Google's fiber effect: Fuel for a broadband explosion - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnet.com/news/googles-fiber-effect-fuel-for-a-broadband-explosion/ <comment><USER4> > AT&T and local cable operator Grande Communications have beaten Google to > market

Oh, gee, look at all this bandwidth I just found...

> AT&T maintains it has been planning this fiber upgrade for a long time, and > that Google's announcement didn't affect the timing of its network.

No, no, we planned this all along...

> What Google recognized that others didn't is that Americans want to have the > best communications infrastructure

Yes, as it turns out study after study showing Americans were fiercely proud of being in 15th place, may have suffered some sort of statistical vagaries. We're looking into it.

<comment><USER5> yeah, and it's just a total coincidence that AT&T's upgrades that they've been "planning all along" are only in the cities that google announces Fibre in.

<comment><USER6> AT&T, maybe, but Time Warner recently doubled speeds in NYC for free. The announcement was rather silent; I noticed downloads being faster, did a speed test, and had to search for information about it. A couple months later, I got a little card in the mail about it.

100Mbps isn't 1000Mbps, but I'll take it.

<comment><USER7> TWC definitely did it because of Google Fiber, too. They started doing this right around the time Google made it clear it's not just an "experiment" anymore, and they were starting to get a lot of media attention.

I strongly urge people that if they have to choose between Google Fiber and AT&T or Comcast or any of these other guys who've frustrated you for years and couldn't care less about you until Google Fiber arrived, to dump them _immediately_ and go with Google Fiber anyway, even they are matching speeds and prices by then.

They don't deserve you as a customer anymore, and they wouldn't have given you this speed were it not for Google Fiber. So Google Fiber deserves to be rewarded with customers because of that, and Comcast/TWC/AT&T _does not_.

If Google Fiber isn't rewarded with customers for its fiber expansion, then it might die, and then what do you think will happen then? Comcast/etc will go back to their shitty services once again and not care one bit about upgrading anymore, and we'll be in the same situation we are now 5-10 years from now, or perhaps much worse if there's no net neutrality anymore, and all the current telco cartel boys get to bully small start-ups without any fear of any real competition that might _not_ do that, and without having to risk losing customers again. That's why you should quit them immediately.

<comment><USER8> What has Google done to deserve you as a customer. What in the data gathering they do now makes it a good deal to expand their view of you?

The only thing that makes Google different in this situation is they haven't pissed you off yet.

No I would not be getting Google Fiber when/if it showed up, but I don't live anywhere where it would any time soon, if ever.

<comment><USER9> > What has Google done to deserve you as a customer[?]

Introduced competition into a market that had none. That's worthy of a switch in my opinion.

<comment><USER8> There was a time that the cable companies did that. Then everything converged to a new normal.

I don't buy into the Google worship. They are a corporation like any other and act like one. When switching to Google Fiber means ubiquitous Google data collection, I don't see it as a positive thing.

I suppose if you have the memory of a goldfish Google fiber is great as huge speed bump.

<comment><USER10> Sadly, I would take data collection w/fiber over Comcast anyway. If I want protection than I can just purchase a VPN account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The case-study with which the article starts isn't a particularly good example of a reason for upgrading to fibre-based connectivity: latency doesn't care whether your connection is 1Gbps or 1 Mbps.

There might be a slight improvement given that routers and switches aling the way have to operate faster to handle gigabit switching but in the UK the there have been complaints that VDSL interleaving ( which can't be turned-off ) actually raised latency above their ADSL levels.

<comment><USER12> I was wondering the same thing. I'm not much of a gamer these days, but back when I played a lot of LMCTF, it was all about latency (and the offhand grapple). Have game engines gotten so much worse that bandwidth is now an issue, or is this just artistic license?

<comment><USER13> It's all assets. For example, an average Team Fortress 2 map is 50MB, and servers can push new maps to clients when they connect.

Lag compensation [1] does not compensate for lost kills, unfortunately, and I bet people still uniformly complain about bad net code nowadays.

[1] [https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Lag_compensation](https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Lag_compensation)

<comment><USER14> How common is it to need to load a new map, as apposed to downloading the map once then caching it for future use?

<comment><USER13> Not frequently. Competitive players loathe new maps ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > customers don't need that kind of speed.

Sure they don't, they also don't need bluray or terabyte hdds either... Should be rephrased to 'We hope customers don't realize they can use that type of speed.'

<comment><USER16> Yup. That argument tends to bug me a bit. It's not that users don't need it, but more that they can't use it because they don't have it. I'd love to backup all my computers to the secure encrypted cloud with something like Backblaze. But, with 2mbps upload, I'm looking at like a month of straight upload time. If I had gig or even 100Mbps upstream, there would be no question here, I'd get to it. For now though, someone can argue "Oh look, you don't need gig because you're not even using your 2 meg all the time". Umm, yea, there's a reason I'm not using it all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Verizon never gets enough credit for their fiber roll out. Sure they don't offer 1Gbps, but they laid fiber so they can hit those speeds when the time is right. And until then 50 or 100Mbps over fiber is a lot better than 20Mbps over DSL. Not just in the speed department but in terms of latency and consistency. DSL does amazing things but is just at greater risk of interference. My DSL seems to trane at different speeds each day. Fiber is just a much better medium, things don't get too weird until you want greater than 100 Gbps per wavelength.

Disclosure: I wrote some of the software for the early hardware behind FiOS back 10 years ago or so. Wow FiOS has been out there for a long time. Also I am old.

<comment><USER18> ...what fiber roll out? As far as I know, they did some token fiber installations, but the vast, vast majority will never get it. In fact, from what I've read, they took the subsidies for fiber, and used it to build out their metered wireless network.

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140424/06185027014/verizo...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140424/06185027014/verizon- knows-youre-sucker-takes-taxpayer-subsidies-broadband-doesnt-deliver-lobbies- to-drop-requirements.shtml)

[http://www.nj.com/cumberland/index.ssf/2014/03/hopewell_town...](http://www.nj.com/cumberland/index.ssf/2014/03/hopewell_township_and_cumberland_county_officials_say_verizon_is_reneging_on_fios_promise_to_new_jer.html)

<comment><USER17> Depends how you define token? They have about 5 million subscribers on FTTH. Supposedly passing 18M houses.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_FiOS#Stable_footprint_....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_FiOS#Stable_footprint_.282010-present.29)

Note: I was focused on them being technical leaders. Which they were. I make no endorsement of their business practices. Also they were not the first to FTTH in the US or not the world, just the first big mover in the US.

<comment><USER18> Sorry, I was talking about the huge about-face they did once smartphones became popular and they realized there were much larger profit margins to be had in the wireless industry, so basically started shutting down expansion of fiber internet.

<comment><USER19> I think Ivan Seidenberg was fired because of short term returns on FiOS being low.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As awesome as it is to see Google kick the regional monopolies into upgrading, it's really a lack of competition that's stifling both modern connection speeds and reasonable prices. Prices for the ridiculously named "Gigapower" are undoubtedly going to go increase repeatedly over time if Fiber backs out since it has achieved what it wants. Competition would have the opposite effect.

Or better yet, why not treat ISPs as utilities. Could anyone offer insight as to why internet in this day and age is not regulated like electricity or other utilities?

<comment><USER21> _Could anyone offer insight as to why internet in this day and age is not regulated like electricity or other utilities?_

This was the obvious solution after the telecom act of '96\. Many experts in the field said so much at the time. But the telecoms dug their heels, broke the law by locking out people from the DSLAMS, and used disinformation and lobbying to get the FCC to say it was O.K. to have a telecom-cable duopoly. This was also around the time that telecoms did everything they could, at the state level, to prevent cities from offering free city-wide internet [1].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband#Controversy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband#Controversy)

</comment></comment><comment> floody-berry > The mere promise of Google Fiber seems to be enough to send rivals > scrambling to deliver ultrafast Internet service at a reasonable price.

We have a TWC connection 2000m outside of Google Fiber availability that's been disconnecting up to 10-20 times a day for months that says some rivals just don't give a shit. The disconnections are only mildly more annoying than the constant spiking and pl that had been going on for a year or so..

</comment><comment><USER22> Google is extremely good at commoditizing their complement. A whole lot of their strategy makes sense in this light: Android, "Project Ara"/Phoneblocks, Chromebooks, Google Fiber.

Good read on the subject: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html)

<comment> wes-exp This strategy makes sense when we are talking about actual commodities that are interchangeable, like gasoline, but the effects are a lot more ambiguous when we are talking about unique inputs to a business like technology.

As an example, consider the current topic of broadband. In theory net neutrality is beneficial in terms of keeping costs down. This is beneficial for web companies. However, consider that without net neutrality, broadband providers have additional business models available that increase overall revenue. This additional revenue can help drive broadband R&D, which in turn could actually benefit web companies in the long run.

Making technology cheaper is good in the short run, but in the long run it may interfere with innovation, which benefits from things not being cheap, but actually profitable to produce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> He was spending $208/month for 20Mbps? What the hell is going on in Austin?

<comment><USER24> U-Verse is "triple play" so he probably had phone(s), TV(s), and Internet.

<comment><USER25> This is stll ridiculous pricing. I pay something like 120 a month for tv, hbo included, and 30 mbps internet. Unless he has every station on earth, he's being overcharged,

<comment><USER26> I'm paying ~$300/mo for TV (HBO etc), phone (no long distance charges) and ~$35/mbit Internet connection. It's a rip-off, of course. But since there's no real competition (U-Verse?!) I have no choice. Meanwhile, the cable industry is reducing potential for competition (Time-Warner merging with Comcast).

<comment><USER27> There's always a choice. You can always choose to disconnect one or two of those.

<comment><USER26> That's a non-choice. A _choice_ would mean being able to choose between a variety of competing services with good offerings. Disconnecting is not a realistic choice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Just out of curiosity, I checked Virgin's prices in the UK. In my area (Kentucky, US) my ISP options are AT&T DSL and Comcast cable internet. I'm paying for the cheapest internet plan offered by comcast $45 for 25Mb down. The MOST EXPENSIVE plan offered by Virgin for £37.50 gets 152Mb down.

<comment><USER29> UK is much more dense than Kentucky. Really hard to compare prices like that.

<comment><USER30> I disagree. The US has already built all this cable and telecom infrastructure (only ~50% of the UK has access to cable, which is way lower than the US).

The expensive part - digging the road and laying the physical cable - <USER2> already done, and was done 30+ years ago in many cases. These assets have been paid for.

The high internet prices in the US are down to terrible regulation. While there are many things that the EU hasn't done well, it has really nailed telecom (both fixed and cellular) regulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Living in Austin, I've been closely following news related to Google Fiber's rollout throughout the city. The two big providers here, TWC and AT&T, are still doing business as usual. TWC has promised increased speeds by summer 2014, but as a TWC customer myself I cannot help but view their announcement with a fair bit of skepticism [1].

Interestingly enough, Grande Communications has actually beat Google with regards to being the first company to actually start offering/installing fiber services within the city limits [2]. Granted, their fiber offerings are limited to a small subset of people living in downtown/west Austin, but it's progress nonetheless.

Google has been incredibly tight-lipped about their fiber rollout. To this day, there have not been any official announcements since their initial unveiling 1 year ago. But from small news pieces I can find online, it seems their service launch has been delayed to 'later this year' (compared to the summer 2014 date they originally gave) [3]. Last, performing a search of permits files by Google for fiber construction reveals that their initial rollout/offering will be exclusively to south Austin residents (south of Lake Austin) [4].

[1] [http://www.pcworld.com/article/2099908/aha-time-warner- cable...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2099908/aha-time-warner-cable-ups- austin-broadband-speeds-as-google-fiber-looms.html)

[2] [http://mygrande.com/austin/1-gig-fiber- internet/](http://mygrande.com/austin/1-gig-fiber-internet/)

[3] [https://gigaom.com/2014/04/08/google-delays-austin-fiber- lau...](https://gigaom.com/2014/04/08/google-delays-austin-fiber-launch-plans- and-offers-a-look-at-future-service-areas/)

[4] [https://mapsengine.google.com/map/u/0/edit?mid=zKGIh6VixM7Q....](https://mapsengine.google.com/map/u/0/edit?mid=zKGIh6VixM7Q.kpvawAIdVCMA)

</comment><comment><USER32> Great, can Google Fiber take a serious look at our market in Australia: the current chumps running the country seem to be taking backward steps with the previous government's (admittedly ambitious) plans for a National Broadband Network every day.

<comment><USER33> You do realise the previous government of chumps passed a law making it _illegal for Google to create Fiber in Australia_ even if they decided they wanted to?

The NBN is the worst policy idea to hit the Australian tech industry, ever. I doubt there will be one worse. It has already wreaked a trail of destruction and slowed down adoption of high speeds, it will continue to do so for at least the next 5 years, until some future government finally sells the scraps and turns it over to private companies, as it should have done from the get- go.

We had a grandiose government scheme announced 7 years ago. 7 Years down the track, private investment is forbidden, none of the Telcos have made any additional investment, existing infrastructure is being torn up. And the number of people passed by the new system is less than what a decent football stadium will hold, but they are $15 billion spent already. The forecast cast has progressed beyond $65 billion, but any number you hear is just finger-in- the-wind anyway.

It's fashionable - very fashionable- to love on the NBN, but it is a terrible, terrible idea. Fibre? great. Government owned communications monopoly with grandiose promises and an army of people and advertising, but little actual rollout.

Worst. Idea. Ever.

You think I'm being partisan? No. I would have opposed the idea no matter which party put it up. You've only got to look at various transport projects which are endlessly promised, re-promised, and then re-re-promised when a PR opportunity is ready. The Redcliffe rail link has been promised for _100 years_ now.

If you want fast speeds, then you need competition. Just like this article says. Not a quasi government department full of paper shuffling. Please kill the NBN and invite Google over. Give them tax money if necessary, but dismantle a nationalised communications network, stat.

<comment><USER34> It's interesting to see posts on this topic about turning the Internet into a utility, then see your post about how Australia seemed to try that and failed.

<comment><USER33> Utilities can be privately owned. Indeed, many power stations and transmission lines are privately owned. It should be a utility, it just shouldn't be owned by the government. Australia would have to be the only country in the 21st century trying to actively _undo_ Telecommunications privatization by re- nationalizing the telecoms infrastructure. It's like all the 'baby bells' getting reformed into the Mama Bell, and all the new entrants being told they are now only retailers of a fixed price plan. It's nuts. But you'll never hear criticism from most Australian tech people because they fervently hold out hope that it's all going to happen and they'll get affordable high speed broadband. Just like people grow old and die hoping their highway will get upgraded or their town will finally get connected by a train line.

The problem with government ownership (and particularly with the NBN) is that the focus of the organization transfers from cost-effective rollout to political points and favors. Those regions which supported the previous government were given priority for the rollout, despite them being areas of poor commercial return. The lack of return from early customers compromises the cashflow of the organization. Because the technology was selected with a one-size-fits-all approach - madness in a country the size of the USA with the population of the Greater NY area - commercial consideration was again ignored, right down to paying $11 billion to an existing Telco to pull up working HFC in existing areas.

Definitely a plan is needed - the original case was for the government to lay down the backbone in Fiber and let the Telcos complete the costly last mile in whatever worked best. But this didn't fit the grand 5-year plan so beloved of committed central planners so it was expanded to a FTTN vision - <USER3> undercosted, underestimated and underperforming.

The result is a disgusting mess that nobody wants to own up to, and meanwhile, I'm sitting here with the exact same crappy connection that was here 10 years ago, and no progress because _committee this_ and _study that_. Politically I'm in the wrong area, and the existing Telcos aren't going to upgrade my line because it's only going to get torn up and replaced (supposedly) sometime soon. They aren't even allowed to advertise 4G mobile as a competitor to the NBN because the government needs every single person on board to have a hope of making a $50 or 60 billion white elephant look remotely commercial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I live in Austin.

I have Grande _and_ AT&T fiber to my house. I have service from Grande. AT&T won't sell me their 300Mbps service.

When Google comes, Grande is dropped like a hot rock.

</comment><comment><USER36> I can't seem to find the article right now, but Google said their intent with Google Fiber was to prove it is possible. Further, to then force other companies to improve their service.

They seem to be on that second point and it seems to be working well.

</comment><comment><USER27> What I want to know is when does everyone start to realize that if one can get service of 1Gbps for around $70 and not just from Google, why does existing much slower service cost almost as much or more than that?

</comment><comment><USER37> I suppose this just goes to show that internet infrastructure is a natural monopoly and it takes a company with $400 billion market cap to disrupt the market and create actual competition.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'll believe it when there is any better available service. I even live in a location where google fiber was announced, but so far it is just nothing.

</comment><comment><USER39> I used to have a 3Mbit DSL connection from AT&T, I have now switched to a 6Mbit DSL connection from a local provider (who is using same wires). Sure, I'd love more speed, although I've grown to cope with the lack of it. I am just appalled at the prices. And now all of a sudden they are offering 1Gbps connections; if they like tiers so much, why not offer something "slower" for a cheaper price, I'd be more than happy to have a 50Mbit connection, do consumers REALLY need 1Gbps?

And what's up with San Francisco disliking fiber so much?

<comment><USER30> NIMBYism. No-one wants the street cabinets which contain the routers and what not on their street corner and are doing everything in their power to block them. Result = terrible internet speeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is definitely a thing. Here's a link from my friend in Kansas, and how Comcast is preparing for it already:

[http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3479092379](http://www.speedtest.net/my- result/3479092379)

Incredible what happens when you get a little competition!

<comment><USER17> A reasonable article on how cable companies can respond.

[http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/why- co...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/why-comcast-and- other-cable-isps-arent-selling-you-gigabit-internet/)

tl;dr: by using more spectrum in the coax cable can get pretty fast... So pressure from Google should get them to crank up the speed sooner than later.

<comment><USER41> As mentioned in the article, this requires a DOCSIS 3.0+ modem, and there are costs to rolling out equipment. Cranking up the speed isn't simply a matter of turning the dial on their end.

However you are correct that coaxial cable has plenty of room for improvement with a cost that pales in comparison to rolling out FTTH.</comment></comment></comment>


PDFed Hacker News Daily - <AUTHOR> http://pdfcrowd.com/hackernews/

<comment><USER2> Very nice, you should use <http://viewtext.org/> API to clean the pages and comments. The PDF will be easier to read and with less pages :)

I love the idea!

<comment><USER3> I want to implement something like viewtext.org on my own server (not using an API). I recall somebody mentioning a package that did a pretty good job of cleaning up a web page but can't find it. Can anybody recommend anything?

<comment><USER4> You might want to have a look at the source of readability:

[http://code.google.com/p/arc90labs- readability/source/browse...](http://code.google.com/p/arc90labs- readability/source/browse/trunk/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder about the copyright issue with this? It is basically packaging someone else's work and producing it in another format. I thought that is why Hacker Monthly had to contact each individual author to get permissions, or is that just because he is selling it?

<comment><USER6> HackerMonthly is repackaging several articles under a unified name. He is also putting ads on the magazine and later selling them after the first couple of issues. Not getting permission would have been both legally questionale and a dick thing to do.

This "web-app" (if I may use the word), is a simple automated way of putting multiple stories in to PDF format. You could do it yourself at home. There is no ad, reformatting, or rebranding or selling involved.

This distinction seems very obvious to me.

<comment><USER5> Is the distinction obvious if I took your blog articles and packaged them in a series of PDFs and published them on my site for download?

<comment><USER7> The distinction here is between the software and the distribution.

This is legal in the same way that software that rips MP3s from CDs is legal.

On the other hand, distributing the content isn't. So you can rip the content and use it personally, but you can't distribute it without permission.

<comment><USER6> Its a conversion tool, not a distribution tool.

<comment><USER7> That's my point. This web app is doing the content extraction and nothing else. (I can see how perhaps I wasn't clear on that)

I'm saying that it would only be illegal if he attempted to distribute the content too, which he doesn't.

<comment><USER6> OK, I misread you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Nice. But limits you to the top 10. I regularly find stuff in the 10-20 positions that I want to read. Ideally you would be able to customise the number of results and add filters to ignore articles with certain words in their title.

</comment><comment><USER8> Very good, for people on the go. If there was a way to also include the HackerNews users' comments on it, it would be even better.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is an 'Include comments' checkbox which does exactly this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really like this! It will come in handy when I travel in a few days

</comment><comment><USER10> Honest criticism here with suggestion on how to please me.

I wasn't interested viewing a website I saw last week as a pdf. What I suggest doing is checking out how arc90 made the readability bookmarklett, scoop content that way so that it works on your pages with your own magazine-like design that isn't boring. Include top comments, and create a section for discussions (comments that get a lot of replies/nesting). I go far out of my way to un-style every website to be nice and uniform without superfluous content screaming at me from every direction (why did gopher:// have to die?!).

</comment><comment><USER11> This is nice, but the API requires your app to communicate back to some central web server in order to function...</comment>


Nomad Million Container Challenge - <AUTHOR> https://www.hashicorp.com/c1m.html <comment><USER2> It's really impressive that it can handle these many container placements.

But, honest question, what's the value of determining how fast can we schedule a million containers? This question is not just for Nomad but other cluster managers as well that have recently published similar benchmarks.

I see the value of scheduling thousands to perhaps hundreds of thousands of containers across many nodes, but millions seem excessive.

I think that is more valuable to measure what happens after you have 1 million containers running on your cluster. Such as: \- What is the overhead keeping track of that many containers? \- How do they impact the responsiveness of other API calls (list, delete)? \- What happens when nodes go down and suddenly you lose a considerable amount of containers, can it recover quickly? \- How does it impact the performance of running containers in the cluster?

Also, there are other important factors to test for: \- what about image size? How does it impact scheduling time when non-cached? \- container density per node \- number of nodes \- what about scheduling other workloads that Nomad support, like VMs and runtimes?

<comment><USER3> With any system of sufficient scale, you're bound to hit artificial (software design inflicted) limits to maximum scale or performance.

The reason why a good software company tests extreme limits (1 million containers) that most customers will never see is to ensure customers that they will not reach a scale limitation.

From my experience running large private cloud infrastructure (>14,000 virtual servers at once), you will always hit some crazy limit that the vendor never anticipated. "14,000 VMs? We've only tested with 10,000" (not a real example, but an idea of what type of problem you'll run into)

Proving 1 million containers in 5 minutes is just designed to assure regular customers that they're fine. I doubt anyone really needs that many containers for any current workload...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great work, although I wish they hadn't reused the terms C100K and C1M that have been used to refer to holding many TCP connections open.

The timing is an interesting coincidence given recent work on K8s scheduler scalability: [https://coreos.com/blog/improving-kubernetes-scheduler- perfo...](https://coreos.com/blog/improving-kubernetes-scheduler- performance.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Hi everyone, let me do what I normally do and answer the FAQs regarding something I see on HN about us. I'm one of the founders of HashiCorp, creator of many of our tools, and so I have the authority to respond here as well as the bias.

In no particular order, the feedback or questions we get asked about commonly about this are below. If you have any additional feel free to ask and I'll try to answer. I'm flying today so I may be in and out.

1\. "Scheduling 1M containers isn't realistic"

Nobody is going to schedule 1M containers right now in a short period of time. I don't argue that and we don't make that claim anywhere.

HashiCorp has always believed that if you build something that scales UP, it always scales DOWN. Now you know Nomad can schedule containers at ~4,000 containers/sec with 5 servers. You may only need a few per second, but when you get a bunch of batch jobs you want to run (data processing, queueing, etc.) and maybe have thousands to submit in a short period, you can now be confident that Nomad is going to be very, very okay.

I fly a lot, and I've always been in awe of airplane wings. Did you know a Boeing's wings can bend enough to nearly touch each other at the top before they snap? I fly over 100 times per year (for 6 years now). Have I ever seen wings even get 10% of the distance to that? Nope. But because they CAN, I feel really confident in that plane [under those circumstances].

In addition to that, I think schedulers will only get more loaded over time. We allude to this in our conclusion: think about Lambda, or using schedulers for basic queueing, etc. All of these require a scheduler, and the load that they'll put on a schedule is easily 10x if not 100x more than what we put on schedulers today (in practice). Knowing _today_ that Nomad can handle this load allows us to design for the future. Maybe its never needed, maybe.

2\. "But how does Nomad act under failure scenarios?"

This challenge actually demonstrated this! In our 1M container launch, we actually launched 1.003M due to failures in hardware, network, as well as finding a bug in the Docker engine itself. Amidst all of this, Nomad self- healed and relaunched failed jobs. As a result, we actually launched 1.003M containers to complete our jobs.

3\. "Starting containers isn't impressive, keeping them running is."

The goal of this benchmark and this post was to show the speed at which we can binpack with constraints and high pressure and relatively few servers (five). However, it isn't every day we get access to a 5,000 node Nomad lab, so we did and measured a _lot_ more than what we published.

We kept the cluster running for some time. Nomad continued to self-heal any failed jobs, and the 5 servers kept up just fine. Nomad client's monitor the health of their own tasks so that is never very expensive, and the clients and servers heartbeat periodically.

We didn't publish any of that because its just so boring: Nomad just kept things running, CPU was within bounds, network was quiet, etc.

We're planning on a more strenuous benchmark around disaster scenarios currently. We now know Nomad can scale, we're now designing tests to observe how resilient it can be.

<comment><USER6> "I fly a lot, and I've always been in awe of airplane wings. Did you know a Boeing's wings can bend enough to nearly touch each other at the top before they snap? I fly over 100 times per year (for 6 years now)."

I thought this was amazing, so I looked it up:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rak2HldVp9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rak2HldVp9M)

It is indeed impressive, but by no means nearly touching each other.

<comment><USER7> Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. ;) His metaphor was evocative and the point came across well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Nomad 0.3.1 was released earlier today. In the next major release, we will focus on data volumes to enable Nomad to run more stateful applications."

What is the current approach for dealing with persistent data?

<comment><USER9> Data is the remaining elephant in the room. Containers have made code and config ephemeral and trivially replicable. But then you get to data, which represents billions of actually valuable magnetized bits of platter or flipped nand gates or whatever. It's like butterflies and battleships.

One approach, as another reply suggested, is to mount external volumes into the container, i.e. a persistent disk on GCP or Amazon EBS (or even a GCS or S3 bucket). This works, but of course the container, hosting the software that makes the data meaningful, is now bolted to a physical thing. It can no longer be moved, auto-scaled, etc. It can be monitored and restarted and you still get all the benefits of dependency isolation and repeatability. I'd still much, much rather run a DB this way than installing it directly onto an instance, but there's no use pretending that we can do with data what we can now do with code and config. It's still a cement block chained to our ankles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd be curious if they spent any time on getting multiple containers on a single machine to start faster. When I tried to do this recently, it appeared that starting of docker containers on a single machine is inherently serial. Anybody else experienced this?

</comment><comment><USER11> Nomad seems cool, but this benchmark is almost completely meaningless as far as I can tell. There is no reason to test this with 5000 servers and 1 million containers, it just seems like marketing nonsense. All you really care about is how fast it can provision 1 container and 1 machine. The rest is just parallelism - which, when dealing with multiple discrete servers should scale perfectly without any actual effort.

<comment><USER4> Starting containers can be done in parallel, but scheduling cannot be trivially parallelized because it needs to take into account the resources consumed by existing containers. Situations like a rack failure can cause scheduling storms where many workloads need to be rescheduled as quickly as possible.</comment></comment>


Pre-WWI Britain harbored many of the preconditions for fascism - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fascism/2017/04/britain_shared_many_of_the_preconditions_for_fascism.html <comment><USER3> Asking why Britain did not follow the same path as much of Europe in the early part of the 20th C is a worthy question but this is an oddly ahistorical article. The rise of the New Liberal government didn't happen by accident as the article seems to imply, it happened in response to social conditions.

The fact that Britain took three years to win the Boer War (largely because the army was unfit to fight) was a national scandal, and gave birth to a national preoccupation with the condition of the working class.

Independently of each other, two wealthy British industrialists, Booth and Rowntree, published two surveys into the state of working class life in Britain. These found that 30% of people were living in poverty, and that the conditions were such that people would be unable to pull themselves out of poverty alone.

While the rest of Europe engaged in a great battle between Marxism and Imperialism, British politics set about trying to improve the condition of the working classes.

Political revolution has also never really been the British way. Almost all of the major institutions of British society (including arguably the trade unions) are under the pall of political conservatism. One of the reasons why the recent Brexit has been such a surprise is that Britons have never been given to overthrow the whole system.

Politics in Britain pre-war was also intensely local. Most people lived and died close to where they were born, people were even more parochial than they are now, and most people saw what was happening in Europe as completely distant from their lives.

Politics in Britain pre war may have held some of the conditions for fascism, but it was never likely due to a multitude of reasons never addressed in this article. Also, it was a strange kind of crisis for conservatism - <USER2> Conservatives went on to dominate 20th Century politics in Britain.

<comment><USER4> > While the rest of Europe engaged in a great battle between Marxism and > Imperialism, British politics set about trying to improve the condition of > the working classes.

In all fairness, the UK could do that also because it had already developed the biggest and richest empire on Earth...

<comment><USER5> This sounded fina to me at first but then I thought - why is this not a false dichotomy? (Honest question)

<comment><USER4> From just a purely economic point of view, creating/expanding an empire required resources (investment), while having it brought you resources (returns). Improving workers' conditions also required investments, hence the dichotomy (or, more precisely, trade-off) I see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Perhaps the book does a better job (or argues a different point entirely) but I'm not sure the article does a particularly good job of justifying its headline. Most of the things it describes (ambivalence towards democracy, mostly latent racism) were the rule rather than the exception in most historical societies; lack of mass democracy was if anything a bulwark against populist movements like fascism. It was the liberals the middle classes favoured rather than socialists they feared that were driving changes, and the Right's preoccupation with vestiges of monarchical tradition and belief their "racial superiority" could best be demonstrated by the Empire were the polar opposite of the fascist fondness for radical new social contracts and demonstrating superiority through self-reliance and military might

Above all, the early twentieth century UK didn't have the sort of massive sense of grievance that fascists built their movement arount or a charismatic far-right figure to lead a fascist movement.

</comment><comment><USER7> Thus characters such as Roderick Spode in P.G. Wodehouse's works.

</comment><comment><USER8> A far more interesting story is how Houston Stuart Chamberlain's writings influenced the Nazi movement in Germany. The Slate article omits the fact that Chamberlain married into the Wagner clan in Bayreuth, who were early and enthusiastic supporters of Hitler. The family was also deeply enmeshed in a nexus of virulent pro-Aryan and anti-semitic propaganda prior to WW I. Chamberlain left England in the late 1800s and settled permanently Germany where he became a citizen during WW I. This fact alone seems to indicate that conditions for Fascist philosophy in England were less than salutary.

For a great read on the Wagner clan and their connections to Chamberlain, see Oliver Hilmes' outstanding biography of Cosima Wagner. ("Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth", "Herrin des Huegels" in German).

</comment><comment><USER9> And the same was true of the United States, pre-WWII. While I certainly heard a lot in school about our victorious rescue of Europe from the claws of the Nazis, little was I told about our cultivation of eugenics and scientific racism. Or anti-Semitic industrialists like Henry Ford allying themselves with Hitler. The turning away of Jewish refugees. Charles Lindbergh and the American Nazi Party.

How would the US be different today if we understood our own complicity in fomenting fascism ideology in the aftermath of WWII?

<comment><USER10> There are times it feels like outside of the USSR's involvement, WW2 was a battle between various fascist interpretations.

<comment><USER11> Communism shared the totalitarianism, militarism and racism (incl antisemitism) of fascism. Communist art looked a lot like nazist art. Flags and banners too. So did the way their soldiers marched. The way individuals just didn't matter.

When you go to the far right you end up at the far left, and vice versa.

<comment><USER12> Yes, for example the far left "anti-fascists" in the US are the ones that are assaulting people for their beliefs and using violence to suppress free speech. However, because they are leftists, the left has not unconditionally condemned their actions.

Remember, that both the far left and the far right are dangerous. For all the talk currently about fascism, it was Communism in the 20th century that produced the most death, suffering, and misery.

<comment><USER13> The Great War (WWI) was a 20th century event?

<comment><USER14> Yes. Confusing as it is, the first digits of the current year (2017) don't align with the current century (21st) because we started counting centuries at one, not zero. e.g. 1 A.D. / 1st, 100 A.D. / 2nd, 1000 A.D. / 11th, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The sub head "Edwardian Britain harbored many of the preconditions for fascism—including rampant anti-Semitism—before war broke out and united a divided nation"

Doesn't sit well with me because that competitive european colonial era was a lot more complicated than Pugh describes.

I hope Pugh's book discusses the realities of the global rentier classes and the origins of globalization, because I would argue this is at the root of much of subsequent events.

England, Germany, Holland and France were all competing to colonize the globe in a militaristic fashion during this era, and their internal and external societies reflected that. The advent of fluid global capital unaligned to nation states - including the 1910 Jekyll Island 'Federal Reserve' invention in the USA - led to massive pressures on the parochial societies.

The semitic ethnic cleansing to create the predominantly Ashkenazi state of Israel was largely the result of British capitulation to the global financiers who orchestrated the Sykes Picant and Balfor treaties that enabled the state of Israel to be reinvented.

The punitive reparations on Germany after WW1 was largely seen as this same class extracting tribute from Germans ...and crucially the popular sentiment was that German society was being dominated and overrun with Jewish capital. These are obviously contentious issues but, just as the case now where the 1% who own the world's capital 'haven't taken out enough insurance to protect themselves from the rest' to paraphrase economist Mark Blyth, 'populism' ie people waking up unsatisfied with the way their societies are dominated and run, was a major motivator for change then and now.

Well over 100 million people died in WWII and billions were made by those same stateless rentier classes (who are of all ethnicities and religions, this isn't uniquely about Judaism).

The author's website

[http://www.martindpugh.com/page3.htm](http://www.martindpugh.com/page3.htm)

<comment><USER16> Hmmm..."capitulation to global financiers", "stateless rentier classes", methinks I sense a common theme here. Not a supporter of David Irving by any chance are you?

<comment><USER15> no

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Kind of a "duh" headline to me. The headline of this article isn't that big a deal to me, because every country harbors some level of the preconditions for facism. So I found it more interesting to read about a country that did make the transition from a strong liberal democracy to a facist regeime.

I just finished the book "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J Evans which covers Germany from ~1880 to 1933, and does a great job of explaining how ordinary Germans at the time were living their lives and the greater cultural shifts that gave way to the minority-populist uprising that was the Nazi seizure of power. Way more insightful place to start, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER18> Which pre-war countries with advanced societies _didn 't_ have, say, entire scientific communities beating the drum of eugenics? It was an entire academic discipline in the universities of many countries, and there were 3 international conferences in the early 20th century.

I don't see how you could write a balanced article on this topic without even mentioning the rise and fall of Sir Oswald Mosley, because therein lies the major difference. British fascism died once people realized what was happening in Germany, most notably the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. The BUF didn't even have enough support to run in the subsequent election in 1935.

<comment><USER19> Moseley's black-shirts were certainly the closest Britain came to overt fascism, but this article informed me about lesser-known (at least to me) issues prior to WW1. The title of the author's book suggests that it does indeed cover Mosley.

I imagine one will find fascism has always had its appeal to some portion of the global population wherever there is dissatisfaction - and particularly among people who think they are not getting what they believe they are entitled to, rather than those who are in extremely dire straits, such as refugees and oppressed ethnic groups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How did Slate lose the plot?

They used to have good articles that seemed quite moderate?</comment>


Bitcoin D3.js chart - <AUTHOR> http://vectorspace.ai/recommend/vectorspace-charts/vectorspace-chart-BTC.html <comment> I-like-food This seems like a direct use of the dc.js demo [https://dc- js.github.io/dc.js/](https://dc-js.github.io/dc.js/)

<comment><AUTHOR> My mistake, I meant to use dc.js not d3.js and missed the edit window. Perhaps one of the admins can make a title adjustment.

<comment><USER2> You can contact the mods via the contact link in the footer and ask them directly.</comment></comment></comment>


Bluetooth LED bulbs - <AUTHOR> http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/43722.html <comment><USER2> I'm curious why the chinese don't build open-source friendly stuff. They already sell mostly commodities. What's there to lose if someone builds stuff for you ?

<comment><USER3> Their stuff is more "gongkai": [https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107](https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107)

Because it's so cheap, nobody's going to make the effort to translate the documentation into English and put it on the Internet. But on the other hand if you go there and ask in Chinese you can get quite a lot of information.

<comment><USER2> It still sounds like something doesn't work quite well . The Chinese in general doesn't have a maker culture, a free open-source culture.

On the other hand, just translating the documentation of this led lightbulb interface would have taken very little time, and would have probably created a nice app that would appeal to western buyers and increase sales.

Maybe there's an opportunity for some site to make this process happen ?

<comment><USER4> It's my impression that the Chinese have more of a maker culture than almost anywhere else - it's a country full of people who grew up in villages and have now built factories and started companies that manufacture most of the world's stuff.

<comment><USER2> From an interview with a chinese maker[1]:

"There are almost no Chinese makers in Shenzhen doing it purely as a hobby. I'm pretty active in the community and I have not met them.

Our makerspaces — the few real ones we have — are primarily for educational purposes. We have a couple of places with laser cutters or a small 3D printer for the kids to learn on, but there's no place you can go swipe a card and use real machine tools in the middle of the night like lots of other major cities have.

...

As far as most Chinese people's thinking, hobbies are for old people. If you have seen newspaper articles about actual Chinese makers — who have made homemade robots, dialysis machines, submarines, prosthetic arms — they are nearly all older or retirees. Young people in China just don't have the time or freedom usually.

...

On the other hand, if you are working on a hardware startup or just want to get stuff made, then sure, I think Shenzhen is pretty unbeatable[for making]."

[1][https://exolymph.news/2016/07/05/sexycyborg- shenzhen-3d-prin...](https://exolymph.news/2016/07/05/sexycyborg- shenzhen-3d-printing/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Oh hey, a post by mjg59 involving IoT devices, this should be good."

mjg59 never fails to disappoint.

<comment><USER6> Every one of them is a gem. It's amazing what people will do to get a terrible product to market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> BLE is king for hobby tinkering. You can even re-use the common and dead cheap NRF24L01+ radio module with some hacks [1].

[1]: [http://hackaday.com/2013/09/21/sending-data-over- bluetooth-l...](http://hackaday.com/2013/09/21/sending-data-over-bluetooth- low-energy-with-a-cheap-nrf24l01-module/)

</comment><comment><USER8> If you want to play with Bluetooth Low Energy and devices, your best bet is the Arduino 101. It includes BLE and a nice, simple API to handle BLE characteristics. Combine the 101 with a MOSFET attached to digital pins, running the BLEFirmata sketch, and you can remotely control a number of high- power LEDs from your phone.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why is wireless necessary? Isn't ethernet over power a more obvious solution?

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

<comment><USER10> That's exactly what X10 does, but it's fallen out of favour in recent times.

(I've not used it so I couldn't say why)

<comment><USER11> I used to use X10. Then I discovered the hard way that buying low-bidder electronics that plug directly into mains power is a really bad idea: one of the control boxes that plugged into a wall outlet started to get hot enough to create a blackened spot on its label.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Oh "encrypted", and of course it uses AES ECB mode

Probably enough to tick a box though

<comment><USER13> That is the _least_ of the problems with it. It's very, very odd. On top of the craziness Matthew notes in his article, the code actually appears to use ROT13. Twice. I have no idea why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm interested in making a door movement sensor with a remote alarm to wake me up if my sleepwalking daughter goes roaming.

As a software person who is just getting into electronics (played with a particle photon, just bought the Make: Electronics book & component kit to learn), what are the options when you want to have two pieces of hardware communicate inside a house?

\- Bluetooth - limited range?

\- Wifi - requires you to join each piece to the network, seems a hassle/expensive for simple electronics.

\- Xbee - expensive!

\- RF transmitter/receiver - seems cheap, but maybe distance is limited and there may be a lot of noise?

Anything else?

<comment><USER15> Look up the ESP8266. It's a very cheap piece of hardware that you can program using the Arduino IDE. It can connect to your local WiFi easily and send a push notification to your phone.

So you can build something like this using a simple PIR sensor + ESP8266.

<comment><USER16> Just made an account to say this and you beat me to it.

I built a garage door opening sensor using an ESP8266 (connected to my home wifi) and a magnetic contact switch. I'm also using TelAPI to send me SMS messages every time the garage door is opened.

It is very simple to do, and kind of cheap.

<comment><USER17> Could you please share any existing sources (schema, firmware)? Thanks in advance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What a coincidence, I just finished making my wifi-controlled RGB LED strip:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-SKXioq_Yg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-SKXioq_Yg)

I'm currently writing this up, but I'm loving the fact that I can integrate it with games, and I want to add some more. Next goal is for my living room's lighting to pulse orange or blue depending on which team scores in Rocket League. If anyone knows how I can hook into the game to get various pieces of info, please let me know.

</comment><comment><USER19> Here is someone else who reverse engineered a slightly more complicated WiFi based protocol: [https://github.com/beville/flux_led](https://github.com/beville/flux_led).

It's pretty well done, though he also has these magic numbers around that he couldn't quite figure out what they were there for. I used this and hacked an amazon button to control my home lighting and it works great.

All these seems like more argument to standardized IoT.

</comment><comment><USER20> i've been tinkering with the misfit bolt which is a bluetooth bulb, and some fella (@fayep) posted that on my GH repo last week: [http://www.yeelight.com/download/yeelight_blue_message_inter...](http://www.yeelight.com/download/yeelight_blue_message_interface_v1.0.pdf) \- this seems to be common to several implementation of bluetooth bulbs as the bolt works with these specs. couple implementations for these: [https://github.com/fayep/bolt](https://github.com/fayep/bolt), [https://github.com/sandeepmistry/node-yeelight- blue](https://github.com/sandeepmistry/node-yeelight-blue), [https://github.com/flochtililoch/misfit- bolt](https://github.com/flochtililoch/misfit-bolt) (last one is mine, largely inspired by the two above)

</comment><comment><USER21> I love my Wifi lifx bulbs. Amazing output, low latency, and the standby usage is 0.7w when off. My biggest complaint is there is no physical switch to turn them on and off. Using my phone is slower than a switch, and if I switch them off they won't be able to come back on with my phone or IFTTT schedule. 0.7w seems low to me for standby.

<comment><USER22> What if wall switches were replaced by very simple phones...or even watches. It would effectively be running the one app all of the time, defaulted to the lights in the room. There could even be some sort of hard-wire bus between this switch and the bulbs, to communicate through RF interference.

<comment><USER23> Or just use something like the Philips Hue Tap [1], which sends an RF signal (ZigBee) solely using the energy from your button press (no batteries).

[1] [http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue- tap-...](http://www2.meethue.com/en-us/productdetail/philips-hue-tap-switch)

<comment><USER21> I wish this would work with LIFX. I refuse to go to Hue but man I want a physical switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The 0x56 that is shown as the first packet data byte when setting new color/intensity is ASCII for 'V'. Perhaps for "Value"?

Always fun to theorize about hidden names, considering that somewhere somebody probably reasoned themselves into picking 0x56 over the other values.

</comment><comment><USER25> I found the use of a simple binary protocol rather unexpected but pleasant; it is reminiscent of I2C. Given what the software industry is like today, I was actually expecting some ridiculous combination of HTTP, JSON, SOAP, XML, or a similar level of bloat... for once, it's good to see some down-to-earth sanity here.</comment>


Ted Chiang returns with another awe-inducing sci-fi collection - <AUTHOR> https://aux.avclub.com/ted-chiang-the-mind-behind-arrival-returns-with-anoth-1834449060 <comment><USER2> Here's a list of all 9 stories:

\- The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling

\- What's expected of us

\- The Merchant and the Alchemist's gate

\- Exhalation (found online at [http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/](http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/) )

\- The Lifecycle of software objects

\- The Great Silence ( available at [http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great- silence/](http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/) and [https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted- chia...](https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chiang/) )

\- Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny

\- Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom (new)

\- Omphalos (new)

Some of them (and some others) are also available as audiobooks at [https://www.sffaudio.com/features/author-pages/ted- chiang/](https://www.sffaudio.com/features/author-pages/ted-chiang/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've only read his re-released stories in the "Arrival," compilation, but to me, to describe Chiang as a sci-fi writer is like saying Google is in the computer business.

We inhabit a contemporary world with more technological and social change than the ones which formed the collection of tropes that got authors grouped into sci-fi or cyberpunk in the first place. I don't think devices like time machines and other magic used to create the reflections of characters and situations is sufficient for relegating authors to sci-fi anymore.

Arrival and "Story of your life's" treatment of language and time and experience, and sympathy for the motivations of a super intelligence in "Understand," were succinct descriptions of huge questions. When you compare those to the stupid, 250 page harangues of living national treasures, relegating Chiang to sci-fi puts me into a fit of pique.

<comment><USER4> Why "relegating"? Is this about that old chestnut of sci-fi not being good literature (so if something is good literature then it can't be sci-fi, by definition)?

<comment><USER3> If you are interested in publishing, it's still an issue, even if readers don't care.

<comment><USER5> It depends on who your publisher and target audience is. See this recent article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19708789](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19708789)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _What's Expected of Us_ was originally published in 2005 and is available here: [https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a](https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a)

_The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling_ was originally published in 2013 and is available here: [https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterrane...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140222103103/http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang)

For more on the publication history of some of these novelettes, see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang#Works](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang#Works).

<comment><USER7> Wow thank you for this. What's Expected of Us was incredible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is this book new? I've read most of these stories, I think...

<comment><USER9> It's a new book, but it's a collection of the short stories he published since his last collection.</comment></comment>


What if Facebook merged with Amazon.com? - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/deals/what-if-facebook-merged-with-amazoncom-303410.php <comment><USER2> What if AOL merged with Time-Warner?</comment>


WebSockets now Generally Available - <AUTHOR> https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/7/7/websockets_now_ga

<comment><USER2> I don't appreciate the fact that heroku is actively not supporting php. A language which is by far the most widely used language on the net, which has matured in many different dimensions, and they've yet to provide support out of the gate for it.

I guess they don't want my money. Oh well.

<comment><USER3> There is definitely great PHP support at Heroku: [https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/4/29/introducing_the_n...](https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/4/29/introducing_the_new_php_on_heroku)</comment></comment>


Wherein Javascript borrows a language feature from Arc - <AUTHOR> http://twoguysarguing.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/placeholders-and-currying/

<comment><USER2> > geolocator.getLatLng("Forest Park, St. Louis, MO", function(center) {

> displayMapAt(center, 14);

> });

To my eyes, that solution is just fine. I don't think I'll ever be swayed to believe that adding on layers of indirection to JavaScript code for the sake of "syntactic goodness" is rationally motivated by leading to more practical power for actually solving problems.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. If you're writing something in a web browser, use sane JavaScript. Every time I have done something "fancy" with a language, there has been a large hidden cost later on, be that complicated debugging sessions, new hire training, or unintended side effects. Terrible syntax/rewriting hacks in Rails are probably what convinced me that I do not like ruby. If you truly care about programmer efficiency, you probably want to look into cross compilers like Objective-J or parenscript.

<comment><USER4> I agree. The beauty of software systems is they can be made as complex as the programmer can imagine; this is also the horror of software systems.

All software should be as complex as it needs to be to do the job, and no more so (where complex means the cognitive load necessary to understand it). Unfortunately 99% of programmers and 100% of programmers' managers don't understand this (both numbers are probably correct to the nearest integer, in my experience).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should probably assign an object to the underscore, otherwise any argument which is undefined will match:

        js> var _
        js> _ == undefined
        true

Just doing "var _ = {}" should be sufficient.

 _edit: however, this conflicts with Underscore.js (<http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/>), but if you put an "if (typeof _ === "undefined")" around the assignment you should be ok_

<comment><USER6> It also conflicts with gettext libraries. The name '_' should be considered reserved for that purpose.

<comment><USER7> Not to be a jerk, but why? What if gettext isn't important to your current application? (I don't know a lot about gettext; I went and read the blurb.)

<comment><USER6> In pretty much any language which has a gettext implementation, "_" is the name used for the function/method/whatever which marks a string for translation. This is just as true in JavaScript (at least two JS gettext implementations that I know of use "_"). It's one of the few truly cross- language naming conventions I know of.

But libraries which expect to be able to use "_" for something other than gettext break this convention, and not only run the risk of screwing interoperability but also cause confusion for the (large number of) developers who are accustomed to "_" having a particular meaning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone explain why this:

      geolocator.getLatLng("Forest Park, St. Louis, MO", displayMapAt);

Is better than this?

      displayMapAt(geolocator.getLatLng("Forest Park, St. Louis, MO"));

That is, why is it more sensible for getLatLng to accept a callback function that will accept its result, when one can just pass its result to a function?

<comment><USER9> I expect the call to geolocator requires a network round-trip, with displayMapAt getting scheduled to be called when the result appears; meanwhile your code can do other things. (I'm not familiar with this API, though; I could be wrong.)

Another way to do this sort of thing, that might feel more composable: have geolocator.getLatLng() return a 'promise' object that will be asynchronously resolved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Clojure has #(+ % 10) for Arc's [+ _ 10]. Does anyone know if Arc inspired Clojure, or whether there's prior art for this syntax?

<comment><USER11> I think Clojure copied Arc on this.

<comment><USER12> Actually it was inspired by Mathematica:

<http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/ref/Slot.html></comment></comment></comment>