Why Academic Papers Are A Terrible Discussion Forum - <AUTHOR> http://rationalconspiracy.com/2012/06/20/why-academic-papers-are-a-terrible-discussion-forum/ <comment><USER2> Academic papers today are not meant to be discussion forums. To be fair, undergrads and early-stage graduate students often use academic papers as a way to figure out what kind of debates are taking place in their field. But once you get into advanced levels, academic papers are little more than _archives_ of discussions that you had many months and years ago. All the real discussion happens in labs, offices, colloquiums, conferences, by e-mail, and through countless other channels that everyone knows are much more efficient than academic papers. Only those who are relatively isolated from the rest of the academic community, like scientists working far away from major research centers, rely on academic papers to catch up with what everyone else is up to.

Also, sometimes it doesn't matter that the paper gets published a few months or even a couple of years late. Not every academic field progresses at the rate of cutting-edge science. In my philosophy PhD dissertation I criticized works that were 10-16 years old, and even older if you count how long they took to be published. But those works are still considered a hot topic in their field. Hardly surprising in a discipline that has been moving slowly and steadily for thousands of years. The same might be said of many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, though perhaps to a slightly lesser extent. So whether or not papers can be a suitable discussion forum depends on the field and how people expect their discussion forum to work. Blanket statements that cover everything from philosophy to mathematics to the latest nanotechnology are not helpful.

Some of the other problems you mention, though, are real.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article seems terribly confused. Of course academic papers are a terrible discussion forum. They're not supposed to be any kind of discussion forum.

Academic papers are supposed to be contributions to science. They take by definition a long time to publish because they need to go through a peer review process, and they are only interest to a narrow group of people because they typically advance the understanding of a very narrowly defined problem deep within their field.

Academics don't just sit in a dusty office communicating with the world through journal articles. We meet in conferences and work in joint projects, have informal discussion forums and correspond through a multitude of different channels. Many academics also have non-academic publications about their research.

Academic papers serve a very specific purpose and they do it well. Just because they don't serve some other purpose that you'd like them to serve doesn't make the process broken.

</comment><comment><USER4> From "How To Do Artificial Intelligence at the MIT AI Lab" ([http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research.how.to/section3.4.htm...](http://www.cs.indiana.edu/mit.research.how.to/section3.4.html)):

After the first year or two, you'll have some idea of what subfield you are going to be working in. At this point-or even earlier-it's important to get plugged into the Secret Paper Passing Network. This informal organization is where all the action in AI really is. Trend-setting work eventually turns into published papers-but not until at least a year after the cool people know all about it. Which means that the cool people have a year's head start on working with new ideas.

How do the cool people find out about a new idea? Maybe they hear about it at a conference; but much more likely, they got it through the Secret Paper Passing Network. Here's how it works. Jo Cool gets a good idea. She throws together a half-assed implementation and it sort of works, so she writes a draft paper about it. She wants to know whether the idea is any good, so she sends copies to ten friends and asks them for comments on it. They think it's cool, so as well as telling Jo what's wrong with it, they lend copies to their friends to Xerox. Their friends lend copies to their friends, and so on. Jo revises it a bunch a few months later and sends it to AAAI. Six months later, it first appears in print in a cut-down five-page version (all that the AAAI proceedings allow). Jo eventually gets around to cleaning up the program and writes a longer revised version (based on the feedback on the AAAI version) and sends it to the AI Journal. AIJ has almost two years turn-around time, what with reviews and revisions and publication delay, so Jo's idea finally appears in a journal form three years after she had it-and almost that long after the cool people first found out about it. So cool people hardly ever learn about their subfield from published journal articles; those come out too late.

You, too, can be a cool people. Here are some heuristics for getting connected: ...

TL;DR Academic papers are for presenting final results and assigning credit, not discussion.

<comment><USER5> "A reference graph is a web of citations: paper A cites papers B and C, B cites C and D, C cites D, and so on."

A bit off topic, but where is the computer generated version of this graph. This was the inspiration to Googles Page Rank algorithm, right? We do have Google Search and even Google Scholar now. But where can I access this gigantic graph of published research?

<comment><USER4> That's what CiteSeer was supposed to do, unfortunately they quit halfway there.

<comment><USER5> So, what you are saying is, that it doesn't exist? Why is no one building this? I understand, that there is less demand than for web search. But there still is a lot of demand from smart and skilled people, no?

<comment><USER4> It's a question of academic paywalls. If all journal papers were freely available it would have been done by now.

<comment><USER5> Thx for your reply. Makes sense. Other than abstracts, the reference are usually behind a pay wall.

But how does, e.g. Google Scholar estimate the number of citations? Do they only look at papers which are not behind a pay wall or do they buy a subscription to all journals?

It still buggles my mind, that the science loving google founders Larry and Brian haven't tackled this yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> With respect to item #1 (huge time lag), it's worth mentioning that in some fields—I'm familiar with psychology, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering, but this likely applies to others as well—many if not most labs are in some form of contact during the course of the year, whether it takes the form of planned or serendipitous meetings at conferences, email conversations, second- hand talks through mutual collaborators and similarly-minded faculty, or other channels. In these fields, it's pretty unusual to be working in a total vacuum, where your only method of communication is through academic publications.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the author is implicitly talking about academic philosophy papers.

Regarding point 8, the "bottom line" rule (<http://lesswrong.com/lw/js/the_bottom_line/>) is about _process_ , not actual placement of the bottom line. It is about asking how the conclusion and evidence came about: is the conclusion derived from the evidence, or was the conclusion stated, and the evidence filled in afterwards to support it?

Sure, I will state my conclusions in the abstract of my (computer science, mostly systems) papers. But I _arrived_ at those conclusions after designing and experimenting with the artifact I'm presenting in the paper. That my conclusion comes first in the paper is not what matters.

I assume the author does not mean to apply point 8 to engineering and scientific papers. But I want to point this out since he didn't say so.

<comment><USER8> But many of the author's points don't apply to philosophy papers, either - when philosophers are deciding what to write they don't start with their conclusion any more than scientists and engineers do. Likewise, the author's claim not to have been convinced by a philosophical paper seems odd to me, and suggests he doesn't have much familiarity with philosophy. If anything, I think there are _more_ influential papers than books in philosophy, particularly of the analytic sort; think of Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," Gettier's "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge," or Putnam's "The Meaning of Meaning," for instance, all of which are more influential than any of the books written by these authors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Academic papers fail as a Reddit-style discussion forum because they were never meant to be a Reddit-style discussion forum.

If you need to discuss things with people, join a mailing list or go to a conference or get to know them. The paper is not supposed to be the transitional step where you are bouncing ideas off people.

I agree that academic journals should be open access. I don't agree that it is unfair for subject matter experts not to publish every crank who comes down the pike in every journal.

If you want to talk about enforcing conformity as a bad thing, a discussion forum (particularly one with upvotes and downvotes) is the last thing you should use as a model.

I guess you are more directly engaged with Less Wrong and Singularity Institute and other online fora which lack any academic credibility, but sort of pretend to have some.

</comment><comment><USER10> Who claimed that the primary purpose of peer-reviewed academic papers was to serve as an all-inclusive, real-time, 'democratic' discussion forum?

Next up: "4chan flame comments are a terrible way to incrementally advance the state-of-the-art in a narrow academic field, presenting theorems, experimental data, and citations to closely-related work."

<comment><USER11> >Next up: "4chan flame comments are a terrible way to incrementally advance the state-of-the-art in a narrow academic field, presenting theorems, experimental data, and citations to closely-related work."

Now I'm tempted to test that, by submitting my next paper as a 4chan comment and seeing what kind of response it gets.

<comment><USER10> semi-related ... some of my colleagues wrote a research paper about 4chan (but I don't think they posted it ON 4chan!):

<http://projects.csail.mit.edu/chanthropology/4chan.pdf>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Say what you will about academic papers, but I needed to know how to solve a tridiagonal matrix efficiently on a distributed computer, and damned if I didn't find some that told me how.

As a survey of the field, maybe papers in journals aren't so great, but as a way to find heavyweight answers to heavyweight questions? You bet your ass they're good.

(Of course my University pays through the nose so that I can do that, but that has no bearing on the format).

</comment><comment><USER13> There is a reason why _conferences_ are so hugely important. Often, what will be published as an article is presented beforehand on conferences, among knowledgable and interested peers. And while some conferences are invite-only or have to be paid for, most universities have a lot of conferences either completely open to the public or at least open to students. Often, just _asking_ someone of one is allowed to just audit the talks without going to all he social events aimed at invited people will be enough in order to be "let it".

Overall, what bothers me most about this blog post is this:

>> Papers are, intentionally, written for an audience of specialists rather than a general interest group, which reduces both the tendency and ability of non-specialists to read them when asked

This repeats the same bias that _everyone can say something about everything_. Nobody here would complain that mailing list discussions about bugs, features or programming questions are hard to understand for non-programmers. However, a scientific discussion in a paper is supposed to cater to everyone. In reality, especially within the confined spaces of an article, one has to assume some baseline of knowledge in the reader, because one can't afford to explain all the basics one implicitly builds upon. To give an example: I do literary studies, and often people assume that they know _just as much_ without having properly dealt with it, because _hey, everyone can read a book, right? right?_ While that part might be true, every scientific discipline over time builds up a plethora of instruments for analysis of their respective topics, an understanding of the matter's and the subject's history, its pitfalls, shortcomings and strengths.

Also, I do not understand his paragraph regarding the "bottom line", since I know noone who writes the abstract first. The abstract is the very last bit to be written, _after_ the paper's structure, arguments, theses, supporting evidence and rebuttals are decided, fixed and usually written. What both the cited Paul Graham essay and his text fail to see is the _process of writing a paper_. It is true that the actual writing process usually doesn't start with a thesis statement and a chain of arguments. But structuring a paper is just as much part of writing as finding words for what one wants to express.

The author hints at being an undergrad in maths, having trouble with the understanding of state of the art research. A professor I know once said this about degrees: undergrad & grad work are a necessity, they teach how to start a car, how to accelerate, break and also drive on basic roads (research methods/skills). A PhD then allows (and teaches) you to drive on the autobahn (research), where you can start to close the gap somewhat to all the people already on it going faster than you do. The actual entry into novel research doesn't happen until after the PhD. That's where journals and conferences, workshops, groups, funding etc. become interesting and important. First then are you within the actual target group for academic papers, since you are seen as an _equal_ , equal also in terms of discussing on eye level.

Nobody expects complex technology etc. to be understandable by everyone, but one could say: "Everyone thinks they are a writer, much like many people stand in front of contemporary art saying they could produce the same thing." What they fail to understand is the complexity involved in the writing _process_. What sometimes looks easy or even "trivial" in a finished paper often has a highly complex, dense and far-reaching background.

[edit] Mhm...I apologise for the length of this comment, it grew larger than I originally thought it would... [/edit]

<comment><USER14> I disagree about the value of conferences, especially large ones, for actual discussion.

If you go to a large conference (e.g. the International Studies Association annual conference), you are almost guaranteed to be fielding questions from an audience that _has not_ read your paper.

You would get more valuable feedback on your actual work (rather than your academic powerpoint/presentation notes) from a small colloquium than from a large academic conference. The only person is guaranteed to have read your work is the discussant, and if you're lucky the panel chair and other presenters.

Conferences are a good way to network and get a feel for the overall state of the field, but for having actual discussion of a problem or issue area they're pretty ineffectual.

<comment><USER13> Oh, I agree with you in terms of big conferences.

I suppose I should have defined "conferences" more closely, which for me includes workshops, workgroups etc. Right now, my subject isn't the biggest, so people usually know each other, each other's interests and what most other people are currently working on.

So yes, different experiences with conferences here. However, you are obviously right that the bigger the conference, the less constructive the overall discussion. This in a way corresponds to the aforementioned amount of readers targeted. If you aim to reach a broader audience, discussion will be less in-depth, if you specialise and focus on a smaller amount, discussion is more likely to be more relevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The real problem is that 99% of research publications are, to put it bluntly, worthless. This is the root problem of the entire system which leads to many of the problems the author here is listing.

These 99% are often churned out because they help sustain someone's carrier or lab. To be published, crap research thus needs to convince people that it is smart and important. This is usually done by being written poorly.

The remaining 1% will progress human knowledge and help other scientists to continue down the right path. If they are important enough for wider dissemination, well, that's what science journalists are for.

</comment><comment><USER16> > 8\. [...] one starts with the conclusion in the abstract, and then builds up > an argument for it in the paper itself.

Yeah but you _write_ the abstract last (intro too). Having a conclusion at the beginning is just UI.

<comment><USER17> I cringed at this point. Especially in mathematical fields where the abstract is in some sense an API -- it tells you what theorems you might use from this paper and how to apply them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This post might be more useful if it offered more specific alternatives, rather than mostly criticizing the academic process. Imagine the same ideas reworded as suggestions for improving the process. Then the posts here could discuss the new ideas (useful!), rather than debating the criticism (tedious!).

Perhaps peer review should be done in public, as a page-rank style rating according to the authority of each reviewer in that domain. Would it be completely open, single blind? double blind? Good questions. But it might reduce delays and decrease the effect of politics on the process.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the central urge in there is to get scientific discussion more out in the open. The single biggest issue by far, is not the pace of the publication process or the level of writing. It is access.

I would argue that access would actually solve a number of his other complaints (poor moderation, percieved time lag, people don't wanna read 'em, academia selecting for conformity). If we raised the quality of content on the open internet, the quality of discourse would go up.

</comment><comment><USER20> Could this be a niche for a software solution enabling scientists to comment/share/contribute on each other's papers faster and more efficiently? Perhaps in the end speeding up research times and in the grand scheme of things furthering the scientific process?

</comment><comment> mck- HN outperforms on all those points

<comment><USER10> yes, except for the part about disseminating novel research findings

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article has some good points and some bad ones too.

e.g. Academic papers violate the "bottom line" rule.

If you were making stuff up as you write it down then it would be true that starting with a conclusion might bias your arguments towards justifying that conclusion. This might describe how a (bad) journalist writes, but not how scientific papers are usually written.

The majority of the work for a scientific publication usually comes well before writing the first word. Theorists will discard many theories before they find one promising enough to do extensive work (primarily aimed at proving that theory wrong) before they even consider publication. Experimenters must work with theories that have been through the above, conduct a complex (and usually expensive) experiment, and then analyze the results extensively before they start writing. The writing process can trigger some consistency checks and digging through references may reveal new spins for or weaknesses in the theory or experiment. However, if the entire point of the paper was wildly misguided to begin with, it's unlikely writing the paper in a different order (so that the authors aren't beguiled by their conclusion) will be what reveals it.

Now, the big benefit to writing scientific papers with the conclusion presented right up front is that you don't have to read entire papers to figure out what they're talking about. Scientists generally don't read papers to be led down a grand story with a surprise payoff at the end. The first thing they want to know is what this paper has to say so they can decide if it's worth reading. Science is big. Really big. Go to arxiv.org (a preprint repository for both articles that will be published and some that won't). Pick one specific sub-field and look at how many papers were submitted _yesterday_. The reason few people read material from outside their bailiwicks is because they barely have enough hours in the day to keep up with their own field and do their own work. If scientific papers followed the "bottom line" rule things would get much, much worse.

Personally, my biggest complaint about journals is how expensive they are. The only reason university researchers have "free" access to journals is because the universities pay (frequently exorbitant) subscription fees to the journals. It's better than having every researcher pay $30 every time they want to look at a paper, but it's still far from cheap. The really weird thing is that it costs several thousand dollars to _publish_ a paper in a decent scientific journal. Yes, you do ground-breaking work, write a beautiful paper about it, and then you have to _pay_ the journal to publish it if they accept it, and color figures are almost always extra! Where does all the money go? Journals have remarkably few expenses. In terms of producing content the only people they really have to pay is their editors. The authors pay and the referees work for free. Publishing the content does require some infrastructure, like servers and code. The print version requires type- setting, production, distribution, etc... However, I find it very difficult to believe that journals need to charge what they do to either creators of the content or the consumers of it. I'd love to see journals open up their books and reveal where the money is going.

</comment><comment><USER22> Upvoted!

Wish I could do that for academic papers.

<comment><USER23> This might work for you: <http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Academic papers also make terrible pornography. That's not what they're designed for either.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well, there's at least one way in which academic papers are a great discussion forum: People think a lot before posting and do thorough research on their arguments - and those of their opponents.</comment>


Mathematicians dispute claims that golden ratio is natural blueprint for beauty - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mathematicians-dispute-claims-that-the-golden-ratio-is-a-natural-blueprint-for-beauty-10204354.html <comment><USER2> (2015)

<comment><AUTHOR> everlasting struggle between keeping the headline close to the original and under 80 characters, while adding meta header tags.</comment></comment>


Making Cents: the meager royalties currently paid to bands by streaming services - <AUTHOR> http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/8993-the-cloud/

<comment><USER2> Worth reading for the second half of the article which argues that streaming services are "divorced from music" and not financially helpful to musicians.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd be really curious to see how the royalties from traditional radio breaks down on a cost per person per play basis. I have no feel for where that number would end up, but I think it would really shed light on how comparable a payment of 0.005 cents per play per person is.

<comment><USER4> I'd really like to see that comparison as well. And wouldn't Pandora and Spotify, like radio, be a channel to expose people to new music that they then might buy? Personally, Pandora has worked this way for me multiple times-- they'll play a track that I haven't heard before and like, and I'll go to Amazon and buy the track or sometimes the whole album.

In the days when a few radio stations were the only free mass distribution channel, this exposure was so valuable that bands or their labels would actually pay the radio stations substantial sums to have their songs played. This was known as "payola," and was viewed as a crime, for reasons that are still a bit unclear to me.</comment></comment>


Comparing Node.js with Tcl - <AUTHOR> http://pietersz.co.uk/2015/06/beating-node-js <comment><USER2> Interesting enough, Tcl was one of the past's most versatile tools. We used it in agent-oriented programming in 90's where code could move from place to place to cut data bill. Sandboxes were built for it. Tcl was also used in AOLserver and a related web framework before that became a fad. So, the author's point that Tcl is an _option_ for high-performance event driven apps was proven when the highest traffic site in the world ran on it. I think we have something better today in about every area due to inherent properties of Tcl and labor invested in other solutions. Yet, Tcl delivered plenty in the past, apparently still can, and has potential for people using that sort of thing.

The main potential, though, is portability and future-proofing. Tcl is so ridiculously simple that it's been implemented on about every OS and architecture. That's batteries included due to all the existing code and ActiveState's development tools. People can extend live apps, run shell scripts, configure networks, and so on all using the same (or a similar) language. Any change in underlying platform just requires porting the (simple) lower layers. Makes Tcl a powerful future-proofing option if used judiciously.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a very silly comparison. There's a huge difference in terms of features and reliability between node's http module and this - [http://pietersz.co.uk/software/dandelion- server](http://pietersz.co.uk/software/dandelion-server)

I'm sure an equally minimal http implementation using the net module would match or beat that, but since you'd never use either of them in production, the results are meaningless.

<comment><USER4> I state the point of the comparison in the post: to see how TCL's event loop + my code compres. Node's http module is fairly lightweight, and even if something more minimal would beat my TCL code by a bit it still show what I wanted to, that they are comparable and TCL is an option for event driven servers (at least as far as performance goes)

<comment><USER5> Sounds like your title is a distraction.

<comment><USER4> In retrospect the title is a bit too attention grabbing. If I had anticipated the reaction I could justly be accused of writing flame bait, but I did not expect it to get so much attention or debate - I thought just TCL people would be interested!

<comment><USER6> 1\. Node is not a language it is an implementation of a language, so the title would really be TCL vs JS or Dandelion vs Node...

2\. In which case you would be opened up not only to performance benchmarks but usability, simplicity, and features - whether you are talking about the language or the implementation.

That being said, I have nothing against your opinions or work though and understand that your implementation is also from 2008 :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If it really matters that much how many connections per second you can handle, perhaps Node is not the right tool for the job. Try Go instead, which also runs on multiple cores more naturally.

</comment><comment><USER8> So some Node written by a self-confessed Node novice, based on a 'hello world' example, and running on an old(ish) verson of Node is actually quite similar in performance terms compared to TCL written by someone who knows how to write a TCL server from scratch. That is not a reasonable comparison. Get someone with some Node experience to write the Node server, then compare them.

<comment><USER9> He uses the Hello World code from [http://howtonode.org/hello- node](http://howtonode.org/hello-node) so he did not write the Node version.

<comment><USER8> The point it that he's comparing his TCL code (which is as fast as he could be bothered to make it) to a 'hello world' tutorial that was written as an introduction to Node, not as anything that was designed to demonstrate Node is in any way fast.

<comment><USER10> The 'hello world' example is a good comparator: Presumably the Node developers have optimised the `http` library as much (if not more) than the author's Tcl equivalent. Given that they are therefore doing the same thing, it seems a fair test. Beyond forking new Node processes to handle more requests, I don't think you could make it faster (likewise with the Tcl version).

That said, while it's a fair test, I don't think it's a particularly useful one. It would be interesting to see how the two compete when they do something equivalent but non-trivial.

<comment><USER4> I suspect that for something non-trivial, it will depend on what you are doing. TCL is slow at most things, has fast string manipulation and very fast regular expressions. TCL also makes it easy to write some C to do your heavy lifting, which could be very fast indeed. On the other hand it lacks libraries for async database access etc.

It was not meant to be more than a limited test of the TCL event loop and my code.

<comment><USER11> Node's regular expression engine will run circles around almost every other language implementation out there.[0] This is thanks to Google's work on V8.[1] Regexes are, maybe surprisingly, one of the few things that Node is good at.

[0] [http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?...](http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/performance.php?test=regexdna)

[1] [http://blog.chromium.org/2009/02/irregexp-google-chromes- new...](http://blog.chromium.org/2009/02/irregexp-google-chromes-new- regexp.html)

<comment><USER12> Nothing really surprising here.

Regexes are the only way to do more advanced text manipulation in JavaScript, so they're being used far more than in other languages. Lua is similar here, having only a couple most basic string operations built-in and relying on regexes for anything even slightly more advanced. This makes it natural for these languages' implementations to focus heavily on optimizing regexes.

Also, regexes are easily JITable and of course implementations having a JIT are going to be much more performant than normal interpreters. This explains the results of your [0] - I didn't check, but I suppose it's a vanilla Lua interpreter and not LuaJIT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Tcl may be tolerable if what you need is on the level of some shell script. Beyond that, it's the most god-awful language I've ever seen, barring only classic BASIC.

So this comparison is as skewed as can be. Writing server (or even client) software in Tcl is a pure travesty.

<comment><USER12> I'm sorry, but you're really wrong. TCL is a beautiful language; consistent, easy to extend both semantically and syntactically, it offers a stable and mature ecosystem and is quite performant for an interpreter.

> it's the most god-awful language I've ever seen

I wonder, how many and which exactly languages have you seen, used and learned? Are you sure you're versed in PLT enough to be able to really understand all the TCL features and their impact on the language?

I'd say TCL is fairly similar to Lisps and REBOL, which makes it both simple and hard to master. It also makes it very different from BASIC...

[EDIT: typo]

<comment><USER13> My exact pain points with Tcl are: (1) No types at all, everything is a string. If strings are all you have to deal with that may be enough but it gets hairy fast for everything else. (2) Dynamic scoping rules and `uplevel` & Co. Do I really have to say anything about that?

<comment><USER12> > No types at all, everything is a string

At least there's no need for any kind of toString() method...

This is a design decision which makes the language smaller and easily composable. It also helps greatly with metaprogramming, because the code itself is also just a string - this makes Tcl homoiconic, which is a nice property to have. Last but not least, you can easily type-tag the values you use in more than one way if you want; you also have a built-in object system for cases where you need more structure in order for things not to get hairy.

> Dynamic scoping rules and `uplevel` & Co

Tcl is lexically scoped by default, it just provides ways to break out from lexical context. It's a good thing, allowing you to write for example this: [http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Generic_swap#Tcl](http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Generic_swap#Tcl) without any hassle. Like all design decisions it has its downsides, but it's a powerful tool if used correctly.

Tcl is not a bad language, it's just ill-suited for you or for your use case.

<comment><USER13> That rosetta code has NO static scoping (neither has Tcl, you got that wrong). It uses dynamic scoping with `upvar`. It's a design decision all right, just a really bad one.

<comment><USER12> > That rosetta code has NO static scoping

That was the point! I pasted it as an example of what you can do with upvar, by bypassing lexical scoping. Take a look at other entries on that page: almost all high-level languages either pack the two variables into a list of some kind (passed by reference) or have a specialized language construct for this (inout etc.)

> neither has Tcl

This is very easy to disprove, take a look. This code:

        proc g {} {
            echo $a
        }

        proc f {} {
            set a 10
            g
        }

        f

results in an error in Tcl:

        can't read "a": no such variable
            while executing
        "echo $a"
            (procedure "g" line 2)
            invoked from within
        "g"
            (procedure "f" line 3)
            invoked from within
        "f"
            (file "main.tcl" line 35)

while in a dynamically scoped language, like Emacs Lisp, it would work:

        (defun g ()
          (message "%s" a))

        (defun f ()
          (let ((a 10))
            (g)))

        (f)

How can you argue with that, I wonder? :)

> just a really bad one.

It (upvar and uplevel) lets you easily define new control structures (think "unless", "until", "await", things like these). I don't think you can convince me that adding a powerful feature to the language is a bad decision... but that's indeed a matter of preference and there are people who use Go, so I'm not going to argue about this :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What free or low-cost static site hosting do you use most? - <AUTHOR> I still use Wordpress and shared hosting for most projects and microsites, simply because it's easiest and I'm not a developer. But I suspect there are better ways to do this in 2016/2017. Especially since I'm prepared to learn more.
Essentials: static hosting, custom domains, html, css, js Nice to have: php, FTP, markdown support
Am I missing out on AWS, Github, Digital Ocean, Heroku?
What are the pros and cons? <comment><USER3> I use Github to host the source for my blog/website which is open source. Jekyll for the building which happens on Travis CI. Deployment on S3 with cloudflare as a CDN for SSL and reduced bandwidth. I really like this setup. I wrote a guide called The One Cent Blog[0] a while back detailing how it's setup. Typical months the cost is around $0.01-$0.03.

Becuase people usually ask why S3 over Github pages I'll answer it up front. Github pages is too limited in terms of what you can do with custom jekyll plugins and code.

0: [https://hugotunius.se/2016/01/10/the-one-cent- blog.html](https://hugotunius.se/2016/01/10/the-one-cent-blog.html)

<comment><USER4> I don't understand why you need the S3 if you're already hosting it on github pages.

<comment><USER3> Sorry about the confusion. The source[0] is hosted on Github, but the actual page when compiled to static files is hosted on S3.

0: [https://github.com/k0nserv/hugotunius.se](https://github.com/k0nserv/hugotunius.se)

<comment><USER5> Yeh I think everybody is saying that if you are already hosting the source on GH, there is no need to host the static files on S3 -- you may as well just host it on GH:pages, because that will be free and you get all the benefits of S3.

<comment><USER4> Plus, you can use custom URLs on Github pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a soft spot for Neocities, which is trying to be everything we loved about Geocities, but for a modern age:

[https://neocities.org/](https://neocities.org/)

 _ZERO ADVERTISEMENTS_ , even for the free plan. Supports only static hosting, is free for 100mb websites with bandwidth of 50GB per month, or five dollars per month for 10,000mb with 2TB and a number of other extra features.

EDIT: As mentioned by detaro, custom domain only supported in the paid plan, see [https://neocities.org/supporter](https://neocities.org/supporter)

Works really well with creative coding frameworks like p5js or Twine, for fun, fast little sketches you just want to thrown online and share with others:

[http://p5js.org/](http://p5js.org/)

[http://twinery.org/](http://twinery.org/)

Also, they really care about resurrecting the ideals of the old internet:

[https://blog.neocities.org/its-time-for-the-permanent- web.ht...](https://blog.neocities.org/its-time-for-the-permanent-web.html)

[https://blog.neocities.org/default- ssl.html](https://blog.neocities.org/default-ssl.html)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the warm words!

> ZERO ADVERTISEMENTS, even for the free plan. Supports only static hosting, > is free for 100mb websites with bandwidth of 50GB per month, or five dollars > per month for 10,000mb with 2TB and a number of other extra features

Haven't announced yet, but these numbers are all increasing soon. Well, except for the advertising one. I'm literally in the datacenter right now working on it.

<comment><USER8> Be nice if neocities support Lektor ([https://www.getlektor.com/](https://www.getlektor.com/)), or some sort of web gui static publishing framework. Something easy like WordPress, but not so blog focused. I'd do it myself if I had macOS, but haven't got it setup for Windows yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nearly Free Speech (nearlyfreespeech.net aka NFSN). [1] I'd strongly recommend you try it, without purchasing a domain, and see for yourself how far the initial trial takes you (you get a 25 cent credit when you create an account). Even if you decide to try something else, it's worth your time to read NFSN's FAQ [2] to know more about the service and policies. It's quite impressive.

Advantages:

1\. Excluding domain costs, which are reasonable (and even cheaper than many others), you can have small static sites for pennies a month, or even pennies a year if you put the free tier of CloudFlare in front of it (with DNS changes). It's really dirt cheap!

2\. It's the most honest service I've seen, where you pay close to what you actually use.

3\. The owner/admin is a no-nonsense person and is available on the forums to help with things that don't need extensive support involvement.

Disadvantages:

1\. You need to be tech savvy (at least know how to use an FTP client to upload your static files and use the BSD shell if you wish to play around with application setup or other things over ssh). NFSN does not have any fancy control panels (like cPanel) where you can do one click installs of WordPress or other applications.

2\. For PHP and MySQL based applications, setup is not difficult at all. But if you want any other application server (like Node or Rails or Django), you would have to do more work to get it set up.

3\. If you truly need support, then there's a paid support subscription (it's optional). For most requirements the forums would suffice.

4\. If your site grows a lot (in terms of disk space used, network traffic used and resources used), then NFSN could become very expensive compared to the commonly oversold $5 a month or $10 a month services that promise a lot but depend on most users not reaching their promised limits.

[1]: [https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/)

[2]: [https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq](https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/about/faq)

<comment><USER10> I used to host with them. It's very cheap, but you can't have any expectation of high uptime.

</comment></comment><comment> nodejs-news I'm a great self-hosting fan, behind my DSL connection using 2 x RaspberryPI. I have 3 static web sites, 2 with Jekyll, 1 with Hugo, with great perf :

checkout webpagetest -> [https://www.webpagetest.org/result/161123_0R_8RDY/](https://www.webpagetest.org/result/161123_0R_8RDY/)

and feel free to check my 3 web sites:

\- [http://www.it-wars.com](http://www.it-wars.com) \- [http://www.louer- hendaye.com](http://www.louer-hendaye.com) \- [http://www.nodejs- news.com](http://www.nodejs-news.com)

Init : 2 RaspberryPi + electric plugs : 2x 30$ + 2 x6$ Monthly bill: electricity : about nothing DSL : 30$

Enjoy!

<comment><USER11> Can you explain your setup and how you did your self hosted sites?

<comment><USER12> Simply install any linux distro of your choice (mine is Ubuntu) and fire up apache/nginx to load in your HTML. Then port-forward 80 to your raspberry pi IP address and you are done. If you are on dynamic IP (which most of the residential broadband does), set up dynamic DNS and add a CNAME record in your DNS to point your custom domain to your dynamic domain - this way visitors will be able to access your site even after your IP changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Just to echo... Amazon S3 with CloudFront. No contest. CloudFront has free SSL too. Then AWS Lambda to provide dynamic content via Javascript / API if needed.

If you want to get fancy you can even attach it to your domain root (example.com vs www.example.com) using Route53. Which is impossible with many static hosts. Although that requires a hosted Route53 zone which at $2 might very well be 100x your hosting costs.

I use Jenkins to generate the website itself.

Edit: Only downside is if your traffic spikes you have no control over the cost. There is no upper bounds. With that said, it would take a tremendous amount of traffic to balloon the costs to anything worth worrying about. And at least you can be sure your website will actually stay up.

<comment><USER14> If I may ask a simple question which reveals my ignorance about AWS and anything too technical, but what is the actual CMS being used for a website hosted on Amazon? Take a simple website with text and images that you want to update via an easy to use CMS, what is the AWS service that is the CMS seen by a user looking after the website? Does one exist or is it a matter of needing to make such a CMS?

Edit: thanks for the replies. I had a feeling AWS was more a "parts" bin rather than anything approaching a ready-to-go hosting + CMS, but thought I'd check.

<comment><USER15> Amazon offers basically hardware. You rent a piece of server resourses. What operating system, what CMS you use is up to you, but prepeared to install and configure everything.

But, they also offer plenty of free (and good) "ready made and pre configured" packages for people to use (for exampe wordpress, bitbucket etc.). You can search them here [https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/](https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/)

<comment><USER13> > Amazon offers basically hardware.

AWS is way more than hardware.

Lambda - on demand code execution

Route53 - DNS and domain registration

S3 - File storage with redundancy and an HTTP interface

RDS - Managed relational databases

DynamoDB - NoSQL key/value store with indexing and scanning

SQS - Job queue-ing without needing to manage servers

SES - Email service with the ability to both send and receive email and also trigger a Lambda function when email is received

SNS - Fan out notifications with multiple destinations (iOS, Android, Email, SMS, webhook, etc)

IAM KMS - Manage your encryption keys

EC2 - Ok, this one actually is hardware

Git hosting, docker file hosting. Etc...

That is just off the top of my head. However, if you want to avoid vendor lock-in, then yes, it is just hardware.

<comment><USER15> You are correct. They are also huge ecommerce site and book store.

I understood previous question as "What CMS amazon is offering for clients in website hosting", to where I think my answer still stands.

<comment><USER13> > They are also huge eCommerce site and book store.

That is a complete miss-categorization. Amazon AWS is a single business unit with EC2 being a single product inside of it. When people say Amazon Web Services it very clearly means more than just EC2.

To compare EC2 to SQS (simple queuing service) and saying they are different is the same as comparing Amazon Book sales to Amazon Clothing Sales. It is a distinction that not many people would make.

Actually in a way it is more like saying that Amazon Selling the Twilight novels is different than Amazon selling college textbooks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm biased, but Neocities ([https://neocities.org](https://neocities.org)) can do all of these things and is a great choice for static web hosting. We run a global anycast CDN with instant cache purging, custom domains with Let's Encrypt SSL, high availability architecture, and all the rest. We haven't had a full site hosting outage in years.

We include 10GB storage 2TB BW for free (more of both included soon) for $5/mo, which would cost over $180/mo at AWS with S3. Cloud providers really upcharge on bandwidth big time. Really that 2TB is just a soft cap just to make sure nobody tries to run the New York Times from a $5 hosting plan. Many people go over it and it's not a problem.

The one thing we don't do well is show how good we are for pro hosting as well as people learning HTML and having fun. I need to work on that.

<comment><USER16> You should give a link to custom domains in the front page, took me a while to find you offer that. Btw are you related to Geocities??

<comment><USER7> No relation (except for the site I once had on there). Sadly, Geocities is long gone. My attempts to acquire the domain name and relaunch the site (at a bare minimum to restore the old sites to their proper location) have not been successful.

<comment><USER16> Good idea focusing on that niche. It'd be cool to see geocities live again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I use GitHub pages with Cloudflare (free CDN + HTTPS) for simpler sites but I'm a fan of netlify.com right now. Setup is simple, atomic deploys are simple, rollbacks are simple, caching + cache invalidation + HTTPS is done for you and there's paid plans if you need passwords, form submissions and custom response headers. There's probably cheaper options compared to the paid plan at $9 a month but you have to ask yourself how much your time is worth in comparison if you're burning just 1 hour a month on configuring your hosting.

Deploying over S3 sounds like a bunch of hassle to me. Can you deploy atomically? Can you rollback?

<comment><USER18> I use a static site generated called 'middleman' for my blog. I tested S3 deployment in the past and I must that it's not all that complicated.

The PITA is that you need Cloudfront to handle SSL and if you're not using Route53 automating the upgrade process is more complex than it should be.

> Can you deploy atomically?

Hm, I'm not sure what _atomically_ means in this context, S3 supports 'sync' so you basically can write a bash/ruby/python script to handle deployment (I use a rake task).

> Can you rollback?

Yes, I use git (gitlab) to keep track of changes, so rolling back is not a problem.

<comment><USER17> > I use a static site generated called 'middleman' for my blog. I tested S3 > deployment in the past and I must that it's not all that complicated.

I'm not saying it's super complicated but if extra features are costing you even a couple of hours of time it's probably worth paying to make the problem go away.

> Hm, I'm not sure what atomically means in this context, S3 supports 'sync' > so you basically can write a bash/ruby/python script to handle deployment (I > use a rake task).

Atomically means you either update all of the files or none of the files. If you're updating one file at a time there's a chance e.g. a visitor will see a new page but with the old CSS file. What happens with S3 here? Also, how do you deal with cache invalidation?

> Yes, I use git (gitlab) to keep track of changes, so rolling back is not a > problem.

I personally prefer if you can rollback to a previously working deploy with a dedicated CLI/web rollback option than having to deploy again if that's what you mean. There's a chance your local setup or deploy script is messed up and it's quicker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I use AWS S3, which I put behind a Cloudfront distribution. It's quick to set up, and there are no servers to keep up to date and patched. You also get free SSL for your Cloudfront distribution via AWS certificate manager. For stuff like Contact Us forms, I use AWS Lambda to post the data into my company's CMS. We've had this setup for about a year now and it works quite well.

The cost is almost nothing but we don't have a high traffic website. If you started getting billions of hits from expensive Cloudfront regions such as Australia or India, you might consider something else.

<comment><USER20> A quick note on the S3/Cloudfront option - make sure you enable "Compress Objects Automatically"; it's not enabled by default and wasn't provided for a long time.

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-gzip-compression- suppor...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-gzip-compression-support-for- amazon-cloudfront/)

You'll save a lot on your bandwidth bill.

<comment><USER21> You can also set your edge usage to "Use Only US, Canada, and Europe" vs. "Use All Edge Locations" to save money, depending on your performance needs in various geographies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Uberspace.de

Shell Access, pretty much every common language available, service running, databases, mail, etc..

No bullshit hosting in germany, Pay what you want (1€/month minimum).

Absolute best, I'm hosting about 25 projects with them for various bands, etc. and haven't had any problems whatsoever.

<comment><USER23> Can't find english language switch. Only german then?

<comment><USER24> Only german, yes. They explain on [https://wiki.uberspace.de/philosophy:englisch](https://wiki.uberspace.de/philosophy:englisch) why (in german): it boils down to too much work, not being sure of being able to adequately support in english, having servers only in germany and fearing legal implications of having an english offering.

With google translate and maybe a bit of help from a german speaking friend (and a bank that supports wiring money to a german account without problems) that is probably still manageable, but not ideal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For static sites I used to use surge [0], but now I use Neltify [1] for my site [2], because it offers free SSL on your own domain, and continuous deployment from a GitHub or Gitlab repository. You can set your own build options, for example to build Jekyll.

(I have no affiliation with Netlify I just think their service is neat.)

[0] [https://surge.sh/](https://surge.sh/)

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

[2] [https://gilly.tk](https://gilly.tk)

edit: formatting

<comment><USER26> netlify looks great, and the free tier covers probably 90% of what all SMEs need. I'm curious, where are the sites actually hosted?

Does netlify provide the actual hosting or they allow you to setup deployment to a VPS? Also if netlify does the hosting, how good is their uptime/availability?

<comment><USER27> I work for Netlify.

We host the sites on our CDN, which has more than a dozen points of presence around the world. You can either let us build your site using anything you can get working on linux (see [https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/10/18/how-our- build-bots-b...](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/10/18/how-our-build-bots- build-sites/) for details) or build it yourself and ship the finished product to us. Nothing "runs" on our side after build, so there are no servers/VPS's which you can configure in the equation as far as hosting is concerned. We let you do a few things that you used to do with htaccess files (redirects are free; custom headers including basic auth are a paid feature)

You can check out our list of past incidents on our status page to gauge uptime for yourself: [http://netlifystatus.com/](http://netlifystatus.com/)

Since we use redundant DNS (NS1 + self-hosted), and use dynamic DNS response based on both location the query comes from cross product which CDN nodes are responding, we can (and occasionally do) remove, rebuild, or add CDN nodes without affecting our overall service. Since we use multiple network providers (for instance we use AWS, but we also use 3 other services), downtime at any one of our providers won't introduce any substantial problems in our network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Github Pages + cloudflare + travis

why: free, cdn, version-controlled, continuous integration, https, custom domains.

<comment><USER29> +1 for Github Pages + Cloudflare

Wish there was a poll option on HN. How are you going to count OP? Will you share the results?

<comment><USER30> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll](https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll) \- I've never seen one in the wild, though. Maybe too few people know about it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I use a cheap $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet with nginx, Nikola [0], and letsencrypt for ssl. Works great and I can expand easily if I want to add php or other wsgi apps.

[0] [https://getnikola.com](https://getnikola.com)

<comment><USER32> I did this for a while and ended up expanding out to setting up my own email server, calendar server, and contact server. Needless to say, I'm a happy customer. :-)

<comment><USER33> Setting up your own email server? You're a much braver person than I.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have a PC in my basement on a nice 150meg fiber connection. I have a dynamic DNS service and client set up, and ports forwarded. At this point, I can do whatever the hell I want (static or dynamic), as long as I don't transfer like 10TB a month.

I have Payara (java app server) running my blog down there, and HTTPS courtesy of Let's Encrypt. I looked into running a Open Street Maps server, but it was fairly hard (I might have been close to getting it running), and professional reasons for maybe playing around with it changed.

<comment><USER35> I wish more geographies had 150 megabit (or even better) symmetric residential service. I will never understand how residential service became asymmetric by default. At my address, the best upload speed I can get is ~5 Mbps, which is utterly embarrassing considering my first DSL connection, in 1999 or thereabouts, was ~1.5 Mbps symmetric. In 17 years, I have only approximately tripled my upload speed. (Frankly, even the download speed doesn't seem commensurate with 17 years of technological advance; such is the tragedy of popular "good enough" syndrome.)

In my opinion, asymmetric residential service is in large part responsible for the centralization of the Internet. I would have much liked the alternate history where residential service continued from 1999 onward supporting and embracing the notions of self-hosting and peer-to-peer communication. The resulting decentralized, federated Internet while no utopia in its own right, would be so much more appealing to my sensibilities.

Putting that wishful thinking aside, your setup sounds nice. Since I can't get that kind of bandwidth to my house, I had to lease a dedicated server at a data center.

<comment><USER34> Thanks.

I'm on Verizon FIOS, and it is symmetrical, roughly. It speed tests about 158 down 162 up. How I got that fast was sorta an accident from moving, and rep handling it looked at the deals. I think it was maybe $10 more than the 50meg service I had before.

I see Google Fiber over there, but what I have is nice too, and deployed wider. I also see Comcast's "gigabit" service with it's paltry 35meg upload.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wordpress.com or Blogger.com

Fully operational, all the important stuff (text editors, analytics, pictures hosting...), nice themes, well indexed by google, zero maintenance, free, and unlimited traffic.

I run blogs so obviously it is particularly appropriate. But that works as well for small static sites with a couple pages.

<comment><USER37> Zero maintenance on WordPress? What do you do? I have several updates all the time + themes and plugins.

I do like WordPress though

<comment><USER36> Hosted by wordpress.com of course.

Self hosting wordpress is a nightmare. I wouldn't wish that to my worst enemy.

<comment><USER38> Why do you say "self hosting wordpress is a nightmare" ? I've been doing that for 12 years and have had no worries at all. Admittedly it's only a very low trafficked site, but still, curious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> as a few people have mentioned, NearlyFreeSpeech.net is my static host of choice. i use them for static blogs (jekyll built) and they work perfectly. non static sites get charged at 1c per day (and you get a MySQL instance for about 1c a day, give or take), and static has no charge per day. you are billed for bandwidth and storage, and can have multiple sites in one account. SSH/SFTP access available also.

</comment><comment><USER40> I generally use nearlyfreespeech.net

I added about 5 gbp two years ago and it's down to about 4 gbp. It's cheap as hell and I only have to dump 5 pounds on there every few years or so.

<comment><USER41> Of all services mentioned here, this is the one I like the most and the one I think I'll use.

Their pay as you go makes totally sense when you have a static website that will be access sporadically and you don't want to rely in a public infrastructure such as Github.

I also don't want to depend on freemium services, because they could just shut down the free tier any time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I use Google AppEngine with Python SDK. Whilst it is intended for web apps (and I use it for that too) it works well serving up static content alone. Very easy to add interactivity as and when the need arises. Also has access to Google Cloud services.

I like that I can check my changes on my notebook before uploading to the cloud.

</comment><comment><USER43> NearlyFreeSpeech - fantastic business, incredibly cheap. My domain costs are more than my hosting costs (I pay roughly $2.50 a month for hosting a forum).

<comment><USER44> I switched from NearlyFreeSpeech to Amazon's S3 and Cloudfront.

The main reason I left is that I wanted to use HTTPS, but I didn't want to have to purchase a certificate when there are many good free options available now. NearlyFreeSpeech requires opening a ticket with customer support to update certificates, so using Lets Encrypt isn't really an option there. Amazon offers free certificates for Cloudfront.

In addition to gaining HTTPS support for free, my hosting costs went from a couple bucks a month to less than 50 cents a month.

<comment><USER45> Not sure when you switched, but NearlyFreeSpeech works fine with Lets Encrypt and doesn't require opening a ticket with support. [https://deletethis.net/dave/2016-11/Let%27s+Encrypt+NearlyFr...](https://deletethis.net/dave/2016-11/Let%27s+Encrypt+NearlyFreeSpeech.net+Update)

<comment><USER44> Nice! Looks like the process was changed after I switched. Still, since they don't support cron to use Lets Encrypt I'd have to remember to do that every 90 days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> RamNode: 128MB RAM 15GB storage, $15/year. Cheapest I have found yet for a tiny VPS.

Perfect for static pages, but a little bit of PHP might be fine.

<comment><USER47> Seconded. In 18 months my RamNode VPS has had one unexpected reboot, but other than that it has been flawless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I think I'd go with DigitalOcean $5/mo, nginx, a static site generator (there's so many), and LetsEncrypt (for SSL).

<comment><USER20> I'm with you on this one. Given the choice between configuring nginx and navigating AWS/Wordpress' arcane configuration GUIs, I'll go with nginx every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Gitlab pages ([https://pages.gitlab.io/](https://pages.gitlab.io/)) is free, and has some advantages over Github pages:

\- Not restricted to jekyll, use any static generator

\- Supports https on custom domains

</comment><comment><USER50> I'm still using Dreamweaver 8 and pushing the site to a server as static files.

Unfortunately, Dreamweaver 8's static SFTP doesn't work any more, due to some Microsoft-forced change in Windows 7.

<comment><USER51> Upvoted for nostalgia.

<comment><USER50> It beats trying to write HTML via Markdown.

<comment><USER51> I'm that close to install Win2K and Dreamweaver 4...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I'm very happy with the service at [https://www.scaleway.com](https://www.scaleway.com)

<comment><USER53> Their pricing looks insane? Like an order of magnitude less than DO, OVH, ...

Edit: Looks like it's because they're using Atom and ARM based servers.

<comment><USER23> What's that mean for the common folk? Are they slower?

<comment><USER53> Yes. Slow CPUs.

<comment><USER49> The Atom servers appear to be Avoton Atoms[1], probably a C2550 or similar. While they aren't as high end as a typical Xeon, they aren't as terrible as the older Atom cpu. See this chart: [https://www.servethehome.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/Inte...](https://www.servethehome.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/Intel-Atom-C2550-hardinfo-benchmark.jpg)

[1][https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/54859/Avoton](https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/54859/Avoton)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I use linuxpl.com ([https://linuxpl.com/Hosting-Serwery- wirtualne](https://linuxpl.com/Hosting-Serwery-wirtualne)) which is ~ 12 usd / year (so just $1/ month). Comes with 2 GB of space and 50 gb bandwidth per month.

SSH access, shared hosting (so pretty powerful CPU/ram there). Currently i have about 700 daily unique visitors and growing. Used to deploy custom sites, now i use mostly wordpress. Also, i use it for my git remote repos.

Great service. Been using if for years, awesome quality for the money.

Lately had some issues but the support is helpful and they fixed whatever i wanted, enabling SSI, fixing response headers, etc. Never had to wait for a reply longer than 6 hours (usually it's just minutes, really). As a bonus, admin staff is available through odlschool IM app - Gadu-Gadu. And PHP 7 is available and easy to switch to.

The site's in polish, which sucks for you guys, but it's by far the cheapest and best solution i have for low cost hosting. I'm a happy customer.

</comment><comment><USER54> I use Nginx either on my basement server (I have 50/50 fiber internet at home) or I use one of my digital ocean droplets, which can be as cheap as 5$ a month, that is less than my server at home uses in power. A Raspberry pi would also suffice if there is not too much traffic I guess, that would cost you about 10€ a year in power. Running a whole server means there is no limit to the amount of sites you can run (apart from memory and bandwidth of course.)

Both my servers (DO vps and basement) run Ubuntu 16.04, I use PHP-fpm for PHP, domains I purchase at a local registrar (.nl domains are about 10€/year), for ssl I use lets encrypt. For simple sites I always use Bootstrap for the css.

FTP is implicit if you count SFTP as FTP (FTP over SSH). Under Linux SFTP is mounted as easily as any network share.

At home I run a Nextcloud instance and share some directories as Nginx roots, that means I can locally (even on my phone) edit a static web page and it is synced immediately to the webserver's root folder. This can be quite convenient.

</comment><comment><USER55> dreamhost.

I manage all my sites there. Never had any issues with them, there is SSH access too so I recently set up a Hugo bitbucket pipeline which builds my personal website and rysncs it to dreamhost.

They were very fast to add lets encrypt support, so all that stuff is taken care automagically. Reliability is very good.

</comment><comment><USER56> www.nearlyfreespeech.net is cheap (really cheap, hence the name) and reliable - they've been around since 2002, and I've used them since 2008.

<comment><USER57> IIRC I think the name is because they allow a lot of content that other hosts may shy away from.

<comment><USER58> It's both: "For everyone to have free speech, they need to be able to afford it."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> For static sites I use firebase hosting, quite simple to use and it includes a free SSL certificate [https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/](https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting/)

<comment><USER60> I'd appreciate if someone could jump in about the costs of a high traffic website firebase hosting, as I don't have much experience with other hosting platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I host my static stuff (with my own domains) at FastMail, it's included in my "standard" plan. Upload is possible via FTP and DAV, the quota is currently 5GB disk space, 2GB or 80K files daily traffic.

<comment><USER62> I knew I had some free space with my Fastmail account but didn't realise how much - or that I could use my own domains. That's pretty cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> StockDroids.com is hosted on S3 and served using Cloudfront. It's pretty easy to get going if you don't mind getting a little technical.

Not sure how price compares to the competition, though. HN's + /r/Android's front pages resulted in about 13K uniques and it ended up costing me ~$10 (which is insanely cheap, but GitHub + Cloudfront is free...)

Edit: I should mention that the site isn't as light it can be, currently stands at 473kb of code and about 3 megs of images. So that $10 is for ~45 gigs of traffic.

</comment><comment><USER64> If you want PHP and FTP, I've been successfully using webfaction <[https://www.webfaction.com/>](https://www.webfaction.com/>) for years now (they're a developer-friendly shared host). $10/month. Their setup is a little weird to figure out at first (they add an extra layer of indirection between domain names and applications), but once you get it it makes it very easy to set up new sites.

</comment><comment><USER65> Github Pages with CNAME file, CircleCI, Cloudflare. Free, CDN, and SSL hosted if it's all open source.

No how-to, but it's all open source here [https://github.com/barricadeio/docs](https://github.com/barricadeio/docs)

Most awkward part was figuring out the voodoo required to get Hugo and Middleman working (lots of trial and error).

</comment><comment><USER66> I use an S3 bucket. I have a Docker image that pulls Markdown out of git, runs Hugo over it and pushes the site to an S3 bucket. I set it up to work with Bitbucket pipelines so I get a site rebuild with a simple git push: [https://github.com/rabidgremlin/hugo-s3](https://github.com/rabidgremlin/hugo-s3)

<comment><USER67> Ditto. Can't beat the price + availability and flexibility of S3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I've been using Jekyll + Gitlab + S3 + Cloudfront (+ lambda).

This costs me just over 50 cents a month, almost all of which is the Route53/DNS costs.

      - Gitlab stores the source and GitlabCI builds the site.
      - Lambda triggers the build on a schedule.
      - GitlabCI pushes the site to S3 (using Gitlab ENV VARS!).
      - CloudFront as the CDN, also provides free SSL.

</comment><comment><USER69> I've been a happy customer of Register4Less.com for years, and they throw in free static hosting with every domain name. It does everything you mention except PHP and Markdown. (But you could do Markdown yourself with a static site generator!) They also provide free WHOIS privacy, which is nice.

An extra $1.45/month gets you PHP and CGI hosting, plus raised quotas.

My only caveats: The free hosting tier only gets you 10MB of space per domain (no bandwidth quotas, though!) Which has been plenty for me for everything except large photo galleries, but YMMV. Also, I've had terrible experience with their domain backordering service--the domain I backordered was quietly released and became publicly available without a peep from R4L.

Their actual domain hosting, website hosting, and technical support has been stellar, though. (Websites are actually hosted on a shared server somewhere at OVH, if Ican trust the reverse DNS info.)

</comment><comment><USER70> If you're into retro-computing and unix, there's also [http://www.sdf.org](http://www.sdf.org) and [http://tilde.club](http://tilde.club) (but, as I understand, their membeship waiting list is endless at this point).

</comment><comment><USER71> NearlyFreeSpeech.net

super simple, super cheap, never had a real problem.

</comment><comment><USER72> I prefer full control. I have a 10$ a month Digitalocean VPS with Nginx, PHP and whatever I want.

</comment><comment><USER73> You can use App Engine ([https://cloud.google.com/appengine/](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/)) to host a static site for free. It's easier to set up than S3, which I've also used.

</comment><comment><USER26> Github Pages does pretty much everything you've listed. Also Github Pages explicity allows companies to setup and host their corporate websites on there.

PROS: It is free, always available, and the deploy is easy once you get the hang of git.

<comment><USER74> One big inconvenient is that they don't support HTTPS for custom domains

<comment><USER28> Which you can solve with cloudflare for free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> For some cheap VPS you can try searching on [https://lowendbox.com/](https://lowendbox.com/) some are like $2/month (usually a year commitment)

<comment><USER76> Downside of this is that you then have to administer and secure a VPS.

<comment><USER75> that's true. they list some shared hosting providers though which cost $1.50/month and they manage the security etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> How about github.io. Github pages allows us to host our custom domains too

</comment><comment><USER78> I am on scaleway bare metal at 3.6€ per month. I use no-ip.com for the free domain name. I have a docker image to update a jekyll static site that I publish over ssh with rsync. I use fgallery for the pictures collections. For me, it is the easiest solution because I am familiar with the OS and it uses only standard tools that will never change and no fancy and broken website interface.

It is cheap enough to not bother with the limitations of most low-cost static site hosting.

</comment><comment><USER79> Another vote for AWS S3 + CloudFront here.

We also have a distributed team updating and looking after our website, and we use BitBucket as our git repo. Recently implemented their Pipelines feature to auto update the S3 bucket and refresh CloudFront resources with any changes pushed to the repo.

Makes it really easy now - just a 'git push' and Bam!, the website is updated and CloudFront auto invalidates all the old assets and starts serving up the new stuff. Really smooth.

</comment><comment><USER80> Github pages + Jekyll + Wercker for custom builds

Pros: free, convinient (a push ends up as a new post upon a successful build)

Cons: no SSL with custom domain on Github (at least not easily)

<comment><USER81> With Netlify, you get all those things with custom SSL. In fact, you don't even need your own cert as Netlify interfaces with Let's Encrypt on its own to provide a custom certificate.

It also lets you interface with Gitlabs (which has its own Github pages competitor) which provides you with free private repos. I think it's a much superior setup than Github.

<comment><USER82> Are there instructions about hooking up Netlify with GL pages? I'm currently using Cloudflare w/ my Github pages blog, but it was a bit tricky to set up and I'm considering redoing my blog anyways.

<comment><USER27> There are a few:

[https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/08/02/migrate-github- pages...](https://www.netlify.com/blog/2016/08/02/migrate-github-pages-to- netlify/) [https://vgmoose.com/blog/moving-from-github-pages-to- netlify...](https://vgmoose.com/blog/moving-from-github-pages-to- netlify-2383586894/)

<comment><USER81> It's stupidly easy I wondered why it wasn't any more popular...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Recently migrated my Hugo generated blog to Netlify and so far so good.

Deployment from git, Hugo build on server, free HTTPS with Lets Encrypt and free for my basic usage.

</comment><comment><USER84> I use github to host the source code for my static Jekyll site, but since github doesn't support HTTPS on custom domains, I use Netlify as a CDN. Netlify automatically hooks me up with an A+ rated Let's Encrypt cert setup.

So my domain points at Netlify, which pulls the site from github.

The total cost of this setup is only the yearly cost of the domain, which you can eliminate too if you use a sub-domain on netlify.

<comment><USER85> Does the free Netlify plan provide a cert?

<comment><USER86> It sets it up through Let's Encrypt with one click.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> I use orgmode publish to html and then a simple script to upload/sync to s3[1]. Hosted there + cloudflare for CDN/HTTPS. I was hosting the site myself on a linode, but I like this setup much better.

[1]: [https://www.rolando.cl/201607-1-blogging-like- its-2016.html](https://www.rolando.cl/201607-1-blogging-like-its-2016.html)

</comment><comment><USER88> I have the cheapest VPS from Linode, which is $12.50 a month including an extra $2.5/mo for their automatic backup service. (So, $10 if you don't want them to do the backup for you)

I wrote my own little script that converts markdown to html with python and push that to the server with git, but of course with a VPS you can run pretty much anything you want.

</comment><comment><USER89> Long time user of [https://idleserv.net](https://idleserv.net)

</comment><comment><USER90> surge.sh - i can get a website up in 10 seconds with a normal folder structure from my machine. i love it.

</comment><comment><USER91> middleman -> s3 -> cloudfront. About $0.15/mo.

Pros: Generally works well, speedy enough, free ssl with Cloudfront, cheap for many sites (most hosts charge per site which catches me out for little projects). I've mostly got the process figured out now...

Cons: not easy or quick to set up, lots of steps to get right, AWS is a terrible UI, Cloudfront invalidations are apparently sent by carrier pigeon so asset hashing is a must, even then it can take a while to see your site updates

I've noticed a high mortality rate among static hosting sites, particularly those "just add files to Dropbox and we publish your site" services. Static hosting services are to ops people what todo list apps are to frontend designers

Also, to your point: you can't, by definition, run php on a static site.

<comment><USER79> > Cons: not easy or quick to set up, lots of steps to get right, AWS is a > terrible UI, Cloudfront invalidations are apparently sent by carrier pigeon > so asset hashing is a must, even then it can take a while to see your site > updates

Check out the s3_website Docker container by attensee. We have it in our BitBucket pipeline, so that any push to the hosted repo will automatically copy the latest updates to our S3 bucket AND invalidate the respective assets quite quickly.

Any website refresh our developer in the US does now is usually available to look at within a minute here in Australia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> I currently have one website that's built with Jekyll and I host it for free on Github Pages. The only thing I'm paying for is the custom domain name from Namecheap. Also I set up HTTPS with Cloudflare in front of it.

I prefer this method over managing a server any day.

</comment><comment><USER93> I run a cheap OVH VPS for hosting. I can host any number of websites I want and it costs less than any static hosting service.

Also, Github Pages and Gitlab Pages are great and free. You can't beat free if it's reliable and both of those two are reliable.

</comment><comment><USER94> I host some odd static sites with my fast mail family account. Has webdav file access and a dns control panel. Since I am buying the email service anyway it's free :-) Lets you set up different hosts serving from different folders.

</comment><comment><USER95> Firebase ;) Great static hosting, HTTP/2, CDN, custom domains, and free SSL. [https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting](https://firebase.google.com/docs/hosting)

</comment><comment><USER96> I've used www.openshift.com to host a django website for free, since 2014!

</comment><comment><USER97> for non-developers, I advocate the use of google sites, which is basically a google managed wiki. very good for intranet sites, and passable for client documentation portals.

</comment><comment><USER98> aws: s3/cloudfront.

</comment><comment><USER99> [https://www.simplybuilt.com](https://www.simplybuilt.com) works pretty well. Completely free for OSS projects, which is nice.

</comment><comment><USER100> I use surge.sh, pretty easy and comfortable to use.

</comment><comment><USER101> surge.sh + cloudflare

Free static hosting with custom domain support

<comment><USER102> I'm also a big fan of this combo!

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> I wouldn't consider WordPress (and most other blog systems) static? But for real static hosting I preferre AWS S3.

</comment><comment><USER104> I like Zeit now, aerobatic.com and surge.sh

</comment><comment><USER105> I have been trying to find the perfect static site hosting solution - <USER2> a little bit engaging AWS offers the best flexibility and cost (if you use the free tier). Anyway I created a course on how to do it all: [https://www.udemy.com/go-landing- pages/?couponCode=BLACK10](https://www.udemy.com/go-landing- pages/?couponCode=BLACK10)

Anyway good luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> Octopress + Github Pages + CloudFlare = Free, Stable that can handle a good amount of traffic.

</comment><comment><USER106> Hugo + AWS S3 + Cloudflare

</comment><comment><USER107> OVH just does the job for me since years, cheap and reliable.

</comment><comment><USER108> Middleman + AWS S3 + s3_sync module. Dead simple!

</comment><comment><USER109> Google Firebase, Google App Engine, GitHub Pages

</comment><comment><USER110> hugo or jekyll static sites. tons of themes...really cool blogs. no setup. use github with a custom domain

</comment><comment><USER111> Dropbox public folder is pretty useful.

<comment><USER112> Dropbox no longer supports HTML rendering/hosting for their free users.

Dropbox Pro and Business users have a grace period till September 1, 2017.

[https://www.dropbox.com/help/16](https://www.dropbox.com/help/16)

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> i use ramnode. my setup is rather simple with git push and git hook to build along with cloudflare

</comment><comment><USER114> AWS S3 with custom domain

</comment><comment><USER115> GitHub Pages or Firebase.

</comment><comment><USER116> github.io, using it to power the yosai project and my own blog

</comment><comment><USER117> Namecheap hosting

</comment><comment><USER118> S3

</comment><comment><USER119> AWS S3.

</comment><comment><USER120> github, we are developer.

</comment><comment><USER121> Look for deals on LowEndBox, there are some amazing ones.</comment>


How to natively use ssl with haproxy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.exceliance.fr/2012/09/10/how-to-get-ssl-with-haproxy-getting-rid-of-stunnel-stud-nginx-or-pound

<comment><AUTHOR> a followup to last week's news that haproxy has integrated ssl now.</comment>


Best book/paper you read in 2018? - <AUTHOR> What's the best book or paper you read in the last year, and why? 'Best' in terms of value it gave you personally - what's something you learnt from it, or something you used from it, or was it inspiring, what possibilities did it show you; what question(s) did it answer for you, where did it lead etc. Thank you.<p>I guess it could as well be a lecture, talk, video etc, I don't want to rule something out just because of the format. <comment><USER3> If you have taken some "intro to proofs" or "intro to abstract algebra" or "intro linear algebra" or any other such course where you've seen rigorous proofs, then Jay Cummings' "Real Analysis: A Long-Form Mathematics Textbook" [0] is simply a phenomenal introduction to real analysis. It's a fast paced tour de force through rigorous analysis.

I actually wrote a longer comment, but I had to invoke the names of other authors. Better not. Either way, I love the book.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Real-Analysis-Long-Form- Mathematics-T...](https://www.amazon.com/Real-Analysis-Long-Form-Mathematics- Textbook/dp/1724510126/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1542422962&sr=1-1&keywords=jay+cummings)

<comment><USER4> Got any recommendation for those other intro ones with rigorous proofs? Teaching maths and looking to move from a physics background to more pure maths one.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Scott McCloud's _Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art_ (1994), an amazing book on the history, science and philosophy of comics, is itself a comic...then checking out most of the cartoonists he mentions that I hadn't heard of[0], too many to mention. I discovered a load of great stuff from that, e.g. the graphic novels of Will Eisner and wordless novels of Lynd Ward.

[0] Library Genesis's comics section helped with that [http://libgen.io/comics/index.php](http://libgen.io/comics/index.php)

</comment><comment><USER5> "A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas"

It's a very insightful read on how you can see the world differently by simply asking questions (even if you never get an answer)

[https://www.amazon.com/More-Beautiful-Question-Inquiry- Break...](https://www.amazon.com/More-Beautiful-Question-Inquiry- Breakthrough/dp/1632861054)

</comment><comment><USER6> "Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst" by Sapolsky was my favorite. I knew little about neurobiology, and this went a little deeper.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sapolsky's 25 lecture series on Human Behavioral Biology: He's such a wonderful lecturer.

[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL150326949691B199](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL150326949691B199)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Subtle art of not giving a f$@k

And Ray Dalio's Principles.

Both of those gave me personal aha moments. Neither was what I expected but both delivered.

</comment><comment><USER8> " _Why We Sleep_ ", by Matthew Walker [1]. I've read a lot about sleep over the years, but I still found it fascinating and comprehensive.

I've mentioned the book on several other threads [2], so I'll avoid repeating here.

Along the same lines of expanding the ability of your body/mind, one that I'm currently reading is " _What doesn 't kill us_" [3]. Pretty fascinating to think that we have a lot more control over our immune system than originally thought.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking- Dreams/dp/1501...](https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking- Dreams/dp/1501144324/)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606274](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606274)

[3] [https://www.amazon.com/What-Doesnt-Kill-Environmental- Condit...](https://www.amazon.com/What-Doesnt-Kill-Environmental- Conditioning/dp/1623366909)

</comment><comment><USER9> _The Innovator's Dilemma_ by Clayton Christensen (the book itself is 20 years old but I only read it recently). It's a fantastic analysis of why successful companies get displaced by disruptive technologies —or, the other way around, why it's so complicated to innovate in successful companies.

The underlying reasons exposed by the book are timeless and universal. As I read the book (which, again, is 20 years old and focuses on the hard drive industry) I recognized all the pitfalls my previous company went through as it was trying to adapt to public Cloud.

This book is a powerful lens to look at disruptive innovation, well-written and very thoroughly researched. A must read if you're working in technology IMO.

</comment><comment><USER10> Shoe dog by Phil Knight. It's a memoir by the co-founder of Nike. This is one of my favorite books till now. The biggest reason being that it's a perfect combo of personal and business story of company that started with $50 and is now selling over $30B of goods annually. It's motivational, lucid, and keeps you on your toes. Phil is a great story-teller and I almost felt as if I was part of the story. A definite 5/5.

</comment><comment><USER11> not a paper that came out this year but Emergence of Locomotion Behaviors in Rich Environments by Google deepmind: ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.02286](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.02286))

made me realize that although RL is brittle and slow it can still be super effective the problem domains I care about (robot locomotion).

</comment><comment><USER12> Atomic Habits by James Clear.

I work on a habit building platform so read almost all books and papers on habit building and behavioral science. This recent book by James Clear has summarized the key points of what's known about building and replacing habits. It's easy to read and most importantly - practical.

<comment><USER13> I am interested in these topics as well, can you share your top 5 resources besides Atomic Habits?

<comment><USER12> sure:

James Clear, the above author has the blog where he writes about habits extensively: www.jamesclear.com

Tiny Habits is a habit program created by Stanford Prof BJ Fogg - www.tinyhabits.com

21 Day Hero (shameless plug) - is a place where you start building habits through 21 day challenges. We're transitioning however to full-on habit building journey, through an app and other tools/programs - www.21dayhero.com

Selfication - [http://www.selfication.com/](http://www.selfication.com/) \- is also a great blog in the behavioral science direction

Best apps out there is Fabulous, Spar!, Habitica, Pacifica and many others.

If you want this all in one - our team actually have this secret habit landscape map done, which includes all books, apps, researchers, blogs in the habit space. Haven't shared publicly yet. But can email it to you if you wish

<comment><USER13> This is excellent, thanks a bunch! I'd love to have that list, can you email it to me please? [https://aalhour.com/contact](https://aalhour.com/contact)

<comment><USER12> sure, just did.

<comment><USER13> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Thorstein Veblen's "The Theory of the Leisure Class" (1899). The book was difficult to read for me since the language is very archaic, but it pretty much explained a lot about how class and community is structured.

As an introvert and a social recluse, this book is a goldmine; it eased a lot of confusions in my head about how society and class structures work, and taught me to better avoid the pitfalls of consumerism and peer pressure.

<comment><AUTHOR> I loved that too! Apparently there was Veblen craze in the US when that came out, Veblen societies everywhere. Here's a bit I liked:

...the cheap, and therefore indecorous, articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are commonly machine products; and the generic feature of the physiognomy of machine-made goods as compared with the hand- wrought article is their greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both. Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the characterisation here given would have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper. - <USER2>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Shoe Dog by Phil Knight (founder of Nike).

Hands down the best autobiography I have read. I personally learned a lot about how a brand is created rather than a business. How businesses were built even before VC capital was a thing. And how life is all about making tradeoffs.

</comment><comment><USER16> __How Google works __[https://www.howgoogleworks.net/](https://www.howgoogleworks.net/)

Those ideas and principles of building a successful Google, from making great product, build the great culture and hiring the smart creative people.

</comment><comment><USER17> \- Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better

\- Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future

</comment><comment><USER18> Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Alboom, really great book about life and everything brilliant about it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Microsoft Windows by filter.net Software origins always fascinated me. It was a new world discovery in very recent history.

</comment><comment><USER20> Inadequate Equilibria - Where and How civilizations get stuck

By Eliezer Yudkowsky

First book in a long time which really made me see the world differently and taught better thinking.

[0] [https://equilibriabook.com](https://equilibriabook.com)

</comment><comment><USER21> Creativity Inc. It's about Pixar.

</comment><comment><USER22> Gunter Pauli - The Blue Economy

</comment><comment><USER23> Bad Blood

</comment><comment><USER23> Bad Blood.</comment>


DjangoStack - <AUTHOR> http://bitnami.org/stack/djangostack

<comment><USER2> This stack is awesome. I spent months trying to build an easy-to-replicate django environment, and after I discovered bitnami, it was a piece of cake. Highly recommended for local development.

<comment><USER3> > _I spent months trying to build an easy-to-replicate django environment_

Really? What problems did you encountered?

      sudo aptitude install apache2 libapache2-mod-wsgi  \
        mysql-server-5.0 python-mysqldb python-django

Or if you want more flexibility in regards to available packages ...

      sudo aptitude install python-pip python-virtualenv
      virtualenv ~/django-env
      pip -E ~/django-env install Django
      source ~/django-env/bin/activate

And yeah, you still need to configure an app.wsgi and the site in /etc/apache2/sites-available, but it doesn't take longer than 20 minutes the first time, and then you can easily replicate it (personally I have a little script written by me that does the configuration). Just cargo-cult the stuff in here ... [http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/deployment/modwsg...](http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/deployment/modwsgi/)

<comment><USER4> Do you mind sharing your django.wsgi file? I'm trying to set this up right now for a site I'm working on. After looking throught the docs and some blog posts it wasn't clear to me how to hook up apache and virtualenv. Do you source in the env via the activate script? I feel like I'm missing something. Thanks.

<comment><USER3> Basically in the WSGI file (which is just python code) you need to insert the virtual-env site packages in sys.path, with something like this ...

      virtenvdir = '/path/to/virtual-env/lib/python2.5/site-packages/'

      import sys
      if virtenvdir not in sys.path:
          sys.path.insert(0, virtenvdir)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> But that isn't my stack. What about nginx, memcache, and more recently a nosql tool like couchdb.

I got the impression the first is rocketing in popularity, the second is ubiquitous, and the third is inevitable at scale. Why start with anything less?

<comment><USER6> > _But that isn't my stack. What about nginx, memcache, and more recently a > nosql tool like couchdb._

If you're working with a project that _needs_ nginx over apache, and _needs_ nosql, then you won't be using a packaged solution anyway.

> Why start with anything less?

Because it's better than not starting.

Beisdes, "less" in this case is subjective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shameless plug: there's also <http://www.turnkeylinux.org/django></comment>


The White House is wooing tech workers to do tours of duty in government - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/ <comment><USER2> wrong link

<comment><AUTHOR> Too late. WaPo doing its thing.</comment></comment>


My math teacher site from 01.04.2008 - <AUTHOR> http://lo.szczecinek.pl/matma/matma.html

<comment><USER2> The web of 2008 didn't look like this. Looks more like '98.</comment>


3 secret Apple TV features Steve Jobs hasn't told you about - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/gaming.gadgets/10/01/apple.tv.secrets.wired/

<comment><USER2> But can you (reverse-)pinch to zoom and swipe to scroll?

<comment><USER2> Sure I was being sarcastic, but why a downvote? It is a legitimate issue. If it is jailbroken and you put apps written for iOS on it, how you would perform pinches and swipes type commands via remote? I'm not saying that iOS was the wrong choice, but it seems like it needs to be geared towards a completely different input device and screen.

<comment><USER3> Easy... Use iOS device as multi-touchpad

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why is there so much talk about apple tv like places on CNN, without any mentioned of the first-to-announce Google TV?

<comment><USER5> The Apple TV was announced back in 2007. The new model isn't radically different other than being much smaller and possibly doing more in the future.

<comment><USER6> The old model was a cost-reduced Mac Mini. The new one is pretty much an iPad- in-a-box. That's radical enough for me.</comment></comment></comment>