Cascading errors caused AWS to go down - <AUTHOR> http://status.aws.amazon.com/rss/ec2-us-east-1.rss

<comment><USER2> In case your browser doesn't speak RSS:

 _Service is operating normally: Root cause for June 14 Service Event June 16, 2012 3:15 AM

We would like to share some detail about the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service event last night when power was lost to some EC2 instances and Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes in a single Availability Zone in the US East Region.

At approximately 8:44PM PDT, there was a cable fault in the high voltage Utility power distribution system. Two Utility substations that feed the impacted Availability Zone went offline, causing the entire Availability Zone to fail over to generator power. All EC2 instances and EBS volumes successfully transferred to back-up generator power. At 8:53PM PDT, one of the generators overheated and powered off because of a defective cooling fan. At this point, the EC2 instances and EBS volumes supported by this generator failed over to their secondary back-up power (which is provided by a completely separate power distribution circuit complete with additional generator capacity). Unfortunately, one of the breakers on this particular back-up power distribution circuit was incorrectly configured to open at too low a power threshold and opened when the load transferred to this circuit. After this circuit breaker opened at 8:57PM PDT, the affected instances and volumes were left without primary, back-up, or secondary back-up power. Those customers with affected instances or volumes that were running in multi- Availability Zone configurations avoided meaningful disruption to their applications; however, those affected who were only running in this Availability Zone, had to wait until the power was restored to be fully functional.

The generator fan was fixed and the generator was restarted at 10:19PM PDT. Once power was restored, affected instances and volumes began to recover, with the majority of instances recovering by 10:50PM PDT. For EBS volumes (including boot volumes) that had inflight writes at the time of the power loss, those volumes had the potential to be in an inconsistent state. Rather than return those volumes in a potentially inconsistent state, EBS brings them back online in an impaired state where all I/O on the volume is paused. Customers can then verify the volume is consistent and resume using it. By 1:05AM PDT, over 99% of affected volumes had been returned to customers with a state 'impaired' and paused I/O to the instance.

Separate from the impact to the instances and volumes, the EBS-related EC2 API calls were impaired from 8:57PM PDT until 10:40PM PDT. Specifically, during this time period, mutable EBS calls (e.g. create, delete) were failing. This also affected the ability for customers to launch new EBS-backed EC2 instances. The EC2 and EBS APIs are implemented on multi-Availability Zone replicated datastores. The EBS datastore is used to store metadata for resources such as volumes and snapshots. One of the primary EBS datastores lost power because of the event. The datastore that lost power did not fail cleanly, leaving the system unable to flip the datastore to its replicas in another Availability Zone. To protect against datastore corruption, the system automatically flipped to read-only mode until power was restored to the affected Availability Zone. Once power was restored, we were able to get back into a consistent state and returned the datastore to read-write mode, which enabled the mutable EBS calls to succeed. We will be implementing changes to our replication to ensure that our datastores are not able to get into the state that prevented rapid failover.

Utility power has since been restored and all instances and volumes are now running with full power redundancy. We have also completed an audit of all our back-up power distribution circuits. We found one additional breaker that needed corrective action. We've now validated that all breakers worldwide are properly configured, and are incorporating these configuration checks into our regular testing and audit processes.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience to those who were impacted by the event._

<comment><USER3> Sounds like Amazon is doing something wrong, shouldn't it fail over to Battery then Generator?

<comment><USER4> The batteries at colocation facilities are only designed to hold power long enough to transfer to the generator. They're also a huge single point of failure. A better design is a flywheel that generates enough power. But datacenters are often hit with these generator failures (in my experience, once every year or so.)

Amazon had a correct setup--but not great testing.

By the way, these are great questions to ask of your datacenter provider: Are there two completely redundant power systems up to and including the PDUs and generators? How often are those tested? How do I set up my servers properly so that if one circuit/PDU/generator fails, I don't lose power?

There is a "right way" to do this--multiple power supplies in every server connected to 2 PDUs connected to 2 different generators--but it's expensive, and many/most low-end hosting providers won't set this up due to the cost.

(I ran a colocation/dedicated server company from 2001-2007.)

<comment><USER5> The rotational UPSes are the cause of the majority of 365 Main's downtime, and in general, horrible and must be destroyed with prejudice.

They're a nice idea in principle (and were the best option back in the mainframe era), but power electronics have gotten better faster than rotational maintenance at a datacenter company. They also weren't widely deployed enough to have a great support system, and it was firmware/software which caused most of their outages.

Dual line cord for network devices, and then STSes per floor area, probably make the most sense. Basically no commodity hosting provider uses dual line cord servers on A and B buses. I love having dual line cord for anything "real" (including virtualization servers for core infrastructure), but when you're selling servers for $50/mo, you can't.

(there's the Google approach to put a small UPS in each server, too...)

<comment><USER4> (Person you replied to here.) "The rotational UPSes are the cause of the majority of 365 Main's downtime, and in general, horrible and must be destroyed with prejudice."

No. Incorrect. There is a reason I 100% refused to move my hosting company there. I'm not going to say anything else publicly, but it wasn't the hardware that caused repeated outages there. (I moved my hosting company from San Francisco to San Jose, and lived in the Bay Area for 10 years. Everyone in the hosting industry in the Bay Area knew each other. I also hosted for years in AboveNet SJC3, which had the same flywheel setup.)

Note: I hope at this point they've fixed the issue. I've been out of the industry for a few years. I wish them the best.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I almost took half a floor of 365 Main back in 2003-2004, and didn't due to their (at the time) tenuous financial situation and thus being underresourced on everything. That and there being ~no carriers in the building at the time. For SF colo, 200 Paul remains a superior choice, although some floors have had problems, and it's a totally conventional design.

But the hitech UPS was a weak link. When they sold all their facilities to someone else (DRT), that fixed most of the other issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The RSS link was quite amusing. My Chrome instance downloaded the RSS file without displaying it. Then I clicked it to open, and it opened Firefox. Firefox showed its file download box, suggesting I open the RSS with Google Chrome.

Deadlock detected.

<comment><USER7> On Linux, right? Firefox, or whatever gnome/dbus/opendesktop/gtk fuckery it uses has all sorts of strange notions about file types. When I download a tar.gz file, it saves a copy to /tmp, then launches a new instance of firefox with a file:// url, which opens a save file dialog.

<comment><USER8> Respectfully, your setup is broken; not linux...

<comment><USER9> Yup, similar file association nonsense can happen on Windows too (and it is a right PITA to fix)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In my time at larger companies, DC power seems to be one of the weakest links in the reliability chain. Even planned maintenance often goes wrong ("well we started the generator test and the lights went out, that wasn't supposed to happen. Sorry your racks are dead").

Usually the root cause appears simple - a dead fan, breaker set to the wrong threshold, alarm that didn't trigger, incorrect component picked during design phase, or whatever else that gets the blame - things it would seem to a software guy that good processes could mitigate.

Can any electrical engineers elaborate on why power networks fail (in my experience at least) so frequently? I guess failure modes (e.g. lightning strike) are hard to test, but surely an industry this old has techniques. Is it perhaps a cost issue?

<comment><USER11> It's really incredibly complicated, and difficult to test fully. The bits of Amazon's DC that failed seem like stuff normal testing should catch, but the DC power failures I've dealt with in the past always had some really precise sequence of events that caused some strange failure no one expected.

As an example, Equinix in Chicago failed back in like 2005. Everything went really well, except there was some kind of crossover cable between generators that helped them balance load that failed because of a nick in its insulation. This caused some wonky failure cycle between generators that seemed straight out of Murphy's playbook.

They started doing IR scans of those cables regularly as part of their disaster prep. It's crazy how much power is moving around in these data centers, in a lot of way they're in thoroughly uncharted territory.

<comment><USER5> The even crazier thing is big industrial plants where they are using tens or hundreds of MW and have much lower margins than datacenter companies, so they run with dual grid (HV, sometimes like 132kV) feeds and no onsite redundancy. As in, when the grids flicker, they lose $20mm of in-progress work.

<comment><USER12> I'd guess that's because "tens or hundreds of MW" of on-site backup power would be _ludicrously_ expensive to own/maintain, and the tradeoff against the risk of both ends of their dual grid flickering at once and trashing the current batch is less expensive. (or maybe the power supply glitches are insurable against, or have contract penalty clauses with the power companies?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _"Those customers with affected instances or volumes that were running in multi-Availability Zone configurations avoided meaningful disruption to their applications"_

"Meaningful disruption" is a bit of a weasel word; Amazon's own EBS API was down for almost two hours[1] despite being designed to use multiple AZs

[1] _"the EBS-related EC2 API calls were impaired from 8:57PM PDT until 10:40PM PDT ... The EC2 and EBS APIs are implemented on multi-Availability Zone replicated datastores"_

Guess the moral of the story is, if you require high availability then you must test your system in the face of an availability zone outage.

</comment><comment><USER14> I love this sentence: _Those customers with affected instances or volumes that were running in multi-Availability Zone configurations avoided meaningful disruption to their applications; however, those affected who were only running in this Availability Zone, had to wait until the power was restored to be fully functional._

Translation: If you have a redundant (multiple-AZ) installation, then you were ok, if not then your server died.

</comment><comment><USER15> Data Center Operator:

We've lost our main power. No problem though we have a backup generator so we are good!

... 5 minutes later ...

Uhh boss, our backup generator's fan crapped out. But no worries we have a secondary generator just for this kind of scenarion!

...10 minutes later and lights go out...

"Well damn...looks like we configured the breaker wrong. This is not a good day."

<comment><USER16> Things could be have been worse -- it could have been a nuclear power plant. oh wait...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> On the plus side, the level of transparency that AWS displays and the detail that they provide seems above and beyond the call of duty. I find it refreshing and I hope that other companies follow suit so that customers can understand the details of operational issues, calibrate expectations appropriately, and make informed decisions.

<comment><USER5> They're less transparent and responsive than most datacenter or network providers -- it's just that most of those providers hide their outage information behind an NDA, so only customer contacts get it, vs. making it public.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, a good datacenter will have SLAs around the root-cause analysis document for any failures. Like a preliminary report within a day and a final report within 7 days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The title is incorrect. It should say something more like "Cascading failures cause part of AWS to go down."

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm running <https://www.rootredirect.com/> and <http://www.restbackup.com/> in us-east-1, in multiple availability zones. Both sites remained up with no problems.

<comment><USER20> Does your rootredirect service actually attract paying customers? I'm genuinely interested to know.

<comment><USER21> Also, how do you do this without having to handle the customers DNS lookups as well?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can someone translate that to control rods and manifolds?

</comment><comment><USER23> Seems like deploying on two _physical_ regions (or more) is the best and only proven approach.

That could be within the global AWS, or even say, one cluster at AWS and the other at RackSpace/Linode, etc.

<comment><USER24> Then you just need to worry about your application consistency with the replication lag. No silver bullet I guess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Did anyone else run into issues with ELB during the outage? We're multi-AZ and could access unaffected instances directly without a problem, but the load balancer kept claiming they were unhealthy.

</comment><comment><USER26> Could it be possible to have power management the same way Erlang manages processes? Instead of 2 or 3 enormous backup power unit, hundreads of small ones to come in and out of use "fluently".

</comment><comment><USER27> TL; DR:

Shit happens. Don't use AWS as your only platform, you _will_ get burned sometime. Guaranteed, you will also get burned if you try to host and run your own stuff. How competent you are determines which way you get burned less.

<comment><USER28> Actually, starting right now, AWS is probably your best bet.

Old story about Chuck Yeager from the 1950's: one time shortly after take-off, Yeager's aircraft suffered an engine failure, and he had to do an emergency semi-crash landing. When he realized that a mechanic had put the wrong type of fuel in the plane, he went looking for the guy. The mechanic profusely apologized, said he would resign and never work in aviation again. Yeager replied something along the lines of "Nonsense. In fact, I need someone to refuel my plane right now, and I want you to be the one to fuel it. That's because of all the guys here, I know you'll be the one guy who'll be sure to do it right."

Probably apocryphal, but the point has merit.

<comment><USER29> This is mentioned in 'How to win friends and influence people' where the anecdote is about Bob Hoover and Jet fuel put in a WW2 plane. It is used as an example that it is easy to criticize and complain but that it takes character to be understanding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> 1 in a (million/billion/trillion) I guess.

That'll make for a great horror story to tell though.

<comment><USER31> Isn't the moral of the story, "Check your backups"? There was a defective fan in one generator (sounds like it was findable via a test run?) and a misconfigured circuit breaker (sounds like it was findable by a test run).

Redundancy is only helpful if the redundant systems are actually functional.

<comment><USER32> Having been affected several times by colocation facilities bouncing the power during a test of the failover system, I can tell you that such tests are not without risk. Yes, you should test redundant systems, but how often, at what cost, and what risks are you willing to run while doing so.

It's a fact of life that when dealing with complex, tightly coupled systems with multiple interactions between subsystems that you will routinely see accidents caused by improbable combinations of failures.

<comment><USER33> I wonder if it's better to create an accidental outage during a scheduled test, or to have an outage completely out of the blue. Obviously mitigation is tricky even during a scheduled test, but perhaps its plausible?

<comment><USER34> With a scheduled test, you have the benefit of having the main power actually working if the backup being tested comes crashing down; seems to me that mitigation would be much quicker in a scheduled test than in a real outage.

<comment> excuse-me But would you rather risk a once in 10years real power failure testing your backups, or would pull the plug once per year to test it yourself?

<comment><USER35> I suspect a monthly test - if communicated to customers as well - would drive better customer behaviour, e.g. multi-AZ usage, automated validation of EBS, adding extra machines in another AZ automatically. Maybe start with one or two AZ's with an opt-in from customers.

It's the same as advice to routinely replace your live data from backups. It's not a real backup until you've tested that you can recover from it.

<comment> excuse-me It's an interesting and well studied area of statistics for medical tests.

eg. If you have a test that is 99% accurate and a treatment that harms 1% of the patients and you do this screening of a million people - how common does the disease have to be before you cure more people than you kill ?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Things I wish I'd known before I started traveling  - <AUTHOR> http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/10/13/28-things-i-wish-i-knew-before-i-started-traveling/

<comment><USER2> Some of these are very good advice (e.g. the local police is not always your friend), some are debatable (the health care in Costa Rica is better than the US, it may be _cheaper_ , of course) and some are ludicrous (dollar is not teh world's currency, his link says a few small conversion shops in Amsterdam refused it).

I would add the following: 1) Don't wear flashy clothes and flaunt your expensive photo equipment. Your multi thousand camera is an invitation.

2) Try to blend in visually, don't go around continuously checking a map or photographing everything.

3) If you are a woman, you should especially be careful. Lots of cultures have different expectations of proper behavior from women. Wearing ultra-mini shorts, as American college girls generally do overseas, can get you quite a bit of unwelcome attention, and not just in "backwards" countries either: I've seen many a girl harassed in Italy.

4) Try to go around with a local friend, if possible. They'll know the trouble areas much better than a guide. Many cities have such local welcome citizen programs.</comment>


Show HN: Hacker News Extension show GitHub language tag - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/betty200744/Hacker-Tag <comment><USER2> Wow I never knew HN supported a `?from`[1] query parameter!

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com)</comment>


How to reduce your Amazon S3 bill - <AUTHOR> http://www.labnol.org/internet/lower-amazon-s3-bill-improve-website-loading-time/5193/

<comment><USER2> Besides the information on this article there's also a lot more information on how to reduce your bill and serve your site way faster on this one > <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=352695>

</comment><comment><USER3> You also get a big performance boost when you use the cache-control headers properly. Because you'll be saving the browser having to connect to the server to check if the file changed, and if you have many js, css, and image file, then you'd be saving a lot of round-trips.

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought the point of a web startup is to figure out ways to _increase_ your hosting bills... :)

</comment><comment><USER5> AFAIK, one of the browsers (probably IE), ignores query parameters on css and js files and will not refresh foo.css?v=2 if it has foo.css?v=1 in its cache.

<comment><USER6> I am told by someone with a high volume, consumer site that there are proxies in use that strip the query parameter from URLs that they guess are images. They are rare, but they caused him to put the serial number in the file name. (This was several years ago, I don't know if these proxies still exist.)

<comment><USER7> Facebook would probably confirm that this still happens. They switched from simple ?cachebreakers to:

[http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/zD9BP/lpkg/rjg2jdf2/en_U...](http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/zD9BP/lpkg/rjg2jdf2/en_US/141/132916/css/dmdc8cemfg8ww0g0.pkg.css)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for posting this, very useful.

One of our services relies heavily on S3 for image storage.

</comment><comment><USER9> These tips are definitely useful for S3-based apps, but are also very informative in general. Thanks a lot for the article.

</comment><comment><USER10> Great article.</comment>


Show HN: DatoRSS – RSS Search Engine - <AUTHOR> http://www.datorss.com <comment><USER2> What is it?

Does it search for feeds that include my search text?

It looks useful, but using two minutes to do two searches was not enough to figure out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems to be bringing a lot of stuff from Yahoo News ?!?! for some searches, for some reason. Not a source I would personally ever consider.

Great that it includes non English sources as well. Very useful since I always found it difficult to discover new blogs.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice! Seems to be a good way to find text-heavy news sources on any given topic. Thanks!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> just added covid-19 section [https://www.datorss.com](https://www.datorss.com). Stay healthy!

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't figure out how to execute a search with my own term(s) on mobile (iPhone SE). UI/responsive issue?</comment>


India, Once a Coal Goliath, Is Fast Turning Green - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/world/asia/india-coal-green-energy-climate.html <comment><USER2> Parts of the theory of disruption - specifically that an entity with less entrenched structures, can solve problems in more efficient ways - applies to nation states as well.

When 25% of your country has no electricity at all, you get to imagine parts of your grid from the ground up. If there's an expectation of load-shedding and your grid doesn't have to be at a 100% in all places, you have room to make mistakes. Most importantly, if the renewables aren't replacing but rather adding to your energy generation capacity, you don't have to fight entrenched fossil fuel businesses and associated regulatory capture to get started.

In many ways it's similar to how telephony spread in the developing world. They skipped landlines entirely and went straight to GSM.

I'm terribly excited about renewables in parts of Africa and the rural areas in South Asia. My family is originally from Bangladesh. The local grid is so unreliable in rural areas and Chinese solar equipment so cheap that most of my family members who live in villages just bought a solar installation instead of waiting around for the utilities to run wiring.

<comment><USER3> > In many ways it's similar to how telephony spread in the developing world. > They skipped landlines entirely and went straight to GSM.

And also how banking/payment is spreading in Africa: mobile-to-mobile, skipping credit cards entirely.

<comment><USER4> I love the elegance and futurism of paying with mobile phones like that, but do the telephone companies operate in a similar manner to financial institutions there?

For instance, if I deposit money, do I receive interest? What happens to my funds if the phone company goes bankrupt? Are there similar regulations to banks?

<comment><USER5> When was the last time you earned a noteworthy amount of interest on a bank deposit?

<comment><USER6> Not many in India would see things the way you do. Why lose interest if you can get it, particularly if you don't have more interest coming in from mutual funds or someplace else? If anything, the competition is on to see who'll pay more interest. One payments bank announced 7%: [http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/wealth/personal- finance-...](http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/wealth/personal-finance- news/airtel-payments-bank-offers-7-25-interest/articleshow/56512588.cms)

<comment><USER7> What's the post inflation adjusted interest rate? Because simply moving your money to a low inflation currency does the same thing.

 _The only catch is that the payments banks, which do not offer loans and several other facilities offered by full fledged rivals, are not allowed to accept deposits beyond Rs 1 lakh in bank accounts, which will have the same number as your mobile number. Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal said that the higher interest rate and freebies such as life insurance of up to Rs 1 lakh was an "introductory offer" and the rates would go down in a falling interest rate environment_

Ahh, nm. This is just a fixed amount of cash they hand you for switching banks not a full time interest rate.

<comment><USER6> Moving money to a low inflation currency sounds good in theory, but is not an accessible solution to the average Indian, and is fraught with bureaucracy and fees even for those it is accessible to. I put my money in a liquid fund (debt mutual fund) to earn 8% nominal interest rate. That's a much more practical solution than moving it to dollars, say.

Airtel's offer may be temporary, and interest rates rarely go to 7%, but the point is that there's always a competition on interest rates.

India's inflation and nominal interest rates are both higher, which means you lose more if you forgo interest. In a hypothetical country with 5% inflation and a 5% interest rate, if you forgo interest, you lose 5% every year. In a country with 2% inflation and 2% interest rate, you lose only 2%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ha! Try telling this to the current Australian government...

The current narrative is that India desperately needs coal and our coal is the cleanest, so we need to dig it up [1] and sell it to them to help fight climate change, because otherwise they're going to get 'dirtier' coal from somewhere else. If you disagree, then you believe that Indians don't deserve electricity.

And this isn't a strawman, this is almost verbatim what's being said in Parliament. The cognitive dissonance with our current PM is strong.

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

<comment><USER9> India imports a huge amount of coal from Australia because of local restrictions on mining, by the way. Otherwise we have one of the largest coal reserves on the planet.

Digging up coal to fight climate change is just silly, and I doubt that flies anywherre.

<comment><USER10> The normal industry name for lower quality coal is "brown coal" (the most common type is lignite, which actually has a brown colour), and higher quality coal is "black coal". For coal used for steel making / coking has to be purer so low sulphur black coal is the only option.

<comment><USER9> This may be true to some extent, but a significant amount of noise was generated because of the previous government refusing to issue mining clearances for coal. I think a number of private companies had laid out infrastructure to use brown coal after the energy reforms by the Vajpayee government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am a young Indian. I have a dream . The dream that we are running electric vehicles. We have banned plastic everywhere. We have stopped burning our garbage. We have improved air quality. I think we can start with auto-rikshaws and public transport. Auto rickshaw constitute to a lot of traffic and pollution in the cities. We could replace them with smart electric ones. They move around only in cities so it won't be a big problem to build charging infrastructure. Then we could replace buses and increase their number. Ofcourse we need a lot of subsidies and incentives to make it happen. But it is POSSIBLE. but I need to build billion dollars companies ,sell them . Then use all that money to build this dream. I think someone did something like this in USA right? ;)

<comment><USER12> Auto-rickshaws are already ALL electric in some cities. Haridwar for one.

<comment><USER13> India is a large country.

<comment><USER11> Yeah. But we have got to start somewhere. First we can focus on cities and then move towards rural India.

<comment><USER14> 50%* of our workforce relies on agriculture. Bringing up their standards of living i.e. rural India is what we need to focus on first.

*[https://www.ibef.org/exports/agriculture-and-food-industry-i...](https://www.ibef.org/exports/agriculture-and-food-industry-india.aspx)

<comment><USER11> Yeah. I sometimes think about it. The problem is most of the farmers have very less land. Also they use unsustainable methods and weather has been inconsistent in recent years. We need another agricultural revolution. But it's lot more complicated to get people on board. People in the rural area are really hard to work with ( not all of them ).They suffer , but they don't want change , they want subsidiaries , free loans. maybe we don't understand them because we live in the cities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> India is doing pretty well in green energy on the whole! India has the 4th largest energy generator from wind in the world. India has the largest solar power plant in the world (Kamuthi in Tamil Nadu). I at least hope that India is not inclined to return to coal with the US's exit from the Paris accord.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_by_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_by_country) [http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/12/02/india-solar-power- pl...](http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/12/02/india-solar-power- plant_n_13352756.html)

<comment><USER16> The thing I don't understand is why it's assumed that somehow the Paris Treaty is somehow enforced, or binding, or that it will even actually improve conditions more-so than independent initiative.

I personally think that the USA can achieve its goal without the Paris Treaty through personal responsibility of the states, and independent initiatives through counties, and cities. That type of independent resolution is necessary for long term improvement at the grassroots level.

The US, I don't think, can get to the level of European in terms with climate, unless the US, and its states stop being complacent, and reliant on the Federal government.

<comment><USER17> Treaties like this have a big signaling component, just like macroeconomics. Improvements are perfectly possible without them, but even a toothless treaty affects all kinds of decisions downstream.

We also take into account that energy production is about large capital investments that aren't looking at tomorrow, but a decade or two ahead at the minimum. Building a new coal plant today isn't a bad idea because it'll be way to expensive to run in its first year, but because it'll be less and less attractive as time goes by, and will probably have its life cut short.

This is why on one hand, Trump's decisions aren't necessarily that hard hitting in the long run as long as the people building plants can expect his decisions today to be a historical aberration. It's the long run trendline that is important, and we can tell about that by what other stakeholders do.

That said, I'd not put much faith in most states caring about climate change individually. There's plenty of states that are deep red and where most energy today still comes from coal, and where candidates don't even bother mentioning an energy stance: Elections are about protecting religion and policemen and lower taxes. It's not that the states are relying on the federal government on the environment: If there's a mention of the environment, it's something like 'The EPA is too tough on our farmers'. This was a real talking point in Missouri's last election for governor, and guess what? the candidate that was in favor of letting farmers dump more chemicals into rivers won.

The federal government can force those states to make changes, but they'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming. It's good to have some states that lead the charge on this, but it's can't be the main way to do this. If this is decided state by state, the Midwest will be mostly powering itself with coal for decades.

<comment><USER18> As a current Missouri resident - I am getting the heck out of here.

<comment><USER19> You are not alone. Look into population migration numbers among states.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One of the interesting segments was a feature made by a bearded David Letterman in Nov 2016 - around the problems with solar panel rooftops in the USA and the success these have in India.

[https://youtu.be/bW_eGAwnfeI](https://youtu.be/bW_eGAwnfeI)

The point it tries to make is that - the demand exists, the challenge is the govt and the policy makers.

One other point made in the same video is at the end by Prime Minister Modi - we need tech transfer from the US. Solar and nuclear . India is probably the only non-NPT country to be authorised by the US Congress for civilian nuclear technology sale.

But all bets are off now. One does not know how the current regime will operate due the "coal is best" rhetoric.

Of course, Tesla might still move to India given the repartee between Anand Mahindra (of Mahindra motors) and Elon Musk yesterday!

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/870570686409920512](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/870570686409920512)

</comment><comment><USER21> Last I checked, the reason India's coal power plants were running at 60% was not because of lack of demand, but because fixed prices make it uneconomical to produce coal and the government monopoly Coal India is utterly incompetent and inefficient even by Indian government standards...

<comment><USER22> You should look up the NTPC chairman's explanation for why average PLF runs below 75%.

Apparently, the transmission & distribution network for evacuation is overburdened already. This results in plants running below their rated capacities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Yeah unless India influences corrupt politicians of neighboring countries to make coal based power plants in neighbouring countries and imports electricity from those plants. Search "Rampal Power Plant", "greatest mangrove forest of the planet" etc. Also please see: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/20...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy- environment/wp/2016/07/18/a-new-power-plant-could-devastate-the-worlds- largest-mangrove-forest/)

</comment><comment><USER24> One thing I learned on a trip to Kerala is that most people in the region actually burn their garbage - the government doesn't provide disposal service. While I'm sure the particulate and chemical emissions of this practice are awful, I'm curious about this carbon implications.

<comment><USER25> CO_2 emissions are the same if it goes up in big black smokes of clouds next to some school, or if it's burned in the best incinerator money can buy, or even if it's thrown in the ocean and slowly degraded by organic means.

The only thing that makes a difference is recycling.

<comment><USER26> "CO_2 emissions are the same if it goes up in big black smokes of clouds next to some school, or if it's burned in the best incinerator money can buy"

Is that really true ?

I was under the impression that the very best incinerators (what nordic countries use for garbage disposal as well as cities like Zurich, etc.) had carbon capture mechanisms ...

Is that not true ?

<comment><USER27> I believe carbon capture is a newer innovation whose development had been stalled due to its prohibitive costs. The first carbon capture experiments were scheduled to be conducted in 2016. Albeit I'm not aware of their results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone know more about India's nuclear story? At one time they were focusing on thorium. I wonder what we could do to spur on a little more competition with China.

[http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current- and...](http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future- generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx)

<comment><USER29> Nuclear power is such a mess though.

There's the political logistics of getting the fuel, figuring out how and where to dispose of the fuel, the NIMBY problem with plant locations and the fact that in general its politically very unpopular.

<comment><USER28> That sounds like it is true for western countries, but China has a lot of nuclear power coming online, and what are the attitudes in India?

<comment><USER30> It's the same. While liberal class sees nuclear as future, no one wants a nuclear plant opened in their city. See: [http://www.nzherald.co.nz/environment/news/article.cfm?c_id=...](http://www.nzherald.co.nz/environment/news/article.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=10762102) for an example

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder why NYT conveniently chose to ignore the previous US administration's WTO complaint on India's local component requirements for solar panels and it's subsequent verdict against India.

India required US solar panel manufacturers to source cells from locally, which was challenged by US in WTO and subsequently awarded in it's favour. So it's not just India is moving forward with green energy in spite of 'unfair- share' in global climate policies but also moving against the hurdles imposed specifically targeting it's green energy movements.

<comment><USER29> They didn't ignore it. It's just irrelevant to the current topic at hand.

India and quite a number of other countries e.g. China play this game all the time with industries. Look at what Apple went through for example to establish a presence in India.

<comment><USER30> Wait. I don't think apple example is relevant here. They already has a very big share in flagship mobiles(I don't know a better word, say of $500 or more), I think more so than other countries. The problem is India has very low share of flagship mobiles. Apple now plans to make the cheaper C models in India, but nowhere forced to, and given some leivy in manufacturing those locally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As an Indian, I'm really proud to read this. I'm hoping that they strategize this well and execute it well. India can easily harness wind and solar energy, create an really strong energy surplus and supply it to neighboring countries.

The whole region can benefit. India can be a beacon of peace and use it to stabilize the region and become a leader.

</comment><comment><USER33> I know this is completely beyond the topic, and only relevant in regards to the website, but, as someone who has been convulsively clicking text while reading articles his whole life, this site design is absolute garbage. When i double click text I do not expect the site to interact. Double click in my world is known for highlighting. Not increasing font size. Sorry, end rant.

<comment><USER34> I agree about how the site should act, but in my browser (chrome on mac), it does act the right way.

<comment><USER33> Interesting, I'm using chrome on windows. One thing I also dislike, if I may keep ranting to the internet, is how much windows has fucked with their windowing system in W10. For example: I'd be playing a game and something would cause the game to hang. It happens. But in windows 10 I couldn't even alt-tab because the focus would never leave the hanging 3d area. Couldn't control + alt + delete. Couldn't Windows key + tab, or alt + tab. Couldn't ctrl + shift + esc. Just had to hold the power button down. May I ask you: when was the last time you had to hold the power button down on your mac?

<comment><USER35> I'm using Chrome on windows too and it highlights normally on double/triple click. I think you either have malware on your computer or you have an extension that is... taking some extra liberties with your browser.

As with all initial debugging steps, try in incognito and see if you have the same behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This seems precisely timed considering how Trump backed out of the Paris agreements partially because India was allowed to build MORE coal.

<comment><USER25> There are two reasons why Trump backed out: (a) he enjoys the look of horror on conscientious' peoples' faces, and (b) it was the only quick "win" with his hardcore supporters that was available.

It's disingenuous to insist that India should lower their power consumption, considering they currently consume only 1/15 as much as the US per capita: [http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?contex...](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?contextual=default)

<comment><USER29> > it was the only quick "win" with his hardcore supporters that was available

Surprised this isn't being covered more.

This decision is basically it for Trump supporters for the rest of his term. Everything else e.g. the wall, infrastructure spending, budget cuts, repeal Obamacare etc. all require Congress who will never have the votes to pass anything in both Senate and House.

When you think about it he almost for political reasons had to pull out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Can you unilaterally walk out of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarisation_of_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militarisation_of_space)

</comment><comment><USER38> Certainly not just India, the switch is nearly universal. Some countries are getting a faster start ditching big polluting coal plants than others. Three closed yesterday in the US, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER39> Renewable energy is all automated and mining is innovation and creates jobs. India proves this

/s

</comment><comment><USER40> Article headline is be misleading, India is still using 54% Coal in its Energy mix. India is still the top emitter of green house gases in the world.

<comment><USER41> China 9,679.30 MtCO2e

US 6,668.79 MtCO2e

India 2,432.18 MtCO2e

2010 figures, so India will be a bit closer the US by now.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> India, "still a coal Goliath" is a better description. They burn a massive amount of coal compared to most countries.

They've just scaled slightly back on a massive coal consumption plan they implemented in the last few years. Nice, but hardly worth any recognition in the shadow of the damage they have already done.

<comment><USER43> Indeed. India has a coal glut on their hands. India was opening one new coal planet every month at the end of 2015. Around the same time India's Arvin Subramanian coined the term "carbon imperialism" during Paris accord negotiations because India didn't like the terms.

As expected, much more favorable terms were renegotiated to get India on board; India now gets to grow their CO2 emission as a function of GDP. A simple extrapolation of this shows they'll double their already huge CO2 output by the end of the decade, far surpassing the US.

Made the deal a lot easier to sign.

<comment><USER44> _> far surpassing the US_

Why is this a problem? India has 4x the population...

<comment><USER45> For one, health issues related to air quality have no basis on per capita pollution.

<comment><USER9> But air quality degeneration does have a lot of basis on per capita pollution. The per capita argument was good enough to set the tone at Paris, for an agreement between all the nations on this planet. The argument against per capita pollution contribution is just willful ignorance.

Besides, none of you have even bothered to look at the figures. India's current coal consumption is less than 30% of the US, for a population 4-5 times larger. Even if we double our coal consumption, it wouldn't outstrip US at their current levels.

<comment><USER45> > But air quality degeneration does have a lot of basis on per capita > pollution.

Can you explain to me how this works?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> After watching this talk show with Alex Epstein I've realized the word 'green' is largely bs.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw-1ohbRDrE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw-1ohbRDrE)

Green doesn't automatically mean better, and dirty does not mean coal and fossil fuels. It is how the technology is used. He argues alternative energy leads to deforestation, destruction of habitats, and deaths from vegetable oil which otherwise could be used to prevent some starvation.If you accept these things then alternative energy becomes extremely selfish by putting the burden out of your cities.

It's a good interview I hope you guys check it out.

<comment><USER25> All methods of power generation involve trade-offs. But this is rather transparent attempt to muddy the waters. Just one short point because this idiot doesn't deserve more: Hunger isn't a problem of production. We produce enough calories to feed the world twice. It's a problem of distribution, infrastructure, and economics.</comment></comment>


Recent Article Here, what was it? - <AUTHOR>

There was a post here a few weeks ago discussing offering cash incentives for bug fixes or adding features. Can anyone link it to me? <comment><USER2> See if you can recall an exact phrase (even if short), and google for it (in quotes of course).

It's amazingly effective - provided you get the phrase right. It's quite easy to mis-recall, but for articles that strike me, there'll often be an arbitrary fragment that stays with me. It's even better if you happen to recall the end of one sentence and the start of the next - then, even two words can be enough.

BTW: I found this (but it hasn't been submitted here): <http://www.librarything.com/topic/98543> It's an example of someone actually doing this. Here's another [http://glovepie.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=185&st...](http://glovepie.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=185&start=20)

</comment><comment><USER3> Was it this? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1580798>

Or this? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1532251>

If not, can you remember any specific words that were definitely in the post?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not about Google offering rewards. It was a blog post discussing the potential for small ($1) amounts being used to prioritize some feature requests or bug fixes.

<comment><USER3> Well, as I say, can you remember specific words? Did it use the word "bug" in the title? Or "cash"? Or "money"?

What do you really remember?

<comment><AUTHOR> I do not remember any words of the title, and I didn't read any of the comments. It was one of the link submissions that was on the homepage one day recently.

<comment><USER3> Home page? Not the "New" page?

How recently? Can you remember what else you did that day? Can you remember what time of day you saw it? All these things can be used to find a short list of titles for you to skim read to see if you recognise it.

But I'm going to bed, so it won't be me. Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Throw Away Your Bug Tracking System (apidesign.org) <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668780>

<comment><AUTHOR> Found thanks to <http://hckrnews.com/> listing articles in chronological order.</comment></comment>


Sitting on an Ocean of Talent - <AUTHOR> http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/01/sitting_on_an_o.html <comment><USER2> Caplan is making the argument that opening borders would bring huge economic benefits.

In addition to the economic argument, I think there is a compelling moral argument to opening borders. Why should we deny equal rights (the right to work or move freely) to human beings based on their national origin?

If someone today told you the Jim Crow laws were _economically_ justified in modern America - "we can't allow desegregation, blacks will compete with whites for jobs" \- you'd see them as a disgusting, backwards racist. And yet in the US, foreign nationals are denied basic rights that US citizens take for granted. Does anyone believe these laws are actually just, or do we just support unjust laws we (mistakenly) think are to our economic advantage?

<comment><USER3> One thing that bothers me somewhat about immigration discussions on HN is that the US always seems to be mentioned as unjust in terms of immigration policy and rights of foreigners. However, I'm pretty sure there are plenty of other 'advanced' countries that have similar or worse policies (Japan comes to mind). So the question I end up wondering about is, why do countries practice this kind of stuff? It seems so odd to me that happening to be born somewhere is a meaningful qualifier for anything.

<comment><USER4> It fulfills a social contract: the service you provide by being born is carrying your parents' genes. There is a three-way transaction between citizen, child, and state. This is a boon; it allows social contracts with long time horizons to be made. Take away preference for native-born citizens over foreigners, and you remove the incentive for citizens to leave a country better than they found it. This is not an absolute---limited naturalization, like we have, has not caused the world to fall down. But there is an effect.

<comment><USER3> I hear what you're saying and it makes sense. What would prevent such contracts from being a boon if we were all in one 'country'(the world), though? Is it to hold onto something deemed of value that some may consider arbitrary (speaking a particular language, celebrating certain holidays)? Perhaps some of the values held in certain countries are the things folks want to hold on to (personal liberty vs group cohesion, gun rights, etc). We humans are sure interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm buffled. On one hand, HN users love to upvote articles about how evil companies in US lay off local workers for bogus reasons only to replace them with "cheap labour" through H1Bs and outsourcing. On the other hand, this.

Dear average HN reader — I assume you're a software developer in US and often from Bay area. You realize that after this happens, your wage will reduce, may be twofold, right?

<comment><USER6> I am a software development manager from Europe. Right now we have to turn down projects because we don't have enough people. If we have more people we can start more projects and make more money. My wages will go up as I will have a larger team to manage. The developers in the team already will get more seniority as people come in from overseas "below" most of them. Their wages might go up. Some of them that might not perform as well as the new arrivals might get paid less. Overall, the market might not be as flexible as the labor supply, so we might a reduction in wages over the mid term. This would be a correction in my eyes. I think western workers are overpaid and third world workers are underpaid, so it seems fair to see a natural adjustment here.

<comment><USER7> > Overall, the market might not be as flexible as the labor supply, so we > might a reduction in wages over the mid term.

If you allow unlimited immigration, you will be flooded with _millions_ of programmers. There will be a tremendous reduction in wages.

>My wages will go up as I will have a larger team to manage.

Why do you think you'll still have a job, surely in the millions of people who are clamoring to come to your country there will be many who are willing to do your job much cheaper. Managers aren't immune to competition.

>I think western workers are overpaid and third world workers are underpaid, so it seems fair to see a natural adjustment here.

Do you think you are overpaid, or just the people working below you?

<comment><USER6> Those "millions" of programmers had work in their own countries I presume. Long before a small fraction of these "millions" get around to leaving and moving to the west, the market would have stabilized a bit. Wages would raise there as the supply drops below demand. Eventually we will see "millions" of western developers taking a small paycut to move to Romania or Maruitius or wherever for lifestyle reasons. I hope someone will come here to replace my job for much cheaper, I am sick of it. It would take them a while to train up though, and by the time they are ready to take over, I will be ready to move on to something else. All these new programmers will need someone to support, train, manage, lead, and coordinate them.

Yes I am overpaid on a global scale. Underpaid on a local scale heh. Now what we need is millions of people here earning less than me.. That should put prices down...

<comment><USER7> >Those "millions" of programmers had work in their own countries I presume. Long before a small fraction of these "millions" get around to leaving and moving to the west, the market would have stabilized a bit.

There was a poll recently that estimated about 30 million people from India and China alone want to move to the US permanently (the number of people willing to relocate temporarily is much higher).

Even with depressed wages, developed countries have many quality of life benefits that will immediately attract many more people than you seem to think. Yes millions may be a bit hyperbolic for your own country, but for US that's likely accurate.

>Wages would raise there as the supply drops below demand.

Wages would likely not rise there because a huge fraction of software created in developing countries is done as outsourced work from developed countries. The demand for offshore work will dry up as wages drop in developed countries. That will encourage even more workers to immigrate to developed countries.

>Long before a small fraction of these "millions" get around to leaving and moving to the west, the market would have stabilized a bit.

You have no evidence for this. It's just wishful thinking.

>Eventually we will see "millions" of western developers taking a small paycut to move to Romania or Maruitius or wherever for lifestyle reasons.

How long is eventually? There's no way to know, it could be decades before labor markets stabilize.

>I hope someone will come here to replace my job for much cheaper, I am sick of it.

That makes no sense. Why don't you just quit?

<comment><USER8> Point-by-point responses "in-line" is just just the type of engagement I'd expect from a "business" type.

It's a style of small-minded nit-picking that shows a desire to defeat a conflicting point of view at all cost, by pulling at threads, without really engaging in the debate at hand.

It is quite a lot of effort to reassemble any relevant points and so to respond in less disrespectful fashion.

I won't be doing that, but I will respond on your single position that the parent post has "no evidence" for their postulation, and that it's "just wishful thinking". TFA was entirely in such a vein (a fanciful pipe dream), and your arguments in support are but notional, based on a wished for outcome that would suit yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Open borders are scary probably because the upside is relatively limited for rich countries, because we are already rich. We can either make ourselves a little richer, or on the downside we can make ourselves _a lot_ poorer, by becoming overcrowded with worldwide economic refugees.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a complicated topic but there were real world "experiments": In 2004 in Europe:

"By allowing anyone in the eight relatively poor new members of the EU to come and work freely, Britain, Ireland and Sweden are putting these claims to the test. All seventy-five million people in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are now free to move to Britain and work. Since wages in Poland are typically only a fifth of those in Britain, Poles have a big incentive to come and work here. If opponents of immigration are right, Britain should now be deluged with East Europeans and unemployment should be soaring.... But it isn't. In fact, only 427,000 East Europeans have so far applied to work in Britain (many of whom were already in the country illegally) – and most stay only briefly: net migration from eastern Europe was only 48,000 in 2004.5 Unemployment remains at thirty-year lows, tax receipts are up and jobs that British people no longer want to do are being filled."

\-- Philippe Legrain

<comment><USER10> There is also a the income : cost of living balance and barriers of language & culture.

Another thing I wonder if they can take advantage of welfare? Can a polish person get UK welfare and NHS services indefinitely if they just move there?

<comment><USER11> As a Canadian living in the UK on a temporary work visa I get to vote (LOL THE QUEEN IS ON THE LOONIE), and am served by the NHS for emergency stuff but my visa says "no recourse to public funds" which I'm pretty sure means I don't get things like disability benefit.

Pensions on the other hand, I'm not sure about. I'm getting tax relief for my pension contributions, but maybe there will be a withholding tax if I leave without naturalising.

<comment><USER12> European Union citizens who are habitually resident in another EU country are entitled to receive welfare benefits. (The current UK government wants to renegotiate this arrangement.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We have no way of knowing what impact completely open borders would have on global GDP, so to throw around predictions like doubling global GDP is just ridiculous. Economies are complex systems and moving around tens to hundreds of millions of people is such a massive change that you can't possibly accurately model what would happen. I doubt the economies of developed countries would react positively to an influx of tens of millions of people.

But the people advocating this usually aren't advocating for truly open borders, they are usually advocating for more IT workers, so they can reduce the costs to their companies.

Let's imagine for a moment what would happen if we allowed just the small subset of unlimited immigration that people are really pushing for--an unlimited number of immigrants who have CS degrees. What do you think would happen to programmer salaries when 10 million new programmers arrive next year?

<comment><USER13> > We have no way of knowing what impact completely open borders would have on > global GDP

The impact on developed countries from the enlargement of the EU is probably the best "open borders" experiment we can look at:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_Europe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_enlargement_of_the_European_Union)

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

<comment><USER12> They're all European countries, which is not exactly a random selection of countries.

edit:

European union countries share similar populations both culturally and biologically.

If you moved the populations of Catalan, Cameroon, Kuwait, Cambodia, Korea and Kiribati to the same geographic area, that would be a different experiment.

<comment><USER13> Yes they share the same continental plate. But:

"There is a significant variance for GDP (PPP) per capita within individual EU states, these range from €11,300 to €69,800 (about US$15,700 to US$97,000). The difference between the richest and poorest regions ranged, in 2009, from 27% of the EU27 average in the region of Severozapaden in Bulgaria, to 332% of the average in Inner London in the United Kingdom. On the high end, Inner London has €78,000 PPP per capita, Luxembourg €62,500, and Bruxelles-Cap €52,500, while the poorest regions, are Severozapaden with €6,400 PPP per capita, Nord-Est with €6,900 PPP per capita, Severen tsentralen with €6,900 and Yuzhen tsentralen with €7,200."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union#Economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union#Economy)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This whole article is so mindbogglingly dumb.

 _Under free migration, labor would relocate to more productive regions, massively increasing total production._

He thinks it is a given that open borders would be overall beneficial, because it would "massively increase total production."

So is he totally unaware that the basic commodity of human labor is rapidly diminishing in value?

What massively increases total production, and what drives economic gains is human creativity.

And for whatever reason, creativity, of the world changing sort is concentrated in relatively small areas on the globe.

 _The knowledge that we 're sitting on an ocean of talent should haunt great minds day and night._

What the hell? Where is the evidence of all this talent? Why would these magic immigrants just start demonstrating this talent after they migrated? Why aren't they demonstrating the talent in the countries they are currently in?

</comment><comment><USER4> The author's main reply to standard immigration boogeymen are keyhole solutions, which are admittedly a pretty cool idea. A keyhole solution is one that tries to address the negatives of a policy _exactly_ , rather than torpedo the entire policy because of a few problems. In the link from the article, suggestions like: if worried about foreigners voting against the interests of current citizens, don't allow foreigners to vote. If worried that a specific market sector will be affected, compensate that sector. Basically: pursue overall improvements, and compensate the losers or guard against specific negatives.

This reminds me of a funny story. Bear with me.

My brother is about to graduate with a physics degree. In an interview with an engineering firm, they asked, "You have a metal that expands/contracts with heat according to such-and-such relationship. How do you keep a room at such- and-such temperature?"

He answered, "Oh, just wire things up such that when the metal does blablabla, it heats the room, and when it does the opposite, turn off the heat."

"Could you explain what you mean by "wire things up?""

"Oh, I don't know. That's an engineering problem."

My brother did not get hired, to everyone's (including his, ha) relief.

Keyhole solutions seem like bullseye-on-head clusterfucks of political engineering. They are (by definition) complex and involve many interest groups. Proponents (correctly, I think) point out that they are designed for that environment, in that they may gain support from all parties, but for different reasons. But is there any guarantee that the bill remains integrated? What about a last minute addendum/removal of a clause? We can't seem to stop SOPA and cousins; is anyone confident that the legislative process is their friend?

I know, I know, it's a political engineering problem, not an economic one. Hence the story about my brother. Sometimes you need an engineer.

<comment><USER14> _In the link from the article, suggestions like: if worried about foreigners voting against the interests of current citizens, don 't allow foreigners to vote._

Yeah, so just create a society with an underclass with no political power, sounds like a great way to create a healthy thriving nation...

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Then why can't the talent be leveraged elsewhere? We all know that capital moves around quite easily.

So, what makes some places more effective at turning talent into wealth than others? Could be a lot of things, for sure. But, my guess is that it's mainly 'culture'. And, once all those new people come, that culture is no more.

<comment><USER11> There could be other reasons too, like infrastructure. You probably can't house a dev team in a small town far away from a major city where the internet is slower. (To name just one type of infrastructure.)

Or perhaps it's human capital that can't be moved: customers and devs need to be close, so putting the devs on a cheap tropical island with a good fibre connection won't cut it.

<comment><USER16> Kansas City has gigabit, yet Silicon Valley still exists, so inter et connectivity isn't the major factor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A more cautious approach would be to open boarders selectively to people who have demonstrated whatever "talent" is deemed to be economically useful.

Of course, many wealthy countries do this already (including the United States).

</comment><comment><USER17> First you need a government/organization that can scale. How much poverty/discontent/violence exists in the US today? How much are you willing to accept as a possible cost?

<comment><USER18> Why? If poverty is a problem, do not allow immigration of poor people. It's about flipping the default, not about getting rid of all restrictions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I liked the overall thesis but disagree with the example:

> Getting Leonium is a great benefit for mankind, period.

I don't think it is good for humans to live longer. Sure, I'd love it if 80yr olds were as healthy as 50-60yr olds. But I don't want 150yr olds hanging around in any capacity, especially not the ones who own and control 95% of the wealth of the world.

"Science advances one funeral at a time." \- Max Planck.

I don't want 2100 to be run by people who believe things discredited or refuted in 1950.

<comment><USER16> There must be ways to deal with people you don't like, without _killing_ them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Extended lifespan for sale would carry an onslought of moral and social problems with it. And this is why it's actually a good analogy, but not for the reasons the author brings up.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd be fairly certain that if a trillion dollars worth of _anything_ were discovered beneath the Empire State building, much of Manhattan would be gone overnight.

</comment><comment><USER6> As someone who did the completely normal thing of leaving one country to go work and live in another, I agree completely and can barely understand those who do not.

</comment><comment><USER21> "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." \- Law of the Instrument

All Economists are universally indoctrinated into the same basic classical theories of economics. Using inaccurate mathematical models and pseudo-math to map the world as one big series of supply/demand curves.

What's worse. They delude themselves into believing there's a divergence of thought by using Keynes vs Smith as counter-examples. There's no divergence, both schools of thought are minor variations of the same basic fundamental concepts. Economic theory is -- and has been -- stunted for decades by Ivory Tower theorists who gave up on self-reflection decades ago.

Supply/demand do a decent job of mapping basic short-term fiscal trends at the expense of evaluating the impact of long-term trends and/or secondary/tertiary influences.

For example. If immigration limits were eliminated, logic dictates that high skilled labor would migrate en masse to developing countries with a low cost of living. ie maximize profit gains by reducing costs of living.

In reality high-skilled laborers act contrary to Econ theory. The vast majority of individuals who earn enough to cover their costs + future savings are more likely to migrate to western countries where they have a less purchasing power.

Social stability and professional opportunity present a value that transcends the assumptions of traditional Econ theory. It requires a long-term sociological investment (ie measured in centuries) to stabilize a multi- cultural society enough to break down the barriers of tribalism, xenophobia, caste, prejudice, etc.

Economists love to argue that the US recovered from the Great Depression due to the increase in industrialization following WWII. I'd argue that the US became an international super power because of the massive number of high- skilled exiles who migrated the US in search of safety/stability.

Decreasing the limits on immigration will only increase the 'brain drain' from developing countries. Further stunting their growth and competitive standing in the international community.

On the lower-skilled end of the spectrum, people who can't match the high standard of intelligence/talent will be priced out. For instance, I currently live in San Diego not far from the border with Mexico.

Most low-skilled Mexicans that move here either: permanently survive with a lower standard of living (ie for at least a generation); live here temporarily and send money back to their family in Mexico; or commute across the border temporarily for work.

I have a lot of respect those who sacrifice to stay permanently. The rest live a parasitic, transient existence. It's sad to see but I can't really blame them. Mexico is an unsafe, destitute, overpopulated, shithole; run rampant with corruption and extreme economic inequality. Given the choice, I'd probably do the same.

Illegal immigration doesn't hurt the US. We receive an abundance of cheap labor freeing up citizens to pursue higher-skilled professions or work in privileged positions managing low-skilled laborers. It hurts Mexico because -- by subsidizing their failing socio-economic structure -- we're delaying the inevitable watershed effect that would happen when a poverty-stricken populace is absent any alternative.

Instead of addressing the corruption, restructuring the government, and focusing on developing policies that lead to a more safe/stable society; Mexico defaults to a public policy of blaming the US for all of their problems while exporting their poorest/underprivileged underclass as cheap labor to the US.

The most intelligent and/or hardest working of those stay in the US, raise kids who are born naturalized citizens, receive a good education, rise above low-skilled labor, and prosper bringing more long-term benefit to the US overall.

The rest go as the wind blows. When the US economy contracts, opportunities for low-skilled laborers (ie construction, landscaping, etc) are cut and they immigrate back go Mexico.

The hidden impact from looser immigration laws is the potential for overpopulation. It's no good for anybody when a populace increases in size dramatically over a short period of time. Cultural stability depends on some semblance of identity.</comment>


Show HN: My new tool to help with debugging - DebugMap - <AUTHOR> https://www.debugmap.com/

<comment><USER2> Is there any way to try out without signing-in. From you web page, it is not clear how does it work. Is there any video demo?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's the slideshow on the main page but since it's free I didn't build in a way to try it without signing in. Is there something keeping you from signing in? Just curious. Thanks.

<comment><USER2> No, I could not get much from the slide show. Everyone is lazy for signing-up. Unless, there is something very compelling, people will not got for sign-up even it is free.

<comment><AUTHOR> Understood. Thanks a lot for the feedback. I'll keep this in mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm all about constructive feedback so if anybody has any thoughts, please let me know. Thanks!</comment>


Why I Can't Update to iOS8 and Why You Probably Can't Either - <AUTHOR> http://blog.zaheer.me/2014/09/cant-update-ios8.html

<comment><USER2> Funny it said over 5GB for me.</comment>


Ask HN: How did you go from idea to product to first 100 customers - <AUTHOR> Far too many people only see successful companies, but rarely do they see the struggles that occur early on. I would love to hear about how you went from a simple idea, product to fighting for your first 100 users.<p>You don't have to be generating millions a year, if you're even generating $1,000 a month, I would love to hear about your journey. I know there's websites like https://indiehackers.com, but I'm interested in hearing from others. <comment><USER2> For my Chrome extension Checkbot ([https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/)), I got the idea when I was working as a freelance web developer on several websites at a time. I was doing a lot of manual checks for SEO, speed and security best practices, and wanted something to automate the process for me. I wanted a tool that could check many pages at the same time, check for many best practices, check localhost sites, check unlimited sites and let you recheck whenever you made a change. I couldn't find one at the time so I made my own.

I showed Checkbot in its early stages to several people I knew and after I had the feeling enough other people would find it useful I spent time packaging it into something I could try to sell. This included polishing the UX, creating a website and writing a web best practices guide which was a lot of work. I launched a free beta on reddit and Product Hunt which I got a lot of feedback from. After refining the product some more, I launched payment plans and now I'm slowly growing a paid customer base.

</comment><comment><USER3> For us, SoloKeys, it was via Kickstarter [1]. We have blogged for a couple months before the campaign, typically sharing on HN where we hit the front page 2-3 times. Overall we signed up 2.5K emails that then helped funding the campaign very quickly. Independently from a crowdfunding campaign or not, I think trying to generate some sort of buzz at a specific point in time can help amplifying your message.

Post-campaign, we launched Shopify + Amazon US stores. In a sense we reset from zero, because our product isn't recurring. I think the 3 key strategies to get the first 100 customers on the store have been: 1. speaking at a conference (clearly planned in advance), 2. Amazon US, because people can find you even if they don't know you, 3. again some blogging, for example I went back to all my major posts and added an update with a link to the store (example [2]), so new readers can find it.

[1] [https://solokeys.com/kickstarter](https://solokeys.com/kickstarter)

[2] [https://hackernoon.com/why-choosing-a-fido2-security- key-8cb...](https://hackernoon.com/why-choosing-a-fido2-security- key-8cb0e5a1a71e)

Edit: formatting

</comment><comment><USER4> You have the order wrong. It should be customers, then idea, then product.

That's how all the successful products I've worked on have done it. Someone was in an industry, saw a need, built a product, and sold it to old coworkers/friends/employers in that industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> Care to support this with your example of something you done?

<comment><USER4> Insurance — cofounders worked in insurance and saw a need for telematics that don't require a smartphone or dongle. Built it and sold it to their friends.

Real estate — cofounders worked in RE and saw a need for automated reporting. Built it and sold it to their friends.

Marketing — cofounder's company (he was the CMO) spent $500k on a bespoke campaign automation system that was easy to build. Built a generic system that did the same thing, sold it to other marketing execs that he already knew.

Getting the first customer is extremely hard, so that should usually be your unfair advantage when starting a company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We tested Draftss ([http://draftss.com](http://draftss.com)) back in April 2018, and here we are today where we have successfully achieved $8,000 MRR by serving 100+ customers with 0 refunds till date. Draftss provides Graphic design & Landing Page UI/UX with code on a monthly subscription.

Initially, we built a minimal landing page with a decent portfolio (We had been running a design shop for more than 10 years and we had a good portfolio to show). We pushed the prototype website live within a week. To validate the idea we first published a Show IH post on IndieHackers and hurray! We received our first 4 customers. We had added the Experiment Plan at $29/per task thinking that our customer would want to try our services first and then opt for other superior plans although we didn't saw any such behavior from our first few customers.

By then we were pretty sure that our productized service was filling a market gap. We tried reaching out to customers for feedback on our services who had previously tried design platforms like 99designs, Upwork, Fiverr, and were unhappy with the designer services. Each platform had their own issues. This was an important point where we considered adding many services and carved a path for future updates. We improvised our landing page, edited out our FAQ's, added more designs to our portfolio, optimized images for faster load time, and many other UI changes to make the landing page more beautiful and crisp. We re-launched our services on several listing websites and blogs. The traffic picked up and we were consistently getting users who were interested in our services.

While the visitors to our landing page were flowing in, we were eventually hunted on ProductHunt. Within a few minutes, we were bombarded with visitors on our website. We were sitting handling live chat for more than 18 hours straight, trying to initiate a conversation with as many visitors as possible. We believe live chat with visitors on the website is the most effective medium for getting quick and actionable feedback on your product. For a span of 3 days, We got around 1500+ visits out of which we were able to convert 11 paying customers.

We received tons of feedback from our visitors and customers. Using this feedback we keep on improving our services. Within the course of 10 months, we tried connecting with many communities to find a product-market fit. We helped these communities with our experience and made some good connections. We eventually created a product where we started providing FREE landing page UI/UX feedbacks to founders ([http://draftss.com/getfeedback](http://draftss.com/getfeedback)). We have helped hundreds of founders in improvising their landing pages and are now inclined to create more open source projects that shall help the community.</comment>


GoDaddy Acquires Merchant "Finder" Startup Locu for $70 Million - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Here is a link:

[http://allthingsd.com/20130819/godaddy-acquires-merchant- fin...](http://allthingsd.com/20130819/godaddy-acquires-merchant-finder- startup-locu-for-70-million/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I messed up the link and can't change it.</comment>


A Developer I Admire — Walter Zorn - <AUTHOR> http://www.useragentman.com/blog/2012/08/26/a-developer-i-admire-walter-zorn/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing, I never heard about Walter Zorn, but I recall searching for an alternative to Raphael and I came across his 2D library. At the time I thought it was a clever hack, little did I know that the library was more than 10 years old and miraculously worked all the way back to Netscape 4.

I searched around for some of his work and came across this beautiful recumbent bike: [http://www.recumbentblog.com/2009/06/29/sometimes-you- just-w...](http://www.recumbentblog.com/2009/06/29/sometimes-you-just-want-to- know-more/), even if I know nothing about bikes it's evident this is a masterpiece of craftmanship and design. I'm greatly saddened by his passing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sad to read this. I recognised his name, having seen the same domain name for years as really the primary effort towards making JavaScript graphic-friendly before the APIs were designed to make it do so.

It's a pity to think there's still no effective mechanism in place to prevent sites like this disappearing. But it also shows the importance of Wayback Machine.

<comment><USER4> _But it also shows the importance of Wayback Machine._

Which, sadly, seems to be suffering. At least, all of the times I've used it in the last couple of years, its indexing had slowed significantly or even stopped on the sites I was looking up. I'm not sure what the deal is, but it could certainly do with a large endowment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Without a doubt, a talented developer. He made some very useful libraries. Sad to learn of his passing...</comment>


U.S. Nuclear Weapons Target List from the Cold War Declassified for the First Time - <AUTHOR> http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/u-s-nuclear-weapons-target-list-from-the-cold-war-decl-1749527500 <comment><USER3> One of the most unintuitive concepts in thinking about Cold War strategy is the assertion that explicitly targeting the opponent's civilian instead of military targets was _morally superior_ : targeting military first (counterforce targets [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterforce](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterforce)) would potentially prevent retaliation and thus allow an aggressive first strike. Targeting civilian (countervalue targets [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countervalue](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countervalue)) would ensure destruction and thus be inherently defensive.

It makes my head (and heart) hurt to think about it and I'm glad that I didn't have to make those kinds of decisions. I can see how it can (and did) lead to madness and the kind of irrational thinking satirized in Dr Strangelove and other stories.

<comment><USER4> I think the US command was still very aware of the lessons learned from WWII and particularly, those of how the Soviets defeated the Germans in Operation Barbarossa. The Soviet army might have pulled the triggers, but it was the Soviet people who ultimately won the battles and the war for them. They were resolute and could not be broken, even in facing the most daunting of environmental, emotional, and physical challenges. The Soviet army was largely a joke at the start of the war due to Stalin's purges of the military. They were soundly beaten time and time again by the Nazis. It was the sieges of Stalingrad and Leningrad where the people, ordinary citizens, made the difference. This bought the Soviets enough time to properly regroup, retrain, and rearm to end up fielding the largest, and later one of the most effective, armies of all time. If the people had given up or evacuated, the Soviet Union probably would have collapsed or been beaten back too far into Siberia to matter. The civilians were their ultimate weapon. I think the US command still remembered this when picking targets. You can shroud that however you want in terms of moral superiority -- a quick blow to the populace vs long years of sieges and urban warfare.

Aside: The excellent documentary "The World at War" is available on YouTube. Especially check out episodes 5, 9, and 11 to see how the Soviet people, not the army, beat the Nazis.

<comment><USER5> Stalin's military lacked in organization, tactics and strategy due to the purges and was surprised by Operation Barbarossa's timeline, but it was well armed and well equipped. Case in point being the Soviet tank forces, which were much more numerous and advanced than German intelligence had suspected.

The population's ability to bear sacrifices and Stalin's willingness - <USER2> by Hitler's - to sacrifice millions of civilians alongside the soldiers were instrumental, but it certainly was the military - rather than civilian resistance - that ultimately broke the German war machine.

<comment><USER4> Your ordering is off. Their initial tanks were old and ineffective. It was after the sieges that tank production in the east ramped up with T34's. If the civilians had not taken the brunt and fought back, there wouldn't have been enough time to produce any tanks on the other side of the country. The Soviet tank forces of 39-40 couldn't hold a candle to the later version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> too bad the cold war isn't over: [http://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-34797252](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34797252) (2015)

<comment><USER7> The threat of nuclear weapons is still very much alive, with intercontinental missiles being upgraded and maintained.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd be curious to know if the Soviet Union's target list has ever been released to the public.

<comment><USER9> There is a list of what the British government thought would be likely UK targets (pretty much anywhere populated).

[0][http://robedwards.typepad.com/files/probable-nuclear- targets...](http://robedwards.typepad.com/files/probable-nuclear- targets-1972-national-archives.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Better link: [http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War- Nuclear-T...](http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb538-Cold-War-Nuclear- Target-List-Declassified-First-Ever/)

</comment><comment><USER11> The last paragraph is a bit dramatic while a nuclear exchange would've killed many people it would not come close to destroying the plnanet.

The map is also a good reminder to why Russia is so paranoid.

Russia is like a larger Seoul for all intents and purposes everything of any importance is a stone throw away from its borders.

On the side note its interesting that Russia concentrated its nuclear arsenal in its populated areas while the US did the exact opposite, I wonder if that's is the case or did this list did not included first strike targets or did the US had gaps in its intelligence as locating a launch site in the Siberian tundra is quite hard to do.

</comment><comment><USER12> That map is interesting. There are fewer targets on the middle and eastern part of the country than I imagined. For whatever reason I figured we would have just carpeted the entire country with nukes, but I guess that doesn't make sense now that I think about it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Just a usual all-inclusive war plan. Both sides were producing them prolifically.

</comment><comment><USER14> What on earth does that site try to do with JS? When I open it in Firefox (43) on an old low end laptop running Ubuntu (15.04) it completely freezes the whole system (had to shutdown with the power button). With NoScript on it works fine.</comment>


I Sent Fake Versions of Myself on TV and Everyone Fell for It - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/amp/en_uk/article/9k7vap/i-sent-fake-versions-of-myself-on-tv-to-make-myself-look-better <comment><USER2> Inspiring !!!! Thx</comment>