Amazon Elastic Container Service now supports Amazon EFS file systems - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-ecs-supports-efs/ <comment><USER2> I see a lot of notes about EFS's performance in the comments. I figured it's at least worth noting, for anyone considering using ECS with EFS, that just last week EFS had its read throughput on its general purpose tier increased by 400%.

That probably won't solve all EFS performance issues, but it's a pretty big boost and a nice announcement to come alongside ECS support.

[https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/04/amazon- el...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/04/amazon-elastic-file- system-announces-increase-in-read-operations-for-general-purpose-file- systems/)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is great news!

Yes, these containers are supposed to be stateless, but I was tasked with converting an app at my previous job over to using ECS on Fargate and we hit so many issues because of the limits on storage per container instance. We ended up having to tweak the heck out of nginx caching configurations and other processes that would generate any "on disk" files to get around the issues. Having EFS available would have made solving some of those problems so much easier.

I've also been wanting to use ECS on Fargate for running scheduled tasks with large files (50gb+) but it wasn't really possible given the previous 4gb limit on storage.

<comment><USER4> containers shouldn't necessarily be stateless; most existing codes don't know how or want to talk to services via RPC interfaces. In some sense, a mounted remote filesystem is just a standard API the OS provides you to access state in a convenient way that happens to be high performance, indexed, etc.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I think they are conflating stateless and ephemeral in this case.

<comment><USER3> > conflating stateless and ephemeral in this case

You're totally right, I was mixing up stateless and ephemeral. My mistake and thanks for pointing it out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Oh man, awesome. We had a rather janky workload where ECS would spin up an EC2 that would then mount an EFS volume and then write a file over to S3. This is going to make that so much easier and cleaner.

If you're wondering why you'd ever have to do something like that, the answer is SAP.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is going to make a _lot_ of container workloads that were possible, but inconvenient to setup, suddenly trivial to deploy. Very nice!

</comment><comment><USER8> This is the single biggest blocker to running something like Postfix in ECS. This is a huge, huge win.

<comment><USER9> I think postfix would perform horrifically on EFS, which has absymal latency and is terrible for workloads with lots of random i/o.

<comment><USER10> (One of the product managers on the Amazon EFS team here). We have many customers that use EFS for a wide variety of use cases, including hosting Postfix. As with all applications, performance needs are relative. Use EFS if your application requires consistent low single digit ms latencies, shared POSIX file system, and a pay as you go elastic usage model. As with all AWS services, EFS is always launching greater performance capabilities, including IOPS, throughput and lower latencies to meet the needs of our customers. As example, on 4/1, EFS launched a 400% improvement in read IOPS for its General Purpose performance mode, from 7,000 to 35,000. Given the type of file system operations that Postfix performs, it should nicely benefit from this improvement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How's the performance on EFS? Has anyone used it in production that is willing to share their experience?

We evaluated it for a relatively simple use case, and the performance seemed abysmal, so we didn't select it. I'm hoping that we made a mistake in our evaluation protocol, which would give me an excuse to give it another try.

<comment><USER12> It's terrible. Very slow when we tried to use it. There are ways to work around this, and ways to tune the performance, but honestly it was not worth it for our use case and instead we found a way to make EBS work.

EFS is a great way to get a lot of iowait on your cpu graphs. Would not recommend it for anything that had to be fast.

<comment><USER13> > we found a way to make EBS work.

Can you say more about what you did with EBS? It seems like it would be necessary to make some compromises in availability and disaster recovery because any given EBS volume is restricted to the availability zone where it was created.

<comment><USER12> We were hosting third party software in an EKS cluster and needed a way to share state between components of this system. We tried EFS initially but it actually killed the EKS cluster with iowait under load. We found a way to divert most of the systems requirements to local emptydir volumes, leaving only infrequently accessed media files on EFS

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Technically it supported it before, but you had to configure everything manually (or with your own automation). Having it native is a lot nicer, and brings provisioning of NFS-style volumes up to par with the current Kubernetes experience.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is going to make running teamcity or jenkins from fargate, much simpler.

</comment><comment><USER16> EFS performance is just horrible. Running containers on it is asking for problems.

My advice, stick to EC2 + EBS, it works.

</comment><comment><USER17> FINALLY!!! edit: thanks a lot ECS team

</comment><comment><USER18> Hope this is added to Lambda soon. EFS scalability would shine with Lambda.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the difference between cold emails and spam? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A cold email is something that takes a human at least an hour to write.

Spam is something that takes a factory less than a second to spit out.

Somewhere in-between, there's a gray area. 'Spam' is in the eye of the beholder (nobody claims to produce spam) so where that is is a matter of taste.

For me, a cold email _must_ have a human writer. That _hour_ isn't a strong boundary, but once you're cold emailing ten different people an hour, I think you're reaching spam country.

I also think there's computer-produced emails that aren't spam, but I can't think of any I would call "cold email".

</comment><comment><USER3> Spam is unsolicited correspondence. Cold emails are unsolicited, therefore are spam.</comment>


RubyGems: Nerd rage is optional (and discouraged) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.majesticseacreature.com/rubygems-nerd-rage-is-optional-and-discourage

<comment><USER2> Obviously it would be nice not to be rude to people who, after all, are working on something that benefits you, if you are prepared to call other people out like this:

<http://rubyhitsquad.com/Ruby_Hit_Squad.html>

Then I believe you should probably have a thicker skin in return.

<comment><USER3> That was a long time ago.

<comment><USER4> He annotated a passive-aggressive annotation on a patch I made and basically hijacked a presentation I made because the library I presented did not fit his aesthetics & work style. I don't remember ever acting in an uncivil way toward him.

If you regularly act like an asshole, expect to get a reputation and to be treated like one (even unfairly).

Btw, I'm glad you are bringing civility up. For some reason the lack of a civil vibe (at least from my experience in the Ruby community) really bothers me.

<comment><USER5> I want to oppose to the impression that there is a lack of civil vibe within the ruby community. I work on the Padrino project and most of the communication with the ruby community, our committers and our users is highly enjoyable. Jerks can be found everywhere, but they are a minority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Summary: people who maintain popular projects can sometimes be jerks because of all of the pressure; it is not an excuse to be a jerk when submitting tickets and/or patches.

This is why I try to submit patches instead of tickets whenever possible. When I can't quite wrap my head around the fix when submitting a ticket, I ask if anyone can point me in the right direction so I can at least try to help fix it.

<comment><USER7> With few exceptions, I categorically deny the existence of any entitlement to be a jerk. By entitlement, I specifically mean justifications like "well, I was under a lot of pressure."

There's always a "reason" one can give for being a jerk.

<comment><USER3> You're absolutely right. And to clarify, my article is not in any way meant to claim that the way that the RubyGems maintainers are acting is justified. Instead, I'm just trying to make the point that their experience with end users is not exactly full of ponies and rainbows, and if you act like a jerk to a maintainer, you should not expect civility in response.

Users of RubyGems who proactively act rudely to the maintainers in the expectation that they will be treated rudely are only making things worse. I think in the very worst case, that the idea that RubyGems is under some sort of tyrannical rule would seem less incredulous if contributors and users would at least _try_ being civil first. Those that don't are simply poking at a sore wound.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just be civil and nice when you have a problem. I think most maintainers actually don't mind people but when you get a constant barrage of demands for functionality or people telling you that you suck because your project don't quite measure up to their standards I can see how people can get to the point where they lash out. Most open source project are after all a hobby or pastime for people and it's important to remember that before ragging on someone.

Civility is key in all human interaction.

</comment><comment><USER9> To be fair, the deprecation message spam is a downright failure.

Fortunately, RubyGems reverts to its previous version really easily.</comment>


Greuler – Graph theory visualizations - <AUTHOR> http://maurizzzio.github.io/greuler/ <comment><USER2> Whenever I see a new graph visualization tool, I instantly start dragging the nodes around like a madman to see how well the graph "balances" in the viewport. I soon noticed there was a tutorial was running _while I was manipulating the position of the nodes_ , and regardless of how much stretching and pulling I did to try breaking the tutorial, it worked flawlessly as if I wasn't even touching it. That, I thought, was really awesome. Well done!

<comment><USER3> This actually is the power of the algorithm behind webcola, not totally anything greuler does. Still cool though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks nice. I do find the headlines drawing themselves a letter at a time to be kind of distracting. I makes it hard to scan down the page, as the headlines aren't there.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. The font choice was also very odd. Everything else looks incredibly cool though!

<comment><USER6> hehe yep I should've chosen a better font

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool! I was lazily working on something similar for a project, and might be able to drop this in and save a ton of time.

If the author reads this, might I suggest some examples using the label attributes of nodes and edges? It'd be great to see a graph annotated (potentially with some image or link tags embedded for further browsing?).

<comment><USER6> thanks! right now I'm working on more examples where the information on the edges is used like finding the minimum spanning tree or the shortest path from a source vertex, I'd suggest to open a new ticket in the repo issues section so I can take a look at it later, thanks for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> How many nodes/edges can be handled by this ? I'm working with graphs with hundreds of node/edges.

</comment><comment><USER9> Really nice. One nitpick: I can drag the graphs out of the svg frame and then they are lost forever. It would be nice if there was an attraction toward the center of the frame or there would be walls that wouldn't let this happen.

</comment><comment><USER10> Cool. Any way I could connect my Neo4j API and visualize the db or individual requests?

<comment><USER11> Yes, this would be excellent. Most people who would be using this in a serious way would likely run the bulk of their queries on the serverside in their graph DB, and then perhaps allow a bit of graph manipulation in the browser just to visualize the results for users.

Some kind of hooking of a graph DB API would make this perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Awesome! I'm currently piecing together teaching material for an intro to algorithms class and this is excellent. Right about to implement Bellman- Ford's and Dijkstra's.

</comment><comment><USER13> I counted six cycles ?

      6,7,8,6
      8,0,3,4,9,8
      0,5,1,0
      0,1,3,0
      (are these not considered separate cycles ?)
      8,0,5,1,3,4,9,8
      0,5,1,3,0

Anyway, very nice presentation.

<comment><USER6> you're right hehe I should rename the problem to finding the number of back edges in the dfs tree, thanks for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, this is slick!

Would love to use this to visualize a min/max algorithm.

A nice way to demonstrate graph algorithms, as you have already shown!

</comment><comment><USER15> This is an entirely personal opinion, but as nice as it is, I find the font painfully difficult to read.

<comment><USER6> Indeed, I've changed the font, idk what I was thinking hehe

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> thanks for the submission OP!

<comment><AUTHOR> no problem; thank you for something submission worthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> love it!!

I am looking for a tool to construct a PERT visualization, but it require to be a activity-on-node type of graph

does Greuler allows to construct such type of graphs?

<comment><USER6> I'm sure you can do it, the layout is powered by WebCola which has an example of a DAG: [http://marvl.infotech.monash.edu/webcola/examples/downwarded...](http://marvl.infotech.monash.edu/webcola/examples/downwardedges.html), greuler is more like a tool that provides the necessary methods to interact with the nodes/edges of the graph in a nice way</comment></comment>


Euro bailout. Now banking risk morphs into geo-political risk - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2010/05/euro_bailout_now_banking_risk.html

<comment><USER2> Excellent description of the public sector dimension of the current debt crisis.</comment>


It's the Economy, Dummkopf!  - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/09/europe-201109?currentPage=all

<comment><USER2> This article tries hard to present something useful/interesting in a lightweight manner. And is insulting throughout the text.

What stuck out was "Shit, crap, anal, Hitler, Hitler, anal, excrement, Greek people are lazy and dumb, good that they don't have Jews anymore, Hitler, Nazi, Holocaust, "Deutschland unter alles" a reference to the (now illegal) part of the 'Deutschlandlied' originally called 'Deutschland ueber alles' (think Nazi hymn).

I stop reading now. This is the most disgusting thing I've read for a long time, and goatse would probably feel like a relief now.

Stavros, what's your take on the Greek stereotypes..?

And to add insult to - erm - insult:

Page 9: "Why should you pay $20 million to a 32-year-old trader? He uses the office space, the I.T., the business card with a first-class name on it. If I take the business card away from that guy he would probably sell hot dogs." He is the German equivalent of the head of Bank of America, or Citigroup, and he is actively hostile to the idea that bankers should make huge sums of money.

\---

He in this case is Klaus-Peter Müller. Please check the first hit I found searching for his name and 'Einkommen'/income. It's German and outdated, but Google Translate should help or just scroll down to see amounts listed next to his name. You see what he got 2007 and (oh, poor guy took a hit) what he got in 2008 up until the 15.05. Yes it's not 20 million. But 'hostile to the idea that bankers should make huge sums of money'? > 2 million / year? What exactly is the author smoking?

[http://www.focus.de/finanzen/boerse/aktien/vorstandsgehaelte...](http://www.focus.de/finanzen/boerse/aktien/vorstandsgehaelter/vorstandsgehaelter- martin-blessing_aid_10905.html)

<comment><USER3> If you're referring to me, that came as quite the surprise. If not, I'll reply anyway:

I didn't manage to read the entire article (it's 17 pages), but I'll comment on the parts I did manage to read. First of all, I've never heard of anyone in Greece making 70k, as the article says. 40k is considered a really high salary, although I think that might be 55k before taxes (I'm not sure about the calculation). At any rate, the median is much, much lower, as most of my friends get around 1k a month, which is about enough for one person to live on. We're hardly a rich country.

About the 13th and 14th salaries, those are Easter/Christmas bonuses, and are (used to be) given to everyone, including people who make 800-1000 Euros/month. I've never heard of them being an accounting trick, but I can't be sure.

Generally, the stereotype Greeks have for themselves is one of the enterprising, law-defying Greek who will try to get by doing the minimum amount of work possible. It's true in many areas, e.g. the public sector, where services are dysfunctional and only open to the public for 4-5 hours a day. A Greek joke has three children (French, English and Greek) comparing their mass transit times, saying "my father gets off work at 4 and he's home at 4:30", "my father is home at 4:15", and the Greek kid says "mine's a civil servant, he gets off work at 4 and he's home at 2".

To make matters worse, civil servants can't be fired, this was a measure instituted years ago to avoid politicians hiring and firing their people every four years to get votes, I don't think this has changed since then.

The problem with Greece is that societal values are pretty much "every man for himself", which is why we're having so much trouble with everything public. There's no regard for public spaces, no regard for a well-run society, even politicians are only trying to embezzle as much as they can while doing the minimum amount of work to get reelected.

It's odd, this systemic laziness is both contrasting and complementing the fact that most of my friends today are either out of work and desperately looking for anything, or working 10-12 hour days for 700-800 euros a month, no paid overtime, and no security. You wouldn't call people who work this hard "lazy", of course, but the moment someone could get a job in the public sector, they'd work much less, simply because that is the norm there. There's no incentive for anyone to work hard, and there's no penalty for not working hard in the public sector.

Given these (dis)incentives and the mindset in the workplace, I think that anyone would do the same. It's clear that we need public services to be more meritocratic, but that doesn't align with the politicians' incentives.

Sorry about the stream-of-consciousness post, but most of the things came to me as I wrote them. I'll be happy to answer any questions anyone has.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the "dreizehntes Monatsgehalt" (thirteenth monthly salary) is common in Germany, too. Many more than half of all employees in Germany get it. It's a Christmas bonus, usually about equal to one monthly salary. It's nothing special.

If I know my Griswold correctly, Christmas bonuses don't seem to be too uncommon in the US as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >The only financial disaster in the last decade German bankers appear to have missed was investing with Bernie Madoff. (Perhaps the only advantage to the German financial system of having no Jews.)

Ouch.

<comment><USER6> Germany has a population of ~200,000 Jewish people, which is over 1% of the global Jewish population and puts Germany among the 10 nations with the largest Jewish populations.[1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Germany#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Germany#Jews_in_the_reunited_Germany_.28post-1990.29)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kind of odd to mention the German obsession with shit and not mention _the shelf toilet_. That's like stop #1 on the tour.

<http://asecular.com/~scott/misc/toilet.htm>

<comment><USER2> I downvoted you, because..

Really? Fecal humo(u)r on HN? Ignoring the stereotypes and you repeating the 'German obession with shit' line as a sort of fact, that's just low.

<comment><USER7> Actually I was just pointing out the fact that the author, whom I respect and have read, tried to tie this story to the stereotype without actually involving himself in true German culture or, as I have, actually spent a serious amount of time in the country with actual citizens. Hell, I married one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> An interesting look at a theorized national German character. But I agree with the driver/interpreter woman, Germany is huge, Bavarian, and North German, and High German are not even mutually intelligible. The article just didn't convince me of anything.

It didn't explain exactly why German banks were so blind to risk. And the claim that German banking is behind the times, is also just plain wrong. I can't find the Economist article, but there is one bemoaning how backward and inefficient American banks are compared to German banks. But the Economist might have referred more to retail banking, this seems to be more about investment banking.

In any case, long article, interesting read, but does not answer much unless you buy into the author's weakly supported thesis that Germans are anal- retentive to the point of being cripplingly oblivious to any kind of deceit.

<comment><USER4> It's not interesting, it's completely speculative and might as well be numerology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> LOL. Did "The Sun" hack into the vanityfair web site and placed this article or what happened?

</comment><comment><USER10> Single page version: <http://www.readability.com/articles/yt57clbl>

</comment><comment><USER11> I dunno if it's the mobile redirect or not but I can't view the page on my phone. Either way why oh why do people redirect without my input to m.site.com??? Maybe try to make your content readable no matter what the format. Secondly, make sure redirects don't break your page. Just sayin

</comment><comment><USER12> Stopped reading because site would not let me resize in my eye pad. Too old to squint.</comment>


Why Some Security Experts Use Mutt - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-security-experts-are-using-an-ancient-email-format-in-2015 <comment><USER3> I don't know any security experts who do this. I do know a bunch of old-school nerds who use mutt because that's what they got started with.

<comment><USER4> I don't think people use mutt because of security (other than good PGP support). I think people use mutt because they like the efficiency of a lean, terminal based, email client.

<comment><USER5> That plus there aren't many good open source (non-web) options.

Thunderbird is pretty bad.

<comment><USER6> What's wrong with Thunderbird? Note that if you use it as an IMAP client for Gmail, that Gmail's IMAP implementation is -as I understand it- kinda bad, so you're gonna kinda have a bad time.

<comment><USER7> I find that it hasn't really been designed for keyboard-only use. Some features, such as switching folders for instance, seem to require a mouse, or at least I haven't been able to find a shortcut for doing it. It's also kind of hard to avoid accidentally composing html emails - it cannot be disabled completely. I still use thunderbird myself though, as I haven't been able to find a better alternative for Linux. claws-mail comes close, but it does too much work in the ui thread, which grinds everything to a halt whenever it fetches email. Why do mail clients all seem to suck so much, given how much people use email?

<comment><USER8> To switch folders with the keyboard :

\- install Nostalgy addon

\- press "g"

\- type/select folder name

\- profit$

<comment><USER7> Perfect! That seems to fix the main issues I have with Thunderbird :). Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I still use mutt (and default to text), but I don't see anyone else doing this, even in my geek coworkers or friends. So I'm a bit surprised by this article.

I use mutt because it's very very fast, and quite customizable (I maintain a kind of 0-inbox through a set of hotkeys, + spamassin + procmail). To handle numerous mailing-lists with medium volume, it's so far the best I've seen.

I tried many email clients (on Windows, OSX and Linux), but I always come back to mutt, because it's the fastest to handle the high-volume of email I have...

<comment><USER10> I've been using mutt exlusively for many years, and I got a fair amount of flack for it every now and then. While I like to believe that it's more secure than any full-featured bloated mail-client (hello Thunderbird), my reason for using mutt is simpler. I like the speed, efficiency and customization aspects of mutts, plus being able to use vim to compose my mails. Quite frankly, I don't get how people rave about text editors but then fail to include them in their mail workflow, which is where people spend quite a bit of time nowadays.

The other reason I like mutt is because it still conforms to the UNIX principle: One thing and one thing well. True, you could use mutt for SMTP/IMAP, but there are better tools for that. I use mutt with offlineimap, msmtp and mu (for searching).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most "Security Experts" are working for consultancy, tech firms, and government agencies so they probably use plenty of other clients. The majority will probably run Outlook since Exchange is the defacto mail-server standard for any organization (that isn't tied to Lotus because 45 years ago the CEO had to sacrifice a goat to appease IBM to spare his 1st born), the rest will probably use Gmail or any other web-based mail that their smaller company is using. Most "experts" don't necessarily follow their own advice just as alcohol, drug use and smoking is more common in Doctors than any other diploma based profession out there, so can security "experts" run just as much as a shitty setup as everyone else and think that slightly better common sense and opsec will keep them safe which more often than not it would.

<comment><USER12> You can use mutt with Exchange servers and Gmail servers

<comment><USER13> Mutt and Exchange? Bliss! Would you happen to have a doc link handy?

<comment><USER12> Mutt doesn't support retrieving mail very well, but you can use sync programs (getmail, offlineimap, isync, exchange2mbox) to create local mailboxes and make mutt use the local mailbox directory instead.

you can send email using external programs (local smtp server and openxchange for exchange).

Mutt is not a traditional mail client, it is more of a glue between multiple programs so you can have one interface for all of your emails need.

<comment><USER14> If Mutt is not a _traditional mail client_ , then what is? heirloom-mailx?

I read my mail with less. _That 's_ a nontraditional mail client.

<comment><USER15> _" I read my mail with less."_

How? Sounds like you just grep your way through the mailbox?

<comment><USER14> Yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Security Experts... let me quote Linus Torvalds: "the security community tends to be very black and white. Either it's security or it's not. And if it is security, they care deeply. And if it is not, they don't care."

So who cares if you write your email in text mode but browse the web with Chrome/Firefox? No offense against Mutt... I can understand that some terminal pros like it but I cannot understand using it for security sake. So what happens if you want to view a html email? What about mail on a mobile phone (I guess security experts do not use them)?

And mutt has other attack surface because it is using the terminal. Look here for a Ubuntu security notice about mutt: [http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-2440-1/](http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/usn-2440-1/) Now I smile because gmail is not affected by that!

This is all not practical for 99,9% of normal users out there.

If you care about security do not let the paranoia control you. We need to improve security for the normal users out there. Just my opinion.

<comment><USER17> I used to use mutt (now i use mu4e) and indeed i do not own a mobile phone capable of more than GSM. Also, as mentioned elsewhere, HTML rendering works fine in mutt and mu4e (although perhaps this opens me up to various nefarious things).

I don't do this because i'm a security expert (i'm not), i just love speed (so AJAX and fancypants websites are out for me, i'll use the terminal or Emacs where possible) and the keyboard.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and i'd never trust my web browser with my PGP key...

<comment><USER18> > i just love speed (so AJAX and fancypants websites are out for me, i'll use > the terminal or Emacs where possible) and the keyboard.

The trouble is that most people who say this end up doing 6 things that take 200 ms each (with the keyboard) instead of 1 thing that takes 1 second (with the mouse), and feel like they're zooming along in hyperspace. You feel like a leet hacker, but are you really getting anything done more efficiently?

<comment><USER17> > are you really getting anything done more efficiently?

Maybe not, but is that 200ms improvement when using the mouse really worth it if i get all warm and fuzzy-feeling by being able to type something? :p Intangible benefits, yo.

More seriously though, i also feel (personally -- maybe i'm an outlier) like switching from keyboard to mouse and back is a bit of a performance hit, so i tend to concentrate my workflow around the keyboard as much as possible. And yeah, maybe (99% certainly!) i'm not the leetest or fastest h4x0r out there, but at least i'm enjoying myself :).

(i would be curious about an actual test case though -- maybe someone could design a few common tasks to complete using one's favourite HID and compare!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I use mu4e[1] to read, search and refile my emails, and there's a keyboard shortcut for viewing an HTML email in a browser. offlineimap[2] handles inbound messages. I love it!

But for writing email, I still tend to jump over to Apple Mail. msmtp[3] handles outbound messages on those occasions when I choose to fire off a message from within mu4e.

[1] [http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html](http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html)

[&] [https://github.com/djcb/mu](https://github.com/djcb/mu)

[2] [https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap](https://github.com/OfflineIMAP/offlineimap)

[3] [http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/](http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER17> I also use mu4e, and i'm curious, why do you switch to Mail.app for composing? I love the fact that all my editor customisations (of which there are many) are still there when i'm writing email.

<comment><USER20> To each their own, obviously, but this does seem profoundly weird. I can't imagine anyone choosing an Emacs-based mua and not using the editing ability for composing mail.

<comment><USER19> I've been using Apple Mail since the OS X Public Beta in 2000. Its address completion and rich text support are entwined in how I think about authoring emails, so I'm simply more comfortable using it for that purpose. It also helps that Emacs-style movement keys work throughout OS X, including Apple Mail's "new message" windows.

I did give mu4e a go, i.e. for writing emails, and I never got to a point where it really appealed to me. I do love it, though, for reading and managing my tens of thousands of email messages. It's also nice that I can easily create links to messages in mu4e, which I can include in my org-mode files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've used mutt for ages, but a couple of years ago I switched to Karel Zak's mutt-kz branch ([https://github.com/karelzak/mutt- kz](https://github.com/karelzak/mutt-kz)), which integrates notmuch into mutt. The setup is a little fussy (although well documented), but the results are spectacular. Mutt's search was never horrible but with notmuch its nutty fast, and the tagging feature makes dealing with search and mailing lists very convenient.

<comment><USER22> You can use mairix as a search system outside of mutt. Results are a temporary mailbox.

<comment><USER23> notmuch can generate temporary maildirs as well with this script:

[http://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch/blob_plain/HEAD:/cont...](http://git.notmuchmail.org/git/notmuch/blob_plain/HEAD:/contrib/notmuch- mutt/notmuch-mutt)

However, in my experience mutt-kz is much faster. Plus, you get tagging everywhere (if you use it) and threads can be reconstructed across folders (helpful when your own mails are in a 'Sent' folder).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As I'm a emacs person, I tried once wanderlust[1] and got hooked up to it. Wanderlust is mail client which supports a wide variety of protocols. For me the biggest advantages are the blazing fast IMAP support and the whole emacs thing (Keybindings, Help (C-h b for all keybindings in this buffer, priceless I have to say), the possibility to run it either in GUI or in a terminal, etc). Recently the devs uploaded it to melpa[2] which makes it even more easy to get started. I would definitly recommend it, to people who are already using emacs, its such a joy!

[1] [https://github.com/wanderlust/wanderlust](https://github.com/wanderlust/wanderlust)

[2] [http://melpa.org/#/wanderlust](http://melpa.org/#/wanderlust)

<comment><USER25> Another Emacs person here. I'm using offlineimap+msmtp together with mu4e. I prefer not to do IMAP sync or mail delivery in Emacs itself.

<comment><USER26> Have you tried isync? I was using offlineimap before, but found it buggy and inefficient.

<comment><USER27> What are the bugs you are referring to? I have been using it for a few weeks for a couple of mail accounts without trouble so far. It could probably be faster though (customizing 'maxconnections' does help).

<comment><USER20> It never reliably functioned as a daemon for me. It would just stop checking for messages randomly after an hour or two. And if you give up on it being a daemon, then it's horrifically slow because it's doing full syncs all the time.

I ended up having a script running out of cron that would kill and restart the daemon process every 30 minutes so that I could get reasonably fast incrememntal updates but still have it continue to work properly.

And then it started losing track of what the server looks like. If you delete a label on the Gmail side, then of course offlineimap wants to recreate it. For a little while, it was tolerable to stop offlineimap, delete all the local metadata for a folder, go delete the folder from Gmail, and then restart offlineimap, but eventually that stopped working too, and it was recreating deleted folders on the server that I never managed to find a reason for.

isync just worked exactly how I wanted to after spending a bit of time setting it up, and it's been pretty solid since then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> There are several slightly less hardcore alternatives to Mutt for those wanting a more modern e-mail experience without the security baggage of running an entire browser. Sylpheed for instance is a very pleasant text-only MUA ([http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/](http://sylpheed.sraoss.jp/en/)). For added peace of mind it does not take long to write an AppArmor profile to further confine Sylpheed to just the parts of your filesystem you'd like it to be able to access.

<comment><USER29> _For added peace of mind it does not take long to write an AppArmor profile to further confine Sylpheed to just the parts of your filesystem you 'd like it to be able to access._

Do you have an example? Sounds like a pretty awesome setup that you should share.

<comment><USER28> I will see if I can get it tidied up enough I'd be comfortable sharing :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Thunderbird has, or had, a plain text mode and a "Simple HTML" mode (other than only recognizing a subset of HTML, I don't know what it does) for displaying messages. You can leave it in plain text mode and, in the event you really need to view HTML, switch it to "Simple" or full HTML. It also can block remote images and, I think, all JavaScript.

The wonderful Nostalgy add-on provides a very responsive keyboard interface.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/thunderbird/addon/nostalgy/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/thunderbird/addon/nostalgy/)

I don't know if current Thunderbird versions include all that, however.

<comment><USER31> I use Thunderbird and keep it set as text only for sending and remote images loading is disabled by default (as it should be). JavaScript in emails is not loaded or run.

<comment><USER30> Thanks.

> I use Thunderbird and keep it set as text only for sending

Is that an option for viewing messages? That's where the security risk mostly exists.

<comment><USER31> View - Message Body As - and then your options are Original HTML, Simple HTML, and plaintext.

Loading of external images is fully disabled by default. You can enable it per-email by clicking as well as per-sender (which I don't personally do or recommend).

Showing as text is mostly unnecessary, though, as Thunderbird does not allow Javascript or any plugins within messages. As a result, the attack surface is _significantly_ reduced compared to a browser as most browser-based attacks are via Flash, PDF, Java, Javascript, etc in decreasing order of popularity. That wipes out the vulnerabilities used in the vast majority of attacks right off the bat. Thunderbird uses the Gecko engine underneath which is up to date and version tied to Firefox ESR, so the engine gets security updates basically same-day as Firefox itself, which is another big point in its favor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm not sure I buy the reasoning on "surface area", at least not the specific comparisons in the article. It seems unfair to count Chrome but not Unix. For that matter, shouldn't we count the surface area of everything that touches the email as it hops around, including routers, etc? And isn't that the whole problem with email that the protocol does not require secure transport? So, seems like the only way to make that even vaguely secure is to use PGP (or something) on top, in which case who cares about mutt...

<comment><USER33> Right.

"Let's switch from an email client written in a safe high level language that's also running inside multiple sandboxes and which has a full time security team (e.g. gmail) to ...... a mail client written in C"

Doesn't seem like a great approach.

<comment><USER34> (Preemptive N.B.—I'm far from an expert, but I'm very interested in seeing this aspect of the topic discussed further by folks who might be experts.)

Isn't the general premise here that one can choose to package up any program in as many deeply nested (virtual or physical) sandboxes as one would like, but there's an inherent benefit to the piece of software inside all those boxes exposing to one's adversary as few avenues as possible to attempt to escape them (specifically as it pertains to people in the business of painting targets on their backs e.g. Soghoian)?

Put another way, of course Gmail and Chrome have dedicated security teams, but they won't ever have _prevent $GIVEN_INFOSEC_RESEARCHER 's box from getting owned_ teams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Another reason is that it spawns a text editor. Typing emails in a text widget without proper editing capabilities can be irritating.

<comment><USER36> In Firefox, you can use It's All Text! to edit the current text area in a proper editor.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/its-all- text/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/its-all-text/)

<comment><USER37> That works less and less as more websites offer "improved" text editing capabilities through javascript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The title carries sarcasm as soon as you finish the article half-way.

I totally agree that usability is damn important. One reason I stopped using Ubuntu Desktop version is exactly the poor usability of Unity, and I now prefer headless (and if I ever need browser I'd use X-windows).

For email client I either use Thunderbird, or Outlook 2013, simply because graphical interface is easier to work with. I code using VIM and I do a lot of work from terminal, but I can't image myself learning all the tricks like dragging image, setting up a meeting, viewing people's availability the next day all via terminal screen. Doable but I still think graphical interface has advantage. The thing I dislike about email clients like Outlook is their WYSIWYG editor as sometimes the editor is limited, or too aggressive. But since my job involves a lot of communication, I do need the convenience of WYSIWYG and COPY-PASTE. What a struggle.

<comment><USER39> I'd prefer things that need formatting be an attachment such as rtf or pdf leaving the email in plain text. There is no reason why personally written email needs rich text.

<comment><USER40> I use outlook at my work for email and its not uncommon to send screenshots and similar.

A common workflow for me is to hit print screen paste into the message compose window, crop the image and super impose annotations onto it using the office drawing tools (circle, arrows, text box etc).

I also like the integration with Communicator and calendar, Having notification about when people are online in meetings and which building they are in (my work has multiple sites) is handy. I don't usually like Microsoft products but Outlook is pretty solid in my opinion. The only alternative I've really seen is Lotus Notes.

<comment><USER41> Does that really crop the image, or just hide parts of it? I ask because cropping in Word can be undone by another recipient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Claws (and sylpheed, which it is a fork of) is by default text-only (html rendering only through a plugin). I used to use just mutt, but use claws quite a bit now.

<comment><USER43> My graphical client of choice. Lightweight, quick, and relatively easy to box in. Didn't play with Gmail so nicely so I access it a different way. Works with other accounts fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I don't use _mutt_ anymore, but I still feel it's a beautiful client, both in its simplicity and its appearance (take the screenshot from the article, for example). I probably should start using it again since I'm transitioning away from Gmail to a traditional mail host.

<comment><USER36> I use Alpine instead; tried mutt first, but found it abstruse to set up.

<comment><USER45> Yeah, I'm biased towards (Al)pine, would be interesting to know how does Mutt compares with it

<comment><USER46> I started with Pine, and used mutt for a bit later. Mutt is ok, if you invest the time in learning it. (If you can handle vim, you can cope with mutt.)

<comment><USER47> Interesting. I've been using (al)pine for years, and there are bits of it which really frustrate me - mostly how slow it is when dealing with large mailboxes - so i have been considering a move to mutt for a while. I'm not a vim fan, so i might have to reconsider!

<comment><USER46> Oh, the specific keystrokes etc are not the same. (I don't think they even have the concept of modes in mutt.)

It's more of a spiritual similarity. About as faint as vim / nethack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The sup email client is another good option. Text mode like mutt but threads emails like gmail [http://supmua.org/](http://supmua.org/)

</comment><comment><USER49> I do use mutt as my principal e-mail client. It started as an experiment, now I fully transitioned to it. I enjoy being able to compose messages in vim and the tight integration with gpg. In case you want to try mutt out, some time ago I wrote a short guide about setting up mutt on osx,

[http://www.lucianofiandesio.com/getting-started-with-mutt- on...](http://www.lucianofiandesio.com/getting-started-with-mutt-on-osx)

</comment><comment><USER50> I still use mh (well, nmh now) programs for my personal email. There is nothing that beats mh's "pick" program for selecting emails.

<comment><USER51> Does imap figure anywhere in your mix?

<comment><USER50> Nope! I forward mail from various other email addresses to my email address where I care.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I like alot: [https://github.com/pazz/alot](https://github.com/pazz/alot)

</comment><comment><USER53> I used to use Mutt, but these days I do over 75% of my mail reading on a phone, and on a phone Mutt is a non-starter.

<comment><USER54> I have used it from a phone with a terminal emulator over ssh (all of my phones have had keyboards). It was impressive to see how the keyboard supported mapping swipe gestures to cursor movement keys so that I could swipe up and down in my mutt message listings.

<comment><USER14> What's the best QWERTY-keyboard phone now?

<comment><USER55> You would have to use an ancient modem or just sync emails by serial cable/irda, but the Psion 5MX was about the pinnacle of portable content creation hardware, IMO. With it you can write emails or whole books if you wish. Some prefer the 3 series, but not necessarily for the keyboard. 25-40hr battery life on 2 AAs, insta-on operation, CF card transfer of files - <USER2> wonder people are still using them.

Now that people are not as fixated on having colour screens, being primed to now accept e-ink style displays, is there a chance we could get a similar device with more modern specs? I think I'd _still_ rather work from a palmtop than a laptop or phone when not at a 'workstation'.

I used an N900 for a long time (relatively speaking) and found its keyboard to be solid, but not in a way that could make writing or emailing tasks more productive.

<comment><USER14> It does look pretty awesome, but I can't find anybody selling Psions here in Buenos Aires, and it seems like they might lack something in the camera, GPS, 3-D modeling, and audio department. Like, I recorded a beatboxer at a public gathering today on my Android phone, and more than once I've sketched things on paper and photographed them with it, quite aside from other creative uses for photography.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> > A quarter of a century ago, checking your email meant logging onto a > mainframe

The lead in seems incorrect. Pine wasn't publicly released until 1992. By the early 90s many college and university environments were thin clients or unix workstations connecting to unix servers.

</comment><comment><USER57> Popular mail clients such as Thunderbird and Outlook are underattack so the "Security experts" use lesser known clients. I do believe GPG should have been mentioned more besides the Enigmail mention since we are talking about security.

</comment><comment><USER58> I've used mutt since '98 or so, and see no reason to change. For HTML email I can either pipe it into lynx or bounce it to Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER59> Wish it was more user friendly and ran well on Windows (yes, I'm that guy). A good example of something that is user friendly, fast, secure and runs almost everywhere is the messaging client Telegram. Would be great if there were more programs like it.

<comment><USER6> > Wish [mutt] was more user friendly and ran well on Windows...

I would be _shocked_ if Cygwin's mutt port didn't run just as well on Windows as it did on Linux. Remember that UNIX software that you compile with Cygwin becomes a native Windows executable.

<comment><USER41> Software you compile with Cygwin's GCC becomes a native Cygwin executable, with its own concepts of paths, processes, symlinks and environment. All binaries compiled with Cygwin always inherit GPL virality. The Cygwin OS is coincidentally hosted on Windows and mostly plays nice with it.

Software you compile with Mingw(-w64)'s GCC becomes a native Windows executable.

<comment><USER6> AFAICT, Unix software that you compile with Cygwin's tools understands both Unix paths and Windows style paths. [0]

It also understands Windows environment variables. [1]

Cygwin is aware of Windows processes. [2]

Cygwin is aware of the Windows registry. [3]

The executables that are created by the default Cygwin build process are PE executables that have a dependency on the Cygwin DLLs and run on any Windows system. They _are_ native Windows software, with a dependency on a third-party DLL.

If you build open-source software against the Cygwin libraries, that software can be distributed under its _original_ license. If you modify the Cygwin build process to produce executables that do _not_ depend on the Cygwin libraries, then you can distribute that software under any licence you like. Regardless, if you have cash you can _always_ reach alternative licensing terms if you reach out to Red Hat. [4]

Cygwin symlinks don't make use of NTFS junction points, but I imagine that that is for two reasons:

1) Cygwin _might_ be run on a FAT32 system.

2) There are many, many, many pieces of Windows software (some of it is big name software!) out there that blow up _spectacularly_ when they encounter a Junction Point. (Indeed, it was my direct experience that Windows Explorer behaved very poorly when asked to recursively delete a folder containing a couple of Junction Points in -I think- pre-SP1 Windows 7. I haven't tried JPs in _AGES_ , so I can't speak to whether or not MSFTs own tooling has gotten better.)

At a _minimum_ , software compiled against Cygwin meets the most basic definition of Windows software (A PE executable that runs on Windows systems). I hope that I have made it clear that the Cygwin libraries _also_ provide a _large_ amount of interoperability between Unix software and software originally written for Windows.

[0] Try it out. Fire up a Cygwin Bash shell and do the following (assuming that you're running on an English-language Windows):

echo "hello there" > "$USERPROFILE\Desktop\helloThere.txt"

then check the new file on your desktop. rm works just fine, too. Forward slashes work in paths, also!

[1] Try this out in a Cygwin bash shell:

echo $APPDATA ; echo $LOCALAPPDATA ; echo $SYSTEMROOT

[2] Again, in a cygwin bash shell do:

ps -W

[3] Do (in a Cygwin bash shell):

ls /proc/registry/

[4] [https://cygwin.com/licensing.html](https://cygwin.com/licensing.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Reminds me on the inverse question I replied to from a few weeks ago: "Ask HN: Someone still using Thunderbird for Gmail in 2015?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10026641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10026641)

To be honest, I never thought about the possible weakness of the html rendering in most clients. But then I am more concerned about my privacy than security.

<comment><USER61> How can you have pricacy without security?

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I use mutt because after you learn of its power, other mail clients reveal themselves to be toys. I keep all my active correspondence in my inbox (5773 messages at the moment). With a few keystrokes I can instantly create a subset of my inbox optimized for the task at hand. (People who use toys instead of mutt often advocate an "inbox zero" approach, I understand.)

<comment><USER46> You can do the same two things with gmail.

(There are lots of things mutt does that gmail doesn't, of course.)

<comment><USER62> What two things?

I'm not an expert on Gmail's keyboard interface. How, for example, can I see all the messages from Joe Zwanizol that are more than 15 days but less than 60 days old, using only the keyboard, in five seconds?

<comment><USER46> > What two things?

The two things mentioned: quickly-customized inboxes (via search) and handling lots of emails.

> How, for example, can I see all the messages from Joe Zwanizol that are more > than 15 days but less than 60 days old, using only the keyboard, in five > seconds?

There's a search syntax for that. Not sure whether you'll type it out in five seconds.

A browser extension to bring mutt keyboard interface to gmail might be useful for some folk.

<comment><USER62> After looking for it I found the search syntax, so it would seem that something like this is possible, as you say. But it's not as expressive as mutt's pattern language, so would be clunkier to use. But it is there.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Category Theory - <AUTHOR> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/category-theory <comment><USER2> It's interesting that when I think of philosophy (which "plato") suggests, I think of a completely different kind of "Category" theory. It puts category in a different category.

<comment><USER3> Eilenberg & Mac Lane needed a word like 'set', 'group', 'class', etc, except of course those were all taken. They claim to have gotten the word 'category' from Kant, although they didn't intend an actual semantic relation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We should just pin some category theory posts to the top of HN.

</comment><comment><USER5> <neo-voice> I know category theory </neo-voice>

Kidding. Where's the tl;dr?

<comment><USER4> tl; dr Collections of objects and maps between them are themselves good objects to consider. So meta, much abstraction, wow.</comment></comment>


The problem of shitty software is you because you pay for this shit - <AUTHOR> https://prog.nocorp.me/post/the-problem-of-shitty-software-is-you-because-you-pay-for-this-shit-1u7fh8ftzwfhn <comment><USER2> the problem is not "me".

We always like to think of consumer choice as being the ultimate determiner for what becomes and stays successful, and that's how it should work. But, it's not actually how it works. With sooo many monopolies out there (at&t/comcast ISP), there's a lot of things where you don't have much consumer choice or no consumer. And when you do have a choice, the cost of switching is super high.

I periodically go through my apps and see which ones are taking up the most disk space/memory/bandwidth/battery life and prune all of the ones above a certain amount.

Guess what all the top 10 have in common: yup, they are all pseudo monopolies. If you think the problem is you, I dare you to go to your top 10 biggest wasters and see if you can find a viable alternative to any of them.

Heck, sometimes, it's literally impossible to delete certain apps: the bloatware that's baked into all our phones. But, people don't seem to mind, some of those app even rate 4 stars out of 5.

And it doesn't help that searching for an app is such a big pain point. When you do finally find an app that meets your criteria, it's tough to find another ones that meets All your requirements.

But, my impression is that, most non-tech people don't care about hings like: disk space, memory, bandwidth or effect on battery life. At least, not enough to measure it or do anything about it. My wife would rather carry along a super heavy dumbbell-weight battery, than look at which apps are draining the most juice.

<comment><USER3> I do server side stuff so battery life and disk space aren't the most pressing of performance concerns for me. However i do take an interest in producing clean maintainable code that performs well. No one higher up gives a shit about these things, they just want their new feature out faster.

<comment><USER4> That's because as a good developer you know that ignoring those things will eventually bite you on the ass.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. I try explaining, but its always a case of "yes, next month".

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately as we all know, the problem is that you're the one who will get bit on the ass, not them.

"Your feature made things slow down - you need to fix it!! Oh, BTW we need this next new feature as well".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most software is shoved down our throats by other people. I don't get to chose the OS I use at work, I can't remove the sluggish virus scanner or other software IT installs, and I can't pick the chat client someone else wants me to use to chat with them.

In markets where individuals do make the software choice, buggy and slow products are often punished. You see a lot of warnings about bugs and performance problems on video game reviews, and those reviews do seem to hurt the sales.

<comment><USER6> You're right that games are a market where consumers have lots of choice. If you watch the choices people make, though, you'll see that they don't care about whether a product is buggy and slow.

The top game on Steam for many months now is PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. It has a "mixed" rating, with only 49% of reviews giving it a thumbs up -- by far the lowest rating of any game in the top 20. The reviews tell a story of how bugs, lag, broken servers, loot crates, and rampant cheating add up to a barely-playable game.

And yet, no one cares! It continues to top the charts, both in sales and cumulative play time. If we think about why that is, we might come up with non-monopoly explanations for why buggy software proliferates in other fields.

<comment><USER7> >And yet, no one cares!

It can top charts and have also tuned away a sizeable portion of the potential player base. Both can be true at the same exact time.

You're telling an easy to believe just-so story. And that's the problem with the way these things are analyzed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've thought for a decade+ that as soon as computers stopped getting faster there would be a return to people spending the effort to build more efficient software. It absolutely costs companies real money to build slow software quickly now that the common paradigm is buying machine time on AWS.

But I'm beginning to think I might be wrong, things just continue to get more bloated, and people continue to use it. Some of it is the price. A skype update that now burns a whole CPU core and 400MB ram is still acceptable because its _FREE_.

Long term I suspect I might be right, companies that can run their chat app on 30 servers, vs 3000 will have a competitive edge. Whether I will be around in the decades this will take to shake out is another question.

<comment><USER9> > the common paradigm is buying machine time on AWS.

That alone is an indicator that cost (at least of compute) isn't a critical factor in the decision process. If it were, AWS costing a multiple of self- hosting would render it no longer paradigmatic.

<comment><USER8> I think you underestimate the middle management "everyone is doing it so it must be better" argument. People regularly talk about how inexpensive AWS is vs buying hardware and renting space.

This is probably true for people who only need tiny instances or have massively variable workloads. OTOH, the cloud vendors have been very good at selling people on the idea that its hard to rack machines and buy clean power & network connections. So, even at small companies I've seen AWS bills that could easily pay for another engineer (at middle America prices) despite the fact that a back of the envelope calculation wouldn't lead you to understand where all the compute power is actually going.

<comment><USER9> > I think you underestimate the middle management "everyone is doing it so it > must be better" argument.

Not at all. Although I didn't state it outright (in this thread), I'm convinced that this, rather than cost, is _the_ critical factor in this decision, not just in middle management but all the way to the top (especially in startups where there may not be a middle).

> People regularly talk about how inexpensive AWS is vs buying hardware and > renting space.

As I mentioned in another thread [1], they're both right and wrong. For the general case, and if cost were actually a critical factor, they'd be wrong.

However, as you point out, they've been sold on the idea (i.e. perception). Since what they end up having to pay is actual, not perceived cost, perhaps what we're saying is that a form of delusion is a factor in the decision making.

> This is probably true for people who only need tiny instances or have > massively variable workloads.

I'd go so far as to say it's definitely true in those cases, but that they're rare/niche enough to be irrelevant to the broader discussion.

Even the latter case, the sweet spot for "elastic" compute, is hard to imagine being the exclusive workload in an environment. To borrow a term from electrical generation, there's always some "base load". If the variable load is being used as justification for running the base load on AWS, then any cost savings could be wiped out [2]. I've found these lines of reasoning never have any actual numbers (cost analysis) behind them.

> the idea that its hard to rack machines and buy clean power & network > connections.

Those things are trivial, of course, since they're generally outsourced (and safe [1] to outsource), but there's more to it.

In that way, the idea is also both right and wrong. It's not trivial/obvious how to do it right, without getting bilked for too much money or creating needless risk/instability. It isn't however, cognitively or intellectually challenging and can easily be taught.

It is, however, potentially tedious and unsexy, which means that hiring someone to do it exclusively isn't a credible option. Fortunately, that aspect of even a few hundred servers might take up a quarter of senior engineer's time [3], and all the other things (that would still need doing even with AWS) would take up the rest of the time.

> a back of the envelope calculation wouldn't lead you to understand where all > the compute power is actually going.

That's part of the magic of AWS, it doesn't have to "go" anywhere to get charged. GCP recently announced a more pro-rated approach to, at least, CPU cores, based on actual usage.

In general, even to take advantage of elasticity, a customer has to expend (costly) engineering effort and/or engage in the vendor-lock-in auto-scaling tools provided.

Even then, there's opportunities to slip under the radar, such as with unattached EBS volumes, or snapshots on volumes, or S3. I'm sure there's a myriad of other opportunities to get charged for unused services spread throughout the AWS ecosystem.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18043544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18043544)

[2] I interviewed with a startup that was attempting to use this justification to move completely out of a colo, even though the variability of their "spiky" load was below 10:1 and their base load was well over half.

[3] Something that is often grossly over-estimated by people who have inadequate experience. I've read here on HN "but then we'd have to hire 5 sysadmins", a 10x over-estimation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For this reason I will often buy high quality software as soon as I'm made aware of it even if I won't be using it often. When it comes to making a choice between slightly pricey high quality and free or cheap mediocre, I'll opt for the former every time. I believe that if enough people vote with their wallets, change will come.

Whatever handful of coins I save going with crappy cheap or free software just isn't worth the frustration and lost time that's sure to come as part of the deal.

<comment><USER3> What do you consider high quality and what do you consider crappy cheap? Word is superior to Libre Office in most respects, but for the amount that I use a word processor even Google docs works fine for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For sure not. nobody pays for shitty open source, and for commercial closed source, you have no idea and care for the internal code quality, you only care for the feature set. if it gets the shit done.

the problem with open source is clustering of medium-level devs who drive out better devs.

the problem with closed source is management who prefer code monkeys over engineers who want to solve problems.

you as user have zero influence over these phenomenons

</comment><comment><USER12> The meaning of high quality software can be argued. Another HN comment put it pretty well:

>People are more likely to use a buggy app that has features they want over a perfect app with limited features.

I understand the article is specifically addressing the slowness of chat apps..if we're talking about messenger: I'm sure they could use a fraction of the RAM with the same features. But the fact of the matter is that it has the features people want and we will continue to use it. Is Facebook so in the wrong if their RAM hungry App is so successful? I'm not sure.

On a side note regarding good software, I enjoyed using a site called teamtreehouse so much that I pay for it still 3 years later and I never log in.

</comment><comment><USER13> I do indeed pay for this crap...but what are my options?

When Amazon had the one-click patent, I boycotted them for the better part of a decade. They didn't notice, and I missed out on some of their best service years, when deliveries arrived on time and products were legit

When blizzard cracked down excessively on bnetd, I boycotted them for several years. They didn't notice, and while gaming is not a big part of my life I was a warcraft and starcraft fan that missed out on the original sc1 competitive scene (as a fan, not participant), warcraft 3, and this little thing that grew into DOTA.

Had I treated comcast the same way for their many and continued terrible behaviors, i doubt I'd have the job and experienced I have today.

The issue is not that _I_ pay for this, it is that WE do, and long term vision is a noted human weakness that _I_ lack the power to change no matter how many times I inform the internet that it is wrong (j/k).

I dont have a real solution to offer, but if we think the system is broken, just trying the same ineffective solution over and over won't change it. And if you think the system is great (as the article does)..well, I'll have to disagree. Mass market capitalism has done great things and I wouldn't want to toss it wholesale, but one need only look at the environment (and consider the software environment as well, to keep it topical) to realize there is room for improvement - improvement that doesn't magically happen on it's own when people simply embrace what we have and stop there.

<comment><USER14> I feel the same way. People complain about microtransactions and other bad design practices in gaming, but while I make every effort not to give these companies money, millions of other people do. People defend these companies all the time.

<comment><USER4> 100%. I'm with you too, man. I didn't buy Star Wars Battlefront either, and I was very excited for it before it was released.

I can't believe people would buy a game where it's literally pay to win. Kids these days...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of that article I read about buying fake shoes where buyers are complaining that the shoes are too this and that and getting their demands met more than if they were at a legitimate shoe-seller, like if you are buying fake shoes, you are buying what you're getting

</comment><comment><USER16> > If you think that you'll be able to win over Slack by building a client that > fast and slim, then you're wrong. Even if you can get to the market, because > of the time you spent on polishing the experience the competition will be > far ahead of you.

Seen this a bit, why not create literally an alternate client for Slack if customers actually care? I'm not sure this is a good argument. A large part of Slack is the backend and admin tools and advertising, without these to care about you can catch up fast.

There's the obvious risk being at the mercy of Slack, but any software has risk, getting big corp to pay for your 'better' client is high reward if there actually is value to clients, big corp will pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER17> No shit

</comment><comment><USER18> Nah, almost nobody buys software these days. Even the bastion of capitalism that is Windows is now free.

<comment><USER19> Windows is not free.

<comment><USER18> Just skip entering a key. It won't bother you.

Before that it was the free upgrade from win7/8 which was unprecedented. They really want you to be on win 10 to push their store.

<comment><USER20> But they don't give you an ISO to download for free, do they? Even Apple makes it a little awkward to get the actual OS installer (if you aren't already on a Mac running the App Store.app).

<comment><USER21> Sure they do. It's like literally the first result for "windows 10 iso".

<comment><USER20> Ha! Oddly I can't actually get that page to render, I see it paint for a second and then it goes white and tries to load some tracking js forever. But point taken!

<comment><USER22> Last time I tried to download the win10 iso while on windows, their site proposed me the download of something along the lines of an installation tool. Shortly after that I tried the same webpage while running Ubuntu and the site proposed me the download of the full win10 iso. I believe that the webpage checks few alternatives prior to passing you the ISO .</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Defamation lawsuit over "Shitty Media Men" spreadsheet could break new ground - <AUTHOR> https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/google-fight-subpoena-demands-shitty-media-men-spreadsheet-1151932 <comment><USER2> I think the Bill Cosby allegations, accusations and trial are somewhat relevant to this contextually.

Putting aside (if you can) what Cosby was accused of, the trial by media and widespread publicity of accuser allegations and claims over a multi year, two trial period was a disaster for legal credibility IMO.

""The ability to find evidence that can support a defense 20 years later — it's an almost insurmountable task," said Nina J. Ginsberg, a criminal defense lawyer in Virginia who has handled a number of sexual assault cases.

"Having these really long statutes of limitations where it makes it virtually impossible to disprove what the victim is saying is grossly unfair," she added. "Just from the defense attorney's perspective, it's disabling."

[http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-gloria- allred-...](http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-gloria-allred- famous-cases-20151113-htmlstory.html)

With historical sexual allegations a powerful weapon in politics, business and for financial gain, the accused are increasingly defenseless and accused is the new guilty.

I'm not defending 'shitty men' or Bill Cosby here, I'm saying the legal system is a mess and that careers and credibility are destroyed during the witch hunt whether found guilty or not.

Whatever happened to 'innocent until proved guilty' and the accused's rights to privacy?

<comment><USER3> My life has been destroyed by a baseless corporate accusation of misconduct. I used the bitch-word toward a woman, and the story morphed into me flying off into a drunken rage while I was out of the office for a funeral. The story stuck and I'm now homeless. By the time I went to legal counsel realizing the extent of the damages, ironically, the statute of limitations of one year had already closed. And on the street I remain, until I can gain employment and credibility again. I'd actually welcome an assault case or anything to shed light onto the situation... because I'm effectively being treated as guilty of assault.

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry you're homeless, that sucks.

Can you help me better understand what happened here, though? Because it sounds like you called a coworker a bitch and was fired over it, and now can't get a recommendation from that job... In which case, can you understand why people might have a hard time sympathizing with your situation? Seems the results would be the same whether or not the story morphed.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. The morphing sounds unfortunate but immaterial here. Calling a coworker a bitch should absolutely be grounds for dismissal in my opinion.

<comment><USER6> Why should calling a co-worker a name be grounds for dismissal? grounds for a warning, or other punishment perhaps, but not ground for immediate dismissal.

<comment><USER7> It's a name which is associated with a certain level of contempt when applied by a man to a woman.

It really depends on the jurisdiction's employment rights and very much on the context as to whether it could be grounds for dismissal, but I can certainly see situations where you could be summarily dismissed even in a jurisdiction with relatively strong employment protections, such as the UK.

It's also worth noting that in some cases the employer is placed in a difficult position where they face a difficult choice: do nothing and they run the risk of an employee leaving citing constructive dismissal as management did nothing to handle the bullying; do something and risk retribution from the alleged. In some jurisdictions, sex discrimination in the workplace can lead to a substantial claim, so if you use aggressive language towards a female colleague in a 90% male workplace, HR is going to get twitchy.

Allegations in the form of statements are substantive evidence when it comes to employment disputes and if gross misconduct is defined by your workplace as bullying or harassing co-workers, you can expect to be summarily dismissed.

Also, employers can and frequently are wrong in their interpretation of what they can and cannot lawfully do. Again, this depends on jurisdiction but some jurisdictions have tribunals where you can take your case without the risk of costs being awarded against you.

<comment><USER8> > It's a name which is associated with a certain level of contempt when > applied by a man to a woman.

I am not a native speaker, so I might be wrong on this. But I believed that "bitch" is the female version of "dick", isn't it? For example in Italian both are rendered with the same word, only flexed by gender.

<comment><USER9> In essence those words are used pejoratively in comparable situations.

The word "bitch" however literally means "female dog" and is, in fact, used in a non-derogatory way in dog breeding circles.

Context is everything, but calling a female coworker a "bitch" is not acceptable in a professional environment.

<comment><USER8> And what about calling a male colleague a "dick"? And of course I agree that it's unprofessional and generally not acceptable; however I disagree that it should be in itself enough to fire somebody. Of course a _repeated_ behaviour of this kind is not acceptable and can be grounds for dismissal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm all for freedom of speech, but I believe it is unbelievable shitty for someone to publish a list of unsubstantiated allegations anonymously. Legally, I think Google has every right to stand in the way of this lawsuit, but morally and ethically I don't believe so. It's just like people posting pictures on Reddit to start witch-hunts and whatever you call what 4chan does.

If you're going to accuse someone, you harm yourself and case if you do not stand up. The one exception would be if you go to a newspaper/site, they do their due diligence, and backup your claims.

<comment><USER11> I think if you are for freedom of speech, this is exactly the sort of speech to disagree with and yet defend. This was a list of people not to work with, not a list of people to actively go after and harass. The list was not maintained by people with government or industry power. A world where you can't speak to others unless it's either a popular idea or a media organization will vouch for your speech is one where individuals don't actually have freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech is not going to be good for everyone. It will hurt people. It will cause people to believe things without hearing all sides of the story. It will allow a lie to travel halfway around the world before the truth puts it pants on. We want freedom of speech _despite_ all this risk, because we believe it has a power to improve society in a way that simply cannot be done by a censor that makes sure that all speech is good for society in its eyes.

<comment><USER12> So, you think it should be perfectly legal for me to circulate a rumor that geofft on hackernews is a pedophile?

I think our (the US) defamation laws are pretty reasonable. It provides a huge leeway for free speech but draws the line at lies that damage a private party. If you're going to publish a serious accusation like that, you had better be able to back it up - and if you can't, you should face legal consequences.

<comment><USER11> I do, actually. You have no evidence, so spread whatever rumors you like. If you start fabricating evidence then I would like that to be illegal.

I think there's also a distinction here between a good-faith claim with minimal evidence by the nature of the claim (e.g. "this happened between the two of us privately") and a bad-faith claim because there's no evidence because it never happened. I'm not sure how exactly to draw the distinction, but I do think that we shouldn't treat people who genuinely believe a thing happened (whether or not it happened) and are unable to provide evidence as equivalent to people who intentionally made up a claim. I think there are ways to figure out which case you're in, but if not, the principle of "presumed innocent until proven guilty" guides us to not punish either.

(To me "presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" is a check on government power which would otherwise be unchecked and unappealable, a statement about due process _of law_. I believe in it in this context; I don't believe in it as an ideal of a good society and non-government behavior, the way I believe in freedom of speech as both a legal right and an ideal of a good society, because I don't think a good society should bring everything before the courts.)

<comment><USER12> I admire your principled stand but I think you'd be singing a different tune when people start throwing bricks in your window and slashing your tires. Or worse, depending on where you live:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-18/lynch- mob...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-07-18/lynch-mobs-are- india-s-problem-not-whatsapp-s)

Rumors cause real damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The idea that, because a single user broke confidence and published a private correspondence, the real identities of each contributor might be exposed is, quite frankly, horrifying to me. While it might, possibly, be reasonable to accuse that member _only_ of defamation, the access requested is far too broad.

If this suit is successful, it will set a chilling precedent: That no conversation on the Internet may be considered legally private, and that any negative conversations may run the risk of a lawsuit-enforced doxxing.

<comment><USER14> _the real identities of each contributor might be exposed is, quite frankly, horrifying to me_

Person A adds your name to a list and you'll never know that that's why Person B tossed your resume in the trash. That's horrifying. And in the UK at least, illegal [https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/legal-qa- blacklisting/](https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/legal-qa-blacklisting/)

<comment><USER15> The spreadsheet wasn't being used to stop men from getting jobs. It was being used to warn women that they may need to protect themselves when working with those men.

Please don't conflate the UK laws about blacklisting - which come from a time of vigorous anti-union activism in the construction industry that prevented men from working in any company in their industry for many years (and led to the creation of UK laws about data protection) - with this small private spreadsheet.

<comment><USER14> _he spreadsheet wasn 't being used to stop men from getting jobs_

The linked article on Scribd says that that was the purpose of the list.

 _a time of vigorous anti-union activism_

"They're not union members, this is, umm, some other list" won't fly in front of any judge.

\----

I can't reply because I'm "posting too fast" so here is my reply here:

I'm familiar with the case. And so there is no doubt: those who have actually committed crimes mentioned on the spreadsheet should be in jail. But anonymous blacklists are not the way to get justice for anyone, they are too open to misuse.

<comment><USER15> UK building firms built extensive blacklists of union activists. These blacklists were used for years to prevent those activists working in the construction industry. These blacklists were kept on paper. The first UK data protection law had to be changed to include paper records so that these anti- union blacklists would be covered by the law. Even with the change in the law the black listing probably continued into the 21stC.

This was a long running, extensive, campaign

[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/27/on-the- black...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/feb/27/on-the-blacklist- building-firms-secret-information-on-workers)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_(employment)#UK_Blac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklist_\(employment\)#UK_Blacklisting_of_trade_union_members)

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't see either the first amendment or section 230 argument here. The first amendment has been held to protect anonymous speech in the sense that the government can't ban anonymous speech or require registration in order to speak. It has not to my knowledge ever held that the ordinary civil law discovery rules must be modified because people wished to speak anonymously but did not take sufficient measures to remain anonymous.

Section 230 meanwhile protects electronic publishers from being sued civilly for the what users of their services write. This is important because under defamation law one who repeats a libel is equally liable as the original speaker.

There's two possibilities that I see: a) most likely the boring traditional reasons to quash a subpoena (e.g. too burdensome) or b) as a long shot one of the journalist shield laws.

<comment><USER17> Both the first amendment and section 230 were mentioned in the article. Also, Google is not being sued here, merely being given a subpoena, so I don't see how it applies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> if you're open mindedly looking for context, thecut managed to get quotes out of 5 guys on the list: [https://www.thecut.com/2018/10/stephen-elliott-moira- donegan...](https://www.thecut.com/2018/10/stephen-elliott-moira-donegan-men- respond.html)

and hmm daily (they're new) has a piece on the sue-er just today: [https://hmmdaily.com/2018/10/14/who-is-stephen- elliott/](https://hmmdaily.com/2018/10/14/who-is-stephen-elliott/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Actual title: _Google to Fight Subpoena Demands Over "Shitty Media Men" Spreadsheet_</comment>


Oumuamua may be a hydrogen iceberg - <AUTHOR> https://news.yale.edu/2020/05/29/ahoy-oumuamua-may-be-hydrogen-iceberg <comment><USER2> This is great sci-fi fodder, imagine if you could land a tiny craft on that thing and then use the hydrogen as fuel without having to haul all that fuel into deep space (very unlikely to be practical but the idea is exciting).

<comment><USER3> Imagine you just land a tiny craft on that thing and let the thing take you to interestelar space without you having to burn no more fuel.

Unfortunately, if you can't catch it, you don't need it for that, as you'll be traveling faster that it to be able to intercept it and would just burn fuel trying to break enough to match its speed.

<comment><USER4> Rule 1 of orbital mechanics: if you're about to dock with something, you're already on the same trajectory as that thing.

Might make a good radiation shield, though.

<comment><USER5> I'm not into orbital mechanics at all, just an interested layman, but how does a space tug work in relation to your 'Rule 1 of orbital mechanics'?. What is the point of a space tug then?

<comment><USER6> One of the purposes of a proposed 'space tug' is to use slow low thrust but high delta-v, high efficiency engines to do things such as:

Raise the orbit of satellites in LEO which are affected by atmospheric drag. Or re-boost things like the international space station, proposed future Chinese space station, etc.

Extend the lifetime of geostationary satellites which are still electrically functional, but out of station keeping propellant. One such thing docked for the very first time with a satellite earlier this year. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Extension_Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Extension_Vehicle)

On unmanned missions, slowly move cargo from low earth orbit to destinations at the Moon or Mars. If you can use ion and hall effect type thrusters for your missions to move cargo around, you can establish a logistics supply chain for essential supplies consisting of unmanned craft.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta- v_budget](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget)

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

An interesting example of using ion engines to maintain low earth orbit, through long continual thrust was this mission:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Field_and_Steady- State...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Field_and_Steady- State_Ocean_Circulation_Explorer)

<comment><USER4> I try to follow interesting space missions, but I've never heard about either of the two you linked to here. Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "It has now passed beyond Saturn's orbit and will travel another 10,000 years before exiting the system".

How big is our solar system? I always assumed it referred to everything between the sun and Pluto, but 10,000 years suggests it's far larger.

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure of what definition they used here, but one that is common is heliosphere, or in other words sphere around the Sun where solar wind is dominant. This is about 120 AU.

<comment><USER9> 'Oumuamua's incoming and outgoing speed is ~5AU/year. In 10,000 years that's 50,000AU, which is approximately the distance to the outer most region of the Oort Cloud: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud)

<comment><USER10> I always thought the Oort cloud was a scientifically proven thing but apparently it's "a theoretical cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals proposed to surround the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 au (0.03 to 3.2 light-years)"

<comment><USER11> Thanks for correcting my similar misimpression.

It's curious to note that the proposed outer limit of the Oort cloud (3.2 ly) is more than half the distance to the closest star system (4.4 ly) [1] though I'm unclear whether the cloud would be roughly spherical or have some sort of directionality.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I like the idea that these things could be potential star-seeds. It would be an interesting way for new solar systems to form.

</comment><comment><USER13> Makes me wonder if you could slingshot around the sun towards relativistic speeds with thermal power. At the very least it could save fuel on the egress, if not the second half.

Can you aerobrake around a star?

<comment><USER14> Thermal power requires a reservoir of cold temperature; your car's engine would do nothing if the incoming air was just as hot as the post-ignited air.

<comment><USER15> I'm sure this is true in practice, but I can't wrap my head round why it's correct in theory. Let's say I hook up my exhaust to my intake, I can still squirt some gasoline into the engine, make it explode and expand and thereby drive a piston, at the cost of having even hotter air the next time round.

If I repeat this long enough, my engine will melt, but that's a minor matter of materials science. Maybe I can win my drag race before it melts. Is that the limiting factor or is there some other reason I'm missing that we need a heat gradient?

<comment><USER16> If you heat it more each time, yeah, the old air can act as a cold reservoir and make things run.

If you do draw it with enough detail, you'll notice that if you do not heat it more at each turn, you won't be able to get any pressure difference at your "explosion".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there an element or compound in the universe that will remain a gas at 0K? Does everything become solid at that temp?

<comment><USER18> To be pedantic, it's impossible to get to 0K due to quantum fluctuations. Even empty deep space is over 2K. In laboratory settings, we've gotten way below 1K. I don't think anything qualifies as a gas at that temperature. It'd be a solid or a BEC.

<comment><USER19> This is true, but doesn't have anything to do with quantum mechanics -- the third law of thermodynamics is basically a statement that you can't cool things to absolute zero.

<comment><USER17> Your input caused me to google a video about this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kswiDQ2aAKA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kswiDQ2aAKA)

Very intereting!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Marc Andreessen says he spends $4,000 a month for Internet access - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/marc-andreessen-pays-4000-a-month-for-his-home-internet-connection-2010-5

<comment><USER2> He's got too much money then.</comment>


Medium will now pay writers based on how many claps they get - <AUTHOR> https://blog.medium.com/expanding-the-medium-partner-program-3be09dd146e4 <comment><USER2> I've been a fan of way Medium is trying to new approaches in this space. The idea of having members sponsor other "members" (though they call them authors) is really interesting. Especially if they get enough members on the site.

Obviously, it's easy to point out why this won't work, but waht I'm interested to hear is how it might just work.</comment>