Real World Microservices: When Services Stop Playing Well and Start Getting Real - <AUTHOR> https://blog.buoyant.io/2016/05/04/real-world-microservices-when-services-stop-playing-well-and-start-getting-real/ <comment><USER2> From my own experience building a platform of products on top of microservices, I find that the most difficult part about this architecture (and the one that nobody ever talks about) is how to share data between microservices via message bus instead of direct requests. If you can get this down the rest, in my opinion, is just pure bliss and a piece of cake.

<comment><USER3> Message buses and queues are far, far easier to manage than API endpoints across a bunch of loci of control, so this may be why it's not discussed as much as, say, how the lifecycle of REST services work. Topics and queues with different segmentation features are much more powerful and fine-grained in control compared to a service that's tied to HTTP transport than, say, a REST or SOAP API. For object serialization / marshaling, you can use a lot more stuff now all of a sudden like Protocol Buffers, Capn Proto, Thrift, Avro. The recommended advice comes down to what your bus / queue is (each one offers vastly different best practices and features to implement them) as well as how you want to scale out and up. But perhaps a general set of terminologies / jargon may be worth pursuing as a community for the problem.

The question I really have is how people have managed to upgrade their message bus and to keep availability high with rollback contingencies while upgrading, say, RabbitMQ or Kafka across all your connected services. I really don't hear about that as much as how to do rolling restarts / upgrades of nodes for a service endpoint using some feedback from monitoring and metrics.

<comment><USER4> > Topics and queues with different segmentation features are much more > powerful and fine-grained in control compared to a service that's tied to > HTTP transport than, say, a REST or SOAP API.

"than" and beyond is an illogical statement. Like Y is Z than X.

<comment><USER3> Funky parse as I wrote it out, but you're correct. Despite the problem, I think the point being made is understandable. You can replace "than" with "like."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting article. It was initially confusing to me because I wasn't able to find what's unique about this approach, and how it's different from the typical Ambassador pattern that I'm more familiar with. That is, what does the word "Routing" even mean in this context?

I think the answer is that he's doing essentially layer-7 routing, using the HTTP path (and verb?) to decide what backends to route to, rather than doing it on a per-port basis (which is necessary to support non-HTTP services.)

Implementations I've run into before seem to fall into a few categories:

\- A service declares that it needs to talk to, say, 3 other services. Each of these upstream services is assigned a unique client-side port, and an ambassador proxy is launched alongside each instance, which exposes those 3 ports, routing each to the corresponding 3 backend services. To keep the ports out of the source code, typically environment variables are automatically assigned, so you just talk to ie. "my-ambassador:${UPSTREAM_PORT_NAME}"

\- A service is responsible for using a service discovery layer like zookeeper or etcd to find backends on its own. This is important for things that use raft/paxos/gossip, where blind routing isn't enough, you actually need to keep track of peer instances (although in that case, the service discovery layer is only used for initial discovery).

\- Service discovery is done with just plain DNS on well-known ports (or even SRV records if you're lucky enough to have client software that can tolerate them), and you just hope the right thing happens. This can be accomplished with things like SkyDNS on top of etcd... a surprising amount of flexibility can be accomplished by putting logical things right in a hostname.

This approach seems to be like a more opinionated version of the first approach, but instead of ports, it uses HTTP routes, which is definitely more flexible, but only works with HTTP. The routes can contain enough information to route more intelligently than just enumerating your dependency services ahead of time and getting static port assignments.

It's almost like an API gateway distributed as an ambassador to each service. At least, it looks a lot _like_ an API gateway, in that it presents the whole mesh of services underneath in a single URI namespace, using HTTP to route requests accordingly and handling things like TLS and potentially authentication. It's definitely an interesting approach, and something I'm curious to try.

<comment><USER6> You'll want to read the whole pitch about Linkerd [1], which the article seems to assume the reader has read. In short, it's a sidecar proxy that performs all the functions needed to glue apps together. This allows apps to be simpler; they can implement a minimal interface and rely on simple protocols such as HTTP, with no knowledge of how to reach their remote partners. Linkerd implements a bunch of techniques such as health checks, load balancing and circuit breakers.

[1] [https://linkerd.io](https://linkerd.io)

<comment><USER5> Well, linkerd was what the article was about, so it's what I was referring to. A "sidecar" sounds like the more established term for what I was calling an ambassador proxy, so it's nice to learn that that's what people call this pattern.

Your explanation sounds a bit "no duh" though, since I can't imagine any way of implementing this pattern that _doesn 't_ abstract away knowledge of how to reach remote partners, perform health checks, load balancing, retry logic, etc. It's generally what the term "proxy" implies. Or am I missing something?

Edit: I think my confusion is caused by my experience with running vanilla Mesos (not Marathon or DCOS, but our own custom frameworks), where it's expected that you just have to implement this stuff yourself. I never even thought of open sourcing or productizing what I've written, because I kind of thought that everybody else must be rolling their own quick solutions for these problems too? I admit I'm probably the one with a messed up worldview though.

I think the mesos community is still in the phase of picking the winners for best practices, and hopefully one day it'll be obvious that you use services like linkerd and don't roll your own solution.

<comment><USER6> Apologies, I didn't mean to sound condescending. I think you got it.

I just wanted to point you to the official explanation, since you seemed to be asking for clarification as to Linkerd's purpose.

A proxy can be a lot of things, of course. Linkerd is explicitly designed to route RPC, not just any web traffic. Linkerd is designed to run close to your app and offload all the routing intelligence.

For example, it seems quite common these days to build many types of service discovery and so on into the app itself: App wants to find another microservice, so it looks up the target host in Etcd or ZooKeeper or whatever, then talks to it, handling retrying and load-balancing and so on. If you're using a DNS solution like SkyDNS or Consul, then the app is isolated from the lookup mechanism, but you're still talking directly to your peer. The opposite, older trend is to use something like HAProxy to handle the routing, but HAProxy was designed for a fairly static set of routing targets.

Linkerd is a bit of a middle way: Make the app stupid and put all the operational intelligence in an external process that isn't actually your app, but still sort of behaves like it is. Linkerd is designed to be dynamically configured to support all the kinds of glue you can think of (ZooKeeper, Kubernetes and so on) so that no app changes are needed to support different routing schemes.

<comment><USER5> Yup, makes total sense.

I think I'm just jealous that they're getting attention for solving something that I solved too, but didn't even think to release it because I thought everybody else was just like me.

My approach involves running a sidecar that registers a set of etcd watchers, and when upstream services move around, it passes the list of backends through a config file template (using Go's templating syntax), and runs a configurable command.

Meanwhile, other services' sidecars are health checking them, and keeping them in etcd only as they are healthy.

We wire that up to have the watcher process in the downstream sidecar, which rewrites an haproxy config with the list of upstream backends, and triggers an haproxy restart when it changes the config file.

And then, that whole thing is wrapped in a declarative syntax that lets you say "here's the things I want to talk to", and it knows how to find them in etcd, how to construct the haproxy template, and how to restart haproxy, and puts the whole thing in a docker container that links to your container.

And then we wrap all _that_ in a web UI (and CLI) that lets you say "I want my service to talk to that service" and all the things happen for you.

Looking back, it shouldn't surprise me that this level of effort is something people would want an off-the-shelf solution for. But to be fair, I started doing this a few years back so things like DCOS and Marathon and confd and linkerd and namerd didn't exist then. :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At times it seems the only thing we are doing with microservices is shifting complexity into different areas.

<comment><USER8> Microservices is about tradeoffs. Many people will reiterate this over the coming years and attempt to make it clear its not the be all and end all of software engineering. Before it had this name it was known by many others. It is in fact simply distributed systems.

The logical evolution of ones architecture when scaling from zero to orders of magnitude beyond is to eventually split out functionality so it can be worked on and scaled independently. That's it, that's all its about. And over time you find this becomes the pattern that helps stabilise and speedup an organisation as the number of people increase.

Most of the time it's an organic process. I would never tell anyone to start with microservices but to merely keep these ideas in the back of their mind and pick tools that simplify the process of moving to distributed systems later.

<comment><USER9> True. No silver bullet this time either...

But right now it's a cool thing, since google is doing it. And Netflix, or whatever. Organisations are about to waste crazy amount of money on microservification of "monolithic" applications that are perfectly fine, because they think it will solve all of their problems.

Microservices are not solving complexity, it is adding complexity in order to solve problems related to scalability and size, and you need to be _good_ to pull it off. If you are working in a half-arsed inhouse development department in a medium sized company in a uninteresting business, chances are that the organisation (as a whole) is not good enough even if there are some smart people around, and you should be grateful that the RDBMS is there and rolls back problems caused by the shitty code that keeps piling up in your git repository.

I started working for about 20 years ago with distributed systems in the telecom industry, where we had to scale telephony services over a lot of machines, both vertically and horizontally. We had key-value datastores, services, application logic, and interfaces as small programs running in it's own machine. And it was bloody hard to handle transactions, routing, fail- overs and generally getting the right balance between calling a service or doing it locally. We did web applications like that too actually - using cgi, a custom html template format and the crappiest script language ever imaginable and it kind of worked too.

It was rather ahead of it's time, much thanks to a few smart guys that were trying to solve the rather hard problem of using cheap hardware for providing very reliable telecom services. It never was "very" reliable, but it was ok. At least on sunny days.

It scaled up to a point. The networks weren't that fast, and the sheer complexity of it all was a limiting factor. We had to create tools for generating the configuration and at one point I found out that we had more than 100.000 lines of configuration in a moderately large system, which explained why it took a while to assemble these systems by hand.

But as time went, the hardware was catching up and you could more or less put everything in one box. And we did. And we started to use RDBMs because we could really need the power of a flexible and transactional database manager, and it was a bliss to write a large monolithic application for user provisioning and administration and not needing to handle every shitty little detail by yourself.

I am very reluctant to going back to key-value stores and really small services, unless we really need the speed. It comes with a heavy cost. (Even though you get more for free now, as more people is doing it.)

The best trade off in my opinion is to build as large systems as possible while it still handles the load and it is still possible to work on efficiently with a few teams. When it's hard to keep up with what is happening and how everything works, it might be better to split the system into smaller systems and (semi) independent teams. The key is the independent team, real devops, and a hard focus on making deployments fast and with no or almost no downtime.

Unfortunately, where I work now, the major limiting factor of our velocity is our dependencies to other teams and systems. If we can build something on our own we can typically do a reasonable feature in between 3 days to 3 weeks. If we are depending on development by another teams changes in other systems, it minimally takes 3 weeks.

And the problem grows exponentially. If 3 systems are involved, it will take us 3 months or more, and failure is always an option.

I don't see how more services will solve that rather hard organisational problem, but that is apparently what some people think will happen, effortlessly, just because technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Love the use of the header for per-request overrides to the routing table. I've rolled my own solutions using haproxy as a k8s service a couple of times now. Really looking to move to something more packaged that handles some of these use cases. Will be giving linkerd and namerd a try.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am new to Microservices, any good place to learn about major patterns/anti- patterns?

<comment><USER12> This is just a 40 minute lecture, but you might find the ideas inside helpful.

It talks about anti-patterns that lead to the construction of a "distributed monolith" and how to avoid them.

[http://www.microservices.com/ben-christensen-do-not- build-a-...](http://www.microservices.com/ben-christensen-do-not-build-a- distributed-monolith)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > When Twitter moved to microservices, it had to expend hundreds (thousands?) > of staff-years just to reclaim operability.

That's both impressive and not surprising. Orchestration is just really hard. Big systems that are supposed to behave rationally and be easy to upgrade and debug... it seems like such a meager request at first.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting project. It would be great if something more out of the box was available in AWS - or a project that could package AWS services for a similar pattern (Route53/elb etc).

It's cool to run your own proxy, however doing that at production level is far from simple, at least with smaller teams.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't understand. You either deploy this as a sidecar proxy, in which case you need to reconfigure a lot of them, or you deploy them centrally introducing a spof?</comment>


U.S. Personal Spending Plummeted by a Record 7.5% in March - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-30/u-s-personal-spending-plummeted-by-a-record-7-5-in-march <comment><USER2> Um, cause we can't spend it? Planning on spending all this extra dosh as soon as society opens for business again!</comment>


More than 100 Apple Store customers are victims of follow-away burglaries  - <AUTHOR> http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/01/more-than-100-apple-store-customers-victims-of-followaway-burglaries-in-la-region.html

<comment><USER2> I don't suppose this type of crime is common, but to the extent that it happens, it's probably an inevitable consequence of people walking around the mall with a bag that screams, "Hey, I'm carrying $1500 in unopened electronics."

In any case, you're better off buying computers from Amazon just to avoid the ~$50-100 in sales tax.

<comment><USER3> Ever since I got followed down the street after buying a mobile phone a few years ago, I've always taken one of those big reusable supermarket bags with me to buy anything pricey. People are far less likely to look twice at you if you've got a Tesco bag than an Apple or mobile shop bag.

<comment><USER4> Maybe Apple (and other similar stores) should stop putting their name on bags. Just use a plain one.

Or at least give people that option.

<comment><USER5> I remember hearing a year or so ago that Hermes (or some other similar luxury brand) had started to offer plain white bags at their stores for customers who didn't want to be seen buying high priced luxury items in the midst of a rescission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting story, disappointingly unreflective and myopic discussion here.

Buying a computer from Amazon is only cheaper because of US law unfairly privileging internet retailers over bricks-and-mortar. The sales tax pays for things in your community. You know, the physical location where you eat and sleep?

Why exactly should someone well-off enough to afford a brand-new $2,000 MacBook Pro be able to escape paying sales tax just because they bought it on the internet (and they even have the money to afford an existing computer and internet connection in the first place), but the food that a struggling single parent working near minimum wage needs to survive should be subject to sales tax?

Further, the Apple Store isn't just a retail outlet, it's also a service center. Do you think everyone who got robbed was buying a brand-new one? Maybe they were picking up their repair.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's fairly unsurprising that an expensive computer left in a parked car gets ripped off in an urban center.

<comment><USER8> It is when you left it in your trunk out of sight. My car doesn't get randomly broken into, when was yours?

<comment><USER5> If you'd read the article you'd know that the cars aren't being randomly broken into. They are being targeted by people who saw you place the expensive computer in the trunk. So if it's out of sight or not is totally irrelevant in this case.

<comment><USER9> Um, I suspect that may have been the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If only there were a way to purchase electronics using a 'machine' from the comfort of your home and then utilize some sort of electronic banking mechanism to pay for it and then a shipping company to transport it to your door. That would solve this issue.

<comment><USER11> Don't you think saying this is akin to saying a rape is the victim's fault because she wore a short skirt?

<comment><USER12> No, but I do think it is akin to saying a rape is the victim's fault because they went to a bar instead of using eHarmony from the comfort of home. So, i'd say it is even more ridiculous that your analogy.</comment></comment></comment>


The Smoldering Ruins of Centralia (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.damninteresting.com/the-smoldering-ruins-of-centralia/

<comment><USER2> Fascinating. It's hard to even comprehend an underground coal fire that could burn for 250 years - though apparently the oldest known coal seam fire has been burning in Australia for 6000 years! [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Mountain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Mountain)

Centralia on Google Maps: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-76.3428604,287m/dat...](https://email@example.com,-76.3428604,287m/data=!3m1!1e3)

</comment><comment><USER3> I grew up about an hour from here. It's a fun place to hang out, but isn't really smoking like it used to. If you get up there early on a cool day you can find some warm cracks with smoke coming out, but that's about it.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the story is great, but it's pretty uninteresting to actually visit. It's definitely one of those places that people like to justify their trip to by sharing pictures of the one actual smoking hole they found and saying it's amazing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I learnt about it and coal seam fires in general the other day from Wikipedia. Coal seam fires more common than I thought. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire)

</comment><comment><USER6> I Watched a documentary about some of the people that still live there. Probably one of the most boring documentaries I've ever watched. I've watched documentaries on the history of indoor plumbing that were more interesting.

Still, pretty crazy.

<comment><USER7> As the grandson of a plumber and son of a plumbing engineer, just have to jump in here and defend plumbing...it's damn interesting! It's also responsible for a larger chunk of recent increases in longevity than probably anything other than maybe antibiotics.

<comment><USER8> "what have the Romans ever done for us"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you do visit, it's an interesting post-apocalyptic world. Explore a little bit to the southeast of the old town and you'll find a locked shed, untouched, with a very old car inside and a sign boarding up the back window that says, "The dying set free the souls in Purgatory."

Avoid the few remaining natives, as they're understandably territorial and suspicious since they're living there in defiance of a court order.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was there in 2008. I went there because I'm a fan of the Silent Hill series and read somewhere that the town in the game was inspired by it. The place smells like sulphur, kinda like what you find near volcanoes. Roads are cracked, bark on trees has turned white and yes, you can sometimes light a match if you leave it on the ground. It's a very isolated place too. I wouldn't recommend going alone.

</comment><comment><USER11> Been there, theres not a lot to see beyond the fire station and a memorial to veterans. I first heard about it in an article about the movie Silent Hill and how the producers discovered a town that was covered in fog like the fictional city. There is actually a pretty cool This American Life episode about it: [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/59/fi...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/59/fire)

</comment><comment><USER12> That is very eery. Reminds me of Aktemto Mine in Dragon Warrior 4. Any heroes want to volunteer to investigate what has awoken in the deep?</comment>


Evernote: Greetings from Our New CEO - <AUTHOR> https://evernote.com/blog/ian-small-new-ceo/ <comment><AUTHOR> We recently saw news of layoffs at Evernote: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18019219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18019219) It seems like they've been trending downwards for quite a while.

I have noticed that there are a myriad of notes apps options (like Bear, Notion), but none of them seem to be thriving where Evernote should be leaving space. In your opinion, what do these notes apps (especially Evernote) fail?

What should they be trying to build and what did they build instead? What did they not understand about their users?

</comment><comment><USER2> markdown?</comment>


Ask HN: Alternatives to Gmail that are new, cool, etc? - <AUTHOR> Curious if people use any personal email tools. I like gmail but also realize I haven't looked for an alternative in several years. <comment><USER2> Fastmail. Paying $30/yr for my email hosting. Pros:

I don't have to worry about my emails being scanned to create a profile of me.

I got my <firstname>@fastmail.com which I could not with Gmail.

As a paid customer I get support for if/when something is wrong.

Has solid Web UI that is minimal and fast. Email client for ios works great.

Cons: Not the cool new thing. Setting it up for shared calendar with others was a bit unintuitive.

Every now and then someone sends me a Google Doc, and I need to think about how to open it without a Google account.

Spam filter is not as good as Google's. A phishing email gets to the inbox every now and then. But, I report them.

<comment><USER3> Not getting <firstname>@ shouldn't really be a problem. Everyone should buy their own domain name for email. It's cheap, easy to setup (and natively supported by Fastmail), and it means that you're not locked into one mail provider ever again.

Don't be <firstname>@fastmail, be <firstname>@<lastname>.me - or whatever you prefer.

<comment><USER4> I have an uncommon last name - about 3 families in the world with it as far as I can tell. Some asshole has been squatting <mylastname>.com for over 20 years and said he "hadn't considered selling it" then wanted $100,000 for it. The same guy has been squatting hundreds of domains since the 90s, many of them 1 letter off from major websites.

What can I do against this scum? I saw that there have been many successful disputes against him so I was thinking of constructing one in a similar vein saying that his use of my unique last name to serve malware and ads is damaging to my reputation but it seems a little weak.

Also no other TLD is even an option for an email address because people always assume you made a mistake and just send things to .com anyway in my experience.

<comment><USER5> For 100 thousand you could just buy a tld and be firstname@lastname

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm excited by superhuman ([https://superhuman.com](https://superhuman.com)). Alas I haven't got an invite. Also, dunno if they're going to support my style of email use out of the box (I'm strict adherent to the Andreas Klinger style: [http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email- how-t...](http://klinger.io/post/71640845938/dont-drown-in-email-how-to-use- gmail-more)).

<comment><USER7> > I'm excited by superhuman ([https://superhuman.com](https://superhuman.com))

That looks like any other Electon-based email client that someone decided wasn't cool enough any more...

<comment><USER6> Can you explain? I don't see how you got to that conclusion.

<comment><USER8> The first screenshots on the homepage. It looks like every other electron email app (and also messaging app). Also the overuse of the word "brilliant" is quite grating too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Google Inbox is really amazing, it groups email automatically and its spam filter is awesome.

<comment><USER10> I also like Inbox, except that the desktop experience is so utterly woeful.

<comment><USER11> I use Inbox because I cannot find any other free alternative. It is awesome on the phone....but on the computer it takes forever to load.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hello,

I work for Zoho Mail, so I may be slightly biased here but I would recommend Zoho Mail :). Let me try to convince you about why you should move to Zoho Mail. 1\. Privacy - We are a 100% ad-free email service. We always have been and always will be. We don't scan your emails for keywords, we don't show ads, anything. We are 100% committed to maintaining your privacy.

2\. Cost - We have a free plan that is free for up to 25 users. Through our referral program, you can get another 25 users absolutely free. That's a total of 50 free users, which is plenty for most small businesses. Our free plan is perfect for that. Above that, our paid plans start at $2/user/month. You can take a look at our pricing here - [https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html](https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html).

3\. Reliability - We have a 99.9% uptime guarantee for Zoho Mail, which is the industry standard. We constantly work on upgrading our infrastructure to maintain that reliability. In the odd event of a downtime, we have contingency plans in place for you to access your email.

4\. Features - We are constantly innovating with email, to make it fit into the modern workplace. We've introduced a new feature called Streams, which is perfect for teams and combines slack like real-time collaboration with email. We also have a host of exciting new features for email.

5\. Integrations - Zoho Mail is part of 30+ apps from the Zoho family. All our apps are well integrated with each other, and can be used to run your entire business from the ground up. In addition, we are also integrated with 3rd party apps like Dropbox, Asana, Trello, and more.

6\. Migration - We make it easy and hassle free for people to migrate their email to Zoho Mail. It is free of cost, and there is absolutely no data loss at all.

To begin with, I recommend you try our free plan. All the features of the paid plans are available in Free as well, so you will get a clear picture of what Zoho Mail is. If I can help in any other way, please feel free to reach out to me at email@example.com.

Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm really happy with posteo.org

1\. Ad-free, bloat-free, 1 Eur / month.

2\. Privacy respecting, with clear transparency reports.

3\. Support for IMAP/POP3.

<comment><USER14> Seconded. Happy customer since 3 years here. The only thing that's not nice is that they do not offer Bring-Your-Own-Domain. You can only have a @posteo.tld address (with a certain range of TLD).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Protonmail: 100% guaranteed E2E encrypted, nice UI, servers based in Switzerland, Android/iOS apps available aswell. Oh, and open source.

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

As a nice addon they also recently launched a interesting VPN solution. Also headquartered in Switzerland with core infrastructure located in Switzerland and Iceland. No logging, and Tor routing is available with a single mouse click.

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

</comment><comment><USER16> I have been looking for an alternative to the Google apps ecosystem, to support mailing, calendar, contacts and document editing, but most importantly it should allow me to have "guests" contributors to documents I can share with them.

Anybody knows of a company providing such a service?

<comment><USER17> Sandstorm.io? I don't think it would cover everything... but it might work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> MIXMAX. It adds many great features to Gmail. Its too expensive, its pushing too hard to integrate with Salesforce, its probably too dependent on Gmail. But, all that said, I really cannot live without it. The founder Olof is a genius.

</comment><comment><USER19> Tutanota

[https://tutanota.com](https://tutanota.com) \- [https://github.com/tutao/tutanota](https://github.com/tutao/tutanota) \- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutanota](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutanota)

The company is based in Germany and benefits from BDSG.

<comment><USER7> No pricing information without signing up for the free tier?

<comment><USER19> [https://tutanota.com/pricing](https://tutanota.com/pricing)

<comment><USER7> Oh, thank you. I feel a bit stupid for not just trying that URL, but I couldn't (can't) find a way to navigate there from the home page...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Paid Gmail & Inbox (G Suite).

Personally, it feels like Google's spam filtering is still superior to the competition, so it would take quite a lot to get me to switch to a new vendor.

Not to mention the integrated action buttons that Gmail and Inbox have supported for years. Those buttons are a great productivity enhancement that I have yet to see from most of the competition.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just started using Spark [https://sparkmailapp.com](https://sparkmailapp.com) for Mac and iPhone (couples of weeks now) and quite like it, generally overall positive experience and great UI. PS., I am not working in the company, just using couple of their products.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> THANK YOU EVERYONE! What an amazing set of answers. I'll be exploring a lot of these over the coming weeks.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have looked around but haven't beat a paid g suite account.

I have also coded some custom extensions to Gmail that make it more useful.

The most popular one I run is [https://dndemail.com](https://dndemail.com). It basically adds do not disturb to Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm using Zoho. I have no issue so far. You can easily register and point your domain to them. Free if you have less than 5 users. You can then configure catch-all email to forward everything to you.

Work pretty well on any IMAP/SMTP mail client.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for recommending Zoho Mail. Appreciate it :)

Just want to let you know, however, that we've changed our pricing, and now we are free for 25 users. We have a great referral program as well that lets you earn a further 25 free users, should you need them.

[https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html](https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> outlook on mobile and web is great. I happily throw my $8/ month at them.

My only peeve is the confusing admin tools -- it is still Exchange on the backend, so there are a ton of features and settings that are simply in the way.

</comment><comment><USER25> I also have thexyz.com as my email provider, very reliable service and I like how there are unlimited aliases included so I can have firstname.lastname@example.com or firstname.lastname@example.com also sent to my main address.

</comment><comment><USER26> I find thexyz.com a really good alternative they have a $20 per year plan and a $50 that adds more storage and syncs your contacts and calendars also. It does a great job of keeping spam out too.

</comment><comment><USER27> It would be great if telegram incorporated email into their system.

</comment><comment><USER28> Take a look to ox.io, an European safe and secure mail provider. It take 1 to 2 days to get an invite.

</comment><comment><USER29> Rainloop with cloudron is awesome

</comment><comment><USER30> zohomail.com

</comment><comment><USER31> protonmail

</comment><comment><USER32> I use protonmail (protonmail.com). It's encrypted email developed by the scientists at CERN. The data is hosted in Switzerland and therefore subject to Swiss privacy laws. There are app for iPhone and Android. They just came out with a VPN product, too.

<comment><USER33> The free plan is only limited to 500 Mb though.

<comment><USER3> Pay for your email or you are the product.</comment></comment></comment>


Think twice before you attend an interview at Accenture - <AUTHOR>

I attended an interview at Accenture recently and was stupid enough to pay a part of the my travel expenses using my credit card. After a series of interviews I was offered a full time position. I got fed up with cheap i-will-hire-him-for-dirt-cheap HR tactics and rejected their offer. After my repeated calls/mails for a few of months I have decided to give up expecting reimbursement for travel expenses.<p>I am sure I am not the only one out there. Think Twice if you have to pay for travel expenses to attend Accenture Interviews. <comment><USER2> I very well might be able to help with Accenture expenses. If you are comfortable, email me at email@example.com. Hope that is in line with etiquette around here. If not, ignore me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Got burnt like that with another Big IT Co in MA.

When I worked for a small tech firm, I routinely received an advance for any large travel expenses. Yet working for a multi-billion dollar revenue firm, I had to put everything on CC, make a expenses claim and typically the bill came due before finance (outsourced) had made the reimbursement. Eventually left in disgust over than and other management foibles.

</comment><comment><USER4> Don't travel beyond of reasonable expectations on your dime for a job interview. Request initial interviews to be conducted via video and get the invitation to fly you out...paid. If they're serious about the position and your potential fit, most HR teams have a budget to pay if they're interest lies in the best fit.

</comment><comment><USER5> I had the same problem with a pretty well-known tech company in Cupertino(but not THAT one).

Any phone calls that involved me getting back my hotel costs were not returned, despite promises to the contrary before I interviewed.

</comment><comment><USER6> That sounds pretty unprofessional, but is surprising to me. When I was applying for full-time positions this past fall (for post-graduation) I ended up having a lot of places to reject - no problems getting reimbursed from any of them. Accenture was not someplace I had applied to work, nor someplace I'd want to work, but hopefully your experience is atypical. This said, it can definitely be hard to pay enough attention to recruits and interviewees even in the best of circumstances... not that that's a good excuse for HR.

</comment><comment><USER7> Bummer. I worked at Accenture for 10 years and can understand the difficulties in claiming expenses, lost a lot of money over the years because it was just too damn hard sometimes.

Regarding the pay, the first few years I earned minimal salary but then it went up very fast. Very few people last that long though ;)

<comment><USER8> Might I ask why very few people last that long? Is there too much work and not enough free time, or is it that work itself is harder than elsewhere? Or is it something else entirely?

<comment><USER9> The Accenture solution to solving a hard problem is throwing more people at it.

Imagine the IBM shovel vs spoon advert in reverse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had the same issue with Google, I interviewed there for a post MBA position and never got reimbursed for my last minute travel expenses. Never got a reply phonecall or email.</comment>


It's Adventure Time - <AUTHOR> http://theholenearthecenteroftheworld.com/ <comment><USER2> Amused and happy to see this on the front page of HN. Adventure Time is one of my favorite shows of all time.

My husband and I had an Adventure Time themed wedding a month ago and we turned a whole slew of people into fans that way - our cake baker, some of the venue staff, a whole bunch of our friends and family. Unlike MLP and other shows where I feel like I have to explain things for people to get started, AT is generally great enough that I just tell people to watch any episode and then just blow their minds explaining some of what's going on in the show at large that they might not have picked up on. Love it.

Cake (and we even got CN's permission for it! suck it disney!): [https://www.flickr.com/photos/argon/13347167874/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/argon/13347167874/)

His and hers flowers with Finn and BMO: [https://scontent-a- sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/t1.0-9/p480...](https://scontent-a- sjc.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos- ash3/t1.0-9/p480x480/1962693_10152306904399648_141489450_n.jpg)

And one of the centerpieces ;) [https://fbcdn-sphotos- c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/t1.0-...](https://fbcdn-sphotos- c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak- prn1/t1.0-9/p180x540/1964952_10152374309819388_545707268_n.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Also, the creators have been working on a short made-for-youtube cartoon show (~5 minute episodes) called "Bravest Warriors". If anyone here likes Adventure Time, check it out:

[http://bravestwarriors.cartoonhangover.com/](http://bravestwarriors.cartoonhangover.com/)

(Also the character designer from Adventure Time is working on a new cartoon called Bee & PuppyCat, also in a similar awesome vein [http://beeandpuppycat.cartoonhangover.com/](http://beeandpuppycat.cartoonhangover.com/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This quote from NEPTR (The Never Ending Pie Throwing Robot) made me sad and touched in a very deep way and made me realize that Adventure Time isn't just a kids show:

"Creator, I am eager to commence the creation and propulsion of pies forever, but my pie-hucking appendage is... malfunctioning, and my oven lamp is cold, and my tank treads do not roll! They only do skids! Why, creator? Does it please you to watch me struggle?"

The line is a joke but the delivery just makes me feel a deep existential angst.

[http://adventuretime.wikia.com/wiki/Neptr/Quotes](http://adventuretime.wikia.com/wiki/Neptr/Quotes)

<comment><USER5> There's no reason to question a creator that is not sentient.

<comment><USER6> I'd also add that NEPTR does not know that he was created somewhat accidentally by an unskilled creator and that his intended body plan did not become realized. Both points that are also quite tragic and close to home for some cosmologies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Adventure Time is one the greatest things coming from recent American pop culture. It's not only imaginative, creative, fun, loving & caring and emotionally daring, twisted and complex beyond the naive first layers meant for present day children, and those work for them too. It connects with this old Gen-Xer in deep ways. There you have the Cold War angst, the fear and uncertainty we all were brought up with, which now has vanished like a nightmare, but it's still lurking inside. The technology in the post- apocalyptic World of Oo (delicious names) shows tokens of that age, BMO is a Mac, there are VHS tapes and CRT TVs, everything is old but has that timeless charm of the things you learnt first. And there is so much Sesame Street vibe deep down there, we were really educated by it. It's a love song from grown up kids to grown up kids. An uncertain world, full of charm and hidden dangers with pure heroes that make mistakes and surprising foes that have their adult reasons.

Just a quote. Episode "Beyond this Earthly Realm", Ice King is watching static on TV (how cool this was?), he can alter it because of his ghostly condition in that scene, and then he comes up with this:

"What do you think, Finn? Can we pull back the veil of static and reach into the source of all being? Behind this curtain of patterns, this random pattern generator... so clever. Right here in every home, watching us from a one-sided mirror."

This is unassumingly awesome.

</comment><comment><USER8> Besides the fact that the creator(s) are clearly geniuses, I think a big part of the awesomeness of the show is that those creators are abstract people. One example was when Finn (the human) suggested that they should pretend to be defeated by a tiny little army of little mushroom people because he pitied them and wanted to give them confidence. To this, Jake (the dog) said something like "no way man, it'll ruin my stats".

Or NEPTR's "You cannot tell, but I am giving a thumbs up." [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTTplK3kin8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTTplK3kin8)

In other words, the humor/atmosphere is much geekier than what you'd expect to find on a television show. The only other show I remember with this aspect is Futurama, except that Futurama is overt with its jokes, whereas Adventure Time has many shades of subtlety.

<comment><USER9> Why are those two examples abstract?

<comment><USER8> The idea of "stats" is a gamer thing, but Jake is talking about "stats" as applying to real-life scenarios.

Then there's the idea that a robot is "doing a thumbs up" in some sense or another that doesn't get across through the physical realm. That's how I perceived it, aynyway.

<comment><USER10> "Stats" were a sports thing before there were video games, or even before integrated circuits.

<comment><USER8> the show is often dungeons & dragons-y, so i assume it was in that context. regardless, you wouldn't use the jargon of "stats" when talking about real- life scenarios. and besides this altogether, there are countless examples. i just randomly picked two that i could remember. there's an entire episode ("All the Little People") that is a playful exercise in abstraction. but maybe "idea humor" has a better connotation

<comment><USER10> But taking a dive doesn't cause stat damage, except to your HP. Unless the mushroom people drain levels.

I actually saw "All the Little People" as an advanced version of The Sims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Adventure Time is one of those wonderful shows that evokes very strong emotions from its fans that are very difficult to put into words.

I've gone through a few drafts of this comment trying to explain what I love so much about it, but I can't seem to think of anything that wouldn't just be rehashing what either Pendleton Ward or Maria Bustillos have already covered in the article.

All I can say is that I highly recommend this show to everyone, as it's the only thing on TV that I make sure to follow as-it-airs.

EDIT: Just wanted to add that I watched S06E01E02 again this morning and remained completely blown away by the writing, acting, and animation. Ron Perlman plays a Lich King that feels dangerous in a way that few other "children's story" villains come close to.

</comment><comment><USER12> The Ice King is one of the most tragic characters ever written in recent times right next to Gollum. When you consider he was pivotal to how the Earth survived and how he protected a main character throughout childhood at a great ongoing personal cost - its astoundingly deep. The lore/universe is also very imaginative in the right way (somewhat grounded but very creative). Highly recommended. Watch Season 1 and 2 before judging because S01 is a little rough.

<comment><USER13> Also observe the physical resemblance of the Ice King to his creator, Pendleton Ward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think a lot of people like cartoons like this because they're forced to be clever with the jokes, whereas something made for adults just throws the sexual innuendo and adult oriented content right at you, not to mention there is little to no philosophical discussion to be had on the average sitcom. You can re-watch adventure time and regular show over and over and each time catch something you missed before.

</comment><comment><USER15> [MEGA SPOILERS]

One of the best scenes in Adventure Time is when Ice King goes to Marceline's house to jam. It turns out the "lyrics" Ice King wrote were actually messages to Marceline the little girl that he wrote hundreds of years ago, before the crown turned Simon into the Ice King.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vknDUJ3MM1M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vknDUJ3MM1M)

<comment><AUTHOR> Woahwoahwoah... That episode was absolutely amazing and was the first time it became clear to me I was no longer watching just another kids show, but finding out what you just said before actually seeing it for the first time would be like finding out early that you-know-who was you-know-who's father. Please consider putting a [MEGA SPOILERS] tag at the beginning of your comment.

<comment><USER15> Indeed, that is when I really appreciated the depth of this show.

I went ahead and put the spoilers tag :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In a similar vein, I've been loving the show Space Dandy, which is like Adventure Time's (slightly) older brother from across the Pacific; it's co- directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, of Cowboy Bebop fame.

Bringing it closer to Adventure Time than Cowboy Bebop however, it includes the work of a wide range of artists in different episodes, and isn't too minded by continuity. It also benefits from surprisingly bearable English voice acting and translation in Adult Swim's dubbed version.

Here's a review:

[http://www.avclub.com/review/space-dandy-is-more-than- cowboy...](http://www.avclub.com/review/space-dandy-is-more-than-cowboy- bebops-demented-li-201062)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is one of the few cartoons my children and I can completely enjoy together. Most cartoons just suck, and most "anime" that's good isn't properly dubbed into English which makes watching things a bit slower. (Although for Evangelio 3.03 I read every line, like I would a book, to her while watching.)

It covers interesting themes, but skips out on sexuality (mainly cause I'd do a poor job explaining such jokes off-the-cuff to my daughter). Yet it's fun enough that they never lose interest, unlike some Star Trek episodes.

<comment><USER18> Isn't Eva a little hardcore for someone not yet old enough to read?

<comment><USER17> They both can read, just not fluently enough to fully enjoy subtitles.

The rebuilds, so far, seem _relatively_ not-so-violent, and at least not violence for violence's sake. The only hardcore scene I recall overall is when Unit 2 gets eaten in one of the earlier movies. And it's all redeemed by destroying and or recreating the world anyways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Is Adventure Time really as amazing and revolutionary as some proclaim it to be? The way some describe it here makes it sound like it surpasses the entire roster of the classic Cartoon Cartoon era, which I'd like to doubt.

I pretty much gave up on Cartoon Network a long time ago when it met its downfall, and have moved on with life. The only animation I've watched since then has been Ralph Bakshi.

<comment><USER19> As someone who grep up during the Cartoon Cartoon era, and am a big fan of many of those shows (Power Puff Girls and Dexter's Lab were quite good), I'd say yes.

At the very top level, Adventure Time actually has serial elements, as opposed to Cartoon Cartoons' strictly episodic nature. Character's actions in previous episodes have real and lasting consequences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> As the parent of 6 and 10 year old boys, I do not let them watch the show. "Why?!" you ask? Because I can't trust the commercials shown by Cartoon Network. I've recorded shows for myself on CN and the commercials are... racy. "Yes, Scott, but I bet those shows are on after midnight!" You'd be right, of course. The things is though that 6 and 10yo precocious boys know how to get the DVR to show all upcoming shows. So if they asked for "all upcoming shows" of Adventure Time, do you think they will care that they are recording a show that comes on at 2AM vs 2PM? No, of course not. They'll just look for episodes they haven't seen and record them ASAP. But I sure as hell care which one they record! The commercials on at 2AM vs. 2PM are quite different.

The bottom line, for me, is that if your station sells commercials to "anyone with money" then my kids are not allowed to watch your channel.

</comment><comment><USER21> I guess I am alone in being completely unable to relate to this at all. I am sort of shocked to find myself confused and off-put by a top submission on HN.

I like to assume that HN is a very broad filter for the most relevant high- level & low-level technology, media, news, discussion and tangentially related topics.I understand the need to have a broad focus, because restriction is friction and seemingly unrelated content can be extremely useful sometimes.

However, I don't find this cartoon particularly innovative or interesting, and to me (someone uninitiated) I would have trouble picking it out from the horde of look-alikes on cartoon network. Collaboration in media and cartoons have been around for ages, and adult cartoons have been around since the simpsons. Maybe this deserves to be here, but I could think of a lot of content I would rather see at the top.

<comment><USER22> You're not alone. I thought it was borderline for HN, because it didn't strike me as intellectually engaging, but we were persuaded not to penalize it by the fact that the article was unusually in-depth (or at least long).

It's important to realize, though, that Hacker News isn't just for articles about tech and startups. That's a common but wrong misconception. We want a wide range of intellectually interesting articles. That's been true for as long as HN has been HN.

<comment><USER23> I don't like meta-talking about what is good or bad for HN generally, but when I saw dang had chimed in, I felt obligated to leave an opinion. Like the top comment, I was both amused and happy to find this content on HN.

Given Adventure Time's regular toying with ideas like SCIENCE vs. MAGIC, boundaries of morally responsible science, D&D meta-geekery (character alignments), machine sentience (BMO), and all of the games it plays in gender & identity roles and other existential weirdness, I always assumed it's adult audience would be strongly represented on HN.

Not only was the article the most in-depth analysis of the show I've ever come across, but the comments here contain intelligent discussion and observation that lead me to similar analyses and content like Adventure Time.

This was a perfect article for HN, as I use it; identify things tangentially interesting to the 'hacker' mind, in all it's different forms, and provide intellectual discussion on it.

Thanks to OP for finding it and you (dang) for allowing the discussion to remain. Glad to have seen it.

EDIT: for clarity

<comment><USER24> I suspect there is the confusion between what appears to be 'childish' and what is sophisticated. Things can be "childish" but also sophisticated, a la Adventure Time.

Ultimately, I have met a number of people who are so incredibly serious (and usually fairly young) that if it isnt a math paper, it's a waste of humanity. If only our brains worked like that!

Embrace neurally diverse experiences!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sorry, I have a visceral revulsion for this show. Its not the crappy animation, nor the macabre characters. Its not the plots. Its because I had to suffer through it over every single meeting of our game-invention club for several years. The proprietor of the card shop where we met had it on, and we met at the same time each week. It would distract everyone, made it hard to get real work done, and slowed our progress for months.

I hate it. Hate, hate, hate it. Hate it.

</comment><comment><USER26> I might be an idiot but I reloaded the website 3 times and turned adblock on and off before I realized it was an article and I just needed to scroll down. Being on a macbook with low-resolution screen and no visible scrollbar doesn't help. Still, what is "theholenearthecenteroftheworld.com"? Why don't they identify what they are at the top of the site?

<comment><USER27> It seems that this website is just dedicated for this one article. Which originally was from: [http://www.theawl.com/2014/04/how-adventure-time-came- to-be](http://www.theawl.com/2014/04/how-adventure-time-came-to-be)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Where can one watch adventure time episodes online?

<comment><USER29> [http://www.watchcartoononline.com/anime/adventure- time](http://www.watchcartoononline.com/anime/adventure-time)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Unfortunately the writing seems to be getting worse and worse over the years. There were lots of nerdy jokes in the early seasons, but at that time they were done in a celebratory way. In many of the newer episodes it feels like mocking. See "Vault of Bones" for example. Not to mention all the "preetreen drama" introduced.

<comment><USER29> I agree that it dipped briefly after the first season, but lately the show has had amazing maturity and depth. as well as being hilarious in a slightly less zany way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I cant believe no one mentioned Rick and Morty. Co-created by the creator of Adventure Time and Community.

The main character is a hacker scientist who with his grandson fight aliens, explore parallel dimensions and save the world from destruction!

</comment><comment><USER32> I am unabashedly a fan of Adventure Time.

</comment><comment><USER18> I love(d) Adventure Time but it's (IMO) suffering from the same problem as many good American shows, which is that as long as it's profitable the network keeps it going even after it's run out of creative steam. I'm sure there are still good episodes but I've mostly lost interest in the thing as a whole.

</comment><comment><USER33> That was some nice writing. All 11,000+ words of it. Kudos to Maria Bustillos.

</comment><comment><USER34> x

</comment><comment><USER35> No reason to be top on HN.

<comment><USER21> You & I are the only people that feel this way apparently.

<comment><USER35> And we all get downvoted. These people surely feel strongly about their cartoons.</comment></comment></comment>


'Big Data' Is Bunk, Obama Campaign's Tech Guru Tells University Leaders - <AUTHOR> http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/big-data-is-bunk-obama-campaigns-tech-guru-tells-university-leaders/47885

<comment><USER2> "Agile", "Data Science" and "Growth Hacker" also fall into this category. At the end of the day use what works for you, there is no "one size fits all".</comment>


Easily deploy web applications with Strobe [screencast] - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/28528883

<comment><USER2> Condense that cloud!</comment>


Naked mole rats have more than one weapon against aging - <AUTHOR> http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/09/30/when-youre-a-naked-mole-rat-why-stop-at-one-weapon-against-aging/

<comment><USER2> In general, when you read statements like this in an article: "lthough we cannot directly test whether the unique 28S rRNA structure contributes to the increased fidelity of translation, we speculate that it may change the folding or dynamics of the large ribosomal subunit, altering the rate of GTP hydrolysis and/or interaction of the large subunit with tRNA during accommodation, thus affecting the fidelity of protein synthesis."

it's a strong suggestion that the authors are searchng for impact- that is, they found some mildly interesting data from an experiment that is replicable. The rest of it- the speculation- can just be tossed out. Their data is not strong enough to support it, so it's just speculation.

I once had a prof who seemed really arrogant to me. He said, "when I read a paper, I skip to the methods. if the methods make sense (IE, they actually know how to run a basic experiment) then I look at the results. That's all."

I thought that was arrogant, but in retrospect he was giving sage advice: the only content in most papers is in their data sections, not in the introduction, conclusion or discussion. Spend your time looking at the data, not what the authors think the data means, and make up your own mind.

<comment><USER3> That's fine if you happen to only read papers that are dealing with data you understand. In short, only papers in your own field.

You can't understand the statistics, and therefore the conclusions, if you don't understand the data. Your Professor was certainly arrogant (and foolish) if he didn't comprehend that.

<comment><USER2> Disagree completely. I can easily read papers well outside of my area (biophysics), such as climate research, and follow most if not all of the analysis. my field along includes hundreds of subspecialities, and I must frequently read and follow papers in another specialty.

Statistics itself is indepedent of the study details; it's just the application of probability to hypothesis testing and I know of no science which cannot express its models in the form of probabilistic analysis. That's why people who are physicists can move to medicine and produce useful criticisms of study design (cf Stan Glantz).

The one big issue with studies outside of my domain is that it takes more time and attention to read because I have to refer to citations or online resources to understand the technical details of their domain.

<comment><USER3> A while back, I picked up an old introduction to statistics book from the 1950s, just out of interest to see how things were done before computers, and I remember that near the beginning, there was a cautionary tale.

It started out with a simple bimodal distribution and explained that it was the results of some student tests. The reason it was bimodal was simply that it was the results from two different classes, the "smart" class and the "others". And talked about how this is a classic way to spot that you are dealing with two populations.

Then it related the tale of First World War marksmen. It turns out that when they were training their sharpshooters, the results, when plotted, had a bimodal distribution where they were expecting a normal one. They took this to mean that there were such things as "natural shots": men with a natural ability for shooting. If they could identify early which ones were the natural shots, they could concentrate their training much more effectively.

But it didn't work. After they separated the groups, it turns out that not only did the "natural" group also have a bimodal distribution, but they actually didn't perform any better than the "bad shots". To cut a long story short, they discovered that the bimodal distribution was actually an artifact of the scoring system they were using. When they recalculated the data with a different scoring system, they had a regular normal distribution.

It's a simple story with a simple moral: you can't interpret your results if you don't understand your data. Maybe I'm wrong though; it's been a while since I did stats and I've driven most of it from my memory. :-)

Oh, and it's not at all sad that I buy second-hand statistics books for fun reading. It's just not.

<comment><USER2> The scoring system would be described in the methods section and anybody with a decent data analysis and experimental design background would ferret that out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Amazing how building a diagnostic protein, the biological equivalent of a `printf` statement, is being used here.

It's also exciting that this is no big deal for the researchers.

<comment><USER5> I like how the debunkers have already appeared, stoping scientific progress at every opportunity

<comment><USER2> it's not scientific progress if we falsely accept incorrect hypotheses. Debunkers play an important role of casting doubt on improbably claims.

<comment><USER5> Like how the sun is the center of the universe and burn all the heretics?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looking like a naked mole rat is quite the price to pay for cancer immunity. But I guess every species is subject to evolutionary trade-offs. :p

</comment><comment><USER7> "A number of studies have hinted..."

"The scientists were unable to directly examine the 28S RNA fragments in action, so they can't say for sure that splitting 28S in two _is the reason for the accuracy of naked mole rat proteins_."

Right. So the entie article is nothing more than bs. Thank you for the book- tip, HN: "Bad Science", Chapter 11: How the Media Promote the Public Misunderstanding of Science "The dumbing-down of science to produce easily assimilated wacky, breakthrough or scare stories... The relative scarcity of sensational medical breakthroughs since a golden age of discovery between 1935 and 1975, is seen as motivating the production of dumbed-down stories which trumpet unpublished research and ill-founded speculation. "

<comment><USER8> I used to get upset about these things, but nowadays if a writeup of a paper bothers me or sounds weird, i just go to the original publication. This might be hard if you're not at a university or otherwise have access to the journals.

In this case i don't see anything particularly wrong. Just reading the abstract would tell you enough (linked from the article):

[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/09/25/1313473110](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/09/25/1313473110)

The paper reports that the 28S RNA is split and that the ribosomes seem to be better at avoiding mistakes whilst keeping the same translation speed, and the authors speculate if these two things could be linked. And that's the gist from the Nat. Geo. article, too.

<comment><USER7> Thank's for the reply. I'm currently reading 'Bad Science', After someone mentioned it here on HN. Perhaps I'm now in a 'too sceptical' mood. My apolegies to the author ;-)</comment></comment></comment>


Unified API of WebSocket and HTTP long polling/streaming for Clojure - <AUTHOR> http://http-kit.org/index.html

<comment><USER2> This seems similar to SignalR in .NET world, would you mind comparing the two feature-wise ?

<comment><USER3> I am afraid http-kit is much feature less than SignalR. SignalR provides client side javascript[1], and hubs. http-kit provide non of these. http-kit just provide a way to get a Channel that can be used to push data to client, The Channel can be WebSocket or HTTP (long polling/streaming). IMO, http-kit is more like a unix command line tool, tiny and focus.

Socket.IO[2] is more like SignalR compare to http-kit.

[1] jquery.signalR-1.0.1.min.js [2] <http://socket.io/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi Feng,

Great work! I know it's quite complicated, but how are the plans for https support coming along?

Kudos to you and Peter on a great library!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the kind words.

For the server, https is not planed, since It's better be done by Nginx or something alike [1].

For the client, https is planed. We have use case for it, too. Some time is needed to work on it. It will come out in one or two month, I guess.

[1] <http://http-kit.org/migration.html#https>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I, and many others, want to use this in production. Is the API solidified, as per version 2.0.0?

<comment><USER3> Yes, it's 2.0.0, that's a promise of the API. No API breaks after 2.0.0 get released (It's already released today).

To tell the truth, I, Peter[1], and a few others take more than a month to think and discuss the API, even though there are just few functions to export. We try our best to make it better. In the end, I think, We are quite happy with what we get now: the unified API.

If a very good idea found to do the API, but the API would break, then it's version 3. But version 2 will still be maintained, and any bugs will get fixed. That's the promise.

Is this address your concern?

[1] <https://github.com/ptaoussanis>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How does compare with all the other async offerings for clojure like aleph and pure netty?

<comment><USER7> I'm curious how it compares to pedestal.io

<comment><USER3> pedestal is quite a large project, try to offer a complete solution for building web application in Clojure, from server side to client side, to tooling.

http-kit is a very small and focused library, It just do one thing: talk in HTTP. http-kit need to work together with other libraries like Ring[1] and Compojure[2] to do the server side.

Few good things about http-kit: 1\. Very fast and scalable, almost as fast as what you can get from the hardware. 2\. Focus, do one thing and do it well, thing about Linux/Unix's philosophy. Personally, I prefer this way of doing software.

[1] <https://github.com/ring-clojure/ring> [2] <https://github.com/weavejester/compojure></comment></comment></comment>


Wireless Power Is Still Pretty Useless - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2009/10/23/wireless-power-is-still-pretty-useless/

<comment><USER2> I noticed this the other day while cruising Target. They had a big PowerMat endcap display in the electronics dept.

$99 for the powermat base, then $39.99 for the iPhone module.

So, we're talking about a $140 charger for a _device that starts at $99_.

The article mentions convenience, but I don't even see that. There is no distinguishable time savings and the only other convenience I can think of it using less outlets. Not to mention the additional bulk that is added to your iPhone.

Sorry, but even with a price drop, I see this thing being relegated to the Sharper Image & Sky Mall catalogs.

<comment><USER3> well duh. give it a few years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd definitely have to agree with the article, it must be cheap and standardized before it's useful to me. Once that happens though, this can be amazingly handy.

I don't really understand why it's not cheap, the basic concept is just two coils of wire as far as I know. There has to be something I'm missing that makes it expensive, though I have no idea what.

<comment><USER5> _I don't really understand why it's not cheap_

Maybe the device manufacturers demand excessive royalties?

I'm sure the low unit volume contributes as well. Economies of scale will bring the price down.

<comment><USER4> I suppose that's a possibility, though I saw these in the store today for $100. That's an absurd amount of royalties if that's the case.

It was also in a Target, so I'd imagine they already have the scale part down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I understand that _consumer_ wireless power has not yet achieved its full potential. But those systems do not represent the entirety of wireless power...

For example, RFID access cards (like those found in student IDs) use wireless power to transmit their ID. Quite ubiquitous, and definitely not "useless".

There are also examples of robots using wireless power to great utility -- again, not "useless"

[http://www.hizook.com/blog/2008/10/07/wirelessly-powering- sw...](http://www.hizook.com/blog/2008/10/07/wirelessly-powering-swarm-robots)

</comment><comment><USER7> I do love my touchstone charger for my Palm Pre.

Still sticking a thing on an iphone and buying a $99 matt is way too much of a kludge.

Best if it is built into the design.</comment>