Who's using Google App Engine? - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a scalable web hosting provider which is free or cheap at entry level, and which isn't a VPS (I don't want to bother with server maintenance). Google App Engine is the only one that comes to mind.<p>What big sites use Google App Engine? Have you tried it? Is it flexible enough to run big, serious projects on? <comment><USER3> I use app engine for several projects, a couple of which have decent load. My biggest one is networkedblogs.com, which I started on php/mysql and recently migrated big parts of it's back-end to the app engine. My experience with it has been good, and I always build new projects on it, unless there is a good reason that prevents it. It has it's own pros and cons, but overall it's a good choice:

\- It's easy to start with and fun to use. You shouldn't need more than one day to learn it.

\- If you like to focus on coding and not worry about managing the server then you'll love it. But if you're a control freak and like to have access to low- level settings then you'll not.

\- If you have prior experience with relational databases such as mysql, then you'll need an adjusting period to forget much of what you learned about databases and start thinking in new and different ways. Some things that are really easy in mysql, such as getting the number of records in a table or joining tables, become hard on app engine and require writing code.

\- When it goes down, you'll feel helpless that you can't do anything to bring your site back up, but you'll also feel lucky that a Google employee is carrying that beeper and have to wake up and fix it.

\- It scales, but it's not super fast. Due to its distributed nature, individual requests rarely finish in less than 50ms and usually take 100 to 150ms (that' my experience, yours will likely differ). But it can run a huge amount of requests at the same time.

\- It solves the scaling problem, but it's not magic. You still need to optimize the heavily used parts of your code for scaling. But at least you do it with code, rather than having to fiddle with server and cache settings.

\- It's a paradigm shift that will eventually eliminate most of database and system admin jobs if it catches it (I think it will).

\- It's very different from Amazon's EC2. Amazon gives you servers that you have to manage, Google manages everything for you. With ec2 you pay per server hour, with App Engine you pay for resources you use: CPU Cycles, storage, bandwidth, ...etc.

\- It's free to start with, but if you have heavy load it's a bit more expensive than hosting dedicated servers. I think it's worth it, though, because you'll be saving a lot of your own time.

\- It's good for the majority of projects, but if your project has special not-too-common requirements, then it might not. Check first.

\- It only supports python and Java right now.

If you're in Silicon Valley and if you need more in-depth information, you can find me at the next App Engine meetup at Google on the 6th.

<comment><USER4> _You shouldn't need more than one day to learn it._

Depends how well you want to learn it of course.

<comment><USER5> This reminds me of <http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been using GAE+GWT for about 6 months now, mostly for small, "do it in a weekend" type projects. I've also used it to host content for my iPhone apps, so that I could update the content (mostly ebooks delivered as PDFs) without going through the awful App Store update process.

It's been great for me. I love how quickly I can bootstrap new ideas, put up a prototype, and then just hand out the URL for to people to try.

A couple of recent apps:

<http://create-a-password.appspot.com> <http://slimpoints.appspot.com> <http://mealminder.appspot.com>

That last one was mostly a proof-of-concept in using Google's account and payment infrastructure. Really handy if you decide that you'll want your customers to pay you some day.

I guess the biggest hurdle is getting used to the Datastore, which is not really intuitive if all you're used to is SQL. Overall, a very positive experience for me.

<comment><USER7> Meal Minder is cool, but you might want to work on the automatic-filling-in bit. It read my directions as an ingredients list... AND as directions. I listed my ingredients with bullet points (*) which is a pretty common format, and they weren't recognized at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We're using app engine for www.jukaroo.com. We've been using it for a year now and after a lot of invested time are migrating away. The number one reason to use it is the one click deploys but we've found that time saved there is lost working around app engine's quirks. The service is buggy (set a page to refresh every ten seconds or so and watch how many random 500's it will throw - there's a monkey patch floating around for the random datastore timeouts that are partly to blame). It's also slow compared to other setups I've used (currently running vanilla django at webfaction). The limitations are many and absolute (dig around but off the top of my head no threading, no long running threads, no push, no naked domains, no python c libs, no ssh no advanced image processing, no support, no support and no support).

Core apis I've had to patch: imaging (black lines on edges of pics), datastore (random timeout errors), inbound mail (improper body and attachment handling) and probably others that I've forgotten about.

There is also no portability at this point. I've seen one project that will run an app engine app on ec2 but I haven't used it.

I think it's a cool project but if you want the unhindered ability to build really good products I can't recommend it. Also don't mistake app engine for a hosting company. The experience for us has been 'you are lucky to be using our nifty cloud' and not 'thanks for your business, we're here to help'.

</comment><comment><USER9> I talked with one of the guys that works for Google App Engine, and he confirmed that BuddyPoke is one of the biggest (if not THE biggest) apps that run on it. That app serves millions of DAUs on various social networks and runs just fine.

I've set up things on app engine and amazon as well. I found GAE just to be much, much easier and saved me a lot of time and money (yes I know EC2 is cheap but it's not cool to see your bill growing when you're just testing things).

I actually took the time to switch to EC2/S3 for a couple days because I was worried that GAE was not really serious about making it a productive place to run serious applications. Portability was a big factor too. But after a while I figured that all this worry was nonsensical. If I ever have to move things over, it must be a good sign and either someone will have built a tool for it or I just spend a week building a tool for it.

Also, re: SSL. You can actually do it right now on GAE but it involves a few tricky workarounds. That said, the GAE team just pushed a more straightforward feature for this to the top of the roadmap. Beforehand they had said they weren't going to work on it anytime soon, but presumably after so many people complained they decided to go ahead with it -- another good sign that at least they're responsive to developers' needs.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been using it for about a year for <http://www.wolfire.com> and several hobby projects and am a big fan. If you have any specific questions, I am familiar with most aspects of it. It certainly has a lot of limitations, but if your app happens to coincide with what App Engine currently offers, it is a pretty sweet deal.

<comment><AUTHOR> About where do you usually hit the limit for free usage? Are we talking hundreds of daily visitors? Thousands? Tens of thousands? I know this varies heavily depending on your code, but does anyone have a good rule of thumb?

<comment><USER10> We rarely go over the free limit -- I think we've stayed under $10-20 for the entire year, while serving up several million pages. Most of this is due to bandwidth overages from our comic: <http://www.wolfire.com/comic>

The times we are charged tend to be for burst traffic when something gets picked up on Digg or Reddit. Recently, one of our blog posts was featured on Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc. at the same time and Google dutifully served up a couple hundred thousand visits over the course of a few days. They charged us about a nickel! Granted everything is nicely cached so we were not doing much heavy processing.

It definitely depends on your web app. If you can cache it, App Engine is essentially free. If you are doing something CPU intensive for every visitor, it's going to be expensive.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! One more question: Had any problems with using third-party Python libraries? I mean like PIL, cjson or stuff like that? Heard something about C-based libraries not working?

<comment><USER11> No, you can't install your own C libraries. There's an imaging library built in:

[http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/images/usingima...](http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/images/usingimages.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've found it just fine for whatever clients want to do....EXCEPT....when they need to contact a server over a non-http port. It just can't do that. So for my client who wanted to do apple push notifications for his iPhone app, we needed to use both app-engine and dumb endpoint nodes on rackspace 11 buck a month linux servers.

Amazon Ec2/S3 works well as well and has the highest security bar of all the cloud offerings.

Rackspace is pretty good, but everyone seems very dis-satisfied with the S3 competitor, cloudfiles, so just use them for servers. Don't put anything super valuable there though, they know your root passwords (as does google, if you think about it, on GAE).

The users are on python. Apologies for the poor formatting/spelling, having to rush out the door.

<comment><USER10> That is no longer a limitation as of the 1.3.2 release. I quote:

 _URLFetch API - We've expanded the number of ports you can access with the URLFetch API. You can now access ports 80-90, 440-450, and 1024-65535._

<comment><USER12> Well that will be nice that I can then talk to 2195

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm using it for small, very low-traffic projects, so I'd also be interested in hearing about larger sites using GAE. Also curious whether they're using Python, Java or something running on the JVM like Clojure.

</comment><comment><USER14> I have used google app engine for several projects. Most recently for <http://www.smstweet.in> This basically helps Indian mobile phone users to update their twitter status by sending a simple SMS at negligible price.

Overall I feel GAE is very good to quickly validate your core ideas without having to worry about scalability at all. In SmsTweet I created the app in couple of days and as traffic grew, started optimizing little by little by using Tasks and Memcache. Yes there are a tonne of restrictions if you chose GAE, but there are decent workarounds for every one of them. You also have to learn stuff specific to GAE (datastore, tasks for example), but I guess they are trivial to pick up. And finally if your application does pick up traffic you can easily convert it to paid version and pay only for the extra traffic that you get. So a win win situation for you.

</comment><comment><USER15> <http://www.subituqueja.com> (in spanish) <http://pythonregex.appspot.com>

Both running Python + Django 1.1.1 (with Google App Engine Django Helper, <http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-django/>)

I don't know if they are "big", but you can see app engine in action there.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you're disciplined about how you design your app it's an amazing platform.

I recommend doing a fairly trivial project in your spare time to get the hang of it. Try out the following features before deciding:

\- large data set related stuff like cursors, paging lots of records \- transactions \- GQL (look at the various limitations of it)

GAE gives you a set of solid conventions for writing a highly scalable app that you'd eventually have to deal with if you used a more traditional approach. Some can be a bit annoying at first but it's fairly obvious why each choice was made.

You might also check out jinja2, django, etc. But personally I love the simple webapp framework. It's clean, obvious, stays out of the way, and it's very fast.

<comment><USER17> I used webapp pretty faithfully, myself, until I came across bottle.py .. I haven't looked back, since.

<comment><USER18> I saw a note in the bottle docs that it's easy to set up with GAE but no further info. Any tutorials out there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > I'm looking for a scalable web hosting provider which is free or cheap at > entry level, and which isn't a VPS

Heroku! Basically the Ruby equivalent of GAE—you get a Postgres database instead of Bigtable, though (whether that's a good or bad thing is up to you.)

<comment><USER20> I am loving Heroku for the exact reason described in this post: no sysadmining. At first I thought that wasn't possible and expected all kinds of issues with gems etc, but so far everything I've tried really does Just Work™.

This may warrant a separate question, but I've seen various posts here and there about running Ruby/Rails on GAE using JRuby. Does anyone have any experience as to just how realistic that is as a deployment option? I can imagine it being full of headaches, but I would love to hear from someone who has either tried it or is actually running it on a production app.

<comment><USER11> I've not run it myself, but a neighboring team tried it and switched to Java due to latency issues. Remember that anything you do at startup will affect latency for some requests when App Engine has to spin up a new JVM. It's to your advantage to make startup times as fast as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> While we're on the subject, does anyone here have experience using Clojure with GAE? I'm considering that configuration for a useful-but-not-mission- critical application, and wondering if Clojure on GAE is robust enough for that.

<comment><USER22> I've been using Clojure w/ GAE to build an enterprise knowledge-base webservice for about 3 months now. It's my first serious project with Clojure on the GAE although I've been playing around with it since last summer.

(1) On GAE you don't get to use some of the good parts of Clojure because you can't spawn any threads. So the rationale for Clojure has to be something else than agents and the Clojure concurrency model. I'd say use Clojure if you want functional programming and all of the Lispy goodness: code as data, macros...

For me Lispyness is a huge + so it was a no brainer.

(2) One of the things I really like about traditional Clojure web-development (using Ring or Compojure) is that if you set things up properly you can experiment with and patch a live system using the REPL. I haven't been able to set that up just yet on the GAE.

On your development server using the GAE jars, however, you can do it (see [http://www.hackers-with-attitude.com/2009/08/intertactive- pr...](http://www.hackers-with-attitude.com/2009/08/intertactive-programming- with-clojure.html) for some guidance). There is nothing like being a C-c C-c away from updating your development server app :)

I can't emphasize enough taking the time to get Slime, your GAE development server, lein, and Clojure well-integrated. Your development cycle will make good ol' Java GAE development using the Eclipse plug-in (which I used to think was pretty sweet) feel really really clunky.

(See also [http://elhumidor.blogspot.com/2009/04/clojure-on-google- appe...](http://elhumidor.blogspot.com/2009/04/clojure-on-google- appengine.html) for some pointers on setting up Clojure on GAE)

(3) GAE's datastore works extremely well with Clojure because it's schema- less. You can store arbitrary hashmaps and structmaps in GAE with zero effort -- it's a match made in heaven. There are a couple of branches of appengine- clj (<http://github.com/duelinmarkers/appengine-clj> is the original, <http://github.com/r0man/appengine-clj> is a pretty good branch) that you can look at to get a feel what I mean.

(4) With GAE's transaction support and automatic index generation (it's good enough most of the time), you can dynamically create types (kinds), put them in the datastore, and query on them without having to do any of the traditional NoSQL stuff (thinking queries first, denormalizing ahead of time, etc.). It's very sweet. I've done some Clojure+Cassandra and Clojure+GAE is a lot more painless (as long as you can live with the other limitations of the GAE) -- although things are getting much easier in Cassandra world with Hector + automatic index generators.

(5) In terms of performance and robustness, nothing about Clojure's held me up. But since I haven't launched yet, that doesn't mean anything.

I don't know of any "high-traffic" Clojure+GAE apps out there -- if there are any, I'd love to get some numbers on costs (CPU, especially) to see if there is a significant difference with similar java projects.

(Actually, the guys behind <https://the-deadline.appspot.com>, see [http://www.slideshare.net/smartrevolution/how-a-clojure- pet-...](http://www.slideshare.net/smartrevolution/how-a-clojure-pet-project- turned-into-a-fullblown-cloudcomputing-webapp), just launched three days ago -- you may want to shoot them an email, they seem nice enough)

My guess is that this is a non-issue. Clojure holds up really well against Java and JVM languages like Scala in terms of performance (especially if you give type-hints), and I'd expect the same thing to be true on GAE.

(6) General Clojure limitation with web development: Clojure web frameworks are light. You don't get to start with anything as nice as Scala's Lift. You'll have to work and build your own tools -- the good thing is that Clojure is a blast and macros will, in the longer term, allow you to do much cooler stuff.

Compojure is a great light framework to start with. Also look at Enlive for templating.

On the flip-side Clojure immutable nature works very naturally with request / response.

(7) For the OP: before you get on GAE, spend some time reading about its limitations:

\- exploding indexes (makes implementing text search very tough -- there is some irony in there I think)

\- no threads (it kills me, I want to use pmap)

\- not real message queues. GAE is a pull/request-based system, not a push system. It is, however, getting much better (tasks, comet on the coming features list). Still, if you are building a real-time system that needs constant background processing, I'd think twice right now.

\- if GAE goes down, you're down until they fix things, and will be totally helpless.

\- some of the GAE goodness/crack means you're locked in (e.g., index building -- to move away you'll have to build equivalent facilities for whatever DB you move to). Although you can protect yourself by being smart in how you abstract away the GAE.

(8) Can't think of anything else.

If there is interest, I have been thinking about writing some blog posts about my experience setting up a Clojure+GAE development environment, working with the data store, working the the GAE API, etc. Let me know here and I'll get a first post out of the way by week's end.

<comment><USER23> The one problem with using Clojure on App Engine is that the time for a "loading request" is at least 5 seconds. It makes your app look bad for the random user stuck on the loading request.

<comment><USER22> I'll interpret that as a dig against the App Engine and not Clojure... even though it's clearly aimed at either Clojure alone or the combination with GAE.

Anyway, are you being serious (i.e., in your experience is clj+gae noticeably slower than java+gae or python+gae?) or just funny? Since I've never done any serious profiling of Clojure on GAE, I'll bite and do some brief performance tests and report back.

<comment><USER23> I am serious when I say that the GAE loading request time for a Clojure app is noticeably longer than the time for Java or Python. I searched for some benchmarks and found this: <http://github.com/garyburd/app-eng-cold-start- test> See [http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/12/request- performa...](http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/12/request-performance- in-java.html) for more info on loading request perf.

<comment><USER22> Both of those are about "loading requests" which happen pretty rarely in the larger scheme of things (on upload, new server for app, too much traffic so need to scale jvm). On my current project, it's 3.5-4 seconds. Definitely not ideal, but it's not that common an event.

I'd like to run some benchmarks for normal requests, where I doubt there'll be any real difference.

Thanks for the search.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> <http://therealurl.net> runs on on GAE and handled >1m reqs/day a few times with no problem. Billing is turned on, but limited to $1/day - Google only charge for the resources you use and you can assign X cents for bandwidth, Y for CPU etc.

I posted a screenshot of GAE quota usage on 430k reqs/day, might interest you: [http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/google-app- engine-q...](http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/google-app-engine- quotas-on-43k-requestsday/)

</comment><comment><USER25> GAE is ideal for nano web apps. I wrote an HTML5 Canvas Plasma Benchmark using GAE/P:

<http://speed.okaq.com/>

It clocks in under 10kB compressed, is very fast, very accurate and I use it to test devices all the time.

Under current quotas, I'm able to serve ~200k users per day at no cost and am actively developing 2 more nano web tools.

The development environment is certainly restrictive, but the risk for web app prototyping is absolutely minimal.

</comment><comment><USER26> LittleShoot is all built on Google App Engine with App Engine Patch using Django:

<http://www.littleshoot.org>

I'll soon update that to use "Django non rel" though -- Django running on no- relational data models like Big Table:

[http://bitbucket.org/wkornewald/django-nonrel- multidb/wiki/H...](http://bitbucket.org/wkornewald/django-nonrel- multidb/wiki/Home)

</comment><comment><USER27> i've used appengine from time to time @ pitchfork, and it's been great. with the recently relaxed restrictions on uploads, result sets length, and the task queue, _and_ ability to read and process larger uploads, _and_ xmpp and incoming mail handling, etc, i'd say it's in good shape for bigger, more "serious" projects. absolutely capable for smaller projects, too.

</comment><comment><USER28> _Have you tried it? Is it flexible enough to run big, serious projects on?_

I believe it is and am betting with my startup with hosted apps targeting SMBs with CRM (<http://crm.ifreetools.com>) and Online Database App Creator (<http://creator.ifreetools.com>).

If you are from RDBMS, at first you will have to become flexible to accommodate to the BigTable way of things - no group-by, joins, etc., - <USER2> find alternate ways of doing things. Once you make the switch, if will indeed be good enough for _big_ or highly scalable projects.

</comment><comment><USER5> Jumping URL (<http://www.jumpingurl.com>) runs on app engine.

FYI, there are few key things the GAE team is working on which can be found at <http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html>

Things like SSL for custom domains and background processing would make GAE even awesome to have your project running on.

</comment><comment><USER29> Although we aren't a big site by any measure; we're using it and loving it for <http://www.classlet.com>

<comment><USER30> Great site you have going there. Went through the whole thing, and then demo. Clean and straightforward.

Quick question, a bit off topic. Here: <http://twitter.com/Classlet/status/3854900110> you say "We finally rescued our Twitter user name from a squatter!". How did you manage to do this?

<comment><USER29> Thanks!

As per some instructions on the web, we created a "classlet2" Twitter account. When logged in, there is a help form where you can open a ticket. It took a few weeks, but they eventually released the account to us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Google's Panoramio runs on App Engine: <http://www.panoramio.com/>

</comment><comment><USER31> I built a small app on it Tweetc.com using python and webapp framework. It was my 1st gae and python app. So far no problems. I know Twibes is built on it which gets moderate traffic. I like it can I can quickly build and test ideas for free.

</comment><comment><USER32> <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/hosting> is the only service I know of that does this kind of thing other than GAE and Heroku.

They support a whole bunch of languages, but PHP is the only one worth using because their execution model is pure-CGI — no persistent processes. The pricing model is just like GAE: pre-pay into an account that is debited for the resources you actually use.

</comment><comment><USER33> I really only know sites that use Google API's like <http://www.socialwok.com/>

We're working on moving our application over to App Engine but waiting until they get SSL on your own domain before doing that. You can see the roadmap for it here <http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html>

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm considering working with GAE to make a persistent browser-based game. Not serious about it yet, but maybe in another month or two.

I have some doubts about staying within the CPU quotas, since I have to take on a processing load in the tick-update loop of game time, but I think I can design it to be spread out somehow.

<comment><USER35> I did a very simple game on GAE in its early days and the biggest trouble were very costly writes.

Basically you could forget about applications that needed to write game state to datastore in each step.

Even the simplest possible writes were already triggering CPU quota warnings [1].

I didn't touch GAE recently, so maybe they already relaxed it a bit, but when it started, it was usable practically only for read-heavy applications (for which Google strongly suggested to use memcached wherever possible).

Also moving larger amounts of data between your computer and GAE datastore was massive pain (e.g. backups or initial state load). You had to be very careful not to blow over your quotas, as such imports were doing a lot of writes.

\---

[1] For example, in early days they counted CPU use in "megacycles":

      * memcached based ajax request costed tens of megacycles
      * datastore-read based ajax request costed hundreds of megacycles
      * datastore-read-write ajax request costed thousands of megacycles

<comment><USER16> this has gotten much better. Also, they now let you specify what level of consistency you want, which makes writes go a lot faster if you're just putting in a bunch of data or don't need to wait to be sure it's consistent before you put in the next item.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have used it for prototype projects, but nothing that I have been completely serious about yet. I know that <http://www.shoesofprey.com> uses it and I believe it is working well for them and scales when it needs to.

</comment><comment><USER37> I use it for 2 sideprojects: <http://www.websitecheck.org/> and <http://www.serversproxy.org/> are both running on GAE , it's very easy to "manage"

</comment><comment><USER38> Sounds like from all these postings that its appropriateness for "big, serious projects" just isn't there. Now that it's over 2 years old now, I'm underwhelmed (yet not at all surprised) by it's lack of adoption/popularity.

</comment><comment><USER39> We're using it for <http://www.scienceslides.com/> ... a place for scientists to download signaling pathway slides in powerpoint format, etc...</comment>


Ask HN: People who employ contractors, what is it that makes them attractive? - <AUTHOR> I am currently in the market for a contractor PHP position, and am trying to figure out what it is (or what group of things) specifically that you look for in a contractors CV that makes them attractive to you as a prospect?<p>Any insight into this is appreciated! <comment><USER2> Two things are attractive from an employer standpoint:

(1) Elasticity-- it's hard for both personal/morale reasons and legal reasons to lay people off, but it's easy to increase or decrease contractor utilization as needed.

(2) Expertise-- sometimes you need someone with some specialized know-how and you only need them for one job.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the answer!

So if I'm understanding you correctly then the best thing to do on my end is:

1\. Look for a niche in which I have a deep level of expertise.

2\. Target only those employers. With evidence of this expertise.

3\. When targeting those employers, only seek out the ones that tend to hire people on a short term basis. I.e. project-focused company, like an agency or something along those lines.

Is this a good assessment of the heuristics I should be following?</comment></comment>


Studying the Internet Censorship in South Korea - <AUTHOR> http://pierrekim.github.io/blog/2016-10-17-studying-the-internet-censorship-in-south-korea.html <comment><USER2> I noticed a few months ago that internet access from an EC2 instance in the Seoul AWS region seems to be censored as well.</comment>


Witchcraft and Wizardry – RPG game created in Minecraft - <AUTHOR> https://www.planetminecraft.com/project/harry-potter-adventure-map-3347878 <comment><USER2> People's ability to _create_ in Minecraft is amazing.

Case in point: someone built a Quad-Core computer that runs inside the game ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbO0tqH8f5I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbO0tqH8f5I))

<comment><USER3> It's unfortunately that games with thriving modding communities are so few far between these days. So many fantastic games have branches off of GoldSrc, Source, Starcraft, WC3, Quake, etc. Nowadays it's mostly just Minecraft left.

I do wonder if it has to do with game making tools such as Unity becoming so much more prevalent. I'm guessing most people have just migrated to making their own indie games instead of making mods for other games which is much harder to monetize and scale.

Although I guess there's a resurgence of game creator games. Dreams [0] and Crayta [1] specifically. Very reminiscence of Gmod and the like.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rezzjJ4NtK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rezzjJ4NtK0) [1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTo8TiOoABk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTo8TiOoABk)

<comment><USER4> For one thing Minecraft absorbs a lot of this interest. I'm not going to check out your new mod for some game I don't own and which has no other notable mods, but I might check your Minecraft mod, and I definitely will play it if it gets bundled into a "pack" I was interested in anyway. I had no particular enthusiasm for a mod focused on rats (plague rats, rat breeding, rat training, an entire rat civilisation including terrible rat-based puns...) but it's baked into MC Eternal so now I have a cage full of tame rats and a hankering to find Ratlantis.

The choice of Java for Minecraft really matters. Java's if-it-compiles-it- probably-runs approach means third rate programmers can easily put something together that doesn't crash the game mysteriously every five seconds. Java's strong OO background is well-suited to modifying a game too, and particularly to allowing mods to be compatible with each other.

Constraint is often helpful in art. Few of us have the grand vision (and sufficient free time) to build a sprawling Total Conversion that radically overhauls gameplay, visual style and so on. So if you're thinking smaller then something like Super Mario Maker 2 looks pretty good. Can you put in weeks to make something as fresh as the Mario "ROM hacks" made with Lunar Magic (software to modify Mario) which Nintendo won't admit inspired SMM? No. But you can spend a few hours arranging pre-existing components to make something pretty interesting within Nintendo's agreed constraints. Or you can spend five minutes adding every possible boss character to a single screen fight like a two year old finger painting. Whatever you want.

<comment><USER5> I would also add IMO the main reason that Java matters: it's easily moddable without the creator's permission. For most of Minecraft's existence, there was zero official mod support and zero in-game scripting abilities. However, Java is relatively easily decompilable and many modders put in effort to deobfuscate it.

The end result is that Minecraft was easily moddable without Mojang needing to officially support them in any way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did anybody ever attempt to load a Dwarf Fortress world into Minecraft?

<comment><USER7> Minetest has a mod called DFCaverns that makes the underground like Dwarf Fortress.

<comment><USER8> I wish I could convince my friends to play minetest. A bunch of our old minecraft accounts got screwed up when microsoft bought the game but it's _still_ more popular.

I poked around with running minetest in JSlinux so it would be even easier to join but it's missing the vector instructions and I can't seem to get luajit to run without those no matter how I build it (not that it matters, the graphics and everything are so slow that freeciv barely gets 5FPS plus the whole nested TCP networking thing.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> someone should plug minetest here, an open source reimplemtation of minecraft for use in creating mod packs

<comment><USER10> Any recommendation for getting into minetest? The default "game" it ships with feels a bit too barren and unpolished, and I didn't really know what to pick instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does this run on pocket edition? That's the version my kids play on their iPads.

<comment><USER12> > Currently only works in Java Minecraft version 1.13.2!

> Unfortunately, it does not work in Minecraft Bedrock Edition or Playstation > Edition.

Pocket Edition is bedrock edition I think, so that would be a no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't Minecraft an RPG game? I'd call it a Harry Potter adventure mod

<comment><USER10> The vanilla game isn't usually considered one. E.g. it doesn't really have a fleshed out character or a narrative.

<comment><USER14> Isn't the whole point of the RP in RPG that the player is responsible for fleshing out the character?

<comment><USER10> Basically all RP systems do have player-choosen character details and progression with gameplay consequences, be it a points system, a skill tree, just attributes that cause the game world to react... RP games that aren't strictly multi-player also typically have some sort of story line and pre- designed role for the player, because the world should reflect the role being played in some way, and unless there is a human GM it can't do that for anything random the player came up with.

You can forego all that and role play in Minecraft, but that's primarily because it is a sandbox which you can use for whatever. And most RPG mods/maps/servers do add some of the mechanisms above.

<comment><USER14> > Basically all RP systems do have player-choosen character details and > progression with gameplay consequences, be it a points system, a skill tree, > just attributes that cause the game world to react.

A renaissance fair is RP without the G. Chess is a G without the RP. D&D is an RPG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I get a 403 error.

While I'm here, I'll just point out that the "G" in RPG stands for "game".

<comment><USER16> They may have mentioned game so someone did not think they created a rocket propelled grenade.

<comment><USER17> Well, it could be a game written in the IBM RPG language, if that's possible at all…

<comment><USER18> Someone needs to make an RPG in RPG and make sure it has RPGs...in minecraft.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DRACO antiviral, Update - <AUTHOR>

First, DRACO has been nominated for the 2013 Katerva Award in the Human Development category and is eligible for the People Choice Award.  Please spread the word and vote for DRACO between 3/7 and 3/28.
http://katerva.net/home/accelerate/human-development/human-development-2013/
Second, The DRACO Fund is in the process of incorporation.  It will channel crowd sourced funding to Dr. Rider who is now at Draper labs.  All funds will be used to optimize and test DRACO against HIV.
https://www.facebook.com/TheDRACOFund?skip_nax_wizard=true
Third, The DRACO Fund is looking for a web developer or two to build our website.  We don't have any money to offer, but you will be working for a great cause.  Full Software Requirements Specification with mockups will be available.
Thank you, Scott www.synapticsynthase.com <comment><AUTHOR> please spread the word!</comment>


Upstart Americans brandish alligators at the almighty Reg Standards Soviet - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/09/socially_distancing_alligators/ <comment><AUTHOR> FYI - this is self-deprecating British humour and derives from the habit of UK newspapers (of old) always to convert lengths into things such as Nelson's Columns or double-decker buses, or areas into relative sizes v Wales or football pitches.</comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to share screens without downloading anything? - <AUTHOR>

Just wondering if anyone ever ran across or had an idea for a purely browser based screen sharing implementation. <comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be a pretty bad security hole if your browser - the one program on your machine that the most people are trying to exploit - could access parts of your screen that are outside its own windows?

</comment><comment><USER3> Probably yes. Have you seen screen cast o matic .com? They allow video recording without installing any plugin just visiting their website. So if that can be done then yes Screen sharing too.

Sorry I exactly dont know how do they do it. Please try out. They use some kind of Java plugin (not alone Java Script).

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're using chrome, you can share your screen using WebRTC to other browsers that support it. Right now, that's just Firefox and Chrome.

Check out talky for an example. [https://talky.io](https://talky.io)</comment>


Show HN: Working on a new network transport for PulseAudio and ALSA - <AUTHOR> https://gavv.github.io/articles/new-network-transport/# <comment><AUTHOR> A brief summary.

I'm working on Roc, a toolkit for real-time streaming over the network. Among other things, it provides command-line tools and PulseAudio modules that can be used for home audio. It can be used with PA, with bare ALSA, and with the macOS CoreAudio.

The main difference from other transports, including PulseAudio TCP and RTP streaming, is the better quality of service when the latency is low (100 to 300 ms) and the network in unreliable (Wi-Fi). The post explains why and provides some comparison, usage instructions, and future plans.

There is still a long way to go, and now we're looking for people thoughts and feedback. Do you find the project useful? How would you use it? What features would you like to see?

<comment><USER2> I see you've got Opus on your to-do list. I would really appreciate that! I find Opus (appropriately configured) to be audibly indistinguishable from CD audio, and it would really help with the bandwidth requirements.

I've always been really excited by the possibilities implied by PulseAudio's network capabilities, but disappointed by their latency and bandwidth requirements. Roc + Opus would be amazing.

<comment><USER3> Check out [https://github.com/eugenehp/trx](https://github.com/eugenehp/trx) for Opus streaming inspiration, I've played around with their code and found it easy to work with. Opus would be great with ROC because in case of buffer over/under runs the codec provides features to mask dropouts based on previous content. This is critical when using Wi-Fi.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

> Opus would be great with ROC because in case of buffer over/under runs the > codec provides features to mask dropouts based on previous content. This is > critical when using Wi-Fi.

Are you talking about its PLC or FEC? I didn't test it yet and I'm interested if people are using both of them with music.

BTW it would be also interesting to combine our FECFRAME support with Opus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds great! What about encryption? If that is used in any environment not in complete control of the user that should be mandatory. E.g. in an open wifi, a shared wifi, or directly over the internet. As the protocol is using RTP anyway, it should be easy to slap on SRTP or DTLS? For the beginning, it may even be sufficient to use a static symmetric key. Or directly use WebRTC which has that already included, but what about the FEC then?

<comment><USER4> Update: I just discovered SRTP in the advanced features list. Awesome!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, SRTP is in the list :) It's not the highest priority right now, but I'll get to that sooner or later (sooner if somebody will be asking for it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great staff! Finally there is an Open Source initiative to create a robust transport for sync audio streaming. Existing Open Source solutions that come to my mind (like SlimProto, SnapCast, ffmpeg) focus on providing 'a product' rather than a reusable 'transport'. Few questions: how do you 'capture' PCM stream in case of ALSA? It is straight forward to create a PA sink and plug it into PA configuration, but I am wondering about pure ALSA. Disclaimer: I am an author of [https://www.github.com/gimesketvirtadieni/slimstreamer](https://www.github.com/gimesketvirtadieni/slimstreamer)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

> Few questions: how do you 'capture' PCM stream in case of ALSA? It is > straight forward to create a PA sink and plug it into PA configuration, but > I am wondering about pure ALSA.

Good question :) Roc does not implement any special capturing code for ALSA, it just reads from the given device (using SoX currently). The user is supposed to use something like snd-aloop.

It would be possible to create a custom ALSA plugin I guess, but we have no plans for that currently.

You're right about the transport vs product part. I would prefer to work on the transport. And an ALSA plugin would be a product on top of it so it should be a separate project ideally. Actually, the same is true for our PulseAudio modules. I hope later we will either submit them to upstream or separate into a standalone project.

> Disclaimer: I am an author of > [https://www.github.com/gimesketvirtadieni/slimstreamer](https://www.github.com/gimesketvirtadieni/slimstreamer)

Interesting, didn't see it before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is cool! I've recently been playing with streaming local audio to another system (a raspberrypi with a dac). I tried Pulseaudio's builtin way of streaming, but lag was pretty bad. I found JACK[0] to work well (<20ms) once I got it configured correctly. Kind of a complicated setup (including getting it all to be "automatic", systemd unit files and all, realtime kernels, etc), and not particularly stable. Unfortunately the latency makes up for it.

[0] [http://www.jackaudio.org/](http://www.jackaudio.org/) (is this link dead? here's a few more-

[https://github.com/jackaudio/](https://github.com/jackaudio/)

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

</comment><comment> matthew-wegner Network audio is pretty nifty! I run a Snapcast[0] setup at home, tied into Home Assistant[0] automation for multi-room audio. Some notes:

\- I have six total audio zones, including my desktop computer.

\- Audio for a room turns on/off with a room. It's neat to walk from my office into the kitchen, and have the kitchen lights come up and audio follow me in when the motion detectors fire. Some speakers don't mute when "off", but change source to a text-to-speech only channel (for i.e. door/window contact notification, other messages).

\- Everything but my desktop (macOS) are speakers connected to a Raspberry Pi via USB DAC.

\- One of my motivations here was multi-room audio, but a big one was to connect a Linux VM's audio output directly to the speakers so I could use the official Spotify client, instead of a 3rd-party library that will eventually break.

\- Snapcast is really quite DIY for config, but I could set up other sources-- an Airplay target, a line in target with a cable hanging off the server so people could plug in devices at a party, etc. I've seen setups online where people do this, and someone in a room can change that room's "channel" to another source.

\- Spotify's DRM-as-feature is nice here, because I just use the Spotify client on my desktop normally, with output coming out elsewhere. I run 700ms of buffer, which is just low enough that clicking play/pause doesn't feel broken. I could probably drop it more, since everything is hardwired in the house.

\- Previous to Snapcast, I just toggled Spotify's source when I walked between rooms, but there's quite a bit of dead air there, and it's a hassle to setup, plus multi-room audio sync is nice with people over.

[0] [https://github.com/badaix/snapcast](https://github.com/badaix/snapcast)

[1] [https://www.home-assistant.io/](https://www.home-assistant.io/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment> Frans-Willem Can this also play to multiple devices (at the same time), while keeping the audio synchronized ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet. This is in our roadmap however.

<comment><USER7> This would be very cool. I've been pondering about how to do this every now and then (but never worked on any real time stuff, so...)

If you ever get around to adding this I will start building my el cheapo raspberry pi based sonos clone. ;-)

<comment><USER8> Regarding realtime stuff there's a project out there to implement the Ethernet AVB (audio/video bridging) standard on BeagleBone using PTP (precision time protocol) for synchronization.

Some of the older network synchronized transports like CobraNet and Dante might also be interesting for anyone wanting to learn more about this stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks awesome! Functionally speaking, it reminds me of Snapcast. Compare/contrast?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I didn't know about this project and will definitely look at the implementation.

Their documentation says they use TCP, which usually means that it won't handle low latencies on Wi-Fi due to packet losses.

On the other hand, they have service discovery, remote control, and multi-room synchronization. All three features are planned but not yet supported in Roc. We'll add the first two in upcoming releases, but the multi-room support requires a serious research.

Their documentation also says the client can correct time deviations by playing faster or slower. We use resampling for that instead. I'm wondering how they can avoid glitches without using a resampler.

One more difference is that they use their own protocols (both for streaming and control) while Roc relies on standard RFCs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> You've mentioned PA, ALSA and macOS CoreAudio. That's Linux and Mac. Will Windows users be able to use this as well somehow?

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, no. Windows port is in our roadmap but not a priority right now. However, if someone would want to maintain it, I'm ready to accept PRs and help with porting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a cool project! I always wonder how to measure latency of sound- related programs. Is there any tools to benchmark latencies?</comment>


Show HN: My project to complement wikitravel.org with pictures. - <AUTHOR> http://www.picitravel.com

<comment><USER2> This seems to work well. It'd be nice if you could filter out images that aren't travel related, e.g. for "china" I got [http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4071/4429271873_cb6163e9e1_q.j...](http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4071/4429271873_cb6163e9e1_q.jpg).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, sometime a few images slip in that are not travel related. It mostly happens because that image is tagged with one of the travel destinations in that search query. In this case, the image was tagged as 'Beijing'. Nevertheless, I will try to improve my search results.</comment></comment>


If Tesla Would Stop Selling Cars, We'd All Save Some Money - <AUTHOR> http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/tesla-would-stop-selling-cars-wed-all-save-some-money

<comment><USER3> "Tesla can't increase demand by dropping the price very much. "

That's a pretty big leap on the Authors part, one that isn't really justified from facts or information. We know basically nothing about Tesla's plans for their cheaper models or what they have/will do to reduce the cost.

It's really bizarre to me how much certain groups are just itching for Tesla to fail.

<comment><USER4> > It's really bizarre to me how much certain groups are just itching for Tesla > to fail.

Patrick Michaels is a climate change denialist. He himself has estimated that about 40% of his funding comes from the oil companies. He has been criticised for manipulating the data of other scientists - not trivial mistakes or oversights, but deliberate serious manipulations. (Here's just one example where a colleague almost accuses him of fraud (<http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2005/Crichton_20050927.pdf>)

> One of the skeptics, Pat Michaels, has taken the graph from our 1988 paper > with simulated global temperatures for scenarios A, B and C, erased the > results for scenarios B and C, and shown only the curve for scenario A in > public presentations, pretending that it was my prediction for climate > change. Is this treading close to scientific fraud?

He's part of the Cato Institute, who have publically said they disagree with the scientific consensus on climate change.

Disappointing to see this worthless tripe on HN, and to see it getting any votes.

<comment><USER5> <http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ad-hominem.html>

It's disappointing to see someone avoid addressing every single one of the issues raised in the original article, and instead focusing on attacking the author.

Would you care to address any of the points he made in the original article?

<comment><USER6> Why is it disappointing? There's plenty of people here who address the original point. Knowing more about the author and his motives is useful information.

<comment><USER5> It wouldn't have been disappointing had DanBC posted it as an FYI - in the sense of "be careful to check this guy's claims; he has falsified data in the past."

But what he wrote was: "Disappointing to see this worthless tripe on HN, and to see it getting any votes."

That is an ad-hominem attack, and disappointing to see on HN.

<comment><USER4> I don't want people to be careful when checking that guy's claims.

I want people to not waste their time bothering to check that guy's claims.

Scientists gather data and form an opinion.

This guy has an opinion before he sees any data; he's paid at least 40% of his funding for having that opinion; and then manipulates data to fit that opinion. He misrepresents other people's work and other people's opinions.

If he had lied once or twice then perhaps there's some useful information to be had by carefully checking what he's saying. But the pattern is so strong that people can safely ignore him. Just as we ignore the time-cube guy, or people who use phrases like quantum touch healing.

<comment><USER5> "I want people to not waste their time bothering to check that guy's claims."

That is pretty much the definition of an ad-hominem attack.

Your criticisms of his approach are valid, but also apply to a good number of climatologists whose income is more dependent upon pro-AGW funding this his is dependent upon oil company funding. Glass houses, stones, etc.

FWIW, my position is that correlation between human activity and climate change has (finally) been solidly established, but:

\- our models lack any real predictive ability w.r.t. future climate, except to say "interesting stuff will happen."

\- catastrophic climate change happens regardless of human input

Given the above two points I'm unconvinced that there's any AGW-based argument for legislation. Argument based on atmospheric pollution harming human life? Sure.

Instead, we should be focusing on growing our technological and academic capacity towards climate engineering. Regardless of what AGW brings, at some point in our history, we will need to tweak the climate to survive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is only true if you do not factor in the longer-term costs of carbon emissions. Those emissions will eventually need to be dealt with, and the costs will be substantial. If those costs are addressed today via tax subsidies for zero-emissions vehicles then the future costs will be lower.

It is an "ounce of prevention" thing.

<comment><USER8> "...the costs will be substantial..."

This is an article of faith for the green crowd. I and many others are skeptical of such a claim, especially when temperatures have dropped despite higher emissions the past 10 years.

<comment><USER9> >This is an article of faith for the green crowd. I and many others are skeptical of such a claim, especially when temperatures have dropped despite higher emissions the past 10 years.

Am I reading the graph wrong?

<http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A.gif>

Looks like a rise to me.

Source: <http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/>

<comment><USER10> The quote you're responding to said "past 10 years". Strictly speaking, that's accurate. You can play with the chart here - this is a chart of an average of several global temperature series over exactly the last 120 months, with trendline:

[http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/last:120/plot/wti/last:...](http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/last:120/plot/wti/last:120/trend/plot/wti/last:120)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's rather odd to hear Cato complaining about tax breaks. It's even odder to hear them talk about one persons tax break as another persons tax burden. They seem to be very selective with where they apply this logic.

<comment><USER12> What a rag. Here they are talking about the Keystone Pipeline, a proposed way of pumping oil in north america to the shore where it can be exported at a profit. They cite job creation as a benefit of public funding for the pipeline, as well as the environment.

I can't believe this is on the front page of hacker news.

<http://www.cato.org/blog/climate-impact-keystone-xl-pipeline>

<comment><USER13> > They cite job creation as a benefit of public funding for the pipeline

That is not stated or implied anywhere in the linked article. The Keystone Pipeline is a private project.

<comment><USER12> you're right, apologies for that

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As I pointed out in the other thread[1], this argument is pretty silly as the Cato Institute and most electric car critics have openly advocated subsidies for the industries they support. These "subsidies" are paid for by companies who CHOSE to pay them to continue participation in the California market without producing zero emissions vehicles. In the minds of these critics, the fact that Tesla is a niche startup today in a small, renewable transportation sector changes the entire dynamic about the deal.

One needs look no further than Cato's full-throated endorsement of oil subsidies[2]. Despite admitting externalities exist, they put their stamp of endorsement on oil industry subsidies while opposing far smaller industry-paid subsidies for Tesla, a company whose product harms profits of oil companies.

[1] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5753993> [2] [http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/big-oil- pub...](http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/big-oil-public- trough-examination-petroleum-subsidies)

<comment><USER15> Your Cato link is _not_ a "full-throated endorsement of oil subsidies," it is a discussion of whether government interventions in energy markets benefit oil companies on net, and if you'd done a cursory google search for "Cato oil subsidies" you would have found that Cato has repeatedly argued _against_ them[1][2].

This sort of thing is why I'm tired of political news on HN.

[1] [http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/eliminating- oil-...](http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/eliminating-oil- subsidies-two-cheers-president-obama)

[2] [http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/oil-subsidies- do...](http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/oil-subsidies-dock)

<comment><USER14> Cato: "The evidence indicates that, on balance, the oil industry is not a net beneficiary of government subsidies... The contention that oil consumers do not pay their fair share of the environmental and national defense costs they impose on society is dubious. There is little evidence to suggest that the environmental externalities imposed by oil consumption exceed the taxes and regulatory costs paid by consumers."

That's about as close as anyone has ever come to fully-backing oil subsidies. They're not terribly popular in normal political discourse. The piece unveils a dubious argument that evades the fact that taxes on oil are used to finance the cost of roads and highways. They do not serve to mitigate national defense costs, environmental damages, or health costs caused by burning fossil fuels, extracting them, or refining them. These costs are borne mostly as hidden externalities paid by government and consumers.

<comment><USER16> How in the world is that a "full-throated endorsement of oil subsidies"?

Also, claiming that "That's about as close as anyone has ever come to fully- backing oil subsidies" is quite laughable.

<comment><USER14> If you have been in politics as long as I have, you would know that an argument which is designed entirely to downplay the risks and costs of a policy is an endorsement of the same policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The total cost of the referenced program in California is $55.7m spread over four years, or just under $14m per year[1]. In a budget that measures into the _billions_ of dollars per year, that's nothing.

[1] [http://energycenter.org/index.php/incentive- programs/clean-v...](http://energycenter.org/index.php/incentive- programs/clean-vehicle-rebate-project)

<comment><USER18> I'm not saying the program should end, but your argument is how we get death by 1000 paper cuts.

<comment><USER17> I'm guessing we probably disagree on the sequester too, then, huh?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The article should take sales tax into consideration, ranging from 3 to 8 percent, while the average is 5.75%[1]. That's pretty close to the $7.5k federal taxback bonus.

Another critique of the article is that Leaf's sales numbers are not good evidence for future sales. Electric cars will make a lot more sense when fast charge stations become more commonplace. It's like saying (in 2004 or something) that nobody ever wants to buy a smartphone because there's only a few apps available.

1\. [http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/cost-of-car- own...](http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/cost-of-car- ownership/cost-of-taxes-on-your-car1.htm)

</comment><comment><USER20> The subsidies and tax breaks are minuscule to the subsidies of oil companies which cato backs. I wish we could just tax all companies equally and much much lower. But we should always give breaks to encourage competition.

<comment><USER13> What? Here is Cato praising Obama for proposing the end of oil subsidies:

[http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/eliminating- oil-...](http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/eliminating-oil- subsidies-two-cheers-president-obama)

I tend to disagree with Cato's brand of libertarianism, but they are consistent.

<comment><USER20> Well I stand corrected, had not seen that. Glad they posted that. However still the breaks for electric/green tech is still not a comparison at all and oil/gas/manufacturing are well established. I'd be for kicking taxes down to the subsidy levels so there aren't any major costs to remove it, just a tax break for other industrie. It would be great for revenues for companies for a while and they might pay their taxes actually. In a perfect world taxes would be 10% maybe and companies could bring their money back to the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article was written with an edge. I would not be surprised if the author is among the people who consider taxation to be theft.

I wonder how he felt about Lee Iacoca getting Congress to bail out Chrysler in the 80s.

<comment><USER22> Was the author even born then?

<comment><USER23> I'd guess "yes": <http://www.cato.org/people/patrick-michaels>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > but it would be more comfort if we weren't all compelled—completely against > most of our wills—to shell out around somewhere around $10K

Tax subsidies are decided by legislators who are elected by us. So the claim - "completely against most of our wills" - is utterly false.

<comment><USER25> Doesn't have to be. Legislators elected with small majorities can easily vote for legislation that is supported by less than 50% of the constituency.

<comment><USER24> Its possible in one of the following cases: 1\. The issue is insignificant enough (or else, opponent would hammer the electorate with ads highlighting this issue) so voters don't care about it. 2\. The issue comes up after the election and stance of candidates regarding that is not known before one votes. #2 is not applicable since green energy / electric cars are pretty old issues and voters (should) know what their candidates think about those. #1 might be more applicable, in which case the original point in article ("against most of our wills") is still moot - voters simply don't care about this as much as they care about some other stuff.

<comment><USER26> The fact that there are more important issues doesn't mean voters don't care, it just means the system is unfit to take them into account.

<comment><USER24> If majority of voters care about some not-insignificant issue, current system will ensure that its taken into account. And thats my main point - this issue is simply not significant for a majority of the population.

<comment><USER26> _If majority of voters care about some not-insignificant issue, current system will ensure that its taken into account._

Well, that's your claim, but not everyone agrees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Elon Musk says the ZEV credits are likely to go to 0 by Q4. The car is also projected to 25% gross margins in Q4. Battery energy density and cost improve about 7-8% each year and there will be a $30k car in 2016 or 2017.

I suspect the oil and car industries and their PR departments will push hard to repeal the tax credit as they are in this article. Also expect Tesla will push hard to tax carbon emitting vehicles. Should make for plenty link bait like this.

<comment><USER28> There will be a tipping point thought. Hopefully sooner rather than later, the major auto companies are going to have to jump on board with the electric vehicle industry and fully support EVs.

What year do you think the last ICE vehicle will be sold in the US? At some point, gas stations will stop selling gasoline. I honestly don't know if it'll be in 10 years or 50 years.

<comment><USER27> I think within 10 years we will see an explosion in the popularity of EVs. However, it's possible as EVs increase in popularity, Lithium prices could go up and gasoline prices could fall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Putting Cato's credibility and biased views aside, this article it's first of its kind that doesn't just republish Tesla's PR as news! You can view Tesla as tax on the middle class. You can argue most middle class families will not buy a Tesla but they are paying the rich to buy one. I think the tax credit should be tied to income.

</comment><comment><USER30> ". Then there are generous state subsidies ($2500 in California, $4000 in Illinois—the bluer the state, the more the taxpayers get gouged)"

I live here, and I am no fan of Illinois, but the sales tax rate is 6.25 on autos right now, which mean the state makes back 98% of that subsidy every time a Tesla is sold.

</comment><comment><USER31> They should get those tax credits for driving the car - not just buying it - cause then they help lower the cost of gas for us all!

<comment><USER32> They already get an effective tax break by not paying gas taxes.

<comment><USER33> So, if I get you correctly, you're saying they get a tax break by not paying taxes on something they don't use? Why stop with them not paying gas taxes? Since they are American-built, they also don't pay import taxes. They aren't luxury yachts, so they don't need to pay a luxury yacht tax, either. Why, there's all sorts of taxes they don't pay.

Claiming they get an effective tax break by not paying gas taxes is absurd.

<comment><USER34> Gas taxes are used to build and maintain the roads that electric cars drive on. Electric car owners reap those benefits without paying the gas tax.

That said, the CATO article was beyond biased for all the reasons already mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> First draw your curve, then plot your data.

Cato isn't so much a "conservative think tank" as a mouthpiece for certain established financial interests, such as the oil industry. So Cato's job is not to produce facts and logic, but rather to produce propaganda that bears a surface resemblance to facts and logic, in order to put a thumb on the political scales.

Tesla is what we in our little corner here call "disruptive innovation" - <USER2> this case, disrupting the automotive sector's dependence on the oil industry. This is a technically difficult and very expensive proposition, in the face of some extremely powerful vested interests at both the national level (Cato Institute for oil) and the local level (mandatory dealer laws in Texas, etc). Tesla is tackling this in part by relying on tax subsidies to consumers, based on the public good.

Now, if tax subsidies benefit Cato's backers, then Cato is all for tax subsidies. But if tax subsidies threaten their backers, then Cato is suddenly all righteous about "free markets". Cato doesn't give a crap about free markets. And their backers are scared... Detroit and other non-US auto manufacturers are sorta-neutral third parties here. They're not in the oil business, they're in the car manufacturing business. If Tesla's disruption is successful, they'd much rather adopt Tesla's model and cut Big Oil loose, than go out of business manufacturing dinosaur-fart burners.

So this post is mostly interesting in that grumbling about consumer tax subsidies on high-end luxury goods is the BEST they have.

<comment><USER26> Well, the fact that they may be hypocrites doesn't make them wrong, but a look at their arguments for tax breaks on the oil industry could help better understand where they're coming from. Do you have some links to those? Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> > As the company sold 5,000 cars in the quarter, though, $13,600 per car was > paid by other manufacturers, who are going to pass at least some of that > cost on to buyers of their products.

The article compares pollution credits to bribery and a shakedown, but I don't quite get the case. Tesla doesn't get them for free, it actually has to produce low emission vehicles. And no one is forcing Honda to buy them from Tesla specifically (or technically at all). Honda isn't prepared to produce low emission cars, so the carbon credits market means they don't have to, so long as they're willing to bear the external costs in some other way.

Pollution credits are a relatively lassiez faire mechanism for converting a specific type of external costs to internal ones, and they seem to function pretty well. Not a leading question, but I'm honestly curious. What is the conservative or libertarian argument against them, and what approach would conservatives or libertarians prefer we took to the problem of large externalities?

<comment><USER26> Well, there are multiple capitalist libertarian schools of thought, not to mention left-libertarian, but from what I've understood the Rothbardian position (which, I believe, is pretty hardcore in general) to be, it boils down to:

1\. It's impossible to calculate the true costs of an externality like "air pollution", therefore any number that the government chooses is arbitrary and unjust.

2\. When an externality can be defined concretely as in "Action by person A harms person B or her/his property", then B can sue A to stop it and get compensated (e.g., a factory dumping chemicals to someone's land).

3\. On the other hand, it's unreasonable for people to individually identify and sue car owners, therefore the best solution is to privatize roads, and then the road owner would be liable for the pollution, so he would have an incentive to raise prices or ban high polluting cars.

That said, this is not necessarily the position of the CATO Institute; I'm not sure where they stand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The author blames a company which is able to take advantage of laws rather than blaming the lawmakers for creating such laws.

1\. Tesla is able to sell carbon credits it earns from selling its cars. Due to California law, other car companies must buy these credits to offset the sale of their fossil fuel burning cars. 2\. Its customers get a lower price on their vehicles due to tax-credits for electric vehicles.

These are the laws in place which help a company like Tesla grow.

I would imagine these laws are designed to do exactly what they are doing, which is helping an electric car manufacture grow and compete in a world dominated by vehicles using fossil fuels.

The hidden argument he is making is that fossil fuels and climate change surely cost us nothing and should not be included at all in the cost of items which generate a third of CO2 emissions.

</comment><comment><USER38> The tax credit and carbon dioxide emission credits compensate for the negative externality of petrochemical products.

</comment><comment><USER39> Cause you know the big three never got any government money...

<comment><USER40> Who do you think the Cato Institute is?

<https://www.google.com/search?q=auto+bailout+site:cato.org>

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The Cato institute is not exactly without bias. Doesn't mean they're wrong, just something to think about as you read this piece.

</comment><comment><USER42> It doesn't seem all that strange or bad that the non-tesla car producers are passing along the costs to the consumer. If a company is putting their own profits into R&D for a new product they are developing, is that not same thing as passing on the costs to the consumer?

Except in this case, Honda is paying for Tesla's R&D instead of their own.

<comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure their disagreement is with the exceptional nature that you pointed out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> They mentioned Honda, of all companies!

[http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cato_Institute#Co...](http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cato_Institute#Corporate_sponsors)

American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, General Motors, Honda North America, Toyota Motor Corporation, Volkswagen of America

</comment><comment><USER44> Comparing apples to apples, I would figure out what % of the US military budget is spent defending oil supplies for gas powered cars which is another unseen subsidy.

</comment><comment><USER45> Save some money on a very short term.

I'll put my hopes in Tesla. Long term thinking is where the future becomes reality.

</comment><comment><USER13> The argument is deeply flawed, but not because libertarianism is inconsistent.

Reducing dependency on petroleum is a trillion dollar issue. Tesla has made some major innovations in this area, including the multi-cell floorpan battery, and all the money they have spent buying batteries is used by suppliers to innovate on making them cheaper. Innovation only has to be done once, and right now every car company on the planet has Model S's on racks and are doing engineering tear downs. Tesla's engineering will probably pay dividends to the world in the amount of billions over the next 30 years. A few hundred million in state subsidies seems a small price to pay.

From the article: > About the only way they can do this (barring some—currently remote—major battery technology improvements) is by cutting the vehicle's range.

It is completely lost on the author that one reason batteries get better (both directly and indirectly) is because Tesla builds cars.</comment>


Show HN: AutoSnoozer – take back control of your Inbox - <AUTHOR> https://autosnoozer.com <comment><USER2> This looks so cool. Exactly what I wished for. Currently, I manually snooze each email.

Signed up!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Glad to know you found it useful.</comment></comment>


Why It's Time to Quit Your Job, Travel the World - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-25/why-it-s-time-to-quit-your-job-travel-the-world <comment><USER2> Meanwhile I'd be happy to merely have a few hundred bucks a month coming in.

<comment><USER3> What, you are not 32 and making $250k/year (as the example in the article)?

<comment><USER2> I know right? I must be well below the median income :))) surely :)))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I encourage everybody people to quit their jobs and travel the world.

Maybe that will make the job market less competitive.</comment>


Trump's paid Thiel's Palantir $1.5B so far to build ICE's surveillance network - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/08/12/study-trumps-paid-peter-thiels-palantir-1-5b-so-far-to-build-ices-mass-surveillance-network/ <comment> word-reader Domestic surveillance by ICE of everyone, both citizens and those without papers, wouldn't even be necessary if either the border was properly controlled, or if employers were made more liable for employing workers illegally. But somehow we simultaneously have these billions of dollars in surveillance, associated chilling effects, the whole police-industrial complex, and no effect at all on the rate of illegal immigration, which is higher than it was under the Obama admin by some metrics.

Sometimes it seems like the purpose of these contracts is just to give taxpayer money to contractors to put a boot on said taxpayers' faces, rather than whatever is listed.

<comment><USER2> The whole employment without papers thing is a bit of a mystery to me because: I am an employer. I was also an immigrant. Based on being those two things I can't imagine how you get a job without the legal basis to have one[1]. And yet, very large numbers of people do. I'm guessing there's a whole big story to how this works, but surely it has to depend on the government at least turning a blind eye somewhere.

[1]As a non-citizen I had a driver's licence that indicated my immigration status. I didn't have a US passport. I couldn't buy a gun legally nor could I vote. As an employer we are required to verify immigration status for anyone to whom we make a job offer, a task that our HR people take very seriously.

<comment><USER3> You can buy a fake social in Queens for $50. It's a deliberately flawed system because fixing it would utterly decimate the pool of cheap labor for the service sector.

Source: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/if-youre-a-good- work...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/if-youre-a-good-worker- papers-dont-matter-how-a-trump-construction-crew-has-relied-on-immigrants- without-legal- status/2019/08/09/cf59014a-b3ab-11e9-8e94-71a35969e4d8_story.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Shame on Palantir and Thiel for being a part of this; it's still pretty disgusting to me the sheer lack of moral responsibility at play here.

1\. Insinuating that the tools will ever predict crime or terrorism.

2\. Allowing, fostering, and building tools of mass surveillance without oversight in secret for no reason other than to surveil.

3\. Aiding in the human rights abuses through enabling ICE and other organizations which fuel America's concentration camps.

Though this is pretty unsurprising considering he literally wants to consume the blood of the young: [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel- wants-to...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to- inject-himself-with-young-peoples-blood) supporting ICE, and trump, is one helluva way to make sure you have a steady supply of it on your hands.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is the tech company that really deserves to be beaten up in the media!

<comment><USER6> It's a "dog bites man" story because the whole point of Palantir is selling this sort of service. Whereas when Google or Facebook does something "right- leaning" it's more fundamentally unusual and thus newsworthy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> i'm so disappointed that i, early in my career, fell for the palantir koolaid.

<comment><USER8> I know the feeling. For much of my career I drank the koolaid of the military- industrial complex. Thankfully never worked _directly_ on weapons programs. But still sad that it took me so long to acknowledge how evil it all was and leave it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's wrong with enforcing immigration laws effectively?

<comment><USER10> Assuming this is a sincere question, there is already a great deal of reporting about the harm of (as you put it) "enforcing immigration laws effectively", and it is staggering to believe you're unaware of it.

Just within the 5 days, over 600 immigrants were taken at their workplace by ICE in Mississippi, leaving many children stranded and uncared for [1].

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2019/aug/08/mississippi-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/2019/aug/08/mississippi-ice-raids-children-video)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So how many months/years until the same technology gets used against a group PT regrets, and we hear a repentance speech?

</comment><comment><USER12> This is extreme ignorance, clickbait, or outright deception.

Headline:

 _" Study: Trump's paid Peter Thiel's Palantir $1.5B so far to build ICE's mass-surveillance network"_

From the actual study:

 _" It has received over $150 million from ICE alone, and has contracts worth some $1.5 billion with different federal agencies or departments, like the FBI, Navy, and Census Bureau."_

So the headline is off by 10x but the study also notes that $800M of that $1.5B is a single contract for the Army. If you remove that single outlier, Palantir's 2017-2019 contract total doesn't look all that different than the 2014-2016 contract totals. Looking through the contracts themselves (later in the report), they're from all over the Feds and consistent over time.. other than the outlier.

There are lots of places and ways to criticize but this doesn't look like one.

</comment><comment><USER13> I flagged this because the report [1] directly contradicts the headline.

Heck, the _article itself_ contradicts the headline.

The vast majority of the 1.5B is going to the DOD, not ICE.

According to the report, ICE is getting just 44m of that 1.5b. For comparison, the IRS gets 31m and the SEC gets 56m.

It really looks like the article was willfully misrepresenting the numbers in order to get a hot-button social issue into the headline.

[1] [https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Mijente- The-W...](https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Mijente-The-War- Against-Immigrants_-Trumps-Tech-Tools-Powered-by-Palantir_.pdf)

<comment><USER14> It surprises the dickens out of me that the editor would allow such an obviously mis-understandable title

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The "black budget" is probably a monster of waste and graft. We're lucky we even get to see how much Palantir is getting.

Reminds me of this old article about TARP I was reading recently. They loaned out $700B to a select few companies, many who were former employers of cabinet and treasury members. And they weren't even required to tell the public what they did with it:

> They'd decided not to even ask banks to monitor what they did with the > bailout money [..] Instead of lending their new cash to struggling > homeowners and small businesses, as Summers had promised, the banks were > literally sitting on it. [..] From the start, taxpayer money was used to > subsidize a string of finance mergers, from the Chase-Bear Stearns deal to > the Wells Fargo Wachovia merger to Bank of America's acquisition of Merrill > Lynch.

> Congress had approved $700 billion to buy up toxic mortgages, but $250 > billion of the money was now shifted to direct capital injections for banks.

Only $4 out of $700 billion ended up going to help home owners directly, the other $696B went to Wall St, even though it only passed congress because it was sold as helping the home owners:

> In fact, the amount of money that eventually got spent on homeowner aid now > stands as a kind of grotesque joke compared to the Himalayan mountain range > of cash that got moved onto the balance sheets of the big banks more or less > instantly in the first months of the bailouts. At the start, $50 billion of > TARP funds were earmarked for HAMP. In 2010, the size of the program was cut > to $30 billion. As of November of last year, a mere $4 billion total has > been spent for loan modifications and other homeowner aid.

[https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics- news/secrets-...](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/secrets- and-lies-of-the-bailout-113270/)

It's always a great time to have friends in government, but even more so in recent years. Especially the way Trump has only increased spending, just like Obama and Bush did. Likewise public/private partnerships and investments directly into private firms have increased in numbers, particularly in defence.

<comment><USER16> $636B was actually loaned out, and so far $740B has come back to the Treasury in interest and principle. The US government _made money_ on TARP.

[https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/](https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/)

<comment><USER15> mhm, everyone posts this reply whenever it comes up now as if that was the whole point of TARP was to make some money off mega-banks and car companies.

Subsidizing monopolies and financing M&As which further reduce competition is always a safe bet if your goal is making money. Especially in a down market when no one else has your special access to cheap capital... you can make a killing and help your buddies from private school get the bulk of it. Why doesn't the gov always do that?!

If the public asks questions just show them the sweet 10% interest the government got back. Who cares about moral hazards, long term stability, opportunity costs, lack of competition, oversight, and people lying to congress. We're now $100b richer(?), at least in the short term!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> While Trump's undoubtably been helping Palantir, I'm not entirely sure how much can be attributed to Trump vs. ongoing procurement issues. E.g., the military's previous analysis software was arguably vaporware [1] and should have been replaced anyway. If the government doesn't have access to decent analytical software, it runs around like a headless chicken (e.g. the wars in the middle east).

When it comes to ICE, it looks like Palantir's just integrating data from different sources. Surveillance is an issue, so the question seems to be whether the government should be able to tap into that data in the first place.

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-is-the-killer- produ...](https://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-is-the-killer-product-that- is-tearing-the-army-intelligence-community-apart-2012-8)

</comment><comment><USER18> Did anybody here played with Palantir's software stack? If so, how is the overall experience especially the UI?

<comment><USER19> As someone in the software industry, looking at palantirs UI gave me the feeling that this is a glorified pandas/sklearn/hive shop, certainly less accomplished than Apache, but enough to dazzle the dinosaurs in government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hard to say if being so pro-Trump was purely a "don't bite the hand that feeds" or if he had indeed went from some sort of libertarian to having a halfie for the road to at least a police state, but this probably explains Thiel's behavior as of late.</comment>