The $18B Electric-Car Bubble at Risk of Bursting in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-14/the-18-billion-electric-car-bubble-at-risk-of-bursting-in-china <comment><USER2> A newer and better article on EVs in China: [https://fortune.com/longform/electric-car-auto-industry- chin...](https://fortune.com/longform/electric-car-auto-industry-china/)

An interesting tidbit from this article: "One direct result of the meltdown was the Obama administration's 2009 economic-stimulus plan, which included billions of dollars in support for U.S. clean-energy industries. That spending plan caught the attention of Beijing. And it led, in 2009, to what Ouyang describes as a "strategic discussion at high levels" in the Chinese government about how the country should proceed with its own clean-technology push. China's State Council, the country's top policymaking body, ultimately announced nine "strategic" industries, one of which was electric cars."

</comment><comment><USER3> In China this is common when everyone wants to do or appear to do Govt promoted ideas and schemes to get govt subsidy. [1]

If they do not act in time someone else will get it.

It works somewhat similar to startup world where one raise money with compelling story, just in this case instead of VC it's govt money. Some survive and become big, but most fail. Obviously some are outright fraud.

[1] [https://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/1976825/chin...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/1976825/chinas- robot-industry-plagued-low-quality-overinvestment-and-too)

<comment><USER4> Gov is more likely to be schemed than VC because those who make investment decision don't get as much reward/punishment. However, for the same reason, gov can also invest in projects with long term benefits. So gov is not intrinsically good or bad; it's really about good governance.

<comment><USER5> I don't know if that's true. Overselling becomes less enticing to these administrators. It's really a question if less motivated but more rational people are better at these decisions.

That said, there is plenty of incompetence, fraud, and corruption to make the worst on both sides really bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's tons of performance bike manufacturers with minimal variation. Reason is its easy - not that many parts, parts easily configured and modular, easy to build, low maintenance.

Maybe EVs are similar. lower complexity than fossil engines (fewer parts and complexity moves down the supply chain). Perhaps such a large number of vehicle producers is sustainable. The real ev companies are the companies making batteries, motors, and ev base tech.

<comment><USER7> That would be similar to the dozens of Android phone brands. But new industries sometimes start that way, but eventually shake out into an oligopoly.

<comment><USER8> _But new industries sometimes start that way, but eventually shake out into an oligopoly._ The Herfindahl–Hirschman Index might say that's enough functional competition to sustain a good outcome. It depends. It's why we have in ICE engines anyway these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Note many of these are just forced by policies to "make" EV if they want to continue making traditional vehicles, others are just making money off of policies and subsidies, buyers are mostly forced to buy it due to license plate quotas.

EVs' reputation in China is going downhill ever faster, it's been called "electric daddy".

Urban area is extremely dense so it's lucky to find a place to charge where it hasn't been ocupied, many place refuse to turn on their chargers.

Hope western media can stop praising China's EV industry mindlessly, it's there coz of artificial markets. Just like farmers are banned to use coal, but they are never gonna be able to afford the natural gas heaters required to install.

<comment><USER10> > Urban area is extremely dense so it's lucky to find a place to charge where > it hasn't been ocupied, many place refuse to turn on chargers.

Plugging a car to the power grid is just one of many solutions to the problem of powering a car. There are other ways to solve the same problem, which in totalitarian regimes with a centrally planned economy are easier to implement, such as swapping pre-charged batteries.

<comment><USER11> Not only are you overlooking the massive size and weight of these batteries which would make it infeasible to build a battery swapping station in a smaller footprint than the space required for charging stalls but you have not addressed what to do about the cooling of the batteries. The Model 3 has coolant lines going through the battery itself so each battery swap would also require dumping and refilling fluid.

Nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Electric-Car Bubble"...

"EV sales make up just 4 percent of overall passenger vehicle sales of 23.7 million units, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers."

Yup, definitely sounds like a bubble.

Smog is their main problem, and EVs are the solution. Exponential growth will continue. And I'm tired of these anti-EV/anti-Tesla articles from Bloomberg.

<comment><USER10> > Smog is their main problem, and EVs are the solution.

They are not _the solution_. They represent a specific way to mitigate the problem by reducing the output of a very specific type of emissions.

I'd argue that setting up a functioning mass transit network in urban areas does more to lower emissions than switching powertrains in personal vehicles.

<comment><USER13> They are already doing this. And building cities out so people down have to travel as far or come downtown. The busses are the main cities are mainly electric and more and more cities are betting metro lines.

Most people use bikes or electric bikes to get to the metro or for short journies (probably at a ratio of 2 to 1) but people still want cars.

In Shanghai and Beijing, you can get an EV instantly but there is a quota for how many new ICE cars are added each month which means you go on a waiting list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article seems light on numbers and high on assumptions.

Plus what if the consolidation is expected? I mean during the formative days of ICE cars there were way more manufacturers than today...

<comment><USER15> HN is turning into r/china these days

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > 486 EV manufacturers registered in China

That's an incredible amount. I can't imagine the complexity of managing engineering a car, manufacturing, sourcing everything needed.

That's a lot of very ambitious people.

<comment><USER17> I think you'd have to be fairly naive to believe the tech was all developed in-house, especially in China.

<comment><USER18> Let's say you're half right. Or even 75% right. Or even 90%. That's still a lot of EV companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Here's my few cents worth. I think this article has got things back to front. Sure, there may be a bubble, but it's nowhere near bursting. Yes, there are fast growth rates predicted for EVs, but they still account for reaching a very small proportion of the overall vehicle market for quite some time. There's every reason to believe that things may change much more dramatically, much more quickly. If this proves to be the case, there is an equally good chance that the number of EV makers could increase equally spectacularly before there is any kind of consolidation in terms of numbers of players. History shows that when we started the journey from horses to automobiles, there was at least one small independent car maker in countless towns and cities at a time when the lack of experience, standard parts or skills meant that the vehicles you built were nowhere near as likely to be reliable or durable as just about any electric car you could build yourself today. In those days it was a challenge to start designing and building a new car (ironically it was almost as likely in the early days that the car engine design would be based upon on electric, steam, gasoline, natural gas or diesel) but today it's actually relatively easy to design and build a car factory. Ok, differentiation might be a challenge if you are going for a low cost market, but guess what, history tells us that localism counts for a lot in nascent automobile markets and 'staying profitable' for a small manufacturer where production costs are as low as they are for making electric vehicles using mostly standard parts may mean that the bubble is going to get a lot bigger, a lot faster and the burst, when it arrives, will probably be much more like a slow leak in a worn-out tire.

</comment><comment><USER20> Seriously, is there anything in China nowadays that is not a bubble?

<comment><USER8> Selling goods to the USA, and wine. Chinese red wine is pretty good. Bad wine has this habit of not succeeding.</comment></comment>


Makerbot in acquisition talks - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324069104578527723929210466.html

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're not used to the WSJ paywall, access the article via the Google results page instead: [https://www.google.com/search?q=3-D+Printer+Firm+MakerBot+in...](https://www.google.com/search?q=3-D+Printer+Firm+MakerBot+in+Acquisition+Talks&oq=3-D+Printer+Firm+MakerBot+in+Acquisition+Talks&aqs=chrome.0.57&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)</comment>


Ask HN: Online resources for beginner web dev/design - <AUTHOR>

My stepson (19, no college) is going to explore web development and design.  He doesn't have any prior experience.  I'm looking for free online resources for him to get some exposure.  I was thinking html,css,jQuery on codecademy to start with, and then introducing JavaScript.  What else is out there?  Is there anything similar for the design side of things? <comment><USER2> For a free, high quality introduction to HTML and CSS, take a look at [http://learn.shayhowe.com](http://learn.shayhowe.com).

A few others I'm aware of but less familiar with:

[http://tutorials.codebar.io](http://tutorials.codebar.io) [http://howtocodeinhtml.com](http://howtocodeinhtml.com) [http://learnlayout.com](http://learnlayout.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, some nice additional resources, the advanced shayhowe lessons look good for explaining the concepts around bootstrap which will be useful for a novice rather than just diving straight into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A good place for documentation is MDN (Mozilla Developer Network) [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web). They have extensive documentation with regards to web technologies. I suggest he read up about HTML first, getting the first few basic elements on the page. Then he can move on to CSS to style up the page.

At this point, you can practically build basic webpages with just HTML and CSS. From here, you can take 2 paths: A graphics designer or a front-end developer.

A graphics designer leans more to design rather than building apps. This requires a basic of jQuery, but mastery of Photoshop. A good place to learn is reading articles from Smashing Magazine [http://www.smashingmagazine.com/](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/)

A front-end developer leans more to app-building rather than design. This requires knowledge of JavaScript libraries and best practices. For this, select your basic set of frameworks and master them. Suggestions range from jQuery, Bootstrap, to full-fledged frameworks like Ember and Angular.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the smashing magazine link, should be worth exploring. While the MDN resources are great I was looking for more interactive tutorials. I'm hoping the gameification format used by codecademy will pull him in. Experince tells me his enthusiasm is inversely proportional to my own, so I'm hoping he can catch the bug without me having to walk through it with him.

<comment><USER3> You can provide him an IDE setup to give the errors. Sublime Text can be set up with plugins that provide immediate feedback about code errors. Just select a few for HTML, for CSS and for JS.

As for the gamification, [https://codecombat.com/](https://codecombat.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can check out Treehouse. It's not free, but a great value for the money since you get access to their full library.

[http://teamtreehouse.com/tracks](http://teamtreehouse.com/tracks)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this looks good, and it is close enough to free, I was just trying to avoid 12 week immersion code schools for $1000s. That may be an option later but just testing the waters first.

<comment><USER5> CodeSchool ([http://codeschool.com/](http://codeschool.com/)) is another similar one to Team Treehouse.

Their HTML / CSS ones are paid, but they have a free Javascript intro one: [https://www.codeschool.com/courses/javascript-road-trip- part...](https://www.codeschool.com/courses/javascript-road-trip-part-1)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this looks pretty similar to codecademy, have you done the courses? Any reason in particular to choose this over codecademy? I guess he can try the free ones and see if he finds additional value.

<comment><USER5> I have done a number of the CodeSchool ones, they are a video tutorial followed by an interactive code editor thing like Codecademy.

The difference is that Codecademy doesn't have the video beforehand (you read the instructions and do the exercise), vs. CodeSchool which gives a bit more of an in-depth explanation then you do the exercise.

I guess it comes down to which method of learning your stepson prefers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really like www.w3schools.com They go through HTML, CSS, JS, JQuery, and a ton of other stuff. I'm sure they're not the only site that does this, but I found the "Try it Yourself" feature to be extremely helpful. Every single concept has an built in editor with example code/markup, so you can see it in action, change it, break it, whatever.</comment>


Basic but useful 40 Linux Commands for newbies - <AUTHOR> http://teknixx.com/40-useful-linux-commands/

<comment><USER2> The quotes are missing. For example, #22 is "find -name _.sh " but the _.sh will expand in the shell, rather than in the find.

There are several other typos, like I don't think "passw" is the way to change the password but rather "passwd".

</comment><comment><USER3> You forgot command #1: sudo - use in those exceptional cases where you need root permission.

It makes me really sad that all these examples are showing a root prompt. It is dangerous and bad practice.</comment>


Leaning In Can Be Uncomfortable - <AUTHOR> http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/12/leaning-in-can-be-uncomfortable/

<comment><USER2> I think this makes some great points, without casting any blame. The article offers a very diplomatic perspective on some of the challenges facing female founders. I hope the comments here don't immediately become trolly, as they seem to do any time an article deals with women in tech at all.</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite stack overflow posts? - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> I guess this is technically stack exchange, not stack overflow, but the answer to this math question is amazing:

[https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1749853/if-there- ar...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1749853/if-there-are-74-heads- and-196-legs-how-many-horses-and-humans-are-there/1749871)

<comment><USER2> That's brilliant. So intuitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Probably this one on sorting socks. It perfectly displays the stack overflow community and the silly seriousness developers seem to have:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14415881/how-to-pair- soc...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14415881/how-to-pair-socks-from-a- pile-efficiently)

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you mean other than the famous "RegEx match open tags except XHTML self- contained tags" [1]?

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match- open...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags- except-xhtml-self-contained-tags)

<comment><USER2> Great answer but it depends on the use case. If the regex is for manually searching through a "view source" then who cares if finds the odd false positive?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Probably this one: "Cycles in family tree software" [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6163683/cycles-in- family...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6163683/cycles-in-family-tree- software)

</comment><comment><USER6> I like this one

"What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered?" [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the- best-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-comment- in-source-code-you-have-ever-encountered)

</comment><comment><USER2> [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is- subtracti...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6841333/why-is-subtracting- these-two-times-in-1927-giving-a-strange-result)

Shanghai 1927.

I'm sure there is a .Net answer as well similar to this.

</comment><comment><USER7> I recently found the following, and it just blew me away:

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8318911/why-does-html- th...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8318911/why-does-html-think- chucknorris-is-a-color)

</comment><comment><USER8> You can also run queries and find which questions are most upvoted.

[http://data.stackexchange.com](http://data.stackexchange.com)</comment>


An OCaml/Mirage-friendly implementation of the Plan9 filesystem protocol - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-9p <comment><USER2> This is cool. I've written two or three implementations of 9p in the past, the more the merrier :) In the other direction, I ported Ocaml's interpreter to Plan 9. Wish there were more people using it back in the day, but that's what you get from a dying operating system...

9P is cool though. Simple, elegant, working.

<comment> nv-vn >I ported Ocaml's interpreter to Plan 9.

That sounds pretty cool, care sharing any more information about this project?

<comment><USER2> here's the link to the page: [http://mirtchovski.com/p9/ocaml/](http://mirtchovski.com/p9/ocaml/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why is it that almost always 9P is implemented instead of the improved 9P2000?

<comment><USER4> Bottom of the README says:

> This library supports the 9P2000.u extension

<comment><USER5> That's right -- it'll negotiate 9P2000.u if it can and otherwise drop back to 9P2000. I don't think it'll ever support 9P2000.l the very Linux-specific variant.

<comment><USER6> Is there any reason to support 9P2000.l if you're not Linux? Are there Linux- specific filesystem servers that won't negotiate plain 9P2000?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd be interested to know how it compares to more recent protocols.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I put our passwords in our wills? - <AUTHOR> I'm just thinking about if we died all our documents, financial records, etc... are on our machines and cloud services, but where's a good place to stick our passwords just in case something happened to us and our families needed to access the information?<p>Eg: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26448158 <comment><USER2> I am using the emergency contacts feature in lastpass, this contact can ask for access, lastpass will contact and allow it if you don't respond in a configurable amount of time (i.e 24h, 1 week, etc). I have 2 emergency contacts, one with a long period and my wife with a shorter one. I also use secure notes to include information about important things that only I might be aware.

<comment><USER3> So does that mean they store your passwords in some other way as opposed to only storing those encrypted with your master password? I've only used 1pass, so maybe it's different, but that seems sketchy that they can just access your data without your master password to decrypt things. Or is this recovery system all handled locally on a machine you own?

<comment><USER4> [https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/emergency- access/](https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/emergency-access/)

From the documention:

LastPass uses public-private key cryptography with RSA-2048 to allow users to share the key to their vault with trusted parties, without ever passing that information in an unencrypted format to LastPass. When Emergency Access is activated, each user has a pair of cryptographic keys – a public key to allow others to encrypt data for the user, and a private key that allows the user to decrypt the data that others have encrypted for them.

The key used to encrypt and decrypt your vault data is encrypted with the Emergency Access contact's public key, and can be decrypted only with their corresponding private key. When setting up Emergency Access, you are using the recipient's public key, encrypting your vault key with that public key, and then LastPass stores that RSA-2048 encrypted data until it's released after the waiting period you specify. Only the recipient can decrypt the data, so no one else can decrypt it without access to the private key of the recipient you're sharing it with, which is encrypted with their master password key. This process is completely automated, with no action required by the end user, and ensures that the data is inaccessible by LastPass or outside parties.

<comment><USER3> Awesome! Thanks for the info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Safe Deposit box with emergency unlock codes for 1password or Last Pass maybe? That should be pretty straight-forward.

You would need to make clear that they would need your phone as well for MFA codes, so if you have a phone password (you should) make sure to put that in the deposit box or notes section of 1password/LastPass.

<comment><USER6> I would also recommend a Yubikey or something, in case MFA is needed.

Nice story here about this topic: [https://www.buzzfeed.com/nicolenguyen/digital-death-plan- pas...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/nicolenguyen/digital-death-plan- passwords?utm_term=.yhQQD2gnW#.mqEm8PB5G)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure about passwords. But I have left clearly explained how my family should use my private keys for my Bitcoin and Ethereum cold wallets.

<comment><USER8> "Do not hastily throw any hard drives away."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be better if you put a password hint on your will that only your beneficiaries could figure out; do not directly give the password.

</comment><comment><USER10> There was a newspaper column a decade ago urging people to write a "Read This If I am Dead" document describing how to actually find and do all the large and small things that you want done when the contents of your brain are gone. Thinking carefully about that, writing, revising and simplifying it to the point that someone will be able to actually do that when I am gone is probably the best thing I ever did. Google used to be able to find the contents of that column, but it appears gone now. There is a book now "Read This When I am Dead" by Presley and Howard on likely the same subject.

<comment><USER11> Humberto Cruz, "A family records organizer", in the Boston Globe, 2007 ---- [https://archive.is/SjTWI](https://archive.is/SjTWI)

"In essence, "Read This If I Am Dead" is a living, loving, and constantly evolving little book I write for my family. You can do the same..."</comment></comment>


Show HN: A real-time crowdsourcing game that improves what you're writing - <AUTHOR> http://proofist.com/party.html

<comment><AUTHOR> V1 was a few weeks ago and got folks pretty excited ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6908181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6908181)). Would love to see if the rewrite works better: it's now really easy to sync up with partners initially by posting a text on to the public lobby. Players sign on and proofread your text, and it's surprisingly fun to meet like-minded people, get feedback in real-time, and help others.

</comment><comment><USER2> I am still a little confused how this works... Must i TRY it to find out? A "How it works" page for the proof-readers would be most helpful

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Does the new blurb work better? I'm thinking of adding a FAQ or how-to page. So far, my focus has been on simplifying away anything that is unclear.</comment></comment>


I'm a Citizen of the Internet, Where's My Passport? - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/03/11/im-a-citizen-of-the-internet-where-do-i-get-my-passport/ <comment><USER3> Thinking a lot about nationality and citizenship lately and I've come to realize just how absurd is that far and away the easiest way move citizenship in this world is still marriage.

While a global citizen passport would be nice, simply making it easier for productive members of society to move around would make a great deal of difference. Imagine if all you had to do to move was to trade your American citizenship with a British person who wanted to move to the States. Wanna move back in 10 years? Trade your UK Passport to an American looking to move to Britain etc...

<comment><USER4> I had this idea, but even better: make the passport trades temporary, on a monthly basis, and turn it into a financial market.

US/UK switch? Probably basically free for both, if both are seen as equally desirable. But citizens from "less desirable" countries would pay ($30K/yr?) to have to the right to work in the US/UK. And, for example, US/UK doctors would receive money ($30K/yr?) to work in third-world countries. The rates would vary depending on each pair of countries and relative demand.

It seems abhorrent at first to ask already-poorer third-world citizens to pay money, but the $30K/yr would presumably come out of salaries paid from the first world -- so people from third-world countries would only be able to work in the US if they were making excellent money, and therefore contributing greatly to the economy. No money is actually being "taken" from the third- world. And the $30K/yr payment to doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. living abroad would provide a fantastic transfer of skills from the first world to the third world, helping to counteract "brain drain".

I'm not sure any governments would want to sign up for something like this, and it may feel rather questionable morally, but it could solve a lot of problems.

<comment><USER5> Do you think this should be limited to passports, or extended to citizenship as well?

<comment><USER4> I'm basically just thinking about the right to reside and work. And it would be on a monthly or yearly basis, not a permanent thing. Citizenship is a permanent thing, so it's a different beast entirely.

Of course, if citizenship were an option after n years of residing and working in a country (which is the case in many places), then one would expect the market prices to change considerably...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _Imagine there's no countries_

 _It isn't hard to do_

It's hardly a new position: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_citizen>

<comment><USER7> But does that mean we'd need a "World Government" too? That part kind of scares me, although I think something like EU is pretty democratic, although still not perfect, which means that at some point in time, maybe during a crisis, they'd call for "streamlining" the Government, making things more centralized, and therefore the thing I fear most about a World Government.

<comment><USER8> By no measure is EU "pretty democratic". I never voted for anyone who matters in the EU bureaucracy, nor was I given an opportunity. We have people running the EU like baroness Ashton who has never been elected in any elections, ever in her life, not just for her current position. The democracy deficit is painfully obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A nice yet very naive idea. The passport you hold represents a key to the walls which surrounds your country. Without these walls international trade would flow unhindered - resulting in the devastation of the western economies and our artificial upheld position as the worlds supreme beings.

If you really want this world join ATTACK or a similar organization and try to bring down WTO for starters.

Note: Not arguing one over the other - just stating the obvious

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if this article is a really an unconscious railing or secret diatribe against the cost of renewing a UK passport these days :)

* Minimum cost to renew a UK passport in 1997: GBP 18 ($28).

* Minimum cost to renew a UK passport in 2011/2012: GBP 77.50 ($121).

That's _431%_ in 14 years or 11% per year! This does not include Post Office handling charges.

This is more than twice the highest single data point inflation (even including housing) and almost four times the annual average over that period.

Oh, and if you were tempted to fast track it for the 1-day service renewal, that's GBP 129 ($202).

<comment><USER11> This is interesting. Consumer prices increased 24% from 1998-2009, passport renewal increased 269%. It seems the product has greatly changed and adopted technology and more bureaucracy. It appears the major reasons for £56 price increase were: * 40% new anti-fraud measures * 27% update passports, new anti- fraud, interview for 1st timers (2006) * 12% to deal with 500k backlog in 1999 * 20% because of falling number of passport applicants and to pay for ID cars.

The world has changed a lot over the last 14 years.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_passport#Fees>

<comment><USER12> Not to mention the costs of integrating the UK passport system with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The great thing about the internet is you don't need a passport...

</comment><comment><USER14> Maybe it's just me, but I couldn't stop thinking about taxes (and its collection) while reading the article.

<comment><USER15> Taxes are often levied on residence and behavior, rather than citizenship.

<comment><USER16> > Taxes are often levied on residence and behavior, rather than citizenship.

But not always. The US govt taxes overseas earnings of its citizens and resident aliens. (There's an exemption for the first $95k (plus some deductions) - <USER2> [http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,...](http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=97130,00.htmlhttp://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=97130,00.html) )

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My passport is my GnuPG public key.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm a citizen of the Internet and sadly, Facebook is my passport.

<comment><USER19> And the best part is it's so much easier to get a fake ID.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Who's going to help negotiate your release from some 3rd world prison on trumped-up charges, and with what leverage? And who's going to fight your extradition to some random country whose laws some judge deems your service to be infringing. Sometimes having a real country behind you can be a good thing.

<comment><USER21> Well, I don't want to come off as libertarian, but presumably you could buy insurance against this in an environment where there's a bunch of people who need such a service.

There's more such arguments, like suggestions that you need a nation to subsidize your health care or protect you from every day crime, but all of those are reasonably privatize-able as well.

<comment><USER20> How is an insurance company going to stop an extradition? Unless it manages to claim sovereign status over some land where you can live and have your business, you're still at the mercy of your generous host country. And if that happens, I think they call it a country.

<comment><USER21> Insurance Company A has mercenary company B and diplomat C on retainer in case of conflict with foreign nations.

Really, we pay taxes, and taxes cover things like the aforementioned ambassadorial services. It is arguably doable that we could pay some other organization to do the same thing.

<comment><USER20> OK, let me illustrate my point. Let's say you, a US citizen, renounce your citizenship and vow allegiance to this new entity which doesn't hold any land, but with which the US has generously agreed to a permanent residency status for any of its citizens (however unlikely such an occurrence). You run your online business from the US, and a judge in, say, Thailand rules that your product is in violation of their laws incriminating insults to the king. The Thai embassy files for your extradition, as the country has an extradition agreement with the US, and since you are not a US citizen, you are placed in US Immigration & Customs custody until your residency status can be determined. Now, why would the US ICE administrator or Justice Dept. official in charge stick his neck out and prevent your custody from being transferred to Thai authorities? What could your "ambassador" possibly offer as leverage comparable to what his Thai equivalent brings to bear?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Corporates are not bounded by citizenship. Perhaps we should start considering people as corporates rather than corporates as people. As long as you can be economically viable in a new country, just go ahead and settle there.

<comment><USER6> What do you mean? Corporations can't just start selling stuff either, they have to be registered, comply with the prerequisites, pay taxes, etc. Some countries are very lax, some are more restrictive, but that's true for citizenship too.

If you mean they aren't bound as in, forced to be in just one country, then citizens aren't either: I myself am a citizen of two countries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Facebook is the defacto. About.me along with its slew of clones are the long tail.

Think about it... certain demographics around the world all recognize the Facebook logo. Certain demographics will recognize the utility of a Facebook profile. Certain demographics will accept your Facebook login to exchange for access.

Month by month that legitimacy will only grow.

Your "hood passes" are different.

Who's the custodian of how long you've been on Reddit? How much karma you've gotten on Hacker News? How much influence you have on Twitter? How many followers you have on Tumblr?

Some roll their own with their own domain name while most others end up using About.me.

oAuth has a lot of your data too, maybe it's a matter of timing before someone takes that, make it into a legit passport service and sell it Google. Or Microsoft.

<comment><USER6> _oAuth has a lot of your data too_

Wait, what? oAuth is just a protocol.

 _make it into a legit passport service and sell it [to] (..) Microsoft._

Interestingly, it's Microsoft itself who tried to give people online passports: [https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/1999/10-11passp...](https://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/1999/10-11passport.mspx)

<comment><USER23> Bad phrasing. I see oAuth as having access to your data.

The joke I was making is that Microsoft started, kept changing, and ironically may one day just end up buying a startup to make their passport scheme finally useful.

<comment><USER6> Oh, OK, I didn't catch it, sorry ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nations and borders exist because different peoples have different values and different collective aspirations.

Even the notion of an 'internet citizen' is not an entirely universal citizenship. How much interaction do people on HN really have with the Chinese internet populace or the Russian internet populace or the Arabic-speaking internet populace? There are entire internet subcultures which do not or hardly intersect.

I'm sure at some point in human history being a 'world citizen' will be possible, but we're not even remotely close to that at this point.

<comment> guard-of-terra In fact, HN consists of Chinese, Russian and Arabic populace along with more traditional US/UK.

Reading comments to any submission I sometimes play "spot the Russian" and more often than not I find one.

HN perhaps have less interaction with Yahoo populace than they have with Russian populace. In internet, you have another axis orthogonal to citizenship - the services you're on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yes because the internet will defend you, protect your natural resources, provide you with health care, provide you with unemployment insurance, negotiate treaties to your benefit, inspect your food, regulate your drugs, educate your children and pave your roads.

The reason it's so hard to move between countries is standard exploitation. People would exploit the resources(be them natural or otherwise) and move on to the next place if there was nothing stopping them. Maybe you wouldn't. Or maybe you wouldn't notice yourself doing it. But people would. Tourism is really only good for local economies if you leave after a few weeks. Otherwise you're putting to large a burden on the place you're visiting and the payoff of having you come and leave money is no longer there.

People should be able to move to other countries if they want but it should be a serious and large decision. And realistically, you should care about your local government. It's not like democracy doesn't need you just because you have cute ideas about global citizenship.</comment>


Escaping the Von Neumann architecture - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/quale-quest/sql-mvc/blob/master/doc/Theory/Escaping_the_Von_Neumann_architecture.md

<comment><USER2> Pity that the author confuses declarative programming and functional programming. SQL was never nowhere near functional programming. It's closer to see it as a Prolog's cousin than Haskell's. This fundamental confusion weakens author's credibility greatly.

<comment> lafras-h Good point, I think I should not even link to that blog post that refers to it as such. [http://thoughts.davisjeff.com/2011/09/25/sql-the- successful-...](http://thoughts.davisjeff.com/2011/09/25/sql-the-successful- cousin-of-haskell/)</comment></comment>


Find out how a smart lamp can improve your Productivity - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/85280086/kien-light-intelligent-daylight-at-your-fingertips?ref=nav_search <comment><USER2> Wow, thats looks interesting

</comment><comment><USER3> great lamp! amazing project, everyone should have daylight on grey winter days

</comment><comment><USER4> Sensational creations !!!

</comment><comment><USER5> i can totally picture the concrete one above my desk!

</comment><comment><USER6> Amazing product!

</comment><comment> benny-luth really nice product

</comment><comment><USER7> cool!

</comment><comment><USER8> wow! nice</comment>


Western Digital makes a $46, 314GB hard drive just for the Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/03/western-digital-makes-a-46-314gb-hard-drive-just-for-the-raspberry-pi/ <comment><USER2> Took me a while..... 314GB because Pi=3.14....

<comment><USER3> "Currently available for $31.42".

<comment><USER4> Pi is 3.1415, so rounded to four numbers that's 3.142.

<comment><USER5> you rounded that incorrectly, the next digit is a 9: 3.14159265… but of course you are correct about the $31.42.

<comment><USER6> 4, i know there's a 4 after the last 5. memorized up to that decimal place way back in the day.

<comment><USER6> Just realized it's a 35 rounded to 4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if they limited the drive in software to 314gb and it's just a 500gb drive in reality. I have no idea how actual disks are produced and whether or not it's feasible to make specific platters for each product.

In any case very interesting, I wish there was a decent system w/ SATA for making DIY NAS devices, it seems though each raspi-ish with sata lacks gigabit ethernet, or they are limited to USB speeds.

<comment><USER8> 320 GB is a standard size of 2.5" form factor hard drive.

<comment><USER9> From what I understand these could be 320GB drives that were rejected because they had too many bad sectors, but still had over 314GB of usable storage. Manufacturers usually don't, but they can definitely control in firmware --- down to individual sectors --- how much usable capacity a drive has. A drive that didn't make 320 would likely be cut down to 250. They don't do it more granular than that because it would either mean a proliferation of models of very similar capacities, with the associated complexity of stock-keeping, or they'd have to sell drives where e.g. 320GB would mean a guaranteed minimum and you might get a 321, 325, or 323GB unit. (The early PC hard drives that came with a list of bad sectors physically printed on them were like this --- some would have more, and some would have less, but they'd all be within a few KB of a "nominal" capacity.)

I wonder if they made this one exactly 613,592,315 sectors...

<comment><USER10> Years ago WD sold a 808.8GB drive which reportedly contained two 500GB platters that had failed QC.

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA67S23Y89...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA67S23Y8983)

<comment><USER11> It always scares me when buying smaller than normal hard drives in that I am actually just buying drives that have failed QC.

<comment><USER12> Hope you never buy anything other than the fastest GPU and CPU for a given model :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Its a specific drive but obviously will work for other low power devices. Nice going WD, may buy one later. I've noticed that a lot of caddies actually draw over 1A for a split second when powering up, which is very bad for the USB port long term on older laptops.

<comment><USER14> No kidding. I have a Rikiki (LaCie, never again)(it's a 2.5" usb powered external HDD) that systematically shuts down my old and trusty eeepc (1000he) when plugged in _if_ the laptop is running on battery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've got a similar setup via homebrew. It's a USB 3.0 powered hub along with a USB spinning disk HDD, 500GB. The powered hub combined with the USB 5V power line helps keep the system afloat. For some reason, the system is more stable when it's overclocked to the highest setting!

</comment><comment><USER16> Damn, got to the end of the checkout process before I noticed it was US only.

<comment><USER17> According to WD:

[http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd- pidrive-314gb/](http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/)

> _Sold in US, UK, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cypress, Czech > Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, > Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia,Slovenia, > Sweden._

Try the link on that page, instead of Ars Technica's link to the US store: [http://store.wdc.com/promo/97047600](http://store.wdc.com/promo/97047600)

<comment><USER18> For Europe:

[http://store.wdc.com/store/wdeu/en_IE/DisplayAccesoryProduct...](http://store.wdc.com/store/wdeu/en_IE/DisplayAccesoryProductDetailsPage/ThemeID.22586100/productID.335498900/WD_314GB_PiDrive)

(It's 34,28 € with free EU-wide shipping.)

<comment><USER19> It's not EU-wide shipping. They're selling into a strange subset of the EU. Basically all the large countries are missing: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK are not listed in the menu of the shipping destinations (UK is listed in the product page but not in that menu). Maybe they don't have enough drives for everybody?

<comment><USER5> They seem to have separate stores for the large countries, you can see the offer by changing the locale (i.e. en_IE to de_DE) in the URL, but I can't add it to the cart and the search doesn't find it either. Their webshop is rather terrible :(

<comment><USER19> Maybe they are deliberately not selling this drive in those markets for now. My hypothesis is that they don't have enough units yet but did that already happen before?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Also, what about all those old SSDs replaced with higher capacity ones? folks are upgrading their 128's all the time and these should fit in a caddy nicely.

</comment><comment><USER20> Is it really 314GB? Or is it actually 314159265kB?

<comment><USER21> Or is it really just 320GB and they are calling it 314GB to go along with the pi-based promotion?

Either way, I'm in for one. I have an extra Pi that I was trying to decide what to do with, and this harddrive will be perfect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> One of the things I find interesting about the Orange Pi [0] is that it has SATA headers on it, which would be perfect for a media center.

[0] [http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiplus2/](http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiplus2/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Still, I don't understand why I can't find HDD smaller than 500GB and cheaper. I guess they mass produce to bring cost down, or maybe 500GB is the most efficient GB/$, but I'd be happy about a 250GB HDD for less.

<comment><USER24> A hard drive is a set of magnetic platters that's spun by a motor inside a casing with a circuit board. A read-write head rides each platter atop a thin boundary layer of air. The platters are the expensive bits that have QA/QC problems.

There may be 1-5 platters fit in conventional drives, or up to 7 in helium- filled drives (thinner than air).

To build these, it costs the hard-drive maker a given amount for the casing and circuitboard and motors and such, and then some other amount per precision-manufactured platter. A drive that has 5 platters will cost a lot less to make than 5 drives each containing 1 platter.

Hard-drive builders like to work with the same basic parts, so when they switch to a 500GB per 3.5" platter mark, they'll tend to have drives at 500GB, 1000GB, 1500GB, 2000GB, and 2500GB.

The smallest HDD in a form factor tends to be set by the smallest platter they still bother making, and the price for it tends to be remarkably high per gigabyte because there's less data to amortize over the parts needed to make a drive. Generally it will cost them about the same to make a 500GB platter as it cost them to make a 200GB platter a few years earlier.

The cutting edge pushes HDD areal density. A 2.5" platter is smaller and will hold less data per platter than a 3.5" platter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember when CompUSA had a big sale selling a 340MB hard drive for $340. They called it the "Buck A Meg" sale.

This would have been around 1994-1995. Boy, things sure have changed...

</comment><comment><USER25> This could make a whole bunch of interesting things possible.

</comment><comment><USER26> Unavailable for shipping internationally, which is unfortunate.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is really awesome, hopefully there is a case soon that accommodates it for a neat little package

<comment><USER28> Not a bad looking case they sell for it and the pi

[http://store.wdc.com/store/wdus/en_US/DisplayAccesoryProduct...](http://store.wdc.com/store/wdus/en_US/DisplayAccesoryProductDetailsPage/ThemeID.21986300/productID.330357600/WD_Pi_Enclosure%2C_Black)

<comment><USER29> I love how scifi this looks. Ordered one, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> i don't want to be a debbie downer because i like the raspberry pi too, but this article looks like a Press Release fluff piece. They link to 'prnewswire' and the whole thing seems like an SEO gimmick.

<comment><USER17> It's a real product: [http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd- pidrive-314gb/](http://wdlabs.wd.com/products/wd-pidrive-314gb/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> But the 1TB version has over 3x the storage and is just above 2x the price.

</comment><comment><USER32> I bought a 2tb thumb drive in Wish for $16. Is it slow or error prone?

<comment><USER33> Try formatting the drive, sometimes you'll get the original size. Ten years back there were many mp3 players with fake 1gb storage, which when formatted would show only 256mb.

<comment><USER34> This sounds hilarious. I would love to hear some stories!

<comment><USER35> They're very common overseas. When I lived in Shanghai, the markets would have tons of these. Unfortunately, they aren't always ludicrously oversized/underpriced. I had some data I lost on a 16GB drive that was only 4GB(IIRC). Granted, that was years ago

<comment><USER21> You can see them on Amazon if you look for flash drives. A few manufacturers will have really large drives (256GB or more) for ridiculously low prices, along with a 1-star rating and a lot of people claiming they are fakes.

There are plenty of legit companies selling devices that are legitimately those sizes, but you will pay a lot for them.

Of course, since flash media prices seem to drop by 25% or more every year, it won't be long before there are real devices at the prices of those fake ones mentioned above.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't really get why the RPi still doesn't have a proper eSATA or at least a PCIe/TB interface...

<comment><USER37> The Pi is a cheap device based on phone SoCs, so it's limited to what typical smartphones can have.

<comment><USER38> The Pi 2 and later use custom chips designed and manufactured solely for use in the Pi. The real reason is that for whatever reason, Broadcom don't seem to be interested in any upgrades beyond sticking a faster ARM CPU in.

<comment><USER37> They are made specifically for the Pi, yes, but they're still basically customised phone SoCs.

<comment><USER36> So if they're already customized, I don't see the problem in adding an eSATA or "real" Ethernet/MII IP core.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't understand this at all.

Why would I attach a (relatively) large, (relatively) power hungry _spinning disk_ to a raspberry pi when I can very simply attach a nice little compact flash card, or an even faster and smaller mSATA card ...?

Which is not to mention that it already natively accepts microSD cards ...

Why would anyone want this ?

<comment> Const-me The most obvious reason is cost per GB. SSD of comparable capacity would cost $200-$400.

Also, for some use cases, spinning HDDs are more reliable. For example, if you're building a video surveillance server, i.e. you'll be overwriting the whole drive 24/7 at several megabits/sec, you'll soon wear out a typical flash drive. In the same conditions, a typical spinning HDD will be just fine, enjoying stable thermal conditions and the lack of spin up/down cycles.

<comment><USER40> 1TB SSDs are actually only $230 right now

[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226596)

That's a MLC drive btw, not cheap TLC.

<comment><USER41> $230 drive for a $35 computer; surely these aren't in the same niche?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


True Zero-Downtime HAProxy Reloads - <AUTHOR> http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2015/04/true-zero-downtime-haproxy-reloads.html <comment><USER2> This was more complicated that I hoped it would be. Is there any reason HAProxy couldn't simply add a way to reload it's conifg file while running?

It already supports a bunch of commands to modify the config while it is running, via the Unix socket, but there's no way to pipe an entire config file to that socket.

It wouldn't work for version upgrades, of course, but that's not really the main use case.

Another option could be to start up a parallel HAProxy that listens to a different port. Then use iptables to route traffic to that port instead of the old one. Not sure if this would break connections, though, or if there is a way to prevent breaking connections.

<comment><USER3> _Another option could be to start up a parallel HAProxy that listens to a different port._

That's how we do it and the script isn't even complicated.

Use iptables to shift the traffic to the new instance, wait for the old instance to drain (netstat is your friend), and kill it.

Much respect to the effort that went into the yelp solution, but it does feel a bit brittle and over-engineered for a such a simple problem.

<comment><USER4> The solution you mention has some tradeoffs. Imagine that you have hundreds of services each of which have a port and have some long running connections. With your solution you can only restart the load balancer at the rate of the longest running connections or whenever ports run out, whichever comes first.

Also then you'd have to maintain the logic to do the port mapping, iptables switching, draining, etc ...

The post mentions they considered this option and they claim that they were worried about engineering risk; seems reasonable to be worried about that.

<comment><USER3> _With your solution you can only restart the load balancer at the rate of the longest running connections_

Well, perhaps I should have provided more detail. Our ansible deployment script actually counts the port up until it finds a free one (we keep a port- range reserved for this purpose). So if there are multiple changes in rapid succession then more than two haproxy instances may dangle around for a while.

The "port discovery" is a shell-task that registers the port to be used as a variable, which is then used by the templates of the haproxy and iptables roles.

The cleanup is done by a 15min-cronjob which kills all haproxy instances that have no connections in netstat and don't match the haproxy pidfile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My favorite part was when you were rewarded for scouring the source code by finding an undocumented qdisc, that was golden. :)

You mentioned that your colleague had produced a patch that did file handle passing? Is that patch available? My first thought on reading that was, how many other people have tried that very task. Im wondering if it would be helpful to HAPrpxy if your patch was made available?

Thank you for sharing the plug qdisc, this is hugely useful in any number of situations. Did you find any others by chance?

I can see why some would say this solution is brittle, but actually I quite like it. It feels elegant and The Right Way to do it.

<comment><USER6> Yep, I found a number of them, but I promptly forgot them in excitement when I found the one I actually wanted. If you want to check them out yourself, they appear to congregate in the kernel tree at net/sched/sch_* [1].

The only other qdisc I have much experience with is sch_netem, which emulates behaviors of a WAN (delay, loss, etc). I used it in this post [2] to conduct adversarial testing of MySQL replication (search 'tc qdisc').

[1] [http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/net/sched/](http://lxr.free- electrons.com/source/net/sched/)

[2] [http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2014/03/mysql-replication- ne...](http://engineeringblog.yelp.com/2014/03/mysql-replication-network- issues-and-why-you-might-want-to-upgrade.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How about using IPVS? To reload HAProxy, start a new instance, add as a new IPVS real server, set the weight of the old HAProxy to zero, wait until the connection count drops to zero, and then you can remove the old HAProxy real server.

IPVS also allows to gradually shift traffic from one instance to the other. So if you see elevated error reports from the new server, you can quickly drop it and go back to the old setup.

<comment><USER8> I am not familiar with IPVS, I'll look into it.

From your description though I imagine it might have the same drawbacks that exist with the multiple HAProxy + iptables swap solution. With a solution where we run multiple HAProxies and move traffic between them I worry about port exhaustion, long running connections, and the maintenance costs of the infrastructure. It could just be the case that we're talking about different problems. At Yelp we have hundreds of services that are added, changed, moved, and removed from physical machines causing our internal HAProxies (which listen on hundreds of ports and many have long running connections) to reload pretty constantly.

As all engineering decisions, I could very easily be wrong and be overestimating the complexity involved with the multiple HAProxy instance solution. At the end of the day I made a call based on the data available, and I decided the solution I talked about in the blog post was lowest risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Everyone seems to have overlooked the fact this only works for outgoing traffic, you can't use this strategy on a public facing load-balancer without additional work.

Specifically you will need to accept the traffic on one interface and forward to a new local interface in order to apply the qdisc plug.

This is cool, but the above is still a pain in the neck.

<comment><USER8> Totally agree, I mention this as the largest drawback of this approach in the post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Doesn't unix socket commands work without dropping connections?

[http://cbonte.github.io/haproxy- dconv/configuration-1.5.html...](http://cbonte.github.io/haproxy- dconv/configuration-1.5.html#9.2)

<comment><USER2> Yes, but you can only apply small updates. You can't reload the whole config.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why not simply let DNS handle the routing and load balancing?

Bring up another HAProxy with the new configuration. Then swap the new and old IP addresses in DNS. Wait for DNS to propagate. When traffic on old HAProxy is zero, bring it down.

<comment><USER12> DNS is a fragile system to use within a DC to do service/endpoint discovery. That's because DNS tends to be a single point of failure.

Though the DNS system can inherently be resilient, within a DC most people only operate a single DNS server because a hierarchical domain scheme and DNS setup within DC is too cumbersome and is much less reactive to end point changes. Eg: Changing a service endpoint in an emergency takes way too long.

A single DNS server means, still there are propagation delays(local caches) and a single point of failure at critical moments(when there is a thundering herd)

<comment><USER13> That's a pretty weak argument. It's like calling a databases a single point of failure because the people who set them up tend to be too lazy to setup HA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> wow, ton of respect for solving that and proving it out so clearly.

but also, soooo glad to have 'real' loadbalancers and not have had to do this.

</comment><comment><USER15> When you run `/etc/init.d/nginx reload` I was under this impression this is zero-downtime. Is that not true then?

<comment><USER16> If you truly meant Nginx and not HAProxy, Nginx does its best to avoid dropping connections on a reload:

[http://nginx.org/en/docs/control.html](http://nginx.org/en/docs/control.html)

> In order for nginx to re-read the configuration file, a HUP signal should be > sent to the master process. The master process first checks the syntax > validity, then tries to apply new configuration, that is, to open log files > and new listen sockets. If this fails, it rolls back changes and continues > to work with old configuration. If this succeeds, it starts new worker > processes, and sends messages to old worker processes requesting them to > shut down gracefully. Old worker processes close listen sockets and continue > to service old clients. After all clients are serviced, old worker processes > are shut down.

It brings up the new worker processes to handle new connections and wait for the existing connections to terminate. Key phrase is "does its best", I've seen edge cases that aren't really Nginx's fault that cause connections to be dropped. [e.g. OOM issues when it tries to bring up new workers]

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not familiar with HAProxy, but with other load balancers. I've been looking into it as a replacement for the hardware load balancers we use.

Why do you have to reload haproxy? When you update the configuration?

I reload nginx all the time (nginx -s reload) and I'm not sure if that is a true zero-downtime reload either.

Interesting hack nonetheless (stopping SYNs.)

<comment><USER18> Reloading HAProxy is part of the SmartStack architecture, IIRC. SmartStack/synapse does polling on say, ZooKeeper or Docker or whatever, generates a new HAProxy configuration and then reloads it.

<comment><USER19> That's an important detail, as it explains why the tests aren't entirely flawed: Testing 10 reloads every second really distorts the numbers, assuming a reload every hour, or every few hours is more realistic. But if reloads are part of what amounts to doing live testing on a large part of live traffic -- then the exercise makes more sense.

And to be sure; being _able_ to do ten reloads every second with few ill effects enables different, more nimble systems engineering.

But if we assume 2000 requests per second, per box - fighting ~100 reset connections a day (assuming two ha-proxy reconfigs) doesn't really seem worth the effort - packet loss and other outages would probably(?) domminate anyway.

<comment><USER20> _> Testing 10 reloads every second really distorts the numbers, assuming a reload every hour, or every few hours is more realistic._

It depends on what you do. I've seen shops (successfully and, IMO, correctly) scaling AWS instances for services with a threshhold of every fifteen minutes, and I've seen Mesos clusters dynamically spinning up web instances much more nimbly than that (think every two minutes under spiky load--the instances would come up in five seconds, so it didn't hurt to down them).

<comment><USER19> Well, once every 120 seconds is still quite a leap from 10 every second...

<comment><USER20> Sure, but if it doesn't work there, I don't trust it to work if, say, a piece of my scheduler goes nuts and suddenly is upping and downing containers every few seconds. The problem remains, it's just not as acute and still must be fixed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm afraid I'm also of the feeling that this is too complex, especially moving forward with the business. It was probably fun to work on it and solved your issue, but somehow it looks like a patch for an architecture issue.

Does this add extra complexity to platform (software) updates?

</comment><comment><USER22> Does this issue exist in servers like Unicorn? A new instance forks from the old one, inheriting sockets, and starts handling requests.

[http://unicorn.bogomips.org/SIGNALS.html](http://unicorn.bogomips.org/SIGNALS.html)

<comment><USER23> I suspect inherited sockets across forks don't exhibit this, if a test done by Nicholas Grilly described on the haproxy mailing list [0] is to be believed (no code though, but shouldn't be hard to reproduce).

One thing that makes doing this in haproxy difficult is that there is not really any shared state between the parent and child processes, so the child doesn't have a good way to know which file descriptor maps to which listening endpoint in the configuration, since the child pretty much throws its entire state away and reads the config file anew. It's not that there can't be any shared state, but that's not how it's been architected. Finding out the endpoint via something like getsockname(2) might be doable, but the mapping of listening endpoints to listen configuration blocks isn't one-to-one, so it's actually "safer" (from an amount of code standpoint) to use SO_REUSEPORT and let the OS handling the shared listening.

[0] [http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.haproxy/14143](http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.haproxy/14143)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> My gut feeling is that this approach can be prone to silent misbehavior that they cannot detect.

There's no reason not to patch HA to reload it's config and reapply it.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're using this for internal load balancing, so we control both ends of the connection. If this started misbehaving, we'd see timeouts, dropped connections, or errors, which would show up in logs.

<comment><USER24> I see. Any reason not to patch HA to reload config?

<comment><USER8> Patching HAProxy to reload config is really hard. There have been ideas, patches, and discussions on the HAProxy mailing list for a few years now trying to get zero downtime reloads natively supported in HAProxy, but the reality is that it just is not as easy as it might seem.

For more details check out the mailing list: [http://marc.info/?l=haproxy](http://marc.info/?l=haproxy)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Last Days of John Allen Chau - <AUTHOR> https://www.outsideonline.com/2400030/john-allen-chau-life-death-north-sentinel <comment><USER2> Reading the history of Westerners on the islands really broke my heart. Particularly this paragraph:

> Perhaps no one fell so deeply under the islands' spell as Maurice Vidal > Portman, a minor English aristocrat and amateur anthropologist who was made > Royal Navy officer in charge of the islands in 1879 when he was just 19. For > two decades, Portman made ceaseless expeditions to find the various Andaman > tribes, who he would kidnap and transport to Port Blair. Portman was an > enthusiastic practitioner of "race science," believing that intelligence > could be gauged by measuring a subject's cranium with calipers. Poor science > cannot explain Portman's additional recording of the size of islanders' > penises, breasts, and testicles; his evaluation of their "lustfulness" > (which he equated with willfulness); and his photographs of naked tribesmen > in classical poses. But his ambivalence about whether his subjects lived or > died is explained by the view, common in Europe at the time, that the beings > before him were so distantly of his species, they were best categorized as > fauna. "They sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the > four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents," > Portman wrote of six Sentinelese he took to Port Blair. "This expedition was > not a success. ... We cannot be said to have done anything more than > increase their general terror of, and hostility to, all comers."

I cannot even begin to imagine how terrified those people must have been. To be kidnapped and then poked and prodded by a bunch of instruments you've never seen before by people you can't communicate with or understand. The way they were treated was truly barbaric.

<comment><USER3> It almost sounds like an episode of alien abduction. Except the aliens were white men in a ship, not Martians on a flying saucer. We have indeed fashioned the villains in our fantasies after our own image.

<comment><USER4> Except that none of the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_abduction_claimants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_abduction_claimants) would claim that they were fantasizing their experience. But anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found reading this article gripping and it led to a lot of questions.

My first thought is how casual 'belief' or 'faith' in moderate Christians is what led JAC down this route. When society believes that not knowing God is a path to eternal damnation, then is it that surprising if someone with empathy and ambition makes it their mission to fix?

Obviously there is also a bit of the 'messiah' complex going on there - probably reinforced by other Christians and IG followers.

I was also thinking about how the dad felt, when he tried to talk his son out of what he was doing, but couldn't argue against the religious beliefs he'd previously taught him? At that point, if I were in his shoes, would I hold my hands up and say my faith had all been a big mistake, it was convenient to getting me where I am, but it doesn't really make sense. Or maybe I'd take the tack of 'don't be so extreme - be more moderate', something that really wasn't going to fly with JAC.

Also, as a father, I can't imagine raising a baby boy, a child, who becomes a young adult and then watching him take this path. The article made me think about how a father is a role-model to their children. His father went through a difficult time with his career and JAC was witness to this. I lead a stressful, busy life, I wonder what affect that will have on my kids outlook?

<comment><USER6> > bit of the 'messiah' complex

Why not calling it mental illness at this point...

<comment><USER5> You can have a bit of messiah or jesus complex without having mental illness, and mental illness is a broad term for an entire field of medicine, so it's not very specific. I don't think we can call it mental illness unless we are trained psychiatrists and we'd assessed him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think the effort to say "look, this guy wasn't evil, he was doing what he thought was right" is totally off course.

Almost no one is intentionally evil. Most people somehow or another justify whatever they are doing as right. I'd imagine most low level nazi party members thought they were making a hard decision to do what was right.

He did what he thought was right and luckily he got killed as opposed to surviving to make contact causing serious damage to the tribe.

He is the embodiment of evil to me, not because he wanted to be evil but because he was too stupid or intellectually dishonest to realize that what he thought was right was deeply damaging to other people. In this sense he puts himself in the company of most horrendous people in history.

<comment><USER8> Brutal. Can it really be classified as evil without intention to do harm, though? It seems to me that true evil can only be if the actor knows and intends harm. Classifying ignorance as evil seems disingenuous - ignorance can be not only a symptom of laziness or some other self-imposed decision but also a result of circumstances out of ones control. Being a victim of circumstance does not IMO precipitate being evil.

<comment><USER9> Would you consider attempting to convince an entire civilization to bend to your (lord's) will, against their own (as expressed on several occasions, spanning several decades), to be a harmful act?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not a bad write-up but one thing that's conspicuously missing is anything about Lynda, John's mother, who apparently was the most devout of the family. Isn't _her_ influence in his life likely to be as or more important than his father's? My guess is that the author had access to Patrick but not Lynda and shaped the narrative accordingly; if true, that would be unfortunate.

</comment><comment><USER11> I feel like I have the opposite problem. I don't actually have many strong beliefs that guide my life, which leads to "drifting" and lack of intentionality.

The most fulfilled people in life are probably wired more like JAC than anything else. Like if he applied that level of belief to a startup as he did to his faith I imagine he'd be wildly successful by now.

<comment><USER12> I also sometimes envy people who totally identify with something be it religion, business or something else. It must be nice to have full conviction following a path but obviously this can also go wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article completely glosses over Chau's selfishness, he exposed the Sentinelese to outside pathogens that they have no immunity to and could have killed all of them, that might currently be killing them for all we know. He possibly wiped out a stone age community of real people.

<comment><USER14> The article makes multiple references to the fact that he could have infected the islanders, I'm not sure what led you to this conclusion.

<comment><USER3> The article also mentions that he immunized himself against a dozen diseases -- probably in addition to the vaccines that most Americans get in their childhood -- and quarantined himself for a while, too. He was definitely aware of the risk and tried to minimize it. Not sure whether that was enough, though. If the North Sentinelese have been isolated since the end of the last ice age, they could be vulnerable to something that outsiders don't even care about, like our normal gut flora.

<comment><USER15> Well, specifically it said he "attempted to immunize himself against 13 diseases", which isn't equivalent to actually doing that. Furthermore, I get the sense that his isolation was primarily to avoid the authorities ("he stayed not at the Lalaji but secretly—and illegally", use of the word "safehouse"), and not due to biological concerns. If anything, that was a second order benefit in his mind - "The benefit of that is that I was essentially in quarantine"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reading this makes me want to look at what constitutes fanaticism in my own life. His life looks like a study in someone who fell into a true believer mindset and it led to his death.

But, I'm haunted by the parallels of En-mei, who turned out to be no less subject to the stress of finding a mate than those of us in the more modern world. If there is a hidden message there that is trying to say that we are all fanatics like JAC, well, it's an interesting thought.

<comment><USER5> I think the message is we all just want to get laid...

Joking aside, we might be fanatic about some things, but if we knew of an incredibly violent group of programmers using notepad, I think I'd pass up attempting to teach them vim.

<comment><USER17> "Have you heard the good word of emacs?"

<comment><USER16> Coincidence that Stallman has all the letters of Satan? I doubt it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What an astounding success! Job well done, mission accomplished, RIP.

What I don't understand is the dismay felt by readers for the loss of this ignorant and closed mind man. Most men lives life of quiet desperation. There is no meaning but that which we make and this (to me) foolish man live the life that he wanted.

</comment><comment><USER19> Im glad someone took the time to write this

</comment><comment><USER4> Many dreamers die while following their dreams; this does not mean dreaming is wrong.

<comment><USER20> In this case the dream was making a bunch of people sick and kill them.

Hitler also had a dream. Sadly he was not killed fast enough.

So before you die following your dream, you should run a sanity check on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I read the abstract, anyway.</comment>


OMGPOP Draws Zynga's Daily User Traffic Up By 25% - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/31/omgpop-draws-up-zyngas-traffic-a-25-increase-in-total-daily-users/

<comment><USER3> The article buries that caveat about how many players of Draw Something also play Words with Friends, etc. I would guess it's a significant amount. I play both games, and many of the friends I play with are playing both too.

So, inaccurate headline with a rather speculative article to follow.

</comment><comment><USER4> So when is Zynga's traffic going to normalize? Most of the guys I know have already stopped playing the game.

I was actually thinking, what about creating the same game except only obscene/explicit/offensive adult drawings & word choices? There should be plenty of immature people wanting to play the game with their immature friends. I would : )

I read the rules on the Apple app stores and it doesn't seem promising to obtain approval. If someone knows how to find a loophole into getting it approved, please let me know!

BTW. I think everyone is valuing Zynga incorrectly. Wall street guys and VC guys alike are looking at Zynga with an incorrect model just like all the street guys built incorrect assumptions in their models for housing before it popped.

People should be valuing the company on a risk-adjusted long-term discounted cash flow basis (similar to an early stage pharmaceutical company) mixed with sensitized accretion/dilution models as these companies have to continuously go on acquisition sprees if they do not organically produce good games... But at one point or another, they're not going to create cool games / there won't be another OMGPOP available to buy OR what they bought cools down faster than what they envisioned; and that "RISK" is not currently priced in today's stock price.

Hot games come and go over time but with very little visibility to know when it'll get cold. So what would happen if I was able to create OMGPOP2 - <USER2> version and somehow it was approved and got crazy popular taking market share from the original game. Then Zynga just wasted a lot of the 200m they just paid for (I heard it only makes 200k a day on ads)... that's a long ways to go to make up that 200m watermark to break even, taking into account fairly strong growth...

GG.

<comment><USER5> If it really made 200k a day on ads, that's 73 million a year. That would be crazy if true and would justify a 200m valuation.

<comment><USER4> True statement. But only if the analysis was that easy... Yes, if that can continue but the 200m valuation is much more complicated than applying a 3x multiple on 73m earnings.

You have to model out and do a churn and fatigue analysis to get to your top- line volume potential over time (meaning, games like this for example, my friends who used to play 3 hours a day now play 30 minutes a week or just stopped playing... this is in a span of 3 weeks of playing!). What goes up can go down. Of course Robryan makes a great point about potential synergies but I would imagine synergies can't be that great. Who plays these games that haven't played angry bird or other zynga games? Only a subset of the population would be incremental new users.

What is the average churn rate per week/month? What is the avg user's playing time per month and trend (trend should go down over time) and one or both of the variables drop by 25-50% more than offsetting any new users added. Then that 2-3 year payback period to break even now turns into 4-5-6 years. So then would this game be still popular at all for that many years? Maybe. I don't know.

What I was pointing out was if somehow some new drawing game like my absurd example becomes more popular over the next 2-4 years then it's got a lot more binary risk embedded in that 200m valuation that most investors are not thinking about or priced in.

Now, I don't know how many people are paying members v. ad members. That may help / not help their case.

Hope that clears up any lack of clarity that I provided in my previous post!</comment></comment></comment>