Ask HN: How to disagree with someone more powerful than you - <AUTHOR> What do I need to say if I disagree with my manager or CEO. Sometime I even don't know whether to speak or not.<p>The issues could be anything, it can be my goal, my deadline to finish something or some idea which is not worth trying.. <comment><USER4> Two techniques:

1\. Instead of disagreeing outright, try to figure out their motivation and your motivation, and then find a third solution that addresses both. Talk about this here: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/03/09/win-technical- argume...](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/03/09/win-technical-arguments/)

2\. When asked to do something you don't want to, don't just say "no". Instead, listen in detail, and ask questions - this helps you decide better, and shows respect. Then decide, and explain your disagreement in terms of project and organizational goals - "I can do that, but then I'd have to drop this bug that is impacting our biggest customer - can it wait until next week?" (Long version: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/08/16/how-to-say- no/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2018/08/16/how-to-say-no/))

<comment><AUTHOR> This was quite helpful. Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just be ultra honest about the point you want to make with supporting evidence/arguments without being disrespectful. The way you speak to your manager doesn't necessarily have to the same you speak to your CEO, because their motivations may differ (usually do). Speaking to CEO, you should try to be aligned with the company goals, whatever you're speaking about try to connect with company's goals. At the end of the day, that is all CEO cares about. However, manager might have ulterior motives, politics etc. So here you formulate your points without causing too much trouble or insecurity to their position.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's rather simple, really: Your honest and plain opinion. Formulated in respectful, but determined words.

Especially if you're dealing with higher ups and (important caveat) they are not narcissistic, they will respect clarity and honesty.

Working in groups and in higher positions it is absolutely normal - <USER2> actually beneficial - to deal with differing opinions. There is research on the fact that contrary voices increase the quality of group decisions - <USER3> Devil's Advocate.

</comment><comment><USER7> What culture are you in? In direct cultures, saying "I don't see how that makes sense" or even "that's nonsense" can be appropriate things to say to your manager; in others one should phrase that as "that's interesting" or "I'll think about it". In yet others, saying "yes", but doing "no" can be appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER8> Funny but applicable McSweeney's article: [https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-list-of-things-ive- sai...](https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-list-of-things-ive-said-to-men- this-week-instead-of-youre-wrong-or-no-to-spare-their-feelings-even-though- they-were-wrong-and-i-knew-the-right-answer)

<comment><AUTHOR> All the 10 ways looks good. I should try this also sometimes ;)</comment></comment>


The case against non-profit news sites - <AUTHOR> http://www.hitsville.org/2010/05/09/the-case-against-non-profit-news-sites/

<comment><USER2> Very well written article, and clearly, written by an journalist.

What strikes me is that newspapers don't seem to have realized that they offer a different style of news than we get online.

I don't read the paper much, I know I only get a snapshot of the news online as reading larger bodies of text just isn't the same.

Obviously there must be a change in the model of the newspaper.

What does a premium paper look like? Have papers like Barrons seen a decline similar to more general papers like USA Today or the Wall Street Journal?</comment>


Women 2.0 x Startup Quote: Rebecca Woodcock, co-founder, Cake Health - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/6561670722

<comment><AUTHOR> Finding out about the competition was the best thing to happen to us since it forced us to lean forward, accelerating our launch.

\- Rebecca Woodcock (@rebeccawoodcock)

<http://startupquote.com/post/6561670722></comment>


Show HN: Introducing – Hacker Fund - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hacker.fund/introducing-hacker-fund/ <comment><USER2> I'm excited to follow their progress. I've had the privilege of following Justin's Facebook posts for a while now, and his passion for the mission seems unstoppable.</comment>


Powerful image manipulation and categorization with facial attribute detection - <AUTHOR> http://cloudinary.com/blog/powerful_image_manipulation_and_categorization_with_facial_attribute_detection

<comment><AUTHOR> Automatically extract detailed face attributes from any uploaded image, and apply different image transformations accordingly. Create accurate face detection based and eyes detection based thumbnails. Dynamically add image overlays of glasses and masks. Code samples included for Ruby on Rails, PHP, Node.js, .Net and other frameworks.</comment>


Why is TCP accept() performance so bad under Xen? - <AUTHOR> http://serverfault.com/questions/272483/why-is-tcp-accept-performance-so-bad-under-xen

<comment><USER3> This is a very well known issue (at least among virtualization developers :-)). ESX does a surprisingly good job handling this but both Xen and KVM are still trying to catch up here.

The issue is small packet performance. You can isolate it pretty easily with netperf TCP_RR. In order to send a packet, the hypervisor needs to switch from the guest, to the hypervisor, and in the case of Xen, to domain-0. These switches are very expensive.

Normally, you don't notice this because almost all I/O in hypervisors is done with a data structure known as a lockless ring-queue. These data structures are extremely efficient at batching requests in such a way as to minimize the overhead of world switching by trying to never do it.

But TCP_RR is the pathological test case for this. No matter how smart the data structure is, you still end up taking one exit per packet. In particular, with small packets, you've got multiple world switches to move a very small number of bytes (usually around 64).

There are ways to improve this (using things like adaptive polling) but this is still an area of active development. I don't follow Xen too closely any more but we've got quite a few new things in KVM that help with this and I would expect dramatic improvements in the short term future.

</comment><comment><USER4> First, you should test on an unloaded domU, not anything in EC2;

\- EC2 will dynamically adjust your CPU share as you try and use it, so you will _not_ get consistent results over any short period. \- EC2 is subject to other people's loads, which may be IO, CPU or network bound.

Going from there: \- Xen is slower any time you need dom0/domU coordination - it wouldn't surprise me to learn that there's some sort of coordination happening in accept() to tag the session through the upper dom0 firewalls. \- You don't describe what your backlog is on the listening socket, but you should make sure you're accepting as many as you can during your CPU share on EC2 -- your slice _will_ be interrupted at inopportune times.

Finally, EC2 is _lousy_ performance-wise, especially w/r/t disk IO - <USER2> doesn't sound like it, but if you're logging to disk after accept(), this could be the killer.

Tangentially -- you _might_ get better accept() performance if you turn ON syncookies, as then the handshake occurs basically at the kernel, and the accept() is only relevant _after_ the handshake is done. It's a bit hacky, but with _large_ numbers of connections, it can improve your performance a bit.

<comment><USER5> (I wrote the Serverfault question)

Thanks for the suggestions, here's some clarifications:

* I clarified what hardware I've tested in a comment (see below).

* I've run tests with my server ranging from 10 sec up to 10 minutes. They're consistently bad unfortunately.

* Interesting what you say about dom0/domU. I'm no Xen guru, but the culprit is probably something like that. I've been using a backlog of 1024 for the server tests (set both in Java land and sysctl.conf). The netperf are all defaults, both in terms of run time and backlog. Was actually trying to monitor the backlog somehow, but I'm not sure that's even possible in Linux?

* The server isn't doing anything disk IO-bound so this shouldn't be the case.

* syncookies seems like a good idea, I will definitely try that along with a lot bigger backlog and see if it makes any difference. I'll also try and see if netperf can be tweaked as well to provide a better, isolated test case.

Writing this off as Xen overhead would be such a shame, virtualization should not cause this much overhead. I'll continue investigating!

<comment><USER6> A nit re. syncoookies: TCP three-way handshake _always_ occurs in the kernel. You can grab the kernel source, the relevant stuff is in net/ipv4/tcp_input.c; What syncookie _may_ somewhat help you with is if you have super-large number of half-open (SYNRCVD state) connections - and even then, the data structures for those are supposed to be efficient enough for this not to be a problem.

OTOH, what you _will_ be trading off with syncookies, is that they subtly violate the TCP standard, and especially this will be a problem with the "server talks first" connections (like [E]SMTP, SSH): if your third ACK of the three way handshake gets lost on the way from client to the server, the canonical TCP implementation would have retransmitted the SYNACK from the server side. Except that the whole point of the syncookies is not to keep the state on the server side, i.e. there is nothing that can at all retransmit the SYNACK.

The HTTP, being by nature "client talks first" protocol, hides this problem (the ACK for the SYNACK will be effectively retransmitted because it will be part of the data segment), but I thought it might be useful to remind that turning syncookies on by default is not the standard modus operandi.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The fact that the CPU is high on one CPU suggests that to me all interrupts from the NIC are going to just the one CPU (generally default on Linux). An 8 core ec2 machine has lots of total CPU, but individual cores are not that fast.

Change the interrupt cpu affinity to split network interrupts over multiple cores. See:

      http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~brecht/servers/apic/SMP-affinity.txt

<comment><USER8> Won't irqbalance do this?

<comment><USER9> Unfortunately irqbalance has some limitations on some multiple core CPUs. On my Core 2 Duo 6400 CPU it doesn't do anything. I also found this in the man page:

 _This raises a few interesting cases in which the behavior of irqbalance may be non-intuitive. Most notably, cases in which a system has only one cache domain. Nominally these systems are only single cpu environments, but can also be found in multi-core environments in which the cores share an L2 cache. In these situations irqbalance will exit immediately, since there is no work that irqbalance can do which will improve interrupt handling performance._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The clue seems to be in very high cpu load on one cpu under xen. Need to do some digging to see what it is. I would look at the interrupts under xen and see if they are not being balanced. The config of the network interfaces and which drivers are being used are key.

There is really not enough information in the post to diagnose though, although someone might recognise te situation.

</comment><comment><USER11> You should check if you have a listen queue overflow and syncache buckets overflow in netstat -s.

For FreeBSD you should also check if there are packet drops in sysctl net.inet.ip.intr_queue_drops

<comment><USER5> Thanks, noted. Updated the "action plan" in my question at Serverfault.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Carl, I can confirm that this issue exists. We have seen the exact same performance characteristics on EC2, regardless of instance type. The same performance characteristics apply even if the instance is a type which would be singly-hosted on the host hardware. And in spite of days of effort, nothing I could do seemed to "tune" it out.

Our most amusing result was watching a t1.micro beat the pants off a cc.4xlarge.

</comment><comment><USER13> It would be interesting to compare accept() performance between different hypervisors to see what the performance hit is with KVM, VMware, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> just a hypothesis. accept() triggers a context switch. Context switches involves MMU commands, and can be slower in xen if it is being emulated in software (type2 hypervisor). This is much slower than a native OS doing a context switch and the MMU operations are executed at the CPU level.

<comment><USER15> Real hardware (and 32bit paravirtualized Xen) don't require any MMU changes during a syscall. This is because on real hardware, there is no VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) to protect, and on 32bit paravirt, Xen can use x86 segments to protect the monitor.

For better or for worse (most would say better), segment limit checking is disabled in 64bit mode, so 64bit paravirtual Xen has to use the MMU to protect it's monitor. Basically, both the kernel and userspace actually run in ring3, but on different page tables. This means that expensive MMU updates (and TLB flushes) are required both on the way into and out of the kernel for every syscall.

<comment><USER3> I'd be surprised if it was 64-bit. 64-bit PV Xen is awfully slow because of exactly what you reference. HVM would be quite a bit better.

<comment><USER15> All the EC2 instance types mentioned in the article are 64 bit PV.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Torus development has been stopped at CoreOS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/coreos/torus/commit/4df3e5633f466f90047071b995a41fca3ecca5ad <comment><USER2> "But we didn't achieve the development velocity over the 8 months that we had hoped for when we started out, and as such we didn't achieve the depth of community engagement we had hoped for either."

Open source is tough, even as a successful VC funded company. Gotta give credit to CoreOS though, rather than beating a dead horse they're acknowledging there's little external interest and their time would be better spent focused elsewhere. Seeing as they've discontinued Fleet as well it's likely they're doubling down on the commercial Tectonic product built on kubernetes. There's also likely pressure from their investors to start making money, especially as they're well into using their series B and might want to look to raise more money.

Distributed file storage is a tough market in itself. Developers get excited about technology but how many need this as opposed to a highly available database? I love the building blocks of distributed systems and understand that Google's technology is built on a layering of tech (Colossus, Spanner, etc) but it seems the world is not yet ready. Everyone is already struggling to understand the complexities of this new ecosystem and how the pieces all fit together.

Again, good move by CoreOS, wish them luck with their commercial strategy.

<comment><USER3> _> Everyone is already struggling to understand the complexities of this new ecosystem and how the pieces all fit together_

I believe Google's (and Amazon's) secret sauce is having large sysops and devops teams filled with subject matter experts - and the software's original developers.

Efforts like Torus are trying to build zero-to-low-maintenance turn-key solutions, whilst Google is happy to have tens of full-time distributed storage engineers.

<comment><USER4> For Google at least the SRE teams for infrastructure components are not large, neither in total nor relative to the huge infrastructure that they are managing.

You could call this operational scalability, it is made possible by decoupling service quality from individual pieces of hardware. The key ingredient are redundancy across relatively large failure domains and auto mated handling of all foreseeable events. Everything is built around this concept, compute with a fault-tolerant container scheduler, storage on a fault-tolerant file system, checksuming everywhere,...

Another enabler is probably keeping things simple at the component level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bcantrill on how hard such a feat would be to accomplish.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817387](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11817387)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11818081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11818081)

<comment><USER6> disclaimer: I work on project Rook.

Yes building a whole new data path is complicated and takes many years to get right. Its also somewhat of a moving target with new storage technologies appearing on the scene (like SMR drives, NVME, and persistent memory).

It would be much more effective for the community to coalesce around a common data path just like we coalesce around kernels. Something like Ceph is a great start, its battle-tested and has storage vendors (like Intel, Samsung, SanDisk and others) updating/optimizing it for new kinds of storage.

The focus on simplicity and integration into cloud-native environments is critical however and Torus' vision was spot on. Kudos to the CoreOS team for raising the bar on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have karma to burn on this, so here goes:

I worked for several years in VFX/HPC. 30k+ cpus and 15pbs of storage.

Firstly with storage its very rare that people want actual block storage (unless you are hosting VMs, but thats so 2007.....) Yes, I know, openstack, but that's just fucking horrific, seriously just use netboot and be done with it. I've seen people do it inside new clustereing systems, but its really not fun to do, especially if you consumer is prone to disappearing without warning. (FSCK is a terrible mechanism for fast recovery)

Most apps, unless they have bought into the "shove everything over HTTP and pay the penalty", want a posix file system to store anything of importance. (yes, yes database, but where is that writing the data to?)

Now, there are three ways you can do this:

o use a clustered file system

o Use NFS (with or without a clustered filesystem underneath)

o Fuck about with iscsi/SAS/FC and dynamically map block dynamically.

Using a clustered filesystem spread over many clients is begging for trouble, mainly because one client can fuck it up for everyone. Some FSs are dynamic and sexy, but they have a habit of fucking up in new and interesting ways that even the authors can't figure out.

The common ground is having storage nodes attached directly to a pack of big fat disks(for streaming IO) or NVME/SSDs for random IO. They then serve out NFS traffic. Now, you can either have a clustered file system underneth, or not. (Having stand alone servers can be advantageous, if you can map your filesystem out hierarchically)

Now, unless you have a Storage area network, then the last option is just begging for shit performance. You really don't want IO traffic fighting with network traffic. However, if you want raw throughput, this is the way to go, but be warned, you won't get any friendly help if you accidentally disconnect a disk.

Basically, kubernetes/HPC and storage is a solved problem _ducks_ no really, just map in NFS shares and be done with it. If its exotic, its probably going to fail hard, and in ungoogleable ways. More importantly only a few people are going to be able to help, and they may or may not still employed at your company.

<comment><USER8> Why isn't a fourth option being explored: local storage with async replication? Seems like it'd be fairly simple and fast, and no worse than non- clustered NFS regarding data integrity.

I'm just talking from ignorance, so am I missing something?

<comment><USER7> Oh yes, sorry I assumed that.

The simplest storage, is a bunch of dumb servers (well beefy dumb servers) with some application aware scripts to move/copy the dataset.

A place I worked at had a wrapper around rsync that would split up the directory and spawn multiple rsyncs to do a parallel copy.

The Directory structure was effectively copy on write, so backup to the nearline was <15 minutes

<comment><USER8> I wonder if you could have something better, closer to streaming replication of databases. A few weeks ago I found zrep, which sounds more like what I had in mind: [http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/zrep/](http://www.bolthole.com/solaris/zrep/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In addition to Rook [https://rook.io/](https://rook.io/) , which CoreOS mentions and we need to add, please take a look at the other cloud-native storage options listed on the CNCF cloud native landscape: [https://github.com/cncf/landscape](https://github.com/cncf/landscape)

Disclosure: I'm executive director of CNCF, and co-author of the landscape.

<comment><USER10> Do you have any details about running Rook on Kubernetes? The Rook docs link to an outdated document about running Kubernetes on CoreOS.

<comment><USER11> The folks behind Rook at Quantum have put together an operator (custom K8s controller and TPR) for Rook: [https://github.com/rook/rook/tree/master/demo/kubernetes](https://github.com/rook/rook/tree/master/demo/kubernetes)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I called it here, right at the initial announcement:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11816951](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11816951)

This is just too hard of a problem to solve frivolously. Kudos to CoreOS for trying, and coming to the inevitable conclusion sooner rather than later.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is good news - CoreOS needs to focus on what's most important to their core business to be successful.

Being chock full of bright, relatively young and enthusiastic engineers drunk on the Golang kool-aid, there's a very real risk of getting distracted by reimplementing everything under the sun in their favorite shiny new language.

Even if Torus is a good idea, CoreOS has to prioritize, commit, and execute. They can't afford too many diversions. This is a competitive space, their opportunity window and runway are both limited, as usual.

</comment><comment><USER14> I kind of wonder if there will ever be a kubernetes operator built for Ceph (not rook ontop of Ceph). Besides it being a bit of a PITA to maintain, Ceph is about as good as exists regarding OSS distributed object storage currently. If they could kill some of the operational overhead via an operator that did much of it, they might have a serious winner on their hands. Note that I'm just referring to the radosgw bits for the S3 style storage API, not the posix filesystem bits.

<comment><USER15> There is some discussion on this in the ceph-docker project - [https://github.com/ceph/ceph-docker/issues/472](https://github.com/ceph/ceph- docker/issues/472)

Interestingly there is an unannounced project by CoreOS for a storage Operator that will handle Ceph, Gluster, etc. I'm sure we'll hear more about that now that Torus has been retired.

<comment><USER14> Source for the unannounced project, or just overheard in person from someone? I don't see anything obvious on their github but it could be private.

<comment><USER15> Some more info here: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nm3ZQXtojd7Ruw8gQ-8xNo0v...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Nm3ZQXtojd7Ruw8gQ-8xNo0v1rReHl7v-KSd19UJO4I/edit)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dangit, I trust the CoreOS team more/better than a lot of people in the space. Torus would have been so useful.

At the other end of the spectrum though, maybe this is reasonable? As a developer, my first thoughts for "I want my own S3" is not etcd (strong consistency) but projects like [https://github.com/minio/minio](https://github.com/minio/minio) , or even using eventually consistent SQLite replication / synchronization tools [https://github.com/gundb/sqlite](https://github.com/gundb/sqlite) .

So that makes me ask about rook.io too, what layer of the "stack" is it trying to fit into? Obviously pretty low, but that also seems unnecessary (and part of why I suspect Torus is stopping).

<comment><USER17> At a glance, Torus was intended to be a distributed file system. As I understand it, distributed file systems are easier than distributed block systems, but harder than distributed blob systems.

A blob system is all-or-nothing. You create or replace the entire blob at once. This makes bookkeeping and replication much easier for the implementer.

A filesystem supports much richer semantics, including the ability to seek parts of files and modify small regions of files. You need a lot more mechanics to maintain consistency across a network.

A block store is difficult because you're trying to work at very high speed on very small units of state wooshing back and forth willy-nilly. You don't get to rely on any of the higher semantics provided by a filesystem or blobstore, since you're pretending to be a magical harddrive.

I am often wrong in these matters, as an interested outsider, so I'd be happy to receive correction.

<comment><USER18> Disclosure: I work for OpenEBS project

Torus was intending to write distributed block storge that is container native. Metadata management using key value (KV / etcd) method is increases the complexity and not new. Ceph tried it.

OpenEBS uses a novel approch, linux sparse files for managing the blocks of a volume. Fork of Rancher longhorn. The issue of managing the large scale distributed block storage metadata is solved easily throught he management of the files (not blocks).

[https://blog.openebs.io/torus-from-coreos-steps-aside-as- clo...](https://blog.openebs.io/torus-from-coreos-steps-aside-as-cloud-native- storage-platform-what-now-2375e7f5b145#.fslj3rwsg)

<comment><USER4> What I don't get around the new efforts around container-native storage: if you decide to build a new container-native storage system, why would you aim for block storage and not file storage?

Block storage is not exactly a great fit for containers as you can't access its file systems from multiple hosts and fail-over is a hassle (forced remount, fsck).

<comment><USER18> Container native storage has two aspects. One, the storage that container uses, (Like Docker uses Device Mapper, Overlay2 etc.) and two, the persistent storage that the applications inside containers need.

Both of them need to be truly container native. Portworx is attempting LCFS to provide a container native storage for containers itself [https://github.com/portworx/lcfs](https://github.com/portworx/lcfs). So, you are right. You would need a container-native storage (file system for Docker) for running containers.

OpenEBS is targeting providing containerized storage (persistent+block storage) for applications in containers. OpenEBS builds a storage volume as a container and presents the volume-container as part of the K8s POD. This way the the storage persistence problems are resolved by K8S orchestration ingelligence written for application PODs.

Ofcouse, OpenEBS containers will use LCFS when it is ready.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does anyone have experience with [https://rook.io/](https://rook.io/) which is mentioned in the message?

</comment><comment><USER20> could anyone more familiar with the situation give context around the decision + what is happening moving forward?

Thanks

<comment><USER21> Nothing of value was lost, don't worry about it. People reinventing the wheel, realised it takes a lot more than they are capable of. Same old, same old.

<comment><USER3> I can't speak to the value of Torus, but in this case the best wheels are proprietary and their design is secret. Reinventing them is reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anyone looking at openEBS.io? This is open source scale out block for containers.

<comment><USER18> [https://blog.openebs.io/torus-from-coreos-steps-aside-as- clo...](https://blog.openebs.io/torus-from-coreos-steps-aside-as-cloud-native- storage-platform-what-now-2375e7f5b145#.fslj3rwsg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Those of us in the game for some time ultimately read "beta" to mean "30% chance of survival" so this doesn't come as a surprise but it probably isn't true for our more optimistic colleagues.

I think more tempered marketing would have really helped.

<comment><USER23> For reference: [https://coreos.com/blog/torus-distributed-storage-by- coreos....](https://coreos.com/blog/torus-distributed-storage-by-coreos.html)

"Releasing today's initial version of Torus is just the beginning of our effort to build a world-class cloud-native distributed storage system..." 2016-06

"Torus development has stopped on Core OS" 2017-02

Simply pointing out what is the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I understand they don't hand out Internet points for this sort of thing anymore: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11816821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11816821)

<comment><USER25> Note that CoreOS has not given up on the concept of distributed storage; they just gave up on writing their own. So they haven't proved you right.

I realize reliable block/file storage isn't "cloud native" but legacy apps require it and they are willing to spend billions to have it.

<comment><USER22> What does "cloud native" mean here? To me it suggests purpose built much as Torus was /is - though the OpenEBS engineers are asserting there are really only two "container native" storage solutions going, their open source project and PortWorx. [https://medium.com/@kiranmova/persistent-storage-for- contain...](https://medium.com/@kiranmova/persistent-storage-for-containers- alternatives-to-torus-2375e7f5b145)

<comment><USER25> As with all buzzwords, it means what people want it to mean. Many people say that cloud-native apps should use only ephemeral storage (probably because they don't provide reliable storage).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Well that seems eminently reasonable

</comment><comment><USER27> What's Torus and why should I care?

</comment><comment><USER24> The next question that needs to be answered at CoreOS: "Why, exactly, are we maintaining our own Linux distro when the Go binaries that we're writing can mostly ignore userspace?"

<comment><USER28> For one, CoreOS auto-updates smartly, so you can install and forget.

<comment><USER29> Ah.... Hahah... Hahhahahahhahahahahahahahah.

No.

During the 1 year I ran CoreOS in production, updates were turned off, because they caused all sorts of issues.

They only reliable way of doing updates in CoreOS is to replace the machine and reconfiguring it. But then you need to automate joining etcd, which itself is a major pain in the ass.

<comment><USER30> You don't deserve the downvotes. When Docker arbitrarily changes something important and pushes those changes to Docker Hub, CoreOS is dragged along for the ride.

We had our auto-updating servers move to Docker 1.10 over a weekend. Of course, this brought down our CI/CD process because that version of Docker changed something important. Our staging environment was totally horked, but our production environment survived due to an unexplained reboot lock. We were lucky.

Turn off auto updates.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://bhorowitz.com/2012/04/22/instagram/ <comment><USER2> Congratulations on the investment. The return is nothing short of spectacular. It's a truly excellent example of execution _and timing_.

But the point that keeps resurfacing in my mind is SpaceX. SpaceX, from nothing, created a low-earth orbit delivery system that is revolutionizing satellite launches and (soon) the cost of getting men into space... for less than the price that a bunch of people can send photos to each other with cheesy filters [1].

It would be difficult to overstate the impact Elon Musk has had, is having and will have on _humanity_ (and no this isn't hyperbole) through SpaceX (and maybe even Tesla). And it didn't even require, relate to or is connected with some bullshit social network.

I'm also reminded of Steve Yegge's OSCON talk [2] from some months back. The computer power we have available now is stunning. used for the right purposes it could fundamentally change humanity for the good, whether that be in bioinformatics or whatever, is hard to overstate.

Yet we're using all this power and the brightest minds on the planet... to send cat pictures. It's actually reached the point that when I get unsolicited recruitment email or read about some new startup on HN that I tune out as soon as I see the word "social".

There's something astoundingly depressing about all this.

EDIt: I should add that my issue isn't that the founders and investors sought wealth. I don't begrudge them that at all. Not by any means am I anti- capitalist. Bill Gates, as one example, is doing huge amounts of good with his accrued wealth.

The issue is more on what society values.

[1]: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3857904>

[2]: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8>

<comment><USER3> If it makes you feel any better, there's nothing new about this situation. One could just as well complain in the 1930s about the money and effort that were going into popular films instead of whatever other more virtuous project.

This case actually sounds like a fairly mild one. Instagram didn't have many employees, so only a few people were diverted from curing cancer to sending cat pictures.

<comment><USER4> _only a few people were diverted from curing cancer to sending cat pictures_

Pre-acquisition, sure. But how many people will see the instagram acquisition and decide to give up on curing cancer to help people send cat pictures instead?

<comment><USER5> Burned out (and homeless) in San Diego says: I am completely ready to make that (type of) switch, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with any company being acquired. Most people don't really want to get well. They want a better drug. I am currently seriously planning to burn my health site to the ground and start something shallow and hopefully profitable, like an astrology site.

Not kidding at all.

<comment><USER6> Mz, you don't know me but I've often read your comments here with interest and respect. I also know several people in the San Diego ecosystem (I was in LA for many years). I admire what you're doing with healthgazelle and if I can help let me know (email is in my profile).

<comment><USER5> While the sentiment is appreciated, I cannot imagine what to ask for. I need either a huge cash gift to wipe out my debts or to declare bankruptcy, which I am currently trying to work on through legal aid. I also need an online income. I suck at self promotion and most people have either given me well meaning advice which failed to make any real difference or pooh-poohed the idea that any of my current sites could be commercialized and monetized. While it bothers me to take the site down, my webhosting expires in May and not only can I not afford the $120-ish dollars to renew for another year but if someone gave me the money, as has happened the previous three years, I would spend it on food, not hosting service. I see little reason to continue taking verbal abuse for a project which makes no money and is of interest to very few people.

I also do not know how to get off the street in part because I have been healthier sleeping in a tent these past few months. I do not wish to remain homeless but I also do not want to rent a typical American apartment ever again. I do not know how to go from homeless to homeowner, which is probably the only hope I have for arranging a housing situation which does not contribute to my health issues.

You are more than welcome to email me. I just have no idea how it would help.

Thanks

Edit: Though I do have a non-internet business idea I am toying with. And concerned that it will go nowhere because a) I can't get a business loan in my current circumstance b) I won't qualify for a business loan if I successfully declare bankruptcy and c) I don't know if I can successfully run an IRL business given my health issues.

<comment><USER7> > While it bothers me to take the site down, my webhosting expires in May and > not only can I not afford the $120-ish dollars to renew for another year but > if someone gave me the money, as has happened the previous three years, I > would spend it on food, not hosting service.

How about if someone offered to take over the project(s) from you? In effect equivalent to the above, but non-fungible.

<comment><USER5> Since all three of my current sites are deeply rooted in first hand personal experience, I do not see how that can be realistically accomplished. I either need a (financial) miracle within the next month which makes it worth my while to continue developing my sites or they need to die. I don't see any other reasonable alternative.

But thank you for asking.

<comment><USER8> How about if someone offers to host the site free for some time. And once you have recovered, you can move it your own server. Even if you are not going to update it any time in future, the information already there could be of some help to someone. Just don't take the sites down since could be providing some value to some one in the mean time. Let me know.

<comment><USER5> I will think about it however free hosting will not solve anything. Other people have paid the hosting for the last three years. Keeping the site up does not change the lack of traffic. It does not change the lack of credibility I have with the CF community. It does not change the general perception that I am some attention mongering egomaniac who got myself well as some publicity stunt. It does not change the fact that no one wants to compensate me for the information there. Given that I am currently homeless, it rubs me the wrong way that people still want to preserve the site but not give me one thin dime. Meanwhile, people in the CF community raise thousands of dollars for the CF Foundation because they are desperate for better drugs. If everyone here is so fucking idealistic, why are there zero donations?

I do not know what the answer is but at the moment I see no reason to be idealistically trying to preserve the information for the benefit of other people and I find it incredibly offensive that people are suggesting I should given that I am homeless. Either give me money, help me effectively monetize it, or say goodbye to it. If it has value, it should be worth something to people. If it is not worth something to people, then bleeding a homeless person for sympathy seems pretty freaking sick.

<comment><USER9> Take all the info you have on your site, dump it into a PDF, give it a title, and sell it as an e-book on Amazon -- let the site die.

If someone out there thinks your information is valuable, they can pay $15-25 bucks for it; at least then you don't have to keep paying/updating your site and you might put a few bucks in your pocket.

<comment><USER10> If you search for "convert wordpress to book" you get a bunch of sites, including this one <http://www.blogbooker.com/wordpress.php>, which is free. There are a lot more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is something wrong with a world that allows an investment of $250,000 to turn into $78,000,000 in such a short period.

Now before you downvote me, I'm not suggesting what these guys did was wrong, or that FB's money is dirty, or even that anyone directly suffered as a result of this transaction.

But capital is like a liquid, it ebbs and flows. The fact that so much of it can flow in such a small amount of time toward such a small group of people bothers me. Especially when you consider the impact that investment could have made in other places.

Ok _now_ you can downvote me.

<comment><USER12> Well, then, take heart. You also live in a world where a $78,000,000 investment can, in a short time, be turned into $250,000!

Feel any better?

<comment><USER11> Ha ha! Yes I do feel strangely better. I wonder why? Perhaps I'm just annoyed I haven't managed to make a decent financial investment...ever.

<comment><USER13> I think your inability to make good financial investments is directly linked to your hard leftism and your desire to punish people who do.

Unfortunately, the policies you advocate are the cause of poverty in this society... and when they do something like create the housing bubble -- you turn around and blame the victims, rather than the perpetrators. (The housing bubble was created by clinton administration regulations requiring banks to loan money to people who couldn't repay- after it burst the obama administration effectively nationalized the banking system, moving the country closer to fascism.)

Your "how quickly they forget" tells me that you view the world thru the lens of propaganda, not reality, and thus it was heartening to see once again that the source of this support for evil is simply jealousy.

<comment><USER14> I may be wrong about this, but wasn't the program that effectively nationalized the banking system the TARP, which was signed by Bush before Obama was elected?

<comment><USER13> That's a fair perspective. And really, you could go all the way back to the founding of the federal reserve as the beginning of the nationalization of banking. But I was specifically referring to the Obama administrations "reforms" that put the federal reserve in control of regulating the banking industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _funding Kevin to compete with Dalton would be a violation of the original implicit commitment we made to Dalton—to not fund competitors to PicPlz._

This is very interesting. Is this common practice among VCs? PG has said that they don't reject YC aspirants simply because they're building something that competes directly with another YC company: _The way we deal with it is that when two startups are working on related stuff, we don't talk to one about what the other's doing._ [1]

For some reason, I assumed this practice extended to VCs as well.

[1] <http://ycombinator.com/faq.html>

<comment><USER16> Different investors approach this differently; it depends on the velocity of investments they make and on how hands-on they are.

For instance, SV Angel (Ron Conway's fund) has an explicit policy much like YC's: they _will_ invest in competing companies, but that they _won't_ reveal one company's private information to another (and they don't really get involved in the management of their portfolio companies). Both SV and YC are making a lot of small, early-stage investments, so this makes sense for them.

A traditional VC, though, is very hands-on (usually a partner takes a board seat after an investment) and thus often has a policy of not investing in competing companies--it would just be too hard to not share information, at least implicitly, when you are sitting on the board and actively helping manage the company. Andreessen-Horowitz is a VC firm, and this seems to be their approach as well. It makes sense when you're making fewer, larger, later-stage investments.

<comment><USER17> The idea that you can mask learned knowledge of a company's strategy by simply not explicitly revealing sensitive information is a difficult concept to wrap my mind around.

It is not possible to unlearn the information. If you are acting as a strategic advisor, the information has to weigh in your mind and you implicitly will end up revealing information, practically subconsciously. A simple case would be where one company explains an experiment they ran (perhaps testing a feature with a small part of their customer group) and the result of the experiment. If the competitive company comes in and says they are thinking of running a similar experiment and explicitly asks the advisors what they think—what is the response given?

I have a hard time understanding how this type of accumulated information could not enter into future judgments the advisors are making. As a management consultant who faces this type of challenge frequently (and overcomes it by avoiding competitive clients and never sharing my work) I am honestly curious how one elevates themselves above this type of subconscious thinking.

<comment><USER16> Well, that's exactly why VCs don't invest in competing companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Andreessen Horowitz did the only ethical and logical thing it could do. It was in a tough spot, so it did the thing that wouldn't violate its implicit agreements with Kevin and Dalton.

I don't think either side is complaining, and I doubt Andreessen's LPs are either.

Can we put this matter to bed now?

</comment><comment><USER19> All I know is this...this is the kind of support I want from the people I work with. A16Z consistently show me they're the kind of people I want to be working with.

</comment><comment><USER20> A couple of things I thought about while reading this, unrelated to the ethics...

1- If he's able to assign a precise value to the investment outcome, that implies that Facebook assigned an explicit value to their stock involved in the transaction. I don't know if that had to be the case or not, maybe it did. But what it makes me curious about is...what valuation did they use? The current second market valuation? Something else? The $100 billion bandied about isn't an official valuation is it?

2- What Facebook bought was an open social graph, as opposed to their current private one. Now that makes a lot of sense as something worth a lot of money, specifically to Facebook that otherwise has no way to make their private graph public, at least not in any way that doesn't piss off their users. Of course, now they have some verrrrrry tricky waters to navigate.

<comment><USER21> 1\. It was published the day after the Instagram acquisition that Facebook had assigned a valuation of $75 billion to their stock.

2\. I doubt Facebook bought Instagram for the "social graph" . Facebook has always been laser focused on user engagement. One of the core features on Facebook that keeps users engaged is photo sharing with their friends. Instagram was an up and coming challenger in the sharing photos with your friends arena and that is the primary reason Facebook bought them.

<comment><USER22> Re: #1, this is a part of a reasonable answer to "How are they worth so much?" - the purchase of Instagram was made "roughly 30 percent in cash and 70 percent in stock[1]", meaning that the $1B was really ~$300M in cash and a bit under 1% of Facebook.

Maybe that still looks high, but it's certainly not as outrageous as a billion dollars. The bit that makes it look crazy is Facebook's valuation at nearly $100 per active user.

1: [http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/with-instagram- deal-f...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/with-instagram-deal- facebook-shows-its-worth/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _So our choices were: a) invest in Dalton b) invest in neither or c) invest in Kevin and violate our commitment to Dalton._

I would have thought that suggesting that Dalton and Kevin join forces would have been one of the options.

<comment><USER20> What happens when the idea doesn't work out and they pivot? Do they stay together then?

<comment><USER23> Presumably they'd then be in the same position as any co-founders regarding a pivot: They'd have to reach agreement on whether and how to alter their plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> If I was Dalton (PicPlz) I would have been fine with my investor exercising their pro-rata rights in another investment, even it had become competitive. It's not ideal, but I don't think it's unethical. I'd be much more concerned about them sharing information, so there would have be a discussion about that.

<comment><USER16> See my answer to "yabbadabbadoo". It's just too hard to _not_ share information, at least implicitly, when a VC takes a board seat on competing companies. So most VCs have a policy like Andreessen's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Andreessen Horowitz continues to show that they are among the classiest investment firms in the business, as well as being one of the best. Bravo.

</comment><comment><USER26> Christ, 78 mil for an app that shares pictures. I must be the only one thinking this is money which could be used more wisely developing better medical equipment and generally solving real engineering problems.

<comment><USER27> well, one of the technical challenges in medicine is how to share medical imaging between different hospitals and doctors. the current "PACS" systems that do that suck.

Instagram or something like that would be a neat way to accomplish that.

Turing completeness and all...

<comment><USER28> The reason why it is a hard problem is HIPAA regulations, not because of some deficiency with the PACS. Any social or semi-public solution would be instantly shut down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is this standard of ethics amongst VC firms the exception or the rule? A lot of news and comments paint VC firms in a bad light but this story seems to suggest that strong ethics are still alive and well.

</comment><comment><USER30> Ethical and transparent -- two phenomenal qualities in a VC.

<comment><USER31> What do you expect? People don't talk about their unethical dealings.

This is not to say anything about Andreesen Horowitz -- but recognize that this is a savvy piece of marketing, just as the Valve employee manual "leak" is a savvy piece of hiring material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I am really thrilled to read something like this from the venture capital community :)

</comment><comment><USER33> I think it was a great investment and great for them for the transparency. For those that criticize how much money was in so short period of time. You are probably in the wrong industry. I'm sure nobody feel bad for when somebody else do a bad investment. Thinks can go in both ways.

</comment><comment><USER34> What else is there to say now? He makes it very clear, shows how they value and respect both entrepreneurs and sets the record straight.

Very well done.

</comment><comment><USER35> That means that our friend Jack Dorsey also pocketed another 78M - along with Adam D'angelo? When most people will never strike 10M in their entrepreneurial/investment career, these guys have pulled three already... That's really impressive.

<comment><USER36> They were probably not invested at the same level but I'm sure they did well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> all of the anger over instagram seems to come from zero-sum thinking. I liked one of the touches of David Brin's novel Sundiver, where people who think in terms of zero or negative sum games are deemed insane.

</comment><comment><USER38> Can someone please explain what "...Kevin came to it organically based on the Burbn data" means?

<comment><USER23> Ben Horowitz is countering accusations that Kevin pivoted into photo sharing based on Dalton's work. He's saying that Kevin saw that Burbn's photo sharing was its most popular feature and so naturally (organically) Kevin pivoted in that direction.

</comment></comment><comment> DanI-S Imagine if other industries were this transparent.

</comment><comment><USER39> So when faced with a sticky situation, he does what he thinks is ethically right, then makes $78,000,000 (with six zeros). If someone can't step back and evaluate that situation for what it is, they have a serious issue with perspective.

</comment><comment><USER40> This deal absolutely stinks. It sure seems like someone said, "Hey Facebook, you just got paid. Why don't you buy instagram for an amount of money that we made up so that my buddies and I can get even richer?" And they made _78 million dollars_ behind that.

1\. If people can make up money, then it lowers the value of money for everyone.

2\. If people can make up money, then it destroys any semblance of fairness in the system. Why are we working every day when some people can just invent tens of millions of dollars for themselves?

This isn't how markets are supposed to work. An asset isn't worth one billion dollars just because someone you know has a billion dollars to spend. The last thing I expected to see was a blog post bragging about it.

<comment><USER41> > An asset isn't worth one billion dollars just because someone you know has a > billion dollars to spend.

Actually that's nearly the definition of what something is worth: how much someone is willing to pay for it.</comment></comment>


Compiled or Bust? - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/03/compiled-or-bust.html <comment><USER2> It's interesting to me that he's got a top 1000 site with standard tools. No "NoSql" or the other such echo chamber flavor of the day fads.

Can get away with this because c#, .net, asp.net and sql server are pretty darn fast?

<fud> It's been my experience that the standard 2 tier app with a compiled language is usually pretty fast out of the box. Databases are an _almost_ solved problem. The db folks have been at it a long time and you can wring some pretty amazing performance out of sql server|oracle|etc.

Problems: php is usually slow as sh!t and requires something like eAccelerator to provide decent performance.

Java could be good, but the App Server/Broker/N-tier architecture usually kills performance rather than enhancing it.

Just me experience. No hard science here. </fud>

<comment><USER3> Some domains suit the relational database model better than others. If he was doing a huge amount of machine learning-type stuff he might have a different architecture.

Then again, given that he (like most people, myself included) has a lot of RDB experience, he designed his application around what RDBs do well. Perhaps if he had 10+ years of experience with distributed hash tables he might have designed a site with a different feature set.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but services these days that are announcing the usage of a NoSql storage aren't doing any machine learning, they are just storing comments, tags and relationships.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's real confusion in this post.

Rico's statement "Each execution builds the expression tree, and then builds the required SQL." is talking about turning a LINQ expression tree into a SQL string _before_ SQL Server ever gets a chance to reach into its query cache.

Jeff's conclusion "The computational cost of pre-processing a given query is only paid the first time the database sees the new query....Not so in Linq to SQL." is just plain talking about the wrong thing.

SQL Server doesn't care what abstraction generated the SQL query that it's receiving, it'll still use the same old cache.

Rico is legitimately discussing the time taken for the web server to compile a query to SQL, not the time for a SQL Server to look up a cached or uncached query.

<comment><USER6> "In short the problem is that the basic Linq construction (we don't really have to reach for a complex query to illustrate) results in repeated evaluations of the query if you ran the query more than once."

It sounds to me like Rico is advocating the prepare/execute model. With ODBC, it's possible to generate a query plan on the _client_ side. What Rico is saying is that it generates a query and then sends the raw query to the database. This would have been a valid point _before_ SQL Server 2005, but according to Microsoft "the prepare/execute model has no significant performance advantage over direct execution, because of the way SQL Server reuses execution plans."

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175528.aspx>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> how does a sql engine cache [results and plans given] queries?

i would naively assume that there are two caches (ignoring compiled queries - see comment below). one, up front, is a literal cache: repeat a query text exactly and bang, you get the previous results.

but then it would make sense for a second cache based on the structure of the ast after parsing a query. if the structure is the same, but some parameters have changed, then it should be possible to re-use much of a previous [plan].

if i understand the article correctly, it's saying that this doesn't happen. the only way to get this is to use a "compiled query" that you then call with a variety of parameters.

is that right? if so, why? seems like my second level cache wouldn't be that hard to implement...

[edit: i realise this wouldn't avoid the needless passing from linq to text and back to ast, and i agree with the general tone of the article that you need to justify worrying about optimisations - i'm just curious about how sql engines work]

[edit2: clarified by explicitly mentioning plans]

<comment><USER3> What happens is this: There is something called a "query plan." For trivial queries, it is the same as the query. But for more complex queries it works out how to use indices, joins, and so forth. It's kind of a lower-level query language. Figuring out the query plan can be costly for complex queries.

The database maintains a cache of query plans, so when you give it the same query, you get the query plan back right away and the database runs it.

There are data caches for other reasons, but the problem Jeff is describing is that the C# VM must interpret all the steps of building a SQL query in text every time it's run. The database may have the query plan cached, but even though the code never changes, building the SQL query string happens every time.

<comment><USER7> i thought he was saying more than that.

i thought that he was saying that a new plan is _always_ constructed. what i was saying is that a new plan only needs to be constructed for "sufficiently different" queries, where "sufficiently different" can be something much more stringent than the hash of the literal text.

if we're only worrying about the _parsing_ time (as opposed to the time to build and optimize a plan) then it's even more pointless to worry about this (i'm assuming parsing is significantly faster than actually building a plan).

[edit: i'm confused who is who here; have swapped person twice, hope this is correct]

<comment><USER3> I think the database is smarter than a simple literal text for query plans. I think it reverse-engineers literals so that if you query WHERE t.initials = 'ac' and then later query WHERE t.initials = 'rb', it re-uses the cached query plan.

But the point of the article is that the problem is not in the database, it's over in the CLR which is spending a lot of time composing the SQL text that gets sent to the database.

<comment><USER3> UPDATE:

In Oracle, when you use literals any change to the text results in another hard parse on the database side. However, you can use bind variables instead of literals and it can re-use the query plan even when you are searching for different values.

<http://www.akadia.com/services/ora_bind_variables.html>

The OP is talking about LINQ. I assume that its Oracle implementation is smart enough to use bind variables, but I am not going to look that up right now...

<comment><USER7> the article gives an example of how to do compiled queries. which strongly implies that "ordinary" linq queries are not compiled as you seem to expect.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Japanese company replaces office workers with artificial intelligence - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/05/japanese-company-replaces-office-workers-artificia <comment><USER2> The submitted link is a 404, but a quick search later and we have this link:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/05/japanese-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/05/japanese- company-replaces-office-workers-artificial-intelligence-ai-fukoku-mutual-life- insurance)</comment>


Lessons I Learned from the Dotcom Bubble for the Coming Cryptocurrency Bubble - <AUTHOR> http://continuations.com/post/161091248805/some-lessons-i-learned-from-the-dotcom-bubble-for <comment><USER3> Respectfully, I think a lot of comments on this topic are missing the point of the author's advice. Whether there is or is not a bubble, and if there is, how big that bubble might get, are irrelevant here. That's not what this article is about.

First, the author assumes there _is_ a bubble brewing. That's not his thesis; that's his background assumption. His thesis is that, _assuming there is a bubble_ , you should do X, Y, and Z, and not do A, B, and C.

So yeah, after reading this, we could argue once again about whether there's a bubble or not. But the more interesting argument is about whether his advice is sound. Not whether his assumption is sound.

<comment><USER4> One of his advices is:

> 2\. Beware vanity metrics

Can we tell if BitCoin and other cryptocurrencies has any vanity metrics? If so, what would that be?

My uneducated guess would be how valuable the currency is in Dollars. The currency seems virtually inflated as we don't know how much of that would translate to real purchasing power. It doesn't seem that it would be possible to many people to sell it all out. Thus, who invested in it would be supposed to keep using within the coin's network, and given that a transaction takes awhile and there are not many shops accepting it, it would be hard to get some return.

In addition, BitCoin has fluctuated a lot since 2012 and there were several issues in its way, like the lead maintainer stepping out, capacity limit being reached because of block chain monopoly, Mt Gox bankruptcy etc.

<comment><USER5> Current vanity metrics seem to include "market capitalization" and amount raised during ICO. It is true that those have become signal in the current noise but it speaks about how frothy things are.

Crytocurrencies simply are hard to value because you don't know how many users they've got.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The difference is the dot-com stocks had some theoretical value - <USER2> Pets.com, people buy pet supplies online after all.

Unlike commodities, equities and so forth, cryptocoins have no value whatsoever. So to try to make it sound like it has worth, its pushers have to cast about for anything they can and finally come upon the only thing they can - the dollar. In fact, they say, it's even better than the dollar.

It would take too long to explain here why the Bitcoin is not like the only thing they have left to compare it to, the dollar. Also, an explanation won't sway anyone who has already had a drink of the kool-aid any how.

May I recommend another message board for all those high on cryptocoins here - 4chan ( [http://boards.4chan.org/biz/catalog](http://boards.4chan.org/biz/catalog) ). 4chan /biz/ is filled with uneducated, poor kids all looking to get wealthy with little work on the cryptocoin get rich quick schemes.

I think it's a much better message board for all of you of this bent. Here on HN there are still some people who believe in studying math and science and engineering and CS at universities, and then going and doing a lot of hard work and creating wealth. 4chan is mostly filled with your types - the get- rich-quick scam artists. Go read 4chan /biz/ right now - it's filled with no work, no study, get rich quick types like yourself. Leave and go there. HN will be stuck with those "out of it" old fogies who actually believe in study, hard work, that commodities need value to have worth in the long-term, and old-fashioned, out of touch ideas like that.

<comment><USER7> Bitcoins are saving this Venezuelan guy's family from starving. I'm pretty sure that qualifies as value: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6d2w1b/bitcoin_is_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6d2w1b/bitcoin_is_saving_my_family_from_starvation/)

This is not to say that there isn't an absurd amount of hype and froth right now, but if nothing else cryptocurrencies will continue to serve a purpose for anybody who needs to send money outside capital controls.

<comment><USER8> If you read the thread you find out that the Venezuelan guy lives in the US has never done what he described and knows no one who has used it as he described.

He gets called out by someone in Venezuela here [https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6d2w1b/bitcoin_is_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6d2w1b/bitcoin_is_saving_my_family_from_starvation/di0etdc/)

<comment><USER9> See this is why I really appreciate this community sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Internet companies during the dotcom bubble had market value of several trillion dollars.

The total market cap of crypto-currency is still only ~$70 billion. I agree with the principle, but this boom is still pretty modest.

<comment><USER11> I think it is not absolute value what defines a bubble. It should be relative. E.g. perceived value of an asset compared to it's real value/revenue/growth.

<comment><USER12> To provide a context here - one of the key value propositions of BTC is real interest rate.

Cash real interest rate: 0% interest - 2% inflation through debasing currency = -2%

BTC real interest rate: 0% interest - 0% inflation = 0%

Note how _this_ benefit of BTC is _not_ bubbly by itself (growth expectation usually is - due to it being based on past growth)

<comment><USER13> Prices only remain flat (0% inflation) if no increase in productivity occurs.

2% inflation doesn't mean the currency has been debased by 2%, it means: if it has become _x_ % cheaper to produce a basket of goods -- and the price of this basket of goods has increased by 2% -- the currency has been devalued by (2+x)%.

Producers are constantly competing to cut the costs of production, in order to gain market share at the expense of competitors, so I don't see how flat prices can be a reasonable assumption.

<comment><USER12> Increase in production increases supply, so prices fall -> deflation.

Yes, inflation can have other reasons than debasement (for example, productivity _decrease_ ) but this affects both types of "money" \- fiat and bitcoin, so I left it out to keep it simple

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone think that when the crypto bubble bursts, that will cause a stock market level crash?

<comment><USER15> Not really, but the crypto currency community looks like a pyramid scheme. First users gets most of the coins.

<comment><USER16> Do you have any idea what is going on here or are you ignoring away in bliss? This is as much a pyramid scheme as VC industry is in that early investors make disproportionate gains (and losses). Finding the right tokens to invest in is the challenge.

<comment><USER17> Well I will gladly change my mind anytime someone can provide a convincing argument against the "bitcoin pyramid scheme" that is nor an ad-hominem attack, neither a cryptic response like "value come from scarcity induced by the growing complexity of the arbitrary mathematical problem solving that require big amount of current tech silicium mostly running in a non-democratic country who don't care about power efficiency...(goes on with technical gibberish)"

My theory is that if MasterCard roll-out a "masterbyte" crypto-currency that can automagically convert to real cash usable in all MasterCard enabled retails, bitcoin will loose all value almost overnight. Prove me wrong using strong arguments and I'll change my mind.

PS: needless to say, downvoting me don't count as an argument. It just keep me thinking that you are in lack of a better one.

<comment><USER18> Your statement indicates that you don't know what a pyramid scheme is, or that you do and you're expanding its definition to generalize its negative connotation to something else that doesn't fall under the proper definition of a pyramid scheme.

A company using credit card technology in combination with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is simply leveraging existing technology interfaces for companies that want to accept cryptocurrency without said companies having to deal with alternative payment systems. The payment system handles everything related to the cryptocurrency and the payee simply sees the USD (or other fiat currency) value in their accounts.

<comment><USER17> I will stick to the pretty basic definition that a pyramid scheme cannot sustain itself when less foreign currency enter the system. That is because the system is blatantly unable to produce value and only produce virtual currency from foreign currency.

I stil don't see any argument, just as-hominem as usual when defending bitcoin: "Pheeww you know nothing...".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Glad I sold my Amazon stock in 1999.

<comment><USER20> 1999 wasn't a bad time to sell Amazon stock, actually, since it got punished in the bust and took years to return to 1999 levels. But Amazon is a huge exception because it was a real company and most dotcoms weren't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If governments start to actually fear that their monopoly on creating currency is in danger, they will destroy crypto currency.

Bitcoin may be decentralized, but they can go after currency converters. They can make holding it illegal. They can make mining it illegal. They can make trading it illegal.

They can manipulate the market to crash the value of bitcoin with (to them) pocket change.

<comment><USER22> > they can go after currency converters

Only in their own jurisdiction. The US already goes after those, but it won't help as long as other countries don't.

> They can make holding it illegal.

Unenforceable. Making the knowledge of a secret key illegal would simply be weird. Bitcoins have no physical incarnation. So, you cannot "hold" them in your hand.

> They can make mining it illegal.

Unenforceable. It is very easy to hide that a machine is mining. Furthermore, such machines can be located in any country of the world.

> They can make trading it illegal.

They already try to do that. It doesn't help.

> They can manipulate the market to crash the value of bitcoin with (to them) > pocket change.

They would first have to buy up a lot of bitcoin in order to dump them and crash the market. While buying up the coins, they are pushing its value up. When selling them, they just go back to the point they came from. Hence, the strategy would be totally ineffective.

What's more, if governments attack the internet, people will discover that the reverse is much, much easier. Using the internet to orchestrate attacks against the government, is simply trivial to organize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I will make a prediction so I can come back and make fun of myself in a month. It is a bubble and it will pop real soon going down back to $500 bringing down all the alts with it, then it will slowly go up again at a normal pace for the next couple of years.

<comment><USER24> Soo just the way it did three times already at different levels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What did the cummulative registered users metric mean in the dot com days?

</comment><comment><USER26> Can we get this renamed to reflect that that is a cryptocurrency bubble and not a "crypto bubble"?

It certainly isn't discussing companies working on cryptographic technologies like I initially assumed.

<comment><USER27> Ok, we added 'currency' above.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Don't borrow to invest in something? Ever heard of leverage? Such a stupid argument. How about you talk about why that carries so much risk and teach people something instead of this click bait shit

</comment><comment><USER29> Sounds like you're conflating the value of the coins with the corporate value being invested. Corporations are dedicating a desk or a lab or a few staff to Crypto. There may be a decrease in the value of coins but there's no bubble to pop on the organisational side.</comment>


It's Not Just You: In Online Meetings, Many Women Can't Get a Word In - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/zoom-meetings-gender.html <comment><USER2> At work we switched from zoom to [https://team.video](https://team.video) in part because when we tried it out, all of the sudden the quieter people were actually using the emoji reactions to register agreement or reservations, or whatever feelings about the point being made.

And so we could have a much richer discussion, because when someone would flag their concern, we could know to dig in and ask questions to understand the hesitation. Or even better, if we could see everyone is in agreement, then we get to stop talking about the thing and move on.

It was immediate for some people, and for others it took a little getting used to, but so far overall it has been a great equalizer for those who might have previously kept their good ideas to themselves.

</comment><comment><USER3> > One study by the Yale psychologist Victoria Brescoll found that when male > executives spoke more often, they were perceived to be more competent, but > when female executives spoke more often, they were given lower competence > ratings

Here's is what the study they're referring to measured. They volunteers read one of 4 bios of an executive. They were identical except they were divided across whether the executive was described as male, female, talkative or quiet.

They found that talkative women were rated a 4.83, quiet women 5.62, talkative men 5.64, quiet men 5.11.

> The annual McKinsey and LeanIn.org Women in the Workplace report, which in > 2019 surveyed 329 companies and more than 68,000 employees, found that half > of the surveyed women had experienced being interrupted or spoken over and > 38 percent had others take credit for their ideas.

I imagine women are talked over more than men but I wish they'd share the percentage of men to show the disparity.</comment>


Silicon, the new lithium? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mnn.com/technology/gadgets-electronics/blogs/silicon-the-new-lithium <comment><USER2> I hate it when the article never links to the original paper.

[http://materials.technion.ac.il/EinEli/Publications/publicat...](http://materials.technion.ac.il/EinEli/Publications/publications.html#)

Click on 2009, and then click the pdf link to request by email.

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone who's been paying attention to various high-performance battery technologies, I'm a little disappointed that they didn't link to the original paper (if anyone could find it, that'd be nice). However, the author is a little eager to jump to conclusions, some of which are wrong: first, a non- rechargeable battery that "uses air as a cathode" is called a fuel cell, and it's not a particularly new design. In fact, silicon fuel cells have been around since at least 2007 [1]. Also, Bolivia does _not_ have half of the world's supply of lithium; they currently have the cheapest reserves, but as lithium represents about 2% of the cost of producing a lithium-ion battery, there are many more potential reserves available [2]. It's also worth pointing out that we've had non-rechargeable batteries that exceed lithium's energy store potential for quite a while, in the form of lithium-thionyl chloride [3].

Really, though, what seems more interesting to me are the _nanostructured_ silicon-anode lithium-ion batteries, which have been demonstrated multiple times now, have capacities several times those of lithium, and _are_ rechargeable [4] [5] [6].

[1] <http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-983920.html>

[2] [http://gas2.org/2008/10/13/lithium-counterpoint-no- shortage-...](http://gas2.org/2008/10/13/lithium-counterpoint-no-shortage-for- electric-cars/)

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_battery>

[4] [http://gas2.org/2008/11/25/silicon-could-give-lithium-ion- ba...](http://gas2.org/2008/11/25/silicon-could-give-lithium-ion- batteries-10x-more-capacity/)

[5] [http://aiche.confex.com/aiche/2009/webprogrampreliminary/Pap...](http://aiche.confex.com/aiche/2009/webprogrampreliminary/Paper159441.html)

[6] [http://news.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908....](http://news.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html)

<comment><USER4> Nice example of interesting but vapid post leading to dense HN comment. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> any 3rd party verification available on this?</comment>


Palindromic karma - <AUTHOR> This is explicitly a content-free post - skip it if you have no interest in trivialities and cute asides, but ...
Currently my karma is unexpectedly palindromic.  I just noticed, wanted to tell someone, and this community is actually pretty much the only place I could say it.
However, if this is the sort of thing that you find interesting, intriguing, or otherwise catches your imagination, I wonder if there are any interesting questions to ask, such as how often it happens, how long it lasts, how many people have palindromic karma on HN at any given time, etc.  Just idle speculation.
We now return you to your regular programme ... <comment><USER2> Content free reply: You can buy old bus tickets with a palindrome number from Argentina ("capicua"). You get 504 of them for 350 dollars :) [https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-613223635-boletos-c...](https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-613223635-boletos- capicuas-tren-colectivo-coleccionistas-lote-de-504--_JM)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> 20 hours later and it's gone - it was 85558.

Fun while it lasted - thank you everyone for not upvoting this submission!

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, very impressive. Did you have few very successfull post or you cumulated such karma over long period of time?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm old, and I've been here a long time. You can see my posting and comment history here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ColinWright](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ColinWright)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ColinWright](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ColinWright)

That's the case with everyone. Click on their name to see their profile, _etc._ I can see you account was created 103 days ago and you have 151 karma. You've posted 8 links, and commented about 15 times (I didn't count precisely)</comment></comment>


Cryonics is like a startup - how / how not to start a cryonics company - <AUTHOR> http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/03/18/letter-to-aspiring-cryonicists/ I think it helps to think of starting a cryonics operation in the same terms as if you were starting any other high technology enterprise that requires substantial physical infrastructure and wide-ranging expertise in both hands-on and theoretical areas. <comment><AUTHOR> More Mike Darwin awesomeness.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my new Mac app TwistedPair. Promo codes inside. - <AUTHOR>

I created a new app called TwistedPair as the sister utility to the Mac's native AirPort utility. I used my Macbook at work with a wired connection, and often have to "settle" for wired connections in hotels without WiFi. If I had a problem connecting, it took treading three menus deep in System Preferences, and got frustrating quickly. So I scratched my own itch, and made a menulet that displays your wired network information at-a-glance in the status bar. You can also enable AirDrop on your wired connection, giving you the ability to transfer files between your wired and wireless Macs.
I welcome your feedback on how the app might be improved. If you take a promo code, please leave a comment.
Mac App Store link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/twisted-pair/id490427284?ls=1&mt=12 App Website link: 	http://twistedpair.me/
Promo Codes:
H3PYNT939X4E PMJPJWLE6TYP 34T6HXA9MK7H Y9WL7MYKPEL3 RE4LFNYAMPPX 4FJL6F3JLM3H AWKMA6NWXA6R <comment><USER2> I used PMJPJWLE6TYP

</comment><comment><USER3> Used RE4LFNYAMPPX</comment>


A northern English town offers a glimpse of life when migrants leave - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/news/britain/21736178-harrogates-downward-migration-trend-few-years-ahead-britains-how-it-faring <comment><USER2> This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but...

Despite this is clearly an intermediate situation and things are not definitive... This looks good. Very good.

Think about it:

1- unemployment fell straight down (it's easier to find a job)

2- housing prices fell down (it's easier to afford a better house, and easier to buy one!)

3- employers have lost a source of low-wage workers and are now rising hourly wages

So, so far it's easier to find a job, you get to get paid more and you have to spend less on housing (which is usually one of the bigger cuts of your salary).

Of course, the same old argument: "Locals worry about who will care for the elderly and wait on tables in restaurants if migrants continue to leave". With rising salaries and plummeting housing prices, locals will probably approach those jobs again. If you can make a good living where you were born, some will likely stay.

\</comment><comment>-----

Excerpts from the link, relative to the above points:

1- "Unemployment has fallen to 3.6%, below the national and regional levels, allowing some workers to drive harder bargains."

2- "Demand for low-end rented properties has fallen. In Harrogate, prices in this segment grew at half the regional average between 2014 and 2017"

3- "Though real median wages in Harrogate have not changed much since 2014, at the lower end they have risen by 9%"

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>--

If we have to look at the facts... This looks good, imho. For UK people, of course.

<comment><USER3> #3 might be partially due to the recent increase in the minimum wage.

<comment><USER2> Might be, but beside that the author clearly writes: "Some businesses in Harrogate are paying teenagers well above their minimum wage of £4.05 ($5.70) per hour, to tempt them into work".

<comment><USER3> The NMW is 5.60 for teenagers of normal working wage under 18 there are resections on of the sorts of work teenagers <18 can do as they are all supposed to be at school or in training.

The real NWM is £7.50

Also Harrogate is a posh spa town (like a small town in the Hamptons) so its not typical depressed northern town like say Blackpool or Hull - I suspect the author my have a probrexit agenda.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The /e/ Google-free, pro-privacy Android clone is now available - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-e-google-free-pro-privacy-android-clone-is-now-available/ <comment><USER2> Bromite author here ([https://www.bromite.org](https://www.bromite.org) ); I was contacted some time ago about the possibility to maintain a modified version of Bromite with a customised /e/ home page and list of search engines. Nothing particularly murky there, but after some Q/A I did not want to proceed with this type of cross-branding because fundamentally I do not want Bromite to be using or be affiliated with any cloud service and I concluded that /e/ invites users to swap Google for /e/ as a cloud services provider.

Now to the reason why I am commenting here: there is no GPL violation for the patches used in their /e/ browser but I find it a bit disappointing that nowhere it is mentioned that the browser is a complete Bromite build, minus the logo and renamed to '/e/ Browser'.

Most users are assuming that it is a Chromium fork developed by /e/ and will never reach the Bromite open source project, which is basically the way the project is kept alive.

<comment><USER3> I haven't looked into the compiled code but the source repository still shows the Bromite logo and name: [https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/apps/browser](https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/apps/browser)

The AUTHORS file also mentions being a fork of Bromite, but doesn't list any authors that aren't part of the project: [https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/apps/browser/blob/master/AUTHO...](https://gitlab.e.foundation/e/apps/browser/blob/master/AUTHORS)

It looks like your patches have been changed to renamed Bromite to Browser in user-facing code though. Have you already asked them to add a reference to Bromite somewhere in the about screen? Maybe create a pull request to make it easier for them to accept your request if the devs themselves are lazy. They obviously won't rename the browser shortcut, but adding a reference in the "About browser" section shouldn't be too much to ask for.

Unrelated: I understand your position on cloud providers, but I think /e/ is different from MS or Google in that it's possible to swap out most of the integrations with your own servers (it's all a bunch of glued-together open source services, after all).

Without cloud integration, I doubt /e/ would reach any sort of mainstream of non-technical cult status at all. You'd be left with an app store on top of a build of LineageOS. It's the services delivered with the system that a) distinguish the project from LineageOS without GApps and b) provide basic usability many normal users would miss otherwise.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I am aware of the repository.

> Have you already asked them to add a reference to Bromite somewhere in the > about screen?

I have not; I was expecting it, given the amount of modifications from Bromite patches (which is zero, as far as I understood).

> I think /e/ is different from MS or Google in that it's possible to swap out > most of the integrations with your own servers (it's all a bunch of glued- > together open source services, after all).

It's that "most" that corrupts the intent.

> Without cloud integration, I doubt /e/ would reach any sort of mainstream or > non-technical cult status at all.

Sorry, I will avoid discussing this, it has all the clues to become an endless and inconclusive talk :)

In short: yes, I agree with you, and still do not care about "mainstream or non-technical cult status" at all.

<comment><USER3> > I have not; I was expecting it, given the amount of modifications from > Bromite patches (which is zero, as far as I understood).

I won't lie, I would have expected the same if I were in your shoes. Thinking positively though, it's possible that the /e/ people don't care much about the attribution they themselves receive and don't realize what it means to others to be recognized for their personal hard work. Asking nicely might show them that other people in the open source community do care. The worst that can happen is that the people behind the project do indeed not care about you and are rude about it, but in that case nothing really changes anyway. Things can only improve from here, I'd say!

Based on the changes I've seen, they basically replaced all instances of "Bromite" and "Chrome" in the source code with "Browser". I don't see much /e/-specific code in there at all, aside from a project description and some links in the documentation. They did add a reference to the original project to the AUTHORS file, so I'd like to believe in a variation of Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by laziness.

> Sorry, I will avoid discussing this, it has all the clues to become an > endless and inconclusive talk :) I completely agree :)

<comment><USER2> > They did add a reference to the original project to the AUTHORS file, so I'd > like to believe in a variation of Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice > that which is adequately explained by laziness.

This would be all fine and agreeable if they had not contacted me first, see my first comment :) of course I can still do contact them pointing out the situation, but let me say that given the nice project manifesto ([https://e.foundation/wp- content/uploads/e-manifesto.pdf](https://e.foundation/wp- content/uploads/e-manifesto.pdf) ) and the large amount of open source projects being involved...there _must_ be expectations of this type :)

I do not claim malice - but I feel like the exact bare minimum was done there, which is not that surprising given that I declined creating/maintaining the customised fork that then they created.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The name of the operating system is actually "/e/"??? That's terrible..

<comment><USER5> I have to agree, the first thing that pop in my head is the /e/ board from 4chan which is for ecchi

<comment><USER6> I'm reluctant to google; what's that mean?

<comment><USER7> hentai - pornographic manga and anime.

"ecchi" is Japanese for the English letter "H", standing for "hentai", which means perverted or strange.

<comment><USER8> Specifically /e/ is the board for softcore images of that nature, while /h/ (hentai) is for hardcore images (and /d/ is, well...)

<comment><USER9> ... Females with large phalluses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The advantage here is that they sell phones.

It is very difficult to install Lineage OS, as it is completely unclear which phone one should buy to install it. There isn't a single viable answer online for the question: "Which phone should I buy for Lineage OS". I am dead serious!

The support is up to individuals able to produce ROMs, so for example a Galaxy A5 is supported, while A6 and A7 used to be, but are no longer (!) supported. So if you bought an A7 for Lineage OS, you are out of luck now.

Of course it is also difficult to install Lineage OS itself. For most of us, it is probably at least possible. But there is no chance rest of the 95% of the world will ever do this. Indeed, I would also feel at least anxious to attempt it (alas, for my current phone no Lineage OS is available).

So this is great. You can buy a Samsung phone and get it preinstalled with a good distro. I am not aware this is possible otherwise, let alone for less than 300 euro.

Everyone who doesn't understand why this is better than "just install Lineage OS with microG" has some serious disconnect going on.

I am fairly incompetent with computers, but I don't think I could fork my own Lineage OS for my phone of choice. Therefore, having something preinstalled and actually supported is a serious selling point for me!

Edit: Additionally, they will offer a service for you to send in your phone to flash it. I really like this!

<comment> 0-_-0 > There isn't a single viable answer online for the question: "Which phone > should I buy for Lineage OS". I am dead serious!

Check out [https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/](https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/)

<comment><USER10> Yeah but that site had mentioned phones officially supported, and then no longer.

It doesn't answer the question which of these phones is a viable one to get now to have Lineage support. Clearly, its not better to get a newer one, it is best to get the one with most support. Which one that is, I do not know.

<comment><USER11> I used the following site lately to choose a phone. I found it much easier to understand than the device list of LineageOS.

[https://piotr-yuxuan.github.io/choose-a-new-phone/](https://piotr- yuxuan.github.io/choose-a-new-phone/)

Still, individual research still required e.g. to find out that the fancy 48 MP camera mode is not supported in LineageOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't really see the benefit in this. You can install LineageOS without gapps and MicroG already distributes a fork of LineageOS that includes MicroG. If you want full control of your device you will likely be better off going with something like Librem 5 from Purism.

<comment><USER13> /e/ is LineageOS + MicroG already. Seems like a LineageOS downstream distro with bunch of defaults and some Cloud stuff (can be self-hosted) and an Appstore other than FDroid. Oh and they'll sell you preflashed phones.

So basically AOSP for less technical people interested in privacy. Seems harmless so far.

<comment><USER14> The cloud integrations feel suspect. "Ditch Google! Use us instead! You can _trust_ us!"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Google-free" in that the name is impossible to google? /s

I had not heard of Qwant before this. How does it compare to other privacy- focused search engines e.g. Duck Duck Go?

<comment><USER5> Last time I read about it it wasn't very promising. If I remember correctly their code is proprietary and last time I checked it was just aggregating results from other search engines.

<comment><USER16> Isn't this exactly what DDG does? Closed-source, aggregating/proxying other search engines like Yandex.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you want google-free android with some privacy defaults you can build/sign yourself with a simple make command, see: [https://github.com/hashbang/os](https://github.com/hashbang/os)

<comment><USER18> Nice, but works only on Pixel phones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seeing a lot of critical comments here. I get it, this isn't perfect, but let's not forget that this is part of a growing movement towards something better. That is to be commended.

Don't let perfect be an enemy of good.

</comment><comment><USER8> Me and my friends had a good laugh over this. You'd think that at the very least _someone, at some point_ would've recognized "/e/" as following the grammar of 4chan board names, right? People are still at least vaguely aware of /b/ (and nowadays, /pol/), right...?

EDIT: Maybe they just googled it and assumed the name was free after finding nothing....

</comment><comment><USER20> WARNING:

If you buy one of the S7/S9 preloaded models, the camera quality is likely to be quite poor, especially under low light. This is the state of affairs under microG (/lineage), as Samsung ROMs use a proprietary camera library that doesn't carry over. Source: My main phone is an herolte (S7), as the Exynos variants are one of the few phones with separate baseband and application processors.

This should be prominently mentioned on the product page, as it's just going to cause disappointment, regret, and ultimately backlash. Really they should choose an additional model with good camera support to refurbish, and offer the choice as an explicit tradeoff (better quality photos vs better baseband security).

(And if I am completely wrong here because they've somehow fixed or sidestepped this, please correct me. It just doesn't seem likely)

</comment><comment><USER21> I applaud the effort but I'm buying a Librem _because I can google Librem_.

<comment><USER22> Not intuitive, but:

[https://www.google.com/search?q='/e/'](https://www.google.com/search?q='/e/')

<comment><USER8> >1 (foot / e) / foot = 0.367879441

Thanks Google, that's exactly what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just what we need, a new system with the name of /e/ which will make information and discussion of it unsearchable on the web. WTF.

I thought only Google did that, name things and projects for common dictionary words. You'd expect a search company to know better.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've been using this for over a year on multiple phones. The amount of negative feedback here based on zero experience reads like corporate fud.

</comment><comment><USER25> I see no reason reason to expect that this will fail to capture enough market share to justify maintaining it, and then stop providing updates, leaving its users with an insecure and unmaintained fork that offers no compelling benefit over it's better-maintained alternatives.

None at all.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'd like to know what their support model is. Will phones pre-loaded with /e/ continue to receive security/version updates? Since this is a fork of LineageOS, I'm guessing they don't get automatic updates from upstream.

</comment><comment><USER27> Finally!! Ditch google to dirt.. and go with alternatives! Google is evil and privacy abuser!

</comment><comment><USER28> what's wrong with cyanogenmod?

<comment><USER26> For one thing, it hasn't been called "Cyanogenmod" for about three years?

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

<comment><USER29> To rephrase the question for pedants: What's wrong with LineageOS née Cyanogenmod?</comment></comment></comment>