Bell Canada to charge 15 cents per Twitter SMS even with an unlimited plan - <AUTHOR> http://www.ottawacitizen.com/News/Canadian+tweets+cheap/1328869/story.html

<comment><USER2> As a Canadian this comes as no surprise to be. Bell and Rogers (basically the only two telecoms in Canada) have always pulled shenanigans like this against their customers. Canadian cell phone plan rates are ridiculous, and data even more so. When I lived in the US I had a ton of minutes and unlimited data for $50 a month. In Canada I pay this just for a handful of voice minutes.

And this is one of the major reasons why the tech field is constantly failing in this country. Our government (both parties that matter, anyway) have no interest in encouraging fair telecommunication prices to drive innovation.

<comment><USER3> _Our government (both parties that matter, anyway) have no interest in encouraging fair telecommunication prices to drive innovation._

Well, the high wireless data rates were one of the stated reasons for last year's spectrum auction -- I don't think any of the companies which bought spectrum last year have started operating yet, but I'd guess that rates will come down once they're up and running.

<comment><USER4> That could be a long ways off with the expense of building a network and the difficulty in raising capital these days ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bell/Rogers have horrible cell phone pricing.

Before the iPhone came to Canada about 6 months ago, they were charging 30$ per month for 5 megs of data usage. In 2008.

Why? Because Blackberry users here are mostly corporate users that don't pay their own phone bills, and they were nailing those corps for massive overage bills on data.

Such scamish companies and they are the only 2 options for most of Canada.

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill It seems that the bigger the telecom firm, or the greater their level of incumbency, the more evil they are.

I have seen this as mid-size companies like Broadwing and Telcove got absorbed by Level3, and the quality of customer service going down while Level3 invented additional charges on set-price contracts out of thin air.

</comment><comment><USER6> It seems that this article is wrong-- today Twitter confirmed that _there are no additional fees_. [http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/bell-mobility-and- twitterno-...](http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/bell-mobility-and-twitterno- extra-fees.html)

<comment><USER7> The keyword is "incoming":

"Twitter and Bell have agreed that Bell customers on the company's text messaging bundles will be able to receive unlimited incoming Twitter SMS messages at no extra charge."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think it'd be any great loss for Twitter to dump SMS entirely.

Stripping out SMS support is what really allowed it to take off in the UK. When you think that there's even a chance everybody is getting yr minutae fired to your phone, it acts as a rate limiter.

<comment><USER9> Tweeting via texting is a big plus for me - I don't have an iPhone/Android phone with a data plan.</comment></comment>


So can Google's self-driving cars be jacked? - <AUTHOR>

Just saw the news that SDCs are coming to Austin. One of my friends posed the question, and it's a good one. What does the community say? <comment><USER2> Can we assume the team is intelligent and has general experience with security? Can we assume that the autonomous driving Google team is aware of car-jacking? Can we assume they are able to find a better solution than human driven vehicles?

I say it's up to your friend to construct an argument against the SDC engineering teams being aware of the problem or unable to solve it better than the solution we already have. I have a hard time constructing either.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

</comment><comment><USER3> If there's no manual override, then it would be trivial to stop the car and threaten the passenger. According to the LA Times [0], Google is trying to make their autos fully autonomous, without any user controls. I'm not sure if there's more recent news than this.

If there is a manual override (wheel and pedals), the door is already locked when in motion, so the driver should have enough time to floor the gas and escape.

Unless Google incorporates some seriously advanced detection and response, I see SDCs being an easy target for criminals.

[0] [http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-google- car-20140...](http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-google- car-20140529-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> If someone stands in front of one of these cars then I imagine it will stay still. Someone could probably commandeer it at that point. A person in the same situation might sense they are in danger and try to get away. I would be ok with having the self driving car give itself over since that is safer for the public, but what if there is a human passenger in the self driving car?

<comment><USER2> > Someone could probably commandeer it at that point.

How exactly would that happen and what fail-safes could google put into place to prevent those?

<comment><USER4> One person stands in front of the car to stop it. The next person smashes a window and jumps in. What comes next is a guess, but they would probably do something to override the controls. I imagine that there must be an override button on the car somewhere, otherwise you have literally no control over the car in the event of an emergency.

I don't know that they can prevent it through fail-safes. I think they can discourage it, at best, but as with any system, people will find a way to force the system to suit their needs.

<comment><USER2> That sounds like a pretty easy fix. I bet there's several ways to prevent that. No Ai necessary. Acceleration profiles, non accident window breaking, area criminality profiling, speed profiling... As soon as you get expert systems into it it gets even easier. No problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine study put on hold due to suspected adverse reaction - <AUTHOR> https://www.statnews.com/2020/09/08/astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine-study-put-on-hold-due-to-suspected-adverse-reaction-in-participant-in-the-u-k/ <comment><USER2> It's important to note that the AstraZeneca vaccine is adenovirus based [0], not mRNA based like the Pfizer and Moderna candidates. It was to be expected that this approach could cause more complications. mRNA vaccines have their own issues, but they do not involve live viruses being injected [1]. Instead they use lipid nanoparticles as a substrate to enter the body's cells [2].

[0] [https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press- releases/2020...](https://www.astrazeneca.com/media-centre/press- releases/2020/astrazeneca-and-oxford-university-announce-landmark-agreement- for-covid-19-vaccine.html)

[1] [https://www.phgfoundation.org/briefing/rna- vaccines](https://www.phgfoundation.org/briefing/rna-vaccines)

[2] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2639-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2639-4)

<comment><USER3> So how does this one work? Live adeno's?

<comment><USER4> The chimpanzee adenovirus is used as a vector, with its payload replaced with instructions to manufacture SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

Virus enters body, hopefully survives immune system long enough to insert instructions into your cells, your cells churn out tons of copies of coronavirus spike protein, your immune system sees the surfeit of spike protein and develops a response (antibodies and T* cells).

[https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/23/a-...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/23/a-close- look-at-the-frontrunning-coronavirus-vaccines-as-of-april-23)

<comment><USER3> This sounds pretty harmless. Any idea how they got a bad adverse event out of it?

<comment><USER4> Imagine a 4 billion year old codebase, written by dice throws and unit testing.

The immune system is a "complicated" thing to work with.

<comment><USER5> _> Imagine a 4 billion year old codebase, written by dice throws and unit testing._

That's a _great_ analogy, except it doesn't go quite far enough. The code for the toolchain that compiles the codebase (not to mention the unit testing framework) is just as old, and written the same way.

<comment><USER5> Note to self: while the code (including the toolchain code etc.) is in a monorepo, it is actually surprisingly modular. OTOH, much of the functionality was implemented by copy-and-paste of existing code elsewhere in the repo, and the copies then diverged with subsequent modification.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> According to the NY times, the adverse reaction was _transverse myelitis_

> The individual also said that a volunteer in the U.K. trial had been found > to have transverse myelitis, an inflammatory syndrome that affects the > spinal cord and is often sparked by viral infections.

More at: [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/world/covid-19-coronaviru...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/08/world/covid-19-coronavirus.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw- nytimes)

<comment><USER7> That's what you have studies for! Glad they caught it before it got into the wild.

Also, it's really great that there are multiple vaccines. Just imagine what happens when everyone gets a single vaccine that turns out to very often cause an adverse reaction...

<comment><USER8> All drugs have adverse side effects. The idea is the "therapeutic index" being the ratio of the good to the bad. In this case, balancing the risk of the vaccine against the reality of all the deaths that covid is causing.

Waiting for a zero risk vaccine is not the optimal decision.

<comment><USER9> But waiting for a reasonably safe and risk-free vaccine is, which is the point of the trials.

<comment><USER10> it is also true that this does not mean that this vaccine will not be the reasonably safe and risk-free one

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Where it says "serious adverse reaction" do they mean the adverse reaction was serious or that it's an actual grade 3 adverse event (SAE)? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_adverse_event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_adverse_event)

<comment><USER12> how do they find volunteers for such a trial? If I get it right, the risks are high (including death?) so seems like a big risk, and I suppose they need to start with someone that's healthy to avoid confounding factors?

<comment><USER13> The risk of getting the virus is death too. If you're already in a risky position (say you're a teacher in a district that is insisting on in school teaching or a paramedic or cashier at a grocery store) then the vaccine trial might be the less risky option.

<comment><USER14> Getting COVID-19 now you would know the risk of death is very low, especially if you live in a society where you would have access to adequate intensive care.

With the vaccine trial you are taking on an unknown risk which to me seems way worse.

I think there are factors that drive people to join these trials though. For example if you have a loved one that has a much higher risk of severe complications if they catch the virus. Then it is in your interest to help get a vaccine ready.

<comment><USER15> > _" With the vaccine trial you are taking on an unknown risk which to me > seems way worse."_

There's a reason why clinical trials are done in phases. If you are one of the very first to receive a new medicine or vaccine, then yes, you are taking a risk - and are compensated accordingly.

By the time it gets to phase 3 trials, you already have a pretty good idea of the safety. One possible adverse event amongst 30,000 participants doesn't seem so bad to me. Certainly it's less than the risk of developing serious illness if you are infected with SARS-CoV-2.

<comment><USER16> That would be 11,000 people with quadriplegia or worse amongst a population of 330M.

And keep in mind that the people participating in this trial are already pre- screened, taking the healthiest of the potential candidates. Known side effects would typically occur at higher frequency amongst the population than found in a clinical trial.

EDIT: To add to this. The cost of rolling out medicine with SAEs at this rate would cost the company / government in the order of about $4,730,000,000 (430k x 11k) [1], which is about the equivalent to the amount paid out for all other vaccine caused injuries over the last 30 years. This is likely low-balling it though, as I bet the families sueing would get more than $430k with the numbers of eyes on this.

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/vaccine-s...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/vaccine- safety-program/589354/)

<comment><USER15> My comment was in regard to the risks of clinical trial participation, not approved vaccines.

There is some precedent for the scenario you describe, however: the 2009/10 H1N1 vaccine "Pandemrix" caused permanent narcolepsy in 1 in 55,000 children it was administered to:

[https://www.narcolepsy.org.uk/resources/pandemrix- narcolepsy](https://www.narcolepsy.org.uk/resources/pandemrix-narcolepsy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not good news, but don't panic - as the article says "Clinical holds are not uncommon", and "in large trials illnesses will happen by chance but must be independently reviewed to check this carefully."

<comment><USER18> I agree, don't panic. However that phrase isn't especially useful. Clinical trials failing isn't uncommon either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The russian vaccine is also based on adenovirus vectors. Not clear if the method of delivery is to be blamed here, but it could be the cause for the adverse effects..

<comment><USER20> They (russians) are conducting large scale phase 3 experiment, with up to 40k volunteers. Need to watch closely; most of the volunteers are in Moscow, and it will be difficult to conceal high rate of side effects .

<comment><USER21> Careful, because a "high rate" would be ~1/100k. Even a two SAEs in that cohort size, would be a huge deal and enough to shut down most efforts.

Edit: also note that the Russian Gamaleya vaccine is actually 2 vaccines one with a human adeno virus carrier and the other with a (chimp?) Ad5 and Ad26. So you could have a response to either one of them, or both. The problem with using a human viral carrier is that pre-exposed might fight it off without developing nCoV immunity.

<comment><USER22> Pretty dumb because the damage from the real virus, both the damage from the illness and from the measures against it, is much worse than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> maybe this is off-topic, but it's interesting to me that this is the first time i've heard this referred to as the "astrazeneca vaccine". all the previous good-news stories seemed to call it the oxford vaccine.

<comment><USER24> This is a US trial, AZ is listed as the Sponsor for the trial, [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04516746](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04516746) and the PIs listed are both at US.

<comment> seedless-sensat Except the adverse reaction was not in the US trial.

<comment><USER24> I followed the first link in the stat article, which says "A large, Phase 3 study testing a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford at dozens of sites across the U.S. has been put on hold due to a suspected serious adverse reaction in a participant in the United Kingdom"

As I read that, it was a UK participant in a AZ and US-run study.

<comment><USER25> AstraZeneca and Oxford have subjects in the US, UK, Brazil, and South-Africa. The aim was to have diverse make-up of the testing groups, to have an order of magnitude more people in the Phase 3 trial than normal for a vaccine, to test in countries with high infection rates, and to deliver the results on 15th of September. A British subject from the British trial got ill.

I presume these countries have deals with Oxford/AstraZeneca so if a safe vaccine is available, they get guaranteed access. I've heard India is already producing the vaccine ahead of the Phase 3 conclusion. The phase 3 is only on hold since it is not clear if the vaccine was the cause. There are other causes for the adverse reaction, such as viral herpes infection, or onset nerve diseases not caught during subject checkup. Since not all vaccines offer 100% protection (while still being useful), COVID may have also been the cause of spinal nerve inflammation.

<comment><USER24> As I would classify it, they're running _multiple_ phase 3 trials in multiple countries, but applying _policy_ as if it's one big study (that wasn't clear). An action in the UK study caused all the studies to halt. This is not strictly required, but it's clear they're playing things conservatively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Other ongoing Covid vaccine thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24411540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24411540)

</comment><comment><USER27> > It was not immediately clear who placed the hold on the trial, though it is > possible it was placed voluntarily by AstraZeneca and not ordered by any > regulatory agency. The nature of the adverse reaction and when it happened > were also not immediately known, though the participant is expected to > recover, according to an individual familiar with the matter.

What would be a reason why they don't disclose this detail immediately but only to tell public the trial is on hold?

<comment><USER28> What would be the reason to disclose the details publicly? You can't do anything with the information right now; the vaccine isn't available to you.

<comment><USER29> The illusion of control. It is the same reason people doomscroll on twitter hoping more information will somehow how change the result. Our brains, all human brains, are not rational but instead are their own thing.

<comment><USER30> Vaccine progress is of enormous practical consequence. Effective reporting of material information can move markets, and that means it's useful for efficient capital allocation.

Of course, there's diminishing returns and problems with many kinds of noise, and AstraZenica isn't strongly interested in marginal efficiencies in the broader market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Question for people who understand the Phase 3 process - would the first step in an investigation of this type be to "unblind" the patient with the adverse reaction to see if they got the vaccine or a placebo?

Seems to me if the reaction _wasn 't_ caused by the vaccine there's a 50/50 chance this person received a placebo. In which case, you could instantly discount the vaccine being the cause.

<comment><USER32> The principal investigator of the trial knows who got placebo and who did not, although neither the people working on the data nor the clinical staff know.

It's likely that the participant will be "unmasked" to see why the adverse event occurred.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Is this one of the two favorites?

<comment><USER34> Yes. The one in pole position.

Until now.

<comment><USER35> The Moderna mRNA vaccine was producing 103 degree fevers (and passing out) in a Phase 1 volunteer. [1]

If that's the reaction in small sample with a healthy 29 year old (most volunteers had high fevers), I can't imagine old or unhealthy people will be unharmed. I was more concerned about the mRNA vaccines being at risk initially.

Things aren't looking great...

[1] [https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/26/moderna-vaccine- candidat...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/26/moderna-vaccine-candidate- trial-participant-severe-reaction/)

<comment><USER36> The idea a vaccine can be safely made in less than a year is absolutely insanity. Many of these things shouldn't even be considered vaccines in the traditional sense.

Are there any vaccines out on the market today that are not one of the two: 1) inactivated virus, 2) attenuated virus (run through another host/egg or a related virus found in an animation that's less harmful to humans)?

Everything I've found indicates all our current viral vaccines are one of those two (excluding bacterial vaccines, which shouldn't be called vaccines either).

<comment><USER37> The modeRNA vaccine is an mRNA vaccine, a completely new type of vaccine. While theoreticall less likely to have adverse effects, it did have adverse effects, and its efficacy remains a question. These are completely new types of vaccine, that presumably would need even more testing than the relatively well understood attenuated viruses.

<comment><USER38> > completely new type of vaccine

Then is it a vaccine at all? Vaccines were traditionally live, dead, or attenuated virus/bacteria injections, some with adjutants, to stimulate an immune response.

Technologically speaking, it's bicycle vs airplane. Similar underlying purpose, entirely different implementation.

<comment><USER9> Both a bicycle and an airplane are transportation vehicles. Likewise, anything that illicits imunity is a vaccine, regardless of how novel the approach is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> "The platform has not been used in an approved vaccine, but has been tested in experimental vaccines against other viruses, including the Ebola virus."

hmmm... this method of vaccination has never been used in an approved vaccine.

<comment><USER40> All medicines were new at some point in time.

Your anti-vax fear mongering doesn't belong here.

<comment><USER41> LOL! Pointing out that an unfamiliar vaccine technology has never been used before is now officially anti-vax fear mongering.

<comment><USER42> I swear the pro vaxxers are as much of a cult now as the anti vaxxers. I've been attacked so many times for simply saying that I would wait a while for results before trusting a rushed vaccine, especially one that has a massive financial upside for the creator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> What's really funny is even if they can prove it's not an adverse reaction the anti-vaxers will run with this forever.

If you can prove anything.

If it's not real.

And absolutely this is just the beginning.

These things normally don't make the news. This will be all the time over the hundreds of vaccines and when they get rolled out properly there will be hundreds of stories to pick from.

</comment><comment><USER44> Someone better come up with one. I don't want another year of this bull __ __.

<comment><USER36> It's unlikely. I'm much more likely fatalities will drop to zero per week before the end of the year in countries with high spread and we'll have herd immunity (which is where Sweden is at now).

<comment><USER45> This community refuses to acknowledge that Sweden's strategy has merit.

<comment><USER46> Ten times the cases, and ten times the deaths of its neighbors, and a 8.6% drop in GDP in Q2.

Meanwhile, Norway lost 5.3% of its GDP, and Finland lost 4.9%.

Exactly which part of this strategy has merit?

<comment><USER47> Not to mention Sweden is more locked down than the US - _0_ gatherings over 50 people allowed. 0.

I'm astounded there's still people doing the 'debate me!' act about it, most gave up by July in the US, we had already clearly chose a more intense version of the Swedish 'strategy'

<comment><USER42> I'm amazed that smart people have been advocating Sweden's strategy. Sweden has a population of 10 million. New York alone has more people than that.

It's as if population size, distribution and density aren't even a consideration, let alone local practices.

<comment><USER48> It was also the strategy of South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming and Utah, and they seem to be doing a lot better in terms of both GDP hit and caseload than places like California and New York with heavy lockdowns.

<comment><USER46> Iowa has a projected 9.5% GDP hit. New York has a projected ~14% GDP hit, and due to its density and reliance on elevators and public transit, will _of course_ have a higher case load, and require harsher measures to control the spread.

Half of the population of Iowa can fit in the 22 square miles of Manhattan. Oh, and infection rates in Iowa are climbing, whereas infection rates in New York peaked five months ago... And they are currently neck-and-neck in per- capita cases.

So, how did a mostly rural state get a case rate that's as bad as a state that packs half of its population into a single sardine-can of a city? Is their strategy actually working, if they are getting the same outcome, despite having a much easier set of starting conditions to deal with?

Meanwhile, in Canada, BC is projected to take a ~6% GDP hit... While having 1/10th the per-capita case load of Iowa, and higher population densities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is the vaccine trump set his hopes on to be available by November. Isn't it?

<comment><USER50> One of them. It's funded through Operation (OS/2) Warp Speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I wonder what are informed positions about these vaccines potentially modifying and patenting your DNA or using aerogels ([https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6539078/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6539078/)) since these stories float around in particular for this vaccine to my understanding.

Are these all bs? What's the risk?

<comment><USER52> > modifying and patenting your DNA

In order to do what, exactly? These bizarre conspiracy theories always lack a specific goal by the supposed perpetrators.

> using aerogels

So, what if they did?

<comment><USER51> I'm not really interested in the goals but on what parts are true/not true.

But it seems easier to get upset and downvote rather than explain, which in turns fuels conspiracy theories. Now I understand most of us arent biomedical engineers or something like that - but I'm just hoping someone sees it and gives an informed reply.

<comment><USER52> If there is no reason for them to do it, no goal, then would they spend money doing it? No? Then the crazy is untrue.

<comment><USER51> Money.. but still that's just a side topic. The document linked is pretty official and pretty clear, but i guess no one reads it...</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A cross-browser offline-enabled web compass - <AUTHOR> http://lamplightdev.github.io/compass/ <comment><USER2> This is awesome.

Here is a link to the 3d web compass I built and submitted to Hacker News 3 years ago [1] (direct link to a demo @ [2]).

I also released a JavaScript library based on that research that may help others use web device orientation without needing to understand all the math involved [3]. That in turn is based on a primer I made for web developers @ [4].

I hope this helps others who want to use device orientation on the web to build web-based compasses, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality experiences!

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4115768](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4115768).

[2] [https://richtr.github.io/Marine- Compass/](https://richtr.github.io/Marine-Compass/)

[3] [https://github.com/richtr/Full-Tilt](https://github.com/richtr/Full-Tilt)

[4] [https://dev.opera.com/articles/w3c-device-orientation- usage/](https://dev.opera.com/articles/w3c-device-orientation-usage/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is incredible, will look to use that library in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On my iPhone 5s this doesn't seem to work all that well. The outer ring rotates twice as much as I physically rotate my phone. Otherwise the raw numbers are roughly the same as what I get in the Compass app on my phone, as expected from the Orientation API (the gps on my phone doesn't work well in my current location - maps gives my location about half a degree north of where I am with an error of +-120 km)

Plus, the demo is counter intuitive - the needle should point north, not where I'm pointing my phone. That's how a magnetic compass works. I'm not Jack Sparrow.

<comment><USER4> > That's how a magnetic compass works. I'm not Jack Sparrow.

Thank you. That's the first time in a while I've laughed out loud. It's been a dreary week.

On the other hand, I've got to give props to what is clearly a project someone worked hard on. It's got a very attractive design, despite it's technical difficulties (that may be surmountable!).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In my iPhone 5, it seems to point exactly in the opposite direction. The included Compass app works perfectly. I don't know if this matters or not, but I'm in South America.

<comment><USER6> I don't think the geography should matter. The reversed toilet direction is a myth, the north pole is the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> By "cross browser," it looks like the OP means the following minimum versions of mobile browsers which support the Screen Orientation API[1]:

\- Chrome 39 \- Firefox Mobile (with the moz prefix).

Apparently the API is also supported by the following Desktop browser versions...but I'm not sure this app takes advantage of it:

\- Chrome 38 \- Firefox (Gecko) \- IE 11 \- Opera 25

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Screen.orie...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Screen.orientation#Browser_compatibility)

</comment><comment><USER8> It doesn't seem to work on my Nokia Lumia 710, Windows Phone 7.5 (7.10.8779.8), Internet Explorer.

But also, a lot of things don't work on my phone (not even Youtube I can watch on the browser, I have to use an app for that; a non-official one btw).

<comment><USER7> It seems that the screen oriantation API[1] isn't compatible with mobile IE, and is only supported by IE 11.

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Screen.orie...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Screen.orientation#Browser_compatibility)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome ! Loaded, closed tab, turned off data, loaded again, still works :) (except that people think I'm crazy waving my phone in the air trying to draw the figure 8)

</comment><comment><USER10> I can speak from experience, getting things to look this nice in mobile browsers AND actually do something is really hard. Good work.

An interesting additional feature might be some means to indicate magnetic declination. Actually, if you also grab GPS location, you should be able to calculate it and correct magnetic north back to true north.

One note, usually it's the needle that moves with the orientation, not the dial.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback all. Unfortunately each browser seems to have its quirks in the implementation of the spec - I thought I'd caught most of them but obviously still a bit of work to do!

With regard to the dial rotating rather than the needle, it's an interesting point (no pun intended :) I think each has its own merit for certain applications - probably worth adding an option to choose.

</comment><comment><USER11> I love being being caught off guard like this by what's possible with the Web platform. Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER12> When I rotate screen to landscape on my Android using Chrome 40.0.2214.89, it says North is about pi/2 anti-clockwise from where it says North is when my screen is portrait. Presumably It's not accounting for screen rotation.

<comment><USER10> So, this is something that is not explained well with Device Orientation API. It's meant for holding your phone flat in your palm, parallel to the ground. In that orientation, the heading is reported relative to the top edge of the device. It _can_ work in a landscape orientation, but at that point that top edge of the device is now pointing 90 degrees in the wrong dejection from what you probably intend, i.e. the back plate of the device. And in a portrait orientation, it completely gimbal locks.

For that very reason, I wrote this: [https://github.com/capnmidnight/Psychologist.js/blob/master/...](https://github.com/capnmidnight/Psychologist.js/blob/master/html5/js/input/MotionInput.js)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunately this browser doesn't support orientation so will not show your correct heading.

Chrome 40.0.2214.111 on Yosemite. Not really cross-browser when its not working in newest Chrome ...

Edit: tried it on iPhone, its working but orientation is reversed. For example I turn to North, turn left 90 deg and instead of showing West, its showing East.

<comment><USER14> What did you expect it to do on your laptop? It's a compass. It's pretty fundamentally tied to the orientation service. And of course laptops don't tend to have gyroscopes in them.

<comment><USER15> Laptops, including Macbooks made since 2010 or so have gyroscopes in them. Originally for the purpose of detecting a fall and parking the drive head before impact.

<comment><USER16> Gyroscopes or acceleratometers? How many axis?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lessons Learned After Shutting My Startup, Following a Six-Year Struggle - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/lessons-learned-shutting-startup/ <comment><USER6> This is a great article and kudos to Yaakov for being brave enough to share his experience with us. This is a classic example of a talented and dedicated people working on a bad idea and hoping that they can pivot their way to a good idea.

As they rightly noted in the end people don't want to make their own clothes online. They want clothes that make them look good and project the image to the world that reflects how they want to be seen. No matter how well executed, this idea can't work except for the tiniest niche.

I have often thought about how to make this market (the "consumer co-creation" category) work and I have yet to figure out a way. The best idea I have had is to out Zara Zara. The Zara model it to keep the supply chains short (with a resulting high labor cost) and the stock turn over rapid so if something proves popular they can make more of it quickly (no ordering for summer in the middle of winter). It might be possible with better physical tracking and identification of the key influencers to be able to get a jump on what will prove popular with enough lead time that you can lengthen the supply chain to be able to take advantage of low cost labor, but I have not explored this idea.

</comment><comment><USER7> i do a 1h free for startups, this means i talk a lot with startups of all kinds.

sometimes i talk with early stage founders - very, very clever and very passionate people - who have figured everything out. they know what product they will build, what their website will look like, what they URLs will look like, what their marketing campaign will look like, how they will get investment, what their customers will be like.

i call this a "perfect start-up"

perfect start-ups fail. always. sometimes fast, usually it takes them a long, hard, crappy time.

sometimes i talk with early stage founders - very, very clever and very passionate people - who have an idea. they don't know what their product will look like, don't know what their website will look like, don't know what their marketing campaign will look like, don't know how they will get investment, don't know what their customers will be like. they don't even know if their idea is great or shit.

i call these "interesting people"

they are clever, passionate, willing to listen, willing to work hard ... and sometimes, only sometimes, they succeed.

<comment> d--b Here though it is clear that they were in the second category. They said they pivoted several times, changed their customer targets, tried many things and it didn't work out. It's not like they started with a "know-it-all" attitude, it's just that they tried, failed, iterated and failed again until they could not do it anymore. I say congrats for trying.

<comment><USER8> > It's not like they started with a "know-it-all" attitude,

Well, they hired a (presumably competent) web design firm and then told them to implement a truly horrific site wireframe design, replete with a font in the same family as comic sans. It takes a certain amount of hubris - <USER2> ignorance - to think you can design an effective, attractive website for a growing business (and in the fashion industry, to boot!) with zero training or background in web development or graphic design.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, i am guessing the design was in 2009'ish, when they started, rather than in the last few years.

<comment><USER10> Wireframes we drawn were meant to be a design guide, they never made it to production of course ;—)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow you guys just hit that thing pretty hard - no experience, no tech knowledge, raise cash, throw it at an agency that takes a year and $100K to build the software then grind out your unproven new concepts for six years.

You've got stamina I'll grant that. (or you HAD stamina?)

Not my cup of tea. I prefer my to do my failing writing my own code and these days I try to avoid spending any money so that when I fail I feel less bad about it than I used to when I spent lots of money to get to failure.

<comment><USER12> To me it sounds more like "We had no skills, no experience and no worthy advice. But we DID have $100K burning a hole in our pockets".

Literally "Rule number 1" of being a startup is "Do an MVP and then test if it's worth it to do more". $100K is one hell of an MVP.

A fool and his money are soon parted.

<comment><USER13> Hi, I'm interested in your perspective on this. Could you elaborate as to how much is an acceptable amount to spend on an MVP and testing? $100k certainly sounds high but not altogether unreasonable considering there is a physical product and distribution.

<comment><USER12> You are not wrong about the "physical product and distribution" part, but the article says they paid $100K for web development alone.

<comment><USER10> Didn't elaborate well — $100K were total expenses by the time of launch, but tech took more than production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I hate to see a good idea go to waste. I think the assumption that people want to design their own clothes is false. But if a celebrity designed a pair of jeans, people would want that.

It probably isn't realistic to get Kanye West for a non-ridiculous sum of money. But a lot of fairly popular indie musicians or fashion bloggers would surely endorse a pair of "custom" jeans with their name on the label. I know a lot of musicians would do it simply to get a bunch of free pairs of their own custom jeans.

<comment><USER6> This is just another celebrity fashion brand. These are popular for a short while, but it is really hard to build a sustainable model on this.

Fashion is incredibly competitive - really, really competitive. Us techies underestimate how cut throat the fashion industry is. It is not a bunch of idiots air kissing each other - it is in the main run by really canny people who know what they are doing.

<comment><USER15> Apart from Victoria Beckham I don't see any celebrity fashion brands lasting.

<comment><USER16> Uhh... Just because you're not aware of celebrity fashion brands doesn't mean they don't exist:

Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen - The Row

Jessica Simpson - <USER3>

Gwen Stefani - <USER4>

Jay Z - <USER5>

Beyonce - House of Dereon

P Diddy - Sean John

Kanye West

And these are just a FEW.

Celebrities selling clothes is pretty lucrative.

<comment><USER15> I meant lasting in the sense that Chanel, Dior, Boss, are

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm wondering, and forgive me if I missed this somewhere in the article, but did the founders wanted this type of product for themselves in the first place?

If there was a solution like that before they started, would they go and design their own jeans instantly, cause they really really wanted to do so?

Sounds to me like one of these "that would be cool if, I think"-type of ideas... I may be wrong though?

<comment><USER18> They did address this and acknowledged it should have been a red-flag for them.

Really what it comes down to is the old saying how people "...don't know what they want until they see it." Bespoke items are great, but, at least with pants, I would assume the purpose would be to get the best fitting pair, not necessarily to give a pair of pants flair. The end result of telling people "your pants can look however you want!" is a bunch of people scratching their heads going "I want...them to fit?"

<comment><USER19> I guess that's the difference between this and say, threadless. Threadless has amateur custom designs submitted and voted on, and the top designs float up to the front page. Because most people simply aren't very good designers...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am a little puzzled that they they didn't try to sell companies instead. Every company has shirts with the company brand but I'd think you'd really stand out if say your food delivery people were wearing company branded jeans. I did a quick check and none of the corporate apparel vendors offered jeans or pants.

<comment><USER20> Probably because the brand recognition on a pair of jeans is too low to even bother. A logo on a shirt is instantly recognizable: it's right in front of you.

Putting the company name on a jeans only works for short names. Even a relatively short name like Facebook is challenging to keep it readable from a short distance, let alone from a few meters.

Similar for logos, with the additional challenge of logo placement. Where will you put the logo on a jeans? On the back? That will cause a lot of uncomfortable situations. On the front? Now you have to look down in front of the person wearing the trousers, making it even more uncomfortable.

Maybe jeans in the exact company color could work, but you need a lot of different sizes. People are very picky about the fitting of a jeans, so you'll end up with a huge number of sizing combinations. Shirts a far more easy: from XS to XL and you're done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We are trying an experiment with the a new product my company is launching.

We started out by writing down all of our assumptions, of which there are many. I'm not sure you can ever build any product or service without them, no can you successfully "validate" all of them (people's actions don't always line up with their words).

It's actually really refreshing to be able to look and see, "OK, there's all of the stuff that we don't really know, and our job is to invalidate any lore in there as quickly as possible."

</comment><comment><USER22> "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." \--George Bernard Shaw

</comment><comment><USER23> As a die hard tester, my first question would be, "what price points did you test?"

$299, $399, $499?

For example, you said you have a 0.6% conversion rate and $99 price point point. Perhaps your conversion rate at $499 would drop to 0.3% but even so you just dramatically increased your profit

Often times mispricing (either too high or too low) is why startups fail.

<comment><USER10> We started with $150, as far as I can remeber than went down. The higher the price, the more important is the brand component OR bespoke experience in the luxury offline environment. We did work with ateliers that sold our jeans for $300, but a) the volume was still low and b) we were only getting our $99 out of the each pair. Besides, when you go for real bespoke, people tend to be much more picky → more returns and alterations as a result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm surprised they decided to just focus on jeans. I can't imagine buying pants without trying them on. Even if I get the size right I might not like how they feel. Hoodies and shirts seem much more forgiving, and there are a bunch of companies who seem to be successful in that space.

<comment><USER25> There are lots of companies popping up that focus on doing one thing well - Casper's, Harry's etc. It sounds like they'd have had far lower margins on hoodies and shirts.

</comment></comment><comment> d--b I see all these comments saying it was a bad idea in the first place. That is quite not true. The market for custom jeans is simply overcrowded! I mean why wasn't getwear on this article at all: [http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487038050045756065...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703805004575606533495860918)

I think that - as the article points out - the execution wasn't great for a number of reason, but don't blame the idea.

<comment><USER26> if anything.. that's confirmation they're right. 2 of the 3 custom jean makers in that article are gone:

here's a blank page for one: [http://thimbler.com/](http://thimbler.com/)

And indiedenim is now Indie Internet Marketers: [http://www.indidenim.com/](http://www.indidenim.com/)

The 4th mentioned in the article was a site that ranked premade jeans from major manufacturers based on a questionaire.. so i'm not counting that one.

<comment><USER16> Whoaaaa... Indie Denim's website is HORRIBLE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> After all that, the idea still has merit, but as the author pointed out, jeans (and clothing in general) are rather tricky products.

I recently purchased a sofa from a site that used a similar tack - though in hindsight it had a more limited set of options than a typical furniture store. But that's still OK, at least I didn't have to make chatter with a furniture sales rep - who aren't bad people, I'm just not very social.

</comment><comment><USER28> A couple of things I don't like about clothing startups is that they don't go after my demographic that has a problem, the cost of the products are way too high and they have an assumption that people have fashion sense.

For example my problem is that I have not-so-lovely male gyno and I produce sweat stains on my T-shirts at a particularly high rate (such that when I find a shirt that fits and looks right its ruined in a couple of months). Thus I like the idea of customizing a piece of clothing but I just can't see how you could make it cost effective given I want to use different materials and cuts. Not to mention I want you to pick a good fashion for my body type.

If the company went after a particular niche.. like shirts for ugly dudes to make ugly dudes look better instead of rich good looking young hipsters.. I might be interested :)

<comment><USER6> I have always been fascinated why fashion labels make equal numbers of each size (XS, S, M, L, XL) when this does not fit the distrubution of sizes of the population. It is even worse with pants where 36" & 38" sell out instantly, but there is always a 24" in the sale bin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I use buildyourownjeans.com for this.

They are somewhat spammy, quality control is dodgy (I've gotten a zipper when I ordered buttons), the website is a joke, but...

The price is right ~$75

They offer things I cant easily get elsewhere that matter to me, 14oz fabric, raw denim, and customized cut

</comment><comment><USER30> This idea is not revolutionary and already has plenty of market research. A single day talking to people who work in fashion/apparel/denim industry would've told them this was not viable.

</comment><comment><USER31> $100k and a year to launch something?

</comment><comment><USER32> They have their VK vs Facebook numbers completely wrong: "Russia's mighty Facebook rival, VK — which has more than twice as many total users and probably many times more active users — didn't work for us. It seems that folks there are too preoccupied with cats and funny images to bother about custom jeans." Facebook has 1.55 billion monthly active users, not the 24 million claimed there – even with 2014 numbers, Facebook went over 1 billion monthly active users in 2012. ([http://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of- monthly-...](http://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly- active-facebook-users-worldwide/) [http://newsroom.fb.com/company- info/](http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/)).

<comment><USER33> The article numbers are obviously only for Russia.</comment></comment>


How to: Compete with Amazon S3 without Buying Hardware - <AUTHOR> http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2012/04/how-to-compete-with-amazon-s3-without-buying-hardware.html

<comment><USER2> Tahoe-LAFS[1] is a storage system that works similarly. It splits data into n fragments, of which any k fragments are enough to restore the data. This leads to a replication factor of only DATA_SIZE/k*n, while you can still lose n-k pieces without data loss. Additionally all data is encrypted, signed and optionally deduplicated.

One of the authors of Tahoe-LAFS started a company that ported the whole system over to cloud storage providers.[2] It's still in alpha, but it's definitly worth a look if you want secure, encrypted storage without relying on a single cloud provider.

1: <https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs>

2: <https://leastauthority.com/>

<comment><USER3> Now _this_ is a cloud application.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been watching the storage industry for years as a hobby-passion. Adam pretty much hit all the major points. The storage space is still open for disruption but is hard with high risk.

It's not like building a website. You need serious funding for hardware. You need people to manage the hardware. You need complex software to manage the data and ensure security. One serious breach early on and you're done.

Competing with Amazon is especially hard since S3 is well established and entrenched. If you use EC2 you're going to use S3.

Pricing would be a primary factor in competing. 3x redundancy is unnecessary. I'm not sure why services still do that. Reed-Solomon or similar redundancy algorithms can provide better protection and use less space. They have CPU overhead but CPUs aren't going to be the bottleneck for a storage service, bandwidth and hard drives will be.

 _Edit: This would be if you built from the hardware up. I don't think offering a service like S3 on top of other storage services would work as a business. You'd have to deal with too many vendors, too much variation in APIs / software / hardware, lack of control, latency issues, and much tighter margins. IMO you'd be better off starting with bare metal. You could do something like this for personal, smaller scale storage but growing it to scale would be a nightmare._

<comment><USER5> I imagine that the response times of S3 vs. this Frankenstore model will be much better, which may be an issue for certain applications.

Also you need to host infrastructure software that knows where your data is sitting, how to deal with provider failures, how to efficiently route requests, etc. which means yet-another-thing-to-configure.

Finally, if the volume of data you're storing is so expensive on S3, I have to wonder why you have all this non-revenue generating data stored in the first place. Processing it also seems more expensive now because the free bandwidth you get from EC2<->S3 won't apply in the Frankenstore model.

<comment><AUTHOR> All good points!

I should have mentioned this more explicitly but you could take the buying- raw-storage model and use it to do anything S3 does, I think. Eg you could have three independent whole copies, or one whole copy and 1.5 copies distributed widely.

The only thing I can think of that Amazon could do that you couldn't do, if the raw storage providers are untrusted, is serve the data with no addition hops, since the data would be encrypted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "In 2006 a 320 GB hard drive cost $120. Today (Thailand floods aside) that much money will snag you a 3 TB drive."

Floods or not, the current price isn't $120 dollars. It's 50% higher than that.

[http://camelcamelcamel.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Green- Desk...](http://camelcamelcamel.com/Western-Digital-Caviar-Green- Desktop/product/B004RORMF6?active=amazon)

Shows one of the cheapest 3tb non enterprise drives. It looks like 3tb was $120 for ~2 weeks. Looking at enterprise drives, 3tb is closer to $300.

This article is basically advocating RAID 5 across many storage providers.

*edit: From the pictures, article is advocating RAID 10. Nonetheless, RAID5 would be just as feasible for additional storage.

<comment><AUTHOR> > This article is basically advocating RAID 5 across many storage providers.

That is correct. And to be more precise, I'm advocating RAID 5 across storage providers _as a service_ , so people who just want to store data don't have to manage anything.

<comment><USER7> >> _This article is basically advocating RAID 5 across many storage providers._

> _That is correct._

The diagram in the article and text description is RAID 1+0 aka RAID 10.

<comment><USER8> No, it's RAID 5. Well, specifically, it's RAID 6 but customizable. You can lose _any_ k drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A big cost of running a redundant data storage service is data transfer.

To store two replicas of each piece of data, you must receive the data at one replica, transmit it to the other replica, and receive it at that replica. The data goes in at one server, then back out, and then in at the other server. To store 1 GB of data, you must pay for 3 GB of data transfer. Data transfer is expensive.

Amazon works around this problem by building data centers in clusters, interconnected with low-cost connections. When you upload to S3, your data goes over the Internet only once.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Amazon S3 has high margins today. ...

> ... despite the fact that hard drive costs fall 50% per year.

Citations for both statements please.

Even if both are true, it may be the case that hard drives are not the primary cost of running a large cloud storage service.

</comment><comment><USER11> So basically <https://nimbus.io/> on rented hardware.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure I completely understand. Are you recommending people shop around? Do you want someone to develop a service to shop around for storage? Or, do you simply want a cheaper competitor?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. I just edited the post to try to make it clearer.

I'm proposing that anyone could start a company, Foo Inc, who would sell redundant storage and compete with S3. Instead of operating your own hard drives, you rent hard drives connected to the Internet from a variety of providers. Of course your customer would know that you were doing this, and advanced customers could even choose their own blend of raw storage providers to optimize for different things.

Towards the end of the post I mention briefly that instead of a startup (Foo Inc), this ecosystem could be set up in a decentralized way (think Bitcoin v.s. central banking), though that is far less realistic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's true that cost/GB has fallen, but cost/IOPS hasn't followed suit. If your I/O maxes out when the disk is 10% full, you can't really do much with the other 90%.

</comment><comment><USER14> Break the file into 3 equal parts. You only need to store one part plus the parity file. And not necessarily with the same cloud provider. Result: you pay 1/3 less for storage. So if Dropbox is so clever why aren't they doing this for their customers? xor'ing/Reed-Solomon has been used this way since Usenet.

</comment><comment><USER15> So... let me get this straight. You came up with an idea which requires building a strong brand which takes a lot of money and that Amazon can squelch any second there's a hint of possibility of a success. And this made HackerNews frontpage. What?

<comment><USER16> Or building an open source tool that individual users could use to manage raw storage in an S3 fashion. Its an interesting idea.

<comment><USER17> Or one many little startups everywhere could use to compete locally with Amazon in the SMB space.</comment></comment></comment>


Replacing a silently failing disk in a ZFS pool - <AUTHOR> https://imil.net/blog/2019/07/02/Replacing-a-silently-failing-disk-in-a-ZFS-pool/ <comment><USER2> > What? there's a shitton of docs on this topic! Are you stupid?

I've been using one form of Unix or another since 1994. I've been employed as a sys admin over many of those years. I think the git CLI is just dandy. I love iptables. lsof? No problem. No CLI has made me feel more dumb than ZFS's. I have more "how to" notes for it than any other Unix CLI that I use. So no, you aren't stupid. (The Linux "ip" CLI isn't my favorite either – when you need a rosetta stone for your CLI it's not a great sign [https://access.redhat.com/sites/default/files/attachments/rh...](https://access.redhat.com/sites/default/files/attachments/rh_ip_command_cheatsheet_1214_jcs_print.pdf))

</comment><comment><USER3> Before I put my first zfs system in production, I prepared for the following scenarios, using the actual hardware: Corrupt bits on three disks. Cut power to disk Pulled disk out while running. Decided I hated a healthy disk and replaced it with a different disk. Pulled a disk from the zfs and the root mirror and installed a new root mirror without backups. So I now know that it has the ability to recover from most things I could come up with. If I had only kept notes on how to do it, but I deferred that with "I'll do the google and maybe setup a play-system in the same state to test stuff before doing it on the real system".. not a good admin this one (me, myself, not the author, kudos for them to write about their experience and make us all smarter)..

<comment><USER4> I think every single person in charge of a production storage system has pulled their hair out for a while dry running these things. If only we built playbooks for our software that showed exactly what to do in these simple failure modes.

This post is a very strange failure mode so it'd probably not be in that guide.

<comment><USER3> yeh, it's somewhat strange, then again, disks trying their best, and drivers trying their best, to serve, probably result in many silent retries that just appear as slight performance jitter.. It's not like the FS would know the first time a disk re-reads a sector, it might not even be relocated the first time it happens.. Maybe we need some mechanism for reporting "yeah, we got your bits but it wasn't as smooth sailing as usual" to filesystems such as zfs.

<comment><USER5> As marcosdumay says, smart should handle this, but you do have to look.

Iffy sectors get marked as Pending, Reallocated sectors are also marked. There's some smart stats for seek times too, I believe (but those weren't as clearly associated with failure as sector counts).

There is a danger that manufacturers will avoid acknowledging problems in smart, but so far, I haven't heard about that happening too often. There are certainly some drives that are dead or dying with fine smart values, but it seems rare, and there's often a not obvious dependency where a drive that is very unhealthy may not be able to record new smart values.

<comment><USER6> In my experience, SMART doesn't detect anything of value. 95% of my disk failures are:

\- Seek time gets very high (>80%). \- Drive drops dead and won't respond

SMART doesn't detect either of these.

Setting an alert on seek times > 30ms has been by far the best predictor of drive failure. If the seek times go over ~400ms then other components start complaining about slow/missing I/O, but by that point you've already gone crazy because your array is unusably slow.

If a drive develops bad sectors SMART will report it, but that's rare enough that I don't bother watching for it. It's a non-event with ZFS because of the checksumming. These drives never have one random error; they start raising hundreds in the space of minutes, and that's the moment you replace the drive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Big Kudos to ZFS (on Linux), it's just amazing how sane and stable it is. It saved my ass multiple times in the past years. I've also just finished upgrading a RAIDZ1 vdev by replacing one disk at a time with bigger ones. Resilvering took 15h for each disk and there was some trouble with a (already replaced) disk failing during that. Panic mode set in, but ZFS provided the means to fix it quite easily - all good. Best decision ever to pick ZFS.

<comment><USER8> you can replace multiple disks at a time, assuming you have enough drive slots.

<comment><USER9> And assuming the array has sufficient redundancy to allow multiple disks to be offline, which a RAIDZ1 vdev doesn't.

<comment><USER10> If you have space you can "zfs attach" the new drives to make mirror vdevs with the disks they're replacing, and then "zfs detach" the old drives to break the mirror when done.

This is preferable because you're never exposed to any additional risk of data loss and can replace more disks at once than original pool redundancy would allow.

<comment><USER11> Not on a raidz vdev you can't.

You can't make mirrors out of anything other than existing mirrors or single disk vdevs.

(You _can_ run zpool replace on more disks than the pool redundancy has, assuming you don't need to disconnect the old disks to put the new ones in...running zpool replace on two disks in a four-disk raidz1 is perfectly legal, as long as the old disks are still there.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interestingly enough I had a reverse scenario a few weeks ago: ZFS alerted on rw errors on a drive, smartctl and the kernel was perfectly fine with it. The drive was in fact failing, the physical noises (!) made it clear, but other than ZFS, nothing was reporting it.

<comment><USER13> Hardware failing is a noisier (literally in your case) version of silent data corruption, which is one of the core original use cases and justifications for ZFS:

> BILL MOORE We had several design goals, which we'll break down by category. > The first one that we focused on quite heavily is data integrity. If you > look at the trend of storage devices over the past decade, you'll see that > while disk capacities have been doubling every 12 to 18 months, one thing > that's remaining relatively constant is the bit-error rate on the disk > drives, which is about one uncorrectable error every 10 to 20 terabytes. The > other interesting thing to note is that at least in a server environment, > the number of disk drives per deployment is increasing, so the amount of > data people have is actually growing at a super-exponential rate. That means > with the bit-error rate being relatively constant, you have essentially an > ever-decreasing amount of time until you notice some form of uncorrectable > data error. That's not really cool because before, say, about 20 terabytes > or so, you would see either a silent or a noisy data error.

> JEFF BONWICK In retrospect, it isn't surprising either because the error > rates we're observing are in fact in line with the error rates the drive > manufacturers advertise. So it's not like the drives are performing out of > spec or that people have got a bad batch of hardware. This is just the > nature of the beast at this point in time.

> BM So, one of the design principles we set for ZFS was: never, ever trust > the underlying hardware.

> […]

> Greenplum has created a data-warehousing appliance consisting of a rack of > 10 Thumpers (SunFire x4500s). They can scan data at a rate of one terabyte > per minute. That's a whole different deal. Now if you're getting an > uncorrectable error occurring once every 10 to 20 terabytes, that's once > every 10 to 20 minutes—which is pretty bad, actually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _> But… at less than 40K/s! Turns out that very logically the failing disk and its timeouts was slowing down the silvering, so I learned that to avoid this kind of situation, you should offline the failing disk from the zpool:_

Yeah I ran into this too. I wish raidz would route around the slow drive by re-balanceing reads to the more performant drives based on IO queue depth (reconstructing data from parity if needed). They do it for mirrors, but not raidz.

</comment><comment><USER14> I just spent about a week trying to get a raidz pool going for a home server under Ubuntu. It was about one of the most frustrating experiences in recent memory. My goal was to run the root system off an SSD with the heavily used folders offloaded onto a ZFS raidz pool.

I followed the Ubuntu Root on ZFS guide with changes I thought would be appropriate.

I gave up eventually and came to a disgruntled conclusion is that it works for beginner users tho follow guides to the T and advanced users that know the changes that need to be made from institutional knowledge, but not for people in between.

<comment><USER15> That depends on your OS. Ubuntu is, frankly, very bad at it -- though few other distributions are very much better.

I'd recommend NixOS. ZFS is a proper first-class filesystem there, and you can use it almost however you like.

<comment><USER16> Thanks... have a used server I'm going to play with in a couple weekends... won't have the final drives for the new shared drive setup for a couple months (moving away from an old nas box) and going to try a few scenarios with an nvme as the boot drive via adapter, and most storage/backup to the RAID array.

Was planning on trying both unraid and windows server as host OSes, and maybe even using a NAS distro in a VM managing the individual drives, etc. Would prefer something that supported docker, full vms and a friendly NAS UI, but not sure such a beast exists.

<comment><USER17> FreeNAS is linux distro with a friendly NAS UI: [https://freenas.org/](https://freenas.org/) \- but still linux, so you get all the usual linux stuff - docker, full VMs, etc...

<comment><USER18> FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD, not the Linux kernel. It's from a completely different lineage of operating systems.

<comment><USER17> Ooops, thanks for the correction!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Note that his zpool is in "raidz" mode not "mirror" mode. The latter is going to be far better and faster at handling replacement of dead/dying drives because you can pretty much just remove the old one, plug the new one in and then update the zpool (in that order). It's also faster in normal use due to lack of performance issues related to calculating and storing of parity bits in raidz.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've got a RAID-Z2 array that is being kind of weird, and I'm not entirely sure where the problem is, but it has never lost data. At first I thought it was a marginal disk. Now I'm thinking it might be the controller.

It's amazing how easy it is to work with ZFS though. I was able to take each drive out of the pool, run badblocks on it (read/write to exercise it and look for errors), and then add it back in once it passed the burn in test. Easy peasy. Even with each drive being a dm-crypt.

I've been using ZFS for a very long time, and never had data loss on it. Even back in the early days of ZFS+FUSE under Linux. At one time I had 5 big systems running ZFS for backups of ~150 machines.

</comment><comment><USER20> Has anyone investigated Stratis? I only recently heard about it, and it sounds like it has a ways to go to match feature parity, but it is targeting ZFS and Btrfs, seems like it has made a lot of progress in the last 2 years, and has Redhat behind it (?). It's not clear to me how closely it will match ZFS features, but it seems like it might be on a path to maturity before Btrfs.

[https://stratis-storage.github.io/](https://stratis-storage.github.io/)

I really wish we had HAMMER on Linux.

<comment><USER21> Its nowhere near ZFS/HAMMER/BTRFS ...

Check their FAQ here: [https://stratis- storage.github.io/faq/](https://stratis-storage.github.io/faq/)

In short:

 _In terms of its design, Stratis is very different from ZFS /BTRFS, since they are both in-kernel filesystems. Stratis is a userspace daemon that configures and monitors existing components from Linux's device-mapper subsystem, as well as the XFS filesystem._

Red Hat move seems very strange here because it would be better just to hire several BTRFS developers and join the BTRFS Linux ecosystem instead of writing something new ... I still do not know what for ...

<comment><USER22> > it would be better just to hire several BTRFS developers and join the BTRFS > Linux ecosystem instead of writing something new

I found this previous discussion rather enlightening on the subject:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14907771](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14907771)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you already have a spare disk installed doesn't it make more sense to just add it to pool anyway and just bump up the redundancy to Z2 or Z3?

<comment><USER24> That is one of those Great Debates.

If your spare disk is a "hot spare" where it is plugged in and powered up, yes.

If your spare disk philosophy is "cold spare" where the drive is in a box on a shelf, probably not.

Hot spares are faster and easier to turn into replacement drives but the "hot spare" is subject to usage-based (electrical, thermal, and mechanical) failure modes. For a given drive, the probability of failure is largely proportional to power-on hours[1].

Cold spares are not accumulating power-on hours so they likely won't fail while waiting to be used and presumably won't fail for quite some time after being installed as a replacement.

[1] Intuitively, but hard to prove because of many confounding factors.

Backblaze has the best drive failure rate data that I'm aware of: [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test- data.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have a few zfs pools mostly for temp space for tape backup. I tried using an old attached dell storage for ZOL with luns, but ZOL had locking issues. But pretty much we replace all cheap solaris zfs storage for a mix of flash/consumer drive nimble.

</comment><comment><USER26>
        Jul  2 12:51:02 <kern.crit> newcoruscant kernel: ahcich1: AHCI reset: device not ready after 31000ms (tfd = 00000080)

Looks like the FreeBSD kernel has a similar configuration as Linux, which is a command timer of ~30 seconds. If the drive hangs longer, then the whole link is reset. And the reason why the drive is hanging is lost in that reset.

The likely reason why the drive is hanging, if it's a consumer drive, is it has very high bad sector recovery time, and can approach 3 minutes. That's pretty crazy.

Anyway, it's central to any RAID to be able to get a discrete read error from the drive. And that read error will include the LBA for the bad sector. And that information is needed to know what data is affected and where to get a good copy (from mirror or from reconstruction using parity). This is the same on md raid on Linux, ZFS, Btrfs, and even hardware RAID will depend on it. There are too many commands in the queue to just assume one of those commands and therefore one of those requested sectors (which could be thousands) is the bad sector. A discrete read error with LBA is necessary.

And the link reset prevents that.

On Linux, this is set per drive (this is a Linux SCSI command timer, which applies to all PATA and SATA drives too, and it is not a drive setting, it's a kernel setting) timeout:

        $ cat /sys/block/sda/device/timeout
        30

Ideally the drive supports SCT ERC (that's for SATA, there's a SCSI/SAS equivalent) and you use 'smartctl -l scterc' to change it to a value less than the kernel command timer. That way the drive itself gives up faster, and issues a discrete read error, and now the kernel (and ZFS) can figure out how to repair the problem.

If the drive doesn't support configurable SCT ERC, you have to raise the kernel command timer to an obscene level.

        # echo 180 > /dev/block/sdN/device/timeout

And now the kernel will just wait and wait and wait and wait until finally the drive does give up on recovery and issues a discrete read error, and the kernel and ZFS can fix it.

The late tl;dr is, this is not a ZFS problem. This is the result of long set kernel command timers, and a refusal by kernel developers to update them for the incredibly high (some might say crazy) deep recoveries that consumer drives use. But here's the thing, macOS and Windows know about these high recoveries, and tolerate them without doing link resets. And that's why they eventually recover bad sectors, but the user notices them as performance slow downs.

And what fixes them? A clean install. And that's because a sector write that fails due to a bad sector, causes a remap. Which is the same mechanism that ZFS, Btrfs, md raid, and hardware raid will all depend on. The read error results in getting good data from a copy (mirror or reconstruction from parity), the good copy is both sent to the application layer as well as results in an overwrite command to the sector that had the read error. If that write fails the drive firmware itself remaps that LBA to a spare sector.

Anyway, this is a misconfiguration, the question is who is to blame for it? And even that's complicated because the drive doesn't announce its SCT ERC support or value. You have to poll it. Could the kernel poll for this? I guess? But should it? Probably not its domain? Is it a distribution question rather than an upstream kernel question? Perhaps, yes, the distros should use high command timers by default, and expect sysadmins will reduce them if the use case requires it.</comment>


Ask HN: Realtime chat engine - <AUTHOR>

What is the best technology to implement real time chat engine ? <comment><USER2> Ummm... your own IRC server? Seems pretty realtime to me, and quite configurable. Of course, IRC is geared towards group chat, not user-user.

Perhaps include some more details about what your restrictions/requirements are - will the users be web-based? How many concurrent users will you expect online at any given time?

If you're looking for advice from others, it's best to provide as much info as you can.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the lack of information, but the engine I'm looking for is web-based and able to do group chat or real time collaboration, and assume the engine can communicate with Ruby On Rails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I looked into this previously and was interested most by XMPP. You can use open source servers like Openfire (Java, <http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp>) or eJabberd (Erlang, <http://www.ejabberd.im/>). It's more instant messaging than chatting, though (although it does support multi user chat)

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you looking to write something, or use something like mibbit?

(In other words, would mibbit do what you needed?)

<comment><AUTHOR> Can mibbit do realtime collaboration ? Actually the one I need is web based group chat and realtime collaboration, so other than chat the group can do realtime collaboration too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Comet?

<comment><AUTHOR> I search and found Ajax Push Engine, is it belong to Comet ? The exactly technology that I need is group chat or realtime collaboration, does this technology serve well ?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: As a developer, should I care about the systemd controversy or not? - <AUTHOR>

Self-explanatory, being a java and python dev is there any way in which systemd is going to affect me negatively or is the init system irrelevant for me? <comment><USER2> If you'd have any contact with init system, or one of services systemd integrates, you'd definitely know what you need from it, so apparently you don't. Systemd will integrate many things that were not integrated before, but that's opaque for app developers. If you write any kind of daemon that starts with the system, you may want to add systemd config file defining how to start your app, but that's probably where your contant with systemd will end.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, it's possible if you're somewhat interested in linux in general.

I'm a webdeveloper, mainly doing php, and I found a use case for php-fpm and systemd thanks to a blogpost of a friend. Its php-fpm pools ondemand, if you're interested I've written a blogpost about it here: [http://thanatos.be/2014/04/12/php-fpm- ondemand.html](http://thanatos.be/2014/04/12/php-fpm-ondemand.html)

I guess It all depends on what your goal is or what you like achieving with your code, but imho systemd has some nice features for developers (and doing fun stuff in general). Also have a look at Joey Hess his blogpost about his systemd alarmclock: [http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/a_programmable_alarm_clock_usin...](http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/a_programmable_alarm_clock_using_systemd/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Unless you find yourself interacting with it on a frequent basis probably not.

</comment><comment><USER5> Basically don't bother. Init system isn't really irrelevant to you, but if you aren't already involved in the debate, then you likely aren't too concerned are you?

</comment><comment><USER6> At this point in time, no.

If any of the runtimes that you use decide to start adding a systemd dependency, though, then you need to start paying attention.</comment>


Nassim Nicholas Taleb misconstrues data, is wrong about economics and mobility - <AUTHOR> http://greyenlightenment.com/nassim-taleb-wrong-skin-in-game/ <comment><USER2> A nit: 1 Rockefeller is on the Forbes 400: [https://www.forbes.com/profile/david-rockefeller- sr/](https://www.forbes.com/profile/david-rockefeller-sr/)</comment>


Emulating the Intel 8080 on a MOS 6502 - <AUTHOR> http://www.pagetable.com/?p=824 <comment><USER2> "Why would you do that?!", the readership of Hacker News exclaimed loudly. Their significant other/family/cat looked over at them with a strong wtf look on their face(s).

<comment><USER3> I used to use a 6502 emulator on a 6502.

Why you would do that is that you could develop and debug code in a way that gives you a lot of visibility into the processor and control: stop anywhere in a non-intrusive way and look at the state of anything.

The only other way to get that would be a hardware debugger requiring a second computer.

<comment><USER4> I always use an emulator when I'm doing OS development or low level shit. The ability to see what's happening makes life so much easier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Brilliant piece of work. The kind of coding that you do when space is expensive, been there, done similar things. And as others say an emulator lets you see exactly what your code is doing.

</comment><comment><USER6> After a quick overview, in my opinion it makes sense to try to assemble it. Comments make sense, also the code. I don't think is "garbage code", and if it is, the author put _a lot_ of work of making it convincing.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does this mean the listing doesn't work, or that the original author just never ran it, or that the author hand-assembled it?

Quote:

"Honestly, I don't remember for certain… BUT… MORE THAN LIKELY, it is a FAKE – i.e., I probably just text-edited a listing in "assembler listing" format for the purpose of publishing the code and "looking professional"… ;)"

<comment><USER8> It means that the printed version was manually re-constructed from the original working version. The author here probably just had a hex dump which he'd hand assembled, and re-wrote it to be more comprehensible in a text editor.

This happened more often than you'd think. Before the widespread use of modems or other long-distance ways of sending digital data, it was often very difficult to transfer a digital version from one model of computer to another, let alone converting that format to something that a typesetting system could read.

I remember listings in magazines that were clearly typeset manually from people who were just reading and re-typing from an original printout. Bear in mind that the reader was also expected to type the program by hand from the magazine.

Generally the final proofreading was left to the person brave enough to type it all in again. It could be very frustrating to be faced with a program that was clearly exactly the same as the printed copy, but didn't run. On the other hand, it did teach you to be sceptical of what you read in magazines.

<comment><USER5> It also made you learn quickly how to debug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My first assembly language programs written in 8086 running on DOS (pctask?) , using MASM on an Amiga 500. The irony doesn't escape me.</comment>


System76 Oryx Pro review: Linux in a laptop has never been better - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2016/11/system76-oryx-pro-review-linux-laptop/ <comment><USER2> 32 to 64 GB of RAM and up to 9TB disks sounds pretty great... But out of curiosity, when would you ever need that much on the go?</comment>


Freelancers: Never miss a mention in any of your client's tools again - <AUTHOR> http://www.mentiond.in/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure I understand what the service provides. Can screenshots be added to help visitors understand what the service does?</comment>


Show HN: A First Look at Witnet's Decentralized Oracle Prototype Sheikah - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/witnet/welcome-to-sheikah-5b658d4815c8 <comment><USER2> Direct link to GitHub repo: [https://github.com/witnet/sheikah](https://github.com/witnet/sheikah)</comment>


Boycott SOPA: An Android app that should terrify publishers and politicians - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/112579-boycott-sopa-an-android-app-that-terrifies-publishers-and-politicians

<comment><USER2> Under SOPA this would be banned from the Market. But at least on Android you can get it from other places (at least before they get banned, too).

</comment><comment><USER3> In the Android Market one of the related apps is Go Daddy Mobile!</comment>


Why Seed Funding Isn't A Regional Business - <AUTHOR> http://jasonlbaptiste.com/venture-capital/seed-funding-regional-business/

<comment><USER2> What would be really great is to have a 'YC of ...' in each different area. For instance, New York could be the YC of Finance (e.g. startup: private equity exchange), LA the YC of entertainment (e.g. startup: low-budget TV show delivered through the web), etc. They needn't be about SW/webapps, but whichever area they focus on should be cheap enough to at least prototype something.

Within just the SW/webapps space, it doesn't much sense to have a YC clone in every US city. But it still would make sense to have a YC clone in -say- India or China which focuses on the unique needs of its market. (I suspect these already exist but most of us YC-fundees or YC-wannabe-fundees haven't heard of them and wouldn't care if we did.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think this is entirely true.

Great companies have been started, funded and grown outside the valley. Microsoft, MySQl, Skype, 37Signals, etc. There are more examples than you might think.

Also, while I'm sure there is a lot of engineering talent in the valley it isn't unique. Finland, Denmark, India and the baltic states have awesome programmers and engineers. And they're a lot cheaper, especially in the former eastern bloc.

<comment><USER4> Not to be mean, but that's like saying "Since Obama was elected president, racism is no more." You can't point to exception cases and be like "all done". You have to look at things in aggregate and at the trend lines. And those things show a preponderance of the necessities for a startup culture in the Valley and in few other places.

<comment><USER3> I think there's a lot of groupthink going on in the Silicon Valley echochamber. The examples I came up with were just on the top of my head, not outliers in any way. Here are a few more just for kicks.

fogbugz, Alcatel/Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia, Siemens, Avid, IBM, Ubisoft, Research in motion, Sierra, Kazaa, Joost, Dell.

The tech-world doesn't revolve around Silicon Valley. There are actually other tech hubs, and there are important tech companies being started in other parts of the world. The valley is important, but not _that_ important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wanted very badly to think this wasn't true... but it is true.

<comment><USER6> So did I. Starting a YC like thing in your town isn't easy, but it's not impossible. It's letting the companies grow up and keeping them in your city that usually borders on impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm going to coin this acronym: YACEP, as in, yet another chicken/egg problem.

But sometimes it's not even about having enough talent or enough gasoline. Sometimes, sociological reasons prohibits the growth of multiple fledgling startups in area.

One bit of data I want to offer is Pittsburgh, PA. Pittsburgh has both the distinction of having two top-notch universities (CMU and Pitt) and an emerging early-stage seed incubator. But they're having trouble getting the startup culture going because the talented engineers and developers just don't plain don't want to stay in the city, or they get hired for research/corporate work right away. Those college grads actually prefer _that_ rather than working in a startup. You can try to sell them the Silicon Valley dream without the Silicon Valley all you want but if the mentality isn't there it's going to take a lot more convincing than from just the school, the city, or the investors. The rest that do stay have to compete that much harder to deal with external factors affecting their success than they would get instead of just moving to Silicon Valley in the first place.

But you're definitely right: time is the only thing that will change this.

<comment><USER8> _just don't plain don't want to stay in the city_

I'm not so sure it is that as much as...

 _they get hired for research/corporate work ... actually prefer _that_ rather than working in a startup_

Most of the CMU nerds want to work at the best companies for stimulating their intellectual minds. I suspect people who get accepted to CMU recognize its capacity for strengthening your inner nerd, and so those are the types who go there: people who can maximize their time thinking about difficult computer science problems.

AlphaLab, I presume the seed funding organization you refer to, is going about it all wrong. They are trying to be a copy of YCombinator, and I'll challenge them to a debate if they think otherwise. What they ought to be doing is being more open to the startup community at large to the point where all of the startups in Pittsburgh and all of the investors in Pittsburgh are in one room hobnobbing. So far I have yet to even have met anyone affiliated with AlphaLab. They had some lame happy hour kind of event at their facility _once_ in the last few months, but I left when the director started to waste our time with a presentation which I could have (already had) absorbed via the information on their website.

I've overheard a few comments from investors here. One said something along the lines of, "AlphaLab expects you to invest a couple million in some companies who give 10 minute presentations? Get real." This tells me the adaption to the trend of angel investing isn't happening here. Another investor, when I mentioned the startups in Pittsburgh he replied, "Yeah. There are not enough."

One solution, as I mentioned, is creating the illusion of a startup scene. Just have weekly events and do what you have to that people will actually go to them. Don't waste their time. Carnegie Mellon has a Pre-college program. These are kids who end up going to UPenn, MIT, Stanford, Cornell and so on. That is, they are there because CMU is one of the best schools for computer science so why not get a sample of what it is like there. So, if incubators like AlphaLab actually helped the startup scene _seem_ as though it exists, those Pre-college students may decide they like it and choose to go to CMU over MIT (let's say Stanford rejected them by chance) because they feel a strong sense of a startup environment.</comment></comment>


Patching High School: Teaching the Classes That Should Exist - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tutorspree.com/post/9551298875/tutorspree-classes

<comment><USER2> Applied. Yippee.</comment>