ePantry Launches – Sustainable Home Supplies, Automatically Shipped To Your Door - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/04/epantry-launches-an-online-grocery-offering-sustainable-goods-automatically-shipped-to-your-door/ <comment><USER3> Great. Another service that automatically ships stuff to me that I already have en-masse because some heuristics have poorly analysed my requirements or rule in favour of the seller who wrote them.

Also, have people forgotten how to do literally _everything_ themselves suddenly?

I like automation but automation shouldn't deprive us of basic choices and "keep us". We should be keeping the machines, not the other way around.

And no this isn't some neo-luddite rant. I said to my wife about 10 years ago that at some point in the future people will run out of things to invent. Then we'll invent services that people need. Then we'll invent services that people think they need. Then we'll invent services that people don't need and develop a dependency on them.

And it's perfectly fine to run out of something. If all our needs are instantly catered for, what are we?

<comment><AUTHOR> We couldn't agree more! Our model is not a beat-you-over-the-head subscription. Instead we suggest products and a schedule, and encourage you to customize each shipment. Our goal is to make this a _really_ efficient process. Give it a try and let me know if you still feel the same way:

[https://www.epantry.com/sandbox/4758/](https://www.epantry.com/sandbox/4758/)

Plus we try to be pretty human :) For instance if you tell us a joke on live chat, we'll give you a $2 discount.

Anyway - love to hear more thoughts as you have them.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link. This appears to be simple forward selling. I'm not suggesting that it is a subscription model but you will need to keep selling this every month.

Also, I'm in the UK (not your target market but anyway) and we already have massive amounts of online delivery services like this (Tesco, ASDA, Sainsburys, Ocado, Waitrose). Ocado in fact pretty much have exactly the same model for pre-populating baskets but the scope of the service is considerably larger i.e. it covers all groceries and not a simple subset of consumables.

Unfortunately the only way to market this method is having your supermarkets stalk you heavily which I find objectionable (and many others do I assure you).

Disclaimer: I worked for one of the online supermarkets in the UK for a period of time and thoroughly distrust them.

<comment><USER4> I can vouch that the US doesn't have much in the way of online grocers and our brick & mortar stores already stalk you just as effectively via loyalty card programs AKA 'we raise prices and discount them to normal levels if you signup' programs. :/

I really wish a store would give me an API to purchase from. >.>

<comment><USER5> This gets you close with Amazon: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3984254/send-users-to- a-p...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3984254/send-users-to-a-pre-filled- amazon-cart-checkout)

<comment><USER4> Thank you :)

It is close enough to the goal I might just tinker with it this weekend.

<comment><USER5> Please keep me updated! My email is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If I lived alone I'd definitely sign up for a service like this, but for the time being my roommates and I just rotate taking turns picking up these kind of items. Likely a niche specific to people with roommates, but it'd be interesting to implement either household accounts where the bill gets charged multiple ways or you can allow accounts to be linked into a group where you can see whose turn it is to pay for each item next.

UX Sidenote - Why can't I close the modal after clicking "Get Started"? From a potential customer perspective it's frustrating if I click that and realize I want to find out more information before giving my email or Facebook account info.

<comment><AUTHOR> We can split the bill for you! Sign up and you can invite your roommates - <USER2> we'll share the cost evenly between you each month. And you can all log in and manage the same dashboard of products.

<comment><USER6> Should definitely push this as a feature on your landing page. It's hard to find out what all I can/can't do with the service and the FAQ is a little unconventional.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 1\. Need a search text field that is easy to find on this website. That way people can search for the products they want and you can know what products people want

2\. Add those refrigerator water filters. they have to be changed every 3 months or the water taste like crap and only like 2 stores (home depot and lowes) sell them

3\. Offer "product sampling" service to companies. We have customers using your competitors product we can send them a sample of yours for a fee

<comment><AUTHOR> #1 - We are approaching a SKU count where search is becoming inevitable. I'm actually (perversely?) proud that we haven't needed search to date. Users haven't requested it (but they'll start soon, I'm sure) and our on-boarding process doesn't necessitate it. And thanks for the reminder to use search data to measure demand!

#2 - Water filters are coming eventually! But we're a startup and need to be judicious with our purchasing decisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the idea! I just had a hard time removing items from the list that I didn't want, and I couldn't find how to check out/pay for the items. I couldn't scroll over to see the right side of the site. Hope you carry more brands soon too! Best wishes! :)

</comment><comment><USER9> How would you compete with Amazon? Checkout their new device. [http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/04/amazon-dash- amazonfresh/](http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/04/amazon-dash-amazonfresh/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Chatting with the customer service rep. This services will apparently save about 28% over traditional grocery stores, but compared to places like Costco you won't save any money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing the info! You were actually talking to Drew, one of our engineers. He was logged in under a different name -- but you could have easily asked him hairy questions about automated backbone testing too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> really cool - but even their website doesn't make it clear why i should choose this over amazon subscriptions

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback, thanks! Maybe the easiest way to check it out is to kick the tires in our sandbox - you can see exactly how it differs from Amazon :)

[https://www.epantry.com/sandbox/4758/](https://www.epantry.com/sandbox/4758/)

And we'll strive to make the homepage communicate this more clearly as well.

<comment><USER12> Some assorted nitpicks:

Why is the box with "Annual Savings" and "Average Monthly Price" at the lower left where it's obscuring the content instead of at the lower right where there's a bunch of empty space?

The text for individual items feels small, low-contrast, and "fuzzy" to me - my eyes glaze right over it. I'd personally increase the size by 2pt, change it to black (or a Bootstrappian near-black), and include the product's brand underneath the name in the current grey color (not important to me, but some people will care).

The emphasis on "annual savings" and the big "refer and get $10" are too big and emphasized and make me feel like the site is assuming I'm a cheapskate. It detracts somewhat from the convenience reason for the service when the site is shouting at me about the money saved instead (and if I was looking for absolute savings I already have money put in to Amazon Prime shipping). The Average Monthly Price number, on the other hand, is extremely useful, since trying to figure out that kind of thing is the biggest cognitive load for me for these sorts of services.

The thing at the lower left, the More Products button, the plus and minus buttons on products, and the buttons at the top are all way too emphasized and distracting as compared to the actual important stuff on the page at a first glance (the products queued up, the total pricing, and the ship date for each batch). The mouseover color change per month is also distracting, but I think it could maybe be a nice touch if it was tuned way down.

What's with the Fisher-Price green and blue that don't actually map to any particular sorts of actions? Green is to increment/decrement but also for the Help and date buttons, and blue is used for two buttons, a menu (but for some reason the email address, which I presume is an account name, isn't a menu), and an infobox that's not clickable at all, none of which have anything to do with each other.

I have no idea how any of the products in the list correspond with each other - are they recurring? I don't know. It looks like when first added it adds a matching one to each second month in the future, but there doesn't seem to be any other data linkage, so if I want to adjust numbers I have to manually go down the list and change it for each instance? There's also no way to add anything for future months except by adding a product to the current month and then dragging it forward, and then manually clearing out or moving around all the ones automatically added to future months.

All-in-all, it feels more hassleworthy than Amazon, because this UI is relatively complicated and means a lot more brainwork to process and monitor than having "send me this item every X weeks/months". I think for this to win out, it would need to be at least that convenient, and handle anything unusual by having a list of exceptions (e.g. "send me one extra item Q in July") instead of having a full shopping list for every shipment to babysit.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is really great feedback, thanks. We're going to take action on a lot of the suggestions right away. I hear what you're saying in the last paragraph, but we've done a lot of user testing and research on this and found that:

1) People don't know much toilet paper they use well enough to say "send me x rolls every y weeks" 2) Managing more than about 3 products via the "send me x every y" model becomes very difficult, very quickly. You need a consolidated view.

One thing we think about a lot is exposing less information about future shipments - that way you are less inclined to meddle with them in advance (there's really no need to worry about things > 1 month out). Then we can build a suggested shipment ~1 or so months in advance, with better data.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scaleway: Bare metal SSD ARM servers - <AUTHOR> https://www.scaleway.com/ <comment><USER2> It seems they're using xnbd to provide the storage for the box. On Debian, the box is running a xnbd-client, which provides the rootfs:

      xnbd-client --blocksize 4096 --retry=900 10.1.32.197 4096 /dev/nbd0

      root@scw-6d2eff:~# df -h
      Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
      /dev/nbd0        46G  507M   44G   2% /

I did not check, but I hope there's some filtering/authentication for that process.

Like EC2 and others, the box has an internal ip allocated and an external ip via nat (or something else).

I was able to download a file from OVH with ~500 Mbit/s throughput when writing to the filesystem. Writing to /dev/null it increases to ~650 Mbit/s.

Running an untuned nginx, it can do ~300 req/s with ~20% cpu util.

Seeing as the storage is still virtual, I'm not really sure why this would be so much better than a virtual machine. I like the idea though.

<comment><USER3> So their "no noisy neighbours" claim is essentially incorrect. (Poor IO due to shared storage is the main performance issue with virtual servers.)

<comment><USER4> When you use a remote blockstore like they are as your storage, you also generally are always booting via PXE, and so far have a provider controlled kernel.

I used to work on Rackspace OnMetal: [http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/servers/onmetal)

[https://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2014/07/02/putting-...](https://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2014/07/02/putting- teeth-in-our-public-cloud/)

In OnMetal this not the case -- you get local storage, you have your local kernel that you can re-install or do whatever you want to -- and if we have a control plane outage, you can reboot -- there is no dependency once your server is created on a provider hosted PXE server.

OnMetal isn't cheapo-ARM servers, but it is possible to build a "bare metal" cloud, which is truly bare metal, like you would normally get, and no remote block stores for your root FS.

<comment><USER5> Do you think it would be feasible to provide a bare-metal cloud made of cheap ARM or Atom servers while giving each server its own independent SSD?

<comment><USER4> Yes, most definately.

OpenStack Ironic[1] can do this today, given you had right hardware. Making that hardware "mutli-tenant" is not a trivial project, mostly because the firmware stacks are still very closed, but it can be done. Top of Rack switches are also another area of complexity/pain, but also feasible to overcome with a little engineering.

[1]: OpenStack has its complexities, but the OnMetal project has upstreamed everything feasible we can.

<comment><USER6> These folks seemed to tried that approach, but gave up on Ironic for a number of reasons:

[https://www.packet.net/blog/how-we-failed-at- openstack](https://www.packet.net/blog/how-we-failed-at-openstack)

<comment><USER4> True; I think it is reasonable project to take on if you are willing to staff developers... if you are trying to build a "bare metal" public cloud, having developers on staff is going to be a prerequisite for quite some time going forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is from the same company as Online.net -- [http://www.online.net/en/dedicated- server](http://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server) Hosted in France.

They're very reliable, and a pretty good competitor to KimSufi/SoYouStart/OVH.

Iliad, the group behind Online.net and Scaleway, also owns Free Mobile and Free Telecom and Free Internet, all of which are quite popular.

<comment><USER8> Free/The Iliad Group is the Comcast/Verizon of the EU...They have horrible peering and transit policies, which they maintain under the auspices of French protectionist laws.

<comment><USER9> but Online.net has its own network with a completely different policy ;) (AS12876)

<comment><USER8> It may have its own ASN, but its still run just like the rest of Iliad's networks. Online.net/Ponytelecom still lacks diversified transit that isn't also run horribly hot and the NOC peering policies make it so that its all but impossible to actually peer without exchanging money.

All the network properties operated under the Iliad umbrella suffer from this. Iliad and Orange pushed a bill through parliament that basically says "French ISPs can charge you whatever they want and you're required to pay it because operating in France means mandatory connections to the entrenched regional ISPs"

<comment><USER9> well being the "noc", I pretty much know about it, so, point by point : \- first our policy is here : [http://as12876.net/](http://as12876.net/), where do you see "paid peering" ? \- diversified transit : we've got 4 tier 1 transit, is not that enough "diversified" ? I hardly see what we could do better there ... \- peering: we are also available on the 2 main French IX ! you just need to drop a mail to get our routes on them (how much costs a mail these days ?) we are also doing _free_ PNI with those having enough datas to send/receive

we are also adding a new IX soon (order was sent yesterday) which will improve our peering towards Europe

the infos you have are at least 10 years old imho... maybe look at [http://map.online.net](http://map.online.net)

<comment><USER10> It looks like you are directly connected to OVH's network via Telehouse2 in France from that map. :)

You may want to make that map more obvious/prevalent on Online.NET, I wasn't aware you had a public network map like OVH does.

<comment><USER9> agreed, there is a plan to improve that ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Scaleway is the first IaaS provider worldwide to offer an ARM based cloud"

Bold clame I see. We begun offering the exact same configuration early last year ( [http://www.unixy.net/arm-server/](http://www.unixy.net/arm-server/) )

<comment><USER12> Not sure it qualifies, but [http://raspberrycolocation.com/](http://raspberrycolocation.com/) has been around since 2013.

But, you know, salestext is useless :)

<comment><USER13> [http://raspberrycolocation.com/order/](http://raspberrycolocation.com/order/)

"Average delivery time" 90 days? I'm not even sure what that means, but it doesn't strike me as particularly useful...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a very interesting offer, that clearly targets DigitalOcean.

The only thing I could not find quickly is info about the company: Is it a startup? Is it funded?

Until I found out it's a new product by Online, which is a subsidiary to one of France biggest telecom disruptor. There should be an About us that tells just that, which would clearly give more confidence to potential customers.

<comment><USER15> There actually is an about section that tells just that: [https://www.scaleway.com/faq](https://www.scaleway.com/faq).

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> You need to verify email, then validate address, then add a credit card (no paypal), and then press a button labeled "Enjoy my free month".

Except when you add a credit card, they try to bill you for 20EUR right away.

<comment><USER17> Yes, but they clearly state - _" To register your payment information, we will ask your bank for a 20,00€ debit preauthorization. This will appear on your bank statement and be automatically released after 7 days."_.

This is a fairly common practice to weed out stolen credit-cards and to make sure you are real subscriber/customer, no biggie.

<comment><USER16> 20 eur is quite uncommon, it's usually 1 or 2 usd/eur. So I skipped reading these two lines of unassuming gray text and entered details of my disposable visa with like 5 usd on it.

<comment><USER18> dev here; made the text bold, and validation is now 2 euros :)

<comment><USER19> now you just need to enable paypal

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I tried their free trial when it was still branded as Online.net Labs. What follows is my experience, which is good as anecdote only.

I use MariaDB-Galera in a project of mine to be able to run it in a parallel fashion. To determine if the servers were suitable for my use, I tried to install MariaDB-Galera, only to find out:

\- MariaDB doesn't officially support ARM yet;

\- The Debian and Ubuntu repos don't have the MariaDB-Galera edition available;

\- All repos I could find with the Galera edition didn't have it compiled for armhf, including the official repo, by virtue of the first point.

\- Compiling it on the server resulted in other problems: besides the usual compile errors that can be more or less sorted out by hand, and the dependency hell of the resulting deb packages (remember, no armhf packages available) I figured it would be unacceptable (in terms of ease-of-maintenance) to have to recompile MariaDB every time a new version with security fixes came out. This is something I can live with when toying with Raspberry Pis and similar things, but not on production stuff.

I eventually gave up, declaring the servers unsuitable for _my_ use. End of anecdote.

IMHO they are charging too much for the product, at a time when the ARM ecosystem is not yet ready for server use (the architecture and OS support are fine, the user-land software, not so much). The servers are bare metal (it's awesome being able to use as much CPU as you want without breaching AUPs or hitting artificial caps), but the networked storage, while definitely better than HDDs, may not fulfill the needs of those with higher I/O requirements (I admit I haven't tested, also by virtue of Galera not being available). Lastly, the prices first show without VAT, which means that if you're in the EU and without a VAT ID, it'll turn out to be even more expensive. I'd consider something like €7/month (perhaps with less storage) to be a more acceptable price.

<comment><USER21> They have local SSDs now, the previews had local HDs only. I do think the pricing is a little higher than I expected. I had fewer problems with compatibility than you. MariaDB seems to be in jessie [1]

[1] [https://packages.debian.org/search?arch=armhf&keywords=maria...](https://packages.debian.org/search?arch=armhf&keywords=mariadb)

<comment><USER20> That is the "normal" MariaDB, not the Galera edition. This is a problem that has more to do with MariaDB than with Scaleway, but it still shows one of the problems people may have with ARM servers at this point.

A couple of friends of mine are happier with compatibility than I am, too. Others are even more disappointed than I am, since one of the uses they have for dedicated stuff is game servers, which usually are closed source and not available for ARM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Besides hacker curiosity, what's the appeal of ARM from _our_ perspective? I'm not seeing a cost advantage here compared to Kimsufi (dedicated) or a good SSD-backed VPS.

<comment><USER23> Compared to a VPS there's some security benefits. You can't meaningfully encrypt the disk of a VPS - as the decryption key can easily be read out of memory by the host. A physical server offers slightly more protection than this - although if there's no TPM not all _that_ much.

VMs are also bad at some specific tasks - they have issues with clock accuracy for example.

One appeal of ARM, specifically, would be that it's cheap. Sadly these are based on ARMv7, which is a lot more limited than aarch64/ARMv8 and Intel CPUs. - but hopefully they or someone else will have an ARMv8 offering out soon.

<comment><USER24> They already are: [http://datacentred.co.uk/datacentred-world-first- openstack-p...](http://datacentred.co.uk/datacentred-world-first-openstack- public-cloud-on-64-bit-arm-servers/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> It'd be nice to see FreeBSD adopt arm as a Tier 1 architecture with the increased adoption in the datacenter.

<comment><USER25> it'd be nice if NetBSD was available from these cloud providers.

<comment><USER21> There is a thread in their support forum, it seems like they want nbd rootfs. It is a pretty simple (not very good) protocol (from memory) but I dont think there is a BSD driver at present.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How well would one of these work for running TOR? The unmetered 200 mbps would lend itself to a decent relay, but only if the ARM chips can process the traffic at that rate.

</comment><comment><USER27> I like the basic, easy design. One suggestion though (take this with a grain of salt though, since I am a backend programmer and not a design specialist). I didn't see the 20 euro preauthorization message the first time the new card dialog came up, and instead I closed it and went to the billing faq to find out what that was about when I saw Visa asking me to approve a 20 euro charge. I saw the message the second time around, but perhaps making that message a little more prominent would be helpful, especially for simpletons like me to tend to miss things.

<comment><USER18> Dev here. just changed this, also it's now 2 euro for the validation :)

<comment><USER27> Now that's good customer service. The new message style is much more prominent and obvious. I wish you guys the best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As a developer, where can I get a 1U ARM server? I thought they'd be much more available by now. Scaleway say they designed their own servers, which is interesting. Aren't there any on the market that are good enough? I guess not.

<comment><USER29> you can get an AMD A1100 dev kit, but it's like three grand.

I mean, obviously, that isn't a realistic price, but if you want an ARM server with ECC ram right now, that's one way to go. (my understanding is that once AMD ramps up production, which is looking less likely at this point, it will be on the order of a few hundred bucks.)

Most people actually doing things with ARM servers are using non-ecc ram, which I don't think is particularly practical for real world use. The problem with non-ecc is not that it fails more often; the problem with non-ecc is that you often don't know when it failed.

<comment><USER28> _once AMD ramps up production, which is looking less likely at this point_

Why is that? What changed?

<comment><USER29> because this has been right around the corner for longer than I would expect. The big problem here is that AMD is fighting against a moving target. If they don't move and get the thing out the door soon, Intel will be out with a new chip, which will raise the bar further. Like a year and a half ago, when I was trying to get myself a dev kit, it looked like a really nice piece of kit that would provide a real advantage (above and beyond the novelty) over competing x86 offerings from intel, but that was before the v3 intel chips.

I mean, from a shallow evaluation, I _think_ that if these things came out at the "couple hundred dollar" price point, they would be competitive right now. at $300 per for board+cpu, I'd buy 20 right now. But I'm not at all sure that will be true a year from now.

(Note, I'm entirely ecc, so we're not talking about atoms. There is a huge opportunity here because intel stunts it's e3 line to 32gib ram. AMD needs to get in and exploit this while the getting is good. Yes, the 4xxx CPUs don't have any such limit, but compared to the E3, they are pathetic. These ARM boards would give AMD a chance to offer a reasonable compute per watt in a package with a ram footprint that can crush the E3.)

But... it's a year and a half later, and I still see no sign of AMD actually selling the things, other than as engineering samples at engineering sample prices, and meanwhile, intel is improving their x86 lineup.

Maybe I'm just impatient, but I just don't have a lot of hope that by the time it is out it will be able to compete with virtualizing a big xeon box.

I mean, yes, there are some applications where you really want your own server, and the A1100, if it does ship before Intel releases the ram limits on the E3, could compete in that niche, but for ARM to really take off in the datacenter, it needs to be cheaper per unit work done than a big xeon box. E.g. I need to be able to replace one of my giant dual xeons with four or five of these puppies, and it needs to cost less over the life of the hardware.

I'm paying California prices for power, so it shouldn't be that hard, but I'm just really frustrated by the slow progress of the AMD ARM server (and ARM boards that support ECC in general.)

<comment><USER28> Yeah, I had some of the same concerns. Thanks for the details response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I used their beta, and was pleasantly surprised by the performance of these little boxes. I find the idea of a dedicated box vs. virtualisation quite attractive for some hard to quantify reasons.

Wondering if they'll roll-out in more regions soon. Interesting to see the international take-up, of course quite an euro-centric approach :)

</comment><comment><USER31> Site looks good, but they do need better editors. There's a glaring typo before you even get past the first page:

"Deploy dedicated SSD servers with constant and predictable performances (sic) in 44 seconds."

More typos as you scroll down.

<comment><USER32> Help welcome :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I have used online.net labs bare metal arm cloud servers and scaleway seems to offer the exact same. Can anyone explain the difference or is this just a re- releasing?

fwiw, i am from the east coast us, and have used both online.net labs and ovh dedicated cloud from ks and sys, and I have found that online.net has a lower latency and higher throughput to me.

also fwiw, i have not had issues with finding arm packages for developing in node, golang, or mono

<comment> Syrup-tan Online Labs[0] turned into Scaleway.

There's a blog post about it at [1]

\--

[0] [http://labs.online.net/](http://labs.online.net/) [1] [https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/04/02/from-online-labs-to- sca...](https://blog.scaleway.com/2015/04/02/from-online-labs-to-scaleway/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The CPU performance is a joke though.

c1 from instantcloud.io:

      ubuntu@c1-10-1-33-39:~$ openssl speed rsa
      Doing 512 bit private rsa's for 10s: 11119 512 bit private RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 512 bit public rsa's for 10s: 111478 512 bit public RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 1024 bit private rsa's for 10s: 1950 1024 bit private RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 1024 bit public rsa's for 10s: 34638 1024 bit public RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 2048 bit private rsa's for 10s: 291 2048 bit private RSA's in 10.01s
      Doing 2048 bit public rsa's for 10s: 9393 2048 bit public RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 4096 bit private rsa's for 10s: 40 4096 bit private RSA's in 10.16s
      Doing 4096 bit public rsa's for 10s: 2402 4096 bit public RSA's in 10.01s
      OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014
      built on: Thu Oct 16 16:07:24 UTC 2014
      options:bn(64,32) rc4(ptr,char) des(idx,cisc,16,long) aes(partial) blowfish(ptr)
      compiler: cc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -g -O2 -fstack-protector-strong -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,relro -Wa,--noexecstack -Wall -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_GF2m -DSHA1_ASM -DSHA256_ASM -DSHA512_ASM -DAES_ASM -DGHASH_ASM
                        sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000899s 0.000090s   1111.9  11147.8
      rsa 1024 bits 0.005128s 0.000289s    195.0   3463.8
      rsa 2048 bits 0.034399s 0.001065s     29.1    939.3
      rsa 4096 bits 0.254000s 0.004167s      3.9    240.0

local odroid u3:

      thresh@odroid:~$ openssl speed rsa
      Doing 512 bit private rsa's for 10s: 19334 512 bit private RSA's in 9.99s
      Doing 512 bit public rsa's for 10s: 204957 512 bit public RSA's in 9.97s
      Doing 1024 bit private rsa's for 10s: 3490 1024 bit private RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 1024 bit public rsa's for 10s: 62453 1024 bit public RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 2048 bit private rsa's for 10s: 516 2048 bit private RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 2048 bit public rsa's for 10s: 17051 2048 bit public RSA's in 10.00s
      Doing 4096 bit private rsa's for 10s: 72 4096 bit private RSA's in 10.09s
      Doing 4096 bit public rsa's for 10s: 4434 4096 bit public RSA's in 10.00s
      OpenSSL 1.0.1f 6 Jan 2014
      built on: Fri Jun 20 19:00:28 UTC 2014
      options:bn(64,32) rc4(ptr,char) des(idx,cisc,16,long) aes(partial) blowfish(ptr)
      compiler: cc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -Wl,-z,relro -Wa,--noexecstack -Wall -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_GF2m -DSHA1_ASM -DSHA256_ASM -DSHA512_ASM -DAES_ASM -DGHASH_ASM
                        sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000517s 0.000049s   1935.3  20557.4
      rsa 1024 bits 0.002865s 0.000160s    349.0   6245.3
      rsa 2048 bits 0.019380s 0.000586s     51.6   1705.1
      rsa 4096 bits 0.140139s 0.002255s      7.1    443.4

digitalocean cheapest vps:

      thresh@thre ~ $ openssl speed rsa
      Doing 512 bit private rsa's for 10s: 119305 512 bit private RSA's in 9.81s
      Doing 512 bit public rsa's for 10s: 1450435 512 bit public RSA's in 9.85s
      Doing 1024 bit private rsa's for 10s: 35347 1024 bit private RSA's in 9.85s
      Doing 1024 bit public rsa's for 10s: 541458 1024 bit public RSA's in 9.86s
      Doing 2048 bit private rsa's for 10s: 5259 2048 bit private RSA's in 9.84s
      Doing 2048 bit public rsa's for 10s: 161094 2048 bit public RSA's in 9.88s
      Doing 4096 bit private rsa's for 10s: 627 4096 bit private RSA's in 9.81s
      Doing 4096 bit public rsa's for 10s: 41353 4096 bit public RSA's in 9.75s
      OpenSSL 1.0.1e 11 Feb 2013
      built on: Thu Mar 19 18:31:36 UTC 2015
      options:bn(64,64) rc4(16x,int) des(idx,cisc,16,int) aes(partial) blowfish(idx)
      compiler: gcc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DZLIB -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -m64 -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -g -O2 -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -Wl,-z,relro -Wa,--noexecstack -Wall -DMD32_REG_T=int -DOPENSSL_IA32_SSE2 -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT5 -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_GF2m -DSHA1_ASM -DSHA256_ASM -DSHA512_ASM -DMD5_ASM -DAES_ASM -DVPAES_ASM -DBSAES_ASM -DWHIRLPOOL_ASM -DGHASH_ASM
                        sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000082s 0.000007s  12161.6 147252.3
      rsa 1024 bits 0.000279s 0.000018s   3588.5  54914.6
      rsa 2048 bits 0.001871s 0.000061s    534.5  16305.1
      rsa 4096 bits 0.015646s 0.000236s     63.9   4241.3

amazon t1.micro:

      [ec2-user@ip-10-71-147-165 ~]$ openssl speed rsa
      Doing 512 bit private rsa's for 10s: 85447 512 bit private RSA's in 9.48s
      Doing 512 bit public rsa's for 10s: 123882 512 bit public RSA's in 9.96s
      Doing 1024 bit private rsa's for 10s: 7720 1024 bit private RSA's in 9.98s
      Doing 1024 bit public rsa's for 10s: 187876 1024 bit public RSA's in 10.04s
      Doing 2048 bit private rsa's for 10s: 1268 2048 bit private RSA's in 9.99s
      Doing 2048 bit public rsa's for 10s: 67337 2048 bit public RSA's in 10.07s
      Doing 4096 bit private rsa's for 10s: 36 4096 bit private RSA's in 7.89s
      Doing 4096 bit public rsa's for 10s: 25180 4096 bit public RSA's in 9.85s
      OpenSSL 1.0.1g-fips 7 Apr 2014
      built on: Wed Apr  9 21:51:31 UTC 2014
      options:bn(64,64) md2(int) rc4(16x,int) des(idx,cisc,16,int) aes(partial) idea(int) blowfish(idx)
      compiler: gcc -fPIC -DOPENSSL_PIC -DZLIB -DOPENSSL_THREADS -D_REENTRANT -DDSO_DLFCN -DHAVE_DLFCN_H -DKRB5_MIT -m64 -DL_ENDIAN -DTERMIO -Wall -O2 -g -pipe -Wall -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fexceptions -fstack-protector --param=ssp-buffer-size=4 -m64 -mtune=generic -Wa,--noexecstack -DPURIFY -DOPENSSL_IA32_SSE2 -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_MONT5 -DOPENSSL_BN_ASM_GF2m -DSHA1_ASM -DSHA256_ASM -DSHA512_ASM -DMD5_ASM -DAES_ASM -DVPAES_ASM -DBSAES_ASM -DWHIRLPOOL_ASM -DGHASH_ASM
                        sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000111s 0.000080s   9013.4  12438.0
      rsa 1024 bits 0.001293s 0.000053s    773.5  18712.7
      rsa 2048 bits 0.007879s 0.000150s    126.9   6686.9
      rsa 4096 bits 0.219167s 0.000391s      4.6   2556.3

<comment><USER35> Tried running your benchmark, seems noisy.

t1.micro running ubuntu

      sign                                 verify         sign/s       verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000104s 0.000015s   9647.3  67715.6
      rsa 1024 bits 0.003637s 0.000236s    275.0   4242.7
      rsa 2048 bits 0.004487s 0.000107s    222.8   9351.2
      rsa 4096 bits 0.180566s 0.003013s      5.5    331.9

t1.micro running CoreOS

      sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000109s 0.000009s   9190.4 114333.6
      rsa 1024 bits 0.000354s 0.000023s   2822.7  42725.7
      rsa 2048 bits 0.002491s 0.000078s    401.5  12833.4
      rsa 4096 bits 0.017951s 0.000289s     55.7   3454.7

t2.micro running ubuntu

                      sign    verify    sign/s verify/s
      rsa  512 bits 0.000060s 0.000005s  16569.7 208219.9
      rsa 1024 bits 0.000196s 0.000013s   5113.5  74559.9
      rsa 2048 bits 0.001459s 0.000045s    685.3  22400.0
      rsa 4096 bits 0.010396s 0.000165s     96.2   6050.9

<comment><USER36> It may be noisy, but so are micro's. If you had that much variation between ubuntu and CoreOS on large+, that would be interesting. (Other than the micro differences, variation like this could be 32- vs 64-bit, or different default daemons running, eating CPU).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I just had very fast turnaround on a support ticket from them. Simple issue, but still - I'm really impressed.

Support ticket answered in < 2 minutes. Resolved in 9 minutes.

(The ticket was sort of my fault, partly a design issue on their UI where I couldn't resubmit info. There are teething problems, but they sorted it out really quickly.)

</comment><comment><USER38> Any idea how a JVM would do on one of these?

<comment><USER39> I don't know if there are any commercial special purpouse ARM JVMs, but HotSpot/OpenJDK is pretty sad performance-wise on ARM.

<comment><USER40> Oracle provide Java 8 for ARM: [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8...](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-arm- downloads-2187472.html) The performance on my little Raspberry Pi went up dramatically compared to OpenJDK when they released it (over a year ago).

<comment><USER39> There's a marked absence of benchmark data on the web about this vs same on x86. Does Oracle's license forbid publication of such?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The title is misleading, as €0.02/hr would result in €14.4/month. Their pricing page[0] lists the servers at €9.90/month.

Their "Infinite Storage" is €0.02/ _month_ , though.

[0] [https://www.scaleway.com/pricing](https://www.scaleway.com/pricing)

<comment><USER42> > Their "Infinite Storage" is €0.02/month, though.

"Infinite Storage" is, like the term "unlimited", misleading. I clicked through only to find out that it's for 1GB of storage, with unlimited requests and transfers.

<comment><USER43> I think the implication was an infinite amount of those 1Gb chunks -- IE: they can grow the infrastructure as fast are you can use it.

It is almost assuredly a lie (as someone who is working on a project scaling to PBs -- I pressed a lot of vendors on "unlimited" or "infinite" and most said they simply couldn't scale to X).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Typo on servers button: [https://www.dropbox.com/s/xspd7l0ld56dm2e/Screenshot%202015-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/xspd7l0ld56dm2e/Screenshot%202015-04-02%2014.38.11.png?dl=0)

</comment><comment><USER45> This looks great! It's interesting to see hardware innovation, self- provisioning "bare metal" and so on.

Just one problem, I'm getting an internal server error while verifying my address (home address), and the SMS isn't arriving. I'll try it a little later. But I am a little confused, how exactly do you verify a home address?

<comment><USER46> Dev here. Sorry for the address issue. It was all my fault: validation was too strict. The fix was pushed on production servers 16 hours ago. You should try again ! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> What's the L2 cache size? They don't mention it anywhere, just plain benchmarks unrelated to memory speed.

<comment><USER18> CPU is MV78460; 2MB L2 cache

doc: [https://origin-www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada- xp...](https://origin-www.marvell.com/embedded-processors/armada- xp/assets/Marvell-ArmadaXP-SoC-product%20brief.pdf)

<comment><USER47> Cool, thanks for the link!

Do you know the latency numbers?

Edit: found this [https://www.ruhr-uni- bochum.de/integriertesysteme/emuco/file...](https://www.ruhr-uni- bochum.de/integriertesysteme/emuco/files/System_Level_Benchmarking_Analysis_of_the_Cortex_A9_MPCore.pdf) (slide 17)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This seems pretty expensive to me. How powerful are the instances?

<comment><USER49> "The C1 server is a 4-cores ARMv7 CPU with 2GB of RAM and a 1 Gbit/s network card. It is designed for the cloud and horizontal scaling."

"How does a C1 server perform? A C1 server gives a constant CPUMark of 12K. This is equivalent to an AWS M3 medium instance. "

<comment><USER50> I find this surprising in both directions: Either that an AWS M3 medium instance is so slow or that ARM servers got so fast!

Edit: It seems that ARM CPUs got really fast: According to [1] an Intel Core i7-3930K @ 3.20GHz gets a Passmark score of 12k.

[1]: [https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html)

<comment><USER51> I am 99% sure that's not the same benchmark. The cheapest way to break 12,000 CPUMarks is a $370 Intel Core i7-5820K (15MB of cache, 6 cores, 12 threads).

Perhaps they are using the Android benchmark. A score of 12,000 is about what a quad core ARMv7 phone gets.

[http://www.androidbenchmark.net/cpumark_chart.html](http://www.androidbenchmark.net/cpumark_chart.html)

Edit:

Compared with the cross-platform Geekbench3 a HTC One (ARMv7 4 core, 1.7-2.2Ghz, 12,000 Android CPUMarks) gets between 2,000 and 3,000 points[1], while a 5820K gets around 20,000 points[2].

[1]: [http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?q=HTC+One](http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?q=HTC+One)

[2]: [http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?q=Intel+Cor...](http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/search?q=Intel+Core+i7-5820K)

<comment><USER50> Ah that would explain it. That's a pretty misleading claim then. So I guess ARMs are still pretty slow and Amazon is not all that terrible after all performance-wise. That also makes more sense intuition-wise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is like paying $10 every month for a raspberry pi + $40 SSD, or $75 in hardware.

I rather pay $40/mo for Hetzner 3930 CPU server with something like 30 VMs.

<comment><USER53> "I'd rather pay four times more for something better" isn't the most compelling argument against Scaleway. They're targeting people who want to host something for $10/month. For the money what they're offering is pretty good.

<comment><USER54> They are targeting people that want to deploy large quantities of such micro- servers, programmatically on demand.

Otherwise, someone willing to pay as little as possible for just a single bare metal dedicated machine, is much better of renting a Kimsufi instead.

[http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/](http://www.kimsufi.com/fr/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Why would I use this over Amazon? It seems their cost is higher and it is ARM, which I assume sucks from a perspective of running e.g Python.

<comment><USER56> Python runs just fine on an ARM powered RaspberryPi (and some custom IMX233 ARM hardware I was working on a couple of years back with ARM ARCH Linux on it). I suspect not everything that gcc compiles on x86 will work, but you might be surprised at how much "just works", or has versions available where someone's already done the hard work of ensuring it compiles properly for ARM.

<comment><USER55> I don't mean it works as in it runs. I mean that the Python Jit would be optimized for X86. It has to run better to be worth the trouble of using this.

<comment><USER57> What Python jit? Do you mean PyPy?

<comment><USER55> I assumed the standard python command used a JIT.

Is this really not the case? In 2015?

<comment><USER57> Nope, CPython compiles source to bytecode (ahead of time), but then interprets that bytecode. There's no JIT.

<comment><USER58> ...except for the aforementioned PyPy. Which is quite good IMO! (and supports ARM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Anybody know if they (unofficially) support FreeBSD?

<comment><USER60> Support is on the way it seems:

[https://hub.scaleway.com/](https://hub.scaleway.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> No imprint, no address, no phone numbers. A french company.

"Online SAS, a company registered in France."

No imprint in France? Illegal.

<comment><USER62> [https://www.scaleway.com/terms](https://www.scaleway.com/terms) (at the end of the page)

        ONLINE, a simplified stock corporation (Société anonyme par actions simplifiée) with a working capital
        of €214.410,50, headquartered at 8 rue de la ville l'Evêque - 75008 Paris, FRANCE, registered with the
        Paris Corporate and Trade Register number RCS PARIS B 433 115 904, VAT number FR35433115904, reachable
        via its Internet site http//www.scaleway.com/ as well as by telephone at +33 (0) 184 130 000", or by
        fax at +33 (0) 899 193 775 (€1.35 per call plus €0.34/min.)

<comment><USER61> Thanks - that wasn't there at launch time. Great they got it fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Praise the lord. Why aren't more cloud companies selling bare metal ARM servers?

<comment><USER64> I just went searching for ARM servers last week...the options for white box systems are very slim. There are no Supermicro, Asus, etc. ARM rack mount systems yet, so you'd need to work out a deal with one of the few big name vendors with offerings in this space.

The costs seemed very high, to me, compared to whitebox/barebones AMD or even Intel based servers on a performance basis.

I think it is simply a function of them not being widely available cheaply yet. I wonder how they're getting them cheap enough to make this make sense...maybe quantity pricing is much better.

<comment><USER65> HP are manufacturing racks of high density arm servers. I would have thought someone would be renting them out.

<comment><USER64> That's one of the big names I had in mind. They're pretty expensive for the performance you get. I'd choose a multi-core AMD or Intel...even when virtualized it's gonna provide more juice for your dollar, according to the math I did. Which is weird because ARM has come so far. I'm really wanting to try ARM on the server but the costs are still wrong. This is, of course, at least partly just because the barebones and white box manufacturers haven't entered the fray.

Memory capacity was actually my biggest cost factor that made a difference. You can buy x86 boxes with 256GB capacity for quite cheap. Up to 1TB for not outrageous amounts. The micro servers are designed for quite low amounts of memory... But memory is, by far, the bottleneck I am concerned with. CPU speed barely matters at all...so virtualizing CPU is fine as long as memory can be huge and fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> You can get 24hrs free by validating your phone number :)

<comment><USER57> Doesn't seem to be working, at least for Portuguese numbers. Tried resending it twice, but I'm still to receive anything.

<comment><USER67> It doesn't work for Serbian numbers either. I tried to verify my number for the free preview and it didn't work. Their mobile gateway is down probably.

<comment><USER68> Our SMS provider has issues to send messages to foreign numbers :( If you write us a ticket, we'll validate your phone manually

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I assume the data center is in France. Is that correct?

<comment><USER9> yes, first scaleway's platforms are in Paris suburbs in our own datacenters (see [http://iliad-datacenter.fr](http://iliad-datacenter.fr)), more platforms are expected (most likely outside of France)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Feedback: Clear information; some typos in the FAQ.

<comment><USER32> Where? :)

<comment><USER38> I was looking at the wrong FAQ. There are some typos on [https://www.scaleway.com/faq](https://www.scaleway.com/faq) :

> Scaleway is also providing a fast, 100% S3-compatible, object storage > service called SIS (Scaleway Infinit Storage). SIS starts at €0.00004 for > 1GB of storage.

Should be 'infinite'?

> At Scaleway, we provide bare metal SSD servers. When you request a server, > you get full root access on a dedicated servers.

Plural agreement. Should be 'on a dedicated server'.

> A simple, robust REST APIs to control all your cloud ressources

Plural agreement, 'Simple, robust REST APIs'. Also spelling, 'resources'.

<comment><USER32> Fixed! thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Vive La France!

</comment><comment><USER72> I thought it is 0.02 EUR per month. That would be interesting... otherwise it seems to be too expensive.

</comment><comment><USER73> This story is posted twice, on the front page of HN.

They have only one OS available, Linux, (in various flavours), while the others are branded 'coming soon'. That alone doesn't inspire any confidence.

<comment><USER64> What other OS could you want, _especially_ on ARM? Most alternatives to Linux are a mistake for web hosting at this point in history. As much as I like some of the ideas and features of some of the alternatives, when taken as a whole, Linux is simply the right tool for the job most of the time.

In short, while its cool if they offer other OS options, my confidence certainly is not shaken by them choosing to roll out first with just Linux support. It seems like the only sensible thing, to me, given how good Linux ARM support is.

<comment><USER74> > What other OS could you want, especially on ARM?

OpenBSD. Or any of the BSDs, but OpenBSD would be ideal.

That said, my confidence isn't exactly shaken either by the current lack of BSD availability (FreeBSD is supposedly "coming soon"). I'm getting by moderately well on Linux right now for my own "cloud" needs. It would just be nice to have my preference in operating systme (and ecosystem; I've taken a liking to OpenBSD's subprojects like relayd/httpd, OpenSMTPd, etc., and it's much easier to use these things on OpenBSD - or probably even on FreeBSD - than it is on GNU/Linux).

<comment><USER73> Exactly this: NetBSD & OpenBSD. Linux, although popular, is not the only operating system.

<comment><USER74> Even FreeBSD would be better for my use cases. At least it supports pf.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elixir Cowboy with IIS 8 - <AUTHOR> http://www.zohaib.me/elixir-cowboy-with-iis-8/ <comment><USER2> Handy bit of administration and deployment information, but I still wonder:

...why?

Azure already has *nix VM support, yes? So, why creak along with Windows boxen?

<comment><USER3> For small users with less experience/resources, Windows can be attractive to manage and feel friendly. Just like there's people that like using the Network Manager GUI on Linux distros. Windows offers a lot of stuff with a few clicks, without having to read or understand too much. Like SQL Server, setting up even advanced fail over cluster systems is pretty simple. A day's work, even if you've never done it before. That's attractive.

Plus there's all the corp management stuff like AD, which Linux doesn't have for real. At least not as slick and smoothly integrated.

But yeah, even as a long time MS user, I'm less impressed with it as time goes on. No containers. IIS's reverse proxy support is a sick joke. No equivalent of DRBD; no real tweaking in general.

And IIS didn't have SPDY. It'll be showing to see how they handle HTTP/2\. Will they stick to the lame line of "http.sys is the HTTP stack, so only Windows 10 can do HTTP/2"? (IIRC, that's how WebSockets story went.) Or will they just do the right thing and make it work?

Anyways, your question is one MS is very aware of, and in the center of a lot of Azure. For a quad core VM, Windows costs an extra $1000+ a year on the cloud platforms. MS knows this is often not a good ROI.

<comment><USER2> The AD/LDAP support on Windows Server is pretty amazing, and I really like their administration interface.

As for the rest, well--let's just say I'm trying my damnedest to migrate one of our products off of Windows hosting, because frankly the impedance mismatch for testing and automation is just so much lower on 'nix. Also, the licensing is an issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This could already be done with the older ISAPI filter/module API.

This is how we integrated Tcl with IIS back in 2000 for our application server that was deployable into IIS and Apache.

<comment><USER5> Yeah but how horrible was setting up IIS and ISAPI back in server 2003. I still remember the anxiety when a problem was reported on one of the IIS servers. I don't work with IIS anymore so I hope it has improved, don't see how it could have gotten any worse.

<comment><USER4> As far I know the .NET version of the modules APIs are better, the problem was the C based API. I don't do ISAPI since 2002.

Still, the capabilities were already there, even if the API wasn't that pleasant to work with.</comment></comment></comment>


The British Airways Breach: How 22 Lines of Code Claimed 380,000 Customers - <AUTHOR> https://www.riskiq.com/blog/labs/magecart-british-airways-breach/ <comment><USER2> Seemingly a case study to drive sign ups, but decent technical information.</comment>


Two big questions for economists today - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2015/01/05/two-big-questions-for-economists-today/ <comment><USER2> >Ackerman's point of view that economists were infallible and their suggestions should be adopted uncritically by voters was called into question by the fact that the group neglected to book the most popular speakers, such as Thomas Piketty, into sufficiently large rooms and, though they were videotaping the talks, did not have any provision to show the videos in real- time on screens in lobbies or other rooms. If the nation's top economists can't estimate demand for talks by economists can we trust them to tell us what to do about global warming?

I think this touches on the core elephant in the room with modern (especially American) economics. There is often a lot more money and career advancement to be made as an economist if you are productively wrong - making policy proscriptions that serve an agenda, than if you are right.

Of course it does none of them any good to admit that. State this aloud and expect to be ostracized at a conference like this.

It would be helpful to look at economists themselves as rational agents who produce an output (political opinions with the veneer of objectivity) and who respond to incentives.

Bearing in mind that the employment/income options for most economists are:

* Academic departments, funded via student debt.

* Think tanks - nearly all funded by large corporations and high net worth individuals.

* Finance - large banks, hedge funds, etc.

Large corporations usually have different agendas but will seek to form cohesive blocs to increase their power, often under the umbrella of a lobby group. Sometimes they will fight, though. Examples:

* Exxon cares about discrediting climate change.

* Power companies want solar panels dead yesterday.

* Comcast wants net neutrality dead.

* Google and Netflix want net neutrality alive.

* Google's founders want something done about climate change (as do many notable high net worth individuals from a non-fossil fuel background).

* Private colleges want the federal government to keep increasing loans to students.

* Corporations that employ a lot of people and are under threat from unionization would like to see workers' bargaining power curtailed (debt is good at that).

* Everybody in high finance likes debt (obviously). Especially if it is administered by them, but even if it is not, because even if it isn't, one day it could be privatized and produce profits.

<comment><USER3> So, can we change the incentives?

<comment><USER4> The golden rule is hard to change - he with the gold makes the rules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >A possibility that the Big Thinkers don't seem to consider is "Maybe colleges aren't teaching anything of value to employers?"

It's not about employers, but about society. Colleges are supposed to be teaching things that are of value _to society_, not necessarily to employers. Employers should be trying to improve society by rewarding people who produce value to society, not to employers. That is how an employer justifies her power to a society that allows her to have a disproportionate amount of it.

It is very possible that employers' values are not an accurate representation of societal values. Maybe your currency doesn't accurately encapsulate what your society values? Maybe your businesses are not in touch with who their customers/employees are and what motivates them?

Example: I pay rent. I've never received an invoice telling me what that rent pays for or how much I'm actually paying for it. My rent payments are not approval of my landlord, they are necessary for my survival. Yet it gives my landlord economic power regardless of why I'm spending the money. Social values are not measured by economic power.

<comment><USER6> >It's not about employers, but about society. Colleges are supposed to be teaching things that are of value _to society_, not necessarily to employers

Then why are students asked to bear the $100k cost _individually_? Kinda hard to justify that level of self sacrifice from anyone.

<comment><USER2> The justification is that because college students benefit personally from their education, non-college students should not be expected to pay for it.

The reason is that ramping up aggregate private debt has a number of advantages to the following two groups:

* Large employers would like to see the bargaining power of their employees curtailed. You'll be much more fearful of quitting your job or demanding a raise if you fear spiraling compound interest.

* High finance (investment banks, hedge funds, etc.) because they can often figure out a way of being paid to administer debts and use it as fodder for high profit gambling activities (derivatives, etc.).

An ancillary reason is that ramping up private debt is a way to give a quick economic and employment boost because it usually increases aggregate spending. The public can be boiled like a frog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > There may be a market opportunity for an economist to write a big Piketty- > style book on climate change.

Yale economist Bill Nordhaus' Climate Casino is that book. And his research with integrated assessment models concluded:

> The consequences of [climate change] will be costly for human societies and > grave for many unmanaged earth systems; the balance of risks indicates that > immediate action should be taken to slow and eventually halt emissions of > CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

And, by the way, this analysis doesn't even take into account tipping points!

<comment><USER4> Until we as a society face the fact that doing something about climate change required compensating the owners of fossil fuels for not letting them extract them then we are going to get nowhere.

<comment><USER8> Why would we need to compensate them (Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and other owners) when it's our demand that gives them the ability to sell their product. Since the value of their oil reserves is tens (if not a hundred+) trillion dollars.. it would be cheaper to simply give everyone in the US and Europe a free electric car.

Edit: 100 trillion is so much money.. that we could literally replace every car in the entire world (1 billion cars) with a free tesla and still have money left over.

<comment><USER4> Yes the money involved is massive, but the way politics works is those with something to lose have far more power than those that will gain from any change. This is why tax reform is so difficult. The owners of all the fossil fuels are effectively able to veto all change unless we pay them off. If this is the case lets get on with buying them off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Despite the evidence that people who weren't academically inclined prior to > college get little benefit from college and simultaneously suffer four years > of lost income,

The real reason we put kids through four years of college is because nobody wants to trust 18 year olds with pretty much anything, much less a salary and responsibilities. So the choice isn't between college and starting a career, it's between college and whatever bullshit jobs they'll be able to scrape up.

If you got rid of or otherwise stopped convincing kids they should go to college, you wouldn't have a bunch of gainfully-employed teenagers. You'd be gleefully recreating the enormous social problem of lots of bored young people sitting around without a whole lot to do.

We all know where that leads. Anything's better than that, even something that doesn't really help end outcomes much.

</comment><comment><USER10> > If K-12 and college are making ever-better American workers then capitalists > are using their class power to steal from the working class ... If on the > other hand ... the problem is simply that engineers keep designing better > machines (capital) while our education system turns out workers no better > than those of 30 years ago...

This is a key point. People talk about increases in labour productivity (how much output per given unit of labour) but this economic definition doesn't match the day-to-day meaning of the word.

If I devise a new process/system which means that I need only 1 employee rather than 1000, for the same amount of output, that remaining employee hasn't suddenly become 1000 times more productive. (Although it would be measured as such by economists.)

Why should we assume that the capitalist (or the market) would reward workers for such technological progress?

<comment><USER11> >If I devise a new process/system which means that I need only 1 employee rather than 1000, for the same amount of output, that remaining employee hasn't suddenly become 1000 times more productive. (Although it would be measured as such by economists.) Why should we assume that the capitalist (or the market) would reward workers for such technological progress?

This is where we go back to the era of Marx and why him and others were advocates of the people owning the means of production. The two eras are similar, lots of automation, lots of inequality, huge companies growing from nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's stunning to me that a Living Wage isn't the main thing they are talking about let alone not even on the list.

</comment><comment><USER13> I find the assumption that the goal or purpose of higher education should be paying off economically in terms of future employment a foreign one. I am well aware that I could build a much more fruitful career by making a different choice than pursuing the path that I have chosen. I have other priorities in life and I assume that so do most of the people who would, say, major in poetry at a "lower quality college". Despite what some economists seem to think, money doesn't really reflect how a lot of us like to think of "value". Spending a big amount of my time on spiritual development, cooking, sozializing and taking classes outside of my field is obviously not the most rational choices for my career. Why focus on getting more money if I already have enough to get by?</comment>


Twitter tells me my account may have been compromised - what does that mean? - <AUTHOR>

I just got an email from Twitter:
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---- Hi, brazzy
Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter. We've reset your password to prevent others from accessing your account.
You'll need to create a new password for your Twitter account. You can select a new password at this link:
[...]
Please don't reuse your old password and be sure to choose a strong password (such as one with a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols).
</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>----
Wthat the hell does that mean? Can someone translate that from CRMese into techspeak? Did they give their account data to someone else? Did someone try to brute-force my account?
I barely use twitter and have never used third-party clients. </comment><comment><USER2> I'll bet the link they provide doesn't actually go to twitter for real, but goes to a harvesting site.

In short, it's phishing.</comment>


Dedicated eReaders - <AUTHOR>

I just browsed into BarnesandNoble.com (for possibly the first time in my life). 1/3 of the homepage is covered with an ad for their "nook color" (a dedicated eReader). Fellow YCnews readers, this may be super obvious to you already...
But, WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE THESE COMPANIES DOING?.. spending the resources on developing electronics dedicated to reading books. Same applies to Amazon with the Kindle. Okay, I suppose one could argue (at least in B&N' case) that they are appealing to their specific audience with modern tech. Nevertheless, why would a consumer spend $250+ on a device just to read books? B&N.com, if they really care about their costumers, should put an ad up that says: "We do not recommend spending $250 on a dedicated eReader."
Sure Apple (i.e. iPad/iPad2) offers an eReader... but it's just one of 65,000+ apps.
Let's organize a group and barge into B&N's next board meeting, explain in plain English where our planet is heading with tech, and help them diversify/liquidate+re-invest in a better model.
Sorry (but not really); I felt the need to vent. <comment><USER2> Because many people prefer reading on an eBook reader over a tablet:

\- Cheaper ($149 or $249 compared to $499)

\- Easier to read (eInk is a lot easier on the eye when reading for long periods than a backlit display)

\- Not confusing (Granted, an iPad is pretty easy to figure out, but for an average consumer a device that does one thing is generally easier to grasp)

\- Better battery life (Nook claims 10 days, iPad claims 10 hours)

The two technologies may converge in the future, but for now, the dedicated eBook Reader still has its place.

<comment><USER3> The eInk is a critical factor here. I've talked to a few people who have read books on the iPad and Kindle, and they've all said it was much nicer to be reading for long periods of time on the Kindle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A dedicated eReader has less pressure to keep upgrading the components. The current kindle doesn't need much improvement; the CPU is adequate, RAM is adequate, flash storage is adequate. The screen could use a little bit of improvement in contrast, # of gray shades, and refresh speed.

The point being, it's pretty close to stabilizing, at which point Amazon can just keep dropping the price as components get cheaper. Then Amazon can sell more and more of them, and sell more and more Amazon ebooks. If the Kindle's cost falls enough, Amazon can give them away.

By contrast, general-purpose tablets are going to be under constant pressure to keep upgrading the components, with faster CPUs, more RAM, better color screens, new wireless tech, better GPUs, more storage, so that users can use the latest software and run the latest apps. That'll help keep the prices relatively high.

If you think of dedicated eReaders, or at least the Kindle, as being like a simple 4-function calculator, it might be clearer. Calculators like that used to be expensive way back when. Now they're cheap enough to give away free with magazine subscriptions. There's little point in upgrading the hardware, so they just get cheaper and cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER5> > WHAT IN THE WORLD ARE THESE COMPANIES DOING?

At least in the Kindle's case: selling a hell of a lot of them, and a hell of a lot of books.

Ever since I got a Kindle, I don't really use my iPad anymore.

My Kindle cost ($139) and weighed a fraction of what my iPad did. I can securely carry my kindle in the pocket of my cargo pants or my jacket without weighing me down.

It's easy on my eyes. A LOT easier. And I can read it outside with sunglasses on.

I read & download books and PDFs like mad.

I use klip.me (<http://klip.me>) & Instapaper (<http://instapaper.com>) to shoot every interesting web article to my Kindle automatically.

I shoot work-related documents to the Kindle via Whispernet for free.

I keep all my tech books on it. I find the resolution completely fine for tech books, btw. I was worried about this after reading Kindle DX reviews. I am working through Big Nerd Ranch's latest iOS programming book, which is full of illustrations.

I keep cheatsheets galore on it (packetlife, wireshark, vim, ipv6, etc)

And what I've come to find out, is that I largely use my iPad to read stuff. I don't play games. I watch movies, but I can just use my MBP for that.

In most cases, I find the Kindle handles things better, for a fraction of the cost. I can browse Google Reader on my iPhone, or my MBP. I've already got two expensive devices to handle the Kindle/iPad gap. But your YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER6> One thing I have noticed about ereaders (and owners of ereaders) is their willingness to purchase books. I have friends who before buying a nook or a kindle would read one or two medium sized books a year. Revenue for Amazon/B&N ~ $20 ($60 if they are both new release hardbacks). With the ereader the same person will have a "stack" of 13 to 14 books to read in their ereader. Revenue for Amazon ~ $130. This is not including the cost of ereader, but we can just skip that. Now, ereaders certainly make reader more accessible (you don't have to carry around a book with you), but changing mediums is not going to increase the amount you read by 700%.

Please don't misunderstand me on this, I actually really like ereaders. I think if you are a person that used to go on vacation with four heavy books in your luggage then they are great. I also really like a lot of the tech involved. The kindle's battery life is simply amazing.

The point is that I feel like the barrier to buying a book has been dramatically reduced. IMHO, this is why the bookstores are supporting and promoting them. With a physical book, you have to order it from the site or go to the store. You also have a physical book which can feel like 700 pages of procrastination staring you back in the face everyday that you don't read. Sure the bookworms out there really want you to like books and to actually read more, but bookstores are a business, and their business is _selling_ books.

</comment><comment><USER7> iPad is unreadable outdoors in daytime. glass surface acting as a mirror and display not being transflective. also it is way overpowered to display text. so it's battery is depleted after 12 hours instead of a few months.

i'd love a transflective ipad with image-persistence on powerdown. notionink seems to offer this i think?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Good contradictive viewpoints. I think everyone has a good argument. @jonhendry made a strong case. Even I can agree that the quality (performance & display) for reading books on dedicated eReaders is much better than iPads'.

I guess I'm just looking at this from an investment standpoint. If iPad offers 50%=.5 of the eReader quality against Kindle, Nook, etc. then the iPad (for eReading) cost equates to (~$500 _1/65,000)(.5) = .038 cents.

... There is room to argue that nobody is going to download 65,000 apps (and memory won't even allow for it). But still, the cost/benefit is substantially in favor of an all-inclusive tablet._

*That is, if you like to use gadgets for multiple apps.

</comment><comment><USER8> I currently have a Kindle DX graphite, it means I need to take one thing with me, I don't need to take lots of paper books and research papers with me everywhere, I can read it in direct sunlight, unlike a tablet or laptop and I can read if for hours without eyestrain, and the 3G means I can keep up with HN or other websites without the need for a seperate device, in short I'm glad I have it. Perhaps for someone who only reads occasionally it is overkill, but for those of us who are always consuming new information it is definately a useful tool.

</comment><comment><USER9> I actually hope BN is able to make money with the Nook, especially with the Color Nook, it's a good device.

Maybe BN should introduce a Color Nook Pad, with slightly better hardware, and enter into the Android tablet market. They already have a large retail network. There is a big opening for tablets priced under $500.

<comment><USER3> The color nook is basically an Android tablet already. You just need to root it and you're all set.

<comment><USER9> It is but BN should improve the specs little bit and market/sell it like a tablet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pushing ink stained scraps of dead trees is not as sexy as being in high tech like Apple.

Venting about eReaders, the ones I've tried out are all so slow and clunky. Unless you don't need a tablet, like ever, you're better off spending the $250 on eBooks to read on your computer or tablet.

</comment><comment><USER11> honestly,the benefits are plentiful, I own one and the value proposition for me is clear - wide choice of books in tiny package, battery life unheard of and out of reach for years to come for ipad-alikes, minimum of distraction. Overall, the post is a troll magnet.</comment>


What to Do in an Earthquake - <AUTHOR> https://battleofearth.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/what-to-do-in-an-earthquake-good-advice/ <comment><USER2> Fantastic information, flew in the face of everything I thought I "knew". :-)</comment>


Why does the US generate more fast-growing tech startups than Europe? - <AUTHOR> https://www.aei.org/publication/why-does-the-us-generate-more-fast-growing-tech-startups-than-europe/ <comment><USER2> For obvious reasons.

1) ~160M people in those countries vs. ~320M in the US. Per capita, those countries are doing about as well as the US.

2) People in France (and many other countries) simply don't work as many hours as we do in the US. That can hurt productivity in some cases. I'm certainly not saying it's a bad thing overall though.

3) It's much cheaper to start a company in the US than many European countries. It costs a few hundred dollars to get incorporated, and then you get tons of tax breaks.

4) We have a lot of nonprofit and institutional support, as someone else mentioned. The Kauffman Foundation is an incredibly important source of money that gets sunk into startups (literally sunk -- it's a charity, and little of that money will see a return).

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone with a tech startup in Europe:

1\. Europeans are more risk averse, and there is not the same entrepreneurial spirit.

2\. You're comparing it with the home of tech and startups so it's not going to compare well. More of a question would be why does the US generate more fast-growing tech startups than the whole world put together.

3\. European investors are comically small-minded, stingy and don't have much cash to use.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also there's a regional language issue in Europe, and English is not the native language in most countries. People in CH are expected to learn 2-3 languages, with English usually being the optional language. Hiring people from outside the country becomes a problematic issue esp. for startups.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would argue that it's due in large part, if not totally, to the size of our VC/Angel funding system.

2013 VC investment Stats:

US: 33BN

Europe: 7.4BN

China: 3.5BN

[http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Global_venture_capi...](http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/Global_venture_capital_insights_and_trends_2014/$FILE/EY_Global_VC_insights_and_trends_report_2014.pdf)</comment>


Optimizing TLS for High–Bandwidth Applications in FreeBSD [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://people.freebsd.org/~rrs/asiabsd_2015_tls.pdf <comment><USER2> Netflix can serve up to 40Gbps of traffic per server in cleartext HTTP. Their initial test of adding TLS induced a performance cut of ~3x, which has huge cost impact to their infrastructure. This is due to sendfile(), a kernel syscall used by nginx, not being available when data needs to be encrypted by TLS in userland.

Netflix really needs sendfile() to work with TLS to enable HTTPS on all of its traffic, so they added some limited crypto support to the BSD kernel. What that paper really demonstrates is the need for a TLS stack in the kernel that can let userspace daemons benefit from low-level optimizations. I, for one, would love to see something like this added to the linux kernel!

This is great work from Netflix. They could have just said "screw it, it's too hard/expensive, we'll do HTTP". But instead they listened to a minority of their users that really cares about privacy and dedicated time and resources to fixing a hard problem. Really impressive work!

<comment><USER3> _What that paper really demonstrates is the need for a TLS stack in the kernel that can let userspace daemons benefit from low-level optimizations._

On the other hand, vulnerabilities can become more severe, like this recent one: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9380468](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9380468)

Perhaps full TLS in the kernel isn't necessary, but only the stream encryption - which tends to be the simpler part and thus less likely to have vulnerabilities compared to session negotiation/key exchange/etc.

It might be a rather expensive option, but what do you think of offloading TLS to the NIC? A lot of them do TCP offload already and there are "SSL Accelerator" HSMs available.

<comment><USER4> Alternatively, offload TLS to GPU's: [http://hgpu.org/?p=2472](http://hgpu.org/?p=2472)

<comment><USER5> The only reason they could do 40 GBps without SSL was kernel zero copy. Copying it over to the GPU and back will definitely not be faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Judging by the few comments here, people seem to be more accepting of moving tls into the kernel than they are of windows moving http into the kernel. Is this a double standard? They are both protocols implemented on tcp, most often by userspace programs.</comment>