Alcohol and social bonding in humans (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/c5ce0834-9a64-11e8-9702-5946bae86e6d <comment><USER4> "Loneliness is a health threat in the western world, and the UK even has a dedicated minister to address the problem. How to solve it, of course, is a huge challenge, but encouraging people to get out and socialise over a few beers or a bottle of wine at the village pub may be a good place to start."

Proximity, unplanned encounters and the privacy to confide with someone have been identified as key factors in making friends as an adult.[cite] I find it unfortunate to read about the closing of so many neighborhood pubs in England over the past decade or so.

<comment><USER5> One has to wonder why even the author states specifically that loneliness is a problem in the "western world". Isn't it a problem elsewhere and if so, why? What does it really correlate with? Longer lifespans, smaller families, peace and security, wealth?

<comment><USER6> > _One has to wonder why even the author states specifically that loneliness > is a problem in the "western world". Isn't it a problem elsewhere and if so, > why?_

Because other places have stronger social and family bonds (Africa, Asia, Latin America). Exceptions is the West and very westernized societies in Asia (e.g. Japan).

It's partly cultural (e.g. protestant cultures being more impersonal), partly because of necessity (you need more family/friend support in less developed countries), and partly because of the development model chosen (or imposed onto people) which sacrifices personal and social time and binds for productivity and consumption. Where western style productivity has not been applied (e.g. in vast expanses of global rural areas, non-factory cities, slower economies, etc), even the poor have plenty of social time. When that has been eroded and people are forced to factory work, sweatshops, or worse (mines etc), that drops closer to zero.

Quite a lot of social time was the norm in the west too, both in the pre- industrial past, and when a middle class emerged that overcame the Dickensian working conditions (e.g. sometime before WWII, up until some point in the 70s - late 80s or so. Thank neoliberalism/globalization for the changes...).

<comment><USER7> [citation needed]

<comment><USER6> [fieldwork and reading up required from the reader]

<comment><USER7> So you made it up and then downvoted me for asking for a source? Oh well.

<comment><USER6> No, I summed up my informed observations and readings (having lived and worked in a few continents for some chunks of time), and downvoted the cliche Reddit- like "citation needed" content-less response.

If you have your own observations, or opinion, or point of view, or counter data, or some citation you'd like to share, please do so. I've written mine.

<comment><USER7> > my informed observations and readings

I lived and worked since the mid-1990s in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, plus have a related degree. And no, I will not give you sources to contradict your "facts". That's not how science works. If you present "facts", then its on you to present the sources. And don't downvote people asking for a source. That's yet another level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The author is Robin Dunbar, of Dunbar's number. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Dunbar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Dunbar)

Past threads have shown this to be a bit of a triggering topic, but this is an interesting and substantial article. We changed the title to make it less baity, in accordance with the HN guidelines. If anyone suggests a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral), we can change it again.

<comment><USER9> > If anyone suggests a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral)

I think the important insight in the article is "how alcohol and social activities trigger the endorphin system in humans".

I object to the article's proposition that alcohol is useful, except in controlled amounts. Two or three ounces of wine is enough, not the whole bottle.

As a taxi driver, I dealt with a lot of people who had trouble with alcohol, and trouble with "social activities". _I_ had trouble with social activities, but talking to random people in my taxi was much more useful to me than any of the drinks I've ever had.

One of my most successful interventions was for the passenger whom I'd later learn had been written off by her family as a hopeless drunk. Her family and friends cared about her, but they didn't know what to do, and had their own problems to deal with.

I didn't know that when I arrived at that passenger's apartment. She provided simple directions. I quickly realized we were going the drive-thru liquor store. I took a few minutes out of my day to detour to a fast food restaurant, spent a few extra minutes talking to her, and called back a few times over the next two days. Then I forgot about her...

After her taxi ride, her friend called one of her sons and said, "GO SOBER UP YOUR MOTHER!" She did well for two or three months, that time.

This passenger later told me she'd fallen into alcoholism because drinking "made [all her problems] go away". Prison for her 3rd DUI did not actually provide the help she needed to pull herself together.

Eventually I told her daughter that what her mother really needed was to know that she had her children's support. They stepped up to take care of her. She's doing quite well now, and is useful to her children instead of a burden.

Johann Hari's book [0] talks about how social connections are what people actually need to break their addictions.

[0] [http://chasingthescream.com/](http://chasingthescream.com/)

<comment><USER10> >Two or three ounces of wine is enough

Enough for what exactly? A common pour of wine is 4 - 6 oz.

Also, I'm sorry you don't like alcohol, but not all use is abuse. I wouldn't even go as far as saying occasional and mild drunkenness itself is problematic.

I don't disagree that in many cases substance abuse happens because of external problems and unless those are fixed relapse becomes almost inevitable. Sometimes that has nothing to do with connecting to others; there is a reason the opioid crisis is hitting rural areas that have been hit very hard economically.

<comment><USER9> > Enough for what exactly? A common pour of wine is 4 - 6 oz.

2-3 ounces of wine is enough to "trigger the endorphin system in humans" to facilitate social interactions, for people whose endorphin systems aren't already overloaded with pain signals.

People for whom 2-3 ounces is not enough can refresh their endorphin system using the drug mentioned in the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is nobody going to mention that the "research" that lead to this article was funded by the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) and it's conclusions _might_ be biased toward portraying alcohol consumption in a favourable light?

Drink more beer/wine/etc in pubs if you want to bond with people.

Yes, alcohol can be a social lubricant, but there is no shortage of evidence that social bonding can/does occur without it.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is getting the "connectedness index" up from 5.9 to 6.6 significant?

The "article in the British Medical Journal" is here.[1] The "Whitehall study" has been tracking a group of British civil servants since the 1980s. The alcohol effect seems to be slightly above the noise level. But the level of alcohol consumption at which things start to get worse is quite low. "Alcohol consumption >14 units/week was associated with an increased risk of dementia in a linear fashion". 14 units a week is about one glass of wine a day.[2]

Also, in this study alcohol consumption is self-reported, so it's probably low.

[1] [https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k2927](https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k2927)

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

<comment><USER13> The group with the highest rate of dementia was those who abstained from alcohol completely though.

<comment><USER14> Did they control for the recovering alcoholic abstainers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Taking Devil's Advocate on the article because of alcohol.

You can't just instruct an alcoholic not to overdo alcohol. Bonding over a beer is fine if you are able to control your consumption (or you don't care,) but don't push it on people who you know don't drink or have drank in the past but have since quit.

As Artie Lange likes to joke "People who don't have the disease say, 'Artie, you can have one drink, one beer, one five-dollar bet. If I put down a five- dollar bet on roulette in a casino, half an hour later, it's beer, vodka, weed. By 11:30, I'm doing blow off a stripper's ass... By 8 a.m. I'm running guns to Cuba."

</comment><comment><USER16> I spent 25 years in bar and restaurant with almost half that time actually behind a bar. Alcohol does indeed grease the social skids. Sometimes positively and sometimes not so much. It all depends on who is doing the imbibing and the chemistry between the various parties. Bartenders are very much attuned to these dynamics...

</comment><comment><USER17> Wonderful article. Lots of interesting observations and studies cited.

The last paragraph -

> So, if you want to know the secret of a long and happy life, money is not > the right answer. Get rid of the takeaway in front of the telly, and bin the > hasty sandwich at your desk — the important thing is to take time out with > people you know and talk to them over a beer or two, even that bottle of > Prosecco if you really must. There's nothing quite like a convivial evening > wrapped around a pint to give you health, happiness and a sense of > wellbeing.

<comment><USER18> The horrible thing about that last paragraph is that doing the thing - <USER2> to folks over a beer or two - requires money. Not lots of money, but some money. It requires transportation and, if you don't have it, you shouldn't have the beer. And so on.

If there is a population of folks that have trouble affording food every month, that sort of simple happiness isn't available. Money - to a point - <USER3> part of the answer.

<comment><USER19> I once felt the same way. And maybe in the future I will come around to that way of thinking again.

The problem is not money, per se in my view. I'm coming to believe now though that humans have a baseline of social health in the same way that there is a baseline of physical health - and that baseline health is rather reasonable and flexible. Money correlates somewhat with social health.

If someone heart pounds and they get dizzy whenever they stand up, then something is clearly wrong and they should see a doctor. Normally healthy humans should be able to stand and walk around at least.

Likewise, if someone cannot afford (their society's equivalent of) a pint of beer with friends, it means that something has gone wrong: being able to socialize with friends is the baseline, however socializing is defined in that society. A person unable to afford to socialize is a socially ill person.

There is absolutely nothing morally wrong with being poor just as there is nothing morally wrong with being ill. But it is not baseline. Moving the baseline expectation from "pint of beer" to "playing musical instruments" or "telling entertaining tales" or "making costumes" or "listening warmly" will still mean that some people will still be unable to afford to socialize.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Alcohol's track record in my life thus far:

Relationships created: 0

Relationships destroyed or severely damaged: 2

To clarify, I was not the one affected by alcohol in those 2 cases. So thanks, but no thanks.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, I feel like I have to justify why I am not participating in "doing drugs", when people wonder why I wont have a drink. Very tiring and kind of helped me to avoid drinking just out of spite :P ..

That weird "must be something wrong with you" attitude is pretty unique to alcohol, I would say.

<comment><USER22> Perhaps that explains why people who drink moderately enjoy better outcomes: they're not being penalized by others for not drinking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Since this article refers to einkorn bread as "grimly tasteless, rather soggy flatbread," I just wanted to say that einkorn sourdough is my favorite type of bread. Definitely worth trying!

</comment><comment><USER24> I enjoy drinking, but I am tired of reading stories about how alcohol or psychoactive drugs are key to whatever.

</comment><comment><USER25> So, we get a lot of "alcohol is bad" or "alcohol is good (in moderation)" from different scientists. What am I, a non-scientist, to believe? For my "null hypothesis", which I hold to unless and until a scientific consensus demonstrates otherwise, is that conditions similar to my ancestors' lifestyle is what is most likely to be what I am adapted for. I'm pretty sure my ancestors were occasional drinkers of alcohol.

Of course, it would depend on my particular ancestors. If my dad or mom died of cirrhosis of the liver, I would choose differently.

<comment><USER26> This is hackernews, where random commenters from the internet can dig up evidence that anything you might enjoy consuming is bad for you. About the only thing people can agree is good for you is fasting.

<comment><USER27> Not anymore, currently top comment on article on IF:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21888639](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21888639)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> If alcohol consumption is crucial to human bonding, how does the author explain friendship and bonding in communities where alcohol is not consumed?

I have never consumed alcohol - historically for religious reasons, but now due to personal convictions - so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

I am of the opinion that it's much easier to fall into addiction and/or abuse of the drink if it's available as an option. I am not at all condoning prohibition here; that never worked anywhere it was attempted, and never will. Rather, I am looking at this from a personal level.

I am definitely open to hearing reasonable arguments for drinking, other than the social aspect, which was covered (poorly, imo) by this article.

<comment><USER29> Well,it's all about your culture's relationship with it. In NYC, it can be difficult to socialize at times without alcohol because it's very ingrained in the young professional community. In Istanbul, where it isn't, perhaps it's difficult to socialize as a coffee abstainer.

In neither case is it really that difficult to abstain and still socialize, but presuming you don't have a problem and can drink moderately, I can see why the benefits outweigh the negatives.

<comment><USER30> Also a non-drinker, and yeah, it really sucks to not drink in the professional American world. Not only does it make me the buzzkill, I honestly hate being around drunk people. Being drunk is really only fun when everyone's doing it together, like the adult version of campfire songs, making it hard to be the odd man out.

<comment><USER31> You really should not use "Drunk" to mean some one that has had one or two drinks - it shows your huge (presumably unconscious bias) from your upbringing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Drugs are fun. But have nothing to do with honest friendships imho.

<comment><USER33> Drugs are very fun but, many times, can lead to a false circle of friendship. Depending on how deep you are, you end up surrounding yourself with super shady people who you would never trust/hang out with normally but the lifestyle keeps you together. Eventually, you believe that your little circle of "friends" are the normal ones and everyone else is screwed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'm going to guess that human tolerance of alcohol has some evolutionary advantage. In addition to being a social lubricant, which seems to be critical to the species, I can imagine it's previous value was that it let us eat not- so-fresh fruit that the other beasties couldn't.

<comment><USER35> Aboriginal Australians did fine despite not really having it, for ~40,000 years or more.

<comment><USER31> If stalling at the late stone age level and then being basically obliterated by colonisation is doing fine.

Not quite sure I buy that

<comment><USER35> Parent comment was about biology and evolution, not... whatever it is that this reply is about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> follow the money - I am sure there would be a sponsorship hook with a large alcohol producer :)

</comment><comment><USER37> If only people bonded as well over tea.

</comment><comment><USER38> Flagging this. As if people did not bond socially before alcohol was invented.

</comment><comment><USER39> Fact: Tech careers attract many sketchy people and many young people. Alcohol is one of the few legal ways to quickly identify and filter out the union of those two sets, many of whom are the most disturbed individuals that have found their way in. Sadly, it doesn't work on those who abstain due to physical incapacity, religion or the truly psychotic. Just keep parroting expressions with an obsolete context like "free as in beer"... or "Alcohol and social bonding in humans" (as opposed to animals?) here on Hacker News..hah

<comment><USER40> I really want to understand what you're saying. Can you try to rephrase?

<comment><USER41> I read that as: alcohol is used to get employees to open up for "post-hiring interview" purposes, to get a better feel for their character. I've had people senior to me pry pretty hard into my own thoughts over alcohol at company events before, so that fits my experience.</comment></comment></comment>


NSA warned to reign in surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/17/nsa-surveillance-house-hearing

<comment><USER2> I thought the problem was that the NSA does reign? USA! USA! USA!</comment>


FCC's Net Neutrality-ISP blocking port 80,25 - <AUTHOR>

"Under the FCC rules, an ISP would not be able to pick and choose apps or service to block in order to improve network performance."<p>I assume that under this law they now have to open port 80, and 25. Hopefully, now I can run my own web server since I am paying $50 a month for service. <comment><AUTHOR> I have filled out an informal complaint and hope everyone else does so that your ISP will finally open these ports again without an abundant fee.</comment>


The Self-Storage Self - Storing all the Stuff we Accumulate - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06self-storage-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

<comment><USER3> I was looking at prices for a small room in Manhattan storage. The price of a room slightly bigger than a double-size mattress is $150/mo, for a pretty central location. YMCA membership for $40/mo for your running water, and bam, an apartment for < $200/mo in Manhattan. Sure, it won't be cozy, but I wonder whether it'd be feasible to have crazy-cheap housing like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you spend the night at the storage place? Are you worried about having the door locked behind you?

<comment><USER4> no, you are not allowed to live in storage units, but in the article many people spent the days there, ran businesses there or watched tv in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Quasi-related: There are some people in my neighborhood in San Francisco who have apparently been parking their junky RVs along the curb for years. Occasionally I'll walk past and they'll have a generator out on the sidewalk charging their batteries. Neighbors have complained, but I guess it must be legal, because they're not going anywhere. Though a really ghetto solution, I've often wondered about the feasibility of bootstrapping in an RV :) Or maybe a sailboat.

<comment><USER6> Unless your sailboat is tied up in a marina, actual sailing will take up too much attention. You can't just leave the radar on to warn of collisions, for example, it takes too much power and CBDR isn't widely available (tho' I suppose you could hack it up if you were running a laptop anyway) so you would need to visually assess every proximity alarm. Even anchored in a secluded bay you have to worry about being T-boned by a novice day skipper...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> On a related note, suppose I share my music collection with my friends (a ka the internet). How will I then know which is my music? Has that problem been solved to a satisfying degree yet? Forgive my ignorance, I am still struggling with iTunes (MP3 collection not yet fully tagged), so I am not sure how it works these days.

<comment><USER7> I take it you don't see the problem then. I thought it is related - <USER2> people pay to keep their record collections and what not around, because it is their identity. So how do you manage your identity, that was my question.</comment></comment>


Expedia Buys Orbitz for $1.6B in Cash - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/12/expedia-buys-orbitz-for-1-6b-in-cash-to-square-up-to-priceline/

<comment><USER2> 3 weeks ago, Expedia acquired Travelocity for $280M.

[http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/expedia-buys- traveloc...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/expedia-buys-travelocity- for-280-million-in-cash/?_r=0)

This Orbitz deal ($1.6B) makes the Travelocity deal ($280M) look cheap.

<comment><USER3> I need to check my sources, but I believe the Travelocity deal excluded much of Travelocity's technology, it was just a brand-name purchase.

Edit, sources:

> Sparks was brought in a couple of years ago to turn around the company, > which needed a wholesale upgrading of its back-end systems in order to make > a go of it, but apparently the transition fell short. [1]

[1] [http://skift.com/2013/08/22/travelocity-gives-in-sites-to- be...](http://skift.com/2013/08/22/travelocity-gives-in-sites-to-be-powered- by-expedia/)

<comment><USER4> Expedia was already powering the Travelocity backend back in 2014 as part of a strategic deal because travelocity had failed to modernize their stack. . The latest acquisition simply bought the brand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All these sites seem to use the exact same backend services, so it's difficult to care. About the only site I use regularly is hotels.com because they have a loyalty scheme (book 10 nights, get 1 free) - and even then I'm sure there's some catch I'm not aware of that makes them the same as everyone else.

<comment><USER6> The catch, in my anecdotal experience, is that third parties have terrible integration with the hotels. In some cases, they fax a reservation using a company credit card, to pay on your behalf. End result is some percent of the time, this gets messed up and you end up dealing with an annoyed person on check in that sometimes ends up having to get the agency on the line to sort it out.

Same for flight bookings. I've never found the attraction of booking through third parties; it only adds a failure point. Maybe small or specialized agencies are the exception, like Amex's travel service (which, I think, used a platform like Expedia's, but they had fantastic phone options and would always go figure stuff out on my behalf.)

<comment><USER7> I agree in many cases, but two cases in which I book through the third-party sites:

1\. For hotels, where the hotel itself doesn't actually have an online-booking system. Not very common in the U.S., but common among smaller hotels in Europe. Often a third party (most often booking.com) is the only way to book these hotels online.

2\. For flights, where Orbitz or Expedia are able to put together a multi- airline itinerary that I can't get those airlines' own sites to return. The last time I used Orbitz was for this reason: it was able to come up with a round-trip ATL-CPH with Delta one way and KLM the other way, with a good price and times that were convenient for me. The fare rules work because they're partner airlines (so it ends up billed as a round-trip, not two one-ways), but I couldn't manage to get either the KLM or Delta websites to offer me that combination, despite quite a bit of fiddling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tis means that hotels in the Us and Europe now effectively have only two partners to consider for distributing their inventory. This means less competiton to drive commissions and prices down. Bad news for the consumer. Good analysis on Skift with more details: [http://skift.com/2015/02/12/its- expedia-against-everyone-els...](http://skift.com/2015/02/12/its-expedia- against-everyone-else-after-orbitz-and-travelocity-deals/)

</comment><comment><USER9> The origins of Expedia

"And Bill said, 'No let's start it inside Microsoft. And if it wants to be free we'll consider it.'"

[http://www.wired.com/2013/06/rich-barton-empowers-people- and...](http://www.wired.com/2013/06/rich-barton-empowers-people-and-picks- fights-very-profitably/)

<comment><USER10> Rich Barton went on to found Zillow. He's cut an impressive path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> According to Forbes, hotels represent 97% of Priceline's revenue with 23% margins. Car rentals and cruises represented 9% margins and airlines at 3% margins.

Assuming Expedia and Orbitz have similar profiles, then this is really a market share fight to capture the largest pool of hotel transactions.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/01/10/bre...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2013/01/10/breaking- down-pricelines-business-and-stock-drivers/)

<comment><USER12> Does anyone know why there's such a huge disparity in these different types? I'd think the revenue would start getting driven down toward the value added, and I can't imagine the value added by a website varies so much between plane tickets, car rentals, and hotel booking.

<comment><USER13> Airlines are already operating on such razor-thin margins that it's not surprising that Priceline can't extract much profit from those deals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I interviewed at a travel company last year. It was interesting because they didn't do any of the backend booking stuff (for flights), but instead seemed to like to direct you to other sites to book and then take a referal cut if you buy. This was a weird business where the person buying the travel was the product (I didn't like it).

Expedia is one of the direct bookers. I use them. The UI is not pretty but functional enough.

<comment><USER15> I think Hipmunk (the site founded by some of the Reddit founders) works like that. It's not unusual though. Here in the UK, things like insurance and utilities are increasingly sold in this way (we call them "price comparison" sites). I believe(?) Shazam also makes most of its money by referrals to iTunes and Amazon.

<comment><USER16> that is how kayak and tripadvisor make most of their money too. Ever notice how photo galleries for hotels on tripadvisor open new windows? they're making sure you have their cookie when you book it on hotels.com, expedia, booking.com, etc later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Surprised there are no anti-trust concerns.

<comment><USER18> In this article from Reuters [0] their CFO stated that they only hold a single digit market share in the travel industry.

"The possibility of antitrust issues was played down by Expedia's Chief Financial Office Mark Okerstrom who said, "It is a $1.3 trillion industry and is highly fragmented ... We are only a small player and our overall share is in single digits.""

[0] [http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/12/us-orbitz- worldwid...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/12/us-orbitz-worldwide-m- a-expedia-idUSKBN0LG1OA20150212)

<comment><USER19> That's a ridiculous argument by their CEO.

That is like saying Microsoft Office only holds a single digit percentage of revenue in the technology sector. It might technically be true, but it is irrelevant. MS Office has a monopolist hold on the office software space.

Monopolies aren't defined by someone who controls an entire sector (a "sector" is arbitrary anyway) it is when one specific company controls one commodity or service (see Google Search, which both the EU and US have called a monopoly).

Expedia absolutely has a monopoly on travel price comparison sites now. However it only becomes an antitrust complaint when they leverage that position into other markets (e.g. like Windows with Internet Explorer, or Google with Google+).

So while I don't think Expedia has broken any laws, yet. I will say that if they started using their newfound position for leverage I'd hope the US and EU governments stepped on them pretty fast.

<comment><USER20> "it is when one specific company controls one commodity or service"

There are plenty of office alternatives, including open office.

Here is a list of 10: [http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/best-microsoft- office...](http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/best-microsoft-office- alternatives/)

Google also has competition: Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu to name a few.

"Expedia absolutely has a monopoly on travel price comparison sites now."

There are many other travel comparison sites. How can they possibly have a monopoly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It seems as though the whole travel industry is excited about the news:

EXPE - 90.45 +15.64% OWW - 11.65 +21.05% PCLN - 1092.83 +3.09% TRIP - 82.03 +21.94%

Worth noting as well that the deal was based upon 115M Orbitz shares @ 12/ each, which makes it a $1.38B. The $1.6B represents the enterprise value.

</comment><comment><USER22> I applied for a Job at Orbitz yesterday and today this news came. Orbitz ratings are pretty solid on Glassdoor and that makes them one of the best companies to work for in the Chicagoland area, hope it remains the same after the merger.

<comment><USER23> I've worked for orbitz for 7 years , good place to work , don't know what the outcome of this acquisition will be tho.

<comment><USER24> This is probably a fair indication of what might happen

[http://www.smh.com.au/business/wotif-boss-and-other-staff- ge...](http://www.smh.com.au/business/wotif-boss-and-other-staff-get-a- permanent-vacation-following-expedia-takeover-20150125-12xrbu.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In all cash deals like this, is there just a bank wire transfer that's made in the purchase amount from one company's account to the other's once everything has been approved and the deal has closed?

<comment><USER26> I can't answer your question directly, but I'm reminded of a story a friend once told. He was a new lawyer at a large firm. He was helping with a large deal and the bank couldn't get a hold of the lawyers listed above him. The bank called him and said "Is this $12.5 million transfer approved?" Do which he said yes, and 1 second later, 12 million dollars was moved from one account to another. So perhaps, with some authorization calls, it is as simple as a wire transfer.

<comment><USER27> My brother once put in a 1M EUR transaction instead of 1M HUF he wanted and it went through without a hitch... even though his account didn't have that sort of money or even anything close to that. That was weird and disconcerting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> i've been using kayak instead for quite a while now. Expedia bought them yet? Nope, looks like Priceline did. Well, it's still a good site last time I checked.

</comment><comment><USER29> Really interesting strategy Expedia has, having these new brands benefit from Expedia's tech stack.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is Orbitz still running lisp code?

</comment><comment><USER31> Anyone know if Orbitz is still built on lisp as pg famously documented so long ago?

<comment><USER32> A lot of job listings here: [https://twitter.com/OrbitzTalent?original_referer=https%3A%2...](https://twitter.com/OrbitzTalent?original_referer=https%3A%2F%2Fcareers.orbitz.com%2F&profile_id=70411733&tw_i=565903637235658752&tw_p=embeddedtimeline&tw_w=405387587155533824)

A quick scan of the software engineering positions did not, however, uncover any Lisp-related jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So they put their money in bags and give it to them?

</comment><comment><USER34> Wait until they buy Homeaway next..

<comment><USER35> Homeaway focuses on vacation rentals and is in a very different market than Expedia and Orbitz.

It's not out of the realm of possibilities, but Expedia and Orbitz are much closer competitors than either would be with Homeaway.

<comment><USER4> Expedia syndicates HomeAway listings on their site now.

<comment><USER34> At Homeaway's most recent national conference it seemed pretty clear that this was the first step in acquisition.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why is american internet so slow? - <AUTHOR> https://psmag.com/why-is-american-internet-so-slow-98f4eeadb371#.qulit1cy7 <comment><USER2> This seems like part of the problem: [http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2016/09/att-comcast-fail-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech- policy/2016/09/att-comcast-fail-in-latest-effort-to-stall-google-fiber-in- nashville/). Good old American telephone and telegraph.</comment>


Why I Like Perl - <AUTHOR> http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/101155.html

<comment><USER2> Good read. Comments are interesting as well. Since I started with Python and then switched to Perl, I guess this means I'll have to learn Haskell now. BTW when I made the switch I noticed immediately that I found Perl far more 'comfortable' then Python. I later came to the conclusion that there was a relationship kind of thing; if you liked/loved 'C' then you would feel the same about Perl. If you liked/loved 'C++' then you would feel the same about Python. Absolutely no evidence beyond the intuitive here just something that came to me...

<comment><USER3> I went from Perl to Python and back again over the span of about ten years (with lots of other languages before and in between). I like them both, but Perl is also more comfortable for me. Ruby maybe even moreso, but I've never done any large projects in Ruby, so I can't say for sure. But I do know that when I write a few lines of Perl, even after ten years, I tend to include a few syntax errors...when I was learning Ruby I was often stunned by how many lines of code I could write between syntax errors. It's probably an order of magnitude higher, and something I've never experienced before. Python, I found to have roughly parity with Perl, which many Pythonistas find shocking. But I agree that there are different types of folks, though I don't know that one can do the comparison with C and C++...maybe C and Java.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Mostly interesting, though some of his assertions are somewhat questionable. Like saying that Perl5 takes its OO style from Python. I'd like to see some citations on that, as I don't find them at all similar (beyond both being object systems in a dynamic language). The JavaScript module pattern (which obviously came later) feels more like Perl 5 objects to me. Likewise for some Lisp and Scheme object systems that make use of innate closure support to build the object system from primitives rather than building it in--Perl objects are effectively hashes with almost no new core language features (bless, and the new special variable @ISA, primarily).</comment>


Are You a 10x Programmer? Or Just a Jerk? - <AUTHOR> http://thenewstack.io/10x-programmer-just-jerk/ <comment><USER2> What I have observed is not 10x programmers. I have seen happy path programmers who ship quickly. Their code works in the specific way management has asked and no more. Step off the happy path, and there be dragons.

To use an analogy, management says "Build me a bridge!" So Mr Happy Path does so. It's a rope bridge. He gets the pat on the back, the promotion, and his bridge is now handed off to a "lesser programmer" to maintain.

Now management comes to the lesser programmer and says, "I _just_ want to drive cars and trucks over the bridge. Can't you make it do that?!" So the lesser programmer now has to build a real bridge that can support 18 wheel trucks. That takes a really really long time to do, and it's hard work. Management can't be bothered to understand the details though. "Why is this bridge taking so long? 10x had the first one done in a week!"

Before long, 10x is called back in on the project to "rescue" it because it's so far behind schedule. He gathers the requirements and again builds exactly what management asks. A bridge that can support cars and trucks. How? Well, screw all this suspension stuff. 10x just dams up the harbor and drives a truck across the top. He's congratulated again, and the bridge/dam is handed back to lesser beings again.

Then management wonders why they can no longer get boats out of the harbor...

Just my experience with it though :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not both?</comment>


How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need? (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/ <comment><USER3>
      >>> len("3.141592653589793") - <USER2>
      16
      >> math.log(2**51) / math.log(10)
      15.35252977886304

The precision of pi used by NASA is suspiciously close the precision limit of IEEE 64-bit floating point integers, a reason which is not given the article :). Interesting nonetheless.

edit: formatting

<comment><USER4> Unrelated: love your handle

<comment><USER3> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


FBI kicks some of the worst 'DDoS for hire' sites off the internet - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/20/fbi-ddos-booter-sites-offline/ <comment><USER2> I watched a documentary on Scientology ages ago about how they were suing the crap out of people for DDoSing their site. The problem was these people were basically just kids, most were ~14 years old, who saw something on 4chan and followed instructions. I believe this was ~2001 [correction: 2008]. One of their lawyers was going with the defence that DDoS was equivalent to a sit-in protest, not unlike those used during the segregation protests in the US in the 1960s, specifically of diners who refused black customers. Sending 200 people into a diner and refusing to move is basically IRL denial of service. Unfortunately I can't remember the exact name of the documentary but this wiki page covers the events [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology). I always wondered how successful that defence was, I havent been able to find a follow-up.

<comment><USER3> The major problem with that defense is that sit-ins aren't legal. There is no general right to occupy private property to make a political point.

You may think that's what was going in the 60s lunch counter sit-ins, but the question there was the legality of racial discrimination in privately owned restaurants. The court never ruled on the exact issue, made moot by the Civil Rights Act. But there was never any suggestion that sitting-in somewhere _where you had no right to be_ was legal.

<comment><USER4> Speaking as someone who wasn't alive during the 60s:

I thought the objective of a sit-in was to gain service (not obstruct it)? My understanding is that people of color were not served when they were very willing to pay for and make use of it.

<comment><USER5> The objective of sit-ins was to protest, not to buy lunch. If you wanted lunch, you'd go to a place that would serve you and the status quo would be maintained. It's immaterial whether people participating in sit-ins had money or planned to eat.

You might say that the long term objective of sit-ins was to gain service, but only inasmuch as "gaining service" fell under the umbrella of "equal rights".

Finally, as a possibly unwelcome aside, I find it somewhat irritating to see civil rights protestors referred to as "people of color". The Civil Rights Movement was about acknowleging shared humanity, not dividing people into groups based on privilege. Also, Americans, dark-skinned and otherwise, participated in these movements. Many sit-ins involved large groups of white people sitting down with at least one black person, so _all of them_ would be refused service. The Civil Rights Movement of the 60s sought allies regardless of race, which is perhaps why it was so successful.

<comment><USER6> > The Civil Rights Movement was about acknowleging shared humanity, not > dividing people into groups based on privilege. The Civil Rights Movement of > the 60s sought allies regardless of race, which is perhaps why it was so > successful.

This is rather revisionist.

The term "privilege" in its contemporary usage hadn't been coined then, but if you go back to the writings of early civil rights leaders, it's pretty clear that the purpose was _not_ about "acknowledging shared humanity". It was specifically about liberation of Black people, and the fight to secure equal rights for Black people. It was _not_ uniformly welcoming to "allies" of other races, and in fact, many of its most successful leaders were skeptical at best of support from people who weren't black.

We've since whitewashed the legacy of its most famous leaders, such as Martin Luther King Jr., but even he was a lot less interested in "shared humanity" and non-black "allies". Yes, if you go by popular representation of him today, that's the impression you'll get of him, but as often is the case, the primary sources tell a very different story.

The statement "the Civil Rights Movement sought allies regardless of race, which is perhaps why it was so successful" is only correct if you are referring to the Civil Rights Movement as a retroactive construct: the way that contemporary society has essentially retconned the history of the real civil rights movement. Yes, _that_ depiction of it has been very successful, because that depiction is more palatable and appealing to people who aren't black (specifically: less threatening to white people), and that's why we think of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a milquetoast nonviolent preacher who gave speeches but didn't really step on anyone's toes, instead of the revolutionary, armed radical man that he really was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did the FBI add the santa hats? Because that's pretty savage if they did.

<comment><USER8> No I thing arstechnica did that...

<comment><USER9> Yes if you go to the sites via the links to the domains in the article they don't have the santa hats. I had to check for myself.

<comment><USER10> Aww yeah ok this is more realistic :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I won't shed a tear for DDoS services, but I seriously doubt this will have any relevant impact.

These DDoS services exist because we have an Internet full of devices that you can trivially take over by logging into them with admin/admin or other default credentials you can find in public lists. As long as these exist there will be people abusing them.

If you want to do something about DDoS the thing that needs to happen is that the number of trivially vulnerable devices needs to be reduced. That likely means thinking about device security regulations and minimum security requirements, probably also vendor liability.

</comment><comment><USER12> All seriousness aside, the "domain seizure" actually made me laugh. I guess there was deliberately a bit of humor it. Random hex numbers scattered all around, glassy blue, and a massive red "THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED," feel at least a little tongue-in-cheek.

</comment><comment><USER13> Hadn't heard them called "stressers" before. Is that for sites that were pretending they were for stress-testing your own site, not DDoSing someone else's? Glad it didn't work out for them.

<comment><USER14> Yep, especially on the more "public" forums like HF.

The same approach is used with malware crypters or RATs (remote administration tools, heh).

<comment><USER15> I take it then that there are legitimate sites that do offer this service but properly verify owners first?

<comment><USER16> Yes. I used Blitz.io a couple of times; they'd require you to put either a DNS entry in place or upload a file to a specific location in the domain's root.

<comment><USER17> That doesn't really prevent anyone from attacking a hosting service like GitHub Pages or Netlify, though.

<comment><USER18> The idea is that the stress testing site dictates where the file must go, not the user. So for them to run the test, they may need to see a specific file at "subjectsite.com/secretguid"

The idea being that unless you have total domain control, you can't get that file where they want you to put it.

<comment><USER17> If you use a custom domain with those services you can still place a file anywhere you want.

<comment><USER19> Sure, but now GitHub can see what domain all the DDoS traffic went through, see who paid for it, and now you've practically giftwrapped a confession.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> They just seized the marketing sites domain names? How is this a victory? If the people running these sites are still able to continue their operations then they'll just get a new domain name and host a new signup page. The only thing they might have lost is some brand recognition.

</comment><comment><USER21> Wonder if they managed to get their hardware or a list of compromised machines they use for their attacks.

Maybe let some people know their router is f'd.

</comment><comment><USER22> Sure, some particular DDoS campaigns can be seen as a sit-in protest and personally I'm not personal objective or supportive to these campaigns, but under the current architecture of the Internet and World Wide Web, DDoS cannot be prevented, and as a vulnerability, it not only enables "sit-in protest", but essentially enables a mechanism of censorship, especially after the rise of these "DDoS as a service" vendors, they are effectively a "Censorship on Demand" service. Any self-published speech on a personal webserver now can be kicked out of the Internet by anyone. For example, during the Hong Kong Occupy Central protest in 2014, some news websites experienced a government-sponsored 500 Gbps DDoS attack. The recent example was Krebs On Security blog, which has been a target for blackhat groups and hit by a 1 Tbps attack.

The World Wide Web was supposed to be a (to some extent) permissionless publishing platform, that means if you are already connected to the Internet via a commercial ISP, as long as the content is legal and the law of your jurisdiction protects the freedom of speech, you don't need anyone's particular approval to run a HTTP server. But now under the threats of DDoS attack, no independent webserver can survive, the only solution is utilizing a centralized CDN / reverse-proxy, and accepts EULA of their choice and theoretically they can modify and censor your traffic arbitrarily. I think decentralized systems such as ZeroNet or IPFS may be a solution, and I hope they can be integrated into a web browser one day.

</comment><comment><USER23> 'DDoS for hire' == Aaas == Assholes as a Service

<comment> mickael-kerjean Not necessarily, a DDoS for hire is of great way to test things before deployment

<comment><USER24> This is exactly how they're marketed - they're not DDoS services, they're "stress testing" services you can use to make sure your server can withstand a real DDoS. Obviously nobody (including the FBI) believes that.

<comment><USER25> Professional load testing tools usually require you to proof ownership of the server

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Any idea what percentage of all (at least the biggest ones) were taken down? '15 high-profile [...] websites' could be most of the high-profile ones or just 10%. Sadly, few articles put things into perspective.

<comment><USER27> I'd be more wary of the low-profile sites. Those will be more difficult to take down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> FBI domain takeovers is abuse of power, pure and simple.

<comment><USER29> The government has long been able to seize property used in a crime. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_Unit...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER28> why would you apply us law to global top level domain extensions?

<comment><USER30> Because the US created and still largely controls the internet, in practice if not in ideology. Also we have the largest military and law enforcement reach on the planet.

<comment><USER31> > Also we have the largest military and law enforcement reach on the planet.

I think the modern equivalent of gunboat diplomacy fit the term abuse of power rather well, wouldnt you agree?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can't they just move them?

<comment><USER33> They can, but whatever existing links or organic rankings they had are now gone.

<comment><USER27> And now copycats will probably release their own site claming they are the same guys. This happens with torrent sites whenever they get taken down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This site is still up.

</comment><comment><USER35> The US is such a weird country. They probably have the best free speech protection in the world, for which I admire them, but then they do this kind of stuff. They sometimes are an example in freedom and sometimes they're the complete opposite.

<comment><USER36> Maybe we "do this kind of stuff" specifically _because_ we value free speech. DDoS perpetrators restrict the online speech of their victims. There is nothing inconsistent about America's First Amendment protections and the FBI's actions here.</comment></comment>


The Kubernetes Effect - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/articles/kubernetes-effect <comment><USER3> I'll stand by my assertion that for 99% of users (maybe even 99.99%), Kubernetes offers entirely the wrong abstraction. They don't want to run a container, they want to run an application (Node, Go, Ruby, Python, Java, whatever). The prevailing mythology is you should "containerize" everything and give it to a container orchestrator to run, but why? They had one problem, "Run an app". Now they have two, "Run a container that runs an app" _and_ "maintain a container". Just give the app to a PAAS, and go home early.

Most startups - most large companies - would be far better served with a real PAAS, rather than container orchestration. My encounters with container orchestrators is that ops teams spent inordinate amounts of time trying to bend them _into_ a PAAS, rather than just starting with one. This is why I don't understand why this article lumps, e.g. Cloud Foundry in with K8S - <USER2> solve entirely different problems. My advice to almost every startup I speak to is "Just use Heroku; solve your business problems first".

The article also mentions it enables "new set of distributed primitives and runtime for creating distributed systems that spread across multiple processes and nodes". I'll throw out my other assertion, which I always though was axiomatic - you want your system to be the _least_ distributed you can make it at all times. Distributed systems are harder to reason about, harder to write, and harder to maintain. They fail in strange ways, and are so hard to get right, I'd bet I can find a hidden problem in yours within an hour of starting code review. Most teams running a non-trivial distributed system are coasting on luck rather than skill. This is not a reflection on them - just an inherent problem with building distributed logic.

Computers are fast, and you are not Google. I've helped run multiple thousand TPS using Cloudfoundry, driving one of Europe's biggest retailers using just a few services. I'm now helping a startup unpick it's 18 "service" containerised system back to something that can actually be maintained.

TLDR; containers as production app deployment artefacts have, in the medium and long term, caused more problems than they've solved for almost every case I've seen.

<comment><USER4> I tend to agree with you and it's one of the biggest reasons that I'm a fan of Elixir.

Here's the path that leads to K8s too early.

1\. We think we need microservices

2\. Look how much it will cost of we run ALL OF THESE microservices on Heroku

3\. We should run it ourselves, let's use K8s

One of the big "Elixir" perks is that it bypasses this conversation and lets you run a collection of small applications under a single monolith within the same runtime...efficiently. So you can built smaller services...like a monolith...with separate dependency trees...without needing to run a cluster of multiple nodes...and still just deploy to Heroku (or Gigalixir).

Removes a lot of over-architectural hand-wringing so you can focus on getting your business problem out the door but will still allow you to separate things early enough that you don't have to worry about long term code-entanglement. And when you "need" to scale, clustering is already built in without needing to create API frontends for each application.

It solves a combination of so many short term and long term issues at the same time.

<comment><USER5> 100% agreed. A lot of the cloud computing products are simply re- implementations of what was created in the Erlang/BEAM platform, but more mainstream languages. IMO it's cheaper to invest in learning Erlang or Elixir than investing in AWS/K8s/etc.

Elixir and Erlang are basically a DSL for building distributed systems. It doesn't remove all of the complications of that task, but gives you excellent, battle tested, and non-proprietary tools to solve them.

<comment><USER6> And JEE :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> <rant>

And yet finding people who can reliably install K8s from scratch, who understand what's going on under the hood, remains remarkably close to 0.

How many people can, within a few hours, tell you how Kubernetes runs DNS, and how it routes packets between containers by default? How do you run an integrated DNS which uses, say, my_service.service.my_namespace instead of my_service.my_namespace?

I've found that most installs of k8s have been made using defaults, using tooling that Google has provided. We hired one such administrator, but when asked anything outside of how to run kubectl, they just shrugged and said "it never came up".

The codebase is vast, complicated, and there are few experts who live outside of Google. And it's getting more vast, more complicated on a quarterly basis.

It bothers me how far operations has gone from "providing reliable systems on which we run software" to "offload work onto the developer at any cost".

</rant>

I realize that a lot of this is because of scarcity. The good devops folks (i.e. those who are both competent generalist sysadmins and competent generalist programmers) are few and expensive. That makes pre-packaged "full stack" solutions like GAE, Kubernetes, and Fargate very appealing to leadership.

"You don't need an operations department to act as a huge drain on your revenue, just re-use your developers" holds a lot of appeal for those high up in the food chain. It's even initially appealing to developers! But in the end, it makes as much sense as re-using your developers to do customer service.

<comment><USER8> My question is this. Why does the container world use NAT.. ( 3 layers to get out of container to base host in k8s ) ... and not use routing ?

Is it just the container devs dont know routing ?

<comment><USER9> Kubernetes is the opposite. NAT is explicitly not required:

[https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster- administration/n...](https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/cluster- administration/networking/#kubernetes-model)

E.g. on AWS you might have all of a node's pod IPs on a bridge interface, then you talk to pods on other nodes thanks to VPC route table entries that the AWS cloud provider manages. NAT happens only when talking to the outside world or for traffic to Amazon DNS servers, which don't like source IP addresses other than those from the subnet they live in.

<comment><USER7> My memory is a touch fuzzy, but to route traffic out of a container in AWS, you have to either NAT thorough the instances network adapter, or attach an ENI to the container. However, you only get one ENI per vCPU in a VM (at least until Amazon finishes its custom NICs). What I'm really fuzzy on is whether the instance itself consumes one of those allocated ENIs.

That is, if you're running off a m4.2xLarge instance, you get a maximum of 8 ENIs - 8 containers if you want to use only VPC routing. For some services, this may be OK, but for many others (most?), it's far too few.

<comment><USER9> What's the destination? If it's the outside world, yes, you need NAT for state tracking and address rewriting, since the rest of the AWS infrastructure knows nothing about the pod CIDR (I guess you could set up a subnet for it and run a GW there).

For pod to pod, if you're OK with the limitations of 50 routes per VPC route table (you can open a ticket to bump that to 100, at the cost of some unspecified performance penalty), then you don't need NAT.

Otherwise, you can use something like Lyft's plugin, which does roughly what you describe. On a m4.2xlarge you only get 4 ENIs, but each of them can have 15 IPv4 and 15 IPv6 addresses, which the plugin manages. They assign the default ENI to the control plane (Kubelet and DaemonSets), so you should get 45 pods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A consequence of the "Kubernetes Effect" is that while distributed systems are easy to build and use, a lot of developers lose sight of the fundamental problems which make distributed systems difficult.

For example, the sidecar in a sidecar pattern might fail while the application is running and the system can get stuck in weird states. The developer still needs to understand fundamentally how the system works.

Eschewing deeper knowledge just because it is easy to use is trap in this case. While the article compares Kubernetes to JVM, Kubernetes can fail in a lot more hard to debug ways than the JVM right now. I don't know if this semantic gap between distributed systems like Kubernetes and monolithic systems like JVM can ever be bridged.

<comment><USER11> > A consequence of the "Kubernetes Effect" is that while distributed systems > are easy to build and use, a lot of developers lose sight of the fundamental > problems which make distributed systems difficult.

I would extend this to cloud as well. The more prevalent cloud becomes, the more ignorant developers become. It's like: I have Mathematica license, who cares how to calculate function derivative?

<comment><USER12> More generally, society's achievement currently rely on a workforce that gets more and more specialized.

We are bound to fragment every sector into sub-niche where specialists in functions, general programming and infrastructure resources cooperate on their boundaries without being able to quite understand what the others are doing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Kubernetes by itself may be daunting for most teams.

But I'm not sure I understand the backlash. Once you've built your application and it's been packaged (containerized) and deployed why would anyone care how its run. Also running a container in production and orchestration seem to be conflated somewhat in this thread and the use cases are very different.

You can think of Kubernetes as an Automated SysAdmin . This is a bit reductive I know but it is useful to think of this way. You ask the sysadmin to run something for you and they tell you how to package it (tgz, war, zip etc) and they run it for you on hardware.

The level of engagement that a dev has with getting his app running on hardware is no different to that of dealing with a sysadmin and with the admin requesting that your app is packagedin a container.

Kubernetes out of the box will give you most of this functionality as long as you keep state outside of the cluster. There are also options on how to make the experience smoother. There also these tools to help too:

* Openshift * Kubernetes + Rancher * Mesos

If you need orchestration and scheduling. I am a little perplexed.

</comment><comment><USER14> Any one have opinions on the Kubernetes admin cert linked? Wonder if it would significantly help in getting work and skipping the interview BS?

[https://www.cncf.io/certification/expert/](https://www.cncf.io/certification/expert/)

<comment><USER15> I've been working with kubernetes since 2015 and running production workloads on GKE since 2016. Since you asked for opinions, mine is that the certs don't matter very much. CNCF plays them up, and they will probably have some impact in larger orgs as enterprises get on the train, but in the open source community from which most of the kubernetes momentum emanates there has never really been a ton of respect for formal certification programs, and this doesn't feel any different to me.

<comment><USER16> Just wanted to chime in to generally second this opinion, but with one exeception as it relates to hiring.

While I don't think having a cert would help you get hired necessarily, it would probably influence a decision to get an interview. What really matters is if you know how to do real-world operational tasks with the knowledge, which will show up if your technical interviewers know k8s. If you are the first person they are hiring at the company to begin their k8s project, then you might have a real advantage with a cert.

Personally, I've never been one to give undue respect to many of the certs on the basis of having them alone, but it can depend on where you interview. Some places love certs.

<comment><USER14> Yep, I suspected as much. Was just jealous of some nurses I know where their job interviews consist of:

Is your license up to date? Are you an ax-murderer? Can you start Monday?

<comment><USER15> My wife has been a nurse for 12 years and there's some truth to that, but "license" in their case goes way beyond kubernetes certification :). It's like if someone hands you an up-to-date pilot's license and log book you know they can fly proficiently. We don't have that in software, as far as I know, so that automatic respect for the document isn't there.

<comment><USER16> Yes, and you also don't have nurses having to train for different "flavors" of humans (I'm speaking in a general practice sort of way, of course there are speciality nurses). If you know how to draw blood, you don't have to learn a whole new system based on the type of hypodermic needle you use. In the Kubernetes world, you'd need to know how to use AWS, GKE, your own custom stack, etc, in addition to knowing how to draw blood on this particular version of this flavor of human.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hablog – High-availability, distributed, lightweight, static site with comments - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zorinaq.com/release-of-hablog-and-new-design/? <comment><USER2> How do you take a server out of rotation if one goes down? For example, if I hit a server in the round robin that isn't online, I could try force-refresh the page to initiate a new lookup but in that case 1 in every 3 requests to the site would still fail (assuming only one server is down, and hoping my client doesn't decide to cache the initial resolution?). In your post you mentioned a browser can handle this transparently - did you mean that if the client can see that the domain has multiple A records and the initial connection fails on one of the IPs, it will automatically try to establish a connection on the next IP in the round robin if the first connection times out, is that correct? Is this a browser standard or is this behaviour handled differently between different browsers?

Either way interesting project, thanks for sharing.

EDIT: Also it'd be cool if the code wasn't in a tarball. I'm on a mobile device (as I'm sure many of your users are too) that doesn't allow me to save/extract the archive. Would've liked to have had a browse through it! Maybe consider uploading to a service like GitHub, or having an extracted version available so we can view the contents directly in a browser? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have to do anything to take a server out of rotation. Browsers automatically try all IPs, and then stick with the first IP they find that works. Even if some servers are down, your HTTP requests continue to all work. This is a standard browser behavior. For a really extensive outage (2+ days), I would probably bother to manually update the DNS records.

Thanks for the feeback about making the code browsable. Will consider.

<comment><USER3> That's only true if origin doesn't respond at all. If one of your IPs accepts connections and hangs, then the browser will display an error.

<comment><AUTHOR> The browser would time out after a few minutes. However if the user stops loading the page and hits Reload, the browser will try another IP and the page will load successfully. I verified this behavior with Chrome. For a personal blog, that's definitely "good enough" HA.

<comment><USER4> If a webpage I view hangs on loading, I'm going to bounce and not come back. Because it's just a blog makes me less inclined to wait it out.

<comment><USER3> When you think back on it, this was the true genius behind RSS aggregators. I could still read your blog when your blog was not working, because Google Reader (or your favorite aggregator) had already downloaded it once. It's too bad that RSS died.

<comment><USER4> Yes! Absolutely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just use hugo for site generation, isso for self hosted comments, rsync for dumping files on the server and postcss for all the styling. All the scripts are in a package.json so I can download and run everything with an npm run build-init. I don't think most people's personal blogs need to worry about high availability, multiple servers and the complexity that goes along with it, but I'm sure some do. I simply don't have that traffic.

The orange line is neat, I opted for a css avatar replace as isso tags the generated avatars with an id I can grab. The two columns I'd have to get used to, maybe I'm just easily distracted.

Thanks for posting this.

</comment><comment><USER6> The HA part looks pretty cool!

I'm not a big fan of the design though. I find the visual hierarchy of the layout a bit confusing:

\- There isn't enough whitespace around the content, making it feel cramped

\- Scrolling isn't a bad thing. I usually find a top-down flow (from title to content) easier to navigate than reading down from the title to the byline and date, then back up for the content

\- Comments and comment form below the content makes sense since people usually like to read and post comments after they've read the blog post. Having them at the top forces users to scroll up again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I will act on this feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> After the DNS resolves the IP will be cached by the client for hours. So if any server goes down the blog goes down with it for those users. If you can't reboot any server without causing downtime I don't think it can be called high availability.

Taking a simple jackyl blog on a single instance and adding cloudflare would work much more reliably, and it doesn't require all sorts of rsync tricks.

<comment><AUTHOR> _" After the DNS resolves the IP will be cached by the client for hours"_

Not true because my TTL is low (5 min). Chrome will even try another IP within tens of seconds if the initial IP becomes unresponsive. I tested this on Linux. That said I recognize this is not a production-quality mechanism to implement HA (large sites or CDN providers use anycast, load balancers, etc.) But for a personal blog, this is perfectly fine :)

<comment><USER7> In my experience TTL isn't respected at all. Clients will cache IP addresses no matter what.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tested this pretty extensively. When I switched IPs, 99.9% of the HTTP traffic hit the new servers within the TTL time (5min). The only residual traffic hitting the old IPs I saw was from poorly configured bots & webspiders who probably don't re-resolve hostnames frequently enough.

I remember also reading a post from Amazon EC2 Route 53 engineers who investigated DNS propagation times across large-scale tests in the world, and my observations aligned with theirs. They concluded the "DNS doesn't propagate according to TTL" story is mostly a myth (modulo rare issues here and there).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> From the deterministic comment IDs section it seems like the design allows a commenter to repeatedly update the timestamp of a comment they authored, which might be amusing:-

\- Remember the "seed" value and submit a comment

\- Wait for a reply to the comment and then submit the same comment again with the same seed

\- Now one's comment appears later than its reply!

<comment><AUTHOR> Very good thinking!... but not possible. watch-db only takes into account the first timestamp (see "del c['edited']").

<comment><USER8> ah yes, I see it. well done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great read and serving 2500 hits/sec for $15 is awesome! Even better: in Digital Ocean you could have a snapshot of your server and if needed deploy another node in minutes.

Off-topic: how does rebuilding the blog's menu/index works with Jeckyll? Say you add one entry under home/foo/bar and you have hundreds of pages. Will it actually re-create hundreds of html pages to update the navigation? Or does it use some sort of HTML include/JS magic?

<comment><USER10> > serving 2500 hits/sec for $15 is awesome

That's peak...I doubt he'd still be paying $15/mo if he was sustaining that kind of traffic. Even as lean as his site is (looks like it's a bit over a kilobyte being served from his domain...wow!), 2.5 MB/sec is around 6.5 TB/mo, which would cost another ~$100/mo from DO.

However unless you have some desire to roll your own setup and maintain/admin the servers, I just don't see the rationale for hosting your own statically- generated site. GH Pages is free. And if you need more than what it offers, Netlify's $7.50/mo plan will be fine for more than 90% of these kinds of blogs and has many advantages...no servers to maintain or worry about going down, use of Akamai's network for faster content delivery, and automatic site builds from source code. And all for less than a 2-server hosted setup. And there's also Surge, Forge and a few other competitors in that space, so it's not like you'd get locked into a single vendor.

<comment><AUTHOR> The main rationale for hosting my own site is that I do not want to depend on a single provider, ever. Using GH, or Akamai, or Cloudflare, etc means putting all your eggs in one basket. And outages do happen at these companies.

I argue that the statistical chances that 3 outages occur at the same moment at my 3 different providers on 3 different continents is less than the chance of a single outage at a single CDN. Not because of technical reasons, after all they are extremely redundant, but because of process reasons: they are a single company with company-wide processes and sometimes human errors happen causing company-wide outages.

I do realize it sounds silly to be obsessed as I am with redundancy :) but I love exploring these sorts of ideas to see how well they work in practice.

<comment><USER10> > I argue that the statistical chances that 3 outages occur at the same moment > at my 3 different providers on 3 different continents is less than the > chance of a single outage at a single CDN.

I'm not sure I'd agree with that. You're probably running a pretty similar software stack on each box, so there's a chance that a software update could take down all three or a vulnerability could put all three at risk. I also have a hard time believing that any one cloud virtual server has many 9s uptime, so 3 together isn't likely to get you to Akamai's level.

But I prefer to rely on the large players simply because there's advantages to staying with the herd. If Akamai has an outage, much of the internet will be down. People will see that your site is down and attribute it to a larger problem. If your 3 boxes have a problem or your DNS provider has a problem, the fact that your site is down will be more apparent to users.

Also, uptime is not just a function of the percentage chance of an outage. The time to recovery also matters. What kind of monitoring do you have in place? How long are your outages likely to last vs those of a large player? If it take you 24 hours to recognize a failed server, then the chances of all 3 failing in a 24 hour period are probably a lot higher than a big player having an outage.

There's a lot that goes into high availability that you just don't get by putting your eggs in three small baskets.

<comment><AUTHOR> _" I also have a hard time believing that any one cloud virtual server has many 9s uptime, so 3 together isn't likely to get you to Akamai's level."_

Actually even if the servers are only 98% available (7 days of downtime per year!) then they provide 99.9992% availability, aka "five 9s": 1-((1-.98)^3) = 0.999992

Of course this statistical result assumes downtimes are random and uncorrelated. As you say the risks is that a common bug or vulnerability affects all 3 of them at the same time. Hopefully this risk is mitigated because my software stack is _extremely_ simple (a web server serving static files + ~400 lines of Python code) and I will not be performing software updates on all 3 servers at the same time.

 _" or your DNS provider has a problem"_

I do not use a provider, but run 3 parallel authoritative DNS servers on these 3 servers :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Looks great at 1230px wide, but 1231 is too cramped. I don't want to write a new comment before reading the article, and then there's a big blank space that takes up 40% of my viewport when the article continues past the comments.

I'd suggest rethinking that breakpoint or doing away with it altogether; centering may feel like a waste of space, but it makes for comfortable reading and your large images can still take up the full width.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't have more than 80-90 characters per line: [http://baymard.com/blog/line-length- readability](http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability) So 40% of your viewport has to be either margins or comments.

Perhaps it would look less strange if I swapped the order of the 2 columns?

PS: I increased the margins around there orange line to make it look less cramped.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, I meant specifically that the 40% is all on the left and the text is all on the right.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. Maybe I'll shift the 2 columns against the left edge of the viewport.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for sharing your setup with us, I found this very interesting. Great read and your new blog looks _great_!</comment>


2011 is year of the Server-Side JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://labnotes.org/2010/12/29/2011-is-year-of-the-server-side-javascript/ <comment><USER2> You didn't mention the biggest benefit of server-side javascript -- you get Javascript on client, server, and database. You can pass JSON objects from client to server using Socket.IO and then just save them in MongoDB with ease. You can reuse code between client and server. It's simply fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah, I remember server-side javascript the first time it came around. I seem to remember that it was available as part of Netscape's webserver. I was using it in an electronic publishing project in 1999.

I dare say that the new incarnation is considerably different ... or at least, I hope so.

</comment><comment><USER4> Judging from the general instability of node.js and company, I say, it's not.</comment>