Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, and others launch fund to fight climate change - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/859860/bill-gates-is-leading-a-new-1-billion-fund-focused-on-combatting-climate-change-through-innovation/ <comment><USER2> Most comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155146).

</comment><comment><USER3> The same story has been in the top 10 on HN for 2 hours.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155146)

How does a duplicate go straight to #1?

<comment><USER4> No one caught it, that's all. Dupe ^

<comment><USER3> No, 28 people upvoted it within 8 minutes without realizing that the same exact story has been in the top 10 for 2 hours.

Not sure that speaks well of HN readers. I can see a few people missing it, but dozens...

<comment><USER5> Is it our responsibility to check for duplicates before upvoting a story?

<comment><USER4> The way I generally look through HN, first look through front page, then the newest page, opening new tabs as I go, I'll sometimes see and mark dupes. I think the general consensus is if you see 'em, mark 'em, but I wouldn't get overly worried about it.

<comment><USER6> How does one mark things as dupe?

<comment><USER4> Add a comment like:

Dupe: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155146)

It serves as a note to others to comment on the other submission. No magic. Sometimes a mod will come by and clean up comments and mark the submission title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is for the madmen, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, fish out of water, for those who see things differently. They do not like rules and have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify them or slander them. The only thing you can not do is ignore them, because they turn things around, they propel the human race forward. And while some may see them as mad, we see the genius. Because people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do (Jobs). This week I received the news that our prototype is almost finished. I made the request for help: A unique opportunity to raise funds for a very important invention, which involves a market of about thirty billion dollars. Countries and governments will take advantage of this invention to clean and sustainable energy. Laws and rules governing the supply and consumption of electricity should be amended. The Chinese market is five times larger than the US for the use of this invention. The Indian market is fifteen times higher. The poor and the rich on an equal footing. Homes, industries and businesses use the invention to reduce energy consumption by at least 50%. For this we need to patent the invention in Brazil, also in China, India, the United States and the European Union; follow the process made by a specialized company and finalize the prototype of the invention. That is why, we ask for voluntary contributions to this good cause and energy revolution that our invention can provide. But the national and international press ignored the invention. I particularly like that. This motivates me. This describes the human race well. And it is at times like these that people like me get what they want and push humanity, charging a natural price for it. Persevere, this is our motto.

</comment><comment><USER8> Rich guys with money to burn. Maybe that will heat up our record cold temps during the global warming-cool.</comment>


Amber Alert: Californians confused, angry and startled - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-amber-alert-california-angry-20130806,0,2233972.story <comment><USER2> The problem seems to be a misunderstanding of scale - This system was designed for natural disasters, nuclear wars, and large-scale public address. Mass dissemination of mundane information is quite frankly unwarranted; Even if everyone should receive this alert, they should simply get a buzz and notification, not a full warning and reading of text.

<comment><USER3> Which system are you talking about? The AMBER (America's Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response, named after a specific child abduction case that I remember watching the news reports of with my parents while in high school) Alert system is specificaly designed for child abduction.

I actually am not certain if there is a similar large-scale system for "natural disasters [or] nuclear wars". In Santa Barbara (a specific county) we have a way to sign up for that kind of alert run by the "County Office of Emergency Management", but AMBER operates over a much larger arena. Sure, war might _sound_ important, but think of the children!

> The AMBER Alert™ Program is a voluntary partnership between law-enforcement > agencies, broadcasters, transportation agencies, and the wireless industry, > to activate an urgent bulletin in the most serious child-abduction cases. > The goal of an AMBER Alert is to instantly galvanize the entire community to > assist in the search for and the safe recovery of the child.

<comment><USER4> I think he means the regional emergency message system thing on cellphones. That system(s ?) is currently meant to be used by several things (most commonly dangerous weather I think. I recall getting "flash flood" warnings with it before in Philly.), and was presumably not initially created for AMBER Alerts.

Stuff this sort of system would _really_ be useful for is things like Tsunami warnings. I assume it is use for that where applicable.

<comment><USER5> If that's what he means, he's wrong. At least on iPhones, there is a specific setting for AMBER Alerts, separate from Emergency Alerts.

<comment><USER4> I strongly suspect the same systems are used to deliver all alert types, and the phone can just select which type of message from that single system to display. This probably depends on the carrier, but I don't see any good reason to implement them separately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I got this alert last night, woke me any my wife up and we were irritated and confused. The level of the alert was vastly disproportionate to the relevancy and severity of the issue. It was a very poor implementation of a reasonable idea.

</comment><comment><USER7> The idea of getting more eyes on Amber Alerts is a fundamentally good one, I think we can all agree on that.

I think a far superior option to these kinds of active, "HEY LOOK AT ME" alerts would be something that could fit in passively but draw just as much viewership, and not just on phones.

Imagine if, when an Amber Alert was out in your area, the alert showed up in your Twitter and Facebook feeds, your phone's lock screen, and maybe even above your email inbox. Sure, some people would probably mentally (or actually) filter these out just like they filter out ads, but it's preferable to everyone getting annoyed by the alerts and turning them off entirely.

<comment><USER8> "The idea of getting more eyes on Amber Alerts is a fundamentally good one, I think we can all agree on that."

Can we? It is not clear that the Amber Alert system is an effective way to find kidnapped children, and it may actually cause more harm than good.

[http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/abducted/?page=full)

[http://www.psmag.com/culture/amber-alerts-largely- ineffectiv...](http://www.psmag.com/culture/amber-alerts-largely-ineffective- study-shows-4792/)

Like most attempts to protect our children from strangers, the Amber Alert system was a knee-jerk reaction to a shocking but exceedingly rare crime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> That seems like an incredibly odd system to be deployed, and to be used for that particular incident at that time.

<comment><USER10> But think of the children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> While I understand why they made this system on by default and opt-out, I feel like that's unethical and should have been opt-in. Adding such things to people's phones without their permission is a bad action done with good intentions.

Making it impossible to disable Presidential alerts is even worse.

<comment><USER12> As long as they tell you about it when you buy the phone, and there's an easy way to opt out, I don't see the problem. And after some time, people will just know that it is turned on by default on new phones.

<comment><USER11> They activated it suddenly in the past couple months on most existing phones without asking, under Congressional orders. And there is no way to opt out of Presidential alerts.

<comment><USER12> OK, that's not good. The system they are introducing here, NL-Alert (which still has some problems), is purely opt-in. And only for things that would make the air sirens go off.

I wonder what kind of alert a Presidential alert could be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Discussion last night ("Just got an Amber Alert ..."): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6165026](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6165026) had predominantly "think of the children, how can you complain about your minor inconvenience" prevailing tone.

I wonder what makes this thread so different. More people are focused on the costs as well as the benefits (I agree that the costs are significant). If it's not just a random difference in the initial seeding of comments, I'd have to guess that it's the authority of latimes.com talking about how (many!) Californians are startled etc. Now this is a safe, approved line of thought.

This calls into suspicion the independence of the typical HN comment. If you're just posting to be seen on the prevailing side, why comment at all? The less deeply you think before talking, the more you're swayed by subtle priming and attention-focusing trivia.

Also interesting, a years-ago attempt to shame Apple into enabling Amber alerts: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509741](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=509741)

It sounds like a less intrusive amber-alert UI (a regular text, for example) would be accepted by most, although I'm sure if you tally up the attention spent vs. the increased odds of catching a criminal vs. increased harassment of near-matches, it's not a clear win.

</comment><comment><USER14> If the goal of the iPhone Amber Alert feature was to wake people up, induce panic, then get them to turn alerts off...it's working.

A good example of the law of unintended consequences.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Most newer phones are automatically set up to receive the alerts -- which > look like text messages but are free -- meaning customers must contact their > cell service provider to opt out of the program.

FWIW, on the iPhone, AMBER is a switch under notifications; you don't have to contact anyone to turn it off. (The alerts also come with a "Settings" button to help users turn them off if the notification was unwelcome.)

<comment><USER15> This is true in Android as well, at least on my Galaxy S III running Android 4.1.2. The preference setting on my device is in Messaging > Settings > Emergency Alerts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> About a week ago my phone went bonkers with a weather alert, warning of potential flash floods. I would say this was roughly as distracting as an air raid siren... it wasn't raining and to my knowledge no flash floods actually came to visit destruction upon the Philadelphia region that day.

It seems absurd that there's no setting in iOS to disable this nonsense without calling up the phone company. Can we at least have a graduated system of alert terrifyingness out of which to opt?

<comment><USER17> > It seems absurd that there's no setting in iOS to disable this nonsense > without calling up the phone company

There is: Settings > Notifications > Government Alerts (at the bottom)

<comment><USER16> Cool, thanks for the pointer. I'd never scrolled past the start of the enormous list of notification center apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The way Android does Amber Alerts, which IIRC I have been getting for at least 2 years now, seems much more agreeable. That said I am surprised this just came up. I get an Amber Alert on my phone every couple of months or so.

Is this a regional based thing where it was just enabled in California so for whatever reason something that has been going on for awhile now finally hit the national news? Or is this alert format new to iOS? Basically, why haven't we heard about people in other cities complaining? (Or were they just ignored?)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is what it sounds like. I had no idea my phone make that sound. lol

[http://youtu.be/y2tj4vz8qX0?t=55s](http://youtu.be/y2tj4vz8qX0?t=55s)

</comment><comment><USER20> I was asleep when it went off and my immediate thought was that my phone had some sort of LiOn-battery-about-to-explode warning system. It freaked me out.

</comment><comment><USER21> Was this Amber Alert geo-targetted? I never even heard of Boulevard, CA, which is 500 miles away from my home.

</comment><comment><USER22> Um... I received that this morning but my phone was on silent so I didn't hear a damn thing. I did see it on my phone when I looked at it, but no big deal. Android was nice enough to say 'You just received an emergency alert. Do you want to continue receiving these? Yes/No'.

</comment><comment><USER23> I admit to not knowing how effective Amber Alerts are. Perhaps the cell phone alerts are overkill and should be opt-in. However, are the commenters here really claiming the abduction of two children after their mother was slain to be 'mundane' or 'trivial?'

<comment><USER8> [http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/...](http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/07/20/abducted/?page=full)

<comment><USER23> I already admitted the possibility that Amber Alerts themselves may be overkill and ineffective, so that doesn't really respond to my comment about 'trivial' and 'mundane' descriptors being applied to the actual abduction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My girlfriend got this last night. Scared the shit out of us with a bunch of beeping and buzzing. Then just went away as soon as we looked at it...we still don't know what the actual alert was for.

</comment><comment><USER25> If a alert sounded like that in Brazil, people would instantly panic and think we are under attack by US.

Using a alert like that for something trivial is VERY, VERY, VERY stupid.

It should be just a normal SMS...

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady People are actually angry over this? If you are sleeping put your phone on silent or do not disturb. If you aren't how inconvenient is one text message?

<comment><USER20> It wasn't a normal "ding!" text message - it was sirens and all-hell-breaking- loose.

<comment><USER26> Yep, these kept going off on the (crowded) train this morning, and I thought they were some sort of fire alarm. It didn't help that everyone assumed the noise was not coming from their phone (because they'd never heard it before or found a configuration page for it,) so they mostly just let it go off while looking around for the source. The whole ride was more than a bit surreal.

<comment><USER27> That sounds intense. Maybe this was one mass psychological experiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> tl;dr An amber alert went out to people's phones, here are 5 tweets about it.</comment>


Facebook to Begin Testing Six New Reaction Buttons - <AUTHOR> http://ir.net/news/technology/11603/facebook-reactions/ <comment><USER2> Still missing the dislike button... I would rather have "dislike" than "angry"</comment>


Snapchat QR code Stickers - <AUTHOR> http://snaptagstickers.com <comment><AUTHOR> Get your very own Snapchat QR code as a sticker and stick them around your city to gain more followers.</comment>


Ask HN: Why are there so few intermediate learning resources? - <AUTHOR>

When I first started out as a web developer (about 8 years ago now), there were literally millions of sites and books to teach me 'beginners X' or 'Y for dummies'.
Then I got beyond the beginner stage and struggled to find any useful resources that didn't assume I was an expert and already.
Even for things that are meant to be step by step guides I sometimes find that they assume that I already know how to perform some non trivial step and breeze over it. Obviously I then go searching to find out what I'm meant to do but there's often little to no meaningful explanations to be found.
So I ask this: Why are there so few resources targeted at bridging the gap between beginner and advanced level skill sets?
OR
am I just not very good at using the internet? <comment><USER2> The intermediate stage of developing is learned through experience and personal research. The newbie-friendly stuff is just a quick get go of some very universal concepts that you don't really need to learn on your own. The hardcore stuff is difficult and complex and very specific or just an aggregation of the experience of some senior developer.

</comment><comment><USER3> The difference between a beginner and an intermediate is the fact that intermediates understand that they have to get their hands dirty to improve. Whereas beginners want everything spelled out for them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Because such a book would have to be written for each individual, for each topic. Hire a tutor, or a consultant, or get a liberal arts education that teaches you how to learn independently.

<comment><USER5> True. Or if he insist on staying online try spending some time on Coursera |EdX | Udacity</comment></comment>


Cheap Recurring Payments with Stripe and AWS Lambda - <AUTHOR> http://normal-extensions.com/2017/05/05/simple-recurring/ <comment><USER2> Remember that if you use stripe subscriptions you absolutely __must __setup a webhook, or otherwise examine your logs every month.

Why? If a customer is subscribed to a "plan", and their payment fails it is retried three days later, then five days later, then eight days later, and if all three payments fail they're quietly unsubscribed without any notification being sent to you!

I have a toy project which has paying customers and last month realized I'd had people using my SaaS for over a year without having paid me. A few failures in a row meant they were unsubscribed, and since I didn't read the reports every month I didn't notice.

I reworked my payment system now, to subscribe to webhooks and ensure I find out promptly in the future.

Not a huge deal at my volume, but a surprise I could have lived without.

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, did any of these customers return?

<comment><USER2> I had three users who were really affected, and all of them paid up. None of them "left" really, they were receiving a service from me, just not paying for it.

The user who had a years free service I wrote down a little - they should have paid around £140, and I suggested we'd be good if they paid £100.

Perhaps I went too easy on them, but I was trying to be nice and it wasn't their fault I'd not been paid, not directly. The other couple of users ranged from 2-8 months of non-payment, or so, and I agreed with each that I'd bill them the full amount as a one-off charge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> ~3%, dirt cheap?!

Why are so many of you so happy to throw so much cash away to process money? I _know_ Stripe is lovely to integrate but as a business you have to shop around.

In the UK (and EU) card processing is much cheaper. Stripe is closer to 2% but if you shop around, you'll find somebody who'll offer you 0.8-0.9%, give you free terminals and no monthly contract fees.

Edit for those asking: Worldpay and Handepay are the best rates I've seen recently. Both for online and off. But again, don't just cluster around one company, harass a few yourself. They're willing to compete.

<comment><USER5> Stripe has an extensive ecosystem of services that integrates with it, literally hundreds ([https://stripe.com/works-with](https://stripe.com/works- with)).

The services I need to run the back-office operations of my business including bookkeeping, invoicing, receipts, business metrics, customer support etc. all use Stripe data and APIs. Writing our own integrations, or worse, trying to poorly replicate some third party service, would be money poorly spent. It would take a very large transaction volume for it to make any sense to spend engineering time here, and arguably the end result will be qualitatively worse than just going with the market leader. Even if that calculation does come out positive, you still have to consider whether the engineering time wouldn't provide an even higher ROI by being invested into your core product instead.

<comment><USER6> Integrating with a merchant payment gateway isn't rocket science. A few weeks is easily worth the cost (it doesn't take that long, either, most have decent enough APIs or SDKs that may not be stripe quality but still are simple to integrate with).

It doesn't take a large transaction volume to justify the engineering cost at all. We're talking entire percentages of revenue. The ROI justification is going to be a hard one to beat in this case.

<comment><USER5> The point was that there are N other services you use when running a subscription service, that all integrate out of the box with Stripe and not at all with the cheaper alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's unbelievable how easy this is with Stripe in comparison to PayPal. I had to do the latter a week ago and it was horrible [1]. It's no wonder Stripe is so successful.

[1]: [https://fman.io/blog/paypal-for- saas-99-problems/](https://fman.io/blog/paypal-for-saas-99-problems/)

<comment><USER8> Isn't that why they made Braintree

<comment><USER9> Not sure if you're implying that PayPal "made Braintree" or just that someone made it, but PayPal didn't acquire Braintree until 2013, after being founded in 2007 [1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braintree_(company)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braintree_\(company\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, the others mentioned have a monthly fee and then lower transaction fees. So Stripe isn't remarkably cheap.

<comment><USER11> Depends. Developing intregrations has a cost, and until you're processing enough to offset the difference, using something other than Stripe is bad business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is what people are missing on Lambda. It's pay-to-play, and for 90% of the sites out there, they're paying too much in comparison.

If you're running server instances 24x7 for an application that is doing < 25 requests/minute on average, you would probably find your hosting costs come down (perhaps to zero) and your reliability would increase considerably if you moved to Lambda-style applications.

serverless.io is a decent framework to get started (allows for local dev and testing, manages deployment) and is agnostic in terms of deployment target: AWS, IBM, Google coming soon, etc.

The only reason we're not rolling it out everywhere at work is because it assumes all developers are deploying directly from their term with god-like CloudFormation access. Nope, nope, nooope. We just need to build the deploy pipeline for it, and then off we go.

<comment><USER13> But are they really paying too much? I can't think of a lot of products out there, especially those that have a recurring subscription, that don't required some sort of database. So you need a server running a database anyway. It seems that the subscription logic would be a very negligible addition to the instance you have to be running anyway.

To me it seems like the only sweet spot for lambda on a large scale would be for those that have consistent usage of a small instance that have some extra functions that need to be highly scalable and are very inconsistent.

<comment><USER12> There are multiple alternatives to running your own DB service, and again, all pay-per-use.

In the original article the author suggested on a successful subscription a write to the MailChimp API (because that's the product). In that example, MailChimp is the DB. You don't have to run a copy of a DB locally if you architect things like that. Obviously if the call fails, you need to think about what you fall back to, which is why error handling is such a critical piece of the the Lambda ecosystem - as it should be for every ecosystem, really.

<comment><USER14> In this case you should really just dump the subscription on a queue (SQS) and process the payment to mailchimp on a different thread that can deal with errors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been using Laravel Spark [1] for recurring payments built on top of Stripe, and at a 100$ one-time fee for Spark and a small server setup (that I needed for the service in the first place) I think it's a cheap option for recurring payments, too.

[1] [https://spark.laravel.com/](https://spark.laravel.com/)

<comment><USER16> I did something similar with aMember a few years back. Supports many payment processors; a one time fee. API, etc. [https://www.amember.com/](https://www.amember.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The problem is that Stripe is still not usable in the half of the world, including my country, Romania.

<comment><USER18> You can use Atlas cant you?

<comment><USER19> What is Atlas in this context?

<comment><USER20> Stripe's offering to set up a company in the US, with bank accounts and everything.

[https://stripe.com/atlas](https://stripe.com/atlas)

<comment><USER19> Ahh. thanks. I googled for Atlas, but as you can imagine, lots of things came up..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I maintain a small open source library for managing payments websites that uses this architecture [1]. My Lambda costs have been about $0.04 per transaction.

Also you can provision AWS from the browser using a CloudFormation template and a Launch Stack URL [2].

[1]: [https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket](https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket). [2]: [https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket#automated- dep...](https://github.com/christophercliff/flatmarket#automated-deployments)

</comment><comment><USER22> I never got around getting the true value prop of recurring solutions such as chargebee etc when used on top of stripe. Stripe already provides excellent recurring subscription payments api out of the box, so why use any of these services. Am I missing something ?

<comment><USER23> We transitioned from Stripe to Chargebee importing our Stripe stuff. It was a solid 2 man-months of engineering (of our 4-person company) and we questioned the cost through the process, but it has really paid off. Stripe was a great starting point for us to collect direct payments, but as we grew Chargebee has proven very worthwhile.

The main value is central customer and subscription database, which muxes multiple payment methods: Credit Card (via Stripe), Amazon payments, and Paypal. This alone has doubled our monthly paying customer growth.

Next it allows us to create invoices, subscriptions and customers data to put in the same database for customers from other channels -- mostly this is our iOS users who have to subscribe via iTunes (due to Apple TOS) -- now we can manage their data in the same place.

It is also an integrated coupon management system, hosts custom styled payment/subscription management pages (as opposed to just a tiny payment widget like Stripe), supports more flexibility like trial periods, switching between subscription plans, adding credits to a user's account.

We've moved all our non-iOS customers to Chargebee for about 6 months now, and really happy with it.

<comment><USER24> Have you done any formal ROI on the move to Chargebee?

I moved from Chargify to Stripe about a year ago (to save on cost) and the biggest challenge was getting customers to re-enter their card details for Stripe.

I offered a coupon for 50% off a month's subscription to entice them to do so but still resulted in a couple of months of paying both Chargify and Stripe while I chased the errant customers.

<comment><USER23> Chargebee had a one-time free customer database import process from Stripe, does Chargify/Stripe not support any kind of customer import/transfer?

I can't give numbers for our ROI, but we spend far less time providing payment/subscription support, and pay a flat extra cost to Chargebee for the added abstraction layer they provide so it's easy to evaluate -- worth roughly 100 subscribers/month, and since shifting to Chargebee we gained more than that number within the first month beyond our regular month/month growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Thanks for article. Though I known about Lambda for long time, but this is one nice example, how Lambda can be used. Now I am planning to use to develop some zapier like integrations.

-=-=

Having said that, before you jump into making free payment forms for your static site, keep PCI compliance in mind. (even if stripe is rendering form using js).

</comment><comment><USER26> I've seen several comments on here about how high a percentage is being charged by credit card processors and this is something I've wondered about for a while. There are some sites where I feel like I must be missing something.

As an example; [https://www.sendmoneytoschool.com](https://www.sendmoneytoschool.com).

The site is used to pay online with a credit card for your children's school lunch and it typically charges a $1.50 "convenience fee". It is my understanding that they are not charging schools for the use of this service (I may be mistaken); at Stripe or PayPals fee rates this service would be losing money. Every $100 would incur at least a $2.00 fee. Here a low cost processor like Worldpay and Handepay would allow for a profit; albeit a very small one.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is pretty cool but to be pedantic this is actually API Gateway proxying requests to AWS Lambda not just a Lambda function. Zappa and other Serverless Frameworks sort of obfuscate the fact that API Gateway is setup in front of Lambda but that is what is happening here. Again, cool example.

</comment><comment><USER28> I can see many cases where there is need for more control. Yes, we can start and end manually, but is it acceptable to be that flaky with payments. I mean, I have managed my personal server in pretty ad-hoc way and more often than I expected there are some problems with something. I don't think I can trust myself with lambda.

</comment><comment><USER29> Now if only my property manager could get with the beat and take electronic payments ... I still have to bike over to their office and drop off a physical check every month because they don't take anything else.

<comment><USER30> Can you use bill pay from your bank?

<comment><USER29> I think so, but it requires me to call them to set up, I hate calling and being put on hold.

And also, phone calling usually involves walking out to the street so I can get reception, yell my social security number in front of a bunch of strangers walking by, and somehow verify my account number and various transactions from my account which I can't do without going back inside, logging in from a computer and checking them, and then having the call dropped because I went inside. Or having my phone battery cop out halfway through being put on hold.

I _hate_ phone calling. It's easier to bike to my property manager's office 12 times to drop off checks than make a single phone call to my bank to set up something that should be doable from a web page.

<comment><USER31> Most banks allow you to setup bill pay online. The bank will mail a check on your schedule. No need for phones.

<comment><USER29> I wish. Both of my banks bring up messages saying to call customer service when I click on their respective Bill Pay links. So much for "online" banking. We're back in the 80's.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is simple and cool.

You'd still need some way to authorize subscribers on your website, no? Therefore, you couldn't create a serverless subscription blog/website... unless I'm missing something.

<comment><USER24> The example given in the article is a pay-to-subscribe mailing list run on Mailchimp where you can use an API call to add the paying user to the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> id rather use XRP</comment>


Evorus: A Crowd-Powered Conversational Assistant - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.02668 <comment><USER2> It would be interesting to test this approach on reddit. Some specialized reddits receive lots of beginner questions (common case being recommendation for low-cost starting equipment for a hobby). These questions are always answered in FAQ, but are still frequent. A capable bot could learn from previous answers and provide a good generic answer that could be corrected as needed by community.

Having one-on-one chat with bot is not the best approach, as everyone will have different experience and there would be no consensus where improvements have to be made.</comment>


Advertisers can now pay to sneak by your ad blocker (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cio.com/article/2986749/consumer-electronics/advertisers-can-now-pay-to-sneak-by-your-ad-blocker.html <comment><USER3> this is why a huge number of former adblock plus users have now moved to ublock origin.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock- origin...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublock- origin/cjpalhdlnbpafiamejdnhcphjbkeiagm?hl=en)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> We've recently launched a competitive product to Adblock Plus - the product noted in this article, made by EYEO. It has been extremely illuminating - <USER2> also disappointing – to learn how much user deception there is in the adblocking market.

EYEO also has a long running practice of using legal tactics to try and shutdown and intimidate competitive products. We've been hit with these tactics recently.

<comment><USER4> What is your product then? I don't think it hurts telling the name here, especially if someone asks for it. And also, what's your USP against ublock?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our product is Magic Lasso – [https://www.magiclasso.co](https://www.magiclasso.co) – an efficient and high performance ad blocker and content blocker for the iPhone, iPad and Mac with native Safari integration.</comment></comment></comment>


Showing up - <AUTHOR> http://cdixon.org/2011/04/12/showing-up/ <comment><USER2> The real take away use supply and demand to your advantage.

They took a supply of MIT programmers who weren't in demand and leveraged it. I think this is a huge take away for startups trying to get attention online. Imagine you post your startup related to food (<http://www.housefed.com>) on HN. No big deal; another will be along later.

However, imagine you post a food startup to a foodies forum! Bam, you have a huge demand of interest and limited supply of technology improving food. You've just found where you are in more demand and you can provide the supply side.

<comment><USER3> Wait, can you explain the part again about MIT programmers who weren't in demand?

<comment><USER2> It appears as though they weren't in demand. The demand is for good programmers (school isn't relevant). These weren't 'good' programmers for a number of reasons.

1\. They didn't have a degree. Technically, they weren't MIT programmers at the time.

2\. They didn't have 10+ years of experience with Java. Good programmers are often confused with experienced programmers.

I still think my point still stands though, go find out where your supply (start up opportunity, applying new technology to niche community) is disproportionately in demand.

<comment><USER4> I find it hard to believe that CS grads (or soon to be grads) from MIT would have a hard time finding a job because they don't have 10 years of Java experience.

These people always had the option of graduating and finding another job. Instead, they chose to work for this startup (and dropout I suppose). I don't think they 'settled' for Siteadvisor because of lack of job opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Minor quibble: it was actually Woody Allen who coined the "80 percent of success is showing up" phrase.

<comment><USER6> True.

But then wasn't it Twain who said, "In the future 80 percent of all quotations will be attributed to Mark Twain"?

<comment><USER7> Nope, that was you. Congratulations on being in the 20 percent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> X-Istence I work at an awesome start-up (iPhase3, my main income while I figure out where I want to take my own startup) and the only way I got here was because I knew someone that worked here.

Networking is definitely a big thing, and being in the right place at the right time. I liked the idea, and it allowed me to do what I love most, work on back-end high availability systems.

</comment><comment><USER8> I love the guerilla tactic of repeatedly pitching to random students at MIT lunch counters. Recruiting is hard, but persistence is essential.</comment>


Happy Petrov day - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov

<comment><USER2> I find it fascinating and terrifying that on the one hand, these events were "close calls", on the other hand, considering that we can celebrate this event today, they were inevitable.

Logically speaking, we always must live in a world where past existential threats to humanity were avoided (including super-volcanoes, asteroids), but that says nothing about the possibility of future existential threats wiping out humanity.

<comment><USER3> One of my favorite SCPs: [http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-988](http://www.scp- wiki.net/scp-988)

Spoiler (including why it's related to your post) since I think it's easy to miss what this is: Vg'f n obk gung, jura bcrarq, qrfgeblf gur havirefr. Fvapr nccneragyl guvf obk yvirf va n znal-jbeyqf havirefr, vg'f onfvpnyyl n havirefr-fpnyr Dhnaghz Fhvpvqr qrivpr.

[http://www.rot13.com/index.php](http://www.rot13.com/index.php) , for your convenience.

<comment><USER4> How did you come to that conclusion? It could similarly be a joke out of a ringworld novel too.

<comment><USER3> The big clue is in the last paragraph.

And yes, I'm extrapolating a bit, but given the rest of the SCP-universe (inasmuch as there is a such a thing), it's a pretty reasonable conclusion. If it's wrong to you, well, it's right to me, Hail Fanon, All Hail Discordia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI, if you call it Petrov day, your eastern european orthodox friends (such as Bulgarians and Russians) will tell you you are 3 months late. "Petrovden" (den == day) is the shorthand name of the St Peter's and Paul's day on the 29th June, it is a nameday of everyone called Peter, Paul and their variations, and it is very well recognized and celebrated.

<comment><USER6> Never heard of it, leave alone seeing anyone celebrating it.

Though I did hear about the "Saint Mother Mary of Egypt" day which was about every second Friday if you were to believe a heavy-drinking madam two floors down from where we lived.

<comment><USER5> [https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE...](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%8C)

<comment><USER7> The "Spring farewell day" ... on June 29th?

Yep, sounds like a Russian holiday alright :)

The context is that it's the oldest inside Russian joke to make up random occassions when drinking. You feel like having a drink, but can't justify it - no problem, drink to the revitalizing power of parsley or to bid spring farewell or something as silly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Happy Petrov day, everyone. I thought I was the only one that recognized this holiday. Thanks, Omegant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Happy Petrov day to you Bill!.

It´s in my calendar, and I´ve already wished all my friends happy Petrov day (via Facebook).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Holding back a world on the brink of madness cant be easy. A good man.

<comment><USER10> We are all fortunate that there were a lot of good people on both sides during the Cold War.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thankfully, we're on one of the multiple universes that had this guy to stop nuclear armaggeddon from happening.

</comment><comment><USER12> If there were ever one guy that deserved the Nobel's Peace Prize, it would have been him!

</comment><comment><USER13> So according to the wiki article:

-$30,000 from the Dresden Prize

-$1,000 from SF's World Citizen Award (does that even cover airfare from Russia?!)

Preventing nuclear disaster, it seems, is an undervalued skill. Mr. Petrov needs to fire his publicist.

<comment><USER14> An interesting part of the article is that he was actually _demoted_ after averting nuclear disaster. This is because admitting that there was a fault in the nuclear defense system would be tantamount to admitting that top Soviet military and scientific minds were capable of error. Rather than embarrass the regime, the military quietly moved Petrov out of the spotlight.

<comment><USER15> This bug in human nature makes me half wish they were destroyed, but the other half of me wants to take eat, and be entertained.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Software bugs are a threat to humanity.

<comment><USER17> The See Also section at the bottom of that wiki article is enough to induce serious pucker in even someone with tungsten-level constitution.

<comment><USER18> Command and Control[1] offers a comprehensive compendium of nuclear incidents if you're interested in more. It's quite remarkable that the US never faced an accidental nuclear detonation, despite the SAC, Air Force and Navy's bickering between themselves over control of them, and their refusal to fit safety devices until late in the war.

My favourite anecdote is the code on all warheads on the US' Minuteman fleet being set to 00000000 as an exercise in simultaneously conforming to and circumventing requirements for PALs (locks to forbid misuse).

[1] : [http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/eric- schlosser-c...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/eric-schlosser- command-control-excerpt-nuclear-weapons)

<comment><USER10> The book "One Minute to Midnight" about the Cuban Missile Crisis has a rather long list of places during that confrontation that almost led to nuclear war.

[http://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnight-Kennedy- Khrushchev...](http://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnight-Kennedy- Khrushchev/dp/1400078911)

One fascinating one was a U2 getting lost on the way to the North Pole due to the Northern Lights and flying back into the Soviet Union just at the _wrong_ time - alarming the Soviets and resulting in fighters being sent up by the US to protect the ailing U2. Unfortunately, due to the US being at Defcon 2 the fighters were only armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles.... The relief (for a number of reasons) the U2 pilot felt when he eventually landed was, understandably, rather intense!

Amazing book about a ghastly time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thank you, mr. Petrov!

</comment><comment><USER20> I read that as Harry Potter Day. _sigh_

<comment><USER21> The guy possibly prevented a global thermonuclear war and that's your comment?

<comment><USER20> It's my comment because it's the truth. I was tired. No need to downvote.</comment></comment></comment>


Docker without Docker - <AUTHOR> https://chimeracoder.github.io/docker-without-docker/#1 <comment><USER2> Author here - I'm working on a blog post for this and didn't expect this to be posted on HN so soon, but I guess that's what I should expect for posting a link to it in another HN comment! :)

These slides correspond to a workshop I conducted a week ago demonstrating the internals of Docker and how Docker containers can be run without using any of the Docker tools or runtime.

Docker is a great tool, and I'm glad it's gained so much traction. But containerization is still new to many people, and even then there's still a lot of confusion about the difference between Docker and containerization in general. The goal of this presentation isn't to discourage anyone from using Docker, but to outline the lay of the land for people interested in using containers.

Personally, I run containers both with systemd and with Docker. The good news is that it's really easy to switch from one to the other, so there's very little cost to trying it out both ways.

<comment><USER3> Off topic: how do I create slides like this? What did you use to create 'em?

<comment><USER4> An alternative to this system that I have been enjoying using is slidy, it makes slick presentation:

[http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy2/](http://www.w3.org/Talks/Tools/Slidy2/)

<comment><USER5> No scroll wheel support? F that.

<comment><USER4> Scroll wheel on a slide?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The slides mention that Docker containers have hashes. This is not the case. In fact, it's probably one of the biggest user misunderstandings of Docker. Container IDs and Image IDs are _not_ SHA hashes. Even though it may look like it they are actually just randomly generated 256-bit hex-encoded unique identifiers.

Since the slides also mention that you can use Docker images with a systemd- nspawn/machinectl setup it would be great if they soon supported the v2 Docker Registry and image format which actually does use content-addressable hashes for images.

<comment><USER2> > Container IDs and Image IDs are not SHA hashes.

Thanks for catching that - I've updated it.

> Since the slides also mention that you can use Docker images with a systemd- > nspawn/machinectl setup it would be great if they soon supported the v2 > Docker Registry and image format which actually does use content-addressable > hashes for images.

I haven't used the v2 registry, so I don't know if systemd (machinectl) supports this yet, but I imagine they will soon if they don't already.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Use LXC and LXD. It's the best of both worlds. Docker is very limiting and already falling short in features. For instance daemon must run as root which sucks. LXC supports unprivileged namespaces so all users of a system can have their own set of containers. Docker insists on being the parent process, That means when docker dies, so do all your containers.. This is really bad...

<comment><USER8> How do you get boot2LXC working? Any docs, or does everyone have to DIY it all again?

Is there an ecosystem around LXC that provides things like Flynn?

I can do it all myself, but I can't do it, my development job, and be home for dinner at night. Like most tools today, the value is in the ecosystem, not the tool itself.

<comment><USER9> LXC is generic container technology like KVM OR Xen are generic virtualization technologies. LXC virtualizes the OS environment and gives you lightweight containers that you can seamlessly transition your VM workloads to, or use as a lightweight portable alternative to VMs, so its use case is general and not a narrow focus on paas or deployment centric technology.

Users can then decide how they want to deploy. Docker takes that base container and adds layers of aufs, constrains the container OS template to single app by modifying the container OS's init, gives you the dockerfile and focuses on deploy centric functionality with immutability idempotency etc, and this makes it much more complex to use than LXC. Its a use case built on Linux containers, not containers itself.

LXC is not 'low level kernel capabilities' [1] as Docker misleadingly refers to it on it's website. This has resulted in a lot of confusion about LXC in the Docker ecosystem with folks thinking its 'difficult to use' or 'just low level stuff'. A tad unfair to LXC given Docker was based on it till 0.9 and knew exactly what it was, and is as accurate as referring to docker or nspawn as low level capabilities.

That would be kernel namespaces and cgroups that LXC uses to give end user containers, like Docker uses post 0.9 directly with libcontainer and systemd- nspawn uses for its containers.

Docker builds on containers to deliver additional functionality. There is an additional cost in complexity but if that is your use case the trade off may be worth it, but for other use cases the complexity may be overkill.

You can simply make a VM image of LXC installed and you have boot2lxc, the vast ecosystem of orchestration technology that works in VMs and systems works in LXC, you don't need specific tools to be designed just for LXC. its not opinionated or exclusive like the tools built around the Docker ecosystem that are finely focussed on a specific use case and typically support Docker only.

[1] [https://linuxcontainers.org](https://linuxcontainers.org)

<comment><USER10> > A tad unfair to LXC given Docker was based on it till 0.9 and knew exactly > what it was,

I had noticed that too initially.

They had to minimize it because otherwise people would just say "why not just use LXC, what do I need the whale for?".

From the marketing standpoint it had to be "yeah that is complicated low level bearded guy stuff, you need cool easy slick stuff we provide".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You may want to mention that the network and disk isolation are not what someone from Docker would expect by default.

It uses the docker equivalent of "net=host" (which provides better performance at the cost of isolation), and the disk is pointing at a shared "changeroot" on disk, instead of at a layered FS.

Both of these can be better isolated with natted interfaces and a `btrfs` (which has its own reliability issues) layered image, but they are not what you expect by default.

</comment><comment><USER12> > At its core, your OS is just a bunch of files

"But, you NEED to run the installer on that (bare metal) server!" Nope, I can just boot from knoppix (remember?) and mount the disk and run debootstrap on it.

Every so often I run into programmers and sysadmins that believe these things are a kind of magic. They're not. They're just files on a disk.

Love this presentation. Thank you!

edit: s/mount knoppix/boot from knoppix/

</comment><comment><USER13> Very interesting. Almost got ready to up my systemd-hate on slide 19: "machinectl -H firstname.lastname@example.com:debian-tree"[1] -- but calmed down and had a look around and saw that it just uses ssh, not some pottering pixiedust kerberos abomination...:

[http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/machinectl.h...](http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/machinectl.html)

With proper handling of access (allowing unprivileged users to start containers) along with --bind for the home directory, this could be a viable alternative to Debian's schroot [s].

There's also a complimentary lwn article from 2013 that's worth reading:

[https://lwn.net/Articles/572957/](https://lwn.net/Articles/572957/)

That also contains a quote that explains a bit about systemd (if read maliciously): "As part of the development of systemd, the team looked at various kernel features to see if they were relevant to the project."

At least with this (containers w/log handling etc) we get _something_ for our complexity. Still, having had two seperate machines fail to boot/even come up with a text console with some sensible errors - I'm far from sold on the idea that I want all these features in PID 1.

[1] changed user "foo" to "root" to be a little more clear. Maybe "user1" would work as well - but systemd (unlike lxc etc) requires root?).

[s] [https://wiki.debian.org/Schroot](https://wiki.debian.org/Schroot)

Reminds me that I should probably make write-up of how I set up schroot to allow "source"-access for root, and automagic sessions for a standard user backed by lvm -- the documentation is a bit dense.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord tl;dr It's basically a tech demo for systemd, and the systemd-nspawn tool in particular (which you might recall recently gained Docker format support).

<comment><USER14> Yep, and not particularly interesting. It is a catchy title and some showcase for Systemd.

<comment><USER15> Much like docker.

<comment><USER14> I am not sure what you are talking about. I am talking about this:

"Within 9 days, all of the top 10 Linux distributions will use systemd by default, or descend from one that does." [https://chimeracoder.github.io/docker-without- docker/#1](https://chimeracoder.github.io/docker-without-docker/#1)

<comment><USER16> What they mean is when the slides were made, Debian 8 was about to be released in "stable" with systemd. With debian 8 released the only oddball is ubuntu with their own early fork of systemd called upstart. It means from this day forward the things you see in the demo are already or inevitably available on every install of linux. You don't need to install anything special to do what he's doing there.

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Linux_Dis...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Linux_Distribution_Timeline_with_Android.svg)

<comment><USER17> 1\. Upstart is not a fork of systemd, and was started a fair amount of time before systemd. 2\. Ubuntu 15.04 just shipped _with_ systemd as the default init system (although installing "upstart-sysv" the system should revert to using upstart).

<comment><USER18> Note that in the Grub boot menu you can also choose whether Ubuntu 15.04 boots with upstart or systemd. Both are functional.

Thankfully that saved me when systemd couldn't grasp the concept of a btrfs volume being spread over two disks (raid 0).

<comment><USER19> really? i have that exact setup except with three striped disks, it works fine

<comment><USER18> Gory details are at [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/14478...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/systemd/+bug/1447879)

It actually mounts root correctly, but them fails to mount home which has exactly the same details except a different subvol parameter.

<comment><USER20> Systemd seems to have ongoing problems with mounting...

<comment><USER18> In this case it would perfectly if it just tried to do the mount, exactly as written in fstab. Instead it tries to be clever and ends up outwitting itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is what normal LXC containers has always done. Systemd nspawn does not yet provide a toolset to wrap these capabilities like the LXC project. Things like userland tools, library of OS templates for containers, networking, features like unprivileged containers that allow non root users to run containers etc.

Lennart Poettering has spoken about containers and btrfs subvolumes and easy snapshots, this could be the direction systemd goes in future for managing the OS with apps in btrfs subvolume containers, with rollback, management etc so this seems like it may mature fairly fast, except unprivileged container support which Lennart does not seem to like.[1]

[1][https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...](https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/posts/W2itNERXvMh)

</comment><comment><USER21> As a heavy docker user who only has a couple of years of focused linux experience I found this fascinating, even if you weren't quite ready to post it. Thanks for the slides.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is almost exactly how we run the Ironic provisioning agent that supports Rackspace OnMetal. We export use Docker to build and export an image, then use CoreOS + systemd-nspawn to run it across every unprovisioned machine.

<comment><USER23> Funny, we're running the rackspace-monitoring-agent on CoreOS like that. however we do docker pull/extract before running systemd-nspawn, if i got it right the systemd-tooling can handle docker images as they are, which would be nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anybody else having issues navigating? I'm on Firefox.

<comment><USER25> It's works fine here using the right arrow on Firefox Nightly 40.0a1 running on Ubuntu 15.04.

<comment><USER24> Ha, it didn't occur to me to use the keyboard.

<comment><USER26> What I find incredible is that the same exchange takes place on HN every single time a web slideshow is posted...

Isn't trying the arrow keys / keyboard navigation an instictive thing to do?

<comment><USER24> > Isn't trying the arrow keys / keyboard navigation an instictive thing to do?

Evidently not. My position is that a web page that is impossible to navigate via mouse is broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> that's a good intro to systemd-nspawn and machinectl - which happen to be much nicer to use than docker (yet transparently work with docker images if you want that). its also easier to install since you generally "already have it" and there's no setup.

There's a few things it doesn't do (neither docker, or lxc for that matter) - yet at least - such as mounting fses before container start or manage upgrades.

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure how you'd manage upgrades - that's an OS function, but for nspawn you'd just write your unit file to Require some *.mount files before boot.

<comment><USER27> updates generally require a daemon restart (and in this case perhaps a container restart), if you couple it with requisite mounts, the whole machinery has to care for mounts, upgrades and restarts altogether

I suspect it could be hacked somehow with service files, too

This is particularly significant if you use something like btrfs snapshots with a base mount and child mounts, or overlayfs and invalidate inodes during upgrades, instead of a dumb-ish "yum upgrade/apt-get upgrade/etc"

The main difference is that in this case the update is at the mount / container level when propagated from the base image.

Some (most) others also do that with image versions and a full image swap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We're back to chroot jails again?

<comment><USER30> Everything that is old is new again. For full disclosure i went from support Linux/Solaris (sysadmin) to mainframe middleware (CICS/WebSphere app server).

<comment><USER29> Yeah. Back when I started as a sysadmin chroot jails with bind, qmail etc were all the rage.

I've seen them used in good and bad ways, but mostly the former. It's good to see something that actually solves real problems coming back in to use again. Added bonus, it's an extremely mature (from a tech perspective) way of doing things. Chroot jails have been around for decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This slideshow is impossible to read on an iPad; the scrolling isn't synchronized with the width of the screen, and attempting to align a page makes it jump to another. Any solutions?

Edit: Apparently, if you don't touch-move but only tap, you can keep it for, getting out of sync.

</comment><comment><USER32> Somewhat unrelated. Is there a way to ship a container image with just a "diff" of the default image. Say I build a container with ubuntu 14.04 + some packages installed with apt. I would like to be able to "export" the filesystem, but only the files that are not present in the base os image. The reason I would like this is that I would like to use docker (or systemd- nspawn) to run containers on an device that will not always have access to the internet. It would be nice to be able to add a new package to that device, and not be multi 100 MBs. As long as I can guarantee that the base image is present on the device, I should not need to include it in the image.

<comment><USER33> As long as you are pulling images from a docker registry, this should automatically happen.

<comment><USER32> Ya the point is it won't have access to a registry. I would like to be able to ship docker "packages" that have everything they need, but not have a lot of duplicate data (the base os image) in each package. I should be able to have the base image as its own package for example, and the other packages just have the "diff" files that they need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So we should also add Docker to the chimera that systemd is becoming?

<comment><USER35> It's already in there...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What is the actual difference here between using debootstrap and LXC?

<comment><USER27> debootstrap just populate a directory with files from the debian/ubuntu distros, LXC uses it, everyone who wants to create/boot a debian image that they create use it.

One major difference between systemd-nspawn and LXC is how simple and reliable systemd-nspawn - in particular the guest OS/image has to run systemd as well which is what provides the integration.

Eventually, if you wanted, you could mix and match the tools just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> @chimeracoder:

First thanks, this was really interesting.

Sorry, I must not be that bright, I cannot guess your email from your username :-( (and I don't have a tumbler login, and you haven't enable dm from strangers on twitter), but I wanted to point at that you have a typo on slide 9, s/ journactl/journalctl/.

</comment><comment><USER37> Combining this with IPFS could be pretty cool!

</comment><comment><USER38> I haven't used Docker myself. So what value add does Docker provide?

<comment><USER39> * Ease of use * Publicly available image registry * Dockerfiles

I should stress that last point - I dislike certain aspects of docker, but I love their system for building images. I want to somehow adapt it for building bare metal images.

<comment><USER40> > * Publicly available image registry

I am unconvinced downloading system images from the Internet is a great thing overall.

<comment><USER39> I somewhat agree, but it's a thing that many people see as a feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> What about the entries in /dev? Is mknod not a thing anymore, or do I not need to have /dev entries in my container root filesystem?

<comment><USER42> It's systemd based, so it'll be bringing udev along for the ride.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm very sad that Hacker School had to change its name (for entirely valid reasons, although it's sad they're there). "Recurse Center" makes it sound like some . . . creationist think-tank.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is interesting, any recommendations for further reading?

</comment><comment><USER45> What's old is new. You're describing containers I think.

<comment><USER46> See: User Mode Linux, available since somewhere around 2002 or 2003.

[http://user-mode-linux.sourceforge.net/](http://user-mode- linux.sourceforge.net/) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User- mode_Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-mode_Linux)

<comment><USER47> Not really the same, since that runs a full kernel for each "container". OpenVZ is a better example (and is, in fact, the precursor of LXC).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I feel like HN really loves docking.

</comment><comment><USER49> So, this is just a systemd commercial pretending to be about docker?

<comment><USER50> Well it says "without Docker" in the title so not sure what where you expecting...

<comment><USER49> anti-systemd comment buried to the bottom of the page. worth burning karma for!</comment></comment></comment>


RC1 ArangoDB 3.4 – What's new? - <AUTHOR> https://www.arangodb.com/2018/09/rc1-arangodb-3-4-whats-new/ <comment><USER2> I'm new to ArangoDB but this release looks impressive just by the sheer number of new features. Congrats!

I was wondering if this release allows FULLTEXT indexes when the backend is RocksDB (now that it is the default storage engine)? The new ArangoSearch features look cool, but honestly a bit daunting vs the simple setup of a FULLTEXT index.

By the way, the ArangoSearch tutorial casually talks about "ArangoDB views of type 'arangosearch'", but I haven't come across the concept of views before in the documentation. Are there other types of views?

<comment><USER3> Currently there are no other types of views. But they are planned and will follow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love each of the new releases. Would appreciate hearing any stories of performance implications with the 'Distributed COLLECT' improvements.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! We have a very brief description of the "distributed COLLECT" feature here: [https://github.com/arangodb/arangodb/blob/3.4/Documentation/...](https://github.com/arangodb/arangodb/blob/3.4/Documentation/Books/Manual/ReleaseNotes/NewFeatures34.md#distributed- collect)

More beef to be added to this until the GA release.

The benefits of distributed COLLECT will come into play for queries that can push the aggregate operations onto the shards. Previous versions of ArangoDB shipped all documents from the database servers to the coordinator, so the coordinator would do the central aggregation of the results from all shards to produce the result.

With distributed COLLECT we now create an additional shard-local COLLECT operation that performs part of the aggregation on the shards already. This allows sending just the aggregated per-shard results to the coordinator, so the coordinator can finally perform an aggregation of the per-shard aggregates.

This will be beneficial in many cases when the per-shard aggregated result is much smaller than the non-aggregated per-shard result.

Following is a very simple example. Let's say you have a collection "test" with 5 shards and 500k simple documents that have just one numeric attribute (plus the three system attributes "_key", "_id" and "_rev"):

        db._create("test", { numberOfShards: 5 });
        for (i = 0; i < 500000; ++i) {
          db.test.insert({ value: i });
        }

Running a query that will calculate the minimum and maximum values in the "value" attribute can make use of the distributed COLLECT:

        FOR doc IN test
          COLLECT AGGREGATE min = MIN(doc.value), max = MAX(doc.value)
          RETURN { min, max }

The database servers can compute the per-shard minimum and maximum values, so they will each only send two numeric values back to the coordinator.

Without the optimization, the database servers will either send the entire documents or a projection of each document (containing just each document's "value" attribute back) to the coordinator. But then each shard would still have to send 100k values on average.

With a local cluster that has 2 database servers and runs them on the same host as the coordinator, this simple query is sped up by a factor of 2 to 3 when the optimization is applied. In a "real" setup the speedup will be even higher because then there will be additional network roundtrips between the cluster nodes. And in reality documents tend to contains more data and collections tend to have more documents. If this is the case, then the speedup will be even higher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Graph database aficionados, I have a question: What's the deal with most graph databases having a very limited number of types? It would be nice if we had more robust numeric types (integers and decimals rather than just doubles) and timestamps for example.

<comment><USER7> This is on the list of more than one teammate here at ArangoDB. But also not trivial to implement.

<comment><USER8> Can you elaborate why that is? Of all types I could come up with (beyond bool), integers and unsigned integers seem the most basic.

<comment><USER7> The simplest explanation is that ArangoDB uses JSON as dataformat to the outside world. JSON doesn't support these types like arbitrary exact decimal, or timestamps. Despite ArangoDB using VelocyPack internally, which is capabable of much more than JSON, a user will import JSON and get JSON back.

You can of course use datetime [https://docs.arangodb.com/3.3/AQL/Functions/Date.html](https://docs.arangodb.com/3.3/AQL/Functions/Date.html) and decimals with a precision of 10E38 in ArangoDB but it is not as precise as in a relational database. If we want to be as precise as a relational DB, then we would have to say goodbye to JSON

<comment><USER9> MongoDB uses this to express decimals as JSON: { "$numberDecimal": "<number>" }

<comment><USER10> I suspect creating a specification based on what mongodb does/did might be the better approach - but a quick search for "typed json" turned up:

[https://www.tjson.org/](https://www.tjson.org/)

Not sure if I'm a fan of the syntax - but some kind of open, sane, standard would be nice.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Luge Yourself - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/sports/olympics-learning-to-luge/?utm_term=.fba78a08427a <comment><USER2> It always amazes me what kind of things you grow up with nearby can be a live long dream for other people (Its probably the same for other people with surfing). As kids, it was just one of the many thing we did, that we were invited at school by the local club to try this sport with them one day for free. Sure, it we did not get a suit and we had to carry the sledge our selves but we won prices in the end and if was generally fun. Well, at least so much as going down a few times is interesting but from the tenth time on the same track it would become repetitive and less engaging than building your own tracks in snow and trying them out, improving etc.

<comment><USER3> Yes. I like to call the winter Olympics the privilege Olympics.

Summer Olympics is running and jumping, throwing sticks or stones, and wrestling each other

Winter Olympics is zipping down a multi-million dollar luge track

<comment><USER2> I would not go that far. With every type of olympics these days, you need to have money to fully concentrate on the sport (including many years before you become successful). There may be some sports that require less dedicated support like running but when a nation like India that has about 1 on 6 people wins 1 or 2 medals in summer olympics again and again it should become clear that those games aren't any different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can I just say I love this article layout, dead simple minimalist but with full-width high-quality short gifs? It really feels like the state of the art settling down to something standard and excellent.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hyperfocus is amazing. I also suffer from anxiety and, if I don't luge, I get the same experience as the girl in the video on a racetrack with my superbike. For 20 minutes at a time it's just me and the machine and everything else disappear. Ironically, the best place for me to get inner peace is on a piece of metal gushing down the track at 140mph.

</comment><comment><USER6> I am curious, what differentiates between competitors at events like the Olympics? My naive assumption is that the speed you go is largely controlled by the shape of the track, and gravity.

What does a competitor need to do in order to win, other than stay on the track?

<comment><USER7> Not that I have any experience, but I would guess it's mostly in the skill of negotiating the curves with minimal loss of speed, while not crashing.</comment></comment>


Mossberg: Apple's MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed To Be Reliable - <AUTHOR> http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20080723/apples-mobileme-is-far-too-flawed-to-be-reliable/

<comment><USER2> Seems like there is definitely a market for "exchange for the rest of us" done right... I wonder what the minimum feature set for an Exchange-compatible email/calendar sync server might be.</comment>


Ask HN: How can product/program/project mgrs sharpen their tech skills? - <AUTHOR> My wife is sorta in this middle management space and looking to sharpen and maintain her tech skills. Not necessarily programming but talk sufficiently in depth about current trends. Any recs on any periodicals/sites (subscription or free) that can keep her in the loop (have already recommending HN!) <comment><USER2> I work for ITProTV, I might be biased but we have great IT and Dev content. We have a Host/Co-Host model, their rapport makes it very engaging. Check it out [https://itpro.tv](https://itpro.tv)</comment>


Tracking systems of TV streaming devices - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/02/10/watching-you-watch/ <comment><USER3> I knew this was the case but the reminder is just more motivation to revert back to purchasing optical media, ripping it, and using mpv on a computer.

I don't want my entertainment to be tied up with advertising. I don't want my whole life to be subject to metrics.

<comment><USER4> Advertisement works because most people do not feel this way and are ok with metrics and adds as long as they get something back. Is that ok, or is there a rational argument why everyone should feel bad about being subject to metrics?

<comment><USER5> Advertising works because people have little choice in the matter. It's exploiting that people value "consumption with ads" more than "no consumption at all", and most are not skilled enough to remove the ads themselves.

(It's not like they wouldn't do it if they knew how; remember the popularity of VCRs? Their main use case was that on a recorded show, you could fast- forward through ads.)

People are not OK with metrics; most population has no understanding about the extent to which they're being surveilled or measured. There's also a growing feeling of helplessness, because the more the snooping is becoming known, the more apparent it seems that it's the same as with advertising - unless you're a tech-savvy person, you have _no_ choice at all.

EDIT:

A big part of the problems are the constant lies of omission. I believe much fewer people would be willing to connect their TVs to the Internet if on the box, next to "you can watch Netflix from your couch", there would be text saying "we'll spy on you as much as we can, and this data might wind up at your insurance provider". Or an asterisk next to "Netflix" explaining that "the service will work until we get bored or they change their API, i.e. for about two to three years".

<comment><USER6> Indeed. I had planned to purchase a few Roku devices for me and someone else. Then I stumbled upon an article describing the amount of third party data sharing and how it varies by channel. Stopped me from purchasing. And this is after a bit of research on streaming devices and plans and all that!

People in one of the online neighbor groups routinely ask about options for this channel or that channel and such as the lineup out here with some services seems to change regularly and lots of people are moving.. invariably someone squeeks about how great their Roku device is...

I ask them how they like the device sharing info about what is being watched and when with multiple third parties, If they knew that before purchasing, and if they tell other people who use it... every time the answer has been 'this is the first I've heard of this"

<comment><USER7> Cable companies to this too with their STB. OTA or pirating content is the only way to maintain privacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> money quotes

> Running with a Pi-hole helps, but still misses about 27% of A ID leaks, and > 45% of serial number leaks. <USER2>
> Our measurements showed that tracking is prevalent on the OTT platforms we > studied, with traffic to known trackers present on 69% of Roku channels and > 89% of Amazon Fire TV channels… Our analysis of the available privacy > countermeasures showed that they are ineffective at preventing tracking.

the fact that pihole is ineffective is troublesome.

<comment><USER9> You can improve that stat. If you have a router that allows it, make a rule that allows port 53 out if it's from the Pihole, and redirects it back to the Pihole if it isn't. You'll catch more of the sneaky crap that way.

<comment><USER10> dot/doh is here, pihole is becoming irelevant

<comment><USER11> Quite, effectively your device VPNs to the internet on port 443 to a non descript IP. You can either block it completely or allow everything through.

The only hope is that device manufacturers are terrible, don't implement certificate checks, and you can MITM everything by redirecting port 443 through a proxy.

<comment><USER12> The only choice is to block it.

<comment><USER13> Block https?

<comment><USER14> Could just block it from that device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Surprised that apple TV isn't included in this analysis at all. I'd be interested to see that, especially using a short list of the 'most common' apple TV apps -- eg Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, HBO.

</comment><comment><USER16> I have a Roku and it's a targeted advertising machine. Great if you're a marketer but kinda iffy if you're just an ordinary consumer. I see ads for debit card purchases within a matter of hours. I don't mind because I'm into marketing and might leverage the adtech at some point. But if you're concerned about privacy, stay far away.

</comment><comment><USER17> Surprised it doesn't recommend Kodi in the 'What can you do about it'

It's basically the OpenWRT equivalent of streaming devices.

</comment><comment><USER18> Presumably an AppleTV is only as good as the apps you choose to run on it. I'd love to see some analysis of YouTubeTV. I recently saw a stat which claimed YouTubeTV only had 2M subscribers, which seemed critically low to me.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's a handy list of domains to put into pi-hole for them to be blocked.

<comment><USER20> I did not see a list of domains on that site. I thought they talk about using a pihole in general. If you saw, or recommend specific lists - please do - <USER2> thank you in advance.

<comment><USER21> It was in the table (image): [https://adriancolyer.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/ott- table-2...](https://adriancolyer.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/ott- table-2.jpeg?w=326&zoom=2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Here's a question: when my old tv dies, where can I even get a new non-smart tv? I haven't seen a new one sold in years now

<comment><USER23> Walmart and Amazon. They even sell 4k "dumb" TVs.

[https://www.walmart.com/browse/electronics/sceptre- tvs/3944_...](https://www.walmart.com/browse/electronics/sceptre- tvs/3944_1060825_1939756_5735890)

This link used to have better results, but Amazon must have changed something: [https://www.amazon.com/s?k=4k+-smart&rh=n%3A1266092011](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=4k+-smart&rh=n%3A1266092011)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> After reading this, I think if everyone setup a Tor node just for TV, that's be great (harder to identify who is watching what).

<comment><USER25> Did you actually read it? It literally says identifiers were sent irrespective of tracking settings. Tor only masks IP and that was never the intent of the Tor network and using it that way is a is a complete waste of resources that doesn't solve anything.

<comment><USER26> > Tor only masks IP and that was never the intent of the Tor network and using > it that way is a is a complete waste of resources that doesn't solve > anything

More garbage traffic on Tor isn't necessarily a bad thing. It keeps others safe who actually do need it.

<comment><USER25> I don't know a great deal about tor so maybe that's true, but suggesting people use some convoluted routing in the name of privacy (which it doesn't solve) isn't the way to go about it.

If smashing TOR with bandwidth actually helps anonymise real users, then TOR should get in contact with BitTorrent client developers and get them to creat clients that split traffic over tor and non tor routes. That way they can create sanely manageable traffic from a very large volume of nodes, helping mask tor users far more than what a few obscurely routed tvs ever would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> So what about Apple TV?

</comment><comment><USER28> What is a Roku channel? Is it like an app on your phone?

<comment><USER29> Yes. There are apps for Netflix, Amazon, etc.</comment></comment>


Facebook gets redesigned - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/?redesign

<comment><USER2> I hate to be one of those people constantly whinging about Facebook redesigns, but ... can someone explain why Facebook seems to intent on "curating" your stream for you, based on priorities that aren't clear? I know a lot of people probably enjoy having some definition of "highlights" stuck at top, but many of us like going through the whole thing to see what all our friends are up to, until you get to a status update you recognize, which means that you know you're done looking. What does FB lose by taking away the ability to see a simple chronological list of updates? What do they gain by foregrounding the posts that they think are important?

Edited to add: Several people replied to me saying "But some of us DON'T want to see a big chronological list!" Well, yeah, I said in my original post that I realized this. And in fact you already had the option to see only "Top news" instead of "All posts." What bugs me is the one-size-fits-all version that has now been imposed on everybody. Why is FB allergic to allowing different users to interact with their data in the way those users want?

<comment><USER3> Because 'going through the whole thing' is nearly impossible for some people, who either log on spargingly or have a lot of friends. Additionally, since Facebook is full of relationships that are less than actual 'friends', a lot of people have complained for years about the quality of the posts. I think they must have realized their algorithms needed a stronger signal than what they had, and this UI is a way to get that data.

<comment><USER2> But this option already existed (you could choose "top stories" instead of "latest stories"). What annoys me is imposing a one-size-fits-all version on everybody.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As opposed to previous minor redesigns, this time Facebook has complete lost it.

Basically what you're missing out on is "subscribing" to non-friends a-la- Twitter, horrible page layouts, numerous bugs, and way too many options and configurations.

No Facebook, I do not want to manage my friends as if this is some kind of war room. Stop it.

And someone please let Zuck know that we're not in 1999 anymore. Floating frames and detached sidebars are a UX abomination.

Facebook is panicking and shooting in every direction.

<comment><USER5> I don't think so. I think they're backgrounding (side-bar'ing) random friend activity and designating the center stream for capital-c Content. Subscriptions, active threads, messaging from Like'd entities...the center box is commerce-oriented, the sidebar is for communications and for contributing to entities (comments, photos, statuses, etc.) defined as candidates for the center stream.

I believe that the center stream will be where the half-page forced-Chevrolet ad is going to go, the changes of late all point in this direction. Think: monetization and profit.

<comment><USER6> Along those same lines, I'd bet that the floating section was added to get more eyeballs looking on the right side of the screen where the ads are.

<comment><USER5> I'd say that along those lines, one aspect of the purpose of the sections is that the center is long-form attention and the right sidebar is short-form "constant check" attention.

And just to put the button on it: I fully believe that FB is _at least_ this cynical when it comes to the design of the page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I hate to jump on a hater bandwagon, because I genuinely am a proponent of innovation, but: really?

I think part of the usage of a web product should be to put you in a state of ease and enjoyment, not anxiety. The new FB puts me in an anxious state. I feel I'm always on the verge of missing something.

Twitter I feel has balanced the checking-in anxiety issue with a compelling product experience, and I always felt that Facebook allowed me to maneuver through the information flow at a pace I wanted.

Now, I'm presented with a realtime feed and a curated feed within the same context. I just get an anxious feeling looking at it.

I think the technology is amazing behind it. To be able to do realtime information flow and processing on this scale is astounding. But I think product developers need to focus not only one the technology that drives the user experience, but the emotion they are trying to instill on the users.

<comment><USER7> I retract my views in light of Timeline.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those who are not lucky enough (ha!) to enjoy the new design, here's a small glimpse: [https://img.skitch.com/20110921-rfae5d2pera2ig7ugbupd4pf61.j...](https://img.skitch.com/20110921-rfae5d2pera2ig7ugbupd4pf61.jpg)

It is mind-jarringly chaotic on my Home screen. Not wise.

<comment><USER8> Oh my. My eyes don't know where to go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> These new changes have made Facebook an unbearable platform for application developers. Firing ajax requests in a constant and fast pace is making the platform unmanageable. Combined with buggy and incomplete apis debugging and managing canvas apps are nearly impossible. I really hate building applications for the platform now.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've had this for a couple of weeks (weirdly). You never get used to it and you always feel like you're missing something.

Even more annoying is the little status updates in the top right, above the sidebar showing everyone of your friends recent activity (which I really liked) seems to have gone now.

<comment><USER11> Yes, and the changes have pretty much ruined the iOS app's "news" display.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Facebook users, your Homer Car™ is ready for you.

</comment><comment><USER13> It feels like signing into AOL back in 1998!

</comment><comment><USER14> They took away the ability to show all events in chronological order? Ugh. I was trying to stay away from G+ for ethical reasons, but this... This might just drive me back.

<comment><USER15> I'm very curious about the differences you think exist between the two services regarding ethics.

<comment><USER14> It's the whole Real Name debacle. It's been debated to death, though.

<comment><USER16> Facebook actually has the same policy.

<comment><USER14> Again, when Facebook bans someone, it doesn't destroy the rest of their online identity. And before you quote Google's policy on it, best do a search on the web for how it was actually handled.

<comment><USER16> My comment isn't defending Google. I'm pointing out to you that by your standard, both companies are unethical, and there is really no reason to trust either. Just in case you didn't know Facebook's stance on real names...

<comment><USER14> You have never heard me claim that Facebook was ethical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> With only ~300 friends, it seems sort of pointless to curate my feed into 'Top Stories'. Over the course of a day, there are only a couple of things that get my friends commenting or clicking 'like', and they don't get lost because there is no noise.

It's as if Facebook thinks we're all Power Users (TM) with 1,000+ friends who cannot possibly keep up with the demands of 'real-time' updates.

</comment><comment><USER18> The thing that scares me most about this redesign is that Facebook is spending resources making half baked UX changes instead of focusing energy into doing something new an innovative.

Lists might have their place in the future, and somehow users might get used to a more cluttered design. Ultimately, these types of features are tweaks on a product and not a game changer.

</comment><comment><USER19> Each redesign they do lately seems to bring them closer to the look & feel of myspace.

wtf are they thinking?

</comment><comment><USER20> Oh god. This is horrifying. Less is more facebook.. less is more. I agree with the people complaining about facebooks need to curate things for you. Thats what the "hide posts from this person" should be used for. Just give me one stream and let me decide what filters to put on it.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm not one of the lucky few who gets to see it, unfortunately.

Thus... Screenshots pl0x.

<comment><USER22> <http://cl.ly/AJp0>

Having a 27" screen, I don't mind it. The only things that bug me is the triangle at the top of each post, and your profile pic up in the header (which now floats)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's such a shame. G+ has so much potential but unless everyone joins the game it won't succeed. Facebook really has a TERRIBLE User Experience compared to G+ Let's hope it won't end in a new Bing vs. Google situation

<comment><USER24> Agree. I see a ghost town in G+ and see a big city in Facebook with all their traffics and unmanage bugs. Facebook just copied the G+ features, but could not copy the concept behind it. I hope both Facebook and G+ success and find their own market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The right-hand bar feels very "app" like. I wonder if their intention is to transition, through many iterations, Facebook into more of an "app-like" design and less of a "website"?

</comment><comment><USER9> This is why I still enjoy using FriendFeed. No fuss no confusions. A working social environment.

</comment><comment><USER26> Still rolling out apparently, I'm not getting the redesigned facebook.

<comment><USER13> Count yourself lucky, it's like twitter, Facebook and google+ mixed into a dirty stew.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Clutter++</comment>


Escaping VMware Workstation Through COM1 - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sIYgqrytPK-CFWfqDntraA_Fwi2Ov-YBgMtl5hdrYd4/preview?sle=true#heading=h.825t0x3oq2oh

<comment><USER2> Having a printer and COM port available by default seems just as silly as a virtual floppy drive :)

[http://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2015-0004.htm...](http://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2015-0004.html)</comment>


This accused hacker is a jerk. Here's why he shouldn't be a felon. - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/07/09/this-accused-hacker-is-a-jerk-heres-why-he-shouldnt-be-a-felon/?tid=rssfeed <comment><USER2> FREE WEEV!</comment>


Never Hire Job Hoppers. Never. They Make Terrible Employees - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-suster-never-hire-job-hoppers-never-they-make-terrible-employees-2010-4 <comment><USER2> Analogues, just as right, mostly wrong:

"Never join a startup. Never. They make terrible employers." (i.e. god complexes, lies, broken promises, dumb ideas, untested leadership)

"Never join a publicly traded company. Never. They make terrible employers." (i.e. quarterly earnings statement syndrome, god complexes, layoffs, corporate culture, brain-dead middle management, political infighting)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The piece itself is not bad, and has food for thought, but I was surprised at the good quality of most opposing comments (now up to 16).

<comment><USER3> Agreed with the latter, there are some truly great opposing comments and the signal to noise ratio is pretty high (very high for this topic).

"'Goldilocks' hiring guys", the poor guy who's had to move every year due to his wife's work, the "SGI Syndrome" (inability to leave the culture of a long term employer behind, very relevant WRT to Sun today), some fields are different; all great stuff in addition to the usual but generally well told.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the third time (at least, as I do not see every post by a long chalk) that this self same item has been posted to HN in the last 48 hours.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. I only happened to see the original (author's blog, I think) get 'dead'ed for some reason a couple of days ago, and liked the comments on BI, which in average seemed exceptionally well thought out and presented.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: SF is full of apartments with asbestos. Will we get cancer? - <AUTHOR>

I'm one of those living in an old apartment with asbestos. It has been 2 years. Will I get cancer? <comment><USER2> No. It is the removal of asbestos and the dust it produces that is the danger.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes</comment>