The problem with the Code of Conduct - <AUTHOR> https://shiromarieke.github.io/coc.html <comment><USER2> I feel excluded by CoCs. Not because they prohibit behavior which I otherwise relish to engage in on a daily basis, more because of fear of coming under some behavioral rule enforcing institution within a community because some behavior could be interpreted as violating the rules when seen under a bad light.

This is mostly a gut reaction, a feeling that CoCs serve more to tighten the overton window and fear that I might find myself on the wrong side of sharp demarcation which should be more of a soft gradient. It's like a wanted poster, being declared a thought criminal.

Of course many things in a CoC are individually sensible rules, but as a larger set they feel like a demand for a flawless human who is always genuinely nice, polite and only makes perfectly inoffensive jokes and never raises their voice while arguing things etc. I'm quite aware that I am not that perfect human, I have issues with empathy and following what was considered group consensus (it has cost me friends and a job before). Those CoCs just feel a bit like a "only people with A-grade social skills welcome here" sign to me.

<comment><USER3> I sometimes get this anxiety too. And then I remember that if I were black, or a woman, or etc. etc. etc. I'd maybe have a similar anxiety as a baseline:

« a demand for a flawless human who is always genuinely nice, polite and only makes perfectly inoffensive jokes and never raises their voice while arguing things »

Yeah, that sounds similar to the frustrations I've heard from women and people of color, being held to a higher standard than their white or male colleagues.

I'm societally allowed to be rude, even threatening! And I'm rarely called on it. But that's _not actually a good thing_.

So I think it's totally fair to have a CoC that says "be nice to people" and has some teeth and makes white men a little nervous. "A little nervous" is kind of a baseline for a lot of people. Think of it as educational.

<comment><USER2> That sounds like a low equilibrium point.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't have to be permanent. I think that once white men have more of a taste of this nervousness, maybe we can fix some stuff that's deeply broken in our society. But I think it's necessary as a first step.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Disclaimer, I help run an organization that requires CoC's on all events.

I like this article but it doesn't go into the positives of a CoC. There are many problems but if you don't weigh them against the positive characteristics, you don't see the full picture.

My organization NumFOCUS, asks all conferences and projects working with us to adopt some CoC. Why do we do this? First it has been shown in our community to help encourage minority groups to participate. Second it outlines a real procedure if something does go wrong. Finally, it sets the expectation of professionalism early.

Our numbers on diversity have skyrocketed as we enforces CoCs. It's not just a bandaid, it's an invitation to people of all types that we, the organizers, will protect your right to be at our event. I don't think event organizers are in any position to think they can solve all the problems in tech but at least they can create an inviting space.

Without a CoC, the procedure on how to handle a harasser is very grey. What legal grounds does a person have to tell someone to leave an event? If it is any grounds then why for some and not others? Who makes these decisions? I've seen conferences not deal with up front and have to resort to the local law enforcement to intervene.

Which brings me to my last point, set expectations up front. It's like the big silver punch bowl at the new years party. We expect you to be an adult and treat everyone else like an adult. A CoC clearly lays out that your event is intended to be professional.

I don't think it is the end of all discussions, in fact only the beginning. Our staff put together more things to consider, [https://github.com/numfocus/DISCOVER- Cookbook](https://github.com/numfocus/DISCOVER-Cookbook), but a CoC is the simplist.

<comment><USER5> >Disclaimer, I help run an organization that requires CoC's on all events.

>I like this article but it doesn't go into the positives of a CoC. There are many problems but if you don't weigh them against the positive characteristics, you don't see the full picture.

The author mentions this,

"People are trying to force organizations like CCC, or events I am involved with, at a smaller scale (I cannot talk for other events I don't know anything about), to adopt a CoC because they feel like it works for them, and therefore everyone should adopt a CoC regardless of the own culture of each community."

It seems you're doing exactly this and you've ignored large parts of the reasoning in the author's post.

<comment><USER6> Lots of these feel-good initiatives are actually dictated by very real concerns around legal liability. For example, many corporate diversity programs exist because they're trying to protect the company from the unfavorable EEOC decisions that are required before an employee can file a lawsuit alleging discrimination.

When people do things to prevent liability, they can't _say_ they're doing them to prevent liability, or the liability effectively recurs. If such middling statments exist, it's much more likely that judges and juries would consider the action insincere, if not intentionally deceptive and evasive, and disregard it entirely, thus undoing the effect of the program/statement/rule in the first place and potentially inviting additional punishment for the supposed deception.

So why is it a good idea for venues to force events to have Codes of Conduct? Because if the venue gets caught up in a Donglegate-esque scandal, they can point to something and say, "We did everything we reasonably could to prevent such an outcome, we told our customers that they needed to warn attendees against such behavior, we acted according to the documented procedure, and we need to get dropped from the suit and/or not have bad press anymore".

Whereas, if they don't have such a policy, especially if other venues _do_ , there's more ambiguity and it's much harder to make a decisive argument.

This is also a large reason why PR matters so much. Try all you want to find an unbiased jury or a judge totally unmoved by public opinion, couch it in pomp and circumstance until the cows come home, but like it or not, reputations and assumptions matter. You're much more likely to get a positive outcome with a positive reputation v. a neutral or negative one, and PR events frequently become legal props: "Of course we're non-discriminatory, see $LOCAL_NEWS for the story about how we're working so hard to recruit diverse talent!"

<comment><USER7> Just curious, why does stating that a particular training or policy is purely for liability purposes make it not valid?

<comment><USER6> It doesn't necessarily wholesale invalidate it, and it depends on the context. The danger is that if the claim is, for example, "they are making a hostile environment for $MINORITY", if statements exist that say "We are just doing this to avoid liability", those could easily be interpreted as indicators of insincerity and that the bias exists. Whereas, if they at least appear to be True Believers, it is harder to call that into question.

It also hurts from the PR angle, for basically the same reasons. News outlets don't want to be seen as tools of the machine spreading corporate FUD and saving BigCo from liability. They want to see themselves as noble soldiers on "the right side of history", and they want the public to see them that way too.

It's therefore much easier to get coverage, which will be useful for establishing your non-bias, if you don't tell everyone "we wouldn't be running this program and enforcing these 'everyone play nice now' codes if we didn't feel there was a meaningful legal risk involved in not doing so".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Don 't Hit On The Students!

But also (and this is my main issue with such points) CoC are a reaction to things that went bad, and an attempt to fix these issues._

I briefly talked for a time with a guy who knew I had life threatening respiratory problems and he tried to talk me into meeting him in person, while swearing my health and welfare were his highest priority and intentionally leaving out the fact that he was a smoker and a toker. When it finally came out in conversation, I had a cow and he pulled this nonsense about "If it is that important, you should have asked."

Um, no.

I was so upset by the whole thing, I briefly considered putting something in my profile on the forum where we met specifying "No smokers, no tokers." Then decided this is about as useful as putting up a dating profile that says "No rapists, no pedophiles."

He knew it was not acceptable. This is why he hid the information. Any BS justification for his behavior after the fact is just part of the headfuckery.

And, unfortunately, a lot of CoCs seem to be along those lines of explicitly forbidding behaviors that we already understand are bad, as if that will somehow stop people who already know what they are doing is not socially acceptable.

The areas where people are oblivious due to entrenched prejudice of some sort will not be fixed by spelling it out in some detailed list.

We are catering to the lowest common denominator by spelling out what is and is not acceptable. This isn't a means to foster a civil environment.

<comment><USER9> I've never seen Codes of Conduct as attempting to prevent (no more than any other lists of prohibited activity actually prevent such activities), but more to be an automatic defense for the organizers when they have to kick someone out for misbehaving.

<comment><USER8> Every restaurant I have ever been to seems to have a sign saying "We reserve the right to refuse service." They also sometimes say "No shirt, no shoes, no service." That's about it.

Somehow, they don't seem to typically have big problems with people behaving badly while having lunch or whatever.

<comment><USER10> With restaurants, you pay afterwards. With conferences, there is a lot of up front money. The situations are different.

<comment><USER8> Hotels will just keep the entire amount if you try to cancel at the last second after making a reservation.

There are plenty of situations where you just forfeit the cost. Too bad, so sad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My problem, for good or ill, with codes of conduct, is that they are written in the language of HR--which is to say, the defensive language of ass-covering --and thus I cannot trust them.

Sounds like this author feels similarly.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. The author has some sympathy for organisations which decide "we need to have a CoC to get X grant from body Y". And if that's the reason to have a CoC, of course it should be written in the appropriate HRy, ass-covering language, because that's what Y expects and is paying you for.

Of course no organisation of fewer than say a hundred thousand people can actually abide by all the provisions of a HR-worthy CoC. The problem is then with the organisations that instead of saying "we have this ass-covering CoC to keep the grant, but here are the actual things we will do to enforce acceptable behaviour" escape with "we've done our bit to prevent unacceptable behaviour -- look, you can read our code of conduct".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One thing that's worrying about CoCs is that many of them seem political in nature and are used as excuses to abuse other members of the community who don't conform to certain opinions. Bryan Lunduke has chronicled a few examples of this occurring and causing destruction of otherwise healthy communities.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s087Ca9JnYw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s087Ca9JnYw)

</comment><comment><USER3> This was a better post than I was expecting. It's written from the heart, and from a non-dismissive standpoint. Worth reading the whole thing.

I really liked the example about accessibility. It's a great point—organizations should be honest with themselves about what they can actually offer.

I disagreed with some other parts, in particular the part about how a lot of orgs aren't actually prepared to handle harassment complaints professionally. While that's definitely something to work on, I think that's something that's going to be true for many orgs regardless of whether they have a CoC. _Not_ welcoming people to come forward with complaints is... probably worse, right? Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER14> If someone feels they aren't capable of handling harassment issues, they're probably correct. Handing off the job to someone incapable does seem like an issue.

In general, telling an organization they need a process for something doesn't work out unless they genuinely buy into the idea. It tends to result in a bunch of process documents getting written, but no practical changes to how things are run.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I think my big take-away from this document is: If you're going to have a CoC, you'd better be able to stand by what you say in it. Don't just copy- paste from someone else's and thereby unthinkingly overpromise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It seems like the point of the article is not sufficient to make a community feel welcoming and safe. Which is a great point: lots of shitty communities have a Code of Conduct that's ignored.

That doesn't mean a Code of Conduct is not a necessary step.

Teaching people to be good members of your community, and being proactive in removing bad members, isn't possible until you define what that means.

<comment><USER16> There can't be effective learning if there aren't clear and public post mortems on instances where the Code of Conduct was violated or wrongly invoked and what the correct action should have been. No one really does this. I was at a conference once where someone was arrested and taken away in handcuffs. To this day I have no clue what he could have done to realistically end up in that situation besides physical assault.

<comment><USER17> If somebody was arrested, it's obviously because they were believed to have committed a crime. There are many crimes available.

Codes of conduct are generally about behavior that isn't criminal, because once you've crossed that line the appropriate response should be obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am faced with feeling pressured to add a CoC for one of my own projects in order to apply for funding. I am unsure what to put up. It seems like a massive task to me.

I quite like the CoC of the EMF camp as it seems to the point, un-ambigious and written in language I understand. I may try and adapt it for online interaction. What do others think?

[https://www.emfcamp.org/code-of-conduct](https://www.emfcamp.org/code-of- conduct)

<comment><USER19> Whatever you choose just make sure that the enforcement is consistent. That seems to be the key. People know when rules exist for the purpose of selective targeting. See this for what happens when CoCs are applied inconsistently [https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6whs2e/multiple_coc_v...](https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6whs2e/multiple_coc_violations_by_nodejs_board_member/)

<comment><USER20> That's the biggest issue. I was following a certain community recently that had a fairly elaborate code of conduct with very precise language and somehow always managed to manipulate said language so that one of their members could virtually get away with murder, while other people would get moderated/banned/whatever for the slightest mistake.

As long as its impartial (to the extent humans can be impartial...), there's no real problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find it telling that she felt it necessary to include the disclaimer "I am a queer woman". When discussing issues around Codes of Conduct I see all too often people leaning on personal attributes that give them social permission to critique them.

<comment><USER22> It has become necessary because we regularly discard people's opinions based on identity politics these days. It's sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > I believe that this person honestly cares about feminism and CoC, but that > they are unable to be aware of how their own actions are going to far and > come over as threatening. They do respect every aspect of a CoC, but refuse > to be qualified with those "vague terms" as it is possible to interpret them > in so many ways and are, of course, impossible to prove.

> How is a CoC helping me here, when CoC offer so many gray zones to play > with, when the line between insecurity and harassment is so thin that it is > almost impossible to distinguish one from another?

This is exactly the sort of thing a CoC _should_ help with. Without explicit policy, you have no explicitly stated means of defense. With a CoC, you _should_ be able to simply tell the people in charge of upholding it that this person's actions come across as threatening and harrassing.

I am not saying this will work everywhere. A CoC also only enables you to know what defenses you have, it does not create them. But I feel at least the spirit is in the right place, and I know of at least one community where IMO it works very well.

</comment><comment><USER24> Well, we have rules but we don't have a silly prescriptive law in our hackerspace. The rules are all made by experience not guesswork and intentions.

Sample rules that were retired:

* any member may ask anyone else to desist and go away or shut up and you have to comply (hasn't been invoked yet to any real extent - people tend to comply)

* any member may ask a non-member to leave (likewise) - criminal stuff is covered already

* we have a list of persona non grata - preferably do not let them in or keep them under constant supervision - list gets outdated, these people tend to not show up, new members have no idea

* do not take excessive phone calls in open space - just asking is good enough

Rules that we kept:

* is not a hotel or sleeping space - do not abuse the coach - crashing is fine, doing that many times in a row is not

* is not a pub - take excessive drinking elsewhere, likewise drug use or dealing

* members can be banned by a vote in a specific matter - it has happened

* keep the place clean (esp. put things back in their designated places, take out the trash and keep fridge clean of old mold)

* how meetings and rule changes are made (consensus on an actual face to face meeting announced at least 48h ahead; must be at least one person from steering committee which is also chosen by consensus on a big meet by majority)

Note there is nothing about harassment since there is no need to. The general rules are fine. There is also clear definition of who is responsible for upholding the rules.

If we had a CoC like one of those "inclusive" ones we'd have to ban half to two thirds of the members. They are fond of religious and sometimes lewd jokes. Or are sometimes abrasive or crude.

Abuse (incl. verbal, stalking) is not tolerated regardless since it is a _bad plan_ and if it recurs it will get you banned - it has in the past. We do not write it in rules as it is dealt with on case by case basis. Mostly as it requires a vote and vote requires a discussion and presenting the points clearly. And anything illegal and disruptive will get the police called on you. Obviously.

</comment><comment><USER25> COCs are virtue signaling at best (as mentioned in checklist items) and a catch ~~all~~ most for immature behavior at worst.

Really, it would help if we could trust adults to be adults, or at least 16 year olds, but this speaks to bigger industry and societal problems. Recently, I heard conference attendees bragging of how they messed up a presentation by trying to connect to the bluetooth device being demonstrated. And I've been lucky to have never worked at a place where changing the background to pornography or setting an inappropriate facebook status was a thing.

The truth is that the tech industry (among others) still has people who are less mature than the people at lan parties I went to when I was 14-16.

<comment><USER26> Nearly every form of communication is a form of signaling your values in one way or another ("virtue signaling").

Your post is _filled_ with things that signal your virtues.

Why is virtue signaling bad? How is it not just a standard part of humans communicating with each other?

<comment><USER27> Virtue signaling has become a perjorative term: "In recent years, the term has become more commonly used as a pejorative characterization by commentators to criticize what they regard as empty, or superficial support of certain political views, and also used within groups to criticize their own members for valuing outward appearance over substantive action. ... Examples of behavior described as virtue signalling include changing Facebook profile pictures to support a cause, participation in the Ice Bucket Challenge, offering thoughts and prayers after a tragedy, celebrity speeches during award shows, politicians pandering to constituents on ideological issues."

<comment><USER26> I guess a code of conduct is literally virtue signaling _with the express purpose of signaling the virtues the community will tolerate_.

It's like looking at a profit and loss sheet, and perjoritivity calling it a "economic document".

That's literally just what it is doing, and it's stated purpose for existing.

<comment><USER27> if the profit and loss sheet was pulled from some other company, and doesn't accurately represent the company? I'd call that lying, and there'd probably be people going to jail. That's why this is being negatively referred to as virtue signaling:

"That line that made you feel like you'd get something out of the event was nothing else than an useless talking point copied of some checklist that made the organizers of the event feel like they are doing the right thing."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This seems like more of an argument against bad CoCs and against CoCs for all organizations, rather than a CoC always being bad for every organization.

There's also a difference between specifying a CoC and enforcing a CoC. Maybe there needs to be a different name for expectations that aren't going to be enforced, either because they're too imprecise or the people running things are incapable of doing so.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't know. I helped organize a conference where we were required to use a code of conduct by the parent organization (to be fair, we'd probably have put a code of conduct up either way).

From my point of view, as someone who is likely not going to be subject to bad behavior, I felt like a lot of it was standard HR boilerplate feel-good stuff. Not that there's anything wrong with that - it's good to signal quite clearly the behavior you think is right and wrong.

But I think that in some cases it helped more than that. It really _does_ give you specific benefits:

1\. It gives you something to aspire to. Yes, our CoC included accessibility issues. No, we weren't amazing at dealing with them, since it was our first time and it's not an easy topic to take care of. But the CoC certainly helps make it a priority, if only because people may (rightly!) call you out on failings. Most people will be understanding with you even if you don't get everything right, as long as you're trying.

2\. I think specifying specific contacts (male and female) in case of certain abuse situations is a good thing. Of _course_ whoever is the contact is not necessarily trained in dealing with trauma - but that's usually not the situation we're talking about. If someone is raped or physically asaulted, it's a matter for the police. We're talking about much lighter but still problematic cases, where hopefully the victim wants something done, but doesn't need a trauma specialist or anything.

The idea of the CoC isn't to be _instead of_ law enforcement, it's to be another layer on top of that providing specific rules about what is and isn't considered professional behavior in this kind of conference. No more, no less.

</comment><comment><USER30> The world is separating into bastions: with CoC and without CoC.

I'm much happier in one of those than the other.

</comment><comment><USER31> A Silly question, is CoC a thing in Commonwealth / EU countries? Or is it mostly an US thing?

</comment><comment><USER16> It's important to remember a conference is not a space, it's the _people_ in that space.

In a conference there are no safe spaces, only safe people. What we need are social structures to help keep safe people around other safe people, if that's where they want to be.

We need an effective way of calibrating a person's safety profile. An individual for instance may be perfectly safe for a minority, but unsafe for all but the most hardened women.</comment>


Ask HN: Advise on CV, etc? - <AUTHOR> I've been unemployed for about 3 months and am about to be homeless. I've been applying for jobs for the last 3 months unsuccessfully. I'd really really appreciate someone with some knowledge looking over my CV and past cover letters to perhaps find out how I can improve things.<p>Over the last couple of weeks I've been rejected at the application stage so I'm guessing I'm doing something wrong. I would offer some money but I don't have much left. I can spare $10 for a decent critic, beyond that you'd have my genuine thanks. I'm barely sleeping and beyond desperate. Thanks. <comment><USER2> I'm happy to have a read (no cash necessary). Contact details are on my profile page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you =) I'll send you an email now

<comment><USER2> Just replied - let me know if it doesn't come through.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey man, I can help. I've been a recruiter for tech for 10 years and now run Workshape.io, a job discovery platform for software developers. Reach out to me on email hung at workshape.io.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would be happy to take a look at your CV if you're still looking for a critic. No payment necessary!

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm happy to take a look as well (no payment needed). Email in profile.

</comment><comment><USER6> Happy to help pro bono. pranav [at] pranavpiyush [dot] com

</comment><comment><USER7> How visible are you in the marketplace? Can you be found on Github? Linkedin?

<comment><AUTHOR> I use both

<comment><USER7> Suggest taking a look at your profile, what's missing? Make sure it's punched- up with the appropriate buzzwords. You want to send a signal to the market you've got experience & expertise in this space. Recruiter Bozos should be able to reach you easily. Include a good contact link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can take take a look. (Thanks for the $10 offer, but no thanks).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I really appreciate it =)

What's the best way to contact you?

<comment><USER8> My email is in my profile. :) tapan (AT) karecha (DOT) com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'll do it for $10.

Contact information in profile.</comment>


Google is replacing conference room paper schedules with solar-powered LCD's, updated via 802.15 - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/articles/radish.html? <comment><USER2> Umm ... why do you need conference room schedules on the conference rooms? I've never worked anywhere that needed that.

How a "zero impact" policy of "look it up on your computer/phone"?

(Neat device though; there are other electronic sign age applications that I can imagine it being useful for).

<comment><USER3> Meeting rooms can change, but if you have a regularly scheduled meeting you will go there out of habit. Another thing is I've had my meetings bumped to a different room (particularly if I reserve a large room but have few attendees)

(Not all engineers carry their laptops to all meetings.)

<comment><USER4> Didn't they give everyone Android phones last year? Shouldn't that interface with Google Calendar pretty well?

<comment><USER3> Yes. My phone is associated with my personal account and not my company one though.

Besides, the system predates the phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I made a pretty sweet graphing weather monitor using this screen. Plots the indoor and outdoor temperature and of course doesn't use any batteries when it's idle. I packaged it up in a 1" thick display and have it hanging on my wall. Data is also stored onto an SD card in CSV for archiving.

<comment><USER6> You have any more details on how you put it all together?

<comment><USER5> I should take the time to put it on the web. My degree is in electrical engineering and so I went all out and designed the pcb and all the goodies from scratch. It also has an integrated capacitive touch screen that I integrated into the PCB so that I can change modes by simply pressing on part of the screen. I think it would make for a pretty sweet open source project since the display could be pretty universal and the wireless sensor could monitor lots of things beside temperature. It would make for a wicked seismograph project....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Aaron thought to himself, "If only there was a inexpensive device that could display the room reservations, we'll save all that paper ...."_

seems like an interesting side project but i can't shake the feeling that, at least in this context, the solution is being over-engineered. i mean...isn't this what whiteboards are for?

<comment><AUTHOR> The video points out that there are 2200 conference rooms, so while using white boards will save paper, but doesn't address the manpower needed to keep them up-to-date, nor the expenditure on dry-erase markers (not to mention the PR this kind of project gets you in all the right places).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft already has that and they are much better, it syncs with Exchange and so on.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, but uh.. Google doesn't use exchange ;)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I noticed that this is almost a year old - does anyone have any updates?

<comment><USER3> ...it works...?

(I believe the system is not being expanded due to time/money/whatever constraints though.)

<comment><USER10> A previous poster got it right, we all have androids, and the calender program works fine, as does the email alerts. As a side note, the radishes (that's what they were called) we're tied into google calender and worked really well.

<comment><USER11> Not all of us have paired our androids with our google.com accounts, and some folks simply refused their gift phone.

I wish we had radishes in my offices. Too bad they're not available anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Say what you will about how lame Microsoft Exchange is - the one advantage to it is that pretty much every Mobile Device in the world (that wants to have a market) - can bring up the Calendar in it - and give you a reminder as to what room you need to be in.

I don't see how the paper solution ever worked anyways - I can't tell you the number of times I've reserved a conference room 10-15 minutes before, hoping someone wasn't at the same time as me.

I think this is as much a commentary on Google Calendar, and how negatively MicrosoftExchange has impacted standards around calendaring, as it is on the cool 802.15 hack.

<comment><USER11> "pretty much every Mobile Device in the world"? I don't think that's true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's great to see 802.15 getting a little bit of press. It's fantastically low power, got pretty good range, and the throughput isn't bad. Far better than 802.11 for these kinds of devices.

For anyone who wants to play with 802.15, I strongly recommend getting your hands on some Sun SPOTs. I've been playing with one of the dev kits, and they're an amazingly hackable platform.

</comment><comment><USER14> The age of ubiquitous computing is finally arriving, though we no longer call most of them "computers" anymore -- at least, not most people.

Like with AI, we keep defining down what is a "computer" and what's not as we cease to notice their advance.

And, heck, maybe one day the paperless office will come to pass. In 2500 or so.

</comment><comment><USER15> We investigated cholesteric LCD screens when I was with i-conserve. Their energy use wasn't as low as e-inks, if I recall correctly, but you could buy a dev kit, as well as the actual screens, for a much more reasonable price.

</comment><comment><USER16> Hmm, isn't Ruby an unapproved language inside Google? (i.e. not one of C/C++, Python, Java or Javascript.)

</comment><comment><USER17> Where can I get one? Need to get my company to do the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER18> Drop the solar panel; meeting rooms are full of hot air - there must be enough temperature differential across the door to power a Sterling Engine or a small computer...

</comment><comment><USER19> they had paper schedules?

<comment><USER11> Admins would print out the google calendar for the room and tape it up, to be helpful. It's not like the schedule was kept on paper, just printed on it.</comment></comment>


Aussie firefighters save world's only groves of prehistoric Wollemi pines - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/01/16/796994699/aussie-firefighters-save-worlds-only-groves-of-prehistoric-wollemi-pines <comment><USER2> Is anyone else blown away that life as large as a couple hundred of these trees could remain hidden from discovery until 1994 in a developed nation? We're talking about a national park in Australia, not the inaccessible depths of the Amazon encircled by the Andes.

It makes one wonder what else is out there to still be discovered.

<comment><USER3> Central Australia is a pretty big place too...

[https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTUyNTIxNDM.NDkxNjc4OA*...](https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTUyNTIxNDM.NDkxNjc4OA*MTk2NzI5NDc\(MzMxNzI5NDc~!AU*MTU4ODQwNjQ.MzM2MDkzMzM\)NA)

EDIT: It seems that these pines are in NSW, which is in the southeast of Australia, not central Australia. My point about the size of the place stands however.

<comment><USER4> Neither here nor there really but that page is total fail as it seems to be using the Mercator projection which is terrible for comparing sizes!

Drag Greenland down to the equator and watch it shrink, it's really odd!

<comment><USER3> Yeah that's the point of it, if you grab a country near the equator and drag to the poles it will balloon.

It's about showing relative sizes of countries by placing them at the same point on the projection than it is about creating a projection with accurate absolute sizes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not for nothing, but doesn't the occasional fire help habitats overall? I would expect ground-based seedlings in a canyon to perhaps regrow, and perhaps they have had a few fires over the millions of years of their existence? [https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green- scienc...](https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/how- forest-fire-benefit-living-things-2.htm)

Not saying this is a net good - more of a silver lining / glass half full.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but the idea is to set controlled fires to prevent these larger uncontrolled ones. It not only requires regular controlled fires, but when they are performed, for how long, and where are all critical. The remaining factor is you have to ensure the controlled fires do not burn _too hot_. This is knowledge that was passed down from the indigenous people of Australia, but apparently has not been well understood (it's not easy, especially the part about hot enough versus too hot).

[https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-14/traditional- owners...](https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-14/traditional-owners- predicted-bushfire-disaster/11700320?pfmredir=sm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How can they make this claim given the current political powers that be in Au?

"""

Kean said. "There's a huge opportunity for us to lead the way in terms of tackling climate change and help the rest of the world decarbonize. There's no better country on the planet better placed to do that than Australia."

"""

<comment><USER8> "We have to lead the way to X" sounds much better than "the current policy is a huge mistake because it doesn't do X". Both lead to the same action, but one frames it as a way to recognition and a new legacy, the other is accusing people of incompetence or worse.

If you want people to act then telling them they can become internationally recognized generally works better than accusing them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This may sound cynical, but I'm honestly just curious in hearing arguments:

What's the point of risking human lives and wasting resources on something that is kept a secret? For all we know, more people have walked on the Moon than seen this forest.

I'm not criticizing that they did it. I'm glad they did. I can see the emotional value to it, in keeping a species that has survived millions of years alive longer, and I share that emotion.

But was it rational? What was the benefit of this action?

<comment> j-wags From a purely monetary standpoint, genetic diversity has growing commercial uses [1]. Isolated ecosystems often contain genes and enzymes that let us access new areas of chemical space (this is big in drug discovery ATM). We recognize that sequencing methods at a given time may not capture all of the relevant info about a gene (ex. methylation, weird folds, expression), so having living samples as new technology becomes available is critical in this research.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_product](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_product)

<comment><USER10> Speaking of genetic diversity, interestingly, the grove in question has none whatsoever.

In the gorge there are perhaps 100 clumps of trees, but genetically there could be as few as one or two 'individuals'. This is because each plant has multiple clumps of trunks. The plants basically clone themselves, which makes the entire population extremely precarious in terms of disease.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are samples of this tree on another site ? it would interesting grow some of they on a few botanical parks.

<comment><USER12> The article says they saved the only grove of them in their natural habitat in a secret location, so I assume that means they're growing in botanic gardens in other parts of Australia. But since they were only discovered in 1994 it's likely we're dependent on these groves.

<comment><USER13> They are spread in many botanical gardens by now. I have seen one myself, properly protected by iron cage.

<comment><USER14> You can even buy Wollemi pine seedlings at the Mt Tomah Botanic Gardens in the Blue Mountains, which is near the (still secret) spot they were found. But they cost $100+ a pop and are apparently rather tricky to grow.

[http://wollemipine.com/order.php](http://wollemipine.com/order.php)

<comment><USER7> I wonder whether it'd be dangerous to introduce them on other continents. I'm naturally against such ideas usually, but the entire American continent is full of such things already. At least the SW has invasive trees that seem somewhat integrated.

<comment><USER15> Probably not. Is cultivated from seeds, is huge, needs a lot of time to flower and reproduce, and is economically valuable.

Creation of new populations ex-situ of critically endangered species is normally seen as beneficial. Is an exception allowed under certain circumstances.

<comment><USER16> >economically valuable.

Is that solely because of their rarity, or is there some other reason?

<comment><USER15> Some of this trees, still alive, were born when Europe was in the Middle Age. The genus is monotypic and exists since the last 200 millions of years or so.

Those are invaluable comprehensive reviews about australian climate and history registering each single, warm, hot and cold year, each volcanic eruption. In a place of the planet without written documents and mostly unknown before the arrival of the white men. We can infer from here if something happened with the macrofauna (when), if people migrations match some harsh decade and dry spell, if it was an equivalent to a small ice age or not, etc. Is a treasure of data.

<comment><USER16> OK, so they're scientifically valuable, historically valuable, perhaps emotionally or culturally valuable. That's plenty good enough reason to save them - I'm not trying to argue they shouldn't have been saved.

But I'm still not seeing that they have any current economic value. Which is fine, not everything needs to have economic value, I was just curious if there is some that I was missing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My immediate thought is that satellite pictures could show where the trees are at, since it's burned all around them, and then people will try to visit them.

<comment><USER18> They are asking people not too, but also its hard to overstate just how rugged and inhospitable the terrain to the north west of Sydney is.

It is essentially untouched wilderness that is very difficult to traverse for even experienced bush-walkers and hikers. The area is riddled with steep canyons that are all but impassable without specialist equipment.

Even if you knew the exact location, it would still be very hard to actually get there.

<comment><USER19> And if you did, you would probably bring the diseases that wiped out this species that used to cover all of Australia and Antarctica and has some how miraculously survived in 1 hidden valley.

So just don't.

And if you know where it is, don't share it.

Thanks.

<comment><USER20> I'm not at all arguing that everyone should go visit, but if the trees are really that fragile how did they manage this fire-fighting operation? I can't imagine the firefighters scrubbed up and put on surgical scrubs before rappelling into the forest.

<comment><USER19> I can. I mean, Australia is OH&S mad & really full on biosecurity. I do high risk work as a rigger, we need a whole bunch of random OH&S qualification, then on a job, might have rope access gear a bunch of tools, and that's just showing up for a gig. In this case you're talking the same, plus helicopter experience (belaying down), ability to signal and radio with a helicopter, search and rescue qualifications, firefighting experience. Can't imagine that in addition to putting on the harness and kitting up, they had a bit of a spraydown before hand. It would probably be something that kills fungi and bacteria, maybe as simple as tea-tree oil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It was close... a good new at least. One of the closest things to a Jurassic park still extant in the planet.

</comment><comment><USER21> [https://www.rhs.org.uk/Plants/134274/i-Wollemia- nobilis-i/De...](https://www.rhs.org.uk/Plants/134274/i-Wollemia- nobilis-i/Details)

Seems it is widely available for sale as well, which as only discovered in 1994 is kinda good to know that had this growth died, the tree would live on.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great news but terrible that we're in this situation in the first place. Hopefully the Australian government wakes up to the climate crisis.

<comment><USER23> do we even have proof its due to climate crisis. eucalyptus is highly flammable, tourism increases, im pretty sure fires can start from some foil paper on the floor in those regions. also like the aboriginal australian use to do, you need to clean the bush and forests. we should focus our efforts onto that rather than talking about a philosophical "climate crisis" that wipes out concrete efforts that governements can lead to protect their forests.

<comment><USER24> > philosophical "climate crisis"

The climate crisis is very real and very observable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Am I the only one who winces at the brain-numbing robot-like false confidence and dogmatic preaching of attributing all natural disaster to man-made climate change?

<comment><USER26> There's a reasonable case for the impact of climate change here: the drought in Australia has been partly caused by the reversal of the Indian Ocean gyre, which is linked to climate change, and the fires occurred during a heatwave, during a time when heatwave are becoming more common, which is also linked to climate change.

Like you I'm also frustrated by the dogmatism around climate change. I think the majority of people on both sides have chosen their position on the basis of political allegiance and social identity rather than a consideration of both sides, and that's a really big problem because it moves the debate away from observable reality and into the realm of politics.

<comment><USER27> >the majority of people on both sides have chosen their position on the basis of political allegiance and social identity rather than a consideration of both sides

How would you suggest most people actually consider "both sides"? (i.e. a method not requiring more skills than most people have, or more time than most people would want to invest.) I think I have above average skills in reading scientific papers etc, but still it's not clear to me at all how to go about doing that. I guess I'd find the climate change report that seemed to have the most credibility with (ultimately) the kind of people whose politics I like, and yield to that because of its authority. Not much "considering" involved.

And..are there actually only two "sides"?

<comment><USER26> > How would you suggest most people actually consider "both sides"?

I'd suggest that they have a look at local weather data going back a couple of decades, compare it to global data, check out the methodologies used to calculate that data, read a few of the best resources they can find from each side, and try to work out what the debate is about.

I don't think many people will change their minds, but I hope that they'll learn what both sides _actually are_ and come to have more respect for the other side.

> And..are there actually only two "sides"?

I think there are two sides to the question "how much effort should we spend preventing climate change?", and those sides are "no effort" and "all available effort", with plenty of middle ground. I think serious debate around climate change is about where we are on that continuum, rather than whether man-made climate change is actually happening.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google launching a Chrome OS tablet on Verizon, goes on sale November 26 - <AUTHOR> http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/08/18/google-verizon-chrome-os-tablet-on-sale-november-26-2010/ <comment><USER2> So an OS that was originally intended for netbooks, before it's even released, has switched targets to the newly formed iPad-like tablet market? Suspect, but not unbelievable.

On another note, It still impresses me just how quickly the market was anticipating, repulsed, and then rapidly copying the iPad. I genuinely wonder if Google had targeted the iPad form factor first (with Android or Chrome OS) if they would have a fraction of the same success in bringing tablets to the masses.

<comment><USER3> Why is every tablet assumed to be inspired by the iPad? All sorts of companies have been creating tablets for a long time.

Sure Apple apparently made a nice one. But it is not only Apple's genius, it is also the the progress of technology that made it possible (faster, more power efficient CPUs, better batteries, better displays...).

One big thing hindering other companies' tablets was probably Windows, which presumably just sucked too much. There were attempts with Linux tablets, but again, the sleekness wasn't there yet (in the meantime, as with the hardware, things have improved).

So now Google has their own OS, so they can make a new attempt at creating a nice tablet without Windows suckage. They are not just copying Apple.

<comment><USER4> The supporters of history rarely get the credit for the work they put in. It is the person who was there when the final blow was struck that gets most of the credit.

Apple shouldn't get all the credit for creating tablet computers. They should get credit for creating the first tablet that most people actually wanted to buy. If you want to ignore the influence of the iPad on the current market and overall design of the tablets we're going to see, you're being painfully myopic.

<comment><USER3> I think coming tablets can piggyback on the Apple hype machine that created the demand. As for the design, I am not so sure: they are tablets. The design is basically inbuilt in the name (very likely flat rectangles).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why bother, what does ChromeOS do that Android doesn't for a tablet?

<comment><USER6> ChromeOS is probably worse for a tablet than Android. Imagine if the iPad only shipped with Safari and no other native apps. The uproar would be incredible.

<comment><USER7> ChromeOS is trying to solve some of the last limitations of the web as an app development platform so that it doesn't need native apps.

I would be surprised if this thing didn't support webcam/microphone access through the new HTML Devices API as well as WebGL. With Local Storage, Workers, and the other HTML5 APIs, ChromeOS will be the first time someone presents the browser as a application development platform on par with iOS and the other native platforms.

This is incredibly exciting to me... it's a push back towards the "write once, run anywhere" spirit of the web. Not all developers want to write a web app and two or three mobile apps just to get good market coverage.

My hope is that Google uses ChromeOS to start building a stable of apps built with web technologies that can compete with the native app stores, that they slowly replace the Android Market with it, and that Apple and Microsoft will support these new web platform technologies in their mobile browsers, and 5 years from now, the web is again the only app platform that matters.

<comment><USER6> I agree that HTML5 is an awesome spec. With iOS, HTML5 developers can access native hardware like Location APIs (GPS), cameras, etc, however, the spec is still in it's infancy. Remember when Netscape was supposed to replace the desktop and Microsoft started to get scared? HTML5 has the potential to do that, and I personally would love to see it start to replace thick apps, but we're still a few years away from being able to do everything on the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Total evidence offered for YAGTR (Yet another Google tablet rumour): 0. Plus given that Google just got _out_ of the phone handset to consumer business (because, frankly, they suck at any product that might require end user support), how likely are try to jump into another end user hardware sale/support setup?

<comment><USER9> The article talks about a potential HTC-built device sold by Verizon. Where does it talk about an end-user sale?

<comment><USER8> In the comments, from the author...

> Lee Mathews said 10:50AM on 8-18-2010

> No, my source tells me it's Google hardware -- like the N1.

I'm assuming handset support in the US is the same as the EU, where for smart phones, you normally deal with the manufacturer, not the carrier ( i.e. If my iPhone or iPad breaks, I call Apple - not O2).

<comment><USER10> > I'm assuming handset support in the US is the same as the EU, where for > smart phones, you normally deal with the manufacturer, not the carrier ( > i.e. If my iPhone or iPad breaks, I call Apple - not O2).

The iPhone is unique in that aspect, support is almost always done through the carrier in the US. Probably because handsets are almost always sold subsidized through the carrier (and frequently customized for them).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Note the author of the article states in the comments:

> _Hardware is pure speculation -- my source didn't have any details for me. > Launch date and carrier he did have_

So don't get too excited about the specs, they are plucked from the ether.

</comment><comment><USER12> The best part of the article for me is the fact that that picture _is_ the iPad, down to the little x at the top right corner of the keyboard window.

And yet it can't be that far off. ChromeOS is basically a browser with a kernel. Done right, I bet a product like that could be as viable, if not more so, than the iPad. And along the way, Apple might actually be out-minimized.

</comment><comment><USER13> "This one's a render, but Google's Chrome OS table is REAL."

At least per their anonymous yet doubtless terribly reliable source.

</comment><comment><USER14> Smoke and mirrors. Let's see a demo.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Expect it to be every bit as geek-tastic as the Nexus One -- Google won't > want to disappoint its early adopters.

I've got a G1 matey, so I'll be skipping this tablet after being lumbered with Android 1.6 until I get a new phone.

<comment><USER16> Biggest problem with the G1 is that it was RAM constrained to begin with, and that's only gotten worse with 2.x.

FWIW, CyanogenMod has bee solid on mine. CM6 RC3 (Froyo) runs pretty nicely on my G1.

<comment><USER15> I recently wiped CyanogenMod as it wouldn't run the example scripts supplied with the Android Scripting Environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> First, they copied Apple iPhone and created Android. Now they are going iPad and creating this tablet. Very innovative Google. very.

<comment><USER18> Google bought Android in August 2005.

[http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2005/tc200...](http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2005/tc20050817_0949_tc024.htm)

The IPhone was launched January 2007.

<http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/01/09iphone.html>

<comment><USER19> But you just compared the acquisition of Android to the launch date of the iPhone. Are you saying that the development and manufacture of the iPhone all took place in 2007?

<comment><USER18> No. But did Google have knowledge of the details of the IPhone before it launched?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Feedback on startup name "Mindrosia" & logo suggestions - <AUTHOR>

I was wondering whether this would be a good name to use for my Study Stickies service.  It sounds cooler to me although I'm not sure as to the sorts of connotations people would associate with this name.
I'm also trying to come up with a logo for this service.  Any suggestions?  The logo at http://studystickies.com doesn't look good when small (e.g., for an icon). <comment><USER2> My first reaction is that the word is elegant but with 4 syllables is a lot to ask. It seems like the most successful names are simple with fewer syllables making it easy to remember.

For the logo, there is a visual conflict between the abstracted lines of text and the "study stickies". Maybe if you choose either just the lines or the letters that would help, or you could differentiate the two more with thinner abstract text and thicker font lettering. For the small version, you could just use the open book look with an abbreviation of your name. We did a similar thing at <http://www.streamfocus.com> (see the little logo in the address bar)

</comment><comment><USER3> I like Study Stickies much better. There is always some benefit of telling you what it is right in the name.

Also, Mindrosia in my opinion is one of those names that people just aren't going to be able to pronounce or spell right. My first startup was called learnection (learning + connection) and we constantly had this problem. Of course, if people aren't saying or spelling it that is one thing, but I wouldn't want to close off that route.

As for the icon, it doesn't have to be the same as the logo. Why not just make the icon a post-it note. (I say this not really understanding the service yet, so feel free to ignore.)

<comment><USER2> Actually, this is a really good logo idea. Instead of trying to do to much, simplify. You could have maybe 2 post-its together with "study" on one and "stickies" on the other, and drop the book. Have the two out of alignment too, of course.

You could take it even further and treat the two words as if they were writing on different post-its with different looks :)</comment></comment>


How to Scale PostgreSQL on AWS: Learnings from Citus Cloud - <AUTHOR> https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2017/03/10/how-to-scale-postgresql-on-aws/ <comment><USER2> Citus are doing a fantastic job on content marketing. Every single piece they publish on [https://www.citusdata.com/blog/](https://www.citusdata.com/blog/) is a case-study in how to write content (and headlines) that appeal to the kinds of developers their product targets.

"How to Scale PostgreSQL on AWS: Learnings from Citus Cloud" \- seriously, how am I as a PostgreSQL-liking developer who cares about scalability NOT going to click through to that article?

<comment><USER3> Simon, thanks so much for the kind words. It's nice to know that the content is useful. In general we're focused on sharing both content about how to use Citus and what it's good at, but also good and interesting engineering content as well as we want to add value to our users and broader community. It's great to hear that we're doing alright from your perspective on that front.

<comment><USER4> Really appreciate the quality of the content, there is some real value to it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Citus Cloud is perhaps most exciting me because it has tremendous momentum: as the combined product of deep technical expertise meeting top-flight open source software meeting tons of end user experience, it's quickly outpacing platforms which are locked-in anachronisms. Take Redshift: Postgres 8.4? After you've used some of the features in 9.6, it's hard to go back. It'd be interesting to see some numbers around Citus Cloud's battle-tested deployments.

As a side note, these blog posts on high-level techniques and open source tools (e.g. PgBouncer, wal-e) are useful for anyone considering deploying an on-prem version of Citus as part of a product – thanks, Ozgun!

Usual disclaimers apply: not an employee, but big fan of the team and technology and it's great to see them gaining well-deserved mindshare.

</comment><comment><USER6> I saw the section on EBS, but it didn't offer much advice. Getting good performance on networked storage is the biggest challenge to me. The last time I asked about that here [1], I got this answer:

        nasalgoat 161 days ago [-]

        The secret to EBS is to use General SSD,
        not Provisioned, but use a RAID stripe.

        The reason this works is because IOPS are provisioned
        per EBS drive and by the size of the drive. So a RAID0
        stripe of, say, ten General SSD drives will outperform
        the more expensive PIOPS single drive.

That sounds like a great approach, although I haven't had time to try it out yet. I'm curious if anyone else has done anything like that.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12609172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12609172)

<comment><USER7> I'm working on an approach using ZFS on K8s. The idea is to write a custom "flexvolume" driver that takes set of EBS volumes an options, attaches them, create a zpool, set options, etc. In tandem, however, I'm adding to each node host a systemd service to create dm-crypt+LVM devices atop of each NVMe drive (as in the i3 instance types). The flexvolume driver will support adding SLOG and/or L2ARC devices by provisioning LVM volumes from those.

Something I'm still unclear, is whether EBS does any data checksums, in which case I could disable ZFS' to spare CPU cycles (but keep compression, of course.)

<comment><USER8> > I'm adding to each node host a systemd service to create dm-crypt+LVM > devices atop of each NVMe drive

That sounds cool; can you describe how you're using systemd for this in a bit more detail? I do this with an Ansible playbook when the machines are provisioned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We use MemSQL and it has the best replication setup process for any relational database with 1 line:

      REPLICATE DATABASE db_name FROM master_user[:master_password]@master_host[:master_port][/master_db_name]

Why is it in 2017 we still don't have any other database that can come close to this? Basic replication is very well understood and used everywhere but it seems like database creators just don't understand what should be prioritized.

<comment><USER10> The stuff in postgres 10 isn't that much different (for logical replication). On the master you do

      CREATE PUBLICATION all_tables FOR ALL TABLES;
      or
      CREATE PUBLICATION important_tables FOR TABLE transactions, users;

and then on the node you want to replicate to

      CREATE SUBSCRIPTION backup_important CONNECTION 'dbname=foo host=bar user=repuser' PUBLICATION important_tables;

<comment><USER9> What about editing the postgresql.conf, pg_hba.conf, recovery.conf files, setting up archiving and doing the first base backup transfer? That's the actual hard part.

Logical replication doesn't replicate DDL commands either from what I know so far so that's another major problem.

<comment><USER10> > What about editing the postgresql.conf, pg_hba.conf, recovery.conf files, > setting up archiving and doing the first base backup transfer? That's the > actual hard part.

I talked about logical replication here... But the defaults for those are going to be a lot saner too in 10. We're not going to expose postgres to the world by default, so you'll have to change listen_address - but I think everything else would be a really bad deal security wise.

> setting up archiving

You don't really need that anymore in the more basic cases. Unless you want/need point-in-time recovery to older states, replication slots make that a lot easier.

> doing the first base backup transfer?

        psql -h master "SELECT pg_create_physical_replication_slot('my_standby');
        pg_basebackup --write-recovery-conf --slot my_standby -D targetdirectory

I'm not saying things are perfect, but they're clearly improving. And some of the complexity (e.g. not allowing remote connections by default) are pretty basic security vs. simplicity tradeoffs.

<comment><USER9> Default remote access off is perfectly fine, we don't need the mongo style security problems.

However the rest just seems to be a overbuilt mess. Why not start simple with barely and options and work up from there instead of trying to build in so many different configurations and features?

90% of use cases would be satisfied with a simple async replica on a different server started with any user that has read access to that database and a single command, along with the ability to become a standalone master anytime.

Redis (yes its a different database) has another nice and easy setup with a simple "slaveof" command.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was looking for the "I want my database to be performant under high random load" question. PIOPS can hurt.

Anyone have any experience running PostgreSQL on the new I3 instances?

<comment><USER7> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13842222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13842222)

Not yet, but you're not the only one with that idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have mentioned this on some previous posted articles but we are really happy users of both citus and pipelinedb.

Check out pipelinedb if you are a Postgres fan (obviously it is for a different use case than Citus).

The only thing I don't like about pipeline is that it currently is a fork and not an extension but that is supposed to change.

Consequently we syndicate to citus and pipeline through rabbitmq and Kafka.

We use google cloud as well. I'm contemplating on writing a post on what we have learned (and not :)) but I don't think I could ever match the quality of this article.

And yes invariably some one will mention memsql does both but it is proprietary and not Postgres. I probably should have spent more time investigating it though (and eventually will).

</comment><comment><USER13> Does Citus (Cloud?) have features that offer better high availability and failover functionality than what RDS provides? Managed Patroni and packaged workflows for zero-downtime failover would be quite interesting, but I don't see anything like that mentioned on [https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud](https://www.citusdata.com/product/cloud).

<comment><USER3> We don't use Patroni or any of the other off the shelf items. We rolled our own primarily from our years of experience on Heroku Postgres. We're actually working on a detailed post on how HA and disaster recovery works for Citus Cloud, though the core mechanism powering it all under the covers is our state machine. You can read a bit about how it works in this post: [https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2016/08/12/state-machines- to-...](https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2016/08/12/state-machines-to-run- databases/)

<comment><USER13> Thanks! I look forward to reading about implementation details.

It does seem like documentation of Citus Cloud HA and disaster recovery _behavior_ is a bit light, compared to e.g.

\- [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Concep...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Concepts.MultiAZ.html)

\- [https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres- ha](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-ha)

"In addition to continuous protection which is explained above, high availability is available if your application requires less exposure to downtime. We provision stand-bys if you select high availability at provisioning time. This can be for your primary node, or for your distributed nodes." [https://docs.citusdata.com/en/v6.1/cloud/features.html](https://docs.citusdata.com/en/v6.1/cloud/features.html)

Please let me know if I've missed any resources on this topic!

<comment><USER3> Yep, our docs are definitely behind the product here, we'll be working to improve. FWIW it would be the closest to the Heroku Postgres HA as it's the same person that wrote both systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is it seemingly impossible to read a technical blog-post on a company- blog, without some seven-year-old-humor type meme mixed-in?

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how Postgres Aurora will fair against Citus... that's what we're considering migrating to in the next year or so.

<comment><USER16> Aurora PostgreSQL and Citus are pretty different. The big draw of the former is that it provides PostgreSQL as a managed service on top of a cloud- optimized flash storage layer that facilitates high availability, durability, and low-latency read replicas for PostgreSQL workloads that fit on a single machine. The latter provides a product (or managed service in the form of Citus Cloud) that performs transparent sharding that allows for scaling relational workloads beyond the limits of a single machine. Most workloads will favor one or the other of those scenarios pretty clearly, either by not stressing the capabilities of a single machine or by being easily shard-able.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, Aurora is great for scaling already-fast reads but if you wanna scale writes or get large indices in memory, it's not going to help you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any plans to take Citus in more of a data-warehousey, complex queries direction over time? We are starting to hit test limits of Postgres 9.6 and would like to move to a columnar store, but Redshift is hosted-only, Teradata looks expensive, Greenplum looks old.

<comment><USER19> Try ClickHouse if you need a columnar DBMS: [https://github.com/yandex/ClickHouse](https://github.com/yandex/ClickHouse)

We started using it recently and it's been amazing.

<comment><USER18> That looks like a great suggestion, thanks! It looks like we'd need to break out our JSON data into columns (our events table is basically just an event name, time, user id, and then a jsonb column) and rewrite our queries, but it seems more suitable than anything else I've seen so far.

We've been getting good results with some tweaks to our Postgres indexing (partial indexes on event names makes a huge difference) and that'll be even more practical when we can move to logical replication, so will be sticking with that for now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> i feel DB hosting is such an underrated field right now. in terms of scaling everything is pretty easy to scale except databases. i would love to see more services like this.

</comment><comment><USER21> Aren't most of these use cases already offered/handled by Amazon RDS? Maybe not transparent sharding - but otherwise everything else?

<comment><USER22> So basically everything except horizontal scaling?

Seems like a pretty big difference...

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why does the community link on your pricing page lead to a 404?

<comment><USER3> Thanks for reporting, looks like a place we missed updating for our new tutorial. Should be fixed now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> 1\. I'd like my PostgreSQL database to be Highly Available

Highlight: "The first is the complexity associated with it: it takes twelve steps to setup streaming replication ... open source solutions such as Governor and Patroni aim to do just that. That said, this integration again comes with a complexity cost."

I cannot believe it is 2017 and streaming replication is still considered complex. I have spent the last half decade+ of my life to try and make this simple, here is a demo: [https://youtu.be/-i-11T5ZI9o](https://youtu.be/-i-11T5ZI9o)

2\. I'd like my application to not worry about failovers

Highlight: "most PostgreSQL clients don't have a mechanism to automatically retry different endpoints in case of a failure."

Master-Slave systems are not conducive to failover (determining a new Master involves its own locking/election mechanisms). If we have streaming Master- Master replication by default, you can have some easy automatic failover - [https://youtu.be/-FN_J3etdvY](https://youtu.be/-FN_J3etdvY) .

4\. I'd like my database to scale horizontally

Highlight: "Deploying a distributed RDBMS into production requires a good understanding of both relational databases and distributed systems."

We can do a lot of work to improve understanding out there, Kyle Kingsbury (Aphyr of Jepsen Tests) has done a lot to spread awareness. A couple years ago I did a tech talk that explains the ideas with stick figures so that way even laypersons could understand what is going on: [http://gun.js.org/distributed/matters.html](http://gun.js.org/distributed/matters.html) .

5\. I'd like automatic backups for disaster recovery

Highlight: "Distributed database backups are even harder."

See the (1) demo, this doesn't have to be hard, it can be easy enough for frontend web developers IF the system is a streaming Master-Master database to begin with. Ontop of that, check out our "backup to S3" prototype where we scaled to doing 100M+ messages for $10/day (all costs, CPU, disk, S3) here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_WqBuEA7s8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_WqBuEA7s8)

My goal and argument here is that database vendors keep propagating the message of "this is hard, so trust us and pay for systems" that Aphyr has repeatedly proven to be broken (although, actually, Postgres did really well, Kyle was recommending it as the best general purpose database) - as Craig notes himself: "In fact, I've been on calls where we quoted $300K for the services work, and never heard from that user again."

We need to break these cycles, and I do believe Craig is trying to do that with these blog posts, which is great. But, we have a long ways to go (all of us).</comment>


How not to build a ship: the USS Ford - <AUTHOR> http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/military/guest-voices/sd-me-grazier-ussford-20170606-story.html <comment><USER2> The EMALS system's big problems seem to be with the motor-generator-flywheel system used to power them. The ship doesn't generate enough power to drive the catapults directly from ship power. They have to wind up a flywheel, and then dump that energy using a generator when launching aircraft. The hardware for that weighs 12 tons. Whatever problem they're having has resulted in damage to the motor/generator windings, requiring pulling out the rotating component. This is apparently a difficult repair.

That has to create huge stresses on the windings. You wind up the flywheel, and then suddenly apply field current to activate the generator. They may be trying to ramp up field current slowly to reduce the stress. Some articles mention problems with a voltage regulator causing machine damage. Maybe the rotating machinery can't take a full-power turn-on.

Details on the system seem rather vague. Some published articles say there are four motor-generator-flywheel sets; others say only two. Isolating failed units electrically for maintenance is apparently difficult. Unclear why.

This unit "passed factory acceptance testing" in 2008.[1] These problems should have been discovered and fixed years ago. The manufacturer is Kato Engineering, part of Emerson Electric, acting as a subcontractor to General Atomic. They make a range of generators for various applications. So this is coming from a company with a long history of making generators. But generators are usually continuous-duty, not something that experiences shock loads like this flywheel rig. Apparently nobody insisted on some serious testing like running this thing through 50,000 cycles into a dummy load.

The linear motor of the catapult itself seems to be working OK.

The new arresting gear shouldn't have been a problem. That's mostly a paddles- in-water brake, something that's centuries old. How did that get screwed up?

Overall, the Ford series of carriers uses electricity for functions that, on other carriers, involve piping steam around. Most newer Naval ships are Diesel or gas turbine powered, and don't generate steam as a by-product. Nuclear plants do generate steam, which has been convenient for carrier catapults. The new British carrier series (if it gets built) is to be non-nuclear, and they want to use the EMALS launcher on some of the ships (maybe). That's part of a big mess - without a catapult, they have to buy the VTOL/STOL version of the F-35, which has its own problems.

There's an amusing book, "Ships, Machinery, and Mossbacks", by H.G. Bowen, from WWII. Bowen was a U.S. Navy engineering officer and eventually was in charge of most Naval propulsion systems during WWII. He was a real hard-ass on contractors, and often sent back large, expensive items like final drive gears back as rejects. Admiral Arleigh Burke ("31 knot Burke") wrote that his ships wouldn't have been able to go 31 knots without Bowen's work. When it really has to work, you need people like that who can say no.

[1] [http://www.ga.com/emals-motor-generator-passes-acceptance- te...](http://www.ga.com/emals-motor-generator-passes-acceptance-testing)

<comment><USER3> I wonder why they didn't use a large capacitor bank (e.g. Marx generator) instead of flywheels and motor-generators.

<comment><USER2> Each EMALS flywheel unit stores 121 MJ.[1] This is roughly the energy in a gallon of gasoline.

Here's a big ultracapacitor bank, from Maxwell. This one is intended for temporary energy storage for buses, trucks, and trains, so it can take some banging around.[2] Capacity is 144 Watt-hours, or about half a megajoule. Weighs 64Kg, not including fans. So it would take about 250 of those units to equal one flywheel unit, for a weight of 16 metric tons.

The flywheel unit weighs about 11 metric tons. So using ultracapacitors increases weight, but it's not out of the question. Might be simpler. If the system were being designed today, it might well be capacitor-powered. No moving parts, unit-replaceable if damaged, and low-maintenance.

The EMALS system doesn't actually need 121MJ to launch.[3] Each launch uses maybe a quarter of that. Apparently the idea is to have enough energy stored for several launches on several catapults.

(A Marx generator is a setup for getting a high voltage at low current, by charging capacitors in parallel and then switching them to series. They're useful for powering some physics experiments and for making big sparks. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago used to have a big one, their old "Million Volt Lightning Generator". Not useful in this application.)

[1] [http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/systems/...](http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/systems/emals.htm) [2] [http://www.maxwell.com/images/documents/125vmodule_ds_101469...](http://www.maxwell.com/images/documents/125vmodule_ds_1014696-7.pdf) [3] [http://vtb.ee.sc.edu/vtbwebsite/downloads/publications/emals...](http://vtb.ee.sc.edu/vtbwebsite/downloads/publications/emals%20formatted%20for%20IAS.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This story lacks perspective. They are 25% over budget. For a government defense program that just is not that bad. The reason they are over budget is because they are using a ton of new systems and new technology and guess what it is buggy. NASA blew up a ton of rockets before they got one to work, and blew up even more getting them to work reliably. Given the new technology 25% is pretty damn good. They will work out the issues. There are numerous military technologies that where less then stellar in the 1st run. It is like anything else, it gets better over time and effort. If you say hey, this worked for the last 50 years we should not change then I guess we should be flying bi-planes?

<comment><USER5> I think there is a huge difference between NASA trying to find a viable rocket design for manned flight and building an aircraft carrier - they already have designs for catapult and arresting systems that are much more reliable and cheaper than the new ones they decided to try out on the new class of carrier ( and using the same metaphor with NASA, they chose a company that had never designed a rocket engine to design rockets for manned space travel to put on top of a Saturn V stage 1), and if they continue to stick with the new unproven designs, they won't be able to deliver for many, many more years, if ever.

If they had stuck with the proven design with just improvements, they might have been able to deliver the ship three years ago on time.

The new electric only system means they committed to not routing steam from the nuclear power plant to the catapults so that would be a major retrofit for that one completed new style carrier. The new electric systems when they do fail, they disable the entire catapult launch capability of the aircraft carrier, the contractor made a really poor design decision here that they apparently cannot fix. The steam catapults can be taken offline individually and worked on, leaving the others in service.

<comment><USER6> The big issue is that the EMALS system is easier on the airframes. In a conventional steam catapult, the steam head hits the piston face at max pressure and expands as it accelerates the aircraft, but max acceleration occurs at the beginning. This means there's much more load on the aluminium components of the airframes. As aluminium has no elastic limit, all deformation is bad. The Navy goes through a lot of airframes compared to the air force.

The EMALS system is intended to spread the load out continuously during take- off so the max load is much lower, thereby dramatically increasing the lifespan of the airframes.

<comment><USER7> Intended, yes, except it actually fails to do this currently and potentially indefinitely.

<comment><USER4> There was a more balanced story awhile back that talked about this in detail and it said they believe they can make software tweaks and a few other changes to resolve that. However they where not 100% and where doing testing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Zumwalt

F-35

USS Ford

It reminds me of Qing China in the 1890's.

"On paper, the Beiyang Fleet had the superior ships,[2] included two pre- dreadnought battleships, Dingyuan and Zhenyuan, for which the Japanese had no counterparts. "....."Though well drilled, the Chinese had not engaged in sufficient gunnery practice beforehand. This lack of training was the direct result of a serious lack of ammunition. Corruption seems to have played a major role; many Chinese shells appear to have been filled with cement or porcelain, or were the wrong caliber and could not be fired."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Yalu_River_(1894...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Yalu_River_\(1894\))

"Li wanted to delay the battle against the Japanese fleet, thus allowing the Chinese more time to equip their ships with additional ammunition. However, the imperial court called him a coward and his recommendation was turned down."

"Defense spending analyst Winslow Wheeler concluded from flight evaluation reports that the F-35A "is flawed beyond redemption";[196] in response, program manager Bogdan suggested that pilots worried about being shot down should fly cargo aircraft instead."[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_II#Concerns_over_performance_and_safety)

I don't think U.S. is at the terminal stage yet, as Qing China was at that time - but it certainly rhymes.

<comment><USER9> The analogy seems poor.

Qing's warships are just good on paper, but the men in charge of them lack actual real-world experiences wielding them effectively.

While F35 Zumwalt Ford are all products driven by US military's real-world experiences, guided by their requirements, and addresses real issues. And I have no doubt that these weapons can be used effectively in their designated use cases.

Their failure is that the engineering work did not finish quick enough to land their impact in appropriate time frame.

<comment><USER8> Prompted by the November 22, 2016, break-down of Zumwalt in the Panama Canal with both propellers seized, Mike Fredenburg analyzed the program for the National Review and concluded that the ship's problems "are emblematic of a defense procurement system that is rapidly losing its ability to meet our national security needs."[93] After detailing problems relating to the skyrocketing costs, lack of accountability, unrealistic goals, a flawed concept of operations, the perils of designing a warship around stealth, as well as the failure of the Advanced Gun System, Fredenburg concludes:

The Zumwalt is an unmitigated disaster. Clearly it is not a good fit as a frontline warship. With its guns neutered, its role as a primary anti- submarine-warfare asset in question, its anti-air-warfare capabilities inferior to those of our current workhorse, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and its stealth not nearly as advantageous as advertised, the Zumwalt seems to be a ship without a mission.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt- class_destroyer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer)

<comment><USER10> Would make a nice super yacht though, all those fancy angles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, one of the contributors is Pierre Sprey. I would take his criticisms very seriously. He's basically the father of the A-10, which he came up with when he studied WWII records and interviewing soldiers the aircraft was meant to support. The Air Force hated it and still does to this day but that plane proved to be cheap, durable, and useful. The A-10 is pretty much the opposite of these fancy weapons projects.

<comment><USER12> I understand that ground troops love the power of the A-10, basically the "tank of the skies". Not sure why we can't have classes of distinct planes now like bomber, fighter, ground-support, and reconnaissance. Pick 1 area and be the best possible plane at doing that. The jack of all trades plane seems to perform poorly at all those things.

<comment><USER13> The USAF could transfer the A-10s to the US Army ( as has been proposed many times since the 1970s ) and focus on the supra-tactical missions, but that would require them to swallow their pride and end the Johnson-McConnell 'agreement'.

That dates back to 1966 and forbids the Army to operate armed fixed-wing aircraft. The USAF would rather keep the A-10s, no matter how unenthusiastically, than ever permit the Army to take control of the air- support mission. It is ridiculous that such 'pride' has any part in national security decisions.

<comment><USER12> Never heard of that before. Pretty crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Referenced from a recent HN posting on "What really happened to Vista" \- seems amazing prescient about precisely this sort of situation, master writing and a super quick read:

[http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html](http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html)

Just a short sample (It's all worth reading - and it involves battleships!):

 _"...do you realize that there has been no basic change in armaments for over a century? It is, I am afraid, the result of a tradition that has become conservative. For too long, the Research Staff has devoted itself to perfecting old weapons instead of developing new ones. It is fortunate for us that our opponents have been no wiser: we cannot assume that this will always be so."_

</comment><comment><USER15> > The new EMALS stores an enormous electrical charge -- enough to power 12,000 > homes for three seconds

It's hard to not love how prevasive arbitrary metrics are in modern day sports and reporting.

<comment><USER16> The wiki says it's 484 megajoules, delivered in 3 seconds. That is equivalent to 134 mega-watthours,

For a potentially more useful arbitrary metric, that's a bit less than two Model S batteries. Except it delivers all the energy in seconds, and charges in 45 seconds, and isn't limited to a few hundred charge cycles. It's a kinetic flywheel storage system, but I wonder if it would be built today using a giant lithium-ion pack (many Tesla PowerWalls, basically) or a supercap array.

<comment><USER17> 134 kilowatt-hours.

1 megawatt-hour is 3600 megajoules.

<comment><USER16> Thank you for the correction.

It seems like this sort of energy could be very feasible with supercaps, lithium-ion, or lead acid, at that level.

<comment><USER17> Like you said in your other comment, the energy is a couple Tesla batteries. It's the power and cycling requirements that are hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a little different take on this.

We aren't fighting a major war right now. We aren't facing off against a similarly-powerful navy. So if you see the need for carriers at all, going forward, then now's a good time to experiment. Throw all the new systems in one carrier. If some of them take years to make them work right, well, we learned at a time when we could afford to learn.

<comment><USER17> The existing fleet is being stretched pretty hard:

[https://news.usni.org/2015/11/04/navy-half-the-carrier- fleet...](https://news.usni.org/2015/11/04/navy-half-the-carrier-fleet-tied- up-in-maintenance-other-5-strained-to-meet-demands)

[http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/30/no-us-carrier-at-sea- le...](http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/30/no-us-carrier-at-sea-leaves-gap- in-middle-east.html)

They could have deployed something like 2 Nimitz class ships for the unit cost of the Ford (more when you consider the money spent on developing the Ford class).

Work has started on the second one: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_F._Kennedy_(CVN-79)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_F._Kennedy_\(CVN-79\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think we're at a point where the value of a traditional aircraft carrier is questionable (for the cost), and likely to decrease in the coming decades.

A smaller, possibly submersible craft that could launch and catch drones would probably be able to replace carriers in a variety of missions at vastly reduced cost. Pilots can be offloaded to military bases; launching/catching systems can be as powerful as the drones can be engineering to support, for shorter landing and takeoff distances; required storage space is less, crew is less, and cost is less for drones. DARPA has already done a little work in this direction - [http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/darpa-develops-system-launch- retrie...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/darpa-develops-system-launch-retrieve- large-drones-travelling-speed-midair-1605298)

</comment><comment><USER20> Tomorrow on HN: How not to ship a build

</comment><comment><USER21> Robert Farley has a good explanation of how difficult it would actually be to sink one of the fleet carriers:

[http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/what-it-would-really- take-t...](http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/what-it-would-really-take-to-sink- a-modern-aircraft-car-1794182843)

<comment><USER22> It doesn't matter how difficult it is to sink them if they can't launch any planes because the catapult is broken.

<comment><USER5> Those are just the new carriers which can't be deployed until they can prove it works as long as the Senate (from the article) is forcing the Navy to do according to established protocol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Unrelated to the content ...

Their ad setup is very interesting it all appears to be served through subdomains.

</comment><comment><USER24> Seems these problems comes down to selecting a contractor with no experience in building these type of systems (whether steam or electrical).

<comment><USER25> The military is always in a bind with contractor selection. If the don't choose the lowest bidder they get hauled up in front of a Senate committee full of people grandstanding for the next election accusing them of taking care of cronies.

Particularly at the rate we build ships these days, if you only chose companies that have done it before you're not going to have many bids to choose from.

<comment><USER26> No relation to the Ford, but speaking as someone who works for one of the big defense contractors the underbidding thing is a real issue. One of our competitors (also not related to the Ford) that stole some business from us a while back is currently eating some serious crow on some promises they couldn't fulfill... but they did get the contract. That's serious money in their pocket.

Likewise I'm pretty sure the average Dog Dating App startup has better equipment than we're given, although to be fair what we have does the job, just not nearly as well as it could. Not to mention the mountain of legacy equipment and code that no one ever wants to spend money to replace or upgrade properly (once again, underbidding). For every F-35 or USS Ford there are hundreds of smaller programs wither much tighter (also underbid) budgets that you never hear about (either because they're classified or just too boring for media coverage). But it has to be that way, otherwise we don't get the business at all.

Don't get me wrong I like my work and my coworkers, I'd certainly rather be where I am than Silicon Valley, but the red tape and budgetary constraints are a repeating source of frustration at all levels, and it sucks that there's not really all that much we (at least anyone remotely close to my pay grade) can do about it. At the end of the day it's up to our customers to set the bidding process and pick the winners. A realistic bid is likely a lost contract.

<comment><USER25> I've been there. This is not an easy problem to solve - they do have vetting procedures and sometimes reject bids because they think the contractor can't do the job. But companies are pretty good at making sure the boxes are all checked during the bidding process.

I had a relative in the Air Force, and his group was in charge of salvaging programs that failed because the contractor couldn't deliver. They would get half-finished satellites and boxes of parts arriving at the loading dock and then try to figure out what to do. Is someone criminally culpable? Can we do a contract to finish this, or do we need to start over?

According to him you could just never tell - sometimes the contractors you were sure would fail actually delivered, and sometimes the old reliables went belly up or just kept asking for more money.

<comment><USER26> Yeah I'd say the issue there is that traditional defense contractors are highly silo-ed, quality can vary drastically from program to program. I've worked on programs that I'd pit against Google and programs where the culture was a bunch of math majors who learned to code in the 70s and haven't updated since the 90s. Just last year I had to review a 500 line FUNCTION in NEW CODE.

Thankfully I'm no longer attached to that program, had to continuously bite my tongue and pick my battles in code reviews to avoid getting a reputation. Even nicely telling people 15-20 years my senior "go spend two days refactoring this crap" was a non-starter. To be fair the code did work, I doubt a user would ever notice. But I felt bad signing off on the review all the same.

I sdhould point out that not all the old-timers are a problem. I'm currently working with some 20-year guys who are VERY up to date and open to new ideas; and the company is trying to modernize from the top-down, but some programs have taken to it better than others and some have outright resisted. Given that these programs are only staffed after a bid is won, I'm not sure what kind of vetting process could catch these kinds of inefficiencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This article is a bit too one-sided for me to take seriously.

The cost overruns seem modest compared to what I see occur regularly in big aerospace projects (not just 25% or 50% but 300 or 500%). F35 cost is absolutely absurd, for instance.

I saw basically no mention of the extra capabilities that a fully electric ship like this could provide, it all was just a long list of down sides.

</comment><comment><USER28> Seems to be a more concise version of the warisboring article from a couple of days ago (the author is the same):

[https://warisboring.com/how-not-to-build-an-aircraft- carrier...](https://warisboring.com/how-not-to-build-an-aircraft-carrier/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like General Atomics has a good lobbyist.

<comment><USER30> they can afford it

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Wait, I think I heard this story before: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_\(ship\))

</comment><comment><USER32> So in other words, just as the current Administration is finding fixing one ship will be met with great resistance, a war of buts, and gnashing of teeth the same can be said for any attempt by anyone in fixing the government.

there are just so many excuses to throw money at it and worse they are used to it. they purposefully create holes that are too expensive or painful to get out of.

being ex military and a Libertarian I always get the same result, we spend too much on the wrong stuff "just because". the sad part is neither party up there wants to fix it, it is not that they can't, they are just to invested in not</comment>


Scale-Free Networks Are Rare - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.03400 <comment><AUTHOR> From the abstract:

 _A central claim in modern network science is that real-world networks are typically "scale free," meaning that the fraction of nodes with degree k follows a power law [...] Across domains, we find that scale-free networks are rare, with only 4% exhibiting the strongest-possible evidence of scale-free structure and 52% exhibiting the weakest-possible evidence. Furthermore, evidence of scale-free structure is not uniformly distributed across sources: social networks are at best weakly scale free, while a handful of technological and biological networks can be called strongly scale free. These results undermine the universality of scale-free networks and reveal that real-world networks exhibit a rich structural diversity that will likely require new ideas and mechanisms to explain._

</comment><comment><USER2> I was involved in that kind of research in the 1990s and it was clear to me at the time that the people doing that kind of research didn't even know what an "estimator" was and didn't care to know.</comment>


The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences - <AUTHOR> https://oeis.org/ <comment><USER2> I recently had a sequence accepted:

[https://oeis.org/A294249](https://oeis.org/A294249)</comment>


Show HN: PRISM take that – Old School Steganography (80 chars only) - <AUTHOR> http://www.masswerk.at/cardreader

<comment><AUTHOR> A cheerful way to steganography: Compose and download a punchcard at [http://masswerk.at/keypunch](http://masswerk.at/keypunch) then mail it to a friend. Scan this card back to text at "The Virtual Card Reader" [http://masswerk.at/cardreader](http://masswerk.at/cardreader). Any URL, e-mail address, or Twitter-user will be detected and presented as a working link. (Even solves simple arithmetic expressions.)

</comment><comment><USER2> This is neat.

I'm always worried when people mention steganography because often they've just read something about it, and coded up a nice proof of concept toy to play with, and they put it on a bit of webspace somewhere.

These toy systems often use things like manipulating the LSB in gifs. But these are trivially easy to detect and are not a safe form of steganography.

I'm a bit surprised we haven't seen more steganography now that many people have fast Internet connections. Traditionally bandwidth is too limited to cope with the huge amounts of cover text you need to hide the plain text.</comment>