Ask HN: What is your favorite place to find work? - <AUTHOR> Do you have a favorite job board? <comment><USER2> The problem with job boards is that unless they are rather unknown, everyone is using them. Applying through boards is essentially like getting into the back of a line and hoping you get noticed.

When I coach job seekers on finding new work, I typically encourage them to be careful not to spend too much time on the boards, and instead rely on their networks/meetups or personal research.

Using LinkedIn to search for open jobs is similar to using any other site, but it's greatest value is as a research tool.

Say you're a Python programmer in a suburb somewhere and you're looking for a new gig. If you use LinkedIn to search "Python" and set a geographic preference, your results will likely be other Python programmers in the area. Where do they work? Where did they used to work? Sometimes LinkedIn will offer other profiles in the sidebar ("people also viewed") - click those and see where they worked. Now you've got a list of companies that have employed Python devs, so you can do a bit more research to see if they are the type of place you might want to work - and pay no attention to whether or not they have any jobs listed on their site.

Once you found some companies that interest you, use LinkedIn to figure out the best person to reach out to. Might be their CTO if it's a small shop, could be an internal recruiter or hiring manager for a larger firm. Make the approach, tell them why you're interested in the company, and make a soft close to try and get them to agree to a conversation.

<comment><USER3> I know LinkedIn isn't particularly popular here at HN, but I think the job adds I get shown there are quite good. Even if I am not looking for work I get a sense of what companies there are, and what kind of positions they are looking to fill.

<comment><USER2> Your mileage will vary on LinkedIn depending on the time you put into populating your profile.

I have written hundreds of profiles for clients this year - some clients are more concerned with branding (what does someone feel when they are directed to the profile or find it on their own) while others are much more concerned with just being discovered by recruiters, hiring managers, peers, etc. The approach is quite different, not unlike SEO techniques.

If you're getting good ads, chances are you put some time into your profile and added skills that help their recommendation algorithm.

<comment><USER4> Is linkedin's SEO approach documented anywhere? Something like SEO Site checkup for linkedin profiles would be pretty cool.

<comment><USER2> There was a great detailed article on it many years ago, but since they've changed the site I haven't seen a new one. This is about as good as I've seen, and it's written by them.

[https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/4447/linkedin-...](https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/4447/linkedin- search-relevance-people-search?lang=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yes. I've spent a lot of time looking at job boards and here are my favorite ones.

# Design

Authentic Jobs - [https://authenticjobs.com/](https://authenticjobs.com/)

Dribbble - [https://dribbble.com/jobs](https://dribbble.com/jobs)

# Nonprofit

GIIN - [https://jobs.thegiin.org/](https://jobs.thegiin.org/)

Idealist - [https://www.idealist.org/](https://www.idealist.org/)

Next Billion - [https://nextbillion.net/jobs/](https://nextbillion.net/jobs/)

# Remote

NODESK - [https://nodesk.co/remote-jobs/](https://nodesk.co/remote-jobs/)

RemoteOK - [https://remoteok.io/](https://remoteok.io/)

WeWorkRemotely - [https://weworkremotely.com/](https://weworkremotely.com/)

# Startups/Tech

AngelList - [https://angel.co/jobs](https://angel.co/jobs)

Hacker News - [https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring)

WorkinTech.io - [https://workintech.io/](https://workintech.io/)

<comment><USER6> If you own one of those job boards, you should be up front about that when linking to it.

<comment><USER5> I agree, but as that's not the case there was no need for a disclaimer in my original comment. I just felt like I could contribute to the discussion which is not often the case here on HN. Hope that's ok.

<comment><USER7> Hall monitors everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> [https://whoishiring.io](https://whoishiring.io) which is basically an agregator.

I also like the concept around [https://www.honeypot.io](https://www.honeypot.io) (I think it's only available in Berlin though). Once you sign up and add your CV, you get a list of quite detailed offers almost every day, including company name (wow, I know, crazy) and salary range. You can accept or reject them through the UI, by just clicking a button. No endless chain of messages to figure out what company or position you're actually applying for, no horrid misspelling of your name, no waiting for the recruiter to contact the company and check if they're actually interested in your skill set - your CV is presented to the company beforehand so you've already passed their vetting. The one time I tried, I didn't find a job through Honeypot, but I definitely appreciated the experience.

<comment><USER9> Honeypot is pushing for lowest possible salaries; they outright reject you for wanting 100k EUR jobs even if you held such positions before. They are more like agency for startups wanting cheap labor to quickly burn through. Mind you, German startups rarely give you equity, bypass labor laws (small sizes), pay low and expect insane dedication.

<comment><USER10> Besides the equity, that sounds like every other startup around the world.

<comment><USER9> Yes, but regular German companies have a very hard time getting rid of any employees, whereas for small-sized companies there is much more flexibility. So you get all drawbacks of US startups, but 0 shot at becoming rich.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am certainly biased, but I built a job platform because I felt all the existing job boards were lacking, called Limbo.

[https://www.limbo.io](https://www.limbo.io)

The long and short of the problem is that great folks are often employed and finding your next ideal role is too time consuming and emotionally taxing, and that great folks with diverse backgrounds are unfairly discriminated against at resume review time. Limbo attempts to solve those problems with an anonymous job platform.

More on the concepts behind it here: [https://medium.com/@chrisdary/introducing-limbo- ddb97a67ff63](https://medium.com/@chrisdary/introducing-limbo-ddb97a67ff63)

<comment><USER12> For someone who is considering posting there, it might be of interest to get an idea about the likely payoff:

\- How many "reveals" do an average profile get? How many profiles get no reveals?

\- What kind of businesses typically use your service, and what countries are they from?

<comment><USER11> Good questions.

\- In the past month and a half or so since we've launched, about 20% of published profiles have had a reveal request. That varies heavily based on profile quality, some have gotten 4 in a row.

That said, even though it'll be pretty low volume it should be very high signal. Our accept rate is around 70% right now. This is primarily because people have to pay outright to contact you (excepting the first free one), so only folks with pretty good matches should be reaching out.

\- Tech only right now and also heavily biased towards US, probably 95% US. Startups and Agencies have been the primary target and market. You're less likely to find a Facebook on Limbo and more likely to find a small team that is a pretty precise match for you. There are a couple larger companies on there though, like Mozilla.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not to fanboy, but the "Who is Hiring" thread posted here on hacker news on the first of each month. In my experience, the rate and speed of responses from that thread is dramatically higher than anywhere else.

Obviously it's not the UX that makes it shine, but when you're looking for work, you care about the results. I recommend that thread to anyone who mentions looking for a tech job.

<comment><USER14> I like that thread because you can load the entire thing and look for keywords relevant to your skillset - comes quite in handy when you work in a more niche market. I am not currently interested in new work but I always like to see what is out there to keep a finger on the market movements to see what is gaining popularity.

<comment><USER15> The last Who Is Hiring went on for something like 5 pages, so it was a bit clunky to search for, in-browser, but the API makes it pretty easy to scrape/search whatever you like: [https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As chrisked mentioned - definitely my previous clients and friends.

The best long-term contracts I received was through a former colleague, classmate or a friend. Recently, linkedin provided a steady source of leads (not talking about recruiters) via niche groups, 2nd/3rd connections etc.

One great site is [https://whoishiring.io](https://whoishiring.io) \- an amazing job aggregator that parses (in my opinion) the best sites for work. This eliminates my need to go hunt for jobs on job boards.

Avoid freelance marketplaces like upwork, freelancer and others.

<comment><USER12> > One great site is [https://whoishiring.io](https://whoishiring.io) \- an > amazing job aggregator that parses (in my opinion) the best sites for work.

It seems to be just for developer jobs, or a I doing something wrong? Will they go into other fields as well, or is there someone else who is already doing that?

<comment><USER17> You can filter using the category filter. Link bellow is for design jobs.

[https://whoishiring.io/search/39.4871/-110.8740/3?category=d...](https://whoishiring.io/search/39.4871/-110.8740/3?category=design)

Disclaimer: I wrote whoishiring.io, and I'm not doing too good job to present that other categories ar available (the filter is missing on the index page). But yes my main focus in the beginning were dev jobs.

<comment><USER12> > You can filter using the category filter. Link bellow is for design jobs.

Right, "developer jobs" wasn't an accurate description. There still seems to be a narrow focus, though. I mean, what about finance, medicine, chemistry, carpentry, etc? Is that outside the scope or is it coming?

<comment><USER17> I wasn't planning to go that broad, extending this outside IT would need serious research in HR mechanism for each of those categories. I'm not calming that that I know HR in IT but this project kind of evolved from my needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> To be honest, the most effective way to get a job is through friends referral.

The 2nd most effective way is to be part of networking event of the company that you want to work for.

The 3rd best place to get a job is through relevant tech meet up in your area.

Nothing beats direct human connections when it comes to getting a job.

<comment><USER19> You can also check out tech associations and their job boards. Some of them are behind a membership/paywall though, but at least then you know they aren't being bombarded by the masses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My secret strategy is to find out what company is responsible for distributing the tech grants from the state. There is almost always some list of all of the companies that got money from the state and how much. Find interesting companies with a fresh budget to build something in your domain and hit their CTO/whoever with a few line email and a resume. You may get on their radar before they even finished writing their hiring budget.

<comment><USER21> Smart. I know what I'll be doing the rest of the day

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I am running [https://coderfit.com](https://coderfit.com), a tech recruiting agency doing tech-video interviews, so I am obviously biased in my suggestion:

A possible way is to go through a recruiter. Recruiting agencies add value in two ways:

1) They prevent that you or the firm fuck up things. This happens more often than you think, read my draft: "Why software engineers don't get jobs: Three horror stories": [https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/why-software-engineers- dont...](https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/why-software-engineers-dont-get- jobs-three-horror-stories-6ce06b93b121)

2) At every given point in time recruiting agencies know which companies in your city are hiring, which are firing, and which are good places to work.

I just recorded a short video about "how to identify a good tech recruiter with whom you want to work with" for the HN audience: [https://youtu.be/z_CC9kHvoIw](https://youtu.be/z_CC9kHvoIw)

The recording is a bit unstructured, so here a summary; A good recruiter will...

1) at least understand the tech a little bit

2) find out your needs (e.g., do you want to work in an agency or in a startup? Do you want to work in a big or small firm?)

3) prepare you to avoid pitfalls that are common with the hiring firm

4) repare you to avoid pitfalls that are prevalent with "geeks like you (e.g., female programmers often undersell themselves and open source contributors often don't know the engineering salares in the city.)

5) walk and handhold you to the end and ideally ping you after 3, 6, 12 months and ask how it is going.

<comment><USER23> Recruiters often get bad press and that's unfair, there's usually a few unscrupulous people who taint the profession for the rest of us. We're in the same boat as yourself and find we get loads of positive feedback from candidates we place.

we like to give something back to our community and clients to through our tech specialist podcasts. you can listen below

[http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/promoting-data- science/](http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/promoting-data-science/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I pay the premium fee to LinkedIn and get a small number of lucrative job offers in my inbox every year, doubled my salary a few months ago!

<comment><USER25> How does paying the premium help you get job offers?

<comment><USER24> Your profile is emphasised to recruiters during searches, kind of like a premium profile in a dating site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The job ads on StackOverflow are quite good. You can search for keywords and location.

</comment><comment><USER26> For freelance developers, there's this list:

[https://github.com/engineerapart/TheRemoteFreelancer](https://github.com/engineerapart/TheRemoteFreelancer)

</comment><comment><USER27> I reference this repo frequently [https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome- remote-job](https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job)

</comment><comment><USER28> I find that unless you're an entry-level worker, your best means for finding work will be through the generation of leads.

Generating leads just means putting yourself out there and letting the opportunities come to you.

There are many, many people who are qualified to perform a job that is posted on a job board. But if you can enable a company to skip posting to a board at all, then you and the company in question both win.

</comment><comment><USER29> When I most recently looked for a job, I got most of my leads through linkedin (from recruiters reaching out to me), and from seek.com.au (which is similar to indeed, I think). I actually got my current role from a recruiter who reached out to me via seek, since recruiters can search candidates on the platform.

Seek is also making a new platform called Onploy, which is an inverse job search platform, where you put your profile on, and companies apply to you. I wasn't on it long enough to really determine how good it was, but it was a fairly novel concept.

I think the best way to get to the front of the queue is to actually ring the recruiters/hiring managers, often there's a phone number on the job listing, by ringing them, you force them to put your CV at the front of the queue and look at it.

Maybe it's location though, but I found that I didn't even really have to look for a job, I was getting contacted by at least one recruiter per day just by signing up on seek, and from setting linkedin to looking for opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER30> No. Been a couple years but I usually just toss my resume on Dice, wait for a flood of calls/emails and filter through the trash. I guess I have a "network" because they certainly contact me when in need but personally I don't feel comfortable reaching out to people I haven't talked to in a couple of years just for leads.

</comment><comment><USER31> My last job came from the Who is Hiring post here. We've hired people off of here, referral, Reddit (x2), and LinkedIn. I will always suggest reaching out to people and having a conversation with a place that you want to work and have a conversation or speak with them directly. All the better if you can get a referral to them.

</comment><comment><USER32> I work through Toptal. Once you get through their interview process (takes 1 month plus) I've found their team to be very helpful in connecting me to great clients. I'm in NYC and can live quite comfortably, set my own rates, and get plenty of full time work.

<comment><USER33> after wasting the time to write the sample application, my interviewer refused to even look at at it. I have seen similar stories posted here. would not recommend.

<comment><USER34> Whenever I read a similar story, there always seems to be a piece of information missing.

Like I'm pretty sure the interviewer wasn't just out to get you and simply refused to look at your application because that's just how they do things.

<comment><USER33> I have no idea what the interviewers motive was. I'm certain he has a different story. From my perspective he asked me to show certain functionality and then shouted over me every time I tried. After 30 minutes I hung up.

edit: obviously it wasn't personal, there is no way we had ever crossed paths before. personally I think had no idea how to conduct a technical interview and thought he was being tough on me. anyways, its just one experience. obviously people make it through the procces. I do think they could try to be a little more responsible given that they just asked for a week of your time

<comment><USER32> I can't speak for others but it's been a real pleasure to use them. The interview was a tad tedious and the project ambiguous. But after that, smooth sailing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just gonna throw our name into the pot, Venturi Ltd recruits for positions in London, NYC and Germany.

We're IT specialists recruitment agency that specialises in Big Data, Network & Security, Development and cloud & Infrastructure. [http://www.venturi- group.com/](http://www.venturi-group.com/)

As some of you might have seen to we also produce tech industry podcasts, we thought it was a great way to give something back to our great candidates and clients.

[http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/promoting-data- science/](http://www.venturi-group.com/podcast/promoting-data-science/)

</comment><comment><USER35> Craigslist is fantastic for Bay Area tech jobs.

<comment><USER35> No idea why this was down-voted. I suppose the person disagrees. I have found a lot of work for many great companies including names that we all know and respect through Craigslist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I built [https://www.stackpair.com](https://www.stackpair.com) because I was over reading job listings to get an idea of what I'd be working with. It puts as much info as possible up front about the languages, stack, and tools used in the position. The search makes finding relevant positions easy, the query "go remote sf" returns what you'd expect, for instance. I also do a lot to feature quality opportunities, which traditional job boards can struggle with.

</comment><comment><USER37> Not a job board. But I love using my phone and calling folks :)

</comment><comment> technolo-g My favorite place is at local Meetups of interest.

</comment><comment><USER38> Job boards usually sucks.

Your best job will be when you are passively hired ( saw that you are a software engineer ). This, you can achieve with spending some time to build a physical ( go to events ) or virtual network ( LinkedIn ) surrounded by people that would hire a person like you.

</comment><comment><USER39> LinkedIn is very good place, and hack news' whoshiring is very good place for remote job.

</comment><comment><USER40> Current gig was found on Stack Overflow. I'm very happy with it and glad to get it done without a MITM.

SO is not my favourite necessarily but I definitely checked it regularly. I found the jobs tended to be slightly lower paid but this was the exception.

</comment><comment><USER41> Stackoverflow careers[1] is my favorite. Lots of interesting jobs there!

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/remote-developer- jobs](https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/remote-developer-jobs)

</comment><comment><USER42> Hired.com. Love the fact that employers are applying to you. Love the fact that they're mostly open about their compensation from the get go. And the extra $2K bonus from Hired doesn't hurt either.

</comment><comment><USER43> Not a job board, but I've found a great place to find work is at a conference/event for something you're passionate about.

This could be a technology, language, stack, anything that's cool to you!

</comment><comment><USER44> I just let recruiters reach out to me on LinkedIn or ask my network.

</comment><comment><USER45> I've tried to brand myself online so work finds me.

<comment><USER46> How's that working out for you?

<comment><USER45> It's actually working out pretty well. I would say I get about 1-5 inbound weekly requests from companies like Facebook, Snapchat, AirBnB, Apple, etc. The best part is that recruiters have already done their research for the most part and my inbound is strictly about iOS development positions. I don't really get inbound for backend jobs, or anything else that I'm not interested in.

I would say that it did take me 5+ years to get to this point but anyone can do it with enough effort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Disclaimer, I work at SymbaSync!

[http://SymbaSync.com](http://SymbaSync.com) is a platform for developers to anonymously find their ideal jobs. We match your skills, workplace culture, salary, location preferences and more with jobs on our system, to ensure that you only see highly relevant opportunities for you (and you don't have to submit a new CV/Resume for every job you apply to!).

Currently we have a focus on jobs in the UK as we're based here, but will hopefully be expanding to other locations soon!

</comment><comment><USER48> At least here in Canada, indeed.com (actually .ca) has noticeably better selection than LinkedIn and Monster, the sites I've used before.

</comment><comment><USER49> Social media, HN, and tech related Slack communities. It's how I got a great job in less than a month.

<comment><USER50> > tech related Slack communities

Any particular ones? So far, Reactiflux is the only one I've found that seems to have a reasonably active and quality job channel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Don't you get spammed?

I just stop ignoring recruiters or let some of my friends/network know I'm looking.

</comment><comment><USER52> It's ejobs.ro when in Romania.

</comment><comment><USER53> I think some commonly overlooked spots are:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/forhire/](https://www.reddit.com/r/forhire/)

also

[https://twitter.com/search?q=looking%20for%20a%20freelance%2...](https://twitter.com/search?q=looking%20for%20a%20freelance%20developer&src=typd)

</comment><comment><USER54> In the uk www.unicornhunt.io is very popular with startups.

</comment><comment><USER55> I found both my current and previous job via indeed.com.

</comment><comment><USER56> If you are in London or New York yunojuno.com is good.

</comment><comment> d--b There is only one for finance-related jobs: efinancialcareers.com

Not as good as knowing people, but if you want to work in finance and don't know anyone, that's a goodbye place to start

</comment><comment><USER57> LinkedIn seems to work well in London

</comment><comment><USER58> LinkedIn InMail

</comment><comment><USER59> If you are on a Work Visa like H1B or EU Blue Card, most of the job boards here don't work. That's why I created [http://www.visaok.in](http://www.visaok.in) to help techies find Work Visa sponsored Jobs.

Also researched a ton and created Visa Guides for over 25 different countries including Germany, Mexico, Singapore, United Arab Emirates etc.

You can find these Visa Guides here => [http://www.visaok.in/work- permit/blog/](http://www.visaok.in/work-permit/blog/)

</comment><comment><USER60> Wouldn't people with the most experience in "finding" work... also be the people who have "found" work they didn't like--requiring many job changes?

My job was never listed anywhere. It was purely word-of-mouth that mentioned the job, and got me hired.

</comment><comment><USER61> _Do you have a favorite job board?_

Obviously.

For my job as a snowboard instructor: Burton Process 157 Off-Axis Purepop Camber.

For my other jobs: Linkedin Easy Apply. It delivered.

<comment><USER40> Very droll

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> [https://codefor.cash](https://codefor.cash) is a search engine I built that searches __remote, freelance __programming job boards.</comment>


HOW TO: Build a Local Startup Community - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2011/05/13/build-startup-community/ <comment><USER2> Turoczy, next time I'm in Portland we gotta meet up

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds good. Please let me know when you're in town. And let's make that happen.</comment></comment>


Sailfish – An open source mobile OS - <AUTHOR> https://sailfishos.org//index.html <comment><USER2> For those wondering, this is a successor of the Nokia/Intel MeeGo project which was sidelined a few years ago.

It's hard to see how yet another mobile OS will make traction. Perhaps the Android runtime will make it compatible enough that developer-types will use it.

<comment><USER3> Rejecting a new thing out of hand because it isn't the current popular thing is a classic example of "middlebrow dismissal".

Android is not perfect and was not always a popular thing and there is room for more than one mobile platform.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you. Too bad HP did not. WebOS was really fantastic and just a bit ahead of its time performance wise. I feel like I'm one of the few users that "got it".

It is good to see another opensource OS step into the arena.

<comment><USER5> I think there were a lot of us who got it. Palm's hardware division, marketing dept. and whoever sucked at wooing carriers didn't get it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> First Sailfish device will be released next month (May): [http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/17/jolla-to-show-first- phone-i...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/17/jolla-to-show-first-phone-in- may/)

May be some devs can get a hand on it

</comment><comment><USER7> How do I put it on my phone?

<comment><USER8> If you have an Android phone, go to their website; grab the platform binaries, and flash it onto your phone using fastboot. (Disclaimer: you'll have to root your phone first, so be prepped for broken warranties.)

I'm kidding ofcourse. The real answer is, wait until they release some device that supports it!

<comment><USER9> You don't need root access on whatever OS you're running to unlock fastboot. You typically only need to access fastboot via USB, how else would you load an OS to a blank device?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The logo seems suspiciously similar to the Seagate emblem.

</comment><comment><USER11> The tech description lists an "Android Runtime" (<https://sailfishos.org//about-technology.html>), so maybe it'll be able to run older/smaller android apps like the new blackberry phone. Good for users and developers, and not a bad way to jump-start a new OS.

</comment><comment><USER12> Got excited when I saw the download and realised it was for an SDK. Ah well, that'll keep me entertained for a bit.

Hopefully they'll be working towards having something releasable so people can start using it in the wild soon, it looks interesting but it's going to need many eyeballs on it before it's ready to play with the big boys.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there actually any information about the OS? Are there any examples of how this is different than what we already have? Isn't Android exactly this. Linux with a touch UI.

<comment><USER14> Most importantly, Sailfish offers real multi-tasking as we know it from desktop operating systems. While in Android or iOS your application is suspended when you switch to another one, in Sailfish they can run in the background.

<comment><USER15> Suspending apps in the background of iOS is a _feature_. It's not like the OS doesn't support "real multi-tasking". Apple could give us "real multi-tasking" at the flick of a software switch -- most of us prefer battery life.

<comment><USER16> This is a piece of common wisdom among the Apple "slavery is freedom" crowd, and is impervious to the fact that N900s and N9s have fine battery lives. I frequently have a couple of browser windows, my media player, bash, and an SMS window open on my N900, and it isn't too tough on my battery.

The problem with battery life and multitasking on N900 is that it has so little RAM that it gets super swappy and starts to thrash esp. under heavy client-side js. I'm dying for an N900 w/2013 specs.

>Apple could give us "real multi-tasking" at the flick of a software switch

This is not true. Task management has to be designed into a multitasking OS. Maemo did a beautiful job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Will there be any competition between Sailfish and Tizen? Will it be a war among brothers?

</comment><comment><USER18> I miss Meego.

</comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how this compares to established Free Software mobile operating systems such as Cyanogenmod <http://www.cyanogenmod.org/>

<comment><USER20> Cyanogenmod is not an separate OS. It is just Android.</comment></comment>


Windows Vista, 7, and Singularity: The New Copland, Gershwin, and Taligent - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/04/22/windows-vista-7-and-singularity-the-new-copland-gershwin-taligent/ <comment><USER2> I don't think that MS ever claimed that Singularity would produce a product, while Taligent was supposed to be a real OS IIRC.</comment>


Angular Radial Plot – An Angular directive for creating radial plots - <AUTHOR> http://gordyd.github.io/

<comment><USER2> Very cool!

<comment><USER3> Thanks! There are a few more additions are in the works here. I ultimately want to make a collection of interactive visualisations. I love the concept that such a graph can be a form of input. Anyone who would like to help please feel free :)</comment></comment>


Nothing Is Too Strange for Cities Wooing Amazon to Build There - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/technology/wooing-amazon-second-headquarters.html <comment><USER2> How ridiculously good is Amazon at getting free press? They have already likely decided on where to put the new HQ (1), and will get featured in these overwhelmingly positive articles for months to come. I'm also reminded of that 60 minutes segment on drone delivery that just happened to air right before cyber Monday a couple years back. Still waiting on that one, although I do actually think it will happen eventually.

*1 [https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/09/08/amazons...](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/09/08/amazons-red-herring/)

<comment><USER3> From the Brookings article:

> Even if only a few of these assumptions about Amazon's interests were > correct, they would limit Amazon to only one to three places. Amazon already > knows that, and given what we know about the company and the site selection > industry, it most likely has a favorite.

I think I can guess what they are thinking, but it would be nice if they just named those 3 likeliest metro areas.

<comment><USER4> Why name it and lose any possible tax advantages the target city might offer? That's the thesis of the article.

<comment><USER3> I was referring to Brookings naming it, not Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think Amazon should have gone the exact opposite way: buy a small, failing city to become Amazon's. There are plenty around the US and the world. Bring in your people. Pay people to relocate. Allow the spouses of those employees to create small businesses. Essentially make Eureka.

<comment><USER6> Any city owned and run by Amazon wouldn't be Eureka, because that's not what in Amazon's interests. It would be a company town straight out of last century, and most of its citizens would be little more than slum-dwelling wage slaves.

But, it would have one hell of an airport.

<comment><USER7> Except your wage slaves can leave at any time for well-paying jobs elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> IIRC Bezos chose seattle not just for available talent but also the fact that there are no income / corporate taxes in the state of WA. I believe this factor will be also significant when they choose the 2nd HQ. Texas / Florida / Nevada are the competitive places that come to mind that have no income tax. Perhaps Austin (availability of talent pool) seems likely ?

<comment><USER9> Don't forget New Hampshire! We have no income tax, no sales tax, and a significant population of software developers.

[https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151132.htm#st](https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151132.htm#st)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Elon Musk battery plant went through a similar bid process, although I don't know if it was on the same scale. I think Nevada and Buffalo won that bid.

</comment><comment><USER11> Personally I think a Canadian city will win. Simply because we have a large, educated workforce that can't simply move to the US.

Although, I will add, the immigration benefits here are over-stated, we've always had more controls on immigration than the US has, and we still do.

<comment><USER12> I don't know about that. Can you imagine the hissy fit trump would throw if Amazon put 5 billion into a city outside of the US? He already doesn't like Bezos because of WaPo. I'm surprised he hasn't already tweeted a threat about it.

<comment><USER13> Trump's tweets aren't enough to have an effect on business, anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is _so_ unsettling. Cities bribe companies/sports teams/etc all the time, but Amazon's gall in publicly pitting governments against each other to get the best deal ... just makes me sad.

<comment><USER15> This sort of thing should be illegal by federal law; I don't see anyone benefitting from it other than Amazon.

<comment><USER16> Competing in the interest of their citizens should be illegal?

<comment><USER14> That's so simplistic there's not really a good discussion to be had.

But the answer is: there are a lot of things governments shouldn't be able to do. _Especially_ to benefit corporations. Corporate subsidies almost never pay off for individuals, but saddle cities with unmanageable expenses later on. They tend to actually hurt the poor, as well.

<comment><USER16> But by that restriction municipalities wouldn't be able to do any business with corporations because that would benefit the corporations.

This isn't as obvious as you'd like to make it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Makes me wonder if the city has already been picked, and this is just a smart way of Mr. Benzos to get the absolutely best conditions without having to even negotiate..

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd rather not be bribed with a cactus.

<comment><USER19> I'm kind of shocked they tried. Tucson's in the middle of Saguaro national park, give or take, so i'm assuming the cactus in question was a Saguaro, but the sheer amount of paperwork, not to mention botanical effort, involved in moving an adult Saguaro anywhere is enormous. Most of them are microchipped, their root networks are huge and shallow, they're really cranky about being transplanted in adulthood.. the list goes on and on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> According to their government relations team they've already chosen a city, architect, and have everything planned. What the strategy here is really to force all of these cities to come to Amazon, hat in hand, so they can also lobby them on their major issues. It's pretty much a scam.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder what kind of "things" cities have to offer? Property tax breaks, maybe other city taxes? Free land? Be interesting to see an offer package.

<comment><USER22> amazon listed things it was looking for in their RFP

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does anybody actually want this to happen in their city? Living in Seattle, I wouldn't wish it on any city.

<comment><USER24> To me, this sounds like it's the perspective of a pampered person.

You really don't think Amazon opening a campus in a city with stagnating or negative job growth would be good for that city?

<comment><USER23> It doesn't help the people currently there at all. The only people begging for it to come are those who can already afford to live in a place where rents are through the roof.

This only ends up helping the already wealthy.

<comment><USER25> > This only ends up helping the already wealthy

How? Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER26> Guessing they mean land-owners.

<comment><USER27> Even property owners can feel the effects.

In Austin Texas, the historical legacy of racial segregation meant that there have been areas of the city that were predominantly hispanic or black, for generations. The modest homes in these neighborhoods were paid off long ago and passed down through the families.

When the development boom hit Austin, even the parts of these neighborhoods that didn't undergo gentrification have seen a massive pressure on the folks who did live there in the form of explosive property taxes.

For many of these folks, this has pushed them out from their family homes because they can no longer afford the taxes on their properties, despite owning them outright. Of course there is an argument to be had about why these folks can't afford the taxes but heavily under-girding that is the same neglect and marginalization their populations have always faced.

So even owning property is not always enough to insulate someone from the whims of explosive development aimed at those with extremely large incomes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Slicehost accounts will be converted to Rackspace cloud accounts - <AUTHOR> http://go.rackspace.com/index.php/email/emailWebview?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRoksqjMZKXonjHpfsX%2B7%2BgkUK6%2BlMI%2F0ER3fOvrPUfGjI4FTMNqI%2FqLAzICFpZo2FFKG%2BOeb5BB%2BfA%3D <comment><USER2> Definitely a misleading title and kind of unfair to Rackspace. I founded Slicehost (with Matt Tanase) and I absolutely think this is the right thing to do and definitely is the best thing for existing Slicehost customers.

Given that this is a public plan now I feel like I can share that during the acquisition process of Slicehost we debated heavily what the right thing was to do with the brand. It was honestly a very very tough call and at the time the thing we all (Matt, me _and_ Rackspace) were most sensitive to was to not disrupt the Slicehost community. We succeeded in that goal but the net effect (unintentionally so) was to disconnect Slicehost from Rackspace's cloud roadmap and effectively strand the product.

Unfortunately I think in hindsight I can say that our decision was probably the wrong call. I honestly think everyone would have been better off if we just ripped the band-aid early and tried to figure out how to make the core Cloud Server community out of the incoming Slicehost customers.

Control panels, features, pricing, etc all change and in the long run are only ephemerally important. What matters is having your interests be in the direct path for the company that is serving you and as a Rackspace Cloud customer you'll have that, while as a Slicehost customer you did not (post acquisition).

I definitely can see this from all sides and for Slicehost customers, all I can say is that at no point along the way did anyone (at Slicehost or Rackspace) ever have less than the best intentions for the brand and the community. There are some serious champions of Slicehost at Rackspace both in the form of former Slicehost employees still there (Paul Tomes, article site creator) and long time Rackers. Trust me that these guys are really working for the best for you all.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for making an awesome product in Slicehost.

You mention that "...control panels...are only ephemerally important..."

Many in this thread disagree. You can see it getting brought up over and over as a reason we loved Slicehost, and a reason we don't like other alternatives as much.

I won't get too deep into UX theory here, so I'll just say this: people who make apps: if you hear the same comments over and over from your customers, they might be on to something interesting.

I truly believe in the expression "listen to what your users do, not what they say." So i'm not gonna pretend every lil gripe we have about this is right. But there is definitely a pattern in this thread that Rackspace can learn from.

[update: so far i've counted 18 mentions of the phrase "control panel" in this thread. it, and all user experience, matters a lot.]

<comment><USER2> I don't disagree with you. It's just that even if the Rackspace control panel was perfect today that wouldn't fix the core issue.

The core issue is that you're going to have your needs met if you are on the critical path, especially for a company growing at such a fast pace that has to deal with the reality of making choices on where to spend scarce resources.

By your own logic, having more people be squeaky wheels for the Rackspace control panel should be a good thing. It will be even more pressure for that to be addressed.

<comment><USER3> My point is that you might be measuring customer needs/migration path in a way differently than customers do (if you repeatedly see them move away to a 3rd party, especially one particular 3rd party).

A common theme in this thread is that people _inside_ Rackspace see Rackspace Cloud + Slicehost as very similar, because 1) they have a common corp ownership 2) they have an increasingly common (but hidden-to-users) back-end 3) they have common staff in some cases.

But the customers in this thread see Linode + Slicehost as much more similar because 1) their control panels are a bit more similar 2) they share DNS flexibility + other featuers 3) Price (Linode moving in more attractive direction for some use-cases).

Neither interpretation is necessarily right, but in this era it's definitely time to rethink what customer needs are (if you're outlining a migration path). I don't think RS is wrong for discontinuing Slicehost (I'd definitely wanna EOL older products), I just think they're wrong in how they parse features, experiences, and what user needs are.

I see since I posted earlier that user:polvi (hiya!) says the Cloudkick posse is working on the control panel for RSC. I've no doubt that _all_ providers will greatly up their UX game (something something Dave McClure design dogma :D).

It just feels disingenuous for RS peeps to say over and over "Slicehost services are not dying, it's just the _brand_ that's going away" when real features and real UX are going away, at least for a window of time. And it's totally normal for users to go where those features and UX can be found, even if it's a separate company. To users, that feels easier.

<comment><USER2> We are in agreement for sure.

UX at rackspace now is ick at best, but since the Polvi virus is currently spreading in the place, I'd bet on significant improvement.

I just see that there are two independent issues. One is that Rackspace UX needs help, the other is that there are dual/competing brands, one of which is feature stranded. Clearly they are related when you consider collapsing the brand into one, but I still think it's worth thinking about them in terms of two distinct issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Let me explain why this is incredibly annoying for a long term (read: selfish) customer.

I have a ton of apps running on my old slices. A client pays monthly for the one slice and it really doesn't look like it will cover costs with the shift to their 'cloud' servers. I really don't want to have to go and reconfigure several versions of python and django and several apps. I don't want to migrate databases. I don't want to move various processes that have been running without being touched for 3-5 years.

The email doesn't give us any indication of the migration path. I don't care about your IPv6 problems or your OpenStack announcements.

Even something like domains hasn't been addressed. I use the slicehost interface to manage a dozen or so domains and their subdomains. Am I going to have to shift nameservers and reconfigure these domains?

Read their initial announcement to gain some perspective on how the acquisition was described.

"Our number one goal is to continue delivering the Slicehost experience. In fact, we hope to make it even better." <http://www.slicehost.com/rackspace>

<comment><USER5> As far as I remember, Linode have a tool to migrate your DNS automatically. Migration, for me, was relatively painless, apart from the fact that I had to confirm each domain and change the IPs by hand. I'm sure you can write a script to do it, if you have many.

If you're worried about costs, Linode's price is half Slicehost's. That should make the migration time worth it.

<comment><USER6> Is <https://github.com/Schultz/slicedns2linode> what you mean?

<comment><USER7> Thank you for posting this. Aside from one wildcard record (that shouldn't have worked anyway), it handled all of my zones perfectly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Or you can switch to Linode, which provides more resources and a more fully- featured web interface for less money. I switched several months back and I haven't run into a single issue. :)

Edit: To be fair to Slicehost, they provided me with wonderful service for over a year and I never had a single issue while I was with them. I'm sad to see that they'll be shutting down.

<comment><USER9> I don't know how feasible this is; but it would be killer to be able to have a 1-click migration process.

i.e. "Moving from slicehost? Provide your credentials and we'll bring everything over automatically. Just click this button!"

<comment><USER10> A couple months ago someone posted a link on HN to a pretty cool looking tool that automatically would generate a Puppet script based on your server environment (packages installed, etc). I didn't save it, and I can't find it now from googling.

Now I've set up a Linode account and want to migrate my config from Slicehost, and it looks like this might be a useful opportunity to test out that tool. But for the life of me I can't remember it's name.

Does anyone have a link?

<comment><USER11> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2344080>

<comment><USER10> Thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for.

Also laughing hard at the irony of the title.

<comment><USER12> I'm certain blueprint can make this transition easier for most people, if anyone has any questions, please get in touch - firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have paid Slicehost a premium for a few years to avoid having to spend expensive engineer time on a migration to an unproven system which will almost certainly require downtime and break something in production. This announcement is absence-of-happy for me.

I respect the desire to EOL an old product line holding up dev schedules, but this email has a lot of things which scare me (multi month dialogue about migration? Translation: "hit a button to reboot server" is not in the cards.) It also doesn't identify any benefit for me to stay: Rackspace's dev problems are not my problems because, prior to this email, my servers worked.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm one of the co-founders of Cloudkick (YC W09) and now part of the Rackspace. I wanted to reassure everyone that this is a migration, not "killing" off your slices. The Rackspace Cloud is based on the Slicehost technology, but has the full support and momentum of Rackspace behind it.

If you have any questions, concerns, or would like to discuss this with anyone at Rackspace - please do not hesitate to reach out directly to me: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER15> I was a slicehost customer, then a rackspace customer, and now a linode customer.

The biggest reason I love linode now is the control panel. Slicehost also had a good control panel, but the Rackspace Cloud CP is severely lacking. It's extremely slow and the DNS is in a really awkward spot (click a server and then click DNS to see a global DNS...it doesn't make sense).

I was a fairly happy Rackspace Cloud customer but Linode is just a great experience. What is Rackspace doing to improve the cloud offering?

<comment><USER14> Rackspace is investing heavily into the cloud. The Cloudkick acquisition was part of that. I am extremely happy to hear that the CP was one of your major pain points, because it is one of (if not the top) priority to improve. The team that is based in San Francisco is working directly on that project. If these sorts of problems are interesting to you, please let me know!

<comment><USER15> That's great to hear. I'm excited for more competition in the space.

That being said, I've raised the issue of the location of the DNS manager many times and have been told that it is by design and won't change. Go to the Linode or Slicehost CP and a link to the DNS manager is on the dashboard, where it should be. I just don't understand the reasoning for hiding it behind a specific server instance despite it being a globally applicable system. This is probably more annoying to me because of the slow speed of the control panel, meaning it takes a long time to get to the DNS manager.

Best of luck with the improvements!

<comment><USER16> yesimahuman: Despite what you have heard, that is something that is scheduled to change. Take a look at [http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/blog/2011/03/21/announcing- ra...](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/blog/2011/03/21/announcing-rackspace- cloud-dns-api-private-beta-for-us-uk-cloud-customers/) This will be the foundation for a brand new DNS Manager in the Control Panel, and it will give you the ability to script your changes!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is it just me, or is this an example of terrible corporate communication. As a slicehost customer, I don't give a shit about what Mark thinks about IPv6 and OpenStack. All I care about is what is going to change. He makes statements like "as seamless as possible". That doesn't have any meaning.

If the major change is going to be a new control panel, and a different way of accessing support, then just say so.

<comment><USER18> I agree that the email is just about things that have little interest to customers. My own questions were more along the lines of: \- Will I need to restart my servers, reinstall, reconfigure them for the change? \- How long will be the downtime? \- Will the IP change (My DNS is managed elsewhere) \- Will it still be 64 bit? \- When will this happen approximately? \- Will we able to choose when it happens for our instances?

Also the fact that I haven't received the email myself is not reassuring at all. I am not going to just sit around and remain without a predictable migration path, be it a migration to Rackspace or elsewhere.

<comment><USER19> Yes, I got this e-mail today and was most impressed that it went on for so long without providing any information useful to me, the customer. None of the links in it go to anything that is useful to me, either. It's nice that they agonized over their business decision but now that they've made it surely the important thing is to tell us how exactly it is going to affect us and what we need to do. None of that is mentioned. Makes me feel like they really are not taking any customer concerns seriously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great. I hope rackspace fixes their control panel before this happens. The current one has required me to contact support to make dns changes because my end was throwing errors. After a year of that bullshit I left for a different host. I found rackspace's servers to be excellent but the control panel is very slow, buggy, and lacks functionality that the slicehost panel has. (like setting TXT records in the dns.)

Edit: Just to note. The only issue I've had with rackspace was the control panel. The support was excellent. The people working there are excellent. I want to use their product. The control panel not working just made me feel dependent on support for everything I'd rather manage myself.

<comment><USER21> Yes! I can't believe the control panel has been able to exist in such a shitty state for a long time. I mostly interact with cloudservers through the API these days, but last I remember, the control panel didn't let you set up wildcard DNS, which was a major use-case for me. It actually had javascript validation to disallow it, if you turned off JS, it worked fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hope they keep their articles section, it was really helpful for me when I was setting up my first VPS.

<comment><USER23> Yup ... I was a linode customer but I set up my instance using the slicehost tutorials :\

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Misleading title: Slicehost accounts will be converted to Rackspace cloud accounts. They are killing the brand, not the product.

<comment><USER24> Afaik, Rackspace cloud accounts are more expensive than Slicehost accounts. Have you seen or do you know of how this changes pricing?

<comment><USER25> Actually, I made the switch from Slicehost to Rackspace because it was cheaper. It's pay for what you eat pricing, so you don't get a free allotment of bandwidth, but it's around ~$11 for a 256 meg instance.

My biggest concern is that the Rackspace Cloud product doesn't seem as polished as Slicehost. Slicehost was a great service for newer users, with great documentation and help resources.

<comment><USER26> But bandwidth is _expensive_. That 256 slice had 150GB of b/w included, which brings the Rackspace Cloud cost to $37.95. It really adds up quick if you were using any serious percentage of your bandwidth allotment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> My first instinct is to plan a migration to Linode or Softlayer. I use SliceHost because I want to push a button and have a running server, and push another button to resize it in less than a minute. If I wanted more control, I'd be using EC2.

I'm hoping someone with Rackspace Cloud experience can pipe in, but at a glance, it looks like a more bare-metal offering, like EC2, where you have to worry about more of the low-level concerns. Thoughts?

<comment><USER28> No, you are incorrect. Slicehost technology __is __Rackspace Cloud _Servers_ technology. Cloud _servers_ and Slicehost slices are running in the same racks on the same hardware using identical technology stacks -- always have been. The control panel for managing a Rackspace Cloud account and products (including servers) is distinct from the Slicehost customer control panel, and the support teams were distinct groups of people. Now these two corporate structures and logical pools of resources will simply be merged under the name Rackspace Cloud Servers.

<comment><USER28> Oh, forgot to point out the other big difference. Slicehost had (and still has) a monthly billing model with a monthly bandwidth allowance bundled into the cost. Rackspace Cloud _Servers_ costs are calculated on two factors: how many hours the Cloud Server ran that month (from the day/time you instantiated it); AND then bandwidth usage is calculated separately, based on some $$/GB rate:

[http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/server...](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing/)

So, the real point is that even if this wasn't apparent to you the customer, the substantial differences between Cloud Servers and Slices was _branding_ and different pricing models; the support teams were also separate (and the two front-line support teams have different "styles"). Otherwise, behind the scenes, they're literally the same thing -- in terms of data centers, hardware platforms and hypervisors, etc., etc.

<comment><USER29> This is what I was looking for in this thread, so thank you.

The email left me concerned of the transition and what it would mean for uptime of websites, but if it's literally just a change of billing, branding, and control panel, why are they waiting months and months to change this? If it doesn't affect my websites' uptimes or IPs, they should just rip off the bandaid now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I've been waiting for the final reason to force me to transition my sites off my Slicehost account. They've clearly been gutted and left in the dust; their plans haven't upgraded in specs while their competitors have. It's really too bad, Slicehost was so great before they were purchased.

<comment><USER31> They had the best customer service of anybody I've ever used. I'm sad to see them go

<comment><USER32> Absolutely. Slicehost has been the example I've used for "doing it right" for quite some time.

The chat was _awesome_. You could jump in there at pretty much any time and start talking to somebody who could help you immediately.

<comment><USER33> Rackspace has live chat too...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm seriously considering migrating from Slicehost to Linode. I've been a Slicehost customer for over 2 years. I was happy with them at first, but I don't think I've noticed a single thing change about their service since I signed up. Particularly the pricing. I'm now paying double what I would at Linode for a 1024MB VPS, and the control panel isn't as nice. These guys dropped the ball, big time. This announcement (Very vague -- I don't even understand what they're announcing) will probably just make me start migrating this weekend.

</comment><comment><USER35> A real bummer.

Have really enjoyed the uptime, stability, and performance Slicehost has given us over the last few years. I've got our web site configured to be brought up on AWS in a flash if needed--but we've never needed...uptime of 99.99% in the last year, 100% in the last 6 months. And crazy affordable. Their support/incidence response rocks, too.

Vaya con Dios, Slicehost, I loved you much.

</comment><comment><USER36> What do I do as an administrator with regards to communication and guarantees of up-time when I communicate these concerns to my clients ?

Here is my take: The longer Rackspace waits on transition details, the more customers will leave. I will if I don't see a concrete plan of migration, and I realize that these things are not easy.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is my wakeup call to finally switch over to Linode.

</comment><comment><USER38> Interesting stuff... I'd been thinking about leaving Slicehost for Linode anyway; now I guess I should at least wait and see what the new setup is going to look like. Any current Rackspace Cloud customers want to comment on their experience(s)?

<comment><USER11> Rackspace Sites user here - same control panel, different product (was called Mosso). CP is pretty terrible, but services are fast/reliable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I here a lot of talk about linode, but they are hardly the only competitor. I'm a very happy customer of ARP Networks <http://www.arpnetworks.com/vps> . They support FreeBSD and OpenBSD in addition to Linux and have competitive pricing. I run 4 low traffic sites (2 rails, 1 sinatra, 1 django) on a $10 VPS without issue (using nginx, thin and tornado).

<comment><USER40> They are probably the best option if you are going to run openbsd or freebsd on a vps, though if you are going for linux I would say my experience with prgmr (for a similar price range) was much better than arpnetworks and if you want support/dns you should go with linode.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The server administration information on slicehost has been real useful for me, I hope they port that documentation over and it doesn't get lost. The articles were basically my introduction to setting up a web server, db , and installing language packages.

</comment><comment><USER42> About a year ago, when I was making plans to rent a vps for my personal sites and projects, Slicehost and Linode were the only real contenders. Slicehost had backups at the time, Linode didn't, but Linode had a slightly better offer overall. In addition to that, a review from uggedal.com favored Linode. Later, they doubled the memory, introduced backups, so in my mind, I made the right choice.

I must say, Slicehost articles are great though. They are exceptionally well written. Not that Linode's articles are bad, but Slicehost articles are really good guides.

</comment><comment><USER43> For light use, I'm definitely glad I switched from slicehost to prgmr.com.

</comment><comment><USER44> Just signed up for a year of linode... goodbye slicehost, you were great!

</comment><comment><USER45> Rackspace needs to talk about pricing before they lose more customers. I'm a Slicehost customer and my main concern is what the price difference will be. About to set up a Linode account...

<comment><USER46> Two weeks ago we started migrating servers to Rackspace Cloud from Slicehost and it appears to be equivalent in pricing to slightly less expensive for us. YMMV depending on bandwidth, storage needs, RAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm Mark Interrante, from Rackspace, I wanted to let you know that we will have an FAQ on the transition posted at the Slicehost forums and on Hacker News in the next 24 hours.

<comment><USER48> As of now, you have not appeared to live up to your promise. I don't see anything here, in the first few pages of new submissions, or on the forums first page.

You do not make a compelling case for continuing with you through the transition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I hope the flood of refugees doesn't make my Linode 1024 slower.

</comment><comment><USER23> I remember agonizing over picking slicehost or linode 2/3 years ago ... So glad I went with linode.

<comment><USER50> What made you choose Linode?

<comment><USER23> In the end it came down to price and size offering. Linode had a 128 or 192MB instance at the time that was insanely priced. Slicehost started at 256MB. There wasn't a lot to separate them otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'm most curious if this is a marketing decision or a result of an unsustainable business model.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm a Slicehost customer, and I just found out about all this from a blog - it's two days after this Hacker News post, and I still haven't received email about the matter. Rackspace, I'm very, very unimpressed.

</comment><comment><USER53> Slicehost was awesome but my more recent sites have been on AWS. If they're going to force me to transition my whole setup, I'm going to move it over there and make my life easier.

Not very happy with this whole thing.

</comment><comment><USER54> Didn't Rackspace just give up indymedia's servers with zero fight?

<comment><USER55> well, that's the danger of MLAT treaties in this time of multinational corporations. even though ahimsa.i.o was hosted in london, the datacenter facility was owned by rackspace which was based in the USA so they had to comply with the MLAT request initiated by the dutch. it was a shitty deal, but certainly not rackspace's fault completely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> They advertise starting at 1.5cents/hr. Does that mean the cheapest "cloud server" I can get is $108? Versus the $20 or so I'm paying now?

Edit: 1.5 cents is actually $10.8 a month. Nevermind :\\.

<comment><USER57> $10.80 (just correcting the math, I don't actually know about their fees)

<comment><USER56> Oh duh, I put 15 cents in. How do I downvote myself?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I've been putting off moving my Slicehost VPS to Rackspace Cloud. I'm glad I won't have to now.

<comment><USER59> Same. I guess it's a re-branding exercise and they'll do most of the heavy lifting for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Goodbye Slicehost. Hello Linode.

</comment><comment><USER61> You won't notice a thing.

-Rackspace</comment>


Punchfork shutdown inspires Open Recipes - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fictivekin.com/post/46860403233/the-jokes-on-us <comment><USER2> Startups that are based on user-contributed content are based on fraud in the sense that they imply to their users that the contributed data will always be available. But it's a lie, the user's data is only being used to explore a potential market. If the market idea proves successful the company will be sold and shutdown. If the idea is unsuccessful it will also be shutdown.

Startups should be required to tell users upfront with a big warning that the business is not profitable, how many months of runway the startup has, and that all data could be lost at any point.

<comment><USER3> No. Private companies should not have to disclose their runway or profitability as this gives competitors insight into the market. Imagine if Pandora plastered a big notice on their signup that says they're not profitable so beware of creating new channels because who knows what will happen. Same is true for Facebook in the early days. It's just unnecessary and business should not be conducted by trying to optimize users away from your product. Of course, I like when companies are fair about how they go about their shut down (e.g. Posterous with ample time to backup your content and go elsewhere).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmm, correct me if I'm wrong but Punchfork scraped their recipe content from other sites? Is it possible there is a data tainting issue here? Hard to reconcile Jeff's comments about user archive and the stuff on the web site, but that said I wasn't a user so I don't know if they sent an email with a download link or something.

<comment><USER5> I'm a registered user and they did not do any notification. I didn't even know it was shut down until seeing this link.

<comment><USER6> I (and all Punchfork users, I assume) received a notification on January 3rd, including the following:

        Initially, support for Punchfork will continue, but
        we will soon be retiring the Punchfork site, API and
        mobile apps. We believe that a unified destination
        benefits our users in the long run, and the Punchfork
        team (me) will focus on contributing to Pinterest as
        the premier platform for discovering and sharing new
        recipes and other interests on the web.

EDIT: Gmail binned this email in "Promotions"... I wonder if that explains why some didn't see it?

<comment><USER4> Hmm, nothing about where you could download your data from?

<comment><USER7> Jason Scott may be your only hope: <https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/313386087802351616>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting that this is written by one half of the Analog Folk/Fictive Kin co-op.

These guys are responsible for Mapalong, a (formally great) mapping service that they abandoned early last year and for which they ignore any requests for exported data (I've been asking for a .KML file for a year to move my points somewhere else).

<comment><AUTHOR> Mapalong is still in private beta, but it's otherwise alive and well. It's a huge bummer that you think otherwise. I'm sure you're not alone.

We have had to pause development, but not only is your data still there, you can still use it. New users can't join, but that's about it.

As soon as we're able, we want to finish it and launch it. As part of this, we'll make sure people can get their data out in useful formats. (Perhaps a GeoRSS feed per URL? A KML file per user?)

I genuinely respect you for holding us to a high standard, but I think it's a little unfair to criticize us for an unfinished app.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry if you feel it's unfair, but it's hard not to jump to such conclusions when the Twitter account is dead and nothing (visibly) changes.

It would certainly make people feel better if, with slowly progressing software, it was made easier for these testers to feel like they could properly test such software with the full knowledge that they can get their investment out in the form of a reasonable export function - they are after all providing a service to you by testing the software and providing feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's cool. Like I said, I'm sure you're not alone.

Also, you make a very good point. We never expected to have to pause, but we should have put more focus on making sure people never felt their data was trapped, even in the very beginning.

In fact, you've managed to convince me that proper data export should be the very next feature we add.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a fairly regular user of Punchfork, I definitely wish it were still around, but this feels self-entitled.

Let's not forget that the data Punchfork is letting users take out is the exact information they put in: a list of liked recipes. The original recipe data is just one click away.

I'm not sure how this is any different than a personal Twitter archive; it contains only your tweets, not those of the folks you interacted with.

</comment><comment><USER9> Lovely subtext in the last section.

Good on you guys for not rising to Jeff's stubborn/dismissive attitude.

<comment><USER10> > "If you think it is easy to build, feel free to replicate it yourself."

>We were super inspired by Jeff's "teach a man to fish" attitude...

This left me with tears in my eyes. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You young 'uns. Do you not remember S.O.A.R.?

SOAR had its beginnings in 1993 when someone collected all the recipes she found on Usenet and mailing lists while at UCB.

In 1995 she put the archive on the web as "SOAR" .. the "Searchable Online Archive of Recipies".

In 2001, that moved from (IIRC) a subdomain of UCB and became "Recipe Source" and can still be found at <http://www.recipesource.com/>

It's very old now, and majorly lacking in features. But then I've never found a recipe site that gave me everything I needed.

</comment><comment><USER12> On Usenet in the 1990s, people used to whine if they weren't given attribution for the work they did scanning and uploading somebody else's published porn photographs.

Punchfork's attitude here seems similar.

</comment><comment><USER13> Has anybody ever succeeded in applying the distributed development approach (forking, pull requests, multiple branches and variations) to recipes?

<comment><USER14> I don't think recipes hew very well to that model. Revisions aren't as important as variations, which means each would be a branch, which is unwieldy.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We're in #openrecipes on Freenode if anyone would like to join us.

</comment><comment><USER15> I could see posthaven turning into an API that any site could integrate with so that users knew their data was safe. Depending on the site and type of user data, this type of exportability/backupability could be a real differentiating feature.

<comment><USER16> Idea: a browser extension that automatically scrapes and archives your data as you browse a site. Power-users can submit scrapers for new/modified sites.

Normally scrapers can be detected and blocked, but if it's passively running in the background on a user's machine, opportunistically grabbing data the user is already viewing, it should be impossible to detect.

<comment><USER17> This is a great idea. I've actually wanted to do this before. Browser plugins are one fundamental tool in the war against web tyranny. For instance, crawling Craigslist could be accomplished this way in a way that was unblockable.

This needs to exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm surprised the ArchiveTeam / archive.org scrape of Punchfork before it was removed didn't also get a mention in all this mess.

<http://archive.org/details/archiveteam_punchfork>

</comment><comment><USER19> I hear a lot of grief about companies shutting down. And I get it, if I spent a lot of time on Punchfork or Google Reader I would be bummed out.

However I can still see the good that will come, yummly already jumped at creating an API replacement much like feedly promises to be an alternative for google reader.

By the way, is ending your startup in "ly" the new fad in the technosphere?

<comment><USER20> Ending in .ly was really popular 2 years back (bit.ly, embed.ly, etc etc). It's still popular, but it has waned since .ly was publicly available.

I think the fad has since passed and a lot of people have been jumping on the .io bandwagon recently.

<comment><USER21> Don't forget the "try to use the TLD bit to make the end of your word"-fad :-) Like doing "hackerne.ws" - not exactly new, but a rising star fad.

<comment><USER19> Haha never knew about that one, easier to type on my phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I long ago stopped replying to posts and comments that anger me for their negativity and bullshit, but none has made me as furious as this one.

Disclaimer: After reaching out to him cold, Jeff Miller was an informal advisor to me for over a year providing valuable insights and advice, not to mention moral support, as we built our company. He did this for no reason other than his dedication to helping a fellow entrepreneur. Over dozens of email exchanges and in-person get togethers, he proved hands down, to be one of the most helpful, friendly, altruistic people I've met in the valley. After a year building up this friendship and trust, he invested in our company, and he is consistently one of the first people I reach out to when I have real founder issues to discuss.

The OP has literally ZERO idea what reasons Jeff has for his decisions about the data on his site, not the least of which could be legal restrictions of the acquisition. They provided, what looks like, ZERO background on why they wanted to talk to someone who was incredibly busy transitioning a startup into the hands of a new parent company. Jeff was as polite as he needed to be when he responded to a completely context-less request for a call with, "I'm sorry I can't right now." The OP does not know, beyond building a startup worth acquiring, and transitioning it, what else someone might have on their plate that would prevent them from having time to chat with someone who failed to provide any reason for their request. Then, when Jeff asked point blank whether the OP was scraping data from his site, they responded with an ambiguous, "not trying to do anything uncool. Still super eager to talk more. Happy to do so anytime."

The OP apparently does not have to _try_ to do something uncool. This entire situation is unbelievably uncool, from the beginning of the communication, to their actions in between, to this post. The only thing more shocking than the sense of entitlement displayed here, is that they, or anybody here, thinks this post documents anything other than a pure display of arrogance and entitlement by the OP. They approached this whole situation with such a stark lack of professionalism that it would be laughable if they hadn't also decided to smear one of the nicest people I know in the process.

This post reflects an attitude that is a shining example of so many things wrong in the startup community, from the sense of entitlement, to the lack of common courtesy, to the manipulation of a situation for personal gain at the expense of others. It is so unreal how easily people seek to tear down others, and worse, how quickly smart people jump on the bullshit bandwagon.

This post is a joke. Nobody owes you anything because they built a site you enjoyed. If anybody owes anybody anything, the OP owes Jeff Miller an apology for this time wasting bullshit.

<comment><USER23> People have gotten pretty sick of the web tools they use being acquihired and shut down. Compound that with the founder being hostile towards Archive Team scraping their data, and is it any surprise your friend is getting flack?

<comment><USER22> Let me clarify what happened here for anybody who couldn't read between the lines of Fictive Kin's ridiculously biased representation of this situation.

Cameron Koczon hits up Jeff on Twitter asking to talk about Punchfork. Jeff has just sold Punchfork and most likely has legal obligations prohibiting him from talking about too much, plus he's busy transitioning the company into a new parent organization, along with whatever else he has going on in his life. They don't provide context, or email him with more information. They tell Jeff to DM them if he wants to talk, as if this now puts the ball in Jeff's court.

Jeff politely responds: "I'm sorry I can't right now." Nothing hostile here.

Then, OP posts a page about Hugspoon. They intend to scrape and replicate Punchfork's data, in particular its user data. Keep in mind, Jeff's site generated traffic for the sites he scraped, much like Google does. By not showing full recipes, Jeff has become a discovery tool for those sites, not a competitor. Hugspoon will not be providing value to Punchfork, the site it scrapes, or Pinterest, the site that now owns it. Hugspoon competes with Punchfork by stealing its data and giving no value in return. OP's claim that they're doing it for the users doesn't really matter. They are stealing this data and it is not an apples to apples comparison to say that Punchfork also scraped data, because it provided significant value to the companies whose data it shared. Ask any of those sites if they minded.

Jeff asks the OP if they are cloning his site and scraping all of the data. He says it's extremely uncool if so. So far, not hostile. He has turned down a context-less request to chat with someone, and has now very level-headedly responded to a blatant attempt to clone his site and steal his data, competing with his new parent company and him for the same users.

Cameron Koczon does not answer the question. He evades it and says, "not trying to do anything uncool. Still super eager to talk more. Happy to do so anytime."

Let me translate this last part for you. "We have stated publicly we plan to scrape your data. We'll say we're not doing anything uncool, but that's because we think "liberating" your site's data is cool. The ball is in your court to contact us, because you owe us that. Just so you know, we can't wait to chat with you!"

Jeff responds. "Please do not scrape any data from PF for your product. I'm asking you unequivocally and in public. OK?"

Yet again, I see absolutely nothing hostile on Jeff's part so far. In fact, if someone insisted _I contact them_ in order to find out more about what they want to talk to me about, and then posted a note saying they intend to pull all of my data, I'd say asking for clarification and a confirmation that they are _not_ going to do that is pretty fucking cordial.

Then Cameron says he will email Jeff in the AM. Four days later, Jeff has to ask if he's going to get an email about this clone site that the OP has publicly announced. Cameron responds that he "ran out of steam" and was away for the weekend. Apparently, him being busy is a perfectly good excuse to leave a big issue out in the open un-addressed, but Jeff being busy isn't enough of a reason to send the guy more context about your plans in an email before announcing publicly your bullshit intentions to rip his site off.

And now there is the article on Fictive Kin, which could not be more ironically headed with the tagline "Work Hard. Be Nice." by people who are going to scrape all of the data they want from a single site, while bullying the site's owner into dealing with them in the way that they expect him to. The post criticizes Jeff's acquisition announcement as callous, an opinion of theirs that I didn't share when I got the same notification. I use Punchfork all of the time. They criticize the "ominous shutdown banner", which I imagine was intended to alert users about the site's imminent closing. Had he not posted such a banner, they would have said he didn't take enough action to alert users to the site's future. Then, they take their arrogant opinion of the situation and paraphrase Jeff, saying: "We're excited to share the news that we're gonna be rich! To celebrate, we're shutting down the site and taking all your data down with it. So long, suckers!"

And as for Archive Team. I assume you're talking about the guys that announced their own intentions by saying "Injecting terabytes of Punchfork user/recipe data into <http://archive.org> . Relive the assholery of this goodbye: <http://punchfork.com/pinterest> ....

Now that we've clarified all of that. Explain to me the part where Jeff is the hostile one. Explain to me how these aren't a bunch of bitter dicks that saw a site get acquired, didn't like another company getting bought and absorbed, and decided to steal all of its data and compete with it, pausing only briefly to insist that the owner of that site give them a call because they would like to tell him to his face about their arrogance. Explain to me why Jeff's request to "Please don't copy any Punchfork data" is a hostile response to being called an asshole.

I don't know a single level headed person who would look at this communication outside of the context of Fictive Kin's ridiculous blog post and not think that these are some of the biggest douchebags on the internet.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised you blame us for the way Jeff is perceived. The only thing I think we could have maybe done better is omit the links to his actual replies. In retrospect, that might have been better. Our link text is pretty benign, e.g., "Then, we heard from Jeff."

The story is simple. We offered to save the likes of users who asked us to. Jeff objected, so we didn't. We offered to save the recipe data and make a searchable index. Jeff objected, so we didn't. While we might have been surprised, we complied; we didn't want to ruffle any feathers.

I can only imagine that you either object to the fact that we started the Open Recipes project or that we shared the story behind it. Either way, I'm afraid I just don't care. If there are exactly two people who think we did something wrong here, and lots of people who support what we're doing, then I think we chose wisely.

Also, you can't truthfully claim that anything we're doing is competing with Punchfork. (It was shut down at the end of March, before the Open Recipes project existed.) Not that there's anything wrong with competition.

<comment><USER22> Your link text is benign, set between accusations and hyperbole. You could have emailed Jeff with context on what you were thinking. You didn't. You tweeted asking him to DM you about a conversation _you_ wanted to have, not him. He told you he was busy. You could have emailed him context then, you didn't. You posted a page publicly saying you planned to save a bunch of the data from his site. He asked you if you were planning to scrape his data and said he thought doing so was uncool. You didn't answer the question. You said you weren't doing anything uncool, which is a matter of opinion, not a clarification of fact, and again acted as though it was his responsibility to pursue clarification from you.

Your approach was wholly unprofessional. The reason it pissed me off is because I know what kind of person Jeff is to those entrepreneurs who approach him professionally, respectful of his time. He is completely approachable, super friendly, and incredibly generous with his time. The reason he wasn't here is because your approach lacked common courtesy and respect. You acted as if he owed it to you to reach out and discuss _your_ project. He doesn't. Then you all but slandered him in your post, paraphrasing him with things like "So long, suckers," which is something that anybody who knows Jeff knows could not be further from his attitude about anything.

I'm glad you came around to respecting Jeff's request. It's too bad you didn't approach the situation as reasonably from the beginning. I get tired of seeing good people have their name tarnished around the community by people whose sense of entitlement leads them to paint a one-sided picture of someone who has worked so hard to contribute to the community, simply because they didn't get what they wanted, how they wanted it.

I don't think having an easily incited mob of trolls supporting your view validates what you've done. I think if you take a step back and look at the situation subjectively, you'd realize you owe Jeff an apology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So yet another business gets it's start by only using content from another site(s) via data scraping, and they are upset that their source of content was acquired and shutdown? Cry me a river...

This reminds me of the Craigslist/Pad-Mapper event, except that Craigslist hasn't been acquired.

<comment><USER25> I think you may have misread. The article is upset because his _user data_ is being taken away. Punchfork acquired their data by scraping recipe publishers. Hugspoon wanted to liberate the user data by scraping punchfork.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I felt the same way when I first read about the acquisition/shutdown. Like the idea.

As a replacement I found <http://www.yummly.com/> today.

</comment><comment><USER27> on a related note, does anyone know whatever happened to foodieview.com? I lost a lot of recipe links when it unceremoniously disappeared.

</comment><comment><USER28> What exactly is the motivating factor for an acquired website (especially one acquired by a large successful media company) to care about how you feel with their service?

>large amount of work into scraping those sites

I think this states clearly the founders attitude about data rights. It's the Wild West out there still.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, "a lot of work went into scraping those sites, so how dare you scrape mine!"

Wat?</comment></comment>


Lyrebird: ultra-realistic artificial voices - <AUTHOR> https://lyrebird.ai/ <comment><USER2> Looks interesting. I applaud them for their work.

However, they look like they are going to be going toe to toe with Google's Wavenet. Their demos seem a generation behind Wavenet.

I wonder what is their value proposition going to be.</comment>


Emacs Outshine - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tj64/outshine <comment><USER2> Pictures please.

I know everyone else that visits the site will have a larger attention span than I have, but it's possible that some will have even less than I have.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am less convinced another org mode for emacs is what I am looking for (even if it works as a minor mode - which is a good idea)

I personally think the next step is a common DSL for organising notes and interacting with many different external services and dbases.

<comment><AUTHOR> A DSL such as you describe is orthogonal to something like outshine. There is no reason why you couldn't use both.

One of the main reasons I'm interested in outshine is for seamless use of org- mode in my emacs init files. While I suppose I could stick my emacs init files in a database and query it using some DSL, I personally prefer to have it in plain text and readable with standard text-processing tools.

<comment><USER4> One of the "common" (heh) solutions is to use org-babel to have a "literate programming" version of your .emacs that you then weave/tangle into the real .emacs

Personally, I've tried this approach with some smallish programming projects and literate programming has to be a good fit for your way of coding. Since I'm quite a big tester-rewriter, LP is a heavy chore. Of course, I'd probably get better doing it more often.

<comment><USER5> They seem to imply that no weave/tangle would be necessary with Outshine. At least I assume that's how it would work with the outline headings 'outcommented in the comment syntax of the major-mode language'.

<comment><USER4> Yup, looks like it, and probably does (since outline mode does, more or less, kind of and sometimes.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems like one of those things where it would be really awesome to see some example use cases and/or a video.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a video of outshine being used here,[1] along with some other tools.

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqE6YxlY0rw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqE6YxlY0rw)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this like [http://www.emacswiki.org/LinkdMode](http://www.emacswiki.org/LinkdMode) ?

</comment><comment><USER8> I always end up on fargo.io or littleoutliner.com for this. Or concord is the underlying engine which you can embed in any HTML.

<comment><USER9> Have you tried Yipgo?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Your great learning experience - <AUTHOR> What was one memorable learning experience you had? What have you learned, and in what setting? Was it from a great book? In a great class? Working on an open source project? <comment><USER2> Mushrooms</comment>


Yachts, jets and stacks of cash: super-rich discover risks of Instagram snaps - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/03/super-rich-discover-hidden-risks-instagram-yachts-jets <comment><USER2> 'Investigators often use location search tools such as Geofeedia, which enable them to throw a virtual "geo-fence" around a certain building or area and gather all of the social media posted from there in real time.'

Am I the only one who finds this capability disturbing?</comment>


The Inside Story Behind MS08-067 - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.technet.com/b/johnla/archive/2015/09/26/the-inside-story-behind-ms08-067.aspx <comment><USER2> Having supported Windows in production in wild, real world environments and worked in security research....

Windows has a giant attack surface because of the sheer indefinitely-legacy- compatible, multiverse-sized codebases of unsafe, unprovable, low-level code in C/C#(CLR)/asm.

The last beta copy of Windows code I reviewed looked like it was maintained by thousands of contract programmers and interns on artificial deadlines whom can't spare a second to clean up nasty technical debt.

With Russinovich and Azure's leader promoted now, I hope they're gonna nut up to take a stab at incurring temporary customer wrath by remaking Windows from (mostly) scratch with less duct tape and more lessons learned. It could even go full open source (for core OS, Visual Studio and shared libs) to dig at Apple (whom is already semi-open source). Given their resources, they could do a modern, nearly ground-up, respectable-as-OpenBSD OS in a combination of functional/multiparadigm languages and not fail too terribly at it if it's previewed/seeks feedback early-and-often. Maintaining marketshare is about taking-on hard-but-necessary choices for long-term gain, not seemingly safe moves of tacking on some tweaks and security add-ons to the overall status quo.

<comment><USER3> Can you point to remote execution issues in the CLR? I'm having a rather hard time thinking of any that'd impact an organization. The CLR issues with unsafe code has almost entirely been related to trying sandbox binaries (via CAS or loading .NET apps via browser plugins (same as Java)).

I'm unaware of any time the CLR would provide any useful attack surface. The only ones that come to mind are GDI+ issues that .NET inherits via passthrough. So, citation needed, I guess?

Agreed that use of C/++ code in general is bad and for all the effort spent on mitigation, we'd be better off moving to a proper language, but ... doesn't seem like that's happening.

A rewrite is rather silly; the NT kernel is well respected and capable. You're basically suggesting "throw away everything and start a new company" which certainly doesn't seem like a winning strategy.

<comment><USER2> You missed the boat and went off on a strawman fallacy based on a fundamental misunderstanding: Microsoft OS code and libraries, are implemented not _just_ in C/C++/some asm but are also implemented in CLR languages. All that legacy crap in a variety of languages is a huge attack surface. Demanding pointing to closed source proof is an impossible, specious fools' errand.

Have you ever done any Windows NT kernel driver development? Compared to OS X (xnu) kexts or Linux, it's a disaster. XNU and Linux extensions are also not that great because it follows the same, flawed insecure methodology of allowing kernel extensions to modify the kernel, which OpenBSD wisely eliminated.

The other strawman you raise, trying put the wrong words in my mouth, rewriting a massive legacy codebase does not throw everything away. The lessons learned are the most important. Instead, OS and app virtualization can be used to run prior OS/apps while new apps can run in a new environment, sharing a filesystem as needed. That doesn't start over "from scratch, with inexperienced people", which is _your_ incorrect presumption because that would be foolish. Otherwise, the Microsoft ecosystem will continue to accrue technical debt and job security which can never be paid off, because it's stuck in 1993.

The kernel should be the kernel.. a tiny, mostly immutable thing which does just enough to provide process/thread isolation, IPC and such. Even better is _capabilities-granted_ privilege requests to perform _unsafe_ operations, so that drivers are demoted to least-privilege processes. QNX and MINIX loosely follow this, and it's a far more secure _and_ robust benefits of reasonable microkernel architecture approaches.

<comment><USER4> > Have you ever done any Windows NT kernel driver development? Compared to OS > X (xnu) kexts or Linux, it's a disaster.

I have done NT drivers and linux kernel modules. I disagree with your statement. Can you be more specific?

I'm not saying there are no warts in NT, but your comment doesn't demonstrate any knowledge of where they are.

<comment><USER2> What kind of NT drivers (USB, Storage, what)? What kind of Linux kernel modules?

I've worked on storage drivers for Linux (2.6), Mac (10.6+ - 10.8) and Windows.

What like Nt vs Zw? Are you fucking serious? Do I need a badge and certification from you too, your majesty? You haven't proven you've done shit either, but it doesn't matter.

You don't have experience with xnu kexts (which make much more sense, at least more so than the Linux model), so I don't see how you can claim, broad pseudo- expert "opinion" on something you know nothing about.

Regardless, these three approaches are still irrelevant because they're critically flawed: granting transfinite trust to the kernel driver developer to not fuck up. A real microkernel model, only a process would likely crash. QNX runs on billions of devices, including now BlackBerry 10 since they acquired it: game, set, match.

That's the boat you've missed trying to go off into the weeds and make it a personal attack, because you have nothing.

<comment><USER4> Calm down. I'm not asking for a badge of certification whatever whatever. I just don't understand what the complaint is and therefore cannot evaluate it.

[Since you asked, the biggest complaint in my filesystem-centric Windows experience is that filesystem drivers are very "heavy". There is not really a layer like Linux VFS which can handle common bug-prone tasks before they get to your driver. The driver is expected to do a lot. But I don't think drivers are easy on any platform.]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article mentioned Conficker. Conficker was the only malware that I had years ago that seriously made a mess for me, mainly horribly slow Internet.

And it was my ISP that notified me of the unusual traffic and that I had Conficker.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, Conficker was pretty easy to detect at the network level. I worked at an .edu at the time and set up alarms for it. Fortunately, it was trivial for us to identify the user who owned the device, kill their network access, then wait for them to call the help desk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone explain to me what is the MS rationale behind binding RPC mapper(135) to public ip on client computers?

<comment><USER8> Same reason unix systems typically did the same with theirs (albeit on port 111)

Its not very useful if other machines can't talk to it.

Keep in mind, the decision to do this in Windows happened back when home computers were on dialup. (Even RFC 1918 and NAT were young at the time) The real question is why didn't Windows have a firewall that blocked it by default and the answer is that it has.... since XP SP2 was released in 2004.

<comment><USER3> And going a bit further back, this is probably one more reason Windows was successful. Networking "just worked". It was pretty neat (in the 90s) to just plug stuff in, turn it on, and hey, there's the other computers, and printers and so on.

<comment><USER9> If you mean Windows 3.1 running over Novell Netware and Trumpet Winsock then it did indeed bring networked ease of use computing to the masses :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN:What is stooping us from only using Tablets? - <AUTHOR>

Every use for a computer these days can be found as a webapp or Tablet app, What is stoping us from only using iPads, GalaxyTabs and Other tablets? <comment><USER2> I think there is very little stopping us. For consumption of information, there is nothing quite like a tablet. However it is a little different for productivity. I can't imagine coding or doing sys admin on a tablet. I'm on a tablet now :)</comment>


SMSmart Simulates Useful Apps Using SMS When You Have No Data - <AUTHOR> http://lifehacker.com/smsmart-simulates-useful-apps-using-sms-when-you-have-n-1688160346

<comment><AUTHOR> I've been testing this out for a week or so. It's amazing what you can do, and the latency is not even close to as bad as I was expecting. They do some clever compression, so it's actually quite tolerable and a good option for people with limited or no data plans.

</comment><comment><USER2> Very cool!</comment>