We can't see our culture very well, because we see with it - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/hand-brain/william-gibson-57e75f87e525 <comment><USER2> One of my biggest eureka-moments I had when I moved to the states from Denmark — wasn't what I learned about the US — but what I learned about Denmark.

I suddenly saw things about my own culture clearly when I wasn't surrounded by confirmation bias of specific ways of looking at things.

One of the most eye-opening experiences for me; If you wan't to understand something you need to understand it through things that are related to it not the things themselves. I have applied this to many other things in live (want to understand design, read about the things that are related to design instead of design itself.

<comment><USER3> I think international travel should be mandatory, especially for US citizens. The longest I've stayed anywhere overseas is a month, but even a few days in another country can be eye-opening.

<comment><USER4> Transatlantic roundtrip airfare for a family of 4 at a time kids will have off from school is around $5500. That's before you start getting places to sleep for any appreciable amount of time, car rentals or train tickets (which are quite expensive), etc.

Median income in the US is around $50,000. $7-8k is a family car, most of somebody's student loan balance, the entire electronics budget for ~5 years. You want them to piss it all away on a week or two? Fuck no.

International travel is a luxury for the extremely privileged. Hell, I was pretty privileged - my parents made a total of around $110k in a low-cost-of- living city - and $3,500 for New York City was a once-in-a-lifetime treat.

Granted, there are ways to do it outside of the family, like study-abroad programs. But then in addition to the cost of the vacation you're paying full tuition to not take real classes and (if you're in a field like CS) delaying graduation by a semester or more because you're not making any progress on your major.

Analysts say current airline prices are hilariously, unsustainably low. It's only going to get far, far worse.

EDIT: I should say that vacations are important and we do take them. We drive 10-15 hours and stay at AirBnbs in other 3rd-string US cities that, while pleasant, are not high-end tourist destinations. Nashville, Lawrence, Raleigh- Durham, Cape Cod, far-flung D.C. suburbs, etc. With a Prius and more than 2 people, driving far is cheaper than flying pretty much everywhere in the continental US.

<comment><USER5> Without even getting into money - try taking 2 or 3 weeks off work and see if you still have your job in most places... taking time off is a rarity in the U.S for anything short of maternity leave. Meanwhile many other countries have _mandatory_ time off. As in "you better take off at least 21 days this year."

Seriously, just take a look at this. [0] United States has _0_ days off. Over half the list is >15 days. Those people have time off to go on a 2 week vacation.

You might note that US workers can "earn" up to 20 days. Taking off those days is usually looked down upon and can hurt chances of promotions. Being fired shortly after returning from an "extended leave" is not unheard of.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_empl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_employment_leave_by_country)

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, many people will look at this list and tell you that's why the United States is so much more prosperous. Vacation time and workers rights == laziness in many people's minds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "I already am eating from the trashcan all the time. The name of this trashcan is ideology.

The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating. It's not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology."[1]

This is a really nice documentary about all the unspoken assumptions that permeate our day to day lives, I would really recommend everybody to see it.

None of this is scientific or empirical, but the thing is, neither are the myriad of day-to-day assumptions that we usually take as obvious or common sense.

[1] The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012)

<comment><USER7> I thoroughly enjoy Zizek, and to actually understand him I would recommend reading his work, because the Zizek of cinema or Youtube really is a confusing, tiny glimpse of his thought.

I'll also note that he's pretty unpopular in this forum. He can be pretty brutal to thinkers popular here, such as Steven Pinker. [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kugiufHh800&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kugiufHh800&feature=youtu.be&t=1h56m30s)

<comment><USER8> I both agree and disagree with both of your points. Heh : )

a) I think that The Pervert's Guide to Ideology is quite self-contained and digestible without the need to read his (entire) work. There are YouTube clips of some of his talks/lectures that are pretty standalone as well.

b) I like Zizek. So he's popular with me for what it's worth. I like Pinker too though. Hmm. Can we not just all get along?

<comment><USER7> a) I disagree still... let's put it this way, on a forum like r/zizek where people discuss Zizek's positions, it's patently obvious who hasn't actually read Zizek and who just watches YouTube and the Pervert's Guides, which is what a lot of Zizek fans do because they find the reading intimidating (it certainly is, at first). Don't read his entire work, just Less than Nothing, or one of his self-proclaimned important works.

b) We can like and appreciate both (I do too). They are compatible to an extent, but some facets of behavior described from a pure evo psych or cog sci perspective conflict with a Lacanian-Hegelian one. My friend is a Steven Pinker fanatic, and we are in constant debate anytime we meet up for beers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Some of my friends report how eating certain mushrooms made the super creative. I have asked what they created? Nothing. The reason why they think they we're creative is because they _felt_ creative.

This article made similar thing for me with respect to learning. I feel like I learned something. But I really don't remember what.

<comment><USER10> I actually buy that psychedelics make people more creative. People fall into more predictable mental ruts than random exploration would, so anything that kicks the brain out of the patterns it wants to match to is going to help.

<comment><USER11> Agree. "Creative," may be a misleading term if interpreted literally and nothing tangible has been created, but colloquially, I think we use the term more to refer to patterns of thought and behavior that derail the self or others from their normal patterns.

<comment><USER12> Agree. Maybe it comes down to the relationship between "creative" and "productive". They're related without being synonymous. I think "chemically" is just one way of accomplishing the goal of thinking differently but as it's a pretty reliable method (albeit an occasionally overpowered one) it comes up a lot.

I'll leave the discussions of whether the various drawbacks outweigh the benefits for another conversation but it's hard to deny that treating yourself chemically can be a very direct and effective way to ensure your thought patterns and processes are temporarily changed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Marshall McLuhan once said that the last thing a fish would ever notice in it's habitat is the water. Likewise, the most obvious and powerful realities of our human culture seem to also be the most unrecognised.

[http://stoweboyd.com/2013/07/12/marshall-mcluhan-once- said-t...](http://stoweboyd.com/2013/07/12/marshall-mcluhan-once-said-that- the-last-thing-a/)

<comment><USER14> My pet peeve is people who see or read about a single festival in another culture, then talk about how "we have no culture, not like those people over there and their rich one". Yet we still go and see movies, wear certain kinds of fashion, go to sportsball events, celebrate the birth days of those near and dear, participate in office kris kringles, learn to play a particular set of musical instruments, eat out at restaurants, live in nuclear families, argue over how to set the cutlery for a dinner party... so on and so forth.

<comment><USER15> The academic definition of culture isn't the one implied when most people say "culture". The common and daily usage of "culture" is more linked to explicit "expressions" of culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> NB: I'm finding this article impossible to read, even in Reader Mode, due to the animated images within its main body.

1\. Do. Not. Fucking. Do. This.

2\. Firefox: include element blocking / image removal, or at the very fucking least, animation blocking/suppression, in Reader Mode.

<comment><USER17> The animated images are ridiculous. When I read your comment I thought "Oh great another article using one second gifs of popular tv shows to seem funny". But it's worse than that. It's literally just text.

<comment><USER16> Jitter-type images are among the more staggeringly annoying.

I'll admit I've been known to abuse animations myself. When G+ introduced "cover photos" always visible on profile pages which couldn't be hidden and filled upwards of half the screen, I compiled a set of the most annoying animated gifs I could find. Out of protest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Similar, but on another level, is how we can't see our mind very well, because, well yeah...

That's one of the things meditation leads to, a sort or meta-mind state where you can observe the workings of your mind. A very subtle yet profound experience.

</comment><comment><USER19> This concept has been developed very well, imo, by people like Zizek. I honestly don't care much for his political follies or his real academic research- when it comes to discussing ideology, he's doing the best outreach bar none.

Here's him giving a talk at Google: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x0eyNkNpL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x0eyNkNpL0)

A friend of mine also parsed it well like this:

> _" I think there is something to be said to the effect that laziness is > actually where we can find a lot of insight - as it's when we're lazy, when > we cannot be bothered, or at least where we think it is not essential to > focus our attention for the sake of the work at least, that we tend to defer > to the implicit shared attitudes or beliefs about the world to do the > lifting for us."_

</comment><comment><USER20> Sartre described this on a more abstract level in his essay "La transcendence de l'ego: Esquisse d'une description phénomenologique"[0], which essentially says that the active level of consciousness can never be reflected upon because the moment we reflect upon it it becomes passive, being reflected upon by a higher level of consciousness.

[0] english wp article about the essay: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transcendence_of_the_Ego](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transcendence_of_the_Ego)

</comment><comment><USER21> In the Quran, it states "We have made you into nations and tribes, so that you may know one another [... not that you may despise one another]."

We can only see ourselves once we see someone who is different.

</comment><comment><USER22> I suppose I have an "outsider's" view on cultural matters but I've always been highly skeptical of framing culture in such absolute terms. While it is true culture is a nebulous concept that has a tendency to leak everywhere doesn't mean that it's so smoke-and-mirrors that you can never sit back and examine things. Many people are forced to do this through talk therapy via the development of unhealthy thinking patterns because of a life circumstance in which they developed them.

I don't know what this article is trying to say or what it's trying to teach. It seems to be the word version of a pastel grunge aesthetic blogger.

</comment><comment><USER23> Terence McKenna - Culture is Not Your Friend: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw_lS6IuLeQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw_lS6IuLeQ)

<comment><USER9> I think this is great.

He says pretty convincingly that collectivity is bad for us as individuals. And that individualism is bad for us as society.

Then he suggests that we should abandon society so we could act as individuals. And abandon our individual habits to form dream society.

This perfectly shows that he is unable to really understand society or individualism. Which are also essential blocks of our existence. I feel I understand it better, but probably so did he. Maybe none of us understands it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is the obvious answer to the fundamental question of epistemology: would I think what I think if I didn't think the way I think?

The answer is obviously "no", but the next questions that arise from that are more complicated ("What would I think if I thought differently?" "Is there a 'correct' way to think?" "How can I validate my thinking?" "Is there a way to move my thinking towards a more 'correct' way?").

</comment><comment><USER25> The study of criticism teaches one to crack open cultural artifacts like novels, paintings, plays, movies, etc. and look for the motivations and influences of their creators. It is a very useful way to examine a culture, including a culture you might find yourself in, even if it is a culture that you grew up in and would therefore be sort of blind to.

And it provides a set of mental tools that can be useful for the rest of your life, to answer questions like "why did he write that email?" or "why did that politician say that?" or "what does this news article really mean?" This is why I recommend that even technical track students like engineers take a few liberal arts classes if they can.

</comment><comment><USER26> > We can't see our culture very well, because we see with it

Sounds like a theorem of incompleteness :).

<comment><USER27> I wouldn't read too much into _that_. In that vein, I think it makes more sense to look at culture as the lossy compression we use to store value judgements of our experience -- accepting that we can only store a fraction of the "raw" data.

The best way to combat the natural narrow-mindedness that _any_ culture forces on you, is to travel -- and if possible live for a long time (6-12 months) submerged in a different culture. The best time to do this, is probably before you fully become an adult -- living with a host-family as the "child" of a foreign culture allows/requires a degree of acceptance that is very valuable if the goal is to widen the idea of culture. Having two cultures that are sometimes contrasting, but also accepted as "real" allows one to introspect -- and realize that one really have to question _everything_ \-- there are very few universal truths.

For those that are, or have, teenagers in the house, and have the means -- I strongly advice to look into international volunteer inter-cultural programs, like:

[https://www.afs.org](https://www.afs.org)

[https://www.yfu.org](https://www.yfu.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > We do tend to have this unexamined assumption that the individual is a huge > fucking deal. Because it feels to use that we are. Because our neurological > equipment seems to demonstrate to each of us that we are quite obviously the > exact center of the universe.

Taking time to practise stepping outside one's own POV and attempting to measure your life objectively against whatever scale of value you hold is one of the most worthwhile and fulfilling disciplines I know.

It is exactly what 'prayer' is, though that word comes with the baggage of traditional religion which may be offputting.

But in reality you don't have to be religious to pray.

<comment><USER29> Perhaps you confused "prayer" with "meditation" or something else?

<comment><USER30> There are many different kinds of prayer in the (for example) Christian tradition. You might be thinking of intercessionary prayer, but there is also contemplative prayer which is indeed a lot more like meditation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I was born and brought up in India and have lived in the U.S for around 6+ years before finally returning back home recently.

Living outside your own country for a significant length time is pretty mind expanding. This is what I have realized:

Culture is a very real thing. A lot of the thoughts that we have are not really our own. They are a product of the culture around you. It is pretty incredible to observe.

This is just from my perspective.

America values rugged individualism while most asian countries including India, China, Japan, Philippines value the opposite. Here are some things I found pretty interesting.

America: Family

1\. Your child doesn't owe anything to you. No child asks to be born. You made the choice to have a baby and so it is your duty and responsibility to educate them well and provide basic comfort and security. It is your responsibility to meet your own emotional needs. American parents feel like they are failures if their kid continues to stay in their home after they reach adulthood. Even the adult children feel the same way. I remember Travis Kalanick mentioning the time he was living with his parents as pretty depressing (after his startup Redswoosh failed) If you want to insult someone here you can say, "Are you still staying with your parents?. You need to move out of your parent's basement!"

Once the kids move out, the parents reconnect with each other and will try and pursue their own interests.

India

Your life is a gift from your parents who will be the number one priority in your life. You owe your parents everything. Indian parents will do _ANYTHING_ and _everything_ for their kids. They will sell their property and get into a lot of debt, if it comes to that, to educate their kids and to make sure they have a great life. Kids are expected to honor and listen to their parents. Even after marriage there is a tug of war between the mom/dad who feels that their kid is being stolen from them by the spouse. If you want to insult an Indian you can just say, "He/she doesn't respect elders". In India parents work hard so their kids can enjoy their money and property. People admire kids who stay and live with their parents. Even celebrities who are worth many millions of dollars stay together with their parents as a family and there is nothing disrespectful about it. The children are an extension of their selves and there is a deep life long attachment. The kids will take care of their parents in their old age. People get very offended if you ask them if their parents are living in an old age home/retirement/assisted facilities.

"A marriage is considered to be a union between two families and not two people!", is a common dialogue heard everywhere in India. Most people say this as if it is the most obvious truth. It's almost like saying the sky is blue. In the US, a marriage is considered a union between two individuals and not two families.

Again, here is the question. How come most Americans feel exactly the same way? How come most Indians feel the opposite?

2\. The need to learn a foreign language.

Most Indians know three languages. 1. Their own native language (like, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati etc) 2. Hindi 3. English. A lot of people know and understand upto 4 or even 5 languages. So, there is nothing special about knowing different languages. People won't be impressed if you tell them you know French, Spanish or Mandarin. It's like telling someone that you can hop on one leg for a few miles. A difficult but pointless achievement.

For many Americans, knowing a foreign language is a big deal. They will go to great lengths to learn Spanish, French or Mandarin. Mark Zuckerberg showed off his ability to speak Mandarin a while back. I read one answer in Quora (which an elderly person wrote) mentioning that he regrets not being able to learn a foreign language. Tim Ferris shows off his foreign language acquisition skills to impress visitors to his blog and tv shows.

Again I have to ask the same question: How come most people in the US feel this way? To an outsider it seems really silly and absurd.

3\. "4 people". In India, many people live for the sake of society. This is true everywhere. Most people want to impress others but it is at a completely different level in India. People make life changing decisions not based on their own interests but for the sake of society. There are 20+ plus languages in India and interestingly, almost every single language has this phrase "4 people". Are you planning to quit your job at Google to do your own startup? What will the "4 people" around you think? What do you mean you are not getting married? What will the "4 people" say? Conformity is everything. If your older sibling or younger sibling marries someone from a different race/caste/religion then it means that your family doesn't have a value system and it will be difficult for you to find a spouse because you come from a family with no values.

4\. Inquisitiveness. Indian people are very inquisitive. If you are overweight, they will advise you to start dieting. "Looks like you've been eating a lot. You need to lose weight", is a common refrain. They will ask you how much something costs, how much money you make per year and enquire about your properties and other assets. If you tell them you booked a flight from L.A to Delhi, the first question they will ask is about the flight cost. If you are their friend they will quiz you about your savings. Again, this is not just one person or two but most people in India.

Again, the same question, why do most people born in a certain culture all behave in a certain way? It's almost like people are hypnotized en-masse into believing some things as fundamental truths. Pretty surreal to experience it.

<comment><USER32> Do you think either culture can make a case for itself being superior? I have witnessed firsthand the abuse and corruption that stems from Asian "family- first, materialistic" approach and honestly believe the American way stands a far better chance of creating someone who has self respect while still being able to function in groups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Noting before reading that 15mb of animated GIF's is not a great way for an article to make a first impression.

<comment><USER34> And in this case, their being gifs or images add nothing of value to the article. They're just quotes superimposed over faces with blinking text. Aesthetics over functionality.

<comment><USER35> This whole article is something you would normally see on Tumblr. Also, I can't read text on GIFs, it's very unpleasant and makes me feel dizzy.</comment></comment></comment>


Rackspace acquires Mailgun (YC W11) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/28/rackspace-acquires-y-combinator-startup-mailgun-an-api-that-abstracts-creating-email-inboxes-for-apps-and-web-sites/

<comment><USER2> Congratulations.

Also, TC, sigh. If you can't find someone to articulate the value proposition for not hosting one's own email, I can help (+). Saying "young devs can't figure out email" once makes you sound ageist, saying it three times makes you sound stupid.

\+ Email makes businesses a lot of money. Delivery optimization is a full-time job. Securing a new email server is highly non-trivial. Existing options for controlling first-party inboxes and outgoing email with a web application rely on brittle shell scripts and Deep Magick. There are operational inflection points in administering email servers; navigating one incorrectly means the business dies until addressed; many quickly quickly growing companies will hit three to four of them. (Some popular web app genres can hit three to four within weeks of launch - coupons or social anything, for example.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely agree (and that TC headline is terrible). We're an email startup (not the delivery side). I had the pleasure of speaking with Ev @ Mailgun early on in our life. He gave us tremendous help figuring out how not screw up delivery.

That conversation also made me realize we didn't want to worry about all of the things that companies like mailgun do well. I'm more than happy to leave the intricacies of email delivery to the experts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I congratulate the Mailgun team and I wish them all the best, but Rackspace's previous acquisitions bode ill for the future of Mailgun.

Rackspace acquired CloudKick in late 2010 and Anso Labs in February of 2011. Both teams must have been put on other projects, because their products have stagnated. CloudKick no longer lets people sign up. Their blog, <https://www.cloudkick.com/blog/>, has broken images and few updates. I couldn't find any products by Anso Labs, so I googled the founders. It looks like they no longer work at Rackspace: [http://gigaom.com/cloud/openstack- developers-leave-rackspace...](http://gigaom.com/cloud/openstack-developers- leave-rackspace-for-nebula/)

Again I wish the best for Mailgun, but I really hope they know what they're getting into. If I were a customer, I would be wary right now.

<comment><USER4> CloudKick is perhaps one example, but Slicehost is a counterpoint. It became their Rackspace Cloud offering, which is quite good.

<comment><USER3> Did it? I thought Rackspace was using OpenStack. And there was that PR debacle migrating Slicehost accounts to Rackspace Cloud. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2510300> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2515650>

<comment><USER5> I work at Rack. Our legacy compute provider is based on the Slicehost code. Our new Open Cloud offering is based on OpenStack nova.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the clarification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just to be clear, Mailgun is still offered as a stand alone service and existing customers do not have to make any changes. Some more info is available on our blog: <http://blog.mailgun.net/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Rackspace has a nice deal with SendGrid (free SendGrid for Rackspace customers)(<https://sendgrid.com/products/rackspace>). I wonder if this remains as well as if there were any discussions on a SendGrid acquisition? I suspect SendGrid might be aiming higher.

</comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations to everybody at Mailgun. Rackspace has a nice setup in SOMA, you will be joining forces with the uber smart CloudKick crew.

</comment><comment><USER9> Congrats Roman and co, but I am not surprised. Your enthusiastic support and the effort you have poured into the product is something I will learn from.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ev and Taylor are fantastic :) Those guys live and breathe email. Congratulations to everyone at Mailgun!</comment>


No paper, no PhD? India rethinks graduate student policy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01692-8 <comment><USER2> This is a huge step backward for Indian science and it's really sad to see. India already is far behind China and not even comparable to the US or Europe. Now they'll fall far further behind.

You don't get your PhD in US/Canadian/European universities without publications. Not in physics, math, cs, psychology, neuroscience, etc. Publications don't just show you can do things, but they hold your advisers to account to make sure they're also pushing out new ideas, they hold entire departments to account. If a department can't produce enough new ideas and research to get 1 paper per PhD student out, then they are failing and should be dealt with by the university administration. Failing to graduate PhDs is a critical metric in finding such problems and dealing with them.

What this does is just entrench India's failure in the research world. Lazy senior researchers will get lazier. Young researchers will have far less incentive to keep moving. Departments won't be held to account anymore. And low-quality PhDs will keep being minted.

I'm not a fan of publish or perish, and it's damned stressful sometimes. But 1 paper per PhD student is not a burden. It's a bare minimum and advisers should be ashamed if this is all that they can publish with a student through their PhD.

India is pumping out huge amounts of junk research, mediocre PhDs, and is just stagnant overall in research. This is short sighted, lazy, and will hurt everyone there.

<comment><USER3> > You don't get your PhD in US/Canadian/European universities without > publications.

This is not a national requirement however. I bet you could find a PhD granting institution in the US that doesn't require publication.

Moreover, there's spillover effects from requiring this; I'm told in China that medical journals are facing a dire problem of research fraud, due to research publications being tied to promotions in the medical community ([https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(15\)60700-0/fulltext)). It seems reasonable to assume incentivizing publications will reduce the quality of publications, whether the incentive is a promotion or a degree.

The question I have though, is what harm there is in reverting to a socially enforced standard. It's pretty easy to screen out PhD applicants without a publication, and I don't know of anyone who's too busy churning through PhDs to give their scholarly output at least a brief glance. If the screening device is available cheaply, who is harmed by this legislation?

<comment><USER4> FWIW that social standard, and the mindset behind it can really penalize some fields. FWIW, in some fields of neuroscience it is common even for very successful phds to not publish before defense, and a single paper requires massive amounts of work, while other neuro fields churn out short paper after short paper because the culture is focused that way, and the experiments less time consuming.

It puts some students at a severe disadvantage for hiring because they get screened out because they chose a field that publishes 50 page papers instead of 2 page papers.

<comment><USER3> Is it common to see people hiring the category of 'PhD in anything at all' and not 'PhD in neuroscience or highly related subject?'

<comment><USER4> I'm saying that even within neuroscience there is large variation in publication frequency and expectation.

So if person from neuro discipline A and neuro discipline B are applying for the same job in data science, discipline A could get screened out because they spent years training a monkey to do a brain machine interface task while person B published five fMRI papers in three years. Neither candidate is going to use their specific neuro expertise, but rather their general data science skill set. One will be at a huge disadvantage unless she is hired directly by people who know her field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first publication related to my thesis appeared nearly a year and a half after I graduated. Part of the reason is that, at least in pure math, it might take 3-6 months to receive a _rejection_!

<comment> semi-extrinsic I made the error, early in my PhD, of naming the git repo for one of my papers "prestigiousJournalYearX". It didn't end up in that journal, and it took something like two years more than Year X. Not a good idea, with the constant reminder of falling short of your earlier goals, and I never could get myself to rename it either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems like a poor answer to the wrong question. The problem is not that students are being preyed on by publishers, the real question is why they aren't publishing in reputable journals and conferences.

I was a volunteer for the IEEE SoutheastCon one year. It was amazing; almost none of the authors showed up for the conference. It was enough for them to get the publication and enough for the IEEE that they'd payed the registration fee.

<comment><USER7> In my field it's standard that if you don't show up, your paper is not published in proceedings - and normally those proceedings are in an IEEE Transactions journal.

<comment><USER6> There's apparently quite a bit of difference between the single-subject conferences and the regional, general conferences. The latter are primarily about funding the regional groups, while the former are only partially about funding the groups (yeah, I'm still bitter about ICDCS '98).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing to note here is that India has massive credential over demand. An international hotel can require Master's degrees in English for its front desk staff. So it doesn't matter that these PhDs can't do original research because 99% of them won't be.

<comment><USER9> So pretty much where the US is headed then?

(I've met a technical support person with a master's degree in CS)

<comment><USER10> I met an Uber driver who was doing his PhD in CS and specifically in machine learning!

<comment><USER11> That should tell you how grad students are paid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> US universities seem to do fine without a government-mandated Ph.D. publication requirement.

However, helping grad students publish and present their work in a high- quality, peer-reviewed context is one of the most important things that graduate advisors can and should do. I am certainly OK with institutions making that a requirement for advisors.

<comment><USER13> US system computes hell out of statistics for ranking and validation of quality. Other countries, including India or China, has no such things. There, universities/institutes are "ranked" by sort of public perception and media image. It is not uncommon in these countries to buy PhD degrees by simply contracting ghost writers and/or publish in to shady for-fee publications. Government mandates have typically evolved in these countries for a reason.

<comment><USER3> > US system computes hell out of statistics for ranking and validation of > quality. Other countries, including India or China, has no such things. > There, universities/institutes are "ranked" by sort of public perception and > media image.

Having worked in university administration, I can assure you these two things are not so different after all. US News ranking, is for example, a survey of professors and high school councilors, plus some reporting about things like overall budget per faculty member and per student, and yes, some statistics about the incoming class.

And... the ghost writing problem is not unheard of in the US. After all, a lot of PhD candidates hail from India and China, so this shouldn't surprise you overmuch.

> Government mandates have typically evolved in these countries for a reason.

I suspect it's because of government mandates in these countries and others. For example, advanced degrees help in obtaining visa status in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, I like most things that involve moving away from the publish or perish culture in academia. On the other hand, this doesn't seem to be a productive way to do that. This seems to be trying to attack poor quality publishers through an indirect method which likely will not solve the problem - people are still incentivized to publish in other ways and the root cause needs to be hit to make any real progress. I also think that having at least one publication during an entire PHD is not an unreasonable request - ending publish or perish shouldn't be pursued by trying to curtail the importance of publishing overall since it is still a critical part of the scientific process. There need to be good journals that accept null results and in progress results and replication studies so scientists can continue to be incentivized to share their work without forcing them to build their life around achieving something "publishable" in the current paradigm.

</comment><comment><USER15> A PhD in a scientific or engineering discipline is a certification that you know how to conduct research and communicate the research you conducted. Papers are the evidence people use to assess that ability. Graduating without them makes it unclear what was accomplished and if the necessary skills were acquired. Informally, most top programs in the US have students produce 2-6 original papers to graduate, which varies per discipline. Without publications, it will be very hard for graduates to get a job doing research, which is the main career door that a PhD opens.

I assume that thought process was what motivated the policy forcing people to publish to graduate. However, very low quality publications are equally useless and do not showcase one's ability to do research, so just requiring publications isn't sufficient. A PhD student's committee is supposed to assess if they have demonstrated the ability to do good research and add to humanity's knowledge. It doesn't sound like that is happening appropriately.

<comment><USER16> Look - it's straightforward, is there a genuine contribution, is the thesis of sufficient quality to effectively communicate that - there's the standard. Who cares what random referees have / have not decided about the work if you are examining it?

<comment><USER17> Not sure what profession you refer to but in physics you publish to specialized journals in your field of research. The referees typically have some, if not a lot of expertise. It's not like a random guy is giving a thumbs up or down. It is a critique of your scientific work.

Having been a referee for a long time I can tell you that so much submissions are just minuscule variations on existing papers that are sugar-coated to be ohh so important contributions to the field that it is mind boggling. And if you decline it, they try the next journal with a lower impact factor until they get published.

<comment><USER18> This is accurate in every field I've worked in (synthetic organic chemistry, comp chem, statistics, genetics, clinical trials).

The top glam journals have an additional layer of politics. It's the worst system aside from all the others that have ever been tried...

(last time I was actually excited to review was for NEJM & was disappointed)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's important to note that publishing a paper can take quite a long time. For instance, it quite commonly takes 2+ years to publish in JASA, the premier statistics journal.

</comment><comment><USER20> As a faculty member who works with students in other developing countries where this is required, this is a great step forward. The requirement not only pushes students towards rapid publication, predatory journals but it also produces poorer quality science because the focus becomes entirely "What do I have to do to get just enough for that publication?"

</comment><comment><USER21> I agree with the others who say that publication is an important aspect of doctoral education. However, grad students already face too many sources of risk and delay. I've known a number of PhDs who had to deal with professors holding back on letting them graduate in order to get one or more papers out of them, at enormous expense to the student, and after the dissertation work was finished. In one case, a student had to lawyer up.

I also know one professor who simply can't bring himself to let anything be published, and a student shouldn't be penalized for that.

The professors who review the student's dissertation should be able to decide if the work is of publication quality. The dissertation is still the main focus of the PhD.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wouldn't it be somewhat better to maintain a list of international peer reviewed papers for each discipline?

My country (Italy) has something of the sort for evaluating prospective full- time researchers. It doesn't even really need to be based on impact factor, especially in what are considered non-bibliometric disciplines like humanities.

</comment><comment><USER23> that's interesting. so, what's gonna be the next batches of PhD? pass a few more exams , get that PhD degree, and add a Dr prefix ?

</comment><comment><USER24> That proposal basically lowers the value of an Indian Ph. D. If you already have one and had to publish, you should be upset at a proposal to have your existing credentials blemished in this manner.

<comment><USER23> i fail to understand why is this comment downvoted .

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'd like to see more professional, terminal (doctorate) degrees that aren't PhDs. Run them in parallel. For instance, I feel there should be an M.Eng. equivalent for comp sci that requires mastery of existing theory instead of development of new theory.

<comment><USER13> Exactly. There is something dearly missing between Masters to PhD. Many European PhDs are now 3 years while US PhD tends to be 5 year. It would have been great if PhD degree standardized to 5 years but was broken down into two separate degrees of 2+3 years.

<comment><USER26> Although the time to completion seems quite disparate between Europe and US, the difference isn't nearly as stark as it appears.

Nearly all Europeans enter PhD programs with a Master's degree in hand. At least in psychology (my discipline), US PhD programs will admit candidates directly from undergraduate. The overall time from bachelor's to PhD is similar when you account for these differences.</comment></comment></comment>


Anonymous Reacts to Megaupload Takedown With "Largest Attack Ever" - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/anonymous-megaupload-department-of-justice/ <comment><USER2> This story is already on the front page 3 times; submissions that are 2 hours and 1 hour earlier than this one. Please exercise a little restraint and stop posting copies. This should be flagged, not upvoted.</comment>


UK now most unequal country in the West - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk-most-unequal-country-in-the-west-1329614.html

<comment><USER2> I would rather stay in UK than anywhere else. Sure there is the inequality but the poor in UK are much "richer" then the poor in other countries used in example. And the rich are much richer then the rich elsewhere.

The main distinction is that if you decide you don't want to be poor here, nothing stands in your way, while as elsewhere you may end up being stuck where you are ( due corruption, casts, discrimination, lack of opportunities etc. ) unless you emigrate.

( I am not UK born, I lived in 4 different countries UK is fourth. The previous ones include one of the top 5 with lowest inequality and I surely don't want to live there )</comment>


Show HN: Example of GitHub Markdown with Collapsible Sections - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/boost-experimental/ut#overview <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm being pedantic, but this isn't Markdown, it is HTML. If this is meant to highlight the utility of the <details> tag, great! Or the utility of embedding HTML in Markdown in any CommonMark compatible Markdown interpreter, cool!

</comment><comment><USER3> This isn't working on IE11, just so you know.</comment>


30 years a sysadmin - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/article/2987198/operating-systems/30-years-a-sysadmin.html <comment><USER2> _The Downside: ... Systems administrators are rarely customer-facing unless you count as customers the staff that use the systems that you keep humming along._

You consider this a downside? Customer-facing IT Support is an absolutely nightmare. It's part of my job, and by far my _least favorite_ part of the job, as the customer is more often an impediment to solving their problem than an asset.

<comment><USER3> The way I read it, the author was saying that it is a problem of recognition: Because you are not customer-facing, you are more invisible in the system and with it comes the lack of job satisfaction one may get from a pat on the back of a job well done via the customer interaction.

Certainly it' s a double-edged sword but that's how I read it at least.

<comment><USER4> I dunno. The staff when I did internal customer IT treated me like royalty. It helped that I could solve just about anything within minutes rather than hours like the previous guy. It also helped that I enjoyed learning the ins and outs of the software they used. Most of the IT staff did not like to RTFM. But that's IT. It's probably much different for sysadmins though I did a bit of that too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I worked as a Unix systems administrator 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago.

20 years ago, in 1995, a tech startup would usually have the programmers do the systems administration, until about four programmers or so had been hired - by then the code would be in shape to put on the Java application server, traffic was picking up, and they needed someone to deal with it full-time, who knew what they were doing. The servers would often be on-site, on the company's T-1 line, or sometimes would be at a colocation facility.

Nowadays, how many people are hired at a tech startup before they hire someone to deal with installing Red Hat on HP rack servers? It can be a while - nowadays if you need 500 servers quickly, and have the money, you can spin them up (and down) on EC2 in a few minutes. Plus there's Linode, Rackspace, Ramnode - I have a personal VPS on each of them. Why not? It's only $10-$20 a month each. It's hard to justify the cost of hiring a sysadmin, a backup person to the sysadmin, pay for colo space, leasing a server etc., when you can get a pretty nice Linode VPS for $10 a month.

<comment><USER6> > It's hard to justify the cost of hiring a sysadmin, a backup person to the > sysadmin, pay for colo space, leasing a server etc., when you can get a > pretty nice Linode VPS for $10 a month.

Once you have hundreds or thousands of instances, especially ones with reasonable amounts of resources, the sticker shock starts to make owning and hosting your own servers look pretty tantalizing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There's a lot to like about IT, but I found plenty to be frustrated about as well.

I spent four years with an IT consultancy piecing together 40 hours working for clients who didn't need a full time IT department. Not having enough hours to transform their operations, running around the city putting out fires, and dealing with old hardware was a bit miserable. Looking around the job market showed a lot more of the same, along with a few high-stress and non- specialized positions working for financial or legal companies. Maybe that's just the scene in New York, I don't know, but the dream of being a company neckbeard did not pan out.

Reading slashdot in the 90s made IT sound amazing, but I've found that geek dream much easier to fulfill in the software industry.

</comment><comment><USER8> Usual bullshit.

The job of sysadmin is to recognize how systems have been designed, based on which first principles and what are the alternatives. This is how one ends up with Postgres instead MySQL (or Informix instead of Oracle) with Scala instead of Ruby (because you do understand principles Scala is based upon), with Erlang instead of Java (you do understand the differences and principles),etc. Basically, sysadmin is a system (or service) designer and architect.

Nowadays the term sysadmin is used to describe a job of issuing memorized commands to AWS or some "containers" without any deep understanding of what dynamic linking is, what is libraries and API visioning, how to compile from sources and run several versions of some sets of libs, how to recompile a source package disabling unnecessary features, and so on. This is the same nonsense as to call an auto-mechanic an engineer. Most of moderns sysadmins does not know what the _. /configure; make; make install_ sequence or a syntax of Makefiles or how the mess they called cmake works. (how many here knows how to write RPM's spec?))

Old school sysadmins are engineers, not mechanics. They do understand access patterns, data-structures, memory allocation techniques, what are shortcomings of posix threads and its naive usage, and, of course, programming paradigms, so they could reason (more objectively than managers or other laymen) about behavior of a system.

They think that running a Hadoop on AWS (from ready images) is a big deal.

btw, in my 20 years of being sysadmin (since SCO Open Server and FreeBSD 2.0) everything worked.

<comment><USER9> Your description of a sysadmin sounds much more like the role of an architect.

btw, in my 23 years of being a help desk tech, sysadmin, architect, consultant, manager, and finally owner of my own business, nothing has ever just worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The great thing about sysadmin as a job: even in the future, nothing works!

</comment><comment><USER11> Kind of funny picture for the tape backup -- that's a stereo recorder, not a data backup device.

<comment><USER12> Young whippersnappers. I actually had one of those TEAC reel to reel tape drives, maybe not that exact model---I don't remember it being able to auto- reverse, but I wouldn't have cared about that---but otherwise the same controls. It was a good device for its time, as were the reel to reel 7- and 9-track _computer_ tape drives I used later and concurrently: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_track_tape](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9_track_tape)

(7 track was the standard for 36 bit PDP-10s, 6 bits of data and one of parity, and some earlier IBM machines as well.)

<comment><USER13> From that wikipedia article:

 _The above describes a typical transport system; however, manufacturers engineered many alternative designs. For example, some designs used a horizontal transport deck where the operator simply set the tape reel in the supply reel bay, closed the door and pressed the load button, then a vacuum system would draw the tape along the path and onto a take-up hub within the mechanism._

Back in the day, I used a 9-track tape drive like this. It was quite the thing to watch it mount the tape. A while ago I found a video of it[0].

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS9QtC7FYiE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS9QtC7FYiE)

<comment><USER14> Ah the HP 88780, my cubicle-mate for a summer job 15 years ago</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Enriching Log Messages Using Go Contexts - <AUTHOR> https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/enriching-log-messages-using-go-contexts/ <comment><USER2> Consider switching to entirely structured logs! It's awesome and it'll make the DB much easier to operate! See [https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KciJt- groC22smVgCg4T...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KciJt- groC22smVgCg4TfJXqCUAA6D4c6NRdKBIkIHM/edit?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER3> Thanks! Yes, I expect we will be moving in that direction before too long. It will work well with log tags which are already key-values. Plus most of our messages make it into traces and OpenTracing is switching to a KV interface as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What worries me about this is performance. Contexts are linked lists and adding a new value to log will add a new node to this list, slowing down all future operations involving the context. I didn't look at the implementation, but I, at least, couldn't come up with a design that doesn't suffer from this, when I last thought about it. What makes matters worse is, that the logging layer is wrapped around the context in a pretty early stack frame; so every logging statement will need to traverse the whole context list, slowing down the overhead from logging even further than it already is.

So, did you look into this? Does Performance suffer?

<comment><USER5> Cockroach Labs employee here - the implementation only uses a single context key, so traversing the context linked list is only necessary when the context in hand is a derivative of the annotated context (e.g. obtained via WithTimeout or WithCancel), which is relatively uncommon in practice.

[https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/6b0698f/pkg/ut...](https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/6b0698f/pkg/util/log/log_context.go#L35)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I thought about that and it definitely is an improvement, but IMHO it still suffers similar problems. In practice, you won't just have logging; you'll add grpc Metadata, user info and whatnot and each thing will slow down all the other things. Is my intuition. I'm skeptical of saving _any_ data in context, for that reason (and this skepticism has prevented me from finishing my ctx-logging-package, that does exactly what you describe :) ).

I'd just like to see good'ol'benchmarks that this is not a problem, before I trust the Context for data :)

<comment><USER3> In the majority of cases, the current layer would have added a log tag to the Context, so looking up the log tags structure will be immediate. On the other hand, we also use OpenTracing and we do have to go through the hierarchy to find the current Span, which will be slower with deep hierarchies.

The other thing to consider is that logging a message carries other costs, so we can't go crazy with very frequent log messages anyway. In our case the message usually also makes its way into an OpenTracing span and that involves memory allocation and/or data copying. My guess is that going through a few linked Contexts is not a big deal, comparatively speaking.

I don't have the kind of benchmark that you are looking for (with vs without using Context), but I can tell you that in the workloads we looked at, tracing was taking a few percentage points (1-2%) of CPU usage, and I don't think a significant part of that was in Context code.

Finally, Context is an interface, so if need be, we can make our own Context implementation that always stores the frequently looked-up things (like log tags, tracing Spans) to short-circuit that cost.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mesosphere Announces First Data Center OS and $36M in Funding - <AUTHOR> https://gigaom.com/2014/12/07/mesospheres-new-data-center-mother-brain-will-blow-your-mind/ <comment><USER2> Congrats to the team! Ben was one of the most brilliant students in my undergrad class and it's awesome to see him employ his talents in such a big way.

I worked on healthcare.gov last year and it's hard to overstate the potential impact of a tool like DCOS. At one point, we had 2000+ VMs, most manually configured, with no monitoring, and completely different configs between dev, test, and prod (not intentionally). Straightforward operations like migrating half of the database servers from one VLAN to the other took months, small mistakes like changing a database password could result in hours-long outages, and simply getting the data that Mesosphere displays automatically would sometimes take weeks and other times simply be impossible.

Of course, clean devops hygiene would have eliminated much of the pain in the first place, but not every organization has the expertise to do things right. In fact, most don't, and the solution for most organizations is good tooling that automates as much of the system as possible and provides good development discipline for the rest.

<comment><USER3> Having 2000+ VMs without automation or monitoring in place is pretty unusual. Especially for a site like healthcare.gov which must have had all sorts of HIPAA and data security requirements.

But it's honestly not hard to hook all those machines up to a system like Chef/Puppet/Saltstack/Ansible and start automating common tasks within a few days.

Migrating databases between networks and rotating passwords would generally be outside of the scope of a tool like Mesosphere. Again, this is something that can be easily handled by existing automation tools. With most databases though, there's nothing straightforward about migrating data to nodes on different vlans or password rotations. If it's a one-time task, I recommend hiring a database consulting firm to do the migration or rotation.

I think that have good defaults and enforcing best-practices is a good idea. But I think that a lot of this can be achieved with existing tools. IMO, it makes more sense for organizations to automate and orchestrate Mesos deployments via existing/mature DevOps tools like Chef/Puppet/Ansible/Saltstack. Would also be exciting to see deployments working via NixOps/NixOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Older person here.

Whats nice is that people are thinking about supercomputers again, even if they insist on calling them "the cloud".

First things first, look up beowulf ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_cluster](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf_cluster)) which is a suite of tools that implents a multi machine scheduler, and message passing interface. Whats nice is that if one host is overloaded, it can migrate the process to another. (however I'm not sure what performance is like nowadays)

In the world of VFX for movies, we've been dealing with schedulers for years. Programmes like alfred, tractor, qube and deadline can dispatch tasks, and deal with dependencies at massive scale.

The first thing to note is that "DCOS" is really a discrete set of parts; a scheduler, machine state enforcement, network config, Storage, and the underlying OS.

With careful planning, the state enforcement tool (puppet and the like) can take care of all of these tasks except a global scheduler.

The beuty of the VFX scheduler is that they understand dependencies really well. (I need x to complete before I run y, I need feature z to run) A lot of newer schedulers really don't understand this concept well.

<comment><USER4> Its really important to understand that puppet and the like cannot (without heavy engineering) act as a task dispatcher. The big feature of "DCOS" is task distribution.

In linux terms its like comparing the CPU scheduler to chmod. Yes you can make a program run by chmoding a file to +x, but its the scheduler that is responsible for making sure the programme has CPU time.

<comment><USER3> Task distribution primitives are handled by Mesos and implemented in the various apps running on Mesos (Marathon, Chronos, etc.)

It seems inaccurate to call this a feature of DCOS.

Puppet and the like can easily configure and manage Mesos and the various apps running on top, giving all the task dispatch functionality goodness.

DCOS will hopefully be a great integrated Mesos distribution. Seems to me that by supporting machine provisioning and having a per-node licensing model, it's being positioning as a direct competitor to Openstack and VMWare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Disclosure: CoreOS employee; Kubernetes contributor.

After reading the title I was a bit tempted to call BS since I think Kubernetes should have the rights to "The first Datacenter OS" tagline[1]. However, after reading up on the project details at [https://mesosphere.com/learn](https://mesosphere.com/learn) I can see how Mesosphere came to the conclusion of being a DCOS, if not necessarily the first. Mesosphere goes a bit further than Kubernetes and offers a solution to the storage problem and attempts to address other "userland" concerns by shipping Apache Spark, Cassandra, Kafka, and Hadoop. So maybe it would be more accurate to call this a datacenter distro on top of the Kubernetes kernel?

Regardless, I think the concept of a datacenter OS will be the key to commoditizing IaaS providers and leveling the playing field in terms of features and usability for those who have not given up on the dream of running a "private" cloud.

Why will the DCOS work where others have failed?

Current solutions aimed at taming the datacenter operate at the machine/VM level, which exposes the OS for each machine, and completely punts on the application. Guess who gets to stitch it all back together? A DCOS is designed to manage applications directly, commonly via application containers, which means we can treat the OS running on the underlying machines like firmware and limit our interactions to basic updates and minimal configuration -- think CoreOS.

What about PaaS?

That's a topic worthy of a lengthy discussion, but I think it boils down to the lack of control found in most PaaS platforms[2]. In order for a PaaS offering to be successful it must make opinionated decisions about how to deploy and run applications; a bit too inflexible for most people. On the other hand, a DCOS seems to hit the sweet spot between IaaS and PaaS.

[1] I'm sure you can make an argument for Joyent's SmartDataCenter ([https://www.joyent.com/private-cloud](https://www.joyent.com/private-cloud)) as well. [2] Deis ([http://deis.io/overview](http://deis.io/overview)) attempts to address this issue.

<comment><USER6> Isn't it running ontop of the Mesos kernel, which has been around for longer than Kubernetes?

<comment><USER7> A bit of the history:

The Mesosphere DCOS is built around the Apache Mesos kernel

The Mesos kernel was developed at UC Berkeley in 2009 [1].

Spark was written as a sample app on top of it [2].

Ben Hindman and his colleagues at the UC Berkeley AmpLab had always envisioned Mesos as a kernel inside of a full-blown operating system [3]. They finally brought it to market.

[1] [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/nsdi11/tech/full_papers/Hindman.pdf)

[2] "We have implemented Mesos in 10,000 lines of C++. The system scales to 50,000 (emulated) nodes and uses ZooKeeper for fault tolerance. To evaluate Mesos, we have ported three cluster computing systems to run over it: Hadoop, MPI, and the Torque batch scheduler. To validate our hypothesis that specialized frameworks provide value over general ones, we have also built a new framework on top of Mesos called Spark, optimized for iterative jobs where a dataset is reused in many parallel operations, and shown that Spark can outperform Hadoop by 10x in iterative machine learning workloads." ibid.

[3] [http://people.csail.mit.edu/matei/papers/2011/hotcloud_datac...](http://people.csail.mit.edu/matei/papers/2011/hotcloud_datacenter_os.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Yep, also had input from Google around the time there were deploying (or building) their new scheduler to replace Borg, Omega.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, the commoditization of on-demand and highly scalable virtual computing infrastructures, together with the rising popularity of "containerization" for app and service composition, seems to be creating an "orchestration crisis", or an "orchestration business opportunity," depending on your vantage point.

Are we about to see the emergence of what might be termed "new wave mainframe" computing?

<comment><USER9> > be creating an "orchestration crisis"

Spot on, and very well put.

The problem with existing orchestration tools, and tools like chef, puppet, etc. is that they're all a bit piecemeal and complicated. What we need is a step up the abstraction hierarchy, and some standardisation.

We'll probably know when we've got there if companies no longer have any real idea of how many servers or VMs from different providers that they're utilising. They'll just know which applications they're running and how much it's costing them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a recent mesos convert but I think "first" is a tad inaccurate if you consider Joyent's SmartOS and it's recently open sourced Smart Data Center.

<comment><USER7> There are a lot of components to an operating system. It's not just the technology components, it's the product components and the business components. E.g., Does it have an API? Does it have an SDK? Does it have a user interface? Does it have an init system, a chron, a storage system, service discovery? Does it have an ecosystem of third party developers? I posit that the OS Checklist is fairly long and that no of the other systems you mention have the complete OS package.

<comment><USER11> _I posit that the OS Checklist is fairly long and that no of the other systems you mention have the complete OS package._

They do.

E.g. SmartOS is a UNIX. It'd be pretty odd if it didn't have an _init system_. Or storage. Or cron. Or POSIX. Or whatever else you'd like to add to the list that UNIX systems usually have...

<comment><USER12> I assumed the OP meant a distributed init system, distributed storage, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mesosphere should really evangelize libprocess [0] more. Probably one of the cooler C++ libraries out there.

[0] - [https://github.com/apache/mesos/tree/master/3rdparty/libproc...](https://github.com/apache/mesos/tree/master/3rdparty/libprocess)

<comment><USER14> OK. But, what is it? I tried reading the documentation, but all it said was "readme: this is the readme for libprocess."

<comment><USER15> "Libprocess is a library written in C/C++ that provides an actor style message-passing programming model that leverages efficient operating system event mechanisms. Libprocess is very similar to Erlang's process model, including basic constructs for sending and receiving messages. I'm excited about giving people an opportunity to use this software, so look for lots more details to be added here shortly!"

[http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~benh/libprocess/](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~benh/libprocess/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A well discussed and related story from a few days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8694940](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8694940)

<comment><AUTHOR> But this is our official announcement of the DCOS project. The other post was about Ben's ideas that helped drive the creation.

<comment><USER17> I don't think there was any confusion but thanks for making sure it stays that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The DCOS project looks amazing. The command line interface looks like a heroku toolbelt for your very own servers. Cool server usage visualizations too.

</comment><comment><USER19> DCOS is an interesting description, as the idea of a data centre (to my tiny mind at least) is made more fuzzy by concepts like AWS AZs.

Do people expect that the 'DC' will span AZs, regions even? Or is the separation of these things valuable in some way?

How about the idea of dev vs prod environments? Will the isolation provided be strong enough that we'll happily drop everything onto a single cluster of machines?

</comment><comment><USER20> We changed the url from [http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/07/mesosphere-releases- first-d...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/07/mesosphere-releases-first-data- center-os-and-announces-36m-in-funding) because this one is a somewhat more substantive article (though not the title). Via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8715055).

<comment><USER3> lol. mind blown.

"Mesosphere Announces First Data Center OS And $36M In Funding" \- Techcrunch

"Mesosphere's new data center mother brain will blow your mind" \- GigaOM</comment></comment>


IE9 team responds to Reddit questions: reddit tl;dr version - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_team_responds_to_your_questions/c10szx5 <comment><USER2> Mark my words, the decision of not to making IE9 compatible with XP will lead to thousands of hours of developer time and millions of dollars wasted in fixing browser compatibility issues. This will just be another reincarnation of the IE6 effect.

BTW the tl;dr version is an excellent summary. It is a warning to all the marketing people out there that the internet will make a bare truth tl;dr version of any sugarcoated market-speak you publish.

<comment><USER3> [disclosure: I've just spent the last few hours getting some new stuff working in IE7 and 8. at the moment my level of contempt for all things IE is pretty high :) ]

I have no problems at all with them not supporting XP. It's 10 years old, and if they've decided to make use of features of Vista and 7 not available in XP, then good for them. Seriously.

I'm also inclined to think that any non-enterprise user still running XP and IE isn't going to manually upgrade to IE9 without being forced to. Those that would are also able to install any of the alternatives that _do_ run on XP

<comment><USER4> in the corporate environment it's much easier to tell them "hey! Please upgrade your IE6 to the latest version" than it is telling them "hey! Please install $alternative_browser for which no means of administering it with group policies exists"

<comment><USER5> "hey! Please install a plugin[1]?"

<http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/>

<comment><USER4> yeah - that what I said today.

And now there's 300 less IE6 to worry about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> in response to a question about websockets and friends:

 _Our approach when deciding what technologies to support starts with data. There are three things we consider: What are developers actually doing on the web today? What do developers want to do in the future? <snip> We started by building a tool to look at the top 7000 sites and what web APIs they used._

Isn't this arse about? Isn't it kind of hard to use new tech if it isn't supported. I'd love to be able to use some of the new HTML5 things, but IE is holding us back

 _XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a modern web experience._

WTF sort of a response is that? There's some good answers in there, but this sort of spin-driven markety rhubarb works so hard to hide it. Why not just say that IE9 makes use of features available in Vista and 7, but not in XP.

<comment><USER6> Their entire attitude is worrying. I'm afraid that this is going to hinder the web again, it just looks like they want to release the bare minimum they can to get marketshare instead of actually make a good browser.

Opera, with its 5% market share (or so) has been reigning on the tests and innovation for ever, and Microsoft can't get enough employees together to work on a browser?

As far as I'm concerned, nobody should recommend IE for anything, as the risk of Microsoft pulling another IE6 is too high, and not worth the reward.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if it could be possible to see more and more web apps take advantage of the full standard and state clearly on the front page "this website does not work on any IE version. Please use another browser".

This is indeed a hard choice to do, since it means leaving a lot of potential users out of the plate. Maybe startups can afford such bold moves, I don't know. But I think this could be the only way to force Microsoft change their mentality, eroding their browser market share more and more.

<comment><USER6> This is debatable. For example, the historious bookmarklet works on all browsers right now, except IE8 which refuses to run the JS. IE users are about 6% of our users, so is it worth spending hours debugging an issue for 6% of the userbase?

We will do it, for the _user_ , not for the browser. I don't want to have to tell someone "this doesn't work, use something else", because it's just not polite to tell him what he can or can't use for a few extra hours of work on our part.

However, if the browser is _so_ broken that it takes considerable work to make it usable, then yes, I'll put up an overlay saying "your browser is too broken, please use another one for the good of the internet and your sanity".

EDIT: Also, I don't want Microsoft to change their mentality. I want them to stop making browsers (and maybe a few other things).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I read the original thread on reddit and this pretty much sums up what I silently thought to myself.

It was a nice touch to get in front of the reddit crowd, but they completely sidestepped hard questions. It's a bit like a Catholic doing an AMA and then not answering the questions about child abuse, homosexuality and bloodshed and ridiculous things in the bible.

<comment><USER9> [Responding critically because this comment was posted critically.] I had to re-read the Catholic comment before I found you weren't being intentionally offensive. The analogy would have been better stated if it were a Catholic priest doing an AMA. Asking a Catholic would be like asking an IE user why a Microsoft employee was arrested for embezzling, why Microsoft doesn't support Open Source, or why they arbitrarily refuse to make their browser more cross- platform. An IE user is justified in dodging the question since they don't really control those things, they just use the product.

<comment><USER8> You said it better than I did. A Catholic priest, who has credible authority talking in detail, would have been better.

If you go in front of a crowd who is outraged by the actions of the organisation you're representing, do expect difficult questions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Standards plays are political and market based, nothing to do with IE being slow or them being stupid. Innovations we can thank IE for that were never 'standard':

* innerHTML

* css applied to chrome

* XMLHttpRequest

* i18n DNS

* double-byte char support (since 96)

* embed (or was it object? one of the two - the first one)

* first video embed (IE2 on Mac)

* hasLayout

* iframe

* marquee (for the lolz)

* contenteditable

* opacity/filter

* favicons

* first implementations of CSS, tables, 128-bit ssl, xml (5) and xstl (5)

It works better when coders who build browsers decide new features, not some guys sitting around a table trying to agree on what an image display should look like.

Exactly what Andreessen did, he just added stuff to Netscape and let the loonies complain about it not being 'proper'. We criticize Microsoft for the same thing.

People don't complain about Intel and AMD with instruction set standards, but they complain about web standards because it is easy to.

<comment><USER11> You're quite wrong.

HTML5 is innovating. IE is way behind when it comes to innovative features.

And please don't hold up 'innerHTML' as an example of a good thing.

<comment><USER10> That is my entire point. They are far behind now because we criticized the for so long and they threw in the towel after IE6.

Microsoft did almost zero browser innovation after 6 and until now, whereas previously they innovated. And now they can't win either way.

It just shows that the sentiment the entire time was anti-msft

<comment><USER11> I disagree. They stopped innovating after they killed all of the competition. They didn't need to any more.

MS certainly don't have a vested interest in the internet - it goes against their core business.

<comment><USER10> I think its fair to say that Microsoft don't do complacency

esp. in competitive markets

IE team was torn apart as part of internal politics

<comment><USER12> That's not fair to say at all. IE6 is a perfect example of complacency in a competitive market from years ago. Their mobile efforts to date are a perfect example of complacency in a competitive market today. They were _years_ late in shipping Vista, _years_ late in trying to meaningfully compete with Google, they've been long complacent with their Mac Office products, and some of their developer tools are atrocious.

You don't get a pass because your internal bureaucracy and politics prevent your engineers from doing their jobs.

<comment><USER10> Actually you are correct. I think if they had the option to, they would not have been complacent, but all the internal muddling stalled them on Vista (worst project ever) and IE. They only got their teams cleared out in the past 18 months and restructured and there is a lot more to do (Dean Hatchamovitch leads the IE team now, great guy who came in via sysinternals)

So you are right that internal turmoil shouldn't be used as an excuse. I think they know that they can't be complacent though, the Vista slip must have cost a lot of market share to Apple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just to clarify for those that haven't read the answers, this doesn't look anything like the "IE9 team" responding. It looks like a marketing team responding.

That's why you get BS answers like "XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a modern web experience."

<comment><USER13> I'm just wondering; if they had said "we don't want to have to spend time and money backporting new APIs and we want to encourage you to upgrade Windows", how would we react? Frankly I would have far more respect for an honest answer like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can we kill the IE-should-be-built-on-webkit meme? One of the web's strengths is the wide range of independent and compatible implementations.

Yes, the differences suck when you are dealing with CSS incompatibility problems, but when you look at the big picture it remains vitally important.

<comment><USER15> _One of the web's strengths is the wide range of independent and compatible implementations._

What do you mean by this? Am genuinely curious, because I've always raged at the lack of browser standardization.

<comment><USER16> Because:

* Mono-cultures are bad security-wise, it's harder to target multiple platforms with different vulnerabilities then one platform (which is one of the reasons IE had such a bad reputation for a long time)

* It prevent people from coding to specific browser bugs/quirks. When there are a lot of platforms it is easier to code to standards (if they are consistently implemented across browsers) then specific platforms. Theoretically at least..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I love reddit, but I place some of the blame in this fiasco on the reddit admins -- raldi & company. They came out a few weeks ago and mentioned explicitly that they were MANAGING the ad campaign for IE9.

Now, the reddit admins are abosulutely excellent at connecting with their audience. When the site goes down for a bit, they put out technical no-BS posts that get upvoted close to 1000 times, and all is forgiven.

The admins should have interjected themselves before this response was posted and warned Microsoft marketing this 'this response won't fly here'.

Reddit is at an important inflection now, and the admins need to step up and become the Don Draper for their world of tech users. If this campaign had succeeded, I could absolutely see many other companies coming to them and paying big bucks for similar campaigns.

There's still an AMA coming up today, so there's a chance to recover, so we'll see how that goes.

<comment><USER18> >The admins should have interjected themselves before this response was posted and warned Microsoft marketing this 'this response won't fly here'.

How do you know they didn't? Maybe they did and Microsoft ignored their advice.

Regardless, I blame Microsoft for not understanding marketing. The whole point of doing this sort of Q&A thing is to give a community exclusive access to build rapport. That's just basic. And they promised exclusive access and instead delivered marketing tripe where people were expecting exclusive developer commentary.

<comment><USER17> At some level Microsoft know's they're not ideally cut out for doing this type of dynamic marketing. Which is why they put the reddit team in charge of the campagin in the first place.

The admins should have made it clear in no uncertain terms that this post would be a disaster. If they didn't do that convincingly enough, that's their fault.

<comment><USER19> > The admins should have made it clear in no uncertain terms that this post > would be a disaster

I dunno. If you look at some of the more technical stuff the MS devs post on channel9 (and some of it being really, really good) you could almost imagine that there _could_ have been an interesting and informative exchange of information here.

<comment><USER20> Honestly, I don't think there could have. Take for example, the question on spell checking. The right response, IMO, would have been. "Given everything else we needed to do and still needs to do, this is pretty far down on the priority list."

I'm sure that would have been disliked just as much as their response, which I actually sort of liked as it went into more detail about how items get prioritized.

But a general tip to the IE team... you can tell customers your decisions, not how you arrived at them. In general the most vocal people will be those that disagree with your decisions, and can then attack how you made the decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The actual responses are here:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_te...](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/dk3s0/the_ie9_team_responds_to_your_questions/)

The comment linked summarizes the IE team's responses in the voice of a M$ strawman, ready to be attacked by Reddit. As a result, it makes for a more entertaining read if you like to hate Microsoft, but it doesn't tell you what they're actually thinking.

I preferred the long version.

<comment><USER3> the long version doesn't tell you what they were thinking either

 _[edited to add the following]_

Yes, there's a few cases where the longer version contains a bit more detail, but in general the tl;dr version is a pretty concise summary. For example, compare this answer

 _XP is a platform that doesn't allow for the performance characteristics of a modern web experience. We have a great browser for XP users (IE8) but as the web continues to advance you need a modern operating environment that can take advantage of the underlying hardware through the OS. IE9 requires Direct 2D support which is available in Vista (with SP2) and Windows 7._

to this

 _Because Microsoft neither wants to backport new APIs to XP, nor do they want to release a version of IE9 that doesn't require the new APIs._

<comment><USER6> Especially with the answer about visualisation, the summary was _spot on_. Seriously, what the _fuck_ , Microsoft? Your browser is so precious that you can't release it as a standalone product so _the entire world_ can move on?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The refusal of including auto-update is pretty infuriating to me.

"Will you force users to keep IE up to date so developers don't have to support legacy browsers.

Corporations don't want to have the latest version of a browser."

Alright, I understand that auto-updating could be an issue for IT at large corporations, but why not just make it a feature that is enabled by default? I'm sure IT guys who DO want their users using the latest stable release would be quite happy, and those who don't could easily disable it.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think that tying IE to operating system is a bad decision. If they can make whole MS Office package available on OSX, then why is browser that special ? Of course I know many of the reasons why _not_ port IE to other oper. systems, but it would make my life easier if I could have all browsers on my machine for development testing.

<comment><USER3> I'm probably telling you stuff you already know, but from what I can see Office for Mac isn't simply a port but a completely separate codebase developed in parallel (for low values of parallel)

It (Mac Office) also generates a significant amount of income for MS

<comment><USER23> No, I didn't know that, because it's completely counter-intuitive approach to creating software. You have to abstract most of the stuff and then port just OS-specific stuff. It's beyond me why a company of the great software development tradition like Microsoft would go and maintain two completely separate codebases.

<comment><USER24> Because then Office would end up like iTunes for Windows. Office for Mac is actually really, really nice. I'm sure they have a lot of shared common libraries between the two, but it isn't a quick and dirty port. They take what they can use, but make sure that the end result is tuned for the OS.

<comment><USER25> Not to derail the topic from the main issue at hand, but what's so wrong with iTunes on Windows? While it doesn't conform to all of the Windows idioms you'd expect, I still found it to be a better music player than just about everything else. This was a couple years ago, back when I was using Windows, however.

<comment><USER24> First, there is the issue of those Windows idioms that you expect on Windows. iTunes and Safari both essentially forgo any pretense of adopting Windows standards and instead keep their own way of doing things. It would be as if Office for Mac didn't use the menu bar on Apple, and instead, simply copied what they did on Windows.

It also doesn't work well with the OS. Things you can quickly and easily do in WMP are painful in iTunes.

I'm sure some people found iTunes a pleasant experience, but most people I know only have it installed because they have an iPod or an iPhone, and are forced to use it.

Basically, it works well enough, but it's not a polished application.

<comment><USER26> Office for the Mac doesn't follow standard Mac OS X idioms either ... for example using its own spell check rather than the system wide one. Printing goes through their own dialog which can cause all kinds of issues. Excel's scrolling is not the same as scrolling in the rest of OS X (they followed the scrolling from Excel on Windows which is horrible).

The worst part is that I like to have various apps open in my dock, then when I click on them or switch to them with Alt + Tab I DON'T want them to open a new empty document that covers the entire screen thereby disrupting my thought process, and even if it did that when I open an existing document it should close the temporary empty document it just created (see TextEdit for a good example of that).

In Excel for example the only way to get the function toolbar to show up is to click the "Formula Builder" in the "Toolbox". As soon as I click away from it to format the text a certain colour the bar disappears.

When I am within a Cell in Excel, I can't use any of the Cmd + key shortcuts to accomplish anything, for example, selecting the entire contents of said cell.

Going back to the text editing part, I can't easily look up a word in the built-in dictionary with ctrl + cmd + d while hovering over a word.

Office for the Mac stands out like a sore thumb.

<comment><USER24> Fair enough. You do make some good points. =) However, I think it's fair to say the Office for Mac team has done a lot more to make their software for the Mac, rather than just a mere port.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Lack of Websockets support so disheartening it almost makes me want to cry.

<comment><USER28> This one drives me crazy too. At least it can be emulated via Flash or Socket.io to support the same features on IE.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just read the original, and while I do disagree with Microsoft's approach to answering these questions, I think the reddit community did a disservice to themselves (and possibly the entire hacker community) by transparently disguising attacks in the form of asking a question. For example:

"When will they be releasing a Mac OSX version? I couldn't find the download link on their site. I must be an idiot. But I submitted a question so I'm sure they'll get back to me and tell me where the download link is. I've also got a Linux machine at home. Perhaps I could use that? Has anyone tried the Linux version yet? Does it work OK? I couldn't see the Linux link either, but I wasn't really looking very hard. Some companies don't support Linux, so perhaps it's understandable if they haven't got a Linux version yet. I'm sure it'll be coming along soon. But I can't imagine anyone would release a new browser these days and not have a version that runs on Macs. So it must just be me. Right?:-/"

I'm not saying tough questions shouldn't be asked -- they should, and were -- but this particular kind of question is immature and should have just been ignored. I'm not at all surprised MS decided to respond in PR speak (although I still don't condone it).

Personally, I'd love to see Microsoft reach out to a more mature audience and actually have their engineers answer questions this time.

<comment><USER30> Perhaps we should invite them to an HN ama?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > _As you can imagine a hospital with a multimillion dollar patient tracking > web based application doesn't want a silent or automatic upgrade to their > browser that could in fact jeopardize their patient's safety._

I doubt I'm the only one, but... I'd be willing to bet the _delays_ in adopting updated browsers is a _far_ worse security hole. I can't count the number of times I've heard of a company getting a virus into the network through some specific version of IE, and which only works on some specific version of XP. Businesses which _don't_ update are a script kiddie's wet dream, because they're such an easy mark to cause trouble to.

And, to the writer of the tl;dr version: _wow_. That's a billion times more readable than the official responses, and remarkably accurate for the ones I was able to stomach reading. Excellent job.

</comment><comment><USER32> I saw this and at first I was hopeful that something good would happen. Then I saw the comments and remembered that, for every smart Reddit user there are about 99 blithering idiots.

Most of the comments were troll responses and a circlejerk of Microsoft hate. Very disappointing.

</comment><comment><USER33> _Making a browser gives us more power to control web technologies._

This makes me truly sad. It's clear they've learned nothing from their own browser history and have a terrible attitude towards the progress of the modern web.

<comment><USER34> It seems they are still fighting for control through the web browser, and its a strategy ingrained into their very core. I would think they would do everything possible to protect their cash cows (office + os) and limiting browser functionality to the least common denominator (IE) is the easier way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if we also could have something like "HN questions" here?

<comment><USER36> My searchyc foo is weak, but I think this was done a few weeks ago.

And also, this is directly part of Microsoft advertising on Reddit. Since HN doesn't have ads...

Not saying they wouldn't ever do it, just that's how it got on Reddit in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> im surprised how honnest they are. sure they control what they say, but it is far from the usual "ie9 is better than all other browsers" diagrams they usual give us

</comment><comment><USER38> Not the best moment in MS' history but some of those questions are kinda "low" too: people seriously expecting that there will be IE9 for Linux? Come on, get real!

<comment><USER39> IE is the only (common, useful) browser that doesn't run on Linux. It's not _that_ absurd to hope that future versions might be cross-platform.

<comment><USER38> IE on Linux would only be used by webdesigners (all 17 of them that actually use Linux) to test if a webpage works good in it, a "normal" Linux user would never use it as his default browser, if only because: a) it's not open-source b) it's from that "evil" Microsoft

So there's no sense for MS to invest money into that sort of adventure.

<comment><USER39> Microsoft makes gobs of money from ads on Bing searches, just as Google does from Google searches. In the consumer market, Windows share is falling. Google is releasing an OS later this year, Apple's products are obscenely popular. Android is more and more popular every day.

People don't _care_ what OS or browser they're running half the time. The thing is that IE is _not an option_ ; it can't be bundled on the most popular smartphones, or the most popular tablets because MS won't let it be.

I'm not suggesting that Gentoo nerds who write web software are going to care; I _am_ suggesting that MS is losing out badly because of their Windows-only attitude. The future is NOT Windows-only software: the future is cross- platform software.

Microsoft is making a big mistake by not allowing anyone to use IE unless they also use Windows.

<comment><USER38> At no point I wrote that I'm for IE being Windows only. Sure, Mac version would make sense. But a Linux one? Not really.

<comment><USER39> Linux phones are selling faster than Apple phones. Why doesn't it make sense to support the new, popular mobile OS?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I hate when i read a lot of "Because Marketing told us so...". I know this is how the world is going, but damn it's harsh.</comment>