Hiring Processes Are Also Engineering Processes - <AUTHOR> http://ramblinjan.com/development/2016/12/05/Your-Hiring-Process-is-your-engineering-process/ <comment><USER2> Where does this assumption come from that rejecting the majority of candidates leads to better results? At some point you're just cutting into the bone and rejecting candidates that are perfectly acceptable.

The more candidates you reject, the more time you waste and the more people come out of your interview with a negative experience of the company.

These costs can easily outweigh the cost of a bad hire. Nobody writing these blog-anecdotes even quantifies what that cost is.

At the end of the day, programming interviews seem more like hazing than anything. No other profession hires with a full day oral examination. It's fucking ridiculous.

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on your definition of "perfectly acceptable." Almost every job in every industry with a hiring cycle rejects "a majority of candidates," especially when there's limited space.

> These costs can easily outweigh the cost of a bad hire.

How so? You're right that I've relied a good bit on the anecdotal, but aren't you doing so a bit here? Bad hires are ridiculously costly--especially on a small team--because they aren't just expensive. On a good team, almost every new hire lowers everyone else's productivity initially.

Hiring more people because of loss aversion also falls prey to the trap of "more people = more productive" that's been pretty thoroughly debunked in the software industry ([http://a.co/3ierKnl](http://a.co/3ierKnl))

<comment><USER3> > Bad hires are ridiculously costly

Here's a serious question. Please make an effort to think about it and come with an answer for your company: What is a "bad hire"?

<comment><USER4> Someone who writes code bad enough that the maintenance costs of the code outweigh the cost of employing them to write it.

Of course this is often an organizational issue more than a hiring one, but we seem to have given up on fixing those.

<comment><AUTHOR> There's also the cost of impact on a team, etc.

Shameless self-plug, though, for another post I wrote about organizational process: [http://ramblinjan.com/development/2016/07/05/Going-Agile- Whe...](http://ramblinjan.com/development/2016/07/05/Going-Agile-When-You- Have-No-Authority/)

I definitely haven't given up on fixing those. I just, uh...I have a lot of feelings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Resume writer and ~20 year tech recruiter here. Just a comment to readers about the author's estimate that your resume is being reviewed for 5 minutes. _It 's not,_ so be sure not to write your resume as if it is going to get that much attention.

Don't save the good stuff for the ending, thinking "the reader will get to that." Interview or delete decisions are often made in under thirty seconds, at least for things like a quick phone screen. If you start out the resume too slow, many readers are not getting to page two.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I tried to be pretty conservative so it didn't feel like I was fudging numbers to make a point about speed in earlier rounds, but I wonder if I should clarify.

I'll definitely include this when I write more for an audience of applicants. Resumes are soooooo boring, so anything to stick out is a big deal.

<comment><USER5> I was hoping not to seem pedantic on this, but it's potentially a key detail to a reader and I wouldn't want anyone to think they have 5 minutes to make an impression when the reality is much closer to 5 seconds to make an immediate positive impression. Then you likely get some more review time once the initial gut reaction is over.

Nicely written article BTW.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

Definitely didn't take it as pedantic. Thanks for the reminder about the impact this could have on an audience I didn't think about. I added a small disclaimer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hiring fast is actually really important. It sets a really good tone with candidates and forces you to have a hiring process with good decision points and processes.

At Voxy we had a 1 week turn around goal from receiving a resume to having on offer on the table. Didn't always work out like that because of candidates, and vacations and what not, but that was the goal. The day of last interviews we either said no thanks that night, or got the offer out.

<comment><USER7> Anec-data to your point: The two best companies I've worked for made their offers at the end of the interview day.

<comment><USER8> How did they go about doing that? It seems like it would be very difficult to avoid pressuring someone to decide on the spot. When that's not the intent (i.e. when the company respects a person's right to think about the offer), it seems like that risks becoming an uncomfortable situation.

<comment><USER7> The offer was made: they didn't require an immediate response. They had refined their decision process, they didn't constrain my decision process beyond what's customary.

<comment><USER8> Cool. So they just said, "Hey, we would like to offer you the job. Here are the details. Please take your time and let us know when you've made a decision"?

<comment><USER7> That's right, although they said something like 'Please decide within the week' or something to that effect. I'd have to dig up old, old paperwork to get the exact phrasing, but it wasn't 'Hey dude, it's chill, whenever you make up your mind'

<comment><USER8> Ha! Right, right. Good on them, and thanks for indulging me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I especially liked this part:

> If you need someone who can hit the ground running right away, test them > with the exact tools they'll be using on the job. If you need someone > flexible who can learn anything, test them on something new and unique. If > you need someone with a level head, try to frustrate your candidates and > ditch the ones with short tempers.

Edit: Except for deliberately frustrating candidates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I'll have to give it some thought because it seems like I failed to explain this well enough (though I may just straight up be wrong about it altogether).

The candidates who ended up frustrated weren't feeling that way because we were jerks to them (I don't think). Maybe what I'm getting at is don't be afraid to push people to the limit a little bit in a task, because their reactions to it say as much as their approach.

<comment><USER10> Most jobs don't require people who can endure getting "pushed to the limit" every week, hour, day, etc. Especially while under close observation and scrutiny. That would strain most any person. If it is that demanding, then be upfront about that instead of surprising candidates during a stressful interview.

People should be aware of what they accidentally select for in candidates. I feel like I am skilled at remaining calm in crisis work situations where people (customers, co-workers, owners) are dependent upon me, but I can bomb interviews just as easily as the next person. Some approaches might consistently filter people who get stressed during interviews, rather than select people who maintain poise.

<comment><AUTHOR> > then be upfront about that instead of surprising candidates during a > stressful interview

People are rarely humble enough to actually reflect on this if they're excited about a job.

> People should be aware of what they accidentally select for in candidates

Absolutely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Andy Groove "High Output Management" covers this topic and more. Highly recommend! [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015VACHOK](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015VACHOK)

</comment><comment><USER12> Not communicating clearly and on time definitely leads to terrible candidate experience. I was on the receiving end of this when a recruiter from a famous hosting company told me over the phone that they are going to make an offer by the end of the month. When that time came, he told me that they would need to conduct another interview with the CTO who is out till the end of that month. By this time, it had already been 3 months in the pipeline. I hung on to it because I liked talking to the team and loved the product. But this is surely not worth my time.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's not an issue of time, but expectation. If it is clearly known that it will take 5 days to respond then the developer won't be peeved. The most important part of the process is to be transparent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Made a small edit based on your comment. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _I want to say this again: a technical recruiter should not define hiring policy or hiring process. Their value is in their relatively low cost per candidate._

I look at this a little differently. OP seems to treat Engineering as a totally independent organization within a company. In bigger companies, I understand. But I don't think it makes as much sense in a smaller company, where, often, the tight-knit culture is what's keeping the ship afloat.

Engineering is one piece of the pie. The success of the company is everyone's success. Consequently, the team's hiring process _can and should_ be influenced by people outside of Engineering, to some extent. One has to take the comapany's culture in account.

<comment><AUTHOR> You've got me looking back at what I've written, because I actually agree with you on company culture (if the company's culture is a positive force). My point about technical recruiters is because they're very often totally separated from the engineering culture. Oddly enough, I'm speaking about smaller companies more so than bigger ones because a large company is less likely to give their engineering teams enough autonomy to really do anything with what I've written.

The main thing I wanted to get at here is that a hiring process can not be thought of as separate from your engineering process. I'm not trying to argue that hiring should be insulated from reality. I'm arguing that there are a lot of companies who are ignoring the fact that it isn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Most hiring processes are engineering processes in the same sense that throwing a sheet over two chairs to make a cubby house is civil engineering...

<comment><AUTHOR> The title got updated by HN, I think. I'm not trying to call everything engineering (I don't actually think everything should be approached as an engineering process). My argument is that the decisions you make about culture and process in hiring inevitably affect your actual team's process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Was there ever a time in the tech industry where employers would provide actual training to new hires? Besides Facebook's boot camp.

<comment><USER17> Every new hire takes training.</comment></comment>


What proposed Rule 41 changes mean for your privacy - <AUTHOR> https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2016/09/15/rule-41-privacy/ <comment><USER2> Rule 41 does away with privacy.</comment>


Social Chat Widget For Websites - <AUTHOR> http://embedded-chat.com/

<comment><USER2> The 'try it now' feature is nice. Perhaps you should have a default website, maybe based on the referrer?

It doesn't work on google nor hacker news for me:

<http://embedded-chat.com/example/?url=www.google.com> <http://embedded- chat.com/example/?url=news.ycombinator.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> hey gavinjoyce,

Thanks for the advice! A default url based on the referrer could be cool!

It doesn't work on those sites because they disallow iframes to show their pages. Anyway we will work to find a way around this.</comment></comment>


Hyper.sh cloud service will shut down on Jan 15 - <AUTHOR> https://hyper.sh/ <comment><USER3> Less then a month migration period.

If you factor in that not much work is getting done in many western countries until early January the actual migration time is more like less than two weeks.

Now I don't know how easy it is to move from hyper.sh to alternatives, but that is unprofessionally short regardless.

I would have expected at least three months. Is it possible that they are that short on money that they need to shut it down immediately? Seems like it.

Let that be a lesson to not rely on cloud infrastructure too much without designing your architecture to be somewhat cloud agnostic.

<comment><USER4> "Let that be a lesson to not rely on cloud infrastructure too much without designing your architecture to be somewhat cloud agnostic."

Not disagreeing _per se_ , but I believe it's much more important to design for migration between providers instead of designing for abstraction over providers. The difference is subtle, but trying to make predictions about what needs abstraction will most likely lead to the same (or bigger) costs when a migration actually happens.

It's a bit like the general advice to design to avoid getting stuck in a hole as opposed to designing to getting out of future holes.

<comment><USER5> The thing that drew me to Hyper.sh in the first place was the fact that it used the Docker Remote API. That gave me some confidence it would be provider agnostic. Unfortunately no other providers have done this, so that idea didn't pan out.

<comment><USER6> I thought Joyent had a container service that used the Docker Remote API?

<comment><USER7> Joyent Triton

[https://www.joyent.com/triton/compute](https://www.joyent.com/triton/compute)

A few years ago (when I last checked} their container startup times were a lot slower than hyper.sh's

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Weird, no statement or anything that I can find, just a banner at the top of the page. As well, they're shutting off service in less than a month during a time in the year when at least many western countries have limited staff/availability due to holidays. While I understand that once they decide they will no longer be operating, they don't have a legitimate business reason to help (former) customers ease through the transition, it really seems like they went out of their way to be as customer-hostile as they could.

EDIT: Looks like an email went out (copied in a comment below) and that they are not shutting down as an organization, just this product. Even more curious as to why they'd offer such a short migration window to former customers. I would, especially in an organization, be truly hesitant to rely on any of their other technologies if this is the pattern being set.

<comment><USER9> Here's a copy of the email I received:

We are writing to let you know that we decided to pursue a new direction in 2019, and will be closing down the Hyper.sh cloud platform on January 15, 2019.

Over three years ago, we set out to create an open secure container-native platform. We believed that containers represented a sea change in how software would be developed, deployed, and maintained.

Along the way, we created one of the first container-native cloud offerings, the Hyper.sh platform, which utilized our open source technology, called runV, which last year was merged with Intel's Clear Containers project to become Kata Containers. We're proud of the platform we built, and the influence we have had on the overall container industry. We are even more grateful to you, our customers, who have deployed hundreds of thousands of containers and built out new business on our platform.

The Hyper.sh platform, while trailblazing, is not where Hyper's future efforts lie. Moving forward, Hyper is focusing all our attention and efforts towards the upstream Kata Containers project and in developing our Enterprise Kata stack for deployment in the major public clouds.

As of today, it is no longer possible to create a new account on Hyper.sh, and on January 15, 2019, the Hyper.sh cloud service will be shut down. Per section 11 of our terms of service, we wanted to provide you time to migrate off the platform and for the next month, our priority is to help your transition to other cloud services. If you need assistance, please feel free to reach out to us via Slack or your account dashboard. On January 15, 2019 any remaining user data and accounts will be deleted from the platform.

Please start now migrating your containers and data volumes off the platform. Directions on how to migrate your container volumes can be followed here. Please note, you will not be charged for either the container or the FIP in performing the migration.

Thank you for your business and support of our platform. It has been a privilege to serve you.

Sincerely,

The Hyper Crew

<comment><USER10> " Please note, you will not be charged for either the container or the FIP in performing the migration."

So nice of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow! Just checked my email and got this. I was considering using this, but KNEW I couldn't have built parts of my infra around this, because of one thing: the pricing. I even sent a message on their website asking what their roadmap was. After not getting a response for days, I figured the end was nigh.

It was far too low to build a sustainable business around, and so I decided to write my own stack. What I needed they served very well ( ability to run one- shot docker containers as an HTTP rpc ) — similar to AWS Fargate but much much simpler.

Fargates' RunTask is close but requires way too much configuration of roles and permissions and "provisioning" just to run a container. And even at the scale AWS is providing fargate, their pricing was still higher! I remember the AWS pricing being something like 5c / hr priced out in seconds, but with a minimum charge of 1 minute, but hyper.sh was 1c/hr with a min charge of only 10s! So, roughly here's why they're going out of business: the business requires very scaley things ( think dinosaur not lizard ) in order to make very small amounts of money. And it's making 1/5th of the market dominant service.

<comment><USER12> What would be good pricing in your point of view?

<comment><USER11> Micro pricing only works when your customer is running high frequency transactions. I would have been happy to pay $25 but even 50-100/ month for a starter service that does this well.

<comment><USER13> Have you tried DigitalOcean Ocean or Joyent to see how they compare in complexity to AWS Fargate?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Woa... I was evaluating this service a couple of months ago. The conclusion was, even if it looks nice the major downside was that the company hadn't been around long enough and we didn't know if they were profitable. These kinds of moves with sub-30 days during major holidays is really scary. I feel for everyone out there having to work during the holidays. I hope the CEO did this out of financial necessities. Otherwise he should be put on some type of do- not-purchase-from-these-founders-blacklist.

<comment><USER15> > Otherwise he should be put on some type of do-not-purchase-from-these- > founders-blacklist.

Does such a blacklist exist? Given the short notice I expected that Hyper.sh would be gone (and thus free of commercial backlash) but it appears the company will continue in new areas, which makes this decision even more surprising.

I'd definitely be interested in having such a list and an easy way to determine if they are involved in new companies, which doesn't sound trivial. "Foo Co was terrible to their customers" doesn't tell me Bob made the decisions, nor does that tell me that Bar Co is also run by Bob.

<comment><USER16> The usual HN feedback for trying to track bad CEOs so you don't get bit in the future is that we shouldn't because they're humans who make mistakes and always deserve second chances. Not saying I agree but it's what I've noticed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > The Hyper.sh platform, while trailblazing, is not where Hyper's future > efforts lie. Moving forward, Hyper is focusing all our attention and efforts > towards the upstream Kata Containers project and in developing our > Enterprise Kata stack for deployment in the major public clouds.

(From the shutdown email users received)

I was not aware of these products. Interesting.

<comment><USER18> kata (Intel clear containers + hypers runv) is big in the nested virtualization space but is still a tiny project (contributor wise) consisting of mostly Redhat. It's unlikely you'd run into these projects if you're not at an IAAS or dealing with containers accessing custom hardware (fpgas, gpus, etc). They're really cool, along with gvisor, kubevirt, nemu, etc. The really exciting part is everyone is using these projects for extremely different reasons. IAAS, rendering farms, android emulators, it's a really fun project to watch.

I think in the future there will be a big shift off of runc (docker) as the k8s default runtime now that CRIO has made them pluggable.

<comment><USER19> > I think in the future there will be a big shift off of runc (docker) as the > k8s default runtime now that CRIO has made them pluggable.

I don't think there's going to be a big shift away from runc (though I'm biased, I'm one of the runc maintainers -- and runc is quite separate from Docker) for a couple of reasons:

1\. Containers are still more than decent, and will always handle certain usecases and setups better than VMs can (due to the pliability of namespaces and shared kernels -- VMs have the fixed DRAM problem just like they always have).

2\. At the moment, plain containers are arguably more secure than kata containers (though this can be fixed "fairly" easily with some minor memory penalties) because they disable a bunch of security features in their VM kernels -- so you don't get seccomp or AppArmor protections for your containers. Now, you do get hypervisor security, but there was a study some time ago which claimed that a well-tuned seccomp profile is about as secure as a hypervisor.

3\. Hooks (like the NVIDIA ones) will always work better with plain containers because the whole idea behind hooking into a container runtime is that you can attach things to the containers' namespaces (with NVIDIA this would be vGPUs). kata is trying (and succeeding in most cases) to emulate these sorts of pluggable components with their agent, but fundamentally they're trying to pretend to be a container (which is going to cause problems).

I think kata is a really good project (and I'm happy that Intel and Hyper.sh joined forces), but I don't think it will replace ordinary containers entirely (even under Kubernetes). But hey, I could be proven wrong -- at which point I'll switch to working on LXC. :P

<comment><USER18> My last line was bait to get some low level container talk going on in here. Glad it worked ;p

What problems do you see/think arise from kata pretending to be a container?

<comment><USER19> Dammit, I got baited.

> What problems do you see/think arise from kata pretending to be a container?

There are a few.

One of the most obvious is that anything that requires fd passing simply cannot work, because file descriptors can't be transferred through the hypervisor (obviously). This means that certain kinds of console handling are completely off the table (in fact this was a pretty big argument between us and the Hyper.sh folks about 2 years ago now -- in runc we added this whole --console-socket semantic to allow for container-originated PTYs to be passed around, and you cannot do that with VM-based runtimes without some pretty awful emulation). But it turns out that most layers above us now just have high-level PTY operations like resizing (which I think is uglier and less flexible, but that's just my personal opinion).

Another one is that runtime hooks (such as LXC or OCI hooks) now are a bit more difficult to use. There's nothing stopping you from doing CNI with Kata, but it's one of those things where either the hook knows that it's working with a VM (which requires hook work) or the hook is tricked into thinking its dealing with a container (which requires lots of forwarding work, or running the hook in the VM). I'm really not sure how Jata handles this problem -- but the last time I spoke to the Kata folks the answer was "well, we're OCI compliant" which isn't really an answer IMHO (they're also cannot be OCI compliant, because OCI compliance testing still doesn't exist -- but that's a different topic). I imagine their point was "we copy runc", which is unfortunately what most people think when they say "OCI compliance".

There was a recent issue a colleague of mine (who works on Kata) mentioned, which is that currently "docker top" operates by getting the list of PIDs from the runtime and then fetching /proc information about them. Obviously this won't work with Kata and will require some pretty big changes to containerd and Docker to handle this (though I would argue this would be a good thing overall -- the current way people handle getting host PIDs for container processes is quite dodgy). There is currently some kernel work being done by Christian Brauner to add a new concept called procfds, and all of this work will be completely useless for Kata (even though it'll fix many PID races that exist).

But as I said, Kata is quite an interesting project (the work done for the agent is quite interesting) and it fulfills a very important need -- people are still worried about container security and adding a hypervisor which is lightweight will dissuade those fears.

<comment><USER18> Really appreciate the response. I'm pretty new to the more low level aspects of containers.

Can you recommend any great blogs? Jess's is the only one I'm aware of that sometimes dives into multitenancy/container stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This really sucks for those that have invested in the platform and now have less than a month of warning.

If anyone needs help migrating off hyper.sh I am pretty free over the holiday period. I have extensive DevOps experience. I'm happy to help (gratis).

My email is on my profile.

</comment><comment><USER21> Over the past 5 years I've seen too mans PaaS provider shutdown. Every time those affected ask why and my answer is the same: PaaS is a great tool but an awful business. We studied many PaaS providers and their business model and I believe there are fundamental business issues with a PaaS provider that provides infrastructure as well as the platform. The only way to survive the market is to have a rich owner (like Heroku / Salesforce), be a cloud provider (GoogleApps), run it yourself (DIY Kubernetes like solutions) or use a service that manages a PaaS on your own servers (Cloud 66).

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow, a two week notice for an infrastructure provider is borderline criminal. I'm out for the holiday during this period... Guess it's going to be a scramble to get back on reliable 'ole Heroku for me. What a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER23> The promise of "Speed of containers and security of VMs" is enticing, but is there a simple 101/quickstart for somebody that just wants to run one container in this way?

as in no Kubernetes, OpenStack, Multi-tenancy, nothing.....

Just one bare-metal server, configured as KVM host, and how can I [run/start/stop] one Kata container?

I feel like everyone just assumes you're a Kubernetes Pro and runs infrastructure at the scale of Google/FB/Amazon these days... :-(

<comment><USER18> k8s is really just the scheduler and gives you a uniform way to deploy the "vm" containers in the usual scenario. With k8s you can have workloads run on different runtimes like trusted=runc, untrusted=kata, etc and this is even easier now with RuntimeClass which you can write right inside of a regular k8s deployment yaml.

Kata is actually just several binaries that talk via grpc (kata-agent, shim, proxy, runtime) and interface with QEMU/NEMU. For instance kata-proxy proxies commands over virtios serial interface that's exposed via QEMU.

You could install the binaries and qemu-lite and have a similar system but I'm not really sure how you'd benefit as it's the management through k8s that really won me over. I think in your scenario you'd just be making very complicated QEMU vms. I've linked this to the contribs, maybe they have some thoughts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sad to see this. What happened to the "serverless containers", especially startups working on the idea? Months ago, Zeit.co gave up the idea of hosting containers and changed their direction to FaaS . Wondering if there is a technical reason (e.g. cost effective and scalable) behind both changes. On the other hand, big cloud vendors are all providing the serverless containers while the experience may not be as smooth as the startups provide.

<comment><USER25> AWS employee here. Serverless containers are hard, and there are a lot of technical challenges along the way.

For context when we launched ECS years ago the goal was always to build a serverless container platform. But first we had to build out our own container orchestration platform capable of keeping track of all the containers at the scale that AWS requires, and build out a lot of underlying tech that didn't exist yet. Recently we open sourced Firecracker ([https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight- vir...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/firecracker-lightweight- virtualization-for-serverless-computing/)) which is one of the pieces we built along the way to enable the data plane. It took us a few years to get to this point, which is a really long time in startup lifetime.

The major cloud providers have the resources to spend a lot of time building the technical depth required to offer full featured serverless container platforms that can truly scale up and out. In my view the smaller providers like hyper.sh really nailed the initial developer experience but they are missing the depth behind the scenes that allows serverless containers to be scaled out cost effectively.

In time these two ends of the spectrum will hopefully converge. By open sourcing tech like Firecracker AWS enables small providers to have access to tech that we built because we needed it, and now its available for them to use. Conversely AWS learns how to improve our developer experience by seeing how these small startups create a great developer experience.

<comment><USER26> The best developer experience I have ever had was Zeit Now v1 - <USER2> serverless containers product. I would absolutely love for AWS to offer something similar (serverless Docker containers where I only pay for the periods during which they are serving traffic), ideally with a similar developer experience.

Nothing puts me off faster than having to click through dozens of web UI screens (or read a hundred pages of API docs) just to get a container launched and accessible via a URL. The Zeit Now v1 model, with everything configured from a single (optional) JSON config file and deployed with a single "now" CLI command, was absolutely ideal for me.

<comment><USER26> ... huh, it looks like that fargate CLI project gets much closer to what I'm looking for: [http://somanymachines.com/fargate/](http://somanymachines.com/fargate/)

I do wish AWS would build experiences like this without me having to turn to the wider developer ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I used Hyper.sh for my side project 2 years ago during the initial development phase. It was really easy to start with but I wouldn't say it was stable. Every month or so there would be downtimes or the container would run but for example networks wouldn't work. Or storage volumes wouldn't mount/unmount.. :)

After several downtimes I switched to Google's GKE and never looked back. Hyper is easy to start with but impossible to finish. There was no managed database at that time (not sure whether they had it now) and using Postgres with their persistent volumes (which are backed by Ceph I think) performance was really sad.

All in all, it was a great service for trying out ideas or running small & less important applications, but if you really want it to always be available, then probably it's not the right tool.

</comment><comment><USER28> In fact, I felt this coming since quite a long time. One day, they abrubtly shut down their Pi (serverless K8s) without a notification. Their forum was deserted. A little activity in Slack. Nothing but these.

</comment><comment><USER29> This seems like a sudden shut down, only giving users a few weeks to migrate.

</comment><comment><USER30> less confusion for [https://hyper.is/](https://hyper.is/)

<comment><USER31> Exactly what I thought the link referred to initially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sad to see them go. They were easy to use and cost effective (for my use cases at least).

They have some really cool underlying tech.

I can't say I'm surprised though - there have been signs that this was coming.

<comment><USER32> I'm curious, what signs were there that they might/would be shutting down the service?

<comment><USER7> The forums quieted down. Direct product and support questions in the forums were unanswered. Frequent changes, almost pivots, in product development. No updates in github repos for key product related software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I note that their Twitter account has had no activity for a few months. This seems to be a common thing with services that shut down or products that get discontinued.

Makes me wonder.. maybe it's worth building a tool that monitors the Twitter accounts of common services and products and raises a bat signal if they don't tweet for a month or two. It seems to be where budget gets tightened first.

</comment><comment><USER34> I've been looking for a service like this for a while, and the first I find out about it is that it's shutting down. Does anyone know of similar offerings that are as simple? I know AWS, GCP and the likes offer container clusters, but I would like to just run a single container (for cheap) and not worry about it.

<comment><USER35> GCP Employee here.

You can run a container on a f1-micro VM for free forever: [https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/containers/deploying-c...](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/containers/deploying- containers#deploying_a_container_on_a_new_vm_instance)

If you want something more similar to Hyper.sh, serverless containers are coming out publicly soon, and you can sign up for the alpha here: [https://g.co/serverlesscontainers](https://g.co/serverlesscontainers)

<comment><USER36> Surely you don't actually mean "forever"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Just found out about this service. It looks like a solid concept. Any alternatives out there?

</comment><comment><USER38> Zeit is dropping the support for containers for their v2 and now Hyper is shutting down their services. Any other one sentence deploy ("now" or "hyper run") for containers available out there?

<comment><USER39> App engine is really nice, it's `gcloud app deploy` and they have support for multistage deploys.

I had to drop them because it's hard to start a HIPAA compliant product on their platform as a solo dev. AWS on the other hand signs a BAA with you with the click a button.

This forced me to learn AWS and to learn that all I really need for the MVP is a single EC2 instance, RDS, a redis subscription from redis labs, and cloud watch.

Deploying is just pulling from github, shutting down the service and restarting it. It doesn't really need to be simpler than that.

I'm pretty sure that I could scale to 10k users per day on 1 ec2 instance and by that point I would hopefully have venture capital and hire an expert to handle all this for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> They had a cron feature which was really good. I've switched to running a Kubernetes cluster for my side projects but Hyper.sh cron was really easy to get started with.

<comment><USER41> Any specific areas for Kubernetes to focus on?

<comment><USER40> I'm not sure I follow.

As in, is there something k8s might do better with its CronJob feature? I don't think so no...

If you just wanted to run a container on a schedule, and you didn't have a cluster running already, Hyper sh was a lower bar to do that.

If you do have a cluster, using a CronJob on said cluster is easier for me than maintaining something on Hyper sh...

I might have missed the question...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I was just considering using this service for a side project that needed isolated containers to run jobs in. Anyone have suggestions for similar alternative services?

<comment><USER43> To just run a container and have it available over the web?

Azure has Azure Container Instances. AWS has Fargate. Zeit has Docker deploys with v1. GCP is coming soon with Serverless Containers.

<comment><USER42> No, for short-lived (a minute or two per run) batch jobs. But, it looks like most of the ones you mentioned can also be used for that sort of task. Thanks!

<comment><USER44> Azure Container Instance billed per second, specifically for short lived tasks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> You say another, which other products are shutting down ?

<comment><USER46> We changed the title from "Yet another holiday shutdown: Hyper.sh" to one that is less baity and uses representative language from the article.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Well I guess that is one valuable lesson to not choose no name company as your cloud provider. Big buddy is your friend.

</comment><comment><USER48> I was planning on using this for my side project. I thought it looked great for MVPs and small projects. What happened?

</comment><comment><USER49> Interesting to see one of these happen. Put me down for this happening to Mongo's Stitch product next.

</comment><comment><USER50> I thought it was a brilliant idea for builds. Not many customers?

</comment><comment><USER51> I JUST signed up for their service this week. :(.

<comment><USER52> you should consider yourself lucky. you could have signed up a while ago and invested in it

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> It's a shame. It was one of the most innovative cloud provider and my personal favourite.

</comment><comment><USER54> What is hyper.sh ?</comment>


What are the benifits to move from AWS to an OpenStack cloud? - <AUTHOR> I m planning a migration but would like to know. What are the pros and cons for this? <comment><USER2> Pros:

\- economy of scale, if you are large enough OS is very cost effective \- OSS \- No vendor lock in

Cons:

\- Complexity \- Lack of features and higher level abstractions v public cloud

<comment><AUTHOR> How much of the price Cut I should be expecting If I am planning for vms with total capacity 1000 cores.</comment></comment>


Anita Sarkeesian, 'gaming's feminist advocate,' makes the Time 100 - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/16/8428461/anita-sarkeesian-time-100 <comment><USER2> According to the article, the people previously celebrated in the industry would be folks like Notch, Jens Bergensten, and Miyamoto. People that created _Minecraft_ and the early IP of Nintendo.

Anita, by contrast, is more notable for the buzz and backlash she generated than any of her actual work.

And so, Times celebrates the victim instead of the maker.</comment>


Do Millennials Give A Damn About PRISM? - <AUTHOR> http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/06/18/do-millennials-give-a-damn-about-prism-ctd-2/

<comment><USER2> Polls that touch a wide audience should be taken with a grain of salt. When you ask someone who doesn't really know what's going on "do you care?" their response doesn't mean much. This is true of just about everything, and transcends age. I would rather see polls like this come with an intensive questionnaire to correlate knowledge about the recent revelations of an NSA surveillance state with their answers.

For instance:

"Do you think PRISM is a powerful tool to prevent major terrorist attacks?" 48% yes, 52% no

A powerful tool which has yet to provide leads into a potential threat (rather, traditional means have still been significantly more effective), and which failed spectacularly to even hint at the Boston Marathon bombing? There's too much data. People can easily use code words or encrypt their communications. It's horribly and totally unreliable, and warrants are already a thing.

"Is Bradley Manning a hero?" 31% yes, 69% no

"Should Edward Snowden be prosecuted for disclosing classified information?" 56% yes, 44% no

"Do you consider Edward Snowden a hero?" 34% yes, 66% no

But then...

"Are you glad that Edward Snowden revealed the secret surveillance program?" 75% yes, 25% no

That seems like strong cognitive dissonance. Is it possible the people answering this poll are getting their information from a source that bashes the person/act, minimizes the program (or discloses no information about it or how it could be abused), but is happy it's a talking point? Maybe NBC and Fox News?

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if this is evidence of cognitive dissonance or the fact that people have a nuanced view of what's going on. For example, I was channeling my inner Thomas Friedman and talking with a cab driver about the spying last night, and he was glad that Snowden revealed the program, but didn't consider him a hero (because Snowden fled to Hong Kong).

<comment><USER2> I still see that as dissonance. On the one hand, they believe in the US, in our rights, in the freedom of speech, and in the need for us to blow whistles on government actions that violate those rights.

But on the other hand, someone who seeks asylum from a tyrannical government who would illegally violate those rights and possibly torture or indefinitely detain them is clearly a bad person. Even though this is very similar to how our country was founded.

I don't see how those two views are not entirely contradictory.

And that's what the mainstream media has been focusing on in this case: he fled to China. That's the only important thing. Clearly he's guilty. Clearly he's a treasonous anti-American. Is he a Chinese spy? It's all borderline defamation at this point.

<comment><USER3> Look at the situation from the perspective of someone who doesn't believe that the US government is tyrannical, and instead, represents the best, most just system in the world.

From that perspective, why wouldn't Snowden stay in the United States, since he's guaranteed the right to a fair trial? Why not face the music at home, instead of fleeing to HK?

<comment><USER4> Serious question: have you been brainwashed by your country?

<comment><USER3> Only when I'm channeling my inner Thomas Friedman ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have yet to meet someone in person, millennial or otherwise, who cares. Hell, my wife and I care strongly about several political issues (privatized prisons, for-profit schools, the environment, abortion rights, public pensions, privatized water, in her case the 2nd amendment) and she totally doesn't care and I struggle to care. I'm really more disappointed with the attempts to keep it secret than the actual program--I think the program is legal and there is no reason it needs to be kept secret.

<comment><USER6> _I think the program is legal and there is no reason it needs to be kept secret._

Do you think it is legal only in the pedantic sense that "congress passed a law approving this" or do you consider it legal in the constitutional sense (would likely pass a 4A challenge in the SCOTUS ), or even in the broader sense where something might be allowed by the SCOTUS, but is still not "ok"?

And to dig a little deeper, how do you feel about the argument that non- targeted, unspecific data collection approval by the FISA court amounts to a "general warrant" as opposed to a warrant that describes "the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized"?

<comment><USER5> We have to be careful defining about exactly what "it" is. I'm operating under the assumption that the NSA is collecting call data records from phone companies, and getting downloads of peoples' Google/Facebook/etc accounts pursuant to court orders that don't meet the requirements of Article III warrants. I reserve judgment on any activity that isn't covered by the above.

If that is what is actually happening, I think it is at least legal Constitutionally. I think the third party doctrine is alive and well, and I agree with Orin Kerr that it makes 4th amendment analysis technologically neutral ([http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question...](http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question_should_the_third- party_records_doctrine_be_revisited)). Basically, if I print out my e-mails and leave them in my friend's garage, the police do not need a warrant to get them, they can use a subpoena or lesser court order to get him to produce any documents I gave him. So why should those e-mails be protected if, instead of printing them out and leaving them in my friend's garage, I instead keep them in digital form on my friend's servers and my "friend" is named Google?

I think it's also consistent with how the framers understood the 4th amendment. It creates a zone of privacy around you that protects you from invasive search and seizure. It protects your person, it protects your house, it protects your property. It does not attach to the information itself and follow it around wherever it goes.

And I think with call detail records the 4th amendment isn't even implicated, because it's not even your data in the first place. It's data generated by Verizon's or AT&T's computers in response to signals on their networks. It's like a 7/11's security cameras. It's not a violation of your 4th amendment rights if your trip to the local 7/11 was captured on a security tape the store handed over to the police.

I think the NSA's programs are actually more likely to run into problems with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or the Stored Communications Act.

Vis-a-vis FISA court warrants, I absolutely agree that they do not pass muster as Constitutional warrants. That is to say, if a search was deemed to require a Constitutional warrant for 4th amendment purposes, the police could not offer a vague FISA warrant to meet the requirement. But at the same time, I don't think collecting say call detail records from Verizon is something that requires a Constitutional warrant in the first place.

There is a very deep distinction in the law that I think a lot of people want to ignore. _Your_ information in your possession is protected much more strongly than information _pertaining to you_ in the possession of other people. The police need an article III warrant to bust into your house and take your accounting records. The police need merely a subpoena to get copies of your accounting records from your accountant. Similarly, a court cannot compel you to testify against yourself (5th amendment). But it can definitely compel your friend to testify against you. This is an asymmetry based on qualitative distinctions that transcend technology (i.e. _your_ information versus information _pertaining to you._ ) It's not like new technology has changed this distinction, all it has done is make it much easier and more convenient to give your personal information to third parties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I asked most of my friends and they all say they don't really care. There's really only a small vocal minority that even understands the ramifications.

</comment><comment><USER8> No, because it hasn't impacted the lives of any Joe Sixpacks in bad way so far therefore Joe Sixpack is OK with it.

But the looming risk for Joe Sixpack is a mysterious string all of the sudden being rejected from jobs, loans, schools, airline flights, credit scores, tax audits, passports, arbitrations, etc and there's no appeal process for any of that. Your record is has been red flagged, maybe it's an error, but too bad for you, terrorist!

The real outcry would happen if a few dubious data points go viral through the web of information sharing handshakes between government and private industry, and those bad data points start raising irrevocable red flags on the records of ordinary people. That's how this could all go wrong for everyone.

<comment><USER9> > But the looming risk for Joe Sixpack is a mysterious string all of the > sudden being rejected from jobs, loans, schools, airline flights, credit > scores, tax audits, passports, arbitrations, etc and there's no appeal > process for any of that. Your record is has been red flagged, maybe it's an > error, but too bad for you, terrorist!

Millenials know this will _never_ happen. Ever. And that's why we don't give a shit.

<comment><USER10> Sure, that's exactly why nobody innocent landed on the no-fly list. Ever. Because government knows best!

<comment><USER9> That's completely different from, "being rejected from jobs, loans, schools, airline flights, credit scores, tax audits, passports, arbitrations, etc and there's no appeal process for any of that."

Obviously no-fly lists exist, and obviously they're not _perfect_. Not sure what your point is, friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder what would happen if you normalize millennial views on PRISM by the amount of data stored online for each age group. Baby boomers and older groups may (probably mistakenly) feel they have less of their personal info online and therefore care less.

</comment><comment><USER12> The USA Today/Pew poll had similar results: "Sixty percent of 18- to 29-year- olds polled support the leaks, compared with 36% of those 65 and older."

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/18/young-p...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/18/young- people-nsa-leaks-poll/2435005/)

</comment><comment><USER13> A 6% difference between the 35+ crowd and milennials seems rather insignificant, especially when the data clearly shows that 56% of milennials and 62% of 35+ respondents are "not outraged" by the existence of PRISM.

Furthermore, cherrypicking some comments regarding PRISM to support a 'point' that milennials care more than the 35+ crowd doesn't really provide accurate support to statements like "milennials are among the angriest" about PRISM.

Finally, the poll question itself is worded badly: I'm certainly interested in PRISM and curious about the extent of its reach, but 'outraged' would never be a word that would describe my feelings about the program. 'Outraged', in my book, _certainly_ isn't synonymous with 'giving a damn'.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't really give a damn yet, because I don't even know what PRISM is.

Is PRISM just software for making sense of huge data sets? Is PRISM some system for hacking into web servers and stealing information? Is PRISM just a program where the government can request access to private information on some company's servers?

From reading about it, I don't really buy that it's as bad as many people make it out to be. Have lines been crossed? Yes. Do I know enough about how far we've gone over the lines to be outraged? No.

<comment><USER15> PRISM itself is an automated way to do what used to be highly-manual before. It's like people complaining about robotic car factories or how we use EFT to direct deposit paychecks instead of handing out paper checks every 2 weeks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A lot of the difference I believe has to do with how we consume news, and more specifically from where. My parents (baby boomers) consume news in a very traditional way. They read the local newspaper, and watch network news. On the other hand, myself, and other people my age get news from the internet. The difference is a lot of the articles that really are fueling the outrage are not coming from "traditional" sources. The Guardian for instance is not something my parents would ever read.

</comment><comment><USER17> Could it be simply that millenials have always assumed that this stuff was going on, this they aren't surprised or particularly worked up by the revelations?

<comment><USER18> This is sort of where I am. Given that I have known about ECHELON for oh, 15 years at least and basically look at the NSA as the organization that does explicitly this, I don't see why people are shocked over the PRISM leaks. ECHELON to PRISM, the only thing that changed is they got better and people willingly put disgusting amounts of information out there.

I just figured it was the mobs lack of long term memory.

/Don't call me a millenial

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm 39. I hate PRISM and related programs. I think my generation has very little control over national (or local) politics due to the demographics in the US. Namely, Boomers are conservative, and too numerous to outvote.

</comment><comment><USER20> 24 comments. word count 2349: wasted talent lol</comment>


Tell HN: A book about Twitter that isn't full of bullshit. - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470556137?tag=domnet-20&camp=0&creative=0&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0470556137&adid=1243KQPYD6X3CY0BTQ7X&

<comment><AUTHOR> I know that there are a lot of mixed feelings about Twitter and it's value. But I think that this book does a good job of explaining various uses, and style/structure guidelines for what I personally believe to be an exciting new protocol.

Most books about Twitter are full of complete bullshit, but this one caught my eye at Borders. I read it, and was pleasantly surprised by it's coherence. Suggested.

(Twitter account: @thebook)

</comment><comment><USER2> There's an affiliate link in this URL.</comment>


The Glium Library – Safe OpenGL in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@tomaka/the-glium-library-5be149d87dc1

<comment><USER2> The library author feedback on the Rust ecosystem shortcomings is pretty interresting too : [https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/production-user- research-s...](https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/production-user-research- summary/2530/9)

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent writing on the pitfalls of OpenGL and how to circumvent those. Applies to any OpenGL programming, not just Rust also.

Here's hoping Vulkan will fix these issues in the future and Apple also adapting this platform.

<comment><USER4> It seems unlikely Apple would adopt Vulkan at this point. Maybe if Vulkan came out a year ago. The only thing that might convince them is if big developers such as Blizzard and whoever else decides to write PC/Android games in Vulkan. EA's Dice was already pushing for Mantle, which is now part of Vulkan, so maybe most of EA's games could be written in Vulkan in the future. That might get Apple to adopt it, even if 80% of iOS games will use Metal instead of OpenGL ES by that point.

<comment><USER5> Unity and Unreal already support Metal and I imagine other engines are in the process of doing the same.

With all major engines on Metal, Apple has nothing to lose by not supporting Vulkan, other than a few indie devs that stay away from engines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oddly not linked in the article, the source:

[https://github.com/tomaka/glium](https://github.com/tomaka/glium)

<comment><USER7> It's linked in the third paragraph.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another cool thing he mentions is that it does something sort of like React's diffing.

When you tell Glium, "make me these three polygons, add a light source, apply a transform matrix", it optimizes the number of OpenGL calls it needs to do, and the kinds thereof, and puts them in the right order to run most efficiently.

Like React, it optimizes state changes required for speed to get a view from one state to another.

<comment><USER9> The fact that Glium needs to do this demonstrates how flawed the state- wrangling in OpenGL has become. Vulkan can't come fast enough.

<comment><USER8> A couple years ago I was trying to teach myself OpenGL, and I failed miserably for that exact reason, plus bad function naming conventions.

The weirdest thing about OpenGL is that you sometimes have to run one function before another function, for no good reason, but it gives you a giant performance boost.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds great! Dare I try it on windows now? (The last n times I did ... things did not work out).

Kudos for taking also the texture colorspace issue into account - I've found people new to real time programming tend to find this initiaĺly one of the most bysantine minutiae one absolutely needs to get right

<comment><USER3> First time I've heard about it in any writings. Put onto my list how to implement it. Any good articles on the RGB vs sRGB colorspace issue in OpenGL ?

<comment><USER11> Linear vs gamma space is not an OpenGL specific problem. Also the decode/encode doesn't require 3D API support, it can also be done in the pixel-shader (decode from gamma to linear when sampling color textures, and encode back into gamma during a post-effect pass that most engines have anyway).

'The importance of being linear' is the best introduction to the topic I know: [http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch24.html](http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch24.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is a fantastic example of how to make a foreign API safe and neat in a Rust-y kind of way. The author has done a great job with hlua too (see previous blog post).

</comment><comment><USER13> > The "untextured objects" example of AZDO: drawing 64x64x64 individual moving > objects. The glium version runs at _approximately the same speed_ as the > original pure OpenGL example.

Seems like Rust is making good progress (emphasis mine). I really should take the time to learn this language.

<comment><USER14> The fact that it runs at approximately the same speed isn't really important. You would get the same result with any language.

The AZDO examples show what the most optimized OpenGL techniques are, and I just wanted to show that you can do the same thing with glium as with raw OpenGL.

That being said, you should still try Rust!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm using it to render cocos2d-x's c3t model, [https://github.com/linuxaged/newton](https://github.com/linuxaged/newton)

</comment><comment><USER16> This seems fantastic compared to my experiments in C + glut. Great work!

The API has macros to automatically generate type boilerplate. Very clever

</comment><comment><USER17> So, Rust is ready for writing high performant games?

<comment><USER18> I don't know if it is, but it doesn't, it doesn't prevent people from trying. There is a community of rust game developer and a framework dedicated to game developpement : piston ([http://www.piston.rs/](http://www.piston.rs/)).

Also a link related to game developement in rust : [https://www.reddit.com/r/rust_gamedev](https://www.reddit.com/r/rust_gamedev)

<comment><USER19> Semi-unrelated: The set of themed names around Rust will make it fun when and if a Rust game become available on Steam — "Today <game name>, a <game type> written in Rust with the Piston framework became available on Valve's Steam game marketplace." It's a steampunk fan's dream.

<comment><USER20> And just imagine if they rewrote Rust in Rust! :P</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ignoring Downturns Is Unhealthy And Dangerous - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/22/ignoring-downturns-is-unhealthy-and-dangerous/ <comment><USER2> The failure of startup companies is real news, but I wish there were more focus on the reasons behind the failure. Most coverage I read comes across as mockery, as to suggest that the concept or group could never have succeeded in the first place. Perhaps that is often the case, but it teaches others little. Real investigation into the failure would be both entertaining and edifying.

<comment><USER3> _Real investigation into the failure would be both entertaining and edifying._

Sure, but as they say: Success has a thousand fathers, failure is a motherless child.

It's very hard to get a good, real-time post-mortem on a startup. One reason is that, oftentimes, failure is a big amorphous mess. If all the employees agreed on what the problem was, they might have been able to do something about it before it killed the company. :)

(By contrast, it's easy to explain a successful company's success: Just look at where the money is coming from.)

Moreover, it's in nobody's best interest to call attention to their own bad decisions, and it's even less wise to poke fun at the bad decisions of your coworkers, who may be a vital part of the personal network that will keep you alive after the startup explodes.

The entire point of this Techcrunch article is that doing post-mortem work on a startup is a thankless task. No matter what you say, you will be treated like an assassin. Look closely at your complaint:

 _Most coverage I read comes across as mockery, as to suggest that the concept or group could never have succeeded in the first place._

You call that "mockery", but isn't that the _polite_ alternative? What else can the coverage say? That the concept was sound, but that the founders made a bunch of boneheaded mistakes in execution?

<comment><USER2> Distinguishing between concept and execution failures would be a huge start, actually. Don't you think that makes a big difference in your final evaluation of the company - particularly from a startup perspective? Absolutely fair point that it may be difficult to determine where the failure was - but you could start by interviewing the management and go from there. Isn't journalism about investigating things that aren't immediately obvious? Anyone can lampoon a company for failure.

If you think the investigation isn't worth it, either because it is thankless task or because the cause can't be determined (the founders won't admit to their mistakes, etc), then why write a story at all? It is just sensationalism. Publish a report every week with a list of startup failures. Other startups will get the idea - lots of startups fail - and they will have learned just as much as if they had read the types of stories that are being published now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Making sweeping generalizations from a few events is also unhealthy and dangerous.</comment>


Godaddy Down - Anonymous claims responsibility - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2012/09/10/godaddy-down/

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed this when trying to access coursera. Googles DNS servers have no record or coursera.org

</comment><comment><USER2> my gf just asked why her site silentblossom.com wasn't redirecting to www.silentblossom.com - was pretty cool knowing why as I'd just seen this post!</comment>


C2: Affordable X86-64 Servers - <AUTHOR> https://blog.scaleway.com/2016/03/08/c2-insanely-affordable-x64-servers/ <comment><USER2> Avotons are very slow, an 8C SoC will typically be slower than an 8 year old 2C desktop CPU (I ran Go builds as a benchmark on my own 2.4 GHz C2750 vs. a 2008 iMac with 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo).

As for Scaleway, some people seem to like it very much, but I found their policy about spamming their users problematic. They (online.net) mock you at registration with a sleazy checked and disabled box for receiving spam ("product news" etc.), therefore I would consider their offers "ad-supported".

The C2 is advertised as "bare-metal", but since they offer a 4C variant, I doubt that (there's a 4C variant, the C2550, but that doesn't seem to be a sane choice). C2L might be a full dedicated box (or not), but C2S and C2M seem very much VPS/shared. It's likely to be based on SuperMicro MicroBlades: [http://www.supermicro.nl/products/MicroBlade/module/MBI-6418...](http://www.supermicro.nl/products/MicroBlade/module/MBI-6418A-T7H.cfm) (4 nodes in 1 3U blade!).

<comment><USER3> I'm happy to run any benchmarks people like (within reason). I can also compare to most AWS instances if you like.

<comment><USER4> Please run nbench [1]. I ran it on the C1 in April 2015 and got the following results:

      CPU                 : 4 CPU
      L2 Cache            :
      OS                  : Linux 3.2.34-29
      C compiler          : gcc version 4.8.2 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.8.2-19ubuntu1)
      libc                : libc-2.19.so
      MEMORY INDEX        : 5.859
      INTEGER INDEX       : 8.164
      FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 5.770

For comparison, here are an Intel Atom N450, a Core 2 Duo L7500 and a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B:

      CPU                 : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N450   @ 1.66GHz 1667MHz
      L2 Cache            : 512 KB
      OS                  : Linux 3.2.0-23-generic
      C compiler          : gcc version 4.6.3 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.3-1ubuntu5)
      libc                : libc-2.15.so
      MEMORY INDEX        : 10.845
      INTEGER INDEX       : 9.315
      FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 8.748

      CPU                 : Dual GenuineIntel Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     L7500  @ 1.60GHz 1601MHz
      L2 Cache            : 4096 KB
      OS                  : Linux 3.5.0-26-generic
      C compiler          : gcc version 4.6.1 (Ubuntu/Linaro 4.6.1-9ubuntu3)
      libc                : libc-2.13.so
      MEMORY INDEX        : 18.734
      INTEGER INDEX       : 14.318
      FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 23.178

      CPU                 :
      L2 Cache            :
      OS                  : Linux 3.6.11+
      C compiler          : gcc version 4.6.3 (Debian 4.6.3-14+rpi1)
      libc                : libc-2.13.so
      MEMORY INDEX        : 2.536
      INTEGER INDEX       : 3.159
      FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 2.157

[1] [http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html](http://www.tux.org/~mayer/linux/bmark.html)

<comment><USER5> Here are the results on a C2S:

      CPU                 : 4 CPU GenuineIntel Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU  C2550  @ 2.40GHz 2394MHz
      L2 Cache            : 1024 KB
      OS                  : Linux 4.4.4-std-3
      C compiler          : gcc version 4.8.4 (Ubuntu 4.8.4-2ubuntu1~14.04.1)
      libc                : libc-2.19.so
      MEMORY INDEX        : 22.134
      INTEGER INDEX       : 17.899
      FLOATING-POINT INDEX: 21.522

<comment><USER6> I have to be honest, they don't look bad at all.

From my experience so far, C1 is like working with a microwave, and VC1 (VPS) is much nicer, for €2.99 let's not forget.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Prices seem really great but a few paragraphs down they say the servers are based on Avoton SoCs. Intel Avoton is an Atom chip (Silvermont core), so CPU- bound performance will be somewhat lower than the usual Sandy Bridge/Haswell/whatever core that you get on AWS or Google Compute Engine. It's a server SoC though so I/O throughput is probably pretty decent...

<comment><USER8> That's what scares me a bit. The multi-core performance is great (considering their pricing), but single-threaded performance is quite a bit below what the competition gets you. If you're running a web server with something single- threaded (like PHP) requests might start taking a bit longer than you're used to.

<comment><USER9> Well, that is the whole point, you are suppose to have a whole bunch of small, inexpensive, power efficient, cores.

If the software you normally use doesn't take advantage of, at least, multi core hardware, then you can obtain more value from other hosting provider...

On the other hand if your software can takes advantages of multicore hardware, or -- even better -- multi node architecture, then scaleway is likely the best option.

<comment><USER10> Nearly no web framework is per request multi core (e.g. multi core HTML / JSON rendering, assuming backend operations already async). So each request will be slow.

[Edit:] Not sure for the downvote, would be interested what's wrong in my comment.

<comment><USER11> Go's net/http framework uses a go routine per connection.

<comment><USER10> For my understanding: One request is executed on serveral cores?

<comment><USER12> No. There's a certain amount of basic serialism in a single HTTP request. Go, Erlang, Haskell, a few others make it _really easy_ to write handlers that may themselves be running on multiple cores, but the HTTP handling itself is essentially serialized by the fact that you have to get the request, _then_ send the headers, _then_ send the body, which itself probably has order constraints (such as HTML, which certainly does, at least unless you really go out of your way to write yourself a CSS framework that would render chunks of the HTML order-independent). Most of the required bits of handling a request, like header parsing, header generation, etc. have been made so efficient in the implementations that care about that that any attempt to multithread that would lose on coordination costs to a single-threaded implementation, I think... at least, I'd need to see a benchmark to the contrary before I'd believe in a win.

(You can play a lot of games in how a lot of requests are handled, even going to the HTTP2 extreme of interleaving responses to different requests on the underlying network stream, but what I said will be true on a per-request basis.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been testing the performance of the C2.

Compared with a Xeon D-1520 (the current hot chip of low-cost cloud computing and actually very nice), single core speed is less than half of the Xeon D (at about the same clock rate of 2.4GHz); multi-thread speed (8 threads running lame encodes) is about 66% of Xeon D.

Not bad for the price.

</comment><comment><USER14> Using this for a remote backup server would be cool. Start the server, copy over backup, take their "storage snapshot", and turn off the server.

Lets do some napkin math: (In USD)

      - $0.01/hr USD
      - 10hr of backups each day (Heavy Usage)
      - 10 cents/day, $3/month, $36/year

You can also take snapshots. So that's extra cool.

Edit: Calculations for 150GB storage instances:

      - €0.01/hr (@ 150GB of storage)
      - 20hr of backups each day (Heavy Usage and more data transferred)
      - $0.24/day, $7.27/month, $87.29/year

Just did these for my own needs so thought everyone else might enjoy having them too.

<comment><USER15> > take their "storage snapshot", and turn off the server

Or rather, turn off the server and then take the storage snapshot, which is the order you have to do it. And you have to snapshot and reincarnate just in order to attach or detach a volume, which means adding some more storage space requires several hours downtime, which is a nuisance.

Although apart from that, I have found them very good.

<comment><USER14> For this usecase several hours of downtime is not much of a problem. In fact, the server will be off for more time then it's not. If you want to upgrade: wait until the backups are done and you should have 12hr till your next backup.

I'd hope that's more than enough time to expand a snapshot.

Also, how does pricing work for hourly servers? Is it still a quid a month?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been very pleased with [http://packet.net](http://packet.net) and their typo 0 server. It's bare metal, but much more performant than here. They have an amazing network, it's by the hour, and it's < $40/mo. Bandwidth is not included: $.05/GB, but that's half AWS.

Also they're based in the US, so less latency for those of us with primary customer bases here. We use them at DNSFilter in NYC as part of our anycast network, for the last two months. Looking forward to their San Jose and Amsterdam datacenter expansions coming soon.

<comment><USER17> Why do you use [http://packet.net](http://packet.net) as a URL in your comment when this only redirects to a www.packet.net subdomain, on Cloudflare?

Why not just use [http://www.packet.net](http://www.packet.net)?

From the perspective of the user, wouldn't it be "more performant" to skip the gratuitous redirect, extra GET request and DNS lookups?

Maybe this is just marketing? Setting referrer, cookies? Fear of a thundering herd arising from an HN comment? Inadvertence? I don't understand.

Apologies for being so naive.

<comment><USER16> I don't work for them, just a customer. It just happened to be what I typed for their URL. I'm not intimately familiar with how every site I visit does their redirects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Their support isn't great, and they're only in Canada and EU, but Kimsufi[1] is my goto for beefy but cheap dedicated servers. Their cheapest offering is $5/month for an Atom, 2G RAM, and 500G harddrive. But where the value really lies is a step up to about $25 where you start getting non-Atom processors, 16+G of RAM, and 1+TB harddrives. Also free bandwidth. It's a real dedicated server so you can install whatever on it, but KVM access is expensive if you break it into not booting. You can deploy a fairly good set of distros through their built-in wizard for free

1: [https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/](https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/)

<comment><USER19> > KVM access is expensive

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I got the impression that KVM access on KimSufi or SoYouStart requires somebody to walk over to your machine and plug a USB key into your machine. That would explain why it costs $30.

<comment><USER20> Not really in a data center. They have embedded firmware for KVM e.g. Dell's DRAC, HP's ILO, Oracle's ILOM, Intel's RMM2, and IPMI. Plugging and unplugging things into a server can be operationally hazardous and is definitely tedious.

<comment><USER19> OVH's more expensive servers do use IPMI and include free KVM. Their cheaper kimsufi and soyoustart offerings use a USB KVM to ethernet device, and charge for its usage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The blade servers at Delimiter ([https://www.delimiter.com/](https://www.delimiter.com/)) are even more affordable. I pay $20 a month for a dual Xeon blade with 16gb of ram.

They did have a very long downtime this year with no service credit, but uptime has been reasonable over the past year. If you're looking for a hobby box it's a pretty good deal.

<comment><USER22> I got super excited at first, but then...

The servers are based on: [http://ark.intel.com/products/33927/Intel-Xeon- Processor-E54...](http://ark.intel.com/products/33927/Intel-Xeon- Processor-E5420-12M-Cache-2_50-GHz-1333-MHz-FSB) and [http://ark.intel.com/products/47927/Intel-Xeon- Processor-L56...](http://ark.intel.com/products/47927/Intel-Xeon- Processor-L5630-12M-Cache-2_13-GHz-5_86-GTs-Intel-QPI)

These are super ancient.

If you're looking for affordable north american servers, OVH has the Kimsufi outlet which is cheaper and better hardware. They've got a data center in Canada and will give you American IPs from their AS in Newark, NJ:

[https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/](https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/)

The parent company of scaleway, online.net, also has some inexpensive offerings, but the servers are in France which might be a deal breaker for you. (Delimiter seems to be in Atlanta.)

<comment><USER23> kimsufi doesn't look bad but I don't find anywhere their cancellation policy

<comment><USER24> You can choose how many months you pay for (1-12), and sometime before that runs out they email you. Either you pay for some more months or the server goes away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> unlimited bandwidth. Is that for real?

300 Mbits. Let's assume you can pump out 100 Mbit sustained. That is about 10 MB/s. or 26,000,000 Megabytes/month. 26,000 GB / month.

      AWS & google cloud are about $.10/GB.    That'd cost 2600 USD to serve.

Scaleway claims that'd cost just 12 euro.

For realz?

<comment><USER5> I have a 3€ C1 server at Scaleway moving some 25-30TB of data per month, so yes, it's very real.

<comment><USER25> amazing! very good!

<comment><USER26> With my tor relays I pushed around 150Mbit up and Down. Which is around 45TB per direction and Month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Dammit. Cheap - very cheap - for everything but storage.

It seems impossible to find a low-cost server with some big, slow spinning disks on it at the moment. I'm really not sure why.

Anyone got any recommendations there? Where would I look, if anywhere, for, say, 4Tb of storage attached to a low-cost virtual or dedicated server, for less than Google Nearline or equivalent?

<comment><USER28> We just introduced an SSD cached storage solution at MNX.io

$15/TB -- scalable to 40T.

[https://mnx.io/pricing](https://mnx.io/pricing)

<comment><USER27> Hmm, very interesting. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> CPU:model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU C2750 @ 2.40GHz Network: root@scw-4e7977:~# ./speedtest-cli Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Testing from Free SAS (18.104.22.168)... Selecting best server based on latency... Hosted by NEOTELECOMS (Paris) [1.59 km]: 2.652 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 881.83 Mbit/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 513.56 Mbit/s

</comment><comment><USER29> Not surprised to read in the comments they're a subsidiary of Online.net. Ever since they've introduced ultra-cheap dedicated boxes ten years ago, it seems everybody's been sub-renting either them or OVH. I wonder why there aren't more similar offers worldwide, at least in Europe (I can only think of Leaseweb, and they're data capped). The network backbone isn't much different in Britain, Holland or Germany. And the server units aren't really custom.

</comment><comment><USER9> I had a great experience with scaleway.

However last time I checked the still have only IPv4 and very few of them, it happens to me that I wanted to spin up an instance for a quick experiment but wasn't possible to have a public IP where to connect, mine was just a simple experiment, nothing important, but still...

<comment><USER30> The FAQ [1] says that C1 servers don't support IPv6 but C2 servers do.

[1] [https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/](https://www.scaleway.com/faq/server/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How would this compare to Hetzner offerings? [https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver](https://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver)

<comment><USER32> I don't think there's much to compare there. Hetzner's servers are a completely different price range. Unless you get a used one here: [https://robot.your-server.de/order/market](https://robot.your- server.de/order/market) (URL looks suspicious, but it's Hetzner, I promise). These are servers that are fairly old and out-dated and whose users have discontinued their contracts; now they're being auctioned off so Hetzner doesn't have to throw them out. But these, I'd say, are also difficult to compare because of the old hardware vs. the new but low-cost hardware of the scaleway ones.

<comment><USER33> Hetzner has cheap VPSs:

[https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_vserver/cx30](https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_vserver/cx30)

<comment><USER32> I know, but the parent comment was explicitly asking about root servers; I agree, though, that I should've mentioned these, as they fit more into the price range (and I imagine they're quite good, as I've mostly heard positive things about Hetzner).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Invite only.... So you cannot even get them. What's the use of this announcement?

<comment><USER3> I think I have a number of invites, but the site is very slow at the moment.

<comment><USER35> if you have one more invite, i've sent you an email with request :) thx

<comment><USER36> Invitations won't get too far : "Send an invitation to your friend to try Scaleway! Your invitation will get queued and sent when enough capacity is available."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Hosted in the same datacenters, with similar low-end offerings: [https://www.online.net/en/dedicated- server#perso](https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server#perso).

</comment><comment><USER38> C1 is a good idea and works well especially while arm distro are maturing. IMHO C1 perfs are quite good for the price (700-900 tps on pg_bench, 1500 req/s on rabbitmq on debian). We are running an ELK server which is performing well enough for us even with 2gb of ram.

I was just expecting a low cost (6$/month) 4cores ARM64 server with 8gb of ram, I think it would have been more exciting !

<comment><USER39> > I was just expecting a low cost (6$/month) 4cores ARM64 server with 8gb of > ram, I think it would have been more exciting !

In case anyone doesn't spot it the closest is this:

> Our Starter VPS comes with 2GB of ram, 2 x86-64 Cores, > 50GB of LSSD and > 200 Mbit/s of unmetered bandwidth. > It's available at the insane price of > €2.99 per month > or €0.02 per hour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Where are Scaleway's data centers located? I found mention on their site that they're a Paris-based company, but is this the only geographical location for their offerings?

<comment><USER41> Seems the data centers are also hosted in the Paris area:

[https://www.scaleway.com/faq/general/](https://www.scaleway.com/faq/general/)

"The service is hosted in our own datacenters, Iliad's datacenters, DC2 and DC3. Both are located near Paris, France."

I have to say this is quite an interesting offer, especially for private/side projects. Currently I rent a virtual server at Hetzner, which costs me 23 € / month and is way below the specs mentioned on the Scaleways page, so I am compelled to switch, provided reliablity is good.

<comment><USER37> Interesting. I'm currently using servers by OVH, which compete in the same low-end segment using their Kimsufi[1] offering, and have datacenters in France, Canada and Germany.

Paris is close to me, so these might be interesting for VNC or other low- latency applications.

[1] [http://kimsufi.com](http://kimsufi.com)

<comment><USER42> Nope, OVH doesn't have data center in Germany afaik.

<comment><USER37> I was mistaken, I thought they had one in Frankfurt, but it seems the closest they get is Strassbourgh, Near the French/German/Belgian border.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> $13/mo for 8GB of ram is the big thing for me here; most of my servers are not cpu bound, but require a lot of tuning to fit in the smaller VM instances.

</comment><comment><USER44> the prices look sweet. anyone has experience with them? How's the network stability? support response times?

<comment><AUTHOR> They are a subsidiary company of Online.net, itself a subsidiary of Iliad/Free, one of the leading ISPs in France.

I have over 50 servers at Online since more than a year now, and they have been pretty much flawless. Support is good and reachable by phone. I haven't worked with Scaleway though.

<comment><USER29> >Support is good and reachable by phone

Really ? I used them quite a bit years and years ago, and at the time the support was somewhat garbage, which made me move to OVH.

<comment><USER45> I did the opposite and moved from OVH. I didn't have any problems with Online, but can't say the same about OVH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> ECC RAM? Sounds suspicious when this kind of offers don't mention memory type.

</comment><comment><USER47> has somebody experience with Scaleway? Especially if you compare to DigitalOcean? First time I see them. Seems for me the biggest difference is that their servers are baremetal and not VMs?!

<comment><USER48> I've been using their ARM Servers for a while as a build/test servers for some embedded Linux stuff. Overall a positive experience and things have 'just worked' with a Digital Ocean style interface. That said I've not been hosting critical websites or similar.

Unlike Digital Ocean I like the ability to add flexible storage volumes.

<comment><USER49> Our BigV service has done this since 2012, on more traditional KVM-based virtualisation - up to 8 SSD or spinning discs which you can add & remove (as well as RAM & cores). We think vertical scaling has been pretty underserved...

<comment><USER50> Does BigV have a web interface yet?

The command line interface and need for my physical key essentially put me off the service.

It's also reasonably expensive compared to the alternatives these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> A real x86/64 bare metal server for ~ us$3.30/mo inclusive, wow, it seems like only yesterday people were drooling at $99/mo 300mhz Cobalt RAQs at ev1servers (it was more like 15yrs ago). I was able to spin one up in <1min however I was previously registered at scaleway due to their last offering.

<comment><USER52> Indeed, I remember perfectly well how "die of success" was a thing when sites that became popular could not keep up with the hosting costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> If you do CPU-intensive work on these servers, might not the electricity cost surpass the 0.02/hour income? Example: if a kWh costs 0.10, then to have something burning 200W costs 0.02 per hour. (Someone substitute real-ish numbers.)

<comment><USER54> These are low-end devices, the system-on-chip uses at most 20W. Add in memory, etc and you don't get that far. I'm sure they've run their numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Right now I'm developing on Amazon EC2, because of the low ping times and because I have a range of options in terms of being hosted around the world to minimize low ping times for potential customers. I would like to know what options would I have at scaleway.com, but I can't find that information easily.

All I found was: _How are my servers positioned in terms of network proximity and resiliency? -- The ability to group your servers to create placement preferences is already integrated in the core of our system. We will expose it to you in the coming months._

</comment><comment><USER56> Just yesterday tried to install Gitlab-ce in C1 then realized that there is no ARM build for it. Went to digitalocean just for x86. And today they introduced x86, great news.

<comment><USER57> You could install it manually or even use the provided image - it's really just a few clicks.

I run Gitlab on a C1 in a docker container since around half a year. Just a few dozens repos and a few users. Works flawless :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I already have Scaleway account. I just finished some benchmarks on their starter vps and looks very interesting price per performances. Cores are dedicated, based on Intel C2750 (on /proc/cpuinfo). I have approx 23% more performances on cpu and iops than DO $20 plan. For equivalent $2.70 price, its 8-9 times less expansive for more performances. It's time for me to think about migration :-)

</comment><comment><USER59> How does the CPU performance of Avoton compare to a Pi 2? How do they perform on single threaded encryption, eg for a Tor relay?

<comment><USER60> I can't actually test it, but considering nbench shows the Avoton is faster on regular CPU operations, and that on top of that it comes with native AES-NI support (unlike the ARM CPU used by the Pi), it's probably much faster at Tor encryption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I just run ServerBear tests and results for the VPS (VC1) are here. [http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2016/03/13/sd7vRARnHCYhDa5S](http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2016/03/13/sd7vRARnHCYhDa5S)

<comment><USER61> Interesting. I have an invite and so I have thought about buying Scaleways for long. Their storage space fits what I need at an unbeatable price. May be that a better choice for me is the VC1 over the C1, as the CPU seems to be much better (Atom C2750) there. The cores will, however, be shared right? What kind of virtualization are they using, hardware-based? Very happy if you can make a response. This server looks really promising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> "Avoton" sounds very close to "Avorton", which is not what you want powering your computer.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avorton](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avorton)

</comment><comment><USER63> I can't wait for the day when it's actually cheaper to host in the cloud then hosting the servers yourself, electric, bandwidth, and storage costs included. This is a step in the right direction!

</comment><comment><USER64> I can see nothing about where the servers are, which can impact latency dramatically in some cases. I have to serve to a chunk of our users in China, and I need to have at least a server in Asia.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER44> They are located in France

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I would like them to make their S3 replacement available to new signups.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'd still like to know where I can buy the new Xeon D variants at an affordable price. The Avoton variants are okay but the availability is not good, certainly in the UK.

</comment><comment><USER67> I've just tried it, but did not found how to resize/scale... And a bit disappointed about snapshot: you have to power-off your server before snapshot/backup.

</comment><comment><USER68> I've tried the C1 to run JSPWiki on Tomcat, but it didn't work. I guess too little RAM. I'm sorry to see that there is nothing inbetween a C1 and a C2.

<comment><USER69> 4GB is too little?

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> If you want even more affordable (but lower performance), [http://lowendspirit.com/](http://lowendspirit.com/)

<comment><USER71> I would be careful with them. I've bought couple VPSes there and there was always an issues. In one instance provider vanished after 3 months, in another one VPS is still live but it's terrible slow (high ping latency). I am not complaining much because I paid for them ~$7/year (yes, thats year) but still, the same companies offer more expensive options and I wouldn't risk data lost. Use DigitalOcean, I think its very reliable and fairly inexpensive solution, just avoid London datacenter if you are in UK, for some reason Amsterdam is way faster.

<comment><USER72> Thanks for the intel re the London DO datacentre. I'm glad it's not just me :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> how easy is it to boot/install your own OS on these bare metal servers? some of these offers look interesting for unikernels.

<comment><USER74> I don't have any experience with Scaleway, but Vultr allows you to upload your own ISO and install it (even Windows Server). However, it's purely a VPS at competitive prices, not bare metal. Their bare metal servers start at $60USD/month.

<comment><USER75> I love Vultr. Support is fantastic!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Are they still offering the C1? It's absent from the pricing page.

</comment><comment><USER77> What is " _unmeted bandwidth_ "?

</comment><comment><USER78> insanely cheap? For this price you can get a real i7 from Hetzner instead of Atom...

<comment><USER37> Do you mean through their server bidding? Because those old pieces of junk are known for being stacked with near-failing hard drives.

<comment><USER78> I got a dozen of them an in the last 5 years only one drive failure, quickly replaced, no data lost thanks to RAID.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Anything similar in the UK?

</comment><comment><USER80> Any support for FreeBSD?

</comment><comment><USER81> How do they handle DoS?

</comment><comment><USER82> >invite required

Great way to drive away customers

</comment><comment><USER33> Meh. I just got a 4-core / 6GB RAM / 150GB HDD / 1Gbps VPS for $6/month.

<comment><USER83> Where from?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It'd be nice if Docker was supported out of the box. I don't want to be pissing around with kernels just to test them out.

<comment><USER84> I know nothing about Scaleway, but found these via the link above: [https://blog.scaleway.com/tag/docker/](https://blog.scaleway.com/tag/docker/) [https://www.scaleway.com/imagehub/docker/](https://www.scaleway.com/imagehub/docker/)

what is the problem with kernel? very curious as I would need Docker myself if I was going to use them

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I tried Scaleway last year. I was very disappointed with the usability of their offering (I was trying to run a simple Ubuntu Minecraft server - it was unnecessarily complicated to set up everything from ssh keys to snapshots), and stopped the account quickly. That very next day and for the first time ever my card picked up a fraudulent $3000 bar bill in Las Vegas. I don't think it was a coincidence.

I cannot recommend Scaleway.

<comment><USER86> How exactly is Scaleway (European company) related to some fraudulent bar bill in Las Vegas?

And you didn't say what was wrong with their service.

<comment><USER87> Not parent poster, but the implication was that his card details had been sold.

Geography has nothing to do with it, I'm reliably told that one can cheaply purchase card details on Tor hidden services, paying in BTC.

I've not tried it myself, and the only time I've had my card cloned was the other way around. It was cloned IRL, and was then used online for gambling.</comment></comment></comment>


Stone Age chewing gum holds clues to the life of a girl who lived 5700 years ago - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/17/world/ancient-chewing-gum-genome-scn/index.html <comment><USER2> I guess it was naive of me, but I was really hoping for an image of the girl. Even a reasonable guess can be pretty interesting sometimes.

When you see that image of what King Tutankhamun most likely looked like, it's kind of jarring.

<comment><USER3> [https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/191217110819-02-ancen...](https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/191217110819-02-ancent- finds-1217-exlarge-169.jpg)

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of images on the article, but most of them seem to be links to other articles. Was that slideshow specific to this article? The first image seemed to be a skull that was completely unrelated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting bit of knowledge I gained from the article is that it's believed we only gained the ability to digest milk recently. Prior to that all humans were lactose intolerant.

<comment><USER5> I believe they meant all humans older than infants - adult onset lactose intolerance, otherwise it implies human lactation is a recent evolutionary trait that was reacquired or mothers made milk but their babies could not drink it.

<comment><USER6> The term lactose intolerant is commonly used as shorthand for adult onset.</comment></comment></comment>


Bring Back the Lyme Vaccine - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/opinion/bring-back-the-lyme-vaccine.html <comment><USER2> I got Lyme disease last year, from an undetected tick bite in my back yard. Fortunately, it was diagnosed in time for the antibiotics to knock it out. I was annoyed to find out from my vet that I can get a vaccine for my dog, but not for me or my human family members, and that the reasons for this are irrational and non-medical.</comment>


The Four Color Theorem And Algorithm - <AUTHOR> http://www.math.gatech.edu/~thomas/FC/fourcolor.html

<comment><USER2> This has been around for at least 10 years - the bottom of the web page says "13 November 1995." As a PhD in graph theory I'm curious to know:

* why do you think this is interesting?

* what other 10 or 20 year old results might you be interested in? I have lots ...

<comment><USER3> It is interesting because it is easy to understand the problem quickly -- we've all seen maps. Additionally, for graph theory, the solution is pretty accessible.

I took just an introductory course in graph theory so I only got to see this famous problem and a few others. I would think that this crowd would find a list of other famous problems from your field quite interesting.

<comment><USER2> _the solution is pretty accessible._

I don't think that's true. I think you'll find the proof that discharging gives you what you want is pretty impenetrable. And this is a review of a survey paper that doesn't actually give the details.

I guess in this case I know too much about the topic to be able to assess whether it will be interesting to a generic hacker. I think it's pretty content-free. That's probably also the difference between me and a good science writer. Anything I read about something I know seems to be complete content-free fluff. I've tried, but I don't think I'll ever be able to write anything for general consumption.

However, here are a couple of results and/or odd questions:

* Given a Turing Machine one can construct a graph such that 3-coloring the graph is equivalent to running the Turing machine.

 _> > Since 3-coloring doesn't have a "direction", that means you can effectively run the TM backwards._

 _> >> That is a direct proof that 3-coloring is NP-complete._

* The set of reals is bigger than the set of integers

* One cannot decide from the axioms of set theory whether there is a set of reals that is bigger than the set of integers, but smaller than the set of reals.

* pi is very closely approximated by 355/113

* Define the sequence k(1)=0, k(2)=2, k(3)=3, k(n)=k(n-2)+k(n-3), and for n>1 ask: Does n divide k(n)? The answer is always "Yes" if n is prime, and almost always "No" if n is composite.

 __Challenge: find the first 5 cases where it gives the "wrong" answer.

Finally:

* What do you get if you photocopy a mirror?

<comment><USER4> I found this post interesting. I'd subscribe to your blog if the posts were about things like this.

<comment><USER2> Oh. Gosh. <fx: blush>

I might have to think about getting a blog, then ...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why brand identity is important and how to keep it consistent with HostBill - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hostbillapp.com/2018/02/08/why-brand-identity-is-important-and-how-to-keep-it-consistent-with-hostbill/ <comment><USER2> This is a "fluff piece" blog post that doesn't really describe the (actually pretty well designed) product. It looks like someone decided that they needed to "do some marketing" on the blog, but was challenged to be as generic as possible so as to not make any specific claims. As a marketer looking for a plug-in invoice system, it's a little odd that every vendor wants to "educate" me on basic marketing concepts like "branding" that presumably I'm already an expert in.

"It's worth to consider to create one template with the same graphic to use for various messages to recognise your communications."

There are some pretty big translation issues too. In the more technical blog posts or the feature updates, the language issues aren't as obvious as a post like this. If you're trying to break into publishing, you have to be a great writer AND have a great product, it's not necessarily a great way to market a small developer-friendly project.</comment>