Mod_python development resumes after a 5 year pause - <AUTHOR> http://grisha.org/blog/2013/08/02/hacking-on-mod-python-again/ <comment><USER2> This seems ill advised. He should really justify why he is doing this, and why, in particular, it makes sense for mod_python to gain python3 support.

I don't know of any currently-developed framework that hasn't deprecated mod_python, and for good reason. wsgi and uwsgi are superior solutions in every way. I don't _want_ my python code running within the Apache process.

I am in the process of migrating all of my development to uWSGI. This also has the advantage of entirely de-coupling from Apache, so that I may move a given app to nginx at will.

<comment><USER3> > He should really justify why he is doing this..

Why?

If he wants to work on mod_python and make it support python3 why shouldn't he?

> I don't want my python code running within the Apache process.

Good for you but no ones forcing you to use it for your code, so you do your thing and if hacking on mod_python makes him happy why shouldn't he?

Now if he was working on mod_cobol you'd have a point... :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "At #python.web we warn against using mod_python."

Some pretty good reasons are listed at: [http://wiki.python.org/moin/PoundPythonWeb/mod_python](http://wiki.python.org/moin/PoundPythonWeb/mod_python)

Django also is hoping to deprecate mod_python in the future: [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/howto/deployment/modpy...](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/howto/deployment/modpython/)

<comment><USER5> Correction: Django isn't "hoping" to deprecate mod_python in the future, we already did it.

You linked to documentation for Django 1.2; the current release, 1.5, does not include mod_python support in the framework. WSGI is now the only deployment option supported in Django itself.

<comment><USER4> Well, awk. That's what happened when I searched for "mod_python" and "django"; I guess I know why it didn't show up in the later versions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ive been using mod_wsgi for some time, and it has worked great, and I had kind of assumed it had superseded mod_python. Wonder what the benefit of bringing it back to life is.

<comment><USER7> I was wondering that, too. Seems like he'd be better served contributing to mod_wsgi if he's got the itch to play again. It's going to be a whole lot of work to catch up again.

<comment><USER8> I use mod_python, and the only reason I see to switch to mod_wsgi is "mod_wsgi is maintained": it has nowhere near the functionality that mod_python did, and as far as I can tell runs the Python code in separate processes (which will result in even more context switches and data marshaling). I currently am using Apache with mpm_event and mod_python using Apache's SSI to do sub- request compositing between different systems all within the same embedded Python VMs.

Honestly, I've always been under the impression that mod_wagi is the project that needed to catch up... WSGI as an API mostly seems to be about attempting to rebuild some of the stuff Apache has had in place, in an implementation- agnostic fashion, for well over a decade (like the middleware stuff, which they are still having troubles integrating with "write callables", something that seems to be a non-issue with Apache filters).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We're not talking fire-and-forget software here so that's a _very_ long delay to catch up to.

On one hand, I'm glad this isn't going into obscurity (hopefully). I don't like to see projects fade and die out completely simply due to neglect. On the other, I can't see how this will become relevant anytime soon for any new project or even existing one. For that matter, I'm seeing fewer instances where Apache itself is still relevant in new projects these days.

From simple file serving to complex web apps, Nginx has pretty much taken over by and large, so unless Apache can show how it can remain competitive when the smaller upstart stays lean and fast, it's stuck right out of the gate.

I think it may be time Apache itself branches out to a leaner version (with the kitchen sink build available separately) that's as bare-bones as possible with basic functionality that can still be easily extended by modules later.

Of course, it's always good to have other options available. Homogeneity is rather boring.

      For now the main goal is to re-establish the community...

This will be an interesting challenge in an of itself. I'm curious to see how this will pan out and I wish him the best of luck.

<comment> j-kidd Apache, while not hipster-compatible, is still very much alive.

> I think it may be time Apache itself branches out to a leaner version (with > the kitchen sink build available separately) that's as bare-bones as > possible with basic functionality that can still be easily extended by > modules later.

Right. Here's a binary size comparison between Apache 2.4.6 and Nginx 1.4.1:

        ~ $ ls -l /usr/sbin/apache2
        -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 580528 Jul 26 13:23 /usr/sbin/apache2

        ~ $ ls -l /usr/sbin/nginx
        -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 661264 May 24 07:42 /usr/sbin/nginx

Apache is totally modular. Going from Apache to Nginx would be a downgrade for me.

<comment><USER9> When I was referring to "leaner", I was referring to the apparent ease with which Nginx serves while Apache was having difficulty in the same setup (it's quite silly to compare binary sizes). I'm not sure if that makes it not "hipster-compatible" any more than not as performance compatible while running on the same iron and facing the same load.

Also of note, as teilo mentions ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6151215](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6151215)), sometimes you want to decouple the app/scripting engine from the web server.

FYI, current stack is OpenBSD, Nginx, PHP-FPM and Postgres. Does that make us hipsters?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> mod_python and its publisher handler is how I got started with web development. Being able to rapidly write web apps in Python was, at the time, a great boon for me. I'm not sure how it fits in with the current state of web app frameworks, but it's nice to see it coming back nonetheless.

</comment><comment><USER8> mod_python works fine with 2.7, but that might be because Debian/Ubuntu was doing some maintenance out-of-tee (so their patches should definitly be pulled in). To the people who believe it is obsolete, though: mod_wsgi handles only trivial HTTP handling, and is not a reasonable replacement for mod_python, which could be used to plug in to almost any part of the Apache processing pipeline; it is much closer to mod_perl than mod_jk (which feels more like mod_wsgi).</comment>


Yes, progressive enhancement is a fucking moral argument - <AUTHOR> https://sonniesedge.co.uk/blog/progressive-enhancement <comment><USER2> The way I see it it's properly insuring that the site can be used in ways that the programmer might not predict even after it's grown to billions of lines of code and/or has been abandoned. (See [http://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm](http://www.warnerbros.com/archive/spacejam/movie/jam.htm))

Imagine if eBay, IMDB, and millions of other cruddy old site's were designed in a manner that didn't depend on screensize, pointer or input method.

Maybe they wouldn't need to make seperate ghetto mobile versions of their site that are still missing features. The site would just adjust itself according to its context.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article is unfortunately not very well organized, but I agree with its sentiments.</comment>


AdLib - Apple's secret iPad web framework - <AUTHOR> http://almost.done21.com/2010/04/adlib-apples-secret-ipad-web-framework/ <comment><AUTHOR> The full source is here <http://help.apple.com/ipad/mobile/interface/javascript.js>

you can actually read it after beautifying it at <http://jsbeautifier.org/>

It's an amazing piece of code. Obviously comes from many files and they must have a 'build & minify' internally.

Also the binary of graphics is injected within the JS... Again, showing the build system.

n.layer.children[1].innerHTML = '<img src="data:image/png;base64,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" alt="Globe" />' + localizationController.localizedUIString("Change Language");

Shame for the takedown notice (see article), it shows Apple's true colours, once again.</comment>


Why Not Eat Octopus? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/eating-octopus <comment> aaron-lebo It strikes me as rather bizarre to oppose eating octopus because they are "too smart", but to continue to eat other animals because they "aren't smart enough". That's a really arbitrary line to draw.

An analogy I like to use is that there presumably could be aliens out there that would like to eat humans. You could imagine said aliens landing on Earth and trying to eat us, and even imagine some argument among themselves that humans aren't smart, and thus can be eaten - something that we'd all obviously find issue with.

Now obviously animals cannot think of or cannot communicate with us that they do not want to be eaten the same way we could with another species, but I believe part of the responsibility of having any kind of power (whether intellectual or otherwise), is to take the utmost care of those who are somehow weaker than you. To do otherwise is to take advantage (might makes right), and that notion is disturbing.

In those terms, I have a very hard time justifying raising, keeping, and killing (and in most cases causing incredible suffering) to animals purely for our pleasure, when it is both entirely possible and likely more efficient for us to not eat them.

Basically, the only reason we eat animals today is because we've always done things this way. I do not mean to be offensive, as putting it this way suggests that those eating animals are wrong or doing evil, but instead I just think it is one of the many little things that we as society and individuals do without much thought.

<comment><USER2> A bit of a rambling, since I'm basically just thinking out loud.

We'd all obviously find issue with being eaten not because we think it's unethical that the alien wants to eat us (it's unlikely that the ethics question would even come up), but because we don't want to die, as an individual and as a species (I'm trying to say that it's NOT obvious that the issue we would have with such a scenario would have anything to do with ethics, not to make a judgement whether it's ethical or not). And so your argument looks like it's saying "we don't want it to happen to us, therefore it's unethical (for anyone to do that to us, or for us to do that to others)". I know you probably doesn't mean it that way.

Now, whether it's ethical to eat meat itself. As someone else have mentioned, I've always wondered where do you draw the line? Pigs and cows seem obviously out of the questions, but how about cockroach, caterpillar, corepod, hydra[0]? Event certain plants do sense distress signals when they're being attacked.

Do we actually know that it's possible for us, as a society as a whole to survive entirely on non-animal products, food or otherwise? Additionally, even if it might be just historical accident that we have a heavy meat-eating society, and another society that starts out without ever using animal products can advance to where we are right now and have a perfectly functioning society, it doesn't mean that it's ever feasible to actually switch to such a no-animal product society. In _our_ terms, that would be a switch from not just from one programming language to another, but probably from silicon-based chips to germanium-bases chips.

[0]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(genus)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_\(genus\))

<comment><USER3> > Do we actually know that it's possible for us, as a society as a whole to > survive entirely on non-animal products, food or otherwise?

Yes, we know that we virtually can't, at least not in a long-term multi- generational societal context. Humans are superbly evolved to eat a little bit of just about everything, and terribly evolved to eat a lot of one kind of thing for a long time. There are millions of years of evolution built into us and inherited from our ancestors that determined that a modern _homo sapien_ is destined to require some animal products in their consumption inventory. Meat was important enough that if we had an herbivorous ancestor, that ancestor is unknown in the fossil record. We purposely spent so much time finding animal sources, despite plentiful plant life nearly everywhere, that we even evolved brains, tools and fire and actually evolved away in-situ nutritional synthesis of various critical nutrients (that all other herbivores enjoy) all almost purely to take on the higher risk task of eating other animals. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763330](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7763330)

In _theory_ it _might_ be possible to craft a healthy, sustainable, long-term diet that uses no animals whatsoever, and would last generations with no ill effects on population health.

However, there's overwhelming evidence that, in practice, the kind of diet around 90% of practicing vegans practice is not that diet. In numerous serious studies, 70-90% of all tested practicing vegans test as B12 deficient, which is not a sustainable long term dietary deficiency over generations. Theoretically, after just a few generations of this kind of deficiency, if anybody is alive at all, they'll suffer from severe congenital neurological deficiencies that would make sustaining a modern society impossible. B12 sufficiency would be a non-optional part of any non-animal diet, and it appears that practicing vegans are not able to construct an alternative herbivorous diet that provides even single-generational sufficiency.

Other typical deficiencies found in large vegan population studies suggest that humans are generally poorly adapted to long-term, sustained, plant-only diets: with neurological and cardiovascular issues presenting as long-term consequences of the diet.

There's other challenges, some nutrients are pitifully rare or not as bioavailable to humans from plant sources as from animal ones: B12, DHA (and some important varieties of O3FAs, Vitamin A compounds, Arginine, Creatine, Carnosine, Vitamin D, Heme, and the list goes on.

There's other issues to, as the nutritional balance of vegan diets isn't what we're evolved to process, humans suffer from various absorption issues as plant sources provide high quantities of some food components that prevents absorption of some critical minerals: e.g. phytates block zinc for example.

One of the significant challenge for Vegans is the incredible amount of "sciency-sounding", but completely wrong nutritional advocacy advice available in the vegan community. The science is _so_ complex, almost no vegan understands enough of the science of human biology, nutrition and agriculture to properly assemble a diet for themselves (as demonstrated through dozens of studies). Various critical dietary issues are often waived away or minimized (just eat yeast extract!) and major deficits are often covered up under a handful of dietary supplements (many of which are derived from animal sources) for long-term adherence.

The flip side of the problem is that modern food practices _also_ provide animal sources _far_ in excess of what we evolved to need nutritionally. You could probably eat a vegan diet 4-5 days a week, and eat a healthy omnivorous diet just for dinner the other 2-3 and easily satisfy all your animal sourced nutritional requirements and come out extremely healthy with none of the Vegan diet associated health problems. And I don't mean a huge steak for those dinners. I mean just a regular old meal with a few ounces of some animal sourced protein.

<comment><USER4> Around 1/4 of Indians are vegetarian [1]. That's 300 million people today. The vegetarian traditions of Hinduism date from a few hundred years BC. How do/did these people get B12?

[1] [http://www.thehindu.com/seta/2004/10/21/stories/200410210011...](http://www.thehindu.com/seta/2004/10/21/stories/2004102100111600.htm)

<comment><USER3> Animal sources of protein. Vegetarianism does not preclude this. Most vegetarian Hindus (Brahmins mostly) are lacto-vegetarians and quite a few are ova-lacto-vegetarians.

[http://forbesindia.com/article/recliner/being-vegan-in- india...](http://forbesindia.com/article/recliner/being-vegan-in-india/4482/1)

Jains are often also pointed to as long-term Vegans in Western Vegan circles, but it turns out most Jains are a particular kind of lacto-vegetarian, with some other peculiar restrictions (no root plants). For example, most Jains will still cook with Ghee.

Some Jains live a Vegan-like lifestyle (there may be up to 500 in all of India), but wax-on and wax-off getting periodic B12 during lacto-vegetarian times (B12 is fat soluble and can stay in your system for up to 3 years). Still, B12 sufficiency is a major topic in modern Jain literature.

However, and this is important, several recent population studies in India have shown that as many as 81% of Indians are B-12 deficient. Current dietary guidelines for Vegetarians in India is driving the need for consumption of at least 4 glasses of milk per day or change to an omnivorous diet to cover the dietary B12 deficiency.

Because of cleaner food handling and the widespread introduction of antibiotics, B12 deficiency has also been demonstrated to be increasing in India and many local urban doctors report seeing multiple patients with B-12 deficiency per week.

In most Western studies, Vegetarians have far lower incidents of B12 deficiency than do Vegans. Vegan populations test as deficient at 70-90% of the population. B12 deficiency is trivially treated with animal protein sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I agree that we should think twice about eating sentient animals like octopuses, pigs are quite intelligent too (more so than many dogs!) and few people hesitate in front of a hot dog. Unlike the pigs we eat, the octopuses at least had a nice life and weren't cramped into tiny, dirty pens. Furthermore, octopuses have a very low life expectancy, they die after reproducing, and eating them is ecologically more sensible than many other seafood, tuna for example.

<comment><USER6> I think the case of dogs is very interesting. Any dog lover will readily admit their dog is intelligent and emotional. Is owning them and keeping them on leashes not therefore slavery?

<comment><USER7> The domestication of dogs was something that was mutually beneficial at the time. The use of leashes on a walk is for the sake of safety, not because the dog wants to escape.

If you're talking about abused dogs being chained up and not taken care of, you're right. That is unethical.

<comment><USER8> Dogs all around the world today live more often than not on small cramped apartment demarcations (or kennels), much like a baby's playpen even though-- and as opposed to how owners tend to treat cute ones--dogs are not babies forever. They're pretty much kept "on notice" for whenever owners feel like playing with them, at the end of a hard working day. I tend to think that's pretty close to slavery, you could make a case for Stockholm's syndrome at the least, since owners normally end up preventing dogs from interacting with other dogs at will (!) or even castrate (!!) them. You know, smoke a joint, have kids--find some other stress reliever and bonding mate, and as a bonus you get not to feed a reckless breeding industry.

<comment><USER9> Point well taken - for people who abuse and mistreat their dogs. But I hope you're not tarring everybody with the same brush.

We rescued our three dogs through a wonderful no-kill shelter here in Redwood City, Pets in Need:

[http://www.petsinneed.org/](http://www.petsinneed.org/)

I don't know what industry we were feeding with our modest adoption fees and donations, other than Pets in Need's mission of rescuing dogs from kill shelters.

So here's an example of how badly we abuse our dogs. Meet ThinkPad Dog:

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/12356111084/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/geary/12356111084/)

<comment><USER8> I guess my bigger point is that if you're someone whose work day involves the dog (a farmer, a policeman, blind people), that's great, "man's best friend" for me is exactly in this sense of the dog thinking of you as peer, not owner, of being side-by-side helping along and being an active dog. If you're gonna keep your dog in close quarters for the limited time you can see him and walk him, I don't think that's to be encouraged--dogs as house pets, that is. Of course, much like adopting abandoned kids, what you do is very noble and lessens the suffering of dogs, but I don't think that leads to being supportive of "pet culture", especially where people buy brand new pups and of races breeded for quality X that end up with all sorts of cruel diseases-- that's feeding the industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting to me that the dolphin and octopus seem to be separated from us by some missing feature. The Dolphin is social and intelligent, but lacks graspers (for tools). The Octopus is intelligent, has capable graspers, but is not social and doesn't live long. I wonder if having those missing features would cause critical tipping points toward civilization.

<comment><USER11> Both animals live underwater, where it would be really hard for any advanced civilization to form (no fire, much harder to extract raw resources, much harder to build shelters out of dirt/straw/etc.), etc. It's probably not a coincidence that all civilizations (for a perhaps loose definition of civilization- bees, ants, termites, humans, etc.) live on firm ground.

<comment><USER12> I was with you until bees and such. In what way do you feel bees are more of a "civilization" than say a pod of whales or dolphins? Is it a "has a structure" requirement?

<comment><USER4> Cetaceans don't have technology - they don't build things, adapting the environment to themselves. Their niche doesn't afford placing and combining materials like others do. So as Douglas Adams observed, all the dolphins seem to do is muck about and have a good time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Humans became human by eating meat. We aren't nearly as good as we think we are at creating fake replacement foods (see the number of people who have health problems clear up after going Paleo). Some day, we may be able to replace real animal protein, but we aren't there yet. In the meantime, I think we owe it to the animals and the environment to give the animals that will sacrifice their lives to propagate our own a happy existence. My goal for the past year has been to convert to sustainably raised, pastured meats exclusively. I'm not perfect, but I try. And I am grateful for the sacrifice these animals make.

On the specific topic of Cephalopods, I think our highest moral imperative is to ensure the survival and continued evolution of the species. If that requires farming some, fine, but we may find the intelligent life on earth in the next two million years belongs to them. Breaking that branch of, either trough ignorance or gluttony, is intolerable.

<comment><USER14> We can live perfectly healthy lives without meat. That said, I have no problem killing an animal that lived a full non-tortured life for food. I do think we owe more than buying the expensive whole foods meat. I think we should all go through the experience of killing a cow, pig, lamb, and chicken. Killing animals shouldn't be completely abstracted away from society - we need to understand what we are doing in a hands on way.

<comment><USER15> >>We can live perfectly healthy lives without meat.

Perhaps and with great care a diligence. Ask anyone who has tried to body build vegan, getting complete ammino acids takes planing. All the reverted vegans I know say they feel much better now. And being a vegan can be more unhealthy _if_ you replaced the meat that was in your diet with carbs/sugars.

It is far more healthy to eat a diet without grain/carbs IMHO if you are choosing one thing to improve health.

Want to be in fat burning mode (ketonic)? Done. Want to cure your type II diabetes? Done. Want to lower your blood pressure? Done. Want to raise your HDL and lower your triglycerides? Done. Want to lower your cancer risk (est. 60-90% of tumors can't run off ketone bodies, but require sugars)? Done. Want to have better dental health? Done. Want to have consistent energy all day? Done.

Based on everything I have read and learned it is my strong (but open to change) opinion that the natural human diet was consistent daily consumption of vegetables/leafy greens (esp. low starch ones), occasional fruit and occasional gluttonous consumption of animal products as community members made kills.

That is to say, I think humans evolved for a ketogenic diet (< 20 grams of carbs/day) and that is why it makes so many people healthier, independent of choosing to have a caloric deficit.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/](https://www.reddit.com/r/keto/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As Benjamin Franklin famously noted, even animals eat animals. The problem is quantity. Never in human history, even modern times, meat was served daily, in mass. For most people, it was an expensive food, affordable once or twice a week. And that before population increase we see. If people consumed meat once or twice a week, the diet, and for those who like it - taste, were OK, yet many many problems would be solved. Much more food, and less cruel industrialisation of animals to food.

(full disclosure: vegan)

<comment> aaron-lebo That's a good observation by Franklin, but in so many ways we like to think of ourselves as superior than animals. An animal doing something is a poor justification for a human doing something.

(This is probably obvious to you already being a vegan).

<comment><USER17> Agreed, that's a very flawed line of reasoning. Many animals rape, torture, and kill other animals. Just because they do that purely by nature doesn't mean it's ethical for us to do so as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If anyone stops by Padova, Italy, (I have a standing invitation like patio11's: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/standing- invitation/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/standing-invitation/) ), there's a fantastic seafood street stand that serves octopus:

[http://www.tripadvisor.it/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g187867-d3...](http://www.tripadvisor.it/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g187867-d3185414-i66002712-La_Folperia- Padua_Province_of_Padua_Veneto.html)

It's so good even my kids love it! "More tentacles, please!"

</comment><comment><USER19> Reminds me of this (surprisingly powerful, IMO) video of a kid who doesn't want to eat an octopus:

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

<comment><USER20> Wow great video. Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I found the "bargain with humanity" argument mentioned to justify eating pigs disturbing, since it was also used many times to rationalize human atrocities, too and many a situation that is disguised economic slavery, e.g. "Yes, their condition is bad but wouldn't they be worse off if we weren't doing this to them?".

</comment><comment><USER22> Okay between this and the lobster story you guys and gals are really starting to make me feel bad about the seafood Christmas my family does ever year (we're each responsible for a different seafood dish). I'll surely bring this up at the dinner table and I can tell ya right now, grandma isn't going to agree! :)

Back on topic though, this was another good read. The debate about how to cook it was hilarious:

 _He insisted that there was an art to cooking octopus correctly. His includes a Neapolitan trick: a wine cork in the cooking liquid. Éric Ripert and Harold McGee dismiss this step as mere legend—to which Pasternack gleefully responds, "Éric Ripert is full of shit!"_

</comment><comment><USER23> I wanted to like this article, but it didn't address or resolve the pig versus octopus debate adequately really.

</comment><comment><USER24> I honestly can not come up with a comfortable moral basis for eating meat derived from sentient animals. I do it anyway, mostly out of practical concerns, but I really hope artificial growth technology picks up over the next few years and tank-grown meat becomes viable.

</comment><comment><USER25> More cladistic thoughts:

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/kvk/the_octopus_the_dolphin_and_us_a...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/kvk/the_octopus_the_dolphin_and_us_a_great_filter_tale/)

Octopus is definitely on _my_ menu.

</comment><comment><USER26> Rather than assessing a species intellect, I tend to look for things to eat that are healthy, nutritious, delicious, environmentally sound/sustainable and most importantly, low carbon.

</comment><comment><USER27> Just started reading the article but Jaron Lanier has a whole section on this (surprisingly) in his book, You Are Not A Gadget.

</comment><comment><USER28> Octopuses may be much smarter than any other invertebrate, but does anyone seriously think they are as smart as pigs?

</comment><comment><USER29> Great article !

</comment><comment><USER30> I've been a strict vegetarian for close to 5 years. While I support any reduction in meat consumption, grading the edibility of animals by our perception of their intelligence is Nazism.

<comment><USER31> As a vegetarian you do the same thing. You kill living things to eat them, you simply choose to kill living things that don't have a nervous system. That is, you kill living things that you perceive are unable to appreciate that they are alive. Although plants do transmit electro-chemical signals across their regions, which could be argued as a rudimentary nervous system. They also get damaged and heal, they get sick, grow, reproduce, and respond to interactions with the environment.

We're not talking about whether or not killing is wrong, but rather where on the gradient of developed nervous system-like behavior is it ethically okay to kill something. Many people have chosen a higher point on the gradient than you have, but that by no means implies that it's okay to kill anything along the full spectrum. You've simply chosen a lower cut off point than others.

<comment><USER32> Either direction is entirely arbitrary. There is no objective basis to claim it's morally better to kill plants instead of animals. These moving lines are being made-up as people go along, and it's almost strictly an issue that exists in the very wealthy first world (ie it's invented by people with nothing better to do, who believe they're superior to the rest of the planet). The best that can be said is: vegans have arbitrarily created a personal moral line, wherein they are ok with killing plants but not animals. Anything else is just subjective argumentation.

And the obvious reason why vegans and others do what they can mentally to avoid facing the plant vs animal hypocrisy, is because if you take that to its logical conclusion, you end up with nutjobs that claim it's as evil to kill an ant as a human baby.</comment></comment></comment>


Inside the Microsoft FPGA-based configurable cloud [video] - <AUTHOR> https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017/B8063 <comment><USER2> The explanation of FPGAs between 5:00 and ~12:00 was very very good.

TL;DW:

\- FPGAs are more power-efficient than CPUs and GPUs

\- FPGAs are more flexible than ASICs

FPGAs vs CPUs:

\- CPU: Sequentially apply instructions on data in place

\- FPGA: In parallel, flow data through instructions in place

</comment><comment><USER2> Tried to scan the video to see if they have any support for reconfigure.io [1] (Code FPGAs with Go concurrency primitives). Didn't see any mention. Anybody knows more? Or I'll have to watch the vid in detail ... looks pretty pedagogic anyways :) ...

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

<comment><USER3> In general, code meant for sequential processors (even massively parallel sequential processors) doesn't really translate into the potential gains you see from FPGAs. I'm pretty skeptical that this gives you any gains.

Even OpenCL->HDL wasn't the huge boon it was supposed to be.

<comment><USER4> 1) You're right. The problem here is the unpredictability of the buffer's size - it's equivalent to halting problem in general. You miss just one item in the buffer and you risk circuit not working at random times.

2) OpenCL->HDL takes hours to complete due to need to synthesize, whereas OpenCL->CPU code takes seconds at worst. The time to get working (synthesized) code is major blocking factor in utilizing FPGAs anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google's TPU uses 28-40 W, Microsoft's uses 25 watts.

Relevant but not deep: [https://redmondmag.com/blogs/the-schwartz- report/2016/10/dif...](https://redmondmag.com/blogs/the-schwartz- report/2016/10/different-cloud-based-ai-paths.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER6> Why aren't more people deploying FPGAs like this? I started looking into using FPGAs for distributed systems work about six years ago when I was building a distributed database. Since then, about once a month I come across some problem that an FPGA could be useful for (i.e., enhance the performance enough that something otherwise infeasible becomes feasible). The devices themselves aren't that expensive (<$100) so why doesn't every server have one? Is there some hidden cost I'm not aware of (socket real estate, power consumption)? Or is it just a chicken-and-egg problem with not enough engineers asking for them because they don't know how they work because they're not more widely deployed?

<comment><USER7> FPGAs are hard/expensive to program (including being very painful to debug), at least for most tasks - and few people are good at both FPGA and software development, so you may need different people to do the programming. New FPGA generations can require substantial re-work, at least for best performance. Many tasks would require kernel support (which is another "hard/expensive to program, and annoying to debug", although not nearly as bad).

You need a deployment scenario where FPGAs beat GPUs (and CPUs) by enough to be worth that pain, but not by enough that someone already has a ready-made ASIC for you. I agree that one would expect to see _more_ deployment of FPGA's naively, but not a lot.

<comment><USER6> This seems right, except that Microsoft has clearly developed a higher level language than VHDL / Verilog for writing "virtualized network functions" that compiles down to something they can flash onto an FPGA (they call it Flow Tables in the presentation). So there's a higher level language that's, presumably, more intuitive for "normal" engineers to work with. When a new FPGA comes out the compiler is re-written and high level code stays the same. Basically the same thing we do with CPUs. So they're not _inherently_ hard to program.

SDN is common, and definitely a scenario where FPGAs outperform GPUs. Same for machine learning. (FWIW, Google uses ASICs for both of these use cases.) What we need is a high level language and access to FPGAs. I've been interested in business opportunities in this area, but it's hard to monetize. What's somewhat surprising is that the language bit hasn't been solved in the open source world either. My suspicion is that the reason an open source language like Flow Tables doesn't exist (AFAIK) is that there's not widespread access to FPGAs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anybody know if the FPGA accelerated NIC uses a different driver on the guest VM, or just the standard hyperv net driver?

If it uses the standard hyperv driver, can a guest be migrated live between accelerated and unaccelerated hosts?

<comment><USER9> Yeah, there's a different driver in the VM needed</comment></comment>


Spain is trying to get rid of Uber: drivers will face fines up to €18K - <AUTHOR> http://novobrief.com/spain-trying-push-uber-country-drivers-will-face-fines-e18000/ <comment><USER2> As far as I can see, Uber is the problem in countries, where taxi industry is heavily regularized.

Recently Uber started its operation in Poland, in Warsaw. For 2 days that was a news, but later nobody paid much attention on it.

In Poland in order to become taxi driver one needs to fulfill a number of conditions (only people who never comitted a crime are allowed a licence, must be physically and mentally healthy) a then pass the "city knowladge" exam. Exam is obligatory only in cites larger then 100K. And that's all.

Due to competition taxi prices are kept on resonable level, so taxi companies are competing by having nicer cars, being highly available (wating for a taxi longer then 10 min is unusual), offering loyalty cards, cummulative invoicing at the end of the month, etc.

Uber can compete with lower prices - they have promised to be 20% cheaper. It is not clear however cheaper from which price - premium taxi companies (about 60 cents per kilometer) or cheap services (40 cents per kilometer).

There are other questions as well - would Uber be able to provide invoices, if not, it is not a deal for many people.

Even if I pay less (10% less?), I don't think I will risk riding with someone who might be totally unfit for the job and does not know city. Plus if something goes wrong I am not sure how Uber is going to handle that.

So, basically, Uber is one more taxi company out of 25 with fancy way of calling taxi, so there is no reason for other companies to protest.

<comment><USER3> When people talk about 'heavy regulation', they don't usually specify what regulations they are actually talking about. In Germany for example, Uber is in trouble because they are not ensuring that their drivers are insured (a normal private car insurance won't cover commercial operation) and not ensuring that the vehicles have the required level of mechanical safety checks (commercial vehicles require more regular tests because they do far more miles).

When you peel away the vague and emotive language of 'heavy regulation' to look at the actual issues then suddenly things look quite different.

Hands up who on HN thinks filling our roads with uninsured drivers is a good thing? Hands up who thinks mandatory checks on vehicles brakes and other basic safety systems is a bad thing? I think I see pg's hand at the back there. But in general the vast vast majority of people think mandatory insurance is a good idea. That's why nearly all developed countries require it by law.

Uber don't want to actually come out and say 'our drivers are not insured', but make no mistake, thats the kind of thing Uber and SV VCs are talking about when they complain about 'red tape' and 'regulation' and 'lack of entrepreneurial spirit'. Ignoring insurance laws makes it easier for them to undercut law abiding and sociably responsible competitors, and they want to continue to get away with it.

<comment><USER4> > Hands up who on HN thinks filling our roads with uninsured drivers is a good > thing? Hands up who thinks mandatory checks on vehicles brakes and other > basic safety systems is a bad thing? I think I see pg's hand at the back > there. But in general the vast vast majority of people think mandatory > insurance is a good idea. That's why nearly all developed countries require > it by law.

The thing is that instead of making these things "expected" because of market forces, imposing it by law makes it a default for everyone and it becomes a box to tick when you want to operate a taxi, just like many other things. And you end up with people who simply do not give a shit at all about consumer experience and providing a good service at all. That's the key difference with countries were taxis have less regulations: people actually compete on service, for the benefit of everyone, not just the few who are taxi drivers and running a monopoly provided by the State.

With this attitude you end up with Taxi drivers who do this job because they see it as a rent, not as a way to make a difference on the market. Yeah, that's the spirit!

<comment><USER5> The thing is that insurances and checks on vehicle brakes are not visible for the consumer, and so an uninformed consumer won't care about it until an accident happen. By then, it's too late.

<comment><USER4> I was obviously not just referring about insurances/checks, but the whole regulation package.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > How they will do this in a city with thousands of cars is a different > question, and authorities haven't given any details on how they will try to > find Uber cars in the streets of Madrid.

Easy. Undercover inspectors just book an Uber ride. Soon as they step into the vehicle, they present ID and fine the driver.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it's that "easy." Uber could easily develop a way to detect such users and block them.

<comment><USER8> The authorities wouldn't need to be successful very often. So long as there's a possibility of a large fine the number of drivers would start to fall. If it falls to a level where getting an Uber car takes too long the customers will leave, and then Uber withdraw because they aren't making any money if there aren't any customers.

If 1% of Uber drivers are fined leads to 50% of drivers being scared away that could be enough to stop Uber completely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, a taxi license in Spain costs as much as a good new house.

Maybe even two houses depending on the area.

Historically, people needed to take big credits to start a taxi career.

I'm not sure what is my position, but I've empathy for those who did pay such license and special insurances.

Also I've empathy for those who want to make use of Uber services.

It's not easy to make justice to all of them at the same time.

I think there are more European countries with the same conflicts regarding this situation with traditional taxis and Uber. Many disputes, demonstrations and strikes, all around Europe.

Here in Spanishtan the government has take a position. We can not presume of a 2.0 government, neither about pro technological laws, or pro entrepreneur laws. Indeed. Is not new for me.

<comment><USER10> > Also I've empathy for those who want to make use of Uber services. It's not > easy to make justice to all of them at the same time.

Well, it depends on your culture and perspective, of course. To me, the answer is almost always clear and obvious: when there's a conflict between the worker's happiness and the consumer's happiness, the worker comes first. Society's role is to ensure its members can make a respectable livelihood -- not to solve every minor inconvenience for those whose comfortable survival is already guaranteed, or to make their life more "efficient". Of course, if the rich want to run their lives like well-oiled machines, it's their prerogative, as long as they don't interfere with society's more important goals.

<comment><USER11> You mean typewriter manufacturers should have been kept afloat forever using taxpayers' funds so as to not fire workers?

(That's what "the worker comes first" despite the consumer not wanting the product would mean, I think. If not, then the question is where you draw the line and how you measure the harm done to the average _worker_ when he is forced to support other workers who are unproductive compared to available alternatives. For instance, rich people have private cars and sometimes private drivers and don't need taxis that much. Who needs a taxi? Someone without a car who needs to quickly get from A to B. Could be a rather poor chap. Of course, taxis, that regulated brand of public transportation, are hardly affordable on a regular basis to "poor" people. Whether this helps or hurts "workers" is not obvious to me. All of which is not to say that I'm "on Uber's side" or some such, I'm too uninformed to take a side on this one. Just wondering about your "pro-worker" statement.)

<comment><USER10> Common sense and politics[1] usually provide the answer. I'm not talking about keeping dead industries afloat, but protecting certain necessary ventures through regulation, to ensure that the workers get compensated fairly for their required service. It is better to have customers wait another 3 minutes for a taxi, than taxi drivers not being able to make ends meet. The important thing to remember is that we aren't supposed to work for the sake of the economy; the economy is meant to work for us. What that means in practice, is left for each country, with its own culture and customs, to decide.

[1]: Although I mean politics in its very common denotation (i.e. the work of politicians, and not "politics of oppression"), it does provide a very good mechanism for groups to bargain over interests. It doesn't always come up with the same answer your common sense would give you, but it's sometimes better (though more annoying): it allows groups to consider various proposals as a package, rather than fight it out over each one in isolation (e.g. we won't oppose increase in gas tax if you don't allow unregulated taxi services).

<comment><USER12> But clearly the issue here is not compensation for the workers. The issue is cost of license. Consider this hypothetical:

1\. Country A - taxi license costs $300,000. Average ride costs $30, driver keeps $10 after paying off the license mortgage.

2\. Country B - taxi license costs $100. Average ride costs $15, driver keeps $15 since he doesn't have to pay it off.

<comment><USER10> The structure of the arrangement between taxi companies and the government is different in each area, and is subject both to particular deals struck (and I don't mean that in a bad way, though sometimes it is) and to whatever extra safety procedures the government wants to enforce. For example, a country should be free to require an expensive insurance from taxi drivers, as well as background checks as means to preventing future costs, or as part of a deal. Thing is, Travis Kalanick and his ilk are trying to restrict our freedom to choose what's right for our community, as if there's only one way to run an economy, and as if they know what it is.

<comment><USER12> Color me cynical, but I think that most of opposition to Uber stems not from desire for safety but simple desire to protect the incumbent profits.

Moreover - the 'community' isn't really choosing anything. Instead it's some crony local politicians in the pocket of taxi lobby. If you want to do a referendum on whether Uber should be operating - I'll agree on the 'community' stance. Otherwise it's the minority who have the most to lose advocating against it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You have to bear in mind that Amazon was not in Spain until just a couple of years ago because you know, the law here is very much pro-publishers. This move is not a surprise for us Spaniards. A real pity.

On the other hand, taxis here in Spain are nowhere near the chaos they seem to be in Manhattan or SF. They are usually rather clean (not necessarily shiny but decently clean) and drivers tend to be agreeable (there are exceptions, as in everything).

<comment><USER14> Can't agree with your point here. It's extremely common to get ripped off by taxis in Spain. There is no incentive for them to be agreeable with foreigners.

<comment><USER15> Not in Barcelona, at least, since fare prices are shown in the windows (IIRC this is also the norm in the UK, and I thought this was also done Spain-wide, but it's been a while since I took a taxi outside of Barcelona.) Of course, nothing prevents the taxi from driving around needlessly. But this can happen anywhere, Uber or no Uber.

<comment><USER16> When I took a taxi in barcelona the taxi driver held my luggage hostage and insisted on a flat fee instead of the meter when we arrived at the destination. I had no working mobile phone so there was not much I could do but pay him.

An anecdote but I doubt it's the only time that happened.

<comment><USER15> I doubt it too, but in highly regulated places (like Spain is, sadly for many affairs, luckily for some others) you could just pick the taxi number (they are always shown outside, license plate would work too) and complain against the city/company. Losing their mean of living is a pretty scary thing.

As a matter of fact, I've taken 2 taxis in the UK and was scammed in one of the trips (first one actually), the second one was nice. Shit happens, everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is indeed true that taxi licenses in Spain are so outrageously expensive that taxi drivers have to take a mortage big enough to buy a house, to pay for it.

There are certain industries in Spain which have legal barriers of entrance, so that it is very difficult for newcomers to get in, such as pharmacies and taxis. Think of it like a mafia.

That said, it has been proved on a TV programme, that a spanish-looking person taking a taxi, the taxi took a short route, and a foreign looking person taking a taxi from the same place to exactly the same destination, the taxi took a much longer and expensive route.

That said, it is my opinion that taxi driver and truck driver as a career has its days counted, in the light of innovations such as self driving cars. Obviously there will be a fierce (and presumably violent) opposition to the introduction of such disruptive technologies, they will lobby as a group (or as a mafia) trying to avoid that overtaking the market, but in the end those technologies will win.

So in the end, it is irrelevant if Uber can or can´t operate now in countries like Spain, because taxi drivers have no future.

The only hope for smart taxi drivers will be to buy a self-driving car and operate it 24hours a day (that is, embrace innovation as opposed to resist it, resistance is futile), while working themselves on something else, or just enjoying life.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm just wondering: facing such explicitly adverse government, what is the point of trying? Do you think Uber should sit that one out, and wait success abroad to change people's mind, or have foreign tourists used to Uber beg for the service to come back?

I can't imagine a change in public opinion in favor: the country that has massive official unemployment, systemic black market: the "sharing economy" cannot be more popular than now. One PR strategy would be to denounce the undeclared equivalents, drivers who offer rides without any licence or control; have the obvious accident happen (unceremonious driver, riders running away) and blow it out with a PR campaign; Uber could then present as the savior, and an needed control over the unscrupulous drivers and riders.

</comment><comment><USER19> I lived in Madrid for some time, and I rarely used taxi (in fact, only in cases when I needed to get to the airport in late hours).

The public transportation is pretty good, one can get anywhere in Madrid by using metro. [http://www.expatica.com/es/essentials_moving_to/essentials/P...](http://www.expatica.com/es/essentials_moving_to/essentials/Public- transport-in-Spain_15222.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> I take a fair amount of taxis and Uber. Except on some cases*, my experience with Uber is always vastly superior than it is with taxis: from the conversation to cleanliness, efficiency, etc. Specially in Spain.

I agree that Uber needs to have the same fiscal treatment as taxis do, but making the service illegal is beyond ridiculous, and a very sad way to try to stifle innovation (which will end up finding its way anyway).

<comment><USER10> Why do you think Uber is an "innovation"? It's simply an unregulated, unsafe and uninsured taxi service. It's just like those illegal scalpers offering rides in any airport, except with a smartphone app. That's not innovation (useful and popular taxi apps existed before Uber), and whatever it is, it's not being stifled. Uber is free to apply for permits just like everyone else. I think that instead of being sad you should be proud that your country doesn't automatically adopt any potentially harmful idea that comes from America.

<comment><USER21> > unsafe and uninsured

What are your citations for those bold claims? The first one is subjective, and the second one seems objectively false: [http://blog.uber.com/ridesharinginsurance](http://blog.uber.com/ridesharinginsurance)

<comment><USER22> That's for UberX in the US, the discussion is about UberPOP in Spain.

<comment><USER21> Okay, do you have any citation for the claim that UberPOP in Spain is unsafe or uninsured?

This link seems to say that neither of those fears is true for Brussels: [http://blog.uber.com/uberpopfactsbxl](http://blog.uber.com/uberpopfactsbxl) ... I can't find a similar post for Spain, but then, I'm not the one who bears the burden of proof.

<comment><USER22> I'm not either, pron is. I just pointed out that the link didn't apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't see what the problem is. In Spain the rule is that you need a taxi license to be a taxi driver or you'll get fined. Uber pretending they don't need one is bullshit.

<comment><USER21> Most American cities have that same rule, and yet Uber is legal in them; the key is how you define "taxi driver".

In most US cities, if you don't pick up strangers holding up their hand on the sidewalk, you're not considered a taxi, and the rule does not apply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> People could just order Cabify in Madrid. 100% legal, cheaper than a taxi and more cars on the street.

</comment><comment><USER25> "According to Spanish law, private drivers are not allowed to use their own cars to provide transportation services for-profit."

I wonder if private drivers are allowed to drive _someone else 'e_ car to provide such services?

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't want to be a wet blanket, but it seems to me that a better business model would be to make sure your entire company isn't operating illegally most places it exists (AirBnB, Uber / Lift).

</comment><comment><USER27> I live in Spain. I hate spanish laws. Living here is like living in socialism. 3 months to create your company because of bureaucracy, laws agains Airbnb and Uber, we want some liberty.

</comment><comment><USER28> It would be nice to be able to find a "sane" taxi-driver in Spain. Many (most) of them drive like crazy and they are all listening to very loud football on the radio.

<comment><USER29> I believe that's part of their value proposition. I enjoy pulling out from them how far right-winged they are by throwing out franquist bullshit all the time. They make my day.

<comment><USER30> I usually do the same. I wonder if Madrid cab drivers think all their clients are right wing enthusiasts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I live in Madrid and I'm totally ashamed about this.

I used Uber a couple times, the second one this friday, and I friend and I asked the driver what will he do about the fines that will start happening this monday. He just said that he will probably stop driving.

I love these new kind of services and this is not the way to boost innovation.

Our politicians are fucking morons.

<comment><USER32> Do you live in the same Madrid as me? I can't figure out what kind of 'innovation' Uber is bringing to the table.

There are plenty of taxis and free services for you to book one, I have never waited more than 10 minutes to get one, and most drivers are respectful and will turn the radio off or leave you alone if you say so. You can even ask them to take a particular route and they won't have any problem in doing so

<comment><USER31> The innovation is that you don't have to pay 100K in order to be a city driver

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Because the last thing Spain needs is more job opportunities...

<comment><USER23> Of all the jobs spain needs, taxi drivers is not one of them, that's for sure.

<comment><USER34> That's for the market to decide.</comment></comment></comment>


Droid camera fixes itself (for 24.5 days) - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/17/motorola-droid-camera-autofocus-fixed-in-secrecy/comments/23182303/

<comment><USER2> TechCrunch was reporting that you just needed to "clean the lens" to get focus working...

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/droid-autofocus-fix- now...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/droid-autofocus-fix-now- available-clean-the-lens/)

<comment><USER3> Yes, and if you bang on a drum the magic cargo planes arrive and drop food to you.

<comment><USER4> What is this a reference to?

<comment><USER5> Richard Feynman's 1974 Caltech Commencement speech: <http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a date workaround yet? I don't have the phone, but it would be interesting to see if manually setting the date to a certain period fixes the autofocus until the update.

Edit: Answered my own question:

 _"Just changed the date back to 11/11 and got red boxes. Went back to 11/17 and got green boxes again. Could be something to it."_ \- From the article comments.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anyone have the actual technical details of why this is?

<comment><USER8> My guess is that they're measuring time in milliseconds stored in a 32-bit signed integer and its overflowing to negative after 24.5 days (which is approx 2^31 milliseconds <http://www.google.com/search?q=2^31+milliseconds+to+days> )

<comment><USER9> Ya I've run into this before where we started an ms counter at 0 and after 24 days it would overflow.

Pain in the ass to catch....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why would an autofocus routine use a timestamp? Boggle me confused.

<comment><USER11> Well, there are many options how to do autofocusing, but one of them involves sending out either ultrasonic or infrared wave and calculating the delay it takes to cover the distance to the subject.

Now lets just hope that someone with more knowledge about the implementation of this system can describe the problem more clearly...

<comment><USER12> I'd like to point out that if we assume that the infrared wave travels at the speed of light in empty space (I know it's somehow slower but good enough for the back of this virtual envelope) to a subject 1.5m from the camera and comes back, the total time would be 10.007 _nano_ seconds, so the timer should be accurate enough to measure fractions of nanoseconds to perform a correct autofocus.

So, I don't think that's how it works. Now, for the sound wave, maybe?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mine doesn't seem fixed.</comment>


Firefox passive-aggressives adjudicate Nerd Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/11/dziuba_firefox_extensions/ <comment><USER2> I usually like the Register, but this article was pretty caustic. Not only was it irrationally biased against Adblock, and the user for that matter, but it made sweeping attacks against introverts and geeks in general.

<comment><USER3> Also, the article makes it sound like these guys never communicated at all, but weren't efforts made to settle the dispute privately? It seems like the article went to great lengths to make everyone involved look silly, when in fact the only real silliness would be the hundreds of users and even non-users who developed a passionate interest. So nerds waste time on gossip and politics. So teenagers are idealistic and think every little thing is the end of the world. So public opinion of the silliest kind may influence the opinions of Supposedly Serious People. So what? Doesn't that mean nerds are just like everyone else?</comment></comment>


Obama Campaign AWS Infrastructure In One Diagram - <AUTHOR> http://awsofa.info <comment><USER3> Harper Reed and Scott VanDenPlas did a talk / Q&A at the Chicago AWS meetup group a few months ago. My hazy recollection of the salient points of the talk:

1) This represents a heterogenous set of services where the engineers in charge of each service were more-or-less free to use whatever technology stack they were most comfortable with.

2) Use puppet for provisioning everything. (There is some subtlety Scott went into about being able to bring up a bunch of servers quickly which I have since forgotten).

3) Everything shuts down the day after the election. Not much time spent future-proofing the code when it has a well known expiration date.

4) Testing testing testing. System had serious problems and 2008 and they didn't want to repeat in 2012.

5) Engineers and sysadmins had a lot of latitude to make changes in order to respond to issues as they developed. It sounded like this is essentially Harper Reed's management style (he seems like a cool guy to work for).

<comment><USER4> Kinda odd saying that it has an expiration date. Aren't the same systems required for the next election?

<comment><USER5> I was at a talk by Rayid Ghani, the chief scientist for the Obama campaign. He said that they shut down everything after the campaign simply because they can't afford to keep on all the staff full-time for the 4 years, but they don't throw away the code.

<comment><USER6> With the billions of dollars pumped into election campaigns, it's odd that a political party wouldn't keep at least a small team on the code to continually test, update, refactor, and generally improve the quality.

Fred Brooks, nine women / one month, etc.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that political parties are fueled by donations, and it's hard to get people to donate for something like that. Not to mention you'd be competing with local/state/House/Senate elections with actual candidates for that fundraising money. I've donated politically in the past and even having only given small amounts, I still get emails daily and calls monthly asking me to donate to about half a dozen groups (many of which I've never donated to). Heck, wounded firefighters and cancer-striken kids have a low conversion rate for their fundraising - "money for technical systems to help a candidate to be named later" is even worse.

<comment><USER8> This will seem a bit OT, but it is relevant: [http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about...](http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead_wrong.html)

I'm bothered that we as a society have trouble recognizing the point and purpose of overhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Previous Discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5542368>

The diagram follows the style of the AWS Reference Architectures[0]. I have yet to find a published set of diagram components that compare well to that style.

Edit: Juan Domenech[1] has a small custom made component pallet in png form. And, it looks like the original diagrams are custom Adobe Illustrator drawings[2].

[0] <http://aws.amazon.com/architecture/>

[1] [http://blog.domenech.org/2012/06/aws-diagrams- palette-v10.ht...](http://blog.domenech.org/2012/06/aws-diagrams- palette-v10.html)

[2] <http://blog.domenech.org/2012/05/aws-diagrams.html>

<comment><USER10> Kind of wish GAE to have some sort of whitepaper, reference architecture, best practices/patterns as well.

Oh well, I guess GAE is for toy project _ahem_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wish this had a legend. Obviously the box sizes and positioning mean something.

What I can see makes me a bit curious.

\- Frontend Web boxes are "big", where the (some) of the backend App boxes are small. I'd have though it would be the reverse -- frontend horizontally scaled first, backend vertically scaled first.

\- Sometimes they use Zones ABC, sometimes AB. This is cool, but a lot of the "front" infrastructure is AB (including www), so not sure what advantage having ABC on backend pieces are. These are obviously super-critical for some special reason? I guess they also might be pieces that are-not/only-partially replicated to the secondary site.

\- The failover US-West site is using Asgard along with Puppet, but the primary US-East one isn't. I guess this is for managing failure scenarios?

\- Prodigious use of a lot of AWS services. Including internal ELBs all over the place. SQL Server and PostgreSQL sneak in a few places.

\- Couldn't find the CDN!

\- Looks like staging and testing are a complete replica (hard to tell, the resolution isn't quite there). They're big though. This is fine, but raises the question why the secondary site is just a part replica? If you provision the lot to stage, you'd figure you'd run the secondary the same way?

\- The Data Warehouse runs on the secondary site, but it only accessed from the primary. Interesting. Wonder why they just didn't put it on the primary?

<comment><USER12> I remember reading somewhere that they were using Akamai as their CDN provider (at least for their donation page).

<comment><USER13> Ask Scott why they ended up going with Akamai and how they, "reached out" to the campaign. Funny story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The most surprising thing about this is that test and staging are 1:1 duplicates of production. At the companies I've worked at dealing in scale, that has _never_ been the case.

"Oh, you run 10 servers and 2 load balancers across these 2 sub-systems? Here's 2 servers and a toy whistle for staging."

But then again, I suppose that's what you get when you can dump hundreds of millions of dollars on a problem over a couple years.

<comment><USER15> With Puppet, and with AWS, presumably it's possible to flip a switch, and 5 minutes later have a replica which is around for the 30m you want to test it for, at 1/250th of the monthly cost

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This would be much easier to read if the entire thing wasn't slanted.

</comment><comment><USER17> Really jazzed by CloudOpt, which I didn't know about. I had a multi-region architecture supporting AWS offshore development teams and HA between US-East & US-West, and this would have been a godsend. We had Windows Servers as dev workstations in Singapore and devs were based in India and Canada -- latency was actually fine to the desktop, and we used Amazon's internet connection to haul data back to US-East before hitting our data centre. This was satisfactory for most connectivity (throughput was fine) but occasionally the encapsulated routing would cause packet retry pains that traditional WAN acceleration may have helped with a bunch.

But, overall, this is great work, and shows what's possible to those in the enterprise that think that Amazon is still a bookseller, and clouds are basically things in the sky you don't want on your golf days. This will only help further the progression to way less wasted cost & time in IT. (Unless you're a republican, I suppose. Or maybe especially if you're a republican, you should be studying this for 2016 and considering an alternative to hiring Very Serious IT Consultants.)

<comment><USER18> Cloudopt rocked, but it's being renamed Union Bay Networks or something. <http://www.linkedin.com/company/union-bay-networks>

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I would really be interested in know a) if I had a copy of the Puppet scripts how long would it take get this server configuration up and running and b) how much would the AWS costs be per month?

<comment><USER20> A) That's a bit nuanced and depends on the application you are referring to (there are ~200 represented here), but if you had the scripts and the repos and built from a vanilla AMI, a box would boot and configure within a few minutes. We shortened the boot times greatly by using puppet to configure a template node which we then used to create a generic versioned AMI per autoscale environment and deployed with Asgard. If you had the AMIs, an EBS backed instance would boot and serve traffic in anywhere between 15 and 30 seconds or so.

B) For costs, you can check the FEC filings... I cannot recall what they were month to month, but it will be accurately reflected quarterly there, so you can get a rough estimate. It was like a kabillion times more in October 2012 than it was in June 2011. The important part for us is that the costs scaled with our demand.

<comment><USER21> Here are the numbers I pulled:

AMAZON $58,525.33 18-Oct-12

AMAZON WEB SERVICES $144,955.12 5-Nov-12

AMAZON WEB SERVICES $150,000.00 18-Dec-12 AMAZON WEB SERVICES $150,000.00 18-Dec-12 AMAZON WEB SERVICES $47,887.28 18-Dec-12 AMAZON WEB SERVICES $135.75 18-Dec-12

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Man, I didn't realize big sites were this complex under the hood. That site wasn't even complicated; if I recall correctly it was just some info pages and payment. I don't know anything about backend stuff. All my projects are like this:

[traffic] -> [hosted server] -> [Amazon CloudFront files]

<comment><USER23> I believe this includes all of their internal tools for campaigning and organizing and suchlike, not just the public website.

<comment><USER24> They're not internal; that's the point.

You want a citizen to be able to receive emails and give you money, then move smoothly to calling other citizens through the website, being provided with a walk sheet to go door-to-door in her own neighborhood, eventually leading a small team of other volunteers.... all of these require interaction with the database of other supporters. Ideally the campaign has over a hundred million people all contacting each other and urging each other to vote a certain way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That just drives home how much simpler things have become with no SLA IaaS. Instead of spending 20+ hours racking an east coast/west coast pair of small cages or perhaps just 2 full racks each, you can save time and money by going with simple and glitch proof scale out systems driven by one button provisioning of hundreds of low performing vms. As an added bonus if your san or ethernet collapses you can safely sleep through the pager - somebody else will undoubtedly post the problem on their well monitored support forum.

Let's not forget the capEx advantage - It's not like the Obama organization can afford heavy five or low six figure expenditures on infrastructure when who even knows if they'll be able to raise a series A or will even be around in a year.

<comment><USER13> The campaign isn't a tech startup. Its a people startup that uses tech to facilitate the things that people do.

<comment><USER13> Perhaps that was a bit overly broad and not quite representative of what I meant to convey. The problems faced by a campaign and the problems faced by a tech start up are inclusive but not all encompassing. Every dollar you save on your server infrastructure is a cell phone plan for a lonely field office in Texas struggling to make a dent in a hopeless battle but they're there because they care. Are you gonna tell them they can't have phones?

<comment><USER8> > The problems faced by a campaign and the problems faced by a tech start up > are inclusive but not all encompassing.

I thought this was pretty obvious.

> Every dollar you save on your server infrastructure is a cell phone plan for > a lonely field office in Texas struggling to make a dent in a hopeless > battle but they're there because they care.

I have no idea what you're trying to convey here.

<comment><USER13> There is an existing fundraising infrastructure, an existing polling infrastructure, an existing media market infrastructure, all of these are highly successful and competitive and get candidates elected. When you're introducing sprawling new web based architectures into this mix you've got to prove the efficacy of every minute decision and improvement. There is very little trust.

<comment><USER8> So... you're saying that a tech startup does not have to contend with existing infrastructures? Do I have that correct?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Its interesting to note that the the boweb-production servers of "www" don't have read-replicas (asynchronous replication) for read scalability. Anyone know why? Typically, one would use read-replicas to alleviate read workloads on the master.

<comment><USER27> Most likely the www servers are serving almost entirely static, cached content. Hell, they might not actually see any actual public traffic - <USER2> might just serve as CDN origins.

<comment><USER20> This is 100% correct. We also generated static snapshots of the origin and mirrored to S3. In the instance of something going awry with our primary origin servers, we could fail back to S3 as an origin.

EDIT: I'll add that our origin offload for WWW hovered around 98%.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Who would have thought the infrastructure behind Obama's site and whatever else they're running was so big. I always assumed it would be running maybe one or two instances, not require a whole freakin' diagram to explain.

<comment><USER29> As pointed out down-thread, there's a lot more to this than a simple website (voter analytics/GOTV stuff just for starters), and the potential user base/traffic load is enormous (ramping up particularly as you near election day).

Just as a data point in support of the kind of traffic that US presidential elections can drive for election-related things, I happened to be working on the web team for a major American newspaper circa the '08 election and we saw something like 1.2Bn page views the month leading up the election. (Traffic analytics wasn't my team, so that's a vague memory of being told that from five years ago. Grain of salt, etc.) This is for simple news/op-ed, mind you, and only one source of many for that information. I have no problems believing that the main web presences of the two candidates would see even more traffic, and they'd likely be more complicated under the hood than "hit homepage, follow article link, read article."

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's interesting that apart from the DynamoDB and the SQL Warehouse (Redshaft?) there's a pretty large LevelDB instance serving the sites/services.

I also wonder if in reality there were only one or two instances in each zone for each site behind the ELBs and the others were added to show how scalable the infrastructure is; or if their number actually did correspond to the avg. number of instances they ended up having to spin up.

<comment><USER31> My guess is that they wouldn't have used Redshift as it only became available for beta a few weeks before the election.

<comment><USER32> They used Vertica, which they didn't seem to be too pleased about. I think they would have liked to use Redshift it was available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Where did this lovely map come from and how can I generate my own?

<comment><USER34> I tried to figure out what software this was from, but I gave up. I did find that Wikipedia has a nice list of network diagram software here [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_network_diagram_s...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_network_diagram_software)

I'd love to describe a network in (something like) graphviz dot notation and get a diagram that looks like this out the other end. Usually I wind up just using Visio and doing it by hand because work pays for it anyway, and it's actually very nice.

<comment><USER18> It's good 'ol Inkscape :)

<comment><USER34> Thanks for the answer! I was just playing with Inkscape the other day, I'll make a point of learning it for real next time I need to put something like this together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Here is a chat from AWS Invent BDT 207: Big Data and the US Presidential Campaign [1]. Really interesting. They cover the diagram too.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1tJAT7ioEg>

<comment><USER18> That's me at the podium!

<comment><USER36> haha me too!

<comment><USER37> me too

<comment><USER18> no, you're down front with the goofy glasses. answering most of the questions. being smart. i'm the one futzing with the mouse and asking awkward questions like a wank.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Serious question: does the 3d mode add any information? I am distracted by it but perhaps the size of the blocks have any attached meaning? Is there a 2d variant available?

Otherwise: very interesting to see such a large infrastructure used for the campaign. I wonder how it compares to an average campaign here in Germany. I'd assume only a 10th of the servers (while spending the same amount of money :)) used here. I can't see anything special on the web before elections other than some wordpress alike web servers.

</comment><comment><USER39> It will be interesting to see how Organizing for Action ( OFA ), the follow-on group works out. So far they are raising money in decent chunks ( [http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-organizing-for- ac...](http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-organizing-for-action- fundraising-20130412,0,1428014.story) )

</comment><comment><USER40> Did anyone else notice the blue narwhals in the Staging and Testing areas? What's up with that?

Edit: D'oh: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Narwhal> (disappointed it's not an easter egg)

<comment><USER13> It is in a way. The department heads were very worried about the scrutiny and tone of the press in covering project narwhal and actively discouraged its use as a codename for the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Mother of god...

</comment><comment><USER42> Is this complexity really necessary?

<comment><USER39> Ask Mitt Romney that question

<comment><USER13> Yes and no. This diagram lays out how to do this kind of thing cheaply and scale the systems up and down quickly. It allows the campaign to bring these systems and services "in house" instead of contracting 3rd parties to manage adding boxes at great expense at the last minute based on best guesses of expected traffic. It allows you to respond to the spikes in traffic that are expected during a campaign and during promotions that would otherwise bring your site down or have you paying for unused bandwidth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is this not rendering for anyone else? Latest ubuntu + chrome. All I get is black.

<comment><USER44> Same for me, along with several other sites.

Ubuntu 12.10 + chrome 26.0.1410.63

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> They misspelled "Wall Street".

</comment><comment><USER46> Your tax dollars at works.

<comment><USER47> Please tell me that you weren't educated in the United States. I can't understand how else someone could misunderstand such a fundamental concept of our election process.

<comment><USER46> Ah, yes, because somehow wasting all that money on an election campaign is okay so long as it is voluntary taxation. Then I remember that this is the same group of intellectuals that voted up "Star Trek-like computer with voice interface" (a 15 line mashup that is neither a computer, nor Star Trek-like) to the top of HN. God bless America.

<comment><USER48> Also the same group that created Y Combinator, Hacker News, and the Internet. If you don't like it, you can see yourself out.

<comment><USER49> We created the Internet?

<comment><USER48> Al Gore is American :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Knowledge management for developers? - <AUTHOR>

Do you see any potential for a knowledge management app that focuses software developers and their teams?
I like the idea of having an app that manages the knowledge of my team and makes it searchable.
Do you know any existing apps? <comment><USER2> i think so. i have a similar application (and idea) that i want to expand.

what is your twitter handle or e-mail address or are you using irc? let's meet and talk about it.</comment>


Show HN: Alert Facebook Users with Tweets - <AUTHOR> https://2fb.me <comment><AUTHOR> Designed to alert Facebook users with tweets. I hope this tool helps with live news alerts. The only caveat is you need to be using chrome but you can also use this in API mode:

I.E

[https://2fb.me/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20368188](https://2fb.me/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20368188)</comment>


Free Software Talks Usually Priced at $300 - <AUTHOR> http://businessofsoftware.eu/business-of-software-videos-free-for-a-limited-time/?utm_medium=P4&utm_campaign=Videos&utm_source=HN <comment><USER2> This has nothing to do with "Free Software", the GPL, GNU, or even open source.

It concerns a limited time promotion by the Business of Software Conference to give no cost access to their videos.

The actual page title is "Business of Software Videos – Free for a Limited Time".</comment>


Apple, Microsoft now on nearly equal footing - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20006003-56.html <comment><USER2> Does anyone know if Microsoft still holds its investment in Apple (originally $150 million)?

<comment><USER3> General consensus is that the stock was converted (to common shares) and sold sometime in 2003.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IBM market cap passed Google as well at a point earlier today.

<comment><USER5> Why is that notable? Here's IBM and Google's market cap difference over time-

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ibm+market+cap+-+goog+m...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ibm+market+cap+-+goog+market+cap)

Compare that to Apple and Microsoft, where Apple fell $600 billion dollar behind at the turn of the century, and has pounced up (while Microsoft fell back) since.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=aapl+market+cap+-+msft+...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=aapl+market+cap+-+msft+market+cap)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> At it's peak, AOL/Time Warner's market cap was higher than both.

Market cap is not always a trustworthy number.

<comment><USER5> When AOL/Time Warner merged, Microsoft was peaking at over $500 billion. They've since continually edged back, but far slower than the collapse of the AOL monstrosity.

You'd have to go back pre-90s to even consider the possibility that a cable co beat out Microsoft. Maybe in the early years.</comment></comment>


The chicken analogy of startups - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/broiler-startups-vs-country-kapil-rajak-1?trk=hp-feed-article-title-publish <comment><USER2> Just in case someone doesn't get what the analogy is, "Broiler" == "VC funded", and "Country" == "Bootsrapped".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Broiler startup vs country one</comment>


Google could buy $110M worth of land, without subsidies, for San Jose megacampus - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/16/google-san-jose-campus-documents-no-subsidies.html <comment><USER2> Downtown San Jose is a curious place. There are almost no stores and only a few big companies (like Adobe) clustered together. It seems like bars and restaurants are the only things really thriving there.

If you compare the experience of walking around downtown San Francisco or any other larger US city during a weekday or on a weekend, San Jose seems very, very quiet and lacking that "bustle" that big cities have the world over.

This Google development has the potential to give the downtown area some much needed balance and revitalization.

<comment><USER3> Downtown San Jose business / office space is owned by a few agencies who aren't interested in working with the local business to build a better downtown, but instead are interested in kicking them out as much as possible from their leases to renovate and bring in all the other random non-local- built conglomerates into downtown.

I know this as I have a friend who owns a local business in downtown SJ who is being kicked off their lease, as well as every other club, restaurants, and businesses who's buildings were bought last year buy a single agency.

Not everything needs some big company to come in to make everything better, all that actually does is bring in a whole new wave of business to benefit off of what was built by others who were crushed before them.

<comment><USER4> There's a spot right across the street from Original Joe's. I'm not sure exactly how much of the building has been sitting empty for the past 10+ years, but the only time I've seen the corner retail space occupied was for a [temporary] pop-up store for SuperBowl 50's memorabilia while that was going on. This makes sense for somebody, and at the moment that's not me.

<comment><USER5> If the property has low prop13 taxes, then there's not much cost to keeping it empty. Lots of older california real estate like that... entire shopping malls are empty and "appreciating in value".

<comment><USER6> Prop13 on commercial property really needs to be balanced with heavy vacancy taxes.

<comment><USER7> Prop. 13 on commercial property needs to be terminated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've recently been doing a fair amount of traveling to tech-heavy cities from my base in the Rust Belt.

I see all the money and development going on in places like this, and it amazes me how growing and non-dysfunctional these economies are.

How do we get Google to move, say, 10% of those high-paying jobs to places whose economy really needs them?

Clearly money alone isn't a motivator, I just did a quick check and 3 times that amount of highway adjacent, commercial zoned acreage is available in my zip code for 1% of this price.

<comment><USER9> Does your ZIP code have the kind of employees that Google needs to succeed?

<comment><USER10> I can think of quite a few qualified people that'd be happy to move to a small town in the middle of nowhere, if they could work in a place like Google, get the same paycheck as their colleagues in California offices, but have a significantly lower cost of living. So I don't think that's really a problem - they would certainly have enough people to kickstart such a thing, and then it would just grow.

<comment><USER11> This.

It's truly amazing to me how much elitism is oozing in this thread from people who just keep repeating as though it is some well known fact that good people only want to live in big cities, hence suffering cities clearly are only suffering because there is something fundamentally, immutably undesirable about them.

People need to drop these elitist attitudes. A huge number of tech workers would love to leave SF, NYC, etc if only the damn jobs would let them.

<comment><USER12> If what you say is true, then surely it would be reflected in reality.

<comment><USER13> It could be, if only large companies would attempt to move to smaller cities, and show any interest in following through with that intention.

<comment><USER12> I'm saying it must not be to their economic benefit, otherwise it would have happened already.

<comment><USER11> The market is not perfectly rational. Sometimes companies do things that are against their economic interests due to irrational perceptions to the contrary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's crazy to me that big Tech Cos keep building massive offices and don't mind that there's not enough housing built to match. Those rent/housing prices drive up the wages they have to pay.

<comment><USER15> > and don't mind that there's not enough housing built to match.

Of course they mind. Google even works with developers to build housing: [https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/12/12/googles-massive- housi...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/12/12/googles-massive-housing-and- office-plan-poised-for-approval/)

Also FWIW, housing prices (rents) have generally stagnated for the past 3 years in the Bay Area; it's less of a problem now (in terms of getting worse) than it was half a decade ago.

<comment><USER16> is that because supply is rising or demand is falling?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is Google just desparate to expand in the Bay area? I guess its nearby to commuter rail, so there is some infrastructure, but unless San Jose starts doing many upzones, or Google includes over 10k units of housing, this will boost rent and property prices in the area.

<comment><USER3> They don't care, their employees can / will be able to afford the cost of living, and others will flock from the areas around to work low-paying jobs to support them.

I'm leaving the area because I don't want to be forced to work for a FAANG to be able to have what should be middle-class lifestyle abilities without having to worry about how I'd be so much better off just working at one of them. I find it fairly appalling that no BigNameCos are at least trying to work at:

a) remote work being a thing they offer b) expanding on meaningful satellite office space

I don't want to really hear about how Amazon is trying to do this - they are simply exploiting alternate economies for their own gain instead of genuinely deciding to bolster them to give everyone involved an upside.

I don't buy into the belief that this is the only place where people can build good software, that this is the only place to meet people to build great opportunities. The sooner we stop continually buying into this the sooner we can work on a change.

<comment><USER18> In regards to your point 'b', Google at least does have some rather substantial offices outside of Mountain View, but other than NYC and Zurich (the big ones) they don't get a lot of publicity I guess. For example Pittsburgh & Waterloo are two great offices that are in smaller more affordable cities, and both offices are growing.

I don't think you can say the same for Amazon, Facebook and Apple though. When my wife worked at Apple Canada a decade ago the trend was to strip engineering from remote offices and leave them as marketing/sales orgs only. I understand that changed some in the last bit, but I'm not sure how substantially. Amazon's offices here in the greater Toronto area are growing, but they're in Toronto, where cost of living is extremely high.

<comment><USER3> Google does to some degree, however, from what I know (and Googlers feel free to jump in) it's non trivial to work for the Cloud team in sunnyvale or wherever but actually work from the Pittsburgh office. Because you can't do this sort of thing, the type of work that may be available to you at any given office not around headquarters may be limiting.

I could be wrong on the above, but it's what I've minimally gathered from talking to some friends / recruiters over the years.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, you're roughly correct. There are exceptions. But in general 'remote' sites (hate that term) have learned over time to avoid excessive fragmentation, as that has led to undesirable results. Sites tend to try to focus on a small number of teams with a strong centre of gravity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > $110m

Probably less than the cost of one diversity training seminar for Google.

<comment><USER20> I flagged this because I think it's a joke, but let me know if you're serious and I'll unflag.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Details of the specific lots in question can be found in the linked Memorandum, with a map on page 7: [http://sanjose.legistar.com/gateway.aspx?M=F&ID=6e29db0e-c5d...](http://sanjose.legistar.com/gateway.aspx?M=F&ID=6e29db0e-c5d7-4952-b0cc-f3a04a97caf9.pdf)

The biggest lots appear to be currently used only for parking for the adjacent SAP Center sports arena: [https://goo.gl/maps/5rGgitUeisL2](https://goo.gl/maps/5rGgitUeisL2)

<comment><USER21>
      The biggest lots appear to be currently used only for parking for the adjacent SAP Center

No, only the one parcel directly south of SAP, corner of Autumn and Santa Clara, is designated SAP parking (known as Lot D).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> really wish they would expand somewhere else instead (i know they are doing NY).

</comment><comment><USER23> So, about 3 acres then?

<comment><USER24> From the article: "In a new document, the city of San Jose says that Google could pay upwards of $100 million to buy roughly 21 acres of land for its proposed mega-campus, without any subsidies."

<comment><USER23> Lame attempt at "TRBA" sarcasm, my apologies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> To say "without subsidies" is seriously misleading.

Google is being offered these lots at _well below market price_. Many of the same lots were previously offered to the Oakland A's for a new ballpark, also well below market price at that time.

San Jose land policy is run by corrupt idiots, as evidenced by them paying $41 million(0) in a sealed bid auction for the Convention center South Hall property at about _twice_ the price they are getting from Google ($10M/acre for that mostly landlocked parcel vs. $5M/acre they are charging Google for _prime parcels_ with good freeway access at Bird Ave.).

But, hey, I'm sure they'll all get cushy Google executive positions when they leave "public service"... like Mineta did from Lockheed Martin after redirecting light rail their way.

Also, regarding "no subsidies": watch them offer Google below-srandard development impact fees.

(0) the highest private sector bid? Just $11 million!</comment>