Ask HN: Is HN webpage's width wider than before? - <AUTHOR>

I use clearly to read comments. Today I just realized I have to scroll horizontally, and very much. It makes me to check the site's real width, seemed wider but , is it ture or just my illusion? <comment><USER2> Might be related to that security update from Microsoft that disables OpenType fonts [http://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/forum/windows_7-w...](http://answers.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_update/security-update-kb2753842-corrupts- all-open-type/83e0395d-5980-44e2-ae8c-dd771c761e05)

<comment><AUTHOR> actually, It's on Mac not on Windows.

I measured the width of site, that is 1074 px (more | less) , at least that is on my screen.

here is some snapshot: <http://grab.by/iq1c>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't think so - HN seems to be pretty responsive when the browser is resized anyway.

I've seen this happen if comments have an excessively long line in them, that would cause the scroll (I think in a code block).

<comment><AUTHOR> maybe you are right

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks the same for me...</comment>


Ask HN: Securing IoT Device - <AUTHOR> I'm building an IoT product that basically sends the data from a single sensor over the web. Since it's so simple, I'm planning on building no over-the-air update functionality, and the device will store no data. Is this enough to consider the device secure? <comment><USER2> I doubt it - but "secure" is a very broad term without context. Without knowing the type of data being sent, and whether the overall collection over time could be insecure, you also have the underlying operating environment. Most sensors utilize a version of linux, Bluetooth low energy, or wi-fi, all of which have security risks. Also, if you have any accessible ports [usb, network] they are prone to physical attacks. Hope it helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

There are no ports. There's only a serial bootloader, but in operation there's nothing plugged in.

The device does connect to the internet via WiFi, but only once every 12 hours for about 3 seconds and then it shuts down.

<comment><USER2> That is definitely a very low security risk footprint then; especially if it's an outbound request (eg: outbound GET / POST, etc). No physical ports of anytype (BLE, USB, etc) also makes it a very low risk. So you're ahead of easily 99.999% of all sensors

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> no telnet? no SSH? Probably OK then.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.</comment></comment>


Google Code Jam 2015 has begun - <AUTHOR> https://code.google.com/codejam/contest/6224486/dashboard

<comment><USER2> I'm stuck on the pancake problem. I can't find the error in my output.

Input: [http://paste.ofcode.org/VQvSyq2bF8SCxxRu2uSjgu](http://paste.ofcode.org/VQvSyq2bF8SCxxRu2uSjgu)

Output: [http://paste.ofcode.org/LKpMbPCd4S7wGfDRzugg6n](http://paste.ofcode.org/LKpMbPCd4S7wGfDRzugg6n)

Can anybody please run it through your solution and tell me where my output is wrong?

<comment><USER3> I am getting exactly the same output as you for that input and I also am having trouble finding an error.

<comment><USER2> I really hope it's not some formatting bullshit like a newline at the end.

EDIT:

I just tried again without a blank line at the end, and still got INCORRECT.

Second attempt data:

Input: [http://paste.ofcode.org/jCNBZw6vPJT7ryZA4GUziM](http://paste.ofcode.org/jCNBZw6vPJT7ryZA4GUziM)

My incorrect output: [http://paste.ofcode.org/eNx74e35rqF54Uvm5bRa8K](http://paste.ofcode.org/eNx74e35rqF54Uvm5bRa8K)

<comment><USER4> Ran both your inputs and get exactly the same results, also can't figure out where's the error. Apparently there's some edge case when you should use different strategy than splitting it in 2 equal piles.

<comment><USER2> Finally solved it. Apparently splitting in half isn't always the optimal step, sometimes you have to move a different amount.

Example:

9 3 3

6 3 3 3

3 3 3 3 3

2 2 2 2 2

1 1 1 1 1</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Approximate search for LaTeX formulae - <AUTHOR> http://scattered-thoughts.net/one/1291/799313/731344

<comment><USER2> His distance based near neighbor search algorithm is good but as I noted in an email to him it performs at worst in O(|T|) distance computations where |T| is the size of his text corpus. While this is fine, you can do better if you use distance based indexing methods. Such methods will give you O(log_{k}(|T|)) distance computations to find the nearest neighbor. Where the k depends on the index structure used. For the simplest structures, such as a vp-tree or gh- tree, k is 2. However, for more advanced structures such as Bozkaya and M. Ozsoyoglu's MVP Tree or Sergey Brin's (yes that Brin) GNAT, k can be much higher.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bear in mind that I have not one large corpus but ~8m short formulae. The filtering stage removes most of these in O(L log N + KL) time, where K is the number of results which match one or more fragments, N is the number of formulae and L is the maximum formula length. In practice K is about 3x the actual result set. So yes, in the worst case this is O(T) but in practice the performance is very good.

I've used a variety of spatial index trees in previous versions but this method improved perfomance by 80-100x on typical input. I think the main problem is that the equation space has an incredibly high dimension and the vast majority of pairs of formulae have no elements in common so most comparisons give you little information.

<comment><USER2> Good experimental results! The high dimensionality (or non dimensionality) of the space can definitely hurt performance of spatial trees such as R-Trees, however for distance trees what really kills you is the the metric to compute the distance. There can be a couple of problems with it: 1) if it takes a long time to compute that will obviously hurt you, 2) if the variance is low or if some distances are meaningless the tree will be mishapped.

I was thinking as I was going over the article again that you could represent you formulae as trees instead of strings. This might yield more accurate/interesting distances. I recently used the PQ-gram distance[1] to compare subsets of ASTs with great success. PQ-gram is a really fast approximation of tree edit distance. I also tried using exact edit distance with the Zhang-Shasha algorithm[2], but in general the PQ-gram was so much faster the greater accuracy of ZSS didn't matter.

[1] [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.149....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.149.7933) [2] <https://github.com/timtadh/zhang-shasha>

<comment><AUTHOR> > ... if the variance is low ...

Yes, thats a better way of putting it. The variance is so low that the tree always ended up very deep. I put a lot of effort into tuning bucket sizes etc but in the end it just didn't work out.

> ... you could represent you formulae as trees instead of strings ...

For some definitions of edit distance, the edit distance between two trees is equivalent to the Levenshtein distance between the in-order traversals of the trees. In any case, the tree structure of LaTeX itself tends to be quite flat and non-useful and the the tree structure of the equations themselves is hard to derive in general. ArXMLiv is working on this, among others, but its still a hard research problem. If I could get my hands on the tree structure I would be doing more sophisticated searches than edit distance, cf hoogle and uniquation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I would love to give proper attribution for this algorithm, but I can't remember for the life of me where I found it. This is the 4th major redesign of the core search algorithm and the first that I've been happy with.</comment>


A Space Shuttle on the Streets of Los Angeles - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/10/a-space-shuttle-on-the-streets-of-los-angeles/100386/ <comment><USER2> Those pictures are surreal! I especially liked the "Shuttle X-ing" sign.</comment>


Elon Musk: Bitcoin Has 'Quite Brilliant' Structure, Paper Money Is Going Away - <AUTHOR> https://cointelegraph.com/news/elon-musk-bitcoin-has-quite-brilliant-structure-paper-money-is-going-away <comment><USER2> > "[...] paper money is going away, and crypto is a far better way to transfer > value than pieces of paper, that's for sure."

I don't know why he's comparing cryptocurrencies to paper money. Government- issued money is mostly transferred and stored electronically, not with banknotes and coins, and I'm sure he knows this. Is he also including checks?

</comment><comment><USER3> Full interview (relevant part starts at 25:30): [https://ark- invest.com/research/podcast/elon-musk-podcast](https://ark- invest.com/research/podcast/elon-musk-podcast)</comment>


American Indian tribes thwarted in efforts to get coronavirus data - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/11/native-american-coronavirus-data-314527 <comment> y-c-o-m-b From down-playing the threat of COVID-19 in the early stages to the mixed messaging on mask effectiveness and the timidly inconsistent guidelines for managing the outbreak, I've lost trust in both the WHO and the CDC. This issue only erodes that trust further. I fear the erosion in trust between the public and public health agencies is causing permanent damage in our abilities to mitigate future disasters. I have the same distrust for social services that purportedly protect kids from abuse yet turn kids over to abusive foster parents. There's zero accountability for the damage these events contribute to and if you ask the people in charge they just shrug their shoulders.

<comment><USER2> How did WHO downplay the threat of the virus?

They've pretty consistently given good advice on how to handle the outbreak, and countries that have done the things they've emphasized (notably, test, trace and isolate) have done well.

<comment><USER3> They have been worse than useless. There was a point where they told the public that masks don't help. And recently one of their leaders said that "asymptotic transmission is rare" which is a deadly lie. It was retracted, but incalculable damage is done by these mixed, inconsistent messages.

<comment><USER4> Did the WHO and CDC say "Masks will not help." or did they say "We don't yet know whether or not masks will help."?

<comment><USER5> They specifically said "There is no evidence that mask use reduces transmission." ...despite a 2003 SARS WHO study showing a 65% reduction in community transmission even with basic surgical masks.

The conspiracy people say it's because they wanted to protect mask supplies - but most people just blame incompetence.

<comment><USER2> Which study are you referring to?

I can only find one paper by the WHO from 2003 that discusses the effectiveness of masks in reducing transmission of SARS.[1] The paper says that because many different social distancing and hygiene measures were taken at the same time, it is impossible to assess how effective each individual measure was. For example, the abstract states,

> The independent effectiveness of measures to "increase social distance" and > wearing masks in public places requires further evaluation.

I found plenty of papers that find that mask use by healthcare workers in hospitals is effective, but that's not the same as what you're claiming.

1\. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3329045/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3329045/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems to be the case of non-recognization of tribal epidemiology centers by the CDC as being public health organisations. Who makes this seemingly binary decision as to which entity falls under the "public" sector or not? Shouldn't this be already well-documented which entites fall under which jurisdiction?

"The tribal epidemiology centers were originally created to coordinate public health efforts between tribes and state and federal agencies. And under the Affordable Care Act, the centers are considered public health authorities on a par with state health departments and federal agencies such as the CDC. But Abigail Echo-Hawk, the director of the Urban Indian Health Institute, told POLITICO that the CDC has so far rebuffed the centers' requests — telling her only that the data is nonpublic."

<comment><USER7> The US government seems to recognize tribal organizations as sovereign or not based on their whims at the moment, usually to the tribes disadvantage.

<comment><USER8> That's the real systemic racism. It's even more glaring since it happens on their land.

<comment><USER9> Please don't discount other other groups experiencing systemic racism. This is another example of systemic racism, but it's not any more or less real than systemic racism against people of color.

<comment><USER10> I see what you're saying, and without GP disclosing exactly what kind of systemic racism is not "true", I agree with your objection, but it might have been an unfortunate way of wording.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Actual article is linked there: [https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/11/native-american- cor...](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/11/native-american-coronavirus- data-314527)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm a Canadian citizen in Alberta. I made a freedom of information request for some aggregate statistics, and got a response from the agency indicating that the information wouldn't be available for several months, allegedly due to a "high volume of requests".

From my perspective, if the information is delivered months after being relevant, it's the same as denying the request.

In general, it seems like "public institutions" don't act like they're beholden to the public. They act just like private institutions whose primary concern is self-preservation.

<comment><USER5> It's not like they can just take your one request and push it to the head of the line because you say it's urgent.

Everyone gets their turn.

<comment><USER13> That was not the original commenter's point at all. Doing things in sequence is fine. Doing things so slowly as to be useless is not.

<comment><USER5> You are assuming malicious intent in the duration of the backlog - which is not the case.

FOIA requests routinely take months and/or years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Federal Indian trust responsibility" seems to be the term of art. Like with the South Dakotan governor's opinions on tribal Covid checkpoints, I'd expect the CDC to become more cooperative after they've consulted counsel.

</comment><comment><USER15> Health data related to Native Americans is already highly undercounted and incomplete as compared to other groups. This continued surpression of their ways of living is sad to watch. When NA's already have little trust in Western medicine, this action by the CDC will do nothing more than erode that relationship further.</comment>


What Writing and Selling Software Was Like in the 80s - <AUTHOR> http://thecodist.com/article/what_writing_and_selling_software_was_like_in_the_80_39_s

<comment><USER2> I had a game company in '82 for Commodore VIC-20 and C-64 home computers. We sold our games on cassette tape, had to contract printers for the cassette labels and the package sleeves, and then myself and my partner heat sealed each one by hand. One of our games had a memory issue, as the memory was re- organized between two manufacturing runs of the VIC-20, so we printed the series of PEEKS and POOKS necessary to get the game to run after loading in our magazine ads - and it did not appear to impact sales. Made some money, but being "dumb kids" (17 years old) we went bankrupt. That experience gave me focus during my undergrad.

<comment><USER3> That sounds way professional!

ZX81 game programmer here. A game shop said they'd stock it, but I was too exhausted from finishing the game to deal with the "business side" of arranging duplicating tapes, professional labels etc. (I didn't realize you could just do them one-by-one, by hand. Start small.) But it did get me a programming job at a games company (the interviewer later told me he didn't think a game that good was even possible on a ZX81).

Business side is important. Good to learn at 15.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I can really recommend Jordan Mechner's Karateka and Prince of Persia journals for a look into game development in the 80s.

Every time I read one I come away energized with the same passion for creating something unique.

Edit for link: [http://jordanmechner.com/ebook/](http://jordanmechner.com/ebook/)

<comment><USER5> Two more game development diaries, from Andrew Braybrook (the 'Carmack' of that time!), who wrote Paradroid and Morpheus for the C64:

[http://www.zzap64.co.uk/zzap3/para_birth01.html](http://www.zzap64.co.uk/zzap3/para_birth01.html)

[http://www.zzap64.co.uk/mentalprocre.html](http://www.zzap64.co.uk/mentalprocre.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it was easier at that time to get a good, pretty complete picture of underlying hardware and software. A kid could do that. Many of us did :-P. It was an incomplete picture, because it was not including, say, algorithms used in BIOS/OS. Or, say physics of the underlying semiconductor technology. But from the engineering standpoint, yes. It was a full picture. Think this way, a complete IBM PC manual was a very readable, pretty thin book which included a complete description of 8086 processor, hardware and APIs (BIOS). And K&R was another pretty thin book, which gave enough to start hacking away and get you pretty close to the point when you could develop code that is genuinely useful to someone! And with that comes an opportunity to start actually selling that genuinely useful software (and hardware).

I think now, it is maybe easier to get started writing something, but it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible to get the complete picture. Many components are designed using technologies that require PhD level understanding - basically being current with modern research in computer science. And that comes with a very heavy baggage of scientific notation and ability to work with research papers. Definitely not approachable by 8-year- olds :-/ And I'm not sure if one just can be a good engineer without having that kind of understanding of underlying technologies. Sorry kids :(

</comment><comment><USER7> Demo of Trapeze by the author: [http://archive.org/details/Business1987_3?start=660](http://archive.org/details/Business1987_3?start=660)

<comment><USER8> Possibly more interesting... start the video from the beginning and they're talking about software patents. The same points were being brought up then as now.

But yes. Good video! Cheers!

<comment><USER9> I think they're actually talking about copyright. Apple famously lost a big copyright infringement "look and feel" case against Microsoft, partially on the grounds that software can't be copyrighted. This was one of the catalysts for the switch to patents as a means of defending software novelty.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer%2C_Inc._v._Micro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer%2C_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp).

<comment><USER10> Another interesting case during roughly the same period was Lotus vs. Borland in which, in this case, the court basically found that it was OK to imitate another program's menu layout and contents. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Int...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Dev._Corp._v._Borland_Int'l,_Inc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My uncle was friends with some guys who set up a small game shop in Michigan in... 1982? They had some text adventure games, and were branching out in to video games for C64 at that time. They were called Aardvark Software in... White Lake Township, I think. My dad and uncle took me out to meet them at their 'office' \- a small house/shack with a whole mess of computers. I don't remember much of the visit, but the idea that people could just sit around and work on games was inspiring, as run down as the house was ;)

IIRC there was a cassette tape duplication machine, but that may just be a foggy memory. I seem to remember a lot of cassettes in plastic baggies, and there were some 5.25" floppy disks in baggies as well.

Right around that time they put out 'Pacacuda', a PacMan variation with a barracuda/fish angle. My uncle was angling to have them call it 'Fish Lips', but they stuck with Pacacuda.

Not sure what happened to them after that.

</comment><comment><USER12> > _Now in those days when you almost never sent out patch disks; generally you > had to wait 6-8 months to ship a new version and you had to charge the > customer for the update. Trapeze only needed one floppy but Deltagraph > shipped on something like 10 disks. Paying for hundreds of thousands of > disks is expensive; add to that printing of manual updates and boxes and > shipping and you never did this casually. So the version we sent to the > duplicators had to be perfect and live for months. I was always the final > arbiter of what shipped. Thankfully we never had an issue with either 4 > versions of Trapeze or the 5 of Deltagraph._

      We never had an issue (with a shipped version)

Damn, this is really impressive.

<comment><USER13> Now imagine if this was not "really impressive", but the norm today. Things would be so much better if we'd no longer need constant patches-upon-patches to fix what _should 've been fixed before release_ (while sometimes introducing _new_ bugs), and users would spend more time doing useful work with the software instead of fighting it.

As the article notes, this is all possible with a minimal of tools and resources, so I think it's all a matter of mentality. Today we have access to so much information and tools, machines that are several orders of magnitude more powerful, huge bureaucracies of development practices for assuring quality, "safer" programming languages, and yet... it feels to me like software quality today hasn't really improved much if at all.

<comment><USER14> No. Errors in production have become more common because they have become _much_ more tolerable (cheaper and faster to fix), and (apart from the massively increased feature scope and complexity of the environment) tolerating errors (that are soon fixed) gets you more features and shorter time-to-market.

Users value software that does more and is available _now_ more than software that is perfect, but does less and comes out next year.

<comment><USER15> Users value software that works. The driving forces behind featuritis have very little to do with what users want.

<comment><USER16> Users come up with feature requests all the time. Featuritis is exactly what the users ask for.

<comment><USER17> What users ask for is not necessarily what they want. A good designer listens to what users say, but doesn't follow them to the letter.

('Twas the night before Christmas variation on this topic: [http://www.daclarke.org/Humour/sware- engr.html](http://www.daclarke.org/Humour/sware-engr.html))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I feel like I missed out on the personal computer marketplace of the 80s/90s -- I had a Mac in 1990, but I got VMS and UNIX shells slightly before, so the Mac was really just a terminal (and at one point, I actually replaced it with a dumb terminal to do dialup since the screen was bigger, and then a 386 running 386BSD.

MUDs, stuff like XTrek, and the general requirement that things be non- commercial (to fit within NSFnet guidelines) was really different from the small-computer marketplace happening at the same time. There were definitely commercial packages, but my only real contact with that kind of stuff was commercial OS and vendor support contracts for big machines I had shared accounts on (e.g. Sun support contracts, and some packages being harder to get than others).

There was a period in the mid to late 1990s when it was an NT vs. Linux (well, UNIX in general, but mostly Linux by then) question -- NT 3.51 and 4.0 became viable. But, before that, the high-end timeshare world and the small-computer world were totally separate.

<comment><USER19> Don't forget the NT vs OS/2 wars.... that was far more brutal in those days.

<comment><USER20> Ah, this MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics, and I do have bad words against MS for it. Remember "Microsoft Munchkins" for example?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This reminds me of the book, The Masters Of Doom.

John Carmack, et al. Had to be quite creative on the programming side of things.

</comment><comment><USER22> As far as selling the biggest difference between now and then was back then software could only be shipped on floppy disks, so it was more like manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping physical merchandise.

<comment><USER7> I do recall some companies having BBSs however where you could download updates, and other utilities. This would be around 1987.

<comment><USER10> Right. Although it wouldn't have been practical for software that filled multiple floppies, by around the late eighties it was pretty normal to have drivers and the like available through BBSs. I don't recall most companies operating their own systems but this type of software was widely available through private BBSs--whether totally legally or otherwise. (It did seem to take a while for many companies to realize that they probably shouldn't make it hard for their customers to obtain the software needed to use the product they sold.)

Shareware was also widely available on BBSs by around that time although it was also distributed on floppies at Computer shows and the like. When I had a small shareware company starting in the mid-eighties the process of taking orders was still very manual--most orders came by mail with a check and I sent back a floppy (which I reproduced myself) in a mailer with or without hardcopy docs depending upon if those had been ordered or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> When we talk about making programming accessible to kids (or anyone new to it), I think of how selling and distributing software is different now than it used to be. Webapps and app stores make it easy to reach thousands or millions of customers, but what's the modern equivalent of a kid writing something in BASIC (or VB) and selling a few copies to friends, parents, local businesses, etc.?

Some kind of Ruby/Tk/SQLite bundle that produced a universal executable (say, mac, win, lin) would be cool, I think.

<comment><USER24> I cut my teeth writing websites using PHP and MySQL, mostly around a computer game I used to play. I got a few thousand hits in the first year and plenty of nice email so I kept going with it and eventually studied software development at uni and have spent the last 15 years working as a developer.

I actually knew a heap of kids around my age (I started at around 15) who I met through my website who did the same thing and many of them also became developers or designers too.

I don't know if the web is still as accessible as it was back then when you could get free hosting somewhere like Geocities if you were just starting out, but I think HTML and javascript are a really nice starting point because it's fairly easy to cobble together something that works and you can get a fairly long way just by trying to make whatever you built just that little bit better. The web is also a good place to learn about the web, particularly since in those days it was easy to view source on anything I saw that I didn't know how to do myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Well, at least nerds had to get out of their basement back then;)

</comment><comment><USER19> I remember typing programs in by hand from magazines. At that time, debugging meant tracking down your typing errors, not debugging actual code.

<comment><USER26> the "64er" magazine (from Germany) even had checksum programs when typing in programs by hand (one for Basic code and one for machine language).

So you could be pretty sure that your programs worked afterwards.

Nothing beat the feeling to type a program and then finding out that the game sucked.

But in one of the magazines there was a drum computer for the C64, which was pretty cool (forgot its name).

<comment><USER27> Yeah, I spent hours copying these programs to the computer. I remember one huge machine program listing (I think it was for a graphics program) that had a line with a wrong checksum printed. Without a correct checksum, you couldn't go on typing. So I changed one of the hex values until the line passed... The final program was kinda buggy but I never knew whether my change was responsible for one of the bugs or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> [https://archive.org/details/1993-04-compute- magazine](https://archive.org/details/1993-04-compute-magazine)

Page 159 is one of the later reviews. Interesting to see you couldn't search for anything back then either without seeing ads for porn.

</comment><comment><USER29> I love hearing these kinds of stories. It makes me appreciate how much easier it is to ship and build software nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER30> Shareware was a great increment from the publisher model. And then of course, AppStore is the real game changer.

<comment><USER31> I think internet was the real game changer. Once bandwidth got good enough for downloading software, it got easier to sell and patch anything. I can't imagine living 7-8 months without patches.

AppStore is definitely a step up, but it may be too crowded.

<comment><USER32> I agree. Before any "AppStore", there were countless avenues to getting software. Plus, software finally got online "profiles" so to speak that allowed people to learn more about it before purchasing/downloading.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> windows 3.0 came out in 1990, not 1992</comment>


People who care most about politics have least understanding of their opponents - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/americas-most-educated-engaged-citizens-are-making-politics-worse/ <comment><USER2> Take this with a grain of salt: it's based on a study by a group called More in Common [1], which exists explicitly to spread information that supports this conclusion.

[1] [https://www.moreincommon.com](https://www.moreincommon.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> If they are really educated, that means knowing both sides of the story, not just what the echo chamber feeds you.

<comment><USER3> "In other words, the more you pay attention to political media, the less likely you are to understand the true beliefs of your political opponents."

Paying attention to political media does not make you educated.

<comment><USER4> "First Things" [https://www.firstthings.com](https://www.firstthings.com) provides an authentic and sympathetic view into conservative thought. Regrettably, Fox News appears to have more influence, and in the handful of hours I've spent with that it was an abyss of greed and hatred.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The report itself (skip National Review's explainer, since their writers and editors are the worst people in the entire world) is here: [https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a70a7c3010027736a227...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a70a7c3010027736a22740f/t/5d101028495118000181fad6/1561333806922/The+Perception+Gap.pdf)

At first blush the paper itself doesn't look very interesting. Everything in the paper hinges on its use of the term "extreme views," which in their usage is about perception and has nothing to do with the objective reality of what constitutes an extreme view (pp. 56-67).

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a good rebuttal to the study:

[https://twitter.com/jbenton/status/1142891539598852102](https://twitter.com/jbenton/status/1142891539598852102)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not unlike sports or wrestling fans. Do they want to hear and consider strong arguments for their villain? Not so much.

<comment><USER8> That's the problem. People are applying the template for being a sports fan to politics. In sports it's OK to be a blind believer or believe nonsense but in politics this is very damaging . I have wished before that some people who are into partisan politics would cheer for a sports team instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It seems time for a centrists rebellion. If someone is good at Twitter it's a proxy for relatively extreme beliefs.

<comment><USER8> Being extreme gives people a lot of energy so these activists put a lot of effort into lobbying for their view. It's hard to get centrists fired up to fight for their beliefs with the same intensity.</comment></comment>


Vine: A new way to share video - <AUTHOR> http://blog.twitter.com/2013/01/vine-new-way-to-share-video.html

<comment><USER2> It's interesting that picture sharing is so popular and ubiquitous and yet the problem of sharing the natural extension, videos or clips, has proven to be surprisingly elusive over the last few years. What is the missing component?

I think it's not any one big thing, it's several small things and details that have to align in just the right ways for adoption. For example, the sharing needs to be fast, the videos need to play right away without any action (like GIFs), there must be some fun component to it (usually in form of an arbitrary limitation that challenges creativity), the design must be clean and functional, and it needs to integrate well with existing services.

Vine has a checkmark next to all of those. The idea isn't particularly novel, but the execution is great and the Twitter integration helps. I particularly like the mechanic of recording only while a thumb is down. This might just be fun enough for me to use.</comment>


Microsoft is pushing users and vendors to Macs and Linux - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-is-pushing-users-and-vendors-to-macs-and-linux-7000002280/

<comment><USER2> Pure link bait.

Switch to Mac because MS is making their own (non-exclusive) hardware? Really? Has this guy forgotten the OS/hardware deal that you get with Apple?

Windows 8 is dead because enterprises aren't planning to upgrade? Most just got to Windows 7, they don't like change, so they'll stay there for another 5-10 years.

I doubt the writer believes anything he's written, but this is the nature of tech "journalism".

<comment><USER3> Is it somewhat realistic to assume enterprise IT is increasingly becoming irrelevant when it comes to the desktop?

I mean, how insane is it when people have to work with technology on their job they've ditched 5-10 years ago at home for being too outdated to be even be give away? There comes a point where enterprise IT loses all credibility.

At this pace, during my lifetime homeless people in third world countries will have phones that are more modern and powerful computers than office workers will have at their desk. The practices enterprise IT currently still holds on to don't seem sustainable to me.

<comment><USER4> How often do you get a new stapler?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree with this. I am not sure if I see a compelling reason why Win8 on desktop should take off for businesses. It will be a transitionary version just like how Vista was.

Windows 8 tablets? Same story. Why would I as a consumer want to spend $600 to get a tablet with so many unknowns? What does it provide that the iPad currently does not provide? I keep wanting to find a good set of reasons but I can't. You just know what your $500-600 is getting you when you go to iPad and Android. Unless MS lowers the price point to $150-200 it will be a tough sell in my opinion.

The software side of things are very different though. Being a .NET developer for years (after coming from UNIX) I find myself using Java and open source languages more and more often.

If you are an ISV/entrepreneur I am just not sure if it is a good idea to bet the future of your organization on Microsoft's mercy. They keep changing languages/platforms like they change clothes lately.

Nonetheless, the next three-four years will be fun to watch.

<comment><USER6> "get a tablet with so many unknowns?"

There will be 0 unknowns a month after they get released. There are unknowns now because it is an unreleased product. Using that as a point against the success of the system is moronic.

<comment><USER7> Are you sure? iOS has 5 years in the market and plenty of apps, Android 4 years and also plenty of apps. Both have matured and you probably know a geek or two who use them and can answer your questions. Windows 8 will be a newcomer with less apps at your disposal and probably no geek nearby to ask questions. Lots of unkowns for me.

Face it, they are really late in the game this time.

<comment><USER8> For business use, how many apps do you need? They're going to sell it to enterprise users by Microsoft Office, which is a safer bet for interoperability than Numbers/Pages/Keynote on an iPad. Apple beats them handily in number of 99¢ games and Instagram clones, but it's much more even in the areas that matter in enterprise.

And how often do you need to ask a geek a question about an iPad? There isn't much of a learning curve, and anybody who has owned one can probably answer most questions. Hopefully (I haven't used it myself) the Win8 tablets are similar in that regard. In my opinion, it'll mostly depend on whether they do the 8-levels-deep-control-panel and features with no visible interface (like the desktop's start menu and sidebar).

<comment><USER7> The future will tell, but I don't think tablets are very enterprisey. All the people I know use tablets casually, for work a larger screen and a good keyboard are golden.

I believe if there was a strong use case for tablets in the office, businesses would have bought iPads by now and many enterprise apps would have appeared, the compatibility in iWork is really good and it has all the hardware you could need. It's not like all managers are waiting for Windows 8 tablets as their savior, I think it's a fantasy that the world is waiting for Microsoft to enter the tablet market.

And it's not just a matter of solving OS problems, the geeks I know are usually in the position in which people go to ask if something is good before they buy it. If people come to ask me about a tablet with Windows 8 today I'll answer "I have no idea idea if it's good, but I have an iPad and it's great. Here, try it.". What do you think they'll do next?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Microsoft's strength is that Windows 7 runs a corporation's crusty old legacy Windows applications better than any other operating system. If this somehow fails to be the case, corporations will switch to whatever platform provides this support better.

It's not unthinkable that Linux could be made to run Windows XP vintage applications better than Windows 8 can.

<comment><USER10> Windows 8 is still Windows. You can run all your "crusty old legacy Windows applications" just as you could on Windows 7.

Disclaimer: Microsoft employee (not really relevant, but just in case ...)

<comment><USER11> Unless you get the ARM version, which I believe is called WinRT. I think that could be the biggest problem for Microsoft. People are used to being able to install any old Windows application, but if you get the wrong kind of Windows 8, all those x86 applications won't run.

<comment><USER10> Right, and that's a legitimate concern. It's by no means going to drive people to Linux, though. WINE isn't going to run Windows apps better than Windows 8, and Linux on ARM isn't going to run x86 apps at all (except maybe in an emulation, which would be miserable).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Microsoft biggest problem, by far, is that they think the OS installed on PCs is what sells them. It's not.

In the 90's, it would be very hard to change, but currently two trends are converging into MS's perfect storm: users are doing more and more through web interfaces to remote servers running their apps and holding their data, and FLOSS is fast becoming a very viable alternative to what most PC users use their machines for.

Every time I debate this with my friends who work for Microsoft, they seem to think the only way to install a printer on Linux is still to open a terminal and edit a configuration file with vi, if not compile the driver yourself.

<comment><USER13> Maybe you should point them to Sun Tzu. Seems like your friends at Microsoft are basing their opinions off of some anecdotes gleaned from the web, rather than grabbing a box and attempting to install Linux on it to size up the competition.

<comment><USER14> I did that, installing Ubuntu last fall. It was miles better than the last Linux distro I installed, Red Hat 6 back in the 90s, but it was still a painful process.

<comment><USER12> I find it rather odd someone considers installing Ubuntu a painful process. From time to time I have to install Windows machines for testing and, compared to Ubuntu, it's a slow and involved process. With Ubuntu it's something like boot, answer questions, install (with updates) and boot-to-useful-machine. With Windows it's often install (which takes a long time, with several boots), find, download and install drivers, install updates, reboot, install newer updates, reboot again and so on...

The only situation where a Windows box is less pain than an Ubuntu one is when corporate IT installs it for you and drops it onto your desk.

<comment><USER14> The installation itself wasn't the pain. It was the usability and configuration afterwards that sucked. The built-in music player didn't work, with no hinting towards the problem. There was some other stuff I can't remember specifically now. I did like, however, how easy it was to get up and running with Python and Vim. It's significantly easier to install third-party modules on Linux than on Windows, in my experience.

I think Linux is a better 'work' OS for development, but Windows is better for a home consumer OS. But it's not worth booting back to Linux just to work on my side projects, so I just develop in Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it possible to Microsoft does not plan to have the Surface be a longtime product of theirs?

My impression with the Surface is that it was Microsoft's way of showing the world an example of how Windows 8 devices should work. I did not come away thinking that Microsoft is now fully into the PC manufacturing game.

Could it be Microsoft's way of jump-starting OEMs into creating the types of devices that are needed to make Windows 8 successful? And not the first round of war between Microsoft and OEMs that this article (and others) claims it is?

</comment><comment><USER16> Meh, I doubt it. Vendors can complain all they want but the average consumer is sure as hell not going to switch to linux. And if they wanted to switch to OSX then they probably have already bought a Mac.

Everyone else wants Windows because they are used to it and it runs all their programs.

<comment><USER17> You sure?

It might motivate vendors to, for instance, sell Ubuntu PCs. It's quite user- friendly. Who knows. I don't think it's likely, though.

<comment><USER16> I mean its easy to make a nice interface for people who just browse and such. But it becomes a problem when people go: "Oh so does it have Word and all my other office products?"

Open office and etc are all pretty poor replacements.

<comment><USER17> You sure? I suspect for most people, they don't use enough features of Word for LibreOffice Writer to feel much different.

<comment><USER16> Its not just about the feature set, its about using whats familiar for a lot of the "average" consumer.

<comment><USER17> Familiarity is an issue, but the newer generation are quicker to pick up new technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think this story is a little in the extreme and not very forthcoming. However, SJVN regularly reports on stories as such. I remember when he reported back before Vista was released and said that (paraphrasing) "Vista will be the push Linux needs to end up on top!" Of course it had only a very small percentage gain for the Linux community as a whole.

I think we'll see businesses simply hold their versioning until either the bulk of ISVs change their focus to Mac/Linux, Microsoft caters (more?) closely to businesses, the last critical piece of software refuses to run on 7/Vista/XP, or the company bites the bullet and upgrades. Now, honestly my experiences are 100% anecdotal and I'm can't see into every business's structure. However, I've worked in quite a few IT offices and when Microsoft upgraded to both Vista and 7, there was a lot of working around to either delay the update to the new system or have a trained workforce that was more comfortable to work with it, but we never once thought we should switch our entire system to Linux or OS X.

Now, you might be wondering "We're talking about vendors, not the end users". True, but vendors follow demand, whether we like it or not. If Acer doesn't sell Windows computers, they'll be missing out on a lot of sells to larger entities.

But the main point I want to make is, why does it even matter? What is Microsoft competing on? The locked-down ARM Tablet. That's it. We aren't talking about stand-up or laptop computers. These will likely not be used in the corporate or government markets on the high-end. The Windows 8 ARM Tablet is really nothing more than a consumer device and is designed to compete with the iPad and Android Tablets (to a lesser degree). It has business-y functions, but I don't see the corporate sector adopting it any time soon.

Is Windows 8's "Metro" interface going to detract consumers? Probably not, or at least as much as SJVN is arguing. If businesses don't like it, they'll probably just stick with 7 or whatever is doing just fine right now.

Linux will probably see more usage thanks to Google and some other developing entities, but not to the degree that is inferred by this article or for the reason described.

</comment><comment><USER19> stopped reading after "Microsoft has always been a "my way or the highway" kind of company"

this can be written just by person who wants to lie. MS backward compatibility is unmatched for this size of company. I still can run apps written 10+ years ago. In most cases I can find same menus and options where they were 10+ years ago. Try this trick with Mac. I recently switched to Mac to do development... so have not big but experience in both worlds

</comment><comment><USER20> I really believe Mac OS is the future of the consumer market.

It's easy to use, complete, and has friendly people at any apple retailer to help you onboard yourself on to the system.

<comment><USER12> Try to convince every other PC manufacturer to leave the consumer market.

They may even die in the end, but they'll certainly try other things before it comes to that.

<comment><USER20> Either Apple, or the Apple Model.

Hardware >> Software >> Support.

All from one manufacturer.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't achieve the network effects. They'd probably embrace something like Android or desktop Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not this guy again. He is a hack with an agenda.

</comment><comment><USER22> Microsoft is screwing over its customers like this.

Apple is screwing over its customers like _this_.

Both of them are pushing the tabletification of computing. I see how that works for the vast majority of users, but it isn't really for me. Sadly, the workstation companies have mostly died out. Sure, you can probably get a PA- RISC machine from HP or a POWER box from IBM, but those are mostly servers for the legacy market.

</comment><comment><USER23> The Windows 8's Metro UI is fundamentally designed for a touch screen based tablet, bad things will happen if MS pushes desktop users to use that UI.

Really don't want Win 8 to fall, my soon-in-beta new text editor (with a Firebug-like UI, called LIVEditor) is designed for Windows only...

</comment><comment><USER24> Windows 8 will take off because it is Windows 7 +1. I for one am glad they are back to numbering things sequentially instead of trying to come up with poetic terms or meaningless initials.

At the very least it will probably be big in Japan, China and Korea since "8" is a lucky number.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am absolutely sure that a change on the desktop market is coming and that open source operating systems will gain a nice percentage of the market share, if not the majority thereof.

But this change will be a lot slower than we would like it to be. It'll come, but it'll take some time.

We saw similar changes in the browser and the phone markets recently, it went faster there because it's an easier change for non-technical users.

It's rather great that the floodgate is now open and that open source is slowly overtaking their proprietary software and operating system counterparts. It's also a fact though that Microsoft and surely others are trying to close them again, one approach is the "secure boot" nonsense for example. One can only hope (and of course, work on open source whenever possible) that they won't succeed in that.

<comment><USER26> This is EXACTLY the same argument when Vista came out, which was a subpar release, and yet another "Year of The Linux Desktop" was not upon us then nor is it now. This was also the same argument when XP came out. I remember the slashdot kiddies saying "Its Win2000 with fisher price colors! Mandrake will be the new desktop." Err, okay. I love FOSS, but the idea that Joe Sixpack is switching to Ubuntu because the start button is missing is a little overblown.

I'm begining to feel sorry for MS's Windows product. Its a damned if you/damned if you don't scenario. If they don't innovate and do something different then they'll be criticized for being stale. When they do innovate they're criticized for confusing users and not sticking with the same tired WIMP formula.

I get it, these critics are biased, but lets at least wait until the RTM gets in the hands of users before we call it a disaster. It might very well work out for MS. Win8 went from a joke on these forums to a brave OS after the MS surface announcement. Public opinion is quite fickle isn't it?</comment></comment>


Winter Is Probably Coming Soon - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/18/winter-is-probably-coming-soon/ <comment><USER3> Of course a VC does not want you wasting his money and will finger wag all day long to try to make entrepreneurs behave.

However his analysis focusing on isolated economic indicators is missing the forest for the trees (presumably willfully). Why is money cheap? Because investors have no place to put their money. The accelerating consolidation of wealth within the super rich (ie. the 0.01% funding VCs) and the pathetic amount of tax and philanthropy mean they have _nowhere_ to put their money. It is going to be impossible to get the returns they demand because of the decimation of the middle class and on a larger scale the impossibility of sustaining 20th century level growth over the long term.

Tech is a long way from being an unattractive investment because it still provides the best avenue to scaling a business quickly. It will survive a tremendous amount of douchebag entrepreneur cash burning simply because there's no better game out there, and until society comes to term with what's actually happening economically rather than wishfully believing the juked stats the government puts out to get re-elected I don't see any better investment opportunities coming along.

Let the party continue...

<comment><USER4> You can still put money in an index fund (e.g. anything from Vanguard) and get reasonable returns (better than most investors at least).

<comment><USER5> You can, but many investors are concerned about the stock market as a whole being overpriced. "Bonds are overpriced, Commodities are overpriced, Equities are overpriced, and Real Estate is overpriced. When rates go up they will all tank."

Of course this is a first world problem.

I used to say "Invest in your own human capital" but I took a look at the cost of private schools nowadays, and they're overpriced too. :-)

<comment><USER6> I'd hate to see what those investors think of paying 10 billion for SnapChat...

<comment><USER5> "Oh sh*t we should have gotten in at 3"? :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like we've heard this before:

2008: [http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/10/sequoia- capitals-56-slide-p...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/10/sequoia- capitals-56-slide-powerpoint-presentation-of-doom/)

2011: [http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2011/08/winter-is- comin...](http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2011/08/winter-is-coming.html)

And it makes me think of 2 things:

1\. "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

2\. The way large companies use layoffs not to actually cut the total number of jobs, but to cut deadwood. This seems like the VC equivalent.

<comment><USER8> But the 2008 slide deck was _right_. It was comically easy to hire great people for a few years after Lehman. Rents were going _down_ in San Francisco. SOMA wasn't a ghost town, exactly, but it was pretty empty compared to now. The bust was real.

The rapid recovery in tech has more-or-less paralleled the rapid recovery in the stock market as a whole. There's no lesson to be learned from cynicism here, except that the tech industry probably never paid the full price for the last crash, because the "fix" for that was flooding the market with cheap capital, which makes risky investments look reasonable.

<comment><USER9> The question is whether the slide-deck was self-fulfilling because it came from Sequoia.

<comment><USER10> The answer is no. It was fallout from to the financial crisis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope so. Currently, VC money is a horrible market distortion that encourages what is basically dumping - companies with good products and actual business models being starved of oxygen by cashed-up competitors who simply give products away for free. I'm not even sure of the economic term for it but wouldn't be surprised if it's illegal in a few years, after we've gotten more sophisticated.

<comment><USER12> A related argument had been made a lot lately about how "free" can lead to scummy business models like surveillance and manipulative black hat media tactics.

You can do free sustainably if your costs are low and if you have something a tier up you can sell. That's freemium and it can work for some things. But if your costs are high or if a paid tier does not materialize... Now you have a big problem. You own a liability, one purchased via massive investment and employing many people. You must find a way to make it pay, so you start looking at what you have a little differently. Your users... Now there's a product.

South Park parodied the grow-first-monetize-later gambit in the "underpants gnomes" episode:

1) collect underpants

2) ...?

3) profit!

Nobody knew the second step back then. Of course now companies like Facebook have shown us what step two is. It's:

2) sniff underpants

:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think it's fair to say that this analysis applies better to web/app companies. There's just a fundamental problem with raising (and burning) millions trying to grow a site for inbound marketing, or an app for dating, or what have you, even though these are great ideas and things that people want:

You likely won't be able to generate real revenue on something whose value is so immediately replicable or replaceable.

There needs to be a caveat to "build something people want": there has to be some barrier so that others can't compete so easily. Customer and market understanding is one, and that's certainly helped. But again, the replication model, which will drive down profits for everyone, kicks in. Technical superiority is a possible solution, but most web/app products simply wouldn't benefit from this because their functionality is trivial.

Of course, there are exceptions. Unicorns. Things like Whatsapp, Twitter, and Salesforce come to mind. Obviously their initial products were replicable, but the winner-takes-all network effects (and eventual "platform dynamics") create that lock-in. For every one of them, 1000s of similar companies fail. The problem is when VC money is chasing those 1000s of likely-to-fail-I-might-do- it-too companies. They're more likely to fail than laundromats, but they're burning millions in an attempt to be those "winners". Easier than investing in clean energy though.

Fundamentally, as a society we need some technical advancement to create meaningful economic growth. We can't just keep advertising and selling the same stuff to each other. When a sector is running dry on innovation opportunities (i.e. webs/apps) maybe it's time to look elsewhere. Or stick around and wait for unicorns. Meh.

For now though, how people want to misappropriate (in my opinion) their money is their choice, as long as most of this doesn't get dumped on John Smith from The Public like it did in 2000.

<comment><USER14> > Fundamentally, as a society we need some technical advancement to create > meaningful economic growth

Fundamentally, as a society we need a social+economic advancement that allows society to continue to function in the absence of growth.

Farms don't need growth to produce food. Power plants don't need growth to produce energy. Construction companies don't need growth to build houses. There is no good reason why the wheels should come off our economic system in the absence of growth.

The fact that the wheels _do_ come off in the absence of growth is a bug. Plain and simple. We need to fix the bug rather than "working around" it by trying to produce unending growth.

<comment><USER15> Capitalism is cancer.

<comment><USER14> Capitalism, like cancer, can't be avoided. Economics is more like the laws of physics than a game of Monopoly: you can't really opt out of it because it simply describes the way things "want to" work (people competing for scarce resources).

Unlike cancer, I suspect that if we're sufficiently clever we can figure out a way to manage the symptoms in perpetuity.

<comment><USER15> So you think some "we" can be clever enough to manage economics but some "we" (perhaps same, perhaps different) can't be clever enough to manage cancer. Bummer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Winter is always coming. Gurley's analysis is spot on but it really talks about VC money not "real" money. Something not enough startups internalize has always been how "expensive" it is to use the dollars you get from investors to fund operations.

</comment><comment> barry-cotter Will any of the bootcamps survive, do you think? It seems unlikely given the stories I've read here, lsc hiring a former coworker (his technical superior) out of a sandwich shop, or tptacek having to move from San Francisco to Ann Arbor because there were no jobs going in San Francisco for someone who co- founded a large ISP and had lots of security publications.

I'm sure it'll be bad enough in the US but I pity the graduates of General Assembly London or the Berlin bootcamp.

<comment><USER17> What about the bootcamps? A friend of mine is considering enrolling in one. Is it a bad idea?

<comment><USER18> It's not a bad idea for people who go through them and successfully get jobs before the crunch comes. As long as they can do the job and don't get laid off, they're way better off than they would be otherwise. (And even if they do get laid off, they're probably better off than they would be otherwise - <USER2> have tangible skills that will likely be in demand for a while.)

It could be very bad for the boot camps themselves. The reason they have a business is because the demand for software engineers is red-hot right now; much of this demand comes from the easy availability of venture/seed money. Think what happened to telecoms, ISPs, and infrastructure providers at the end of the dot-com boom. It was not unusual to go from thriving repeat business to absolutely zero customers in six months.

<comment><USER8> Yep. And even more to the point, there were a lot of people who were hired as "webmasters", and knew little more than some HTML. Those people were cut almost immediately when the crash came. It's not even a metaphor -- almost the _exact same scenario_ played itself out in the late 90s. We know how it ends.

It amazes me how resistant we are to learning from experience.

<comment><USER19> Based on seeing the last crash-

It's not really skill level that determines whether you keep a job. Having a good network and being able to hustle for opportunities are far bigger determinants.

The quiet, 50th percentile engineer who hasn't had to look for a job in 10 years, doesn't know a lot of people, low-ish EQ, works for a company that's not well-known: most at risk of struggling to find a job if laid off or company goes under.

Someone who knows little more than HTML but is a young, hustler type, big network, sociable, puts more energy into finding gigs - likely to get at least some contract work to sustain him through the

<comment><USER19> *downturn

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Translation: "Waaaaaah! I'm a VC; I'm not the only game in town anymore; and I have to pay money. Waaaaah!"

Yeah, guess what? Nobody likes VC's. They screwed everybody over in the 1999-2000 bust, so those people have stayed away ever since. And, now, the stupid 20-somethings are starting figure the same thing out, are buckling down on very small amounts of money and cashing out to Yagglesoftazon ASAP since there is very little barrier to entry on something which is solely software.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm always amazed by stories of startups that generate almost no profit and yet burn millions of VC dollars. Yes, I know that VC count on that 1 out of 100 invested in companies to generate profit larger than all the other combined, but still it's a bit ridiculous and in my opinion not healthy for the industry. It's a different story if you've a bootstrapped, profitable company and want to boost the growth - you can negotiate better terms with the VC, because a) you've paying customers and have a proven business model and b) you don't need the VC money to survive, unlike a fresh company without any profits.

<comment><USER22> Some types of companies are harder to bootstrap in a way that is profitable from day 1, also the risk for a small bootstrapped company is they just prove the market for a VC backed juggernaut to come in and eat them alive.

<comment><USER21> Yes, some types of companies need time to provide value, but in my opinion the vast majority of VC funded companies could easily be bootstrapped. I don't deny that the vision of receiving a fat check and being able to rent a beautiful office, buy the best equipment and hire a big team is tempting, but it's something for something - the main goal of VCs is to grow like crazy, without a sentiment. A bootstrapped company will grow slowly, but steadily, and I don't believe a VC backed competitor is a real threat in the long term. Sure, they can offer a similar product for free, but not forever - once the VC money is gone, they will need to get profitable. Fast. Without the VC money such company can dissapear the next month. Not to mention the interference of VCs how to run your company, which is of course expected - after all it's their money that keeps your company alive.

<comment><USER22> Sure, but by the time they have folded you're already out of business!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't think there is an overall tech bubble like 1999, but there may indeed be smaller scale bubbles in overheated or overhyped sectors.

There are two areas of worry from what I see. One is free apps and services with high burn and no good path to revenue. Another is what looks to me like a mini-bubble in startups that cater to other startups. Scene-centric inbreeding like that is probably more worrisome than the overvalued pic sharing services.

</comment><comment><USER23> I somehow hope it's gonna happen sooner than later, just because that way it could hurt a little less. What's not clear here is that the impact on global economy will be not that big. Anyway, if they're called venture capitalists, shouldn't they be able to look forward a little better than the market? That way they know what will happen if they keep going on like this. A quick deflation of the bubble, with some notable victims, would be better than a complete burst. Especially for VCs

</comment><comment><USER24> Any evidence the party is coming to an end?

Actually for me it is getting a bit ridiculous when an app like Yo can get like a million dollars when it goes viral without anyone actually figuring out what's so great about it.

It does seem like growth is triumphing over other metrics, like revenue, or common sense. Of course if we go by that measure, companies like facebook will never survive at all, not sure how this is gonna play out.

</comment><comment><USER25> Can somebody explain to me why every startup company(or at least every one that articles are written about) feels the need to raise as much VC as possible ASAP? There are so many options for developing scalable systems relatively easily and the cost of running an entirely web/software based company(read: 90% of the hot startups) today is comically low, especially with pay what you use PaaS/IaaS systems like those offered by Google and Amazon. If your product crashes and burns, you will be out a couple thousand dollars MAX + whatever time and effort you put in. If your product is successful, by the time running it on one of these platforms gets too expensive to pay for out of pocket(meaning you have a lot of users running up bandwidth/infrastructure costs), I'd guess that VC firms would be coming to you rather than you to them, and you would basically have more authority to dictate investment terms, and wouldn't have to slog around pitching to firm after firm - most of who will probably reject early stage investment in anything that isn't some rehashed social media dreck made by the white boys from Stanford. I've never pitched to a VC firm, but I don't believe that any pitch is better than "Hey my thing has 10,000 fucking users and we get a metric shitton of new signups every day". I don't think they would care if you were a hobo clown from Latvia who dropped out of elementary school if your product had users and pull, they'd throw money at you since they all want to jump in on the next big thing.

This confuses me as it would seem to be a counter trend to what I'd expect based on what stuff was like a few years ago, when infrastructure costs were much higher, there were much less options, and development was more difficult. Google and Facebook - both of which are practically the model now for successful web companies - were fairly bootstrapped(run out of garages and dorm rooms by a few friends who had scraped together money from friends and family) before getting VC funding, which they got after their products had received somewhat widespread hype/adoption. I don't even think it would have been difficult to raise money or make VC connections before the product even launched for these people, they were practically the definition of the white boys from Stanford - but they didn't. The founders of both of those companies still retain massive shares and control in them compared to what you would expect from almost any other type of company of their calibre. Neither of them had to resort to advertising before their companies got big. The excuse that seems to be given is that by getting VC you don't have to worry about profits and paying costs for a while and you can just focus purely on the product, but as I said before, the costs are minimal - if you had even a small amount of savings or hit a family member up for a loan, you could run for quite a while on Google App Engine and such and not really have to worry about cost. If your founders are even remotely technical, I don't see how you would need more staff members in your early stages, successful web/software companies love to brag about how early on their team consisted of 3 people who worked a million hours a week on the product subsisting on nothing but cocaine and melon rinds because they were so dedicated to the company. As a person who I guess would be considered technical(though if you ask me I'm just a monkey who doesn't have a clue what they are doing and just bangs rocks together and hacks at stuff till something working comes out), I simply don't see the appeal of begging a bunch of of suits - most of whom probably don't know a shit about computers - for venture funding, and having to sell large stakes of your company to get it when you don't absolutely need it at the time.

The only reason I would postulate for this trend is an increasing amount of non-technical founders who need to pay for developers to make and maintain their product, but don't want to give these developers significant equity in the company. Almost all of the cofounders of Google and Facebook were highly technical and very driven and intelligent from what I can see, so I could easily believe that they were able to chug along on their own for a while without hiring more technical staff. I've put a couple of fairly popular and highly trafficked web projects(nothing huge, current one pushes about 2TB of bandwidth a day from 30k visitors, and costs about $100 a month to run on a dedicated server) together with some friends and am currently learning iOS dev, and I don't believe its a stretch at all to think that me and a buddy could build something like Snapchat or Instagram in a couple of weeks and throw it up on App Engine.

I know almost nothing about finance and haven't ever managed or worked at a for really reals startup, so let me know if I'm way off here. I would just like to get some people's perspectives on this. Sorry for the rant.

<comment><USER13> >Can somebody explain to me why every startup company(or at least every one that articles are written about) feels the need to raise as much VC as possible ASAP?

>The only reason I would postulate for this trend is an increasing amount of non-technical founders who need to pay for developers to make and maintain their product, but don't want to give these developers significant equity in the company.

I think this is the best explanation. It's not just tougher to find engineers period, but you have to incentivize them away from the big co's who are paying like 120k/engineer. Equity helps, vision helps, but more than anything so does cash. However it is telling if companies need to rely primarily on cash to incentivize rather than the first two.

Maybe this could be a good litmus test for you as a founder: can you get your early engineers to work at half, or less, their market rate? If so, it implies you're putting something together worth working on (or you're really damn good at recruiting). But if not, if you have to pay close to their big co salary, then I think there's a problem.

<comment><USER26> If you want the really good engineers from those companies, they're often making more than $120k - they can be making up to $160k.

Speaking as an engineer who has already been pitched at by others working on startups due to my formidable scalable productivity in my domain (while only being in the Bay area for 4 months), I prefer the security of a good salary and a good amount of stock. It would be very hard to convince me to leave without offering some level of immediate financial security.

Note: I work at a startup that raised a Series A round - I was offered $140k + signing bonus & generous stock options. I believe the company has been very happy with my results so far.

<comment><USER27> I'm a decent engineer; not top 10% necessarily, but maybe in the top 25% and certainly well above the median. I earn almost $160k doing pretty basic/routine software work at a non-software/tech company in the Bay Area. I'm underpaid (as an hourly contractor)--that is, I know for a fact that the hourly rate I'm currently working for is 20%-30% less than what I could get doing something else. Your salary, if you are as good as you claim, is less than what it should be by a good 10%-20% (factoring in benefits and bonuses).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm guessing it's in 18-24 months. Companies are still getting acquired left and right and BigCo still has cash to spend (especially Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Twitter). As long as BigCo is acquiring, VCs will continue pumping.

</comment><comment><USER29> Nice link baity title. I thought this was about the new Game of Thrones book being released soon.

<comment><USER30> Heh, I can see where the confusion would stem.

Somehow though, maybe because this came a day or two after Suster's response to the Gurley interivew, I had a good idea going into it that the post had something to do with the impending VC crunch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Stupidity and greed are year round.</comment>


Thread Pools in Nginx Boost Performance 9x (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nginx.com/blog/thread-pools-boost-performance-9x/ <comment><USER2> This message should probably be repeated at the bottom of the article:

 _" The page cache works pretty well and allows NGINX to demonstrate great performance in almost all common use cases...So if you have a reasonable amount of RAM and your working data set isn't very big, then NGINX already works in the most optimal way without using thread pools"_

So using thread pools in NGINX isn't a general recommendation. The article suggests "a heavily loaded NGINX‑based streaming media server" as the type of situation where it makes sense.

</comment><comment><USER3> The moral is that threads and asynchronous programming are not mutually exclusive.

No matter how much you can do with a single thread, in a highly parallel environment (such as a web server), on a cpu with multiple cores (the norm), you can (almost always) do more with multiple threads.

<comment><USER4> Sure for threads up to cores / 2\. Past that it is likely a throughput and latency loss.

<comment><USER5> Does anyone have numbers to back this claim? Seems like for IO focused software you'll have a lot of dead CPU time. If you have more threads than cores, you can take advantage of that.

<comment><USER6> "Seems like for IO focused software you'll have a lot of dead CPU time. If you have more threads than cores, you can take advantage of that."

Yes, see here for more discussion on this:

[https://github.com/ronomon/crypto-async#adjust-threadpool- si...](https://github.com/ronomon/crypto-async#adjust-threadpool-size-and- control-concurrency)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As long as you're not using Apache in pre-fork mode then the rest boils down to a few percent in terms of http server overhead. Unless you're trying to serve tons of little static object with either no resource or big scale then there are better places to spend your time optimizing.

<comment><USER8> and even then it only matters if you don't have something in front of it handling the connection-pooling/spoon-feeding/static-stuff like a load balancer or a cdn or varnish or pretty much _anything_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the main takeaway is that Linux is broken as far as async file reading goes.

</comment><comment><USER10> It seems quite similar to libuv's work queue [1]

[1] [http://docs.libuv.org/en/v1.x/guide/threads.html#id1](http://docs.libuv.org/en/v1.x/guide/threads.html#id1)

</comment><comment><USER11> So the main problem seem to be that libaio on linux does not use the filesystem cache because it's forcing the use of O_Direct. Any reason linux could not support AIO on regular file like FreeBSD ?

</comment><comment><USER12> TLDR, the Linux non-blocking filesystem API requires you to bypass the OS file cache (!!!)

So the whole webserver serving clients might occasionally block waiting for disk if you're serving online videos or some other application where your whole website is too big to fit in the OS cache. But if you have multiple threads, then if one of them blocks, it isn't a big deal as the other threads will continue to unqueue requests.

> The asynchronous interface requires the O_DIRECT flag to be set on the file > descriptor, which means that any access to the file will bypass the cache in > memory and increase load on the hard disks

</comment><comment><USER13> Looks similar to apache worker MPM (release ~2005)

<comment><USER14> Different paradigms.

Worker does use process pools with their own thread pools, but they're still not evented/async.

Apache 2.4 (2012) saw the release of 'event', an async variant of worker, which is like the new nginx model.

[https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/event.html](https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/event.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ok, I understand why you might "offload" read() from _disk backed files_ file descriptors. But why "sendfile"? I thought sendfile is properly async in linux... Unless I'm getting something wrong.

"aio_write" -> wasn't the idea of AIO operations to actually be truly async? Maybe it's because it requires XFS. Anyway, I'm confused.

<comment><USER16> From what I can see, sendfile isn't really async, it still returns the number of bytes written or error status, and nginx probably needs to wait for that to e.g. log the results, handle short writes, or proceed with whatever next operation must be done to the socket (like closing it). No idea why aio_write needs offloading, though.

<comment><USER17> They say why in the article

"The asynchronous interface requires the O_DIRECT flag to be set on the file descriptor, which means that any access to the file will bypass the cache in memory and increase load on the hard disks"

They even go into how no interface has been surfaced yet that allows determining whether a file is in cache or not. Also how FreeBSD's aio interface doesn't have the same limitations

<comment><USER18> I never tried, but mmap and mincore could work (or not, as one of the many special cases in this area). I expect that's not a viable approach for this application, anyway :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It would be interesting to compare this with coroutines/fibers, and it would also be interesting to know how latency is affected. In my experience, thread pools introduce latency.

<comment><USER20> Trick is that nginx uses thread pools for non-blocking reading on the "fast" devices - you can't use coroutines/fibers, because on Linux is not reliably possible to read the regular file in a non-blocking way, as far as I'm aware, so that means that `read` in a single fiber would block entire thread until the data is fetched from the disk.

In the storage engine I'm developing/maintaining, I've been using fibers, for both network and disk IO, until people started noticing that, if number of the client grows, and if they ask a lot of data (generating a lot of disk traffic), the performance drops severely. I've moved to the thread pools, dispatching my disk IO operations there (although it's much problematic for the reads, as writes would be performed by kernel anyway, `fsync` and `close` would be operations that you still want to do in the separate thread): [https://github.com/sociomantic- tsunami/dlsnode/blob/master/s...](https://github.com/sociomantic- tsunami/dlsnode/blob/master/src/dlsnode/util/aio/AsyncIO.d)

edit: used right link for the freshly opensourced repo.

<comment><USER21> Why files can't be read without blocking with Linux? There's certainly an API for this.

<comment><USER20> Which API are you referring to? If you're referring to `aio_` that's just glibc's user-space thread-pool emulation of the POSIX's asynchronous IO + many operations needed for the truly async IO are not supported (such as `stat` and `open`). There's `io_` syscalls family, but that's not in the ready-to-use state yet, judging by the manpages and various patches being submitted every month.

<comment><USER21> I'm referring to `fcntl(fd, F_SETFL, flags | O_NONBLOCK)`. `stat`, `open` are blocking, yes, didn't think about that. Also according to [1] file operations will always block, even in non-blocking mode, so I was wrong, sorry.

1: [https://www.remlab.net/op/nonblock.shtml](https://www.remlab.net/op/nonblock.shtml)

<comment><USER22> > ... Also according to [1] file operations will always block ...

not quite :) look at aio(7)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> this approach sounds very similar to SEDA (staged event driven architecture) that was done a while back, iirc, circa 2001.

</comment><comment><USER23> Interesting read, however a 2015 tag would be nice, since the post is from June 19, 2015

</comment><comment><USER24> must need some monads =P

</comment><comment><USER25> This is not the right place but I failed to find an answer elsewhere so would somebody answer?

Is it possible for me to use lighttpd as a proxy but at the same time serve static pages for a subset of urls?

<comment><USER26> I don't know, but you can definitely do that with nginx.

You should ask here: [https://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd/boards](https://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/lighttpd/boards)</comment></comment>


Mapping America's Underwater Real Estate - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-flood-risk-zone-us-map/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://floodfactor.com/](https://floodfactor.com/) is the flooding open data site from the article, which is a project by First Street Foundation nonprofit.</comment>


Javascript coding error - lesson learned - <AUTHOR> http://poincare101.blogspot.com/2012/01/stupid-coding-errors.html

<comment><USER2> _Never, ever use Javascript to figure out the current date._

It should be never use client dates. The developers should have sent a server UTC time code to the client and all JavaScript dates should have used that date as there seed. We actually create an extension of the standard JavaScript date in our projects which is seeded off of a server time so the time since epoc comes from the server. Further, they still should not trust the clients data as submitted and check to see if it is in range.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. Or, you could just use your server side language to stuff the _server_ 's date onto the template.</comment></comment>


How do rubygems work anyway? - <AUTHOR> https://www.honeybadger.io/blog/2014/02/04/how-ruby-gems-work

<comment><USER2> This doesn't explain how rubygems works at all.

For example, when you do

        require "some_gem"

how does _require_ know where to find _some_gem. <ext>_?

First ruby looks in the current load path (i.e. _$:_ ). If it cannot find the file it then looks in your set of installed gems. If it finds a match it loads the file and adds that gem path to $:.

[http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.0/Kernel.html#method-i-require](http://ruby- doc.org/core-2.1.0/Kernel.html#method-i-require)

(though those docs say nothing about checking the gem paths.)

 _This makes sense since if your project depends on a certain gem, who knows where you might reference it. Better load it as early as possible so its code can be used anywhere._

That's silly. If you are referencing gem code in a file then have that file require the needed gem. _require_ will only load the file once so you can wait until you need a gem before you load it.

( _load_ , OTOH, will reload a file as often as you call it).</comment>


Kubernetes 1.5.0 Released - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md <comment><USER2> If anyone is interested in giving k8s a go we've been working on fully supported Kubernetes for Ubuntu: [https://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/kubernetes](https://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/kubernetes)

This works on GCE, AWS, Azure, VMWare, bare metal (via MAAS) and LXD containers. We're currently supporting 1.4 but will support 1.5 (and upgrades) in the next week or so.

Disclaimer: I'm on the team that works on this.

<comment><USER3> What does Canonical work on in upstream Kubernetes? I see hundreds+ of commits from Redhat and CoreOS in Kubernetes and the associated projects?

In the main kubernetes git repo, I see 39 non-merge from @canonical commits, 99% of which are under cluster/juju/* and 1 doc fix for juju, so not really a value add to Kubernetes at all. How can I, as someone deploying kubernetes on bare metal, trust you to manage a difficult project when Canonical doesn't seem to contribute much at all to the project or ecosystem?

It is great that you're making kubernetes easy to manage and deploy, but other than ease of use (which GKE does an excellent job of as well from the authors of k8s), what is Canonical's actual value add for paying you to manage k8s? Sorry for the terseness, but I'm genuinely curious what value add there is here. As a purely tech focused person, I simply don't see it. Even other firms doing exactly what you do (Apcera) have actual code change commits. I don't see a single one from Canonical that does.

<comment><USER4> Unlike other companies, we don't jump in to upstream projects and throw weight around to influence a project to make it more marketable for us. Kubernetes has a vibrant, and powerful core contributor base already. When it makes sense, for any changes we make, we'll be happy to package those back upstream. Primarily, our contributions to Kubernetes is around operations. What happens 1 week, 1 month, 1 year after setting up a cluster.

GKE is great, but GKE is Google only. It's not on-prem, it's not cross cloud, and it's not portable. That's important to some people. Our contributions to cluster/juju is the distillation of our operational knowledge in running Kubernetes everywhere. The same upstream k8s, deployed with the same tooling, everywhere.

Not all value can be measured in commits :)

<comment><USER3> The way you start this off is a pretty poor response to my original question, whereas the rest is fantastic. It isn't about throwing one's weight around or even making it more marketable, but about improving the product for new use cases (such as Apprenda wanting to better Kubernetes via the on-premise sig).

Thanks for your response, I was curious as to the value add and this helps.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback, my original sentence may have been a bit hasty, but the core of the message is there. I see Canonical's role as the expediter/server in a kitchen instead of donning another chef hat when dish are piling up to go out. We want to celebrate and get the amazing work of the community into as many hands as possible.

We participate in SIGs as well, sig-on-premise being one we co-chair and co- founded. We've planning on helping the project in ways other than code contributions.

<comment><USER3> Sorry I meant even Apprenda has actual golang feature commits. That was my point Re: Apprenda and contributions.

This seems to be Canonical's general direction. It just makes me sad that is is more on marketing than engineering. I wish it was more of both as clearly Canonical does Linux + marketing better than basically anyone or there wouldn't be so much Ubuntu everywhere :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Has anyone already successfully created a HA-cluster on a bare metal infrastructure? It seems overly complicated and not that well documented from what I can see.

<comment><USER6> I have attempted this using [https://coreos.com/kubernetes/docs/latest/kubernetes-on- bare...](https://coreos.com/kubernetes/docs/latest/kubernetes-on- baremetal.html) . One can get quite far, but I am not sure it is worth the effort. I understand this is a vague analogy, but it feels like you're trying to setup email infrastructure when what you really want is to send email.

It is a lot easier on the public cloud, or easier still on a managed service.

<comment><USER7> What about people who cannot go to the cloud? What about people who need more performance? Lower costs? Kubernetes seems to be such a great abstraction for the underlying hardware, why not use it where it is needed the most?

<comment><USER8> citation required, since there are IaaS offerings that do not involve a hypervisor (e.g. Rackspace OnMetal) and therefore its possible to move "to the cloud" without performance penalties.

on costs via Reserved Instances and negotiating with your account team at larger volume, it can be pretty reasonable, and for a smaller outfit, substantially cheaper than hiring experts in running physical infrastructure of your own.

<comment><USER9> > and for a smaller outfit, substantially cheaper than hiring experts in > running physical infrastructure of your own.

You needs to have the skillsets to manage cloud deployments too. For the systems I manage, which range from actual bare metal, via dedicated servers, to VPSs and AWS deployments, the incremental effort spent on managing hardware as you go down towards bare metal tends to be pretty much a rounding error compard to the overall operations effort. Once the systems have been wired up, and PXE booted into a suitable setup, the effort is pretty much the same.

And with the cost differential, I'd say once you go over a few hundred dollars a month on servers that stay up 24/7, you're losing money on public cloud deployments vs. managed dedicated hosting. Once you go over $1k to $2k/month, you're losing money vs. colo.

For people who actually have a lot of batch jobs where servers stay up for less than 6-8 hours a day, the maths look different, but it's very rare I come across cloud setups that are cheaper than dedicated, with all staff costs etc. accounted for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One note of caution for those skimming the release notes: v1.5.0 now allows anonymous access to the API server by default. With the default k8s authorization being `AllowAll` this makes it _very_ important to pass `--allow-anonymous=false` if updating from v1.4.x to v1.5.0.

It looks like this is going to be set to false for v1.5.1: [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/38708](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/38708)

<comment><USER11> This is correct, and has been fixed. If you use kube-up or Google Container Engine, the default is set to false.

Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Folks wanting an easy road to deploying Kube on (so far) AWS, GCE and OpenStack, with bare metal and local on the roadmap, might want to check out KubeNow:

[https://github.com/kubenow/KubeNow](https://github.com/kubenow/KubeNow)

Tries to re-use as much as possible from great projects like Terraform, Packer, Ansible and the kubeadm tool, and just add a thin layer on top of that (less risk for bit rot), which is an approach that seems appealing to me.

<comment><USER13> Does KubeNow support AWS Spot Instances ?

<comment><USER11> Not sure on AWS Spot, but on Google Cloud you can use Preemptible VMs (which have similar 50-80% discounts).

[https://cloud.google.com/container- engine/docs/preemptible-v...](https://cloud.google.com/container- engine/docs/preemptible-vm)

Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> you'd think such a project so heavily supported by Google would have IPv6 support. Hell, you'd think it'd be native/first-class.

<comment><USER15> Yes, it's a known issue. Pull requests welcome. [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/1443#issueco...](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/1443#issuecomment-264605379)

<comment><USER11> Yes, please! It's a pretty deep problem, so we'd love the help.

Disclosure: I work at Google on Kubernetes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like PetSets has been renamed StatefulSets and has moved to beta in this release.

</comment><comment><USER17> DotNETes (Windows container and Hyper-v container) support is here! Disclosure: I worked on DotNETes

<comment> iso-8859-1 Do you have an example application?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> k8s-the-hard-way explicitly says its not production ready. Is there a document that explains what its missing or production topology documented somewhere?

<comment><USER19> I don't think its documented in any official capacity, but we (sig cluster ops) did generate some visuals that might aid in grokking the topology of Kubernetes as a whole, and we did model this after production-setups.

A few things to keep in mind:

These maps are service centric, and abstract units as vertical columns in their respective diagrams. Services must be HA to be considered "production ready"

Additional concerns that may/may-not be represented here:

\- TLS Security on all endpoints \- TLS Key Rotation in the event of compromise/upgrade/expiration \- Durable storage backed workloads \- ETCD state snapshots for cluster point-in-time recovery \- User/RBAC - this still needs more info before i can outline it (time limited) \- Network policy for namespace/application isolation (this is an unspoken requirement for many business units)

The diagrams:

Kubernetes cluster services [https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1U4GBSg9Sdn7JspoxDyA4qwGM...](https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1U4GBSg9Sdn7JspoxDyA4qwGMJC9JelWiev5MwYG9zwg/edit)

Kubernetes Binary Services Topology map [https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/10sXtgdelUI3GbWjrYh2z5vhF...](https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/10sXtgdelUI3GbWjrYh2z5vhFahdqcYqQtOu9fs2dPkk/edit)

Kubernetes Cluster node Maps (3) [https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1x1PEE0RKvCRnP5JCAjmfbr_7...](https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1x1PEE0RKvCRnP5JCAjmfbr_7NTpjBvOo04pvXbgztqM/edit)

We left off working on a Network draft diagram, and if you're interested in contributing/participating in this process, join us in the #sig-cluster-ops slack channel. We meet thursdays (or have, new year schedule dependent)

<comment><USER20> Missed these in Slack SIG channel, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py kubefed autocorrects to 'cubefield' in G search</comment>


A Walkthrough Guide to finding an engineering job at Slack - <AUTHOR> https://slack.engineering/a-walkthrough-guide-to-finding-an-engineering-job-at-slack-dc07dd7b0144#.c0cjso2bk <comment><AUTHOR> I wish more companies would provide pre interview documentation like this.</comment>


Ask HN: Switching from MediaTemple to Slicehost - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone. I did a quick search but didn't come across any topics directly related to this, so I'm looking for some help from the community. I've recently become interested in switching from MediaTemple to Slicehost. Some background: right now my MediaTemple (gs) account hosts about 5 or 6 Wordpress blogs, and a few static sites. I'm starting to get into Rails and my MediaTemple account is old enough to have been grandfathered in to the free 64MB gridcontainer. None of my blogs receive much traffic, and I really just use my hosting for learning, testing, and non-critical projects. After seeing CloudKick, and researching Slicehost some, I'm thinking of switching over to the bottom of the line Slicehost server. I like the idea of installing everything myself and I think it meets with my goals (what better way to learn than to set everything up yourself). So what do you think? I have 0 experience managing a server, installing Apache, etc. I'm comfortable enough in the terminal to follow any tutorials I might need. Does anyone have any advice on switching/migration? Any great articles I should read before I make the change? Will the 256MB Slice be enough to continue to manage my existing blogs? <comment><USER2> I've been running my sites (Django-powered) on Slicehost for about two years and have been very pleased overall.

A few observations:

1\. Running Apache with both mod_php and mod_passenger (assuming that would be your deployment method for Rails app) on a 256 meg slice may be tight if your traffic levels pick up. (Based on experience with mod_wsgi, mod_python and mod_php, I haven't explicitly used mod_passenger and am unaware of its memory/interpreter model, but think it is similar to mod_wsgi.) But it will be enough to manage your existing blogs and additional PHP applications as long as the load doesn't explode.

2\. You don't need any linux administration chops to get started, but every year or so I've learned enough additional practices that I grab another slice, setup the new slice from scratch, transfer my webapps/sites to the new slice, and power down the old one. There are just a number of small best-practices that--when avoided--add up to a hard to manage setup over time, especially when managing multiple sites within multiple servers. You'll probably want to do the same.

3\. Slicehost has great resources, <http://articles.slicehost.com/> , which should cover most configuration/setup details.

4\. Switching over to my own slice and doing administration myself has been a very valuable experience for me, and I really do recommend it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! So you migrate to a new slice each year? Good to know I don't need any linux admin prior knowledge, but it sounds like this is just right for me. Hoping to learn a lot from the experience.

<comment><USER2> Yep. They prorate charges, so firing up an extra slice for a couple of days will only cost a few dollars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yea it definitely will. Just follow the tutorials on slicehost's website and you will be fine. Start off with ubuntu 8.04 imo

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Phil the Pill - 3 year company side project finally released - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/phil-the-pill/id630845514?mt=8

<comment><USER2> Congratulations on the release will check out later

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! Please let me know what you think!</comment></comment>