Marijuana Law Mayhem Splits U.S. In Two as Travelers Get Busted - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-22/marijuana-law-mayhem-splits-u-s-in-two-as-travelers-get-busted.html <comment><USER2> "I very politely and truthfully told him, 'I'll show you where it is.'"

Don't Talk to Police: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc)

</comment><comment><USER3> The US Constitution makes states almost like countries. For those who don't know, laws are different, sometimes in major ways, when you cross a state line.

And that's just fine. A big problem in politics is trying to push 300M people to all follow the same set of laws. That's how we ended up with illegal marijuana in the first place.

Vote for what you believe in in your state, and leave the rest alone. Singapore doesn't nees the same drug laws as California. Mississippi doesn't need the same minimum wage as Massachusetts.

And when you travel, it's a good idea to follow a baseline of behavior that is acceptable almost anywhere. If you don't live there, you are a guest.

<comment><USER4> > For those who don't know, laws are different, sometimes in major ways, when > you cross a state line

That seems like a recipe for a huge disaster that we should rectify.

It's incredibly easy to cross state lines without purposely intending to, especially in the northeast (e.g. you can easily be ushered into NJ trying to get to upstate NY through NYC). It's exactly why 'safe passage' laws exist, even if it doesn't apply in these two scenarios.

It's not as though there's a customs check point at interstate boundaries where you are urged to dispose of materials that might cause you to be in violation of another state's laws.

<comment><USER5> Actually, California has precisely that. Shortly after driving across the California border, you'll usually find an agricultural checkpoint or "Border Protection Station".

Their focus is mainly on agricultural products, but they're there to get you to dispose of (plant/animal-based) materials that violate CA law.

[http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/plant/pe/ExteriorExclusion/borders.ht...](http://www.cdfa.ca.gov/plant/pe/ExteriorExclusion/borders.html)

<comment><USER4> Interesting! Certainly seems to be the exception, but good to know nonetheless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As already pointed out in another comment, don't _volunteer_ that you have pot on you. At least make 'em work for it. Oh, you were thinking they were going to go easier on you? It doesn't work that way.

On the one hand, yes, current marijuana laws in most states and at the federal level are ridiculous and unproductive. On the other hand, as a Washington resident what do you think I left at home on a recent motorcycle trip out of state? There's the way we think things should be, and then there's reality. And the reality is that the states through which I would be traveling are not quite as enlightened as WA when it comes to pot possession.

I mean, come on, it's not like pot laws are the only laws that differ from state to state (I refer the skeptical to state liquor laws). I understand that folks will say "I didn't know." and "But I thought that..." to the press, and it's probably the wiser answer should one be interviewed by a reporter. But I don't seriously believe that someone buys pot in WA and thinks that driving through ID with a quarter ounce is a-okay.

<comment> at-fates-hands >>> As already pointed out in another comment, don't volunteer that you have pot on you. At least make 'em work for it. Oh, you were thinking they were going to go easier on you? It doesn't work that way.

Actually it does.

I've had several incidents in states where medical marijuana is legal, but you have to have a card. Possession without the card is illegal. Both times we were up front with the cop and he thanked us for being honest. He only gave us a citation for a fine, confiscated our weed and then sent us on our way.

Or you can "make em' work for it" like you said. You can bet the cops are not only going to get you on the possession, but then you get arrested and now if you're driving and you test positive for THC, now you're looking at an impaired driving or driving under the influence, which can get you reckless driving or reckless endangerment if you had passengers. If you were a real douche to them, then they start looking at obstruction or impeding an investigation. Sure, if you get yourself a decent lawyer, most of those charges could be dropped, but that doesn't change the fact you spent a few nights in jail, had to post bond and now have a court date and now have to explain to your employer why you missed three days of work.

Trust me, it's always better to cooperate with the cops. Being a dick is just going to get you more trouble.

<comment><USER7> If you're telling the truth, you are incredibly lucky. Hell the guy in the cited article was absolutely cooperative and now he's very likely going to jail and ultimately will likely be deported.

If he had chosen to simply invoke his 5th amendment right, he very likely would have left that incident a little bit poorer (traffic violation) but not much else.

<comment><USER8> > If he had chosen to simply invoke his 5th amendment right ...

The right to be silent, and the right to avoid self-incrimination, are distinct rights. Being silent during interrogation doesn't necessarily mean one is exercising a fifth amendment right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Marijuana laws are much like gun laws - you live in the US, but legal activity in one place is a felony worthy of decades in prison a few miles away - in the same country. It's mind-numbing that a citizen of the US would have to know 50 sets of laws just to travel around their own country.

<comment><USER10> We have a Federal system, though states' rights have been weakened over time. A US State has sovereignty that the Feds may not impede on. The boundary between state sovereignty and national sovereignty has been contentious throughout history. States rights are good because it allows California to be a leader in emissions laws (example.) States rights are bad because they make inter-state commerce and travel more perilous.

<comment><USER11> Hence the name 'United States', and not Germany or Canada.

<comment><USER12> Odd that you would pick those two countries as your examples. Both are federations comprised of a number of separate sovereign governments. Or, for that matter, the United States of Mexico shares that trait of its name with America. (An actual counterexample would be France, a unitary state.)

The Constitution of Canada far more clearly lays out what is and is not the role of the Federal and Provincial governments than the US 10'th amendment does for states rights. Canadian provinces, then, are sovereign themselves (tho not independent). The federal government can't decide it doesn't like an Ontario law and block it any more than it could an American law.

The States of the United States then sound far less like united, sovereign states than the members of some federations without United in their names.

<comment><USER13> Canadian federal government has much more power than US feds can ever imagine to have. The criminal law is entirely up to the Canadian Parliament, and this is highly unlikely to ever fly in US. Further more, the courts have held that Canadian federal government can spend its money any way it likes to influence provincial policy. While the US Supreme court has allowed some percentage of money to be tied to state legislation (viz 21 year drinking age), it has also struck down laws which forces states to take up new spending or lose all the earlier grant from federal government (viz Medicare expansion in Obamacare). Each US state maintains its own Constitution and individual Judiciary, while the Canadian Supreme Court sits on top of any case of controversy in Canada,

US is much more federal than Canada, except may be for legal fiction where each Canadian province has their own relation to Crown. While Canadian federal government cannot outright strike out a state law, they almost never have to, as the power of Canadian federal government are almost endless where it really matter viz. criminal law, tax and spending.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Even if the cop sees the card, is it probable cause for a search?

Comparing it to gun laws and interstate travel, a gun permit seen in a wallet probably wouldn't lead to a search if the driver simply said there is no gun in the vehicle.

Pot seems like it would be under more scrutiny in a red state than guns sadly.

<comment><USER15> Interestingly with guns if you have a concealed carry permit from state A that is accepted in state C but not in state B which you must pass through in transit between you can't be held liable for violating state B's gun laws as long as you are just passing through between point where your permit is valid. Thanks to the Firearms Owners' Protection Act, or FOPA.

<comment><USER16> Concealed carry has nothing to do with it. You don't need a CC permit to take advantage of the FOPA safe passage provisions, and FOPA won't protect you if you're carrying on your person even if you have a CC permit valid at the endpoints. The firearms and ammunition need to be unloaded and not readily accessible from the passenger compartment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Marijuana is illegal federally, and federal laws supersede state laws.

Until the federal law changes, possession is risky even in states that have 'legalized' it. Things seem to exist in a sort of grey area where the federal government doesn't seem to be doing (many?) raids of medical marijuana or what's going on in Denver; but that doesn't mean you're in the clear.

I'm surprised people aren't more careful about this kind of stuff. Then again the TSA likes to show pictures of the large knives that people either forgot about or (somehow) didn't realize were illegal on planes.

</comment><comment><USER18> Jurors deciding not to convict (Jury Nullification [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification) ) would speed along a change in law but the penalties for possession are so harsh that most people take the deal in plea bargain.

<comment><USER19> I can't see an Arizona jury making this leap to rescue a Mr. Patel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> traveling with pot is not smart.

also little sympathy for people that dont use the car turn signals

<comment><USER6> Upvote for the turn signals. Traveling with contraband? Be a model driver.

<comment><USER21> And don't carry a card in your wallet that says "I have contraband," and don't tell the police, "I'll show you where the contraband is, kind and friendly officer" when he asks you about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It says 14% of americans smoke pot. I think that sounds accurate. That is 44 MILLION people in case you were wondering.

<comment><USER23> That is impossible and does not even pass a basic math.

317,493,212 is the current population. If you discard people under 15 and over 70 you are left with the you have (219685604) that means 20% of the US smoke pot.

Pot people always like to over inflate the usage number, but 14% too funny. Even in states where its legal, it would not reach 20%.

<comment><USER24> People under 15 and over 70 smoke pot.

According to this 38% of those surveyed and 17% of those over 65 admit to trying pot. [http://www.gallup.com/poll/163835/tried-marijuana-little- cha...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/163835/tried-marijuana-little- changed-80s.aspx) Though only 7% of those surveyed where willing to say they currently smoked.

As a sanity check if you where 15 in 1960 your ~69.

PS: Though, in an informal survey's my 14-15 year old classmates in the 1990's over 90% said they had used pot in the last year. So their numbers might be off.

<comment><USER23> Yeah sure but statistically it is not significant. There is a two year chinese kid that smokes 2 packs a day, but that does not mean a significant number of 2 year old kids smoke.

Also if 14% of people smoke pot that means 80% of all house household smoke pot and it is NOT true.

<comment><USER24> My point is it's a high variance statistic which is hard to control for.

If population A = 95%, Population B = 30%, and Population C = 1% then it becomes vary important to get the correct ratio of populations A, B, and C. And correctly sampling culturally diverse populations in the same geographic area is vary difficult. Something as simple as a phone screen is unlikely to work due to things like % of population in prison or number of phone numbers in a household. Even block by block analysis can fail with transient populations as it's easy to introduce bias by counting someone twice or not at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'll never understand the logic behind this. How come cancer patients or people recovering from surgery with powerful opiates aren't thrown in prison? Why is possessing a chemical used medically a crime? (This is mostly rhetorical, but still sad.)

<comment><USER19> Authorities will ruin an individual's life and nobody will really think much of it. There's no accountability. No logic or sense to pop up at some point and say "this isn't right." No, if they can find a way, they will ruin your life for the most harmless matter.

Meanwhile another suburban soccer mom/dad doctor-shops and snags another prescription for fully legal, powerful opiates. He/she eventually overdoses and dies. Nothing is done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> >James Siebe, a lawyer in Coeur d'Alene, put it another way: "Come on vacation, leave on probation."

Who the hell is going to Idaho for a vacation aside from neo-Nazis.

<comment><USER27> Lots of people visiting Yellowstone National Park</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Possible to gain employment as an entry level back end engineer? - <AUTHOR> I've no desire to sling javascript or work on webpages or other front-end specific things but would love to work on distributed systems and other "back-end" related things, services that other developers build upon. Is this something (looking at you hiring managers, etc.) that can be interviewed for at an entry-level level or is this something one must have experience doing? Skills: python (intermediate) <comment><USER2> Yes. I'd be very careful about your wording/intent around nothing front end. Whenever I interview developers(back end, full stack, front end) it's a little bit of a concern if someone has no interest in learning the mechanics of the opposite side. My personal opinion, n=1, is that to be a great back-end developer you should have a solid understanding of front end architecture and design.

Granted, zero wrong with a candidate letting me know that he/she does not want to work on the front end but with the understanding that there may come a time where some minor front end/full Stack projects may be needed, and on a case by case basis I may ask them to help out.

Just looking out for you, as I think if you did some front end side projects (simple to do apps, crud apps, or anything like that) it'd make you a much better backend developer.

Even just a simple Django or flask app with angular, or some basic JS/jQuery would show you some of the pitfalls of the front end and how to design your APIs, services/microservices in a way that helps out your front end teammates consuming them.

As for Portland, I believe LaunchPad or Smarsh is based out of Portland, which are pretty cool companies to work for.

Tl;dr . Yes, people look for backend developers a lot. Doing some front end side projects(small crud apps) will make you a better back end developer.

Best of luck!!

<comment><USER3> If you require front end then you are obviously not his target employer. There plenty of companies that would hire a backend only developer.

<comment><USER2> That's not what I said. We never require front end work from someone who only wants to do back end work.

My point was if you have intermediate backend programming ability with a DBA background and you're concerned about getting a backend role you should be careful, yet clear about what you're willing to do.

Generally speaking, if a candidate comes across as willing to help out on a case by case basis but the vast majority of their workload is backend that's an easier hire by far. Is the trade-off of a potential 95/5 split of time worth it to the developer? That's a personal decision to the developer.

Unless you're never going to be writing code that is directly consumed by a front end or full Stack developer it is a good idea/practice to understand basics of the front end.

So yes, you are correct that if the poster never was willing to touch the front end he'd be harder to hire for the company but that's just because we want people to be open to new technology and the full Stack.

Either way, I think it'd be unwise to not learn basics of the opposite side you're on to stay relevant and be an attractive hire. N=1.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1.) Through what criteria do you consider your Python skills intermediate?

2.) You can work on the back-end and use Javascript. The two things are not mutually exclusive.

3.) "Services that others developers build upon" do not exclude the front-end. D3 is something other developers build upon, along with front-end interfaces to back-end services. There are many more examples of this.

\---

Anyway, to answer your question: it is yes. Large tech companies readily employee developers to work primarily on the back-end. To increase the likelihood that you'd be working on distributed systems, I'd try to join a team that works on a product that is already at scale (Google Maps, Facebook Newsfeed, Amazon AWS, etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've written tools for work that automates the boring things in python. That said I wouldn't consider myself advanced and maybe intermediate is pushing it. But I know how to use the language to accomplish things and I try to optimize where I can: using threading and queues where they help etc

Edit: I know JavaScript can be done on the server side via nodejs I was talking more about the client side soup of libraries that I'm not interested in

<comment><USER2> Using threading and queues where appropriate is excellent stuff. Presenting yourself as intermediate knowledge is also humble, and from your description of your background I do think you'd be able to get a back end job.

I'd look at AngelList for companies in Portland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 100% yes. Build something with Django + Django Rest Framework if you haven't already. Back-end engineers are one of the hardest positions to fill, and often pay higher than mobile or full-stack web. Reddit and Instagram are two large starrups that run Python backends. Lots of companies use Python for automation and "glue" if you want to go that route as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> It would help if we knew what area you are in.

But yes, that's a role companies hire for all the time. I believe we are currently hiring for those roles as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a DBA in Portland Oregon.

<comment><USER6> We are in the Seattle area. You can send me an email if you're interested from my personal site listed in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your contact me page isn't working.

<comment><USER6> Sorry about that, haven't updated that page in a pretty long time. Shoot me an email at my username @ gmail dot com</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Personalized, affordable software developer resume advice - <AUTHOR> https://debugmyresume.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN. I've found myself wearing the recruiter hat a lot at my current position. I noticed that many devs (especially junior developers) don't really know how to right a good, technical resume and as such don't get a follow up interview. My goal with Debug My Resume is to share my tips and what I look for when I review a resume, while keeping the price in a range that's affordable to students. (I also have a free email list where I'll share some of my best advice!) Would appreciate any and all feedback!</comment>


GitHub user 4148 just starred 129k repositories and still counting - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/4148 <comment><USER2> A case of github not limiting a particular api endpoint? I don't see any real harm in this guy sorta running amok. It does make the feature of staring repos less... something.

There was a good talk I would recommend watching by Jeremy Edberg (Architect from Netflix/Eeddit that said to put limits on everything)

[http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2013-08-13-jeremy- edbe...](http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/2013-08-13-jeremy-edberg)

"As I mentioned before, you need to watch your limits. You should also put limits on everything. Put a hard number of limit on number of API requests that could be made from any one IP. Make it a thousand a second, something absurdly high. Because you know what? One day, that's going to happen and you're going to be really glad that that limit was there because now you've blocked somebody from completely taking down your service, maybe because they just wrote a bad robot or something, you know? They were trying to scrape your site, they screwed up, they're hitting you 10,000 times a second. At least, it won't take you down. Or, maybe perhaps, you've been linked from the Yahoo front page, which is what took down Reddit the first time when somebody put a Reddit button on a page that was linked from the Yahoo! home page. We basically DDoS-ed ourselves with the Reddit buttons. We quickly figured out how to put that on a CDN, so we didn't have to deal with that problem anymore."

<comment><USER3> There _is_ a 5,000/hour rate limit. ([https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/starring/](https://developer.github.com/v3/activity/starring/)) So 120,000 repo Stars a day at maximum utility.

You can get a list of _all_ GitHub repos and derive their IDs with some BigQuery shenanigans on the GitHub Archive, then just feed the IDs into a while-loop. Simple to implement, albeit not necessarily _ethical_.

EDIT: 5,000 limit is not endpoint specific. But if you use it all for one endpoint...

<comment><USER4> That seems like a super high limit.

<comment><USER3> It's high because the 5,000 limit is _globally shared_ for all non-search queries: [https://developer.github.com/v3/rate_limit/](https://developer.github.com/v3/rate_limit/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems like a good way to gain attention to ones repositories. Greenhat[1] is interesting. I wonder how deceptive this is to recruiters, and if GitHub can do anything to try and validate commit histories / distinguish or weight vs open source contributions and individual projects.

[1] [https://github.com/4148/greenhat](https://github.com/4148/greenhat)

<comment> jack-r-abbit Why would you ever want that? After seeing that script, I checked his own and sure enough... he runs it on his own. It only took a few clicks to see that it just changes some number on one file a few times a day. If you are "decorating your calendar" like that to impress people, you're just going to look foolish. Or is there some grand plan I'm missing?

<comment><USER6> It's a funny thing that exposes sort of a vulnerability in something that is supposed (?) to show ... something good? productivity?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The user is also the author of this, which will artificially inflate the number of commits a user has made of a calendar year. [https://github.com/4148/greenhat](https://github.com/4148/greenhat)

Perhaps 4148 is testing something out related to that or a new project and the script went bad?

</comment><comment><USER8> I was all, "Hey, someone starred my repo!" It was this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel you bro, same happened to me.

<comment><USER9> Exactly man. A great start to the day .. now this .. :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Rate limit EVERYTHING. I learned this lesson the hard way early on at Stack Overflow. ;)

<comment><USER10> Do you (or anybody else) have any advice on how to figure out how to come up with limits for things? Somebody else mentioned that Github limits stars to 5000/hr, but that definitely seems high. How would you decide on how to limit something like this?

<comment><USER11> that's more of a query limit, not just starring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm kind of feeling left out, none of mine.

<comment><USER13> Same here :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I kept getting notifications that "4148 starred your repo" and I was very confused because it was a seemingly unrelated set of repos!

</comment><comment><USER15> I've seen a few users with 100k-plus starred repositories so nothing exceptional there. What would be interesting to know is when this "starring frenzy" actually started. Considering the user joined Github in November 2013 that equals to about 5.5k stars/month.

<comment><USER16> They're now at 134k, so I'd guess it started recently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> About Stars

Starring a repository allows you to keep track of projects that you find interesting, even if you aren't associated with the project.

When you star a repository, you're actually performing two distinct actions:

-Creating a bookmark for easier access

-Showing appreciation to the repository maintainer for their work

Many of GitHub's repository rankings depend on the number of stars a repository has. For example, repositories can be sorted and searched based on their star count. In addition, the Explore page shows you popular repositories based on the number of stars they have.

[https://help.github.com/articles/about- stars/](https://help.github.com/articles/about-stars/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't followed him before, but when I clicked the title and saw I have followed him. Now my GitHub timeline is full of him ...

</comment><comment><USER19> Seems like they should remove the ability to star via the GitHub API. A star should indicate physical/human interaction.

<comment><USER20> Any feature you remove from the API will be replaced with a python mechanize script that does the same thing but less efficiently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> hey he starred my projects! thanks 4148!

<comment><USER15> Starred one of my projects too, but within 134k stars it makes me feel kind of insignificant ;)

<comment><USER22> Not as insignificant as not being starred.

<comment><USER15> True that ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> meh</comment>


Frontiers of Computational Thinking: A SXSW Report - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/03/frontiers-of-computational-thinking-a-sxsw-report/

<comment><USER2> That was worth a read to see him factorize Jupiter. I was wondering how flexible the language is, and that kind of answered the question.</comment>


Oh MySpace: Why I Hate Thee / Shady Reengagement Tactics - <AUTHOR> http://naveedl.tumblr.com/post/3909963995/oh-myspace-why-i-hate-thee-shady-reengagement I went to MySpace.com today to update my profile (I have pictures / messages on there from the college days that are not so appropriate…don't ask). Having not used it for years, I had to reset my password. The captcha was so terrible (took at least 10 tries to get it right; I'm convinced I was entering the right letters), that it reminded me why I never got on in the first place for so long and triggered me to cancel my account.
The cancellation process seemed pretty straightforward. Go to your account settings, hit cancel account, tell them why your canceling, and they would send a confirmation email to verify your cancelation. I followed all of the steps, then MySpace told me it would take 48 hours to cancel the account (wtf??). Okay fine. Two minutes later, I open up my inbox, and I start receiving messages from women wanting me to go to MySpace to talk to them. I'm certain if I click and try to login to my account, I'll have to go through cancelation process again. No matter how hard I want to see what Chelsy or Mariska want to tell me, I will resist.
Coincidence or shady reengagement techniques? Oh MySpace, you're falling on your own sword. Hopefully in 48 hours, my account will be no more.
Click link to see image proof. <comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what kind of other shady tactics they are using, to me this seems like MySpace initiated spam. Completely unethical. Has anyone else encountered this?</comment>


A map of depression rates around the world - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/11/07/a-stunning-map-of-depression-rates-around-the-world/ <comment><USER2> That map is a really bad visualization. They're showing a single numeric variable with a limited scale, so all they need to express graphically is a level between "empty" and "full". They should have mapped it to a single axis that intuitively corresponds to that notion: for example, a simple scale between white and red would have been perfect.

But instead, they decided to have a scale between red and blue, which goes through purple if it's an admixture of the two colors. But then they would just have had a few colors with more or less the sale lightness and saturation, but different hues, and there's really no intuitive reason why purple should be perceived as "more" or "less" than blue. So instead they made a three-point scale going from red to white and then to blue (look at the pink and light blue colors next to the center to see that this is what they did); except that now white looks like "empty", and redder and bluer colors look increasingle "full", except in opposite directions: the only situation where this makes sense is when you have relative numbers, and white is zero, red is positive and blue is negative. But then it would look like Iran has lots of depression, Brazil has no depression, and Australia has... negative depression?

They could tell that something looked wrong, but what? "A-ha! Of course!" \- thought the graphic designer - "a mix of red and blue is purple, not white!" So he replaced the white in the middle cell with purple, leaving the neighboring pinks and light blues unchanged. So now the scale goes "red, red but a little whiter, white but a little redder, PURPLE, white but a little bluer, blue but a little whiter, blue", and nothing makes sense. Good job!

<comment><USER3> What do you think is the reason for this? A bunch of propaganda that we're well off here in the 'safe' part of the world?

Love this comment from the article

"I'm sure we've got high quality, nationally representative data out of the Congo."

<comment><USER4> Your paranoia is not only annoying, but also quite insulting to the researchers involved. Contrary to your perceived 'the Man is holding me down', not everybody is out to 'deceive' you. The reason is likely purely functional, as I explained in a comment above, and I'd even agree with the choices of colors of the authors - they show more clearly than the proposed white-red where in the world there is more depression.

Furthermore, if you don't believe this particular studies' findings of depression rates, I would invite you to look into the decades of research into suicide rates, depression or just the flow of immigrants from the countries in the red in the map to those in the blue as a proxy for overall happiness and perceived life opportunities, and to draw your own conclusions.

<comment><USER3> Sure, just check

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

Where you can find a good mix of 'blue' countries such as US, Japan, India, Russia, Norway, China and Sweden. So it doesn't tell me THAT much unfortunately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I missing something fundamental here?

Is depression diagnoses really so objective that we can not only compare diagnosis rates across the country, but across the world? Sort of like comparing how good the pizza is in countries across the world, is it not?

It doesn't seem like this analysis holds much value, if any.

<comment><USER6> I thought the same thing. I also think first world countries will diagnose the disease far more. If for no other reason, there are expensive pharmaceuticals to be sold.

<comment><USER7> 10% of Americans are on antidepressants. I really hope that rate isn't consistent around the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you read between the lines, it's clear the methodology used to extrapolate this data is shaky at best, and borders on "you've never taken a statistics class in your life" at worse.

Complete garbage... Favorite snippets: " The paper further cautions that reliable depression surveys don't even exist for some low-income countries -- a common issue with global studies -- forcing the researchers to come up with their own estimates based on statistical regression models."

My interpretation: "There was no data so we guessed".

Terrible.

<comment><USER9> It really annoys me to see people judging studies based off of press coverage of them. If you're going to accuse it of being shoddy, at least take five minutes to read the paper. I'm not saying you're wrong, since I just spent five minutes reading the paper and they do use an modelling tool in the way that you suggest (and also use it to combine multiple reports from over the years or reports with only partial information). It's just that it's very easy to see something and wisely claim "Oh I bet they're making this laughable mistake based off of some vague claim in an article I'm criticizing" which is kind of harmful. I've said things in the past like "I read a study that X" and immediately the other person was like "Oh but that's just correlation", which is a good thing to think but seriously, it's not like the people writing these studies don't know that correlation-isn't-causation and might have thought to address that. I hadn't mentioned any methods used in the study because I didn't recall any of them, yet the gross assumption that it was wrong was still lept to. So if communities like Hacker News want to ever believe any science report ever (and they probably do), then I really think people should slow down and at least give the study the benefit of the doubt. You shouldn't have to read between the lines - the actual study is free on PLOS. If you don't have the time or expertise to read the paper, just pose this complaint as a question instead and probably someone else here will do the work for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There is NO way Japan's depression rate is that low. The culture does't treat depression as a legitimate medical issue (their main remedy is along the lines of "man up!") and I have to imagine that it's being severely underreported.

<comment><USER11> Depression is over-exaggerated in Japan.

It's like those reports on how the salarymen work these long and crazy hours and are ready to throw themselves off a building any minute but it's _massively_ overblown.

Virtually _everything_ is overblown or sensationalized about Japan. It reminds me of those herbivore men and "declining sex" articles that popped up recently. Writers like to write about some obscure sub-culture or push some misleading statistic and then write about it as if it applies the entire country.

I lived there for 14 months and it wasn't what I expected at all. I was prepared for massive culture shock but it just never happened. There was some, but no more than one would experience on an extended vacation. Japan, in my experience, is just like anywhere else.

<comment><USER12> Where in Japan were you living? I found people in the country to be much more balanced and well-adjusted. But living in Tokyo and expecting to see 'culture shock' may be disappointing because people are not so 'open' about their social lives. A lot of the personal problems are kept away from the public eye until it's too late and they are throwing themselves in front of a train, hanging themselves in a forest or comitting seppuku in their homes. It's classic honne/tatemae--you never saw what was beneath the surface.

<comment><USER11> " _Where in Japan were you living?_ "

I was bounced around a bit, but most of my time was spent in Tokyo, Sapporo and in Hachinohe.

<comment><USER10> Off topic, but I'm jealous that you got to live in Sapporo :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> guard-of-terra Ukraine having opposite result from Russia and Belarus lights the red immediately. Why would it be so? The rest of data on the chart may be noise too.

<comment><USER13> That struck me as very questionably, too. Based on personal experience and what I know about the economic state of the three countries I find it hard to believe that Ukraine is somehow doing such better psychologically.

To convey an anecdote, on several occasions I was told by fairly well-traveled people that the Eastern regions of Ukraine were the most miserable place they'd been to in Europe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't believe the UK is that low either. I wonder if it's because of the clinical depression is defined as something more serious than "taking anti- depressants or having CBT/Counselling"?

<comment><USER4> Therapy and medication _work_ to treat depression (not for everybody, but considered at macro level, they work). If you'd actually read the paper (which it seems few people commenting have done, or maybe you/they don't understand), by using DALY's (an accepted (by the community) proxy for 'impact' of a disease), they account for the fact that since people in Western countries get treatment at higher levels, the effects are less. E.g. if I get depressed and get treatment, and work through this in a year, and somebody in Central Africa gets it and lives with it for 15 years, then objectively I am better off and should be counted at 1/15 th in the study (well actually you can debate that - you can say 'I study the amount of people who get depressed'. Which is fine, but different, and imo not nearly as interesting, except maybe for when you look at the genetic disposition for depression).

I don't understand why people in this thread are so keen on trying to hold on to the position that depression in the West is high compared to other places, or even how they get to this position in the first place. To me it's quite self-evident that living in constant fear of being shot, blown up or just starving to death is more depressing than having to go through the agony of standing in traffic an hour before you can go home and eat a warm meal before falling asleep in front of the tv (to just name an example of what I've heard people as reasons on why life in the West is so 'stressing' and 'depressing').

<comment><USER15> The map is titled "Prevalence of diagnosed clinical depression".

It seems reasonable to complain that the diagram is confusing when it gives a rate of 4% for the UK, when UK NHS figures give higher rates.

> I don't understand why people in this thread are so keen on trying to hold > on to the position that depression in the West is high compared to other > places

I don't think that's happened in this particular sub-thread. One reason it happens is that some countries have better diagnosis than others. (Rates may be higher in developing nations, but cases are undiagnosed.)

> To me it's quite self-evident that living in constant fear of being shot, > blown up or just starving to death is more depressing than having to go > through the agony of standing in traffic an hour before you can go home and > eat a warm meal before falling asleep in front of the tv (to just name an > example of what I've heard people as reasons on why life in the West is so > 'stressing' and 'depressing').

That manages to be fantastically ignorant of developing nations _and_ mental illness.

EDIT: Maybe I'm being stupid but I can't find that map in the linked research. I go to figures and scroll through. [http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...](http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001547)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Without commenting on the science or validity of the study...the map implementation here could be improved, in fact, it's about as confusingly implemented as an infographic could be.

First of all, it violates the "rainbow map" rule, in that a wide spectrum of color is used to graph what is basically a very simple continuum: more depression vs. less depression.

[http://eagereyes.org/basics/rainbow-color- map](http://eagereyes.org/basics/rainbow-color-map)

Second of all, and most egregiously, it uses the _most confusing color scheme possible._ At least in America, which is the WaPo's main audience, the color blue is widely used to describe "depression" ('feeling the blues'). While red is often used to describe a dangerous or very intense situation...it's not really appropriate here, as red is also used for "passion", which is not mutually exclusive to depression, but is not usually associated with it either.

And the purple, rather than acting as a middle ground between "more" and "less" depression, comes off as its own weird symbolism.

And why the f-ck is "gray" in _between_ blue and purple?

And of course, in America (and _especially_ among the audience that the Washington Post serves), red and blue often indicate political thought.

It's hard to think of how this map could be any more confusing, even without getting into the discussion of how country/state-color maps greatly distort the quantities involved.

\----

That said, I was surprised to see that the United States ranked on the low side...my intuition was that well-off countries had higher rates of reported and diagnosed depression (first world problems and all that). But I had to stare at the map for quite awhile to make sure I was reading it right...

Edit: Also, this stuck out:

> _The most depressed country is Afghanistan, where more than one in five > people suffer from the disorder. The least depressed is Japan, with a > diagnosed rate of less than 2.5 percent._

I know Japanese culture has the propensity to be greatly distorted by outside observers...but how is it that a country that has among the highest suicide rates in the world ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan)) also happens to have the lowest rates of depression? I mean, it's certainly mathematically possible (e.g. clinically depressed Japanese, few as they are, are also at the extreme edges of depression, or, Japanese suicides are committed for reasons other than depression)...it's just a bit unexpected.

<comment><USER17> Regarding your edit, at no point is it said Japan has low incidence of depression; the claim made is that they have few diagnoses of depression. The article takes care to point this out. I would take these numbers to mean that Japanese people are not receiving adequate treatment for their depression (of which diagnosis is an obvious first step), contributing to the suicide rate.

<comment><USER18> I would say that the title is slightly misleading. The map and article clearly say that is clinically diagnosed depression, but that is not clear from the title. By leaving out "clinically diagnosed" the title makes the article feel like it has a stronger claim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What in the world is going on in the Netherlands? Why is this country such an anomaly in terms of reported depression rates?

<comment><USER20> Good question - looking at the OECD Better Life Index [1] for the Netherlands:

 _In general, 86% of people in the Netherlands say they have more positive experiences in an average day (feelings of rest, pride in accomplishment, enjoyment, etc) than negative ones (pain, worry, sadness, boredom, etc), more than the OECD average of 80%._

Perhaps it's a case of better access to health services, so more people in the Netherlands are able to be diagnosed and treated with depression whereas countries with poor health services and high levels of depression are ultimately under-reported?

[1] [http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/netherlands/](http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/netherlands/)

<comment><USER21> I don't know; the contrast with Belgium, which despite cultural differences has health services with similar quality, and I imagine has similar awareness, is surprising. However, I have read anecdotal stories that mental health service here in the Netherlands is rather bad compared to other countries. Pressure to perform here may be on the high side, but I can't imagine it's much higher than in the US or Germany.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I read the text...and got no usable info. Plus the awful map and a table that's not sorted by rank but by region (thus only doubling the "information" of the map).

Where can we downvote? ;)

</comment><comment><USER23> I live in Russia, but I don't know anybody who diagnosed with depression. This is very uncommon diagnosis. I think that these researchers used invalid data.

</comment><comment><USER24> communist / 3rd world countries pretty much win this one</comment>


The Achievement of Vasily Grossman - <AUTHOR> https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-achievement-of-vasily-grossman/ <comment><USER2> I have a friend, G, whose father, like Vasily Grossman, was a Jew in the Soviet army. An embedded journalist, just like VG.

Stalin only employed Jews in these forward positions because however bad it was on the Soviet side, it was worse in the Nazi camp, so no chance of defection. Then there was the added bonus of knowing Yiddish, i.e., a language closer to German than Russian.

G's father started the first German language newspaper in the Soviet zone. G's mother was his first employee. They fell in love, got married, had G and then a couple of years later, as Stalin became ever more anti-Semitic, G's father was purged. This was in 1950, before the Doctor's Plot. G was two years old.

Purged but not killed. I believe exiled to Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod) or some other place in Siberia. Which is where he lived out the rest of his life. G didn't see his father until 1977.

Such was life in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.</comment>


Ask HN: How to Be a Tech Nomad in an Airstream? - <AUTHOR> I am thinking about buying a used Airstream and setting up the interior to have a dedicated workspace and as many of the high tech features I'm used to in my home as I can.  I'm thinking solar, lithium batteries, LED lighting, etc...<p>I would love any advice folks may have either about specifics (use these solar panels not those) or general (living in an airstream will make you hate XXXX).  Thanks! <comment><USER2> The trailer culture is still solidly lead-acid, for which most airstreams will support the weight. Lithiums are definitely better in theory, but they aren't that much better volumetrically, and they're considerably less forgiving- you'll either pay through the nose for the intelligent battery management circuitry or end up with a ticking time bomb. I'd plan on sticking with lead acid to start. It's forgiving, good in the cold, and heat. With a 99+% recycling rate, it's not like you'll be killing the environment by doing so. Stick with AGM or gel lead-acids to eliminate the risk of acid spillover and failure from lack of maintenance.

Since airstreams are shiny and curved, flat rigid solar panels are probably not going to be what you want. There are a number of thin film panels, and although most of them are less area-efficient than commodity silicon PV panels, you can compact them more easily and then deploy once parked. Thin films can easily win on weight-efficiency too.

PV's are unfortunately, regardless of efficiency, not going to absorb enough sunlight to do much more than charge your laptop and maybe keep your batteries topped off and run a fan or minifridge. That is, unless, you have a ridiculously large number of PV modules taking up half your interior space, or you only camp in spots that are nice all year.

Living requires heating/cooling, food, water, toilet, and bath/shower. Those are usually the hardest things to get right. Active climate control requires wall or truck power, or a genset (yuck!).

Lastly, budget a lot for an airstream, and budget a lot of time and money for the renovations you want to do. People in the know may tut-tut the upgrades you want to do because they are purists when it comes to airstreams.

</comment><comment><USER3> A best practice for moving to any off-grid lifestyle is to start paring down now and also start reducing your energy dependence. Back in the day when I was reading such articles, your typical North American house had a clock on the microwave, a clock on the VCR, etc and they all draw small amounts of power continuously. It adds up. You need to go on an electricity diet and break certain bad habits.

Passive solar approaches to keeping things a bearable temperature will drastically reduce your energy dependence.

You need toilet facilities. If you are healthy and have clean habits, you do not necessarily need to shower every single day. Carry hand sanitizer and use it liberally. If your hands are kept clean, everything you touch will stay cleaner.

A super short haircut can also help you stay adequately clean and decent- looking when reliable bathing facilities are hard to come by.

You can live without a mini fridge. It isn't an absolute necessity. It does require some lifestyle modifications. Only buy milk or other fresh items when you are about to use them. Get hot meals at eateries or cook with mostly shelf stable goods. You can also use a seed pot for preserving food without electricity. It isn't as good as a fridge, but it may be an option that works well for you to have some options while freeing up electrical load.

If it gets fairly cool at night, assuming you aren't in bear country, some things can be stored outside overnight to keep them cool. I have become quite fond of sodas cooled this way instead of being served over ice.

My experience: Cardboard, paper, cloth items and upholstery generate heat, much like a compost heap does. Limit those items and keeping your place cool in summer is much less challenging. You can reduce that amount of cardboard in your space by removing cardboard boxes from food (crackers, snacks, etc) and trashing them the minute you get groceries home.

</comment><comment><USER4> This covers some general information about Digital Nomad in an Airstream (with kids)

[http://bootstrappedweb.com/80-brecht-palombo-on-longterm- tra...](http://bootstrappedweb.com/80-brecht-palombo-on-longterm-travel-as-an- entrepreneur/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Investor Paul Singh is currently doing a "tech tour" in an Airstream to highlight tech opportunities and innovation in smaller US cities. It looks like fun, and there are some sweet photos of meetings inside the Airstream!

[https://twitter.com/hashtag/RJTechTour](https://twitter.com/hashtag/RJTechTour)

[https://twitter.com/paulsingh](https://twitter.com/paulsingh)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is an excellent idea, I've often looked longingly at used Airstreams and thought about reconfiguring one for a mobile tech workspace.

A typical RV park (or many of the campgrounds in Oregon) will have sewer and electricity hookups for RVs. That takes care of your two major consumables (water and power). I've done a lot of "dry" camping (no hookups) in my class B motorhome (basically van sized) that we tow a small utility trailer behind (we use a Space trailers ([http://www.spacetrailers.com/](http://www.spacetrailers.com/)), they work well for us in that role). We also have an 85W solar panel which we use to top off our battery during the day (12V AGM 45Ahr lead/acid). There is a small 1kw honda generator (quiet) which we can use if we want to use the microwave or AC when we're not connected to power. Fridge and stove run on propane. We have two battery boxes (basically an ice chest holding an AGM lead-acid battery and a power inverter) which we can use in camp to run lights or fans away from the camper. The solar panel set up lets us use it to charge any of the batteries.

Ok, so there some meta considerations. One is that most trailers and RVs are designed to be compact "living" spaces, and are not set up for "working." In my sketches I've got the dinette changed to be convertable between dinette and workspace (giving up the extra bed). With my current camper I have been known to write code with my macbook in my lap or on a picnic table. What I don't have is good network connectivity.

You can make a lot of progress by making a log of your typical "work" day for a week or so, in both good weather and bad, and then going back over that log and taking each day and describing how you would spend that day if you're living space were this trailer. What things would you need the trailer to provide, what things would you substitute.

If you're primary goal is to avoid the "high cost of housing" then you probably need to scope out where and for how long you can park your trailer while you live/work in it. Camp sites will often have continuous day limits (like 14 days in California state parks) RV parks you can go longer but you have to figure that cost into your 'burn rate' as well. That said, one of the features of 'trailer park living' has been the low overhead.

Feel free to contact me offline if you have more questions (mail is in my profile)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Chuck! My thought is to have one end of the Airstream be the bedroom, and convert the other end into a workspace with a U shaped desk, big displays, Aeron chair, etc... And then leave the middle for the kitchen and dinette.

It's less about saving money than it is about minimizing a bit, and seeing more of the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you don't get a lot of responses here, I'd search reddit r/diy. Motor home/trailer renovations show up periodically. In the comments they'll share why they setup things in a particular way or what they might change.</comment>


Buildpacks: Heroku for Everything - <AUTHOR> http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2012/7/17/buildpacks/

<comment><USER2> I'd like to point out a Common Lisp buildpack. I've used a fork of it and it's pretty spiffy. (Now if I only knew a simple app I could give people. :-) )

<https://github.com/mtravers/heroku-buildpack-cl>

<comment><USER3> That's awesome - thanks for pointing it out.

I've only poked around Heroku a bit with basic applications and the standard stacks (Python w/ Flask, etc.), but I think I'll look into what would be required to create a buildpack for Racket.

That is, if someone hasn't already beaten me to it...

EDIT: As figures, it already exists[1]; I'll toy around with it and test it out before suggesting they add it to the list.

<https://github.com/onixie/heroku-buildpack-racket>

<comment><USER4> Hi.

OpenShift is also interesting. And if you need something to hack on, see

      https://github.com/RayRacine/rackos

Almost there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ActiveState's Stackato private PaaS platform (<http://www.activestate.com/stackato>) has support for Heroku buildpacks to deploy (<http://docs.stackato.com/deploy/buildpack.html>), as well as the usual options for polyglot app deployments (it also has a 100% compatible Cloud Foundry API). This is useful when you want portability (deploy on a PaaS that you have full control over).

<comment><USER6> Stackato rocks!

<comment><USER7> I really wish they would publish some prices though. I'm hesitant of the "contact us" pricing model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if it's possible to hook this up to something like Vagrant <http://vagrantup.com> to use a buildpack for local development and easily install all the required dependencies.

<comment><USER9> If you want to use buildpacks locally, check out Mason: <https://github.com/ddollar/mason>

<comment><USER8> Ooh, nice -- thanks for the pointer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a bit surprised there isn't a buildpack for PHP. It seems like there would be a demand, since PHP it so popular (I know I would definitely use it).

I wonder if it's because modern PHP apps (such as Symfony) have some external dependencies (such as on the APC cache).

<comment><AUTHOR> There is, it's just not officially supported: <https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-php> . Github lists it as having 82 forks, so people are definitely playing around with this.

<comment><USER11> Yep. You can even run Wordpress with our fork: <https://github.com/Americastestkitchen/heroku-wordpress-php/>

<comment><USER12> How do you deal with uploaded files/persistent storage?

<comment><USER11> S3. Ignore the scary warning, this plugin works great for us: <http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tantan-s3/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I maintain a buildpack for lua if anyone is interested: <https://github.com/leafo/heroku-buildpack-lua>

<comment><USER14> Great! I was looking for exactly this .. thanks for doing that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone have any insight into why Google App Engine has not taken this route? Are there technical limitations within Google's infrastructure that would limit it?

<comment><USER16> I am not sure what you mean by "this route". App Engine supplies multiple runtimes (Java, Python, Go). Heroku somewhat analogously supplies buildpacks for using different languages, but also allows custom buildpacks.

Understand that Heroku and App Engine are fundamentally different kinds of things.

The commonality is that they are both selling some kind of service to run code on, and they are both (in different ways) trying to make it easier than just administering everything at the low level of a VPS or dedicated server, while also giving you similar levels of isolation and capacity as you get outside the shared hosting world.

But other than that, they are aimed at quite different goals and the architectures (necessarily) vary accordingly.

App Engine imposes heavy constraints on your app architecture with a primary goal of making scaling easier from the outset. You are very much doing everything inside a framework provided by Google. They are trying to make sure your handlers do not run too long or do certain classes of insecure things. And the infrastructure of production is very much opaque to you. You can't just run any old combination of services, they provide you a set of very good and very transparent but proprietary APIs for things like memcache and datastore. You just use them and get billed by usage. While they offer multiple runtimes and some multi-runtime tricks are possible, they really aren't trying to cover the 'polyglot' use case or support every language under the sun. It has good technical merits but your app is almost completely married to Google. Running a low-traffic app is free but scaling can be a little costly compared to approaches where you are doing more yourself.

Heroku is not a platform in the same sense as App Engine. That could be good or bad depending on what you need. It provides high-level interfaces to reduce most users' deploy and management overhead. But like a VPS, it isn't trying to limit your flexibility or determine your architecture. It explicitly gives you control over your mix of services and your own languages and use different things together. However, in the course of simplifying it also does constrain and hide details. It just isn't a fundamentally different environment from normal Linux VPS, as App Engine is - it's only one which you manage at a higher level using Heroku's tools. You are left with less lockin than App Engine, but you are still dependent on Heroku insofar as it is supplying all your deploy/management scripting and stuff like that.

App Engine says something like "do it our way with our tools and you will be able to scale easily on high grade infrastructure" and Heroku says something more like "do what you could do on a VPS in a slightly different way, with slightly less choice of tools, and we can make it much easier. We can help you cross the scaling bridge later." So they are designed to meet different kinds of needs and have attracted somewhat different kinds of audiences.

<comment><USER15> slugfest, thank you for the detailed response. By "this route" I just ment creating independent isolated environments for the various runtime to operate within. Based on comments made on the GAE mailing list, I suspect they have moved in this direction. After reading your post I now understand that the issue is not allowing indiscriminate code to work in isolation, but to allow that code to interact with external services E.g. make http requests. Maybe in the future GAE will provide a generic API for interacting with the various service, but I don't know what that would look like.

<comment><USER16> App Engine just isn't intended or designed for that kind of interaction with services. Take memcache as an example.

On a VPS, you install an OS package and manage memcached as any daemon. You are editing the configs and compiling your own binaries if you want. Set it up on a separate box if you want. Set up a bunch of memcached boxes if you want. Do the wiring how you want. It's up to you and you handle all the details and you are billed by time. Handle it correctly and it's crazy fast.

On Heroku, there is a layer of abstraction which makes this more like 'give me 3 instances of memcached'. You are billed by the service-instance, essentially. You get help making things work well out of the box. But at a lower level it isn't too different from running deploy scripts to set up EC2 boxes. They just provide the scripts and sell you the resources and support at the same time.

On App Engine, Google runs a clustered memcache service for you. It is always running and there is no service setup. It is already on a scalable distributed configuration, not necessarily the fastest or cheapest but good; micro- optimizing memcache servers is not even intended as a supported use case. There is a ton of Google secret sauce involved, behind the scenes you are connecting to some cluster with RPC, all you know is the simple API interface they give you. You are billed based on how much you use it.

I think I can predict confidently that GAE is never going to expose an interface where you allocate individual memcached instances. That kind of interaction with services just isn't the App Engine way. Google has Compute Engine for the cases where you want EC2 style control of what is going on at the per-service level.

If you want to run your own App Engine platform you can try AppScale. (I never met anyone who does.) It is a whole prescribed architecture and it is not likely to be changed to become more like Heroku.

<comment><USER15> Thanks again slurgfest. I appreciate the way that App Engine does thing. What I ment to say, sorry it wasn't clear, is that by exposing a generic api to various services memcache, datastore, etc. App Engine could make it easier to add additional runtimes. And now that I think about it - I'm sure they are doing this to an extent.

<comment><USER16> Sorry that I keep running off in the wrong direction.

They control the runtime in a very heavy-handed, opaque way to lock it down and I doubt that would ever change. New runtimes will be 100% up to Google to implement and they seem not to be a high priority in general - Java seems to be favored for the enterprise people and Go and Python have had involvement from the respective language creators... Google has only so many major language creators ;)

Just part of how App Engine is a closed platform really (although it's not like all of Heroku is open either)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oh, Heroku, how can you have such an excellent build system and yet you can't support WebSockets? You've spoiled me, and it's so painful to have to use other services now just because you think the standard is too much in flux.

</comment><comment><USER18> The vulcan node build server seems to have a handful of dependencies that aren't public (unless I'm missing something? - e.g. logger, spawner, cloudant): [https://github.com/heroku/vulcan/blob/master/server/web.coff...](https://github.com/heroku/vulcan/blob/master/server/web.coffee)

<comment><USER19> The logger, spawner and cloudant coffeescript files are in the lib folder: <https://github.com/heroku/vulcan/tree/master/server/lib>

When the app is created it sets NODE_PATH=lib so the app can find those files without specifying the full path: [https://github.com/heroku/vulcan/blob/master/lib/vulcan/cli....](https://github.com/heroku/vulcan/blob/master/lib/vulcan/cli.rb#L155)

<comment><USER18> Ahh fantastic, thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> what are the differences/advantages/drawbacks between a buildpack and an automated deploy script that installs OS packages?

What happens in an environment where you have multiple applications with different but overlapping dependencies?

<comment><USER21> buildpacks are designed to work when you have one system/container per application. The goal is to produce an image that can easily be distributed to the auto-scaler and associated with the reference OS to provide application processes. The images are mounted read-only and no guarantee is made on the process lifetime. This limits the class of applications to ones who don't keep state internally or on the filesystem.

automated scripts like Chef / Puppet are designed to keep a system in a predictable state according to some code+data specification. It's not a guarantee though as things not specified by the scripts can have any state. They're more useful to maintain an heterogenous park of machines, systems that want to keep state on the disk like databases or even configure the underlying system that will run the buildpack containers.

that's how i see it but notice that there are some similarities. it could be possible to use chef to pre-configure a system image as a "buildpack", or to add some disk storage to buildpacks. although both not on heroku obviously.</comment></comment>


Iceland, Volcanoes and Data Centers - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/04/15/iceland-volcanoes-and-data-centers/

<comment><USER2> Much like Japan and earthquakes, the fact that there is a well-functioning post-industrial economy on the island should suggest to you that the environmental problems are perhaps less pressing than you might assume from two minutes of reading this week's newspaper headlines.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, just make the technology to cope with it. Many of Japan's buildings are earthquake-resistant. Active volcano nearby? Invent ash-resistant datacenter equipment.</comment></comment>


Amazon to Expand Grocery Business With New Convenience Stores - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-expand-grocery-business-with-new-convenience-stores-1476189657 <comment><USER2> They were going to test market this in Sunnyvale, but have run into a few issues [http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/09/14/amazons-s...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2015/09/14/amazons- sunnyvale-drive-through-grocery-store.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> What is the advantage of being an online retailer if you still have to pay brick and mortar rent?</comment>


Usability vs. Privacy–Keeping Things in Balance - <AUTHOR> https://mycroft.ai/blog/usability-vs-privacy-keeping-things-in-balance/ <comment><USER2> Google instant apps is an excellent way to give away your privacy totally and absolutely</comment>