'American Soil' Is Increasingly Foreign Owned - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2019/05/27/723501793/american-soil-is-increasingly-foreign-owned <comment><USER2> There's approximately 1 billion acres of farmland in the U.S., so 30 million acres is around 3%[1].

Also... the U.S. already can direct people not to farm and I'm 100% confident in emergencies or if it feels threatened it can take the foreign owned farmland back. I'm not super concerned about this one.

[1] [https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food- statistic...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics- charting-the-essentials/farming-and-farm-income/)

<comment><USER3> "Also... the U.S. already can direct people not to farm and I'm 100% confident in emergencies or if it feels threatened it can take the foreign owned farmland back. I'm not super concerned about this one."

I've wondered about this for a while. On one hand, owning investments on foreign soil seems super risky when shit hits the fan, because you depend upon friendly relations with the legal system of the foreign country to enforce your property rights. If it really comes down to "Americans are going hungry and homeless because Chinese are speculating on real estate", don't you think they're going to kick the Chinese out regardless of what the deed says?

OTOH, the scale of interconnectedness across the globe seems to create a very large market for private non-national security companies. It's not just Chinese in America - as the article noted, it's Americans in a wide variety of other countries, as well as corporations owning factories and having whole supply chains across the globe. If shit hits the fan there will be _a lot_ of money seeking mercenaries, private armies, and independent defense contractors to enforce their property rights globally.

<comment><USER4> But there are already a great many homeless and not the slightest move has been made in this direction. Perhaps there just aren't enough yet.

If the nation is run by its people then what you describe would indeed happen. If it is run by a small cadre of wealthy then they would invite investment world wide to maximally drive up land values regardless of homeless numbers. Indeed there would be extreme reluctance as any seizure or even hint of it would permanently reduce land values.

Perhaps we'll see which is the case.

<comment><USER5> Regarding homeless - there's a great youtube channel where a guy does long interviews with homeless people (unfortunately available in Polish only), and they basically say that, for them, consistently getting up early, commuting to job, working hard for 8+ hours (while being sober) is just more of a hassle than living on a street. There will always be people like that and the only way to not have homeless at all is to give people everything they need for free (UBI).

<comment><USER4> I not sure I'd put too much faith in a YouTube series. Also, sometimes Wikipedia is almost as good[1]

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some weird cognitive dissonance here. On one hand farmers are concerned that companies buying up land to use for windfarms means the land is no longer used for food. But we produce so much food that the government sometimes pays farmers not to sell it... and taking farmland out of production would theoretically increase crop prices for everyone else.

As the article points out, farmers are retiring and their families don't want to run the farms anymore, so someone needs to buy it. Your choices are generally going to be either a mega farming corp or investors.

<comment><USER7> Scratch the surface of the farmer complaints, and they're probably just upset that they can't gobble up their neighbors' acreage as smaller farms fail. Wind gives a steady source of income that can keep farmers afloat if a crop doesn't go well. Meanwhile the large successful farmers are looking for land so that they can expand, or perhaps for some so that their multiple children can continue the tradition.

I've read a couple articles on wind/solar use of farm land where the farmers' quotes reveals their true interests and concerns. At first they may complain about "change" or views, but their view, but economic expansions comes out as the far more likely culprit. Farmers are far far more politically sophisticated than the crazy billboards on I-5 would have a person believe.

Wind also has almost negligible impact inland use, and even if the land is foreign owned it will likely be rented out to be farmed. Farmland that is leased for solar use is almost always the marginal parts of the land that don't produce much anyway.

And some German experiments are combing solar with crops in a way that produces overall economic wins. Many farmers will adapt quickly to new tech, and those that don't will go bankrupt quickly.

<comment><USER8> I'm pretty sure it's because those families calculated and planned for years ahead.

They are mostly economically more invested and interested than average Joe from the street...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How much land do American citizens own outside the US? Probably a lot more than non-Americans own in the US?

</comment><comment><USER10> Yet another reason for a heavy land value tax: to ensure that the fruits of the land benefit the community even when it has been purchased by a foreign corporation.

</comment><comment><USER11> Didn't we go through a period worrying about this (non farm land that time) with the Japanese?

Didn't work out for them...

</comment><comment><USER12> No discussion of US farming subsidies that incentivize these kinds of land investments?

The land in and of itself isn't worth much more than its lot value, and the Canadians, Chinese and Germans aren't exactly buying all those acres to turn them into parking lots and strip malls.

</comment><comment><USER13> >And because there are no federal restrictions on the amount of land that can be foreign-owned

That's very surprising for a nation that bars foreign-flagged ships from moving cargo between American ports.

<comment><USER14> The Jones Act should have been repealed a long time ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I want to buy a few acres of farmland, but either it's too expensive or its in remote location.

<comment><USER16> > too expensive or its in remote location

This is generally how land values work...

<comment><USER17> Generally....how much has "too" varied over time though? Was it as relatively expensive for an middle to upper middle class person to pick up a few acres 30 years ago as it is now? I've heard more than one farmer say you have to operate at very large scales to justify current farm prices, but I have no idea how true that is (and of course, it varies by region).

<comment><USER16> > how much has "too" varied over time though?

Looks like[0] the real value of your average acre of US farmland is about 3x what it was fifty years ago. There's more data available if you want to drill down into cropland vs pastureland, and specific regions (e.g., Corn Belt vs the Southeast).

[0]: [https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use- land-v...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-value- tenure/farmland-value/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN, how to find keyword similarity & distance?  - <AUTHOR>

Im building an app, I need to compare lots of data, essentially keyword phrases, but I could work with just single keywords if I had too. I need a good fast reliable and fairly cheap way to compare the distance or similarity between key phrases. I've been looking at various concepts such as wordnet , which looks Orishas thouhgh it's only for single keywords, rather complicated with the various different filters and not extremely accurate, it seems to be somewhat useful though not as good as I was expecting. Is there a better API service which you can recommend in the natural language processing sector? Thanks <comment><USER2> Lucene is the one-stop solution for what you want, but it does require some setup on your end. If that's overblown, what you should compare would be either Levenshtein distance or something like Metaphone or a stemming algorithm. All have implementations in many languages, and are easily integrated into whatever you're doing.</comment>


Contact-tracing apps have a trust problem, even if they do protect your privacy - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/contact-tracing-apps-have-a-trust-problem-even-if-they-do-protect-your-privacy/ <comment><USER2> This article makes good points about the challenges involved in encouraging widespread application adoption in the face of recent mistrust of tech companies.

It will likely require strong and clear messaging from authorities -- backed up by experts and the facts -- to persuade large enough percentages of national populations to adopt contact tracing apps for them to be effective.

From what I've seen and read so far, I like the sound of the approach that Covid Watch[1] is taking.

It's backed by reputable institutions, is open source (alleviating potential security and trust concerns from software experts), and does include healthcare agencies in the verification loop when cases are reported.

Although some technologists might argue for fully decentralized solutions, I'd argue that ensuring that a healthcare agency is in-the-loop is important to avoid accidental and/or malignant false positive self-reports from users.

DP-3T[2] also appears trustworthy and has a similar protocol design as far as I understand it.

TCN[3] appears to be a good community rallying point for a number of these projects.

And be careful of PEPP-PT: it looks potentially troublesome based on this[4] thorough and well-documented investigation. Their data protection policy[5] is archived in case it's useful to refer to in future.

This comic[6] is also a really nice introduction to contact tracing protocols and TCN and DP-3T's proposals.

[1] - [https://www.covid-watch.org/](https://www.covid-watch.org/)

[2] - [https://github.com/DP-3T/documents](https://github.com/DP-3T/documents)

[3] - [https://github.com/TCNCoalition/TCN](https://github.com/TCNCoalition/TCN)

[4] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22907499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22907499)

[5] - [https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.pepp- pt.org/datens...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.pepp- pt.org/datenschutz)

[6] - [https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/](https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/)

<comment><USER2> For the record, there's also a community-edited research document summarizing various contact tracing technologies:

"Unified research on privacy-preserving contact tracing and exposure notification" \- [https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Kh4_Q_tmyRh0-v452wiul9o...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Kh4_Q_tmyRh0-v452wiul9oQAiTRj8AdZ5vcOJum9Y/edit?ts=5e801c37)</comment></comment>


Show HN: IEEE Micromouse simulator – write and test maze-solving code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mackorone/mms <comment><AUTHOR> I got involved in the IEEE Micromouse project a few years ago at the University at Buffalo. Back then, we didn't have good tools for testing our maze-solving code, so I decided to build my own. The project started out super simple - draw a box that moves around - but quickly grew complex. Especially early on, it was tremendously difficult to stop adding features. After coding myself into a hole, I realized that the only way to finish the project was to rip out most everything I had added over the years. Nowadays, it does a lot less, but it's polished, and I'm comfortable calling it "done." Let me know what you think!

</comment><comment><USER2> Related previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16003683)

Neat video here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883666](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19883666)</comment>


MIT develops new method to cure broad range of viruses - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/08/04/mit-researchers-develop-new-method-to-cure-a-broad-range-of-viruses/

<comment><USER3> These DRACO proteins are (in the grand scheme of things) non-sequence (or indeed virus) specific, which is one of the reasons this is so exciting. They are specific in terms of the dsRNA binding domain they're built with, although these domain may have a range of different sequences or secondary structures they can bind. The apoptotic response is triggered by the DRACO proteins crosslinking when two of them bind to the same fragment of dsRNA.

Put into slightly more straight forward terms, the apoptotic pathway is like a massive self destruct switch, which is triggered by a whole range of different things (viral infection, DNA damage, cancer signals etc). The body has evolved various mechanisms to detect dsRNA, as this is often a sign of viral infection. dsRNA doesn't occur naturally in mammals beyond ~10-25 nucleotides in length, while many viruses either have a dsRNA genome, or create long strands of dsRNA during their replication cycle, even if they do not have a long-term stable dsRNA genome. I'd imagine this provides a mechanism for DRACO proteins to target these non-dsRNA viruses. These DRACO proteins are simply a way to supercharge the body's defences, increasing the cell's sensitivity to dsRNA.

My main concern would be relating to an immune response (any kind of recombinant protinaceous therapeutics is often risky), and also regarding administration and pharmacokinetics. Viruses are good at making lots of themselves, and may accumulate in different cell types, tissues or organs. Getting good, thorough coverage of the body may be a challenge. However, that said, any kind of "outside the box" therapeutics is always very welcome, especially where apoptosis is concerned, as it's implicated in a wide range of diseases but is still relatively poorly understood.

<comment><USER4> I'm curious - I remember that over time viruses been incorporated into our DNA and rendered inert. Could these be targeted and damaged by the DRACO system? Or would they come within the ~10-25 nucleotide limit?

<comment><USER3> So the viruses incorporated into our DNA are in fact fragments of viral DNA, typically from reverse transcriptases. The DRACO proteins recognizes double stranded RNA (dsRNA), while reverse transcriptases incorporate dsDNA into our genome, and then use our own DNA replication proteins to make more of themselves! Crafty! The upshot of this, though, is that there's no dsRNA in our genome, so nothing the DRACO could detect.

It's like we store our genome on DVD, and some viruses use CDs. They're very similar, but it's not the "content" the DRACO proteins are looking at, but the medium. We have no way to make CDs, only viral proteins can do that, so if the DRACO proteins see CDs, there's probably a virus about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am not convinced, especially when the company is hyping it to kill "virtually all" viruses. Far from the majority of viruses contain dsRNA. For example, the Ebola virus and rhinoviruses, which cause the common cold, all contain an ssRNA genome. (For this reason I am confused why somebody quoted in the article specifically uses these examples.) HPV and many other categories of virus [1] contain only DNA. It would seem that only this category [2] of viruses would be affected.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DsDNA_virus>

[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-stranded_RNA_viruses>

<comment><USER6> You're talking about the contents of the virus capsid.

DRACO works by killing cells that contain viral dsRNA, which will include cells infected by most kinds of DNA and RNA viruses, because those viruses usually have a dsRNA stage.

<comment><USER5> I don't believe that any DNA virus would replicate via a dsRNA intermediate, since that would be an unnecessary step and therefore anti-selective. You are correct that ssRNA viruses create a dsRNA template while replicating but I would think that this state is transient and therefore not a great target, unless this treatment can target dsRNA strands littered with replication forks.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, 'stage' was misleading. As described in the PLOS ONE article on this subject, they typically undergo symmetrical transcription. So more accurately, dsRNA & ssRNA viruses typically go through a dsRNA stage. DNA viruses typically produce dsRNA during transcription.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You have to read to the end to find out that it has only been confirmed in mice. We have cured practically every major medical condition in mice. The human part is the hard part. I'm skeptical that this mechanism wouldn't have some pretty severe side effects.

<comment><USER8> _"It's bad enough that I live in a country that ranks 37th in health care. The thing that really pisses me off is that I have worse health care than mice."_ \- Scott Adams, "Frequently Disappointed by Mice"

[http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/freq...](http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/06/frequently_disa_1.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious why bostinnovation.com posts get voted up so high on HN, when they're so full of hype, and so lacking in content. This one is at least intrinsically more interesting than the last one I saw, "a list of programming language designers who have driven past Boston".

<comment><USER10> jleader, I am the author of this post and the 'programming languages who have driven past Boston' article. I literally laughed out loud when I read your comment. I was surprised when that post was on Hacker News myself (I knew it wasn't my best). I promise to do better :)

<comment><USER9> Glad to hear it!

As a resident of Los Angeles, and graduate of Caltech, I'm completely sympathetic to trying to get the word out about tech innovations happening in places other than Silicon Valley.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Press release: <http://www.ll.mit.edu/news/DRACO.html>

Journal article (open access, hooray!) [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022572)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is coming from a non-biological background, and hence may contain ridiculous ideas:

Would it be possible to devise some sort of virus which could somehow 'checksum' a given cell's DNA, and trigger cell-death if it doesn't match?

I've no idea if that is even possible, or whether it'd require a custom virus per-person (or whether you could add some sort of 'training stage' by introducing it to clean host DNA first)

Another tricky problem would be making sure it hits every/enough cells to kill the other virus, but slowly enough that there's time for the body to replace them. And of course, that the virus checksums itself regularly and self- terminates on mutation.

<comment><USER13> Actually, you wouldn't want to do that. A lot of human cells actually rearrange their genome as part of their normal function. This is how lymphocytes come up with antibodies, for example.

By selecting and rearranging several different coding sequences from three different chromosomes, each lymphocyte develops its own antibody "design", permanently changing its own genome in the process. This is what allows us to develop immunity to a broad range of foreign antigens with a relatively small amount of genetic code. Think of it as an "immune alphabet", if you will. You certainly _don't_ want to interfere with that!

Other rearrangements also occur, some harmful, others not so much. Even if you wanted to target just the bad ones, though, a virus really isn't the tool for it. Your cytoxic T lymphocytes already do that. In fact, what you're really describing isn't all that far off from what we already have. I think we even have mechanisms for genetic error correction and repair, but I'll have to hit the books again to double-check that.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the detailed answer, you've given me a bunch of stuff to go read about. My original idea came from something from SENS about moving mitochondrial DNA into the nucleus to take advantage of the better repair systems: <http://www.sens.org/sens-research/research-themes/mitosens>

Obviously it would be more complex than

        if hash(nuclear DNA) != clean_DNA_hash) die;

but I wonder to what extent the immune system could be enhanced. I wonder if there are some techniques that could be adapted from the computer virus/malware detection field back into biology.

A recent article on creating false-positives for a virus scanner (<http://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/aids8064.html>) by analysing the signatures makes me think of creating 'virus pre-images' for vaccination.

Other than the specialised cells which manipulate their own genome, would there be value in positively checksumming {D,R}NA, rather than adaptively pattern-matching for the bad ones, which is (I think) how it mostly works now?

Granted, you'd be hindering the evolutionary process by preventing mutation, but if we ever intend to start messing around inside ourselves, the first step would probably be to make sure that whatever we create, it's going to stay that way, or die.

<comment><USER4> One interesting thing to remember about the human immune system is that its always on - IE it spends more time correctly identifying something as NOT THREAT, than it does spending time finding THREAT. Mucking about with this could have extreme consequences, a la auto-immune diseases for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone fix that title? The viruses aren't cured, they are killed.

Also, are we sure that killing "a broad range of viruses" in one's body is a good idea? Killing "a broad range of bacteria" certainly is not.

</comment><comment><USER15> What about a virus like Herpes which enters a nerve cell? My understanding is that nerve cells have extremely long lifespans so inducing apoptosis in them has the potential to destroy physical sensation no?

<comment><USER16> VIruses will kill the cell anyway. This kills it before the virus has a chance to reproduce. Or do I have that wrong?

<comment><USER15> I think you have that wrong. The virus travels up the nerve into the cell body. It stays there until the nerve (or you) dies. There it hijacks the cell's DNA machinery to create more virus. These new viruses travel back down the axion to be released in the blister. A cold sore on your lip is just the herpes virus shedding new viruses. Once infected, the body develops antibody to that type of the virus so infection doesn't spread but by then it's too late. Usually the site also becomes asymptomatic over time as well, however the virus will chill out in that nerve reproducing itself forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> >DRACO selectively induces apoptosis, or cell suicide, in cells containing any viral dsRNA [, which is RNA with two complementary strands that id the genetic material of some viruses], rapidly killing infected cells without harming uninfected cells.

and for the cases when pretty much all the cells of specific type are already infected?

<comment><USER18> Most viruses kill the host cell, or at least render it incapable of performing its normal function, so if most of the cells of a type are infected you are in trouble anyway.

<comment><USER4> Well, despite the qualifier MOST viruses, I would have to point out that some viruses end up being in your system without destroying their host cell - <USER2> example HSV.

Ideally a way to excise the viral code from the cell would be found. DRACO basically activates the destructor on a cell and ends the entire cell, even if it is still serving the body.

I also recall that our chromsomes contain the genomes of viruses that have been overcome over the span of our species life on this planet. Whether these fragments would get affected is something I'm curious about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If this was to backfire, it sounds like something out of dystopian sci-fi.

</comment><comment><USER20> For a moment I thought it's the curing of a broad range of computer viruses, which can more likely be done than biological viruses. Reading the article cured my misconception. The technique is still impressive.

</comment><comment><USER21> can't this "cure" fix HIV ?

</comment><comment><USER22> I would have a number of questions about this study, which was apparently run and written up by the "DRACO" patent holder.

The results are largely from cell culture so any talk about a "cure for a broad range of viruses" in the press release is premature bullshit to say the least.

There were some _mice_ studies, along with this statement in the paper: "We have also demonstrated that DRACOs can rescue mice challenged with H1N1 influenza" - for which evidence are examination of harvested organs after two days, and three graphs showing separation for mortality between treatment and control (buffer) groups out 10 days or so (time plot ends at that point). Searching the paper, I finally find by looking at the morbidity graph that we're talking about 13 mice per group for one type of DRACO intraperitoneal administration, 5 per group for the other type of DRACO i.p, and 12 mice per group for intranasal administration.

In addition, as the authors themselves note, how much cell death could be tolerated in the face of _chronic_ viral infection remains to be seen.

This is a very preliminary trial. There are _years_ of work before this even approaches meriting mention of a "cure".

</comment><comment><USER23> how much portion of cells can human lose before getting into trouble? ...per organ or other cell groups?

</comment><comment><USER24> Unfortunately viruses may also be an agent for evolution [1]. This discovery is basically a means to kill cells that match a particular rDNA sequence. Seems like something that could become a very strange tool or a very horrible weapon.

[1] [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/03/071203fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/03/071203fa_fact_specter)

<comment><USER13> This is what your normal immune defenses already do. While some white blood cells (neutrophils, monocytes) fight bacteria by "eating" them, viruses are too small to be directly attacked this way. Instead, they cells they infect have to be destroyed before they can release their viral burden. That's what cytotoxic T cells do. They recognize antigens on infected cells, and kill them by triggering apoptosis (programmed cell death).

What is _truly_ unfortunate is, this doesn't always work. Some viruses are able to "hide" in their host cells, preventing them from activating the immune response, and persist idefinitely in a latent state. This is why you can't really get rid of herpes, once you have it.

What looks promising about this development is that it seems to target a _form_ of RNA that is simply _not found_ in healthy cells. Human cells store their genome in double-stranded DNA, and use _single_ -stranded RNA for transcription, but make no use of _double_ -stranded RNA. Apparently, only certain viruses do, so the presence of dsRNA in a human cell should be diagnostic for viral infection, regardless of its sequence. In other words: see dsRNA, kill it!

Would that all viruses were that easy.</comment></comment>


LuaJIT Implementation of Simple Object Machine (SOM) Smalltalk Dialect - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rochus-keller/Som#a-som-to-luajit-bytecode-compiler-and-debugger <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. There are two versions of the interpreter: one transpiles SOM to Lua source code, and the other compiles SOM directly to LuaJIT bytecode. The latter offers more optimization possibilities; currently the bytecode compiled version runs twice as fast as the transpiled version; additional optimizations are work in progress.

There is also a class browser, a Lua source level and a LuaJIT bytecode level debugger, all written in C++/Qt.</comment>


Docker is the Heroku Killer - <AUTHOR> http://www.brightball.com/devops/docker-is-the-heroku-killer <comment><USER2> Docker is great, and I love Docker. I have a couple of specialized non-HTTP apps I'd love to deploy to a Docker cloud, and I'm waiting for a convincing Docker PaaS vendor to come along.

But:

1\. A single, full-time sysadmin has a total _employer_ cost of $200K per year in most tech markets.

2\. A single sysadmin won't provide 24x365 coverage. They sleep, they take weekends off, they go on vacation.

3\. I know people who run tech startups with 80+ employees and heavy server load who pay Heroku a few grand per month, and _they just don 't care_. It works great, and it's a rounding error compared to their programmer salaries.

4\. As I explained to one consulting client, if Heroku goes down (they do, every couple of years), you spend your time reloading [https://status.heroku.com/](https://status.heroku.com/) and apologizing to your clients on the phone. And eventually the problem goes away by itself. If you run your own servers, it's all fun and games until you lose 2 RAID drives and the RAID controller board in one night over Christmas vacation—one month after your sysadmin quit, leaving the backup system broken.

In practical business terms, you need to be either _huge_ or completely broke before Heroku looks like a bad deal. $1000/month will buy you a lot of dynos, and for most actual business, $1000/month is a rounding error.

<comment> grey-area _In practical business terms, you need to be either huge or completely broke before Heroku looks like a bad deal. $1000 /month will buy you a lot of dynos, and for most actual business, $1000/month is a rounding error._

I'd dispute that, because of the following:

* Heroku is in no way equivalent to a single full-time sysadmin, not even close

* The choice is not between managing your own hardware and Heroku, it is typically between Heroku, VPS (managed hardware), AWS, and then possibly your own hardware. The same answer does _not_ apply to everyone.

* Many small companies don't have a large wage bill (outside SV), and don't have lots of devs or a sysadmin, instead they tend to have devs who do the sysadmin too.

* Heroku can be significantly more expensive than other options like VPS which also don't require managing hardware (your RAID example) - for some businesses not burning VC money, that makes a big difference. In your example of $1000, you could probably serve the same customers with $100 a month using VPS servers.

* Dynos are not the only cost, you'll be charged for storage too, and $1000/month is not a rounding error for many businesses starting out

* As your business scales Heroku would become more and more costly - there have been reports of clients being charged things like $20000 a month when they start to hit scale.

* They've had more than a few major incidents in this year alone: [https://status.heroku.com/uptime](https://status.heroku.com/uptime) \- no service is perfect, but that's not once every couple of years

Heroku can look like a bad deal for all sorts of reasons, not least of which cost, and it is not comparable to hiring your own sysadmin, more like having a freelance sysadmin on call who is also responsible for thousands of other sites which are liable to be down at the same time. If you are medium/high traffic website with few other tech costs, heroku can be very expensive compared to the alternatives. Additionally, as documented by some of their customers, they are an extra level of indirection between your app and the user and that make troubleshooting issues or optimising harder -

[http://news.genius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret- anno...](http://news.genius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly-secret-annotated)

I would disagree anyway though that Docker (in its current form) is going go to kill services like heroku, because it requires significant expertise and setup time to get right, and doesn't fully address the same concerns.

<comment><USER3> > Many small companies don't have a large wage bill (outside SV), and don't > have lots of devs or a sysadmin, instead they tend to have devs who do the > sysadmin too.

It's exactly those kinds of companies that Heroku is aimed at. I can hack being a devops. I don't want to:

— I don't know what I don't know, which has huge ramifications for both security and uptime

— I have plenty of opportunities available to me and am not interested in being on call all the time. Your business could not reasonably pay me enough to answer the phone at 3 am.

— One day of heads-down product development can easily create several thousand dollars in value (or more) for a company. When I am interrupted with server patches, setting up new servers, or debugging a failed deploy process, and you throw a meeting or two in the mix, I'm downgraded to shipping a few bug fixes that day.

Any competent executive wants his key developers heads-down shipping features and should not expect them to manage devops anymore than he would expect them to interrupt their day to balance the accounting books. It's a context switch. Throwing money at Heroku makes perfect sense here.

<comment><USER4> What if you can automate your AWS infrastructure, so there will NoOps, like using Heroku: CD/CI, AutoScaling, AutoHealing, just battery included?

The point is that you have the 100% control of the infra, but the orchestration service can get you covered. And of the orchestration service went down, your instances will continue to run. Not like in Heroku, their downtime is your downtime!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> (For us) Docker is not about security or scalability but about (good enough) isolation, separation of concerns and reproducability. Let me elaborate.

* Isolation: Docker enables us to pack any software and let it run with close to none side effects. Different versions of packages, libs and gems needed by apps don't interfere. It's like bundler but for all kind of dependencies not only gems.

* Separation of concerns: For our operations it doesn't matter what's inside a Docker container. We have mid sized Ruby web apps, small Go demons, NGINX with Lua support compiled in, legacy PHP apps neatly packed in Docker containers. They have a well defined interface:

 __The build script which consistently sums up dependencies and the build process. __`docker run` wrappers which clearly state the interface of the running container like exposed ports and mounted volumes.

* Reproducability: We are able to run the same containers in development, staging and production. A dozen containers will easily run on a developers laptop.

As a side effect the Docker architecture makes us think harder about app architecture like which services are stateless and which are not and for what reason.

The fact that containers share a kernel and thus are not 100% isolated or reproducable as with virtualization hasn't been an issue for us (so far).

There are still issues and features we're missing. For example private Docker repos are PITA and building instead of pulling from a repo means you might get fooled by the build cache. And we'd love to have build in support (or at least a common standard or best practices) for orchestration. But all together for our needs it's already pretty useful.

<comment><USER6> > _And we 'd love to have build in support (or at least a common standard or > best practices) for orchestration._

Look into BOSH[0][1]. It's a IaaS orchestrator that works for multiple cloud backends -- AWS, openstack, warden and vsphere out of the box. I use it in my day job.

It's already been applied to working with Docker containers.[2]

[0] [https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh](https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh)

[1] [http://docs.cloudfoundry.org/bosh/](http://docs.cloudfoundry.org/bosh/)

[1] [http://blog.pivotal.io/cloud-foundry- pivotal/products/managi...](http://blog.pivotal.io/cloud-foundry- pivotal/products/managing-stateful-docker-containers-with-cloud-foundry-bosh)

<comment><USER7> My problem with every single one of the orchestration solutions I've seen is that they tend to be overcomplicated for small deployments, and make a lot of decisions that I often don't agree with.

Looking at BOSH, my immediate reaction is that they have a huge page just explaining terminology [1]. The fact that they need one (and they do, judging from what's on it) is already a red flag for me.

We run "only" about 150 containers at the moment, so maybe I'd appreciate it more if we had thousands, but to me it seems horribly overcomplicated. And I have an immediate dislike to anything that requires constantly running processes in every VM. That may be necessary for full VM's, but it's one of the reasons I don't think VM focused orchestration solutions are a good fit for container based systems. Our existing (homegrown, on top of OpenVz) system makes heavy use of the fact that every resource in the containers are accessible from the host, and that's one of the thing I like abut Docker too.

[1] [http://docs.cloudfoundry.org/bosh/terminology.html](http://docs.cloudfoundry.org/bosh/terminology.html)

<comment><USER6> It's complicated because orchestration is complicated. You're looking at essential complexity that can't be made to go away. What you _can_ do is wrangle the complexity into a repeatable, declarative form. That's what BOSH and other orchestration tools do.

Everything on that terminology page is what has been found, in various systems of various sizes, to be necessary to ensure some semblance of robustness and operability as you scale from a single box to thousands of VMs and containers.

In my dayjob I've written BOSH release and deploy manifests that stand up a virtual machine containing 2 containers. I've used other deploy manifests that start a virtual machine with a small cloud of containers. My employers use BOSH to orchestrate multiple clouds on multiple backends with thousands of VMs.

Running a process inside the box is necessary to be agnostic of the substrate. BOSH can't assume that you'll run everything in Docker, or AWS, or vSphere, or any other such system. You can run heterogenous combinations per your requirements. Again, some people absolutely require that capability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Until shit hits the fan.

I really don't understand how all these "instead of Heroku just use X"-people do not understand that one of the main benefits of Heroku is not managing servers. If your app on Heroku has an issue Heroku will fix it (not your app of course). If your app on Docker has an issue. Who you gonna call?

<comment><USER9> Docker + {aws, digital ocean, rackspace} is substantially cheaper than heroku.

Docker makes these services relatively comparable to Heroku in complexity, so the heroku value prop has been diluted.

<comment><USER10> This may be true, but it also makes the common assumption that your time (or the time of your team) is somehow worth $0 dollars. But, I imagine that you would be the first to say that your time is worth much more than $0 dollars.

Put another way, hardware stores sell paint and paint supplies all day. Buying those and painting a room yourself is certainly cheaper, but it assumes you have the extra time to paint and don't mind you being the laborer. Hiring a painter costs more, but saves you a ton of time, energy, and elevates the level of expertise you are bringing to the job.

Getting started is one thing. The ease of how you maintain and grow is another.

<comment><USER11> This. No one ever factors in Ops time when I hear them complaining about Heroku.

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure ops time is even the one to worry about. Most things I've learned I've learned the hard way. So a server going berserk isn't fun, but it's not like I just wasted either time or money on it. I learned something. I better understand my execution environment.

Downtime, on the other hand, is just lost revenue opportunity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The actual drawbacks (the author has chosen to ignore them):

\- less secure

\- you still have to update the system images and redeploy a lot (its made for that so its fine). you cant just spin an image and stop caring for it. libraries will update and potentially breaking ur app because u know, performance, sec fixes, the usual

\- docker itself is not very nicely made, hard to debug etc. hopefully will get fixed over time.

what is actually does better? its faster.. not 26:1 but it is faster obviously. mainly, you dont have to preprovision vms since there is no boot time. so you can deploy fast. its also providing a much needed API/glue for all the things.

</comment><comment><USER14> We couldn't find exactly what we wanted to replace heroku with in our setup, so we ended up building longshoreman :

[http://longshoreman.io](http://longshoreman.io)

[http://mikejholly.com/introducing- longshoreman/](http://mikejholly.com/introducing-longshoreman/)

<comment><USER15> Hi Adrian,

Longshoreman looks interesting. I have two questions I couldn't find an answer to. How does port allocation work? And can you specify rules such as: service a should be on all hosts.

<comment><USER16> Port allocation is quite simple. We randomly select an unused port between 8000-8999.

The most recent version has a --count flag which allows you to specify the number of application instances to launch. I believe the Heroku equivalent is --scale.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just saw the spike in traffic this morning from my post being added here, thanks!

I'm very much a "DevOps" guy. I like running my own servers. When I first took over a Heroku based application it was extremely frustrating to me that I couldn't tweak nginx, Apache, or some type of on-dyno cache without adding network overhead to each call. I was also dealing with a system that I took over after a buggy relaunch and at that time, Heroku seemed to have fairly regular outages which was a problem for our customers who were already very sensitive to the quality issues of the relaunch. Amplified the lack of control significantly because I was constantly aware of what I couldn't do to fix the problems.

I'm still actively using Heroku and the work they've done with their PostgreSQL offering has been really impressive. It has been significantly more stable too. From a development efficiency standpoint, it really is hard to beat. They've silently implemented "Shadowing" which is supposed to provided redundancy across availability zones (but not regions). The additional Dyno size options have been great too. It is a great company. I just wish Heroku had an option similar to RightScale to deploy within other data centers or at least AWS regions - but that becomes complicated because of their network of add-on providers.

What I was getting at with the article was exactly what arihant mentioned below. Docker open sources the core piece that makes Dyno-like functionality possible which opens the door for disruption in the PaaS market.

For what it's worth I also posted a followup a couple of days later called Tempering My Docker Enthusiam ([http://www.brightball.com/devops/tempering-my- docker-enthusi...](http://www.brightball.com/devops/tempering-my-docker- enthusiasm-retracted)).

</comment><comment><USER18> Heroku has always seemed like more "sysadmin as a service" than just pure hosting, case in point: their response to Shellshock -> [https://status.heroku.com/incidents/665](https://status.heroku.com/incidents/665)

<comment><USER19> I'd say it's more that they aim to be more full-stack than just the upper sysadmin layer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> One of the biggest issues with Docker is security more than anything else. You can't really rely on container separation in a shared environment if someone somehow plans on selling Docker containers.

<comment><USER21> I was surprised i didn't see it mentioned in the post. VM-style isolation is there for a reason. Dunno if Docker is the wave of the future, but as a Heroku(AWS?) killer would be nice to learn how sharing all this performance goodness on the same system is resolved isolation-wise.

<comment><USER22> Docker and Heroku use the exact same sandboxing technology under the hood (Linux namespaces and cgroups). This is not surprising since Docker came out of Dotcloud, a direct Heroku competitor. The pros and cons of linux namespaces have been extensively discussed, it's no silver bullet but when used properly is quite robust and is rapidly gaining industry recognition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Counterpoint: Heroku Button is the Docker killer [[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8148794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8148794)]. :)

It's cute to be bombastic, but no one's getting killed. The dotCloud people have always been my favourite PaaS people, and competition in deployment UX is sorely friggin' needed.

</comment><comment><USER23> I know this is a dumb/basic question, but it's one I've wondered and don't fully understand. How is Docker that much easier/better than just writing some other kind of script that configures a machine for your app to run in and deploys it?

<comment><USER24> Docker is an application run time, basically a small package that is build to run software of your choice.

It's much faster (and smaller) to build such small images .vs building out the whole OS with Memcached installed (for example).

And you don't have to deal with OS configuration, etc.

<comment><USER25> Not to mention the fact that because intermediary containers are imaged, you don't have to worry about making a mistake in your script.

Sometimes (okay, every day) I find myself trying a bunch of different things to get something to work. With Docker, you've got a series of "save points" along the way. You can continue building an image from the last good point, and end up with a really clean image that represents the shortest path from bare install to "what I need to get done."

I was playing around with a Perl script about a month ago that would strip all the RUN statements out of a Dockerfile, convert them into a shell script and use that to bootstrap a Vagrant box. So what I'm saying is, if you don't know what you're doing (or just like to experiment with OSes), Docker is really interesting.

<comment><USER26> AWS or Azure, right mouse click "save image snapshot".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I work on a sorta-kinda Heroku competitor (Cloud Foundry), so my views are suspect and of course are mine alone etc etc.

However, asking "which should I use for my app, Docker or #{PaaS}?" is a bit like asking "which should I use to build my house, a brick or a general contractor?"

They are different things, at different levels of abstraction.

People have already written Docker deployment systems for Cloud Foundry[0]. Plus you get all the other stuff you'd have to write yourself.

[0] [http://www.cloudcredo.com/decker-docker-cloud- foundry/](http://www.cloudcredo.com/decker-docker-cloud-foundry/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Check out Dokku for deploying docker containers. It's like a mini-heroku in 100 lines of bash.

[https://github.com/progrium/dokku](https://github.com/progrium/dokku)

<comment><USER28> Also worth checking out is dokku-alt ([https://github.com/dokku-alt/dokku- alt](https://github.com/dokku-alt/dokku-alt)), a pretty active fork of dokku with added features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't think docker is accessible enough right now to kill Heroku. You have to put on your devops hat when you use it. With heroku, you push and it works.

I'm not trying to bash Docker. In fact, I use it quite a bit, and I never use Heroku. I just think that compared to Heroku, it's much more of a low-level tool. With Heroku, you can just paste a few really simple commands and your webapp is now up.

<comment><USER30> in addition to that, heroku comes with an ecosystem of things that work with it.

I.e. In any new app, even a toy one, that I deploy to heroku, I am going to get a basic new_relic account for free.

<comment><USER17> For what it's worth, you do get that anywhere now. [http://newrelic.com/application- monitoring/pricing](http://newrelic.com/application-monitoring/pricing)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For those us using JVM and .NET languages in AWS and Azure, the real value are the runtimes running on top of hypervisors without a needless OS layer.

I would rather see more investment into exokernels.

</comment><comment><USER31> I agree with the article. However, I am also a fan of PaaS like Heroku, IBM's BlueMix, etc. because they save labor costs. I also always run a beefed up VPS and I have my own "Heroku like" git push deployment set up.

Docker in particular, and containerization in general are the future especially for very large shops like Google, Facebook, etc.

</comment><comment><USER32> > I'm waiting for a convincing Docker PaaS vendor to come along.

I believe Google Cloud services support that now.</comment>


Newsletters Newsletters Newsletters. Oh My. - <AUTHOR> http://www.kaledavis.com/2013/09/06/newsletters-newsletters-newsletters.html

<comment><USER2> Wow, great list. Do you do anything special to manage the consumption of these? Any particular tools, or just read the email and move on?

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you enjoyed it. I just try to be efficient with it by not saving emails and deleting when done and/or if I skip an issue. Besides that, I use gmail's labels and the + tag trick to help sort them.</comment></comment>


How Cloud Computing can Help you grow your Small Business? - <AUTHOR> http://www.getapp.com/blog/cloud-computing-help-grow-small-business/

<comment><USER2> There not sufficient awareness from the vast majority of small businesses on the benefits they can draw from Cloud Computing, specifically cloud based applications. This article helps getting a high level view.</comment>


How Yahoo Killed Flickr (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet <comment><USER2>
      Because Flickr photos were tagged and labeled and categorized so efficiently
      by users, they were highly searchable.

      "That is the reason we bought Flickr—not the community. We didn't give a shit about
      that. The theory behind buying Flickr was not to increase social connections, it was to
      monetize the image index. It was totally not about social communities or social
      networking. It was certainly nothing to do with the users."

It is kind of amazing that it did not occur to them that the users were the one who created this index and would have continued to do so.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. The hubris in that statement is almost palpable. They're essentially saying the didn't give a shit about the cause of the result they were buying.

<comment><USER4> Welcome to humanity. I doubt Facebook cares a lot of its users as well. They are living off the network effects of an incumbent monopoly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> * make it impossible to sign in: check

* break the batch uploadr in an effort to quickly release the new UI: check

* don't respond to features in Google Photos people care about: check

Everything they did to Flickr since Mayer's takeover has been half baked. They concurrently had the new UI and the old one, but most damning of all as another user mentioned was the impossible miserable sign in process.

<comment><USER6> I want to use Flickr again but I don't have access to my Hotmail(!) account anymore. I don't even recognize the area code for the number they have on file for me.

After exhausting those two options it sends you to the yahoo help website. The first page asks for your yahoo email address. I don't have a yahoo email address and one was never associated with my flickr that I am aware of.

I've tried but have no clue how I can access my own photos again. I'm a customer just sitting here begging to use their service again and they don't want me to.

<comment><USER7> Sorry, but it doesn't seem to be their fault, it looks more like the usual case where the user doesn't want to take responsibility for their actions and blames customer support for it.

<comment><USER8> Yahoo has a really crummy recovery system compared to the big 5. If things really go wrong, Google will let you recover your account provided authorized forms of identification -- obviously forgery is an issue and Google is very thorough with regard to this (like checking if the account is still being used by the regular IPs or has gone inactive.)

Yahoo on the other hand basically tells you "go fuck yourself." I literally had a Yahoo agent curse me on the phone after I asked for the supervisor. And then she hung up. I gave up on recovering my parents' yahoo account. Yahoo deserves the demise it suffered. Unlike the big 5, its processes are kludgy, even when it comes to customer service and people stuff. Good riddance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's 2017 and I still use my Flickr account because I can't find an equivalent service that maintains the level of photo metadata, privacy settings, and archive capability that Flickr does.

I have close to 11,000 items personal photos and videos in there (60GB), and it is constantly growing, yet searchable. I also have a myriad of tools to back up my Flickr photos and metadata to Dropbox, which I do periodically.

People love to nitpick about it, but I still find Flickr enormously useful, and have been paying for Pro for nearly a decade. I try to be proactive and open to alternative photo services, but migrating to something else at this point seems like be a huge hassle.

I wish they didn't have old and new UI mixing though. Yahoo could definitely polish that.

<comment><USER10> If you want to know how it would feel if it was more consistent, the Flickr (partial) redesign was done by the same guy who did the Chow(hound) most recent redesign.

I don't think much of him.

<comment><USER11> I hesitate to question anyone's abilities before you know what constraints they had to work under. Designers often get the blame for internal management chaos, and a lot of executives feel qualified to make major design decisions.

<comment><USER12> A dev and a designer require the same primary quality: being able to manage the scope and the conflicting requests from the environment.

<comment><USER11> Well, yes, but they also have a job to do. If whoever is in charge mandates something your options may be to do it or find another job, and not everyone is financially comfortable walking away.

I'm not saying everything is great, only that it's far more common for something wrong to be explained by factors you aren't aware of than someone to be utterly unqualified to hold their job.

<comment><USER12> Relax. Noone is getting fired for asking what's the purpose of a feature.

You gotta understand why you are creating what you are creating to make it well. And that is perfectly reasonable to suggest an alternative route if you think it's better for the business and the users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yahoo did not kill Flickr, Facebook did. Turned out the secret sauce to putting photos on the internet was the social interaction with your friends, not a bunch of photograph amateurs obsessed with lens quality (not that there's anything wrong with that), but that's not what regular folks care about and Facebook really took this aspect of the web by storm.

<comment><USER14> I'd say Instagram did a better job of killing Flickr.

<comment><USER15> Agree with this. Outside of the normal complaints wedged against Flickr, people moved into a mobile-first world and left Flickr in the dust.

If flickr wanted back in the game they'd have to jump in the mobile market and re-design their traditional web platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea."

Are writers required to write a minimum number of words? Why so many writers write stuff that add nothing?

<comment><USER17> >Are writers required to write a minimum number of words? Why so many writers write stuff that add nothing?

You used 2 sentences instead of 1. Why?

<comment><USER3> You took the words right out of my mouth :)

> Why so many writers write stuff that add nothing?

I also found this amusing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Regardless of the missed huge opportunity here, I actually love Flickr the product. It's an enthusiast community for people who love photography. That's not nearly as big of a market as consumer and beyond, but I'm glad Flickr exists as-is.

<comment><USER19> > It's an enthusiast community for people who love photography.

500px replaced Flickr as that for me.

I was a long-time Flickr user back in the day because the community aspect helped me become a better photographer. I got feedback from other photographers, and got inspiration from their stuff. Now that Flickr is a ghost town, that aspect is dead.

500px has been a great substitute (though it has some strange biases towards lots of Russian model photography) for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Way too many examples of this over the years. First one that I can remember off the top of my head was AOL buying Global Network Navigator (GNN). Great resource. AOL took their dial up subscribers and killed the website.

Of course, AOL switched it's focus away from dial up once it went unlimited shortly after so the entire acquisition did nothing but to make a valuable resource disappear.

AOL and Yahoo have been buying up companies, killing them, and then writing off the losses for years. This spans multiple management teams. It's inbred into the system.

It cracks me up that these two companies with years and years worth of fail between them, are somehow going to combine and become a winning organization.

Full Disclosure: I worked for a company purchased by AOL in the early 1990's, they immediately came in and ramped it up to about 120 people, and then killed it and fired everyone less than a year later.

That one was over an internal power struggle at AOL. One management team loved the idea, bought the company, and then lost political power. His replacement came in and killed everything his predecessor had been working on.

</comment><comment><USER21> Del.icio.us and Tumblr is also acquired and killed by Yahoo. Also Geocities, like it's hard to serve some static files.

<comment><USER22> Del.icio.us was sold to AVOS systems. It changed hand a couple of more times and now owned by an entity called 'Delicious Media'. In its current state, it is almost non-functional. The bookmarklet for tagging links does not work, API and RSS feed are deprecated. I knew it was time to get out when I found the data export function to be broken. I wrote a scraper[1] to get my data out and export to some other service.

[1] [https://gist.github.com/rubayeet/a5c25458986ddecafd5e569866c...](https://gist.github.com/rubayeet/a5c25458986ddecafd5e569866cfd171)

<comment><USER23> Do any bookmarklets for tagging links work anywhere? It seems like most services simple javascript bookmarklets were shut out by increasing security? At least I know the bookmarklet that I used for pinboard became nonfunctional in Firefox then Chrome for example.

<comment><USER24> The pinboard bookmarklet seems to work for me in Firefox on almost every site except Github (where the CSP blocks it).

<comment><USER23> Well huh, so it does. Some maybe it was just a temporary gap that I fell into..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I know that "killed" and "murdered" etc. are hyperbole, but I wonder if they might be toxic, bad hyperbole.

Flickr is still bigger and more important than anything I'll ever be able to take credit for. Any random reader of this comment will almost certainly have to admit the same.

So Flickr is a hit with photo hobbyists, and general-interest snapshot-sharing happens elsewhere. Big deal. That only makes Flickr "dead" if you have a very narrow vision of what it means to run a business, of what it means to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER26> Last time I tried to use Flickr was when they upped (or removed?) their storage limit and I was looking for a way to move several old hard drives worth of photos to the cloud.

I couldn't even sign up for a yahoo account because they required a mobile number. Am I the only one without one? I have to imagine they are missing out on a large chunk of people by requiring that but maybe not since Microsoft is the same way when you sign up for Azure.

Just tried again and they still require a valid mobile number (not google voice or skype).

<comment><USER27> People that have an internet connection but no phone number? I think you're in the minority of the minority there.

<comment><USER28> Have none? Probably not that many (although Flickr probably is comparatively interesting for a large part of that demographic). Willing to share with a random service on the other hand...

<comment><USER29> It's a security measure which protects the unlimited storage feature, among other things.

What if someone wants to use random burner accounts to store gigabytes of child pornography?

That's a lot harder to achieve if they have to buy a burner mobile phone for each account, and each burner phone has the potential to be tracked to the point of sale to use video and other techniques to catch the predator.

Mobile number verification is a very cheap and powerful way to cut out the vast majority of bad actors.

<comment><USER30> Phone number requirements is a very effective tool of surveillance and surveillance capitalism but it's also incredibly effective at keeping potential users out of your business.

Have a look at the popularity of online services providing phone numbers for verification purpose.

<comment><USER29> "Have a look at the popularity of online services providing phone numbers for verification purpose."

Sure.

Let's see, Facebook requires phone number verification:

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social- net...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks- ranked-by-number-of-users/)

Facebook is #1 most popular social network.

Okay, WhatsApp is #2 service: Requires Phone Number verification

Youtube, #3: No phone number verification, service is full of fake accounts, trolling, bigotry, and state propaganda and is seen as one of the worst communities in internet history

#4: Facebook Messenger: Phone Number Verification

#5: WeChat: Phone Number Verification

#6: QQ: Optional phone verification, but operated under am authoritarian government which strictly regulates user bases, use of networks, messages made, etc. (AKA they hire armies of people to manually monitor and police the service)

Perhaps I'm failing to see your point...?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This link doesn't seem to work from Australia and New Zealand, it redirects to [https://www.gizmodo.com.au/?r=US](https://www.gizmodo.com.au/?r=US) which is just the main page.

For anyone else who can't read it, here's a Google cache version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oMEtULA...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:oMEtULAztHYJ:gizmodo.com/5910223/how- yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-the-internet+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nz)

I'm not sure whether it's intentionally region blocked or if the site is just stupid.

<comment><USER30> Gizmodo is stupid, and automatic redirect due to localization is even more stupid.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> How is flickr dead?

* I still have my 1TB.

* I can still upload straight from Lightroom

* I can still share private photos with friends via URL, or make them public, or hotlink

Seems fine to me.

<comment><USER33> Myspace isn't dead either. I mean I can log in and there are people on there I'm sure.

<comment><USER34> No it's just much like Detroit, only without criminality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Don't forget Yahoo Pipes. Another great idea killed by Yahoo.

</comment><comment><USER36> I think yahoo lost for a simple reason: it was really hard to make an account. You had to fill out tons of forms.

Instead, they should have started with a very lightweight signup process and progressively deepened it as you were pulled back by activities you subscribed to.

Their second problem was not embracing mobile early enough or well enough.

YUI and Pipes was great though!

<comment><USER37> > Their second problem was not embracing mobile early enough or well enough.

Maybe not well enough, but they were certainly early enough; see this press release from 2001 [1], where they were making mobile search available (in 2001, Y! was using Google for search, so don't freak out about that part)

As with many things Yahoo, they were there early, put in time and money, saw results that weren't great, so they backed off, and may have come back too late. PS, you can read old Yahoo! news releases to get good ideas for what to do today :)

[1] [https://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=17431...](https://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=174311)

<comment><USER36> I should have said smartphone apps

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Recently heard a talk by Thomas Friedman about how the year 2007 was a really interesting "inflection" year wrt all kinds of technology.

 _The cost of making solar panels began to decline sharply in 2007. Airbnb was conceived in 2007 and change.org started in 2007. GitHub, now the world's largest open-source software sharing library, was opened in 2007. And in 2007 Intel for the first time introduced non-Silicon materials into its microchip transistors, thus extending the duration of Moore's Law — the expectation that the power of microchips would double roughly every two years. As a result, the exponential growth in computing power continues to this day._

His talk was basically a rehash of everything he talks about here: [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/dancing- in...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/dancing-in-a- hurricane.html)

Yahoo was an awesome company in 2007. Back when developer conferences were more or less free (for attendees), it hosted the first conference I attended as a newly transplanted person to SF... the "Open Source CMS Summit"... I think I still have some of the stickers it handed out to promote some of its then-recent acquisitions the original article discusses. Yahoo! was kind of one of the first companies to really actively engage and enable external developers (those not employed by Yahoo) as collaborative partners who probably could have helped Yahoo keep its then competitive advantage. Mozilla did this a bit earlier, yes... but not as a publicly-traded company. So part of its demise was due to impatient investors, for sure; however, I think the article makes a good argument for the implications of ignorance when it comes to fostering community.

It's now ten years after this _inflection_ point that Friedman talks about; and according to him, it's just getting started.

<comment><USER39> _Yahoo was an awesome company in 2007_

I know nothing about the company, but in ~2003 I remember associating yahoo with elderly people who didn't know how to use their computer. Granted, this could have been a side effect of doing tech support for a dial up ISP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I've had a Flickr pro account since 2006. I'm not that into photography, I use it as a means to share pictures with extended family around the world. For that purpose it does pretty much everything I need it to, I don't use any of the 'social' aspects of it. What I do hate is having it tied to a yahoo account which I don't use (other than signing in to flickr) and would rather close, and that downloading a dump of all of my photos for my own backup is not a simple task. If I could find something that would cost me the same amount (30$USD ish per year) that offered the same level of privacy control I would probably switch.

<comment><USER41> I believe Smugmug's basic plan may be what you're looking for. They've been around for 15 years (and I believe some of the founder's articles have been on HN), so should be in it for the long haul.

<comment><USER40> I like what they are doing at that site and some of the options they have available but the ability to use access controls only kicks in at the power user level which is $70 per year and that's a key thing for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Well, I agree with lots of the points in the article, but I am one of the user who never used Flickr for their social capabilities, all their groups which could allow you to get discovered by pro photographs, or as a gallery, but mainly for their unlimited storage and their (a bit horrible tbh) api.

I am one of these old school guy who still want to believe in the power of the personal website, and so my main tool to convince people to pay me to photograph them for their wedding is still my photography website.

With Flickr and a plug-in like Justified Image Gallery for WordPress, I can use Flickr basically as the storage backend for all my pictures (and I still do). As I have dozens of thousands of pictures, it's useful.

As such, I don't care that much to have thousands of followers to tell me my photos look beautiful, I know they are. And I don't think personally that to have thousands of subscribers will bring me much more paying opportunities. To be contacted by big firms to do corporate photography requires to put the time and energy to build a much bigger following in the likes of the dozens and dozens of thousands of followers, something I'm just not interested in, I still have a day job after all...

But still, what I would have liked with Flickr would have rather be to go much higher end in the pro market. For example, I would have loved to be able to have the equivalent of my lightroom catalog online. I would have loved to be able to upload my raw photographs rather than only jpegs. That would have been a differentiating factor worth a lot to me. I don't care about having a Facebook bis or an instagram bis.

And I would have loved to be able to rsync or ftp my pictures, gosh, batch upload or processing is still a pain in the a __.

</comment><comment><USER43> Note: this article is from 2012

</comment><comment><USER44> It seems to me that the Yahoo! brand was perceived as destroyed, and simply milked for as much short-term profit as was possible. Security was completely sacrificed, and there was never any vision for building brand loyalty despite having highly-loyal properties (e.g. tumblr/flickr/fantasysports/finance). Long-term value is not built with short-term thinking.

<comment><USER45> Yeah, the Yahoo home page reminds me of the old advertisement laden Altavista site.

It takes 9 seconds to finished load and always sends my computer fan on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> And the question remains, what becomes of Flickr in a post Verizon world?[1]

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/25/yahoo- mov...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/25/yahoo-moves-next- for-flickr)

</comment><comment><USER47> (2012)

<comment><USER48> For those wondering why a five year old article is on HN today, you can thank Taylor Swift:

[https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/85669833453010944...](https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/856698334530109440)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> On a related note, the iOS app has basically stopped working. Whatever APIs are driving it behind the scenes seem to be up maybe one out of four days. The rest of the time you just get a spinning icon.

Time to move my photos off, I suppose.

</comment><comment><USER50> i rely on flickr as my mobile photos backup should i be worried, and look for alternatives

i know it is not very social a la instagram and all .. but it is really good to backup and store my photos and share them with family

i hope they dont close it

<comment><USER51> Dropbox also has a pretty good mobile photos backup feature if you're a Dropbox user.

My problem hasn't been where to backup photos but how the heck to manage (and make use of) tens of thousands of photos. I mean, 50 years from now when each of us has several hundred thousand photos, what exactly are we going to do with them all? And our children and grandchildren? Those are going to be pretty big (and ever-increasing) photo albums. We need better ways of managing and making use of them. Apple has made good progress here with Moments and facial recognition and grouping by location, but all of that is siloed in Apple's infrastructure.

<comment><USER52> Why would your grandchildren want to view several thousands of your photos? Just find the best ones, and backup to multiple locations. Print the best of the best and make a physical album. Scribble some notes under the photos with an actual pen. Your grandchildren will love it. By doing that you are giving importance and meaning to the images, which otherwise would be absent in an ocean of dropbox archives.

<comment><USER30> Hwo would your grandchildren be able to view outdated digital file format that no one knows how to use anymore ?

They'll probably be busy trying to find clean air, clean water, food and shelter scrambling to face the consequences of overpopulation in a climate changing world out of cheap oil more than looking at photos they don't care. You don't even look at your own photos from a few years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The day I was forced to sign up for a yahoo account was the day they lost me...after finally finding a crappy yahoo user id which was sooo much less cool than my three letter initials flickr id I got when it was in beta, I failed the recatpcha 4 times, cursed them a dozen times, and said goodbye forever.

</comment><comment><USER34> Oh man, they put ads in between my photos. You would see some three photos then an ad. That's when I removed all of my content, my account, everything (try doing that on fb).

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm curious what was the story of Dabble DB, and why they killed it.

</comment><comment><USER55> (2012)

</comment><comment><USER56> From the bloody knife pic to the snark...this article lost me at paragraph 1

<comment><USER57> it was a very good article, but yes, the bloody knife pic was offputting

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Now, can someone please tell me who is fucking up Photobucket? It has been impossible for me to login to my account for a couple of months, even though I know the credentials are correct. I've been using imagen.one instead, but that's not what I would prefer.</comment>


Sam Altman is running for governor of CA? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler/status/863674430890717185 <comment><USER2> Not sure why this links to a tweet, here is the source article:

[http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/williesworld/article/The-...](http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/williesworld/article/The- man-President-Trump-fears-most-11144034.php)</comment>


Introducing key/value data storage in Heroku Postgres - <AUTHOR> https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2012/3/14/introducing_keyvalue_data_storage_in_heroku_postgres/

<comment><USER2> HA! From the article: "The pace of software development is accelerating. Agile processes, application frameworks, and cloud deployment platforms are force- multipliers driving this change. The PostgreSQL project has seen these trends and is embracing them."

Hstore (the key/value data storage Heroku is introducing) has been available for postgres since before 8.1, circa 2005.

</comment><comment><USER3> ...and Postgres comes packaged with OS X. Lovely.

<comment><USER4> What version is it, does it have support for hstore? If not...homebrew ftw!

<comment><USER5> Last time I looked it came with 8.4; I would highly recommend installing 9.1. A lot of awesome things have come out in the last few years.</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin P2P Cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitcoin.org <comment><USER2> I wrote the software used at <https://loom.cc>. That is a site which allows anyone to create and issue new types of digital assets. Typically the issuer will write a contract pledging to redeem the digital asset for a specific quantity of physical assets or services. Owners of the digital asset may spend it freely on the server, similar to how they spend cash in the physical world.

One thing I like about Loom is that an asset type has a single issuer. This means that an issuer can store some physical assets in a vault, create a digital asset type redeemable for those physical assets, and issue the digital asset type in a strictly limited quantity.

Then there's no question what a digital asset type is good for, because even if no exchangers or merchants accept the asset type, at least the issuer is contractually obligated to deliver the assets in storage or the promised services.

I wish Mr. Nakamoto (the author of Bitcoin) could devise a way for a digital currency to have a single issuer, but still trade in the wild like Bitcoin does now without a central server. However, that may be a logical contradiction and thus fanciful thinking.

So the best I've been able to come up with is Loom, which does indeed depend on a central server. But I would like to see many Loom servers with trading networks between them. That might be a way to realize the benefits of central servers while avoiding much of their risk.

      (invite 42215c198e22c724d7cfd7887bda2a57)

P.S. Various source code references here:

[https://loom.cc/view/eae93b14a717a7f43e6354bade2a199ca2e3bef...](https://loom.cc/view/eae93b14a717a7f43e6354bade2a199ca2e3bef4971eddc5dba1636f026c94e7)

<comment><USER3> I heard of cryptographic protocols that can achieve what you ask for here.

(I just have to dig up where I read about it.)

<comment><USER2> I've read up a bit on blinded signatures, Brands, etc. I have two problems there.

First, I would need a reference standard implementation of blinded signatures. I know if I tried to cobble something together myself, some crypto-guru would laugh and point out that my prime factors weren't super-prime in a Zeta field of modulus three or some such thing.

Second, basic blinding still _does_ require a central server. I believe the Brands protocol allows blinded tokens to circulate without contact with the server at every stage, and anyone who attempts a double-spend can be identified cryptographically. But it's complicated and ultimately relies on the technique of going after the bad guy with a baseball bat.

So if I went with blinded tokens on a central server, I'd be right back at the central server problem. Blinding provides un-traceability at the cryptographic protocol layer. With Loom, I figured that anyone that concerned with un- traceability could just use a VPN or Tor.

<comment><USER4> What about a peer-to-peer solution? Every participant runs a brand server; to "spend" a token, you contact any random server and tell it that you're doing so. That notice then gets spread to every other server; a server who has received the notice won't allow the same token to be spent again, and a server that isn't "caught up" to the mesh won't be allowed to be authoritative (be a source for spend announcements.) It would basically be like Bittorrent—except the pieces are created after the torrent is, inserted into the "file" (keyspace) one at a time, and the hash mutates with every spend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem with all cyber-currencies is that they can be used for money laundering, so the feds will shut them down. I know, you're saying, "it uses crypto so you can't track it and it's decentralized so you can't shut it down." This is true, however, if you want to spend your bitcoins you need to convert them into some recognizable currency, which means you need a bank to do so, which can and will be shut down by the feds.

See the case of E-Gold for a similar comparison. E-Gold was doing something very similar: letting people transfer money anonymously and untraceably, but backing it with real gold in a vault so that it had some legitimate worth. The feds shut them down.

Crypto currency sounds great, but unfortunately it always breaks down where the rubber meets the road, or where the crypto currency gets converted into real currency. These places are easy to shut down by any government.

<comment><USER6> So are you suggesting that a fundamental property of any workable currency system is the ability for the government to track and control where every unit of currency goes and how it is used?

<comment><USER5> No, I'm just stating a reality of the banking and financial systems. If you want to receive wire transfers, you need to be a federally licensed financial institution, and therefore subject to regulation. Those regulations say you must report all activity that meets certain patterns (ie, certain dollar amounts, suspicious transactions, etc). So, by default all money transfers are monitored by the government. If you want to turn bits into currency (ie wire transfer) you need to pass through a federally regulated entity to do so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Third parties can't prevent or control your transactions." But they can devalue the currency by minting money and keeping it. Also the currently is worthless by definition as no one is willing to pay money for it.

Both of these are common problems among all new currencies, and the most common way to defeat both is to have the currency issuer back their currency with something of known worth (gold, a fiat currency, etc). If conversion to/from the backing currency is common, then most transactions become bound by the problems of both currencies, for example paypal is effectively a currency that is more or less worth USD * ##%, because of the currency switching costs.

I can't wait to see a crypto-based-currency jump these hurdles, but I can't yet imagine how they'll successfully do it (and perhaps some already have that I don't know about?).

<comment><USER8> Minting it and keeping it _increases_ the value of others' money. It causes deflation, because there's a strictly-finite amount of possible "coins" (single-digit percentages of which will likely remain in a couple years. Difficulty in finding them increases exponentially).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This currency suffers from the same major problem that all limited supply commodity-based currencies have (assuming someone doesn't figure out a way to counterfeit it) - deflation. Whether your fixed money supply is based upon gold or hard cryptographic problems, a fixed money supply encourages people to hoard money rather than invest it, because their money will be worth more later. This causes the amount of money in circulation to fall, which causes even more deflation, etc. (Google for "deflationary spiral").

Basically, you have 3 choices for currency. You can have debt-money (most modern economies). This has the advantage that money is effectively created by the market based upon the mutual agreement of a lender and a borrower, which means that money is created and destroyed by the invisible hand. This is a good thing. It is problematic, however, in that you get problems if large sections of the economy ever start paying off their debts through very large productivity gains because that destroys the money supply. Also, it tends to support a "banker class", who does nothing but loan money and gets paid for very little work (capital allocation isn't THAT hard compared to how much you make doing it).

You can have commodity money, which is great because you don't get runaway inflation. But because of deflationary spirals, you can get runaway deflation. Also, people tend to hoard whatever commodities you are using, which are typically useful for industrial or other uses.

You can have fiat money, but that only works if you have an incorruptible central bank. Otherwise you end up like Nigeria.

Personally, I think we should use the Joule as a basic unit of currency. Although energy supplies can fluctuate, they tend to grow and shrink with the economy, which prevents either inflation or deflation. Different banks could offer different baskets of energy types (wind farm or solar farm output futures, barrels of oil, coal, etc.), and you don't end up with a banker class living off of everyone else, but you don't end up with hyperinflation or deflation. 500 MJ today would tend to buy a similar amount of things 10 years from now as today (maybe a little more because of efficiency gains, but not a lot more).

<comment><USER2> When paper money was redeemable for gold, yes there was mild deflation each year, and that condition lasted for decades on end. But people still bought things. The nice thing was, savings had its own reward: you could count on your money buying slightly more next year than the year before. But people still invested money when they could achieve better returns than deflation. Interest rates could be lower too.

A nice steady mild deflation is nothing to worry about. That kind of deflation was mostly caused by productivity gains, which benefited everyone. With inflation, the beneficial effects of productivity gains are stolen, and given to the privileged early recipients of the inferior irredeemable money coming out of the spigot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _To prevent A from transferring the already used coin to another user C, a > public (but anonymous) list of all the previous transactions is collectively > maintained by the network of Bitcoin nodes, and before each transaction the > coin's unusedness will be checked._

Sounds like that'll cost a lot of CPU/bandwidth... * continues reading __* I'm curious how the whole thing is organized...

edit: technical paper link[1] is on the FAQ page.

[1]: <http://www.bitcoin.org/sites/default/files/bitcoin.pdf>

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

edit2: from the technical paper:

      The steps to run the network are as follows:
        1) New transactions are broadcast to all nodes.
        2) Each node collects new transactions into a block.
        3) Each node works on finding a difficult proof-of-work for its block.
        4) When a node finds a proof-of-work, it broadcasts the block to all nodes.
        5) Nodes accept the block only if all transactions in it are valid and not already spent.
        6) Nodes express their acceptance of the block by working on creating the next block in the chain, using the hash of the accepted block as the previous hash.

So, existing data is _always_ re-"proved", continuously, to out-pace any would-be attacker (the longest chain is "correct"). A "proof-of-work" involves repeated hashing of the previous hash + a nonce until X number of 0s prefix the resulting hash. The theory goes that as long as more people are working within the rules, they'll out-pace anyone trying to break the rules, by sheer combined-computing-might.

I'm curious though: what happens when transactions get large compared to cpus- which-can-prove-transactions? Wouldn't that cause the average rate of growth of the histories to decline, making it easier to attack individual lines?

I don't see how this can scale. But please correct me if I'm wrong... I like the idea of a distributed currency, and I'd love one to work.

<comment><USER8> Now that I think about it a bit more, and have lost the ability to edit, I think it may happen when it's a relatively low ratio, or maybe even _even_ , as _all_ histories must be continually re-proved to stave off attackers. It seems there has to come a point where it becomes trivial to devote more attacking CPUs to a single history than histories/CPUs devotes.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I remember reading the book "The Sovereign Individual" which was written in the 90's. The authors argue that as the internet becomes more abundant, cybercurrencies will become popular and over time make it very hard for governments to collect taxes. This would in turn change the world in a lot of different ways.

Since I read the book, I have been waiting for someone to create something like this. It will be exciting to see if this will work and if "cyber currencies" will become more widely used.

<comment><USER10> The cyber currencies which try to look like traditional currencies will be shut down by the government while they have the power to as stated in other comments. However, I see couch-surfing in a way, as a very lose cyber- currency. It has its limitations: there is only one kind of product in the market which uses the currency, and the amount of the currency you have isn't exactly quantifiable. Still, you can use it to trade services at no cost (or very little) and flies under the radar since there is no exchange of quantifiable value taking place. Reputation becomes a new lose currency. Also see LETS systems which are actively, legally in place around the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A long time ago, in a land far away, I wanted to develop a p2p betting network without a vig. This would have made that chore a million times easier. Very cool stuff. What other applications might this be useful for?

<comment><USER12> Farmville. Seriously though something like an open source Flattr without the 10% rake would be nice (micropayments)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Personally, I've always liked the look of eCache: <https://ffij33ewbnoeqnup.onion.meshmx.com/>

Plus points for the top pun as well.

However, I think if we're ever going to escape the problems mentioned in other comments here, what we really need is a huge PayPal-style system to take off, integrate with common systems etc. Can you imagine the potential if eBay supported this? Shame it won't happen, as that's the kick it needs in my opinion :)

</comment><comment><USER14> For anyone considering this, it's already been exploited by people running it across 1000s of vms/processors causing massive rate fluctuations.

One to skip imho.

<comment><USER15> Thats not exploitation. That makes the network stronger. The currency isn't based in CPU power. The inflation method's reward is.</comment></comment>


Colleges Recruit at Richer, Whiter High Schools - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/13/opinion/college-recruitment-rich-white.html <comment><USER2> I cannot view the complete article but I suspect that this is part of a long- term strategy to bring in more private donations and endowments.</comment>