Airbnb Tech Talk: Evan Priestley of Facebook - Move Fast and Break Things - <AUTHOR> https://www.airbnb.com/meetups/25z4mzn4a-tech-talk-evan-priestley Move Fast & Break Things
A practical set of step-by-step recipes for reproducing some of Facebook's biggest mistakes (in security, web stacks, polytheism, deployment, algorithms, photo faxing and other areas) delivered by an engineer who helped make them.
About Evan
Evan Priestley worked as an infrastructure engineer at Facebook. He inflicted substantial and lasting harm, amassing a mountain of technical debt which the company will be paying down for decades to come.
Livestream
If you are not able to join us in person, we'll be streaming Evan's talk at 7pm. Please visit the meetup page to get the link for the livestream. A recording will be posted to our Tech Talk page as well.
Dinner, prepared by Airbnb's Executive Chef, will be served at 6pm. <comment><USER2> If an engineer at Bank of America said something to this tune, it'd have tremendous negative consequence as it should. Facebook is reaching a point where breaking things should not be okay simply because it opens up the possibility of breaking privacy settings and causing great damage.

Lots of people have pretty sensitive data within facebook with very granular privacy settings. When I read this attitude from facebook, it scares the shit out of me.

I'd love to hear more about why I shouldn't fear that their "Show this post to only x group of people" feature will break and result in everyone being able to see all my posts. What are your testing procedures for that and at what point are those kind of bugs caught?

<comment><USER3> Facebook is, by a _huge_ margin, the buggiest release software that I use every day. When I look hard, I notice at least a dozen UI bugs a week. Yet, Facebook is hugely successful -- so successful, in fact, that it's hard for me to think of ways in which it could be more successful. Your comment implies that there is some threshold that they will pass, at which point they will be forced to adopt more stable sensibilities. There are 1 billion active users [1], so I ask: if they haven't gotten to this point, when exactly will they?

I don't believe the lack of quality in Facebook code poses an existential threat to Facebook, and I don't believe it ever will:

(1) Facebook code is not Google code, but it is not _bad_ code, it's just not needlessly good code. If Google is consistently buggy, anyone can switch to Bing. On the other hand, switching from Facebook is really hard. Their core services are not easily replaceable. People are willing to put up with more. Note that this is even true in the case of businesses: Facebook is _horrible_ to develop against, but developers don't have a choice.

As the network grows, this cost will be higher, which means Facebook can throw its weight around more, not less. This is exactly opposite of the situation you predict. The only thing that can really reverse this is if there is a viable competitor, but the increased growth of Facebook makes this increasingly unlikely. It is clear, in any event, that G+ is not quite there.

(2) By maintaining a lower bar, Facebook actually has an advantage. It is a website, and can fix its product at will. Code can be deployed quickly and rolled back accordingly, making failure cheap. This means they can concentrate on things that really matter like user acquisition.

(3) Facebook does _not_ run nuclear reactors or bank systems. There is a high incentive to switch from buggy bank systems. There is little incentive to switch from buggy social network websites.

footnotes:

[1] whatever that means

<comment><USER2> _(3) Facebook does not run nuclear reactors or bank systems. There is a high incentive to switch from buggy bank systems. There is little incentive to switch from buggy social network websites._

I'm arguing that facebook _wants_ to run something even more important than a banking system. For example, Facebook wants me to share posts that are only visible to me. Such a post could contain secrets that could have huge consequences on my life and life of others' if they became public. It is pretty clear from facebook's history that each year, they want you to share _more_ of such private data.

They started with you being able to share your drunk party pics. They are headed towards actually becoming something like PayPal. Really, facebook should behave more like a bank than just-another-social-network if it wants its users remain confident. In this respect, looking at their past success to as proof that all is well is a mistake because I am certain facebook intends to be much more than what it is five years from now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Evan is hilarious, check out all the copy on <http://phabricator.org/> for an example.

However he should probably have been described as ex-Facebook, he left quite a while ago.

<comment><USER5> This made me crack up the first time I read it!

'Facebook engineers rave about Phabricator, describing it with glowing terms like "okay" and "mandatory".'

<comment><USER6> This made me crack up even more : "Written in PHP, so literally anyone can contribute, even if they have no idea how to program."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is such a grey are that I think it's close to impossible to make a rule about how much quality you should sacrifice for the sake of speed. Sometimes you might get lucky and break something insignificant, sometimes you create the IceBox Pro fiasco and be remembered at "that company". It's all calculated risk / gambling.

On the other hand, perhaps someone will argue that all publicity is good publicity.

</comment><comment><USER8> I honestly think that "Move fast and break things" might be the singularly most important software engineering mantra of our age.

Things break all the time in any company, but by understanding that frequent breakages occur, and adapting your development process to that understanding, you enable fast recovery and ultimately less breakage and greater security in the long run.

<comment><USER9> This is inane, frankly. There are people who code to a much higher standard than this. People live and die by the code they write, so they can't accept "things break all the time ..." and forget about writing correct code.

See for example: your car, your bank (not the website, the backend), the space shuttle, the Fed, anything important. Some places cannot accept the supposed fact of frequent outages and failure, and engineer for _that_ reality instead.

I don't know how you're concluding that the hackday coding methodology creates more secure code, unless you are simply unaware of the industrial standards to which other fields' programmers are held.

<comment><USER8> Of course I wasn't talking about banks and space shuttles, that would be inane. Some places can't accept outages and failure, and naturally "move fast and break things" is an unacceptable mantra for those places.

However, few companies are rated on the quality of their code. Rather, most companies are rated on how well they serve their customers needs, including the vast majority of companies discussed on Hacker News.

The way to delight your customers is to iterate quickly. The way to achieve great software is also to iterate quickly. That is not a coincidence. Willingness to withstand a little bit of breakage allows companies to move fast. This contributes to an overall _higher_ level of quality, leading not to frequent outages (Facebook does not have frequent outages and failure), but to more robust product.

I am aware of how people build software in more traditional fields (my background is in compilers and static analysis). I am also aware that traditional software development techniques are being eclipsed by those who are willing to throw off the shackles of the past. The "hackday coding methodology" may not be useful to make the code for your car, but the techniques used to build your car are not useful for building a successful SaaS product.

<comment><USER9> Is it still suitable to code loosely when people use your trivial SaaS as if it were a vital component of their life? And if you encourage people to do so, isn't it irresponsible to keep applying such a methodology?

<comment><USER8> I think you're missing my point. It's not coding loosely, it's optimizing moving quickly. And by moving quickly you can actually have a safer and more secure site than by, say, only releasing code every 3 months or something.

<comment><USER10> This confuses the act of shipping code frequently with _what the code actually does_. Both of those are important but don't really have any bearing on each other.

fwiw, I disagree strongly that moving fast and breaking things _"might be the singularly most important software engineering mantra of our age."_ Frankly, this terrifies me. You already qualify it by carving out banks, space shuttles (and presumably medical devices, transportation, etc). I suspect we could discuss a list of things where it doesn't quite apply and in the end I would have to add _"...for products that aren't critical to your users."_ to the end of your sentence.

<comment><USER8> "Move fast and break things" is about moving fast, and only mentions "break things" to indicate that its OK to break things. I agree that what the code does is orthogonal.

I would carve out space shuttles, etc, as different, but they already are carved out: they use special subsets of C with no memory allocation, run extensive static analysis and proof software, because those things literally cannot go wrong.

Anything that doesn't use that sort of thing has already committed to the idea that it won't be foolproof. If you code in a scripting language, you are already writing software which you implicitly acknowledge can go wrong. Software has bugs!

<comment><USER10> I guess my issue is specifically with 'break things' as it overgeneralises the idea of experimentation (which is something I do agree with). The impression that 'move fast, break things' leaves me with is that it's ok to break _anything_ and that it's also (implicitly) not a big deal if they _stay broken_ or somehow hurt a user (e.g by exposing, even temporarily, what was once private).

Even though it's a wonderfully pithy 4 words, people can interpret them in many different ways, most of which I'd argue are not good for the end-user.

 _"... you are already writing software which you implicitly acknowledge can go wrong. Software has bugs!"_

Agreed, but shouldn't the _intent_ be to create things in a way that tries to reduce the likelihood of damage while still allowing plenty of room for experimentation? i.e take some care that what you're about to do/push isn't going to do harm? If I follow the 'break things' mantra, I don't need to care. That's what bothers me. It's so easy to hide behind when something goes wrong.

<comment><USER8> From what I've learnt of Facebook's attitude, it's more that you won't be fired if you take the site down (at least, the first time). I don't believe that they don't care when you break things, and that wasn't what I was advocating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yup, Facebook's broken for me right now.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wish I could know, whether he tried moving slow and make things less brittle.</comment>


High performance single-threaded access to SimpleDB - <AUTHOR> http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-06-29-high-performance-simpledb.html

<comment><USER2> Are your operations simple enough that you could perform equivalent ones using carefully constructed keys and S3 list/get/put?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, S3 doesn't have a Query operation. But I suppose you could do the same PUTs, GETs, and DELETEs using S3 if you wanted.

<comment><USER2> It does however support listing key ranges with "prefix=" parameter.

<comment><AUTHOR> That allows you to get a list of items with _names_ in a given range, but doesn't allow you to do queries on the items' attributes.

<comment><USER2> For what I was thinking the value you want to query could go in the "name".

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want to use S3 LIST to emulate a SimpleDB Query, you can only Query one attribute _and_ that attribute must be at the start of the name. Obviously you can't have two different attributes both at the start of the name, so any Query involving two or more attributes can't be emulated by S3 LIST.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, but if your values aren't large and if your client can do the obvious filtering then you can emulate it quite easily. This is actually what Mark Atwood's S3 storage layer for MySQL did.

I'm still curious about the values you're using in your test. Did you use exactly the same ones described on the "Indexing and Querying Amazon S3 Metadata with Amazon SimpleDB" page?

<comment><AUTHOR> _Agreed, but if your values aren't large and if your client can do the obvious filtering then you can emulate it quite easily._

True, but the S3 LIST operations you need for that can get expensive quickly. I considered it for the application I intend to use SimpleDB for, and decided that SimpleDB was far cheaper.

 _I'm still curious about the values you're using in your test._

They were utterly synthetic -- the first things which came to mind: The item names were 0000, 0001, 0002, ... 9999, the attribute names were "square" and "cube", and I think you can guess what the attribute values were. :-)

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I remember your earlier article where you wrote

 _Third, if you have an item with only one attribute, and your read:write ratio is more than 22:1, it's cheaper to use S3 instead of SimpleDB -- even ignoring the storage cost -- since S3's 1 μ$ per GET is cheaper than SimpleDB's 1.305 μ$ per GetAttributes request._

and wondered if that still held true for varying I/O rates.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, still true -- the price (per BoxUsage) of SimpleDB requests doesn't depend on how many requests you're making per second.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Very Personal Computing - <AUTHOR> http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/05/02/very-personal-computing/ <comment><USER2> " _Google wants carriers to be mere bit pipes, wireless ISPs and nothing more. They want to drive the price of smartphones to less than $100 in order to take the carrier out of the subsidy business and, as a result, loosen the carrier's control over handsets."_

I guess that explains why Google and Apple are on a collision course, Apple can't compete at the low end. Though interestingly Apple led the way for loosening carrier control over handsets with their take it or leave it attitude.</comment>


Racist, Anti-Chinese Messages Tagged on San Francisco Buildings - <AUTHOR> http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/09/07/racist-anti-chinese-messages-popping-up-on-san-francisco-buildings/

<comment><AUTHOR> If the tag was "No more illegals" every commentator and rabble-rouser and point-scoring politician would be on the airwaves.

The ethnic Chinese population in the US have a real problem - they appear to have no political voice. There are few ethnic Chinese political leaders and there are no mass organized protests. The result is that the concerns and needs of the ethnic Chinese population are not met.

Perhaps we can see some kind of political awakening in the second and third- generation Chinese i.e. those who are suing Harvard over racial bias on admissions.

It's a surprise that the ethnic Chinese do not vote majority Republican given that the community are broadly speaking, hard-working and pro-business.

<comment><USER2> > The ethnic Chinese population in the US have a real problem - they appear to > have no political voice. There are few ethnic Chinese political leaders

In the US on a national level, that may seem to be the case.

In San Francisco, however, that's not at all the case: the mayor and 3 of 11 members of the Board of Supervisors are ethnic Chinese, as are both of the S.F. representatives in the California State Assembly.

The Chinese community has long been a strong political force in San Francisco politics.</comment></comment>


America's Start-Up Silver Lining - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/30/america-s-start-up-silver-lining.html

<comment><AUTHOR> An excruciating metric (and the reason I left London for San Francisco :-):

"The European economy is basically the size of the U.S. But last year it saw only $6.2 billion invested in 1,074 deals. And in 2012, 16 European companies backed by venture capital went public, raising 379 million Euros between them... By contrast, the U.S. saw 3,826 venture deals worth $27 billion last year."</comment>


This Kid Will Do Whatever You Want in Antartica - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/for-27-this-kid-will-do-whatever-you-want-in-antartica-on-tuesday/

<comment><USER2> Interesting details missing: how does one run a marathon in Antarctica anyway? Firstly, how do you get down there? And secondly, where do you find a good place to run (ie somewhere where you won't slip on ice or fall into a crevasse?)

<comment><USER3> 1) Set up a plane to Puntas Arenas, Chile. 2) Coordinate with group of other crazy people to fly to Antarctica 3) Bring LOTS of warm clothing. 4) To run, be very careful. Mostly shuffling. 5) Find big ice sheets to run on

\- Travis (the guy running the marathons)

<comment><USER4> Have a safe trip and a safe race. :)

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm usually not a stickler for details, but Stanford is not an Ivy League school.

<comment><USER6> Upvoted in agreement, although as an "Ivy Plus" Stanford is the next closest thing to an Ivy League school.

<comment><USER7> > the next closest thing to an Ivy League school.

Most people would agree that Stanford is better than many of the Ivy schools.

[No, I did not go to Stanford]

<comment><USER6> I said it was the cloest thing to an Ivy League school, not that it was the "next best" thing.

Without debating quality, even if it was 10x better it would still remain "the closest thing to an Ivy League school".

<comment><USER7> Sigh...you said "the NEXT closest thing" referring to it's inferiority.

<comment><USER6> No, referring to its not actually being in the Ivy League.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Enormous unspoken point in the article: masterful publicity scheme! Kudos to you dude.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. While I wouldn't say masterful (rather serendipitious), I'm definitely planning to write an article about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Travis: if you ever want to learn web development with Ruby on Rails, you've got a free PDF+screencast bundle from <http://railstutorial.org/> waiting for you. :-)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the offer but I'm a pretty big PHP guy (yeah, I know, snide comments)... ;)

<comment><USER10> I for one support your use of PHP. I'm thinking now my donation request will consist of you putting up some permanent ice monument in support of PHP in Antarctica.

<comment><USER3> Yes... That would be pretty sweet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hmm, looked and couldn't find a "HEY YOU" link. So, here's my proposal which I will also e-mail to you:

Create an ice sculpture in honor of PHP. Bonus donation if you also include a penguin (real or fabricated)

<comment><USER3> Got the email and noted the request. I'll see what I can do about the penguin!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why would one really does this? This does not seem reasonable what so ever. I do like the kid's idea, but its counter intuitive. The cost to get to Antarctica ranges from 5-14k. I dunno if that came out of his own pocket or what, but from what the article infers, it didn't. Also running 7 marathons in 7 continents, seems pretty expensive again. All that money wasted on travel could of gone to running the same program you already have locally. I have more questions but I'll direct those via email.

<comment><USER12> Small nitpick on my part to the original article, but this guy is not a kid, he's an adult. He's a man

<comment><USER3> Yes, I'm 23. And I'm a kid at heart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Boo for Paypal, why not use an alternative, perhaps WePay or similar?

I tried (in a couple browsers) to make a donation via the link in the TechCrunch article, but got "Sorry — your last action could not be completed".

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I know. I'd love to set up something like WePay but simply didn't have the time and we're already verified on Paypal. But I would like to talk to the WePay guys... :)

Also, the link doesn't work in TC but it does work when you visit our page - <http://gumballcapital.org/7-Marathons-7-Continents/> \- and click "Make a Donation"

Sorry for the difficulties!

<comment><USER10> Thanks, new link works, but how can I tell you my suggestion? I guess you could you just check the e-mail address the donation comes from?

<comment><USER3> There's a little "HEY YOU" on the second page, which you click and tell me your idea. Or you can send me an email!

Either works. Thanks for the support!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I got a "Sorry your last action could not be completed" message when I clicked the paypal!

<comment><USER3> From the Gumball Capital page or TC? If TC, please follow through to the Gumball Capital page and click "Make a Donation".

Does that help?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congrats Travis! Long-deserved recognition for all that you do for Gumball

<comment><USER3> Thanks David!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> go Travis go! you're the bomb! for 27 dollars he will go wild!

<comment><USER3> Thanks Ian! woOOOooohooOOOOooo!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Did someone tell TechCrunch that Stanford isn't Ivy League?</comment>


What technology skills you should focus on next - <AUTHOR> http://danmartines.com/2014/12/01/what-technology-skills-you-should-focus-next/

<comment><USER2> Here's a simple heuristic: focus on the skills you are completely alien to.

If you're a web developer, learn low-level native code.

If you're a seasoned neckbeard, learn front-end Javascript and CSS.

If you're an awesome developer, learn about provisioning systems and doing administration and automation.

If you're a sysadmin, learn programming.

If you're really "practical" (engineer, coder, sysadmin) in your day-to-day, spend some time learning about academic topics.

~

You need to always be throwing yourself out into places where you aren't comfortable, because that's how you'll build the skills that will help you stand out and be most useful.

<comment><USER3> Excellent post. I also think this applies more broadly. If you're an engineer, learn about marketing, etc.

<comment><USER2> Quite right!

Being a proper generalist makes you _dangerous_.</comment></comment></comment>


C14 – Cheap, secure long term cloud storage - <AUTHOR> https://www.online.net/en/c14 <comment><USER2> For anyone else who was wondering what "80 Go" means, it's 80GB.

It took me a few seconds to realize they're located in Paris and the French call their bytes "octets" \-- hence, giga octets and tera octets. At first I thought it was something like "80 Go instances" where Go might be a cheap vps variant of theirs or something.

<comment><USER3> indeed the slider was lost in translation, I have forwarded this to our web team, thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This offer is really strange.

It claims lot of guaranties for your data (99,999999999% durability).

It claims to be secure against all natural and human destruction, despite being located in only one datacenter, 25 meters under the ground, in Paris, which means it could be subject to floods (directly or indirectly).

It claims to be able to handle formats that don't exist yet (for example, LTO-1 to LTO-10, the most recent version of the media being LTO-7).

It claims (with a footnote) to be able to handle "Secret Défense" data, which is extremely dubious. "Secret Défense" is the second most restricted classification in France. It's for highly sensitive information. Companies dealing with "Secret Défense" have to put many security measures in place (proper access control, separated networks, personnel habitation by the government, physical protection, tracking of every copy of every documents...) and are regularly audited by the government. The penalties for messing with that kind of data are pretty harsh, you could spend several years in prison if you publish an SD or just a CD (Confidentiel Défense) document, even accidentally.

Even if it's clearly targeting backup of state related data, it doesn't seem to have been audited by the ANSSI (french National Agency for Computer Security).

What is weird is that Online is a well established company (the parent company, Iliad is 4 billions euros in revenue).

<comment><USER3> Well, the shelter is still actually quite higher in Paris than the Seine (and quite far from it too), floods are not a concern at all in the area of this datacenter.

Regarding the LTO format, well LTO-10 seems to exist from what Google tells me (but I am no expert there to be honest ;)

As for the Secret Defense certification, this is ongoing, and, as you stated, we are part of a larger group which already have lots of relation with institutions like ANSSI but we (Online) have also been working with them to be certified in the coming months, of course this is a long and tedious process (as every certification is _sic_ ), but we are working on it every day and we see no reason we could not get to the end of it, we have a complete team of guys working on completing all the certifications displayed on the website and we are working with all our teams to get things done right for this.

The whole C14 infrastructure itself has been carefully designed _from the beginning_ with people knowing all the certifications requirements to make sure nothing could get in the way to pass the certifications for it.

Hope this clears a bit your worries,

Mik (Online.net network)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >> Your important data are encrypted AES-256 and replicated many times then stored in our 25 meters deep underground fallout shelter, located in Paris, with no known natural, technological and military risks.

So, only one location.

<comment> a-priori Yeah, it's pretty silly to say "no military risk" about any single location. Yes, France is as geopolitically stable location as there is on Earth, but it's also part of NATO and NATO has rivals, like Russia and China, with whom they may go to war with in the future. France has been invaded in the past, and may be again.

If you're really concerned about possibilities like that, you should be storing your data redundantly such that it's unlikely that all the locations would be on the same side of a war. France is a good choice for one location; now choose one non-NATO superpower (China?) and one unaligned nation (Brazil? India? Egypt?).

You want to be reasonably certain that at least one location would be either neutral or the victor in any war. Only then can you say you're as close to 'no military risk' as you can get.

<comment><USER6> Antartica?

<comment><USER7> But what if there is a massive Goa'uld battle?

<comment><USER8> If that is part of the threat model for your SaaS app, you may be over- engineering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Website impossible to use because it hijacked my scrollbar without understanding the dimensions of my browser window.

<comment><USER10> Pages that affect your scrolling in any way are the worst. It's just as bad as popups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks great and seems feature-rich enough to get started with straight away! I'll definitely check it out for server backups over scp.

My only suggestion is that you have a native English speaker proofread the text on your website. There are a few grammatical and translation errors which make the service seem less professional.

<comment><USER2> Or just anyone who actually speaks English. As a Dutchman I spotted a bunch of mistakes as well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The one advantage of this business nobody is mentioning so far is that they've been around since 1999. The first thing I do when I see "long-term" or "put all your data in our hands" is see if they're a recent, VC-backed company. If they're recent, then they might be inexperienced. If they have a good team, then the product and network are still new with bugs waiting to be found. If they're VC-backed, then _run_. The reason being they'll sell out eventually with the service and your data possibly going offline. Happens way too much.

So, for anything long-term, I always recommend going with an established company with a track record for innovation. I don't know these people but they've been hosting since 1999. That means they showed up during a hard time [1] for IT then lasted and improved until 2016. I don't know if they're VC- backed or the quality of their product. Looks innovative, though, for a 90's era company. So, altogether a nice, first impression without the sell-out risk common among storage providers that show up on HN a lot.

Note: One can still use VC-backed providers so long as they're just one among many you use. That way you yourself can exit when they do without threat to operations.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot- com_bubble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble)

</comment><comment><USER13> No mention of what technology is backing the service, however I like the support for existing file transfer protocols (particularly SFTP), no need to wait for or build yourself an integration, existing tooling just works.

<comment><USER14> From what they explained on IRC, this is home-made hardware (not yes disclosed because of pending patent), low-level storage without a filesystem. They split the"safe" in chunks, encrypt it, calculate parity blocs, and store them all on a different hardware. They intend to disclose the software "soon", and the hardware later.

<comment><USER15> sounds similar to backblaze... though they use XFS (IIRC) for their file system, but do the RAID type stuff themselves...

<comment><USER14> Nope, with Backblaze you have instant access to an individual file. Here you need to unarchive your safe, which can take up to a few hours (depending on the size of the vault), and only then you have access to the content of the safe. No way to retrieve only 1 file, or have instant access.

<comment><USER16> Wait, this isn't random access (live) storage ?

How do you rsync (or borg, duplicity, whatever) to a dataset that has to be checked out ? I can imagine some ways of doing that, but am curious ...

<comment><USER17> It says on the page that there's a 7 days window during which your data is freely accessible and mutable, after which it is permanently stored in the homemade infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very interesting. Aside from the slight inconvenience of not being able to use standard tools like ftp, scp and rsync... Amazon Cloud Drive's $60 a year plan ([https://www.amazon.co.uk/clouddrive/](https://www.amazon.co.uk/clouddrive/)) is still significantly cheaper for storing more than ~2.5TB. It's also free of charges per operation and such like.

Amazon Cloud Drive doesn't seem to have any SLAs regarding uptime and redundancy though... I'm not sure if that should worry me.

<comment><USER19> Can anyone with direct and frequent experience with Amazon Drive comment on how well the product's been working out for them overall?

I've just been playing with its interface a little bit, and although its interface is unquestionably pretty clunky (both web and desktop app), it does seem like a I could save money by moving to its $60 unlimited plan. I currently use a set of S3 buckets, which is great in that it scales with use, but I'm about to cross the $5/month threshold.

Edit: The biggest missing feature so far seems to be something akin to a folder sync. When re-uploading a directory, it seems to be able to skip files that it knows it already has, but I'm not sure if it can delete files that have subsequently been removed locally.

<comment><USER18> I've been fairly happy with it... though I'm not a heavy user. I've mostly used it to backup pictures and email.

I use rclone ([http://rclone.org/](http://rclone.org/)) for my syncing email backups. It also supports a bunch of other storage backends, so it may be worthwhile checking out.

Edit: Rclone works from both Linux and the commandline... so it's extremely useful for serverside backups.

<comment><USER20> Unfortunately rclone doesn't support encryption (yet) though... so the cloud provider can see all your data - [https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/219](https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/219)

(unless of course you manually encrypt it locally before upload)

<comment><USER18> Mmm... true. Though if you're truly paranoid then you'll never really trust anyone to encrypt your data. :) I use tools like attic ([https://attic- backup.org/](https://attic-backup.org/)) to create encrypted snapshots of my backups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting... If i am reading this right, to store 1TB there its costs EUR2.05 per month. uploading and downloading are "free" but only from the non vault. You upload and download from a tmp storage, which, after either 7 days or when you say, gets put into permanent storage. that move is what costs EUR0.01 per gig... hence, uploading 1TB will cost EUR10.24. uploads can use FTP, SFTP, Rsync or SCP and they also an API too... might try this out... handy for photo storage...

</comment><comment><USER21> tl;dr: a cheap _data archival_ solution; upload is free, storage is cheap (€0.002 / GB / mo), download is somewhat less cheap (€0.01 / GB) and not instant; rsync / sftp IS supported for upload, but an API call is needed to complete the operation.

Seems great for redundant regular backups that you hope to never restore from, but would like to keep just in case.

(EDITED: previously incorrectly stated that rsync and sftp are not supported.)

<comment><USER22> > send [...] using FTP, SFTP, Rsync or SCP,

and upload and download are both free, operations (archiving/unarchiving?, et al) are not

Unless they changed it in the space of 16 minutes, I think you might of wanted to give a closer look for making your tl;dr

<comment><USER21> Oops! Thank you; fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> That's €0.002 per GB/m, AWS Glacier is $0.007 per GB/m. So it's like a third of the price. Do I read this right?

<comment><USER2> Amazon has always been extremely expensive in storage. I wanted to start a company doing online backups because every option was outrageously expensive. Like, so expensive I could just buy new disks and host them myself every 2 months for what they were trying to charge. (A disk lasts about 3 to 4 years, so that's a >2000% profit margin.)

Only Backblaze had unlimited storage for 5 dollars a month, but I wanted to upload multiple terabytes from a server and they only allowed uploading stuff through their custom, closed-source client.

I didn't have enough time to get my backup service off the ground, but prices have been getting significantly better since then (this was two or three years ago). Dropbox, Google Drive and others are now nearly reasonable and Amazon is lagging behind a bit. I'm still waiting for another price cut, and C14 seems to be doing it. Backblaze B2 is also interesting, but it has other issues again.

<comment><USER23> Re Blackbaze B2, what other issues can you think of?

<comment><USER2> What I mentioned in another post in this thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11971353](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11971353)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Their comparison section looks like an advertisement for Backblaze B2. C14 looked interesting until I got to that part. Now, I'm not sure why I would choose C14 over Backblaze.

<comment><USER25> I think there may be something missing in the comparison table. When I look at the prices of Backblaze, [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage- providers.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-providers.html) it is $0.05 for 1 mo but in the table on the website of C14, it's written "free"

<comment><USER26> Also I think Backblaze is geared towards backing up your Desktop with its own client software, or can I use regular scp/ftp/etc(standard transfer utilties) to do my own upload/download?

<comment><USER27> Backblaze "B2" is a separate service for blob storage with a REST API. It's currently in public beta. I presume its built on the same infrastructure. You can store about 10GB for free if you want to play around with it. (backblaze.com/b2/docs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's nice that the customer actually gets to control the encryption key. I'm not too knowledgeable on secure cloud storage systems, but from what I've heard about other cloud storage systems that encrypt files, it's typically the cloud hoster who controls the keys.

<comment><USER29> On "other cloud storage systems", nothing is stopping you from encrypting your files _before_ uploading them.

This is exactly what I do for personal files that I upload to S3/Glacier for archival purposes -- they are GPG encrypted before ever being transmitted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If they hadn't hijacked my browser's scrollbar, I might have kept reading.

Can anyone compare the advantages of C14 to, say, S4 by Least Authority? I kind of like not having to trust my service providers for security when encryption does the job well enough.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why is regular FTP even supported for so called secure storage?

So far it reads as secure 'because we say it is secure'? I find the whole idea of putting your data on hardware other control and still consider it 'secure' a bit strange. Though that might be just my twisted mind.

Also note they charge for internal traffic (and im not sure if you can measure these yourself to make sure the invoice is correct.):

"An operation is an action between your temporary safe-deposit box and C14 infrastructure: Archiving, Unarchiving, Destruction or Verification. Transactions are billed according to the volume of data to be processed at a price of € 0.01 / GB"

Do your math before simply signing up, my penny.

<comment><USER3> the FTP is actually TLS enabled

Mik (Online.net staff)

<comment><USER32> so why not say FTPS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Any different than Backblaze B2? Seems that B2 is still cheaper and more mature.

<comment><USER34> B2 has a file limit of 5GB. No thanks.

What's with the downvotes?

Here: "A file contains a sequence of bytes. Any file on your computer can be uploaded to B2 and stored in a Cloud Storage, as long as it's not too big. Files can range in size from 0 bytes to 5 billion bytes. "

[https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/files.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/files.html)

<comment><USER22> [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/large_files.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/large_files.html)

<comment><USER34> Thanks. I was using rclone last time to upload files and that's when I had hit the file limit. So I googled and found the link I provided in my comment. It appears that rclone does not support large file upload! hm...

EDIT: Actually it's in progress: [https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/456](https://github.com/ncw/rclone/issues/456)

EDIT2: It is actually already implemented in v1.30!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I am confused: what is the "Cost of Operation"? Is that a one-time fee? For 1.3 TB of data, they are quoting something like 2.58 per month and 12.88 "Cost of operation".

Also, can I use this with duplicity?

<comment><USER26> After reading the page the 'cost of operation' might be what happened before- your-download and after-your-upload, as you are dealing with its deposit- cache-storage, so I assume it means 'archive-from-deposit/unarchive-to- deposit'. This is the same as charging for download(so download is _not_ free), and nearly the same as charging for upload(unless you remove the uploaded content from deposit quickly).

For Glacier I believe the download is not free? You need pay for the retrieval of stored data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The name is interesting. I wonder if it's a reference to carbon 14, the radioactive isotope of carbon used for carbon dating. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating)

Or, maybe the service is 4.66 times as good as Amazon S3?

Or, the 14th letter of the alphabet is N. If we swap that for 14 we get "CN", which is the top-level domain for China, which is most certainly not in France.

The conspiracy theory possibilities are endless! ;)

</comment><comment><USER37> > The durability of your data are covered by a contract with clear guarantees > with financial compensation for loss of data.

I wonder what the details of the SLA are. I can't find them on the page.

<comment><USER3> in the T&S here [https://www.online.net/cgv-c14-en.pdf](https://www.online.net/cgv-c14-en.pdf)

<comment><USER38> Note the SLA compensation (clause V) says it only applies if the data is stored in more than one C14 datacentre, which is currently not possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> What is the difference between Standard and Entreprise except for the latter being more expensive?

<comment><USER40> Looking at their documentation it look like there is more redundancy and you get "increased priority" on requests.

[https://documentation.online.net/en/c14/offers](https://documentation.online.net/en/c14/offers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> How does it compare against Amazon Cloud Drive that has unlimited storage for USD ~60/year?

<comment><USER42> Whoah. I had no idea about this. That's massively cheaper than Google and Dropbox. Is there some catch about max download size limits per day or something?

<comment><USER34> There is an unpublished max file size. I think the max file size is 10GB.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Would it be possible to use it for syncing data? I mean I have deduplicated data, and then I generate more backups, and would like to sync new chunks&remove old chunks from the c14 backup.

</comment><comment><USER44> I honestly might pay for this service because they used the word "data" correctly (it's the plural of datum) which got me to keep reading long enough to get to the numbers.

</comment><comment><USER37> What is the difference between "standard" and "enterprise"? Typically I expect to see something extra in return for the extra cost of the enterprise offering.

<comment><USER3> it's quite detailed in the documentation here : [https://documentation.online.net/en/c14/offers](https://documentation.online.net/en/c14/offers)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Intuitively, it seems sub-optimal (for Americans and Canadians) to send your backup across the Atlantic ocean - probably slower than something on the same continent.

<comment><USER25> You have to pay a 1 € to add or get back the data, so it's more for long term storage. I don't think the speed of transfering data is hugely crucial in this case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Two things very wrong with the landing page: the horrendous parallax effect and the "Go" instead of Gb.

</comment><comment><USER47> "Long term" and "cloud" in one sentence! Isn't "long term cloud" an oxymoron?

There is no cloud, only other person's computers.

</comment><comment><USER48> Idk I'll stick to b2

</comment><comment> pi-rat While the price seems awesome, please stop overriding my browser's scroll :/

<comment><USER49> [http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/](http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/) I do not understand why many choose to do it. It is definitely annoying.

<comment><USER50> For me the apple site looks and feels fantastic ;)

<comment><USER2> The intro animation is annoyingly slow, but are you supposed to be able to scroll on that page?

Another page, the specs, does not seem to override my scrolling, so that feels fantastic indeed but it's probably not what you mean.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> "C14" is suspiciously similar to "CIA"... just saying.

<comment><USER52> No, It's really not.

<comment><USER53> Or is it, agent "xx"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> "send up to 20 TB of data using FTP... " \-- that's funny. At 24 MBit/s it comes to 2,000 hours, which is more than two months.

<comment><USER15> where did the 24mb/s come from?

<comment><USER54> Highest listed ADSL _download_ rate ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_digital_subscriber_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_digital_subscriber_line#ADSL_standards), ADSL2+)

But here we actually want the upload rate, so it would take even longer.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: I painted maps on my shoes - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/112153365286725889851/posts/EmPDFXNN7tJ

<comment><USER2> If those are based on the Stamen Design "Toner" maps, which in turn are based on the OpenStreetMap data, you might want to send them a photo. They like to feature people using their maps in cool ways, like cakes, blankets and jigsaws.

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_image_proposals#...](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Featured_image_proposals#OpenStreetPad_Screenshot)</comment>


Sketching Algorithms for High Dimensional, Large Datasets - <AUTHOR> https://www.sketchingbigdata.org/fall20/ <comment><USER2> Lecture videos appear to be private. They've had 5 class sessions so far but no assignments are viewable - maybe some will show up soon or perhaps those will be private as well. There's a Piazza signup but it's only accessible to those with an @berkeley.edu or @ucb.edu email address.

I'm not sure how the general public can benefit from this link.

Edit: There do appear to be lecture notes outlining the curriculum. [https://www.sketchingbigdata.org/fall20/lec/notes.pdf](https://www.sketchingbigdata.org/fall20/lec/notes.pdf)</comment>


Sharefest Hackathon - <AUTHOR> http://sharefest.eventbrite.com/

<comment><USER2> Someone bring web crypto to WebRTC apps as soon as it's done.</comment>


Show HN: Grapherl – Realtime, scalable stats-gathering daemon - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/processone/grapherl <comment><AUTHOR> I also discuss the architecutre of Grapherl here, [https://medium.com/@kansi/erlang-otp-architectures- grapherl-...](https://medium.com/@kansi/erlang-otp-architectures-grapherl- aae6d6a76005)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Grapherl is realtime scalable stats gathering daemon which can handle high amount of incoming data points (~1 million data points per minute per socket). It also provides a web dashboard that allows the users to visualize graphs for gathered stats.

</comment><comment><USER2> Instead of that complicated minute/day/week/year data retention scheme, why not just randomly replace an entry in a fixed-size store? So the probability of a datum being in the store is inversely proportional to the log of its age. And it's a one-liner.

<comment><AUTHOR> couldn't understand your idea. can you please elaborate ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I noticed the GitHub description for the repo says "ejabberd monitoring server." Can this be used for non-ejabberd monitoring? I assume the answer is yes given the rest of the documenation. Maybe you can update the description.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, its a general purpose monitoring solution. Currently I don't have the permissions to change the description but will try to get it changed tough.</comment></comment>


New Twitter UI Revealed (FF to 1:11 to see it) - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/newtwitter? <comment><USER2> I favour this a lot. Looks promising!

I have never been a fan of twitter desktop clients. Majority of my usage is done on the Web UI or through the newly released bookmarket (this was a godsend). The reason for that is simple, I have Photoshop and Illustrator open 99% of time and every twitter client I have tried has severely clogged my cpu/memory usage. So much so that I stopped tweeting for a while.

I can definitely see my usage going up if the Web interface is more intuitive and interactive.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> First thought was that Twitter client apps might be negatively impacted. On the other hand, this presents a good way to get people who have been stuck on the old-school web interface to learn how much richer the experience can be, predisposing them to use rich clients.

<comment><USER3> I think the goal is, in part, to negatively impact the Twitter clients. They did their part in carrying water for Twitter for the last two years. Now it's time for Twitter to swallow up their best functions.

"A true friend stabs in you the chest." - Oscar Wilde

<comment><USER4> Agreed. I think the founders are still trying to rationalize otherwise, but the goal is to make the service the best it can be. Any clients in the way will be consumed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it just me or does it look very very similar to the iPad app?</comment>


Brilliant approach to selling a house in a bad market - <AUTHOR> http://coloradohomeessaycontest.com/ <comment><USER2> 2000 is the breaking point, very do-able... of course I would try to get the local press to cover it

<comment><AUTHOR> I just saw it on The Today Show.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is it even legal to require a $100 entry fee under contest law?</comment>


Mammalian Near-IR Vision Through Injectable, Self-Powered Retinal Nanoantennae - <AUTHOR> https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(19)30101-1#%20 <comment><USER2> I've read the study just now - it does appear that:

a) The chemical put into the retina is surprisingly biocompatible, in that it does not appear to have caused anything out of the ordinary to happen. It works by effectively converting IR light to visible light - so it does not involve 'sending more data' to the brain, or 'opening another colour band' or anything like that. It is seen as just plain old green light, because the crystal structure of the chemical basically converts 980nm~ IR to 500~nm visible green light. So no uber-neurohacking going on here.

b) The procedure they are using to put the chemical in place is fairly run-of- the-mill medical procedure for humans for treatment of eye diseases, albeit a little icky.

So, I'm surprised, to say the least, but this could actually work with humans as a fairly harmless enhancement. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but haven't seen one in the study itself for the time being. (Disclosure: not an expert, but I follow related fields)

<comment><USER3> > does not involve ... 'opening another colour band'

That's not so obvious to me. If this chemical were uniformly spread across the retina, then I'd agree. But if it's sufficiently clumpy, or ideally attached to every second green-sensitive cone, then it absolutely would give (N+1)-colour vision (N=3 in humans). On first glance I can't figure out what the paper has to say about this distribution... and even if it were uniform in their mice, perhaps the next step would be to make it non-uniform somehow.

The earlier way to do something similar was by genetically altering some cells, [1]. If you inject a virus (carrying the modification) at a low concentration, then you do get just half the cells. Then the brain learns (in a few weeks) which cells are now giving what information, and you get more colours. [1] did this in monkeys, IIRC they are N=2 and the virus added the gene for one of the human receptors. I don't think it was safe enough for humans.

[1] [https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene- th...](https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-therapy- corrects-monkey-color-blindness)

<comment><USER4> still it would not be possible to discriminate if the green that i see is normal green or IR green. it would be rather obvious in the night, when color cones are not used, but during the day it would be confusing. I 'm thinking "Aww that s a beautiful tree ... oh , it's a trash fire"

<comment><USER3> No, that's exactly what the monkeys learned to discriminate. After a few weeks they pass monkey-specific colour-blindness tests, which wild-type monkeys cannot.

I don't think you are born with different wiring to the three different kinds of cones, your brain just learns to lump all the red ones together, so that a red object stays the same colour in different parts of your visual field. The claim is that the monkeys learned which of the previously-identical cones now had a new colour.

<comment><USER4> yes it is possible to create objects that can discriminate between colorblind and wild type. but from the point of view of the colorblind person (the augmented person) it will still be a source of confusion.

<comment><USER3> Just to be clear, the point isn't that we can distinguish which monkeys are treated, it's that the monkeys can distinguish many colours which they could not before. The treated ones behave like trichromats.

Do they lose any sleep philosophising about how these new colours are possible, and what to call them? Who knows. But I believe they can still do all the usual monkey things.

<comment><USER4> > it's that the monkeys can distinguish many colours which they could not > before

That's the point they can not distinguish more colors. Their retinal cones still have the same spectral response. They cannot distinguish between a normal 500nm green leaf and a 900nm infrared source.

<comment><USER3> Ah, you mean the mice? In the near-IR study it's not clear (to me, yet) whether all the cones are altered, or just some of them. If all of them are altered, then for sure, same N=2 as normal mice.

The monkeys are in a different study, the one I linked a few posts above.

<comment><USER4> sorry i was referring to the nanoparticles. Indeed rhodopsins are used so routinely in neuroscience that one wonders why it has not been used to treat colorblindness in humans yet.

<comment><USER3> OK! I was told was that inserting genes with a virus like this had a tendency to cause cancer, which is why it wasn't done on humans (least of all for something not life-threatening). But I don't know if that is still accurate.

The nanoparticles sound to me like they could be safer? Would be interesting to know whether they can be non-uniformly spread, so that only half the green cones can see one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Growing up watching Star Trek The Next Generation this is so cool to read about. Talk about Geordi Laforge vision. That part that I find so cool is seeing a lot of things that were mere dreams on Star Trek become real. Our smartphones are essentially tri-corders and now we could potentially get night vision.

<comment><USER6> Too bad the tricorder app got pulled from the Android store by Paramount due to trademark violations. Anyone know of a good version of a tricorder-like app that doesn't use the Star Trek LCARS theme?

<comment><USER7> There's an LCARS live wall on F-Droid App "Store" (F-Droid.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder if/how it would interfere with normal vision. Could you mistake IR for normal green and vice versa, or would IR have some other characteristic that would distinguish it?

Are there situations where you'd run into lights that are intrusively (or even blindingly) bright in IR but not visible wavelengths?

<comment><USER9> Yes and yes. Standard NIR illuminators are everywhere. You would need context to distinguish that it's not green except I suspect it's a very specific green so your brain may be able to do interesting things with that knowledge.

Edit: looking at the emission charts, it's a wider bandwidth than I expected, not sure how well the brain would be able to use the specificity of the green.

Things that are normally just cool enough to not emit significant visible would suddenly be visible. It's far far from the standard 7-14um thermal IR, but would be... well.. downright awesome.

It might be possible to design a mixture of these to generate "impossible colors".

<comment><USER10> > _It might be possible to design a mixture of these to generate "impossible > colors"._

Since they just convert light between frequencies, they won't show you any colors you couldn't see by illuminating your retina with the output frequencies the old fashioned way.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, I'm referring to type 2: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_colors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_colors)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wouldn't ordinarily be an early-adopter type when it comes to medical technology in my eyes of all places, but damn, IR vision. When this is ready for humans I'm going to have to think about it.

<comment><USER12> It would take very long years for this to become available to the public. I am sure we will hear many early-adopters' stories in the news which will make you rethink what you are thinking right now...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Now this is the kind of journal article title I expected in 2019.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Negligible side effects" stood out to me because I remember reading in a few places [0] [1] that depriving oneself of Vitamin A can improve vision; but at a health risk. I've also heard that this is impossible. [2]. I wonder if these things are co-related somehow?

[0] -- [https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajplegacy.1938.12...](https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajplegacy.19220.127.116.112?journalCode=ajplegacy)

[1] -- [https://petapixel.com/2014/08/23/dietary-experiment- successf...](https://petapixel.com/2014/08/23/dietary-experiment-successfully- extends-human-vision-near-infrared/)

[2] -- [https://petapixel.com/2014/08/25/retinal-neuroscientists- reb...](https://petapixel.com/2014/08/25/retinal-neuroscientists-rebuttal- humans-cant-see-infrared-matter-eat/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow, that sounds like quite the biohack!

As most of the biology stuff went over my head, I couldn't find if it is reversible though, they just mention it was "stable" at 10 weeks after injection, but is it expected to be working indefinitely? Can you wash it out somehow, if you later decide against it?

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if some variation of this experiment would be useful for retina detachment, personal interest (my retina was completely detached and I was left with 0.60 vision in the left eye).

What's the effect of giving more information to the cells, would the brain use the extra information to self improve vision? In my case the right eye would be used for training the left one.

Another experiment I am thinking of, If a 3 month old child suffer a retina detachment, would his brain be able to recover the full vision by the brain making appropriate changes?

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how well eye lens focuses NIR. And if it focuses NIR differently than visible light you'd have to choose between blurry IR green or blurry everything else.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if some military unit would be interested.

<comment><USER19> Is 980nm in the range of body heat radiation? In other words, would you be able to have "night vision" in full darkness by seeing the heat from animals?

<comment> orbital-decay No. Thermal vision is LWIR, far down the spectrum.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> For now I can only see downsides of this on healthy eyes. You would be constantly blinded and disturbed by various equipment, and your different vision compared to others would be the source of constant confusion and annoyance. What would be the use case for healthy patients in an urban environment?

</comment><comment><USER21> If this was in a sci-fi action movie I would roll my eyes at the implausiblilty of it. If it actually works... Wow!

</comment><comment><USER22> One step closer to "having the technology". Colonel Steve Austin would be proud.[0]

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

<comment><USER23> This was way before my time. Now I know where "We have the technology. We can rebuild him" comes from. Uncanny! Thanks for referencing, added to my entertainment TODO list :-)

<comment><USER22> IMHO, one of the best TV intro's ever.

"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better...stronger...faster."

<comment><USER23> Is that where Daft Punk got the lyrics too?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wonder what the potential long-term psychological/physiological impact is...

Your brain would essentially be forced to constantly process more visual data than it was used to... more data than human brains in general had _evolved_ to process.

Surely that has consequences.

<comment><USER25> Human sensorium is extremely flexible. The experiment I'm thinking of used subtle vibrating motors on a belt to indicate north, and people performed exactly as though they had suddenly acquired absolute directional sense with no awareness of the vibrations after a little acclimatization.

The other classic is "reverse vision" glasses that flip everything upside down. Takes about 2-6 weeks to rewire your brain, then everything appears normal... until you take them off.

<comment><USER26> Examples:

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kohUpQwZt8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kohUpQwZt8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think we could also use this to make people more colorblind.

<comment><USER28> Meh, I'm colorblind and I would do it for the option to see the world differently! First, though, I'd want some idea of how much the world would change.

<comment><USER29> I'm curious if a similar procedure could be used to correct for colorblindness by making one eye into the "red eye" and the other into the "green eye". Filtering and enhancing color frequencies as appropriate.

<comment><USER27> First instinct was to say no. Because you would only be able displace a color you can't see to overlap with a color you can see, meaning you're just shifting the color blindness around.

But the two eye solution is interesting.

I bet you could also do palette swaps for everything

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's probably a good time to invest in the 980 nm-blocking sunglass industry.

</comment><comment><USER31> So its kinda like putting small IR->visible light lenses into your cornea.

</comment><comment><USER32> Excitingly interesting

</comment><comment><USER33> Where do I sign up?

</comment><comment><USER34> What we filter out and don't see is just as important as what we do. If we could see all wavelengths, we'd have just noise.

<comment><USER35> I agree w/ your first sentence.

But if we could "see all wavelengths", for any reasonable definition of "see", that would imply our eyes and brains had evolved to distinguish visual signal from noise.</comment></comment>


Godoc.org will be closed owing to legal reason - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/ez7m26/godocorg_will_be_closed_owing_to_legal_reason/ <comment><USER2> Original URL (bypassing Reddit):

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang- dev/mfiPCtJ1BGU/qtCrq...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/golang- dev/mfiPCtJ1BGU/qtCrqlrEEwAJ)

Relevant quote:

> _The teams working on the proxy and on pkg.go.dev have spent a lot of time > talking to Google 's lawyers about what we can and can't do with Go source > code downloaded from the internet. The rule we've been given to follow is > that serving a pretty HTML version of the docs is displaying a modified > version of the original, and we can only do that if there's a recognized > known-good license that gives us that permission._

> _When we adopted godoc.org from Gary Burd back in 2014, it did not occur to > any of us to put it through that kind of review. If we had, maybe the > community would have gone through this licensing pain earlier. For now we > are focusing on making changes to pkg.go.dev rather than correcting past > mistakes on godoc.org. (At this point, more scrutiny of what godoc.org does > is not likely to have an outcome that anyone likes.)_

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> > If we are not able to detect one of the OSI-approved licenses below, only > limited package and module information will be made available.</comment>


US military shelves Google robot plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35201183 <comment><USER2> Wait - didn't Google say it wouldn't pursue military contracts, when it bought those Boston Dynamics robots? Because most people thought at the time it would be quite an "evil thing" for Google to do (building Terminator-like robots [1] for the US military's invasions and all that). So much for Google's promises.

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HALC9PBQMQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HALC9PBQMQ)

<comment><USER3> Yeah - that's mentioned about 3 times in the article.</comment></comment>


WordPress.com Just Read My Mind - <AUTHOR> https://bancosfamilypracticeblog.wordpress.com/2018/05/24/wordpress-just-read-my-mind/ <comment><AUTHOR> Seriously, does anyone know if WordPress.com had a way of knowing that it was a good time to show the pop-up? I'm not sure if I can reproduce it now that I've installed the add-on.</comment>


Capturing Millions of Packets per Second in Linux without Third-Party Libraries - <AUTHOR> http://kukuruku.co/hub/nix/capturing-packets-in-linux-at-a-speed-of-millions-of-packets-per-second-without-using-third-party-libraries <comment><USER3> In case you're wondering about the different linux kernel bypass mechanisms, here's the relevant slide from a recent talk: [https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/TO1UdUicn1wuF4jIAhskikO6ML...](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/TO1UdUicn1wuF4jIAhskikO6MLaQgUuurORG_l9Zxr_L_XRvwvVhuZmF5vWTGGkauRFVT2daOOM=w1439-h1079-no)

Sorry I haven't found the actual slides yet, that's why it's a photo from someone who took it while attending the talk.

</comment><comment><USER4> This must be the 10th blog post to land on HN on the same topic, and they all walk through the same steps and all use the same hardware (ixgbe), which is by the way a hard prerequisite to make much of these strategies effective.

In any case, stop reinventing the wheel, just use a library purpose-made:

[http://dpdk.org/](http://dpdk.org/)

<comment><USER5> I am a Snabb hacker and I see things differently. Ethernet I/O is fundamentally a simple problem, DPDK is taking the industry in the wrong direction, and application developers should fight back.

Ethernet I/O is simple at heart. You have an array of pointer+length packets that you want to send, an array of pointer+length buffers where you want to receive, and some configuration like "hash across these 10 rings" or "pick a ring based on VLAN-ID." This should not be more work than, say, a JSON parser. (However, if you aren't vigilant you could easily make it as complex as a C++ parser.)

DPDK has created a direct vector for hardware vendors to ship code into applications. Hardware vendors have specific interests: they want to differentiate themselves with complicated features, they want to get their product out the door quickly even if that means throwing bodies at a complicated implementation, and they want to optimize for the narrow cases that will look good on their marketing literature. They are happy for their complicated proprietary interfaces to propagate throughout the software ecosystem. They also focus their support on their big customers via account teams and aren't really bothered about independent developers or people on non-mainstream platforms.

Case in point: We want to run Snabb on Mellanox NICs. If we adopt the vendor ecosystem then we are buying into four (!) large software ecosystems: Linux kernel (mlx5 driver), Mellanox OFED (control plane), DPDK (data plane built on OFED+kernel), and Mellanox firmware tools (mostly non-open-source, strangely licensed, distributed as binaries that only work on a few distros). In practice it will be our problem to make sure these all play nice together and that will be a challenge e.g. in a container environment where we don't have control over which kernel is used. We also have to accept the engineering trade-offs that the vendor engineering team has made which in this case seems to include special optimizations to game benchmarks [1].

I say forget that for a joke.

Instead we have done a bunch more work up front to first successfully lobby the vendor to release their driver API [2] and then to write a stand-alone driver of our own [3] that does not depend on anything else (kernel, ofed, dpdk, etc). This is around 1 KLOC of Lua code when all is said and done.

I would love to hear from other people who want to join the ranks of self- sufficient application developers. Honestly our ConnectX driver has been a lot of work but it should be much easier for the next guy/gal to build on our experience. If you needed a JSON parser you would not look for a 100 KLOC implementation full of weird vendor extensions, so why do that for an ethernet driver?

[1] [http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2016-September/046705.html](http://dpdk.org/ml/archives/dev/2016-September/046705.html) [2] [http://www.mellanox.com/related- docs/user_manuals/Ethernet_A...](http://www.mellanox.com/related- docs/user_manuals/Ethernet_Adapters_Programming_Manual.pdf) [3] [https://github.com/snabbco/snabb/blob/mellanox/src/apps/mell...](https://github.com/snabbco/snabb/blob/mellanox/src/apps/mellanox/connectx4.lua)

<comment><USER6> > DPDK is taking the industry in the wrong direction, and application > developers should fight back.

DPDK is doing the exact same work you did, make hardware vendor release their driver API and abstract it away so that Application developer can stay independent from it.

You "successfully lobbyied" for one API to be released. Now do that for any number of hardware, NICs versions, and in the end you will have to release a generic API, which is effectively a new DPDK.

Completely independent applications will only go so far. You are left with a vendor lock-in with a very high upfront cost if you ever need to evolve your hardware.

<comment><USER5> I understand your perspective. If you are satisfied with using a vendor- provided software stack to interface with hardware then you are well catered for by DPDK and do not have to care what is under the hood.

I feel that the hardware-software interface is fundamental and that vendors should not control the software. I see an analogy to CPUs. I am really happy that CPU vendors document their instruction sets and support independent compiler developers. I would be disappointed if they started keeping their instruction sets confidential, available only under NDA, and told everybody to just use their LLVM backend without understanding it.

<comment><USER6> That is effectively the case. See for example DDIO with Intel which can only be enabled for specific devices with full cooperation between Intel and this particular vendor.

You cannot compete with a DDIO-enabled device, which of course all Intel devices are.

See also the Intel multibuffer crypto library, which was specialized and timed for Intel CPUs. No one else could write at this level of optimization, because we do not have the internal design and simulator that Intel work with.

So yeah, you are talking with sophisticated hardware which will have firmware blobs and undocumented features. If you only rely on general instructions sets you will only get so far. When we are talking about ns of latency and these level of bandwidth, they make the difference between several stacks.

The push for smart-NICs will increasingly blur the line between soft and hard layer. We can either direct our efforts so as to avoid rewriting an abstraction layer upon it or do so for each vendor-specific API (OFED is but one example, there will be others).

<comment><USER5> I will respectfully disagree :).

We have taken Intel's reference code ([https://github.com/lukego/intel- ipsec/blob/master/code/avx2/...](https://github.com/lukego/intel- ipsec/blob/master/code/avx2/gcm_avx_gen4.asm)) for high-speed AES-GCM encryption and used DynASM ([https://luajit.org/dynasm.html](https://luajit.org/dynasm.html)) to refactor it as a much smaller program ([https://github.com/snabbco/snabb/blob/master/src/lib/ipsec/a...](https://github.com/snabbco/snabb/blob/master/src/lib/ipsec/aes_128_gcm_avx.dasl)). I see this as highly worthwhile: we are working on making the software ecosystem simpler and tighter just because we are hackers, while Intel are working primarily on selling CPUs and whatever is best for their bottom line.

I disagree with this characterization of DDIO but I don't think Hacker News comments is the best venue for such low-level discussions. Hope to chat with you about it in some more suitable forum some time :) that would be fun.

<comment><USER7> FWIW, I would be quite interested in your view on DDIO - anything you can link?

<comment><USER5> Intel DDIO FAQ: [http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/...](http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/faqs/data- direct-i-o-faq.pdf)

My understanding is that DDIO is an internal feature of the processor and works transparently with all PCI devices. Basically Intel extended the processor "uncore" to serve PCIe DMA requests via the L3 cache rather than directly to memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for resurrecting my article! :) It was originally wrote for one russian site and I do not have spare time to translate it.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's still not a lot of oomph left over to do anything with the traffic...or is that not the point of the exercise? You're not going to be comparing it, or writing it to disk at these levels.

This traffic is a bit above the levels I've dealt with, but I've seen Cloud Datacenter levels of traffic that, as far as I know, you can't practically log/monitor/IPS/SIEM...or am I misinformed?

<comment><USER10> > you can't practically log/monitor/IPS/SIEM...or am I misinformed?

It depends the hardware you're using (specifically router), but using netflow / sflow / ipfix [0] you can get pretty high visibility even for high bandwidth networks. This only gets you "metadata" and not a full packet capture - <USER2> for monitoring and the like, the metadata can be far more useful.

I'm not entirely sure what level of traffic you're talking about, but I know it's possible with the right hardware to use netflow with 100GbE links without having to sample (ie: Recording flows for every packet, not 1 in every n packets)

[0]: Good sflow vs. netflow beakdown: [http://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/a/1335](http://networkengineering.stackexchange.com/a/1335)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's great, but how do you then get that many packets to _disk_ so that you can do something with them?

Presumably you need flash drives, and probably an append-only filesystem?

<comment><USER12> > but how do you then get that many packets to disk

it _may_ be possible to do disk i/o at that high rate e.g. with pci-e or a dedicated appliance for dumping the entire stream. but you would running out of storage pretty fast.

for example, a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, where you dump packet stream from 4x10gbps cards with minimal 84b size (on ethernet), show that you would exhaust the storage in approx. 4.5 minutes :)

<comment><USER11> 40 Gigabits per second is roughly 4 Gigabytes per second.

4 Gigabytes per second times 86400 seconds per day is 345,600 Gigabytes per day.

Roughly: 345 Terabytes per day.

Large, but not stupidly so.

<comment> m-app 40 Gbps would actually be _exactly_ 5 Gigabytes per second (divided by 8).

<comment><USER11> While I don't know the exact overhead of 10GigE, there is likely still some overhead.

At the lower speeds, things like 8b/10b encoding and Reed-Solomon ECC added enough overhead that dividing by 10 was more accurate than dividing by 8.

<comment><USER12> > While I don't know the exact overhead of 10GigE, there is likely still some > overhead.

on 10gige pipes, at max Ethernet mtu (1500) bytes etc, there is approx. 94% of available bandwidth for user data (accounting for things like inter-frame-gap, crc checksums etc). with jumbo-frames that number goes to 99%.

<comment><USER11> Okay, so call it 10% overhead (actually 8%) if we're taking a WAG (wild *ss guess).

That would mean that I would need to divide by about roughly nine (8.8 or so).

Sorry, I can't do divide-by-nine quickly in my head. I can do divide by 10 though, and my error is roughly 10%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If anyone is interested I wrote a lock-free, c/c++ free, implementation of an AF_PACKET socket abstraction in Golang:

[https://github.com/nathanjsweet/zsocket](https://github.com/nathanjsweet/zsocket)

I haven't implemented fan-out at all, but if anybody is interested in adding it, I'd happily apply they're pull-request.

</comment><comment><USER14> What's the point of capturing and storing 40 Gb/s of network traffic?

<comment><USER15> analysis, IDS, etc.

The inability to analyze traffic at this rate is a serious problem. How do you study it to see how protocols can be improved? A lab environment cannot compare to real world traffic. How do you detect attacks (not DoS!) if it's hidden in a link operating at this capacity?

<comment><USER14> Even if you can capture the traffic at wire speed, the CPU doesn't have the power to analyse the stream. I thought that traffic analysers had to be done with FPGA/ASIC because of that.

<comment><USER15> My manager did his thesis on this. Endace NICs, split traffic up and send to a cluster of IDS servers. Allows you to actually do line rate analysis. No need for FPGA/ASIC.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


I'd rather publish these here than with Nature - <AUTHOR> https://onarbor.com/sites/biology <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I'm a molecular biologist at Harvard and have published several times in Nature, Science, and Cell, premier journals in our field. Ask me anything.

<comment><USER2> I wish I had cottoned on to how interesting molecular biology is when I was in grade school. But as regards this outlet, I have two questions:

1\. Is the tumblr-like format not a barrier to compared to the more typical presentation of Abstract, full paper and so on? I found the UI pretty unwieldy, but OTOH that's just a teething problem.

2\. As a well-established resercher, you still mention the journals as the 'gold standard' of quality. Obviously up-and-coming researchers desperately want the recognition of being published in a prestigious forum like that in order to advance their careers. What do you think would be the 'tipping point' for publication in a new format journal like Onarbor to be sufficiently prestigious for citing on a resume, attracting funding and so forth?

It's a nice site, but I can't help a feeling of 'academics reinvent tumblr, hail it as the future of publishing.'

<comment><AUTHOR> Great questions.

1\. tumblr-like format: feeds are the most common UI and are standard for billions of people on the internet. Traditional academic publishing format are known to significantly less than 1 million people. Onarbor would rather satisfy the former.

2\. "What do you think would be the 'tipping point' for publication in a new format". Onarbor devised the tipping point to be similar to what Stackoverflow (SO) is doing with Reputation for computer programmers (REF below). The reputation you earn on SO is replacing the C.V. in hiring decisions across silicon valley. Onarbor more or less replicates SO's Reputation system with the analogous intent to replace existing academia advancement mechanisms.

"It's a nice site, but I can't help a feeling of 'academics reinvent tumblr, hail it as the future of publishing.'"

Onarbor is publishing and funding in one site. So the real goal is to do away with Nature and the NIH at the same time. Try funding a work. Your experience will quickly diverge from that you've had on Tumblr.

ref: [http://stackoverflow.com/help/whats- reputation](http://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation)

<comment><USER2> It's a great concept that deserves to succeed, and building the funding aspect in at the infrastructure level might make a big difference. I also like the deeper ambition o redefining the university - as an outsider to that system I just feel a bit skeptical by default.

I'll dig into it further and see what happens!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't get it. Are you just trying to get money from people who aren't qualified to critique your work? Publish in PLOS One if you really want to get something out.

<comment><AUTHOR> No journal besides Onarbor gives you money to publish. In fact, most journals charge you thousands of dollars to publish (PLOS One charges $1,200). Onarbor is publishing and funding in one platform, there is no comparison with any journal.

Also, Onarbor enables infinite reviews. PLOS One and other journals have 2-3 reviewers, whom in most cases are your cronies who will accept your work no matter what. Traditional evaluation is broken and virtually no academics respect it. Onarbor easily 10X's the status quo of vetting work.

<comment><USER3> _Onarbor is publishing and funding in one platform_

Great pitch, but it's still just an attempt to end-run the funding process. There should indeed be systematic solutions to the current problems, but this attempt is just a recipe for funding snake oil.

 _Traditional evaluation is broken and virtually no academics respect it._

There's plenty to criticize about peer review and about the big journals, but to say "virtually no academics respect it" is just factually untrue.

<comment><AUTHOR> "this attempt is just a recipe for funding snake oil."

Everything is snake oil and an end-run. Have you ever read Nature? Have you ever submitted a grant to the NIH?

""virtually no academics respect it" is just factually untrue." Virtually no reasonable academics respect it.

Read this, an interview of Sydney Brenner, no doubt one of the most important biologist ever. [http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2014/02/24/how- academ...](http://kingsreview.co.uk/magazine/blog/2014/02/24/how-academia-and- publishing-are-destroying-scientific-innovation-a-conversation-with-sydney- brenner/)

<comment><USER3> _Everything is snake oil and an end-run._

It sounds to me like you're conceding the argument. I don't disagree with your sentiments about the quality of review, but manufacturing an outlet to completely sidestep peer review (the key word being "peer") does nothing to improve the situation. In fact, it runs directly counter to your stated ambitions.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've already addressed peer review with you earlier in this thread. You need to look closer at the site.

Also, Onarbor devised reputation building to be similar to what Stackoverflow (SO) is doing with Reputation for computer programmers (REF below). The reputation you earn on SO is replacing the C.V. in hiring decisions across silicon valley. Onarbor more or less replicates SO's Reputation system with the analogous intent to replace existing academia advancement mechanisms.

ref: [http://stackoverflow.com/help/whats- reputation](http://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't get it. What is this about? You have to write up your results or else people outside of your specialty will not be able to appreciate your findings. Publish somewhere instead of just throwing up some figures.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am a bioinformatician currently doing research. I don't really get this website. Is it a crowd funding website or a publisher? Or both? So the point is that you publish a proposal and people back it?

I think the site needs to be more explicit on its goals. The interface and design of the site also needs to step it up a bit to appeal to a wider audience.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Is it a crowd funding website or a publisher? Or both?"

Both. Onarbor is publishing and funding in one platform. What specific about the design needs to be stepped up to appeal to a wider audience?

<comment><USER5> How does that work? So you publish a proposal, people back it, you get funding for your work, then you publish on the same site? They seem like two very different services. How are you synergizing the crowd funding aspect with the publishing aspect?

In terms of the interface:

\- Too much white space in the main page makes it look like you just don't have enough content.

\- Instead of the tour, "trying onarbor", I would explicitly describe what it is and its goals. A tour of something I vaguely understand just confuses me more.

\- Using the iframes on the frontpage to display projects depends completely on having an appealing image which not all your projects will have. I would simplify that down to a thumbnail with text so you can display more content. Or a better format so you can provide both the image and description visibly.

\- When you click on the iframe in the front page to go to the projects page, the whole browser window should go to the projects page, not just inside the iframe.

\- Is there no link to browse projects from the front page?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your questions.

"How does that work? So you publish a proposal, people back it, you get funding for your work, then you publish on the same site? They seem like two very different services. "

Onarbor is flexibly structured. It is up to the work creators to decide what/when to post.

"How are you synergizing the crowd funding aspect with the publishing aspect?"

The crowdfunding is that anyone can back a work and that Onarbor requires at least one person to back the work within the 1st week it is published. If nobody backs the work within one week, then the work creator has the option to self-back it to keep it live on the site.

"Too much white space in the main page makes it look like you just don't have enough content."

We don't have enough content yet but are looking for submissions :). We just launched last week.

"A tour of something I vaguely understand just confuses me more."

On the homepage, we can include a "Read more" link to reveal a longer description. That is a good suggestion. We tried to do that in the slideshow with the last slide by directing people to the help page, [https://onarbor.com/help](https://onarbor.com/help).

"Using the iframes... appealing image".

This was a toss-up for us. We wanted to show off that all the works could be embeds on any site (like a Youtube video but with payment buttons!).

"Is there no link to browse projects".

Another good suggestion. Onarbor is divided into sites, such as [https://onarbor.com/sites/biology](https://onarbor.com/sites/biology), where site-specific work is displayed. We will add a link on the homepage to browse sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A question about hype since I know almost nothing about biology;

Is this possible? - [http://microfabricator.com/articles/view/id/538989659aad9d53...](http://microfabricator.com/articles/view/id/538989659aad9d533400009b/a-new- idea-for-colonizing-space-3d-printing-humans-on-other-planets)

<comment><USER7> Any kind of information has been successfully stored in bacteria (one example: [1]), so it should be possible, but not easy to get that information to another planet, especially since the human genome is much bigger than what we can currently store in bacteria. The human genome is about 3.2 gigabasepairs, a bacterial artificial chromosome can carry around 300 kilobasepairs, so you'd need quite a few of these.

The actual '3D printing' is still far from possible, but not impossible. We can synthesize DNA, but we can't synthesize bacteria (even though we now can make artificial bacteria, but these are based on already existing bacteria from which the DNA has been removed [2]).

Once we can synthesize bacteria we can go to bigger things like fungi, other animals, humans. I'd give it 100-200 years.

[1] [http://www.ijcaonline.org/archives/volume69/number19/12083-8...](http://www.ijcaonline.org/archives/volume69/number19/12083-8322)

[2] [http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100520/full/news.2010.253.ht...](http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100520/full/news.2010.253.html)</comment></comment>


If you aren't embarrassed by past work, you're not improving - <AUTHOR> https://www.gkogan.co/blog/progression/ <comment><USER2> Past work? I'm embarrassed by what I'm doing _now_.

<comment><USER3> Can totally relate. Your comment made my day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good advice, but the article adds _nothing_ to the headline.

<comment><USER5> That's because this article is really just a thinly veiled ad for his consulting company.</comment></comment>


Colma, Calif., Is a Town of 2.2 Square Miles, Most of It 6 Feet Deep (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/09/us/09cemetery.html <comment><USER2> I recently took a walk around Colma. The cemetaries were in fact the least creepy part of that town. Walkways leading nowhere covered in racially charged graffiti, lack of sidewalks along the roads, and sprawling parking lots occupied the area not reserved for the dead.

I walked past some sort of workshop that made tombstones. I took a picture of some tombstones on display outside, since they looked kind of cool. Some worker there started asking me: "Are you here to buy one? Then why the hell are you taking pictures of them?!" Not the most inviting place. The graveyards were nice though.

<comment><USER3> > I walked past some sort of workshop that made tombstones. I took a picture > of some tombstones on display outside, since they looked kind of cool. Some > worker there started asking me: "Are you here to buy one? Then why the hell > are you taking pictures of them?!"

I mean, I can see where they are coming from, that's kinda disrespectful to the dead. I wouldn't want you to take pictures of my recently passed away father's headstone just so you could put a cool filter on it, load it up with edgy hashtags and get likes on your instagram. :(

<comment><USER4> I think they were display headstones, outside the workshop that makes them.

<comment><USER3> ... maybe. Maybe they were pre-orders waiting for customers to come pick them up. Who knows. Either way, still kinda tacky and in poor taste, imo. Grief shouldn't be a sideshow for kitchy photo-ops.

<comment><USER5> Maybe they were tombstones for dead teenagers who would have appreciated you taking a selfie with their tombstone, putting a cool filter on it, loading it up with edgy hashtags and getting likes on your instagram. Each generation has its own way that they want to be remembered. YOLO!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Colma is a lovely necropolis. I went there once to visit the grave of Emperor Norton I, one of my personal heroes. I'm still disappointed they didn't name the Bay Bridge after him.

</comment><comment><USER3> Colma is home to a simply amazing bar. Go there if you are ever in town. It's awesome and everyone is so friendly.

[https://www.yelp.com/biz/molloys-tavern-south-san- francisco](https://www.yelp.com/biz/molloys-tavern-south-san-francisco)

<comment><USER7> Said bar was mentioned in the article, even.

<comment><USER3> well, that's just uncanny :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I once lived there for a few months. The first day I arrived, I opened by window and looked at the view and thought "Wow this place has a beautiful view, no buildings, all nature... wait... what are all those things on the ground?"

</comment><comment><USER9> Colma was the inspiration for Buckethead's best album:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKQypgRJ9vU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKQypgRJ9vU)

^ excellent focus music!

<comment><USER10> damn dude. i did not put two-n-two together. That is a really good album! :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> You're 800% more likely to get robbed in Colma than in the average US city (based on per capita crime stats).

I always found that as the fun fact nobody mentions about Colma. It's usually just graveyard talk.

<comment><USER12> Are you sure?

[http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Colma-California.html](http://www.city- data.com/crime/crime-Colma-California.html)

It's a really quiet and boring place where you go to Home Depot and Target. It looks like theft is more likely than robbery. I don't live in Colma, but I know SF and Oakland are much worse.

<comment><USER13> I would guess the high crime statistic is just a quirk of the fact that Colma has very few residents, but many more people visit from neighboring communities for shopping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Skylawn [1], a few miles south, is about the same size as the biggest cemetery in Colma, and it's still expanding. The scale of the place isn't visible from the highway. It's on Lifemark Road (Their slogan: "Every life leaves its mark") off of CA 92 at the summit near CA 35. Their section with sample gravestone sculptures is worth a visit. Some of them are humorous.

[1] [https://goo.gl/maps/T971V3ChLL62](https://goo.gl/maps/T971V3ChLL62)

</comment><comment><USER15> Cremation for me, thanks.

I think as the world very very slowly loses its religion, this kind of waste will finally come to an end in a few centuries.

Then there is the Tibetan "sky burial" which is amazing.

<comment><USER16> Cremation apparently requires much more energy than burial and has a large carbon footprint. Perhaps it's simply another kind of waste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> FWIW, the NYT did a new story about Colma a few weeks ago, with the Super Bowl happening nearby:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/06/sports/football/the- town-o...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/06/sports/football/the-town-of- colma-where-san-franciscos-dead-live.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> >"We have 1,500 aboveground residents," Mayor Helen Fisicaro said

>Today the little city has many thriving businesses, including car dealerships, two Home Depots, shopping centers and a game room.

Two Home Depots for 1,500 residents? People don't generally build the coffin at the burial.

Something tells me there is a lot more supporting that town than just their cemeteries.

<comment><USER19> There's two Targets I believe too.

<comment><USER20> It's insane. You literally leave one Target parking lot, drive under the freeway and turn into another Target parking lot. I would have decision paralysis even picking one.

<comment><USER21> The one at Serramonte Shopping Center is almost always busy/crowded. Parking can be absolutely awful. That's since it's a mall. When the "Colma" Target didn't have a pharmacy, that was the one advantage that the Serramonte one had over it.

Nowadays it's almost always better to go to the Colma one if possible to avoid the crowd.

I think someone told me a while back that the one at Serramonte is one of the best-selling Target locations in the country, which I can definitely believe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's a lovely place. I've got several family members buried there, and the graves are well looked after.

As a non-American it reminds me of how everything in America is bigger. Haven't looked at the numbers, but it's probably bigger than even the WWI memorials in northern France.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm surprised no one's mentioned this novel: Alive in Necropolis, by Doug Dorst: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2439336.Alive_in_Necropo...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2439336.Alive_in_Necropolis)

</comment><comment><USER24> Colma a also features a passable par 3 golf course (as of 2005 anyway). A good option if the municipal is too full of a weekend. Out of bounds in many areas is guarded by the deceased.

</comment><comment><USER25> Prime real estate that could otherwise help lower housing costs.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's more people underground in Colma than there are above it.

<comment><USER27> At least the mayor is quoted in the article as saying so:

      "We have 1,500 aboveground residents," Mayor Helen Fisicaro
      said, "and 1.5 million underground."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Not a good place to be during the zombie apocalypse.</comment>


The Royal Society puts historic papers online - <AUTHOR> http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/

<comment><USER2> How well is the user interface working for you? With one browser, I get a frozen screen, and with another I get a paywall from that site.

<comment><USER3> Works alright here. Safari 4.0.4 (ha) on OS X 10.6

e.g. try this link: <http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/6/69-80/3075> (Newton's letter on optics)</comment></comment>