Ask HN: What do you use to monitor your web application? - <AUTHOR> What do you use to monitor
1. Requests/second
2. Average Request Time
3. Exceptions
3. Background Queues
4. Mysql/Postgres servers
5. Uptime
6. Memory usage
7. Disk usage
If you have any tips/scripts/tutorials, please share :) <comment><USER2> These are all important metrics but they're available from different things.

You will have application specific metrics - errors, user counts, message queue sizes. These will help you understand what is happening in the app itself, let you fix problems and ensure that things are running smoothly. For this we use FogBugz to report errors and have various user metrics store in a database.

The next level is the daemons and services used by the application. Apache will report the number of req/s and MySQL can tell you about the number of connections, or the status of replication. These are important for planning growth and ensuring your server capacity is sufficient.

Then there's the servers themselves. This is CPU load, memory usage, disk usage, etc. This ties closely to the services above.

There are a lot of tools for doing these things, but in the end you have to tie everything together yourself. You might start with simple website response monitoring with something like <http://www.pingdom.com> then move on to having it triggering your own check scripts to alert you when custom stuff goes wrong (e.g. queue sizes).

And of course I'd recommend my company's server monitoring product <http://www.serverdensity.com> ;) but you could spend some time setting up a bigger, more flexible (and thus more complex) tool such as Nagios to pull all the metrics in.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have trouble imagining something more useful than Munin for a *nix server. Check out this screenshot - it only shows four of the tens of graphs available at any given time: [http://dpritchett.posterous.com/test-driving-munin- service-s...](http://dpritchett.posterous.com/test-driving-munin-service- statistics-on-a-la)

Edit: Munin profiles services and responsiveness. You'll probably want to complement it with Nagios to monitor service/hardware failures.

<comment><USER4> I use Munin even on my local work computer.

And vnstat for realtime and aggregated network traffic. Conky for volatile realtime cpu/ram/etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're addicted to every statistic possible, check out collectd <http://collectd.org/> . It's a tiny daemon that polls every couple of seconds pretty much every server and services stat imaginable (cpu, mem, disk, snmp from routers, get vals over http from your app, apache, *sql, etc) without really any noticeable performance hit. You can output it all RRD files and view it in a variety of ways. You can also use use cacti, munin (by them selves to collect and graph, or use collectd to collect and use either of these to graph as well)

</comment><comment><USER6> A Windows 7/Vista desktop gadget. Actually, the gadget is just a tiny (400x300ish) iframe showing a webpage with some small text. It sits in the corner of one of my monitors where I can always see it.

This webpage is a list of servers (front and back end) and their load averages.

At least for all the webapps I run, which serve hundreds of requests per second to tens of thousands of users, load average is a good enough proxy for all the metrics that matter.

When CPU usage on the front end servers is getting high enough that it impacts response times and throughput, that shows up in the increasing load averages. When disk IO on the database servers is getting high enough that it impacts response times and thoughput, that shows up in the increasing load averages.

The web servers each have a webpage on them that has the load average as its only output. I wrote up a little script for the database servers to query the load remotely on the DB servers. The webpage I use as the desktop gadget polls those webpages/scripts and prints out the server names and their current load as its output.

As for uptime monitoring when I'm not around, I used to use AreMySitesUp.com. Nice, simple service that does what it's supposed to. Even with a free plan it seems to check every 15 minutes or more often, and if a site goes down, it checks again much more often until it comes back up. It'll also tell you the exact status code if it's not in the 200-300 range, so you can tell a server is 500'ing out but online, and will notify you of timeouts.

I built my own uptime monitoring service, though, so I don't need that anymore. I run it using VPS accounts at different providers so I don't get stuck with the sites and the service monitoring them going down at the same time. Twilio just added SMS to their API, so adding SMS alerts to any custom monitoring scripts is dead easy now.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nagios - measuring that the application and database is up, and that disk and load are ok. (also ping but that is redundant).

I use exception notifier for rails. Simple, but it works. Might switch to newrelic.

From time to time I also use pingdom.com to see that the site is available from different networks around the globe.

</comment><comment><USER8> 1\. I dont actively use Apache extended status or req/sec monitoring because it slows down serving requests. Instead I look in the logs every minute and feed the count into ganglia.

2\. Again apache logs into ganglia. New Relic for rails. Firebug and yslow when testing.

3\. Exception notifier in rails, ErrorDocument in apache that triggers a php script which notifies by email. Log4j in java.

4\. Redis, OpenMQ for queueing, Resque for background jobs

5\. MySQL only because at the time postgres did not support replication.

6\. AlertSite

7\. Monit

8\. Monit

I am always on the look out for better ways to monitor the servers at work. I never really liked nagios. Monit is extremely easy to use and is very good at what it does. MMonit is a management console that can centralize the monitoring of all servers. Ganglia is great for metrics, flickr can vouch for that one.

</comment><comment><USER9> Our primary means of monitoring is to do fullpage requests to different parts of the application every 5 minutes and check the results. We have a historical record from multiple locations around the world that we can use to see if changes were made that had a negative impact as well as automated alerts when the full page load takes longer than expected.

We then have secondary monitoring that can allow use to isolate issues within different areas if primary monitoring indicates a problem.

</comment><comment><USER10> For stats, I use Ganglia. The newest versions, which sadly have to be installed from source on most Linux variants, have support for Python modules. So, in addition to the out of the box stuff, I monitor a whole bunch of other stuff related to how my applications are doing (signups, item counts, etc).

For daemon monitoring and watchdog-ing, I use monit. It emails me if there are problems with the server, and can automatically restart processes if they fail or get out of control.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's early development (pre-alpha), but <http://www.leemba.com/> looks promising.

<comment><USER12> Check out the demo (it's currently on a virtual host so it might get destroyed :-)

<http://demo.leemba.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> <http://newrelic.com> has been pretty critical, but we're a Rails only shop.

<comment><USER14> +1 for New Relic

I wouldn't consider building a production Rails app without it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've testing scout as well. Was easy to setup. Interface could use a bit of work though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you are looking for some commercial solutions, there are ton of them like AppManager (appmanager.com). But then, some of these solutions monitor what you expose from your application.

I don't know if there are any hosted solutions though.

</comment><comment><USER16> For all of my Rails apps, I use a combination of Munin (for trending and profiling over time), NewRelic (for daily and weekly profiling and optimization) and AreMySitesUp (for 15-min pinging).

</comment><comment><USER17> ScriptCanary - monitors Javascript errors

</comment><comment><USER18> I would say all of them. Generally top + atop + the log files should be enough.</comment>


AI benchmark – a detailed GPU card benchmark for deep learning - <AUTHOR> http://ai-benchmark.com/ranking_deeplearning.html <comment><AUTHOR> See:

\- [http://ai-benchmark.com/ranking_cpus_and_gpus_detailed.html](http://ai- benchmark.com/ranking_cpus_and_gpus_detailed.html) for training and inference times on various devices (for ResNet-50, VGG-16, MobileNet-V2, Inception-V4, etc)

\- [https://pypi.org/project/ai-benchmark/](https://pypi.org/project/ai- benchmark/) for a package</comment>


Away's former CEO is returning as its co-chief - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/business/steph-korey-away.html <comment><USER4> Reading between the lines of the Verge piece, I got the impression that weird abusive behaviour aside, she just wasn't very good at managing her company. They seemed to have chronic supply problems that she didn't seem to have any idea how to fix beyond yelling at her customer outreach staff. And when her customer outreach people kept getting behind, she tried to con them into working extra till they started quitting or complaining to Verge, instead of just, like, hiring 3 more people

<comment><USER5> This was my read too, which is mostly why I'm completely incredulous that people actually defended her. She clearly is doing a poor job managing her supply chain, and ultimately giving her support staff the yeoman's task of preventing operational shortcomings from destroying the company's reputation with customers, while chronically understaffing a division that clearly needs to be twice as large as its clearly being used as a "hack" to compensate for other organizational deficiencies.

If your entire organization is riding on the backs of a bunch of over-worked, underpaid staff... hooo booy buckle up Verge stories are the least of your worries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've worked with people like the one The Verge paints Korey to be. The fact that she quit and then came back points more to The Verge's reporting to be accurate - this kind of personality can usually never accept the mistakes they've made and just doubles down in the future in an attempt to prove they were right.

<comment><USER7> why is coming back a failure to accept they made mistakes?

<comment><USER8> Looks like it's more of a PR duck your head for a while until things cool down vs. external pressure and internal acceptance of bad behavior that led to them stepping down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The members of Away's board say they feel as if they fell victim to management by Twitter mob."

This statement speaks volumes about the efficacy of board governance.

<comment><USER10> > _volumes about the efficacy of board governance_

Not sure it does.

The Board could have gotten caught up in a mob, regained its senses, and started pulling on the reins again. Or blaming Twitter could be the messaging around what was really a compensation (or some other) negotiation.

<comment><USER11> There's nothing about this that indicates the board asserted itself at all. The plan to step down was presented to the board by the CEO who wanted to move to become Chairwoman of the board.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The part of the original story that upset me the most is how the people she abused were underpaid and overworked customer support staff.

An incredibly strong signal of how decent someone is is how well they treat people that have no ability to help them. Even a selfish asshole will be charming and kind to the rich and powerful: if you want to see their true colors look how their reports talk about them when they aren't around, or how they treat a waiter who messed up their order.

<comment><USER13> > Even a selfish asshole will be charming and kind to the rich and powerful

See Harvey Weinstein.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> To quote Oscar from The Office:

 _Look, it doesn 't take a genius to know that every organization thrives when it has two leaders. Go ahead, name a country that doesn't have two presidents. A boat that sets sail without two captains. Where would Catholicism be without the popes?_

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm confused, the backlash was after they already started the search in early 2019 ([https://www.wsj.com/articles/online-luggage-startup-away- say...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/online-luggage-startup-away-says-ceo-is- stepping-down-11575930577)). I thought they said they wanted to install someone who had more experience before all of this due to their own internal investigation.

<comment><USER16> Translated, the founding CEO wanted to install someone that would "sell well" for IPO. Successful Lululemon exec story brings that.

They're going back to that because it's how they will get best valuation as shareholders. Not an ego play, a convert shares to more cash play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you like the cases and want an alternative, the Muji ones are probably better in a lot of ways, and Muji have shops.

<comment><USER18> I've been using the muji cases for years. My partner just got an Away case of equivalent size as a gift, and I can't figure out why people would choose them over muji. In almost every way the muji cases feel better to use, and they seem much more durable.

The one attractive thing about the away cases is the lifetime warranty, but I don't know how easy it is to submit a claim.

<comment><USER19> > The one attractive thing about the away cases is the lifetime warranty

lifetime warranty is worthless if the company goes out of business, too

<comment><USER20> Paging now defunct "lifetime warranty" backpack company Boreas Bags, whose founders rebranded to Alite Designs just to weasel their way out of their previous iteration's warranties.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The journalists are going to continue to have a field day with this. She shows no signs of growth, and in fact seems to have doubled down on denial. The company turns a profit with a simple business model and a product people like, but the brand halo will only last so long, and this kind of dysfunction can only be catnip to a fast follower. There is only one way to play this, which is for the adult in the room who was hired to clean up this mess to defang her and give her a short leash, seek exit, and fast.

The alternative is that she runs the company into the ground on the backs of her employees and courts PR disaster after PR disaster. It's a dangerous game to play -- in this climate, bad PR is still PR. But she's going to be in the hot seat now, and one slip up that the court of public opinion doesn't like, and she's going to be back to square one.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Come work for us. We're changing the world"

"By curing cancer or going to space?"

"Not exactly..."

</comment><comment><USER23> On original verge article: "Update December 6th, 8:20PM ET: This story was updated to reflect that Erin Grau does not identify as a person of color."

I'm curious about the story of this update. Original reporting claimed Erin Grau identified as a person of color (near context of ""The stuff you said was hateful, even racist. You no longer have a job at this company." Emily, who is a person of color, was shocked. "That was jarring — three white people telling me I was racist," she says.")

Did Erin Grau previously identify as a person of color at time of reporting? Does she no longer identify as a person of color as a result of this article? (I saw her get a lot of ridicule online because she very much looks white.)

</comment><comment><USER24> She disputes the reporting, but didn't say specifically what it was that they got wrong. The screenshots of slack messages were pretty clear evidence to me.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm sure she's totally learned her lesson and will change her abhorrent behavior permanently.

<comment><USER26> From the article it seems that they are now disputing the reporting and blame Twitter for her having stepped down.

So from her perspective the lesson to learn here is to keep the company's dirty laundry out of the media. I suspect the culture will become even worse at Away, but more secretive. Monitoring people's Slack messages. Scolding people in places without a paper trail, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A reminder of this article/HN discussion [1] where John Gruber speculated that the attacks on Korey published in The Verge may have been part of an internal power struggle.

I have no particular insights or opinions on the matter; I do think it's worthwhile context, given this development.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21749694](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21749694)

<comment><USER28> I don't see how that's possible considering the proof of Korey's unprofessional communications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > _The members of Away's board say they feel as if they fell victim to > management by Twitter mob._

Interesting times. Social media is dictating countries, and companies governance. Of course, before internet there was media (newspaper etc) which used to do that.

But in these times people or rather _mobs_ have got that power - for better or worse.

<comment><USER30> "Social media" make it seems like some separate entity, it's still public sentiment. You have also bought into the framing the company has used to make itself seem like the victim by referring to "mobs" having power, rather than a company and CEO facing backlash from the public finding out about its terrible culture behind the scenes, as it rightly should.

<comment> barry-cotter > "Social media" make it seems like some separate entity, it's still public > sentiment.

If your target market is American teenage boys and some Qatari old men really, really hate you their feelings are public sentiment too but you shouldn't care in the slightest. Likewise what journalists think should be irrelevant compared to what customers think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is the story of a young founder who is scared and trying her best at an impossible task. And young employees who believed they were allowed to get the job they wanted at the company they wanted.

But that's not how the system works. You need to vote with your feet - <USER2> don't like it, leave and let them know you aren't going to put up with it. Without that, we're all just arguing about what's ok and what's not. Don't complain, vote!

<comment><USER32> Part of the problem with that approach is that the market won't sink bad companies unless it has information that they are bad.

Plenty of companies play the game of "hire employees, treat them like crap, when they leave hire new employees by misrepresenting what the company is like". The labor market is huge, and you can always find new employees that don't know your previous employees.

So you could argue "If you don't like what the company is doing, don't shop there!" But unless current/former employees speak out, the market (consumers, investors) won't necessarily know "what the company is doing" and won't penalize them.

In this case, employees spoke up, and a whole bunch of people who read the Verge (who are probably in the "luggage buying demographic") decided they didn't like what the company was doing and voiced their concerns stating they would no longer buy the company's product. The board fired the CEO, this apparently satisfied many customers, now they're walking it back and I guess we'll find out how the market feels about it.

But I don't see anything wrong with this approach as long as the reporting is well done (and in this case it was).

<comment><USER31> I think I disagree with that. The labor pool isn't unlimited and there's laws in place to protect workers. Reading this article as someone that's worked in banking it seems unfair to treat this company a different way that all others. We all still go to banks despite the horrible ways they treat their workers.

Ruling by mob means the treatment is unfair across companies. I think people should argue for laws that are broadly applicable when the market fail. And in this case I think the market (even like glassdoor, reviews, etc) would tank the company's ability to hire it it was not a place people wanted to work.

<comment><USER33> I have never heard of a company struggling to hire due to reputation. Low wages or lack of qualified workers, sure. Reputation? Never.

<comment><USER31> I suppose it's not a broadly discussed topic, but it's definitely a thing. HR or recruiting teams would speak best to it. But you can spot this pretty easily. A recent example is Uber. When you do a big lay off followed by accelerated hiring, it's signaling the end of a talent drought. You can't performance manage very aggressively in a period of crisis since it's really hard to hire. So the bar goes down. At some point you clean up, and bring the bar back up. Uber couldn't hire well at all for several years as they went through their culture struggles.

It's definitely less of a problem for lower skilled jobs. And that makes sense since the labour is a lot more replaceable. But it's also why unions are there to prevent abuse.

I won't pretend to claim the system works perfectly. My point is just that there are levers there already that work pretty well. And we should decide as a society how to play or add levers. Managing by mod is really a dictatorship run by the angriest twitter users. If that's who we want running the show - <USER3> think that should at least be put to a vote... I'm definitely against it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems incredibly cynical. She pretends to step down to try and do damage limitation, then when customers, investors and suppliers are surprised they are still dealing with her she decides, actually, the heat is off and she'll just cancel her stepping down. Notice how through all of that she's actually not really dealt with the problem in the first place - only the PR impact. Now having changed literally nothing, and not addressed the issue she's decided she can move on and wants to sue the reporters.

Oh and to really put the icing on the cake she gives a statement saying she's been doing some deep soul searching and reframed all of the issues as just

>"When I think back on ways I've phrased feedback, there have been times where the word choice isn't as thoughtful as it should have been, or the way it was framed actually wasn't as constructive as it could have been," she said. "Those are not, in the eyes of our leadership and the eyes of our board, terminal, unsolvable problems."

Well firstly, the eyes of 'our leadership' appear to be... guess who! And apparently, creating corporate policies to publicly humiliate employees and denying them private spaces to talk is a matter of how she "phrases feedback"? Pressuring workers to work extra outside of work hours and at anti-social hours? Badly phrased feedback. To me this just screams "I didn't do anything wrong but need to handle PR for the IPO".

<comment><USER34> It's pretty amazing what awful things executives can get away with. Though, truth be told...compared to stories about some of the CEOs in the valley, this seems pretty small potatoes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> One of my friends has an away bag and I don't really see the hype. If you're looking for a lower priced bag with a great warranty then Brigs and Riley's build quality is far better and they have a lifetime warranty.

If you want a well-built aluminum case then Tumi and Zero Haliburton are the way to go (sadly Rimowa went downhill after the LVMH acquisition).

</comment><comment><USER36> Startup name breaks promise

</comment><comment><USER37> "The internet" has short memory, but not that short. She should have waited at least half a year.

<comment><USER38> I don't think most people particularly care about this to be honest

<comment><USER19> oh I don't know. lots of people on flyertalk stating they cannot support a company with such toxic management.

these people are influencers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I am not surprised. She somehow was able to bleed her employees dry for business benefits. People at power love someone like that. Of course they're not gonna let her go so easily.

</comment><comment><USER40> Seems like a lot of drama for 4-year old luggage company that has a couple dozen products, some accessories and a podcast. Yet they got 100 million in their last round of funding and have a "valuation" of 1.4 billion according to wikipedia.

What's wrong with just building a business that makes stuff, selling and marketing it, hiring people as needed, making a decent profit, and per-chance innovating? But giant globs of venture capital money for luggage, LUGGAGE?

<comment><USER41> It's for this reason I bookmark the 37signals blog section "Bootstrapped, Profitable and Proud" [0], which is a set of posts about small companies who are just out there selling stuff. No VCs, no term sheets. Just small business, like the ones we're told America is built on.

It honestly gets tiring reading about the latest "unicorn" company that's valued at a billion plus despite grossing nowhere near that and never making a profit.

[0]: [https://basecamp.com/bootstrapped](https://basecamp.com/bootstrapped)

<comment><USER42> Hmm, the list is a little strange, as it includes a few entrants that are shadows of their former selves. I can speak to one that I'm personally familiar with: A Small Orange is a hosting company that sold to a conglomerate and the entire staff was cycled out after the sale. Now it's merely a shell corporation with a website with some branding, the same as every other Endurance International Group brand. The infrastructure and whatnot is all EIG, and the staff is intermingled with the staff from dozens of other small- name web hosts, and not to mention that that whole industry has been bleeding money since the advent of AWS. I guess it was started as a small business, but it's not one that prevailed. The owner made some money when he sold it -- in 2010 or 2011. Now? It's barely a company at all.

<comment><USER41> Business is fluid, so I imagine some of those posts are going to be out of date. I'm reading them more to learn about how they started and what their basic business model was at the time of writing. Like I said, it's a respite from the breathless coverage of the latest food delivery app that raised a billion in their last round.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> PG's prediction inspired by this event: [https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1217010274672304130](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1217010274672304130)

<comment><USER44> Twitters relevancy to the wider world and your actual customers is extremely exaggerated simply because so many journalists rely on it to make their lives easier or are actively addicted to it.

End of the day it's just a glorified Internet forum. Would you oust a CEO because 1000 Reddit users commented against them in a thread? Not likely but it's about as relevant in the real world as a twitter outrage mob.

Not commenting on Away CEOs actions specifically. Just saying that hardly anyone has a twitter account. Hardly anyone with an account actually uses it and out of those who do use it most of the content is driven by a small group of actual addicts of the platform and shouldn't really be taken as seriously as it is.

It's not the real world, it's a lens that magnifies a tiny and specific sliver of the world and gives it false credibility beyond what it actually has.

<comment><USER43> What do you think about people who leave reviews on websites like yelp, tripadvisor, capterra, etc?

Do you think they're also review writing addicts who shouldn't be taken seriously or do you think one should take what they write seriously while making a purchase decision?

PS - Not trying to compare deciding who to keep CEO vs. making a purchase. Genuinely want your opinion.

<comment> barry-cotter > What do you think about people who leave reviews on websites like yelp, > tripadvisor, capterra, etc?

Those people are (former) customers. They gave you money and might do it again. Their opinions have real relevance. A journalist's opinions only matter insofar as they are a customer or their writing changes the behavior of customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> TLDR: CEO says stupid shit to make a point and drive the team hard, Interwebs raise hell because some of the recipients were minorities, CEO feels the only way to defuse the situation is to apologize and resign, handing over to Eric Schmidt type adult supervisor who was already slated to come on board, then realizes that everyone thinks the public face of the company is exiting in disgrace and that sales and partnership meetings are going to be awkward, so stays on as co-CEO until adult supervisor is fully caught up and ready to do the IPO.

<comment><USER46> It was more the abusive work environment. She's a good example of someone who shouldn't be in charge of employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I guess he just couldn't stay Away

<comment><USER48> It's a she

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Followup prediction - this year more major platforms will realise that there's no fixing the calls for increased moderation and policing and will switch back to not really doing any content policing at all.

</comment><comment><USER50> Im glad this is happening ... for reasons aptly stated in this essay: [https://eggonomy.com/blogs/news/ellsworth-toohey-award- for-z...](https://eggonomy.com/blogs/news/ellsworth-toohey-award-for-zoe- schiffer)</comment>


Show HN: Coding Monkey - <AUTHOR> https://www.codingmonkey.io <comment><USER2> Initial feedback, why does this site have all the fancy loading gifs etc, why not just ake it basic html like sites like [https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/](https://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/) ? It will help keep the maintainability of the site down since this feels like overkill for a info site

<comment><AUTHOR> To be honest I just used the Aurelia Skeleton app - [https://github.com/aurelia/skeleton- navigation](https://github.com/aurelia/skeleton-navigation) which had font awesome already part of the project so I just used it cause it was readily available and did the job. Frontend work is certainly not my strong suit!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN!

Coding Monkey is a site to practise coding in C#. It isn't anything new (Coding Bat, Hacker Rank all do the same and better) and still rough around the edges but it is the first side project I have actually finished and shipped so any feedback would be great.

<comment><USER3> Not sure that I can see much value in it if the response to a failure is just a compiler error message. The response should explain why the submitted solution is wrong and give a suggested solution with an explanation of why it is to be preferred.

For instance this compiles in Visual Studio 2015 but fails on Coding Monkey:

        public class StringManipulation
        {
            public string GetFirstLetter(string input)
            {
                return input.SubString(0, 1);
            }
        }

with this error:

CS1061 5 'string' does not contain a definition for 'SubString' and no extension method 'SubString' accepting a first argument of type 'string' could be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

What's going on? MSDN says that string is an alias for System.String which definitely has SubString().

I don't use C# very much but I do use .Net very heavily so I am very interested to know why that code doesn't work on Coding Monkey. Perhaps it will improve my code.

Edit: I do realize that explaining why something is wrong is a seriously difficult task, but eventually the same wrong answers will appear repeatedly so a canned response should be possible in the end, at least for some code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey - I think that is a problem on my side. I have taken the site down for now after someone gave me some feedback on a security issue. To be honest I am not too sure what is going on here but I shall have a look - while changing the code execution engine to be a bit more secure/robust.

As far as canned responses it is a good idea - and would definitely add some value, for now, I wanted to get a rough copy out to see what the feedback looks like and I shall have a look to see how I might be able to do this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How can I track my progress. Anyway to know how many compiles / runs it took to get an exercise right

Is fun though

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it definitely needs some user progress tracking. I like how CodingBat does this - it tells you how many times you attempted and even has graphs. It is something I am looking to add once I get some of the more fundamental things (security) right.</comment></comment>


Why Reality Is Not a Video Game – And Why It Matters - happy-go-lucky http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/03/09/519376356/why-reality-is-not-a-video-game-and-why-it-matters <comment><AUTHOR> I was really hoping this article would show a clever argument why we don't live in a simulation. Instead it questions why an advanced civilization would have any interest in performing this simulation. We can't have the faintest hope to understand what some super-advanced beings want to do, just like a drosophila melanogaster fly can't understand why we spent time on Hacker News.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, so was I. Instead it was simplistic drivel. I'd expect more from a theoretical physicist (the author).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> >"we have no free will"

I preface this by saying I haven't thought about this much or know much about the subject, but I would argue that a stochastic simulation model would generate what we consider "free will". I mean if they ran the simulation multiple times there would be a different outcome so our "decisions" would matter at that point, and affect the outcome.

<comment><USER4> The idea of free will is thorny. Even philosophers who work on it a great deal have a hard time figuring out what anyone means. This is my conclusion, after much thought: All events necessitate causes, therefore no event, including human action, can be self-caused. Quantum physics doesn't save free will. Randomness and unpredictability are just as constricting to human will.

The entire question is super fascinating. It's one of the last remaining delusions of humanity. Many otherwise thoughtful people are uncomfortable considering the question at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Look, here's the thing. We all ought to be able to agree that you could build a digital computer out of pipes, valves, and diaphragms (the water analogues of wires, diodes, and capacitors). Does anyone believe that a sufficiently complex plumbing system would be self-aware? That a sufficiently complex plumbing network might become confused about whether it is, in fact, pipes and water?

Though, the other reason we're not living in a simulation is that reality is continuous, and numerical simulation can never overcome that barrier. But that point is more esoteric.

<comment><USER6> I agree we can build plumbing complex enough that it can convince anyone, including itself, that it is self-aware.

We can philosophise about whether that's true consciousness. But that's the same directionless thought experiment as questioning whether anyone besides yourself truly exists.

<comment><USER2> I've actually thought a lot about exactly that: how can I be certain that anyone else actually exists? They could all, you could all, be NPCs populating my universe of one. The argument for this is that it takes far less computational power to render such an experience than it does to render that same experience for billions of people and all their complex interactions. But if it's one person than you simply render what they are currently experiencing. You don't render far off places, economies, environments, etc. Just focus on the individual.

And perhaps it's no simulation at all, but some super realistic form of VR (via brain implant?). Perhaps if the future world is a wasteland than this may be a way for future people to experience the "good old days." Or perhaps this is how education is conducted in the future: we live some number of virtual lives before getting a crack at a real one.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: We're trying to create a better datasheet - Datasheet.net - <AUTHOR> http://www.datasheet.net

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, looking for some feedback on our new site. A lot more detail about what we're trying to do can be found on our blog at [http://blog.datasheet.net](http://blog.datasheet.net)

Would love to hear what you think.

</comment><comment><USER2> Cool! I like it!

<comment><AUTHOR> We just released a new version with user upload support. Hope its useful for you.</comment></comment>


What Android 2.0 and the new Motorola Droid mean for Android - <AUTHOR> http://journal.markbao.com/2009/10/what-android-2-and-motorola-droid-mean-for-android/

<comment><USER2> > especially since Android and all Android applications operate on Java, which > is a notoriously slow platform

There are several things wrong with that:

* JIT'ed Java, in this day and age, is actually quite fast.

* However, Android doesn't really run on 'Java', but on Dalvik, their own VM, which probably does make it a bit slower until such time as they get around to giving it a kick in the pants and including a JIT or something else to speed it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry. You're right. I was unsure about said statement, though my experience with android apps on the G1 was probably what made me feel that way. I somehow forgot that it ran Dalvik.

Making change as soon as I have access to a non-BlackBerry device (which is admittedly also Java.)

<comment><USER3> I had some annoying speed issues with 1.0 and 1.5, but 1.6 is much speedier. I think that ultimately, the hardware put in there is going to be the major determining factor of the device's and software's perceived speed, and luckily the open nature encourages an ecosystem of hardware that hopefully device manufacturers will end up competing and differentiating on.</comment></comment></comment>


Counting elements with dictionary - <AUTHOR> http://kracekumar.com/post/77925927684/counting-elements-with-dictionary

<comment><USER2> That was the Pythonic approach until 2006. With Python 2.5 the Pythonic solution was often to use defaultdict:

        >>> from collections import defaultdict
        >>> words = ['a', 'the', 'an', 'a', 'an', 'the']
        >>> d = defaultdict(int)
        >>> for word in words:
        ...     d[word] += 1
        ...
        >>> d
        defaultdict(<type 'int'>, {'a': 2, 'the': 2, 'an': 2})

It's a bit more cumbersome, but the performance is better, and defaultdict(list)[key].append() is much better than setdefault(key, []).append(value).

In modern Python (starting with Python 2.7, released in 2010), the Pythonic solution is collections.Counter:

        >>> from collections import Counter
        >>> words = ['a', 'the', 'an', 'a', 'an', 'the']
        >>> Counter(words)
        Counter({'a': 2, 'the': 2, 'an': 2})

or dict(Counter(words)) if you want the result to return an actual dict instead of a Counter instance.</comment>


Devs bet big on Android over Apple's iOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9188198/Devs_bet_big_on_Android_over_Apple_s_iOS

<comment><USER2> Wait a minute....they polled a bunch of Appcelerator Titanium developers and found that 59% of them think Android has the "best long term outlook"?

That poll is about as useful as polling only iOS developers and finding that 90% of them think iOS has the best long term outlook.

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems computer world and pc world are trying to reignite the glory days of ghe Mac vs pc wars with these sensationalist headlines and nonsense stories.

Ill save you the time: in a survey of people using a cross platform development tool, most of the people using it are using it for android.

This is not the app marketplace, where most people make apps for iOS and I'm sure many are keeping an eye on android, but there really is no android platform eprightbnow except for things that don't suffer from lowest common denominator ports.</comment>


Warp from Cloudflare, from Hype to Scam - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I am living in China so I was quite excited about the new VPN promised by Cloudflare.
Then they release it, and basically it is just added encryption on top of their DNS server.
So please, don't advertise Warp as a VPN it is so lame. No geolocated server, no kill switch, not able to bypass China's great firewall. Give me my hype back!
It is better to stick to real VPNs like Portal, Astrill, NordVPN, any other or even local ones...
You can tell "Warp adds an extra layer of encryption" but not "Warp is a new free VPN", it is very misleading the way we think of VPN.
Not to mention I did not see any significant speed gain between Warp and Warp+ on the benchmark tests.
To make an analogy, Warp is exactly like those fruit juices that advertise themselves as "strawberries with bananas", when you check the ingredients you see 5% strawberries, 30% bananas, 65% apple. <comment><USER2> Straight from Cloudflare's own blog: "From a technical perspective, WARP is a VPN. But it is designed for a very different audience than a traditional VPN. WARP is not designed to allow you to access geo-restricted content when you're traveling. It will not hide your IP address from the websites you visit. If you're looking for that kind of high-security protection then a traditional VPN or a service like Tor are likely better choices for you."

<comment><USER3> It's interesting how terms evolve. The original virtual private network (VPN) is the business kind which WARP is. The newer, now more popularly known (and thus traditional?) is the consumer kind. The difference between them is the axis of the 'P'rivate part. The business VPN isolates one network from another. The consumer one isolates the client-side from the server side. Private-proxy would be better name for the latter but for widespread usage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> +1 for calling cloudflare out on this - so sick of San Francisco scams nowadays

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> WARP is not .... WARP will not...

Apart from taking your money, does it have any utility?...</comment>


Show HN: goober, a 900B CSS-in-JS solution at the cost of peanuts - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/cristianbote/goober <comment><AUTHOR> Hey there!

I always wondered, if you can get a working solution for css-in-js with a smaller footprint. I recently started a project and wanted to use styled- components. Looking at their sizes, it seems that I would have to include ~16kB(styled-components) or ~11kB(emotion) just so I can use the styled paradigm. So, I embarked in a mission to create a smaller alternative for these well established apis.

And that's how I come up with `goober`. Let me know what you think :) Cheers!</comment>


Quantum observers may be entitled to their own facts - <AUTHOR> https://www.hw.ac.uk/news/articles/2019/Quantum.htm <comment><AUTHOR> [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw9832](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw9832)

paper here</comment>


Google Launchpad Accelerator:  Equity-Free Accelerator Program for Startups - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/startups/accelerator/ <comment><USER2> I think with any of these sweet deals, founders really need to think, "What's in it for them?" This can help people understand where they might be winning or where they might be losing.

For Google, this may be an attempt to grow the overall internet user base in these countries which may be correlated with increases in GOOG's revenue. It could also be that Google would like to arbitrage ideas from one country and apply these ideas to other countries.

Either way, it's a great deal that there is no-equity-stake financing with access to free consulting via Google PM's. I'd just always recommend people wishing to take this deal to think hard about what's in it for the other party to foresee any possible risks.

<comment><USER3> > "Credits for Google products"

> "utilize this mentorship and privileged product access to scale your apps"

> "only mobile app startups in Brazil, India, and Indonesia are eligible"

> "you should be planning to build an Android version of your app."

> "Google Launchpad is Google's program for startups developing products on > Google platforms."

Looks like a play for Google Cloud and Android.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Q.Does my startup need to have an Android based app, or can it be an Apple app?

A.You can apply even if you only have an app in the Apple App Store. However, you should be planning to build an Android version of your app. Please let us know this information when you fill out the application form.

I guess it was expected that Google would want their tech to take center stage, but why can't they go the BizSpark route and provide resources with no strings attached??

<comment><USER5> I think BizSpark is wonderful but let's be honest here there are tons of technological strings attached, just no contractual ones...

\- Azure credits: Get you tied in/used to/familiar with the platform and services. Sure, you can use just Linux VMs, but Microsoft pushes their integration services pretty heavily.

\- Free SQL Server, Windows Server, and Visual Studio. Any of which you use in anger, you're now somewhat tied into those respective platforms.

\- Office 365: Just more generic Office-washing, so the assumption continues to be that Outlook/Word/Excel are the only offerings in the space.

Microsoft are just more subtle about it. That's their style. Kind of like giving every school hugely discounted Office products, it might seem altruistic, but really it is to hook them into the Microsoft-way early.

<comment><USER6> There aren't very many strings. I am a year into the BizSpark program. So far, I have only been using a small VPS, always on, for the product I am working on - so I am not taking as much advantage as I could. Azure is very nice, comparable to AWS and Google Cloud

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> || Currently operating in three locations: Brazil, India and Indonesia.

</comment><comment><USER8> From their splash page...

Launchpad Accelerator

Are you a challenger?

guess the copywriters in this department were born after 1986

</comment><comment><USER9> There is Others section , i hope it works for other countries. I am from Yangon , Myanmar. We have a huge startup community who really want to try , including me.

</comment><comment><USER10> i'm glad to see that this isn't a silicon valley only thing or even a US only thing.

<comment><USER11> It's limited to India/Indonesia/Brazil for now though, not exactly worldwide.

<comment><USER12> A reach of 1.7 billion people is a nice start I'd say :)</comment></comment></comment>


Social media is rotting democracy from within - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/22/18177076/social-media-facebook-far-right-authoritarian-populism <comment><USER2> I would class social media as a symptom of a broader class of social estrangement that makes democracy less viable. Why, today alone on Hacker News we have articles like "Alarming Decline of Quality Youth Playtime" and "Rural America's "brain drain": How student debt is emptying small towns". There is a general trend of less engagement in community, and increased segregation by social class. People engage with social media because _that 's all they have left_.

Without the daily "forced" interactions with people of diverse backgrounds and intelligence levels that come naturally through proximity, and with all communication centralized and mediated by something that allows you to easily (even transparently) avoid challenging viewpoints, small wonder that society becomes segregated and unstable.

Really, I think the solution is small, walkable, community-oriented towns, preferably alongside the abolition of cars. Solve that, and nobody will care about "social media".

<comment><USER3> I don't think you're wrong, but I'd just add that social media platforms like Facebook are doing everything they can to keep a user's attention at the cost of closer IRL relationships or anything else in their lives. To them, the more time you spend on their platform, the more money they make.

So increased social media use is definitely a symptom of broader disconnection in our societies, but it's also helping that disconnection along quite happily.</comment></comment>


Boeing Puts Another Behemoth in the Sky - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/02/boeing-747-8-intercontinental/

<comment><AUTHOR> Some interesting bits:

 _"... The secret sauce in the aerospace business is not building a pressurized tube with swept wings and podded engines, It's carefully surveying market needs and building a product the market wants. That's the secret sauce ..."_ ~ Richard Aboulafia, Teal Group.

 _"... When the 747 entered service the global air transportation system was a lot different than today," he says. Back then, individual nations held strict control over who could fly where, so you had to fly large numbers of people into relatively few cities. Today's open-sky policies make it easier for airlines to connect cities, making point-to-point flights more attractive. ..."_

I'd never thought about how connectivity has increased in complexity like this before. Network theory considers Air transport as just another human network like powerlines, movie stars working in films and roads.

<comment><USER2> Although I know little of the airplane business, I had predicted the 787 to be a success from when I first heard of it(when it was still called the 7E7), simply because the way it had been marketed was very passenger- appealing(improved comfort and noise levels - a huge downside in the contemporary air travel experience), while also offering an obvious bottom line benefit for the airlines in fuel economy.

Regulations aside, the alternative from Airbus simply did not make sense in terms of growing the market and increasing air traffic. Big A380-style planes have been made in the past( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-225> for example ), but they are constrained by airport facilities. As in cloud computing, horizontal scaling beats vertical.

<comment><USER3> I agree on the obvious difference in market size between giant planes and smaller ones and that it's an easier investment to make smaller planes rather than big ones.

The situation however is not as simple as declaring the end of bigger ones, there is always a problem with long-haul flights, given that we don't want to start making 3 stops to reach an intercontinental destination. While it's true that a plane can go from A to C without going through B it doesn't mean it's always financially convenient for an airline to do so. All of the long flights from SFO to Europe stop at a big hub and this only makes sense because not a lot of people every day need to fly between Europe and SFO compared to internal flights. Having many smaller half-empty planes is not as good as having few pretty full ones in that situation. Lufthansa is going to operate the new A380 on all major intercontinental flights around the world (I'm gonna use it to go back to Europe from SFO in June for example). It might be a niche but new routes are expensive, you can't open countless of them and you can't have low saturation on your planes.

Another issue is airports saturation. LHR is an incredibly busy airport, with currently no plans to open a 3rd runway (the last one cancelled last year), operating at 98% capacity[1]. The only way to move more passengers through it is to increase the size of each plane. It's true that in this situation you would reduce this problem a bit by avoiding to go through LHR and going directly to the final destination but it remains true that a lot of flights just go to LHR as a destination and that it's not convenient for BA to fly the amount of people that fly today (or in the foreseeable future) using more flights rather then less.

It's not by chance that no low-cost airline has any long-haul international flights. It's a smaller market but it's a real market. Evaluating the winner by amount of planes sold rather than on a profit/passenger basis is gonna miss the point.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Heathrow_Airport>

Edit: typos</comment></comment></comment>


The hacker's guide to acquiring the first 1,000 users: Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the-first-1000-users-twitter/

<comment><USER2> I despise how twitter and facebook have become the de facto gatekeepers for marketing an app. The web is littered with millions upon millions of "Share this on/Log in with Twitter / Facebook" and for a lot of apps that are successful at this marketing approach they are little more than a house of cards and uninspired vaporware.

How about this, send a link to your site to all of your friends. Ask them if they'll share it with their friends - via email or text -> novel idea right? If people really like what you've made then you won't have to go around doing shameless self promotion and being a slave to Twitter and Facebook status updates on every little detail about your app, your company, or your team.

When did marketing an app become so ego-centric? I don't give a shit what you look like. I don't care how many people are on your team. I don't care whether you have 50,000 twitter bot followers. Does your app make me want to use it more? Does it fulfill a real need I have or invent a need I never knew I had? If it's reliable and I like it or need it then guess what: I'll use it.

Source: Google, Craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc... Astronomical successes that didn't have the 'benefit' of a glitzy social platform to share their special sauce with the masses.

<comment><AUTHOR> While there's no marketing tactic that can make up for having a crappy product, the notion that you can just email a couple of friends and a product will take off works in _maybe_ 1% of cases, even for good products.

<comment><USER3> It helps if you have something good....

<comment><AUTHOR> Even if you have something good, the chances you'll be successful without marketing are _way worse_ than the chances you'll be successful as a startup in general (which already suck).

<comment><USER4> ...and if you don't have something good, you'll figure it out a lot faster with marketing than without. With a short runway, like when you're living out of your car or something crazy, figuring that out is pretty important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title purports to be about how Twitter acquired 1000 users.

The article is more about how to spam-favourite your way to 1000 followers on Twitter.

<comment><AUTHOR> As stated in the article, your Twitter profile serves as a sort of pre-landing page to get people to click through. You should be able to watch the interaction from Twitter flow through to your landing page in real-time.

(The title is supposed to be about how to acquire the first 1,000 users for your startup via Twitter. Sorry about the confusion.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems down. Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.a...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.austenallred.com%2Fthe- hackers-guide-to-the-first-1000-users- twitter%2F&oq=cache%3Awww.austenallred.com%2Fthe-hackers-guide-to-the- first-1000-users- twitter%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.538j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

</comment><comment><USER7> The #SEO tweet trick didn't work, now i'm depressed.

<comment><USER6> Worked for me, I got two favorites almost immediately:

[https://twitter.com/m_evans10/status/385418950861156352](https://twitter.com/m_evans10/status/385418950861156352)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Twitter is still a somewhat divisive tool among those in the profession you'd _think_ would automatically love it: journalists. It's almost a badge of honor, like still reading the Sunday paper, in print, to eschew Twitter.

However, I think it's more of an existential judgment than one of actual merit...I think many/most reporters, when the Internet was new, were used to thinking that everyone in town read or watched or listened to them. Pre- Internet media was very one way, so the only knowledge you had about your audience was through personal letters (which could be surprisingly frequent) and through circulation/Nielsen ratings (having a circulation of 300,000 does not mean 300K people actually read your story). Even as a non-senior reporter, random people would recognize my byline when I worked in Sacramento (a medium sized paper) and if you were on TV news, _everyone_ in town knew you.

But it's much different on Twitter. Unless you're already a celebrity, you're going to find in the first day, first week, first months of tweeting, very, very few people will seem to acknowledge you. And even if you get to a respectable sum of followers...between 1,000 to 10,000, you'll always be _magnitudes_ less popular, via Twitter's follower metric, than the latest teen pop star or reality TV freak.

That's pretty crushing to the ego, and that's the vibe I get from many friends (journalists or not) who've poo-poohed Twitter. And it's not because they despise the triviality of online interaction...they are on Facebook and update it frequently, but on FB, your network more closely mimics your real life friendships/following, and there's less "follower envy"...in that it's respectable to weed out your Facebook network. But there's not much benefit to having a small Twitter network.

<comment><USER9> Talking and listening to some journalists, I get the sense that they don't so much as "like" Twitter, as simply recognize that since it is part of the modern 24-hour news cycle, they have no choice but to be a part of it. If anything, it seems like a love-hate relationship because now they have no choice but to be constantly "on".

Anyway, I'm not a journalist and I find Twitter to be an interesting distraction where I follow interesting people to see what they are interested in. Oh, and comedians.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any cached links? The site's down due to HN effect.</comment>


Flymble - <AUTHOR> http://flymble.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, we just launched our new product on ProductHunt! Who wants to have a look? :) [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/flymble- live](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/flymble-live)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Flymble is a booking platform offering instant airfare financing. Book your flights for as low as 1/10th of the cost upfront and pay them off in monthly terms, ranging from 3 to 10 months.

Our product is fully functional and live, we would greatly appreciate your feedback! E-mail me on firstname.lastname@example.com or comment here please!</comment>


Computer Scientists Exploit Social Networks To Create New Recommendation System - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428753/computer-scientists-exploit-social-networks-to/?ref=rss <comment><USER2> It's a non-story, all speculation about whether preferences might be contagious like a virus:

       "That's an interesting idea but the acid test will be
       whether it works in practice."

       ". . . Shang and co don't know but they plan to find out
       using data from Yelp.com, which provides user ratings of
       restaurants, spas etc. If it works, I'm sure we'll be
       hearing from them again."</comment>


Missing genes point to targets for drug development - <AUTHOR> https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2017/04/18/missing-genes-point-to-possible-drug-targets/ <comment><USER3> > One potential way to discover more of these unique individuals is NIH's new > All of Us Research Program, which will aim to enroll one million American > volunteers in a long-term study that will ultimately include DNA sequencing.

This is the first I've heard of this initiative. I hope that it is successful, but I'm not sure that I will be volunteering.

</comment><comment><USER4> The study focused a lot on consanguinity's effect on genome - I wonder if there are studies examining children with 'very' unrelated parents, i.e. mixed race?

<comment><USER5> I have 0 support for this, but it the mixed race people I know tend to be much, much, much healthier. It makes sense when you think about inbreeding, but it's sort of weird to think about. A friend who is 100% Polish Jewish - <USER2> people who were forced to live in small shtetls and didn't have a wide genetic pool - just randomly went blind one day. My mixed-race wife is literally never sick.

I'm kind of jealous to be honest.

<comment><USER6> _I have 0 support for this, but it the mixed race people I know tend to be much, much, much healthier._

Biology has your back on this. (I have farming background but results should be valid for humans as well.)

<comment><USER7> I'd be interested to see if you can find any evidence for this in human populations. From my undergraduate classes (and in my admittedly limited exposure to plant biology), it sounds like you're referring to increased fitness of plant hybrids.

In this case, you're falling into the mindset I outlined in my other comment. At least in the simple examples presented at the college biology level, hybrids often combine true-breeding traits (hypothetically, good growth in a certain climate, resistance to a certain temperature, etc). It seems reasonable that an individual with a mixture of such traits would fare better than its true-bred counterparts.

In humans, our race labels don't correspond to true-bred traits. While some genetic conditions are most common in certain racial groups, I cannot think of any set of genes where heterozygotes are only formed by mating across racial groups.

Note that I'm writing in the US - these points may be less true in homogeneous countries like Norway. But in such groups, we're not seeing the effect of race as much as the effect of small groups of human founders.

One interesting point, which could buttress OP's observation, is the finding that immigrants are often healthier than native born individuals[1]. This phenomenon occurs across many measures of health; unfortunately for America, a nation of immigrants, the phenomenon regresses over successive generations.

1\. A discussion of weight and immigration. This is the first link I could easily find, but I have seen this discussed more convincingly with respect to low birth weight in African mothers vs Black American mothers: [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e645/c696508ccb09cfbd476a86...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e645/c696508ccb09cfbd476a86b17af2562023bf.pdf)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Government Opened Data via APIs in 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.apievangelist.com/2011/12/31/government-opened-data-via-apis-in-2011/#.Tv95flnURAk.hackernews <comment><USER2> Beware of "open data" cheerleaders. Several of these things are simply resume fodder -- the CIO announces this amazing API at a fancy conference, (living it up traveling on the taxpayer dime) and the open data people fawn all over them. Value/substance of the API? Zero.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also see where they release a junk API as "open" while selling accessing to the same data behind the scenes.

All of these types of APIs need to be identified. We need a way to high grade them and make it known when they don't have any value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was excited to look at the USA Search API:

<http://search.usa.gov/api>

I assumed it would have census data, etc. But disappointed to find out it only has one api: product recalls.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is a nice listing to explore but I have to object to the OP's optimistic tone of "the government is listening to us, so let's make some apps"

Look deeper and you'll see that many of these APIs are junk, particularly the crime reports (week-period aggregates are useless). The reason why developers don't make apps is because the data is incomplete and non-normalized and redacted in unknown ways. Making apps out of the data is a poor use of time and helps to obscure the failure of government to modernize their data collection and publishing systems.

<comment><USER5> We organized and hosted Hack4Reno, which was Reno's first open data hackathon and what we discovered is that the government is listening but they are not equipped with the knowledge or the tools to provide the information in a useful, meaningful way. If you talk to the individual departments and agencies, they all love the _idea_ of being able to have a better handle on the information they have so that both internal and external applications and reports. Doing so would allow the departments to make better decisions and ideally make a more informed and engaged citizenry.

Most of the datasets we provided for Hack4Reno were things that we found by scouring local government websites and finding random static spreadsheets and pdf documents. In some cases, we actually had data delivered to us on a burned CD or via flat files in FTP. It blew our mind since most of us were so used to consuming APIs to get real, timely data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Still waiting for the embassy cables API.

<comment><AUTHOR> oooh. I think that would be a popular one. Who still has the data? Who will keep updated when new data gets leaked. Winner!

<comment><USER6> I mean live data ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Extreme transparency</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Americans: Pay Your Taxes or Lose Your Passport - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-pay-your-taxes-or-lose-your-passport-1447971424 <comment><USER2> This law is so stupid that it turns out and becames really funny.

You might have american citizens who are the descendants of lincoln - but just because they forgot to pay some "money" \- they are not americans anymore.

Punishment and vindication seems to be american way.

<comment><USER3> This doesn't have to do with citizenship, as far as I understand. I think it would hinder people's ability to travel, for people in the US. For Americans abroad, it'd have more serious consequences and would likely affect their daily life, but they'd still be Americans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google Link: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwj_1pfDqcTJAhXJk5QKHbdLDqcQFggdMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Famericans- pay-your-taxes-or-lose-your- passport-1447971424&usg=AFQjCNHHmvsuPMuUQ1Oi9JQ5fqESqTlMWg)</comment>


Any Recomendations on Great Rails Hosting Services?  - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> This keeps coming up, and the response IMO is always:

Set up your own box and run it.

Layered Tech is who I use, but other people have others.

<comment><USER3> <http://joyent.com/></comment></comment>


Y Combinator's FathomDB Takes The Hassle Out Of Managing Your Database - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/27/y-combinators-fathomdb-takes-the-hassle-out-of-managing-your-database/

<comment><USER2> _the system isn't necessarily meant to actually replace database administrators, but instead to take care of low-level tasks so that they can focus on more complex and important issues_

Nice quote. The last company I worked for developed trading software for foreign exchange and money markets. Only you couldn't ever sell it to traders; they were too afraid of being put out of a job. You had to go to the Head of Desk and sell him on the benefits.

As it turns out few of them actually were put out of work, many really were able to move up into trading more volume and higher-value instruments. But if you say that up front, no-one will believe you.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would say that there's am essential piece of information that's not answered in your FAQ: What happens to my data if you go out of business?

That is a dealbreaker for me. If you go out of business (which I hope you don't) I need to get my data out, or I'll be out of business too.

With that said, I've signed up for your service, and hope to use it. It's a great idea.

<comment><USER4> Understand the concern. We'll have options to dump a backup to various destinations under your control. Your S3 account would be a good choice within EC2 (no bandwidth charges), but we could also do FTP.

<comment><USER3> Great, that would definitely make me sleep better at night. Particularly if it could be automated so that I would have a dump delivered every night.

And good luck with it :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd be a lot happier if I saw hints that FathomDB would also handle slave/mastering situations as well. Ideally it would be really easy to set those up, add new slaves, etc. I didn't see anything on this in the FAQ-- nor a clarification on the backups. Are the backups daily, are they EBS snapshots, etc?

Right now, the only thing that looked overly compelling (versus our existing RightScale/free+MySQL tools) was some of the performance analysis reports, but we get hints at that via other mechanisms.

Promising, especially if it grows. I'm hopeful because we use so much EC2 and this could help us speed things up if it adds more features.

<comment><USER6> Well they're just starting out and I guess that's where the obvious potential is.

The screencast didn't get me so excited either. Mostly because of the guy raving off in that annoying marketing slang over the most basic features, without answering any of the interesting questions.

For example he praises the ability to make queries from the web frontend and the visualization of the mysql logfiles as "enterprise features" - Oh c'mon boy.

More interesting would have been to learn more about that magic "server size" slider that goes from 1-256. Will that select the amazon instance type, mysql configuration, EBS size, or what does it do?

From what I can see they built a pretty frontend that lets you launch customized AMI images with a mysql installation. I sure hope there's more about it because this alone would take little more than 4 weeks to clone...

(We built a similar frontend for our own EC2 postgres cluster, so this is a bit more than an educated guess).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a really great idea. I'm excited to try it out. Congratulations!

<comment><USER8> I agree completely - what a great idea! - I will definitely give these guys a try. Rightscale is in the same space, but they charge an arm and a leg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd think running sql queries over the internet would slow down response time. Or is it not significant?

<comment><USER4> We're starting by targeting EC2 customers and ourselves running within EC2 to avoid this issue.

In future, we'll work with more cloud/hosting providers so that we can stay 'close' to the client, and we do have some tech that could be applied here also.

<comment><USER9> Is it possible to apply the service to already existing clients databases, maybe by sshing to their servers or providing them with special software?

<comment><USER10> You could just dump your current DB and restore it to the new one hosted at EC2, then point your application to the new one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Congrats on release.

People interested in FantomDB should also consider RightScale who also offers managing and scaling MySQL on EC2 - [http://blog.rightscale.com/2007/08/20/redundant-mysql-set- up...](http://blog.rightscale.com/2007/08/20/redundant-mysql-set-up-for- amazon-ec2/)

RightScale doesn't offer MySQL-specific services such as reporting etc. but can help with treating your entire application stack "as a service"

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't do a magnolia,

Never hire a DBA,

Effortless, reliable backup,

Get FathomDB today

</comment><comment><USER13> Nice and simple.

Question: Is it theoretically possible to build a cloud hash-database that uses mysql on the front-end? Any joins would automatically be handled for you and the system would watch what queries you are running to dynamically balance/distribute/reindex data as needed. SimpleDB/Couch/etc work, but they require a steep learning curve for people used to working with relational databases.

At the end of the day you are just saving/getting data, I don't understand why the database service can't deal with the pain.

<comment><USER4> I think it's definitely possible to front-end a cloud database with MySQL, but the question is: would it be faster or better in some other way? Relational databases are very functional, reasonably efficient and powerful, and give you some nice guarantees (ACID).

The 'alternative' databases trade off some of those properties for scalability; reintroduce them with a layer on top and I'd guess you'd lose those benefits.

<comment><USER14> I would go further than just saying "reasonably efficient and powerful". More like "extremely powerful and optimized".

No offense to the grandparent, but that comment strikes me as a direct result of the hype around these key-value store DBs. The idea that you could build out a relational database using a key-value store as the backend and the end result would somehow have the underlying system's scalability properties needs to be shot down with extreme prejudice.

The philosophy behind a key-value store DB is that, if we don't need 99% of the powerful features and ad-hoc queries of a relational database, we can build something that scales much better. There is some (growing) subset of relational functionality that can easily be implemented on top of a key-value store, but the developer better know what that is.

Emulating a full-on relational database is not going to perform at anywhere near the level of a real relational database. You'd be better off working on the problem of better ways of replicating and sharding regular relational databases rather than conflating two different models with competing assumptions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Congrats on the launch and good press! I wish you the best of luck. There is probably a decent number of people who would like to avoid dealing with the database infrastructure directly.

However, this launch raises a question for me, with regards to funding and YCombinator.

Obviously I'm only seeing what's in the video, but it looks like you have a provisioning system, and a web interface (like an enhanced phpMyAdmin). I assume there's backups, failover, monitoring, etc... in the background as well.

Why did you need funding for this? What did you gain from YCombinator? Perhaps I'm downplaying your efforts due to ignorance on how your system really works, but it seems pretty straightforward to build. I don't use EC2, but I'm pretty sure I could build a web app that creates new databases, an enhanced version of phpMyAdmin, and my standard monitoring/backup stuff that I do already, in a couple of days. My understanding is the "cloud" aspect of EC2 makes scaling the new db instances out much easier (than if I did it myself using dedicated servers). So I'm not sure why you felt you needed investors, months of dedicated full time work, exposure to VCs, etc...?

My intent isn't to be snarky or put down your accomplishments, but clearly I'm missing either the complexity and effort to build your solution, or I'm missing some key ingredient that YC provided that made your startup easier/possible/etc...

<comment><USER4> If you really could have built it in a few days, you should come work for FathomDB!

I would point out that doing this properly on EC2 is an order of magnitude harder than doing it on dedicated hardware; the assumption on EC2 has to be that things will fail and you have to build accordingly.

The simplicity of the web-based GUI and the offering hides the complexity going on under the surface. But that's the whole point of FathomDB: you just use the database, and you don't see (or care about) the hoops we're jumping through to make it all work.

<comment><USER16> " _doing this properly on EC2 is an order of magnitude harder than doing it on dedicated hardware; the assumption on EC2 has to be that things will fail and you have to build accordingly_ "

I don't follow, how is that different from dedicated hardware where you also have to assume failure will happen?

If anything I'd argue it's the opposite (but ultimately note that I think both take some work). But I say that it's perhaps the opposite because on EC2, you have EBS:

" _volumes that operate with 20 GB or less of modified data since their most recent Amazon EBS snapshot can expect an annual failure rate (AFR) of between 0.1% – 0.5%, where failure refers to a complete loss of the volume. This compares with commodity hard disks that will typically fail with an AFR of around 4%_ "

And neither failure rate involves RAID which you can of course do with both EBS (mdadm) and disks to go for lower AFR projections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> how much did it cost you to sponsor that roundtable thing?

<comment><USER4> I don't think I should say, but I would say that the TechCrunch team were fantastic, put together an amazing event, and helped FathomDB get great launch exposure. I would definitely do it again, and would recommend it to others where the event's theme is relevant to your business, as 'cloud' is to FathomDB.

<comment><USER17> understandable...how about letting us know how you went about getting in touch with techcrunch, did pg phone Arrington? called yourself? emailed?

<comment><USER4> Sorry to disappoint: there is no great tale of working back channels, I just emailed them on the address they provided in the conference info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are there plans for adding PostgreSQL?

</comment><comment><USER19> Is there a benefit to using EC/2 for mysql if the majority of the work is reads rather than writes (Something like 90/10)? A large site I work (non- profit) could move all our mysql DBs to EC/2 with something like FathomDB, but I worry that it will be more expensive (and not that better performance-wise) than our current dedicated server at Rackspace.

</comment><comment><USER20> Could anyone comment on the feasibility and speed of using this service as a database for a non-EC2 dedicated box?

<comment><USER15> That will depend greatly on how you use your database (number of queries over time, type of queries, size of returned data, etc...).

I worked on a large DB intensive eCommerce site, with a large number of writes and un-cachable data. While it worked great locally, trying to point a cluster at the DB in the backup data center (50 ms away on a dedicated backbone line) absolutely killed performance.

Also, for another eCommerce site, the local dev instance on my laptop boots in about ~ 1 minute when running against a local database. It takes about ~10 minutes when running against the corporate dev db over the VPN connection (~50ms added latency).

However, for an application with more cacheable data, and less queries per second, it would matter less.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nice! if you can take the guesswork out of backups and slaves, you'll save me (and a lot of others) a ton of work!

</comment><comment><USER22> Is this something you could replicate your existing MySQL database to in order to have a hot spare? That might be a way to provide service to people who aren't on EC2.

<comment><USER4> Definitely possible - you get MySQL root on the box. If this is a popular scenario we can also make it simple from our GUI..

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Congratulations Justin! Great job, looks super slick.

</comment><comment><USER24> Now if FathomDB had a rails plugin that made it stupidly easy to shard, they'd have a new customer.

</comment><comment><USER25> when will pricing be available? will there be a free tier?

</comment><comment><USER26> please let me into the beta! email@example.com. My site opensourcerails.com is going down every day because of dreamhosts shitty mysql server

</comment><comment><USER27> oh man, that is really a great idea! If this service was around 6 months ago, ma.gnolia wouldn't have to go down.

</comment><comment><USER28> Congrats Justin. Looks really impressive

</comment><comment><USER29> Great work Justin!</comment>


The Way GCHQ Obliterated the Guardian's Laptops Revealed More Than It Intended - <AUTHOR> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/08/26/way-gchq-obliterated-guardians-laptops-revealed-intended/ <comment><USER2> It could be GCHQ actually had bugs, recorders and malware installed on those specific computers, knew it, and didn't want their existence revealed.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Original title is 'The Way GCHQ Obliterated The Guardian's Laptops May Have Revealed More Than It Intended' but that's longer than 80 characters. The HN title fits with the text at least.</comment>


Meet the Man Building the Fort Knox of Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/8/29/6082195/the-fort-knox-of-bitcoin-xapo-wences-casares

<comment><USER2> If you aren't holding the bitcoins yourself and instead are paying a fee for someone else to do so, it pretty much defeats the purpose and decentralized nature of bitcoin.</comment>