Conspiracy Theories, Denial, and the Coronavirus - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/conspiracy-theories-denial-and-the-coronavirus <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/x5qgg](http://archive.is/x5qgg)

</comment><comment><USER3> > "The glorification of convicted war criminals, the denial of genocide and > war crimes, and bitter disputes around conflicting commemorations all create > an environment of perpetual division that is gradually becoming the norm."

Taking the specific example of (as it was then) yugoslavia, an environment of freshly perpetual division (stoked in those times mainly by radio and TV) was what started the bloodshed.

I know refugees whose conspiracy theory is that that division had been helped by outside forces. I think they're optimists, and Solzhenitsyn called it more accurately:

> "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, > and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy > them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every > human being."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23613311](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23613311)

</comment><comment><USER4> How can you really argue with the thesis that anyone who argues with the thesis is a denialist and a conspiracy theorist?

It takes a special kind of elitism to assume a conclusion from an unposed argument as a premise for an opinion piece likening public policy disagreements to genocide, all the while with no sense of irony hand-wringing about partisan media outlets and institutional decay.

People like this author are exactly why the tenor of our national discourse has gone off the rails into crazy territory. Well-traveled, well-educated and blinded by their own arrogance.

<comment><USER5> If you have a thesis that goes against well established facts and you meet that by not re-evaluating your stance but by blaming the media for not supporting your altered facts, then yes you are a conspiracy theorist.

I don't see where "elitism" comes in here. When you are wrong, you are wrong.

<comment><USER6> It seems that reality (that is, the narrative of events supported by facts and evidence, the things that actually happened) and truth are no longer the same.

As Henriquez inadvertently makes clear, he doesn't need to address the facts. He can simply say that his course of events is just as valid as that of the "elites", with their "evidence" and "facts". He can (and does) dress it up with bullshit wordy adjectives, and he can (and does) make it somehow not even _about_ the facts, not even _about_ reality, but instead about some kind of weird fucked up culture war. You'll note he doesn't mention facts even once; the very idea of evidence isn't present. Those who deal in fact, the people he rails against, are powerless when people ascribe zero weight to those facts.

<comment><USER4> I have not denied any facts or reality, yet you attack personally while missing my point. Here, to clarify:

1\. Does the coronavirus pandemic exist? Yes.

2\. Has it killed a lot of people? Obviously.

My point is that how we respond to that threat is a public policy debate. The author of this piece doesn't make his position clear or offer evidence either, instead he simply compares disagreement with his preferred consensus to a genocide and related coverup, all the while drawing parallels to "some kind of weird fucked up culture war" (as you put it) and vaguely posing the "how did we even come to this" drama trope.

"disagreement == genocide"; statements like that are how we've come to this and why we face the institutional decay the author decries.

TFA is arguing in bad faith pure and simple. That's why facts aren't relevant here, not to be confused with facts don't matter. Facts matter, but you don't argue with [not an argument].

<comment><USER6> Genuine question; did that atrocity happen? Was it real? I know what I think, but maybe you disagree.

<comment><USER4> You're asking if I believe in genocide against Muslims?

<comment><USER6> I guess your refusal to actually answer that straight, simple question says it all.

<comment><USER4> I was just trying to clarify your actual question after spending two posts explaining why genocide is not relevant to U.S. public policy (or at least how this particular article fails to establish so).

To answer, I wasn't there, I don't know but based on the information available I assume it _did_ happen.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GitHub: October 21 Incident Report - <AUTHOR> https://blog.github.com/2018-10-21-october21-incident-report/ <comment><USER2> I saw some comments on reddit which highlighted a pretty serious problem - many orgs rely on github as a fully integrated CD platform, with everything from code hosting, to running CI hooks, to pushing to staging or prod.

It seems very unwise to have essentially your whole deployment process manager in the hands of an entity which you don't only have no control over, but which has regularly been targeted in attacks by nation-state-level actors because of their role as a code hosting platform.

EDIT: GH hasn't been targeted regularly, but it has been so historically, so this is a plausible thing which might happen again.

<comment><USER3> It's a tradeoff, just like anything else.

We use Github heavily at my work, and at past jobs as well. But at the same time it's not the ONLY way we can work. If github has an outage, our CD will shut down, but we can still run all tests locally, and we can still push to the server directly, and we can still push code between ourselves manually and review it.

Sure, it's a hiccup in our day when it goes down, but it's not like the entire company grinds to a halt. And the alternative of maintaining servers and systems to replicate all of that would take significantly more time, potentially cost more, and is probably more likely to go down.

<comment><USER4> On premises git hosting with Gittea or GitLab with mirrors to GitHub seems like a smart idea going forward.

<comment><USER5> But then you have to host it and maintain it. It's a slippery slope. How many 3rd party services do you in-house with hosted OS software. Pretty soon you're spending a huge chunk of your time doing ops work. And, where do you host it? On AWS, which can also go down, or on hardware hosted at your office. With on premise hosting, now you're in the hardware game too.

<comment><USER6> Well, your code is your companies' IP. It might be prudent to have that IP on- prem(eg Gitlab). Every business has varying requirements, but I've yet to be employed at one using 3rd party hosting for source control without an on-site mirror. Disclaimer: my employment has been at megacorps so far, smaller shops may not do this.

<comment><USER3> with git, you have a mirror on every single developer machine (kinda... depending on what you consider "all" of the code).

We also have a full copy on our CI server (which is hosted on another service, so still not "in-house"), and we have a copy of at least the master branch (and all it's history) on our production boxes (which also gets pulled into our whole backup system there).

In a disaster recovery scenario, that's more than enough for me.

Sure, if github blinked out of existence we would probably be at a fraction of our normal productivity for a while until we fully recover everything and find new workflows, but the risk vs reward there is well within the margins of what I'd consider acceptable for a company like us.

<comment><USER7> > In a disaster recovery scenario

That's not really enough. You need more than "all the code is around here somewhere" you need a plan with specific steps that have been tested.

<comment><USER8> Honestly for git, it probably is enough. We're talking about someone deleting your github account or github closing overnight with no warning (it's been acquired by Microsoft, so it's much more likely that the company you're working for will shutter). It should take ~30 minutes to push your repo to another provider including looking up instructions. Unlike database backups, there is rarely any data loss and any data loss should be recoverable. It's also not client-facing, but is a temporary problem similar to wifi going down at your office. An inconvenience and hassle, yes. Long-term problem, no.

Furthermore, the problem with these disaster scenarios are that there are much more dangerous problems than your account being deleted. Someone with admin access, could insert a back door or sell your source code to someone else. That's honestly scarier.

<comment><USER9> That's probably the case for valley-style startups where the whole team can fit in a room and they all hack on the same handful of repos, but most "enterprise" customers will have hundreds of repos with not necessarily anybody hacking on most of them at any given moment. It's very good policy for such organizations to have a plan in place to "break glass in case Github is down" with local mirroring of all data and a tested process for doing deploys without Github.

<comment><USER6> We have exactly that... in our DR plan, there is a section for how to cope with the 3rd party source control provider being unavailable/compromised/etc. Update DNS for the equivalent of "upstream-git.foo.com" to an internal address, and continue business as usual.

It's like you said, smaller shops probably think it's over-planning and overkill, but we do indeed have 100's of projects that are "mission critical", that might not have been touched in 1+ years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yeah, we're still facing issues with, erm, Github issues.

Also, while they haven't updated this blog post for a while, their status page has been very up-to-date and informative: [https://status.github.com/messages](https://status.github.com/messages)

<comment><USER11> > very up-to-date and informative

Is that satire? It said 2-hour ETA 5 hours ago and the last update was over two hours ago.

<comment><USER12> I see an update 7 minutes ago.

>12:56 British Summer Time

>The majority of restore processes have completed. We anticipate all data stores will be fully consistent within the next hour.

<comment><USER13> Every hour they promise something will be done until the next hour. I haven't been able to work all day so far.

<comment><USER14> Consider this a lesson on serverlessness. (We have been similarly afflicted, but their git backend seems to be up; and even further, we have rediscovered what we stopped paying attention to: that with Git, a centralized repo is just a convenience, not a requirement.)

<comment><USER13> Yes, I agree, but here it's not up to me to choose the infrastructure.

I wonder what the total cost of this ordeal must be. Surely in the tens of millions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On the plus side, this disastrous calamity by Github really made me try out Gitlab and in the process, I will now set-up a second remote on my repo's:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11690709/can-a- project-h...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11690709/can-a-project-have- multiple-origins)

      Quoted:
      "Try adding a remote called "github" instead:

       $ git remote add github
       https://github.com/Company_Name/repository_name.git

       # push master to github
       $ git push github master

       # Push my-branch to github and set it to track github/my-branch
       $ git push -u github my-branch

       # Make some existing branch track github instead of origin
       $ git branch --set-upstream other-branch github/other-branch"

Actually, I don't know why I pay for Github private repo's.. I might as well set-up two origins, one at Gitlab and one at Bitbucket, for all my privates. Then keep Github as a public front-facing portal.

<comment><USER16> Every company at some point has some kind of incidents. It just happens. GitHub is most of the time rock solid and doesn't deserve to be judged based on one major incident like this. On the contrary they need our support. Bitbucket and GitLab both have had problems of the same magnitude.

<comment><USER15> But a multiple origin solution seems the most sensical. We have failover for everything infra and services.. it seems we now need failover for cloud-based code. It just seems logical, especially if all 3 of the big cloud providers have big incidents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ugh I detest the term " abundance of caution " as used in that message. Weasel words designed to stop you thinking about the problem as who wouldn't want them to be overly cautious

<comment><USER18> It's not that bad. X definitely modifies Y but it may also modify Z. You are informing the audience of this fact and it provides them with 'warm fuzzies'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > During this time, information displayed on GitHub.com is likely to appear > out of date;

if the new data is not presented, users will typically retry which may result in duplicated new content.

<comment><USER20> Happened to me already. Created a new branch but it kept me informing me the non-existence, retried a few times and shortly after was created with a bunch of duplicates.

<comment><USER21> Same here, but last night I was trying to post a comment to another repo, refreshed and tried again like 5 times before realizing there was an outage and it wasn't on my end. This morning that issue has 5 dupe comments (so I look like an idiot), and deleting them does nothing; they just reappear when I refresh the issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As long as the same problem doesn't occur again, I have no hard feelings against them.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow, is this still going on? I noticed this yesterday and figured it would be fixed in a few hours, but [GitHub's status page][1] is still showing red. Is this the longest outage GitHub has had?

[1]: [https://status.github.com/messages](https://status.github.com/messages)

</comment><comment><USER24> This incident report tells very little. I hope they release what actually happened and how it affected their services. And how they are going to avoid it in the future. Almost any issue can be publicly described as: stuff broke because of network.

<comment><USER25> "Partition failure" is a relatively specific term of art that implies it was a partial database failure, so "stuff broke because we lost part of a database".

It may not be in GitHub's best interest to describe much more than that because which database, which tables, and how they were partitioned can be secret performance sauce.

Postgres partitioning: [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/ddl- partitioning....](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/ddl- partitioning.html) Redis partitioning: [https://redis.io/topics/partitioning](https://redis.io/topics/partitioning)

<comment><USER26> "Network partition" is unrelated to partial database failure or database partitioning. It means that database servers got disconnected from each other. Normally this shouldn't be a problem, but as far as I know they don't use proper distributed algorithms and so it's possible that disconnected servers each became masters and were serving requests independently, which is why they speak about inconsistencies. I believe this problem is commonly known as split brain [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split- brain_(computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain_\(computing\))

<comment><USER25> It's not "unrelated", it's an intertwined phenomenon, especially in practical consequences. In Redis, as one primary example I already mentioned, all database partitioning is network partitioning (and vice versa). The logical object is still a "database" even if the physical object suffering problems is the "network".

For similar reasons that you suppose they "don't use proper distributed algorithms" (which seems an overly harsh way to put it), I simply presumed the logical entity in question is still a "database", even in the case of a network partition problem. I don't think it was either Postgres or Redis in this case, but they are simple enough examples to illustrate the overall problem.

Either way, my case still seems to stand that we aren't likely to get more information about the specifics of the partition failure because likely both the logical (which "database") and physical layer specifics (which datacenters/"network") are things that are internal to GitHub that they may not be able to publicly describe much more than what they have.

<comment><USER24> It doesn't really matter what they used, I just pointed out that their incident report is BS. I can blame virtually any production problem on network, but the ugly truth is - it is not networks fault in most of cases, but fault of engineers who developed the system with unreasonable assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't understand why code hosting platforms like GitHub, GitLab or BitBucket have so many issues regularly. Is there anything special about it?

<comment><USER28> Define regularly.

I can recall only 2 incidents this year. I think that's not too bad considering the level of traffic they have to contend with.

<comment><USER29> Considering this is going on for several hours now, their SLA is down to at least 99.9 and going down by the hour. Their business SLA is 99.95% (though I have no idea what it refers to), so it's quite possible that they are in breach.

Still not bad, but 2 incidents like this a year, is usually considered unacceptable for infrastructure service providers.

<comment><USER30> I wonder how they define their SLA though. If only some of the features are down, does it impact the SLA?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It would be interested to know what was the cause of the network partition failure.

</comment><comment><USER32> Something that struck me yesterday as this started, is that Github isn't really just a dvcs hosting solution, Github is a social network.

It's easy to change the remote origin of a git repository. It's not hard to migrate a project to Gitlab etc, and duplicate all the technical features of Github.

What's really hard is replacing the social graph. If you're a large project with a lot of contributors, onboarding everyone is not going to be easy. About as easy as convincing all your friends to stop using Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER33> > Further, this incident only impacted website metadata stored in our MySQL > databases, such as issues and pull requests.

Basically the only things I was going to do on Github today :)

</comment><comment><USER34> Why bother telling people five incorrect estimates for service recovery?

[https://twitter.com/sneakdotberlin/status/105434537971655884...](https://twitter.com/sneakdotberlin/status/1054345379716558849)

After one or two wrong guesses it just shows that you're making it up.

</comment><comment><USER35> I hope they are going to provide a better RCA than that!

<comment><USER36> Sure, but I don't think they have the time since the outage is still ongoing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Don't try creating a new repo, it will create part of the meta data but not allow you to see or use the repo and the repo name gets taken.

<comment><USER38> I created a new repository at about 9 UTC, and it started to work some of the time at 12 UTC — I've pushed the code from my computer, and pulled it from elsewhere.

However, it's still intermittently failing as of 14 UTC, so I haven't managed a Maven release build yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> GitHub also silently published a private repo of mine this week. I checked audit logs for both the owner user and the org and it didn't show a permissions change anywhere.

Netlify has caused me to stop using GitHub Pages and between the clownshoes outage reports and the security issue I am now a GitLab user.

This is GitHub's jump the shark episode. :(

<comment><USER39> Gitlab has had its own issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This was a head-on blow for MS?

</comment><comment><USER41> Also discussed there: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271180](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271180)

</comment><comment><USER42> As I rearrange today's todo list, I recall wishing that I'd used the Microsoft purchase event to encourage folks to increase their familiarity with gitlab. So I now note:

[https://gitlab.com/explore/projects](https://gitlab.com/explore/projects) is a live feed of project activity, suitable for code surfing. It also sorts by stars and trending.

</comment><comment><USER43> Lets do a quick back of the envelope calculation:

Github reports 28,337,706 users by 2018-06-05 [1]. Lets assume 50% of these are active. Lets also assume that, due to the unavailability of GH, around 2 usable hours per developer are lost. Another assumption is that each developer contributes around 50 US$ per hour.

This means, this outage has cost us users: (28337706 * .5 * 2 * 50) = 1.351 billion US$.

Perhaps not use MySQL for such critical systems?

[1] [https://github.com/search?q=type:user&type=Users](https://github.com/search?q=type:user&type=Users)

<comment><USER44> The assumption that developer time is lost when Github is unavailable is wrong. The whole idea of Git being a distributed VCS that it does not require any connection to the main server (i.e. Github) to work with a local copy of the repository. If Github is down, I can still do my work locally and then push changes to Github when it's back online. The only case when I may get blocked, is when I need to fetch project dependencies hosted on Github to do the initial build of my project, which doesn't happen very often.

<comment><USER45> But you are ignoring a huge component of using github. If you only use github as a central, shared repo, sure you lost almost nothing. Their git infra seemed to be operational throughout this, but if you use the major features of github: issues, PRs, review, webhooks for CI, etc, you probably did lose out on developer time.

Me and my team pushed tons of code to origin today (JST btw), but we were almost at a stand still as far as merging to master and closing out branches. Github being down had a huge affect on the process -- review, merging and CI success. Merging was our big one since we have protected branches via github -- master; CI was second since we received no webhook events. So either we wait it out (~8 hours) or we throw out our process and do something different until they fix it. The later didnt seem like a reasonable course of action.

github != git

Its easy to say, "well they are down, that doesnt affect git", but the reality is that a lot of orgs dont just use git. They use github. That fact envelopes a lot of process, routine, infra, schedule, money, etc. Luckily, its only been one day. But developer time has definitely beem lost. You cant reasonably say otherwise if you use github.

edit: I will say I dont fully agree with the GP. Blaming the downtime on MySQL is silly and coming up with dollars lost is over the top. Things happen. That comment was a weird attack on a reasonably stable database. Github had a bad day; it happens.

<comment><USER15> Going forward, I see that the sensible solution for all small companies relying on cloud-hosted git is to always have a secondary cloud provider at all times.

<comment><USER45> > Which brings into question... what is so special about the "front-end" > features that Git provides? ... bare bones skeleton that we can swap in/out > at will

Your comment disappeared. I think you had a good point. And itd be cool if it could be a real thing, but...

I dont disagree. But our team realized that we rely almost too much on github; we just decided to put up with it. Is there a solution that doesnt depend on running your own "github"? My infra lead and I had the usual, fun tongue and cheek chat that began with... them: "maybe its time we switch to gitlab", me: "can we be up tomorrow?" Weve had that same discussion many times before.

In the end, it comes down to process. If you buy into the features, PRs, CI hooks, etc, then its really hard to just say "well we can maintain and replicate the alternative for the .1% edge-case". Otherwise, you might as well just use that and not github, gitlab, etc. Its hard to decouple from github. They do that by nature -- dev still continues; they are a piece of the process puzzle. I think abstracting them away just complicates things unnecessarily.

<comment><USER15> Ah yeah, it disappeared because I thought I would get more reads If I moved it up in the post chain lol.

May I ask what makes your company feel secure about using cloud hosted solutions. I mean, can't a disgruntled employee easily clone the git repo to his own GitHub account ? I suppose they could do that anyways, just by copying the repo somewhere, but having an entire company's secret code on the cloud just seems to remove too many barriers of entry for protecting the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> GitHub team seems to be _VERY_ unprofessional. 15 hour outage means ~99.82% availability which is extremely bad. 9 hours ago they also told that they would fix the problem within 2 hours... still not fixed!!!

<comment><USER47> In order to objectively assess their level of professionalism, you'd need to know what happened, and what's going on in there right now. Think about it this way - can someone break things where you work right now to cause an outage of this magnitude? For all places that I've worked the answer would be "yes, of course".

<comment><USER15> It doesn't matter, really. Its a black box from a business perspective. Some users have lost faith, and some people will migrate to other solutions. Regardless of how fair or unfair the incident was, it is a fact that it was poor up-time especially for such an important cloud provider for code.

<comment><USER47> Making decisions based on a single event is risky. One could even argue that an event of this magnitude is likely to cause significant improvements in reliability. And you just paid the price for that as a user, so unless they keep failing repeatedly, you may be better off sticking with them.

<comment><USER26> > One could even argue that an event of this magnitude is likely to cause > significant improvements in reliability.

Doesn't happen in practice and usually the whole thing is just blamed on "process" with subsequent "process changes".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Common Lisp, Typing and Mathematics (2001) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~sergerar/Papers/Ezcaray.pdf <comment><USER2> I love reading stuff like this, but I also hate reading stuff like this. On the one hand, it confirms once more how wonderful & useful Common Lisp is; on the other, it depresses me how much our industry as a whole refuses to use such a valuable tool.

<comment><USER3> Sometimes I need to remember that the top of the mountain is narrower than its base.

At the same time, less people adventure themselves near the top. Most of them go to the beach. It's fun there too but not the same thing.</comment></comment>


Why Haskell is beyond ready for Prime Time - <AUTHOR> http://intoverflow.wordpress.com/2009/01/13/why-haskell-is-beyond-ready-for-prime-time/ <comment><USER2> Advanced languages like Haskell will never reach Prime Time in the sense of the term because they're too challenging. Similar to the "Python Paradox," except that Python's easy to learn. There's a strange appeal (that we all still can relate to) that's led people to prefer simple junk like ColdFusion to better-designed, more useful languages over the years.

<comment><USER3> Object orientation eventually "won" in the market. Unfortunately, it was adopted by the general programming public in the form of Java, not Smalltalk.

It seems like functional programming is similarly "winning" as an idea. Anyone who thinks about programming much agrees that a language where you can't pass a function as a value, or construct functions at runtime, is pretty broken.

The question then, is whether Haskell is the new Smalltalk of functional programming, and what language will play the role of the functional programming Java.

<comment><USER4> I think part of Lisp's success was that academics liked it, so when they did clever stuff, it was related to Lisp. Today, it seems that academics like Haskell (is it true?), and so when they think of clever stuff, it will be related to Haskell.

The "Java of FP" could be C# or F# (although Microsoft isn't willing to go multi-platform, so that might stop it becoming "successful", by many definitions).

But honestly, I don't think there is a powerful enough vector available to carry FP. C had Unix. Java had the net. A novel way to think about the next "Java of FP" is to think of what vector could matter, and then what FP language is well-placed to be carried by it.

Mobile phones are all I can think of at the moment, but no FP has come of it; the netbooks (which are becoming phones) are plain ol' PCs; and the iPhone runs Objective-C (doesn't it?). What's the next IT revolution?

Actually, time_management is right: the next IT revolution is clearly multi- core.

 _EDIT_ : I keep hearing about Intel's CUDA for multicore on GPU's, but it's pretty much the anti-FP, being "recursion free" <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#Limitations>

<comment><USER5> There's a project called GpuGen intended to allow the compilation of Haskell code to CUDA.

[http://www.galois.com/blog/2008/08/29/gpugen-bringing-the- po...](http://www.galois.com/blog/2008/08/29/gpugen-bringing-the-power-of- gpus-into-the-haskell-world/)

There's also something similar called Obsidian:

<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3016>

<comment><USER5> And if you'd prefer to read the original papers, rather than presentation slides...

<http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/papers/gpugen.pdf>

[http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~joels/writing/dccpaper_obsidian....](http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~joels/writing/dccpaper_obsidian.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Rather than writing blog articles touting how great your favorite language is for general purpose programming you should write some code.

When you have more non-trivial applications written in Haskell than a Haskell compiler and a DVCS it will be a lot more credible to talk about it being ready for 'Prime Time'.

<comment><USER7> I'll give the same reply as was given in the comment thread of the article, which you apparently didn't read.

<http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html>

<comment><USER6> Hasn't changed since I last looked at it. Still a big clusterfuck of esoteric math libraries, wrappers for useful things written in other (practical) languages, and a handful of half finished clones of libraries and applications first written 10 or 20 years ago in C.

<comment><USER8> about a package a day is being added to hackage, so my guess is that you are just spewing uninformed bullshit.

you don't know anything about haskell, hackage, or anything related. stop commenting until you do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author is asserting that Haskell, the language and the tools, is ready for `Prime Time'. There is also a sustainable community of smart and enthusiastic Haskell hackers.

The developer mainstream may not be quite ready for Haskell, but Haskell is ready for them.

EDIT: Meant to be in reply to thomasmallen: "Advanced language like Haskell..."

<comment><USER10> Is the developer mainstream any better than it used to be?

<comment><USER11> I think it is or will be soon enough. The internet made communication between geographically disparate developers so much easier. It's become mature enough that there are sites now where curious developers can congregate and exchange ideas.

When I started in the field the internet wasn't on the radar of businesses. Email accounts were uncommon never mind blog sites. Most book stores didn't carry books on academic topics. Besides, the wave of OO was just starting to gather so 9 out of 10 books were on OO or C++ or both.

Developers are now exposed to more and can share code and techniques. More complex problems are shared now causing curious developers to stretch their limits.

The largest problem I see now with adoption of Haskell is the us/them mentality of field trained developers vs. academically trained ones. I'm in the former group. While not all academically trained developers code/design well, the median one has been exposed to a wider range of coding problems and tools. Our ability to share ideas and problems on the internet levels that playing field if we let it.

In short, yes, mainstream developers are ready for Haskell/Lisp/OCaml/etc. We need to get over the "that's just for academics" mentality. They are tools, thought out by people with lots of brains and time on their hands, to solve problems. The only thing holding us back is our mentality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Being able to search for functions/libraries by type signatures is very, very useful.

<comment><USER13> Though thinking about functions/libraries in terms of their type signatures is, in itself, a pretty new concept to a lot of people.

<comment><USER14> I remember, about a week into my exposure to Ocaml, asking what a functor was. "It's a function from a module to a module."

My response was along the lines of, _What?_ It turns out, though, that Ocaml functors are really cool and can provide some of the functionality of Haskell's type classes.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Simple app-to-app messaging with a hosted server and common interface - <AUTHOR> http://dropfrog.io

<comment><USER2> This is a really cool service, but I have some questions after reading through everything:

\- You say it is HTTPS over a persistent TCP connection, does this mean I can make standard HTTP request... Like using xhr from JavaScript?

\- Any plans for SDKs or libraries? Example code in popular languages perhaps...

\- How is this different from Parse? (Except less developed)

Also, some feedback:

\- Make it easier to understand the main benefits quickly, I had to read the small text

\- I love the simplicity of the product, keep it simple \- The pricing is weird... Not sure what to recommend, but $1.50 just seems weird. Too low?

edit: formatting

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. This is a great community. I would love to have more examples on the site. I have included a fully functional Java client on the code page, and will be looking at Objective-C/Swift as well as your suggestion for JavaScript. Asynchronous-response-capable and HTTPS is the basic requirement...if the XHR works I will post the examples on the site.

Regarding comparisons, the DropFrog emphasis is ephemeral messaging--the API is all about communication/messaging between the connected clients and when there are no more channel participants, the channel is destroyed. I have also toyed with the idea of adding limited persistent storage capability; will be listening to feedback.

The pricing is rock bottom, but designed to be sustainable with the current feature set.

<comment><USER2> Ephemeral messaging sounds cool, you should plug that somewhere on your site. Standing out will be good for business.

My initial concern is connection stability issues. What happens if the client's connection drops out for a period of time? Do clients have to explicitly leave the channel?

My team was estimating a story recently which could have used this, but we didn't want to spend the time and effort to build a whole infrastructure for one message. This would have been perfect! If I find some time, I'll give it a try and send you my feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> A client TCP connection close, whether intentional or due to network failure, does quickly remove the participant from the channel.

<comment><USER2> Got it... I'm not sure I understand the use case for this tool then?

In a browser, the TCP connection will close itself. On a mobile device, the TCP connection will close when the network connection drops.

I suppose a server could reliably keep a TCP connection open, but at that point why wouldn't I just deal with the messages myself..?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mobile device connections work well enough -- a reliable VOIP app on Android was constructed with the DropFrog service on the backend. Generally, a network connection can get dropped on any device even for a "server" device; it is a failure case to anticipate and program accordingly. On DropFrog, by the way, the channel continues to exist if there are any participants and also for half a minute with no participants whatsoever, anticipating and accommodating failure cases. For the browser (and more) consideration, WebSockets under control of the application programmer makes the most sense, fulfilling the requirements of a persistent and secure connection (WSS). WebSocket support will be added in the future.

<comment><USER2> Awesome! Thanks for the info. Good luck with the product, hope to find some time soon to try it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'd love to see some real-world examples on the front-page. I think I get the concept but not sure how I'd actually use it in a chat app.

Cool service - I like the approach.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good stuff - the generic broadcast example has now been replaced with a working chat example and there is a link to it from the front page.</comment></comment>


Evidence for a particle that's its own antiparticle - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170720142321.htm <comment><USER2> Most of the discussion is here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14839427](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14839427)

At this moment there are also two comments here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14817322](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14817322)

And there's another comment here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14818725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14818725)

There are also other submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14817206](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14817206)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14840123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14840123)</comment>


Zfec – Efficient, portable erasure coding tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/zfec <comment><USER2> Anyone know of a comparison of similar tools. I've tinkered with this one: [https://github.com/klauspost/reedsolomon/](https://github.com/klauspost/reedsolomon/)

I believe it's compatible with the Java implementation used by Backblaze and others.

<comment><USER3> One of the authors of Tahoe-LAFS and the original creator of zfec, Zooko, co- authored a paper on the performance of such codes.

[http://nisl.wayne.edu/Papers/Tech/code-pf- fast09.pdf](http://nisl.wayne.edu/Papers/Tech/code-pf-fast09.pdf)

Luigi Rizzo is the original author of the fec C library.

I co-maintain zfec (and the Debian package of it) along with Zooko. A new release of zfec is planned to be out soonish.

edit: removing the <> delimiters around the URL. Sorry!

<comment><USER4> HN sadly does not support <> URL delimiters, so your link ends up 404. Here is it without delimiters:

[http://nisl.wayne.edu/Papers/Tech/code-pf- fast09.pdf](http://nisl.wayne.edu/Papers/Tech/code-pf-fast09.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Thanks. Updated the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I find liberasurecode more interesting [https://github.com/openstack/liberasurecode](https://github.com/openstack/liberasurecode)

BSD licensed

Pluggable erasure coding backends, and supports Intel's ISA-L

There is also a Python library available [https://bitbucket.org/kmgreen2/pyeclib](https://bitbucket.org/kmgreen2/pyeclib)

<comment><USER6> PyECLib upstream is now at [https://github.com/openstack/pyeclib](https://github.com/openstack/pyeclib)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another tool that is the de-facto standard on usenet for erasure coding is .par2 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive)

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure PAR2 really counts as erasure coding rather than a more general FEC. I've tried zfec in the past but it's not really set up for backup uses such as creating an archive to burn to a set of BD disks.

For backups, what you want to generate additional files, par2 style, which can be combined with the regular archive files (eg like in duplicity, GPG- encrypted tarballs) to repair any bitrot or lost fractions of those archives. But with zfec, as I understood it, it only works if you turn them entirely into erasure-coded shares and assume you'll lose _entire_ shares and wind up using m-of-n shares in recovery/restoration (as opposed to PAR2 which will handle losing individual archive files but also arbitrary corruption in any of those archive files, as long as the total does not exceed the redundancy %). So you would have to do something like create a single giant archive file, and if you wanted the equivalent of 50% redundancy, you'd use zfec to turn it into '50-of-100' shares and backup the 100 shares (or do 500-of-1000 etc).

Then any shares which aren't bit-identical to get tossed out at restoration and you hope you have enough shares left to reconstruct the original giant archive file. But you might not - your shares might be _mostly_ good but missing a few chunks, which is something a PAR2 setup could cope with (if the chunks are in the archive files, they get repaired normally, and if they're in the PAR2 redundancy, they don't matter). This is fine in the Taho-LAFS or datacenter setup where you assume your storage nodes will store perfectly or fail entirely (since given any live errors, you can just scrub the entire machine and rebuild an additional copy from the erasure-coded shares). Not so much in a backup setting.

Ultimately, while zfec is way faster than par2, I found this setup squirrely enough that I wasn't convinced to switch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Slightly offtopic (although the title contains "portable"): it often saddens me that purely mathematical functions like these are so tightly coupled to implementation language (even though there are three different language bindings here). Shouldn't the programming community have advanced past that point by now?

<comment><USER10> Can you give an example of what you mean?

<comment><USER11> Maybe he has this in mind:

Imagine a high-level, straightforward imperative language X whose only purpose is to specify libraries and data structures. This X has strong typing, memory safety and maybe also memory alignment directives but abstracts away as much as possible from any actual environment/platform/CPU layout. It has a precise semantics and even some ways of specifying pragmatics (e.g. big O runtime behavior of functions). In X you write "pure" algorithms that do not access (m)any OS-dependent features. Libraries in this language are then transpiled to various target languages and platforms.

To use _all_ libraries that have ever been written for X, someone only needs to write a transpiler-backend for the target language/platform once.

LLVM intermediate language is similar but too low-level. Think about a high- level counterpart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While FECs are useful, I really wish there was a free and good implementation of fountain codes [1].

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

<comment><USER13> I believe fountain codes are patented so you are unlikely to see a free and open implementation.

According to this comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2684488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2684488)

Qualcomm now owns the patents.

<comment><USER12> Are software patents a thing outside US? Surely plenty of hackers in EU could use such a library.

<comment><USER13> I believe that software can be patented in the EU if you have a clever patent agent...

From wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_European_Patent_Convention)

> Under the EPC, and in particular its Article 52,[1] "programs for computers" > are not regarded as inventions for the purpose of granting European > patents,[2] but this exclusion from patentability only applies to the extent > to which a European patent application or European patent relates to a > computer program as such.[3] As a result of this partial exclusion, and > despite the fact that the EPO subjects patent applications in this field to > a much stricter scrutiny[4] when compared to their American counterpart, > that does not mean that all inventions including some software are de jure > not patentable.

Going back to the original question, I certainly wouldn't want to start an open source project knowing that Qualcomm might sue me for patent infringement. Defending their intellectual property is part of their core business strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In face of cheap TB disks erasure coding seems to be a far better option than RAID.

[http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Erasure-coding- versus-...](http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Erasure-coding-versus-RAID- as-a-data-protection-method)

Is there any empirical data which zfec parameters are recommended for which device? AFAIK reliability is DVD < Blueray < SSD < HD < tape < cloud.

</comment><comment><USER15> Never seen this licence before : [https://github.com/tahoe- lafs/zfec/blob/master/COPYING.TGPPL...](https://github.com/tahoe- lafs/zfec/blob/master/COPYING.TGPPL.rst)

Anyone knows more details?

<comment><USER16> Seems to exist since 2010: [https://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2010/01/20/the- transitive-grace...](https://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2010/01/20/the-transitive- grace-period-public-licence-good-ideas-come-around/)

Originals version of the license: [http://zooko.com/tgppl.html](http://zooko.com/tgppl.html)

Seems like the goal was to keep the product under copyright for some time, giving it a opportunity to recover costs or integrated exclusively inside a product for a while, giving some advantage over competitors, but making it a public-license after the period.

Also found this explanation: [https://tahoe- lafs.org/~zooko/tgppl.pdf](https://tahoe-lafs.org/~zooko/tgppl.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Zfec is really slow compared to state of the art CRS codes like cm256: [https://github.com/catid/cm256](https://github.com/catid/cm256)

</comment><comment><USER18> Another plug for [https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/663643/discover- par...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/663643/discover-parameters- of-a-reed-solomon-code-from-its-output/1290327#1290327) given n inputs & outputs of a reed solomon function is it possible to derive the parameters?

</comment><comment><USER19> Is it like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornado_code) ?

They were used for reliable data distribution, being able to recover from loss of packets without requesting the packets be sent again.

</comment><comment><USER20> Just curious: any similar libraries for the other class of erasure codes, the fountain codes?

</comment><comment><USER21> Can anyone explain to me, what is the usage of `erasure code` ?

<comment><USER6> As a quick answer, the name comes from being able to recover data when some of it is "erased".

The only way to durably store data so that it survives a hardware failure (e.g. drive dying) is to store more than one copy. Full replicas are the simplest way to do this, but you've got a relatively high overhead (e.g. Store 1GB of data with 3x replicas, and you store 3GB of data). Erasure codes are a way to effectively store fractional replicas, so you only use 1.5x or 1.7x of the original data.

Erasure codes are great when you've got a lot of data and you need high durability but don't want to pay for the storage space required for full replicas.

Why don't we always use erasure codes for everything? EC isn't great when you've got small bits of data, and since there's a bit of math involved in reading and writing the EC data, EC has higher latency than simple replicas.

[https://www.swiftstack.com/blog/2015/04/20/the- foundations-o...](https://www.swiftstack.com/blog/2015/04/20/the-foundations- of-erasure-codes/) is a great into to how erasure codes work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The project behind it, Tahoe-LAFS deserves some love.

Basically, spread your data across many cloud storage providers and built a super fast soft-RAID.

<comment><USER23> I tried Tahoe-LAFS, the setup seems a bit weird and from trying it on that public gateway a bit, there seem to be some issues in relation to what happens if you loose that link to your folder.

There seems to be no way of using it to simply attach and have a list of your data only.

I'm favoring Camlistore over Tahoe, though Camli has no good encryption yet and no erasure encoding. The basis of Camli seems to be better.</comment></comment>


Deep Learning Is Eating Software - <AUTHOR> https://petewarden.com/2017/11/13/deep-learning-is-eating-software/ <comment><USER2> Some of my work is related to traditional BI tools and not one day goes with me hearing someone, specially the management, talk about applying machine learning in some way.

Now while I can see some aspects which can be improved by usage of ML many don't tend to understand the implication of such systems. A good example came last year. On the BI system there existed 200+ reports with an average user having access to maybe 20 reports based on their department - finance, sales etc. There was a big push from the management to "improve" user experience with ML. Build a recommendation system they said. There was no cost benefit analysis done for using a complex ML based recommendation system on 20 reports - It sounded cool and in line with the hype.

Then there is the question of user involvement. While I believe there is surely a case to made for stuff which involves software engineers, like the ones mentioned in the post - search ranking, data center energy usage etc. But things which require non-software engineers is a bit doubtful. This is because as the post puts it - "This doesn't require the same technical skills as traditional programming, but it _does need a deep knowledge of the problem domain._ " And engineers cannot be expected to have deep knowledge of every function. If they get too drunk on the ML kool aid, and some of them do, the end result will be mess.

</comment><comment><USER3> Deep learning is certainly eating conferences, funding and PhDs. And that wasn't a bad thing until everyone got focused on generating another random architecture that yields another 2% improvement on their favorite dataset so their paper gets through.

<comment><USER4> >> another 2% improvement

2% is HUGE at this point, at least on the datasets that I am familiar with - ImageNet, MS-Coco, PascalVOC etc. And at this point, any modifications or strategies that gets you the 2% improvement is noteworthy, and I know that people in my team are looking forwards to techniques that will give us these improvements.

<comment><USER5> > 2% is HUGE at this point

Hell, on MNIST 0.14% is huge. Geff Hinton created an entire new architecture to get 0.25% error, which is far better than the baseline 0.39% error [1].

To be fair, he did reduce the error by 35%.

[1]:[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.09829.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.09829.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sure. Can we see an example of Deep Learning used to create a regular CRUD app?

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't be surprised to see deep learning optimize a GraphQL backend by indexing and caching queries as needed.

<comment><USER6> Indexing and caching is optimization. Who did the real job, that was being optimized?

If my account balance is $5, and I buy that yummy Cheese Swirls for $2, I expect the balance to be $3 afterward. Deep Learning will not help, or frankly it can only make this simple calculation wrong. So... no, deep learning is not eating software. BTW deep learning IS software, so this is all just headline- grabbing.

<comment><USER7> Deep learning will allow software to infer how your comment maps to a CRUD operation, and instead of having someone code up a backend and think through a schema, it'll happen on the fly.

So yes, I suspect deep learning (or ML more generally) will eat up a lot of the CRUD, glue code, and repetetive data-pipeline related crap I deal with daily.

I yearn for the day when I can tell my db "store this" and "give me that" without having to think of the umpteen* data stores that back it all.

* No joke. We have a real-time feed, a few warehouses, and external data sources we need to wrangle to build applications. From my perspective, some statistical machine could easily do that with a bit of human help.

 __If you think we should rearchitect our infrastructure, your right! But doesn 't that seem like something a computer could be good at?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not every problem can be solved by matrix multiplication and gradient descent. Particularly, many problems require _exact_ solutions, and not just good approximations (think aerospace or science or finance). And speaking of science particularly, many solutions require _insight_ , which ML often can't provide.

</comment><comment><USER9> After reading this, is machine learning just the coded version of what you do in Calculus II? Analyzing a scatter plot and trying different equations to get the correlation coefficient value close to "1" and predict the next value? Because that would seem to me to have limited usefulness.

<comment><USER10> What you describe sounds like regression, which is a powerful technique with varied applications, but is not the same as deep learning. Aspects from calculus do play an important role in ML notably in the gradient descent algorithm used to adjust weights. If you're interested in learning more I recommend the 3blue1brown series on YouTube</comment></comment>


How (not) to Fix URL Shorteners - <AUTHOR> http://tweete.rs/blog/how-to-fix-url-shorteners-my-take/ <comment><USER2> URL shortening services have been around for a long time, with the recognition that they weren't permanent. The recent issue with URL shorteners is because Twitter has created a false need for them.

What twitter ought to do is assign a fixed character length to all urls. So if you place _any_ url in your tweet, you get docked 16 characters (that's a reasonable length since a URL shortening service would shorten the URL to about that length). Then just stick the actual URL in the href, and have some generic URL text that is visible.

Now, this might not work for mobile devices that receive tweets. Perhaps twitter should buy one of the URL shortening services, so that if it dies, then all the tweets die, and we no longer care if the links are valid anymore.

The need for permanent shortened URLs is a false need.

<comment><USER3> Twitter could do bit.ly links only when sending via SMS, and then do normal links via the API and web interface, just shortening the link text with ...

I don't see any reason for them not to do this.</comment></comment>


Student Privacy Tips for Students - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/08/student-privacy-tips-students <comment><USER2> A good list, though another one might be 'separate your online identities based on who you want to have access to them'.

That way, you can use one profile (or at least, public parts of your profiles) to show school administrators and teachers/professors (with boring info on grades and education history) and another for whatever parties you might be going to or any interests outside of school/work life.

So many kids and teens don't do this, and end up losing jobs or getting in trouble with their school or college for things like having wild parties or taking drugs or what not.</comment>


How is salary negotiation done in real life? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> The last offer I successfully negotiated went like this:

Recruiter: What kind of number are you looking for?

Me: I'm looking for a minumum of $num. (A 25% raise from current gig)

Recruiter: We can totally do $num.

<a week or so passes while they put the offer together>

Recruiter: We're offering you $num.

Me: Could you do $num + ($num * 7%)?

Recruiter: I'll see what I can do.

<a week or so passes while he gets approval>

Recruiter: We're offering you $num + ($num * 7%).

Me: Sounds good.

Now, a professional negotiator probably wouldn't have coughed up a number first, but my gig at the time was paid fairly and I really liked the company. So I tossed out a number that was big enough to actually get me to jump ship. Was no skin off my back if they couldn't reach it. But they could. And I had a pretty good feeling from the hiring manager that they wanted me there, and that they'd advocate for me with HR, which I'm pretty sure is what happened.

</comment><comment><USER3> Some things about salary negotiation - don't give much information except anything that would increase your value to the company directly based on your quality of work.

Don't be afraid to say no and turn down an offer if it is too low. It will be hard to say no the first time, but as you get more experienced, it becomes easier and you put yourself in a better position.

When it comes to receiving an offer, one can go to the current employer and see if one can wrangle a counteroffer, but be aware that some employers don't like this. At least, be sure that you are an employee that the employer absolutely does not want to lose and that you would rather stay with your current company all things being equal.

Personally, I'm probably a bad negotiator. I have reached the point in my career where I don't care as much about the $ as I do about the work environment, although it has taken 4 jobs in my short 2 year career to reach that point. I essentially make certain mandates, and if the company is able to meet them, then I am happy - if not, I have my choice of companies to work at. Usually this might require say [insert current salary + $30k+] + [insert bonus for relocation/paying previous company's bonus for leaving early/pot sweetener]. Also find out whether the company pays bonuses, vacation/benefits structure, and other relevant info, although nothing beats a high raw salary since it is a hard reference point for future negotiations.

</comment><comment><USER4> For me, the negotiation has been different with each job, and has depended on whether I sought them out or they sought me out. You don't say your situation. Let's assume I'm satisfied in my current role, and a recruiter is cold- contacting me.

If their initial pitch goes well, and they ask about my comp requirements, I know that I'm supposed to have them make the first offer, but I will usually offer a salary and equity number. Granted, that's considered by many a negotiation mistake. So, I will say that I will not consider less than x$ and y-equity, but that it will likely take more. Depends on how the interview process goes and what I learn. But they're numbers that, if we end up there, will be better than my current situation.

So, then things go well, and they make an offer, usually at or very close to what I told them. I've always countered some bump in salary or equity from that, but a package that if they accept, I will accept.

For me personally, money is no longer the top factor, I don't particularly enjoy negotiation, and I'm usually also talking by this point with my potential new boss. So, I willingly make the process pretty streamlined at the expense of possibly squeezing out a little more. That approach is not right for everyone.

That said, I think companies fully expect some negotiation. So whatever negotiation tactic you take, as long as it's respectful, will not hurt your chances of ultimately getting the new gig. In other words, they won't withdraw an offer or anything if you negotiate.

</comment><comment><USER5> Never EVER tell them what you are currently making. They don't deserve that information and it puts you in a very bad spot for negotiations. If they make you give them a number take your previous salary and bump it up but 10K+ or 10%+. If they ask for pay stubs then kindly refuse saying that you are not allowed by your former employer to share those documents.

I also always tell them I am willing to take $X (Where $X is 10K+ more than your previous salary) but that would make this a lateral move for me so I want $X+$Y (Where $Y is ANOTHER 10-20K) to take the job. At worst they say "No, but we can start you at $X with a renegotiation at 3-6 months based on your performance". Instant raise plus the promise of re-opening negotiations down the line. Also remember that no matter what they say make sure you have the schedule for when re-negotiations will take place and try to get it to less than 1yr (especially for the first re-negotiation). Ideally you would get: Initial -> 3-6mo's -> every 6mo's but you can settle for Initial -> 3-6mo's -> every year.

NEVER take a job making less or the same as your previous job, moving companies is the BEST way to get a raise. Even if you feel the need to get away from a bad company don't take less.

</comment><comment><USER6> My employer changed a material term of my employment that I negotiated for when I joined the company and by doing so, saved themselves ~20-25% of my all in cost. I used that opportunity as a jump off point to renegotiate my compensation. They said they'd consider it and came back to me very quickly, saying there was nothing they could do.

6 months later, I had a new job offer. On the day I was going to resign, they gave me a raise (they probably knew a about my displeasure, but not the job offer). I thanked them, showed them the offer and told them I couldn't ignore the difference in comp. Then, I asked if they could do better. So, they gave me another raise. Then, I asked them if they could do better and...

You get the point. I am good at my job and before this point in my career, got recognized in every way possible, other than financially. However, for whatever reason, the only way I could get any financial validation was to have leverage, which in this case was another job. In the case where you are negotiating a new opportunity, your leverage is whether or not you'll take the job. In my case, my leverage was another great opportunity for a lot more money.

I suspect I'm not the only one on HN that focuses on doing a great job and not on directly advancing their career. So, my advice to you is always have leverage when negotiating and don't be afraid to use it. However, there are 2 caveats. 1\. You have to be willing to take the other job - your company may not be interested in retaining you. 2\. Having a job offer is very different than just being disgruntled, from the company perspective. But, tread lightly, you want to come across as wanting to stay, but unable to ignore the financial or professional disparity

</comment><comment><USER7> It's not much different than how two people would negotiate to get maximum out of a conversation, but on a diplomatic level.

<comment><AUTHOR> How does one start a negotiation with it being awkward?

<comment><USER8> In the context of a job offer? You might start with "I'm really excited about working here, assuming we can come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. What were you thinking in terms of salary?" _hear answer_ "Interesting. Can you go higher on that?"

<comment><USER9> You can also --- actually, _should always_ \--- say "Great, I think we're in the ballpark. I'll need a day or two to consider."

The first number offered by an employer (for the benefit of the grandparent commenter) is --- practically always --- their _floor_. They expect some fraction of candidates to make a higher ask, and they can't predict which candidates those are, so there's a safety margin built into the first offer. Any number inside that margin is, for the purposes and incentives of the hiring manager, the same as the floor, so there is no reason ever to accept it.

"We're in the ballpark" is a convenient way of saying "no" that sounds a whole lot like "yes". It comes in handy all over the place!

"I'll need a day or two two consider" allows you to take the negotiation offline. If you're more comfortable, for instance, making a counteroffer via email than on the phone, "I'll need a day" accomplishes that for you (a good hiring manager is going to get you right back on the phone when you make that email counter, though). Since every piece of job hunting advice ever written suggests that candidates ask for a day to consider, every sane hiring manager (a) expects you to ask and (b) will happily concede.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are several factors here that I haven't seen anyone else bring up yet, so I'll mention them:

1\. Negotions will be very different if you _need_ the job rather than "just looking" \- especially if they know it. Try not to let emotions get in the way, but it can be tough.

2\. Never "negotiate" salary with a recruiter. They make money when you get an offer. They couldn't care less if you get what you want or if the employer will offer you want you need/want.

3\. Recruiters don't give a damn about you and they aren't working "for you". You are a commission. They are no different than a realtor. They want to close the deal as quickly as possible and focus on the next commission.

If your first contact with a potential employer is through a recruiter and money comes up, it's 100% about weeding you out. They don't want to waste time with someone who is going to demand more than the employer is willing to pay.

If you don't need the job, your best bet is to talk to them about lifestyle and comfort level instead of money. Do you want to own your own home? type of community? retirement? kids to put through college? The salary required to meet those requirements will be wildly different based on where the company is located, but no matter what the employer's upper limit is you'll know going into the negotiations (later on) that your needs/wants should be met by whatever the final salary agreed upon is. Do _not_ mention what your current situation is. That's completely irrelevant to the discussion.

If you _do_ need the job, and really don't have time to sit around and wait for the best offer possible to come your way, then just tell the recruiter that you'd rather wait until after you've had a chance to go through some of the interview process before talking about money. If they press the issue, suggest that they tell you what the position pays (usually it's a range) and that you'd like to continue forward with the interview. During the downtime, do your due-diligence on the location, cost of living, etc.

Once you're done with the recruiter and through the interview sufficiently enough to start talking real money, it's important (imo) to not worry about trying to squeeze out every dime possible. You should be going into the interview with a number in mind that allows you - and your family - to be comfortable and happy. However, ...

1\. Good companies usually have salary ranges fixed based on "level" or some other factors (senior people make X while newbies make Y). Companies that do this have no problem telling you what that salary range is, because they aren't trying to weezle anyone. You should be able to ask them what those ranges are. You should be able to get a sense of what you could be making in the future (but don't count on it!).

2\. Remember that benefits can greatly compensate for salary! If the potential employer has a great health package, covers 90%+ of your health care premiums, matches 401K, offers 5+ week vacation, etc. Those things (to you) may be worth far more than an extra $5,000 / year. Remember to give them an opportunity to sell those to you. On the flip-side, if those benefits aren't there, bring those up as part of your negotiation asking for more.

3\. This is my own experience, but don't ever take less salary because the company offers great bonuses. It's much better to make $10K more per year than it is to possibly get a $15K bonus at the end of the year. You can invest salary, bonuses aren't guaranteed, bonuses can be taxed differently based on how they are paid out, etc.

HTH</comment>


Blue Moon - <AUTHOR> http://blueorigin.com/blue-moon <comment><USER2> [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/09/jeff-bezos-unveils-blue- moon...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/09/jeff-bezos-unveils-blue-moon-lunar- lander.html) has more information.

(Via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872667](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19872667), which we'll merge into this thread.)

</comment><comment><USER3> It's been said that in order to become a space faring species access to space, rocket launches, must become routine, common. Hats off to Bezos. He has certainly made it boring.

You can put stuff on top of it! There is a club! The presentation opened with the most uninspired call to inspiration. And then pivoted to a call to fear. We're gonna have to ration due to energy shortages! In a couple hundred years. Fusion? 1) It's gonna be raw resources and real estate, not energy, that we run out of first. 2) Amazon, the company, is doing all it can to reap profits at the expense of the environment with seemingly no regards for the health of the real Amazon and other natural treasures. 3) Amazon, the company, is a primary driver of some of the "immediate" social problems Bezos opened with such as poverty, so that argument falls flat. Not to mention the whole presentation managed to avoid mentioning SpaceX explicitly and ended with a self-referencing "Big things have small beginnings" photo of Bezos, kinda sadly insecure.

I for one don't want to live in a "manufactured" world that is "manufactured" by Amazon. My head just kept going to "Amazon Prime Planet"!! My god it will be efficient, cheap, on time, and chock full of externalities that we can all ignore because instead of being off-shored and hidden in warehouses, now they'll be off-planet. This is how we get the dystopian future none of us deserve or want.

(edit: Also, did Bezos just rip off the tag line from Prometheus, a movie whose central thesis is the inherent dangers in attempting to engineer life and worlds!? Bezos: "Big things start small." Prometheus: "Big things have small beginnings."

<comment><USER4> Amazon is not saint but market hates vacuum. If Amazon wouldn't exist then other, smaller companies would fill it's space. That would probably mean more people employed but environmental footprint would be much greater. It may look bad if you study Amazon carbon footprint etc. but if not them then someone else would be doing all that pollution and most likely in far less efficient way.

<comment><USER5> What's your point? That doesn't make it okay. Amazon could and should pollute less.

<comment><USER4> My point is that Amazon is polluting less than multiple small companies doing Amazon job. Should they pollute less? Yes. Are they polluting less than others? Also yes. You see grand total numbers of pollution created by Amazon and compare them to other companies and those numbers are terrible, the issue is that Amazon, one company, is pretty much whole industry and should be considered as such. It's like comparing USA pollution to Cameroon. In raw numbers USA will be far worst, on the other hand, per capita numbers are not so nice on Cameroon side of things.

TL;DR Amazon is not ideal but still much better than it could be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm honestly underwhelmed. This is not more capability than Apollo (uncrewed variant of whose lander could land about 5 tons). A really high deck making egress difficult. Apparently expendable. Given Blue Origin's resources, they should be shooting far higher.

There's a bunch of small companies pursuing expendable lunar landers of similar capabilities. I worry Blue Origin will just crowd them out.

A reusable upper stage or reusable lander (or both) would be more interesting and more important. Bezos is/was the richest man and Blue origin is given roughly a billion dollars of capital every year, and a relatively modest expendable lunar lander is their big announcement? And even that they may have difficulty executing on in a timely manner.

I don't think Blue Origin can't do this. I just think it's far too modest of a goal for a company with free rein over a billion dollars in additional annual capital.

...and I'm also skeptical of mass drivers (of the typical type) and lunar mining. Plenty of shade thrown at Mars, but Mars has vastly more resources.

Additionally, the architecture of the lander is disappointing. A crasher stage (ala the Surveyor spacecraft which used a kick stage for deorbiting) for most of descent would be far more efficient. It'd allow a much smaller and cheaper descent stage and much lower to the ground, making egress much easier.

<comment><USER7> Of _course_ it's less capable than Apollo - we don't have anywhere _near_ the lift capability of Saturn V anymore, and this program's budget is a rounding error in the $200B (inflation-adjusted) that went into Apollo.

I think people underestimate just how insane the investment was in that program: in the neighborhood of 0.25% of GDP for a decade.

<comment><USER8> I think most people (myself included) do not understand how much technological improvement costs.

Anecdote: I once had a conversation with a guy who worked at ITER, and he was pretty bullish (and he had no reason to bullshit me) on the prospect of fusion as a viable energy source, but frustrated with the internal politics of ITER. So I asked, "well, what would it take? If I could call up a bunch of rich people to get funding, how much would it take?" He casually said, "oh, probably 1.2 to 1.5 trillion dollars". And then I understood why it was a multinational conglomerate that was funding it, and not a bunch of rich people.

<comment><USER9> 2016 estimation for the project was $20B [1]. Your number is over 50 times larger.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-15/world- s-b...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-15/world-s-biggest- science-experiment-seeks-more-time-and-money)

<comment><USER10> The number is $20B for a "technology of the future" project because if you would propose a number 20x larger the project would never get started.

How are you going to justify $1.2 _trillion_ to tax payers for something ephemeral that might work or not, all while their kids cannot get toilet paper in school?

$20bn is kind of "normal" in government spending and those numbers are quickly forgotten.

On the other hand, the yearly US defense budget is already half of that amount and the loud voices do not care.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was waiting for this announcement. It is unclear to me how "real" this is; Bezo's claims they can meet the timeline of people on the moon in 2024. Since they aren't flying a heavy booster like the Delta IV heavy or the Falcon Heavy yet, and those platforms took about 10 years to go from concept to first flight. Bezos is suggesting he can do that in 5 years. Perhaps he's considering using the Delta for FHeavy as the first stage booster and building the upper stage{s} himself. Either way, its great to have someone pushing for more progress.

The second successful FHeavy flight cut into the potential demand for New Glenn so the challenge is to remain relevant while building nation-state level infrastructure. Exciting to watch!

<comment><USER12> Unlike Elon Musk, Bezos has a tendency to set more accurate timelines.

This is not to say that Space X's achievements are not incredible. They are. It is just that Elon Musk projection timelines are pretty much always bunk, while Jeff Bezos seems to be better at projecting achievement timelines.

Again, what Space X and Blue Origin have achieved are incredible, and yes Space X has an entirely different set of technology that is capable of sending huge payloads to deep space...

I'm just saying Musk's timelines are completely unreliable. Bezos' aren't (historically).

<comment><USER13> Unlike Bezos, Elon Musk actually gets things done. Bezos still hasn't done anything that SpaceShipOne didn't do in 2004 (and that carried people, unlike their current rocket). Their little hopper rocket is leagues away from a proper orbital vehicle. Bezos hasn't given any timelines for New Glenn (their first orbital rocket). People give way too much praise to Bezos.

That's not to mention all the blatant patent trolling and lobbying that Blue Origin/Bezos is engaged in which constantly tries to hinder SpaceX. (Ex: Trying to patent landing on a barge to stop SpaceX doing it. Ex: Successfully lobbying several congresspeople to delay down selection of launch vehicles for military launches (but failed to delay it).)

Blue Origin is big on talk and little on action.

<comment><USER14> >Unlike Bezos, Elon Musk actually gets things done.

As a betting gal, I disagree.

source: $2MM investment in Amazon from back in 2014 has performed extremely well. Stock price isn't exactly a golden metric, but Bezos knows how and what to prioritize and when to deliver. I would trust Bezos over Elon Musk with real money any day.

Your post makes it appear as if Bezos is devoting the majority of his time to one specific company or venture, and therefore not being the industry leader is some sort of failure. That's extremely short sighted from my perspective.

The little hopper rocket you described is a better investment from my perspective than anything Musk touches. Hell, if all Bezos had was a literal tin can and merely a promise of using material from that tin can as part of a lunar lander 10 years out, I would still put more faith in Bezos.

My only experience with Tesla is with purchasing a Model S, which was horrible. I no longer have that vehicle. Good riddance.

<comment><USER15> Amazon is not Blue Origin. SpaceX is not Tesla. The Musk/Bezos comparison is regarding spaceflight. And in that regard:

>> Blue Origin is big on talk and little on action.

The parent comment is definitely correct. Unless you mean patent trolling. Then Bezos has Musk crushed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Blue origin can't build a moon rocket by 2024, so maybe they can settle for the lander. Here's the vision I bet they're aiming for: a Spacex rocket, a United Launch Alliance capsule, a Blue Origin lander, and a round of pork barrel in every Congressional district.

<comment><USER17> I'm seeing a lot of exponential technology. If Jeff B. takes more risk and focus, it could be possible. We'll see.

<comment><USER18> Not sure why you got downvoted

<comment><USER19> What on earth is exponential technology?

<comment><USER20> i think it's a buzz word for things that people think will gain internet scale cycle of development, one thing begetting another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm all for anything that gets us back to the Moon, but this clearly feels underwhelming versus Starship.

It'd also be good if they got to orbit prior to marketing these grand plans. Gradatim Ferociter indeed.

<comment><USER22> I'm glad to see a different approach. SpaceX has the "outrageously audacious" space well covered. It's good to have a competitor working on something more incremental in case it turns out that the giant leap isn't viable.

<comment><USER23> Blue Origin is somewhat like the Waymo of space tech. They'll continue plodding methodically, indefinitely. And you can bet their safety/reliability record will be nigh near perfect.

Yes, Waymo is the market leader in self-driving technology (unlike Blue Origin). And there's currently no analogue to SpaceX in the self-driving car market. The incredible, complementary leadership duo that Musk and Shotwell present is unparalleled in both markets.

<comment><USER24> >And there's currently no analogue to SpaceX in the self-driving car market.

Isn't... Tesla analogous to SpaceX in the self-driving car market?

<comment><USER7> Nope.

SpaceX has a working product that is eating its competitors' lunch (from a nothing company to having almost half the launch market within 10 years).

Tesla doesn't have a self-driving product that works, just standard assisted- driving tech that every other car company already sells, plus dangerously overpromising marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why does everything BO build have to be so fugly? Don't they care, are they not good enough that they can make it pretty and achieve their technical goals at the same time or are there hard constraints that dictate the ugliness?

<comment><USER26> classic trilemma, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilemma)

good, beautiful, real

<comment><USER25> Yeah, but then SpaceX.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Have I missed a lot of news recently, or is this some strange usage of the present tense that I wasn't previously aware of?

<comment><USER28> Having come from nuclear engineering, I'd say it's pretty typical for people speaking of large conceptual engineering designs. Paper reactors, paper spaceships, etc. are often spoken of in present tense. The design exists now and it has a name - that's the way I interpret it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Disappointed there wasn't an Amazon box in the payload illustration.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd like to see us put two return rockets on the moon. Would increase the safety factor of all future manned missions significantly if a crash landing wouldn't necessarily mean death.

If you could safely verify the return vehicle is ready to go before sending the people, you could potentially use a one-way lander, vastly decreasing launch weight.

<comment><USER31> Better safety factor would be having such regular visits that there's already another vessel in the area that can divert to assist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> [https://www.blueorigin.com/engines/be-7](https://www.blueorigin.com/engines/be-7) has a bit more information about the new engine, since there's basically none in the article. Looks like a small, restartable, low-thrust LH2/LOX engine meant for in-space use.

<comment><USER33> They say it's an expander cycle, given the ISP I assume a closed cycle expander rather than the open cycle expander they're using as the BE-3U.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> So the question is going to be if you can lift this with a Falcon Heavy, given that New Glenn isn't even close to ready, and while the pace that Blue origin moves at is awesome compared to traditional space vendors, it's way behind where it needs to be for this, and where SpaceX is today.

</comment><comment><USER35> Is there anyone else that feels like Blue Origin actually has a chance of making their own timelines, as opposed to SpaceX?

Don't get me wrong, I love SpaceX, but the down to earth way in which Blue Origin appears to be working also appeals to me.

<comment><USER36> but hasnt spacex done more? i feel like blue origin is actually behind.

<comment><USER37> Considering the amount of money Bezos has, Blue Origin is far far behind. They only achieved suborbital flights with low-speed reentry landings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If this is a lander what will they use to deliver the lander to lunar orbit? I'll admit I don't follow this sort of news very closely, but it seems quite exciting.

<comment><USER13> They'll launch this paper lander on their paper rocket (New Glenn). Nothing exciting here because there's no hardware being built yet.

<comment><USER39> Considering they plan to fire the engine this summer, they seem to be building something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Welp, then _I_ am going to say it: it looks underwhelming, both in capability and looks.

6.5t of soft-landed payload to surface of moon and 2.5kW of power via fuel cells if Twitter can be trusted. A grand vision of O'Neill cylinders and whatever in space is nice but how? _How?_ Less _gradatim_ and more _ferociter_ would be nice.

<comment><USER41> Do looks matter for a lunar lander?

Of course it doesn't look as good as the awesome streamlined rocketship concept art I grew up with in the 1950s, I will grant you that.

<comment><USER42> _Of course it doesn 't look as good as the awesome streamlined rocketship concept art I grew up with in the 1950s, I will grant you that._

While SpaceX's concept for Starship does look that awesome. (In the form of animations and concept art, not in the form of steel water tower construction blown over on its side.)

<comment><USER43> Starship looks like it does because it has to re-enter Earth's atmosphere. If you don't, aerodynamic shells are just dead weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> There seems to be alot of hate here that blue orgin is not 'shooting high enough'. This will get 'America' back to the moon and this is a great thing! Congrats to Blue Orgin team, and I wish them all the luck.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'll take soft-serve over a soft landing any day:

[https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/blue-moon-ice-cream- midwe...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/blue-moon-ice-cream-midwest- mystery)

<comment><USER46> Blue Moon Brewing is also having a ball w/ this [https://twitter.com/BlueMoonBrewCo/status/112661146722524774...](https://twitter.com/BlueMoonBrewCo/status/1126611467225247744)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Nice to see some advancements coming to landers from the private sector. Hope they will be able to work with other parties and move the technology forward and make it cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER48> I didn't think Blue Origin had even put something in orbit yet. How feasible is this?

</comment><comment><USER49> Anybody willing to bet he will announce building an 'Amazon Sphere' like structure in the moon? Feel like that project was an experiment for later use on his other endeavors but using Amazon's deep pockets to pay for it.

<comment><USER35> That'd be some office.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I'm confused. Does this actually exist yet?

The linked page says things like "Blue Moon _is_ a flexible lander", and "Blue Moon can land multiple metric tons of payload on the lunar surface". Is there any actual hardware? Or is it entirely CAD drawings and renderings? They seem to be implying that the hardware currently exists and is ready to go (presumably for the Pence/Trump 2024 mandate), but the videos and pictures don't seem consistent with that.

Edit: I found a bit more info elsewhere [1]. They built a nice nonfunctional model of it. It sounds like it's relatively early in development, let alone integration. They'll start testing the engines in the next few months. This sort of hyperbolic marketing copy that abuses verb tenses and grammar is a huge pet peeve of mine.

[1]: [https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-unveils-lunar- lander/](https://spacenews.com/blue-origin-unveils-lunar-lander/)

<comment><USER51> It's Amazon's way of working. Starting from PR/FAQ and working backwards.

<comment><USER46> Err well publishing the PR while it's still vaporware is not the Amazon way.

<comment><USER51> I don't mean it as shortcoming for Amazon. Their way of working have brought them quite far.

As for proving my point: [https://www.quora.com/What-is-Amazons-approach-to- product-de...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-Amazons-approach-to-product- development-and-product-management?ref=http://www.product-frameworks.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> OT, but their web dev is an inconsiderate jerk. [https://i.imgur.com/OCpESVs.png](https://i.imgur.com/OCpESVs.png)

<comment><USER53> I am still surprised by how often devs put full size images into thumbnails.

<comment><USER54> I have yet to gotten used to that 500x500 pictures are "thumbnail". I unconsciously expect them to be 32x32 or something... :-D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I would rather see two engines with enough TWR and gimbaling to be able to lift off with one failure. Plus then you can place the payload between them and not mess around with cranes.

.O##O.

/^[$]^\

</comment><comment><USER55> Nice to see some private LH2/LOX propulsion being developed, but I was hoping to see some pictures of some real hardware, not just simulations.

</comment><comment><USER56> Nitpick: the miss-alignment of the rendered shadow with the direction of shadows in the surface photos they comp over is maddening.

</comment><comment><USER57> This whole mini-site looks like an extremely audacious undergrad aerospace engineering group project.

Except when I was an undergrad, it was all about going to _Mars_.

<comment><USER57> Also the city I live in doesn't have a, "how to get to the Moon" problem, it has a "homeless" problem. The planet I live on also doesn't have a, "how to get to the Moon" problem, it has a climate change problem, a pollution problem, a corrupt political system problem.

We've got lots of Hard Problems to solve before we need to go back to the Moon.

<comment><USER58> Exactly — THE WAY OUT IS UP:

[https://marriottexpeditions.org/finalmarket](https://marriottexpeditions.org/finalmarket)

<comment><USER58> "At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Now everyone want to bet on future of future, but they forget the real problem like global warming (it's just one example its so many). Steve jobs have vision which is based on reality and solve the real world problem. Hope someone in tech industry solve the real problem instead problem which is never exists.

<comment><USER60> Many of us are working on it. It's a very difficult problem because so many aspects of the carbon economy are intertwined and baked into culture now. The "halo" effect around petroleum is extremely strong and disincents many incremental advances. Could be solved top-down with a carbon tax but that's a big change and beneficiaries status quo have more of an advantage the bigger the system change being attempted.

However many people are trying and failing anyway, and that creates a bed of appropriate technologies that eventually will stand on their own, and perhaps not _too_ much slower than a top-down solution would work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> When is the accompanying AWS service announcement for MoonDeliveryAsAService?

</comment><comment><USER62> wait how can they claim having precise landing etc. if the thing have never been tested? did they land it on the moon before ?

<comment><USER63> Testing here on Earth could give them some idea I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Epic vid, great audible sounds of space ;s

</comment><comment><USER65> Hmm, no https?

<comment><USER51> It's https now.

<comment><USER18> Still not https on my browser. Have the dns records updated yet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> at the rate this is progressing there won't be a permanent moon habitat until the 22nd century. probably a good thing since space humans will need to be genetically modified and quarantined for life.

</comment><comment><USER67> Astronauts train for years before going to space. Do these space tourism companies pretend that anyone with enough cash can do it?

<comment><USER68> Elon's stated goal re: astronauts and training is that the technology should be sufficiently simplified to let anyone go up with minimal training. The idea of a heavily-trained astronaut is old, and the new thinking is that the people going to space should be able to spend their time up their doing whatever it is they are good at - even if just vacationing - rather than learning how to fly spacecraft etc.

I know this is a Jeff Bezos / Blue Origin article, but I would fully expect the same to be true here. Jeff has stated multiple times that he sees millions of people moving to space stations for work and general life. Earth should be left void of manufacturing and mining and things, which could be moved to space (and asteroids, etc) leaving Earth to be more of a natural environment for life to thrive.

<comment><USER67> I imagine that's the end goal but I have a hard time believing we will be there in just a few years.

Time will tell.

<comment><USER69> A big part of astronaut training is knowing how to fly the craft and knowing what to do if something breaks. If the machine is automatically controlled and reliable, you don't need as much training. (Maybe they'll send a trained person or two along with the tourists?)

<comment><USER70> Not sure I follow that logic. More automation might mean you won't have to use your training _as much,_ but how does it mean less training? In the event all the automation fails you still have to know everything an astronaut would need to know were there no automation.

<comment><USER71> For Starship, there's absolutely no way a human could fly it anyway. Even if it weren't fly-by-wire, a human could not control the drag fins and the engines precisely enough to land safely. Even on Crew Dragon, which will (hopefully) fly in the near future with crew onboard, there isn't a hardware joystick. If the vehicle fails to the point where the computers aren't working, your only option is to deorbit. These spacecraft weren't intended to be flown manually.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A Telegram Channel with Only NBA Tweets from ESPN Stats and Info - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/assafmo/nba-espn-stats-and-info-telegram-bot <comment><AUTHOR> Channel link - [https://t.me/nbaespnstats](https://t.me/nbaespnstats)</comment>


Kinect Confirmed As Fastest-Selling Consumer Electronics Device - <AUTHOR> http://community.guinnessworldrecords.com/_Kinect-Confirmed-As-Fastest-Selling-Consumer-Electronics-Device/blog/3376939/7691.html <comment><USER2> That is super impressive. I would have never expected Microsoft would be able to breath new life into the 360 this late in the generation.</comment>


Huawei set to debut a new, improved Mate X - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/huawei-set-to-debut-a-new-improved-mate-x/ <comment><USER2> Mate X looks like the future, screen on the outside (if durable) is a great idea</comment>


Censorship crackdown? Top alt-media pages newly banned by Facebook and Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://www.rt.com/usa/441075-facebook-twitter-banned-accounts/ <comment><AUTHOR> TFA has a leftist emphasis, but this is happening on the other side too:

[https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-11/facebook-purges- ov...](https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-10-11/facebook-purges- over-800-accounts-millions-followers-including-conservative-meme)

Wow I'm so shocked that these two awful antisocial media platforms from which I fled long ago are now full-fledged members of the war media.</comment>