Sanic – Python 3.5+ web server that's written to go fast - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/channelcat/sanic <comment><USER2> I've actually written a highly optimized asyncio-based Python web server in the past. I meticulously optimized every component, using all the standard CPython optimization techniques (heavy use of stdlib, minimizing method lookups).

In the end, my implementation was nowhere near nginx. I even ran it under PyPy and it fared no better. Then I realized the oxymoronic nature of writing an optimized web server in Python.

<comment><USER3> What does "not even close" mean in this context? I find it a bit interesting that the most obvious conclusion from the benchmarks in the story, and the linked one - is that uvloop and go are high-performance and consistent low- latency, high performance python is on par with nodejs - but in general the real jump up is towards go and c++(?).

It's great to see an order of magnitude leap on the python side - but on the face of it I'm not sure the leap really is enough to enable a different class of services in python? Perhaps I'm being too pessimistic - I know I'd be happy to be able to "ignore" node, and only consider eg: Python for most things and go for some things. Just to limit my tech stack.

But where does nginx with lua fit - is it another order of magnitude above go for dynamic content?

<comment><USER4> Honestly you sound confused.

Performance is not a magical inherent property of a language-and-webserver combination, and will vary wildly with the application. In my experience practical performance has much more to do with architecture, algorithms and "the other bunch that makes things efficient" \-- not so much with a language.

It's also only one facet. And usually not a very important one, either.

<comment><USER5> > Performance is not a magical inherent property of a language

well it is. however most performance characteristics of a language are well understood. mostly python/ruby is slower than a lot of other languages.

> practical performance has much more to do with architecture

well sort of not every case does well with these kinds of languages.

however in most cases it's just fine to use them.

my company changed one product from python to scala. __everything __was slower in python, however in 90% of our use case that didn 't even matter. however we were thread and calculation (i.e. shuffling/changing large lists/maps in memory) where python was just slow. I guess we could've written a library for these kind of transformations in C. however another problem was also PDF generation, which was really really slow in python (for bigger pdf's, slower one's we just fine). we are happy to use scala, but I didn't found python bad or weak. you are pretty fast and the tooling is just amazing. also the ORM's in python are superior to everything i've seen on the JVM world. (Django ORM and SQLAlchemy) I guess they are even the best ORM's out there. if I would be developing more towards a cloud architecture I would probably use python again. you could just do more if you have room for a "infinite" amount of servers

still python is a really great and well designed language. I would everybody encourage to look into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really excited about these efforts. Python is my main programming language, but for high volume endpoints it's sometimes necessary to switch to other languages. In an ideal world I'd just use Python for everything. It will take a while before that's possible though. These performance gains don't mean much if your DB connection is still blocking.

How does your benchmark compare against GO, Elixir and Node?

<comment><USER7> MagicStack has already taken the initiative. [https://github.com/MagicStack/asyncpg](https://github.com/MagicStack/asyncpg)

<comment><USER8> Still beta, but those postgres numbers are incredible. MagicStack is doing amazing things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's interesting how so many of these microframework+app server type things spread across many languages have converged on a very, very, similar set of conventions and practices. The example code looks strikingly like every other recent JavaScript/Perl/Python/Ruby microframework+server that I've tinkered with lately (Express, Koa, and Hapi in JS, Mojolicious in Perl, and Flask in Python). Aside from the obvious language differences, the concepts are all so similar.

I wonder if this is a convergence on a local maximum for writing web apps, or if it's just a situation where the most popular ones did it this way, so everyone does it this way. Not that it matters too much, in the general case. The route and app setup plumbing is a small part of most applications, so it's rarely going to be ruinous if you spend an extra hour or two getting it working right. But, since I've been evaluating a bunch of different ways to build web app backends lately, I've just noticed how similar they all are, no matter what language you choose. Most of the ones I've been looking at are asynchronous, so this also has that similarity to most of the others.

While one could argue that it's obvious that they would look the same...but, web development didn't always look this way. The first 10-15 years of web application development I did looked very different, in fact (CGI or mod_perl or PHP, which has some quite different conventions).

<comment><USER10> The README suggests this one is written to be Flask-like, and Koa is based on Express/Connect.

<comment><USER11> And Express as well as many others are loosely based on what Rails did iirc

<comment><USER10> I don't see how Express is at all based on Rails. They both have… similar URL pattern syntax that Rails didn't invent?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why it is app.run() and not app.go_fast() is beyond me.

<comment><USER13> Good point. With Sanic you gotta .go_fast()

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a great project. I am going to be watching this!

One question: Why default to ujson? I understand that if you're always dealing with small, simple json objects it's quite fast and safe. But with larger json payloads, its performance and compatibility start to break down. I haven't touched it in the last 8 months, but I had to switch to Python's built-in json module (which is quite fast in 3.5) for compatibility when serializing and deserializing large json objects.

<comment><USER14> Do you have a good writeup of this problem? I've seen only scattered, anecdotal info about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Curious to see how this fares against something like uWSGI with aiohttp support (haven't tried either, but uWSGI brings so much more to the table than speed that I'd like to be able to make an informed choice).

<comment><USER16> asyncio is experimental still on uwsgi [http://uwsgi- docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/asyncio.html](http://uwsgi- docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/asyncio.html)

<comment><USER4> Running asyncio-based servers on uwsgi is very stable though, but may not achieve 100 % of the performance native asyncio in uWSGI may have. Even then, Tornado is "fast enough" for us (ie. we run out of network bandwidth before we run out of CPU).

But the main advantage - that you're still using uwsgi as a "unified application server" of sorts - persists, which was the main point for us (Django, Flask, Tornado on uWSGI). This simplified deployment and administration quite a bit.

Re. topic: It would be really interesting to see it compared to Tornado.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I use uWSGI for a lot of things (check out [http://github.com/rcarmo/piku](http://github.com/rcarmo/piku), for instance), so am more interested in figuring out if I can get a little extra mileage off it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I noticed that the past several Python-related threads on HN haven't contained the usual cynical comments against adopting Python 3. Are we finally at a point where Python 3 has been accepted as the gold standard?

<comment><USER18> Yes. I think the async syntax in 3.5 was the tipping point for the stragglers. It finally looked like a serious upgrade, not just a bigger number with a load of things to fix.

I know there are people who are stuck on old versions, but the community has recognised how much damage this dispute was doing to Python's image. They know they'll have official Cpython support to 2020, so it's a non-issue until then.

Oh and Ubuntu 16.04 defaulting to 3.5 helped too.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Async handlers, Flask-style API, and fast.

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with this project.

<comment><USER19> Link to the docs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right there in the README, but here's the Getting Started [0] anyway.

[0] [https://github.com/channelcat/sanic/blob/master/docs/getting...](https://github.com/channelcat/sanic/blob/master/docs/getting_started.md)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The comparisons are nice, but it would have been nice to see a comparison with Flask + Nginx/Apache2 for example.

</comment><comment><USER21> TIL about "Sanic Hegehog": [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sanic- hegehog](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sanic-hegehog)

</comment><comment><USER22> Curious how much this benefits from optimizations coming in Python 3.6. Is the benchmark essentially spending all the time in uvloop Cython code?

</comment><comment><USER23> I love the name!! :D

The hard dependency on uvloop looks weird. It's just a pluggable loop for asyncio, anyone can switch to it in two lines of code, no reason to depend on something that's a native extension.

Also why not just improve aiohttp's performance…

<comment><USER24> > Also why not just improve aiohttp's performance…

Have you read aiohttp's code? there have been some discussions about improving its performance, there is basically no immediate bottleneck, the whole thing just performs poorly. I hate to say it but sometimes it's just better to start from scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is awesome, Python is my number one, Node.js already has much larger ecosystem for async i/o. If we need something faster for heavy computations Go is a good choice.

But maybe in near future Python will grow significantly, who knows.

</comment><comment><USER26> Best name ever.

</comment><comment><USER27> No support for websockets ?

<comment><USER6> I think it's fine to use an external library such as Faye for websockets. That comes with the benefit of having many client libraries available. (JS, iOS, Android)

<comment><USER28> When did the principal benefit of Websockets (send and receive _whatever_ instead of HTTP primitives) become a matter of client and server library availability?

I want to trace this profound moment in WebDev history. Amazing.

<comment><USER29> The principle of sending _whatever_ is important, but in reality most modern consumption literally follows the ethos of 'go fast'. Perhaps dropping Websockets helps out; it's a freedom of choice to pick speed over compatibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can we just use the webserver of Sanic with Flask on linux?

</comment><comment><USER31> What's up with those latency numbers? Seem huge to me.

<comment><USER32> Who measures average latency? Nearly meaningless.

<comment><USER33> I'm curious. Why is it meaningless? What would you measure?

<comment><USER32> You almost never want to use average as your metric when dealing with time. For time, the 95 or 99 percentile latency is going to be measure of how many requests out of a hundred a less than your metric. Esp when the thing you are measuring is a piece of larger system, which is the crux, because of how a resource in turn requests k-more resources. Each request has an equal chance of being over the latency percentile. Even at 10 requests, only 90% of sessions will be under the 99% latency.

See also, Gil Tene [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ8ydIuPFeU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ8ydIuPFeU)

A nice overview, [http://bravenewgeek.com/everything-you-know-about-latency- is...](http://bravenewgeek.com/everything-you-know-about-latency-is-wrong/)

See also, [http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/10/5/your-load- generato...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2015/10/5/your-load-generator-is- probably-lying-to-you-take-the-red-pi.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Gotta go fast.

<comment><USER35> Gotta go faster.

<comment><USER36> [Air Horn]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This looks awesome, exactly what python needs right now

</comment><comment><USER38> I honestly don't understand why you would do this when nginx with Luajit is so fast. I think Python is great but nginx is so robust, widely used and Luajit is so impressively quick.

<comment><USER39> Probably because even though Lua is super a nice language, writing code in a config file is not that much fun? App servers spitting out HTML written in the language of your choice are so much more flexible than developing on a single platform/stack such as Apache + mod_php|mod_perl, or OpenResty. Of course nothing stops you to proxy them through Nginx and serve the static content directly with Nginx in production.</comment></comment>


Tuvi - <AUTHOR> Hello, after some months of just lurking around I decided to submit my first post. It is about an application I'm working on, called Tuvi. It would be awesome if you guys can help me visiting the landing page and give me some feedback about it. Is it clear enough? Any tips? Thanks in advance http://tuvi.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, again, and thanks for the feedback. I changed the landing slightly in order to include a basic example. Hopefully this will help people understand the basic concept. Also in the upcoming days will be start using HTTPS.

</comment><comment><USER2> First of all, congratulations on launching something, and welcome!

It's not completely clear what you're building. Some kind of prediction market with social features? A question-oriented social network? It would help if the landing page gave the steps and sample flow for a question in time order, rather than just miscellaneous features.

You also shouldn't equivocate between "your friends" and "the community". Which is it, or both? Is it private, or public, or does it support both?

Are questions persistent and enduring, or ephemeral (e.g. Snapchat-style)?

Also, you're building a social application that wants user data, and you advertise "trustworthy" as a selling point. You need to be using HTTPS pervasively; Let's Encrypt makes that easy.</comment>


Monitoring the Erlang VM With AppSignal's Magic Dashboard - <AUTHOR> https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/02/04/elixir-monitoring-erlangvm-with-magic-dashboards.html <comment><USER2> Appsignal is very very good! I highly recommend it for Elixir projects if you only use elixir and need something setup fast. It's awesome!

I also highly recommend looking into spans and tracing (if you use multiple languages together), then you can use something like spandex with elixir and other languages to do tracing across languages. It's excellent with datadog.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks very cool. I've been using Sentry, but this is something that may make me switch to AppSignal at some point.

It's so good to see so many improvements/cool features in Elixir/Erlang ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER4> If interested in setting up CI/CD for Elixir, this might be worth checking:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236049)

</comment><comment><USER5> WombatOAM seems similar:

[https://www.erlang-solutions.com/products/wombatoam.html](https://www.erlang- solutions.com/products/wombatoam.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been very happy with AppSignal for my Elixir projects (introduced them to 3 paying customers).

I especially like their request-based pricing model. It makes it a no brainer to put it on every rails/elixir project under one account (per paying customer).

Disclaimer: they have sent me a box of delicious cookies for creating an open source plugin (ember deploy plugin for automatically uploading source maps to AppSignal). But I have liked them way before that :)

</comment><comment><USER7> We're using Appsignal and it's been great. Fantastic support too.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks like a web version of Erlangs "observer" app, offhand.

<comment><USER9> There's a web based observer, it's called wobserver [https://github.com/shinyscorpion/wobserver](https://github.com/shinyscorpion/wobserver)

<comment><USER10> Yes, but it's woefully out of date.

Fun fact -- Ian (maintainer) is/was a backend dev at Square Enix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I tried out AppSignal for Elixir and was disappointed that the BEAM metrics don't include scheduler utilization, which is kind of a proxy for CPU usage. IIRC there was scheduler count but not utilization metrics.

</comment><comment><USER12> this is a little too much handwaving for my tastes.</comment>


All of Packt's technical ebooks are now $5 - <AUTHOR> https://www.packtpub.com/

<comment><USER2> Any views on the best R book ?

<comment><USER3> Machine Learning with R is a pretty nice book: [https://www.packtpub.com/big- data-and-business-intelligence/...](https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and- business-intelligence/machine-learning-r)

Might pick up Data Science Cookbook myself, [https://www.packtpub.com/big- data-and-business-intelligence/...](https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and- business-intelligence/practical-data-science-cookbook)</comment></comment>


Coinbase Debit Card - <AUTHOR> https://www.coinbase.com/card <comment><USER2> In a way this is great but in another way it's the worst. It's nice to have a practical way to use Bitcoin (or other cryptocurrencies) to buy things in the vast majority of places that don't take Bitcoin.

On the other hand, I have always considered one of the main concepts with cryptocurrency to be the potential ability to avoid third parties taking a cut of all of your digital transactions. This turns it into just another way for big companies like Visa or Coinbase to get rich just on the basis that people need to exchange money.

The basic idea for me with cryptocurrency is that since it's our money we shouldn't have to give control of it to third parties just for basic usage. We have math, the internet, and plenty of computers. We should not need Visa or Coinbase.

<comment> m-i-l I don't see what is in this for the consumer either. If you are not already a holder, why would anyone want the hassle of becoming one, just to pay high fees for each and every transaction (e.g. the 2.49% "crypto liquidation fee" for this card) when you can get a cashback card (e.g. mine gives me up to 10% cashback on some purchases), and why would you not want your assets working for you until as late as possible (not until point of purchase as in this case but up to 5-6 weeks later when a conventional monthly credit card bill become due)? And if you are a crypto holder, why would you want to transfer custody of your crypto to Coinbase and make your tax return a nightmare (i.e. with a potentially large number of small disposals)?

<comment><USER3> what card do you have and what do you get 10% back on?

<comment><USER4> Not him but the Discover It card gives rotating 5% cash back and a cashback match for the first year, making it 10%.

<comment><USER5> Wow, that's a pretty good deal. How widely accepted is Discover these days? I'm curious what has your experience been? Cheers.

<comment><USER6> I've had this card for a few years, I rarely encounter someone who doesn't accept it. (United States) I carry this card, the citi cash back master card and the amazon prime visa. Figure at least one works and I prioritize best reward.

Also the categories they offer 5% on (amazon, gas, restaurants, grocery) are likely to take discover.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the feedback, good to know. Interesting you mentioned the Amazon card. I would actually be curious to hear your experience with that Amazon card. In looking at the reviews on their site, nearly the entire last two years reviews are pretty abysmal review(one star.) Cheers.

<comment><USER7> I have had an amazon card for a few years now.

I can't say anything bad or good about it. I get 1% back (or points to spend at amazon) for any purchases, 2% points back for gas, and 3% points when I use it at amazon.

There's been more than several times where it looked like it never applied the points to my account though. I always paid it off in full every month, and sometimes it works sometimes not. When I lived on the road and used it for hotels, while getting reimbursed from them, I was able to rack up $1500 worth of points.

Other than that, it's been fine. Looking around for something a bit better though.

<comment><USER3> Costco card is better for gas, restaurants, and travel. Double cash card is 2% on everything. Both are Citi, so its one app and account, just have to remember if youre buying gas, restaurant, travel or costco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is one of the worst crypto-debit cards I've seen. Coinbase's card has a "Crypto Liquidation Fee": 2.49% of transaction. (Even Gemini, the most expensive cryptoexchange has 1% exchange fees, while the median is probably around 0.2%)

You are better off selling manually on an exchange (0.1-0.25% fees) and transferring to a sane bank with debit cards and minimal fees like N26(EU) or Charles Schwab(US).

Have a fiat buffer, but control your holdings and don't get milk by fee- vampires like Coinbase.

<comment><USER9> Or you could skip a step and just use a regular credit card with cash rewards and receive 1-2% of transaction amounts cash back.

I'm not sure why people want to make it harder (and more expensive) than necessary.

<comment><USER10> But then you're missing the whole point - storing your money in a deflationary currency.

I moved 95% of my savings into cryptocurrencies years ago, and it's been orders of magnitude better than the silly 1-2%.

<comment><USER11> And some people moved their savings into cryptocurrencies half a year ago and it's been orders of magnitude worse than the silly 1-2%.

Kind of like advising putting your savings in naked options plays because it worked for you that one time.

<comment><USER10> The difference is, inflationary currency is guaranteed to lose value over long term. One-year fluctuations are not very important to me, this is short-term thinking.

That's why even now I buy as much cryptocurrency as I can.

<comment><USER12> > The difference is, inflationary currency is guaranteed to lose value over > long term. One-year fluctuations are not very important to me, this is > short-term thinking.

The whole point of currency is short-term; it's the virtual particle of the economy intended to lubricate the flow of useful goods without incentivizing hoarding of itself over investment in productive assets.

<comment><USER10> > The whole point of currency is short-term

Not if you're saving for retirement or your kid's college fund.

We never had any deflationary currencies till recently. Now we have a choice.

If you want to quickly spend your money, go right ahead, nobody is stopping you.

I prefer to spend for what I need, and save the rest, and it's been working great so far. That's what most financial advisers advise anyway - live within your means, and create a financial cushion.

<comment><USER12> > > The whole point of currency is short-term

> Not if you're saving for retirement or your kid's college fund.

No, even there: it's to be the short-term stable thing you trade other stuff (for most people, labor) for and then use to buy the productive asset you invest for those purpose. It's an important part of the process, just not the final vehicle.

It is very much not for direct use as the final vehicle for those purposes itself, because the attributes which make something good as a long-term investment are very different than those that make it good as currency. (Savings accounts, which still are only good for fairly short-term reserves and not the purposes you lay out, aren't the same as raw currency.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The general pattern here is "Keep the balance of your current account 'invested' in bitcoin until the moment you spend it".

Can't that model be expanded to include any tradable commodity? Why can't I get a 'Gold debit card' or a 'Nasdaq Debit card'?

Would there be a market for this?

<comment><USER14> Well stocks can't be sold in tiny tiny fractions. If you have 5 shares of Amazon and 6 shares of Apple...which stock does your debit card provider sell to cover your latte? Also stock markets don't operate 24/7, crypto does.

Gold is hard to sell in tiny fractions as well.

<comment><USER15> Beyond the point made by siblings comments about selling fractions of stocks I also want to point out that selling small amount of bitcoins or ethereum on- chain is also prohibitively expensive. I'm sure those debit card transactions won't be directly settled on the actual cryptocurrency, they'll just keep a balance internally and make big transactions on the blockchain if they need to balance their accounts. You know, like a bank.

<comment><USER14> ETH transactions avg like 10 cents: [https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum- transactionfee](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfee)

But also, Coinbase owns an exchange, so they don't have to commit every transaction to the blockchain, so it's peanuts for them.

<comment><USER15> > ETH transactions avg like 10 cents: > [https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum- > transactionfee](https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum- > transactionfee)

That's still significant for small transactions. Beyond that, will it scale well enough to cost only 10 cents if it becomes the new Visa/Mastercard? The transaction rate of BTC/ETH is still almost negligible when compared to mainstream payment processors.

>Coinbase owns an exchange, so they don't have to commit every transaction to the blockchain, so it's peanuts for them.

My point exactly. It's not a Bitcoin card, it's a Coinbase card, the cryptocurrency aspect is tangential. This is not cryptocurrency going mainstream, it's the mainstream taking over cryptocurrency because it's just so much more convenient to have a Visa card than a Bitcoin or Eth wallet.

<comment><USER14> At 10 cents it is cheaper than debit card transactions. And credit card processors charge 2-3% on average for transactions... maybe as low as 1.5%.

Visa is more convenient today but it took decades for Visa to get to the scale and scope and convenience it has today. If people start parking more money in crypto and using crypto credit cards it's only a matter of time before merchants start accepting direct payment from coinbase wallets. At that point, Coinbase can bypass Visa and charge a fraction of the fee for facilitating the trade from USD to BTC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This seems like a nightmare if every purchase is a capital gain/loss that needs to be scheduled for tax purposes.

<comment><USER17> Yup, the legislature is lagging, but this is typical for when there's paradigm shifts.

<comment><USER18> What paradigm shift? It's capital gains. _Maybe_ there would be an argument that this is a currency conversion but in its current state BTC is totally a speculative financial instrument

The inverse (_not_ paying capital gains on this) would be very weird

<comment><USER19> The turkish lira has been at least as volatile as BTC in the last couple of years; Bitcoin is about as much a currency.

<comment><USER20> Except the Turkish Lira is legally recognised as currency, and Bitcoin is legally recognised as a commodity (and thus, subject to CGT)

<comment><USER19> Yes. I read GP's "current state" to mean volatility, but it could mean legal state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So I can take my currency, trade it for crypto, then spend it at stores?

Do you know what would be even more crazy and innovative? If I could skip the middle part and just exchange my dollars directly for goods and services!

<comment><USER22> You can, but your sarcasm seems to assume people are just simply converting dollars into bitcoin just to use this debit card. This feature may not be for you, but for those who trade or accept it as a payment for their goods/services. It essentially eliminates the process of selling the bitcoin and/or waiting a few days to transfer the funds to your bank.

<comment><USER23> The fees listed in the FAQ ([https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/296991...](https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/2969910-coinbase- card-faq)) are important when considering the trade-off between convenience and cost.

You're paying 2.49% on every transaction, and the fee rises for certain kinds and volumes of transactions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I've been piloting this program and I've got to say it's been a convenient way to pay without draining my real bank account. IMO this is a killer product compared to everything else I've experienced with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency this far, it really bridges the gap.

Heck, I even used it to pay my back taxes to the IRS.

<comment><USER15> >IMO this is a killer product compared to everything else I've experienced with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency this far, it really bridges the gap.

So it solves the usability problem of cryptocurrency by... working like a regular bank, more or less? And mostly getting rid of the actual blockchain to use off-chain transactions while having the convenience of the centralized Visa system?

This might be the killer product for cryptocurrency, but in a more literal sense. It shows that the market seems to inexorably converge towards the good old solutions, and the cryptocurrency ecosystem slowly (and rather inefficiently) reinvents the modern banking system.

I wonder when Coinbase will start doing fractional-reserve banking with they off-chain "cryptocurrency" accounts.

This is no more "cryptocurrency technology" than if I set up a script to sell some of my Bitcoins to replenish my bank account when its balance reaches a certain value.

<comment><USER25> Cryptocurrency is both a monetary system and a payment system. You don't lose all of the benefits of cryptocurrency if the payment layer is scaled up with centralized solutions.

<comment><USER26> > You don't lose all of the benefits of cryptocurrency if the payment layer is > scaled up with centralized solutions.

What are the benefits if you relay solely on existing payment networks for transactions?

<comment><USER25> Well, a cryptocurrency monetary system is just code rather than a bunch of old guys with nukes.

<comment><USER15> It's a bunch of "hodler" whales who, if the currency is successful enough, will become the next "old guys with nukes".

If most people use bitcoin off-chain then it means that it's the cryptocurrency exchange cartel who gets to decide what is and isn't bitcoin. Who cares if the node in your basement disagrees if all the exchanges have forked away and nobody can trade with you.

The whole "it's just code" shtick is really shortsighted. It's never only just code, it's a complex consensus. Look at all the drama around segwit/bitcoin cash for instance.

<comment><USER26> exactly, if it was "just code" it wouldn't be worth anything, and they'd be no stakes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Seems like this would introduce an unwelcome element of pricing uncertainty into every transaction. Instead of knowing at the point of purchase that my latte will cost me $3.95, it's going to cost me some unknown amount of bitcoin depending on the rate Coinbase happens to use at the moment it processes the transaction.

I accept this kind of uncertainty when I use my existing card abroad (although in some cases, the POS terminal offers to do the currency conversion up front); but I don't much care for the idea of introducing such price volatility into all my everyday purchases.

<comment><USER28> If you have Bitcoin you have price volatility, Visa card or not.

<comment><USER29> Not if the thing you're buying is priced in bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Isn't paysafecard the point-and-click-and-become-a-card-provider of the pay card industry along with Wirecard? Used by loads of dodgy no credit check providers, card providers going bust every other week, apparently its harder to spin up an AWS EC2 instance than it is to become a card provider with these jokers.

At a functional level - No 3DSecure support, unexplained failures, little insight from the vendor into paysafe infrastructure. I'm very surprised Coinbase launched on this mickey mouse platform. It's like launching a clothing brand with cafepress.com as your product provider

Ill stick with Monzo thanks

<comment><USER31> > No 3DSecure support

That should change within the next few weeks as PSD2 requires that.

<comment><USER32> Or an approved equally secure alternative: we for instance have dynamic cvv, no 3dsecure needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The fact that this is being introduced _now_ , is kind of telling if this crypto/bitcoin story this far.

High valuations has been a double edged sword. On one hand, it brought attention, interest and such. OTOH, it sucked all the energy into trading/speculation and all but forced the like of coinbase to specialise in it, neglecting everything else.

I have to say, crypto has been (and still is) an interesting look into what money is and how it might evolve. It seems that possibly inevitably, getting paid for work and paying for goods and services is "naturally" an extreme iceberg... The tiny piece of the whole that's visible. Below the surface is most of the "ice," the enormous volume of currency trading and other high finance uses.

</comment><comment><USER34> The idea is to preferentially spend cryptocurrency over dollars. This only works on the assumption that dollars are ``better money''[1] than cryptocurrencies. People spend worse money before their good money. Coinbase is making a bet that there will be a lot of people sitting on piles of depreciating cryptocurrency that they don't mind liquidating. They're making a very bearish bet, or maybe just hedging their business model to survive a little longer.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law)

<comment><USER35> You're implying that the current bear market is permanent. Most cryptocurrencies are deflationary in nature, so it's hard to accept the premise that there's "piles of depreciating cryptocurrency" in general.

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I agree. I don't think this debit card is a good business idea. But Coinbase thinks cryptocurrency will be in a bear market for much longer since they thought this product would be a good play.

No one wants to spend their crypto. It's better money than dollars.

<comment><USER35> It's worse money than dollars, at the moment. There's work being done to make crypto better money, and efforts like this debit card are a step in that direction.

People aren't spending their crypto because it isnt' as easy/economical to use, and yeah it's more likely to retain/grow in value than a stack of cash. And that's probably what you meant :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Bitcoin at this point is purely speculative and this is almost like hooking up a debit card to my Robinhood account and selling stock to pay for it every time I buy something.

Seems to completely work around the reasons why Bitcoin etc. were interesting in the first place as a technology.

<comment><USER24> "Seems to completely work around the reasons why Bitcoin etc. were interesting in the first place as a technology."

I respectfully disagree. The original goal of Bitcoin was to create a new financial system and instrument which ultimately enables people to pay for things.

<comment><USER37> *anonymously

<comment><USER24> Pseudo-anonymous. Research it a bit if you aren't aware of the implications.

[https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/anonymity/](https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/anonymity/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Read the fine print, for example:

> Crypto Liquidation Fees: 2.49%

[https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/296991...](https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/2969910-coinbase- card-faq)

<comment><USER26> Is that higher or lower than Visa ?

<comment><USER39> That's _on top_ of what Visa charges the merchant.

<comment><USER26> hot dang

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is great news! I've literally been living off my Bitpay debit card for the past 2 years, they come in clutch as f, but only have 2 pairs (BTC & BCHABC). But Coinbase has a variety coins, especially XLM & XRP which have ridiculous fast sending speeds (like ~3min), and now finally, you can spend them without the whole withdraw coin-to-fiat process.

Though, i'm curious about the fees/tax side, and I'm wondering if they will be implementing some sort of rewards program in the future

<comment><USER41> > especially XLM & XRP which have ridiculous fast sending speeds (like ~3min),

And here I am with my "old tech" SEPA bank account and Instant Payments that take 15 seconds max...

<comment><USER40> It's not about transaction speeds. It's about the whole point of cryptocurrencies. Try sending fiat money to another country and see if that takes 15 seconds

edit* also, checkout other services like Wirex, they're great

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Apple Card [1] and now Coinbase Card [2] hmmm…

I have thought about this many times in the past: How are big companies able to steal these ideas so fast?

Actually, "steal" may not be the correct word, but I don't think this was a coincidence. Knowing how secretive Apple is, I am surprised that Coinbase was able to work on this project _(also in secret?)_ without them noticing. Or maybe they noticed but didn't care? Which is even more bizarre considering how sensitive Apple lawyers are with their unreleased projects. There must be some underground market of corporate secrets that I am not aware of because I cannot explain how two companies can work in the same project more or less at the same time without it being the product of a stolen idea.

I had the same train of thought just a few weeks ago when Google announced project Stadia [3] and then Apple announced Arcade [4]. I know what you are going to say, _"These two projects are very different"_ , well yes, they are, but they seem to have the same ingredients: big-4 creates platform for games. Maybe these are really simple coincidences, and I'm just paranoid.

[1] [https://www.apple.com/apple-card/](https://www.apple.com/apple-card/)

[2] [https://www.coinbase.com/card](https://www.coinbase.com/card)

[3] [https://stadia.dev/](https://stadia.dev/)

[4] [https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/](https://www.apple.com/apple-arcade/)

<comment><USER43> Or...it's just no conspiracy at all because neither Apple not Coinbase reinvented the wheel but put just another card into your wallet? It's not like this is something ground breaking to do if you handle cash in the US.

<comment><USER44> With Apple it is different due to the depth of integration with the ecosystem, and also it is a credit card, not a debit card.

<comment><USER45> Not really, it's not easy but it's pretty simple. It's money + politics to get the connections to have a bank underwrite the cards. Apple went a little further with the fancy app and physical card but all the foundations are already available. You can see it yourself if you use any other major bank's mobile apps and cards.

<comment><USER44> Well, it is somewhat different still - this is real ecosystem work, and the depth of integration into it is quite significant.

<comment><USER45> Can you explain what you mean by Apple's ecosystem integration? What is it that they do differently? As far as I can tell, the app has budgeting features that are similar to what mint.com offered a decade ago.

<comment><USER44> Payment categorisation, maps, etc are long available as services from companies like Yodlee, for example. For the budgeting part, as well. What I mean is that it will just feel natural to pay with the phone using the credit card, which you don't really need to get from anyone else, but Apple themselves.

<comment><USER45> Apple Pay has been backed by whatever credit card you want for years now, this isn't any different. The bank still has to approve you, it's not automatic. I guess I just don't see what's so special about this other than the fancy app.

<comment><USER44> Because it is not about going to the bank and getting your credit card, and then linking it to the Wallet. I think it will feel different from the experience perspective. For them that is the only way to get traction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems this encourages users to keep all their money sitting in a coinbase wallet... That doesn't seem great when coinbase gets hacked... What happened to the advice of "don't leave your money in an exchange"

<comment><USER46> Coinbase is a pretty well established exchange. It's probably much safer than storing it themselves for many non-technical people.

<comment><USER47> Probably is a worrying word there...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Isn't it a tax event every time you spend crypto?

I'm guessing that's a reason why something like this won't arrive in the U.S. anytime soon...at least one blessed by U.S. regulators.

</comment><comment><USER49> How is this different than the Coinbase Shift card? I had a shift card and the fees on purchases made it prohibitively expensive so I stopped using it after a few purchases.

<comment><USER50> Shift just shut down, apparently. So that's at least one difference. From their website:

> We hope you enjoyed using the Shift Card and truly thank you for your > loyalty. We, unfortunately, will be retiring the program in April of this > year. All Shift Cards will be officially deactivated on April 11, 2019.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Backwards compatibility is a good thing for a technology with (a) potential to dramatically improve an industry and (b) insufficient adoption.

For example: Square.

</comment><comment><USER52> Really cool! The barrier to me to adopt it is the high floating prices of bitcoins. I already use it to do transactions overseas, to receive payments, etc., but I never let bitcoins on my wallet for more than some hours.

A hedge strategy could help me on this, but this is more work. It's easy to transform it into a more stable currency.

</comment><comment><USER53> As some people have already mentioned, spending crypto in the US is classified as a taxable event. So I think it's questionable to market crypto as a replacement for traditional spending when you have additional overhead that is not being accounted for and would definitely come up in the event of an audit.

</comment><comment><USER54> To even get bitcoins you have to pay a 1.5% fee.

Credit cards don't even charge you that

<comment><USER23> A fair point, but remember that credit cards leverage their fees towards outstanding credit (and incentivize you to access that credit). This is more like a debit card, where the fees are leveraged on transactions where you access your own holdings (incentivizing you to leave your funds in the account).

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> How does this work exactly? I notice it's a partnership with Visa, are payments converted to dollars or is the payment in Bitcoin directly?

Also does Visa or Coinbase then make a server side log of all the transactions?

<comment><USER56> It's a partnership with a stored value card provider (Paysafe Financial Services Limited). Coinbase just liquidates your Bitcoin and then settles in fiat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> So, Coinbase's market makers (possibly itself) are seemingly providing the liquidity for this product. How do they avoid over-exposure if this debit card is successful?

</comment><comment><USER58> Not available in the US?

<comment><USER59> Nope « At this time, only residents of the United Kingdom may apply for a Coinbase Card. We're working on expanding the offer to additional European markets. »

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> The greatest thing about it is that it will be like the ThenX card had been, while it worked. Cryptocurrency will be converted in the last moment, when the spending is made.

</comment><comment><USER61> When I go to Google Play to install the app it says "not available in your country." I'm in the US.

Isn't Coinbase only for US citizens?

Who is the target of this card?

</comment><comment><USER62> How does capital gains tax work with this?

For example you've been sitting on a pile of bitcoin with massive gains and spend it straight out of the account.

<comment><USER28> It depends on the regulations where you are and the tax situation you are in. In the UK the first £12k gains are free.

The US is kind of complicated with different rates for short term and long term gains.

I declared UK crypto gains recently. It can get complicated if you try to follow all the instructions properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> 6.9 MB on the play store? I'm impressed. Although I can't really what's going on in there because of Geo restrictions.

</comment><comment><USER64> There has been cards doing this for at least 5 years.. Revolut allows you to trade at midpoint with no fees.

Not innovative.

<comment><USER65> I've never heard of revolut or midpoint. So I think that's the point, for something to really be "innovative", it also needs significant reach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> So, it basicaly makes easier to avoid taxes? For example you earn in bitcoin and you now have easy way to spend it. That's probably not applicable for US citzens, but would IRSes around the world be able to get your data from coinbase?

<comment><USER67> > but would IRSes around the world be able to get your data from coinbase?

Yes, they already do. ([https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/292444...](https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/2924446-irs- notification))

<comment><USER66> I can't find that it is about forign IRSes, can you point me to more specific place?

<comment><USER67> The wouldn't typically ask directly unless they expected people are committing tax fraud, but you can bet that any country Coinbase is operating in can ask them similar. They have to abide by a wide range of financial regulations. It would be more typical for such a thing to come up during the audit for a singular customer

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> How much is this ?

</comment><comment><USER69> It's like a checking account except your balance is subject to the whims of the Chinese mafia. I'll take two!

<comment><USER26> I love these comments</comment></comment>


Scaling Teams and the Fight Against Human Nature - <AUTHOR> http://moz.com/rand/scaling-teams-fight-against-human-nature/

<comment><USER2> If people are behaving decently at 80 people, chances are that you're doing a lot of things right.

I don't think there's an upper limit on the number of people who can function together and be decent, but there seem to be a hard limit on _rate_ of growth. I don't think anyone has enough data to know the exact "magic number" but it's probably dependent on size. 10 to 15 in a year is fine; 100 shouldn't go past 120 in a year, in general.

What I think causes startups to fall to shit, culturally speaking, is a mix of three things:

(1) Culture is never made an explicit priority and evolution is "by default", which leads in a bad direction. Investors don't care (and shouldn't care) about company culture; founders would care but are too busy managing investors, and no one else has the power to do it, so power vacuums and fiefdoms emerge.

(2) Tiny equity slices motivate people in the wrong way. Larger profit-sharing slices are better. ([http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais- macle...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais- macleod-17-building-the-future-and-financing-lifestyle-businesses/)) When the 25th engineer is offered 0.05%, vesting over 4 years, either (a) he doesn't care at all about such a puny slice, in which case you'd get more from him with a higher salary, or (b) he wants to become an executive and get a real slice. The toxic software politics (scorched-earth rewrites, calamitous tool wars) come directly from (b), as engineers bash each others' heads in to get real titles and meaningful equity. (They get hit with karma when they get there and find out that being an "executive" doesn't mean they can code but control the division of labor and take the good work for themselves, but, rather, that it means that their lives are wasted in meetings.)

(3) Sometimes without even knowing it, or without choice (VC interference) companies sell off their culture to hire external executives. The "problem" with Valve-style open allocation (e.g. employee autonomy) is that it's hard to hire the traditional entitled executive who's used to having 20 people who can't say "no". Google didn't lose its culture via executive hiring until _after_ it grew large, but most startups begin that process much earlier.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe you can add 'resent deadweight' to the list. Or maybe that should go somewhere underneath 'invent an enemy.'</comment>


That Will Be Easy (It's Never Easy) - <AUTHOR> http://www.omniref.com/blog/blog/2014/03/20/itll-be-easy-how-we-built-gemfile-uploads-for-omniref/

<comment><USER2> I would love to hear more about what it took to wrestle Bundler to do what you guys needed and any insight into how Bundler's design could have been improved to make doing this easier.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I should write a more detailed post with all of the horribleness that was involved...I didn't want to get that far into the weeds for this.

The worst of it was probably the environmental contamination that Bundler does -- you don't realize it when you're running it from the command line, but it has all sorts of little system-level side effects, from setting secret config variables to updating caches. And those side-effects change as you do different things. And they're not documented.

The result is that if you want to run Bundler (or even parts of Bundler) as part of other code, you need to be _very_ careful to establish a strict sandbox (i.e. tmp directories and clean environment are the starting point) -- and even then, it's pretty easy to get hosed.

Just figuring that stuff out took the better part of a few days, not counting the time it took to figure out how it _actually works_ , of course.</comment></comment>


Raspberry Pi webserver, even if its behind NAT - <AUTHOR> http://ishan.chattopadhyaya.com/blog/?p=247

<comment><USER2> That looks a bit complicated... provided you get a public ip and your router supports upnp, why not use something like dyndns instead?</comment>


Voice Hero: The Inventor of Karaoke Speaks - <AUTHOR> http://theappendix.net/issues/2013/10/voice-hero-the-inventor-of-karaoke-speaks

<comment><USER2> I was recently reading only a slightly related article about Karaoke. Apparently in other countries, there has been a rage of killings due to certain songs being Karaoked. See the Wikipedia article here: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Way_killings](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Way_killings)

</comment><comment><USER3> Related - How Karaoke Conquered The World

[http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/17/karaoke-music-memoir- opinio...](http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/17/karaoke-music-memoir-opinions- book-review_0217_fran_bigman.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Great article - worth reading.</comment>


ASIC-Proof Digital Currency - <AUTHOR> http://alexsmith.io/?p=221

<comment><USER2> _ASICs by their very nature can attack any known problem._

For the problem of randomly accessing gigabytes of data, ASICs can't beat commodity DRAM. That's why there's so much research into memory-hard PoWs like Momentum, Dagger, and Cuckoo Cycle.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right. ASICs can include ram internally or use external ram modules just like a computer. General purpose processors are generally cheaper and more effective for memory intensive applications.</comment></comment>


Wapple.net solves problems of mobile internet - <AUTHOR> http://wapple.net/press-releases/wapple-opens-the-floodgates-for-mobilizing-web-applications.htm

<comment><USER2> Yeah. Sure.</comment>


Ask HN: Startup Digital Agency targeting the restaurant industry - <AUTHOR> Were a team of devs (plus a sales/marketing person) with a plan to help independent restaurants fix online ordering problems and optimize their existing websites.  How should we be thinking about this?  Is there a big opportunity were overlooking beyond individual client business? Ad network/consumer data potential? <comment><USER2> Do independent restaurants get a lot of online orders? Is it similar to grubhub?

<comment><AUTHOR> Growing Trend: Online Ordering Will Outstrip Phone Orders > [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jared-shimoff/5-restaurant- onl...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jared-shimoff/5-restaurant-online- order_b_9518332.html)

<comment><USER2> So, basically your talking about independent pizza and Chinese.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, any place that does significant take-out/delivery business. Besides pizzerias & Chinese, delis too. Doordash does a good job on categorizing food options > [https://www.doordash.com/](https://www.doordash.com/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Compiling gcc 4.6.2 on Lion - better C++11 support - <AUTHOR> http://solarianprogrammer.com/2011/12/01/compiling-gcc-4-6-2-on-mac-osx-lion/

<comment><USER2> just use macports</comment>


Choosing Elixir's Phoenix to Power a Real-Time Web UI - <AUTHOR> https://blog.wallaroolabs.com/2018/04/choosing-elixirs-phoenix-to-power-a-real-time-web-ui/ <comment><USER2> Always happy to see more Elixir posts, truly a great language. Im always amazed by how much I can build with so little.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, it really is just an incredibly well designed language.

Been digging back in recently and between Phoenix, Plug and Ecto it's very clear how much care and thought when into the API/architecture. Truly a joy to work with.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm the author of this post. Would be happy to answer any questions if folks have some.

<comment><USER4> Very interesting post. Could you elaborate more (maybe another blog?) on the DevOps perspectives on how to manage a prod Elixir/BEAM stack (CI/CD, scaling, dev vs test vs prod environment management)?

<comment><USER5> If you have a decent engineering + ops background (which your comment indicates you might), we're hiring.

[http://careers.wallaroolabs.com/apply/FjrSD7HjmW/DevOps- Engi...](http://careers.wallaroolabs.com/apply/FjrSD7HjmW/DevOps-Engineer)

Looking for a combination role that crosses what is often considered SysAdmin and what is considered SRE.

We don't run infrastructure ourselves but have clients who are starting to run Wallaroo in production and we are looking to hire someone who is focused on making sure the end developer lifecycle experience is awesome.

This would mean touching everything from installation of the Wallaroo development environment through documenting best practices for running in production to contributing to the core Pony and Elixir codebases in order to add new functionality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Among the Pony language posts and this one, I can't see how this company won't become the darling of HN regarding tech stacks. Solid post nonetheless.

<comment><USER5> We're big fans of the actor model when addressing concurrency issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been wanting to get into Elixir but my work has been building web apps using SaaS starter kits that come with billing, account management, social logins, multi-tenant and more out of the box. Are there any SaaS starter kits in Elixir? Examples in other languages include aspnet zero in .net, bullettrain in ruby and laravel spark in php.

<comment><USER8> example? are you talking about something like Django cookie cutter on the backend and a react or Vue or angular dashboard on the front?

<comment><USER7> Isn't Django a web framework like Elixir Phoenix that gives you the technical layers to build a web app? These are still great starting points for web apps but the examples[1][2][3] would be the ones I mentioned in my comment that give you the web app plus SaaS functions:

.net - [https://aspnetzero.com/](https://aspnetzero.com/)

ruby - [https://bullettrain.co/](https://bullettrain.co/)

php - [https://spark.laravel.com/](https://spark.laravel.com/)

Yes, these aren't OSS but are the equivalents for elixir (if any)?

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure there isn't such a thing for Elixir.

And quite possibly there won't be something like it anytime soon, if ever. I get the impression that the Elixir 'ecosystem' is a bit more modular/manual in approach even when you compare Phoenix to Rails, which means, with all else being equal, a bit less of an out-of-the-box experience.

Of course in part this is because there are currently just fewer packages available for Phoenix. But I think it's also inherent to the 'culture'. It might never be as cookie-cutter in what it offers.

(but I'm still relatively new to the Phoenix/Elixir world, so I could be entirely wrong)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Possibly tangential: Assuming one is sticking to AWS as cloud provider, wouldn't it be cost-effective and less devops to use AppSync, Lambda, Cognito instead of Elixir?

I ask because I am debating whether or not I should invest any time in Elixir, if many of the benefits of learning it are easily and cost-effectively available through AWS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most likely, yes.

As with everything though, there are trade-offs. If going strictly AWS fits your use case, you're fine working with GraphQL, etc., go for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've been using Rails since 2.x, and very much interested with Elixir/Phoenix. Will I regret using Elixir/Phoenix for production?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really a question that can be answered.

I'd suggest looking at Elixir/Phoenix if you have a problem with Rails that you think Elixir/Phoenix might be able to solve. Could be scale problems, reliability, real-time communication, etc.

I wouldn't suggest replacing your entire Rails app with Phoenix right away. If possible start with a service that may be having issues and migrate that over if possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How do you feel about Kotlin + Reactive SpringBoot 5?

<comment><AUTHOR> Truthfully I don't have many thoughts on that combination.

The channels abstraction was the driving force behind our choice and at the time there wasn't anything that stood out in the Java world.</comment></comment>


Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings - <AUTHOR> https://greece.greekreporter.com/2020/02/14/varoufakis-to-publish-notorious-eurogroup-recordings-from-turbulent-2015-meetings/ <comment><USER2> That's a really shitty move.

>a USB of the conversations he had secretly recorded while attending a Eurogroup discussion in Brussels

People in private converse completely differently (more freely) than in public. Judging people on what they said there by a public standard (it's impossible that this will not happen) is extremely unfair. Especially since Varoufakis knew that he will be recorded, he has probably chosen his wordings accordingly.

<comment><USER3> While what you say is true, the contents of these meetings should be public knowledge. A lot of citizens of a few countries had their lives almost destroyed by the decisions of these politicians, so is only fair they know what was discussed, who defended them, etc.

Let us not forget the pressure the ECB (and other european institutions) put on _some_ countries that have come to light after the fact. (Like only allowing emergency liquidity assistance to be used based on bailout conditions, thus interfering and blackmailing supposed sovereign governments)

edit: And to be fair, while I don't like Varoufakis, the fact his party wants these recordings to come to light, means there is probably something there are is damning to someone

<comment><USER4> > While what you say is true, the contents of these meetings should be public > knowledge.

I honestly don't think it's that simple.

While decisions should _always_ be public, in order to come to reasonable compromises on issues, it can be valuable for leaders to be able to have closed-door conversations outside of the spotlight, where they don't have to engage in political grandstanding; after all, it's that kind of compromise that allows democratic systems to function.

In fact, I would make the claim that at least one reason why the US democratic system has become so utterly paralyzed by polarization is because so much of political debate is now happening in the spotlight of social media, instead of behind closed doors where politicians can have the more nuanced conversations that might displease an electorate that is too busy cheering for their team to worry about actually getting anything done.

That's not to say this isn't without peril. Behind closed doors, corruption might happen as easily as compromise. I'm just not convinced the risks outweighs the benefits.

<comment><USER3> When these discussions impact so many people (various countries affected) I don't believe they should be kept secret.

Lets (just for example, I am not saying it happened), during that meeting, the German/French Finance minister said: 'I don't care about the Greek people, we can't let German/French banks fall, so do what you must if you ever want the ECB to lend you money'. Wouldn't the greek people deserve to know and make up their mind about their part in the EU project?

(again, I am not saying this happened, but I can see similar backdoor deals being put forward)

Lets not forget that any opposition to the EU project by the citizens is seen as misinformed or misleded people. It is never the EU's fault [1]

[1] - [https://torrentfreak.com/eu-commission-portrays- article-13-o...](https://torrentfreak.com/eu-commission-portrays- article-13-opponents-as-a-misled-and-misinformed-mob-190215/) (Sorry, no time to search for other source, but the comments were also published in my local newspapers)

<comment><USER5> And even if it was the case... Maybe the logical reasoning is something like: EU need some worldclass banks to be independant, so we can't let a single country trash everything for all other EU countries.

I can understand that Greek people would be angry to be "sacrified"... and that's why that kind of meeting is secret! Because to govern is not only to be elected but sometimes to have to take bad choices, when only other choices are worst

<comment><USER6> If that were the case, the politician would have to be able to explain that to the electorate and convince them of it. If they can't, then that decision should not be taken.

That's what democracy should mean - we don't elect representatives so that they can take decisions we don't want but that they think are good for us. We elect representatives because direct democracy doesn't scale.

<comment><USER5> Actually, that's 2 different points of view on democracy: do we elect people to to do what we want now or to do what is best for us in the long run ? And who is "the people" ? The majority of the numbers (without any though for all minorities) ? The loudest minorities ?

At best, both would be same: elected people would explain to the people what is best for them and convince them, then people would want what is best for them in the long run.

But sadly, nobody like to be sacrified now for the long term better good of all. And politicians need to be reelected. So politicians have to hide and manipulate to some extend (for what they think is the greater good of most of the population)...

"Crowd wisdom" is nice for really specific matters... but not really for managing a population with diversities in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To the people who think Greece deserved that:

lender is responsible for checking how much the borrower can take. My bank reasonably doesn't give me a billion. Default likelihood exists because there is an interest that prices it. When default happens, shame on the borrower and shame on the lender for having been a bad checker or just shame on no one if that default was one of the "expected" and covered by all the debt+interest already cashed in.

An any case increasing suicide-rate and child mortality-rate is not the right answer, unless you are called "mafia" or "IMF".

<comment><USER8> So you argue that it is O.K. to game the bank and live a lavish life destroying your own way of living and if the bank catches up and wants you to take measures so you can pay back, the right thing to do would be to jail the people who were gamed or conspired with the people who gamed the bank and simply continue the lavish life and let the people who dod not manage to game the bank(some richer and some poorer than you) keep writing checks to you so you can sustain the lifestyle you achieved by gaming the bank?

Do I get this correct?

<comment><USER6> No. The point you are missing is that it is also not ok for the lender to lend everyone a billion dollars, wait for people to default, and then go ask the government to give them a billion dollars back because otherwise they will go bankrupt.

If the supply of money has essentially been exhausted, then both borrowers and lenders have been doing something wrong, and it should be BOTH that suffer, so that both are incentivized not to resch this point again. What happened in Greece instead was that only the borrowers suffered, the lenders got all their money back.

<comment><USER9> > What happened in Greece instead was that only the borrowers suffered, the > lenders got all their money back.

Even worse, it'll be the borrower's __children __who will suffer the consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is about "elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy" It reflects the anti democratic perspective of the Eurogroup and is one of the most fundamental political issues of our times.

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/markcarrigan.net/2017/05/08/ele...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/markcarrigan.net/2017/05/08/elections- cannot-be-allowed-to-change-economic-policy/amp/)

<comment><USER11> Greece voluntarily joined a larger currency zone and reaped the benefits for a decade.

Should state elections in Mississippi drive US Fed policy?

<comment><USER12> Reaped the benefits? Greece's GDP dropped 30% since 2008 it and was forced into austerity by the Troika to move debts from the left pockets of Deutsche Bank to the right pockets, with the interests paid for by Greek tax payers.

<comment><USER13> > Reaped the benefits? Greece's GDP dropped 30% since 2008

Most of it was due to the fact that Greece had forged their nation accounting to falsify their actual state and hide sovereign debt, and once they faced bankruptcy they had no alternative than to come clean and straighten their accounting.

Another important fact that is oddly left out by proponents of the "austerity is a conspiracy" rhetoric is the fact that EU's national accounting reform kicked into effect in 2014, and included anti-accounting engineering measures which were highly abused to artificially inflate GDP and mask sovereign debt.

> it and was forced into austerity by the Troika

This conspiracy theory is absurd, as it weirdly imits the fact that member- states that underwent bailout processes had already exhausted their own access to sovereign debt markets resulted from their own financial and economic colapse, and the ECB/EU/IMF trio were quite literally the last people in the whole world willing to lend emergency funds that helped them soften the blow of the problem these countries' governments created to themselves over the years.

<comment><USER12> Look, I'm no Greek, and you're entitled to your opinion. The problem is this is exactly the same kind of finger pointing and the Greeks (the Spaniards, the Italians, etc) are the spoiled brats rhetorics that are creating toxic politics in Europe and causing the rise of far right populists. I wouldn't imagine a rhetoric where evicted homeowners are blamed for causing 2008 crisis with irresponsible borrowing instead of the Wall St.

<comment><USER13> > The problem is this is exactly the same kind of finger pointing and the > Greeks (the Spaniards, the Italians, etc) are the spoiled brats

You're getting emotional and in the process trying to out words into others people's mouths for no good reason. Greece's problems were a political and institutional problem, and it's not possible to hide this fact and its consequences. You cannot have a string of governments patently and systematically committing state-wide accounting fraud, and even resorting to paying consultants to optimize their fraud, and still try to spin it as emotional pettiness. Eventhough the actual Greek people had to bear the blunt of the problem, that changes nothing with regards to the problem, what caused it, andwho were responsible for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article does a poor job of explaining what could be controversial about the 2015 Eurogroup Meeting. Who cares? This just sounds like Euro-Politico Soap Opera.

After some digging, I found this:

> The Eurogroup on the 11 July 2015 discussed the request by the Greek > authorities for financial assistance from the European Stability Mechanism > (ESM) and their new proposals for a reform agenda.

[https://www.europeansources.info/record/extraordinary- eurogr...](https://www.europeansources.info/record/extraordinary-eurogroup- meeting-11-12-july-2015-euro-summit-brussels-12-13-july-2015-european-council- brussels-12-july-2015/)

So presumably, the recordings provide evidence of some kind of back-door deal between the EU and Greece as terms for refinancing its debt.

<comment><USER8> As far as I remember, Varoufakis was personally offended that the eurocrats did not take him seriously and did not engage in a discussion of his ideas. He wrote about it several times, he sounded extremely disappointed that you can't have an academic discussion on that table.

I had a really hard time to sympathise with him as I got the impression that he didn't pay attention to the reality of the situation and kept complaining that it's not like the way he likes it.

He seems like a nice guy to drink with but not a person you would like to do business. My guess is that the recordings will prove how cool and smart is he and it wasn't his fault.

<comment><USER12> > he didn't pay attention to the reality of the situation

Or he paid too much attention to the reality of the situation.

According to him, as a professional economist, the Euro is structurally unsustainable and is going to implode in the next 2008 because of the way the EU is set up politically creating a situation of a central bank without a country and countries without central banks.

What angered him is the way Eurogroup bureaucrats pretend this situation does not exist, even when they themselves admit they understand the same thing, which, to an academic like him, is a crime against logic.

<comment><USER8> See, here is the problem: This was not the topic of the meetings.

They did not convene there to fix the grand issue that was well known since the inception of the Euro. Not really a scientific discovery he made, a hot topic since ever.

Some professional economists argue that the current capitalist economy is not sustainable, how well do you think it will go if an economist brings this up in his meeting with his bank about the restructuring of his debt he/she racked up?

It's simply ridiculous. It's like those tech people over-obsessed with the technical aspect of an issue who get a managerial job and screwing up royally, get fired and keep bugging people about how company X is doomed because they did not implement his tech idea.

He simply did not understand what job he got and where he is. He thought that he had all the answers for all the problems of the world and he can fix them in those meetings with the eurocrats but they did not listen to him.

It's cringie.

<comment><USER12> I'm not talking about _the_ meetings either.

The meetings were even simpler: he went there for debt negotiation with an election mandate to not capitulate and with the most open mind for compromise, and was immediately handed an ultimatum to capitulate, with quote verbatim "elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy."

The crime against logic was what he discovered afterwards.

<comment><USER8> Okay, he could have not capitulated and let the electorate face the music of their decision.

It was a referendum among the Greek people about what their government should do.

You can't hold a referendum about what other people should give them.

The UK got a Brexit referendum and they got out. Nobody would have cared if they held "EU gives as market access but we do not allow Europeans coming over and work referendum" which is what the UK essentially wants.

<comment><USER12> He could. He was committed to a Grexit, which he calculated to be substantially better for Greece than what it has now. Then he got immense political pressure and death threats to his family.

<comment><USER13> > He was committed to a Grexit,

That was his personal political goal but not Greece's collective goal or will, and he did nothing more than to run political manoevers to try to manipulate Greeks to assume there was a ridiculous conspiracy by the whole world against them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sunlight is the best disinfectant. All citizens deserve to know what their politicians are saying behind closed doors.

<comment><USER16> That type of blanket statement is a great example of theory vs. practice.

In theory you'd want everything to be public in the interest of informing your populace.

In practice that's nonsense. There's genuine national security concerns, forthright debate of alternatives by advisors, and discussions of limits on negotiating positions.

Earring on the side of transparency is a good idea but there's a whole lot in government that should never, and will never, be public.

<comment><USER6> How can the public take informed decisions if the reasoned debate is always assumed to be held in secret?

OK, national security and foreign negotiation is a special topic where secrecy can be warranted. But if the government of a country or union of countries is considering, say, pay cuts, why on earth would the population not be entitled to hearing all sides of the argument?

<comment><USER17> How can politicians take responsible measures if they can be called out on any nonsensical thing?

Not that I'm against transparency, but there really are two sides to this. In the best case, politicians act in the interest of the people, which makes publication of their private dealings unwanted. In the worst case, they act against the interest of the people, which can only be dealt with by complete openness and independent justice. In practice, there's a balance between the two.

And it's worse if the decision makers are judged by people that are only partially affected, such as in EU decisions.

<comment><USER6> I disagree completely.

If there were real transparency, the public can also, in time, grow together with their politicians, and understand why certain decisions must be taken, and can help the public take a more active and measured role in their own government.

Controlling the actions of politicians who explicitly act against the public interest is at best a minor win. Open and honest dialog is the much more important aspect of this.

And the best case of this is - a politician working for the public interest convinces people to be mindful of their long term goals even when it contradicts their short term goals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> People deserve to hear this. Varoufakis has tried to go through the proper channels to make this public. Now DiEM 2025 (his party) has every right to self-publish these recordings. I for one welcome the transparency.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not directly related to the article, but here's a bit of context regarding the industriousness of different populations: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_average_annual_labor_h...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_average_annual_labor_hours_in_OECD_countries)

As can be seen, Greece is towards the top and Germany close to the bottom of the ranking.

This should not be taken as saying that the Greeks are better than the Germans. It's just that individuals in Greece, like those in many other places, spend their lives working hard and they don't deserve to suffer for the corrupt dealings, incompetence and prejudice of their or other countries ruling elite.

<comment><USER20> That list speaks nothing of industriousness. It's about how many hours are spent at work. Most people who have experienced working in different cultures could tell you that that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how productive people are at work or how much actually gets done.

<comment><USER19> Productivity is not the same as hard work.

A guy with a pickax can work very hard and still be a lot less productive than a guy with an excavator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If we wanted to release them, he would have already. Clearly he won't, cause this could backfire at him. Most probably it will be evident that he was not really participating in the negotiations about the future of his own country and he was literally just a listener (and eves dropper) responding with politically correct generalities. I really want him to publish them, in order to bust the image he is trying to build (that of some type of savior). He never will, unfortunately. He "threatened" to do it to get attention, such as the one he gets in this thread, because he can sense that he has become irrelevant. Please people, stop taking him so seriously.

</comment><comment><USER19> Might be worth taking a look at _And the Weak Suffer What They Must?_. While I still think Varoufakis is a bit too much of a calculated politician, the book is compelling in showing that the treatment imposed on Greece stemmed to an important degree from the creditor state's desire to save their own banks and from cultural animus.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is a really good chance for EU to become more open and organized.

I know of MEPs that have pushed for more open decision making in the past, and not making a lot of progress.

</comment><comment><USER23> Whatever is in these recordings, is probably meaningless. We know EU is a bureaucratic organization, we deal with it all the time in business, in research funding, in financial filing, etc etc. We also know that people argue a lot, thats why there isn't a central government, and the rules are based on consensus, not majorities. At best he should give them to an interested journalist, who could report on whatever is interesting to be reported. Publishing them wholesale just reeks of egomania.

As a greek, this kind of thing being "news" is insulting to me. This guy is a veritable idiot: a rich boy academic with little-to-show, who became popular for talking in economic gibberish to the most foolish part of the readers of The Guardian(1). After he was summarily dismissed at a cost of at least 100B, which caused needless pain and the first capital controls in my life, he proceeded to write a novel, make a movie, and write another novel for his personal vendetta. He now leads a tiny party of the worst champaigne socialists of europe[2] (who thankfully are on their way out of life). Yes, we have scumbags of this kind in this country, but this is not a representative specimen, or at least it shouldn't be the model of greek citizend who are struggling to catch up with the rest of europe.

1) I 've been tricked to watch a lot of his speeches. I couldn't find a single damn coherent actionable proposal there.

2) [https://diem25.org/ap](https://diem25.org/ap)

<comment><USER24> I agree with you. He likes to give long speeches, but doesn't have anything to say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> My first thought was: "Did he write a new book?"

And indeed, "Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present" will be published soon.

</comment><comment><USER26> Varoufakis only cares about himself, always promoting himself and is just seeking attention. What a joke of a person! He wanted to replace Euros with a crypto-currency as IoU at some point rather than going back to Drachma. The man is an academic, not a very good at that either and a clown of a Politician. His "negotiations" cost the Greek tax payer about 100Bn Euros, and enabled DB to shift their debt to the German taxpayer, passing it as a "financial rescue".

<comment><USER12> > He wanted to replace Euros with a crypto-currency as IoU

I don't know where you get this piece of information, but in all his books he argues against Bitcoin and crypto-currency as a reserve currency, making a point of the impossibility of apolitical money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the essence of those conversation have already published by Varoufakis in a book he wrote.

<comment><USER28> That's true, but until now it's basically been "he said / she said". Having a recording that shows the outright callousness of certain elements of those meetings, is another thing. At the very least, it would set the historical record straight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I for one, would be interested to read the primary source, when it comes out.

If no one else does, will try posting a link in reply to this comment when it does,

</comment><comment><USER30> I think that in 2020, everyone outside of a specifically secured facility should assume that are being recorded at all times.

</comment><comment><USER31> My intellect may be too small but I never understood anything Varoufakis said. I understand how shallow and hypocritical governments can be, but I never got the point of his interviews or actions, beside ranting about how imperfect things are (kinda like Snowden).

</comment><comment><USER32> This would be quite spicy to hear.

</comment><comment><USER33> It's as though Farage was right, and there's a lot of unsavory undemocratic backroom dealing going on, cigar smoke and all.

<comment><USER13> > there's a lot of unsavory undemocratic backroom dealing

That's an extremely loaded word for negotiating consensus. It's as if populist parties are manned by opportunists who have no qualms to throw everyone under the bus if that gives them any advantage.

<comment><USER33> Well, if it's all above board, they shouldn't be worried about transparency then, so what Varoufakis is doing is totally OK, am I right? Except I think there will be unsavory stuff in it, or there wouldn't be any reason for him to disclose this.

<comment><USER13> > Well, if it's all above board, they shouldn't be worried about transparency > then

That's either extremely naive or disingenuous. It's quite frequent in negotiations that you have to concede parts that might be spinned as collosal political losses even if they are completely inoquous or even in line with the greater good or your political mid to long-term interests. The sovereign debt crisis is an excellent example, as even though it was in no one's best interests to let states go bankrupt, a hand full of member states were forced to navigate populist and extremist political parties and movements who were fundamentally opposed to both the EU, euro, and bailout processes who were spinning this issue to further their personal agenda. It's absurd to even assume that needlessly exposing your nation to this sort of manipulation is in anyone's best interests.

<comment><USER33> Who decides what is "greater good" though? Some unelected bureaucrat in the Brussels? A globalist cabal? Frau Merkel? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Why do you have so much trust in these "negotiations" that you don't even want to see what transpired in them?

<comment><USER13> > Who decides what is "greater good" though?

The people you voted and elected for that exact role of course. That's what being a democratic republic is all about.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Simple brain exercise that may boost your short term memory (open-source, feel free to tinker with it) - <AUTHOR> http://shawnpresser.blogspot.com/2008/04/brain-rage.html

<comment><USER2> I actually created a version of this in ARC (Yes! ARC!) just yesterday. See the arc forum <http://arclanguage.org/item?id=6467>

Mine is less faithful to the original though (but still has the visual and auditory component) and is not very fancy or polished. On the plus side, it's only 70 lines of code and runs on Ubuntu :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't work for me. Win XP pro on a 32-bit machine.

I get an error called "NBack has encountered a problem and needs to close."

Edit: Same problem on a Vista system. I know this isn't a tech support forum, but I wanted to let other readers know that they aren't alone if they're encountering troubles.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's pretty embarrassing. The Reddit thread is full of people really interested in this idea but unable to run the program due to some incompatibility or another. I did this in Direct3D because I didn't know Flash and thought I could get it done faster in D3D. Well.. I could, and that was a big mistake. The end result is way worse than the time delay it would've taken me to learn Flash.

Hopefully someone finds the source code useful, or inspiring, or somehow some good can come out of this. It's just frustrating that I can't solve these issues for people.

You might want to try making sure you have the latest Direct3D components: [http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2da...](http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&displaylang=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I managed to get it to work, and after messing around with it for a little while I've come to the conclusion that I really suck at this game.</comment>


Use this to demonstrate Adaptive, Responsive, Static and Liquid  - <AUTHOR> http://liquidapsive.com/

<comment><USER2> I've never heard this distinction between adaptive and responsive. The article claims that responsive layouts are series of liquid layouts while adaptive layouts are series of static layouts. I was under the impression that "responsive" refers to all usage of media queries to swap layouts, and it just so happens that most of the time liquid layouts are used.

<comment><USER3> I haven't heard of adaptive before either, but I kind of like it. The original book on responsive design spent a lot of time talking about how to correctly make liquid layouts, and heavily advocated for their use along with media queries. It wasn't until Bootstrap that responsive design also started meaning static layouts with media queries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's nice... and also very wrong, if you take the initial definition of adaptive web design!

Adaptive web design as introduced by Aaron Gustafson in the "Adaptive Web Design" book has little to do with layout design, and everything to do with progressive enhancement and adapting the website's behavior to the browser's abilities (geolocation, ...)

But I guess, most people didn't read the book, and now everyone has their own definition for it, so in effect, it doesn't mean much anymore; some say it's non-fluid RWD (like here), some say it's server-side components (like most people), some say it's exactly the same as RWD... oh well, pick your favorite!

</comment><comment><USER5> I had this idea about using a "utility" function to represent how useful a given amount of screen space is to each widget, and then choosing the layout that maximizes the sum of the utility functions. It hasn't gained any traction, and I haven't had time to implement it myself.

See [http://gtk.10911.n7.nabble.com/Idea-for-automatic-widget- lay...](http://gtk.10911.n7.nabble.com/Idea-for-automatic-widget-layout- td59448.html) for more details.

<comment><USER6> I quite like this idea. A lot of toolkits already allow a widget to specify a "preferred size." I wonder if a simpler approach to your idea would be similar to e.g. the Accept-Content-Type HTTP header; a widget lists a series of preferred widths (or width ranges) with weights.

      preferred-width: 300px, 1.0; 200px..299px, 0.7; 100px..199px, 0.5;

That's slightly less flexible than a utility curve function, but (especially if ordered) is far easier to optimize for, as choices are ordered and restricted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When do you use em for height/width on boxes? And why not use % instead?

</comment><comment><USER8> Most illustrative. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER9> Did this site really deserve its own domain? We (as the internet) really ended up misusing the domain system and the only one benefiting from it are those selling domains.

<comment><USER3> I can't really see a downside to this page having its own domain name. Also your point makes no sense... clearly liquidapsive.com is much more memorable than [http://www.yahoo.com/geocities/en/us/~liquidapsive/home.html](http://www.yahoo.com/geocities/en/us/~liquidapsive/home.html)

So, no, domain (re)sellers aren't the only ones benefiting. And TBH the credibility of your statement is questionable given that ICANN doesn't directly sell domain names anyway.

<comment><USER9> Well as a common practice seems to be to always go trough google for everything, I'm actually not sure if it does matter?

Besides, even if it where some github.io page or something, I got the link here, now I can bookmark it.

Half a year from now i wont remember liquidapsive.com or [http://www.yahoo.com/geocities/en/us/~liquidapsive/home.html](http://www.yahoo.com/geocities/en/us/~liquidapsive/home.html) anyway.

I actually don't think using domains instead of paths or sub-domains makes things easier at all. Here's an example. Lets say you wan't to know about the latest playstation. Where do you go? ps.com, playstation.com, playstation4.com or sony.com? As a non gamer, I have no idea but I know its made by Sony so I guess that's where I'd go.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Building LinkedIn alternative for tech focused community - <AUTHOR> As LinkedIn have become feed flood of humble-brags, self proclaimed gurus of work life balance and unknown social connections which may never generate any value.
It may be good for professional networking & generating network for business people. Not sure, how much value it generates for software developers.
What would an alternative LinkedIn like social network look like for tech people which actually can add values in terms of jobs search, improving knowledge, helping get referral and talk directly with people who do hiring decisions? <comment><USER2> Great work. It does a good enough job handling most common cases. At least for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> You mean LinkedIn works great for you, but you would be interested in something around tech community only?</comment></comment>


Why Aren't U.S. Cars Popular in Japan? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/us-cars-japan/544991/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Wild guess: Their infrastructure runs on time and they don't have to wait hours to catch a bus.</comment>


Ask HN: Missing FCC comments? - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to figure out if anyone else's FCC comments weren't posted. I had posted one a few months back and could not find it through[1]. So I posted another one two days ago and have still not found it. I can find some of my friends, but not others. First I posted was through Battle for the net[2] and the second was through the EFF[3].
My comment through BFTN did go to my representatives, who did email me back.
Anyone else failed to find their comment?
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/
[2] https://www.battleforthenet.com/
[3] https://dearfcc.org/ <comment><USER2> I had this happen too, my experience is the same as the other posters when I used comcastroturf to post a comment. There was no sign the FCC received it at all.

If you submit your comment directly to the FCC, you get a confirmation e-mail, you don't get signed up for any mailing list (comcastroturf tried to sign me up for a mailing list), and you will see it posted to the site after a day or so passes, when they have reviewed it.

It's very interesting that so many robo-comments in support of Axe'ing the Title II laws were posted to the site, if they are being manually reviewed by someone... it's almost as if the FCC already knows what direction they're going to take, and this comment period is just a dog and pony show so they can say they had one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, filing directly gives me a confirmation email. Hopefully I see that comment post in the next few (working) days.

<comment><USER2> Mine only took a day to get posted, I think they must be reviewing them very carefully... /s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is slightly off topic but because of this story I went looking for my FCC comments [1] and decided to search for all recent (last week) comments from my small-population, somewhat-limited-ethnicity zip code, and discovered hundreds of anti-neutrality comments with very unlikely surnames. Every one of the ten I sampled failed a zabasearch.com search and looking in the property appraiser's website different owners are listed for the addresses given. Apparently fake comments continue to be common e.g. [2]. [1][https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/](https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/) [2][https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2017/05/26/victims-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2017/05/26/victims- demand-fcc-remove-fake-anti-net-neutrality-comments/#68b771716e79)

</comment><comment><USER4> Apparantly FCC had to throttle their commenting system.

> IMPORTANT NOTE: these numbers STILL represent only a portion of the final > totals, and due to the massive numbers, comments and emails will be > delivered over several days.

[https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2017-07-13-update- his...](https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2017-07-13-update-historic-day- of-action-for-net-neutrality/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the strange part about it, though, is the one that I posted a few months back isn't there. But thank you for this notice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I submitted directly via the FCC website and it was posted the day after I submitted it.

I would assume posting directly via the FCC is more reliable and also carries more weight than submitting a filled out template via an api. (If they can tell the difference.)

</comment><comment><USER6> The best thing is to post your comment directly on the FCC's website. Downtime/batch posting of comments can mean that your comment could show up late, or maybe not at all.</comment>