Mixpanel - Internships. A story. - <AUTHOR>

Mixpanel is looking for summer interns.
In 2008, I interned at Slide, Inc and it was one of the most valuable summers of my life. I went from college hacker interested in starting a company to learning deeply about product design and what it was like to work on a team.
That summer I was fortunate enough to work with an awesome PM, Adora (who taught me the essentials of product development) and Max Levchin. I am still not sure why Max ended up working so closely on the product we working on. Our product was new and had the least business value of all the things Slide was working on but it was still exciting. If I had to say, I think he just liked that we worked so hard on it.
At Slide, I was determined to work hard. I wanted to know if hard work paid off so I worked from 10am to 12am. It did: Slide offered me a full-time but I declined.
At the end of the summer I had huge takeaways:
- I knew I wanted to start a company. Immediately.
- I knew grad school didn't matter out in California
- I didn't realize it at the time but I grew a huge network of fellow Slide people ("Slide" mafia). Some of these people are my closest friends now.
- I learned so much about product, working with others, and how real companies "do it."
- I learned smaller things like: git, python, vim, etc.
- I could've never built Mixpanel without having been at Slide first.
If you're looking for a similar experience to my own, Mixpanel can provide this.
Apply for an internship: http://mixpanel.com/internships/ or firstname.lastname@example.com
Sincerely,
Suhail Doshi
Founder <comment><USER2> Good luck finding great interns!

I do want to point out the flaw in this line: "I wanted to know if hard work paid off so I worked from 10am to 12am. It did: Slide offered me a full-time but I declined."

You might have received an offer doing good work 7 hours a day.

<comment><USER3> I agree. I never worked overtime in my internship but was extended an offer. My review doesn't say how much I worked but what I accomplished and delivered.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I worked 6.5 - 7 hours a day at MSFT and got a full time offer as well [1], which is what made me think of pointing this out in the first place.

[1] And left my team happy, having finished my project beyond what they expected. Plus, those days were short largely because of all the entertainment stuff MSFT did for us interns. I don't want to give the impression I was slacking off for the sake of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow... you just explained my experience at Twitter. I went from being a future PhD looking for a fun summer to someone who forgot about grad school and wanted to stay creating "real" stuff in 4th and Folsom for ever.

Suffice it to say, I ended my internship, left grad school (including a fellowship by Google via GEM) and stayed at Twitter.

Get an internship, it can change (or confirm) your vision about a career and your future in general.

<comment><USER5> Great to hear Miguel, sorry we never got to really catch a proper meal together last summer... (can you guess who this is? ;) )

Let me know if you are out NYC / Boston way.

To chime on on this subject: Several internships at Google have offered tremendous learning experiences and network-building opportunities, and the subtleties picked up by immersion in the communities around the SF Bay area - or wherever you might fight yourself - are truly valuable. Internships are great, if you are a student reading this - go forth!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _I wanted to know if hard work paid off so I worked from 10am to 12am_

While I agree that an internship can be a great motivator (or an early de- motivator for people that chose the wrong career), I don't think this kind of extreme behavior should be encouraged. I'm not beneath doing extreme hours for a project, a few weeks ago I didn't leave the office for almost 72 hours to finish up some polishing of a product because of a sudden client imposed deadline. I did it knowing that I would then take a few days off and that it was an extreme measure to a extremely retarded requirement. It shouldn't be the rule since it can easily lead to tired and unhappy employees, and of course disgruntled employees who think they are being undervalued because they don't stay the same time the over-worker does.

If you have a very motivated employee, by all means let him do his overtime if he really wants to, but there has to be a line where you say "stop, go home". In any case, have some good luck looking for great interns. I'm pretty sure you can do wonders for all the new kids that're just starting out.

<comment><USER7> I don't know if its encouragement but its definitely what he did.

So we can take away one or two things:

1\. His rapid maturity as a developer, and deeply expanded network came at a cost to time. If he had worked less, perhaps he would have known less people, been talked about less, and consequently had a smaller network. Also, the amount of time he put into the job might be directly related to the expertise he got out of it ("Practice makes perfect").

2\. His type might just be your competition at an internship.

To be honest, while you're young spending 12 hours per day away from home isn't so bad. In high-school track, we'd regularly put in 3 hours mandatory after a 7 hour school day, then do one or two more hours if we were varsity. We were just teenagers.

Now adays, I can't imagine expending that much time on a single thing (school related stuff in this case), because I have so many competing interests but then single-minded devotion was the name of the game.

<comment><USER6> I never meant to say that the intern should not do such things. I just meant that it's not behavior to be encouraged on the workplace because it can have negative connotations that can hurt the social aspect of the team and/or can cause burnout which will inherently hinder productivity. If an intern wants to work 12 hours for any reason by all means let him. But if he's doing 12 hours + each and every day to basically prove his worth, there needs to be a limit before all parties come out losers in the relationship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Actual link: <http://mixpanel.com/internships/>

<comment><USER8> Quick question,

The link says,

>We think the best way for you to learn about software engineering is to actually do it

Does this mean that I can apply for an internship without any coding experience?

Because I'd love this.

<comment><USER9> What's keeping you from getting any coding experience?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well written explanation of how internships are amazing. Mine were all similar growing up.

<comment><USER11> Same here. I learned the same things as OP did too. Git, vim etc..

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Are you looking only for current undergrads, or would someone about to transition to university be fine if we have demonstrable work experience and recommendations?

</comment><comment><USER13> Great story Suhail -- a strong testament to not only why internships are critical in career exploration (something left out of much of the college experience) but also as to why startups in particular offer such fantastic opportunities for interns to grow.

From direct access to founders, CEO's, and advisers to being part of creating products that go live to working long hours in the trenches which creates a glue between interns and co-workers -- these experiences make startups an invaluable place to get early experience as a student.

Looking at mixpanel's internship opportunity it looks like it will be just as standout -- thanks for sharing what a great internship program can offer.

I'd like to post this story up on the InternMatch blog with your approval. We can also put the position up for free on the site. Feel free to shoot me an email for a promo code email@example.com.

Great stuff!

</comment><comment><USER14> Do you accept students with J-1 visas?

</comment><comment><USER15> Is there any place where it is easy to find high quality summer internships for students?

I did research at GA Tech when I was working on my Chemistry degree and had a blast / learned quite a few interesting things.

I would like to do something similar for the CS degree I am also working on this summer, but it has been difficult to find a "list" of companies offering quality summer internships.

Could anyone offer any directions?

<comment><USER16> Keep an eye on HN Jobs - there will be a flood of listings in the coming weeks/months (there's already one).

And Quora as well - here's one to start with - [http://www.quora.com/Startup- Internships/Which-startups-will...](http://www.quora.com/Startup- Internships/Which-startups-will-be-hiring-CS-interns-for- Summer-2011?q=which+companies+are+hiring+interns)

If you are looking for startup internships, you can pretty much find one at almost all of them these days (in the Bay Area and probably NYC). Hit up www.startuply.com for a huge list of startups. Find ones you like, look into their jobs page or email someone there. The more proactive you are, the better your chances.

I assume you are complaining about ATL? Even then, I find it hard to believe it's difficult to find companies here. Go to some networking events, I am sure you will find plenty of them in Tech Square :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> i did computer science in undergrad and did a summer with an investment bank. it made me want to shoot myself in the face. so i went to law school to get out of tech. now i'm trying to do startups, which probably would've been nice to do all along.</comment>


Learn Meteor Fundamentals and Best Practices - <AUTHOR> http://andrewscala.com/meteor/ <comment><USER2> How can there be best practices when there's no production ready software? Best practices aren't derived from first principles -- they're a reification of all of the human experience that has gone into writing and MAINTAINING software systems.

</comment><comment><USER3> The thing that concerns me about Meteor right now is that they seem to be fighting the use of the existing node ecosystem (e.g. not using npm, fibers) which makes it harder to use existing node libraries. Derby.js (<http://derbyjs.com/>) in contrast, build upon existing node components and plays nicely with npm.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, but Meteor is still young _and_ it actually has a reason for doing it that way. Meteor doesn't have a built-in module system right now, so when you add something like underscore.js to your Meteor project, you don't need to require("underscore"), it's simply available on both the client and server globally.

I feel like they chose to go for convenience rather than consistency with existing practices.

But like I said, Meteor is still in its infancy. It's entirely possible this will all change down the line.

<comment><USER4> How is having all second party modules be global automatically a convenience? That sounds like the worst possible way second party modules could work.

Throwing away a package manager as great and as tried and tested as NPM, which could easily be used seems so counter-intuitive.

<comment><USER5> well its called "smart" package manager so perhaps the team believes NPM is a "dumb" package manager? But isn't a package manager suppose to be dumb? Sounds like over-engineering already :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I appreciate the brief diversion at the end (which I would summarize as 'make sure your users can't delete your entire database'), but it seems like there's nothing on which to base fundamentals/best practices for Meteor security yet...

</comment><comment><USER7> I feel left behind, I thought Meteor was pretty new and already a fundamentals and best practices article?

</comment><comment><USER8> Meteor is interesting but like others, I have some concerns. It's position within node.js community is a little strange to me. Also, this idea of "best practices" for something so new is just a little odd. Is it really a "baked" state where people can really build non-trivial apps or complex apps? I think you need a baked state plus time for best practices to actually develop.

</comment><comment><USER9> Still waiting on the day that I can use Meteor without giving up on SEO...

</comment><comment><USER10> If best practice for database access security is to monkey patch the functions... ON THE CLIENT... i'm writing this off.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Note: Execute $ meteor remove autopublish on every project from the root project directory. It publishes all your data by default to the client and is poor practice."

This note does not belong in any article that also contains the heading "What is Meteor?". You should remove autopublish eventually, but it's a great piece of scaffolding.

</comment><comment><USER12> Man, Meteor is a pretty interesting framework. Looking forward to spinning up my first app on this.</comment>


Ask HN: I often don't read the stories I upvote and vice-versa - <AUTHOR> The HN content I get the most value out of is not always the content I upvote.
Sometimes, I'll hit the back button in the middle of an article to altruistically upvote it, but often, I'll upvote based on other signals even though I don't end up reading the articles.
For example, I looked at my history just now. I upvoted
"Solid – A set of conventions and tools for decentralized social applications (mit.edu)"
because MIT + Bootstrap Page + Tim Berners-Lee = Upvote
In retrospect, that was the extent of the mental calculus I did. I did not read the article and don't know what Solid is.
Would HN vote buttons that detected a third-party cookie and reduced the friction to vote off HN (like Facebook Like buttons) mitigate this? Or, do you all generally upvote what you read and vice-versa? <comment><USER2> Relevant example: Currently 5 upvotes for a story submitted 30 minutes ago "Swedish rape warrant for Wikileaks' Assange cancelled" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12289509](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12289509)

The article is from 2010. I'd say at least half the upvotes where for the headline, not the story.

</comment><comment><USER2> That's fine. It's impossible to read every article. I regularly upvote submissions in /new that sounds interesting in the sense of "I'm not an expert, but this should make an interesting discussion" or questions in /ask that I can't answer myself. Usually I do click to make sure the submission isn't too short or linkbait. With stories on the frontpage I regularly upvote after reading comments without touching the article. Overall the voting system seems to work, I won't claim wisdom-of-the-crowd, just that on average enough care is taking place.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the more interesting part in my question is the vice-versa. I read a lot of stories, but don't go back and upvote them because I'm either engrossed in the article, or it has infinite scroll and I don't want to lose my place, or whatever. Usually, I'm lazy and don't want to overcome the friction to upvote. I realize it's selfish, but it seems like a usability issue that could be fixed with on page buttons

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In high school, I had a poster that said "EAT SHIT-- Five Billion Flies Can't Be Wrong!!!"

Your approach reminds me of that. You upvote things you don't read, because you figure they're probably pretty good?

How about we mitigate this by forcing you to attend Donald Trump rallies until your brain melts?</comment>


Etsy moving to GCP - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2017/12/14/etsy-picks-google-for-first-move-to-cloud/ <comment><USER2> Copy of the article without a paywal [http://www.cetusnews.com/business/Etsy- Picks-Google-for-Firs...](http://www.cetusnews.com/business/Etsy-Picks-Google- for-First-Move-to-Cloud-%C2%A0.BJm8uVxGM.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazon should divest AWS into its own company for its sake.

<comment><USER2> The CTO said that support for machine learning was the deciding factor. In that case the lesson for Amazon would be that it should get serious about machine learning and offering pipelines and automation around it. MTurk puts them in an excellent position for that, imo.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who is having trouble hiring? - <AUTHOR> What startups out there are having a hard time filling roles?<p>Particularly curious if there are some lesser-known companies at the Series A/B/C stage that are finding it difficult to fill a bunch of roles, possibly in unsexy industries like fintech, advertising, etc. <comment><USER2> Depends on what you consider 'hard'? I'd say the market for quality developers is still pretty small and thus time consuming and it takes a lot of time to sift through to find the right candidates or candidates with potential.

If a position takes longer than 2 months to fill I consider it 'hard'.

</comment><comment><USER3> Every startup here in Bangalore, even well funded ones, is having trouble hiring good engineers. Not their fault, people who are really good have plenty of options. It is very rare for companies to be well funded/profitable, _and_ have interesting problems to work on.

Most are doing glorified CRUD (nothing wrong with that, from a business pov) and then one job is much like another. If you are well paid and 'settled' in a present job, why move?

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't think startups will come out and openly admit that they are finding it hard to hire. Thats really bad for their reputation and can sometimes be the difference between life and death for many startups.

Also, your question doesn't tell what your motive is other than just curiosity? Maybe adding that to the question might be helpful.

</comment><comment><USER5> fintech/advertising are unsexy now ? what is sexy, instagram/imgur ?</comment>


Ask HN: What is your expierence with smart watches? - <AUTHOR>

I am asking this because I need a watch, I sadly broke my years old "original" smartwatch, the EZ430-Chronos by TI today. :( <comment><USER2> i wanted to buy apple watch but did not hear anything good about it :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Same, I specially considered it because I already have an iphone</comment></comment>


The Twilight Years of Cap'n Crunch - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116863379291775523-_EQCu93LyjSommsN6J7qiCozuu8_20070122.html?mod=blogs

<comment><USER2> I just met him at Bar Camp - cool guy In fact, he's currently recruiting for his new startup in LA. I im'd him to see if he was interested in talking about it on the site formerly known as "Startup News" Actually with its current name, John would probably be more inclined to post

<comment><AUTHOR> Send him our way, I'd love to interact with a legend. Maybe he could set the record straight, I can't imagine that the WSJ got everything right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> holy crap</comment>


Ask HN: How to get major websites to cover your startup? - <AUTHOR>

I have been trying to get some major tech websites coverage for my new startup but they don't even seem to read my emails and if they do, they don't even send me a reply. I have tried to make connections with some of their authors but that didn't work either! <comment><USER2> I read somewhere on here about a process of starting with smaller blogs and feeding a news story from there because bigger news outlets source stories from smaller sites, etc. might check out this post too. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341138)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing, Do you know any good and small tech websites that I can use for this purpose?

<comment><USER2> you might try googling: "[your niche] blog" "[your niche forum" "[your niche] comparision" etc. look for keyword tools around your niche. search twitter for keywords aroudn yuor niche.

<comment><USER3> Or use technorati's search engine, and work through the top 100 backwards. That's the suggestion I recently read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote up how I got TechCrunch to cover my launch. I didn't really have the connections or relationships. A big part was luck.

[http://kevinohashi.com/27/11/2012/reverse-engineering- startu...](http://kevinohashi.com/27/11/2012/reverse-engineering-startup- press-how-and-why-techcrunch-covered-my-launch)

</comment><comment><USER5> Mike Butcher wrote a good guide to it:

[http://www.slideshare.net/mikebutcher/how-to-deal-with- tech-...](http://www.slideshare.net/mikebutcher/how-to-deal-with-tech-media- by-mikebutcher)

<comment><USER6> video of same & 2 others: [https://www.themediagraph.com/blog/2013/pitching-a- startup-t...](https://www.themediagraph.com/blog/2013/pitching-a-startup-to- journalists-three-great-videos)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> HIGHLY Suggest making the login/register fields, boxes, buttons smaller...

</comment><comment><USER2> what does your startup do?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is kind of a Google Reader alternative but in a much creative way than all those Google Reader clones such as Feedly or AOL Reader

<comment><USER8> Is this it?

[http://picktoread.com/](http://picktoread.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes :D</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to create and use program libraries on Linux (2003) - <AUTHOR> https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/ <comment><AUTHOR> Related discussion on HN:

* How to Write Shared Libraries (2011) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22408624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22408624)</comment>


British Telecom bars Huawei's 5G kit from core of network - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46453425 <comment><USER2> Considering that one can purchase a zero day exploit in pretty much any piece of network equipment for ~$50k, I don't see how these 'national security' claims hold up.

For a government who wants to spy, the difference between inserting your own exploit in a piece of equipment and paying $50k to find an existing exploit is insignificant.

Using an existing exploit is preferable anyway, because then it's harder to trace the origins of the exploit back to you.

<comment><USER3> It is always better to have more options - but it is also a matter of trust - how much can you trust a bought zero day? Especially when your opponent is the UK state.

<comment><USER4> Trust? In terms of competency of the exploit?

I've wondered how the security experts privately regard nation state security personnel and teams? For example, no government was competing to employ Barnaby Jack. And of course government is notorious for inefficiency and incompetence when producing goods and services.

Of course nation states also have enormous advantages over any other individual or group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Recently we had a situation in New Zealand where a large telco announced Huawei would provide their 5G kit for the entire network, then days later had to retract because the national intelligence agency barred the deal [0].

[0] [https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&...](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=12167798)

<comment> dis-sys Many are asking the same legitimate question - what is the point keeping the free trade agreement with NZ when Chinese products are being treated like that.

<comment><USER6> Who are the many? One side says the equipment isn't secure, that isn't related to free trade. I suppose a lot of countries selling asbestos and aerosol are upset

<comment> dis-sys > Who are the many?

are you assuming that there are not many hardliners in China?

> One side says the equipment isn't secure

after so many years with so many Huawei equipments used in the west, when all kinds of security experts and law enforcements officials all have 24/7 access to those devices, when the state of the art analysis tools and procedures are all available to them, any actual backdoor intentionally placed by Huawei got busted?

<comment><USER6> You are making the assumption that a backdoor needs to be active now, not a sleeper backdoor that is a activated on a trigger

What about future firmware upgrade or hardware replacement that isn't vetted today. What triggered all this was BT found the equipment was too chatty

<comment> dis-sys > What about future firmware upgrade or hardware replacement that isn't vetted > today.

same question for all Cisco/IBM/HP/Apple devices used in countries not that close to the US/UK. should they use the same cheap excuses to ban all those devices? or maybe the standard is simply different here?

> What triggered all this was BT found the equipment was too chatty

please define the term chatty and what is the acceptable threshold? or maybe get the best expert to look into it and present the smoking gun evidence to the world to actually prove something with solid evidence?

before that, what you mentioned above is nothing but fear mongering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not directly related to the story, but just for info - "British Telecom" is an incorrect name (it's not used in the BBC article). The company renamed from that to BT in 1991.

<comment><USER8> Didn't British Petroleum do the same thing? Now they are exclusively known as BP.

<comment><USER9> I was reminded of this when Obama still referred to BP as British Petroleum during the oil spill:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10303619](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10303619)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Huawei denies having any ties to the Chinese government beyond those of > being a law-abiding taxpayer.

I find it interesting that these kinds of verbal games are continually played out in the public eye despite everyone involved knowing exactly what's going on. And that goes for all APT / nation-state actors.

<comment><USER11> Australia has effectively banned Huawei since 2012 (NBN participation ban). Therefore, there is plenty of discourse and information from Australia about technology sovereignty.

The article at [1] directly addresses the claim:

> Huawei denies having any ties to the Chinese government beyond those of > being a law-abiding taxpayer.

Articles at [2] also provide more in-depth analysis.

[1] [https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/huawei-and-the- ambiguity-o...](https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/huawei-and-the-ambiguity-of- chinas-intelligence-and-counter-espionage-laws/)

[2] [https://www.aspi.org.au/report/huawei-and- australias-5g-netw...](https://www.aspi.org.au/report/huawei-and- australias-5g-network)

<comment><USER12> The irony here in that Australia just passed laws requiring local vendors to put in backdoors at the governments request, not just for national security but also in regards to "national economic well-being" aka industrial espionage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem is that Huawei kit does not have GCHQ/NSA backdoor capabilities. Hence it has to be banished.

The story has not changed since five years ago:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/25/huawei_responds_to_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/25/huawei_responds_to_spying_allegations/)

It would be commercial suicide for Huawei to have backdoored their export products. For the Chinese domestic market they may have 'Great Firewall' extras to them but for export products it simply makes no business sense.

There is zero evidence in the public domain to support the hysterical allegations of the crazy folks in our domestic military-industrial-espionage complex.

In former times there was this quaint notion of innocent until proven guilty. It is time we grow up a bit and stop slandering our Chinese friends. Xenophobia has never helped.

Edit: Instead of downvoting, please explain the flaws in my comment, whether they be based on unsubstantiated claims, tone of voice or just personal grudge. Thank-you.

<comment><USER14> > The problem is that Huawei kit does not have GCHQ/NSA backdoor capabilities. > Hence it has to be banished.

GCHQ/NSA don't need to add their own backdoor capabilities. Huawei gear ships with support for what is refered to as _Lawful Interception._ [0]

I agree with the rest of your comment and I said something similar myself a few days ago[1]. But the idea of Huawei being barred by a British carrier because of GCHQ not being able to snoop on it is absurd.

Full disclosure: I am a Huawei employee.

0: [http://support.huawei.com/enterprise/en/doc/EDOC0100412586?s...](http://support.huawei.com/enterprise/en/doc/EDOC0100412586?section=j00b)

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18514607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18514607)

<comment><USER13> I like the Huawei employees I have met in Surrey, it does seem a pity that their world is being ruined by the brainfarts of politicians and those spooks that told so many lies about Iraq and every other war.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So _something_ has changed, because there used to be a weird little collaboration/supervision operation going on between BT, Huawei, and UK Intelligence at Martlesham Heath.

[https://www.eadt.co.uk/business/martlesham-heath-huawei- pled...](https://www.eadt.co.uk/business/martlesham-heath-huawei-pledges-to- invest-370m-in-superfast-5g-mobile-network-1-2972789)

<comment><USER16> Not often I find my local rag referenced in HN, but I'm intrigued... where in the article does it mention UK intelligence? Martlesham is BT's R&D facility.

<comment><USER15> It doesn't. I doubt it would be legal for them to mention things covered by the Official Secrets Act. Remember that GCHQ was "officially invisible" for _years_ despite being a hugely visible building and major Coventry employer. The Martlesham Heath connection is less conspicuous but something I've had people in the know hint at.

<comment><USER17> > I doubt it would be legal for them to mention things covered by the Official > Secrets Act.

Official Secrets act only applies to people who signed it.

A journalist would have to be insane to sign the official secrets act as it is hilariously broad.

If you don't sign it then you can print (almost) whatever you want.

Even the much vaunted "D-Notices" are not mandatory, it's an informal agreement between the press and the government that occasionally the government will ask them not to print something and the press will (mostly) trust them, it seems to work fairly well, one thing I've wondered is that because the D-Notices are voluntary rather than mandatory the government can't abuse them the way they could if they where mandatory (since if they did the press would stop ignoring them).

<comment><USER18> > Official Secrets act only applies to people who signed it.

No it doesn't. It's a law, not a contract. They only get you to sign to it in order to remind you of the fact you're bound by it.

<comment><USER17> Sorry you are wrong.

They have to either sign it _or_ be notified that they are covered under it generally by employment contract that you sign.

Without either of those you are not bound by it.

> It is not necessary for a person to have signed the Official Secrets Act in > order to be bound by it. The 1989 Act states that a person can be "notified" > that he or she is bound by it; and Government employees will usually be > informed via their contract of employment if they must observe the Act. [1]

[1] [https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Sum...](https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7422)

Since I've never signed it nor a contract notifying me that I'm bound by it, I'm _not_ bound by it nor would a journalist be.

This is how you end up in the somewhat funny situation of a government employee not been able to confirm something because they are covered but the person asking for confirmation not been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Edit: UK outage vendor confirmed as Ericsson: [https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-o2telefonica- outages/erics...](https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-o2telefonica- outages/ericsson-software-glitch-hits-mobile-services-in-britain-and-japan- idUKKBN1O51I2)

Old paranoia filled post left below for reference. Thanks to saaaaaam for pointing the above link out.

\----

There's something going on here, political or technical.

O2/Telefonica subcontracted out a lot of their core to Huawei in 2012 [1]. Literally today, after their CFO was arrested in Canada [2], we've been hit with a massive telecoms outage here in the UK which has taken out data / SMS. O2 have stated that it's due to one of their technology provider's software [3].

Edit: Giffgaff (virtual provider) have also stated that this is a global problem which is even more worrying [4]

I hope this is a coincidence.

We've had data down here in UK from 0500 to 14:00 so far...

China stock is falling, this happened, Huawei already have a somewhat iffy reputation and now BT is throwing out news about jumping ship from them suddenly.

[1] [http://telecoms.com/44197/huawei-wins-managed-services- deal-...](http://telecoms.com/44197/huawei-wins-managed-services-deal- with-o2-uk/)

[2] [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46465768](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46465768)

[3] [https://twitter.com/O2/status/1070612301110226944](https://twitter.com/O2/status/1070612301110226944)

[4] [https://twitter.com/giffgaff/status/1070674248606339072](https://twitter.com/giffgaff/status/1070674248606339072)

<comment><USER20> The outage was apparently caused by Ericssons software: [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/06/o2-customer...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/06/o2-customers- unable-to-get-online) \- our domestic, trustworthy and great company.

But it's sad to see that Chinese scaremongering propaganda is so effective even on educated people.

<comment><USER21> The Chinese equipment isn't being rejected because it can fail. It's because Chinese companies aren't as separate from the government as in the West. And they don't trust China of course.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > still plans to use the Chinese company's phone mast antennas and other > products deemed not to be at the "core" of the service.

So apparently phone masts aren't "core" to a _phone network_?

<comment><USER23> It likely refers to the technical definition of the core of a telco network, see e.g. the evolved packet core part of a 4g/lte network [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6dt9xVMvtB8/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6dt9xVMvtB8/maxresdefault.jpg) , of which the eNodeb's ("phone masts") are not part of.

At least for 4g some layers of the control plane and all the user plane data are encrypted when passed through the eNodeb's. Albeit an eNodeb can probably do a lot of nefarious things if it wants to.

Or they mean literally just the phone masts and antennas - which are just inert components.

<comment><USER22> That makes more sense. Cheers :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > However, critics point out that its founder, Ren Zhengfei, was a former > engineer in the country's army and joined the Communist Party in 1978. There > are also questions about how independent of state influence any large > Chinese company can be.

Is this really the best they can come up with? I've never heard any more specific accusations, in any media. Sounds pretty racist.

(I have seen specific accusations that Huawei is violating sanctions, but that is a separate concern from national security in infrastructure.)

<comment><USER25> Corporate espionage and military intelligence are not clearly separated in China, and this is due to the culture and values of the Chinese Communist Party. This is seen as the same thing, advancing towards the same goal.

This is arguable less of the case in other countries, which is why people in other countries don't understand what is going on right now (i.e. why Huawei is seen as a security threat). The concern is, if you in the future cross the will of the Chinese Communist Party, your national infrastructure may suddenly...behave differently.

<comment><USER24> > Corporate espionage and military intelligence are not clearly separated in > China, and this is due to the culture and values of the Chinese Communist > Party.

Any _specific_ examples or accusations????

<comment><USER26> It's mostly science fiction at this point. You'll only get vague comments at best. It may well be true, but the people you're talking to don't know.

Always remember: you're almost certainly talking to a software engineer with an active imagination using Wikipedia to selectively back up their stories.

<comment><USER27> They always make sure to put a TON of "citations" in their comments too lmao.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Seems like they started fight with Huawei via non-market means. Does it mean its actually a successful hardware company, threatening Apple/Samsung dominance?

As for fears, they could mandate open source with reproducible builds for all security critical infrastructure hardware.

<comment><USER29> Pretty sure Huawei is getting targeted for a reason, and not just because it's a "successful hardware company".

Neither the US nor the UK have any interest in protecting Samsung from competition.

My guess is that there's been some discoveries related to how aggressively Huawei is spying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Backdoor in event-stream library dependency" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18534392](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18534392)

[https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/29/why-we- stopped-...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/29/why-we-stopped- trusting-elites-the-new-populism)?

Trust!</comment>


5 Ways to Get Engineers to Actually Do What You Want - <AUTHOR> http://trialfire.com/blog/5-ways-to-get-engineers-to-do-what-you-want/

<comment><USER2> It actually depends on who "You" are.

Are you the Sales guy who promised the moon?

Are you the Marketing guy whose Copy doesn't match the product?

Are you the CEO battling fires?

Are you the CTO wondering if why the engineers don't want to move to the last new fad?

Are you the Customer Success guy getting buried under customer issues?

Are the VP Engineering trying to maintain schedule?

In all cases, it's only about the customer. It's not what "You" want that's important but what the customer wants.

</comment><comment><USER3> #0: Put your engineer(s) in the same room as an unhappy customer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hire better engineers?</comment>


Gifrocket – Video to GIF for Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> http://www.gifrocket.com

<comment><USER2> This needs a little more information. What are the features of the app? Is "Drag and Drop a Video and it becomes a GIF" the only functionality? (usually such apps offer trimming in addition) What is the quality of the output?

<comment><AUTHOR> The application settings allows changing of output width and three levels of quality. Tested it once and worked pretty much the way I expected. Trimming is not included as far as I know. Disclaimer: I am not the author of this app.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Open-source social networking platform - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking to create my own social network, but with more customization than Ning offers (and I'm willing to hack).  Any recommendations?<p>I've looked at Insoshi (RoR), and Elgg (LAMP).  Any others? <comment><USER2> I was recently looking around or something similar, and came across a project called LovdByLess (RoR):

<http://lovdbyless.com/>

I can't say I've used it, but it looks like it's worth checking out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why reinvent the wheel, if you want more customization than what Ning offers, just download the source code of the social network that you create on Ning and then extend it to suit your taste.</comment>


Few.swift – React-Inspired Library for Writing AppKit/UIKit UIs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joshaber/Few.swift <comment><USER2> > Few.swift lets us express UIs as stateless, composable, immutable-ish values > of their state. When their state changes, Few.swift calls a function to > render the UI for that state, and then intelligently applies any changes.

arent most Objective-C and Swift views written like this already?

in the .h:

        @property Klass *model;

in the .m:

        - (void)setModel:(Klass *)model {
          if (![model isEqual:_model) {
            _model = model;
            // ... stuff like self.text = model.value ...;
            [self setNeedsLayout];
          }
        }

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the proliferation of ideas around React and the various new attempts at cool stuff.

Question, though: why is the idea of glorified two-way bindings with dirty- checking constantly popping up? It may make your code slightly prettier, but at the expense of efficiency. Instead, what's wrong with this:

      component.state.x = 5;
      component.state.y = "blah";
      component.stateChanged("x","y");

And in the view:

      component.onStateChanged("x").set(function() {
        component.someExactElement.innerHTML = x; // or whatever
      });

No need to do dirty checking, and it's explicitly clear what the bindings do.

<comment><USER4> Because it automates away bookkeeping. Consider

      component.state.x = 5;
      component.state.y = "blah";
      component.state.z = "bug!";
      component.stateChanged("x","y");

That one line addition should have included a change to the last line.

Also, I don't know whether it is done, but with a relatively slow/relatively large overhead network between the bound objects, software can bunch up the synchronization of changes to independent objects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If one is looking for something similar for Android - you might like Anvil: [https://github.com/zserge/anvil](https://github.com/zserge/anvil)</comment>


The Unsavory Story of Industrially-Grown Tomatoes (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2011/08/26/139972669/the-unsavory-story-of-industrially-grown-tomatoes <comment><USER2> Imagine how much more perfect and flavorless tomatoes could be with genetic engineering! Or the opposite - they could be filled with salt and fat, like other highly processed foods, to encourage increased consumption.

If that's what corporations did when they had the ability with processed foods, why do we expect them to act different with GMOs? What they optimize for may not have much to do with consumer or environmental well-being.</comment>


Kontena 1.0 Released: Developer Friendly Container and Microservices Platform - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kontena.io/kontena-1-0/ <comment><USER2> Interesting that their "What is Kontena" doesn't actually tell you what it is:

> Kontena is an open source container & microservices platform designed for > software developers. It is easy to set up, use and maintain. The platform > has all essential features built-in so there is no need to spend time > tinkering with it. That means you can focus on what matters most – your > software.

Replacing "all essential features" with a list of the actual features would be a good idea in my opinion

<comment><USER3> This looks like a pretty standard offering for 'orchestration as a service' \- Essentially hosted Kubernetes/Swarm/Mesos (or whatever orchestrator they're using).

What I'm sceptical about is the $0 price tag on their core service. They say they'll make money on support, but what makes them qualified to provide support for MY particular system? Sure, they'd have expertise to help resolve any generic container/orchestration issue that I might have, but what if the issue is related to my own code, the framework, database engine and/or library/module that I'm using? It's not always easy to tell.

Can they truly help fix my issues efficiently if they don't fully understand how my system works? They'd have to be really involved in my product to be able to have the necessary knowledge to provide adequate support.

Maybe this is not 'hands-on support' \- More like over-the-phone support - That makes more sense I guess.

<comment><USER4> > This looks like a pretty standard offering for 'orchestration as a service' > \- Essentially hosted Kubernetes/Swarm/Mesos (or whatever orchestrator > they're using).

It's not hosted. The hosted web-ui thing will probably include some premium features or some enterprise installation deal, like Ansible has with Ansible Tower.

> They say they'll make money on support, but what makes them qualified to > provide support for MY particular system?

Github doesn't offer support for developing YOUR application, only for issues related to using Github.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All you need now is a homemade wifi booster made out of a Pringles can, then you can deploy your containers to Kontena using your cantenna.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is there a valid reason for using microservice unless you have 1000+ engineers working on a product?

The microservice argument is compelling to begin with but shifts the separation of concern to the extreme, to the point that you now have intra service level delegation bubbling up with complexity.

Suddenly, fetching a blog post now involves multiple context switching than something written in RoR deployed on beantstalk.

If I was forced to use microservice architecture I would not try to deploy it myself instead using Azure Fabric because breaking a monolithic framework codebase itself is such a monumental task especially when you are dealing with legacy code.

I feel as if microservice is the "blockchain" of backend architecture space where it's actively solving problems that isn't there. Much like moving to a cryptographic linked-list with decentralized consensus creates ton of drama, splitting services into as many pieces as possible seems like asking for trouble.

<comment><USER7> There are cases where it makes sense. In my own case I've splitup several parts of a "simple web application" into services.

For example if a new user joins my site I want to send them a welcome email. The traditional way to do that would be to have the back-end send the mail directly. But of course sending email can block and take a while, so you really want to do it in a different process, not inside your Rails/PHP/Perl CGI process.

So in this case I submit a "new.user.joined" event to a work queue. I then have a micro-service which pretty much sits idle, until it sees such an event, and then it sends the mail.

I have a bunch of these little services that just listen for events that they care about, and do one specific job. If I were in ruby they could be sidekiq workers, but since I'm not I'll just call them "microservices". They can be started/stopped independently, and though they do have application knowledge (e.g. where to load email templates from) they're pretty decoupled.

Perhaps I could have picked a better example, but I think it still counts!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Among those features was support for stateful containers and multi-region, > something no one else was doing in the container platform world.

Stateful containers? Depending on what you mean by that it seems to me that's a rather bad idea. The idea is that containers don't contain state. Doesn't mean it can't be an application that stores state somewhere else, but the container itself shouldn't be stateful.

If you mean being able to run a database through a container (while still storing the data not in the container) then yes, sure, stateful container. But that's been feasible for a long time. I don't think it's fair to claim that no one else was doing that in the container platform world.

<comment><USER9> Feasible, yes. Easy to coordinate, not so much.

Things like this are still alpha/beta for a reason: [http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/petset/](http://kubernetes.io/docs/user- guide/petset/)</comment></comment>


Xkcd 2168: reading Wikipedia in the Greek original - <AUTHOR> https://xkcd.com/2168/ <comment><USER2> Is it this? [https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A0%CF%8D%CE%BB%CE%B7:%CE%9...](https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A0%CF%8D%CE%BB%CE%B7:%CE%9A%CF%8D%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%B1)

or another language?

<comment><USER3> That's Greek alright!</comment></comment>


I Moved to Linux and It's Even Better Than I Expected - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/i-moved-to-linux-and-it-s-even-better-than-i-expected-9f2dcac3f8fb#.g1ik84xk5 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10841520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10841520)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10837129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10837129)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10836988](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10836988)</comment>


Show HN: Header only C++17 template library: PEG parser and AST builder - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MoserMichael/cppcombinator <comment><AUTHOR> Please check out my side project, it's a library for building PEG parsers (top-down parser) that build an in-memory parse tree, Each template instantiation stands for a grammar rule, and translates directly into a node in the parse tree. In this respect this project differs from PEGTL. The project taught me a lot about C++ metaprogramming.

BTW: I am also looking for a job right now. I do C++, Golang, Python and Java on Linux. Looking for remote job as contractor or full time (on-site in Israel). I have worked with kubernetes, storage, networking, security.

Contact info is in my profile. Please consider my application.</comment>


Rapid Hiring & Firing to Build the Best Teams - <AUTHOR> http://www.artima.com/forums/flat.jsp?forum=106&thread=281754

<comment><USER2> Paul English sounds like a huge douche.

>During interviews, I do tell people about this, and that they should not join if they are risk-averse in their confidence about themselves.

Basically he's saying if you don't think you're smart enough to work for me, don't bother. Instead of factually stating that 1 in 5 new hires will be let go in X months, he flips it around on the candidate and turns it into a challenge. It's a subtle psychological trick that is dishonest at best.

No one ever wants to talk about the ethics involved in treating people like cogs in your money-making machine. If you want the absolute best people on your team, provide a salary that will attract the best. Anything else is simply using people as tools for your own self-interest.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would not assume 'best' people are primarily motivated by salaries.

<comment><USER2> I depends on how big of an increment we're talking. If we're talking a 10k/year difference then other factors probably weight greater. But for more significant amounts, I'm sure salary would be a primary motivation.</comment></comment></comment>


Parsing Expression Grammars: A Recognition-Based Syntactic Foundation - <AUTHOR> http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~baford/packrat/popl04/

<comment><USER2> Ahhh, now this would have been useful 2 weeks ago when I was creating a parser using Treetop (a Ruby implementation of a PEG generator)...</comment>


Ask HN: My Show HN post won't show. Could it be? - <AUTHOR> My friend had posted the project here without asking me and then deleted the post.
Could it be the reason why my submission doesn't appear? Am I doomed from submitting it to Show HN now?
This is what I submitted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11800148. It was titled "Show HN: Goodbye Gun Stocks." <comment><USER2> For this kind of thing it's always a better idea to email hn. email@example.com

They don't get to see everything, and will probably miss this.

And dang is always happy to fix things if there are problems, and to let you know what's happened.

</comment><comment><USER3> Another possible explanation is that the automatic spam filter detected some strange pattern, for example a lot of upvotes from just created accounts. Did you share the HN post in tweeter or something?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It appears my account is ok, so I am guessing my domain has been blocked.

<comment><USER4> When I turn on showdead in my profile settings I can see your post marked as [dead]. So it is a problem with the domain.

See this post for details: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1691145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1691145)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking. So it's really been blocked!

It could have been my friend, or a anyone else -- in our case there are (pro- gun) people who are hostile toward our project as well.

This is really unfortunate, if it's so easy for anyone to sabotage your domain or project.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Underground - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1003016361&ref_=&ref_=mas_undrgrnd_SWMS

<comment><USER2> Typical "You are the product" disclaimer

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting. I wonder how they will monetize this, or if it will simply be to get more people in the Prime ecosystem.</comment>


How the Great Recession changed the job market forever for college grads - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2018/06/01/how-the-great-recession-changed-the-job-market-forever-for-college-grads/ <comment><USER2> Possible non paywalled link for low income users,

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/grade- point/wp/2018/06/01/how-the-great-recession-changed-the-job-market-forever- for-college-grads/)

<comment><USER3> Doesn't work, but if you open it in incognito mode, it doesn't have the paywall.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How would you repurpose bulk old computers? - <AUTHOR> Say you had access to a bunch of old xboxes, bought a bunch of computers at auction or otherwise had access to a bunch of old computers. Would mining cryptocurrencies be a good use of these resources? If not, how else could you get value out of them? <comment><USER2> Even on brand new high efficiency setups I'm doubtful crypto mining is cost effective _unless you 're doing it somewhere you don't pay for the electricity bill_.

Depending how old they are, you may find charities that will accept them.

Or use them to learn about clustered systems?

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there any benefit to having your own clustered system vs just using AWS or other cloud services?

<comment><USER3> short answer: not really. longer answer: depending on how old the systems are, they're likely not useful for learning modern distributed computing.

For example, a friend of mine had four 4 core, 8GB machines and tried to configure a hortonworks cluster, but the system spent so much time just running the cluster state, that you could only do trivial computing on top of the cluster before the nodes started timing out.

He then spent ages disabling unnecessary services, re configuring components to be more memory efficient - and spent so long doing all of this maintenance he never actually learnt how to compute on top of the cluster, which was his original goal.

So it's best just to pay a few hundred a month to amazon and run your own small cluster that you can spin up and down as you need

<comment><USER2> FYI Hadoop is not a synonym for "cluster".

A clustered system could be a load balancer and a few servers running percona cluster, or a couple of ldap masters with read-only relicas and proxy-writes.

Doing it on bare metal also gives exposure to the parts amazon specifically don't

<comment><USER3> Yes I didn't mean to imply that, only that it can be challenging dealing with a resource constrained environment.

For example our deep learning clusters do not use hadoop, but use multi- process python daemons (written by me) and communicate with protocol buffers. Writing these high performance daemons myself has taught me a lot about cluster computing and some of the tradeoffs that have to be made in order to keep the GPU pipelines full.

For anyone else reading: Pyro is quite fun if you're in a limited environment and want to learn [https://pythonhosted.org/Pyro4/](https://pythonhosted.org/Pyro4/) Also, setting up a spark [https://spark.apache.org/](https://spark.apache.org/) environment can be done on smaller machines too

<comment><USER2> Right, but I think you still missed my point.

The _vast_ majority of software developers will interact with, if it's running clustered it's because the project needs higher availability for that service (typically the database) and potentially higher performance in _production_.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I was commenting on learning distributed programming, rather than configuring distributed service (regardless if goal is performance or redundancy). Configuring distributed services is boring

<comment><USER2> Oh right well I guess all the ops in the world should just pack up and go home, it's "boring" so no one ever need learn about it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> temp-dude-87844 You sound new to this, so I recommend you make it someone else's problem. As in, sell, trade, or give them to someone who specializes in acquiring outdated hardware, whether it's a repurposing shop, a recycler, a charity, etc.

</comment><comment> mark-r I've heard that old PCs can be turned into the equivalent of a Chromebook without too much trouble. Haven't had the opportunity to try it myself.

</comment><comment><USER4> If they are less powerful & efficient than a Raspberry Pi then probably not worth trying to use them for anything other than nostalgia.

</comment><comment><USER5> assuming wholesale cost, start a website that sells old computers one at a time for cost + $10

</comment><comment><USER6> Similar to what kirkyl said, but with a twist.

Your end user is the 6th grade version of myself. (Curious and interested in computers but no mentors/guidance to get started/lay breadcrumbs). My family/friends came from blue collar background, so their programming skills are effectively zero. Asking for help doesn't really exist since I didn't know anyone to talk to or know where to go on the internet.

When I was much younger (10 years old), a big part that delayed me from getting involved in programming, was not understanding "the point" of programming and figuring what to search for when trying to learn.

I (10 year old version) seriously thought that all programming was: cout << "What is your name?"; cin >> name; cout << "Hi << name; return 0;

Based on the C++ book I had access to, I didn't understand what I could tangibly build from knowing the idea of int,strings,arrays etc. I also thought that when people made games, they hardcoded the raw pixel values for every possible state/character/action. (Dumb, I know.)

I also thought you programmed "cool" games, by throwing a stupid amount of time in hardcoding each pixel value.

So I paused on programming for 10 years and picked up paintball/cars/Mechanical Engineering instead.

Make and install custom Ubuntu image with all of the needed packages/software to do introductory tangible dev work on. Make it work for 3 large dev camps(Python, Web Dev(Basic HTML,CSS,Javascript),Embedded electronics (Arduino). Sure the 10 year old kid can install everything via command line scripts themselves.

But knowing that you need a './" in front of 'script.sh' isn't entirely obvious at that age. It is also incredibly demotivating when your getting your feet wet, and can't figure the './' out.

Have links on the Desktop to the Mozilla Developer Network, Python Docs/ Game Tutorials, the github explore tab, Intro to Python/Web Dev online courses and StackOverflow. As well as a challenge for the 10 year old: Like make a pong- like video game.

The mission statement for this entire idea, "We gave you all the tools and they work well. Now the only thing stopping you from being a hacker/programmer is yourself."

Distributing it via old hardware would be nice, because most kids/parents are worried about "ruining" their existing computer by migrating to Linux and losing Windows.(At least I was)

Having a separate dedicated physical box, will give the kids a good environment to try things and fail in. Without worry about accidentally deleting everything on the file system. Like family vacation photos.

Do FB marketing and target parents that have kids in middle school and want them to go college and be doctor/lawyer/engineer types.

Sell it at (cost + $20 +shipping). Plug and play.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this idea a lot. Thanks for sharing

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Recycle the raw materials

</comment><comment><USER8> Return them for a refund.</comment>


Battle of the Custom Shirts: Ratio/Indochino/Modern Tailor/Blank Label - <AUTHOR> http://thegeekscompanion.com/home/battle-of-the-custom-shirts-ratio-vs-indochino-vs-modern-tai.html <comment><USER2> One of the things to look for in a made-to-measure shirt is the fabric selection. Look for brand names like Thomas Mason, for example. NiAlma.com is excellent and they occasionally have sales, too.</comment>


How I hosted a local television contest for $2.37 on heroku - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/5acc19da8a6d

<comment><USER2> You can use redis's set or list command next time for increase i/o rate and decrease response time. However, great experiment!</comment>


Google Cloud revenue could be bigger than ads - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/urs-holze-talks-google-cloud-beat-search-2015-11?r=US&IR=T <comment><USER4> If one of those giants could make a user friendly service with proper, clean documentation, then that would be bulls eye. Both AWS and Google are really bad at this and they assume every potential customer have quite good technological knowledge (IT college + 1-2 years work experience type of knowledge) or have all the time in the world to dig in in to countless instructions and specifications. With a first look I am not sure what type of server should I buy to set up a simple website - if such a basic information requires from me to do even simple research - I am out.

This is where DigitalOcean and Vultr are profiting the most - <USER2> tutorials, explaining everything and helping to go step by step through the setup with simple notes and comments.

<comment><USER5> If you're just looking for a single server to let you run a website, AWS isn't really a good fit for you -- and they probably don't want your business. They (as you found out), aren't really setup to provide you the kind of support you need.

When you outgrow Digital Ocean and want to set up larger distributed infrastructure that spans datacenter and regions for high availability (and you hire the people that can run it), then AWS (or Google Compute Engine, Azure, etc) will be a better fit for you.

<comment><USER4> I am actually a startup and time is very precious for me. Within a day I managed to set 4 server infrastructure on Vultr - I have database server, 2 workers and 1 web facing server. While this is nothing compared to what companies use AWS for, I will be scaling very quickly. And best thing? I wont be scaling to AWS.

Lets look at Vultr, that is more complete option compared to DO in my opinion. You get click away following:

-backups

-ddos protection

-internal IP

-storage servers

-dedicated resources servers

With this I can scale up to rather large size. While this is not enough for some startups, for MVP and Bootstraping startups that's more than enough. And frankly once I will grow big enough to hire tech guys, I will just move everything either to dedicated servers or simply to Rackspace or Softlayer for premium cloud solution.

The whole point of my comment was - AWS, Google and Azure - all are loosing to the ones like DO and Vultr in smb market. And while it looks irrelevant now, what stops DO etc. to scale up and offer more services? I bet if not due to their enormous growth rate, they would be already doing this but for a year or two they must focus more on scaling rather than increasing number of products. Once they are ready AWS/Google will be forced to either buy DO for crazy money or rethink their documentation, offering, approach, business model etc.

<comment><USER5> I don't think AWS is chasing the Small Business market (but they probaby want the Medium Business market), they are looking for the enterprise market. I doubt AWS turns much, if any profit on a 4 server implementation when support costs are factored in. Instead of 100 4 server customers, they'd rather have a 400 server customer.

If I had a small static site that could be served by a few dedicated servers, I probably wouldn't use AWS myself. But, for me, the power of AWS is the elasticity - I can scale from 100 servers to over a 1000 servers and back down to 100 servers in one day - and those servers are distributed across 3 regions. And I have nearly a petabyte of data in S3. If I ran my app on dedicated servers, I'd need to pay for 1000 servers to handle my peak load, and I'd need a large petabyte-scale storage array (well several of them for redundancy).

I'm probably biased in thinking that my use case is more what AWS is seeking since they provide a good API and powerful tools to enable exactly this use case.

<comment><USER4> But that is what I am saying. If there is a startup, it builds infrastructure that is easy to scale. In a year they end up having 500 servers. Are they interesting to AWS? Sure. Are they interested to move their infrastructure from quite good setup that works to completely new provider? Not likely. Medium sized high growing startups cannot really afford moving to new infrastructure until they got proper funding.

I can scale Vultr from 100 servers to 1,000 in 1 day as well (most time this takes is to click things through, not sure if AWS have buy XXX servers at once but if they do, thats good then).

And once again, I am not saying about small websites/static sites. I am talking about startups. Companies that can grow XXXX% a month for first few months, companies that are very careful where they spend money and where they allocate resources.

<comment><USER6> Good luck scaling vultr beyond 30 servers. My company is using vultr for over 1 year and we were running about 40-50 servers during peak load. Here problems start to appear very often:

\- We nearly failed our launch due to failure to increase server capacity during peak traffic, Vultr didn't have any more instances in that datacenter. This happened a lot of times and support always answered "We don't know when we will add more capacity".

\- Periodic network partitions. In the last two months we experienced a lot of network partitions both on public and private network, some of them lasting for about 2-3 days, our fleet beeing totally partitioned in 2-3 distinct blocks. Even new instances started had private network down (100% packet loss).

\- Technical support. We opened a few support tickets asking when private network will be fixed. Usually they respond that everything is fine and I have a configuration issue. I reply with ping/mtr logs and finally they agree there is a problem (which can be easy tested by themselves anyway). Then, they fix the issue after 1-2 days. Good luck fixing this yourself when your external load balancers have no public network connection, and new provisioned instances don't have it, too :)

\- They changed instance types. The instances started months ago have a powerful CPU at 3.6Ghz which is shown in all their advertised benchmarks against DO/AWS/etc. Now they are offering 2.4Ghz CPU which is about 60% slower. When I told them about this I received an predefined template response like: "Thanks for your inquiry, we are constantly revising our hardware to meet customer needs".

\- They increased pricing. First, the instance pricing was 20% lower than on DO. Then, they changed the price as beeing the same as DO and added a 20% discount. Then, they removed this discount, just telling everybody that they ended the discount period, nothing about the price increase :).

So, we are in the process of migrating everything to Google Cloud. We've been testing it on a staging cluster of 10 nodes and everything works smoothly, so we are in the process of moving the production cluster too. Be aware of small instance types (f1-micro and g1-small), they have very small CPU capacity for production load.

Also, Google offers us a lot of hosted stuff we don't need to manage anymore: DNS, Mysql, Datastore, Object store, etc. We were using Amazon S3 before, but peering from other datacenters (eg Vultr Datacenter, DO) sucks, constantly getting network timeouts, increased latency, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First of all, "cloud computing" is going to be a very low-margin business compared to ads. So comparing revenues doesn't mean very much.

Second, pretty much every Google business other than ads could be described as "running on Google cloud" for some definition of Google cloud. Apart from App Engine (which is a completely separate starting point than the rest of GCE and is really more of a solution to Google internal tools than to enterprise customers), the initial cloud offering can roughly be described as "what is the MVP that can run both websearch and gmail". As they gain customers, they gain features.

(note: I used to work on Google App Engine [and Cloud])

<comment><USER8> Not to go all corporate but cloud offering has a lot of synergy with other Google projects. They already have this huge infrastructure, and bought a lot of fibre when it was cheap. Standardizing and renting it out only makes sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google App Engine has been a pretty terrible experience in comparison to AWS services.

<comment><USER10> Can you expand on details?

Also, why are you comparing App Engine (Platform as a Service) with AWS (Infrastructure as a Service)? Wouldn't AWS vs. Google Compute Engine be a better comparison?

<comment><USER11> Can't speak for the parent, but the entire US offering is hosted at a single datacenter, allegedly with 3 zones, but there were a couple times during our evaluation of them when all zones went unavailable.

They really need a us-east and a us-west. Not just for availability, but for latency-critical applications, too.

<comment><USER12> This is not correct. GCE is now (1-Oct) available in the South Carolina data center (us-east).

<comment><USER11> Ah, I stand corrected. Thank you, it's been a while since we gave up on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone other that Google use GCE for production workloads?

I never meet people who are. My sense is they're a distant #3.

Maybe they don't have the storage issues Azure does? Or maybe they're worse. Who knows.

AWS has indicated that the network is the bottleneck growing faster at a slower rate than everything else which has huge implications for anything network attached.

There is tremendous IP required to be competitive in the space and admittedly Google may well have built that capability for its own services.

still the number one thing holding Google back has got to be the fundamental lack of knowing how to be an enterprise oriented business. I suppose that can be learned just as Microsoft is learning to be a cloud business.

my final concern is their branding seems komplex I don't like Google "compute engine" as it doesn't flow off the tongue nor does the acronym. Google Cloud does but it's confused if they want to call Google Cloud compute and Google Cloud docs and email all cloud offerings... admittedly Microsoft blurs these lines too. Only AWS can claim to be be the clear compute cloud winner and not need to hide cloud usage numbers in SaaS offerings also sold

<comment><USER14> >Maybe they don't have the storage issues Azure does?

What storage issues does Azure have?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _[...] despite a later start, Android has become the single most popular operating system in the world.

"I hope we're going to be the Android of that story," Hölzle said._

This seems like a strange wish given that Apple is making almost all of the money in that market. Surely their goal can't be 'the most popular but not particularly profitable cloud offering'.

<comment><USER16> Sure, the analogy isn't very strong, but from Google's point of view Android is a big success. They want their hosting service to also be a big success, it's just that the metrics for success are very different.

Google's strategy with Android is not to make money off it directly. It's to ensure that there is always an open mobile platform with Google services and a decent browser that has a strong market presence. They're actually doing very well at that. But the mission statement for cloud services will be different and presumably include making a profit.

<comment><USER15> 'Google makes money from Android indirectly' is a sensible point but it's not obvious how something similar applies to their cloud services. Or why the emphasis is particularly on revenue. It sounds like there might be something missing or confusingly oversimplified in the Business Insider summary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been using both GCP and AWS for awhile now and think they both have their strengths and weaknesses. AWS has an amazing breadth and depth to their offering that GCP can't match. GCP has some very nice little features though such as how easy it is to use their system with the gcloud CLI vs AWS' CLI. The GCP offerings feel as though they were planned out and have some overarching standards whereas the AWS offerings feel as though disparate teams designed them and they tried to standardize them together after the fact.

But GCP has some big gaps esp when it comes to the network and their firewall vs AWS' far superior security groups. Google has no way to chain rules together right now which can make configuring a pain. Google also feels as though it was really meant for everyone to be super user to take advantage of their web console vs AWS where the amount of ways to segment access is dizzying.

<comment><USER18> Agreed 100%. I give it a year, though, and I think Google will sort a lot of those things. Just judging from all the press lately -- a lot of which seems "solicited", based around PR pieces -- it seems clear they're taking GCP very seriously now.

<comment><USER17> Yes. It's fascinating to watch these companies evolve. A few years ago AWS was all about price reductions. Now, they are focused on large enterprises and most of their R&D is on features that appeal to that set. Google seemed to be built by engineers for engineers, but now they are starting to really polish the edges around their offering (for example their new redesigned web console that was release a week ago or so).

The other advantage Google has is simple no-nonsense pricing. The longer you run a machine, the bigger discount you get. That's pretty much the extent of their pricing schema vs Amazon with their whole reserved instances and you never really know if you're getting the best deal without breaking out Excel and doing some analysis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If Google Cloud would offer much cheaper outgoing traffic than AWS, I would switch immediately. 10 cent/GB is like modern highway robbery...

</comment><comment><USER20> >(...) there are some announcements coming up that will "remove any doubt."

I guess in the next few months, it will be interesting to see how they compare to low cost competitors like "Backblaze B2". [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud- storage.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html) [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-frequent- que...](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-cloud-storage-frequent-questions/)

<comment><USER21> Backup/archive storage is a use case where storing your data far away from any processing power does not matter.

Far away in the sense of bandwidth, latency and transfer costs.

For (nearly) everything else, the opposite is true. Google Cloud stands out in the PaaS-world because of their excellent internal network.

While an excellent offer in their own domain, Backblaze B2 is not comparable at all.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the explanations. Much appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This comes from the same guy who wrote the memo that started Google+. So I'd take it with a boulder sized grain of salt. 3 years in Google is still having trouble putting up the table stakes.

<comment><USER23> Google tried to compete against Facebook with a "me too" product very late in the game. And now they're doing the same against Amazon. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯. What's next? Google Doors operating system? Google ZuneTunes music streaming?

<comment><USER24> They also took the entire search market with a me-too web search engine, and a huge chunk of web-mail with a me-too solution. And they do have music streaming and they do have several operating system.

<comment><USER23> Those weren't a "me-too". By all accounts, google search was insanely better than its alternatives (Lycos/AltaVista/Yahoo). Nobody paralled the speed and storage of email in the browser that Gmail did at the time of its launch. Is that "me too"? But you're right, the key here isn't me-too. Android was arguably a me-too iOS. Chrome was arguably me-too Firefox/Safari. So why /did/ the me-too Google+ flop so impressively against Facebook? What did they learn from that failure and the Android/Chrome successes to be able to successfully outperform Amazon in (arguably) it's most important service with a me-too product?

<comment><USER25> Not going to claim this is the authoritative reason for the G+ flop but as far as I can tell from the user perspective, it came down to a few related issues with the basic way social networks work.

Probably the easiest way to illustrate is to take the other examples you gave (search, mail, and browser) and compare to G+. If you're a user and you are used to Yahoo or Altavista but you hear about this new Google search, you can easily check out Google search and start comparing how it works relative to your usual experiences. If you like Google search better, you just start using Google search as your primary engine. Done.

If you had been email@example.com for years and hear about Gmail, you open a Gmail account, start sending and receiving email as email@example.com and if you prefer the new service, you set up forwarding on your email@example.com account and tell friends and family to use the Gmail address. Done.

If you had been using Safari and hear about Chrome, you download Chrome and use it for a few days. If you prefer your old Firefox setup you leave Chrome installed or ditch it but if you like Chrome, you just start using Chrome. Done.

But social networking isn't the same as email or a browser or a search engine. It's about communication like email but unlike email, you can't just pick whatever social networking service you prefer and use it. For social networking (at least in the typical Friendster/Myspace/Facebook way we usually think of it), you need _everyone_ to be on the same service in order to communicate with them. Switching services is a lot more work than switching a browser or a search engine and there's no relatively easy "patch" like forwarding for email. For a massive amount of people and orgs, Facebook was the first big social network that they invested their time in. It was the first one that really got widespread adoption among people who may not really do much else on the web. It was the one that your mom and your boss and your neighborhood association and your local bartender all joined.

And when G+ came along, plenty of people (myself included) checked it out because we like checking out new services and Google has put out several that are at least competitive if not definitive (gmail, search, chrome, maps, etc). I won't speak for everyone but I found it much nicer to use than Facebook. There was no Farmville spam. Sorting the contacts that were displayed on your feed or who saw your posts was much more granular and visual than Facebook. The mobile app was much faster and more attractive. It was already tied to your email, voice/video chat, calendar, and photo/video hosting if you had a Gmail account. At the time, Facebook didn't have a lot of these features.

But regardless of whether you liked it or hated it compared to Facebook, it turned out to be irrelevant. Because unlike switching from Yahoo to Gmail or Firefox to Chrome, switching from Facebook to G+ wasn't something that only depended on your interest and relative acceptance of change or effort. Because unless all of your Facebook contacts did the same, it didn't matter which you liked more. The real limit of these kinds of services is that they're not interoperable. And if one (in this case, Facebook) gets a "critical mass" of users who might be resistant to change or switching services, it's nearly impossible to succeed as a competitor.

The only real way it could succeed is by offering something other than Facebook (which is what they're going for now I guess) but they will never be able to succeed as a _better_ Facebook even if they build one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Google should just buy Digital Ocean and build their cloud around that. I know it's not on the same level of sophistication as their existing offerings but who cares? It's so affordable and easy to get up and running with that it's easily the best acquisition target for them.

<comment><USER5> Who cares about the level of sophistication? Customers do.

DO has a nice product for relatively unsophisticated users that just want to build a website. But when you want to move a large application that spans hundreds or even thousands of servers and scales up and down to meet demand, you're not going to run it on an unsophisticated provider.

You're going to want a provider with rich service API's and enough capacity to let you scale your infrastructure as needed.

Most of DO's customers are not in the target market for AWS or GCE - <USER3> those users provide decent revenue from a small amount of compute resources, Google and Amazon are looking for the larger corporate customers that are willing to purchase thousands of compute units and terabytes (or petabytes) of storage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am curious what is Oracle going to do , what do you think ? They are going to as harsh as possible in cloud.Do you think they can take on AWS ? (reading comments in HN is one of my best resource)

</comment><comment><USER28> You pay google (ads) to get traffic to your website, where you also pay google (cloud) to serve it- good for business!

</comment><comment><USER29> > That means that Google can offer ever-increasing lowered prices to customers

Hmm, maybe things have changed since, but last I checked their offerings were more expensive than any of the main competitors by a nontrivial margin.

<comment><USER30> Google has been the price leader in compute and storage for at least 2 years. Here's an example:

[http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-analysis/google- vs...](http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-cost-analysis/google-vs-aws- pricing-google-cuts-are-first-2015)</comment></comment>


Border Patrol Agents Stop Domestic Travelers at New York Airport - <AUTHOR> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/border-patrol-agents-stop-domestic-travelers-at-new-york-airport-w468643 <comment><USER3> Is there a reason the check didn't happen at TSA instead? Everyone is required to show ID when they go through security, making a second check when exiting the plane unnecessary.

The only scenario in which CBP would check deplaning passengers is that an individual used someone else's boarding pass to get on a different flight than they were scheduled.

In that case, I still don't see CBP being involved but rather normal law enforcement.

<comment><USER4> You don't have to show ID to enter security. It's just the most convenient way to confirm your identity. TSA is not concerned and not able to enforce immigration laws. ICE can't just walk up to the TSA ID-checker and say "tell me if you see a Jose Morales."

<comment><USER3> TSA asks for identification when you show boarding pass. How would I confirm my identity without ID? (e.g. driver's license or passport)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one that does not like this? :(

<comment><USER6> Things are getting scary. I don't really know what to do. It feels like my country has gone completely mad. Empathy and reason feel forsaken. Some things incite protest, journalists point out what looks like insanity, and at first I'd agree and feel some vindication that perhaps all is not lost. Now each article, each sign held up, feels like just another example of powerlessness and inefficacy. Screaming into the void. We've become everything I was taught we shouldn't be and those fighting seem to be doing so in vain. I don't really understand what's happening or what can truly be done.

<comment><USER7> Human society and history is a lot older than us and we are subject to forces set in motion long ago with very limited capacity to change this.

And human nature is a problem priests and moms and governments have been working on for a long time with very limited success.

It's kind of like when it's raining. You can't really get mad. It's a natural event that happens as the result of a proceeding sequence of actions and will eventually play out. So put on a rain coat.

I'm not advocating for helplessness either. We have to do what we can to improve the quality of human existence. That's our whole job. But acceptance of the scale of our lives and efforts and our current place in space and time I think is peace. We can't look at things in isolation but rather as how they connect in a series of cause and effects.

Sorry for the ramble. Just trying to discourage agitation. Agitation doesn't it make it stop raining and renders us less able to deal with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Ihre Papiere, bitte."

I also wish / would like to know whether someone recorded the exact wording that was conveyed, to the airline staff, and to the passengers, and by whom.

The numerous recountings by passengers give the strong impression that this was anything but "voluntary".

<comment><USER9> But since no one bothered to assert their rights (I'm sure it would have been mentioned), we'll never know how a court might have interpreted the situation (or whether the agents would have done the right thing and backed down - <USER2> who am I kidding?).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I will not comply (US citizen).

I will also not answer any non-customs related questions when re entering the country (eg, what were you doing overseas?)</comment>


Microsoft Edge supports ES6 modules - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/05/17/es6-modules-and-beyond/ <comment><USER2> For those thinking about using this, it bears mentioning that there are a few caveats to script type=module that makes it difficult to use with a lot of modern workflows, namely:

1\. No way to dynamically import a module (the article explains this).

2\. All imports must be relative or absolute urls, so either ./foo.js or /foo.js or [http://example.com/foo.js](http://example.com/foo.js)

This means you can't npm install lodash and import the string "lodash".

3\. All imports must include the file extension (.js). So even if you set up a server route for /lodash it would break as soon as one of lodash's imports didn't use .js (or it imports another package). This is assuming lodash is written with import/export; it's not so it wouldn't work at all.

4\. Until http2 comes around, this is probably not something you want to ship to production (unless you have a small app with only have a handful of scripts being imported), so bundlers are here to stay for a while.

It might be possible to work around 1, 2, and 3 using Service Workers, I wrote about this a while ago: [https://matthewphillips.info/posts/loading-app-with- script-m...](https://matthewphillips.info/posts/loading-app-with-script- module)

<comment><USER3> > All imports must include the file extension (.js)

Or, .mjs [1].

[1] [https://github.com/nodejs/node- eps/blob/master/002-es6-modul...](https://github.com/nodejs/node- eps/blob/master/002-es6-modules.md#determining-if-source-is-an-es-module)

<comment><USER4> > .mjs [1].

I was worried this was short for "Microsoft JS", thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Honestly I'm perfectly happy with Typescript and browserify. At this point I'm not sure I need support for JS in the browser to advance unless it allows my transpiler to produce more optimized code.

</comment><comment><USER6> What a time to be alive. Microsoft IE shipping modern features! Well done.

<comment><USER7> The reason IE used to be behind was that at one point Microsoft decided to only publish features which had been standardized, which sounds nice, but the rest of the web wants to be on the bleeding edge with new features.

<comment><USER8> I don't think anybody really believed that. Maybe some manager. Everyone I knew on the IE team at the time wanted to be on the bleeding edge, but they were up against it catching up years of no work on IE—the "Recommendations only" line was as far as one could tell something made up by marketing to justify the fact they were so far behind and what they were implementing as a result. (It's also laughable—for a specification to become a REC at the W3C, post-2001, one practically needs two implementations. Practically it's saying "we're always behind two others!")

<comment><USER7> I can't remember where I read it, if on HN or elsewhere, but that was what I heard, it sounded plausible enough. I guess it was likely another excuse. At the very least they're aiming towards the bleeding 'Edge'.

<comment><USER8> It originally comes from the IE Blog in, I think, the IE7 release cycle (my memory of the date could be wrong; it's certainly a while ago!). At the time almost everything there was pretty censored and overly-dressed-up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So what I still don't understand is how es6 module imports work with requests. Even reading through that blog post it's not obvious to me. Does the browser make an HTTP request for the file on the server based on the relative location on the server? So if I have type="module" and app.js is in example.com/js/app.js and then I have an import statement for ./foo/bar.js it makes that request to example.com/js/foo/bar.js? I imagine all these requests would add up and will block if so. With HTTP2 maybe it would be OK to do it this way but I see myself creating single JavaScript builds for the foreseeable future making this sort of module support unlikely to help in anything other than development (which still is nice).

<comment><USER10> Note that since ES6 imports are statically defined, the browser can find and begin to download dependent files before even parsing the actual JS. They could even start downloading dependent files in parallel before the first file is fully downloaded.

But bundling will still probably be faster and will probably continue to be a mainstay of production web apps, just like minification already is.

<comment><USER11> Bundling may not necessarily be faster with HTTP/2 and proper cache controls.

<comment><USER2> I don't see a practical difference between bundling and server push to the developer. You are still using tooling that traces your dependency graph and produces... something. In the case of a bundler it produces a concatenated script and in the case of http push it produces a list of files that should be sent with a particular route. To the developer, why should the latter be preferred over the former?

<comment><USER12> Three reasons off the top of my head: \- Smaller cacheable objects -- every change you make doesn't invalidate the whole "bundle". \- If there are many permutations of the optimal bundles: different browsers, different pages use different scripts, etc. \- The browser does not need to wait for the "full bundle" to download to execute your app/site -- it can start once the first necessary assets are loaded.

In one project I worked on, we had 3 bundles: \- early load (inside the head tag) \- deferred load secondary (after body tag, for the other site pages) \- deferred load primary (after the body tag, for the 'hot' pages of the site) With a optimal http/2.0 setup, we wouldn't need to make these never fully optimal bundles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Short of browser useragent sniffing ( _yuck..._ ) is there any way to make use of ES6 features in a browser agnostic app? Seems like the only way to work is with a transpiler and series of polyfills.

<comment><USER14> You could do something like

        try {
            eval('"use strict"; import "jquery";');
        } catch (e) {
            // No imports.
        }

but I wouldn't really recommend it.

<comment><USER2> That won't work, you can't eval modules.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Always glad to see Microsoft stepping up their game :)

Not surprised by this, they made it pretty clear at their dev summit that ES6 was a priority.

</comment><comment><USER16>
      (function() {
      ___MODULE["foo"] = foo
      })();

      function require(m) {return ___MODULE[m]}

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Who'd have though that the first vendor to build in support for ES6 modules was going to be Microsoft?

Of course it will be at least 10 years before people can safely require Edge and another 5 years before that version of Edge current enough to support modules.

Remember: IE11 will be supported with Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 until at least 2020 and the enterprise version of Windows 10 never gets feature updates and thus never an updated Edge.

<comment><USER17> Wasn't the announcement, yesterday, that webkit/Safari had complete implementation?

<comment><USER18> The catch is there's the JS Module syntax, controlled by TC39, which WebKit may or may not support (not sure whether its a part of ES6 or not), and then there's the browser module loading standard, which is controlled by WHATWG.</comment></comment></comment>