Ex C++ coder seeks young & vibrant web language for adventures and good times - <AUTHOR>

My background spans a legal career, computer programming and server ops/management. Combining these fields I have an idea for a web services that I'd like to develop. My question is, what language or framework should I use?
My programming experience is mainly with C++ (Visual C++ & under linux) and scripting with BASH and perl. I recently built a website with ExpressionEngine which was good but I felt restricted (eg passing variables required odd syntax and didn't work in all cases) and hated having to edit via their back-end. I'm happy to learn a new language but want to learn the "right one" and also have reservations about starting a project while still being new to a language.
Finally, the choice is quite overwhelming (Python, PHP, Drupal, Plone, Java, GAE, ruby.. and then there's the frontend!) so I would be grateful for some pointers from some of the web hackers out there on possible languages, how to easily migrate given a mainly C++ background, and how to go about creating a new web app while still learning a language. <comment><USER2> > I'm happy to learn a new language but want to learn the "right one" and also > have reservations about starting a project while still being new to a > language.

There really is no such thing as the right language, but you can find a language (and framework) that suits you well.

For me the language and framework that I work the best with is Python and Django (with jQuery for frontend).

I would recommend picking a couple of languages and frameworks and try building a small project (or even a prototype of your app) in each one. That way you'll probably figure out what works for you and if the framework is going to meet your needs.

You seem hesitant to just pick something and go for it, so this way at least you can try a few thing out before you launch into it and find out halfway through that you don't like the way things work. It might seem like it will take a bit longer this way, but buy jumping in with one language and framework it'll only be quicker if you fluke it and happen to pick something you really like.

</comment><comment><USER3> Since you have a C++ background, you may be interested in Seaside (<http://seaside.st>). It's a web application framework based on a true OO language (Smalltalk). Very easy to get started, and surprisingly different than most other offerings.

The official guide takes you through the creation of several small applications (<http://book.seaside.st>).

Also search the web for articles and comparisons: Seaside has several immense advantages over other frameworks...

</comment><comment><USER4> PHP, Javascript (jquery) and mysql

</comment><comment><USER5> I like python + Tornado web server because I am a minimalist. If you want to learn how the web works from the top down & bottom up, this is a great framework to start and end with.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd recommend Rails 3 and jQuery. <http://railstutorial.org/book> is an excellent resource to learn Rails 3.

</comment><comment><USER7> You can't go wrong with PHP and Javascript. Those two are basically universal and later on you can transition to other frameworks if the need arises.

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't it be better to use a Python or Ruby framework? That way one can use either language for writing other non-web apps? PHP is very popular on the web but Ruby and Python are used for much more. Python and Ruby both run on the JVM, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks all. I'll have a bash with a couple small ideas and then go from there!

</comment><comment><USER9> i can recommend padrinorb.com, it is both young and vibrant. its pretty lightweight but still has a lot of the helpful shortcuts you find in bigger frameworks.</comment>


Ask HN: Siri for Travel - <AUTHOR>

Hello folks,
I am starting to make a website which is something like siri for travel effectively meaning that given the constraints like "I have 1 week of vacation", "I have 1000$ budget", "I am interested in hiking" or "I am interested in drinking wine" or even "I dont want to go farther then 100 miles" the app will plan a trip for you including details like which place to go, what attractions to visit there, what to eat etc?.
Just throwing my idea to you guys to see if you guys think people will like to have a minimal effort website for their travel plans which will give them recommendations based on their taste.
Thanks Nishant <comment><USER2> How would you be able to use any technology to match Siri. I recommend you build an SMS service that does this and maybe finishes by sending you a link to pay or something. As Siri works with SMS.

Not sure about this though. I like Hipmunk for hotels and flights. It's probably the best in the travel space but isn't exactly like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I say siri for travel, its basically saying something like "Plan me a trip" and these are my requirements, I dont care what you plan but it should be awesome.

For the version 1, I am planning to launch something like if you go from place A to B, what are the places that you can visit on your way. I came to this idea when I was travelling from Page AZ to Zion National Park Utah and there were numerous attractions on the way that I didnt even knew about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should have a look at <http://www.hidentify.com/> who are attacking a similiar idea/problem albeit in a different market.

<comment><AUTHOR> I highly doubt these guys are doing any recommendations stuff that I am targeting.</comment></comment>


Why I Moved from a Square to a Circle - <AUTHOR> https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/01/why-i-moved-from-a-square-to-a-circle-calculator-interface-design/ <comment><AUTHOR> Fantastic comment in that thread:

[https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/01/why-i-moved- from-a-...](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/01/why-i-moved-from-a- square-to-a-circle-calculator-interface-design/#comment-1286788)</comment>


Ask HN: What are top promising technologies of tomorrow must get involved today? - <AUTHOR> Hello, What are the top promising technologies of tomorrow must learn today? for example, I hear a lot of buzz around "Blockchain"<p>shot <comment><USER3> Kubernetes -> Envoy -> Istio.

Yeah, yeah, it's not rockets to mars or whatever, but I think we've spend DECADES trying to figure out how to abstract away the lower parts of the stack. The last big leap was AWS, and it forced a choice for a lot of people: do you want to work at AWS? or do you want to work on applications that run on AWS? The API is so strong that you can't do both.

There's a similar thing around operating systems, networking tools, and containers. Heroku was a cool PaaS, but ultimately is a little too inflexible to work for everybody. Companies keep rebuilding these internal PaaS systems, and I think Kubernetes has finally nailed it. It's lacking the primitives to do traffic management and introspection, and Envoy / Istio provide those primitives.

Many people see these technologies as an endgame to themselves, but the Istio community has started talking about how they're a platform themselves, and that feels correct. Like AWS, you can abstract away a TON of this stuff, and you will divide people into those that keep a cluster running vs. those that build apps on top of it. The specialization gains will be on the same level as dynamic infrastructure, imho.

Disclaimer: I work at a company that wants to build on top of this new world, but I joined them because I believe this, not the other way around.

<comment><USER4> Agree, and I think cloud is very much becoming a must-know technology. I suspect many here on HN will be shocked that anyone -doesn't- yet fully grok cloud ecosystems, but there are plenty of us in enterprise environments where physical or at least virtual hosts are still dominant.

3 -4 years go in my sector cloud felt very much like an emerging thing. Now it's absolutely "here", and I would encourage anyone with an interest in staying current over the next 5 - 10 years to get into this stuffif you're not doing so yet!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> More so than just "blockchain" I'd say getting into distributed computing will pay dividends in the future. Understanding DC is plenty good for lots of current tech trends (big data, ML, etc), but also looks forward to the switch to trustless systems to be used in everyday life.

<comment><USER6> Indeed I'm not a fan of "blockchain" as a buzzword at all (especially now that people are trying to apply it to things that _shouldn 't_ be distributed); but clearly there are many things that do benefit from distribution.

Things that come to mind are Namecoin, I2P, IPFS, and other tech on the pipeline that can bring the internet closer to it's original ideal of distributivity, each person responsible for their content, etc.

Those are also free software ideals: while great strides have been made in open sourcing user-side software, (mainstream android, Linux on servers, etc), the internet just hides a massive closed system: before you could at least inspect how things work through reverse engineering, but querying web servers is literally a black box model. The problem that not everyone wants to run their own server or even deal with renting out can largely vanish from certain applications. We've started with the easiest ones, which were file sharing (reputation-free), then Bitcoin, with more basic web tasks incoming.

It's important to keep in mind most of those are fit for low-efficiency. Unless we have a breakthrough with Fully Homomorphic encryption, the bulk of computing itself will be centralized (or you will have to accept a mix of high cost or unreliability).

<comment><USER7> I agree with most things in your comment, I'm just curious what things you see that "shouldn't be distributed"?

<comment><USER5> I would say anything that can be done by a centralized entity that doesn't benefit from adding censorship resistance. The main reason blockchains need complicated and, in many cases, wasteful consensus algos is because they were first designed to promote open membership to the network. This meant that you had to design a system that allowed strange machines to work together while no entity trusting any other to not cheat it. Open membership means that the ledger can not be effectively censored, and by extension, neither could one's wealth. Outside of that use case (censorship resistance), very few things benefit from transitioning from central authority to blockchains.

I didn't cover the case of smart contracts, but it's essentially the same thing.

<comment><USER7> > I would say anything that can be done by a centralized entity that doesn't > benefit from adding censorship resistance

Ok, and what concrete, real examples does not benefit from that?

<comment><USER6> You have some private data. You want to compute a hard function of this data, and your computer isn't powerful enough.

For example, this could be a rendering problem: you provide the models, a distributed system computes it (for a cost). This system cannot be private, efficient and reliable. It can be private and reliable, but hugely inefficient, or efficient but non-private and non-reliable. With a non- distributed system (i.e. Google compute, Amazon cloud, etc) you get pretty much all 3 of them, with a slight caveat that privacy is guaranteed circumstantially/legally instead of mathematically. But it's extremely safe to assume you'll be fine.

You want to run and real time multi-user application.

For example, and MMORPG. This one is a fun challenge for sure, but it's a complete nightmare to develop, and again needs sacrifices. In this case you probably can't achieve speed, security, and large number of players simultaneously. Every decision (like "what did this monster drop?") needs to be done through some large scale consensus to guarantee security, which kills latency completely. If you're extremely lax with security and consistency, then you can probably make it work, but accepting users might cheat, possibly game-breakingly. Or you could achieve it all with a handful of players, and reasonable efficiency[1], but your scope will inevitably be limited. I believe Ubisoft's ForHonor[2] uses P2P gameplay, but I'm not sure how safe their system is. Also I'm sure stats and most persistent data is stored centrally.

[1] See Mental poker:

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

[2] Some reddit discussion from quick googling:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/forhonor/comments/5u8jlh/why_forhon...](https://www.reddit.com/r/forhonor/comments/5u8jlh/why_forhonors_p2p_is_preferable_over_dedicated)

Note that the players largely loathe this system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Robotics, but more specifically Tele operated robots. Remotely driven vehicles and remotely controlled robots.

There is a chance that all factory work becomes like a video game.

Tele-ops robotics would lead to:

\- large-scale redistribution of physical/blue-collar jobs (bigger than "software" over last 20 years)

\- allow new business models that were never possible in manufacturing (e.g. robots for "rent" \- subscription model, gamification, flex-work like Uber for tele-operated robots in manufacturing; low-volume sales)

\- order of magnitude better physical health of workers (lower injuries, more fun)

\- savings for manufacturers (not just on labor, but lower insurance etc.)

\- a 20 to 30 year hedge against the invention of general AI that seems far away and what other roboticists are chasing.

There is a potential to release huge latent wealth by creating a new industry (potentially trillions in value could be released over the next 10 years - <USER2> single company would capture it, but it would create something at least as big as "software").

Tele-ops is already successful for surgeries and dangerous situations. But it should be it's own "field"

</comment><comment><USER9> DC Microgrids. Massive improvements in storage, solar panels, and DC circuitry is having a massive effect on the way that people think about power. Especially utilities, appliance companies, and regulators. Also the push for electric cars is changing the demand for rapid DC charging.

</comment><comment><USER10> GraphQL, Serverless & The Graphcool Framework

<comment><USER10> The new kinds of building blocks provided by these technologies are straight out revolutionary for backend development! I think this has a lot to do with the declarative programming model they are following.

Backend development in the way it was done using Ruby on Rails, Laravel or Express.js will become less and less appealing since the abstractions offered by the mentioned technologies are increasing development speed and generally very cost-efficient.

GraphQL minimizes the data transfer over the network by letting client applications ask for exactly the data they need, thus also making the life easier for frontend developers! Having productive engineers also makes product iteration a lot faster and cheaper, which directly results in business value!

Finally, Serverless enables great deployment workflows and minimizes the overhead companies need to invest in DevOps.

<comment><USER9> How do you do backend optimizations with GraphQL? For example can I limit the number of records someone can ask for from the backend? Can I limit the time the query runs on my database from the backed? Can I change the order of joins so that my indexed column is hit first? Or hard set what index is used for that rare case that the database tries to use the wrong one?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Brain machine interfaces and neurotechnology. The cycle time is a little longer than releasing a new tinder app but movement in this space has been speeding up with Neuralink, Braingate, heavy investments in neuroscience worldwide with the NIH brain initiative, DARPA's numerous programs, European brain project, and massive investments from private foundations like the Simons, Wellcome trust, Allen institute, HHMI, etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> Automation and tools that augment human productivity and time saving tools.

For instance, we're helping web developers to automate their regression test construction. This frees the developer up to develop their code, rather than spend all their time developing test cases: [https://swif.club/?s=hn1](https://swif.club/?s=hn1)

</comment><comment><USER13> The field of deep learning seems to produce breakthrough results every other day.

<comment><USER14> But I wouldn't call deep learning a "technology". DL is a branch of mathematics, technology (e.g programming language, ML framework) is secondary, and most important non-mathematical advancements in the field of DL are those in hardware, not in software.

<comment><USER15> I consider DL to be a technology. Of course there is DL theory, but most people doing DL are engineers. To say that most advancements are in hardware really trivializes the engineering breakthroughs made in computer vision, language understanding, robotics, etc. DL is enabled by better hardware, but it still requires a lot of work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> CRISPR

</comment><comment><USER17> AI/ML - specifically Deep Bayesian approaches. The Deep neural network might have run its course, but Bayesian approaches (Probabilistic Graph Models) hold a lot of promise.

<comment><USER18> This comes off as pretty biased. "Run its course?" \- really? Remind me, did DeepMind use Probabilistic Graphical Models to beat Lee Sedol at Go? Does any of OpenAI's research use them?

<comment><USER17> I will leave this here: [http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial- intelligenc...](http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial- intelligence/11135--geoffrey-hinton-says-ai-needs-to-start-over.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not block chain, Internet of things, self driving cars.

</comment><comment><USER20> Drones.

Design: increased efficiency and distance. Automation and auto pilot.

Applications: find new verticals to apply this technology. Many industries can be disrupted.

<comment><USER21> Don't mean to be a downer, but it feels like we'll get to self-driving cars before we can automate/autopilot drones.

Having to consider additional degrees of freedom (z-axis, correction for wind/weather conditions) makes autopiloting drones additional degrees of magnitude harder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> WebAssembly and decentralization are big ideas. Things are moving very rapidly there are probably 100 right answers to this question.

</comment><comment><USER23> Memristors

<comment><USER24> Yep. I really want to get my hands on some to start experimenting with, but the ones that are available are still fairly expensive. :-(

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Algorithmic mechanism design, agent based neural nets design and lastly Network science

</comment><comment><USER26> Machine Learning in general. Not just the NN flavour du jour, but the area in the large.

</comment><comment><USER27> 3D (OpenGL, Vulkan, Metal et al), GPGPU and AR. Not so sure about VR though.

</comment><comment><USER28> Formal methods and provably-correct software.

<comment><USER29> I have a soft spot for formal methods, but how do you see this taking off?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> VR and AR

</comment><comment><USER31> Cryptocurrencies

</comment><comment><USER30> AI and ML</comment>


Introducing AdaNet: Fast and Flexible AutoML with Learning Guarantees - <AUTHOR> https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/10/introducing-adanet-fast-and-flexible.html <comment><USER2> Example notebook from the official repo which gives a better example on how AdaNet works: [https://github.com/tensorflow/adanet/blob/master/adanet/exam...](https://github.com/tensorflow/adanet/blob/master/adanet/examples/tutorials/adanet_objective.ipynb)

Despite being "AutoML", there's still a lot of work that needs to be done to optimize the model. (the second example notebook is a bit better in this aspect: [https://github.com/tensorflow/adanet/blob/master/adanet/exam...](https://github.com/tensorflow/adanet/blob/master/adanet/examples/tutorials/customizing_adanet.ipynb))

<comment> scottyak-adanet True, while the AdaNet project doesn't currently include the most advanced architecture search policies/search spaces out of the box, it does provide an abstraction (adanet.subnetwork.Generator) for researchers to implement their neural architecture search algorithms, while exposing a production-friendly TF Estimator interface for users. This makes it easier for developments in algorithms to be integrated into production, and for users who are already plugged into the TF Estimator ecosystem to benefit from these developments sooner.

I would like to point out though, that even though some aspects of AdaNet aren't as advanced as they could be, we have seen good results with AdaNet on a wide variety of tasks. Try it on yours and see!

And of course, we are not going to stop after exposing an interface! We are excited to work in this space ourselves too, and we will continue to update this project as we make progress.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Author here with several of the core team; we can answer some questions here. We also have a post on r/machinelearning for further discussion: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/9spw5g/p_g...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/9spw5g/p_google_ai_opensources_a_tensorflow_framework/)

<comment><USER4> I haven't read it in detail so my apologies if you explain this in the notebooks; can AdaNet handle blocks with variable-length skip connections (like DenseNet), or even come up with AmoebaNet-style models on its own? What is the meta-strategy guiding the hyperparameter/architecture selection process (grid search/Bayesian/etc.)? Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Great question! In the simplest case, AdaNet allows you to ensemble independent subnetworks from a linear model to user-defined DenseNet/AmoebaNet-style networks. But more interesting is sharing information (tensor outputs or which hyperparameters worked best) between iterations so that AdaNet can do neural architecture search for you. Users can define their own adanet.subnetwork.Generator in order to specify how to adapt training across iterations.

Out of the box, the meta-strategy is little more than simple-user defined heuristics (e.g., "if the the deepest candidate subnetwork performed best, try subnetworks that are one layer deeper than that"). However, the AdaNet framework is flexible enough to support smarter strategies as you mentioned, and abstracts away the complexities of distributed training (Estimator), evaluation (TensorBoard), and serving (tf.SavedModel).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool! Will there be a simple Keras support for it? Or just via TF estimators?

<comment><USER3> We started with Estimator because it's the easiest to train and deploy with production infrastructure. Having a Keras model API is a good idea: it would make it easier to try AdaNet. Feel free to file a feature request on the GitHub repo: [https://github.com/tensorflow/adanet](https://github.com/tensorflow/adanet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yikes. There is just so much progress with ML and DL.

Can anyone estimate how much CPU $$ we need to get some results with this ?

I train on about 20M samples (1K data points each).

<comment> scottyak-adanet TL;DR: It depends on the number of subnetworks you search over and the cost of training each subnetwork.

You could define a search space with a single DNN, and give it one single iteration, and this would behave identically to the canned DNNEstimator.

In a slightly more interesting case, suppose your search space consists of (say) 5 DNNs that cost you X each to train over (say) 1 epoch per iteration, and you train them over (say) 10 iterations, that would cost you around X x 5 x 10 = 50X.

Do consider, though, that using AdaNet to explore, train, select, and ensemble these 50 DNNs is probably worth it considering how annoying it would be to do it without AdaNet :) Additionally, since AdaNet is implemented as a TensorFlow Estimator, it is easy to scale up the number of machines to speed up the training, if this is something you want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Can AdaNet work with CNN and RNN layers?

<comment><USER3> We have an example of AdaNet on GitHub that uses several complex CNN layers (conv2d, pooling, linearly-separable layers) as part of the NASNet-A architecture (presented in [https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07012](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07012)): [https://github.com/tensorflow/adanet/blob/master/adanet/exam...](https://github.com/tensorflow/adanet/blob/master/adanet/examples/nasnet.py)

AdaNet supports high level APIs (e.g tf.layers, tf.losses), so it can support RNN cells as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Curious if there are any results for well known benchmarks achieved by this project?

<comment> scottyak-adanet Yes, the blog post mentions that AdaNet, using NASNet-A as subnetworks, achieves 2.30% error rate on the CIFAR-10 benchmark.

<comment><USER8> In what wall time? Compared to similar error rates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ur-whale Article doesn't load for me. Anyone else experiencing the same?</comment>


Idolize Bill Gates, Not Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/11/idolize_bill_gates_not_steve_j.html

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't idolize either of them. Idolatry seems like a bad idea. How about just reading about their lives and seeing what makes sense for you to copy for your life?

As one Zen teacher puts it: "there are no enlightened beings, only enlightened actions". So do the actions and ignore the beings.

<comment><USER3> From a business perspective, Gates offers some interesting lessons - bootstrapping allows a lot of your employees to get rich - even the secretaries; eating your own dogfood can help you produce successful product lines (Project, Office, Visual Studio); you don't have to sell to the the cool kids using Pascal - BASIC is fine; and if you treat consumers like your B2B customers, you will build market share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "As much as I love Apple, Inc, I would happily give up my iPhone to put food on the plates of starving children."

No you wouldn't. If that were true, you would have already done it.

<comment><USER5> hmm, i think what people mean when they say this is:

i would gladly trade the system which produces iphones for one which puts food on the plates of otherwise starving children

there's a mismatch between the narrow "my iphone" and the broad "plates of starving children"

<comment><USER6> Initself's point still stands ... you have the opportunity to do something now, however small it may be, about whatever things are important to you.

Instead, the author seems to be saying, "I want someone else to change their policies that impact the world so I can feel less guilty about the fact that I am doing nothing."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is not fair to Steve Jobs. We don't have a full life to judge him by. If this writer had to judge Bill Gates 10 years ago, he would have fallen short of Gates now.

<comment><USER8> I don't know about that. This year they're both the same age, had both amassed billions, and had become titans of industry. One of them publicly devoted himself to spending his riches on improving humanity; the other continued to enrich himself by developing what are at their core expensive first-world gadgets (though how much he gave to charity is I believe not known).

How much does it take before you have a "full life" that you can be judged by?

<comment><USER7> I think the general consensus is that a full life is more than 56 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wouldn't idolize Bill Gates either -- while his recent activities are more charitable than Jobs, he led Microsoft through some less-than-charitable activities. I worked for Sybase which, initially partnered with Microsoft, but which later Bill Gates had targeted, much like Jobs and the Android.

</comment><comment><USER10> The problem with idolizing Bill Gates was stated most elegantly by PG: "no startup can be the next Microsoft unless some other company is prepared to bend over at just the right moment and be the next IBM[...]Microsoft is a bad data point." There is much to be admired in what Bill Gates has done with his wealth (and little to be admired in Steve Jobs by the same criteria). But if you're looking for an idol in the context if building a tech company, Steve Jobs seems like the way to go.

I guess the important thing, then, is to have different people guide different parts of your life. No one was good at everything; pick and choose their good sides.

<comment><USER11> One of the most important steps in Google's growth was when they cut a deal to be the technology provider for Yahoo's search back when Yahoo dominated the web, so perhaps finding a big company that will bend over at just the right moment isn't as impossible as it seems?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great example of where I wish I had a downvote button. This article is fluff linkbait, but it _is_ also on topic.

<comment><USER7> I agree entirely. This is what the flag link is for.

<comment><USER12> Here's why I've been confused about that I think:

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

> _If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page > and clicking on the "flag" link._

Maybe we could get more flagging if you updated the guidelines or renamed it "junk".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The whole comparison is silly and a false dichotomy. Using Jobsian attention to detail and work ethic to drive your career/business is not mutually exclusive with donating the result to charity.

Arguably, Jobs's lifestyle is probably more suited for philanthropy because of the (relatively) spartan nature of his tastes in fashion, housing and cars.

</comment><comment><USER14> They both contributed to humanity in different ways.

They don't need to be one better than the other.

</comment><comment><USER15> This post will not be well received on HN because the taste leaders here are people who have deeply internalized the Jobs mindset for better or worse

</comment><comment><USER16> Clearly there is a lot to admire in the life and careers of both men. I don't think this is an either-or situation.

</comment><comment><USER17> Gates has done a lot of good out of the company, so yes for that work he is better than Jobs, better than most people (bit hard to judge with billionaires, most of them want to give away 90% of their wealth but it doesn't make them charitable). In terms of business and innovation, when you look at the five-ish years around the starts of the two companies the stories I keep hearing lean a lot towards Jobs/Woz doing a better, more involved and innovative creation.

Unfortunately the line may well be "Don't make money the way these billionaires did, no-one did it nicely. When you have billions, give it away like they all do."</comment>


Ask HN: Are weights trained from a dataset also under the same license terms? - <AUTHOR> This regarding machine learning / deep learning.
A lot of the datasets that are commonly used nowadays are bound by some license or the other. ImageNet for example - http://image-net.org/download-faq
I understand when the use of the actual images is restricted under the terms, but what about weights that we derive out of millions of these images? There is no actual trace of the image within the trained networks, its just a model derived by various iterations over the images. Much like we humans read books and derive knowledge (Most books by themselves are bound by restrictive copyright, but we are free to apply the knowledge we derive from them).
How do companies deal with this? Most companies using deep learning will have to use large datasets and actually creating the data(for example, of millions of images for tens/hundreds of classes) would not be viable.
Also when we do transfer learning on these heavily trained models, we essentially change the network, what about the licenses then? <comment><USER2> IANAL. From your example.

"Researcher shall use the Database only for non-commercial research and educational purposes."

So they saw you coming. Your efforts of whatever kind can't end up in a commercial product by you. Could you put your weights into the public domain? (Meaning others could profit.) Maybe. Might be a court case, but I think they'd lose it.

A later clause allows for-profit companies to do non-profit related research, as I read it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The r/MachineLearning discussion for this(for reference) - [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/7eor11/d_d...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/7eor11/d_do_the_weights_trained_from_a_dataset_also_come/)

</comment><comment><USER3> When you download the weights is it in a github with a LICENCE file or some other agreement? Most likely the reason is yes. If you don't understand I would try to email the person if you can use it.

Companies deal with this probably since they have their own data and probably would either need a custom solution or if it is relatively easy to do they would use a third party. (clarfai).

<comment><USER2> Not downloaded: "weights we derive."

Subtler question, here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I feel this question would apply to downloaded weights as well. Because if the license does apply to the weights, whoever put the weights on the github with whatever license, the original license should prevail. Also, if your process requires that you be safe from license restrictions, we'd anyways have to check the original licenses, right?

<comment><USER2> I agree, as shown elsewhere here, but clarification is still cool. The license is viewable.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The outcry over deaths on Amazon's warehouse floor - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/17/amazon-warehouse-worker-deaths <comment><USER2> You know where there isn't outcry about this? In Seattle at the Amazon corp offices. There are regular company wide email threads (seattle-chatter@ among others) making jokes about the shitty working conditions of warehouse employees. Walking around the hallways and lunch areas you hear people making jokes about how awful it is. Nobody there cares. Change the type of free coffee in the lunch areas though and all hell breaks loose.

Quitting that company was such a relief to myself, and cutting ties with everything Amazon was at least important to me. I cannot morally support a company that treats their employees in such a way.

<comment><USER3> I've been subscribed to that mailing list for about five years and I've never seen anybody making jokes about bad warehouse working conditions. Sometimes it gets brought up to let someone know that overcrowded bathrooms or "bad coffee" aren't so bad in relative terms.

Also, some people care enough to sign their names next to quotes in support of warehouse worker strikes: [https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/quotes- of-...](https://medium.com/@amazonemployeesclimatejustice/quotes-of- solidarity-for-striking-amazon-warehouse-workers-fe6e1c1e3c61)

<comment><USER4> Just to be clear - did you sign your name in support or are you a current Amazon employee defending the company's reputation in light of these deaths?

<comment><USER5> How did you come to this conclusion... this is just flaming

<comment><USER6> Didn't Amazon "encourage" warehouse workers to post tweets praising their working conditions? (Who knows if they actually worked there though). Someone found them and saw that the accounts had a pattern, and the tweets were eerily similar as well.

With that in consideration, one has to ask whether they're also astroturfing HN...

<comment><USER7> I know in the twitter thread that went viral, most of the "Amazon workers" were actually satirical accounts, that kept ramping up the outrage.

The whole situation is shitty to be sure, and encouraging employees to defend you from Twitter mobs is stupid, but holy shit did a lot of people get baited hard during that whole ordeal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The story has a link to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health's 2019 Dirty Dozen list of the most dangerous employers in the United States. Facebook is on that list, which surprised me at first, but then I guess it made sense:

● Facebook contracts with outside companies for low-paid moderators who remove objectionable content from its global social network

● "Every day, every minute… heads being cut off" Moderators review hundreds of posts during a shift – including hate speech, pornography, and images of suicides, murders and beheadings

● A former employee says: "I don't think it's possible to do the job and not come out of it with some acute stress disorder or PTSD."

I know nothing at all about this org:

[http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir...](http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dirty_Dozen.pdf)

<comment><USER9> The Verge had a long read on life of Facebook moderators that is worth a read if you have the time. [https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant- facebo...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook- content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona)

<comment><USER10> I read it a while ago and wish I hadn't. It was quite disturbing. Read at your own risk.

<comment><USER11> I read it too. Made me think how ethical it is to continue using Facebook (and its other major product, Instagram).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> James Bloodworth's book Hired is a good companion piece. It covers what it's like to work in an Amazon warehouse in the UK, among other low paid jobs. I'm not sure if it was the tagline, but I think 'the last thing you'll buy on Amazon' would be a decent slogan for the book.

He has a tendency to get a little purple with his prose, but if you can get past that it's a good precis of low pay jobs.

Here's a link to the Goodreads page. [https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37780792-hired](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37780792-hired)

</comment><comment><USER12> The weird thing to me was not just the delayed response by 20 minutes (reportedly), but that everyone was forced to get back to work. It just illuminates this very impersonal atmosphere bordering on the inhumane.

I'm wondering if this opens up Amazon to more regulatory scrutiny, or even punitive settlements in the future. Something like this seems like actual evidence for very negative patterns of behavior.

This seems like a new kind of "hostile workplace environment" \- one where your workplace will ignore your medical needs if an accident occurs. I just wonder if this is just some older pattern that's repeating itself, it's just not widely known.

</comment><comment><USER10> I had a friend who worked as a software engineer at a big retail company that wasn't Amazon. They had a tour at a distribution center. The place was a death trap. He got a bad concussion by walking into a low ceiling. No hard hats, no warning about it nothing.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've taken Amazon's warehouse guided tours several times The surprise was that there is NO surprise: the entire process is merely the application of current technologies in warehousing and distribution, with humans in the few niches where machines are not quite "there" yet. in the places where humans are involved, there's just enough workspace so that, say, once Amazon develops a proper "binning" robot, the human can be fired and a machine rolled in to replace him/her.

Place was nicely put together though: all the screws and bolts tight, racks and tracks level and properly aligned, sensors everywhere on the production line ready to alert of any problem. So kudos to the guys and gals who put it together and lined it up! Looks like the U.S. Army put it together (well, actually, if the Army did it, it would be use better parts and be more sturdily constructed).

As for what it does, nothing there of interest to high tech.

</comment><comment><USER14> Totally coincidental collection of cases about

> delayed medical attention to a warehouse worker during a cardiac arrest

I'm not trying to say that Amazon warehouses are a good place to work for, but if you want to be taken seriously make an effort to bring meaningful numbers.

How many workers work at Amazon's warehouses ? 6 out of 125,000 [0] seems like a rather low rate

Were there any laws or regulations broken ?

What is expected from a nominal workplace before and when a worker suffers from a heart condition ?

[0] [https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon- warehouse...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516004/amazon-warehouse- fulfillment-centers-productivity-firing-terminations)

<comment><USER15> What is expected from a nominal workplace is that they spot someone collapsing on the floor and give that top priority - I mean the article mentions a 20 minute response time, that's not normal for a busy warehouse. Vs a 2 minute response time for making a mistake.

Also, do you work or are you paid for by Amazon? It's known they pay people to say how great it is to work at Amazon on e.g. twitter - not dystopian at all. I get really paranoid whenever someone jumps to the defense (or in your case sows doubt about an accusation towards) of a major corporation which can afford to both halve workload and double wages of all of their employees without having to worry about their bottom line too much.

<comment><USER16> Considering how many blind spots their warehouses must have, and how rarely many of the isles might be visited, I don't think any special maleficence or irresponsibility is required for some down person to be missed for a while.

Not saying they shouldn't be fixing this problem, just that it seems like a problem even the most perfectly humane company could easily have.

And you might want to check your paranoia. It doesn't make you a reliable source of opinion to flat-out say you don't believe anything made in defense of your predetermined villains.

Amazon barely makes any profit, you may have heard. It's completely wrong to claim they could halve the work and double the wages. Such assertions make you come across as delusional and biased.

<comment><USER17> From the article:

> "How can you not see a 6ft3in man laying on the ground and not help him > within 20 minutes? A couple of days before, he put the wrong product in the > wrong bin and within two minutes management saw it on camera and came down > to talk to him about it," Edward Foister said.

Amazon management was able to identify via a camera that the deceased individual previously put an item into the wrong bin and act within two minutes to speak to him about the mistake. Why can't Amazon management use a security camera to detect the same individual laying on the ground and get to him in two minutes?

Yes, this quote is from that of the deceased individual's brother, but Amazon could easily confirm, or refute this account.

<comment><USER18> It in no way excuses any negligence but the likely reason for that is frequency of events and how attention is structured in designs and processes. There are /far/ more cases of hurried workers misfiling items than having heart attacks. Algorithmic assistance would lack the events to recognize and humans would lack the attention to surveil everything.

They certainly should do better and make appropriate changes to practices but at that scale it would require something systemic by definition whether it is adding a tighter employee welfare patrols or say emergency fall detection gadgets that ask if they are okay and if not responded to within a certain time call for aid or similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Amazon has 250,000 hourly employees in the USA?

Can it really take nearly 0.1% of the US workforce just to deliver online goods? And presumably that's an under-estimate, because it doesn't include most courier work.

I was sort of hoping that every item I order on amazon has only perhaps 30 seconds of human time going into it... Assuming I order 3 items/week, and am typical of US citizens, amazon ought to be able to serve everyone with 130k employees.

<comment><USER20> 30 seconds to grab an item off a shelf in a huge warehouse, wrap it, put put in a box, tape the box shut, print and attach a label, load it on a truck, and complete all the required tracking steps? And we still haven't accounted for managing all these people, cleaning the warehouse, or even stocking the shelves.

Edit: CNN says it takes a minute of human labor as of 2016 ([https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/06/technology/amazon- warehouse...](https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/06/technology/amazon-warehouse- robots/index.html)). And that's shelf to delivery truck, so there is plenty more in that process that it leaves out.

<comment><USER19> I'm guessing most of those steps will be automated, or done in bulk, therefore only taking 1 or 2 seconds of actual human time.

For example, sticking labels on a box could be entirely automated, with the only time use being 30 minutes to replace the printer once every million labels when it wears out.

<comment><USER20> Sure, lots of it is automated. There has to be a fantastic level of automation to achieve that 1 minute per order.

Amazon is one of the most brutally efficient operations in world history. We read every week about workers afraid to take bathroom breaks, and according to the article here workers seem too busy to notice their coworkers dropping dead of heart attacks. The sentiment of us here at our keyboards saying "wow, I can't believe it takes more than 30 seconds to put my order in a box" seems really wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What is strange to me is that after a series of such incidents workers don't go out on protest or something, given this is happening in the US.

<comment><USER22> Amazon actively, proactively, and reactively busts all forms of labor organization, including unions.

Hourly wage workers do not have the time, or runway to protest.

The deaths are only witnessed by a handful of workers, as their zones are spread very far out in these enormous warehouses. Word of mouth flows very slowly as a result.

During their shifts, workers are lonely and interact with more robots than other humans.

<comment><USER23> >During their shifts, workers are lonely and interact with more robots than other humans.

To be fair, some of us prefer it that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Amazon is the Foxconn of America (although Foxconn now has operations in the US too)

</comment><comment><USER25> >> _Amazon said it had responded to Foister's collapse "within minutes"._

Yeah, in just 45784512 minutes. Actually less, but 20 minutes is not minutes when it comes to heart attacks.

</comment><comment><USER26> A few cubes away from me one of our guys put his head down on his arms on his work surface. No one noticed, but he died. The guys holding a meeting in the cube across the aisle from him felt bad about it, but they thought he was taking a nap.

Any large employer will have people die on the job.

<comment><USER27> An occasional random death at work is statistically inevitable. Six deaths in as many months is something else.

A week before Billy Foister died of a heart attack, he went to the onsite clinic complaining of chest pains. They said he was dehydrated and told him to drink some water and go back to work. The article links to the NCOSH Dirty Dozen report, which describes a well-documented history of Amazon mistreating sick and injured employees. [http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir...](http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dirty_Dozen.pdf)

Don't write this off as a series of unfortunate coincidences.

<comment><USER28> > Six deaths in as many months is something else.

It says "Six worker deaths in seven months; 13 deaths since 2013."

It doesn't go into any detail as to whether these workers actually died _on the job_. Six out of ~125,000 warehouse workers in one year would be double the average[1] (over all professions), but 13 out of ~100,000 over six years would be quite low.

> A week before Billy Foister died of a heart attack, he went to the onsite > clinic complaining of chest pains. They said he was dehydrated and told him > to drink some water and go back to work.

That sounds like medical malpractice, should be investigated on its own merits.

> Don't write this off as a series of unfortunate coincidences.

Yes, but also don't declare it a scandal before the facts are on the table.

[1] [https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cfoi.pdf)

<comment><USER27> > _It says "Six worker deaths in seven months; 13 deaths since 2013." It > doesn't go into any detail as to whether these workers actually died on the > job._

One might reasonably assume that an article about workplace deaths isn't counting employees who slipped in the shower at home. But we don't have to assume: the linked Dirty Dozen list published in April 2019 says "Six workers have died at U.S. Amazon facilities or operations since November 2018." Six on-the-job deaths in six months, November to April. Not all of them were in warehouses, but all of them were preventable.

It also mentions (direct quotes):

* a high incidence of suicide attempts

* workers urinating in bottles because they are afraid to take breaks

* workers left without resources or income after on-the-job injuries

* the company treated illness as a "misdemeanor," assigning a point that could have led to dismissal when [an undercover investigator] took a sick day

This is not a few bad apples. This is systematic.

<comment><USER28> > One might reasonably assume that an article about workplace deaths isn't > counting employees who slipped in the shower at home.

I disagree. With these kinds of sources, you can't reasonably assume this.

> But we don't have to assume: the linked Dirty Dozen list published in April > 2019 says "Six workers have died at U.S. Amazon facilities or operations > since November 2018." Six on-the-job deaths in six months, November to > April. Not all of them were in warehouses, but all of them were preventable.

You're right, I should have paid more attention, because those deaths aren't Amazon employees _at all_ and _none_ of them are warehouse workers:

 _\- Andrew Lindsayand Israel Espana Argote, contract workers, died when the wall of an Amazon warehouse collapsed during a severe storm in Baltimore in November 2018._

 _\- Brien James Dauntfell to his death during construction of an Amazon warehouse in Oildale, CA in January 2019. Falls from a height are a well-known –and preventable –hazard in the construction industry, with long-established protocols to reduce risks. CalOSHA is investigating the incident._

 _\- Aviators Ricky Blakely,Conrad Jules Askaand Sean Archuletadied in February when an Air Atlas plane, carrying cargo for Amazon, crashed into Trinity Bay, southeast of Texas. Blakely and Aska worked for Air Atlas and were members of the Airline Professional Association (APA), Teamsters Local 224. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the incident._

None of these incidents hint at negligence on the part of Amazon.

This also explains why over the period of several years, Amazon workplace fatalities were well below average: They counted those properly. Working at Amazon is actually very safe, statistically speaking.

<comment><USER27> > _those deaths aren 't Amazon employees at all_

> _None of these incidents hint at negligence on the part of Amazon._

Whether their paycheck is signed by Amazon directly or through a contracting service is irrelevant. Amazon is responsible for the firms it hires to run its operations, and the rules and standards it requires them to meet. If Amazon contractors are chronically negligent, then Amazon is negligent.

<comment><USER28> > Amazon is responsible for the firms it hires to run its operations, and the > rules and standards it requires them to meet.

I don't disagree that Amazon has _some_ responsibility here, but within reason. No evidence has been presented that Amazon has been neglectful. Accidents happen even in the safest of environments, but you also can't expect Amazon (or any other company) hiring a contractor to supervise them 100% of the time. It can't work that way.

> If Amazon contractors are chronically negligent, then Amazon is negligent.

Again, there is no known indicator that Amazon was being negligent in these cases, otherwise that would've been put forth. Whether or not such indicators will turn up during investigation, Amazon is already on that list. That's plain dishonesty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The incident is among the latest in a series of accidents and fatalities > that have led to Amazon's inclusion on the National Council for Occupational > Safety and Health's 2019 Dirty Dozen list of the most dangerous employers in > the United States.

Completely ridiculous. Look at the list:

[http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dir...](http://nationalcosh.org/sites/default/files/uploads/2019_Dirty_Dozen.pdf)

In five out of these twelve, nobody actually died.

Those may be shitty jobs/companies, but they're not exceptionally dangerous - especially not Amazon.

This is spitting in the face of people who actually have dangerous jobs with exceptional risks:

[https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/08/most- dangerou...](https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/01/08/most-dangerous- jobs-us-where-fatal-injuries-happen-most-often/38832907/)</comment>


Karojisatsu – Leaving the DevOps Community - <AUTHOR> http://itrevolution.com/karojisatsu/ <comment><USER2> I guess that's one danger of work and hobby being the same thing: when you get tired or run into problems, you may have nothing to turn to.

<comment><USER3> that might be a pretty accurate assessment of Carlo -- from reading his tweets, it sounds like he was juggling multiple realities -- I knew him actually -- I really wish he waiting long enough for someone to talk him out of it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm just now putting two and two together, but I now realize that I saw Carlos talk about his haproxyctl project at the Pasadena meetup last month. He projected enthusiasm and earnestness in a way that had me grinning from ear to ear. This is a major bummer.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's the price of the lean organization. Some must die for the bottom line.

<comment><USER6> Not sure why you're being downvoted....this is a direct result of profit first, 10x bullshit.

<comment><USER7> Probably because he is 1) singling out the lean movement for no apparent reason 2) being hyperbolic (except for the odd psychopath, I'm fairly sure the vast majority of business owners do not believe "some must die for the bottom line").

<comment><USER8> A 'lean' organisation is more likely to rely on a small number of individuals, or one person, to manage a large deployment. The devops approach gives a single good engineer a large amount of leverage in terms of deployment, but that will then bring a commensurate increase in pressure on that individual. I think it's a fair criticism of lean principles that it increases the pressure on individuals.

I agree most business owners wouldn't believe anything close to "some must die" \- however, I do believe that inaction is almost as bad, and I do think mental health / wellness doesn't get anything like enough thought or attention. The harder you work your staff, and the more pressure you heap on them, the more you have to focus on them as individuals and support them better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > In our industry a lot of young IT professionals use the term "burnout" as a > badge of honor.

That's me, but I feel the burnout at the same time. On one hand it is me who is addicted to working, and on the other hand I just can't start thinking that doing more would allow me to work on something more interesting, like a mad scientist trying to solve some mystery. But half of what I do are break-fixes, and can't even start working on real devops, gaming changing practice. The culture - devops, building practice is part of my job, but often I don't see me doing that...my responsibility exceeds my title, my role right now, which is great for career growth. I don't know man...

I'm 23.

<comment><USER10> As someone almost ten years older that has been basically in the same position, I think you have to challenge yourself sufficiently to grow if your job itself won't challenge you appropriately. If your organization is too uncaring to change, life is too short to deal with bad jobs. But it is always worth working towards skills that will get you a better job. That is, do the minimum to say employed but put the real focus into getting to a saner, smarter company. I say appropriate because to me the whole point of modern devops is about having the entire organization work smarter, not harder, and together on the right things to be able to stay sane.

Where I am, I know that the wider organization is completely not capable of actually fixing itself (when your network team is still manually running ping and tcproute instead of having monitoring galore from every link to another either with vendor tools or something crude like Nagios, you're too far behind to ever catch up). So, even if my corner of the devops world is completely flawless, I will be basically handing off tickets to another team 100% of the time while my applications that depend upon them suffer the consequences.

According to my boss I already am changing how others do things by showing the power of solid, modern tooling and instrumentation but it's awful hard to tell that any of it makes a difference when you're doing 20-hour days 3 days in a row all for issues you only diagnosed, none that you are directly responsible for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In Australia they have free phone numbers for people to call who are in distress for whatever reason. Don't they have that in the US?

<comment><USER12> Yes the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 800-273-8255.

Stories and situations like this is one of the reasons I accepted a board position at [http://www.headquarterscounselingcenter.org/](http://www.headquarterscounselingcenter.org/). It's very preventable with the right treatment at the right time.

<comment><USER13> Not only that, if you search Google for how to commit suicide, Google returns as special large-format card with that info:

[https://i.imgur.com/4FEn35Y.png](https://i.imgur.com/4FEn35Y.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I just read _The Phoenix Project_ , the book mentioned at the end of the article. It's an entertaining look at what DevOps is supposed to be like, based on things happening at various real enterprises.

The main character takes over an IT organization that's way behind on deadlines and experiencing one major disaster after another. He gradually transforms it with better practices, until everybody's living a stress-free, balanced life, _and_ they're delivering much better results to the business.

These two things don't need to be in conflict.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. I've been a big fan of John Willis for awhile and the challenge that he, Gene Kim, and others have taken on to fix enterprise IT culture should be commended. They hit the nail on the head when they state that DevOps isn't about Puppet and Chef or the latest hotness on Github, but that the key to it is culture. The tools can help automate some processes, but without fixing the underlying culture it's missing the point.

The Phoenix Project should be required reading for all IT professionals, especially senior leadership. If you've worked in IT for any amount of time you'd quickly recognize all the characters and wondered who from your organization told all your dirty laundry to Gene.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Which part of it says leaving the DevOps Community?

This is more like leaving the world?

</comment><comment><USER17> Its irritating that as soon as I start scrolling, a little popup appears asking me to subscribe to the site. The popup is out of view on mobile devices, leading to an experience where this page just turns dark gray after I try and scroll.</comment>


How to plan for traffic surge? - surya-j

How do you plan for your website to handle traffic increase from an upcoming marketing campaign? What makes Walmart, Amazon so vulnerable (http://bit.ly/1RRFAqn)? <comment><AUTHOR> A small to medium business website is never likely to get as much traffic as Amazon gets on holidays. If you are going for serious marketing campaign then you have to keep in mind following things.

1\. Total volume of traffic

2\. Maximum simultaneous connections

3\. Average page size of landing pages

If your average page size is 1mb and you are likely to get 20,000 pageviews a month then you need atleast 25GBs of monthly bandwidth to handle the traffic.

The second factor is simultaneous requests. If your campaign condensed to a specific time of day..or by any other reason, you get 1000+ people coming at a same time then a shared hosting will fail. Alternatively, you can distribute traffic to entire 24 hours to reduce simultaneous server requests.

To handle huge traffic, you will have to follow these steps.

1\. Bring page size to minimum.

2\. Estimate maximum number of page views and simultaneous visitors

3\. Contact your web host to check for their limitations and choose a suitable package.

4\. Distribute your content to various servers. Place static content on a CDN.

This is just to give you some food for thought. Research on these lines to get your site ready.

Hope it helps.</comment>


CBP and ICE DNA Collection [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy-pia-dhs080-detaineedna-january2020.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> _Effective January 6, 2020, CBP will begin collecting DNA from any person in CBP custody who is subject to fingerprinting. This will include aliens as well as United States citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents (U.S. Persons)._</comment>


Dimensions.Guide – Dimensional Reference Database - bryan-maddock https://www.dimensions.guide/ <comment> bryan-maddock Very excited to finally share the results of many months of labor with you all! Dimensions.Guide started this summer as a passion-project that will continuing growing to be an essential online resource for spatial information.

Background: As a licensed architect, professor, and founder of my own architecture practice, I have experienced first hand the lack of easily accessible and trustworthy dimensional data on the internet. To fill this gap in public knowledge, I have been building Dimensions.Guide in an effort to support architects, interior designers, artists, graphic designers, illustrators, game designers, UX designers, and anyone generally curious about the world.

CAD blocks in 2019?: Yes, everything on Dimensions.Guide is downloadable in designer-friendly .dwg, .svg, and .jpg formats, BUT we are also focusing on SEO to better populate search engines with quick answers to any dimensional questions you might have. Unlike other shady CAD downloads that exist on the internet, all of our drawings include both imperial and metric scales and are researched and drawn in-house for quality control.

You haven't drawn THIS yet: We have a long way to go before the database is truly comprehensive, but for now, please send us any requests of the things that you would love for us to incorporate using our Request forms. Needless to say, this is a long-term effort that will evolve over many years.

Looking forward to your comments! Thanks for the support!</comment>


NASA must immediately cease contact with Russia - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/04/nasa-must-immediately-cease-all-contact-with-russia/

<comment><USER2> The USA should immediately cease contact with the rest of the world. The rest of the world will thank the USA for it. DUH.</comment>


Cyberattack Captures Data on U.S. Weapons in Four-Month - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/cyberattack-captures-data-on-u-s-weapons-in-four-month-assault-1507806261 <comment><USER2> Brb, need to go change my admin password... Where do they get these guys?</comment>


Australia to use drivers license photos to create facial recognition database - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/05/asia/australia-facial-recognition-turnbull/index.html?utm_source=homepage-australia <comment><USER2> Headline is misleading. This already exists and has for a long time, essentially they seem to be seeking a realtime database, currently there is delays and inter-agency issues on weeklong scales.

Though the government hasn't been clear on usage and whether it will extend to public cctv much like seems to be happening in the UK.

Anecdotally, have an old passport with a cleanshaven photo and a recent drivers license with a beard. Australia has an automatic customs system based on biometrics, been through dozens of times and the epassport system will only work if i have a beard as exists on my most recent license photo.[0]

Despite being routinely swabbed for explosives because of beardedness (about 30 seconds extra) have now learnt to travel with a beard in order to save the 15 mins extra from being diverted into a customs queue. It's well worth it.

[0] [https://youtu.be/2SAnexoNUAM](https://youtu.be/2SAnexoNUAM)

</comment><comment><USER3> Any computer vision people that can speak to the accuracy of using a single photo for facial recognition?</comment>


Tell HN: The down arrow is for downmodding, not downvoting. - <AUTHOR>

If users are going to use the downmod button on comments as a disagree button then all accounts should have the ability to "disagree". Otherwise, please don't allow users to abuse the privilege.
I recently made 2 comments, which i thought were constructive, only to have them both downmodded because another user with more karma didn't agree with them.
Thanks <comment><USER2> Obviously, some people here thought your comments were not constructive/interesting/etc and downvoted them. They have every right to do so. Whether you agree with their judgment or not is not the point of the system.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I know I'm ready to be a full time developer? - <AUTHOR> I graduated in CS in 2008 but all my jobs have been Sales Engineer roles so far, one of which was a long-term role at a top 5 global travel site.
I code every day on my own side projects as well as building multiple internal tools that have been used by numerous staff, and external clients.
I've comfortable in Python, PHP, MySQL, HTML/CSS and JS but how do I know I'm ready to take the step up to be a full-time dev?
My main side project is an algorithmically (Collab Filtering) powered music recommendation site running off an API I wrote and integrated with several 3rd party APIs including Spotify, Twitter, Last.fm, Pinterest and Facebook. The site gets ~20,000 uniques per month and is profitable.
(using a throwaway) <comment><USER2> Do you need to have someone tell you you're ready? You're ready.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do your own thing - you seem to have the right mix of skills: dev + some sales exp. Don't bother with an actual dev job.

</comment><comment><USER4> You've got a profitable site that you developed, so you're already a developer. Yes, you can do this, and the money coming into your bank account is solid evidence of that.</comment>


The Hardest Adjustment To Self Employment - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/08/25/the-hardest-adjustment-to-self-employment/

<comment><USER3> The hardest thing for me about working at home is convincing everybody around me (and myself) that I'm "at the office" during the day and am therefore unavailable to do things you'd normally do if you were sitting around the house all day.

So, no, I can't take the car down to the DMV to get the emissions tested at 11. I can't run a bunch of little errands because it's not my day off. I need all 8 of these hours in an unbroken stretch, and if I do it right I won't even find time to stop for lunch. It's tough to communicate that to your partner, especially when she comes home at six to find you in your bathrobe playing Fantastic Contraption (, relaxing after a long productive day, but it probably doesn't look like it.)

Like most things, a lot of it comes down to self-discipline. I tend to start the day at 8am with a cup of coffee and a walk up the stairs to the office. As the author says, there's nothing wrong with a little bit of schedule, so long as you remember to take advantage of the upside of running your own business. If the sun is shining at noon, chances are you'll find me out in the hills with a pair of rock boots and a bouldering mat.

<comment><USER4> I can do all of those things during the day, because I am self-employed. I do what I want, when I want, because I'm self-employed. I go hiking mid-week, run errands when no one else is, etc.

That's like the whole point!

<comment><USER5> > run errands when no one else is

That one can be a fantastic time saver. I like to go food shopping at about 2 in the afternoon - the stores are virtually empty, so it's very quick - <USER2> much better than going on a saturday afternoon with a zillion other people.

<comment><USER6> It's also really funny to get weird looks from the few octogenarians and young mums in the supermarket at that time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _"That's the the thing about schedules: once you have one everyone else needs to, too, preferably as close to yours as possible."_

Quick schedule hack: run your schedule a half hour earlier than everyone else's. Show up for lunch at 11:30 instead of 12. Get to the restaurant at 5:30 instead of 6. View an earlier movie. Get to work a little early.

You'll always get preferred seating, preferred parking, and you'll never wait for a meal again :). You may beat traffic in some locales, but I've yet to benefit just from a 30 minute shift.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like a good hack (as long as you like to wake up early)

A bit off-topic, but... you dine at 5:30 or 6 p.m.? Over here (Uruguay) the earliest people dine is 7:30 p.m., and sometime between 8 and 10 p.m. is the usual.

You probably won't find many restaurants open for dinner at that time!

I've seen that in other countries, Austria for example, people have dinner much earlier, but it also gets dark earlier in winter. Sounds healthier as well. Do you keep coding after dinner?

<comment><USER7> It's hard to pinpoint an average eating time for Americans, but restaurants start to get crowded around 6:00. If I'm not eating out, my dinner is typically much later, since I run after work and before dinner.

 _"Do you keep coding after dinner?"_

Yes; I work on personal projects at night. But I take a long dinner break for cooking, cleanup, watching some TV with my girlfriend, and any other needed relaxation. I usually "work" for another 2 hours in the PM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Speaking of "leveling up" (and EpicWin, from what I can see, is clearly mankind's greatest invention):

The new AppointmentReminder site is extremely solid.

Can I invest?

 _By the way:_ Get the office.

I'm working from home this week too, because it's the first week of middle school for the boy and so the first time he takes the bus.

Since the beginning of the year, on a typical week, I actually full-time on product for Matasano, which _always_ feels less productive than being billable --- nothing is more "productive-feeling" than being billable. But this week is different. I'm doing a web pentest for a friend's company, because, well, I like the company. So I'm actually unusually productive this week.

But because I'm home, it does not feel that way at all. I feel totally unproductive and lost, despite clear daily evidence to the contrary. It's because I'm not going to the office to boot up my work day.

</comment><comment><USER10> At 2 in the afternoon yesterday, I hopped in my car and drove 2 hours to the beach. I sat in the sun and gazed out at the ocean while the kids played in the sand. We took a long walk along the beach, did a little window shopping in the local town, then went out to dinner. We watched the sun set behind the perma-cloud spanning the horizon, then drove back home.

The worst thing about being self-employed is that I don't do that sort of thing more often. I feel much more pressure to constantly work - even if I'm not being productive. I used to think the hardest thing would be self- motivation, but really I've found the hardest thing is forcing yourself to stop working and take a needed break. _(Oh, that and taxes. I hate doing taxes)_

</comment><comment><USER11> _Like most people, I have lived an entire lifetime conforming to schedules. They exist like the Greek gods: you didn't ask for them but they are there, there is no negotiating with them, and prolonged association means you are likely to get your dignity violated by a bovine._

Once again Patrick nails it, with his usual flair.

<comment><USER12> I think he may have had one too many cokes from the refreshment cart on that trip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have stopped taking the issue of 'working from home' so seriously. In fact, I find it liberating to have an infinitely flexible schedule. In fact, not having to commute and not having a strict schedule was one of the primary motivations of doing a startup. As long as you are making more sales than what you were originally earning and the sales keep growing, why bother about fixed schedules? I'd love to see some hard research on productivity effects of fixed v/s flexible schedules.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. Closing this issue with "Works for me."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yeah, it's great setting your own schedule, but it can be brutal too. No one yells at you if you're screwing off, you've got to be your own taskmaster and slavedriver, which isn't always a healthy relationship with yourself.

Me, in order to stay productive, I needed to start tracking my time and having daily objectives in order to get anything done. I wrote up something about this if anyone is interested - "The Evolution of My Time/Habit/Life Tracking" - <http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=127>

</comment><comment><USER16> "But you set your own hours" is one of my least favorite things to hear. That doesn't mean there's less work to do.

<comment><USER17> It isn't supposed to. It's merely more flexibility. I agree that more flexible hours and the ability to get things done with fewer of them would be a fine thing, but complaining that you only get one is like griping that "Here's a new car" doesn't mean "Here's a new car _and_ a private jet."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Since giving up my previous work as a small business manager/co-owner, I've struggled greatly with this. I go through periods of great productivity, but especially while traveling, it's easy to do nothing for days.

I hate schedules, but the structure is valuable.

</comment><comment><USER19> The greatest thing about being self employed is that it gives you lots of freedom. That's also the worst thing about being self employed.

My personal enemy #1 is distractions. I used to be much better at that but the last half year has been pretty horrible.

</comment><comment><USER20> So, what is your immigration status? I'm pretty sure I couldn't stay in the US, pursuing the kind of business you have, without obtaining a green card by some other means first.

<comment><USER21> Engineering status of residence at present, gained with support of old day job. Japan is fairly understanding about renewals for this: still engineer, pays taxes, demonstrable means of support = auto renewal on application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I made the switch after ~10 years of unbroken employment. The biggest feeling I had is explained in <http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html>

There's absolutely no way I could do this without getting an office though. Well, an office isn't essential, but somewhere other than my home office is. There's just no way I can get myself into the right mindset to work at home on a consistent basis.

<comment><USER23> At least some of the week I find needs to be spent working from somewhere other than a home office, or bedroom in my case at the moment. I find to if you can go somewhere where people are working hard around you it is a motivator to stay on track.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review My App - heyhub.com  - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, wanted to get your feedback on my now working and out in the wild prototype. I think I'm at a good place with all the foundational pieces created.
Trying the bring the "dating website" experience to a local service provider directory. (it shows more once you're logged in). Simple, easy-to-use and personable.Currently its limited to just dogwalkers/pet services but eventually I would like to broaden the scope and support tutors, babysitters, photographers, artists, (see craiglist's services section). I'm also trying to create a deeper integration with facebook. Alot of these business work around a word-of-mouth network and I figure facebook is can be a natural extension of that.  I think I'd be more inclined to use a dogwalker that I know my friends use.
On the business side, got a lot of ideas around a business model, the most obvious one to me seems like a paid subscription or lead generation. Still crunching spreadsheets on that one. Would like to get some real users and see what works first.
Also trying to come up with a sustainable traffic acquisition strategy. Link building? Any one have any ideas?It's challenging running a one man show doing design, code marketing, business analysis, marketing etc etc. Definitely a steep learning curve there which is probably why a lot of people recommend against it. Gonna soldier on for now.
So any tips on how I can do more with less? Any and all constructive criticism are welcome!
Thanks! pk <comment><USER5> Nice looking site. My only thoughts are on the name. For something as specific as pet services, I think HeyHub is a very general name and I probably wouldn't remember it as a pet service website. Just my 2 cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> true, I'd like it to be more than just a pet service website. Just using pet service as a start.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://heyhub.com>

Clickable link

</comment><comment><USER6> autoscroll - <USER4>

aggregates things from reasonable sources - <USER4>

simple understandable UI - <USER4>

navigation under an infinite scroll field - hates this. I have to load your whole dataset to see what is up with your site.

site about dogwalkers? I don't care even a little. I'd expand out in topics as your #1 priority.

Overall, nice prototype. Got some performance tests on the server to benchmark where it's at?

EDIT... how do I make a single newline in this text editor ? lol /n

 fail me...

<comment><AUTHOR> "navigation under an infinite scroll field - hates this." You're right I will need to address that.

"I have to load your whole dataset to see what is up with your site." What do you mean by that can you clarify?

<comment><USER6> well every time I scrolled, the footer went down so until I got it all loaded I could see like signup/login for a few seconds, then the autoscroll pushes it down... so once all the posts were loaded, I could click your blog links etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like the interface and design. Once it populates more, I'm sure it will be more fulfilling.</comment>


Fully Automated Advertising Software Just For Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://tweettornado.com/ <comment><USER2> How to destroy a concept in a few clicks... Besides the main idea, even, i can't even see who this software is addressed to. I mean, looking at the eye- melting advertisement of the first page, I feel like i'm watching some of these blinking advertisement which are only pushing to close the page. So who would have an interest in that ? Some serious firm ? It looks more dedicated to the casual/unprofessionnal user

<comment><USER3> It's for spammers. Plain and simple. Look at the feature list. "Unlimited accounts, unlimited followers" unlimited frustration for real human users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This seems to be a 'Benjamin Heckendorf' production, the same guy that sells 'how to succeed on craigslist' shit.

If he's going to do a 'domain by proxy' to avoid a C&D or worse by the twitter folks then I think that he'd better change his nameserver policy :)

</comment><comment><USER3> The last thing I want to see in my Twitter stream is automated spam. I'm pretty violently opposed to products like this.</comment>


Experiment: Can we write a collaborative Javascript presentation? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vjeux/jsCollaborativePresentation

<comment><USER2> I can't contribute open source code now for.. some reason. But, here's one of the more impressive JS demos I've seen: <http://www.ro.me/tech/>.

<comment><USER2> Also, here's a JavaScript game done in WebGL: <http://www.playtankworld.com/>

There're a lot of ways to appreciate a programming language, just like there're lots of ways to appreciate different forms of art. JavaScript is a messy yet versatile language these days. It's not as fast as C, but you can do a lot of things with comparatively very little code in a very accessible way.

<comment><USER3> "Tankworld is programmed in Javascript and does not need any plugin to run, a modern browser is sufficient (preferably Chrome). The game uses a custom 3D engine which only uses the basic canvan rendering functions. The engine does not use WebGL because most people don't have enabled it yet."

So no, it's not WebGL. :)

<comment><USER2> It is.. the author hasn't updated the description, but I've talked to him personally. It was one of the competition entries for Mozilla's Game On, and at that point it wasn't written in WebGL. But the author has updated the code later to use WebGL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ok ... Looks like my marketing approached failed! I'm going to write the slides myself and seek for correction instead of a full community write :)</comment>


Our Experiences Switching to Python - <AUTHOR> http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/archives/2834.html <comment><USER2> > List comprehensions, for example, are really cool and natural, but they make > a surprising number of problems too easy and allow students to avoid writing > loops. We show them toward the end of our intro course but don't require the > students to use them.

Kinda funny to hear that phrased like a bug instead of a feature.</comment>