Boston Meet-Up for YC Founders and News Contributors (Sunday, May 6th) - <AUTHOR>

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FACTS:

What: Boston Meet-up for YC founders and contributors

When: May 6th, 7:00PM

Where: Espresso Royale Cafe on Commonwealth Ave in Boston ( <http://espressoroyale.com/location.php?id=9> )

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DETAILS:

I'm hoping to organize a Boston area meet-up for News.YC'ers and YC founders on May 6th, at 7:00PM. Espresso has some great coffee, a perfect atmosphere and is T-accessible. The idea was originally suggested in this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17711>

Bring Friends, Co-Founders, whoever! Post with a little bit of information about yourself so we know who's coming!

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Mod this comment up to keep it on top!

<comment><USER2> Why not set it up as an opencoffee event? <http://www.opencoffeeclub.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> MY INFO:

I'm currently working on <http://www.PhotoFlock.com> \- a fairly standard photo upload site which offers similar functionality to imageshack.us (with a few web 2.0 extras). This summer I will be aggressively expanding the operations of the site to create a UGC destination with some innovative premium services. I didn't apply to YC and will be bootstrapping development for the next few months.

For the last year, I was involved with <http://www.SciLink.com> where I was a co-founder and the principal designer. SciLink is a social network for life- science professionals which integrates journal article data. I recently left the company to focus on finishing school and also to explore the viability of my current project.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it is a good idea ! It would be a great opportunity for those who are looking for great hackers or great ideas. Why don't we form a "Boston/Cambridge Young Entrepreneurs Club"? We could have monthly meetings, reviews of our demo products and sharing knowledge/experiences. We could also discuss different successful start ups, fund raising issues...sort of our own small Start Up school - by Entrepreneurs for Entrepreneurs ! Those who are successful founders in the area can also tell their stories and share their experiences. We could extend this idea to the next level by having investors to give us talks if possible. Any suggestions/issues?

<comment><USER4> there's a group like this that does monthly dinners (open invitation):

<http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/boston-startup-meetup>

next meeting may 9th:

<http://www.mypunchbowl.com/publicparty/05c98908a9a3e84e593d>

see you there!

<comment><USER3> Cool ! Probably I will see you guys there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=8830> it looks like there are other things like this going on. Anybody go to either of these and can comment on the quality of the people or how things went?

I don't want to duplicate efforts, but I'm still game for some informal chill/hack time on Sunday at ERC.

<comment><AUTHOR> I saw that thread when researching YC Meet-ups. I signed up for the Yahoo! group, which says it's targeted at "Founders and those interested in becoming founders of software and Internet businesses in and around Boston. No consultants please."

I was hoping to start something which would better cater to our age bracket and, if possible, involve the YC. I love the values and core ideas of PG's essays -- I think at its heart YC is more about hacking and discussing/developing interesting ideas than it is about VC networks and structured business plan presentations.

In essence I want to meet people who operate with a similar philosophy. The existing groups just don't provide that.

<comment><USER6> ed: you should give the Boston startup meetup a shot. We started it after YC's first Startup School (at Harvard in 2005) so initially it was entirely made up of this kind of crowd. The group has broadened quite a bit since then, and some of the early members have entered new ventures or moved to the SF bay area, but there's still a core of fairly young, hackery folks. You should drop by some time. (So far nobody has brandished a business plan, and AFAIK most of the group members' ventures are bootstrapped or angel-backed.)

On the other hand, there's something undeniably energizing about being able to engage _every_ _single_ _other_ _person_ at the table with you in a debate about filesystem performance (or whatever). A more focused group would probably do well. I want to be there (but might not be able to attend this one) and we should see if there's some way we can work together, because we both want the same thing: more happy smart people hacking on ambitious, interesting startups in Boston.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I will probably attend and bring a co-founder of mine or two.

Background: Serial young entrepreneur and blogger based out of Babson College (about to graduate). Also started a venture development firm for young entrepreneurs to launch ventures cheaper and faster (Invenio Group), we are about four years old at this point and continue to grow and thrive.

Excited to attend!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm in.

I'm co-founder of a YCombinator startup that hasn't gone public yet. I'm also an MIT student that's living in Boston until at least the end of the summer.

Anyone who's interested in startups/hacking should come. I suggest bringing something to hack on or get feedback on (I'm probably going to be working in Espresso Royale that day).

</comment><comment><USER8> Will be there. There is also the weekly OpenCoffee in Cambridge that does have free WiFi and a mix of VCs and entrepreneurs. ( <http://boston.going.com/event-122245> )

<comment><USER5> Yeah - thanks for responding to my question on heyletsgo and updating the newest date for it. I'll try to make it this Thurs or next.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'll be attending with a partner; we recently launched Intern-U (<http://www.intern-u.com)> and are excited to meet and share ideas.

</comment><comment><USER10> Damn...It's my birthday and I won't be in town that day! Is there another potential meetup next month (June?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haven't discussed it but if this goes well I'd like to see it become a monthly thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'll be there too. I've done some good hacking in that coffee house. They don't have free WiFi though :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, this is true.

If I recall correctly, their access rates are very low. Most of us should be able to get through the night spending less than $10 ($4 for a drink, $6 for internet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm in. I'll float the idea by my cofounder too and see if he wants to come.

</comment><comment><USER13> Cool. I'll be there. And I'll bring a friend!

</comment><comment><USER14> Im there... Where?</comment>


Ask HN: Ever wonder if you would be happier doing something else? - <AUTHOR> I sometimes wonder if I have an unhealthy relationship with programming. At its worst I find myself getting really frustrated and impatient when things aren't working, but even in the best of times - when I would describe what I'm doing as "fun" or "satisfying" - I feel like I'm just indulging my OCD and neuroticism by relentlessly chasing purity, simplicity, performance. I get obsessive about always making my code more perfect, to the point where it can give me a headache. And I sometimes feel like this builds mental habits that spill over into the rest of my life, making me more impatient and anxious and restless. It's to the point where I'm almost wondering if I should change career fields.<p>Can anyone relate? How did you cope? Did you change careers and become happier? <comment><USER2> I was exactly the same way and being that way is what got be terminated from an employer I worked 7 years for. After that, I took a break for a few months to do some soul searching and decided even though I spent a decade of my life becoming the developer I am today, that I had hit peak intellectual satisfaction with programming. Although I haven't changed careers, I no longer have a romantic relationship with programming--it's simply a means to and end for me.

You may not have to change careers because odds are it's your environment i.e. "job" that's toxic. Once I started doing independent contracting it felt like this massive emotional burden had been lifted that allowed me to have energy to focus on what really mattered to me. I'm doing things now that I thought I would never be capable of because I didn't have a formal background in fields I ended up not pursuing in school but wanted to. So now instead of learning new programming languages I study other topics like mathematics and chemistry.

I think the act of making a "career" or business out of something you enjoy in some degree makes it drab and boring. The best minds in any scientific or technical field aren't "professionals", they are always in a constant state of "play"\--which is true for the most prolific programmers that I can think of. So my advice is to give yourself a license to just have fun! Don't guilt trip or second guess yourself: go by that textbook or go take that course etc you've been too afraid to read or attend.

</comment><comment> non-entity Yeah I think about this a lot tbh.

Turns out I'm not a very good developer, probably average on a wider scale, maybe a bit below that and certainly bottom teir when it comes to highly tech minded contexts, such as here on HN. And frankly, I dont care for much of it at all. I dont hate programming i guess, and while I rank myself poorly as a developer, I'd same I'm ok as a hacker, meaning I can dig my heels into a problem I'm interesed in and "hack together a solution" from nothin, mostly for the sale of wanting to do it. Its very rare that I'm exposed to a problem that I can get engaged in, but when I do the spark returns.

OTOH no idea what else I could reasonably do. Most careers are going to be plauged by the reasons that turn me off of programming. There's a handful of things that interest me, but all stuff that is out of reach because of education reasons and I make too much money to afford going back to school (but to little to self fund). Its also hard to tell where my intellectual ceiling is and if I'd even be able to work on some of those things anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm slightly worried that I'm just a little bit behind the curve, and I'll be in the same position in a few years; so all I really have to say is that I think spending time on non-programming^ hobbies helps.

^(and better: non-computer, so there's no 'I could write a script to do this faster' or 'I have so many better ideas for a site/program that would do this better' temptation)

</comment><comment><USER4> Constantly. I'm still trying to decide what that thing might be. I cope by playing around in different hobbies, trying to find interests outside of tech. Preferably no screens involved. I'm also trying to develop ideas for side projects that could subsidize a different career/lifestyle.</comment>


Datamining Bandersnatch - <AUTHOR> https://blog.thecybershadow.net/2019/08/02/datamining-bandersnatch/ <comment><USER2> Ha! My brother and I tried watching all the variations of Bandersnatch that we could, assuming there wouldn't be very many and that we'd see all possible clips after 3 or 4 watchings. We got impatient after 3 times through and quit, but still guessed we'd almost covered every possibility. Looks like we were pretty wrong about our guess.

<comment><USER3> I watched refusing to make any decisions and waited for the timer to run out and force Netflix to go with their default.

I'm pretty sure that it just walks through every branch and I eventually got to a final spot where it wanted me to put in a special code and when I didn't it finally ended. So I think I only missed one ending by doing nothing at all.

<comment><USER4> if the article is correct and it didn't take you a few days, you probably missed a lot more than one ending.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder what the authoring software is like?

(I hope for Inform 7 for movies... )

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inform#Inform_7)

<comment><USER6> I believe it was made with Twine:

[https://www.konbini.com/en/techandinnovation/twine-free- tool...](https://www.konbini.com/en/techandinnovation/twine-free-tool-made- interactive-episode-black-mirror-possible-2/)

[http://twinery.org/](http://twinery.org/)

<comment><USER7> They made the first prototypes/scripts for Bandersnatch in Twine, but they later moved to a Netflix-internal tool called "Branch Manager".

<comment><USER5> Cool, thank you both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So the author took the JSON/video file provided by Netflix and reverse engineered the encoding and ran it on a Netflix player emulator?

<comment><USER9> No. They pulled all the logic out, converted to truth tables, and generated a flowchart of the entire game. In doing so they uncovered some interesting bugs like unreachable content and incorrect logic expressions. Yes they used a player emulator in the process to verify their work.

<comment><USER8> That sounds like reverse engineering the encoding and running it on an emulator.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps. I interpreted your comment as asking about the actual video encoding. The focus of this write up is about interpreting the accompanying logic associated with the clips of video. My point is to make it clear that this is not just an "I played Bandersnatch on an emulator" post which would be rather boring IMO.

<comment><USER8> Ah, okay, I meant "reverse engineered the [JSON] encoding [of the gameplay logic] and ran [the video] on an emulator [to interpret the state]".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Robert Langlands, who linked number theory, analysis, and geometry (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://projects.thestar.com/math-the-canadian-who-reinvented-mathematics/ <comment><USER2> A lecture series by Langlands for a lay audience:

[https://video.ias.edu/The-Practice-of-Mathematics](https://video.ias.edu/The- Practice-of-Mathematics)

The video is not great, but the content. From the summary:

"In spite of forty years as a mathematician, I have difficulty describing these problems, even to myself, in a simple, cogent and concise manner that makes it clear what is wanted and why. As a possible, but only partial, remedy I thought I might undertake to explain them to a lay audience."

<comment><USER3> > If it works out, I would like to continue in following years on classical > fluid mechanics and turbulence

Since it's dated 1999, I guesss he didn't continue with fluid mechanics?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's about Robert Langlands of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langlands_program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langlands_program)

>linking math's main branches — number theory (once called arithmetic), harmonic analysis, which includes calculus, and geometry.

>To mathematicians, this is mind-blowing stuff. The branches deal with completely different things: number theory is about, yes, numbers, harmonic analysis studies motion and geometry deals with shapes. They may as well be different planets.

<comment><USER5> I think that may be an exxageration. I study maths at a much lower level and the teacher regarily points out links between these domains.

I believe number theory is already strongly linked with analysis.

<comment><USER6> Those links only became apparent after centuries of development in total isolation. Now that we know they are there, we involve them in teaching because they change how we see things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Somewhat randomly, I've been working with a mathematician that has convinced me to study the Langlands program with him. I feel ill-equipped for the journey, having boycotted number theory ever since they tried to get me to learn the multiplication table. But on the other hand, there is plenty of geometry involved! Who would have thought that the dodecahedron is involved with solving the quintic? It really does seem like this area (the Langlands program) is at a vast nexus of many different branches of mathematics. It's intense.

<comment><USER7> Shapes just come about when you are talking about objects with certain types of symmetries. One of the main "attacks" on polynomials is to realize that their roots are related to eachother, in terms of total, product, difference, etc.

The simplest of these methods is just Vieta's formulas:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vieta%27s_formulas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vieta%27s_formulas)

I highly recommend Edward Frenkel's book, Love and Math. It was a great read about the mathematics itself, and also his troubles as a Jewish academic in Soviet Russia.

Love and Math: [https://amzn.to/2qcqUb4](https://amzn.to/2qcqUb4)

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, but the dodecahedron is a modular curve, and I'm guessing this is how Hermite came up with the solution to the quintic using modular functions in 1858. If there are any real number theorists here they might be able to clarify this some more. Modular functions, modular forms, automorphic forms, these are all key ingredients of the Langlands program.

<comment><USER7> I believe you're talking about the free algebras on groups of modular forms of a certain 'weight.' That's not exactly the modular forms themselves.

Here's some more information: [https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/quantum- mech...](https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2017/12/31/quantum-mechanics- and-the-dodecahedron/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That john baez article is about something else.

Try this: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.0955.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.0955.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The book of Frenkel (the guy of the photo), Love and Math, is one way to go from zeto to not being 100% clueless about the Langlands program, and enjoy the time at the same time. Very likable.

</comment><comment><USER9> A somewhat accessible account of the Langlands Program can be found in Edward Frenkel's book _Love & Math_.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is Frenkel giving a talk on the geometric Langlands program [1]. I wouldn't say it is "accessible", but if you have seen some physics maybe give it a go.

[1] "What Do Fermat's Last Theorem and Electro-magnetic Duality Have in Common?" [http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/bblunch/frenkel/](http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/bblunch/frenkel/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For the Langlands program he was awarded the Abel prize just a few weeks ago, following the link "Read more about Robert P. Langlands" at the end of the official page [1] for the Abel prize you can read a short and informal explanation of his work written by Alex Bellos

[1] [http://www.abelprize.no/nyheter/vis.html?tid=73025](http://www.abelprize.no/nyheter/vis.html?tid=73025)

<comment><USER11> Discussed a bit at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16632364](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16632364).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What's the intended purpose of this article? Why was it written?

It's always frustrating to read pieces about mathematicians written by people whose attitude is "[I have no chance of ever grasping what ultimately makes this article possible]" and "'[Cartesian geometry?] I can recall sitting in that class,' I said, lying.".

I know writing such things is often supposed to make the article more palatable to a lay audience who probably feels the same way, but honestly all it accomplishes is reinforcing to that audience that mathematics is an esoteric topic for geniuses.

This kind of article, which pretends to be bringing mathematics to the masses, is just another one of the reasons students feel so comfortable incessantly returning to saying "I'm not a math person" instead of being empowered whenever they have some success with math.

This is so frustrating because of course I approve of the apparent motivation behind writing an article like this.

</comment><comment><USER13> His seminal paper, _Problems in the Theory of Automorphic Forms_ is here:

[https://publications.ias.edu/sites/default/files/problems- in...](https://publications.ias.edu/sites/default/files/problems-in-the- theory-of-automorphic-forms.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER14> It is inspirational that he is still active at 80+. Frankel's videos are great, though I am still building to a real grasp of Langlands work.

</comment><comment><USER15> The way the title is formatted made me think this would be an obituary. I'm really glad that's not the case.

</comment><comment><USER16> > "What normal person cares whether the square root of two is a rational > number?"

egh, is it?

</comment><comment><USER17> Wasn't Category theory supposed to unify everything? Has it failed in doing so?

<comment><USER18> Category theory is basically a language. If one wanted to formulate an explicit conjecture corresponding to the original Langlands program, it could possibly be phrased as some kind of equivalence of a category of automorphic representations and a category of motives. Precisely defining those two categories is the hard part.

So even with this language, one still has to do the work of actually proving these things. It's like having a nice programming language; you still have to write the code to do the thing!

<comment><USER17> I see.thanks for the info and light

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hahaha I love how the title of this post implies the idea that the idea of a Canadian being a good mathematician is a shocker. In my head I read it the same as "John, an octopus, is the world's greatest mathematician".

<comment><USER20> The Star is a Canadian publication. The clear interpretation is of national pride.

<comment><USER21> Still somewhat over the top. They mention he's a Canadian three times in the first half of the article. In case you missed it, he's a Canadian. Although looking him up it seems he's also an American.

<comment><USER22> Welcome to the other side. It's common place here to see the same sort of nationalism for the US, but no one ever comments on it. For those of us outside of the US, it's extremely obnoxious though.

Right in line with that, the minute any comment or article even slightly nationalistic about another country, you get tons of comments about how untrue it is and how it's still the US that is amazing, not the other country.

<comment><USER21> I'm not from the US and don't really notice this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Tangentially related, Jakow Trachtenberg invented a new and much faster system for mental arithmetic [1] while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. It's a far cry from Common Core math, not easy to learn but once you know it, wow, you can multiply arbitrary 3-digit numbers in your head nearly instantly. 4-digits and higher gets a little trickier but the mental difficulty increases slowly.

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

<comment><USER24> How is this related?

<comment><USER23> Thinking in a brand new way about Math, a way no one else has, to come up with novel new connections?

<comment><USER25> Arithmetic is to mathematics as typing is to being a writer. If the subject of an article is a brilliant author, then a cool new keyboard that makes it easier to type really _isn 't_ related, not even tangentially.

<comment><USER26> However, tangents themselves are part of geometry, which is tangentially related to Langlands' work.

<comment><USER25> Damnit, you win this round. :-)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Project Flogo – Open Source Framework for IoT Integration - <AUTHOR> http://www.flogo.io/ <comment><USER2> >Internal Use Only License Grant. TIBCO hereby grants you a limited, non‐transferable, non‐exclusive license to use the software solely for your internal business purposes.

"open source"

<comment><USER3> open source != free software

<comment><USER4> Pedants would probably agree that this is a true statement, but it is also not relevant. The project itself claims it is open source and the parent claims it isn't. No one mentioned the free software movement.

Parent is pointing out that the license lacks some provisions commonly required to be considered "open source" \-- a better term for what is presented might be "disclosed source" or "visible source."

Defining open source can be a point of contention, but the license in question is pretty far away from most accepted definitions. There's not even a right to modify the code. Note that this license appears to be only on the base project that seems to contain nothing beyond documentation and samples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 12 hours off HN & your project gets posted! Phew :)

I'm the PM on Project Flogo and welcome your questions + feedback. As some have noted on the interweb, it's a pretty big step for an enterprise sw vendor like us, to open up a core piece of our technology, so your constructive feedback gets a lot of attention around here and shapes it!

Couple of quick clarifications:

\- All the repos (CLI, Library, Contrib and Services) except the top-level repo are BSD-licensed. The top-level repo is docs+samples, so we have put it under a free-beer license. However, we are in principle open to putting it out under BSD or a CC license as well.

\- At its core, Flogo is a process engine that executes flow definitions consisting of activities. These flows are triggered by events happening in the real world. Triggers could be HTTP, MQTT, CoAP, etc. & activities could be AWS IoT, Log, HTTP, Send MQTT, etc. There is a fairly simple SDK to build your own activity or trigger and bring those along.

\- We are actively working on a Web UI to model the flows instead of handcrafting the json DSLs or writing code.

\- The runtime footprint comparison is for apps with equivalent functionality (Think a flow like MQTT Trigger -> Log Message -> HTTP Request -> Send MQTT). We just chose 2 common frameworks to showcase the difference in runtime footprint. We love Node & Java - it's just that for Edge integration microservices we chose Golang - and the runtime footprint was a key decision factor among others.

</comment><comment><USER6> It should be an IoT integration framework, which has 3,3 MB. That sound huge to me. If I have an embedded processor that has 1 MB of Flash, than that is already huge. Still this has to fit my application besides that framework.

<comment><USER7> Initially I thought the same, but looks like it's only a web application, not the software you'd ship with the node.

<comment><USER8> I'm not so sure.

 _" Build IoT applications that run on edge devices..._"

The moment I see "runs on Raspberry Pi", I know they haven't done any thinking about low cost or low power consumption edge nodes. Get back to me when it can run on a CortexM0 with 128KiB of flash.

<comment><USER5> Good point - yes, we have M0-3 class target platforms on our roadmap. IoT Gateway devices was where the need was most pressing for our customers and we just went there first.

Now, we will likely end up doing a whole lot less functionality on an M0 profile, compared to a typical Flogo flow app on an IoT gateway, but the idea is to offload the right level & kind of edge compute onto lower power nodes.

One point worth mentioning is that pretty much any framework can run on a Pi, but running dozens of these Edge apps - "12-factor" style[1], that is where Flogo's advantage shines through.

[1] [https://12factor.net/processes](https://12factor.net/processes)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google Brillo and Weave are essentially providing the same functions for Google's evosystem for IoT which connects to Google Cloud Platform. How does Flogo compare with Brillo + Weave?

<comment><USER5> We havent seen a whole lot of real world demand yet, but something that could likely end as a trigger or activity in Flogo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A Tibco project?! What the.

<comment><USER5> lol. This goes up on my review deck with execs. But yes, a (new) TIBCO & a new TIBCO project :)

(Disclaimer: TIBCO PM working on Project Flogo)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have been doing "IoT" for 10 years and after checking the website and the github repo I still have no clue about what flogo does.

Isn't it like some basic http api for "triggers"? Is this what people think IoT is about?

More importantly, can these basic set ups make money for some?

<comment><USER12> The gist I get is that it's a daemon for a gateway device (like a Raspberry Pi) that you configure data flows via JSON files. The Flogo CLI seems to be a JSON generator ([https://github.com/TIBCOSoftware/flogo- cli/blob/master/READM...](https://github.com/TIBCOSoftware/flogo- cli/blob/master/README.md)). They compare their functionality to Nodered ([http://nodered.org/](http://nodered.org/)) except it doesn't have a GUI (they mention working on it) and instead of being written in Node.js, it's written in Go.

I'm of the opinion that these frameworks for Gateway devices are reinventing Unix pipe and cron, that integrations for devices and databases should be written in any language (as CLI), and running logic on the gateway is 90% of the time not what you want to do, you just want to pull data from a device and push it to a database somewhere. Shameless plug, in my free time I work on Open Pipe Kit, a project that is building CLI for devices and databases. We're currently working on a series of DIY LORA Nodes for Agriculture. If anyone is interested in lending a hand, please reach out. [http://openpipekit.github.io](http://openpipekit.github.io)

<comment><USER13> Nice work with the open pipe project. Looks perfect for DIY sensor/telemetry projects.

If you are looking to monetize connectivity services, you certainly will need a bi-directional architecture to push values back to end nodes, and compute resources available at the gateway for data filtering, preprocessing, and security.

But these are tasks that AWS IoT, Azure IoT, and GCP IoT are currently tackling with a lot of resources. So it would be hard to compete at that level.

<comment><USER12> Thanks. While our examples are usually "pull from some device and push to a database", with farmOS we experimented with "pull from a database and push to a device". In this way, pipes are used to transfer state of a device two ways. This depends on a database UI giving users the option to modify the state of something, something that IoT databases like Phant ([http://data.sparkfun.com](http://data.sparkfun.com)) and Adafruit IO ([http://io.adafruit.com](http://io.adafruit.com)) don't currently support.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Corporations and OSS Do Not Mix - <AUTHOR> http://www.coglib.com/~icordasc/blog/2015/11/corporations-and-oss-do-not-mix.html <comment><USER3> In 15 years, I've read my fair share of "open source developer's lament", and when the projects mentioned are stuff like Requests or SQLObject I honestly don't understand. If you step back and try to look at these problems in a structured way, you can see that it always boil down to the following algo:

1\. Is it a money problem? Then _ask for money_ every time anyone asks for a piece of you (i.e. bug fixing, event patronage, whatever).

2\. Is is a time problem? Then hire someone. If you can't afford it, it's a money problem: goto 1.

3\. Is it a skills problem? Then hire someone. If you can't afford it, it's a money problem: goto 1.

I mean, _requests_ alone is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. with all due respect to Kenneth and Ian, I find it hard to believe that it cannot pay one developer salary, even at Californian rates, unless they simply _cannot be bothered to ask for money_. Stuff like adding a "donate" button on the page looks _lazy_.

There are tons of ways to get money out of big corporations. Get a rotating- sponsorship deal where a company pays one salary for one year -- between Amazon, Google and Twitter (all heavy requests users, I'm sure), you already have three years of _full-time development_. They get quick bugfixes, you get a better life, win-win. These companies make _billions_ with your code, I cannot believe they can't cough up some spare cash. I mean, look at the OpenBSD Foundation: they asked for some change to pay a month of server time, and they got _Microsoft_ to dole out huge cash to port OpenSSH to Windows. _Microsoft_ , FFS!

<comment><USER4> We should have Open-Source agents who can represent projects and pitch corporations for paid sponsorship. The agent gets 10% for closing the deal.

Sounds like an opportunity for a new start-up.

I'd sign up for it.

<comment><USER5> That's just a standard software consulting. Lots of clients wouldn't mind you open sourcing what you worked on for them.

<comment><USER4> Not consulting.

It would be having a person pitch a business or groups of businesses to sponsor an open-source project.

The overhead of communication, negotiation, and writing contracts is outside the scope of what most open-source developers are willing to do in terms of time.

Simply put, there is a disconnect between the value of the open-source software and the availability / willingness of open-source project maintainers to monetize a project.

<comment><USER5> Best of luck!

<comment><USER4> Best of luck with what? I'm merely stating an idea here.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I was hoping you'd try and implement it.

<comment><USER4> I'm in the category of open-source developers who don't have the time or willingness to start pitching corporations for sponsorships.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's worth thinking carefully about what you expect to gain from Open Sourcing code, before you do it. One of my projects ([https://mitmproxy.org](https://mitmproxy.org)) is pretty widely used commercially (both as a tool for analysts, and as a back-end component). We have a vibrant pool of contributors, many of whom use mitmproxy in their day jobs, but the only financial contribution from a commercial user has been from Google, and that at arm's length via a GSOC sponsorship.

I would never complain about this, though - we don't solicit financial contributions, and I didn't start the project expecting to benefit financially. I get a lot of direct enjoyment out of working on mitmproxy, and I see it as a way to share something neat with like-minded people. In that sense, it has been immensely "profitable": I've met and collaborated with many interesting folks because of mitmproxy.

If you don't feel these indirect benefits make a project worth your while, you might want to consider doing something else with your time. There's no likely future in which small open source projects will be deluged with either contributors or money.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for mitmproxy, used it for the first time the other day :-)

<comment><USER6> No problem! Hope it was useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I fully understand the authors frustration. However, as an hobbyist I would always publish my source code under a strong copyleft license such as the GPL: The companies that can't live with these conditions are most probably exactly those you don't want to deal with in the first place. And as the source code was created as the result of a "hobby", the size of the user base doesn't matter anyway.

<comment><USER9> I upvoted you, and I agree. However, as a professional developer, it is nice to be able to use OSS at work because you are sure it will always be available.

Therefore developers who release things under BSD license have a very good incentive - they want to use the thing they wrote (as a hobby) at work, yet they want to continue to use it even if they change jobs. I think this is actually a primary reason why BSD is favored by some developers.

I don't think there is an easy solution to this, at least as long as "intellectual property" exists. However abolishing IP would be digital communism and many people are for whatever reason adverse to that idea.

<comment><USER10> What about the GPL or LGPL prevents you from using it at work? Do you use Linux?

<comment><USER11> Perhaps your confusion is in the distinction between the literal 'using it at work' vs. what I interpreted OP's meaning as incorporating a GPL-licensed OSS project as a dependency of commercial software?

The 'problem' with the GPL is easy: commercial software is often distributed to end users only as binaries because it is sold closed-source.

The LGPL may be less clear, but there are still problems: LGPL is (was?) not allowed in iOS apps on the Apple app store, is only intended to be used when licensing software libraries, corporate lawyers spidey sense tingles as the license gets into the details of what is a library and linking, etc.

The commercial friendliness of the BSD license vs. [L]GPL seems to be fairly self-evident; the FSF summarizes it as a 'lax, permissive non-copyleft free software license'[1].

[1] [http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license- list.html#FreeBSD](http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#FreeBSD)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
      As soon as a bug affects them, they want it fixed
      immediately. If you don't fix it in 24 hours (because maybe
      you have a real life or a family or you're sick or any
      number of other very valid reasons) then the threats start:

      "Well if you're not going to take this seriously, we'll
      have to start using another project."

What's the downside to an individual at a corporation for trying to guilt the maintainer into doing their bidding? If the bug gets fixed, they look good within their company. If it doesn't, what do they lose?

I'd guess that companies take this approach because on net, the benefits outweigh the downsides. If guilt can get 1/3 of your bugs fixed promptly and for free, and if the other 2/3 of the time there are no repercussions, then guilt is probably a good strategy.

To change this, one either needs to reduce the success rate, or penalize the request. Judging by the prevalence of spam, you'd have to get the success rate very, very low before it would curtail "bad" behavior. So what's the appropriate penalty?

Has anyone tried a "black list" license? Take some standard open source license, and add "This software may not be used by anyone employed by the following corporations: [list]. If you are employed by an company on this list, and use software without specific license, you will personally be held liable for liquidated damages of $XXXXXX. If you would like have a company removed from this list, please contact [x] to discuss how we can better align our interests."

I'm not suggesting that this is the right solution for most (if any) projects, but consider the "glee" of being able to respond "Great! In fact, I think you might want to switch to a different project immediately. I've added you to the blacklist, and while you are allowed to continue using the current version under terms of the license distributed with it, all future releases and bug fixes are now off limits."

<comment><USER13> My response: that will be $10,000-$20,000 please. And no I don't care if you go use another project.

Or you can also sign up for our enterprise support package for only $2,500/mo with a 1 year contract minimum we can figure out a way to get that bug fixed asap.

Ultimately it's all a question of money, if you are not getting enough to provide the kind of service they demand. DEMAND MORE!

And don't give a shit about the manager trying to manage you. They don't pay you, you owe them nothing.

Don't be afraid to say no. Free software is free because they should pay you to either provide support or fix problems when they pay for them to be fixed. You be a good little capitalist and let them get up the creek without a paddle and then charge them an arm and a leg to get back down. If they don't like it, they can figure out some other way to solve their problems.

<comment><USER14> Or tell them to fork the project and fix it themselves. Perhaps we should popularize something like "go fork yourself" as a valid response?

<comment><USER13> brilliant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think Mike Perham does a great job of leveraging his open source project into direct contributions.

[http://sidekiq.org/](http://sidekiq.org/)

Sometimes if you respond to 'we need feature x, y, and z.' with an upsell, they actually will give you money.

<comment><USER16> We at GitLab love the open core business model too, it is a hard balance but it can lead to having the money to make the open source project much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Building a healthy community doesn't just happen by accident.

Too many open source devs put almost no thought into the cultural aspects of building a community that is (1) not full of jerks, and (2) able to attract meaningful support from the businesses that use the code.

Those things can be done, if you try, especially if you start early in the life of the project.

<comment><USER18> Devs aren't supermen. A lot of people get into open source because that's the way they feel they can best do something good for the world, to put their software development talents at work.

Asking them to now go and develop a new set of skills, political savvy, that aren't just not in the same ballpark as dev, but not even in the same sport, they're going to just throw up their hands and walk away from OSS.

When firms have talented but politically-averse individual contributors, they give them managers so as to best direct those talents. OSS needs to stop expecting themselves to do everything and get some bosses to shoulder some of the burden.

<comment><USER19> What I think you're hinting at is that OSS shouldn't just be for the developers. People who are good at curating a community but don't write a line of code are super valuable. They should be seeking out OSS projects (and OSS project owners should be seeking them out).

<comment><USER20> I have to disagree with that. If you don't write a line of code, how are you supposed to actually understand what's going on? OSS projects are not simple Hello World applications here.

<comment><USER19> > how are you supposed to actually understand what's going on?

By talking with developers of the project! All it takes is a few conversations to get an idea about the why/what/when/ about a project and understand enough of its internals to be able to articulate those same things to others.

Numerous other things can be done by people who don't write the actual code:

* Writing a great "Getting Started" guide

* Writing great conceptual documentation

* Acting as a community moderator and squashing vitriol

* Acting as a contact for companies needing work done on the project

* Keeping things like Github Issues fully tagged, organized, and traced back to from Pull Requests

That's just off the top of my head. There are likely many more things that an OSS project would value which someone who isn't writing code can do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "...the company wanted to invest as little time in the problem as possible so the person couldn't fix the tests, write new ones, or write a real fix. I don't blame the engineer, I blame their manager and their company."

This is spot on. Managers of software teams (and their bosses, all the way up to CTOs and CEOs) need to allow their engineers to contribute fixes to OSS with the understanding that it helps the community. There's also the added benefit of helping the business to develop a positive image in the OSS community.

This obviously is not always possible, and in some organizations it is never going to be possible. However, there are teams out there that do have the freedom and flexibility to give back to the community.

If enough teams begin contributing bug fixes to projects they find helpful, eventually this pervasive attitude the author writes about will change.

On a separate note, the author needs to stand up for himself more. A boilerplate e-mail with his hourly rate wouldn't take long to put together. If an issue is important enough to a company to bombard him with support requests, it's likely worth it to them to pay for a fix.

<comment><USER22> > Managers of software teams (and their bosses, all the way up to CTOs and > CEOs) need to allow their engineers to contribute fixes to OSS with the > understanding that it helps the community.

They NEED to? Or what? I _need_ to drink water. If I don't, I die. What creates this need to allow engineers to help the community?

<comment><USER23> As with drinking water, you need to have a goal (e.g. surviving) to say need. I suspect GP was saying that they need to do that to have a non-parasitical relationship with open source projects they use.

<comment><USER22> I mean, parasites get to sit around in the host and have a free lunch. You don't cure malaria by yelling at a bunch of Plasmodium falciparum about how they should be ashamed of themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> However you forgotten something.

Not all companies are big and not all have the time (even in free time) to help your project.

I know there are lots of companies who actually use your software and doing nothing.

However there are also lot's of small companies who started or started within 1-5 years and employ 1-5 people. Those actually need your libraries most but can't give too much back. Actually their time is lacking while they built their product. (I would like to contribute to a project but can't due to my restricted time. Currently we are 3 people and I'm teaching one, currently I hoped that he would share more of his free time in the open source world, but I don't believe he ever will..)

Also I know your library and I used it and I know that you've got a high quality of standard and that's the second thing you forgotten. Younger people don't like to take the bigger issue's, they are just not confident. As I am in the projects I would like to fix a Bug I'm just too scary to make a bigger contribution. It's mostly the lack of my experience. Especially when it comes to testing. Nobody ever learned that to me, so I was and I am on my own by dealing with it.

What I also thought and why I'm doing it is raising issue's (hopefully not duplicating it) when a project has an issue. I'm also fixing Typo's if I find some. I didn't thought how much work it is for a small project. I thought I could get 'something' back which is better than nothing. However I was never one of those guys who stopped responding.

I also tried to fix some minor things in Django however somehow I got lost and had no time on those and our project moved away from Django which wasn't caused by Django more caused by the fact with our Python expertise.

Btw. I started to read HN afterwards so I was a complete 'noob' at the beginning of my career. And as I've read through your blogs I will certainly try to offer more time at projects my company is using and I'm also willing to share my thoughts on the company if we grow. At the moment we needing to handle our stuff, not enough money, not enough developers, not enough time.

<comment><USER25> LOL startups can afford swanky offices and free massages and all the rest but can't afford to pay for software? I call shenanigans.

<comment><USER26> There is a world outside of SV you know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think all FOSS projects need a support model. State the situation explicitly on the website of the project.

1\. How many are working on?

2\. If a patch is requested what is the SLA of that getting merged. It should be based on the bandwidth available to the maintainers.

3\. Provide "priority" support. It can involve money, resources, anything actually. It is better to call out, how someone can get "priority" help. In case of money, provide hourly rate for different priorities.

4\. Offer a chance to for 3rd party developers to "charge" a company and provide a "quality" fix for the project. The money may be shared between the committers and 3rd party developers, based on some pre-defined contract.

There are several open source projects that have "paid" support. So, this is not new. But it does require, thinking from the angle of money.

</comment><comment><USER28> > I've also never demanded this. It would be nice, but it never happens

Perhaps you should start asking then.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, I'm baffled as to why he wouldn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Author is in a far better position than most projects, since he 1) already has companies using his software and 2) has folks from those companies contacting him directly for help.

Corporations are in the business of making money which also puts them in the business of spending money. They pay for office space, things to put in the office, people, services, insurance, and software. They pay for everything. There are hardly any things they don't pay for!

So as long as the math makes sense and the transaction is presented properly, they are happy to shake hands and pay for your services. In fact, they want to pay you to make problems go away. Red Hat is worth billions for executing this at the corporate scale. Free software is just the hook. Corporations that can pay for software now have money to spend on other services. This realization is what made Red Hat.

The only thing you need to know when freelancing is that if they walk away, they were never shopping to begin with. They were just gaming you. Everyone knows labor isn't free. So if they really need your help they'll pay. And they'll expect market rates, so charge them market rates.

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks Ian for all your hard work!

Ian's projects are what they are today because of what he has invested in them, without any guarantee of reward. The work that he has done will remain even now that his willingness to maintain these projects 'for free' has waned.

It is the open source developer's responsibility to fight for their own OSS/life balance, and it is good to see Ian taking this step to stand up for himself. Hopefully Ian's transition away from his own self-admitted naïveté will go smoothly -- these projects will continue even when he chooses to ignore destructive input and/or give an outright 'no' (or 'not right now') when necessary. Ian and other OSS maintainers do well to take a few pages from the lean startup customer support desk handbook: creating email templates, personal developer/contributor FAQs, etc. No doubt this blog post will serve its part as something Ian and others can point corporate developers to as a not-so-subtle hint in the future!

In my own very limited (and far less impressive) experience, I have found maintaining a list of alternative projects to be very helpful. Then, when someone brings an urgent need to my attention, I can point them to the list so they can solve their problem without me. One such conversation went like this:

      >
      > Hi ______,
      >
      > I will not be able to resolve these issues in what it sounds
      > like is the timeframe you need.
      >
      > My recommendation would be that you install the trial version
      > of a tool on the list of commercial alternatives: [url]
      >
      > One that I have very limited experience with is [url]. The page
      > also lists all of the free tools that I am aware of.
      >
      > Thanks for reporting these problems; I will create issues to
      > track the progress of resolving them.
      >

Edit: PS. Hopefully Ian will invest some time in sharing some of the details of his positive experiences in OSS, perhaps even in interactions with the corporate world. In addition to what not to do, examples of what has worked well could make it easier for others to request more of the same! This discussion seems to serve both sides of this coin as well.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have mulled over two "financial innovations" that are worth mentioning here.

1\. OSS Development bonds 2\. OSS draw down financing

1\. Is most practical here, being the idea that one can build a Kickstarter like infrastructure to escrow payment to develop new features on a project. This seems the closest to the OP's problem - he wants to get paid to work on his projects. As they are really high usage projects then I suspect this is doable. What most corporations miss is a culture where this is permissible. Probably because it would effectively end their in house developer system

2\. I want to spend the next ten years writing really good OSS software that solves and provides government services (land registry, elections etc - <USER2> [http://oss4gov.org/manifesto](http://oss4gov.org/manifesto))

But right now most software purchased for use by the government is license based - that is the assumption (and RFPs and timescales) screams "you have already built this".

Seed money will help, but perhaps more helpful would be the ability to have say the first government delartment or local authority pay, and then build a finance product that gives the developer 10x to go build it. If another govt wants the software it pays a development fee, and that fee is routed to the original funder. This continues.

<comment><USER10> Your manifesto is down

<comment><USER31> Thanks will go fix

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why is it surprising when companies contribute patches mostly to fix issues they care about? Isn't scratching your own itch what you're supposed to do?

</comment><comment><USER33> He can only blame himself. He should explain his situation, and ask for a reasonable amount to fix bugs or implement requests. And reasonable is not minimal wage, it's proper payment for the work he does. If the user doesn't like it, then they can ask someone else to fix it.

<comment><USER34> Why the hell would he blame himself for users making asinine demands? Are the users not adults? Are the users not fully capable of taking responsibility for their actions?

<comment><USER35> He can blame himself for worrying about it and wasting time on a huge writeup. Instead, he should offer to help for reasonable pay, have stock responses for rejections to prevent wasted time, and otherwise dont worry about the fact that companies are mostly selfish. That's life.

Just enjoy building and letting people use your app. Fuck the rest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Corporations are run to benefit their shareholders, not open source developers or society at large. If they can get away with using your software for free, as per licence, contributing nothing back, and adding insult to injury by demanding any bugs they find are fixed PDQ or else, that's what they'll do.

It would be better if new commercially useful projects are released on a shared source licence, allowing free non-commercial use but requiring payment for commercial use. That way, their developers get remunerated for their work, and hobbyists still get to use the software for free.

<comment><USER37> So like a GPL/commercial dual license?

<comment><USER36> No, because that would allow companies to use the software for free if they choose the GPL licensing terms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Sadly not surprised to read this...

Some thoughts:

Some projects that have active companies behind them clearly offer development work/support contracts that include modifications (Maybe "support" is easier to bill in an enterprise than external dev work?).

Is there potential for something similar for less cathedral-style projects? like a list with "the following developers have contributed to/a lot of experience using this project and are available for hire"?

</comment><comment><USER39> I have zero sympathy for people in this situation, because it's their own fault for being in it. The solution is super simple: Stop working for free like an idiot.

If a company won't pay you to work on what they want, tell them you'll get to it when you get to it. If they have a problem with that, tell them to pound sand.

Further, releasing a bunch of stuff as open source, and then complaining that nobody contributes back, or doesn't contribute enough, or only contributes because they personally benefit, is a little ridiculous. Nobody forced you to give away a bunch of work for free, so don't make it sound like you're some kind of martyr.

<comment><USER40> While your general idea is correct, the way you communicate it is needlessly rude and contrarian.

The better way would be to answer, that yes, surely you will help, but there doesn't seem to be a valid M&S contract in force and that you will gladly discuss specifics with them, if they are interested.

See? That's the talk the managers understand, they don't work for free either. So it is either an important thing they need to fix and will work with you, or it is not and in that case you will not waste your time. The simple thing is, that you need to recognize when they exert pressure on you and then simply mind your own interests.

<comment><USER39> Re-reading what I wrote, it's pretty clear I didn't recommend being rude until after they've declined to pay.

It seems obvious not to be rude right off the bat in such a situation, so there didn't seem to be a point mentioning it. I think most people understand not to be rude to potential customers.

> See? ...

There's no need to be condescending about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I like the idea of having to subscribe to get the latest source, be it dev, unstable, or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER42> If everyone who used OpenSSH donated 1 dollar to OpenSSH.... well you get the idea.</comment>


Claustrophobia - <AUTHOR> http://www.jordanm.co.uk/post/46657852980/claustrophobia

<comment><USER2> Amen. I hate responsive design as an end user. And simple users hate it even more -- they don't understand why they don't get the exact same thing in their mobiles that they do when they access the site on the web.

Responsive is a cop-out instead of making a proper design for each medium or having a design that works THE SAME in all kinds of screens.</comment>


Magic Leap Livestream 02 Gives Up Some Clues - <AUTHOR> https://www.kguttag.com/2018/06/10/magic-leap-livestream-02-gives-up-some-clues/ <comment><USER2> Now that demos are out, it's rather disappointing.</comment>


Resources to learn practical front end development? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Is it android/iOS you are looking to get into? If that's the case my first tutorial which proved to me very helpful was on this youtube channel.. It starts from scratch and builds up through each video in the list and everything is nicely covered

[https://www.youtube.com/user/thenewboston/featured](https://www.youtube.com/user/thenewboston/featured)

Here you can find android/iOS front end development as well as various other tutorials..</comment>


How to Run a Business in 202 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/30/style/millennial-entrepreneur-startups.html <comment><USER2> I'm not going to shame anyone for a simple typo, but I will admit that I was genuinely hoping the link would be about how one would have run a business 1818 years ago.</comment>


How Shortcuts Turned Writely Into Google Docs - <AUTHOR> http://founderdating.com/how-shortcuts-turned-writely-into-google-docs/

<comment><USER2> Interesting to get someone else's perspective on what cut backs they made and how they evaluated the decision. And always good to hear that it worked out pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER2> What are some shortcuts that others have made that have caused bigger problems? What are some risky shortcuts that others have made that turned out surprisingly well?

</comment><comment><USER3> "Avoid risks that might kill your startup." I think partnerships are one of the big, overlooked killers of startups.

</comment><comment><USER4> I think what's important is looking at the tradeoffs - which shortcuts make sense and which ones don't?

</comment><comment><USER5> Super insightful, love such stories. I wish they could be easy to replicate</comment>


V100 Server On-Prem vs. AWS P3 Instance Cost Comparison - <AUTHOR> https://lambdalabs.com/blog/8-v100-server-on-prem-vs-p3-instance-tco-analysis-cost-comparison/ <comment><USER2> > Our TCO includes energy, hiring a part-time system administrator, and co- > location costs.

Which is a myopic view of TCO. This ignores so many things about purchasing on-prem hardware (for good or bad):

Admin:

\- Cost associated with finding an admin who understands how this thing works

Speed / convenience:

\- Try before you buy

\- Time it takes for the box to be built, shipped and sent to the data center

\- Time (and cost) it takes to install software, drivers, etc

Maintenance / Capitalization / Finances:

\- 3-year? What is the useful life of this? When does it seemingly become obsolete?

\- AWS will continually upgrade their hardware and you keep paying the same

\- Hardware can be capitalized, which means you can push it to the balance sheet (for tax or valuation purposes)

\- Spending $90k instead of $184k in year 1 with the option to turn it off if you want (no longer need). This could be very valuable for a startup who wants elastic spending patterns.

Hidden costs:

\- Returns, breakage, warranty in case of a hardware failure

I understand why there is a market for this product, but it's not always an apples/orange comparison. Generally speaking, if you know what your workload is going to be, (I'd be hard pressed if a lot of orgs really know the answer to this) then on-prem hardware is not a terrible choice, but it has to be analyzed appropriately.

<comment><USER3> (Author here)

I agree with a lot of your points, especially the fact that TCO is practically impossible to calculate, is highly subjective, and should ideally include opportunity costs which, almost by definition vary from person to person.

I've definitely thought through some of your points. First I want to say that if your load is spiky you have no business buying hardware. No matter how you slice it, you're simply not going to be able to get hundreds of GPUs of throughput with an 8 GPU machine so it's not possible to get the same "product". So for those doing short bursts of hyperparameter search, stick with cloud.

But, like you said, for those with high utilization and known utilization patterns, it makes a lot of sense to go on-prem. Let's just say pretty much anybody who is buying a reserved instance from AWS should consider buying hardware instead.

>\- Cost associated with finding an admin who understands how this thing works

Pricing based on what co location facilities will provide you without much search and is pretty generous. $10k per year per server is silly high and should cover that search cost.

> \- Try before you buy

You can try essentially this exact machine on AWS. That instance and hardware are almost exactly the same. Now of course this doesn't apply to many instance types.

> \- Time it takes for the box to be built, shipped and sent to the data > center

5 business days is our mean lead time for that unit. Most workstations are 2 days.

> \- Time (and cost) it takes to install software, drivers, etc

It comes with that stuff pre-installed as mentioned in the article. See Lambda Stack for driver / framework / CUDA woes: [https://lambdalabs.com/lambda- stack-deep-learning-software](https://lambdalabs.com/lambda-stack-deep- learning-software)

> \- 3-year? What is the useful life of this? When does it seemingly become > obsolete?

I'll admit it's a long time but 3 years is about right for GPUs from my experience. I personally purchased new GPUs for my workstations in 2012 (Fermi), 2015 (Maxwell), 2017 (Pascal).

> \- AWS will continually upgrade their hardware and you keep paying the same

Yes, but only if you never commit to a reserved instance, in which case costs are 3x higher. If you buy a reserved instance you don't get upgraded hardware.

> \- Spending $90k instead of $184k in year 1 with the option to turn it off > if you want (no longer need). This could be very valuable for a startup who > wants elastic spending patterns.

Yea, most of these are people who are already using GPUs really often for internal training infra and are finding it expensive.

> \- Returns, breakage, warranty in case of a hardware failure

Our hardware comes with a 3 year parts warranty. Of course, this doesn't pay for your time lost but it's pretty rare to see parts fail and the $10k / year more than covers in-colo swap outs.

I agree with all of your points. I don't think that we really disagree with much here. TCO is hard to calculate :).

<comment><USER4> K80s are 2014 and people still use them at scale. So 3 years isn't unreasonable, right?

A major drawback of having this sort of hardware on-prem (and this unit in particular) is that it doesn't include local storage for a 100TB+ scale dataset. There's not just the admin cost of hard drives and RAID, but there's the infra cost of synchronizing data to the machine. An average, reasonable, product-oriented Engineering Manager could easily choose cloud over a $100k savings if it means less headaches. Especially since GCloud will give big discounts if they're trying to outbid Amazon. On the other hand, if Lambda offered some sort of NAS solution plus caching software (Alluxio! :), that would make the offering a lot more competitive. Oh and maybe throw in a network engineer to set up peering and such.. ;)

What might make the comparison more compelling is to take anonymized workloads from your customers, examine how often the workload results in idle (wasted) time, and to factor that into the figures. If a user's workload is elastic (many are, especially in R&D), then the user would be drawn towards ML Engine, Sagemaker, Floydhub, Snark, etc... The downside to these services is that they almost always involve expensive copying of data from NAS to worker machines. But if user utilization is high, and the dataset is static, the on-prem machine is a prime investment.

While the savings is a big and noteworthy number, iteration speed is of principle concern to readers here and likely a good segment of your customers. I love the Lambda offerings, but there are a lot of deep learning hackers who can't make the most of bare metal.

The 1080TI server is probably the killer solution at 1/10th the cost. But NVidia legal blah blah blah :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This false dichotomy between colo and AWS is just making me exhausted 'cos I have been repeating this for so long: just rent a dedicated server. There surely are some cases where colo is the best choice but as the years, now a decade pass since I have tried to spread this, it makes less and less sense every year -- and it never did much in the first place. Maybe if you have several racks worth of equipment? I am not familiar with that size.

<comment><USER6> Lambda Labs engineer here. Here's what we're trying to argue:

Many benefits of running infrastructure in the cloud are lost for offline batch processing jobs. Training machine learning models doesn't require low response times, high availability, geographic proximity to clients, etc. Yet, with cloud, you're paying for all this extra infrastructure.

The main benefits of cloud for tasks with machine learning type workloads are cost saving (if utilization is low) and no electrical set-up.

On the other hand, cloud is extremely expensive for groups that require high base levels of GPU compute. The article is arguing that such groups can save a huge amount of money by moving infrastructure on-prem.

<comment><USER5> I feel I am talking to a brick wall. This often happens and this is what exhausts me. You are _still_ arguing between cloud and colo / on-prem (even ignoring that on-prem and colo is very different but w/e) and what I am saying is that there is a _third_ option neither the article nor your reply even acknowledges.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now if they'd only throw in S3 for pseudo-infinite data storage, reliable SQS for work queue management, 10/25/100 Gigabit networking between the instances, redundant power supplies and cooling and racks in carefully selected stable locations for free, I'd buy a dozen!

<comment><USER7> I never get the point of these things. This is like saying a Raspberry Pi hooked up to your home router is cheaper, why bother buying Gmail for your company.

Or like saying that if you spend 20 hours every day in an Uber buying a car would be cheaper over 3 year term.

Nobody is disputing that buying similarly specced hardware on the market is likely to have a cheaper TCO, the point of cloud providers is that also have a bunch of stuff attached to the servers, which turns to be pretty important.

<comment><USER8> The point is that GPU instances are different. The usecases like ML training or general HPC are sufficiently isolated from the rest of your stuff that you don't really need all the bells and whistles that aws has. If you want to host a niche gpu database like production system, you may get more out of aws's ecosystem, but even then, the cost difference is huge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Buy servers if you have stable workloads, otherwide rent virtual machines in the cloud.

<comment><USER10> I'd add to that: Most people have far more stable workloads than they like to think.

"Everyone" seems to think they have massively spiky loads, and almost nobody does. There may often be demands that _could_ spike (e.g. because "someone" has not randomized the start times for batch maintenance processes through the night but start them all at the same time), but more often than not the spikiest demand comes from batch workloads where nobody cares if it takes a bit longer. In practice when constrained that often simply smooths out the overall capacity use.

(of course that does not mean that there aren't people with spiky enough workloads for it to make sense to put at least some of their workloads on VMs for cost reasons; but measure first)

<comment><USER11> Is that really the case?

So far all companies I worked for had a wave-like pattern for customer generated workloads, simply because of the locality of the customers. It doesn't even matter if it's a globally used product, as some markets are usually stronger than others (e.g. US vs. Asia). So you have some base load, which is relatively stable, but on top of that daily or even more frequent "spikes".

For non-customer-driven workloads you even might want to have spikes. Take big data pipelines for example. While you could schedule them so that they're not spiky, you might benefit from running them as fast a possible to get your results earlier. That's something you probably wouldn't do with dedicated servers, simply because it'd be too expensive. Instead with dedicated servers you'd optimize for utilization instead of speed. When you only pay for what you use, you don't have that limitation and can fire up as many instances as it makes sense. That's actually a pretty nice benefit.

And don't forget changing workloads over the course of multiple months. The calculation looks completely different if you buy a dozen of servers now, but have your computing requirements change in a few months, so that you don't need them all anymore (reasons for such are manifold, but could be as simple as optimizations to your code).

<comment><USER10> > So far all companies I worked for had a wave-like pattern for customer > generated workloads, simply because of the locality of the customers.

Yes, but rarely big enough to allow for long enough periods of spinning down instances to be cheaper than dedicated hardware. Consider that (while not really a suitable example, since it's a GPU instance) the costs in the article are only that low for AWS because it's a reserved instance, where the savings of not using it are much lower than for regular instances.

I've seen setups where we were close to considering using AWS for peak load, which would have been _far_ cheaper than going all AWS, but when we did the calculations we needed peaks lasting shorter than 6-8 hours for it to be worthwhile vs. new hardware, and the cheaper alternative was simply leaving older machines in our racks past the 3 year depreciation schedule - it's not "free", they took up rack space and cost in terms of power, but it was cheaper to just let them stay in rotation until they failed or we needed the space for a faster machine, than it was to rent extra capacity.

Scaling up with cloud services cost-effectively for daily peaks is tricky, because you're still going to be scaling ahead of use and most of your "peaker instances" are not going to have average utilization anywhere near 100% when factoring in ramping up/down for setups that aren't huge, because you still have lead times before an instance is maxed out, or as load is dropping, and you need to factor in that lower utilization in your cost estimates.

That's not to say it's not worth considering, not least because having the _ability_ to do so lets you load your dedicated equipment to much higher utilization rates because you're able to respond to spikes faster than you can add servers.

> For non-customer-driven workloads you even might want to have spikes. Take > big data pipelines for example. While you could schedule them so that > they're not spiky, you might benefit from running them as fast a possible to > get your results earlier.

You might. But my experience is that over a couple of decades of working with various types of online services, it's very rare for those types of workloads to move the needle much in terms of overall compute needs. There certainly _are_ exceptions, and machine learning workloads might well make them more common, but they're comparatively rare in most companies. Keep in mind that while you may want capacity to handle spikes, in most such setups you _also_ want capacity to handle loads that can run off peak.

But by all means: If you _do_ have needs that require those kind of big spikes that you can't accommodate within you base capacity, then use cloud instances for that. They do have their place.

> And don't forget changing workloads over the course of multiple months. The > calculation looks completely different if you buy a dozen of servers now, > but have your computing requirements change in a few months, so that you > don't need them all anymore (reasons for such are manifold, but could be as > simple as optimizations to your code).

In practice I've never seen dramatic enough changes anywhere for this to be a real concern for most people, as massive drop-offs tends to be rare, and tends to be eaten up by subsequent growth in a matter of months unless you're in big enough problems for it not to matter. If it's a potentially real concern to you, then rent dedicated servers by the month for some of the workload - it is typically still far cheaper than AWS, though not _as much_ as leasing or buying - or do use a cloud provider for some of your peak load as an "insurance".

The big takeaway is not that you shouldn't use cloud services, but that you should know your workload and do the cost calculations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you're not deploying in a datacenter, you can save even more money by building a workstation with a few 2080 Ti cards, which cost $1200 and give 90% of the speed of the $3000 Titan V: [https://lambdalabs.com/blog/best-gpu- tensorflow-2080-ti-vs-v...](https://lambdalabs.com/blog/best-gpu- tensorflow-2080-ti-vs-v100-vs-titan-v-vs-1080-ti-benchmark/)

<comment><USER13> Exactly my thoughts - instead of one datacenter class gpu, you can use multuiple desktop components for better performance and more performance per buck. I've seen some sweet supermicro 2U chassis that can fit and run cool four 2080Ti.

I remember, though, that NVIDIA disallows in EULA the use of nvidia driver blob in consumer gpu in datacenter environment. Time will show how legally enforcible is this restriction.

<comment><USER14> We have one of these. Aside from the mechanical differences (it's actually a 2.5U server due to how the power cables connect to consumer cards), you're losing out on NVLink. You're going to be restricted to single-card training, which means either batching or other restrictions to ensure it fits in the memory of a single card. This setup is able to train four one-card models in parallel; it is not able to train a four-card model.

<comment><USER15> NVLink supports 2080 Ti

<comment><USER14> There's a physical connector also called NVLink, yes, but the cards don't present as unified at the driver level; nvidia-smi shows "link: off" even using the bridge. It's effectively SLI, which can reduce memory bandwidth load and cross-card transfer costs, but doesn't unify the cards the way Volta (actual) NVLink does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In my mind, the reason to use something like AWS is to a) get your servers in minutes instead of weeks and b) easily right-size your service

Once your service is somewhat stable in terms of size and you can afford longer lead times, then you should return to on-prem to save money

<comment><USER17> What's this false dichotomy between AWS and on-prem? Dedicated servers at Hetzner, OVH, Datapacket, etc. are much cheaper than AWS and can also be ready in minutes.

<comment><USER16> I should have said on-prem or dedicated (or whatever the opposite of expensive AWS is)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If it's really on-prem (i.e. not in the "datacenter" as per NVIDIA EULA), you could spend a lot less than $100K+ for a lot more throughput by purchasing consumer-grade cards and HEDT gaming hardware.

Sure you'll have 4 GPUs per box and not 8, and sure, each GPU will have 11GB and not 32, but the whole machine (_with_ the GPUs) will cost just a tad more than a single V100. So if you don't really need 32GB of VRAM per GPU (and you most likely don't), it'd be insane to pay literally 5x as much as you have to.

</comment><comment><USER19> 1)How long does it take to get a Lambda Hyperplane operational, from the point I place an order?

A p3dn.24xlarge is a few minutes.

My experience in deploying new hardware-based solutions is that it typically takes between 6 and 12 weeks.

2)How does the TCO compare when I only need to train for 2 hours a day?

3)If I was previously training on AWS p2.16xl, I could upgrade to p3.16xl with basically 0 incremental cost (for the same workload). Does LambdaLabs offer free (0 capex) upgrades? If so, how long would it take to upgrade?

<comment><USER20> 1) 5 days (according to the author) 2) Obviusly the cloud is better in that case 3) You can't always upgrade on aws eigher if you have paid for a reserved instance: [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri- modif...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ri- modifying.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Save $69k sounds a lot more significant than save 38%.

If you're going to be using the server less than 73% of the time, AWS sounds better.

<comment><USER22> Keep in mind, the AWS cost is already for a reserved instance. On-demand would cost more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Cloud computing was never about price, it was about the ability to provision and operate infrastructure instantly through an API.

If you can take advantage of that flexibility to build reactive capacity then you can save money, but that wasn't the initial driving point.

<comment><USER24> you MIGHT save money.

The price difference can be substantial enough that you might simply be better off having it "over provisioned" off hours.

Also, not having "reactive capacity" might simply mean that your 95th percentile goes from 100ms response time to 300ms. Which again, might be a more cost effective approach.

I think the initial development and ongoing cost of maintaining that reactive capacity is also substantial enough to be considered.

Most of the apps that truly need the elasticity should probably going hybrid anyways. Baseline on dedicated hardware, spikes on spot instances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm inexperienced in the hardware front, would that machine likely not break down under a large load for 3 years straight? Nothing is set aside for hardware failure etc.

<comment><USER26> But isn't that $69,000 peanuts compared to the cost to hire sysadmins who are on call 24/7 to swap out: RAM, fans, drives, power supplies, provision new images, etc.?? So you saved on cloud costs, but now you have the admin burden: 1-3 people for $200k each. No?

<comment><USER10> From having managed several racks worth of equipment in two separate data centres 1-2 hours travel from my office at the time: I cost closer to that $200k/year, but I also only usually visited the data centres 2-3 times a _year_ , and other than that we used "remote hands" at the colo to do maintenance and be on-call 24/7\. On ~60+ servers, we had maybe on average one minor incident every couple of months that required physical intervention.

Between two data centres, lets assume I did 6 visits a year, and that we had one ~30/min incident a month at $50/incident (it was less, but I don't remember the exact details, and it doesn't matter for this exercise). Let's assume I lost a whole day every visit (I didn't, though it got close at times), and "charge" $1000/day for my visits. That adds up to $6k/year for my time, and $600/year for remote hands, or ~$110/year per server. For comparison the colocation cost us ~$17k/year, or ~$283/year per server. These costs were pretty stable by _number_ of servers, and so favored using fewer, more powerful servers than we might have otherwise.

So that added the cost of renting space at a manned colo facility instead of having the servers in the office (we did have a rack of servers that didn't need 24/7 attention at our office as well).

The rest of my time was spent on devops work that in my experience tends to be more expensive (on the basis of having contracted to do this kind of work on AWS too, and know the difference in billable hours I'd typically get per instance on AWS vs. per physical server on colocated setups) on cloud setups because complexity tends to be higher.

<comment><USER27> > costs were pretty stable by number of servers, and so favored using fewer, > more powerful servers

Didn't this make each failure a bigger hit to your overall capacity? How much redundancy did you have? I used to work in adtech with colocated hardware, and it was old and failed a lot, but they had enough it didn't matter ("we're down 5/120 in Germany but we can swap them out while we're there next month").

<comment><USER10> In that case it was ~60 servers, so losing any single server made little difference, but yes it of course needs to be a consideration if your number of servers is low enough.

It was also a fully virtualised setup that could also tie in rented dedicated servers or cloud instances via VPNs as needed. So where it made sense or if we had an urgent need, we had the ability to spin things up as needed.

E.g. we had racks in London, but rented servers at Hetzner in Germany (Hetzner got close to the cost of the colocated servers, though mostly because rack space in London is ridiculously expensive; it might actually have saved us money to put servers in their colo facilities in Germany, even with the cost of travel to/from them occasionally)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Who's running model training 24/7 to justify reserving this instance or co- locating your own hardware? (Apologies in advance for not being very imaginative)

Their ImageNet timing fits within the bounds of a Spot Duration workload, so in the most optimistic scenario, you can subtract 70% from the price - assuming spot availability for this instance type. (Of course, there are many more model training exercises that don't even remotely fit inside 6 hours.)

</comment><comment><USER29> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

First, thanks for writing this up. Too many people just take a "buy the box, divide by number of hours in 3 years approach". Your comparison to a 3-year RI at AWS versus the hardware is thus more fair than most. You're still missing a lot of the opportunity cost (both capital and human), scaling (each of these is probably 3 kW, and most electrical systems couldn't handle say 20 of those), and so on.

That said, I don't agree that 3 years is a reasonable depreciation period for GPUs for deep learning (the focus of this analysis). If you had purchased a box full of P100s before the V100 came out, you'd have regretted it. Not just in straight price/performance, but also operator time: a 2x speedup on training also yields faster time-to-market and/or more productive deep learning engineers (expensive!).

People still use K80s and P100s for their relative price/performance on FP64 and FP32 generic math (V100s come at a high premium for ML and NVIDIA knows it), but for most deep learning you'd be making a big mistake. Even FP32 things with either more memory per part or higher memory bandwidth mean that you'd rather not have a 36-month replacement plan.

If you really do want to do that, I'd recommend you buy them the day they come out (AWS launched V100s in October 2017, so we're already 16 months in) to minimize the refresh regret.

tl;dr: unless the V100 is the perfect sweet spot in ML land for the next three years or so, a 3-year RI or a physical box will decline in utility.

</comment><comment><USER30> The actual cost of running a cloud instance is inflated. The cheapest way to run them is using spot/interruptible instances which for most deep learning jobs will suffice. If anything there will be some upfront cost to set it up in a way that it automatically manages interruptions, storage etc. Also by not limiting yourself to AWS you can have many other options.

With this setup you can get 2x4x V100 on Azure for a total of $42k/year (assuming running 24/7).

Even if one spent $40k to write code for spot instance management this is by far the cheapest solution for GPU compute both short term and long term.

source for calculation: [https://cloudoptimizer.io](https://cloudoptimizer.io)

</comment><comment><USER8> p3dn.24xlarge's pricing makes no sense at all. It feels like aws did it to pull off some PR/marketing stunt without any real users in mind. I've tried getting spot instances for it, but aws just errors out. So they don't even have enough of them to allow spot instances. And it's a gpu machine. So the usual arguments of scaling up on demand or adapting to load don't really apply. You either have this usecase or you don't. And if you do, just buy the hardware.

<comment><USER31> You are not the target audience since you don't have the use case nor the budget

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I bought a second hand Xeon E3-1246 v3 (8 VCPU), 16GB memory for $250 on ebay. That's less than it costs to rent an a1.xlarge for 6 months. Hardware is so cheap now, esp with SSDs and memory getting cheaper. Don't automatically rent!

<comment><USER10> Or if you're going to rent, consider dedicated hosting providers too. Providers like Hetzner often work out far cheaper ( _especially_ if you're doing anything requiring a lot of outbound bandwidth).

AWS is great for convenience when you can afford it, but it is a _really_ expensive solution, even when factoring in the extra things you have to deal with to rent, lease or buy dedicated servers.

<comment><USER15> Sadly no major dedicated provider offers machines with 8 GPUs..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This makes sense only if your prospective clients want "lift and shift" into the cloud. But lots of people are using AWS for their services like S3, RDS, Cloud Front, Route 53, etc.

<comment><USER20> You can still use s3, even if you aren't totally in aws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> damn, "includes hiring a part time system administrator".

<comment><USER35> Must be extremely part-time, for $10k/year total cost.

<comment><USER36> I mean $10k/yr/server doesn't sound too unreasonable. Just sounds really bad when you're only looking at one server.

$100k/yr total compensation (i.e. 60k-ish salary) for someone babysit 10 servers isn't super unreasonable.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Heck, I'd take that job!

...seriously, any chance that's a real thing? Sounds better than what I do now.

<comment><USER10> Yes, sort of. You can find people with small-ish number of servers that will pay stupid money to have someone on-call when you count on a per server basis. In practice it's a nice side-gig, but you'll tend to need several of them, as people do understand they're paying a premium to have you accessible, and do expect to pay (substantially) less per server if they have more of them.

In practice this will tend to include out of ours availability and/or devops type work, not just low level sysadmin stuff or physical maintenance, as a lot of that can be farmed out to "remote hands" at the colo providers on hourly rates with 24/7 availability and will certainly cost a tiny fraction of that $10k/year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It may be useful to note that most deep learning workloads for training are pretty latency insensitive and are pretty flat throughout the day.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'd be curious what the TCO is when factoring in storage. i.e. What is replacing S3 for data storage in the colo setup?

<comment><USER39> That system has slots for 16 2.5" drives in the back. I'd guess they can buy whatever commodity drive/SSD they want, and store the data there. Even throwing some cycles and memory at ZFS, the cost is small compared to the rest of the box.

You'll need additional off-site backup, but that's starting to get out of the scope of the article.

<comment><USER38> I don't think tossing 16 SSDs into a single enclosure is a fair comparison with S3. I also think that storage is absolutely in scope for an article like this.

<comment><USER10> True, for most workloads 16 SSDs in a single enclosure will be far faster and more efficient, but will require offsite backups.

If you _need_ redundant blob storage, pretty much every colo providers has solutions, and most of them are going to be cheaper than S3. Worst case you can use S3, and then need to factor in the bandwidth cost difference.

<comment><USER39> Yep. Amazon even offers the Storage Gateway appliance to facilitate these workflows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Interesting note about Lambda Labs, all of the press links on [https://lambdalabs.com/?ref=blog](https://lambdalabs.com/?ref=blog) are about a ~"privacy violating Google Glass app" that recognizes faces and geotags photos of them.

I don't see why they choose to promote that link now.

</comment><comment><USER41> Nice.

</comment><comment><USER26> I thought ads on HN were discouraged?

<comment><USER42> Maybe not! I wonder how much if anything was paid for this placement. And I also wonder if I should be preparing an "article" about my company. We could sure use some extra exposure.

Anyway, despite my belly-aching, it was an interesting read.

<comment><USER43> YC has nothing to gain by selling ads on this forum. The business is already extremely wealthy and successful. Any ad revenue from this would be absolutely peanuts. It just doesn't add up.

<comment><USER42> Look, it was an informative piece and I'm glad I read it. I even book-marked it for future reference.

But let's be candid, It was a promotional piece as well and if I "owned" this forum I would certainly have something to gain by charging a modest fee for such placements. It may sound like I'm angry about this or have a negative feeling, but I don't; not at all.

<comment><USER43> There's no argument whether you would have something to gain. We're talking about YC, not you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is just the most extreme example. AWS is just really expensive.

If you want a VPS take a look at Digital Ocean or Linode.

<comment><USER45> I think the expense is mostly because these are GPU instances, which are not yet commoditized. Unlike VMs, multi-tenancy on GPUs is just a little bit harder.

<comment><USER10> Actually the savings on this server looks to me to be low compared to what I'd usually expect.

You should use AWS for convenience, not cost. They're expensive for cloud services, and even the cheapest cloud providers are expensive compared to renting dedicated for all but the most transient workloads, and of dedicated hosting providers I only know Hetzner to get close to the costs I could get for renting colo space or doing truly on-prem hosting. Even then the only reason Hetzner is competitive is because I'm in London where space/power is expensive, and they're in Germany, where it is cheap (e.g. they rent out colo space as well, and prices are at 1/3 to 1/4 of what I've paid in London).

<comment><USER46> Hetzner rents out 1080Ti GPUs which are not available in most regions or from most cloud providers, hence the lower cost. This article refers to the much more expensive Tesla V100 GPUs. From what I understand the NVidia license for the 1080Tis prevents cloud providers from offering them for uses other than blockchain. Since AWS can't control what you actually do with it, they simply don't offer 1080Tis.

Source: [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/03/nvidia_server_gpus/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/03/nvidia_server_gpus/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's not fair comparison unless we are comparing all in costs that include ops.

<comment><USER15> They include ops cost for on-prem server</comment></comment>


Digital Publishers Put Brave Software on Notice for Substituting Ads (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.newsmediaalliance.org/digital-publishers-put-brave-software-notice-substituting-ads/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's a classic Mafia shakedown scheme. We'll remove monetization from publishers unless they pay us. Even then, they'll get paid in a cryptocurrency we made up and own the majority of.

Brave is by far the least ethical of all browsers. At least the other browser vendors try not to be evil, even if they fail.

When I steal from publishers, nobody should benefit, including the browser vendor.</comment>


Solving Programming Puzzles Without Using Your Brain - <AUTHOR> https://doisinkidney.com/posts/2019-06-04-solving-puzzles-without-your-brain.html <comment><USER2> I love the idea of using OEIS to automate finding mathematical patterns in the solution. Also, plotting the search space immediately is something I _know_ is often unreasonably effective, but I almost never take the time to do. This is a fantastic little article.

<comment><USER3> Given that I'm a bit of a moron mathematically, I have, more times than I cared to admit, made serious progress on a problem by (a) writing a Python or C++ program to spew out a highly non-scalable count of some entity whose nature I'm trying to understand and (b) taking that count and sticking it in OEIS.

This has led to some pretty major insights, which one can carefully 'launder' casually as something you knew all along. "Oh, of course the number of subtrees can be found by half-Catalan numbers", you say, with aplomb, as if you hadn't learned about half-Catalan numbers approximately 10 minutes ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well haha still seems like a lot of brain was put into it.

Also, there's a simpler pattern to the sequence that is easily observable without even opening OEIS.

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately, if you spot _that_ pattern then you will not guess the correct generalization. It seems that this may be a puzzle that's easier to solve if you aren't good at spotting easy things.

<comment><USER4> Well tbh, it seems 2^k-1 does actually match the sequence as far as it is shown. Perhaps there is a proof that n=2^k-1 for the numbers where 2^n is divisible by (n+1). I'll have to see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Transforming a problem into pattern recognition seems like a good way to use your brain natural inclinations.

Very neat little article.

</comment><comment><USER7> I got lost at step 3. I wasn't super clear in how we went from line to memoization. Cool article though - I had never thought of plotting before to recognize patterns.

<comment><USER8> If you write out the coordinates for a straight line from the origin they look like this:

        3, 5; 6, 10; 9, 15...

So now, instead of having to test 6, 10 and 9, 15 when we see it, we can just test 3, 5 once and we'll know the answer to all of the points on that line. Then, to answer the question "which line is this point on?" we simplify the fraction (i.e. 2, 6 -> 1, 3).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google Foobar puzzles are amazing. Solving them was immensely fun and challenging. Best code I ever wrote.

</comment><comment><USER10> _" While Python is usually great for programming puzzles, this step in particular is crying out for something like QuickCheck: without it, we'll have to roll our own."_

Instead of rolling his own, the author could have just used Python's _Hypothesis_ package.[1][2]

[1] - [https://github.com/HypothesisWorks/hypothesis](https://github.com/HypothesisWorks/hypothesis)

[2] - [https://pypi.org/project/hypothesis/](https://pypi.org/project/hypothesis/)

</comment><comment><USER11> The bad thing about not using your brain is that you don't learn anything.

</comment><comment><USER12> Do that in a face to face interview. Good luck with that.

<comment><USER13> Do you mean write the naive solution and explain how you'd turn it into a good solution? I think that would be well received.</comment></comment>