'To change the world' is a terrible reason to do a startup - <AUTHOR> http://overnumerated.com/to-change-the-world-is-a-terrible-reason-to-d

<comment><USER2> Become a startup entrepreneur if you "want to change the world" is not the same as "to change the world". I also would not block on the word "change".

To me it means providing a significant contribution to the world evolution. There is some liberty degree in how we would contribute to its evolution and how much.

Another point is that I feel we shouldn't take this at 1rst degree. To me it means the initial author is talking of a life goal, not an objective. A goal is something we try to achieve, tend to, but it's ok to fail. An objective is something we have to achieve and it is bad to fail. In french there is a third level on top of these but I don't know how to translate it. It is a life ideal. (idéal de vie). This is just a general direction we define for our life. Whether we want to do good or bad, make significant contribution to the world evolution or help and support others to live their life and achieve their own goal.

The initial author is himself confusing objective, goal and ideal, but the post author too.

What I retain from the initial author is that beeing a startup entrepreneur is very hard, unsure and we have false assumptions on what it could yield to us : power, money, ...

</comment><comment><USER3> _You should do a startup because it's what you're meant to do, because you can't think of anything else you'd rather do, because you are driven to solve tough problems, and/or you're passionate about the problem you're trying to solve._

That's the part of the post I agree with.

 _I say if you want to do it to change the world, go work for an international non-governmental organization or UNICEF. What you do will actually have a greater chance of changing the world through those organizations._

 _Maybe you should plant trees or study migratory patterns of marine life or dig wells in Africa._

These are the parts that I don't agree with, and they come up a ton in these conversations. How is working at UNICEF more world changing than doing a start-up that solves tough problems? Same goes for the other examples. What the author describes in the top paragraph I quoted has the potential to be significantly more world changing for the subset of people who are facing that same tough problem.

To me, Libin's general thought was to be driven by the right reasons, and it's in line with what this author says. A large amount of responses to Libin's talk picked on his wording, but in the end the responses are saying the exact same thing, but without the exact phrasing of "change the world", as that is seemingly reserved for projects involved solely with charity, Africa and cancer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great Article. It is Ye Olde Reductio ad absurdum though. No rational peron goes into business just to change the world. No rational person goes into business just to make money. No rational person goes into business just because they are fed up of their current boss. As ever, it is a combination of all of them. A point in a high-dimensional cube, if you will.

</comment><comment><USER5> "work for an international non-governmental organization or UNICEF. What you do will actually have a greater chance of changing the world through those organizations."

Citation needed!

<comment><USER6> Working for a charity will NOT change the world, since charity places are already oversubscribed. There's an interesting Oxford-based thinktank that works on the most effective forms of making a difference called 80,000 Hours. They're quite a good read, I'll leave the link here.

<http://80000hours.org/>

<comment><USER7> OT: I find very funny that 80K Hours singles out "banker" as a positively socially impacting career. I guess all those people that were evicted after the housing bubble collapsed don't count :)

<comment><USER5> Still, being able to borrow money to build a business used to be considered essential for a working economy...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I disagree with the logic behind this piece and I believe it's conflating expected value with utility.

Basically, if given a 0.1% chance of earning 50 billion dollars or a 50% chance of earning 3 million dollars, one could convincingly argue that the most rational choice is the latter because the marginal utility of money diminishes rapidly.

However, if given the choice between a 0.1% chance of saving 50 million lives vs a 50% chance of saving 30,000 lives, one could argue that the former is better since the marginal utility of saving lives is much more linear.

<comment><USER9> Except that's not his general point. It is not about economics or balance of probabilities. Economics is just another barrier to overcome for a startup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> TLDR: (Using Phil Libin's own logic against him) Startups are likely to fail, so it's just as absurd to say you're doing it to change the world as it is to believe you're doing it for the money. You're still better off joining an organization that has momentum and resources.

This invites inevitable argument though, since: 1\. It's endlessly debatable which companies are actually changing the world. 2\. The ones most people think of first are based on charity, which is again arguable and limited to very short term gain.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Yes.

2\. I don't think of the ones based on charity. The ones that come to mind are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and AOL (in its day).

My point was just that there are other ways to change the world. I used a poor and overdone example by work seemingly related to charity (how come no one is picking on the marine biology example), but you could very well have a world changing impact and be an author or a professor or a painter. Heck, you could be a mechanic or a stay-at-home mom. There's no reason changing the world has to be tied to profession at all.

<comment><USER10> I should have been more clear that I personally thought your article was spot on. I was only trying to summarize the debate brewing on HN.

Great blog post and really thought provoking.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! As were your comments!

I admittedly glossed over these issues in the post, but I didn't want to dwell on them because I thought it might detract from the overall message. I kind of did that anyways though.

I like HN because the quality of responses is so much higher than elsewhere, and because you have a forum for fleshing out the glaring issues left in the article. I might delve into the topics you mentioned a bit in future posts. One thing that I think drives people crazy is the whole "change the world" rhetoric in general. It might be useful to explore what that actually means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A very cogent article. Having had my own experiences of startups this is the best takeaway:

"innate driving force that is _intrinsically tied to_ doing the startup."

This applies to all types of startup, not just software/tech.

</comment><comment><USER11> The author of this article seems to be confusing "changing the world" with helping people. UNICEF and similar organizations are great at helping people, but they really aren't meant to change the world. They just make the existing one a little less terrible for those who are worst off. I can't imagine a compelling argument saying that digging wells or tree planting has changed the world more that Facebook or Google over the last 15 years. Whether those changes have been for the best is open to discussion, but the fact that many startups have in fact changed the world in significant ways is hard to dispute.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I think I quite understand their world changing impact, but those are two examples of the very few companies that have reached the sort of scale where they actually change the world. They represent the vast minority of successful startups, which are a vast minority of all startups.

In any case, what is changing the world if not helping people? Or, as I phrased it in the post, improving the circumstance of mankind?

There are plenty of ways to do it, and it need not be charity (marine biology or journalism, the other examples from the post, are not charity) and it need not be altogether altruistic in purpose, but to change the world in a desirable way necessarily means helping people. For example, Google helps me find information. Facebook helps me stay connected with friends and family.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Everything we do changes the world, even if it's only a little. Our influence is small but it's all we've got. Use it in the best way you can.

And if by chance you're a giant success, all the better.

</comment><comment><USER13> The "change the world" rhetoric that most of these startups use is marketing copy to get naive engineers to work for them for half market salary. At most of the hot VC startups, the rank-and-file tend to believe in "the mission" but the higher-ups don't.

It's like many religions. The peasants believe it and work dutifully, but the high priests know it's bullshit but keep it going because it works.

For the record, I think the 2009-12 "social" startup boom is Over. The economic bubble might stick around for a couple years, but we're already at the point where VCs and management have laid down their terms and figured out where to draw the lines, and going into (or trying to start) one of these "hot" companies makes no sense. You're not really better off (from a career perspective) working at a hot VC-funded company than you are taking the stable, boring job at an insurance company in the suburbs. Not anymore. If you're not rich (and 99% who got involved in that racket aren't) you missed the opportunity. Time to let it go and move on.

What I hope to see is more of a movement into Real Technology. That's where we should be doubling down. Things that might make you crack open that linear algebra or logic textbook. There are real problems worth solving, and creating the next build-to-flip IUsedThisToilet.com is not one of them.

<comment><USER14> > _The "change the world" rhetoric that most of these startups use is > marketing copy to get naive engineers to work for them for half market > salary. At most of the hot VC startups, the rank-and-file tend to believe in > "the mission" but the higher-ups don't._

So, mostly like any political party!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I agree with this. I am a college student and I recently left my part time job at a start up. It went from trying to change how people interact across the globe to trying to put anything out there that would help the company survive. Got tired of seeing failed prototypes and never would be too soon for hearing the word "pivot" again

</comment><comment><USER16> Why not start a startup simply because you're curious what would happen? You don't have to change the world. I think it's fine to just have an adventure (with the understanding that it may be a huge number of hours, fraught with frustration, etc).

</comment><comment><USER17> I disagree. Fred Wilson puts it much more succinctly than I could:

[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/04/can-the-crowd-be-more- patien...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/04/can-the-crowd-be-more-patient.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> And yet he seems to argue that the sort of world changing things we need aren't in the wheelhouse of startups, in the internet/mobile sense, which are the sort of startups that Phil Libin argued should only be done if you mean to change the world.

Fred Wilson's post seems to advocate crowdsourcing the funding of big, world changing ideas like curing cancer. Tackling these sort of problems is hardly prevalent among startups, but as far as it goes it's fine. But then changing the world is still an extrinsic motivation. You're not intrinsically driven to the idea of a startup or an obsession with the problem your trying to solve. I tend to think this is more problematic with the really big, world changing sort of problems with a long time horizon. It's also unclear to me how crowdfunding these sort of things would work. Would you need to renew funding annually? Would people continue funding you if they didn't see marked progress? ...maybe that's the point of his post, but in any case it's tangential at best to the present discussion.</comment></comment>


The List of Legendary Hackers - <AUTHOR> http://zed.m6.net/dyne/hackers.php <comment><USER2> Obviously a list like this is never going to please everyone - but how can alan kay have been omitted??</comment>


It takes up to 42 hours right now for a Bitcoin transaction to be confirmed - <AUTHOR> https://blockchain.info/de/charts/avg-confirmation-time <comment><USER2> anyone have a good explanation why these delays occur in spikes, and why those spikes occurred around June but seemed to have subsided?</comment>


Ask HN: Plenty of large sites down; Reddit.com, GNU.org, Discord, coincidence? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Is AWS/Azure/GCE down?

Remember: the cloud is someone's else computer. When it's broken, you cannot do anything

<comment><USER3> So what? I would rather have Google/Amazon employees on the issue than some random DevOps dude.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't. Hire the right person and you have immediate response instead of waiting or somebody else. A large reason we are not going cloud for our new infrastructure.

<comment><USER3> And this one person never sleeps and is 24/7 on-call, right?

<comment><USER5> and isn't about to quit once they have a little more money saved up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not the best at interpreting this map[0] but seems that something is going on?

[0] [http://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL&...](http://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL&list=0&time=17754&view=map)

<comment><USER7> What's the significance of Poland in the output? A tracking thing?

I noticed problems with Reddit earlier, too.

<comment><USER8> Where are you seeing 'Poland in the output'?

>Edit: Nevermind, I see what you mean (on the map). I'd be interested to know too... maybe PL is a big player in their attack monitoring?

<comment><USER9> I don't think so - when you look at historical data, labels change. Seems like Poland is simply a significant actor in this particular attack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks like wunderground.com is down too. If you're wondering, high chance of thunderstorms this evening in New York, NY.

<comment><USER11> I was wondering, thanks. Rain has been wild recently

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Whatever is happening, it got me out of bed instead of browsing endlessly

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://status.discordapp.com](https://status.discordapp.com) states that Discord identified and resolved the problem.

</comment><comment><USER13> I suppose I came late because only gnu.org is down of those mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER14> defcon week

<comment><USER15> But why gnu? They seem like a static site that can only be taken down by simple ddos?

<comment><USER16> Why does the fact that the site is static make it easier to take down by a simple ddos?

I have a static website at [https://alexandreviau.net/](https://alexandreviau.net/). It sits behind AWS CloudFront. Good luck taking it down.

<comment><USER17> It will DDoS your wallet with CloudFront charges which is even worse.

They just need to hit you over a longer time scale and avoid making obvious peaks so that you can't ask for the DDoS refund.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reddit is up as of this writing, although GNU.org is down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty unstable here, it loads but all the user specific pages return 'error code: 503'

<comment><USER19> And their status page shows all green...

[https://reddit.statuspage.io/](https://reddit.statuspage.io/)

<comment><USER20> Although I like the concept at this point status pages are very disappointing to me, between those that stay green when everything is failing because they're not updated properly, those that stay green because "it was a localized partial failure only" even though the whole thing breaks (hi aws !), ... Sure some are reliable, but enough aren't that it feels like you can't trust them.

You can't look at the status page and believe what it says, so you go and ask people anyway (on irc, reddit, hnews, whatever community you like). Meaning that page might as well not have existed.

<comment><USER21> Couldn't agree more. I pushed for one to be implemented at my last job (api) as I felt it was ridiculous that we didn't have a means to communicate downtime, outages, issues.

Initially the status page worked. But as more and more people subscribed to it, it became a bigger issue, to issue an alert.

And unfortunately an issue couldn't be raised only to those it was relevant for.

All this lead to was, not updating the status page and thus it becoming a useless tool to determine if an issue was occurring.

Back to Twitter...

I feel the product needs a lot work in practice, and possibly in implementation and training.

<comment><USER20> Ah, sadly I believe your personal experience is very common.

It's insane really; a company puts out a status page to say to their customers "you can trust and rely on us through that dedicated medium to know our status", and if the customers in question buy into the proposition and use it the very first thing that company does is make it so you cannot trust and rely on them through that dedicated medium. Succedding is what causes it to ultimately fail.

Status page should have stayed as undocumented features for "the little guys" behind the scene to communicate and never get into the open world where PR and marketing and decision makers can roam.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Turkey?

<comment><USER23> I don't understand the relation/reference.

I'm Turkish and have been watching the news but I don't see any reason why someone correlates large websites being down with Turkey. With no explanation too.

Can you elaborate please? This is an honest question and I would like to know if my government is hacking foreign sites in retaliation for sanctions.

<comment><USER22> Well Trump obliterated any chance of a decent lira value for the next years with his tweets and sanctions.

<comment><USER24> Why would you think that Turkey would retaliate against Trump's tweets by taking down reddit and GNU.org? I don't think that the Turkish government has nearly enough technical knowledge to pull of something like that. That is the problem with Turkey right now, it seems to me that the government doesn't want to work with qualified people.

<comment><USER23> Honestly, I wouldn't dismiss the technical capabilities of the Turkish government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> [https://kb.isc.org/article/AA-01639/74/CVE-2018-5740%3A-A- fl...](https://kb.isc.org/article/AA-01639/74/CVE-2018-5740%3A-A-flaw-in-the- deny-answer-aliases-feature-can-cause-an-INSIST-assertion-failure-in- named.html)

<comment><USER26> What evidence do you have to support this claim?

I could sit here and just pull out random CVEs too, with as much validity.</comment></comment>


Lenovos Warranty Upgrade Is a Scam - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@gadotti/lenovos-warranty-upgrade-is-scam-965b2bf7a497 <comment><USER2> Are there warranty upgrades that aren't scams?

<comment><USER3> Warranty upgrades, to be profitable, usually need to be charged at a price they exceeds the cost you would bear on average if you just covered repair/replacement out of pocket—as is the case with any insurance, which is what a warranty upgrade is—but quite often it's not an outright scam, because the seller wants a good consumer reputation to get repeat business.</comment></comment>


Cofactor Genomics (YC S15) plans to analyze cRNA for consumer diagnostics - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/09/cofactor-genomics/

<comment><USER2> Hi everyone! Dave Messina from Cofactor Genomics here. I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.

<comment><USER3> I don't know much about circRNAs so excuse my naiveness - I wonder if it could be used for gene replacement therapy in the future? Something like, if there is a stop codon somewhere in the middle of a gene, the small piece of circRNA, contains the correct version of that stop codon and is introduced into the cell. Next thing you know, that stop codon is by passed, as the transcription or translation machinery builds an entire good sequence using the DNA and the good code circRNA. Also, since they are resistant to degradation, they might be good shuttle vehicles for tiny 'good copy' exons.

<comment><USER2> I am not an expert in gene therapy, but I think getting the transcription or translation machinery to read the "good" copy instead of the stop codon would be the challenge there.

circRNA have so much value already as a way to diagnose disease — we're excited about just that powerful capability! Our understanding of circRNAs is just beginning, and it'll be interesting to see what other applications for them are invented.</comment></comment></comment>


Hacker News Secret Menu - <AUTHOR>

I just learned that you get to down-vote submissions once you reach 500 karma points.<p>I'm now wondering what other hidden features there are.  Anyone have some good ones? <comment><USER2> Check out <http://news.ycombinator.com/lists>. When you visit these links, they show up at the top of the page as a new section in the normally blank area to the right of 'submit'.

</comment><comment><USER3> Actually you cannot downvote submissions on HN. You can only downvote comments.

</comment><comment><USER4> Really? I've got nearly 20,000 karma points and I can't downvote submissions. You don't have 500 karma points, so where did you get your information? It seems to be wrong.

Certainly at about 500 poimts you get to downvote comments, and at some stage you get to flag submissions and similarly to flag comments. There are other things that kick in with karma, such as the ability to creat polls.

But as far as I know you never get to downvote submissions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I was mistaken. Turns out you get to vote down comments, not submissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Once you pass 20 (I think that's the number), you can do polls. Once you pass 250, you can change the topcolor for the nav bar.

<comment><USER6> Haha, I never even noticed the 'topcolor' field in my profile. Nifty =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note that the number needed to downvote comments changes over time. About a year-ish ago I was able to downvote comments with ~200 points - today I am unable to at 330 points.</comment>


OPPO Digital will gradually stop manufacturing new products - <AUTHOR> https://www.oppodigital.com/farewell.aspx <comment><USER2> For those who don't know, OPPO's main line of business is selling cellphones now. They seem to do pretty well in China, and they are the parent company of OnePlus, which many thought is a competitor to OPPO. It's actually not easy to find information of OPPO and OnePlus's relationship unless you query the commerce database in the Chinese government, where you will also fine that VIVO and OPPO are affiliates..which are under control of BBK Electronics, who shipped 56.7 million smartphones in 2017 Q4 surpassing both Huawei and Apple to become the 2nd largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, just behind Samsung.

<comment><USER3> > It's actually not easy to find information of OPPO and OnePlus's > relationship unless you query the commerce database in the Chinese > government, where you will also fine that VIVO and OPPO are affiliates

Oneplus sold its phone on the back of the fact that it was a "startup". Then came this:

 _According to the Chinese government 's documentation, the only institutional stockholder in OnePlus is Oppo.Although Lau initially denied that OnePlus was a wholly owned subsidiary of Oppo, upon release of the regulatory filings they admitted that they are owned by Oppo and are "in talks with other investors" (although nothing has been announced to date)._

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnePlus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnePlus)

The opacity of Chinese market was documented in another recent post too:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16726355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16726355)

The amazing thing about the scam is that Chinese companies were filing correct numbers in China and fake revenue numbers in US. But with information not easily accessible people got away with it.

<comment><USER4> So actually their ceo is a liar who tells stories of a small company worthy of support by idealistic customers while being funded by a billion dollar enterprise? Happy i didnt buy their phone...

<comment><USER5> Samsung is a corrupt company as well. Huewai may be spying on us. I guess you pick your poison.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. Then again, just because others do bad things too it's not more acceptable for the one we're talking about right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm saddened to read this. I've had their blu-ray player (BDP-103) for many years now, and it has been a pleasure owning a piece of electronics that is designed to _not_ be disposable. Continued firmware updates (for years), solid hardware, and feature-rich. They'll be missed, at least by a niche community of a/v enthusiasts.

</comment><comment><USER7> A shame, I am a big fan of their PM3 Headphone and it's companion amplifier the HA2.

I was hoping they would be developing these two further.

Both were well received by the audio crowd at large.

<comment><USER8> I am a very satisfied owner of the PM3 myself, I was glad finding it a year ago after a long search. Now what? Should I resume search when my headphone wears out or unfortunately get broken or lost? I was relaxed that I always can buy a new one or even an improved one after that happens. Maybe I should buy a reserve now!

<comment><USER9> Maybe! Or maybe just wait - one thing we know is that technology will continue to improve, and there may be a headphone in the future that appeals to you even more by the time your PM3 gives out.

... Or maybe it's worth buying a reserve just as an investment. Some people regarded the PM-3 as one of the best value closed-back headphones on the market now[1][2]; there's a chance it may increase in price?

PM-3 Reviews:

[1] [http://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/oppo- pm-3](http://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/oppo-pm-3)

[2] [https://www.techradar.com/reviews/audio-visual/hi-fi-and- aud...](https://www.techradar.com/reviews/audio-visual/hi-fi-and- audio/headphones/oppo-pm-3-1299128/review)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These guys consistently made the absolute best disc players (DVD, BluRay, 4K BluRay). Guess it wasn't enough.

<comment><USER11> A pity - I'm surprised they didn't use their expertise to get into the set top box business. Roku - as the only independent box maker vs FireTV, Google TV, Apple TV - needs some competiton.

<comment><USER10> Nvidia shield tv is tops. I think Oppo probably hit something a lot of companies are, which is that quality is losing value. People are less able to discern quality so making top notch products at top notch prices is a weakening strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Another sign of the times. I remember when Oppo's were one of the few (if not only) players to play burned CD's. There's just not enough of a "mid-market" enthusiast crowd left - someone that wants a hardware player, won't splurge on the big names, but willing to spend more than what a local retailer (or Best Buy?) has. Wonder what that says for mid-range speaker makers?

<comment><USER13> Audio seems to be getting more personal now. Now that everyone can have just about every song ever, nobody wants a shared listening experience anymore. Half the reason to have a great stereo was because people couldnt afford tons of content to play, so having a nice room filling stereo meant others could hear and enjoy it too. I have fond memories of my uncles listening room. He was a tube amp hi-fi junky and every visit included at least an hour of deep listening sessions.

<comment><USER14> > because people couldnt afford tons of content to play

You'd save for a while to buy a vinyl LP, choose it carefully (besides radio play, you could also ask to play it for a bit at the store), take it home and listen to it a score of times in a row, perhaps in company.

Then lend it to the friend(s) who also loaned you their LPs. Eventually the LP would come to its place of honour on a shelf with a couple dozen others, to be played when the mood struck.

[/Flintstone ;-]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've had the pleasure of working with OPPO Digital on a couple of joint projects. They were the best, most put-together company I've ever worked with.

They made, hands down, the best Blu-ray player. I've worked with every blu-ray player under the sun. Theirs was fast, featureful, and stable. It was something to be proud of; their engineering team always out-did themselves.

OPPO Digital will be missed.

</comment><comment><USER16> Oppo makes a great product but the thing that set them apart for me was their ability to play SACD disks. The number of players that can play this format have been dwindling and Oppo's demise is just a sign of the times. I wonder if physical media for very high resolution audio (and video?) would be as far removed a memory as sony beta or if the vinyl sales trends would imply a reversal of fates down the road, vindicating the high resolution video and audiophile crowd.

<comment><USER17> If you've got discs you want to preserve, get them dumped using a modded PS3 and store the files for posterity.

<comment><USER18> In fact it is possible to rip SACD using some OPPO models, so no need for hard to get PS3 version [1]

[1] [https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/28569-sacd-r...](https://www.computeraudiophile.com/forums/topic/28569-sacd- ripping-using-an-oppo-or-pioneer-yes-its-true/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Everything is great, they are at the pinnacle of development... so why do they stop?

<comment><USER19> Because people don't care about quality, only cheap prices. Audiophile/Videophile market is tiny in comparison. The general public is happy if they can see the picture, and hear the sound.

<comment><USER4> This is probably true. The article doesn't say anything about something like that...

<comment><USER19> Why would OPPO discuss that? My girlfriend is completely happy with just hearing the words being sung. She understands my obsession, and recognizes things do sound and look a bit better. But she doesn't care as long as the basic idea gets through.

<comment><USER4> Because they talk about having people who love their products. Aren't they worth a word of explanation why the products they love are withdrawn from the market? I don't see whom it could hurt to spend a sentence on saying something like "but unfortunately the enterprise of giving you such high quality products didn't lead to economicall success as we need it to sustain the business, and therefore took the hard decision to stop..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The UDP-205 is sold out. However Oppo is considering one last production run if enough people express interest. To do so go to

[https://oppodigital.com/blu-ray- udp-205/lastbatch.aspx](https://oppodigital.com/blu-ray- udp-205/lastbatch.aspx)

and express your interest by giving them your email address. I've got my fingers crossed!

When I picked up my 1O5D at their headquarters in Menlo Park I was told that there is no relationship with Oppo Asia, the cell phone maker. They are two totally separate companies. They use the Oppo name under license.

<comment><USER19> Soon as I saw that announcement I got my purchase order in. I knew that was going to sell out fast. I'd been holding out for the last nine months, and knew I'd never get my hands on one if I waited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Had one of their DVD players with Faroudja processing. Best DVD quality I ever experienced. RIP OPPO, loved your products.

</comment><comment><USER22> I have happily owned a BP-83 for many years. But this is a very strange announcment. Apparently, everything will continue has usual: firmware upgrades, customer support, warranty repairs, returns and even sales. So from a (naive) customers perspective, OPPO will become a company that will continue indefinitely, with no products and no means of making money! Even knowing that OPPO owns or has shares in other companies, this is hard to figure out. I would love to know the inside story. Someone, somewhere is not happy.</comment>


Do Not Track Me - <AUTHOR> https://scrumpy.io/blog/do-not-track-me <comment><USER2> > We don't use tracking. For example, there is no Google Analytics installed > in this blog.

Sure, but there is Google Analytics installed on the main page. "We don't use tracking ... on this particular page where we boast about not using tracking"

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, we have to remove it there. We removed it from the app a year ago and the blog is new and never had Analytics or similar tools.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to manage the team when shit goes south? - <AUTHOR> Imagine your team is burdened with lot of production fires, not able to spend time learning new things. Team's morale is down and everybody is frustrated, while wishing to leave. The product doesn't seem super important to upper management as well. What's the best thing a manager can do in this situation?
Should the manager accept the situation, ask people to work on it and tell that things would get better (even though they are probably not going to be)?
Want to hear opinions from engineers and managers. <comment><USER2> organizations need hierarchy so the top and the bottom can communicate via a chain. you asked how to communicate down the chain. but it sounds like you should ask how to communicate up the chain.

go to your manager. tell her/him the situation. ask for advice.

if it's unsatisfactory, then judge whether you have a bad boss or whether everything is fucked. if it's one sub par person, talk to another person who you are close with about it.

if everything is fucked, quit. don't lie to your reports, but I also wouldn't say "everything is fucked". but do say you are leaving and say why (politely) if asked. you want them to have the real context they need to make their own decisions. but you dont want them to copy your opinions as gospel.</comment>


Learn Python The Hard Way: Warnings For Beginners - wh-uws http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex0.html#warnings-for-beginners <comment><AUTHOR> If someone wants to learn Python, teach them Python. Don't teach them 'nix, gnu, bash, vimacs, git, and oh yeah Python. The big draw of programming is that you can take a computer and _make it do something_. Shorten the path to _doing something_ as much as possible; anything that lengthens it is premature optimization.

They'll learn the value of those tools easily soon enough. Before someone has actually written code, all of those things are barriers, not tools, and the only reason to use them is cargo-cult-ism. Once they've written a few lines, they'll start to appreciate the value on their own.

</comment><comment><USER2> I started working through this book with my girlfriend who wants to learn Python... it turns out most people don't know/understand what a terminal or shell is. This should have been obvious to me, but it wasn't :)

Any suggestions on how to explain what the terminal is and why it is necessary? I feel like there has to be a "pre-learn python" book that explains the basics of how computers work. This probably already exists though... anybody know?

<comment><USER3> 1) The terminal is a conversation; you tell the computer to do something and it answers you (a lot of the time telling you it doesn't understand you).

2) When you want to do something very specific the terminal can be much more efficient, as well as easy to explain. example "copy c:\foo.doc c:\bar.doc"

versus (e.g.):

1) Navigate explorer to c:\

2) Find the file named "foo" with the MS Word icon and click and drag it, staying in the same window

3) Click on "Copy of foo"

4) Press F2

5) Type in "bar"

The shell way is both faster and easier to communicate to someone else (as long as they know how to open a terminal).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> At my former workplace we hold regular programing workshops for absolute beginners, mostly for groups of art students, using Processing. Surprisingly the first and biggest pitfall what our students had to jump was always the question: How can I type { ? So after a few occasions, we get the habit of starting with an introduction to the whereabouts of funky characters.

I can see how fast could things turn unmanageably hard when a novice try to tame the keyboard, an unfamiliar text editor, the command line, and a programing language at the same time. I think that should be the reason why all the programing systems, which are intended for non-professionals, and I know of have a tightly coupled ide. (Arduino, Logo, NodeBox, Fluxus, and the aforementioned Processing) Did I forget something out? Do anyone know any popular, or less known exception?

</comment><comment><USER5> I started learning python a little while ago-there are so many options-mostly been using trial and error to figure out the best approach-from experience what you said TOTALLY makes sense--thanks p.s talking to other people who are also at the moment trying to learn python seems it would help-but I haven't been able to find any good discussion group/sites/forums/etc like that. Doea anyone know any good ones to do that?

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm a dedicated and long-time Emacs user but he's right.

Not everybody that learns Python is looking to become a professional programmer, just leave them the fuck alone and let them learn to code in their own way.

<comment><USER7> I don't see how gedit is simpler than emacs for a complete beginner: open an editor, start typing (letters, arrows, delete produce the same result), press "save" button (I think emacs shows toolbar by default).

emacs gives you the power to do much more but it doesn't force you to use it.

To be fair making emacs a complete Python IDE that has the same features as Eclipse for Java has a steep learning curve and it is not trivial. But for the book you don't need it (some don't need it even for professional work with Python provided that there are other useful features in emacs).

<comment><USER8> Did you even read the link? I'm sorry, but I can't imagine a worse time to invoke the editor wars. Shame on you.

Look, I love my editor just as much as the next guy. I have tremendous respect for emacs, and you can take vim from my cold, dead hands (and no, I will not start _those_ wars now, either). But a beginner has far too much trouble just getting shit fucking installed and working consistently.

Case in point: the reason why a menagerie of tools and scripts for setting up programming environments make the front page of HN every week is because it's a total schlep to try and get your environment set up. And this is an audience of _experts_. That 30 second fabric deploy script is literally the most convenient that process will be for anyone, ever. A beginner might have a hard enough of a time touch typing.

I think Zed's entire point is to dissuade beginners to listen to people who are proselytizing as you are now. Let the beginner find emacs when they're ready. Trying to move them into that habit up front might be beyond the opportunity cost of programming for that individual. And then a community which is attacked left and right by ignorant people in power trying to legislate it away will have have lost an ally do to pithy zealotry.

Any amount of editor or environment advocacy on your part is really just injuring the signal to noise ratio.

<comment><USER6> Even explaining why C-s searches instead of saving in Emacs is an immense roadblock for new users.

The guy you're responding to is suffering from this: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge>

Not everybody that writes code needs to be using Emacs or vim.

Just the same, not every 6 year old kid learning to play violin needs a Stradivarius.

I've been using Emacs for _counts in head_ 13 years, almost 14 now. I've also spent many years teaching new people to use it and I can tell you right now, most people not willing to dedicate some time independent of anything else to just learning Emacs will get any value out of it.

Don't distract them from learning to code. End of story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I always wonder why in python context the three enemy brother OS should be presented in Mac, Windows, Linux order. If based on usage it should be W M L, if based "close minded ness " it should be L W M, and no other criterion I can think of would result in M W L.

<comment><USER10> What do you mean by "close minded ness"? Anyway, I think ease of use for many people would be ranked M W L (cue pointless discussion based on anecdotal evidence on all sides). But I think really, you're missing the larger point; this does not matter in the slightest. The order in which operating systems are talked about is _not_ significant.

<comment><USER9> What I have learnt reading good books is that every thing matters.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I strongly disagree, regarding the text editor. You'll make mistakes and want to fix them, want to copy things, etc, and this is much easier in a decent text editor. Learn to use vim or emacs or something of similar power before you get started programming - it's worthwhile. Running through vimtutor is not hard (I don't know of a similar thing for emacs, but it probably exists), and it can speed you up wherever else you're working with text, as well.

<comment><USER12> I can't understand why learning vim/emacs is in any way useful for a programmer. Surly the best text editor is the easiest to use (ie one which makes use of a keyboard + mouse)? Vim is certainly powerful (and unnecessarily complicated), but when it comes to writing out code anything will do (Sublime in my case).

<comment><USER13> The reason you want to learn a decent text editor is the same reason you want to learn to touch type decently fast--you don't want to have to think about moving around, or using your mouse, or swapping some words when you're trying to just write code.

Also, there is a difference between "easiest to learn" (e.g. uses keyboard + mouse) and "easiest to use" (e.g. keyboard navigation). In the hands of an expert, Emacs and Vim are more efficient than other editors--in a very real sense, they are _easier_ to use, but only _after_ you learn them.

Learning how to use an editor well enough to be efficient is an O(1) task. The benefit to using a powerful editor efficiently is O(n) to however much programming you do. Unless you don't plan on doing much programming, learning how to use a good editor is worth it.

There are some other reasons as well (e.g. Emacs is extremely consistent, customizable and supports every single thing you can imagine doing in a text editor, and then some). However, I think this is all secondary to just being more efficient and not having to think or switch contexts (e.g. never going from typing to using the mouse to using the arrow keys and back to typing).

<comment><USER11> Not just programming - editing configuration files or html or other large blocks of structured text. Which, granted, is more common in the life of a programmer than the average person, but there are certainly non-programmers who wind up doing a lot of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


List of whatsapp groups of all Masters(MS) universities in US or other countries - <AUTHOR> http://groupsone.com/groups/msuniversities <comment><USER2> Can I get any best GRE whatsapp group ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi ixplored, Yes absolutely. You can join one from here.

[http://groupsone.com/group/GrePreparation](http://groupsone.com/group/GrePreparation)

If you cant find particular group, try asking it here. [http://groupsone.com/AskGroup](http://groupsone.com/AskGroup)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Jiphy – a 1:1 Python to JavaScript converter - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/timothycrosley/jiphy

<comment><USER2> This is incredible. I love Python and I tried to learn JavaScript, but I had a tremendous amount of trouble with it. Moreover, I really can't stand JavaScript. CoffeeScript alleviated a lot of my concerns, but this tool is perfect considering that it lets me use a language with which I am already way more comfortable. I think that this will make an excellent learning tool for a lot of people. Thanks a lot for creating and sharing this.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is pretty cool! It's going to get even more interesting once ES6 features are implemented :). However, i feel like javascript by itself is such a great language (has some weird parts but eh) that i would never use this. Cool project though!</comment>


Ask HN: What is your ultimate development environment? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'd say my favorites are Xcode, IntelliJ and PyCharm.

The former because it's simply _the_ way of developing on Mac/iOS and although it has some quirks, it's really a great IDE.

For Java and Python I tend to look at the JetBrains family of IDE's.

They work pretty well, but like many other IDE's can feel a bit sluggish. JetBrains IDE's also don't work well with a 4K/5K external monitor (it causes high CPU spikes), but they're apparently working on it.

</comment><comment><USER3> VSCode is amazing. I do web work with Haskell, Elm, and Angular, and it has great support for them. Having an integrated terminal is such a nice feature. Its debugging tooling is impressive. Live Share makes pairing remotely a lot easier. There are extensions for database management so I can do it all in 1 app.

But of course I also have iTerm open running all my docker containers. I just don't want VSCode trying to do ALL of that :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Emacs. Although IDEs like VSCode are lean, pretty and fast. I don't want to switch IDE if I switch my programming language. Having modes for nearly everything you need and being able to quickly switch between programming, note taking with org and LaTeX, or basic shell tasks is really comfortable. An external terminal for demanding tasks which could break Emacs with its multi threading issues rounds it up.

</comment><comment><USER5> Emacs with evil-mode (or spacemacs, but that's just Emacs with evil and other stuff). Emacs allows you to very easily treat everything like text, and evil provides the best ways of navigating and editing that text. You get a very powerful set of tools to operate on a universal interface.

</comment><comment><USER6> The best environment for me is bash+vim+(tools needed for the language I'm using). In my line of work I mostly do webstuff (react, php, some golang).

A good terminal setup, alt+tab to the browser (or just testing with curl). I only use the mouse when testing in the browser, otherwise I prefer to type commands.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is Sublime Text already uncool? I'll open another editor if I feel like I need a power feature that's not available, but for general everyday coding it's still my go-to.

Beyond that, any Unix environment is fine with me.

</comment><comment><USER8> I use tmux + vim. I use different tmux sessions for work, school and side projects.

</comment><comment><USER9> Viscode for remote programming ftw.</comment>


Ask HN: Who are the best dedicated server providers right now? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to upgrade our dedicated server infrastructure and I'm trying to shop around for some good deals. I'm running into a lot of providers that are either single-homed, have fairly crazy bandwidth prices, offer very old hardware or use consumer grade parts like SSDs.
My requirements are eight 3+ GHz CPU cores (Haswell or newer), 64+ GB RAM, 10+ TB outbound bandwidth and a mix of HDD / SSD storage (using enterprise-class drives!). Network should have a good mix of peering and not rely on a single carrier such as Telia / NTT as many seem to. Budget is < $1k/month.
Right now OVH is looking like my best option as they seem to be the only provider offering 4th / 5th gen Intel CPUs with Intel SSDs at a reasonable price, and their own network with peering at lots of major IXes.
Anyone have any other good recommendations? <comment><USER2> I'll vouch for OVH as a great choice - I've been a customer there for several years. Their phone support is awesome and you get a ton of hardware and bandwidth for your dollar.</comment>


And again: Is Cloud a Revolution or just an Evolution? - <AUTHOR> http://www.iamondemand.com/post/13549067852/and-again-is-cloud-a-revolution-or-just-an-evolution I initiated this discussion in two separate Linkedin groups in different times. The first one was on May this year and the current one is still rolling as we speak. Amazing to see the differences between the winds that blows in each one of the discussions. Reading the comments submitted in the first discussion, you will find that most of the people vote for Evolution. The current discussion seems to have winds of Revolution. This can be because the time that passed and proved everyone that cloud is a revolution, the crowd type, the people roles or it can be just a coincidence.<p>In any case the total amount of comments for both discussions reach to almost 80! It is fascinating to hear and learn what people think about cloud computing including its current and future development. If we discuss it in a boarder sense, I personally tend to say that the cloud is revolutionary. <comment><USER2> It's neither. It's history repeating itself.</comment>


Simulated Knitting in Python - <AUTHOR> http://blog.learnfromdata.com/2011/11/simulated-knitting.html <comment><USER2> These are the kinds of things that arise from mixing another interest or skill with programming. A knitter wouldn't think of doing this, and neither would a programmer, but a knitter-programmer comes up with this great idea.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a video from a while back, were Vi Hart explains to the 2011 Joint Mathematics Meetings how to have fun with negative-curature objects: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsE2UKkIKXU>

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd considered doing this with crochet for a while. I like the 3D mesh approach. Glad to see it works!

<comment><USER6> The actual pseudo-sphere he makes a model off is crocheted. I think the approach he uses would work okay with crochet, but you'd have to add in something that knows a bit about the height of a stitch (and stick with the same height stitch), and also do something where the slight tilt of crochet stitches isn't significant for your purposes.

<comment><USER5> Since all crochet stitches are just combinations of hook-through, yarn over, and draw, my idea was to make a simulator in terms of those. At one point I put together this cheat sheet breaking down the stitches: <http://fstutoring.com/~chris/stuff/crochet></comment></comment></comment>


Google's new drawing app can turn your terrible sketches into works of art - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/04/12/google-autodraw-can-turn-terrible-sketches-works-art/ <comment><USER2> Works of ClipArt __ _</comment>


An Introduction to A/B Testing | 20bits - <AUTHOR> http://20bits.com/2008/10/06/an-introduction-to-ab-testing/ <comment><USER2> Didn't expect this to get submitted.

I wrote this for people who may have heard of A/B testing but want to know what all the fuss is about. More detailed articles will be forthcoming.</comment>


Like Slime, for Vim - b-man http://technotales.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/like-slime-for-vim/

<comment><AUTHOR> Like slime, if you ignore autocompletion, arglist hints, automatic indentation of macros based on &body, M-. (jump to definition), crossreferencing, and compiler note overlays.

But having C-c C-c is nice!

<comment><USER2> My thoughts exactly. SLIME if anything is more of an Lisp IDE (and a superior one at that) not just a clever hook to a REPL.

<comment><USER3> _and a superior one at that_

Slime is indeed a superior lisp interaction mode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is close, but I would have to say that the way emacs interacts with external processes is probably my favorite feature. It is simply a paradigm that no other text editor seems to even attempt.

Here are some common modes that I use that interact with external processes.

py-shell: kind of obvious, using the python shell is sometimes awkward because of the way that python doesn't reload code.

pdb-mode:in any shell process, if my python code hits a pdb.set_trace() python will pop up a debugging repl. As I step through my code with pdb, emacs opens up whatever file the current stack is in to the position in the stack. I couldn't imagine debugging code without this. This functionality also exists for gdb and rdb I think, I don't use those frequently.

compile-mode: when I run unit tests and I get an error, compile mode lets me click or hit return on that error and instantly jump to that code in another buffer

shell: emacs deals with my bash shell. I can easily scroll up in the buffer to copy and paste output from previous commands. I can search backwards through not just commands I have previously run, but through previous output from the shell. When I open a file from the shell, it defaults to my current shell directory.

sql-mode: gives all the goodness of emacs to an sql repl. I can edit sql in another buffer, craft the query I want, and send just that query to my sql repl.

</comment><comment><USER5> slimv is a more complete Vim+SLIME plugin that doesn't require screen: <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2531>

There is a Vim+screen plugin as well for interacting with shells: <http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2711>

</comment><comment><USER6> _Yeah, Slime is great. I'm just not an Emacs fan._

I'm not an emacs fan either but I grudgingly use it everyday for R and Octave development. Vim is my preferred text editor but it can't compare to the power of emacs when working with interactive languages. Emacs viper mode is excellent though and gives access to the vi keys anywhere. I'd also recommend those that really hate emacs to try the console mode -- its much snappier and brings the monster closer to a vim-like experience.

</comment><comment><USER7> Overall, great idea. However, it's kind of annoying to use with Python, since when you copy in a function definition, you need to go to the interpreter and hit enter an extra time to get it to work. I was going to try and fix this myself, but I'm not sure if there's any easy way to add a special case for this, since the Vim script has no way of knowing what kind of interpreter is running in the other screen session....

</comment><comment><USER8> This is cool, but kinda hacky... I mean what if I want to use the output for say, going to the error in the copied code? Does screen have a way to attach to stdin/stdout/stderr for a process it is running? While still displaying in the host terminal as well (something akin to tee)?

</comment><comment><USER9> For slime-like editing with vim for Clojure, check out VimClojure. It's really great.

<comment><USER10> I had trouble installing it, actually.. I couldn't seem to get the plugin to load the keybindings (LocalLeader never seemed to have got bound and the functions which were to get called werent defined..) :-(

Its a pity, because VimClojure looks damned sweet. Thankfully I did get VimClojures syntax highlighting to work.

<comment><USER11> I had the same issue at first. I did get it fixed eventually but I can't remember what I did. :-( Once you get it running though it offers syntax completion send-to-repl and most of the slime functionality without the need for screen. Very worth the effort setting it up.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, the features looked very convenient and useful for interactive development, testing and debugging. I guess I'll have to give it another try.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Like _Steering Wheel_ , but for _Brick_! No car needed!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This also reminds me a bit of projects along the lines of "Like Lisp, for <some non-Lisp language>!" Yes, just like it, except missing most of the good parts.

</comment><comment><USER13> What i think would rock would be reinteract like development environment inside Vim.</comment>


Ask HN: Recommended non-technical reading - <AUTHOR>

I haven't read a non-technical book in several years, but I finally have time to read again. I'm looking for some good book recommendations. I got a degree in physics 20 years ago. I'd love to know some good math and science books that are non-technical, but also don't overly simplify things. I went to Barnes and Noble today, but couldn't tell quickly what recent books have substance and which are full of fluff.<p>Any recommendations? <comment><USER2> Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz: Making Light of Weighty Ideas (Burger, Starbird)

Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down (Gordon)</comment>


OpenStack Launches Kata Containers Project to Improve Security - <AUTHOR> http://www.eweek.com/cloud/openstack-launches-kata-containers-project-to-improve-security <comment><USER2> I can't keep up with the number of stripped down operating systems designed to do little else than run containers (most of the time OCI compliant containers only). At least in this case Intel and Hyper are working together.</comment>


Bike Sharing Service Coming to San Francisco Bay Area - <AUTHOR> http://laughingsquid.com/bike-sharing-service-coming-to-san-francisco-bay-area/ <comment><USER2> I think most people in the bay area probably own a bike already. First thing I did when I moved here was buy a bike off craigslist to explore the city. The service will certainly be convenient, but might cater more towards tourist. Is it going to look like the bike in the picture? Honestly it might be the ugliest bike I have seen so far.</comment>


How much are your US insurance premiums for self-employed people? - <AUTHOR> I was curious how much self-employed people are paying for healthcare for single and family plans. I was commenting on another thread and the suggested premium for someone making $50k was on the high side.<p>If you could ballpark your income that would be great. <comment><USER2> $0.

I'm a veteran with a disability rating of 40% after several deployments overseas. This means I get free healthcare for life through the VA(although my family is not covered through the VA, instead through my wife's employer).

If I didn't have VA coverage we'd have to spend $800/mo for me to be added to my wife's plan. Incurring an extra $800/mo out of the gates would have likely been a non-starter.

That was a _significant_ factor in my ability to step out on my own.

It feels like America is really hamstringing our entrepreneurs by not having a medicare-for-all or some other public option.

<comment><USER3> This weirds me out so much about US. It is (was?) touted as a beacon of entrenourship and savvy business thinking, but a lot of things seem to be right downward hostile towards business.

The parent is an indication of this - he wouldn't have considered starting a business unless his health care was taken care of. Other things like taxes, beaurocracy and legal matters seem extremly convoluted and unfriendly to business when compared to Sweden, which is often painted a socialist.

<comment><USER4> When people say the US is business friendly, I think they're really observing that the US is big-business friendly.

Convoluted taxes allow big business and the very wealthy to evade them more easily.

Convoluted bureaucracy makes it easy to get ahead by working the loopholes, which you can only do if you're big enough.

Same thing for other legal matters.

All of this is really a cautionary tale of regulatory capture pushed by vested interests, usually at the expense of working people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> $500/mo/person for ACA (Obamacare) HMO Silver Plan in Illionois. It comes out to $12,000 per year for a family of two adults, no kids. This is fully out of pocket without subsidies.

HMO means you have to go to specific providers, and get referrals for any specialists. Silver plan means the deductible is about $2000 per person before insurance starts paying, then various levels of co-insurance until you hit a spending cap of about $7000 per person. Only family doctor and referral specialist visits are fixed price, at $30 and $60 fixed copay, respectively.

EDIT: comparatively speaking, a PPO silver plan (you get to choose your own doctor) would go up to about $800/person/month. And a gold plan with lower deductibles and lower coinsurance would be $1000/person/month and more. Basically, if you end up going to a doctor for anything serious, you end up paying $thousands out of pocket anyway, whether due to monthly premiums on gold, or deductible on lower plans.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think it is open enrollment season; log on to your local Obamacare site and check.

In New York, off the top of my head, premiums are something like $250 a month for an individual plan, I think $900 for a family for a high deductible plan that probably won't pay anything next year.

When the subsidies are factored in for a family that earns $50k a year, I think you wind up paying about $70 a month.

If you are not destitute but have a fairly low income (say $35k a year for that family) you qualify for the "Essential Plan" which has a $20 a month premium and a low deductible.

<comment><USER7> I don't live in the US but asked some colleagues in New York how much it would be for a self employed person with a family (of 4 as an example) and they told me around $20K/year. Your figures are very far off that, what gives, is it because there are so many options it's like choosing anywhere from a low end to a high end restaurant?

<comment><USER8> In essence, yes. GP quoted figures for a high-deductible health plan. The premiums are low because the deductible is high - you would have to pay thousands of dollars of any medical bill out-of-pocket before the insurance plan would start to cover expenses. Low-deductible plans (insurance covers practically all of any bill) are available, but the premiums are substantially higher, especially for higher-income people ineligible for government subsidies.

<comment><USER9> $20k p.a. is a low-end estimate for minimal cover and high deductible. Here are the actual plans from Oscar for NYC -> [https://assets.ctfassets.net/plyq12u1bv8a/1ffUyjqSleteGxYkSq...](https://assets.ctfassets.net/plyq12u1bv8a/1ffUyjqSleteGxYkSqRN2T/3b77eb76be665039019f09681f4a2a46/New_York_Plan_Grid___Rates_English_111219.pdf) Likewise, for a single, min cost in 2020 will be $500/mo.

GP figures might exist in NY if it's a) a very low-income situation or b) a generous employer that covers most of the cost, and the employee's contribution is minimal. Neither applies to a typical self-employed family.

<comment><USER7> That link is something to behold, tiers within tiers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Unfortunately this completely depends on how the state implements the subsidies. For a family of 4 in my state, $50k will get you a $0/month Bronze plan or $1500-2000/month for the Silver or Gold plans. As far as I can tell the only benefit for the Silver and Gold plans is that you pay for your care ahead of time so it seems like you are paying less for each visit.

<comment><USER11> From my recent plan shopping in Washington state, the silver and gold plans looked like they might save you money if you were likely to use a lot of services, but not hit the out of pocket max (i seem to recall out of pocket max plus premiums was pretty close for all the plans); it felt like silver and gold might cover a couple things bronze didn't, but it's pretty hard to actually compare these things, because you have to go through so many layers of plan documentation, much of which isn't easily obtainable.

<comment><USER10> The situation is absurd. healthcare.gov is supposed to help us figure out what's best but you can't export any of their info. I have to hand-create a spreadsheet every year using information from the that website in html form and then for the plans that look promising I have to go into multiple PDFs and pull out information. It's all so opaque.

It's even more difficult in my case because I can decide on my income ahead of time since it's almost all capital gains. The only way to see how the plans change when your income changes is to delete your current application and resubmit it, fortunately the info is all still there. But you still have to repeat the html and pdf -> spreadsheet process.

It's become very helpful to understand cutoffs like 200% FPL and 218% and 400% and concentrate around there.

I'm happy for ACA as it allows me to contribute to the industry outside the confines of a medium or large company, but it's clear that the whole healthcare system needs to be burnt to the ground eventually.

<comment><USER12> There is a "compare" function. But I think you can only compare 3 or 4 at a time.

But in many cases, I think silver is the sweetspot for anyone who plans to use a moderate amount of healthcare.

Bronze if you just want catastrophic coverage.

The plans above bronze rarely offer much benefit for the price.

I would focus on comparing all the silver plans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Exact income is irrelevant here, all you need to know is if you are above or below the ACA subsidy line. Having been self-employed in Washington State both pre-and-post ACA, the actual $$ per family member hasn't shifted greatly, but choice of plans became more limited. Currently paying ~ $375/mo for myself (ACA Bronze equivalent), with minimal (~$10/mo) increase for 2020. When I had the kids on my plan, they were a bit less - last time I paid for a full family plan (two years ago), it came in at approx. $1100/mo.

I've been with all of the major carriers in the state. Cost differences are minimal and any coverage differences are impossible to compare. Health insurance in the US has become exactly like auto insurance - you pay cash out of pocket and just pretend you don't have insurance until something really bad happens.

</comment><comment><USER14> I hate this country.

<comment><USER15> Funny, things were substantially different here in the US back around 1999-2004. Cost of living was substantially lower and consumer pricing was actually better in the US than elsewhere. Fast-forward to today and we're all being gouged by the telecoms, food prices, tuition bills, health insurance, real estate prices... well you get the idea. What's the big difference between then and now? Many, many mega-mergers. For example, back in 1999 there were 17 major airlines. Today there are four. The government plays a big role in this, as do the major corporations since they draft their own legislation and have their bought and paid for politicians sponsor the bills. I've heard the situation summed up as: in Europe, the governments work for the people. In the US, the government works for the big corps and that means, it's not working for the people.

<comment><USER16> Isn't this expected? The capital growth is proportional to its size. Unless there is something that restricts it's growth, it will absorb all smaller players.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> On COBRA, wife and 2 year old kid. I pay 1900 per month for Anthem Blue Cross plus dental and vision benefits. I'm in California. I'm self employed and COBRA runs out soon, but everything on the exchange is about the same amount.

<comment><USER18> Have you checked on Health Sherpa? I pretended to be a San Jose, California resident with a spouse and a 2 year old kid, making $100,000/year, and it showed me bronze plans starting at ~$700/month.

Your age, etc. may cause this to be different, but I think there's a good chance you can improve on $1900/month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Don't know about individuals anymore but in the East Coast area (NY/NJ), a family of 4 would cost you about $2000/Month for an OK plan.

</comment><comment><USER20> I pay about $475 a month for a HealthShare program through Liberty Health Share (for my entire family). It qualifies as insurance for tax purposes, but they are very clear that it is not insurance. But IMO it's a much better option for people living a healthy lifestyle.

</comment><comment><USER18> You might want to check Health Sherpa, it does a decent job of sorting through your options for you. I live in Texas, and am in my 50's, and for me and my family it's around $1000/month. I am above the ACA subsidy line.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's kind of blowing my mind how different the prices are state to state. $900 for a family plan in New York? I pay $1600 in MN for my family plan in MN.

<comment><USER9> It's the same cost in NY. The "$900" figure given elsewhere is either outdated by a decade, or the plan is heavily subsidized by the employer. $1,600/mo is the minimum a self employed family would pay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Self employed in CA, single, $225 per month, no subsidies.

</comment><comment><USER23> $1300 per month for two 28 year olds in NYC</comment>


You can't really disable Google history - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dreamc0re/status/1016992101962313728 <comment><USER2> It seems like a bug. Of course you can't force Google to remove these data internally, but if they don't want to be sued, they have to hide them from the users themselves. So it looks more like a bug from pre-GDPR times that will be removed relatively quickly. Not to mention the caching issue: if you opted out recently, the change might not be immediate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: yes, it's my tweet. I reposted it not for the sake of self- promotion, but because I believe this may be important, and I am interested in more attempts to reproduce this "bug". Regarding your comments: my history has been disabled 2 years ago, and it had been guarding me from having unrelated stuff in recommendations well enough. Few months ago I noticed that random clicks on YT links started affecting my recommendations. So it's obviously not a caching error, and it persists for noticeable time as well. Time when the issue first happened doesn't correlate with GDPR either.</comment></comment>


After Neoliberalism - <AUTHOR> https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/after-neoliberalism-progressive-capitalism-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-2019-05 <comment><USER2> Weird that this was not discussed much. The title is not very gripping, I must say. But the content is hard-hitting. Stiglitz (Nobel price in economics, former chief economist of the World Bank) says:

"The neoliberal experiment – lower taxes on the rich, deregulation of labor and product markets, financialization, and globalization – has been a spectacular failure. Growth is lower than it was in the quarter-century after World War II, and most of it has accrued to the very top of the income scale. After decades of stagnant or even falling incomes for those below them, neoliberalism must be pronounced dead and buried."</comment>


An iPhone interface for Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://hn.buxfer.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Please let me know if you like it! I presume quite a few hackers out here are like me constantly checking hacker news on their iPhones while they are out. The pinching and zooming is great, but it gets tiring after a while; so I figured I should do something about it. Given that Buxfer already had a good iPhone interface, it did not take that much time to build it.

Of course, this is unofficial. Hopefully, PG won't have a problem with it since it does not create any additional requests for the HN server; just routes request through Buxfer.

<comment><USER2> I like it, but comment replying isn't working ("A network error occurred. Please refresh before continuing.").

The only thing I would suggest is that you make the hot spot on the comment smaller (only the top, maybe), because when I drag my finger, it keeps clicking the comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just fixed that error. Replying should work now...

I will keep thinking about the reply "hot spot"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ok, this seriously rocks. Thanks Ashwin!

I'd like to make an iPhone interface for Disqus in the near future. Any pointers to nice resources?

<comment><AUTHOR> I used Joe Hewitt's excellent iUI library as the base, although hacked it quite extensively. Also, prototype.js is always a time saver.

The hardest part about the iPhone app, I felt, was just reducing clutter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just tried this on my phone. It looks really really good. (Much better than you would expect if you just clicked on the link in Firefox.) Great job!

</comment><comment><USER5> Great idea Buxfer guys.

A simple version of this can also be done through mofuse, granted I think the Buxfer one looks better.

I was able to create a News.YC in about a minute.

Here's the link to the preview. <http://gg20o9.mofuse.mobi/iphone/preview/>

<comment><AUTHOR> The buxfer version is actually much more functional as well. It allows you to reply as well as vote stories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for taking the initiative - works very well on the iPhone. I'd ask you to do the recently added 'comments' stream but I'm afraid (ok, certain) that it would make me use the interface more (which is bad in a way - I have 8aweek on my computer(s) limiting access)

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome, thank you. Has news.YC got an api yet or is this done by scrapping?

<comment><AUTHOR> No API, just plain old lib-www-perl :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Beautiful stuff, Ashwin!

</comment><comment><USER9> Also, would be great a better interfase for BlackBerries! :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks :) I was hoping someone would whip something up.

</comment><comment><USER11> i think this needs to be extended quite a bit, but its a start.</comment>


Online PHP Debugger - <AUTHOR> http://phpio.net/ <comment><USER2> Can someone explain how this is a debugger?

<comment><AUTHOR> It might help you debug some PHP function if you don't have php environment on your machine

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Oh. It's cool to try Vim.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great! Pretty simple.</comment>


Fred Wilson on the StackOverflow Investment - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/stack.html <comment><USER2> Good luck and congratulations. That said, I think they should have stuck to StackOverflow itself. Being THE site that programmers use for Q&A could eventually make millions per year in profit, with high quality sponsorship. It's also a site they can genuinely be in to. I don't see them being passionate about fashion or car Q&A sites.

Now they're stuck on the VC train without a repeatable formula. They had the power to get thousands of programmers coming to one site, and just as importantly, linking to it from hundreds of high pagerank sites. That's why they've done so well with SEO. It's a picture perfect SEO-driven site.

Now they're going to struggle hard to build up a single new site as successful as SO, let alone dozens.

Not that I think it's a mistake from Fred's perspective. The VCs can afford to roll the dice, and it's not risky compared with many startups. They're betting that Joel/Jeff can figure out a repeatable formula, maybe they can.

<comment><USER3> Depending on how this all shakes out, the issues that you touched upon may be an opportunity for somebody else to fill any void created.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know where the habit of writing $6mm instead of $6m came from? Is there some ambiguity in writing $6m that I'm not seeing?

<comment><USER5> It comes from banking. In that context, $6MM stands for the Latin "6 mille mille," or "6 thousand thousands". $6M seems natural for those used to SI units (6 megadollars), but I have heard that in some financial circles that may be taken to mean "6 mille" (what we would call 6k).

It's all probably moot, the average person uses and understands them as interchangeable, I'd imagine.

<comment><USER6> And to avoid a confusion between a US billion (10^9) and a UK billion (10^12).

Errors of 3 orders of magnitude used to worry bankers once upon a time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Congrats to USV and Stack Overflow. (I also participated)</comment>


Body-hacking: Tim Ferris's next book & request for help. - <AUTHOR> http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/06/22/the-next-book-from-rapid-fat-loss-to-strongmen-a-guide-to-becoming-superhuman

<comment><USER2> I'd like to see Timmy train for an ironman triathlon or a super marathon. He should do quite well (in theory) given his hacking skills.

If he can do well in one of these events it would give credit to his claims. Until then, he should consider touring around with David Copperfield.

<comment><USER3> _I'd like to see Timmy train for an ironman triathlon or a super marathon._

Or win a UFC championship (most likely by strategically placing his crotch in the path of his opponents' fists so they become disqualified and he wins by default).

<comment><USER2> No pain, no gain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> While I make no claim of knowing Ferris personally, I've read his book and blog.

He reads like an Infomercial. I'd trust his advice about as much. Do be careful, particularly when your health is on the line.

<comment><USER5> I think it goes without saying that anybody who takes medical advice from Tim Ferriss will get what they deserve, and deserve what they get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let me get this straight. He has tens of thousands of pages of potential material _[1]_ , but he is soliciting tips and help from people who have some actual credulity in the field?

Forgive me if I'm a little suspicious of this one.

        [1] "I'll spare you the 10,000 pages of literature on a
     given topic and give you the one unusual 1-2-3 method that
     produced unbelievable results."

<comment><USER7> I think, what he is saying is... since he has done most of the reading and experiments, that actually save us having to go through the same amount of literature.

I know personally, when i do those type of reading, they all give a very conflicting opinion. Example: Vitamin C. Some say 250mg, another say you need 3000mg/day (or even as far as 20000mg/day). Almost every piece of medical advice that i read always have counter-argument. It's so hard to know which one is working without experiment. Even then, i'm not sure how long u need to carry the experiment.

<comment><USER8> > Almost every piece of medical advice that i read always have counter- > argument. It's so hard to know which one is working without experiment.

Medical advice based off peer reviewed studies and expert analysis or advice from some quack promising to increase your strength by 30% in 48 hours?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't know much about Ferris nor have I read his book but I am very interested in what he has to say. I didn't know he was viewed as an 'Infomercial' type of guy but its not like the body can't be hacked.

There is the Atkins Diet, Caveman Diet, etc that go against the traditional nutritional advice. There as that one guy that recently watched TV in the morning and just that helped him control his appetite. (it was a story on here or Reddit I think) There was the woman who used eye training to give her depth perception that she had not had her whole life. There was the researcher in the 70s or 80s that wore glasses that inverted the light entering his eyes and he proved that within a week his brain adapted to it and he could function normally. Josh Waitzkin mentions being in the 'Zone' during a chess match when an Earthquake happened and he was so focused it was Zen like to him. There was an article today on researchers finding that sleep happens as areas of the brain shut down independently. Charlie Sheen went on a special workout and diet before Hot Shots Part Deux and gained 20-30 pounds of muscle while getting to under 10 percent body fat with in 4 to 6 months. Eating many small meals a day versus three square meals is supposedly healthier.

I'm not saying that Ferris is correct or a good man or anything like that. I am interested in what he has to say and as far as hacking the body I completely believe it is possible.

Heck, I was thinking of what the 30% strength gain could be and I figured it might be something like over-training a muscle group for several hours one day and then resting. Perhaps the body through evolution will direct more resources to repairing it as it might have in the evolutionary past because it assumes it is going to be needed again soon. Then on day two you get really angry or scared to release adrenaline to give speed, strength and cover any pain as you try and lift something. I don't know... but I know that the stuff talked about today nutritionally would seem crazy 100 years ago and the stuff now ill look crazy in 50 years.

"Come on! Get liposuction to release the natural stem cells in an adult body and then inject it into your heart during a bypass to increase your chance of survival 10 fold AND lowering your chance of complications?! Crazy!"

</comment><comment><USER8> I think his scientific process is a little flawed... wheres the control? How is it a double blind study if he is the experimenter and guinea pig? Just an example of quack science using outrageous statements and feeding off the fact that people are willing to ignore reason if they _want_ to believe what hes selling.

</comment><comment><USER10> All these disproportionately strong reactions show that Tim Ferriss is still relevant and still very good at what he does. I look forward to the book.

<comment><USER11> _All these disproportionately strong reactions show that Tim Ferriss is still relevant and still very good at what he does_

Correct, if Tim Ferriss is a professional annoyatron.

<comment><USER10> Close, he's a professional firebrand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> here's some help: STOP WRITING. YOU ARE A JACKASS.

sorry, but good God the planet would be so much better off without this douchegeyser.

here is an article corroborating my opinion from someone who knows the guy:

[http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time- management-t...](http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management- tricks-i-learned-from-years-of-hating-tim-ferriss/)

<comment><USER12> I agree Tim has some very shady practices that I believe are unethical, but he does have some good information on his blog as well. Also, no one can deny he is a skilled marketer.

In any case I have much less respect for Penelope after reading that rant. She comes off as a very jealous and spiteful person.

<comment><USER3> _She comes off as a very jealous and spiteful person._

Perhaps, but beside the point - points #1-4 in that article are valid examples of Significant Douchebaggery (point #5 seems to have been thrown in just to round out the list).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can save him the trouble of writing the book with one (compound) word: Crossfit.

<comment><USER10> Crossfit is awesome, but impossible unless you've already got some baseline level of physical fitness.

<comment><USER14> I can't agree with that... Yes, it hurts, but if you start off with shorter than usual sessions you will keep up eventually. Talk to whoever is running the classes and don't be afraid to leaave half-way through a class!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't think I would trust a sample size of one to tell me anything about my body, especially when my body is nothing like the subject.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't see why he doesn't approach, say, the national Olympic Weightlifting team or something like that. They would just win all the gold medals, break all the world records and I don't think anyone would need more proof after that feat.

</comment><comment><USER17> "I can show you how I safely do things outdated physiology textbooks tell you is impossible. This isn't because I have some unique intelligence. It's because I've tested the most basic assumptions of nutrition and exercise… and I experiment with outrageous alternatives that end up working."

I don't buy it. It sounds too good to be true and it most probably is, it most probably will sound like the article itself on and on without saying much.

What assumptions has he tested? This is like some amature physicist suggesting he has found out the secrets to the whole universe or something and and who reads outdated physiology books for practical information anyway?

One more... Outrageous Alternatives to me seems to suggest like alternative medicine or something, or alchemy :P

I mean good for him for using his publicity from 4 hours work week to come up with any other book. This guy is a marketer in my opinion and if I had his publicity I too would spend a month going through medicine journals and come up with some advice.

That all said, I wouldn't mind some online sources for optimal home exercising, like you know push ups and other alternatives. And what I think would be supper cool is like distance karate learning or something :)

<comment><USER18> if you want info on home excercising check out rosstraining.com and his books, tons of info there on workout routines you can do without a gym

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This guy's fifteen minutes is way up.</comment>


Show HN: Debug Some JavaScript, Weep - <AUTHOR> https://debug-async.korynunn.com/ <comment><USER2> I like this. It helps show just how absurd the error handling in Async/Await and Promises in node are.</comment>


Proposal to move CoreOS off of btrfs - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/coreos-dev/NDEOXchAbuU <comment><USER2> Thank goodness. btrfs has bitten me way too often on CoreOS. I eventually succumbed to wiping the /var/lib/docker mounted directory on every reboot to minimize the occurrence of the low disk space issues, but nevertheless, issues still exist. Even today, I still have some cases where docker will complain about not being able to create the container/file, due to some inane error. I've had to reboot machines many times just to try to get it to cooperate. Furthermore, that solution of wiping the partition means that my machines need to redownload their docker images on every reboot, which means they come up more slowly than absolutely necessary.

<comment><USER3> This is ridiculous. CoreOS is managing their own distro, so why not just package in ZFS and get it over with.

It's been how many years now waiting for the next great ZFS competitor? If nobody is able to improve on ZFS, how about we just all jump on the bandwagon and move on with our lives?

If nothing else, having more people using ZFS may inspire someone to actually improve on it. BTRFS has such a limited feature set in comparison to ZFS that with the advent of ZFS on Linux, it's really hard to understand the community's continued backing of BTRFS as the Linux community's CoW filesystem competitor to ZFS. Spend a few weeks using ZFS on Linux on a machine with a few SSDs and a few HDDs, or just enable it on a linux laptop with a SSD drive, and it's hard to go back to anything else.

<comment><USER4> Because sun decided to sabotage it when they released it and oracle haven't stepped back yet.

<comment><USER5> Sabotage? How, exactly? I have heard of no major corruption or performance bugs in ZFS, what am I missing?

<comment><USER6> as others have said below. the CDDL or 'cuddle' license as some chose to pronounce it. Is incompatible with the GPL, which means two things.

1 - We can't just take the code and add it to the kernel. 2 - The patent and other legal grants in the licence won't apply if we try to reverse engineer a compatible GPL2 equivalent for the kernel to use, which will be a HUGE risk for the few companies that would probably consider the cost of reverse engineering worth it. And before you say it can be done without company support. I have 2 things to say, hows that going for the ReiserFS 4 fans who wanted to keep improving that, and in order to continue the work on ZFS effectively, the existing ZFS developers have 'ganged up' and now try to work on everything so that the openzfs project can be a single source of truth for the ZFS source code, and a reverse engineered version would be very unlikely to benefit from this, and would therefore require _even more_ developer time just keeping up with the improvements 'upstream' in ZFS from the 'original' ZFS codebase.

<comment><USER3>
      In the case of the kernel, this prevents us from distributing ZFS as part of
      the kernel binary. However, there is nothing in either license that prevents
      distributing it in the form of a binary module or in the form of source code.

Source: [http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue](http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue)

      ZFS cannot be added to Linux directly because the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL.
      ZFS can, however, be distributed as a DKMS package separate from the main kernel package.

Source: [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ZFS)

So why not just distribute the DKMS package with a distro? Easy enough. Will it ruin the user experience somehow?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So... I just installed Ubuntu 14.10 on my (new) home PC, and chose BTRFS because I figured it was stable by now. Should I be worried? I do plan on playing with docker.

<comment><USER8> I've been using btrfs on several machines for about 3 years. It is not stable: [https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page#Stability_...](https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page#Stability_status)

When it goes wrong (about every 4 months for me), you will end up in a nightmare. Generally attempts to fix issues will make things worse, various tools and pages contradict each other, and the devs are only interested in the latest kernel version. Much of this is deliberate - the code is written to not sweep things under the rug, which means you can hit problems and not recover. Use backups and make sure you can restore.

The reason why I keep using it is because there is no silent corruption as you get with ext4. A scrub can verify every byte of data is unaltered and recover if using anything other than single profile. Compression, volume management, cheap snapshots etc also make working with it nice. Until things go wrong.

The single biggest "going wrong" is running out of space. Copy on write filesystems by their nature leave existing content alone and write new information in the spare space, eventually doing a garbage collect of obsolete data. When you are out of space that gets rather difficult with bizarre symptoms and tricky recovery.

<comment><USER7> Thanks! Luckily, I hadn't done much more than just installing Ubuntu, so now I'm reinstalling it, this time with EXT4 :)

<comment><USER8> Just be aware that other filesystems like ext4 do not checksum their data. They have no way of telling if corruption has happened, nor are the diagnostics useful if you do somehow figure out that a block is problematic. This has happened to me several times over the decades as hard drives have lost the plot, or due to bugs. Backing up a corrupted file gets you nonsense in the backup. (A standard btrfs demo is deliberately corrupting the filesystem and then showing recovery. You can't do that with ext4 since it has no idea if what is there is correct in the first place.)

You can use tools like LVM and md as a layer underneath ext4 to provide some resiliency, but there is a learning curve and two sets of tools to work with. Changing around disk/partition sizes isn't much fun with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For everyone complaining about the metadata rebalancing, btrfs 3.18 (CoreOS is currently using 3.17) added auto rebalancing:

[https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Balance_Filters](https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Balance_Filters)

[https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php?title=Main_Page#News](https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php?title=Main_Page#News)

</comment><comment><USER10> First they came for your SELinux... and you did nothing. Then they came for your Docker... and you did nothing. Now they've come for your filesystem... Madness!

Just as BTRFS is finally stable and fast CoreOS decide yet again to ship.

We've been using BTRFS in production for over a year now (and heavily with Docker) and haven't suffered any problems at all(1), in fact we actively simulate failures to practice / test repair processes which have all been successful.

To me, while diversity is great CoreOS is going the path of Ubuntu with it's NIH syndrome.

(1) _With the exclusion of a slow docker push /pull bug that's about to be patched:_ [https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/9720](https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/9720)

<comment><USER11> Can you clarify how this is an example of NIH? They're switching the default from btrfs to ext4, not writing their own filesystem.

Also, it's necessary if they want to switch to overlayfs as the Docker backend, because btrfs lacks whiteout support which causes problems with overlayfs.

Switching to overlayfs for Docker makes a lot of sense, given that you get the dedupe benefits of AUFS with lower overhead than devicemapper/btrfs and it's now part of the mainline kernel tree.

<comment><USER10> overlayfs is still in its infancy and you're then still relying on an underlying filesystem, also unless I'm mistaken OverlayFS doesn't provide compression and checksumming?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I right in saying that the complaints with btrfs in CoreOS are specifically around its use in conjunction with Docker?

(Interested as I'm thinking about building a homebrew NAS/general purpose server w/ btrfs, there's a lot of outdated info on btrfs but I was getting the impresssion that it's now a pretty stable and useable filesystem)

<comment><USER13> I can say that ZFS has worked great for me on BSD-based home servers. Haven't used ZFS with Linux yet, though it's possible to do so, it's just unpopular partly for licensing reasons. I suspect what type of RAID you do may have greater consequences than what file system you pick, particularly if your distro is already designed for serving files on the file system you choose. Oh and working out all the AFP/Samba bits are fun, because there's always something that surprises you.

<comment><USER14> I've got severely burned by ZFS on linux running in AWS. Heavy NFS load (ZFS NFS, not linux kernel NFS) caused a kernel panic, pretty reproducibly. This was on Ubuntu 12.04 with the offical ZoL PPA sources, so YMMV.

<comment><USER15> I've had ZFS on linux freeze up on me every several months too. Not a production system fortunately.

<comment><USER3> One thing you might want to check is if you're setting a limit in the driver for the amount of memory ZFS uses for caching. By default it'll use a LOT of memory, so I usually just set to a max of 2GB and don't see any issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If so many people are so regularly bitten by these BTRFS issues – they're easy-to-reproduce and painful – shouldn't they be relatively easy to prioritize and fix?

<comment><USER10> I'd like to see a real-world, reproducible BTRFS bug on 3.18 that's a serious problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If Btrfs is as bad as this proposal makes it look, why did the folks at openSUSE make it the default file system for the root partition on openSUSE 13.2?

<comment><USER10> Yeah I haven't experienced any BTRFS problems, it could just be people stuck on RHEL running kernel 2.6 / 3.2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> ZFS is coming for Docker. This is a natural move. Now that enterprise relies on the cloud they need enterprise-reliable storage -- and ZFS is proven. Looking forward to the ZFS-hosted cloud future.

<comment><USER3> Funny thing is that if ZFS happens in Docker it'll be only because the community demanded it over the opposition of the core Docker maintainers. AFAICT, Aufs is being dropped due to massive opposition from Redhat. (Apparently AUFS code is too horrible to merge/support???) Despite its spotty track record, BTRFS is the only current recommended/supported CoW file system, and OverlayFS looks to be the docker-blessed next-gen Aufs alternative.

Based on past experiences, I don't see Docker-blessed ZFS support coming anytime soon, but I hope I'm wrong. Maybe someone over at Joyent or Oracle can grease the wheels here? :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The out-of-space / metadata balancing problem has bitten me more times than I care to count. It's essentially a fact of life that I have to blow away /var/lib/docker and all its subvolumes every few weeks on any given machine, to clear an out-of-space problem.

<comment><USER20> Copying a sentence from the first reply on the list?</comment></comment>


Our Social Media Is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.archive.org/2020/01/30/our-social-media-is-broken-is-decentralization-the-fix/ <comment><USER2> While I'm happy to see new solutions in any shape and form, it's strange to see all problems of social media blamed solely on centralization. The misinformation, in particular, is not a problem of centralization, it's a problem of people. As long as it's lucrative and easy to spread misinformation, it will be done. While decentralizing could help curb it, I don't think it's a full fix.</comment>