Show HN: Everything I Know Wiki - <AUTHOR> https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz <comment><USER2> I do a similar thing at [https://blog.kowalczyk.info/](https://blog.kowalczyk.info/) (under "My external brain"), e.g. section on programming: [https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/d61b4f94b10d4d808d3d238a...](https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/d61b4f94b10d4d808d3d238a4e7c4d10/programming.html)

I build a custom toolchain to generate it.

All the content is stored in Notion (which is the fastest way I found to write and edit content).

I wrote a Go program ([https://github.com/kjk/blog](https://github.com/kjk/blog)) to convert that to html and deploy as a static site to Netlify, on their generous free plan.

I also generate the rest of the website (mostly blog) from content in Notion.

Since the code is open source, others can adopt it.

<comment><USER3> Interesting! What is Notion?

<comment><USER4> Looks like it's this: [https://www.notion.so/](https://www.notion.so/)

It wasn't clear to me how the data was exported, but it seems the author built his own library: [https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/88aee8f43620471aa9dbcad2...](https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/88aee8f43620471aa9dbcad28368174c/how- i-reverse-engineered-notion-api.html)

<comment><USER5> I just began looking into Notion as an alternative to OneNote.

It appears that you can also export the majority of your data as shown here: [https://www.notion.so/Export-to-PDF-or-markdown- ebb66c27de32...](https://www.notion.so/Export-to-PDF-or-markdown- ebb66c27de324f4287fe609c6c03fd73)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really cool project. How do you differentiate between things that have been too internalized/are too obvious and things that are worth writing down? i.e. you don't have a section for basic algebra, because I can only assume you know that pretty well.

<comment><AUTHOR> In similar vein to this tweet ([https://mobile.twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/10272457592326...](https://mobile.twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1027245759232651270?lang=en)) I mostly try to organize files by topic. Some topics I didn't come across so have no notes/links to share. Other topics may be included inside other files.

Before starting this wiki, I already got some experience in organizing and visualizing knowledge in some way with the Learn Anything project.

<comment><USER7> > move files around until it feels right

Which I find true too, modulo obvious conventions like bin/ doc/ public/ etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Using a system of personal knowledge management (PKM) has been a huge boon for me. Just the act of jotting down all my ideas whenever I have them (Google Keep), then dedicating time to structuring/curating them into an organized format (Microsoft OneNote), and then being able to quickly access them in the future has helped my retention and creativity immensely. I just see patterns I never would have recorded or remembered otherwise. Sometimes it's a pain to dedicate a few hours every weekend to structuring all this information but I've found the long term benefit to far outweigh that cost.

<comment><USER9> Aren't you worried that google or Microsoft will deprecate your personal library? Google isn't exactly good at keeping non-gmail programs in good shape and my original MS One note files simply do not open anymore. Do you at least keep a plain text file somewhere?

It just seems like such a delicate choice of software to use for something like your personal knowledge. Certainly a wiki of some kind would be better?

<comment><USER10> I had a similar thought to this. I was shocked that he was willingly and publicly making proprietary software such a part of his life, and I thought of emacs org-mode, but maybe he doesn't like that sort of workflow. I've only barely used org myself, but I've seen a lot of thoughtbot talks and such that make me feel like bringing it up in case someone goes farther with it than I did.

<comment><USER11> Thanks to GDPR now everyone can export all their data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of the project ran by scholar Avery Morrow, "Everything Shii Knows."[0] He was an early Wikipedia administrator and one of the founders of 4chan. It was really interesting.

Great work OP, personal wikis are very cool! I wish there were more of them :(

[0] [http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Everything_Shii_Knows...](http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Everything_Shii_Knows.html)

<comment><USER13> It reminds me of Shii's wiki, too. Shii's wiki is not only a personal knowledge base, but also a piece of important documentation of Internet cultural history.

Unlike the pre-2000 Usenet era, Internet culture today (e.g. those on 4chan) is no longer systematic documented, and for better or worse, it has a significant influence to the "cyberspace" as a whole. But when people started to realize the existence of something, it's already too late to understand it, original records have been all lost... And people started shouting, "what the hell is going on?"

Written documentation like Shii's wiki is the rare treasure of a time capsule, a snapshot of the time. At Shii's wiki, 2006 never ends.

I'm particularly interested in the history of online culture of obscure political movements (including those crazy conspicary theorists and nationalists). It'n not that I'm morally approving their actions, but to me, they seem to be a new type of social organization in the information age. From Shii's wiki, written by a intelligent person who's observing and thinking about these topics, you can see many indications in 2006 about the status of things and how it's connected to the present day.

For example...

* How the Web was Lost

[http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/How_the_Web_was_Lost....](http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/How_the_Web_was_Lost.html)

This 2006 article describes the upcoming demise of Internet utopianism. The massive commercialization was transforming the Internet to just another TV, telephone, or a shopping mall. It also mentioned how giving everyone access to information can have the side-effect of disintegrating information authority and good writing, and causes the polarization of extremes in politics.

> _Will we ever have another Thomas Paine standing in the street, telling us > common sense that changes our lives? Those are rhetorical questions. The > answer is no. There will be no more shots heard round the world, no more > revelations shocking the whole nation at once. The Web is a difficult > freight train to turn around, and it will likely destroy those lines of > communication._

These topics/issues are NOT identified and explored by the Internet personalities/analysis/mass media until recently.

For example, this article _Why isn 't the internet more fun and weird?_ ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038327](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038327)) was only posted on HN, two months ago. And _What the Hell Is Going On? Effects of Information Abundance._ ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19413852](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19413852)) was only posted on HN, 7 days ago.

Another example about politics.

* Project for the New American Century ([http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Project_for_the_New_A...](http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Project_for_the_New_American_Century.html)), Ron Paul ([http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Ron_Paul.html](http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Ron_Paul.html)), and NAFTA ([http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/NAFTA.html](http://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/NAFTA.html)).

Before Donald Trump gets popular in 2016 on the Internet, this trend can be traced back to (1) free trade and globalization, (2) September 11th, (3) hatred of neoconservatism online, which caused (4) many to support Pon Paul, (5) whose supporters were later disillusioned. Then the (6) Great Recession and (7) Obama occurred. It was a very complicated chain of events, which were all partially documented in Shii's wiki.

The bottom-line is, I think Shii must have gained some deep insights about everything by reading through the endless shitposts on 4chan. I wonder if Donald Trump never ran for the president, it may take another 10 years for the common people to realize these issues.

If you are involved in some online community, please consider to create your personal knowledge base. 20 years later, it may become the only historical records of something.

<comment><USER14> Fascinating.

How does on go on to finding the next shii , telling us what will happen next with such accuracy and insight ?

<comment><USER13> I think you've missed my point. I'm not saying that Shii was a wizard, oracle or prophet, and we should find the next one to predict the future for us. When looking back, things are often pretty straightforward and clear, hindsight is always 20/20.

Instead, what I'm saying is that, he preserved an important segment of the history for us by creating his personal knowledge base, especially that, it was written by someone who was an Internet-native, worked extensively on Wikipedia at its early time, and credited as one influential figure who shaped early 4chan. So we can use the material from his knowledge base to gain some insights about some parts of the undocumented history.

And I think it's another advantage of an knowledge base - it can provide a good record of history from a personal perspective, more comprehensive than a blog or diary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is great and extremely interesting. I imagine me and you (and many others here on HN) fall in the spectrum were many of our interests converge so reading some of the things you wrote is in many ways a different take on my own interests and chances of finding something new of interest are quite high!

</comment><comment><USER16> On the other side of the spectrum we got "Things I don't know as of 2018" [1]. I really appreciate when people share what they do and don't know.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18780065)

</comment><comment><USER17> Back when I was getting my degree and was reading & writing a lot I got really enamored with the idea having an extensive repository of everything I had read or learned or simply come across and found interesting.

There are all sorts of software packages designed to facilitate this, I used DevonThink for a fairly long time. However, it never turned out to be nearly as useful or fulfilling as I had imagined going in and truth be told I just couldn't maintain the self discipline that the curation requires.

So now I have this ginormous unused data store that I don't want to mess with but nevertheless still can't bring myself to delete.

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't see transparency as necessarily a virtue to optimize over everything else, or even a terminal good in itself.

Consider: Would it be wise for a CIA agent to run an "Everything I know" site? No, because they could be targeted through the information they blindly broadcast. I know you're not in such a high-risk role yourself, but do you never want to be important in the future, e.g. a CEO, founder, or a high- ranking software engineer?

Knowledge is power, and sharing unnecessary information to strangers will allow them to abuse it and you.

<comment><USER19> It's important to strike a balance though. We all know engineers and sysadmins who think that their value lies in the exclusive information/knowledge they have or data sources they control. Working with hoarders like that is toxic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree with this 100%! The one thing I always try to optimize for in life is ability to solve problems efficiently.

And in my mind this means empowering everyone else around me so they can build even more awesome tools and ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Great work! I did something with a similar approach, although it's just kind of a knowledge base for myself build with Jekyll and a little search function, called "My Sysadmin Cheatsheet": [https://docs.j7k6.org](https://docs.j7k6.org)

Did it mainly for myself, because I was tired of having to google for the same problem more than once, but decided to make it public to kind of share my knowledge with others.

<comment><USER21> This is fantastic! I love the live search results feature.

I don't suppose you have your source available with a free license?

EDIT: wait, I see it: [https://github.com/j7k6/docs.j7k6.org](https://github.com/j7k6/docs.j7k6.org)

<comment><USER20> Thanks! I'm actually thinking about releasing it as a standalone Jekyll theme some time.

<comment><USER21> I'm not familiar with Jekyll. How much work was it to get your site up and running besides the posts' content?

I'd love to be able to run the same kind of site you are - a series of markdown posts with a live search frontend. Did you use a specific tutorial to do that? Is there a Jekyll live-search plugin or whatever it uses?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > I also started making YouTube videos as I find the video format is often > superior to just text and words.

No. A thousand times no.

</comment><comment><USER23> Almost everything I know/find interesting is on [http://handlr.sapico.me](http://handlr.sapico.me)

HTML is possible through a tag, but adding Links is just faster then writing it down. Managing it through hierarchical/multiple tags makes it even more easier.

There's a bookmarklet for the browser and I can share it on Android through Tasker and autoshare

</comment><comment><USER24> Am I the only one here that thinks this is all a bit creepy? The technical bits I get, but the parts on general life advice, especially the chapter on "seduction" give me a very bleak image of the OP's actual life.

I might be wrong, the OP might be the happiest person ever: I'm just picking up a lot of different signals from this project and the writing in it.

<comment><USER25> "Creepy" seems judgmental.

Many (most? all?) single, heterosexual men are somewhat preoccupied with how to be attractive to women (the reverse is also true). Is this news to you?

I also have a negative reaction to you speculating about how "bleak" his life is. I see this project as an attempt at absolute honesty. And if we're being honest, doesn't everyone's life contain a fair amount of bleakness? We all have insecurities. We all suffer tragedies. We're all wrong about various things. Your comment seems basically uncharitable.

I wouldn't attempt to be honest about "everything I know" publicly, on the internet. But I think a little charity is in order towards those who do make that attempt.

<comment><USER24> Yes, it's judgemental. This is a discussion forum and this is my view on it, this is how I "judge" it. But honestly, I'm all for weird & quirky.

However, my response to reading this post and the blog/wiki was very different than some of the more positive responses here. Ergo, the counter argument. I didn't get the positive weird/quirky feeling, rather the opposite.

<comment><USER26> I can understand the "ick" factor - putting this much of oneself online, without any contextual filter, embodies a level of intimacy unusual with strangers. I don't think it's weird to find it discomfiting seeing notes about machine learning side by side with relationship advice. It feels like a bit much from one guy.

But I think it's very unfair to say it paints a very bleak picture of his life. I jumped straight to the Seduction section after your comment, half- expecting some kind of PUA crap. But it's just filled with the kind of solid advice you get from your dad. Maintain eye contact. Don't slouch. Be honest and genuine. Compliment effort, not intrinsic beauty. Flirt with body language and small amounts of touch, but don't be aggressive. It's all pretty standard, solid stuff.

<comment><USER27> "Maintain eye contact."

Well, you naturally want to look a woman in the eyes if you are genuinely attracted to her, it's hard to resist.

If you need a manual on maintaining eye contact, you probably just want to have sex with somebody, if not with this woman, than with another one.

The creepy part is that this section in wiki teaches you to simulate feelings you don't actually have in order to get laid and this directly contradicts the earlier section about being genuine.

The bleak part is that if you need to simulate attraction to a woman you are missing something very good in your life.

<comment><USER28> > If you need a manual on maintaining eye contact, you probably just want to > have sex with somebody, if not with this woman, than with another one.

Or your path through life didn't teach you prevailing mating rituals. That "it comes natural" narrative is bullshit. Sure, will be the case most of the time. But, you know, human experiences are on a wide spectrum, with many of them fucked up in some way or another. And thus a lot of people can greatly benefit from finding help to improve themselves and thus their mental health. I'd generally consider this a good thing. Especially on such an important topics as finding a significant other.

It's great you apparently naturally learned communication protocols regarding flirting / body language / etc. And yes, PUA stuff can quickly become toxic and not be to the benefit of all involved. But that doesn't seem to be the case here. And you implying everyone who isn't a natural or wants to get better must be "simulating feelings" is just... disappointing.

<comment><USER27> "just... disappointing"

I'd bet that is not how you really feel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Another digital commonplace book. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonplace_book)

</comment><comment><USER30> This is pretty comprehensive. How do you manage to capture learning across devices? For instance when I find some interesting link on my mobile, I read and save it to Pocket but I don't like typing on mobile so I don't capture the gist of it like I do on desktop. And now my Pocket items are so bloated that I have no idea how to organize.

<comment><USER31> If you're on iOS, I can't recommend working copy highly enough: [https://workingcopyapp.com](https://workingcopyapp.com)

It's an awesome git client (event git-lfs) with an editor + preview engine built in, it also provides everything iOS can offer regarding 3rd party app/scripting integrations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Very cool. My thoughts went to the series Buckminster Fuller did called "Everything I Know". [1]

What inspired you to do this?

[1] [https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/resources/everything-i- know](https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/resources/everything-i-know)

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote about my inspiration of starting both Learn Anything and this wiki in 2017 as a journal entry in the wiki itself.

[https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/looking- back/2017](https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/looking-back/2017)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Beautiful project.

If I understand the author's motivations, they are likely to have written and maintain this largely for their own use. I also keep a lot of notes about things I know and information I may want to refer back to, but, I don't have my notes in a form that would be of much use to other people.

</comment><comment><USER34> [https://nathanwailes.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MTOVT/overvie...](https://nathanwailes.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/MTOVT/overview)

This is my friend's wiki which also deserves some attention I think.

<comment> black-tea I hope he has that information backed up locally. It scares me when people invest so much time and effort into contributing to a closed platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is very cool. I am working on a similar project since past 2 weeks but also plan on providing the resources(at least those which I think worked very well for me) to readers. It is kind of a no-nonsense guide to learning anything. Very inspired by this. Thanks

</comment><comment><USER36> Its interesting to see how people reinvent this conept continually. This is cool and certainly useful for slices of knowledge, but I think sadly technology is still not at a point where this would be universally feasible.

Links and text is lightweight and searchable but rather fragile (because of external dependencies) and incomplete. I use a filesystem for this purpose, but that would be still cubersome to effectively share - I wish we'de be at a point where hundreds of gigabytes/mixed form of media are easier and faster to sync and manage.

</comment><comment><USER37> I created a github repository[1] for my personal knowledge base. There are other people doing this too[2]

[1] [https://github.com/azappella/knowledge](https://github.com/azappella/knowledge)

[2] [https://github.com/RichardLitt/meta- knowledge](https://github.com/RichardLitt/meta-knowledge)

</comment><comment><USER38> This is a great project. I've been attempting to achieve a similar goal but just by writing articles on topics I'm interested in. Even if its a synthesis of other things I'm reading or studying. Essentially trying to boil a subject down and re-explain it in a compelling way to help cement the knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER39> This looks very cool. I would like to see a combination of Learn Anything and this wiki, but driven by a timeline, so that nodes align with the date they were created at. And then in addition, it would be amazing to have an option to explore other people's knowledge graphs. Is there anything like that?

</comment><comment><USER40> I simply use a github repository but instead of being "everything I know" is kind of "everything I'm (actively) learning and can't find (minimalistic compiled) elsewhere". I have less will to document stuff that I already know or stuff that is easy to find in a palatable form.

[https://github.com/archimodels/learning- notes](https://github.com/archimodels/learning-notes)

</comment><comment><USER41> I like this a lot and I wonder if it could work for me too. Currently, I use the iOS Notes app as my thought archive but it's obviously not very organized. One thing I notice about this project is that there are a ton of categories. Having so many categories seems to be poor organization because you're likely to have thoughts that overlap categories. Perhaps tagging would be a better method of organization?

</comment><comment><USER42> I personally struggle at times to grasp some concepts being a first generation immigrant does have some effects but it's also the lack of a deeper level of communication. Seeing something like this spelled out in front of me with every single little point about a person's life choices is actually a really interesting way of peeking into someone else's mindset. So thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER43> Anyone else use a paper notebook and writing long form? I somehow feel that it helps with recall/refresh better than a lot of the wikis Ive tried out? A lot of the times, one look at the page brings backs a photographic memory of the context under which those notes were made. Type/electronic note taking doesn't seem to cut it for me.

<comment><USER44> I'm a huge fan of writing in a paper journal, for more important stuff, i.e. blog posts, video scripts, I'll use my Surface Pro + some OCR to get a rough draft converted.

Something about the physical action of writing makes me retain information better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> When they design a human like robot they should give it this wiki to learn how to be more human. Or is it the other way round?

</comment><comment><USER46> I really like this idea. I may steal it.

Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER47> What's the best way to get up and running with something like this that's really easy to maintain?

<comment><USER48> He actually uses Gitbook [https://www.gitbook.com/](https://www.gitbook.com/)

I've been doing the same too [https://www.aizatto.com/why- gitbook](https://www.aizatto.com/why-gitbook)

<comment><USER49> Thanks for sharing both, but especially the second link.

There you said: "Organizing a lot of pages is difficult, even if nested..."

Any chance you've done, or know of an article titled something like: "GitBook - If I Knew Then What I Know Now"?

The idea is ultra-intriguing. But before getting started it would certainly help to not make the same mistakes others have already made.

tia

<comment><USER50> GitBook is nice and I would recommend that if you want something that works good for you out of the box. I personally write markdown files with typora and then publish that to my own notes setup, which is simply mkdocs and some tweaks.

<comment><USER49> I thought the fact that GitBooks has search is a nice and necessary touch. I'm going to have to revisit the static site / blog generators. It's prefer to publish to GL or GH, as well as (for that I have in mind) be able to accept PRs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I got really inspired by it a few months ago and created my own repository. Thank you for the idea OP.

</comment><comment><USER52> About 10 years ago I wrote wiki software called Pylowiki (Pylons/Python) which I still use occasionally to write notes that don't really fit in my personal blog.

Demo of it here: [https://www.foxhop.net](https://www.foxhop.net)

</comment><comment><USER53> I love this! I'm a big knowledge hoarder myself. My brain is mostly written down in workflowy. I hope the day I die I'll be able to give friends/family members this one bug massive doc for them to peruse.

</comment><comment><USER54> I do something similar at [http://www.rodrigofranco.com/](http://www.rodrigofranco.com/) — all using Orgmode exports.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some more interesting discussion on personal wikis and workflows:

[https://lobste.rs/s/ord0rg/does_anyone_else_keep_their_own_k...](https://lobste.rs/s/ord0rg/does_anyone_else_keep_their_own_knowledge)

<comment><USER55> Why are those called wikis? "personal wiki" sounds like "collaborative website but with only one user".

<comment><USER56> Probably because the term "wiki" is now also used for any website being made using a wiki engine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Curious: what do you do for a living?

<comment><USER45> And where do you live where rent is 450 euros a month?

<comment><AUTHOR> Den Bosch in Netherlands

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> linked to [https://github.com/learn-anything/learn- anything#readme](https://github.com/learn-anything/learn-anything#readme)

</comment><comment><USER59> Niki's wiki, right?

</comment><comment><USER60> I also did this on joelx.com. See my philosophy links at top.

</comment><comment><USER61> first, just want to say this is pretty amazing!

</comment><comment><USER62> I detect traces of Jordan Peterson. ;)

</comment><comment><USER63> The more things you try and do, participate in, and understand, the shallower your knowledge will be of any one of those things.

<comment><USER64> A vast superficial knowledge, along with a good memory, the ability of making meaningful connections between far away domains is a scarcely distributed skillset and a quite valuable one in today's Western world.

<comment><USER26> I'd like to believe this were true. Personally I've found it very difficult to find paid work that allows me to exercise even a fraction of my general knowledge. My best results so far have been with underfunded startups who are trying to do too much with too little - they need people who can tackle a different challenge every week, because they can't afford to hire specialists. But it's not a spectacular way to build a career.

Of course there are other kinds of value than monetary.</comment></comment></comment>


What's A Non-Programmer To Do? (How I keep myself busy.) - <AUTHOR> http://spencerfry.com/whats-a-non-programmer-to-do I wrote a comment for Hacker News back in August in response to a guy's question about what a non-programmer should do in a startup. My response received 164 up votes and is the tenth most popular comment of all time. In this article I add some depth to most of my previous twenty bullet points.<p>Original comment thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779378 <comment><USER2> I'm actually the guy that started the thread, and I really appreciated your well-thought-out response. Since putting that up, things have picked up tenfold for me, I had been doing a lot of the things you mentioned, but our customer base was small, and all the little stuff really hadn't reached a level where it was challenging to organize. Boy did it change, and I'm really happy for it. These days I'm finding myself getting buried in an ever- deepening list of must-do items. It's sometime stressful, but then I think about having too little work and smile, so it all works out. A couple of specific comments about your post:

1) You said that the business guy should keep his eye on the macro focus. I find myself doing this to a point of fault. One of my cofounders works in the same room as I do and one day he just had to say: "Look, I can't work with you talking about the future all the time, we need to keep our heads down and develop at this exact moment." I'm curious: do you guys have physically separate work spaces or are you just better able to control your forward looking urge than I am?

2) Customer service: I've taken over most of this, and it's been great. I love interacting with customers (even if I get some requests about a hundred times), and as we grow, I'm ecstatic to report it's eating up larger and larger chunks of my day. Eventually I'll have to figure out a way to continue producing new content (I double as the designer, but I traded that workload with our third guy for the book keeping), but for now it's great. I was curious, we have a one day policy so that people always get a response in a day, oftentimes it's much faster, but sometimes we'll be focused on designing a new feature together, it slips. People have told us they don't mind getting a response one or two days after, do you think it's worth investing high energy in making sure it's super fast?

3) We've been having troubles with our user's guide and we're thinking about pulling it altogether in favor of a more dynamic feature-specific overlay system. We're keeping the FAQ though. Do your customers appreciate a user's guide because it's a collected resource, or do you think it would work as an enhanced tooltip system? This is just personal style, but I was curious.

Again, I really appreciated your comment back when I posted, and this blog post is great. Thanks for helping me out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm stoked that I was able to help you. That makes writing this article completely worthwhile.

1\. Dave (designer) works in our NYC across office right across from me ([http://www.carbonmade.com/blog/2009/09/24/150000-portfolios-...](http://www.carbonmade.com/blog/2009/09/24/150000-portfolios- and-new-office)). Jason (programmer) works back in Chicago and is moving to NYC in May or sooner. What I find works best is to plan for the future, but not to necessarily bring it up with the other folks until it's time. I actually find myself saying "let's focus on the present" a lot more than I find myself sharing my thoughts for the future. Sharing those thoughts are best left for when you've completed a new version or a major segment of your product. Keep everyone focused on the task at hand and bring out your plans for the future only at the appropriate times.

2\. Someone mentioned in a response to one of my posts (and I'm paraphrasing) that "a response to a support ticket takes the same time today as it does tomorrow, so you might as well answer it today." I think that's very true. You shouldn't let it derail you if you're deep in concentration, but if you see it and you can take a minute to respond, why not respond then and there? By responding it won't weigh on you for the rest of the day and affect your other work.

3\. What troubles have you been having? I think the decision of having a user guide or not should be based on whether your product needs one or not. Luckily, ours is simple enough that a few FAQs do all the work for us.

Let me know if you have any other questions here or via email [at] spencerfry [dot] com. I'm also open to having lunch/coffee/beer with you if you're in NYC at any time.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a comment for Hacker News back in August in response to a guy's question about what a non-programmer should do in a startup. My response received 164 up votes and is the tenth most popular comment of all time. In this article I add some depth to most of my previous twenty bullet points.

Here's the original thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=779378>

<comment><USER3>
      2. Doing all the business related tasks.
      3. Doing all the customer service.
      4. Handling all incoming e-mail.
      5. Doing all of the social networking stuff (facebook, twitter).
      8. Tracking all of our expenses, etc., into Excel and getting everything ready for accountant (see 7).
      13. Handling payroll. I do that.
      14. Dealing with the bank accounts. I deal directly with the small business rep at our bank.
      16. Handling all incoming advertising requests, setting up their campaigns, etc.
      17. Dealing directly with all our merchants (credit cards + PayPal). Dealing with the very few chargebacks we receive.
      18. Paying all of our bills (server expenses, software licenses, domains, advertising, etc.) and monitoring our cash flow.
      20. Anything that requires a phone call. Incoming or outgoing.

Frankly, this sounds like work for an administrative assistant more than an equal equity partner.

      1. Writing the copy for the website. Mainly keeping the support documents up-to-date.
      6. Doing all of our marketing. Handling Google AdWords, banner advertising, text advertising, etc.
      7. Dealing exclusively with our accountant
      9. Handling all legal work with our lawyer.
      11. We all come up with ideas for product development.
      10. Doing all of our networking. I'm the guy that goes to all of our relevant events.
      12. Blogging. I do all the blogging.
      15. Market research. I find out as much as I can about our competitors, what they do, etc. I also learn about our market as a whole.
      19. Pitching. I handle all of that.

There is no reason a technical founder wouldn't be able to do these things and continue to work on the product.

<comment><USER4> Hm, I think it's all a matter of cost/benefit. What value would hiring an administrative assistant bring compared to just having an equity founder with more of an incentive? At least the founder can abstract everything business related away, so all you need to do is code. And, to me, that's hard enough as it is.

<comment><USER5> More incentives and the communication barrier may be lower.

<comment><USER6> Plus I would never outsource copywriting. Good way to end up with a FAIL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One thing I'm curious about - I don't see user research on the list, the closest ones to it are the customer support and maybe the market research as well. Does your designer cofounder run usability tests? Or do you all take the 37signals approach and rely more on a combination of your gut instincts and customer feedback?

Just to disclaim my bias: as a designer, I've slowly dropped the more esoteric UX/interaction tools like card sorting or mental models over the last 2-3 years as I've focused more on startups but usability testing is the one most resistant to being dropped and I still see it as pretty much the gold standard of design feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dave took the gut instincts approach for the current version because he built Carbonmade for himself originally rather than for anyone else. The new release that we're working on is a combination of gut instincts and user feedback. Your users don't always know what's best, so you can't base new features or approaches on user feedback alone.

I think we'll get more heavily into some A/B testing, but really only on select pages. For example, I want to set up A/B testing for our new sign up page. Right now you can't upgrade immediately when first signing up. You instead need to sign up for a regular Meh account and then upgrade to Whoo! later. I want to test allowing people to upgrade immediately when they first sign up and see how that goes.

<comment><USER7> " _because he built Carbonmade for himself originally rather than for anyone else_ "

That works pretty well for a v1, Tim O'Reilly had the colorful phrase "fishing with strawberries" to explain why it works so well:

[http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/straw.h...](http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/articles/straw.html)

I'm down with user feedback and a/b tests, I guess I was asking specifically about usability testing though since I don't see it talked about much around here. It's categorically different from the other stuff and yields much more qualitative insights (why did they just do that?) versus the more quantitative results (which page layout has a higher conversion rate?). Plus it's actually a hell of a lot of fun to do! If done right.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! Brilliant article. Love it.

"On one level, the difference between the two points of view is simply the difference between selling one on one to a very targetted prospect and selling to a mass market, where you are casting a wide net, and some set of potential customers will match your own "strawberry" profile."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Market Market Market...Sell Sell Sell. Even, if your product is not ready yet, start building relationship with your customers and other helpful people.

</comment><comment><USER9> learn to code? :) --> <http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/>

<comment><USER5> Yes. Though I'd recommend another _first_ language. C is a fine second or third language.

<comment><USER10> What language would you (or others) recommend?

I'm just curious, as I'm doing Ruby (for the obvious RoR), but python also seems smart.

Or would recommend people start more basic, like with Scheme or something? Scheme was my true first language in school way back when, but I think others could benefit from a comment that dealt with some advise on recommendations about languages that I'm not qualified to give.

<comment><USER11> Python is a nice language because of the everything and the kitchen sink approach to the built-in libraries. It also has a clean look because of the significant whitespace. Ruby is another nice language. It seems to be a bit more esoteric as far as some of the more advanced language features but for the beginner the language lets you accomplish it in more than one way. C is a fine language too but you will spend your time working on memory protection instead of getting things accomplished fast. It is more useful on memory constrained systems.

Every language is useful in a different way and each have a domain or two in which they excel at.

The real takeaway is that the shift from knowing one language to another is fairly easy. The real trick is knowing the idioms of the particular language and how to use them.

<http://www.pythonchallenge.com> or <http://rubyquiz.com/></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Syria is attacking their people. Spread the word. (NSFL)  - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/pchdi/syria_is_attacking_their_people_spread_the_word/

<comment><USER2> While I support causes, I don't think gore pictures are the way to spread them. It reminds me of driving safety videos posted to automotive boards, with similar images of heads cut off, eyeballs falling out, etc. I mean, yeah, people die, people get injured, it IS tragic, thank you for spreading information. But do we have to get into details which body parts were flying where? Does it make any sense at all or is it to satisfy some wicked curiosity?

</comment><comment><USER3> This video is pretty graphic, I'm not even sure if it really belongs here on Hacker News. If it really is authentic, then it is horrifying that the Syrian military is still doing this to their own people. May justice be served.

</comment><comment><USER4> Word of warning if that video is still up when you visit: There is a man with half of his lower face missing. It really is NSFL.

</comment><comment><USER5> The horror that has been going on in Syria for months is beyond comprehension. I personally don't know what to do but pray for the people.

Tensions are electric in the Middle East. Rumor is Isreal will strike Iran soon to stop their nuclear program. Syria and Russia may have something to say about that. All hell is going to break loose.</comment>


NSView song – WWDC 2007 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79YIZ9D8irg <comment><USER2> Wouldn't mind seeing more videos like these.</comment>


Ask HN: What Can Distributed Software Development Teams Learn from FLOSS? - <AUTHOR>

As a long time free software proponent and team lead of a small development team (10+ ppl) in a midsized company I always try to intercorporate my experiences from both worlds. Lately I was confronted with the need to accept new team members from abroad working on the same codebase and I expect to have even more [http://www.helpscout.net/blog/virtual-teams/ and http://www.peter-ivanov.com/will-working-virtually-frequently-future/] telecommuting people in my team in the future. All this while research suggests that the failure rate of virtual teams could be as high as 70% [http://sherimackey.com/2012/06/19/virtual-success-the-dark-side-of-virtual-teams/].
On the other hand many FLOSS projects do not seem to suffer from the same problems (especially premature deaths), despite being developed in a distributed manner more often than not. What can corporations and managers learn from FLOSS to make their distributed teams more successful? Consequently, what FLOSS tools, methods, rules and policies can and should be incorporated into the software development process in a company more often?
I'm interested in the opinion of others especially regarding technical issues like source code ownership and revision control system, but also ways of communication, dealing with cultural differences, ... <comment><USER2> There was a previous discussion about fully distributed teams here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3976819](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3976819)

It sounds as though you're doing a partially distributed team though, which is hard to do correctly. You basically have to treat the remote workers same as a remotely-managed multi-site team, except a site has only 1 worker. You have to worry about any resulting politics and the remote worker(s) getting marginalized and upper management thinking "If they're not present they must not be important to the payroll". That decision made informally during free bagel friday? They haven't heard about it.

One way I've heard it put is that everyone in the office now works in a corporate branded internet cafe, and should assume they're working fully remotely. That means more written artifacts about decisions and design.

From my own experiences, similar timezones work best. If you're in the US and your coworkers 12-13 hour different from you, it's going to be difficult if you're the only person holding everything together without some working hour modifications from either side.

For the technical issues, you need a realtime and asynchronous communication component. Chat and email works fine for this, though you can also do an audio/video chat.

</comment><comment><USER3> Perceived FLOSS success rate may be due to selection bias</comment>


"Our Universe Evolved from the Black Hole of a Collapsed 4-D Star" - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2015/07/big-bang-nixed-our-universe-evolved-from-the-black-hole-of-a-collapsed-4-d-star-todays-most-popular.html

<comment><USER2> Sounds like an interesting article, but my browser took me to susupect page.</comment>


Pastie.org host pulls hosting after DDoS attack - <AUTHOR> http://pastie.org/ <comment><USER2> DDOS attacks are a fact of life, nice to know that Rails Machine will throw you under the bus when one happens. Doesn't seem to fit their homepage description: "You write Rails apps. We deploy, manage, support, monitor, and scale them. Done."

<comment><USER3> So if someone throws multiple tens of gigabits at your customer, and your upstream threatens to turn off your entire hosting company, you would respond "no way, we're going the extra mile for our customer"?

Rails Machine was, in all likelihood, compelled to act to either (a) preserve its relationship with is upstream or (b) preserve its relationship with its other paying customers that do not attract DoS attacks. Your idealism will fall down quickly when one annoying customer threatens service for every last one of your clients: it becomes a "do I continue to get paid or do I fight for this customer" equation.

Price out mitigation equipment and the multiple high-level engineers you will need to administer it before you respond telling me how wrong I am, by the way. The gear alone is an engineer's salary just to get started.

Edit: Fine, I dropped the Amazon example.

<comment><USER2> Any given site might not experience a DDoS attack, but if you run a hosting company, it will happen. The frequency depends on how many customers you have, how popular they are, etc. If a DDoS attack catches you by surprise, then you are very ill-prepared. One possible strategy is to throw the targeted customer under the bus and call it a day. For hosts of a certain size, that may be reasonable, as long as you clearly communicate that to customers.

I've seen these attacks mitigated single-handedly by an experienced fellow with no access to fancy equipment. I believe it went something like this, change the DNS to point at some EC2 instances to do front-end load balancing with some scripts that detect and drop connections from attacking IP addresses and do severe rate limiting. You can proxy legitimate requests back to the original servers.

Granted, not everyone knows how to do that in a pinch, but it shouldn't be a big deal for a hosting company. You only have to figure out how to do it once and when you detect a DDoS attack, flip the switch for that customer.

<comment><USER3> > I've seen these attacks mitigated single-handedly by an experienced fellow > with no access to fancy equipment. I believe it went something like this, > change the DNS to point at some EC2 instances to do front-end load balancing > with some scripts that detect and drop connections from attacking IP > addresses and do severe rate limiting. You can proxy legitimate requests > back to the original servers.

That isn't how it works, but I appreciate you trying to explain it to me (I have personal experience as a former employee of a hosting company, in this exact position). A typical DoS attack is designed to flood the pipe, usually with UDP. UDP spam attacks are _far_ simpler than layer 7 attacks that you describe, and layer 7 attacks (if small enough) are easier to handle.

As a point of reference, I don't even have access to a botnet these days but I could knock your home cable connection offline in about five minutes of my time.

In your scenario, if you were to update DNS to point the victim at some EC2 instances, you'd accomplish DoS attacking EC2 instead as they only offer you gigabit connectivity on most EC2 instances. If the DoS attack is multiple gigabit, that isn't going to help you unless Amazon steps in and mitigates about as best they can. A DoS mitigation strategy generally has nothing to do with your application. If an engineer's first answer to a huge DoS attack -- as in, larger than the uplink -- is iptables or "scripts to detect and drop connections", that engineer is uninformed. I'm sorry.

I have personally witnessed a 40 gigabit/sec attack. I'm sure the smart engineers at CloudFlare have seen bigger. Upstreams don't give a shit what's flowing across the wire, and a small TCP SYN flood directed at your server won't gain any attention from your host or their upstream. A multiple-gigabit attack that takes down the entire uplink will.

<comment><USER4> Would have appreciated if you did explain what an effective mitigation strategy is.

<comment><USER3> Depending on your position, there really isn't one. The hosting company can implement one, which they might be able to insert in your path if you are at the receiving end of an attack. There are Cisco products and a bunch of up- and-comers that can do this.

If you're a "typical startup" with an Amazon footprint, you have no mitigation strategy for flooding attacks aside from not attracting them. If someone points multiple gigabit at you, there is just about nothing you can do except hope Amazon can do something.

<comment><USER5> That's a little pessimistic.

There's a range[2] of ISPs who will sell DDoS protection to you, either as an addon when you host with them, or as an external service (re-routing your traffic).

E.g. StormOnDemand just recently added it to their portfolio[1], which is note-worthy because they actually list prices right on the website.

Either way, even without "explicit protection" any ISP beyond mom&pop-size deals with these attacks every day and will sort them out for you for free the first couple times. Only when they turn into a habit or become so huge that they have to talk to _their_ upstream they will politely ask you to throw some money their way.

Pulling the plug immediately is definitely not normal. However considering Pastie was apparently a sponsored account it's at least somewhat understandable (albeit a _terrible_ PR move).

[1] <https://www.stormondemand.com/ddos.html>

[2] When in doubt, and pockets deep enough, there's always Akamai. They're the ones who can filter TBit/s-scale (yes, that was a T) attacks for you.

<comment><USER3> > Pulling the plug immediately is definitely not normal.

Nulling immediately is. You're also assuming that this is Pastie's first DoS attack, which we don't know based on the information presented to us.

<comment><USER5> _Nulling immediately is._

For serious accounts (in the 6 digits/year) absolutely not, unless the attack is large enough to affect other customers.

Admittedly RailsMachine looks very small, in all likelihood their pipe was rather easily clogged and they simply didn't have the choices that larger ISPs have.

<comment><USER3> > For serious accounts (in the 6 digits/year) absolutely not, unless the > attack is large enough to affect other customers.

If it doesn't affect other customers, a hosting company won't act or even be aware, in most cases. They'll just send you a bill for the transfer. If someone attacks you and it impacts other customers, you get nulled. I'm aware of 7 digits/year and 8 digits/year accounts through industry anecdotes that have had machines nulled. The engineer operating the null doesn't say, "oh, that's X, maybe I shouldn't fix the network for my other customers".

I don't understand what you're disagreeing with.

<comment><USER5> I'm disagreeing with your black/white record.

There's a bit of middle ground between "sending a bill" and nulling.

I've been hit by two larger attacks in the past (GBit/s range) and the respective ISPs were both extremely supportive, switching our IPs while they tightened their filters. Neither billed us a dime despite our ingress spike making quite a bump in their charts and a lot of handholding over 2-3 days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This behavior of unplugging the destination of the DDoS is common with smaller hosts. They don't have the capital to spend on expensive mitigation devices. There are times when these attacks affect their entire network (bad design), so their quick and fast solution is to null route you at their cores.

<comment><USER7> The issue isn't unplugging, I don't think anybody here thinks that it is unreasonable if they were to do this. The issue is that they kept the site unplugged for good because a single DDoS attack. My analysis based on the official response is that they used this incident as an excuse to drop the site because it was too much of a hassle to deal with the takedown notices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I can not understand these attacks. Why block a service that is free of charge, useful and did no harm? Unless of course this DDoS was not targeted, which makes even less sense to me.

Also, why did Rails Machine throw out the site so quickly? If I choose to sponsor someone out of my free will, I'd do so without distinction from paying customers.

<comment><USER9> @everyone who doesn't work in hosting....

>"why did Rails Machine throw out the site so quickly?" If you run a datacenter, you pay for an uplink. That uplink has limited capacity. 4gbit, 10gbit...whatever. A big attack can saturate that link completely, so even with the biggest most expensive "mitigation device" on the market (some of this gear can get into the hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars for /one/ device, mind you), if a DDoS is overloading your upstream bandwidth providers, you can either have your entire DC brought to a crawl, or null route the site.

With that said, how did CloudFlare keep lulzsec up? Anycast, lots of iron, lots of smart technicians, and probably tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in bandwidth fees. TL;DR it was a publicity stunt that they very smartly played up.

DDoS is pretty misunderstood, and lots of clients think that there is some magical box that can take all the traffic. Again, if your link is saturated, a "mitigation" device can only filter the traffic; your upstream providers can and will take you offline if you don't fix it. Failing that, you get a massive overage bill and every other client at the facility is crawling. It's not really a good solution (mitigation devices /can/ help with smaller attacks, but for the big stuff, null routing is the best solution unless you have something like CloudFlare -- and even they will pull the plug if the attack gets too heavy, because it's simply not worth the expense to them to keep your site online.)

<comment><USER10> As someone who does not work in hosting, I am somewhat surprised that "upstream bandwidth providers" don't have mediation strategies for DDoS attacks. It is my understanding that most of the asshats out there aren't sitting on Stuxnet: they have well under a hundred machines that they are able to flood traffic at you with (which is certainly more than enough). It seems like there are network-level mechanisms you can use to just block such an attack at the ingress connections. Is anyone willing to explain more about the issues here? (I, at least, would find it fascinating.)

<comment><USER3> Dropping UDP is a start, because most of these attacks randomize the UDP source address. The real problem is AS operators who let forged UDP addresses escape their network. If your outgoing edge ACL is not dropping source addresses that do not belong to you, _you are doing it wrong_. Period. Full stop.

If the packets are random UDP sources, then there's not really much you can do on the receiving end except strategies that involve the destination address. There's really only one effective one: nulling it.

<comment><USER10> Okay, but then why null route the entire machine, as opposed to dropping just the UDP packets going towards it? If you already have routing infrastructure that can disseminate "attempts to access this IP address will fail" it does not seem a stretch to disseminate "attempts to access this IP address over UDP will fail; over TCP there is no issue". Are "upstream bandwidth providers" really that impotent against that kind of issue? :(

I, personally, have absolutely no need to have incoming UDP packets of any kind at all entering my network, and can not come up with a reason why any web hosting company would: it seems like it should almost be a question on your bandwidth contract "will you need UDP (recommendation: no)". (Given the simplicity of the UDP problem, I personally assumed that the complexity would come from state-ful TCP filtering issues.)

<comment><USER11> The issue with dropping UDP is that DNS uses UDP in most implementations. Unless you have no need for DNS on your network, you might want UDP packets to be not dropped completely.

<comment><USER10> Ah, that a web host might want to host their own DNS in house (maybe for ease or cost) is not something I considered (I outsource DNS as it is sufficiently performance sensitive you really want to AnyCast it against numerous networks, and there are people that specialize in that). As a client you can just use TCP for DNS. (Again: I am not a host ;P. Thanks!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd like to apologize to those who have been negatively impacted by my decision to pull support for Pastie (especially Josh). To understand why I made the decision to pull our support after 9 hours of multiple DDOS attacks, I'd like to share some background and our ops philosophy.

It is important to understand that I put our existing customers that pay us to manage and scale their high growth revenue-generating web applications before all else. This is the core of our business and what they trust us to do. As we are seeing now, this means that I will protect them at the expense of making some non-customers and "risky" customers upset. Let me explain further...

Rails Machine at this time is 6 people. Through a lot of tools like Moonshine, experience, and process we manage 100+ web applications. Please note that I did not say "host". Hosting is only part of the package. We commit to do whatever it takes to keep our customers' applications available and growing their business.

Everyone in the organization is a developer on a varying scale of dev to ops including myself who started with Rails in 2005 and have been a professional dev for 20 years.

Although not as quiet as we would like, in general the workload of responding to outages, bugs, scaling problems, and traffic bursts are managed by the team. We've been doing this for 6 years focused specifically on Rails and have seen most problems with Rails applications in production. This makes us fairly efficient in identifying and resolving issues.

We've been hosting Pastie pretty much since the beginning and free of charge for several years. In the past two years, Pastie began to attract a lot of users intending to use it to do illegal things. This includes sharing stolen credit cards, stolen passwords, phishing schemes, copyrighted content, virus/trojan horses, hacker scripts, confidential corporate info, etc, etc.

Please know that the overwhelming majority of Pastie's user base are well meaning folks who kindly follow Josh's basic rule of "using Pastie for good". A tiny minority however attract a lot of attention through their public pastes that ruin the experience for everyone else.

Aside from the obvious problems, the public existence of this stuff makes a lot of people upset who in turn threaten us. This includes but not limited to criminals, giant corporations, angry individuals, trolls, and more importantly our data center/upstream provider. These upset people then send us nastygrams requiring us to take action or else. "Or else" includes suing us, arresting us, DDoSing us, and more importantly terminating our service.

To avoid bad things happening to us and all of our other customers, we have to take action immediately. Every now then other customers get a spam notice or a DMCA notice but in general it happens once and not a huge deal. Pastie on the other hand generates 100s of abuse complaints. Abuse complaints that we can not ignore and require us to investigate and follow up on. While we are doing this, we are not helping the 100+ other customers that generate zero abuse complaints and most likely never will.

Enter the DDos. Over the past 6 years, we've handled multiple DDoS attacks on different applications. Given that 95% of our customers are running revenue- generating business applications, we deal with a DDoS about once or maybe twice per year. They are really annoying and consume a lot of _time_ and a lot of concurrent team members. Although we wish they never happened, as some have pointed out DDoS attacks are a fact of life. Many high profile sites with much larger teams and budgets have struggled for multiple days fighting waves of attacks. We accept this as part of our job.

The problem in this particular instance is that these DDoS attacks on Pastie were a continuation of the stream of operational disruptions already being generated by the site. After handling the first attack with four of us covering all of the angles around 10pm and with the help of Internap's network team, we halted the attack.

Within a few hours, it began again in the wee hours of the morning. At the same time, alerts for another customer _who had entrusted us with their business_ came in. So a decision was made to halt the second attack as quickly as possible and focus on doing our job as we promised to the rest of our customers. We could have chosen to ride out multiple other attacks and engage in a lot of time consuming and expensive behavior to preserve a site that was already a source of ops disruption. Making that choice would have been inconsistent with our values and commitments.

This decision was purely ops motivated to protect our team members ability to serve our core customers.

Some of you are upset about this decision and I am sorry for that. I know 100+ customers that would approve. I put my customers and team first.

Please feel free to reach out to me directly (email or twitter) if you would like to discuss this further.

@bradleyktaylor, Founder, Rails Machine

<comment><USER3> You made the absolute right decision, and anybody that is saying otherwise hasn't been in your position. The good of the many over the good of the one; that's hosting.

The operational awareness in this comment makes me wish everybody would print it out as an example of a tough call to make in defense of your brand.

<comment><USER13> Throwing the victim under the bus is standard procedure for third rate hosters. Doing it without notice is even worse.

Only if the brand is "we're el cheapo hosting cowboys" it's the right decision.

<comment><USER14> You ignore the fact the this customer wasn't paying for the hosting. He only costs them money, a lot of time (through dealing with DMCAs, DDoSs and more).

At this point they had to make a choice and they chose for their paying customers and drop pastie.org

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I know I'll get a lot of shit for this but good riddance. I hope it never comes back. I've felt this way since I found my stolen accounts posted on Pastie and they ignored requests to take it down.

<comment><USER16> Once they're on pastie, it's already too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like an opportunity for the other managed Rails hosts.

<comment><USER18> Right, especially considering EngineYard and Blue Box are here at RailsConf

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Perhaps an opportunity for Cloudflare to offer support?

<comment><USER20> We would love to help, and have offered.

<comment><USER19> Awesome; I hope Josh is able to get things back online. I'm curious how much support or assistance Rails Machine offered prior to pulling hosting.

<comment><USER9> >"I'm curious how much support or assistance Rails Machine offered prior to pulling hosting."

Me too, just out of curiosity, but if you have an attack that is large enough to be affecting other clients, you can't usually wait around too long for the targeted client to respond (and even if they did, there isn't typically much you can do for a large attack.) How long? I'd say about 5 minutes. The typical attack we see rises up over the course of a few minutes and lasts 6-48 hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know about the scale of the DDoS attacks but have you tried cloudflare?

</comment><comment><USER22> FWIW, apparently Rails Machine's CEO thinks some of Pastie's users are not-so- great: <https://twitter.com/bradleyktaylor/status/194937146153508864>

<comment><USER23> Uh, he's not talking about _all_ of Pastie's users, he's stating that Pastie has some bad users who use it maliciously and threaten the provider.

<comment><USER22> Sorry, worded that wrong. Fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I really enjoyed this, the user experience is very nice and its a well designed site.

I tend to use Gist now because its improved and I have a client for it, but this is a shame to see.

</comment><comment><USER25> If you're looking for more of a minimal snippet experience there's always <http://marked.cc>

<comment><USER26> Unless you're pasting code. Check out my trivial example: <http://www.marked.cc/4f9766f05e69190001000017>

<comment><USER25> It does support code snippets you just have to use fenced code blocks ala Github style.

``` x = [] ```

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is a good chance to move over to <http://gist.github.com> for all your pasting needs.

<comment><USER28> I use both Gist and pastie.org. While I prefer Gist and wish it would just add support for disposable gists (without making me log out!), pastie.org is awesome for the disposable stuff on IRC, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Clearly the gist.github engineers DDoSed them - it's all so clear!</comment>


Run Go on AWS Lambda - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/apex/apex <comment><USER2> You may give us a try too ;) Native go (without spawned process ) on AWS Lambda. Nothing more, nothing less. [https://github.com/eawsy/aws-lambda- go](https://github.com/eawsy/aws-lambda-go)</comment>


Git tutorials - <AUTHOR> http://www.gitguys.com/

<comment><USER2> The illustrations look like they were made in MS Word 97.

The first tutorial, "Version Control System (VCS) Requirements: What every VCS must do" looks more like a rough outline of a first draft than any comprehensive introduction that would make sense to a beginner.

I find the other sections to also be generally incomplete.

Maybe this will get better, but I'm not going to point any newbies there given better options right now (like <http://gitimmersion.com/> ).

<comment><USER3> +1 for gitimmersion.com.

+2 to Edgecase for giving back (rubykoans.com).

Great screencast from Jim Weirich on Git at pragprog here: [http://pragprog.com/screencasts/v-jwsceasy/source-control- ma...](http://pragprog.com/screencasts/v-jwsceasy/source-control-made-easy)

<comment><USER4> I don't know about the screencast as I've never watched it -- but the pragprog text 'Version Control Using Git' is certainly wonderful: [http://pragprog.com/titles/tsgit/pragmatic-version- control-u...](http://pragprog.com/titles/tsgit/pragmatic-version-control- using-git)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found <http://gitready.com> really useful when I was starting out with git.</comment>


Who rises to the top? Early Indicators (.PDF) - <AUTHOR> https://my.vanderbilt.edu/smpy/files/2013/02/Kell-Lubinski-Benbow-20131.pdf

<comment><USER2> No. Correlation is not causation.

1\. There's no discussion of potential influencing variables and other inputs, like private tutoring and income that could affect scores. Also, note the sample: "The sample included 253 males and 67 females; 78% were Caucasian, 20% were Asian, and 2% were of other ethnicities." Why bother to add anything but white male at all?

2\. since when do we take SAT at 13 Y/O? 3\. Is the 1980's SAT even remotely similar to 2013? If not, so what? 4\. "Top of their field" n=260 means we get sub samples of different industries around n= 3 to 16 or so (on graph). Please do 1 industry with n=31, and I might pay attention to a correlation. 5\. Can we see the model output? Are the results significant, and the model sound?

Based on the data, it would seem more likely that the influence on successes here is more likely that the individual is MALE and WHITE and NOT SAT score. I'm not sure I understand what this model is getting at except trying to suggest other than how to achieve material "success" through SAT SCORES??!!

Read this one instead: [http://www.businessinsider.com/grant-study-reveals- what-make...](http://www.businessinsider.com/grant-study-reveals-what-makes- us-happy-2013-4)</comment>


Source: Google Plans to Announce Long-Rumored 'Yeti' Hardware at GDC Event - <AUTHOR> https://9to5google.com/2019/02/21/google-yeti-gaming-hardware-gdc/ <comment><USER2> I feel like kicking myself for never going further with my 2D game because I felt it wouldn't have an audience that wasn't on a Saturday platform. Now I feel motivated to get one done soon so I can get it in Yeti/playstore ASAP as it would use a couple tripper since I hate touch screen games.</comment>


Web GL Ocean Simulation - <AUTHOR> http://david.li/waves/

<comment><USER2> The code is quite cool to look at. Love seeing the extensive use of matrices and mathematics to create such a beautiful and mesmerizing display.

If anyone is interested in playing around with it, I threw it up at JSFiddle here: [http://jsfiddle.net/zyAzg/](http://jsfiddle.net/zyAzg/)

Excellent demo.

<comment><USER3> Just to clarify - the bulk of the work here is done in GLSL shaders on the GPU, not with matrices in JavaScript.

All that matrix code you see in the source here is basically just the minimum prerequisite for doing 3D graphics, it would be the same if you just wanted to get a spinning cube with some camera control.

The real magic happens in the shaders which compute water mesh displacement, normals and shading directly on the GPU (21 simulation passes + 1 rendering pass + 1 initialization pass, using several floating point textures, seems like stateful simulation with ping-ponging, basically using graphics rendering pipeline to do GPGPU without a need for OpenCL / CUDA).

<comment><USER4> >basically using graphics rendering pipeline to do GPGPU without need for OpenCL / CUDA

It would be really cool to see a project that would make that easier to do in JS more generally. Basically a similar idea to Parakeet or Numba, but with GLSL as a target.

<comment><USER5> I think the closest you'll get right now is something like THREE.js that builds shaders for you out of a high level graphics API.

<comment><USER4> That seems to me actually further than just writing the GLSL shaders yourself. I suppose the MVP would be a library that simply eases getting data in and out of webgl.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Your browser does not appear to support the required technologies.

It would've been nice to have an 'I don't care, proceed anyway' button. The check excludes Safari 7, which runs the demo just as well as Chrome.

[http://jsfiddle.net/bYHfh](http://jsfiddle.net/bYHfh)

^ removes the hasWebGLSupport() invocation.

Very nice demo, though!

<comment><USER7> I am on latest chrome on win8, I still get that message. I guess it needs something more powerful than the onboard GPU I have.

<comment><USER8> I'm using the onboard/ondie Intel HD4000 and it works. You might have a driver that is blacklisted. Chrome and I think other browsers have a list of drivers known to allow execution of dangerous shader code and block WebGL in those cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thank you for the Youtube fallback! ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrUehq6vJss&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrUehq6vJss&feature=youtu.be))

</comment><comment><USER10> Honestly very impressive, idea: if made into fullscreen (i.e. without edges visible) and with an added horizon and an emulated sun-rise/sun-set this would make for totally enthralling watching - the "live'ness" of it makes it a thousand times more interesting to the eye than images or pre-recorded video material.

<comment><USER11> I'd love to see that!

A dream/stretch goal would be some sort of a vessel (fishing boat?) that allowed me to recreate the 'perfect storm' and WASD around while trying stay afloat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very nice and fully custom code too! The UI is really clean and fits nicely with the WebGL via CSS transforms I believe. Props to you.

BTW geistner waves reference here: [http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch01.html](http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems/gpugems_ch01.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Sorry if this is a dumb question, but how hard would it be to add a boat that realistically bobs up and down with the water?

<comment><USER12> Just calculate the boat's water displayment via some very approximate measure. Then use that to determine buoyancy relative to boat weight and just integrate that overtime and add some dampening to represent friction/inertia.

But there is a better way of doing interactive waves from a boat, wave particles:

[http://www.cemyuksel.com/research/waveparticles/waveparticle...](http://www.cemyuksel.com/research/waveparticles/waveparticles.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of this shader toy shader. [https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdsGDB](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XdsGDB)

<comment><USER15> Yeah, love that one too. Insanely great. But it's raytracing the sphere and raymarching the water distance-fields per fragment, right? Not gonna fly realtime any longer (or at all) if you ever wanted to use it with additional polygonal art. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Might be system dependent, though couldn't help but notice a non-trivial difference in the OpenGL rendering quality, between Firefox and Chrome.

Chrome 32 beta on OS X, produced an anti-aliased canvas, whereas Firefox 25 had the dreaded jaggies @ 1680x1050

<comment><USER17> I have the same thing in Win and Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Where would one start if they wanted to learn the math needed to achieve something like this?

<comment><USER19> I've alluded to this in other comments but a lot of the mathematics is linear algebra. As gaius mentions, check out the wikipedia article. There are plenty of linear algebra books out there. Recently I've really enjoyed the book by Meyer which is free although it does get quite advanced and is mostly theorem / proof-style. It's also free so who can complain.

[http://matrixanalysis.com/DownloadChapters.html](http://matrixanalysis.com/DownloadChapters.html)

Here is a link I found yesterday which gets you solving the 2D NS equations.

[http://lorenabarba.com/blog/cfd-python-12-steps-to-navier- st...](http://lorenabarba.com/blog/cfd-python-12-steps-to-navier-stokes/)

I've take a quick look through it and it seems pretty good. It introduces many of the most important ideas of solving PDEs. Obviously there are huge tomes on various techniques to solve the Navier-Stokes equations but this link, I think, does a pretty good elementary introduction. A more comprehensive treatment would require a more thorough background in mathematics (e.g. I wrote a 2D NS solver using the vorticity formulation and FFTs but to understand the equivalence requires a greater background).

As for the cool visualisation, I cannot help you. I don't know any fancy graphics programming since I normally use the built-in plotting tools of Python and Matlab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a really awesome demo. Great work.

I'd love to see it with different ocean floors to be able to see how waves break in different locations based on certain conditions. Someone please make this happen! :D

<comment><USER21> It's heavily based on Jerry Tessendorf's "Simulating Ocean Water" paper, so it only does open water: interaction of water and wind using Phillips' Spectrum.

So it doesn't model the interaction with land in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really like the layout of the controls, it's a mix between infographics & some movie-like GUI and it works pretty well.

<comment><USER23> I can't use the controls at all (Chrome, OS X). Clicking the sliders just moves the whole plane around.

<comment><USER24> Works flawlessly here (Chrome, OS X).

I also love the controls, reminds me of Bret Vistors interactive document examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Awesome demo, and a great way to turn your laptop into a heater. Still, performed quite well on my 15" retina mbp.

</comment><comment><USER26> I knew this is a bit irrelevant, just want to show a pure js ripple effect which I borrowed before: [http://jsfiddle.net/esteewhy/5Ht3b/6/](http://jsfiddle.net/esteewhy/5Ht3b/6/)

</comment><comment><USER27> This runs at about 7 frames per second in Chrome on my 10-month-old 13" Macbook Pro at work.

Are people with better graphics cards seeing 60 (or even 30) fps? I'd love to be able to see this in all its glory.

<comment><USER28> It's definitely performing better than that on my 2nd gen 13" MBP on Chrome. Could it be struggling with retina?

<comment><USER29> 60fps in Chrome on MBP 15"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Relevant: [http://www.babylonjs.com/Scenes/Worldmonger/index.html](http://www.babylonjs.com/Scenes/Worldmonger/index.html)

Scene with water, made with BabylonJS.

</comment><comment><USER31> Hitting ctrl-+/ctrl-- on chrome leads to interesting results :) Impressive demo, kept staring at it for a while pondering the exciting future the web platform has in it.

</comment><comment><USER32> I am surprised how this runs smoothly even on lower end PCs. I was able to view it perfectly smooth on a old Dual Core, integrated graphics and 2GB RAM linux box.

</comment><comment><USER33> Too sad they are using "OES_texture_float" extension :( It would be more interesting to see it done with pure WebGL.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'd like to listen to the bottom edge of the simulated region played back as a waveform as the simulation progresses.

</comment><comment><USER35> Crashed my browser (using Firefox 25 on Arch Linux). Maybe it would've worked, but I only waited for 25 seconds.

</comment><comment><USER36> Wow, this is awesome. After many years of experience in programming this still makes me feel like a total idiot.

</comment><comment><USER37> excellent work, thanks for sharing. my wavyness simulation resulted in more literal results [1] so i'm glad to have code to study for improvements.

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnG6I1nsHy4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnG6I1nsHy4)

</comment><comment><USER38> Error on line 36: An "body" start tag seen but an element of the same type was already open.

<comment><USER39> A great demonstration on why such validation doesn't really matter at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> That is really cool.

Is that some sort of fluctuating perlin noise?

</comment><comment><USER41> That may be the only wave in SoCal today. But can I surf it? :)

</comment><comment><USER42> Redundant but I just want to say it: this is well done:)

</comment><comment><USER43> Very realistic, with the foam it would be perfect

</comment><comment><USER44> I would love to see this code fully commented!

</comment><comment><USER45> sheesh, all these great blogs... Mine looks like it was made by a middle schooler.

</comment><comment><USER46> That's super cool!

</comment><comment><USER47> This is really cool

</comment><comment><USER48> looks cool, but it's really slow.

</comment><comment><USER49> Really cool!

</comment><comment><USER50> which browser can display?

</comment><comment><USER51> Love it!

</comment><comment><USER52> wow this is great!

</comment><comment><USER53> I remember seeing this run smoothly on a P2 after a very small executable download in late 90's. How far we've come in a big, stupid circle back where we started.

Now instead of a small executable, we need a large executable to sit on top of a large API on top of the CPU before even touching the GPU, and a network connection to download all the dependant APIs and libraries every time the page is loaded.

The only impressive thing about this demo is how many YCombinator readers are impressed with blinkenlights

<comment><USER54> I'd venture that the differences these day is that there is no install step and it works on many different systems.

<comment><USER53> >many different systems.

Sure, for varying values of "works" and "different" and "no install step".

I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that a DOS executable from the 90's will run on more machines in the world than this demo, given "platforms" similarly to what this demo takes as a given.

<comment><USER55> _Sure, for varying values of "works" and "different" and "no install step"._

You could say the same thing about anything related to web browsers. What's your point?

 _I 'm going to go out on a limb here and state that a DOS executable from the 90's will run on more machines in the world than this demo_

Right... except a user has to trust you enough to download and execute your DOS binary rather than just execute a javascript file in a browser sandbox.

<comment><USER53> I already have a sandbox, it's called a computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> You know...IE11 does support webgl...just saying. (I don't think it checked...)

</comment><comment><USER57> computers have now become so powerful that this stuff is easy. you can implement it in a way which, aside from platform, is really quite naive and wasteful - and still get applause.

most programmers can come up with a much better solution to this problem if removed from google and forbidden access to gpu gems.

this is at least well presented though...

its a shame the code has been posted. whilst i normally assume that demos like this are unlikely to be smart or impressive these days - this time i know for sure. its actually a good deal worse than i ever would have imagined.

i'm still quite torn whether all this horsepower is a good thing or not.... on the one had we get a demo like this without much in the way of understanding or resourcefulness. on the other hand we have hundreds of man hours being wasted at dev studios because clever efficiency is rapidly becoming a thing of the past...

<comment><USER58> "most programmers can come up with a much better solution to this problem if removed from google and forbidden access to gpu gems." I doubt I could come up with such a solution even with access to google and gpu gems. I am not a particularly good programmer, but I know for certain that most programmers wouldn't even know where to begin to implement something like this.

<comment><USER57> don't be so doubtful. i started out down this path without google and the internet so its especially easy for me to see, but consider: do you even want to make this?

if you did i'd bet you'd find a way - google, wikipedia and free copies of gpu gems make it stupidly easy. the amount of understanding required to produce a demo like this is no more than is required to copy someone else's code or algorithm in any other discipline.

even without those, if you wanted to make this i bet you could come up with something pretty good on a first attempt. even now i bet that somewhere in there you have a pretty good idea of an approach - you might think its dumb, inefficient or must have a flaw in it - you might have no idea about what you need to feed the rendering pipeline - but i'd bet its pretty good - probably a lot better than you'd give it credit for.</comment></comment></comment>


Port Automation: Robots Play Growing Role in Handling Ship Containers - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2018/01/30/port-automation-robots-container-ships/ <comment><USER2> > These kinds of coordinating, organizing, and choreographing tasks are more > efficiently handled by machines than by humans.

That's an assumption they didn't fact check.

According to the terminal itself ECT Delta terminal in Rotterdam was the first automated terminal, see [http://www.ect.nl/en/node/205](http://www.ect.nl/en/node/205) (in Dutch). This terminal was built in 1985. This terminal was always slower than any human operated terminal. They did invest into technological upgrades.

Since ECT Delta they also built newer terminals. Also for those the automation isn't just magically quicker, cheaper or has a higher availability than a human operated terminal. Another thing to be aware of is that one bug can stop the entire terminal. With humans they work around it (more flexible). Such problems have occurred often enough. Without even a bug, the Maersk cyber attack also had quite the impact.

For US, the main problem is unions. The way that unions operate in the US vs most countries in Europe is vastly different. Union in US seems to be about being powerful, not so much about doing what is right or makes sense. They have way more of an impact on any productivity than calls for automation.

<comment><USER3> >For US, the main problem is unions. The way that unions operate in the US vs most countries in Europe is vastly different. Union in US seems to be about being powerful, not so much about doing what is right or makes sense. They have way more of an impact on any productivity than calls for automation.

The culture of management in America has historically been much, _much_ more confrontational than in Europe and unions reacted to that accordingly.

European management can be confrontational (especially in the UK) but it still relatively tame by comparison with the US - there hasn't ever, to my knowledge, been an aerial bombing raid delivered on a strike in Europe, for instance, whereas that has happened in West Virginia.

<comment><USER4> > European management can be confrontational (especially in the UK) but it > still relatively tame by comparison with the US ... for instance, whereas > that has happened in West Virginia.

Your point would actually have a chance of standing up, if you provided recent examples that prove a common trend of using violence against unions. As it is, you provided zero evidence.

US management confrontation is _extremely_ tame today. All you need to do is look at the lawsuits filed against US employers by their workers, and the nature of the claims in question (overwhelmingly they're discrimination based, violence is almost non-existent in the US work place). You're using a one-off example - Blair Mountain was a century ago - about a very large subject body. Using violence against union workers today is a really fast way to end up arrested by the FBI or state police.

<comment><USER3> These days the threat is more muted on both sides, but historical precedent still drives the culture and relationship between the two sides today. The underlying hostility is still stronger than in Europe.

For instance, Wisconsin Attorney General Jeffrey Cox advocated the use of live ammunition against the ~100,000 people protesting against the 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 while a deputy prosecutor advocated the use of a violent "false flag" attack to garner sympathy. As far as I am aware this kind of thing does not happen in Western Europe.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Errplane (YC W13) Snags $8.1M for Open-Source InfluxDB Time Database - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/08/errplane-snags-8-1m-to-continue-building-open-source-influxdb-time-database/ <comment><USER2> One of the founders here. Thanks to the community for all the support and encouragement. We couldn't have gotten this far without people getting excited about our software. 2015 is going to be a great year for open source time series databases!

<comment><USER3> How does your offering compare to KX ? [http://kx.com/](http://kx.com/) . Do you see as a direct competitor or rather a completely different product? Do you see yourself competing in the financial sector soon?

<comment><USER2> KX seems to be much more focused on the financial sector use case. It's also closed source and has been around for a long time.

We're open source and want to make sure we hit use cases in DevOps, metrics, and sensor data. The financial market data use case is a nice to have for what we're building, but it's certainly not what we're optimizing for.

If we compete in the financial sector with them, it won't be for a while.

<comment><USER4> Disclaimers: I was CTO@Kx for a while, but also like InfluxDB :-)

It is definitely more finance oriented, though Kx are making moves towards other application areas. Another difference I'd highlight is that Kx concentrate on the core database itself, esp. performance and expressiveness of the query language, and leave things like GUIs and admin add-on tools to partners (like first derivatives and aquaq).

kdb does just fine with metrics and sensor data. Personally, I would argue that it's weaker on string handling though, which can hurt in certain use cases.

I doubt it'll go open source any time soon. However, it being around a long time is something salescritters can spin to wonderful effect re stability, support, etc etc. ;-)

I think there are fine application areas in finance that you should consider -- just consider the many areas where the core problem isn't related to juggling TB of market data ticks coming off the exchanges.

<comment><USER2> Thanks! That last use case you talk about is the one I'm definitely thinking is what we won't be pursuing. Lots of money there, but hard to come after an entrenched competitor that is heavily optimized for it ;)

If KX is making moves into sensors are they competing more with Informix? Or maybe Vertica?

<comment><USER4> It's been a while since I've been an insider, and these comments are purely from an outside perspective, interacting with such users.

Vertica is seeing use for more historical stuff, and where the time series queries are pretty simple. Informix time series is doing ok, and has better support for rich queries, but isn't really playing realtime. MemSQL has the realtime perf (hi guys!) but needs to beef up on expressiveness. SAP HANA could do it, but not seeing major uptake there.

Still seeing lots of ad hoc solutions, and the expected experimentation with the usual hadoop menagerie (spark is helping make that practical).

The sensor stuff gets interesting at scale. Individual sources may not be producing data that quickly, but in aggregate it can be entertaining volume. Esp. when it comes to mobile things, and correlations become interesting to look at.

Deep thoughts need to wait for the coffee to kick in.

I suspect we'll see a lot of reinvention of technology to cope with these problems; perhaps even open source..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh that's great news! I've been using Influx for about a year know and I'm really happy with it already. Hopefully the upcoming version 0.9 with BoltDB will even better than the current storage engines. I'm also contributing to one of the drivers and most of the time it has been fun using it.

@Paul, are you still going to release a preview of 0.9 in december or is it delayed to celebrate the news? ;)

<comment><USER2> We're trying to get the 0.9.0 previews out as quickly as possible. We're trying to get something out for testing by the end of the year, but there's still a lot to do.

In software development there are lies, damn lies, and timeline estimates ;)

<comment><USER5> I'm glad I'm not the only one facing those challenges! Well, I'd be happy if you guys make it in mid January.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Been flowing InfluxDB for sometime now and used it to do some analytics work few times. Loved it and will use again every chance i get. Also plus points for being written in clean idiomatic Go.

</comment><comment><USER7> InfluxDB is one of our favorite database (we host and run open source DBs ...). Most people can get more from their data by recognizing time series problems, and it's nice to have an easily accessible DB to put that sort of information into.

</comment><comment><USER8> Great news for them. I built a dashboard a few months ago using graphs which pull data from InfluxDB and I had a lot of fun with it. To me, it seem a whole lot easier to use than Graphite.

</comment><comment><USER9> The underlying technology is pretty cool and the team behind it is quite smart, glad to see they are being successful.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks like some healthy competition to graphite

</comment><comment><USER11> I still don't completely grasp what this is. Is it actually a database application that is specifically built to scale-out (shard) time series data?

<comment><USER12> In short no. In long, there have been attempts mostly failed ones. The current industry standard is making a big NAS and putting paths to log files in an SQL database, and make a nice java front end to chop up logs by time stamp.

The idea is from a testing perspective (I do data acquisition and analysis for test systems), is when a part breaks, or something critical in your test happens.

You want to find the source of failure. Often times analyzing every single data point is pointless, especially after a 10 hour test with 100 points per second per channel. And you only want to see ~2 minutes of data.

How most systems work is you need to open up a measurement file, and either use a stand alone tool to chop this (and pray it doesn't corrupt your measurement file). Or from what I understand Influx simply lets you query time code to time code and return channels via pattern matching within that time span.

Very simple.

Data management is another big issue. A single day's worth of road test can be ~5-10TB per vehicle (2 months of testing + 20 vehicle fleet). Also this total is project to like all things double every year -_-'

Also as far as I understand Influx doesn't support sound or video. Which is really what aerospace and automotive are looking for.

<comment><USER2> The upcoming version will have support for raw byte values. Then you'll be able to query those out based on tagged metadata and the time.

Custom processing against raw byte values (and other custom functions) should come sometime next year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Good luck on your journey Todd & Paul!

<comment><USER2> thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Congrats on the funding! What data structures do you guys use for storage and indexing?

</comment><comment><USER15> Already been done in 2001-2004: Sensage ([http://www.sensage.com/](http://www.sensage.com/), [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensage)), followed by Vertica, etc. All the columnar-storage big-table timestamped data collectors and data aggregators. Sensage failed at the market. Splunk succeeded, perhaps with a different underlying data storage model, but certainly with great marketing.

What's different about InfluxDB?

<comment><USER2> I'm not familiar with Sensage and I know of Vertica. Open source is a key difference. Developers want to build their products and careers on open tools and we want to help them do it when it comes to time series data.

There will be more as we go along. Our project is a year old and had 2-3 people working on it for most of the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Haven't played with InfluxDB much, but it seems great. Congratulations!

Now....any chance of open sourcing the retired errplane codebase?

</comment><comment><USER17> Hi, I'm on os x using macport. What are my options for installing InfluxDB?

<comment><USER2> Switch to Homebrew and "brew install influxdb" or build from source. It'll be much easier to do the latter once 0.9.0 is released.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Difference from _rrdtool_?</comment>


Ask HN: Comparing QNX and Plan 9 for system development? - <AUTHOR>

Can anyone compare the benefits or difficulties of self-hosted development on QNX Neutrino and Plan 9? I'm looking for an alternative to Linux that would make life easier by having cleaner structure, direct support for distributed processing, and a microkernel architecture to simplify driver development.
The project is a non-commercial/open distributed system (both in the senses of multi-processor and peer-to-peer) on x86 platforms, with no realtime requirement.
From looking briefly at both and reading the docs, my impression is that Plan 9 has a more elegant design and frendlier license/community, while QNX has a more developed environment. The tradeoffs give them about even appeal for me, so I'd like to know how they fare as you get deep into a project with them.
Tell me if I'm wrong, but of the alternatives, Amoeba looks very awkward, Chorus seems completely dead and gone, and GNU/Hurd, MINIX 3, and Genode look far from ready to be used in anger. <comment><USER2> QNX is going to have better hardware support, plan 9 seems more interesting from a distributed system point of view. Why not the plan 9 follow on, Inferno? It comes with a VM for other oses so you could get linux or windows contributors.

<comment><AUTHOR> The portability of Inferno is really impressive, but from what I can tell, you are limited to using the Limbo language for it. I also haven't found any discussion of how easy it is to port Unix tools to Inferno. Is it more difficult than porting to Plan 9?

<comment><USER2> That I am not sure. From what I have read they claim to have spent about 90% of their time on the project making it unix compatible. How easy they made it to port I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I did a port of a word processor to QNX 25 years ago, so that makes it old as the hills and the system calls must have been Unix compliant. Other than that I dont remember much. Plan 9 is of similar vintage. Even Linux is newer.</comment>


Reverse Basketball: How easy is it to lose a basketball game? - <AUTHOR> https://thewinnower.com/papers/4772-reverse-basketball <comment><USER2> Awesome article! I Never really considered how the intricacies of the rules of basketball would factor into a game in reverse but it sounds like it would be interesting to see played out.</comment>


Emacs rewrite in a maintainable language - <AUTHOR> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-10/msg01154.html <comment><USER2> He should just rewrite it in Lisp. We've actually had this discussion on HN.

Here's a recent comment I made this year:

"My comment is that he should have built more of it in Lisp since it's a better language. First he needed a better Lisp (ie. high-performance Lisp). Then he would have had a better foundation. Wouldn't we be better off with hundreds of millions of lines of free software in Lisp rather than C?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9559800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9559800)

I'm not sure why most people don't get it. Well, at least rms is now onboard.</comment>