General Motors to Lay Off 2,000 Employees in Ohio and Michigan - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2016/11/09/general-motors-layoffs-ohio-michigan/ <comment><USER2> I have to wonder if the timing of this announcement isn't a coincidence, given the relevance to Trump's platform, and Ohio and Michigan being swing states...

<comment><USER3> >> what the company believes will be a continued shift from cars to crossovers and trucks.

This part hints (to me anyway) that they may have waited for the election. Trump seems to be a fan of fossil fuels, so that would suggest cheap oil will be around for a while and people will be more willing to buy bigger vehicles. The article also points out that these vehicles are not selling well enough to support 3 shifts, so it probably has very little to do with union concerns. I suspect it's just a straight business decision based on a market forecast which was solidified by the election. They probably waited a bit for the election to feed that into the forecast.

<comment><USER4> From GM, anyway.

I see plenty of small cars around, but they're the Prius, Civic, Accord, Corolla, Camry, Fit, Golf, and Mazda3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It will be interesting to see Trump attempt to follow through on his promise to eliminate NAFTA and slap tariffs on imported goods. Somehow I doubt he will have a lot of support from congress on that goal, as pretty much every senator and representative is in the pockets of big multinationals who have already moved their manufacturing overseas or to Mexico.

This is one area he really can't ignore. A lot of people voted for him because he promised to bring their jobs back and they're very keen on seeing manufacturing return to the US.

<comment><USER6> > in the pockets of big multinationals

Your comment dismisses any concern that tariffs could be a bad thing, and ignores literally hundreds of years of research and experimentation that shows trade barriers to have negative effects on economic health and international peace. He may have little support from congress because congresspeople believe it to be _a bad idea_.

<comment><USER7> I understand tariffs aren't good when taken alone, but what else can you do to put the US on an even playing field? We want to have strict environmental laws, which make manufacturing more expensive and then companies move to where there is no EPA so we lost jobs and new laws are a net negative for the environment.

My opinion is that there should be tariffs to make up for the differences in laws anywhere without similar laws - if you want to pay workers pennies a day no problem, but you're going to pay the difference on the way in. China might let you destroy their local environment but you'll pay for the effects of your pollution on the way in.

Trade deals should come with negotiations that will help us with our global warming problem at the very least - if you want to have a trade deal you'll need to match or beat the regulations we follow or the tariff will reflect an approximation of the difference in cost.

I think that it is a bit problematic that the majority of those for free trade also want policies that discourage domestic manufacturing like an increase in minimum wage and increased environmental regulations.

<comment><USER8> Paying a price on goods entering the country will not encourage the manufacturing of those goods to come back to the US, it will only reduce the flow of goods coming in, increase the prices consumers pay or reduce selection. Also, dont you think the natural reaction of any country on the other end of such a tariff would be to slap a tariff on our goods and services? So the net result is lower international trade overall. The result of that is that goods have to be manufactured in thousands of places (inefficient) rather than a few place for distribution globally (highly efficient).

<comment><USER7> I don't think tariffs should be used to keep manufacturing here - but if you get to move your manufacturing to China and pay people less than you would in the US and use a process worse for the environment I think it's really silly not to put something in place to discourage that. If China puts into place labor laws and environmental laws similar to ours, then sure no tariff should be in place.

Otherwise we're just rewarding companies (many of which are American) with access to our market without having to follow any of our laws.

<comment><USER9> A tariff is a tax on the local population, not a penalty to the origin country. The tariff is added to the sales price so the origin country is repaid. It makes the price of foreign goods higher for local purchasers to allow the local market to be competitive.

If it doesn't bring manufacturing jobs back (which it won't) it will do nothing, but lower sales. the amount lowered depends on the size of the tariff, and how much that makes the products unaffordable to the locals.

<comment><USER10> Things aren't so simple. A tax (tariff in this case) negatively affects both sides of a transaction. The effect on our side is then mitigated because the money from that tax lets us reduce other taxes in our own country.

So yes, in the end it does work out to be a penalty to the origin country.

The only local harm relates to marginal utility, but this is offset by the benefits of national security and improvements to the mix of different types of employment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Two long term trends: automation car sharing/hiring

Both mean that in the case of autos, Trump won't be able to bring manufacturing home in terms of jobs.

<comment><USER12> In energy policy, Trump wants to make coal more affordable compared to renewables. Applying similar logic, he should work to enact legislation to prohibit automated vehicles or make them very expensive so they can't be deployed widely.

In 2020, Trump can point to this piece of legislation and tell voters: "Silicon Valley billionaires tried to put a million truckers and taxi drivers out of work, but I prevented that!"

I wonder how that would sit with Peter Thiel.

Anyone who expects the upcoming all-Republican government to be innovation- friendly may be in for a rude awakening. I have a feeling that many "job protection" solutions from Congress will be similar in spirit to the state laws that prevent Tesla from selling cars directly. In other words, there will be more legislation that's friendly to established business but hostile to SV's cherished "disruption". (Republican voters said loud and clear that they haven't liked being disrupted.)

EDIT: I expanded this comment into a post on Medium: [https://medium.com/@pauli/disruption-in-america-please- hold-...](https://medium.com/@pauli/disruption-in-america-please- hold-d997d6cf9461)

<comment><USER13> I find Trump repugnant and don't think he's remotely fit to lead the U.S. but what has he said that makes you think he's going to be against private-sector- driven innovation?

Sectors that require, or are helped substantially by, the government to innovate will almost certainly suffer but what makes you think he would interfere with private enterprise?

Trump doesn't like business regulation and seems to want to make it easier for businesses to operate. Obviously that has negative consequences some some things but would also mean he wouldn't interfere.

Where he does want to make changes is in regards to trade and outsourcing jobs and manufacturing to foreign countries.

As far as Republican leadership in the House and Senate, there is no doubt that they'll play favorites with lobbyists but Trump's main appeal was that he WASN'T like that. If he is like that, we'll have a Democratic Congress in two years and a new president in four.

<comment><USER14> He wants it to be easier for certain businesses to operate, so he wants to cut environmental protection to cut the costs of companies that pollute, this means they can produce more (pollute more) and employ more people.

He could well be anti automated driving vehicles, it is widely accepted that one of the first casualties of the introduction of automated vehicles will belong distance lorry drivers. There are approx 3.5 million drivers employed in the US right now, even if we see only 25% of jobs going in the next 10 years that is an extra 850,000 unemployed people. And not only are they unemployed but their skill set is no longer required, so they are either long term unemployed or they need to retrain. I imagine many will be older people and they will not be in a position to retrain significantly, so they become competition for low paid manual work, further depressing wages in this sector. So even if you do get a job the wage is likely to be much lower than that of a truck driver.

These could be protected (for a while) if they introduced anti-automation policies and laws. This sort of short term thinking is right up the republican street.

<comment><USER13> It's just speculation that he'd be anti-automated vehicles. I agree with you in regards to environmental protection but you can't extrapolate that into thinking Trump will be against everything you're in favor of.

Until Trump proves otherwise, I'll continue to think he's not going to act like current Republican leadership, because he didn't act like that during the primary or general election and his platform doesn't line-up with someone who would be against self-driving vehicles.

<comment><USER12> We just don't know yet. His public talks have been to a white blue-collar audience, so if you take the things he's said there to represent his platform, then it's pretty clear that he's not in favor of replacing drivers with automation.

But what is he saying in private to people like Peter Thiel? We have no idea... And amusingly, Hillary was heavily criticized by Trump proponents for stating the obvious about public vs. private stances. Every bit of Hillary's private talks was dug up, but we know essentially nothing about Trump's real intentions. (Maybe Wikileaks could get on the case? Hah.)

<comment><USER13> He's largely talked about tax breaks and trade reform to encourage more companies to bring things back to the U.S. that are currently done overseas. I don't recall him ever talking about eliminating technology that replaces human labor. I think it's way too big of a leap to speculate on that until he shows signs of moving in that direction.

There's a lot to dislike about him and I don't think it's fair to speculate on positions of his he's given no evidence to merit speculation on.

<comment><USER15> This interpretation is stunning to me. The Trump base is not savvy Republican mucky-mucks -- it's _exactly_ the people who would be directly and immediately impacted (for the worse) by these technologies. It's a very clear path from "Tesla, Google, and Uber created automated trucking technology that eliminated 2.3 million jobs" to "Donald Trump did nothing to stop the destruction of 2.3 million jobs."

One might make subtler arguments about how this (and much) technology indirectly benefits all of civilization in myriad ways, even in the face of causal fallout like that mentioned above, but we have not one scrap of evidence that subtle arguments will either be employed or considered.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> People are buying more trucks and SUVs and fewer small cars?

I mean, I get that people are climate change deniers, but there is no need to be rude about it.

<comment><USER17> Im sure this is a dumb question but why are your energy wasteful activities ok but others' are not?

Who gets to decide that? Maybe you flew 5hrs somewhere and your jet fuel environmental damage ends up being larger for the year than the suv driver who didn't make any long distance trips

I think this points to a basic issue. The only way forward is progress like Tesla and Impossible Foods and not in some elites choosing which wasteful activities are ok and which aren't

<comment><USER18> The difference between driving an SUV in towns and taking a flight is that there aren't many more fuel-efficient ways to cross the pacific.

Agree with the sentiment, though. We all want to make improvements. The strongest way to cut waste probably is less around making our current lifestyles cleaner (electric cars, easier to grow food), and more around making our lifestyles themselves cleaner (walkable cities, stop eating as much, or as much meat).

EDIT: Yeah, maybe I shouldn't ever cross the Pacific. It is a luxury in itself.

<comment><USER19> Sail across the Pacific! I mean it's incredibly slow but guilt free, if you buy a used boat.

Yes I know it's impractical advice but it's technically not wrong and hopefully also funny.

<comment><USER20> Pros:

-Lots of fun, at least for a little while

Cons:

-Perhaps increased possibility of not making it across

-Would have to quit your job(maybe file this one under 'pro' instead?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> India actually uses a rather simple strategy to keep car jobs. We simply tax all car imports at 100%. Full car kit imports that need to be assembled in India are taxed at a lower rate and companies that manufacture and setup local supply chains get tax concessions. Guess how global car manufacturers respond.

In a labor heavy supply chain like car manufacturing, it still boggles my mind why major consumer markets like the US would allow easy car imports at all.

<comment><USER22> American lawmakers love their German cars :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> These layoffs are simply part of the cyclical nature of the automotive industry and the continual flux of consumer preferences.

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting, little is mentioned of re training workers for their new products

<comment><USER13> The factory that makes the Cruze is set up to make the Cruze and it will continue to make Cruzes, just 16 hours a day instead of 24.

They might be able to work in another model on the same platform as the Cruze but they can't build Cruzes for 16 hours a day and then switch to building trucks.

GM does typically offers reassignments but maybe workers expect to be called back at some point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If Trump doesn't do anything about this will they finally believe he's not really interested in anything but their votes and money?

</comment><comment><USER26> > is a response to what the company believes will be a continued shift from > cars to crossovers and trucks.

What's a 'crossover'?

<comment><USER27> Newer model Subaru Outback is a good example. It looks something like an SUV, but the shape shows that it descended from a station wagon, not a pickup truck.

<comment><USER13> Almost all SUV's are crossovers these days, including the three row ones. There are still some on truck frames like the Suburban but the market has almost entirely shifted. I assume they're cheaper to build that way, lighter, and also drive more like a car than a truck.

<comment><USER28> I think the big reason we see more unibody SUVs/trucks is that people don't need the body-on-frame rigidity as much as the automaker needs to meet CAFE standards (in the US at least).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This news is obviously important and shows a key trend in the vehicle industry but dailymail is utter garbage as a news source and in no way trustworthy for facts.

Would recommend truth seekers visit one of the following:

[http://fortune.com/2016/11/09/general-motors-layoffs-ohio- mi...](http://fortune.com/2016/11/09/general-motors-layoffs-ohio-michigan/)

or

[http://www.reuters.com/article/us-generalmotors-layoffs- idUS...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-generalmotors-layoffs- idUSKBN13431E)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree and sorry for linking to dm piece (I'll be more careful next time). I see though the link was changed - not by me though (you cannot change a link after submission which would be handy). Also it would be more appropriate/accurate as it now appears that I submitted a link which I actually did not.

@HN admin</comment></comment>


Attack of the Splogs--One Of Our Posts Copied 152 Times Without Attribution - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/09/attack-of-the-splogs%e2%80%94one-of-our-posts-copied-152-times-without-attribution/ <comment><AUTHOR> I have a suspicion that Google makes a shitload of money off of spam sites. I have a friend who makes upwards of 1000 dollars a month off of scraped content.

If I were 'economically rational', I ought to be doing the same thing instead of screwing around with things like langpop and squeezed books.

<comment><USER2> I've been reading a certain blog that deals with 'adsensing' and making money on the web through joint ventures, arbitrage etc. There are people out there who make $100K a month (and some that make over $1M a month) using all kinds of schemes. Yes, Google makes a ton of money too off these guys as well. I've never tried any of these things myself...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How many largish bloggers are there? 10,000 maybe? Certainly, when the pagerank hits a certain point, keeping a human-verified whitelist of sites is doable.

That is, if something is getting a high enough position on google, a google rep could look for a phone number and verify that a human, not a bot, is behind the content.

Of course, this will hurt short-term ad revenue...

<comment><USER4> All it would take is a google toolbar button "kill the splog"

<comment><USER5> You forget something: people that download said killsplog feature are not going to be running into splogs often (i don't). Other than that, I think its just fine...good for the economy. Eventually (as Eric S. ) said, advertisers will wise up, and start paying less. If they don't, good for google.

<comment><USER4> Or angry blog owners would hunt down the sploggers for revenge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Spammers are also using Amazon Mechanical Turk to reword posts and articles in dozens of differnt ways. This helps them get around services such as Attributor.

SLEAZY!

<comment><USER2> I've seen software (I think they charge over $4K per install) that uses hidden markov chains etc to create content that looks like it was written by humans. You give it few keywords that you'd like to optimize your site/pages for and this thing does the rest. Google does ban few of them but they're getting more sophisticated with every new version so Google has _really_ hard time keeping up.

<comment><USER6> I've read about that software, too, although from a research perspective: <http://www.eblong.com/zarf/markov/>

I would have never thought to use it for spam generation, though... I have to admit (grudgingly) that some of those spammers are clever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mm, so what I understand is that Google has duplicate content detection to punish people who do this kind of thing.

However! If you have a high-ranking site and you scrape from a low-ranking site, Google might index you first and think the originating site was stealing "your" content!

And then there's the fact that it wouldn't be hard to replace words with synonyms, chopping up multiple articles, etc. so that Google probably wouldn't detect it. This is what spammers do.</comment>


The cloud vs. dedicated servers - <AUTHOR> http://www.screamingatmyscreen.com/2012/12/the-cloud-vs-dedicated-servers/ <comment><USER4> I think if you are spending more than $100 a month in VMs you should seriously consider co-locating if you have the skills to support it.

For my side-projects, personal websites and general purpose "whatever" I'm using an in-expensive colo provider(Colo@). For $50 I get 10mbit/s @ 95% (basically, burstable to 100mbps for up to 5% of a month). That's about 3 TB of data transfer which alone would cost hundreds of dollars at EC2. Of course, it is also way more data than most people would use.

The server I bought used on eBay for $365. Its a dual Xeon L5420 (8 hw cores) and has 24 GB of RAM. I run seven or 8 VMs under KVM on it presently. These images are pretty portable and a couple of them I backup regularly to S3; I could recover to an EC2 instance if I lost the box.

I monitor this with an EC2 micro instance and have not had any network outages in 6 months there. If I wanted to run a production site there I would need at least a second machine for redundancy; that would be another $30-40 a month. I'd probably also replicate real-time to a small EC2 instance so that would cost a little (though the incoming B/W to EC2 is free) - I don't do that now as I don't have real "production" data.

Not everyone should do this but if you like servers you should consider it. Another advantage here is that I own the server. If I get in a billing dispute or other issue with my provider they can take me off the network but they cannot hold my server hostage. Also they cannot login to the box - any attempt at social hacking is pretty well doomed.

On the other hand, on the two occaisions I've needed remote hands and the one time I needed a KVM they responded in less than fifteen minutes. It is mind- blowing the level of support you can get with the right provider.

<comment><USER5> I completely agree, having co-located a few projects in my day as well as using dedicated HW through Rackspace.

One of your key points is what turns some people towards more managed services: "skills to support it". I'd add time to that factor as well.

If I had the support staff, I would co-locate in a second. Heck, one of our previous locations was next-door to a Level 3 co-location facility. It was pretty nice to be able to walk 10 feet and access your hardware.

<comment><USER6> Relatively none of the AWS/Heroku-type startups of the type most publicized on HN is spending money hiring those skills.

<comment><USER7> There's a distinction to be made between AWS and Heroku. If you're hosting on AWS you still need to have someone who's able to maintain a server. With heroku, you don't. So the advantage of AWS over Colo is mainly scalability and the reduced need for expensive hardware. Depending on your apps load behavior, spikes can require that you keep 10 times as much HW than you'd need on the average, that's where AWS really shines. But in the end, the instances you buy at AWS are virtual servers that need a real admin.

<comment><USER6> It's a distinction without much of a difference when most are deploying via Rubber, Vagrant, Chef/Puppet/cfengine, etc. to maintain a policy of programmer-deployers. Of course this isn't a rule, but it's prevalent.

<comment><USER7> No, not true. Server maintenance is a job that requires that you track what services are deployed on a server, which ones need security updates, knowledge about how to correctly configure a firewall and lots of other stuff. Deployment via Rubber/Puppet/Chef etc. only changes how you get the needed packages and configuration on the server. It doesn't tell you magically _what_ configuration you need on a system.

Nitpick: Vagrant is not a deployment system. It's an awesome tool, but it falls back to puppet/chef for the actual configuration.

<comment><USER6> I know what server maintenance is.

<comment><USER7> Then I don't get your point. One of the major advantages of heroku over raw AWS is that you don't need to do the server maintenance - it's all done for you. And yet you say that the distinction blurs when people use puppet - <USER2> is not true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't intend to sound harsh, but comparisons like these are absolutely useless. It's simply incorrect to make blanket statements on the pros and cons for each service without some context. The benefits and drawbacks are going to change depending on the characteristics, purpose, and needs of the application. This post makes a "one-size-fits-most" generalization, which makes it almost entirely useless.

What kind of application are we trying to deploy? What is your budget? What is the traffic level? Is performance a top priority? How many sysadmins do you have at your disposal, and how many are you willing to add? What kind of sensitive data are we storing/transmitting?

The answers to these questions drive the selection process, and end up altering the importance of each pro and con the author mentioned. Depending on your application, some pros and cons are eliminated, and new ones added.

Please please PLEASE, for the love of all things good, don't use an article like this as the sole basis for selecting providers. Think about what you need, ask questions, and craft your search to your purpose. Don't go pick method X because other people say it's great (for their purpose).

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. You are right that I should have given a better overview what exactly I am doing (the introduction + requirements are a bit short).

The pros and cons can change, some of them, like availability of features, support,... don't. But you are right that there is no "one solutions fits for everyone" plan.

<comment><USER8> > The pros and cons can change, some of them, like availability of features, > support,... don't.

But they do change. What features are important depends on your application. The amount of support you need, and by who, changes as well.

What I'd love to see is a series of articles that helps walk people through the platform selection process from the perspective of a few sample applications/organizations. I feel that would be really constructive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This issue is near the top of my list at the moment.

I currently spend $100/month on 4 Linodes (3 x 512MB, 1 x 1GB). I love Linode -- efficient support, and their London datacentre has been utterly rock-solid for me for several years -- but I'm beginning to think that, for me, it's the worst of both worlds.

On the one hand, I could move all 4 servers to a dedicated Hetzner box (EX6 or EX6S) running Xen, for a small setup fee and similar monthly cost, and get 4 or 8GB ECC memory _on each one_. This has a slightly higher sysadmin burden (5 servers to administer instead of 4, slightly higher risk of disk failure), but not that much. And the move is relatively painless, because I can directly transfer the disk images with dd over SSH.

On the other, I could move the services to Heroku, probably pay a bit more, and essentially stop doing any sysadmin. This is superficially attractive... but moving a load of old things to Heroku isn't straightforward, and that probably rules this option out.

<comment><USER10> "I could move all 4 servers to a dedicated Hetzner box "

How do you deal with hardware failure when you have a dedicated box at Hetzner? Specifically if/when something fails are there spares etc?

<comment><USER11> _How do you deal with hardware failure when you have a dedicated box at Hetzner? Specifically if/when something fails are there spares etc?_

Just to play devil's advocate, it's not unknown for large VPS providers to have major issues. This is something you need to consider _regardless_ of whether you're using dedicated or VPS.

<comment><USER10> "This is something you need to consider regardless"

I'm not talking though about a separate issue which is proper backup procedures. I mean if you have a server racked at Hetzner (or elsewhere) what is your "plan b" when there is a hardware failure.

In the case of a server that I just racked somewhere I will purchase a supply of the most logical parts to fail (fan, hard drive, board, power supply etc.) so that the parts are available and can be replaced quickly. I know that some providers take care of this for you so if the hardware fails (your hardware) you are back up and running quickly.

In the case of a VPS, by contrast, it can generally be assumed (nice if a way to verify this but I'm guessing there isn't) that they take have taken care of and planned for hardware issues and spares and have a strategy. Of course if they haven't you have a big problem. At least with your own hardware you can plan accordingly and insure a better outcome.

There are other issues as well. If the colo place is close to you do you keep the spare parts yourself or do you leave the spare parts with them? The answer depends on many factors (such as is there security where the parts are and who has access to them. If that is not the case better to keep the spares and drive over yourself with them even in the middle of the night).

<comment><USER12> You're talking about colo issues, not dedicated servers as originally mentioned (the Hetzner EX6 package). It's simpler and sometimes even cheaper to just rent the hardware and let the hosting company deal with all those issues, while of course taking care of redundancy yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As I'm looking at setting up a blog, website, and company, my inner nerd keeps nagging me: "You could build it and host it all yourself". But I know I don't need to.

I nearly majored in economics, and I've worked in a datacenter, so I know it's simply more efficient to depend on hosted services. Yet I still want to set up the whole stack. For me, it's a question of letting go and trusting the services that others host and others use. And it's foregoing the pride of "doing it all myself".

There simply isn't enough time to build _everything_ from scratch -- if you build your own servers, you're sourcing HDDs and motherboards and power supplies and other components. If you make motherboards, you're sourcing copper and other raw materials. No single human is so tall as to pull copper ore from the ground, pull silicon from sand, and move vertical enough to self- produce a tablet or PC. Currently this takes several thousand humans.

</comment><comment><USER14> Don't forget hybrid solutions. I've done things in the past with:

a) co-location for the main DB servers (allows you to be very specific about hardware choices: RAID cards and SSDs not just preferred manufacturer but also the exact model) and backup machines (needed higher density HDDs than could be supplied by hosting providers choice of dedicated servers)

b) some unmanaged dedicated servers for the core servers that don't rely upon specific hardware requirements (HTTP servers, memcached, varnish). Also easier to slowly ramp up the number of these month on month.

c) virtual boxes spun up when required to handle spikes in the load and then canned when it goes quieter again

Even better if your hosting provider provides all 3 and can arrange a private VPN between the sets of hosts so you don't get billed for your 'internal' bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER15> ...and these kinds of issues, which I've faced myself many times, are why I'm building Uptano. The "cloud" vs "dedicated" vs "co-located" are issues that were created by the artificial separation of a few good ideas.

There's no reason you shouldn't be able to have dedicated hardware performance, instant deployability, on-demand usage-based billing, at costs close to, or better than, co-locating it yourself. As I'm working to prove with Uptano (<https://uptano.com>)

I really think server hosting is going to look very different in a few years. We've not come very far in the past 5 years.

<comment><USER16> In fairness, baremetal clouds have existed for a while. E.g. baremetalcloud.com, stormondemand.com and a few others.

That said your offering strikes a nice balance in terms of price/performance. What I'm missing is bigger profiles (64G Ram please?) and information what CPUs and hardware you are using (blades?). "Compute units" are a terrible metric, give me a model number so I can look it up on cpubenchmark.net.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the feedback. Bigger hardware profiles are definitely coming (some exciting profiles as well). CPUs vary a bit, but I added Passmark numbers. Clarified that the servers are 1U rack-mount machines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In my experience, Linode is the best roll-your-own you-are-on-your-own cloud provider. Obviously they are aimed at the savvy but it's reliable, cheap while being easy to estimate costs, simple to configure and expand, pretty good documentation, plus it doesn't have the learning curve or linguistic peculiarities of Amazon.

Regarding Rackspace, I've had good experience with them when working at mid- size and larger companies. Unfortunately I've had the opposite experience when functioning as a freelancer, working with startups, or as an entrepreneur myself. Rackspace didn't even respond to sales inquiries. Initially I figured this was a strangely repeated fluke, but other small companies and entrepreneurs I've spoken to have reported the exact same thing, where they send an inquiry to Rackspace or ask to speak with a sales engineer, and they get no response. Nothing, zip, nada. I find that very strange, and am speculating RS no longer wants to deal with the growing pains and frequent support requests of startups, but it certainly makes the decision to stick with Linode or EC2 much easier.

I don't have much experience with dedicated anymore, but have repeatedly heard good things about ServInt and SingleHop. Have also heard good things about Firehost for a managed cloud provider. I would love to hear others opinion and experience on any of the aforementioned companies though.

<comment><USER18> I really do not understand why people keep recommending Linode on here. Apart from their woeful and disgraceful security policies some of their data centres e.g. Fremont is very unreliable.

I would recommend <http://www.webhostingtalk.com> as you will find out much better options for your specific needs.

<comment><USER19> I defended you the last time this came up; this time I think you're being wholly unfair. A single incident -- severe though it was -- does _not_ make "woeful and disgraceful security policies". And the _only_ data center that they have that has _occasional_ issues, as far as I know, is Fremont, and it's worth pointing out that Fremont has had _less downtime than AWS_ this year.

I use their Dallas and Newark data centers currently. I have had _zero_ downtime this year, which puts Linode at the head of the pack in terms of reliability.

So if you don't understand why people keep recommending Linode, it's because:

1\. The prices are fair;

2\. The service is as reliable as anything else out there, and in some cases, far more reliable;

3\. The performance is good;

4\. The support is blow-you-out-of-the-water fantastic;

5\. The software (their management console) is pretty good;

6\. There are very very few complaints overall, _other than their handling of the Bitcoin incident_.

I agree that they should have handled that incident differently, and that they still haven't taken proper care of it. However, you're being otherwise dishonest in your portrayal of Linode.

<comment><USER20> Linode also offers native IPv6 support, and they will route you a /64 on request.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Good comparison between the 4. Rackspace has come a long way since we evaluated them a few years ago (they wanted like 24 hours to bring up a new instance/server for us back then, so we ended up going with AWS).

Generally speaking our biggest challenges with AWS have been storage (making TBs of web content securely available to various autoscaling clusters) and network i/o (especially across VPC/public internet boundaries).

We've actually found that AWS' pricing beats the costs of hosting internally, especially once you look beyond raw server cost and factor in power/cooling/manual labor/datacenter space/etc. And there are lots of different options for monitoring your usage to avoid surprises (we're looking into programmatic usage reports and New Relic for that, though we've been there a couple years now so we have a good idea what our bills are going to run each month).

As far as CDN, we get way better pricing from Level3 and Akamai than we could from CloudFront or Rackspace, but our traffic patterns are more 95th- percentile-friendly than most.

</comment><comment><USER22> The issue with these comparisons is that it tends to be about VMs and storage only. A modern applications requires a lot of moving pieces. Setting up and managing, say, a queue service, has costs associated with it where something like SQS becomes a serious value add.

</comment><comment><USER23> I totally dislike comparisons of dedicated hosting versus cloud. Especially when they dont factor in any of the costs of the support contract, hardware replacements, etc. involved in supporting physical hardware.

He also mentions that there is no way to see what your next bill will be in AWS. They offer an 'Account Activity' link, that shows you current charges in the current month. That can be helpful when testing things.

I hope people that are new to setting up infrastructure and supporting it do no use comparisons like this to make the decision for them. There are far too many variables not discussed in this article for this to be very valuable to anyone.

<comment><AUTHOR> > He also mentions that there is no way to see what your next bill will be in > AWS. They offer an 'Account Activity' link, that shows you current charges > in the current month. That can be helpful when testing things.

Good to know, thank you. I was not sure about this feature and after asking one of the sales engineers on the AWS event they told me that this is just not possible, especially if you want some details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A good balance I found is to have a dedicated server with a stand by AMI in the cloud and switch over using DNS.

What you pay for in the cloud is convenience and not performance.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've got a con for the Rackspace list, that in some was conflicts with one of it's pros. Pricing is simple because of the small choices for instance performance. I would love to have more choice in instance performance beyond memory based tiers. I'd kill for a c1.medium analogy on Rackspace.

With that being said, I'm a loyal Rackspace customer and love their cloud offering.

</comment><comment><USER25> There's a very simple formula for figuring out whether self-hosting or cloud hosting makes more sense.

Add a month's worth of colocation fees, capital depreciation and associated labor costs. If it's less than your monthly cloud hosting bill, then it's time to self-host.

And if you run your own firm and haven't figured out how to calculate capital depreciation yet, it's time to learn. :)

</comment><comment><USER26> This is a pretty thin 'comparison' with dedicated servers being given only a cursory mention and no analysis and VPS not covered at all.

</comment><comment><USER27> how much cheaper is Rackspace vs Amazon CloudFront? From our experience, Amazon also has more nodes that its CDN pushes files to and our CDN cost with 100k+ views a month is still under $3/month, for each solution.

<comment><USER8> You can always still use CloudFront from Rackspace. It isn't bound to Amazon EC2 VMs in any way. You get much better transfer speeds when you're interacting from within EC2, but even outside it's not too bad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> >Of course there would be the point where I would need help from people who are specialized in database design / sharding / partitioning, etc - <USER3> earlier than going the cloud hosting route

Where does this misconception come from? That is the exact opposite of reality. With the "cloud" route, you are limited to absurdly inadequate servers, which is a large part of what drove the "nosql" fad, you need to shard if you are on EC2, because they offered nothing with reasonable IO. Even now they have an SSD option, but it is a single crappy SSD, and barely any RAM. With the dedicated route, you can do a 512GB RAM, 24 SSD array server and not have to worry about sharding until you are in the top50 sites on the web.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. From what I understand AWS tries to address the performance problem with RDS - marketing statement "this is build for solving this problem". Do you have any experience with RDS? Still the same problem?

That this problem does not exist if you kill it with hardware in the first place is true. But the way from evaluating an idea, to gaining traction, to hiring people and buying hardware is still a long way.

<comment><USER28> Unfortunately, RDS is EBS backed, so it does nothing to solve the issue. And you are stuck with oracle on top of that.

<comment><AUTHOR> This basically rules out the last provider I knew of with a hosted DB option. Looks like DBs of a certain size are still a "do it yourself" area :/ Thanks for the info</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Does the 'Bamboo Ceiling' Shut Asian Americans Out of Top Jobs? - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2014/05/23/315129852/does-a-bamboo-ceiling-shut-asian-americans-out-of-top-jobs <comment> core-questions Well, does a Milk Ceiling shut European and American ex-pats out of top jobs in China, Japan, and Korea? Certainly we're just as underrepresented there as they are here.

What if we stopped expecting every single group to be identical and perfectly proportionately represented in every aspect of society? How about instead of assuming that evil and racism and prejudice lurks behind every single stat, that it's possible other factors are at play, with each situation being a little bit different depending on the individuals and their actions?

I'd say this - for each of these claims of unequal treatment and representation, would it be okay for White people to similarly look for under- representation impacting their own group, and advocate for action and redress? If not, why not?</comment>


Ask HN: How would you invest your next 12 months? - <AUTHOR> I decided to invest one year from now to learn to hack. Where would you invest your time: building mobile apps or websites? Or something completely different from programming?<p>Thanks for your time. <comment><USER2> I think the dominant theme is that people are waking up to "mobile apps suck".

For instance, everybody wants to publish video content because it is painful to read on a phone.

Chatbots are big because you can roll out new features without going through that awful approval process.

</comment><comment><USER3> Me personally I would spend the time on AI and python.</comment>


YouTube 500 Sever Error - pi-squared https://www.youtube.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Down in at least USA, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Ireland, Australia from my limited testing.

<comment><USER2> Up and running again in Italy.

</comment></comment><comment> pi-squared I find it rather odd to have a GLOBAL 500 even for a minute (it may be still lasting at least in some regions [http://downdetector.com/status/youtube](http://downdetector.com/status/youtube)) when a web app is distributed among servers, services, dockers or whatever and has so many systems in place to roll back automatically.

The same thing happened about a week ago with Fb Messenger ([http://downdetector.com/status/facebook/news/53463-problems-...](http://downdetector.com/status/facebook/news/53463-problems- at-facebook)).

I expect this level of outages in 2016 to be only caused by solar flares, am I missing something?

<comment><USER3> Are you missing something?

Absolutely. Just to name a few:

Deploys. Migrations. 3rd Party Systems. Configuration Rollouts. Failover not happening. Accidental failover. Rogue Employees. Routing changes.

oh yes, Solar Flares too, but they're rather the exception.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Worst distributed monitoring system ever.

</comment><comment><USER5> Sorry guys, it was my fault. Just as i logged in, it crashed. Apparently my password were too complex.

</comment><comment><USER6> Also lots of people on twitter are complaining. [https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%23yo...](https://twitter.com/search?f=tweets&vertical=default&q=%23youtube)

</comment><comment><USER7> A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. :)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd hate to be an SRE working for Google right now - the stress must be crazy.

<comment><USER9> a dear friend of mine is a YT SRE and he's never been happier with his work life balance.

<comment><USER8> Work/life balance is a false dichotomy. In the ideal world, one's work is one's life, and conversely, one's life is one's work. But that's a discussion for another time.

I was merely commenting on the fact that whomever was on call tonight (I know an SRE @ Google as well) probably had a stressful experience. I hope there is a post-mortem, as I'm sure many of us could learn from such an event as the one that transpired earlier.

<comment><USER10> Well, actually I disagree with this statement completely, I recommend you reading "In Praise of Idleness" from Bertrand Russell if you've never read it, it's a good point of view on how "leisure time" not necessarily needs to be productive to be enjoyable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I imagine a network operations intern at YouTube turn in his chair, face totally flush.

"Did I just accidentally reboot every webapp server for the entire site!? I hope nobody notices."

</comment><comment><USER12> That's funny, I've had youtube on for all the morning and didn't notice anything. Hooray for one hour long compilation videos (and caches).

</comment><comment><USER13> It appears to be back up, so now there is nothing to see so this entry is kind of pointless.

</comment><comment><USER14> Aaaannnnddd it's back in Czech Republic

</comment><comment><USER15> Up in Bulgaria now.

</comment><comment><USER16> Down in Australia.

</comment><comment><USER17> Same thing for me.

<comment><USER18> Back up in the UK

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Down in India :-(

</comment><comment><USER20> Down in Serbia

</comment><comment><USER21> Poland is down

<comment><USER21> Back up in PL

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Same here :-(

</comment><comment><USER23> Not severed in the UK</comment>


Reverse Engineering Native Apps by Intercepting Network Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://nickfishman.com/post/50557873036/reverse-engineering-native-apps-by-intercepting-network <comment><USER2> Let us also mention the great mitmproxy, an open source equivalent to the Charles proxy: [https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy](https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy) / [https://mitmproxy.org/](https://mitmproxy.org/)

<comment><USER3> My go-to has always been Fiddler[1] (for windows). I wish it were open-source though.

I'll give mitmproxy a try. Thanks!

[1] [http://www.telerik.com/fiddler](http://www.telerik.com/fiddler)

<comment><USER4> Fiddler is amazing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow, this guy has the completely opposite attitude of me. He seems to think it's a bad thing, an attack!, for users to see just what the hell data you're pulling off someone's phone. And, bizarrely, uses an example of an app that essentially stole data from its users.

I should be able to see what data an app is sending, and certificate pinning (and ATS according to another comment) kills that. That's not a good thing.

<comment><USER6> I agree. Cert pinning is fine but there should be an option to disable it (maybe system-wide) for people who want to analyze traffic.

<comment><USER7> That would pretty much beat the purpose, the author of the app doesn't anyone to snoop.

<comment><USER8> Data generated on my phone belongs to me. By definition I cannot snoop on myself.

<comment><USER9> That's what you'd like to think, but the numerous terms & conditions that you've agreed to for your apps means that you're wrong, some data isn't yours.

<comment><USER10> OK, then how do we separate the data that is his versus data that belongs to somene else? Maybe we would have to look at what is being sent from the app?

<comment><USER9> Who knows? The two things are unrelated. My comment wasn't anti-reverse engineering, just stating a fact: just because something is in your phone doesn't mean it's yours.

<comment><USER10> The parent stated "Data generated on my phone belongs to me."

I interpreted this as "Data generated _by me_ on my phone belongs to me."

The user could agree to license her rights to the data, e.g. via terms and conditions. But it's still her data. That's why the agreement is necessary.

None of this has anything to do with "reverse engineering".

The scenario I am thinking of is a user looking at her data being sent from her hardware over an internet connection that she is paying for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is also a way, on rooted Androids, to sniff SSL pinned Apps.

SSL pinned is not an protection for reverse engineering anymore, you may want to add this info on your post.

More info at

[https://github.com/ac-pm/SSLUnpinning_Xposed](https://github.com/ac- pm/SSLUnpinning_Xposed)

<comment><USER12> +1. Thanks for the link, I didn't know bypassing certificate pinning became so easy.

<comment><USER13> Here's a few other ways as well: [http://blog.dewhurstsecurity.com/2015/11/10/mobile- security-...](http://blog.dewhurstsecurity.com/2015/11/10/mobile-security- certificate-pining.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I had to do this recently and found a great tool for Android for sniffing traffic on the device called Packet Capture. It can even sniff SSL without root permissions by installing a self-signed certificate and running an in-app local VPN proxy. It also had a bunch of other nice features like parsing common protocols, showing the good bits of HTTP, etc. Much nicer than the approach described here (this article is from 2013), although it's certainly only for Android folk.

I don't think it's FOSS, but hopefully a FOSS alternative will come along and use this approach.

<comment><USER15> I've been using Packet Capture to get some data I wanted out of an app recently and in the process I started generally snooping around. What I saw disgusts me. First, just how much waste there is in communication - so many requests with so much JSON traffic for no real reason (except maybe laziness). Second - just how much various apps report on you. I've seen everything I could possibly imagine the phone could know about me and my operator sent to the various "motherships", sans actually transcribing my contact lists and messages. I'm not even going to ask what they do with this data.

I recommend the experience highly. Just be warned, you may not like what you see.

<comment><USER16> Usually it's just usage analytics, but the potential for abuse is great because individual data is still sent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> aggregator-ios For those looking for a fully native experience, give [https://interceptapp.xyz](https://interceptapp.xyz) a try. Currently in alpha. Feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Disclosure: I'm the developer.

<comment><USER17> Nice, I reckon you're targeting the primary 'benefit' sought by MITM'ers. Most of my Android MiTM'ing is because I want to get at the data behind the app. Trying to comprehend some of the crazy, ultra-nested JSON schemas that some app devs use is a PITA.

Just a suggestion: I know you mention it in one of the marketing lines, but it might be worth stating that it's for Mac in the headline (or in the download button). Otherwise people like me, who just breeze past the marketing material to the download link, will waste 6.8MB of your bandwidth (sorry about that...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article is from 2013. The ssl vulnerability mentioned is no longer present: [https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/using- charles/ssl...](https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/using-charles/ssl- certificates/)

</comment><comment><USER19> What are some other ways to prevent people from discovering your API endpoints?

One terrible idea I just had was creating only one publicly accessible API and then encrypting the actual endpoint in the payload which the server would decrypt and then redirect.

<comment> ju-st \- encrypt everything using AES and pray that nobody will find the key in the apk \- use your own crooked Http implementation that violates the official specs (e.g. missing \r\n's or introducing random whitespace characters...). Simple http parsing tools won't work anymore and the attacker will get grey hairs when he tries to test/use your endpoints

<comment><USER20> Just a heads up that changing the HTTP protocol can break a load balancer. Experienced this one time while using Amazon's ELB: the response had invalid HTTP and the ELB instances would silently lock up and stop responding, eventually draining the pool. Was not fun to debug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how many techies could be silently MITM'd using the Charles root.

<comment><USER22> I worried about the same thing. Modern versions of Charles use a per-user root CA that is generated in the client.

<comment><USER21> Aha, much more sensible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Isn't it possible for apps for ignore the OS's proxy settings and make a direct TCP connection? In that case the proxy man-in-the-middle trick won't work.

<comment><USER24> At least on Android you can generate a fake VPN-esque connection locally that passes everything through a proxy, so the proxy isn't exposed to the application

<comment><USER25> Sure but then the verification will fail since you won't be able to sign the handshake with the "pin'd" cert. (Assuming they implement TLS or other crypto in their own code.) If you aren't modifying the execution environment then it's possible for an app to be "safe".

<comment><USER26> An clever-enough emulator can just lie to an application and say, "You're running on a stock device. Everything is fine".

<comment><USER24> Clever-enough is the key word, with Safetynet involved, which dynamically executes signed classes and you don't know what checks will be done

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> this doesn't work anymore on iOS apps that use ATS. ATS is enabled by default and will be required by Apple by the end of 2016

<comment><USER28> Sounds like Charles can work with ATS, just not pinned certs.[1]

[1] [https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/faqs/ssl- proxying...](https://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/faqs/ssl-proxying- with-ios-9/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm pretty heavy into home automation and I use this technique all the time to learn how to control various walled garden home automation systems. Even worked with my Alarm company's system.

However, if the phone app uses certificate pinning and SSL it doesn't work. (yes, that means my alarm company doesn't use certificate pinning).

</comment><comment><USER30> Is there any scenario where snooping on the upstream network connection can give you valuable reverse engineering information? Because of latency/reliability issues, most mobile apps have pretty simple and stateless protocols with the server.

</comment><comment><USER31> On android, this only works when the app is using http urlconnection provided by java. If the app uses apache http stack, the request is not routed through the proxy settings. Such traffic will not showup in charles or _the great MITM_.

</comment><comment><USER32> Even on iOS it's possible to bypass certificate pinning by using a jailbroken device and tool. I wouldn't say that's a good meassure against reverse engineering.

</comment><comment><USER33> That's what I call debug mode enabled in production. RESTful JSON APIs are truly in debug mode in production

<comment><USER34> What would you recommend in place of RESTful JSON API's?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Seems ignorant not to have a unique Charles certificate

<comment><USER36> Apparently modern Charles versions have a unique CA generated by each client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Did someone just post this guys blog from 2013 up?</comment>


IQRF: Do you want to participate in contest?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.iqrf.us/contest.html

<comment><USER2> I will give it a try.</comment>


Apple just shared iOS 11 beta 7 to developers - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/21/apple-just-shared-ios-11-beta-7-to-developers <comment><USER2> I wonder if they changed the App Store icon back.</comment>


I Drove a Crazy Rare Imported TVR Tuscan, and It's Insane - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32u6KPTALxg <comment><USER3> Hmm. Total piss take and wrong on so many counts. Daft sod didn't even know they announced a new car back in October for their long awaited comeback. Stupid Russian fool who bought them destroyed the company in 2yrs.

All TVRs had battery really low, they weigh just under a ton and put out 300-400bhp, so as much wight as possible is lowered. In my Chimaera battery was in passenger footwell. Tuscan dropped it in wheel arch. There was a page in my Tuscan S handbook telling me how to get into it if battery dead (same way as the Chim). Never once had difficulty opening filler cap either.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's fascinating to see how the manufacturers of this car violated just about every rule of usability and user interface design: obscure unmarked controls, being unable to unlock the car if the battery is dead, a trunk cover that covers the hazard flashers when opened, a gas cap that's almost impossible to open, a hood that's bolted shut, etc., etc.

<comment><USER3> You learn the controls in about 11s after buying it, there's only about 8 of them. As for the rest, the guy in the video just gets it all wrong. Getting in with dead battery is explained in handbook btw. etc etc.

The bonnet was split as the bolted down one was only lifted for service - <USER2> fluids, day to day maintenance could be done via the little one. Silly idea I agree though - everyone who buys one wants to look at the nice 4l straight six that makes the nice noises!

Should be titled "clueless idiot looks at a nice car"</comment></comment>


Yes, I am still learning Rust - <AUTHOR> https://llogiq.github.io/2020/03/07/learning.html <comment><USER3> I used to put every technology I had any experience with on my resume.

Then I started only listing the ones I knew the best.

Now what I do is treat the list as aspirational. "Here are the technologies that I'd like to work with (and which I'm familiar enough with that I could figure the rest out on a job)." I try to paint a story with those technologies: this combination of technologies draws an outline around the type of work I want to be doing.

I did this recently with Rust on the list even though I've only done a couple of personal projects with it, and the presence of it specifically made me stand out to a company that I'll soon be starting a position at! They use Rust and are sort of a dream job in a couple other ways too. They said the presence of that language spoke to the personality of the developer, and the kind of things he was likely interested in.

Takeaways: don't undersell yourself, and tell a coherent story.

Edit: To be clear, I was not being deceptive. Through the interview process the company learned precisely how well I know the things that I listed - <USER2> even dove into some of my projects together - and they were still excited to hire me. My point is that "knowing general principles" \+ "being fairly comfortable in a particular language" is often all that's really being asked for, and doesn't need to be disqualified with "still learning" just because you don't know everything there is to know.

<comment><USER4> That's tough because often I've had coworkers who give their thumbs up or thumbs down based on "he had it on his resume and I asked him basic question X and he had no idea, terrible".

<comment><USER5> "He used a for loop instead of a list comprehension. he clearly isn't actually a Python programmer" \-- actual debrief comments :|

<comment><USER6> I flunked an interview in a similar manner several years ago.

Hadn't done Java in around half a decade but the company recruiter said that it's not an issue (they contacted me).

Then I got a 30-minute online coding test that I had to do in Java. Took me a while to remember the syntax but finished the required problem in time and without issues/bugs.

In the end I got dinged for not using the Java Arrays library for copying an array (used a manual for loop)...

<comment><USER7> > In the end I got dinged for not using the Java Arrays library for copying an > array (used a manual for loop)...

This doesn't sound like a smart interviewer. They are testing your knowledge of the library ahead of understanding what's going on. I'm pretty sure I've interviewed some people who could pull out Array.Copy for the interview but couldn't tell you that it does pretty much the same as the for loop, and that is much more alarming.

<comment><USER6> > This doesn't sound like a smart interviewer.

I was slightly upset/angry at first but after thinking about it I came to the same conclusion and ended up being happy that I didn't get to pursue the opportunity any further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm still learning Rust, but I'm developing a deeper appreciation for Go. I've already _learned_ Go. As far as I can tell, I'm a Go expert.

Rust has a pretty large surface area. There's a ton of places where you can get overwhelmed by choices. For example, when you're working with slices, you might find yourself thinking about the pros and cons of different approaches using indexes, convenience functions, pattern matching, or iterators.

It's a big toolbox, and sometimes I wish I had a smaller toolbox, even if it means giving up the choice of which tools to keep.

So, I'll still be learning Rust for a while, too.

<comment><USER9> Pretty much what I am thinking. When I use Rust, at the end of the day I will have spent more time with the language instead of my actual task, and I don't see this changing given the rate Rust is still changing. It feels like you have to be a "programming language afficionado" to use Rust properly.

Whereas in Go, there is always only one reasonable way to do a specific task. You almost forget about the language and just get stuff done.

<comment><USER10> Here is a very practical example.

We chose Rust for the current project because our Python program took more than 1TB of RAM. Rust program carefully manually laying out memory takes 75G. Other choices in this case are C/C++, but after you get a hang of Rust, it's actually easier because you don't spend days inspecting core dumps in gdb: once it compiles it actually works.

<comment><USER11> What kind of program requires that much ram?

<comment><USER12> > What kind of program requires that much ram?

Elasticsearch is written in Java, and routinely uses 30GB+ of RAM. I suspect if it was written in Python, it would use an order of magnitude more.

<comment><USER13> I think you are confusing VM with RSS memory metrics. Elasticsearch is not using routinely 30GB+ of RAM, I am using it on machines that have a lot less RAM. You can additionally set how much RAM you want to give to JVM.

<comment><USER10> It would depend on the data set you want cached in memory I would think? And you set that in a configuration file I suppose. You can probably set it to use 128MB or RAM too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > So, yes, I am still learning Rust.

I have always been very cautious about how much I tout my skill with C++. Sure, I know a bunch. Probably a good bit more than the average bear. But the scope of C++ is enormous (even if you stop at C++03 there is a lot to know). And with new language standards it keeps growing.

Despite ~two decades of experience, I list my skill level with C++ as "intermediate" because "expert" paints a bullseye on your forehead. I could imagine tons of C++ questions that I could not answer off the top of my head. Those probably disqualify me as an expert and would involve a lot of embarrassing backpedaling in an interview.

I wonder how many times my resume was discarded because they needed someone with more than "intermediate" level experience with C++?

<comment><USER15> I learnt clojure _the language_ in a couple of hours.

Ofcourse, I am still learning the library and how to do things better in a functional way. But I was good to go with the language in a couple of hours.

<comment><USER16> And by writing Clojure, you lose a lot of type safety and compile-time efficiency. Not that that's a bad thing, just pointing out that there's a trade-off that it makes in favor of a simpler language to learn and implement. There's also the matter of it being more verbose to represent certain concepts in Clojure due to lack of syntax, but that's harder to argue.

<comment><USER17> Learn, maybe. Implement, though? Pervasively-immutable data structures and STM were no walk in the park to write.

<comment><USER15> clojure's data structures are written in java

<comment><USER18> Interestingly ClojureScript's are self hosted: [https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/blob/master/src/mai...](https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript/blob/master/src/main/cljs/cljs/core.cljs#L7858)

The JVM Clojure story is probably just that the data sturcture implementations were done very early in the history of the language before all the type etc directives were there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Rust is still new and shiny, and is still evolving at a rapid pace. Everyone's still learning Rust, I'd imagine that even Rust core contributors are still learning Rust! (The same can be said for most other languages too, although not all to the same extent). Anyone who is looking for Rust talent right now, and who discards the CVs of people "still learning", clearly knows nothing about Rust, nor about hiring good devs.

<comment><USER20> 1.0 was released 5 years ago.

Swift is younger and I think it's a great language.

If the tooling is ready and I don't have to fight it, I'd be fine using Rust. I just need a reason. Anyone using it for iOS development?

<comment><USER21> I love Rust, but it doesn't have a strong UI development story yet.

<comment><USER22> very few languages do, and those that do it is usually for just one platform.

<comment><USER23> Because native UI is on the decline unfortunately. Its too complicated and there are too many different systems. If you want a gui in rust you would be better off having your program start a web server on localhost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I find this to be one of the reasons I didn't find rust that appealing as an C++ alternative. Its safety is something I admire and is highly valuable to many domains, but the two main things I want to abandon with C++ are its complexity and its compile times. Rust doesn't seem to get away from either of those.

As someone who doesn't really use Rust, does anyone who does find the complexity detracts from it a bit as a language? Is there effort to reduce complexity with the language or does it mostly embrace it?

At this point I find myself mostly looking at modern C alternatives—ones which manage to stay relatively simple the way C does, but with a few additional features and better designs (Zig, Odin, maybe Jai, etc).

All that said, I work with C++ and so I could see myself potentially working with Rust in the future, so I'm curious how people feel about its complexity, especially given that its complexity will presumably only increase with time.

<comment><USER25> The problem is that there's no standard definition of "complexity," and so not only is it really hard to answer your question, it's also really hard to compare one language's complexity to another.

I personally subscribe to the "waterbed theory of complexity", that is, I believe that the world is complex, and often, attempts to remove complexity cause it to pop up somewhere else. Rust's goals have an inherent level of complexity to them, and so require a certain degree of complexity to accomplish. There is an argument that if we had dropped one or two of those goals, we could have made a language that is _much_ simpler, but I'm also not sure Rust would be as popular if we did.

One thing we strive for with Rust is that features are reasonably _orthogonal_ and work well together, without weird corner cases. We also try to only add more features when the cost is actually justified. We have said "no" to a lot of things. We have also tried and rejected a lot of things.

You also may enjoy this blog post of mine: [https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-language-strangeness- budg...](https://words.steveklabnik.com/the-language-strangeness-budget)

(I should also note that I'm not actually on the lang team, so this is more of a statement about what I observe and my own opinion rather than policy, strictly speaking.)

<comment><USER26> > attempts to remove complexity cause it to pop up somewhere else

Yes, but sometimes the average brain is better at dealing with certain types of complexity. C++, IMO, puts the complexity in the wrong places. Programming is inherently complex, but it shouldn't be any more so than it needs to be and the complexity should be of the type humans can manage, as much as possible anyway.

<comment><USER25> I don't disagree! Well, I might disagree that they put it in the "wrong" place exactly; I think that the committee is doing the best that they can given their goals and constraints. I do not have the same goals and constraints, and therefore prefer to use other languages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am researching a backend programming language for a future project. I am debating if I should choose rust fearing for the difficulty of hiring.

<comment><USER28> I think that you'll actually attract all the right people.

<comment><USER27> But we need to control the burning rate. (We are a startup) the right people are expensive.

<comment><USER28> Hire remotely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> We are all always learning. I am all over the place from java, shell, awk, python, and now I'm playing with Go and I kind of like it but can't find the time to actually make something useful so I can learn from it.

</comment><comment><USER30> I don't consider this a positive.

I would, on balance, prefer to have a language with a smaller feature set that limits the amount of syntactic variability in the code I see. This, I believe, allows me to focus on the problem, not on the language features the person is using to solve the problem.

With Rust it always feels like there are changes and, at times it feels exhausting having to 'keep up'. It also means that there's high variability in the code you see in the wild.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's like C++ - no-one can ever know it all.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is applicable to any language with a sufficiently big ecosystem, but the thought is sound.

</comment><comment><USER33> Rust is a terrible language. It has an identity crisis. Thinks it's a high level but also system level language. You cant be both. The unix philosophy always wins. Do one thing well. C is the perfect system lang and Java/C#/Lisp/Python etc are the cream of high level langs.

<comment><USER19> Rust has always clearly labelled itself as first and foremost a systems programming language. It strictly maintains performance and safety as its top priorities. It doesn't go out of its way to be easy to learn or to use, compared with higher level languages. Doesn't seem to me like there's any identity crisis.</comment></comment>


Regex Golf Part 2: Infinite Problems - <AUTHOR> http://nbviewer.ipython.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313-part2.ipynb?create=1

<comment><USER2> Whether it's a testament to Python's clean syntax or Norvig's immense coding experience, I always find his code to be good examples of readable code. He even managed to make code about regexes look nice!

</comment><comment><USER3> This is what happens when Randall Munroe nerd-snipes Norvig. Its a beautiful thing, very interesting!

</comment><comment><USER4> Holy shit. That article was an intense read. Well worth it, in the end, though.

</comment><comment><USER5> Norvig teaches a Design of Computer Programs course on Udacity, which helps you think about solving problems.

[https://www.udacity.com/course/cs212](https://www.udacity.com/course/cs212)

</comment><comment><USER6> Those un-wrapped lines of text are really annoying to read.

<comment><USER7> They wrap for me in Chrome, but not in Firefox. (What the hell?)

<comment><USER8> Looks like a quirk with display: -moz-box (an outdated property). Changing div.input to display: flex makes it work properly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's quite amazing that he manages to do this sort of thing in his spare time, for fun. I guess he has decades of experience that most people don't though :)

</comment><comment><USER10> Peter Norvig of spell-checker fame explains us regexes.

I always get confused when I have to do NLP stuff and use the re library.

</comment><comment><USER11> I wish I'd known about Branch And Bound when I was a student - it would have probably come in handy a few times.</comment>


AWS Re:Invent Keynote Livestream (Andy Jassy) - <AUTHOR> https://live.awsevents.com/ <comment><USER2> So far announced:

1\. New instance types: r4, c5, i3

2\. GPU attach to any instance.

3\. AWS Lightsail: Virtual Private Server, like Digital Ocean

4\. FPGA instance family F1

5\. Amazon Athene: Ad-hoc analytic, Google Big Query style.</comment>


Too Big to Care: Citibank and the Cost of Uninvested Bureaucrats - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dempsey/too-big-to-care-citibank-and-the-cost-of-uninvested-bureaucrats-cff0698fc14a

<comment><USER2> I'm guessing Citibank is playing hard ball because if they lose this case it opens the flood gates to a bazillion other settlements.

<comment><USER3> How? It's arbitration and settlements are usually confidential with a non- disparagement agreement.</comment></comment>


Why The World Needs A Time Machine - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@vik/why-the-world-needs-a-time-machine-f326c2cb4633

<comment><USER2> Loved the blog and the thought process. Long way to go but an amazing ambitious dream I must say. All the best!</comment>


Ask HN: How long does it take for you to become productive in a new job? - <AUTHOR> By that I mean, understand the current system / requirements for new system in such a way that you effectively work alone, if you need.<p>And in general, how is the on boarding process? Do you normally have a mentor/guide to ask questions, or do you just learn by doing? Do you do pair coding in the first few weeks? <comment><USER2> One of my mentors, a former Fortune 500 CEO turned business school professor, told me it takes 2 years for an employee to become full trained in a job. I've found that to also be true for technical jobs.

I've also found that it takes about 6 months to start understanding the system without hand holding from a manager or senior developer.

To get up to speed, I'd recommend starting with the smallest projects first: simple bug fixes, pair programming, and doing some support work. That will get you seeing how the software is used and which lines of code correspond to the different pieces of software. You can move on to bigger projects once you get your feet under you.

I wrote more about getting up to speed at a new job on my blog: [https://www.climbuptheladder.com/how-to-succeed-in-a-new- job...](https://www.climbuptheladder.com/how-to-succeed-in-a-new-job/).

</comment><comment><USER3> That really depends on the company and the software they are building.

I work in healthcare and before I was hired I was told it would take me about 6 months to become productive (understand the system, the jargon,..).

The first month I had a mentor that I did some pair programming with, in which I was mostly watching at first and then being the programmer. I also had courses on how to use the software and was taken to many meetings to get 'context' of what we worked on.

All in all I became productive around 4-5 months (developing new features without bothering colleagues too much and leading some own projects)

\--

At a job before the current one I was not really guided at all, but they had written tutorials about how to work with their software. And in the tutorial you build a 'new' feature as you went along using more and more complex features of their framework.

No pair programming and actually felt more like a university course (as you kind of got graded via code reviews and had to retake a tutorial step if you failed).

I would actually recommend the first approach.

</comment><comment><USER4> One or two days; setup dev environment, database connections(local or remote), checkout code, build, start, debug. Start working tickets, features or bugs. Ask for direction when I need it. I usually don't. The truth is in the code, if you ask you just get people's out dated information. But I've working the same stack for > 10 years (Java enterprise).

Learning the domain takes longer of course, but you don't need domain knowledge to fix bugs or put buttons on a page.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would think it would depend on many factors.

For starters:

1\. What the nature of the work is.

2\. What the culture of the company is, and if you have adequate help from other folks you work with.

3\. How quickly you learn.

That makes it a challenging question to answer, as it seems like a moving target.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'll say, when you join a new company, it takes some time when you feel you are "involved" and care about the company.

> If the product involves 50+ engineering team members, then 2-4 months takes > you to onboard, and post that you learn new things and feel involved in day > to day.

</comment><comment><USER7> Time to minimal productivity, at the cost of pestering coworkers often: a few days. Time to basic, awkward autonomy: a few weeks. Time to full participation: about a year. Time to leadership: 2-4 years.</comment>


A young Steve Jobs talking about Apple at Stanford (1980) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://smarttalks.tv/post/14836282256/a-young-steve-jobs-talking-about-apple-at-stanford

<comment> Apple-Guy This video is RIPPED from the computer museum site without credit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that this use falls within the fair use exception under US copyright law.</comment></comment>


Six Degrees of Separation at Burning Man - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/74/networks/six-degrees-of-separation-at-burning-man <comment><USER2> > How, after so many years, could Burning Man throw an event of such chaos, > and yet leave the desert without a trace?

Pretty simple answer actually, they don't. And a lot of the trash they do take with them they illegally dump in Reno. "Leave no Trace" is just a marketing slogan.

[https://www.apnews.com/ab70872567d94e2585d744e676c976f5](https://www.apnews.com/ab70872567d94e2585d744e676c976f5)

[https://m.sfgate.com/travel/burningman/article/Burning- Man-g...](https://m.sfgate.com/travel/burningman/article/Burning-Man-garbage- reno-dumping-leave-no-trace-13186812.php)

<comment><USER3> "Burning Man's contract stipulates that no more than 1 square foot of debris per acre can be left behind after the event. The area where a human effigy is burned had nearly 7 square feet of trash after the event, according to the BLM."

1 acre = 43560 square feet, and over the 7 square miles of the event (= 4480 acres) that was the peak measurement? Get real.

"attendees — returned from a week of self-discovery and partying on the 'playa' — have the propensity to dump trash illegally"

I think you need to be fair and compare against the mess left at _similar_ events.

Although it seems obvious Burning Man should provide trash bins - rubbish is generated in large amounts and they should accept that.

<comment><USER4> The reasonable complaint is that attendees are hauling their trash off the playa but the infrastructure to deal with the trash after that still needs to be improved.

Personal anecdote: I attended lightning in a bottle years ago and they had a similar "pack it out" rule. Well that doesn't help when you're not aware of that prior to attending and need to dispose of plates from food you purchased at the event. I guess the expectation is that a day visitor carry around a trash bag full of waste with them all day. It came across as lazy by the event organizers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great project, both requires and creates optimism.

Sadly, some marketer is probably reading this and trying to figure out how they can exploit the "cooperative effort and whimsical creativity" of the non- tech-driven IRL networks...

<comment><USER6> "Probably" doesn't do it justice. If you haven't seen this documentary it's worth checking out if you're curious to see how sinister and deep the rabbit hole goes.

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s](https://youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s)

<comment><USER5> Indeed!! Hell, just the first three minutes indicates where this is going...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, this is a traceroute LARP.</comment>


Startup Quote: Jim Barksdale, former CEO, Netscape - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/1632425581

<comment><AUTHOR> The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.

\- Jim Barksdale

<http://startupquote.com/post/1632425581></comment>


Show HN: People search engine built on top of the blockchain - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoinusername.com

<comment> ryan-c Yet another site from the OneName team that says "Blockchain" instead of "Namecoin". This one goes so far as to imply it's built on Bitcoin. What's the deal with this?

<comment><USER2> This is literally just the OneName search engine already available on the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why rely on third-parties when you could use bitcoin:1JZuM9qKaeAuDpepigSMmNvBzsAgTavqLB URIs instead? Or you could use your own trusted server with things such as: bitcoin:email@example.com

<comment><USER4> I can't tell if you're being facetious, but a Bitcoin URI is not readable, shareable, or memorable, making it harder to use Bitcoin itself. A username, just like a URL, provides that. Not to mention, everyone can't run their own trusted server, just like most people don't run their own mail or web servers.

<comment> ryan-c OneName is an application built on top of Namecoin. Namecoin itself provides decentralized registration of secure, memorable names with the ability to associate a small amount of data.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Advanced analytics for fantasy baseball players - <AUTHOR> https://baseballengine.com/about/

<comment><USER2> As a baseball fan and fantasy baseball player, I hope you don't mind if I say that I am not finding this site very useful (or am I not able to figure out how to use it effectively.) For instance, given that we are only 3 (or 4) days into the season, showing 2012 season stats is not very useful yet. Showing projections might be useful -- you don't even have to make your own projections, as there other well-known projections out there such as Bill James', ZiPS, Marcel, etc.

Another issue is that selection of stat categories for the "BE scorecard" does not match up with most fantasy baseball 5x5 leagues since it is missing AVG.

I think the idea of bringing more data visualization to baseball is great though. This is actually the topic I am using for my class project in my data visualization class (due in a couple weeks now!) I will definitely keep an eye on this site though, and hopefully you will continue developing and improving it.

<comment><USER3> "Another issue is that selection of stat categories for the "BE scorecard" does not match up with most fantasy baseball 5x5 leagues since it is missing AVG."

Tyrone, it seems like your site's main marketability strategy is to allow fantasy owners big and small to customize their own comparisons and data visualization based on the stats they want to see. So with the above concern raised in mind, what if you allowed users to input their own 5x5 categories for their league and boiled that down into one number?

For example if someone was playing in a league that counted just Hits, Runs, Stolen Bases, Home Runs and OPS, and they wanted to know how Alexi Ramirez was doing in this format, they could just input these five stats and create a "Custom BE Rating".

This way, the hardcore data crunching aspect is still there, but the user will still be able to get a full amount of value from the site because it offers them the ability to tailor the data to their own league.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is interesting stuff. I started a fantasy baseball analytics site as well a couple of years ago and have a bunch of feedback.

1) I would love for the site to integrate with my Yahoo/CBS/ESPN leagues and adjust the stat displays to account for my league settings

2) These stats are great for during research, but are also available at baseball-reference.com, fangraphs.com and several other sites. What would be great is for this to use the CBS/Yahoo API (scrape ESPN until they open their fantasy leagues API), and pull in my league info, teams, settings, positions and give me customized advice.

3) One this I found 2 years ago was that these stats were great for hard core stat nerds, but for more casual games, I've found that these numbers didn't make sense to them. We had to provide a simpler dashboard, with easily digestible recommendations/graphs and allow them to drill into more detail for each point.

4) Historical data is nice to have, but the real value would be to use the historical data to try and project the future. I don't really care that in 35 career ABs that Aaron Hill hit 4 HR (too small a sample size). What I'd like to know, is given his age, his ball park, and the profiles of the opposing starting pitchers, what range of stats can I expect from him?

5) In addition to historical stats, it would be nice to use your particular league context to define what a "good" trade is. For instance, trading Miguel Cabrera for Michael Bourn late in the season may seem crazy, but if you need SB and trading Cabrera to an opponent might prevent your nearest opponents from gaining on you in HR/RBI, this trade might make all the sense and actually improve your odds of winning.

These are just some of my quick thoughts and I hope they help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. I think the integrations with other services (Yahoo/CBS/ESPN) would be great as would be the customized recommendations.

I think the first thing I'll add is the projections, because that seems to be meaningful to a lot of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty cool, but some of that stat choices are a little curious. VORP instead of WAR? No park- or league-adjusted offensive stats like wRC+ or OPS+? No defensive stats at all? No BABIP or batted ball rates for pitchers? It's hard to do any in-depth pitcher analysis with only FIP.

I really like the ability to compare up to 4 players on any given stat that's available, but the choice of stats is kind of lacking and I don't see much to draw me away from Fangraphs at this point.

I know you said this is primarily for fantasy nerds, (and stats like UZR don't really matter for fantasy baseball) but you could pull in stat nerds in general if you expanded the stat selection to be competitive with FG/StatCorner/etc. Pitch f/x data could also be something to think about as a future addition to add huge utility to the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have any input on the BE Score?

<comment><USER5> This is a tough question to answer. The fact is that your typical fantasy league is going to value stats that have little predictive or descriptive value such as RBI. I think that the BE score would be a good metric for how valuable a player has been in one of these kind of fantasy leagues in the past. However, if you're wanting the BE score to be predictive of future value to a fantasy team, what you're really trying to project is future performance in general. If you want to get into that, the inputs that you have aren't sufficiently predictive and you're going to have to lean on more advanced metrics. As far as I can tell, BE weights all of the 7 stats exactly equally. The truth is that RBI is a terrible stat and VORP is an okay stat, for instance.

There are some really smart people out there working on projection systems that you could look into. Dan Szymborski does ZiPS, Tom Tango does Marcel and then you probably know about Bill James who has a projection system by the same name. There are others, but these are probably the most popular.

I'd love to offer my assistance; baseball nerdery plus development nerdery would essentially be my dream job, but I would be way too swamped until June or so to be able to contribute. I don't know how SABR savvy you are, but my contact is in my profile and you're welcome to bounce questions off of me. There are also tons of resources out there I can direct you to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The Baseball Engine lets you analyze and compare major league baseball players in over 80 statistical categories.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very interesting idea - I'll have to introduce it to one of my friends :) You wouldn't happen to have football a fantasy football branch in the works, would you?

One complaint: on the root page, the right (?) puts text off-screen, and you can't scroll to view it because that hides the text.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you like about this version that you would like to see in the football one?

<comment><USER3> Tyrone, first of all I love the data visualization efforts. As a personal baseball stat nerd myself, I always appreciate a site with in depth stats.

As for a football version, since the format is week to week you should heavily consider incorporating weekly matchups for players (ex. Arian Foster vs. Indanapolis Colts Defense, at home). There are a few good resources that I could direct you to for projecting matchups, but if you made your own incorporating split stats you could honestly provide a great resource to fantasy owners and, with the right marketing, capture a good portion the fantasy football market.

Positions are much more important for fantasy football than they are in baseball, so the tabbing system you have right now to distinguish pitchers and hitters is good, but expanding that concept to QB, RB, WR, WR/R, K, DEF would provide a good resource for all fantasy owners.

If you have any questions, email me. I'd love to help you out with this, and I could go on and on about where you could take this idea. The market for this type of site is just getting off the ground! My contact information is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is fantastic, thank you. Any chance of adding predictions based on past performance, etc?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you take a look at the data table, you'll see that in the BE Scorecard & statistic value columns they are either colored green or red. I'm doing a least-squares linear regression on the player's BE Score here and showing red if the player's BE Score is trending down over the last 30 days or green if the player's BE Score is trending up over the last 30 days.

<comment><USER7> Excellent. Again, this is really great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> very nice graphics, but not having previous years data is a big drawback.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have peppered in some comments throughout this thread, but I've got loads more. Give them a read and dont hesitate to contact me if you'd like to share ideas sometime.

</comment><comment><USER9> looks great, job well done.

would love to see a blog post from you explaining your development process on the project

</comment><comment><USER10> Anybody interested in advanced analytics for soccer (a fledgling industry), check out my blog: www.centralwinger.com

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone have any input on the cost that Pro has been set at or the pay structure of the website?

<comment><USER3> Pay structure should include a free 10 day trial. That way users will be able to see what kind of advanced stats and analysis that is provided. Through the free trial method, users will get a small sample of the site and develop a dependency of sorts on the site's analysis and find themselves needing it for the rest of the season!

There appears to be a lack of advertising on the site as well. Seeing that you work for Google, I'm assuming its not because AdSense wouldn't accept the request for ads, but a strategic move on your part. Nice job, it looks very clean and easy to trust. Having no ads at this phase in the site's development is a smart move, and as the site gets more web traffic it might be a smart idea to reevaluate.

<comment><AUTHOR> Added a 7 day free trial: <https://baseballengine.com/free-trial/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am trying to figure out how to reach this customer segment. Do you have any suggestions?

<comment><USER11> Contact sportswriters like Rob Neyer and Fantasy Sports editors/bloggers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I've contacted Rob!

<comment><USER4> Also consider going the the Fantasy Sports Trade Association conferences. They have them twice a year and the opportunity to meet a lot of folks in the Fantasy sports world gives you an opportunity for cross promotion and just meeting good guys (and it's almost all guys)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Always glad to see more hacking on the one sport that can appeal to geeks of any stripe.

</comment><comment><USER13> Great job. Curious where are you getting your raw data from?

<comment><USER14> Could be here:

<http://developer.yahoo.com/fantasysports/>

<comment><USER3> @sparkygoblue Is anybody using this API? If so, have you ever used YQL? Since it integrates so many other languages like JSON, do you know how different it is from SQL?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Highcharts looks slick. My weekend project is using Flot. If I ever generate some cash from it I might have to buy a Highchart license and make the jump. Looks so much better...:-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. The implementation is also very well documented and there are so many different customizations that can be made!</comment></comment>


Creating a community and social media dashboard using Dashing and Keen.io - <AUTHOR> http://purevirtual.eu/2015/02/09/creating-a-community-and-social-media-dashboard-using-dashing-and-keen-io/

<comment><USER2> Author of the blog post here, thanks for sharing! Any questions on the project throw them my way.</comment>


Research: Programming Style and Productivity - <AUTHOR> http://www.scala-lang.org/node/3069

<comment><USER2> This reads mostly as a scala-vs-java argument, but there are plenty of other contenders that you could compare scala against.

Maybe this is written this way because scale targets the same market as where java now dominates but even then the number of languages that are running on top of the JVM is increasing very rapidly.

I've had a look at Scala, Java, PHP and Python for a new project and have finally settled on the Python/Django combo, with scala as a runner up.

The clinching factors for me were that even though the scala folks have a neat thing going their community is nowhere near as vibrant as the one around python.

Another issue was that I personally found scalas combination of object- oriented pascal and C/Java syntax combined quite hard on the eyes.

It would be interesting to see the 'scala is more readable' argument hashed out for more competitive languages than Java.

The linked PDF is quite good, but because of its age there is no mention of scala.

[http://page.mi.fu- berlin.de/prechelt/Biblio/jccpprt_computer...](http://page.mi.fu- berlin.de/prechelt/Biblio/jccpprt_computer2000.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Scala syntax, I've found, is a matter of taste (although that goes for every language). I've been using Scala at my workplace for almost a year and find the syntax very readable. It's choices are not arbitrary and are quite thought out. Does it have its nagging points? Sure. But as with any language, once the forms are understood they become second-nature.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's a really good management training programme for technical people? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Manager Tools, Google it.

There's nothing about being a technical person that requires any special consideration, it's not an impediment.

Often people who think this way are just people with no experience beyond job with a large technical component. That's easily fixed, just you might fix any other missing experience.</comment>