Ask YC: MacBook Black vs. MacBook Air - <AUTHOR>

I have been wasting way too much time trying to decide whether I should get the Slick MacBook Air vs. a MacBook black.
I'm going to Europe in a few days and I need a portable laptop to code on the road.
I love how light (3 pounds), compact, slick and beautiful the Air is but I'm concerned about it's limitations: only 2 GB of RAM, slower processor, only one USB port, not DVD/CD-ROM, not Ethernet port.
On the other hand I could get a not so pretty, not so light (5 pounds), not so slick but more complete and powerful MacBook black. It comes with  a faster processor, RAM can eventually be upgraded to 4GB, it has more USB ports, DVD/CD-ROM, battery life is supposed to be better.
What do you recommend I get? <comment><USER2> looks like you've made up your heart and now you're trying to make up your mind and/or wallet.

It may seem silly, but for me the main reason to choose a computer is what I call "the regret factor" (i.e: how much you'll miss the one you didn't choose)

No amount of processing power or future expandability can compensate just a single "I wish I had bought the other computer"

Just my .02

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a pretty good point. I have been in love with the air since the day it was announced. I just want to make sure I won't eventually regret not having a little more flexibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I am sorely tempted to tell you to wait just because WWDC is around the corner. Not much chance that the MacBooks will be updated, but you never know..but given your timeframes it seems you don't have a choice.

My two cents: black MacBook and get extra ram and battery for the same price as an air. The air is a nice machine, but if it's going to be your only computer on the trip, you might want to reconsider (taking into account your budget, length of travel, et cetera).

On a sidenote, I've been sorely tempted to buy an air but I've been sidetracked by the vastly cheaper ultraportables (like the eee and hp mininote 2133) that fit in my purse. Something to go between my blackbook and my iPhone. The air doesn't quite fit that niche well and I would be pretty mad if someone stole it or I lost it, while losing an eee wouldn't be as tear- inducing. They don't run (unhacked) OS X, so I can't do some development work (iphone iphone iphone ;) ), but I could do other things on there...and they all do email and web and what have you.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you intend to do heavy lifting in OSX and VMWare/Windows concurrently you either need "patience" or 4GB of RAM. If you only need one OS at a time 2GB should work. This advice is specific to my type of software work. Depending on your specifics the RAM issue may be the decision point or it may not be.

BTW, the RAM upgrade to 4GB right now is ~ $100 (see crucial.com).

</comment><comment><USER5> The MacBook Air is slow. Go for Black.

<comment><USER6> so slow you'll notice? :/ depends if you do lots of CPU heavy tasks.

<comment><USER5> From what I have heard from new Air owners, it's the CPU and the disk drive. It's pokey all around. Compactness is its primary and only virtue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> MacBook Air, no question. It's fast enough.

I came to this conclusion unexpectedly, having lived with a couple of generations of MBP 17", and, tiring of slow laptop drives, got a latest- generation 24" iMac a few weeks ago. (Which is a great balance of disk/CPU speed, size and cost vs the high-end Mac Pros. I had a 30" cinema display on the MBP and found it too large, oddly enough, while the 24" size seems just exactly right, especially when paired with another 23" cinema display for serious real estate.)

Then, having passed on my latest 17" to my daughter for some serious InDesign production work (2000+-page concordance), I realized I'd need a portable machine, so got the Air as an after-thought, assuming I'd only use it on the road.

Without my realizing it, I had shifted most of my daily work to the Air (email, web browsing, Campfire, iChat, NetNewsWire, Terminal (emacs), etc.), leaving the iMac for only actual development work. (Mostly iPhone development these days.)

The Air seems just as snappy as my recent-generation MBPs, and it's a dream to pick up and carry around--more like a paper notebook than a computer. The screen is about the best you'll ever find (LED backlighting), and the CPU core shutdown problem seems to be defeated fairly easily by simply selecting Optimization: Normal in the Energy Saver system preference panel. (I don't think this particular fix is well-known. It certainly solved the YouTube- video-causes-one-core-thermal-shutdown problem for me.)

So go with your heart and you won't be sorry. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER8> I have a white MacBook that's about a year old, and it's already taken quite a beating. I've been in school, and admittedly I have been pretty rough on it. But there are scratches in the white lacquer, and more disturbingly, there are some cracks in the case, near the trackpad.

Since the black MacBook doesn't have the same glossy finish, you won't have the same type of exterior scratches. But I doubt build quality is actually much different between the two. I'd be wary of buying another MacBook.

The MacBook Air is only about $300 more, but all reports indicate that the build quality is phenomenal. (Same with the MacBook Pro.) If you're going to be using the laptop on the road, and you want to keep it a few years, then I'd spend the extra money for the Air.

Plus, you're clearly more excited about the MacBook Air... so go for it! :)

<comment><USER9> I'd try taking your MacBook to an Apple Store. The cracks are a known problem, and they may take care of you even if you're out of warranty (or maybe not).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think you have to be realistic about HOW LONG you will be carrying a laptop on your shoulder before you take a break. 10 minutes? Half an hour? 3 hours? Realistically? A 'standard' notebook is no problem to carry in a shoulder strap bag for up to an hour at a time I'd say. Any more (like my recent siteseeing trip around London and you'll wish you had an Air. I certainly did! Most people go for only a relatively short distance before sitting.

</comment><comment><USER11> MacBook Air is a truly excellent computer. It's powerful enough for all but the most intense compiling. I don't know anyone who has one and doesn't love it.

<comment><USER12> Sam, do you have an email address to send you something about add-on to Loopt service? Or send to my email on profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Dunno if the latest versions of the black MacBook still have this problem, but I had one of the first (Core Duo), and that thing picked up grease like nobody's business.

If they still have that problem (which I think they do), you're better off going with a white MacBook. But personally, if you're not going the Air route, I'd opt for a 15" MacBook Pro: it's only 0.4 lbs heavier, with more screen real estate.

<comment><USER3> I just recently got the top case of my blackbook engraved and nobody pays attention to the grease marks anymore. ;) (Arguably the engraving may or may not detract from the overall beauty of the laptop, but that's a personal preference to me)

In fact, the only time anyone does pay attention to them are in my flickr photos of the engraving, because I didn't bother wiping off the laptop before taking pics. Oh well.

<comment><USER14> I give Apple a lot of credit for making a product where it is really worth paying extra money for a different color. Has anyone else ever done that? I would get a Black Macbook if I was getting a Macbook.

<comment><USER3> I was so sick and tired of being able to choose between only silver (the pro laptops) and white (the iBooks) that I vowed my next Apple laptop would be a color I want (black) no matter what. Apple thankfully came out with a black MacBook when I was finally getting sick of my iBook after having sold my PowerBook G4 (it was 17" and too big). I hounded the salespeople at the local Apple store until they had one in stock.

It ended up being cheaper than a "professional" paint job (which usually doesn't include the keys) and cleaner than a paint job done by yours truly. The whole laptop is black, including the colored parts of the ports that you can see and the keyboard. I know it doesn't cost them that much to manufacture a black version, but I thought it was well worth it.

I don't think many others have been able to pull off charging for a color option, but it's not exactly unheard of (think cars and metallic paint).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I faced the same choice last month and went for the Macbook black. Mainly because of the better specs for a lower price.

<comment><AUTHOR> Has it been picking up grease like walterk mentioned?

If I go for the black I'm pretty sure I will be getting the same model you got.

<comment><USER15> walterk does have a point... but it's pretty ok... i bought a "crumpler" keyboard protector with it, which can also be used to wipe the screen and "grease" of the surface

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I recently bought a MacBook and I'm very disappointed with the screen as it's vertical viewing angle is very narrow. Looking at the screen other than at exactly the right angle results in the screen appearing very washed out.

Compare it against the MacBook Air and your descision will be made easier.

<comment><USER17> I think the MB Air is a beautiful design, but have the same complaints/ deal killers as everybody else: not enough ports, non-swappable battery, CPU throttled down by heat (a biggie for me).

[http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/05/11/putting-an-end-to- macboo...](http://paulstamatiou.com/2008/05/11/putting-an-end-to-macbook-air- core-shutdown) <http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/macbookair/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd be reluctant to be an Air just yet as it's still so new.

If you ever use ethernet, remember, there's no port. It may be compact and light but as you mention, it doesn't have as good a spec and costs more. You're paying for style and size, and unless you travel _a lot_ , is it worth it?

<comment><USER6> weight, build quality, multi touch, backlit kb. build quality on air is even better than mb which is no mean feat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> My rule of thumb when purchasing a computer: think about what will be most (relatively) useful 18 months from now. I always consider purchasing a new computer every 24-30 months. The 6-12 months is my "coping" period between the old computer and new computer depending upon my needs.

</comment><comment><USER20> A friend of mine bought a MacBook Air. It is nice if you don't have to high expectations performancewise. Another problem is, that the Air gets very warm. All the other limitations you can work around.

I would get the MacBook Black because it is more bang for the buck.

</comment><comment><USER21> I took a macbook black around Eastern Europe last year, and it was invaluable, however - it was quite a weight to lug around.

I assume the Air is a lot lighter?

If it saved me a kilo I'd seriously consider it. Battery life is important too.

</comment><comment><USER22> Being unsure of the specs I bought an Air at a local big box store so I could bring it back later if I was unhappy. I did. -no power-

</comment><comment><USER23> I have a MacBook black, and I'd go with the MacBook Pro - the more screen the better.

<comment><USER3> I have a black MacBook and unless my laptop-lugging habits change, I can't go with the Pro. I used to have a 17" aluminum PowerBook G4 and that thing dented like crazy. I see the MBPs still dent fairly easily. My MacBook Amateur tends to be a lot more cosmetic damage-resistant. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'd go with a Macbook black.

</comment><comment><USER25> black</comment>


Instagram Deleted Woman's Account After She Posted A Harmless Photo - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/instagram-deletes-accounts-over-controversial-photos-2014-7

<comment><USER2> _If she had it to do all over again, she says, she might choose a different social media platform altogether. "But this is where everyone I like is," Newman adds, "so I'll stay."_

There's still no decentralized social media platform out there? It would be great to post and share but not have my info in someone else's editorial grasp. I think Diaspora was working on this, but I'm not sure how far they got.</comment>


Show HN: Front, Collaborative Email for Sales, Customer Support, Hiring and more - <AUTHOR> http://frontapp.com <comment><USER2> Front looks good, but unfortunately it makes the same mistake as some other apps (Flowdock and SupportFu come to mind): It invents a new email app and requires that your team members live in this app.

For example, if a customer emails email@example.com, you get an email notification about the new conversation, but you can't keep the conversation going solely through your email client. You have to use Front.

This is a dealbreaker, I think. The normal day-to-day interactions — ie., responding to mail — that Front handles can, and should, easily be done with an email client; there is nothing different about Front does that an email client doesn't do today. People can still use the app, but they shouldn't be forced to switch.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome, looking at how we could use it at sendwithus to replace/augment our current support systems.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks nice! In the same space, there's also Respondly: [https://respond.ly/](https://respond.ly/)

I've found it hard to pull myself away from Gmail and use these apps though, old habits are hard to change…

<comment><USER5> There's helpscout that let you reply directly from gmail but still use their team inbox. However I find it very pricey.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hello,

This seems like a nice program that we definitely may need in our current company (we do internet-based loans and use a support@ email which is shared between several people.

Unfortunately, it is not clear what features your service can provide; what problems it can solve. I opened an account and played a bit with it but just couldn't find something that I could show my colleagues to tell them "look, we _need_ to use this service"

I would recommend showing one of those 2 minute video marketing overviews of what we can achieve with your service. If you put that in the homepage, it will be easier for people like me to sell this to other colleagues.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anybody have an overview about nice CRM systems for startups and small companies? I keep feeling overwhelmed whenever I look at this stuff, and whenever I don't, it takes me five minutes to find essential features lacking.

<comment><USER8> We're a small business and we use CapsuleCRM. It took me a long time to find a simple CRM that did what we needed. Just Google around, there are others that are made for small businesses.

<comment><USER9> We used capsule, but switched to Streak. We found since we live in Gmail, and it lives in Gmail, it's a really really good fit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Landing page wise, a sign up link at the bottom as well as the top would make a lot of sense. Otherwise there's no call to action when you've read all the pitch.

<comment><USER11> Also, I'm willing to bet that almost any call-to-action text other than "sign up" is going to get more clicks. "Sign up" is generic, doesn't say anything about the benefits of signing up, and simply isn't compelling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Google Wave?

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKCK16Junz4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKCK16Junz4) (their video minus that last 10sec)</comment></comment>


Apple infringed UWisconsin power-saving patent; damages up to $862M - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/14/apple-wisconsin-patent-idUSL1N12D2FV20151014 <comment><AUTHOR> ($862M is a maximum to be decided in the next phase of the jury trial; in the final phase the damages will be tripled if the infringement is judged willful). Case is Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation v. Apple Inc; Apple claimed the patent was invalid but the jury disagreed. WARF claims they approached Apple to negotiate a license and were "ignored".

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.google.com/patents/US5781752](https://www.google.com/patents/US5781752)</comment></comment>


Coca-Cola pays nutritionists to suggest cola as healthy snack - <AUTHOR> http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/296404461.html <comment><USER2> There's a curious distinction in the uproar between scandals in tech and in other sectors. One obvious thought is that I'm mostly finding myself in tech- oriented crowds, thus I find them more exhilarating . I have to admit to myself that when I read this headline I wasn't the least surprised. I mean "of course they do that, they're old school! McDonalds, pepsi, tobacco, they're all money grubbing and soulless!" Apparently I actually believe tech companies are capable of changing and somewhat try to do good. Perhaps because I have an actual (though imaginary) relationship to the people who run google/apple/msft. The fact that a lot of you guys work there probably enforces that; I do not and will never know anyone working for Coca Cola, for whatever reason.

I wonder if that's two different, calculated strategies employed by the different sectors respectively.

</comment><comment><USER3> Title is inaccurate: Coca-Cola isn't working with nutritionists, they are working with _dietitians_. Literally anyone can call themselves the former, but the latter requires a bachelor's degree with an accredited nutrition curriculum, passing a registration exam and doing an internship at an approved facility.

[http://eatrightdc.org/dietitian-vs- nutritionist/](http://eatrightdc.org/dietitian-vs-nutritionist/)

<comment><USER4> I think you mean latter and former, respectively. You swapped them.

<comment><USER5> Err, no, they got it right.

"Dietitian" is a protected name in most places.

"Nutritrionist", not so much.

The article claims Coke is working with dietitians, while the post title erroneously states they're working with the nutritionists.

It makes the article a lot more alarming considering dietitians are supposed to be policed by a professional organization.

<comment><USER4> Oh, I learn something new every day. Thanks for the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bah. What a clickbait title. If you consider blogger a "nutritionist" then you deserve what you get. The Star Tribune is guilty of posting the exact same level of crap as the nutritionist bloggers. Any service which generate revenue primarily by generating clicks must be treated with an abundance of caution.

<comment><USER7> >If you X then you deserve what you get.

This attitude is harmful, toxic and wrong. Humans are irrational and reactive, their hehaviour is heavily dependent on the context and mind state. Please reconsider.

<comment><USER8> >> If you X then you deserve what you get.

> This attitude is harmful, toxic and wrong.

But that's how you learn. At some point you need to admit that you -yourself- have lacked in judgment in order to learn something. Not everything can be taught in school, not everything can be protected by law, at some point you need to take some responsibility.

What level do you set the bar to ?

That the real question. Should we make the blogger be liable, require a license to blog online or special qualification ? If I give the same advise to a mate at the pub, should I be fined ?

Setting the bar too low is just creating a tyranny.

<comment><USER9> I agree with you but there must be a bar there for a multinational company knowingly lying. It's fine (great) to make something unhealthy. Just don't lie about it being healthy.

There must be false advertising laws that can already catch them for this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This has been a common practice by many of the big brands. For eg. You can watch John Oliver's Last Night with John Oliver on Tobacco and on doctors. Companies pays doctors to recommend medicines.

<comment><USER11> And their echo chamber reinforces the practice.

>"We have a network of dietitians we work with," said Sheidler [a "Coca-cola spokesman"], who declined to say how much the company pays experts. "Every big brand works with bloggers or has paid talent."

Every big brand does it, therefore it is acceptable and expected. Sure, we might be dishonest, misleading, and hide behind self-proclaimed experts, but, shit, how could we justify being a BIG BRAND if we didn't?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have a feeling every time something is called a "snack" in headlines like this it's probably pretty bad for you.

My mother never allowed us to eat chips or other junkfood as snacks during the day. We ate them on special occasions (e.g. watching TV on saturday night).

If we were hungry, we could eat apples or other fruit that was around.

In retrospect a good habit to have.

</comment><comment><USER13> Probably the same with the cereals, dairy, vitamins, fruits, etc. industry.

<comment><USER14> Yup. Here's a "scientific paper" that shows that dairy does not cause heart disease:

[http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/93/1/158.abstract](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/93/1/158.abstract)

Paid for by the Dutch dairy industry...

<comment><USER5> Well, to be fair, modern studies seem to indicate that neither fat nor cholesterol consumption lead to heart disease. So it's quite possible that study is perfectly valid.

The sugars, on the other hand...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They should team up with these guys

[http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1841910,0...](http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1841910,00.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> If you're dumb enough to believe a beverage containing phophoric acid (commonly used in fertilizer) with a PH of ~2.8 is healthy, than you deserve it.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how tha tip about drinking coke to alleviate stomach ache came about.

<comment><USER18> That's the literal genesis of Coca Cola. The syrup was originally developed by a pharmacist for stomach ailments. Carbonation was added to help digestion.</comment></comment>


Understanding "Trembling Hand Perfection" Can Save Your Business - <AUTHOR> http://bookmarkbroker.com/health/trembling-hand-perfection-save-business/

<comment><USER2> No content, just ads. Flagged.</comment>


Ask HN: Recommendations for hacker hostels in the bay area?  - <AUTHOR> I recently left my development job to bootstrap my own product. Community is extremely important for me so I'd like to be around other developers doing similar things as me.
I also love the hostel feeling so, naturally, I'd like to start there. My budget would be ~$40/night for accommodation.
I found three places that seem to fit: Chezjj's, Treehouse, and something called StartupHouse.
Does anyone have any experiences with these? Are there any other places I'm missing?
Working in a coworking space is also an option. Is this a better way to get involved in the community?
I'll be headed down the first of November if there are any events taking place. I'm sorry to have missed the startup school event on the 20th. <comment><USER2> I've lived in Hacker Fortress 2 months (los altos), visit frequently at Chez JJ for the last few weeks (mountain view) and have visited StartupHouse once to help someone move in(in SOMA).

Hacker Fortress and Chez JJ are both lovely. Chez JJ has been around a little longer, so they are more organized and hold great events; Hacker Fortress is a bit newer and more chaotic, but is more competitive on price. Both have great people.

Of the three, StartupHouse seems to be "trying" hardest in that the startup- ness is very in-your-face when you walk in. Key articles by Paul Graham and similar are hung up on clipboards, everybody is hacking away on keyboards, and the whole place has a sort of dark, moody, intense feel to it. I only visited once, so take my impressions with a grain of salt, but it didn't feel as friendly as HF and ChezJJ - most people didn't look up or seem to notice there were new people (maybe partly because there are so many people there), and the guy who showed us around was "on duty" and looked it. Whereas HF and ChezJJ felt like actual homes and not just places to hack.

In terms of physical building, HF literally feels like a fortress on a hill (huge mansion, isolated from surrounding houses, great view). ChezJJ is a cozy, comfy normal house on a street where the houses are close to each other, with fruit trees in the backyard (yum!). StartupHouse is a retrofitted warehouse and feels like it.

Whatever place you choose, I highly recommend staying in some kind of hacker house/hostel. The community you get from this living environment cannot be approximated elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://chezjj.com> is the best! Come cowork at Parisoma!

Also, check these guys out: <http://www.risesf.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> by far the best hacker house in the area is the Hacker Fortress in Los altos hills (find it on airbn).

unlike Chejj there's no air of pretension, just hackers hacking and helping each other out on cool projects.

</comment><comment><USER5> Look in <https://www.airbnb.com></comment>


Salaries on AngelList - <AUTHOR> I had a question I was hoping someone could provide some insight on. I am curious, how dynamic are the currencies for the salaries at https://angel.co/salaries?
Meaning, if I select Developer > San Francisco, is the average salary computed in USD?
Moreover, if I change the city to Toronto (Developer > Toronto), is the average salary reflected in CAD or USD? <comment><USER2> I doubt it handles international currencies well.</comment>


Steve Ballmer saved $100 million in taxes selling $2B in MSFT stock - <AUTHOR> http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2010/11/steve-ballmer-saved-100-million-in-taxes-selling-2b-in-msft-stock.html

<comment><USER2> This is a concrete example of an intuitive fact. There is a limit to how much a government can tax the "rich." This limit will be the tax differential between locations, investment vehicles, or over time, plus the cost of moving the money.

An example of tax rate differences by location is Michael Arrington: California vs. Washington (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1736265>).

Ballmer's sale appears to be the result of a time-based tax rate differential. IRAs are also time-based tax rate differentials: the premise is that the investor defers paying taxes on the IRA investment until he retires and (he hopes) is taxed at a lower rate.

Examples of investment vehicle-based tax differentials are tax free (government) bonds, Roth IRA (interest is tax-free), special "economic investment zones", etc.</comment>


Visual Transistor-level Simulation  of the 6502 CPU - <AUTHOR> http://visual6502.org/

<comment><AUTHOR> Visual 6502 - get deep knowledge if one of the most amazing chips ever.Apple, Commodore, Atari, Nintendo...

<comment><USER2> And the BBC Micro, responsible for a generation of computer literate school children in the UK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Before on HN:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Visual6502#!/story/forever/0/Visua...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Visual6502#!/story/forever/0/Visual6502)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's okay, I imagine some people don't browse HN history. It's also pretty damn cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> anybody happen to know what the weird zig-zag(or comb) patterns near the contact pads are for?</comment>


Fmt – A Modern Formatting Library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt <comment><USER2> It's really astonishing how bad <ostream> is. It's not just one or two problems—the <ostream> interface is just a total disaster. In my mind, fmt is not just a replacement for <ostream>, it's a replacement for <cstdio>, which is a much higher bar to clear.

[https://www.moria.us/articles/iostream-is-hopelessly- broken/](https://www.moria.us/articles/iostream-is-hopelessly-broken/)

</comment><comment><USER3> For those who don't know, much of the fmt library interface has been standardized in C++20 as std::format. It's a great library, and a very efficient alternative to ostream and friends.

<comment><USER4> It's great that it's there now but it absolutely amazes me how long some of these features have taken.

Concepts took, what, the best part of 20 years and the end result is just OK. Unless there's something I'm missing the system as standardized in C++20 just seems overcooked - not very elegant while also introducing a lot of new legalese in the standard. The system D uses seems to be much simpler (and more powerful in the sense that it effectively moves template constraints into the library - doesn't require updating as traits change) i.e.

        template<typename T>
          if(constexprConditionOnT<T>)
        void toy(T x) {}

<comment><USER5> The real power of concepts was the "concept_map" construct. Gaby & Bjarne wanted predicated checking instead of structural checking. Without structural checking there's no "natural" way in C++ syntax to specify a concept_map. The problem is that predicate checking isn't that great.

I can send you the turd of a PhD thesis that was left after my doctorate was bombed by the removal of concepts from C++0x.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (C++)

<comment><USER7> I was wondering that was "modern" about it, given that fmt(1) has been around since 3BSD (1979?).

<comment><USER8> very different, in just about every way. Type safety, deduced by the compiler instead of the stringly-typed %d and friends for starters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know I am a barbarian, but I'll probably just continue to use my own std::string sprintf( const char *fmt, ... ); function as implemented here;

[https://github.com/billforsternz/retro- sargon/blob/master/sr...](https://github.com/billforsternz/retro- sargon/blob/master/src/util.cpp)

</comment><comment><USER10> I kind of think that IEEE 754 (or other binary floating point) to ASCII conversion should be its own project, or else in a language's standard library, since it is quite involved, especially if accuracy is important.

<comment><USER11> The low level part of that was standardized in C++17 as std::to_chars

[https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/to_chars](https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/to_chars)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I see that the ostream comparison is cooked. On each iteration they trigger a memory allocation.</comment>


Chrome 71 arrives with an expanded ad blocker - sahin-boydas https://venturebeat.com/2018/12/04/chrome-71-arrives-with-an-expanded-ad-blocker/ <comment> sahin-boydas Probably they are now blocking all non google display ads :))</comment>


Tesco withdraws Christmas cards from sale after forced labour claims - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/dec/22/tesco-halts-production-at-chinese-factory-over-forced-labour-claims-christmas-cards <comment></comment>


http://www.snipito.com – Web content notification service - <AUTHOR> Hi, I am working on this project (http://www.snipito.com) for a while and would like to know if anyone would be interested in such service? Please let me know. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I suspect there is a market for this. My context is working with my biggest client who has used Mozenda and now Kapow to track pricing changes on 10K plus SKUs across 5 to 7 major retail sites for the past 3 years for the retail segment that they operate within. Even given that they probably spend at least $1500 a month on independent price data services - some who have API agreements with one or more sites so they can access the data without crawling.

Even with that larger scale volume of scraping there have still been sometimes that I wrote little scrapers for a site to track some changes. I don't write these little scripts very often. I will keep your service in mind for the next time this need comes up.</comment>


Show HN: Solid Carbon - <AUTHOR> https://www.solidcarbon.ca/ <comment> core-questions OK, so, this obviously uses energy in order to do this work. How do we guarantee that that energy was produced in a carbon-neutral fashion? And how do we know that it's better to use the energy for this effort than simply directly using it for industry etc? Is there really such a surplus of energy that doing this makes sense, vs. using that surplus to decommission current mass-scale emitters of carbon (like coal plants)?

I find all this stuff to be too pie-in-the-sky to have any real chance at success. We're at what, ~400ppm of carbon right now? So to produce a single metric tonne of carbon, you need to process 2.5 billion metric tonnes of air? If my calculations from [https://www.aqua-calc.com/calculate/weight-to- volume](https://www.aqua-calc.com/calculate/weight-to-volume) are correct, that's nearly 2 trillion cubic meters of air.

I think I need someone better at math because I don't trust those numbers, but all in all it seems like you'd need to have MASSIVE fans blowing tremendous amounts of air around, AND you'd have to capture at a very, very high rate, in order to get enough to be worth it. Surely all the energy spinning those fans cancels out tons of energy generated by wind power plants. What the hell's the point?</comment>


Appropriate Uses for SQLite - <AUTHOR> https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html

<comment><USER2>
      "The SQLite website (https://www.sqlite.org/) uses SQLite itself, of course,
      and as of this writing (2015) it handles about 400K to 500K HTTP requests
      per day, about 15-20% of which are dynamic pages touching the database.
      Each dynamic page does roughly 200 SQL statements. [...]"

Wait... What? They're saying that their dynamic pages are executing 200 SQL statements per request?

Off-topic: I enjoyed reading this article which was posted here a while ago [http://www.sqlite.org/testing.html](http://www.sqlite.org/testing.html)

<comment><USER3> 200+ queries for a simple dynamic page doesn't surprise me. Once you add some dynamic features it's easy to start sticking all kinds of stuff in the database. Let me check some sites I run:

      Medium complexity Drupal 6 site: 200-300 queries
      Wordpress site with accretion of plugins over the years: 100+ queries
      Drupal 7 site: 100+ queries

Those totals might be inflated due to having administrative menus active.

Many of these are key/value lookups which can be accelerated by serving from Memcached or Redis, although I imagine SQLite dishes them out pretty quickly as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _SQLite works great as the database engine for most low to medium traffic websites (which is to say, most websites). The amount of web traffic that SQLite can handle depends on how heavily the website uses its database._

I am curious to know how many people here solely use SQLite to power the back- end of their web application(s), especially when the page states, " _SQLite does not compete with client /server databases._"

(Or is the page referring to content-management-system-type websites?)

<comment><USER5> On work, my area has a conflicting relationship with IT, thus we are often required to use unusual setups...

Well, we've tried distributing applications that needed to share a DB backend. We tried a MS Access backend first, but it stopped working after about 5 people were using it. Then we migrated to SQLite, it handled well up to near 50 people, then its over-restrictive locking become a problem. Luckly by that time we got hold of an Postgres server.

Low to medium traffic websites don't usualy have much more than 10 working threads, so yes, I've used a lousely similar setup, and it worked. It'll depend on how much time is spent on DB access vs. local processing, and how fast the DB is accessed by those servers, so YMMV.

<comment><USER6> It's worth noting that you can split your data among multiple database files (effectively on-disk sharding) to alleviate contention... in-memory record caching and mostly read scenarios will also reduce contention.

There's a _LOT_ you can do with SQLite... not to mention that with simple read caching and reduced writes you can get a lot of performance out of SQLite. Highly interactive web applications, I wouldn't expect to handle more than 50 users on a single system backed by SQLite, as you mention... with SSD, you may get a couple more.

<comment><USER5> Yes, we start splitting the data at one point. But don't take those 50 users limit too seriously, it was more a consequence of bad networking infrastructure than of SQLite.

I have no idea how far SQLite would go on a nice network with a sane file sharing protocol.

<comment><USER6> If you aren't having to do many writes, it will fly for thousands of users... when you have to do a lot of writes, then it will slow to a crawl. I've seen distributed Access based database apps that handled several hundred simultaneous users before.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was fooled by the name for a long time. "SQLite? That's what you use to store 160 phone book entries or something." How wrong I was.

<comment><USER8> I'm using WebSQL / Sqlite to store TV show data on the user's system. works like a charm, databases regularly grow to 10+mb, _never_ had a problem with crashes, speed or anything like it. Plus, everything runs locally <3

Now I really hope that Spartan can implement WebSQL as well...

<comment><USER9> I look forward to using SQLite again. In 2010ish I used it for an airport and aircraft database to be installed with our iOS app for 'find near you' feature. lookup performance was perfect. but did have some performance snags on application start, a server call retrieved any DB records needing to be updated. I found SQLite update statements were slow (10mb DB of 10,000 records, less than 100 updates took 30s on first gen iphones), so instead of retrieving the records that were changed, we modified it to retrieve the latest 3mb (compressed) of the 10mb DB from the server, decompress and replace the single file which turned out to be simpler, more atomic and required much less code.

I really enjoyed the simplicity of it all.

<comment><USER10> Actually, all you needed to do was wrap that batch update in a transaction; by default, SQLite autocommits and writes to disk after each update/insert, which is a bit slow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's also mbtiles, which is a standard way of storing map tiles in an sqlite database in blob fields.

[https://www.mapbox.com/guides/an-open-platform/#storing- tile...](https://www.mapbox.com/guides/an-open-platform/#storing-tiles)

you can have sqlite databases that are gigs in size and perform great.

</comment><comment><USER12> Can anybody speak to their experience using sqlite for data analysis purposes?

Am I wrong in thinking it's just plain old row oriented storage and not something more aggregate oriented?

<comment><USER13> I use sqlite to store all of my small datasets. Minimally, I think of it as a replacement for zipped CSV files. But it also has the added benefit of a relational structure and SQL.

It is super easy to access from julia, R, python, etc, so instead of importing a CSV and manipulating the data, I find it a lot easier to connect to the sqlite database and use SQL for the a lot of the joining and manipulating.

<comment><USER12> I see. So the benefit is mainly in having more relational structure than in actually crunching numbers. Makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Neat. I've also used an in-memory SQLite db for testing ActiveRecord models.

Also, the same list if uses can be applied to nedb as a lightweight alternative to MongoDB.

</comment><comment><USER15> Don't get mislead by the "lite" in sqlite. I can do about 200k sql requests per second with a sqlite inmemory db and node.js

</comment><comment><USER16> How does SQLite handle replication? Can I have 10 app server nodes reading from one SQLite DB? NFS?

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure if SQLite writes over NFS work, I wouldn't trust it. Previously I have done SQLite replication by simply rsyncing the database to application servers at certain times.

<comment><USER18> Writes definitely work, but concurrent writes will hose the database. SQLite relies on filesystem locking (which NFS does not handle properly) to handle write concurrency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> micro-ram sqlite.org SSL Cert just expired</comment>


What would you say is the most important workplace perk to you? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Flexibility.

Being able to work remote if I don't feel like going into the office.

Take a vacation whenever.

Never worrying if I can't get a day off to go see a doctor.

I get my job done and do it to a high degree which frees my time up to do other things. You couldn't give me name a price to me right now that would make me give that up.

<comment><USER3> What kind of companies give you that kind of flexibility?

<comment><USER4> For me, those where you put a lot of effort, you earn it and of course you get your stuff done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Silence (I have my own office).

I'd take a job with an office over.one without even if without pays 15% more, I know this because I did.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean like a 4 walled office rather than open plan / hot desking, or literally over remote working?

<comment><USER6> I'd say a great place makes all the difference. Being remote can be nice but for teamwork it can get tricky. Having a place where you can both work alone and meet in teams is a great perk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My coworkers. It really doesn't matter how much good the place is if I don't enjoy the people I work with.

</comment><comment><USER8> How the hell has no one said insurance yet?! I guess this mostly applies to the US, but I wouldn't want to work at a place with bad insurance.

Otherwise

\- fun/intelligent people to work with

\- vacation, both in length and ability to take it whenever I want (I have 20 days right now)

\- ability to take an hour here or there to get a haircut/deal with bureaucracy/etc. I guess wfh is included in this

-office being in a convenient place close to public transportation with lots of lunch options nearby

Stuff I don't have that I'd like:

-natural light/a view

-summer hours would be amazing

<comment><USER9> It's also a solid perk in the UK. I've not worked at many big companies, but most places I've worked at have had good health insurance plans.

<comment><USER10> I've worked at a few major, but mainly smaller over my 30 year UK career, and _none_ have had health insurance. Mostly outside London.

I have had gourmet meals in-house, gym membership, book allowances, discount hardware and others, but never yet health insurance.

<comment><USER9> That's surprising, considering most plans are pretty cheap. I've almost exclusively worked at small companies, agencies mostly, and my last three places had some form of private health plan. I've also never worked in London, where it seems to be a common perk everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The most important to me right now is enough money to care for my wife and child.

The second one, which used to be the first "before", is flexible hours.

</comment><comment><USER12> 0\. Proper ergonomic furniture, including height-adjustable desks (ideally hydraulic sit-stand), depth-adjustable chairs, standing mats, and laptop/monitor risers plus external peripherals.

1\. Quiet / walls (haven't found those in over a decade, tho, so...)

2\. Non-fluorescent light. Ideally from nice big windows with a view of something other than the side of the building across the street.

3\. Summer Fridays (afternoons off between Memorial Day and Labor Day; common in NYC companies that originated in the 1980s or before)

4\. Norms of taking > 3wks/yr PTO

5\. Flexible hours

6\. Keeping the fridge stocked with milk to go with all that free coffee and tea (so many places take weeks to restock whenever they run out of milk. Such a simple thing. Boggles the mind.)

</comment><comment><USER13> 1) Respect for my role from upper management. This one is huge for me. I have a friend working as an engineer in a company where engineers aren't considered impact players (i.e. aren't perceived as revenue generating, even if the _perception_ isn't 100% true). She is paid well and her boss loves her. But her boss's boss and everyone from there on up have the attitude that engineers "just don't get it" and she's miserable there, because her work can't have as much impact without upper management buy-in. This is a cultural thing and varies highly even between companies in the same industry. For example, there are hedge funds where good engineers are rock stars and there are hedge funds where they are looked at as support staff. In that industry, your importance to the company is often reflected in your pay, but pay aside, where do you think that the engineers are happiest?

2) Some people reading this aren't going to like it, but: Coworkers and/or bosses who have kids, or at least are sympathetic to the fact that I do. This one is really only applicable once you have kids yourself, but if you are in a startup where everyone is young and childless (or old and childless), it'll be hard for them to understand the myriad number of things that come up with children. You need to take your kid to the doctor, you need to stay home because the nanny is sick. I can make up the time, but sometimes it means missing important work or things that can't be rescheduled. The excuses add up and I've met many people who aren't sympathetic to them. And I even understand where they are coming from. But as a parent, I value a company where people _are_ respectful of this.

3) An even keeled boss. You can be a nice person or you can be an asshole. But as long as you are consistent, I can figure out how to deal with you. But if one day you are Dr. Jekyll and the next day Mr. Hyde, then I'll always be afraid to approach you.

4) Good health insurance (in the USA). Our system of having health insurance tied to employment is stupid. But it is what it is, and if you aren't getting good health insurance from work, it can be a fortune to pay for it out of pocket.

<comment><USER14> >I have a friend working as an engineer in a company where engineers

I categorize this as a place where there are "leaders" and "peons." The "leaders" see themselves as the important people who have ideas and make decisions. The "peons" are the grunts who are involved in execution and are easily replaceable by another peon. The most valuable people are the ones talking about all supposedly great revenue generating stuff they getting peons to do.

Don't work for these places if you like to be an engineer. As you pointed out, an individual manager may be great, but everybody above them sees you as a cog. If your manager is replaced you are done.

I think the only benefit of these places is that execution is mixed in with so much BS that great work life balance can result from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Flex time / working from home

A private office that is quiet

</comment><comment><USER16> 1\. Congenial colleagues.

2\. An office with actual walls and a door that closes. Full-time remote work is a good substitute.

</comment><comment><USER17> Working remote nearly 100% of the time.

</comment><comment><USER18> We have so many and get used to having them it's sometimes hard to pick one out.

Practically speaking I'd have to say the free breakfast/lunches/snacks because I'm way healthier than when I worked at places without them. Sometimes I even get in on time to have a breakfast.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Do you guys ever think about the light inside your workplace and how it affects you?

<comment><USER19> We're in a dungeon with fluorescent lights here. It makes me so miserable that I'm considering looking for work simply because of the lighting. Every other group in the building has windows they can look out of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Quietness. As a creative person it's very easy for me to get distracted. I try to work with noise canceling and white noise, but that doesn't really work that well.

A library like quiet place would be a gamechanger for me.

</comment><comment><USER21> Being able to work with really smart and engaged co-workers.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm a Jr. Engineer and I really appreciate working in a positive learning environment with a bunch of experienced, helpful Senior Devs.

</comment><comment><USER23> Salary

</comment><comment><USER24> company car with unlimited mileage. So far I've driven more than 11.000 km in a month - mostly private, due to the customer being 5min away from my home.

<comment><USER25> But this could easily be replaced by an increase in salary right ? It is not really part of the workplace (unlike coworkers, location, size, etc.)

<comment><USER13> Or reimbursement for mileage. Businesses can take this as a tax write-off (i.e. no payroll taxes) from the IRS [0]. My father used to get reimbursed for mileage from his work at the IRS rate, which accounts for things such as reduced car value, gasoline and maintenance costs, but is actually quite generous. The reimbursement rate was high enough that he actually _made_ money from it, since it exceeded the costs of gas, increased maintenance and depreciation. That said, if you drive a ferrari which depreciates quickly and guzzles lots of gas, the calculus is going to be different.

[0] [https://www.ifebp.org/news/regulatoryupdates/Pages/2019-irs-...](https://www.ifebp.org/news/regulatoryupdates/Pages/2019-irs- mileage-rates.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> \- Vacation

\- Remote work

\- Flex time

\- Vacation

\- Free coffee

\- Office close to public transit

\- Did I mention vacation?

</comment><comment><USER27> part time work</comment>


I'm a Solo Founder, Why Can't I Get Traction? - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/i-m-a-solo-founder-why-can-t-i-get-traction-38b44c8b5f <comment><USER2> Combining two comments on the thread which both attack the issue from a different perspective.....

"What did you do to reach out? Did you go face to face? " "writing a blogpost != talking to customers"

That's the issue.</comment>


Bye Bye Bluetooth - <AUTHOR> http://techdusts.com/2009/10/15/wifi-direct-in-2020-will-replace-bluetooth-wifi-alliance/ Come 2010 and no longer would you be using Bluetooth for short range file transfer. Apple, Intel, Cisco (and other major players) along with WiFi Alliance have together come with a set of standards for WiFi Direct. This will convert you Wifi gadget into a access point. <comment><USER2> I always thought Bluetooth was optimised for low power wireless transfer of modest amounts of data (e.g. mouse and keyboard, voice or music), not full on file transfer.

Don't get me wrong, I would really like to say bye to Bluetooth and switch everything over to Wifi, but I don't think Wifi is optimised for low power (the typical Bluetooth use cases) just yet. Or is it?

File transfer with bluetooth was always very slow. I use a USB thumbdrive for any kind of short range data transfer. Heck, even sending files over the internet (IM or E-Mail) seems always much more convenient than bothering with bluetooth.

</comment><comment><USER3> the main advantage of bluetooth is not it's "direct" connectivity. It's its low power consumption. Which makes it suitable for mobile gizmos. So it wont vanish anytime soon.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. We're probably only a standard or two away from Bluetooth officially becoming the 'low power' wifi standard and a spec that allows devices to initiate connections with lower overhead and scale up to higher bandwidths if and when necessary.

<comment><AUTHOR> i will not agree here... The battery life is incresing at a very fast pace and it wont be long when the amount of power wifi sucks will be very small when compared to the over all battery life.

<comment><USER5> Battery life historically has been an issue, and solutions historically have been just over the horizon. We are seeing improvements however, low power consumption is still a factor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know about the royalty situation for this stuff? Bluetooth would have been far more useful if the rights holders hadn't been so greedy in its early days.

</comment><comment><USER7> Zigbee, a simplified successor to Bluetooth, has become pretty important to industrial and power grid computing; WPAN wifi was around when those standards were drafted. I don't think direct wi-fi is an automatic win.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is such a poorly written article. Is it translated?

I much preferred the BBC's description, even if it was a little "layman": <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8307977.stm>

The one paragraph in their story about the "threat" to bluetooth was far more fair than all the other stories I've seen on HN about Wifi Alliance.

</comment><comment><USER9> It will be interested to see how Bluetooth 3.0+HS (Bluetooth+WiFi, backed by Broadcom/CSR) and WiFi Direct (My WiFi, backed by Intel) compete with each other.

But I think Bonjour may be the biggest winner if WiFi Direct wins since, unlike Bluetooth profiles, WiFi Direct doesn't include any application layer. Bonjour will fit in the need of service discovery protocol.

</comment><comment><USER10> The only thing I've ever used bluetooth for is audio; my cell phone has it, my iPod has an adaptor for it, and I have a pretty acceptable set of headphones that receive it. I'm also planning on getting a car stereo that supports it. Has file transfer every really been a use-case for bluetooth?

<comment><USER11> \- Automated connectivity between your cell phone and the hands free set in a car. \- Backing up the cell phone

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know how this will work in practice? Will I have to disconnect from my WLAN to connect to the device's? What's the benefit compared to an ad- hoc network, in the peer-to-peer file transfer case?

</comment><comment><USER13> bluetooth 3.0 HS (High Speed) standard is going to provide high speed transfer in comparision with Wi-Fi without consuming lot of power. So can't say bye bye to blurtooth so early. Have patience..</comment>


User Bases, Pricing, Revenue, and the Value of Users - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.xobni.com/asmith/archives/66

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately his analysis is not right. He is confusing revenues with earnings. P/E of 60 is not the same as Price/Revenue of 60. If you are only doing $1M/month and your margins are say ~10%, you will end up with a value of $60M not $600M.

<comment><USER3> Yup, totally right. Fixed now. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The "success" number of $1M a month is a little high no?

Move that down to $100K - $300K and things look a little nicer for a new startup.

Not that $1M/month is not a great looking goal, but in the traditional world that would be a pretty established small business.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting post. Shame there isn't any discussion of advertising revenue though. Users that choose not to pay can still generate a lot of revenue from advertising.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't believe Salesforce has a PE of 1100, thats insane

<comment><USER7> Not really. For many high-tech companies, the earnings can vary a lot from one quarter/year to the next. If the profit margin is hovering in the +/-10% range, the P/E can vary wildly. Even in a low-earnings period, wall street will typically not punish the company too much if it expects things to turn around soon.

Regarding Salesforce.com in particular, looks like its 2006 profit margin was 9%, but 2007's was 0.1%. The street is still optimistic though, because the company's revenues increased 60%.

For such companies, the P/S ratio is generally a more reliable metric to compare with. Salesforce.com's P/S ratio is 8.8. For reference, Google's is 13.

<comment><USER6> Still, Salesforce's forward PE is 300+. A wide variation, but still almost an order of magnitude bigger than M$.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't believe "forward" anything :). If Salesforce.com goes back to 9% net profit margin next yr, its P/E will become 80. A P/E that's 1.5-3x that of MS is reasonable, since MS's revenues are not growing much.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Maduro slashes five zeros from the Venezuelan bolivar to curb hyperinflation - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/07/26/facing-venezuelas-1000000-percent-inflation-maduro-pushes-a-quack-remedy/ <comment><USER2> [http://archive.is/5fBTb](http://archive.is/5fBTb)</comment>


An Amish town that builds live sets for music acts - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/tait-towers-amish-music-concerts-stage <comment><USER2> Lititz is by no means 'an amish town'. It was founded by Moravians. Its more suburban than rural.

Interesting note: The owner of Tait Towers owns a home that looks like a castle on top of a hill.

<comment><USER3> That's the guy who owns that castle out by Millport Road? I've always wondered about that place.

<comment><USER2> It overlooks Millport Rd off of Woods Dr, but yes, that is Tait's towers =).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am a happy CTO of a SaaS AI company but ever since I graduated a double Msc in computer science and EE, I miss playing with PLCs.

It seems to me that the worlds of industrial computing/EE and software are finally merging. Being involved in Navigator design & dev must be an amazing job.

Anyone has more technical info about it? I guess it's probably a bunch of QNX hosts sharing data on Modbus and from there bridges to the light show & al to synchronize everything?

Their careers section mentions Siemens gear but not much more...

<comment><USER5> Would also love to know more about this tech. I dabbled in show control (MSC) when I was a lighting tech with my high school theatre company. Loved it, but it barely worked... Running MIDI over WiFi between two computers running QLab is not a good idea!

<comment><USER6> To get around this, I used to create ad-hoc WIFI networks with my iPad running Lemur and my MacBook Pro running Ableton.

The local network, always hosted on the Mac, was absolutely reliable enough to do live-streamed, videotaped combo theatre/musical performances with. I literally counted on it.

I still had an MPD32 by my MacBook in case it messed up, but over a series of 7 performances it never did. Many of these are even on video.

Call it luck, though. I considered myself crazy for doing it to the point where we actually wrote the use of the iPad into the script, it affected our whole team that much. I was a lot more of a naïve girl back then with regards to the reliability of these things.

Or possibly, back then, shit was just more reliable (here's looking at you, Sierra/High Sierra/iOS 11).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hello from Water Street, Lititz. It is pretty cool to live here.

<comment><USER8> I always planned to live in Lititz, but I've only made it to neffsville so far as permanent residence wise. Sadly it's not walking distance to the bulls head.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great article, but it's depressing to learn that acts are optimising their performances for a single "instagram moment" that will maximise publicity, potentially at the expense of the actual live experience.

<comment><USER10> Why depressing? Remember when bands prohibited recording devices from their concerts? They are now finally realizing that fans with cameras (video and still) can do more for publicity than a bloated advertising budget, something which newer bands don't have access to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So wired block images if you use an adblocker?

<comment><USER12> Lazy loading via javascript at work... If your adblocker has an option to use the <noscript> element, the images display fine on wired though.</comment></comment>


Nginx to Be Acquired by F5 Networks - <AUTHOR> https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-joins-f5/ <comment><USER2> So...what is the future of enterprise open source? Is there a future for enterprise open source?

If you start a company and open source your core/clients, your product becomes part of AWS, and AWS runs you into the ground. If you mix in proprietary licenses to protect yourself, AWS forks your core, adds in open-source licensed clients, then runs you into the ground (and you lose open-source contributors/supporters as a bonus who may fork your core themselves).

I remember from a undergrad class reading Google's system design papers, that they publish only the top-level architecture for core systems they use, and only after 3-5 years of use when they have moved on to a better system. After all this (Docker/Redis/Elastic/Nginx), I think that might be the best path forward. You can provide the benefits of open-source and recognition for the architects, but not lose your competitive advantage. Open-sourcing your core product seems too idealistic.

<comment><USER3> You could AGPL and sell proprietary exceptions. Amazon won't touch AGPL code.

<comment><USER2> Maybe. At least our company won't touch GPL code; as one colleague described to me, if you violate a proprietary license, a company will come after you for money, while violating a GPL license gets the EFF involved who will come after you for your source code.

I'm still wary, though. I could imagine if the resultant fines or source code releases from violating a GPL license weren't a strong enough deterrent, you could win by using a GPL-licensed product enough, then parry off attacks from EFF/FSF until you do a complete rewrite of the product underneath, then pay the fine/contribution to EFF/FSF while toppling the original company. If the company is big enough, and can afford enough good lawyers, there may be legal ways to get around laws.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7572332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7572332)

<comment><USER4> The only claimants to your source code are those to whom you've distributed binaries built from GPL sources. Anyone else can pound sand.

<comment><USER5> not the case for AGPL: then it's everyone who has access to your online service built with the code.

<comment><USER6> I don't think it works like that.

This is a copyright license at its heart. It is a contract between the copyright-owner and the service owner. The end user is just 3rd party.

<comment><USER7> Wait, isn't the whole point of AGPL that the "user" entitled to the source code is now the _service user_ , i.e. potentially everyone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I guess that signals it's time for nginx users to check out possible alternatives - just in case, if things turn out for the worse.

I can recommend having a look at [https://varnish-cache.org/](https://varnish- cache.org/) \- while its performance might not be 100% up to par with nginx in some (very, very high-end) scenarios, it has many other fortes that nginx (at least in its FOSS release version; I've never used nginx plus) just cannot match in my experience. Having seen `varnishlog` and `varnishtest` in action alone are worth spending a day or two exploring it.

<comment><USER9> According to the public statements, F5 is committing to maintain the current level of resources NGINX has allocated to their open source programs, to keep the same dev team involved, to keep licensing as it currently is, not change any of the repositories on Mercurial and GitHub and to keep the NGINX brand.

Which only means that NGINX will get even better over time.

<comment><USER10> NGINX was already paywalling bug fixes once they launched Pro.

proxy_pass for example will only resolve a hostname at the time the configuration is parsed, unless you use a convoluted variable hack. This was a serious issue requiring you to restart your fleet if a backend server changed IPs. The bug fix for this was implemented only in Pro and sold as "DNS for Service Discovery."

<comment><USER11> Put a load balancer between your reverse proxy and your backends. Problem solved.

<comment><USER12> What do you think nginx was being used for?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Acquired for $670 million

[https://www.f5.com/company/news/press- releases/f5-acquires-n...](https://www.f5.com/company/news/press- releases/f5-acquires-nginx-to-bridge-netops-devops)

<comment><USER14> Cash, apparently. I like how Wilson Sonsini advised F5 in the purchase while firm heir Peter Sonsini invested in Nginx corp. Good times for old money in the Valley.

<comment><USER15> I thought F5 was primarily a Seattle based company? I've known more F5 employees growing up in Seattle than Amazon employees at least.

On another note, F5's poorly written code is the reason TLS 1.0 is considered insecure (using a variant of the POODLE attack), among other major security lapses.

<comment><USER16> F5 has a few hundred person office in San Jose as well as a decent amount in Tel Aviv as well.

<comment><USER14> Sure but it's not engineers who are getting paid in this deal, it's VCs and lawyers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> With everything that is going on with open source licensing this certainly can create a bit of worry down the line.

Interesting to also see what aws is doing in response to some of the more complicated licensing agreements and specifically elastic search: [https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open- source-...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/keeping-open-source-open- open-distro-for-elasticsearch/)

The challenge for nginx was they raised VC capital so they were in a forcing function. Either grow revenue or get acquired. Could have remained an independent oss product for ever but alas no more.

<comment><USER18> Could this simply be about losing hardware sales to this newfangled open source? A big F5 rig used to go for $175k, vs $30k-sh for an nginx on plain hardware.

[https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-plus-vs-f5-big-ip-a- price-p...](https://www.nginx.com/blog/nginx-plus-vs-f5-big-ip-a-price- performance-comparison/)

<comment> X-Istence A big F5 rig is basically Linux with a CLI/admin interface on top.

<comment><USER19> (I work for F5.) This is not true - Linux is really just userspace to run our own data-plane code.

<comment><USER20> Serious question: what does it actually do in non-corp speak, though?

<comment><USER21> It's an inline swiss-army-network appliance that can do a fuckton of things at the speed of packets or nearly so up to 100Gbs.

load balancing? check.

stateful load balancing? check.

ssl-termination? check.

HSM-enabled ssl-termination? check.

hardware accelerated ssl-termination? check.

firewall? check.

NG firewall? check.

compiled Lua/tcl (i forget which) scripts so you can program something insanely complicated? check.

SAML? check.

ISP sized NATs? check.

etc.

Plus, way more configuration knobs and options than you'd ever want at each network layer. Like, come up with a load balancing scheme where Tls1.2 clients using Poly1305-chacha20 get sent to a specific pool of servers while everything else goes to another pool, except for clients trying to use QUIC and who are coming from a specific range of IP. They go to another set of servers.

Maybe a better way to think of it is that it's a single device for tweaking anything L3-L7 for your server and parts of your network.

(used to work for f5, too, but i'm not sure how specific i can get with the nda).

<comment><USER22> Thanks.

As the industry [0] continues to put its weight behind NFV [1] and SDNs [2] along with the rise of IDNs [3], do you see network-appliances keeping up the share of the market against those solutions? I believe @Edge network might continue to require these appliances for WAF, Firewall/DPI (and other things I don't know about)... but that'd be a niche?

[0] [http://opennetworking.org/](http://opennetworking.org/)

[1] [https://www.opnfv.org/](https://www.opnfv.org/)

[2] [https://opencord.org/](https://opencord.org/)

[3] [https://www.apstra.com/](https://www.apstra.com/)

<comment><USER21> Not gonna lie, that question is almost not something i'm qualified to answer, since I was more focused on specific ssl technologies/integrations, but I'll have a go.

Obviously they won't go away, but network appliances definitely won't keep their share because not everyone needs them as SDNs get better. I see the SDN and IDN as mostly solving multivendor integration issues and making it easier to configure at least semi-complicated networks, which doesn't make them a drop-in replacement for many of the problems f5 is trying to solve. For certain network loads they might achieve performance parity, too.

One of the draws for an f5 box for a large customer is that instead of having like 5 vendors or OSS technologies that they have to maintain for load balancing, ssl-termination, hardware-accelerated/-hardened encryption/decryption, SAML, firewalls, etc. you have one company's product (that hopefully has been designed to work well with itself) to do all of that that's configured from one location. If you don't have to worry about that multivendor orchestration headache, then massive network appliances like BIGIP aren't a value add over having a couple vendors.

Another draw for BIGIP is doing things at the speed of packet flow or nearly so even for VM containers and even for fully encrypted SSL. If you don't have to care about making sure to squeeze every last microsecond of latency or bandwidth out of you 10Gbs or 100Gbs fiber connection, BIGIP isn't a value add over SDN. If you only care a little bit, than an SDN could be way cheaper than BIGIP because you can configure things to do what you need for lower hardware and support costs.

For the people who care about that multivendor issue and performance, they're always going to have hardware dedicated to networking, even if they use SDNs or IDNs, because they need that dedicated compute to achieve their goals. Sustained 10Gbs connections are no joke, let alone 40Gbs or 100Gbs. Same with tens of thousands of simultaneous SSL connections. All of a sudden you need dedicated ASICS/"Raw Compute" and RAM to keep up with the firehose of packets. Plus, network appliances will begin to integrate with SDNs and IDNs, so for customers on the border between needing an appliance and a getting by with an IDN or SDN and more manpower, the form of the network appliance will change, but they're still going to have hardware down in their server room or compute instances in their cloud dedicated to networking infra. If you want SSL- termination? You need compute. Hardware accelerated or hardened SSL termination? You need specialized hardware. Firewalls? Compute. SAML? Compute. Complicated NATs? Compute. If you've got a couple BIGIPs in your server room, your network's complicated enough and/or bandwidth heavy and/or low latency enough that you're going to have nearly as much racks dedicated for your SDN so that it has enough compute as you do for network appliances.

BIGIP isn't valuable because it's great a router or switch. It's great because of how much it does on top of that in a single server/VM, and how well it does it. And most of what it's great at are not things that an SDN will solve. Sure, the configuration tweaking will have parity and maybe load balancing performance (but having seen how BIGIP achieves it, especially for complicated setups, i kinda doubt it). But if BIGIP integrates with SDNs or with IDNs even just a little, then what could happen is that people on the borderline are just going to get slightly smaller BIGIPs and offload some of the tasks where BIGIP overlaps with SDNs/IDNs and the BIGIP will just be another node in the SDN. If BIGIP goes in on SDN and IDN, then you might even see people buying larger BIGIPs to orchestrate their overall SDN and IDN.

<comment><USER22> Thanks a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm nervous about what this means for the future of nginx's built in load balancing. That's been an important and rock-solid part of my infrastructure.

<comment><USER24> Throwing out a question to the room: if the worst happens and Nginx gets butchered, would it be so bad to go back to using Apache? I've never used it really, everything I've done has been Nginx, but is there some technical reason why Apache wouldn't be a fine fallback option for an open-source server?

<comment><USER25> HaProxy does load balancing better, it never was a primary feature of nginx. Varnish can do the caching. Apache/Lighttpd can serve files and CGI, but maybe not as efficiently.

Apache is really struggling on resource consumption. It's still living in the world of one process or one thread per connection.

Operationally it always ends up in a clusterfuck of rewrite rules and there are many gotchas with undocumented and misbehaving directives.

<comment><USER26> "It's still living in the world of one process or one thread per connection."

It hasn't lived in that world for a decade or so. It's great to give advice, but at least make it valid and factual. With the Apache 2.4 event MPM, httpd is async and event-driven and is just as fast as nginx.

<comment><USER25> Apache is full of gotchas as stated. For one, the event MPM is not async :p

It's still creating multiple processes that get recycled periodically, each with a fixed number of threads. Every active request holds a thread.

Apache quickly runs into troubles when having long lived requests (slow API calls or large file downloads) or when using websockets (hold a thread permanently).

The tuning to balance processes, threads, connections, requests and resource consumption is extremely complicated and it doesn't get very far.

HAProxy and nginx can both handle 10k concurrent connections out of the box. Apache requires extensive tuning before 1k.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In the event that F5 pulls an Oracle and horribly mismanages nginx, runs it into the ground, or tries to close it off, I vote we name the community fork "nginy".

<comment><USER28> Got to feel lucky Oracle or IBM didn't buy them, definitely would have run them into the ground.

<comment><USER29> People thought Oracle would run MySQL into the ground, and that didn't happen.

<comment><USER27> That's because Oracle was too busy suing Java users and pissing on OpenSolaris. There's only so many open source projects a company can eradicate at a time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nginx is an incredible product. I've used it at nearly every company I've been at and on multiple occasions its entirely saved us both via its capabilities and its accessible, robust documentation that we had to read at 2 AM while fire fighting. Congrats to the team on a hard fought journey.

</comment><comment><USER31> "F5 is committed to continued innovation and increasing investment in the NGINX open source project to empower NGINX's widespread user communities." from [https://www.f5.com/company/news/press- releases/f5-acquires-n...](https://www.f5.com/company/news/press- releases/f5-acquires-nginx-to-bridge-netops-devops) what do we know of F5 history in open source?

<comment><USER17> I think the issue is that there isn't much and certainly nginx could be viewed as competitor to F5. And with everything else going on it's not difficult to imagine that this acquisition isn't a positive sign.

<comment><USER32> Could it, really? I know that nginx has some builtin load balancing, but unless it's vastly vastly changed in the past few years, it's still a LONG way behind haproxy for load balancing.

nginx is an excellent high performance webserver, which is something F5 don't really have. It is (or was, at least) at best a mediocre load balancer, with all sorts of limitations at the sort of scales you'd usually use an F5 box for. While it's probably fair to wonder how much more work will be put into the LB feature-set of nginx, I hope that this will be counterbalanced by increased funding for the core feature of being a superlative webserver.

<comment><USER33> nginx's worse-than-F5-and-haproxy load balancing was great for where I was using it. And from all reports, F5 would have required a full engineer to do configuration, compared to about 1/4 of an engineer for nginx.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've recently been getting quite a few marketing emails from nginx pushing for replacing F5 with nginx. Just checked and the last one I received was last thursday, March 7th.

Interesting how recently nginx was continuing this campaign. I wonder how effective the "replace F5 with NGINX" marketing push was at increasing the price and urgency for the acquisition.

For the curious, the big headline at the top of the message was "Modernizing Applications by Replacing F5 with NGINX Application Delivery Controller and Signal Sciences"

Then the text of that top section was:

"F5's rigid and centralized approach to load balancing and web application firewall (WAF) prevents enterprises from modernizing their applications. In this recent webinar we describe how replacing or augmenting your F5 deployment with the NGINX application delivery controller and Signal Sciences WAF helps reduce costs and improve agility."

<comment><USER35> NGINX is upset that AVI networks is winning all major the F5 replacement business. I looked at NGINX in the past and the rep seemed hesitant to talk about AVI vs NGINX. Seems to be true. [https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi- Networks-Doubles-Revenue-Customer-Base-Legacy)

<comment><USER36> Having worked at NGINX, I would be surprised if Avi Networks was at all a consideration for marketing F5 replacement. When I left (not too long ago), most of our enterprise sales of NGINX+ was for F5 replacement deals...which is why the marketing emphasis has always been on replacing F5.

As an engineer (so I can't speak to business strategy), I always thought of Avi Networks as market validation for ancillary software services like Amplify and Controller rather than a competitor with NGINX+. But that was just my thinking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> F5 side of the press release: [https://www.f5.com/company/news/press- releases/f5-acquires-n...](https://www.f5.com/company/news/press- releases/f5-acquires-nginx-to-bridge-netops-devops)

</comment><comment><USER37> I think this will all be alright. The open source product will continue to support most use cases the same as it always has. Customers with additional needs or edge cases will opt-in for support. The byproduct of that relationship will be to ascertain which users are growing to a point where nginx may not be able to support more mission critical needs, and that's where F5's commercial products can come in.

Of course, this also means that you could expect any sort of future development that overlaps with their higher end products to vanish.

</comment><comment><USER38> In what world is NGINX worth so much less than WhatsApp, Snapchat, and some other sites of dubious value?

The world of economists has no idea how to value technology beyond narrow ad- based business models.

</comment><comment><USER39> One thing I find interesting in this is the valuation: $670MM which means nginx that powers almost the entire web and has a strong monetization model is not a unicorn while some very questionable businesses are if you ask their VCs.

</comment><comment><USER40> Interesting move. Big IP is a hell of a product on it's own. Curious to see how they add nginx to their product line and what this means for open source usage.

</comment><comment><USER41> [https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/f5-acquires-nginx- for-670m...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/11/f5-acquires-nginx-for-670m-to- move-into-open-source-multi-cloud-services/) is a much better rationale and details on how it went down

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder if Facebook's opensourcing of BPF [1] 4 months ago had negative affects on F5's competitive advantaages.

BPF allows to run user code in kernel modules, so things like packet rewriting and traffic shaping are possible. [2]

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18337429](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18337429)

[2][https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/bpf/docs/bpf- docs#tools...](https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/bpf/docs/bpf-docs#tools- built-on-bpf)

<comment><USER43> BPF is 12 years older than Facebook :)

People don't buy individual pieces of technology, they want packaged solutions that come with support. Tech almost matters less than good support

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Really sad. NGINX was the cure to F5 proprietary boxes.

Up next is likely HaProxy....

<comment><USER35> We replaced F5 with Avi Networks and we are a global fortune 500.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is vaguely discomforting but perhaps inevitable in a world where open source is sponsored, funded or developed by corporate interests.

The connection with end users and ideology has been broken as everything from the kernel to major projects are corporate funded and driven.

And most inadvertently acknowledge this when they raise concerns about the sustainability of projects without financial or corporate backing. The exploding complexity of things like browsers and projects like Systemd make the idea of individuals and smalls team developing alternatives without corporate backing a non stater.

Most open source projects in the last 10 years would see this kind of acquisition as an ideal outcome and for vc funded ones a necessary one. Even a 'fork' of Nginx at this time would most likely be driven by commercial motives so the 'vague discomfort' expressed in this comment itself is perhaps misplaced.

</comment><comment><USER46> Man I didnt even realize F5 was still relevant...

I recall my first two F5 box purchases...

Tore it apart with the engineer installing it for us at Decide.com in ~1999 and each box was ~$35,000

After asking about and being shown what the box was, a low end machine with a custom linux distro with a custom LB logic that was complex... I was really turned off by their implementation....

Dont get me wrong, it was revolutionary as a product and what not - but from an engineer, I was kicking myself as to how much they could charge for the thing....

Now ELBs are "free" for same functionality in cloud...

So what is F5 doing - and Who is buying them, aside from governments? (I am not hating on them - trying to understand them)

</comment><comment><USER47> How can some of you do balancing, but have never heard of F5? Heck, I knew if f5 10 plus years ago. F5 can be fully automated now from top down, plus the additional security aspects are a major plus. Most people that use Nginx, and have some knowledge of load balancing products use both. It's often called the best of bread, which Nginx and f5 are IMO. Now, a few years ago could you have automated everything? Probably not, but just look at their gitrepo. It's pretty transparent at what their aiming at.

</comment><comment><USER48> First time I heard of this company. Their website is in the highest order of marketing speak, but actually offering nothing much. Note to self: security services are a nice way to milk governments & corporations.

In any case, I'm glad that Nginx is still available for free and the project will continue to have funding in the future from what looks like a cashed-up company. Besides, if it doesn't work out, it can always be foked. Hooray for open source software!

<comment><USER49> We use their VPN client at where I work...it's a mess. Disconnects all the time, IF you can even get it to connect in the first place, it like's to sit there for up to 20 minutes sometimes before it finally connects. Almost never works with captive portals, and all sorts of syncing issues with our network drives.

To be fair, it might just have to do with our company's implementation, our IT department pretty hit or miss when it comes to implementing new stuff, it only rolled our 6 months ago and we do have 30,000+ employees/contractors so I'd imagine it's headache getting everything just right, but still.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> what are some good alternatives to nginx?

<comment><USER51> Obviously Apache, IIS

[https://caddyserver.com/](https://caddyserver.com/)

[https://www.lighttpd.net/](https://www.lighttpd.net/)

[https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/](https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/)

<comment><USER52> Probably not that last one...

[https://www.hiawatha-webserver.org/weblog/132](https://www.hiawatha- webserver.org/weblog/132)

<comment><USER53> Or IIS... yikes!

<comment><USER51> Not all of us work in small startups. The enterprise needs webservers too!

<comment><USER54> But Microsoft bad, everybody say so

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> We were one of the first three investors in Nginx in 2011 and just decided to share memories about development of the company thought the eyes of its VC shareholder:

[https://medium.com/runa-capital-collection/nginx-and-runa- st...](https://medium.com/runa-capital-collection/nginx-and-runa- story-6e27e2a4ab5d) (from idea in 2002 to exit in 2019)

</comment><comment><USER56> Wow. Huge exit for them. Didn't see this coming.

</comment><comment><USER57> congrats Nginx team! i've gotten lots of value out of your product

</comment><comment><USER58> Would be curious to know if employees are able to tap into these profits, or if somehow they are getting screwed?

</comment><comment><USER59> I am using F5 BigIP 5600 for quite some time now. In one line: I hate it! Can't rename "objects". You can't search properly for something in a DataGroups - at least not within the UI. There is just so much that I really hate about that product. I was about to tell my chef about NGINX - well ...

</comment><comment><USER60> I wonder if load balancer and API gateway products might eventually converge. Things like Kong, Tyk and Apigee have caching, embedded scripting, basic load balancing, etc. They aren't as good as Nginx or Haproxy at it, but a single product outside the app would be attractive.

<comment><USER61> Curious how you think Kong falls short of Nginx. Isn't it built on top of Nginx via Openresty/ngx_lua?

<comment><USER62> Marco, CTO of Kong here. Kong is not only built on top of Nginx, but also extends it significantly to provide features that Nginx doesn't do out of the box (dynamic configuration, SRV records resolution, dynamic Plugin based system, data plane API and so on).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I was always under the impression nginx was keeping rather basic stuff(like downstream status) out of core so they could sell plus and that the community deserved a better defacto server.. Maybe this will be the catalyst?

</comment><comment><USER64> Well it makes sense for F5.

Their main buisness, hardware loadbalancing is rapidly diminishing, so buying in NGINX seems like a sensible move.

After all, its much easier to sell support to people who are actually _using_ your product.

<comment><USER65> hey, can you provide a source for their decrease in market share? Or are you assuming based on AWS growth? I tried looking up the Gartner starts but couldn't get past a login.

<comment><USER64> Sorry based on my own ignorance.

In 2014 we had two, then I moved company to where we had 6 loadbalancers, in the four years we were there we killed them off with a mix of AWS and k8s

At most recent place, I'd no even consider installing them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Congrats to them. Grateful for the product they open sourced.

</comment><comment><USER67> I wonder where that puts Wallarm that sells WAF solutions relying on NGINX and F5's Big IP is a competitor.

</comment><comment><USER68> I'm guessing this will upset many devs longing for nginx per default. Personally, I never understood why nginx is so popular with a particular demographic, and have always preferred tried-and-true Apache httpd.

<comment><USER69> nginx had very well performing event driven core from the get-go. Apache event mpm module stabilized only in 2.4, and at that point nginx was already quite popular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Are we all going to move back to Apache httpd?

<comment><USER26> Why not? Apache 2.4 with the Event MPM is async and event-driven, just as fast as nginx, lower latency, more fully compliant w/ RFC specs, robust reverse proxy w/ load balancing and dynamic configuration, super-fast caching,... and fully and completely open source.

<comment><USER70> Hey you're preaching to the converted. Tbh I have no idea why we all moved away in the first place. I was fine with Apache.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Yeah, well, that was fun while it lasted.

</comment><comment><USER72> Wonder how the other shareholders did.

</comment><comment><USER73> Terrible news

</comment><comment><USER74> what happens to A10 now, being in the same market as F5?

</comment><comment><USER75> lol

</comment><comment><USER76> I still have hard time believing that commercial merger will result in Nginx remaining available as free and open source without any drawbacks and hidden payments for those requiring fully functional piece of software.

Let's see what follows.

</comment><comment><USER77> Congratulations to nginx. It could be an acqui-hire or it could be a defensive move by F5.

</comment><comment><USER78> Is docker up next? Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER79> Seems to be too early for an April fool's joke :(

</comment><comment><USER80> F5 Networks - never heard of them.

After reading what they do I am not sure whether I should have heard of them.

</comment><comment><USER35> They probably bought nginx because AVI networks has been winning F5s largest customers away one major logo at a time, and are scrambling to compete. F5 already bought a software load balancer in the past and did nothing with it, so they will once again probably do nothing with NGINX and struggle to build something as usual. I replaced f5 with AVI and know of a number of global companies that have done it as well. Interesting times for the ADC space. Bye bye nginx. [https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi...](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190311005876/en/Avi- Networks-Doubles-Revenue-Customer-Base-Legacy)</comment>