tobbyb

Containers are useful and provide many advantages compared to VM's but as an industry many will acknowledge there is a real risk of putting people off containers due to ballooning complexity. Flockport is a small step towards providing a simpler alternative.

The UBI debate is fundamental to how we perceive society and what kind of society we want to build into the future.

If one's idea of human society is people working to earn money. Fullstop. And those who are better at it are the be all and end alls of human civilization and progress and the ultimate aspiration. Then words like lazy, people will not do anything, arguments that are generic enough to block any action, and are actually red herrings enter the debate.

This seems to be a pretty impoverished view of humanity. But one that our current capitalist system necessitates,

The other way is thinking of the billions of brains wasted every generation just trying to survive, exactly what humans did 2000 years ago. Now imagine if all these brains could be freed and god knows how much innovation, progress and intellectual output can be unlocked into a completely different kind of society. That's a vision.

But the reality is many will stick doggedly to the personal wealth and achievement mantra and because of the disproportionate influence of wealth and entrenched interests in our societies right from feudalism to now, and UBI or any such fanciful idea will be sabotaged and blocked.

It's not so clear cut. You need to benchmark before and after.

Often acceleration modules on Broadcom, Qualcomm, Mediatek etc are proprietary and without acceleration in OpenWrt/Lede the router is going to be dog slow.

The wifi modules are also proprietary and need be well supported by Openwrt/Lede or you will see throughput drops.

Of late it's just best to use what's in the router and not bother. And we move to faster connections on consumer routers with slow main SOCs the proprietary accelerators will become even more important.

We are previewing Flockport's new container orchestration and management platform. It's been designed to massively simplify orchestration, overlay networking, distributed storage, discovery and more.

There is also an app store with a large collection of apps users can download and run in minutes, and a container build system that uses recipes.

Containers are useful and provide many advantages compared to VM's but as an industry many will acknowledge there is a real risk of putting people off containers due to ballooning complexity. Flockport is a small step towards providing a simpler alternative.

A slightly different perspective. For the end user Go apps are by far the easiest to setup and use. Usually it's just a single binary to download. That is a huge advantage that can't be beat.

Other languages usually need a large number of dependencies, with Ruby and Node, often an entire build environment, with plenty of potential for dependency hell and hours wasted.

Some may advocate containers at this point, but it just hides the issue temporarily and may be too much for a certain category of end users. You now need to know how containers, ports, volumes and Linux systems work in far more detail when you actually just want to use an app.

That's why products are becoming progressively more expensive including things which traditionally became cheaper with generations.

Why focus on the 'fluff' who have lower incomes and will have soon have even less, when you can focus on the 'cream' with high margins, hence $1000 phones and $800 billion cash reserves with no use.

Customers can only choose not demand, so this is simply a red herring to shift and diffuse blame and responsibility to consumers from the primary abuser who is actually doing this, and create an environment of helplessness.

Tomorrow if customers demand 10% of the existing prices are companies going to line up with slave labour conditions to deliver and then shift blame? Responsibility does not work like this.

The arguments are very basic, for instance government inefficiency. Every big organization is inefficient, be it government or a private entity.

Open source is a huge achievement. The sheer diversity, wealth and value of the ecosystem is priceless. A true achievement of our times and Stallman and all the pioneers deserve a gigantic kudos.

Any human group has all the problems that comes with us. Some people are insensitive, self centred, selfish, entitled, immature but there are also others who are helpful, warm, polite, genuinely wonderful human beings.

There is little reason for cynicism or negativity. You get to meet and interact with all kinds which in itself opens your life up to a whole new set of experiences.

This is like 2 prisoners arguing about their level of freedom.

That's a classic slippery slope, isn't it? How would you know and how would you stop it. Are you able to stop the surveillance, the secret courts, harassment of activists and whistle blowers, the double speak and duplicitous justifications today?

You won't even know were it not for Snowden at great cost to himself, not an easy decision when the first impulse is to put your head down. And 'allegations' would be met with 'tinfoil hat' you just used.

How will you then detect and stop it tomorrow? Wait for another Snowden? Another sacrifice? Is there some defined point at which the population just stands up and says no. Or is it just faith?

Our democratic systems allow us to say yes, but not no. There are huge flaws with accountability, choice and capture by vested interests that remain unsolved. And now we have creeping surveillance, self serving justifications and arbitrary governance processes to deal with. Few of us have the privilege to stand up and say no, too engrossed in day to day life.

There is no clear mechanism to say no beyond protest and we can see how repressively liberal western democracies are dealing with dissent and protest today, infiltrating and tracking activists, protests and general harassment, something unthinkable at the height of liberal posturing during the bulk of the cold war. Isn't it way beyond the point of faith.

Isn't that more practiced indifference? There is no nervousness about it. It's hard to zero in on it but in this case there is an air of helplessness and despondency, with all that iconic imagery and hubris typical of totalitarian regimes. It all looks a bit too dire trivializing the people and magnifying their helplessness.

It could just be our or my own prejudice and perspective knowing what we know about North Korea and reading more into these rather unique and powerful set of images, you just want people to be free and happy if possible.

I don't know, bribe China, bribe North Korea, surely there must be a way to get those holding the strings to let go and to do it not because of nuclear weapons, strategic interests or business but to set the people free. What a moment it will be. Humanity would have truly prevailed.

Surreal and intriguing. There is a palpable sense of fear and unease on people's faces, not a smile to be seen. A gloomy insight into a whole other world. And questions assumptions about human behavior.

Its frightening to think how easy it is to suppress a whole population for years and decades on end. The romantic image of courage, revolution and human freedom comes to naught here. Status quo, acceptance and survival seems to be the more natural human state.

There is the natural reluctance to put one's head above. And for good reason, anyone foolish or brave enough to put their head above in this all knowing state will be put down swiftly, and perhaps brutally to be made an example of. How does change happen here?

Organizing anything in this state of pervasive surveillance is nearly impossible and should be a wake up call for those sleepwalking into one.

The only way we know from history is implosion of the prevailing power center or outside support motivated more by massive self interests than human freedom or kindness, compromising the road ahead.

Surveillance, secret courts and dubious processes are meekly accepted but change can become very difficult once these infrastructures are put in place, operational and at the complete discretion of whoever happens to be in power. A warning for all of us.

There is something inherently despotic about framing seeking basic accountability as questioning the legitimacy of government.

Security has always been the first resort of tinpots and despots for self seeking behavior. Only those ignorant of history or too distracted with material gain and hubris will fall for it. There always has to be a balance because ultimately everyone is safe in a cage. But that's not what we mean by free democratic societies.

Spying on everyone gives some individuals a sense of power and the logical response to that must be to prosecute them in open courts so their regressive mindsets can be exposed for the sickness they perpetuate. Privacy is much more important and valuable than making day to day law enforcement and governance easier.

Now back to the real world if there was any serious interest in dealing with terrorism Saudi Arabia would have been tackled 30 years ago rather than let them fund and spread Wahhabi ideology globally and the latest round of terror. Yet even today they are the USA and UK's closest allies in the middle east while Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran who have nothing to do with global terror campaigns are casually destroyed with millions dead and millions in disarray making a complete mockery of the world we live in and the humanity we claim for ourselves.

There is no legitimate argument for a surveillance society other than coming from ignorance of history or narrow self interest. It's high time this country makes an example of those emboldened enough to advocate it and reiterate its commitment to its fundamental values.

This is an interesting perspective based on real life experience. The author also has decades of experience around the tech scene in general. I don't understand why he is being put on trial for sharing his experiences in a book or seeking to promote it via interviews. That's the way books are normally promoted. Reading this thread one would think its illegal.

Hubspot is a campaign management and lead management tool like Eloqua, Marketo, Unica and dozes of other tools in this space. They are not remotely interesting unless you are interested in b2b marketing tools. One does not need to disparage hubspot, its a decent marketing tool. But it is not remotely world changing in any way. That is hubris so the author appears to be spot on with some of his observations.

Everyone recognizes the fakery and dubiousness of empty and vacuous corporate slogans. A psychological tactic to induce frenzy and artificial value in your workforce is exploitative and disrespects other human beings. Surely there are more respectful and time tested ways to motivate your workforce without making a mockery of them to promoting your own interests.

Repositioning a firing as a graduation is the stuff of comedy scripts, nearly Monty Pythonisque. With material like this anyone would be tempted to write a book. But this is not comedy, these guys are serious. In the real world this can only be interpreted as insensitive, grossly exploitative and dangerously disconnected from reality.

There is a now a growing awareness of the unhealthy level of obsession governments have about citizens communications.

This is in effect the same as the Burr-Feinstein encryption bill, one penalizes users, the other service providers. The bottom line is there is a lot of posturing about privacy but little commitment. All governments without exception are obsessed with your communications and data. It is unsettling and creepy.

I really think some users will have to take 'secure communications' into their own hands depending on the level of need and address metadata exposures. If its remotely life threatening or impacting it would be foolish to depend on any service provider or technology.

You can't win an encryption 'arms race' against state level actors with near endless resources, capabilities and the will. And the law and willingness to arm twist service providers and projects with secret courts, orders, intimidation, harassment.

One can't help feeling current technologies however committed fall way short and are only lulling us into a false sense of privacy and complacency. A solution that does not acknowledge a state actors sheer range of capabilities and clearly articulate how it is addressed is not a solution. Perhaps something that completely randomizes metadata and makes it too expensive to break per user.

Some of these discussions seem to severely underestimate human intelligence and the ability to reason and take decisions rapidly.

There are hundreds of millions of cars operating in all sorts of conditions with little incident. There are literally hundreds of thousands of preemptive actions, foresight, experience and instinctive actions at play for every possibility on roads that millions of people adopt easily.

To say that's not good enough one must articulate a system that is clearly better or has the potential while avoiding a broad brush with 0.1% incidents or diminishing human drivers. That's an argument of convenience and could reflect a lack of understanding of the scope and scale of the problem. This is just sandbags, there are literally millions of obstacles and scenarios negotiated without incident everyday.

Crashes in snow is not always about bad decisions. It could also be extremely poor conditions that cars should not be in, inadequate vehicle or tyres and computing will not help if hardware is deficient. Presuming the worst of others or jumping to conclusions about their intelligence levels is unsavory and dangerous if used to push something.

An AI vehicle in any crowded Asian city is going to be literally stranded by indecision. On relatively empty and organized roads the computing power needed will barely scratch the surface of what a proper self driving AI system needs to be unless you redesign the roads and place constraints, which then becomes a different discussion to approach carefully.

If we dehumanize others we dehumanize ourselves. We are not objects, we are not economic systems, we are living social beings with all the flaws and all the potential, each and every one of us.

The individual clearly has to wisen up, and this reads like a welcome to the real world but that should not detract in any way from the real suffering caused by exploitative wages.

If a full time Yelp 'job' does not allow an individual to afford basics like shelter and food, let alone education, healthcare or family on what basis does it qualify to call itself a 'job'? This is exploitation.

The individual is not demanding luxuries from life, it can't be 'entitled' to expect basics like food and shelter after a day's work. So is it the individual or Yelp that is behaving in an entitled manner? And to fire someone for pointing this feels fundamentally wrong and boneheaded.

There is zero point for Zuckerberg or any other SFO millionaire to have billions in their accounts they can't use while real human beings who work for them have to suffer like this for months on end with rice bowls. How does that make any sense, in any way?

The cold and impoverished view on this thread justifies dismissing out of hand any 'concerns' from engineers on threads about outsourcing, work visas or any social thread that requires empathy as simply the market speaking. If you can't empathize with others don't expect empathy when it comes to your own personal situation?

You can't complain about outsourcing and also justify the market and unrealistic wages as one logically leads to another.

The US, UK response to terrorism is so disproportional, odious and sinister one wonders whether this is infant a 'response' or something far more evil cooking below the surface.

This kind of technology necessitates mass surveillance, and offers you little more beyond the faint possibility that crime can be predicted. This is bogus science.

If you let your mind entertain the idea you can predict crime, then you are already at the thresh hold of a stifling surveillance state. And why are we even assassinating people. What happens to due process? One by one all these fundamental principles are set aside, massive and dubious mass surveillance infrastructures are being built, doublespeak is comically rampant.

One can begin to understand Snowden's urgent need to act, but what about the moral compass of all the people in the NSA and who support the US and UK security apparatus? People need to act. Surely they cannot suddenly subscribe to values we have aggressively demonized for more than 100 years.

Who would have thought that the US and UK are now the rogue states and other countries who are far more secure and sure about their politics need to begin to isolate themselves from these dangerous totalitarian instincts.

I feel a bit of dissonance on hn on the issue of https. On issues of surveillance and spying the responses are often measured and there is generally a balanced debate, and yet on ssl suddenly its a matter of extreme urgency with strident positions backed up by references to mitm, spying and isp injected ads.

This is not as urgent a matter as some here tend to make it, better to resolve it properly than rush into half baked solutions like Google shaming websites. Why should a private company have the ability to shame websites and drive decisions a certain direction without any consultative process and accountability. Surely these are decisions for industry groups and wide consensus, and not individual corporates driven by self interest.

Corporates routinely mitm ssl traffic and no one is shaming them or the equipment makers for that, so ssl and mitm is hardly going to be problem for state actors. For protection against less influential actors, banks and those who process sensitive data have been on https for a long time now so where is this urgency and the need to take action coming from?

Everyone agrees security is good but the mechanism to enable this cannot be given up to browser makers and CAs. This is a complete loss of end user control and a significant step back from the open net that cannot just be brushed aside.

Not everyone needs https and for ads injections the pressure should be on ISPs to stop the illegal behavior. Why can't we shame ISPs instead of forcing all websites to https?

Other solutions like signing content that empowers individuals rather than corporates and vested interests should be explored. The same browser makers went ahead and arbitrarily started flashing grave warnings on self signed certs without any consultative process or accountability.

The unshare tool [1] can be used along with ip-tools to create a namespace with networking support. Add a chroot or pivot root to it and you have a Linux container. It's quite easy to do. We have a guide on using namespaces directly and the various projects using it including Firejail here [2]

Linux namespaces were created to support containers. This is how userland container projects like LXC, Docker and Nspawn work, only they don't use the unshare tool but the underlying system calls clonens, setns and unshare [3].

[1] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/unshare.2.html

[2] https://www.flockport.com/alternatives-to-docker-and-lxc/

[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/531114/

And rightly so. But are poor people not allowed or entitled to have the same level of safety and benefits for their family like everyone else, or is it ok to associate and tar an entire socioeconomic group with crime and drugs as some seem to do and leave them to their fate? How is this an egalitarian, equal or democratic society that discriminates against kids even before they are born?

Poor people have no choice but to live with it while the more resourceful can afford to isolate and protect themselves but that's not an equal society or one that aspires to be one. No one can advocate that one should not try to get the best for themselves and their children but the if the bare basics of education, healthcare and safety are reliant on socio economic background that there is little incentive for those in power who are always from a privileged socioeconomic background to actually provide meaningful equality beyond posturing.

I think there is a danger of an exclusionary way of thinking that encourages ghettos and the kind of entitled thinking often seen here itself on hacker news that presumes in spite of all these disadvantages somehow all these children should compete fairly and succeed with their more privileged counterparts and if they don't and get stuck in a cycle of poverty they only have themselves to blame.

This kind of thinking leads to a bigoted society, and you then can't complain when you or your children are similarly excluded by those from a higher social-economic background in neighborhoods and other aspects of life, when not possible legally by financial or social means. This doesn't produce an enlightened and egalitarian society, you reap what you sow.

I am not sure this analogy illuminates differences in productivity and resulting inequality as described. If everyone on earth had the same equal piece of land then it can be argued that the tax rate (as property taxes are) would not be on the income but fixed on the basis of the size of the land. So whatever Bob gets out of his land he would pay the same fixed amount of tax that Tom does.

But in the real world we are not born equal and we do not have access to the same size of 'land'. There are differences, sometime vast in family wealth, property, health care, education and access to nearly 'n' number of resources. Bob may be born with the land and have 'n' amount of time and the luxury to think of things like productivity, wealth, interests, life while Tom may struggle his entire life just to survive or maybe work towards getting 1/10 of the land as his entire life goal.

Moving to the real world property taxes are not fixed on income. Income tax is an entirely different tax that Bob and Tom would pay based on their income irrespective of their land holdings. If Bob is more productive he would pay more tax but I am not sure income tax or 'simple productivity' as a concept is useful to understand or explain inequality and disparity in a world where everyone does not have the same piece of land.

On the contrary he had huge shoes to fill, expectations to match and momentum to carry. Success is not an accident. You can always lose momentum, you can always make the wrong decisions, you can always fail, especially in a company as keenly watched as Apple, holding on to leadership in categories it created, with the pressure of innovation in a hyper competitive industry. Look at Nokia.

I think the potential for the Android desktop is huge, and can threaten Intel in a serious way. Look at the Amazon Fire TV equipped with a Mediatek 64 bit quad core A72 + A53 SoC. The same SoC is scheduled to be in Chromebooks shortly.

This tiny 4 inch by 1 inch box can play 4k at 30fps, provide super fast internet browsing, Facebook, Youtube, Office apps, video conferencing and play Android 3D titles well. And it costs 64 Pounds or 90 USD! It geekbenches 1600/3500 which is pretty respectable compared to an Intel i3 which retails for around $150 just for the CPU. Why spend anything more for grandma's, mum's or a just a general PC. It also has good support for Kodi so no need for expensive HTPCs.

So here is a 60 GBP device doing a of lot of thing a traditional basic PC or laptop does at a fraction of the price, power, noise and size! This is disruptive.

The only thing holding it back is the absence of proper desktop support in Android and the relatively closed nature especially GPU of the Arm ecosystem. Also the PC ecosystem is accustomed to a much more open hardware and software playing field, and the driver scenario for ARM and Google's control of Android itself can be problematic.

Android is currently completely touch oriented and even though you can attach a keyboard and mouse, as the recent Ars review highlights [1] there are quite a few rough edges.

Remix OS is a step in that direction but it appears some of the issues are serious enough that only Google can address. A better situation is ARM being more open, Linux is already well supported on ARM so if it opens up the drivers in good faith without the back and forth of licensor and licensee that open source developers deal with, desktop need not depend just on Android.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/12/android-on-the-deskto...

I think its a bit sad that its only when we start getting older and have had time for introspection and reflection that we realise that the only thing we have of value is time.

We are dying from the time we are born and our bodies are changing everyday. They will not be the same, its when you get sick and realise just how valuable even feeling normal and healthy is that your appreciate the sense of normalcy. If it affects your mobility, sense of well being, physical state, your quality of life and quality of of your time drops never mind your wealth. A lot of people don't have that luxury of recuperating or feeling normal. I think its not money but our health that can make us really unhappy.

We have on average a 'journey' of 60 years in this beautiful planet to make the most of the time we have, to make it meaningful and I think what ultimately makes it meaningful is filling it with experiences, learning and people.

What you have done with the time and not necessarily money could be a good indicator of overall well being. Though money can more easily enable access to new experiences every experience is different and has merit irrespective of wealth. Learning new things, new sports, new skills are more valuable than anything else as that time has been used and you will not get it back, but you have something to show for it that anyone else can only get not with money, but spending the time to do it. For instance losing weight or learning a new skill. 10 months down the line you have achieved that and are much happier for it and no amount of wealth can buy this for you or anyone else.

I am generalizing and they are exceptions but when you think about it our deepest and happiest moments are social, about other people; our family, friends and interactions with other people. This has the potential to make us very happy and fulfilled or very unhappy irrespective of wealth and it's experiences with loved ones; parents, siblings. family, kids, relationships that make up our happiest moments.

Everything we associate with happiness in terms of money it seems is often only meaningful or valuable in a social context, and it is always related to it in some way. With the exception of some personal goals that give a sense of achievement in itself, a large proportion of achieving our goals in isolation is meaningless, its only when its widely acknowledged that it becomes meaningful and valuable.

This is not to say money is unimportant as it can be a source of stress and limit our ability to have experiences, It's an economic system that drives our progress and is intimately connected with all aspects of our life. But a wealthy individual has experiences as does a not so wealthy individual. I don't think you can objectively say the wealthy person is happier, I think its the person who has had diverse experiences with his or her time and a fulling social context that perhaps is 'happier' as these are unique experiences that give happiness.

We have to except the desperately poor from this as access to basics like healthcare, food, sanitation, education can completely change one's perspective of life and make the time we have meaningless which is why social security and basic income is essential to dignify human existence.

I applaud your courage! This is so great to hear. It's only when people stand up for what they believe, and nearly always at great personal cost that meaningful change begins to look possible.

It's so important to have activism and structures in place to protect whistle blowers and others not comfortable with our current direction to take this difficult path. Respect!

The question is 'not a bad thing' for whom? That phrase comes across a bit of doublespeak. Can self serving advocacy by those who financially benefit from surveillance be termed a 'debate', as they are the only ones who make that point. I don't know of anyone clamoring for surveillance as 'its a good thing'. Is it a social good?

The ability of power or authority to lock you up, take your property or worse your life is protected by rule of law and due process. Having a debate of the rule of law or due process is similar to having a debate on privacy or a surveillance state. The consequences are negative for the individual and society as a whole, even though they may benefit some stakeholders in the short term who will of course advocate for it but on the whole it's not a social good.

The only thing we have to come to this conclusion is history, a wide body of knowledge and reason.

We can thus say with some degree of confidence that a society without rule of law or due process is not a good thing similar to a society with surveillance is not a good thing. We don’t use the ‘moral high ground’ but reason and historical experience to make these conclusions. This is not a moral issue but a practical one that has consequences for our societies. The ethical issue is the social good for the people who build these systems.

Since we are discussing the social good the alternative view needs to be backed by reason on how surveillance can be good for society as a whole, beyond offering naive presumptions suggesting people are good and will not abuse the power, or how knowing details of everyone’s activities may be beneficial to an individual or company because while that may be true they do not address the social good.

And the only thing we use in these discussions is reason, let's not make it personal.

I think the tech crowd is in denial about their role in surveillance.

We expect professionals to behave ethically. Doctors and companies working on genetics and cloning for instance are expected to behave ethically and have constraints placed on their work. And with consequences for those behaving unethically.

Yet we have millions of software engineers working on building a surveillance society with no sense of ethics, constraints or consequences.

What we have instead are anachronistic discussions on things like privacy that seem oddly disconnected from 300 years of accumulated wisdom on surveillance, privacy, free speech and liberty to pretend the obvious is not obvious, and delay the need for ethical behavior and introspection. And this from a group of people who have routinely postured extreme zeal for freedom and liberty since the early 90's and produced one Snowden.

That's a pretty bad record by any standards, and indicates the urgent need for self reflection, industry bodies, standards, whistle blower protection and for a wider discussion to insert context, ethics and history into the debate.

The point about privacy is not you, no one cares what you are doing so an individual perspective here has zero value, but building the infrastructure and ability to track what everyone in a society is doing, and preempt any threat to entrenched interests and status quo. An individual may not need or value privacy but a healthy society definitely needs it.

If your Internet needs are privacy or anonymity related perhaps. That's why I said it rules out a lot of computing.

For those with a 'serious' as in life dependent need for privacy, for instance whistle blowers or persons of interest it can be argued the Internet today cannot deliver the level of anonymity they require.