Philadelphia taxi medallions fetch less than 17% of asking price - <AUTHOR> http://observer.com/2015/05/the-taxi-industry-is-in-total-collapse/ <comment><USER2> Taxi medallions are the biggest cartel racket out there, and they're inordinately powerful in city politics.

You want to regulate taxis? Great. I'm a liberal. I love that. Regulate the everloving #$%& out of them. Require absurd safety and environmental features. And then _let the market decide_ how many taxi cabs the city can support.

Even a bleeding heart leftist like me will say there are things the market is really, really good at, and deciding how many service providers a sector should have is absolutely one of them. Set standards -- set them high, for that matter -- but for God's sake _let anyone who meets them participate in the market_. Otherwise you're just a protection racket.

<comment><USER3> I'm with you on the cartel bit but I think you're confused about what racketeering is.

<comment><USER2> That was hyperbole; it's not racketeering in the legal sense, since it's based on lobbying to change laws. Fair point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have trouble finding sympathy for someone who over-leveraged to buy a billion dollars worth of taxi medallions on the assumption they would only ever go up in value.

</comment><comment><USER5> > ...those individuals who have invested for decades in yellow medallions. So > I believe it is important that we see the devaluation of the medallions as a > crisis. [...] I believe we have to step up and help those individuals ... to > give value to those medallions.

WTF? That's the most blatant public admission of being in the pocket of moneyed interests that I've ever heard from a politician. It's as if Ydanis Rodriguez has never even realized that having value as an investment was never the intended purpose of taxi medallions.

</comment><comment><USER6> Taxi medallion owners can cry me a river. Hell, whole idea of holly "yellow taxi" concept can go to drain.

Here in Turkey, especially in İstanbul, taxis and private mini-bus transportation business is a big racket as well. Taxis are over priced and medallion (here they call it "plate") prices are extremely high. Taxi drivers are not the owners and they must pay a big sum of what they earn to medallion owners daily basis (A single taxi can bring $5-10k revenue a month to medallion owner in a busy district). As expected, this created illegal taxi business and taxi unions are trying to destroy them.

Mini-bus racket forbids nice inter-city buses carrying passengers to mid- length distances so that people are forced to take their shitty over crowded mini buses.

We need high tech, easily taxed, easy entrance taxi business here badly.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Those efforts have found surprising receptiveness in a city that has made a point of terrorizing billionaires."

Wait, did they start killing them without a trial just for walking down the street? This surely can't be describing saying mean things about billionaires as "terrorizing".

</comment><comment><USER8> The internet's main power is in disintermediation, and in that regard it is an incredibly potent force. At this point it's not an adequate excuse to say you didn't notice or didn't understand what was happening, the internet is in a billion pockets across the world, maybe more, and there's no shortage of examples of industries that have been disrupted by it.

Doubling down on the old ways, especially when they have been propped up through corruption or regulatory capture will gain you no pity from me. Adapt and move on, if you can't compete, good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a poorly written article.

If Philadelphia truly needs more cabs, then Uber can't be blamed for the collapse in medallion prices since it's clearly NOT filling a market need.

In New York City, where the medallion owners are demanding some sort of bailout from City taxpayers, all Uber drivers are regulated under the existing TLC system. I'm no fan of Uber, but they've operated and grown in NYC within existing restrictions.

Tried to comment on the article itself but their goofy Facebook bound commenting system failed with any of the accounts I tried to use.

<comment><USER10> I can't understand this bailout thing at all. If my job gets outsourced or if I get replaced by a computer/robot, do I get a "bailout"? Why is it that industries who were monopolies for so long, who had decades upon decades to innovate but didn't, feel entitled to help from taxpayers? Not all bailouts are bad of course, but this is ridiculous, isn't it?

EDIT: _New York City, for example, auctioned 368 medallions between November 2013 and February 2014. Trading for around $1.2 million each, that injected almost half a billion dollars into the city's coffers._

Jeez! Half a billion for driving taxis!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > The Observer already wrote about New York City's biggest medallion owner, > Evgeny "Gene" Freidman, and his efforts to secure some sort of bailout as he > watched the value of his 900-plus medallions shrivel. Those efforts have > found surprising receptiveness in a city that has made a point of > terrorizing billionaires.

I think you meant "made a point of bailing out billionaires".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Even UberX rates in NYC are ridiculous:

Philadelphia: $1.25 base fare 0.18 / min + $1.25 / mile Chicago: $1.70 0.20 / min + $0.90 / mile

NYC: $3.00 0.40 / min + $2.15 / mile

[https://www.uber.com/cities/philadelphia](https://www.uber.com/cities/philadelphia) [https://www.uber.com/cities/chicago](https://www.uber.com/cities/chicago) [https://www.uber.com/cities/new-york](https://www.uber.com/cities/new-york)

</comment><comment><USER12> The cover article in the Philadelphia City Paper this week was about Uber. I didn't read it to see what opinions were being handed out, but I wonder if someone on either side of this is paying a PR firm.

</comment><comment><USER13> The one complaint I can understand from authorities is that many app drivers don't have adequate insurance. I think there's a legitimate worry that if an accident happens while drivers are working their insurance won't cover it. Beyond that I agree the whole medallion idea is out of date.

</comment><comment><USER14> gasp the market is working

<comment><USER2> Yep. But medallions themselves are a deliberate market distortion. And I'm not a Milton Friedman "market distortions are always bad" person, but this distortion is definitely bad. Artificial scarcity is a stupid way to achieve whatever goal you have.

Set regulatory standards. Set them as high as you want. But then _let anyone who meets them_ participate in the regulated activity.

<comment><USER15> The other argument is one of shared resource. 'The roads' in a city can only 'support' a certain level of traffic/automobiles.

Allowing the market select for how many taxis it can support could have unintended consequences for other industries/anything that makes shared use of the same limited resource.

<comment><USER16> The shared resource argument is a good one, but why are only taxis limited?

There are other approaches (for example, congestion charging as used in London) which can be more closely tailored to whatever outcome the regulator is trying to improve, be it reducing overall traffic volumes, reducing pollution, or restricting certain kinds of traffic at certain times of day.

A congestion charge scheme akin to London would be a better approach, as it can be more easily tweaked for whatever goals you're trying to achieve (overall reduction in traffic, prioritizing environmentally-friendly vehicles, keeping goods vehicles out of the city during rush out, etc).

<comment><USER17> Other European cities, a good example being Zurich, limit the number of available public parking spaces. If you may have a potentially hard time to find relatively expensive parking this could be a big incentive to bike, or use (excellent) public transport.

I'd be all for a congestion charge, but politically this is probably a non- starter.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The full-time job of keeping up with Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://gravitational.com/blog/kubernetes-release-cycle/# <comment><USER2> There aught to be a name to the tendency that as tools get better and better, the more your time goes from having your mind in technical-space to social and news-space. It's like the authority to create goes from the individual first- principles (by necessity) maker, to the control over development being in the hands of an external group, and then all your time is spent keeping up with what they're doing. A similar thing happened with a lot of javascript frameworks. It also happened with the transition from building servers from the ground up, to it all being managed by AWS.

<comment><USER3> I wish I could give you more upvotes. You are describing a somewhat hidden psychology, which I think provides a rational basis for much of "Not Invented Here" psychology. We tend to think that "Not Invented Here" psychology is irrational, but in fact, the loss of control over possibly crucial technology is an important cost, which makes all of us stop and re-consider whether we really want to use some software developed by an external team.

<comment><USER4> And it's not only that - Time spent not doing our own designs (and instead spent memorizing how to use magical frameworks) is time not spent advancing our technical understanding.

It's a sad state when otherwise very intelligent people think it's bad practice to use plain C and a clean OS API that has been stable for decades (because that was somehow "magic" und impossible to understand and error- prone), and advise you to use the Boost filesystem module just to concatenate two paths.

<comment><USER5> Concatenating two paths is difficult if you care about any of the following: security, multiple OS's, Unicode (multiple code units, validity, combining characters), file system restrictions, etc.

Your "two decades" maybe holds for Linux, but what about Windows or MacOS???!

I have seen too many people use string concatenation.

I think an intelligent person would recommend to use the normal library (appropriate for your language, assuming it is well written) since usually your program will be doing many other filename/path manipulations too.

<comment><USER4> [https://msdn.microsoft.com/de- de/library/windows/desktop/bb7...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/de- de/library/windows/desktop/bb773571\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

<comment><USER5> Exactly my point - that function doesn't deal with modern windows. MAX_PATH is 260 characters. Yet Windows now supports longer paths (\\\?\ prefix). So I presume there is another Windows function to combine long path names (and maybe canonicalise Unicode better).

<comment><USER4> > Yet Windows now supports longer paths (\\\?\ prefix).

I know. And this is the attitude that leads to complex software. It's a self- fulfilling prophecy: "I can't do it on my own since the problem is so complex". In which case the problem _does_ get complex.

I recommend not wasting time supporting this crazy feature (unless you are writing infrastructure code for tools and you're required to - in which case I'm sorry). 260 character paths are more than enough for any project. And I certainly recommend against using the crazy abstractions from Boost::filesystem.

(Personally I think it's an unfortunate example. I'd prefer to avoid paths from the start, since nobody understands the semantics of hierarchical filesystems. Alas, typically you need to deal with them to _some_ degree).

<comment><USER5> It is not a crazy feature.

It is a necessary feature for many development environments originally written for Unix (e.g. nodejs), because Unix file systems usually don't have such a low character limit.

Or maybe Windows has mounted or network sharing, a Unix filesystem... In which case your program better deal with long paths (or just fail?)

Really... You are showing exactly why one uses a library so one doesn't need to care about the "complex" details because one hopes the library does a good job of managing it as well as possible for you (although you still need to know the details to use a library function safely).

<comment><USER4> > Or maybe Windows has mounted or network sharing, a Unix filesystem... In > which case your program better deal with long paths (or just fail?)

260 bytes _is_ long. I've never seen a \\\?\ path in the wild, and I don't want to. It's a misdesign (well, I'm sure the designer didn't _want_ to design it...). But I'm repeating myself... I can't practically deal with paths longer than, say, 64 characters (can't read them, let alone type them). Fix your paths.

And again, this is off-topic. This thread was about not using a crazy third party library, when the authoritative semantics (however insane) are contained in the OS interface.

<comment><USER6> That is such an awful toxic viewpoint to take.

"Fix my paths"!? Fix your software! I work from a network share that is about 70 chars long to get to my one project's folder. The beauty of hierarchical file systems is that I can cognitively ignore all the previous paths and just work from there. However when your software doesn't work because "the solution is a misdesign", it's not my path that is wrong, it's your software that is broken and you that are stubbornly refusing to use solutions to well known problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reads like a giant ad for GKE. It emphasizes several times to just use GKE for pretty lame reasons (Google has good SREs and Google started the project).

The people that work on upstream k8s in Google (Tim et al) have a pretty limited overlap with the Google Cloud people that run GKE. Upstream k8s is a full time job so they are most certainly not spending their time also writing internal GKE code.

I don't have an issue with GKE, but this article uses little evidence to recommend it when it seems the conclusion should have been "maintaining a k8s cluster requires a full time sysadmin. If your company has a culture of pretending sysadmins are pointless, then you should pay another company offering k8s sysadmin-as-a-service hosted on their hardware."

<comment><USER8> Author here. I do have a bias toward GKE but that is after trying to use everything else -- DIY, kubespray, OpenShift, Juju, Tectonic, Azure, Fargate, kops, Rancher v2 preview, kubeadm, etc. In my experience nothing (yet) has been as nice and clean as Google Cloud.

<comment><USER9> Have you tried EKS?

<comment><USER10> EKS = Amazon Kubernetes.

(I had to look it up)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Every time a new framework or tool comes out and everybody jumps on it. I always wonder if somebody will realize that you are trading one set of problems and work for another.

As engineers we really need to stop supporting these sort of effort and take the time to help each other become better engineers that write and maintain our own code. We need to promote learning and mastering the underlying concepts that things like kubernetes tries to hide and shield engineers from.

In most cases tools like kubernetes are so vast and huge so they can be the solution looking for many problems.

It is also curious how once kubernetes became big how many small shops needed "Google" level orchestration to manage a hand full of systems. And how hard people ripped their software stack apart into many many micro services just to increase the container count.

I think if most engineers took a step back and said "I don't know" and took some time to truly understand the requirements of the project they are working on they would find a truly elegant and maintainable solution that did not require tweaking your problem to fit a given solution.

Every tool and library / dependency you add to your solution is only adding more code and complications that you will not be a expert in and one day will find your self at the whim of the provider.

Far to often do we include tens of thousands of lines of code of somebody else's work all for a handful of lines of code that if somebody would have had the confidence and support from other engineers around to try and truly understand the problem domain could have implemented and owned the solution.

The general trend I see as I get older is that we are valuing the first to a solution rather than a more correct solution. Only to be stuck with a solution that requires constant care and work around.

So I plead to all engineers, devlopers, programmers or whatever you call your self. Please stop and take a moment and think hard about how you would solve any given problem without the use of external code first. Then compare your solution to the off the shelf "solution looking for a problem". You might surprise your self.

I will also like to point out that if when solving a problem your solution looks like a shopping list of third party tools libraries and services; you might not fully understand the problem domain.

\-- sorry for the rant --

<comment><USER12> I don't think your comment applies at all to Kubernetes.

K8s truly simplifies dev-ops and even the smallest team and website can greatly benefit from it.

I speak from 7 years of experience managing my company's infrastructure's website:

Before kubernetes, I ran my company's stack on very cheap bare metal from OVH. It was great while it lasted, but as the company grew and my team grew, it's become harder and harder to maintain this infrastructure. And I'm not only talking about our production servers. In reality you have to maintain your prod, your staging, and, worst of all, your local development environment.

Over time, your production staging and dev all become entirely heterogeneous. Each environment ends up running totally different/incompatible versions of all your stack's softwares, and no amount of Ansible/SaltStack/Puppet script will save you from this. All those scripts become a nightmare to maintain and your infrastructure as a whole becomes brittle with, for example, bugs happening only in production, but never on your local dev environment.

K8s came as a savior to all my issues: I burned all my old ansible scripts and rewrote all my infrastructure in k8s. Now my prod, staging and dev env are 99% the same. It saves me a tremendous amount of time and headaches. I taught my team how to use minikube and create a replica of our production with one command line on their local computer.

K8s is far from being just a trendy buzzwordy shiny new cool toy to play with. It solves real world problems that dev ops have. I am so glad this technology exists and I hope to never have to go back to writing ansible/puppet/whatever scripts.

<comment><USER13> I hadn't considered the benefits for dev/local instances...

I've known about Kubernetes for some time, but my current job never deploys anything that Kubernetes could improve, so I put it aside and hoped to someday get a chance to toy with it.

I've setup vagrant images pre-loaded with our app for several non-developers to use locally but it sounds like Kubernetes would be a far better way to manage those as well as staging servers.

Unfortunately my current company is 100% against third-party hosting/involvement so I couldn't even use it for staging - our stagings servers are Windows-based, ancient, and internal...

<comment><USER14> For me (small startup) this is the killer feature of k8s. I'm not operating at a scale where "cluster scheduling" is a thing I need to care about, though self-healing and load-balanced services are nice.

To be able to stand up an exact copy of my application on a dev machine, or even better in a review app per-branch (complete with DNS entry and TLS cert) is incredibly valuable. You can run through essentially all of the deploy pipeline before even merging, including SSL config tests etc.

<comment><USER15> In addition to the dev benefits, there is also a built in cloud scaling story and strategy.

It's not like every app needs that kind of robustness, but there is a certain calming security in knowing that if any part of your Kubernetes deployed app actually needs to go "web scale", or someone asks about 100 times the users you have ever considered, that the answer is straightforward and reasonably pre-configured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > The absolute safest place to run Kubernetes application is still Google's > GKE.

Interesting to read given I recently had a GKE cluster auto-upgrade its master version from 1.6.x to 1.7.x at 8pm one night (however foolish it was to not be subscribed to the release notes RSS Feed[1]), which somehow caused a cascading nightmare of things breaking.

Logs stopped appearing in the GCP logging interface and in our own log parsing pipeline, a bug related to a change in the format of the yaml specifications meant that all the containers got stuck in a broken limbo state as we tried to upgrade the nodes (yay for googling the error and finding open github issues!), and then once we'd manually fixed all of our deployments and were finally able to get our nodes rolled over to the new k8s version, all of our load balancers started intermittently timing out until they were deleted and recreated.

Surely we need to keep a closer eye on the release cycle, and we're guilty of bandwagonning onto this cool new tech, but boy does it suck to get auto- upgraded at night only to discover several breaking changes while in emergency mode trying to fix things.

(1) [https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/release- notes](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/release-notes)

</comment><comment><USER17> This article concerns me, especially considering the first thing you see is "There is no such thing as Kubernetes LTS (and that's fantastic)".

What is so great about running your infrastructure on a platform that has no intention of ensuring long-term stability? Irregardless of how well backward- compatibility is maintained, the idea that we should all move our infrastructure to something that lacks the fundamental promise of "updating won't break everything" seems downright irresponsible.

<comment><USER8> Author here. The point is that the stable APIs are rock solid, the design of its API versioning and the community's pace of delivery is a huge part of why it's all maturing so quickly.

<comment><USER17> That's all well and good until it isn't anymore. And to top it off, your recommendation is to either hire someone to manage k8s full-time or be at the mercy of your cloud vendor and hope that one day you don't turn up to work to find that the new update you weren't aware was being rolled out has just broken everything.

You can't ask a large-scale company to take a dice-roll on k8s for their infrastructure when the only promise of long-term reliability is "trust us not to make any breaking changes".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a problem I faced using ansible, webpack + js modules, and more. it's a moving ground and you always need to keep up to date with the latest changes often which are breaking.

I tend to design my systems so that they work even if I haven't touched a line in a year but when using such tools it's always a pain.

I wish things were as stable as a bourne shell and unix environment in general. Not that they achieve the same but I just miss the stability I get from raw unix tools.

<comment><USER19> Github is already littered with the dead carcasses of software using shiny new obsolete tools like gulp, grunt, and browserify to name just a tiny few.

You have to have a strong nose for bitrot and ruthlessly filter garbage out of the firehose, to work in web development today. If that package or tool hasn't been updated in 8 months, do you really want to learn it (and force your team to learn it), since it's practically abandonware already?

It's a self-reinforcing cycle. You don't want to put your organization at existential risk by betting on the wrong horse. But there is no choice. Unless you want to get stuck having to hire Perl guys in an ocean of node ninja rockstars. Your company will be the ugly girl that didn't get asked to prom night. The pariah of Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER18> true but you don't have to go that far. React, webpack, and sometimes well maintained packages that depend on unmaintained packages suffer from this. I am not picking on web dev, it's a general problem.

<comment><USER20> It's a relatively new problem caused by an influx of inexperienced programmers who have to experience these problems first-hand.

They do learn, but they can't teach what they learned because of the ever increasing influx of new, unexperienced programmers.

I highly recommend this talk by Uncle Bob (have a tea and a foot bath, it's long): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc)

<comment><USER21> I don't think it's just the influx of new developers, it's too many rockstars that only work on green fields applications, they can't and don't learn the long term consequences of their decisions. Not all of them are new programmers, they're just the epitome of 5 times 2 years of experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> trigger warning: bitter jaded ops person working in a real company

 _" [...] users are expected to stay "reasonably up-to-date with versions of Kubernetes they use in production." [...] the upstream Kubernetes community only aims to support up to three "minor" Kubernetes version at a time. [...] if you deployed a Kubernetes 1.6 soon after it came out last March, you were expected to upgrade to 1.7 within roughly nine months or by the time 1.9 shipped in mid-December."_

Jesus christ this is so annoying.

Businesses don't have a couple hundred billion dollars sitting around to spend on engineers to look at release notes, compare changes, write new features, write new test cases, fix bugs, and push to prod, _every 3 months_ , just to _keep existing functionality_ for orchestrating their containers.

We have LTS because businesses (and individuals) don't want to have to do the above. They just want a reliable tool. They want the ability to say that if a bug is found in 3 years, it will be fixed, and they can just keep using the tool.

We don't give a crap about "Kubernetes' domination of the distributed infrastructure world". We don't want to use Kubernetes. We just want an orchestration tool - commodified tooling. We want to stop caring about what we're running. We just want the fucking thing to work, and to not have to jump through hoops for it to work.

 _" Moving Kubernetes Workloads to New Clusters instead of Upgrading"_

UGH. We only do this for bastardized unholy stupid shit like OpenStack. Not only is this not fun, it takes forever (you try moving 50 different clients off the service they've been using for three years), and you have to have duplicate resources. What the fuck is the point of cloud computing and containers and all this bullshit if I have to have double the infrastructure and juggle how it's all used just to upgrade some fucking software?!??!?!

 _" The Kubernetes-as-a-Service offerings, particularly Google Cloud's Kubernetes Engine (GKE), are the well-polished bellwethers of what is currently the most stable and production-worthy version of Kubernetes."_

Oh. We're supposed to pay Google to run it for us.

....I'm just going to use AWS.

<comment><USER23> Sounds like full employment theorem at work. I haven't kicked the tires on kubernetes yet but I don't really see what all the fuss is about. I liked AMPLab and Mesos but I guess that doesn't have the branding power of big G.

<comment><USER24> 100% the case. k8s is not a terrible thing and there are good uses for it, but the _vast_ majority of people who are using it don't understand what it's doing, and don't understand that their application is not equipped to handle that type of execution model.

Just yesterday I had someone tell me "Kubernetes was like magic and it made everything easy". This is absolutely _not_ the thing a serious/honest Kubernetes user would say. Kubernetes is a big heavy thing, and it's a lot of trouble to maintain it; generally, far more trouble than using sane configuration management on VMs would be (you need sane configuration management in k8s too, so you aren't swapping one complexity for another). We're reaching "MongoDB is web scale" levels of hysteria around Kubernetes.

Example of the insanity: my account on HN has been censured for the "tedious" nature in which I would assert that Kubernetes is not a good platform for databases.

There is a serious, concerted effort by Google to put k8s at the forefront, and they are not playing games with it.

<comment><USER25> > _There is a serious, concerted effort by Google to put k8s at the forefront, > and they are not playing games with it._

Well no, and why would they? Containerisation is one way to crowbar workloads out of VMs and AWS. Since they're coming from behind, their best strategy is to deny everyone else any oxygen by creating an opensource winner. And it worked: Amazon have added EKS to ECS, Azure added AKS to ACI.

Google does a lot of good, but they don't sink millions upon millions of dollars into things just for the hell of it.

<comment><USER23> In general they have been pretty aloof at product marketing and development. Microsoft came in with a weaker product early on and has really been cleaning up with Azure going head to head with Amazon and GCE.

G as a whole has always been pretty much the opposite of Apple in terms of fit and finish, and in the past it was no mongo in terms of dev swoon. But I agree with cookiecaper, they have somehow cracked the code for mongo level of installing meme based software architecture on the masses. I would _love_ to understand how that works, for selfish entrepreneurial reasons :)

<comment><USER25> I agree that Google is coming from behind in enterprise sales. AWS have the long headstart and Microsoft have an existing, massive sales org.

Cloud computing fits almost none of their DNA. It requires intensive sales rather than automation. It's a volume business with thin margins (rather than a network-effect business with fat margins).

But it's also a business in which they have the best technology out of the three and the first plausible alternative revenue stream they've ever found. I don't think they are going to stop elbowing their way into this, and neither are Microsoft.

<comment><USER22> The difference is, Google is the only company that is both trying to sell cloud services, and giving their product away to their competitors.

The company I work for uses multiple cloud providers, but does not use GCE. They don't even think about it. I think the reason is a lack of confidence, along with other business and technical reasons. Google just isn't a serious company when it comes to supporting large businesses. Like it or not, that old adage about never getting fired for buying IBM is still true.

<comment><USER25> Kubernetes isn't the product, though. GCP is. Google doesn't care what software you're running, as long as you run it with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think this is a symptom of the "release often" philosophy. With yearly or longer releases you could actually keep up and read the release notes. With stuff being released several times a year it's too much work to keep up unless you are deeply into it at the moment.

I notice the same with my Android apps. I used to read release notes of new versions but now I have it on auto update and am sometimes surprised that an app I have been using all the time has completely changed and I don't know how to use it anymore.

<comment><USER27> No, it is the symptom of a high velocity project. If Kubernetes were to have yearly releases, the list of changes would be four times as long and upgrade path would be a major leap instead of four minor steps.

<comment><USER26> I think a major leap is much easier to handle and to plan for.

<comment><USER28> I completely disagree. The complexity and risk of a change goes up with the square of the size of the change. Having moved from upgrading when forced to (almost) continuous upgrading, the number of moving parts in any given change is small and the frequency means we become skilled at rolling out changes safely.

<comment><USER29> That's fine and dandy if you can afford to put up the resources to keep your deployment up to date. For more constrained others, an LTS release can be the deference between using the project vs not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Kubernetes' governance is becoming like Openstack and (I know this is controversial), I hate Openstack, especially because it tried so hard to be "AWS" compatible, and APIs are so awkward to use.

Cloudfoundry is better in terms of governance and project's direction. Many of the main developers work full time at Pivtoal. But it is hard to run your own CF without significant investment like access management and "painless" upgrade (etcd is a pain in the entire CF stack in my experience). Though I have to admit the project is moving in the right direction in the past year or so.

<comment><USER31> Kuberentes/CNCF governance is completely different than Openstack. There's a reason every major cloud provider is involved in CNCF versus Openstack. You can see all stats for CNCF projects here, i.e., [https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/dashboard/db/contributing- compa...](https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/dashboard/db/contributing- companies?orgId=1)

CFF was setup in a completely different way, giving Pivotal a lot of control in the beginning by allowing related entities to have votes and than relinquishing that over time. It leads to a more single vendor controlled ecosystem IMHO.

There's pros and cons to both approaches.

Disclosure: I help run CNCF.

<comment><USER25> Pivotal's strong influence over CFF decisions comes from the fact that votes are assigned according to how many fulltime engineers you devote to Foundation work. Pivotal has more fulltime engineers on CFF projects than anyone else.

There are, as you note, pros and cons. It made sense at the time, as I think there were concerns about vendor politics getting in the way of developing the thing.

I guess one of these days we'll smash the CFF and CNCF together and stagger out with some kind of bicameral system, just for laughs.

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal. Trolling is just my hobby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Combining my brief time trying to put together a proof of concept with Kubernetes and reading articles like this, I'm so glad I chose Hashicorp's Nomad. It's simpler to configure, more versatile (shell scripts, executables, and Docker containers) and a decent third party UI - HashiUI. With Consul, configuration is dead simple.

</comment><comment><USER33> Dr Dobb's articles below reflect a somewhat similar feeling

Just Let Me Code [http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/just-let-me- code/240168735](http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/just-let-me-code/240168735)

Getting Back To Coding [http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and- design/getting-back-...](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and- design/getting-back-to-coding/240168771)</comment>


Help Take the Fight to COVID-19 with BOINC and Folding@Home - <AUTHOR> https://unraid.net/blog/help-take-the-fight-to-covid-19-with-boinc-or-folding-home <comment><USER2> Folding at home is running out of work because of the overwhelming response. I've found that sometimes restarting the FAH client/container will trigger a new job even after being stuck in a loop for hours

<comment><USER3> Rosetta@home (BOINC) still has a ton of work items and is CPU based, so it's easy to run on most anything. Some are COVID-19, some are MERS, some are things that have nothing to do with coronaviruses.

<comment><USER4> I've been running BOINC, and since none of the tasks required GPU, as you mentioned, I was able to scale to a number of devices that the client could be compiled on.

If you have 5-8 hours to devote to a round, put everything you have into it. It's quick to set up and is certainly worth the cycles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a Google doc showing the performance of various GPUs when folding: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v5gXral3BcFOoXs5n1M6...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1v5gXral3BcFOoXs5n1M6l_Uo3pZpQYogn6gVlxRPnz0/edit#gid=0)

</comment><comment><USER6> Mac users, note that Folding@Home can't use GPUs at all. I considered Boot Camp but their docs (and Boinc's) seem focused on Nvidia and don't appear to have kept up on "ATI" (AMD) video card instructions.

<comment><USER7> Folding@Home is runnign GPU stuff on Windows without any configuration on my AMD RX 580. Although it's not using much of it. Presuably because OpenCL only runs of the Compute units which are relatively small part of the GPU.

<comment><USER8> No, all GPUs released in the last 10 years have a unified shader architecture. Vertex, fragment, and compute shaders all run on the same units, and they are the _big_ part of the GPU.

"Compute units" is AMD terminology for a grouping of ALUs and stuff. Nvidia calls them "stream multiprocessors".

Example: Vega 64 has 64 CUs, each CU has 64 "shader processors", so there's 64*64 == 4096 "shader processors" total. This is the big part.

<comment><USER7> Yea I install the Asus GPU-Z and i was better and gave that it was using 90% of the whole GPU. Windows just doesn't know how to count GPU usage apperntly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a FreeBSD port of the FAH client: [http://freshports.org/biology/linux- foldingathome](http://freshports.org/biology/linux-foldingathome)

The installation is as simple as "cd /usr/ports/biology/linux-foldingathome && make install".

</comment><comment><USER10> Is there a way to have some more fine-grained control about how Rosetta and Folding use resources? For example, I want them not to run in sleep mode, and certainly not when the laptop's lid is closed. Or, better perhaps, to throttle above certain temperatures.

<comment><USER11> Yes, those knobs can be controlled by the BOINC client. You retain full control over how/when your computer uses its resources.

<comment><USER10> Where exactly? I haven't been able to find it.

<comment><USER10> Oh, I see: Options / Computing Preferences.

Would still like to have a "suspend when lid is closed" or "suspend when temperature is > 70°C" option, but I guess that would require a lot more hardware specialization than the authors of the tool could reasonably be expected to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't understand the statistics for Folding@Home.

If there are X million PCs donating Y% of their time to the project, and they cost $Z each, I was wondering what X _Y_ Z was.

That is to say, if discovering protein structures is a critical problem needed to solve Covid19, how much would it cost to just replace this distributed computation with some dedicated machinery?

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder why Amazon, Rackspace, and other major hosting providers that are sitting on a ton of hardware haven't contributed resources to efforts like this.

Or have they?

<comment><USER14> Because a legitimate scrutiny of FAH projects would probably just get them rejected

<comment><USER15> Could you expand a bit? Are you suggesting that F@H projects are perhaps not as beneficial?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Gwern's article on folding @home [https://www.gwern.net/Charity-is-not-about- helping](https://www.gwern.net/Charity-is-not-about-helping)

TLDR - As of 2015 it's been pretty useless for the amount of electricity and computing power it burns through.

Nothing particularly noteworthy listed on wikipedia either. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home)

Seems like if you have a huge cluster of computing and free electricity and want to help out it might be more useful to mine bitcoins and donate them to covid-19 charities.

</comment><comment><USER17> If we could throw all computing power that was used for mining bitcoins, how long would it take to produce required results?

<comment><USER18> This would probably not work since bitcoin miners are all ASICs these days.

<comment><USER19> I feel like the question was just trying to see how much computation would help, rather than whether the chips are actually capable of doing it.

<comment><USER20> It's a reasonable question, but it's hard to evaluate the processing power of those chips because of how very specific those circuits are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I once caught wind that my professor gave extra credit in distributed systems class for BOINC points. I ran this constantly for years and then he didn't even give the extra credit.

</comment><comment><USER22> Can you pick which task your resources are being used for? (ie. covid19) because they have several in progress and I think it selects randomly?

<comment><USER23> At least with folding at home they have set the covid19 research as top priority for all of the clients (regardless of the clients preference).

Note - as far as I know there are no covid19 CPU based works units, so you will continue to get normal work units if you have CPU slots available. This is worth mentioning, because by default the client adds your CPU to the available slots. On linux you have to go into advanced settings to enable the GPU at all, so it is something to watch out for.

<comment><USER3> The Folding@Home GPU client works way better on Linux with NVIDIA/CUDA than it does with AMD. I could not get a 4x Radeon VII rig with ROCm to utilise more than a single GPU at any time due to OpenCL errors. Also, the folding@home Ubuntu client has three-year-old issues with not installing properly [1] so you have to workaround that, too.

If you have the time to contribute reliability patches to the Linux clients, I'm sure it would be appreciated as well.

[1] [https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah- issues/issues/1193#issu...](https://github.com/FoldingAtHome/fah- issues/issues/1193#issuecomment-340875034)

<comment><USER3> Update: Installed Windows 10 Pro on a separate SSD, and I appear to have GPU slots for all GPUs under Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love these projects and have donated time in the past to different projects. I'll be promoting this to all my friends -- there are so many ways to help and this feels like one of the easier ones.

</comment><comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL Folding at home is apparently really hard to install and run on windows without admin permissions. Big bummer. I tried for 2 hours! (the beefy pc is for gaming)

<comment><USER25> Why don't you have admin on your gaming computer?

<comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL I have an admin, but it's not the "active" account. It's used only for installing stuff and general maintenance of your computer.

This is not only the proper way to use an admin account, but it's also recommended.

The fact that Folding@home supports only running the software when the admin account is logged in out of the box (there might be a solution to my problem, I just hadn't found it), it's disappointing and problematic.

<comment><USER26> >>The fact that Folding@home supports only running the software when the admin account is logged in out of the box (there might be a solution to my problem, I just hadn't found it), it's disappointing and problematic.

Well, no, that's not entirely true. You can run F@H as a service and then it can run without anyone logged in. The problem then is that it cannot use the GPU for work, but that's not a problem with F@H but with how Windows manages access to resources for background services without a user logged in.

<comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL I'm confused though. Videogames can use the GPU without being an administrator, why is administrator needed to run F@H with GPU active?

<comment><USER26> Now I'm confused. Administrative privilages have nothing to do with using the GPU. A service process cannot use the GPU, regardless of who owns it, that has nothing to do with F@H, that's just how Windows is designed.

According to the organisation behind F@H , the application requires administrative priviladges to make sure you have the permissions to use the application on the machine. I guess they had enough complaints about people running it when they don't(students, employees etc), so requiring administrative priviladges is the easiest way.

<comment> Fire-Dragon-DoL Your explanation though makes sense, even though the solution to the problem it's terrible. I presumed it was for the GPU for weird reasons (bad software, CUDA, somethng like that), but what you described makes the most sense.

Apparently, I managed to get it running today with some magic using icacls and file ownership. The web control does not work, but I'm able to run the Advanced Control Panel and start everything from there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> They should really make an Apple TV app, I have an Apple TV 4K sitting there most of the day, and I'm sure most owners do too.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is there a preference with BOINC vs Folding?

</comment><comment><USER29> Inexplicably F@H is not available as an _official_ docker container, and their install procedure for Linux compares unfavorably with wisdom tooth extraction.

<comment><USER30> How so? I just looked, and they have both .deb and .rpm packages available.

I once spent two-and-a-half hours having two wisdom teeth removed, and afterwards I got an infection in the empty sockets. I'd rather do all of that again, than having to use Docker for anything.

<comment><USER31> The debs don't install on Ubuntu 19.10 BTW (obsolete deps).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I get that F@H does a lot of computation with my CPU/GPU if I am running the client. What do those cycles do? It tries a bunch of random stuff to calculate... what? What is it trying? It sounds a lot like Bitcoin mining, but I'm not sure what it's trying to do.

<comment><USER15> Their about page and update articles give a good high-level overview of the project [https://foldingathome.org/about/](https://foldingathome.org/about/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Blockchain Command-line Interface - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/blockchain-cli <comment><AUTHOR> I built Blockchain CLI to educate myself on blockchain technology. I hope you'll learn something through using this tool!</comment>


Newsom: 'I don't think the schools are going to open again'(For rest of 2020) - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/03/17/newsom-schools-likely-to-remain-closed-through-summer-1267579 <comment><USER2> Until the end of the academic year means until June, not until the end of 2020. Although that too is possible in the future, but it's not what this story is saying.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been hearing this from friends who are medical professionals for several days. This is going to really exacerbate the challenge for people who can't work from home. Even after the school year ends, there is the problem of summer daycare and camps, which also might be cancelled.</comment>


I'm Not Looking for a Technical Co-Founder, I'm Looking for a Technical Leader - <AUTHOR> http://www.derekflanzraich.com/2012/02/looking-for-technical-leader/

<comment><USER2> Just curious, what huge technical problems do you face? You're not dealing with big health data, nor are you analyzing health trends, nor do you have mobile apps.. you're just a blog/content site (albeit one visited by many ppl), so just wondering.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally-- so the big challenges ahead for Greatist are twofold:

First, we're faced with scaling media for traffic & growth. How do we resurface old content? How do we look/work less like a blog and more like, say, the NYT? How do we build out a network of contributors w/ open-ended flexibility for the future? This is much like the challenge faced by the HuffPost, Babble, & others at one point.

Second, we'll next tackle building both products + tools plus an ecommerce platform. We're already developing a self-tracking tool for fitness, health, and happiness goals. We've considered different ways to bring together people who want to be active with people who organize & lead health and fitness activities. We've thought about the challenge of putting people interested in having more guidance in their personal health with online, certified coaches. And we've gone through the background of building an ecommerce site from the ground up. There are so many opportunities in this space-- and particularly ones that can be done in a high-quality way that fits with our brand and with our content... and that's a big part of why we're looking for a Technical Leader to tackle what they're most excited about, what they think has the most potential, and what they know they can build (or figure out how to build) best.</comment></comment>


Show HN: ResizePixel – Ridiculously simple online image editing - <AUTHOR> https://www.resizepixel.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! [https://www.resizepixel.com](https://www.resizepixel.com) is a mobile- friendly image editing website. It is useful when need to edit images quickly without using heavy tools like Photoshop or GIMP.

Tip: to try it out, click "Edit a sample image" link on home page.

<comment><USER2> This is nice. I always use pixlr/editor for very simple editing and this is for sure a very light alternative.

The missing piece I'm looking is for simple draw (arrows, boxes, circles), because I use it to crop and edit screenshots. I understand if it's out of your scope - because of the name.

Good job, thanks for building and sharing!

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate your feedback, thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


The Best iOS Apps: Productivity in Design - <AUTHOR> http://cassfoundry.com/the-best-ios-apps-productivity-in-design/

<comment><USER2> Wunderlist has an incredibly annoying feature, that when you open the app and start typing into the obvious box at the top, it assumes you want to make a new list (which I never want to do), rather than new 'todo' (which I always want to do).

This seems like a really stupid design choice, and one that is very shortly going to stop me using the app. I mention this as an example of an app looking great, as opposed to being well designed.</comment>


How to use Google Sheets to find hundreds of reporters who will write about you - <AUTHOR> http://blog.aylien.com/post/113443039128/how-we-built-a-press-target-list-of-300-qualified?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=Content%20Refferal&utm_campaign=HackerNews%20Press%20Hack

<comment><USER2> The Text Analysis add-on is asking for too many permissions. Is that really necessary? Cool hack though.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point and it's understandable if it's a cause for concern, but there's not much we can do about it as far as I know since we write the results directly in your spreadsheets; and the add-on, once installed, is present in all your spreadsheets. We need your email address in order to manage your credits and verify your credit purchases through Google Wallet.

Most other add-ons require the same permissions, so I think the permission titles could use a bit of clarification.

All that said, this is something to have in mind and improve for sure.</comment></comment>


Amazon Vs. Apple Be Damned: Publishers Pine For A Universal E-Book Format - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/universal-e-books-format/all/1#ixzz0pY0bR6nO <comment><USER2> Publishers don't pine for a universal e-book format, they pine for a universally working DRM system which they, and only they, control as they see fit.

The problem? DRM can't work! Not in an "open" world.

<http://bit.ly/9AoZeo> <http://www.changethis.com/4.DRM> <http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt>

</comment><comment><USER3> I've got no sympathy for their position. It's not as if the development of the e-book market was a total surprise, wasn't it? They could have made the appropriate steps years ago.

But they simply didn't bother or they were unable to cooperate due to their egos.

They got what they deserve.

</comment><comment><USER4> What about PDF

<comment><USER5> Doesn't support reflowing (and thus changing text size), so you can't really read your ebooks on your phone. Even the 6" Kindle's support for PDFs is barely usable.

<comment><USER4> Then maybe HTML is the way to go?

<comment><USER5> Both Kindle's Mobipocket and iBooks' epub formats appear to be very close to HTML.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I advertise to Mac users? - <AUTHOR>

My company has a MacOS App Store app coming out (successor to http://qbix.com/calendar), and we would like to be able to buy ads for it.
Naturally, I thought Google adwords would be able target by OS based on the user agent string, but somehow, in 2012, this seems not to be the case. There's even a video of an expert on google befuddled :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4ZSQ7ej-mw
And putting the words "mac" or something similar into a pay-per-click ad will make its clickthrough rate really small and therefore raise its price by 10-50x times (I read about this). So that's not an option.
Can anyone suggest any options for advertising Mac App Store applications in a targeted way?
And also, how come there isn't anything out there to target operating systems (to sell desktop apps) ... I mean it's 2012. Isn't there a need for this? <comment><USER2> Your best bet for advertising is to try and get your app picked up by one of the mac specific blogs. TUAW, Mac Appstorm, Macworld, Macrumors etc. You should also try and buy ads on those sites to specifically target your userbase. If you can get enough traction through there it's possible that you'll get featured in the App Store, or if not at least the mac users who read the blogs will spread the word to their friends and family if they like it.

</comment><comment><USER3> We have the vast majority of Mac blogs here: <http://buysellads.com/buy/all- things-apple> \- we sell banners and sponsored tweets.</comment>


JALI: Animator-Centric Procedural Lip Synch - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vniMsN53ZPI <comment><AUTHOR> This is the research project of another PhD student in my lab. It takes an audio file and a script and generates a facial animation to lip synch to the audio. The key contribution (in my view) is that the animation curves it generates are much simpler than those generated by motion capture, so even when the results aren't perfect, they are easily tweaked by animators.</comment>


Getting started with Inferno - vezzy-fnord http://www.ueber.net/who/mjl/inferno/getting-started.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Bear in mind that Vita Nuova is now one person - Charles.

Rog went to Canonical and does Go programming.

Inferno is still actively used by big boys though. Some people at IBM run it on Blue Gene, for instance.</comment>


Ask HN: Best web server/language/framework for embedded? - <AUTHOR> My current company is thinking of rewriting from the ground-up an embedded software, which is currently accessed through a simple wsgi server.
My initial suggestion was to use something like Flask + lighttpd, which would serve our purposes, but the team wants to go with Node.JS, as this would be somewhat better for their careers later on.
I do have a lot of experience with Python/Django, and the other developers have some C#/Java/React experience.
Anyone have any experience doing embedded web development? How would go in this situation? <comment><USER2> I'm sure that when you say embedded it's not what most firmware people people think of as embedded, namely resource constrained MCUs where python's a dream and nothing's dynamically allocated and freed. Microchip has a somewhat nasty but functional example web server that runs on things like the dsPIC. You're not deploying onto a little processor though are you? What are you deploying onto?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's close to a beagle bone black running a minimal debian distribution.

<comment><USER2> That's a luxurious platform for an embedded system. You're not at all power or environment constrained? Will your end product actually use all of the peripherals and I/O on the board? BBs (and rPIs) are great prototyping platforms, don't be surprised if there's resistance to the cost when it's time to go to market.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not at all constrained. It's already on the market, but maintenance is excrutiating, so that's why we want to rewrite.

<comment><USER2> It's really challenging to offer up solutions without knowing why the maint is excruciating and what's being servede. Are the updates done manually? Are the embedded swervers serving up dynamic content sourced from somewhere other than the local device?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > the team wants to go with Node.JS, as this would be somewhat better for > their careers later on.

This sounds like Resume Driven Development to me... which seems like a really silly reason to switch languages. Node.js will have new challenges, and different performance characteristics (maybe better in some areas, maybe worse depending on your use case.)

I've done a lot of backend Node.js development but wouldn't migrate an existing project to it without a good reason. Maybe you have a lot of time and bandwidth to debug any new issues and to learn a new ecosystem (which is something I rarely have.)</comment>


Ask HN: Geolocation(HTML5/PHP): Tutorial on plotting numerous users on map? - <AUTHOR>

Can someone can refer me to a tutorial or such that provides information regarding how to capture a users location and plot other users around them? I'm hoping to build an app that contains a functionality for you to open the app on the phone and see other users within a set radius that are also running the app. I'm using HTML5/PHP, and I'm newbie to this, so I'm assuming I'd need to use Google Geolocation APIs or such to pass/capture multiple user locations and plot them? All help is greatly appreciated. Thanks for your time and assistance. <comment><USER2> SimpleGeo is a startup that makes geo-enabled APIs like the one you are describing. They may have the tool you're looking for available for use. I think they are in a closed development phase, but should be out soon if not already.

</comment><comment><USER3> I went to GIS school some years back. I am not sure you can realistically do this. Cell phones are "mapped" based on which cell phone tower they are using, which isn't terribly precise. AFAIK, it takes quite a lot of data from multiple satellites to give any real precision to mapping some specific, fixed spot -- ie this can take hours of standing on the same spot to get significant precision. Otherwise, you can be confident you are within something like 30 yards of the point.

I hope someone else a) knows more than what I vaguely recall from classes taken in ~2002 and b) can prove me wrong and tell you how it's done.

Good luck.</comment>


The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/125772-2/the_25_worst_tech_products_of_all_time.html

<comment><USER2> I was 9 when the Lion King CD came out. My parents did give it to me on Christmas, and they tried to play it for me on a new computer.

It was my first experience desperately trying to hack a computer system. If that had never happened, I may never have acquired an interest in computers.

Thank you Disney, for sucking so much.

</comment><comment><USER3> Single page instead of 8: [http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,125772/printable...](http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,125772/printable.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> They forgot OS/2, which certainly was one of the worst tech marketing fiascos of all times and which helped plunge IBM into a dark place as Bill Gates laughed himself silly.

I still remember my shock when I (as a non-techie type) finally got it installed after hours of frustration only to find that few, if any, drivers worked on it - leaving you with all the theoretically great features in the world and at the same time unable even to print a document or do other basic things.

</comment><comment><USER5> My entire family uses aol on top of their broadband and won't let me explain that you can still keep your email if you aren't paying for it, it is like aol has brainwashed them.

And the ads attached to their email and yahoos are extremely annoying to me

</comment><comment><USER6> Two things - one - DB IV had a GREAT report writer - very RPG-2 ish. You could throw in breakpoint sub-totals anywhere, AND it gave you the source code in dbase for the report!

When I worked in Clipper later I wanted to get DB4 just to create the reports in it and paste the source code into Clipper. Couldn't find it then.

Also - I liked Pointcast. I wish it had stuck around.</comment>


Microsoft releases version 2.0 of its deep learning toolkit - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/01/microsoft-releases-version-2-0-of-its-deep-learning-toolkit/ <comment><AUTHOR> The important feature is Keras compatability: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/cognitive-toolkit/Using-CNT...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cognitive- toolkit/Using-CNTK-with-Keras) (although it doesn't seem to be in the official repo yet: [https://github.com/fchollet/keras/pull/6800](https://github.com/fchollet/keras/pull/6800))

In terms of "how is CNTK better than TensorFlow," CNTK performs 6x better _at minimum_ on old LSTM benchmarks, which is big. ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.07249](https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.07249))</comment>


TERA: An Internet-Scale Database, An Open Source Bigtable Implementation in C++ - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/baidu/tera/ <comment><USER2> Wow it is a database, not the online game(tera.enmasse.com). It looks cool after my computer start "OneBox Tera"</comment>


SARS-CoV-2 by the Numbers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/milo-lab/SARS-CoV-2/tree/master/versions <comment><USER2> This isn't your usual half-baked speculation by non-specialists, this is a properly researched paper with facts, uncertainties, and clear information.

Upvoted, and I'd recommend it to anyone with more than a passing interest.

Note: I'm not an author, not a specialist, and not the submitter.</comment>


An evaluation of Erlang global process registries: meet Syn - <AUTHOR> http://www.ostinelli.net/an-evaluation-of-erlang-global-process-registries-meet-syn/

<comment><USER2> This looks great. Thanks for sharing. Those numbers in the end look impressive. Unlike other solutions it seems like going from 2 to 4 nodes didn't make much of an impact on regs/sec.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, as per what I said in the article: this is just one type of use case, I'd be interested in knowing other people evaluations as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> First thing I thought of was an mnesia table, glad to even be in the same ballpark as Mr. Ostinelli.

Is the slowdown as the cluster size increases is purely due to cluster gossip?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting question, since Syn only uses dirty writes (and hence has no locking mechanism). Therefore yes, I think this is due to the increased nodes inter-communication (which obviously takes resources).

<comment><USER3> I recall reading at some point that things really start to get out of hand re: gossip somewhere around 12 nodes. Not sure if that's a modern limit or not though.</comment></comment></comment>


2 Reasons Why All Online Storage Should Scale - <AUTHOR> http://fourstarters.com/2007/10/14/2-reasons-why-all-online-storage-should-scale/ Scaling is a hot topic in businesses, especially with startups that expect to become Slashdotted or Digged anytime soon. Google recently announced they would increase the speed at which their Gmail would gain storage capacity, mainly in response to Yahoo! and Microsoft recently upgrading and surpassing Google's storage offerings. <comment><USER2> This article doesn't define scaling. It's clear enough from context, but it should be pointed out that price scaling and performance scaling are different. In fact, once you substitute "reduce $/GB over time" for "scale", the article becomes totally obvious. In other news, All Processors Should Follow Moore's Law (because if you don't, you'll go out of business).</comment>


GitHub Enterprise is now free through Microsoft for Startups - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/2020-02-13-github-enterprise-is-now-free-through-microsoft-for-startups/ <comment><USER3> It gives you a credit of $1,000 monthly for 2 years, but there's no real indication anywhere on Github of exactly what that pays for?

So it's not really free.

How does this compare with Gitlab and Bitbucket offerings for small teams?

I know Bitbucket has a one-time payment option for their self-hosted version of $10 for 10 users. Pretty hard to beat that, unless you're adamant you need it hosted for you.

<comment><USER4> >It gives you a credit of $1,000 monthly for 2 years, but there's no real indication anywhere on Github of exactly what that pays for?

Random screenshot I was able to find on their help page. Seems to be that the pricing for github enterprise is around $21/month/user.

[https://help.github.com/assets/images/help/organizations/sta...](https://help.github.com/assets/images/help/organizations/start- trial-button.png)

<comment><USER5> So basically up 47 free users for 2 years. Not bad.

<comment><USER3> Is 47 users really a "startup"? If you have anywhere near 47 actual users, affording $1k a month is going to be trivial.

Would be nice if you could have, say, 5 users and extend the 2 years by not using all $1k monthly credits, adding users as you grow.

<comment><USER6> If you can't afford to start paying after 2 years, it's time to give up or pivot. This is very generous of MS/GH to offer until you've got traction.

<comment><USER3> > If you can't afford to start paying after 2 years, it's time to give up or > pivot

That's kind of extremist, isn't it?

Plenty of startups are bootstrapped, one or two people, and can survive just fine using basic tooling. The free offerings from Gitlab and Bitbucket (which include private repos) are just fine for a lot of startups.

Not all startups are your VC backed unicorns.

> This is very generous of MS/GH to offer

Is it? It's really just an attempt to lock you into a proprietary system that you cannot export your data out of nor easily move off of down the road.

<comment><USER7> > It's really just an attempt to lock you into a proprietary system that you > cannot export your data out of nor easily move off of down the road.

The GH API covers a _lot_ of what `git` doesn't. GH's strategy has never been lock-in. They provide a good service that's constantly improving. (I'm sure other services have advantages and I'm in no way going to claim that GH is the best in class, but I am continually happy with GH and with its continued improvement.)

<comment><USER8> Liking GH and not (currently) wanting to move doesn't mean you're not locked in. Sure, it's _possible_ to export your GH data and import it into something like GitLab or Bitbucket, but it's not exactly an easy process, and most orgs would think really hard before moving. It's definitely lock-in, regardless of whether or not it's a part of their strategy.

From MS's side, of _course_ it's a lock-in strategy. The whole "MS for Startups" thing is a way to attract small companies to their platform and keep them there until they've grown to a point that switching away is more work than it's worth. Adding GH Enterprise to the offering just makes it more attractive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting that it's explicitly limited to B2B startups.

Is there a feeling that B2C isn't a "real" business? Or maybe because B2B startups are more likely to be acquired by larger companies, thus absorbing Microsoft's stack?

<comment><USER10> Not just B2B, but the business must be "Seed, Series A, B, or C stage (or validated equivalent)" funded.

I'm not entirely sure what "validated equivalent" entails, but I take it to mean they're interested in VC-funded companies, not bootstrapp{ed,ing}, angel- funded, or crowd-funded companies

Your acquisition hypothesis seems quite likely to me; it would be naïve to believe that Microsoft would offer such value out of the kindness of their hearts.

I don't want to sound bitter: If one has a business that qualifies and is okay with adopting a Microsoft stack, it seems like a great value. However, let's not give MSFT too many PR creds for being a selfless charitable organization who is 'looking out for the little girl' in business, because they're simply not. They're a for-profit corporation.

<comment><USER11> Frank here, I work at Microsoft for Startups.

Validated equivalent means that you don't necessarily need to be a company on the fundraising path in order to make it into the program.

So if a self-funded company comes to us and shows they have sales traction, then we can take them to our field sales team, make a target list of companies, and get them intro'd to the right accounts to close deals.

No, this is not out of the goodness of our hearts (although I do know my team has good hearts also :).

The point of the program is to get companies on Azure (a strong platform from a technical perspective), and the best way to keep companies on Azure is to provide value via technology and sales.

If you're closing more deals with us, you will have to consume more Azure in order to service those deals.

Win, meet win.

P.S: On the side, I run a community for profit-driven entrepreneurs who have not raised venture: [http://inflectioncommunity.com](http://inflectioncommunity.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having played a lot with gitlab and really happy with it, I'm confused as to why I would look at GitHub.

This looks like it is free as in price, but not free forever and not free of red tape.

<comment><USER13> I also have experienced GH.com, GHE on prem, and (now) twice GL on prem. There's absolutely zero comparison between how hungry the GL team is as compared to GH(E). I appreciate that GH is the gorilla in the room, and "nobody got fired for going with GH" but there's a new feature __packed __release every month from GL, and it comes batteries included.

I do have a huge amount of frustration with GL's open core system where it seems they use a dartboard for deciding what level to make open source, or ultra-enterprise $$$$, and their issue tracker is the definition of chaos, but nothing's perfect, I guess.

A lot of words to say that I agree with you: short of your team/company already being locked into the GH world, I can't imagine going back to GH

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Got to meet MS4S at Govt Cloud Conf in DC. The deal for premiere founders is $325K in Azure Credits. That's pre-seed level. No equity. Then post-incubation you can talk to MS Ventures for Seed Round. Auto-enrolled via YC SUS ;)

I also like the Azure Portal web panel. Powershell in the browser is fun to play with on simulations of clusters.

</comment><comment><USER15> Thank you, I am happy with GitLab.

</comment><comment><USER16> Kinda funny that they market their enterprise plan to startups.

<comment><USER17> This startup-focused "first drink is free" marketing effort for Enterprise software has been going for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Would companies have to worry about their proprietary code being seen and used in a not-so-obvious way?

If some start up is working on some novel ML algorithms, that has some nice demos out in the public showcasing their work, I wonder if these bigger companies would take a peek at the source code and use some ideas from the algos for their ml products. This would prevent start-up from expanding into other areas.

<comment><USER19> > Would companies have to worry about their proprietary code being seen and > used in a not-so-obvious way?

Does that happen when you use AWS or Azure? Enterprise is a completely different ball game, be it Microsoft, Google or Amazon.

The amount of value they will get by peeking will be insignificant as compared to the reputation loss they will suffer from enterprise customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I have a company I started with 2 university professors in the geospatial analytics space and as I work on building out the tech I am increasingly anxious about spending since we're pre-revenue and it's all out of my pocket for now. This Microsoft for Startups is appealing to me. Anyone know of any similar programs I should look into?

<comment><USER21> AWS activate.

[https://aws.amazon.com/activate/](https://aws.amazon.com/activate/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Startups requiring compliance documentation from GitHub were forced to upgrade to GH Enterprise. Many competitors provide this for free or a fraction of the price. An industry based on an open source language will naturally have a race to the bottom in terms of price.

GitHub's CLI is a move to get people off the open source solution by obfuscation.

<comment><USER23> The CLI is itself open source. Surely it can't be a huge barrier for competing software (GitLab, Gitea, etc) to implement its API.

<comment><USER24> It's still an open point of contention whether an API can be copyrighted. There's obvious benefits to GitHub to encourage the use of a 'gh' command over the 'git' command.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I would love to run this in my homelab with a few users, is there a path for that or do I need a registered company?

<comment><USER26> The answer appears to be: yes _you must be a privately held company_.

The FAQs for Microsoft for Startups [1] list the following requirements:

\- _You must be engaged in development of a software-based product or service that will form a core piece of you current or intended business - <USER2> software must be owned, not licensed._

\- _You cannot have received more than $10,000 of free Azure in the past._

\- _Your headquarters must reside in the countries covered by our Azure global infrastructure._

\- _You must be a privately held company._

\- _You must operate a public website on your own domain._

\- _Your contact email address domain must match your public website._

\- _Your funding information must be verifiable._

The FAQs also add that:

> _The qualified offer is designed to help companies that are focused on > growth, so it's less applicable for consultancies and small businesses. If > you are a small business or consultancy you can get started with a free > trial._

[1]: [https://startups.microsoft.com/en- us/benefits/#faq](https://startups.microsoft.com/en-us/benefits/#faq)

Note also that Microsoft's new offer is for GitHub Enterprise Cloud, not self- hosted GitHub Enterprise. GitLab is probably your best bet for a self-hosted GitHub alternative. [2]

[2]: [https://about.gitlab.com/install/](https://about.gitlab.com/install/)

<comment><USER25> Thanks for the info, looks like I had the wrong idea with the wrong product!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Am I the only one finding GHE vastly worse than GH.com? Or is my employer just running an old version?

</comment><comment><USER28> Reminder that this exists: [https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/](https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/) and is the preferred implementation of "web frontend to git" by Linus himself ( _ahem_ the creator of git)

<comment><USER8> cgit is a great git web frontend (I'm the guy who set it up on git.xfce.org back in 2009 or so), but it's a far cry from a full-project management solution like GH (or GitLab, or Bitbucket, or even Sourceforge, of all things).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Interesting, it looks like Microsoft has finally realized how unpopular they are among SV style startups. I've never been a fan of Windows but if there are enough perks in the program I would seriously consider using a Microsoft stack for a future startup.

<comment><USER30> I use Azure at work, honestly the Kuberentes/Docker support is pretty awesome. Not to mention the fact that they only run garbage collection after 28 days so if you accidentally destroy a production bucket with user images in it, support can easily get it back to you. (Yes this happened before)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Scam to create MSFT lock in. Devs are too smart to get snookered.

</comment><comment><USER32> Better go Gitlab

</comment><comment><USER33> I would not use GitHub these days.

On GitLab, you can decide to download all your data anytime and put it into a selfhosted GitLab instance.

Why would I want to give that up and put my balls into the hands of Microsoft?

<comment><USER34> Don't worry, soon you'll probably be able to put your balls in the hands of Google. Git is distributed by definition. If you really want to be free, stop using external centralized sc services.

<comment><USER28> they sunsetted code dot google dot com like 10 yrs ago...it's not coming back

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Ah the GitLab astroturfers are here

<comment><USER36> I mean, I use gitlab, gitea, github, and bitbucket all fairly regularly for different projects, and I haven't seen anything out of the gitlab posts here that I think is wrong.

People disagreeing with you and/or opposing the free offerings of a company known for embrace/extend/extinguish does not mean they're astroturfing.

<comment><USER35> They spam every GitHub post with "I use gitlab" regardless of the content.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Text privately with new people around you (my first iOS app) - <AUTHOR> http://tapchat.com

<comment><USER2> Promising idea!

I don't own an iPhone so I can't try it. :-(

An idea for growing the user base is to get people using it at a big conference where you already have a bunch of people near each other, who are already interested in networking. You could get a few of you to go round convincing people to install it. I think having an Android and/or web version first is a must though.

Also might be good at co-working spaces to help people get to know each other.

Anywhere where people already have the urge to want to get to know people around them.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

I created TapChat because I've always wanted to create a simple app to break the ice during networking events and meeting locals when I'm visiting new places. Basically an anonymous messaging app aimed at more professional use (no dating/cyber bullying). Figuring out the magic sauce for social local apps (it's hard! [1]) has always been a secret passion of mine.

I've spent about 2-3 months to design and create the app from concept to launch (including a couple of pivots and iterations). It has mostly been written in Swift and a mix of backend services written in Go, Python and Node.js. I'm heavily relying on realtime face detection on every picture to prevent abuse. I'm using the Realm.io database as the local database, Firebase for realtime updates and MongoDB for the geo index. I think this is also one of the first implementations of Twitter Digits for logging in with your phone number.

Let me know if you have any more questions about the technology I used behind the app. I've written up some more details about the app here: [https://medium.com/@teamtapchat/tapchat-a-whatsapp-for- stran...](https://medium.com/@teamtapchat/tapchat-a-whatsapp-for- strangers-2bcd8aa7d3a3)

PS: I'm aware of some bugs and crashes and am working hard on resolving them in the next update (after the holidays). Please check it out and tell me what you think about the general UI/UX while I iron out these wrinkles.

[1] [http://andrewchen.co/social-network-marketing-getting- from-z...](http://andrewchen.co/social-network-marketing-getting-from-zero-to- critical-mass)

<comment><USER3> I tried this and I was in Toronto. I was seeing people in SF. It seems you might want to fine tune your search radius.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Could you please help me appreciate OS X more? - <AUTHOR>

The Q&D version:
I'm a PHP and MySQL start up employee and run Gnome and Ubuntu at work and home for the last 6 years or so. Gnome is not pretty but its keybindings are consistent and simple. Debian package management is awesome for evaluating possible platform additions in a relatively native environment (lots of rpm boxes).
However, I bought a Macbook Pro to smooth over Linux's rough  home-use areas like phone syncing and media use, and because it had been so highly recommended as a development platform (after you got used to it, which is way less time than I have used it).
It looked promising and the hardware is way better, but what am I missing? TextMate? That package is pretty great but don't grok it yet.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I installed macports and emacs and kept using OSX like any other unix-like terminal. But in all honesty I prefer my freebsd box for dev over my osx laptop. Using standard unix foo on OSX isn't quite as clean as it is on bsd.

Except for the nice iphoto,safari,mail experiences where it's better to treat it like a nice GUI, they've done a pretty good job. If you're not happy with it, just go back to linux for dev and keep on with osx for your phone sync and media. Why make life hard for yourself?

</comment><comment><USER3> heh I have never heard of gnomes keybindings being called "consistent", they dont even have a consistent shortcut to close the window, let alone things like preferences.

that being said I work on osx and ubuntu most days and much prefer ubuntu, the osx window manager is pretty funky and underpowered compared to gnomes and theres a lot of annoyances to get around, the dock thats impossible to get rid of, having to change keyboard layouts etc etc.

I have been using the mac close to a year now and still seem to be in a fairly similiar situation of not being comfortable with it, I am just waiting for someone to make some nice hardware thats fully supported with ubuntu.

<comment><USER4> You can get rid of the dock when you have the cursor away from it. Check your preferences to change this. I also aligned the dock to the left-hand side to make it less obtrusive.

<comment><USER5> "Let me just grab the edge of this window OH HELLO THERE MISTER DOCK! Glad you decided to pop up right where I was clicking, now we can enjoy the wait while OpenOffice loads!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> First off, I think if you're not getting it, then that's OK and you shouldn't worry too much. I made a similar few attempts to love Linux, but while I could get along OK, I never came to feel at home there.

A lot of it is, I think, personal preference. Part of what I like about OSX is just the general logic by which everything hangs together-- but I wouldn't try to convince somebody who likes the way Windows is set up that they're "wrong."

That said, here are a number of specific things I like about OSX.

As a developer, I really like the integration between the command line and the GUI. Examples: (1) Command "open <thing>" equivalent to double-clicking <thing>. (2) Commands pbcopy and pbpaste move information to and from system- wide pasteboard. (3) Drag-and-drop an icon onto the Terminal window fills in its path. (4) Standard copy and paste keyboard commands work in Terminal.

As a person who just has to use a lot of software, I like a number of other things. The wide standardization of key bindings across apps means very short learning curve to get competent, and no mental remapping when jumping between apps.

Furthermore, I'm required to run MS Office for work, and I like the fact that it's no more painful than on a PC.

I guess overall, I would say that OSX gives me the feeling of control that Linux promises, without the feeling of needing to become an expert in everything that Linux often imposed on me.

</comment><comment><USER7> It is simple. People who have used Linux are not impressed as much by shinny things. I love my Mac becuase it is simple, clean and easy to use.

I have used Linux and it is more powerful and agile. Though Gnome is not as pretty and finished as OSX.

It is like Photoshop vs GIMP, InkScape vs Illustrator etc. The opensource software will get quite good, and in some ways better. Though it is not as polished.

It really comes down to what you can live without.

Dale

</comment><comment><USER8> Two comments: I think that the OmniGraffle and TexShop applications justify keeping an old Mac around. Excellent. Also, Macbooks run Ubuntu very well, especially models that are not brand new. I strongly recommend a dual boot OS X/Ubuntu setup: covers all the bases. That said, the Macbook could be a cheap used one, and spend your budget on a very fast i5 or i7 Windows/Ubuntu laptop.

</comment><comment><USER9> It has bash but with a lot of good software and hardware makers support it. Use mac ports. There are a lot of reasons to stick with ubuntu, just depends on how well you know linux, and how much time you want to spend on things when they don't work on linux. Otherwise you just have to stick with what apple allows, and but be happy with the stability.

</comment><comment><USER10> If you already use Vim or Emacs, I don't think you'll be blown away by TextMate. If you're coming from a lesser editor, definitely jump on it.

If you're missing a package manager, there's MacPorts. I've heard that HomeBrew is a good alternative, but have no personal experience with it.

If you're missing GNOME Do, or any of those command launcher programs, I recommend Quicksilver.

For a better terminal emulator than Terminal.app, there are a few options out there. I use iTerm. It supports 256-color and a bunch of other goodies.

Also, DTerm lets you open a terminal in the current working directory, based on the context of the currently active program.

<comment><USER10> Disclaimer: Personally, I only use my Mac for iPhone dev. I think it's inferior to Linux apart from media, phone sync, gaming, as you allude to.

I am underwhelmed with the interface. It's better than the Microsoft offerings, but it's not half as slick as it's touted to be. Despite what another user has said, I've found clashing keyboard shortcuts to be a problem, between XCode, spaces, etc. It's a bit of a PITA to get everything working just right.

GNOME may not be pretty, but I'd argue it's more functional.

Also, as an APT addict, it feels so clunky to go back to manual installation for everything.

I see Mac OS as the happy medium between Windows and Linux. You'll have to grab most of your software manually, and you won't be able to tweak everything to your heart's content, but you have access to a lot of commercial software, remappable shortcuts, POSIX compatibility (MacPorts), and more.

Keep in mind that if you ever have second thoughts, you can utilize VirtualBox or BootCamp to run your favorite OS, whether it's Windows, Linux, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Welcome to OSX. TextMate is a must (smultron ain't bad either). Get visor for terminal, it is a productivity boost.

And be sure to get quicksilver - it's acting without doing. Quicksilver + TextMate alone will save the day on OS X anyday. I promise.

</comment><comment><USER12> Quicksilver, with its magical plugins, will save you tones of time. I also have a mouse with many functions (hooray for Logitech), so I tend to bind those to Exposé.

</comment><comment><USER13> Run Windows for a few weeks ;)

<comment><USER14> If it's Vista, I'd agree, but Windows 7 is quite stellar.

The question that no one has been able to answer is: why is this Mac: [http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MC372LL/A?mco=MTc0Njg1OD...](http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MC372LL/A?mco=MTc0Njg1ODg) selling for $1999

and this PC: [http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/notebooks/inspiron-1564/pd.as...](http://www.dell.com/us/en/home/notebooks/inspiron-1564/pd.aspx?refid=inspiron-1564&s=dhs&cs=19&~oid=us~en~29~inspiron-1564-anav_3~~) selling for $829

Both have a 15 inch display, 4GB RAM, 500GB HD, and an Intel Core i5 processor. Is having OS X worth more than double the price? If I go with the PC, for $1999 I could buy one for home (running Windows 7) and one for the office (running Ubuntu), and still have money for a printer and digital camera.

<comment><USER15> If you really compare and read both specs/offers you'll see the following;

0\. with the apple price you also buy esthetics. Not a real point for most anti apple guys. But i care if i use the device daily and talk to customers.

1\. Please add $139.99 to the price for the upgrade from windows 7 home to ultimate. (Ultimate is the closest to the variant free Mac OS X) You could also add some $ for the iLife packages you get with the $1999 price.

2\. dell screen should be (reading their own spec) 1280×720 versus MBP 1440x900 resolution.

3\. dell CPU = 2.26 GHz vs MBP CPU = 2.53GHz

4\. wireless-G on the dell vs wireless-N on the apple.

5\. gigabit NIC for the apple vs 100mbit nic on the dell.

6\. FW800 on the apple, AFAIK not on the dell.

7\. shouldn't you add shipping costs for the dell?

As others already said:

8\. aluminium casing vs plastic is a real difference if you compare them in reality. But not everybody cares the same way about this fact.

9\. size between devices.

10\. backlit keyboard and multitouch trackpad on the apple and not on the dell. I know that this is not important for a lot of people so that's why it's stated last.

But the dell wins on video card memory!

There's your answer.

<comment><USER14> My point is that even if the Dell isn't an exact match feature for feature, I can get 2.5 of them for the same price as one Macbook Pro.

But just for fun, I picked a different Dell laptop, with a quad core i7, 1920x1080 15.6" screen, wireless N + WiMAX card, Windows 7 Ultimate, and it's still only $1584.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some apps and stuff:

Coda or Espresso, (html IDEs) Adobe Creative Suite, ('nuff said if working with Bitmaps, Flash, Vectors et al) Terminal.app, (CLI love) UNIX (tm), (a full blown unix under the hoods) CSSEdit, (css editing) TextMate or BBEdit, (programmers' editor) Scrivener, (writers' editor) Navicat, (MySQL admin) MAMP and MAMP Pro (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP stack), MacPorts (app repository), Vim, Emacs, MySQL, Postgresql, Python, Ruby et al (familiar unixy apps), Automator (task automation), Omnigraffle (graphs), sips (CLI image editing), Pixelmator (image editing), Transmit 4, (ftp client) Little Snitch, (application firewall)

Just google for the above...</comment>


Rules Won't Save Twitter. Values Will - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/08/opinion/twitter-alex-jones-jack-dorsey.html <comment><USER2> If the New York Times wants to clean up Twitter they can start with their own staff. They just hired one of the more toxic Twitter personalities to their editorial board:

[https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1025437806775226368](https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1025437806775226368)

</comment><comment><USER3> Rules are set after consideration of values.

I am with Jack on this one. You don't just change rules because everyone else is doing it. What Kara and a lot of other groupthinkers don't realize is how prejudgemental they actually are.

</comment><comment><USER4> >His intent was to tamp down widespread rumors that Twitter was "shadow banning" — who comes up with these creepy terms? — some conservative users.

Slurring her political opponents as 'creepy'...does she think people are buying that dirty rhetorical trick in 2018?

<comment><USER5> It's possible I'm being pessimistic, but it seems to me that readers/listeners are more willing to rally around dirty rhetorical tricks in the past few years than any other time I can remember.

<comment><USER6> you're just paying more attention

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like Kara could have made a relatively persuasive argument about different moderation styles and whether it makes sense for us to care more about adherence to a system than making a positive change but I feel like this one kind of missed the mark. It's essentially just a rant about how Twitter won't ban someone she, and a lot of other people, don't like.

I completely agree with her that Twitter, or really any online community, would be better with subjective human driven moderation guided by values but I see two main issues: moderators have to be angels with nigh perfect knowledge and human moderation doesn't scale.

Communities above a certain size are going to struggle with this until the end of time. The only change Twitter can reasonably make isn't to their moderation strategy but platform changes to make Twitter feel smaller. Some examples:

\- Only allowing people who you follow to reply to your Tweets and giving posters the ability to disable replies for individual messages or account-wide to stop worldwide dogpiling.

\- Changing the default tweet to be protected and having more fine grained controls to limit their audience.

\- Making popularity metrics on tweets visible only to the author.

\- Hiding retweets be default.

</comment><comment><USER8> The best description I've heard of twitter is that it's a mirror disguised as a window. Twitter can be great for getting a diverse perspective that most people wouldn't otherwise have access to. It can also turn into an echo chamber that only reinforces and amplifies your existing biases. If what you see on twitter is hate, vitriol, and groupthink then maybe what's ugly is you, not the world you think you're observing.

I am not sure what good banning people from the service does. I don't think it stops people from thinking outrageous and hurtful things. It just moves them elsewhere and makes them less likely to encounter people who could help them be more civil and less sensational.

<comment><USER9> Social media in general can turn into an echo chamber quite quickly.

But so can traditional media, as there used to be a newspaper for every opinion out there...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> unfortunately, I'm not sure I really buy this.

Twitter was basically about to allow Nuclear war to start on its platform. Alex Jones is kinda a foot note comparatively.

Anyways, unfortunately I think a president that gas lights everyone via twitter is what has saved twitter...</comment>


Brewer's CAP Theorem - <AUTHOR> http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap-theorem

<comment><USER2> And, if you need to explain it to anyone outside of CS: [http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/07/h2h-sex-sells- explaini...](http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/07/h2h-sex-sells-explaining- cap-theorem-to.html)</comment>


The Engoodening of No Man's Sky [video] - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/O5BJVO3PDeQ <comment><AUTHOR> The video tells the story of No Man's Sky, the buildup of unmeetable expectations prior to it's release, the online anger towards the game developers after the game's dissapointing release, and the hard work of those developers to not only fix the game post-release but also extend it.</comment>


Caltech develops electronic nose - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news112269287.html

<comment><USER2> I predict a blockbuster movie next summer featuring armed robots that can find you by smell.</comment>


A curated list of movies every hacker and cyberpunk must watch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/k4m4/movies-for-hackers <comment><USER2> I missed one of my favorites: Office Space.

[http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/](http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/)</comment>


100 Years Of Propaganda: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/13/100-years-of-propaganda-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ <comment><USER2> I'm really surprised that the author didn't mention the propaganda cartoons that came out of Hollywood during World War II. Pretty much all the great American cartoonists and animation studios produced propaganda films. There's a huge number of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Popeye, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, etc... cartoons that were made during the war: [http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bugs+bunny+world...](http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bugs+bunny+world+war+2+cartoons&aq=0)

Also, Dr. Seuss aka Theodor Geisel did a lot of political Cartooning during World War II: <http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dspolitic/Frame.htm>

<comment><USER3> Another surprising omission was the "Lord Kitchener Wants You" poster (inspiration for "I Want You For U.S. Army")

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _There is no doubts about the immorality and emotional deception of these designs; they are still worth mentioning because they were extremely powerful and effective at the time._

There is an odd double-standard when this note is appended to a discussion of Nazis, when there isn't a similar one about the communists. In fact, one of the Nazi posters in question appears to be from an _election_ (the other one is about the military). Compare that to the numerous posters of communists invading countries, defending countries, killing the rich, etc.

It's also too bad the author used the BNP as an example of modern propaganda. Their graphic design is awful, and they're using way too much copy. I just wish there was a recent election in which one-word slogans and iconographic images had been deployed in order to get people emotionally attached to someone...

<comment><USER5> There is also a double-standard when you append it _only_ to Nazi and Communists discussions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> And you'll find that portrait of Che Guevara on high school and college campuses nationwide on the t-shirts of students who have no idea who he is.

<comment><USER7> Not to mention on Mike Tyson's flank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The Imperial War Museum has a great collection of art including a lot of propaganda posters:

<http://www.iwmprints.org.uk/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Have people seen the clip of an aged Edward Bernays saying he coined phrase "Public Relations" because the word "propaganda" had acquired negative connotations? Public relations is just propaganda for corporations.

Too bad this article doesn't cover that.

<comment><USER10> One long documentary that includes that clip is "The Century of Self" by Adam Curtis (search archive.org for higher quality videos) which practically centers around Edward Bernays, the "father of Public Relations".

link: <http://www.archive.org/details/AdaCurtisCenturyoftheSelf_0> (part 1 of 4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's interesting to consider how propaganda is widely associated with totalitarian regimes. Propaganda is a means of stopping people from thinking in favor of giving them prefabricated conclusions--do only bad ideas truly benefit from propaganda?</comment>