Drug money saved banks in global crisis - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims

<comment><USER2> "Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame."

...since when did saving us from economic collapse become a problem? If this isn't an argument for at least partially decriminalizing drugs, I don't know what is.

<comment><USER3> If drugs were legalized, this money would have never been outside the system in the first place, as gangs would be largely removed from the equation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's an idea for a one-time stimulus: legalize drugs and offer amnesty to drug dealers who put their money in the bank. No questions asked, you can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash and open a bank account today.

</comment><comment><USER5> How trusted is The Observer and guardian.co.uk?

I ask because dailymail.co.uk seems to be a very untrustworthy source.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is my understanding that The Guardian is a highly regarded newspaper in the UK.

according to Wikipedia:

Awards Received

The Guardian has been awarded the National Newspaper of the Year in 1999 and 2006 by the British Press Awards, as well as being co-winner of the World's Best-designed Newspaper as awarded by the Society for News Design (2006). The guardian.co.uk website won the Best Newspaper category three years running in 2005, 2006 and 2007 Webby Awards, beating (in 2005) the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Variety.[103] It has been the winner for six years in a row of the British Press Awards for Best Electronic Daily Newspaper.[104] The site won an Eppy award from the US-based magazine Editor & Publisher in 2000 for the best-designed newspaper online service.[105] The website is known for its commentary on sporting events, particularly its over-by-over cricket commentary.

In 2007 the newspaper was ranked first in a study on transparency which analysed 25 mainstream English-language media vehicles, and which was conducted by the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda of the University of Maryland.[106] It scored 3.8 out of a possible 4.0.</comment></comment>


An Unexpected Lesson on Entrepreneurship from a Cup Noodle Museum - <AUTHOR> http://colintoh.com/blog/unexpected-entrepreneurship-lesson-cup-noodle-musuem

<comment><USER2> About a year ago I got really into Ramen for a couple months and sampled as much as I could. There is a tremendous amount of variety and fun in those packets and bowls. I spent lots of time on this site: [http://www.theramenrater.com/](http://www.theramenrater.com/)

Beware - it is not the healthiest habit to get into :)

My go-to favorite was the Nongshim brand for noodle quality...but I've since given it up.

</comment><comment><USER3> Brings new meaning to the idea of being ramen profitable.</comment>


Rancher 2.0 container management platform - <AUTHOR> http://rancher.com/announcing-rancher-2-0/?utm_campaign=Rancher%202.0%20Launch&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=56723586&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_wahRd4Ki9agL8G2kJFmsvDUsyfFU7mdHHY5fHFk7qArQO890aOBJ3RCKdG5uGxogCYsYxHD_5n4mOHeoLi7FDj60I7Q&_hsmi=56723586 <comment><USER2> Will the new system still be able to schedule containers through the GUI with the same options as currently available on Cattle? I like Kubernetes but I much prefer having an easy way to change configuration via a GUI. Frankly I've found the existing Cattle scheduler far more pleasant to manage than Kubernetes, which feels like it requires a lot more time to manage effectively.

Also the one feature I'd really love to see from Rancher is ARM support for the agent. Not fussed about running the server on ARM but it'd be immensely useful for me if the agent could be.

EDIT: And is there a timeline for when a final version of 2.0 is expected? We're currently building our new deployment stack, and if 1.0 will be fazed out by the end of the year I'd rather start afresh now than later :)

<comment><USER3> > Will the new system still be able to schedule containers through the GUI > with the same options as currently available on Cattle?

Yes!

> Also the one feature I'd really love to see from Rancher is ARM support for > the agent

I've seen this running. I can look in to it.

<comment><USER2> Awesome!

And yeah I've found a few resources of people who've managed it. Last time I tried to compile it, it got stuck on some x86-specific dependencies in the base images you guys were using I think. A year later and I'm finally starting to look at it again. Official support would be fantastic if possible; I would very happily start using it on hundreds of devices in the near future :D

<comment><USER4> I soon will be working on this as a contribution. Starting with RancherOS's kernel through, and adding GPU support. Please include me in your comms.

<comment><USER5> FYI some of the contributions related to ARM are mentioned in this issue: [https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/9751](https://github.com/rancher/rancher/issues/9751)

<comment><USER5> Typo: PPC, not ARM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Side note: What is the fascination with skinny font weights (100 in this case) for the entire body text? It's incredibly hard to read. Here's a screenshot of the page with the first 2 paragraphs in a normal style:

[https://i.imgur.com/bdU8Mex.png](https://i.imgur.com/bdU8Mex.png)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's awesome that they're completely based on Kubernetes now -- super ready to switch over and start using it.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to hear what you think

<comment><USER7> I run a very small (1 node) Kubernetes cluster for my projects, and I was looking into Rancher when I was setting it up. At first I chose to go with just Kubernetes to make sure I understood the concepts. I've written about my adventures with kubernetes here on my blog ([https://vadosware.io/post/fresh- dedicated-server-to-single-n...](https://vadosware.io/post/fresh-dedicated- server-to-single-node-kubernetes-cluster-on-coreos/)), and am in the middle of a ton of posts about what I did when I started using Kubernetes.

I just watched the demo, but I wasn't quite sure how Rancher would deal with specifying Kubernetes Ingresses and Kubernetes Deployments/Pods -- I assume they map the DNS tab and "stacks". Also, I see that you can upload a docker compose file, but I have quite a few kubernetes resource configurations that I'm using for everything right now, I assume you can just as easily upload a resource config? (from somewhere like the stack creation page/menu?)

I have an already running kubernetes cluster and I'm going to give Rancher a go tomorrow, if it's as easy as the demo has made it seem I'm going to be very pleased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been been using Rancher for 6 months now and it has been a very smooth experience. They're incredibly careful with upgrades and their Release instructions are just a breeze to follow. I'm actually happy with Cattle but I understand Kubernetes won and we just have to accept it.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback. I'd really like to talk to you after you've tried it out. Let me know if you're open to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is great. My only two issues with Rancher were related to the UI (it was a bit clunky) and Kubernetes being a second class citizen so it's good to see that these are the issues which were addressed in this release. I look forward to upgrading.

<comment><USER3> Happy to hear it. A lot of care went in to refreshing the UI and to get the integration experience with Kubernetes just right. I'd be delighted to hear how the experience goes for you when you try it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tried this yesterday and my initial impression is that this is a streamlined solution and I want to dig in deeper.

One thing though, it is unclear how much RAM Rancher 2.0 requires.

[http://rancher.com/rancher2-0/](http://rancher.com/rancher2-0/) states 2 GB, while the Getting Started Guide at [http://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.0/en/quick-start- guide/](http://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.0/en/quick-start-guide/) says minimum of 4 GB RAM.

<comment><USER11> The correct answer is 4GB.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> @nickstinemates Is there any ETA for the release of 2.0? We'er running 1.x now and were seriously looking at dropping it for a straight Kubernetes cluster, but if 2.0 will be ready soon enough...

<comment><USER3> No hard date we can publicly commit to, yet. Would be happy to chat about your timeline and requirements and get a recommendation from the team. Let me know if interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Congratulations and thank you! It's not an easy choice to abandon self developed and very powerful Cattle orchestration in favor of k8s, but it was a right move!

<comment><USER3> The team did a good job integrating the simplicity of the cattle experience on top of Kubernetes. Part of the goal of the tech preview is to see if we've balanced the goal correctly.

<comment><USER13> Will you continue supporting mesos and swarm?

Will you continue using haproxy for load balancing, or there will be other choices also with GUI support? Any plans to implement similar approach for other massively used containers, like let's encrypt certs provisioning? It would be great to have custom forms for configs and env variables with input validation for parametrizable containers. (Not only for provisioning new stacks, but also while upgrading containers)

Will you continue supporting such a great projects, like aws efs and ebs, ecr authorization, rancher-cron, rancher network stack etc?

<comment><USER14> [Rancher employee] There has been comparatively minimal interest in Mesos/Swarm vs Cattle and K8s, but they will continue to be available as catalog items (not in the current preview).

The built in balancer is still HAProxy. Let's Encrypt integration is certainly a possibility but no immediate plans.

Volume support is not fully there in the current preview release, but all those projects will continue to be supported.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone had experience running a cross vendor cloud setup with Rancher? How was the experience and were you able to reduce operating costs?

<comment><USER13> Using rancher cluster on 4 different hosts in different regions. Sometimes I face different problems with networking, but they are mostly fixed restarting the containers. Its just hard to detect or diagnose them in time. Integrated network state monitoring could be such a great feature for Rancher!

<comment><USER5> Thank you for the feedback, the networking issues are definitely on my radar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So does this mean Cattle is dead in 2.0 and Kubernetes is the only orchestrator available?

That would be a shame because I decided to use Cattle because it seemed simpler and lighter that something like Kubernetes.

<comment><USER14> [Rancher employee] it essentially means the same Cattle experience (ui, api, compose files) as you used before, but under the hood kubernetes launches the containers.

<comment><USER16> Oh ok great! I was worried I'd have to get elbow deep into Kubernetes before upgrading

Thanks guys, you're doing awesome work

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I dug around a bit, but didn't see anything definitive.

Does anybody know if Rancher 1.X or 2.0 support GPU instances? That's a must have feature for us.

Thanks!

<comment><USER18> Does docker need anything special for GPU instances? As far as I know, rancher 1.X simply interacts with the docker agent running on whatever hardware you provide (cloud or otherwise).

<comment><USER17> We use a variant of Docker [https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia- docker](https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker)

Kubernetes version 1.7 (I believe) introduced native GPU support, in beta.

So there are some 'special' things that need to be done...though the gap seems to be getting more narrow.

<comment><USER3> I'm looking in to this.

<comment><USER17> Thank you kindly.

<comment><USER3> Here's what I've found out...

We have some customers who are using this configuration (including nvidia- docker) with some scheduling limitations.

That being said, we haven't expressly integrated this use case, so anything Kubernetes has done in 1.7 is available, but not completely surfaced/taken advantage of.

<comment><USER17> Ok that's sensible.

Any chance of some documentation/HOWTO on how that was done?

Thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Does it do blue-green deployments yet?

<comment><USER20> It's the main feature that attracts me to Deis.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much money am I losing by sticking with Google Checkout? - <AUTHOR>

On my web site the only payment option is Google Checkout. I know that it's better to give users more payment options, but of course it would require additional development effort if I do proper integration. That time could be spent on developing features relevant to the core business (for example "search alerts"). So I'm trying to figure out how high the priority of smooth payment integration should be?
Payment alternative should probably be on-site payment with something like PayPal Payments Pro as a backend. If you have better idea -- please let me know.
I also considered Chargify.com and Recurly.com, but it does not look like they add much value and their services do not address the most painful part of Credit Card processing: dealing with credit card fraud. Besides, it looks they do not support Google Checkout.
To put my question in context: 1) Web site: www.postjobfree.com 2) Paid service: access to resume contact information (+ some other features that are not as important at this moment). 3) Subscription: $20/month. Google Checkout supports recurrent payments, and  as far as I know PayPal Payments Pro supports it as well. 4) Current number of subscriptions ~100 and slowly growing. 5) Current monthly traffic ~165700 visitors/month http://www.quantcast.com/postjobfree.com These are free visitors. Only very few of them are paid users.
So, the question is -- is it appropriate time to work on adding another payment option or is it better to focus on other things for now? <comment><USER3> I offer both Paypal and Google. There are people who are funny about paypal - they use Google. Others are funny about Google - they use paypal. It covers a very wide range of people without being too much of a hassle.

FWIW, I started with just Paypal, and noticed a bump in paid users when I added Google checkout. I hope you notice the same bump when you go with paypal :)

<comment><AUTHOR> How big was the bump? ~20%?

<comment><USER3> IIRC it was closer to 25-30% in the first month for single-issue purchases. I'd estimate overall increased sales about 15% over the long haul - <USER2> worth the initial up front dev time to add it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It might be worth it to survey your users. Maybe popup a link to a quick survey to ask them if they would prefer another payment option. I would have gone with PayPal, personally, because you know everyone who has used eBay has an account. Then it's an easy jump to Website Payments Pro if your users _really_ would prefer you to have their credit card information.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there any difference between amount of credit card fraud on Google Checkout vs PayPal?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The correct spelling is "losing," not "loosing."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I always have problems with lose/loose choice.</comment></comment>


4MB Laptop How-To: How to put a "grown-up" Linux on a small-spec laptop (2000) - <AUTHOR> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/4mb-Laptops.html <comment><USER2> I used Linux on a Toshiba T1900C (20Mhz 486SX, 4MB/170MB) [1]. I started with SLS [2], later moved to Slackware 3.0. SLS was installed through floppies which I pulled from tape on an RS/6000 7012-32T, marking the transition from 'real but expensive unix' to Linux in one fell swoop. X was a bit sluggish on the thing but for the rest it was quite usable.

Using Linux in this early age had advantages but it also came with some risks. Not risks to me as a Linux user but risks to those exposed to things I produced. I managed to create a CD which was distributed with a magazine I was editor for in that period. The CD worked fine on Linux, it worked fine on OS/2 - the other system I used when not on Linux - but it failed miserably on Windows 3.1x due to the use of lower-case filenames. This was... unfortunate... as that CD had already been pressed, what to do? I ended up solving the conundrum by distributing a tailored version of MSCDEX [3] which could handle these files, affected users could order a floppy free of charge.

[1] [http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13145/Toshiba-T1900C/](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/13145/Toshiba-T1900C/)

[2] [https://github.com/rdebath/SLS-1.02](https://github.com/rdebath/SLS-1.02)

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

<comment><USER3> Interesting story, thanks for sharing! I too started off with Linux back in the day - I'd been on minix-list for a few weeks after just getting a 386 and wanting something decent to run on it, replacing the Desqview configuration I'd been using previously. So I was quite happy to download Linus' little kernel and see what it could do .. one floppy at a time from funet.fi, lol. What a great impression it made - a real unix on a 386! Of course, the fact that it took a week to compile X/Windows wasn't that big a deal. :)

Then I moved on from building everything from scratch - a great learning experience back in the day - to Yggdrasil, which was simply a great distro for the time. Ah, good ol' days .. I really wonder what I'd do different if I had a time machine and could go back and tell myself all the things Linux would be used for in the decades ahead, it would have really blown my mind .. Still does!

<comment><USER4> I still have fond memories of building a kernel in winter on a P4. No heater needed. Make menuconfig, because the TCL part was too heavy...

<comment><USER3> Its kind of balls that those moments are so far away, yet so near. I mean, we could if we wanted to, 'make menuconfig', I'm quite sure, even still.

But .. nah.

;)

<comment><USER5> You mean there's something fancier than `menuconfig`??

<comment><USER3> Not really. I just don't bother building my own kernel any more - the distro I use (Ubuntu Studio) comes with one that works great out of the box. Nice to know I still could, though .. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're into running GNU/Linux on older hardware, I can't recommend kmandla's blog[0] (abandoned since 2015, also skip the last post to go to the juicy bits) and Inconsolation[1] (by the same guy, abandoned since 2015 too) enough.

[0] [https://kmandla.wordpress.com/](https://kmandla.wordpress.com/)

[1] [https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/](https://inconsolation.wordpress.com/)

<comment><USER5> The kmandla blog is exactly what I thought of when I saw this post.

I can heartily second the recommendation, and I'd love to know what the author is up to nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I installed Debian on my Libretto 30 ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto) \- AMD 586 DX4 100 MHz, 8 MB RAM) some time in 2000. It worked pretty well - PCMCIA networking, X11 and so on. I think I used the installation technique of removing the hard disk and pre-loading Linux onto it. The machine was of course far too small to have a floppy or CD drive, and predated USB.

(I also kept the Win95 partition)

Given sufficient interest I'm sure I could produce pictures.

<comment> amiga-workbench I did the same with my ThinkPad 380ED. I've got a pile of Librettos still running win98, as long as mIRC works I guess.

<comment><USER8> My 380ED was my last awesome thinkpad, I think I had potato on it. After that they went to "good" then "ok" then where they are now.

I recall trying to compile a 2.4ish kernel with support for my pcmcia network card on an old 486 sx25 (dx?) laptop. Never got it to work. The desktop was fine from redhat 6 onwards (under 5.2 my sis graphics card wouldn't work in graphics mode, so no X)

<comment><USER2> Hm, not much wrong with the T42p I'm using right now. Superb screen with the correct (4:3, 1600x1200) geometry, good keyboard, trackpoint+trackpad, still works as a daily machine even though it is 13 years old. I'd move the Thinkpad line's demise to the point where they moved away from stolid, solid working machines to follow current styles - flat keyboards, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://sourceforge.net/projects/mulinux/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/mulinux/) is still around, but was last updated in 2014.

<comment><USER10> 2004, actually

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/mulinux/files/iso/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/mulinux/files/iso/)

<comment><USER9> You're right, but I wonder what "Last Update: 2014-06-27" is referring to.

<comment><USER11> I've seen inexplicable dates show up on dead SourceForge projects before. My guess is that some of the "update" dates may represent internal changes within SourceForge, rather than intentional changes by project owners.

<comment><USER10> they include comments, wiki, reviews, etc.

[https://sourceforge.net/p/mulinux/wiki/browse_pages/](https://sourceforge.net/p/mulinux/wiki/browse_pages/)

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/mulinux/reviews](https://sourceforge.net/projects/mulinux/reviews)

it's pretty stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Circa 2000 I was using a Compaq Contura 4/25cx laptop with Debian Slink, 2.0.36 kernel. It had a 486 at 25 MHz and 4 MB RAM. I also got a parallel port Ethernet adapter from the same dumpster dive. Even with Slink installing with 4 MB RAM required some special care. My notes from the time say it took one and a half minutes to boot.

There existed a driver in XFree86 for the funky Compaq AVGA graphics so I could use X, but the limited RAM made it impossibly slow to run any kind of desktop environment or even a window manager.

The setup I used on it was the zed text editor in one text console, shell for running LaTeX in another console and the gv Postscript viewer without a window manager running on a X screen. I wrote quite a lot of lab reports that way.

Documentation about that setup was one of the first web pages I made:

[https://www.tablix.org/~avian/contura/](https://www.tablix.org/~avian/contura/)

<comment><USER13> I installed Slackware 3.9 or 4.0 on a Contura 4/25C via floppy around the same time, but as I had 8Mb to play with I managed to get a browser running in X (though without a window manager).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> this is cool and all, for historical purposes. But for modern "small spec" the i386 distribution of debian, no xorg or desktop manager is probably the smallest usable distribution that has a full set of packages and will run on an ancient machine. Any old laptop that has 128MB of RAM should be capable. One of the issues you might run into is that the only way to do the install is via a burned 700MB CD-R of the ISO, and very few people actually keep CD-R media around or CD burners anymore.

<comment><USER15> At the time of course prices were at a different scale than today. My first Linux was on a 486 with I think 4 or 8mb of RAM (Slackware, install by floppy, 1998)

<comment><USER16> My first install was slackware 3.0 on 4mb. You had to manually partition the disk and setup swap space before you could even launch the installer.

This was a minor inconvenience compared to swapping the 40 1.44mb disks needed to install it because I couldn't get it to use my pre-atapi cdrom drive correctly. Using the cdrom drive it would work for a little bit, and then everything would start timing out. And, a network install was some science fiction as far as I and my 9600bps modem were concerned.

Then once you got it all installed you could start trying to get X11 and ppp to work...

<comment><USER17> My first install was probably Slackware 3.0 too (considering the dates, it could have been 2.3, but I don't think I've used a kernel older than the famously stable 1.2.13), but it was not on my own machine. Did that with two friends on one of them's Pentium. We had downloaded a set of 40 floppies at university and brought the whole thing to his place (because we also didn't have either access to a modem and/or a cdrom drive).

We had bought 40 floppy disks in a bundle, and it turns out one of them was crappy and ended corrupted. It also turned out it was the last of the set of disks for the X11 package. So we had a shiny Slackware install... without X.

Fortunately, iirc, Doom was there intact, and we could run it with the "console" svga backend (that was outside X, but before Linux had the framebuffer, I don't remember how that worked exactly)

Had to wait for the next day to re-download the corrupted image on a different floppy, and install the X11 package.

<comment><USER18> That must have been frustrating to say the least. I have many memories of transporting essays to school on a floppy, only to have it be corrupted by the time I got there.

<comment><USER19> Marginally off topic, but this sub-thread reminds me of the many times I have seen/heard people pining for ye olden days of computing. For whatever reason, people remember them through rose colored glasses.

They will say computers were better then. I disagree entirely. They were horrible and had much less capacity.

I see the same thing for the Internet. People will say they miss the time when it wasn't open for commercial activity. Hogwash... I know, I was there. Content was lacking, speeds were horrible, discoverability was an arcane art, and the costs were obscene.

I'm guessing, not my domain, there is some sort of psychological reason for this sort of thing. Computers were giant, more limited, and expensive. The 'net was no better.

<comment><USER16> A while ago I tried installing Slackware 3.0 on Virtual Box out of nostalgia, and it was everything I remembered and worse. I only managed to get XFree86 to start up in some 300x200 mode that would pan around the 'virtual' size. Getting networking working required a kernel recompilation.

Even after all that, there wasn't much it could do. I'm not sure why I insisted on running that instead of Windows 95.

<comment><USER19> Yeah. I have fallen into the VM hole. I even have images for Plan9. I am not proud of this, no... No, no I am not.

My only defense is that I didn't do so out of a fake memory of a glorious past. I just like tinkering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reminds me of using loadlin to boostrap linux from DOS because the internal CDROM didn't support boot and I didn't have the external floppy drive, and since DOS would be overwritten it would have required removing the HDD if the installation failed.

The trickiest part was getting DOS/Windows back with a custom bootable CD after I realized how slow it was with a full linux distribution.

</comment><comment><USER21> My Pentium 100 MHz and 16MB RAM running Slackware Linux was the envy of the lab in 1995.

<comment><USER22> Huh. My first PC was a Cyrix "P166+" (running at 133 MHz) with 16 MB of RAM and a 1.2 GB hard drive. It was not really a high end machine at the time. The hard drive was quite big for the time, but the CPU became a liability once Quake came out. :-/

<comment><USER23> Quake ran just fine on P133. I know because I owned one at the time. Even though that game hardly did any video card magic IIRC it still was one of the major bottle necks so probably not having a good video card was your problem (I had Number 9 something or another).

I remember when winquake/opengl quake or whatever it was called came out that allowed use of the DRX/opengl drivers. It was a major improvement speed wise (as well as not having to boot into DOS and it allowed higher resolutions reliably).

However Linux Quake network wise (and startup speed) was absolutely faster than both winquake and the DOS TCP/IP stack version. A lot of people/clans that played competitively would use Linux because of this reason (as well of course the server version).

Quake was one of the things that kept me on Linux most of the time (highschool circa 1997-1999).

<comment><USER22> > Quake ran just fine on P133. I know because I owned one at the time.

In the absence of hardware acceleration, the Pentium 133 outperformed the Cyrix CPU by a wide margin when running Quake. You are correct that _with_ hardware acceleration, the CPU was far less of an issue. But all I had was a crummy ATI Mach 64, which was not even a good 2D card. So for me, the CPU was the bottle neck.

Ironically, on integer workloads, the Cyrix was a lot faster than the counterparts made by Intel. But their FPU performance was rather underwhelming. On top of that, Quake had hand-rolled assembly code that took advantage of the Pentium's architecture.

I never knew that people used Linux primarily to play Quake. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Today I use Buildroot for all my tiny Linux needs.

Still, it's tough to fit in 256MB with a modern kernel and Xorg.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow, this is from a different world! When this was published, the 2.4 kernel was just a twinkle in Linus' eye--the 2.4 kernel that Damn Small Linux would later stake itself to when it boldly declared that it would never switch to 2.6 because it was just too big.

</comment><comment><USER26> While not smaller than this, the smallest (and my first distro) linux install I ever did was on a Compaq 386/SLT laptop (luggable?) that had 6 MB of RAM...

...why such a weird amount of RAM? Well, when I bought the laptop used its battery (NiCad) was dead, dead, dead - and I didn't have the money to have it properly re-built. So instead, I built my own. I scrounged a bunch of old but usable AA cell NiCad packs from cordless phones (remember those?) and soldered up my own pack, and wrapped it in a bunch of layers of electrical tape. Unfortunately, it didn't fit into the battery compartment completely...

One end was being blocked by the memory! I found that by cutting the battery pack area larger, and removing one stick of RAM (the laptop had 8 MB of RAM originally - 4 x 2 MB SIMMs) - it would fit and still boot - so that's what I did.

The laptop originally ran DOS. My first mod was to install Caldera's OpenDOS (a great version of DOS for the time, btw). Then I found and installed...Monkey Linux. This was an interesting "cut down" but fairly full- feature linux distro. It's crazy claim to fame was using the DOS filesystem for itself, instead of it having its own filesystem:

[http://projectdevolve.tripod.com/](http://projectdevolve.tripod.com/)

</comment><comment><USER27> The kernel alone on my laptop is larger than 4mb, and that doesn't include the initrd (though the article talks about that)

-rw</comment><comment>- 1 root root 7.3M May 17 16:13 vmlinuz-4.10.0-22-generic

<comment><USER17> And that's a compressed image... it is even larger in memory.

On my machine:

      $ stat -c %s /boot/vmlinuz-4.9.0-3-amd64
      4204320
      $ extract-vmlinux /boot/vmlinuz-4.9.0-3-amd64 > vmlinux
      $ stat -c %s vmlinux
      20110308

The script to uncompress the kernel comes from the kernel source: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/torvalds/linux/master/scri...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/torvalds/linux/master/scripts/extract- vmlinux)

Arguably, not everything in that vmlinux is actually loaded:

      $ readelf -Wl vmlinux | awk '$1 == "LOAD" { tot += strtonum($5); } END { print tot }'
      13935704

Counting BSS:

      $ readelf -Wl vmlinux | awk '$1 == "LOAD" { tot += strtonum($6); } END { print tot }'
      14824536

<comment><USER27> I wonder how small a minimal bootable kernel, with all the drivers in modules, would be.

<comment><USER8> Does anyone else remember toms root and boot? Fully functioning Linux machine on a floppy.

<comment><USER28> Yes, I was surprised Tomsrtbt hadn't been mentioned yet.

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

The website is dead now. Here's the wayback machine link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20160120122627/http://www.toms.n...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160120122627/http://www.toms.net/rb)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Good old days. I remember trying to shoehorn Slackware onto an IBM PS/2 m55 with 2.9mb RAM. Unluckily for me, it was an MCA system with an ESDI disk, with the MCA support very experimental, and I ended using a parport ZIP100 to help with a minimal install. One day I got back from school and some dude from one of the Usenet groups called me on my land line asking for the steps.

<comment><USER30> Argh, in college I had an old Microchannel IBM that I installed linux on. I could never get the (coax) ethernet working properly. Pretty sure I used a parallel port zip drive to install, too. Ah, the good old days of having seven computers in one tiny dorm room.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> For my museum I have Linux (and Minix) running on some pretty old stuff. Workstations & servers (Sun/SGI/HP) still run fine with Linux/Unix on them; those laptops are quite painful if you use X.

I was running Slackware mid '90s and I remember beating my head on the table how slow it was compared to the Sun machines I used in uni with running X. But it beat Win3.1/95 already in my humble opinion so I stuck with it until now (although changed to Debian and then Ubuntu recently). Still allows me to, for most dev, to use laptops from 6-7 years old (my goto dev laptop is a Lenovo X220 from 2011 ; I bought a big stack for almost nothing last year and they are excellent).

<comment><USER32> Our laptops (have a T520) got 8MB of BIOS Flash-ROM alone

[https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x220#Flashing](https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x220#Flashing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> If it was built for 486SX, you could probably run stock NetBSD decently on this system with performance not much different from when the system was new.

Edit: Looks like you would be able to do a customized low-memory/disk install of NetBSD 7.1 on these systems if they had an FPU (either a full 80486 or an 80487 coprocessor). With 32MB RAM and 250MB disk in addition to the FPU, you wouldn't even need to do a customized install.

</comment><comment><USER34> To think that the RAM in the smallest system I have used in my life is 256MB (somewhere in 2005 and in Windows 98 and 40GB HD) and that people used to run entire PCs in less. Feels unreal (just like people talking about 4K memory as state of the art decades ago). Nowadays people are indifferent to Memory sizes as they just keep increasing every year.

<comment><USER35> The Commodore VC-20 came with 5kb of RAM and was a "real computer". Nowadays if you play around with Arduinos, the AVR ATmega328P on an Arduino Uno board has 2KB SRAM.

<comment><USER26> You can't really compare the ATmega328 and the VIC-20 accurately, mainly because the former is (arguably) a Harvard Architecture device.

For the most part, the cpu in the 328 doesn't have general read-write access to the 32k flash memory (used for program storage), outside of some basic functionality mainly limited to bootloader usage (at a machine code level, and IIRC only for the first block of memory), and read-only capability otherwise (so you can store data prior to loading it into flash to be read later by the code).

The 2k static RAM (SRAM) is read-write always and anywhere, anytime - and so it used mainly for variable storage. There's also a small amount of general purpose flash memory available, which is also read-write capable (but has a limited lifespan just like any flash memory - though from testing, in general you won't reach the lifespan unless you do something really stupid) that is typically used to store configuration settings and whatnot between reboots.

Whereas on the VIC-20, the CPU had complete access to all of the RAM and ROM, and full control over the address and data lines of the bus.

Each architecture has its pluses and minuses, but in general the Harvard scheme is used when you don't want the code to be able to alter itself (either intentionally or accidentally due to a buffer overrun or something), which might cause a problem that could have consequences; for an embedded microcontroller, this makes sense, as you just want the thing to run continuously and reliably on every reboot or restart, without worry that the code will corrupt itself and lead to problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I went to check the *BSDs and even OpenBSD needs 32mb of RAM for the 386 port. FreeBSD needs a whopping 96mb!

<comment><USER33> NetBSD will install & run in less, but you need to manually customize the installation and it requires a full 486 (with FPU) at minimum. It doesn't seem like it would be _that_ hard for someone to bring back support for no-FPU Intel again, and also to support installation with less RAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> In 2000, someone gave me an old 386 laptop, 640x480 grayscale VGA screen, probably 100MB HD, don't remember the RAM (2 or 4 MB), no ethernet. I had to find an old-for-the-time Slackware to run on it, but I got it set up, with a null-modem cable to the serial port on my desktop, and was able to use it as an X terminal. Mostly only simple Xlib apps like XTerm and XClock, but I think I may have displayed Netscape remotely on it a few times.

</comment><comment><USER38> 4MB is overkill. What about 640K RAM on a 8088? [http://elks.sourceforge.net/](http://elks.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER39> Too many bits. Try 8: [http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20...](http://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I recently switched to openSUSE from a Debian based background. I gotta say I've never been happier. My hardware (HP x360 2-in-1 with intel i3-6100u) is supported where I had to fiddle with some configurations in Ubuntu just to get the wifi going. It's so much faster than Windows and Ubuntu, and easy on development. Highly recommend for users looking for something slightly more advanced than Ubuntu or Debian.

</comment><comment><USER41> My first Linux box was a 386SX laptop with 3 megs of RAM and a 50 meg HD, back in 1993 or so. I started with SLS Linux, running kernel 0.99.10. Later, I got a 486DX (100 mhz) and moved up to Slackware. Fun times!

</comment><comment><USER42> While we're at it, I grabbed a grid laptop (not the compass), an actual 386 based machine, is there anything recent I can run on that ? or should I just write a asm monitor and bootstrap emacs from there ?

<comment><USER43> There are DOS versions of emacs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Just for comparison os/2 v2.1 requires 386sx 4mb ram and 20-40mb disk space according to the box.

</comment><comment><USER45> I ran Delphi 1 IDE on such thing, long long time ago :)

</comment><comment><USER46> Oh the good old days

</comment><comment><USER47> why bother? by the time you get it running the way you want you will be hit by the 2038 bug. /rimshot</comment>


Dell's Canvas display is like a Surface Studio without the PC - <AUTHOR> http://www.windowscentral.com/dells-canvas-display-surface-studio-without-pc <comment><USER2> Surface Studio: 28" @ 4500x3000

Dell Canvas: 27" @ 2560x1440

<comment><USER3> For the price the specs are awful. The surface studio is marginally more expensive, much better quality, and you get the PC with it.</comment></comment>


Archaeologists in China Discover the Oldest Stone Tools Outside Africa - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/science/hominins-tools-china.html <comment><USER2> TIL From the article "To determine the age of the tools, the researchers took advantage of the planet's changing magnetic field.

From time to time, Earth's magnetic field flips, turning north to south. Magnetic minerals in the soil and ocean are pushed into alignment with the field; when they are trapped in rocks, they still point in the telltale direction.

Geophysicists have precisely determined the timing of these magnetic flips, which have taken place at the same time all around the world. It's a useful way to date the material found in layers of rock."

<comment><USER3> These flips happen quickly on a geologic timescale but are not quick on a human timescale. It takes around 1-10 thousand years for the field to flip. The last one happened around 780k years ago. More often the magnetic field gets quite weak for awhile, like the field is going to flip, but then the magnetic field returns to the same strength and direction. These are called excursions and the last one of these was likely the Laschamp excursion about 40k years ago.

<comment><USER4> Huh, interesting. Do you know if anyone has looked at whether the rate of genetic mutations increases during those 10k year periods of weakened magnetic field? Seems like that would cause the magnetosphere to become less effective at deflecting cosmic radiation.

<comment><USER3> Many people have looked into if these reversals can cause extinction events and they don't appear to. Determining a change in average mutation rates seems like something that would not be possible from the rock record. The last reversal was so long ago that DNA does not survive well enough to do a good study even if one had the right kind of samples to work with.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, makes sense. I was thinking that you could look for an uptick in biodiversity or something from the fossil record, but I'm sure it would be tricky to separate the reasons for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As I understand it there's a strong belief amongst Chinese nationalists that the Chinese diverged early from other humans. It makes me suspicious of this announcement, as it may be playing to those beliefs. However, I'm not sure it is untrue, doesn't bother me either way.

<comment><USER6> Well, to that end the very first sentence of this article is wrong. These weren't carved by ancestors of anyone living today. This was homo erectus, a distant cousin.

<comment><USER7> Well, many Chinese scholars claim the Chinese are descendants from Homo Erectus.

It's even shown on a BBC documentary, they get disappointed when DNA analysis disproves their skull-shape "evidence".

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Human_Journey#2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Human_Journey#2._Asia)

<comment><USER6> The fact that I have healthy half-chinese kids puts the nail in the coffin of that idea... among many other things. It's about as serious an idea as a flat earth or "intelligent design".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So, if we looked at all of the "oldest yet found" discoveries (that held up to later scrutiny), and plotted their date vs. the date they were found, would we see it asymptotically approaching some (presumably actual true) value? A job for an enterprising data scientist/archaeologist out there.

<comment><USER6> What would that show?

<comment><USER8> Perhaps, what the actual value could be expected to be. So, for example, you don't do a lot of work on top of the current estimates for oldest tool-using humans outside of Africa, that is likely to be overturned in ten or twenty years.

<comment><USER6> It wouldn't be convergent.

<comment><USER8> Interesting if true. I could easily believe what you say, but do we know that? I don't know the field well enough to say.

<comment><USER6> Yes it is rather trivially true. The age is getting exponentially further while discoveries are happening faster.

But that reflects improvements in technology, not anything about what's being measured.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The original Nature article published July 11[1].

[1][https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0299-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0299-4)

</comment><comment><USER9> The 'out of africa' story gets more and more hard to sustain the longer people look around for other stories in the emergence of modern humans. Yes, the apes is out of africa. And then? it gets really complicated really fast.

Also, reminded of the endless jokes about who is more advanced from what archeologists find in their own country: Americans find copper wire: invented primitive networks. Russians find Glass threads: invented optical networks. Irish dig up a bog and find nothing: invented wifi!

<comment><USER10> "Out of Africa" refers to the theory that Homo sapiens (our direct ancestors) came out of Africa. This article is referring to tools made by Homo erectus or another homonid group. So, not our direct ancestors, more distant cousins.</comment></comment>


SQL Fiddle - <AUTHOR> http://sqlfiddle.com/ <comment><USER2> Love it when I go to lunch, just to find out that someone posts my site to Hacker News and it gets crushed.

It will be back up and running shortly!

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing that would be great here would be autocompletion. I often forget exactly what the syntax of "CREATE TABLE" is or which options I can use. The same goes for infrequently used SQL functions (now is that date_diff or datediff?).

You could combine autocompletion with a doc panel that automatically updates to show the "quick reference" for the keyword you're currently typing.

<comment><USER4> Slightly off-topic, but one thing that always impressed me about Microsoft's LINQ as an alternative to SQL queries is that they considered autocompletion up-front in the language syntax.

For SQL, it's a big challenge - you may type in 'SELECT', but your IDE still has no idea what relation(s) you're going to access, and so it can't reasonably autocomplete the possible fields you might want to use.

It's an interesting example of a language that was arguably designed for human readability in the small ('give me this from that cross-referenced with this other thing'), but in some sense became a weakness of sorts later on.

<comment><USER5> Would you elaborate on the weaknesses of LINQ you mentioned?

<comment><USER4> To clarify: it was the SQL, not LINQ, language syntax (field selection prior to relation selection) that I was referring to as a potential weakness (but only once considered in the light of developer tools).

<comment><USER6> Absolutely. The "get _something_ from _somewhere_ " syntax that SQL employs is completely at odds with it being declarative. LINQ simply does a better job of capturing the abstractions of relational algebra cleanly.

Not that it really matters to someone who is already familiar with SQL, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [http://i.imgur.com/RHxoW5J.png](http://i.imgur.com/RHxoW5J.png)

1\. Security flaw in leaking that much error info. 2\. Who uses ColdFusion in 2013?

<comment><USER8> pud's latest project is still on the homepage of HN and he wrote it in CFML: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6519743](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6519743) Just because project X is not written in your language of choice, means absolutely nothing. Its all about execution and this project is pretty impressive.

<comment><USER9> Sorry, but choice of language means more than nothing. ColdFusion is pretty dead-end and not a particularly good choice these days for a variety of reasons.

<comment><USER10> Let me break it for you, nobody except you and some opinionated programmers on the web, cares what language you wrote website X or web app Y in. If it works, and you are able to maintain it - you won't hear a single word of praise from the 'users' congratulating you on your stellar choice of language. They'll rip you to shreds when it stops working but even then they'll never tell you off for choosing the wrong language.

If it works, and you can maintain it - its all good. Even Cold Fusion, even PHP, even Perl, even Brainf#@k

<comment><USER11> I understand your point of view, and in specific cases, the choice has little practical impact. However, when a business is dependent on an aging technology (language/framework/etc), the choice can have real consequences. As one example, when that very competent programmer who has expert level knowledge in this aging technology decides to move on, if the technology isn't well supported by a vendor, user community, and/or local talent pool, the business can be in a real bind.

<comment><USER12> There are few consequences for the business as long as they're making more money than they're spending.

The consequences come for the poor bastards that have that old crap on their resume... Bus number notwithstanding...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Ok folks. It's back up now. I will keep my eye on it, hopefully it doesn't get hugged to death again.

</comment><comment><USER13> Fantastic tool.

It pops up constantly on StackOverflow and I've found it incredibly useful for interviews. I noticed recently that the Execution Plan was added which just opens more avenues for teaching & interviewing.

</comment><comment><USER14> Also try [http://data.stackexchange.com](http://data.stackexchange.com) where you can query Stack Overflow and other SE site data in real time using SQL.

</comment><comment><USER15> A friend of mine wrote this. If you have any questions I can try to get him on here.

<comment><USER16> He's leaking stacktraces on error BTW:

no SMTP Server defined at railo.runtime.net.smtp.SMTPClient.send(SMTPClient.java:676):676 at railo.runtime.tag.Mail.doEndTag(Mail.java:519):519 at wheels.global.cfml_cfm$cf._1(/root/sqlfiddle/src/main/webapp/wheels/global/cfml.cfm:93):93 at wheels.global.cfml_cfm$cf.udfCall(/root/sqlfiddle/src/main/webapp/wheels/global/cfml.cfm):-1 at railo.runtime.type.UDFImpl.implementation(UDFImpl.java:215):215 at railo.runtime.type.UDFImpl._call(UDFImpl.java:434):434 at railo.runtime.type.UDFImpl.callWithNamedValues(UDFImpl.java:377):377 at railo.runtime.util.VariableUtilImpl.callFunctionWithNamedValues(VariableUtilImpl.java:774):774 at railo.runtime.PageContextImpl.getFunctionWithNamedValues(PageContextImpl.java:1495):1495 at wheels.events.onerror_cfm$cf.udfCall(/root/sqlfiddle/src/main/webapp/wheels/events/onerror.cfm:42):42 at railo.runtime.type.UDFImpl.implementation(UDFImpl.java:215):215 at railo.runtime.type.UDFImpl._call(UDFImpl.java:434):434 at railo.runtime.type.UDFImpl.callWithNamedValues(UDFImpl.java:377):377 at railo.runtime.tag.Invoke.doFunction(Invoke.java:224):224 at railo.runtime.tag.Invoke.doEndTag(Invoke.java:191):191 at wheels.global.cfml_cfm$cf._1(/root/sqlfiddle/src/main/webapp/wheels/global/cfml.cfm:44):44 at wheels.global.cfml_cfm$cf.udfCall(/root/sqlfiddle/src/main/webapp/wheels/global/cfml.cfm):-1 at railo.runtime.type.UDFImpl.implementation(UDFImpl.java:215):215 at railo.runtime.type.UDFImpl._call(UDFImpl.java:434):434 at railo.runtime.type.UDFImpl.callWithNamedValues(UDFImpl.java:377):377 at railo.runtime.util.VariableUtilImpl.callFunctionWithNamedValues(VariableUtilImpl.java:774):774 at railo.runtime.PageContextImpl.getFunctionWithNamedValues(PageContextImpl.java:1495):1495 at wheels.events.onerror_cfm$cf.udfCall(/root/sqlfiddle/src/main/webapp/wheels/events/onerror.cfm:14):14 at railo.runtime.type.UDFImpl.implementation(UDFImpl.java:215):215 at railo.runtime.type.UDFImpl._call(UDFImpl.java:434):434 at railo.runtime.type.UDFImpl.call(UDFImpl.java:384):384 at railo.runtime.ComponentImpl._call(ComponentImpl.java:615):615 at railo.runtime.ComponentImpl._call(ComponentImpl.java:502):502 at railo.runtime.ComponentImpl.call(ComponentImpl.java:1815):1815 at railo.runtime.listener.ModernAppListener.call(ModernAppListener.java:349):349 at railo.runtime.listener.ModernAppListener.onError(ModernAppListener.java:336):336 at railo.runtime.PageContextImpl.execute(PageContextImpl.java:2045):2045 at railo.runtime.PageContextImpl.execute(PageContextImpl.java:2002):2002 at railo.runtime.engine.CFMLEngineImpl.serviceCFML(CFMLEngineImpl.java:297):297 at railo.loader.servlet.CFMLServlet.service(CFMLServlet.java:32):32 at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:722):722 at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:305):305 at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:210):210 at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:225):225 at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:169):169 at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:168):168 at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:98):98 at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:118):118 at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:407):407 at org.apache.coyote.ajp.AjpProcessor.process(AjpProcessor.java:200):200 at org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol$AbstractConnectionHandler.process(AbstractProtocol.java:565):565 at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.JIoEndpoint$SocketProcessor.run(JIoEndpoint.java:307):307 at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(Unknown Source):-1 at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(Unknown Source):-1 at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source):-1

<comment><USER17> Probably don't need it pasted here...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've used this for interviewees. Set them up with a test fiddle with questions set in the comments.

<comment><USER19> As a guy about to finish up school and make his way into the work force, would you be willing to release some of the questions you use in interviews. It be neat to see which areas I need to patch up knowledge wise!

<comment><USER18> Try this quiz. It's based on a quiz I saw posted on HN a while back.

[http://sqlfiddle.com/#!3/3973f/1](http://sqlfiddle.com/#!3/3973f/1)

Edit: I'm not allowed to reply just yet, so I'll post here.

You need to add the boss first to the employee table with a NULL bossID.

Then you add another employee that has a bossID that refers to that last added record.

<comment><USER20> Aww - no test data? And when trying to add test data, I get errors due to the self-referencing foreign key. Perhaps the schema could do with a

> DEFAULT (IDENT_CURRENT('dbo.Employees'))

on the BossID column. Been awhile (years) since I've worked with SQL Server.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This must be the ugliest error screen I have ever seen. Is this 1990?

<comment><USER22> Quick, add Bootstrap 3 and flat UI to everything!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> i still haven't seen the main site, but i found these:

[http://sqlfiddle.com/about.html](http://sqlfiddle.com/about.html)

[https://github.com/jakefeasel/sqlfiddle](https://github.com/jakefeasel/sqlfiddle)

</comment><comment><USER24> Been a while since I've seen a coldfusion error dump

</comment><comment><USER2> If anyone is interested in how this site gets used, here's an idea:

[http://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=url%3a%22http%3...](http://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=url%3a%22http%3a%2f%2f*sqlfiddle.com%2f*%22)

</comment><comment><USER25> Used this a long time ago it is a great tool for figuring out a SQL query.

</comment><comment><USER26> Nice! Might be good to teach some co-workers some SQL stuff rather than drawing on white-boards and drafting up SAS jobs.

</comment><comment><USER27> Excellent tool, especially for checking if certain set of SQL works on certain platform. I wish they added DB2 too...

</comment><comment><USER28> Used this last night to get help debugging an issue on #mysql, worked great. thanks Xgc and jfeasel

</comment><comment><USER29> Cool but it can't handle traffic like JSFiddle (the originator of all code playgrounds) can.

</comment><comment><USER8> this project has always impressed me. keep telling myself that i need to browse the source to see how it was all done. congrats jake!

</comment><comment><USER30> Is the site slow?

<comment><USER31> The site is apparently HN'ed...

railo.runtime.net.mail.MailException which seems to be a framework error from a ColdFusion application server.

Shame on OP, posting something cool and letting it get upvoted without warning the author/host in advance! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. I didn't expect that would happen.

Will definitely do that next time. I found it really cool and thought of just posting it on HN.

Edit: Pinged @sqlfiddle on twitter. I hope maintainer did notice it.

<comment><USER31> I was only joking. How do you know it's going to get upvoted anyway? I think it's probably good netiquette though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The site is up again :)

</comment><comment><USER32> its cool but slow</comment>


Playing Cards of the South Sea Bubble, 1720 (2011) - <AUTHOR> http://resobscura.blogspot.com/2011/03/playing-cards-of-south-sea-bubble-1720.html <comment><USER2> A particularly interesting and relevant account of the south sea bubble can be found in the Brief History of the Corporation post on Ribbonfarm:

[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of- the-...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the- corporation-1600-to-2100/)</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you source community ranked insight besides HN and Reddit? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm wondering this very same thing, now that Reddit has been flooded with Teens, Meme's, Dueches, Knobs and Troglodytes... I am seeking a Reddit alternative that features semi intelligent posts like Reddit used to provide around 5 years ago...</comment>