Hacker Monthly will publish its final issue 12 months from now - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hackermonthly.com/final-issue.html <comment><USER2> I have articles in a couple issues, so I got these free, then a year free and then I subscribed once my free year finished. Probably been a subscriber (free or otherwise) for 3 or 4 years, not sure by now.

I have the deep feeling that the quality of the content shared here on HackerNews has dwindled (may also be that it has drowned by the increase in traffic, though), and this may have (negatively) impacted HM readership.

As a sample point, I was pretty close to cancelling my subscription, since during the past 12-13 issues didn't have that interesting content, compared to the previous ~24-30. Of course, totally subjective, but a year and a half ago I was happy to see the "HM issue available for download email," and now it was more of a "meh." The quality of the magazine was always superb, though: perfectly crafted with aesthetically pleasant articles and layout. So, not to blame the team there.

I hope you luck in your next venture!

<comment><USER3> This discussion about HN link quality is old and comes up frequently. I'm mostly a lurker. Thing is, I haven't read a complaint about the "low quality on HN" in quite a while.

About a year ago or two, these objections would be posted multiple times every day.

Maybe HN declined from 5 years ago, but I think it improved over the last year or so, because a lot of marketing BS isn't here anymore.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> This discussion about HN link quality is old and comes up frequently.

While this is true, I've been reading HN for about 5 years. The first two lurking, the last three actually posting and commenting.

From what I remember, HN used to be very technical and startup oriented, which is what got me hooked. Over the past two years or so, I'm seeing a lot of articles on things which are not directly to tech or startups. I've accepted the fact I have to do a lot more filtering and searching to find articles I'm actually interested in. Not a big deal, but something I didn't have to do 2 or 3 years ago.

<comment><USER4> There's a lot of bias in how each of us remembers these things, but one thing we can say for sure is that HN has always been about a lot more than tech and startups, because that's why it was launched in the first place:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thank you for your efforts. Publishing any work takes significant work, and HackerNewsMonthly always looked professional and seemed to have a good and representative selection of posts.

You have contributed to the community and made the world a little better, and no matter what your goals were or are, you should count this as a success. "From the people who brought you HNMonthly" will be a valuable sentence for most things you choose to do (most, as say, any teenage children would not be impressed).

Thank you and good luck in the future.

<comment><USER6> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you are in the market for a hacker-centric magazine and this news saddens you, you might check out Hack Circus:

[http://www.hackcircus.com/](http://www.hackcircus.com/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Is it profitable? If you're not making enough perhaps you could sell it to someone in a lower income country or to someone with a lower income expectance? Still working on it for 12 months seems like a really long time.

<comment><USER9> Sometimes, you are profitable but you know this is not the way to continue. You also know that it is better to stop than to let someone continue without the same level of commitment to the product/service. I closed a service once, it was profitable, but it was better to close. It took me 18 months to close it, ensuring the existing customers could migrate smoothly somewhere else.

Lim is respecting his customers, giving them time. He is getting all my respect for that.

<comment><USER6> Thanks. Exactly how I felt about closing it and not selling to someone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I didn't knew such magazine existed. It's not popular enough, that might be the reason (just guessing).

<comment><USER11> I remember when it launched here. First few issues got a ton of upvotes and visibility upon release here but then the PDF editions weren't free to download anymore and it didn't get as much attention on new issues.

I really wish the PDF editions were always free to download but if it was competing with the print-edition subscription business I guess I understand why it was locked down.

<comment><USER12> This is a very important point. I got the first pdfs for free and loved the format but didn't want to subscribe (poor as hell) so I believe if they allowed the digital edition for free to browse on their website and to download as pdf, they would have a much much wider and recurring audience and would have made more money inserting ads, well, just like every other magazine out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Had no idea that it existed. All the best for your next venture!

OT: Does HN employ any licensing on the content? I checked FAQ/Guidelines. Couldn't find anything about HN content. So anyone can create something like OP or would it require special permission from YC?

Also can this idea extended for Reddit subs?

<comment><USER14> Articles submitted to HN remain the copyright of the people who wrote them, not of YC. (HN Monthly has been scrupulous in observing copyrights.)

Comments on HN, ditto, although YC has an implicit license to (at a minimum) display them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I discovered Hacker Monthly a little over a month ago and subscribed straight away. I rarely visit HN as my schedule doesn't permit it so having a curated well formatted chunk of stuff to read when I can was amazing and pretty much led me to buying a new iPad. I'm gutted that HM is coming to an end but greatly appreciate that it isn't an abrupt end and I still have a whole other year of issues to look forward to. I'm so grateful for your hard work over all these years and having access to all the previous issues gives me a huge amount of content to make my way through. Good luck with all your future endeavours!

</comment><comment><USER16> When I started blogging a couple of years ago, Hacker Monthly MADE MY YEAR when they put my 'Why I Cycled 100 Miles to Meet My First Customer' story on the front cover

([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4796755](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4796755))

So I just wanted to send you a hug over the internet.

I've loved getting a copy of the magazine by email every month since then.

All the best from London,

James

</comment><comment><USER17> This is the first I head of it and I must say it looks great. I would like to buy previous issues, is that possible?

<comment><USER6> Yup. You can still subscribe now and get all the previous issues for free.

<comment><USER17> How about the print versions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great magazine, it's a pity this is the first time I hear about it! Could you share a bit what type of customers did you gather? What did they like the most about HackerMonthly? Would have this worked online-only or was the print version part of the great value of this magazine?

</comment><comment><USER19> Lim is a great guy who has put in so much work to make an awesome publication - it really is a great example of a project done well. I started my newsletter about the same time and it has been great to work with him over the years. Really sad to see it go!!

</comment><comment><USER20> I subscribed since 5 weeks now, as it was only then I discovered it. I must say, this news saddens me a lot. I've been downloading a lot of the past issues and read articles that I either missed (a lot of them), and articles that have been posted way before I ever heard of hackernews. Now I'm totally a fan of this magazine, and I deeply how some brave soul(s) is/are there to take over the beautiful work you have done. Thank you for the time and energy you've put into this!

<comment><USER6> Thanks.

I won't be selling the site. I'll probably leave the site up (for as long as I can). There just won't be any new issue. People can still go to the site and buy digital/print copies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Could you share the numbers after you finally close it? The number of subscribers, sales, expensed, profit, traffic, conversion... I'm interested by such stats.

<comment><USER22> Maybe put those in the final issue :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why?

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure there's a specific reason. 5 years is a long time (for internet years). I guess I just wanted to shut it down before it wither and die. I also wanted to explore other options (e.g work on new, different things).

<comment><USER24> Haha, I went for the wither-and-die approach myself.. end result is the same, and inexplicably it's still sending "sufficient" funds my way. Major props, next time I shouldn't miss my Penang flight.. Phil ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This looks really nice. Subscribed!

So, how many new subscriptions have you got so far after HN caught this?

Edit: That wasn't an accusation of cynicism, just curious.

<comment><USER6> Thanks. Certainly more than I expected. And I definitely wouldn't expect people to subscribe to a service that's shutting down soon. (also didn't expect this to get on front page)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Damn no idea this existed :(

<comment><USER27> Me neither - I'll be buying a bunch of these then

<comment><USER26> Yeah I feel this would have made my life much easier. I love having paper copies of stuff too =(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Sorry to hear this Lim, i liked the concept (advertised with you in the past :) Best of luck with your new ventures.

</comment><comment><USER29> I really wanted to subscribe at one point, but then I wondered why I would do that since I was already reading HN daily. Why wait for the news? I guess other people who would be interested in such a magazine would face the same problem, content is already here on time and free.

<comment><USER30> See the comments elsewhere in the thread about HN a a whole gradually changing focus from a more education/opinion site to a news site.

A rule-of-thumb to distinguish the two is that a news article is the kind of thing you read right away, an educational article is something you deliberately bookmark to read later when you have some time to reflect on its content.

The early issues of HN are full of articles that are as valid today as they were then. You may not have minded waiting for them.

<comment><USER29> well, for _most_ articles I do mind reading them on time because the discussions they create around me will fathom quickly after the trend/buzz has passed. So you do want to be there when discussions happen.

Talking about discussion, it happens a lot that I don't even look at the article and just look at the HN comments. I think I'm not the only one who would say HN is mostly HN because it has great comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> 1\. Just learned about Hacker Monthly 2\. Downloaded first issue and read immediately. 3\. Subscribed for 1yr and started reading from 2nd issue on.

I want you to know that after 5 years, there are still people finding out about your work and regarding it as awesome :)

</comment><comment><USER32> This is a bummer and not because I am a subscriber, but because I would have been one had I known about Hacker Monthly. Sorry if I missed it somewhere, but will the issues be archived somewhere for newcomers to read?

</comment><comment><USER33> I read the headline thinking it was talking about 2600 Hacker Quarterly. Haven't really looked into Hacker Monthly, but I hate to see someone have to shut down their company.

</comment><comment><USER34> 5 years is a long time to do anything, but what an awesome run!

Congrats on doing it and to all involved. It was obviously a labor of love.

</comment><comment><USER35> Good luck in your future ventures. I hoped you learnt a lot that you can take to your next business.

</comment><comment><USER36> It's worth noting that 2600 is still going strong after 30 years.

</comment><comment><USER37> how about someone take the place and don't let this die ?

</comment><comment><USER38> It is unfortunate they couldn't have had a more original name than stealing 2600's magazine "Hacker Quarterly" name and changing "Quarterly" to "Monthly".

</comment><comment><USER39> Too bad, I was considering subscribing to the printed version in a few months ahead.</comment>


Ask HN: Whiteboard Tool? - <AUTHOR> I want to build something that combines the simplicity of this http://witeboard.com/ (drawing app, shape recognition, limited tool menu) with the structure of this https://excalidraw.com/ (object selection, resize) and lets multiple people edit at the same time.<p>What do you think? Would you pay for it? Already have a solution? <comment><USER2> I've been building a simple, multiplayer whiteboard at [https://hello.whiteboard.systems](https://hello.whiteboard.systems).

Curious if that would work for your usecase / always appreciate any feedback.

</comment><comment><USER3> We use Mural at work. It doesn't have all features you're outlining, but it's widely used because it's very simple to get started. We brought it in for UX work but the business side has embraced it. Unfortunately I don't find it very performant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not very performant?

<comment><USER3> Mural is slow, and once the boards have have many elements they start to lag significantly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whimsical?

</comment><comment><USER5> Miro?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is pretty cool. It has all the templates for scrum. I like the helper feature to line things up. It seems like it's less of a free form/doodle tool. Do you use it, and what for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Figma?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just checked it out. It has the toolbar heavy/MS Paint feel to it that I don't like. This could just be me though. Realtime stuff looks slick.

Do you use it? What do you use it for?

<comment><USER6> Yes. Figma is a de-facto standard tool for UI/UX designers nowadays.

Photoshop --> Sketch --> Figma.</comment></comment></comment>


Avast Study at MWC: People will connect to any free WiFi - <AUTHOR> http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160222005555/en/Avast-Wi-Fi-Hack-Experiment-Demonstrates-%E2%80%9CReckless%E2%80%9D-Behavior <comment><AUTHOR> Gizmodo uses slightly different wording in their headline: [http://gizmodo.com/study-finds-people-are-dumb-will- connect-...](http://gizmodo.com/study-finds-people-are-dumb-will-connect-to- any-wi-fi-1760734633)</comment>


Ask HN: LLC to c-corp? - <AUTHOR>

I'm about to form an LLC for my startup so we can sign our first contract with a client. Right now I am not leaning towards raising $. There is probably a 25% chance that I will seek funding in the near future. Does anyone know how much of a headache it would be to change from LLC to a c-corp in the future? Are you looking at hundreds or thousands more in lawyer fee for the change? <comment><USER2> How much depends on where you are and if the incorporation is out of state, i.e. in Delaware.

However, why would you need a c-corp to accept investment? An LLC provides a lot more flexibility and you'd just have to redo you Operating Agreement.

That flexibility comes at a price, an investor can and likely will insist on modifications that provide him greater protections/rights/whatever that he would have been able to get with an investment in a c-corp. I've worked for one promising company who's life was cut short when its devil investors abused various provisions they had put in the Operating Agreement to gain complete control (all of nothing, we all resigned, but they didn't seem to mind).

<comment><AUTHOR> It would be in Delaware.

Investors would almost certainly want vesting terms. I'm not sure that is possible under LLC.

<comment><USER2> It was in Virginia in 1996, or at least the lawyers who drafted it believed so. Then again, no one knows what's in an Operating Agreement and whether it's really valid until and unless you go to court, but I don't see why that couldn't be part of one and have it stand. But it will LLCs where pretty new for most states back in the mid-90s).

I think you need to talk to a lawyer in your state who's familiar with LLCs and out of state c-corps to know what's possible and what it will likely cost (unless you live in Missouri, in which case I can ask my father).

Note also that a less flexible c-corp might turn off savvy investors (the type you want).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Probably thousands. Most attorney things seem to always involve thousands. Why not just set it up as a corporation right off the bat. By the way, you will not set up as a C-Corp, only a corporation. The C vs. S thing is a tax treatment under IRS tax law that you can choose once the entity is formed.

Since you might want to raise money, to me it seems like the most intelligent thing to do would be to set up a Delaware corporation and operate as a C-Corp. After that if you decide later that you will _NEVER_ want to raise money then flip it to an LLC on advice from your business tax person.</comment>


How an indie game developer sold 30k copies on Xbox Live - <AUTHOR> http://zeboyd.com/2010/09/24/breath-of-death-vii-the-beginning-post-mortem/

<comment><USER2> My prediction was that their answer would be 'We made a good game', but there are actually some decent tips. Most of it is common sense, and a lot boils down to 'you have to love both playing the game and supporting it', but the rest is still worth reading.

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted it because I feel like a lot of the advice they give in the post is applicable to a lot of the things people here do. A number of the points would be directly applicable to selling apps on the iPhone marketplace, for instance.</comment></comment>


We use Kubernetes and spot instances to reduce EC2 billing up to 80% - <AUTHOR> https://tuananh.net/2020/02/20/the-story-behind-my-talk-cloud-cost-optimization-at-scale/ <comment><USER2> I hope people don't go and take this advice and just run everything on Spot as that is a mistake.

It is very common for AWS to completely run out of entire classes of instance types e.g. all of R5 or all of M5. And when that happens your cluster will die.

What you want to do is split your cluster into minimum two node groups e.g. Core and Task:

Core: On-Demand for all of your critical and management apps e.g. monitoring. Task: Spot for your random, ephemeral jobs that aren't a big deal if it needs to be re-ran.

So for a Spark cluster for example you would pin your driver to the Core nodes and let the executors run on the Task nodes.

<comment><USER3> Shout-out for "AutoSpotting", which transparently re-launches a regular On- Demand ASG as spot instances, and will fall back to regular instances: [https://github.com/AutoSpotting/AutoSpotting/](https://github.com/AutoSpotting/AutoSpotting/)

Combined with the fact that you can have an ASG with multiple instance types: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-auto-scaling- groups...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-ec2-auto-scaling-groups-with- multiple-instance-types-purchase-options/)

Means that you can be reasonably certain you'll never run out of capacity unless AWS runs out of every single instance type you have requested, terminates your Spot instances, and you can't launch any more On-Demand ones.

(and even so, set a minimum percentage of On-Demand in AutoSpotting to ensure you maintain at least some capacity)

<comment><USER4> ASG, per the blog-post you linked to, now supports starting both on-demand and spot instances, so what's the use of AutoSpotting?

<comment><USER5> The author of AutoSpotting here, this is often being asked and I'm happy to clarify it.

The mixed capacity ASGs currently run at decreased capacity when failing to launch spot instances. AutoSpotting will automatically failover to on-demand capacity when spot capacity is lost and back to spot once it can launch it again.

Another useful feature is that it most often requires no configuration of older on-demand ASGs, because it can just take them over and replace their nodes with compatible spot instances.

This makes it very popular for people who run legacy infrastructure that can't be tampered with for whatever reasons, as well as for large-scale rollouts on hundreds of accounts. Someone recently deployed it on infrastructure still running on EC2 Classic started in 2008 or so that wasn't touched for years.

Another large company deployed it with the default opt-in configuration against hundreds of AWS accounts owned by as many teams, many with legacy instances running for years. It would normally take them years to coordinate as a mass migration but it just took them a couple of months to migrate to spot. The teams could opt-in and try it out on their application or opt-out known sensitive workloads. A few weeks later then they centrally switched the configuration to opt-out mode, converting most of their infrastructure to spot literally overnight and saving lots of money with very little configuration effort and very few disruption to the teams.

If you want to learn more about it have a look at our FAQ at [https://autospotting.org/faq/index.html](https://autospotting.org/faq/index.html)

It's also the most prominent open source tool in this space. Most competition consists of closed-source, commercial (and often quite expensive) tools so if you're currently having any issues or missing functionality, anyone skilled enough can submit a fix or improvement pull request.

<comment><USER6> Where can I read about some of these more impressive use cases you describe?

<comment><USER5> Have a look at [https://github.com/AutoSpotting/AutoSpotting](https://github.com/AutoSpotting/AutoSpotting) or the FAQ section on [https://autospotting.org](https://autospotting.org)

If those don't answer your questions feel free to reach out to me and I'll do my best to explain further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why are people so obsessed by AWS? It is one of the most expensive hosting solutions that tries hard to lock you into their ecosystem.

I somewhat understand why enterprises want to use it, but why are small startups using it so much and then complaining about the cost?

Nowadays when we have high speed internet, and a lot of things are containerized, it is so simple to change hosting partners. Just pick one that doesn't cost an arm and a leg and move to a different one if it didn't fit very well.

I have used linux containers for 10 years now and changed hosting a few times, each time reducing costs even more. Yes, it is a bit of manual labour, but if you have someone with sysadmin/devops skills, it is easily doable.

<comment><USER8> > Why are people so obsessed by AWS? It is one of the most expensive hosting > solutions that tries hard to lock you into their ecosystem.

I agree with you, and that's why I try to get the point of view of those who actually decide to adopt AWS. They aren't crazy or stupid, and as AWS is the world's leading cloud provider then it's highly doubtful that the decision is irrational and motivated by ignorance.

So far, the main fallacy with regards to companies picking AWS is that cost is relevant. It isn't. AWS might overcharge a lot, but truth of the matter is that for any sizeable corporation it's irrelevant if they spend 200€ or 400€ on their cloud infrastructure. It's far less than a salary and it's even less than the bill for some office utilities. So once the infrastructure foot is in the door then why would management worry about cost? What they do care about is uptime and development speed, because that has direct impact on productivity, and thus value extracted from salaries. If a particular service provider enables you to show tangible results in no time at all (see spin up a database or message broker or workflow in less than nothing) then they don't mind paying a premium that matches, say, their air conditioning bill.

<comment><USER9> For a startup, it can work out like this: Start out on AWS/GCP/Azure in the initial phase when you want to optimize for velocity in terms of pushing out new functionality and services. When you start to require several message queues, different data stores, dynamic provisioning and high availability, you save a lot on setup and maintenance - the initial cost of getting your private own cloud up and running, and doing so stably, is not to be underestimated. Especially when you're still exploring and haven't figured out the best technologies for you long-term.

Then, at some point, that dynamic changes as you have a better understanding of your needs, the bills start to build up and the architecture is in less flux. You might also have a bigger team and can afford to start allocating more resources to operation. That is the point when it it might make sense to migrate over to self-managed.

Then at the same time, you have the scalability, which might be more of a key point for even larger organizations.

I think building somewhat cloud-agnostic to ease friction of provider migration is good, regardless, but do so pragmatically and look at the APIs from a service perspective.

Kubernetes? All the bigger providers have alternatives and you can run your own. Fargate? You're going to have to do some rewrites. MemoryStore? Just swap for your another Redis instance. BigTable? Highly GCP specific. etc.

Not saying there aren't a lot of companies who choose the wrong provider for the wrong reasons, but it can also be part of a conscious strategy. Also nobody got fired for IBM and so on.

<comment><USER8> > Then, at some point, that dynamic changes as you have a better understanding > of your needs, the bills start to build up and the architecture is in less > flux. You might also have a bigger team and can afford to start allocating > more resources to operation. That is the point when it it might make sense > to migrate over to self-managed.

I completely agree, and I had this discussion with my direct manager in the past. Yet, even if the potential savings are significant, managers might not be too keen on investing on switching your infrastructure. Running your own infrastructure is risky, and although top managers enjoy lower utility bills they don't enjoy the sight of having a greater risk of suffering downtime, specially if the downtime is self-inflicted and affects business-critical services.

So, if this transition doesn't go perfectly smoothly... The people signing for the migration to self-hosting services might be risking their whole career on a play that, at best, only brings some short-term operational cost savings. Does this justify a move whose best case scenario is equivalent to a AWS discount?

<comment><USER10> Moving workloads in-house does happen. But, in general, you're right. It's hard to advocate for a near-term expensive (in time and money) and at least somewhat risky (expect some nights and weekends crises) migration for possibly some longer term cost benefit (assuming you've accounted for all the costs). Which BTW neither you nor your manager may still be around to take credit for. And also BTW is at least somewhat counter to what companies are doing in general, for better or worse, and which execs will probably rightly see as a potential distraction from whatever the company is trying to accomplish.

Frankly the whole discussion mostly highlights that these are things you need to think about upfront before you're fully committed.

<comment><USER11> Back in the day, when I was part of a startup, the DB guy was all into making us write "provide agnostic" sql in case we ever wanted to switch to Mysql or Oracle. We were actually using Postgres. This was a nightmare.

Things started improving when we said 'f-it we are not moving out of Postgres, let us at least use the best features of PG'

There is a similar problem when trying to use AWS with the constant thought about moving out of AWS at some point.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, this is a bit what I mean with doing it pragmatically - at least when you choose provider-specific services know that either 1) you have an idea of how you would migrate it or 2) it is a conscious decision to leverage a USP. By taking the provider-agnostic paradigm to the extreme, you have the least common denominator, getting none of the upsides.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On the one hand, building fault tolerant infrastructure that can, as a side effect, work painlessly on spot instances is great.

On the other hand, you can purchase reserved instances and get ~60% cost savings with zero engineering work. Its worth thinking long and hard about whether the cost of engineering time is worth that next 20%.

There's also a lot of useful ground in between "critical state, must never be lost (like a database)" and "can handle being terminated with 2 minutes notice". A service that can be re-created if necessary but takes 10 minutes to start up is really scary if run on spot instances, but can still be pretty useful.

<comment><USER13> Note, AWS savings plans make this even easier

[https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/](https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/)

<comment><USER14> Any idea of when this product was introduced?

<comment><USER13> End of 2019 [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/reinvent- ro...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/reinvent-round-up- savings-plans-cost-categories-and-more/)

<comment><USER14> So is this blog post redundant?

<comment><USER15> No. Spot gives deeper discounts than savings plans do.

<comment><USER16> And you can stack them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> And how much developer time did it cost?

We have done the same - our bills went down, but not by as much as 80% I think closer to 50%. But it took a fair bit of developer time, and we now have a lot of Kubernetes related problems to deal with. I guess those will smooth out over time, but I don't think anyone ever factors in this stuff when they claim great savings. Developer time ain't cheap.

On a plus note, running multiple small boxes via Kubernetes does give you a more high availability system. If one instance goes down, there will still be another one available, so it's not all negative.

<comment><USER18> Goes back to the fact that stack overflow itself runs on a single beefed up machine for all their traffic (with a backup machine of course). What this company does that needs so many instances? And they use the same tech too (.NET). Instead of thinking about that people always think about over engineering for "scale" to overcompensate bad code.

<comment><USER17> Do you have any idea how big their actual database is? And how many clients thay serve?

It does seem to be an example of a "standard" architecture done well. Our application has a tiny fraction of the traffic and it struggles with some things.

<comment><USER19> It's all public: [https://stackexchange.com/performance](https://stackexchange.com/performance)

Here's a series of blog posts with a lot more detail by one of their devs: [https://nickcraver.com/blog/archive/](https://nickcraver.com/blog/archive/)

They're very optimized and can serve all of their traffic on a single webserver, redis instance and SQL server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sigh. I had a very long and detailed reply typed out on my phone about the trevails of dealing with kubernetes in the last 2 weeks. Then Safari decides to reload the page and it all got lost.

I'm literally emotionally drained after unsuccessfully working with k8s after 2+ weeks.

It's incredibly over complicated and documentation is all _over the place_. I had a large write up of my experiences but those are lost and I don't have the energy to retype all of that.

I simply wanted to utilize k8s to help provide some auto scaling and redundancies for a 10 year old service I run.

After 2 weeks of deep diving on this topic and getting essentially nowhere, even with the help of a friend that does this for his day job and him waving his hands not being able to help, I'm reluctantly done.

The technology is just not ready. It's too complicated. The documentation isn't sufficient. Sure you can document every nut and bolt, but if you can't create simple patterns for people to follow you lose. There's too much change going on between versions.

At my last 2 companies, they each had a team of 2-10 people working on implementing kubernetes. After over a year at each company, no significant progress had been made on k8s. Sure some stuff was migrated over but no significant services were running with it.

<comment><USER21> You are definitely right that it is a fast moving target and hence can be frustrating to work with at the moment, particularly if you are trying to get it running on-prem. It is still relatively early days, and there is plenty of distillation to come, before an easy predictable set of patterns emerge.

Not wanting you to go to the pain of trying to recreate your original post, but of interest, what kinda of things were the primary areas of pain from your work?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is quite a neat strategy, leveraging elastic compute costs and kubernetes "self-healing". I'm surprised I haven't heard more about this kind of technique before.

I fully acknowledge this will only work in certain scenarios and for certain workloads, eg not ideal for long running/cache/database style services.

<comment><USER23> > leveraging elastic compute costs and kubernetes "self-healing"

The indirect effect of building on a system like this is that the recovery mechanisms get tested on a regular basis instead of just on the odd day when things fail.

Spot instances are like a natural chaosmonkey mode, with money being saved and forcing you to build failure tolerance, retries & circuit breakers early in dev.

<comment><USER24> GCP has a similar instance type called "preemptible", they're not quite as cheap as spot, but they don't "dry up" and they're guaranteed to go down every 24 hours.

This precludes one from becoming complacent with spot instances that rarely go away.

<comment><USER25> You're right. spot instances are a lot more stable than preemptible. we've seen spot instances that last a year for us.

<comment><USER24> This is the second response of this sort that I'm replying to.

"A lot more stable" isn't really a desirable characteristic of ephemeral compute capacity. In my experience, the less frequently the instances went away, the more complacent the operators became.

Preemptible instance are stable in the sense that you know they're going away within 24 hours and must be prepared for that.

<comment><USER25> true that.

spot used to be that way and the price was very sensitive. but AWS tweaked it so that it's more stable.

to the point, after a year or 2 of running spot instances, we don't feel the difference of spot and ondemand that much. we got complacent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What kind of services are you guys running that require you to scale up and down? Why not get one or two dedicated server(s) and run everything on them!? The post had no numbers, but I'm pretty sure you would come off even cheaper if you use dedicated servers, even managed.

<comment><USER27> I'm running a workload that takes about 3 minutes to run per request (compute heavy MVP), which means that a big surge of users once a day at peak would require a LOT of dedicated servers to serve in time.

My plan is to use dedicated servers for most of the load and some elastic capacity at peak loads if necessary.

<comment><USER18> I have a similar use case in mind, TBF I plan to just keep a small EC2 instance up for this need, and assemble a nice PC at home to catch up with the queue from my home for heavy workloads, the cost is so much cheaper and I get a PC as well! Worst case I spin up one more worker with more specs if the queue gets long. Sounds less effort than doing all this scaling work for a MVP and counterproductive when I'd rather spend more time on my actual logic

<comment><USER27> That's my initial plan as well, until the requirements get too high for my PC :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> author here: please note that this is what we did in 2016-2017 where kops(what we use to provision) did not support spot fleet yet.

also, this works out so well for our use case because we were using .net framework at the time so the cost saving was huge.

a lot has changes since then.

Also, this strategy is not limited to AWS, the similiar type of instances are also available on Azure, GCP, etc...

</comment><comment><USER28> How much would it cost to host this on bare metal and co-lo servers, I wonder. Probably orders of magnitude less, but only if your ops costs are very low. If you developers have a DevOps culture, it's doable.

<comment><USER25> our clients (airlines) would very much prefer we use AWS over the smaller, lesser known offering.

<comment><USER29> Very interesting seeing as Airlines don't move fast tech wise and usually have DCs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> If you want to play with an equivalent (barebones, spot instance) K3s Azure setup I use, the template is available here:

[https://github.com/rcarmo/azure-k3s-cluster](https://github.com/rcarmo/azure-k3s-cluster)

This is NOT For production use (that's what the managed AKS service is for), but I like to tinker with the internals, so I keep an instance running permanently with a few toy services.

<comment><USER25> Thanks. this would be useful to spin up a k3s cluster for testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Btw, spotinst (we, I work there) released Ocean in 2018/2019 which is the K8S equivalent of our EC2 solution (elaatigroup) and Eco which is our AWS reserved recommendation product. I won't start a whole marketing speak but I'll just say that spotinst moved away from just a "cost saving solution" and are now a more rounded cloud managememt solution (ease of use, cost monitoring and insights).

<comment><USER25> Hi,

The whole idea was from spotinst blog. Thanks a lot! I just glue all the opensource projects together with some changes here and there. If the idea didn't work, I will def consider using Spotinst.

However, every cost saving is important for our startup back then. we were a small shop in Southeast Asia where senior engineer merely cost $1000 a month. I was thinking maybe I can save the cut from Spotinst too :)

<comment><USER31> Now that is the cut-throat cost saving strategy we like to see! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> .NET core has been a godsend in making .NET an interoperable option for cloud architectures. I'm continually impressed with the open source embrace from Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER33> > Now, the biggest sunk cost are obviously RDS and EC2.

I don't understand how something you pay for every month is being considered a sunk cost? Am I missing an up front charge, or does the writer not understand what it means?

</comment><comment><USER34> This is pretty common, databricks for example uses regular instances for the driver and spot instances for workers by default.

<comment><USER35> I suspect doing that will break down in the case of large Spark shuffles though?

<comment><USER34> It's the default but you can change it. Most people will appreciate the cost savings

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Love this thread. If you are using K8s and want to reduce both the time you spend managing compute infra and the associated cloud costs (whether for AWS, Azure or GCP) a Spot Instance or Preemtible VM, DIY approach is certainly possible, but will require a lot of setup work. Imagine handling multiple autoscaling groups for multiple Spot Instance types - an absolute necessity to diversify interruption risk, dealing with slow autoscaling or classic autoscaling that only considers cpu/mem and not actual pod requirements or no easy way to create a buffer of spare nodes for high priority workloads that suddenly need capacity, or identifying over-provisioning of machine sizes (based on incorrect pod requirements)which greatly exceed the actual needs of your pods. As an alternative, you can try Spotinst's Ocean product (yes, I work there) for K8s and ECS where not only is your infra management simplified, but you can easily reduce your cloud compute cost by 80%.

</comment><comment><USER37> I also did this with GCP preemtiple instances and worked great for a while until I found out one random day that networking issues may also occur in addition to shutting off your instances within 24 hours. On sandbox clusters thou it's been very smooth for over half a year. Highly recommend.

<comment><USER38> We use preemptibles for our CI fleet and it's great. We can run a hundred instances at full tilt boogie for 8 hours a day and the nodepool downscales to zero while we sleep. It's a no brainer if your controller (and use case) can handle preemption gracefully.

<comment><USER39> What CI software do you use? I played around with spot instances and Jenkins, and it was quite a poor experience.

<comment><USER38> We use Jenkins to invoke Tekton pipelines ([https://github.com/tektoncd/pipeline](https://github.com/tektoncd/pipeline)) with a wrapper we wrote. The pipeline runs, outputs junit to a bucket and we pull it back and give it to jenkins. Was a bit of a lift to get working out of the gate but it's been mostly smooth (and flexible and cheap) since then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Well I don't think that using spot instances is a very good thing to consider there.

1) What if all of them go down would it make application unusable? I recall one or two weeks on AWS when all spots were down because of capacity problems.

2) You cannot rely on requests to complete on spot instances they can go up and down when they need. For background jobs it's fine, you can retry, but for UX?

And if you need to choose this approach to save your costs instead of migration to bare metal, which is usually ~10 times less than AWS then something is wrong with your architecture and you are locked.

<comment><USER25> > save your costs instead of migration to bare metal,

like i mentioned in other comments. due to our use cases, bare metal is out of question since the clients (airlines) would very much prefer we use AWS over the smaller, lesser known offering.

<comment><USER40> We had recent migration from AWS to Hetzner. We used combined clusters with ondemand + spot instances. After migration to Hetzner we doubled capacity and still saved around half. AWS is very good for flexible work loads, but if load and process is constant and well defined, bare metal hosting much more effective. And there are a lot of well known bare metal hosting providers on the market.

<comment><USER25> if workload is constant, nothing beats baremetal in term of cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Good to see .NET Core here in article and the Microsoft trying to embrace into more opensource solutions. Due to the interoperability, This makes the application to be deployed at lower cost on containers.

</comment><comment><USER42> We are using a similar strategy. We have 4 different node groups 2 with on demand instance types 2 with spot instance types It has been working really well for us. We are doing some further optimisations to reduce the costs and improve the performance of our stack. Also, we have jenkins scheduled jobs which kills the staging infra every evening and starts it up in morning. We also keep the staging completely down over the weekends.

</comment><comment><USER43> "We don't have any real ops guy as you think these days. Whenever we need something setup, we just have to page someone from India team to create instances for us and then proceed to set them up ourselves."

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. That is insane. This is a vain attempt to constrain costs?

</comment><comment><USER44> I'm still trying to decide on an orechestrator for my deployments. Any reason swarm wouldn't work instead of k8s?

<comment><USER45> Docker is pretty much abandoning Swarm though, so wouldn't recommend that at least.

[https://www.bretfisher.com/is-swarm-dead-answered-by-a- docke...](https://www.bretfisher.com/is-swarm-dead-answered-by-a-docker- captain/)

<comment><USER46> What's a good replacement for Swarm that isn't as complex as Kubernetes? I like the platform abstraction and flexibility of k8s, it's just really heavy for many of my use cases.

<comment><USER19> I'd advise learning the basics of Kubernetes anyway. Managed offerings like GKE take away all of the operational burden so you can just deploy your app with minimal setup, usually just 1 or a handful of YAML files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I reduce my RDS bill by 66% by keeping it on EC2 and using Percona Server.

</comment><comment><USER48> Hello fellow hackers, I had worked on some terraform automation for running eks on spot instances. If you find that interesting, let me know. I can help run that in production if needed.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've found that rewriting an application from C# to something quicker like PHP or Go negates the whole need to do this kind of stuff because the C# application is 10x faster written in PHP or 20x faster written in Go. I love it when you change one line of a shared lib in C# and it takes an hour for the application to recompile.

<comment><USER50> 1\. Compilation time != execution time.

2\. PHP is ridiculously slow compared to C#. You're doing wrong (or whoever created the application did it wrong). Go is comparable, but not really faster.

[https://benchmarksgame- team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...](https://benchmarksgame- team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/csharp.html)

[https://benchmarksgame- team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...](https://benchmarksgame- team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/php.html)

[https://benchmarksgame- team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...](https://benchmarksgame- team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/go.html)

<comment><USER51> yeah benchmarking all the stuff that is not really needed for a real web app.

<comment><USER50> 1\. Not everything is an web app.

2\. That stuff is deep inside the web frameworks you use, in some way or another.

3\. There you go, bud: [https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/](https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/) The first non-micro framework is ASP.NET Core.

Personally, I don't think performance is everything. Spring (Java) is #221 in that ranking and I'd bet it's used in almost as many places as everything above it combined.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


This house in Silicon Valley sold for $938,000 this week - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ByRosenberg/status/994278935264284672 <comment><USER2> Ugh, these posts go viral everywhere.

Land has value, people. In fact, it's usually the majority of your home value.

If you don't understand this and are outraged by people paying money for land, you probably have no business purchasing real estate.

<comment><USER3> I understand your statement. That doesn't change the reality that most people, even well-compensated white-collar software developer types, cannot afford to spend a million dollars on housing, especially if all that is actually buying is a piece of land with an uninhabitable shack. There is a real, potentially destabilizing housing situation happening up and down the west coast right now.

<comment><USER4> Well that land is expensive to prevent some guy from simply building a shack for himself.

The more expensive the land, the more likely you'll build a whole stack of shacks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [Here is the Zillow listing]([https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1375-Bird- Ave-San-Jose-CA...](https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1375-Bird-Ave-San-Jose- CA-95125/19680166_zpid/?fullpage=true))

</comment><comment><USER6> It's just for the property value, they're just tearing the house down. The "house" really had nothing to do with the transaction, as crappy as it is.

<comment><USER7> It likely had negative value since it costs money to demolish and would be more expensive as an empty lot unless you can save the fireplace or something that you can't build in a new build.

<comment><USER8> I wonder if it's easier to get permits to build there if the current place is in that condition.

<comment><USER6> Interesting question, since California has so so many building restrictions for eartyhquakes and whatnot. New construction on old buildings is very expensive here, so maybe the price was actually boosted upwards because this would be such an easy lot to build on, without the normal teardown costs of a more modern building.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to know where it was, and what a house next door that wasn't dilapidated would have sold for.

<comment><USER10> You can usually figure that out based on the cost of materials to build + land value. Building houses those size probably costs $250k in the SF Bay, so the house next door is probably worth $1.1mm to $1.2mm.

<comment><USER11> The house is 1,100 sqft for a single story. You'd likely demolish and put up a 2-story 2k sqft unit with a cute small-ish backyard.</comment></comment></comment>


Guinness World Record for World's Largest Aerial Firework Shell - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgHnvbYlW2k <comment><AUTHOR> "This new record saw a 2,200 pound shell, with a diameter of 56 inches launched into the sky over Al Marjan island by a 7 metre mortar, weighing 15,000 pounds and buried 4 metres into the sand. The shell spectacularly detonated at a height of 2,200 feet."

That's over a ton in weight, being launched to 2200 feet by a single charge. That's _ludicrously_ large.

1:05 - the shell being launched 2:20 - discussion of the size and weight of the shell 4:00 - the shell under construction</comment>


How to get developers to report time? - <AUTHOR> https://weeklytimelog.com/blog/how-to-get-developers-to-report-time <comment><USER2> What's the point? None of the data captured here is useful for anyone but a non-technical manager to fool himself into thinking he's measuring something meaningful.

<comment><USER3> It's just an advert for their product.</comment></comment>


Researchers discover seven new Meltdown and Spectre attacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/researchers-discover-seven-new-meltdown-and-spectre-attacks/ <comment><USER2> I don't know much about low level stuff, but from what I have read:

\- these issues are inherent in speculative execution

\- speculative execution is critical for performance

\- therefore these issues are really hard to eliminate

\- these attacks can break out of VM's

Are these points correct? Because if they are, it seems like a safe conclusion that most of the cloud will be compromised.

<comment><USER3> I think you're right on everything but "critical for performance".

Some chips (mostly Intel) have seen pretty big performance drops. But nothing like 50%+.

Cloud could cost 50% more. We will bear it.

<comment><USER4> > Cloud could cost 50% more. We will bear it.

Likely far less impact than this, as much of the cloud isn't CPU-bound, right?

<comment><USER5> I think that's his point; cloud is often network-bound, which can be orders of magnitude more costly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Direct link to paper: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.05441](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.05441)

<comment><USER7> Mvp

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like the only solution would be to enable speculative execution on a per-process basis. Something like Visual Studio and it's child processes, core Windows processes and the kernel may fully use branch prediction. "Trusted processes" so to speak. The Web browser, not so much, so no branch prediction, no side channel.

Perhaps new cpu instructions?

\- nspex - No SPeculative EXecution from here

\- espex - Enable SPeculative EXecution from here

<comment><USER9> > Something like Visual Studio and it's child processes, core Windows > processes and the kernel may fully use branch prediction.

Even that does not work.

If the kernel can do speculative execution and user code can cause the kernel to do work (that's kind of the kernel's job), then user code can cause the kernel to leak secret data. This was one of the first set of attacks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Are these already patched?</comment>


Trump withdraws from postal treaty in new front against China - <AUTHOR> https://www.politico.com/story/2018/10/17/trump-withdraws-from-postal-treaty-910675 <comment><AUTHOR> Relevance to tech: The Postal Treaty is used by AliBabi manufacturers to ship to the US from China for substantially less than it costs for US manufacturers to ship domestically. This will affect the vast majority of goods sold on Amazon today.

<comment><USER2> don't forget ebay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This totally makes sense. I never understood how stuff shipped from China costs less than the cost of a package sent in the US.

<comment><USER4> Exactly. I bought a brick of chalk for $2.50 (shipping included) from China. Shipping alone costs more here, and they're still making a profit.

I didn't realize that this subsidy exists. I'm no fan of Trump, but this is a good move.</comment></comment>


Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> This was posted to HN when it was new. (This is non-judgemental)

Link to the discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11809381](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11809381)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting conclusion. I agree that we need to let go of the notion that there is someone "perfect" for us. That person doesn't exist. True, lasting happiness in marriage is possible. Joy in marriage occurs when we seek the highest good of the other through unselfish sacrifice and compromise, and the other does the same toward us. That isn't easy, and could take years of discipline and failure. I've seen couples that I knew were heading for divorce grasp this and are now the happiest people I know. Of course, sometimes divorce is inevitable, but I think some could be avoided if each recommitted themselves to the higher good of the other.

<comment><USER4> Your post contains a contradiction, at least it appears to me to be so.

If something is countable or quantifiable, like 'True, lasting happiness'. Isn't the partner that is capable of providing the 'True, lasting happiness' the perfect match for you? There might be multiple potential partners that will provide lasting happiness, and the one that does this in the most expedient fashion (or perhaps the result of doing happinessp1 * happinessp2) is the 'perfect' partner. My understanding of what you wrote is that you mean to say that there is no Disney prince/princess waiting for anyone out there. I can agree with that, but certainly there is a match somewhere that is maximally mutually compatible (perfect??)?

<comment><USER5> If you want to make a formal argument, I think you will need a formal definition of 'true, lasting happiness' and of expediency in its provision.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, I've admitted in another comment that this was an inexact term. I'm not a happiness expert, so I'm open to suggestions!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My dad, who is divorced, tried to sum up his marriage advice for me: "Marriage can work if each person is willing to contribute more than half to the relationship."

Now that I'm married with three kids (one a teenager), I think he might actually have been on to something. Life isn't fair, things probably won't even out in the end, and nobody will ever fully appreciate the thousand invisible things you do to make your family work. If your belief system expects the opposite of those statements to be true, then you might not allow yourself the emotional slack to buffer the incredible variance of a marriage that lasts long enough to cover the normal trials of real life (illness, death, job change, envy, jealousy, in-laws, travel, aging, boredom, financial trouble, etc.).

<comment><USER7> Reminds me of Mark Twain:

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

<comment><USER8> I get the intended meaning, and also I will be sorely disappointed in myself if I don't learn a hell of a lot between my kid turning 14 and 21.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _" The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste...but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently"_

I do agree with this bit. It's confusing to me that many of the online dating sites are trying to pair people based on how alike they are.

Is there any real research that this is somehow the key to marital bliss? Anecdotal, but most of the long married couples I know aren't very alike, and don't share the same interests...other than things like grandchildren, etc.

<comment><USER10> Remember that we're still talking about a life partner here, which is very different from, say, a roommate. As long as you and a roommate are respectful of each other's sleep, possessions, ability to host friends at least occasionally, and mutually agreed levels of general cleanliness, you'll probably get along just fine, even if you're different in almost every other way. You're two different people in different places in life with different goals and ideologies and you just happen to live with each other for now. It's perfunctory and emotionally cold, but that's OK, because that fits within both you and your roommate's expectations, given that the rent needs to be paid and you only have so much time to find someone to help you pay it.

Of course it's possible to be wonderful friends with your roommate, but the point to be made is that if that's your grand sum of what you expect out of a relationship, you're going to feel profoundly lonely, unsupported, and unloved. Fulfilling our emotional needs is also important, and dating sites that focus on finding people who are similar to each other are sites which understand that people will build that relationship of love, trust, and understanding on a foundation of what they have in common.

What the author is trying to remind us is that no matter who much in common we have with someone, and thus no matter who we marry, there will be areas in which we will differ from and disagree with our partners. As such, healthy dating requires you to find not only that base of similarity but also that ability to disagree without a sense of disappointment that you disagree with The One on something.

So the article isn't meant for people in healthy marriages. They already understand that. It's written for the serial daters who reject suitors for ultimately irrelevant reasons.

<comment><USER11> I logged in just to say that I think this is an _excellent_ answer. But since I'm already here...

> It's written for the serial daters who reject suitors for ultimately > irrelevant reasons.

Do you feel that dating sites help cultivate a mindset in people that predisposes them to doing this? I do - I think many dating sites (OKCupid in particular) swamp you with irrelevant information. In my experience, it seems like people are perfectly willing to use superficial reasons to say "no" to potential partners. I'm not talking things like political views or religious beliefs; I'm talking about things like weightlifting or liking Taylor Swift. Is it the perception that these sorts of things go hand in hand with other behaviors, or fit into a preconceived notion of "what kind" of people like this sort of thing? I'm inclined to believe so.

Just a mild rant. I liked this article a lot when it first came out and I'm happy to see it pop up again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was > often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative.

Is this actually true? I've heard it repeated over and over again, but is there any real evidence that a larger percentage people in "marriages of reason" felt dissatisfied when compared to marriages today? Considering the 50% divorce rate I'd be extremely surprised if the dissatisfaction rate of matches made in days gone by was much higher.

<comment><USER13> There is no 50% divorce rate, but it used to approach that 40 years ago.

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce- surg...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is- over-but-the-myth-lives-on.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The lead image for the article contains deeper insight into the state of modern marriage than all the words following.

<comment><USER12> What are you trying to say?

<comment><USER15> They are referencing what the image portrays, which is quite funny. Here is my take in describing it if the image was not clear for you:

1.the woman paints a perfect picture of how her partner should be

2.then she marries the fake 'image' of that person. The illusion she has built up inside her head.

3\. She discovers the true person behind her false image.

4\. She cries in disappointment that the true person behind her built up fake image is not what she expected.

<comment><USER16> Oddly enough, I feel that there is a positive spin to the last image: the man is holding the woman, who trusts him enough to be vulnerable in his arms. It speaks of the potential for the relationship to still work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've successfully applied the following simplified criterion "am I likely to still enjoy this person's company when I'm 80"

<comment><USER18> The point of the article is that this is impossible to tell.

<comment><USER19> Unlikely. We hear endlessly about how you can't change a person. Then when we assert "This person is unlikely to change substantially over their lifetime" then that gets shot down? I call foul.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, > abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors._

That's not a historically accurate description. In some cases it lead to that (but so did the "modern" idea of marriage as based on passion). It also lead to countless totally normal and stable marriages.

People weren't even unhappy about not marrying someone they are passionate about, because that was not in the "idea horizon". You don't miss what you don't expect.

Ask Indian people (that have not been westernized) for their arranged marriages, for example, and you'll get the idea. They don't find the appalling or alien in the least, and can be as tender and lovable between them as any couple.

</comment><comment><USER13> Like with many things in life, success requires failure, even though failure can be devastating. In my experience, having gone through both, failure in a marriage is different from a breakup. It's a deeper, more public, longer- lasting kind of failure. But the depth of the failure opens up access to a corresponding growth, and the personal awakening that I've gone through following my divorce has made me a better partner and person in every way.

</comment><comment><USER21> Divorce has become too easy and men face too many risks: alimony, children are taken and assets for marriage to make any sense.

70%+ of divorce is by women and men pay 98%+ of alimony.

No thanks

<comment><USER22> Amen.

Not sure if it's the same in the US, but in Australia women can nick half or more (tends to be 60%) of your stuff (including superannuation) even if you're NOT married through the joys and wonders of a de facto relationship.

I've got a mate going through this exact scenario right now, never married, lived with this woman for two years. She decides she wants to move back to England and sends the lawyers after him for a large slice of his superannuation.

<comment><USER21> There are personally no advantages to marriage for me.

I can't find an "equal" in real life. I'm very successful play music, draw and research and I can't find a woman that genuinely is interested and excels in these unless it's for some superficial value.

It's like we're biological different.

All well and good, but when the system itself becomes unfair, I just can't get myself to swallow the pill.

Sayonara mofos.

My career, surrogacy or have family in a less misandrist society.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> That's how life works anyway: what you get mirrors what you know about yourself, then you learn and move on.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great article. But it seems like it was cribbed from [http://www.thebookoflife.org/how-we-end-up-marrying-the- wron...](http://www.thebookoflife.org/how-we-end-up-marrying-the-wrong- people/), even though they come to different conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER22> Does make me wonder why people ever bother to get married. I mean it makes sense if you want/have kids I suppose, but if you don't then marriage really doesn't offer any benefit and winds up being a HUGE financial disadvantage for men when the marriage inevitably ends.

<comment><USER25> > winds up being a HUGE financial disadvantage for men when the marriage > inevitably ends.

Marriage doesn't inevitably end (other than by death of a partner, which this isn't referring to); less than half of first marriages, in fact, do.

<comment><USER26> I wonder what the statistics are for "first marriages that don't want kids". Still not inevitable, I assume...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Nugget of wisdom regarding picking partners (in love or other adventures):

> the person who is good at disagreement

</comment><comment><USER28> This article dates from May 28, 2016.It has been cited on HN many times in the past. Use the search facility to find comments. Nevertheless, it is worth a read.

</comment><comment><USER29> Wouldn't this bring up one very glaring reason not to marry someone though? They have a completely unrealistic view of marriage.</comment>


Ow, My Trademark (Need Legal Help w\ Infringement) - <AUTHOR>

TL;DR Version: Someone started using my company name in commerce about three weeks after I started using it. I have first use in commerce and (as of this week) the trademark. What I don't have is much money for legal representation or the legal know-how to fight this pro se.
The web hasn't been very helpful, does anyone know of an IP lawyer or start up legal help desk for situations like these?
--
About a year ago I started building a company: Domain purchased, design commissioned, business cards printed, code started. But it's not a weekend hack-a-thon type project, it's more of a slow burn long-term project.
About three months into building it full-time (I saved up and quit my job to pursue it) I went to register the twitter handle before heading off to a convention... Only it was taken... I started poking around to find that accounts on almost all of the various social networks were registered, and a shop at an online marketplace under the name was open for business.
The name itself is unique but familiar... Even more, the name uses an odd spelling for one of the terms.
I did some research and found that my first use in commerce bested her by at least 3 weeks, so I applied for the trademark, and contacted her to make sure that she knew that I was using the name (But, I was nice! I did it in a: "It sucks that we both started using the name around the same time, but I was there first." sort of way.)
This was in June, 2011.
I received the trademark a few days ago, but, since applying for it she has started a website under the name ("www.[trademarked-name]ontheweb.com" As if our site wasn't "on the web"?) and formed an LLC ([Trademarked Name LLC.]) What's worse is that she has started using my tagline in various interviews and articles written about her.
It's kind of surreal, she has a degree in business and is pursuing an MBA as well, so I'm not sure why she would register the name everywhere except at the USPTO? It feels like she's simply acting in bad faith.
I'm completely self-financed so I don't have a lot of money to burn in legal fees.
Does anyone know of an IP lawyer or start up legal help desk for situations like these <comment><USER2> Consider talking to the person (with legal advice first). Maybe she'd change her name if you paid for the cost of switching? Probably cheaper than legal action.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't thank that it would help.

After contacting her to tell her that we were already using the name, she went out and registered it on just about every social media platform (that she hadn't already registered) and put up a blog post announcing her "exciting" plans to incorporate our business model into her own.

<comment><USER3> Make copies of that blog post, your email to her, and your published materials at the time which discuss your business model. You can use it to allege willful infringement.

Have records of your earlier use of the name and your earlier use of the tagline and any other marketing slogans that she is using.

Make a list of all of the social media apps that she has registered using your name after you asked her to stop using it. Contact them all alleging trademark infringement and ask them to shut down the account or rename it.

See if Nolo Press has a book on trademark disputes. If she is using your marketing materials, I think you have good cause for a civil case. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Also, build up your business to be better than hers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honestly, I'd spend little to no time on this.

Startups do not live and die based on the uniqueness of their trademark. Your time is better spent working on your product. If / when you get real traction, you'll have enough cash to get this resolved.

<comment><AUTHOR> My biggest concern is that she's starting to push us further and further down in terms of google results. She has been getting so much press that we're barely on the first page anymore.

<comment><USER5> Start doing some SEO for your company name, if that's your concern. How:

\- comment using your company name as name and your website name in the website whenever you can (don't worry about nofollow links).

\- publish as many articles as you can (original, unique content) on as many good article directories you can find. In your article use your company name as anchor text and link to your homepage.

\- Search on Google a good list of web 2.0 properties and start publishing articles (one article/property is fine, more is better) in the same way. Anchor text: company name linking to the page you want people to see when they type your company name on Google.

This is really basic stuff, but if you are new to the thing it may keep you busy for a while.

Feel free to ask for any clarification or some other tip, I'm dead sleepy atm, signing off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My suggestion since this involves essentially a domain name is to file a UDRP to get control of her domain. Of course nothing will prevent the person from registering a different name but you aren't going to be able to handle the cost of the trademark case.

Cost of a UDRP should be $5000 including attorney fees.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that I'm going to start by filing infringement claims with the various services that she uses (she doesn't host her own site, she uses a service.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A former colleague handles IP matters like this. She's a startup lawyer, so her rates are generally competitive in the price range you're thinking of.

Here's her contact info if you are interested: (323) 929-7185 firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will do!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can we add link previews to Hacker News links? - <AUTHOR> I have some chat groups where we share/save HN links (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14731830 for example). Unfortunately, the article names aren't shown as a link preview and the URL doesn't have a text.
It would be awesome if it showed a link preview with the article title in the chat, for example via Open Graph Protocol (ogp.me).
It's also really lightweight. Just a meta tag:

  <meta property="og:title" content="The Title" />
 Please let me know what you think! <comment><USER2> If nobody responds here you can email firstname.lastname@example.com to reach the admins directly.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done, thanks!</comment></comment>


The Absurd Structure of High School - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/s/story/the-insane-structure-of-high-school-762fea58fe62 <comment><USER2> _> Students should have two long classes each day for six to eight weeks._

It wouldn't work. All the article seems to focus on "productivity", without defining what productivity is. What the goal of solving problems in a class? To solve problem? No, to goal is to learn something. Maybe to learn how to solve this problem, maybe to learn how to solve problems of this kind, maybe to learn some new words.

The goal is learning. Learning needs constant efforts applied. Not one time per month, but two-three times per week, or even every day efforts. It is how memory works. There is a forgetting curve[1], the forgetting begins when you learnt some new in a class. You need to rehearse material a few times, to move it into long-term memory. It is considered the most effective to rehearse material after three days. Effective in terms of minimizing efforts needed to move information into long-term memory. You could learn faster if learning sessions was placed each 2 days or even every day, but it would need more efforts per bit of long-term memorized information. At least theoretically so -- there are other factors which have their influence on a process of memorization.

So we need to have math lessons a few times per week. English lessons a few times per week. History lessons a few times per week. The most effective schedule would be 2-3 lessons per subject per week. It can be 1 lesson, but then we would need to add a homework assignment for student make a rehearsal of material between lessons, splitting a week by half. I can work great with highly motivated and conscientous students, but not all of students are highly motivated and conscientous. Therefore school creates schedule that forces students into the most effective learning experience. Or at least tries to do it.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve)</comment>


DHS, FBI say election systems in all 50 states were targeted in 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/dhs-fbi-say-election-systems-in-50-states-were-targeted-in-2016/ <comment><USER2> It's worth the down votes each time I add a comment on this topic, but it bears repeating that since electronic elections are not verifiable in any meaningful way, their legitimacy is suspect, and electronic voting actively creates the conditions for violence in response to contested results.

Everybody knows this now and the effects are so predictable it brings into question the motives of people who have an interest in both undermining and discrediting the democratic process by using these machines.

<comment><USER3> > since electronic elections are not verifiable in any meaningful way

As I once saw someone point out here, the crucial thing is that they be verifiable by _the average person_.

Imagine a technically perfect electronic voting system, immune to tampering, preserving anonymity, etc. It's provably perfect - but only to the handful people who can understand the proof.

Average people could not have confidence in such a system, so it undermines democracy. (This may also be a barrier to using vote counting systems better but more complex than "first past the post" unless they can be explained clearly.)

"Put your paper ballot in that bin everyone can see and we'll all count them together at the end of the day" is a process that anyone can see is legitimate. So that's what we should do.

<comment><USER4> I think a lot of the verification problems for electronic voting could be solved by simplification and using old 'outdated' technology. You don't need a full fledged PC to tally votes, you need the computing power of a 30 year old calculator that could be built on a 2-foot wide board with large and simple traces. Something somebody at home with a multi-meter could probe around and test.

We need the equivalent of a moped to do what we need done, but are being sold on F1 racecars which end up being built by equivalent of rednecks in a scrapyard to line the pockets of the scrapyard owners.

<comment><USER5> > I think a lot of the verification problems for electronic voting could be > solved by simplification and using old 'outdated' technology. You don't need > a full fledged PC to tally votes, you need the computing power of a 30 year > old calculator that could be built on a 2-foot wide board with large and > simple traces. Something somebody at home with a multi-meter could probe > around and test.

Even that's too complicated to be trustworthy. That's why I think optical scan ballots are the way to go: even a totally unskilled, untrained regular person would feel fairly confident that they could count them.

IMHO, all the technology investment should be put into processing and validating ballots _after_ they've been filled out. Personally, I like the idea of a voter being able to feed their optical-scan ballot into a machine at the voting booth that will let them verify it will be read exactly as they intend. Then they carry it over to the ballot box to be tallied by a separate machine there.

<comment><USER3> > IMHO, all the technology investment should be put into processing and > validating ballots after they've been filled out

I think the opposite. When filling a ballot, the voter can use a machine with a touchscreen. The person with poor sight can use huge fonts, the blind can use a screen reader, etc. The output from this is a printed paper form, filled out with perfectly legibility. No hanging chads, ambiguous marks, etc.

At this point, the voter (or an assistant) can verify the form just as if a human had filled it out for them.

From there, these perfectly-filled forms can be counted the old-fashioned way with many witnesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is incredible. Rules of engagement are in profound need of overhaul. This is nothing less than a military attack on the US, via computer. No sufficiently large nation state is innocent, but targeting voting systems (and potentially vote totals) should be a glaring red line that has consequences, taking into account that attribution is falsifiable and hard.

<comment><USER7> How do you feel about any foreign political intervention?

I'd guess that 50+% of 3rd world leaders are supported by some foreign government financially or militarily which keeps them in power.

But yes, it doesn't feel good when a foreign government tries to pick a winner in our elections.

<comment><USER6> Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds like you are asking me if I think changing voting results is equivalent to attempting to influence voters?

No, I do not think those are remotely equivalent.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, I think the point I was trying to make was that most governments try to openly influence politics in other countries rather than protecting free elections.

I totally agree that vote rigging would be particularly egregious. However, I'm not sure that backing a regime with money / weapons / training, etc. that then goes ahead and rigs the vote is that much better.

I think it's more like one scenario is stealing money and the other is investing in a gang that steals money.

I just find it interesting that we openly try to pick political winners and losers in other countries.

<comment><USER8> Not picking winners is also a decision that impacts other countries. It's like a default option in a UI -- there are no neutral options.

<comment><USER7> Sure, but I guess by that same logic not rigging a foreign election would impact a country too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the faculty at my university has conducted some detailed analysis on the practice of electronic voting in the US.

I believe this is the most up-to-date publication on the subject: [https://cse.sc.edu/~buell/Public_Data/2019_VotingMachines.pd...](https://cse.sc.edu/~buell/Public_Data/2019_VotingMachines.pdf)

I would also recommend the documentary "I Voted" ([https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4081950/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4081950/)).

These aren't about the 2016 election in particular, but it would seem that there is strong evidence that the security practices in place by many US states are inadequate, and there is often no "paper trail" to verify that results were tallied accurately after the fact if a recount is needed.

Considering the poor security, if the 2016 election was targeted, it is likely that the attacker(s) succeeded.

</comment><comment><USER10> > _Between June and October of 2016, the group associated with the election > hacking "researched websites and information related to elections in at > least 39 states and territories, according to newly available FBI > information," the bulletin states. "The same actors also directly visited > websites in at least 30 states, mostly election-related government sites at > both the state and local level—some of which overlap with the 39 researched > states."_

> _The "actors" performed their research "in alphabetical order by state > name," the bulletin states, "suggesting that at least the initial research > was not targeted at specific states." The research focused on Secretary of > State voter registration and election results sites, but it also drilled > down on some local election officials' webpages. As they accessed sites, > actors "regularly attempted to identify and exploit SQL database > vulnerabilities in webservers and databases."_

Voter registration information is public (although not technically to Russian citizens!).

Visiting the front end websites of the state election authorities and attempting SQL injection on the web forms is not what some downthread are calling a military attack.

However, I think it's great to be sent such a wake up call in the form of a "tap on the shoulder" because these systems should be heavily monitored and better protected.

The true _election systems_ should require feet on the ground to compromise in any form. And they should not be electronic without a proper auditable paper record.

</comment><comment><USER11> But what will they do about it? Absolutely nothing. Republican politicians don't care and I honestly don't understand why not. Election security should be a truly non-partisan issue, yet whenever they talk about election security it's not this it's about disenfranchising certain voting blocks.

<comment><USER12> Then why are Democrats against showing an ID to prove you are who you say you are? Why are Democrats OK with allowing ballot harvesting in California when the election in North Carolina was invalidated for the same reason?

<comment><USER13> Because there's no significant amount of fraud occurring that ID requirements would fix, and ID requirements are often made to unfairly disenfranchise certain groups.

<comment><USER14> >ID requirements are often made to unfairly disenfranchise certain groups

It's interesting to hear what those "certain groups" think about that: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odB1wWPqSlE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odB1wWPqSlE)

<comment><USER13> A video with anecdotes, this is sure to be worth my time!

<comment><USER14> Saying that the thoughts of people affected by policies you claim to support isn't "worth your time" really undermines the idea that you have their best interests in mind.

<comment><USER13> I don't have the time or resources to interview all 235 million eligible voters in the US. I'll have to rely on others to sample them. Any sample comes with the potential for bias or error so it needs to be done well. I see no reason to think that this four-minute video, whose description says it has interviews with people from Harlem, comes even remotely close. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER14> >Am I wrong?

You're conflating a scientific study on who does and does not have a valid ID with what people think about people assuming they have no ID because of their skin color. They're orthogonal concepts.

All of the black people interviewed in that video found it ignorant and offensive that people assume that because they're black, they likely don't have ID or know how to get ID, and the white liberals had no problem making broad, negative assumptions about black people, if it supported their political views. That's the point I'm trying to make.

<comment><USER13> Were those people a representative sample? What was the sample size?

<comment><USER12> You start off speaking for a group and end saying you're only speaking for a percentage of that group. You just totally invalidated the basis of your argument from earlier

<comment><USER13> Where was I speaking for a group?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone know the details of these "election systems"?

> Russian cyber actors in the summer of 2016 conducted online research and > reconnaissance to identify vulnerable databases, usernames, and passwords in > webpages of a broader number of state and local websites than previously > identified

This makes it sound like just election-related state websites.

> a Russian campaign seeking vulnerabilities and access to election > infrastructure

For me, the term "Election infrastructure" sounds like it would include voting machines, voter registries, vote counts, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> Until now this has all been bullshit accusations. The "false positives" are very common in these security reports, because they want a warning when there might be an attack.

They do not list the numerous internal attacks that were reported too. These actually modified the votes. These votes can only be changed via physical access. But this is probably not politically interesting, and it involves corrupt staff members and such.

I have been following a lot of this kind of security news. But let's follow the money. Homeland security has already prepared a plan to take over the election system in all states (from before 2016). It seems to me that these accusations are used to push to take over the voting system.

Such a change would theoretically be good, but who watches the watchers? And why does DHS not report on the internal problems that actually changed votes?

</comment><comment><USER16> Do we know anything about what these hackers accomplished / what effect they had on the election?

The idea that our election infrastructure is "targeted" is scary but not very surprising. Every web server on the internet is "targeted", so why wouldn't something as valuable as election infrastructure?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Do we know anything about what these hackers accomplished / what effect they > had on the election?

Reports of attacks that aren't repelled corrodes trust in the integrity of elections. [http://time.com/5510100/risk-limiting-audit-election- securit...](http://time.com/5510100/risk-limiting-audit-election-security/)

<comment><USER16> >.. attacks that aren't repelled...

I guess this is what I'm asking. Were the attacks repelled, or did the hackers actually hack/break/change something? What was that thing? I'm genuinely asking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does anyone know if there is a statistically significant difference between the electronic and paper machines in the swing states? I seem to remember hearing that Wisconsin had a very skewed correlation based upon county machine type, but would love to see the actual breakdown.

</comment><comment><USER18> Yeah not surprising. Used to work for the Texas Gov Storage IT. Those guys left the single file server for all of Secretary of State (department that manages elections) up on the internet for months to make remote access / working from home possible. SSL certs, keebase backups, it was all there.

Behind a single user/pass form with a 12 char pass. Would be stupid to not target these states.

This was in September 2018.

<comment><USER19> Not sure why you posted something so specific and fairly recent, it was easy to find more data. They could put you in prison for this dox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there really proof of much of anything in here? Seems like more Russia hysteria.

Lots of use of the word "probably" and "likely" in this article.</comment>


Show HN: UI Design made easy with UI Blueprints - <AUTHOR> http://uiblueprints.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my first product to release. It is similar of course to Balsamiq, but I'm trying to attract a slightly different user with a richer tool set.

Any feedback HN can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Also HN users can get 40% off of the product if you purchase through this link: <http://uiblueprints.com/hackernews.html>

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks good; but I would put more fancy samples, specially for the web page. Everyone hates Comic Sans! I would also group the left menu tools by functionality: text, image, etc. Overall, I think you need to polish it up a little; have a more concise theme/skin/presentation, ideally one that would match your home page theme.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Grouping the components by function is low handing fruit that I should add very quickly. "More fancy examples" would also be a big help. Thanks for the feedback! Back to work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great products. We were looking for something very similar to mock up several UI's for our inventory backend. This has been a great help.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks really good. Please add a Tablet or iPad component.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah... tablet design is pretty important! Should be in the next release!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Simple to use mockup tool, like the export to PNG function and phone widgets.</comment>