Some of the World's Biggest Lakes Are Drying Up - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/03/drying-lakes-climate-change-global-warming-drought/ <comment><USER2> Call me naive but I read the article as consequences of acute human expansion. Virtually every example was followed by explanations along the lines of "man made canals, irrigation, mining..."

I really think technology and better civil planning will be the way to fix these problems. Technology will cause the cost of renewable energy to trend towards zero while better civil planning will apply that energy to pump water from oceans to where it is needed by people. Eventually there will be success stories that will be copied around the world. Israel has had considerable success in water conservation and is considering replenishing the Dead Sea via canals.

If we can build oil pipelines from Canada to Texas eventually there will be a model that says we can build water pipelines from the pacific north west to Phoenix and Las Vegas. Governments around the world will either do something along these lines or they will not. Surely some will. Those that do will still be here long into the future, those that don't will not.

<comment><USER3> China has invested billions in constructing mammoth aqueducts to do just this:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Transfer_Project)

[https://www.gokunming.com/en/blog/item/4038/china_considerin...](https://www.gokunming.com/en/blog/item/4038/china_considering_plan_to_make_xinjiang_desert_a_new_california)

Meanwhile in Western Canada, we steadfastly refuse to sell water into the US, despite all of our fresh water running into the Pacific Ocean anyway...

<comment><USER4> In Canada there exists a widespread belief that if you start selling water, you _have_ to sell it.

I am not sure this is correct, but it is widespread, and probably affects willingness to sell anything.

[http://www.cbc.ca/radio/the180/more-on-nafta-and-water- parti...](http://www.cbc.ca/radio/the180/more-on-nafta-and-water-partisanship- in-government-and-should-expats-be-able-to-vote-1.3163823/the-relationship- between-nafta-and-canadian-water-1.3164244)

<comment> radford-neal It's nonsense. Even if NAFTA somehow forced the provinces to sell water at market rates to anyone who wanted to buy it, the revenue would accrue to the provincial government. Nothing would stop the provincial government from deciding to distribute this income as a dividend to all citizens. The end result is that the citizens of the province could definitely out-bid foreigners for the water, since the money they pay comes right back to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can look for causes all you want. They all lead to human population growth.

Talking about it could possibly lead to finding something to do about it, which would mean deliberately lowering the birth rate. How? I don't know, but the alternatives are 1) hoping we get lucky and don't overshoot Earth's carrying capacity or 2) letting nature lower our population for us.

Regarding option 1, everyone knows population growth rates in many places (not everywhere) are declining, but the rates have nothing to do with Earth's carrying capacity, so it would only be luck if we stabilized below the carrying capacity. If we've already overshot it, lowering rates won't prevent option 2.

Option 2 means people dying prematurely from disease, famine, war, pestilence, etc.

Are there meaningful third options? Going to space or Mars doesn't lower the population here, and it presupposes that people could manage population growth on the spacecraft and early colonies. If we can there, we can elsewhere.

So however challenging figuring out how to lower the birth rate is, it seems the best option of the three. It seems like talking to you kids about birth control. It's easier not to talk about it, but the parents who don't do it end up with grandchildren sooner than they expect, and less cohesive families since they were chosen by circumstance, not deliberate choice.

<comment><USER6> A third option is to increase Earth's carrying capacity. I don't know how, but the capacity depends on technology and resource use, so it should be possible.

<comment><USER4> We have been doing that. But one problem is that it's easy to fool ourselves: you can temporarily raise carrying capcity by eating capital.

So, we catch many more fish now, for example. But we are catching at faster than replacement rate, depleting the natural capital stock.

Carbon energy + space in the atmosphere for CO2 is another variety of capital stock which we have used for temporary carrying capacity gains.

There are also long run carrying capacity improvements in the mix. General efficiency improvements fall in this category.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have to admit i know nothing about this, so i want to ask what feels like a dumb question: What stops water from evaporating into space? I feel like the answer is something simple like "gravity", or "condensation", but we seem to think Mars once had water, so where is it now, and will that happen here too?

<comment><USER8> Gravity and a magnetic field. Gravity keeps the atmosphere from floating away, and the magnetic field protects it from getting stripped by solar radiation. The problem on mars is he magnetic field.

<comment><USER7> Magnetic field, ah! Right so, interestingly does that mean a polar shift (that every now and again people rave about) might have larger implications than breaking electronics? Ie massive water loss? I feel like it would depend what the poles look like after the shift, is it likely the field could be weakened or would it just flip? I should probably try learn more about this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Where is the water going, though? Isn't water a zero-sum game in the sense that Earth is a closed system?

<comment><USER10> Just like energy and entropy, it becomes harder to harvest efficiently. There's still just as much water, it's just not easily accessible. The difference between the water in your glass and the water in the cubic foot of earth after you spill your glass on it. You can't drink from the latter.

The water cycle does the collection for us (lakes, rivers, aquifers) but we're draining them faster than they can recharge, particularly problematic are the melting glaciers (in the Himalayas) and the aquifers:

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

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/20...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/2015/12/03/alarming-research-says-humans-are-using-up-far-more- water-than-previously-thought/?utm_term=.129e41e12062)

[http://lcluc.umd.edu/hotspot/glacial-retreat- himalayas](http://lcluc.umd.edu/hotspot/glacial-retreat-himalayas)

[https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/11-percent-of- disa...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/11-percent-of-disappearing- groundwater-used-to-grow)

[https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4626](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4626)

<comment><USER9> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Surprised no one has mentioned Cape Town yet:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cape-town- drought-d...](http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/cape-town-drought-day- zero-climate-change-global-warming-south-africa-a8236511.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> You don't need to go to South America, Asia or middle East - it's happening in Europe and no one seems to notice.

Look at Portugal and Spain, it's becoming a desert - the day of the cold wave the south of Portugal and Spain had the same temperatures of some country's in Africa.

<comment><USER13> Spain mainland is separated from Africa by a mere 14 km strait, so no wonder temperature is similar, not talking about Canary Islands that are like a thousand km further to the south.

Southwest mainland is becoming a desert indeed, but that's nothing new. Most classic spagetti westerns were filmed there.

It's Sahara crossing the sea and a good thing for "plastic sea" (greenhouses). Almería provides several vegetables harvests a year that our European neighbourgs appreciate very much.

Just 200km west, you have permanent snow and big woods.

<comment><USER12> Uh, neither Spain or Portugal has ever had the same climate has the north of Africa - not at least in the recorded history.

Here's an example of the 27th of February: [http://images.meteociel.fr/im/8481/temp_eur2_crn3.png](http://images.meteociel.fr/im/8481/temp_eur2_crn3.png)

<comment><USER14> Climate != weather.

I'm sure you can find plenty of examples in recorded history when those areas had roughly the same weather.

<comment><USER12> I know the difference - but when a pattern of similar weather is noticed in the past 5-10 years, it's more than just weather, I believe it's climate.

What worries the most isn't how warm or cold it guets, it's precisely how dry it is.

<comment><USER14> No, you don't know the difference when you talk about climates and then link to the weather for a single day as supporting evidence.

<comment><USER12> The day was an example among a period of years of extreme drought.

Drought is the outcome of years of low precipitation - it's not one day, one week,one month or one year. The recovery won't come in the same time period I said in the previous sentence. It will take years of rain to refill what was lost, not to mention there might be erosion already that have made some riverbeds/lakes permeable again, so water will not be held there.

The spring of the main river in the Iberian Peninsula has dried. Many other springs of secondary rivers have dried as well.

It's not weather. It's climate change.

<comment><USER14> I don't know who you're debating. Your original comment used a reference to the weather to argue a point about climate. You can't do that, as your follow up comments clearly explain.

<comment><USER12> I can do this: > You don't need to go to South America, Asia or middle East - it's happening in Europe and no one seems to notice.

First sentence commenting an article about drought in several continents, yet they didn't mention Europe. So I stated such thing is happening in Europe.

> Look at Portugal and Spain, it's becoming a desert - the day of the cold > wave the south of Portugal and Spain had the same temperatures of some > country's in Africa.

In this sentence I state the example of Portugal and Spain - and gave an example of a day of extreme cold, snow and rain in Europe and parts of that territory (the iberian peninsula) had a day with temperatures similar to parts of Africa.

Saying I can't use weather to argue about climate is the same thing as saying I can't talk about anything which is the outcome of something else.

I'm not saying that because of that specific weather event in that day (or days) it set the climate for that region - I say it has a point of data. I gave you more - which is a clear example of a long term effect resulting from climate change - the drought of the main river.

Do you want more data points?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How much of the missing water is actually due to higher temperatures, and how much is due to people siphoning water from the aquifers that feed the lake? This article mostly focuses on "climate change" hysterics, but also acknowledges the siphoning problem.

A HN comment [0] linked to a TucsonWeekly [1] piece about how Tucson used to be an oasis. Similarly, the Salt River used to run year-round through Phoenix. Las Vegas was an oasis too. Cattle and wells turned Tucson's river dry. The Salt River is blocked by dams, where most the water is used for plants and allowed to evaporate. Las Vegas' population vastly exceeds its natural water supply. I don't think the disappearance of these cities' oases can be blamed on "climate change".

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16118109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16118109)

[1] [https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/a-river-ran-through- it/C...](https://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/a-river-ran-through- it/Content?oid=1068331)

The Israelis are experts in hydroponics, which uses a fraction of the water used for irrigation. This is a more responsible way to use water in an arid country.

If the problem causing these lakes to dry up is mostly "climate change", these people's predicaments are hopeless. But if the problem is mostly irresponsible use of the aquifers upstream from the lake, the problem is solvable.

<comment><USER16> >This article mostly focuses on "climate change" hysterics

So what is your view on climate change? Is it that the climate is not getting warmer, or it might be but we don't know if it is or it isn't, or it is getting warmer but it is all due to non-human causes, or it is getting warmer but it might be due in part to human causes but we don't know, or it is getting warmer but it is beneficial? And all the views I just listed you think are wrong, do you believe the people who hold them are irrational, and do you argue against them?

Or is it that you don't care what people think and why, as long as they are opposed to governmental actions like reducing carbon emissions and promoting renewables?

<comment><USER8> One can fully agree that climate change is an important issue that needs to be dealt with, yet still have a problem with it being waved around irresponsibly on unrelated issues.

<comment><USER17> Right, I mean I'm a pretty hard core supporter of wildlands conservation, and I think this overemphasis on and exaggeration about climate change is gonna really hurt the environmental movement in about a decade.

Just like what happened with The Population Bomb and to a lesser extent Limits to Growth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am wondering if mass-scale manufacturing & construction can solve this problem. Imagine large greenhouse-alike setups which spur vaporization, siphoning fresh water off into a lake. The sun would passively vaporize incoming salty water. Reaching m³s/minute of freshwater throughput would without doubt require massive scale. Since freshwater demand is increasing and supply decreasing, the economics of such project become more interesting every month.

Will such plan work at all?

<comment><USER19> This sounds like it has the same problem as salinization does. In most places conservation is cheaper.

<comment><USER20> ... in the sense that the costs can just be imposed on people who can't defend themselves. And at that point, cheaper, more expensive ... ah what's the difference ?

I mean, that's a slightly different wording of the argument you're making.

In other words: this needs an economically viable solution. We need an absurdly cheap way to refill the lakes. Conservation isn't that, but everybody proposing it knows where the costs will go.

<comment><USER21> I'm curious who do you think is suffering now as a result of drought and diminishing ecological resources? Who is going to suffer through famine and drought? Your point is valid, but only insofar as people who can't defend themselves _always_ suffer. Every course of action hurts the group you're concerned about, but the most likely to succeed and least damaging is conservation.

<comment><USER20> Well the problem is the large cities taking up all capacity in the rivers and the people who suffer are the people on the coastlines of those lakes.

The capacity in the rivers, by and large, is not taken up by people on those coastlines.

And conservation, I bet, "somehow" misses this reality. So it attempts to protect things like tourism income at the further expense of the victims. But nobody, absolutely nobody is talking about denying cities the water they depend on (which will dry up anyway, but not for a while yet ...).

You see the problem is not global warming. The problem is those cities and countries that take away the resources these lakes depend on. If you calculate the resulting change in precipitation from the 1 degree or so of temperature change we've seen, that's not what's making the difference here. The difference is those cities.

But of course, we "need to conserve". And what do we mean by that, exactly ? Why, the victims of it, the people living on that coastline, those need to be forced to abandon their lives, because otherwise the tourism that the rest of country profits from (but not so much those people), could get hit ... first a bit, then a lot. That's what we mean by conservation.

<comment><USER21> You didn't even come close to addressing my question. I pointed out that your concern for the helpless is an obvious canard in this context, and you took that as a opportunity to engage in more ideological chatter.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Having Co-founders Is Valuable But Not Crucial - <AUTHOR> http://www.rolfnelson.com/2009/11/having-co-founders-is-valuable-but-not.html

<comment><USER2> I believe if you feel you have found a good co-founder, go for it; it is much, much better to have a co-founder than to go solo. But a bad co-founder is worse than no co-founder.

<comment><USER3> Exactly. I won't put words into anyone's mouth, but I believe the value of cofounders is for the investor - given many startups to fund, a good cofounder group will make faster progress, have fewer roadblocks, play cheerleader to one another, reduce the incidence of depression and despair. Its about return on investment. Why fund a unicycle when you can choose from many functional bicycles?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the key point is more about how YC operates. At least from afar, it seems that they stick to the model that worked for PG and company, which means they strongly favor having cofounders. PG has also said, repeatedly, that they do occasionally found a single founder, so they're not dogmatic about it, just heavily biased.

An important thing to keep in mind is that you don't want a "cargo cult co founder", where you are trying to sign someone up "because you're supposed to have one".

<comment><USER5> I've been avoiding the "finding a cofounder for the sake of having a cofounder" mistake myself. It gets lonely sometimes, coding and trying to work out user experience all alone, but I'd rather do it alone (for now anyway) then have a cofounder who I have to babysit. Maybe I should send my wife to take some Web Design classes and teach her to find her way around jquery :-)

<comment><USER3> Rule 2: never go into business with your spouse!

<comment><USER6> Loads of successful businesses were made by couples. Cisco comes to mind first.

<comment><USER7> flickr too if i remember right

<comment><USER8> Six Apart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thank you for the great post on a subject near and dear to many of us.

I am a single founder who constantly wonders if I should be. I have founded 2 startups before and both imploded solely because of founder issues. One had 4 of us and I spent more than half my time playing referee. I will never go through that again. AFAIC, nothing is more important than being in business with the right people (except having plenty of customers, maybe.)

I am working hard and steady on my new venture, but I do not actively recruit potential co-founders. I freely share what I'm working on (hinting at opportunities for co-founders) and sit back to see what happens. Since I believe the single most important trait of a good co-founder is sheer determination, I hope someone will come to me insisting, "We should do this...," "I could do that...," "Let's try this...", etc. Sorry to say, this strategy hasn't worked too well, but I'd still rather be alone than be with someone who doesn't push as hard as I do.

I know about half a dozen excellent people who I'd love as co-founders, but all have mortgages, families, and other commitments. Our startup would always be a child to me, but only a step-child to them. So I don't push.

I understand pg's concern about single founder startups; they're a lot of work! There are many times I wish I had someone to share with or help me out. But under the circumstances, I'd rather plow along, always positioning myself to have a co-founder, but just as ready to launch alone if need be. I'm not afraid to do that and I don't think other single co-founders should be either.

OP's links were great and for a single co-founder, a little reassuring. Who is fauigerzigerk? I don't recognize him here.

OP's discussion about the "bozo" factor was just silly. Sure, if you're still in school, you should have no trouble finding suitable co-founders. But as you get a little older, there are many good reasons for being a single founder without being a bozo. Those of us who are should remain open to accepting the right co-founder, but in the meantime, just keep on working hard.

<comment><USER10> With regards to the "bozo" thing - I read it a little differently. I took it to mean that anyone can be committed to their own crazy idea; but when you are able to talk someone else into being committed to it, it acts as a kind of validation of the idea. So, that makes it a handy litmus test for investors to use since you've already convinced at least one other person that it's a good idea.

<comment><USER9> _...when you are able to talk someone else into being committed to it, it acts as a kind of validation of the idea._

I've heard this argument before, but I don't buy it. All it really proves is that group think is alive and well.

Two classic counter-examples:

1\. I can come up with the most ridiculous idea in the world and still find _someone_ who I could convince of anything.

2\. I can come up with the best idea in the world and still not be able to convince anyone to join me, but be able to convince many people to _buy_ it.

<comment><USER11> I disagree with your characterization.

Have you ever tried to convince someone to join a truly ridiculous idea? You'd be surprised. People aren't that stupid. We are talking about someone joining as a co-founder. Therefore, that person has some basic notion of what a co- founder is, what a startup looks like, etc. We are not talking about finding a random person on the street who'll give you a quote "great idea".

For the best idea in the world, I also challenge you _not_ to find anyone who believes in it.

Now, to be practical rather than extreme, my experience shows me that having co-founders brings a lot of value during the brainstorming phase. Although I like to think of myself as very smart - I could figure out everything on my own, right? Co-founders bring balance. Once in a while, I have a crazy idea that deserves to be killed. But I'm crazy enough that on my own, I might do it. With co-founders, you get very quick reality check.

The secret is to find co-founders who share your vision 90% of the time, and help keep you on the right track the 10% when you are wrong.

If you don't share the vision with your co-founders and can't even agree 50% of the time, then you are correct: it will be a waste of your time, arguing endlessly about trivial stuff.

<comment><USER12> I think your 90% vs. 50% characterization is spot on. I once tried to found a company with someone who has fairly fundamentally different views on many things, thinking it would balance my crazy ideas out with an alternate viewpoint, but we just ended up fighting about trivialities, and could barely get anything done.

I think close to 100% is ideal, as long as noone is being a yes-man.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I find the two sources he mentions in his post rather irrelevant, given completely wrong impressions.

Firstly, the absolute number of successes is not interesting: if there 1-founder startups outnumber 2-founder startups by a factor of 10, then 1-founder startups are suddenly a lot less likely to succeed.

Secondly, both lists list not just successful, but a very limited set of _extremely successful_ startups. These lists tell you nothing about your chances of being the next Dropbox. It's an entirely different category of companies.</comment>


Reuters Redesign - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/?

<comment><USER2> I clicked on the link and got the interstitial advertisement page for 15 seconds. It's kind of silly that I need to go through an ad just to see _the homepage_. I understand that they need to cover their costs with ads, and it's great that they're experimenting to make their site more usable and clear, but Reuters (and other companies that do this... Rotten Tomatoes was particularly bad for a while) need to realize that the first impression is the ad, and not the homepage, and that's a huge turn off to anyone visiting for the first time.

<comment><USER3> Yes, that sure made a bad impression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know if this is done in-house, or if they hired someone?

Update: Nevermind, it's done by HUGE Inc. (<http://www.hugeinc.com/news/reuters-redesign>)

</comment><comment><USER5> does that whole bottom static bar bother anyone else? I've noticed it a lot now, CNET for example. Lots of sites seem to try to copy the FB chat bar, and it's bloody annoying.

<comment><USER6> Yes, very annoying. It makes me feel like I'm viewing the site in frames.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't make me want to use the site because I can't read many titles together and decide on what to read

Loads rather slow here too

</comment><comment><USER8> I initially thought that the black colored article links on the left was a paragraph of text with insane line spacing.</comment>


The great Android misconception - <AUTHOR> http://ipadwatcher.com/2011/03/08/the-great-android-misconception/ <comment><USER2> I think the author has missed the point on a number of levels. Two representative quotes are:

> Android is and has always been the choice for people and companies that > don't have the option of getting an iPhone.

> iOS is, in fact, being used as a platform by Apple and independent > developers, while Android is fulfilling the role that the simpler phone OSs > used to

Speaking for myself (anecdotes != data, etc.) I bought my first Android phone because it was the most advanced phone at the time with a physical keyboard, and had great integration with Gmail. My organisation has a fairly even split between iPhone and Android, and there are a lot of non-geeks with Android phones. So such a general, sweeping statement dismissing Android as "for people who can't have iPhones" is incorrect and mildly amusing.

I agree with the author's point that most non-geeks do not care about the OS a phone is running, but the second quote above makes me think he/she has their iBlinkers on. Android phones range from cheap and cheerful to feature-packed shiny-fests. There are some Android devices that are less advanced than the iPhone, and some that are more advanced.

This, in my opinion, is Android's key strength - the wide variety of handsets means Android is engaging in asymmetric warfare with iPhone.

I hate the divisive nature of articles like this - it smacks of "my toy is better than your toy", although I suppose my response is little better than "no, my toy is better than your toy, but let's agree to disagree".</comment>


The Really Big One (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one <comment><USER2> _A century and a half elapsed before anyone had any inkling that the Pacific Northwest was not a quiet place but a place in a long period of quiet._

A fine wordsmith paints images of understanding.

<comment><USER3> Yes, this is among the finest popular geology articles that I've ever read. Also, the really cool thing is that it's part of Native American oral histories. But that's only a few hundred years ago. There are also stories about the eruption that created Crater Lake, ~7700 years ago. That is impressive.

<comment><USER4> It's a common complaint on HN that too many articles include irrelevant details about the people and scenery of technical fields, but this article really pulls it off perfectly. It is dense in technical information and the personal stories complement this information and make it more memorable (e.g. I didn't know that the duration of an earthquake is a rough proxy for its magnitude, but I won't forget after reading the narration in the opening paragraphs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Every time I'm reminded that Washington was only granted statehood after the Civil War, I realize how young an area this is and how little we truly know about it. We live in the wild out here and every day we seem to discover a new way that it'll kill us all.

<comment><USER6> Young my ass. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Washington_(state...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Washington_\(state\))

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

I don't say that with particular malice but the human history of north America has been pretty intentionally lost, that's not the same as youth though.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. The Americas have been populated for maybe 20-40 thousand years. And heavily, according so some sources.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jim-jim-jim Earthquakes scare the shit out of me. I was unfortunate enough to experience one in Japan, where dozens of people were killed and water was out for weeks—despite probably being the most prepared society on earth. I can't imagine what a proper one would look like in America.

Up until recently I've comforted myself with the thought that I'm safe here on the east coast. That's until I read that the NYC area is overdue for one as well: not nearly as big, but that doesn't matter to unreinforced masonry. And the nuclear power plant sitting on the fault line.

<comment><USER7> Were you on the East Coast in August 2011?

[https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/earthquake- dc-e...](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/earthquake-dc- explainer/)

<comment> jim-jim-jim I was. I was far enough away from the epicenter that it felt like a pigeon fart. I knew the magnitude was greater further south, but I didn't think it warranted further consideration. It's only after feeling a 7.0+ one that I developed this healthy(?) sense of preparedness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9878160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9878160)

<comment><USER9> A pointed comment in that discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9881946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9881946)

<comment><USER10> Here's a mobile-readable copy of that comment...

An omnious quote from an article on l0phet:

> _Wysopal offered this grim precedent: Cities were once vulnerable to > disastrous fires, which raged through dense clusters of mostly wooden > buildings. It took a giant fire in Chicago to spur government officials into > serious reforms, including limits on new wooden structures, a more robust > water supply for suppressing blazes and an overhaul to the city's fire > department._

> _"The market didn't solve the problem of cities burning down," Wysopal said, > predicting that Internet security may require a historic disaster to force > change. "It seems to me that the market isn't really going to solve this one > on its own."_

> _But here's a frightening fact: The push to create tough new fire-safety > standards did not start after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, which killed > hundreds of people and left 100,000 homeless. It took a second fire, nearly > three years later in 1874, to get officials in Chicago to finally make real > changes._

[via [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760164)]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Makes Kim Yong Un look like a minor nuisance.</comment>


Ask YC: Feedback for our new startup - <AUTHOR>

The site is bidboxr.com
We're getting ready to launch and since I've enjoyed so many of the articles posted here I thought it would be great to get some feedback from the YC community.
Bidboxr.com is a unique blend of online advertising and online auctions. Instead of simply providing a site where sellers list items and bidders bid on those items, we've created an interactive ad banner that bring auctions to the bidders.
One of our major goals when we created bidboxr.com was to provide online entrepreneurs/startups with a profitable source of revenue.  Think of it like Google's adwords/adsense model, but we're using interactive auctions instead of static ads. The auctions are relevant to the content of the page, so it's designed to draw users who are interested in that particular content. Imagine reading a blog post about a digital camera and looking at an ad on the side of the page showing an image of the exact same camera on sale and closing in 10 minutes for $50 with a big 'BID NOW' button beneath it.  If you're interested in running an ad on your site simply sign up, add a few lines of code and when someone bids from your site you earn money.
I've started to do a few "pre-launch" marketing tests to see which method would bring in the most users - so we've already started to see some sellers listing items. If you have anything you'd like to list or know anyone who might want to list some items - I'll remove all listing fees from anyone that list anything over the next few days.
Thanx! <comment><USER3> Founders really need to stop using misspellings for the name of their companies.

Number 1, people are going to have a harder times finding your site. This is somewhat mitigated by Google's technology around suggesting seatch terms, but not totally.

Number 2, you will have to spend five minutes explaining your name to every potential investor, customer, and even your friends, just so they know what your proper name is. That doesn't leave any time for what you should be delivering - your elevator pitch.

Number 3, it suggests you aren't very creative. Saying that all the good domain names are taken just isn't true. I've bought a number of good domain names in the past couple of years, none of which have been misspellings.

Use real words people.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately there are very few real words or even real word combinations that are not registered.

Clever misspellings have been a solution to that problem.

What do you propose as an alternate solution?

<comment><USER5> >> Unfortunately there are very few real words or even real word combinations that are not registered.

Problem solved... I'll plug my own site for finding good, available domain names: <http://Hotnamelist.com>

Or, go out and BUY a good one: <http://sedo.com> or <http://Afternic.com>

<comment><USER6> Sorry but problem _not_ solved.

It's nice that your site lists CowardlyAct.com, MountyBounty.com and SecuritySituation.com as available - but that's completely useless to me who's looking for a name that somehow makes sense in conjunction with my business model.

Furthermore a good name is supposed to be _short_ and distinctive. Most names listed on your and similar services meet neither criteria. They consist of more or less randomly combined dictionary words which leads to generic 10+ letter domains like, well, SecuritySituation.

<comment><USER7> Who told you that names are _supposed to be short and distinctive_? Security Situation is a pretty damn good name if you're starting a security company. Impressing the web 2.0 fanboys with misspellings makes your company look illiterate to everyone else. If you're simply going after those fanboys (or girls) as you target audience then that is fine but considering how many people are web 2.0ers and how many regular people there are, when starting a company I'm probably going to go after the far bigger market.

<comment><USER6> _Who told you that names are supposed to be short and distinctive?_

My common sense and probably every marketing book in existance. Think about the internet brand names that you can recall from the top of your head. How many of them are longer than 8 letters?

 _Security Situation is a pretty damn good name if you're starting a security company._

Most certainly not. It's generic and unsuggestive. That kind of name may work for an information page ("Security situation in your neighbourhood") but not for most businesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, if I get it right you've crossed 'adwords/adsense' with 'ebay' ? Interesting!

I'm quite curious how high the effective CPM is of your usage of screen real estate vs other advertising networks. Since the items are 'relevant' it could be quite high, but initially you might be left with more inventory than you can sell.

Shipping seems to be USA only, you may want to limit your 'ads' to the region that the seller is willing to ship to.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are just getting ready to launch so I'm not sure what the "effective CPM" will be vs other ad networks but I hope it will be high:) That's a good point about shipping. thanx

<comment><USER8> you're welcome. Another idea, not sure if it is feasible: Get your users to place an ad tag on their own pages with their own items that they have for sale. That would build you a ton of backlinks in no time at all. And possibly they'll leave the tag up even when they have no items for sale.

<comment><USER9> That's actually a great idea. We're working on a way to have users request a certain category of ads on their ads that they post on their site, but having them post their own products is a great idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One thing I noticed that I think is really cool is that the first bid starts the auction clock. Not sure if the other "big boys" do that, because I don't use them, but great idea nonetheless.

Something else I noticed though is that in the satisfaction guarantee, you mention that you, Bidboxr, will refund the purchase price if it's not what they expected. I see that lasting about two weeks before you run out of money. If you really want to set yourselves apart with a satisfaction guarantee, you may want to look at some sort of escrow service instead.

Just my two cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you read the satisfaction guarantee you'll see it says "If you see the Satisfaction Guarantee link on an item". We control which items have the satisfaction guarantee - so we will reserve the satisfaction guarantee for sellers that have earned a good reputation with us.

<comment><USER11> That's clever. eBay never tried this? (I've never bought anything there).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yea, I'm a co-founder for the site. It's an "auction ads" site that is self- contained (doesn't use ebay auctions or other auction data). We've got multiple sizes for ads (like adsense) and we're using a highly-cached architecture to serve up the auction ads (typical for ad-serving sites). We use linux servers, memcache for avoiding DB calls, apache, php, mysql, ... The normal stuff. :) We also crawl websites on demand for finding context- sensitive auctions to serve-up similar to adwords. Most of the crawling and text analysis stuff is done in perl.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is a great idea, and has the potential to take off very quickly. One thing you might want to do is seed your site with a bunch of merchandise. Find an interested party with some cheap stuff to unload (like woot.com) and offer to help them move inventory.

You need to get scale first, and you need lots of sources before you'll get lots of products. At then end of the day you are selling affiliate revenue to website owners, so I would focus your message on that, and attempt to stuff the product pipeline with some choice partnerships, until you get enough affiliate sites to drive product.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like it. Thank you for the idea! We already have a few site using our banners but its going to be a challenge getting products, affiliates and bidders :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> your math is wrong:

"We charge the seller a final sale fee of $3.12 which makes $1.56 available to the "active advertiser pool". If 5 people bid on the item from your site and 3 people bid from a different site. You earn 62.5% of the $3.12."

So there is only 1.56 available, but I earn $1.95?

<comment><USER13> actually it doesn't seem like anyone proofread the actual site, since there are a ton of other errors all over the place

"By signing up for a fee account"

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sure there are more errors. I've been working on finding them - but you are right I am the writer, coder and proof reader - and I'm not great at writing - won't mention my dyslexia :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why wouldn't I just feature eBay auctions on my apps and get paid that way? I don't remember if it was directly from eBay, or from some other startup, but there was a way to copy & paste an iframe to your page that would target auctions based on keywords that you give, and you could get a percentage of sales.

</comment><comment><USER15> great idea, but I didn't get it the second I got to the site. Why say "Auctions Just Got a Lot More Exciting!"? Why not say "An entire auction in an ad box"! or something like that?

2nd, if you want people to put the boxes on their page, i'd suggest investing in design. Of both your site and the boxes. You have to get peoples trust, and the poor design could sink you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input. Great idea about "An entire auction in an ad box" - <USER2> like it. And the banners are being re-designed by professionals they should be done very soon :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So many broken images from your badcheese.dyndns.org it's hard for me to move around.

</comment><comment><USER13> it doesn't seem like you guys know that eBay has an affiliate program that pretty much does what you are doing

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right I didn't know eBay had interactive ad banners that you can place bids from... Could you point me to the link - thanks.

<comment><USER13> not interactive, but bidding is only a click away.

The interactive part isn't really a plus. How does a person know that the interactive banner is yours, and not some scammer phishing for information?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a valid point but I don't agree that the interactive part isn't a plus. I agree and realize that some people will be afraid to use our banners because of phishing - but some won't... I hope :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I've reworked by app's home page. Have I made it too simple? - <AUTHOR> http://www.split-the-bill.com/

<comment><USER2> Yes and no.

The _design_ is simple, elegant and, dare I say it, even beautiful.

The problem is that you've made it so simple that I am not sure what exactly is going on. The URL is split-the-bill, so I assume that the tool is a simple (looks geared toward mobile devices--makes sense) tool to split bills at dinner.

Creating a bill, awesome, easy, I'm with you!

Total amount, got it, entered.

Description? Uh, okay, I guess that's helpful, let's say "dinner party at Leo's."

And then you lose me. A message? E-mail address? I just want to hit "go" and see "each person should be paying $x with a 20% tip for a total of $y"

Why do you need my email address for that?

I assume you have some sort of other reason for it, but without the text to clarify, it leaves me sort of in the dark.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool feedback.

Did the you see the pop-up tooltips for each of the input fields?

Are they too bland or is the text just not helpful enough?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, I'm not totally sure whether it's "split a bill at dinner", "split a utilities bill among roommates", something involving invoicing, or something else entirely.

An example would help on that first page, and on the follow-up page. That's as far as I got.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used to have the following text on the site, maybe I should add it back?

 _Have you ever paid for dinner and then had a hard time figuring out who has paid you back?_

 _Perhaps you are continuously chasing up your flat mates for their share of power bill?_

 _Maybe you are trying to figure out who has and who hasn't paid for your team building event or if everyone has chipped in for Joe's stag party?_

 _Well split-the-bill is for you..._

 _1.You just jump onto the site and create a "bill"._

 _2\. Each bill gets a unique link which you send to the guilty parties with a reminder to pay._

 _3\. They pay up and then click on the link to record how much they have paid. Everyone gets to see who has paid and more importantly you get your money :)_

<comment><AUTHOR> I have added "tell me more" and "show an example" links to the page....

Feedback?</comment></comment></comment>


New Intel Tech Bridges Gap Between Fast Conventional Memory, Longer-Term Storage - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-intel-technology-bridges-gap-between-speedy-conventional-memory-longer-term-storage-1489917600 <comment><USER2> Just going by the headline (since the usual paywall workarounds are failing), it seems like this is a rehash of Intel's original marketing claims for 3D XPoint/Optane, but as far as I can tell they've quietly backpedaled to "expensive SSD" for the first-gen products.

This seems oddly reminiscent of Larrabee/Knight's Landing/Xeon Phi, which started off being billed as Intel's high-performance GPU play (they reportedly even hired Michael Abrash to optimize the rasterization code) and ended up being a niche HPC accelerator.

</comment><comment><USER3> >Intel claims the raw 3D XPoint technology is 1,000 times faster than the NAND flash commonly used in storage drives

I like haw they claim the "raw technology" is 1,000 times faster. Why? Because the shipping product isn't anything NEAR 1,000 times faster. They started off with that marketing claim months, and months, and months ago. The finished product appears to be not even double the performance (depending on workload).

 _ahh, should 've kept reading:

>Although Intel touts 3D XPoint as orders of magnitude faster than NAND, it said the new storage drives it is shipping are five-to-eight times faster than NAND-based solid-state drives, because they are constrained by the conventional interface used to connect storage to computers.

So the PCIe interface is the constraint? _please* you guys just over promised and under delivered. NVMe can certainly push more than 5x what you can get out of current NAND based drives.

<comment><USER4> Just Intel underdelivering as always, nothing new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Same article as in WSJ here? [http://www.morningstar.com/news/dow- jones/TDJNDN_20170319473...](http://www.morningstar.com/news/dow- jones/TDJNDN_20170319473/intel-looks-to-gain-from-data-explosion-with-new- drives.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850746](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850746)

<comment><USER7> There's zero discussion there?

ETA: Oh, I get it now. _You_ submitted that one.

<comment><USER8> Except it's a different article.</comment></comment></comment>


Denmark doubles capital buffer to contain wider Danske Bank risks - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-danske-bank-moneylaundering/denmark-doubles-capital-buffer-to-contain-wider-danske-bank-risks-idUSKCN1M5162 <comment><USER2> An interesting thing to note for those that care:

Danske Bank has acquired several banks over time, and integrated them into the brand. The Estonian branch is such an acquired bank.

After being acquired, the normal procedure for Danske Bank would be to move the newly acquired bank completely over to Danske Bank's banking platform. This platform includes all the Danske Bank business logic and procedures, such as money laundry checks as per EU regulations.

However, in this specific case, it was deemed too expensive, and the new branch was left as is, running its own banking system separate from the rest of Danske Bank.

Someone responsible for that decision, which effectively left that new branch to its own devices, is probably having a bit of a bad taste in their mouth right about now.

<comment><USER3> > Someone responsible for that decision, which effectively left that new > branch to its own devices, is probably having a bit of a bad taste in their > mouth right about now.

Why? Their reasoning then was that it would cost them to much to transfer the bank, "discover" the laundering and paying fines, instead they left it so they could earn more money by the time it was eventually "discovered".

These aren't kindergartners running these banks and systems, they knew what was going on. They likely did make the right choice, the fines will be the same since now as they would have been then, and now they have a large profit to pay them from.

<comment><USER2> This explanation is a bit too far fetched.

The effort to move the bank to their own banking system is on itself a tremendous effort. We're talking calendar years of implementation time, huge risks and a stall of most other development. The leadership knows that their banking systems are a pile of bleeding horse dung that they wish to avoid touching at any cost.

They are not kindergartners, but they are not omnipotent either. Knowing that the Estonian bank had improper processes would by itself require a lot of work to discover, and figuring out if this has been abused would likely be quite a massive task. Doing the move to the new business logic would reveal the issue, but not before it was done.

Never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence. What we see here can be explained with just a little bit of incompetence, or an extreme amount of malice. The former is far more likely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There has been a money laundry scandal in its Estonian branch of epic proportions.

The risk is now a massive fine to Danske Bank. Not by the Danish state. But by either the EU or more likely the Americans.

Danske Bank is the biggest bank in Denmark with +50% of all banking business. It is a liability of the Danish state meaning that if it gets in true trouble the state will bail it out.

<comment><USER5> Actually, the share and bondholders will be required to bail it in, under EU laws introduced a few years ago.

<comment><USER6> Yikes. Sounds shitty for EU residents in the long term. Wouldn't it be better to let the bank fail, ie learn from 2008 that bailing out encourages the bad behavior?

<comment><USER5> This is actually great for EU residents, as shareholders and bondholders will (initially) be on the hook for excess risks being taken, not residents.

Not all bank shareholders were wiped out in 2008, while they clearly should have based on the amount of public money some banks got.

<comment><USER7> Does the ECB hold bonds for Danske bank? The ECB and other central banks have been on a bond buying [0] 'spree' [1]

If the ECB holds these bonds then technically eu monetary union citizens do have exposure.

To me this seems to have been a dangerous decision by the ECB and other central banks. With their policy, could this have created a situation whereby companies that would not otherwise survive are now over-leveraged. The result being a small disruption bringing everything down with it?

To put the question another way, do we have a massive bubble in corporate debt due to central bank polcies, resulting in companies that should have gone under being over-leveraged.

With the ECB planning to stop the buying by end 2018, will we see a correction?

[0] [https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/omt/html/index.en.h...](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/omt/html/index.en.html)

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/central-banks-put-squeeze-on- so...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/central-banks-put-squeeze-on-sovereign- debt-market-1467847016)

Edit:

According to JP morgan [3] the policy has created 'zombie' companies.

[3] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-18/jpmorgan-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-18/jpmorgan- s-erdoes-says-ecb-bond-buying-creates-zombie-companies)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What this article doesn't mention, is that Denmark is facing all these issues now, because Danske Bank's Estonian branch was used to move vast sums of money out of Russia by the people close to Russian government and Vladimir Putin himself, using the scheme called "The Russian Laundromat"[1]:

> FSB representatives served on the board of at least one of banks that wired > billions out of Russia as did Igor Putin, Putin's cousin. He was a manager > and executive board member in the Russian Land Bank.

[1] [https://www.occrp.org/en/laundromat/the-russian- laundromat-e...](https://www.occrp.org/en/laundromat/the-russian-laundromat- exposed/)

<comment><USER9> There is a theory that Vladimir Putin is the _actual_ richest man in the world.

<comment><USER10> i've heard his wealth estimated at $200 billion USD. but at this point i don't think it matters. he has an entire country.

<comment><USER11> I've been reading about those claims for well over a decade now.

Not one of them has ever explained where he could have come up with ~$200 billion (or the old numbers, which were more like $40b to $50b) from. There is no entity inside of Russia capable of spitting off that kind of hidden side profit - just for him - in the time frame in question. Their entire economy is a mere $1.5 trillion. If you figure most of the graft occured in the last 13 to 15 years, where was he siphoning $12+ billion per year from? Again, there are no entities in Russia capable of subtly delivering that sort of cash.

If he owned 100% of Rosneft (or Lukoil) and Gazprom, he'd still be worth closer to ~$100b-$120b than $200b. Needless to say, he doesn't own those two. He'd have had to be taking a very large share of the annual total industrial profit of Russia, to squirrel away these sorts of numbers over time.

The notion that Putin is secretly the richest person (they keep increasing the mythical sum over time to stay ahead of Gates etc), is nothing more than empty bravado that Russia likes to encourage to artificially prop up the projection of power that Putin relies upon to govern.

<comment><USER12> Putin de facto owns those companies and more, the oligarchs are in his pocket.

He might not be on the corporate hierarchy, but his decisions override the board.

<comment><USER9> When he can have the CEO killed like Berezovsky, he pretty much has a veto over policy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Doubling capital buffers providers surprisingly little protection. I can't criticize the move but still, in an era of fractional banking where investment banks (really hedge funds that have a banking license) are leveraged 30 to 1 on a good day...things can get bad quickly.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not to worry. I have been staunchly admonished in a Danske Bank branch for attempting to pay a bill of roughly $50 (a laundry bill for an old lady of my acquaintance) without being able to produce the required official ID. I was clearly a terrorist pedophile laundering drug-money for the Russian mafia.

</comment><comment><USER15> Question. Is it remotely possible that as Danish financial institutions attempt to simultaneously increase their capital reserves, that will suck enough money out of circulation to start a deflationary spiral? In other words that the attempt to contain the risk can cause a crisis?

<comment><USER16> It's possible but pretty unlikely. The capital buffers being introduced are about 1% of Danish banks' balance sheets, and it's likely that the capital buffer for this was previously non-zero (e.g. likely 0.25% or 0.5%). So an increase of 0.5% or 0.75%.

And it's worth keeping in mind that a lot of banks, for governance reasons, will already have been holding in excess of the regulatory requirement. So it's not as if most of the banks will have to come up with this money suddenly - it'll already be there and available.

That's not to say that it's not a large amount of money in absolute terms, but relatively speaking if they were to reduce their loan origination for the year they have to come up with the money be something like 2-3% they'd be totally fine. That's not exactly going to kill the economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The problem is that many banks are too big to fail. So we increase the reserves that banks must keep to protect against economic shocks. Result: small banks cannot manage anymore, no-one can enter the financial arena, more banks are too big to fail.

<comment><USER18> Actually the regulations already prescribe additional capital requirements for larger institutions, the so called SIFI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a somewhat minor point, but it surprised me that the edit: Danish reserve requirement has been _raised_ to 1%. In the US, it's at roughly 10% and has historically been between 8 and 12% for large banks. Does anyone more familiar with Danish banking know why their reserve requirement is so low compared to ours?

<comment><USER20> It's Denmark, not the Netherlands we are talking about. Your intuition seems correct [1]. The 1% capital requirement in the Reuters article must be an add- on requirement and is to low to be the stand-alone requirement. Fitch put Danske at 4.2% Basel III 'fully loaded' last summer. The wiki points out how diverse the calculations can turn out so that it's pretty much pears and apples comparing these internationally.

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

<comment><USER16> The 1% refers to a specific sub-segment of the overall capital requirements. This would be on top of any normal Basel III requirements and is typically marked as a "discretionary" capital buffer to be set by the state in question.

EDIT: Ah, nuts, meant to reply to grandparent rather than parent. Oh well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you have not already watched it, Watch "Active Measures" about the Manafort/Putin/Trump money laundering ties...

The reason I mention this here is that the former President of Estonia is interviewed in the documentary a bit.

I was wondering ___why_ __would they be interviewing the President of Estonia regarding the Russian Mafia /Manafort/Trump laundering -- Welp - this is why.

</comment><comment><USER22> The financial sector never fails to demonstrate how utterly worthless it is.

<comment><USER23> Finance makes the world go round

<comment><USER2> Finance provides slight convenience and a few useful products (like mortgages). The vast majority of the financial sector does nothing significant to the outside world, and often just cause negative side-effects.

A good story to tell here is the total bank strike in Ireland that lasted a year, where everything operated just fine without the banks.

<comment><USER24> _The vast majority of the financial sector does nothing significant to the outside world, and often just cause negative side-effects._

So... like Silicon Valley then?

<comment><USER22> Shun the non-believer!

(I guess we're both getting downvoted today huh)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How many years has your Internet startup survived so far? - <AUTHOR>

I'll start first, 8 years.
Given that 25% of startups fail the 1st year, and then half of those who survived the 1st year die off the 2nd year, and the 3rd to 5th years businesses are limping along and slowly dying off.
When I first started, I already knew these statistics, but I said, what the hell. I'll give it a try anyway. <comment><USER2> mine has survived 6months and hopefully we will pull through the years.. :)</comment>


RapidMiner is an environment for machine learning  - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidMiner

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm getting interested in Machine Learning and was wondering if there was such a thing. If people have experience with RapidMiner feel free to chime in or recommend something else.

<comment><USER2> The algorithms in the java libraries (weka et al) are horrendous. If you look you'll just get more confused, especially at the lack of tests. R-project isn't much better.

I'd recommend writing your own. You won't really understand this stuff until you can.

Spend some time honing an algorithm and ruthlessly simplifying it until you inherently get it, and could write it in your sleep. Then write it again. Most algorithms can be distilled down to very small snippets of code if you really care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Lingpipe is also a possible alternative</comment>


Source code for Lua 5.3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.lua.org/source/5.3/ <comment><USER2> When running Lua, always consider running it on the LuaJIT ([http://luajit.org/](http://luajit.org/)). It's extremely fast, portable and lightweight JIT compiler for Lua, although it only supports Lua 5.1.

The performance improvements are incredible, and it allows you to write inline C code thanks to the FFI library (declaring it like this [https://github.com/Mashape/kong/blob/master/kong/plugins/fil...](https://github.com/Mashape/kong/blob/master/kong/plugins/file- log/handler.lua#L21-L25), and invoking it like this [https://github.com/Mashape/kong/blob/master/kong/plugins/fil...](https://github.com/Mashape/kong/blob/master/kong/plugins/file- log/handler.lua#L53))

<comment><USER3> Seconded. LuaJIT FFI is just awesome. Check out the motivating examples: [http://luajit.org/ext_ffi.html](http://luajit.org/ext_ffi.html)

BTW, does anyone have recent benchmarks comparing LuaJIT against new versions of the Javascript JITs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the point of posting this? Pointing out how small and elegant a real world language implementation can be?

<comment><USER5> I'm happy with anything that gives Lua more exposure. It's a pretty language and it is _so damn small_ , fast and embeddable.

Too many developers are using Javascript in places where Lua would be a far more appropriate option. Embedding, especially.

<comment><USER6> Why is embedding Javascript inappropriate? Duktape has a similar codesize to Lua 5.3

[http://duktape.org/index.html](http://duktape.org/index.html)

<comment><USER7> In my opinion, Lua is better-designed language. JavaScript has horrible parts.

<comment><USER8> Why do you say Lua is better designed? And are you comparing classic JS or ES6 JS? I like Lua but there are some things that just annoy me like indexing an array with 1, smaller standard library, etc. I find JS implementation of inheritance, objects, and prototyping better than Lua due to its simplicity.

<comment><USER9> 1\. Indexing an array with 1 is unfortunate but not a bad design decision in a vacuum, eg for i=1,#size is a very easy to understand loop over valid array indexes. I'll agree that it causes cognitive load in practice.

2\. JS has a somewhat broken notion of objects and Lua's implementation is far cleaner while being as powerful. How do you use a JavaScript object as a hashmap? The default try is a potential security hole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why not reimplement lua in lua?

<comment><USER11> It has been done, several times.

A popular version is [http://yueliang.luaforge.net/](http://yueliang.luaforge.net/), although it only supports old Luas (5.0 and 5.1).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much would you pay for a hyphen (domain name)? - <AUTHOR> I'm planning to start a business called, let's say, Icarus Systems (it's in the aviation sector).  I've already bought icarussystems.com, but I really wanted icarus-systems.com as it's prettier and more legible, if more difficult to remember.
It turns out that icarus-systems.com is owned by a medium-sized company who just redirects it to their main site, say paperclips.com.  I got in touch with their CEO, and it turns out they acquired a small company called Icarus and that's how they ended up with the name.
Long story short - they're asking 5000 US$ for the domain name I want.  That's a month or two of runway for me.  I've tried haggling the price down to no avail.  Would you pay that much for a hyphen?
I'm not worried about their icarus-systems.com getting more Google rank because in the long run the term Icarus doesn't even appear on paperclips.com.  It's more of a cosmetic issue in my mind.... <comment><USER2> Sounds to me like they're trying to get some easy money from you. Truthfully, you already have the far more important domain name. I'd offer something like $250 and simply walk away if they don't take it.

Honestly, that name is in no way critical to your business; you should be more than willing to let it go.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not worth it; not for $250 and certainly not for $5k. I'm not sure why you think the one with the hyphen is better than the one without, but I think it's harder to remember and using both will probably confuse users.

I'd dump the "systems" and come up with a name that you can buy a one-word domain for, if at all possible (nothing too cutesie), and it's not too late or too expensive. Better to get a company name that's unique enough you can own all domain variants of it, including the one that's just [name].com.

</comment><comment><USER4> > they're asking 5000 US$ for the domain name I want. That's a month or two of > runway for me

I'd say forget it. You can find a better name without "systems" altogether. Think about what defines your product or service uniquely. The name will come to you.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wouldn't buy a hyphenated domain at any price.

That said, $5k is not a lot of money. If you've got the cash and you want it, just buy it and move on with your life. If its not worth $5k to you just move on - its not going to make or break your business.

</comment><comment><USER6> Possibly useful personal experience: I had sell-out.com registered for about 10 years. For the past five years it pointed to a stale blog.

I was contacted about a month ago by a company that wanted it, and they offered $1000 US, which I rapidly agreed to.

I wasn't intentionally squatting it, it was one of those domains I registered on a whim for a personal project that I grew moderately attached to over time, but never did anything with.

The company I work for spent a bit of money protecting the namespace around our most recent product, and based on our CTO's experience buying unused and squatted domains, I say: walk away. Leave off with an email "If you ever want to get rid of it for $x, I will pay you that afternoon." Either they're willing to sell and will take you up on it, or are more interested in a cash grab and won't.

</comment><comment><USER7> make up your own, for $8 or so you can't go wrong.

A domain name is important but not _that_ important, try to make it short and pronounceable.

hyphens don't help, if I can't get the name with and without the hyphen I normally don't bother anyway.

</comment><comment><USER8> Domain names aren't case sensitive. You can write your domain as IcarusSystems.com without breaking anything.

This technique seems to be underused on the web, and I don't know why this is - perhaps no-one knows you can do this?

</comment><comment><USER9> Make sure they don't own some registered trademark, as part of the same prior acquisition, that could cause you troubles.

Assuming they don't, you could get started without the hyphenated form. Your trademark would eventually make their hyphenated version unusable by anyone else, and then you might be able to get it more cheaply.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads-up. The trademark issue should be OK as they are not using icarus, plus they're in another country (USA vs. Canada).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I lost a spelling bee in grade school for hyphenating "counter-clockwise". I thought I was the only one haunted by that punctuation mark.

</comment><comment><USER11> No way. Hyphenated domains are generally not a good idea since people forget them easily and have to turn to google to find your site.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you both for the quick thumbs-down.</comment>


Ask HN: Could a 13 year old build a search engine like Nathan in Ex Machina? - <AUTHOR> In the movie, the character Nathan built his search engine, "BlueBook", when he was only 13 and the original code he wrote was so groundbreaking that it inspired a comparison to Mozart. Could someone be so off the charts in terms of IQ that they could write an extremely complex codebase and build a company as a teenager? <comment><USER3> Not familiar with this movie but I see no reason why not. Search engines are not that intellectually challenging nor do they need complex code bases - <USER2> underlying concepts are quite simple. If you don't think some 13 year old build one, you simply haven't been exposed to high intellect 13 year olds. I'm sure half of FANG employees (ok maybe just AG employees..) are training their kids to do this now.

<comment><USER4> > I'm sure half of FANG employees (ok maybe just AG employees..)

?

<comment><USER5> FANG: Facebook Amazon Netflix Google

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sure, in principle. In practice spidering the web requires a lot of infrastructure which a 13-year-old might not be able to afford.

<comment><AUTHOR> I had thought about that also, assuming his parents were middle class it's not impossible for them to give him a loan for a few thousand. But even if you were an amazingly gifted coding prodigy I can't see him being able to build a team at such a young age. Who would work for a 15 year old?

<comment><USER7> A few thousand wouldn't even scratch the surface. You're probably going to want at least another four zero's on the end of that number. Per year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think there's any example of reasonably sophisticated and successful software done by a 13 year old, let alone one which requires lots of servers.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anything is possible. Most couldn't but I'm sure there is someone out there that could. Especially if they have a mentor with those skills.

</comment><comment><USER10> > In the movie</comment>


Ripe NIC: 'In Five Weeks We'll Run Out of IPv4 Internet Addresses' - <AUTHOR> https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/10/this-time-there-really-are-no-ipv4-internet-addresses-left.html <comment><USER2> Stupid question: Everytime I'm given the option to work with v4 or v6 (which, granted, is not often) I do v4 for one silly, stupid reason: I can remember a v4 address for, like the 10 minutes while configuring that I might at any moment have to record/enter it somewhere. (So: Not just once, but being able to have it as needed in a small time window)

What do people do with v6? Have better memories than me? cut-and-paste repeatedly as needed?

While I do less-and-less sysadmin work over time, even on my home network, there are opportunities to get more comfortable with v6 that I've skipped because of this, yet I never see anyone talking about it.

<comment><USER3> You remember the prefixes (e.g. 1234:5:6:7::/48) you care most about and the hexadecimal nature of the address makes them fairly memorable and compact. You can prefix addresses with a-f to hint at usage and even spell words. Unused octets can be omitted thanks to the nature of the ::.

<comment><USER4> Yes, this is important to remember.

While automatically assigned IPv6 addresses will usually use the full 128 bits (last half is random), manually assigned addresses usually don't. So e.g. one of my servers is 2a00:1234:8::10, which is pretty easy to remember. There's going to be no way around memorizing the first two or three colon sections, which are assigned to you, but the last part is going to be as easy to remember as you make it.

2600::1, owned by sprint, which is the shortest pingable IP address I know, is exactly as long as 18.104.22.168, the shortest possible IPv4 address.

<comment><USER5> I raise you ...

$ ping 1.1 PING 1.1 (22.214.171.124) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 188.8.131.52: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=26.0 ms ...

<comment><USER6> I raise you ...

        $ ping 0
        PING 0 (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.

Note that this may default to 0.0.0.0 instead depending on what you're running, which is technically the correct interpretation. I'm not sure who is doing the shenanigans here.

<comment><USER5> Touche!

All zeros is self, which is to say generally the same as 127.1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> AFRINIC has a number of available IPv4 free, across multiple /8s: [https://www.afrinic.net/stats/ipv4-pool](https://www.afrinic.net/stats/ipv4-pool)

APNIC has "0.32" of a /8 left: [https://www.apnic.net/community/ipv4-exhaustion/graphical- in...](https://www.apnic.net/community/ipv4-exhaustion/graphical-information/)

ARIN reached zero on Sept 24, 2015: [https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv4/](https://www.arin.net/resources/guide/ipv4/)

<comment><USER8> Can you easily get a free /24 from AFRINIC?

What kind of presence do you need? I will soon have to do a small CDN with a POP in ZA. I might as well get the IPv4 from AFRINIC if they have plenty.

<comment><USER9> You need to have a business presence in Africa, not just a network presence.

Cloudflare abused this long ago by creating a subsidiary on paper in Seychelles just to get as many IPs as possible, while doing no business there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have been hearing this end-of-the-IPv4 world chatter for 10+ years now. While I understand it is a real problem, I wonder if we'll still be talking about it in the present tense 10 years from now.

<comment><USER11> The internet can continue operating and growing without IPv6; it just won't be pretty. More and more endpoints will have to share a single IPv4 address; that's possible, but it can cause a variety of problems. I'm not really qualified to assess their severity on such large scales, but similar scenarios are known for being problematic at small scales.

It might seem like it makes more sense to switch to IPv6 than to deal with the issues of IPv4, but the entities that have to deal with problems that result from IPv4 depletion usually aren't the same entities impeding the adoption of IPv6.

<comment><USER4> Two big reasons that Microsoft says have caused them to start pushing v6 adoption internally from around 2017 are:

a) struggling to implement proper IP based access control with their available address space.

b) as everyone uses the same 16 or so bits of Private IPv4 space, every acquisition likely causes new IPv4 address space collisions which must be worked around.

<comment><USER12> > b) as everyone uses the same 16 or so bits of Private IPv4 space, every > acquisition likely causes new IPv4 address space collisions which must be > worked around.

I mostly agree, but this overstates thing some. 10/8 offers 24 bits, 192.168 offers 16 bits, and 172.16-172.31 offers 20 bits.

The latter are particularly frequently unused; if you pick one of 172.20-172.28 to cram into you have a high chance of not crashing into someone else when you integrate networks. Particularly if you use the upper half of the resultant class b.

Of course RFC 4193 for IPv6 is very nice; pick your own random 40 bit prefix, and get to run 65536 subnets of arbitrary size. You need to integrate ~2^20-- a million-- networks before you have a 50% chance of having encountered a collision.

<comment><USER4> > 172.16-172.31 are particularly frequently unused

haha, I wish. We decided to use them two decades ago exactly because we thought they were less frequently used, but then a decade later docker comes along and uses exactly that as a default NAT subnet. So we get multiple tickets about that a week.

<comment><USER13> What kind of issues is this causing you / your users?

<comment><USER4> Well, the complaint usually goes like this:

"we recently set up service x, and it seems to be working fine. However, when we try to connect from the campus wifi, or a certain department, the service does not respond".

What happens is the server gets a request from a private IP within the range assigned to docker0, and then the container replies, but because the IP is believed to be local, linux correctly tries to find something attached to the docker0 interface with that IP and fails.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We need a Wiki that documents all the problems of migrating from IPv4 to IPv6. Currently it's a scary, unknown process of bumbling into corner cases, which I think is the reason the vast majority of people haven't adopted it into their products. Why do something slow and complicated when you don't need to (yet)? By documenting it fully, it will seem easier, and more people will at least try to adopt IPv6.

One of the many things that would speed up adoption is "IPv6 by default". Often it's just a matter of turning on the "IPv6 thing" at the same time as the "IPv4 thing". We need IPv6 name servers added to DHCP leases. We need load balancers to expose IPv6 addresses. We need to provide an AAAA record at the same time as an A record. We need firewall rules for IPv6 at the same time we add one for IPv4. We need SLAAC or DHCPv6 enabled. And we need applications to natively support an "ip address" field that accepts both IPv4 and IPv6 format addresses.

<comment><USER15> > One of the many things that would speed up adoption is "IPv6 by default".

This is precisely why I end up searching for the knob to turn off IPv6 in kernel after installing a new system. That is, if I remember to do so. And then I curse because the system's (or application's) name resolver still keeps performing AAAA queries and breaking because IPv6 doesn't actually work.

Recent example: [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1582686](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1582686)

Please don't enable anything by default unless it's actually working.

<comment><USER16> [https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html](https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html)

One third of traffic into Google comes from IPv6 sources. And they work fine.

When major ISPs around the world are enabling for both their fixed and mobile customers and not getting issues.

The problem is either in your ISP, your network or client configuration.

<comment><USER15> > The problem is either in your ISP, your network or client configuration.

Thank you for telling me that it's broken. That's kinda my point.

Again, I don't _have_ IPv6 connectivity to the world, _at all._

Random applications trying to enable and use it per default is bound to fail.

<comment><USER16> You linked to a bug in Firefox Nightly. That's hardly indicative of there being widespread issues.

Also that bug seems to occur when IPv6 is disabled in the kernel.

Random applications should be fine with trying the IPv6 address, and if it fails using the IPv4 address.

That should happen transparently. There are millions of Linux deployments that don't require manually disabling IPv6.

You not having an IPv6 address is a separate issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> shaki-dora I recently decided on a whim to try an IPv6-only VPS which was something like 70% off at my provider. It being for internal stuff only, I thought it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

As it turns out, not even the Ubuntu repositories are reachable over IPv6.

I believe this was the PPA server, which held some package I needed for some workaround for all the other connectivity problems.

So let's hope a few important people/companies/institutions start to be slightly inconvenienced. I bet as soon as this rises to the concern of, say, some peoples' Netflix stream stuttering it's a matter of weeks to solve it.

<comment><USER17> Forgive my naiveté - how does running out of IPV4 addresses result in Netflix stuttering? I'm viewing it a binary problem (you either have an IP and have internet, or you're fighting to get an IP and have no internet) but that seems incorrect.

<comment><USER18> I could imagine if your ISP has some big NAT plant that's overloaded, it would cause connection problems with traffic getting congested at the NAT devices.

<comment><USER19> Not just raw bandwidth, but also NAT relies on session tracking, and the NAT device has a limited amount of memory and therefore sessions available. It's often a lot easier to augment bandwidth than to augment available sessions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Finally. I can't wait for the outcome of this. We'll probably waste another couple of years with more NAT and other hacky short-term solutions, but in the long run adopting IPv6 is inevitable.

<comment><USER21> NAT destroys the end-to-end principle and encourages things like CGNAT, which make side-stepping centralized services impossible. I really hope IPv6 starts becoming commonplace and that the outcome isn't that CGNAT becomes the norm for residential Internet connections.

<comment><USER22> > NAT destroys the end-to-end principle

Yes, and that precisely why I use it in my home network, and will continue to use is with IPv6. I explicitly don't want any IP addresses in my green zone to be directly accessibly from my red zone.

<comment><USER23> Then you're doing something very wrong. You can't rely on NAT to stop connections, because that's not a thing NAT does.

You need to be using a firewall. NAT is just an extra, useless, complicated and unnecessary thing to be adding to the top of that; one that makes it hard to understand how your network is even working, and which makes it harder rather than easier to secure.

<comment><USER24> Can you explain how an outside person (other than my ISP) can make an outside connection to my laptop despite being behind a NAT? Assuming for concreteness that my laptop's internal (NATted) address is 192.168.1.123 and my router's public address is 18.104.22.168. What sequence of commands would you type to open a TCP connection to my laptop?

<comment><USER25> NAT is implemented on a firewall, the blocking of incoming connections is a side effect and isn't even intentional (that's why UPnP exists).

Since you already have a firewall you can just add a single rule that block incoming connections and that's all you actually need.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If every engineer took the extra 10 minutes to enable IPv6 for their AWS services we would have a much better availability.

I believe it's less than 50 lines of Terraform code to enable it for the standard Application Load Balancer use case.

<comment><USER27> I have the opposite experience when it comes to availability.

I sell some software that runs on servers, and we used to get so many tickets that came down to the server's IPv6 transit being busted in sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle ways. And then we have to fight with _their_ NOC to convince them something is broken.

IPv6 is an afterthought in many networks. There is less peering, less monitoring, less users overall to uncover issues.

It got so tedious to deal with that support burn that I just changed our software to not dual-stack any of its outgoing connections. Not heard a peep since.

<comment><USER26> Does the software runs well under heavy CGNAT? Because that is where we are going if everyone follows you.

<comment><USER28> The whole problem with ipv6 is that earlier adaptors have not much advantages (while still having to support ipv4 anyway) whereas late adaptors will have it much easier (better ecosystems, much less bugs anywhere else, problems are documented and well understood, infrastructure is tested, etc.). The incentives from the business side are just plain wrong. They can change when CGNAT causes problems. But they don't as long as other stuff is more important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I believe even Hacker News is inaccessible via ipv6.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19833362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19833362)

I noticed this at my parents' house, where their new wifi setup was toggled to "ipv6 only" mode, and HN didn't work.

<comment><USER30> Accessing an IPv4-only website from IPv6 is not a major problem. A NAT64 gateway to access such legacy services works fine. IPv4-only _clients_ is another issue.

<comment><USER31> Running an IPv4-only website becomes a problem as ISPs migrate their IPv4 traffic to NAT44/NAT64, and you can no longer tell users apart for abuse detection purposes.

<comment><USER32> > you can no longer tell users apart for abuse detection purposes

s/abuse detection/tracking

As a user, this sounds like a feature -- but really, there are a ton of other metrics to track most users by (assuming we're talking about abuse done via the actual website interface rather than just flooding ports with packets from a specific IP).

<comment><USER33> I doubt this website would even be up if they had no abuse detection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> When a dns request is sent the dns software most of the worlds ISPs uses pulls both the A and the AAAA record, but the AAAA (ipv6) record takes on average 4x longer than the A record to pull. The dns software short circuits this so what you get back is almost always an ipv4 address.

If you're accessing a website, you're almost always going to end up getting its ipv4 address. This is significant, because still the entire internet doesn't support ipv6. (I'm looking at you Sonic.) If website providers can't get a dedicated ipv4 address, they could use some sort of 6to4 like tunnel to support ipv4. But because of the way the current dns software works, by default all of their traffic will run through that ipv4 tunnel.

This leaves ipv6 almost exclusively used for p2p or other types of home connections. The future of the internet is shaping up in such a way where websites run over ip4v and end users to have a sort of firewalled ipv4 access, then use ipv6 for everything else.

A law that requires ISPs fully support ipv6 may be beneficial.

<comment><USER35> Is there a reason why certain companies get to retain their originally allocated Class-A netblocks with their 16 million addresses?

[http://www.aturtschi.com/whois/neta1.html](http://www.aturtschi.com/whois/neta1.html)

Even companies that were given Class-B netblocks with about 65,000 addresses seems a bit wasteful. I remember when I started an ISP in 1996 it was like pulling teeth to get a Class-C with 255 addresses but there Ford sits with 16 million of their own.

<comment><USER23> Yes: those netblocks belong to them and you can't take their stuff just because you like the look of it.

There aren't enough addresses in v4. Reclaiming one or two /8s here or there won't fix that. Before IANA runout in 2011, we were going through over one /8 per month, and demand has only gone up since then. Those class Bs you're so worried about would last the internet maybe 2 hours each.

You can push as many allocations around as you like, but there just plain and simply _isn 't enough v4_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Some ISPs are resorting to CGNAT eg. [https://help.2degreesmobile.co.nz/app/answers/detail/a_id/40...](https://help.2degreesmobile.co.nz/app/answers/detail/a_id/402/~/changes- to-ip-addresses-%28cgnat%29)

<comment><USER37> Man, that would suck to be behind one of those.

<comment><USER38> Tell me about it. Rented a place in Amsterdam that came with a Ziggo connection. Wanted to play a game online with someone and I couldn't. No way to host a game. Called support, they said I had a shared ipv4 address. They'd be happy to switch it to a real one but then I'd lose my v6 connection. I didn't know what to tell them. These connections need to come with warning symbols, this isn't what I expect of an Internet connection (I think they deployed "dual-stack lite" but it isn't mentioned in the contract, and even if it is, it should be called "Internet lite").

Still happy with my XS4ALL connection on fiber. Proper /48 subnet and static legacy IPv4 address since ~2011.

<comment><USER13> Why can't you host a game behind CGNAT? You should be able to use PCP or STUN to establish an incoming port, no?

<comment><USER39> But wouldn't the game itself would have to support something like STUN?

AFAIK, it's a handshake between the two ends, made trough a third party server. Both parties need to contact the third party server, then they get an IP:port combination.

So you would have to do that, then quickly enter that information in the game client and server, while making sure that the TTL doesn't expire. You might also have to fight your OS a bit.

Moreover, STUN doesn't work on symmetrical NAT, where the router uses the incoming address of a packet to route it trough the host.

I don't know PCP; I'll look into that. IMO, the solution to the GP's issue is a VPN. Hamachi used to be a popular solution among gamers, I think.

<comment><USER13> My point was not about the user being able to work around game limitations but to assert that this is, first, a game limitation, wherein it failed to account for the existence of NATs. NATs aren't some new problem: my computer has not had a public routable IP address essentially _ever_ , as even when I was using dial-up in 1995 I had set up a Linux server in our basement to use NAT (as I wanted to have multiple machines in my house always connected). I just don't see why CGNAT is somehow bad or worse or even different than NAT, if the game supports NATs (which it sounds like in your case it doesn't).

Yes: "symmetric NAT" is useless, but I have not yet seen a CGNAT deployment use symmetric NAT. I would just go so far as to say "symmetric NAT is an example of a technology that is not and never will be good enough to be called carrier grade" ;P. So like, that NAT can and has sucked shouldn't be a demonstration that all NAT everywhere is entirely useless.

It could very well be that CGNAT deployments _don 't_ have support for PCP, (or the related NAT-PMP and UPnP mechanisms that it is a successor to), which would suck. I haven't checked this yet. However, if they do, you should be able to do just about anything you could on any private NAT setup: these protocols let you ask your NAT to open a reverse port mapping to your system on a routable IP address, and you can use them with external tooling (they don't require you to be inside the app listening on the port or anything).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> In the meantime, we still can't have a web server running on a GCP instance that uses an IPv6 address and does TLS termination with your own certificate at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm currently running a pfSense router at home, which has limited IPv6 support. Does anyone have any suggestions for something with more extensive IPv6 support?

Specifically what I need is something which can handle my ISP only handing me a /64, and can smoothly handle prefix changes (update firewall rules etc).

Ideally also being able to register/update LAN clients on dyndns service so I don't need to install an update client locally on every device.

<comment><USER42> I think OPNSense has proper IPV6 support

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> At the same time, GitHub Pages do not work[1] with IPv6 yet...

[1] [https://github.community/t5/GitHub-Pages/Cannot-reach-any- gi...](https://github.community/t5/GitHub-Pages/Cannot-reach-any-github-io- page-via-IPv6/td-p/4021)

<comment><USER44> They _used to_ support IPv6. When they added HTTPS support they removed it because of it [1]. Which is a complete nonsense reason. Using the old IPv6 range works for *.github.io domains even now.

But IIRC, you can fetch GitHub Pages custom domains over IPv6 with HTTPS too, but you don't get the correct certificates, because they simply don't have an IPv6 range pointing to the newer HTTPS-supporting infra.

[1]: [https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/354#issuecomment-385...](https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/354#issuecomment-385746014)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Now if only my ISP would get onboard. I applaud the 1gbps fibre, but IPV6 has been "in progress" for like 3 years now...

<comment><USER24> Verizon FiOS?

<comment><USER44> IIRC, they plan to deploy IPv6 in 2020 spring. Unfortunately I can't remember the source.

And they've had it in few select residential areas as a trial since 2018 autumn [1].

[1]: [https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32136440-Networking- IPv6-w...](https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32136440-Networking-IPv6-working)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Well, to me, the issue of IPv6 adoption is that it is not a natural extension to IPv4, but two different protocols. It requires two settings efforts and additional efforts for interoperability with third parties still limited to IPv4.

I am sure there must be some tools to smooth the efforts, but it is not native in the protocols.

</comment><comment><USER47> Would it be ethical/useful to overwhelm NATs with addr:port combinations to overflow the NAT's translation table? If NATs start breaking down, it might force upstream to start adopting IPv6. I could see a system of doing this as setting a different port for each outgoing connection. Thoughts?

<comment><USER48> I doubt it would be either ethical or useful to deliberately overload translation tables. That said, I would imagine that the migration to QUIC and HTTP/3 would increase pressure on NATs. QUIC's use of UDP means that it's harder to safely reuse source ports for connections to different destinations compared to TCP, so the density of connections per external IP address should be lower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Is there a graph of the average price of a /24 block of ipv4 addresses?

Is the price going to keep appreciating as supply falls until there is no more supply? I.E. is there potential to treat ipv4 addresses like a commodity?

I don't see ipv6 being widly adopted (major cloud providers only offering ipv6 for new servers) in the near future.

<comment><USER23> [https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales](https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior- sales)

[https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud- compute/#pricing](https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/#pricing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> IPv4's inability to label all the things may be a feature. NAT's are like borders in some ways, and prevent fine grained censorship without larger consequences.

</comment><comment><USER51> Meanwhile ipv6 which had literally one job* remains fairly useless.

* that is to avert impending address exhaustion, but it happened, and ipv6 sat idle and did nothing.

<comment><USER14> If that were its only job, the only change would have been 128 bits instead of 32 for the address. There's like a bazillion other changes, unfortunately :(

<comment><USER23> Not as many as you think. It's mostly very similar to v4, and the majority of the changes are to handle the extra address width.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Again?

<comment><USER23> Nope, not again.

This is the first time that RIPE has ever had more applications for v4 space than v4 ranges to satisfy those applications with (even with the strict limits on how much people can request).</comment></comment>