Valve.

The lack of transparency means that the subtle people win a rigged game that the more oblivious don't even know is being played. A category in which engineers are substantially over-represented.

We put it out there so that there are more eyes on it, and people are forced to acknowledge their own pain points and learn a bit about themselves and/or teamwork.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've enjoyed using and explaining this concept ever since I read the article initially, a few years ago. I think it's a powerful idea when applied in the right context. I do want to play devil's advocate though, and point out some "benefits," imo, to "the null process" that are left out from the article:

\- The null process does not have a formal process owner, so nobody is directly on the hook for blame when things go wrong with "the process."

\- The null process does not shake up or disrupt existing, implicit or explicit, political power structures in place. It's harder to make an enemy by "doing things how we've always done them" rather than fighting to change something.

\- The null process allows those in leadership to drastically change strategy at both small and large scales/scopes, without having to actually do formal change management. The new process is whatever randomly settles around the new goals/strategies. As opposed to having to actually tear down or carefully alter existing, formalized processes.

\- The null process is usually poorly understood by any one individual, it's made up of haphazard, ad-hoc communication channels and specific rituals between individuals or teams. This disperses power and disallows any one person or small group from gaining undue influence over the whole by controlling some key cog or relationship in a formalized process.

\- The null process can somewhat shield creatives and strategists from being overwhelmed by stick-in-the-mud, by-the-book people who may use formalized process as a cudgel to beat people over the head with in order to show dominance or gain power.

<comment><USER5> Can't agree on a few points.

> _so nobody is directly on the hook for blame when things go wrong_

Usually the poor guy who broke the unspoken rules is to blame, and worse yet, it looks like he's to blame out of the blue. Things went wrong, his colleagues are unhappy, and the reasons for that are vague.

> _The null process does not shake up or disrupt existing, implicit or > explicit, political power structures in place._

In part, it _is_ those structures, the unspoken implicit expectations. Messing with them is much like messing with explicit power structures, only blindfolded.

> _This disperses power and disallows any one person or small group from > gaining undue influence over the whole by controlling some key cog_

Rather, the people informally "in the know" do gain the undue influence, but do so informally. You just have to talk to them via these haphazard channels (and know to talk to them in the first place), or certain things fail to work well. This also lowers the bus factor of the organization, without formally acknowledging it.

OTOH I tend to agree with the other two points: that informal "null" processes are easier to dismantle and replace with a more formal process of a very different kind, and that the lack of formal process allows some needed creativity, informal "skunk works" to sneak in where (other) formal processes do not allow for that.

<comment><USER4> >> so nobody is directly on the hook for blame when things go wrong

>Usually the poor guy who broke the unspoken rules is to blame

Sure. I could have phrased my point better as, "Even if someone is blamed, nobody in leadership will be blamed for 'bad process' decisions."

>the people informally "in the know" do gain the undue influence

I could argue that this is a feature and not a bug. The inefficiency of the null process means that the "informally in the know" group will need to be much larger, on average, than the feasible power groups in efficient organizations. A group composed of 25% of the employees would probably be less likely to end up making radical decisions than a group of <4% of the employees.

>This also lowers the bus factor of the organization

By the same measure, having a larger power group and the null process would seem to me to greatly increase the bus factor. There would be more people each specifically focused on smaller areas, and/or possibly also overlapping in knowledge due to inefficiencies/redundancies in the null process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I do agree with many of these points, but it doesn't talk about the other end of the scale. Too many processes.

I've been places where excess process is a crutch for poor general technical expertise and troubleshooting skills.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think when people see that, it scares them so much they have no process at all and hit a new set of problems...

<comment><USER7> "fighting the last war"

<comment><USER3> I will say it's a pretty awkward conversation to explain why we are again having a problem that we've already suffered through twice before.

Especially if the customer knows they are paying for our inability to figure out what the hell we are doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some people loves a structured world with clearly stated rules. This has many benefits especially when the situation is very well defined, repeatable and requires many people to cooperate. The down side is that rules will almost never accommodate all possible situations.

So when a problem is very dynamic and requires few people to cooperate it might be beneficial not to try and force strict rules on uncertain conditions.

And yes some people are not as good in picking up social cues and working with loosely defined rules, and maybe they are not the perfect match for these positions. Its not the end of the world.

Not saying that building processes is bad, just that for _some_ situations it might better not to.

P.S. the lawsuit was rejected: [http://svelf.com/class-certification-defeated- in-twitter-gen...](http://svelf.com/class-certification-defeated-in-twitter- gender-discrimination-case/) so maybe not the perfect example in hindsight :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Null process is not only like "null pointer" but like "null hypothesis", except in science you have to make explicit what that is.

Whenever someone talks of "common sense", they're invoking the null process. It also reminds me of the "ask vs guess" culture issue.

<comment><USER10> ask vs guess: [https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground- bet...](https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-between-FU- and-Welcome#830421)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Making a checklist is hard work!

My first and second drafts of process documents are always way too long. It's easy to be verbose. It's hard to be concise.

It's very hard to be concise _and_ to accurately convey the whole process.

One strategy that helps is imagining a tiny flashcard checklist you'd carry around while executing the process.

Another strategy I've seen help in some contexts is tutorial videos -- if you watch someone follow a checklist, you might get to see an obvious implicit part of a step which a novice doesn't know. Watching someone's screen as they actually use a system according to the published steps can be really valuable.

</comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of "Programmer Anarchy" by Fred George: [https://vimeo.com/43690647](https://vimeo.com/43690647)

Except that his talk is, on the contrary, about how preferrable it can be in some contexts not to have a hierarchy enforcing processes.

<comment><USER5> Processes can be instituted democratically, when everybody interested agrees that a process would be beneficial / helpful for their work. I've seen this happen, and I think it's the proper way in most cases.</comment></comment>


The Nixie Tube Story: The Neon Display Tech That Engineers Can't Quit - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/the-nixie-tube-story-the-neon-display-tech-that-engineers-cant-quit <comment><USER2> I used a Nixie tube as an example in my presentation on the evolution of digital typography [0]. I actually brought a nixie clock with me, which was a nice visual aid.

[0] [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14o7vtyxz79Xto4JeDFcr...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14o7vtyxz79Xto4JeDFcrDfM_N4kZ1OxoqhjVseDicbA/edit#slide=id.g9c78baf83_0_6)

<comment><USER3> This presentation was wonderful, thank you! Is there a video by any chance?

Offtopic: I notice it doesn't mention (my favourite) Knuth's Metafont, an unfortunate dead-end in the history of digital typography. And I used some scans of yours in answering (and understanding) a question on TeX.SE a while ago ([https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722/48);](https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/361722/48\);) thanks for that as well.

<comment><USER2> Glad you liked it! Unfortunately there was going to be a video but it didn't happen for technical reasons. I'd love to have the opportunity to do another spin of that talk.

Of course I had to pick and choose, and Metafont is near and dear to my heart, but since the audience for this was mostly humanities rather than a more technical crowd, it didn't make the final cut.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I highly recommend Techmoan - [http://www.techmoan.com/](http://www.techmoan.com/) \- which has an enthusiastic presenter doing Youtube videos covering various retro and new items. There are several about Nixie tubes including solared powered watches! [http://www.techmoan.com/display/Search?moduleId=19697008&sea...](http://www.techmoan.com/display/Search?moduleId=19697008&searchQuery=nixie)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for that link! I watched the whole video on APS cameras: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTV99DzuJp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTV99DzuJp0). What a trip down memory lane. The presenter did a great job of capturing what I remembered about APS. I really liked that format even though it sacrificed quality for convenience. I have a bunch of old reels of APS film I'll have to go see if I can get transferred to digital now.

<comment><USER4> My gateway video was the one on the Tefifon - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBNTAmLRmUg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBNTAmLRmUg) \- a consumer music playback format. Production ended the same decade we stood on the moon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been a Nixie fan for a long time and finally started working with them ~2 years ago. Here is a custom timeline of tweets from my various projects - [https://twitter.com/jazzychad/timelines/773442085278085121](https://twitter.com/jazzychad/timelines/773442085278085121)

<comment><USER7> What kind of power draw would a full Nixie implementation of a hours and minutes clock? And what is the typical lifetime of a tube?

<comment><USER8> Power draw will be a bit higher than what you're used to for LED displays but not excessive, < 10 mA, they start to light up around 90V iirc, lifespan in the 100's of thousands of hours for the newest ones.

<comment> King-Aaron Can you recommend a good cost-effective kit/clock for someone to dip their toes into the field with? I've often looked at them, but when forking over a couple of hundred US dollars, a bit of insight into what's what would be ideal :P

<comment><USER8> Velleman used to sell one, I see it is gone from their line up.

[https://www.velleman.eu/products/view/?id=380384](https://www.velleman.eu/products/view/?id=380384)

I have nothing but good stuff to say about Elektor so if you can get this shipped you'd be in business.

[https://www.elektor.com/six-digit-nixie- clock-150189-71](https://www.elektor.com/six-digit-nixie-clock-150189-71)

<comment> King-Aaron Thanks for that! I think I might check out the Elektor kit :)

<comment><USER8> You're welcome. If you buy it and start building it and you get stuck on something let me know and I'll help you out. Remote debugging is fun :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Dalibor Farny's clocks are stunning.

Mine, circa 2016 if I recall, was well worth the wait, impeccably packaged and shipped from Czech Republic in a plywood box.

[https://www.daliborfarny.com](https://www.daliborfarny.com)

I chose the dark model: [https://www.daliborfarny.com/zen-nixie- clock/](https://www.daliborfarny.com/zen-nixie-clock/)

<comment><USER10> I came here to mention him. The guy's a true artist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The video in the article is just amazing. You don't normally get to see the exact details of how things get made. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA)

</comment><comment><USER12> Great!

Appart from nixies, I also love VFDs ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluorescent_display](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluorescent_display)) , but, as of today, the only options seem to be Noritake (pretty nice quality in my little experience), and Matrix Orbital (can't talk about them).

There are some Noritakes which are pin-compatible with hd44780 controllers, so I've used them to substitute older LCD displays, and they look great!

<comment><USER13> VFD reminds me of growing up in the 80's when the only use for LCD was cheap solar calculators and Casio wrist watches.

Nixie tubes just make me feel warm and tingly.

<comment><USER14> And amateur fishing sonar screens...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think something which hugely benefited the appearance of Nixie tubes in hobbyist use was the incredible supply of surplus electronic components (frequently industrial / military grade parts) from the former Soviet Union that have become available through eBay over the past two decades.

Furthermore, whether due to reasons of preparation nuclear war (EMP) or due to relatively poorer expertise at manufacturing semiconductors as compared to the west, there's a huge amount of rather recent (1970s-1980s) tube-era parts. (The avionics of the MiG-25 are mostly tube-based, as I understand it.)

</comment><comment><USER16> Until recently when I wanted to display some values from my factories in Factorio, I would've had no idea what these things are, thought they might be monster transporters or something.

[https://mods.factorio.com/mods/justarandomgeek/nixie- tubes](https://mods.factorio.com/mods/justarandomgeek/nixie-tubes).

</comment><comment><USER17> Part of the reason why nixie tubes enjoyed a resurgence around 2000 was _Final Fantasy VII_ , which was set in a dieselpunk-ish world with nixie tubes visible on some of the equipment in cutscenes, and even in parts of the UI. I don't remember much awareness of nixies among folks my age until that game revitalized their image as "retro tech".

<comment><USER18> Let's not forget the Nixies that were scattered all around the world of Pixar's _Monsters, Inc._ (2001)

[http://disney-hiddensecrets.tumblr.com/image/1352338597](http://disney- hiddensecrets.tumblr.com/image/1352338597)

[https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GhFS3H2ejNA/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GhFS3H2ejNA/maxresdefault.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Man, just another reason to be grateful to the Burroughs Corporation.

Here's one of the main ones:

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

</comment><comment><USER20> Has anything displaced Nixie tubes as a Pareto improvement? Nixie tubes offer an implementation of custom single-size "vector" fonts. 7-segment displays offer badly limited fonts. Raster displays are only partly competitive with vector displays in the recent "Retina" era.</comment>