Windows Subsystem for Linux is making inroads with developers - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/the-windows-subsystem-for-linux-conference-was-a-virtual-success/ <comment><USER2> It sure is nice for all the people who are stuck on Windows/prefer Windows but need access to Linux tools.

But I'm not sure what this will do to Open Source in the long run. I don't think WSL users will care a lot about the ideals of the Free Software people and I'm not sure whether the Free Software people will love to maintain code for people who don't give a fuck.

Or maybe it will expose more people to the idea and will provide a new entry point for new talents.

At least Canonical is getting paid.

<comment><USER3> > But I'm not sure what this will do to Open Source in the long run. I don't > think WSL users will care a lot about the ideals of the Free Software people > and I'm not sure whether the Free Software people will love to maintain code > for people who don't give a fuck.

People who care about the ideals of the free software people have always been a genuine minority group. You might be using the terms interchangeably, but it's why the term "Open Source" exists.

<comment><USER4> > People who care about the ideals of the free software people have always > been a genuine minority group.

It'd be a lot different if, for instance, Oracle was able to actually kill MySQL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> WSL+X410 is an amazing combo. I have every linux desktop app I want at my finger tips, with a functional and superior to cygwin/msys shell.

And with WSL's import feature I have trivially replicated this WSL environment to all of my machines.

Yes, it's won me over.

<comment><USER6> Lack of virtualization and container support within the WSL was a major blocker for me, has this been resolved?

<comment><USER7> WSL2 offers Docker support. It will be included in the next update of Windows.

Many people are using it now but I don't have time to mess with beta software. I am exercising my patience.

<comment><USER8> I'm also a bit disappointed it doesn't bridge the host network like WSL1. It's nice there that I can just run something and access it on local host - it even works together with docker-for-windows, the docker CLI client being in WSL.

<comment><USER9> I believe that recent(ish) builds of Windows, webservers running in WSL can be accessed from Windows via localhost:port, just like with WSL 1. [0] Accessing servers running on the Windows side from WSL is a fair bit harder, but IMO also a lot less likely.

0: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-ux- changes...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-ux- changes#accessing-linux-applications-from-windows)

<comment><USER8> Oh that's great news. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I always felt this was named incorrectly. It's not a Windows Subsystem for Linux operating systems, it's a Linux Subsystem for the Windows operating system.

<comment><USER11> It was an historical reason. WSL1 was named such because instead of using Linux kernel, Microsoft uses Windows NT subsystem to run Linux userland (hence Windows Subsystem for Linux). As WSL become a well known name, the next iteration (the one with the real Linux kernel) is simply named as WSL2.

<comment><USER12> It was wrong then too.

<comment><USER13> No it wasn't, WSL1 is a Windows subsystem. For running Linux.

I think "Windows Linux Subsystem" would've been more accurate, but it's also more confusing.

<comment><USER14> That's why "Linux Subsystem" would have been clear and straightforward. Just one more of Window's subsystems. Cramming "Windows" in the name is what makes it confusing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The way some Linux/BSD developers fled to OS X and now WSL, kind of shows the big mistake it was for Microsoft and Apple not to be serious with their NT/POSIX and A/UX efforts respectively.

In a parallel timeline Linux would never picked up steam if those systems had been serious POSIX implementations.

<comment><USER16> Linux didn't win because of POSIX. Linux won despite POSIX. Linux won because it was free and fast.

<comment><USER15> Linux won on the server because free beer and lots of money from UNIX companies, using the community to drive down development costs.

In what concerns desktop and embedded, it hasn't won.

Ironically IoT is now getting full of BSD/MIT licensed POSIX clones, exactly for not having to deal with anything GPL related.

<comment><USER17> Not on the desktop, but embedded still seems to be going linux's way. Why does the gpl license of the kernel matter ? Android gets along fine with everything other than the kernel being differently licensed. MS launched some linux distro for IoT stuff as well.

<comment><USER15> MIT/BSD OSes like mbed, NuttX, RTOS, Zephyr, or bare metal like Arduino and ESP32, is where people are heading into, when they aren't using a commercial RTOS with security and real time capabilities that Linux has yet to fully support, like INTEGRITY, QNX.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've got Manjaro XFCE on multiple workstations for almost 2 years now. Setting up a new Manjaro workstation is far less annoying than setting up Windows 10. I just did a comparison the other day because I needed to work on a SQL Server project that requires the use of Visual Studio + SQL Server Development Tools (SSDT).

On Windows 10 Pro - ssh didn't even work correctly in Git Bash after I ran ssh-keygen. I could only git clone from a cmd prompt.

The only 2 things I kinda miss from Windows are TortoiseGit and SSDT. Luckily, I don't really need them most of the time.

(Before Manjaro I used Windows since version 3 and I only used Linux for server since Red Hat 4 or 5. A couple of years ago I couldn't have imagined using a Linux desktop but now everything I do is just better on Linux.)

<comment><USER19> Git Bash is nothing to do with WSL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm a developer, too. But I find it's easier for me to just use native Linux without all the MSFT cruft getting in the way.

Just like I reckon WINE is useless, too. And for pretty much the same reasons.

If you want to use Windows, use Windows.

If you want to use Linux, use Linux.

If you want to use both at the same time, then you might get away with using a pure Linux guest on a Windows host, or a pure Windows guest on a Linux host, using VMWare or VirtualBox. But these hybrids (WINE and WSL) are the worst of both worlds.

<comment><USER21> I disagree. Both WSL and Wine are immensely useful to use some tools from the other world in your workflow _without_ having to shuffle data between the two or adding overhead for simple tasks. I encounter tools that only exist for one (or are a real hassle to build for the other) often enough for this to be useful.

I wouldn't do development that's primarily for the other platform with them though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can understand why people left Linux for Mac OS X: at the time, the Linux desktop really wasn't that advanced, and most folks didn't want to deal with what really could be a pain. I thought that it was worth it to stick with Linux, but I could see why some folks would use a Mac. I don't really understand why they stick with it today, but that's a post for a different time.

But I really cannot understand why anyone would willingly use Windows. I sometimes have to, and it is hellaciously, embarrassingly bad. There's nothing about the experience which says good or enjoyment or quality or _anything_ positive. Things are inconsistent. There are ads on the home version. Simple things are slow. And it's _ugly_!

If you're stuck at a company which forces you to use Windows, I guess WSL is better than nothing. But why not just move on?

</comment><comment><USER23> Back when WSL was first released I tried getting my ruby environment set up using it, but at the time I still used a graphical text editor and getting it talking to the Linux filesystem was too much of a bother.

Nowadays I use vim so I gave it another chance a couple of weeks ago. Together with the new Windows Terminal app [1] it's been a great experience. I can run my editor and my code on Linux and then visit the webapp from the browser in the Windows environment.

Note: There's also better support for talking to the Linux filesystem from Windows nowadays, but I've not needed it so I can't comment on how good it is. Scott Hanselman has a good blog post on getting it set up though [2])

[1] [https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal](https://github.com/Microsoft/Terminal)

[2] [https://www.hanselman.com/blog/RubyOnRailsOnWindowsIsNotJust...](https://www.hanselman.com/blog/RubyOnRailsOnWindowsIsNotJustPossibleItsFabulousUsingWSL2AndVSCode.aspx)

<comment><USER24> Re: files

I can open explorer.exe from inside wsl2 environment to copy files back and forth easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It worries me that this appears to be Windows attempt to turn Linux into a component of Windows-essentially Windows swallowing Linux. Linux shouldn't require Windows to operate.

<comment><USER26> Linux doesn't require Windows to operate, but it might work better if it's packaged in Windows.

The big question mark for me is drivers. Having great drivers to take advantage of hardware across a multitude of different platforms is an issue of market share and market demand. I have an NVMe drive, 16GB of the fastest RAM, workstation-grade networking, and Dolby speakers on my laptop. I can't take advantage of it, because I accidentally erased Windows 10 Professional for Workstations when dual booting Ubuntu, that had all the specialized drivers. I'm fine with Ubuntu, but I kind of wish I had Windows + WSL instead.

<comment><USER27> Whenever drivers come up I wonder what people are doing that somehow doesn't just work automatically. Everything I ever plugged into Linux in the past few years has instantly worked perfectly, the only exception being GPUs.

Meanwhile Windows starts looking for drivers for a few minutes, and may or may not find them.

<comment><USER28> Agreed. From the list of hardware OP listed I see 0 reasons why it won't work natively in Ubuntu. Even better than windows because you won't need any special drivers to download!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't know, I fought Bluetooth and headset mic configurations all the afternoon and got it working (God, I have two mic, why is there 12 mic outputs to choose from ?!) but I still don't want to get back on Windows (it wants too much ram and its file Explorer is too slow compared to dolphin).

And then, how do I use bindfs with WSL ? Where are the WSL files and the docker volumes inside it ?

<comment><USER30> I've used windows my entire life/career. I recently moved jobs to an all Mac startup and I can't believe how much better Bluetooth and VPN is. I keep messing up keyboard shortcuts and I don't quite understand how "windows" work on a Mac. But the Bluetooth situation alone (I could never get my QC35s to work as a headset when needed and just headphones as needed) means I won't use windows for a productive work environment for awhile. (Still have a gaming desktop that will always run windows for fun and VMs for dev)

<comment><USER31> > I don't quite understand how "windows" work on a Mac.

The app and having a window open of that app are decoupled, simple as that. Open up, say, Safari, press Cmd+W to close the window, and Safari will still be open. Press Cmd+N and you'll open a new window. Press Cmd+Q to quit it, regardless of how many windows (including zero) are open.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> For things that do not interface directly with hardware it's great. I use WSL daily for development.

The best part of any Linux distro is the terminal, I've ditched my Linux laptop for a Windows laptop with WSL and haven't looked back.

I've been pretty tired of linux desktop environments being flaky, lack of gaming, Nvidia driver issues, etc. Windows + WSL has been a godsend

</comment><comment><USER33> all I can say is the combination of visual studio + cmake + windows terminal + WSL has been life changing for me. I can have a terminal open with a WSL tab and a powershell core tab, and build both Linux and windows builds from the same repo. No more remoting into a Linux box or having to setup a VM (wsl will turn into one soon). You can even debug your Linux build in visual studio using wsl. Same with haskell builds, I literally have the same stack yaml and I can run tests for both OSes from the same code.

</comment><comment><USER34> I switched to Windows with WSL for all personal work about a year ago. I had been using Lubuntu (Lfce) for years, but wanted to give it a shot. There are some rough edges (file system permissions can be weird if you're sharing files between the host and Linux), but it has been great and I've gotten comfortable with it. One thing to be aware of is many devs will want at least Windows 10 Pro edition ad you can't use Home as a docker host. I didn't feel bad paying $100 for the upgrade though.

<comment><USER26> No hypervisor support for Windows Home is pretty insane. Ran into this problem with a friend's laptop during a hackathon a year or two ago. Wonder if ripping that out makes QA faster.

<comment><USER34> I'm sure a big piece is Microsoft thinking "most users don't need this so we can get away with charging the few who do". I have trouble feeling outrage because it is only $100 to upgrade. I've paid almost that much for a text editor.

<comment><USER26> I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. So many students and future programmers use Windows Home (I did as a kid), and Microsoft would throw away the opportunity for them to play around and lock them in. Now I can't imagine using Windows Home to program.

$100 seems pricey for a text editor, my friend. Is it IntelliJ or PyCharm? Why not VSCode + Sourcegraph?

<comment><USER34> It was Sublime Text 2 and 3. VSCode didn't exist yet.

You do make a good point re: Windows 10 Pro. I hadn't thought of it from that perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> How has cron support been coming along? I have also been wanting to play with connecting a WSL Rails app to IIS :)

<comment><USER5> The trick to cron is to have WSL always "running".

In my case, I use X410+WSL and have a xfce panel always active on my desktop, and that is sufficient to keep WSL alive and so have a working cron.

<comment><USER35> so cron is working now in it? I will definitely try it out again. also... why do you mean by "running"? it's basically a vm so as long as i have a command prompt open, it should be running, correct? it would be cool if there was a way of keep it up and running like a regular vm.

<comment><USER5> When you close the shell it sort of sleeps; there seems to be some hooks to allow it to wake on request, for ssh, but for the most part the system sleeps and won't wake until a shell is opened.

I get around this by having an X app always running, and its behaviour is sufficient to prevent WSL from sleeping.

Some folks I know just leave the shell open, but having an xfce panel is desirable to me.

<comment><USER36> If you used systemd instead of cron it would at least run as soon as it came back, if it was out when it should have run. That's usually sufficient for backups and such.

<comment><USER5> But then I'd have to run systemd. WSL's Ubuntu by default does not have systemd.

        #> systemctl
        System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can't operate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> How is the file system performance in WSL? I'm stuck on WSL1 (IT managed OS upgrades) and file access performance is much slower than native windows.

So sometimes I give up on my favorite command line tools and switch to "CMD".

<comment><USER38> WSL2 should be OK, as long as you're on the WSL managed filesystem image. On NTFS you will still have issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> WSL helps with the pain of having to use Windows, but it's still Windows for good (the trackpad drivers) and bad (pretty much everything else).

</comment><comment><USER40> Has VPN support gotten better in the last 8 months-ish? I keep dual booting mostly because managing the configuration turned into a nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER41> It hasn't won me over yet. I use it for some pretty basic things too.

</comment><comment><USER42> Does small file IO still suck or is it better now with the 2.0 version?

</comment><comment><USER43> Not surprising, linux is a terrible user experience.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Fedora remix for WSL is on sale for $6 right now. If you're interested in WSL, this is an upgrade from the free Ubuntu distro. I hope they continue on with it for WSL2. I much prefer Fedora to Ubuntu.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's a joke. Windows ? Never again.

<comment><USER45> I remember when I bought my XPS13 a year ago, to work while I traveled, I found that even with WSL, it was painful to get my toolchain working on windows (mostly unix based tools) I ended up putting ubuntu (and currently popOS) and never looking back.

<comment><USER46> Had the same experience, I was forced to use Windows for a while, it was all so cumbersome. Tooling does not work, permission errors, wsl <-> host system copy errors, line ending errors, docker errors, character escaping errors, especially quotes and double quotes, PATH errors. The list goes on and on and on.

Also, if there are are no hard requirements for Windows such as most webdev why would anyone use WSL instead of the real thing? Especially if the deployment platform is Linux, makes no sense for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I tried WSL - the moment you leave that little window you're back in the world of the registry, etc. No thanks.

</comment><comment><USER48> Once WSL2 gets released for real, with the improved docker volume handling, I'll try out WSL for work and skip linux all-together.

Great stuff!

<comment><USER49> The filesystem performance on a Windows FS mount is absolutely unusable in WSL2. They are aware of it, but it does not seem to be a priority right now. Looks like I'm going to be stuck on WSL1 for quite some time unfortunately.

<comment><USER48> I suppose it depends on what you use it for. I've only tried some simple stuff like having webserver dokcker image and using a volume for the html while developing on the experimental wsl2 integration for docker, and that has worked splendidly.

Doing it that way, no files are ever mounted 'from windows', it's all contained within wsl.</comment></comment></comment>


Object-oriented programming, where is it now? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hackinghat.com/index.php/programming/programming-like-its-1995

<comment><USER2> "Neither markup nor JS have particularly strong OO characteristics and both are hugely succesful without those OO characteristics."

This is where I stopped reading...</comment>


How Fast Can You Type a Million Letters? - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-fast-can-you-type-a-million-letters/ <comment><USER2> This was an utterly brutal nerd-snipe on a Friday afternoon. Damn you, cfadvan and FiveThirtyEight. Damn you.

My (likely wrong, certainly non-proven) solution is here for those looking for a laugh: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w3lt5mpMQyyV2LWDspMR...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w3lt5mpMQyyV2LWDspMRB69C5QKodJ- uP3zU0UWHbBc/edit?usp=sharing)

</comment><comment><USER3> In emacs, 9 keys. M-1 0 0 0 0 0 0 i

<comment><USER3> It also seems to have pretty much locked up my emacs. I guess I deserved it.

<comment><USER4> Did it eventually finish? I just timed myself (start with an empty document to finish with a million i's) using the method I mentioned, and it took 1:01.19 for an average speed of 16KB/s.

<comment><USER3> It actually finished adding the i's pretty quickly (a few seconds), it was navigation afterward that was a challenge. Probably because emacs is optimized to navigate with reasonable sized lines. A one megabyte buffer isn't a big deal, but I think a one megabyte line was. Anyway, I hit C-a, C-k and then did something else. It completed at some point, probably within a minute or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      for i in {1..1000000}; do echo -n i >> file; done; vim file</comment>


No Survivors in Crash of Flight Carrying Polish Leader - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/world/europe/11poland.html <comment><USER2> The article lists only the most important people. But that's a very short list, as there were many more involved (full list in PL is here: [http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/Wiadomosci/1,80273,7752563,Prezy...](http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/Wiadomosci/1,80273,7752563,Prezydenckim_Tu_154_lecialy_najwazniejsze_osoby_w.html)): There were ~60 people from the government, and ~20 more representatives of army, church and other organisations.

<comment><USER3> Actually whole leadership of the army. And the chief of the national bank.

<comment><USER4> So ironic and bizarre that they were on their way to commemorate the Katyn massacre. This is like a small-scale Katyn.

<comment><USER5> With the notable difference that, as far as we know, this particular massacre wasn't ordered by a Russian dictator...

As far as we know...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The Polish president had been due in western Russia to commemorate the anniversary of the murder of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II.

The ceremonies were to be held at a site in the Katyn forest close to Smolensk, where 70 years ago members of the Soviet secret police executed more than 20,000 Polish officers captured after the Soviet Army invaded Poland in 1939."

It is worthwhile to emphasize these two paragraphs from the article, since presidency of the late president Kaczyński, among other things, has put great importance on reminding about Polish victims of Soviet totalitarianism. He insisted on commemorating the memory of victims of Sovet invasion on Poland, after the Germany, on 17.09.1939, as well as of Soviet occupation after 1945, when Russians defeated Germany in that part of Europe and replaced them in the role of the occupier. Memory about this victims has been prohibited until 1989, when Poland finally regained its political sovereignty.

</comment><comment><USER5> Many companies have policies about not putting more than X senior executives in the same plane... Don't countries have those too?

What happens if Airforce One crashes with the president and his whole cabinet on board? (wait, wasn't there a season of 24 about that?)

<comment><USER2> There was already a problem with that before. In 2008 leaders of Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia wanted to fly in one plane to Gruzia. There was some arguing with the pilot who was refusing to fly in that situation (landed in Azerbaijan instead to maintain minimum of security). Yet, they do it again. Even if there is no policy against it, there will be in a month...

<comment><USER7> for people who might not know, in English, Gruzia is the Republic of Georgia

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Belarussian aircraft informed crew about tough conditions in Smolensk airport - rather old, soviet military airfield - which after that was closed in case of heavy fog and the plane redirected to Minsk or Moscow. Unfortunately, the pilots decided to land anyway, even though three approaches to landing failed.

In fact Tu-154 was aged, but after solid and expensive modernization. For now it looks like a mistake of a pilot connected with really bad weather conditions.

<comment><USER9> _in a thick fog, did not reach the runway but instead hit the treetops and fell apart_

Bad avionics. A Boeing would've been alright.

<comment><USER10> You can't tell before an extensive investigation will have been done. Was the ILS active? Were there some navigation instrument failing? Was there a mechanical problem at this time on the aircraft? Was it just some human error (involved in 80% of aircraft accidents)? It's just too early to draw conclusions.

<comment><USER11> There is no ILS at this airport. That was a visual approach with almost zero visibility.

These aircraft are old, but have received extensive maintenance and upgrades, so a mechanical failure isn't likely. What you have to remember, though, is that a Tu-154 does not climb as well as a modern jet. So an aborted landing is much more dangerous, as you don't have enough engine power to climb quickly.

The pilot made four landing attempts (these are the best of pilots, so I suspect he was told to), the last one being fatal. Also, I don't expect a sane pilot to try to make a turn at low altitude right after an aborted landing, so the stories about the plane being in a turn probably mean the plane was already in a stall and falling.

Also, the runway at this airport is very short for the Tu-154 even at the best of times, so the pilot would have to touch down at the very beginning of the runway. In a dense fog that is extremely difficult.

It's a sad day. We might never know what really happened on board, but I strongly suspect that the pilots did not want to proceed and that either the presidential staff or one of the generals on board told the pilots to land anyway.

<comment><USER10> I had the opportunity to discuss that with a pilot who uses to land in Russia in different airports and explained us NDB landings in Russia. The pilot made only one landing attempt that failed, the other ones are the standard procedure in Russia where ATC take you down step by step in the traffic pattern - make you flight 3 or 4 circuits round over the runway. Also the captain didn't have much hours of flights compared to his years of experience - a common pattern in the east countries who don't have much money for military aircrafts expenses. It looks like a flying error at the end, he maybe have turned over the trees (probably because the NDB wasn't on the runway centerline), and was too low too early... Investigation will tell more hopefully.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My condolences to the people of Poland.

</comment><comment><USER13> There is an interesting article from Xinhua, China, 2008

[http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=zh- CN&tl=en&...](http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=zh- CN&tl=en&u=http://news.qq.com/a/20080515/000697.htm)

<comment><USER5> Not very helpful to post an article in Chinese...

<comment><USER13> Replaced the link with Google Translate.

I confess I was lazy.

<comment><USER5> Cheers!

Interesting indeed. In summary: they knew the plane they were flying had problems, was hard to fly, dangerous, etc, and numerous pilots refused to fly it because of those issues, but they kept using it to save money. This is an article from May 2008.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Shades of Ron Brown's (Commerce Secretary under Clinton) last plane ride. Certain folks in Russia would have had plenty of reasons to cut off the head of Poland's government.

<comment><USER3> This is quite complicated matter here in Poland.

President Kaczyński was one of few our politicians who didn't wanted too many compromises with Russia. There was a tendency of not taking him seriously, as he had a harsh tongue for a politician and was generally considered a bit paranoid. But he actually was one of the few in Europe who actively opposed to Russian involvement in 2008 Georgia/Osetia conflict and was trying to reveal the tracks that the conflict might have been secretly escalated by Russia in the first place.

In our country people tend to know well how Russia government uses the policy of hiding or denying the facts. They used it when tsars ruled, then again during the communism, and again these times. Regardless of what really happened during today's crash, they will make obstacles to investigate it while pretending to be helpful.

Don't get me wrong, I know and like many Russian folks in person, but still their government is one of the crappiest (and most dangerous), by the standards of western democracies.

<comment><USER3> Looks like I've been wrong predicting Russia reaction:

<http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LDE63A08I.htm>

Fortunately!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Vladimir Putin will lead the investigation:

[http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/04/10/2869413.htm?se...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/04/10/2869413.htm?section=world)

</comment><comment><USER16> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off- topic.

<comment><USER5> I think the self-decapitation of a country's government through poor flight arrangements/policy is an interesting new phenomenon. Do you know of another occasion when a country basically lost most of its senior politicians and army general in the blink of an eye? Even at war this doesn't tend to happen.

<comment><USER9> I hope for the sake of the people of Iran, Israel and freedom-loving people everywhere, that rigged instrumentation or autopiloting can be placed on board official Iranian air transport.

What does Ahmadinejad fly? Are they fitted with special or standard avionics? Can something be prepared equipment-wise as pulled from the same type of aircraft, modified, and then swapped when he has landed in a foreign country or else on Iranian soil?

In Die Hard II the bad guys re-calibrated sea level -200 feet below the real ground level and one plane crashed straight into it... <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6EfN4W2z0c></comment></comment></comment>


Hitting China's Wall - <AUTHOR> http://www.readability.com/articles/aicxdbek

<comment><USER2> _> Investment is now running into sharply diminishing returns_

This can be seen quite clearly in the rising ICOR [1] numbers. The stimulus lead investment since the crisis has been substantially less productive, at least in the short term [2]. Infrastructure and real-estate investment is doing much less for future GDP growth than prior investments in capital equipment for manufacturing, exports etc.

The bigger concern in the financing of this investment binge. IMO there is a very real risk of substantial civil unrest in China when the massive credit bubble comes apart.

The FT put out a much more extensive treatment of these issues a couple of days ago:

[http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2013/07/17/1554582/when-does-a- ch...](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2013/07/17/1554582/when-does-a-chinese- growth-deceleration-become-a-crisis/)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_Capital- Output_Rati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_Capital-Output_Ratio)

[2] [http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303...](http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user3303/imageroot/2013/03/20130315_china1.png)

</comment><comment><USER3> It talks about the lack of spending power of consumer because of low wages, and gains all flood into elite class and national enterprises. My observation is that it's seemed almost like "directed" or "forced" consumption to stimulate economy - a consumption without average consumers, or people really have very little role to it. Prove is that the real-estate expansion bubble, empty buildings and cities. It's like a hack of economy for super growth with very little risk. I think it's a complete violation of nature, but effects can vary... my prediction of one significant effect is that there will be very little innovation come out from China for next 20 years. I think they've thought of it, and don't care as it is not a primary concern for them at this point in time. And I don't think this hack is as good as it is thought to be, the risk has been reduced in the short-term, but it's somewhat cumulative, and it's going to be very dangerous in long-term.

Back to topic of this article... I can see the wall, but it's so huge that distance cannot be determined. Maybe when China about to hit, they might come up with something. After all, control is their weapon, and it can be extremely effective.

</comment><comment><USER4> Funny I hit a paywall when I clicked through this link...

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. Japan is mentioned, and they most have passed through the same point some time in living memory. South Korea too. How did they cope?

<comment><USER6> This is just speculation...

With Japan, they had seriously begun the process of industrialization in the 1800's with the Meiji Period [1]. So even though their economy and infrastructure was gravely damaged during WW2, they could rebuild quickly.

With South Korea, I don't know. It was a much smaller country. Being a close ally of the USA may have helped with foreign investment which allowed them to climb up the value curve very quickly. I found this on post-WW2 South Korean economic development [2], but haven't gone through the whole thing yet.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_period](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_period)

[2] [http://www.nber.org/chapters/c4063.pdf](http://www.nber.org/chapters/c4063.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Google "Hitting China's Wall" and follow the link to get around the paywall.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow, I'm as much a skeptic of China's economic model as anyone can be, but this article is just saying words with 1) nothing to back them up, and 2) an overt 'no, america isn't anything like this! don't be silly!'.

I mean:

        (Since someone is going to raise this issue: no, this
        bears very little resemblance to the Federal Reserve's
        policies here.

Really? When an article is written as 'factual' in a 'factual' tone, but contains stupid little personal interjections in it like this, I get :'( face about the fall of journalistic standards.

Needs 'opinion piece, may not reflect reality' at the top.

<comment><USER9> The backing data is Krugman being a nobel prize winning economist whose been incredibly accurate for the last decade and a half. I'm sure you know more than him though shadowmint.

<comment><USER8> Being famous does not excuse lacking citations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The link says "readability.com", but it immediately forwards to the New York Times and a paywall.</comment>


Nemesis: a Rake like task management for Haskell with a nice DSL (BSD3 license) - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/nfjinjing/nemesis/tree/master

<comment><USER2> It looks great, but I just installed it via cabal and the examples on the github page fail to parse.

Does it require a particular version of of ghc?

I have:

        Glasgow Haskell Compiler, Version 6.10.2, for Haskell 98, stage 2 booted by GHC version 6.10.1

edit: After some guesswork I managed to build a cabal package from the source and re-installed, and it looks good. Perhaps something in the readme should mention steps needed to build from source?

</comment><comment><USER3> Super cool. Gonna play with it later tonight. Thanks for the link.

</comment><comment><USER4> Make it "a rake like task management written in Haskell with a nice DSL for everyone" and I'll take a look. Why would a want to use a task management tool that is explicitly targeted at a single language?

<comment><USER5> It's not targeted at a single language. Just like rake with regards to ruby, I could use this to perform tasks unrelated to haskell code.

<comment><USER4> The short description says "a rake like task management tool _____for______ haskell". It doesn't say "written in haskell".</comment></comment></comment>


Flash Drives Replace Disks at Amazon, Facebook, Dropbox - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/flash-data-centers/all/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I buy this as a good idea quite yet. Flash is, right now, about 8x cheaper than DRAM per storage and 10x more expensive than disks. And the DRAM latency is, of course, about 1000x better still.

Basically for many workloads, it's now ( _edited: original said "not" -- oops_ ) possible to fit entire data sets in RAM, backed by cheaper traditional disks that essentially just stream write logs.

And for workloads where storage costs actually dominate (I'm thinking youtube/dropbox type stuff) it seems like access is mostly streaming, where HD performance is actually quite good.

Obviously SSDs make a ton of sense in the consumer space, where you only get one drive. But if you could pick your RAM/Flash/Disk mix yourself and tailor it to your app, I guess I don't see a lot of advantage to putting your money into the "middle" of that stack.

<comment><USER3> At scale, disk throughput more than anything else will dominate. How long do you want backups to take? If ssds are faster they might mean fewer servers with more disk throughput per server can give users a snappier experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The economic crossover for HDD, SDD and distributed main-memory database depends on data volume vs. query volume.

SSD and DMRD win when the query volume is high compared to the data volume since with HDD you'll need to build multiple copies of the system (or equivalent) to handle the load, whereas SSD and DMRD serve more queries with less hardware.

On the other hand, in cases where query volume is low, HDD is cheaper. But if time-to-market matters, you really do want to reduce the turnaround time for your batch jobs and exploratory queries because in the development of KB's with a subjective element you'll probably need to throw 10-100 things at the wall to get the one that sticks.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can absolutely see Dropbox, Google and Facebook creating a class of SSDful machines as a middle performance layer between RAMful and Diskful machines, but price point and storage limits have a long way to go before there's any wholesale replacement of diskful machines with SSDs.

Also, I'm really surprised there's a datacenter that has a meaningful amount of Facebook, Mozilla, Dropbox and Google servers in the same DC. Looks like someone might be trying to bolster their DC image a bit.

<comment><USER6> re: bolster their DC image -- equinix doesn't need to bolster anything. $166 a share: EQIX on Nasdaq. They're fairly well renowned for their facilities around the world.

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry, but share price has almost no meaning without knowing the number of shares outstanding; and then, it only let's you know that the market currently values them at ~$8B. It still seems like a non sequitur, as they are still competing with Raxspace among others. So why wouldn't they need extra press attention?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How much do persistent HD shortages (especially for higher-volume, high-speed drives) since the Japanese earthquake/tsunami and Thailand flooding have to do with moving relative price points of SSD vs. rotational disk?

Also: for app sever storage (and temporary database tables), SSD makes a lot of sense, and contemporary needs vs. available size (100-200 GB is plenty for many system installs, if not a factor-of-ten overkill) makes SSD vs. rotational a no-brainer.

<comment><USER9> I don't think it has had a much of an impact as I personally expected it to have, though no-doubt it has helped SSDs at least a little.

The biggest effect I've seen is that a bunch of companies (generally big companies, but not HDD creators) have made a shit-load of profit from reselling stock they had before the floods because they realised it would make them more money than using the drives for the purpose they were bought for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Facebook has an open source Linux module that uses SSDs as read and write accelerators for regular disks: <https://github.com/facebook/flashcache>

<comment><USER11> There's also bcache, which may make it into mainline linux one day.

<https://lwn.net/Articles/497024/> <http://bcache.evilpiepirate.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have installed 3 in the past month as the prices have come down. I should have done it sooner but did not realize how much they speed up a computer to the point where it is hard to use a computer with a old fashioned hard drive now.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting that Dropbox is making heavy use of SSDs, as I would think that most of their content is more static long-term than similar data at Facebook, for example.

<comment><USER14> they're using SSDs for their metadata about the files you store. The actual files are stored in Amazon S3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Do flash drives still have a ceiling for how many times you can re-write a particular cell? This is fairly common lore and the article didn't mention it.

<comment><USER16> Yes, but there are two types of flash cell you can use. SLC cells have an order of magnitude higher write-cycle lifetime than MLC cells, which is why there's a difference in "enterprise" vs. consumer ssds. In practice for most uses an SLC based flash drive will be retired before it reaches its durability limits.

<comment><USER17> Eh, I just had an X-25M G2 start to fail the other day, after two years of desktop use. Intel replaced it within the week for free, but it was hardly retired.

<comment><USER18> Just a question, did you take the swap partition off the SSD? That's one of the main tips I've seen in improving SSD life-spans.

<comment><USER17> I didn't, but I don't know if it was swapping all that much... Maybe that was it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If that's true, I hope that reduces SSD/Flash prices for consumers.

<comment><USER20> November 2011 I bought a Samsung 470 128GB for $199.

2 weeks ago I bought a Samsung 830 (faster) 256GB (twice as big) for $220.

The price drop is pretty amazing.

<comment><USER21> Newegg had 120GB 830s for $89 earlier this morning, for a more apples-to- apples comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I read this I thought they really meant flash in a general way like USB sticks, heh, not in an underlying technology way. I've read of several people doing such a thing but it seems to be a unnecessary hack anymore. (see <http://analogbit.com/node/4> )

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe we all should chip in on some SSD's for Hacker News?

<comment><USER24> If only it were that simple :) Sadly, HN is not disk IO bound.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I really like the correction at the end of the article:

> _Due to a typo, this article originally said that a 300 terabyte hard drive > sells for about $350._

300 terabytes for $350? In one drive? Sign me up. =D

<comment><USER25> What's with the downvote? I was being sarcastic. =/

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Doesn't dropbox use AWS? Do they have their own drives?

<comment><USER27> The article states that Dropbox store the files themselves on AWS, and the metadata about the files on their own servers, many of which use SSDs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Flash is really great in theory, but in my experience with intel and sandforce controllers, it isn't reliable enough. I've bought 2 flash drives and had 4 failures already.

I've seen both drive controllers get themselves wedged to the point where they just shut down and go dead. This happens because they aren't doing a straight 1-1 mapping and along with wear leveling (which is necessary) they're trying to compress (sandforce) and optimize (intel) the way data is stored but their algorithms are too complex to be fully debugged (as of last year, anyway.)

I've gone back to spinning rust as a result. I'd love to move my servers to flash, but not until they go back to really straightforward controllers (I hear the samsung controllers are very reliable, and this is why Apple chose them for their laptops) and don't do anything more than wear leveling.

For performance in servers, I'm going with a lot of RAM.

Right now the drive failure rates of SSDs are way too high in my experience, and reading between the lines and user reviews on retailer sites it seems that my experience is not unusual.

<comment><USER29> Just curious (and I haven't really used any SSDs yet) if your drive failure experience is with consumer or "Enterprise" SSDs? I'd expect that the enterprise versions would be more resilient but I don't know.

<comment><USER9> They key aspects for Enterprise drives (both disks and SSDs) are generally 1.) Performance and 2.) When you buy them they come from seperate batches (i.e. a single failure doesn't indicate more are likely to follow).

Servers should basically be created to cope with drive failure in such a way that % of failure isn't an impact on "will this cause problems" but merely on working out the cost of using them.

<comment><USER30> Actually, the key difference with "enterprise" SSD is that they overprovision the drive to have a cell reserve. That's why you can buy a 512Go consumer drive or a 480Go enterprise drive. As cells get wonky, they are 'replaced' from the reserve.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What Happened to the Startup School MOOC? - <AUTHOR> There were no lecture videos posted this week and one of the old lectures (How to Invent the Future Part II) has been removed.  Anyone know what's going on? <comment><USER2> I have to say I was initially excited about Startup School but that wore off pretty quickly. This "school" amounts to a bunch of interviews with a bunch of company founders. That's fine, but these are not much more than the history of these folks and their business yet, in my opinion, don't deliver much in the way of actionable value. And, as an aside, if I have to sit through five more minutes of up-talk I'll have to slice my veins (say that in up-talk).

I am not saying this to be mean. I just don't think this effort has delivered actionable value. Years ago I subscribed to Mixergy. The site is about interviewing successful entrepreneurs and delivering usable wisdom in the process. I have to say the difference could not be greater. Mixergy interviews are genuinely useful, something I cannot say about Startup School. Beyond that, the site has hundreds of interviews across every imaginable topic. I have no relation whatsoever to Mixergy other than having been a subscriber for a couple of years and thinking of going back.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry about that. There were a few technical difficulties this week that delayed our lecture releases. Alan Kay's second lecture will be up again asap this coming week, with our new lecture as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's the email that was sent out by YC:

___________

DATE: Sun, May 28, 2017 at 12:53 PM (Pacific Time)

SUBJECT: Announcement: Startup School Delay in Videos This Week

BODY:

Startup School Delay in Videos This Week

Hi all,

We apologize for the lack of videos this week. We ran into quite a few technical difficulties with video editing/publishing, so this past week's lectures will be delayed until the coming week.

In addition, Alan Kay wanted to update a few parts of his lecture slides, so his second lecture will be back up this coming week as well.

Best,

</comment><comment><USER5> Unrelated, but also check out [http://schoolofherring.com/videos/](http://schoolofherring.com/videos/) for some general leadership lessons.

<comment><USER6> This site lost me with the existence of a "Believe in the Positive Energy" lecture. YMMV.

<comment><USER7> I mean, even MIT is into that crap now.

<comment><USER8> Maybe because it's not crap? Positive energy is probably behind about 80% of all success.

<comment><USER9> And the course could be primarily about debunking belief in positive energy

Being skeptical is great but dismissing a potential trove of useful info for some topics that are unappealing is close-minded. I've recently discovered [http://edx.org](http://edx.org) which has a lot to offer :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup, Pagecovery.com - <AUTHOR>

I'm particularly looking for feedback about this idea of scheduling cover photos. What do you think? The url is www.pagecovery.com <comment><USER2> Interesting idea. Simple, but useful in a fun sort of way. Could it be a successful business? I guess we'll find out.

Web site looks very nice. I don't like the bright body text though, I had to darken it with firebug so I could read it comfortably. Despite the current fashion, I can't imagine why text on a white background would ever be brighter than #444 much less #999.

<comment><USER3> I really like the idea, simple and straight to the point.

What I am not that sure about is your pricing structure. I am not sure if it works as this kind of a stand-alone service. Maybe you could get existing Facebook oriented marketing service to offer it as an up-sell? Maybe some form of personal touch about you/team, or at least a "real" address in the contact section could give it more credibility.

Also I am curious: How did you get these testimonial brands?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. thanks for the feedback, i will look into putting our team information onto the site. Those brands are our clients for our analytics platform.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good: \- Simple idea \- Latest blog topics \- Use of social \- Site content

Not so good: \- Pricing. Why is it tied to fans? This seems totally arbitrary.

Possible easy fixes: \- Font contrast (as previously mentioned) \- Link to clients' facebook pages instead of their website. This way visitor can see how your service is being used and also legitimizes your client claims. \- Examples/case studies of how your service is being used for success.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, thanks for the feedback. The font color has been changed to a darker tone. As for the pricing, it is tied to the fanbase to determine the size of the page and its business. We do not wish to charge hefty pricing for SMB or startups, so the pricing model allows SMB to start off with as little as $9.90 instead of paying $119.90

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea! It's unique and honestly it's the first time I stumble upon something like that. As for the design it's simple, clear and straight to the point. Plus, I like that you included some of your client's logo. I got a question though, what do you mean by Scheduling "Real Time" Cover Photos? It's the Real Time that means nothing to me/confuses me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, the real-time means the current fans that have seen cover photos scheduled by PageCovery. To avoid confusion, i have removed the "real-time". Thank you so much

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Guys is the font size on the website comfortable for reading? Do let me know.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Scheduling Real Time Cover Photos" - what does that mean?

<comment><AUTHOR> It means the current fans that have seen cover photos scheduled by PageCovery</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you pay money to do a regex on the whole internet? - <AUTHOR>

Sometimes I'd really like to see all the pages that contain a certain regular expression pattern.
Sadly I can't seem to find a service that offers this for a vaguely manageable price.
So I wondered if there's any demand for this. Do you ever want to do a Google search with regex and equally as important would you pay to have a download of all the pages that matched your regex?
What would you use it for? Would a text only search be enough or would you be likely to want to use it to match HTML code? <comment><USER2> God yes! I am tired of writing scrapers and crawlers myself when most of the time, I'd like to just do some prototyping with a regex in a search box against the internets. This could seriously accelerate the prototyping loop. Traditional search finds the the most most popular / trusted / authoritative. When I am crawling, usually this is not what I want. I want to get constrained information (usually text) from everywhere including the long tail.

This reminds me of SPARQL. SPARQL can do this kind of thing theoretically but go try using a SPARQL endpoint...go on, I dare you. What a terrible experience. This contrast then reminds me of how I'd rather use JSON instead of XML to serialize in about 99% of cases. Or Python instead of Java to prototype with. Basically, <Hacker-Scruffy-Thing> instead of <Mega-Structured- Thing>.

Yes, please bring us the internet regexes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our of interest how much would you be willing to pay per search and would you be doing searches for text only or HTML code?

Finally is it important to you that the data be very fresh? For example is a month old copy of the internet enough for your searching needs?

<comment><USER2> I'd like a regular search page to use first for query development and then once I'd figured out my queries, an API would be good for automation. Maybe make the search page free and charge for the API? Cost-wise for the API, the kinds of pricing offered by services like firebase, parse, readability, etc. seem too high. I think APIs cost too much in general though. Something along those lines would be reasonable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It was a sad day when the net outgrew Kibo.</comment>