Charities we'd like to see - <AUTHOR> http://blog.givewell.org/2015/10/15/charities-wed-like-to-see/ <comment><USER2> My wife runs an early stage charity called New Incentives supported by Givewell, hoping to become a candidate for their top charity recommendation.

They use an evidence-backed model called conditional cash transfers. They give money to disadvantaged pregnant women when they achieve health goals that increase the probability of their child's survival (example: activities to reduce HIV transmission from mothers to babies).

The whole organization is a mobile-first organization using biometrics for verification (because technology is the best way to cut across corruption) and they work on many interesting operational challenges. The organization could really use the help of more engineers, especially Android app developers, to tackle some of these challenges.

If anyone is interested, please respond to this comment or ping me.

<comment><USER3> I have a (minor) concern that we here at HN are biased towards charities that are tech-oriented, hip app-developing to solve the world, versus a more mundane charity. Can you (or your wife) comment on that? Why does this charity need flashy tech? New tech comes with costs, like unreliability or unexpectedly high costs or extra training - any concern for that? Givewell's support is a significant confidence booster in this regards, but I think it's an interesting subject to discuss.

Best of luck to New Incentives.

(P.S. if you want to recruit in this thread, I'd specify if it's paid or volunteer and whether it's on-site or remote. Or anything else they have in Who's Hiring? threads.)

<comment><USER2> Great question! The key is in what way are we using tech. Our model, conditional cash transfers (CCTs), has been used for many years by governments in several contexts. We are not inventing anything new by any means. However, our manner of implementation is trying to innovate by reducing some of the biggest challenges these government programs face: corruption and accountability.

For example, without technology we'd be facing the same issue as the Nigerian government (the country we work in): ghost beneficiaries. By taking advantage of currently available biometric solutions, we reduce this and increase the likelihood that our money goes to real beneficiaries. We are wary of adopting technology unless it is absolutely necessary. Another way we use technology is to collect data in the field. We are working in remote, rural areas with high levels of rainfall so we use mobile apps to collect data. This helps reduce the amount of data compromised and also provides an additional layer of verification: by seeing timestamps and knowing exactly who edits what and when. This helps us maintain higher levels of accountability and identify early warning signs of potential fraud.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the thoughtful response!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not sure if it would be helpful, but I'd love to do a charity someday which focused on providing infrastructure services (power, communications, medical support (testing and other things to make local doctors more effective), logistics, data, maybe utility restoration) in disaster and especially conflict zones. Essentially what the US Military can accomplish on its own bases, as a service for other NGOs (easier) and for local population (harder). Being able to secure part of an airfield, run logistics and communications which are head ends for domestic infrastructure, would be a huge improvement in quality of life for the civilians stuck in these places.

There's a void in the NGO and commercial space between people who do good stuff, and people who can provide security and operate in denied areas. Some orgs like MSF can operate in semi-permissive environments, but not as well as states can. There are a lot of downsides to state involvement in this kind of thing -- unless you're neutral, it's really hard to get involved in a lot of conflicts, and states are pretty horrible at providing IT services in general, and have all kinds of incentives to scale too big/inefficiently.

<comment><USER5> I don't have too much to say but you're on to something. I was at the Humtech conference in May and the Navy came in and said basically they're the only ones who can do what they do.

It'd be nice to have a non military option for that kind of operational support. The place where I work now can do some of that, but it's hard to convince donors to invest in those sort of "someday we'll need this" resource.

<comment><USER4> The nice thing is this gets easier all the time with tech, in that it requires a smaller footprint and thus physical security on the ground. I could run UAV communication relays, satcom, etc. over Syria right now, from bases in Kurdistan, with no personnel physically at risk, for <$10mm/yr.

<comment><USER5> Definitely!

There is a startup non-profit called Uplift Aeronautics[1] that was talking about doing something like that. It was going to be a UAV 'train' that dropped supplies into Syria using randomized paths so to make it hard to shoot down.

[1] [http://uplift.aero/](http://uplift.aero/)

<comment><USER6> Their wiki page seems broken [http://uplift.aero/wiki](http://uplift.aero/wiki)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On this topic, the recent doc "Poverty, Inc" is probably worth a watch. Giving well is more than getting a good buck for the dollar - it's also thinking about the second order effects of your donation.

(Note that there are _two_ films with the same name launched around the same time. This is the one by Michael Miller, not the one by Gary Null.)

[1] [http://www.povertyinc.org/about/](http://www.povertyinc.org/about/)

<comment><USER8> I heard about Poverty, Inc. from the EconTalk podcast episode[1]. It seems particularly relevant to discussion of charities on HackerNews, but may not necessarily be relevant to any specific charity.

[1] [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/michael_matheso.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/11/michael_matheso.html)</comment></comment>


Cunning trick StackOverflow uses to get you to signup using Facebook credentials - <AUTHOR> http://blog.edward-kim.com/how-stackoverflow-makes-you-register-using-yo

<comment><USER2> Uhm, no?

I added the Facebook login option* to Stack Overflow, and I can assure you we don't really care which credential you use. We don't do anything different based on Facebook/non-Facebook creds.

Go look at your app settings and you'll see that the Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow app only accesses your Facebook account when you login. We don't do any subsequent queries, by design (we actually discard the auth token, but that's harder to prove).

The vast vast majority of the accounts on Stack Overflow use Google as a login provider. This has basically always been the case (<http://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/31021/130213>).

* We waited until they supported OAuth 2.0, as we weren't comfortable with the older Facebook Connect.

</comment><comment><USER3> At first I thought this was just embarrassingly wrong, but it's more than that; you fabricate details to try and make your point. This is what the SO login page looks like: <http://i.imgur.com/4Z8P8.png>

SO doesn't push Facebook logins -- they accept any OpenID login, and Facebook is one of 13 default options presented (besides just letting you type in whatever provider you want). They _only_ accept OpenID logins -- the Stack Exchange option is just a Stack Exchange-provided OpenID. You can use that login with any OpenID-enabled website, including Stack Overflow. I can't believe you felt comfortable writing "they strongly encourage you to sign in using Facebook"

Furthermore, they don't even use the Facebook login you're thinking of. Facebook supports oauth, so they connect via that. They're not cleverly stealing all your Facebook data; oauth doesn't work that way. It just got funny when you complained that the password requirements were more complicated than banks, since banks are regularly mocked for their incredibly insecure password requirements

As far as I know they've never published what percentage of users use which type of OpenID, but I know at least myOpenID is very popular. Why you chose to use your Facebook account from one of a dozen options and then bitched that you used your Facebook account is completely beyond me

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a strange conclusion from a site that accepts every OAuth option under the sun with the facebook login as the last presented major option.

Assuming a UX mind trick because someone has a strict password policy is a bit far-fetched IMO.

<comment><AUTHOR> UX mind trick or not, the strict password policy DID ultimately get me to sign in with my Facebook credentials.

My conclusion here is that a strict password policy can actually help a website get more of their users to open up their Facebook profiles to them.

<comment><USER5> That's more a comment about you than about SO. Also, I don't see why you single out Facebook--I suspect a large amount of people use Google, maybe even more than Facebook. And the technically savvy sort could always use _any_ OpenID provider.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What a load of whining rubbish.

Anyone who thinks a short password is secure in this day and age is nuts - particularly as just such individuals re-use passwords across services.

This person would be the first to decry SO if there was any breach of security caused by bad password choice.

<comment><AUTHOR> The intention of the post was not to whine about the password complexity. Quite the opposite, I think Stack Overflow's strategy is a brilliant way to get you to login/register using Facebook.

<comment><USER6> Read their blogs and you will see that SO is keen that you use any available OpenID provider to log in to their site - they have no interest in any one such provider.

Should you have persevered through the terribly difficult task of establishing a password with them then - wow- you would have had a new OpenID you could have used at other sites - without creating yet another username/password combination.

These guys are doing you a favour at their (small) expense and you see it as some sort of con.

Some word combination of horse teeth and gift comes to mind - but whingers there will always be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this a joke post?

8 unique characters? I just checked (as I use a password manager) - 90% of my hand-coded passwords pass this test. The rest of my passwords are machine- generated - and most password generators are capable enough to guarantee unique characters and length.

Maybe StackOverflow's "cunning plan" [1] is really to force you to use a password manager or OpenID?

[1] <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Blackadder>

</comment><comment><USER8> This is what password managers are for. Here's one that the manager I use generated for me:

       87NTK7g9M;xwF@aQ7tqTK{d(87ftLd4(;a$w]#f7X4<yAFNFwk

I believe that meets their requirements.

I like StackOverflow's login implementation. I believe StackOverflow was the first site I encountered that I wanted to sign up for and whose OpenID implementation accepted i-names. I had =tzs for something like 2 or 3 years before finally being able to actually use it.

</comment><comment> mark-r I think this is missing the difference between grabbing your Facebook login and using Facebook's OpenID capability. The only piece of information StackOverflow gets back from Facebook is the fact that you're logged in there.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't think this brilliant at all. Anyone who decided to forego the FB Connect route is already someone who wants to sign up. By making it incredibly painful, it'll lessen the chance of him even signing up. Sure, you'll get more FB signups, but the absolute # of signups will decrease.

And what's the advantage of more FB signups? This isn't a social network like Foursquare or Pinterest.

</comment><comment><USER10> Really? This is to herd you into using FB?

First issue: How do you know this is the intention?

Second issue: Who cares? You are free to not use the site.

Third issue: There are other options. I sign in using Google's authentication. I did not even know they had FB integration.

Seems more like this post is an excuse to whine about things than anything "real".

</comment><comment><USER11> StackOverflow is just doing the right thing enforcing a strict password rule. If people don't want to create an account with a strong password and instead end up using FB connect, then it's just what the user chose. I don't think that amounts to StackOverflow being cunning and tricking anybody. I get your point but don't think you should use those words.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, the risks of putting your own blog post on HN :-)

If you're reading edawerd, One Password and other tools like it are real lifesavers in this sort of situation.

</comment><comment><USER13> All this tells us is that you typically re-use your passwords, and that they are fairly weak to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think the real issue here is the weakness of the passwords your bank is willing to accept.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> kmontrose of StackOverflow informed me in his comment that this in fact was not their intention at all. Futhermore, they don't use any of their user's Facebook profile data. I now realize it was a bit of a stretch to say that Stack Overflow engineered their UX in this manner.

Regardless, the strong password requirement DID convince me to sign in using my Facebook credentials, and I'm sure it will convince others as well. In conclusion, I think a very strong password could actually funnel users into signing in with 3rd party credentials.</comment>


Why Do These Russian Images of Earth Look So Different from NASA's? - <AUTHOR> http://m.gizmodo.com/5787176/this-is-the-moon-and-the-earth-like-you-have-never-seen-them-before

<comment><USER2>
        If you look closely at the Blue Marble Image, you can actually see what
        appear to be the sharp edges of a low-poly 3d-model. You'd think that
        NASA would at least subdivide the faces a little more for the final
        render. Or maybe they just got a little lazy with their polygon select
        tool when they composited in the atmospheric glow. It's kind of
        disappointing to know how artificial that photo actually is.

:)</comment>


Cwc: cat and wc. Did this project to learn go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/v-adhithyan/cwc <comment><USER2> In these 3 functions: o.calcLineCount() o.calcWordCount() o.calcCharCount()

you're splitting the file content 2 times, but you can do everything in only 1 pass.

<comment><AUTHOR> oh ok. do i need to iterate each character and check for delimiter and increase count?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Please provide feedback.</comment>


Ajaxian interviews Appjet founder Aaron Iba - <AUTHOR> http://ajaxian.com/archives/appjet-develop-preview-deploy-all-on-the-web

<comment><USER2> "Aaron Iba has released" should read, "David Greenspan, JD Zamfirescu, and Aaron Iba have released..." I just happened to be awake when ajaxian emailed.</comment>


Original Associated Press Report of Lincoln's Assassination - <AUTHOR> http://bigstory.ap.org/article/91fed0359cc245f0960322a5e7bac56a/ap-was-there-original-ap-report-lincolns-assassination

<comment><USER2> Contrast the vivid storytelling here with the modern approach taken to JFK's assassination, which begins:

"President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin today.

"He died of a wound in the brain caused by a rifle bullet that was fired at him as he was riding through downtown Dallas in a motorcade.

"Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was riding in the third car behind Mr. Kennedy's, was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States 99 minutes after Mr. Kennedy's death."

[http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/1122.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/1122.html)

The JFK story gets us to the facts but quickly bores. Lincoln's takes a while to get going but holds attention right to the end. Masterful.

<comment><USER3> I was struck by the same feeling, that this piece was a gripping read on what was already a gripping story to tell. His "brain was oozing out" was a point I stopped and read again. What changed the style of reporting I wonder?

<comment><USER2> I googled the question. Weirdly, the answer uses Lincoln's assassination as an example. It was the fulcrum event between new and old. Here's how the inverted pyramid report of his death began:

"This evening at about 9:30 p.m. at Ford's Theatre, the President, while sitting in his private box with Mrs. Lincoln, Mrs. Harris and Major Rathburn, was shot by an assassin, who suddenly entered the box and approached behind the President. "The assassin then leaped upon the stage, brandishing a large dagger or knife, and made his escape in the rear of the theatre. "The pistol ball entered the back of the President's head and penetrated nearly through the head. The wound is mortal."

[http://www.poynter.org/news/media-innovation/12755/birth- of-...](http://www.poynter.org/news/media-innovation/12755/birth-of-the- inverted-pyramid-a-child-of-technology-commerce-and-history/)

The technological driver wasn't the addition of new media but the telegraph, which meant news stories took on a new urgency -- and editors had to make quick cuts to stories close to print time as they decided which stories deserved most column inches.

Will the Internet kill the inverted pyramid approach? There is no longer any cost associated with column inches printed or characters transmitted.

<comment><USER4> The cost is measured also in reader's attention. The implicit contract with the reader is that if you just read the first paragraph, you won't miss the essential fact in para 5.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In 1956, an eye witness to the assassination was on a game show, which itself is now on YouTube:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_iq5yzJ- Dk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_iq5yzJ-Dk)

There's something about how this bridges the past to the present that I find deeply fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great read, thanks. One sentence in particular stood out to me: "... a sharp report of a pistol was heard, which merely attracted attention, but suggested nothing serious until a man rushed to the front of the President's box." I found myself contrasting the initial reaction with likely reactions in the modern era. I'm going to guess that in many places in the US, many wouldn't know that they had heard a gun shot. Also, I suspect the reaction would be different in those that knew what they heard.

</comment><comment><USER7> The comments on this article are pretty good. I know the lede is only buried five sentences in, but the report really _does_ sound like it's going to critique the play and performances of the first two acts before it gets around to recounting what happened in the third.</comment>


PSD to HTML editor in your browser - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@redaktorio/psd-to-html-editor-in-your-browser-b3116af6af1f <comment><USER2> Is it built using react / angular? haven't explored this properly but looks reasonable.</comment>


How's that sprint going? ZenHub reporting and GitHub data will tell you - <AUTHOR> https://www.zenhub.com/blog/zenhub-reporting-suite-github-insights <comment><USER2> My experience has been that no one needs a burndown chart to know how a project is going, and, to the extent that you do, it usually points to some mismanagement and an attempt to fix it through intensifying project management rigor. Especially with early stage startups, where the requirements are changing rapidly and throughout the project, I think this stuff represents very real overhead that's just not really that useful. In larger companies, where stuff like this is typically used as reporting up a chain, it can be slightly more useful to get a holistic view of the organization, but again, I'm just not sure it's worth the effort, and I really question resting a significant amount of decision making power on this over qualitative data.

To be clear: I'm not throwing all project management methodology to the wind, but this promises to give you a fancy chart that will "identify bottlenecks in your development process" and I'm sorry if you need a graph to know where those are I think there are probably larger problems in your organization. Identifying bottlenecks is easy, fixing them usually involves much higher level management functions like recruiting and training.

<comment><USER3> As an Agile coach, I agree to an extent. Metrics can be and are often times weaponized by management to exact control over a project.

I wish more organizations saw Agile metrics, or any metrics for that matter, as conversation starters for the team to discuss how things are going and how/when to adjust course. It's a challenge to change habits of making binary decisions based entirely on metrics.

<comment><USER4> I have to agree as well.

Our team has switched from a burndown chart to a "Confidence Check" at each standup. On the count of 3, we each hold up fingers rating the chance to complete the sprint out of 5. It's been a good way to see if the blockers are likely to be overcome and see if anything was missed etc. Our combined gut feel is a lot better than the burndown chart for reporting and for starting conversations.

<comment><USER2> That feels like a _way_ more reasonable effort to signal-value ratio to me. Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like the use of metrics is often just a crutch to avoid real management/leadership decisions. Sprints are meaningless overhead unless they are coupled to important deliveries. Often they aren't.

In my real world experience software doesn't get delivered within sprints, it gets delivered when it's ready. And decisions about what to deliver aren't made by the sprint team.

Anyone can pad story points enough to look like a sprint super-hero. The key focus should be what are you building, are you building it the right way, and what can we do to deliver it faster/better. Sometimes the right answer is stop holding meetings, and just get out of the way and let the team focus on the problem without interruption for a while.</comment>


Show HN: Airhdl – a web-based AXI4 register file generator - <AUTHOR> https://airhdl.com <comment><USER2> First of all: nice job. I can see how this can be useful for some small FPGA hobby projects.

However, once you go one step above that, I think that nothing beats something in text format: it can be checked in with the rest of your project so you can't even have a disconnect between register definition and RTL, and a simple dependency in your Makefile ensures a quick turn-around.

Most companies small and large already have such system, often developed in- house, but for those that haven't, I suggest having a look at ORDT, an open- source tool from Juniper that does pretty much exactly what airhdl does, with the main difference that it starts from the standardized RDL format.

[https://github.com/Juniper/open-register-design- tool](https://github.com/Juniper/open-register-design-tool)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks but this is by far not limited to small FPGA hobby projects.

I'm a professional FPGA consultant, Xilinx Alliance Program Associate Partner, working on serious FPGA projects for all kinds of applications. Defence, medical, telecom, space, industrial, things like that. And I've been using airhdl in many of them.

During the past 8 years, I've worked on dozens of FPGA projects in many different teams. Guess how many of them were using automatic register generation? Zero.

This is why I created airhdl; because we all have better things to do than hand-code register files.

My bet was that if I removed all barriers of entry, then developers would come. That's why it's web-based: nothing to install, nothing to license, no IT person to ask permission for, runs on any platform. That's why it has a GUI: no XML or RDL hacking required. And that's why it's free: so you can start using it right away, no purchase order required.</comment></comment>


Rebooting Communist Kicks for Modern Sneakerheads - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-23/rebooting-communist-kicks-for-modern-sneakerheads <comment><USER2> This will cater to a reaaaaaally small portions of sneakerheads.

Hipsters and likes will be target, will there is a lot of search of old sneakers etc...I've yet to see someone look for soviet sneakers.

<comment><USER3> > This will cater to a reaaaaaally small portions of sneakerheads.

There's probably a bigger market in Germany than in America:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie)</comment></comment>


Kraftwerk played live with an astronaut on the ISS (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://cdm.link/2018/07/watch-kraftwerk-jam-with-the-iss-and-esa-astronaut-alexander-gerst/ <comment><USER2> Expect to see stuff like this become more and more "normal" in the future, thanks to access to space becoming drastically cheaper. Falcon 9/Dragon seats are now available for civilian purchase, as well as license to stay on the ISS.

Some examples: Axiom Space [1] plans to send three private passengers to the ISS on 2021, as well as adding their own commercial modules to the ISS. Tom Cruise seems pretty set on filming his next movie in space too [2].

Furthermore, if the Starship [3] project is successful, space is going to become _cheap_, perhaps even to the point that anyone in the upper middle class might be able to purchase a ride.

Exciting times.

[1] [https://www.axiomspace.com/](https://www.axiomspace.com/)

[2] [https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/5/21248460/nasa-tom- cruise-m...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/5/21248460/nasa-tom-cruise-movie- international-space-station)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship)

<comment><USER3> I feel like shooting a movie in space would make for very good marketing but rather boring footage. Very cramped quarters, very drastic security measures would probably make for rather unimpressive footage compared to what's usually achieved through CGI. Space is big, space is slow, space is quiet. It will be quite an interesting challenge to make it look visually interesting in an action movie I think.

Although I suppose that watching the movie knowing that it was actually shot in space will be novelty enough to keep the audience captivated, but that'll only work for the first few movies going through the hassle of doing it, then the novelty will wear off and I expect that at that point people will be back to using much cheaper, simple and flexible CGI.

<comment> 52-6F-62 All scientific realism and other criticisms aside—I thought Gravity did a pretty good job with essentially what you described as the setting of the film.

Mostly spent focusing on pretty cramped quarters in a capsule. They figured out some ways to introduce drama. I think what might be the most stunning would be some of the exterior footage. I wonder whether that would introduce some sort of barrier-breaking in the mind when watching a film taking place above the earth knowing that the earth in the film is real footage in "real time" and not stock or CGI.

<comment><USER4> Suspension of disbelief failed when main character reached station with wildly different orientations with almost no delta-v in a stupidly short amount of time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm very curious to know as a side point -- what kind of communications path goes to the ISS? Or for example, when SpaceX's rockets live stream the video during launch? The video quality on those broadcasts is really good. The diagram in that article is only a cartoon representation, I'd love to know actually how the signal gets carried.

Do they purely use ground-station-direct-to-orbit path, or is there some satellite-to-satellite "routing" of the transmission? Do they use some NASA ground station network, or pipe it through commercial ones as well? What kinds of frequencies are being used? Microwave (X/Ku/etc?-bands)?

</comment><comment><USER6> Also reminds me of "Space Oddity" [1] performed by Chris Hadfield [2] in 2013 on the IIS. He even released an album with songs recorded up there [3].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hadfield](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hadfield)

[3] [https://music.apple.com/ca/album/space-sessions-songs- from-a...](https://music.apple.com/ca/album/space-sessions-songs-from-a-tin- can/1021790892)

</comment><comment><USER7> Reminded of JMJ colab in 1986 and was supposed to play a concert with a Ron playing saxophone up in space. Sadly tragedy curtailed that endeavour.

[https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/05/us/challenger- astronaut-a...](https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/05/us/challenger-astronaut- and-saxophone/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Well, that was outstanding. i haven't seen Kraftwerk live since 1991 or 1992 but that was a gig I will never forget, and they're still changing and adapting. I wish I'd had the money to get tickets for their Italian gigs.

<comment> squeaky-clean > and they're still changing and adapting

Saw them for the first time in maybe 2014 or so. I hadn't followed much about them except listening to their music, so I was expecting them to be playing with a full setup of vintage 70's gear, mainly because there are a lot of other groups formed in the 70s who are still big and are doing that.

I was really excited to see them mostly using iPads and microsoft Surfaces hooked up to several keyboards and other MIDI controllers. I think they just always want to be trying out the newest musical tech.

<comment><USER8> It seems like an enormous amount of effort just to make your entire life an excuse to fiddle with tech, lol. Long may they continue

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Amazing, I got chills watching this.

</comment><comment><USER10> Here's the first time bagpipes were played in space, aboard the ISS. [https://time.com/4104158/international-space-station- bagpipe...](https://time.com/4104158/international-space-station-bagpipe/)

The twist here is that the astronaut was honoring a good friend of mine after he'd died.

My buddy Vic trained the astronauts on medical matters and first aid. He showed my how you can't do CPR in space the normal way, because you'll just push yourself across the room, so there's special stuff like this that they need to be trained in.

He gave me the real back-stage tour in Houston, which was incredibly cool. One nifty thing he showed my was how they simulate the communications delay in training. It's remarkably easy and obvious: they just use Tivos.

</comment><comment><USER11> I am reminded of astronaut Cady Coleman's flute duet with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, in 2011:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeC4nqBB5BM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeC4nqBB5BM)

</comment><comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Love_(Kraftwerk_song)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Love_\(Kraftwerk_song\))

[https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/048927-000-A/kraftwerk-pop- art...](https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/048927-000-A/kraftwerk-pop-art/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Here's the video: [https://youtu.be/rCQEzgtWv-E](https://youtu.be/rCQEzgtWv-E)

</comment><comment><USER14> Is there an app that I can use to create similar sounds as AstroAlex directly on my iPhone? Lemur (which was used here) seems to best just a remote for synthesizers, correct? Also, 25 bucks is quite steep for just playing around.

<comment><USER15> SynthScaper[1] could definitely make those sounds. Mind you, probably most of the Korg iOS synths can probably do it too.

[1] [https://motion- soundscape.blogspot.com/2017/07/synthscaper-s...](https://motion- soundscape.blogspot.com/2017/07/synthscaper-soundscapes-synthesizer.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> +1</comment>


Thoughts on Colocation Providers in 2020? - <AUTHOR> Most of our infrastructure is hosted in AWS, but we have a few applications that require connections to 3rd party MPLS networks where our integration partner literally mails us an LOA for the ISP and a physical router that we are expected to connect through. For these applications, we have maintained a couple of servers in a colocation datacenter. I'm not in love with our current provider. Does anyone have a great colocation provider they can recommend?
Things about us:
- our colo footprint is small, as most of our infrastructure is cloud-hosted. Looking for someone who will provide decent service to a small customer - we have a pretty small mixed engineering/devops team and don't have a lot of resources for sysadmin. Ideal level of abstraction would be that we specify a network topology and provide some VMs for application servers and they configure the network and keep the physical servers running the hypervisor (w/in some SLA). <comment><USER2> ServerCentral

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you--have a call w/ them tomorrow.</comment></comment>


An update on assessments, grades, and certification - <AUTHOR> http://blog.coursera.org/post/131520811622/an-update-on-assessments-grades-and <comment><AUTHOR> The minor furor over the elimination of free "statements of accomplishment" seemed rather angsty to me; it's not like they had much real value. However, withdrawing access to grading basically eliminates any free value to Coursera over and above the many videos that are already available on any given subject.</comment>


.tel, .xxx and .mobi are all pointless and idiotic - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tommorris.org/post/3968125126/tel-xxx-and-mobi-are-all-pointless-and-idiotic <comment><USER2> I'd go a step further and suggest that _all_ of the new gTLDs are pointless and idiotic:

\- .aero: if IATA airport codes were all registered domains here, it might be useful, but they aren't, so it isn't.

\- .asia: asia is definitely a country </sarcasm>

\- .biz: sufficiently stupid that SpamAssassin has a rule for it

\- .cat: meow? seriously, I've only seen this used for vanity joke domains

\- .coop: there isn't a .llc, why is this any different?

\- .info: happy fun SEO land

\- .jobs: pity they won't take my registration for Blow, Inc.

\- .mobi: as noted

\- .museum: 1138 registered domains in 10 years is a sign of true irrelevance

\- .name: personal names are hardly unique identifiers

\- .pro: stupid hierarchy makes this one even more useless than you'd think

\- .tel: as noted

\- .travel: because .aero just wasn't enough

\- .xxx: as noted

Perhaps I'm just not seeing the possibilities, but I suspect that there's no future for any of the gTLDs beyond com/net/org, and possibly a few of the up- and-coming IDN gTLDs. The future of domain names is really in better unique names, not a more complex hierarchy.

<comment><USER3> whoa there, slow down, there's _.cat_?!

<comment><USER4> Catalan culture. A regional-cultural TLD. If small countries get TLDs, why shouldn't a tightly connected culture of ~5 million get one too?

<comment><USER5> I'm all for .cat, but I can see the arguments against. People are already campaigning for .cym for Wales, so where do we stop? Do all the regional communities on Spain get one (Basque country, Asturias, Galicia, the list goes on). Do the Saami in Scandinavia get one? (They have their own parliaments, so why not TLDs?) What about Native Americans / First Nations? At least being a country is a criterion that works 95+ percent of the time

<comment><USER6> Wales _isn't_ a country!? I would have thought of all people, someone with a handle like "anghyflawn" might be a bit more compassionate to the plight of the cymry...

<comment><USER7> Wales is not a sovereign state, which is what "country" means in this context.

<comment><USER6> If you're going to abuse Wikipedia that way, you should be referring to him as Jimbo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think that this misses forest for the trees.

There should be no restrictions on the domain names at all. We only have the arbitrary segmentation into m.n form (where n is a limited set of (org, com etc.)) for technical reasons.

Preferably, there should be no such restrictions at all. Or the n part should be an infinite set. But I don't see why people are partisan about restricting the available namespace.

<comment><USER9> We already had a de-facto infinite set... it was the _m_ part. We could either buy up common variations of, or ignore the _n_ part. Now it is becoming obvious that ICANN views n as the new m for one of two reasons: money or stupidity. I'm still not sure it can't be both.

If I'm a major corporation, do I now have to buy up my .n tld? Cannon did. Will IBM have to buy .ibm? Will apple have to buy .apple?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Politically, we should push for an actual democratic version of ICANN, and > get a bunch of wise Unix neckbeard types to join and require all TLDs to get > a supermajority vote of ICANN or a future counterpart to ICANN.

Karl Auerbach was the wise Unix neckbeard type who was on ICANN's board for a while. You can read about his efforts to create ICANN transparency: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Auerbach>

</comment><comment><USER11> _If I were an American, I'd now be saying something like "ICANN have jumped the shark"_

"has". Although the British pluralization actually does make more sense.

<comment><USER12> > Although the British pluralization actually does make more sense.

Not really: One organization is one thing, logically speaking.

But it was amusing of him to get that wrong while explicitly attempting to sound American.

<comment><USER13> It gets really confusing, though. For example, "The Jets is doing really well this season," "The Monkees was awesome if somewhat cheesy." One organization is one thing, logically speaking, and teams and bands are just as much organizations as are corporations.

<comment><USER14> The reason it sounds wrong the way you're saying it is because the team and band you listed have pluralized names.

<comment><USER13> Yes, I'm well aware of that. The point is that "The Jets" names an organization just as much as "ICANN" does. Americans do not apply the "groups are singular" rule evenly. British usage is actually more logical and consistent IMO.

<comment><USER14> Americans go by what makes sense linguistically rather than the blanket usage of 'have' and 'are'. British usage is more consistent (usage-wise) but half the time it sounds wrong because "Google have employees" doesn't make sense by other rules of English.

<comment><USER15> Sounds wrong to _you_. Just as the American usage sounds wrong to _me_. It's utterly subjective and completely meaningless. Might as well be arguing that people in Scotland talk wrong.

<comment><USER16> Actually, if both ways "sound wrong" to people who aren't used to them, but one way is consistent, then I'd argue it's the objectively "better" way.

By the way I'm used to the American usage, myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> None of it is idiotic. It is just different than before.

This creates greater competition in the registrar market which will keep domain prices down. It also dilutes the value of any particular domain name, which is a Good Thing (tm). I would be very happy to see the whole domaining business model disappear.

The proliferation of new domains is one of the issues I'm grappling with in my work on delineal.com.

<comment><USER18> It doesn't do this at all. It just shifts the crowded .com space into the root space, causes more confusion for everyone, and eliminates the possibility of any future expansion. Once a name is allocated, it's gone forever - you can't just demand it back or change the rules.

<comment><USER17> It doesn't move anything onto the root space, AFAIK. Do you have a link supporting that assertion? My understanding is that this just creates more TLDs under which domains can be registered.

There is no _more_ confusion created. (Almost) all existing TLDs have domains in them that should not be there based on the original "purpose" of the TLDs.

The .com domain only ever made sense in the context of a single language and a single country. It's only crowded because it is one of the first ones that anyone could register in. If all the TLDs that exist today existed at the beginning, the landscape would be very different.

The notion that "once a name is allocated, it's gone forever" is no different than today. More TLDs provide more opportunities for similarly named companies or organizations to have some form of their name. It "prevents" large companies from dominating all forms of a name.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> .mobi is from way before we had smart phones, so the difference between mobile and desktop web _did_ exist then.

<comment><USER19> Are you suggesting it doesn't exist anymore?

<comment><USER20> The gap is way shrinking. The mobile web originally meant browsers that barely supported HTML (does WAP ring a bell?), picture support was sketchy, and bandwidth was a major concern as connections were very slow. Now the majority of mobile use that use it more than once in a blue moon have the same rendering engines as most desktops on connections that rival (in my case surpass) what we have available through telcom ISPs. Screen sizes are really the only difference oftentimes. Indeed, even the plug-in landscape is similar as many smartphones over Flash plug-ins and so forth.

<comment><USER19> It's not about whether the technologies are supported. It's about the difference between what you get when you're identified as browsing on a mobile device versus anything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> He's missing the point on .xxx. No person with any vague understanding of the internet thinks that they can block pornography entirely from a person interested in getting to it. It's not that hard to get around filters because porn is everywhere online, but it can still be useful to filter it, even though a determined individual can obviously bypass your block. Here's why:

1\. First and foremost, filtration software isn't just about adversarial blocking. It can stop your grandma from getting tricked into going lemonparty.org. This is a big one.

2\. Children looking for porn without permission are often under non-ideal constraints, like a time limit before someone else comes home. If you can get fairly good coverage, the kid will have that much less time, and many kids aren't going to invest in figuring out how to bypass it; they'd just as soon go to their room and fap there, or go to a friend's house where there is unmonitored access.

3\. Filtration can be used to demonstrate a good-faith effort to keep your network and environment safe (at a library or net cafe, for instance). Same principles as number two here: if it's difficult enough and the user is under time constraints, they'll just wait until later.

There are other good reasons, but that should suffice. .xxx isn't about keeping a sophisticated, determined opponent out, and that's rarely successful no matter what measures you take. The internet is always going to have porn and there shouldn't be any enforcement forcing adult content onto xxx.

However, if xxx sees wide adoption, and the xxx sites move off of com (redirect), that's a _big_ weight off the shoulders of blacklist and filtration vendors. To be able to block a whole huge namespace like that, where xxx is now hosting 30% or some other significant number of the new adult content that would have been on com if not for the xxx TLD, that's a big efficiency gain, even if you still have to filter com.

<comment><USER22> > However, if xxx sees wide adoption, and the xxx sites move off of com > (redirect), that's a big weight off the shoulders of blacklist and > filtration vendors.

So, they should move to .xxx to facilitate being blocked? Somehow I do not see it.

<comment><USER21> Yes. As I mentioned above, I think it will become the friendly thing for commercial, bona fide purveyors to do, just as it's friendly now to have a page that says "If you're under 18, click here to leave!" I think any page that currently has such an intro will move to xxx for the social goodwill, and that any page that doesn't won't.

<comment><USER23> But the "under 18" landing page doesn't actually block anyone, including those under 18 from continuing on with the site, so there's really no incentive not do it. If they move to a guaranteed to be filtered tld, they'd explicitly be asking for less traffic, which seems unlikely to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have a .tel. It's almost useless--you get to publish DNS records through the registrar's mickey-mouse PHP thing, and you can only really push TXT and NAPTR and MX records.

The only reason I bought it is because I am a member of an informal organization whose name is "Shadytel", so an @shady.tel address looked real spiffy at the time.

<comment><USER12> > Shadytel is now offering reduced comfort noise as a tariffed service.

(from the Twitter feed: <https://twitter.com/#!/shadytel/status/47150260157562880> )

I'm aware I can pay for that with my Diner's Club, but will you accept Krugerrands if I can get them on the noon autogyro?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > _I've heard that some of the Wikileaks and Pirate Bay crowd are working on a > distributed alternative to DNS._

I suspect that this will be the ultimate solution to this sort of nonsense.

<comment><USER26> It could also open the floodgates of phishing. Decentralized trust is one hell of a problem.

<comment><USER27> Then you just build the trust on SSL certificates instead of DNS

<comment><USER28> Destroying the de-centralized part in the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> When there's an effective way to take the domains of squatters away from them, I'll be fine with just .com, .net, .org. Or screw the dots and just have "google". (I think that may be where it's going, considering Chrome tries to hide the http and www isn't needed in many cases.)

</comment><comment><USER30> There are lots of stupid startups. Why would the ones behind these top-level domains be any different? ICANN's role isn't to pick the winners, its to manage the overall framework. Perhaps .sex will succeed where .xx fails. Or not. But you can't blame ICANN for failed .tld business models anymore than you can blame YC for funding failed startup business models. Its just part of the landscape. Now stop ranting about it and go do something productive. ;-)

<comment><USER31> I'm not blaming ICANN for failed business models. I'm blaming ICANN for turning what ought to be a matter of public interest (i.e. the governance of the Internet) and turning it into a situation where you can turn up with a half-baked idea and a big pile of cash and be able to start churning out new domain names.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> No matter how many are added you will still have to assume that people who are after a site and actually type in a domain name will pick the .com, so no matter how many alternatives you own you won't get that traffic.

The exception of course is when you can build it into your website name like .io and .ly. Also browsers are moving away from domain names so being first on Google (just as hard if someone prominent is already on the .com you want) will be more important.

<comment><USER33> If I'm after a UK or Australian company I'm as likely to try .co.uk or .com.au first - but only because I've lived in both of those places so I'm familiar with the extensions.

<comment><USER32> That's true, at least with .com.au you have to have a registered business so you will usually get the company you are after.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> _"little Johnny can't visit any website where the domain component of the URL ends in the string ".xxx", in which case all little Johnny has to do is go to a web-based nslookup tool, type in the domain he wants to look at, and then replace the domain with that IP address."_

Sounds like a good opportunity for nslookup tools to justify requiring a credit-card payment for certain types of lookup.

</comment><comment><USER35> The joke was fine till .me, .co and .tv but .cat, .tel and .xxx? That sure is bound to be of use to nobody but the ones selling the domain.

The point where he questions if he is desktop or mobile, is actually very critical. The web is one. Especially with new ways of designing and developing a site including things like media queries make the entire point of a .mobi appear like a joke to me.

<comment><USER36> .tv is for Tevula. And .me is another country's abbreviation (Montenegro I believe). Just because they're being abused doesn't mean they're a joke.

<comment><USER35> I actually know that! I own two .me domains and was about to buy .tv domain. Also the .tv domain was launched with high hopes of TV Networks buying enough and paying enough to support the country's economy. Of course that did not happen.

Looks like they were made with the purpose of being abused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Most new TLDs have been pointless and idiotic. Blame ICANN.

</comment><comment><USER38> I can see a valid use for .xxx -- but .mobi is the lamest of them all.

.mobi should have been .mbl or just .m

To make the _mobile_ TLD ___longer_ __than allthe others, that is just plain stupid.

<comment><USER39> Honestly, I think the current format used by most m.website.tld makes the most sense. It immediately tells you you're going to a mobile site in the case that your screen cuts off the full URL.

Too, it's pretty consistent when a lot of sites use subdomains to indicate you're going to a different portion of the same domain, i.e. a blog (blog.site.tld) or an estore (shop.site.tld) or even a 404 page (404.site.tld). 'm' should tell you then that you're on the mobile page of the same site, especially when we're now seeing so many domains that a .com can be a completely different, totally nonaffiliated group from the .net

<comment><USER31> The only prominent site I've seen that does it a bit strangely is Wikipedia:

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/>

Which makes sense, but I can never remember whether it is en.m.wikipedia.org or m.en.wikipedia.org

(And the fact that the iPad goes by default to the Mobile version despite the fact that it's not appropriate for the size of the device.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I also think TLD's have jumped the shark. Let's abolish .com/.org/etc and force everybody to live in a more unified domain name space, so we're left with (at best), addresses like: www.google, graph.facebook, api.cnn, etc. The suffixes have been abused so much they are no longer reliable (see bit.ly that wildly popular Libyan website -- wait, what?), and even if there are people camping on foo.com's, we also have the problem where say foo.com and foo.net and foo.ly are all unrelated to one another and run by different people. Yes, legacy code, I understand, pain, etc. More of an idealistic rant. The increasing inelegance and hypocrisy and over-complexity of TLD's are getting to me just like the OA's author.

<comment><USER41> The same effect [as abolishing all TLDs] could be achieved in a backward compatible way by allowing arbitrary TLDs i.e., google, facebook, cnn would be TLDs in www.google, graph.facebook, api.cnn addresses.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't this reduce our available address space? What about all the sites that currently have three different entities at their .com, .net and .org addresses? What happens to ubuntu.com and ubuntu.org, two different groups? Where we are now, getting rid of TLDs would cause immense unnecessary conflict.

<comment><USER41> _"allowing"_ means that .ubuntu may exist _in addition to_ ubuntu.tld

.ubuntu is a TLD itself (or it could be thought of as having an empty tld)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Functions as a Service: Serverless Framework for Docker and Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/alexellis/faas <comment><USER3> Hi, OpenFaaS author here - it feels like I'm late to the party here. I can see lots of folks chiming-in with their projects which you are welcome to do. I agree with you that this is a confusing landscape with lots of options. Here's my introduction to OpenFaaS (and Serverless), the top 3 new features and what's coming next: [https://blog.alexellis.io/introducing-functions-as-a- service...](https://blog.alexellis.io/introducing-functions-as-a-service/)

If you have 10-15 minutes you can just jump in with your own serverless function in Python with this guide - [https://blog.alexellis.io/first-faas- python-function/](https://blog.alexellis.io/first-faas-python-function/)

<comment><USER3> I presented Open/FaaS at Dockercon in April showing an Amazon Echo dot with voice skills, integration with 3rd party data, GitHub/S3 and auto-scaling in response to demand - it's a nice high-level overview - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h2VTE9WnZs&t=1058s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h2VTE9WnZs&t=1058s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If anyone is interested in doing this without the additional requirements of Docker and Kubernetes check out Microcule.

[https://github.com/stackvana/microcule](https://github.com/stackvana/microcule)

<comment><USER5> This is cute. And it looks like it can leverage Docker as well, with a few tweaks. I especially like the agnosticism of it.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! I built this by refactoring out the core technology which hook.io uses in production and put it into a separate open-source project.

By design, Microcule operates without needing containers or virtual machines. It's up to the user how they wish to isolate their services. I have heard from a few users who have successfully incorporated Microcule with Docker in production.

see: [https://github.com/stackvana/microcule#no- containers](https://github.com/stackvana/microcule#no-containers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is the goal of Lambda/OpenFaaS to basically be cgi/bin in a box? (Container) Would sandboxed cgi/fcgi be faster at forking than spinning up a container?

<comment><USER3> That's not far off what's happening, but in containers. For a deeper dive on the mechanics of OpenFaaS checkout the intro [https://blog.alexellis.io/introducing-functions-as-a- service...](https://blog.alexellis.io/introducing-functions-as-a-service/) and then the watchdog README here - [https://github.com/alexellis/faas/tree/master/watchdog](https://github.com/alexellis/faas/tree/master/watchdog)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In case someone is looking for a way to run and deploy this to a public cloud (in my case Azure), there is an extant pull request here that will set up a dynamically resizable Swarm cluster:

[https://github.com/get-faas/labs-azure-scaling- template/pull...](https://github.com/get-faas/labs-azure-scaling- template/pull/1)

This allows the FaaS runtime to dynamically allocate more Swarm nodes based on CPU load (indirectly, using Azure VM scale sets).

I've been meaning to see how I could tie in Azure Container Instances to FaaS, but currently lack the time (and to do that it would need to cleanly separate the admin UI from function endpoints, something that wasn't implemented yet a few weeks ago).

<comment><USER3> Function endpoints take a route of /function or /async-function and all administration is via /system/functions route and the UI is hosted at /ui - <USER2> you have all the separation in place.

There's an open issue for ACI - would be great if you wanted to contribute to the project. [https://github.com/alexellis/faas/issues/117](https://github.com/alexellis/faas/issues/117)

<comment><USER5> I meant separating the admin UI completely, into its own process/container and IP/port, distinct from the reverse proxy.

Route separation just means I can DoS the admin UI by invoking functions repeatedly - which will eventually happen even with "production" loads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems similar to OpenWhisk: [https://github.com/apache/incubator- openwhisk](https://github.com/apache/incubator-openwhisk) . The built-in metrics reporting of OpenFaas looks useful though.

<comment><USER3> For a great live demo of the auto-scaling and metrics shown in Grafana see my video from Dockercon's Cool Hacks closing ceremony - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h2VTE9WnZs&t=1058s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h2VTE9WnZs&t=1058s)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is great stuff! If anybody's looking further up the stack and executing functions via HTTP / etc. via a gateway, we've developed a formal specification called FaaSlang [1] that includes type-safety mechanisms and standardized error reporting.

This can be connected above your FaaS provisioning system; whether it's in front of cloud-native offerings like Lambda or Azure Functions, or you're running a system like OpenFaaS yourself. FaaSlang defines _execution semantics_ , it is not opinionated about where functions are stored or how they're run.

[1] [https://github.com/faaslang/faaslang](https://github.com/faaslang/faaslang)

<comment><USER9> this is pretty cool. you can also convert it to swagger and restify your function.

the main benefit is annotations in comments

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well chosen name.

Two questions:

1\. How does this square up with the efforts within the Serverless community? [https://github.com/serverless/serverless](https://github.com/serverless/serverless)

2\. Does OpenFaas assume that the smallest unit of work for each function or domain of functions is always a unique container? In other words, does it support scenarios where one needs to deploy a new function into an existing/running container?

<comment><USER3> The Serverless Inc project helps you deploy to closed-source cloud vendor function products using YAML. OpenFaaS is an open-source Serverless framework to do largely the same thing, but you can use cloud servers or your own on- prem equipment. Checkout the intro for more comparisons to other projects [https://blog.alexellis.io/introducing-functions-as-a- service...](https://blog.alexellis.io/introducing-functions-as-a-service/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is it realistic to keep a complex system built around functions and microservices in a small organization?

<comment><USER12> Why would you want to? Honest question.

<comment><USER9> distributed computing

by having a function with a rest API in a container, you can scale it on demand with no infrastructure management

<comment><USER13> > with no infrastructure management

I do have doubts on that part. Well, unless you mean physical infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this just for web stuff? One of the key aspects (imo) about Lambda is how it integrates to other AWS services, allowing the code to react to all sorts of events.

</comment><comment><USER15> This looks very interesting. Does anyone have any experience with this for C++ functions vs AWS Lambda?

</comment><comment><USER16> Also checkout Funktion

</comment><comment><USER17> Last time I checked (a couple of minutes ago), NONE of those "serverless" frameworks were truly serverless. Running your stuff or even your "functions" in the "cloud" is still running it on a server. Just because you do not know which specific server is running it at a given time does not make it "serverless". Why is it so hard to use the correct term?

<comment><USER18> Do you also rail against "wireless" phones as there's wires involved somewhere?

It is called serverless as in the ideal state you let the scaling of the server be handled by someone else. Just like with cell phones you only care about the last bit before it gets to you.

<comment><USER19> No, he calls his phone "towerless", "networkless", and "carrierless" because he doesn't personally own or manage his own towers, networks, or carriers.</comment></comment></comment>


What I Learned This Year - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/12/27/what-i-learned-this-year/ <comment><USER2> _"... After a 40-Dunhills-a-day-habit for nearly 20 years, I stopped smoking ..."_

Best advice.

 _"... Before I got sick, it was hard for me not to interfere in every single decision that was made here at GigaOM ... When I returned, I had to choose to let go ..."_

Second bit is subtle. By letting go you decrease your stress. I like Om for his different take on technology. Here's for his recovery & better health.

<comment><USER3> he smoked 40 cigarettes a day? How can people abuse themselves that much? He is lucky he only had a heart attack, unlike cancer, at least it's not permanent(as long as you don't die)

<comment><USER4> Heart attacks often kill heart muscle which has permanent effects. Nicotine boosts dopamine levels in the brain within minutes, the negative effects take longer to manifest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "When faced with a binary choice — live or die — I made the following upgrades..."

I find it fascinating that death is one of the biggest agents of change that we know of.

<comment><USER6> I find it fascinating that people need to come so close to death, sometimes repeatedly, before they decide to make important changes.

<comment><USER5> I think it's easy for people to grow complacent with their habits and lives. You never know what you're missing until it's gone, or so the saying goes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think that this kind of post here is good. I mean, this community may have a really positive effect on each one of us (maybe a tiny influence, but still) because of this kind of post. It gives me some examples to follow. And for that, reading HN is a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER8> >Caffeine, sugar, salt and all unhealthy foods are now banished from my diet.

I hope he meant "unhealthy levels of salt" and not just "salt".

<comment><USER5> Same for caffeine... most things in moderation aren't bad (alcohol, caffeine, sex, reckless driving, and salt).

<comment><USER9> Yes, but you can survive without alcohol, caffeine, sex, and reckless driving. Without salt you die, painfully and fairly soon.

<comment><USER10> True, but depending on what you eat, it's quite possible to already get most of the salt you need. (Though, he did say he'll be going to the gym every day, so his salt needs might be higher.)

<comment><USER9> I think that was what "anewaccountname" was quibbling about. It's pretty difficult to not get enough salt unless you're fasting or in a hot climate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm a bit sick of lists of advice on blogs. I wish this trend would stop.

Also, and I mean this as politely as possible, the advice is pretty obvious in this case. Nothing really controversial here to make me think.

<comment><USER2> _"... I'm a bit sick of lists of advice on blogs. I wish this trend would stop .. the advice is pretty obvious in this case. Nothing really controversial here to make me think ..."_

The cynicism can be well founded. The smoking reference is an example. But there is also a subtle message for those that look. You can improve your lot through small changes, mainly through perception. For instance, by micro management Om was probably being overly stressed. By letting go, he has reduced the stress. This slight change in perception of leadership just might him run his business a bit better. His change in perception about exercise - even a small one, might let Om live a bit longer, better.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who got on to Startup School? - <AUTHOR> Just got an email saying my company, [Dependabot](https://dependabot.com), was rejected. A little disappointed as we're growing at 25% month-on-month, have 2,000 active users and have $6k MRR after just 12 months.<p>Who got on, and what are you building? <comment><USER3> Got an acceptance followed by a notification that it was a mistake 90 minutes later. Really sucks, I got excited. Maybe next year.

<comment><USER4> Same here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We also got rejected, from my experience it's pretty pointless to ask for feedback as well as we applied several times in the past (to YC) and never got anything beyond "sorry just try again". I mean that's fine and they don't owe us an explanation, I will just not apply again as it seems to be a waste of time and without useful feedback there's not much I/we can learn from this. This time we were even explicitly asked to apply as we were a "promising candidate" with our YC application, which probably was just another mass e-mailing though.

Looking at the current batches it's pretty difficult to say what exactly they're looking for, as there are some ideas that I consider quite reasonable and others that seem completely ridiculous to me.

In general I get the (personal) impression that most of their grandiose talk changing the world is just marketing, in the end it's just about what has a good chance to make decent money.

Sorry this is probably the disappointment speaking but my impression is that we're mostly building unnecessary garbage and diversions while the real problems don't get tackled. Just my 2 Cents anyway, good luck getting in next time :)

<comment><USER6> Check your inbox once again, looks like we were accepted finally

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Funnily, I received an acceptance first and then a rejection email after 2 hours.

<comment><USER6> vice versa, I first got You fail letter, and now - Your Company was ACCEPTED: Startup School Advisor Track

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hi Fedor,

We are deeply sorry, but an error occurred in the software that triggers acceptance emails and you were actually supposed to receive the email below accepting you into the Startup School Advisor Track. Thank you for applying to Startup School Online. Your application looked promising and we would like to invite you to the Advisor track!

As part of the Advisor track, you will be a member of a group of about 25 companies with an expert advisor with whom you will meet regularly during the course. You will have access to the software to:

</comment><comment><USER8> Hi Guys, trying to form a crowdsourced list of Startup School Founders - <USER2> tagged by country here [https://lystof.com/list/HyemlctL7](https://lystof.com/list/HyemlctL7). Feel free to add a founder for this batch or create your own list.

</comment><comment><USER9> I got the _" Apologies - Startup School Acceptance Error"_ email too.

Not even a little sad, I am now just waiting for the _" Apologies Again - Startup School Acceptance Error Error: You're in actually"_ email.

<comment><USER9> Came back here just to say to myself that I was right and it was worth to wait :)

[https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-every-company- th...](https://blog.ycombinator.com/startup-school-every-company-that-applied- is-now-accepted/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Rejected at first and then accepted into Advisor Track with www.recapped.io. I quit my full-time job about 6 months ago to focus fully on this venture.

</comment><comment><USER11> This looks like a great product! Congrats on your success so far

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Kacy! Had been looking forward to having others to learn from, but I'm pretty confident that Dependabot is going to be OK.

Would love to hear from all the companies that got accepted!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> We got in, after first getting the standard rejection email.

Building Commerce.js - [https://commercejs.com](https://commercejs.com)

<comment><USER13> I like your design.</comment></comment>


Thomas all set to appeal the $220,000 RIAA payment - <AUTHOR> http://www.gadgetell.com/2007/10/thomas-all-set-to-appeal-the-220000-riaa-payment/ <comment><USER2> This is a bad idea, it isn't precedent until a higher court affirms the lower court ruling. So she is screwing everyone with her poor case. Let someone come along with a stronger case and appeal it with more chance of it being sent down to the lower court.</comment>


Dates That Don't Exist - <AUTHOR> https://blog.yossarian.net/2015/06/09/Dates-That-Dont-Exist <comment><USER2> That is, the demonstrated behavior of Python is exactly what the documentation claims will happen.

I believe the author is misrepresenting the documentation by writing:

> Python's datetime module, despite claiming to represent a date object in > "the current Gregorian calendar," sadly does not do so:

This is an incomplete quote from the Python documentation. The full context is (emphasis mine):

> A date object represents a date (year, month and day) in an idealized > calendar, the current Gregorian calendar _indefinitely extended in both > directions._

The Python documentation in the same paragraph says:

> This matches the definition of the "proleptic Gregorian" calendar in > Dershowitz and Reingold's book Calendrical Calculations, where it's the base > calendar for all computations.

Elsewhere it says that the datetime represents: "An idealized naive date, assuming the current Gregorian calendar always was, and always will be, in effect."

P.S. The article is dated (2015).</comment>


Has Amazon EC2 become over subscribed? (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://alan.blog-city.com/has_amazon_ec2_become_over_subscribed.htm

<comment><USER4> _I'm loathed to perpetuate a 3 year old article, but..._

One of the key contributing factors to this kind of network degradation of AWS (/or other cloud vendor) is the abundance of the "bad neighbor test" - where a client performs tests to see if they can achieve a _'preferred'_ amount of CPU/IO on the host of their new instance.

Resource sharing rules at the host level actually means that if everyone is trying to max out their instance, you would still get the equal share you are entitled to and guaranteed with your instance, so what the bad neighbor test really means is whether you can actually go into your neighbor's CPU allocation due to their under-use.

Well, if _everyone_ does that then the system degrades as _someone_ has to a party using less than their allocation and the amount of instance spots that don't fail the 'bad neighbor test' become non existant.

The overall health of the entire network would actually be better if folks didn't do this practice and instead everyone simply evened out their use across their instances that enjoy additional resources and stuck it out with the %age of their instances that only achieved their guaranteed minimum resource use and no more.

My company uses another "cloud-like" vendor and although we don't perform 'bad neighbor' tests upon new instances, it is fair to say our application benefits from the fact that the majority of the instances on their network are under- utilized and we can push into the max CPU of the host beyond the limits we pay for. Where instances do share 'bad neighbors' (ie we can only get what we paid for and no more - boo hoo, etc) we still keep the instance but simply route around that and distribute less load than on other nodes in our network.

That doesn't become the most cost effective mechanism, but the "savings" of the _'bad neighbor test'_ are probably negligible and ironically by not doing this we become the "good neighbors".

<comment><USER5> Actually, if the system is well-isolated and correctly subscribed, at worst you'll get exactly your reservation. It is not _necessarily_ the case that someone has to lose.

<comment><USER4> Right. The problem is that a 'bad neighbor' test is often defined as when one can _only_ get that guaranteed minimum amount of resource.

That's the part that doesn't scale.

<comment><USER6> The amazon documentation doesn't let you pin down exactly what that guaranteed minimum is, as half the measures are things like 'IO Performance: Moderate' or 'Compute Units: 4' or aren't specified at all (like EBS performance)

Makes sense from Amazon's perspective, of course - less promises to keep, more flexibility.

Can't blame people for measuring the performance empirically, in the absence of hard guarantees. Just that produces results that happen to be wrong.

<comment><USER7> Compute units are actually a quantitative unit. One compute unit is, to the best of my recollection as I'm on mobile, the equivalent work of a specific class of 1.7GHz CPU.

Other than the "I/O Performance", I think all of their specs are pretty well defined if you're willing to dig up the appropriate docs.

<comment><USER6> I suppose it depends on whether your application depends on ephemeral disk random or sequential I/O, EBS I/O, I/O to the internet at large, cpu cache, ram bandwidth, support for AVX instructions and so on.

To be fair it's understandable why Amazon doesn't promise these features will or won't be present - it would make their already-complicated product offering even more complicated. And for a great many applications, customers won't be sensitive to details like CPU cache and disk performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was trying to figure out how this guy could be so behind the times - <USER2> discovered internal network latency at AWS?

Then I saw:

Published: 9:01 AM GMT, Tuesday, 12 January 2010

<comment><USER9> Yes, the year of the blog should definitely be present in the HN title.

That said, what is the deal with the internal network latency and the other points the OP touched upon today? Did Amazon get around to resolving things, or have things worsened?

<comment><USER10> My non-rigorous impression is that latency is roughly the same now as it was in 2010, i.e. not great, but at least it hasn't been getting worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there any scale (like xlarge) where you are effectively the only VM on a particular physical machine (thereby obviating the issue with the small instances)?

<comment><USER12> ...and here's part of why I created Uptano.

<https://uptano.com>

The flexibility of usage-based billing and instant provisioning is awesome, but it's really not worth giving up dedicated performance IMHO.

<comment><USER5> I upvoted because I love HN comments that offer solutions. That said . . . how can you charge half as much as Amazon for the same service and make a profit. I assume their margins are not that fat, so what are you cutting that they offer? Or else what secret have you discovered that no one knows? I guess since this is your business there's a chance that you won't answer, but I'm curious.

<comment><USER13> AWS uses high end, expensive enterprise grade parts (I believe), meanwhile uptano is likely using standard off the shelf parts, likely with bulk account discounts. Each of those servers could likely be put together for $500 - <USER3> $100/month, he should be making very good margins after a year or so. I have no idea on rent/electricity/etc, but with enough 1U servers the total cost per server may be only $10/month or so.

The big costs you pay for on AWS are the engineering, networking and UI development. Dedicated servers should be easier to provision and manage and he probably has a much smaller team.

So theoretically, it is possible that his prices are half as much as Amazon and he still makes a decent profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there a cloud provider that doesn't (yet) have these issues?

Is it possible to run any cloud service at Amazon's scale without these issues?

(genuine questions speaking from a point of ignorance)

<comment><USER15> Some of the OpenStack providers run their own storage networks using conventional SAN tech. Super expensive but more consistently performant.

<comment><USER16> My experience with SANs is that they are anything but consistent. Local storage is a better idea: fewer moving pieces to go wrong, fewer moving pieces to understand and debug, fewer possible sources of contention, and the latency is low.

SANs in a cloud environment optimize for the wrong thing. Servers by and large have a high uptime -- since their falling over is comparatively rare, this is simply a problem I've never had difficulty with. What I _have_ had in spades, before I learned better, were database problems due to wild fluctuations in latency to the SAN.

It doesn't help that when SANs kick the bucket, they tend to affect a lot of things.

<comment><USER15> The context where SANs make sense, IMO, is when you've got a few servers which need to share stuff (VMs, or whatever). So, essentially everything can fit on one $10k 10GE switch. I've personally never screwed with anything >800TB, too.

Rather than "strictly local storage", I'd say "keep storage as local as possible", but there are absolutely times where keeping it in-chassis isn't optimal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One think that I think may be oversubscribed at EC2 is the API layer for controlling things like instances, ELB's and autoscaling. This seems to be most obvious in Virginia. During the lightning storm in Virginia last summer, it seemed like API access fell off a cliff. I'm guessing that was because everyone was trying to move their services from the impacted availability zone.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've had these issues with the micro instances before. One deployment will be so sluggish it's almost unusable, but starting up another one results in one that is just fine (micro wise).

</comment><comment><USER19> While I understand computer scientists are not always the best writers, phrases like "Amazon do have a breaking point" make it hard to continue reading this article.

<comment><USER20> In British English, a company is plural, not singular. So this construct is correct in some dialects. And he also uses 'armour', which is again a British construct, so I'd guess he's just not using American English.

(I wonder if British law considers a corporation to be a person to the degree that US law does, or if this plural view of a corporation is pervasive in law as well as in grammar.)

<comment><USER21> This is oft-repeated, but not actually true. Most people in the UK who care about these things (for instance, sub editors in the printed press) hold that companies are singular entities. The confusion comes with sports teams, which are commonly referred to in the plural, so "Microsoft is" but "Manchester United are".

Edit: For example, here's what the Guardian's style guide says on the matter:

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/c#id-3022716>

Of course, with something as flexible and constantly evolving (and as used and abused) as the English language, it is usually possible to find examples and counter-examples for just about anything. There are also edge cases; the Guardian refers to police forces as plural entities, I believe. Suffice to say, when I was running a back bench, singular was the order of the day when it came to company names.

<comment><USER22> I'm British, and I always thing of groups of people as groups of people.

But then I never won any awards for grammar.

<comment><USER21> Are you trying to say you disagree but you think you're probably wrong?

<comment><USER22> I don't think it's a case of right or wrong. It's a writing style.

But for me, when speaking and writing consider companies to be groups of people, and so I use plural. And I think that is common over here in Britain.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How To Read Your Users' Minds With Better Menu Options - <AUTHOR> http://www.cloudspace.com/blog/2011/02/22/how-to-read-your-users-minds-with-better-menu-options/

<comment><USER2> It works well for 99% of the time, but when it doesn't, this design decisions make the experience frustrating. I'm-going-to-write-a-blog-post-and-boycott- this-thing frustrating.

And if the description is not clear (as in the Rdio example), it'll surprise the user. And surprise is not good. Let's say you are mindlessly managing your collection, doing some syncs along the way. When you finish, you notice that there are musics in the collection that you didn't put there. Even if that was exactly what you wanted, you don't know how you did it and now the software is not predictable anymore. You'll flinch before using it again. I know I would.

Multi-action options are a bless when aligned with your flow, but if not used carefully they'll bring down the whole user experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally. That's the point of a good product person -- they need to understand who is using the product, and what the point of the whole thing is. If it's something that they know users will understand, then it can be done in the subtle way that Rdio has. If they get feedback from users that are confused, they can change the product to make the process make more sense.

Surprise isn't always bad. I bet a lot of people are surprised the first time they turn an iPad sideways and it rotates. That doesn't make it bad. A good product person surprises users with good things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think engineers know about use-case analysis. Don't bother to present the user with options for which there is no use-case. This isn't some sort of voodoo that only "product people" understand, it's software engineering 101.</comment>


This Really Is the Next Revolution in TV Technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-really-is-the-next-revolution-in-tv-technology-11546956347 <comment><USER2> Link is paywalled. It is talking about this video from ces 2019: [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tkLIBCq5RZo](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tkLIBCq5RZo)</comment>


Mapping the uncertain terrain between the Holocaust's history and memory - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenation.com/article/saul-friedlanders-many-lives/ <comment><USER2> What a fascinating article.

>  But the idea of evil doesn't enhance responsibility; it evades it, lifting > the crimes away from the human plane where they belong.

This is something I think the National Holocaust Memorial in DC nails, the human plane. The room full of shoes, two stories of ghostly family pictures you normally see on a fireplace mantel. The whole place really brings home that it was normal humans perpetrating horrible, horrible acts on other normal humans. That it could have happened yesterday, that it could happen tomorrow.

<comment><USER3> How does showcasing the humanity of the victims provide any commentary on the humanity of the perpetrators?

<comment><USER2> It wasn't showcasing the humanity of the victims that provided the commentary, it was the commentary on how the anti-semitism rose to a level within the general population that reenforced for me the humanity or "normalness" of the perpetrators.

<comment><USER4> What if normalness and humanity are not synonyms? Could it be our responsibility to evaluate what's good and what's bad for society independent of other' opinions?</comment></comment></comment></comment>