Libraries.io – Open-Source Discovery Service - <AUTHOR> http://libraries.io/ <comment><USER2> More details on how it works in this blog post: [https://medium.com/@teabass/solving-open-source-discovery- db...](https://medium.com/@teabass/solving-open-source-discovery-db43a04cd9e7)

</comment><comment><USER3> Browsing C++ and coming up mostly with nodejs libraries. [http://libraries.io/search?languages=C%2B%2B&order=desc&sort...](http://libraries.io/search?languages=C%2B%2B&order=desc&sort=rank)

<comment><USER2> Currently I'm only pulling data from package managers like rubygems and npm, I couldn't find a C++ one yet, although [https://www.biicode.com/](https://www.biicode.com/) looks handy for that, I'll investigate.

<comment><USER4> C and C++ is usually packaged with the OS's package manager, like dpkg, rpm, pacman, etc.

The closest thing to rubygems might be Portage (1) or AUR (2). You might be able to search each of those for "c++". Or maybe peek into the constituent files for ' __.c ' or ' __.cpp ', ' __.cxx ', etc.

1) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portage_%28software%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portage_%28software%29)

2) [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice to see that even my package manager for the Nim programming language is there. Pity that the language is still called "Nimrod" there though.

<comment><USER2> I'm using [https://github.com/github/linguist](https://github.com/github/linguist) for language information, still waiting for this pr to be merged for the Nimrod => Nim change: [https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/1936](https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/1936)

<comment><USER5> I see. I wonder what's taking them so long. In any case I am impressed that you implemented support for Nimble :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Quick feedback: Browsing the Go section, each sub directory(at all depths) in the Docker project seems to be listed as a separate project. Leads to showing a few pages of results linking to the same project(ie, Docker). Also may explain why Go seems to have far more number of projects listed than anything else. :)

Update: Better wording

</comment><comment><USER7> One feature that would be helpful is to parse various formats of dependency specification (Node's package.json, pip's requirements.txt, Maven, etc.) and use that to build dependency lists so that I can (a) get notified of updates and (b) get a list of licenses for internal license audits.

<comment><USER2> Yep, I'm working on that at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be great if:

\- it sorted searches by GitHub starts (otherwise for any popular thing, you get first tons of stuff, in a non-relevant order),

\- for PyPI, there is also anther figure of merit, i.e. no of downloads (most are open source, but some are on other repositories),

\- in general, for Python it misses some very popular packages... for example, [http://libraries.io/search?q=networkx](http://libraries.io/search?q=networkx) is from PyPI but not from Python (why?).

Otherwise, a very needed idea! I wanted to do my own some time ago ([http://pypi.meteor.com/](http://pypi.meteor.com/)), but didn't have time to bring it to a useful (or nice) version.

<comment><USER2> You can sort by stars, there's just not a UI yet: [http://libraries.io/search?order=desc&sort=stars](http://libraries.io/search?order=desc&sort=stars)

Pypi is lacking in information but I'm working on pulling it from other sources to improve the quality for Python libraries.

<comment><USER8> For PyPI it is rather straightforward to get downloads information: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21419009/json-api-for- pyp...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21419009/json-api-for-pypi-how-to- list-packages) (along with some other data, e.g. categorization). See example: [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/seaborn/json](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/seaborn/json)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A few of the OCaml projects are showing up under Standard ML [1]. A little disappointing since anyone using OCaml would really benefit from finding out about Merlin (see the link).

This is due to a recent issue (or regression) with how GitHub's Linguist disambiguates code, which I hope will be fixed soon [2].

[1] [http://libraries.io/search?languages=Standard+ML](http://libraries.io/search?languages=Standard+ML)

[2] [https://github.com/github/linguist/issues/2208](https://github.com/github/linguist/issues/2208)

<comment><USER2> At the moment we lean completely on linguist for language detection, which isn't perfect but gets us a good amount of the way there.

Once we've got OPAM support more OCaml libraries will start to show up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why can't this library [http://libraries.io/npm/debug](http://libraries.io/npm/debug) be found in this list? [http://libraries.io/search?keywords=debug&platforms=NPM](http://libraries.io/search?keywords=debug&platforms=NPM)

<comment><USER2> The keyword filtering is slightly borked at the moment, this does work though: [http://libraries.io/search?platforms=NPM&q=debug](http://libraries.io/search?platforms=NPM&q=debug)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Good idea but doesn't seem entirely accurate.

This project[[http://libraries.io/maven/org.bitbucket.b_c:jose4j](http://libraries.io/maven/org.bitbucket.b_c:jose4j)] was updated last week but Libraries.io says it hasn't been updated since last year.

<comment><USER12> OTOH, I pushed a new version of [http://libraries.io/rubygems/manticore](http://libraries.io/rubygems/manticore) on Sunday and it's found it. Maybe different repos have different update feeds or something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Open source discovery... makes me think of freshmeat, later renamed to freecode.com, no longer maitained since a while ago. And before freshmeat, sourceforge... it was always more interesting to me as a catalog than as a hosting provider.

</comment><comment><USER14> [http://versioneye.com/](http://versioneye.com/) is similar to this and allows to monitor dependency files like pom.xml, Gemfile.lock, package.json, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> Are Go libraries split up more granular than npm packages? Surprises me Go has such a large number of projects listed.

<comment><USER2> They are at the moment, Go doesn't have a central repository like npmjs.org, each project is just a url that you can "go get", I'm trying to find a good way to group them that keeps the full dependency graph intact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks very interesting. Can't seem to find Qt though, but lots of related things, like qt bindings for node.js

</comment><comment><USER17> weird there's no not many python entries... where it seems there's way more than 16k package in it (ie: [https://alexgaynor.net/2014/jan/03/pypi-download- statistics/](https://alexgaynor.net/2014/jan/03/pypi-download-statistics/))

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't understand why Wordpress is considered a platform next to npm, bower, pypi etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> Searching "dancer" brought up related perl modules but not the primary one.

</comment><comment><USER20> How is it that Go seems to be the most popular?</comment>


What life is like in a state where firefighters are paid voluntarily - <AUTHOR> http://theferrett.livejournal.com/995765.html

<comment><USER4> This is coming up because of the Tennessee "firefighters watched it burn over $75" story. But there's backstory to that story.

The fire department in question served a nearby town, and had no responsibility for the area where the fire occurred. As a service to people living outside their area, you could pay $75/year to get "out of area" coverage. The people who lost their house did _two things_ to keep them from being covered: they didn't pay the fee, _and they chose to live in an area without a fire department_.

There are many thousands of communities in the US that don't have official fire departments; a large subset of them have no fire service whatsoever. It can't be the responsibility of every other community in their vicinity to provide fire service _gratis_.

I know 'jrockway finds it hard to believe, but I am as liberal as they come. Even I don't think that when you choose to live in East Bumfuzzle, TN that you're automatically entitled to the services of the West Bumfuzzle, TN fire department.

<comment><USER5> But nobody is suggesting they should have just put the fire out for _free_. They should have put the fire out and billed him a sum many times higher than what the insurance premium would have been. The idea of insurance is to cap your liability, not to be a precondition for receiving any assistance.

<comment><USER4> Where does that logic end? If I build a house in Paulville, TX ("a gated community consisting of 100% Ron Paul supporters" on unincorporated land in West Texas), is the fire department of Dell City, TX obligated to put out fires there? How does that make sense?

<comment><USER5> Assuming it's the nearest town and someone in Paulville begs them to do so at any price, yes. And then you hand them a fat bill and if they don't pay, enforce it via the court, something you seem not to have considered.

I am in no way suggesting that someone who is too cheap to buy a reasonable fee like $75 should get bailed out when they suddenly want in because their house is on fire, that's nothing more than rewarding irresponsibility. But it is not the only alternative to letting the house burn, a false dichotomy if ever I saw one.

There are two reasons to require that the FD respond if they can reasonably do so. One is economic; the limited damage and bill for extinguishing a fire might total to a $15,000 loss for the homeowner. If household earnings are $30,000/yr that's 6 months of work to pay it all back. But if the house burns to the ground, the loss is much higher; even in rural TN it's probably _at least_ $75,000 up in smoke. That's a much bigger loss to the economy. Visualize it as a big bunch of dollar bills laid out along the ground, that starts burning from one end. I'm standing there with a bucket of water and you're offering me $5000 to put out the fire, which will leave the owner with 80% of the total, but I refuse and let it all burn because I'm still upset about your prior refusal to put down $75. Does that seem like a sensible policy? Am I somehow better off by your loss?

The other reason is legalist. The fire department has an effective monopoly on putting out fires, because only they have the necessary trucks and expertise. The homeowner didn't have the option of calling a competing fire department the way you would call a different cab company if the first one was unhelpful. Nor could one easily put out the fire oneself. In such a case, there's often a greater legal obligation to assist than usual.

Here, the fire department's non-action resulted in a _much_ greater economic loss to the homeowner than if they had turned up and billed him. And they could have billed him, because a principle called _quantum meruit_ means you can get a court to enforce payment for providing a necessary service even if no contract exists. Arguably, that extra economic loss, which only the fire department could have prevented, was intentionally inflicted. You can bet a case like that will go to court, and make the whole situation even more expensive.

<comment><USER4> I actually priced doublewides before posting earlier. It's not $75,000. In rural areas, you can get doublewides for under $20,000. A crappy one might go for as little as $15k list.

In any case: I simply can't get around the fact that we're talking about a guy who deliberately moved to a locale that didn't have fire service. I can't understand what moral obligation could require the fire department from another city to come to his aid. We're all hung up on the fact that the fire department "stood by" and "watched his house burn down". But it _wasn't his fire department!_

<comment><USER5> The dollar amount is irrelevant, it's the principle of whether there is some duty to act or not. By this I mean legal rather than moral duty. They're two different things, though you could say that there might be some moral duty towards the neighbors who are otherwise going to have to live next to a charred shell.

If the guy calls up the fire department and they say 'sorry, busy fighting fires in our own town,' then too bad, that's what he gets for living in the boonies. But if they can help, and they are the only ones who can help, but they don't, it's a totally different situation. In those cases where they turn up and just watch, it's worse than not turning up at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "But it had to be done. Because if people knew that the firemen would save them free of charge, then nobody would pay. And if people knew that you could avoid paying the firemen up until the moment that first spark hit your curtain, well, again, nobody would pay."

Exactly. Nobody wants someone stranger's house to burn down, but part of the rules of living there was that you'd pay your portion if you wanted protection.

On another site, I saw someone write a comment like "When my house was robbed, the insurance companies just stood there and did nothing! I offered to pay them afterwards, but they wouldn't agree!" (Obvious sarcasm.) Insurance doesn't work if you only pay it -after- you have a problem.

<comment><USER7> >> Insurance doesn't work if you only pay it -after- you have a problem.

It's been said in several other places but this sort of intellectual dishonesty can't be left alone.

There are a plethora of examples currently in place in society that work well where if an uninsured person requires assistance they pay AT COST. If they can't afford out of pocket they set up a payment schedule.

<comment><USER8> That would create an incentive for firefighters to burn down people's houses. I'm not saying they would, but it's best not to create such situations.

It would be harder to determine the right price to charge people. It's not the water that costs anything, it's the equipment. Remember, this organization is not seeking to make a profit, just cover costs. If people pay in advance, you charge (number of houses / cost of maintenance). Very straightforward. If people pay after the fact, you have to charge (number of houses that will burn down / cost of maintenance). But you don't know in advance how many houses will burn down.

Finally, while letting a house burn down is an ugly business, it's also pretty ugly when you have to send out collections. You already know they were too poor or irresponsible to pay the fee upfront, so it's not like they have a nest egg sitting around.

<comment><USER7> Already, for the uninsured, if you break a leg and need an ambulance ride you get one. It costs an arm (in addition to your wounded leg) but you get it.

Would you say this creates an incentive for EMTs and paramedics to break people's legs?

Again, systems are in place to already collect from people who can't afford lump sum payments. Amortized scheduling occurs in pretty much every industry.

Yes, a certain number of people cannot and perhaps will not pay. But the net benefit to society is manifest when your neighbor's house isn't burnt to the ground.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is what it's like to live in a place where "taxation" is a dirty four letter word. Call me a commie, but I'm glad I live in a place where public safety, road maintenance and health care are a shared civic responsibility. Everyone who can afford to pays and everyone benefits.

<comment><USER10> What happens if you don't pay your taxes? You don't need to wait for an accident that may never happen like the house catching fire, armed men will shortly arrive on your doorstep demanding that you do.

Just saying that there are two sides to every coin.

<comment><USER9> What happens if I don't pay my taxes? Lots of annoying letters and then, eventually, maybe a court order plus fines etc.

They don't demand money at gunpoint. And they'll still send the firetrucks if my house is on fire. We're a little more civilized than that.

One of the reasons for universal fire service is to avoid the harm that comes when people try to do it on their own. You don't want random people - <USER2> homeowners, their kids or passersby - jumping in to fight a fire without the proper training, backup, and equipment.

<comment><USER11> I promise that if you don't pay your taxes and refuse any additional fines, people with guns will knock on your door.

<comment><USER9> Maybe where you live.

<comment><USER12> Hint: the people who will arrive with the guns are police or possibly people who works for the IRS/your tax authorities.

<comment><USER13> Nobody arrives with guns. That only happens when you are wanted for other crimes and the Feds are combining those charges with tax evasion. Tax evasion is also a different charge than simply being delinquent with your taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This ignores the option of putting out the fire and charging more than the fee would ever have been over the life of the house. Pay the fee each year and we'll put out your house for free. Don't pay the fee, and we'll still put out your house if you want us to, but we'll charge 200 years worth of fees.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. The $75 is an insurance fee, not a club membership.

If I shoot myself in the leg and go to the hospital uninsured, they fix me up and then bill me for the cost. They don't let me bleed to death to "teach others a lesson."

We can't have people buying insurance whenever they need it, but it's perfectly OK to have people buy the service that the insurance pays for directly when they need it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I know I'm probably the only one thinking like this, but I find this whole concept - starting from "voluntary" payment right through to "watching their houses burn so they can learn their lesson" - incredibly perverse and morally bankrupt to the extreme.

If your neighbor's house is on fire, you don't haggle over the price of the garden hose. If you're a firefighter equipped to deal with disaster, you do your damn best to do your fucking job whenever the opportunity presents itself.

It would actually be less cruel if there was no local fire brigade at all. What kind of asshole do you have to be if you can just sit there watching a family's home burn down while doing nothing but make pompous remarks?

<comment><USER17> What kind of asshole do you have to be to refuse to pay $6.25 a month and then expect to free ride on a service the rest of the neighborhood paid for?

<comment><USER7> It's demonstrated in the article and elsewhere that they weren't expecting a free ride.

Again, there are numerous examples of systems working where uninsured people pay AT COST. Uninsured? An ambulance ride is really expensive. Uninsured? A broken leg is really expensive.

But you will still get treatment and you will eventually pay the price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I know that people are still up in arms over the Alabama/Tennessee/wherever firefighters that sat and let a house burn because of this, but I honestly don't see a problem with this. For most places, firefighting is a part of taxation. These people have $75 less in taxes, and $75 more as a "optional" insurance policy.

And to all the people saying "Well pay them when they show up", do you drive around without insurance until you crash, and then go to an insurance company with your monthly payment in hand and say "Pretend I've been paying this all along, now go fix my car"? Do you skimp on health insurance payments until you're in the hospital and expect to only have to pay the cost of a month's worth of health insurance? I'm really not seeing why there's such a disconnect here.

And yet, these are the same people that have a problem with the "omg terrible communist" idea of a national health care system. Sheesh.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, tend to agree with this.

In addition to the insurance comparison, which is apt, there is the danger aspect to consider as well. If insuring your house isn't worth less than $7 a month to you, why the hell should the firefighter consider it worth their life (potentially)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here is a video of Tennessee fire-fighters watching a house burn to the ground because the owner didn't pre-pay the annual fee.

[http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/04/county-firefighters- subs...](http://thinkprogress.org/2010/10/04/county-firefighters- subscription/)

<comment><USER6> They weren't 'watching it burn'. They were protecting the neighboring houses. The ones that -had- paid to support the fire department.

<comment><USER20> The firefighting fee was $75. Wouldn't it have been more "economical" to accept what he offered to pay, on the spot, and save the man's house? Instead of teaching him a lesson? He was willing to pay thousands.

I mean, I am all for free market, but libertarians are pushing the limits of common sense just to maintain intellectual consistency. Isn't there a room for "late fee", or "environmental damage", or just good ole "bad PR" in their model?

<comment><USER10> No the _insurance_ was $75. See the difference? Everyone's small fee upfront is what purchased all the equipment. If you wait 'til after, then you've got nothing when you need it.

And a man who won't pay up $75, will he pay thousands _once you've already put the fire out_?

<comment><USER20> It's not just about a single non-paying member. It's unfair to the paying houses around him to have a charred building next to theirs. It would depreciate their property values worse than anything. Not to mention the unsightly view, odors and mess.

Since they're able to constitute these drastic "watch it burn" policies by fiat, why not have a policy entitling the fire department to your car, luxury items, a portion of your income or some of your property if and only if they save your house when you're without policy?

If you have seen drunks and problem gamblers, you would know that not all people are equally responsible. It would be better for society, as a whole, if fees were taken from them in small portions, and put to service when and where they're needed.

<comment><USER21> What "fiat"? Aren't these city governments with city councils, elections, and the other trappings of the democratic process?

<comment><USER20> The law might have been on paper, but the public reaction there, and that of the media, has been one of shock. I have looked into the subject when it arose a few days ago, and this particular policy was one made without public involvement. The entire leadership, every seat in that town was held by GOP members; they cooked up this policy in an attempt to live up to their own idealized expectation of a tax-less government.

Serves the American public right though. They're well versed in toy, divisive issues of "morality", but they're ignorant of laws that affect their lives everyday.

<comment><USER21> So, clear this up for me - is this a secret plan made without public involvement, or is this due to public ignorance and disinterest in the subject, despite the people outside the city being offered the fee every year and the guy in question knowing that he hadn't paid the fee?

And what responsibility do the 300 million members of the "American public" have to know the firefighting policies of some county in Tennessee?

<comment><USER20> Realistically, a legal measure can be considered a popular choice, even democratic, if it was put forth in a ballot, or if the law makers and politicians that proposed it have argued for it in public fora.

What we have here is a crew of GOP politicians who came to power on biblical and national issues; having been financed and propped up by their regional and state offices. The people there, like most everywhere else in the U.S., vote in lock step with their "traditional" parties, for/against issues than don't relate to them on a daily basis.

People will happily vote against their own self-interest because they're under-informed, and held emotionally captive by politicians who invoke moral and religious argument to further their agenda.

Did these people choose to have a dysfunctional fire department? No. They chose less taxes, and smaller government. The GOP, instead of thinking of what's best for the people, decided to stick by their philosophical guns and deprived people of functioning infrastructure.

I will grant you that specific house was outside their taxed jurisdiction. But then comes the next argument: why hasn't the state stepped forward to help its remote citizens? Why hasn't the state of Tennessee dictated a policy of full, state-wide coverage for fire and rescue services for people in remote areas? What's philosophically unacceptable about a state dictating to its cities and towns that they need to support those satellite households? If not, why hasn't the state collected fees from those households to insure them?

Get my drift?

When a gang of politicians has free reign to act out its wildest political fantasies and govern by its most idealized rules, well, shit tends to happen. This is what I meant by "maintaining intellectual consistency". It wouldn't harm ONE TN politician to tax people in remote areas, not ONE. But they chose not to.

<comment><USER21> _Did these people choose to have a dysfunctional fire department?_

Yes. The people of that county have allowed multiple attempts to set up county-wide firefighting services to fail. They've preferred fee-based out-of- area services from a city that has never had any authority to tax them.

There's no "smaller government" aspect here, there's no conspiratorial back- room change by the GOP. There's just bizarre, partisan axe-grinding by people seizing on a lurid story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There is another option.

Cost Per Fire = Fire Department Budget / Number of Fires per year

Looking here: [http://www.ci.bloomington.mn.us/cityhall/dept/fire/budget/bu...](http://www.ci.bloomington.mn.us/cityhall/dept/fire/budget/budget.htm)

They've got about 1200 fires a year and a $3M budget

Which actually works out to $2500 per fire.

So actually, they could charge $2500 to put out the fire and end up at the same place.

So why not a tiered system. 1) $75 per year - no charge for fire extinguishing 2) $5000 - per incident cost to extinguish the fire. This can be taken out as a lien against the property for those without the cash to settle up. Perhaps a property owner does not legally have the right to refuse this service.

The "original spawn" for this post was an article where a fire department allowed a man's house to burn to the ground. Which killed three dogs and a cat.

Allowing three dogs and a cat to die for $2500 doesn't site right with me. In fact it feels downright evil.

I'm sure it doesn't sit right with the firefighters. I'd imagine that they actually have quite a bit of "psychic turmoil" and possibly even "POTS" (post traumatic stress) symptoms because of their being forced to allow animals to die.

What if it were people?

Hopefully hindsight will fix this for the future.

Compared to the actual cost of the fire, the actual numbers paid out by the insurance company, and the actual losses, even $10K would be a deal.

 _Maybe_ if you have fire insurance you shouldn't _ALSO_ have to pay the fire department. Maybe your insurance premiums should cover that (from the article, he does have coverage).

What is the price of life?

In short: this is a major Eff up by a bean counter. It makes me angry.

</comment><comment><USER23> Suppose they did help and one of the firefighters got hurt. It would probably be a violation of their insurance ("Why were you protecting a home not on your coverage list?"). Would the family who was too cheap to pay $75 a year pay for medical costs for that firefighter?

<comment><USER5> Most unlikely. The insuredness or not of a property has little bearing on the dangers it poses compared to any other burning building; it's the accountant who'd be upset, rather than the insurers.

<comment><USER23> When buying insurance for providing a service (especially a dangerous one), there are often conditions about the place these services may be performed and under what condition. It is pretty likely that their insurance policy will only cover them on homes that they are paid to protect. It might also be the case that a certain percentage of each yearly payment goes to insurance.

<comment><USER5> Indeed, but the judgment call about whether a fire can safely be fought would rest with the experts - firefighters.

If I own a very poorly maintained property but my $75, they may be obliged to turn up but I can't force the firefighters to enter an obvious firetrap just because I have a receipt for my payment. They'll do the best they can under the circumstances. The payment or non-payment of a premium tells you nothing about the safety risk of fighting a fire in any given building. Look at some worker's comp policies and you'll find the conditions revolve around the activity performed rather than exactly where that occurred. Otherwise you'd need to assess the financial risk for all possible firefighting scenarios in advance.

Here's an example application for insurance for a volunteer fire department (I can't give you a contract offhand because they're unique to each FD). The insurance company does ask what you claim, but this is in order to calculate what the premium should be. Note that this draws no distinction between whether or not lives are at risk from a given emergency call. If a FD has a policy of responding when that is the case (which they normally would), then the insurance is going to priced to include that anyway. Calls to which a response is purely optional probably make up a tiny fraction of the total, and would have a correspondingly marginal effect on premiums.

[http://www.phly.com/products/forms/VFireDept/VolunteerFireDe...](http://www.phly.com/products/forms/VFireDept/VolunteerFireDepartmentSupplementalApplication.pdf)

<comment><USER23> Actually, the ultimate judge of the actions would be a court not the firefighters. The insurance company would have a good case that the firefighter was hurt trying to protect a non-client and isn't responsible to pay-out insurance on the firefighter's injuries.

As you say, if lives where at risk (not in this situation) and the charter and insurance policies noted the exception, then the insurance company would be on the hook for injury payments. This case didn't involve a person in danger and would probably give the insurance company a very good case for not paying.

<comment><USER5> OK, but when you're considering whether and how to fight a fire in a burning building there's no court to make the decision for you; and even afterwards, all the expert witnesses are going to be firefighters talking about the particular risks presented by the particular structure.

 _If_ the insurance policy draws a distinction between whether or not lives at risk when a non-subscriber's call is answered, then the insurance company may have a case as you describe. But your comment seems to assume this is the norm, whereas the questionnaires I've looked at don't make that distinction.

Remember such insurance policies (issued to a FD) are upon life and limb, rather than on department revenue stability. An insurance company would challenge a payout if they felt the fire department (perhaps because of bad training or staffing policy) foolishly ordered a crew into an impossibly dangerous situation resulting in injury or death, even if the property owner was a paying subscriber. In reality, fire crews sometimes have to let a property burn and just try to stop the fire spreading, because the presence of chemicals or an unsafe building structure makes it too risky to enter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The solution of including the cost of fire fighting in the cost of owning the house itself helps fix what I see as the mistake in thinking that I don't benefit from having my neighbors house fire put out.

If volunteer fire fighters are told by the people who they protect that it is ok to watch a house burn (because necessary costs were not covered somehow) then philosophically what is to stop them from not helping when I don't slip them extra money because their labor is volunteer anyway? I think this eats at the soul of the community.

<comment><USER10> These guys volunteered for a job that might involve getting burnt alive. So I think their value-system likely precludes corruption of that sort.

<comment><USER5> That'd be nice, but sadly it's not the world we live in. Arson committed by firefighters is a small but expensive problem for the people who run fire departments. [http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/tr-141.pd...](http://www.usfa.dhs.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/tr-141.pdf)

Doctors are supposed to be moral paragons too, but every so often one is revealed to be abusing their trust in some horrific fashion.

<comment><USER10> Were these not part-time volunteer firefighters?

<comment><USER5> Not necessarily, no. See for example p9, which documents two famous cases involving full-time professionals. Good screening practices seem to help a lot, but as you know perfect security is an unattainable goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The reason this makes sense in Alaska is that a lot of places aren't accessible to the fire service - if your cabin out in the woods with no road burns down the fire service can't get a ladder truck there so why are you paying?

This used to be the policy with private fire services in most cities - <USER3> somebody realised that the house of a poor person with no insurance burning could start a fire that could destroy the city - so it makes sense to put out that fire, in the same way that it makes sense to give people free vaccinations against TB if they are going to cough next to you on the subway.

Interesting that the police are still covered by commie taxes - if the firemen wanted protection they should have paid the annual police tax, or got a better deal from a private security firm, or just bought their own guns.

</comment><comment><USER26> Flagged.

This is a livejournal link, the content of which is a tedious 710 word polemic of no lasting value, zero cited sources and an overabundance of emotionally charged outrage triggers.

Not HN material at all.</comment>


Entrepreneurs: Why do you need VC anyway? - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2010/09/26/entrepreneurs-why-do-you-need-vc-anyway/

<comment><USER2> I shouldn't feed the troll, but:

1) Scoble hasn't started a company. As far as I can tell he jumps from one major corporate sponsor to another. Based on his background I don't think he's qualified to talk about this. Correct me if I'm mistaken. I know he reports on startups a lot, but well, I like going to the zoo but I have no idea how to change an elephant's diaper.

2) PCH (cited in this article) raised VC:

<http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/29/21-million-for-mr-china/>

My opinion, I think you can get away with saying "you don't need VC to do great things", but certain types of business are going to need VC. Plain and simple.

If you're making software where your marginal costs per user are low, but ARPU is high, then if you have the talent and determination you can probably bootstrap until you're in the black. For some reason people get it into their heads that this is the archetypal web startup. It's not. Some need tons of initial capital outlay, some don't get profitable until there is massive scale.

And lets not forget that VC isn't just about money.</comment>


Keep Ruby Weird Again [video] - <AUTHOR> http://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2016-10-31-keep-ruby-weird-again.html <comment><USER2> I loved this video because I got all the references.

I sit on the Ruby on Rails facebook group, and its flooded with people from India trying to learn ruby. What I find unusual is they publish tutorials when there are plenty of good sources such as Railscasts, but its like the last 10 years doesn't exist to them and they rehash tutorials.

Ruby was great before javascript frameworks. I haven't gotten around to using turbolinks but its strongly makes me question whether I should I stop using js frameworks all together and go full on into turbolinks and go back to a simpler time of rapid development.

All of sudden everything in web-development requires you to be an engineer. I think there is a large influx of Uni CS graduates running startups and the only solution in a complex solution such as React. I can use React but I can't understand from a business perceptive why you would want to quadruple your development time and create such a high bar of entry for developers.

#MakeWebDevelopmentGreatAgain #Remeber2006?Imemeber

<comment><USER3> _What I find unusual is they publish tutorials when there are plenty of good sources such as Railscasts, but its like the last 10 years doesn 't exist to them and they rehash tutorials._

I think it's normal. I've seen it a lot amongst people who are actively learning. It was common in the late 00s in the Ruby world, and is currently common in the JavaScript, Elixir, Rust and Go worlds. It doesn't matter if they're "rehashing" \- they're writing stuff as part of the learning process, we haven't _got_ to read it, and I can only celebrate their enthusiasm. (Plus, on some topics, it's handy to have tutorials rewritten for the latest OS and database versions, etc, anyway since things always change slightly.)

<comment><USER4> So we can look forward to them creating another 20 test frameworks over the next 10 years? Wonderful...

<comment><USER3> Maybe. And that would be awesome, I think, because one of them would likely be better than what we have now and worth using.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I watched the whole thing. Quite entertaining, but the last 6 minutes is what matters. The strengths he mentions are:

\- tools and culture that's optimized for programmer happiness and productivity.

\- Promoting obviousness via the path of least surprise.

\- Consistency through well-considered conventions.

\- Carefully-designed value-based test suites.

\- Building long-term maintainable apps

I have to ask because I am being exposed to Ruby at work right now and I find it, to be quite honest, a terrible language. I'm not trying to start a flame war, I am writing this cause I want to be open minded and have some hard-core rubyists point me in the direction of where I can learn what is good about this language. Specifically:

1) What tools / culture are optimized for programmer happiness & productivity in ruby? \- I don't find anything special about ruby at all. Let me know what improves happiness / productivity. I would like to dl whatever tools / ide / plugins / gems or whatever and take a look into it.

2) Does ruby truly promote the path of least surprise? I am often surprised when looking at ruby code because I find traceability difficult in Ruby. Where does the function come from when looking at a ruby codebase? Is it from a gem? Is it from some parent class that this class has extended? I have no idea. How do people make Ruby 'less surprising'?

3) I have no idea what is consistent well considered conventions. How do I know something is a well-considered convention? Just use a rubocop linter?

4) Carefully-designed value-based test suites: Please explain this. What makes testing in Ruby so much better than in other languages?

5) Building long-term maintainable apps: What makes Ruby apps more maintainable?

<comment><USER6> To add some quick answers in my experience:

1\. It's a general attitude toward building interfaces; the reader of the code is put first. Yeah underneath things may be messy, but using those things should be nice. The onus is placed on the implementor, rather than the user. Ruby libraries will go to fairly extreme lengths to make things nice to use.

2\. Matz has always said that he meant the path of least surprise to him, not to every programmer. I personally find this point the weakest.

3\. Yes, stuff like rubocop can help teach you this, but you really pick it up from reading and writing others' code.

4\. Ruby has had a test-focused bent for a long time; and so it has a lot of tools for testing. Back when I taught Ruby professionally, I even had an organization with a Perl webapp want me to teach their testers Ruby, to write test suites for the app in Ruby rather than Perl. Perl also has great testing, so I'm not sure I agreed with them in this case, but it is something many people feel.

5\. I've seen many unmaintainable Ruby apps as well; I think this is something that should be aspired to overall, not necessarily something that's true today. Or rather, there's a period of development where people get enthused with a language, write tons of unmantainable code, step back, figure out why, and then the next iteration is better. Justin points out that node, being earlier in its life, might be in step 2, and that Ruby, being more mature, is on step 4 or 5 here.

<comment><USER7> > _1\. It 's a general attitude toward building interfaces; the reader of the > code is put first. Yeah underneath things may be messy, but using those > things should be nice. The onus is placed on the implementor, rather than > the user. Ruby libraries will go to fairly extreme lengths to make things > nice to use._

I struggle with this a little as newish ruby coder (but not new to coding). The efforts to make a 'nice' interface can interfere with keeping underlying implementations elegant/simple.

Too much focus on the happiness of a dev cranking out new code at the expense of the happiness of developers coming along afterwards trying to understand it.

Ruby is fun to create stuff with, but I kinda prefer the Python culture that tries to drum into devs the importance of readability and explicitness for other developers. As a dev you do far more poring over others code than creating brand new stuff.

<comment><USER8> Explicitness. << This is key. Ruby/Rails just feels really implicit and magical for someone who spent the first 15 years of his career in C++, C#, and JavaScript. (I've only been doing Rails professionally for a year, though, so maybe my opinion will change with more experience.)

<comment><USER9> That's mostly an effect of Rails. "Convention over configuration" was one of the early mantras, and usually it serves well for such a large API...but sometimes it's just magic.

Ruby itself is a fairly explicit and consistent language. Some of the syntax might seem surprising at first if you haven't bought into the "everything is an object (really)" perspective.

<comment><USER10> Chef is pretty magical as well. I think it's easy to get carried away with syntax-sugary DSLs at the expense of of straightforwardness in Ruby if you aren't disciplined about simplicity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hi HN! I'm the speaker in this talk. Just a heads up that when I refer to "The Failing Hacker News", that's just all part of the satire. It's all love here!

<comment><USER12> Well, we'd believe you if you said "Nobody has more respect for Hacker News than me. I know it, you know it, everybody knows it!"

<comment><USER11> Nobody has more respect for Hacker News than me. I know it, you know it, everybody knows it!

<comment><USER13> Hacker News is a disaster. It's rigged - you can't even mention Javascript without 10 people - nasty people - saying how everyone who uses JS is deplorable. It's the worst website in history.

<comment><USER14> Using JS on the backend is deplorable. For front-end work I don't think there is currently much other choice...

<comment><USER15> (A whoosh so hard it even mussed Trump's hair)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "I'd rather that we all became heroes than just to select a handful arbitrarily"

Preach it brother!

I do miss _why and his antics though.

While in major part satirical this talk does have a serious message. (See from about the twenty-second minute onwards.) Ruby is no longer the new hotness. Javascript is going from strength to strength, new functional programming languages like Elixir and Clojure on the rise, In the compiled language space there's Go and Rust. With our though leaders moving on who do we look to for direction? Imagine if DHH moves on, what do we do then? Justin's point is that the Ruby community needs to become bigger than its heroes.

I see Python taking on the natural language processing, machine learning, computational linguistics space. That's a missed opportunity for Ruby. As awesome as Rails is, its swallowing of mind-share risks making Ruby a one trick pony.

I think this is a conversation we need to have. I know lots of companies use Ruby but at one point I believed that Ruby had the potential to become something like the next Java, and I don't any more.

<comment><USER17> I no longer do anything with Ruby anymore, but I used to for a while (purely as a hobby) around 2004. That was a wonderful time. Rails had just arrived and there seemed to be a lot of experimentation and quirkiness around the language. _why and others showed me the power of DSLs and clever metaprogramming hacks.

From my exposure to metaprogramming I discovered other languages like Smalltalk and Lisp with its macros. I now mainly use Clojure, but I don't think I would ever have discovered that without Ruby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I _love_ this brief history of the Ruby ecosystem and its community, maybe the Trump parody I've enjoyed most. Maybe, the best.

Incidentally, I suppose the first 5 minutes of fighting with a three-way dongle and a poor connection, having to restart the talk, etc. is just a little preview of what every 2016 MBP owner will soon have the pleasure of experiencing themselves.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I'm not thrilled. Turns out I got bit by this bug in the new 12" MB [http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/16/10/20/owners- of-a...](http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/16/10/20/owners-of- apples-2016-12-inch-macbook-report-usb-c-to-hdmi-adapter-flickering)

<comment><USER19> Side note - it looks like that issue (among others) may be with the apple adapter itself rather than the MB [http://www.cypress.com/knowledge-base- article/known-issues-u...](http://www.cypress.com/knowledge-base- article/known-issues-using-apple-usb-c-digital-av-multiport-adapter-and- apple-29w-usb).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Quite interesting, maybe one should also check this older talk:

Robert Martin, "What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby", 2009

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0)

</comment><comment><USER21> Ruby has always been a jack of all trade, master of none.

\- It is not the fastest dynamic language like Clojure or LuaJit.

\- It does not have great C interop like Python.

\- It does not have an easily embeddedable runtime as Lua.

\- It is not the scripting language of all web browsers like JavaScript.

\- It does not have major big business backing like PHP.

\- It is not as good as Lisps for meta-programming and DSLs.

\- It is not amazing at concurrency like Erlang.

\- It is not the bleeding edge of untyped functional programming like Racket or Clojure.

\- It does not have every library under the sun like Python.

\- It is not as great at OOP as Smalltalk

So while it's perfectly acceptable at all those things, it doesn't excel at anything. That's why I think it is loosing ground.

It does have Ruby on Rails, and that's still arguably the best Web Framework.

<comment><USER22> What got Ruby popular (even _before_ Rails) was its expressiveness.

Concerning this aspect, I think it's still above the other languages you mentioned.

So if you rephrase your sentence like: "jack of all trades, master of _one_ ", that is, expressiveness (leading to the "developer first attitude", developer happiness, ecc), then I think it nicely explains why it still represents a valid choice in many situations.

If it also gets more solid in some of those areas you mentioned (and it's important to note that the community is focusing exactly on some of those areas: concurrency ("Guilds"), speed ("3x3"), ecc) then it might not only stop loosing momentum, but actually start _shining_ again (note that I said "loosing momentum", not ground: it's easy to loose momentum when you are not a language backed by Google, but it doesn't necessarily mean you're loosing ground...)

So, considering all this, why not keep it in consideration as an almost unique (expressiveness-wise) all-around tool, and keep an optimistic mind for what it is coming up with, rather than just tagging it as a falling technology?

<comment><USER22> Relevant:

Ruby 3x3: Matz, Koichi, and Tenderlove on the future of Ruby Performance

[https://blog.heroku.com/ruby-3-by-3/](https://blog.heroku.com/ruby-3-by-3/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The last 6 minutes with the hat off really struck a chord. Excellent talk and couldn't agree more.

<comment><USER11> The rest is sizzle, that there is the steak

<comment><USER23> mmmm steak

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm currently watching this video and unfortunately I cannot stare at the video for more than a few seconds bc of that glowing green border around the outside of the page.

I finally had to just change the color. OP if you have anything to do with this website, please consider changing that color to almost anything else (or just remove it).

<comment><USER11> Sorry the green bothers you. You could always click through to Vimeo, which is minimally green [https://vimeo.com/189525997](https://vimeo.com/189525997)

<comment><USER24> All good bud!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> TIL 'Seattle-style' ruby

<comment><USER11> It's a thing! They don't use parantheses! Like savages!

<comment><USER25> Having learned ruby in Seattle coffeeshop meetups, I never realized this. I also never realized that the weirdness that pervaded Seattle hacker meetups wasn't normal everywhere else, until I attended meetups in SF. NW rubyists are... weird.

Also, totally agree with the end this video.

<comment><USER26> Went to a few seattle.rb meetups, and truly felt like the experiences captured what makes Seattle/Ruby weird, wonderful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Do you know where to find the rest of the talks from this conference, by chance?

<comment><USER28> It was just last Friday (I was there; awesome conference). Usually Confreaks gets them up in a couple of weeks; here's the URL where they'll appear: [http://confreaks.tv/events/keeprubyweird2016](http://confreaks.tv/events/keeprubyweird2016)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Keep your weird contained to your monoliths and stop trying to colonize JavaScript!

<comment><USER30> All your base are belong to us.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How does Apple's 2FA location service work? - <AUTHOR> Does it try to geolocate based on the IP or is there something more advanced going on?<p>Sometimes when logging into appleid.apple.com my iPhone responds with the 2FA prompt, but the location is reporting Washington D.C. as opposed to CA (where I am). A bit worrisome. <comment><USER2> I think it is using bad IP geolocation. It often gets my location wrong. Like close but not actually where I am.</comment>


Grow Trees by Flying an Airplane - <AUTHOR> Hello, I would like to introduce our travel project. We are a group of friends who are building up a very complex traveler's porta.It is the first flight search engine where you plant a tree by buying tickets. For each ticket, you can see the number of trees you plant. We cooperate with international organizations where we transmit money transparently.
 We would like to ask you what you think about our project .. http://www.flybarbara.com <comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.flybarbara.com](http://www.flybarbara.com) Please take a look at our project and let us know how you like the idea to infoplease take a look at our project and let us know how you like the idea to email@example.com

Thanks David</comment>


CIA 'Siren Servers' can predict social uprisings 3-5 days in advance - <AUTHOR> http://sociable.co/technology/cia-siren-servers-social-uprisings/ <comment><USER2> I was personally in Western Tunisia (on the Algerian border) as the Tunisian uprising, the first of the Arab Spring, began. I was there a month. The protests were in full swing for weeks in every village in the west before _anything_ hit western media. No travel warnings or any of that backdated pretend bureaucracy. I very much doubt the CIA had much of an idea what was going on outside the capital. The only western presence I saw during the whole period was a German diplomat taking his friends to see some ruins further east, which I doubt he would have been doing if he knew there was serious unrest. Internet is barely utilized there - how are they going to gather intelligence? It really gives you food for thought. Stay off the wires (including finance), and it's very hard for them to see much of anything.

<comment><USER3> A more effective strategy to constant surveillance is to simply raise the background level to just below actionable threshold, so that way their intelligence is effectively useless. That is, really, you should just sit around all day and talk about how you dislike what they're doing, think they're career criminals betraying the nation, that you want to actively do something about it, etc. Bonus points for mixing that conversation with discussion about how you'd like to tour DC and see the various monuments, including the Washington monument, Lincoln memorial, and WWII memorial.

If the background unhappy chatter is close to actionable (or is in the mind of the classifying algorithms), then actionable chatter (eg, actually planning an attack) can only be distinguished from background chatter near when the plans become "active" in some sense, and likely too late to meaningfully respond to. (To use a physics analogy: if you try to predict cavitation in flowing water really close to boiling, it's harder.)

In many senses, simply embracing openly that we're _very_ angry as a society, even in the face of constant scrutiny, prevents that same constant scrutiny from determining when we're planning something. It can only really tell that we're pissed off, in general.

<comment><USER4> Maybe you could create AI agents to flood the Internet with seditious chatter.

<comment><USER5> Amongst many, IBM has done something that does this and the opposite. It was funded by public money (DoD).

<comment><USER6> That sounds pretty interesting. Where could I learn more on this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Every time I read about expensive programs like these I think of what else that money could have been spent on that would prevent the need for populations to rise up against their governments.

<comment><USER8> It's the CIA, there is a high chance that they are spending more money to fuel the revolution.

<comment><USER9> Well, that's one way of knowing when uprisings will happen. Deming wrote that if you have a policy of rewarding people for fighting fires, you also need to watch who is setting those fires.

<comment><USER10> The cobra effect is a great example of this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "much harder to convey confidence for the policymaker who may make an important decision from advanced analytics with deep learning algorithms."

This is an unsolvable problem. From the policymaker's point of view saying "deep learning told me so" is exactly the same as saying "god told me so"

<comment><USER12> "god told me so" worked very well for thousands of years.

<comment><USER13> It certainly worked, whether or not it worked "well" is up for debate.

<comment><USER14> defacto, no debate...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "In certain sectors such as finance, it can be self-detrimental as in the case of the financial meltdown in 2007-2008. When a predictive system becomes too efficient, it undermines the very foundation upon which it stands.

If you've gathered enough wealth and your services are so efficient that their values skyrocket, but there's no money left for anyone to afford them, then you've fallen victim to the seductive power of siren servers."

what the fuck is this author talking about? this is so incoherent. CIA can predict black swan events now and the super computers can accumulate so much wealth that no one can afford it? what is this website? is this satire?

</comment><comment><USER16> I can not predict social unrest 3-5 days before it happens but my google alert for "black man shot by police" can do the same reliably 24 hours before social unrest starts.

Suck this CIA.

<comment><USER17> I think you'll find a lot of false positives, as unfortunately that alert will be sent more than once a week: [http://www.killedbypolice.net/](http://www.killedbypolice.net/) (M/B means Male/Black)

<comment><USER18> Yes, and what percentage of those killings are actually justified? The police have an inherently dangerous profession.

<comment><USER17> Justified or not, I still consider those deaths unfortunate.

<comment><USER18> All lives matter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "We have, in some instances, been able to improve our forecast to the point of being able to anticipate the development of social unrest and societal instability some I think as near as three to five days out"

with that in mind, i would say that they still have a lot of false positives...

</comment><comment><USER20> Would you trust the CIA's predictions, and that they were accurate rather than self-serving?

</comment><comment><USER21> Welcome to Psychohistory. Thanks Hari.

<comment><USER22> No problem, it's just a 30,000 year dark age.

We come out OK at the end of it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Likely because they're detecting their own signals.

It's pretty clear by now that for instance the "color revolutions" were instigated in a large part by the US government; social media manipulation was a prominent attack vector.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't see anything too alarming here. Predicting social uprisings 3-5 days in advance is easy, as long as you're happy with a few hundred false positives for every solid hit. Signal-boosting is only useful to the extent that it doesn't equally boost noise.

Besides, I'm quite sure that this other initiative is producing far more actionable data, even if it's hardly breaking news: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juQcZO_WnsI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juQcZO_WnsI) (2011)

</comment><comment><USER25> In my limited experience, I feel like the CIA has a lot of room for improvement. Reminds me of this-

[http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/21/world/director-admits- cia-...](http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/21/world/director-admits-cia-fell- short-in-predicting-the-soviet-collapse.html)

There's the problem of guys like Michael Morrell, who have no operational experience but go on Charlie Rose and advocate murdering Russian and Syrian officials. Not that I disagree but why publicly talk about it? Morrell's an economist. The agency being run by political bureaucrats I suppose is inevitable but it's unfortunate.

However, my experience on the science and technology side is also lacking. There's some super smart people who seem to lack any directive of strategy. I sometimes think, is this guy really this ridiculous or is he levelling me?

I love the CIA and am biased in their favor, but I can't think of any personal experience that makes me have confidence in them. Perhaps they are good at operational missions, but they are run by bureaucrats and the science side has the lack of socially smart, well rounded individuals.

The mystique and aura of powerfulness is seductive but the reality of the world is, everyone is much stupider than you can imagine. It's a wonder the world works at all.

<comment><USER14> >" __ _run by political bureaucrats I suppose is inevitable but it 's unfortunate._ __"

So if it is unfortunate, what classification of people, in your opinion, should be running it?

What a weird comment you have posted... You love the CIA? are you a sadist?

I am serious about that question, as while I agree that all states need their intelligence services - the CIA has done some downright EVIL shit. And if you "love the CIA" and are unfamiliar with their history, then you're a fucking moron.

Now, its not to say that the US needs to, in their own best interest, remain as a world super-power... and we shall -- but its to focus on the fact that we can do so in a better fashion.

I take the words "I love the CIA" to mean that you're either a sadist, a child of an op, or young and stupid, and by stupid - I just mean not critically thinking about what you have said/what your understanding of the CIA has done/is.

Again, The US will be the predominant power in the world for the foreseeable future, but have some humanity -- something the actions of the CIA fucking lack.

And if you love the CIA so much, you'll realize that they own this country, and that is not necessarily a good thing, you sound naive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> He has some interesting points. I can't say I agree with his opinion of where the "real value" of a service comes from. No doubt a service would be nothing without it's users, but it would also be nothing without the blood sweat and tears of the developers who built it.

In the end we're creating something that people want to use and giving people something like Instagram for free is all the reward they deserve. If you Instagram where to pay their users they'd go bankrupt. It's not a viable business plan.

I also feel like he's missing the whole point of open source. No one ever said it would distribute wealth. Bryan Cantrill said it best: "You should open source your project because you never know when a magical little pony is gonna come flying by and shit out a fucking rainbow right in front of you.".

</comment><comment><USER27> _A siren server is the biggest and best computer on a network. Whoever has the most powerful computer would be the most powerful person, whether they plan to be or not_

That makes no sense. It's not even wrong, it's a bunch of words strung together that don't mean anything.

</comment><comment><USER28> In another article covering this story, I found this interesting quote:

 _" What we're trying to do within a unit of my directorate [for Digital Innovation] is ... leverage what is becoming the instrumentation of the globe," [Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Andrew] Hallman added._

[http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/10/cia-says-it- can...](http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/10/cia-says-it-can-predict- social-unrest-early-3-5-days-out/132121/?oref=d-river)

</comment><comment><USER29> I welcome the CIA's attempt at modernizing. Let's face it: their recent track record at predicting major social movements has been terrible. The Arab spring, Tianamen square. They found out like the rest of us: cable TV and Internet. Monitoring social networks would seem like a good approach. I am wary of this technology being pointed domestically. Supposedly the U.S. is not in the CIAs purview, but there is probably no legal impediment to "lending" it to the FBI, or Homeland Security or whatever.

</comment><comment><USER30> The article mentions deep learning as being one of the technologies that is being utilized here. I find it difficult to put all the pieces together on the efficacy of the system and the technologies being used as Deep learning is one of the most un-explanatory technology. That in turn raises some questions over the effectiveness of a system that predicts social and financial unrest. How did you do that?

</comment><comment><USER31> Or you could just announce you have such a technology and thereby slightly inhibit the organization of uprisings via the Panopticon effect. All for the cost of sending a few emails.

Of course the reason what I say is unlikely is because actually building the system, functional or not, would justify an ever expanding budget.

</comment><comment><USER32> I am not certain, but I think Recorded Future does something similar, and according to Wikipedia they are backed by the CIA. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_Future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_Future)

</comment><comment><USER33> Something like this will become really useful when Google and Amazon are recording everything in US homes.

</comment><comment><USER34> Cool. I wonder how they test this stuff.

<comment><USER35> Probably feed it with historical data and see if it can tell what has happened.

<comment><USER36> Backcasting is a fairly standard testing method, though you've got to be careful about overfitting.

I need to RTFA, but this sounds like it might have relations to Peter Turchin's work on cliodynamics.

<comment><USER37> RTFA won't do you much good. It's pretty light on detail. (IMO) It spends most of its time meandering about and trying to sound like some sort of really mind-blowing techno shaman.

So much so, that I doubt the authenticity and accuracy of the information that presented.

I felt like it read a little more like a paranoid fringe article.

I mean "Siren" in this case is named for the seductive nature of the power of the servers (greek myth reference) as opposed to a "warning siren" sounding the alarm of unrest.

It gets worse, rambling on about the danger (and inevitability) if/when this power falls into the hands of corporate america.

Cliche

<comment><USER38> Dangers coming from usage of systems like this by a private corporation is not a cliche. It is a real danger.

If it has not clicked for you then advertising network is a behaviour control mechanism.

<comment><USER39> HN is a behaviour control mechanism. _Other people_ upvote articles and downvote anything they don't like. Therefore ensuring you are forced fed with only articles _they_ like. Your behavior is controlled by all these other people.

/s

<comment><USER38> Sure it is and without sarcasm. Even when you do not post anything here then reading what is posted influences you toward certain target. Perhaps you get more interested in Javascript for example or most probably, startups.

The question is not in this. The question is in the scale of the operation and actual spread of the influence.

<comment><USER39> HN is big and people spend a decent amount of time on it.

<comment><USER38> Still it is minuscule compared to some real large scale operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> What's the precision/recall?</comment>


Thank You for Subscribing - <AUTHOR> https://www.xda-developers.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/ <comment><AUTHOR> Welcome6</comment>


Should we get rid of the European Union? - <AUTHOR> http://kottke.org/17/04/should-we-get-rid-of-the-european-union <comment><USER2> No.</comment>


Ask HN: Which startups have nice/normal hours? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I've seen quite a few startups with "normal" (say, 60 hours or less per week) hours. That being said, the people I know who put in 100+ hours per week on their startup also have been more successful (long-lived company, multiple millions in revenue per year, etc.).

I think it's possible to have a startup that promotes a sustainable lifestyle, but it's all about costs and benefits. If you work 100+ hours per week, you might miss out on seeing your kids grow up (or having any in the first place). Working ~50 hours instead might make your business grow more slowly but might allow you to enjoy other (more important, for some) aspects of life.

As a side note: some of the investors I've talked to also encourage and prefer a more sustainable lifestyle in a startup. That way you'll be alive in the long run. :)

I don't want to name any names or give explicit examples here, but happy to discuss you're making a difficult decision.

<comment><USER3> If you work 60+ hours a week, you miss your kids growing up. If you work 100+ hours a week, they're not really your kids anymore, are they?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it just me, or is 40 hours a week possibly too long, even when you're running a startup?

<comment><USER5> Some startups are more demanding than others. There may be a difference depending if you're a founder, early employee, or regular employee. 40 may be too much for some and too little for others.

One of the startups I founded required 10 hours a week from day one. Made my first million. That's when I realized that the number of hours you put in to something doesn't necessarily reflect what you will get back from it.

Another startup I founded required 60 hours a week in the beginning, and 5 hours a week down the road.

These days? RescueTime says I'm at 61 hours this week so far. Obviously not sustainable, but it's what needs to be done to reach my goals. I know where I want my startup to be, and what it will take to get there. It's important to be honest with yourself.

I keep my significant other in the loop so that she understands what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and why I'm putting in long hours. She knows that right now I'm working hard, but there will come a time when I won't have to put in long hours. Communication is key.

There's something to say for efficiency too: make better use of the time you do have. My personal efficiency hovers around 92% — While I'm at the computer, I'm unproductive only 8% of the time. If you're working 40 hours a week and you improve your efficiency by 25%, now you can do 40 hours of work in 30.

<comment><USER3> > I keep my significant other in the loop so that she understands what I'm > doing, why I'm doing it, and why I'm putting in long hours.

I've been terrible at that in the past. Any tips?

<comment><USER5> The biggest thing is to remember that they can't read your mind, so speak up. There's a big difference between, "I'm working 80 hours a week so I can make lots of money" and "I'm working 80 hours a week so I can help with my sick relatives nursing home bill" or "I'm working 80 hours a week because I'm self concious about my teeth and want to get them fixed." - they can tolerate it more when they understand. If you don't give them enough detail, their imagination will fill in the blanks with things like "they don't care about me" and "they don't want to make time for me." that's when the relationship falls apart.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We have mostly normal hours, although my co-founder less so because she works a real job during the daytime. We're kind of expected to have reasonable hours because we're a travel magazine, and all work and no play would be bad for our image :)</comment>


The $10m Engineering Problem - <AUTHOR> https://segment.com/blog/the-10m-engineering-problem/ <comment><USER2> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Awesome writeup! I've seen lots of customers do similar "let the packets spray" on both GCP and AWS. Interestingly, it's one of the reasons I was so excited for our "ILB as next hop" [1] feature. Routing to the Service within the same Zone, _unless_ there's a failure at which point you wish to go elsewhere in the Region is a common pattern. I'm excited to see where Traffic Director and similar service mesh patterns lead in this space. Having everyone need to roll this by hand, seems needlessly redundant.

As an aside, another personal surprise when I got into an argument over Zone- to-Zone pricing: GCE only charges for one-way while AWS charges for send and receive. We should clearly do better marketing :).

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/internal/ilb- ne...](https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/internal/ilb-next-hop- overview)

<comment><USER3> gcp services are always great on marketing booklets but tend to have less than stellar reliability and you gotta read the fine print. A perfect example is ilb only supports max 250 backends and is basically unusable for mutli- regional setups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 340 VMs is maybe at most, 2 racks of equipment.

So figure 4 racks, 2 racks in each of 2 locations. That's not even 500k in equipment. Telecoms run 'tandem' and that is good enough even for 911 infrastructure.

10gb of decent quality internet at each location is another 2x 5k per month. Power space etc. and remote hands is 2k x 4 racks is 8k per month.

So 500k capex plus 18k per month. And how much are they paying AWS?

<comment><USER3> Righto and while you're setting all of this up (which usually takes months) your business is going to competition who just spun up a few nodes with a couple lines or terraform (or just autoscaled to demand). Also 10g link is hilarious - you will get x30 that on gcp for this many cores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is awesome. I'd love to see more blog posts tying business value to engineering problems, finding ways to measure before/after outcomes, and then sharing the engineering details. What a great post.

</comment><comment><USER6> > Then when a reader connects, instead of connecting directly to the > nsqlookupd discovery service, the reader connects to a proxy. The proxy has > two jobs. One is to cache lookup requests, but the other is to return only > in-zone nsqd instances for zone-aware clients.

> Our forwarders that read from NSQ are then configured as one of these zone- > aware clients. We run three copies of the service (one for each zone), and > then have each send traffic only to the service in its zone.

Isn't this the default behavior of ELB/NLB to begin with? Why not just configure the zone-aware clients to call zonal LBs, instead of hosting your own LB? Same with Consul. I'm not understanding what benefit Segment gets from using Consul vs. calling EC2 Metadata API to discover the AZ and then calling the appropriate zonal LB endpoint...that's not hard to do and avoids many extra dimensions of operational complexity.

It's also unclear to me how all this migration to intra-AZ routing affects Segment's resilience to AZ outages.

<comment><USER7> The EC2 Metadata API isn't meant for high-throughput calls, so it's possible to hit rate limits even from moderate polling once you get enough nodes involved.

<comment><USER8> Why do you have to constantly poll it? It's once on startup to discover the zone it's running in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Buying rack space at a colo costs money, but if you are spending millions of dollars on AWS you will likely end up spending a few hundred thousand including a salaried sysadmin to manage the hardware.

This does mean increased management complexity, so you have to build out an operations team. The total for salaries will be around 400-600k.

In the end you will have some setup costs and you will have to choose a subset of the features AWS offers, but you'll save millions of dollars per year and have much better performing hardware and much, much more flexibility.

AWS is extremely expensive.

<comment><USER2> Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

The blog post doesn't make it as direct, but one of their biggest costs was for networking between datacenters (Availability Zones in AWS). Most comparisons for "buy a rack at a colo" assume one colo, and a static fleet of hardware.

If you wanted to compare apples-to-apples, you'd need to have (at least) three nearby colos with enough capacity to handle one going down entirely at peak load ("N+1"). Leased lines in a metro area aren't actually all that expensive, but like the compute, you also need to purchase that with failure in mind.

tl;dr: Maybe, but the analysis needs to assume the same(ish) reliability outcome. Otherwise, they could have avoided lots of cost by just running in a single Zone.

<comment><USER10> > If you wanted to compare apples-to-apples, you'd need to have (at least) > three nearby colos with enough capacity to handle one going down entirely at > peak load ("N+1").

Not true if it's possible to fallback to cloud. That way we can have both high reliability and low cost (other then during outage/maintenance of collocation).

<comment><USER2> Hmm. I read the comment as saying "no cloud, because you'll save so much by just being on-prem". And I think an "apples-to-apples" comparison requires an N+1 setup including both compute and networking.

Hybrid could be many different setups, but before their "zonal affinity" change it would actually be worse, right? (Egress over Direct Connect is 4x higher than Zone to Zone, while "internet" egress is 8x). What are you assuming for the balance of Compute and Networking across at least three "sites"?

<comment><USER10> > Hmm. I read the comment as saying "no cloud, because you'll save so much by > just being on-prem". And I think an "apples-to-apples" comparison requires > an N+1 setup including both compute and networking.

That is valid interpretation. I just wanted to say that is you need high availability it might be cheaper to have one colocation and cloud in standby.

> Hybrid could be many different setups, but before their "zonal affinity" > change it would actually be worse, right? (Egress over Direct Connect is 4x > higher than Zone to Zone, while "internet" egress is 8x).

Yes, in/out traffic would be one of more problematic points of such setup, but there should be some solutions available (BGP?).

> What are you assuming for the balance of Compute and Networking across at > least three "sites"?

Least expensive should be zero compute in cloud unless there is issue with collocation. Depending on specific scenario, some storage/databases would have replication to cloud. I don't know how I would setup networking in such case.

<comment><USER10> > Least expensive should be zero compute in cloud unless there is issue with > collocation.

One more thing: cloud can be great to scale up in peak utility without buying servers that will idle most of the time. It's just that using only cloud might be much more costly, even if it is easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Always interesting to see the scale you have to hit before rewriting from one language to another saves money (relative to engineering cost).

With node.js: 800 containers, with each container processing 250 messages per second

With golang: 340 containers, with each container processing 650 messages per second

Say each one of those containers cost $0.02/hr then that's order of $100k/year saved!

<comment><USER12> Considering a typical HCoL junior dev costs about ~100k/yr, if you can have one junior dev rewrite your entire codebase in a year, you'll breakeven in cost after 2 years. Considering a senior dev costs 2-3x that amount per year, as soon as you have one of those involved for an entire year (odds are, if it's business critical software you will), your breakeven point comes out to just under a decade worst case.

I think that just illustrates how risky rewrites are. Very few companies at that scale can just rewrite everything in that timeframe using that little resources. Many companies don't even have codebases that will survive a decade.

<comment><USER13> We considered a few options before rewriting it. I've got a draft blog post about the process laying around, but haven't gotten around to getting it over the finish line.

We definitely knew the risk going into it. Fortunately, it only took us 2 months to rewrite it. I think our strategy for the rewrite is directly responsible for the speed at which we rewrote it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This was a great engineering blog post in that it did a good job in describing, in detail, a large overlying problem (excess intra AZ bandwidth), its impact on margin (20%) and concrete steps to measure the problem and solution. This is exactly the type of communication we should be able to use as an example of the outsize effect engineering can have on the long term value of the company -- if there's anyway that margin increase can in some way be turned into CAGR, these increased margins could double the company's valuation in 4 years (in an ideal world, of course).

Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's better to use multiple regions instead of multiple zones in a single region. The costs are very similar (and sometimes even the same) especially with the ridiculous networking fees.

Also object storage is a great way to expand capacity for queueing systems instead of oversized instances. We either write to Kafka or fall back to writing files to S3 across different buckets and providers.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anybody else find it funny when companies talk about typically private metrics (like gross margins) very publicly.

</comment><comment><USER16> this looks as much as an engineering problem as a learning problem (how to build systems for cloud) and management (how to track and establish better quality in the whole product lifecycle). nice that they are learning their stuff still and having fun.

</comment><comment><USER17> They have a Gross Margin Team??? Wow

</comment><comment><USER18> Segment sounds like the kinda business that should presumably just serve up 403 errors for all EU traffic. Data laundering analytics to 300 external tools is shitting on the GDPR.

(Remember this when reading the article: all the traffic, all the VMs, all the megadollars spent on AWS here are doing nothing but tunnel ( _replicate_ ) analytics data to third-parties, all of whom would be perfectly happy to receive it directly. It is the definition of waste.)

<comment><USER19> Among other reasons to architect it this way, having the client (web browser) connect to each analytics provider directly pushes the work to the least reliable, most network-constrained, and least manageable node in the network. Segment lets you have the client do de minimis work and have the heavy duty transfer (and retries, etc) happen from somewhere in AWS, where they're not connected over a 3G connection. That isn't waste, contingent on the company or the user getting value out of analytics and analytics-driven decisionmaking, which is quite plausible.

<comment><USER20> not to mention that many businesses have multiple client platforms (web, iOS, android, etc), so implementing anything client-side immediately multiplies the dev spend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A $10m problem is 1,000,000,000× smaller than a $10M problem.

</comment><comment><USER22> Its a bit silly that moving something from one app to another is so complicated.

</comment><comment><USER23> >>> As a concrete example: a single Salesforce server supports thousands or millions of users, since each user generates a handful of requests per second. A single Segment container, on the other hand, has to process thousands of messages per second–all of which may come from a single customer.

This sounds like the basic problem with Big Data and selling advertising as a business model ... that eventually even bits aren't free.

I can see how it happens - but I think any business that has as its core ship everything to our servers in San Francisco is just badly architected - and if that's your business model you have a bad business model.

no particular comment on segment but a general thought - perhaps most of the business models today are not very good ones

(I seems to remember a rap lyric start up that spun up a new single threaded Ruby on Raiks instance for the most trivial request increases)</comment>


10 examples of productized services you can start today - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/@Vinrob/10-examples-of-productized-services-you-can-start-today-240be4b578 <comment><USER2> Love the examples! This couldn't have come at a better time in my career.</comment>


The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitamin-myth-why-we-think-we-need-supplements/277947/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> The writer seems to have a real agenda.

No mention that the key to effective Vitamin C absorption is to combine it with Zinc...was this taken into consideration in the 'tests' he refers to.</comment>


Do we want textbooks to live in Apple's walled garden? - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2012/01/19/do-we-want-textbooks-to-live-in-apples-walled-garden/ <comment><USER2> Ask any college student if he or she thinks that the dead-tree textbook industry is a racket. I'd wager that 99% or more of those asked would say "yes."

This is an area ripe for a shake-up. It has been for decades.

Granted, the iBook Author EULA is pretty intense. I'd also venture to say that public school systems are _not_ the ideal institutions for such a play.

Consider private institutions of primary, secondary, and higher education, as well as public colleges and universities: In these venues, the student, or his/her family, is responsible for the cost of textbooks. That amount can be huge. The high cost is the result of a lack of competition. The lack of competition is due to the barriers to entry that are bolstered by the textbook publishers.

Given a student body already well-armed with iBook-compatible devices (likely today), it seems to me the overall cost for educational materials (textbooks) will decrease significantly.

If a given author is unhappy with the iBook Author EULA, then I suggest that he or she publish their content as a PDF document. PDFs can be consumed easily on iOS as well as many other platforms.

In the case of independent PDF publication, the author loses the distribution power of Apple's marketplace, but they gain the right to distribute their work how they see fit, to the best of their ability.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think the iBook Author EULA is stupid and petty, but I think a lot of people are missing something important: It doesn't apply to works that are distributed for free.

Consider this in the context of Connexion (<http://cnx.org/>), which provides a community where people can share and curate CreativeCommons-licensed textbook modules.

Is the $8B (or whatever the number was) spent on textbooks annually actually money well spent? Most of the underlying content of most textbooks changes very slowly so the textbook publishers do what they can to generate churn so they can sell new versions.</comment>