I Don't Need Backups, I Use Raid1 - <AUTHOR> http://momjian.us/main/blogs/pgblog/2012.html#May_31_2012 <comment><USER2> I once started work somewhere where they did software releases by RAID.

Their systems involved shipping a server (effectively an appliance) to the customer with all of the working components on it. However, there was no build or deployment process for these components - so the only way to create a new server was to take an existing one and create a copy.

This was done by opening up a working server running with RAID 1, removing one of the disks and installing the disk into a new server. Let the RAID recover the data onto the other blank disk then remove it and put the other blank disk in and let it rebuild.... result, a copied server!

<comment><USER3> <http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/RAIDing_Disks.aspx>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Dud, Flood, & Bud._

 _Duds_ are hardware that goes bad, like a disk drive, network adapter, NAS, or server. There are an infinite number of ways and combinations things can break in a moderate sized IT shop. How much money / effort are you willing to spend to make sure your weekend isn't ruined by a failed drive?

 _Floods_ are catastrophic events, not limited to acts of God. Your datacenter goes bankrupt and drops offline, not letting you access your servers. Fire sprinklers go off in your server room. Do you have a recent copy of your data somewhere else?

 _Bud_ is an accident-prone user. He accidentally deleted some files... the accounting files... three weeks ago. Or he downloaded a virus which has slowly been corrupting files on the fileserver. Or Bud's a sysadmin who ran a script meant for the dev server on the production database. How can we get that data back in place quickly before the yelling and firing begins?

There are more possible scenarios (hackers, thieves, auditors, the FBI), but if you're thinking about Dud, Flood, & Bud, you're in better shape than most people are.

</comment><comment><USER5> We live in a sad world where most companies don't have a real disaster recovery plan. Many times in my career I've had customers ask me to save them because they "thought" they were backing up but when they went to restore from the {tape|floppy|backup disk} media they found it to be corrupt.

Backup and Disaster recovery strategies seem really easy until you think through all the failure modes and realize the old axiom "You don't know what you don't know" is there to make your life full of pain and suffering.

Years ago my customers would literally restore their entire environments onto new metal to verify they had a working disaster recovery plan. Today most clients think having a "cloud backup" is awesome.. Until they realize in the moment of disaster that they are missing little things like license keys for software, network settings, passwords to local admin on windows boxes etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> RAID is not a backup strategy. RAID is an _availability_ strategy. Unfortunately, it appears that many people don't understand the distinction.

</comment><comment><USER7> _The community has discussed the idea of adding a feature to specify a minimum streaming replication delay_

This is a feature of Oracle, the redo logs are replicated to the standbys as normal, so you have an up to date copy of them on the standby, but only applied after an x hour delay. You can roll the standby forward to any intervening point in time and open it read-only to copy data out.

Less need of it these days with Flashback, of course, but it saved a lot of bacon.

<comment><USER8> Using mk-slave-delay you can do this with Mysql as well. We always have a slave running behind a day. You can fast forward the slave using the 'START SLAVE UNTIL' command.

<comment><USER7> Don't MySQL slaves pull from the master, rather than the master pushing? In the Oracle way, the transactions are on the standby, just not applied yet. In the event of a catastropic failure of the primary, you're still covered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most companies I've worked for have had some kind of annual fire drill / alarm testing. They announce it the prior week, and then, say, Tuesday at 10am the alarm goes off, everyone files out of the building into the parking lot for 5 minutes, then back inside. In 15+ years (at several different companies), only once has there been an actual fire department call where the evacuation was "real" (even then, there was no actual fire).

In those same 15+ years, mostly working for startups, there have been numerous drive failures. Unfortunately, failure (a) to verify backups _before_ there's a failure, and (b) to practice restoring from backups has often meant that a drive failure means loss of several days' worth of work. In one instance, the VCS admin corrupted the entire repo, there were no backups, that admin was shown the door, and we had to restart from "commit 0" with code pieced together from engineers' individual workstations. _That_ was when I got religious about making & _testing_ backups for my work and the systems I was responsible for...

</comment><comment><USER10> You must test your backups. I used a commercial backup service that sent daily status emails. It seemed great for months until I realized it had a bug and there was nothing in the archive.

<comment><USER11> Yep. It helps to think of it as: Backups aren't the end product. Successful restores are the end product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cloud backup services have taken away any possible excuse for not remotely backing up any non-ginormous collection of data. It's push-button easy and a lot cheaper and easier than dealing with taking tape backups and moving them offsite.

Not to say that it's the best solution for everyone, but simply that it leaves people no excuse for doing _nothing_.

</comment><comment><USER13> The underlying cognitive bias in "I don't need backups, I use raid1" seems to be the quite common one of "I don't do anything stupid, so I don't need anti- stupidity devices" (feel free to substitute "careless" or similar for "stupid"), maybe with a side-order of "if I set up systems that protect me from my stupidity then only stupid people will want to work with me". The fact is, most of us do many stupid things every day--some stupid at the time, some stupid in retrospect--and systems that don't let us recover from them are poor systems.

</comment><comment><USER14> Never underestimate your RAID controller's ability to fail (silently!) and start writing corrupted garbage to your disks.

<comment><USER15> EDIT: people didn't like my humor. Well, look, the whole thing that you're buying with a raid controller is...redundancy. So if it's not redundant, failing silently, while telling you it's being redundant, how is this different from, say, paying for a house inspection that doesn't get done? If a raid controller is allowed to silently fail, it becomes a post-experience good.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_good>

Meaning that even while you're using it, you have no idea if it works.

My contention is that it's not a raid array if it can silently stop being redundant without telling you.

At best it's an Possibly Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

(The below is how my comment first read.)

 _(sarcastic) Yeah, it's only prudent to grab a drive out from time to time and make a surprise inspection of whether it's actually filled up a full 4/5th of the way (or whatever) with the actual data the volume is supposed to contain! And the remaining fifth had better look a_ damn _sight like parity information!

Seriously though, a controller that fails like this isn't a RAID controller, since what separates it from a paper plate and a cardboard box. On the paper plate you write "RAID controller" and tape it to an already attached hard drive, and you put the remaining members of the redundant array into the cardboard box. No setup or even connection required!

seriously seriously though, what you're suggesting is unacceptable. that's not a raid controller, that's a scam_.

<comment><USER16> Of course a RAID controller isn't supposed to fail silently, but it can and it does. I can't think of many complex pieces of technology that work 100% all of the time.

<comment><USER15> You don't think that something that only exists to create disk redundancy is in a different category from complex pieces of technology that don't have this in their name?

I simply disagree that you should "never underestimate" your raid controller's ability to fail silently (which is the comment I was replying to). If this is even on your radar you don't have a RAID controller.

This is literally like saying. "Never underestimate your digest algorithm's ability to hash the same file to different values, making the checksum seem to fail." That's not a digest algorithm, that's a randomized print statement.

A RAID controller you should 'never underestimate' the ability of to fail silently is literally sometimes the same as a paper plate with "raid controller" written on it. Call it "sometimes raid". or "maybe raid" or "more raid". You don't have a raid controller.

<comment><USER13> In general, then, we shouldn't call RAM memory since it might misremember, we shouldn't call them computers since they might miscompute, we shouldn't call it encryption since it might not encrypt, and we shouldn't call them bicycles since one of the wheels might fall off. Is that about it? I think I can see your point, but as we're nowhere near the point at which machines become as reliable as humans, let alone utterly reliable, I'm not quite sure of the use of the fine distinction you're trying to draw.

<comment><USER15> No, I don't at all mean in general.

(See my cousin reply here).

That is not at all "about it". I mean, specifically, for the layer that a RAID produces. It's simple. When you add RAID, you add a layer on top of physical hard-drives to make them redundant.

This type of layer has a completely different expectation from all of your other examples. The example in my cousin reply is apt: it would be like expecting a checksummong algorithm (which you're ONLY using to add verification that a file is genuine) to sometimes fail and produce a random checksum in the space of possible checksums the algorithm can produce, instead of the checksum that the algorithm actually produces for that particular file. Or if it has a comparison function, to sometimes fail and say that the file checksums to the provided checksum, regardless of whether it does so.

This is ridiculous: such a layer wouldn't be a checksum, it would be completely different. The idea that I have to physically roll a layer on top of my checksum, to check whether it's currently acting like a randomized print statement or a comparison function whose truth value is randomly negated, is ridiculous.

I don't know how else to put this. Maybe instead of your RAM, bicycle, examples, I can give you these examples: -> Imagine if you are adding a fuse to a circuit to protect it, but the fuse sometimes actually just saves up electricity so it can release it one quick burst and override the circuit. That's not a fuse.

-> Imagine if you hire an auditor to make sure your employees aren't misappropriating funds, since the business involves a lot of cash, but your auditor sometimes just pockets cash. That's not an auditor. You only thought you hired an auditor. The solution isn't to make sure the auditor has an auditor, it's to hire an actual auditor instead of someone you mistakenly think is one.

-> Imagine if you buy insurance, but actually the company sometimes will just spend lawyers on defending having to pay out, even when the event clearly happened and you were clearly covered. That's not insurance - that's a scam. You shouldn't have to insure the layer of insurance with an insurance against the insurance company out-lawyering you. You should get an actual insurance policy.

-> Imagine if you buy a seatbelt, but after buckling it, there is a realistic chance that you really haven't, and it's just a clothing item draped across your body and not attached in any way at any point.

Well if that's possible, that's just not a seatbelt. It's a defective item that was supposed to be a seatbelt but isn't.

The point is, all these examples are optional layers on TOP of a process. If they have a realistic chance of failing as in the above descriptions, they simply are not what they're claiming to be. Their chance of failure should be so low you can't even think about it; if it isn't, you should just hire or buy a different on, since you made a mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In case anyone is confused, what happens when the server catches fire or is stolen?

<comment><USER18> Or even more likely, the RAID configuration is lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've worked with tapes offsite before hard drives became cheap enough to use for backup (of the appropriate amount of data of course).

My current setup goes as follows:

Servers in colocation get backup daily to a server in the office. That server in the office then gets backed up daily to a iosafe.com fire and water proof hard drive in the office which when I get a chance will be bolted to the desk for further security. Clones are then made of that server biweekly (which are bootable) and one is kept in the office and one is taken offsite.

So the office server is the offsite for the colo server and the clone of that is the backup for the office.

The clones allow you to test the backup (hook it up and it boots basically).

Added: Geographically the office is about 3 miles from where the backup of the office is kept. But the office is about 40 miles from where the colo servers are kept.

</comment><comment><USER20> Fun anecdote: years ago, I worked for a department that had its server on a RAID setup, and when I asked about backups they said, "Don't worry". One day, a drive failed. They replaced it and started restoring from the other drive - which failed mid-sync. The two drives were from the same production lot and died literally within 12 hours of each other.

So: back up your data.

<comment><USER21> It happened to me. It happens the drives had a bug where there death time was hardcoded in the drives. Past a predetermined time of usage, they would fail. Of course, I never believed RAID was a backup strategy so I was able to recover.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is one of the problems I have with SQL Azure. They have yet to implement a satisfactory backup option: [http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34685-sql- azur...](http://www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com/forums/34685-sql-azure- feature-voting/suggestions/655599-enable-backups)

</comment><comment><USER23> It's amazing to me that anyone is actually arguing that RAID negates the need for backup. That is just dumb.

If I ever heard an SA working for me advocate that position, I would probably get them off of my team ASAP.

</comment><comment><USER16> Maybe I'm an idiot, but the vast majority of times I've needed to recover something from a backup are due to user error, not hardware failure. RAID sure doesn't help there.

</comment><comment><USER24> A backup has not much value when stored in the same physical location with the original data. Any fire/flood/robbery will destroy all the data.

<comment> mike-cardwell Of course it has value; fast recovery of data after hardware failure.

You still want off-site backups as well of course, in case of something more extreme, but they're usually going to be slower to recover from than nearby backups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was burnt once when both hard disks in my Raid1 fail at the same time, unlikely but it happened. And Raid is not a backup strategy.

<comment><USER26> Not as unlikely as many people would like to think! If the two drives are from the same production lot, they may suffer from a common manufacturing defect. And because they are in the same chassis, if a server fan fails, both drives may subsequently fail due to thermal damage within a very short interval.

Even if they don't fail simultaneously, the mirror drive may fail (or even more likely) have read errors or flipped bits that will corrupt the restore or render it impossible.

Personally, I don't place much trust in any RAID configuration other than RAIDZ2 (ZFS; you can lose two drives and still recover all your data; every block is checksummed to avoid reading or restoring corrupted data).

But even ZFS can't protect you against accidental deletion, fire, theft, or earthquake.

<comment><USER27> There's RAIDZ3 now!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> redundancy != backup

<comment><USER29> Actually, backups _are_ redundancy.

You just have to structure your redundancy to survive multiple threat models.

In which case, the redundancy offered by RAID alone is grossly insufficient.

<comment><USER30> There is a very important difference. Redundancy doesn't protect you against bad changes to your data, backups do. Backups should ideally be immutable, and append only. What happens when a disgruntled employee runs 'sudo rm -rf /'? With redundancy the effects of that decision are dutifully cloned on all media. With backups one has the ability to rollback to an older state.

<comment><USER29> Backups are redundancy _out of firing range_ of problems like, say, hard drive meltdown, operator error, etc.

I've had gruntled employees, occasionally myself, run some variant of 'rm -rf' unintentionally far more often than I've had to deal with the other sort.

If you feel my grandparent post was advocating _against_ backups, I'd strongly suggest you re-parse it. It's distinguishing between varieties of redundancy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Using RAID1 as backup is OK as long as you occasionally run 'sudo rm -rf /' for maintenance.

</comment><comment><USER32> for most of my stuff dropbox pro (with packrat addon for unlimited file histories) + github handle all my backup needs. Of course this wouldnt work for all scenarios but i dont work with/have loads of huge files.</comment>


It's Time to Panic About Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/10/opinion/internet-data-privacy.html <comment><USER2> I didn't get much out of that, but the very last page says "This column is part of The Privacy Project, a series from The New York Times Opinion." which does seem much more useful and has a bunch more:

[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/opinion/internet- pr...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/opinion/internet-privacy- project.html)

And yes, The Privacy Project has a bunch of trackers on it.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for linking to that page.

As far as the trackers, is it really that surprising? Any news site advocating for privacy, while much of their business relies on tracking their users so they can keep them "engaged".

Almost as ironic as anytime Google says anything about Privacy

<comment><USER4> I don't think it is surprising, but it is hypocritical. I think such hypocrisy is worth pointing out, even if it is routine at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This kinda feels like worrying about how the telephone would allow people to spread rumors and damaging information about each faster and further. Or perhaps discriminate against a potential job applicant based on their voice, instead only getting to see a letter.

This feels like a non-tech person has realized what tech people realized 20 years ago. Technology makes everything we do faster and more efficient even if those things are bad. What they don't propose is any general statement of the problem or any type of solution.

<comment><USER6> > This feels like a non-tech person has realized what tech people realized 20 > years ago.

Really? 20 years ago, tech people realized that billions would be carrying electronic devices that pinged their location and constantly phoned home to 6-10 large corporations?

<comment><USER7> In 1999 when Palm Pilots and Blackberries were there, showing a clear trend towards greater handheld power after things like brick cellphones and gameboys?

Yeah, that was the general consensus about what the future would be.

<comment><USER6> Back then, the business model that incentivized mass data harvesting didn't exist, and neither did the infrastructure necessary to store and process those mountains of data.

In 1999, only the original Blackberry and Palm VII "could" do mobile data. I use quotation marks because they both relied on a very rickety, bandwidth constrained Mobitex network that could barely send and receive text-only emails for a few hundred concurrent users, let alone real-time geolocation and web browsing data across billions of devices. Even then, Blackberry had to route every single email through their own servers to compress it before transmission.

Blackberry's business model, like Apple's, was built around an integrated hardware-software solution. There was no incentive to sell their data to advertisers. That only started with the search and social media companies that had no other way of making money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pretty shitty to have absolutely zero keyboard interactivity on that page. Tabbing gets you … the NYT homepage, a bunch of YouTube videos — which you can't even see on the screen — and a "privacy project" link of some sort.

<comment><USER6> KB navigation works. The response is delayed, probably because part of the "page" were still loading.

Terrible UI, IMO. No signage about how to navigate, except for "Click to Proceed" on the "main" screen.

Why not just create a PowerPoint/Google Slides and be done with it? Probably would have saved the poor design team a ton of time and had the exact same impact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there a text version of this somewhere? Not interested in attempting to navigate some web designer's idea of a fun mirror maze.

</comment><comment><USER10> This makes a pretty anodyne set of talking points around privacy and wraps it in the web version of a PowerPoint. In text form, this would barely qualify as a blog.

On a more general point these articles really should do more to balance the privacy constraints against the benefits.

Google is not just 'a free service', it is all of the world's knowledge, plus mapping, plus email, plus god knows what else all completely on demand, five nines reliable and free to the end user.

<comment><USER11> _web version of a PowerPoint_

It felt more GeoCities to me. But yeah, this isn't the _Times '_ best moment.

Some of the paper's interactive pieces are really well done, and innovative. This... wasn't.

Maybe that's because it came from the Opinion section, not one of the news sections.

Maybe that's why when I get the paper the first section that goes in the recycling bin is Opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This was surprisingly weak. Security cameras? Who cares? Here's what we really should be worried about: Google. They know _everything_. Our browsing history. Probably which porn sites we visit. Our emails. Which services we use. Our passwords (if stored in Chrome). Our schedule. Where we are and where we're going (Maps). Security cameras? Laughable. Google (and to some extent FB, Microsoft and Amazon) is where the danger lies.

<comment><USER13> So switch off them. Fastmail is better than Gmail, Firefox is better than Chrome, DuckDuckGo is pretty good, etc. Even switching _some_ stuff is better than not switching _any_ of it.

<comment><USER14> Seriously people, Duck Duck Go is fine for most work-a-day search. I occasionally use Google search for some obscure technical stuff, but that's it.

<comment><USER15> Is there a reason why startpage never gets a look in, but it's always ddg? I get better results with sp.

<comment><USER14> It's probably just that people have heard of DuckDuckGo and it's good enough to not make it necessary to search for a better performing alternative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is there an article here? I couldn't navigate beyond the initial page.

<comment><USER17> Not exactly an article: it's more like a series of statements, and apparently requires JS to navigate (which is tricky even then). But more easily readable with CSS disabled (or in textual browsers with no CSS).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What a terrible format. There was nothing added to the "Article" (which was like a paragraph in length) by using that format other than pretending it was more that it really was.

</comment><comment><USER19> Because panic is an appropriate response... never? What a terrible framing.

Participating in mob tactics, especially for an issue you care deeply about, is worse than doing nothing at all.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder if there's an interesting essay behind that interface. I'll never know.

<comment><USER21> There's not. I use w3m, so there was no annoyance other than a very lightweight argument and a call for panic. Panic does not make for good public policy.

Don't panic.

Text follows:

Privacy is a thing we all say we want. You get mad when it's invaded or mishandled. Say, when Equifax leaks your credit info, when your nudes show up on 4chan or when your health data is held ransom. But privacy is also something a lot of people are happy to trade away at a moment's notice, for the slightest reward. We claim to want it, companies claim to provide it, neither side is really being entirely honest about the trade, and we all just kind of accept that… You don't have any privacy online. But the latest innovations in tech are elevating questions of privacy into much larger social, moral, political and economic issues. Consider digital home security cameras, a key part of your "smart home." Privacy-wise, they don't seem especially novel. You want to be alerted when a "bad guy" comes to your door, but not when your neighbor walks by. So you get a camera that scans and remembers faces. Very convenient! But what do you do when it spots someone — wink, wink — "suspicious"? What happens when concerned neighbors start sharing these faces on the neighborhood social network? What if law enforcement gets in on the act? Maybe every new face is checked against sex-offender databases, or maybe Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Is that O.K.? Ring, one of the biggest doorbell-cam companies, already has a creepy neighborhood watch social network. It has filed a patent for creating a "database of suspicious persons." Wait, that's crazy. You don't want to profile people. You just want peace of mind that your family is safe. You like these cameras because you can get alerted when your kids come home, and watch your dog from afar. Isn't that cute? But where's all that data going? Can your abusive spouse get it? Your internet company? The smart home is becoming a treasure trove of the most intimate data about your life — and there are few controls over it. Domestic abusers are already using smart-home devices to spy on their victims. And even if they don't literally watch your videos, Congress passed rules in 2017 that allow broadband companies to track your digital data, including smart-home data. O.K., you didn't sign up for all that. You're really just worried about package thieves! Isn't it your right to monitor your front door to make sure your toilet paper isn't getting stolen? Sure, but have you ever considered the privacy of the workers delivering your toilet paper? Thanks to doorbell cameras, delivery drivers can be watched and tracked on the job. Is that O.K.? Of course, it's about more than doorbells. Each time you buy some new device or service that trades in private information — your DNA, your location, your online activity — you are gambling on an uncertain and unprotected future. Here is the stark truth: We in the West are building a surveillance state no less totalitarian than the one the Chinese government is rigging up. But while China is doing it through government … … we are doing it through corporations and consumer products, in the absence of any real regulation that recognizes the stakes at hand. It is time to start caring about the mess of digital privacy. In fact, it's time to panic.

<comment><USER22> Just want to point out how appropriate this reply was on many levels. The core article was about privacy and using w3m overcomes most intrusions. The presentation on the site is apparently awful, but w3m removes all that and distills the page to text. As a developer I use w3m (and previously lynx) for all these reasons, but also as a first-pass proxy for more exhaustive accessibility checks. I guess what this makes me think about, is, for the moment, while we still have access to general purpose computers, we do still have a choice in how we consume what we are forcefed. Maybe if we exercise it enough, we'll get to keep that choice. Maybe not. Worth a try.

<comment><USER21> Thanks! I like w3m because the web in general is insanely overstimulating. w3m lets me engage with the text without having to see all manner of distractions. I'm willing to accept being locked out of some sites to preserve my sanity. I also use firefox, but only as an application client for things I've already opted in to, like webmail, banking, and work-related stuff. Like you say, this is the freedom afforded to us by general purpose computers, and it's worth exercising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Broken without JavaScript.

<comment><USER11> If you're not using JavaScript, there's probably not much a general news publication can tell you about privacy that you don't already know.

<comment><USER24> Make this "if you're required to use JavaScipt, then there's probably not much a general news publication can tell you that you would like to know and don't already"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It was time to panic about privacy in about 1998, and don't think i haven't been!

</comment><comment><USER26> The New York Times must think we're all illiterate ADHD idiots. The subject is interesting and the NYT seem very proud of their flashy graphics, but the signal/noise ratio here is quite low.

</comment><comment><USER27> Related: [https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1116354502032932865](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1116354502032932865)

</comment><comment><USER28> >/interactive/

Is this going to be the trend for how they deliver news now?

</comment><comment><USER29> Imgur version for folks who are having trouble with the interactivity:

[https://imgur.com/a/ibC1RZa](https://imgur.com/a/ibC1RZa)

<comment><USER30> Thanks, but javascript still required for the album..

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> _claps hands_ okay folks, it's time to panic. let's get this train rolling.

(as if "panic" was that sort of phenomenon, like a protest or something)

<comment><USER32> That's literally correct, though I imagine you meant this as sarcasm. Crowd panic is a phenomenon that is in the same category as spontaneous protests.

It's quite nice to see NYT telling the non-hackers to worry, because I've been trying to explain that to them ever since Google bought Dejanews and with the help of NYT and others they're finally starting to understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How is it that, say two decades ago, telephone companies or banks would not dare to think about selling their clients' information, but right now it seems like it's the most normal thing in the world? What went wrong? Why do we accept this behavior now?

<comment><USER34> You're reminiscing about good ol' days that never were. My wife and I got our first mortgage twenty five years ago. The junk mail started arriving almost the next day. Damned straight the banks were selling your information. Every time you wrote down your name and address on a warranty card, a car loan, or anything else, that went into an IBM DB/2 database running on someone's System/38, packaged to be sold to the highest bidder at the first opportunity.

The only reason you might think there is a difference is because the tools got a lot better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> 8 trackers blocked by uBlock Origin, including google-analytics.com and scorecardresearch.com.

</comment><comment><USER36> Timing couldn't be better with today's arrest of Julian Assange. Bravo.

</comment><comment><USER37> Well, looks like they need to make the whole page clickable. And not just invisible sidebars. Or make the sidebars visible.

</comment><comment><USER38> First time Automatic Reader View has really come in handy! (Safari on iOS)

</comment><comment><USER39> Wow that's an incredibly annoying format for an article.

</comment><comment><USER40> Sponsored by Apple™

<comment><USER41> The enemy of my enemy is my friend, until they're not.</comment></comment>


Red Hat Satellite to standardize on PostgreSQL backend - <AUTHOR> https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-satellite-standardize-postgresql-backend <comment><USER2> Rule #1: Always start with PostgreSQL unless you have a very compelling reason not to.

<comment><USER3> Always start with in-memory data structure with straightforward persistence (i.e. load and save it all at once, using some popular format).

If you need ACID, then start with SQLite.

If you need scalability as well, then PostgreSQL. Most other features aren't worth the hassle of configuration compared to a single file on disk and a library to link to.

(But I suspect that most NoSQL apps these days would do just fine with SQLite, perf-wise. As an industry, we don't have a good sense of scale.)

<comment><USER4> For most languages and frameworks, using Postgres as opposed to sqlite is barely a higher cost if you've got the ops skills. I've yet to see an app that straddled this local/web-scale line where SQLite was a better choice or Postgres wasn't the obvious choice.

There isn't some massive cost to using Postgres instead, is there some desktop divide I'm missing here?

<comment><USER5> From: [https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html](https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html)

Appropriate Uses For SQLite:

SQLite is not directly comparable to client/server SQL database engines such as MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server since SQLite is trying to solve a different problem.

Client/server SQL database engines strive to implement a shared repository of enterprise data. They emphasize scalability, concurrency, centralization, and control. SQLite strives to provide local data storage for individual applications and devices. SQLite emphasizes economy, efficiency, reliability, independence, and simplicity.

SQLite does not compete with client/server databases. SQLite competes with fopen().

<comment><USER6> I like the way I recall someone (Richard Hipp?) putting it: SQLite is a file format.

SQLite is an efficient file format for relational data with excellent tooling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A silly, genuine question: when I'm writing a NodeJS app, and I need to store a JSON in a DB that looks like this:

{ "a" : "b", "c" : { "ca":"cb", "cd":"ce" }, "d": { ... } }

How do I store it? To me, NoSQL seemed like the choice in the past.

This is not difficult in relational DBs, but it requires rather long SQL commands, and SQL table design. It seems to me that "MongoDB.insert(obj)" seems like the way to go, as it is much simpler.

How do experienced Node devs solve this issue? Is it simply relational all the way? Is it Postgress's JSON field..?

<comment><USER8> _> How do I store it? To me, NoSQL seemed like the choice in the past._

If you're using postgres, you could use a column of type jsonb. Postgres comes with many operators and functions ([https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/functions- json.html](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/functions-json.html)) to query into jsonb typed columns and many of them even allow index usage for very quick access.

However, the other option would be to use proper SQL tables and normalization to store your data. Then you can query very easily for your data and by making use of a real typed schema, you get free validation of your input and protection against corrupted data later down the line.

And aggregating your information to produce reports over various documents becomes very easy too.

Here's above schema in SQL DDL, Postgres dialect. I'm not sure about nullability and types of your values, but by making use of database types and constraints, you can describe the shape of your data much better which further helps you preventing invalid data from being stored due to bugs

        create table things (
            id bigserial primary key,
            a text not null
        );

        create table c_things (
            thing_id bigint not null
                primary key
                references things (id) on delete cascade,
            ca text not null,
            cd text not null
        );

        create table d_things(
            thing_id bigint not null
                primary key
                references things (id) on delete cascade
            -- ...
        )

<comment><USER9> Or you can store the jsonb in Postgres and use views to also present it in a normalized way. See example here: [https://www.endpoint.com/blog/2016/02/29/converting-json- to-...](https://www.endpoint.com/blog/2016/02/29/converting-json-to- postgresql-values)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This sentence, when talking about support for old enterprise versions, is a bit suspicious:

> Satellite will not use newer versions of MongoDB that are licensed under > SSPL.

So my read is that there is not only an intention of database consolidation, but also a desire of avoiding the SSPL.

<comment><USER11> Nothing "suspicious" about it.

Red Hat also explicitly evicted Mongo from RHEL 8 because of the SSPL [0], and they have a longstanding policy of only shipping OSS.

It's no secret, and they've been very upfront about not shipping anything SSPL.

[0] Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18919543](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18919543)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Indeed a sane choice

</comment><comment><USER13> Does someone have the time explain what NoSQL Mongo didn't do that PostgreSQL does?

I guess I don't really understand the structured SQL vs NoSQL when you aren't accessing directly but via a program. I also don't understand why they would have supported a NoSQL and object-relational at the same time at any point.

<comment><USER14> From reading the post it sounds like they want transactions for some of the functionality they're trying to build. I guess Mongo still doesn't have those.

<comment><USER15> They recently added multi document transactions though.

[https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/transactions/](https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/core/transactions/)

<comment><USER16> This may just be my bias against NoSQL (I'll qualify this with I don't believe it should never be used, but 90% of use cases psql/MySQL/etc is likely the better choice these days), but when it comes to choosing a DB engine when you want ACID transactions, I'd pick the one that was built to handle ACID transactions from the start, rather than one that just added it with this large caveat in the middle of the docs:

> In most cases, multi-document transaction incurs a greater performance cost > over single document writes, and the availability of multi-document > transaction should not be a replacement for effective schema design. For > many scenarios, the denormalized data model (embedded documents and arrays) > will continue to be optimal for your data and use cases. That is, for many > scenarios, modeling your data appropriately will minimize the need for > multi-document transactions.

So, to be able to have one of the core features of SQL, you lose the biggest feature of NoSQL which is super fast writes. Which, they try to remind you that if you model your data in correctly, by creating denormalized documents with embedded data, you probably won't need them anyway. Which just makes me cringe at having to maintain these huge unstructured documents just so you get faster writes since you don't have to worry about ACID.

Or, you can use Postgres, which was built with ACID from the start, using technology and design patterns proven over decades, and has support for JSONB if you need unstructured/document storage that you can also (fairly) efficiently query.

Maybe I'm just woefully uninformed, but I just can't imagine a use case for Mongo unless your dealing with Google level data/traffic, and fortunately in their case, they have enough money to hire enough people that actually know how & when to use Mongo effectively to the point that it's not just a fancy way to write to /dev/null.

I'd actually be really interested in some non-Google scale use cases for Mongo, like where Postgres' performance was actually an issue, and how much Mongo actually outperforms it, and the trade offs/issues switching. Most posts I've seen are of the opposite migration, but I want to see what all the hype for a DB engine (what I've always saw as one of the less _sexy_ areas of CS, at least in marketability, compared to ML/AI or Programing Language/Compilers)

<comment><USER17> ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've never enjoyed Mongo for a second, not conceptually, not practically.

But I don't understand the people who act like Postgres is the end of everything. SQL never felt right for me either. It's a fine language for business analysis, I guess, but is it actually pleasant for development? Do all of you who so enthusiastically post that it should be the first tool you reach for really never experience object-relational impedance? Do you really enjoy modeling like this?

<comment><USER19> Yes: what you're really doing is documenting your data structures and access patterns, which is way less work to do consciously rather than trying to bolt it on ad hoc.

A really big thing is normalization which some people tend to downplay until they've had to write code to recurse complex structures enforcing consistency or making global changes. Similarly, atomicity and isolation are really useful characteristics to be able to take for granted without having to code around the problem everywhere.

The usual arc I've seen for document stores, ISAMs, etc. is that people say this is great based on the first 20 minutes and then about a year later realize that they've spent thousands of lines of code implementing a really clunky subset of what they'd get out of the box with a SQL database and the believed ease of use or performance benefits were far less dramatic than promised or even negative.

<comment><USER18> Right, Postgres is better than document stores, but is it actually pleasant to store your data in square tables and then process it to runtime objects from that? Even with battle tested ORMs, it's never felt right for me.

<comment><USER20> I find it very pleasant, but I also tend to avoid ORMs. I can just write SQL queries to get me the data I need in any form I want, and it's not always useful to stuff that into objects when I can just process it as is.

<comment><USER18> Processing data from format to format is a total drag to me. I just can't do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm so out of date with Satellite server that my first reaction was: Wow it took this long to get oracle out!

</comment><comment><USER22> I am quite surprised that companies still use Red Hat Satellite Server. In 2010 while I was still at Red Hat, deploying and managing it was the mainstay of the consulting business, and it was based on Oracle RAC. It was to my mind already legacy software at that time.

<comment><USER23> Satellite of today is not Satellite of 2010 by any stretch.

Satellite 6 is based on foreman + katello + pulp

<comment><USER24> And, for anyone who has experience with Satellite 6.0/6.1... it has gotten much, much, much better since then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am no fun of MongoDB, but I must admit it has gotten a lot better in the past few years. So, why drop it now?

<comment><USER26> New license that's not OSS (MongoDB Inc saying it is doesn't make it so, the OSD determines OSS, not some company).

<comment><USER23> The upstream project has been pretty vocal about their reasons to switch, and it's not because of the license. MongoDB just isn't the right tool for their use case, despite valiant attempts to utilize it.

<comment><USER27> This is very clearly because of licensing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Any guesses on a timeline? Satellite 6.6? Or will it be in the next major version? 7.0?

<comment><USER24> Pulp 2 will continue using MongoDB until EOL. Pulp 3, which is still in development, is using Postgres -- but while the platform functionality is nearly done the plugins for e.g. RPM and Docker are not yet near feature parity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is there a word for a case of "I told you so" that went on for so long that it curdled from frustration, to despair, to cynicism, to a realignment of your understanding of the human project as something barely capable of tying its own shoes and making it out to the mailbox and back?

<comment><USER30> This is a dead horse that's been beaten to death over and over again here on HN. MongoDB is garbage. MongoDB doesn't scale. MongoDB is $h!t says HN users.

It just feels like an echo chamber. Are you running the latest version of MongoDB in a replica set with journaling enabled and write concern set to one? MongoDB has worked great for my uses, up to moderate write/read scale. Sure, if you are running "big data" or enterprise things, it might not be the best choice, but it's not the steaming pile of horse excrement that some HN users try to make it.

Second, for those who still insist that MongoDB is crap, what is the best pure document store database then? I used to champion RethinkDB, but they failed and development has basically stopped. You wouldn't build a business on RethinkDB now a days unfortunately.

<comment><USER31> Modern Mongo still seems to corrupt itself on the Unifi Cloud Controller I have to deal with if there is no disk space left or hard power off. Postgres will be usable after disk space is freed, or when booted back up. This is a really basic reliability issue.

<comment><USER32> OT: Ubiquiti seem to be ... not good at software and only relatively good at hardware. I'm not sure why they're as popular as they are and I'm slightly ashamed at being suckered in by Troy Hunt's marketing.

Is it just a case of the rest of the home/SOHO WAP/router segment is cataclysmically bad, so they only have to be a little bit better? (The WAP is good, but not as fast as the Turris Omnia it replaced).

<comment><USER33> > I'm not sure why they're as popular as they are

For me it's always been price.

Back when we adopted them Ubiquiti UAPs were pretty much the only thing close to enterprise access points (centralized management, radius support and all that jazz) but at 1/10th of the price of Cisco/Ruckus/Aruba.

I agree that they're a bit overhyped: we have 200+ deployed and they are not exactly the most reliable, some devices just disappear from the controller forever, some early generation ones would just overheat and die, CLI management is non-existent. But hey for $70 a pop you can just buy a truckload of them and replace them as needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Not sure I understand the MongoDB hate here. Migrations and denomalization is not somthing you have to deal with in MongoDB.

<comment><USER35> You almost certainly still need to worry about migrations.

MongoDB can store data in a schemaless fashion, however, chances are your application has a data model (schema).

Sure, you _can_ avoid migrations and just tack on more and more backwards compatibility for old data layouts. But performance suffers, and chances are that code quality and correctness suffer too.

<comment><USER36> From a certain perspective, adding backwards compatibility for old data layouts _is_ a migration. A migration that gets run every the data is loaded instead of once during a classic db migration. This is inefficient in the long run.</comment></comment></comment>


Scrimba is like Asciicasts and Codepen had a baby - <AUTHOR> https://scrimba.com/casts/cast-279 <comment><USER2> A discussion a few months ago, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13814234](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13814234)</comment>


Ask HN: Is Apple Photos using their own AI to tag my pictures? - <AUTHOR> I recently updated to macOS Catalina. When I opened the Photo app, I was surprised to see a celebrity I had not tagged suddenly appear under the "People" section. I thought only people with 15 or more images showed up under "People", yet I only have one of this celeb. Also, I -never- tagged the celeb.
1. How did Photos tag this person?
2. Why are they showing up under People with just one image?
My only conclusion is that Apple somehow tagged this face using their own cloud AI, and that celebs get precedent. <comment><USER2> Is the celeb face tagged with a name, or is it nameless?

If you download the photo from a media service, they may have tagged the face in the metadata (but I haven't personally witnessed Apple Photos extracting anything like that before).

You can view all embedded metadata by running `exiftool PATH-TO-IMAGE` (`brew install exiftool` first, if necessary).

<comment><AUTHOR> It is tagged with the correct name. I took the picture with my iPhone.</comment></comment>


Goldman's new money machine: warehouses - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/29/us-lme-warehousing-idUSTRE76R3YZ20110729 <comment><USER5> Investment banks do provide valuable services: market making (providing liquidity in many markets), capital raising, the creation of financial instruments so investors can hedge against certain kinds of risk and so on.

Unfortunately I think we're reaching the point of banks overstepping their bounds and creating far more problems than they really should.

This strategy seems similar to the "demand shock" approach they used in driving up wheat prices in recent years. And of course the subprime crisis was the result of lax regulation, arguably criminal negligence by Standard & Poor's and Moody's (who rated certain baskets of loans as AAA) and a lot of players who simply didn't have to bear any risk.

I'm really not sure what the solution is here but something really needs to bring this system into check. Such paper shenanigans are having real negative consequences.

In Australia we have a strict financial regulation regime, arguably too strict in some cases, but we didn't have the bubble in real estate prices that the US did. "No doc" and "low doc" lending never reached the point of collapsing the market.

One could argue that financial regulation is to blame and you're probably right but I have no faith in the US government's ability to correct this or pretty much anything else. Washington now seems to be nothing more than a battleground for special interest lobbying and ideologues devoid of rationality.

In the past ~30 years or so investment banks have generally undergone a change from being a partnership to being a corporation. The major difference between the two is partnerships have unlimited liability. Much like a law firm, the partners are _personally_ liable for losses.

I've come to the conclusion that this change has been detrimental to the function of the financial industry as a whole. Combine this with Federal government bailouts and investment bankers seem to act with complete impunity with regards to risk.

Something needs to change.

<comment><USER6> "Investment banks do provide valuable services: market making (providing liquidity in many markets), capital raising, the creation of financial instruments so investors can hedge against certain kinds of risk and so on."

I hear this argument a lot. While I think it would be an exaggeration to say that what Wall Street does benefits no one, at the same time it's clear that what Wall Street does is designed primarily to benefit themselves. Any benefit to society is merely a happy accident that gets leveraged for propaganda purposes, whereas on a day to day basis what they're really doing is earning money off the backs of those that are actually trying to do things that benefit society.

<comment><USER5> > at the same time it's clear that what Wall Street does is designed primarily > to benefit themselves.

So what?

I don't begrudge them making a profit. Capitalism is the engine that propelled us from riding around on horses to putting a man on the Moon in the span of one man's lifetime.

But there are builders and extractors [1]. Allowing a farmer to forward-sell his crop so his income is known adds value. It also allows consumers to know what price they're paying in advance. Both of these make a profit for the bank but they provide value to both parties. This is not a zero sum game.

But when banks create funds that stockpile food for the purpose of driving up prices, the only real beneficiary is the bank's investors. In the short term, suppliers benefit from higher prices but long term you face increased inflation if the price rise is sufficiently large and you start applying the inevitable "me too" to other industries.

If you'd like to see how well denying the profit motive works you need look no further than the former Soviet Union.

[1]: <http://cdixon.org/2010/06/19/builders-and-extractors/>

<comment><USER7> There is really only ONE possible and proven sustainable solution to this mess. It was realised in the aftermath of worst financial crisis ever seen, the Great Depression. It worked so well to create such stability, or at least certainly did not cause any harm to the real economy for so long, that the world saw the longest sustained period of growth it has ever seen and is also considered by all economists to be the "golden age" of capitalism from 1945 to 1971 (they only differ on precisely how the combination of all factors came together).

The solution in the aftermath of the Great Depression was Glass-Steagal and capital controls globally. This meant,

1\. The money supply effectively only circulated _within_ each country and transfers between countries were always linked to trade. Since jobs follow business investment, this meant very high employment per nation.

2\. Financial instability had minimal to zero systemic impact in advanced countries because banks were only permitted to engage in funding and financing directly related to the real economy.

3\. In addition, a side effect due to the partitioning and lack of artificial wealth interconnectedness, TBTF was not possible.

4\. All manner of speculators were able to exist even then, but they knew they only had one chance with the capital they had since completely different types of financial activity were not allowed to co-mingle under the same organisation or group.

5\. Finally, money was linked to the gold standard and debt creation (including printing) that did not relate to trade was very difficult - <USER2> not impossible, especially for governments which wanted to run or extend huge war machines for their empires.

Having to pay for the Vietnam War and coinciding with domestic inflation, caused Nixon to move the dollar off the gold standard in 1971, a fitting end to the Golden Age on 15 August 1971. Almost exactly 40 years later, here we are - in real (inflation-adjusted) economic terms per capita for median person effectively back to square zero with the worst in the real economy still to come as the ripples of the crises continue on through entire sovereigns.

An alternative way to look at it, is that the combination of financial deregulation and financial "innovation" since 1980 caused capital to move well-ahead of the globalisation of the real economy. Like a very strong wave, it caused ripples and bubbles in the assets available to it before real growth and high quality assets (including highly educated workers) backing it caught up. In a sense, the financial industry became too efficient at shifting liquidity and wealth transfer relative to the underlying economy. Combine this with the enormous increase in money supply generated by the political masters of the new fiat currencies, this meant the mother of all deleveraging and financial crisis was being deferred into the future. Well, the future is here now.

In short, there is a reason why in every country above subsistence level in the world, the financial industry is almost as heavily regulated as the nuclear industry. Like writing a good, large and complex computer program, having a few huge procedures with many side effects is far worse along every dimension than having many much smaller and well-organised functions with minimal to no side-effects.

The solution is "Compartmentalization" aka. Glass-Steagall on steroids for the financial industry. It is even advocated by high profile economists and others who publicly foresaw the 2007 crisis.

<comment><USER8> _2\. Financial instability had minimal to zero systemic impact in advanced countries because banks were only permitted to engage in funding and financing directly related to the real economy._

Um, the dotcom bubble happened under Glass-Steagall. So did 1987, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the 73-74 crash.

 _3\. In addition, a side effect due to the partitioning and lack of artificial wealth interconnectedness, TBTF was not possible._

No. The Savings&Loan bailout and LTCM bailout both occurred under the Glass- Steagall regime.

 _4\. All manner of speculators were able to exist even then, but they knew they only had one chance with the capital they had since completely different types of financial activity were not allowed to co-mingle under the same organisation or group._

You have no idea what you are talking about. The decline of product-specific trading desks was caused by the onset of stat-arb and had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall.

 _40 years later, here we are - in real (inflation-adjusted) economic terms per capita for median person effectively back to square zero..._

This is a statistical artifact. The median person who's parents were in the united states in 1968 has income (adjusted for chained CPI, which is not the same as inflation) 29% higher than their parents. Immigrants lower the average/median.

[http://crazybear.posterous.com/did-immigrants-and- simpsons-p...](http://crazybear.posterous.com/did-immigrants-and-simpsons- paradox-cause-the)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Goldman is the great american bubble machine, and it's disgusting.

 _"From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again"_

[http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great- american...](http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american- bubble-machine-20100405)

<comment><USER10> So hypothetically if someone wanted to _opt-out_ of this essentially corrupt system completely, how would they go about it? I mean paying taxes in a country with bailouts certainly ties you up into the system. Even without bailouts, living in a country tied to a dollar that's being printed like mad kind of ties you up into it too right?

So... how exactly would one go about this? Possible?

<comment><USER11> It's not trivial, but one way you could opt out would be...opting out.

[http://www.trulymovingpictures.org/festival- years/2010/movie...](http://www.trulymovingpictures.org/festival- years/2010/movie/zero-currency)

Linked is a review of the movie _Zero Currency_ , about a former social worker who stopped using money or barter. Disclaimer: I haven't seen it.

A good place to start would be to own your own home, aggressively invest in solar energy, and grow your own food.*

All that's pretty expensive though...maybe you could go work in finance and save up?

*3D printing might also be worth a look for some items.

<comment><USER12> Even if you own your own home, you typically still have to pay taxes. You may have to earn some income if you don't have money saved up for your taxes, so you'll probably have to pay income taxes as well.

Bottom line, it's difficult to fully opt out. But what you suggest is not a bad start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This has been posted here before. Part of me respects then for being such excellent hackers of the letter of the law, but mostly I agree that this firm in specific is a. Armpits squid which is out of control and distorts markets, causes widespread harm to markets and individuals, and is not effectively controlled by regulators (who are largely Goldman alumni, in their revolving door system). I have no idea what the right solution is to this problem. I am kind of ashamed to have several friends who now work for Goldman.

<comment><USER14> I think you raising "hackers" with this is the perfect way to describe the situation. Goldman are hackers in the same sense the main stream media refers to crackers as hackers, not hackers in the creative sense used by this community.

Futures markets have a purpose, in food and energy for example, but GS along with others has been manipulating them in dodgy ways. Ditto for this article and aluminum. They helped Greece cook the books to enter the eurozone, and then insured against Greek default knowing there would be bailouts. They recommended to various customers to invest in all sorts of CDOs _while at the same time betting against them having internally decided they were going to fail_. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that there should be numerous prosecutions in relation to GS but incompetence in public officials with a generous sprinkling of corruption makes this unlikely.

I'm a big fan of America but I've never understood the romanticism around the mafia (the Godfather films and the Sopranos TV series for example). If I had friends in the mafia I would disown them, and I'd seriously rather die than join it. While GS is perhaps not as bad directly, indirectly the consequences of their actions have been and are enormously immoral. I recommend you challenge your friends on these issues firmly, send them a link to Salman Khan's story[1] and tell them to put their (no doubt considerable) talents to better use: doesn't have to be a non-profit either. Even if they decide not to leave they should be made aware that there is social sanction associated with being linked to, if not directly involved in, the vortex of corruption surrounding that company.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Khan_(educator)>

<comment><USER15> The type of people that Goldman employs aren't stupid, or ignorant. I've known a few - they are perfectly aware of what the company does, and the moral minefield they are in.

To accept employment there requires a conscious relinquishing of moral culpability - i.e., these people have decided that, yes, what the company does is fundamentally wrong, but for whatever reason (money, fame, power, the thrill of the hack, satisfaction of working on the winning team, etc) _they don't care_.

I'm not sure what use it would be to preach to people like this.

<comment><USER16> I'm going to take massive downvotes on this but...

You can't preach to people like that, they're fully rational and immune to patriotic emotional dulce et decorum est bullshit.

They don't care that their going to hell for their actions because they know hell doesn't exist.

The world isn't some retarded star wars black and white fantasy, it's black and black pretending to be white. Stop naming shadows in platos cave and get out into the sunshine.

Google didn't succeed because open source is some miracle of business, they succeeded because they created a platform for clicking ads and open source software makes that platform cheaper. Gmail isn't a gift to the internet community, it's more ads. If they didn't make money from it, they'd shut it down.

<comment><USER15> I don't care that I'm going to hell, because I know hell doesn't exist. Indeed, no matter how pious I act, by _some_ religion's definition I'm damned anyways.

But yet I'm not out there destroying livelihoods for personal profit. Way to pander to the stereotype that fear of the hereafter/almighty is the only way to get people to act morally/curb antisocial behavior.

I police my own behavior because, by some lucky stroke of evolutionary development, I have been granted the ability for high-level thought. Many people have been able to use this tremendously powerful ability to better us all collectively. Some seem only interested in using theirs for self-interest, even at the (grave) expense of everyone else.

This really is the core of it though: many people I've met in finance _do_ believe wholeheartedly in "might makes right" - that morality and what the system allows them to do are one and the same.

I fear these people greatly.

<comment><USER16> You're a programmer, most of what you is put people out of work.

That thing you automated? Someone who doesn't know how to program lost their job because of it, and it ain't coming back.

You'll tell yourself that you've created opportunities for two more programming jobs for someone else to enhance your automation work, but that guy with the GED is still out of work. Tough shit buddy, should have learned to program.

The difference between you and people in finance is they've stopped lying to themselves about what they do. Btw, I'm a programmer whose going into finance. Why? Because I can eliminate more jobs and make more money for myself doing that then I could eliminating jobs as a programmer. Now I'm just eliminating big money financier jobs instead of 40K grunt jobs. Hey broker dude, screw your 5% finders fee, my program will take 1% instead. Hit the bricks pal. Middle men need to eat just as much as producers and consumers.

We put people out of work for our own personal profit, the only difference is you're pretending about what you do and I'm not.

And you know the really funny thing is? We'll all be better off because the next generation of people won't have to do those silly jobs, but in the mean time people are going to be out of work.

Do you know how many researchers, secretaries, etc are out of work because of Google? Stop kidding yourself and get real about how the world works.

I could write a brilliant essay filled with bullshit about how I'm making the world a better place increasing efficiency, allowing one person to do more, and live a better life, and it would be just as true as what I just wrote. Financiers know double entry accounting and they know that for every credit there is a debit, both sides of the leger are equally true.

<comment><USER15> Ah yes, you're right of course - there is no objective measure of the balance of good and evil. What I do _does_ eliminate jobs. Does the benefit to everyone else outweigh the loss of these jobs? Many people would say yes, some would say no. Some job eliminations open the door for more jobs - <USER3> different people. Does this balance the morality of putting people out of work?

I don't know. Nobody does. But there _is_ some measure of balance to what we do. What we do has a benefit - a benefit to someone other than just ourselves. Right now I work in travel informatics. What I do empowers tens of millions of customers to make better choices about how they travel, find better prices, put more information at their fingertips, keeping them informed.

The price of this is that I'm also putting airline service agents out of work, not to mention travel agents. I've made an end run around them and made it easier to get all of this information than going and talking to a human.

Personally, I think this is a worthwhile balance. The loss of these jobs also means a massive improvement to the efficiency of travel, and the happiness of tens of millions of travelers. This isn't a clueless assumption either - <USER4> emails I've seen from users demonstrates that people _are_ passionate about what we do. You can disagree - and you wouldn't be wrong. I am, after all, not the arbiter of what is and isn't a worthwhile trade.

There's a difference between _this_ and what Goldman does, though. The balance is _way_ on the other end of the scale. The artificial supply squeeze on industries benefits... what exactly, besides Goldman itself? The price is obvious - rising consumer prices, starving people who can no longer afford to eat (re: the food crisis that Goldman is also accused of contributing to), wars and revolutions caused by desperate, hungry people.

So what's the upside? What did we gain for this price Goldman has exacted?

> _"Financiers know double entry accounting and they know that for every > credit there is a debit, both sides of the leger are equally true."_

Please name the "credit" of what Goldman has done here.

We're not idiots, we know there's a credit and a debit. The question is, this doesn't seem to be the case in situations like these, where it seems we're all paying the price, and the only "credit" is to the financier.

<comment><USER8> _The artificial supply squeeze on industries benefits... what exactly, besides Goldman itself?_

If aluminum becomes more scarce in the future (Goldman seems to be betting that it will be), then Goldman has done us all a favor by conserving it in the present.

If it is not more scarce in the future, then Goldman will lose money.

<comment><USER17> It's troubling that a comment like this has to be buried deep in a thread about religion, Platonic ideals, might-makes-right, higher-order thought, and the nature of morality --- most of it stipulating Goldman is evil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A normal person would never starve a child to better his own lot. Instead he will give his pension fund savings to Goldman Sachs, who will then promptly cause a world-wide famine by manipulating the food markets. Which is why GS gets paid the big bucks - they absolve the future retirees of the moral responsibility for the starvation of the less fortunate.

<comment><USER19> What makes you think that Goldman is doing this for anyone other than themselves?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is pretty awful, but it seems like one of these problems that could and should be solved by the free market.

Somebody should just start a new metals exchange that caters to the needs of its clients rather than trying to squeeze them. There is no reason why America has to do its metals trading in some ancient London exchange.

<comment><USER21> It wouldn't surprise me to find out that it is next to impossible to create a new metals exchange due to onerous government regulations that effectively keep out new competitors.

I don't completely understand what is going on in the original story but it also wouldn't surprise to find out that it is only via the existance of various regulations that this scheme is viable.

<comment><USER9> Actually Goldman tends to exploit a lack of regulations, and will lobby to get regulations removed in order for them to exploit markets further.

Interestingly, the propaganda used to win public support for these moves is that "big government is bad, and we should let the market decide".

Your opinion of regulations needs to take a 180, in my opinion :)

 _"The date was November 4, 1999. Senator Byron Dorgan was captured only by the cameras of CSPAN2.

"I want to sound a warning call today about this legislation," he declared, "I think this legislation is just fundamentally terrible."

The legislation was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (alternatively known as Gramm Leach Bliley), which allowed banks to merge with insurance companies and investment houses.

The title of the bill was 'The Financial Modernization Act.' And so if you don't want to modernize, I guess you're considered hopelessly old fashioned."

Ten years later, Dorgan has been vindicated. His warning that banks would become "too big to fail" has proven basically true in the wake of the current financial crisis. He seems eerily prescient for claiming then that Congress would "look back ten years time and say we should not have done this."_

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/11/glass-steagall- act-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/11/glass-steagall-act-the- se_n_201557.html)

Even the titles of bills in this country are propaganda. It's frustrating.

People like Christopher Dodd should definitely be in prison. Take a look at his role and support in the article linked above, and then take a look at this:

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chris_Dodd#Co...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chris_Dodd#Controversies)

<comment><USER21> Arguing about 'regulation' with no context or means to evaluate them doesn't get us very far.

Regulations that enhance and encourage fair competition should be supported. Regulations that reduce competition or hinder commerce should not be supported.

There is always concern for negative externalities and this is an area where regulations can have a role.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A similar thing is happening with generic chemotherapy drugs. Profit margins for generics are thin, so few companies manufacture them. When a supply issue arises, distributors stockpile the drug and charge hospitals one or two scales of magnitude of the generic price.

<comment><USER23> ... which is a perfect example of why we need derivatives markets. If hospitals purchased drugs a year in advance of anticipated demand, they would pay a slight premium, but wouldn't be subject to squeezes like this.

<comment><USER24> ...unless Goldman stopped selling derivatives on chemotherapy drugs and instead began to stockpile a large fraction of the available chemotherapy drugs in warehouses in Detroit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My understanding of this is you buy a futures contract that says you get so much metal on a certain date. The date arrives, and Goldman Sachs tells you that you own the metal, but it is in our warehouse. Further, you have to wait months before you can get it out of the warehouse, and you owe rent until then.

</comment><comment><USER26> Did anyone else feel this was a poorly written article? Maybe I'm obtuse, but I found it _very_ difficult to understand. I felt like the writers were too busy sexing up the article to focus on explaining what's going on here...

It sounds like metal traded on the LME must be stored in an LME certified warehouse. The LME-certified warehousing market doesn't appear to be very competitive, as Metro/GS can take its sweet time getting you your metal yet not go out of business. _LME's_ conflict of interest is that it's supposed to regulate warehousers when one of its biggest members (GS) owns said warehouses. The alleged "warehouse strategy" then was for GS to buy the warehouses and create the conflict in the first place.

Did I get it?

</comment><comment><USER27> I realise these are quite hyperbolic, but you might be interested to watch this short profile of commodities giant Glencore, mentioned in the article: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6rSBifsvwg>

</comment><comment><USER28> I find it curious the article never mentions the real culprit in hogging resources - China. When I was working in the bike industry, over the course of a few years, ALL of our bikes jumped in price considerably. After talking with one the reps from Specialized, they said China has put a huge strain on raw materials like Aluminum, Titanium, and Steel. By doing so, they've pushed the prices up across the board.

The stuff Goldman Sachs is doing pales in comparison to what China has been doing over the past 5-8 years.

</comment><comment><USER29> Please can someone stage a protest outside their warehouse to prevent all movement in and out?

</comment><comment><USER30> Wow, finally this months old story is making the rounds here?

</comment><comment><USER31> How is this any different to stockpiling gold?</comment>


We Promised Change – You Believed Us? - <AUTHOR> http://www.chattanoogan.com/2014/9/25/285058/We-Promised-Change---You-Believed-Us.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> The debate over standards and a flawed evaluation system are expected to continue. Those issues are far from settled. There are many other issues that need to be addressed in education. Our recent survey revealed educators want to be treated as professionals. They feel devalued as professionals and people. Morale is an issue. Common Core is also an issue statewide. Educators see implementation issues and growing concern with the role of the federal government in public education.</comment>


Show HN: Leantime – OpenSource Project Management - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Leantime/leantime

<comment><USER2> Unfortunaely, the demo random login isn't working :(

<comment><USER3> Eh you didn't miss much. I logged in and there's nothing in the UI but two big buttons. I clicked on each one and nothing happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> The demo should show more than just the two buttons now. I'll add some screenshots to github, in case it breaks again.</comment></comment></comment>


Cross-side scripting vulnerability in gitweb - <AUTHOR> http://www.no-ack.org/2010/12/cross-side-scripting-vulnerability-in.html?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d0ba3dd94ff1509%2C0 <comment><USER2> I'm not super familiar with gitweb so I'll be the one to ask: what can you do with gitweb as a logged-in user? What's the impact of an XSS on gitweb?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is basically no login area. Gitweb is the official web interface for the source tracker git. If you have permissions to push to the repository the gitweb page is showing, you could possibly add a file to the repository, when shown on the page will inject malicious javascript code for example.

If you run gitweb for repositories where only yourself (an people you trust) has those permissions, this vulnerability is rather harmless. But if you are running gitweb for a large FOSS project with a lot of committers, you should be aware of that issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems to be a re-submission of a page by the same person:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007597>

Was this deliberate?

</comment><comment><USER4> Site. Cross Site Scripting.

Would Cross Side Scripting come from the other side, beyond the grave? That would be quite a bit more serious.</comment>


The Truth About Marissa Mayer: She Has Two Contrasting Reputations - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/The-Truth-About-Marissa-Mayer-She-Has-Two-3713581.php

<comment><USER2> What kind of hit piece is this?

It's all anonymous sources. I think the quote that resonates the most is the one where they say "One of her flaws at Google [was] that she was too tough with her colleagues in the early years, and these people have memories like elephants."

I mean her first day, and they have the cavalry out for her trying to bring her (and Yahoo!) down.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a former Googler who didn't have a lot of interactions with Marissa, but has heard plenty of opinions about her, this is very interesting to read.

</comment><comment><USER4> I bet you could take the tales about her, change her name to someone else who's well known in the valley, fix the pronouns, and it would look positive. Someone should try taking this story, washing it through sed, and re-posting it somewhere to see what the reaction is then.

<comment><USER5> > The other view, more common amongst long-time Googlers, is that John is a > publicity-craving, lucky early Googler, whose public persona outstripped his > actual authority and power at the company, where he was once a rising star – > thanks to a bullying managerial style – but had become marginalized over the > past couple years.

Nope, doesn't sound positive at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Was Marissa's last reorg at Google really a demotion, or was it just a reorg? It's hard to tell from the outside.</comment>


In Amish village, a rural doctor sees the rarest diseases on Earth - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2019/11/29/wisconsin-rural-doctor-treats-amish-studies-rare-genetic-diseases/3995625002/ <comment><USER2> This is my father's family doctor and was my doctor throughout my childhood.

He actually birthed me in Viroqua Wisconsin where he spends a few days a week. In the past few years (since they got a new Clinic in La Farge) his time has been pretty exclusive to La Farge and the Amish community. However he still sees my father multiple times a year, who is not Amish.

</comment><comment><USER3> ... Or the doctor in question could just have moved to Dewsbury, in West Yorkshire.

(n the mid-1980s I made an early career mistake and qualified as a pharmacist. I did my pre-registration work at the -- now closed -- district hospital in Dewsbury, a Yorkshire town of roughly 60,000 people. Dewsbury is in a steep valley and the working-class population tended not to travel: according to an older relative who worked there all his life, he knew co-workers who had been born, worked, lived, and retired in Dewsbury without ever travelling more than ten miles away from their birthplace. (Automobiles didn't really become a mass-cultural phenomenon there until the 1950s-1960s.) Cue lots of first- cousin marriages. During the 1970s, a Pakistani immigrant community arrived ... also from an isolated mountain valley town that didn't have much time for exogamy.

The hospital serving a city of 60,000 people shouldn't have a 30-bed cystic fibrosis ward (CF is an inborn error of metabolism) ... but Dewsbury needed one. (CF has a frequency of roughly 1 in 3000 in Northern Europe, so you'd expect 20 living cases in a town the size of Dewsbury: but they wouldn't need hospital beds simultaneously! The local frequency was much higher.) Nor should it have exotic conditions like familial hypobetalipoproteinaemia showing up in the population. Again, Dewsbury had that. In fact, Dewsbury was so notorious for genetic disorders that house officers and registrars training in the relevant fields got rotated there from the big teaching hospitals in Leeds (the nearest big city).

Upshot: if you get geographically isolated communities with religious cultures that discourage exogamy, you get _really weird_ genetic disorders cropping up within surprisingly few generations.

<comment><USER4> Also in Surrey. A relative worked with visually impaired children, one of them of Pakistani heritage and having albinism, and this kid said one day "it's because we marry our cousins". This is one of those situations where the authorities etc. being all cringey and PC about things _harms the very people they are trying to protect_.

<comment><USER3> It's not specific to Pakistan: the same problem tends to be seen in many if not all cultures with a strong dowry tradition. If substantial wealth is transferred with a bride, there's a powerful incentive to marry within the family.

(This used to happen in Europe, but during the middle ages the church banned cousin marriages for political reasons: it stopped the nobility consolidating too much power.)

<comment><USER5> It was certainly common for a long time in many places, and still is across what's now the muslim world (although I think it long predates Islam). But I'm not sure dowry tradition is quite the right marker, IIRC it's much less common in Hindu tradition (where the pattern was larger caste groups instead).

But it's certainly a way of concentrating power in the family. And presumably, for a very long time, having lots of grandsons of undivided loyalty was important in conflicts with the neighbouring family/tribe... worth the individual fitness cost (and the extra miscarriages etc -- many of these strange illnesses would of course have killed the child).

<comment><USER6> > still is across what's now the muslim world (although I think it long > predates Islam).

It can trivially be seen to have little to do with islam in examples like the House of Habsburg, and the famously ignominous end of the Spanish line. Or orthodox jews (the endogamous set is wider than just a family, but you still see lots of rare genetic conditions crop up, and some jewish communities don't even stray outside of it e.g. Mashhadi jews).

Though it does look related to _Arabization_.

While first-degree cousin marriage has gotten quite a bit rarer used to be extremely common across the globe, and aside from the middle-east it also remains legal throughout eurasia (except for a few eastern european countries and notably china where it's entirely banned and india where it's dependent on culture and religion) and south america

> IIRC it's much less common in Hindu tradition

It's less common but hardly non-existent: according to Shrikant Kuntla, Srinivas Goli, T.V. Sekher, Riddhi Doshi via wikipedia[0] rate of consanguinous marriage is 25% of indian muslims, 15% for indian hindu, and under 10% for other indians. State / culture presents a much wider spread, from 1.2% in Himachal Pradesh to 38% in Tamil Nadu.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage#India)

<comment><USER5> Well, royalty are special and weird, and a drop in the bucket, and prove little. My point was that it was a widespread pre-islamic custom, not one which arrived with the book; the geographical correlation with islam is because (as cstross says) it was largely stamped out in Europe a thousand years ago.

It's my understanding that cousin-marriage was rare among european Jews, but a bit more common elsewhere. (Not sure if as high as the surrounding peoples, not sure.) There are indeed rare and interesting genetic conditions in some Jewish groups, but that's another story.

(Am surprised by Tamil Nadu's 38%, thanks. But certainly north-indians take dowry pretty seriously, while avoiding cousins.)

<comment><USER6> > (Am surprised by Tamil Nadu's 38%, thanks. But certainly north-indians take > dowry pretty seriously, while avoiding cousins.)

Yes, India seems extremely split between the north and the south, northern cultures have disapproved of it or forbidden it forever while southern states much less so.

<comment><USER5> I wonder how this happened... do you know if it's known? Could it be one of the relics of Buddhism adopted by the ~ Gupta revival, and never made it down south?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Link that works in Europe

[https://eu.jsonline.com/story/news/special- reports/2019/10/1...](https://eu.jsonline.com/story/news/special- reports/2019/10/10/amish-mennonite-health-wisconsin-doctor-has-found-rare- genetic-diseases-founder-effect/2119965001/)

<comment><USER8> GDPR brought too much hate and it solved too little.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Similar thing going on with the Navajo and _xeroderma pigmentosum_ :

[http://archive.pov.org/blog/pressroom/2012/06/sun-kissed- pre...](http://archive.pov.org/blog/pressroom/2012/06/sun-kissed-premieres-on- pov/)

Attributed to gene-pool shrinkage and/or ancestry mix-ups arising from the " _trail of tears_."

<comment><USER10> Don't you mean the _Long Walk_?

<comment><USER9> Why y'all downvoting this man? He's right.

<comment><USER10> The full reference is [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Walk_of_the_Navajo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Walk_of_the_Navajo)

The _Trail of Tears_ [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears) was other tribes such as the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations.

It still amazes me that my most down-voted posts are about Native American facts.

<comment><USER11> I assume most downvoters (not having heard of the Navajo event) thought you were making an inappropriate joke referencing the Stephen King novel of the same name: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Walk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Walk)

<comment><USER12> Also out of context it sort of sounds like a denial of the suffering and conditions - even if that is the name thet used.

In my experience there was no denial about the travesties but the Trail of Tears and maybe the Black Hills got name checked as events perhaps because of the precedent and disregard for even the Constitution and the Supreme Court in the first and the egregious "kick them off of their own reserved lands for a short term gold rush".

<comment><USER10> Perhaps folks might like to do a search before making such damning judgements about other HN users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was a good story. I enjoyed the rural vibe and the simple mechanics: do it because you care, it's right, and it will still be hard.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I remember seeing a documentary--too lazy to look it up now--but it was about the Inuit (or a portion of them) that let a guest sleep with the woman /women in their igloo. At first look, this goes against Darwin, who wants to raise someone else's "bastard" but without it they'd be doomed. So the lesser of evils.

<comment><USER14> Evolution focuses on populations, not individuals. A lot of things make more sense if you consider that.

<comment><USER15> On the contrary. Evolution focuses on individuals.

<comment><USER16> _Darwin himself argued for group selection. He postulated that moral men might not do any better than immoral men but that tribes of moral men would certainly "have an immense advantage" over fractious bands of pirates. "_

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-good-for- th...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whats-good-for-the-group/)

Though the pendulum swings. The case isn't clear-cut, and the argument for group-level selection (or even symbiotic or more general multi-species co- evolution) is strong.

<comment><USER17> Group level selection is irrefutably a thing (Multicellular organisms are selected as a group. Eusocial insects are too). The only question is how important it is in various contexts, in some it may be negligible.

<comment><USER18> I guess you should define what exact mechanism you're describing when you use the term 'group selection'. Richard Dawkins would describe the phenomena you mention (multi-cellular organisms and eusocial insects) as cases of the genes which create those complex phenotypes being selected.

<comment><USER19> In a group without exogamy, selection for the group is selection for those genes responsible for the complex phenotype that is the group, in a similar but less strict way. This is true even with sufficiently minor exogamy.

<comment><USER18> Right, but then you don't need a mechanism other than genetic selection. Because that's what is typically meant by group selection: that there is an _additional_ selective mechanism that exists aside and apart from genetic selection.

<comment><USER17> Maybe we are talking past each other then. Because to me group selection is a type of genetic selection.

<comment><USER18> Then we are in agreement. Typically, group selection is not meant in that way, though. Just an FYI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The link just redirects to eu.usatoday.com's homepage for me :(

<comment><USER21> This may work:

[https://outline.com/4wdE3t](https://outline.com/4wdE3t)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> [https://web.archive.org/web/20191130183259/https://www.usato...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191130183259/https://www.usatoday.com/in- depth/news/nation/2019/11/29/wisconsin-rural-doctor-treats-amish-studies-rare- genetic-diseases/3995625002/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Colorado City, AZ Is Another great example. It seems if you want to See some weird stuff, closed off religious communities are the place to be.

[https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170726-the- polygamous-t...](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170726-the-polygamous- town-facing-genetic-disaster)</comment>


Inside Uber's $100,000 Payment to a Hacker, and the Fallout - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/technology/uber-hacker-payment-100000.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> Dupe. Comments here : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16137727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16137727)</comment>


Ask HN: ad driven iPhone apps? - <AUTHOR>

I don't have an iPhone or a Mac yet, so I wonder how ad driven iPhone apps work. I have heard they exist (or existed, in the beginning), but how do they work (not only technically, but from a UI perspective)? Do iPhone users really accept ads in the apps? I thought they would expect perfect, flawless design, which doesn't seem to align well with in-app ads. <comment><USER2> I use the free version of Twitteriffic which inlines ads with normal tweets occasionally, but the ads are maybe 30% larger in height and not very intrusive.</comment>


Mac App updates Aggregator built using Telescope - <AUTHOR> https://macapptracker.com/page/why <comment><USER2> this looks like it has potential, but it it will be difficult to pull eyes away from MU. good luck</comment>