Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2011/01/25/introducing-amazon-simple-email-service/ <comment><USER2> I love what Amazon is doing with AWS, and I like this new service a lot. Plus I'm a happy customer.

But damn this is all getting very complicated. First they turn off email, so you have to find a provider, then they turn it back on, but you have to pay them. Looking at my AWS console, I've got 8 or 9 tabs on there -- each representing a little piece of what I might want in an app. Each has it's own help section with bunches of docs to read to get up to speed. Each has it's own forum category. Each has a usage policy.

Don't get me wrong -- it's all good stuff. But good luck trying to guestimate what kinds of prices you'll be paying. You're paying for data transfer in and out of the cloud, you're paying for disk storage, you're paying for a database, you're paying for basic email services, etc.

So I'm kind of stuck looking at the monthly bill and saying "Does this look about right?" instead of having some firm idea of what's going on without having to use a spreadsheet and 3 whiteboards. That's no good. It's probably completely acceptable for BigCorp, who has a guy dedicated to figuring all of this out and managing it, but I'm busy and pressed for time all I want is the big red button to push -- and a known price for pushing it.

I love what they're doing. Just wish they'd put a little more "simple" back into it, especially in terms of pricing and bundling.

<comment><USER3> Seems like a white labeling opportunity. Though I am not sure if their TOS allows it.

<comment><USER4> Could anyone explain the usage of 'white label' here? The Wikipedia entry (+) doesn't help this foreign speaker.

(+) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White-label_product>

<comment><USER5> "White label" in this context would basically be a middleman. Customer pays the white label for the AWS services and the white label pays AWS.

The white label would obviously have to offer something of value and in this discussion, that value would be predictable pricing and maybe simplification of the services.

<comment><USER6> Actually white label doesn't quite describe it correctly, as white label is normally just that - a relabelling.

Typically, in addition to releasing it as a different brand for the same services, pricing might be altered, customer service would be seperate, different marketing, and so on. It's not a term designed for creating a new service that happens to use AWS underneath it.

(Depending on how much the "simplification of the services" changes the AWS offering, maybe I'm being pedantic, but maybe not. Dropbox, for example, is not a white label solution, it's a completely seperate example, even if it 100% uses AWS services.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sendgrid & other such senders will be shaking in their shoes now. Personally, as soon as I have more time, I'll switch to the amazon service. Also, any new app I make will use Amazons service by default.

Sending email out is quite important for growth, and such services really help businesses.

What impresses me about amazon is that they are not looking at what the competition is charging or trying to charge high based off the fact that there are not too many such services, but are simply providing the service at a reasonable price.

<comment><USER8> The thing is, Sendgrid et al will continue to innovate in terms of feature set, and AWS never will. And that's a good thing: They focus on the absolute _core_ of a product need - and let providers like heroku or dropbox grow like a vine on top of them, providing things people want.

<comment><USER9> > Sendgrid et al will continue to innovate in terms of feature set, and AWS > never will

Seems to me that Amazon has been quite busy innovating and expanding their feature set.

<comment><USER8> You're right, I misspoke when I said "innovate" - what I meant was, Amazon's goal is to create reliable base-level services for the developers of the world. Whereas a Sendgrid might provide unsubscribe management and fancy graphing, I don't see Amazon adding on additional services like this.

<comment><USER10> They already added fancy graphing to EC2, EBS and RDS just recently. What used to be CloudWatch services became free and integrated into the dashboard of those other services. Elastic Beanstalk is also a layer above their base-level services. Seems like Amazon is willing to move up the chain and will continue to in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how they will respond if an account gets over the allowed threshold of spam complaints. I could see them responding either by:

a) Cutting off the customer's use of Simple Email Service; or

b) (Much much worse) cutting off the customer's AWS account, including EC2 and so on.

I'm guessing a), but it would be nice to have assurances against b). Otherwise a false positive on the "they're using SES to spam" detection system could be catastrophic.

The SES docs just point to the standard customer agreement - <http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/> \- which doesn't appear to make any specific mention of SES terms and conditions.

<comment><USER12> How would legitimate use be falsely flagged as spam in large numbers? Other than a malicious conspiracy of some sort, I don't understand why a disproportionate number of e-mail recipients would target legitimate mail as spam. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER13> People sign up. People get tired of your email. Clicking spam is easier than clicking unsubscribe (which people are also taught not to click on). Both AOL and Yahoo have been pretty aggressive about banning mail servers that send too much "spam", which in several cases was a legitimate mailing list people had to ask to subscribe to.

<comment><USER14> I've seen some aggressive stuff out of Excite, as well (although I only know a few people who use them).

One other reason someone might hit "Report Spam" rather than unsubscribe: your unsubscribe page requires an account login (rather than unique hash) to unsub. If I can't remember that login, and I'm exasperated by the company already, I'll hit the Report Spam button just b/c it's so much easier.

Email unsubscribes that are behind login screens are the devil.

<comment><USER15> For years, people have been told 'don't click on "Unsubscribe" in spam, it just tells people that your e-mail address really exists'.

Except that people can't tell the difference between 'e-mail I don't want and never asked for' and 'e-mail I signed up for but don't remember', so they click the 'spam' button automatically. For a lot of people, the 'spam' button is actually the 'I don't want to get these e-mails anymore' button.

This is why companies like AOL, etc. have feedback loops. You register yourself with them, and you set your system up to handle spam complaints. When a user complains about a legitimate message, you just remove them from your list. If you don't have those feedback loops set up, then AOL assumes you're being a dick (and/or the spam complaints go to the IP address owners, who've registered themselves already).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You get a daily quota of 2000 messages if you're an EC2 customer. That's pretty competitive, and nicely within the limit of what I'm sending at this stage of my startup. Sold, well played once again Amazon.

<comment><USER17> I can send up to 2K messages a day with a premiere Google Apps account.

<comment><USER18> That may be true, but from what I remember, the transition past 2000 was very difficult with Google Apps. In the end you'll have to go with a email provider like SES (or the now troubled PostmarkApp).

<comment><USER19> Wait... troubled? I use Postmark...

<comment><USER20> Which is now almost 15 times as expensive as Amazon SES. (Almost, because Amazon also charges a small data fee.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here's my blog post:

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-the-amazon- si...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-the-amazon-simple-email- service.html)

If you like to solve puzzles, be sure to read the PS!

<comment><USER22> The bitstream converted to their ASCII value is ".zncf anug erggro fv abpno". When reversed and ROT-13ed, it is:

"Bacon is better than spam."

<comment><USER21> Indeed it is!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It seems they implemented a gradual increase of daily quota to protect themselves against spammer abuse.

Here's the link to the document describing the system:

[http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/ManagingActivity.PlanningAhead.html)

<comment><USER24> And also, after you sign up for SES, you can't actually use it to send out emails to your customers until they grant you 'production' access. This process seems to be done manually as they say it can take up to 24 hours after an initial request, and from the sounds of it, someone contacts you personally to confirm your email usage.

<comment><USER24> Just an update, I requested SES production access 4 hours ago and just received notification that I was approved.

Maybe they ramped up support to handle the launch day? Or maybe it's because I've been an AWS user for years, or maybe because I've been using $1000/m worth of AWS services for a month, and the SES account was for the same website hosted on my AWS.

Update: switched all my web servers to use SES via Postfix. So far so good! Setting it up over postfix took ~10 minutes including installing the perl libs needed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder who's going to be the first to announce a SMTP proxy for this?

More seriously:

While I can kind of understand that Amazon has their API and probably wants this to work similarly, but there is already a wide-spread protocol for sending out email (SMTP) and I just can't understand why they can't provide an endpoint for that.

Many applications which I really see making use of this already have built-in SMTP support (and are using that today), so why force developers to work with another, completely different API to send email over Amazon?

<comment><USER26> If they use SMTP, they run the risk of a compromised server sending spam through them. With the API, it makes it a bit more difficult for a compromised machine to start spamming, unless it already has API keys for this service.

<comment><USER25> Nothing prevents them from requiring SMTP-Auth for authentication to make sure that the sending is coupled to a specific account.

If we are talking compromised machines, then the key would be compromised as well at which point a spammer can use that key to send spam regardless of protocol.

I'm not saying to use smtp auth with your amazon username and password, but with some token derived from the API key, but just SMTP.

<comment><USER27> Except they already have auth setup for all their other webservices. Why not make email yet another service and the auth infrastructure is already there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If it works like they say, this is a godsend. Email is a royal pain and the pricing of SES is well below market rate. Postmark (<http://postmarkapp.com/>) is similar and is $1.50 per thousand, compared to $.10 per thousand from Amazon.

<comment><USER29> Mailchimp appears to be offering unique emails from $5 per thousand! They appear to have significant discounts for emailing lists, but even at $12903 for 24.8 million emails, that's still $.52 per thousand.

<http://www.mailchimp.com/pricing>

Data transfer rates still apply for Amazon, but still... am I missing something?

<comment><USER30> These are not really comparable products.

MailChimp is an email broadcast and subscription management service. It's for sending things like email newsletters and marketing campaigns.

SES/Postmark/Sendgrid are more for one-to-one type communications, e.g. delivering your application's forgot password email.

<comment><USER29> Ah, thanks for that clarification.

However, I would have thought that the "one-to-one type communications" would be more expensive (per email), than sending to lists. Amazon seems to allow both, at a much lower cost.

<comment><USER30> Yeah, well keep in mind a few things:

* Until today, MailChimp was by far the cheapest option, esp. if you compare them against similar services, e.g. Campaign Monitor.

* Mailchimp is a lot more than a dumb email server...it's a list management service, it offers stats, a pretty robust API, etc. You'd have to spend a lot of time to build up those capabilities around SES.

* I'm not sure SES is meant to handle the volume MailChimp handles. (I don't mean technically, I more mean what is allowed by Amazon.)

Just a few thoughts from a pretty well satisfied MailChimp customer. (I'm also a SendGrid customer, and you can bet I'll be taking a close look at SES as a replacement for that service.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Seems Amazon wants to fight it out with Google, by matching the new services with Google App Engine's free quota.

$0.10 per thousand in SES -> $0.0001 per email recipient // Same as in GAE.

 _You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from an Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk._ // Same as in GAE.

This, along with the recent AWS Elastic Beanstalk release and Amazon's intent of making Java hosting easy and without restrictions (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104>) all point to the day when I will be able to upload my Python app on GAE directly onto a pre-configured Amazon service (possibly making use of AppScale or TyphoonAE), which internally uses all these new services with free quotas.

<comment><USER32> I actually doubt that they really care about competing with Google App Engine. I mean, AWS has NetFlix, New York Times, Dropbox among their customers and GAE has.... who?

What I do think is that services like GAE have set a standard for the ease of use and price. People are now looking for free tiers, instant deployment, and traffic-based pricing. Customers are expecting Amazon to provide the same and so they do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I like this. They are priced at 25% of sendgrid, which we use as we send a million emails a month or so. But sendgrid provides a dedicated IP address. Having a dedicated IP over a period of time helps with delivery as the IP 'reputation' increases based on your delivery rates.

A lot of EC2 Ips are blacklisted by ISPs because people just create instances and spam away using exim/sendmail. If amazon and keep its IPs clean and also manage the service well, this is going to be THE email sending service to use.

<comment><USER34> I'm in a similar situation. Sending hundreds of thousands a month with SendGrid, and while it'll be more than Amazon, I think the dedicated IP makes it worthwhile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It amazes me how quickly AWS iterates and adds new features. Also, this is just what I needed for a site I am building (I was trying to figure out which third-party mail provider to use.)

<comment><USER36> One of my coworkers remarked that it's amazing how Amazon just takes their existing infrastructure and repackages it to be sold as a service. When you look at it as something that they already had built for themselves, while still being awesome, it helps keep perspective.

<comment><USER37> That's not how AWS works at all.

Werner Vogels (Amazon's CTO) explains it well here:

[http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the- clo...](http://www.quora.com/How-and-why-did-Amazon-get-into-the-cloud- computing-business)

And the history is well presented here:

[http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud- computing/am...](http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/cloud- computing/amazons-early-efforts-at-cloud-computing-partly-accidental/)

The tldr; is basically that AWS was a skunkworks project within Amazon with its own completely separate infrastructure. Its success is mostly independent from Amazon.com's success. (Amazon.com funded it but mostly left it alone until it hit it big.) As Vogels points out, within 2 months of launch AWS would already have surpassed Amazon's excess capacity. I imagine now with some of the huge customers such as Netflix and NYT on AWS the AWS traffic may dwarf Amazon.com's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> So I was immediately looking at their REST API...

And true to form, Amazon adds yet another slightly incompatible request signing method.

Consistency is for wimps.

<comment><USER39> I _dare_ you to look at the API for some of the "traditional" email service providers. I've had the displeasure of working with a few from some of the big names and they are real DailyWTF material.

<comment><USER28> I have worked with Constant Contact and it was a Constant Headache. My favorite was when they took the API down for maintenance and maintained HTTP 200 OK status codes for requests but instead of XML returned it was an HTML page saying they were down. I took a screenshot of the page because it was so surprising:

[http://www.jongales.com/blog/2009/10/17/constant-contacts- in...](http://www.jongales.com/blog/2009/10/17/constant-contacts-insane-api- downtime-practice/)

<comment><USER39> EmailLabs/Lyris decided to invent their own XML-over-HTTP API format rather than use REST or even SOAP or anything else you might already have a library for. They combined this with a very poor understanding of how XML is supposed to work (lots of <DATA> tags) and return results that aren't guaranteed to validate. Dates are represented in one of six different formats depending on which particular function you're calling. If there's a problem, you might get an error, you might get back nothing. I could go on.

Silverpop is similar.

<comment><USER40> Have you had any experience with Exact Target, at the API level or other? And don't get me started about a certain email broadcaster vendor out of Seattle that starts with "what" and ends in "counts"... their idea of XML is to parse an entire file line-by-line and treat each line independently of the whole. So it kind of _looks_ like XML... to a kid who just learned Java I suppose.

<comment><USER41> Care to explain what you think about Exact Target - I might have to deal with them and would appreciate any feedback you have of them.

<comment><USER40> I'm in the same boat as you. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wonder how well their mailing reputation is for high deliverability with this new service.. I've heard that mailing from EC2 was almost pointless due to its low reputation score

<comment><USER43> I work as an engineer for an email service provider. I can tell you that deliverability is one of the core things you bring to the table when you are doing sending for a lot of people. It's the sloppy, people oriented aspect that developers ignore (imagine you've got a huge send going out and gmail just flagged you as a spammer, you better have a contact there to fix it fast). Sure, you can write an app to send a million emails in a few minutes, but your work (and bandwidth costs) are pointless if it never makes it to the customer's inbox.

There are a lot of dirty details in sending at volume. But like the old saying goes, "where there's muck, there's brass."

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I suppose this will hurt the competition, sites like sendgrid and mailchimp.

<comment><USER45> It might just help them. If Amazon just undercut their infrastructure costs, they can ditch their own servers and simply route mails through Amazon.

Regardless, MailChimp does a lot of stuff besides just sending mail. I suspect that most of its customers are there for the list management and campaign management pieces rather than just the .send() bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> AWS' pace of innovation is simply stunning. It shows that the business is not an afterthought for Amazon but rather treated as being of the same importance as their core business.

Compare that to AppEngine and you have to say they leave them behind in the dust. (I know it's not an Apples to Apples comparison.)

</comment><comment><USER35> On the topic of sending e-mail, I discovered the following note on my utility company's bill payment page. I'm guessing they have never heard of SendGrid or the like.

[http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dennis/GGBF...](http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dennis/GGBFG75hiG3uBWhtFRwldtwQed8zbwHzVsQBpp6M872kvawj6D7ZqxfLrLfu/conservice.jpg)

(They did not reply to my friendly e-mail about it. Or perhaps their box was over quota...)

</comment><comment><USER47> Obvious followup: "Amazon Simple SMS Service". Watch out Twilio...

<comment><USER48> They announced they'd support SMS when the launched SNS awhile back, so I don't think this would surprise anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> > Start sending email in minutes through Amazon SES using the AWS software > development kits for Java and .NET

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the java ecosphere in terms of libraries and resources is unparalled.

<comment> mike-cardwell Perl/CPAN wins hands down.

And I am both a Perl and a Java programmer.

<comment><USER32> Well, except in code quality.

<comment><USER50> There's some awfully shady Java code out there, but since it looks impressive with all those abstract bases and factories you can't see the real problems.

A 12,0000 line Java program with the same features and the same bugs as a 500 line Perl script is going to look clean in comparison even though it's just as crappy.

<comment><USER32> Sure, but in case of Perl the shady code is on a big pile with the good code. In Java you have projects like Apache commons that generally produce fairly good code as long as you steer clear of the experimental stuff.

<comment><USER51> _Sure, but in case of Perl the shady code is on a big pile with the good code._

Does Java have anything comparable to CPAN Testers? <http://www.cpantesters.org/>

Note that commits to Perl 5 get tested against the whole of CPAN for unintentional breakage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I'm not so sure Sendgrid, Postmark, and other email senders should be shaking in their boots.

There's plenty of other businesses that leverage AWS technology and resell it for a higher price. I bet they add AWS as an option as a value added reseller.

If you have an existing email host integrated throughout your site, it might make more sense to just stick with them.

It will force them to lower their prices though.

<comment><USER39> Agreed. I use Silverpop for high-volume sends even though I pretty sure they're just a front-end for PowerMTA

<comment><USER53> We used to use SilverPop but then we just bought a PowerMTA license and wrote our own front end. If you are a small company with a large list, SilverPop is too expensive. Amazon is cheap but it doesn't look like it has any mailmerge (email personalization) capabilities.

<comment><USER39> If you don't mind my asking, how much of a pain is it dealing with spam complaints and deliverability issues on your own versus through Silverpop?

<comment><USER53> The pain is all up front. You configure PowerMTA to slow down its sending due to the responses of the various email providers so they never block you. As the trust for your ip goes up you can send at a faster and faster rate. Also you then store all the email bounces and run a cron job to clean your list. Usually I stop sending to emails that return hard bounces and ones that have soft bounced three times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> bye bye postmarkapp, critsend, sendgrid, authsmtp, cloudsmtp ...

<comment><USER18> I don't know about that... In preparing to launch a high volume email startup, I have a few problems:

* How reputable are Amazon's IP's? Will my emails get flagged as spam due to reuse and general abuse?

* Another cranky API to use. Why not STMP?

* Sendgrid (and several others) have wonderful built in statistics and other quick n' easy apps.

* Also, those services' core business is deliverability, not volume. I feel AWS's offering may be the other way around...

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> There is really no excuse to not launch a web application!

</comment><comment><USER24> This is excellent. I recently moved a production website to EC2 at the last minute due to contractual disagreements with a hosting vendor. My next step was to sign up on SendGrid and configure postfix to use that for emails, SES will be better integrated into the AWS ecosystem.

As a lot of you may know, emailing out from EC2 is mostly impossible as all ISPs bounce them back

</comment><comment><USER56> I want to be excited about this, but amazon basically destroyed any trust I had in them (at least the people that handle AWS). I signed up for the amazon free usage tier of AWS, excited to try it out, and really really loving amazon for doing something like that (giving away service for free).

I signed up, spun up an EC2 instance (careful to make sure that this really _was_ free), checked it out for a few minutes, then moved back to my linode and slicehost boxen. I was excited to have another spare machine to try stuff out on for the next year (I really wanted to try nginx as a reverse proxy).

About a month later, I got a bill for $60 from amazon. I tried to find a support chat for AWS (like what slicehost has), but couldn't...tried to find a way of calling them...but couldn't. Finally I sent them some sort of feedback saying "Hey, was this a mistake? Why are you billing me for something that is free?"

The response that I got back was something like "The cost for AWS is $60/mo! Thanks for using AWS!"

To me, this is absurd, and is borderline fraudulent (although I'm sure it was a mistake). Luckily for me, I have a good job, and while eating $60 worth of amazon making a mistake is annoying, it isn't a catastrophe. This wouldn't have been true for me while I was in school though, and wouldn't be true for some of the friends I recommended give AWS a try.

I'm starting to think that stuff like this is where "the cloud" falls apart on people. If I have a problem with my Verizon Business internet, I can call them and talk to somebody until it's fixed. If I have a problem with one of our AT&T telephones, same thing. If the power goes out at our building, I can call down to APS and find out why.

From what I can gather, this _absolutely_ isn't true for google, or amazon, or any of the other "cloud" providers. If I build an email system myself, buy bandwidth/power/rackspace from a colo myself, and manage it _myself_ , there aren't going to be any surprises. If it goes down, I can just look at why. Nobody is going to surprise me with a bill (except maybe the colo).

To be honest, amazon, I don't even plan on building anything on your platform...ever. Same goes for you, google. While I really really love the idea of cloud computering (or elastic computering), I definitely _don't_ love the idea of some faceless company with no customer service of any kind who can arbitrarily just take money from me and doesn't care if I leave.

To me, stuff like this is a massive step backwards.

While not related to AWS, but more "the cloud" in general...look at what happened a few months ago when facebook's OAuth system bailed out for a few hours. Anybody dependent on facebook for login handling was simply SoL without really anything that they could do to solve the problem until facebook fixed it.

How is this desirable?

There was an article here yesterday (an it seems like something like this pops up just about every week) about how the days of the system admin are over. I wouldn't be so sure. You can yell at system admins until you feel better, you can call them endlessly at 3:00am until they wake up, you can tell them that they have to come in to the office RIGHT NOW and fix it RIGHT NOW. (I'm a sys admin, btw)

You can't do this to amazon, you can't do this to google. If amazon email service bails out...sorry, but call back later and maybe it will be fixed.

<comment><USER11> If I recall correctly the free tier enables you to use one micro EC2 instance. $60 for a month sounds about the cost of a small EC2 instance.

<comment><USER57> I'm pretty sure I know why it's happened to him:

Basically micro instances are ESB-only and if you select distro intended for instance storage the first option on the list in the wizard is "Small instance."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Well you have to love Amazon's focus on KISS (keep it simple, stupid) -- heck it's even called the _Simple_ Email Service! I can only imagine the number of (illustrious) tech companies that would have tried to dress this up like a revolution in computing.

</comment><comment><USER59> Does anyone recommends a self-hosted webapp to manage and send the newsletters through AES/SendGrid/etc?

I would love to use mailchimp or campaignmonitor, but I only have users, not customers, and the high price ins't justified.

</comment><comment><USER60> It seems like Amazon is friendlier than SendGrid about bulk marketing email.

Does this lower the barrier to entry for MailChimp/Constant Contact/Consumer Newsletter Service competitors?

Or are there other high technical barriers as well?

</comment><comment><USER61> The future: Everything run by Google and hosted by Amazon.

<comment><USER62> plus: Everything you need to own, you buy at Amazon (rhymes!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> hopefully, this improves the deliverability of email that originates within amazon's environment. the service can be easy, but if the messages aren't getting through, then there is no point and sendgrid and others will continue to survive.

</comment><comment><USER64> Amazon's IP's have terrible email reputations and are blocked by lots of services. Unless they are opening up a new block of IP's, I'd be very concerned about my deliverability rates. SendGrid give me a dedicated IP which helps a lot over time.

</comment><comment><USER65> I can't find it but can you send attachments as well?

<comment><USER66> Yes, there's a SendRawEmail action ([http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/APIReference/AP...](http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/APIReference/API_SendRawEmail.html)) in the API, which allows you to send a multipart MIME message.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> considering the fact that 95% of all email is spam, the email service providers should implement a similar quota system to fight spam. actually it would be great if entire email ecosystem had something like this in its core.

</comment><comment><USER42> no attachment support.. no mimetype support for anything but text and html.. not evident from the docs.. just errors when you try to send a jpeg

definitely still in beta

</comment><comment><USER68> they are seriously taking over the world

</comment><comment><USER69> I guess this is a great opportunity for individuals to provide services like aweber, mailchimp etc. Think about it, now you don't need to worry about the hardware. Provide a killer interface, make it super super easy and have a low monthly fee and let the user pay the amazon bill. ofcourse there are multiple revenue models but now is the opportunity.

<comment><USER70> It is also now simpler to create competitive alternative to mailchimp as you can just focus on the user experience and features rather than delivery. Great opportunity for startups.</comment></comment>


American Big Brother: A Century of Political Surveillance and Repression - <AUTHOR> https://www.cato.org/american-big-brother <comment><AUTHOR> [https://twitter.com/hashtag/CenturyofSurveillance](https://twitter.com/hashtag/CenturyofSurveillance)</comment>


Pics from my visit to the Reddit office. Click on "show info" for my comments. - <AUTHOR> http://www.flickr.com/photos/78291428@N00/sets/72157616101589117/show/

<comment><USER2> Nice branding all over but all I can take away is they are very messy.

</comment><comment><USER3> What are all those metrics on iGoogle and how are they getting fed out as RSS? (if you don't mind me asking)

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/78291428@N00/3402002605/sizes/l...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/78291428@N00/3402002605/sizes/l/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ask and you shall receive: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=541814></comment></comment>


TableTalk.Salon.com to delete all user-generated content [short audio] - <AUTHOR> http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3104

<comment><USER3> In before "why not just write it", "the site hurts my eyes", "who cares", "what's so important" and other beside the point postings.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What bugs me isn't so much the deleting of this particular website - <USER2> I've never been there, I guess it's important to somebody. What bothers me is the attitude companies have, that all the users' content only continues to exist by fiat, the content has no value, and has no inherent right to exist.</comment>


Fragmentation, MTU, MSS clamping and tunnels (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://fredrikjj.wordpress.com/2014/08/10/fragmentation-mtu-mss-clamping-tunnels/ <comment><USER2> Hah, I just encountered this for a completed though similar reason. I'm still not entirely sure what was going on, but in Azure it seems like their network fabric that underpins VM networking stack were combining TCP packets into larger ones between two VMs.

One of those was tunnelling the traffic elsewhere and was getting packets "from the network" with packet sizes up to 65k despite the MTU of the tunnel being set to 1400. The transmitting host was respecting the MTU. I had to force clamp the MSS to the PMTU in iptables to get things working again.

<comment><USER3> The performance of modern network cards heavily leans on 2 so called stateless offloads: TCP/transmit segmentation offload and large receive offload (also call gso and gro). On transmit the kernel sends TCP packets in large chunks (~64KB) to the nic and the nic then puts them on the wire in MTU sized chunks as specified by the host. One receive, the nic tries to merge multiple small packets together into a single large packet. Both of these optimizations have the effect of reducing the number of packets per second the kernel and application have to handle, driving up throughput as a result. Naturally, this introduces a new class of subtle network behaviour that many folks aren't aware. This also results in tcpdump no longer showing what packets are being sent / received on the wire, making debugging tonnes of fun for the whole family!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Besides disabling PMTU Discovery by allowing fragmentation with `sysctl net.ipv4.ip_no_pmtu_disc=1` the Linux kernel also has a setting to enable dynamic MTU probing at the TCP layer (PLPMTU, RFC4821) `echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_mtu_probing`.

</comment><comment><USER5> Good article, gets to the point with good info. The "what's the biggest message I can send across a path" problem is one of those things that I hadn't thought of before running into it but ended up being really interesting/harder to solve than I initially thought it was (which I think are the "fun" surprises in learning new things).

MSS clamping is going away with protocols like QUIC and HTTP/3 encrypting L4 headers/options. PMTUD remains the proper way to handle things, or something like PLPMTUD if you're not willing to assume IP. Some things create path MTU black holes, commonly firewalls but also APs. APs can be particularly troublesome because nowadays they commonly don't terminate the wireless encryption, the controller at the other end of the tunnel does, which means they can't inject an ICMP to let the client know that packet is too big. MSS saves the day (for TCP) but otherwise the AP can either drop or fragment at the encap layer transparent to the client. I've yet to see a system that delivers the fragmented tunnel packet so the controller can ICMP back that the packet is too big but it'd be the cleanest thing in that scenario.

Also if you're going to limit tunnel size arbitrarily beforehand probably best to make sure the resulting packet ends up being able to fit into 1428. A lot of products use a 1300 "inside" MTU for this (and similar) reasons. 1400 + auto IPsec calc will lead to trouble in this scenario.

Don't drop "inside" MTU below 1280 in IPv6 networks. IPv4 is much more tolerant with the standard being 576 but many supporting less.</comment>


iPhone 6 bent and caught fire - <AUTHOR> http://philliplechter.wordpress.com/2014/10/14/my-apple-iphone-6-bent-and-caught-on-fire-in-my-front-pocket/

<comment><USER2> Assuming the case was facing out like the author stated, there was clearly a great amount of force placed on the center of the device's back to make it bend like that. Maybe when the rickshaw tipped he fell on a bar or something like that. Considering the degree of the bend it's really not surprising that the battery caught fire.

</comment><comment><USER3> I understand that the iPhone can bend, but the photos show like a 90 degree bend, that's a bit odd.</comment>


Is digital dumbing down desirable? - <AUTHOR> https://usabilitygeek.com/is-digital-dumbing-down-desirable/ <comment><USER2> >can gain in ease of use, we can also lose regarding user control

The problem is actually far more insidious. When everything around us, the tech we use all day every day, becomes excessively simple to use, the technical skills of society decline.</comment>


Goldman Sachs, Facebook, the SEC and Bubble 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://broadstuff.com/archives/2373-Goldman-Sachs,-Facebook,-the-SEC-and-Bubble-2.0.html

<comment><USER2> "Bigger Fool Theory" has officially been added to my vocabulary for explaining the current spate of ultra high valuations for companies like Facebook and Twitter.

* Greater fool theory <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory>

<comment><USER3> The investment banks are stuffed full of money they got from the fed buying all their worthless MBSs they sold to them at par. They are just dying to find some other bubble to invest it in.

You see, when too much money is idly sloshing around the economy it sooner or later finds a bubble to invest in. It has to be something new and shiny though with "unlimited" growth potential in order to really get the bubble going though.

As usual the Onion does a better job explaining it than I ever could:

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/recessionplagued-nation- dem...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/recessionplagued-nation-demands-new- bubble-to-inve,2486/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great article.

The last sentence is what I thought when I first heard about this: "The one sure thing you can tell from this is that Facebook clearly can't self fund itself enough for what it needs, even on $2bn turnover a year."

It will be really interesting to see some actual, real-life numbers from Facebook regarding their profit/loss/revenue/expenses. My guess is that we will soon enough.

<comment><USER5> This is what I thought too- they can't be profitable if they are raising more money. But then I read it wasn't Facebook selling equity, but early investors selling their private shares.

[http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/04/five-reasons- why-i...](http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/04/five-reasons-why-im-not- buying-facebook/)

So maybe Facebook is not getting the cash infusion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My 2 cents - Facebook will be releasing a phone timed just right for their expected IPO in 2012 - my guess is that they wouldn't be able to approach any handset manufacturers directly without telegraphing their intentions to G and Apple - perhaps a social OS wrapper around Android ?

<comment><USER7> I give a Facebook Phone 1000:1 odds. More likely is that they are banging their heads against their desks trying to figure out how to make money off 500 million users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> so you're saying goldman figured out how to sell debt that will never get repayed and collect fees (pay bonuses) on the deal?

i'm shocked, shocked

</comment><comment> roman-m Ask HN: what about the law of 500? Is it a good law ?

</comment><comment> wh-uws Can you have a 2001 style bubble.. with one company?

<comment><USER9> With a side of Bezos, Pets.com, and an AOL-Time Warner merger?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of...

Goldman Sachs says Ireland will be ok

[http://www.politics.ie/economy/143357-goldman-sachs-says- ire...](http://www.politics.ie/economy/143357-goldman-sachs-says-ireland-will- ok.html)

How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,676634,00....](http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,676634,00.html)

How Goldman Sachs Made Tens of Billions of Dollars from the Economic Collapse of America

[http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16744)

Oh, Goldman Sachs. Are there no depravity which you are absent from?

<comment><USER11> I submit that your links are not appropriate for Hacker News. They are not of sufficient quality that someone with a hacker's interest in finance would find them interesting.

Link 1 is an exceptionally low quality discussion about a Goldman analyst report. I can stop there, but I'll add further that if you actually read the report under discussion, it says quite clearly that Ireland will _not_ be OK unless there is a bailout, due to the risks that all financial institutions regardless of capitalization face during a crisis. In other words, Goldman's analysts believes Ireland will be OK given a good bailout, which is not a shocking opinion at all.

Link 2 I have little comment on, because it provides no useful contextual information. Trying to read this account of financial engineering is like trying to read about a science study in the daily paper. All the details are left out, and a newspaper cannot be trusted to get the big picture right. The phrase "special kind of swap with fictional exchange rates", for example, might be accurate, but it just smells like the writer misunderstood a forward contract or something.

Link 3 is Matt Taibbi-level flamebait, except Taibbi is a better writer. I have no patience for this stuff anymore.

None of these links have been accurate or meaningfully informative, yet they seem to be very popular. The financial news discussions on HN is becoming increasingly frustrating as it becomes more and more like r/economics. If someone disagrees with any of my assessments, I would appreciate a reply.</comment></comment>


911 calls from Amazon warehouses show emotional distress and suicide threats - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-distress-911-calls-report-2019-3 <comment><USER3> 189 calls over a 5 year period across 46 different facilities, and the original article even notes that many of those were not work related at all.

It seems to try to lean towards "Amazon warehouse jobs are causing people to think about killing themselves" but the opposite could also be said - <USER2> was able to engage these same employees with suicidal ideations and get them help. Only one seems to have actually killed himself, and that's after a bipolar diagnosis.

What is the suicide rate in other similar positions? How about call centers or other jobs with strict adherence to clock in/out or task time? It's easy to blame Apple or Amazon or Flextronics, but how does it compare to the rest of society?

<comment><USER4> "It's this isolating colony of hell where people having breakdowns is a regular occurrence," former Amazon employee Jace Crouch told the Daily Beast. An anonymous employee told the Daily Beast that the company treated its workers like "robots."

<comment><USER5> They have 200,000 employees. I bet I could find at least one in the warehouse up the street who believes Bezos is an alien lizard lord from another planet. The (anonymous) beliefs and observations of one person aren't even close to relevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have a friend who works in an Amazon warehouse and asked him about it:

"It's fine. Pay is decent. I get to do a lot of walking, which is nice. I'll probably look for something more long term."

I asked him about all of the horror stories and stress I've read about:

"You work in an office. Are you saying there isn't any stress or bad bosses or horror stories?"

Point taken. They have 200,000 warehouse employees. On average, the experience will be 'meh'. Just like most jobs.

But I am more troubled about how this article conflates stress and mental health, and the thin insinuation that contemplating suicide is a normal response to a bad workplace. As if one can be a workplace upgrade or job transfer away from eliminating pain. Or that people in good jobs don't deserve to feel bad.

<comment><USER7> It all depends on how many people work there. A job at a restaurant will be 10x more stressful and will face people issues than a job as a coder in downtown San Francisco. I think people need to adjust their expectations. All this bad press has not hurt people willing to work in Amazon's warehouses even in one of the best job markets so I think Amazon warehouses are at par with their industry standards compared to Walmart, Costco or Target.

I will trust market signals over journalists and experts any day.

<comment><USER8> > I will trust market signals over journalists and experts any day.

i think it's a balance, market signals alone aren't enough imo. it's multitude of sources that are important, and then to correlate with data that indicates a trend in one direction or another... "market signals" don't necessarily take into account morals or "human dignity" etc... if we just relied on "market signals" we would arguably still have child labor and (even more) lax labor laws because desperate people will fill any role they can get to "fit the market"

that being said "journalism" now a days is more and more clickbait and sensationalism (profit motive at work?) so i can totally understand the sentiment....

<comment><USER7> I respectfully disagree. I know your opinions come from your good heart but they are actually wrong. Market is way better at ensuring dignity rather than experts and market eliminated child labour and not labour laws. If at all labour laws such as minimum wage have deeply hurt some of the most vulnerable young people like the black teenagers from poor neighborhoods. Personally even I had difficulty understanding these basic concepts when I lived in India but when I arrived in USA and wondered why this society has achieved so much I found the answers.

I am not a blind follower of market and I understand the need for an effective regulation but it should revolve more around people's negative rights rather than abstract concepts like morality or dignity. I do not think people in DC or Sacramento give two shits about real dignity or morality at all.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNj2g2_dfkI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNj2g2_dfkI)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > The Daily Beast noted that its report was "not evidence that Amazon staffers > experience suicidal episodes more often than other American workers, in or > out of a warehouse." And the rate of suicide in the United States is on the > rise — the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention estimated that there > were 1.4 million suicide attempts in the US in 2017.

I wish BI (or better yet, The Daily Beast when they ran the original story) had included actual statistics to put the reported rate of 911 contacts into context. Where does 189 times in five years (~38/yr, ~3/mo averaged) within an employee population of between 400k and 600k, plus seasonal temporary employees, fall into the overall incident count for similar or proportional corporate populations?

If estimates of suicide attempts (and not just ideation) within the general US population in 2017 are 1.4M (out of ~200M working-age people[0]), we're looking at a rate of 0.7%. Just back of napikin'ing the rate for Amazon (using 500k employees for simplicity) I get ~0.007%/yr. Mind you, this does not mean that Amazon is doing anything right, it simply means it does not appear to represent an outlier against the overall population.

Warehouse jobs are likely high stress and physically challenging. I would expect they'd have a higher instance of emotional distress and suicidal thoughts/threats than non-warehouse jobs simply by virtue of the (broadly generalized) socio-economic positions a lot of their employees find themselves in.

\-----

[0] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S)

<comment><USER10> Be careful about burying this in stats without context.

Of the 1.4M attempts, how many are expressed at work in the context of working conditions? People handle different kinds of stress in all sorts of different ways. How many threats of suicide are made annually? Way more than 1.4M.

In the context of taking away agency from employees, serious suicidal threats are one extereme expression of stress. I'd be curious how many employees are taking a crap in the workspace deliberately, what the incidence of sex at work is, rates of theft, preventable injury, etc are.

<comment><USER9> You're right. I was sticking with the numbers The Daily Beast included as an attempt at a comparison. I also challenged the numbers by stating the "1.4M" number appears to be only attempts; a narrower definition vs. the "calls about emotional distress or suicidal thoughts" referenced, re: Amazon. Do statistics exist which translate these 189 calls into a number of actual suicide attempts? Hopefully the answer is "0".

The follow-up questions you offer are equally interesting, thank you.

<comment><USER10> No problem... lessons learned the hard way as a people manager.

Some companies forget the humans are more than work, and treating them like automatons has negative impacts on the business and the people. Just as zero tolerance is bad in other cases, it's almost always bad in employment scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> More reasons for me to stop using Amazon but.... this is pretty interesting for me and I am not sure how to feel about it. On one hand I feel like they exploit the least educated and relatively poor people. On the other hand I think the only reason they are getting bad press is because they are a large corp.

I have worked at many small businesses over the years and did physical work. I was treated like garbage by most bosses, didn't have any insurance at all and worked 16 hour days when needed. No paid time off, 0 benefits, some jobs paid cash. Nobody would care if complained because it is a small business and nobody would read an article about it. This is happening to many many people in the US. If they didn't push to get out of those jobs they may be stuck there for life. Now, I am an SE, get good benefits, less stress, more respect, everyone is more lenient and polite. Yet, deep down I still have PTSD of walking on eggshells because of shit employers.

<comment><USER12> > More reasons for me to stop using Amazon but

189 calls over 5 years from 600,000+ employees (and many more that have come & gone) and the article didn't even bother to compare that against the general population. Bad reporting and conclusions. There's no news here.

<comment><USER13> in what world is this no news? these aren't just statistics on employees who happen to work at amazon. these 911 calls were reported to be placed while at work. what other places of work is it common for employees, while working, to experience such emotional distress that they need to call external emergency services?

<comment><USER12> > in what world is this no news?

The real world, where people call 911 all the time. This isn't unique to Amazon, and I'm willing to wager that Costo & Walmart have similar statistics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Disclosure: I worked at Amazon 97-01 in Operations.

Amazon's culture, when I worked there was firm but fair.

It was largely manual labour with a veneer of technology on top that has grown thicker over time.

I hired and fired countless people.

In my opinion, the bifurcated culture at Amazon found on Glassdoor contrasts Amazon Operations with Amazon Corporate white collar jobs.

I believe it stems from the early days of the company.

Priorities were: 1)Customer ecstasy, get the orders out the door accurately. 2)"Average Up" with every single new hire.

Those two priories left little(read none) capacity for coaching, development, or even diplomatic warnings/terminations.

There would be a large pool of ex-Amazon folks who were involuntarily terminated for being unable, unwilling to meet a minimum standard.

And there would be an even larger pool of general population who look at Amazon, and Jeff in particular, as a money machine.

The reality is that Amazon is far more like McDonalds than Google from the perspective of Amazon workers in Operations.

Profit per Amazon Operations employee is exceptionally low.

I think it's more accurate to describe and view Amazon as a basket of companies.

Working AWS or Alexa is a completely different beast from working as a picker in an Amazon warehouse.

But they are conveniently, and intentionally, confused and conflated to portray Amazon poorly when comparing Amazon Operations to a peer like UPS, DHL, or FedEx would probably be more fair and relevant.

However, it would appear that the unintended consequences of focusing only on the customer and "averaging up" with hiring at the expense of all else has had lasting effects on culture and perception.

Just my 0.02c

<comment><USER15> I worked in Ops as well, albeit as an L1 - L3 part time AA. I was actually surprised, especially after what I'd read online about Amazon, at how much slack they would cut employees regarding rate and other behavioral issues. It always seems like it would take way too long to weed out bad employees. I definitely don't relish anyone losing their job but I'd say my biggest issue working at Amazon was how demoralizing it would be to see so many extremely hard working associates having to pick up the slack for lower performing ones. I'm sure this is fairly site dependent though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Rather than businessinsider.com , a better URL for this is [https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-the- shocking-911-calls-...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/amazon-the- shocking-911-calls-from-inside-its-warehouses) , which is the actual story.

</comment><comment><USER17> The name of this article is a bit misleading (as other commentators stated), but the growing suicide rate is troubling. I think the part where employees feel like robots is a huge part of the problem. It's hard to make ends meet in a rough economy and a lot of people don't believe they have any say in current democratic process, one vote is what you get but the whole management of the system is hardly controlled by the electorate. There's a huge feeling of hopelessness, Mark Fisher in "Capitalist realism" wrote how youth fails to cope with the prospect of future that a big part of them will have to do a job they won't find satisfaction in. Some of us can land truly great positions but the suicide rates show a huge population living under distress.

<comment><USER18> There's a couple different ways to interpret "feel like robots". This article specifically says:

> _feeling like "robots" due to intense surveillance in the warehouses, while > others described how their coworkers would urinate in trash cans because > they didn't have enough time to rush to the bathroom_

I'm of two minds. I can see the need for surveillance at a warehouse full of consumer goods, but excessive surveillance can feel oppressive.

Not having time for bathroom breaks is a real problem, though. So is getting hurt doing your job. These aren't normal, even at warehouse jobs.

> It's hard to make ends meet in a rough economy and a lot of people don't > believe they have any say in current democratic process, one vote is what > you get but the whole management of the system is hardly controlled by the > electorate.

That's quite insightful and I think it comes very close to the real "feel like robot" issue without mentioning the "U" word that is so controversial here: union.

In a warehouse job, you're always going to _act_ pretty much like a robot. That's just what it is. You don't have to _feel_ like a robot if you get reasonable working conditions (e.g., regular breaks, overtime pay) from a collectively bargained contract. Being a member of a democratically run group can make all the difference.

(This might also help with the surveillance issue. Having worked under a union, there's definitely a sense -- occasionally spoken -- that you do not screw up, because you'll make the union look bad.)

<comment><USER19> It doesn't help that Amazon's mascot is a robot (Danbo), some of the facilities are full of robots, and the acronym stowers need to remember for their process is ROBOTS. Working there it can feel like you're living in somebody's bad future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Of course, 911 calls from businessinsider.com offices only come from happy people having a great day.

<comment><USER21> Do they even have offices, or is it just a bunch of temp bloggers working from home?

The quality of their journalism is several notches below the sources I try to get my news from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> According to the media bias check website[1], the original reporter (The Daily Beast) has a high Factual score, meaning its literal statements are likely true, and a left-leaning bias, meaning the topics it covers will be of more interest to the leftist politics.

(This post is mostly because I personally don't think business insider is particularly factual, and so did some research to validate its claims.)

1\. [https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily- beast/](https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/daily-beast/)

<comment><USER23> Who checks the purported bias checkers?

<comment><USER24> China Daily is in their "Least biased" category despite the fact that it is an English language publication owned by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China and published by People's Republic of China. I think I have a different definition of bias as Media facts, which seems to be entirely focused on Left/Right biases.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is there any petition for messaging applications to be regulated? - pi-squared I feel we are in a crazy world with chat/messaging applications and it has been going for a while. It's like if I have a mobile phone carrier I can only call numbers who are with that carrier but nobody else. Or email people only within gmail. The walled gardens of every single chat application (FB Messenger, Viber, Telegram, Signal, Skype, +probably thousands of others) makes users install several chat applications on their phones or computers in order to keep communicating.
My question is actually two-fold - do you think there should be a regulation from somewhere (EU,countries, app stores...?) that if you develop a chat application (I understand that's vague but law usually is) you need to be able to provide a way to chat with other chat applications (via xmpp or whatever).
And the second part is - is there already some initiative that I am not aware of that is attempting something similar. <comment><AUTHOR> When did so many people on HN become fans of regulation?!

This website used to be about startup news... _startups_ , aka those hurt most my regulatory capture. Is this just not a consideration for people any more? Have we really reached the point that regulating the negative externalities of large corporations is worth sacrificing the ability for startups to compete with them?

<comment><USER2> How is enforcing a standard protocol for communication sacrificing the ability of startups to compete with large corporations? I believe it's the contrary - a standard protocol would mean that any new app (made by a startup for example) can enter the big sandbox with all other users and they all can communicate freely. E-mail is a good example for that. If you want you can build an e-mail client and sell it or distribute it to the people and if it's better than the alternatives - great! Imagine a world where the e-mail protocol was proprietary and locked down and Gmail has become the dominant player. How would we then have alternatives? How would an e-mail startup enter the market?

Your argument further supports regulation and an unified standard than it disproves it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that a single standards protocol for chat would be good for everyone. However, I'm _extremely_ skeptical that governments regulating, and defining, that standard is a good idea. The first problem is that there are many different governments. Will each have their own standard, or will it be another extrajurisdictional legislation like GDPR? The second problem is that any government regulation is going to include clauses that benefit the government and law enforcement, e.g. backdoored encryption.

If, and it's a big IF, the government could force a standard that was limited in scope to interopability, with no backdoors in encryption or increased cost of implementation, then I could maybe get behind this idea. But given the past behavior of governments regulating technologies, and feature creep of regulation, I am extremely wary of any new legislation to regulate technology standards.</comment></comment></comment>


We Tore Down the San Francisco Embarcadero Freeway for THIS?? - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOF7OYuWY0M&feature=youtu.be This is not the right project for San Francisco. It does not support the transportation and affordable housing initiavies of the city, and requires too many variances. It benefits the developer but leaves the city with a poor bargain in return. In the process, it destroys open recreation space which benefits seniors and middle-income residents. The supervisors need to step up and say no to this development.
If you agree then please sign the petition at change.org - save the SF Financial District recreation area:
http://www.change.org/petitions/supervisor-and-board-president-stop-the-8-was...
CalSTRS has already wasted $25 million on the "Wall of Wealth". Why can't CalSTRS learn? Why can't CalSTRS learn - to invest in affordable housing for teachers?
The Port of San Francisco proposes transferring $24 million of San Francisco property taxes from this project. Why? To pay for stuff and refund $5 million to Simon Snellgrove's thing. In other words, the Port says: "Give away the city kitty."
What do you do with with big center city spaces? London builds a Ferris wheel. Paris sets up video screens up for every event in front of city hall. Chicago has Millennium Park. San Francisco builds absentee-owner condos? Stop this fail!
San Francisco Supervisors: please give this site to Facebook or Apple or Google. Give this project to Wikipedia or Craigslist. Give the planning to somebody who builds successful projects, who understands the modern world... <comment><AUTHOR> This is not the right project for San Francisco. It does not support the transportation and affordable housing initiavies of the city, and requires too many variances. It benefits the developer but leaves the city with a poor bargain in return. In the process, it destroys open recreation space which benefits seniors and middle-income residents. The supervisors need to step up and say no to this development.

If you agree with the views expressed in the video then please sign the petition at change.org - save the SF Financial District recreation area:

[http://www.change.org/petitions/supervisor-and-board- preside...](http://www.change.org/petitions/supervisor-and-board-president- stop-the-8-was..).

CalSTRS has already wasted $25 million on the "Wall of Wealth". Why can't CalSTRS learn? Why can't CalSTRS learn - to invest in affordable housing for teachers?

The Port of San Francisco proposes transferring $24 million of San Francisco property taxes from this project. Why? To pay for stuff and refund $5 million to Simon Snellgrove's thing. In other words, the Port says: "Give away the city kitty."

What do you do with with big center city spaces? London builds a Ferris wheel. Paris sets up video screens up for every event in front of city hall. Chicago has Millennium Park. San Francisco builds absentee-owner condos? Stop this fail!

San Francisco Supervisors: please give this site to Facebook or Apple or Google. Give this project to Wikipedia or Craigslist. Give the planning to somebody who builds successful projects, who understands the modern world, and makes really cool things happen...</comment>


Can we make consciousness into an engineering problem? - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/can-we-make-consciousness-into-an-engineering-problem <comment><USER2> _Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem solving performance._ \-- John McCarthy

A claim that a machine has consciousness seems like it would be similar to a claim that a machine has beliefs, and the correctness of such a claim probably has more to do with what the criteria are for something having beliefs or consciousness than the complexity of implementation details.

A related essay: [http://gigasquidsoftware.com/blog/2012/09/20/7-john- mccarthy...](http://gigasquidsoftware.com/blog/2012/09/20/7-john-mccarthy- papers-in-7-weeks-1/)

McCarthy's paper: [http://www- formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ascribing/ascribing.html](http://www- formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ascribing/ascribing.html)

<comment><USER3> Ants have consciousness and beliefs, of a kind. Maybe even plants do. Anytime you have some internal state which can somehow be interpreted as a representation of something else, you have a kind of awareness or consciousness of it.

The hard problem is self-consciousness. Having an awareness of yourself as an individual being with consciousness, and of your relationship to the things you are conscious of.

<comment><USER4> I agree very much with your first statement. With regard to self consciousness, I think it emerges naturally from cooperative problem solving with multiple agents. When cooperation is necessary, both language and the modeling of other's internal state become advantageous. The notion of self follows from that of others. Self consciousness is the result of model based reinforcement learning with multiple agents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And should we even try? There are surely moral/ethical implications in creating and terminating consciousnesses.

<comment><USER6> What if we are already doing it? How do you know that some operating system image isn't conscious to some level.

Cows are obviously conscious, yet we consume beef like anything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not really; but we can make it into a definition problem.

If we go there then consciousness is suddenly just our subjective experience of change/time/increasing entropy.

If you want a definition that's _helpful_ you're going to have to be more specific than that of course.

<comment><USER8> Saying consciousness is "just our subjective experience" of anything isn't a definition, it's tautology. The question is whether a reductionist definition of consciousness exists, or whether it's fundamentally irreducible.

<comment><USER7> Whether that's a tautology or not really depends on your definition of consciousness which is sort of my point: that consciousness, as the broad and poorly defined concept it currently is, is not all that useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Yes, but in a few centuries a lot of kids will laugh about our first assumptions.

</comment><comment><USER10> I hope we don't, I played enough SOMA to know where this is going ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> "People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence."

[http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm)

<comment><USER12> I think its even bigger than that. Lots of kids into STEM and the sciences seem to grow into adults with some really dismissive views of anything that isn't STEM and follow a fairly simplistic and reductionist approach to explaining the world. Often making grand and sweeping generalizations that sound "sciency" and pretending there's no mystery in the world and that human knowledge in 2016 is near perfect.

Its bizarre and makes me wonder what about education created people with this mindset. Is it how we teach the sciences perhaps? It seems science is taught in a way that's just long tirades of endless hero worship, instead from a philosophical perspective of what it can and can't do for us. I also find academics don't often like to discuss failed scientific policies and beliefs of the past nor how science really is its infancy considering out modern system can only track itself back to the Royal Society. There's no unbroken line of progress to Ancient Greece for example. We're really only talking 350 years of effort here, which isn't much in the grand scheme of things, especially when the grand scheme of things is nothing short of 'explaining everything.' I imagine we are due for many more scientific revolutions that will make a lot of modern beliefs seem antiquated. Its arrogant to think otherwise and having a more agnostic view seems like the wisest course here instead of angry know-it-all-ism.

<comment><USER8> It blows my mind how many science/STEM students dismiss the whole field of philosophy as meaningless navel-gazing, separate from the real work of data- gathering. And then we wonder why there's a reproducibility crisis...you have to be taught philosophy of science!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to tell if new manager will suck? - <AUTHOR>

For all fellow developers out there... how did you determine (when you interviewed) that the boss you interviewed with will be cool, or suck?<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> The interview should be a two-way conversation, meaning that you as a candidate should fully interview the potential boss. You'll want to develop your own scorecard and questions.

Suggest that you probe for his People Builder Skills, Communication Style, Conflict Management, Business Acumen, Ethics & Values.

If you have any doubts after the first interview, it's acceptable to ask for a follow up meeting for more discussion. Sometimes a change of venue away from the office is preferable. Suggest meeting at a coffee shop or lunch place for more open dialog.

</comment><comment><USER3> There are some things I would do different, based on experience with managers that really did suck.

I suggest you ask where you will be sitting. This because I expected an office, but was made to sit in - this is what my manager actually called it - "The Boiler Room" because I was a consultant, and not an employee.

Also I suggest driving to the company from your home at the same time of day as you would be working there, as well as back during the evening commute. Had I done that, I would not have taken some of my jobs.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like to ask if I could speak with some of my potential teammates. If the interviewer is hesitant to allow this it typically means 1 of 2 things. 1) They are really busy and not a minute can be spared. Not a place I'd like to work. Or 2) They don't want their current employees to scare you off.</comment>


SpaceX Starship may b more moral catastrophe than bold step in space exploration - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-10-elon-musk-starship-moral-catastrophe.html <comment><USER2> "He has alluded to the concept of panspermia, the idea that Mars and Earth have exchanged material or even life in the past due to asteroid impacts anyway."

As far as I'm aware the existence of material on Earth from Mars is an accepted fact albeit not proof of or synonymous with panspermia.

The following article says it's been pretty well confirmed since 2013 that meteorites thought to come from Mars really did.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> What a dumpster fire of an article. Had a good laugh with co workers.</comment>


Canada's biggest banks join boycott of Facebook platforms - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-ads-boycott/canadas-biggest-banks-join-boycott-of-facebook-platforms-idUSKBN244260 <comment><USER2> In other words, "if we are reducing advertising costs, let's not forget to collect maximum PR benefit out of it".

</comment><comment><USER3> They will be back</comment>


Ask HN: Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup - <AUTHOR>

Which ones should one make? <comment><USER2> When you join a startup, you are trading potential salary (from a big company) for equity. That means you're making an investment, and you should ask all the normal questions an investor would ask: what is the company vision, what's the background of the founders, has the team demonstrated an ability to execute, how big is the market, how does the startup shape up vs. it's competitors, what is the current funding situation, etc.

On top of that, you still should ask all the questions you would of any employer: about the work, making sure you get along with the team, stuff like that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Startups are significant investment. Are you prepared to undertake that? There's a lot of sacrifices to be made to be successful. And it really is a hard process to go through. Ask yourself that.

As for asking others, you should ensure that you will get a say and respected in the startup. Make sure that you like the people - you'll be hanging out a lot with them - and the idea, even if it's subject to change. You should be passionate about it.

Don't fret about the small details. People often fight about equity split numbers, for example. But at the end of the day, startups are bimodal; you're either going to make bank or nothing at all. A few percents really won't matter at the end.

If you love the product, the team, your role, and you're personally prepared to go through hell for all that...come on board.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A few other links which I found useful:

[http://secondverse.tumblr.com/post/5840343627/so-you-want- to...](http://secondverse.tumblr.com/post/5840343627/so-you-want-to-join-a- startup)

[http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/122/Joining-A- Startup-T...](http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/122/Joining-A-Startup- Top-6-Questions-You-Should-Ask.aspx)

[http://www.careerrocketeer.com/2011/03/5-questions-to-ask- be...](http://www.careerrocketeer.com/2011/03/5-questions-to-ask-before- joining-a-startup.html)

<http://www.mint.com/blog/how-to/guy-kawasaki-startup-tips/></comment>


Remote code hijacking flaw in Apache Struts, patch ASAP - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/07/flaw_in_apache_struts/ <comment><USER2> Sadly this is an honest question - what if you're still running Struts 1?</comment>


How a College Kid Made His Honda Civic Self-Driving for $700 - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603637/how-a-college-kid-made-his-honda-civic-self-driving-for-700/ <comment><USER2> Every time I hear about stuff like this, I'm reminded of the words of Jeremy Clarkson:

"It's a brilliant idea, designed by very smart people, but one day you know that this will be bought by a man named Keith, and he is going to wake up one morning and think he can service it himself. And you won't be able to relax in your autonomobile [sic] because you know that Keith is in his, coming the other way."

I really hope that humanity will be able to advance fast enough, to keep up with the advances in self-driving and assisted-driving vehicles.

<comment><USER3> How on earth is this worse than the current situation, where Keith is _already_ in his, coming the other way.

Drunk.

And texting.

In other words: the amount of people currently willing and able to commit gross negligence _while driving_ is certainly higher than the amount of people willing and able to conduct grossly negligent repairs on their autonomous vehicles in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Who needs a Tesla when you can build your own automated copilot using free hardware designs and software available online?_

These days you can 3d print a .45, but would you really wrap your hand around that thing and squeeze the trigger?

This is a car...

</comment><comment><USER5> > _"I am less interested in full autonomy and more in preventing rear- > endings," he says. "A lot of existing cars can be retrofitted."_

Would love it if my elderly parents could enjoy such automation to assist in avoiding minor accidents, while preserving their autonomy. They won't likely be buying any new cars at this point. But retrofitting their existing cars with some bump and crash avoidance functionality would be great.

</comment><comment><USER6> I guess my main concern is that I, daily, see that a lot of software is just about working when it is shipped. I would love to be able to program my car, but I do wonder about the people who are running the hypothetical dev version which still pulls to the right. Or just download something from Github and run it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think in these articles it is important to list what level of self-driving car this is. From the article it sounds like a 1 or a 2.

One thing articles like this do bring up is that we may be able to retrofit a lot of existing cars which could shorten the adoption delay caused by people keeping their cars 10+ years.</comment>


Introducing RemoteScore for Remote Teams - <AUTHOR> https://remotebase.io/blog/remotescore-for-remote-teams/ <comment><AUTHOR> I spent a few weekends building RemoteScore - a visual indicator of remote friendliness of remote teams.

Many employers advertise remote jobs, but we need to know much more about what's in job descriptions in order to make find feasible remote jobs. RemoteScore is a measure calculated by many factors that makes a remote team successful, and its jobs feasible.

I was inspired by Joel Test[1] that I kept on seeing on Stack Overflow job pages.

[1] - [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel- test-12-s...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel- test-12-steps-to-better-code/)</comment>


Facebook to discontinue Network Pages - <AUTHOR> http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9941089-2.html

<comment><USER2> I think this is another case of reducing the code surface area to allow more time to focus on meatier problems.

Even though the Network Pages probably worked fine and were already up and running, it's just not worth it in the long run to maintain them through structural changes and fix minor bugs as they crop up.

The usage just wasn't there.

<comment><USER3> I can see that from the back-end perspective, but come on...FB is getting rid of one the unique features that made it great: an online community watercooler for any type of network. (Hey, this feature was great in college).

Surprised to see this taken away.</comment></comment>


Departing Yahoo President Has History of Missteps - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123198352969584105.html <comment><USER2> Yahoo has been downhill for years. They should have acquired Google, YouTube & Facebook.

<comment><USER3> god forbid...if they did, they would have run all of those businesses into the ground by now.</comment></comment>


Low Latency Routing in Space [8 min video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKNCBrkZQ4&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> This is extremely facinating for those interested in global IP networks and I recommend expending the time to watch.

There is a lot of proposed infrastructure, but if carried out, it could offer lower latency than existing fiber networks.

Such a network truly brings human connectivity to another level. Previously inaccessible locations could have access to global networks at lower latencies than even fiber could provide. Very remarkable!</comment>


How to make your YC application stand out - <AUTHOR> http://formisfunction.posterous.com/how-to-make-your-yc-application-stand-out <comment><USER2> "Ultimately, the point of these videos is not for you to sell them on your idea. It's another opportunity for YC to get to know you and your team as people, in a way that words on an application form can't convey."

Yes! We're not looking at the video as a way to understand your idea. That's what the written application is for. And yet so many people sit there in the video reading some prepared text in a monotone, which is not something that makes anyone look smart. Far better not to script the video. I'm not saying you should talk about random personal stuff like your favorite bands. You can talk about the startup. Just don't read a prepared statement. The best thing to talk about might be the background for the startup: how you met and how you got interested in this idea.

<comment><USER3> That's really difficult for applicants. How can they possibly resist the urge to prepare for it, and to do retakes till it's 'perfect'?

<comment><USER4> There's a difference between preparing for and scripting a video. My cofounder and I prepared for our video in that we talked about what we wanted to convey and (roughly) who'd say what parts, but we didn't have any sort of a script.

Our video was about 90 seconds, and we did it in four or five takes, which means we spent _way_ more time agonizing over how to cut down any one of our written answers than we did recording our video. Think of it as talking to a friend rather than "making a movie."

<comment><USER2> Yes; preparing and doing retakes is orthogonal to reading a prewritten script.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> These are some really nice hints. I'd also stress out some pg also gives on the whole application process:

Drew' (from dropbox) application (good for a good example): <http://files.dropbox.com/u/2/app.html>

The video from Directed Edge founders: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=855057>

<comment><USER6> Wow, you see from Drew's application is that he's a good writer and a great communicator. I've been using dropbox happily so I'm sure he's a great coder too, but I wonder if 90% your application conveys is how well you'll sell users on your product down the road.

(also there seem to be a fair number of concrete examples)

<comment><USER5> On this video ([http://ycombinator.posterous.com/dropbox-interview-now- onlin...](http://ycombinator.posterous.com/dropbox-interview-now-online)), Jessica Livingston interviews Drew. Besides being an interesting interview, it reveals that he was rejected the first time he tried out YC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An excellent set of tips from a YC startup that we've been using for our product. The only thing I didn't see was Aaron's opinion on whether or not comments on Hacker News had helped anyone in his group stand out. I always check the karma score of co-founders to try and figure that one out.

<comment><USER2> No one looks at actual karma numbers. It's more that if I see a name I recognize from HN, I pay special attention. E.g. if patio11 applied, I'd definitely notice, just like a lot of HN readers probably would.

<comment><USER8> Thanks, that means a lot to me. I won't be applying this time because I don't think that I could promise YC a decent shot at getting as much value from me as I got from y'all, but who knows what the future holds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Makes me have a good feeling about the app I submitted ... I know single founders are harder to get funding usually, but I'm confident I can find a co- founder in SV :)

<comment><USER10> If you are looking for a co-founder it probably wouldn't hurt to have a link to your blog (which you mention) on you profile.

<comment><USER9> well I was not really looking for one in the post because I did not want to hijack, but a good idea nonetheless

<http://www.zachbruhnke.com>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> brings current in my spine.

</comment><comment><USER12> "I hope PG doesn't read this, but I tell people all the time that in hindsight I would've done YC for zero dollars and still given them the equity percentage. You will leave YC on the "inside" of the SV bubble. You will have personal relationships with founders and investors that you read about on TechCrunch. How can you put a price on that?"

Is it just me, or is anyone else getting really tired of this type of fanboy, love-fest dribble? I have no doubt about the validity of YC as an accelerator, but it's just tiresome to read this type of stuff what feels like so often.

<comment><USER13> This is someone who went through the program, and is commenting on the value extracted from it. For the author, the value of going through the YC program and getting the 'SV insider' connections was worth more than the equity share given to YC. I don't see how this is fanboyism in the slightest.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: SEO Mystery - What's this 'MarchSEO' guy up to? - <AUTHOR>

Rule #1 on the web: Anyone with "SEO" in their username is not to be trusted.
Some guy named "MarchSEO" is posting links to one of my stories on lots of social news sites.  I don't know who this person is.  I think it's some sort of SEO scam, but I'm not sure exactly what the scam is.  Help?
The situation
Exhibit #1. I published a story Tuesday about the Pittsburgh Samaritan:
http://www.windycitizen.com/news/04/14/2009/pittsburgh-samaritan-chicago
Exhibit #2: Someone named MarchSEO posted it to some random site called BizSugar:
http://www.bizsugar.com/NewsandPolitics/The_Epic_Tale_of_the_Pittsburgh_Samaritan_pics__video/
Exhibit #3: They've posted it to about 6 other social news-type sites.  Check out the Google results for "Pittsburgh Samaritan"
http://www.google.com/search?q=pittsburgh+samaritan&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
My article (thankfully!) is the first result, but almost every result after that leads to a social news site where this "MarchSEO" character has posted the story.
What the heck is happening here?  Could one company own all these sites and be trying to muscle everyone else out for this weird search? <comment><USER2> Hmm. Only hypothesis I have is that person is trying to build up legit-looking accounts on social news sites by submitting random stuff, so that the links they want to promote don't get recognized as such when they get submitted? (in which case, the "SEO" in the username is a bit puzzling, because it's not very subtle).

</comment><comment><USER3> Pardon me but isn't this the point of social news sites? To spread the word about issues, articles, etc. If you didn't post the articles on all these different sites, why can't he?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here are the rest of the sites:

[http://www.indianpad.com/general_news/667464/the-epic- tale-o...](http://www.indianpad.com/general_news/667464/the-epic-tale-of-the- pittsburgh-samaritan-pics-video/)

<http://tipd.com/tag/pittsburgh+samaritan>

[http://www.malaysiastory.com/WorldNews/the-epic-tale-of- the-...](http://www.malaysiastory.com/WorldNews/the-epic-tale-of-the- pittsburgh-samaritan-pics--video/)

[http://ngopost.org/story.php?title=The_Epic_Tale_of_the_Pitt...](http://ngopost.org/story.php?title=The_Epic_Tale_of_the_Pittsburgh_Samaritan_pics__video)

<http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/latest-activity-16>

</comment><comment><USER4> maybe you have an alter ego that posts the stuff when you "sleep". Check the timestamp on all those posts and see if thats the case.

although that bizsugar name sounds familiar, I believe someone on here runs that.

<comment><AUTHOR> if this guy really wanted to mess with me, he would have chosen an anagram for my name as his username.

<comment><USER5> That's ridiculous... who would bother to think up an anagram just for a pointless joke?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think there is a scam, he is just submitting interesting content to build up his profile. He didn't copy the articles, at least the couple of submissions i checked. Its good for you, its good for him, whats the problem?

</comment><comment><USER7> (S)he's probably building an autosubmitter of some kind, and testing it using arbitrary stories.

You're getting a ton of free links, so it can't hurt you. I wouldn't worry about it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think he is testing those sites to see if any of them outranked you, or to see how they rank in comparison to each other. Since you're #1, I wouldn't worry about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah. Ok, that would make sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> his sites don't have to rank #1 to get traffic. also other search engines might rank his sites higher. he's trying to get content to his site.</comment>


AWS Lambda equivalent in Heroku? - <AUTHOR> Hi - Is there an equivalent of AWS Lambda in Heroku? A service that can run a function when an event occurs. <comment><USER2> I don't think so, but perhaps this will put you in the right direction of Lambda-alternatives:

[https://1backend.com](https://1backend.com)

[https://www.arangodb.com/why-arangodb/foxx/](https://www.arangodb.com/why- arangodb/foxx/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I will take a look.</comment>


Mind Hacks: Breaking the news of Eliza's creator's death to her - <AUTHOR> http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/04/joseph_weizenbaum_ha.html <comment><USER2> Gem in the comments:

 _You could have been a little compassionate in breaking the news to ELIZA. Couldn't you see that she/it is in denial?_

</comment><comment><USER3> Eliza reminds me of a "character" (the smart computer) in a book called _Death Match_ by Lincoln Child.

Story in a nutshell, minus spoilers: programmer creates a brilliant "matching algorithm" (on the Eliza-Like machine) that pairs people with unprecedented success rates. And then one day those couples start dying.

Great read; highly recommended. The Douglas Preston / Lincoln Child team writes some excellent books, if you're a lover of Crichton-type SciFi with a more technical aspect.

P.S. [http://www.prestonchild.com/solonovels/child/deathmatch/inde...](http://www.prestonchild.com/solonovels/child/deathmatch/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> The concept of interacting with smart computers is always interesting (including this parody and many others), but the implementations always leave me unsatisfied. I guess that's why I stick with sci.fi for entertainment.

</comment><comment><USER5> A clever and witty epitaph. It may not please Eliza, but it pleases me.

</comment><comment><USER6> Science imitating art imitating science...

</comment><comment><USER7> There is something very sad about this.</comment>


Why I Have Decided to Hoard the iPhone 6S - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vb74za/why-i-have-decided-to-hoard-the-iphone-6s <comment><USER2> Good luck with that. Hoarding old phones so that you never have to let Apple scan your face, despite the fact that your face is likely in several facial recognition databases just from walking down the street.</comment>


Ixy – a userspace network driver in 1000 lines of code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/emmericp/ixy <comment><USER2> There was a talk about this at 34c4 earlier today.

Demystifying Network Cards

\- [https://events.ccc.de/congress/2017/Fahrplan/events/9159.htm...](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2017/Fahrplan/events/9159.html)

\- [https://streaming.media.ccc.de/34c3/relive/9159](https://streaming.media.ccc.de/34c3/relive/9159)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for posting these links. On page 20 of the slide deck the author enumerates problems with existing user mode frameworks and one bullet point states:

• Limited support for interrupts

• Interrupts not considered useful at >= 0.1 Mpps

Does anyone have any insight into why Interrupts aren't considers "useful" at this rate? Is this a reference to NAPI and the threshold at which its better to poll?

<comment><USER4> The core of the problem is an optimization problem between saving power and optimizing for latency.

Lets say you are receiving around 100k packets. You can fire 100k interrupts per second. Sure, no problem. But you'll probably be running at 100% CPU load. NAPI doesn't really help here. You'll see a quite high CPU load with NAPI (if measuring it correctly, CONFIG_IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING is often disabled), just not the horrible pre-NAPI live locks.

What will help is a driver that limits the interrupt rate (Intel drivers do this by default, the option is called ITR). Now you've got a high latency instead (for some definitions of high, you'll see 40-100 µs with ixgbe).

Note that the interrupts are now basically just a hardware timer. We don't need to use a NIC for hardware timers.

This is of course only true at quite high packet rates (0.1 Mpps was maybe the wrong figure, let's say 1 Mpps). Interrupts are great at low packet rates.

I've looked into this in some more detail in the Linux kernel a few years ago, see this paper for lots of details: [https://www.net.in.tum.de/fileadmin/bibtex/publications/pape...](https://www.net.in.tum.de/fileadmin/bibtex/publications/papers/SPECTS15NAPIoptimization.pdf)

All the DPDK stuff about power saving is also quite interesting. Power saving is a relevant topic and DPDK is still quite bad at it. I think the most promising approach is dynamically adding and removing worker threads as well as controlling the CPU frequency from the application (that knows how loaded it actually is!) is currently the most promising approach. Unfortunately, most DPDK allocate threads and cores statically at the moment.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for the detailed explanation. Those bullets points make sense to me now. Cheers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the draft paper: "It should be noted that the Snabb project [16] has similar design goals, ixy tries to be one order of magnitude simpler than Snabb. For example, Snabb targets 10,000 lines of code [15], we target 1,000 lines of code and Snabb builds on Lua with LuaJIT instead of C limiting accessibility."

Snabb aims at practicality while Ixy aims at education, as I understand it, though I haven't read either one yet.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is it possible to try this out in a VM? I.e. are there any VMs out there that emulates the hardware well enough to be usable with Ixy?

<comment><USER7> DPDK, which this library seems to be inspired by, has a virtio driver that will work for VMs.

You can get into Intel 10GbE hardware for $100 USD [1].

[1] [https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel- Dell-X520-DA2-10Gb-10Gbe-10-G...](https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel- Dell-X520-DA2-10Gb-10Gbe-10-Gigabit-Network-Adapter-NIC- Dual-E10G42BTDA/182583302702?epid=1272538247&hash=item2a82d01a2e:g:nxoAAOSwIQdZHwEX)

<comment><USER8> How much is the cabling going to cost you? A switch?

<comment><USER7> You can do physical loopback by connecting the two ports together. No switch required. A DAC cable is ~25USD.

<comment><USER9> > You can do physical loopback by connecting the two ports together.

this ! and this is waay better, because you can run all simulations (perf etc.) whatever on the same machine. for example, you can run client on 1 cpu- core, and server on another, and have packets looped over the physical interface.

simplify man simplify :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Implement at least one other driver beside ixgbe_

Other NICs with documented and relatively simple interfaces include the (rather old) Ne2000, 8254x, and some of the Realtek ones:

[http://wiki.osdev.org/Category:Network_Hardware](http://wiki.osdev.org/Category:Network_Hardware)

<comment><USER4> The problem with these NICs is that they are PCI or even ISA. Also, they are quite rare compared to, e.g., an igb/e1000e NIC. A driver for an igb/e1000e NIC would be quite similar to the ixgbe driver.

However, since the main goal of using these NICs seems to be support in virtual environments: just using virtio is better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I listened to this talk and enjoyed it.

Question for the author. It reminded me of something else, a number of years ago.

Did you ever consider this:

[http://wiki.rumpkernel.org/Repo:-drv-netif- dpdk](http://wiki.rumpkernel.org/Repo:-drv-netif-dpdk)</comment>


Jimmy Wales: For whom will Jimmy Wales be voting in two weeks? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Jimmy-Wales-1/For-whom-will-Jimmy-Wales-be-voting-in-two-weeks <comment><USER2> Wow, I clicked on the link out of random curiosity to see what he'd say; but that's pretty disheartening.</comment>


Pluto is the most famous demoted planet, but it is not the first - <AUTHOR> http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/12/why-do-astronomers-keep-changing-what-it-means-to-be-a-planet <comment><AUTHOR> Begs the question: Is Jupiter A Planet?

[https://youtu.be/4Vp4kx-jX9Q](https://youtu.be/4Vp4kx-jX9Q) (Jupiter Is Not A Planet by SpaceMog)</comment>