The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/ideas/the-hypersane-are-among-us-if-only-we-are-prepared-to-look <comment><USER3> The point of diminishing returns on sanity occurs sooner than almost everyone expects.

Surprised nobody has yet mentioned Douglas Adams' "Wonko the Sane," who built an asylum turned inside out to house the whole world. Many comedians would qualify as this as well.

I know a few people I would consider "hypersane," and you can't have too many of them around because they are immune to the various arbitrages that create need and value for everyone else. They are also very charismatic and hence, contagious. I understand traditionally the cure for hypersanity was either hemlock, or crucifixion.

<comment><USER4> >Surprised nobody has yet mentioned Douglas Adams' "Wonko the Sane," who built an asylum turned inside out to house the whole world. Many comedians would qualify as this as well.

I'm also thinking of the Terry Pratchett concept of being "knurd". On the Discworld, the opposite of being drunk isn't being sober - sober is the middle ground on the drunk/sober/knurd scale. To be knurd is to be so completely aware of everything that one can't really function in normal society.

<comment><USER5> Why would being completely aware of everything not allow one to function in a society if one wanted to?

Does it imply that you can't selectively focus on things?

Right now if I am to do the dishes, I am already aware of thousands other things and concepts and deep truths about reality, and sciences, etc. etc, but I can focus on this one task, it doesn't matter what I am aware of, if I choose to do it I can do it. How would being aware of more things put a dent in that?

If so, then call it for what it is (perhaps "attention deficit disorder"?), but it has nothing to do with the amount of awareness.

<comment><USER6> _> Does it imply that you can't selectively focus on things?_

Yes - the ability to focus on one thing necessarily involves the ability to ignore lots of other things. One of the key traits of autism spectrum disorder is an inability to filter out irrelevant information. Constant awareness of everything is often functionally equivalent to a lack of awareness, because it degrades the signal-to-noise ratio of your perception.

For example, the artist Stephen Wiltshire can draw extraordinarily accurate cityscapes from memory, but often struggles with basic tasks. Being aware of the precise number and arrangement of windows in every building you pass is an active impediment if you're just trying to get to the subway station.

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/autism- artis...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/04/autism-artist- stephen-wiltshire-cities-genius/)

<comment><USER5> You are talking about autism. Autism is very commonly described as a disease or disorder, disability, etc. How do you compare it to "being most aware", and especially in the context of the term "sane"? It seems that the two are very differnet things that have little to do with each other. "Constant awareness" as you described it is surely not the kind of awareness that they meant when talking about "sanity"? Any regular normal healthy person, if they were being "constantly aware" of everything they already know and can perceive, even though that set of things is much smaller than the set of things available to a highly functioning autist, would already be too much to be able to function. In such a case it is then more of a disorder in focusing, not the question of how less or more aware you are?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> My interpretation of the point the author is trying to make:

The 'hypersane' are those among us who have realized, for better or for worse, that the traditional things that most in a society strive for - <USER2> wealth, social status, conformity to social structures, etc. - aren't really the keys to happiness and that when you "awaken" (and become hypersane, I suppose) you realize that along with those things come stress, anxiety, the rat race, and, well, a pretty boring existence.

I dig it! I expect to see a lot of folks reject this notion outright, because, well, cognitive dissonance. If you've built your life around conforming, it might be tough to hear someone suggest it's all for naught.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER8> > The 'hypersane' are those among us who have realized, for better or for > worse, that the traditional things that most in a society strive for - > material wealth, social status, conformity to social structures, etc. - > aren't really the keys to happiness and that when you "awaken" (and become > hypersane, I suppose) you realize that along with those things come stress, > anxiety, the rat race, and, well, a pretty boring existence.

> I dig it! I expect to see a lot of folks reject this notion outright, > because, well, cognitive dissonance. If you've built your life around > conforming, it might be tough to hear someone suggest it's all for naught.

> Thoughts?

Sounds pretty self-congratulatory, like you think you figured out something most people don't figure out.

In reality, all those "realizations" are so mainstream that they show up in Disney movies--there's nothing nonconformist about realizing any of that. And in reality, the kinds of people who act on those ideas sometimes flee their country and loved ones and live in Russia (Edward Snowden), blow their brains out with a gun (Hunter S. Thompson) or try to strangle themselves with their underwear in a supermax prison (Ted Kaczynski).

<comment><USER9> It's possible to encounter a concept and not emotionally "get it."

It's one thing to hear about something on TV and another entirely to change your entire life.

If it were "gotten" by the masses via Disney shows, we'd all stop chasing it at all.

Social ties and bonds existed before money, achieved via other means.

So yeah we don't all "get it" in the same way. As someone with enough to retire on at 40, money feels pretty pointless to me. Same old cheeseburger or whatever Gates said.

It's what other people gave me for satisfying their goals.

Economic anxiety, a policy pushed by financial planners, is what motivates. Not money.

<comment><USER10> No, even if you realized all that to it's full extent, the fact is we don't get to choose how we live if we plan to live in our current world for very long.

Imagine we lived in a violent brutal world where it was kill or be killed. Even if you realize that killing only brings you stress and unhappiness, you won't last very long if you stop doing it. As soon as you lay down your arms someone will come and bash your head in with a hammer and take what's left of your belongings and family.

You could decide money and the rat race are pointless and decide to just stop pursuing it. And you'll survive... for a time. Then you won't be able to function in society. Won't be able to eat, or have a place to live, effectively the equivalent of having your skull bashed in like in that previous world.

<comment><USER11> Go visit back-to-landers hippies from the early 70s, they lived quasi of-grid for almost 50 years now, all play music everyday, some of them (the youngest) can still ride their horses everyday, and they eat whatever they grow. Poorest people in the US, poorest than some homeless, but they still live really well, and better than most i shall say.

They chose how to live their dreams, did it for ~50 years and still ended up pretty comfortably. If they had the same viewpoint you have, they would probably have lived miserably until an Oxycontin OD.

<comment><USER12> That also means they don't get many of the benefits of modern society, I would think. What do they do when their child becomes a type 1 diabetic? Or goes into shock from an allergic reaction?

<comment><USER13> Same thing that happens to people in New York City who can't afford fast- acting insulin or EpiPen? Your two examples are telling given the current state of pharma business.

<comment><USER12> I hate this meme; and that's what is is nowadays, a meme. There are generics for both EpiPen and fast acting insulin. You can walk into a Walmart and buy R for $25/bottle [1]; it didn't even require a prescription, the last I bought it. Sure, it's not as good as Apidra and the like, but it does work; it just requires a more controlled diet. The generic EpiPen is just over $100 for a 2-pack.

I get it, there's stories every now and then of some person that died because they couldn't afford their insulin (for $275/bottle). And every time I stare at the story wondering why that person decided to kill themself for reason.

I get it that newer insulins should be cheaper, that they're way over priced. But it's disingenuous to pretend there aren't options for people that can't afford them.

[1] [https://www.walmart.com/ip/novolin-r- relion/129783484](https://www.walmart.com/ip/novolin-r-relion/129783484)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article talks about sanity, but doesn't really state what it is. What it describes is essentially just alternative perspectives born out of those rejecting, or rejected by, society. This state has indeed produced profound ideas, but it has also produced even more nonsense ideas. The article makes the classical mistake of the binary: There's the mainstream, and the higher "hypersane". Unfortunately things aren't so black and white. Even black and white plus grey is only one dimension. What this article serves to inspire is pseudoscientific nonsense simply because it is alternative, by pitting all alternatives against mainstream society, without acknowledging that amongst the alternatives, there are some better than others. Unfortunately there's no good heuristic to differentiate between them, when they are already alternative and don't have all that many people researching them.

<comment><USER15> >This state has indeed produced profound ideas, but it has also produced even more nonsense ideas

Can you say with 100% confidence what is profound and what is nonsense in this Universe?

>The article makes the classical mistake of the binary: There's the mainstream, and the higher "hypersane".

The two are extreme points so that we can see the difference, of course, there are all kinds of intermediate states as Diogen was not walking with a lamp during daylight when he was 5.

<comment><USER14> > Can you say with 100% confidence what is profound and what is nonsense in > this Universe?

Given that profundity only makes any sense at all in the context of humans, with a fair degree of confidence (100% is never possible), I believe a reasonable measure is possible. The funny thing about profundity is: It means the advancement of thinking in people. To further add to this, it means advancing society, by extension of advancing its people (Unless you can find exceptions for which humanity does not benefit from cooperation). Advancement of people can be measured, if people agree on criteria. You might even create a measure based on how many different, sometimes competing criteria it advances. One proviso to this is that it is not easy to do so immediately, we usually need to look at the results over time, as it is an empirical measure on society.

Never forget, it's easy to retreat to "Well nothing is absolute, so why bother". The fact that we can create measures that have broad agreement mean we can come up with practical compromises that would essentially guarantee that ideas can never be equal. Yes that does mean that broad agreement will favour society, see the previous paragraph. Also, due to the time issue, broad agreement does change, and it should. So again, not 100% but reverting to that requirement is also not useful. The other dimension in which broad agreement is slippery is, what is the population of people you're asking. This is the edge of where ideas are forged. So even though a wider population may not get broad agreement of something, time will tell.

If there's one final point which I will make which drives home that it is important to have some measure, it is embedded in this saying "We stand atop the shoulders of giants". Without measure, what giants? What ideas can we actually build upon and hope to get something that isn't random chance.

>The two are extreme points so that we can see the difference, of course, there are all kinds of intermediate states as Diogen was not walking with a lamp during daylight when he was 5.

I get that, as I said, the profound has come from this mode of thinking. However, the issue is the framing of the article, it posits that becoming hypersane essentially necessitates being divorced from society in it's entirety. That part is not so well supported. But what this framing does do, is make it seem like anyone who doesn't agree with society has an edge in their thinking (and being, given we seem to be focusing on individual capacity) and should therefore continue with what they are doing. My sense is that this is somewhat orthogonal to success in creating the cutting edge. Clearly accepting everything in society without question can't, but this notion that you must go through madness seems outlandish. The framing seems very good however, to pandering to the various counter-culture desires, and the article does state the author has an upcoming book on the subject.

<comment><USER16> > However, the issue is the framing of the article, it posits that becoming > hypersane essentially necessitates being divorced from society in it's > entirety.

Yes, and it makes it clear it's necessarily so by definition. See, there is this gaussian distribution in nature. Most people are a bit insane, not much, but just enough. Of course the hypersane would be divorced from a society that believes in fairy tales, propagates myths, and is ready to kill or die for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> aeon web write ups feel like an attempt to be super-informative which just .. misses. They always seem to riff on things making a HUGE DEAL about THIS ONE THING which the authors feel WE ALL MISSED and I feel like I am watching a 1960s movie of stoned people.. grooving on the pattern the coffee cup makes on their hand, man.. its all one hole man.. one hole, the hole is not the cup, the hole is .. the HANDLE..

is it just me? Am I really too "thick" for what aeon is trying to say?

I hate this. I hate being critical of people doing long reads, but I think of the family of long reads, Aeon is about the _worst_ example.

Jarrod Lanier. Jarod Diamond. Ray Kurzeweil. Rent-a-quote new-age theorists trying to be a psychopomp for the modern age, or philosophers but as self- taught, auto-didact philosophers they didn't learn how to do it very well.. And it shows.

The two line take-away is: care less about material things. Gee.. nobody said that before, 2000+ years ago. Did they?

(I should speak. I can't write for toffee either, but the point is I don't put it out there on Aeon)

<comment><USER18> It isn't just you, the article reads almost exactly like something i'd have conjured up at 15 years old.

It sounds to me like it is designed to massage the egos of disaffected under achievers to make them feel that they might be special; that the day to day humdrum is a result of a war against their special, now dampened, genius. In a world where the masses want to identify as mentally ill and where psychiatrists expand the definition of aberrant mental constructions and outward behaviours it is hardly surprising this might sell some books.

I doubt this book has much to add over Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow et al.

<comment><USER19> I wouldn't put this on the same level as an increase in mental illness cases in recent times. The scientists making those definitions know what they're doing. This article seems to just be... rambling, I guess?

<comment><USER20> I identify as hypersane (though I've been using the term hypernormal for a few years).

It's hard to put into words because it's a very personal shift from society. Everyone I've met who is like this has got their own path, approaches life differently, and seems to have shed some unique subset of society, while still carrying some of humanity's codependent ways.

To me, rhe article seemed to be trying to introduce a new idea to the mainstream without a clear grasp on what the idea is. I imagine the author either isn't hypersane and/or doesn't have many collaborators looking at the subject.

<comment><USER18> > I identify as hypersane (though I've been using the term hypernormal for a > few years).

I'm sorry, but this is self indulgence on a new near psychopathic level.

<comment><USER20> Would you be willing to go into more detail as to what you mean?

<comment><USER20> And to clarify, I refer to it as hypernormal because I'm making perfectly normal choices others wouldn't today, but might in the future.

Example: I choose to abandon my taste preferences around things. Since doing this on accident, I enjoy everything I eat, drink, and listen to.

Most people I've talked to about this (everyone except for 1-5 people) have no desire to even try doing it. I have no idea why, but people seem really attached to their preferences.

And yet having such strong preferences limits aspects of the world one can enjoy. I suspect strong preferences is cultural programming gone amok, so I'm raising my child while only asking what their experience is like, instead of asking if they like or dislike something.

Being hypernormal here means choosing to allow myself to experience more things. I think it'll be normal to do these things in the future, but it's non-normative right now, so it's hypernormal compared to current times. Hypernormalcy is going to look weird compared to the status quo, by definition.

<comment><USER18> I'm sorry, but this is just silly

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I agree that this is not a very well-written article in that the terms are not well-defined.

I think the self-transforming mind is a more useful concept: [https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans- th...](https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-theory-of- adult-development-d63f4311b553).

If you can understand your own motivations and see through ideology, you aren't bound by the limited possibilities of the "normal man." Of course, everyone thinks they are further along in development than they actually are. Perhaps the author actually is hypersane... or he is just confused.

</comment><comment><USER14> Now that I've thought about it, I'd like to posit that the Author is not in fact talking about "Hypersanity" as a state of mind, but in fact, just people particularly dedicated to spreading their ideas.

As I was reading the article, I was particularly struck by how it failed to acknowledge the threads of ideas which "normal men" may have, but never advertise particularly far. If we were to cast out the net of all the ideas that normal people have, and then also put it through some kind of heuristic to pick the best ideas, we'd end up with something far better than a "hypersane" person.

Adding to my previous comment, the issue here is the heuristic for picking the best ideas doesn't exist for either normal or alternative thinking, so amongst both sets, we end up with masses of garbage.

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting subject, terrible article. This wouldn't even pass on one of those sites that sells essays for students.

There are people who do well under stress. Army elite units have selection programs to find such people.

<comment><USER23> It felt like a word salad.

</comment></comment><comment> dfeojm-zlib Certainly, there's too much magical thinking, but what the heck is "hypersane?" Is it an absence of conspiracy theories, foolish beliefs, and word-salad? Maybe giving too much attention to the histrionic, the unreasonable and the crazies is part of the problem.

<comment><USER24> Hypersanity isn't well defined but it implies 'saner than normal'. Now sanity has many aspects to it in how it is defined but it clearly isn't meant in a pure 'normative' sense. Viewing infections as caused by germs instead of miasma or evil spirits may be reacted to negatively but it is still sane.

One way to define it would be lacking 'common madness' but even that is arguably a reference problem. There isn't a need for a word for 'not a believer in alchemy'. Defining it is a problem since practically by definition we wouldn't know that it was insane and it wouldn't be recognized as such. If you were to point out said issues there would also likely be push-back and resistance.

I have noticed from being on the autistic spectrum that interviewing protocols and expectations are truly insane - like finding people more trustworthy when they fake emotional expression on demand more effectively and mimic their manners of speech seemingly authentically - when it isn't a job skill. This may be too subjective to 'truly count' and I admit to not understanding people well enough to know for sure.

As mentioned earlier sanity is multifaceted with goals and how to pursue them as aspects. Barring a far worse alternative suicide isn't a rational goal but trying to pursue it with a deadly weapon makes more sense than attempting it by painting X's over your eyes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Based on this article, there is absolutely no way to distinguish "Hypersanity" from just plain old insanity.

Rationality is systematized winning. Unless your actions are benefitting yourself in some significant way, you cannot be considered rational.

However, you cannot determine a person's inner drivers from the outside. Therefore, you cannot tell, based purely on their actions, whether they are winning (where winning is defined purely based on the individual's value system). Therefore, it is impossible to tell if an individual is "hypersane" or insane.

The whole concept is meaningless and sounds like something people would think is "very deep" while stoned.

<comment><USER26> > Based on this article, there is absolutely no way to distinguish > "Hypersanity" from just plain old insanity.

I don't see it this way at all. Plain old insanity can manifest as typical (or atypical) behavior combined with absurd, easily disprovable beliefs. Hypersanity as described leads to atypical behavior and worldview via a reasoned dismissal of widely accepted values, but nothing wrong on it's face or disprovable. For example, insanity is believing you are covered with spiders when you are not, hypersanity would be not feeling the need to disturb a harmless spider that is sitting on your nose.

> Rationality is systematized winning. Unless your actions are benefitting > yourself in some significant way, you cannot be considered rational.

Now I see why you can't distinguish between insanity and hypersanity, you are conflating epistemology and ethics, and they just aren't the same thing. A 'true belief' is one which enables you to achieve some goal, but whether that goal is 'good' or desirable can only be determined when evaluated via some kind of ethical framework. For example, if I decide that the most important thing is to make sure the Canadian flag never touches the ground I will have a very different concept of what 'winning' is compared to someone who's goal is to make as much money as possible, and both of us will have a different concept of winning compared to someone who thinks the most important thing is to teach others that their widely held assumptions are not true or important, such as Diogenes.

<comment><USER25> The article mentions "conversing with beings which cannot be perceived by anyone but the person themselves" as a canonical example of hypersanity.

I find that pretty comparable to "believing you are covered with spiders when you are not".

>you are conflating epistemology and ethics

The interpretation that the idea of hypersanity refers only to ethics is due to you and you alone, as the article states nothing to that end, so please do not make claims about my thought process that amount to "you are wrong because you did not arrive at the same conclusion as me". It is not only disingenuous, but also arrogant and short-sighted.

<comment><USER26> I'm not saying it refers only to ethics, I'm saying that you are conflating ethics and epistemology when you say that sanity==beneficial. Sanity refers to a combination of rationality and accurate enough perceptions of the factual state of the world. Rationality means able to make logical inferences, and when you talk about perceptions of the factual state of the world that is epistemology.

A soldier who jumps on a grenade to save his friend isn't automatically insane, but it's certainly not beneficial to the soldier. You would probably counter by pointing out that 'beneficial' depends on what the soldier thinks is best, but that is ethics!

So to say sanity (which is an epistemological concept) is the same as benefit (which can _only_ be defined with reference to an ethical framework) are the same thing, you are directly conflating two very distinct things.

<comment><USER25> Sanity does not mean necessarily "holding only true beliefs". I believe the issue here is we do not define sanity in the same way.

Given your example of the soldier jumping on a grenade - clearly they value the life of their friend more than their own. Therefore, it is beneficial to them.

<comment><USER26> 'true belief' is a philosophical term used in epistemology.

[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth- pragmatic/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-pragmatic/)

The question is 'what does it mean for something to be true', since Hume and Kant largely demolished any possibility that we can access 'objective truth'.

[http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/panova1.html](http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/panova1.html) "On these grounds, David Hume posits two systems of reality: the first—the reality of perceptions and memory, and the second—the reality of the mind. The mind is able, on the basis of its judgments, to compose a picture of the Universe in spite of the fact that it never perceives all its parts. But as the "first" and also the "second" system of reality exist only in our sense experience, they do not say anything certain about the nature of the external world, the existence of which even remains problematic."

Regarding "true beliefs", you would probably agree with William James who held that "truth be defined in terms of utility", in other words, a belief is 'true' in so far as it is useful in accomplishing things, and another belief would be more true if it is more useful to accomplish that thing.

As for the soldier, you are missing the point. Different people can disagree on what 'beneficial' means without either being wrong. What is 'beneficial for a person' basically means the same thing as 'good for a person', and there is no objective way to decide what is 'good'. Any time you say something is 'good' or something is 'better' than something else, you are assuming some kind of ethical framework.

<comment><USER25> I never said that 'good' was an objective measure. Quite the opposite, in fact. I quite explicitly said that rationality is about acting toward achieving what is 'good' for oneself.

<comment><USER26> I wonder whether you are reading my comments with an open mind, or just trying to find something you can disagree with. I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm trying to give you a framework to understand your own opinion.

When you say sanity=success, you are expressing something that is purely an opinion, and can never be anything more than an opinion, based on what you think success is, and your belief that in order to succeed according to your personal definition people have to be sane, or that sanity is just the same thing as being able to achieve your goals.

\- What if I feel very guilty and I think I deserve to suffer? I'm sure you're already getting ready to type "if suffering is your goal that just means you are succeeding at suffering!" Fine.

\- What if you feel like you can't go on, so you kill yourself? Are you sane because you are succeeding at killing yourself? Maybe so.

\- What if my goal is to go temporarily insane to see what that is like? Then you are claiming that I'm only sane if I'm insane... It gets worse though, because what if I fail to go insane, even though it's what I put all my effort into every day? No matter what I just can't make myself insane. Well actually, then I'm not succeeding, so it turns out that by failing to go insane I've succeeded at going insane... which makes me sane.

<comment><USER25> >I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm trying to give you a framework to understand your own opinion.

The fact that you don't seem to comprehend how absurd and arrogant it is that you think you need to help me understand my own opinion (which you continue to misrepresent) is the reason why I am not inclined to do a charitable reading of what you're saying. You seem to think very highly of yourself, to the point where you seem completely unable to conceive that you might have misapprehended the words of others, and assume immediately that anything that seems illogical to you must be the result of others being confused.

While I'm sure you think you're helping me by showering me with your amazing knowledge and clarity of mind, or something along those lines, you're actually just being annoying. Which is why I'm not inclined to read your comments "with an open mind", thank you very much.

>you are expressing something that is purely an opinion, and can never be anything more than an opinion

Yes. Indeed. You are 100% correct about that. You seem to think I believe "sanity=success" to be an objective fact. I do not.

What I believe is "rationality = acting in a manner one believes they will further their own success, however they define their own success", and that rationality requires sanity. When I state this, I am not stating it to be objective fact. I am making it clear where I stand. If you disagree with me on these premises, well, that's that. We disagree, and that's OK. The rest of my argument stands on the premises that rationality = taking decisions that one believes will further one's own success, and that rationality -> sanity (and therefore insanity implies irrationality, but one can be sane and irrational).

Your example about temporary insanity is actually interesting, because it reveals exactly what you have misapprehended.

>What if my goal is to go temporarily insane to see what that is like? Then you are claiming that I'm only sane if I'm insane...

You seem to think I am saying that you are only rational while you are succeeding, but that's not it. I am claiming you are rational _if you act in a way you believe will lead to you succeeding_. Or, in other terms, if you strive to act in ways that you believe will maximize your own "success" metric - or "utility", if you will.

So if your ultimate goal is to go insane (and going insane will not interfere with any other goals which are more important than going insane), if you are doing things you believe will make yourself insane, you are rational.

However, once you make yourself insane, you will, by virtue of the fact that insanity implies irrationality, not be rational anymore.

Failing to go insane does not mean you are irrational, just as someone whose greatest goal is to become rich does not become irrational simply by failing to become rich, as long as they keep trying to become rich while becoming rich is their goal (or "increases their utility").

If I believed what you seem to think I believe, I'd have to believe that every single person who makes a resolution to achieve some goal is insane as long as the goal has not been achieved.

<comment><USER26> > I am claiming you are rational if you act in a way you believe will lead to > you succeeding

This is worse than what you were saying before. Even irrational people believe they are acting in a way that will lead to success, why would someone ever act in a way they believe will fail to work? There has to be some kind of external test of whether it is 'reasonable' for the person to believe that the way they are acting will work, right?

I mean lots of people do things like making hats out of aluminum foil to prevent the CIA from reading their thoughts, and they believe it works, but I don't think you can say they are acting rationally by any definition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A Man that steps aside from the World, and hath leisure to observe it without Interest or Design, thinks all Mankind as mad as they think him. – Lord Halifax (1633-95)

</comment><comment><USER28> An R.D. Laing story happened to be discussed here the other day: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20601466](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20601466)

</comment><comment><USER29> Reminds me of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management_theory) for some reason (not that I necessarily subscribe to either of these "theories" in any particular form).

</comment><comment><USER30> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism)

</comment><comment><USER31> Not sure I would call it hypersanity (as people said, it is a bit self- congratulatory), but I think it is closely related to the "Jester" archetype, which I kinda like (and hacker - probably Wizard in terms of archetypes - mentality is close to it).

The Jester is a free thinker, who ultimately doesn't want to be encumbered by thinking about how his own thoughts or observations affect other people. In order to do that, he makes an implicit deal with the society. He rejects power or authority, and therefore, he is not going to be a threat for powers at be, whoever that is.

This can be made clear by, for example, wearing a funny costume all the time, therefore the image. In exchange for this postulated harmlessness, the Jester gains access to information and also ability to speak freely with powers at be. Of course the latter is also limited, his free speech cannot be used to undermine the authority, because then he would actually had a real power.

Therefore, Jester often uses non-serious, funny manner of speaking about things. Being laughed at by the unprivileged (while making witty and true observations) is a part of his strategy. It is also beneficial for the powerful (and sometimes part of the deal, in fact origin of the term "court jester"), because they get to pick his brain while not being threatened by him or his motives.

Some examples of Jesters in our society: John Oliver, John Stewart, Richard Feynman. But they are at every place (in programming, the most obvious celebrity examples are Erik Meijer and Steve Yegge). Look around, I am sure you will find people who are deliberate in attempt not to look too seriously, and you will probably have a Jester on your hands.

Some Jesters still decide to actually get power, but it is very risky, because the whole freethinking schtick relies on general belief that the Jester is harmless. (There is also an occasional literary trope where a Jester temporarily and discreetly uses his privilege to influence the world as a force of good.) These are, strictly speaking, not true to the archetype, they just mimic it, so let's call them "Mimes". A good example is Boris Johnson, who is consistently trying to look harmless, but in actuality is interested in power.

</comment><comment><USER32> There are two main elements to sanity: having a rational and sound interpretation of reality, and acting in a way which rationally benefit's ones interests.

I think hypersanity would constitute not only a hyper-rational worldview, and to reconcile common cognitive dissonance, but also the ability to integrate that awareness into better self-preserving behaviour (to improve ones safety or efficacy), rather than to respond with depression, terror, self-ostracism, etc.

</comment><comment><USER33> Jane Goodall has created quite a bunch of problems for Africans and I certainly won't class her as "hypersane".

</comment><comment><USER34> Sanity is the ability to correctly perceive what is real. Hypersanity, then, is a nonsense term used to sell books.

<comment><USER35> I would say this article is making the case that sanity is the ability to correctly perceive what society conceives as real, while hypersanity is the ability to correctly perceive things outside of societies norms.

<comment><USER36> That leads to the idea that society and the sane people within it cannot distinguish between the insane and the hypersane.

<comment><USER37> As illustrated by a lot of angry comments by those who feel threatened by perceived criticism of their devotion to societal norms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This concept seems unhelpfully reductive and transparently targeted at people who feel a need for self-congratulation on account of being alienated by the "normal" people, although alienation is paradoxically also portrayed as one of the markers of being painfully ordinary.

      "Many 'normal' people suffer from not being hypersane:
       they have a restricted worldview, confused priorities,
       and are wracked by stress, anxiety and self-deception.
       [...] In contrast, hypersane people are calm, contained
       and constructive. It is not just that the 'sane' are
       irrational but that they lack scope and range, [...]"

All of these things are orthogonal traits and can occur in an individual in any combination. For example, I would categorize myself as having a moderately open worldview, mostly straight priorities, not wracked by stress and anxiety, moderate to severe self-deception, calm, contained, and mostly constructive. So which one am I? A barely conscious pleb or an advanced rational intelligence?

It seems to me these kinds of characterizations are really the product of people trying to build a framework that appreciates their (subjectively underappreciated) positive traits. It's obviously not wrong to celebrate those traits, especially when confronted with their opposites so publicly on a daily basis, but the problem arises when we're trying to bundle those traits up under a buzzword package name. People are very diverse, and their traits and behaviors develop over time.

I allege that it is more helpful to look at the positively connotated traits mentioned here in isolation, and work on improving aspects of ourselves in a targeted manner, as opposed to subscribing to a blanket identity (in this case _hypersanity_ , which is ultimately meaningless). There needs to be less emphasis on "what identity am I innately" and more emphasis on "what properties do I like about myself and which ones do I want to improve". The difference here is not only one of nuance and constructiveness, but also one of fundamental outlook.

<comment><USER37> I'm not agreeing or disagreeing but I feel like you should read some of the books mentioned above and ponder a little more because I feel like you missed something.

<comment><USER38> That's a very generic dismissal. Are you saying that I can't contribute to the discussion because I'm ill-informed or because I failed to grasp the significance of the concept? Could you be more specific about what it is that I'm missing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Hypersane sounds a little smug, but it feels close to something.

Like, there seems to be a difference between how smart a person is, and being [effective? rational? non-reactive? introspective?].

It feels like there's a spectrum of to which extent people are programmed by, and are reacting to, their environment. A spectrum that might be separate from how smart they are. Give them a text-book or an IQ-test and they'll do great, give them the news and they'll ineffectually berate and hate each-other, and so on.

So while a sane person might have a common social programming, an insane persons programming would be corrupted/deviant.

And a "hypersane" person would be someone who is more able to see their own (and others) programming, and to a greater extent be able to opt-out of some of it?

Maybe there are better words for it.

<comment><USER40> May be the Unsane ? :). Seriously, there is already a name for it.

"The name that can be named is not the eternal name."

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> This strikes me as a concept designed to cater to those willing to place themselves above the fray.

As in "I am not crazy or asocial, I am only being hypersane".

In other words, it's just another way to rationalize the lack of empathy and the will to diss any efforts to correct it.

</comment><comment><USER42> I feel like there are a lot more layers to this that aren't discussed. I think it's a lot like enlightenment, in that there are sometimes considered different levels. Some can be comforting (money isn't everything), and some very sane thoughts are very disturbing (is humanity's nature to destroy itself?)

It seems like one of the SV buzz phrases is "fake it till you make it"/"be insanely optimistic and project that excitement". And that rarely comes from a place of sanity, but it can still work too.

Being sane and self-aware can be great, but I think it's overrated in terms of creating happiness.

</comment><comment><USER43> I read Lang's bird of paradise when I was a kid and was thoroughly wowed by the fact it was so deep I couldn't understand it. When I grew up I realised long obscure words used to conceal self-indulgent ramblings wasn't a sign of anything good. I can't find an extract of meat of the book, can anyone else?

As someone who also has had, and likely always will have mental health problems, anyone who glorifies that which is fundamentally an illness deserves a good kicking. It's miserable, destructive, isolating and no less a disease than, say, cancer.

<comment><USER44> I believe that for some philosophical insight to be truly profound, you need to be able to state it in a manner that is completely unambiguous. It is easy to make yourself sound smart by allowing the listener to "fill in the gaps" with their own interpretation, but it doesn't really contribute anything meaningful.

<comment><USER45> Language does not allow for complete unambiguity. Any sort of communication requires context (eg. agreeing on a similar meaning to the words we write/speak). Any difference in context will derive in differences in meaning. We can never not "fill in the gaps". Listening or reading are exercises in translation and interpretation of meaning, which implies always having to fill in the gaps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Interesting concept. Sounds more like an astute sense of critical thinking. Would a machine (i.e. AI) with vast knowledge, driven solely by cold facts and results be considered hypersane?

</comment><comment> dynamite-ready Might be a bit of a tangent, but I was looking at the names referenced to support the article. Temple Grandin, Jung, Jane Goodall, etc...

While I have my doubts about the validity of MBTI testing, I Googled the names, and each of those people appear to tend towards *NFJ types (most likely INFJ).

Not sure if that means anything, just thought it was a fun observation.

</comment><comment><USER47> This is a meaningless article. Define hypersanity or shut up. Don't tell me what hypersane people do. Tell me what it is or else the word is an entirely subjective and therefore useless distinction.

You can select any arbitrary set of behaviors and pin a label on it. That doesn't make the label meaningful or useful.

</comment><comment><USER48> "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." \- Krishnamurti

</comment><comment><USER49> This seems perhaps over stated and the second half is extremely elitist in its phrasing. I think my favorite version of a character like this is Wonko the Sane from HHG who lives 'Outside the Asylum.'

</comment><comment><USER50> When I think about hypersane people, what come to my mind are: Josha Bach, Frans de Waal, Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race), and, a non-human, fictional character: Mr. Spock.

</comment><comment><USER51> For all that, the author does not provide a definition of hypersanity by which an individual may be judged to be or not be hypersane. His examples of hypersane individuals are questionable. Nelson Mandela ordered the torture and murder of political enemies and their families, including teenage children. Tenzin Gyatso is a deposed theocratic dictator whose subjects toiled under abject serfdom before his exile. Jane Goodall is guilty of the admittedly minor sin of being a plagiarist.

It's not hard to win an argument that all of those people had a more positive effect on the world and on history than negative, and I would agree with you, but I believe it is an error to put them on a pedestal as examples of some sort of transcendental rationality.

<comment><USER20> Who said transcendental rationality had to be something that completely aligned with sustainably contributing to life or honesty?

He didn't make the word. I you don't like it, maybe propose a different one to describe people who intentionally shed the teachings from society?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is Alan Watts video on the topic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4wa0tSBdOU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4wa0tSBdOU)

</comment><comment> the-peter "It's not really a measure of mental health to be well-adjusted in a society that's very sick." -The OA

</comment><comment><USER52> Seems like myth dressed up as pop science.

But we basically live in an insane world, and navigate it only by denialism, tunnel vision, ignorance, or distraction.

If we were to actualize knowledge of the massive destruction of the natural world and the insanity of the path of capitalism, it would make someone crazy by the definition of the masses.

Imagine someone screaming at the top of their lungs about the forthcoming destruction of the world and the evils of our economic structure, like some stark raving mad lunatic man of religion pounding a book.

Well, sensible people will turn their head and start talking about football, traffic, money, or a tv show.

Huxley was right, in the end.

<comment><USER53> We cannot destroy natural world. We can only change it. Just like cyanobacteria did. Was that event any less natural? I take an extreme(?) view that humans are a product and a part of nature, so whatever we do is still natural. It may affect other parts of the nature by a different degree, it may make out living more or less comfortable, but it is still natural.

<comment><USER52> Right, so there is no such thing as complex form, and you'd be juuuust fine with living in a small bubble on an airless earth.

Your reductionism ad absurdum is not useful on any level of practical discussion.

Why, by your nihilistic logic I can murder you and burn the body, and that's absolutely fine by your line of thinking. I'm not destroying any atoms, dear judge, all the atoms he was composed of are still there. There is no such thing as a complex form. There is no he. He was atoms, and those atoms still exist.

"Disruptors" I'm sure love these arguments, because it absolves them of any latent subconscious guilt that they may have destroyed something better than what they disrupted it into.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> _Feeling_ hypersane and _being_ hypersane is not the same thing. I guess drug users can tell more about this.

</comment><comment><USER55> Is it anything like this? [https://ebookoflove.com](https://ebookoflove.com)

</comment><comment><USER15> >But what if there were another route to hypersanity

Em, there are many, including Zen, Yoga, and Mysticism.

<comment><USER56> These do not help everybody. For many people (including many of those who practice it and even those who "believe in" spirituality) yoga is nothing but a kind of physical exercise. As for mysticism - trying to practice it seems more prone to make you insane than hypersane, it's not for everybody. As for Zen - many people will probably just fail to get it, get bored and give up trying at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> It's a canonical fact that one of The Joker's super powers is hypersanity.

<comment><USER58> You actually bring up what I think is an interesting point.

People automatically attribute virtue and goodness to the idea of sanity. The more sane someone is, the more rational and, therefore, the better decisions they will make.

But what if a higher level of "sanity" leads to actions that are ultimately bad for those who are less sane? They could perceive the world exactly how it is and conclude that destroying that world is the best course of action. How does one differentiates this behavior from actual insanity? It makes sense that one could tell whether someone isn't sane, since someone who is insane probably wouldn't have an experience consistent with other people, but hypersane bad guy seems difficult to accurately assess; they might be sane overall, but be totally insane in one particular facet, or perhaps not at all.

<comment><USER57> There's a book called "The Killing Star" where humanity is wiped out by an alien species because "Why take a risk?" That's a hyper rational position.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> One of my hobbies is comparing and contrasting apparent synonyms and trying to discern the contours of thought through language usage.

This made me want to muddle around in the middle ground between _rational_ and _sane_. Immediately at hand we have the 'human being' use case; when do we call humans 'rational' and when do we call them 'sane'?

Similarly we can ask what sorts of non-human things do we call sane and which do we call rational.

Rationality in humans appears to be quite temporal, while sanity moves much more slowly. A person can be rational one second and irrational the next, then 'get over it' thereby becoming rational again. Whereas generally we speak of sanity 'slowly slipping away'.

The outcomes generated also seem to have an effect on which words we use. When the outcomes behind events seem outsized relative to proceedings, we might call the whole thing 'insane'. Whereas 'irrational' seems to refer more to smaller-scoped outcomes, the operative aspect simply being that they're intransigent to ordinary reasoning.

As such, 'hypersane' seems to be a similar quality of sanity, and on a continuum you might put 'insane' at the far left, followed by 'irrational' then 'rational', then perhaps 'hyper-rational', followed by 'hypersane'.

What does this leave out? Could someone be hypersane and irrational at the same time? I don't think that's the intended understanding of the hypersane concept. In fact, I would venture a definition of hypersane to be someone whose 'irrationalities' are actually expressions of a more universal rationality. When Diogenes did seemingly irrational things, he was really picking up on broader social themes and dynamics and acting in ways that would confound and amaze rather than merely annoy and hinder. Diogenes' self- expressions might be more or less rational at any given time, but that he had a finger on the pulse of ancient Greek culture is undeniable, so he's eminently distinguishable from a 'mere' madman.

Whereas someone who is insane's irrational expressions are expressions of _individual_ rationality, hopelessly entangled with the individual's own personal foibles.

So what is sanity, if rationalism captures the idea of 'self-expression being intelligible to others'? Even a madman is going to have prescient moments, perhaps they abound in them, as far from the mainstream they are. Perhaps it's the 'capacity of output' that makes up the difference. Terry A. Davis' life, may he rest in peace, was made infinitely better by his masters-level education and programming skills. They gave him a form of agency and ability to fascinate and participate in society that the guy in the red outfit that I pass by frequently on my way to and from work doesn't seem to have.</comment>


Thoughts on the Systemd Root Exploit - <AUTHOR> https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/thoughts_on_the_systemd_root_exploit <comment><USER2> So he closes with

> Unfortunately, the lock-in they're creating will deprive people of the > ability to vote with their feet and switch to better alternatives.

This might sound like a dumb question, and I'm not saying I agree with him, but if I did, I'd vote with my feet by... what? Don't most distros use it now? I'm genuinely curious if this is a practical option for me, though I'm not likely to do it.

<comment><USER3> FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Illumos, etc. Chances are, you don't even need to tie yourself to the Linux kernel. Lots of OSes out there that don't inflict their users with systemd.

<comment><USER4> If you don't like systemd due to it being a lock-in, why on earth would you go with the BSD's who are all lock-in's with their respective implementations of lower-level plumbing which systemd is trying to standardize across Linux ?

<comment><USER3> The BSDs have far less lock-in with the default components than Linux distributions usually do. For example, I dislike the default syslog daemon, so, I disabled the default, and used my own. This involved adding two lines to /etc/rc.conf --

        syslog_ng_enable="YES"
        syslogd_enable="NO"

and that was it. Unlike systemd's way of doing it, the default syslog facility isn't started at all, doesn't run, period. Pretty much all the other low level services -- crond, dhcpd, ntpd, etc -- are the same way. This is one of the many failings as to how systemd operates. One should have reasonable defaults, but at the same time, if the defaults don't work, it should be easy to change them.

<comment><USER4> Well, journald is pretty much the one component of systemd that is very difficult to replace, but even so you can easily forward to another syslog daemon of your choice.

As for the rest, it's very much the same as with the BSD's, they all support their own versions of low level components and only them, and these can be changed by the user with compatible tools of their choice.

<comment><USER5> Forwarding to another process still means that if Journald goes belly up, the logging just died...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _systemd was using a magic value (-1) to represent an invalid mode_t value_

This is not a correct description of what happened, note. Kay Sievers originally used 0 to represent an invalid value. Lennart Poettering changed this to -1, because 0 is clearly not an invalid value. The bug resulted because _he missed changing one of the comparison-against-zero validity checks_.

See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13472516](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13472516)

<comment><USER7> > The bug resulted because he missed changing one of the comparison-against- > zero validity checks.

Yes, that's exactly the kind of mistake that happens when you use magic values to represent invalid values instead of distinct types.

<comment><USER6> You still have not got it right. This is an _old_ class of problem, documented since the 1960s. It's _nothing to do with types_. It's _nothing to do with what language one uses_ (since it has been documented in languages as diverse as RPG and Pascal). It's the use of unexplained constant literals.

M. Poettering was in fact doing the right thing and _correcting the problem_ , replacing the unexplained constant literals written by M. Sievers ("mode > 0") with named constants ("mode != MODE_INVALID"). It is an example of the problem, one of whose symptoms is the question "Well which of these is the specific constant and which just happens to also be that number?", that M. Poettering missed a "mode > 0" that also needed replacing.

Make no mistake. M. Poettering was actually applying the long-time well- understood fix for this.

Here's Ted Holt talking about unexplained constant literals in RPG 4:

* [https://www.itjungle.com/2004/08/18/fhg081804-story01/](https://www.itjungle.com/2004/08/18/fhg081804-story01/)

This same problem, and the approach of turning unexplained literals into named constants to improve maintainability, is explained all over the place, from William Allan Wulf's _Fundamental structures of computer science_ published in 1983, through Niklaus Wirth in the 1975 _Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Reliable Software_ and Clark and Horning in a SIGPLAN paper in September 1973, to several of Gary Cornell's books on QuickBASIC and Visual BASIC in the 1990s.

This is not a new thing, not language-specific, (clearly!) not addressed by changing language, nor addressed by types.

<comment><USER8> It actually has a lot to do with types; while it can occur in a few other situations, the two biggest places it occurs:

(1) Where ints (or some other enumerable value unrelated to the problem domain) are used in place of self-describing enumerations because of lack of type system support for enums.

(2) When values within the domain of a type but outside of the domain that would otherwise be generated are used to signal special situations because of lack of type system support for sum types.

(The main other place that they occur is with "breakpoints" within a domain of a normal type, but even these are arguably a workaround for the absence of the combination of sum types and range-constrained types.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _sigh_ I lost track of the kernel mitigation for the exploit. I'll go take care of it (i.e., I just wrote the patch and I'll get it reviewed).

</comment><comment><USER10> Sincere question without picking a side:

Is Systemd being coded with the same level of 'care' as OpenSSL was before being pwned?

<comment><USER11> Not at all. OpenSSL was suffering from a lack of effort/funding and a desire not to 'break' anything. Systemd has plenty of effort and breaks everything, but a lack of philosophy, a lack of introspection. It's ignoring plenty of hard lessons about security practice and being very Microsoft-y. Massive technical debt which we will collectively pay for for a decade or more.

<comment><USER12> The buggy TLS heartbeat extension was new code I think though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > systemd was using a magic value (-1) to represent an invalid mode_t value, > and C's type system did not prevent passing it to the mode argument of open

The open syscall should reject unrecognized flags in the mode argument (EINVAL), rather than just truncating down to recognized flags. That would also prevent this specific problem with the sentinel value being used on accident.

<comment><USER6> In the actual open and openat system calls, the mode parameter is a 16-bit unsigned integer. There are 12 permissions bits and 4 file type bits. There _are no_ "unrecognized flags". All 16 bits have meaning.

* [http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/include/uapi/linux/stat...](http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/include/uapi/linux/stat.h#L5)

* [http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/include/linux/types.h#L...](http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/include/linux/types.h#L18)

<comment><USER13> Bits above 1<<11 (the non-permission bits) are _not_ valid arguments to open(2), so I don't see what your point is. In this context, they are invalid. open(2) should reject values with bits outside of 07777 (== 0x0fff) set, including (mode_t)-1 (== 0xffff).

Here is the specific place where Linux truncates the bogus mode, instead of rejecting it: [http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/fs/open.c#L906](http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/fs/open.c#L906)

(S_IALLUGO defined here: [http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/include/linux/stat.h#L9](http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/include/linux/stat.h#L9) )

This change would fix this class of issue:

        --- a/fs/open.c
        +++ b/fs/open.c
        @@ -889,9 +889,11 @@ static inline int build_open_flags(int flags, umode_t mode, struct open_flags *o
                int lookup_flags = 0;
                int acc_mode = ACC_MODE(flags);

        -       if (flags & (O_CREAT | __O_TMPFILE))
        +       if (flags & (O_CREAT | __O_TMPFILE)) {
        +               if ((mode & ~S_IALLUGO) != 0)
        +                       return -EINVAL;
                        op->mode = (mode & S_IALLUGO) | S_IFREG;
        -       else
        +       } else
                        op->mode = 0;

                /* Must never be set by userspace */

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > _They have even replaced DNS with a dbus-based protocol, which they > "strongly recommend" applications use instead of DNS._

This seems inaccurate. The phrase "strongly recommend" appears once in the manpage, where it is strongly recommended that you use _either_ the standard libc resolver API, with libnss_resolve, or the D-Bus API.

Applications _should_ be using the libc resolver API instead of implementing DNS themselves. There are some applications like Chrome that implement DNS themselves because they care very much about DNS; those applications presumably know how to do all the things systemd-resolved does. Everyone else should get name resolution functionality from libc. That's what you've been supposed to do for decades, and it's a standard UNIX interface. That standard interface supports things like LLMNR that you don't get if you implement DNS yourself.

Unfortunately, the standard UNIX interface is synchronous, which is why libraries like ares or adns exist. If you want to use such a library, you can point it at 127.0.0.53, but you still have the limitations of what can be expressed in DNS. (And you're still using a nonstandard API to speak to libares or libadns.) No API exists that is standard, async, _and_ does everything that libc getaddrinfo() is capable of doing. So systemd built one.

That's pretty standard behavior for systemd: implement compatibility interfaces where they exist, recommend them if they're good (systemd explicitly recommends /etc/fstab over writing native mount units, because /etc/fstab is a perfectly good format), implement them anyway if they're not, and write a better API, based on D-Bus, when needed. The latter bit not going through a multi-implementer standards committee isn't great, but it's nowhere near as bad as presented.

Anyway, this is completely irrelevant to the rest of the analysis, which seems absolutely correct, and I'm not sure why the author included this parting shot.

<comment><USER15> Reading the man page it is actually recommending systemd-resolved over other options.

It says:

\- option 1 (recommended): use systemd-resolved API.

\- option 2: use glibc API with a glibc NSS module to resolve host names via systemd-resolved.

\- option 3 (not recommended): local DNS stub listener on loopback to connect direct request to systemd-resolved.

Author included this part to illustrate how the real issue is that systemd is an unprecedented lock-in. Honestly an init process implementing a DNS resolver? Where is my kitchen sink ?

<comment><USER16> > Honestly an init process implementing a DNS resolver?

Systemd is a project that manages a large number of low-level services and programs that work together to try to help create a cohesive operating system.

Systemd is also the name of a init program.

These have the same name, but are not the same thing.

Systemd init process does not provide any DNS resolver features. Systemd- resolved, however, does.

<comment><USER15> Systemd is an init system, don't take my word for it[1], I seriously doubt there is any need to add a DNS resolver to an init system, especially one that reintroduced vulnerabilities.

This "project" you are talking about is this very init system + feature creep + mission creep + software bloat + interlocked dependencies to force adoption + time.

[1]: [http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html](http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html)

<comment><USER17> Your reference link is nearly 7 years old. From the current project homepage [0]:

"systemd is a suite of basic building blocks for a Linux system. It provides a system and service manager that runs as PID 1 and starts the rest of the system. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux control groups, maintains mount and automount points, and implements an elaborate transactional dependency- based service control logic. systemd supports SysV and LSB init scripts and works as a replacement for sysvinit. Other parts include a logging daemon, utilities to control basic system configuration like the hostname, date, locale, maintain a list of logged-in users and running containers and virtual machines, system accounts, runtime directories and settings, and daemons to manage simple network configuration, network time synchronization, log forwarding, and name resolution."

[0] [https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/](https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Oh great another whine-about-systemd rant.

</comment><comment><USER19> Everytime I see someone mention rust or c++ I stop reading. Might as well mention COBOL or FORTRAN in the list of 'good' languages, language used is irrelevant.

Anyway it is a local exploit on an old release, not a good thing but containable.

<comment><USER20> Apparently relevant reading from the article:

> A language with a better type system, such as Rust or C++ (which has > std::optional) can help prevent this kind of error.

> That said, this is not about programming languages.

> Rewriting systemd in a safer language would not transform it into quality > software, ...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to report GDPR violations? - <AUTHOR> Many sites started to throw consent forms in the users way but most of them are far from being GDPR compliant. What is the best way to report offenders / force them to take data protection seriously? <comment><USER2> I wish there was an easier way, but it differs per country:

[https://blog.varonis.com/gdpr-data-protection-authority- supe...](https://blog.varonis.com/gdpr-data-protection-authority-supervisory- listing/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this, I never seen it once mentioned anywhere.

The thing is most sites seem to acknowledge the existence of GDPR but barely any makes an effort to be compliant. And I don't mean data requests and deletes, but basic things like forgoing opt-out abuse. Why annoy the users with popups if they are not going to be compliant anyway? It is a lukewarm cya attempt at best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yikes. Sounds like kind of a scummy thing to be doing to well-meaning sites.</comment>


PHP application server with Windows support - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/1y5s1y/php_application_server_with_windows_support exicting to use this application on Windows. Sound really great to test the performence. <comment><AUTHOR> Really exicting to use this application on Windows. Sound really great to test the performence.</comment>


Couchbase launches a fully managed database service - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/04/couchbase-launches-a-fully-managed-database-service/ <comment><USER2> This could be huge. Has anyone played with it yet?</comment>


Is this summary of the Google/China incident useful? How could it be more so? - <AUTHOR> http://elzr.com/posts/google-vs-china

<comment><USER2> This is pretty cool. I remember some of my friends a year ago talking about how you _might_ be able to automatically come to the group consensus of what is likely 'most true' by looking at quotes, search engine results, etc like this.

Not the easiest way to read something, due to the visual aspect, but it is a good way to see a lot happening at once. I'd have the supporting quotes fold out from the bottom of the statement myself.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like it. How did you create it? I think this could be a useful way to pick up a new topic in the news.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very impressive. Can't believe no-one has thought of this before. More please.</comment>


Managed services killed DevOps - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/07/devops-is-dead-long-live-devops/ <comment><USER3> Software dev who just switched to devops recently. Good luck to whoever will manage an AWS infrastructure on his spare time between developing one feature and another. Seriously, the cloud is not shifting roles. Actually, the more everything gets moved to AWS, GCloud, etc.. and the more the level of abstraction will grow - the more you will need specialised devops IMHO.

Overall, disappointing article.

<comment><USER4>
        > Good luck to whoever will manage an AWS infrastructure
        > on his spare time between developing one feature and
        > another.

The point of the article is that this work will be outsourced to companies that specialize in DevOps, that _most_ companies that develop software will not need the specialist in-house.

(edit: Think about $MEGA_RETAIL_CORP. Their main-line of business is not software development, but retailing. Despite being a large company with deep pockets, they have difficulty recruiting the best and the brightest in the DevOps world to come and work with them. When $TURNKEY_DEVOPS_CORP approaches them and offers their devops as a service product, $META_RETAIL_CORP eagerly signs up.)

<comment><USER5> They're just moving the turtle lower. Now we'll have horror stories about devops outsourcing just like we have those about dev outsourcing :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The commentary here is missing the point. The article is about _managed services_ , not EC2, and yes, it is killing devops. My team just built a very successful ecommerce company doing respectable traffic volume with zero ops or devops.

We built it on Google App Engine. If you don't like GAE there are other PaaS providers that offer something similar. Developer life on a PaaS consists of building features day in and day out. It's not mucking with Docker, Chef, Ansible, Salt, Puppet, BOSH, apt, yum, or any other low-level systems management tools. This stuff doesn't even waste space in my brain[1]. Instead of learning this stuff, my team has been been learning about the business needs of our customers and building them out in code.

I plan never to hire a devops team. Running servers is like writing assembly language; appropriate only for companies with very specialized needs.

[1] Not quite true - I used to work on the BOSH team. It's a great tool for deploying CloudFoundry. But you shouldn't use BOSH, you should use CF, hosted by someone else.

<comment><USER7> I recently interviewed a PHP dev who asked me why we even have backend developers. From his perspective, we could just use Parse and it would do all the "magic" of the backend.

Then Parse shut down.

I think the lesson here is, you should never trust your core product to a third party. Also, when you use cookie-cutter services, you really limit the kind of things you can do, and vendor lock-in really, really limits your options in the long run.

<comment><USER6> I have heard this repeated many times and it's nonsense for two reasons:

First, it isn't actually true: Third-party managed services (say, exotic databases) are a mere network hop away. If you _really_ had to you could call out to your own self-managed services in EC2 or whatnot. Even on Google App Engine, which is one of the most restrictive systems, we use a multitude of services running elsewhere in "the cloud". This is occasionally a mild annoyance, but it doesn't significantly alter the value equation.

Second, it's irrelevant: Migrating our application off of GAE would be tough, sure. You can call this "lock-in" if you want, but it ranks somewhere down a distant thousandth after a long list of concerns about my product and how well it is meeting the needs of my customers. Worrying about lock-in is a premature optimization.

<comment><USER7> The typical argument about the superiority of cloud services is that it's more hands-off, but what they don't talk about is how shared resources causes all kinds of new headaches I never had before.

I recently migrated from a dedicated DC to AWS because of business reasons (ie. CAPEX vs OPEX).

Before, my PostgreSQL DBs were always perfectly in sync because they were on a dedicated, private network. Now, I often get large replication delays because the network in EC2 isn't of the same quality I had before, so I've had to spend a lot of dev time working around the delay issue with creative caching solutions.

My point is, there's trade-offs and mostly my calculations show that they're not really worth it, _if you have knowledgable Ops people_. Which, once you grow to a certain size, you should.

<comment><USER6> I think you're misreading the message - _managed services_ doesn't mean EC2. Managed services are things like DynamoDB, ElasticBeanstalk, SQS (in the AWS world) or Cloud Datastore and App Engine (in the Google world). If you're building on IaaS like EC2 or GCE, you will need ops people. If you build at a higher level, you don't.

<comment><USER7> If anything my argument holds up because you're putting even more abstraction between you and your systems by using the managed services, which leads to less understanding of how things actually work.

For instance, I went with running PostgreSQL instead of RDS because I have much more control over what's going on in the DB than I would with RDS.

But your point that the managed services don't require ops might be true in the short term, but what happens when something breaks? Or you experience a level of growth that expands past the capabilities of the services you've organized? There's hard practical limits to all the of SaaS offerings - <USER2> latency and throughput - that doesn't really come up in these discussions.

The analogy about it being like assembly programming might be more apt than I originally thought, given how not doing it yourself generally results in slower and poorly optimized solutions, but then "good enough" is often the mantra of the day at a certain scale.

<comment><USER8> Further on the "assembly programming" line of thought: there was a _long_ time where compilers just couldn't match the speed of hand-coded assembly...but that time is almost completely behind us, and probably has been for quite some time.

As management tools mature and automatic, systemic optimizations are developed for SaaS systems, I wonder if the analogy will continue and areas where you need to manage it yourself to eke out performance and flexibility will get fewer and farther between over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> DevOps is dead? Well I guess that means I can finally delete my fat repo of Ansible, Terraform, and Packer configs. Using AWS, GCE and others doesn't get rid of DevOps. You're just managing computers in someone else's data center instead of your own.

<comment><USER10> I agree.

I recently created a private cloud infrastructure on Digital Ocean. It would have been easier and faster (and more polished) if I'd gone with AWS, but then I would know how to use AWS, and would not know how to do these things myself.

Why learn about HAProxy, keepalived, tinc, etc when you've got AWS to handle it all for you?

Answer: Because relying on a service to abstract the inner workings for you is a path to the dark side.

<comment><USER11> Not sure why you're being downvoted. Abstraction is for ease of use, not ignorance as to what's occurring under the hood.

<comment><USER12> No. Abstraction is for higher level thinking. Dev Ops is still young so we are seeing many attempts at providing these abstractions but it is a very large domain to abstract over and thus hard to make a non leaky abstraction.

Given a non leaky abstraction, ignorance of whats under the hood is just fine.

<comment><USER10> What I was trying to say was more along the lines of a 3rd-party service abstracting the work is not a good idea in the long-term.

It is unthinkable right now, but what will happen with Amazon/AWS goes bankrupt and no longer exists? All these AWS Certified Engineers who are not actually devops will suddenly be lost.

On the flipside, if you learn everything from the ground up and then jump on AWS or whatever service is available, you will be in a much better position when the day comes to move away and to something else.

Abstractions in something like programming languages is fine because the language won't simply disappear one day - you'll evolve as a programmer and will be stronger for it.

<comment><USER13> > It is unthinkable right now, but what will happen with Amazon/AWS goes > bankrupt and no longer exists? All these AWS Certified Engineers who are not > actually devops will suddenly be lost.

Or they could just read this document and move to GCP.

[https://cloud.google.com/docs/google-cloud-platform-for- aws-...](https://cloud.google.com/docs/google-cloud-platform-for-aws- professionals)

<comment><USER11> It's all virtualization/containerization/object|relational storage, no matter how you cut it.

Know the fundamentals, and you'll be fine. Everything else is rhinestone marketing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the analogy with QA deserves some credit here. "Testing" as a part of software process has not gone away, but the people who solely did QA are now gone - either evolved into doing both dev and qa; or moved to companies where the older processes still exist.

Testing was more closer to writing-code - so that got absorbed into the dev side faster. Disappearing QA was a you-blink-and-you-miss revolution.

DevOps is a little farther. Several developers are not able to wrap their heads around the deployment systems, the implications of hardware and network etc. But they will. Eventually. Because they are smart people.

I think the message of the article is that people who solely have DevOps expertise, should look to evolve to developing code as well. That way we have smaller, well-knit teams with each member having an additional speciality other than writing code.

<comment><USER15> My current job seems to disagree with you and their point about QA. As far as I've been able to see, the market explicitly for QA Automation is actually growing. The idea of

>Developers are responsible for full test automation and making sure their code works.

Is laughable outside of [insert new sexy startup here], if only due to the difference in mindset.

Granted I'm totally biased as a QA Automation, but the analogy actually removed quite a bit of credence that this article might otherwise have held with me.

<comment><USER16> Idk, QA Automation is growing but that has rapidly replaced TONS of "follow the procedure by hand" type QA specialists. People who knew how to write procedures well and document executing them well are disappearing in droves to 1-2 people who write QA Automation scripts in Selenium or something.

<comment><USER15> Yeah I can definitely see that side of things. The manual aspect of QA is definitely reducing, though I would hesitate to call it entirely dead. I love the fact that I've got experienced manuals who are able to craft well written procedures that I can automate.

There are more and more opportunities for QA Automation with the ability to write those procedures, which I suspect are the ones replacing the manual QA specialists you reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What I have noticed more and more often lately is people who say:

"Yeah, I'm in team X and I do the Devops part"

So we basically have an "ops" person sitting with the devs, and call the team a "devops" team. The devs have still no idea how to deploy their code. The ops have still no idea how the code looks like. But hey everyone feels better.

This is also true for many job offers in the form of "looking for a devops engineer". No, what they are really looking is for an ops person that has to sit in a dev team and do the part no one likes to do. s/He will be lucky if s/he can actually spend 10% of his time producing application code.

<comment><USER18> _No, what they are really looking is for an ops person that has to sit in a dev team and do the part no one likes to do. s /He will be lucky if s/he can actually spend 10% of his time producing application code._

So? What's the problem with this? DevOps generally means someone who uses developer like approaches (e.g. scripting, automation, developing one-off solutions, etc) to solve operational issues. It is a role, and someone has to do it, and I would argue that there are people who love to do this role.

But if someone sought a job in DevOps thinking they'd be producing application code, they only fooled themselves. If someone sees some sort of status issue and forever tries to fight against their role, well that's just detrimental to everyone.

<comment><USER17> If you are solving operational issues, then you are doing ops (regardless of how much is infra-coding), imho.

I always thought of the Devops Engineer as a person who cares about their full stack, both application development and the operation of it, and understands how one affects the other. Something a step further than just infra-coding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The title is a bit click-baity and misleading. DevOps isn't dead it's just becoming centralized.

The rub seems to be that quality managed services are widely available and affordable enough to obviate the need for in-house DevOps.

<comment><USER11> > The rub seems to be that quality managed services are widely available and > affordable enough to obviate the need for in-house DevOps.

I have yet to find developers who are throwing themselves at carrying a pager.

DevOps isn't going away. Its just less relevant in smaller teams. Larger teams are always going to have an ops team.

<comment><USER20> DevOps does not need to carry a pager. DevOps will automate disaster recovery.

<comment><USER11> I'm a devops engineer, and I assure you, I have been on call for the last two years in my current position, attending to application and infrastructure alarms.

All disaster recovery cannot be automated. A sanity check is required before your Elasticsearch or Redis clusters decide to f___ their datastore.

EDIT: Or perhaps RDS is to your liking? We've had our replicas (off the same master) in AWS fail, at which point they would not further replicate. We needed to fail our app over to the master entirely, reduce its workload to not kill the master, terminate all of the replicas, relaunch all of the replicas, and then re-apply the workload back to the new replicas.

<comment><USER21> > All disaster recovery cannot be automated.

See also: [https://github.com/blog/1261-github-availability-this- week](https://github.com/blog/1261-github-availability-this-week)

> _The automated failover of our main production database could be described > as the root cause of both of these downtime events. In each situation in > which that occurred, if any member of our operations team had been asked if > the failover should have been performed, the answer would have been a > resounding no. There are many situations in which automated failover is an > excellent strategy for ensuring the availability of a service. After careful > consideration, we 've determined that ensuring the availability of our > primary production database is not one of these situations. To this end, > we've made changes to our Pacemaker configuration to ensure failover of the > 'active' database role will only occur when initiated by a member of our > operations team._

<comment><USER11> Pinterest as well uses manual intervention:

[https://engineering.pinterest.com/blog/open-sourcing- pintere...](https://engineering.pinterest.com/blog/open-sourcing-pinterest- mysql-management-tools)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Google SRE and Netflix Devops are places where Devops is not a mindset or culture but type of engineer that requires operation and development skills.

The reality is the field is less welcoming of specialized developers. We all have to develop, test, and deploy our code. Call yourself whatever you want but make sure you comfortable doing it all.

<comment><USER23> I've started reading the Google SRE book that was just released, and now I know more about the people I have to work with when the situation arises. Liking it so far :)

[http://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering- Productio...](http://www.amazon.com/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production- Systems-ebook/dp/B01DCPXKZ6?ie=UTF8&ref_=k4w_ss_details_rh)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love that the screenshot is HTML. DevOps is known to be very heavily HTML based work... .

<comment><USER25> In a proportional font. Ew.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> One funny things I noticed about DevOps culture is that it is usually presented as developers should do more ops. I never quite saw it go the other way, encourage existing ops to do more development. Wonder why that is.

<comment><USER27> Once upon a time there were programmers.

Then there were systems programmers and application programmers. Systems programmers wrote operating systems and utilities for them. App programmers wrote apps. There was a lot of crossover.

Then there were operators, systems programmers and application programmers. Operator was a junior position who did physical things (mount tapes, plug in cables) and ran commands to do things on the systems. They usually moved up to being...

Systems administrators, who did some programming in service to the systems, but not not much. The more senior a sysadmin was, the more time they spent programming and the less time they spent doing physical things... unless they wanted to do that.

Sysadmins started to specialize. People who configured switches and routers and talked to telephone companies became "network engineers". People who spent time working on firewalls and security policies and thinking about that became "security engineers". Junior people who read scripts to end users became the helpdesk. And so forth.

Then we noticed that a bunch of people were doing things manually when they should be automated. This was especially bad in places where there were no senior sysadmins or systems programmers. But we did have the internet, and senior sysadmins got together and started writing tools to make their lives easier: infrastructure automation.

You probably know the story from there, but I'll wrap up with one more important point: you know how when writing a business application you need to have a subject matter expert who actually knows what they are doing? Operations is exactly the same way. All the automation in the world won't help you if you don't have someone around who knows what they are doing. Some people can outsource this to "the cloud", but not everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Devops and QA are more alive than ever. The article actually makes that point. It is just that the boundaries between the disciplines are being blurred consequent to the erosion of distinctions between hardware and software, testing and deployment.

It would be more precise to say that the era of the code illiterate sysadmin or QA engineer is coming to an end. So is the era of the developer who didn't understand the basics of operating systems and networking.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is based on the premise that DevOps is a team of people, it's own silo. And that is not what DevOps is about IMHO...

<comment><USER30> I was surprised to see that most of the comments here seem to take DevOps to mean simply Ops. The whole _point_ , the _only_ point, of devops is to not have "write feature, throw it to ops"-processes. I think the latest generation of PaaS can been seen two ways: on one hand, it's like having a great ops- teamt that will handle everything you throw at them (and have set up clear borders for what is "their" responsibility), the other is to say that it's great for devops: with the low level of management needed for cloud infrastructure (compared with setting up your own hardware, choosing and tuning a network storage solution, manage fail-over for databases, making sure to patch ssh/TLS/libc/libz/libtiff/libpng...) means that we get better DevOps: you might prototype in a local docker, but as part of the commit cycle, every dev will run tests, and push out to production, with rolling updates.

I don't know when "DevOps" became so watered down -- I guess it's the same old story as with Lean/Agile: the real win is in changing the business process, and has nothing to do with tooling and consultants: changing processes is actually hard, so no-one does it. But when you've paid out the nose for "educating" your "team" to do agile/devops, you start to claim that your waterfall was built by Toyata. Because you paid for the privilege.

<comment><USER31> To me, containers seem to be a perfect way to have a reasonable contract between Dev and Ops. The Ops team just has to maintain a secure, stable, and performant infrastructure that can run containers, and Devs can put whatever they want in the container, and not have to worry about anything below it.

<comment><USER30> Sure, but now dev has the responsibility for upgrading all those libraries again. Just because your container worked fine 5 years ago, doesn't mean it's a good idea to run the same container in production today. Maybe it parses png images, or handles ssl termination.

Or you could say that ops now has the responsibility to scan all containers for old binary code/bad behaviour, and throw the container back over the fence if they find an issue.

I do agree that containers are a good start on having such a "contract" \-- I'm not sure it's enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> QA is dead because Agile killed it? (quoth the article) I work at a Fortune 10 company and this is just wrong.

Furthermore, leveraging QA in an Agile process is critical to continuously improving our software quality.

<comment><USER33> Exactly. QA's role has definitely shifted (or should shift) toward being involved earlier in the process and helping to define requirements, but it is by no means dead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Ops teams are more useful when they're analyzing data and improving architecture based on the results of their analyses. The ideal ops role is beginning to phase out the "overqualified support engineer" framework and usher in the new idea of being an "infrastructure architect".

To me, this article is more about the architectural/business decision of outsourcing as much as possible to 3rd-party services instead of reinventing the wheel in-house. How many Chef repos have the same stupid passenger cookbook vendored in? How many times have you had to fuck with that cookbook because it broke or something got updated? My websites for [http://psychedeli.ca](http://psychedeli.ca), [http://brother.ly](http://brother.ly), and [http://www.waxpoeticrecords.com](http://www.waxpoeticrecords.com) are hosted on Heroku and, apart from the occasional Redis issue, they've been chugging along quite smoothly. I've had little to no issues with my development and continuous deployment process, which give my apps the same safeguards that I get with work (even more) with no one needed to "watch over" the project...other than me of course.

</comment><comment><USER35> DevOps has never been more popular in the whoishiring thread. I run monthly trends on the postings, and DevOps just entered the top 10 of terms used[1].

[1] [http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring- trends/2016/...](http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring- trends/2016/april.html?compare1=Chef&compare2=Puppet&compare3=Ansible&compare4=DevOps)

</comment><comment><USER36> _" why not simply teach all developers how to utilize the infrastructure tools in the cloud?"_

You need someone to liaise with the Cloud company, set everything up, test it, organize changes, and update the system regularly with new functionality. Even if a Dev had 10 years experience managing infrastructure, they still shouldn't be doing it because _they should be developing products_. If only there were someone whose job it was to manage _Operational_ changes, and liaise with the _Developers_... Hmm.

And by the way, not everything is moving to the Cloud. We've had managed services in one form or another since the early 90's, and the result is always the same: the service provider is blamed for things working shittily and the company brings services back in-house.

And his continual refrain that "QA is dead" \- does this guy understand product development lifecycle? Whether you're designing a brand new product or just bringing out a new version, you _have_ to have QA. Can you imagine a medical device or medical web service being developed without QA, or QC?

Thanks for the troll, TechCrunch.

</comment><comment><USER37> Devops is dying. And the secret weapon is not mentioned in the article (Docker). With Docker and a scheduler (swarm, kubernetes, etc), what are you going to use Chef or Ansible for? Just to install Docker on a Linux instance? Docker is just getting started, and we can already see that they are going to make a lot of tools and companies obsolete.

<comment><USER38> Even with Docker, I don't think that you would prefer to configure the environment yourself rather than use dedicated tools like Chef and Ansible, assuming your environment needs are complex enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> So, DevOps as you (mis)understood it is dead. Long live DevOps as it was meant to be understood.

</comment><comment><USER40> Look, I appreciate what people are trying to say about this stuff, but there's one universal truth that managed services _absolutely cannot_ get around: Cost. As someone that's bootstrapped a couple of businesses from zero, I have had to lean heavily on my ability to work with bare metal. It is an incredibly valuable set of skills that translates literally to more money. Managed services will not kill off DevOps because there will _always always always_ be companies that want to be profitable sooner, or don't have a ton of money to throw at AWS.

Second, this is a really clickbaity article.

</comment><comment><USER41> DevOps != Ops.

You don't have a DevOps guy, or a DevOps team. You have a team that does both development and operations. The less work they have to do (like the reduction of effort with managed services) the better, but it's still work we need to do.

If you call out DevOps as a specific role, they you're not doing DevOps. Just like those practicing "Agile" are likely lacking in actual agility.

</comment><comment><USER42> As someone with the label "Application Developer" who's been having to develop and deploy and learn my company's entire backend without much help other than "oh, here's the username/password for that, here ya go" from my superiors in IT, I don't know what to think of this.

The servers and databases are all managed by my one boss, but I'm basically now responsible for every aspect of my application's lifecycle. While I'm a 1-man team now, I know down the line we're looking to expand and I'm trying to set things up right for when that day comes - proper version control, and an automated way to push updates to my Django app.

I was looking at Docker and the likes, but we're unfortunately running Microsoft SQL Servers and Windows Servers which apparently aren't going to see much support for virtualization/containers til the SQL Server 2016 version comes out. My company is an engineering firm, not tech, so paying for an AWS bucket or me making a case to get the fuck away from Microsoft backend stuff (the headaches I've had with MS SQL already...), etc etc probably isn't high on their to-do list.

Maybe due to the sort of company I work for this article just doesn't apply to me anyway, but it seems like the author assumes any company rolling out software or a service is doing so at the cutting edge and as its primary focus.

I'm not sure my struggle to find a sane way to automate our deployment and updates would be helped too much by literally any of the cloud based services anyway. Even if they gave me a green light to go all-out on whatever service I wanted to use, at the end of the day I'd also have to manage all of those services and their connections to the app as well. I'm trading off some work for another kind, and a lot of these cloud solutions are hardly painless.

</comment><comment><USER43> If you automate sysadmin then you can make the case that sysadmin is dead, not the people who write the automation.

</comment><comment><USER44> Just one thing taken from the article comments:

> HTML used as the screenshot is as horrible as article.

+1

</comment><comment><USER45> _looks around my devops office_

I guess our company didn't get the memo?

</comment><comment><USER46> In my experience developers have had to set up continuous deployment environments. If you design a set of cloud resources for your application in a dev environment, you are the best person to script that deployment into another environment. So the developer of the application ends up having to script the deployment as well. DevOps always seemed like too much communication between team members for too little benefit.</comment>


Ask HN: Best Database in 2019? (SQL / NoSQL) - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Probably Postgres, you can do NoSQL with the json field if you need to</comment>


Megamerger would own 1 out of every 6 daily newspapers in America - <AUTHOR> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/07/newsonomics-its-looking-like-gannett-will-be-acquired-by-gatehouse-creating-a-newspaper-megachain-like-the-u-s-has-never-seen/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR An industry's last attempt at relevance, just before its departure might be bad, but do we really care?

The title sounds like click-bate, implying a near-monopoly that will be devastating. Yet, the subtitle clears this up real quick. "Buy two or three more years to figure out how to make money in digital."

Unless this large company can move really really fast, the merger, and the company is already irrelevant. In two or three years social media might be gone, morphed into something else, and the players replaced, absorbed, or even wiped from our memory.</comment>