System Admins R.I.P.? - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.mulesoft.org/system-admins-r-i-p/ <comment><USER2> As a sysadmin these kinds of articles have a sort of duality to them.

On the one hand they're insulting. The author is clearly wholesale ignorant of the vast majority of sysadmin roles and responsibilities (and why companies need them) and yet feels like they know what they're talking about enough to declare the role dead.

On the other hand, developers with no clue whats entailed in sysadminning are the number one source of our job security, so its a backhandedly good thing.

Please, by all means host your startup's database in a "aaS" solution with ~500 IOPS (except sometimes! at random!) across a 50 - 100ms link. It will make me look like a wizard when I clean up your rookie moves.

<comment><USER3> I spent two days trying to figure out how to compile a 32 bit library on a 64 bit system.

A sysadmin would have figured it out in 5 minutes, and lazily dropped by my desk to show me where I went wrong.

In my experience, sysadmins aren't just people who keep things running during the course of Business As Usual, you guys are also a terrifying repository of arcane knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes and no. System admins aren't disappearing - they're specializing into 2 distinct professions:

* Those working for infrastructure _providers_ (IBM, Amazon, Rackspace) focus on the bottom half of the stack: everything from the datacenter's floor plan to switching and VM allocation.

* Those working for infrastructure _consumers_ (everybody else) focus on the upper half: the business's software stack, how to glue it together, and where to run it.

Conclusion: system admin, as a profession, is gradually disappearing. But it's being replaced by 2 _better_ professions: more challenging work, higher perceived value within the organization, and higher demand.

<comment><USER5> Shykes comment is better than the article. since about mid 2000s sys admins, regardless of what their job titles are, have become infrastructure engineers. learn the vmware Api, the red hat satellite api, some databases, write some socket apps for monitoring, learn some charting. I'm actually a developer now, but the demands of infrastructure engineering is how I got there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe, but I don't think so.

Not many years ago people got paid to, among other things, pick out the appropriate operating system for any given application. Clearly there's not much of a future in that.

These days that same person is responsible for vetting cloud hosting providers, email service providers, and has to be capable of comparing the "old" in-house solutions and bring things inward if there's benefit.

The technology changes, but the role more or less stays the same. The system admin is generally a bridge between business operations and the technology stack, and there's always going to be glue there, particularly for businesses of at least 10 people.

Disclosure: System Admin / Engineer by trade. Weigh my opinions appropriately.

<comment><USER7> A couple things here...

1\. I think there's a distinction between Sys Admin and a more management position like Director of IT or CIO. In some companies there's only one person who fills both roles but they are two distinct roles and I think this article refers to the actual System Administration role rather than the management role that selects software and vendors.

2\. While I don't think the System Administrator role will disappear completely I do think the focus will switch from one that is more hardware driven to one that's more software/programming driven. I think businesses will expect System Administrators to handle integrating their cloud based services into a comprehensive whole in the future rather than just making sure there's a network to carry data. That's important because it will mean a dramatic shift in the required skill set.

<comment><USER8> My experience is that my job has never really been very hardware driven. My experience with hardware is keeping our standard server spec up to date with the vendor. Installing OS and applications. I also manage keeping track of warranty status and handling hardware failures, and of course backups.

That's a lot of words to describe work that isn't a lot of my time annually. Especially on a team where the load is distributed. Take into account that a few hundred "servers" are virtual machines running on tens of physical servers and there you go.

My skill set already requires me to manage multiple operating systems and applications. My biggest value to the company is problem solving, whether it's engineering a solution to meet new business requirements to diagnosing and fixing a problem that can happen anywhere from the hardware to application layer. Sysadmins don't just sit and look at blinky lights all day waiting for one to go orange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anecdote from a SysAdmin: I remember during the early 2000s there was a trend for a little while to scale down the IT department, and rely on corporate support, or use outside consulting firms, or other methods that involved keeping the payroll mostly free of such "backroom" types. I've heard a lot of horror stories from people who would go into a company to fix a small problem or perform an upgrade, and would find virus ridden computers barely running, people doing ridiculous things like burning cds to move a couple of files (remember, early 2000s here), people losing their product license or support information, or other terrible things, simply because there was no on-site sysadmin to keep all of their computers in good functional order.

This article presents much the same scenario, but updated for 2011. And make no mistake, it will probably work for small, well managed, web-based companies, full of people that already know plenty about computers and technology. For pretty much every other type of major company though, there needs to be at least one person who's responsibility is making sure that the technology in the workplace can be worked with and not just worked around, and who can be responsible for dealing with the new technologies that come around, and until the cloud can provide such a service, the sysadmin will be alive and well.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hey, instead of paying a person to keep our data on our own systems, we can pay a bunch of companies to keep it on their systems.

They'll never fail, get obsolete, lose our data, get bought out by someone who ruins them, have availability problems, or lock us into using just their service, right? Guys?

<comment><USER11> Paying a sysadmin is, sadly, not a guarantee that one will have-future proof redundant systems with seven nines of availability that are meticulously documented enough to seemlessly hand over to anybody with a sufficiently wizened countenance.

OK, dueling strawmen out of the way, let me try to add some value to this discussion. Just like the lower rungs of the value chain are getting eaten up in programming, the lower runs of the value chain in sysadminning are also getting eaten away. Back when I was in middle school I was, I kid you not, routinely told that the comparables to my labor at HTML editing all charged $100+ an hour for making websites in Notepad. (Complete with under construction signs.)

Thankfully, the state of the art has improved such that there are a variety of options for e.g. a church school to have a web page listing upcoming Christmas pageants without having to pay $10k a month on an ongoing basis for maintenance.

You know the old saw about competent sysadmen trying to write themselves out of jobs? Well, don't look now, but in a lot of areas _they are winning_. My old day job called me a Systems Engineer, which includes basic sysadminning, and over my very short career standard deployment practices for e.g. Rails apps have improved radically in a direction which requires me to spend far, far less work at this aspect of m job. There are "real companies" on similar stacks who have server-to-admin ratios which just 10 years would have been unthinkable. (100 to 1? No problem. It's really just 3-to-1 with heavy automation in play, anyhow.)

Sysadmen in the audience worried about their career prospects should probably try pushing themselves up the value chain. There was once lots of value in babysitting cranky programs which blew up frequently in unpredictable ways. That looks like it is changing. Look at Exchange versus I-can't-believe-its- not-Gmail from the perspective of a firm with less than a thousand employees: heads you have someone whose full time job is to fight outages, tails you do not. Don't be the John Henry in that scenario: remember, he dies at the end of the story.

<comment><USER12> > the old saw about competent sysadmen trying to write themselves out of jobs

When I preach this, I modify it to "always eliminate your role". Your job won't go anywhere, but what you're doing for that job should always be changing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Banking and health care data, for example, cannot for the most part live on AWS or some other generic cloud provider. There are financial and legal penalties for leaking a database full of medical histories and Social Security numbers that preclude storing hospital records on slicehost or something. For the time being, and, given the conservative bent of these industries, probably well into the future, there will still be local sysadmins in the classic sense managing physical hardware under physical security.

That said, there's a screaming business opportunity for a group of enterprising sysadmins who want to set up HIPAA-compliant PaaS offerings for medical information shops, or something similar for banks that won't make the SEC or FDIC freak out.

</comment><comment><USER14> As with virtually every headline-as-a-question, _no_.

Too much existing infrastructure. Too many systems that aren't web-UI apps with cloud backends.

Maybe in ten years, this will be more plausible.

<comment><USER3> Will existing infrastructure disappear in 10 years?

<comment><USER14> No, but many systems will be that much more likely to be replaced by something that could possibly run in the cloud. It'll become something actually on the horizon in ten years, as opposed to something unreasonably far off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> High quality sysadmins are evolving into what is called the devops role. Trouble shooting, scaling, architecting, and automating production systems are just a few areas where devops people shine. The cloud just provides them another set of tools to work with. It also frees them from dealing with the annoying/repetitive tasks (spinning a CD to install the OS, plugging in the network cables, etc) and allows them to focus on improving the application. A number of devops people I know can easily transition into developer roles when required. Summary: a great sysadmin should know how to code and does so in order to improve the app.

<comment><USER16> That still feels like "sysadmins are being replaced by developers" to me

<comment><USER17> Only developers think sysadmins arent developers.

<comment><USER18> Conversely only sysadmins think sysadmins can code. A classic example is a close personal friend of mine who works as an sysadmin for an insurance company.

On two occasions I've had the unfortunate displeasure of working with him on web-related projects (we share similar hobbies and our local communities need web services of various kinds) his approach has been vile, Rube Goldbergesque concretions of Perl & shell scripts.

This is absolutely THE GUY I'd call if I needed some advanced logfile parsing in a hurry, but when it comes to actually developing web stuff the guy's totally in the dark. What's worse is his only metric is "It works and it makes sense to me" so he's content to make a complete hash of a development project.

During a recent conversation he admitted to having no real grasp on basic HTML and hadn't heard of CSS. The thing that kills me is he's convinced he's qualified to run websites for our local groups and absolutely refuses to accept input on the subject.

Oh well, the guy's also an ace whitewater kayaker and one of my favorite paddling buddies. Considering this guy will probably save me from drowning one day I can look past his failings as a "developer".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Yes, cloud will remove the need for systems administrators/operations much like the power grid has removed the need for electrical engineers.

<comment><USER20> Actually, they're called "power engineers", and the maturity of the U.S. grid has largely shut down American university production of such engineers.

<comment><USER19> Power engineering is one of type of electrical engineering. Demand has shifted away from that type.

In the same way, the demands shifts from one sort of systems administrator -- the traditional sys admin who racks and stacks machine and manually edits config files on a UNIX system, to another: one who approaches the problem from a computer science and engineering point of view (using software such as chef/puppet, developing custom tooling, working closely with application developers, etc...).

All of this is not news to me: I've been doing this kind of work in 2006 at Yahoo before it had a buzz word ("devops") attached to it (these days I've shifted to being "pure" software developer). Broadly speaking, we had three kinds of operations personnel: those working at the physical layer, the network layer and those working between the operating system and the application layer.

Majority of the upper layer work was either writing code or working very closely with application developers. Thanks to these tools we could deploy and re-deploy machines within the matter of minutes (with no virtualization involved) and handle servers arriving by the truckloads.

I'm glad that Amazon and others have made the lower layers a publicly available service, so that the people preferring to work at the upper layers _but would prefer to be in a startup_ (rather than a corporate behemoth) could concentrate on the work they find fulfilling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> You can have my system admin when you pry him from my cold, dead hands.

Wait, that doesn't sound right.

The points stands, though: I really don't want to do that stuff and he's welcome to it. And I seriously doubt the whole world is going to use someone else's servers... There will always be companies that don't trust 'the cloud'.

</comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me of a sentence I heard somewhere before... Paraphrased: You can make _any_ statements -- so long as you end it with a question mark.

I think it was The Daily Show, when John commented on media headlines.

<comment><USER23> [http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed- september-13-2006/the-...](http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed- september-13-2006/the-question-mark)

<comment><USER22> Nice find! WTF is up with Arnold at the end of the clip?!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> All of those systems introduce convenience at the cost of lockin and they are no longer suitable once you reach a certain scale. Then the problem becomes either the lack of visibility or the cost with the metered services.

For me, a nice service like PubNub would run us nearly $300/day. Compare that to a simple EC2 m1.large at $240/month.

Visibility comes most of all with DBs where you want to manage lower level settings. Things like MySQL configs, disk volumes and their configuration, etc. Good luck tracking your IOPS on a hosted service, or since they're likely cloud based, getting good throughput/latency levels.

Overall though, sysadmins are changing into devops. They're the ones who connect the dots between what the app is doing, what scale it needs to run at, and the systems need to support those. As things grow, need management of all the moving pieces. Then comes monitoring minute aspects of the environment to ensure performance and stability, paging when something goes out of bounds, etc. And as you grow, minor changes or upgrades can have a huge impact or require a lot of roll out, so need to test and benchmark several aspects.

Sysadmins in the small scale may be less important, but they're becoming even more critical as you grow. The nice part is the tools they can leverage are growing so you can do more with fewer hands.

</comment><comment><USER25> " Compared to system administration, being cursed forever is a step up." -- Paul Tomko.

</comment><comment><USER26> Maybe it will be end of the BOFH or the eternal deployer (the guy that does not everyday, just deploy software, I saw some of them in my life). Small web companies maybe does not need a sysadmin, since they are focused on one application generally this will not be a major problem for them if they know some best practices.

The majority of sysadmins that I know works in the financial market, telecommunications industry and ISPs, mainly in data centers, helping developers who does not know about the infrastructure or as network operators.

</comment><comment><USER27> Probably best career decision I ever made, was in 1999, 1 year into my career, to switch from system administration to programming as my focus.

<comment><USER28> Because?

<comment><USER27> (Sorry, I missed this reply).

For me, it was the best decision, as I enjoy programming much more than sysadmin work. I get my kicks out of creating new things.

Valuable experience though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sysadmins will not disappear, however, their role will change. The old hardware lugger/patchjockey role is on the way out. However, managing the sensitive data of the organization will be a role forever: data has to be transported, converted, stored, retrieved, archived, etc.

Especially in organisations which handle data of a sensitive nature the sys- admin (or whatever his/her role will be called) will have an important role in the organisation (think especially of organisations which have to conform to HIPAA, PCI, or other data protection regulations).

The success of an organization will in these Internet times be determined by the value of the (customer) data it holds and the ability to extract business value from that data. A data admin is therefore an essential task in any organisation. The future role of Sysadmins will therefore move in that direction in my opionion.

Disclaimer: the writer is an IT Architect at a large DataCenter Services Provider.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's interesting to see all these cloud-based services being used in the real world but I hardly think this is the death knell of systems administration as a profession.

It would take a pretty major shift in attitudes for medium and large companies to start trusting vendors with the kind of data we're talking about here.

<comment><USER25> I don't see why it's totally impossible. Outsourcing of archive management has been going on for decades at this point.

<comment><USER18> Depends on your archive. There is literally zero chance a clinical research organization (for example) would outsource any aspect of data collection, storage or retrieval. Regardless of what systems where used there's simply no way you could walk into a boardroom of client pharama execs and say with a straight face you had the level of control over the process required to meet their needs.

<comment><USER30> "literally zero chance"? Come on now...

I've only worked on ~10 paid development gigs and one of the first ones was a pharma research company who hired my team to create an interface for a truckload of sensitive data after nothing more than a phone call and a quick NDA. This pattern has continued in a few subsequent projects, often with no NDA or contract whatsoever.

A great many companies stop caring about privacy the second they can make or save a few bucks, questionable legality or ethics notwithstanding one bit. Businesses in general are fortunate that MOST software engineers seem to be honest and good people, because they regularly hand over the keys to the castle, often without even realizing it or considering the potential implications at all, and to be honest I'm actually quite glad it works this way. For whatever reason, we as a profession have apparently been deemed highly trustworthy, and I much prefer this situation with all its risks to a world of bulletproof firewalls and bureaucratic red tape.

<comment><USER18> I'm serious. Between government data retention regulations and hyper-paranoid client pharmaco company execs the odds of a CRO putting their data out on the cloud are functionally nil. This may change one day but that's the reality today. We're talking the kinds of shops that are still signing million dollar deals with IBM reps to provide in-house server infrastructure.

There's a world of difference between hiring contractors to come in and develop in-house systems and betting the farm on a 3rd party vendor.

<comment><USER30> Point taken, but you shouldn't be so quick with the 'never gonna happen' proclamations. Technology moves fast. There are many undisputed benefits to the cloud model. Yes, there are serious drawbacks too, especially for certain industries, but where you see insurmountable obstacles, others will see business opportunities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> PubNub:

"Cloud-Hosted Service for Real-Time Messaging"

"There is no guarantee that all messages published will be received in the same order that they were sent."

... So not really real-time then. Disappointing, since I was already trying to think of ways to use it.

</comment><comment><USER31> It seems to me that every generation has to learn about IT the hard way. Not just devs but also MBAs. The problems that your IT guy solves are not going away.

1\. How to glue disparate systems together.

2\. Determine what services to standardize on.

3\. Prevent business types from choosing tech sizzle over steak.

4\. Translate technology to human readible form.

So long as control and management of information is important to businesses there will be sysadmins.

</comment><comment><USER32> So we've progressed from a small subset of the population as sys admins to ... everyone who wants to deploy an application/service being a sys admin? This seems like a step backwards, in some ways.

I suppose this is a win for people that just want email, or documents, or calendars, but for anything else, you're stuck maintaining your own data in the cloud.

</comment><comment><USER33> From a couple of years ago: We're all ops people now [http://osspack.com/open- source/edd-dumbill-were-all-ops-peop...](http://osspack.com/open-source/edd- dumbill-were-all-ops-people-now/)

</comment><comment><USER34> Sysadmins are being replaced, but guess by who? The fancier term "System Integrator". Now the sysadmins design 'solutions' for businesses. Case in point: Look at all the telecom solutions being deployed.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'll expect to see all system admins gone, when CASE tools actually work and all those programmers disappear. Who ends up employing the system admin is up for debate.

</comment><comment><USER34> Was it just me who thought that this headline meant that some 'sysadmin' had written yet another tool to automate stuff? ;-)

</comment><comment><USER36> This article couldn't be more wrong-headed.

</comment><comment><USER8> Are businesses going to start putting all their proprietary information in the cloud? If so, I could see a short term where getting a job might be difficult, until enough companies get burned and realized they should have never let their information off their network.

Back in the late 90's I had a choice. I could go be a programmer or I could go be a sysadmin. I really love programming. I in fact spend my "free time" (as much as a father of an infant and toddler has) programming. However at that time I noticed all the noise about how all the programming jobs were being outsourced.

I made the conclusion then that they could outsource the programmer, but they still need someone to run the infrastructure. I think that will always be the case. I've worked for business focused, rather than technology focused, companies my entire career. OK, 13 years in I've only worked for 2 companies so I can't say I have a ton of exposure, but still... My experience is that the business user wants things done a certain way and a lot of my time is spent engineering solutions to meet those requirements, which often change several times during the project phase. Cloud solutions currently are a pretty well defined box, one that I don't see a lot of business users being comfortable with the restrictions offered.

I do see some things going to cloud. Email for example... please take it. I could get more work done not having to do restores because someone decided to make a POP connection to their mailbox with their phone and deleted all their email on the server. However most of the other solutions I'd see going to the cloud are going to have to go onto basically virtual servers like what Rackspace and Amazon EC2 instances offer. And who's going to know how to manage, configure, and keep those security updates going? Oh yea, the guys who've done it on physical infrastructure for the past few decades. So basically if a company goes that way then I'll have less warranty replacements to worry about.

I think perhaps the cloud is going to change the nature of a sysadmin's job, but the profession isn't going to go away. Heck, I don't even know that I've ever been a pure sysadmin. Seems I've always had to do some programming, engineering and dabble in network the whole time I've been doing this job.

Lastly, I support my company. When there's an emergency, I am available to handle it. I'm not busy managing several other companies disasters as the same time. My business can also dictate my downtime. Oh, you're having a conference in New Zealand during the time we have our normally scheduled email maintenance, well let me just move that window for you so you can get your job done. Don't forget, we're a service based industry and you're going to get a lot better service from someone you pay to be dedicated to you rather than from a company that supports a few thousand customers. You don't have to wait in line for this car wash.

</comment><comment><USER37> The whole SaaS model just shifts the sysadmins around to where they are more efficiently utilized. They're not disappearing.

<comment><USER38> But part of being more "efficiently utilized" is improving labor productivity, which all else being equal reduces the demand for sysadmin labor.

Although it might make for a more interesting sysadmin job for those that remain.

<comment><USER39> It's not a zero sum game. There's no point in keeping around jobs are unnecessary.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: See what's new from all your social feeds, together - <AUTHOR> http://www.uniquity.io

<comment><USER2> This is a cool idea. I'm surprised it hasn't been done before. It's like Buffer in reverse. Then again, it's basically an RSS reader for social feeds. I suspect the reason that Facebook doesn't offer a newsfeed RSS or API (as far as I know?) is because they would lose out on a lot of analytics and ad revenue. If you scale this, is it possible that Facebook would take some sort of legal action?

How are you getting the data?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually when we first came up with the idea, we were shocked to find that Facebook does in fact offer an API and even an SDK. You can find it here, if it sparks your interest! [https://developers.facebook.com/docs](https://developers.facebook.com/docs)</comment></comment>


Decentralized social networks sound great. Too bad they'll never work (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/decentralized-social-networks-sound-great-too-bad-theyll-never-work/ <comment><USER2> Poorly written, and mostly free of actual data.

The article basically says:

1) New social media platforms have trouble attracting users

2) It's hard to make them cryptographically secure

3) In a decentralized platform implementing a relevance or ranking system is hard

4) If you can't buy resources in bulk, it's more expensive to acquire them, therefore distributed social media will be more expensive than centralized (lots of assumptions here)

They did say "We asked a whole bunch of people about this", but there's no quotes and no actual data.

The article feels like it was written on command by an intern who was told to say something negative about distributed social media.</comment>


Learn How to Build Your Own Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> http://www.firstamong.com/how-to-create-virtual-wikipedia/

<comment><USER2> Very Nice Ariticle :). I havent fount article related to wikipedia before!!!</comment>


You should block your competitors from seeing your AdWords ads - <AUTHOR> http://blog.keltex.com/post/431143579/adwords-click-fraud

<comment><USER2> Really? Is this really necessary? Are competitors seeing/clicking/copying your ads and landing pages really a problem?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote the article but yes, I've seen it. Especially in uber competitive spaces (i.e. ones where 80% of the revenue goes to google) every fraction of a percent of conversion rate counts.</comment></comment>


Quantum imaging with undetected photons - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7515/full/nature13586.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The arxiv link seems to be [http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4318](http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.4318)</comment>


Remote Working: Improving Signal-To-Noise with Voice Only - <AUTHOR> https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2017/02/wordfence-remote-working/?utm_source=list&utm_campaign=022317&utm_medium=email <comment><AUTHOR> Just a heads up, I submitted this story. I am in no way affiliated with WordFence... this isn't an attempt to get free "press" that they are hiring.

I submitted the story (and changed the title slightly) because I am interested in hearing this communities thoughts on remote work and video vs voice calls.

Thank you for your input.</comment>


The Cheap Energy Revolution Is Here, and Coal Won't Cut It - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-26/the-cheap-energy-revolution-is-here-and-coal-won-t-cut-it <comment><USER2> Well over 40% of US electricity is still from coal. Despite all the hype, renewables other than hydroelectric are only 3% in the US.

What's driving energy prices is cheap natural gas. Natural gas is cheap to extract and can be extracted fast. But after a while, it's all gone. Britain's North Sea Gas boom is over.[1] Gas fields also drop off faster than oil fields. The cheap natural gas boom won't last forever. It's created the illusion that the energy problem is over.

Nuclear is discouraging. After Fukushima, nuclear plants are scary. Fukushima was a reasonably good plant which got hit by a larger than expected tsunami and lost site power. That was enough to cause a major disaster. Nuclear now looks like a technology where every decade or two you lose a city. The small- nuclear enthusiasts are a bit scary; some argue they need fewer safety precautions because their reactors can't melt down. What could possibly go wrong? Big, expensive containment vessels are a good thing; when Three Mile Island failed, the containment held it in.

Battery technology will help. Wind and solar are intermittent, and can't carry too much of the load until there's more storage. But it's going to take a lot of batteries.

[1] [http://www.crystolenergy.com/assessing-future-north-sea- oil-...](http://www.crystolenergy.com/assessing-future-north-sea-oil-gas/)

<comment><USER3> Sorry if this is nitpicky but fyi, coal in 2016 was almost exactly 40%, not 'well over': [https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf...](https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_02_a)

But you are absolutely right that its entirely due to natgas and that will maybe last us a decade or two but certainly not three.

In fact its just enough time to build a fleet of nuclear plants, but as you also point out, fear rules that decision far more than physics.

Wind and solar and batteries are awesome, but even in very optimistic case scenarios we need an alternative to coal and the temporary surge of natgas to handle baseload between here and ~2040. It _should_ be nuclear, but, sigh.

<comment><USER4> Data on national scale, like the eia stuff you link to, is vital to understanding and debate.

What I realize I don't understand is the meaning of "Generation at Utility Scale Facilities" in the header of the table. What does this exclude and how meaningful is the exclusion?

According to the table, net generation at utility scale has _decreased_ 10% over the last decade. How much of that is driven by non-utility scale generation versus decreased energy usage? (Alternatively non-utility scale generation has outpaced total growth in energy use - I'm ignorant of total consumption data so I don't know what is really going on).

Either way, the numbers do seem to suggest a case for new nuclear generation overall.

<comment><USER5> Commercial and Residential solar are excluded. Those might add up to half a percent or so. The other 9.5% is probably due to energy efficiency.

<comment><USER6> Residential solar is hard to pin down because it's "behind the meter"; it doesn't look like generation, it looks like demand reduction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Trump can slow the decline of coal consumption but he can't reverse it. Investors in new generating plants expect them to operate for decades. The regulatory pendulum is going to swing back against coal within a decade. The optimal thing to do if you own an old coal plant is to run it as much as you profitably can right now, don't invest in major upgrades for the future, and be ready to scrap it whenever the EPA resumes actually protecting the environment.

The Chekhov's gun waiting to go off in electricity demand is electric vehicles. When they become a non-trivial part of transportation they'll be the biggest new demand driver for electricity in two generations. Hopefully they'll arrive in a big way shortly _after_ the big wave of coal retirements is finished; otherwise they could keep marginal coal units lingering for a while longer.

<comment><USER8> >>Trump can slow the decline of coal consumption but he can't reverse it.

He doesn't want to reverse it. He doesn't give a shit about coal. He only wants their votes, and the votes of similar industries who will view him as a defender of old-school industry.

<comment><USER9> Same could be said for solar? The sunbelt is/was heavy on coal for energy production. Solar is a great fit for the sunbelt. The federal government subsidizing solar adoption is a direct transfer of money to southern states as well as a direct negative on WV/WY economies.

What is the relative value of marginal votes from those different areas...

<comment><USER10> This isn't about the votes from coal miners. It's about what coal stands for in the minds of rural white voters.

<comment><USER5> Exactly right. Coal mining as a job has declined much more than coal as fuel. It's just easier to blame regulations and outsourcing than to admit that people can't compete with machines in energy production and manufacturing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm glad we're leaving a lot of coal in the ground, but for different reasons. If society as a whole ever slides backwards (due to global war, horrific disease, etc), it leaves a lot of fairly easily extractable energy for the future generation that survives. Dark way of looking at it, I know.

<comment><USER12> There are actually things like peat moss[1], which are a semi-renewable energy, which I see being far more useful in a "dark age" scenario.

Not to say, it's not good to keep coal in the ground for the same reason. Just thought I would share another tid-bit lol

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

<comment><USER2> Have you ever seen a large peat moss power plant? Ireland has some. They're gross polluters.

<comment><USER12> I have, I wasn't saying it's a great idea - just that there are alternatives to coal that are more renewable and readily available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Was hard to get through the rhetoric and falsehoods like "When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, the marginal cost of that electricity is essentially free"

I read on until "The natural gas that comes out of these wells is practically free"

Then I had to give up because its obvious propaganda with no real interest in the truth. I am all for clean energy, but unfactual propaganda isnt good for anyone.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps you misunderstood what marginal cost means. It is the cost of generating one additional unit of power on an already existing infrastructure. It takes expense to mine an additional ton of coal, transport it to a power plant, burn it and convert it into electricity even after the underlying infrastructure is setup. It doesn't for solar and wind.

<comment><USER13> That falls under "rhetoric" the author takes a small unit of time "when sun is shining and wind is blowing" to then use the word "free". Thats cherry picking to the extreme and rhetoric 101. It is used to paint a picture that does not really exist. What happens to solar and wind when its night and the wind is still? By cherry picking and creating a scene which doesnt truly exist it paints a false picture of the efficiency of solar at this moment. Hence why I used "rhetoric".

I could also say that is a falsehood in the practicle sense because of what it left out but that wasnt my original intention. My falsehood statement was to include the part about shale which since shale fields are limited its simply not true.

We could further get into UV rays breakin down solar panels etc but that really wasnt my point. I dont expect people to see the rhetoric and falsehoods used in this article but it stood out to me like a sore thumb so I commented.

Nor was I somehow saying save coal or coal is more efficient etc. It was only a comment on the rhetoric and falshoods I saw in a very short span of words.

<comment><USER15> I don't understand. If someone is giving out free balloons but only during certain hours, you shouldn't call it free?

<comment><USER13> As rhetoric I would compare it more with "I will be giving everyone free balloons all day while supplies last!" and the supply is one balloon. Sounds great but reality is vastly different.

Again though I dont expect everyone to see the rhetoric I see.

<comment><USER15> One balloon? Maybe if renewables exploded after half an hour.

The solar-power equivalent would be a balloon every few minutes every weekday, but they run on a strange calendar and you can't predict when weekends happen.

I just don't see how a supply that's unpredictable on a short-term basis, but very predictable on a long-term basis, disqualifies it from being "free".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> More and more people are turning to Molten Salt Nuclear Reactors, like Liquid Fluoride Thorium Breeders, If Kirk Sorensen and others are right this will revolutionize energy (and probably not just energy but mining, water desalination etc.) as we know it unlike wind or solar ever could. Natural gas and coal should die once and for all as they are as dirty as it gets. I strongly believe we are ready for truly nuclear future.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, and fusion is just around the corner...

I wonder why the tech community has this infatuation with nuclear power. Ever since I registered my three-digit slashdot account, I've been reading exactly this post, just that the type of reactor people dream of seems to change every five years or so. Good to know it's "Liquid Fluoride Thorium Breeders", right now.

Meanwhile, solar power has lowered prices by a factor of 10 or so and is on a clear trajectory to beat fossile fuels on costs, without subsidies.

I'm suspecting there is something cultural going on here–maybe some instinct to seek out what others perceive as dangerous? Beats me...

<comment><USER18> A new generation of students who grow up doing math in VR will solve the plasma containment geometry problem, which is one of the major fusion hurdles.

<comment><USER19> Just like a new generation of engineers doing math on computers would give us flying cars?

<comment><USER18> No, we don't need flying cars so that won't happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Coal was dead long before Trump was elected. The fact that he and the majority of the GoP continue to lack the political will to tell their people the truth does not change this.

The worst victims of all of this are of course the people being told that coal is coming back, that the way that their fathers made a solid living will someday return so they continue sitting in a pit of addiction and despair, waiting for their ship to come in while the politicians get ever fatter.

<comment><USER21> I fail to see how anyone would even think that it's possible to bring back coal.

<comment><USER20> You have the luxury of not depending on it coming back in order to earn a living again.

I'm not saying it's a good thing they believe it, I'm saying the conned is still the victim: it's the conartist that should be punished, and the GOP has been conning Appalachia for decades.

<comment><USER22> The real solution is how do you get the people being conned to recognize that they are being conned and quit voting for the people conning them. If there wasn't a payout (e.g. people being (re)elected), then it wouldn't be happening.

<comment><USER23> Oh, they know they're being conned, they're not stupid.

It's just that they believe that both sides are conning them, and they vote for the most appealing set of lies.

<comment><USER24> Or for the side that displays some empathy along with the lies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Solar appears to be on an exponential. If true, no one is prepared for where that will take us in just two to four years!

</comment><comment><USER26> I disagree with the metrics here. In the US Hydro power is not considered renewable yet it powers roughly a third of Canadians. Quebec's Hydro Power also powers a large part of New York, Vermont and Massachusetts.

<comment><USER27> I think they're focused on newly-built renewables rather than hydroelectric which was built decades ago by massive government subsidy and seems unlikely to see real expansion given environmental concerns re: fish spawning, etc.

<comment><USER28> In British Columbia over 50 new hydro electric plants have been built in the last 30 years by private industry. People may say they are subsidized since they often get $100/MWH for the first 30 years of operation but that is the price that must be offered to mobilize investment and it isn't much higher than the projected construction cost from the site C dam which would have much better economies of scale and the Construction cost doesn't include the 30 years of studies and consultation BC hydro did whereas that is covered by the 100$/MWH for the private hydro plants.

Here is a list of Independent power producers in BC [https://www.bchydro.com/content/dam/BCHydro/customer- portal/...](https://www.bchydro.com/content/dam/BCHydro/customer- portal/documents/corporate/independent-power-producers-calls-for- power/independent-power-producers/ipp-supply-map.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _And yet his energy plan is to cut regulations to resuscitate the one sector that's never coming back: coal._

Wait! Hold it right there! Are you trying to tell me that "clean coal" is not coming back? </sarcasm></comment>


Removing objects from video in real time - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/diminished-reality-software-removes-objects-from-video-in-real-time

<comment><USER2> AKA: real-time repair tool. Impressive results overall, and a fun use for AR for sure, though it seems they're not using previous frames' covering textures as hints (or not overly well). Especially visible with a heavy-noise background like where the drainage grate is, at around 1:46.

Next up: augmented reality headgear, so you don't have to see billboards while driving / hunting zombies in the real world. Or your annoying coworkers.

<comment><USER3> A real world AdBlock if you will. I want one.

<comment><USER4> Actually this is the real world adblock: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1770950>

;)

<comment><USER2> Except that that's _way_ worse (currently) than the main article's effort. Ow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well great. Now I can't even trust live video not to be censored.

I wonder how it works on non-static objects, like people? Seeing the drain removed from the sink made me think of removing faces from people. Advance it enough, and you could probably get a visual Autotune for people to make them generically attractive by removing wrinkles and whatnot. Quite useful for politics, news, etc.

<comment><USER6> Actually there is already a tool for enhancing anatomical features: "MovieReshape: Tracking and Reshaping of Humans in Videos", <http://www.mpi- inf.mpg.de/resources/MovieReshape/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It removes the box, but its reflection is still present in the mirror, which is spooky.

</comment><comment><USER8> When I was in college I wrote some software that did something sorta like this. My target was to post-process video content from TV shows with the channel logos in the corners.

My approach was to detect the logos based on rudimentary pattern-detection (mostly finding parts of the screen the didn't change over a period of time) then calculate the replacement pixel-color based on the other pixels around the edges of this logo, weighting their impact on the replacement pixels by their proximity to the pixel being calculated.

It worked reasonably well ... albeit much slower than the demo in this video ... and transparent logos were then introduced complicating the calculations. Also, sitcoms worked much better than sports. Their cameras were more stationary making detection and pixel-color replacement-calculation easier.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's re-synthesize but then for the number of frames per second, there are already re-synthesize plugins for Photoshop and Gimp so this is only a logical step up.

<comment><USER10> There is more information available, from the previous frames.

Its likely that more work is being done than just simply applying a similar algorithm to Photoshops re-synthesise to each frame.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a little bit skeptical of the process. How do you "improve" the image and still get the details back? When you downsample/blur, you lose information. Does he keep the original and splice parts of it back? If so, how does he decide which to splice where? And if it's just using pixel color statistics when you up sample, that would work on most of the single color textures in the video, but how would that work for the brick road with the drain? The seams between the bricks are directional, so there'd have to be some way to account for that.

Anyone got a good guess? (or a paper for that matter?)

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow! This reminds me of this story...

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1770950>

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm thinking this won't work as well on a background that's not plain. I want to see the same thing except with a checker board pattern in the background.

<comment><USER14> well, it would likely work on checkerboard, but not for say a marble on a bed of mixed color paperclips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've often wondered how long it will be before TV companies edit the video of sporting events to replace the adverts in the stadium with different ones they've sold themselves. Given the adverts are in fixed places it would be easy to do you'd think.

<comment><USER16> I thought this already happened, with localised adverts being shown to different audiences?

<comment><USER17> Yes, it does.

Next time you go to a (newer) baseball stadium, check out behind home plate and you'll sometimes see painted blocks where the TV cameras overlay ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> IANA graphics person but could someone help me out in understanding this?

Once the resolution of the image has been reduced, it becomes a low-res image. How do they get back the original resolution ?

Frankly, it sounds a lot like "Enhance" to me.

</comment><comment><USER19> "I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes."

</comment><comment><USER20> Hey, I know that bathroom! (I'm a student at TU Ilmenau.)

I really don't know why I didn't know that our Institute does something other than social science. Cool!

</comment><comment><USER21> there is something unnervingly Orwellian about this.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great for those videos you took on vacation last year -- with the girlfriend that didn't work out. Now she's not there any more.

I would imagine the next logical step (assuming people removal works, it was not demonstrated) would be to _add_ people to videos in realtime. Uncle Joe dead? No problem. We'll just take those videos that we had of him last Christmas and put him in our videos from this year.

While the tech is nowhere being new, the real-time nature of this really makes you think about the possibilities.

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder what could be some real world applications for this technology.</comment>


Is This Google X's Plan to Wire the World? - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-23/is-this-google-xs-plan-to-wire-the-world

<comment><USER2> I don't have any insight into how practical "antenna-balloons" are, but Google is already trying to push "Super Wifi" (white spaces) in Africa, and that might actually be the easiest way to connect most Africans by the end of this decade.</comment>


Braking Bad - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/opinion/11schmidt.html?ref=opinion

<comment><USER2> Quote from the article: " The only thing they had in common was an automatic transmission."

I have an answer to this problem: ban automatic transmissions! Now, I say this as someone who drives a stick shift and who believes that is the only Right Way to operate a car, BUT let me give a serious logical defense of this position:

1\. This would actually prevent the situation described in the article: modern cars with standard transmissions require you to depress the clutch to start the car. So if you accidently put your foot on the accelerator instead of the brake while starting, the fact that you also have to have the clutch in to start the car means that the engine is disconnected from the transmission. So instead of an out-of-control vehicle you'd merely rev the engine loudly.

2\. When driving a standard transmission car, a reaction gets burned into your brain that, any time the car does something you didn't expect, the first step in recovery is to jab your foot down on that clutch pedal. Examples: if the engine revs because you put it into the wrong gear, if the engine dies because you dumped the clutch on a hill, or when you're braking to a stop, the first thing you must do in all those situations is depress the clutch. It becomes a reflex that you don't have to think about. So I argue that anyone used to driving a stick shift is going to press the clutch and disengage the engine immediately even if, or especially if, they are in a panic situation.

3\. When you take into account the actual small number of incidents compared to the large overall population, compared to how many other ways there are to have an accident in a car that people are NOT looking at, requiring a physical modification to all car designs for the lockout pedal is a reaction out of proportion to the issue. I argue that either banning automatic transmissions or requiring a brake/accelerator pedal lockout are both outsize reactions, the difference between them is that lazy people who drive automatics would get upset over banning them, while putting in the lockout switch gives lazy people who won't learn to properly operate dangerous machines the ability to be even lazier.

At least, though, a brake/accelerator lockout switch might finally do away with those drivers who drag their brakes all the time (one foot resting on brake pedal while the other is on the accelerator).

</comment><comment><USER3> This might be an argument against continuing the legacy of having the throttle operated by a pedal. I've always felt uncomfortable continuously pressing the accelerator when driving. Is it just bad legacy UI or are there arguments in favor of operating the throttle with a foot?</comment>


Kim Dotcom's new music streaming service - <AUTHOR> http://baboom.com/ <comment><USER2> Kim Dotcom is an evil genius and a remarkable marketing guy. During his whole career no doubts he made a fortune out of other people work BUT, still, he can't be considered responsible for it because - in fact - he had MILLIONS of users who actually used the pirated content megaupload made available (and i dare anyone here to throw the first stone if they never used megaupload). So, while i'm not yet sure i like the guy, i still consider the megaupload affair a huge mistake.

What is astonishing anyway is what he made out of the whole situation. No doubt most of the people out there would have been simply destroyed by events. Not only he wasn't, but he managed to launch two different businesses that still surely has a lot to show in the future.

Regarding this specific music project, i can only say that i agree with him. Paying for the music you like IS the new model , so far he looks like one of the few who understood it (together with Spotify, which is in fact doing the same).

PS: I really like the album he made available for free.

<comment><USER3> Kimble is a fraud and an asshole. The only things he's good at are marketing and scamming. Just take a look at his history- insider trading, selling userdata from a BBS he ran to a lawyer, scamming the german telcos... the list is quite long.

He's a good marketer, but one of the worst people I've read about. There's a file of his quotes (from the CCC mailing list) circulating, if you know german you should try reading that. Really gives some insight into him. For example how that l33t hacker cred he has is all for show– I wouldn't buy anything about free speech from him either. He's only interested in money. I remember one quote from one of his teachers about how Kimble was the most antisocial kid he ever teached LOL.

TLDR: You really shouldnt like the guy, read a bit about him and you'll figure out why.

EDIT: Here's the quote file: [http://babsi.de/KIMBLE.txt](http://babsi.de/KIMBLE.txt)

<comment><USER4> _> ... a fraud and an asshole. The only things he's good at are marketing and scamming_

Are you talking about AirBnb and their Craigslist scamming?

 _> He's only interested in money._

Meanwhile venture backed start-ups are doing God's work, right?!

<comment><USER3> >Are you talking about AirBnb and their Craigslist scamming?

What? I don't even know if Kimble and AirBnB are connected...

>Meanwhile venture backed start-ups are doing God's work, right?!

If you do a Ctrl+F "venture" I'm sure you wont find any occurences in my post.

<comment><USER5> I believe he's comparing the less than above board things dotcom has done to the sidestepping of the law that AirBNB actively endorses. Basically saying that HN is all about companies like AirBNB because they hatched here while they aren't that much better when it comes to working within the law and playing by the rules. I could be mistaken though, correct me if I'm wrong yapcguy. Not saying I fully agree just trying to make sense of his post for you!

<comment><USER4> You are 100% correct.

I should have used the /sarcasm tag so zwdr didn't take me so literally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have an iTunes library of a million bajillion tracks, a habit I picked up back in the 00s when downloading an entire album (or every album!) of an artist you liked was a novel thing and turned everyone into the digital equivalent of hoarders.

And guess what? I pretty much listen to none of it anymore. My daily music dose now comes from Soundcloud, where active artists are putting up new tracks / mixes and giving the equivalent of Facebook likes to tracks that they personally enjoyed. It is a fun way of listening to music, and I often go and buy tracks on iTunes even if they are already free to download (which is the case a lot of the time).

This site has me really excited. The player is slick, the presentation is cool. Kim Dotcom's album itself is competently generic club music, which is more than can be said for a lot of club music.

Exciting!

<comment><USER7> I'm curious - do you ever use genius to 'rediscover' music from your old collection, or is it just plain better to have a broader range available?

I personally do a little of both - using either my own collection, or pandora and now iTunes Radio. I find myself using iTunes Radio more and more vs my own collection.

<comment><USER6> I actually do occasionally. Genius can make a pretty good mix from just some random song from years ago. iTunes radio isn't available here, but one of my buddies uses Grooveshark all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, never thought it would be such hate on HN against kim.com?

I think he seems to really fight for internet freedom in more ways than the angry commentators in this thread probably will ever do.

Who cares if he had a dark past. He's already been to jail for one crime in my knowledge and I think he really deserves his money.

It seems you're gonna buy the songs you want to listen to directly from artists with this new service. It can't be anything like pirating? He is really pushing it forward and completes his products with the touch of quality.

<comment><USER9> The only thing he has ever fought for is his own bank account. He doesn't have a "dark past", but an ongoing history of scamming. You can be assured that he will find the optimal way to scam both you and the artists out of as much money as possible.

<comment><USER8> Please, enlighten me. Because I have no idea of what you're talking about. Give me some proof.

All I've seen and heard is that the super fiasco on the megaupload case but that's not a fiasco for him, the users or anyone else but the governments involved.

For now, I am still a fan of Kim.com.

<comment><USER10> If I only ever read my news from sites like torrentfreak, I too would think kim was an awesome, super guy. It's not hard to diversify your news sources...

<comment><USER8> Who said that I even visit torrentfreak?

/facepalm

<comment><USER11> People don't have the same view of another person as me, lets make arguments. He is doing good things for some people for sure, because he had lots of support in his legal fight. This guy made money on peoples data? How much did facebook earn of you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Fuck Kim Dotcom. He's a scumbag piece of shit who deserves to rot in prison. He plots and schemes way to put hundreds of millions of dollars into his pocket off of the works of others. Anyone who supports him should be ashamed of themselves.

<comment><USER13> > He plots and schemes way to put hundreds of millions of dollars into his > pocket off of the works of others.

And the way the recording industry works is any different?

<comment><USER14> The recording industry at least doesn't run an underground BBS and sells out its users to law enforcement to save itself after being raided. Kimble has always been a self-centred scumbag. I really don't understand why anybody ever trust him again with anything.

<comment><USER15> You can judge someone both on their merits and vices. Both Mega and this Baboom are pretty awesome and technically amazing. I'm listening to his album right now, and it's actually really catchy and enjoyable. The man has many talents, and he is using them for good at the moment. I'd say the U.S. government is way worse than someone who is 'self-centered.' The U.S. is a war machine, Dotcom is conceited. Now who should we be concerned about, heh.

<comment><USER16> > The man has many talents, and he is using them for good at the moment. I'd > say the U.S. government is way worse than someone who is 'self-centered.'

That's akin to saying "well at least he's not killing innocent woman and children".

<comment><USER15> I mentioned the US because the charges on him are from the US government, lobbied by corporate interests.

Self-centered does not imply killing in any way, shape, or form. If you use the word akin, try not to be hyperbolic, it makes any intelligent reader immediately discard any validity you would have summoned.

<comment><USER16> The point was that perhaps we should be setting our standards a bit higher than the US government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Say what you want about Kim Dotcom, the guy is a marketing genius.

Before Megaupload he was virtually unknown out of tech/finance circles. Now my mother knows who he is. Albeit, she calls him Dotcom Internet.

<comment><USER18> No, he was not. He was, among other things, known as a fellon in a pump and dump scheme around letsbuyit.com. [http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/kimble/](http://attrition.org/errata/charlatan/kimble/)

<comment><USER19> You're suggesting that he was very well known for that scheme? Not so sure about that...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You gotta admire the guy's drive. Relentless.

The player is also quite slick. No flash, and very responsive.

<comment><USER4> The video background on the homepage packs quite the punch, really draws you in - for a minute I thought it might be some kind of WebGL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Apparently they're Portuguese! Congratulations, we sure need more startups around here :)

<comment><USER22> Yes we do.I also didn't know that they were portuguese

<comment><USER23> They weren't, I think they had to "hide" there after all the Megaupload drama.

<comment><USER24> They have numerous remote working developers across Europe. Makes sense their HQ to be there; also, in terms of taxes and etc as far as I know everything is pretty tight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like the site. Can anyone give a technical synopsis of how this has been made, perhaps the time frame and complexity of an app like this?

I'm assuming Kim hasn't coded this himself, anyone know if he outsourced to a company?

<comment><USER26> The Baboom developers page links to 2 open-source projects. One of the web pages, for Mout ([https://github.com/mout/mout](https://github.com/mout/mout)), is © linking to [http://www.millermedeiros.com/](http://www.millermedeiros.com/) so presumably he's one of the devs.

Satazor is listed as a dev on Mout and also on the other OS project on the Baboom site, Bower ([http://bower.io/](http://bower.io/)).

If you really want to know ... [http://instagram.com/p/iGuGNvLpwK](http://instagram.com/p/iGuGNvLpwK) shows pics none of which are Kimdotcom AFAICT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not sure if anyone actually listened to his album but the production on it is pretty solid. I would love to know who made most of this. It sounds like all the pop EDM garbage thats out there right now. A lot of the lyrical content is totally in that realm of meaningless phrases about life and partying. Songs like Keep Getting Better could have me fooled that it was a Rihanna song (really both of the girls Amari and Ilati sounded autotuned like her).

</comment><comment><USER28> The demo site works well and feels slick. It's a pity I had to listen to his music to try it out though.

Auto-tune is a cool technology but I liked it better when tone-deaf rich people couldn't flatly sing a poorly-written, over-produced song and call it music.

</comment><comment><USER29> Did he really just make an entire service just to not have a myspace page?

</comment><comment><USER30> It's also the release of Kim Dotcom's debut album 'Good Times', and also his 40th birthday! :)

</comment><comment><USER31> I assume he made a deal with the artists and we are not downloading illegally?

Nice design, btw the animation is maxing out my gpu.

<comment><USER32> There's nothing on the site to download other than his own album in the preview. His video implies he wants artists to upload their music for free, and fans only pay if they enjoy the work. The download tab for an album in the preview has links to iTunes, Amazon and Bandcamp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I might have missed something (if so please tell me), but the only mention of Kim Dotcom is "Check the first album ever released on Baboom, Good Times by Kim Dotcom", and it's saying what it's saying... and not that Kim Dotcom is actually behind the service.

<comment><USER34>
        We are associated with the same group behind MEGA
        (Megaupload successor as Wikipedia states), and
        responsible for the upcoming music service BABOOM.

From their recruitment document

<comment><USER32> Some more background: [http://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-teases-new-music- service-...](http://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-teases-new-music-service- baboom-130907/)

<comment><USER33> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's like a new myspace.

</comment><comment><USER36> Kim Dotcom is a maverick.

</comment><comment><USER37> Wow, Kim's album is actually pretty catchy...

</comment><comment><USER38> I used Rdio for a few months this it seems like this streaming music business model is the going to be the future..

</comment><comment><USER39> Personality-wise, he's kind of like the alter-ego of Steve Wozniak.

<comment><USER40> ha interesting...

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> The site, including the careers page, is beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER41> he can also sing ? wow

<comment><USER18> just like Silvio Berlusconi. And probably one of the Kim-Clan in northern Korea.</comment></comment>


What are the algos for differentiating and integrating functions? - <AUTHOR>

Want to code a C program for self help. <comment><USER2> There is a whole discipline in this matter. You should look for numerical analysys (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_analysis>).

Start with this and you can make algos to resolve the problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you talking about numerical or symbolic differentiation/integration? If you are talking about the numerical type, derivation is pretty straightforward: f'(x) = (f(x+epsilon) - f(x-epsilon))/(2*epsilon). If your function is regular enough, 2D integration can be done easily by the trapeze method. But you can check the link given by dudurocha.

Now if you are interested in the symbolic type, the differentiation is not too hard on Lisp, but integration is. But doing that in C must not be straightforward.

</comment><comment><USER4> You might want to refer to the book "Numerical Recipes in C."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank u everyone for ur kind rply.</comment>


Netlify CMS – An open-source CMS for Git workflows - <AUTHOR> https://www.netlifycms.org/ <comment><USER4> This will sound crazy, but I recently deployed a content management workflow for a rails app that mounts a WebDAV drive inside of a staging rails application that's running [http://sitepress.cc/](http://sitepress.cc/) (think Middleman in Rails, without all the dependencies)

If the marketing team wants to edit something, they mount the content drive, make changes using their text editor of choice, and are able to preview when they hit Save.

After they make a bunch of changes and add whatever media an engineer copies the changes off of the drive into a commit and deploys to production.

So far it's been working pretty well. The marketing and CS team are all able to edit markdown copy and run it easier through their content editing processes since it's just files. They don't need to learn or care about git. Designers can throw images in the volume without thinking too much about it.

Engineering is happy because they control their git history and commits. When it's time to optimize PNGs, compress assets, etc. the engineer can deal with and deploy to product with confidence.

We also run rspecs against every single page of content to enforce SEO, branding, etc.

Happy to answer questions or write something more detailed about it if others are interested.

<comment><USER5> That's pretty cool. What are the marketing folks using as a WebDAV client?

<comment><USER6> I do it often for my website. The unix command is sshfs remotehost:remote_dir local_dir.

How do you do it with windows 10 ?

<comment><USER7> > _The unix command is sshfs remotehost:remote_dir local_dir._

That's not WebDAV, but using SSH/SFTP. Requires extra software on windows (either an SFTP client, or if you want the filesystem integration specifically there is a version of sshfs for Windows)

Basic WebDAV support is integrated in Windows Explorer, and has been for ages, but there are alternative clients (both paid and free) as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I work on this project, and it's been a big day for us - Smashing Magazine just released a preview of its new site[0], which uses Netlify CMS as the admin interface. I'm happy to answer any questions about the project.

[0]: [https://next.smashingmagazine.com/2017/03/a-little- surprise-...](https://next.smashingmagazine.com/2017/03/a-little-surprise-is- waiting-for-you-here--meet-the-next-smashing-magazine/)

<comment><USER9> This is so close for what I am want. However, why are you using Liquid block elements

        {% section %}

And not something more writer friendly and MarkDown-style such as CommonMark's container blocks

        ::: section

This builds on the commonly used pattern of code blocks that markdown writers know and editing apps will hopefully eventually directly support

[http://spec.commonmark.org/0.26/#container-blocks-and- leaf-b...](http://spec.commonmark.org/0.26/#container-blocks-and-leaf-blocks)

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure where you're getting that `::: section` syntax from. It doesn't appear anywhere in the CommonMark spec. Container blocks in Markdown are just things like blockquotes and list items...

<comment><USER9> Look like you are correct.

I had thought the `::: section` syntax was a recommended approach (if not yet part of the formal spec).

In the past, I have used various home grown solutions to this, but recently I have been using markdown-it and the accompanying plying markdown-it-container. On the CommonMark forums, I see that the ::: syntax is a leading contender, but that CommonMark itself will not address extensions to basic markdown until after the spec reaches 1.0

[https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it- container](https://github.com/markdown-it/markdown-it-container)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pretty interesting and this is the first time I came across the term JAMStack (a concept I always had trouble in explaining to other developers).

Rendering content blocks in server and then further enhancing them on client- side using a JSON API can be how most sites will be built in future (especially, with ServiceWorkers we would be able to create more fine-grained offline experience too).

I'm also currently working on a project on similar lines, check out the initial blog post for more details - [http://www.laktek.com/2016/11/29/introducing- pragma/](http://www.laktek.com/2016/11/29/introducing-pragma/)

Edit: also loved the idea of a kanban board for edit-review-publish process. Might steal that idea ;)

<comment><USER12> Consider adding your project a list of headless cms's. I am hoping to expand the category and spread the JAM.

[https://headlesscms.org/](https://headlesscms.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've been using Netlify for over a year to host static websites on custom domains and it's been impressive to me. Their control panel and tight git integration makes for a powerful combination. Not to mention that they also introduced a free tier for custom domains that I'm now using for some sites.

This is exciting to see them work on. I'm disappointed to see that they aren't focusing on designers though. Something like RespondCMS for Netlify hosting would be a superior combo.

</comment><comment><USER14> If I follow instructions in the "Try it out"[1] link and click on "Connect to github" I end up having to giving r/w access to ALL of my github repositories.

Also, reading the Step by Step guide[2] I'd end up giving r/w access to my public keys as well.

Now, I just wake up and maybe I missed something but documentation should make it clearer that you either have to create a dedicated github account, or how to manage permission in a more granular fashion.

[1] [https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/test- drive/](https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/test-drive/)

[2] [https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/10/27/a-step-by-step- guide...](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/10/27/a-step-by-step-guide- deploying-a-static-site-or-single-page-app/)

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately, GitHub's API does not provide per-repo permissions, so in order to read/write to _any_ repo, the CMS has to get permission to read/write to _all_ of them. This is a fundamental limitation of the GitHub API [0] - we'd love to be able to request more fine-grained permissions. This is a pretty frequent complaint about _any_ application built with GitHub's API.

The r/w access to public keys is specific to setting up continuous deployment from a GitHub repo to Netlify's static hosting service. You can read more about why Netlify requests those permissions for continuous deployment here: [https://www.netlify.com/docs/github- permissions/](https://www.netlify.com/docs/github-permissions/).

While Netlify's continuous deployment is (obviously) the deployment strategy we recommend, you can use the CMS for any static site, as it's totally build/deploy agnostic. You can use the CMS to edit your content and then build that content with Hugo and host on a VPS if you wish. You can also use Netlify to host your content without continuous deployment - it supports updating content with both an in-browser interface and a REST API [1].

The CMS is entirely open source, so you're free to inspect or fork the code - you can find the repository at [https://github.com/netlify/netlify- cms/](https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/)

[0]: [https://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#scopes](https://developer.github.com/v3/oauth/#scopes)

[1]: [https://www.netlify.com/docs/api/](https://www.netlify.com/docs/api/)

<comment><USER15> What about supporting github read/write deploy keys? Those can be generated with permissions for a single repo, no?

<comment><USER16> That was my first thought, too. Why _not_ do it that way?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Looks very cool. Does this _only_ work with Github?

Unfortunately that renders it pretty much useless for me (and probably other non-Github users) if so.

<comment><USER8> Unfortunately GitHub is the only backend we've implemented so far. However, we are planning to support multiple backends, and the CMS is already architectured to do so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How does this compare to Contentful? I've been trying to combine their headless CMS with Middleman but it hasn't been that easy to use, although the experience I'm trying to create is non-standard (imagine a normal blog post but with cards inserted throughout). Plus, the cheapest paid plan is $249/month which is really hefty when compared to the competition. Their free tier does give you a good amount of features though and their admin UI is the best.

I was planning to deploy my site onto Netlify once done. Wondering if maybe your CMS is a better alternative to Contentful and I should just combine services.

<comment><USER19> Contentful is nice and since it's been around longer, it's a bit more baked. However, there's an amazing feature of static sites that are based off of local content (markdown and yaml files, for example): every aspect of your site can live in git.

Treating the content like code offers the advantage of being able to easily roll back a website to any one point in time, and I think it generally makes collaboration between designers, coders, and content editors easier.

When developing, it's really nice to just create a new branch and work on the content and design all at the same time.

The aim of this CMS is to hopefully offer the content editing experience of Contentful without requiring an external dependency, while also keeping all aspects of your site tightly integrated with your git workflow.

<comment><USER18> But the whole point of me using Contentful is that a non-developer will have an easy time editing content within Contentful vs. having to set up a local way of accessing those markdown/yml files through a git repo. Or do you somehow abstract that away?

<comment><USER20> Yeah, that would be nice to know, because that is one of the reasons I use Contentful at the moment. The source is on github and triggers Travis if I push changes, which in turn get's the content from Contentful, builds the static site with metalsmith and uploads the site through FTP. Or if the non- developer makes changes on Contentful this triggers Travis as well etc.

Works quite nice so far (especially since I didn't need to explain how to optimize the images) but would prefer a open source solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thanks for citing DatoCMS, Netlify, appreciate it :)

Really love what these guys are trying to build: critical mass over static websites. That's what we need.

<comment><USER22> +1 for DatoCMS! For simple use cases it works great and combined with Netlify makes for a great way to deploy simple static sites. Although I must say I'm pretty excited about Netlify CMS :)

<comment><USER21> Thank you michael :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> sorry, what exactly does this? Assuming one is looking for a CMS, the description on the frontpage does not tell me anything. How does it compare to other CMSes? After "Find out more" I know now that it does something with Github, but what exactly? (Also I now know that it has something to do with a JAMstack, whatever that might be.)

I am looking around for a smallish CMS, but I got no idea from the introductory pages on whether or not netlify could help me

<comment><USER8> > sorry, what exactly does this?

It's a CMS that works on static sites. Currently it primarily supports GitHub repos for storage, but the plan is to support other alternatives (it already supports pluggable backends, but the GitHub backend is the only one with significant support at this point).

> How does it compare to other CMSes?

\- It doesn't require a database - it works on static files.

\- It doesn't handle building or serving websites - just editing their content.

\- It has a built-in editorial workflow, which allows you to manage publishing and reviewing entries in a sophisticated manner (it uses Git repositories to do this, currently through the GitHub API), where "publishing" means pushing to a specific branch - you're free to build and deploy your website with any tooling you want.

\- It supports arbitrary content types and build tools, by allowing you to describe your content in a config file.

\- It is itself usable as a simple set of static files - its entire functionality is implemented as a JS application, so there's no server support required to host it beyond serving files. You can also use it as an npm module for more complex workflows (such as adding custom extensions to the CMS).

> After "Find out more" I know now that it does something with Github, but > what exactly?

The current primary backend for Netlify CMS is the GitHub API. This means that it allows you to store your files in a GitHub repo, connect Netlify CMS to it, and it will use that repo to store your changes. A build system could then pull that repo to deploy your site. The CMS itself is entirely build and deploy agnostic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wish people would actually use open protocols instead of private APIs, at least in cases where both seem to be available.

As far as I can see, the only feature this needs that only github provides is pull requests – omitting those would still leave you with a useful CMS, and the information could also be communicated in, for example, branch names. That way, you could conceivably use any client you want to work on the repo.

So instead of implementing Gitlab next, why not make it work with git?

This situation reminds me of email clients and libraries, many of whom now use private APIs of a bunch of providers instead of SMTL and IMAP.

</comment><comment><USER25> I work at buttercms.com and we are huge fans of Netlify and how easy they've made hosting static websites and SPAs. This CMS looks awesome and it is clever how it hooks into Github.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm looking to create a back office for a consultancy company. Typical data like clients, users, billing, etc. It seems like Netlify CMS would allow me to create custom collections and data types correct? So instead of pages and posts, I'd could have clients, users, invoices, etc.

<comment><USER8> Yes - the CMS allows you to specify custom content types using the config (example at [0]), which can have a variety of fields. There's a variety of built-in fields, and you can create your own as well [1].

That said, the focus of the CMS team is mostly on online publishing right now - we're trying to make editing static sites accessible enough for everyday users and featureful enough for large publications. I'd love to hear more about your use case and what you were thinking about using Netlify CMS for - you can reply here, raise an issue at [https://github.com/netlify/netlify- cms/](https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/), or contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you'd like to speak privately.

[0]: [https://github.com/netlify/netlify- cms/blob/master/example/c...](https://github.com/netlify/netlify- cms/blob/master/example/config.yml)

[1]: [https://github.com/netlify/netlify- cms/blob/master/docs/exte...](https://github.com/netlify/netlify- cms/blob/master/docs/extending.md)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I was literally gearing up to build something almost exactly like this this week as my own hackathon project. I needed a blog and I don't wanna do static site generation on command line. I may still do it, but dang, way to take the wind out of my sails. :P

</comment><comment><USER28> Seems like a neat idea, I have not yet found a good example of the output that this generates on github.

I've used prismic.io and other such systems in the past, all wonderful. I'm glad to see this is evolving in other ways.

<comment><USER8> The output is very flexible - you can define entry types as collections of "widgets", which would include stuff like a title, a cover image, a markdown body, etc. It's designed so you can use it as a CMS for almost any static site generator by defining how your data looks in the config - <USER2> [https://github.com/netlify/netlify- cms/blob/master/example/c...](https://github.com/netlify/netlify- cms/blob/master/example/config.yml) for an example config (this is a configuration for the in-memory, non-persistent backend which we use for testing and demonstration).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Minor nitpick on the screencast; when clicking save, it took 4-6 seconds for it to complete and then load another page? That's not the best way to show of your CMS and instantly makes me fear what will happen if I have a lot of content in there.

<comment><USER8> Netlify CMS is a single-page app, so the delay you're seeing is the wait for an external API to respond that the entry has saved succesfully - you wouldn't want to leave the page only to find out that your changes weren't saved. When using the in-memory backend (which doesn't persist changes), saving happens with no such delay. Since the delay is almost entirely from the network and external API, it shouldn't get worse with lots of files unless the external API takes longer to respond. Our current primary backend is the GitHub API, which handles lots of files without much change in response time in my experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Surprised in all this that no one has mentioned www.cloudcannon.com - <USER3> with Jekyll and allows our marketing group to make live edits on the website while maintaining the whole thing on Github.

</comment><comment><USER31> When CMS is not Conversational Monitor System...

</comment><comment><USER32> Great idea, definitely going to try it out

</comment><comment><USER33> So this does not work with gitlab, right?

<comment><USER8> Not yet - there's an issue [0] for that in the GitHub repository [1].

[0]: [https://github.com/netlify/netlify- cms/issues/57](https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms/issues/57)

[1]: [https://github.com/netlify/netlify- cms](https://github.com/netlify/netlify-cms)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How does user management work?

</comment><comment> m-j-fox Dumb question: what is a CMS?

<comment><USER35> Content management system</comment></comment>


The Datacenter as a Computer: Designing Warehouse-Scale Machines - <AUTHOR> https://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/10.2200/S00874ED3V01Y201809CAC046 <comment><USER2> It was this paper and John Wilkes' talk at QCon Lon 2015 on Borg/Omega that helped me understand the architecture and motivation behind K8S, Mesos, Spark and so on.

It's a good paper and definitely worth the read.

<comment><USER3> It's actually a book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is an expanded version in case you were wondering:

>The third edition reflects four years of advancements since the previous edition and nearly doubles the number of pictures and figures. New topics range from additional workloads like video streaming, machine learning, and public cloud to specialized silicon accelerators, storage and network building blocks, and a revised discussion of data center power and cooling, and uptime.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone have this? Is it worth the $60?

<comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to pdf: [https://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdf/10.2200/S00874ED3V01Y...](https://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdf/10.2200/S00874ED3V01Y201809CAC046)

You can download it via the parent link too. The link to ^^ is somewhere on the right.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I protect myself as a cofounder? - <AUTHOR> I am the sole tech cofounder in a team of 3. Our business is going well and there are no tangible signs of trouble yet, however since the other two cofounders are close personal friends I feel a fairly high level of personal risk. Specifically, if our business reaches profitability and/or receives funding my value as a "programmer" becomes very low - I could easily be substituted with a better developer for a few hundred K per year (being generous).
We have a fairly bottom-heavy vesting schedule, and our current agreement on paper states that two out of three cofounders are required for an expulsion. In addition, as the "non-business" cofounder I do not have as close of a relationship with our contracted lawyers as the other guys. So I am essentially trusting my entire stake in the company I have built over a year to the goodwill of my cofounders.
What steps can I take to reduce my personal risk? The natural answer is "don't get involved with cofounders you don't trust 100%" - in a perfect world this is true, but in reality I think it's reasonable to take the steps I can to protect myself, and I would like advice on what these are. <comment><USER2> * Talk to a lawyer

* Have everything written

* Do you have a >30% of equity?

* Talk to a lawyer

<comment><USER3> Not just "a lawyer" but _your_ lawyer. The company's lawyer is _not_ your lawyer, it is the company's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't started a company before, but I've seen several stories on HN similar to the OP. Wouldn't someone have some sort of 1/N share of the company as long as you work X years contingency? I also suppose you'd have a clause saying that if you left before the vesting cliff due to "expulsion" you'd be awarded your prorated amount of equity.

Sounds crazy anyone would agree to anything else.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think there's much you can do except make it riskier in your partners' eyes to get rid of you. Become indispensable.

This is totally anecdotal but I remember from an early season of Survivor that there was a contestant who cooked for everyone so nobody wanted to vote them off the island. I think some of that tribal thinking applies to business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah this is my general thinking too. Any suggestions on specific ways to do this as a developer?

<comment><USER5> The only thing I can think of is using a technology that would be difficult or costly to hire for. Of course this would be morally dubious if it doesn't align with the goals of the business but if it does produce some material benefit it could be a win-win. At any rate, I think you would be treading a fine line and anything beyond this could potentially amount to sabotaging the business and you definitely don't want that.</comment></comment></comment>


Mega-Trees Are the New Weapon Against Climate Change - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/mega-trees-are-the-new-weapon-against-climate-change <comment><USER2> Do they drop mega-seeds?</comment>