How Cocaine Changes the Brain - <AUTHOR> http://neurosciencenews.com/cocaine-dopamine-vta-3167/ <comment><USER2> Good to know is that the first time you take cocaine, it works about 1000 times stronger than the natural drugs in your brain, and thus the natural highs you get. These are the normal highs you get when you score a goal in sports, when you get an A for your exam, when the girl or boy you like wants to kiss you etc.

So the first time(s) you use cocaine, you get a high that's incredible. The second time, this effect is about 100 times stronger than usual, so 10 times less strong than the first time.

Then you want to go back to that first unbelievable fantastic time, and take more. You may get at 200, but the more often you take it, the less the effect, and the stronger the craving for it. This is more or less how (this) addiction works.

The numbers I use here may be different, but it shows more or less how it works. Well as far as I understood it from the book Why Zebras don't get Ulcers which is about stress and all its side effects.

[http://www.amazon.com/Zebras-Dont-Ulcers-Third- Edition/dp/08...](http://www.amazon.com/Zebras-Dont-Ulcers-Third- Edition/dp/0805073698)

<comment><USER3> > So the first time(s) you use cocaine, you get a high that's incredible. The > second time, this effect is about 100 times stronger than usual, so 10 times > less strong than the first time.

> Then you want to go back to that first unbelievable fantastic time, and take > more. You may get at 200, but the more often you take it, the less the > effect, and the stronger the craving for it. This is more or less how (this) > addiction works.

Isn't this a common sense regarding drugs in general? I mean, this sentiment is repeated constantly through the fictional depiction of drugs and through the media.

<comment><USER4> From what I've heard, weed seems to work better after the first few tries.

<comment><USER5> That wasn't my experience when I used to smoke.

The first time I ever got stoned was the most effective.

<comment><USER6> Many people experience no effects at all the first or second time they consume it, but then when they finally are affected by it, that experience will be the most effective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From a harm reduction standpoint I wish they'd also research how long it takes until you return to baseline sensitivity or if at all. What is the approximate frequency and dose that you can take cocaine at where it's non destructive?

<comment><USER8> Exactly. Definitely not enough research taking a harm reduction approach. There's quite a bit of short term research on a lot of things that give some basic insights, but don't add additional variables that are useful even if adding them isn't particularly difficult. Long term studies are obviously harder, but for prescription amphetamines which have been around for a while, you'd think we'd have some decent research on the long term effects on cognition. But nope, there's way more research on long term cognitive effects of cocaine than amphetamines. And even that research doesn't seem to focus on harm reduction and best practices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> To understand these results you may need to know that dopamine is not the "reward" signal it was once characterised as. Instead it is closer to a "motivation" signal. Without it you do nothing, with lots of it you are highly motivated to just about anything.

<comment><USER10> I would argue that, while people can _redirect_ the stimulation from dopaminergics to get "motivated to [do] just about anything", the usual effects when the drug-user sets no specific goals are actually rather more specific.

Almost everyone who takes weaker amphetamines like Adderall ends up developing a cleaning compulsion; almost everyone who takes meth ends up developing a compulsion to pick at their own skin. The link I've seen suggested is that these are instinctual "foraging/grooming" behaviors, all using the same neural hardware related to finding small imperfections/differences in a scene.</comment></comment>


Hosting AngularJS with Amazon S3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nickdobie.com/blog/hosting-angularjs-with-amazon-s3/

<comment><AUTHOR> I know some people don't think hosting a website on S3 is a good idea. I'm going with it as it allows me to iterate my website faster. Since I'm trying use ELB to load balance, I have an AMI with my API code on it. If the website were on the AMI, then I'd have to spend time creating a new AMI when the website changes. That takes way more time then pushing the code to an S3 bucket.

My only issue with the S3 hosting is figuring out how to get the googlebot to crawl my website.</comment>


Smalltalk is stable and growing - <AUTHOR> http://joachimtuchel.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/va-smalltalk-is-stable-and-growing/ <comment><USER2> I really dig smalltalk, especially the Pharo project, which I believe is a fork of Squeak.

The development environment is a joy to use, although unfamiliar to the uninitiated, but very powerful indeed. Some people do not like the image idea or the fact that they can't bring their tools with them, but I love it. Pharo lives on my USB stick and is ready and willing no matter what type of system I am on, or whose for that matter.

<comment><USER3> It's funny because I had a really refreshing experience with Pharo lately. A part of the workspace threw an exception and I was presented with the option to debug it. Hitting debug brings up a debugger with the full stack available and the source of the error. Within a few minutes I was able to track down the error, fix it and have the fix go live immediately. Compare this to what it would take to debug and fix an error in, say, Eclipse. The difficulty of checking out the Eclipse source, dealing with potentially confusing and convoluted source code, wrangling with a labyrinthine ant or Maven build process etc. makes it not worth your while to fix the problem.

Whatever the pros and cons of the image based system may be the immediacy and transparency of it is really enjoyable. It's a shame that the idea has been pretty much abandoned by all but a small contingent of developers.

<comment><USER4> > A part of the workspace threw an exception

Did this happen with the standard workspace as it was distributed? This typical smalltalk experience might be acceptable you. There is a chance though that your customers won't find it similarly enjoyable.

<comment><USER3> For one, this was Pharo Smalltalk; a fork of Squeak that's still in beta. For another if I was shipping an application to a customer I probably wouldn't ship it with the workspace, or any of the development tools really. I would also consider buying a license for a commercial Smalltalk if that was the case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I picked up Seaside and Magritte recently to build a demo. Seaside is a refreshing change from the Rails/Django/Pylons style frameworks. I found the abstractions Seaside provides (continuations and components) to be much more powerful than what the other frameworks gave me.

The downside is that it's a drastically different development process than I'm used to. Squeak and Pharo take a lot of effort to get used to.

<comment><USER6> Did you try GNU Smalltalk (<http://smalltalk.gnu.org/>)? It's a command-line smalltalk that interfaces well with unix. I find it simpler to grasp than seaside because there are less things to understand at the same time.

<comment><USER7> Don't you mean "simpler to grasp than Squeak"? I doubt Seaside and GNU Smalltalk have much in common...one being a framework and the other a smalltalk environment.

What I'd be more curious about is whether GNU Smalltalk can run Seaside...

<comment><USER8> It can, as of the recent releases.

<comment><USER5> Avi, do you use Pharo as your main development environment?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So Smalltalk is not dying because someone who sells Smalltalk IDE says so?

\- Wait -

I am not trying to be anti-Smalltalk, but that seems analogous to Spolsky, who sells bug tracking software, downplaying TDD.

\- Wait -

I am not trying to be anti-Spolsky, but that seems analogous to person X, who sells product Y, downplaying Z, in order to persuade people one way or another.

...So this must of been what my professor was talking about when she said it is important to take into account who is providing you with this information

<comment><USER10> The reference to increased sales is true for both VA Smalltalk and Gemstone. Also noted: this growth is consistent in prior years. Those are not opinions without regard to the fact that they did not release sales numbers. I know and have worked for the CEOs of both companies (long ago); they are very honest businessmen. If they claim the growth is real, I do believe them.</comment></comment>


Bernie Sanders' problem with Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/28/bernie-sanders-problem-with-amazon/ <comment><USER2> The marketplace may "set the going rate for labour" and all, but oligopoly and cartel-ism artificially depress wages.

Much like walmart, Amazon's wages do not respect the costs it takes to survive and continue working. It's just that simple. If you want your workforce to be able to do their jobs, they need to be afford a living standard above poverty.

Anything else is either asking taxpayers to fund your business, or financially gaslighting your workers into failure. How is either option acceptable?

Much like Walmart has historically done, Amazon warehouse workers in the US get "coached" in how to get food stamps. If you get sick, you risk getting fired. Get too old, you risk getting fired. Need too much time off? You guessed it... All of this is federally illegal, but conservative state laws make it impossible to hold any company accountable.

Move over to their sysadmin side, and you'll see wages $10-20k less / year than the competition, for 80 hours work in a week instead of the average 60. And the same issues of what'll get you fired show up here as well.

Combined with the fact that Amazon avoids paying taxes, this makes Jeff Bezos the biggest welfare queen in existence.

Anyone else wanna kick Jeff Bezos off welfare?

<comment><USER3> One way to think of it is as Bezos being on welfare. Another way to think is that, presumably, the Amazon workers don't have better jobs available to them. If they weren't at Amazon then they'd be somewhere paying less, with less benefits, or unemployed. Without Amazon the workers would require more from the government. In this sense Amazon is subsidizing social welfare and not the other way around.

<comment><AUTHOR> They briefly mention that in the article - Amazon might be the household name in e-commerce, but they're kinda small fry as far logistics and fulfillment industry goes, and apparently a higher-paying one at that: "That Amazon positions its own offerings as _highly competitive_ can, perhaps, be seen as something of an indictment of larger issues with warehouse fulfillment. While the company is an easy target, it's certainly not alone."</comment></comment></comment>


Legit: A language based on a Git commit history - <AUTHOR> https://morr.cc/legit/ <comment><USER2> I can't barely find time to like work, and enjoy my family life and doing chores, and then, there are people like that. The world is a crazy place

<comment><USER3> I guess time at the Recurse center is substituted for work here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can someone describe a practical case to use such a language?

<comment> ar-nelson It's an esoteric language, they usually aren't designed with any practical application in mind. They're more like art projects.

Despite that, I can think of one interesting use case: steganography, to hide one program inside of another. Kind of like whitespace[1].

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_langua...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_\(programming_language\))</comment></comment>


Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich Resigns - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/13005/intels-brian-krzanich-resigns <comment><USER2> How political was this decision? Seems like they wanted to get rid of him and citet some minor misdemeanor some time back.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the thinking style of HN? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working for a startup (mindtime.com) that has developed a new model of human cognition positing that each of the temporal frames that our species has conceptualized—future, past, and present—correlates with a specific set of cognitive aptitudes.
Broadly speaking, future thinking gives us an awareness of possibilities, past thinking gives us an awareness of certainties and present thinking an awareness of probabilities. In the startup world, this might translate to idea generation (future activity), validation (past activity), and execution (present activity). Each individual member of a startup team blends these three perspectives in their own way, but are all of the thinking styles necessary to make the start-up work?
So what is the thinking style of HN? Are we a community of future, past or present thinkers? Or a healthy mix of all three?
We've developed a simple app to measure the thinking style of communities. Please participate at apps.facebook.com/mindtime/ and report back here with your unique blend. <comment><USER2> Ok, so I was predominantly future thinking style (as probably most of HN).

But the biggest error I see that it suggest I am inclined toward spontaneity and impulsiveness.

I can see where this comes from - I marked that I do not methodically examine choices before I make them. Which is accurate, but not so much when viewed in a vacuum.

When faced with a decision that is not time sensitive, I like to think about the idea for a few minutes, then come back to it a week later, not explicitly thinking about the problem as the week progresses. During that week of not thinking, it is typical to have a sudden breakthrough. If that doesn't happen, when I revisit the problem and commit to thinking about it, I discover that my decisions have already been made without me trying to figure everything out. In a sense it is letting my subconscious do all the heavy lifting.

I very much enjoyed reading through the results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking it out -- glad you enjoyed reading the results. I also suspect HN will be composed of mostly future thinkers, but our research points to successful companies needing all three constructs to operate efficiently.

By the way, we will be adding a link to retake the questions in the next revision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ok, I took the plunge and I'm definitely in the idea generation area. My strengths are much more in line with CEO/CTO than COO. Here's the test result:

You are primarily driven by Future thinking qualities, and your thinking style generates:

Enthusiasm for fresh ideas; Ingenuity led by intuition; A sense for possibilities; An embrace of opportunities and change; A constant drive towards the new and unexplored.

<comment><USER4> Hi, I'm one of the team developing MindTime and thought that perhaps I might help in the discussion. While you definitely seem to use Future thinking as your lead (the brief description points to our lead perspective more than anything) it does not mean that you aren't also using a good amount of Present or Past thinking in the mix. My experience with COO's is that they are often Future/Present or Present/Future thinkers. Especially in software development. The nature of the beast requires a strong ability to stay with what can often be a moving target and changing sets of variables or assumptions while driving things toward concrete goals. The more in-depth description provided in the FB app should give you a fuller picture of your thinking style.</comment></comment>


Facebook client on a SIM, works on any GSM handset - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/14/facebook_sim/

<comment><USER2> Nicely twisted.

</comment><comment><USER3> Someone needs to put a Diaspora client on such a SIM for a Diaspora mod protected by Blowfish encryption. If a volunteer group could do this, we could DHL a bunch of them to the next people's revolt hot spot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Doing the communications via SMS would make it trivially easy to block, or, even better for a dictator, work out who the troublemakers are and track them in real time via the mobile network.

<comment><USER4> Weren't folks setting up their own GSM network at Burning Man?

<comment><USER5> Yes, using OpenBTS ( <http://openbts.sourceforge.net/> ) . It's quite a cool project. Unfortunately, it would be illegal to use here in Brazil.

<comment><USER6> Why do you think OpenBTS is illegal in Brazil? There's a research group at UFPA in Belem that's been quite active in the OpenBTS project. I met two of the guys at the OpenBTS Workshop in Germany last summer. See-- [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5304...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5304848)

A license for the GSM spectrum used by OpenBTS from the relevant government telecommunications authority _is_ necessary almost everywhere in the world.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


MIT grad students achieve long-sought stable nanocrystalline metals - <AUTHOR> http://www.kurzweilai.net/mit-grad-students-achieve-long-sought-stable-nanocrystalline-metals

<comment><USER2> Not entirely sure if this is legal (I'll take it down if it's not), but here's the full article (PDF warning): <http://db.tt/ws6QSyVa>

<comment><USER3> Sorry but the copyright does say _Copyright 2012 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science; all rights reserved._ And the license at the top says "personal non-commercial use only" which I think this violates... I'm not a lawyer though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thank you for saying "MIT grad students achieve" instead of "MIT achieves"!

</comment><comment><USER5>
      > remained stable for a full week at a temperature of
      > 1,100 degrees Celsius

This statement is too ambiguous to me. Did it break down after a week, or did they just stop testing after a week?

<comment><USER6> Apparently the latter. I glanced at the PDF and saw no mention of grain growth after that point. Apparently, a week is plenty of time for the processing such an alloy would normally undergo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could the metals made with this process then be woven into cables, to make (perhaps) an orbital tether / space elevator? Or are carbon nanotubes still the best option in that area?

<comment><USER5> It would depend on the types of stress that the material is good at withstanding. As far as I know, an orbital tether / space elevator would mostly need to be resistant to tensile stress.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(mechanics)></comment></comment>


97 Things Every Programmer Should Know - <AUTHOR> http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Contributions_Appearing_in_the_Book

<comment><AUTHOR> Great list! I particularly like #9 and #88.</comment>


6 Habits of Highly Productive People - <AUTHOR> http://wheredatapp.com/blog/2015/9/22/6-habits-of-highly-productive-people <comment><USER2> Nice!</comment>


QuickScope – Lightning fast movement in Vim - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/unblevable/quick-scope

<comment><USER2> This is actually amazing, thanks so much!</comment>


The Cost Savings Of Netflix's Internal Spot Market - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2017/12/4/the-eternal-cost-savings-of-netflixs-internal-spot-market.html <comment><USER2> > Video encoding is 70% of Netflix's computing needs, running on 300,000 CPUs > in over 1000 different autoscaling groups.

This feels crazy to me. They'll have to encode all their content into 15-20 different formats for various devices/bitrates, but surely they cache the output for each of those so it'll only have to be done once for each show/movie. Compare that to serving content, which happens thousands or millions of times for each stream. This isn't Youtube, there's not much of a "long tail" of content that's only watched a few times but has to be encoded anyway.

<comment><USER3> > Stranger Things season 2 is shot in 8K and has nine episodes. The source > files are terabytes and terabytes of data. Each season required 190,000 CPU > hours to encode.

High resolution video is larger than you might expect.

<comment><USER4> Is there such a thing as a video, image, or audio format that is inefficient for viewing, but is radically more efficient for transcoding? Such a technique would be useful for a number of applications.

<comment><USER5> Sure, Raw video is one example of that, it takes insane bandwidth and storage, but can load it from SSD fast enough that's not an issue. Really, codecs need to be closely related before encoding X helps make encoding Y.

<comment><USER6> To compare: my camera uses 25 megabytes of storage for each single raw frame. I have no idea how much raw sound takes up, but you would have to move around a lot of SSDs to use that.

<comment><USER5> It can get worse 100+ Megapixels at 60 fps: [http://www.forzasilicon.com/2014/04/forza-silicon- introduces...](http://www.forzasilicon.com/2014/04/forza-silicon-introduces- advanced-cmos-modular-video-camera-platform/)

Though, I have no idea what network connections they would use. I mean even in black and white this would saturate a 100Gbps link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article is about improving resource utilization, usually very low for cloud users (between 6% and 12% according to McKinsey). It's too bad the article fails to mention resource utilization numbers at Netflix.

Cloud facilities like Google and Twitter have been co-locating workloads using containers for a while now (using Borg or Mesos) but they're still below 40%.

[https://www.sallan.org/pdf- docs/McKinsey_Data_Center_Efficie...](https://www.sallan.org/pdf- docs/McKinsey_Data_Center_Efficiency.pdf)

[http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/CloudComputing/googletrace- so...](http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/PDL-FTP/CloudComputing/googletrace-socc2012.pdf)

<comment><USER8> It's probably because these cloud companies consider this type of data to be trade secrets. I'm actually surprised they talk so freely about all this. Maybe it's because they're years ahead from the competition, and do not seem to stop innovating.

<comment><USER9> I recall seeing a technical presentation by one of these larger organizations (probably Netflix), where they explain that they have to do these tech talks in order to spread the knowledge enough so that they can find people to hire to work on their stuff. Staffing was _explicitly_ the reason they were speaking so freely about details other shops typically consider proprietary.

<comment><USER10> What sorts of things does one need to learn to get a software engineering job at a place like Netflix? Where would you even go to learn that type of thing (other than Netflix)?

As someone who spends most of their day writing C# web apps for clients, something like a job at Netflix seems like an impossibility at this point.

<comment><USER11> Netflix is, mostly, just a Java shop. They follow good practices in a lot of ways (circuit-breaker patterns, abstracted access to data stores, etc.) but it's still a Java shop.

Their infrastructural/cloud ops teams are broader in the proper nouns they wrangle, but that's a different kettle of fish and is totally learnable outside of Netflix: understand AWS (when to build versus buy), understand how systems talk to one another (networking, HTTP for online queries versus queues for offline jobs), and how systems scale and repair after failure (horizontal versus vertical scaling, quorums for decisionmaking, when to use CP versus AP datastores, that kind of thing). And Netflix open-sources enough of their internal tooling that, once you have a baseline in the infrastructural field, you can probably do a good job of figuring out what the missing bits are.

I'm sure, having not worked there but worked on fairly large systems, that Netflix has its own wacky problems, but they're the things that baseline understanding of this stuff enables you to learn. It's all just digital plumbing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you weren't running in the cloud, you would just use baremetal machines with prioritized job queues. You can keep a low-priority job queue doing video encoding 24/7, and keep any other jobs or applications at a higher-priority. The result is continuous resource utilization at near-peak with little contention.

This reduces complexity and overhead significantly. With a cloud model, each level of abstraction requires new methods for networking, orchestration, configuration, execution, debugging, etc. On a single baremetal machine, all of the resources are essentially the same things running on one layer. But you can still get fancy with cgroups, namespaces and quotas if you need enforced isolation or resource limits.

<comment><USER13> Plus the capex costs of constantly having to buy new hardware and stick it in a datacenter for when your workload went up.

Plus the costs of maintaining that hardware both from an opex and capex point of view.

Plus the capex and opex costs of creating and maintaining the high speed network required to ship those files back and forth within the datacenter space that you're renting.

Plus the massive hit in how nimble your team can be. (Want to support a new codec? Either buy and install new hardware, or set the priority on these re- encodes lower and tell your boss to wait six months)

When you have an extremely variable workload such as Netflix et al, even though AWS/GCP/Azure are more expensive on a unit cost, your savings from operational expenditure will more than make up for that difference. Not having to buy and maintain a bunch of "just using baremetal machines" is a massive, massive cost savings.

Lambda / Google Cloud Functions / Azure Functions are a natural extension of this-- your write/test/deploy cycle can be much, much faster and you don't have to even worry about maintaining any infrastructure. The brainpower savings of this more than make up for the extra cost for CPU cycles.

<comment><USER12> Well first of all, you can _always_ pay someone else for baremetal server hosting and support, just like with Amazon. So you don't need to buy and maintain, and you can still save costs - you're renting, just like with Amazon.

Second, even if Netflix's "workload" is variable, they're still using reserved instances. There's no practical difference from those to baremetal machines.

Finally, I am _highly_ skeptical of anyone telling me that five more layers of abstraction make it easier or quicker to write, test and deploy code. Code is code. Servers are servers. Microservices are microservices. Different people are (or should be) maintaining all of these, and if they do their jobs right it should not incur a performance penalty on anyone else.

I will also state the obvious: if you don't hire the right people to manage the right pieces, you will waste huge amounts of time and money trying to figure out what other people have known for decades. This is universal, and has nothing to do with what technology you use.

<comment><USER14> > 300,000 CPUs

You better have a bloody big datacentre.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have tried reading this twice but can't find how are they leveraging the internal spot markets? Are they re-selling unused capacity to a third party?

<comment><USER16> > I have tried reading this twice but can't find how are they leveraging the > internal spot markets? Are they re-selling unused capacity to a third party?

They have reserved a lot of instances in EC2.

[https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved- instances/](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/reserved-instances/)

You can get a steep discount for reserving instances. A reserved instance is typically reserved for a number of years.

When these aren't in use, then they can put them into their video encoding pool and they are essentially free.

I guess they reserve lots of instances to make sure they have the capacity at peak times and to access some serious discounts.

<comment><USER17> The one universal truth in corporate America is that if your boss's boss spent a million dollars on somehing, they're going to make you 'use' it if it's the last thing they do.

Because they worry it will be if they fail. See also multi year contracts for software that's terrible.

<comment><USER10> Netflix needs _n_ instances to operate at peak capacity. The article is about them utilizing those pre-paid, _necessary_ compute resources when the actual streaming they do requires a small fraction of _n_. I'm not sure how that has any correlation to multi year software contracts.

<comment><USER18> Reserved instances are a 1 or 3 year commitment for the discount, compared to more expensive on-demand instances with no minimum contract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So they built...a scheduler?

<comment><USER20> Well, a multi-machine scheduler.

<comment><USER21> In the HPC world, there are many of these: SLURM, Torque, PBS.

<comment><USER22> Don't forget Globus and Condor!

<comment><USER23> How could you overlook (son of) Grid Engine

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I can't help but think that a hybrid cloud/on premise solution would be cheaper in the long run for them. The millions of dollars that they pour into AWS, it seems like they could colocate/contract out some heavy on-premise hardware for standard load and then offload peak load to spot instances.

<comment><USER25> It's hard to say without seeing the numbers as they're almost certainly getting a very steep discount from Aws (in return for extolling the virtues of Aws, being pushed in Aws promo material etc.) In addition I would assume there's some sort of exclusivity clause in there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Something is wrong with the math:

* Video encoding is 70% of Netflix's computing needs

* Stated cost savings on encoding is 92%

This equals a 64% savings on "Netflix's computing needs", which must be a good chunk of their budget.

<comment><USER26> What's wrong with the math? They saved a significant amount of money doing this, which is why it was worth doing.

<comment><USER21> I would think it would be a significant shareholder event to save 64% of their total computing budget. Their 2016 10K

[https://ir.netflix.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1628280-17-496...](https://ir.netflix.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1628280-17-496&CIK=1065280)

says their 3rd party cloud computing costs increased by $23M in 2015 and increased a further $27M in 2016. More importantly, their total technology and development cost increased from $650M in 2015 to $850M in 2016. That includes engineers so it's a bit tricky to figure out what their costs really are, but they didn't go down appreciably in 2016 so this effect had to be in 2017. Looking at their first three 10Q's shows their Technology and Development budget keeps going up. I don't see how a streaming service could save 64% of its total computing needs, and it not show up on any of its SEC filings.

In 2016 they completed a seven year move of all their computing infrastructure to AWS. When they sized the system, they bought reserved instances (probably at a significant discount). From the math in this article, they bought 64% more than they needed if they just discovered they could save 64% of their EC2 budget. That seems like a big math error.

<comment><USER26> I was a former insider so I can't get into details, but if you look you'll see that almost the entirety of their cost is content acquisition. The next biggest cost is salary.

Servers barely even register as far as costs go, and also, it's a 92% savings over what the cost would have been without the system, not an absolute 92%. The farm keeps growing all the time as movies become higher resolution and more encodings are supported.

<comment><USER21> Technology and Development (T&D) is directly related to computing, not content acquisition or sales. Computing costs are significant in this category, since they point them out explicitly in the notes. 64% savings would show up, since we know that 3rd party cloud costs increased by $50M over the last two years. For the number of instances they must be using, the costs must be running well over $100M.

<comment><USER26> The number you don't know is how much the encoding workload grew in the time it took them to develop the system.

Let's use your numbers. Say that two years ago computing costs were $50M, and encoding was $46M of that. Now say that their costs are currently $100M, but the encoding workload grew 6X. Under the old system, that would have cost $276M, but under the new system it is on $22M. That would be a 92% savings, and would totally be in line given that in the last few years they have drastically increased their machine learning output, which would have overtaken encoding work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > There's lots of encoding work to do. Netflix supports 2200 devices and lots > of different codecs, so video is needed in many different file formats.

Why? Don't they write/control their own client apps and video players? Why isn't a single codec with a choice of 3 or 4 different resolutions sufficient?

<comment><USER28> On most platforms that aren't powerful games consoles or personal computers, the video decoding is done by proprietary hardware; these hardware decoders usually only support a few families of codecs and are difficult or impossible to reprogram.

Even if most things support, say, H.264 out of the box, each video decoding SoC has different quirks which means either A) the same encoding looks different on different hardware or B) the encoding fails to decode on different hardware, so even the same codec can have a bunch of parameters which can/need to be adjusted for different devices.

One smart TV might have a Broadcom SoC with a GPU which supports h.264 decoding like the Raspberry Pis do, an Android tablet might have a Mali GPU which can decode VP9 and HEVC, some weird older set top box which has netflix built in might only support MPEG...

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Are there any posts that analyse how the economics of offering $10/month streaming plans work out? Since they are hosted on AWS, data transfer is expensive, and coupled with the licensing of the content they serve, how to they manage to offer streaming at such a low price point?

<comment><USER30> Netflix doesn't stream from AWS. Rather, they've built their own video CDN[1] with PoPs all over the globe. All of their user-facing streaming happens from their CDN. Their AWS infrastructure is used for billing, transcoding, playlists, etc. Also, they perform some seeding of the CDN from within AWS, but the seed boxes themselves can seed each other as well.

All in all, they clearly _do_ push huge amounts of data out of AWS, but that data account for a very small percentage of the total data that gets pushed out to clients via their CDN.

[1] [https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/)

<comment><USER31> I talked with the CenturyLink tech who hooked up my fiber and he mentioned they had just wired up some 40 gigabit appliances. This was in Utah. They are all over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Every time I read articles about Netflix running on EC2 I really really really want to know who's winning more. Is Netflix really saving money by using ec2 vs ownership? Or is Amazon raking cash in from Netflix and Netflix is basically subsidising the build out costs for ec2?

<comment><USER33> It could be both. Just because they're paying Amazon an arm and a leg doesn't mean they have the ability or the time to do a better job for cheaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Can someone explain what a spot market is in this context?

<comment><USER35> Spot, in AWS market, as you likely know, is the ability to bid for regional data center underutilized compute capacity... compute that is not otherwise reserved or dedicated to a particular AWS client account. The risk is that if I outbid you, then I can slurp your instances out from under you, based on if they are needed from the inventory to complete my bid request.

In context of Netflix, they purchased tons of reserved instances in AWS - these reserved instances will never enter into AWS spot pool, so are dedicated compute power to Netflix.

However, Netflix may not use that reserved instance to its full capacity and so it has downtime that Netflix was paying for.

To make efficient use of the tons of money paid to reserve that AWS instance exclusively for Netflix needs, but seeing that it was only needed to stream to clients say, 30% of the day, they built an internal compute bidding market at Netflix, so that other jobs could say "hey netflix, I need to run this encoding job and I need a bunch of boxes, out of all our reserved instances, gimme some that are not currently utilized for my job"

So they layered their own internal compute request service to maximize the util of their tons of reserved instances, instead of going to additional AWS instances to complete these other jobs...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If they have this internal spot instance market they should schedule crypto mining at a super low priority.</comment>


Picking Winners: A Framework for Venture Capital Investment - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.04229 <comment> chroem- I feel like venture capital is a major choke point in our current implementation of capitalism, where "the market will decide" is really a euphemism for "a small handful of extremely wealthy investors will decide." We're paying a massive opportunity cost on all of those ideas that don't ever reach the market because VC's don't think they're easy money.

A good way to resolve this would be to reform the accredited investor laws into something more meritocratic. Instead of needing to own one million dollars in assets, there ought to be some sort of knowledge-based competency exam so that regular people can invest in ideas they think are worthwhile.

<comment><USER3> VC is really only applicable to a small subset of possible successful business. It is actually poisonous to businesses that will succeed financially but with rates of return less than 10x in a relatively short time scale.

So, for what VC is doing in the market I think it is fine for a handful of people that can absorb the necessary risk make those decisions and the bets.

But there is a huge gulf between those types of new business investments an d smaller risk(both in size of capital needed for the experiment and unknowns)/smaller reward investments.

That fat middle is where smaller investors or crowdfunding could really come into their own.

<comment><USER4> part of the problem is VC has developed a doctrine that is designed for investors, not companies. VCs should be focused on serving their companies, not their benefactors. But in todays world its just not the case. You hear founders talk about burning money and rocket ships and high-risk and danger because of this perverse set of incentives. A revolutionary change is needed to put power back in the hands of companies where it belongs. Companies that are changing the world need to be run by patient careful men, not unstable kids with a dangerous appetite for risk.

<comment><USER5> Putting "power back in the hands if companies where it belongs" requires no change at all. Just don't take VC money. It's that simple. Most companies are not best served by raising money from VC firms (and I say this as someone that has been an institutional VC for almost 20 years). But if your take on a business model that requires capital, the expectations of return of those investors are going to be commensurate with the risk. As soon as you raise outside capital whether from a VC or borrowed from your local bank, you have committed yourself to new obligations that will put constraints on how you run the business. Those constraints can be explicit ("pay us X interest every month") or implicit ("the risk associated with the startups we invest in is so great that we have to swing for the fences with every investment, so we are going to push you to a billion or bust strategy."). It is important to understand them before you take outside capital (topic for a longer post...). But if you want to stay in control, it's always best just not to take any outside capital at all.

<comment><USER4> This isn't realistic. Many business need outside capital, they just need it without the institutional baggage. For my own business i'm specifically looking for investors that are aligned with the companies goals first. And its proving difficult because so many investors have distorted ideas about the very nature of business. Many believe the point of business is to make money. Which is exactly the wrong mindset from my point of view and highly dangerous to what we are trying to accomplish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This analysis is a little too "content free" for my tastes. (Edit: I don't mean there is nothing to it, I mean the analysis is largely formal as opposed to the content of the decision)

But this problem hasn't gone unnoticed and there are some ideas around how to solve the "pick the rare winners" problem:

1\. Andreessen: Don't pick winners. Invest in the startup after it has already demonstrated itself to be a winner but before it goes public. This is the safe growing area.

2\. McClure: Invest small amounts, early so that you can afford to spread the investment over many companies.

3\. Thiel, Gurley: Be right

4\. Graham: combination of #2 and #3

5\. Doerr: Network like crazy to have a shot of being in the few good ones (this assumes you will recognize them)

#3 is not necessarily something we can reproduce

<comment><USER5> 5 is the often overlooked one. The quality of the opportunities that at one sees is a huge driver of ultimate returns. Two equally skilled VCs with differing quality deal flow are going to have different returns. So brand and networking are material drivers of return.

I would argue that that applies to more of the names you reference than just Doerr. For example, the early success of YC with dropbox helped drive better deal flow for future deals.

<comment><USER6> That is an excellent point (that many investors rely on increased deal flow from early success). It sort of pervades the other "styles"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The model seems to correlate what worked previously to what will work next. However, in a field that is supposed to lead to new product funding - <USER2> industries may steer funding in the wrong direction from what will work next. Two issues:

1\. The purple cow effect - the opportunities for highest growth may be in underserved segments which are best addressed by founders less represented in Silicon Valley. (the next big thing may be a farming startup in India, but the founder won't fit the well connected or well advised by people with startup exits model this framework uses, and thus will be missed by SV investors, which leads to problem 2. )

2\. The money trumps product problem - whatever you can't beat with a solid product, you could always hammer with more money in the bank. Instead of hearing about a farming innovation in India, American farmers could be getting FarmVille ads on TV instead and tuning out. Since VCs invest locally, even if a startup starts picking up steam in Chicago, SF investors who don't have a toe in that pond, pick the local fish that eats the same algae and fund it far better than the Chicago company, which might have a better product. In a land- grab industry that money may be enough to gain adoption to the SF pond- dweller, but returns for the entire market will be lower, due to lower product quality and tendency of big firms here to pick only one company per industry.

So the framework, biased by past data, may skew future data away from results that would be optimal without a framework.

</comment><comment><USER8> There's a few VC firms (Correlation Ventures leaps to mind, as noted in the article) that invest solely on the basis of a quantitative model that looks at the various features of the business (market, founders, etc.) and then doing some kind of neural network/similarity scoring analysis on it. Of course, a big feature that I presume their models have which this paper does not is the understanding that an IPO is worth tens of small wins, if not more.

The real optimal setup here would be to pair that kind of mathematical rigor with the dealflow of an a16z or KP. I would suspect that both of those two would say that a similar model exists in the heads of their partners so far as pattern recognition, but..

<comment><USER9> I just spoke to Correlation Ventures this week. Great model, and a refreshing change for fundraising. They came in cold after hearing about us from another VC, then we had one phone call which was mostly a friendly chat, and then 3 emails with pretty simple docs and clarifications. They got back to me with a decision in 2 days. After that, they just want a short conversation with a VC co-investor, and another short call with me. Super simple.

<comment><USER5> I agree that correlation has a great model that makes them easy to work with as a vc or entrepreneur. That said, they cannot exist without other traditional firms leading investments (just as in the public markets, an index fund cannot exist without active fund managers doing the work they have always done).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> With zero information, "picking winners" is like buying lottery tickets.

It's obvious that you can win at lottery if the cost of buying all the tickets is less than the total payout. It's usually not.

In the case of startups, it may still be the case. For this study they examined 24,000 companies over 16 years (1500 companies per year). 24k companies x $10k = "only" $240 millions (or, over 16 years, $15 millions / year on average).

So, if one invested $10k in each of these companies, as early as possible (to get the maximum equity in exchange for these $10k) then they would probably have come out ahead (hard to verify as I couldn't find the total exits in $$ in the study).

I think this is fundamentally, and ultimately, YC's business model: root out the obvious hacks and cracks, and accept everyone else.

</comment><comment><USER11> Despite it being so obvious, I really like their analogy,

      pharma::drug
      studio::movie
      vc::startup

"Just" need one to work out!

</comment><comment><USER12> So I briefly scanned this paper.

"The results show that our modeling and portfolio construction method are effective and they provide a quantitative methodology for venture capital investment."

I really can't find evidence for this statement anywhere in the paper.

This paper seems to conflate a prescriptive model with a descriptive model. A prescriptive model would be more focused on the data and less on the formal mathematical model. It would also be actually useful. It looks like they came up with an interesting way to model the portfolio selection problem, but it will simply not provide a "quantitative methodology" for VC investment as they claim. It's perplexing why that sentence was allowed in this paper.

If you are a VC could you extract anything that is useful and non-trivial from this paper? I doubt it.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you look at figure 4 on page 24, it basically says that the VCs picking ability is about good as random chance. They have some really smart people working for them and its still hard to pick winners.

</comment><comment><USER14> Recapping: top drivers roughly in rank order were: Great market, previous founder, founder worked at a company that IPOed or acquired, founder came from a top school, the quality of current investors (do they have exits). Seems like the standard things most investors look for, so the question is does it come down to deal flow.

</comment><comment><USER15> I thought predicting winners in startups was searching for "Black Swan" events - the ones models often miss...

</comment><comment><USER16> One of the challenges here is that "sector" is strongly predictive, but the data analyzed are historical. It's easy to know which sector one should have invested in historically -- and hard to know which sector to invest in going forward.</comment>


Mary livecodes a game from scratch [video] - <AUTHOR> https://vimeo.com/105955605

<comment><AUTHOR> The heavily commented code: [http://annotated-code.maryrosecook.com/space- invaders/index....](http://annotated-code.maryrosecook.com/space- invaders/index.html)</comment>


The Problem With How We Treat Bipolar Disorder - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/the-problem-with-how-we-treat-bipolar-disorder.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=general&src=me <comment><USER2> They're just throwing chemical darts and trying to sort out what they're left with. They don't know if they're making people worse or better.

E.g article comment at <http://nyti.ms/12QAy1D> points out "six months of mania as the result of a [drug] reaction…followed by a misdiagnosis…" Author herself doesn't seem to notice that she has depression _before_ being treated with drugs, but it's bipolar _after_ being treated.

Not a single mention of meditation or similar therapies, which have been much- studied and successful for many people. As if they don't exist as therapies.

A friend took a drug for mental health issues for ten days, and has had nearly twenty years of side effects (so far) affecting his sleep (he twitches when melatonin is released—or taken as a supplement). It never happened before, became severe on the drug, faded slightly in the months afterwards, and has never fully receded. Has tried many things to treat. And this is a small thing!

Throwing chemicals at problems when they don't know what will be solved or caused should really only be a last resort.

<comment><USER3> It was a last resort, the author was in in-patient treatment in extreme circumstances in which she had had frequent suicide ideation. Therapies that aren't drug based, while often effective, don't work that quickly and are more of a long term thing than an immediately stabilizing treatment for someone in an extreme crisis. Drugs are your best (and only) shot in that kind of situation. There are plenty of places to get therapies like meditation and similar therapies relating to mindfullness - from psychologists who offer cognitive behavioral therapy and its offshoot mindfullness-based cognitive therapy. They're two of the very popular and widely available types of psychological therapies in the US. In this story I wonder if the author's insistance on going to her father's doctor has skewed her perception of modern psychiatric and psychological treatment -- the story took place in the 80s and if the doctor treated her father he had to have been kind if old, probably trained in the days when psychiatry research was in complete disarray and completely unsympathetic to patients' well-being and when the few popular psychological therapies that did not involve drugs or surgical treatment were things like rogerian therapy and psychoanalysis - not as effective as CBT and frankly based on little science.

I think there is also a misconception that psychiatrists and psychologists are the same thing when they have entirely different purposes and training. Psychiatrists have med school educations, thus they deal with drugs (which are often quite necessary and effective) and acute in-patient kinds of cases more often. Psychologists have training which focuses more on effective treatments which are either are not drug based or work in conjunction with pharmacological treatments. They're the ones you go to for issues with the self or if you want therapies related to mindfullness or cognitive behavioral therapy.

<comment><USER2> True that "as suicide eclipsed all other thoughts…The next day I was hospitalized" but there is no mention of _any_ therapy, intervention, nothing before that point, and they decided as a first choice to go to a pharmacologist because he had helped her father.

By last resort I mean try something else first. Later, the pharmacologist explained that she was very different than her father.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It took me a while to read all the way through the article, because I was doing things with my family. And maybe that is exactly the issue. The author of the article reaches a happy ending when she reflects on involvement with children and hoped-for grandchildren. The anecdotes she relates about her treatment, by the way, reflect the how far understanding of bipolar mood disorders and their treatment has come in the last few decades. She writes as a sixty-year-old with decades of treatment behind her. If you are the age of a typical Hacker News user, you are younger, and today in 2013 if you seek treatment your doctor or psychologist has a much better experience base and theoretical framework to work from in designing your treatment.

The author's main point about what needs more attention in treatment of bipolar mood disorder I cannot fully agree with. Unlike her, I have lived in more than one country of the world for a long span of my life, and at a slightly younger age, I have decades of my life that were spent looking back at living a very culturally and linguistically different place, where "self" plays a very different role in individual lives. Human beings get better as they become more connected to their communities, not usually as they become more self-absorbed. (I'm looking for a link just now about that--perhaps I'll add it in an edit if I find the link I'm looking for.) It's great that the article author has family and community connections. The best reason to take individually prescribed medicine is to help build up interpersonal relationships. Preoccupation with self-identity is not a cultural universal, but being with and dealing with our fellow human beings is.

<comment><USER5> I think the author is focusing on the "self" in terms on her conscious state and how she feels. Like the difference between being drunk, sober, stoned, or hyped up. Look at patients on heavy anti-psychotics and you'll know what she means. Doctors focus on stabilizing people, not making them feel normal. If you can get up and shower and go to work, they're happy. They don't care that you might feel completely drugged.

<comment><USER6> No I do not think so. What you describe are called mental states, which are transitory; the self is a relatively persistent concept, spanning one's personality, identity, and life experiences. The author is arguing that rather than just suppressing symptoms with medication, an important part of recovery should be to develop a new self-image that includes the disorder. The medication doesn't help in this regard, but apart from that there are the things one did during episodes which can be very hard to rhyme with one's previous self-image.

tokenaudult's point of other cultures not having such a focus on the notion of the self is very interesting; it seems to completely undermine the idea that the self is key to recovery. It is very typical that stories about mental health end with some suggestion that is going to solve it all, but to me it's clear we are simply stumbling through the dark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well-known hacker Zooko wrote about his family's experience with bipolar disorder: <http://zooko-on-aaronsw.blogspot.com/2013/02/part-2.html>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The self is such a critical over-looked aspect for doctors that are primed to think of everything as a physical, chemical, medicinal equation when it is often so much more than that.

</comment><comment><USER8> Fish oil is far more safer and effective...

<comment><USER9> Snake oil, you mean.

<http://www.badscience.net/category/fish-oil/></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How could a bricked IMEI enter Apple's refurbishment system? - <AUTHOR> I recently bought a refurbished iPhone 8 directly from Apple. Apparently (after working through their tech support), the phone has been bricked by the previous carrier, and cannot be activated.<p>I'm curious about theories as to how this could happen. First, how could such a phone enter Apple's system? Presumably it was stolen, or never paid off, etc. Second, surely Apple is checking the IMEI numbers as part of their refurbishing process?<p>(The tech support call was a bit frustrating, since it was hard to convince Apple that there really was something wrong with the phone. Spectrum Mobile had gotten an error they were not familiar with when they tried to activate it.) <comment><USER2> Previous device owner could have reported it stolen after they traded it in. Someone could have made a typo error during data entry.</comment>


Amazon Now Accounts For One-Third Of All U.S. E-Commerce - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2009/04/14/amazon-now-one-third-of-all-us-e-commerce/

<comment><USER2> Josh Porter (a social design expert and author of the blog Bokardo) told an interesting story about Amazon. He was doing some user testing for a competing e-commerce site, and the tester he was interviewing asked if they could go to Amazon.

"Sure. Is it to compare the prices?" he asked.

"No," replied the tester. "It's so I can check the customer reviews."

I'm impressed by the extent to which Amazon has cultivated trust. They tell you what customers like you think about virtually every product on their site; they help you find products you might like more than the one you're browsing; they give you the chance to buy a cheaper used version of the product from a third-party. And so on.

Throw in their speed, low prices, and reliability, and it's no wonder they've captured such a strong slice of the e-commerce market.

</comment><comment><USER3> makes sense, if I need something I usually just go to amazon first, since they usually have the lowest prices anyways

<comment><USER4> For me, it's also the ease and simplicity of being able to use a single payment system.

<comment><USER5> Ditto. Amazon makes it so easy to buy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> interesting that it counts the third-party partners in its metrics. wonder what it would look like if it were only amazon-handled products.

<comment><USER7> And further: if they are including third parties for Amazon -- presumably including the new-and-used sellers -- that implies they are including Ebay in the "third of all e-commerce" calculation. Is Amazon actually facilitating more commerce than Ebay at this point?

<comment><USER8> No. It was $3B versus $16B last year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> mind-boggling stuff. Bezos is a killing machine - and there was a time when people wrote amazon off in the bust of 2000 - 'selling books online ??? - wasnt getting rid of print the whole point of the net anyways'</comment>


Perfect parody of TED talks - <AUTHOR> http://digg.com/video/ted-talk-parody?utm_content=buffer5f66d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> Some actual Ted Talks appear to be parody:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8znQZ1RUckg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8znQZ1RUckg)

Sad to say, that guy was my co-founder, of a startup we ran together for much of the era from 2002 to 2008.</comment>


Ask YC: what about LBO as exit strategy - <AUTHOR>

I never hear about this way to kick-out the VCs, I always hear about IPO or selling the company. In wich case is it used ? <comment><USER2> A company needs to have reliable free cash-flow to be able to pay all the debt taken out by financial sponsors. Not sure if many current startups fit that profile</comment>


MacOS Sierra - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/macos/sierra/ <comment><USER2> I'm excited to see a working speech interface. I use the one on my phone quite a bit to send quick messages to my wife while I'm driving. The shortest command so far is [press siri button on dashboard] + "tell my wife to come down in 2 minutes". I wish I could tell Siri I trust it and not to confirm the message. [Are you ready to send this message?] "Yes" [Ok, I'll send it]. Every. time.

On the flip side, we're past the line of scrimmage where I like my OS knowing about my files and talking to a mothership about them. I know it was probably three operating systems ago that my checksums started leaking to interested parties, "hey he has a copy of Frozen, did you know that?"

In about 4 months I'll give it a try. I want to hear how the hardware reacts. I installed 10.10 the day it came out, and got bit by that flakey wifi bug for what was it, nine months before Apple fixed it? I automatically bluetooth paired with the phone when the wifi froze, did about 19 gig over LTE (which kept up!) A beautiful failure scenario.

I think I might not value my privacy enough, is my lingering thought, in reflection of this being available.

<comment><USER3> How about " _Ask_ my wife to come down in 2 minutes"? :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the first version of Mac OS X that I'm 0% excited about.

Literally none of the new features[1] are useful to me, considering:

      I don't have or want an iPhone
      I don't have or want an iPad
      I don't have or want an iWatch
      I don't have or want an iCloud account
      I don't have or want an Apple Pay account
      I don't have or want an iTunes Music account
      I don't use or need Photos.app
      I don't use or need Messages.app
      I don't like speaking to my computer
      I don't watch TV while doing something else on the computer
      I don't use the computer enough for tabs to be useful

Am I really the only one who hits all these bullet points? Am I part of a dying demographic, who doesn't use/need/want any of this fancy Star Trek futuristic life, who's okay with using a credit card and organizing photos via folders, and manually typing stuff into google, and taking notes on a physical note pad with a physical pen?

[1] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos- sierra/id1127487414?mt...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/macos- sierra/id1127487414?mt=12) (click "...More")

<comment><USER5> I apologize to you for Apple for not catering to your specific needs and wants when rolling out their newest version of OSX. I'm so sorry that you consider none of these new features exciting nor useful. Personally, I agree with you to an extent - I prefer taking notes on individual parchment paper with a Ticonderoga #2 HB pencil that I sharpen with my $400 hand crafted knife. Heck, I don't even use digital photos or credit cards. I am 100% satisfied with the polaroid camera that my father left me before he passed, and I always prefer to barter with the root vegetables that I grow in my back yard (100% organic of course) as a means of payment.

<comment><USER6> Ticonderogas make for fine pencils though.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I'm only half sarcastic. Polaroid cameras are also fun to play with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Careful if you're a user of Karabiner, it doesn't work in Sierra - there's a rewrite underway to correct.

<comment><USER8> Was sad to see that karabiner no longer works. I discovered that bettertouchtool can substitute for my purposes (adding media keys to a dasKeyboard)

<comment><USER9> AFAIK bettertouchtool is not open source, so you have to place your trust onto one individual instead of the community. Not sure I want to do that as it has access to everything I type.

<comment><USER10> It being closed source doesn't mean that they are any less trustworthy or competent. Trust me, I am totally on board with what you're saying. In this case though, I'd say there would be no need for concern. The developer behind BTT and BST has established trust with their users, great communication and good support.

Also, as for BetterTouchTool being able to replace Karabiner, I have to disagree. I have used both for as long as I can remember and consider them "must haves." But for me at least, they have always been separate in their use and function.

I made the unfortunate mistake of upgrading to Sierra before doing a more thorough check of all my application's compatibility with Sierra. I found out about Karabiner too late - total bummer. I hope an update rolls out soon. (I haven't tried the current "interim" application they created - I need the real thing)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's 2016 and we still can't disable the acceleration curve for wired / non- trackpad mice.

<comment><USER12> It's 2016 and you still can't disable the trackpad while typing.

This drove me insane after switching to an MPB.

The solution was to put the trackpad on the highest pressure setting and hope for the best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> yeah don't be an idiot and install this on your work computer and break vpn. what kind of idiot does that....

<comment><USER14> what's the specific issue?

<comment><USER15> I was the idiot who made the jump. While on VPN, no less. My work laptop has both GlobalProtect and Cisco installed as VPN clients. The GlobalProtect client broke but the Cisco client works fine - both require two factor authentication.

Everything seems to work so the unnecessary risk I took didn't cause too much harm.

<comment><USER14> Ah ok so 3rd party software not yet ready for new kernel. I thought apple dropped support for pptp or something of the like, esp with the IPSec comment in the thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Finder is worse than 10.11 and it crashes on multiple moves. At this point I'm just not sure what the heck is the problem. Now it stops being able to do command-drags (moves) after a while.

<comment><USER17> The finder never worked all that well. I stopped using it in 10.7 and switched to path finder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The new smart card support is pretty cool: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12543905](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12543905)

<comment><USER19> Mac OS X has had smartcard support for a long time. They started removing it a few "updates" ago, but the support was still there. CACKey specifically added missing bits as Apple removed them. This latest release probably features their replacement architecture.

I haven't seen what is needed to make CACKey work on the latest release of the Apple's OS since I don't use it, someone else works on packaging that up.

<comment><USER18> Yep I realize it's been there, but (as you mentioned) keeping it updated has been ignored by Apple long time and turned into a community effort. Sierra brought a significant overhaul.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Doesn't seem to be much of interest there if you're a Mac user without an interest in iOS devices. Of the WSJ's "Top 5" features [1]:

\- Universal Clipboard: Neat, but iOS only. Doesn't appear there's an open API for it that would make it useful elsewhere, which is too bad, because it could be rather neat.

\- iCloud Drive: Cloud sync of your document folders. Free space (5GB) is surprisingly limited and the upgrade pricing isn't any better than Dropbox, so not a lot of motivation to switch from Dropbox/Onedrive/Google Drive -- except for the iOS integration. It'll be interesting to see if they end up making any of the filesystem or sync logic that they're using public, so that Dropbox et al could use them (instead of Dropbox's bolt-on hack), but I'm not holding my breath.

\- Optimized Storage: Basically a 'feature' that automatically deletes stuff off of local storage when your disk gets full, leaving it on iCloud Drive. This basically makes my skin crawl and I can't imagine ever using it; it seems like a conceptually bad idea. Anyone want to place a bet on how long before the first article in a major news outlet about some poor soul losing everything they've ever created since the age of 5 due to this thing uploading it to the cloud, and then deleting their iCloud Drive account? I'm giving it six months on the outside.

\- Apple Pay: Conceptually interesting, and I'm certainly interested in anything that shakes up electronic payments, but there's no way to use it from the desktop (AFAICT) without an iOS device, because that's how you authorize payments. Unfortunate.

\- Apple Watch Unlock: Obviously only of interest if you have an Apple Watch. Again, a quick search doesn't seem to reveal any sort of API for other hardware, so it's a dead end unless you're interested in the Apple Watch.

Looking through more feature lists, the only thing I can come up with that seems remotely interesting is the picture-in-picture video, although I don't know why it's better than QuickTime Player's relatively-ancient "stay on top" mode (unless they removed that when I haven't been looking). But hey, I can at least see that getting some use on my workstation.

All in all, it seems like a representative sampling of what Apple has become: a bunch of neat ideas (well, except for the 'Optimized Storage' thing), but they've basically crippled them for business reasons in order to prop up their walled garden hardware ecosystem. It's exactly the sort of behavior people used to lament Microsoft for: coming up with great ideas, but then kneecapping them on the way out the door to make sure nothing threatened the golden goose.

[1]: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-macos-sierra-five-top- fea...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/apples-macos-sierra-five-top- features-1474391116) or if that's paywalled, Google for "Apple's MacOS Sierra: Five Top Features"

<comment><USER17> The thing that bothers me most is Apple hasn't realized yet that the laptop market has changed. With tablets becoming more powerful, there are fewer and fewer things casual users need a laptop for. That leaves power users as the majority of laptop owners, which is a segment of the market Apple has a history of antagonizing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I see they changed very little, so I'm hopeful this is one of those versions (like Lion if I remember correctly, might be other) where basically Apple just stopped one year, add very few features, and improved the system stability and performance.

I didn't see (perhaps I've missed it) them saying this was the case, so, any insights on that?

</comment><comment><USER22> Any news about APFS?</comment>


What's 250M Light-Years Big, Almost Empty, and Full of Answers? - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/whats-250-million-light_years-big-almost-empty-and-full-of-answers

<comment><USER2> For those too lazy to read the article: Boötes void.

Love those graphics of the filaments and voids of the universe. Like bread or cake as it bakes and clumps around bubbles.

These scales are mind-blowing: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament)

</comment><comment><USER3> Except for the full of answers part, the arrogance of the US Federal Government! Correction: They are full of answers, just not good answers!

<comment><USER3> The exclamation point means that it was a joke, guys. 250 MLY of arrogance is not a joke?

<comment><USER4> I think you're confusing us with Reddit

<comment><USER3> I know next to nothing about Reddit. I do know a joke.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PHP, Once the Web's Favorite Programming Language, Is on the Wane - <AUTHOR> http://readwrite.com/2014/08/11/why-learn-php <comment><USER2> Uh, but isn't that because it turns sane people into crazy people?</comment>


Information Exposure Vulnerability with Django and Memcached - <AUTHOR> https://danpalmer.me/2020-06-07-django-memcache-vulnerability/ <comment><AUTHOR> The repo demonstrating this is now open source: [https://github.com/danpalmer/django- cve-2020-13254](https://github.com/danpalmer/django-cve-2020-13254)

</comment><comment><USER2> I would like to note that libmemcached does expose key validation as a behavior. It's off by default though, which I think it probably should not be. However I'm not sure about the performance impact in typical workloads — some people make quite large gets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, I hadn't seen that, updated. I don't think `pylibmc` exposes it, or again not by default.

I actually don't think that it's wrong for a driver library to have these sorts of features disabled by default, because the target audience is typically a slightly higher level of abstraction rather than the end- developer. I think the aim should be to mimic the API of the service as closely as possible with the same defaults where possible. It's then the responsibility of the abstraction layer closer to the application to decide what's more appropriate on that end, and for that to be resolved between the two.

<comment><USER2> I think Django should set the behavior by default. It is exposed by pylibmc. I know because I wrote it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep I agree. That's pretty much what the vulnerability was about! (Although Django decided to implement the check itself as it can be therefore be implemented in the same way for all Memcached backends)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great work tracking this down and making it so clear with the example repo. Gave me the chance to audit my projects that are lagging behind the Django patch.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why not force memcached clients to use the binary protocol instead of the ASCII protocol?

The length check would still be necessary, but spaces (and other arbitrary bytes) would no longer break things.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not really possible in Django to force this as each library will implement that in a different way (or may not even support the binary protocol). Django adding validation is easy, unlikely to cause issues, and makes all usage safe unless the user explicitly overrides the behaviour.

Plus, Django actually implements these checks for non-Memcached backends, raising warnings if keys aren't Memcached compatible. This is done because very often in local development users might run the "local memory" cache backend, which is just a Python dict. In this case they probably want to know that what they're doing won't work when it gets to Memcached in production.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any suitable method to manage large music collections in iDevices? - <AUTHOR>

Last week was the grand ol' time to play upgrade cycle for the iDevice.  It coincided with my usual look at songs I have on my phone (I usually try and change up on device tunes about every 3-4 months).  Every time I need to address this it is a pain in the backside.
My circumstances:
- large media collection
- primarily iOS devices
- i prefer to manually manage songs
When using iTunes, bulk select and drag by artist starts a slow process of "processing, syncing, copying".  If you add anymore during said process, it seems to sometimes lose it's brain.  In short, iTunes (for large collections and my use case) is not cutting it.
Are there alternatives out there?  Does anyone know if the process for going from directory of mp3 files -> plays well on an iOS device is documented or at least reverse engineered?  (My assumption is no).
I know for large libraries and streaming from Linux/etc to Apple devices there are options, but for me the management of putting things on to iDevices is the bigger issue.
 To address the "just stream music" option, I travel internationally fairly regularly and don't feel like paying for spottily/rdio/nokia music for things I already have. <comment><USER2> Why not just move them in chunks and let it do it's thing overnight? Once it's in iTunes, use iTunes Match to basically transfer it all "to the cloud". Once it's there, activate Match on your iOS device and you should have all your music available and ready to download on demand.</comment>


Ask HN:At ~48 posts per day, is Techcrunch overdoing it? - <AUTHOR>

Is AOL putting quantity over quality. Frankly I am unable to bear with the dismal signal to noise ratio nowadays on Techcrunch.<p>Google reader trends show i have read only 6% of the posts. <comment><USER2> I think you are probably right however you've given only two variables - # of posts over time - and I think you need to add a third: number of writers. For example, if it's "48 posts per week by one writer", then of course you are correct. If, though, it's "48 posts per week by, on average, 42 different writers" then I don't think so.

</comment><comment><USER3> quality > quantity - absolutely.</comment>


JQuery 2.0 beta - <AUTHOR> http://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.0.0b2.js

<comment> iso8859-1 What's the point of linking directly to the code?</comment>


Ask HN: What are people using for remote screen control these days? - <AUTHOR> Looking for something simple, preferably without registration where I can control a family member's screen.<p>What are HNs using these days? <comment><AUTHOR> Well, I should have searched HN Algolia first I guess, because I found [https://screen.so](https://screen.so) and that looks pretty sweet.. will give that a go..

</comment><comment><USER2> google meeting

<comment><AUTHOR> Can't do screen control with that can you?</comment></comment>


Moving to near Mountain View and looking for a roommate / place to live - <AUTHOR>

My girlfriend and co-founder (ainsleyb on HN) and I are looking for a roommate or room to rent. We're currently working on a startup called Tinfoil Security, and are moving out to the SF bay area in the next month. We both have a substantial savings we've attained from working for the past few years and would certainly be able to pay rent.
Both Ainsley and I went to MIT; she graduated in 2010 with two degrees in "Brain and Cognitive Science" and "Writing". I graduated in 2009 with a bachelor's in "Computer Science and Engineering." We're very laid back people, not prone to drama (and really try to avoid it as much as possible). Neither of us does any drugs, we'll occasionally drink (not to excess, just socially), and neither of us smoke. Well, I will have a cigar once every six months or so, but that's certainly something I can curb. :) Also, both she and I are 23 years old. We're both very clean people, and enjoy going out with friends, so you won't find us to be hermits. I basically can't survive without some sort of social interaction. Plus, we love animals.
We both want to make things people care about.
If we sound semi-interesting, we'd love to hear back. :) I hope the fact that we are two people doesn't make you consider us less; we really don't mind living in a single room together. Also, let me know if you'd want to chat on Skype or something to get a better feel for us; we'd be open to that.
Feel free to email me at the address listed in my profile. :) <comment><AUTHOR> Feel free to ask any questions you want and we'll answer. :)

Also, link to Tinfoil Security: <http://www.tinfoilsecurity.com></comment>


Putting my VB6 Windows Apps in the Windows 10 Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/PuttingMyVB6WindowsAppsInTheWindows10StoreProjectCentennial.aspx <comment><USER2> I set out to try the Desktop App Converter with some of my own apps the other day, on a laptop that had just been updated with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Trouble was, the laptop had Windows 10 Home Edition on it and the Desktop App Converter won't run on that. Or so I deduced after chasing an obscure error message awhile.

This seems to be because the converter needs virtualisation support, which isn't included in the Home edition. But it wasn't clear to me whether a £100 upgrade to Win10 Pro would be enough to permit me to run it, or whether I'd need to have Win10 Enterprise which doesn't seem (?) to be a thing a person can just go out and buy.

(Something very 90s about all this worrying about the base OS licence level stuff.)

<comment><USER3> I agree that this is completely nuts.

FWIW i found a much cheaper pro license (around €40, iirc) by using some product comparison sites. Basically, even though it's 2016 you can actually buy software from webshops the way you'd order hardware or shoes, and many of these shops also sell Windows 10 Pro licenses. Somehow, they're often much cheaper than what MS sells in their own store. Completely nuts if you ask me, but ok. All you get after you pay is a text file with a license code, but that's also all you need.

I still think it's insane that MS, who so badly want developers to come back to their platform, force you to be on Pro for a lot of useful stuff (including running the WinPhone emulator (!)). This disqualifies nearly all nice laptops you can buy at a good price point, unless you subsequently go through the trouble of manually finding, buying, and entering a Pro license like I did.

If anyone from MSFT is reading this: fix this! I can't walk into a store, buy some nice cheap Asus convertible, and just start coding Windows Mobile apps, and that's stupid. Your OS is getting better again, WSL is promising, we all love how badass you've been with cross platform .NET and VS Code and getting Node.JS to work great on Windows, but you're really scaring people away here.

<comment><USER4> "Your OS is getting better again"

Literally the first time I've heard someone say that about the recent state of Windows outside of Microsoft PR.

<comment><USER3> I assume you're surrounded by people who don't use Windows? Not meant as a snark - most people I know use Windows and they all think 10 is the best one yet, except a few who're (rightfully) angry about the telemetry stuff.

Personally, for me it's just Windows 7 with better looks and great touch screen support. I know no better OS with decent touch screen support. I really like using the touch screen. You Macbook people don't know what you're missing (but I guess that OLED touch-bar thing is going to get you halfway there, pretty cool).

My laptop is basically an iPad Pro but with a much more powerful OS (for stuff like development, especially).

<comment><USER4> Maybe general consumer opinion is that it doesn't suck as much as Windows 8. I was only considering what I've heard for people in IT. I make a living working on the MS stack and I agree it's a pleasant platform for development, but only for the MS stack. It's inferior for development of just about everything else. I now run Windows in a VM, I don't want it anywhere near my personal things. It's not specifically the telemetry that's so appalling, I expect typical software companies to include it, and I can even forgive it being on by default. It's the fact that users are _not allowed_ to, along with a huge selection of other "features", disable or remove it. Windows is becoming more like iOS, not less, it will eventually leave you just as powerless if it hasn't already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Some nits:

      * Signing packages is not necessary for normal Store distribution. Skip this step.
      * Devs must work with Microsoft to get their Centennial apps in the Store right now, it's not a free for all
      * There's a swath of users that can't use Centennial apps right now due to a bug that will bugcheck the box.

General Centennial app take-aways:

      * Package Win32 apps and throw them in the Store
      * You get package update, flighting, analytics and feedback hub integration for free
      * Clean install/uninstall due to virtualized file-system/registry writes

<comment><USER6> Good news about signing. I suppose the store itself somehow signs things? Code signing certificates are prohibitively expensive for small developers at around $500.

<comment><USER5> You upload an .appx with an associated unique identity (allocated via the Windows Dev Center) and Microsoft manages the signing and such on their end.

<comment><USER7> And you give 30% cut from revenue. Nice played.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> All this is fascinating though. We're talking 18+ years of binary compatibility.

Microsoft sure knows how to keep the cash flowing.

<comment><USER9> Uuuuhhhh. There are plenty of games that came out even 10 years ago that ostensibly have the "Designed for Windows XP" (even Vista) badges but that which refuse to run on Windows 10. Often it's to do with how they do graphics, which is a shame, because sandboxing like this is a great way to allow graphics to be shimmed.

<comment><USER10> Games have always suffered the most from back-compat, usually because they were the ones most prone to using hacks to speed things up. Remember how many things stopped working during the XP migration, because they expected the OS to get out of their way, like 9x did?

FWIW, there are some counterexamples. There is a turn-based strategy game (think Master of Magic meets H&MM) called Age of Wonders, that originally shipped in 1999, targeting Win95/98 and WinNT 4.0 - a rare case, that, most games from that era didn't even bother with NT. I still play it regularly, and the amazing part is how it not just works on Win10 machines today, but works amazingly well. For example, it can handle pretty much any random resolution (including tablets in portrait mode and other weird corner cases), and it actually scales its UI up and down accordingly.

The most interesting part is that it does do things that were normal back then but which are no-no now, like putting savegames directly into its install folder, or saving settings under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. But because they did them in a straighforward, non-hackish way, things like Vista's and later registry and FS redirection all work great, and the game doesn't even notice it at all.

I bet it could be easily packaged into the Store, if they wanted to.

<comment><USER11> > targeting Win95/98 and WinNT 4.0 - a rare case, that, most games from that > era didn't even bother with NT. I still play it regularly, and the amazing > part is how it not just works on Win10 machines today, but works amazingly > well

These two things are not unrelated. Windows from 2k onwards has been based on the NT line (I remember Windows 7 is internally NT 6.1, I imagine 10 is similar).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> .. and it requires a capability not currently documented by microsoft(!) [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/apps/br2114...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/apps/br211423.aspx) called "runFullTrust"; which is displayed with an explanation that will be as clear as mud for a user: "Capabilities: • runs full trust mode". Elsewhere in the document, it was stated that only registry and one folder are redirected. So do these apps do away with the beneficial parts of sandboxing that the windows store was supposed to be good for?

<comment><USER5> Yes, hence requiring "full trust".

Right now, apps are manually reviewed by Microsoft to mitigate abuse. How this works in the open-for-all configuration has yet to be seen.

You can see some of the nuances of full trust apps via [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/uwp/porting/desktop...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/uwp/porting/desktop-to-uwp-root) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if someone will publish a FoxPro app.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there a way to confirm app publishers are who they say they are?

Once it's available for everybody, what's stopping people from uploading things they don't own?

<comment><USER5> Right now, it requires manual approval and paperwork/signatures. It's not clear if this will change, as solving the problem you brought up doesn't seem possible.

<comment><USER15> It can be some system bound to domain names of software developers/vendors (like Let's Encrypt, but for code signing instead of TLS).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 2-m3m3n70 I can't find any documentation on it - does anyone know how auto-updates are handled? Do you just release a new version and hope for the best or is there some sort of mechanism to force people to update?

<comment><USER5> Updates are submitted to the Windows Store, just as you would with any other Store app. After approval, they can be configured to trickle out and/or force install (when available). More information can be found at [https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/uwp/publish/upload-app- pa...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/windows/uwp/publish/upload-app-packages)

You can also create a "flight group" consisting of your test team and only push out more broadly when your internal QA passes. Check out [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/uwp/publish/package...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/windows/uwp/publish/package-flights) for details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I love that VB6 is still alive!

</comment><comment><USER7> The amount of Redmond's astroturfing is ridiculous. One cannot even install one's appx on one's own machine unless one signs it with a real certificate. Even Sinclair ZX80 could do that. Appx cannot.

<comment><USER17> You have to toggle your machine to developer mode first, but you absolutely can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In related news the very first thing I do when installing W10 for someone is [https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat- Windows-10](https://github.com/W4RH4WK/Debloat-Windows-10) which among other things uninstalls Windows Store.

Windows Apps are a joke. Have you seen the "new improved" windows explorer app that just landed in insider builds? Its a frickin phone app Microsoft expects you to use on the desktop.</comment>


Finnish bank opens extensive Public APIs - <AUTHOR> https://metropolitan.fi/entry/finnish-financial-group-opens-extensive-public-apis <comment><USER2> This is a PR piece.

A European law called PSD2 (Payment Services Directive v2) enters into effect tomorrow (Jan 13th) that forces EU banks to provide APIs to third parties.

> Under PSD2, banks in Europe will need to make customer data available in a > secure manner, and eventually give third parties access to their customers' > accounts [1].

[1] [https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/psd2-europe- banki...](https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/psd2-europe-banking-apis)</comment>


Ask HN: Has any African startup ever been accepted to Y Combinator? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> We've had African founders go through YC, as well as startups doing business in Africa. One example is Saida from the lats batch: [http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/31/saida- tktk/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/31/saida-tktk/).</comment>


URL Meter: an experimental audio level meter using the URL bar - <AUTHOR> http://cedrata.com/url-meter/

<comment><USER2> I hovered over the pause bar, and received a javascript alert that said "error". Chrome.

<http://i.imgur.com/fK1Fl.png>

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a soundmanager error, do you have flash (>= 9) installed?

<comment><USER2> I don't actually know - I'm running Chrome, apparently it updates Flash on its own. I don't even know how to find out what version I'm running.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Back.. back.. back.. back..</comment>


Cox assblasts for Gigablast - <AUTHOR> https://reelsense.tv/frontier/224 <comment><AUTHOR> 1Gbps internet at $10 per 50GB after 1TB... Better hope your cloud backup is less than 1TB.</comment>