Capacitor plague – Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague <comment><USER2> Audio equipment got hit by this too. I scored a very nice surround receiver and speaker set this way; someone had put it on the curb, so I took it home for examination, and $20 in replacement caps later it was good to go. Lasted me years, until an evil-minded cat threw up in it.

<comment><USER3> Quite normal on a night shift to replace hundreds of surface mount capacitors from a calrec sound desk. Well normal for my colleagues - my soldering is terrible, I spent the time writing perl instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is also an issue on the original Xbox game console. It is especially exacerbated on a specific capacitor on the motherboard which is asked to perform above it's specifications.

It is known to "pop" and splash acid all over the motherboard and ruining the motherboard in the process.

Luckily it's only function is to keep time (for about 8 hours after unplugging, then it dies and forgets the time anyway). The fix is very quick, wiggle the capacitor until the legs break and remove it. I've done it for about 8 boxes. This procedure is very, very common among collectors and enthusiasts as the capacitor is not needed for normal operation and it's usually not a matter of if the capacitor will blow, but when, leaving you with a brick.

If you have an original Xbox console and would like to know more, search for "Xbox clock capacitor removal", or message me.

(Common symptoms besides not turning on can also be: Not turning off. Turning on or off randomly. Randomly ejecting the DVD tray. Always ejecting the DVD tray and never allowing it to be closed. Never ejecting the DVD tray. Some or all controller ports no longer functioning.

If your Xbox doesn't have these symptoms but it is forgetting the time after turning it off, you should open your box as soon as possible and investigate the capacitor.)

</comment><comment><USER5> When I was in High School our school district had a _ton_ of computers by state grant (1 for every 2 students). One summer (2005 if I remember correctly) the IBM desktops all started popping capacitors. Me and a few technically inclined friends got a nice summer job out of identifying affected machines, gathering them up, re-imaging them, and replacing them around the district.

Funny to learn this was such a widespread issue

<comment><USER6> I worked tech support for my small public school district when I was a senior in high school in 2004-5. I must have replaced at least a hundred motherboards with this issue. Apparently they were covered under warranty (mostly HP computers, I believe), but I wonder if there was any conpensation for labor. Those things are tedious to replace in the slightly odd form factors they use for education/enterprise workstations. Not that my labor was costing the district too much ($6.50 an hour, which I considered a very generous premium above minimum wage.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whenever I have friends give me electronics stead throwing them away, without actual data, id say 95% of the time it's a capacitor

I really wish manufacturing encouraged easy swap components stead filling landfills

</comment><comment><USER8> Almost every one of my Samsung Monitors I bought between 2000 and 2007 has experienced this problem. I went thru and replaced them and now my 17 year old 19 inch monitors work like a charm.

<comment><USER9> I will never get this lucky charm obsession with miniature online success stories.

<comment><USER10> I used to <behaviour Y> and experience <problem Y>. But then I <solution X>. Now I <happy-life X>.

There's a bot/AI application in there somewhere. Of course, this is one of those "we spent so long thinking about whether we could, we didn't stop to ask whether we should" type projects...

<comment><USER11> There's probably money to be made there. Could use something similar to generate realistic fake reviews.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This ended up having a lasting legacy as many motherboard manufactures switched to Japanese made and/or polymer capacitors. They would tout this fact in their marketing material as a sign of quality. Tech sites started noting the source of a board's caps in their reviews. To this day you will sometimes see "all solid capacitors" in the marketing literature for a motherboard.

<comment><USER13> It is slightly questionable whether this episode is really the cause for the switch. Around the same time frame significantly faster switching transistors became available which allowed DC-DC converters to reach higher efficiency by increasing switching frequency, which has the nice side effect of requiring smaller filtering capacitors at the expense of requiring lower ESL/ESR.

Also over past 5 years or so small chip low-voltage MLCCs became available in previously unheard of capacities that are perfectly usable for many bulk filtering applications with prices that are competitive with aluminium electrolytics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know why, but bad electrolytic capacitors also sometimes have a fishy smell.

<comment><USER15> IANAC but my research suggests the odour is due to the presence of amine salts of boric acid in the electrolyte. Any chemists on hand to confirm or correct this?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I remember a guy figuring out a fix for a specific motherboard. That type of motherboard suffered especially from these problems. The guy got a few hunderd of these, fixed around 95% of them and resold them.

</comment><comment><USER17> A similar phenomenon is that of swollen lithium ion batteries: [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=swollen+battery](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=swollen+battery)

<comment><USER18> A victim here. My 2007 MacBook Pro started to swell on the bottom after a couple of years, didn't think much of it, it was a tiny bump at first, but then it almost doubled in thickness so I replaced it with a cheap Chinese knockoff (was broke at the time due to starting a startup), and the same thing happened in about a year. Lesson learned.

<comment><USER9> same in 2009 model, i'm using it right now, (without OS X of course). there is now a 4-2mm lip on the underside where the battery panel is being pushed out. I still get about 40mins and seems to have stopped swelling so what the heck :P Anyway these days Apple sells those sort of things as "features"... lets call it a "leg gripping lip" allows lap usage at strange angles.

<comment><USER19> As a community services announcement: you should probably replace that battery immediately.

It might never burn your house down while you sleep, but someone else might read your comment and think it's okay.

<comment><USER9> I most certainly will not.

Shorting, puncture and overcharge cause lipo fires. Expansion can lead to puncture and shorting in stupid thin enclosures, this is in an inch thick unsealed enclosure with lots of give which even pops off with little force, containing a battery which has swollen around 1-2% of it's original volume.

This is not a consumer advice forum, it's hacker news...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This happened to me on a very popular brand of motherboard at the time. Now I like it when I see Nichicon capacitors on the product description.

</comment><comment><USER21> I remember getting replacement capacitors for a motherboard I bought during that time, fortunately I never had to use them.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have nothing to add outside of some nostalgia: I once had a dual Celeron rig that fell to this problem. It started with not turning on after hitting the power button. Sometimes it took two to twenty times. I remember when it finally died, after bartending a Phish concert near Milwaukee.

</comment><comment><USER23> I remember a bunch of MSI motherboards I had slowly dying over a couple of years because of this.

</comment><comment><USER24> I remember soldering in new caps into a PIII Abit Mainboard that stopped working.

Good times... (haha maybe not)

But the issue was known to interested parties and generally publicised.

<comment><USER25> I thought caps are generally the first thing you look at for any failing/failed electronics? Least I tend to, its pretty easy to spot bulges in electrolytic caps and pop em off then have things magically work again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I had a GeForce card at the time that died from the bad capacitor problems. I also remember many iMac's with failed capacitors.

<comment><USER27> I had _three_ of the same generation card die on me. The past and future generations still work fine.

(7xxx/8xxx/9xxx series if I recall correctly.)

No problems with 560, 1060, or even really old cards like the MX series. So "specific generation of capacitors" seems to line up with it pretty well. I find it hard to believe that just that one chipset generation was terrible (as opposed to OEM's using popular but faulty brand caps and getting burned by it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Huh, I guess this might explain why several capacitors on my video card failed around 2007.

</comment><comment><USER29> After reading this, the Dell Optiplex 745 comes to mind.

</comment><comment><USER30> I might not be the only person who remembers this time fondly for the profits it gave me.

During this time I was doing a lot of computer repair for family friends and other acquaintances that I volunteered with. Most of this work was unpaid for various reasons (either "Family Obligation(tm)" or me helping out some folks who didn't have enough money to pay for repair services). I often received a "Thank You" for the free service of the "it's broken, but have it -- maybe you can fix it" kind of variety[0]. Often, I'd explain that I couldn't do much with these things and would politely refuse, but on occasion, I'd run into an item that I knew I could sell broken on e-bay and recoup some cost, or I'd encounter someone who was embarrassed at not being able to afford to pay and would accept the item as a suitable gift to cover their pride.

Around 2006, I was given an exceptionally expensive plasma television from one of these individuals and really wanted to fix it up, so I took it apart and discovered that it was simply a case of some bulging capacitors. I have plenty of experience with a soldering iron but these weren't even difficult soldering jobs - they were _large_ caps that were obviously part of the power supply component and having a box of these in the basement, I replaced them and ended up with a nice television that used until a couple of years ago.

While initially researching this model of television, I ran across complaints about failing capacitors which led me to some articles complaining about Dell motherboards having similar problems and a lot of noise about this being an industry epidemic, so I investigated the five or so PCs is my basement and seven LCD monitors. In the case of the displays, every one of them had bad caps on the PSU. In the case of the Dell PCs, it was motherboards. I fixed each and sold them for a few hundred a piece. I ended up _buying_ a lot of broken stock on eBay based on descriptions of why they were broken and picked up a nice AVR, amp and sub-woofer that way saving at least 50% (I picked up the $300 amp for $10, my best purchase).

I had _several_ of my own equipment die from this, including a SageTV media streaming device, almost all of the first generation of which had 6-7 bad caps. The lot of these sorts of problems started drying up around 2011/2012 for me, but I still encounter hardware that I suspect is a few bum caps away from perfectly functional. I even had my secondary sub, purchased in 1996, fail due to this.

[0] This happened more often than it didn't and was usually monitors. I recovered data from a bum hard drive for an old lady who had _4_ different LCD monitors ranging from 1024x760-1280x1080 in her basement, all capable of only lighting the little LED in the front. It made no sense for her to have even one of these, let alone five. Sometimes it was the old PC that was a year old but failed and a replacement was gifted from the son-in-law for Christmas.</comment>


Libpython-Clj: Seamlessly Calling Python Functions from Clojure - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/clj-python/libpython-clj <comment><AUTHOR> From the project description:

\- Bridge between JVM objects and Python objects easily; use Python in your Java and use some Java in your Python.

\- Python objects are linked to the JVM GC such that when they are no longer reachable from the JVM their references are released. Scope based resource contexts are also available.

\- Finding the python libraries is done dynamically allowing one system to run on multiple versions of python.

\- REPL oriented design means fast, smooth, iterative development.</comment>


The Large Display Paradox - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000928.html

<comment><USER2> On Windows, I also use GridMove, which works reasonably well. On linux, I use a full blown tiling window manager[1] (and have been doing so for about a year) and, compared to this, even GridMove seems painful. I cant imagine moving back to a traditional window manager now.

 _... wasting time sizing, moving, and z-ordering windows, users only need to deal with one maximized window at a time ..._

This problem is completely elliminated when using a tiling window manager.

[1] <http://aerosuidae.net/musca/Musca_Window_Manager>

</comment><comment><USER3> Windows 7 helps with this a bit, Win+Arrow key to snap a window to the left or right side of the screen evenly. Press the arrow key again if you have multiple monitors, and the window moves to the other monitor. This method is quite handy and I use it frequently, but ironically (in the context of this article) would be far more useful if my 1920 pixel wide monitors were just a bit bigger. 960 pixels often ends up being not quite wide enough for my purposes, so I can't just run with a 50/50 split.</comment>


Ask HN:  Did Steve Jobs have any technical skills? - <AUTHOR>

This question has been haunting me for quite some time. Was steve Jobs just the marketing guy? Or was he involved in hardware/software development of the apple devices too?<p>Thank you. <comment> wh-uws For some reason more recently this old wive's tale of Steve not being technical has catching on.

Read this story here about a 12 year old steve.

[http://blog.eladgil.com/2011/09/12-year-old-steve-jobs- meets...](http://blog.eladgil.com/2011/09/12-year-old-steve-jobs-meets- bill.html)

And decide if you would still like to believe he's not technical.

</comment><comment><USER2> To work with someone like Woz in the early days implies that Steve would hold his own at least to herd a bunch of highly skilled folks forward.

Vision is not just about skills. It is something far deeper and not entirely rational or a result of 10,000 hours of training.

[http://forums.appleinsider.com/archive/index.php/t-19686.htm...](http://forums.appleinsider.com/archive/index.php/t-19686.html) seems to have a good discussion on the subject.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where did he meet Woz? A marketing convention?

<comment><USER4> Steve Wozniak became friends with Steve Jobs, when Jobs worked for the summer at a company where Wozniak was working on a mainframe computer.

<comment><USER5> Possibly HP?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He was a tech for Atari at one point.</comment>


Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways British Spies Seek to Control the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/ <comment><USER3> I didn't realize GCHQ was in the SEO game. If they released an online tool, they'll make a _mint_ selling this to marketing agencies.

Some examples:

AIRWOLF - YouTube profile, comment and video collection

BEARTRAP - Bulk retrieval of public BEBO profiles from member or group

BIRDSONG - Automated posting of Twitter updates

BIRDSTRIKE - Twitter monitoring and profile collection.

BUGSY - Google+ collection (circles, profiles etc.)

FATYAK - Public data collection from LinkedIn

FUSEWIRE - Provides 24/7 monitoring of Vbulletin forums for target postings/online activity. Also allows staggered postings to be made.

GODFATHER - Public data collection from Facebook

GOODFELLA - Generic framework for public data collection from social networks.

INSPECTOR - Tool for monitoring domain information and site availability

RESERVOIR - Facebook application allowing collection of various information.

GATEWAY - Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website

GESTATOR - amplification of a given message, normally video, on popular multimedia websites (Youtube)

SLIPSTREAM - ability to inflate page views on websites

TANGLEFOOT - is a bulk search tool which queries a set of online resources. This allows analysts to quickly check the online presence of a target.

<comment><USER4> Do they make these inhouse or purchase off the shelf/black market? How do they get these tools?

<comment><USER5> In the UK: Contractors. Military contractors in particular are a huge industry and they've moved into producing surveillance equipment as a natural progress of what they produced previously.

They also buy from abroad (although mostly from the US and Israel, who both produce software like this at a number of shops).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Snowden: Dropbox is hostile to privacy, unlike 'zero knowledge' Spideroak" \- [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/17/edward- sno...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/17/edward-snowden- dropbox-privacy-spideroak)

and from [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/07/14/jtrig...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/document/2014/07/14/jtrig- tools-techniques/) under Honeypots we have, LONGSHOT - file-sharing and upload website.

And Condoleezza Rice just got on their board. I haven't seen anything that makes an official link between those but at least I moved off Dropbox :-P

<comment><USER7> It scared the crap out of me when Dropbox asked if it wanted to save my screenshot. Since when did it have access to things like that? I had a phone interview with Dropbox a few weeks ago and they mentioned a ton of new products that seemed vaguely offputting as well. After the screenshot prompt, I immediately uninstalled Dropbox, but after a few days I realized it had a bunch of useful backups so I ended up reinstalling it.

<comment><USER8> If the dropbox program is running under your user account, it has the same permissions you do. Unless you're on Linux and have restricted it via AppArmor.

<comment> mike-cardwell Even with AppArmor in place, it still has access to read every key you press in any other X11 app. Here's how I lock down Dropbox on my system:

[https://grepular.com/Protecting_Your_GNU_Linux_System_from_D...](https://grepular.com/Protecting_Your_GNU_Linux_System_from_Dropbox)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a revolting program they are running. You can't even justify a lot of this stuff with "terrorism" or "national security".

Manipulation of public opinion is simply a power play.

These agencies are out of control and entirely untrustworthy. I feel entirely powerless about it all as well.

<comment><USER10> Don't vote for the big three. We've seen it with DRIP, and it will only get worse with time. Start getting active with the green party, or the pirate party UK.

Both of their manifestos are about individual liberty over state surveillance: [http://www.greenparty.org.uk/values/](http://www.greenparty.org.uk/values/) [https://pirateparty.org.uk/policy](https://pirateparty.org.uk/policy)

<comment><USER11> Or one of the regional parties on this convenient list of those who voted "no": [http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/51-mps- drip-...](http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/51-mps-drip- emergency.html)

SNP, Plaid, DUP, Alliance, SDLP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The original story (with more depth) is here [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating- online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/)

<comment><USER13> this title is clearly fud, this is a relabeling of the actual tech - <USER2> entire purpose of this is to manipulate forums and spread disinformation

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This story was in the first position on the front page less than an hour ago. It was there for hours. The link was then changed from [0] to [1], and within thirty minutes, it was on the second page at number 47. (It first took a drop to around 17, hovered there for a while, then hit 47.)

Could we have an explanation of what's going on here? How can penalties from flagging be this steep for a story with 200 upvotes and 90 comments? Why did the position suddenly change shortly after the link was changed, but not right away?

[0] [http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/15/documents...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/15/documents_show_gchq_manipulating_online_information_like_web_polls_and_traffic.html)

[1] [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating- online-polls-ways-british-spies-seek-control-internet/)

</comment><comment><USER15> The nasty and antidemocratic behaviour of GCHQ is, at last, losing them sympathy: [http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2014/03/should_mathemati...](http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2014/03/should_mathematicians_cooperat.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> To be fair though, hasn't everyone who has started playing with HTTP in code manipulated online polls at some point just to learn? Does anyone actually put any weight in online polls other than linkbait headline sites?

<comment><USER17> Of course. But that is nothing "to be fair" about.

It's wrong to do so if you're a teenage hacker who just discovered scripting, and it's wrong to do so if you're a government.

And the latter is IMO much worse than some teenage kid playing around because of scale, impact, accountability and the fact that, in a "democracy", the government should be influenced by the people and not the other way around.

<comment><USER16> Really? It's wrong? By what measure? It's certainly not illegal to manipulate online polls. In fact, I personally find it quite amusing to do so, in certain cases.

Do you agree?

[ ] Yes [ ] No

<comment><USER17> I agree it can be amusing.

I try to never conflate the meaning of the words "illegal" and "wrong", as they are rather orthogonal, even if many people do not realize this.

And I think it's _wrong_ (unethical) to do so for a multitude of reasons. Two main ones are because it's misleading to people reading/interpreting the results, and that it's actively trying to sabotage the intent of whoever set up the poll.

Don't get me wrong though, if we're talking about a stupid or silly poll, on a stupid or silly site, or if it's in the context of a really good prank, etc, it can be a forgiveable type of "wrong". In fact in certain circumstances one could even argue that it's not actually completely wrong, simply because I wouldn't want to live with a system of ethics where pranks are never right. That's a tricky one (as is often the case with discussions about ethics).

However, that's not really the type of manipulating of polls we were discussing here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would be incredibly easy to use this sort of program to game visibility on HN.

This story itself serves as the perfect example. When it was submitted four days ago [0], it quickly took a huge ranking hit and dropped off the front page. When a story drops off the front page this quickly, it's nearly impossible for it to get the upvote momentum required to gain any additional visibility. And the same URL can't be submitted again, so the opportunity for discussion of the article has essentially been removed.

Then, we're left discussing a breaking story as the top item four days later, when a summary report about the original story that contains no new information is published on Slate.

One might be quick to blame moderators, but in the discussion of another recent First Look story, dang said most of the penalty came from users flagging the story. [1] How many users flagging the story does it take to produce this outcome? Does GCHQ just need three accounts with a little karma to seriously diminish visibility here for days? Safeguards should be developed to prevent this sort of malicious activity. Maybe some sort of collusion penalty, where if the same users are flagging the same stories, the effect is diminished? Or a greater restriction on the maximum penalty?

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8031791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8031791)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008472](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008472)

EDIT: And it's happened again! This story was #1 when the link was to [3]. About a half hour ago, the link was changed to firstlook.org, and within minutes, the story fell to the center of the main page. Now, thirty minutes later, it's at number 47 (with 200 points after six hours). It was at the top for hours, then dropped to 47 within thirty minutes of the link being changed. The fact that flagging happened right after the link was changed seriously suggests that some someone has automated monitoring for First Look links to flag.

[3] [http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/15/documents...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/07/15/documents_show_gchq_manipulating_online_information_like_web_polls_and_traffic.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Of all the predictors of future dystopia, I think Asimov may be closest with the Foundation series in a weird kind of a way. I do wonder who the mule is though.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is why we shouldn't touch online voting systems with a ten foot pole. Stuff like blockchain and next-gen/biometric auth systems give us some hope that in the future we can eventually have online voting for elections, but I'd still like it to be researched and tested for _decades_ before such a system is implemented in a country.

<comment><USER6> Just automate out the politicians, no greed nor corruption!

<comment><USER20> Then you can just game the algorithm directly. No need to fiddle with human intermediates.

<comment><USER6> Not if it's open-source (or at least, harder to game).

All you gotta do is co-opt the "Read the Bills Act" with a requirement to video-record the congress-person reading the bill (as that becomes their affidavit). Make that open-source, and then it just starts bleeding out. Auto- upload that to an app where people could get speech-to-text transcription / notifications / annotate sections / review past laws being read by past congress-people / etc. From there, ensure all bills can be edited in a central and private repositories (probs git, erryone likes git, though svn treats me well), so that all final bills can have all individual contributions clearly marked/annotated automatically. Oh look, auto-matching bill-text with campaign contributions :-P. Code is law. Patch the corruption.

<comment><USER21> If automation can take away Joe Factory Workers' job it could take away his managers job as well.

And even more important it could take away his governments job. I mean.. how much worse could it do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So how come the UK does so badly in the Song for Europe contest then?

</comment><comment><USER23> > GATEWAY: "Ability to artificially increase traffic to a website."

Are they actually just talking about DDoS here? It seems an unusually euphemistic description if so, given how plin-spoken a lot of the previously published documents are.

And if not, why would they want or need to increase traffic? I'm puzzled.

<comment><USER24> I think they mean things like artifical visitor inflation. For example, to make a Youtube video "viral" they could seed it with 30,000 fake views. Or, perhaps, they could mass upvote certain HN threads as soon as they're posted...

Remember that intelligence agencies generally care more about exploitation (figuratively) and manipulation than attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Clearly they were losing the arms race with 4chan.

</comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if upvotes and downvotes on news aggregation sites could be considered to be online polls.

</comment><comment><USER26> "ANGRY PIRATE"?

[http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=angry+pirate](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=angry+pirate)

<comment><USER27> The naming strategies are discussed here:

[http://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/shortcuts/2014/jul/16/wha...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk- news/shortcuts/2014/jul/16/what-gchq-geeky-misogynistic-code-names-tell-us)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Seriously, schoolchildren can manipulate online polls.....

<comment> grey-area Obviously defeating a naive online poll is trivial, but it is also trivial to detect.

Presumably this software does it in untraceable ways - with a botnet of IPs from the country in question, with delays and stutter etc so that it is indistinguishable from real traffic.

You should not underestimate the power of online actions in shaping opinion - for example if stories on a particular tech consistently made the top of HN, a significant no. of people would start thinking it was popular amongst this demographic.

If a BBC or Daily Mail story which was a puff piece for GCHQ was consistently on the top of their 'most read' section, people would be far more exposed to that story over a given period. etc.

<comment><USER29> Running completely gameable, "unscientific polls" should be considered journalistic malpractice. It was annoying and stupid before, continuing to do so going forward knowing that it will be abused by governments and hidden organizations to manufacture consent is unacceptable.

<comment> grey-area This is in no way confined to polls. Almost every website has a voting component of some kind, be that measuring which stories are read most, allowing up/downvotes, Q&A or comment systems etc. It doesn't have to be a straightforward poll to be gamed.

I think it would be better to address the malpractice by our governments than to blame journalists - if the gov. is sufficiently determined, and is given the funds to spend on it, they will find ways to distort online discourse. The UK has just increased funding for 'intelligence' (what an oxymoron) by £800 million, so you can expect more of this to come, and we should lay the blame where it belongs - with those agencies poisoning the well of online discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Online polls are worthless anyway. In high school, someone in our class hacked an online poll to win a contest to get Mandy Moore to perform at our school. NBD.

<comment><USER31> No they're not.

There are some online pollsters such as YouGov who predict significant outcomes with quite good accuracy. We're not talking about vBulletin polls or anything here - their entire business is polls. They also monitor the trends and opinions of people towards products, political parties and other things.

Technically you could ruin a brand or political party by doing a pre-election poll, quoting the stats on newsnight and demotivating the voters into voting for another party to avoid wasting their vote. This _does_ happen. It wouldn't surprise me if cash changed hands here and there to make it happen.

If GCHQ got at the dataset or manipulated it with shill accounts at the pollsters then they could have significant power over the measure of public opinion.

<comment><USER30> Yes they are. A representative sample of the population is not online, period, and the huge self-selection bias in the sorts of websites they visit necessitates some very substantial black magic to get numbers out.

<comment><USER31> I don't disagree with that at all. The stats are completely bollocks but they indicate a trend reasonably well even with the selection bias.

What I'm saying is that they do have influence and after all, that's what GCHQ are about even if the numbers are wrong.

<comment><USER31> HN hostilities already...

Even Reddit (yes REDDIT) is better than this hole.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The PowerPoint Philosophe: Waiting for Steven Pinker's Enlightenment - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenation.com/article/waiting-for-steven-pinkers-enlightenment/ <comment><USER2> Generally speaking, I have found Pinker's writings to be excellent (even when I have quibbles here and there). This latest book, however, seems rushed and an attempt to ride on his own coattails.

Still, it's odd to me that so many reviews of this book apparently go beyond simply pointing out the flaws of the book in order to take a swipe at the man.

Do I smell schadenfreude?

<comment><USER3> Pinker is just a perfect example of a new breed of popular "public intellectuals" who are lazy, boring and non-skeptical thinkers, who love to criticise ideas they are too lazy to study and understand.

<comment><USER2> To you have anything other than insults to support your view?

<comment><USER3> Sure. Pretty much all of Pinker's books' reviews, written by better-educated people who've actually bothered reading what he so gleefully critiques. Here's a selection:

[https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/01/the-precious- ste...](https://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/01/the-precious-steven- pinker)

[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/14/enlightenment-...](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/14/enlightenment- now-steven-pinker-review)

[https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/john-gray- steven...](https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/john-gray-steven- pinker-violence-review)

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes- nat...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/25/what-comes-naturally-2)

Also, I had the dubious pleasure of attending one of Pinker's talks. Let's just say that him coming off as unintelligent is an understatement. He seemed to be both completely unfamiliar with the very subject he had written about as well as incapable of forming any kind of interesting or novel insight about it. He just paraphrases well-worn anti-intellectual sentiments using what appears to the untrained ear as intellectual jargon. His audience in that particular talk happened to be mostly university professors, all of whom did their best not to laugh, as he was clearly the least-informed person in the quite-large room about the very subject on which he'd written a best-selling book!

My insults about this joke-of-an-intellectual are a much-watered-down version of how he's perceived by people who actually know the subject matter. Of course, these are the very people he critiques for this very reason. He can present them as his "opponents" and thus discard their actually-informed criticism as ideological opposition, saving him the trouble of actually studying the material.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess it's a subjective point but I think implying he's simply dumb or lazy is being uncharitable. I've also gone to a talk by Pinker and came away from it frustrated, but also deeply impressed. "The Language Instinct" is a brilliant example of science popularization and he speaks quite eloquently, I thought.

That said, I do think that the further he strays from neuroscience and psychology, the more overconfident and shaky his claims seem to get. You could call it the Jared Diamond fallacy, a kind of high-brow cousin of the Dunning Kruger effect: scientists trained to be interdisciplinary who think that this training makes them competent historians as well. It doesn't.

I've been thinking about writing a rebuttal to Pinker's main claims in this book and _Better Angels_ but I think the job has already been done by a combo of this review from the humanities realm (David Bell is a superb historian of the French Enlightenment) and the issues raised by people well-versed in statistics, like Taleb, who I personally find deeply unappealing as a thinker but who nevertheless is clearly skilled at this sort of critique.

<comment><USER3> _The Language Instinct_ is a book he wrote 25 years ago, back when he bothered writing about stuff he actually had a clue about.

Jared Diamond, with all his faults, is head and shoulders above Pinker. He, too, provides an overarching, overconfident narrative, but at least he more- or-less knows what he's talking about and, most importantly, has something interesting to say. It is not surprising that historians at least consider his thesis something to think about, while Pinker is considered a sad joke, and is more talked-about as a phenomenon (of the uneducated popular intellectual) than for the inanities he spews.

<comment><USER4> With respect, I think you're dead wrong.

Pinker may be out of his depth when it comes to the bigger concepts but within the narrow constraints of materialism the data is incontrovertible. Pointing to a review written by Gray of Pinker's work when Gray is _explicitly_ in the camp which opposes the Polyannas of progress is bad sportsmanship.

What you should be asking yourself is how we can synthesise a worldview that incorporates both optimists and pessimists. I wholeheartedly agree that more nuance is needed but I also think that Pinker has done an excellent job at framing one side of the debate. The fact that he thinks there is only one side of the debate only means that he has as hard a time as the rest of us taking in the enormous sweep of human history and science.

I very much doubt you could write a decent rebuttal of either of his last two works.

<comment><USER3> It's not about pessimists vs. optimists, but about the fact that 1. Pinker has obviously not read many of the works he criticises, and 2. he displays no ability at self-skepticism or any other quality that makes for interesting intellectual writing. His texts are thinly veiled propaganda (in his talks the veil is completely gone; they are long rants against intellectuals he clearly has not read) of the most boooooring kind. It's OK to have an opinion; it's not OK not to seriously study what it is that you're writing about (say, the Enlightenment), and it's not OK to write boring propaganda yet present yourself as a profound intellectual. He is shallow, unoriginal, boring and almost criminally unknowledgable.

<comment><USER4> > almost criminally unknowledgable

Do yourself a favour and develop a sense of proportion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've found this 'things have never been better' attitude put forward by the world's (neo-)liberal elite mostly used as an excuse to keep their heads in the sand about serious threats to the ecosystem and the unsustainability of their socio-economic model.

<comment><USER6> This doesn't seem to be advocating sticking your head in the sand, but to continue using science to address the problems and stop panicking. As we've faced serious threats for a long time, and this model has dealt with them far better than others.

<comment><USER7> From the review, it sounds like our current political problems receive no attention/treatment, and that Pinker advocates a future-dependent technological solution (better/more nuclear power to increase clean power generation) to a political problem we currently face (no will/incentive to enforce taxation scheme to reduce the status quo of carbon emissions) :

> What, for instance, about climate change? Pinker is no climate-change > denier, and admits that "the challenge is daunting." But then he quickly > pivots from his position that things are getting better and better to say > that we can avoid the looming doom if only we start taxing carbon emissions, > increase the use of nuclear power, and engage in deliberate climate > engineering to lower global temperatures.

> He largely disregards the fact that the political will to move in any of > these directions is wholly lacking and will remain so as long as the party > that controls the White House and Congress refuses to admit that a problem > even exists. When it comes to his favored technological solution, nuclear > power, Pinker also seems determined to ignore the problem that the people > who manage plants do not always follow their own safety procedures and > cannot plan for every possible natural disaster (as Fukushima showed all too > dramatically). The industry, he insists, has learned from its mistakes. But > has it?

I haven't read the book so I can't comment on how accurate this portrayal is

<comment><USER6> Much of the current political situation arises from a lack of trust in science and fear mongering leading to panic.

<comment><USER7> Really? I think it arises from simple economic incentives - not taxing emissions makes people (politicians and employees of basically all companies) richer than taxing emissions. Even the most educated and science worshiping populace would be hard pressed to vote for policy that would hamper economic growth and cost jobs/profits.

<comment><USER6> All the various rules under the EPA cost money, yet people passed it as there was a clear need to do so. The unwarranted doubt placed on global warming research is being used to mask the clear need.

The economic implications aren't as clear as you make them. Companies may make less profit right away, but assuming the amount of work needed is the same, that gap would need to be filled by innovation or manual labor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you want to refute Pinker's arguments, you don't have to ramble on exaggeration and misrepresentation of actual facts, you just have to cite one broad metric in which humanity has worsened over the past decades.

<comment><USER9> > you just have to cite one broad metric in which humanity has worsened over > the past decades.

Within the U.S., how about economic inequality and political partisanship, to name two?

<comment><USER10> But that's not "humanity", that's "within the US".

Note that Pinker's argument is global, but not total, and not strictly monotonic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a much better review of Pinker's new book: [https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2018/02/20/enlighte...](https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2018/02/20/enlightenment- and-progress-or-why-steven-pinker-is-wrong)

</comment><comment><USER12> It is a good book, Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist" is better written, and less Polyanna.

Nassim Taleb argued successfully against his previous "Better Angels"book

<comment><USER13> Nassim Taleb is not really Pinker's intellectual equal. As someone who has read "Better Angels", I don't think it's even up for debate that the world is dramatically less violent today than it's ever been (the main premise of the book). To prove his point, Pinker mercilessly bludgeons the reader with hard facts, again, again, and again, until even the most steadfast contrarian starts to nod in agreement.

<comment><USER14> Agreed Taleb is not his equal is his superior. Having read all Taleb's books and a few Pinker books, i have learnt far more from Taleb. Taleb hails from the Middle East so is probably too pessimistic and cynical ( but hilarious). Pinker hails from affluence and comfort so is too rosy. Pinker has no deep insights he just cherry picks facts and presents them eloquently. Taleb is a much deeper thinker so his thoughts are far more interesting to me. His intellect is way above Pinker's level, but not as powerful as Wittgenstein (who Taleb admires) my favourite philosopher

<comment><USER15> Taleb has an annoying habit of attacking the people as much as the idea he's criticizing. If you don't agree with Taleb you're suddenly a "charlatan". And if you don't take his hardline stance on GMOs you're a shill for Monsanto. I've read almost everything of Taleb's by the way, but I find his inability to accept criticism annoying. Seeing how he behaves on twitter has made me admire him less.

<comment><USER14> I agree he is arrogant over sensitive and a bit childish, so are manny other brilliant people eg Steve Jobs. I'm not saying he's perfect just saying that his work is far more interesting to me than Pinker's. It's apparent to me that humans have advanced dramatically in mnay ways hence I learnt nothing from Pinker, unlike from Fooled by Randomness and Anti Fragile which influenced me significantly (not so much Skin in the Game). Pinker glosses over tremendous Global problems no where near being resolved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have to say the when Elon Musk correctly schooled him on general AI threats it certainly raised my eyebrows that maybe Pinker wasn't as clever I believed, as the more simple among us could have appreciated the point Elon made in a tweet.

<comment><USER17> Why is it that so many people seem to call Musk by his first name in written discourse? Smells of fanboy/girlism and certainly doesn't add to objectivity. The point being that he can say pretty much anything he wants and gets away with it because he's "Elon".

<comment><USER18> Is that uncommon (when referring to other people)? I can't think of anyone where I default to using only their last name.

<comment><USER2> As a rule, I use a person's last name when discussing writings, research, and general academic expression. I make an exception in Elon's case because, as another commenter implied, the word "Musk" in English carries some unfortunate connotations.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Prisoner of Amazon.com (checkout) - <AUTHOR> http://tpgblog.com/2008/01/14/prisoner-of-amazoncom-checkout/ <comment><USER2> This article is ridiculous. It just bitches about the drop down menu and other random stuff. I just took a look at the checkout process. Since I already buy stuff from Amazon from time to time, my info is all stored once I'm logged in. Once i'm in the purchase page I just have to click "Place Order". The purchasing page is separate from the normal amazon page, but I would never have noticed. I would say that its really not a big deal that once you click "Checkout" that it takes you to a separate page. I for one, don't click checkout unless I mean to with the items I have. And if I did have second thoughts its super easy to get rid of them or back out.

And honestly, if there UI design was that flawed, as the guy says, they wouldn't be a profitable company because they rely on purchase volume, which if not super easy, wouldn't happen.

</comment><comment><USER3> Once again, an opinion piece that claims to be research.

If _you_ don't like something, say "I don't like ...", not "people in general don't like ...". You don't know what people in general don't like unless you have done some research. Talking out of your ass is not research.

Anyway, thinking back to the Amazon checkout... the author does have a point. It's weird that the UI just disappears during checkout. But on the other hand, when I go to the checkout, I want to checkout and be done. If I just wanted to see my items, I would go to the shopping cart, after all.</comment>


Paul Mus, Ho Chi Minh, and Me - <AUTHOR> http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2017/09/ho-chi-minth-by-richard-sale.html <comment><USER2> Ho Chi Minh is very much recognized across Asia for precisely the strengths outlined in this essay: his brilliant intelligence, chess-play like negotiations and fierce dedication to the Vietnamese people. That was quite a lesson for me to learn coming from the American education system.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ho Chi Minh admired the US and actually modeled his nationalist revolution on the US revolution, even using the preamble to the US Declaration of Independence in his own Declaration of Independence.

[http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/vietnam/independence.pdf](http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/vietnam/independence.pdf)

The US initially supported his independence movement, during and just after the war, but then sided with the French suppression of it and started it's long involvement in the conflict.

</comment><comment><USER4> Excellent writing. And if you haven't been watching Ken Burns' Vietnam War doc, it's an absolute masterpiece:

[http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam- war/watch/](http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/watch/)

<comment><USER5> +1 for the recommendation. The first episode should be required viewing for anyone wanting to understand the post WW2 geopolitical world order and how the US became involved in such a mess. The rest of the series (especially once Nixon comes onto the scene) is like watching a slow descent into madness (the public polls and reaction after Kent State and Mai Lie astounded me).

<comment><USER3> I don't know I've read a lot of legitimate criticism of the show, basically that it's continuing the same old whitewashing of the war.

Having read for example, how Noam Chomsky describes the Vietnam war, I have a very different perspective on it that what is promulgated in the mass media.

According to the show "was begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings". It also inaccurately says the Gulf of Tonkin attacks occurred when there's plenty of evidence to the contrary (Pentagon papers!)

I haven't watched the show but I bet it doesn't characterize the war as the invasion of South Vietnam by the US, which it plainly was, a old style colonial war to prevent a nationalist revolution and to teach the region a lesson in what happens to those who pursue and independent course.

<comment><USER6> You really should watch before judging. On the Gulf of Tonkin, this is how Burns describes the first incident involving the Maddox:

"The commander of a North Vietnamese torpedo-boat squadron moved to attack the Maddox. The Americans opened fire and missed. North Vietnamese torpedoes also missed. But carrier-based U.S. planes damaged two of the North Vietnamese boats and left a third dead in the water."

That pretty clearly states that the Maddox fired first - it doesn't even describe it as a 'warning shot', but rather a 'miss'. He also says that "Johnson knew the attack had been provoked by the South Vietnamese raids on North Vietnam's islands".

Then on the second attack, he says

"No second attack ever happened, but at the time, anxious American sonar operators aboard the Maddox and Turner Joy convinced themselves one had. The attack was probable but not certain, Johnson was told, and since it had probably occurred, the president decided it should not go unanswered."

This is interspersed with tape of Johnson and McNamara discussing how to react to a second attack, and discussion about how the North Vietnamese command had never authorized any attack on the Maddox.

What story of the Gulf of Tonkin were you hoping he would tell?

<comment><USER3> Well I read that it had gotten the Gulf of Tonkin incident wrong in an article here. I stand corrected that sounds like a pretty good description of the incident.

I would like to watch it, I'll get hold of it sometime.

[https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/19/getting-the-gulf- of-...](https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/19/getting-the-gulf-of-tonkin- wrong-are-ken-burns-and-lynn-novick-telling-stories-about-the-central-events- used-to-legitimize-the-us-attack-against-vietnam/)

<comment><USER7> The author of that article can't possible have seen the episode in question, or has possibly seen only fragments of it — or he misinterpreted it — because his criticisms are completely false.

<comment><USER3> Yeah that's why I say I stand corrected on that issue and I'll watch it first, then criticize it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I changed the title to make it clearer that this is a personal story. Not trying to start a political argument. It's just a fascinating story.

<comment><USER8> There is nothing wrong with a political argument. (It would be a very narrow minded view on business building and IT, if you'd think of them as apolitical.)

<comment><USER9> HN's guidelines ask people to avoid, not political arguments as such, but flamewars, which is what they lead to on the internet: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

This isn't naively denying the political for the supposedly non-political—of course there are politics in everything. It's about the limitations of the internet forum as a medium. We can't have both flamewars and stay interesting, and the mandate of the site is to try to stay interesting. Flames are lame.

Re "business building and IT", I suppose I should add that HN is absolutely not just about business and technology—never has been and never will be, as long as I have a say.

<comment><USER3> I don't know if I like this rule, I've had some great political discussions on HN and I don't see why we shouldn't discuss it.

Many times I've seen posts removed for what I can only think are ideological reasons.

<comment><USER9> > _for what I can only think are ideological reasons_

That perception tends to be in the eye of the beholder, in the sense that people of all ideological commitments see HN as being censored in favor of the opposite side, in proportion to the strength of their own feeling. I've written about this a bunch:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20cognitive%20bias&sor...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20cognitive%20bias&sort=byDate&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13110004&sort=byDate&prefix&pa...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=13110004&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> More, please.

<comment><USER11> Looks like there are quite a few posts by the same author on the blog: [http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/richard_s...](http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/richard_sale/)</comment></comment>


Dear HN, you can't censor Newsweek's Satoshi article - <AUTHOR>

Information wants to be free<p>http://mag.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto.html <comment><USER2> This isn't an "article". This is DOXing someone.

<comment><USER3> I agree. The guy specifically told the reporter he didn't want to talk to her, and her to leave. He also told her he was no longer involved with Bitcoin, and no longer wanted to be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> HN - wtf? censoring this is pretty nutty.</comment>


Convert any image to HTML5 canvas - <AUTHOR> http://h3manth.com/content/convert-any-image-html5-canvas

<comment><USER2> What's the point of this? You can do it with drawImage as well. Guessing you didn't know about that?</comment>


Junkyard Jumbotron: join all your screens into one big one, no software needed - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2011/03/13/junkyard-jumbotron-j.html <comment><USER2> Slightly OT, how do they do it on TV shops where they put a lot of TVs to form a big screen? How are the images split? Can I do it with any TV?

<comment><USER3> i think there are boxes that do it. the googleable you are looking for is "video wall"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> quote:

 _RickBorovoy_

      To make your own Junkyard Jumbotron, please use
      http://jumbotron.media.mit.edu
      The jj.brownbag link above is an earlier version of the software.
      And please post your feedback / results on the Facebook page at
      http://www.facebook.com/pages/Junkyard-Jumbotron/207846822564634

</comment><comment><USER5> This is similar to the digital billboard panels on the sidelines at sporting events. There are some augmented reality applications possible with this idea too.

Back in the seventies and eighties before very large TVs having 20 TVs daisy chained together was all the rage to have in your coke dealer mansion.

<comment><USER6> > _This is similar to the digital billboard panels on the sidelines at > sporting events._

Yes, those are called Jumbotrons.

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Jumbotron>

<comment><USER5> No sir I am talking about the field level panels for advertising purposes:

[http://en.cnledw.com/upload/2010/08/30/201008301153735939.jp...](http://en.cnledw.com/upload/2010/08/30/201008301153735939.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Couldn't get two screens on the same computer to calibrate properly. One of them always showed up with the big broken sign. I had to use two different browsers for it to even create two patterns so maybe there's a bug in the calibration when the two screens are on the same computer.

</comment><comment><USER8> This could be really interesting for people working with digital art installations (using old PCs and monitors/TVs).

A shame that its not likely to work with the wooden 'mirror' though: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCSbk9JDwPY>

</comment><comment><USER3> combining cell-phone screens automatically? lame.

combining video projectors automatically? awesome.

i wonder if the code can deal with overlapping displays.

<comment><USER9> As apu points out, this is really well understood now -- has been for over 10 years, in fact. I think the fact that projectors are still fairly expensive (though much cheaper than years ago) and most researchers aren't big participants in the open source community is why we don't have anything widespread.

At the University of Kentucky lab where I worked in 2002 (The Metaverse Lab), we had a 24-projector geometrically/photometrically-corrected only-casually- aligned system projecting on 2 walls and the floor with all 3 planes meeting at a corner. Additionally, the system was cordlessly head-tracked (Intersense) and the world view would dynamically change so that you could look around objects, look under tables, etc. It was amazingly cool.

I'm pretty sure I could write the code for the geometric calibration of a 4-6 projector (whatever a single, stationary camera could see most of) single- plane system in a day and then use the homographies (plane-to-plane mappings) to warp and display large images geometrically seamlessly on the multi- projector display. There would still be extremely apparent photometric seams where the projectors overlap, though. You can use some simple models to get rid of some of this, but REALLY making it look good in practice is hard, and requires some engineering.

As with most things, making it look 80% good is easy. It's that last 20% that requires years of engineering and a dedicated company like Mersive to make it happen. Their stuff looks good.

<comment><USER3> Oh, of course. It's just that sometimes making the 80% go from easy to trivial is as interesting as the last 20% :)

<comment><USER9> For sure -- this is the essence of learning new fields without being a master.

I'm pretty certain if you buy 2 projectors, a camera (get a half-way decent one, not just a cheap webcam), and read/study a few relevant papers, you'd have a calibrated overlapping setup that you could send images to and show reasonably correctly.

The great thing about this is that it's a lot like graphics programming -- once you get the taste of the positive feedback of small successes, you'll want to start playing around with it a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No software needed _except a browser_ much less amazing than title suggests.</comment>


Mac OS X - The state of the file system (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/#file-system

<comment><USER2> Just today I ran DiskUtil and verify disk told me my disk needed to be repaired, but I needed to do that by rebooting into recovery mode and running DiskUtil there. So I do that and it tells me my disk can't be repaired, back up what data I can, and restore my disk. Awesome right. Ran verify disk again and it says the disk is fine... Fine!? You just told me it needed to be repaired and you couldn't repair it. And now its ok. Who knows if I just lost a bunch of data or what. Fortunately I have a backup.

Please Apple give us ZFS so we can all sleep at night.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Corruption in file data is arguably worse because it's much more likely to > go undetected. Over time, it can propagate into all your backups. When it's > finally discovered, perhaps years later when looking at old baby pictures, > it's too late to do anything about it

This applies to every OS I guess (except with ZFS or BTRFS)? This is my biggest concern currently. I'm mostly using one drive with ext4 that I back up from time to time, what if the files silently corrupt and it propagates to my backups, I wouldn't notice until it's too late probably. I guess rsync wouldn't sync the wrong data unless the files have changed since it syncs based on modification stamps. Investing into a proper RAID or ZFS is "expensive". I'm so paranoid about this I'm probably going to do it at some point.

</comment><comment><USER4> So sad. We've been waiting for ZFS (or similar) for years now to no avail. It's one of those things that you know Apple engineers are hitting their head about but there's so much legacy code keeping them on HFS+ that they need some real institutional push to get things ported.

</comment><comment><USER5> For the adventurous, there's Zevo [1] which is a port of ZFS to Mac OS X that supports all the fine grained details of the operating system:

"ZEVO's file system is fully integrated into the Mac's unique OS environment and implements quotas, ACLs, and the HFS+ programming interfaces like search- fs, id lookups, bulk access calls and resource fork stream access."

If I remember it correctly, the company is run by the guy that was responsible for the ZFS-Mac OS X integration at Apple that was canned shortly before 10.6 was released.

[1] [http://getgreenbytes.com/solutions/zevo/](http://getgreenbytes.com/solutions/zevo/)

<comment><USER6> Sadly ZEVO looks to be in trouble, if not dead [1]. Even Don Brady (the lead engineer behind ZEVO) has reluctantly returned to HFS+ on 10.9 [2].

[1] [http://jollyjinx.tumblr.com/post/64863395820/time-to-say- goo...](http://jollyjinx.tumblr.com/post/64863395820/time-to-say-goodbye-to- zevo-zfs-and-greenbytes)

[2] [https://twitter.com/DonJBrady/status/393028766554812416](https://twitter.com/DonJBrady/status/393028766554812416)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone know why this is being upvoted? Anything new (in 2013) that is suddenly makes this relevant again? (ZFS changed their license? WinFS back as a zombie?)

<comment><USER8> It's not breaking news or anything, but by definition, "Mac OS filesystem still a piece of crap" won't be.

I assume it's being upvoted because it's interesting and (apparently) timeless.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The paragraph about the hard link errors propagating from one backup to another in Time Machine is pretty scary.

Is there any known solution to this problem? Would running something like Disk Util from time to time detects the errors and fix the filesystem?

<comment><USER8> Depends on the cause of the corruption. If the physical drive is going bad, then diskutil should at least report some errors. But HFS+ doesn't checksum anything. If you have a flaky controller or just an errant solar ray flipping a bit, there's nothing diskutil can do about it. A 0 is as valid a bit as 1, so as far as diskutil can tell, all you did was save a change to a file somewhere.

You can verify your time machine backups periodically though.</comment></comment>


Prototype array camera could make your pictures better, phones thinner - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/10/pelican-imagings-prototype-array-camera-could-make-your-picture/

<comment><USER3> The video is fascinating, but a complete fabrication in terms of actual consumer products. The plank at 2:50 is an excellent example: to see past the plank entirely, the camera array would have to be _wider_ than the plank. Probably 6 inches or so, in that case.

We may see it, and multiple smaller lenses could indeed solve the crappy-focus problems, and still keep the resolution high. But until I see a _legitimate_ demonstration, I highly doubt the shiny through-occlusion tracking will work as well in any product using it. Better than current cameras, certainly - <USER2> can still track depth - but _nothing_ like their examples.

<comment><USER4> I agree, I'm not sure I can comprehend a situation in which capturing the central figure with such high visibility is worth destroying the rest of the video frame.

edit - Maybe it would be good for scientists tracking animals, however the distance they shoot from would require a very wide array of cameras.

<comment><USER5> So, a lens is a mechanism for doing a significant amount of computation. All this does is move some of that computation from optics to software.

If you take out some of the optics from a real lens you get a blurry image too. That doesn't mean the remaining lenses aren't doing something useful -- or that the output is bad. It just needs further processing.

Post-processing, you end up with interesting images.

More examples: <http://www.refocusimaging.com/gallery/>

<comment><USER6> I'd be interested in what this kind of array could do if it could be used to take cinema-quality video with your examples level of post-processing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love computational photography.

For a better understanding of how this works, watch the video at: <http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lfcamera/>

<comment><USER7> Totally! Array cameras and coded apertures ahoy. I'm convinced that CompPhoto stuff has a lot to offer - now that we've seen the technology _can_ work, even on a DIY level, it's time to get it in the hands of people that will actually use it. Mobile phones are a good way to do that. Glad to see Pelican going this way.

<comment><USER5> I would love to build one of these myself.

Anyone up for building a photography research lab??

<comment><USER7> I have ideas and experience. We've met IRL...

<comment><USER7> In fact, I'm even working on some of the super-low-budget stuff we talked about at FOO East.

<comment><USER5> Oh, awesome! I can't wait to hear more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm curious whether this is actually going to work in practice, because the see-throughish behavior leads me to think that there's a large separation distance between the individual cameras in the experiments (perhaps the test cameras are too large to bring them, say, 0.2 mm apart) whereas this would not be the case on a tiny cellphone camera.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, that's correct. The video has almost absolutely nothing to do with the actual content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does this have any connection to the multi-lensed eyes of insects?

<comment><USER11> No,with insects, every lens on their eyes is like a single pixel, and looking in a different direction - this combines multiple images and they're looking in the same direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> First the picture shows a finished conventional camera module, packaged and including the focus, zoom drives, cable and connector. The concept camera apparently doesn't need any PCB or link to the camera.

The limit on cellphone cameras isn't optical it's computational - the CPU and battery power isn't there to stream more than VGA resolution movies at 60fps, so how is it going to do the image combination for this?

<comment><USER11> The computational limits are very rapidly disappearing. Check Anandtech's story on the new ARM A15 processors. We are seeing generational leaps in processing power very frequently.</comment></comment>


Building blocks of Amazon ECS - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-blocks-of-amazon-ecs/ <comment><USER2> "Let's begin with an analogy"

[4 paragraphs of fantasy explorer game references]

All I've learned is my brain hurts.

<comment><USER3> Yeah seriously what the hell.

And it's not as if the game references are universals.

All this obfuscation for an obtuse and needless analogy.

<comment><USER4> This is like the whole GraphQL Star Wars schtick. I really don't enjoy Star Wars, so reading their documentation was a total drag.

<comment><USER5> There are dozens of us!

<comment><USER4> So good to know. <3

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Even if i skipped the spaceship whole analogy section (I did), all in all really glad to see more easily accessible explanations for AWS technology than the main documentation. I love how approachable this is, and the diagrams help.

</comment><comment><USER7> What this post doesn't explain well is the benefit of using ECS rather than just uploading a docker image to an EC2 instance and running it.

<comment><USER8> Even the smallest EC2 images can run multiple containers if your containers are small enough, and either way it makes sense to add a level of abstraction over your pool of EC2 instances - i.e. treat them as pool as opposed a set of discrete blocks. ECS lets you specify exactly what resources each container needs, and then lets you make your pool shrink or grow as necessary. The pool can also be a heterogenous mixture of instance types, even a combination of on premise (?) ones. And could also be spot instances, which are way cheaper. Could also be whichever spot instance types happen to be cheapest at the moment.

So yeah, being able to pool your EC2 instances is useful.

<comment><USER9> > And could also be spot instances, which are way cheaper.

This what we are currently using ECS for. Keep a set of on demand instances to handle a base load and scale out on spots. Any compute that is not time dependent is on spots 100%.

We have been using AWS for a long time, and wrote/still have a system to scale out instances with AMIs. This system is heavy weight though because multiple AMIs cannot share an instance.

Kubs is our next step.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've had a lot of good experiences with ECS so far, except for their scheduled tasks system. With cron, you check /var/mail. When a scheduled task doesn't run on ECS... you're SOL.

<comment><USER11> I ran into this problem a few weeks ago and couldn't believe how poor the error handling is. I eventually found the FailedInvocations graph in CloudWatch, but I didn't see any way to actually find out what went wrong.

<comment><USER10> How did you solve it?

<comment><USER11> I haven't yet. It wasn't a priority, so I stopped looking into it. I did find this forum thread though: [https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=269884](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=269884)

I tried tweeting @AWSSupport, but they just referred me to the scheduled tasks docs that I had already read.

I suspect the issue is that I set up my tasks to run in Fargate mode, which I didn't realize at the time was brand new. Maybe it's not compatible with scheduled tasks yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For those looking for a more in-depth explanation of Amazon ECS, I highly recommend the videos here [https://awsdevops.io/p/hitchhikers-video-guide-aws- docker](https://awsdevops.io/p/hitchhikers-video-guide-aws-docker)

</comment><comment><USER13> Why even use ECS when you can just start an Elastic Beanstalk docker-based cluster, and get superior, more focused web UI (at least the UI for EB is superior at present) along with much easier configuration?

If I sound bitter, it's because I am -- I recently spent about 2 days straight trying to build an ECS cluster reliably with CloudFormation, and while I must admit I was newer than normal to CloudFormation templates, the amount of errors I ran into (and incredibly slow provision/creation/update time), along with the broken edge cases (try and make an existing EC2 bucket with CloudFormation) was infuriating. Don't read any further if you don't want to read a rant.

While ECS is great in theory (or if you set it up by clicking tons of buttons on AWS's UI), it's significantly harder to automatically deploy than BeanStalk is, from where I'm standing. All I have to do is get a container with the eb command line tool installed, do a bunch of configuration finangling (which honestly is ridiculous as well, just let me give you a file with all my configuration in it, or read it from ENV, and stop trying to provide interactive CLIs for everything, for fucks sake) and I can run `eb deploy` and push a zip file with nothing but a docker container (muilti container setups are also allowed) specified up to the cloud. Later I'm going to look into using CloudFormation to set up EB, but I know even that will be simpler, because I won't have to try and make any ECS::Service objects or ES::TaskDefinitions.

Trying to use ECS made me so glad that Kubernetes exists. Unfortunately in my work I can't use it currently because that would mean the rest of the team stopping to learn it, but Cloudformation + ECS is a super shitty version of setting up a kubernetes cluster and using a kubernetes resource config file. I think the best part about kubernetes is that if the community keeps going the way it's going, cloud providers will finally be reduced to the status of hardware vendors -- all I'll need from EC2 is an (overpriced) machine, network access, and an IP, not to try and keep up with it's sometimes asinine contraptions and processes, or be locked in to their ecosystem.

<comment><USER14> My understanding is ECS can run multiple tasks and services while a beanstalk just runs one.

<comment><USER13> Yeah maybe it just wasn't for me -- with RDS as the database and ElastiCache for redis, all we needed was to run the API server (one container, we don't even have any like queue job workers or anything). When I started looking into how to run containers on AWS ECS seemed like the best fit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> ECS is pretty nice. I wish they did what Rancher did by allowing docker- compose.yml and an extra YML file for Rancher-specific setup.

<comment><USER16> ecs-cli let's you do that, where you specify a compose file that's mostly compatible with docker-compose.yml, and an additional yml file for ECS- specific parameters:

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/cmd- ecs-cli-compose.html)

<comment><USER17> Except it doesn't work with anything complicated, like volumes, in my experience.

<comment><USER18> We use one docker-compose.yml for local dev and another for deploying to ECS. Locally the docker-compose.yml configures volumes, with ECS we do it in the task definition. For shared volumes to gather logs we are using EFS which seems to work and mount in the same way as NFS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So many things are janky in ECS that it ends up costing too much time and energy to get anything done. I've posted at length before about all the specific problems I hit while building on ECS, but lately I've just been telling people that it's like that janky toolbox in the funny old "PHP is a fractal of bad design" blog post [0]. Of all the AWS services I ever used, I find ECS _by far_ the most terrible. Even worse than Amazon's documentation. So this really stunted and awkward spaceship analogy is pretty hilarious, given that it's about ECS.

[0] [https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- design/](https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

<comment><USER8> That's probably why EKS is well under way. ECS was built at a time when there was no clear winner in the orchestration game. Now there is. AWS pretty much admitted that they would throw themselves behind hosted Kubernetes going forward.

<comment><USER20> AWS employee on the container services team here.

We are definitely building out a hosted Kubernetes solution with EKS, but its important to realize that Kubernetes is just one part of the container services ecosystem at AWS, living alongside ECS.

Just like we have multiple database solutions (DynamoDB, MySQL/Postgres in RDS, Aurora, Redshift, etc) we also have multiple orchestrators (EKS managed Kubernetes and ECS).

ECS is like DynamoDB: it is the AWS native solution to the problem. Built to be incredibly scalable, and built for AWS patterns and best practices that we know will scale for our customers.

EKS is like RDS: its the AWS managed hosting for the open source software, designed to solve some of your scaling and configuration problems, and it gives you more flexibility, but that flexibility also gives you the power to do things that may not scale as well.

In ECS you may not be able to do everything you can do with Kubernetes (just like DynamoDB limits what you can do compared to the capabilities of SQL), but just like DynamoDB can scale far past SQL because of its limits, ECS is more scalable than Kubernetes because of its limits.

You can run a much larger cluster in ECS than you can in Kubernetes. We would actually still recommend to our largest customers to use ECS instead of EKS if they have any significant scale. The thing to realize is that ECS is a multi tenant control plane: it already keeps track of every single container on every host in every cluster from every ECS customer per region, and that scale is tremendous, far larger than anything Kubernetes can do. For reference at re:Invent we shared that we have millions of EC2 instances under ECS management each month, organized into more than 100,000 customer clusters, and we launch hundreds of millions of containers every week.

With ECS we can add a new customer with >2k instances into the multi tenant control plane with ease. On the other hand configuring and managing Kubernetes to handle this is a fun challenge. ([https://blog.openai.com/scaling- kubernetes-to-2500-nodes/](https://blog.openai.com/scaling-kubernetes- to-2500-nodes/)) For a lot of orgs on AWS they would rather have the boring, simple power of ECS.

Anyway I hope this provides some perspective on it. We are excited about Kubernetes and excited to offer EKS, but ECS is still our recommendation for the largest customers.

<comment><USER19> But with the inefficiencies and limitations of ECS versus something like Kube or Swarm or whatever, you're scaling your costs way up, too. Also just preemptively I realize I came off pretty hostile in my parent comment and I want to apologize and say it's not meant personally against anybody working on ECS. Having interacted with ECS engineers from quite early on in the lifetime of ECS, I could tell that you folks were under a lot of pressure to get something out the door as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER20> No problem! I'd love to hear more from you about which aspects of ECS you find most inefficient or limiting though, because obviously one of our goals is for ECS to reduce your costs, that's why it is a free service after all.

Every bit of feedback we get from the community helps us make the service better. Please email me at firstname.lastname@example.com (and anyone else who reads this and wants to chat feel free to as well).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This makes me want to die

</comment><comment><USER22> I happen to be working on this and since there's a thread why not ask...

Has anyone gotten "multi-tenant" (default-restricted) overlay network(s) working on ECS in a way that they like?</comment>


Ask HN: How to forward client port number used? - <AUTHOR> Usually the standard for proxies to notify the origin of the client IP is using X-Forwarded-For (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Forwarded-For) whereas none such exists for forwarding the port number used. Is there one I can use or should I resort to X-Client-Port? <comment><USER2> The obvious question to ask is why do you care what the client port was?

</comment><comment><USER3> That's remote_port</comment>


Facebook admits 18% of Research spyware users were teens, not 5% - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/28/facebook-research-teens/ <comment><USER2> Of course it was. From a future revenue perspective, it absolutely makes sense that facebook would focus on young people, so any research done into the future of facebook and its revenue _must_ include a decent number of young people. I imagine that they are having little success in getting young people to join and interact on facebook, especially because it is being heavily leveraged for international political pressure.

Given current social and political realities, though, and a series of deeply troubling news stories coming out of facebook, I think it might have lost a very large segment of young people that will never join or return. I watch my 15 yo daughter interact with people online, and she has no interest at all in facebook, and her interest in instragram is waning. Currently, her primary interaction space is discord.

I've heard semi-private chat rooms are what is going to be popular, and I expect that we're going to see that kind of thing in facebook soon. I wish them luck (not really) building a revenue model on it that matches what they currently expect.

<comment><USER3> Small groups are for sure becoming popular. I'm surprised that your daughter is doing that through Discord vs a messenger app. Is she a gamer?

<comment><USER4> I think at this point discord is the new IRC, a generic chat platform for communities, organised by interest - nearly all the same benefits of IRC vs Messenger apps, with the additional benefit that somebody cares enough to make it user-friendly. A shame that it's closed-source and centralised though :(

<comment><USER5> Discord is slack for not-work with far better voice chat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Facebook is cheating and lying in every twist and every turn.. every piece of news that comes out is worse than the previous one. They are evolving to a true cancer for humanity. That is a pitty and a shame.

<comment><USER7> The trouble is their employees don't seem particularly bothered by the evil they do every day. if they did, they'd leave.

<comment><USER8> If HN comments are any indicator, they think Facebook is being unfairly bullied for nothing more than standard industry practices.

<comment><USER9> Have a friend that was at Facebook for a conference where Miss Sandberg was speaking and she told the tone used felt quite infantilising.

Ztockholm's syndrome? Drinking the Book-Aid?

Pardon the terrible puns but it seems like strange coming from a company full of well educated & reasonably smart people.

At least folks in Google and Microsoft seem to have a bit more backbone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Whoops, apparently we misestimated before. We're sorry.

This is Facebooks MO. Is anyone surprised at this point?

<comment><USER11> I'm surprised it's only 18%.

<comment><USER12> 18% of participants _admitted_ to being under 18. I know when I was under 18 I lied on every single internet form and said I was 18+

<comment><USER13> To contrast, when the XBOX first released, IIRC you couldn't even create an online account if you were under 18... I'm pretty sure most of the accounts were lying at that time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The damage is already done though. This update will be seen by fewer people than saw the original story and facebook will face no meaningful consequences for deceiving people yet again. It's no wonder they lie so often; it pays off for them to lie.

Another lie that doesn't even get the signal boost of being in the headline:

> _Facebook had also told reporters on January 29th regarding teens' > participation, "All of them with signed parental consent forms." Yet in its > response to Senator Warner, Facebook admitted that "Potential participants > were required to confirm that they were over 18 or provide other evidence of > parental consent, though the vendors did not require a signed parental > consent form for teen users." In some cases, underage users merely had to > check a box to claim they had parental consent, and there was no > verification of users' ages or that their parents actually approved._

<comment><USER14> IMHO they are practically begging to be regulated.

It's too bad nothing has happened yet because some guard rails need to be put in place or this type of questionable behavior will never stop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There are various ways to lie using statistics. Let's assume that Facebook's goal was to reach a total of 1 million teens between 13-18 years old. Now they definitely don't want to come into regulators' crosshairs by only targetting these Teens using Onavo/FB Research app so they opened it to everyone including adults. Now let's say, Facebook got a total of 20 million users for participation through this VPN app. So they are now saying "Ohh, don't worry...only 5% of these users were Teens." which is true but on the other end Facebook did achieve its goal to target 1 million (5% of 20 million) Teens with this app. Not saying that this is what happened here but this may be the way they want to defend their act here PR wise.

</comment><comment><USER16> April 2019 update: "Facebook admits 49% of Research spyware users were teens, not 18%."

<comment><USER17> April Fool's! Not...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't understand the uproar around these numbers. Saying that 18% represents a clear intent to target teenagers strikes me as intentionally misunderstanding the math.

Teens, i would imagine, represent at least 18% of recreational internet usage. If anything 18% feels like it risks under-representing the group if i were designing research on the topic.

There are plenty of reasons to be upset with facebook (deceit, privacy, bs marketing, etc) about this very issue. All this hullabaloo about 5 vs 18% feels like manufactured outrage to me.

<comment><USER2> I guarantee that when all is said and done, that a part of this project, or whatever it is, will be attempts to alter human behavior in various ways. Basically, a continuation on the human experimentation that facebook has been allowed to get away with as long as I can remember. People have gotten so used to Facebook changing the news feed on a whim to try to change human behavior and interaction on the site, that we don't think of it as what it is.

Basically, I believe that a curated feed that isn't completely controlled by end-user rules will be declared illegal at some point in the near future.

<comment><USER5> What is advertising if not an attempt to alter human behavior? When a 4 year old sees 10 candy commercials an hour they are gonna want candy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've expressed my thoughts on this already. And now it wasn't 5% teens, but 18%?!?! That changes….nothing. Look through the letter from Facebook and see how many times they were notified they'd be collecting your data. They knew what they signed up for and they got paid to do it. This is such a non-issue, it's insane. What terrible thing has happened as a result of this app? A few teens made a little extra money by letting Facebook see how they use their phone? Let's do another 15 stories on it please TC.

</comment><comment><USER20> users or victims?

How can a teen be held culpable for understanding their choice? This is a clear case of predation.

So so glad Apple kicked them out of the iOS App Store and revoked their cert.

<comment><USER21> Semantics are important here. 'User' connotes more agency than can be expected. I find that 'subject' is more appropriate than 'victim' but we should agree that 'user' is the wrong word. The media can do better, and these companies have to do better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Facebook repeatedly lies and faces no consequences. No wonder it keeps happening.

<comment><USER23> The story has been around for 1 hour on HN and only 3 comments.

This is already a dead story. There's no consequence for follow ups. It's better to lie in the first round. Save the truth for later when the rage dips.</comment></comment>


Steve Yegge's Google Platforms Rant (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

<comment><AUTHOR> > The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as > "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt > it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate -- ask anyone who worked on > platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If > you delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up > front. You can't cheat. You can't have secret back doors for internal apps > to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the > hard problems up front.</comment>


GoDaddy Outage: How to Migrate to AWS Route 53 - <AUTHOR> http://davewasmer.tumblr.com/post/31283249223/migrating-from-godaddy-dns-to-amazon-route-53 <comment><USER2> I recently did some DNS performance analysis and wrote a blog post about managed DNS services (along with a free report):

[http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and- analysis...](http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2012/08/comparison-and-analysis-of- managed-dns.html)

Route53 is a good choice for DNS compared to GoDaddy. It has better DDOS mitigation including custom DNS hostnames across different TLDs for each zone, and zone segmenting across their network.

<comment><USER3> Very nice article. I recently switched to amazon from dyn. One thing I noticed is that amazon has unique hostnames for the nameservers.

Can you comment on how Amazon's use of unique name server names impacted your results? I have a suspicion that amazon is half as fast because it requires two lookups instead of 1. ns1.dyn.org is likely to be cached, but llkadjsf.amazondns.net is unlikely to be cached.

<comment><USER2> It won't generally affect the real user test results because of a warmup/training phase in the test when those DNS records would be cached within the recursive chain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Free and reliable alternative from another big ISP: <https://dns.he.net/>

<comment><USER5> Since when does trusting a business critical function to a free service make any sense? At least GoDaddy has a motivation to provide some level of service because people are paying them.

Some other alternatives that aren't free, but are highly reliable are: <http://dyn.com/> <http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com>

I use the latter one and in addition to providing an alternative to my registrar, they also seem to have much faster response times, which cut some milliseconds off a site lookup.

<comment><USER4> My suggestion makes sense since they are a very big ISP and they simply don't care about the cost of a service that they would need to provide to their clients anyway.

Namecheap does the same and most people think that they provide a good service.

Seriously, pay if you want, but if you aren't Google, you don't need to pay for reliable DNS hosting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It might be worth mentioning for those that aren't totally confident with DNS that (a) errors in setting up your DNS can take your services off line in unexpected ways (anyone else ever forgotten to put in an MX record and only realised three days later they weren't getting any email?) so be careful, and (b) at the low end one advantage of letting your host manage your DNS is that they can make changes behind the scenes -- for example, changing the IP of your website or moving your account to a different physical machine -- and they'll just update your DNS and everything keeps working. If your site is hosted somewhere like DreamHost but you put your DNS somewhere else, one morning you _will_ wake up and find your site is no longer accessible and you'll have to remember that this is probably why.

<comment><USER7> The RFC says that if there isn't an explicit MX record then it implicitly falls back onto the A record. But I'm sure many implementations screw it up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd also recommend taking a look at cloudflare, their DNS service is supposed to be pretty fast, I haven't done any measuring myself but here's a recent post they wrote: <http://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-aka-kickassdns>

So far I've been very happy with their service and it's nice to not only get good DNS hosting but also some security and CDN support.

I switched everything away from Godaddy along time ago. In the past, oh I dont know, maybe year or so, it seems like Godaddy has received so much negative publicity. First with the elephant killing, then with supporting SOPA and now this.

<comment><USER9> I just switched to them yesterday. They have a very nice import tool that matches up all your CNAMES and other records.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Another option is the Linode DNS Manager. They also have a pretty decent (as far as I can tell, never used it, have my own solution) API for managing them. Or you can just do it via the website.

As far as I can tell it's free of charge, as you only need to be a member, but since I host two of my external DNS servers there I cannot actually check that you don't have to be a customer. Maybe a fellow HN user can verify?

On another note, hosting DNS is really easy once you get the grip on how things work.

<comment><USER11> When I stopped my Linodes I'm pretty sure I remember they warned that my DNS would be stopped along with them, so I do think you have to be a paying customer for that to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another nice options is Cloudflare. Especially for small personal blogs, they are free and even offer to put a CDN in front of your data.

</comment><comment><USER13> After a similar DDoS attack on the german provider InternetX we simply set up our own backup name servers. One can do this on a VPS.

</comment><comment><USER14> Just moved ours to Route 53 in the afternoon. I had been on the fence lately, especially after doing a few of the tests on <http://cloudharmony.com/dnstest>, but the move so far has been simple, and new relic reports nearly similar results for us.

</comment><comment><USER15> We recently wrote a tool which can populate our DNS entries in either Route 53 or another provider (can't recall which). So if one goes down, we can run a script which brings up our DNS entires in the alternate provider.

I guess someone could service-fy this and have a meta-DNS service which let you switch backend providers.

Make it so.

<comment><USER16> You could leave them both live with your name server entries pointing at both as well. Then there is nothing to do if only one of them goes down. Waiting until one goes down will mean that requests aren't being served to anyone getting a cached DNS entry with references to the previous hosts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> You can get a Anycast zone (basically it's Route 53) for free with a domain on NameTerrific.

Also the registration is handled by eNom, so you can switch your domain registrar at the same time.

<https://www.nameterrific.com/>

Disclosure: I'm the founder of NameTerrific.

</comment><comment><USER18> Another option that I've heard good things about is called PowerDNS. It's full-blown DNS server which includes a RESTful API.

<http://www.powerdns.com/>

<https://github.com/Habbie/powerdns>

</comment><comment><USER16> Does AWS not offer registrar services? Seems a bit inconvenient to find a separate registrar.

<comment><USER19> I use AWS for most things (including Route53, which is awesome), but I actually like not having my eggs in one basket. If something crazy happens with my AWS account, I could always theoretically point my DNS resolution somewhere else. The domain registrar is reduced to an annual auto-bill transaction on my credit card and they don't have any particular technical responsibility for my traffic.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a good point - for web based companies, your domain registrar will always be your single point of failure. So it makes sense to keep it separate, with the most trustworthy company you can find.

Even in nasty scenario (like GoDaddy's DNS service going down), you can still point your domain somewhere else, even temporarily. But the worst case, your domain registrar going down, leaves you with no alternatives.

<comment><USER20> > But the worst case, you domain registrar going down, leaves you with no > alternatives.

Your domain registrar does not do anything except mediate your ability to alter your DNS records and allow you to renew your domain name entries: it really shouldn't matter if they go offline unless they go offline for months at a time.

You thereby should never, under any circumstance where your domain's availability means anything to you at all, allow your domain name registrar to handle all of your DNS records (as many of the people in that "GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down" thread have done).

Instead, at least some of your authoritative DNS servers should be hosted by anyone other than your registrar: otherwise, you can end up in the situation where all of your DNS goes offline _and_ you can't update your DNS records.

(Of course, you should really not have all of your DNS records hosted by a single company that doesn't have any internal redundancy in the first place; this criteria alone should exclude companies that don't really care about DNS, like any registrar ever, from being your only DNS provider.)

(Note: I'm not certain if today's outage of GoDaddy's DNS infrastructure affected anyone's ability to use their portal to update their DNS records, but one could easily imagine simple scenarios where that happens.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Side note: If your moving and need to figure out a way to redirect a naked domain without having to run a server, and also happen to be using Google Apps then Google Apps will actually do this for you. Its in the Domain settings in the admin panel.

</comment><comment><USER22> I really wish Route53 did secondary DNS using normal bind zone-transfer protocol.

</comment><comment><USER23> If GoDaddy is my domain registrar, but I host my domain on CloudFlare and GoDaddy goes down, will my domain go down?</comment>