Why I Don't Host My Own Blog Anymore - <AUTHOR> http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/02/09/why-i-dont-host-my-own-blog-anymore/ <comment><USER2> I don't know, Patrick, it really seems like a lot of pain and suffering you went though for nothing.

Perhaps if you added your actual volume numbers to your entry it would help the conversation? I have several sites on various platforms, and I'm currently running over 160K visits per month across all of them. It's not unusual to have 10K visitors from HN drop by on any given day. I haven't had any problem with WP. Of course, I don't really check it. It just works.

I hate to sound non-caring, but is it really a problem if ten people come by your blog at 3am and can't load the site up? They'll be back at 4am, and the site will be fine then. Do you really need 99.999 uptime on a _blog_? It's all a numbers game. If you lose 2% of visitors due to technical problems it shouldn't be a huge deal. Just take a look at your funnel and conversion numbers and do the math. There's no way that damage is going to come out to $2500 per year.

On a personal note, what I find is that there are a huge number of opportunities for my startups to accrue costs that don't justify the benefit. It's tough figuring out what to spend money on. Things like hosting or tools have to pull their own weight.

ADD: There are a lot of companies that made huge amounts of money leveraging free blogging services. Not my cup of tea, but it does provide a bit of context.

<comment><USER3> 3 AM Japan time is, um, what time is it for you now? It's then. Right in the middle of the US work day. Which is typically when Jimmy Wales decides to get me mentioned in the NYT. That was mostly not business-oriented, but in general, that sort of thing is very worthwhile.

I don't really have a conversion funnel for the blog at present. (That will probably change in the future, which is one of the reasons I knew I _had_ to switch.) It's just my main source of consulting leads and a) my rates justify $2.5k pretty easily and b) consulting clients start getting all kinds of skeptical if their SEO guy isn't on the Googles because his server went down.

(I'm not the only person with this problem. You should have seen Fog Creek when their blog decided to die. By freak accident I was in the office when it happened and was able to successfully diagnose the problem from "Wordpress just crashed": it was Apache KeepAlive because it's _always_ Apache KeepAlive, grumblegrumblegrumble.)

<comment><USER2> So this is really more of an image thing -- site responsiveness, accessibility, and so forth. Similar to how a shopkeeper might have paid 2500 each year to have a sign custom-painted out front.

In that case, makes sense. I'm not an extreme cheapo -- I'm probably paying 1800 a year for my various hosting solutions, but that's spread across HostGator, a MT hosting company, and AWS. I'm moving to AWS -- exactly in the opposite direction that you are heading -- because I like buying cycles. I can set up databases, write code, and have more power to write hybrid sites. I'm beginning to look at producing content on the web, blogs, apps, static sites, or mixed-mode stuff, as more of an art form and less of a pre-canned WP experience. So I need a box, not a service.

But I look at this as simple content. I'm serving bits to folks who come and consume them. I don't generate consulting leads though my sites, I provide data people want for free, so as long as _most_ of the people get _most_ of the data, everything is copasetic on my end. It sounds like we have completely different purposes.

Just as a off-the-wall suggestion to other readers, you know you could write a script to consume your blog entries and move them to a CDN as static pages. You'd get a hell of a boost in performance, and I don't think you'd really have to change much. (Probably much tougher than I make it out to be. Haven't really thought it through. I use URL rewriting on some of my newer sites, so it all looks like static content anyway.)

<comment><USER4> You should only be creating custom solutions if this (blogging for instance) is your primary business. If you want to kick ass as a one-person team you have to know your limits and only spend time of things which are critical.

Nice suggestion re CDN.

<comment><USER5> _You should only be creating custom solutions if this (blogging for instance) is your primary business_

Even more specifically, only if existing tools do not meet or cannot be adapted to your needs!

<comment><USER4> I disagree. If something is core to your business you cannot outsource it.

Google couldn't use someone else's search engine

Microsoft couldn't use an outside kernel or filesystem for windows

Gridspy has to make its own dashboards. However, We can use handy libraries for html templating and graph rendering.

<comment><USER5> But a blogger (the given example) produces content. A blogging platform is core to their business, but it isn't what brings value. In Google's case, the search engine _is_ what brings value.

Don't let yourself get caught up in NIH syndrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first thing I thought of when I saw this was: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3452477> where about a month ago you mentioned you were on-site doing work for WPEngine.

In the interest of full disclosure, this really needs an up-front disclaimer; the only mention I could find was in the "P.S." in the last paragraph [edit: also mentioned halfway through]. Actually, the article reads like classic long-form sales copy so perhaps people will be automatically conditioned to scroll to the bottom to look for the "P.S." line. :)

<comment><USER7> He did disclaim his involvement, and indeed, his in-the-middle mention of doing client work for them came exactly as he started talking about why WPEngine was so great. You literally can't get to the part where he's praising WPEngine without either finding out he's worked for them or skipping part of the article (in which case, you don't get to complain about _him_ missing something).

<comment><USER6> He only mentions doing marketing work for them after his copy discusses several of people's pain points and waxes poetic for a number of paragraphs about their CEO's technical prowess when it comes to WordPress hosting.

Imagine going to a technical conference on petroleum and a politician is talking about the problems of safely distributing oil to industrial consumers and how the CEO of a company that installs long-distance pipelines is wicked smart and has figured out all the challenges... _before_ disclosing that he does marketing on the side for that very company and says that everyone should use them for their oil distribution. Maybe that company is truly awesome and deserved the praise but it'd seem fishy, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hate hosting Wordpress.

I don't host it for myself. Over the years I've collected a small blog network. I'm proud of the blogs I host, they're the some of the best and most influential in the Australian blogging world.

But by god do I hate hosting Wordpress. If I made more I'd push the whole thing onto WPEngine and be done with it.

Nowadays I have it running smoothly. The performance keys are:

1\. Exorcise Apache. You don't need it. Nginx + PHP-FPM is the correct option.

2\. Caching, caching, caching. Enable the MySQL query cache. Install WP- Supercache or W3 Total Cache. Have them spit out gzipped HTML to disk and tell Nginx to serve it directly.

3\. MySQL should be on a different server. Annoying but it causes a dramatic improvement.

There are other tweaks I haven't applied such as serving static content from a cookieless subdomain, pushing stuff onto a CDN. If I get to the CDN stage it's time just to turn it over to WPEngine.

It's now sufficiently fast. During the Brisbane floods last year, one of the sites got > 100,000 visits in a few hours and I didn't even notice a slowdown (in fact I didn't notice the visits until a month later when I logged into Google Analytics to check something else). I am now preposterously over provisioned but at least I don't have to _think_ about it any more.

<comment><USER9> Yes to all of this.

One addition, if you don't care about comments, or use something like disqus, you can put varnish in front of WP and it will just work. A simpler solution, don't use wordpress, use some kind of static blog generator. It's really easy to host static files!

<comment><USER8> My users wouldn't stand for Disqus and I think the pitchforks would come out if I started babbling about command-line interface static site compilers.

<comment><USER9> of course, it's not the right fit for everyone, but there sure is a lot of upside to it which needs to be seriously considered. Hosting WP is a giant pain in the ass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, Even on WP-Engine the blog takes 3.4 seconds to load. That's terrible.

I had similar nightmares to you for a long time with Apache/PHP/WP, then finally put Varnish cache in front of the whole thing. Every single page loads in sub 1 second, and even a massive traffic spike results in CPU load under 0.2.

<comment><USER3> It will load in comfortably under a second if you already have the 250kb header image cached. I losslessly compressed it but apparently WooThemes went for "pretty" over "lightweight" there. It wasn't worth enough for me to call in a designer to redo.

<comment><USER11> Just a small suggestion in that case (because it makes it so painful on mobile devices).

Little dragon logo (maybe 15k?) and a CSS3 gradient? <http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/>

If your site was otherwise graphics-heavy I wouldn't say anything, but it is a really sparse/clean layout already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Shouldn't the title be "Why I don't host my own Wordpress blog anymore"? Seems like most of the complaints were about the finickiness of WP. Why not host something like a simple static blog, with Disqus for comments?

<comment><USER3> Switching from a car to a bicycle will indeed decrease your gas consumption but that does not turn bicycles into acceptable substitutes for cars, even if you jury-rig a horn on them.

WordPress is, far and away, the best blog software (and particularly software ecosystem) out there. I wish there was a Railsy alternative a fifth as good, but there isn't.

<comment><USER13> What parts of Wordpress do you find superior to alternatives?

I'm building yet another blogging platform (not quite) right now. It isn't going to be Wordpress, but it will be managed and won't cost you $200/mo. A carcycle, if you will.

To carry the analogy to its end: you seem to be only using the car to drive ten blocks to work. In other words, you only serve static content + comments. Which is why I'm curious what, specifically, compels you to stick with Wordpress even though there is an obvious cost (be it money or effort.)

<comment><USER3> The biggest one is the ecosystem. Can I get a WooThemes-caliber theme done for your CMS at 3 AM in the morning for $70 without talking to anyone? And will it work virtually instantly as soon as I drop it over? And will that play well with e.g. using the blog as a lightweight CMS, with custom menus, static pages, and whatnot in addition to the blog proper? And will that work with the plugin ecosystem when I want to do just-a-wee-bit-trickier things like the What Would Seth Godin Do prompt?

<comment><USER12> > Can I get a WooThemes-caliber theme done for your CMS at 3 AM in the morning > for $70 without talking to anyone?

I know you run a business, so for you the answer may be 'yes', but for most people running a blog: is this really a huge concern?

To borrow an upthread analogy, if I'm switching from a car to a bike, whether I'll be able to get a complete paintjob at 3am for $70 without talking to someone is not really something that's going to make the pros/cons list.

<comment><USER14> I think compatibility WooThemes & friends is, in fact, a huge concern for the majority of bloggers.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps not those with traffic problems. Hopefully by then you've found a way to direct that traffic to useful revenue or have enough cash from your business to invest.

In OP's case, he's spending money on hosting a CPU-intensive blogging engine. In theory he could spend the same money on theming an efficient one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I thought Apache had died a long time ago? I haven't used it in a production environment in years. Nginx + php-fpm for WordPress. Hell, you can use any web server you want with some kind of decent caching plugin like wp-super-cache and you'd be able to host this on a $6/mo GoDaddy account.

WordPress is SO easy to make work, I am totally shocked you're spending $2,500 a year to host your site. What a tremendous waste of money.

<comment> mike-cardwell Then you're living in a bubble. Apache still has the vast majority of web servers and sites and it doesn't look like it's going to be taken over any time soon:

[http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2012/02/07/february-2012-w...](http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2012/02/07/february-2012-web- server-survey.html)

Not only that, but in Apache 2.4, the Event MPM is no longer experimental, which addresses Nginx's only advantage (performance).

I recently moved my site from Apache to Nginx and like both. But you're living in a dream World if you think Apache is anything other than a brilliant web server, and the most widely used and successful web server that has ever existed, by _far_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "It's transparently obvious that PHP can scale — one look at who uses it (Facebook is really all you need to know) proves that."

If by scale you mean code your own extensions at the C level including your own VM, then sure, it scales!

<comment><USER17> Facebook began using HipHop (their PHP compiler) at a time when they already had 200 million users and a website that by definition is very hard to cache. So in other words, PHP _without_ Facebook's custom compiler was able to handle a site having 200 million frequently returning users. I'd say that's pretty good.

Sources: [http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/HipHop-Facebook-s- PHP...](http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/HipHop-Facebook-s-PHP- accelerator-makes-C-code-920962.html) and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook>

<comment><USER4> But it wasn't all running on a single VPS.

If OP had thrown more hardware (and hardware costs) at the equation his problems would have reduced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great post Patrick. I know you'd had a series of bad experiences with both Apache and self-hosting WP. This article makes a pretty compelling case to give WPEngine a closer look.

      I ... was not asked to write this by WPEngine (who are,
      again, clients of mine), and would not have written it
      except that their service really rocks.

This statement feels a _bit_ disingenuous to me. It seems likely that they didn't _ask_ you to write it simply because you offered: "How about I write up a mini case study/sales pitch on my popular blog. You win because I'll send you business, and I win because then future clients will know I did work for you and indirectly advertises my services".

I'm totally cool with that, btw, it just seems a bit like lying by telling the _literal_ truth... which is something that rubs me the wrong way.

<comment><USER19> He comes out and says they hired him for marketing...

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems crazy to me to put so much effort into a blog, when you can get very very very close to 100% uptime by just using jekyll + amazon s3 + disqus.

That's what I do with abtinforouzandeh.com and it has been able to handle 50k+ requests over the span of a few minutes while maintaining sub-second load times.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, until your time is so valuable that you'd rather pay your assistant and/or a copywriter to help you with it.

That's where I am with my company right now. Even with my copywriting background, my time is valuable enough that I need to hire someone to help us with website content. WordPress is easy. I can hire thousands of people to update my design or add content. Not so much with another solution that doesn't have a WYSIWYG, web-based interface for adding content.

<comment><USER20> My setup is as simple as creating a new text file with the content, using basic markdown syntax to create the post, adding it to git (totally optional), and running a brain dead script to deploy. I could probably teach my mom to post content to my blog in one 30 minute lesson.

This setup could easily scale with the org so that you have tons of people writing content for you. Let them write a post, push it to github, and have some gatekeeper in charge of posting to the site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I treat my personal projects as practice,

My blog has at a time had a peak of around 100k visits a day, its a static site served by nginx on a linode512 that has various other personal project running on it, its never blinked.

I recently put a forum live(coded from scratch, but not all by myself) that is hovering around 5k visits a day, this has had growing pains (currently on a linode 1024), but when debugging the performance issues I learned a hell of a lot, and its been stable since (touch wood).

If I wasnt able to keep a blog / forum / various other side projects live without having continuous maintenance problems then I would be pretty worried seeing as that is my job.

</comment><comment><USER23> _The VPS that I used to run my blog on cost a bit over $100 a month (1 GB Rackspace slice + 160 GB of bandwidth_

Are hosting services much more expensive in the USA than in the EU? I pay 25 euro for a colocated 1U slot, 100MB/s guaranteed but always seen at top speed, 500GB total traffic/mo, and I can put in there what I want, as long as it doesn't require more than 60W of power.

So I bought myself a nice 'green' 1U server for 700 euro or something, and happily run nginx/cherrypy and apache/mysql/php on it.

The same provider I rent this from also offers VPSses, but I found them underpowered, cramped, and expensive. I guess it's worthwhile to stash your own hardware into a data center ;-)

<comment><USER24> > Are hosting services much more expensive in the USA than in the EU?

For servers/colocation, in general, yes, the services are more expensive in the US. That's been my experience.

<comment><USER25> While they may be more expensive, you can easily find a dedicated server for $100 that is going to be much better then a $100 VPS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> WPEngine seems great and I was thinking of putting the blog for my new startup on there. However, since I want it live in a sub-directory rather than a sub- domain the traffic still needs to go through my own server which effectively eliminates a lot of the benefits.

If anyone knows a work-around please let me know since it would be great to have it on WPEngine.

</comment><comment><USER27> I get worried by blanket statements such as "leaving KeepAlive on will probably not be in your best interests." Using Keep-Alive is generally a good thing in terms of web performance. Not having to establish a new HTTP connection for each new asset request is gold.

The problem is not with Keep-Alive per se, it's more about Apache's process model (assuming you're using mod_php) - the fact that you have a large (10-100 MB) process sitting there doing nothing. My advice would be to either use Apache with mod_fcgid (and php-fpm) or jump to nginx + php-fpm.

We host a number of WordPress sites using Nginx and the stability has improved massively.

</comment><comment><USER28> "I love being out of the hosting business."

I can totally understand that feeling. I was in a similar situation a year and a half ago and not having to fear incoming SMS (hello your server is down...) is a bliss.

</comment><comment><USER29> I gotta say, the setup I'm using for WP doesn't seem like that much of a pain in the arse.

* Bog standard LAMP setup

* Wordpress

* Cloudflare (CDN, security, free)

* WebsiteDefender (monitors WP plugins and general security, free)

About the only cost out of pocket for me is the hosting that the system is running on, which is being used for a great many things besides my blog.

There probably is something to be said for $90 a month to have some of the headaches removed (which I'm sure increase with scale), but I'd be willing to bet finding a good mix of free services would get you most of the way there.

</comment><comment><USER30> A blog is 99+% anonymous users with a comment every now and then. Your database shouldn't receive more than 20-30 requests every minute and varnish / nginx should take care of all of the traffic.

I never understood why people had problems with traffic on blogs :-/

<comment><USER31> Because they aren't caching.

<comment><USER8> And because they're using Apache where, due to a combination of the still- common forking process model and KeepAlive, they get exciting OOM events if 20 people click on a link simultaneously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The moral of the story here is that the author is not a great server admin. WordPress.com was working fine and fast for him because of their engineers.

I love how people blame WordPress for their troubles when it's not.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wish we saw some specifics of those tweaks-to-the-limit. This post is vague and advertisey IMO. It reads to me as "I might be throwing money out of the window, but I'm fed up with dealing with a critical part of my online presence."

Shouldn't switching to Nginx be the very first step? Enabling gzip the second, copying assets to a CDN the third? 1024 Mb is a plenty of RAM to keep every post in memory, too.

If you have the resources to outsource non-critical parts of your business, good for you.

<comment><USER3> I thought I was fairly explicit: I previously had nginx proxying to Apache2, using WPSuperCache and a few rewriting rules to serve all static content and the vast majority of pageviews without hitting Apache. Cache headers were set and quite generous, static content was split over multiple subdomains (and served directly by Nginx). I had manually edited the WordPress theme to fix inefficencies with how they bundled CSS and Javascript. Gzip on, images crunched when I remembered to do so, yadda yadda yadda. (A lot of this work had to be repeated every time I switched themes, so I'm not entirely sure it was all up on the most recent one, but I've done it three times at least.)

Trust me: I put probably high four figures of engineering time into solving this problem "for free."

<comment><USER33> I believe you put the time in and I would never doubt your (or anybody else's) capability to optimize a site.

So it was really just me reading something between the lines that is not there, or the post sounded like "the site was down when I published something... it kept on for several months... then I installed this... it was still slow... then I installed that...".

There's absolutely nothing wrong with outsourcing your blog. It just didn't seem justified.

<comment><USER34> _There's absolutely nothing wrong with outsourcing your blog. It just didn't seem justified._

In what way? I thought Patrick clearly explained that maintaining it himself had become a time sink. Hence, he hired competent people to do it for him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I checked the pricing page and the rates seemed steep. What level plan do you have, Patrick? It looks like the pro account runs about $1,200 a year, but caps at 100,000 visitors. Is that more than you see in a good month of blogging?

<comment><USER3> I am grandfathered on their old pricing, which is $200 for 250k IIRC. My blog occasionally sees spikes of 100k hits in a day. More typically it is 20-50k on a new post day and about 2k to 3k on any given day.

<comment><USER35> Oh, so that's 250,000 visitors per say, not month?

<comment><USER3> Nah, it is a soft-capped 250k per month. That would accommodate I think every month but maybe two in my history, and I assume they'd just ignore the overage for those two, based on conversations I had with them. (If I start routinely exceeding 250k I'll just step up to the next plan level. Money is not a limiting reagent for me at the moment, well, not below the level of "average price of a wedding.")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> A couple things strike me about the rebuttals here:

 _The illusion of simplicity_

No one is saying this specifically, but the spirit of what is being said follows the line of thinking that because it's easy to get a server stack set up and running, it's a "simple task"". Getting a stack running is easy. Making it scale beyond a certain threshold is not simple. That threshold tends to be a brick wall in my experience.

 _Underestimation of time spent_

It's easy to sink a lot of time in to these administrative tasks. You have to remember what business you're in. If you're a sysadmin, great. This is time well spent, but most of us are not sysadmins. We're in some other business. It is good to understand how a web hosting stack works from a high level. It helps you make good decisions. One of those "good decisions" is recognizing where your time is best spent. If your business is anything other than system administration, I doubt that relentlessly benchmarking your stack to see how many reqs/s you can host is a good use of your time.

 _The assumption that "I" know a solution_

The only people with enough knowledge to challenge Patrick's decisions are those who have met this challenge. My WP hosting works fine, but that's because 2,500 visitors a day is a big day for me. I wouldn't even begin to suggest that he didn't make a sound decision until I had met this challenge myself.

I have some small idea of how difficult it must be, because our company's software does "real time" online procurement events (reverse auctions). Sounds like boring stuff, right? Consider one of the basic tenants of scaling: serve from cache and avoid re-building on each request. Now, consider that in a reverse auction, you might have 10 bidders placing bids on 500 line items spread out over 8 lots. Bid rates regularly top 30 bids per minute. Each bidder has a unique object cache because of the nature of reverse auctions (they each have their own data sets to track). Sometimes we implement weighting, where the bids are multiplied by a factor, have some fixed value added to them, or are calculated as a markup/markdown percentage against a fixed value. Then there's the observer screen, which has views for overview, line item summary, and line item detail, each of which have their own view states. Every time someone places a bid, there are a number of objects that are completely invalidated and must be rebuilt. Everyone involved (observers and bidders) in the live event is polling the server at the fastest rate we can afford.

As much as I appreciate input, I'm not asking for solutions to our scaling challenges. We have plenty of good ideas, and we've stayed ahead of the curve (mostly) on what could very generously be called a shoestring budget. Even having done that, I can't question Patrick's decision here. If I suspect anything, it's that he made a wise choice. Scaling is hard.

My point is that you'll never know if you can meet a challenge until you do it yourself. If you have met the challenge, great, but at what cost? Consider your own bias and take a serious look at the time investment. If you still think you've got all the answers and you can do it in trivial time, please send me your business card, because I'll hire you on the spot.

<comment><USER37> Your answer is redis. But I don't have business cards.

<comment><USER36> I laughed, but this is exactly how many of the answers here sound to me.

Answers like this (even though I'm assuming yours was sarcastic) exemplify everything that I outlined above.

The "you" stated below is in the general form, not you specifically. It is the "you" intended to represent people who would seriously respond to a question like this.

You don't even know if a database is our bottleneck (it's not), you don't know what database/datastore we're using (it might be redis), you represent no experience in our problem domain, you have no detailed information about our current performance, but you have no hesitation about positing an answer.

Sorry to be so blunt, but uh... "Get off my lawn, you damn kids!" :)

<comment><USER4> Just to get on your lawn for a moment.

For Gridspy, we store data into our server from sensors and allow customers to watch a 1-second live data stream.

<http://your.gridspy.co.nz/demo/>

The key from us was to switch from a "polling" model to a "push" model. We don't poll the database, our backend pushes the new data through the stack. In our case I plan to actively rebuild assets and store them to disk rather than rebuild and cache on demand. But you can see the live updates on the site now.

More details (a bit dated now): [http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2009/10/realtime- data-from-sensors...](http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2009/10/realtime-data-from- sensors-to-browsers.html)

You might consider an approach such as <http://socket.io/> and lots of logic in the page as a great way to avoid the "everyone polling the backend as fast as they can" model.

By the way, your lawn is very nice. Well maintained. Perhaps you need a zen garden.

<comment><USER36> I appreciate the thoughtful response :) Polling actually works really well for us though. It's like rudimentary time-division multiplexing for sockets. Push means you have to keep an open socket to clients, which has its own set of scaling problems.

Our challenges are related to cache design complexity, fast cache rebuild, serialization, and queuing & distribution of tasks without sacrificing timeliness of response. There's a lot of pressure for us to deliver a specific subset of the data in the same request/response cycle, which can be challenging. These are all pretty well known problems in computer science, and we feel pretty confident that we've got solutions for them.

I'm definitely going to keep an eye on your blog though. It's nice to keep in touch with companies that face similar challenges.

<comment><USER4> Cool!

I agree on the "good to know people with similar problems"

I can see why aggregation of the data can be such a challenge for you. My suggestion revolves around a smart client that can do aggregation through (for eg) javascript on in a browser. Our system is actually polling under the hood (that is how "Comet" works) but our backend never sees the polls.

You have a good point about open sockets being another problem. Fortunately it is thoroughly solved by messaging servers, for instance <http://www.rabbitmq.com/> \- it handles tons of connections so your backend doesn't have to.

Your requirements are a great fit for a single threaded server such as node.js, twisted or so on that uses that whole polling model rather than many threads. You could have (say) a twisted server that receives messages from the backend on rabbitmq, interprets and aggregates and then forwards to your clients. The send to clients happens via another publish of a message to RabbitMq on a different channel and is un-affected by the number of users watching.

But like you said, solved problems are not worth a whole bunch of engineering effort when things are still running just fine. Just throw more hardware at it and move on to selling what you have.

:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I used to host my own blog on wordpress. I had some web space over at NearlyFreeSpeech (great host by the way). I never got a whole lot of traffic but what I found most frustrating was the multiple updates I had to perform.

I'm not saying anything bad about Wordpress, it's a great piece of software, but as a student I simply don't have time to check if I need to update my core installation or a plugin. Plus I would do all my updates from source (I had tweaked the source code a bit and the automatic method would have overridden my changes).

After reading this article, I decided to sign up for Posterous and give it a whirl. I like it so far.

</comment><comment><USER39> I had a Wordpress blog for about two years on one of those $4/mo hosts referenced in the post, and I was getting the same slow, lousy performance.

I hosted it myself for a while and also decided I hated the headache. I knew I was going to do some hosted solution for my next blog, so I looked around and ultimately went with Tumblr - a more social ecosystem I expect will eventually surpass what Wordpress has going for it.

Here's the post I wrote describing it: [http://pdobson.com/post/16576813337/choosing-tumblr-over- wor...](http://pdobson.com/post/16576813337/choosing-tumblr-over-wordpress)

</comment><comment><USER40> It's a bit more work up front but I'm really enjoying running a totally static blog directly off S3. Never goes down and scaling is a non-issue and it costs me a few bucks a month.

<comment><USER41> I heard that Dave whiner was doing this, but can not find any explicit instructions. Would you please let me know any resources?

<comment><USER40> [http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static- website-...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/02/host-your-static-website-on- amazon-s3.html)

Use a DNS provider that does URL forwarding. I use Joker for this but I'm sure other registrars do too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I say if the majority of your revenue, or traffic, comes through the content you create on your website, then you should focus on creating the content rather than running the technical aspects of a blogging platform or server.

Especially if the blog generates the required revenue, then for sure, stop spending time keeping the server(s) alive. Pay somebody else to do, and focus on creating great content.

</comment><comment><USER43> Curious - did you consider Jekyll or Octopress (static generated pages) on heroku or something similar?

</comment><comment><USER44> I thought I'd be smart and use Blogger to host my blog.

Oh what a fool I was.

I'll be completing my hack to make it work properly sometime in the next few weeks with a full report on what I went through just to fix it.

In hindsight, I should have made my own blog engine or something.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm trying to open <http://wpengine.com/pricing/> and the tab keeps loading (it seems i cant connect to their cdn.wpengine.com)...

NB Patrick's site is ok

EDIT: now the pricing page loads

</comment><comment><USER46> _I started blogging about 375,000 words ago (about three full-length novels… crikey)._

I think it's time. You definitely should get a book out - there's plenty of material. I would preorder.

</comment><comment><USER47> "required all access of the admin to happen through a proxy that I control"

How is this accomplished using nginx?

Does this mean creating a Socks Proxy and a special URL that's only accessible through the tunnel?

<comment><USER3> Use a location rule in Nginx for wp-admin denying access to all and then allowing access only to a specified IP address (the machine hosting the proxy).

Alternatively, you can deny access to all on the public site (www.example.com/wp-admin -> 405) and create a separate sites which allows access to the admin (admin.example.com/wp-admin -> 200) with that separate site only listening on a private interface (and/or behind a firewall, etc). That's modestly more secure because IPs can be spoofed, but I was just worried about the "Script kiddie hits every /wp-admin in the world at once with a zero-day" than worried about someone trying to compromise my blog in particular.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Does anybody know how WPEngine compares to PHPFog?

</comment><comment><USER31> What are your issues with nginx and Wordpress? Seems to work for me and I haven't had to do anything special.

</comment><comment><USER49> I just moved from a self-hosted WP blog to a free one at WordPress.com. Much happier now :)

</comment><comment><USER50> Try octopress.

</comment><comment><USER51> Facebook doesn't run on plain old PHP, it's compiled with HPHP into "highly optimized" C++

<comment><USER52> It's does not run on "highly optimized" C++ code, it uses C++ as an intermediary target before being complied to ASM. Which makes PHP just another compiled language that happens to work at FB's scale.

<comment><USER51> So... Facebook doesn't run on PHP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> So he's a web developer that thinks Facebook's use of PHP has anything to do with how wordpress scales?

That's ... weird.

PHP has nothing to do with it (except for maybe the fact that the people who wrote wordpress wrote it in idiomatic PHP)</comment>


Quantum Interference Between Light Sources Separated by 150M Kilometers - <AUTHOR> https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.080401 <comment><USER2> 150 million kilometers = 150 gigameters

<comment><USER3> that helped

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The experiment can be further extended to a larger scale using photons from distant stars and open a new route to quantum optics experiments at an astronomical scale."

This would be interesting as a distant star would exhibit red-shift unlike something as close as our sun. So until further data such as this, we just have the single experiment. Which from my limited understanding, would give the data to draw some solid conclusions. Exciting stuff, and I could only speculate upon the results, though somebody more up upon the matter may well have some better insights.

Though it may well be a way to measure distances more accurately would be my limited take away from this. Maybe not, but certainly something going on here that will enhance our understanding of physics on all levels.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> An ars-technica writeup of the original paper: [https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/identical-photons- ge...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/identical-photons- generated-150-million-kilometers-apart/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> pdf of paper [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.02868](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.02868)

</comment><comment><USER5> Ok, does anyone have a simple guide to what it means?

<comment><USER6> I have a limited understanding, but I think this is just further reproduction of the same science. I believe there's some controversy over non-locality in that entanglement and spooky action at a distance is still a result of hidden local variables. By increasing the distance between the sources of the photons, you would give more evidence to nonlocality. Please correct me if this is offbase.

<comment><USER7> Non-locality means that the way the probability of presence (wave function) of a photon is determined is by trying out all possible paths through the entire universe at once rather than only in regions nearby the photons?

<comment><USER8> The path integral formulation is the most prevalent and successful version of quantum physics (this is what you describe in the second half). Non locality is different; it supposes that there are hidden mechanisms we have not uncovered (and may but be able to uncover) instead which describes our world. It must be non local to get the observed experimental results. Non local means data about the universe is teleporting faster than (conventional) causality allows i.e. the speed of light

<comment><USER7> Either case seems to require faster-than-light or instant communication between alternative paths that are being tried out, so the distinction is whether the combination of different paths is mediated by another faster-than- light (non-local) particle or whether the combination is axiomatic to the laws of the universe without a particle mediating it?

<comment><USER8> No, the path integral formulation does not require faster than light communication. Time is an explicit parameter

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A bug in the simulator?

<comment><USER4> This wasn't a simulation, unless your going down the universe is a simulation avenue and this is a bug in the matrix route.</comment></comment>


Extending the JavaScript Array Prototype with Ruby Methods - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent-software.com/extending-the-javascript-array-prototype-with-ruby-methods/ <comment><USER2> I really wish javascript had more array methods of higher level. It would make our code more readable. Now it's always the dilemma of extending the prototype or write the operation inline. jQuery and other toolkit add some, but the language itself doesn't and shouldn't be overlooked (it's not a technical prestige to only include "building blocks" (basic array operations) in a language).</comment>


Vevo hacked, 3.12 TB of data leaked - <AUTHOR> https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2017/09/17/vevo-hacked-3-12-tb-of-data-leaked/ <comment><USER2> Here we go again, when do these multinationals take their security serious?</comment>


Antarctic temperature rises above 20C for first time on record - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/13/antarctic-temperature-rises-above-20c-first-time-record <comment><USER2> As a lay person I find it really hard to understand the significance of this single days temperature reading. It sounds alarming but I have no idea how to view that single data point. I wish they'd go into more detail in explaining that in these sorts of articles.

</comment><comment><USER3> Paper mentions Thwaites glacier but does not mention the subsea volcanoes contributing to ice loss in the West Antarctic: [https://www.livescience.com/46194-volcanoes-melt- antarctic-g...](https://www.livescience.com/46194-volcanoes-melt-antarctic- glaciers.html)

Antarctica as a whole has seen a slight increase in ice over the last 40 years, with record extent being achieved as recently as 2014:

[https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/](https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/)

<comment><USER4> Simply saying there's more ice doesn't attempt to get to the bottom of it.

"At the end of the last Ice Age, the air became warmer and carried more moisture across the continent, doubling the amount of snow dropped on the ice sheet," Zwally said

[https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass- gains-o...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of- antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses)

We should start to go deeper.

<comment><USER5> Further, the submitted article here directly addresses it

 _" Schaefer said the temperature of the peninsula, the South Shetland Islands and the James Ross archipelago, which Seymour is part of, has been erratic over the past 20 years. After cooling in the first decade of this century, it has warmed rapidly.:_</comment></comment></comment>


Amazingly realistic Facebook ads slamming the company by a street artist in NYC - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ads-parody-nyc-street-art-criticize-company-winston-tseng-2020-8 <comment><USER2> And then you reach for the link with the artist's name, only to find that it leads to his Instagram page. Says a lot about the contradictions of our time.

<comment><USER3> Obligatory comic: [https://i.redd.it/whnuvoh4od031.jpg](https://i.redd.it/whnuvoh4od031.jpg)

<comment><USER2> How brainwashed do you need to be in order to liken Zuckerberg's websites to society?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not wearing masks is not as partisan as the artist thinks.

</comment><comment><USER5> FYI: black and Asian conservatives exist. "Artist" is a racist.

<comment><USER6> 88% of trump voters were white: [https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/for-most- tru...](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/for-most-trump-voters- very-warm-feelings-for-him-endured/2-4-2/)

The photo shows 6 white trump supporters, a 46% chance if they sampled randomly. Does not seem racist to me

<comment><USER5> He's doing better now than he did back then. This is from 2019: [https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/gen...](https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/july_2019/trump_support_up_this_week_among_black_voters). Trump's numbers have improved substantially since, in spite of the riots. In fact, it'd seem that the riots only helped him in this regard, since the poorer inner-city minorities are disproportionately affected by them, as well as looting, burning, and "defunding".

Now granted, these are not _votes_. But we'll see soon enough if this increased approval translates into votes. At least some part of it will.

I do maintain that the artist is a smooth brain racist though. The implication is pretty clearly that there are no minorities on the right at all, which is absolutely not the case. Another implication is that it's only the right that's misinformed, which is rich coming from a party that believed (and still continues to believe) in the piss dossier, and the most ludicrous conspiracy theories in recent memory. Another, even more pernicious implication is that the debate between the sides should not be allowed to take place, which is both shortsighted and dangerous, because that's how things boil over.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does your org use SLI/SLO dashboards and metrics? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
Curious how widespread the use of SLI / SLO reporting and dashboarding is. Is this a Google thing that everyone talks about but no one really uses, or is it being adopted in the wild? My questions would be:
- does your org (engineers, managers, customers) "get it"?
- do you have the right tools available?
For those not familiar with SLI/SLO here are some links:
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/slo-monitoring-widget/
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/sre-fundamentals-slis-slas-and-slos
Full disclaimer: I'm the founder of monitoring SaaS https://checklyhq.com and actively researching this. <comment><USER2> We've started using it at our org in early 2019. Each product team has developed, or is developing a list of 3 SLOs to be treated as high priority.

This means when we miss our SLO targets, that team drops all in progress work to fix what it broken.

Some teams actually started with broken SLOs, which meant pausing the roadmap to tackle performance concerns.

It's been working well. Improvements against SLO targets have been seen to have measurable impact with users. This has been in the form of "completing more steps successfully" while they use our product.

The aim overall has been to decrease user frustration, and improve user satisfaction – and to that end it's been very effective.

<comment><AUTHOR> This sounds like a great trajectory. Like how starting with a broken SLO is fine. Bit like starting with a failing test and making it pass.

Did you have trouble using tooling to measure and report these SLO's?</comment></comment>


JS1024 Results – 1k JavaScript Demos - <AUTHOR> https://js1024.fun/results/2020 <comment><USER2> Post-mortem writeups by submitters:

Frank Force: [https://frankforce.com/?p=7617](https://frankforce.com/?p=7617) (1st place)

Raimon Ràfols: [http://blog.rafols.org/index.php/2020/07/21/javascript- ballo...](http://blog.rafols.org/index.php/2020/07/21/javascript- balloon-1k-postmortem/) (10th place)

Mattia Fortunati: [https://www.mattiafortunati.com/detective-moji- postmortem-a-...](https://www.mattiafortunati.com/detective-moji-postmortem-a- javascript-game-in-just-1024-bytes/) (16th place)

<comment><USER3> I haven't written a post-mortem but I'll take a quick stab here, and post a more polished post-mortem on my website later.

My demo is Star Traveler, which placed #1 in the 2D Canvas category. The GitHub repository is here: [https://github.com/depp/demo- traveler](https://github.com/depp/demo-traveler)

Source code: [https://github.com/depp/demo- traveler/blob/trunk/src.js](https://github.com/depp/demo- traveler/blob/trunk/src.js)

What I like about 1K demos is that you can make them in a relatively short amount of time—something like a week or so, without taking time off. After a week of work I was happy with what I had written, out of space, and had diminishing returns when I attempted to reduce the size. By comparison, JS13K can be a lot more work.

The first thing I did was set up a development environment which would reload in the browser every time I saved changes. The development page showed the number of bytes left at the top of the screen and put the exact, submission- ready code in an iframe. Saving changes would trigger everything to be minified and packed again. Packing is done with Terser -> RegPack. No potentially incompatible techniques like method hashing were used, but that's probably because I didn't see a size improvement when I tried them. There are some custom transformations on the code during compilation, mostly so I could have ESLint watch my back.

The demo itself has three parts to it. Most of the objects are rendered by callback functions, and there's a big array of callback functions in back-to- front order. The function closures contain any generated data necessary for drawing the data. The parts are:

1\. Mountains and clouds, which are just simple midpoint displacement fractals. The mountains were flipped upside down and stretched to make clouds. Various techniques for generating a fractal were tried, a recursive functional approach ended up being the smallest.

2\. Stars, which are just randomly placed in 3D space and randomly resized each frame to make them twinkle.

3\. The planet, which is drawn separately. The submitted version draws it over the clouds. This was fixed in the repo, but not re-submitted.

Notes on technique:

\- Path2D turns out to be a very efficient way to specify a path for a Canvas. It uses an SVG path string to specify the path, which is more compact than using .moveTo() and .lineTo(). There is room for improvement.

\- The 'color' function is a beast, it lets you represent an RGB color as a 3-digit number from 111 to 999, and calculate things like gradients. There was a lot of tweaking to get colors that I liked.

\- Did a lot of inlining and un-inlining of functions at the end. For example, if a function f(x) is defined like f(x) = 4 * ..., then you can move the constant out of the function, or into the function from the call sites.

\- Checked the minified code to see how functions were being emitted. If they were emitted as (x) => { a; b; }, I would try to change the code so they could be emitted as (x) => (a,b).

\- RegPack gives you limited space savings for repetitive code, so use it.

\- If you need local variables, just add arguments to your function and use those.

<comment><USER4> > Path2D turns out to be a very efficient way to specify a path for a Canvas. > It uses an SVG path string to specify the path, which is more compact than > using .moveTo() and .lineTo().

Path2D w/ SVG strings is byte-efficient, but is less computationally efficient vs the same Path2D w/ lineTo(), etc.

<comment><USER3> Some context—in JS1024, the code has to fit in 1024 bytes, so you can safely assume that "efficiency" refers to size and not runtime performance.

This particular demo only creates the Path2D objects once, at startup, and then hammers the canvas with a ridiculous amount of overdraw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's something ironic about a site hosting intentionally tiny snippets of code that's crashed / sluggish under the social media hug of death...

BUT - the few that I've managed to see are super cool, so when it comes back to life it's worth checking out!

<comment><USER6> Question for people that run websites that have been "hug of death"ed: would your website be able to be statically hosted on something like github pages, if no why not — if yes why do you choose not to, given it is free and would make all scaling troubles go away (or so I've heard).

<comment><USER7> There are two reasons why sites fall over in cases like this: CPU saturation, where the solution is better caching (which includes going fully static), and network saturation, where the solution is either to get fatter pipes or to reduce the data transferred. Hugs of death are normally due to CPU saturation.

But in this case, I suspect that the server is just saturating its network connection because of poor treatment of images.

I have JavaScript disabled so maybe it's loading more if you have JavaScript enabled, but when you exclude images, it's only transferring about 152KB. Images are where it goes wrong: it's serving up a large number of images, and some of them are unreasonably large and high quality (like 34ᵗʰ place, a 1000×1000 PNG of a fractal being shown at 400×400), and most significantly it's using quite a few multi-megabyte GIFs, which is flatly stupid and wrong and they _deserve_ to have their site fall over for pulling that.

So the end result is at least 20MB. 20MB = 160Mb, and if your server has only a one gigabit link (very common), you can suddenly only cope with about six visitors per second (though in practice things will start falling over before that, maybe round down to five), which is not quite enough for the peaks you'll get when high on HN, and it becomes a bit of a cascading problem, kinda like a capacitor but bad.

The solution is to treat the images properly: actually _compress_ them, use videos instead of GIFs, that sort of thing. I reckon 3MB total is readily attainable here, which would allow you to serve 40 visitors per second, which is probably enough.

So yeah, putting your pages on a platform with really fat pipes will solve problems like this after a fashion, but I'd argue that it's not really _solving_ them, it's just letting you get away with doing a bad job and shifting the burden onto users.

<comment><USER2> There was 5MB preview image limit for each submission. I was a bit surprised when my preview image went straight into the listing after review. The organizer was a bit struggling with the website (for example, there was no HTTPS for the first days of the contest and multiple people helped to get it working), hopefully next time it will improve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I only get a secure connection error with Firefox 79 (on ArchLinux) when trying to connect to that domain. The certificate configuration seems to be missing some intermediate certs:

[https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl- checker.html#hostname=js1024....](https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl- checker.html#hostname=js1024.fun)

[https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=js1024.fun](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=js1024.fun)

<comment><USER9> Alway there is that one arch guy in the comments

<comment><USER10> Having the same error on Firefox Preview

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really appreciate how well documented a lot of the source files are. There are a lot of cool golf hacks/tricks in these!

i.e.: [https://js1024.fun/demos/2020/16/source](https://js1024.fun/demos/2020/16/source)

<comment><USER2> Besides from being one of the winners (AquaPop1K), I also had a pleasure to read every single source code to rate submissions (as every submitter could rate other entries). I recommend to do the same if you have time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Shedding snake" reminds me of a game I made on my Casio CFX-9850GB+ Color in high school. It started out as snake, but keeping track of the positions of the snake's pixels in an array or matrix, even if treating it as a ring buffer so you weren't constantly shuffling all the values in it, was really slow, so that by the time the snake was even six pixels long there was not the slightest bit of challenge to it because it was moving less than two pixels per second (and by ten, below one). So I turned it into what I called Snail Trail, with it just laying down pixels behind it and never keeping track of them, because you could query "is this pixel filled?" much more rapidly (and it was O(1) rather than O(n²) or worse). That was much faster, and I rapidly worked out the optimal strategy. A year or two later I transferred it to someone's newer model of calculator which was generally about six times as fast, and… yeah, I had to insert busy loops to make it playable!

I had good times with that calculator. 32KB taught me frugality not unlike that needed for competitions like JS1024, and how to find that there was a character/instruction akin to a semicolon in Python that took one byte, where the new line character/instruction took two bytes. (I only obtained a manual for the calculator after having it for two years. Figured out one or two new tricks after that, but I'd worked almost everything possible out by trial and error.) So power efficient, too: I changed the four AAA batteries only twice in more than three years of _very_ heavy usage (looking back on it, I probably got more than 200h of life from each set), while all the rest of the class that had the newer, faster version (except one other who had the same model as me) would need to change them around once a term, and they didn't use their calculators even a _quarter_ as much as me. I'm going to guess figures of a CPU 6× as fast and power consumption 30× as high. And those newer ones were even only monochrome rather than three-colour LCD.

Then after I left they shifted to CAS calculators and battery life was a zillion times worse again. And laptops, phones and such will be even worse still. Ah well.

<comment><USER12> Same for me, except with the FX-9860GII and for the 'trails' feature originally being a bug in my ring buffer that triggered when it grew.

It definitely was fun to experiment within such constraints. I can't remember being very concerned with program size, although after a certain size there was a boundary the jump statements weren't able to cross any more. Only having global one-letter variables and no function calls (and a 21*7 character screen) also made the code hard to read/write, but it was a fun puzzle and I ended up writing a ray caster (god it was slow), something akin to the game Concrete Jungle and a complete 2-player implementation of Settlers of Catan, amongst other things. Not sure if my math teacher was a fan of me not paying attention in class though.

<comment><USER7> I say 32KB, but the actual usable space was more like 20KB, due to things like 4KB for a screen buffer if you went graphics mode rather than text mode, which I did for some things and needed to do if ever actually graphing, however much if you used lists or matrices, _& c._ Anyway, I kept writing programs (sometimes games, sometimes useful things like automating the techniques we learned, such as a surd simplifier or a quadratic solver or a prime checker), so every so often I'd run out of space and rename a multi-letter program down to one letter to save a few bytes, or comb through a program to find ways of saving a few more bytes. I certainly spent _many_ hours coming up with clever ways of saving single bytes. It was good fun. Even sold a few programs to other students for a few dollars if they had the necessary transfer cable. Occasionally I'd regretfully delete a program if it was no longer pulling its weight.

I definitely never tried a ray caster or anything that complex. I can imagine that taking literally hours to render a single frame, if I even coded it right.

I kept my calculator in my pencil case, so I always had it with me in classes. I think all the teachers (definitely not just maths) were pretty much resigned to me using it when I finished my work in their classes (or if I didn't want to do it and reckoned I could get away with it). Having three elder siblings that would read books or used calculators under the desk certainly helped. One teacher complained volubly about the first couple of us for this very reason (and I was very probably worse than them), but by halfway through my schooling he said to my mother once that he always loved having Morgans in his class. This amused mum greatly. Stockholm syndrome, we decided.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not into graphics/games development so that might be why, but I had never heard of Shaders (the third category), which doesn't look at all like JavaScript.

Demo: [https://js1024.fun/demos/2020/12](https://js1024.fun/demos/2020/12)

Source code: [https://js1024.fun/demos/2020/12/source](https://js1024.fun/demos/2020/12/source)

Shaders: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Games/Techniques/3D...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Games/Techniques/3D_on_the_web/GLSL_Shaders)

<comment><USER14> It's WebGL.

Check out [https://www.shadertoy.com/](https://www.shadertoy.com/) for lots more of these demos. You can do some really amazing stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's slow AF because the smallish images are in fact much larger but shrunk and many animated on top of that. So far that page has pulled 15MB down and is still going.

Edit: up to 24.5MB now.

Edit: 34.5MB now and still going

Edit: 44.4MB and still going. It's clearly slowing down badly. I'm killing it.

</comment><comment><USER16> The site is unusable in portrait orientation on a phone. You can't see the [X] to dismiss the pop up divs unless you rotate the phone to horizontal.

</comment><comment><USER17> I though this is same as [https://js1k.com/](https://js1k.com/) it's not

<comment><USER18> Js1k closed 1 year ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Bad time to have your cert go bad on you.

</comment><comment><USER20> That 'Wetlands' demo (winner in shader class) is completely borked in my browser (FF 79, Linux).

<comment><USER21> Same here, Firefox 80.0b2, MacOS 10.15.

But it's not Firefox: I see exactly the same artifacts with Safari 13.1.2. (Safari is also much slower with this demo than Firefox.)

Surprisingly, it depends which GPU it starts with, not the one it's running on. Some Macbooks have two GPUs, only one active at a time.

If Wetlands is started with the Intel GPU active, it looks fine, and continues to look fine if the GPU is switched to nVidia. But if started with the nVidia GPU active, it looks a mess, lots of colour noise, and continues to look that way if the GPU is switched to Intel.

I've checked all combinations and found the same on both Firefox and Safari. So I guess it's probably the underlying OpenGL driver. I'm relieved, this means it's not a faulty GPU :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you enjoy this kind of thing, check out the wizardry/madness over at [https://www.dwitter.net/](https://www.dwitter.net/) \- javascript animations in 140 bytes (the size of a tweet, hence the name, "dwitter").

<comment><USER23> Thanks. In 10 minutes I have seen more art than one can see in the average museum of modern art.</comment></comment>


The Mundane Credit Card Gets a Modern Makeover - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/your-money/credit-and-debit-cards/22cards.html <comment><USER2> See <http://mashable.com/2010/09/17/card-2-0-dynamics/> for a demo.</comment>


Show HN: Try my new app Miscon - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN folks, would like to get some feedback on a new app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.miscon.miscon
Miscon offers a new way of communication and discovery. You can search and browse posts (AKA miscons) in various channels that interest you. Channel tags are free form, so be as creative as you'd like.
You can search channels by their tags, such as #miscon, or #people #OnCalTrain, or whatever. Someone might search for those tags as well and interact with you there. All while you're being anonymous.  Let's see what miscons you come up with!
Any feedback would be appreciated. Thx! <comment><USER2> Okay here's my feedback:

I know it's a new app, but I didn't get the concept of the app. What exactly is a miscon ? A Status update ? I also couldn't find examples of existing miscons.

If you're introducing a new concept, it's generally worthwhile to have some kind of intro with animations.

I hope that's helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Animations? That's fancy! wanna help me out with that? :)

Although I agree the messaging is kinda confusing right now because not all of the the features I envisioned is there yet...

<comment><USER2> [https://github.com/daimajia/AndroidViewAnimations](https://github.com/daimajia/AndroidViewAnimations)

<comment><AUTHOR> Aight. will try to do some of that in V2 :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wouldn't this be more appropriate for the "Show" section? The app looks kind of neat. I can't say much more than that as I don't own any Android devices.

<comment><AUTHOR> good point. updated it now :)</comment></comment>


Diprocd, Control Your Processes Across VMs - <AUTHOR> http://projects.ceondo.com/p/diprocd/

<comment><USER2> How is this different from many other grid projects out there, eg. Condor?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not a grid. It is just a process supervisor which can be controlled from a central point. Nothing more, but it does the work well. You can of course integrate it into a larger system, like what I have done for a PaaS:

<http://notes.ceondo.com/mongrel2-zmq-paas/>

<comment><USER3> Thanks for that link, it was very helpful. It got me wondering if one could run most of your PAAS stack on dedicated hardware at a colo, and the Mongrel2 frontend(s) would sit in a small EC2 instance(s). Could give me your opinion on such a setup?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can definitely do that as you will get inter node communication over the EC2 private IP. You can define your EC2 firewall to also segment your production/staging/testing setup. This would be very elegant.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cell and Molecular Biology Animated Textbooks - <AUTHOR> https://www.smart-biology.com <comment><USER2> The illustrations and videos are good at conveying the relative scale of things. But one mistake they make is common to just about every cartoon depiction I've seen: the molecules seem to have intent. they fly into the scene and an atom is exchanged with the binding site, then then remainder flys away again. the stochastic nature everything is completely missing.

<comment><USER3> I've made a fair amount of these kinds of animations in the past, and it's much harder than it would seem to portray the random nature of interactions. Another common criticism is that a lot of these visualizations don't show how completely packed full of molecules/cells each of these environments are.

You're tasked with the almost-impossible goal of clearly conveying accurate information, visually, in realms where a) though there are a lot of structural data, the visual relationship of things gets VERY complex, b) not everything is actually known, and c) the time and visual scales aren't naturally perceptible to humans.

It's definitely not impossible (see Drew Barry's work, and from the glimpses of this project I've seen it looks pretty great actually), just difficult, and there's not a huge amount of money in it unless you want to work for pharma. Personally, I've been moving more towards 3D interactive content vs. linear videos because you can show a lot more layers, and having users drive what they're focusing in on can be a lot more powerful than trying to design one animation for every learning style.

<comment><USER4> RE random and packed, the first video on the page (about bacterial flagella) manages to pull out both by exploiting the time domain. First, it shows the usual but misleading view focused on the flagellum, but near the end, it fills in all the other missing activity in the displayed cutout - giving a sense of how it fits into the whole.

<comment><USER3> Yeah! I've been seeing bits and pieces of this project over the last few weeks, and it really does look great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Computer graphics and XR are part of an opportunity to transformatively improve science education content, pre-K to graduate. And we're going to spend years aggressively declining the opportunity.

As with that "Unit 1" video at the top of the page... by analogy, "<Attenborough voice> We will get to know the animal kingdom, starting with these airliner-sized mice wearing pink tutus and playing poker. Look at how beautifully rendered they are! You can just _feel_ the feathers on their flippers. You're students will find that highly engaging." Ah well, MVP mumble mumble.

<comment><USER6> Could you clarify what you're saying? I thought the free sample video looked pretty promising. Did you?

<comment><USER5> The "Unit 1" video presents atoms using aphysical cartoons misrepresenting size, behavior, structure, and properties. Nuclei size by more than 3 orders of magnitude.

One might argue that it's so obviously physically unrealistic and representational, that it's "clearly" iconic. Except that it could easily be made _more_ clearly iconic, but wasn't. And arguments of the form "that's so clearly unrealistic, it won't cause misconceptions" are... just not what happens.

Then there are all the usual problems with computer graphical representations of chemistry, biochem, cell and tissue biology. Where "pretty"-but-misleading is prioritized over the messy multiple representations needed to avoid nurturing a rich ecology of misconceptions.

> thought [...it] looked pretty promising. Did you?

Better than many paper textbooks, yes. Doing the things we know are needed to produce good student outcomes... there's a ways to go. Promising? 3D graphics in general, oh very yes. But this project in particular, I've no idea. The incentives around education content are very dysfunctional. So actually providing deep transferable understanding... is usually not the metric of interest.

<comment><USER7> This seems to me like someone criticizing introductory physics courses because they're not taking into account air friction and all the other minutiae from the very beginning.

If someone progresses to the point where these misconceptions really become an issue I think they would be corrected organically.

<comment><USER5> > seems to me like [...] minutiae

Or alternately, perhaps it's like students struggling with high-school stoichiometry, with atom conservation, because they've managed to remain unclear on the simple core concept that atoms are real objects, are real, physical, little balls.

> think they would be corrected organically

Yeah, that's a widespread impression. That say high-school misconceptions will disappear as students become undergraduate majors, and then graduate students. It's not been well studied, at least the last time I checked. But at a minimum, there are notable exceptions. If your 5-year old wants to know which finger-paint color to use for the Sun, asking a first-tier astronomy graduate student is likely to get them the wrong answer. Misconceptions turn out to be highly resilient. Which is why creating and reinforcing them is not something to do lightly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Armando Hasudungan's hand illustrated biology and medicine videos are also excellent. [https://www.youtube.com/user/armandohasudungan/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/armandohasudungan/videos)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is pretty awesome to see. I have longed dreamed of doing this kind of work, building interactive tools for teaching science (whether in an academic setting or in science news media).

I'm planning to spend some time learning three.js in the coming months, but does anyone else have advice for getting into this kind of work? Should I go deep into linear algebra and the math behind the graphics? Or just keep things simple and focus on the actual creative / artistic representation of scientific ideas? (The latter certainly seems like the harder part).

Also curious where one could find paid work doing these kinds of things.

</comment><comment><USER10> A picture is worth a thousand words; a video is worth, well, 24 pictures per second... (Times two, if it's 3D.)

<comment><USER4> It's not, really. Someone needs to make a more accurate version of this saying that's rooted in information theory, to show that video isn't worth 24 _picture_ length in seconds, but picture + whatever is communicated in how it changes over time (which is much, much less than a picture's worth).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is amazing! I think this will really help the visual learners among us.

<comment><USER12> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Criticism)

<comment><USER11> Are you suggesting people don't learn visually?

<comment><USER12> Would it make a difference if I did?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If you want something more accessible, I highly recommend the BBC documentary "The Hidden Life of the Cell": [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6agslv](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6agslv)

If this course is at the same level of production values, I would buy it just for entertainment purposes. It beats watching CGI explosions from movies! It looks like it's just $65 dollars for independent students. The samples look decent: [https://www.smart-biology.com/life-unit-1-from-atoms-to- cell...](https://www.smart-biology.com/life-unit-1-from-atoms-to-cells-free- sample-lessons/)</comment>


NIXTY: Education Engine for the Web (Scobleizer interview) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfuDRlUp3AU

<comment><USER2> I enjoyed meeting Scoble. The guy was really sick during this interview and still managed to come out and meet with me. He clearly cares about his work and is passionate about technology.</comment>


Show HN: Comm.guru, Slack and Twilio Based Company Phone System - <AUTHOR> http://comm.guru <comment><AUTHOR> Hey all, I'm the creator of comm.guru. I'd be glad to take feedback and/or questions!

</comment><comment><USER2> Hey looks cool! Is there a video that shows how it works?</comment>


YC Hackathon without writing code - <AUTHOR> https://airdev.co/post/hacking-at-y-combinator-without-code-1539634676357x118163909297436480 <comment><USER3> I don't throw language like this around a lot, but this was actually very inspiring to me.

I'm currently between jobs, and have a hard time figuring out what direction I want to go (and CAN go).

I see myself as a generalist with above-average it-competencies, but I'm not familiar enough with design to be a designer, nor skilled enough with programming to be a developer.

The past few months, I've been thinking that going the designer route might be the smarter career choice for me, as it is an area I have dabbled in before (both professionally and through education). Programming seems to hard a game to play catch-up in.

It seems like learning a visual framework like this would be an efficient way for a designer to create value for the business, both because it's fast, but also because it reduces the workload on the IT-team. I'm wondering if it would be a better idea to master a tool like this, and focus on design-related learning, that it is learning to program almost from scratch (even though it is the better choice in the long run i suppose).

<comment><USER4> Tons of tools like Webflow in this space - check out nocode.tech

There's a real need in the market for designers who can work better with developers and produce faster - tools like Zeplin.io are key here - <USER2> thats where you position yourself?

<comment><USER3> Thank you for the heads up. I'll check those tools out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't mean to sound elitist, but this isn't a Hackathon, its an idea-athon. Participants are limited to the small toolset of pre-built components provided to them, (Bubble in this case). The whole benefit of a hackathon is to think outside the box, but this actually encourages staying inside the box in order to produce a more polished product. You're getting a deep dive but completely missing any breadth.

<comment><USER6> In all fairness, even a large proportion of real hackathons tend to be light on code, heavy on presentation. Maybe it's a misnomer but it doesn't stop them from using the term.

True hackathons, where everyone's technical, in the same place, and miles of lines of code are written on no sleep, pizza, and Mountain Dew, are really hard to come by, because few talented people have the spare time to do them, and they don't typically pay all that well. Older hackers also tend to avoid them because they're more likely to have incompatible family obligations.

The terminology doesn't suit it, but it's widely used, like "Software Engineer".

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> this is based on [https://bubble.is/](https://bubble.is/) \- I just took the tour, it looks pretty neat for creating a quick prototype. I suspect I could get to market with a half working prototype faster with this, and then hire a team to develop a "proper" app later on. I'm going to try it out for my next app as I am getting a bit sick of getting started each time with create-react- app and running into dependencies etc. etc.

<comment><USER8> Nice. Looks like a competitor to Retool: [https://tryretool.com/](https://tryretool.com/). (or perhaps the other way around, since Bubble predates Retool)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is great. I've been to ~10 or so hackathons including both of the YC ones this year and this approach makes total sense. For the most part, the judges and audience don't care how you built something. They're more interested in the story behind the product including what sparked the idea, how you're equipped to tackle it, the market size, how you're going to get your first customers, etc.

I saw groups spin up AWS instances, throw up backends, and put on a frontend framework. It depends on the idea but for the most part, that's usually overkill. For web apps, I always static hardcode everything (yep, with jQuery) and then if time permits, productionize everything _if_ it helps the demo be more slick.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is awesome!! (disclaimer, I founded Bubble).

We've actually had a few teams at YC using Bubble, either to get in or after, once they were in the program. It's awesome as it's a great validation for our technology.

Thank you for doing the same in their hackathons!

<comment><USER11> Congrats man, we demoed a product at NYTM the same day as you guys (QuickMVP, now pivoted away from).

Been great to see your progress!

<comment><USER10> Thanks! Yeah I remember! I hope all is well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wrote up some reflections on participating in last week's YC Hackathon using Bubble, a visual programming platform. My AirDev cofounder and I didn't take home the prize, but it was a great chance to put our code-free development approach to the test and build a new product (Mailmitten) with Gmail and Stripe integrations in 12 hours.

</comment><comment><USER12> First, I think you guys did an amazing job and should not only celebrate you achievement within the short period of time, but also plan to execute this further. I think it's a good nice-to-have.

</comment><comment><USER13> Is Airdev Bubble, I am a bit confused?

<comment><USER14> > To explain: at AirDev, we build custom web applications for clients using > Bubble, a powerful visual programming framework.</comment></comment>


Fed cuts interest rates to 3.5% - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7202645.stm

<comment><USER3> Either I'm stupid or Fed is amazingly stupid. I'm not sure which one is the case though I really hope it's me.

The reckless mortgage boom and the ensuing crisis was caused when the Fed cut rates to avoid recession and made borrowing so easy. Now to fix the mess caused by lowering interest rates, they're trying to lower interest rates?

If you're bleeding from your wrists because you slashed your wrist with a knife, you don't slash your arm higher up to stop the bleeding from the wrists. Well true, it does stop you from bleeding from the wrists but now you're bleeding from the upper arm! Of course, you can stop the bleeding there by slitting your biceps. Pretty soon you're going to have to cut off your arm to "stop" the bleeding.

How about they just let there be a recession so the organizations that were investing poorly lose money and go out of business while the investors who were smart and focussed stay in the game?

<comment><USER4> I don't agree. I think the Fed should have lowered rates earlier. Lower rates lead to a better lending environment which leads to economic growth. If the Fed had cut more drastically earlier, we wouldn't be worried about a recession right now. And I'll bet the dollar would be even higher, since the world likes investing in currencies that are backed by a strong economy.

There is no need to go through a recession just to make the 'organizations that were investing poorly' pay. The market won't discriminate to that degree (ie, good investments that have nothing to do with housing and have wonderful balance sheets like Apple will also go down).

If you're going to use medical analogies, I'd say that avoiding a rate cut to punish the 'bad' companies is like committing suicide to alleviate an upset stomach....

Anyways, the problems weren't caused by lower rates alone - banks weren't very good at evaluating the risk profile of the people they were loaning money to. And repackaging mortgages to sell them to the 'bigger fool' gave them little incentive to be more vigilant - in fact, it rewarded aggressive lending practices .

I think lenders are now more aware of the problems with this line of thought, which is why they are so reticent to lend now.

Hopefully the Fed will cut again at their next meeting.

<comment><USER5> You clearly don't know what hyperinflation does to an economy. It's not like lowering rates is a silver bullet to economic growth. Lowering rates compromises long term growth for short term growth. "Hopefully the Fed will cut again at their next meeting." ... ahhh, forget about it.

<comment><USER4> You're clearly assuming that lowering interest rates will cause hyperinflation. Back that up instead of talking down to me.

Explain how hyperinflation will occur when what is typically a person's most valuable asset (home) decreases in price. Explain how hyperinflation will occur if we're in for a recession and the associated job losses.

Lowering rates does not sacrifice long term growth. Rates were drastically lowered in 91 and 82 (83?) as well, and that didn't exactly negatively impact long term growth.

I'm serious, and I'd appreciate something concrete to help me understand why my viewpoint is incorrect.

<comment><USER6> By lowering the prime interest rate, they are making it easier to borrow dollars, which lowers the dollar's value, which causes price inflation.

If you have a strong dollar, you can lower rates. But the dollar is at an all- time low, so then to have a 75bps drop hit it, the result is essentially pushing it towards hyperinflation.

<comment><USER7> Actually in classical macro theory, lower interest rates (which amounts to the Fed increasing the money supply) leads to greater investment due to cheaper credit, leading to higher output growth in the short run and subsequently lower unemployment. With higher demand for their labour, workers will ask for more cash leading to wage inflation. And because wages are a major input into goods and services, higher wages will cause firms to raise prices - <USER2> price inflation.

That's the theory anyway. There's been alot of criticism on it, but macroeconomists in reserve banks around the world tend to subscribe to this theory when using interest rates to control growth and inflation.

The relationship between interest rates and the dollar is via the interest rate parity condition (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_rate_parity>), which is a feature of open markets (to take into account arbitrage opportunities). Lowering the value of the dollar doesn't cause inflation directly. I suppose it does so indirectly by stimulating exports and raising output growth, which leads to lower unemployment and so on.

Lowering interest rates will likely increase inflation, but hyperinflation is a bit rich. Current US inflation is 4%, which is high, but a long way from hyperinflation (see zimbabwe - 1000%+).

<comment><USER6> You could have just said:

> Actually in classical macro theory, lower interest rates (which amounts to > the Fed increasing the money supply) ... hence price inflation.

If the money supply is increased (more dollar bills are printed), you'll need more to pay for the same thing: and that is directly price inflation. You can ignore the expected effects in the middle. (In fact, there's no direct correlation to cheaper credit and greater investment.)

4% is stated core inflation. The true inflation number is much higher, but it's hard to know because there's a lot of effort put into diminishing it, for obvious reasons. Sure we're not in hyperinflation yet, but the idea is that it could get there quickly. While it seems impossible from the comfort of growing up in the second half of the 20th century, America is in much more trouble than it realizes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ok, call me stupid. I am a coder, not an accountant. Besides, I am Brazilian so I don't even know how american economy works exactly. Can someone explain what's this fuss is all about in good layman terms?

<comment><USER9> I'm a coder non-economist also, but have been look at this for a few months and will take a shot at explaining it.

The way the fed aim to control interest rates is via the amount of money that they issue into circulation. The problem is that when the government puts more money into circulation it waters down the value of the money already in circulation, thereby encouraging consumption and some types of investment, and punishes saving by putting money in the bank. You buy goods so that you have physicals and not money which is losing value. Thus, it's quite controversial when a government institution participates in this way in that it is effectively directing the market.

"Austrians School" economists get particularly upset by this sort of practice where a government manipulates the market in order to steer to an outcome because one of the tenants of that way of looking at the world is that free markets lead to better outcomes than when governments try to manage economies. Frederick Hayek labelled the confidence of being able to second guess the market and manage it towards a desirable outcome "the fatal conceit" and there's a great book about it. Hence the way that Ron Paul (also an Austrian) gets stuck into the federal reserve at each opportunity, particularly over stuff like rate rises.

The other aspect, and the reason that the current instability is unsettling and that governments and institutions are doing a lot more than usual to prop things up is structural.

First - let's look at an example of a crash that isn't structural. Back when the dot come crash happened it was pretty simple: a whole lot of people had invested in stock, the market changed its confidence in that stock, a whole lot of people lost money. The banks took money in and paid it out and everything was fine. The market functioned. September 11 was the same even though trading floors had been taken out. None of these things changed the nature of market dynamics.

Now one that has been structural: Friedman blames the depression on the US Federal Reserve for failing to honour its responsibility to supply liquidity to banks who were short of it (as the UK government have recently done to try and get Northern Rock through).

The problem with the sub-prime situation though is that the rot is to do with the core responsibility of banks: managing risk. Banks take money in and loan it out, and make judgements about repayment risk to make sure that they make a net profit. But the change to banking culture that led to the sub-prime crisis was this: it became popular to package debts in certain combinations and sell them off to a far greater extent than had ever been done before. So you could buy certain packages of debt that had been guaranteed to fit a certain level of exposure. Basically this represents large scale outsourcing of bank's core business. (That's a nasty way to put it though, because in fact when you loan money in any sense you're outsourcing risk to some extent and this has always happened, just not to the same extent.)

The sub-prime crisis over the last year has given everyone in the banks the jitters because they've lost some confidence in the risk assessments made by banks they have previously exchanged risk with. Worse, they're not so sure about how much other banks know about their own risk and whether they're being entirely square with the market about it. Thus they start getting very more edgy than usual about short-term loans because the other party might not know what its position is or it might become susceptible to slight changes in the economy. And now the US (where most of the bad exposure was) is slipping into recession... meaning more people will fail on their home loans...

The real problem from subprime is that if the banks stop dealing with one another, you can be certain that economic activity will decline further. This will cause less people will be able to pay their mortgages. This will cause banks who are currently on the edge to slip. In other words - ouch. If there is a crash resulting from lack of confidence it will eclipse the actual value of money lost due to dodgy loans.

Thus, from a certain perspective there is some sense in 'the people' via their elected institutions throwing money at this problem, because even though we're not individually responsible for causing it, it's possible we may be able to buy our way out of it and come out ahead of where we'd be if we had to suffer the consequences of a banking collapse. The problem is - if it is inevitable, then we will have spent a whole lot of money for no good cause.

I can't help but think that monetarists have become too clever by half, and that it would be preferable if we were to all just resign ourselves to having ten year economic cycles. Things are much more highly geared now as a result of a prolonged period of good times and if it gets really nasty there will be a lasting effect in people's psyches that actually limits our ability to get out of it (much as there was in the depression where people saved money even when it was in their interest to participate in some consumption). But time will tell. :)

<comment><USER10> This is a pretty good explanation of the situation. At least as far as I can tell, being a coder who's recently tried to learn a lot about macroeconomics.

One detail that could use correction:

"The way the fed aim to control interest rates is via the amount of money that they issue into circulation."

It's kinda the opposite, actually. When you hear that the Fed's cut its interest rate, that means they've reduced what's called the Discount Rate -- the rate at which the Fed makes overnight loans to major banks. If you're a major bank, and you need some cash, you can get these overnight loans from the Fed or you can take money from other places, and your decision is probably based on whatever's cheapest. Since the Fed is always there as a last resort lender for banks, interest rates for other loans between banks and from banks to businesses will generally reflect changes to the Fed Discount rate. That's how the Fed rate has a rippling influence on liquidity supply throughout the banking industry.

Of course, the thing that's special about the Fed is that, unlike typical banks, it's not loaning out assets it has on deposit. It's creating new money when someone takes out a Fed loan, and it's destroying that money when the loan is repaid. Since this increases the money supply, it risks creating inflation if the economy isn't growing proportionately. High inflation is bad because it encourages spending your money now rather than investing it, and long-term growth depends on a lot of investments -- education, equipment, research, etc.

<comment><USER11> "Banking industry" is an insult to those who actually produce goods. Banks should be known as "facilitators", when doing their job properly, and all sorts of bad words when they don't -which is frequently, unfortunately.

<comment><USER9> > "Banking industry" is an insult to those who actually > produce goods.

What do you think should be a use of industry? Is it OK to say "transport industry" despite the fact that what they do is a service?

Banks produce value through strategic use of risk calculation. They take in $100 and then lend out $90 for further wealth creation, and keep $10 on hand as liquidity so that if any of the owners of the $100 want any back they can get it. Thus, you have $190 of value passing around from a base of $100. You've just got to be careful not to loan too much out or you run out of liquidity and then the system stalls.

> which is frequently, unfortunately

Frequently by what measure?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting chart that shows the market may be worse off than expected:

[http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v124/BCStud31/99problems_g...](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v124/BCStud31/99problems_graph.jpg)

<comment><USER13> I'm kinda sad you got buried for that... I laughed to no end... even if it is off topic.

<comment><USER12> I minored in economics and had an amazing prof for monetary economics. Long story short, he worked for the Bank of Canada doing basically what your Federal Reserve chairman does.

The amount of analysis and study that goes into interest rate adjustment is mind blowing. They have 4 teams of experts running amazing models each in a specific technique, and then each team independently reports their results to the board which then decides what action to take. There is literally a mountain of data and factors that come into play.

Anyways, the gross oversimplification of the entire process across the news world today resulted in me posting a dumb (I am glad you also found it funny) picture.

edit: I feel like I am hedging my karma here against people that do not enjoy the odd bit of humour.

edit2: I just remembered a whole lecture that discussed the reason that for interest rate adjustment to work well, everyone has to have full confidence in the federal reserve. So, since confidence levels impact the effectiveness of adjustments, they were probably sitting on this rate hike hoping to do it at the standard time (which was actually bumped up), but to slow the plummeting they took action a bit earlier which may hurt their credibility and the change might not help very much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This seems apt: [http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Ben-Bernanke-Ben-Bernanke- Fede...](http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Ben-Bernanke-Ben-Bernanke-Federal- Reserve-Board- Chairman/ss/events/bs/013006bernanke/s:/ap/20080122/ap_on_bi_ge/fed_interest_rates/im:/080121/480/ccb619bf589e483ba6d90ec2800798cf/;_ylt=AgEdcbukJC9KYe4xZ15KeFpv24cA)

</comment><comment><USER6> 75 basis points wreaks of desperation.

</comment><comment><USER15> Banks can lend out 10 times their assets. When they have to do a write-down, they are reducing their asset base (and the amount they can loan) Does reducing the interest rate help banks (because the way the Fed does it with T-bill purchases)?

<comment><USER12> You are slightly confusing the issues at hand here.

Most of the write-downs banks were doing were related to mortgage trading they were doing, not mortgage issuing. There was not _that_ many banks involved in the sub-prime business and losing a lot directly.

Banks are quite well hedged against interest rate flux fundamentally ...since they make prime + x on loans, and pay out prime - x on balances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I keep hearing the word "recession," but no one has exactly defined what that is, or if we're "in a recession" yet. Are there values that define when you can say we're in a recession?

<comment><USER5> A recession is a decline in a country's gross domestic product (GDP), or negative real economic growth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Recommended reading for anyone interested in what's going on in the world economy. These are just starting points.

<http://www.marketthoughts.com/z20060921.html> (yen carry trade)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_currency> (fiat currency)

</comment><comment><USER5> Wait for it:

...

HYPERINFLATION!

<comment><USER13> Eh, main drivers of inflation right now are food and oil, neither of which is affected a whole lot by fed funds rate. Food prices are high for a variety of policy/trade/weather reasons (corn has skyrocketed due to US ethanol policy), and oil prices are high because, well, it's oil.

<comment><USER18> Oil does not cause inflation. Genuine shortages could inch up prices, but there really are no shortages right now. The usual cause of inflation (and the _only_ cause of hyperinflation) is always the same...

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Components_of_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Components_of_the_United_States_money_supply.svg)

<comment><USER6> >Oil does not cause inflation But increased demand often increases prices. You're talking about monetary inflation, but remember there's also price inflation. If some good, x, is more sought after and the supply doesn't increase, as with oil, the price will go up. Oil was $20/barrel five years ago and hit $100 recently.</comment></comment></comment></comment>