Why we don't sell ads (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads <comment><USER2> _when advertising is involved you the user are the product_

How about: If you're work at a startup where the business model is 'get acquired,' _you_ are the product.

Incidentally, I don't really agree with either of these statements, at least not in their strong forms. The problem with advertising is usually bad advertising. Ads (especially online ads) are usually annoying in inverse proportion to their value. Spam is on the low value & annoying end of the spectrum. 90% of annoyance probably comes from 10% of the value. Regarding privacy, advertising is just the most visible part of something wider and the hidden part of this iceberg is the most worrying.

Anyway, that's besides the point. This "old" blog hints at something sort of hypocritical or schizophrenic about startup culture. On one hand its hackery and lone wolfish and disruptively anti establishment. We can beat you from our basement in our sandals. Hang your cubicles. We don't need bosses or talks from HR departments. We don't need to communicate in corporate speak. There's a hard to deny anti corporate drone streak.

On the other hand, the investment and incentive to found startups is based around the ability to get big fast. Huge. Very fast. Multi billion dollar acquisitions and IPOs in 5-10 years.

Huge means "corporate." Either the startup becomes a huge corporation or their product is put in the hand a big corporation. The real people feel o company where cute memes sound like 'don't be evil' start to sound like _" for your convenience…"_

I don't have any normative message.

<comment><USER3> You're missing one more part of the issue with advertising: brainwashing. In some ways, I'd rather have a silly, mismatched and ugly ad than an ad that's actually effective at altering my behavior. Pretty much the only situation when I want to see an ad is when I'm looking for a specific product, and there always used to be venues that were very effective at that (specialist press, classifieds, or popular streets where restaurants have their windows). Pretty much anywhere else ads are unwelcome, even if they manage to be "nice", and effectively constitute selling chunks of my brain to get access to Facebook.

And, for the other point, the "tiny, innovative, disruptive startup" is something I've never bought. At best, it's outsourcing the R&D risk, with very few exceptions. So much innovation happens either in academia, or in terrible, huge corporations like Boeing or Stadler.

<comment><USER4> I'd like to add something to this: we like to believe that we are immune to advertising, but we aren't. No matter how much self control and self awareness we may think we have.

The consequences may not be as grave as they look at first sight, but it's still a very uncomfortable truth. Recognizing my own vulnerability to ads is one of the many reasons why I block advertising.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Remember the internet back when ads were just something you ran across on cheesy low-quality (or porn) sites?

[http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/09/16/the-web- in-1996-1997/](http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/09/16/the-web-in-1996-1997/)

[http://allthingsd.com/20090720/yahoo-home-pages-over-the- las...](http://allthingsd.com/20090720/yahoo-home-pages-over-the- last-15-years-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-really-ugly/)

[http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/time-10-big-websites- looked-15-...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/time-10-big-websites- looked-15-years/)

<comment> mkr-hn That's because low quality sites were the only ones that would run the kind of ads we had back then. Then someone built an ad blocker and forced the industry to rethink its approach.

<comment><USER6> I think you've got your chronology off. Ad blocking was a _response_ to widespread advertising on web sites, not vice versa!

Ad blocking software has only become common in the last five years or so, as web browsers with "extension" support have become widespread. It was very rare before that.

<comment><USER7> This really isn't so. Ad blocking goes back much further. Here's Ad Muncher v4.7 from 2006: [http://ad-muncher.en.softonic.com/](http://ad- muncher.en.softonic.com/) We were blocking ads back in the 1900s.

<comment><USER6> Internet display advertising dates back to the early 1990s (the first clickable banner ad was in 1993). I can't find any exact information on when ad blockers became widely available, but I suspect it wasn't until at least 2000 or so. I certainly don't remember them being a thing before then.

Most of the early banner ads that have been documented were run by generally reputable advertisers (and on reputable sites), not on the "low quality sites" you're implying. There weren't even very many such sites back in 1993; the Web was a _very small_ place back then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. – Tyler Durden, Fight Club

That's an awesome quote. Personalized ads (retargeting etc are even worse). I didn't realize this before I worked for an ad network. Once I understood how retargeting works (and also after implementing a humble feature), I realized how unethical it is to constantly tempt the user to buy something he or she can not afford or even if she can afford it, the money she could have put to better use by saving. I resigned from that company after a short stint even though it had a great work culture, great team etc. But had they offered me some crazy stock options, may be I wouldn't have had the moral courage to quit, with an underwater mortgage and financial insecurity.

</comment><comment><USER9> Most people's morals and ethics, however "religious" and staunch they sound, is up for sale. It's just a matter of finding the right price (as long as what you want from them is not illegal).

I am yet to meet someone whose morals are not for sale. I only know figures like Gandhi but I never got a chance to meet them (and some books told me they were flexible when it came to themselves - re: his wife's medical treatment).

<comment><USER10> I can find lot of names but I am lazy and one is enough to prove you wrong [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_More](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_More)

<comment><USER11> Your parent literally said "most people," i.e. one example is not enough.

And I have to agree. There's a reason the idiom "every man has his price" exists. Certainly, if a large company offered me billions of dollars for a small business of my own, there are relatively few scenarios I can imagine where I'd turn it down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The more I think about the acquisition the more I wished WhatsApp would've stayed on their own. $500 million a year is great. I wish they would've pulled a Craigslist and become more of a cultural institution than another acquisition; focus more on making chat amazing.

I feel like that would've had a larger, net positive effect on the public consciousness. People would see WhatsApp doing it for what's right(don't be evil) then what's profitable and I think that's just a good sentiment to have out there in the aether.

They could've easily, easily taken on the Google/Facebook conglomerate.

<comment><USER13> > _" I wish they would've pulled a Craigslist..."_

EBay owns around 25% of Craigslist.

<comment><USER12> Then I wish they would've pulled a VSCOcam or something similar. Albeit they're not a cultural institution yet, they seem to be headed in that direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Man, I would put whatever the fuck people wanted on my site if it meant my family and the generations after could live comfortably. That's why I try not to make statements like that.

<comment><USER15> Even if statements like that _help_ getting your family and generations after to live comfortably?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you are a vegetarian and you are told to go to a butcher to buy meat, you shouldn't do it out of principle.

When you are WhatsApp and you are against advertising - referencing a quote with great aversion towards it - you shouldn't accept billions from a company who is build on the single premise of advertising.

They have lost all my trust.

<comment><USER17> "you shouldn't accept billions from a company who is build on the single premise of advertising."

Facebook wasn't built as a way to earn revenue from ads , it was a way for them to monetize on something they built , albeit -- not appealing to the endusers , however it keeps you connected to people in your social circle . Imagine life without the googles and face books of our time

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The whole WhatsApp acquisition touches on some of the same personal nerves that Google's acquisition of EtherPad did. It was a really great product that I used daily. At the time Google had big plans for their Wave product, and the entire deal seemed to make sense. Fast forward a few months and Wave is a dud and EtherPad is no more.

I'm not saying that WhatsApp won't be useful to Facebook, but I do think that the philosophy and goal of the two companies are very different. Ads is one potential "technology" that could monetise the product and it's obviously against the founders' philosophy. There will however probably be many other (more subtle) influences from Facebook's side that'll slowly shift it away from the original vision - and promises to users. That's life I guess: take the cash or keep you vision.

<comment><USER19> Etherpad is now an open source product. In fact, it is still being developed, and is currently being rewritten in JavaScript to run on Node.

Wave as a product no longer exists, however a lot of the technology that Google used has been merged into other products such as Google docs.

<comment><USER20> The project lost a lot of momentum after Google acquired the developers working on Etherpad. I think the original codebase got forked as the Etherpad Lite project that is still being developed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> While I strongly support any business model that tries to escape from the typical ads monetisation strategy, we can see (two years after this post was published) that not relying on ads has not been the best long-term strategy for WhatsApp for two reasons: 1\. They didn't manage to stay independent and had to sell to Facebook. I always thought that they had a very good chance to expand their product and built a platform that could truly challenge Facebook, Twitter, etc. 2\. Now that they have been acquired by Facebook, we know that it is only a matter of time before an ad product is introduced into the service.

<comment><USER22> They didn't have to sell to FB they chose to. They had a history of flipping to paid versions of the app to cover costs and reduce growth. Their actual competitors were carriers who charge exorbitant SMS fees internationally. At ~500M users their plan to simply charge $1/yr would have covered their costs.

<comment><USER21> I don't see it that way. After selling to FB it became clear that hey intended to launch VoIP. If they actually wanted to launch a high-quality product, better voice service than the one offered by carriers (and therefore much better than what Viber has to offer), they would probably have struggled to do it without the help of FB. Every carrier on earth would be against them.

<comment><USER21> A carrier would give a lot more thought to disrupting a competitive voice service provided by FB (who already have many agreements with carriers worldwide regarding data usage) than an independent and not particularly well funded (by carrier standards) company like WhatsApp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Please add a [2012] to the title. Some stuff has happened since then :)

<comment><USER24> Most significantly: "Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it." \- Pretty sure Facebook are interested in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I can't imagine Facebook getting even 10% of their investment on Whatsapp back. It's crazy that they blew so much money on something which hasn't proven to be anything more than a flavor-of-the-day platform. Whatsapp suffers from the same flaw that made Facebook start losing customers to it in the first place: there was a paradigm shift in what the customers wanted in their social apps, and FB always was a touch too complicated for mostly-mobile users' needs. And just like that, the strongest player in the social industry started to decline.

There is zero guarantee that there won't be another such paradigm shift in the near (even super-near) future that would displace Whatsapp overnight. And unlike Facebook, which has tons of features (too many, yes, but that makes it unlikely that someone can replace Facebook with any single solution, which drastically slows down people jumping platforms), they're a one-trick pony banking everything on being SMS, only better. The second something happens and this stops being such a big deal to their users, Whatsapp loses everything. They have no means to ensure long-term user loyalty, they have no other value proposition, they're not ahead of the curve in any other relevant way. If (or rather, when) the Whatsapp bubble pops, FB is left with nothing.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is simply the cable tv model applied to internet services. Cable went from pay to avoid ads to pay and still get ads (and of course there is Hulu). These guys just figured out how to double dip in a really subtle way.

</comment><comment><USER13> _" When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say "Have you considered the alternative?""_

It must be frustrating for those users who really _did_ consider this and thought $1 per year was a bargain. Over time those users may have convinced their friends to sign up and Whatsapp made that choice easy by being available on a lot of platforms.

Everyone has a price. The only way to really avoid this kind of situation is to push things to be decentralised/distributed or fully encrypted. That's even harder to do (but I'm working on it with a bunch of others - see my profile).

</comment><comment><USER27> "In the land of the evil the saints emerge..." (and take venture capital to maintain their sainthood along the way).

What works for Whatsapp didn't work for many others and vice versa.

Ads are necessary evil, sort of like taxes. There is a price for Whatsapp's sainthood their very users are paying for with other currencies. One way or another it is an exchange.

Saint my ass.

</comment><comment><USER28> My assumption is that FB bought Whatsapp for its attach business AKA for its data minning opportunity. I bet they won't throw ads in there, but rest assure that if you're talking vacations with your group "Family", you'll see a suggestion around that via Facebook site/mobile, and so will the rest of your family.

</comment><comment><USER29> So, I uninstalled whatsapp a bit before the acquisition and have been wondering if they sold my past messages along with their company; I really hope that is not the case. I know draconian EULAs ToCs and "Privacy" Policies are all legal, but I trusted them and prefer to give Facebook as little info as possible.

<comment><USER29> a reply to myself and to future readers from whatsapp: [http://blog.whatsapp.com/529/Setting-the-record- straight](http://blog.whatsapp.com/529/Setting-the-record-straight)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The date at the bottom of the post is: "June 18, 2012".

</comment><comment><USER31> Sooner or later the ads will come. Even if FB hadn't bought them, that is usually the painful transition most social sites need to go through.

<comment><USER32> Not if they are paid. app.net is a good example of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Because our business model is to get bought, not becoming profitable."

<comment><USER34> Users pay $1/year after the first year. At almost half a billion active users that's a pretty great business model.

<comment><USER35> $500M/yr in raw revenue? How do you grow from there? Lower costs? Grow your revenue? Half a billion is getting close to max adoption. Do you up your prices?

<comment><USER36> I'll stick with just getting $500M/yr. That is more than most start-ups will ever make.

Once I get there I can solve other problems as they come up. Would that be a reasonable approach?

<comment><USER37> Elsewhere in this thread someone mentioned Whatsapp have $58M of funding, so I doubt it - that'd probably be seen as a huge failure..somewhat amusingly. Let's say them investors want their 10X within a few years so you need to pay them over a year's revenue over a few years with no real growth there - you're paying a lot and they'd probably not agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> ....... Until they got sold to facebook

</comment><comment><USER39> Selling ads isn't cool.

You know what's cool?

Giving your user info to Facebook to mine and monetize.

<comment><USER40> I shiver of fear just thinking that my whatsapp chat data is crossed with the info facebook has from my profile.

The worst is that I cannot convince all my address book list to not use whatsapp anymore.

We are all in a trap!</comment></comment>


LibreOffice 2020/2025 Marketing Plan [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://nextcloud.documentfoundation.org/s/jzryGw7XDkJadmo#pdfviewer <comment><USER2> Executive summary - the LibreOffice ecosystem is trying to find a path that ensures and improves the commercial viability of the various commercial players (who account for >90% of the actual programming work that goes into LO), whilst remaining vendor neutral and open-source.

Not an easy needle to thread.

</comment><comment><USER3> I feel like this will create another OpenOffice forking into LibreOffice kind of situation.

I can see myself not being able to pay for the Enterprise product, but wanting it, and having the core part available to fork and extend.

It's a noble way to guarantee a good management and funding, but it's still rings different to how Open source _feels_. I don't know how to explain it, really. I'd say the one project that rings somewhat true to that spirit in my mind would be PostgreSQL.

That being said, I will always use and support LibreOffice and their descendants, should they exist in the future.

<comment><USER4> Did I miss the presentation saying there will be feature differentiation? As far as I have seen it's all branding and support, so there isn't really a reason to fork for individuals.

There is for enterprise, but at that point why not either purchase support from the authorized companies or join them

<comment><USER3> The whole ordeal with the Online part led me to believe there will be feature differentiation. I might be wrong.

It is indeed blurry on this particular matter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought that their own research had showed that people weren't buying support that was already available

> It is routinely the case that I meet organizations that have deployed free > LibreOffice without long term support

and that people didn't even buy support from Microsoft

> Microsoft gives poor to non-existent support to the majority of users so > ~no-one expects to buy it

So why would they now suddenly pay for a product where (I think, not an expert) the only proposed differentiation is support and calling it 'Enterprise'?

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm sure this already exists but IMO they should switch to working on an online version, by which I mean software you can install on a server that gives you an online document editor like Google Drive, Office 365 etc...

I'm probably just not the target market. One way or another I bought and owned MS Office from about 1993 through 2008-9 but I haven't touched it since really have no need. Nearly everything I write is for online consumption. LibreOffice nor MS Office do this well. Using either to generate PDFs is also horrible. Unlike HTML, PDFs don't reflow for my phone, tablet, etc..

I'm sure others will disagree but it just feels like it's about time for these products to die. Maybe the spreadsheet can say around for but me, if I can't let other people edit together live what's the point? In fact I'd think all the work from home from Covid should make this abundantly clear that both MS Office and LibreOffice are like BBS software from the early 90s

<comment><USER7> It does already exist[1]. Although I'm not particularly familiar with the "core" LibreOffice Online, the Collabora Online[2] branded version is super easy to get running on Nextcloud[3] (via Docker).

[1] [https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice- online/](https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-online/)

[2] [https://www.collaboraoffice.com/libreoffice-from- collabora/](https://www.collaboraoffice.com/libreoffice-from-collabora/)

[3] [https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/](https://nextcloud.com/collaboraonline/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Read the post from a few days ago and some of the comments...open source purists (looking at you, Stallman) might be freaking out but this might give LO the much-needed boost in performance and formatting.

I'm sure it's not easy coming up with something like this with few devs, but I hate to see it flounder when so many office tools are subscription-based now without much of a choice (maybe you could pick up a coveted CD-ROM with a license intact)

<comment><USER5> > open source purists (looking at you, Stallman)

Lol I don't think Stallman would describe himself that way!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The final slide identifies this as a proposal, and and anticipates that there will be changes before the plan is finalised. Does anyone know if there's been movement since? It proposes that the strategy should be announced on July 15th, so I'd expect there to be a newer version by now.

(It also suggests that the proposal has a single author, but doesn't say who it is. Is it Michael Meeks?)

</comment><comment><USER10> Some context: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789659](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789659)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23793942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23793942)

</comment><comment><USER11> > Create a LibreOffice Enterprise Ecosystem LinkedIn page where to push same > stories, to connect LinkedIn profiles of all contacts

> Encourage project members to be on LinkedIn

Yes, this is how I imagine any enterprise would act. Also, they need an ukulele music.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just make it so word documents don't look like garbage.

<comment><USER10> Although it is a valid point, you are missing that it's Microsoft who prevents everyone from doing it [0].

[0] [https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/case/complex- sing...](https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/case/complex-singularity- versus-openness)

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately that very presentation in the OP looks very much like it was done in LibreOffice :( Something about the formatting is just off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How long until the libreoffice.biz domain from their presentation is taken?

Edit: it already is. Not sure it is by them, whois doesn't give any information.</comment>


Mac vs. Acer, IBM, Dell, etc.: The Debate is Over - <AUTHOR> http://lucasrockwell.blogspot.com/2008/09/debate-is-over.html

<comment><USER2> >>Now that the Mac runs on the "x86" architecture, there is no more need to debate the price of a Mac vs. the price of an IBM, or Acer, or Dell, etc., etc. Why?

Why? Because now that they use the same hardware, you can see exactly how much the Apple industrial design is costing you. Hint: It's a lot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely! And that's the point. Design costs money, and there are people who actually care about design.</comment></comment>


The end of Bitcoin volatility - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN!
I've been reading and learning from all of you for the past three years. I finally have something to share, a project I've been leading for the past year.
We address btc volatility by allowing our members to convert bitcoin to the bit-form of money they use every day--bitdollars, biteuros, bityuan, etc.
You can sign up for an invite to our Beta at www.bitreserve.org
Here's a story about it: http://bitcoinowl.com/new-company-bitreserve-protects-against-bitcoin-price-volatility
We announce today and I wanted to let you all know about it and thank you for your inspiring enthusiasm, creativity, and hacking chops.
You have an amazing community in HN and I hope it continues thriving for a long time.
Regards,
Tim Parsa CEO Bitreserve.Org www.bitreserve.org <comment><USER2> My name is Byrne Reese, and I am the VP of Product for Bitreserve. Thank you for your questions. I first wanted to shed some light on how we manage our reserve. When a member of Bitreserve converts bitcoin to fiat, we adjust the assets we hold in our reserve to match. So if our members hold 100 bitcoin, and $1000, then our Reserve will also hold 100 bitcoin and $1000. In this way we manage a full reserve.

We believe that what our Members do with their money is their business, but what _we_ do with their money is everyone's business. So just like the blockchain, the public can monitor in real-time all the transactions taking place across our network via our Reserve Chain, and all of the subsequent adjustments we make to our reserve on our public ledger. Then to build trust in these resources, every quarter a big-four auditor will publicly verify that the assets and liabilities we claim in our ledger are accurate.

Right now we are purely bitcoin in and bitcoin out. In that way all value that flows into and out of our system is discoverable and provable on the block chain. You will be able to track every transaction back to the original entry of value into our system confirmed by the block chain.

Thanks again for your comment and don't hesitate to contact firstname.lastname@example.com with any further questions, or feel free to continue the conversation here.

</comment><comment><USER3> Signed up to the beta and read the article but there is no info on how you will beat the volatility. The simplistic view is that you convert btc to fiat but hold the btc yourself. When price goes down you lose money, when price goes up you make money. I just don't see too many people wanting to protect themselves from drops at the expense of any gains. The article even says there has been a long term upward trend so it makes sense for your business if that holds true. However I expect people will withdraw in times of growth and redeposit during drops, thus reducing your opportunity for profit. Will there be restrictions on withdrawals?

As usual though the problem comes down to needing to store my BTC with you, at that stage I no longer control the BTC and am reliant on your honesty.

Now if you managed to make it work with the Trezor, whereby I control the private keys even if the coins are stored on your system then I can see it gaining some traction.</comment>


3D XKCD - <AUTHOR> https://xk3d.xkcd.com/ <comment><USER2> Make sure you wave your mouse over it ...

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://xk3d.xkcd.com/?teapot](https://xk3d.xkcd.com/?teapot)</comment>


What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town - tuna-piano https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230 <comment><AUTHOR> _for comparison, even the high-end estimates of bitcoin's total current power consumption are still less than 6 percent of the power consumed by the world's banking sector._

Indeed, congratulations Bitcoin. You are able to process 2.3 transactions per second using only 6 percent of the power of the _entire worldwide banking sector!_

       * VISA: 2,000 transactions per second

       * ACH: 800 transactions per second

       * MasterCard: 3,000 transactions per second (?)

       * NYSE: Who even knows?

       * Etc...

<comment><USER2> Who cares? Bitcoins power use is hardly linked to it's transaction rate.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, transaction rate at bitcoin's highest points has been very low. Power usage is strongly correlated to price, while price isn't correlated to... anything.

<comment><USER4> Price is correlated to power usage. There's an odd sort of feedback loop where a rising bitcoin price causes more mining which raises the price of bitcoin and so on exponentially.

You may ask why not just walk away and let bitcoin return to zero but there are a large number of people in the mining industry and similar with incentives to promote and prop it up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> All I can think of while reading this story is... this must be what the Rapa Nui must have felt like as they cut down the last tree on Easter Island to erect even taller mo'ai (statues)

I always wondered how such a clearly talented and advanced civilization could paint itself into a corner. Now I guess I understand.

<comment><USER6> Someone said that's the solution to Fermi's paradox - every sufficiently advanced civilization eventually spends all its resources on cryptocurrency mining :)

<comment><USER7> Funny, but it actually contains a sliver of truth. There is a theory called 'The Great filter' that tries to explain the Fermi paradox. It basically posits there is some almost insurmountable barrier that must be vaulted for a species to become spacefaring. Whether that barrier is behind us (the evolution of intelligent life) or ahead of us (no idea what, avoiding interplanetary warfare possibly?) has not been conclusively theorized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a sad, sorry state we as a species are in when energy is used for such purposes. Greed does know no bounds.

<comment><USER9> As opposed to: gold/silver/diamonds mining (greater energy _and_ human cost), arms manufacturing (orders of magnitude larger industry), etc. Why single out bitcoin (which is actually offering a useful service that critically needs PoW to work)?

<comment><USER10> Clearly the parent doesn't believe Bitcoin to be a useful service. I agree with you that precious metal mining and arms manufacturing are _also_ not useful services, except insofar as some precious metals are used to make useful things.

I think it's fair to say "Bitcoin is wasting energy" does not necessarily imply other useless things don't _also_ waste energy given that this whole conversation and article are about Bitcoin.

The fact that huge sums of money, energy, and human time is _also_ wasted on arms manufacturing doesn't make Bitcoin mining somehow a good thing.

Your kind of argument is called "Whataboutism": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism)

<comment><USER11> The argument being challenged is a comparison -- "... is used for such purposes" that clearly make the point that this purpose is a bad one. That is, the argument is "this use of energy is worse than most others".

It is not specious to confront the argument head-on. If someone says "I am the strongest person in the world" and you say "what about that guy over there", you are not engaging in a useless rhetorical device, you are making a valid counterpoint to the original point.

<comment><USER10> Except that it's not a comparison, it's a statement about Bitcoin, not those other things, which is the key element that makes it whataboutism instead of a valid counterpoint.

Bitcoin mining is wasting energy.

Other potential uses of such wasted energy include _not generating it in the first place_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is happening north of the boarder as well, but not just with Hydro power. Because natural gas prices are so low ATM, you are starting to see long-term Power Purchase agreements for sites in Southern Alberta. I can't see any reasonable argument for putting more carbon in the atmosphere for such a speculative asset/business model.

<comment><USER13> > I can't see any reasonable argument for putting more carbon in the > atmosphere for such a speculative asset/business model.

I can't see any reasonable argument for putting more carbon into the atmosphere for heating mcmansions, driving trucks as a passenger vehicles, or maintaining a perfect lawn, but other people seem to disagree.

The problem is that the cost of carbon release is too low. If we internalized the carbon externality with a carbon tax it would give people the pricing information they need to make good decisions.

<comment><USER14> Alberta has a carbon tax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The most surprising thing in that article is that for a new mine to be profitable, it will require more power than an AWS data center. Like, how is that even possible?!? That's amazing!

<comment><USER16> Amazing in a really bad way. I can't wait for fake internet money being killed off.

<comment><USER17> There exists other means of achieving consensus in blockchains than the power eating monster that is proof-of-work [1]. For example, proof-of-stake [2].

We can have our fake internet money and be environmentally responsible too.

[1]: [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work)

[2]: [https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake- FAQ](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ)

<comment><USER18> This is interesting. How would people acquire coins in the proof-of-stake model?

<comment><USER19> Same way as in a proof-of-work blockchain. Miners (validators) receive the transaction fees plus some number of coins per block that is included in the chain, but instead of anyone being able to mine a block (and thus requiring a very high difficulty), only nodes that have a large number of coins frozen (the stake) are allowed to publish new blocks.

<comment><USER18> Ok, so coin holders are allowed to validate transactions between other coin holders, and for that they get more coins.

But if I have no coins, I have to buy them from a coin holder with another form of money.

So this system would require the original issuer to be someone that you trust and have a reason to do business with in the first place right? So it's kind of like banks and central banks today?

I realize ICOs by startups are a thing but I kind of want to just ignore that whole phenomenon... I don't own any kind of coin and don't understand it well enough, but this seems to me to be a technology that will eventually be very useful.

<comment><USER19> You do need to trust the validators in a PoS scheme, but with PoW you also need to trust the majority of miners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's worth pointing out that compared to other "useless" products of us humans like diamonds etc. bitcoin is rather ok environment wise. Green electricity goes up and down and can't be stored so bitcoin is a good way to create some "value" as those guys in the article are doing.

On the value side, "trust" is one of the most expensive commodities on earth. More "trust" creates more opportunities for business. Think if you could not trust a $1 bill to be exchangeable for some product. I think if you look at crypto as a way to increase trust in whatever area, you can start to see the value. Think of it in terms of Nash equilibrium, like a prisoner dilemma where you can "trust" your prison mate and both get more value out of collaboration.

<comment><USER21> But _does_ bitcoin create trust? It's a highly volatile currency. Maybe it's better than the Zimbabwean dollar, but it's not a foundation for the world economy.

<comment><USER20> At the moment of writing there is $394B worth of "trust" in the crypto coin markets. Before you say it's speculation, let me point out that speculation still operates on trust: the trust of exchanging coins on the market, the trust the blockchain would not lose their transactions, etc.

<comment><USER22> There is no dollar amount attached to bitcoin. The moment a fraction of the coins are being sold, the exchange rate will drop dramatically.

Not to mention that a vast portion of the coins are probably lost in forgotten wallets, while the rest is in the hands of the early investors who will never sell it to not drop their value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As someone who mined bitcoin at home before, stories like this is the reason why I don't advocate for bitcoin. This is a slap in the face of a decentralized system.

When I stopped mining a few years ago, almost half of bitcoin's mining power was coming out of China.

I don't know how hardcore bitcoiners live with this contradiction to their ideals.

<comment><USER24> This is why I think Proof of Stake is destined to outcompete Proof of Work. The costs are drastically lower in both electricity and hardware; and in practice, PoW is basically PoS with extra steps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> As much I empathize with the people in Eastern Washington this one is similar to any other stories out there like "This is what happens when X take over your town" and x can be Walmart, Amazon HQ, or any other big company.

Things like price increases follows as people start moving and most of the time smaller towns are not equipped to handle the influx.

<comment><USER26> Bitcoin mining has by no means "taken over" Wenatchee and East Wenatchee. If you go there and drive around what you'll see is ordinary businesses, fruit warehouses, huge numbers of fruit farms, etc. And then the datacenters which are in East Wenatchee and Quincy.

It's just a weird aberration of people setting up super cheap facilities for ASIC mining that need huge amounts of electricity, but very little network infrastructure. Compared to the Sabey and Vantage datacenters an Ethereum mine needs only a few dozen Mbps for a WAN link, at most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The more I read about it the more Bitcoin reminds me of the California gold rush.

Bitcoin's current price is based on pure speculation, it's useless as an actual currency at the moment. What happens to places like this when the value crashes?

<comment><USER28> Why do you think it's useless as a currency? I've noticed "We accept bitcoin" signs more and more frequently. I've also used it to pay friends who live abroad. I don't think you've actually ever used bitcoin but apparently you have plenty of opinions.

<comment><USER29> I've seen companies dropping support for it more and more frequently, too. Stripe, for example.

<comment><USER28> Wow, you named one. Congrats. I'm referring more to small businesses. To name a few I've seen: A bed and breakfast I stayed at in Tulum, a cellphone repair shop not far from my home, a small theater also near my home.

Bitcoin has better characteristics than the USD. If people continue to see that, it'll succeed. There's of course an element of speculation when buying bitcoin -- I'm hoping other people see value in a currency which can't be manipulated by governments, can't be confiscated, can't be censored, has a known supply, can transfer instantly anywhere in the world, and anyone can open an 'account' with.

To quote Julian Assange: "Bitcoin is the real Occupy Wallstreet".

<comment><USER30> Stripe is an entire payment network, which means many websites lost Bitcoin support when Stripe left. It's a bit more than just "one".

I think Steam dropping Bitcoin support is a particularly useful canary as well. Valve said that the usage they saw of Bitcoin was relatively high (a lot of people invested in Bitcoin like videogames, to no ones surprise), but the exchange volatility and increasingly slow transaction times got to be enough that Valve was more often than not losing too much money on purchases by the time Bitcoins were exchanged for USD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > ... Carlson suspected that many of these stalwarts were probably doing so > irrationally ... others had found a way to making mining pay.

> ... separated these survivors from the quitters and the double-downers, > Carlson concluded, was simply the price of electricity...knew that if he > could find a place where the power wasn't just cheap, but really cheap, he'd > be able to mine bitcoin both profitably and on an industrial scale.

Is the electricity cost really that significant when compared with the amortized cost of the mining equipment itself?

Lo those many years ago that I looked into mining, it was marked by extreme risk. New ASIC designs would emerge that would obsolete the old ones. Retailers would have extremely long and unpredictable lead times for new equipment. You could bet on the wrong manufacturer and end up with no product or late product, which would arrive after your competition delivers a difficulty increase.

I would wager that this system finds equilibrium marked by optimism, such that everyone has at least a minimal net operating loss. But maybe if you get on the leading wave of ASIC production somehow you can stay ahead?

<comment><USER32> Bitmain is already at 10nm Bitcoin ASICs. That's the commercial state of the art right now. 7nm fabs are just starting to come on line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The article barely touches on a strong solution to this problem: Charging (a lot) more for high marginal electricity use. The local power authority can extract most of the value of mining.

<comment><USER33> That is basically anti-net neutrality, but for energy, instead of information.

Why should I pay more if I use my laptop for mining crypto, instead of playing the latest AAA video game on the highest settings?

<comment><USER31> For some reason, it seems that lots of people find cryptocoin mining amoral. It's pretty unclear to me how they got there, but I can only guess that it's something like "free money" or a "get rich quick scheme." To think that I think is to discount the capital and operating expenses, to say nothing of the risk taken on.

<comment><USER34> To me, it's the fact that all this power, all these computing resources, are basically being thrown away. Nothing useful is done with the computational power. If it was doing something like folding proteins or otherwise using that computational power to better humanity, then it'd be different.

<comment><USER31> It's really not, though. It's just associated with something that "seems greedy". I could argue that "nothing useful is done with the computational power used for playing video games or watching and producing films." I could argue that, but I think that line of reasoning suffers the same way yours does. It requires a value judgment and you think that the cryptocoin eco system has no value.

Cryptocoins have tremendous value for remittances alone. We can argue whether it's optimal allocation of resources and I think that is a healthy debate. Mining is required for trustless, decentralized currencies with provably equitable distribution. But we could probably forfeit some of the latter and eliminate the proof-of-work entirely (in fact it's already been done). Another option is to make the proof-of-work of greater independent utility from the transaction itself (also has been done).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder why the price of electricity there doesn't go up? It's not like they can't find buyers for it.

<comment><USER33> Because miners would move to places where the electricity is cheap.

In theory you could always keep raising the price of electricity, because everybody needs to buy electricity to keep the lights on.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't become a tax haven for international companies either, and then raise those taxes when you have some customers.

<comment><USER35> This doesn't explain why not.

<comment><USER33> Because long-term you'll end up with a situation, where your special profitable customers leave for greener pastures (those willing/able to pay higher fees) and your base customers can't or won't afford it.

Short-term they can make some money raises the prices, until supply-demand equilibrium is reached again. But then you shoot yourself in the foot for the long term.

<comment><USER34> But your special profitable customers aren't paying anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> [https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/washington/east- wena...](https://www.electricitylocal.com/states/washington/east-wenatchee/)

</comment><comment><USER37> ITT: "The vague notion of ideal resource allocation I've come up with after 15 seconds of thought is the correct one."

<comment><USER33> One could probably intellectually power a small third world country, if one rerouted all the mental energy that went into deriding Bitcoin's energy consumption into something useful (like getting more people to click on ads, HFT, or random gridsearch for GPU deep learning on MNIST).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This sucks. Poor people have trouble paying electricity bills. In come the bitcoin miners, who drive up the cost of electricity, causing the poor to fall behind on bills and potentially become homeless. All so they can drive a fancy Land Rover.

Fucking stupid. This gold rush needs to die.

</comment><comment><USER39> If Bitcoin succeeds, it will consume 51% of the earth's energy supply. If you want to claim this is bad, you will need the support of some sort system of universal ethics.

<comment><USER40> Your argument tries to set a trap for anyone responding, by forcing a debate on moral relativism.

So, let me counter with this question: If we presuppose we can't label anything "bad" without settling that debate, then is murder "bad"?

If you think murder cannot be defined as "bad", then why have we outlawed it?

<comment><USER39> > Your argument tries to set a trap for anyone responding, by forcing a debate > on moral relativism.

True.

> If you think murder cannot be defined as "bad", then why have we outlawed > it?

The original comment has already been downvoted and is on its way to becoming invisible, so I see no point in having the debate.

[EDIT]

Or for that matter, I don't see the point of taking any unpopular position on HN.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Do Services Like PythonTutor and Repl.it Run Code Safely - <AUTHOR> I'm super curious to know how these services work under the hood. Are there any good writeups about safe execution of unknown code? Are they spinning up isolated VM's per user / connection? <comment><USER2> Repl.it CEO here. As @tony-allan mentioned we're indeed container based. Containers, however, on their own aren't safe for isolation. They're NOT sandboxes. You need to do a lot of things around containers to secure them. Most commonly is housing them in a VM.

At Repl.it we have multiple layers of security with the most important being that the entire execution environment has access to zero user data. Even if someone escaped the container jail, and the VM jail, and compromised the server they really couldn't do much beyond that.

We also use and built a bunch of intrusion detection software and manually look through potential threats.

Finally, if you want a container-based sandbox take a look at GVisor by Google. It's still an early project but has a lot of potential.

</comment><comment><USER3> Working on a service in Go that does this, focusing on no fuzz embeds, yet to be launched tho and the source is not released yet either but it will be.

Anyway, it's currently docker based, basically the only interesting thing is the run endpoint which is a POST request that copies the payload files to a tmpdir on disk (cached files are just represented as a path).

With the files available I spin up the language appropriate container with the tmpdir mounted as the working directory and the default run command (which can be overriden to specify other build options etc but there's a reasonable default built into every docker image).

The output is streamed as plain-text so it works reasonably well even with no JavaScript but SSE is used when JavaScript is enabled, look a bit prettier. WebSockets are just not implemented _yet_.

Finally, I found it annoying not being able to preview servers etc on other playgrounds so TCP connections are proxied, each time a subdomain is accessed it looks up the port and maps it accordingly to the container.

There's a bit of overhead to all this tho, from hitting the run button until seeing output can take anywhere from 10 to 60 seconds.

As for safe execution, people have broken out of docker containers before and no doubt people will do it in the future. Best you can do is minimize the damage breaking out of the container would be able to do by isolating the machines that run the containers from the rest of the stack.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've actually written a short blog post about it ([http://khamidou.com/sandboxing/](http://khamidou.com/sandboxing/))!

Basically, most of them build a sandbox to prevent the guest system from interacting in unexpected ways. There's a bunch of ways you could do this — intercepting syscall, limiting them using seccmp(2), etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> This may be a good place to start.

[https://nodejs.org/api/repl.html](https://nodejs.org/api/repl.html)

Generally you have a client run their own Javascript that speaks to your backend but does not run on your hardware nor within your virtual ecosystem.

<comment><USER6> I think what you are answering is how a REPL works, the question is around running generic code in isolated/sanboxed environment.

</comment></comment><comment> tony-allan I understand that repl.it is container based.

See [https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/15/repl-it-lets-you- program-i...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/15/repl-it-lets-you-program-in- your-browser/)

</comment><comment><USER7> You can checkout Elm repl I wrote at [https://github.com/girishso/elm-repl-in- browser](https://github.com/girishso/elm-repl-in-browser) it uses docker container to isolate user session.</comment>


Show HN: Crowdsourced and curated list of books by women - <AUTHOR> https://thebooksbywomen.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, creator of this project here.

I am a software product manager with background in programming. I am creating #BooksByWomen at thebooksbywomen.com, curating a list of books written by women, especially in the tech/business category as a side project. You could head out to [https://www.producthunt.com/makers- festival-2019/voting#tiny...](https://www.producthunt.com/makers- festival-2019/voting#tiny-apps) and vote if you like it.

Made with: Sheet2site.com.com The love and help from the communities at WomenMake, Women in Product, Tech Ladies and a lot of my friends.

I read Cathy O'Neils book on algorithms: Weapons of Math Destruction, I absolutely loved it. It resonated with me on a lot of insights I was seeing myself in my career. So I paid attention to women authors in my network and there are so many that never would have reached me through traditional marketing and social media if I hadn't sought them out specifically. This is why I am curating and maintaining this list and want it to succeed.

What I would ideally want to do: * Create a page to honor my supporters * Publish regular bi-weekly interview with women authors about their journey * Publish featured books based on common themes, coming up * Create a browser extension where this content can be shared effectively I do hold a fulltime job, so carving out time would be a challenge, any support helps. You can also support me most directly by visiting the site and buying some books from awesome female authors, I make a small affiliate commission from Amazon.

You can also support me by buying me coffee or ramen on Patreon: [https://www.patreon.com/kalinaz](https://www.patreon.com/kalinaz)</comment>


Internet turns on white supremacists and neo-Nazis with doxing, phishing - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/internet-turns-on-white-supremacists-and-neo-nazis-with-doxing-phishing/ <comment><USER2> Aside from the obvious _everything_ that's troubling about the rise of white supremacist organizations, another question has been bothering me.

Where's the line on what terrible things are morally just to do to terrible people? And what must those terrible people do to morally justify the actions taken against them?

 _" I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"_, etc. free speech is one facet. But I'm focusing on actions rather than speech here.

Just because someone is a racist, sexist, * ist piece of shit doesn't give someone else the right to shoot them in cold blood... does it? And if not, then how far back does that walk before our response is back at "reasonable American citizens striving to live in a harmonious culture that allows for diversity"?

I feel like my spidey sense is going off when I listen to interviews and get the sense that the person speaking would tell blatant lies without missing a beat to win the argument, because they believe their cause is that just. And I've been getting that prickling a lot when I hear both sides speak about their positions. Which terrifies the hell out of me.

Any thoughts / personal moral positions or frameworks welcome. I'm honestly looking for a way to find a shred of solid footing here that makes me feel more morally comfortable than "white supremacy is bad, therefore _anything_ done against white supremacists is good."

<comment><USER3> I personally believe people should be allowed to say whatever they want, and violence is never acceptable as a response. We've been preventing hate groups from having a platform for decades, and recent events are only giving them one. It is law enforcement's job to enforce any laws that are broken by _actions of individuals_ , within these groups or otherwise, and the justice system's job to prosecute them to the extent of the law.

Trying to silence words that some may find offensive is a slippery slope, because no matter who you are or what you say, there is _always_ someone that will be offended by it. Attempting to win hearts and minds through civil discourse, and accepting the reality that some people will always be unreachable, is IMHO the only way to move forward without irreparably dividing our society, because "A house divided against itself cannot stand".

Hate only breeds hate, and there will always be naturally evil people. Ignore the haters' speech, and keep preaching love an respect. Those that can come around will, and those that can't won't have a voice unless we give it to them.

<comment><USER4> We hanged Nazis after WW2. Do you believe this was the appropriate action?

<comment><USER5> We hanged proven murderers, not every member of an odious political party.

<comment><USER2> We didn't hang proven murderers on our side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Many fear being outed from photos_

It's not "outing" once you've already been doing it in public.

</comment><comment><USER7> For people (like me) who have trouble parsing the title:

turn on = become hostile towards

</comment><comment><USER8> Two quotes:

"But you are, perhaps, ready to ask, "What has this to do with the perpetuation of our political institutions?" I answer, it has much to do with it. Its direct consequences are, comparatively speaking, but a small evil; and much of its danger consists, in the proneness of our minds, to regard its direct, as its only consequences. Abstractly considered, the hanging of the gamblers at Vicksburg, was of but little consequence. They constitute a portion of population, that is worse than useless in any community; and their death, if no pernicious example be set by it, is never matter of reasonable regret with any one. If they were annually swept, from the stage of existence, by the plague or small pox, honest men would, perhaps, be much profited, by the operation.--Similar too, is the correct reasoning, in regard to the burning of the negro at St. Louis. He had forfeited his life, by the perpetration of an outrageous murder, upon one of the most worthy and respectable citizens of the city; and had not he died as he did, he must have died by the sentence of the law, in a very short time afterwards. As to him alone, it was as well the way it was, as it could otherwise have been.--But the example in either case, was fearful.--When men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded. But all this even, is not the full extent of the evil.--By such examples, by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained.--Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much, as its total annihilation. While, on the other hand, good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose. Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed--I mean the attachment of the People. Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last. By such things, the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it; and thus it will be left without friends, or with too few, and those few too weak, to make their friendship effectual. At such a time and under such circumstances, men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn that fair fabric, which for the last half century, has been the fondest hope, of the lovers of freedom, throughout the world."

Abraham Lincoln, Lyceum address

The next quote is from A Man for all seasons.

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

If we have learned anything from Trump's election, it is that people who we may think unlikely to come to power, can come to power. If we tear up our principles of free speech and rule of law to after the Nazis, what will we hide behind when would be authoritarians come to power? The principle of free speech is what allows people to protest Trump and for newspapers to criticize him. The rule of law makes the police protect even those protestors they disagree with from violence. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

</comment><comment><USER9> People are sick and tired of anti-white (pro-nonwhite) de jure policies and replacement immigration. They feel this country is their rightful homeland and are angry that they had no vote in being replaced. These reactions could have been predicted and were. I guess you can call that "racist" and "white supremacist" but the name-calling just eggs them on and is "not an argument." Instead, let's explain why the white era that started in Athens is now over and that's just natural progress. And if they are genocided in the process well that would be sad. Or I guess we could just dox them.

<comment><USER10> WTF is this argument? Where is the replacement happening? A Mexican sneaks across the border and now does my gardening. Who did he replace?

How is the era of Athens over, because a brown person is allowed to attend my University and learn about Plato and Socrates while sitting next to me?

<comment><USER9> They see the drip-drip-drip of "brown" people unfurling the Mexican flag, municipal swimming pools with men-only hours and University foot baths.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miriam-rosenbaum/womens- only-s...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miriam-rosenbaum/womens-only- swimming-hour_b_10993632.html)

[http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/muslim-footbaths- threaten...](http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/muslim-footbaths-threaten- america-social-fabric-article-1.311574)

[http://www.newsweek.com/white-nationalists-are-right- america...](http://www.newsweek.com/white-nationalists-are-right-america- becoming-less-white-651541)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to recognise parametric drawings? - <AUTHOR> Hey, something I've always wondered, how does an application like Ken Perlin's chalktalk do its gesture recognition?
You can see what I mean here: https://vimeo.com/127447653
I somewhat understand how to classify a crude square drawing as a "square" gesture. What I don't understand, is how do you classify a small crude square drawing as a "square(5)", a larger one as "square(50)" and all the other square-sizes in between.
Do you know how something like this could be done? <comment><USER2> Here is the most accessible implementation I've seen [https://depts.washington.edu/aimgroup/proj/dollar/](https://depts.washington.edu/aimgroup/proj/dollar/) with tons of references and existing implementations.</comment>


Some South African FinTech startups to watch in 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://www.iafrikan.com/2019/01/16/south-african-fintech-startups-to-watch-in-2019/ <comment><USER2> horrible article in my view, by Dominique Collett Senior investment executive, Rand Merchant Investment Holdings, & heads the firm's next-generation financial services business, AlphaCode.

Just names of a company with one/two sentences. And I have no idea, still, why are these 'interesting' to watch in 2019.</comment>


A bug in macOS 10.15.5 impacts bootable backups - <AUTHOR> https://bombich.com/blog/2020/05/27/bug-in-macos-10.15.5-impacts-bootable-backups-weve-got-you-covered <comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

The chflags() system call can no longer set the SF_FIRMLINK flag on a folder on an APFS volume. Rather than fail with an error code that we would have detected, it fails silently – it exits with a success exit status, but silently fails to set the special flag ... Apple preaches that you should always check your error codes, and we do – religiously. This bug slipped past us for who knows how long because the system call exits with a success error code ... It's hard to find kind words to express my feelings towards Apple right now. Suffice it to say, though, I'm extremely disappointed that Apple would introduce this kind of bug in a dot-release OS update. We've seen 5 major updates to Catalina now, we should expect to see higher quality than this from an operating system.

<comment><USER2> Did setting SF_FIRMLINK ever succeed for real? Firmlinks are an APFS addition, and AFAIU not only can't usercode directly create firmlinks, trying to set SF_FIRMLINK with chflags is non-sensical, sort like trying to use chmod to set the S_IFDIR bit on a regular file. Apple would hardly be the first OS to silently ignore non-sensical flags in a bitfield; such problems and their dilemmas have plagued Linux syscalls for years. Though if this is a _change_ of behavior--it previously always failed but now it doesn't--that's problematic. Alternatively, if previously chflags seemed to work--st_flags reflected the SF_FIRMLINK bit on subsequent stat, even if the inode wasn't actually a firmlink--the change would be closer to a fix than a regression. I'm more curious why you were trying to set it in the first place. Maybe I'm misunderstanding.

<comment><USER3> > Did setting SF_FIRMLINK ever succeed for real?

It should have been working fine right? Otherwise CCC team would have reported this bug in the earlier release. As what Mike Bombich said in the original post:

       The chflags() system call can no longer set the SF_FIRMLINK flag on a folder on an APFS volume.

The keyword was "no longer".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And this is why I'm not interested in touching the latest macOS unless I'm forced to for work. I'm still on Mojave and doing just fine. Swift UI was the only thing I was even close to missing but I haven't needed it yet thankfully.

<comment><USER5> Stay there. This is the worst version of the OS since I started using it, which was Tiger.

I've had to reboot twice today. It's not finding the printer or other network devices. Handoff and AirDrop stop working intermittently. It's just a total disaster.

<comment><USER6> Ditto. Started with Tiger and this is just so far below the bar for previous releases it's almost unbearable. The SIP delays alone are bad enough, but the random bugs with Bluetooth, Thunderbolt, and seemingly everything else make it a chore to use my MacBook Pro.

Meanwhile, my iMac running Mojave is chugging along just fine and will continue to until I absolutely can't stand it anymore..

<comment><USER7> Same here. I also started with Tiger. This will be the first Mac I flat out return if 10.15.5 doesn't fix my KPs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is incredibly telling about the state of affairs in the macOS development group. The bug was reported early for a beta (burning a technical incident ticket, even) but still shipped in the final release.

At this point it feels like Darwin macOS can't be saved even when it shares most of its code with Darwin iOS.

What will happen to the iOS app market space when macOS degrades so much that developers can't use it anymore? (I refuse to believe serious developers would put up with an iOS-ified/iPadOS-ified Xcode with the current UI paradigms in those OSes)

</comment><comment><USER9> When I tried updating to 10.15.5 today, the update failed and dumped me into system utilities. I was able to restore from my Time Machine backups luckily. It's unfortunate that issues such as this are becoming the norm for MacOS.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't understand why Apple (and other big companies) with all the resources they've got, all these talented people and all this money, fail to provide reliable, safe and useful updates for their products. Is it that difficult to do proper quality checks and hear the feedback? I can see a trend the last couple of years where updates/upgrades are going in the wrong direction...well at least Apple is not in the same situation as Microsoft with their updates and service packs ruining perfectly working systems.

<comment><USER11> Well, zero bugs in something as complicated as an OS release is not going to happen. It is that difficult.

Not really trying to excuse Apple — probably they should have caught this one and generally should have fewer bugs.

But the idea that an OS update is going to go out with no bugs is just not going to happen.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Why doesn't Apple embrace open source for the lower levels of macOS? If there were a community of developers working together on APFS, for example, this bug probably would have been found and fixed immediately.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, look like the last open source release was 10.15.3:

[https://opensource.apple.com](https://opensource.apple.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't see APFS there. Regardless, I doubt if there is a real community of developers working on the Darwin code base. Contrast this with Swift on GitHub, which is very welcoming project with a high level of developer participation.

<comment><USER13> Swift, like Objective C, is irrelevant outside of the Mac. If SwiftUI is opensourced, that could change, but server-side Swift is done unless Apple goes into competition with AWS, Azure and GCP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is Time Machine or other backup tools affected too?

</comment><comment><USER15> Yes. Keep them coming.</comment>


The brave new world of genetic copyright laws - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/business/2013/04/gene-patents-are-impeding-the-future-of-medicine/

<comment><USER2> " _Lacking financial incentives_ , companies might not be willing to put in the years and millions of dollars…"

Law should not be created for the purpose of giving business financial incentives.</comment>


Canada Moves Ahead on Carbon Taxes, Leaving the U.S. Behind - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602857/canada-moves-ahead-on-carbon-taxes-leaving-the-us-behind/ <comment><USER2> Given a global market, a carbon tax is a disadvantage to Canada as it forces prices upward.

This idea would work best if everyone had to do it, otherwise there are further incentives to move industries out of Canada.

Although they talk about making the revenue neutral it seems unlikely that the government is going to give up the extra money.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not some kind of race where anyone has to get ahead of each other. These complex issues have two sides and we need to examine the both.

<comment> a-priori People have examined the issue. They concluded that carbon emissions are causing increased global temperatures, and that the solution is to reduce carbon emissions. The best way we know of to do so on a national scale is by adding a cost on the polluter for emitting carbon.

Now we're moving on from examining the issue to implementing solutions, and the Paris Agreement -- which came into effect earlier this month -- is the international community declaring that this is the case.

Canada is implementing its part of the Agreement as promised.

<comment><USER4> This sounds like the opinion of someone who has never had to deal with business crushing regulation. The fact is that there needs to be a balance. It is foolish to impose economy killing policies when other countries openly pollute vast quantities on the other side of the planet. Additionally, many of these policies assume Man is only capable of causing climate change and not capable of fixing it. However, early experimental evidence supports the notion that we might be able to solve the carbon problem scientifically. [http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green- tech/a23417/co...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/green- tech/a23417/convert-co2-into-ethanol/)

Obviously this is not a call to abandon environmental protections, but rather a call to be more pragmatic in our solutions. If this last month has taught me anything its that projections are not fortunes and it is dangerous to assume the equivalence.

<comment><USER5> But Carbon taxes are proven policy that benefit the economy. See the FA's reference to BC's carbon tax which has been an enormous success. We are long past the point where people can claim carbon taxes as potentially negative for the economy or unproven.

<comment><USER4> The simple fact is that carbon taxes are only effective if all countries are participating but India, China, and large portions of Africa, the middle east, and south america are not. It will not be effective until we solve 3rd world problems first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Canadian here from Toronto.

Taxes on the middle class have become absolutely ridiculous. Property taxes rise every year, electricity prices have nearly doubled, and payroll taxes take away a third of your income from every paycheck.

The vast amount of benefits in Canada go to the lower class, and disappear if you move up a tax bracket. The rich simply don't pay the taxes [1].

People here _want_ to be friendly to the environment, but trusting inefficient bureaucrats to handle taxpayer money properly is obviously not a good idea.

[1] [http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/justin-trudeaus- econo...](http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/justin-trudeaus-economic- promises-off-to-a-sluggish-start/)

<comment><USER5> >Canadian here from Toronto.

Canadian in Vancouver here.

> Taxes on the middle class have become absolutely ridiculous.

I disagree. We are lower taxed than some US states, depending on which province you are in, and get much much more in services.

> Property taxes rise every year

Citation needed. They have actually dropped here. See: [http://vancouver.ca/home-property- development/residential.as...](http://vancouver.ca/home-property- development/residential.aspx)

> electricity prices have nearly doubled

Citation need. BC Hydro's rate went up 4%, slightly above inflation.

> payroll taxes take away a third of your income from every paycheck.

That's odd as Canada doesn't have a payroll tax. Perhaps you mean payroll deductions for income tax withholding and pension/employment insurance premiums? None of these technically have to be withheld from your pay, but it is helpful to do so.

> The vast amount of benefits in Canada go to the lower class, and disappear > if you move up a tax bracket.

It doesn't work like that. The middle class gets the bulk of the benefits (roads, airport, higher education, etc). Secondly, there is no case where making more money doesn't put you further ahead. All programs, like taxes, have progressive scales applied to them. This just isn't an issue.</comment></comment>


Linus on memory ordering - <AUTHOR> http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=143222&curpostid=143460

<comment><AUTHOR> The whole thread (for the most part) is quite interesting. Here are two other gems from Linus:

[http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=143222&curposti...](http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=143222&curpostid=143432)

[http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=143222&curposti...](http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=143222&curpostid=143451)</comment>


Ask HN: Are Sports Sites Outdated or Am I Not the Audience? - <AUTHOR>

Major sites like espn.com and foxsports.com are ugly and too busy for me.  Minor sites I've come across are similar.<p>What's the reason for this?  Is it just me?  Does the nature of their content force them to present information this way?  Are there other knowledge areas with similar requirements to which I can compare them? <comment><USER2> I have to believe it's you (and me:-). Most people are attracted to images more than texts. espn.com is rich in images and the text is low density. Otherwise it is reasonably clean and not too garish. I suspect that a lot of money went into the design and testing. US Today took the same approach to image rich design when it came out. It was criticized for looking more like a tabloid than a newspaper, but it quickly jumped to number 2 or 3.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's true that compared to sports illustrated, espn is relatively text-sparse. But it's there, and in sufficient quantities.

But it's not just the fact that the front page is image rich. It's that it's image crowded. Is this really the best way to present this info?

Now that I think about it, when I compare espn to other news-centric sites (albeit in other fields) like politico.com and cnn.com, there are a lot of similarities.

So maybe it's not necessarily just a sports related issue.

<comment><USER2> Maybe the idea is to put as much of the high traffic links as possible on the page without scrolling, like newspapers put the important stories above the fold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Who visits sports websites?

</comment><comment><USER4> They drop the coin on state-of-the-art sites - the SOTA is a bit dumb right now, thats all.</comment>


Before the Flood - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90CkXVF-Q8M <comment><USER2> I work in cleantech, and here's my favorite climate change joke:

They say humans won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late.

If you ever wondered what software engineers and tech entrepreneurs can do about climate change, here's how I look at it: 87% of the energy sources we use are fossil-based[1] and will need to be replaced with non-fossil alternatives in the next 30 years. That's trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure and technology growth opportunity for clean energy and energy efficiency[2]. The next Google will be an energy company[3].

In order to actually pull the 87% energy transition off, clean energy sources face huge financial and engineering challenges. Luckily, cleantech hardware is mature and ready to scale up, so this presents a lot of business opportunities for tech startups that can improve efficiencies for those clean energy companies as they roll out solutions. Energy efficiency, electric self-driving vehicles, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, public transit, etc. all need to grow by 100x in 30 years, and a huge chunk of that growth will be software driven.

The advanced energy industry is already a $1.4 trillion industry (larger than airlines and fashion industries)[4]. So there is, right now, a ton of market size for climate change tech, and it will grow by several orders of magnitude over the next few decades. Now is one of those rare moments where you can save the planet and have a business model.

For example, my startup is a SaaS company that is used by tons of distributed clean energy resources to smooth out the process of collecting energy data for feasibility analyses. We shave about 5-10% off the installed cost of energy audits and distributed solar, and make money doing it.

So if you're interested in doing tech startup in climate change. Do it! We need all the help we can get. If you're interested in the Bay Area professional clean energy scene, check out the calendar [https://bayareaenergyevents.com/](https://bayareaenergyevents.com/) (I run it) and start showing up to stuff!

[1]: [https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11951](https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=11951)

[2]: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate- consensus-97...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate- consensus-97-per-cent/2015/aug/31/citi-report-slowing-global-warming-would- save-tens-of-trillions-of-dollars)

[3]: [http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next- internet/](http://www.pvsolarreport.com/the-next-internet/)

[4]: [http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/advanced- energy...](http://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2016/03/advanced-energy-hits- record-revenue-nearly-1-4-trillion-2015/)</comment>


TIL Google can tell when a government-backed entity is hacking your account - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/arrington/status/1217209165489164288 <comment><USER2> "We can't reveal what tipped us off because the hackers will take note and change their tactics".

How many fake alerts do you suppose Google sends out a year in order to confuse these Dread Hackers? Most of the fake alerts will end up with people who truly aren't being hacked, but a few will. In either case, Google benefits.</comment>


"Tests should be poorly factored" - <AUTHOR> This is a piece of advice I'd seen somewhere once, but can't remember where (or if this is exactly how it was worded). Does anyone know of an article or something that talks about this, or a more well-known term for this idea?
The basic idea: Say you have some code like:

  def square(x):
    return x ^ 2
 A test like:

  def test_square():
    for inp in [3, 4, 5, 50, 100]:
      assert square(inp) == inp ^ 2
 is "well-factored", in that it doesn't have a lot of repetition, but isn't a great a test, since it's basically testing that the function's code does what the function's code does.
A better test would be something like:

  def test_square():
    assert square(3) == 9
    assert square(4) == 16
    assert square(5) == 25
    # ...
 because, for one, it would expose the bug (^ is XOR in Python, not exponentiation). <comment><USER2> I wouldn't call the first version well factored since "x ^ 2" is repeated. So you could simplify to

        assert square(inp) == square(inp)

...at which point, if it's not 3:00 AM, you hopefully notice that it's not actually testing anything and include both test input data and output data.

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant the test itself being poorly factored. But, even in that case, I'm not sure realizing that square(inp) == square(inp) is silly would direct you to go to manual input/output lists and not something like square(inp) == inp ^ 2.

This is of course a bit of a contrived, very simple example, so it might seem silly, but I think you can imagine more complex functions where it's less clear that "computing" the expected output in some way "cheats" the test.</comment></comment>


A look at VDO, the new Linux compression layer - <AUTHOR> https://www.redhat.com/de/blog/look-vdo-new-linux-compression-layer <comment><USER2> At first I was confused because I thought that someone miraculously implemented compression with no context switching via VDSO. Funny to see how wrong I was ;)

Could someone explain how VDO works to me? Based on the example, it looks like another DM backend, like LUKS and such. It exposes a virtual device backed by a real one, adding a layer of compression, am I reading it right? I can also see that we're specifying a "logical size" that is exposed to the user. How much space is really used and how is it allocated? Can I grow the logical size later?

Apart from this - what is the status of the patch, is it redhat-only or is it on its way to the upstream?

<comment><USER3> > It exposes a virtual device backed by a real one, adding a layer of > compression, am I reading it right?

And deduplication, yes.

>Can I grow the logical size later?

Yes; the man page for the program discusses the growLogical subcommand briefly: [https://github.com/dm-vdo/vdo/blob/220.127.116.11/vdo- manager/man/...](https://github.com/dm-vdo/vdo/blob/220.127.116.11/vdo- manager/man/vdo.8#L281)

>I can also see that we're specifying a "logical size" that is exposed to the user. How much space is really used and how is it allocated?

There's a vdostats command mentioned in the article that exposes how much actual space is available and used.

>Apart from this - what is the status of the patch, is it redhat-only or is it on its way to the upstream?

It has not yet been submitted as a kernel patch.

<comment><USER4> If I specify a logical size, and that's larger than the physical backing size, then what happens if someone attempts to write unique high-entropy data to fill their logical space?

<comment><USER3> VDO will return ENOSPC when it gets a write and has nowhere to store it. The filesystem or other writer is responsible for passing ENOSPC up to the user, just like if dm-thin were to run out of space.

<comment><USER2> OK, that sounds like a convincing reason not to use this feature - it really looks like it covers wrong abstraction. Consider reasons why you could get ENOSPC before:

1\. Ran out of disk space,

2\. Ran out of inodes,

3\. Media reported ENOSPC and it gets propagated,

4\. (something else I don't know about?)

So now, #3 gets more common. Is it actually something that FS devs think about? "What if I get this weird error message?" Or is it something that could trigger a some destructive edge case in the filesystem and lead to serious data loss? You mention dm-thin doing the same, so I guess that at least the popular filesystems should handle it well.

Anyway, when you think about it, how do you debug #3? You checked file size, you checked number of inodes, other than that the FS gives you no feedback. There's no central API to signalling this kind of problems and suggested solutions and I would say that this makes systems much less flexible. You could of course run vdostats (and whatever dm-thin uses to report its resources), but just imagine the amount of delicate code you would need to automatically solve this kind of issues. It's insane, it really looks like crappy engineering to me.

<comment><USER3> #3 is certainly not a historically common error from a disk, but thin provisioning has been around for a while -- dm-thin was introduced in Linux 3.2 in 2012, and filesystems in my opinion worked extensively to handle ENOSPC correctly since then. Consider that storage returning ENOSPC at a particular write and all thereafter is roughly equivalent to storage stopping writing suddenly, and storage stopping writing is equivalent to a system crash and reboot. Filesystems do work hard to recover without loss of unflushed data from a crash, assuming the storage was properly processing flushes, and this case should be very similar.

Filesystems (and VDO) both log extensively to the kernel log in an out of space situation, so inspection via dmesg or journalctl hopefully leads swiftly to identification of the problem. The 'dmeventd' daemon provides automatic monitoring of various devices (thin, snapshot, and raid) and emits warnings when the thin-provisioned devices it is aware of are low on space; there's a bug filed against VDO to emit similar warnings [1]. Careful monitoring is definitely important with thin provisioned devices, though.

[1] [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1519307](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1519307)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For data compression it uses the LZ4 format [1] (real-time LZ77-like data compressor -without entropy encoding, just string references and literals-, with small blocks so its LUT-based O(1) search is always in the data cache).

[1] [https://rhelblog.redhat.com/2018/02/05/understanding-the- con...](https://rhelblog.redhat.com/2018/02/05/understanding-the-concepts- behind-virtual-data-optimizer-vdo-in-rhel-7-5-beta/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is great news!

At my employer, we're currently using btrfs in production for deduplication. It's relatively stable nowadays, but fragmentation and maintenance are massive issues for our use case.

<comment><USER6> On Redhat? Are you aware that Redhat has deprecated btrfs? I believe btrfs still used heavily in SUSE.

<comment><USER7> Exactly!

_" The Btrfs file system has been in Technology Preview state since the initial release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Red Hat will not be moving Btrfs to a fully supported feature and it will be removed in a future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Btrfs file system did receive numerous updates from the upstream in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 and will remain available in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 series. However, this is the last planned update to this feature."_

Source: [https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterp...](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/7.4_release_notes/chap- red_hat_enterprise_linux-7.4_release_notes-deprecated_functionality)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you plan to use it for your personal traditional storage HDD, you have to keep in mind that it will render most (if not all) data recovery tools naught. Tools such as PhotoRec rely on the file headers to determine the file type to recover the data.

I have a long-term storage HDD that I thought I would never need data recovery on it until I fucked it up good by a wrong partitioning command. Normally those types of mistakes can be recovered by TestDisk but not that time. I realized my only hope was to use PhotoRec to recover what I can from the garbage that I overwrote on the disk. Thanks to PhotoRec I could recover most of them with messed up names. I was so thankful I didn't use any fancy compression algorithm.

Tools such as LVM, SSD backing storage, btrfs, compression and stuff are all nice when you understand their limitations. For now, I don't use all of my storage so I just create ext3, ext4, and exFAT partitions to store my data for the maximal chance of recovery, whether it is due to hardware or software.

<comment><USER9> Using something like VDO for personal storage would be pretty pointless.

Unless, of course, you have a ton of similar virtual machines or other data with high amount of 4 kB block size aligned redundancy.

<comment><USER10> If your data directories have much redundancy (so deduplication can help), or are nicely compressable, then VDO can also make sense for home setups. Like companies, you would consider things like "does it make sense for my kind of data", "do I have enough CPU cycles/ram to spend on getting storage down to some degree" and "am I ok with the additional layer, so more complicated setup".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Considering that it is based on blazingly fast lz4, using twice as much time as non-VDO in this simple test seems ..bad? I suppose the dedup stage is really expensive here. On a setup like this with simple compression, I would have expected the results to be inverted.

<comment><USER12> I would have thought they would consider zstd also, because that would be even better and easier tunable. But I guess there are some license problems still.

<comment><USER13> Reading some blog posts and such about ZFS compression, I got the impression that simpler algorithms such as LZ4 and LZO are typically preferred for transparent storage compression. Presumably a balance must be struck between the benefits of writing less data and the cost of taking CPU time away from other code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if you can run VDO on top of ZFS.

Or is there a better way to handle snapshots and data integrity (block level checksums)?

Without block level checksums, a single corrupted data block could corrupt half of your virtual machine images...

<comment><USER14> LVM provides CoW snapshots. But why would you use this instead of ZFS's native compression or dedup ?

<comment><USER9> How about block level checksums? Can LVM do that as well? Or is there some other way?

ZFS dedup takes 320 bytes of RAM per unique block "record". So _1TB of RAM_ is enough to dedup only a bit over 6 TB worth of unique blocks, when using a block size that works well with virtual machines — 4 kB.

One can of course use larger ZFS record size than 4kB. But virtual machine dedup savings drop very sharply as a result _if_ record size does not match virtual machine filesystem block size and alignment. This happens, because there are exponentially more different combinations how 4 kB blocks can be arranged inside a bigger record size.

It's painful to format all virtual machine images to use say 64/128 kB filesystem block size to be able to efficiently use larger ZFS record size dedup.

I understand VDO dedup requires significantly less memory and uses only 4 kB blocks for dedup. This is ideal for VM storage application.

<comment><USER15> How about taking block level checksum a few levels higher and finally build a filesystem that has a Merkle tree checksum?

<comment><USER16> You mean like ZFS?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So it's a layer under the filesystem and should work with any filesystem in theory? So would XFS + VDO be better than let's say using compression in BTRFS?

<comment><USER10> Yes, VDO is transparent for the layers above, like filesystems. XFS+VDO might be preferable to BTRFS, if it has the features you need. \- LVM could be used for snapshots, but the snapshots from BTRFS might be preferable in corner cases where many snapshots are done (snapshots in XFS are being worked on AFAIK, these could then be comparable) \- XFS+VDO combination might be more reliable, it's a completely supported combination on RHEL, whereas BTRFS is just techpreview \- only missing feature coming to mind is checksums over data blocks, XFS is only providing checksums over meta data

<comment><USER18> How do filesystems cope with the apparent capacity of the disk changing? If you put a lot of data on that compresses really well, suddenly your disk will appear to have become larger.

<comment><USER10> The capacity is not changing 'rapidly', instead the whole VDO device is thin provisioned. Let's assume a 1TB harddisk, then when creating a VDO device ontop, you can have that directly appear as 3TB, so 'thin provisioned'.

The filesystem ontop always sees 3TB, unless you explicitly modify the VDO device. Of course, you have to monitor the VDO status tightly: if you happen to store data on the filesystem which is absolutely unique, has no zeros and is uncompressable, then dedup/compression can not do anything. The VDO device can only consume up to ~1TB of such data. Your monitoring should detect the low space on the VDO backend before, and you should then either stop writing or extend the backend device.

<comment><USER18> What happens if you go over the limit? Does VDO reject writes? Or is your filesystem lost.

<comment><USER10> With the current code, your data becomes unmountable in that case. There is a workaround for getting the data accessable: leave a bit of the underlying blockdevice unused, so when creating VDO ontop give it not the full blockdevice. Then, in case the filesystem ontop completely fills up, the last part of the blockdevice can be used to grow the VDO device, and the filesystem can be mounted.

Should be tried out before relying on it. The current behaviour seems to be considered a bug, [https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1519377](https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1519377) has details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The opening question made me laugh because I actually _do_ feel I have too much storage.

I haven't bought a new hard drive in years, and I'm only using maybe 1.5 Tb of ~3 Tb, and most of that space is used up by RAW images from my DSLR. At the rate I'm going, it'll be 2 or 3 years before I need a new drive.

<comment><USER3> Personally I do agree about hard drives. They're so enormous these days that I'll never use even a moderately sized one. I'm spoiled, though, and love my SSDs; they're fast, smaller, and more expensive, and just a couple of VMs quickly eat up a bunch of expensive space. With VDO, I personally run 20 VMs instead of 8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Remember when the N in O(N) was the size of the problem, rather than the quantity of O(lg N') indirection layers? Pepperidge Ph4rm remembers.</comment>


Walmart, Target Workers Are Terrified of Enforcing Mask Rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedailybeast.com/walmart-target-workers-are-terrified-of-enforcing-mask-rules <comment><USER2> My significant other works at Home Depot, which is the Walmart of home improvement stores.

She echos the same fears and is daily harassed by customers. Doesn't help that she's also a PoC so on top of people taking their anger out on a minimum wage worker they are also throwing in racism to the fire.

Why people think the cashiers at HD or WMT are making the choice about masks is beyond me but they need a reality check that it isn't their decision and they are just trying to maintain employment</comment>