Talking to the Mailman – Interview with Richard Stallman - <AUTHOR> https://newleftreview.org/II/113/richard-stallman-talking-to-the-mailman <comment><USER3> I prefer reading written interviews with RMS. Live interviewers never seem to be able to stop themselves from interrupting him, and he needs more than soundbite-length to make his points.

</comment><comment><USER4> Although he's very committed to free software and individual freedom ideologically, his arguments for them are quite excellent. I find his political views are very common sense too

<comment><USER5> Why "although"?

<comment><USER6> I think they meant that he can argue for those principles rationally, even though he has an ideological bias towards them.

<comment><USER7> It still seems like a strange distinction. Is the implication that RMS did not arrive at his opinions through reasoning?

<comment><USER8> He most definitely got started down his path for emotional reasons, he had a sweet gig at MIT and he wanted to ride that train forever. When people at the lab he worked in left to join Symbolics, he was left behind and he has borne that grudge ever since. He has certainly backed up his philosophy since that time with much reasoning and writing, but even his most rational writings seem trapped under the weight of emotions IMO. It's all good vs. evil, fire and brimstone stuff, he never assumes good faith on the part of those who disagree with him, and has never seen a bridge he didn't want to burn.

<comment><USER9> This post gives the impression to the reader that RMS had put his ego first and then rationalized it with fsf philosophy.From what i had read online he was pissed off when the printer manufacturer at MIT stopped sharing the source code to modify the software and he has formed(or thought about it and discovered) his philosophical leanings at that time. Very soon symbolics was formed developing closed source software and he was invited to it. But he believed strongly in his philosophy and was working hard to keep the free software up to date which symbolics was developing. Also the symbolics engineer had told in one of the interviews they were 5 people and RMS single handedly was keeping up with them. So the conclusion i had was he was 5x capable to the symbolics engineers (who are very smart people) and if he was that capable he could have become rich easily, but due to his strong philosophical belief he sacrificed his life for the greater good. If you have the links to the contrary please share.

<comment><USER10> Based on mailing lists I read, some of those 5 people who RMS single handedly was keeping up with were kind of pissed off about that framing a long after. Kind of ... disagreed. He did not done the same amount of work as them, meaning work on other projects, prototyping, design work etc, through it is true that he could more or less copy functionality of the thing plus minus bugs. Designing it and trying out various ways how to do the thing takes more time then copying the project. I am fully confident in that, because I was porting a couple of projects in the past so I know how much time is saved.

Aside everything else, self-glorifying stories about heroic saviors who are single so much better then second smartest person in a room should be treated with suspicion - and it is completely puzzling to me that some people are believed them so easily. Because really, for me to believe in that much of an unusual hero, I would like to have confirmations from other primary sources then just said hero and people who worship him. (That is not to say that he is incapable on the other extreme, absolutely not. But you can be extremely good and still not the god this story is about.)

<comment><USER11> > I would like to have confirmations from other primary sources then just said > hero and people who worship him.

Sure, I'll bite. This is a passage about Stallman's performance in Harvard's Math 55, which has a reputation as the hardest single undergraduate math course in the US:

To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "It was an amazing class," says David Harbater, a former "math mafia" member and now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. The phrase I say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of Banach manifolds. That's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about Banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school."

Starting with 75 students, the class quickly melted down to 20 by the end of the second semester. Of that 20, says Harbater, "only 10 really knew what they were doing." Of that 10, 8 would go on to become future mathematics professors, 1 would go on to teach physics.

"The other one," emphasizes Harbater, "was Richard Stallman."

Seth Breidbart, a fellow Math 55 classmate, remembers Stallman distinguishing himself from his peers even then.

"He was a stickler in some very strange ways," says Breidbart. There is a standard technique in math which everybody does wrong. It's an abuse of notation where you have to define a function for something and what you do is you define a function and then you prove that it's well defined. Except the first time he did and presented it, he defined a relation and proved that it's a function. It's the exact same proof, but he used the correct terminology, which no one else did. That's just the way he was."

It was in Math 55 that Richard Stallman began to cultivate a reputation for brilliance. Breidbart agrees, but Chess, whose competitive streak refused to yield, says the realization that Stallman might be the best mathematician in the class didn't set in until the next year. "It was during a class on Real Analysis, which I took with Richard the next year," says Chess, now a math professor at Hunter College. "I actually remember in a proof about complex valued measures that Richard came up with an idea that was basically a metaphor from the calculus of variations. It was the first time I ever saw somebody solve a problem in a brilliantly original way."

Chess makes no bones about it: watching Stallman's solution unfold on the chalkboard was a devastating blow. As a kid who'd always taken pride in being the smartest mathematician the room, it was like catching a glimpse of his own mortality. Years later, as Chess slowly came to accept the professional rank of a good-but-not-great mathematician, he had Stallman's sophomore-year proof to look back on as a taunting early indicator.

"That's the thing about mathematics," says Chess. "You don't have to be a first-rank mathematician to recognize first-rate mathematical talent. I could tell I was up there, but I could also tell I wasn't at the first rank. If Richard had chosen to be a mathematician, he would have been a first-rank mathematician."

Source: [https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch04.html](https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch04.html)

<comment><USER10> None of it proves that he did the work of five people nor that those people were unfairly stolen from his lab. It shows he is great at math through. The original claim is that he single handedly did work of those 5 "very smart" people. Especially when main point in dispute is whether what he did was equivalent amount of work and which software had more bugs.

This does not even directly implies he is a good programmer (he is actually good programmer in reality, but high level math skills don't prove it).

<comment><USER12> The following exert is from the [https://archive.org/stream/faif-2.0/faif-2.0_djvu.txt](https://archive.org/stream/faif-2.0/faif-2.0_djvu.txt). If you read above this paragraph its clear stallman did not for the purpose of his ego choose the ideology. Its the other way.

<BEGIN> Already renowned for his work with Emacs, Stallman's ability to match the output of an entire team of Symbolics program- mers - a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself \- still stands as one of the major human accomplishments of the In- formation Age, or of any age for that matter. Dubbing it a "master hack" and Stallman himself a "virtual John Henry of computer code," author Steven Levy notes that many of his Symbolics-employed rivals had no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging re- spect. Levy quotes Bill Gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for Symbolics in the company's Palo Alto office, expressing amazement over Stallman's output during this period:

I can see something Stallman wrote, and I might decide it was bad (probably not, but somebody could convince me it was bad), and I would still say, "But wait a minute - Stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over there. He's working alone! It's incredible anyone could do this alone!" 16 <END>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like RMS however the sad thing is that most people don't care.

We can call those people sheeple or whatever, but at the end of the day they are just users who don't have the time/knowledge to care about free software.

It took me a few times before I could grasp free software Vs open source and I'm knee deep in the code most days.

Another issue this ideology faces is it's main proponent; RMS. He's not charismatic and as another user pointed out, does not present well on videos or talks. If he wants free software to continue, then he should pick new champions and take a step back.

<comment><USER14> The thing I like about RMS is that when he speaks it is like presenting a mathematical proof, he explains the terms, rules and shows the logic arguments, the interviewers are most of the time impatient or incapable to understand such a rigorous style of response.

<comment><USER11> I really think this is how Stallman thinks. As far as I know, he's never mentioned the words "deontic logic" in writing, but I get the impression he believes he's attempting to give a formal logical argument for morally obligatory behavior.

Aside from the hassle involved with using only free software, I think one of the things holding him back is that he's much better at math/comp sci/logic than he is at social skills, and he's not especially suited to being the leader of a popular movement.

<comment><USER15> Nobody else is doing it.

I don't think he needs to hand over - if someone else was doing a better job of the advocacy of Free Software then perhaps he could choose to 'retire', but until then he is the best there is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "If China and the US are in a race for Orwellian tyranny, I hope the US loses."

RMS is generally right, and I have the utmost respect for his adherence to such a principled stance for the social good all these years.

Imagine all the opportunities to become filthy rich in the tech world he's ignored, having lived through multiple tech bubbles while being more than qualified to capitalize on them through developing proprietary software or otherwise exploiting users.

</comment><comment><USER17> Just a couple of comments as I read through this:

> Non-free, proprietary software is also much more likely to be malware—to > contain malicious functionalities, of which there are many kinds. Non-free > programs can spy on the users, report on them. Many are designed > specifically to restrict what users can do—that's their purpose.

I think this is a mischaracterization, since these things apply to _free_ software as well. The difference is that it is usually much easier to detect when such things are happening, and modify the program so that it no longer does these things.

> Another form of malicious functionality is tying the program to a specific > remote server

Again, this doesn't seem to me to be a "free software" argument. The reason this doesn't usually happen with free software is that there is no central entity that controls the software, whereas with non-free software one company/server/person can control their products and "backdoor" them.

> If a program is written in Swift, you can now install it yourself from > source code.

This is not quite true. I can do the same for a program written in Objective-C as well, and I can still write an app in Swift and send you a compiled binary for you to install. Perhaps Stallman was talking about Swift Playgrounds, but even here there are issues: you cannot necessarily change the code on your device itself, and the environment that your code runs in is much more restrictive.

> free software is something businesses can use and develop and sell.

I have seen many companies _use_ free software, but very few actually making money off of free software. When I ask, I'm usually pointed to RedHat, which makes money off of providing support. However, the money they're getting is usually coming from companies that sell non-free software. So I'm really curious how the economy would work if _everyone_ sold free software, since this doesn't seem like something that would work.

Also, just a a final comment, I find it amusing that Stallman has these little nicknames for all the non-free things he doesn't like. It seems to me a bit childish; I wonder if this actually helps him or it just makes other people feel like I do.

<comment><USER18> > I think this is a mischaracterization, since these things apply to free > software as well.

You think free (not in the sense of $0; in the sense of Stallman's usage: non- propriatry, libre) software contains malware/spyware?

<comment><USER19> There have been instances of open-source programs (including a certain code editor Hackernews has a collective nerdgasm over every time a release drops) shipping with telemetry or other spying features enabled. In some cases (like that one popular browser), the vendor makes it difficult or impossible to disable those features without modifying and recompiling the code.

<comment><USER20> "There have been instances of open-source programs shipping with telemetry or other spying features enabled."

Brew comes to mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Has anyone ever done an economic analysis of free software(GNU licensed software) and how it plays out financially for all the actors involved?

As an example, how does a license like GNU play out for the average person contributing to a successful GNU licensed game versus a closed source game?

And also, at a more macro level, wouldn't a GNU-like license foster innovation and collaboration in the developing world and lead to greater profit for all parties involved in the long run(except ofc mega-corps)?

*I might just open an Ask HN when I've thought this question through some more.

<comment><USER22> For games, I'd expect GNU does not play out well at all financially (and I say this as the author of a couple of GPL'ed games). Games are a bit of a strange beast, and atypical, I'd say, and pretty much _nobody_ makes a GPL'ed game and expects to make money on it, and those that do attempt it turn out to be mistaken. If you look on [http://freegamedev.net](http://freegamedev.net) for instance, it's pretty moribund lately, though, say five years ago it was more lively. Unity pretty much killed open source games, there's no new blood in open source games, all the young people flock to Unity. OTOH, more than half my career has been spent working on open source stuff (linux drivers, mainly) and in that, it's worked out pretty well financially. But an anecdote is not data, of course.

<comment><USER23> Well, generally (not always) monetization revolves around having a non-free product at some stage, I think.

Think about the business model of, say, charging for support for an open source library. Users don't pay that essentially _ever_. A business will pay, and they'll pay because they produce a non-free product (maybe it's SaaS, maybe they license proprietary software to other entities, whatever).

A game is the end of the line. If it's free software, (essentially) no-one pays for it.

There are also various examples of companies like GitLab that have the nonfree SaaS version and the free (MIT!) community version.

I'd be interested in seeing examples of a pure free software business model.

<comment><USER24> Thanks for mentioning GitLab. We would not have been able to grow as fast as we did without adopting an open core model. In the beginning we sold only support but companies tended to cancel their support contract after not needing it for a year. The margins on out self-hosted product are much better than on our SaaS product because of the hosting fees for free users.

An example of a pure free software business model is RedHat, they open source everything they make and that is working out for them [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322772](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18322772)

<comment><USER23> Of course. I love what you guys are doing and I'm incredibly grateful for the existence of CE!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The fact that MITAI's system had no security and was accessible over ARPANET is fascinating. What class of users could access ARPANET at that time?

<comment><USER26> In theory the arpanet was restricted to someone with connections to ARPA (now DARPA): either the military, military contractors (typically being paid to support the net, like BBN and SRI) or arpa-funded research institutions like ISI, MIT, etc). However if you had a parent or friend with access they'd sometimes give you the phone number of a local TIP (dialing point) -- then pretty much the only place you could go was the machines at MIT tech square (AI, MC, ML, DM) because they didn't have any restrictions.

Also various people who had accounts on other machines on the net would connect to the MIT lab machines as tourists simply because it was fun.

Even once the lab caved and put in some login security it was only to access the machine -- once you were connected you could change to another user or whatever.

It was "the ARPANET" by the way -- ARPA's network rather than having a name. ARPANET was also an adjective (e.g. ARPANET TIP). I know RMS would have said that but the interviewer transcribed it without the article.

<comment><USER27> Back in the early 90's I remember reading a "Letter from a Famous Hacker" in an e-zine talking about getting access to MIT systems. The sentiments expressed in the text made it seem like the security posture of the MIT AI lab was rather laid-back (and it sounded pretty cool).

I dug up the article[1] tonight (thanks, Jason Scott!). The the perspective I have today (at the time I had no idea who RMS was) it seems pretty clear that RMS wrote it. It's a neat little time capsule.

[1] [http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/DFP/dfp-1-5.txt](http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/DFP/dfp-1-5.txt)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Are not free and open source exactly the same? Opening the source gives you the four freedoms. It's both necessary and sufficient. The objection is that it's not philosophically explicit enough, not enough about the user, watered- down somehow? To me it seems like an only slightly different emphasis - <USER2> openness rather than freedom - which are in fact the same concept, just looked at from different angles. And the openness is obviously for the user just like the freedom is. Seems like a weird place to have a sticking point. It's just People's Front of Judea vs. Judean People's Front - an argument for jackoffs.

<comment><USER29> Remember when people presented an alternative to black lives matter and started to call it human lives matter? Emphasis sometimes matters a lot and people get upset when people intend to steer a movement away from the core issue for why it was created. It might look like a People's Front of Judea vs. Judean People's Front, but open source was created with the intention to steer focus away from the freedom ideology, just like how people say that human lives matter is just a name that people use to steer emphasis away from African Americans that get killed.

<comment><USER28> Interesing & very "gettable" analogy. In fact it's so apt, that it captures the feature most salient to me in all 3 examples: By insisting on things that, in the eyes of their more powerful adversaries, are minor or insignificant differences, they squander goodwill, make enemies out of allies, and make the movement weaker (or fail to make it stronger). It's a political blunder. In the case of the JPF/PFJ against the Romans it's obviously comic, but in the other two cases it's kind of tragic. BLM alienates a certain number of white people who aren't racists and want to work with them toward reform. Stallman maybe alienates a certain number of "open sourcers" who actually share most of his values & principles, certainly more than 1995 Bill Gates or 2001 Steve Ballmer did, let's say!

So yeah I might do that part differently if I were Stallman or in charge of BLM. Although I suppose in neither case is there really anybody truly "in charge," which at least in my experience with FOSS I always thought was the beauty of it. (That's another thing too, how can you "co-opt" something nobody owns?)

At some point you have to get shit done. Granted I'm advancing a position right now that leads to all sorts of compromise (in the one sense but also unfortunately in the other sense) and slippery-slope-ism and lesser-of-two- evils-ism. But somewhere I heard the saying, "There's nothing more useless than an unelected liberal." In other words the purity of your ideas does nobody any good if your hands aren't on the levers of power. Hi Hillary! (HRC disclaimers apply; see store for details.) That saying comes from the hierarchical model, obviously, but to translate it into a 'community movement' paradigm, power is simply the number of people participating. If you chop that in half, you chop everybody's power in half.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> >> I've found GNU social close to a replacement for Twitter, whereas Diaspora was more like Facebook.

> That's what I gathered. I'm in favor of projects like these, because I know > they're useful for other people, but it wouldn't fit my lifestyle. I just > use email. You can call me the Mailman—as in True Names, Vernor Vinge's > science-fiction story.

I really don't get this. Computers are supposed to open the doors to technological and social change, no? Why would anyone drag their feet like this? There are so many things that have come out since email and even more still coming.

<comment><USER23> What do you mean by 'drag their feet'?

I'm something like half RMS' age, and for the most part I use e-mail, IRC, and the odd board like HN (which I probably spend too much time on).

Social networks are simply not useful to me.

By contrast I have a coffee machine and barely anyone else I know does (UK). Because I find it useful and they don't.

What's wrong with that? It's nothing to do with the age of the software and all to do with the purpose it serves. My car is old because it works and I don't need a new one, too.

<comment><USER30> you may not need another car

but you might benefit from a plane

<comment><USER31> I used to love the stream of new technologies and was often an early adopter. Eventually I realised most of the promises of these products were illusory. There is very little benefit to them, sometimes even negative value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Bit off topic but recently I have been reading/watching a lot from Jaron Lanier.

Lanier used to be a FOSS advocate but has now taken the position that his previous support, and the opinions of RMS, are wrong.

Whether you agree or not, Lanier is a smart guy and an eloquent speaker and certainly worth listening to.

</comment><comment><USER33> I think RMS' thinking is stuck in the 80s and 90s. This hinders the whole free software movement. I can see three main points where he is behind the times:

1\. Permissive licensing actually helps the cause by spreading free software more widely, saturating demand faster, and displacing all proprietary software. It also avoids the contradiction when free software developers use their power to spread software freedom by force.

2\. What RMS is afraid of is front-ending of free software with proprietary facades. This is why free software must extend through the whole stack all the way to the end user and it must be complemented with non-profits that deliver complete services to users. Non-profits can also ensure de facto freedom whilst licenses only barely protect de jure freedom.

3\. Internet is not about communication. It's about remote operation of server-side software. Software freedoms must extend to teleoperated software, for example through the above mentioned non-profits.

<comment><USER34> I don't see how he is stuck at all; I see current events as validating his fears. The problem with (1) is that it doesn't solve (2) at all; free software _has_ spread on the backend thanks to permissive licenses, and yet proprietary facades are rampant. A good example of this is Chrome (built on FOSS webkit) displacing Firefox. And that's despite Mozilla being just that kind of non- profit trying to ensure freedom.

Non-profits ensuring freedoms is a nice thought, but it's very hard to compete with the abusive business models of large software corps, so unless you somehow convince regular people that they are better off paying for the stuff they use, licensing is the only real tool you have to avoid having your work contribute to those proprietary facades.

<comment><USER33> RMS' thinking comes from the early days of free software when free software was rare and viral licenses helped spread it. Free software is so commonplace now that its sheer volume displaces proprietary software.

Proprietary software vendors are trying to adapt by replacing fees with ads and spyware (like in the case of Chrome), but this business model will not last. It is abusive and people feel it. They will eventually gravitate to free software. Once they get used to free software, they wouldn't accept abuse anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> >> When I talk about capitalism, I mean private business.

It's interesting that what we call a 'public corporation' today isn't actually public at all - I'm pretty sure that Richard Stallman considers public corporations as being 'private business'.

A big problem with so-called public corporations is that there is not enough fluidity in terms of ownership for them to be called 'public'. The majority of shares move between a very small percentage of wealthy investors which represent an even smaller percentage of the general public.

It would be good to see a capitalist system where there is more fluidity over the ownership of shares of companies. Also, it would be nice to see public companies release all their code in the public domain under the GPL license.

I think that cryptocurrencies could make these things possible because they solve the financial incentive problem which has plagued free software. I think that it's now possible to create free software in the public domain in such a way that people can profit from it significantly but not in quite the same permanent way as we're used to with shares of corporations.

</comment><comment><USER36> The world seems like a very binary and black-and-white place for RMS. Everything non-free + proprietary == bad, whereas the opposite == good.

Is reality really so neatly categorized into binary outcomes with no shades of gray, though?

<comment><USER37> When it comes to source code, yes. Are you able to view the entirety of the code running the systems that control your information and operations? The answer to that question cannot be a shade of gray.

RMS has been proven more correct with each year that passes. More and more of the technologists responsible for our most significant innovations have expressed concerns about the control that large firms have gained over their users. This control is only possible through "non-free" source code, and is a guaranteed consequence when we allow the practice of distributing closed- source systems.

<comment><USER38> rms and the GPL focus on distribution, yet the Internet has enabled large firms to gain control without distributing their software, or even while distributing FOSS software. Perhaps tomorrow Google open-sources the JS executed by google.com in their open source browser, and it makes no difference, because the important bits - what data they retain about users - are not distributed.

Software we never run on our devices may yet control us.

<comment><USER39> AGPL tries to solve some of these problems, but fundamentally any service which controls and operates on your data on a server you don't own cannot fundamentally be free. RMS calls such services SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute).

So while distributed systems under AGPL still protect your freedom, AGPL of a SaaSS (like Google Docs) are non-free because you cannot change the software running on the server (and of course you shouldn't be able to -- because that would violate the freedom of the administrator). SaaSS is fundamentally incompatible with software freedom.

(And this is something that RMS has made clear arguments about. He cares more than just about distribution.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> _Freedom and democracy are more important than advancing technology. If China and the US are in a race for Orwellian tyranny, I hope the US loses. Indeed, the US should drop out of the race as soon as possible. Our society has been taught to overestimate the importance of 'innovation'. Innovations may be good, and they may be bad. If we let companies decide which innovations we will use, they will choose the ones that give them more of an advantage over us._

I liked this part the most as something new and insightful said by RMS.

I am not sure that democracy is better than innovation. I would choose Freedom and Innovation over Freedom and Democracy. Just look at how much has been done in the last few centuries. Nearly everyone can have things today that even kings didn't have. Democracy on the other hand is just a way of voting for some policy that's then enforced on everyone. In fact, China can be said to be a democracy more than the US in some ways. I do think we need to safeguard rights and freedoms but democracy isn't the only way to do that.

<comment><USER31> >In fact, China can be said to be a democracy more than the US in some ways.

None that I can think of, there is no political opposition allowed in China.

<comment><USER39> I agree, though there are many other western countries that have much stronger democracies than the US. Most of them in fact.

In the US, third parties aren't given equal placement on ballots (you need to get "ballot rights"). Large parties get money from the government for advertising, which small parties don't. The people don't actually vote for who is in power (and votes aren't equal between people).

Doesn't seem like political opposition is a workable right in the US to me. Not to mention everyone has guns, and guns are seen as an "break glass in case of tyranny" tool -- meaning that culturally people are primed to see violence as being a reasonable retort for political disagreements (obviously this is an oversimplification -- but political rallies in the US are far more violent than in many other western countries, despite many western countries having their own problems).

<comment><USER41> You don't need "ballot rights", you simply need to prove your idea or candidate is popular enough to make it worthwhile to add to the ballot.

Most political discourse in the US is not violent, regardless of what you see in the news. Dissent happens plenty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Stallman is hypocritical. He says a lot of good sounding things that lure you into ideas that subtly contradict the bait he catches you with.

Justification and examples of these claims here ( [https://github.com/amark/gun/pull/434#issuecomment-336536807](https://github.com/amark/gun/pull/434#issuecomment-336536807) ) on an old old old issue around a GPL code dependency we had to reject.

<comment><USER43> On one hand, it is bad style to accuse someone with strong words while only throwing with a link to give foundation to your judgement. This does not create a constructive environment to debate and learn.

On the other hand, both claims in the linked comment are not reasonable. For the first point in the link, software can be created and shared for money with the GPL while not preventing libraries to collect the software and provide it free of charge. For the second point, the given link does not give any foundation to the claim the Richard Stallman is against cooperations.

<comment><USER42> Many in this thread are quoting his "non-free" statement yet ignorant that Stallman violates his own standard. That totally counts and proves the point.

Besides the fact he outright calls corporations evil?

<comment><USER43> You once again gave no direct argument for your accusation. If you can't or are unwilling to do so, please don't put out accusations.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Higher-order abstract syntax - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_abstract_syntax <comment><USER2> Based on my limited knowledge, SSA form is at a higher level than AST (right?). If yes, would SSA be considered an example of HOAS?

Regardless, besides the question posed by OP, I wonder what the relation between SSA and HOAS might be?

<comment><USER3> ASTs and SSA are orthogonal concepts. ASTs are a representation of syntax (including SSA) where immediate subterms are easily accessible (unlike with strings as representation). Easy access to subterms is important for the efficiency of type-checkers and code-generators. In contrast, SSA is a simple programming language that is often used as an intermediate form in code generators.

HOAS is a form of embedding a language L with binders into a language L-Base also with binders and functions, but such that L-binders are handled by functions in L-Base and the problem of defining capture-avoiding substitution for L-terms is reduced to reusing L-Base's capture-avoiding substitution. (NB L = L-Base is possible but not required.)

HOAS is neat, but (simplifying a bit) prevents you from making inductive definitions on L terms. There are various ways of getting around this shortcoming, the most principled one is probably the nominal approach of A. Pitts et al. Another problem with HOAS is that the representation may contain 'junk'. That means there are L-Base terms that do not represent L-programs.

<comment><USER4> HOAS representations can only contain junk if you have not taken appropriate precautions. See the paper "Boxes Go Bananas" for one technique.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's right. But you need parametric polymorphism for "Boxes Go Bananas" which may not be available in some languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd be very interested to hear opinions of people who've actually used this and if so for what?

<comment><USER5> The Rust compiler uses DeBrujin indices to refer to variables at some point in the compilation process.

<comment><USER6> But that's pretty much exactly what HOAS is avoiding ;)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I'm releasing a series of OS iOS/Mac apps to show how they're built - <AUTHOR>

I'm a iOS and Mac developer and the thing that mostly bothered me when I first started learning Cocoa programming was the lack of full featured sample code.
Now things have changed and more projects have been released, but I still want to do my part.
I've already released Color Picker Pro for Mac:
https://raw.github.com/oscardelben/Color-Picker-Pro
This time I built a copy of the iPhone Calculator which (I hope) will be simple to follow for beginners:
https://github.com/oscardelben/iPhoneCalculator
I hope this will be useful to people who are learning Cocoa. Feedbacks are very appreciated. <comment><USER2> That's a fantastic idea. Just one suggestion, maybe you want to include simple games like Tic-Tac-Toe or Guess the number. When I tried to learn Obj-C I started writing those games first.

Keep us posted.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, I have a snake proof of concept on my github profule which was built with cocos2d, but I'll add more

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks a lot for open sourcing Color Picker Pro, I think it's an awesome utility.

As for the calculator, it nice to see a different approach to a simple problem. There is, however, a line of code missing from the :buttonPressed function. For the case of kButtonSubtract, it needs to set deleteInput to YES.

Thanks for the awesome Cocoa contributions. Please, keep it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> pull request merged, I missed that in a refactoring! Should probably add tests in the next product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great stuff. Thanks a lot!

</comment><comment><USER5> as a non-tech person trying to learn how to do this stuff - all i can say is, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER6> All I can say is thank you!

</comment><comment><USER7> Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER8> thanks :)</comment>


Ask HN: let current employer know I'm interviewing with other companies? - <AUTHOR>

Should I be open about it, or should I try to be discrete? <comment><USER2> Be discrete. You have nothing to gain from honesty in this situation.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting. Same thing is happening with one of my colleagues. He let it be known that he is interviewing with other companies, so our HR department let him know that they are looking to replace him. He may be let go before he wants to go!

</comment><comment><USER4> Discrete. If you are interviewing, but are not getting an offer, and they know about it, your employer will be able to take advantage of you (put more pressure, give extra work, etc.) and you will be stuck.

</comment><comment><USER5> Discrete. Why would you tell them?</comment>


How we introduced Airbnb Cereal typeface to our UI - <AUTHOR> https://airbnb.design/working-type/ <comment><USER2> I was kind of disappointed they didn't go into the origins of the name [0]. There's a good NPR podcast episode that covers this weird story [1].

[0]: [https://www.airbnb.com/obamaos](https://www.airbnb.com/obamaos)

[1]: [https://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=497820565:497945288](https://one.npr.org/?sharedMediaId=497820565:497945288)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good call, it wasn't referenced in this post. It's talked about on the introduction: [https://airbnb.design/introducing-airbnb- cereal/](https://airbnb.design/introducing-airbnb-cereal/)

The story: [https://www.wired.com/2017/02/airbnbs-surprising-path-to- y-c...](https://www.wired.com/2017/02/airbnbs-surprising-path-to-y- combinator/)

<comment><USER2> I think the announcement melted the database, but will be sure to check out that link a little later. :)

It's a solid typeface, so great job.</comment></comment></comment>


A-Frame: Web framework for virtual reality experiences (WebVR with HTML) - <AUTHOR> https://aframe.io/ <comment><USER2> tried A-Frame and ReactVR for a chock-full WebVR app.

eventually settled on three.js as the number of bugs, inconsistencies and inflexibility of both A-Frame and ReactVR was way too much for me. sure, three.js boilerplate is not fun, but at least I had full control over what was happening.

<comment><USER3> What have you built with 3js in VR? Would be keen to check out a demo or video. As a VR developer using Unity, I'm eager to move away from the platform and towards 3js or A-Frame, but concerned that many features I take for granted will need to be re-implemented from scratch.</comment></comment>


Bill Gates: Why I Decided to Edit an Issue of TIME - <AUTHOR> http://time.com/5086870/bill-gates-guest-editor-time <comment><USER2> Human race has evolved from that sub-atomic particle of star dust since eons and reached this point where we are typing this comment. Obviously this cannot happen without the necessary checks and balances throughout history and it will be this way going into the future. So no need to spell doom, though the cautious gene in us still keeps vigil.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just because the world is a better place than it was 50 years ago does not mean it is a better place than it was 2 years ago.

<comment><USER4> And even if it were a better place in some aggregate measure than 2 years ago doesn't mean that it's better _for most people_ than it was 2 years ago, and even if it is better for most people, it doesn't mean it's better for most people _in some particular country, say THE USA_ , and even if it's better for most people in your country, it doesn't mean it's better _for you_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Two things have always been true about human beings. One, the world is always getting better. Two, the people living at that time think it`s getting worse.

Penn Jillette

<comment><USER6> I thought things always getting better is a relatively recent phenomenon. Things didn't get better for hundreds of years for the native Americans when Columbus came to America. Or after the fall of the roman empire was Europe as good the next few hundred years? Maybe there has been a general trend up but if the trend can drop drastically for the few years you're living in does the general trend up make a difference?

<comment><USER5> I think it's meant to be figurative more than literal.

<comment><USER7> You won't even defend the quote you posted from it's most obvious criticism?

<comment><USER8> To everyone in this thread: please step back and ask yourself why you're continuing to comment. Are you looking to be understood? To understand? To prove or show that someone else wrong? If it's not one of the first two, please just stop. If it _is_ one (or both! which is what it should be) of the first two, take another step back and ask yourself what's the most constructive way of accomplishing that goal. Right now you're all just talking past each other, commenting at each other rather than with each other. It doesn't matter how any one else is commenting or how wrong they are: you can only change how you yourself do.

<comment><USER7> I like the quality of discussion on HN. I think we should discourage things like posting pithy quotes from comedians. Especially if you won't even stand behind the point you're trying to make.

And yes, I would like my perspective to be understood.

<comment><USER8> I'm glad that you're hoping to be understood. I think it's equally important (perhaps moreso) to also to seek to understand. Steelman† your opponent: interpret what they're saying in the most charitable way. Straw manning or taking pot shots with short questions rarely indicates that you're also seeking to understand or are engaging in good faith. Who knows? They may actually have an important point, perhaps not yet fully formed, and aren't expressing it well. And if others are doing the same, they may help you better express your own perspective.

† [https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man)

<comment><USER9> I get that you have a pet project in attempting to create civil discussion - that's nice and very commendable. But...

Please apply your own formula to the post you're replying to. Are you understanding what he's telling you, or just trying to tone police?

What happens when your conversation partner is not actually interested in having a discussion, and simply posits a position then abandons it immediately? Is it fruitful to create a position for them? Is that a fair burden for a responder to bear to batter down weak, fallacious, but amply spread falsities?

<comment><USER8> I do my best to apply my own formula: after all, if I don't think it's worthwhile to do, it would be disingenuous for me to recommend others to do it. I think I do understand where they're coming from, which is why I built upon that in my follow-up comment.

Re-reading my comments above, one thing I think that could be improved is the use of "you": it's colloquial to use it to refer to a person in general as opposed to the person you're currently responding to, and that can be misread (perhaps even unconsciously), particularly when discussions get heated.

Do you have other recommendations as to how this might be better conveyed? What indications do you have that I'm misreading 'chickenfries? I recognize that whether I actually am misreading them (which is always a possibility) and whether or not you read me as misreading them are distinct, and it's my responsibility to do my best to reduce the likelihood of mismatch.

As for your last paragraph, ff you've determined your conversation partner is not actually interested in having a discussion, in my opinion it's best to just let the matter drop, which is what I recommended in my initial comment. You're right, I don't think it's fruitful to create a position for them. Continuing the discussion at that point just adds noise and arguably degrades the forum. FWIW, I'll take my own advice here if I decide that my contributions to this thread are contributing more heat than light.

<comment><USER9> >in my opinion it's best to just let the matter drop

Sure, because you're focused on the quality of conversation. That's what you're optimizing for. For others, who are interested in the quality of available information, posting a quick rebuttal to signal to other readers that the post in question has issues may be preferable.

I see plenty of misleading and dangerous musings about law on the forum from people who don't know better and frankly don't care to know better; your advice would be to walk away. Mine is to signal to individual that there is clear and present danger in treating the post's content as factual.

You view that response as creating noise. I don't.

<comment><USER8> I agree that it's important to point out things that are actually harmful. That quick rebuttal needs to include more than a snarky snipe, an insult, or a statement that "No, you're wrong." If that's all that's being added, you may as well just downvote, which is, among other things, an indication that the comment isn't a worthwhile contribution.

To be useful and more than noise, it needs to actually rebut the point in line or pointing to additional resources. HN is pretty good on that point: the community is large enough that it's going to get addressed well. Quality of conversation and quality of information needn't be at odds, and both are addressed in the guidelines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > So why does it feel like the world is in decline

Because our environment is on the decline. Our oceans are full of plastic, our forests are converted to farmland for cattle, pollution from electronics is rising, and our global climate is changing for the worse.

Even optimistic areas like health care are being confounded by obesity and malnutrition. It's great that global health care and poverty rates are improving. But in some of our own countries things are getting worse. There's a growing income inequality and an obesity epidemic. My generation may be the first in a while to have a lower life expectancy than my parents'. Many of my friends are feeling hopeless because their university degrees are buying them 20 hours a week at minimum wage (which has not adjusted for inflation too well) while the cost of housing sky rockets.

<comment><USER5> Yet, you write this on a Computer, which wouldnt be possible without those fossil fuels that pushed us through the industrial revolution and onto the technical revolution and gave us those plastics.

I think it's crazy to assume we won't find answers to the problems you bring up and take a sky is falling attitude when you look at the track record of human progress. Even though your friends are struggling to find jobs, they're likely living better than John D. Rockefeller did. Doesn't excuse the problem, but don't take these things for granted.

<comment><USER11> Many of your comments in this thread have broken the HN guidelines by being flamebait or outright flamewar. It's one thing to express a considered point of view and another to get into ideological mud wrestling. Please don't post like this again.

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

Edit: it looks from your recent history like you've primarily been using HN for ideological battle. That destroys what this site is supposed to be for, so we ban accounts that do it. Please don't do it. That is also in the site guidelines.

<comment><USER5> My comment is in line with the Bill Gates article and wasn't meant to incite the response it got. Bill Gates wasn't trolling when he wrote the article and neither was I. The fact that the post and my comment got flagged says something about HN ideology and/or me expressing myself poorly.

The crux of the article was that people, the media, etc always focus on things getting worse while the data shows they're getting better. I agree with that. In the future, I will be more careful in expressing myself so as not to arouse resentment. I'll also stop posting about BTC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Because he had the TIME?</comment>


Xen and Docker: Made for Each Other - <AUTHOR> http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2014/09/08/xen-docker-made-for-each-other/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=xen-docker-made-for-each-other&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter <comment><USER2> Xen is a great technology, and the community has accomplished much in terms of features and performance improvements. But I doubt the long term future is Containers/Docker inside Xen guests, instead of just bare-metal.

Reasons to pick bare-metal:

1\. Price/performance. For many CPU-bound workloads the Xen overheads are negligible, but for I/O-bound workloads the overheads add up. The network code path, especially at 10 GbE speeds, is sensitive to any wasted cycles. For large sites with thousands of instances, these overheads mean less efficiency, and needing to run more instances, costing more for the business.

Can the future of Xen eliminate (or near eliminate) I/O overheads, so that their resource cost is near bare-metal? Put differently: will there be a future where all I/O paths in AWS EC2 access PCI passthrough, or some similar technology to bypass synchronous overheads? That would be great, but is this realistic? Bare-metal provides this level of performance today.

2\. Debugability. Many environments are sensitive to latency outliers, and measure the 95th and higher latency percentiles. Root causing these is difficult on hardware virtualized environments, where latencies end at the hypercalls, but easier for bare-metal environments. Even with root access on both the host and guests, tracing I/O between them can be painstaking work, as the host can't see and trace inside the guest. (Is the Xen going to solve this problem? Eg, could I have a SystemTap script trace both guest application- level I/O requests and associate them with host device level I/O? I suppose it can be done, but will it?) On bare-metal with containers, the host can see all, and trace I/O seamlessly from guest processes to bare-metal devices. Currently.

3\. Density or efficiency. Resources can be shared at a finer level of granularity with cgroups, than is really practical with virtualized devices such as CPUs. Unless you are only running one big Xen guest on a host.

Xen (and KVM) are here to stay: there will always be the need for different kernel support for legacy applications. But for very large sites with thousands of instances, the future (although it may take a while) for sites with many instances and are performance sensitive, is likely bare-metal + Containers/Docker.

If you're a small site, or you care less about performance and debugging, then there may well be merit in the work this article covers.

<comment><USER3> Have you considered using Ubuntu MAAS?

<comment><USER4> He worked for Joyent, so I'm sure he's _considered_ automated bare-metal deployment tools quite a bit. ;-)

BTW, I tried MaaS recently and it seems to work fine but I could not successfully customize the installed OS which made it impossible to integrate into my environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't disagree with this post, but neither do I see the point of it. Anyone who is deploying containers on EC2 is already using the two technologies side- by-side, not that it means anything earth shattering. Maybe I'm in the minority here but I continue to not get the constant comparisons between containers and VMs. They're not the same thing, and they don't solve the same problems.

I spin up a VM from Amazon and it lets me share an underlying hardware platform in controlled ways so that I pay only for what I need and can't affect the other people sharing it. That's the problem VMs solve.

But now that the VM is running I still have to configure it for my applications. It's just a virtual server, with a potentially large gap between that state and the state I want it in. That's the problem containers solve.

<comment><USER6> The confusion I see comes from the fact that many people use/used VMs for things that containers actually work fine for. For example, developers set up VM with tools like Vagrant and VirtualBox to isolate the dev tools and services used by a project in a development environment. Docker does replace some previous use cases for virtual machines, particularly ones that did not need the security and resource control provided by VMs.

<comment><USER5> Yep, I agree. VMs encompassed the problems that containers address, whereas containers do not encompass the problems that VMs are designed to address at least not in any competitive way. Containers are essentially a finer-grained way to manage dependencies on a VM than the VM itself is. So yeah, I guess I do understand the reason why the comparison gets made. I just don't feel it's a very useful one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think of Xen as a dying technology.

Lately IBM passed around a paper aimed at Amazon that showed how badly paravirtual machines behave compared to bare metal.

What they didn't note is that newer Intel chips have serious support for hardware virtualization, and that with hardware virtualizaton you get near bare metal performance. And they didn't note that the new instance types on AWS support hardware virtualization.

Paravirtualization was an important technology for a while because it was the fastest sort of virtualization ten years ago, but now it is the slowest.

<comment><USER8> Paravirtualization bad, hardware virtualization good, is not an accurate view. You actually want a hybrid model to get the best performance. That's why KVM developers have put so much effort into the paravirtualized virtio drivers, for example. Xen has put lots of work into taking advantage of new hardware virtualization technology where it makes sense and continuing paravirtualization where it makes sense. See the two links below for great details.

[http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2012/10/23/the- paravirtualizat...](http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2012/10/23/the- paravirtualization-spectrum-part-1-the-ends-of-the-spectrum/)

[http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2012/10/31/the- paravirtualizat...](http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2012/10/31/the- paravirtualization-spectrum-part-2-from-poles-to-a-spectrum/)

<comment><USER9> Very informative, especially the second page, thanks for linking that!

If you have any other suggested reading re Xen / Virtualization I'd be very interested in them.

<comment><USER2> Try [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-07/what-color-is- yo...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-07/what-color-is-your- xen.html) and [http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-09/xen-feature- dete...](http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-09/xen-feature- detection.html) .

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Always a good surprise to see new companies embracing Docker. I'd love to chat - email@example.com

<comment><USER11> You actually think they are going to read this and think, "Oh shit! Nick wants to chat!"

<comment><USER12> I met Nick by this way, and my project got published in Docker blog.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We run each services in an LXC container. Containers are run inside a KVM that is connected to a bridged interface (one KVM per VLAN).

This setup is very clean and easy to partition, secure and maintain. So yes, light vs real virtualization can work well together!

</comment><comment><USER9> Site down? It's not loading for me on Desktop or Mobile. From the title it sounds like an interesting read, I'll have to check back later.

Edit: Mwuhaha. [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:upPfoeO...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:upPfoeOZQacJ:blog.xen.org/index.php/2014/09/08/xen- docker-made-for-each- other/%3Futm_source%3Drss%26utm_medium%3Drss%26utm_campaign%3Dxen-docker-made- for-each- other%26utm_source%3Dtwitterfeed%26utm_medium%3Dtwitter+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

<comment><USER14> its just really slow:

Xen & Docker: Made for Each Other!

By Sarah Conway – September 8, 2014

By Olivier Lambert

Containers and hypervisors are often seen as competing technologies – enemies even. But in reality the two technologies are complementary and increasingly used together by developers and admins. This recent Linux.com article talked about this supposed battle, noting however that developers are using Docker in traditional VMs to bolster security. Containers allow users to develop and deploy a variety of applications with incredible efficiency, while virtualization eliminates any constraints and/or exposure to outside attacks.

Uniting these technologies helps developers and system administrators be even more efficient. Let's take a closer look at how to achieve this with Docker and Xen Project virtualization, and why we expect more and more organizations to use them together in the near future. This will also be a key topic at the September 15 Xen Project User Summit at the Lighthouse Executive Conference Center in New York City. Register today to learn more about enabling Docker in Xen environments for a truly open infrastructure.

xen-docker

Caption: Xen In Action: lifting Docker, which is lifting containers. I heard you like boats, so I put boats on your boat :) .

Who's Who: What is Xen Project Virtualization?

Xen Project Hypervisor is mature virtualization technology used by many of the world's largest cloud providers like AWS, Verizon Terremark, Rackspace and many more. Founded in 2003, Xen Project virtualization is proven as a highly reliable, efficient and flexible hypervisor for a range of environments, running perfectly from x86 to ARM.

It's now completely integrated in the Linux upstream and is hosted by the Linux Foundation. The same big cloud users mentioned above also contribute regularly to the project along with many of the world's largest technology companies, including Citrix, Cavium, Intel, Oracle and more.

Feature updates and broader community collaboration are on the upswing too: more commits, more communication, better integration, new use cases and simpler and more powerful modes, such as PVHVM then PVH, as outlined in this recent blog.

The core Xen Project team takes security seriously. The technology has also been battle-tested by many in the defense industry including the NSA. Xen Project users have benefited from this for years, and developers building, shipping and running distributed applications will profit as well.

XenLogoBlackGreen

What is XenServer and Xen Orchestra?

XenServer is a packaged product consisting of the Xen Project Hypervisor and the Xen Project Management API (XAPI) toolstack within a performance tuned CentOS distribution. It's free and can be installed in just a few minutes; click here to download it: [http://xenserver.org/open-source-virtualization- download.htm...](http://xenserver.org/open-source-virtualization- download.html).

Xen Orchestra (XO) is a simple but powerful web interface working out-of-the- box with XenServer, or any host with Xen and XAPI (the most advanced API for Xen). Take a look on the project website to learn more. Both of these tool are of course free software.

What is Docker?

In its own words, Docker defines itself as an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. Consisting of Docker Engine, a portable, lightweight runtime and packaging tool, and Docker Hub, a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows, Docker enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments.

docker-logo-370x290

Main Advantages:

        fast (boot a container in milliseconds)
        simple to use, even in complex workflows
        light (same kernel)
        container density on one host

The other side of the coin:

        all containers rely on the same kernel (isolation, security)
        less maturity than traditional hypervisor (Docker is still young)
        containers are using the same OS on the host (less diversity than hypervisors)
        some friction between developers and admins about its usage: not Docker's fault, more a classical friction when you bring new toys to your devs. :) We'll see why and how to cope with just that below.

Best of Both Worlds

An ideal world would:

        Let admins do their admin stuff without constraints and/or exposure to dangerous things.
        Let developers do their developer stuff without constraints and/or exposure to dangerous things.

Fluid Workflow

In other words, they'd be able to create really cool workflows. For example:

        An admin should be able to easily create a Docker ready VM running in a hypervisor, with the exact amount of resources needed at a given point in time (he knows the total amount of resources, e.g a VM with 2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM.
        He should delegate (with the same simplicity) this Docker-ready VM to the dev team.
        Developers can use it and play with their new toy, without any chance of breaking stuff other than the VM itself. The VM is actually a sandbox, not a jail; developers can create their containers as they need in this scenario.

Now you can easily imagine other exciting things such as:

        An admin can delegate rollback snapshot control to a developer. If he breaks the VM, he can rollback to the "clean" snapshot — without bothering the admin staff. Live, die, repeat!
        Need to clone the same container for other tests? One click in a web interface.
        Need to extend the resources of this current VM? One click, in live.
        Ideally, let a developer create its container from the same web interface.

Xen Orchestra: A Bridge Between Docker and Xen Project Hypervisor

So how do we do all this without creating a brand new tool? As you may guess, the answer is Xen Orchestra, which today achieves much of this. Updates planned for later this year and 2015 will deliver even more efficiencies between the two technologies.

What XO Does Today

        Adjust Resources In Live: You can reduce/raise number of CPUs, RAM, etc., while the VM is running! Doing this, you can grow or reduce the footprint of your Docker VM, without interrupting the service. Check it out in this short video.
        Snapshots and Rollback: Snapshots and rollback in XO are totally operational since XO 3.3. Check out how this works in this feature presentation. Coupled with Docker, this is very helpful. When your fresh Dockerized VM is ready, take a snapshot. Then you can rollback when you want to retrieve this clean state. All with just a few clicks and in a few seconds.

Coming Soon

        Docker-Ready Templates in One Click: This feature will be released this year. In a few words, you can request our template directly from your XO interface, it will be downloaded and operational in your own infrastructure with a Docker listening and ready for action,Iin the resources you choose to allocate (CPU, RAM, Disk). No installation: It works out of the box. Read more in this article.
        ACL and Delegation: The perfect workflow rest upon integration of ACLs in Xen Orchestra is our current priority. In our case, it allows VM delegation for your team using Docker; the VM can be rollbacked or rebooted without asking you. More info. here.
        Docker Control from XO: Because we can get the IP of a VM thanks to its Xen tools, we should be able to send command to the Docker API directly through XO. In this way, you'll just have to use one interface for Docker AND Xen (at least, for simple Docker operations). And take the best of XO for both: ACLs, visualization etc. This last feature is not in our current roadmap, but will probably pop up early in 2015!

We-need-to-go-deeper_inception

Caption: Coming soon — deeper integration between Docker and Xen.

Conclusion

Docker is a really promising and growing technology. With Docker and Xen on the same team, the two technologies work in tandem to create an extremely efficient, best-of-breed infrastructure. Finally uniting them in one interface is a big leap ahead!

Any questions or comments? Go ahead!

By Olivier Lambert, Creator of Xen Orchestra Project

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems you could do most of the resource sharing, separation and dynamic allocation with cgroups in docker (should it be implemented)

XEN mainly provides a stronger separation (or, like, KVM does that, too)

<comment><USER15> It's commonly missunderstood but Xen can also do much more then KVM because it can run systems purely para-virtualised.

This means there is no actual machine abstraction despite it using hardware accelerated extensions like VT-x and EPT.

The difference in overhead between a fully para-virtualised system and a process that is running in a container is going to be pretty similar other than I/O performance (which is a complicated discussion).

If you find this interesting lookup Xen unikernels, a fairly well known one now is Mirage OS. Which lets you easily write Ocaml applications ontop of a Xen unikernel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Would that be simple as running a CoreOS image inside Xen? Does it make sense?</comment>


Ask HN: If you've recently left SF, where and why did you move? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> We moved to Portland; we have some family here and wanted a second child (now en route). In the Bay Area we couldn't afford a mortgage on anything with more than one bed one bath. Our apartment was a miserable 800 sqft packed to the gills with stuff; no room for a child to play. We were also stymied by child care, which would have been ~30-35k per child. Here in pdx day care is half that, and we bought a fucking 3 bed 3 bath house with a back yard for 75% of the rent on our 800 sqft SF place.

</comment><comment><USER3> I moved to Berlin, Germany in mid 2018. Some of the reasons included:

* a studio apartment costing $2100 a month.

* stunted career growth after I reached 'Senior Developer' level.

* had a minor bicycle accident with no broken bones. was taken to Stanford Medical Center hospital, and overall ended up paying over $5000 out-of-pocket after insurance.

* very boring weather (I like and miss storms).

* met only tech folks wherever I went.

* Trump.

I got lucky. I negotiated a relocation package, and ended up transferring within my company.

In Berlin, the culture and quality of life is infinitely superior. I love having the freedom to travel to other European countries. Health insurance is mandatory, and is automatically taken out of my paycheck. I had to make a few doctors visits, and paid nothing out of pocket. A 5 week course of medication cost me €5. Public transportation here is mind-blowingly good (coming from Bay Area). I pay €720 a year, and get unlimited travel on local busses, U/S/R Bahns, trams, and ferries. Plus I get to take +1 after 8pm and on weekends.

The way of living in Berlin is very different. It is taking me some time to get used to it (I miss garbage disposals and Walmart/Safeway/grocery shops open on Sundays). But I moved with an open mind, and absolutely glad I did.

<comment><USER4> Really glad to hear you're enjoying Berlin!

Do travel around Europe! Weekend city breaks by plane are very affordable. So many different cultures and history in such a small place.

<comment><USER3> Will do! Thank you :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure if this is "recent", but I moved to the midwest during the end of 2015/beginning of 2016 to be with my, now, wife. In the Bay Area, I was getting paid relatively poorly compared to other peers and lived in an area that wasn't the best. I had no real desire to work the startup life like so many other grads; it just kinda happened once I graduated college, so I took the opportunity to check things out. The lack of social connections and not minding what type of job I was working at made it equally as easy to leave.

I now work in a completely different part of tech (from web/mobile SPA dev to embedded dev doing defense work) and make more than I was making in the Bay Area. I live relatively comfortably in a gated community, but I honestly cannot stand the weather here. It is so bad that it is affecting me mentally to the point where I think I have mild Seasonal Affective Disorder. The Bay Area had some financial hardships, but the weather was nice, and I wasn't dreading six months out of the year like I am living here. I was healthier there thanks to always jogging outside in the awesome weather, the scenery was better, the roads were better, the food was nicer, there was more intermixing of different cultures and values... I'm looking to head back to the west coast, or maybe even the southwest, but family reasons are keeping me here for the time being and preventing me from moving.

You didn't really list why you're asking this question. If it's purely monetary-based, sure, you can possibly do better elsewhere. However, I have found that it easily has a hard salary cap real quick. I haven't come across many people who make more than $160k all in after they worked 20+ years in the industry, and the area I live in pays higher than other Midwest areas. Housing prices are quickly getting into the $400k+ for nice houses, and the price of a lot of goods is very similar I have found (most big purchases like laptops, cars, TVs, etc are the same whether you're in CA or in the Midwest. The main difference is the tax. I actually pay more for car insurance here than back in the Bay Area). Utilities are basically the same, it seems, so that didn't go down. Internet price is the same, too, and those cost of living calculators don't always tell the whole story. It's just some stuff to keep in mind if you plan on moving for solely monetary reasons.

</comment><comment><USER6> A few people I follow have left SF for NYC. I'm curious if anyone on HN has done the same and why.</comment>


Ask HN: I have been on hn for 10 years, how do you get more karma? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Well, you could try using capital letters - I find your slabs of words without capitals very hard to read. I'm a big disliker of caps too; in online chat I often go without, but not on HN.

Also, make people feel glad they've read what you wrote; teach us something. Give us a new perspective, ennoble our spirits, enrich our minds, be graceful and patient; show us inspiring virtue, remarkable knowledge, well-described experience. Either that or write a bot to submit news articles.

</comment><comment><USER3> The points are a pretty accurate metric of how much someone _contributes_ to the community. And a contribution is simply a new perspective or piece of information to add. Some specific ways to contribute are:

\- Ask questions about submissions

\- Assess the merit of a submission

\- Describe something related that others might not know.

\- Link to related and supporting evidence.

Finally, be kind and humble.... and the karma will come

</comment><comment><USER4> Post contrarian opinions but succinctly and with room for people to correct / refine your points ("strong opinions, weakly held"). My experience is that wishy-washy comments don't go far here but opinionated ones do, even if they're wrong.

Don't be afraid to post the first comment on a submission on the new page with the hope of kickstarting the discussion.

That said, I don't know that HN karma matters for much in the real world.

As far as time zones, anecdotally HN seems to be most active during the workday on west coast time.

<comment><AUTHOR> agree with most of your points. i also dont think karma matters much, but i always wanted a green username. and also, how did you get 5777 karma points? i was looking at your submissions, it's almost like mine, 2-3 points on average. this is somewhat like an seo challenge, i'm assuming your comments of someone else's article received lots of karma.

<comment><USER4> Yes, my karma is almost exclusively (≥ 99%) from comments vs submissions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it can really be summarized as the following: adding something to the community. It can be a new relevant story/project submission or a comment with an on-topic question/anecdote. As long as it adds something new and different,(I say different here because it can't just be a re-iteration of someone else's post, within reason) users will find it karma-worthy. Users here being users like me and probably your average user on HN.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks all, i should probably respond to each thread during the day to keep the conversation lively, but was too busy with work, i just got off work now and am doing a general thanks to all the responders. i thought i wrote some pretty good articles on building a raspberry pi scoreboard, it went over some design decisions and tradeoffs, and i also responded to some posts with, what i thought was well thought up. maybe i'm in the wrong timezone (shanghai), i think a forum is active during certain times and once that window's past, nobody's really looking at all the stale comments.

also, i think in general, article submissions get buried quickly, ask HN, show HN, url submissions, so you kind of either need to hit the right timing where your article is right on top of the stack and everyone happens to be looking at it or you have some mechanism to gain points by gaming the system with fake accounts that add karma, to me that's not worth the trouble. obviously the content needs to be interesting, but i feel behind the curve here.

<comment><USER2> Why do you care how many internet points you have?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Post better stuff

</comment><comment><USER7> Here you go, one karma point for you sir for this post.;)

<comment><USER8> Also be careful, if you add something that contributes nothing you may receive downvotes.</comment></comment>


Ask PG: Is there any chance of getting points displayed again - <AUTHOR> I'm just wondering if theres any plan to bring back the points being displayed for comments.
As I find it rather disorientating not having them,  as it makes it more difficult to know which comments to read.
We could always have a CSS style to hide them for people who don't want them.
Also I believe sites like Reddit 'fuzz' their points displayed to help prevent gaming the system. <comment><USER2> I'm not inclined to. Hiding points seems to decrease the intensity and perhaps also the number of fights, as I'd hoped.

<comment><USER3> Past polls show that a substantial portion of readers (me included) think the points are very useful. They draw our attention to the best comments.

Clearly, you think this reduced usefulness is worth it to reduce fights; fair enough.

So, is there any way of getting back the utility, without increasing the fights?

Maybe show points, but with a time lag? Show points, but just in bins (maybe logarithmicly binned?) You trust users above a certain karma threshold with downvote, because they've learned the ropes; maybe display points to these users? People that get in fights, and hence are downvoted, won't see points?

<comment><USER4> Here are two of the polls created by pg:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039> 186 days ago

      prefer points: 2355
      prefer no-points: 1763

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2595605> 141 days ago

      prefer points: 2717
      prefer no-points: 1703

So, 57.2% and 61.5%, respectively, were in favor of bringing points back.

EDIT: _succinctness and formatting_

EDIT 2: Not sure why this is being downvoted, I simply found and linked to the polls mentioned above, because I couldn't remember the exact outcomes.

<comment><USER5> Beware of selection bias. I saw these submissions when they were posted, but voted in neither, because I didn't mind the status quo of no points, and I'm wary of meta-discussion. If I had felt differently, I'd definitely have voted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd be more interested in something that'd prevent this situation from happening:

        smartest comment
        --smart reply
        ----more discussion
        ----more discussion
        </comment><comment>correction on more discussion
        --smart-ish reply
        ----more discussion
        ----more discussion
        ----more discussion
        </comment><comment>not-so-smart reply
        ----uninteresting reply
        ----downvoted comment
        </comment><comment>comment on why parent was a bad comment
        </comment><comment>another comment that's essentially the same thing
        ----a bunch more downvoted comments
        2nd smartest comment
        [etc.]

Basically, the 2nd best top-level comment is buried below the entire discussion for the best comment, even if much of that discussion has been voted average or negatively.

A possible solution could be to collapse all the replies except for the few quality ones and show a [more] link, much like reddit.

EDIT: This very comment exemplifies my point perfectly.

<comment><USER7> I actually considered posting this idea just now too, but since you did, I don't have to.

A javascript +/- button to collapse and expand threads would be perfect. The indentation is just too subtle, and it's too hard to follow the thread in bigger discussions (which are often the good ones worth following).

Somewhat unrelatedly, I would think that comments should get extra points if they spawn a lot of discussion. I mean, that's what the points are for, right? This would credit the original user's karma for fulfilling the goal of the site, but more importantly, it will bump up the entire discussion higher on the page to better reflect it's value. (Though I don't know the algorithm that orders comments, so that part may already happen)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is off-topic, but since PG reads this thread:

Please add back the "by " in front of each comment. It was useful because if I wanted to see all comments by PG on a page, I could Ctrl-F and just look for "by pg" but now I can't -- if I just search for "pg" I get people talking about you, rather than only comments by you.

A very small UI tweak probably to remove clutter, but it served a purpose, albeit a very small one. :-)

-David

<comment><USER9> pg(space) works most of the time, since there're not many words that ends on "pg" and not a lot of users I suppose.

EDIT: Well.. unless it's an "Ask PG" :-)

<comment><USER10> His point is that he wants to find which posts are by PG, not other posts talking about PG. "PG<space>" would not improve the search results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A tangential question for PG: whatever happened to perhaps showing logarithmic point values?

If I remember correctly, you were seriously considering this.

Personally, I like it better without the points now. But I do still wish there was an indicator of high-quality comments (I think you said you were considering an orange dot?).

<comment><USER12> HN works fine for me without visible points (I think I might prefer it as well), but some simple way to see which posts have received an order of magnitude of upvotes more than other posts might preserve the good taste of the current design and satisfy the curiosity of those users who want that kind of feedback. Would be interested in PG's answer as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There's a huge difference between an opinion held by one person and one held by 100 people.

</comment><comment><USER14> All it's done is freeze the status quo. Nobody votes any more, so those users who had lots of points at the cut off get to exercise their extra powers, and the rest of us just have learn to be good little serfs. I for one have come here less because the voting has become so pointless.

</comment><comment><USER15> I realized the current system works pretty damn well when I thought "I wish these were points were visible!" upon seeing a heavily up-voted comment of mine. I quickly realized that this is a really bad concern to have when commenting. There is such a fine but significant difference between getting feedback that let's you know people like what you say, and publicly displaying it. The former is the natural desire to be right/smart/insightful, the latter is actually the desire to _appear_ right/smart/insightful to others.

I think we've all seen this pattern of fame at any scale: Smart but unnoticed person finally gets attention for their work, people notice this and the person appears smart and worth listening to, after time the person's focus shifts from the smart work they did to work maintaining the reputation of being smart.

I think it's great to get some form of acknowledgment that your ideas are generating positive feedback, this encourage thoughtful comments and provides a real reward to those primitive parts of our brain that want to be the big monkey. But any further and the big monkey starts to be the one doing the talking.

</comment><comment><USER16> It'd be useful to have 1 point comments marked somehow.

I suspect I am not the only one who uses downvoting as a way to sink unwanted comments down the thread, but since newer comments are given a position boost, it is not always clear if a comment floats near the top because it is popular or because it is new. It'd be nice to tell these cases apart (as a short-term fix).

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't think I've voted for a parent level comment since the point were hidden, with the possible exception of downvoting a few trolls. Not having points displayed probably does help prevent fighting and pandering, but it also makes the ordering of comments instinctively feel arbitrary. It's quite possible that the pros outweigh the cons.

</comment><comment><USER18> "I find it rather disorientating not having them, as it makes it more difficult to know which comments to read."

This is a telling admission, in my opinion.

I love the newer, non-points display. Skim through the comments and read the ones that seem most interesting to you. Otherwise, the discussions quickly degrade into thoughtless popularity contests.

<comment><USER16> If only user IDs were obfuscated too... it is really annoying to see e-v-e-r-y s-i-n-g-l-e c-o-m-m-e-n-t of few high-karma users constantly upvoted to the top of every thread. The very same popularity contests, just a different angle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've noticed that since points have become private, people have become more likely to contribute their up/downvotes...

A comment that used to get 10 points, now gets 15-20.

</comment><comment><USER20> Perhaps allowing points to be visible after a fews days would be a suitable compromise?

</comment><comment><USER21> I'll ask again (as I've done in past point discussions):

Why not have these be visible by the people who want them, and invisible to people who don't want them? Perhaps "off by default" but something that can be enabled in registered accounts.

<comment><USER22> > _something that can be enabled in registered accounts_ //

Even 'registered accounts with high karma'. /selfish

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Unrelated, but I'm not sure where I should submit bug reports:

I just tried to submit a story for the first time in a while (weeks? months?) and got the error "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."

</comment><comment><USER24> Maybe have points become visible _after_ you upvote a comment? That way there's no influence on which comments to upvote, but you get some validation.

<comment><USER25> I think this would add a lot of noise to upvotes. Imagine an HN script that auto-upvoted all the posts just to show the points.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Anyway, points on comments doesn't say if a comment is good or bad; it says if people agree or not with it.

<comment><USER22> It used to. I don't think that is true any more. People used to vote towards what they felt was a value rating for a comment (how much it added to the thread). Now I feel votes are simply opinion based though there's not a lot of data to go on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> when it comes to unhelpful comments being (sometimes) voted to the top, why is hacker news "one user, one vote"? why not weight the votes? eg. why not weight users by running pagerank over the vote graph?

</comment><comment><USER28> I'd hate to see a Reddit-esque "fuzz" algorithm used here. IMO, the various hacks applied by Reddit do nothing but confuse people (who then waste bandwidth complaining about being "downvoted") and deny useful feedback to commenters who actually care about their scores.

<comment><USER29> HN already has this kind of thing, but it doesn't affect the scores in any way, just the ordering, and it's global, ie. it doesn't depend on your session like reddit's apparently does.

On reddit they say its an antispam measure, whereas here its a key part of the ranking algorithm.

<comment><USER30> > On reddit they say its an antispam measure, whereas here its a key part of > the ranking algorithm.

Those two things are one in the same.

<comment><USER29> _> Those two things are one in the same._

Fair point.</comment></comment></comment></comment>