Ask HN: Review my pivot, a server uptime monitor - <AUTHOR>

Okie dokie -- Monitor For Me as a home alarm monitoring service was an utter flop, so I let it stagnate while I moved on to other things.
The other day a critical server of mine went down and I only discovered it by chance. "Shazam," I thought, "a pivot is in order!"  I reoriented the service, got it live, and then I discovered Pingdom, UptimeRobot, and the several other options (that I somehow missed in my single cursory Google search) that already provide monitoring and notifications.
Not to worry, though, because I still believe I can carve out a piece of the market.
Monitor For Me checks up to 10 websites (or any hostname/IP and port that can be opened) every minute per user for $15/month.  It'll also capture and show you response times from (currently) three cities around the US, and I plan to add a 4th in the US and one in London before too long.
Obviously there are a tremendous number of reporting, connection types, and options in general that can be added for value, but I want to start with the MVP -- a simple service to let you know (by SMS or email) when your server goes down.
Any hackers around here mind signing up and trying it out and letting me know what you think?  Am I wasting my time (because the product needs more oomph or because there just isn't market share available)?
Edit: Also, if you've used other services like this, what was missing?  What was unnecessary?
If you don't mind taking a look, visit http://monitorfor.me (clicky below), and use the access code HNFTW (limited to 15 users, I'll update if it fills up) for a free month of access.
Thanks a million!
- John <comment><USER2> This problem has been addressed over the last 20 years by more products and services than I can remember, ranging from csh scripts that would ping a site and send an email if it was down to HP OpenView.

There are more than a few and sub $100 tools for Windows that'll do this and a lot more, so charging $15 for a service isn't going to fly.

Further, to properly monitor uptime requires a lot more than just monitoring the host. You need to monitor the various services, and the health of those services. Is the web server returning a valid page or a 404?

Then there's the need to monitor hosts and services that are not publicly routable, getting into authentication or the need to run the service inside the firewall rather than via a public site.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know if I agree with the notion that the service model itself (or at least it's pricing model) isn't viable....

People ARE using services like these (see UptimeRobot and Pingdom as the examples mentioned above). Some of the services are free, some cost $10 a month, some $40.

That said, MY implementation may not be viable, but it's not costing me much of anything to find out, so I'm still going to give it a go.

As to what the service offers, there is obviously more that needs to be done for critical infrastructure monitoring, but for the average Joe running a website or three, keeping an eye on the web server is a good, basic start.

I'm also thinking of people like affiliate marketers (which I'm also attempting to get into) that use their servers to host landing pages and ads (and their tracking) for which they may get charged without a result if the server is down. THESE guys just want to know immediately, I should think, that they may be losing a lot of money with no chance of ROI.

In any case, I certainly appreciate your feedback!

\- John

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So this works by pinging the server? I ask because a lot of downtime is the malfunction of a specific program or component that still keeps ping and http intact. How do you detect this?

And if it's a ping thing, why would I pay 15 bucks per month and trust a third party when I can write my own script to dump failed ping results to my email?

I fail to see the distinguishing feature that I need monitorfor.me for.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Obviously most of us in the highly technical crowd could very easily throw a script like this together, but I'm targeting a somewhat less technical crowd (still guys that know they need it, but don't program).

The other benefit is that I offer (rather, will offer -- don't have it replicated yet) geographically distributed, redundant checking for up to 10 sites. This is a bit harder (and more expensive) to accomplish for the general developer.

Regarding the method of detection, I actually use a standard "fopen," to the hostname and port you specify, rather than a straight ping. In this way you could test specifically for your webserver (port 80) or SMTP server (25) rather than a generic ping. I even use it to test custom socket server platforms I have running.

Does that answer your questions? Change your mind about the value of the service?

Thanks!

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry if I come across as crude, but in startups there's no room for sugar-coating.

Personally I think that anyone who feels they need this kind of service (e.g. a less-techy manager at a company) almost certainly has some go-to tech guy that could whip it up over lunch. If the company doesn't have such a guy, they're probably doomed anyway.

I just don't see much of a market here and I would be surprised if this thing, in its current iteration, would ever buy you ramen. You might be onto something, but I think you should aim higher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://monitorfor.me>

Invite code: HNFTW (on the registration page)

</comment><comment><USER4> Not to pee on your cornflakes, but for basic ping monitoring, even geographically distributed, $15 a month is a VERY high price.

For that cost, I'd expect it to do a lot more.</comment>


The Evolution of Web Design - <AUTHOR> http://cssmysite.com/css

<comment><USER2> Good idea. The execution lacks quite a bit though.

<comment><USER2> Here's a similar attempt: [http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/interface- tutorials/five-l...](http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/interface- tutorials/five-looks-one-layout-how-to-develop-a-library-of-web-design-styles- at-your-fingertips/)

<comment><USER3> That's more current styles though, I like it.

<comment><USER2> So do I. It would be cool with a more complete "catalogue" of common styles, to have to compare between. I know there is an infinite number of classifications, but there's a lot of commonly seen themes, that could be turned into a taxonomy of sorts.

Sort of a "design patterns" catalogue of web design. Maybe it exists already?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant No standard alternate style sheets. Again.

</comment><comment><USER4> The Web2.0 style looks more like a frontpage scheme. It's not even a good attempt to look web2.0-y. Most of the stylesheets are just poor executions of various styles that are even still in use in many places...

I don't know if this was supposed to be a sarcastic or academic look at web design but I think it falls short on both accounts.</comment>


New Racket web page - <AUTHOR> http://racket-lang.org/?new

<comment><USER2> Small error: the 'explain' text on the 'Find Racket files' example uses 'p' while the code uses 'path'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I've fixed it and it should be live soonish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The snap to top is annoying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I agree. It's annoyingly difficult to fix, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've now fixed this, and it should be live at some point soon.</comment></comment></comment>


Are Dreadlocks Unprofessional? - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/news/article/2010/10/virginia-company-sued-for-refusing-to-hire-man-with-dreadlocks.html

<comment><USER2> This company is stupid x2 for wading into this: first, because it's easy to claim that refusing a dark-skinned candidate a job over dreads is a proxy for racial discrimination, and second because hair length is a genuine issue for major world religions, like Sikhs. Both are called out specifically by the Civil Rights Act.

We work in some of the most button-down corporate environments imaginable with people who wear dreads. It will not be hard for Woodson's lawyers to find examples of other companies dealing with this issue.

It's hard to even see a controversy here. Sorry, you don't get to not hire someone because they wear dreads.

<comment><USER3> It's not as simple as that. For example, religious freedom laws don't allow Rastas to smoke ganja, nor Sikhs to carry their swords onto planes.

<comment><USER4> Smoking plants and carrying weapons represent health and safety concerns for the people surrounding them. Dreadlocks do not. There's a huge difference. Don't even pretend that carrying a weapon is similar to having a certain hair style.

<comment><USER5> >Smoking plants and carrying weapons represent health and safety concerns for the people surrounding them.

you do believe that the government's caring about your health is the reason why ganja is outlawed?

<comment><USER2> I hope I speak for all of us when I say that this is not a discussion we can productively have on HN.

The "dreads" issue is at least marginally interesting to HN, if only to send loud-and-clear the message of "DON'T MENTION SOMEONE'S HAIR AS A HIRING CRITERIA".

<comment><USER6> yeah it went so well the last time it happened; keep ridiculing. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1641042>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Totally situational. The guy is a mover, not a heart surgeon. I certainly think that as the "stuffy old guy" generation of management is slowly replaced with the "hip younger guy/girl" generation, more interesting/unusual styles will likely become more frequently acceptable. Still, it is situation and industry dependent.

When I worked in radio I had an orange mohawk for a while. Nobody cared. When I was an on-set medic however that would not have been ok.

It is sometimes a rather thin line between an individual's beliefs, style or values being impinged upon vs. a common professional expectation of conduct/appearance.

<comment><USER2> It is probably not situational when the candidate offers to conceal his hair on the job, and you in effect respond by saying "cut your hair or no deal". Even police departments have had to back down and allow Sikhs to wear turbans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> what is bothering me in all such cases is the emphasis of the religious grounds for the things like long hair. It sounds like a guy insisting on long hair because of religion would have more "right" for it than one who'd just happen to prefer his hair long. Why such preferential treatment of religion?

<comment><USER8> "It sounds like a guy insisting on long hair because of religion would have more "right" for it than one who'd just happen to prefer his hair long."

That is correct. For instance, during Prohibition in the United States, use of wine in communion services was permitted, despite its illegality elsewhere.

Basically, society has judged that deeply held religious beliefs are more worthy of protection than mere personal preferences.

<comment><USER5> >Basically, society has judged that deeply held religious beliefs are more worthy of protection than mere personal preferences.

Sounds like a deep religious belief which have no written support in the current laws or the Constitution of USA.

Of course there are successful cases of lobbying for a privilege like the one you mentioned - an especially funny one considering that the churches were the main driving force behind the Prohibition, yet carved out an exception for themselves.

<comment><USER8> "Sounds like a deep religious belief which have no written support in the current laws or the Constitution of USA."

Actually, the US Constitution prevents the government from establishing an official religion or from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. Federal law extends this protection of religion into the commercial sphere by preventing employers from discriminating on the basis of religion (unless it is a religious organization, or the employee's religion would somehow interfere with the job).

"an especially funny one considering that the churches were the main driving force behind the Prohibition, yet carved out an exception for themselves."

Prohibition is an interesting case, as it was actually one religious group (low-church Protestants) lobbying for it over the objections of another (Catholics and some high-church Protestants).

<comment><USER5> yes, the law prevents anybody from interfering into your personal religious beliefs or from making various economic, social, political, etc... decisions based on your religion. Ie. you're guaranteed to have the same rights as anybody else. Nothing in the law guarantees you preferential treatment or more rights just because of your religious beliefs or practice.

<comment><USER8> That's not the case. As a matter of law, actions undertaken for religious reasons are more protected than actions undertaken for mere personal preference. You may disagree with this approach, but that's a different question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The two ads I had to click to hide and the sharing toolbar on inc.com are all more objectionable than dreadlocks.

As tptacek has written, is there even a controversy here?

</comment><comment><USER10> In all honestly I would think they might be an occupational hazard for someone working as a mover, no?

<comment><USER5> there are couple of situation where long hair would be funny, not for long though - in a machine shop or inside moving tank with main caliber gun auto- stabilizing targeting system on - even untied headphone wires would on several occassions pull the head in

<comment><USER2> Tons of people with long hair work in machine shops. In fact, it's possible that _more_ people with long hair work in machine shops than other professions, statistically, because of the socioeconomic signifiers of long hair on caucasian men (there are far more long-haired white men than there are rastas and sikhs).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is this really an issue? The applicant seems to be "in violation" of an established, company policy of stating "that hair, facial hair, beards and general grooming must be neat, clean and trimmed".

He was obviously not rejected due to his religion, but due to not adhering (or wanting to adhere to) a policy that was in place prior to his application.

Note: I have absolutely no objection people having dreads, and would have no trouble with colleagues having it. I merely believe that a company should have a freedom to say "no thanks" to applicants not wanting to fit in the existing rule framework.

Also, it ticks me off slightly that he uses religion as a way to gain sympathy for his complaint.

<comment><USER2> Require his dreads to be neat and clean, then move on. You can no more dictate hairstyle than you can dictate that men be clean-shaven; whether or not it's your established "rule framework", it's going to get you sued by the first litigious Muslim candidate you reject, and rightly so: modulo hygiene, employee hairstyles are none of your business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ok, Did their lawyers tell them to write that. First of all a Rasta can't cut his hear, Nazarite vow. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazirite>

This is something that some Rastafarian take very seriously. If you did cut your hair depending on where you live and what the Rastafarian believe there, it could result in a leg or hand being forcefully amputated.

So seeing that statement by the employer makes it seem they are ignorant of the religion. And, somehow they think a little hair off the head wouldn't hurt. At this point if I was the lawyer, I would look to settle.

</comment><comment><USER13> I would say going through the process of building up your dreadlocks is what makes them appear unprofessional.

<http://www.dreadlocks.us/dreadlocks-faq.html>

</comment><comment><USER14> It depends on how smelly they are. Hopefully this is not considered a trolling comment, but, in all seriousness some dreadlocks reek and some don't. It depends on how long they have been in, how they were formed and the persons individual preference on how they maintain them.

It also depends on the job - a company hiring in house legal representation who may end up in court eventually shouldn't be criticized for wanting a "cleaner image" in the court room. Someone hiring a programmer? Who cares...

<comment><USER2> You see how "wanting a cleaner image in the court room" here has a societal impact on Sikhs and Muslims, right? A well cared-for beard or hairstyle is not "unclean" simply because it doesn't match how Europeans wear their hair.

This is almost case-in-point for why you don't want employers having the right to dictate hairstyles.

<comment><USER14> I agree with your point, and don't personally accept the given definition of a "clean image", which is why I quoted it. I am just addressing the fact that decisions can easily ride on the appearance of an individual. To extend the lawyer analogy, imagine you are in court defending yourself from some criminal accusation. If you had to pick your lawyer between two identically skilled individuals, and one had dreads to his waste and the other was a "clean cut" individual, which would you choose?

I have no desire for a corporation able to define anything about my style or individuality, however, it happens regularly. It's one of the many reasons I work for myself.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do people bid early on eBay? - <AUTHOR>

Lately I'm seeing people get into bidding wars on my eBay auctions (popular, high-priced things like Apple products) within the first day of a 7-day auction (no "Buy It Now" or reserve price). It's driving me crazy trying to understand the rationale driving the behavior when "sniping" is pretty much always better for the buyer.
So far, I'm thinking it could be one of three things:
1. People think eBay works like a traditional English auction where it ends after a period of bidding inactivity. If so, they are mistakenly hoping no one else sees the auction for a while and that they'll somehow win before the auction's end date.
2. People are using a "shotgun" approach, bidding (low) on a large number of similar items, and not really tracking any one auction closely. They're hoping to win something if they bid in enough auctions.
3. People think eBay is small and that no one else will see these popular items before the auction ends.
#1 doesn't seem very likely since many of these people have high feedback scores and are presumably familiar with eBay.
#2 seems more likely, but is a bit disturbing because it indicates these people are probably committed in their bids to purchasing much more than their budget would allow. Fortunately, they probably win so rarely that they aren't on the line for too much, but it could be dangerous if they win many of the same/similar items (why eBay doesn't allow sellers to target only buyers who have the funds available via PayPal is beyond me - I've been stuck with non-paying buyers on eBay on numerous occasions and it's really annoying).
#3 would still be irrational - that is, even in a limited market, it'd be advantageous to wait and bid late.
Any insights here? Is there a good reason for this behavior, or should we just assume that these people are... lacking in intelligence (trying to rule that out as an option)? <comment><USER2> > It's driving me crazy trying to understand the rationale driving the > behavior when "sniping" is pretty much always better for the buyer.

Bidding the maximum you are willing to pay early is better for the buyer in pretty much all cases. The only real benefit of sniping is that you don't spend time with potential liability hanging out.

> Any insights here? Is there a good reason for this behavior

From your description of the kinds of items -- high-price commodities with high volumes trading on eBay -- one possibility is that its people who are also selling the same products supporting the prices by making sure that there aren't auctions for the same goods open at very low prices for long (in the unlikely event that they somehow do end up winning some of the auctions because the auction slipped through everyone else's radar given the large number of similar items, they can just turn around and sell the items.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I really haven't done auctions in years, but with the way ebay works, with the current price one bid increment above the previous bidders maximum price, what's there to gain from sniping? You wait until the last minute or so, and then _hope_ that the leading bidder has set a lower maximum price than yours? Or hope that they don't understand how ebay works, more likely.

Personally, I would put in a bid whenever I found something I was looking for, and then wait for the email telling me I'd won, if ever. No emotional investment, no getting caught up. I'd just figure out what's the most I'd pay for something, and then go.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've bid early in the past when the bid itself was rather high compared to he item value (helping to ensure the purchase) when I've come across an auction without BuyItNow enabled.

This is due to 1) personal need for the item, 2)the threat of being unable to access the computer or auction at the auction end time, 3) the lack of effort towards setting up an automation of some sort to do it for me.

Sniping is better for the buyer, I agree. The effect is just too small on certain low cost items for me to give a damn.

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes sense (especially the part about not having access to bid closer to the end time) for something cheap or with few alternatives.

Still doesn't make sense to me why these people are bidding - mostly lower than the item value - for things like iPhones that have literally thousands of eBay auctions going on at any given time.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> BTW - a web search for this turns up some very... interesting results of people trying to defend the practice of early eBay bidding. The "logic" consists of stuff like "waiting to bid at the end only gives time for more competition to bid, so it'll be priced higher". Hmmm... makes my head hurt :)</comment>


Superstition: Startups with derivative names fail... - <AUTHOR>

Even if you have first mover, e.g. Feedster, Friendster,...so be original. <comment><USER2> Generalized version: startups fail.

<comment><AUTHOR> A brutal calculus indeed...but best to take notice of what has failed in every case.</comment></comment>


U.S. stock futures plunge, hit limit down - <AUTHOR> https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stock-futures-plunge-hit-limit-down-2020-03-22?mod=home-page <comment><AUTHOR> Happening again for the nth time this month... another -10% tomorrow is likely.

It is getting harder and harder for me to stay in the market, I don't think the investors have fully realized how crazy it is going to be, and the more it starts hitting home, the more they "price in" the situation by selling and causing another 10% drop every time, even if the growth curve has been predicted for weeks this would happen exactly the way it's happening...

I am down 30% and I have everything in the stock market, expect 2 years of living expenses. This sucks so bad it's painful.</comment>


Turns out the signal astronomers saw was "strong" because it came from Earth - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/08/turns-out-the-signal-astronomers-saw-was-strong-because-it-came-from-earth/ <comment><USER2> You mean the aliens are already here?</comment>


New in Thunderbird 78 - <AUTHOR> https://www.thunderbird.net/thunderbird/78.0/whatsnew/?locale=en-GB&version=78.2.2&channel=release&os=%OS%&buildid=%APPBUILDID%&oldversion=68.12.0 <comment><USER2> Thought I'd already read all this. And then installed it and used it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23864934](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23864934)

</comment><comment><USER3> I haven't updated yet, but I sure hope those "address bar pills" are editable ... That's one of my major peeves in webmail clients, which means a typo in the email address requires me to retype the whole thing.

<comment><USER4> I hate those things! In outlook webmail, they completely break copying and pasting addresses and in some cases it replaces the address with names and makes it really hard to find out what the actual address is.

<comment><USER5> Yes! I get so frustrated by those for that reason.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is anyone successfully using Thunderbird with Office 365 + Google for calendars and mail? I've found various plugins but never got both working consistently for both services. Imap, caldav, etc. are a breeze but unfortunately work requirements mean I need to use the two big non-standards.

<comment><USER7> I am using TBSync for Office 365. It only works one way. Events in my O365 calendar show up in my TB calendar, but not vice versa.

RSVP doesn't also work right now from the TB calendar. Author claims he might fix it by the end of the year.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the recommendation, I just tried it and it seems perfect!

Contrary to your experience, I was even able to create events from thunderbird that would show up on O365. They only show up on sync however (which does not seems to be automatic, only on timer). Maybe that's the reason why it did not appear to work for you?

<comment><USER7> There might have been updates. I haven't tried in a while - I have to use the Meeting Scheduler in O365 to set up any meetings that I do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's great that it supports PGP/GPG out of the box now, but it broke the support for yubikey/smarcards, which is really important for me.

I hope the add support for encrypted and signed mails with smarcards soon, meanwhile I will have to use something else.

<comment><USER10> @pinbox you should ask about this at [https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/e2ee](https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/e2ee)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> New thunderbird is not working with our current mail server and doesn't show any helpful error message, is there any way to check what is not right? and probably I am not alone with this problem...

<comment><USER12> [https://www.thunderbird.net/en- US/thunderbird/78.0/releaseno...](https://www.thunderbird.net/en- US/thunderbird/78.0/releasenotes/) TLS 1.0 and 1.1 disabled change security.tls.version.min to 2 (TLS 1.1) or 1 (TLS 1.0)

<comment><USER11> Thanks! Now looks like need to upgrade my TLS!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd like to see it pushed out to dnf repositories. Loathe to do a manual install and then have to do an install in a few days via dnf. Still the 68 branch showing in Fedora

</comment><comment><USER14> Holy God! --talk about having been beaten by the Ugly Stick. What the hell where they thinking?

<comment><USER14> Seriously. The 1990s called. They want their drop-shadow back...

[https://i.imgur.com/Gmeig6a.png](https://i.imgur.com/Gmeig6a.png)

Even in the 1990s, even the most drop-shadow addicted designers resisted the urge to put some on the actual copy text!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A while back I reverted to TB 68 (now 68.10.0), because a newer one broke something. Unfortunately can't remember what it was.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wondering after every update ... Thunderbird has had tabs for years but you can still not write a new message in a tab.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there an upgrade path from 68 yet?

<comment><USER10> yes

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> >REDESIGNED COMPOSE WINDOW

While you were at it you could've align UI elements.

<comment><USER19> I'm pretty sure PRs are welcome.

<comment><USER18> Happy to hear.

I'm just a mere mortal though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I welcome the addition of dark mode, but isn't it time we take a look at why the whole program's UI freezes for tens of seconds when wrangling more than 2 accounts?

<comment><USER21> On windows? This is the fault of windows defender locking files until virus scan finished.

After I declared an exception for thunderbird.exe, thunderbird performs as well as on Linux

<comment><USER20> After following your instructions, I did not notice an improvement in performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> One major (and unexpected) issue I ran into with Thunderbird is font size. On my monitor, it's way too small to be usable.

The recommended fix appears to mess with the `layout.css.devPixelsPerPx` configuration and even then, font is inconsistent when moving from external monitor to laptop screen.

</comment><comment><USER23> If they made a way to configure it using YAML I'd be tempted to switch.

<comment><USER24> Are you ok with steps in between? A puppet module is there [https://forge.puppet.com/puppetfinland/thunderbird](https://forge.puppet.com/puppetfinland/thunderbird)

I'm sure you could find one for ansible and other frameworks out there.

<comment><USER23> Cool, but at that point I would probably just stick with what I have until it can be natively supported, or see if their current config is easy to template myself.</comment></comment></comment>


Why do companies hire non technical people to be their Directors of IT? - <AUTHOR> http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/34693-why-do-companies-hire-non-technical-people-to-be-their-directors-of-it

<comment><USER3> Not sure why this typo laden self professed rant rant is on the front page.

Even the single point anecdote doesn't really hang together logically. Is the hiring manager also the director of IT? At most mid-to-large organizations, those roles are distinct.

It's also not clear why he thinks the company hiring consultants to handle day to day tasks is such an obvious financial loss. Financially, full time employees aren't exactly free either. Work product wise, if it's really "script kiddie work" - why is he applying to begin with?

Either way, I think everyone probably agrees that - all else equal - <USER2> proficiency is better than not. IMO, teams led by well-rounded managers/executives are in a better position than those without.

However, it's also true that non-technical skills play a bigger role higher up on the org chart. This includes obtaining the role as well as fulfilling its duties.

Put plainly : it's possible to delegate technical tasks, but impossible delegate the managerial ones (that is, after all, the job).

</comment><comment><USER4> So there are two parts to this question: why do you end up with non-technical directors of IT and why do you end up with idiots who raise obviously dumb helpdesk calls.

The later one is a fair question and I can't answer it in any useful way beyond the fact that organisations are often structured to allow and indeed reward things which might otherwise be seen as odd.

As to the former, a few reasons spring to mind:

1) Because it's hard remaining technical once you reach a certain level. Sure, you can be the best sysadmin or developer in the company, but when you move up the ladder you will spend more and more time doing non-technical things. As that happens you'll pretty rapidly find that others will surpass you technically - entirely reasonable as they're doing stuff five days a week, you're not. If you're managing a big department then the amount of time you're hands on will rapidly drop to zero and given the pace of technology within three years or so you're probably better assuming you know nothing as what you do know is as likely to be wrong as it is right.

2) Because they should have decent people they can trust to know and do that stuff. People complain that technical people aren't trusted but having a technical manager as often as not results in meddling and second guessing. A decent IT manager should understand high level principals, be able to ask the right questions and help structure thinking and other than that should let their staff do what he pays them to do. As to why they employ consultants to do things their existing staff can do - a lot of the time this seems to be the case but in 20 years I actually can't think of a single place I've worked where this has been true. Sometimes there's a lack of resource (that is people are busy elsewhere), sometimes specialist knowledge is needed or whatever. In my experience people are usually either neutral or positive about consultants coming in.

3) Consider that troubleshooting a VPN isn't the best use of their time. Possibly they could sort out their own VPN connection but if they're earning a six figure salary is it best that they spend half a day sorting it out themselves or that they call in someone who can sort it out in 30 minutes?

The short version: a director of IT isn't some sort of senior, senior sysadmin. It's a different job that needs different skills. Yep having technical understanding would be nice but given the choice between a director of IT who could configure a firewall and one who could manage budgets and keep political crap off my desk I know which one I'd take everytime.

<comment><USER5> 4) The CEO and any other execs involved in the hiring process don't know enough to hire for the position properly. Anecdotally, every single case I've seen of a non-technical Engineering / IT director (multiple, first and second hand), this has been the case.

<comment><USER4> Indeed. There are a bunch of bad reasons but I thought I'd try and point out some reasons why it's not necessarily a sign of incompetence.

Some of this comes down to organisation and department size too. You get directors of IT where a department of five or six people. In that instance they should absolutely have some recent technical exposure. Once you get up to a department of 20 or so though technical competence isn't top of the list of things a candidate has to have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Above a certain level in almost any large organization (and, unsurprisingly, many small ones) company structures are are optimized for highly political corporate sociopaths.

Thus, the op question could be rephrased as "why do companies hire executives unskilled in the role they are nominally obligated to perform?"

The answer is simply that the unwritten primary qualification for any given executive in such an organization is "Political Maneuvering". Everything else is secondary.

You will find that the exception to this is commonly, though certainly not in all cases, finance positions.

If you find a company where this isn't true and where you enjoy working, it's a keeper.

</comment><comment><USER7> Firstly look at the highest level of management, CEOs are not always experts in their fields but have a broad knowledge of operations, finance, HR, payroll, legal etc.

IT Directors do not need to be highly technical (although some technical knowledge is normally required), to manage outcomes.

Prior to my previous role at a startup, I was in the IT industry for over 15 years. What I learned taking on the CTO role is that it isn't just technical. I went from programming/infrastructure/architecting to doing budgets, recruiting, planning, and management on many levels and importantly relied on the staff underneath me to take on the low-level IT issues and provide knowledge.

Management is taking on a more important role in business in all sectors including IT. The people who fullfil these roles will start being from different backgrounds, and as organisations start to look to turn their IT departments into profit centres, they will take on people from roles like product and project management.

However I fear the day when a sales exec runs IT :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Given that half of the professional IT people I've ever worked with don't even have IT-related qualifications, I'm really not surprised (but I am disappointed for our industry that the bar is set so low).

Can you work as a lawyer without a law degree? No. As a doctor without a medical degree? No. As an IT worker without a computing-related degree? Sure thing, how hard can it be!

I guess the differences are:

1\. IT is still young as a profession. 2\. IT lacks professional bodies to regulate the industry (see above).

So we end up with lots of unqualified people pulling the strings :-(

<comment><USER9> It would be nice for some kind of professional body or 10 to come into existence, so you can become say a Chartered IT <something> after either a relevant degree, few years experience and a bar exam, or a more years experience and the same exam. It's so hard for many companies to tell the difference between a guy that simply knows computers or someone who can make the right technology decisions.

<comment><USER10> In security, this is becoming more and more the case. A lot of the CISOs (equivalent to CIO / Sr. Director of IT, but for Security) have CISSPs these days.

I also haven't run into a Director of Network Engineering that wasn't a CCNP or higher for about 5+ years now (this wasn't always the case)

I think the major challenge for "Director of IT" is that it can comprise a heckuva lot of disciplines. Even for a small company - you are looking a BizApps, Back Office Servers (Exchange, AD), Oracle DBAs, Network Engineering, Telecom, Desktop Support, ServerRoom Operations - and all the political pain associated with managing all the various interests that want things their way...

<comment><USER9> Security certainly has it nailed, since the CISSP works like I described, and isn't vendor specific.

I believe a senior IT 'management' type qualification needs to cover, amongst a wide variety of things, things like development management (e.g. mythical man month) cost management (e.g. COCOMO) and general business sense (e.g. not getting locked in by a vendor).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Striking the right balance is tough. As I'm mostly around in and around startups, I can tell though that the ability to manage is just as important if not more important than technical skills. At meetups, I see hordes of ex-CTO's now being much happier in still highly paid specialist roles. Management isn't for everyone, and it's also not much for me. When we were growing, I had to do it, but with more talented folks coming on board I noticed that I'm 4 times as productive with a product manager by my side who's really good in empathy, motivation, keeping track and following up. Those skills are often distributed in counter-balance to high IQ and creativity and I've come to value them a lot.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think the real question here is "why do support teams not have technical leads?"

No one bats an eyelid at a software project having a non-technical PM because it's a Team/Technical Lead's role to fill in for the PM's lack of technical knowledge; I've never heard of a Support Team/Technical Lead before though.

</comment><comment><USER13> So that tech folks can enjoy the free time available by running their work scripts and learn new skills to form startups or get better jobs :-)

</comment><comment><USER14> If you give someone a job that is not their forte, the odds are they may be really good at it, or not.

Well, Jesus is a carpenter, Peter was a fisherman, Bill Gates is an economist, Steve Jobs is a marketing guy. See the pattern here?</comment>


Cracking the Culture Interview - <AUTHOR> https://heybenchen.com/cracking-the-culture-interview-1 <comment> non-entity I remember one time seeing a job posting at one of the big tech companies everyone talks about that looked interesting to me. No way I'd be able to pass the interview today, but out of curiosity I decided to look into what they would be like. I found a copy of one of those popular "interview handbooks" that go into how to get into such a company and it went on to describe how they expect you to he incredibly enthusiastic about the company and its products in a way that seemed very artificial to me. Not sure I could manage to bullshit that well enough regardless of a technical interview.

</comment><comment><USER2> Sorry this smells toxic to me. In my experience the overwhelming majority of people I worked with contributed positively to the culture, most likely because the hiring managers refrained from hiring shitty people, and most people who aren't shitty contribute positively to a team dynamic when the duties align with their area of competence.

I'll go out on a limb and assert that if your professional culture is such that you need to focus long and hard to figure out who will and won't fit in, your culture is what is problematic.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that the vast majority of people are pleasant, positive, and good to work with. I also think not hiring arrogant jerks should be table stakes for any company.

However, if you're not trying to assess a person's soft skills, motivations, and working style, you're leaving a huge part of the hiring decision up to luck. At the end of the day you want to hire someone who is going to do a great job at the company. There's more to that than passing a coding interview.

Often times it's not even about being a "good" person or a "shitty" person. All of that is relative to the role and environment.

For example, I've worked with some engineers who are excellent at their specialization but have no interest in working on areas outside of their domain. This might be a perfect fit for a large organization that is looking for a domain expert but a potentially poor fit for a startup that needs engineers who enjoy doing a bit of everything.

On the flip side, I've seen some engineers who have thrived at smaller companies but then really struggle to navigate the politics necessary to have impact at larger companies. Maybe they're even capable of learning this at some point, but I wouldn't hire a senior engineer who isn't able to give me a solid example of navigating some interpersonal disagreement.

You can't assess for this kind of alignment without digging into a person's background and experiences.

I think inevitably if you're looking for a job you're going to have to talk about some of these key stories at one point or another. I wrote this to help people get the best shot at landing a job that's a good fit for them. Even if you don't end up using these stories at all, I hope they may even be valuable purely as a self-reflection exercise.</comment></comment>


Best and worst Macs of all time - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Feature/135311,top-10-best-and-worst-macs-of-all-time.aspx

<comment><USER2> There is a special place in my heart for the SE/30. It packed the power of the Mac IIx (68030 @ 16MHz) into the original Mac form factor. I used one for nine full years, not counting the time it spent as an SE. Still ran Photoshop and Netscape when I retired it. No other machine has ever treated me that well or been useful for as long -- most don't make it half that far.

I'm happy the 9600 made it into the list though -- that was a screamer.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Sporting a 350MHz 604e processor, room for up to 1.5Gb of memory and six PCI slots, the 9600 was a big beige beast on par with any PC system at the time. "

Ha! "on par"?! What competition did it have? Pentium MMX-based screamers? Laughable. The 9600 ran rings around any PC you could buy or build.

And, BTW, the Lisa was no Alto rip-off. It could be a Star rip-off hadn't Apple perfected so many UI traits that later went into the Mac: files as icons, a menu bar with pull-down menus, floating dialog boxes...

And, BTW, the Lisa was never intended to be a home computer. It was also far less expensive than a comparable Xerox Star.

And they call themselves "authority"... pfff.

</comment><comment><USER4> The pic of Lisa <http://backoffice.ajb.com.au/images/features/Applelisa.jpg>

reminds me of my old cooler O_o

</comment><comment><USER5> Surprised the IIci didn't rate a mention.</comment>


Windows 10 Shares Your Wi-Fi Password with Contacts - <AUTHOR> http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/07/01/2121252/windows-10-shares-your-wi-fi-password-with-contacts <comment><USER2> As far as I know, Windops Phone 8.1 can do it, and it can be turned off.</comment>


Tarsnap – Online backups for the truly paranoid - <AUTHOR> http://www.tarsnap.com They look amazing. Bug bounties for everything, completely transparent architecture, data duplication and compression on the fly, they will be up even if two of Amazon's data centers die, one pays per byte and they are pretty cheap. <comment><USER2> Tarsnap works really, really well. Just make a consistent snapshot of your data (I'm using UFS snapshots), point Tarsnap at it, and you're good to go.

The documentation is thorough, and Colin (the owner/operator/author) responds quickly to emails.

Finally, compression and deduplication is amazing:

      [nick@home ~]$ sudo tarsnap --print-stats
                                             Total size  Compressed size
      All archives                               348 GB            76 GB
        (unique data)                             34 GB           6.3 GB

Yep, I've backed up 350GB of data, but since most of it is duplicated, I pay for storing 6.3GB. Win.

One word of caution though - this isn't a mainstream consumer backup service. If you lose your keys you lose your data. No chance of recovery. So make sure you back those up properly too, ideally in a different geography.

<comment><USER3> _Just make a consistent snapshot of your data (I'm using UFS snapshots), point Tarsnap at it, and you're good to go._

You're using the --snaptime option, right? It's necessary when you're backing up a filesystem snapshot in order to work around a race condition with them -- if a file is modified, the filesystem snapshot is created, and then the file is modified again, all within a single time quantum, it can trick Tarsnap into thinking that the file hasn't been modified later (which triggers an optimization of "this must be the same blocks as it was last time" in place of the usual "read the file and split it into blocks" behaviour).

 _Finally, compression and deduplication is amazing:_

Well, if we're going to be posting statistics here...

                                             Total size  Compressed size
      All archives                               269 TB           121 TB
        (unique data)                            177 GB            72 GB

That's 269 TB of data backed up from my laptop, deduplicated and compressed down to 72 GB. This is what I get for taking a backup of my entire home directory every hour...

<comment><USER2> > You're using the --snaptime option, right?

Yep, emailed you about this in fact, and appreciated your detailed response.

<comment><USER3> Ah, that was you -- I remembered sending an email about snaptime recently but couldn't remember who it was to (and HN user names don't always correlate anyway...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _why Tarsnap pricing is defined in terms of picodollars per byte rather than dollars per gigabyte: Tarsnap's author is a geek. Applying SI prefixes to non- SI units is a geeky thing to do._

I find that so amazingly annoying. To me it says "yeah, I know many people might find it hard to get their head around the units I defined, but I don't really care about that because I find it cool." We have standard units for a reason, because people can immediately get the scale of something in their mind. With this, you can't. I went to their site open to what they were selling, but I'm very turned off by this.

<comment><USER5> Interesting: in my browser, this comment is both greyed out _and_ upvoted to the top of the list. Does this mean that comment placing is determined by upvotes, and comment greying is determined by downvotes, but those two processes are independent of each other?

<comment><USER6> Comment placement is by both new-ness and upvotes. So a post that is downvoted immediately sinks faster, but doesn't immediately go to the bottom.

<comment><USER7> Also average comment score of poster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As an alternative, I use Arq continuously on all my computers and I highly recommend it (Sorry I'm on my iPhone and won't be able to give a link). It lets you use your own AWS credentials for backup and you can encrypt the data before it is sent to AWS.

The issue I have with Tarsnap is that the data is still at the hands of a small operation, as far as I can tell, and honestly I'm afraid we won't get our data if something happens to the guy. This is fine of course for many services, but data backup is inherently as mission critical as it gets. The whole reason for it is reliability, assurance and redundancy. It is not a nice to have, it is for many people the only place they fully trust to keep their data forever.

I wish Tarsnap had an innovation that made it possible to use it with one's (or an organization's) own AWS credentials. An on-site mode, if you will. Otherwise it has always seemed to me like a great piece of software.

<comment><USER9> I have the same thought. I'm using backblaze at the moment but am actively looking to move to either arq or tarsnap. I like that arq is in your own account and the file format is open so you can work on it yourself. Also, storing to glacier means it's dirt cheap. It's reassuring to here someone having a positive experience with it. Backblaze ha been a mixed bag for me.

<comment><USER10> Have you considered Crashplan? I've had positive experiences with it. The only downsides are that the client program uses a ton of RAM and there's no API.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> All the data is encrypted before it ever leaves your machine. Not even cperciva should be able to read it.

You can also create a write-only key. If you run tarsnap from a server which gets pwned, the attackers can't touch the existing backups. Don't be the next Astalavista[1].

[1] <http://joncraton.org/blog/49/analyzing-the-astalavista-hack>

<comment><USER12> I would have trusted that more if the tarsnap client had source code available.

<comment><USER13> The source code is available; it's available under a "shared source" license rather than free software/open source (you can look at it, but not modify it), but it is available for review. <https://www.tarsnap.com/download.html>

He also has a bug bounty <http://www.tarsnap.com/bugbounty.html>, and several substantial security bugs have been found and fixed due to the bug bounty (<http://www.tarsnap.com/bounty-winners.html>). In fact, the first of those, the AES CTR nonce bug, was found before he had offered the bounty program; the bounty program was inspired by that bug, and has since led to the discovery of several other more minor issues.

So, the source is available, and there's a bounty out for discovering bugs ranging from cosmetic issues to major security issues. Feel free to review it and submit any bugs you find!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I believe Tarsnap's only flaw is that it hasn't yet solved the cperciva-gets- hit-by-a-bus problem. Or perhaps I am mistaken?

<comment><USER3> That is indeed a problem which has yet to be solved. Or a potential problem, rather... I'm rather hoping it will never actually happen. ;-)

Seriously though, it is on my list of issues which needs to be addressed. Bringing in someone else and getting them up to speed on how to run everything is an expensive prospect, though.

<comment><USER15> Have you considered some sort of "enterprise" variant where large organizations use their own storage backend? Just 1-4 serious enterprise sized customers would cover the salary and overhead of 1+ good engineers. There's a lot of opportunity in that direction. Like any medium sized or larger company that needs to deal with compliance with education or medical privacy regulation, your tech is a great backup solution, and if carefully done doesn't increase your overheads much/ at all.

Otoh, I am just speculating :-)

<comment><USER3> Setting up tarsnap to use non-AWS infrastructure would be a significant amount of work. Setting up a "private" Tarsnap (but still on AWS) is something I could do for a company needing to store a large amount of data (say, 10+ TB).

<comment><USER15> doesn't AWS have some special clouds for companies that have compliance needs?

Either way, it might be worth looking into even just the "private" Tarsnap on AWS business direction as a way of growing revenue in a way that isn't tied strictly to data storage volume.

One way to go about this is to ask some of your larger business users if they would be interested in such a "private for them" self hosted Tarsnap variant. I think many of them would love a way to help you have revenues sufficient to support having an additional engineer (or two) working with you, which isn't possible for them to do with your current usage based revenue model.

Point being, theres probably an "enterprise" business model that stays true to your quality goals, but gives you more ahead of time revenue by a substantial amount. For some of your customers, there might be more value in supporting you being able to hire some engineers than there is in the cost savings element of the current revenue model. This can be an ancillary product that isn't the core one, but which still helps you have more resources to make the core better.

Talk with your larger customers, they're probably happy to chat with you given the chance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I found them looking for a good backup solution.

They look amazing. Bug bounties for everything (including cosmetic stuff), completely transparent architecture, data deduplication and compression on the fly, they will be up even if two of Amazon's data centers fail, one pays per byte (traffic/store) and for all that they are pretty cheap.

<comment><USER7> Tarsnap is brilliant. cperciva is a well known and respected HN user too.

(<https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cperciva>)

<comment><USER16> > cperciva is a well known and respected HN user too.

Irrelevant.

<comment><USER17> But maybe the fact that he has been a Security Officer of the FreeBSD project for many years is relevant (for those concerned of privacy/security): [http://www.nux.ro/archive/2012/07/Colin_Percival_no_longer_S...](http://www.nux.ro/archive/2012/07/Colin_Percival_no_longer_Security_Officer_for_FreeBSD.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting. Tarsnap and rsync.net seem to alternate coverage on HN, and for the longest time I kept forgetting they were different, even though I had vague sense of confusion.

This one is Colin Percival's project.

<comment><USER19> We hold tarsnap in high esteem and wish Colin the best of luck. Further, we appreciate all of the good work Colin has done for the FreeBSD project.

Glad to see you on the front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I understand data is encrypted before it ever leaves your machine, but I certainly wouldn't want encrypted data at-rest being exposed. Which gives me concern about Tarnap's terms: "I may provide information concerning your account and your use of the service to 3rd parties, at my sole discretion, if ... It is requested by law enforcement authorities ..." note - no requirement for a court order or subpoena.

<https://www.tarsnap.com/legal-why.html#PRIVACYLAW>

<comment><USER3> Note the last paragraph of that: _However, I'm serious about saying "at my sole discretion" — if a law enforcement agency wants information, they'd better have a good reason for asking for it... and I don't consider the NSA saying "we want to have all the information you have, just because we feel like it and someone somewhere might be a terrorist" to be a good reason. Also note that unlike the situation with certain illegal wiretaps, I can't give your data to anyone, because it's all encrypted such that I can't read it._

This situation has never arisen, but if I'm confronted by a police officer and enough evidence that I'm sure they _could_ get a court order, I'd rather be cooperative than force them to go through the courts. This doesn't mean that I'd give them any more data than they would get from a court order -- in fact, quite the opposite, since police tend to err on the side of requesting more than they need when going through the courts, and cooperating could change "seize a server" into "get a copy of the required data".

<comment><USER21> Why would you comply with foreign government agencies?

<comment><USER3> If the Libyan, or Iranian, or Chinese, or Russian police come knocking, I probably wouldn't.

Beyond that, it's a judgement call. Lots of countries have agreements to assist each others' police forces in obtaining evidence.

<comment><USER22> They would all be channeled through your local law enforcement though.

If swedish police comes to you directly, you don't have to comply, but if they go through the proper channels, the request to you, comes from canadian police.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A secure online backup service for _Minix_ \-- FINALLY!!

<comment><USER3> I'd like to support GNU Hurd too, but they make some unusual (but still POSIX compliant!) choices and I haven't had the time to work around them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm thinking of using Tarsnap. Can I absolutely, positively, definitely trust that everything on Tarsnap's end is encrypted to best practice standards and that there is no reasonable way to get to my data (outside of the usual contract provided by encryption I mean)?

I don't have the option to know for sure by analyzing the source code myself so I'll have to trust the popular opionion of Very Smart People here on HN (well, I suppose I _could_ if I spent a non-trivial chunk of the coming year reading up on crypto stuff).

<comment><USER25> Well, the guy who wrote Tarsnap is himself a Very Smart Person here on HN, so I'd say the answer is yes, by definition ;)

<comment><USER26> "a Very Smart Person"

Did he win the Putnam?

spoilers: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35083>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Cyphertite may also be of interest: <https://www.cyphertite.com/>

Client-side encryption and deduplication, with source code. 8GB free, $10/mo for personal unlimited use, 10c/GB/month for business/enterprise. My main reservations are they seem to be based in one datacenter, and don't seem to have support for multiple keyfiles with separate read/write/delete/machine restrictions. Also not in FreeBSD ports :P

</comment><comment><USER28> Tarsnap has been working really well for us, but one huge downside that we've noticed is how slow it is to restore data from say a 1TB archive.

Sometimes it takes more than 3 hours to restore a customer's 40MB directory.

If we were to have a full HD failure and had to restore the whole 1TB, that would probably take days. Days of downtime for us.

So depending on your situation, this might not be ideal.

I contacted Colin about this a few months ago and he mentioned that he is working on a faster version.

</comment><comment><USER29> The "legal" section of the site is confusing.

"1. You may only access the service using unmodified Tarsnap client code which I have distributed" -- really? no API and no custom clients?

<comment><USER30> I imagine that if you want an API you could ask nicely... :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> One of the things I love about Tarsnap is the bug bounties, which range from $2000 for being able to decrypt user data right down to $1 for cosmetic issues.

</comment><comment><USER32> quick question here: is there a delay in Recent Activity?

I just signed up and used it on two servers like 30 minutes ago, but I don't see anything in the account activity except the payment info. I'm quite sure my servers sent stuff because I monitored b/w usage

<comment><USER3> The accounting data updates at midnight UTC -- so yes, there is a delay.

<comment><USER32> roger, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Anyone has experience with Duplicity? <http://duplicity.nongnu.org/>

<comment><USER33> I use it to save backups of my desktop and laptop home directories to a home NAS mounted with NFS, which later gets synced to another NAS.

It's a decent tool. I encrypt with a separate gpg key, do mostly incremental backups, and a full one every few months. Incremental backups take under a minute on my desktop (100K files, 11G). Full ones are kind of slow (which is why I set it to only do it every few months).

I haven't used the S3 support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Colin - I dig what you're doing, but every time I go to the Tarsnap website, I'm turned off from using it for all of the reasons that have been discussed here ad nauseum since 2009. I'd love to see you succeed more; I think you deserve it, and I wish you'd just _grab_ it.

see <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=820705> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1639277>, e.g.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm still not sure whether I can trust somebody else with my data, but I'm growing more and more concerned of hardware failure of my own backups. Might try Tarsnap one of these days.

<comment><USER35> It aledgely encripts all your data at the local machine, before sending it to the server.

Now, of course, if you are truly paranoid, you'll want to review their code first. I don't get why I can't simply mount a volume with encription and write there. Using code that is already on my machine (on the kernel, nonetheless) would make it a much simpler decision.

<comment><USER3> _I don't get why I can't simply mount a volume with encription and write there._

You can (and you could even use tarsnap to back up the encrypted filesystem image if you want), but writing your data to an encrypted filesystem tends to expand the amount of data changing -- in the extreme case, if you create a copy of a file you'll write that many blocks of new encrypted data which needs to be backed up, whereas tarsnap would just say "hey, I recognize all these blocks, it's those ones I backed up earlier" -- so Tarsnap's encrypted backups of a filesystem tend to be many times more efficient than backups of an encrypted filesystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I would love to have something like the Backblaze client but working with Tarsnap as a backend: you install it and you forget about it. The sensible default configuration is good enough for average joe but you can tweak it if you want.

<comment><USER37> Check out Arq

<http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/>

<comment><USER36> Well, it is not using Tarsnap as a backend and it seems that you have to add folders on the first launch, that is definitely not what I am looking for :)

Time Machine and Backblaze know how Mac OS is architectured and backup everything but useful files (logs mainly).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is absurdly expensive. If you have a 400GB laptop, fully backed-up and with negligible deltas, you are paying $1440 a year.

(400GB is not an absurd amount, either. I personally would ideally have about that much in my off-site backup.)

<comment><USER39> You're missing the value-added component here where tarsnap compresses and deduplicates data.

<comment><USER40> That's not exactly rocket science these days (see bup). What you're paying for with tarsnap is making it totally rock solid and as usual the last 90% of the work is also 90% of the cost.

<comment><USER41> The point that suxnoll is making, though, is that the cost is not nearly high to begin with, b/c the data is dedup'ed and compressed. You're justifying an issue that doesn't quite exist.

The query that suxnoll responded to supposed that you have 400 GB of data with small deltas. But that's only possible if you're filling your harddrive with files created from random noise from /dev/random and updating all your files monthly by more random noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I've been using <http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html> for a while and it is as reliable as you need.

<comment><USER43> Sync is not backup. For backups you also need the ability to look back at the previous versions of your files. For example in your sync solution if a file gets corrupted, all copies of the file will also have the corrupted bytes sync'd. With a backup solution you'll be able to rollback to a previous non corrupted version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> i've been poking round the site and i couldn't see an answer to this question - why do you need to encrypt the communication if the data themselves are encrypted? maybe i am misunderstanding, but it seems like each block is encrypted _and_ the pipe between client and server is encrypted. is it because there are additional interesting metadata (if so, what)? or have i misunderstood?

<comment><USER3> There is metadata; whether you consider it interesting is up to you. The tarsnap client has to say "I'm machine X, and I want to store a block of data with tag Y"; and when you extract an archive, "I'm machine X, and I want to retrieve the block of data with tag Y". This could allow someone to figure out (a) that it's the same machine, and (b) that you're extracting an archive which contains data which was stored at a particular point in time.

Paranoia means encrypting everything which _might_ be sensitive, even if you can't see any way for it to be abused.

<comment><USER44> thanks. (i understand the point about metadata; to be honest i was more worried i had misunderstood).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> $0.30/GB/month is pretty steep :) You can use your own private keys with Crashplan, $60 a year for unlimited storage/bandwidth.

<comment><USER10> Crashplan also does dedupe and compression. The only downside is the client program uses a lot of RAM.

<comment><USER45> I concur. I've been very happy with the price and features, but the ever increasing amount of RAM (the larger your backup, the larger its RAM use) is worrying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> How does this compare to dump | aespipe | s3cmd?

<comment><USER40> If none of those commands perform dedupe and compression then tarsnap is much cheaper (like 20x cheaper).

<comment><USER46> It's safe to assume a bz2cat can be thrown in there. And I'm not sure how deduplication can work on encrypted dumps/files?

<comment><USER3> Tarsnap deduplicates first, then it encrypts.

<comment><USER46> I see, that makes sense. Any word on how it compares to simply shipping encrypted dumps to S3?

<comment><USER3> Depends how much tarsnap manages to deduplicate, really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Truly paranoids are/will/should use Bitcoin or Litecoin. I don't get why pricing is USD$ only, it just seems that cryptocurrencies are perfect for this kind of service.

<comment><USER48> It's how your data is actually stored that protects it, not whether you've paid for the storage in tinfoil shekels or picodollars.

<comment><USER49> The "truly paranoids" probably have plenty of bitcoin burning a hole in their digital wallets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> <http://www.tarsnap.com/legal-why.html#BCPSTISSTUPID> I see what you did there :)

<comment><USER3> Well, the BC PST _is_ stupid. I find it amazing that during the HST referendum campaign a large number of people said they thought the HST was good, but they were going to vote against it anyway to punish the BC Liberal government... and now we don't have the HST, the the government they wanted to punish has gotten re-elected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> try crashplan with boxcryptor</comment>


The Internet as a Force in Politics: "Obama Would Not Have Won Without the Internet" - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/07/the-internet-as-a-force-in-politics-obama-would-not-have-won-without-the-internet/

<comment><USER2> I disagree that you can give this much credit to the Internet. You can't deny how important the bad economy and low incumbent approval ratings are. Historically, with these two variables alone, change is a shoo-in.

<comment><USER3> How do you explain Obama's beating Hillary? She had a powerful team that used the TV expertly. Her weakness lay in her not using the Internet effectively.

<comment><USER2> Under this logic, Ron Paul had much more support from the internet during the primaries than his opponents, and look where that got him.

Hillary had a tough time because of how many people didn't like her when it came down to it. [http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2008/11/geff...](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2008/11/geffen- on-obama.html)

<comment><USER3> Obama also is a much better speaker than Paul, and he had a reputation behind him: after 2004, he was a rock star of a celebrity. So he had some advantages. Paul, meanwhile, was virtually unheard of until after the primaries were underway. Obama had already begun consolidating his base and planning.

Plus, Obama _used_ the Internet. With Ron Paul, fans would plan things for him. Obama actively created a platform (my.BO) that let volunteers operate efficiently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1) Obama's campaign used the Internet as a resource skillfully. 2) Obama winning is a historic event (demographically). 3) ... techcrunch deadline ... 4) "Obama would not have won without the internet"

No point in discussing validity.</comment>


InnoDB vs MyISAM vs Falcon benchmarks - part 1 | MySQL Performance Blog - <AUTHOR> http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/01/08/innodb-vs-myisam-vs-falcon-benchmarks-part-1/ <comment><USER2> Conclusion: heavy work in progress, has lots of potential, don't touch until final release :-)</comment>


Google's AlphaGo Defeats Chinese Go Master in Win for A.I - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/business/google-deepmind-alphago-go-champion-defeat.html <comment><USER2> Andrej Karpathy had some awesome tweets on this yesterday, you can see the thread in the links, but these two were my favorite:

"Yes AlphaGo only won by 0.5, but it was not at all a close game. It's an artifact of its training objective."[0]

and:

"it prefers to win by 0.5 with 99.9999999% chance instead of 10.0 with 99.99% chance."[1]

[0][https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867075706827689985](https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867075706827689985) [1][https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867077807779717121](https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/867077807779717121)

<comment><USER3> I know it's a totally different game, but it would be interesting to see AlphaGo play a game optimized for expected number of points, instead of low variance wins. I assume it would require retraining.

<comment><USER4> I would really love to see an AlphaGo with even the minimal tweak of maximize points while maintaining win % > 95%.

I really wouldn't be shocked in those final moves it was optimizing for 5 or 6 "9"s of success probability. Which will still true to programming, it also obfuscates how good it really it.

That said, there is some benefit to not completely embarrassing your human player who previously was known as the best, but has volunteered to be beaten repeatedly on international TV.

Going into this Ke Jie knew he was going to lose, and still agreed.

Speaking as an inexperienced go player, I would not be shocked if the new Alpha Go were 500-1000 Elo points better than Ke Jie. It's true skill being masked by its ultra-conservative style of play.

The original AlphaGo only lost a single game to Lee Sedol that was essentially just a bug, not because it was "weaker". DeepMind has said this completely retrained AlphaGo is significantly stronger than the original.

[1] Partial support for the possibly 1000 pt Elo advantage of Alpha Go. [http://en.chessbase.com/post/alphago-vs-lee-sedol-history- in...](http://en.chessbase.com/post/alphago-vs-lee-sedol-history-in-the- making)

<comment><USER5> > that was essentially just a bug

I'm not sure that's right, everything was working correctly, it just didn't read out a low-probability move very deep.

<comment><USER4> I'd agree it was an algorithmic bug and not an implementation bug.

From my reading, it essentially got AlphaGo into a state where it was no longer reading the board correctly. The algorithmic bug was play a decent but extremely improbable move and AlphaGo won't know how to respond.

Or by a similar argument, I think most people would say that if Lee Sedol hadn't played that move and the game continued 'normally' he would've lost like the other games. The rarity of the move is why he won, not the "strength".

Essentially they trained the app on too specific data. Their main fix was to retrain the next version from "scratch" instead of from moves humans are likely to make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The game is available here for anyone interested - [http://events.google.com/alphago2017/](http://events.google.com/alphago2017/)

It's a half-point win which doesn't seem like a lot, but AlphaGo is intentionally taking lower-risk paths to lock down the win in exchange for some win margin. If you watch the actual game and some commentary, it really feels like AlphaGo is playing at the next level. Some of its moves are so inhuman and subtle.

This is a very exciting time for Go; a lot of traditional wisdom has been shaken up in the last couple of years! I heard a story about a Korean pro study group that was doing nothing but studying AlphaGo's games for new insights for some time. I'm looking forward to seeing the future of play as extremely strong Go AI becomes more widely accessible.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it's exciting that a half point win gives us no bound on the strength difference betwen the human player and AlphaGo -- the human player could play "twice as well" and still lose by 0.5.

The best way to test strength, assuming Ke Jie continues to lose, would be to start giving handicap stones until the winrate stabilizes. I'd guess that AlphaGo is no more than two stones stronger, but maybe that's just more bias towards humans..

<comment><USER8> In the match commentary they talk about why no one is likely to take them up on that offer, because losing at a handicap would be devastating for the self confidence of a pro.

<comment><USER9> I don't understand that. Should an Olympic weightlifter lose confidence if he can't beat a forklift?

<comment><USER10> I think the difference is that Go is played on a psychological level as well, while weightlifting is (mainly) not. Somebody mentioned this in another Go Thread on hn a few days ago: Professionell Go players do not like to play against "weak" players because they are afraid of the psychological damage an (unlikely) loss might have on their play.

<comment><USER11> You can imagine the same applying to MMA fighters, too. The outcome is never a sure thing; you can always catch a lucky punch from someone much less skilled than you and lose in the most embarrassing manner possible, by knockout. Hell, look at how Ronda Rousey's self esteem was shattered from a single such loss.

Weightlifting isn't the best example because it's a big group competition without the individual 1-on-1 aspect to it, and chance plays less of a role. Yeah, you might feel out of sorts on competition day because you didn't peak in your training properly, lift 20 kg left than you're capable of, and subsequently not place, but it's not supremely embarrassing. You're still a very strong person, which you demonstrated. Rousey, though, just got demolished.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> According to Deepmind, this version of Alpha Go (aka Master) is 3 stones stronger than the version that defeated Lee Sedol. Prior to this match it had a 60-0 record against high professional dans (on faster game settings, but still). Right now it would be something like a 13-dan pro, almost impossible to beat.

The natural occurrence of a human being capable of defeating a bot like this would be very rare, and would take decades to train. In the case of this bot, you just set up a cluster and deploy the same software, to produce as many instances of this bot as you want in less than a day. In this sense, AI has a huge advantage.

Finally, by the time a human being can beat this version of the bot, there is going to be a much stronger version.

<comment> forgot-my-pw I would like to see the next game with 1 stone handicap and the 3rd game with 3 stone handicap.

But Ke Jie probably will take that as an insult.

<comment><USER12> I don't know about that.

While it might not be very gratifying to lose to a computer, players often enjoy the opportunity to play stronger players and learn something new.

Then, the way to be a professional 9 dan involves a lot of losing and frustration. I don't think he is very thin-skinned in this respect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This represents a fairly major milestone in game A.I. doesn't it?

I only took one A.I. class in school and had a few that involved games as projects and remember several times the lecturers/professors (10 years ago) mentioning that Go was a next level target after chess due to extremely high branching factor.

<comment><USER14> I wonder if playing Go on a much larger board (e.g. 37 x 37) would limit the ability of AlphaGo to explore branching significantly to tip the advantage back to humans. I'm not sure if A.I. is limited by branching sizes. And would human intuition of strategy on a 19 x 19 board map easily to the strategy of a 37 x 37 board? After all, Go is still Go no matter what size the board, whereas chess can only be called chess when played on the 8 x 8 board.

<comment><USER15> Board size would hamper old brute force algorithms.

Modern Go AI also has "intuitive" components just like we do (large neural networks trained to immediately provide a heat map of what should be the next best move). That NN is not limited by board size.

BTW, even when playing by "intuition" alone (no tree search), AlphaGo is still incredibly strong. It would still beat most amateur players that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's so accurate to call this a Sputnik moment for China. I wonder if we'll see a face off between AlphaGo and a Chinese Go AI sometime in the future.

<comment><USER17> yea totally agree. the fact that state media shut down the broadcast speaks to some loss of face.

Something organized in good spirits like an AI Olympics would be amazing to watch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be awesome if AlphaGo were released as an online-playable version but with an adaptive difficulty. Either by choosing a desired rank or just setting it to "try to win %50 of the time" or similar.

I feel like that would lead to a new generation of players trained on new strategies from a blank slate. Could be interesting.

Disclosure: I only know the basics about playing Go :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Humans are still better on a watt per watt basis!

<comment><USER20> Not for much longer! Apparently this iteration of AlphaGo is using 10x less computational power than the version that beat Lee Sedol.

<comment><USER19> Interesting, is there a link to this?

<comment> forgot-my-pw [https://youtu.be/Z-HL5nppBnM?t=21580](https://youtu.be/Z-HL5nppBnM?t=21580)

More will be published by end of this week

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> People who believe that AGI is too far away to be concerned about should keep in mind that very few people, even AI enthusiasts and experts, predicted 5 years ago that we would have a human-pro-level Go playing program now.

Prior to 2015, no programs could compete evenly with any among hundreds of Go professionals. Two years later, even the human World Champion admits that his competency is far below that of a computer program.

"I am quite convinced by this loss that AlphaGo is really strong. From AlphaGo there are lots of things that are worthwhile learning and exploring." \-- Ke Jie

The time to start working on and funding AI Safety research is now.

Note: I am not saying that AGI is imminent. The point is that we do NOT know when it will emerge and AI Safety research is very difficult and will likely take a long time to complete.

<comment><USER22> This means as much in terms of progress towards AGI as did DeepBlue's win over Kasparov.

</comment></comment><comment> gene-h AlphaGo has won one game out of three so far, it's not over yet.

<comment><USER23> AlphaGo already won the first game, which 5 years ago would have been considered impossible. It is basically over. Google can pour an order of magnitude more computing power at the algorithm to boost its performance if they choose too.

<comment><USER24> The question of performance as a function of computing power is an interesting one. Demis Hassabis claims that the returns are diminishing quickly when going above the system they are using. In fact Alpha Go Ke Ji uses 10 times less power than Alpha Go Lee Sedol, though the architecture has changed to using Google's own TPUs, so it's not an easy comparison.

In either case Alpha Go Ke Ji is said to be 3 stones stronger than Alpha Go Lee Sedol which the team claims comes nearly completely from algorithm improvements.

<comment><USER25> Google has stated previously that the Lee Sedol variant also used TPUs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > He would treat the software more as a teacher, he said, to get inspiration > and new ideas about moves.

Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER27> In the future, only poets will have jobs.

j/k someone will have to program the poets

<comment><USER28> See "The First Sally -or- Trurl's Electronic Bard", page 12 of the pdf (43 of the book) [http://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp- content/uploads/Reading/Lem...](http://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp- content/uploads/Reading/Lem-cyberiad.pdf)

Keep in mind this is all a translation from Polish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I, for one, look forward to more articles starting with "It isn't looking good for humanity." in the coming decades.

</comment><comment><USER30> Tomorrow there will be another story on flawed centaurs narrative which I never understand. How is the Human + AlphaGo > AlphaGo narrative not fail on smell test?

<comment><USER31> The space of playing go is rather large and humans only need to be better at a small portion of it to improve upon AlphaGo. Humans+Computer was better than just Computer for chess (at long time controls) for nearly 10 years after BigBlue beat Kasparov.

<comment><USER30> That centaur narrative seems to have debunked a while back: [http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArti...](http://www.infinitychess.com/Page/Public/Article/DefaultArticle.aspx?id=272)

<comment><USER31> That is for a recent tournament. Now computers are just better. But for up to 5-10 years centaurs were better. Eventually human Go players won't be able to improve on computer evaluations, but that is may not be for another few years.

<comment><USER30> Let's see. I think there are some centaur like tournaments going on for AlphaGo as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Now limit AlphaGo to the same power budget and see who wins.

<comment><USER33> A human eats maybe 2500 calories per day, right? That's about 100 watts, I think? That's a pretty serious restriction.

<comment><USER34> 2500 kcals/day would be around 121 watts, yeah.

But computers have much lower idle consumption than humans. So if we assume alphago idles at ~45w that would consume around 1000 kcal for 21 hours leaving 1500 kcal for the 3 hours it was given to think which would be more like 580 watts.

That sounds pretty doable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder how games will be 10~ years in the future. "Check the box to make sure you are human" will be the largest feature

<comment><USER36> Clearly this checkbox will be AI's next target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Once we have AI writing AI, then we can say AI is on par with humans.

<comment><USER38> That seems like an odd version of the AI Effect [0], where "when a technique reaches mainstream use, it is no longer considered artificial intelligence".

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

<comment><USER37> AI is a vague term. What we are trying to do is capture the human mind's ability to solve problems in general. Otherwise it's like solving a crossword puzzle and calling the solution AI. It's the solving that is of interest not the solution. These game playing algorithms are all trained on human games with algorithms designed by humans. The only computer contribution is the ability to churn through permutations really quickly, which is not intelligence. Intelligence is the reduction in state space so it is small enough for the churning to be of value. No AI can do this state space reduction for us yet. We always need a human.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The article makes a lot of PRC censors trying to subdue news about the match. How much of this is a real tendency or cultural fear? How much of it is just an attempt to kneecap Google/Alphabet?

<comment><USER40> A little bit of both, I think, here is what was apparently send around:

[http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2017/05/minitrue-no-live- covera...](http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2017/05/minitrue-no-live-coverage-ke- jie-vs-alphago-games/)

and in Chinese:

[http://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2017/05/%E3%80%90%E7%9C...](http://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2017/05/%E3%80%90%E7%9C%9F%E7%90%86%E9%83%A8%E3%80%91-%E6%9F%AF%E6%B4%81%E5%92%8Calphago%E5%AF%B9%E5%BC%88/)

"Regarding the go match between Ke Jie and AlphaGo, no website, without exception, may carry a live stream. If one has been announced in advance, please immediately withdraw it. Please convey the gist of this to sports channels. Again, we stress: this match may not be broadcast live in any form and without exception, including text commentary, photography, video streams, self-media accounts and so on. No website (including sports and technology channels) or desktop or mobile apps may issue news alerts or push notifications about the course or result of the match."

Sounds pretty harsh... will be interesting to see how the rest of the event goes.

<comment><USER41> That sounds absolutely absurd. Say what we may about the state of affairs in the United States, but if the media was over forbidden from broadcasting an AI competition, which is effectively educational research in nature, I think there'd be a lot of uproar.

<comment><USER42> When I worked in China nearly a decade ago, the general mindset among my Party friends was "there's no way this will last." Most of them had sent their kids off to get Canadian citizenship because they weren't sure there would even _be_ a PRC in the long term.

I haven't been back in a while but my guess is things have sort of "settled in" more. The Chinese Firewall is absurdly effective - last I heard it was difficult to even get a VPN through.

<comment><USER43> That mindset comes from generational memory of high-risk political instability. In the PRC, there has yet to emerge a population without a cohort that personally experienced first-hand, or was passed by oral history with strong impressions like second-hand recitations, political upheavals that involved substantial loss of life, on the order of thousands or more. Get caught, even if incidentally, on the wrong side, and there are dire consequences. What will be interesting to monitor is whether or not the children of your Party friends (the ones who were sent off to obtain Canadian citizenship) do the same with _their_ children. If they all do, then that's not a good signal. If there is abatement of the trend, then that's encouraging.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>