Robot-assisted surgery associated with longer operating times, higher cost - <AUTHOR> http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2017/10/robot-assisted-surgery-for-kidney-removal-linked-to-longer-times.html <comment><USER3> This study is right that for the same operation manual laparoscopic is currently more efficient than robotic surgery. The issue here is that robotic surgery does not seek to displace manual laparoscopic surgery- it seeks to displace open surgery. Example from the article:

>65 percent of patients with kidney tumors that necessitated the removal of the entire organ underwent an open surgical procedure. About 34 percent had their kidney removed using a laparoscopic procedure, and only the remaining 1.5 percent of cases

That 1.5 percent is growing by reducing the 65 percent open, not the 34 percent laparoscopic. Surgical robots are able to complete cases where laparoscopic is not an option due to the complexity. Additionally, they are able to increase the pool of operable patients. Many patients that are not candidates for open surgery and have a case that is too complex for laparoscopic are able to be successfully operated on roboticly.

Disclaimer: I work in this field, and believe that it is going in the right direction, but do acknowledge that the technology does currently lead to increased cost and time.

<comment><USER4> This reminds me of the time YouTube introduced a more lightweight version of their video page code and were distraught to find that the average load times for the lightweight page were drastically higher than the standard page. They eventually figure out that this was because most of the people switching to the lightweight page were people on very slow internet connections, since people on fast internet connections didn't find the video page slow enough to bother switching.

<comment><USER5> This is the classic Simpson's Paradox

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The robots extend the working career of laproscopic surgeons. The training is long, and their career with traditional laproscopic surgury is limited by the onset of microtremors, which we all get eventually. The robots contain adjustable tremor filters, which add 8-10 years to the career of an experienced surgeon. That is a huge benefit.

<comment><USER7> Sounds like a win for everyone. A more experienced surgeon without the downside of age related tremors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This falls exactly under the same type of news as:

1905: new "automobile" is slower than a good old horse!

Mature technologies or practices will always have an edge when new alternatives come, but mature techs dont improve much while the new ones can only go up. Robots will become faster, be more autonomous, etc and should drive down costs down the road. Just like digital photography started by being much worse than film back in the 90s, while beating its performance in most metrics in 2010s.

<comment><USER9> Not quite: transportation has always been developed with speed in mind. The Benz No.1 was a lightweight phaeton, not a roadgoing tractor.

This is quite the opposite of how medical procedures are developed with regard to cost: there, optimizing for cost is almost considered bad taste, "you can't put a price on a human life" and all that. Of course everybody knows that a less expensive procedure would help more people than a more expensive one, but the whole environment makes it very easy to not think too hard about cost.

High cost of high tech medicine is in no way comparable to the relatively slow beginning of cars.

<comment><USER8> > but the whole environment makes it very easy to not think too hard about > cost.

I think the opposite is happening right now. These days the FDA requires a bunch of health outcome metrics to show that your drug makes more financial sense than your competitors' (patient benefit vs the price you are asking for) so there is definitely more cost pressure than there ever was. Let's not forget also that most countries' social security systems around the globe are completely broke so there will be sooner or later a cost realization.

> High cost of high tech medicine is in no way comparable to the relatively > slow beginning of cars.

The first cars were not cheap, almost nobody could afford them. We had to wait for Ford and the T model to see cars that regular folks could afford to buy. So in terms of analogy, it's not completely wrong: cars were worse in many regards, and way more expensive than traditional means of transportation at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Judging from the comments, it seems that many people are confused about this.

From what I see in practice: the reasons stated in the OR to choose the robot amount in most part to increasing the surgeon's comfort. The additional degrees of freedom in instrument motion, and the stereoscopic vision are very much appreciated. In addition, believe me when I say that hype is a major drive. Robots are often presented as "the most advanced technology", and this resonates with the patient expecting a high level of care and feeling important. It is true that the robot is sometimes chosen for difficult cases, but it is a question of reassurance and comfort for the surgeon more than anything else. Operations being (much) longer is not without consequence on patient outcome, and no operation done with a robot could not be done without.

Secondly, current robots are absolutely not geared at automation. The surgeon is in control at all times, and the machine does not perform any preprogrammed move. Even worse, to my knowledge there is no robot providing haptic feedback on the market, so that you have to rely on vision for many things which would normally be done using the sense of touch (tightening sutures, for example).

From the point of view of the anesthesiologist, the whole robot story is actually a bit sad and seems to add very little for a huge investment in both money and logistics.

<comment><USER11> All absolutely true. I worked on an orthopedic surgical robot and hospitals got excited about it ("Advanced!") but surgeons hated it (slow, cumbersome, reduces "patients fixed per day" metric). Mostly a waste of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are so many factors here that it is difficult to assess the article. The key for me, which doesn't seem to be discussed, is asking why did the doctors opt for a slower procedure?

If they have a financial incentive to keep the patient in the operating theater for longer, that is a problem and needs to be addressed. If they are slowly learning a new technique (as the article seems to be hinting) that is normal but interesting. If they are using a more precise technique to bring complicated cases up to the average outcome, that is praiseworthy and should be lauded.

This article is interesting regardless, but there isn't enough in it to draw a conclusion.

<comment><USER13> I went to a symposium on assessing the value and future investment in robotic surgery a few years ago. Figuring out if it is cheaper or not, than regular surgery is surprisingly difficult.

For simple procedures, you might ask junior staff to do it with a robot, to get them training on the robot - compared to sending staff of to seminars, this is actually cheap, even though it is more expensive than regular surgery.

You might also ask junior doctors to do a slower, more expensive job on a robot to get their performance up to the same level as expert staff.

And even experienced surgeons might opt for using the somewhat scarce resource only for difficult cases. So you might end up with the same surgeon, on the same type of procedure, having a worse track record on the robot, because the severity of each case is not recorded in the statistic!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It reduces fatigue, I can see why doctors are opting to use the robots. It extends how much the Doc can do and do it well. I'd be interested in seeing the data and how robots impact the day in day out ability to perform surgeries. It may not be case specific efficient, but on a whole are the doctors doing better work and more of it?

<comment><USER15> The article says "However, the two approaches have comparable patient outcomes and lengths of hospital stay, the study showed."

So it looks like the answer to the question "are doctors doing better work" is "No".

<comment><USER16> Not necessarily. This is an observational study, so it might be the case that robotic surgery is employed in harder cases, which compensates for its advantages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A few (potentially useful) additional points:

a) The ability to address more difficult cases is increased with robot- assisted surgery

b) Ergonomics of the situation should be considered as well for someone who can go from standing, leaning, or otherwise "on their feet" all the time to being able to sit and having an armrest.

c) While autonomous robots for complex procedures like this are likely many decades away for a variety of reasons, it's not unlikely that we'll see assistive technology for repetitive tasks in the future. In that sense, we are really at the early stages of the surgical robotics field! (In fact, depending on what who you talk to, the field is as young as 30 years old)

d) I partially disagree with the notion that a procedure done with the robot could be done without it

e) Some competitors are emerging onto the scene, such as Senhance by TransEnterix or Verb Surgical's product, which will progress this technology even further (if not out of the pure competitiveness of it all).

For those interested in reading more, I would suggest the following articles:

[0] Vitiello V, Lee SL, Cundy TP, Yang GZ. Emerging robotic platforms for minimally invasive surgery. IEEE reviews in biomedical engineering. 2013;6:111-26.

[1] Lee SL, Lerotic M, Vitiello V, Giannarou S, Kwok KW, Visentini-Scarzanella M, Yang GZ. From medical images to minimally invasive intervention: Computer assistance for robotic surgery. Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics. 2010 Jan 31;34(1):33-45.

[2] Marcus H, Nandi D, Darzi A, Yang GZ. Surgical robotics through a keyhole: From today's translational barriers to tomorrow's "disappearing" robots. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. 2013 Mar;60(3):674-81.

Disclaimer 1: Have done a few years of research with a surgical robot, so am biased towards advocating it's use.

Disclaimer 2: I am not from the institutions of the articles I mention.

</comment><comment><USER18> Also worth noting that complications and major complications were apparently lower (20% lower with major complications) with the robots but the study did not get to the hurdle of statistical significance.

N.B. for people who have no clue about statistics: failure to achieve statistical significance does not show no effect. In reality this study suggests that there was a useful effect, but did not conclusively prove it.

This confusion happens so often in medical papers it is almost a meme. A meme that has killed a lot of people (see e.g. the Vioxx fiasco).

</comment><comment><USER19> Personally, my main take away from this article was that in 2015 50% of the patients that had a kidney removed (which would roughly be the other 24k patients the study didn't comment on) had their kidneys removed via an old school open incision procedure. Why is that still happening at all? Laparoscopic procedures are significantly safer for the patient, cheaper and faster than old school methods, and they have a quicker recovery time, but just two years ago literally half of the kidney removals performed in these 416 hospitals were using a completely outdated method.

<comment><USER20> I had this exact surgery (robot-assisted laproscopic complete nephrectomy) back on September 22nd.

In my case, once the doc got in there, the tumor+kidney was _too big_ and they had to cut a normal open incision to get it out.

So, I ended up with three tiny laproscopic scars and one big 10" scar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hmm, there's no mention of error rates / mistakes.

24,000 operations without error is quite possible.

If the robot reduced the chance of catastrophe by 5x (to pluck a figure from thin air) it may well pay for itself even at an extra $3k per patient.

Would you trade $5k for a 5x reduction in never waking up ?

<comment><USER22> The article claims error rates were comparable:

> However, the two approaches have comparable patient outcomes and lengths of > hospital stay, the study showed.

<comment><USER21> No real error rates though, as I said, it is easy to imagine none occurred in just 28k operations.

What if the error rate was (in extremis) 1 death in 50k for non assisted and 1 death in 500k for assisted.

The extra cost might be justified on that basis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can someone with experience shed some light on the future of this industry? I think surgical robots are really cool, but I don't know the capabilities or limitations of the technology. This article only talks about laporoscopic surgery for removing kidneys, but surely there are many other types of surgeries - some of which robots excel at and many for which it fails entirely?

Basically, I'd love for someone knowledgeable to tell me more about the long term timeline for this technology. How quickly will it grow, and will it ultimately replace entire types of surgery and transform how we treat people or continue to be an alternative with no obvious superiority?

<comment><USER24> surgeon here - 15 years - thinking about, but haven't received training to allow me to use the robot.

I consider myself a moderately advanced laparoscopic surgeon - I do lap cholecystectomies (gallbladder), laparoscopic hernias, adrenals, appendectomies, Nissen fundoplications, colons, biopsies.

I think there is a place for robotic surgery, but you have to maintain your skills to keep using it - at our hospital, robotically certified surgeons have to do at least 25 robotic cases per year to maintain certification - for my caseload, I don't think I have more than 10-15 cases that would warrant the robot so I would basically be taking 10-15 patients to the OR to do their case robotically in order to maintain my certification.

The advantage of the robot is that it is ridiculously easy to sew vs laparoscopically. To sew laparoscopically, you have a 2 foot long instrument holding the needle and trying to sew. For the robot, it follows the movement of your wrist and hand precisely. It really is amazing technology, but there is only specific, limited use in my opinion.

For example, for prostatectomies, it is awesome. In open prostatectomies, it's difficult to see the pudendal nerves and so they are sometimes sacrificed - <USER2> more erections! View is magnified and 3d in robotic. In addition, anastomosing the bladder back to the urethra happens under the pubic bone so only a limited number of sutures can be placed in the traditional way, whereas with the robot, it's a running circular stitch - less urinary leaks with the robot means less incontinence.

The biggest issue is that in our literature (general surgery) all of the research papers the last several years regarding the benefits of robotic surgery are funded by Intuitive Surgical, which leads to bias. It has it's place, but they are a company and are driven by profit - it behooves them to get a lot of surgeons trained so that we're all fighting for the robot, so the hospital feels they have to buy another!

My current status (as told to the rep) "Let's see if Dr. SoAndSo is still doing robotic surgery in 2 years...."

The only plus is that several other companies are going to be entering the market soon, so hopefully costs will go down bc now the robots are several million for one and the instruments are reusable (10 times), but cost $3k. Just look at ISRG......

\- surgeon

<comment><USER25> "but haven't received training to allow me to use the robotbut haven't received training to allow me to use the robot"

What does such training consist of? Is it how to use the robot (like, these are the menus on the machine, and practice with these joysticks) or are the procedures different? I guess I'm asking, are robotic operations completely different from their manual counterparts, or are the 'just' the same except with the robot doing the moving for you?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am interested in whether doctors were able to take cases that they normally don't take.

I do not expect error rates to go down because doctors are already incentivized to avoid difficult cases.

</comment><comment><USER27> It should be noted that robot-assisted surgery is hugely helpful for partial kidney removal versus the whole thing, as the article states. So the headline on its own doesn't cover the whole picture here and may even be misleading.

</comment><comment><USER18> Figures I've seen show that things are worse for a while and then the robots are better, after a significant learning curve.

The story acknowledges that this study was done early on so it will have been affected by the learning curve.

<comment><USER28> Seen similar things, with the effect of learning curve being fairly massive - particularly for the first 5-10 procedures done. Really understated in the article for being a fairly major factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Not a surgeon or robot-user, but just by way of example, conventional wisdom in the medical world is that the best niche for robotically-assisted surgery is radical prostatectomy for prostate cancer. Conventional wisdom is that the robot permits better preservation of pelvic nerves, leading to lower rates of postoperative incontinence. If true, this is well worth a longer, more expensive procedure.

<comment><USER10> In my center, surgical times went from 2h to a whopping 6h+ for radical prostatectomy after introduction of the robot. While you are right in that radical prostatectomy is to my knowledge the only case of demonstrated robot superiority, fragile patients may suffer from the longer operative times (a major risk factor for post op complications)

<comment><USER30> Is saving 4 hours worth having to wear diapers for the rest of your life?

Would a damp environment increase risk of skin infection down the line?

<comment><USER31> The issue isn't four hours of staff time; it's the added risks to the patient from four more hours of anesthesia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> If this requires highly trained doctors then of course it will cost more but it should require less skill overtime until its an automated consultation where you gently fall asleep, then wake up feeling rested and refreshed with some minor soreness but not a scar can be found and you go on with your day.

</comment><comment><USER33> Ok. But over the long term isn't the hope of the robotic method to make the treatment available to more people, perhaps at hospitals that normally wouldn't offer such things.

Certainly, as the method is being vetted and perfected that too needs to be factored into the evaluation?

<comment><USER34> How could it be offered at places that don't offer it? The robot is autonomous it is controlled by a surgeon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> In most industries robots make something cheaper. I am confident that the US health system will find a way to become even more expensive with the help of robots.

</comment><comment><USER36> How about outcomes? At the end of the day that should be the benchmark we should use.

<comment><USER15> The article says "However, the two approaches have comparable patient outcomes and lengths of hospital stay, the study showed." So it looks like the answer to the question "are doctors doing better work" is "No". reply

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Anesthesiologist friend confirms this.

Robots are nowhere near making a huge impact on outcomes yet.

</comment><comment><USER38> Which one would be willing to accept if it would be able to save lives.</comment>


Porting PuTTY to Windows on Arm - <AUTHOR> https://community.arm.com/developer/tools-software/tools/b/tools-software-ides-blog/posts/porting-putty-to-windows-on-arm <comment><USER2> previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19394633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19394633)</comment>


Judge rules for NSA in warrantless search case - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/10/us-usa-security-ruling-idUSKBN0LE2U820150210

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is the actual ruling itself:

[https://ia801403.us.archive.org/22/items/gov.uscourts.cand.2...](https://ia801403.us.archive.org/22/items/gov.uscourts.cand.207206/gov.uscourts.cand.207206.321.0.pdf)

Excerpt:

> Disclosure of this classified information would risk informing adversaries > of the specific nature and operational details of the Upstream collection > process and the scope of the NSA's participation in the program. > Notwithstanding the unauthorized public disclosures made in the recent past > and the Government's subsequent releases of previously classified > information about certain NSA intelligence gathering activities since 2013, > the Court notes that substantial details about the challenged program remain > classified. The question of whether Plaintiffs have standing and the > substantive issue of whether there are Fourth Amendment violations cannot be > litigated without impinging on that heightened security classification. > Because a fair and full adjudication of the Government Defendants' defenses > would require harmful disclosures of national security information that is > protected by the state secrets privilege, the Court must exclude such > evidence from the case.

So the court isn't ruling on whether NSA surveillance is constitutional. They're saying NSA surveillance is too secret for them to be able to rule on, because state secrets privilege.

<comment><USER2> Right. You can't establish that you were harmed, but the easily obtainable evidence you should be able to present in discovery is classified. I know it exists, you know it exists, but State Secrets, so no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Absolutely comical. White argued the plaintiffs didn't have enough information about the program to sue. Ahhhh, the ol' you don't know enough about our highly and intentionally secret program to make a case against it...

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought the constitution was suppose to trump other laws. Is this state secrets law a new amendment I missed?

<comment><USER5> The next thing you know, we'll have a Secret Court. Oh, wait.

<comment><USER6> Actually the next thing is people like us getting rounded up ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Firstly, [https://eff.org/donate](https://eff.org/donate)

Secondly, from the judgment[1]:

        Based on the public record, the Court finds that the Plaintiffs have failed
        to establish a sufficient factual basis to find they have standing to sue
        under the Fourth Amendment regarding the possible interception of their
        Internet communications.

Another day, another ruling that we can't prove we are spied on. Whenever you can get the authority to rule on the actual program's legality, it's ruled illegal[2].

Thirdly, from the judgment:

        Further, having reviewed the Government Defendants' classified submissions,
        the Court finds that the Claim must be dismissed because even if Plaintiffs
        could establish standing, a potential Fourth Amendment Claim would have to
        be dismissed on the basis that any possible defenses would require
        disclosure of state secret information.

This is the surprising part. How in the hell can a federal law trump the Constitution? This part of the ruling sets the precedent that the Executive can violate the Constitutional rights of anyone, including other branches of government (including the Judiciary itself!), and get away with it if the program is a state secret, _even if you have evidence of the violation_. This is very clear and firm loss of power of the Judiciary and Legislative branches.

Why is the Judiciary rolling over like this? The rule of law is being systematically shut down all around them, and they are just sitting there making themselves obsolete. The reason we have three branches of government that are adversarial is so that when one starts to grab for power, the others shut it down. Unchallengable Constitutional violations is exactly the kind of power grab that the Judiciary is supposed to shut down.

Fourthly: [https://eff.org/donate](https://eff.org/donate)

EDIT: Okay, after having read the full judgment, the very strange thing about it is that the can't-sue-even-if-have-standing claim is almost entirely without references. The standing section has tons of references to prior case law. But the state secrets section has very few citations and and is quite a bit of "grave damage to national security" talk without citation.

\---

[1]: [https://ia801403.us.archive.org/22/items/gov.uscourts.cand.2...](https://ia801403.us.archive.org/22/items/gov.uscourts.cand.207206/gov.uscourts.cand.207206.321.0.pdf)

[2]: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/07/world/europe/electronic- su...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/07/world/europe/electronic-surveillance- by-spy-agencies-was-illegal-british-court-says.html)

<comment><USER8> I decided to stop donating to EFF and instead donate to the ACLU when the EFF decided its time was better spent on re-litigating apartheid[1].

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/eff-files-amicus- brief...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/eff-files-amicus-brief-case- seeks-hold-ibm-responsible-facilitating-apartheid)

<comment><USER9> > re-litigating apartheid

In case you missed it, the legal practices in the US depend on previous court cases.

> U.S. corporations should not enjoy immunity for their purposeful assistance, > technological or otherwise, in gross human rights violations > ([https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/eff-files-amicus- > brief...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/eff-files-amicus-brief-case- > seeks-hold-ibm-responsible-facilitating-apartheid))

A positive ruling on this case, which presents to the courts not only a racist and violent but also a clearly stigmatized political system, would affect greatly how courts would behave towards companies collaborating with similar governments in the present time.

Furthermore, are you kidding me? IBM should be absolved of responsibility for aiding and abating severe human rights violations? Stop giving money to ACLU too, then. [https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice-human- rights/mandel...](https://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice-human- rights/mandela-faced-goliath-racial-discrimination)

<comment><USER8> >In case you missed it, the legal practices in the US depend on previous court cases.

You could dial back the snark a little here.

>Furthermore, are you kidding me? IBM should be absolved of responsibility for aiding and abating severe human rights violations?

I never said that. What I am saying is that there are other groups that would be better suited to take up this cause. Technologically minded people tend to be crappy socially and ethically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We need a brave insider leak some private data obtained using one of NSA programs of _every single federal judge_. Something simple, like one full recording of a phone call/private email per judge/judges spouse.

Snowden showed that every analyst can just log in and get at this shit with no checks, no warrants, no supervision. Somehow people in power still think they are above the rest.

<comment><USER11> Maybe they are doing that now, just blackmailing the judges with it

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Big surprise. The government rules in favor of the government. Separation of powers is a myth.

<comment><USER13> The government isn't a unified entity. It's worth watching what arms of the government and governmental elites cooperate with the totalitarian surveillance regime and what arms defect.

<comment><USER14> Are you kidding? Yes it's a unified entity. I will chop off a leg if a government 'arm' defects. Go back to sleep America, everything is under control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder how many secret meetings the judge had with the NSA to come up with this expected ruling.

<comment><USER16> This is just one of the biggest dangers of having an agency that spies on everyone with impunity. Limitless blackmail capability could make almost anyone conform to their will.

<comment><USER15> I think the NSA down voted me. And I totally agree with your statement.</comment></comment></comment>


The iPhone is no longer Apple's most important product - <AUTHOR> https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/apple-just-announced-something-unthinkable-about-iphone-heres-why-its-actually-great-news.html <comment><USER2> Great that they've been able to grow their services revenue, but a huge percent of that is driven by iPhone owners subscribing to things.

Headline is misleading at best, if the iPhone were to suddenly lose their market to Android phones, most of that subscription revenue would dry up too.

Music and Arcade I'd expect are vastly phone-based. TV might have the Apple TV as a significant subscriber base, and Music admittedly has an android client, but I'd be shocked if iPhone users weren't the majority of all of those subscriptions.

<comment><USER3> >Headline is misleading at best, if the iPhone were to suddenly lose their market to Android phones

10 years into the iPhone, it's safe to say this is never going to happen.

<comment><USER4> Hmmm..., I remember the Macintosh's slow death to the PC in the late 1980's and 1990s.

I think you should probably look more closely at the iPhone's global market share.

Developers will support the larger, more profitable markets first. At some point, they'll stop supporting the shrinking market.

[https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/31/iphones-global- ma...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/31/iphones-global-marketshare- dips-to-101-amid-rise-of-samsung-chinese-brands)

<comment><USER5> Declining sales != declining install market share

<comment><USER6> The problem is No Newspaper actually write the word Declining _Sales_ , they all use the word _marketshares_ , where it means unit / revenue in the total market during a period of time.

As a matter of fact Tim Cook mentioned in the Investor Q&A that iPhone User base has been growing in all of their Operating Segment. ( The word _Operation_ was chosen likely because Apple doesn't actually operate in India, where it has declining usage ). The last reported Active iPhone users were 900M nearly 10 months ago. Apple are highly likely to reach 1B Active iPhone user sometime in 2020.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think iPhone sales are slowing because the devices have become more durable and last longer. People aren't abandoning their iPhones, they're just using them for 3 and 4 years instead of replacing hem every 18-24 months under carrier contracts. The iPhone 6 is still a very capable smartphone five years on, provided you've replaced the battery in the meantime. The same couldn't be said of the 3GS in 2013.

And this is where services and wearables come in to pick up the slack, which is arguably more consumer friendly than building devices that barely last two years.

<comment><USER8> The iPhone 6s continues to be the best piece of hardware I've ever owned. I imagine folks with an SE feel similarly.

<comment><USER9> i'm on a 6s as well. every year i look at the new phones and i just can't justify paying so much for incremental improvements.

faceID is nice but touchID is just fine. 2GB of memory is fine too. and while i don't use the headphone jack much any more, it's nice as a backup for when i forget the airpods. i may upgrade next year with the purported 5G rollout, but i'm not even sure that's worth it. LTE is fast enough and its coverage is mostly good enough too.

<comment><USER10> When LTE came out in India, I noticed my service provider (Airtel) deliberately slowing down HSPA+.

Plus, I am pretty confident that the speeds that I actually get didn't change by a huge factor when the transition happened. If anything they got slower because of congestion, due to the amazing price drop and crazy increase in user adoption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The iPhone is still THE MOST important product for Apple.

No iPhone means no services and no wearable sales.

The iPad may sell independently of the iPhone and Macs would as well, but they are both significantly smaller than the iPhone market.

Apple appears to believe they've saturated their addressable market, and their best bet for growth is to sell more to their existing customer base.

I suspect we will see a shift in their marketing as well. The general ads which would attract new users to the iPhone platform will reduce, and the focus will be more on getting existing iPhone users to upgrade, or buy additional services/products.

<comment><USER12> Yes, the headline is not just misleading, it is false.

Not only does the iPhone drive other revenue streams, "It also still makes up the largest chunk of Apple's revenue."

It is no longer the only important product, but it is still the most important.

<comment><USER13> Rate of growth is a garbage indicator for anyone who isn't VC funded. Particularily if you're a (still predominantly) hardware outfit with Thea history of designing, producing, shipping and selling some of the most profitable mass market products in history.

If I decided to setup a lemonade stand in my front yard and sell one glass today (it's already late in the day here) and 100 glasses tomorrow then the growth argument makes me the most important (future) retailer in the world.

Diversification is good for Apple, it's good for the ecosystem and as mentioned elsewhere probably makes it easier for them to produced devices that are less disposable. That's a great story and, given the dollars at stake, an important one. Why bother with the click-bait title that seriously erodes credibility?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I use an android phone, I'd buy an apple phone in a heartbeat if it didn't cost as much. They just keep raising the price too, which is ridiculous.

I get its a premium product, but they've priced themselves out of so many peoples budgets at this point I think.

<comment><USER15> In many venues, I'd be labelled an Apple fanboi. And I probably am. I've got all their shit; services, too. The day their credit card comes out is the day I sign up for it. Hey, it's one-stop shopping, I'm comfy in the ecosystem, I feel like a superior person by using their products, and the stuff mostly works.

But I would absolutely love a $400-500 iPhone and I'm fine if it's missing a lot of features. My phone just isn't my primary point of mobile computing anymore (if anything, Apple Watch fills that role for me now[0]), so I neither need nor want a $1000 phone (even though, being a fanboi, I have one). And the point of putting my CV in the first paragraph is to point out that, hey, even if you don't make money selling me a phone, Apple, you'll still make an arse- load of money off me. And maybe you'll get _new_ customers/revenue to boot.

[0]Which, I'll point out, is _also_ a ridiculously-priced device at $900 for the one I bought.

<comment><USER16> > But I would absolutely love a $400-500 iPhone and I'm fine if it's missing a > lot of features.

Apple still sells iPhone 7.

<comment><USER15> Good point, I somehow skipped right over that one. Granted, I was thinking more along the lines of the SEs, which were a CPU generation behind, and would be supported for a while. The 7 is only a couple of generations from obsolescence.

OTOOH, having given a bit of thought, is it just more economical to eat the expensive of the flagship up front and then hang on to it for four or five years (which is what we currently do).

<comment><USER17> So far, the trend seems to be for Apple to support devices for 5 years after release [0]. Most apps will support at least 1 previous version of iOS, so your total lifespan is around 6 years total. Given that, you end up with:

XR: $750 / 6 years = $125/year

8: $599 / 5 years = $120/year

7: $449 / 4 years = $112/year

So assuming you plan to keep the device for its entire lifespan, I'm not sure it actually matters very much what you buy.

[0] [http://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_5824_io...](http://infographic.statista.com/normal/chartoftheday_5824_ios_iphone_compatibility_n.jpg)

<comment><USER14> This is my point exactly. My moto x4 is no slouch and does almost everything I want. Cost me $150.

Will easily last me 3-4 years.

50/year to own.

iPhone 8 assuming it lasts 4 years without battery/breakage means I could buy new moto x4 every year I own that 8. I get that its supported longer but these devices are heavily used and abused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What's mind blowing to me is they could easily double their already respectable Mac revenue by simply undoing some of the Ive-induced idiocy like keys with no travel, dongle infestation, touch bar that distracts when you look at the main screen, or hinge which breaks if you open/close your laptop a lot. I hope this can actually happen now.

And their services themselves have considerable potential given that currently most people just use storage and music.

<comment><USER19> Their MacBook sales never dropped. The dev and internet geek community who want MacBooks but have stopped buying them isn't that big. They aren't going to double MacBook sales. If that was the case there would be some clear indications of it, no?

<comment><USER18> Did I say they did? I merely said they could double if they paid a bit more attention to usability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Well, new iPhone sales may not fuel the future growth of revenue for the company. Yet, the existing base of iPhone devices is definitely fueling the revenue growth for the company's new and future services.

Rare are the non-iPhone owners who choose Apple Music, or Apple TV... The iPhone is the gateway to that walled garden.

<comment><USER20> ...and if a current iPhone owner switches to an Android device, I doubt they'll stick around Apple services! Therefore, the iPhone is still cornerstone to Apple's growth, as it enables it.

<comment><USER21> You're right about switchers, but I wonder if this is a missed opportunity. If I switched to Android, I might still want to use iMessage. I'd probably still want to be plugged into shared photo libraries between family members. I honestly prefer Apple Maps to Google Maps at this point. But I'm not sure how Apple would monetize this, or if they'd want to give people any incentive to switch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Terrible headline. iPhone is still by far Apple's most important product. Just because it doesn't account for the majority of the company's revenue doesn't demote it. Some other product would have to be more important. But what is that? The article never says.

</comment><comment><USER23> If they can't really compete on engineering they are done. Everybody can pretend services and style and brand makes up for it but it don't. They were built on engineering and without it and leadership to actually do something it's just a matter of time. The rate might be faster than expected. Looks like it to me.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sales are slowing because they stopped innovating and give us the same exact device for four years in a row. Every once in a while the apple sheep wake up a little and stop buying until they add another camera then gobble the next device up. I'll ativk with my X until they actually do something innovative. Maybe they can figure out how to copy notchless androids by 2025 or so?

<comment><USER19> "Apple sheep". Good mature comment!

<comment><USER25> Still more substantial criticism of Apple than your comment. Besides that, insults are often used as a rhetoric element, is that too hard to grasp for people on HN or why is this so frowned upon?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I mostly agree. I am finding Apple Services to be much improved and I often leave my iPhone at home and just wear my Apple Watch.

I hope I don't sound too judgemental, but every time I see a room full of people where most everyone is staring into their phone I question if they are really making best use of their time in the wonderful world that we live in.

<comment><USER27> > I hope I don't sound too judgemental, but every time I see a room full of > people where most everyone is staring into their phone I question if they > are really making best use of their time in the wonderful world that we live > in.

There are a lot more use cases that demands phones instead of smart watches.

<comment><USER26> Agreed, which is why I sometimes do carry my phone, mostly when I think I might be taking pictures or be on a video call. I am trying to make my default 'no phone' but I understand that does not work for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So they're going to bank on the $60k desktop or the $4k laptop vs. the $1500 phone?

I guess there's always beats with $300 headphones too.

</comment><comment><USER29> The Apple watch is the only other device with the popularity to kind of sell Apple services. People aren't buying Apple's smart home solutions. I really wish Apple services were more broadly sold over other platforms.

<comment><USER30> And the watch is still tethered to the phone. We are a looooong ways from the iPhone not being Apple's most important product.

<comment><USER31> For how long though? It will gain its own App Store this year, with standalone apps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Beginning of the end. IBM, HP, Oracle - once tech companies start making more money from services than products, they lose something and start to decline in relevance.

I would include Microsoft in that, but they started making things again.

<comment><USER19> Oracle is a massive company in profits and market cap still.

<comment><USER32> yeah, but outside a tiny (although rich) part of the industry, they're irrelevant. Well, except for the things that Sun built and they bought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Apple are excellent at figuring out what "the next big thing" is. The fact that none of us know what that could possibly be is kind of exciting to be honest.

</comment><comment><USER34> iPhone may still be an important product to Apple. But the competition is too high nowadays because of the cheap Android mobiles which provide similar features like iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER27> Not really interested in iPhone development anymore since mine already meets my needs.

The Macs, on the other hand, have so much room for improvement.

</comment><comment><USER35> One could almost say they've leveraged their monopoly position in phone platforms to expand into additional markets...

<comment><USER36> Can you explain the monopoly part?

<comment><USER37> There is one seller of iOS devices and you can't select another seller if you want to run software from the Apple store.

<comment><USER31> That's not how monopolies work. In that case all of the console makers are "monopolies".

<comment><USER37> Usually the friendlier term "ecosystem" is used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> For those who don't want to read through, they're saying it's services, Mac, and iPad.

</comment><comment><USER39> Apple is the new IBM!!!

</comment><comment><USER40> yeah not because they made a more important product but because people aren't buying the iphones like they used to

<comment><USER41> I have upgraded once in 5 years (from a 6 to the 8+) They are a great product, durable and very capable even when they are 3 or 4 years old.

Im not chasing innovation, I want something I can depend on.

<comment><USER11> I agree. I used my iPhone 6 since 2015 till a few months ago. Androids do not last that long.

The problem is that during that time my iPhone suffered damage, despite a case (some of the damage was acknowledged as inherent flaws, but some were just my fault). And being a 6 I was able to get it repaired for a reasonable price.

That is increasingly less true for newer iPhones. It's $50 more to buy a new iPad than it is to repair the iPhone X screen. You can buy an iPad Air ($499) for less than the cost of any other iPhone X damage ($549).

And if you lose your iPhone, and would like to buy something cheap to keep you going until you splurge for the next generation a few months or a year from now, then your cheapest entry point is north of $500 again.

The economics of owning an iPhone are getting pretty rough, compared to what you get on the Android side.

<comment><USER42> > _The economics of owning an iPhone are getting pretty rough, compared to > what you get on the Android side._

Specially when you can get a pretty decent device such as the Mi A2 for $200 that runs Android One (almost stock).

<comment><USER31> I've had experience with "pretty decent" Android phones like the Moto G. It was nowhere near as performant as my iPhone 6s that was three years older. I bought a Moto G for my son. He was glad to "upgrade" to a phone that was three years older.

<comment><USER42> I had a Moto G (it was my first Android phone) and the Mi A2 is way better than that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dfeojm-zlib Apple products are no longer durable, well-made or a good value, so their "services" are now required to keep them operable, which explains why said "services" revenue is now more important than purchase price. Think of Apple products as American-made Mercedes rather than a Volvo.

<comment><USER43> Last I checked my four year old iphone still works without paying for apple music, icloud or any other apple services. It also lasted longer then the phone I had before it (an android), and my friends phones that run android. I don't know if your argument holds water.</comment></comment>


RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths - <AUTHOR> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1925 <comment><USER2> (0) For every fundamental truth, there exists a counterexample:

 _(1) It Has To Work._

Counterexample: U.S. healthcare.

 _(2a) No matter how hard you try, you can't make a baby in much less than 9 months._

Counterexample: adoption.

 _(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead._

Counterexample: Who cares? </resumes eating his BLT>

 _(4) Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor understood unless experienced firsthand._

Counterexample: Microsoft Windows.

 _(5) It is always possible to aglutenate multiple separate problems into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases this is a bad idea._

Counterexample: U.S. Constitution.

 _6\. It is easier to move a problem around (for example, by moving the problem to a different part of the overall network architecture) than it is to solve it._

Counterexample: Joe Biden's speeches.

 _(7a) (corollary). Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two (you can't have all three)._

Counterexample: Five Guys.

 _(8) It is more complicated than you think._

Counterexample: "All you lawyers do is complicate situations that aren't complicated." - Erin Brokovich

 _9\. For all resources, whatever it is, you need more._

Counterexample: calories.

 _(10) One size never fits all._

Counterexample: Pencil and paper.

 _(11) Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation, regardless of whether it works._

Counterexample: suicide.

 _(12) In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away._

Counterexample: Hacker News.

<comment><USER3> Your counterexamples for the most part make make no sense. I feel like I should give a line by line rebuttal, but that's probably giving your joke more attention that it deserves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://www.rfc-editor.org/errata_search.php?rfc=1925&eid...](http://www.rfc- editor.org/errata_search.php?rfc=1925&eid=3104)

Mark Nottingham's update on the speed of light.

</comment><comment><USER5> Number 2 should have the subpoint "You must travel along the curvature of the Earth" - that is, until we get IP over neutrino.

Honestly, even for a joke-RFC, this is pretty spot on.

</comment><comment><USER6> "It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove." – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

</comment><comment><USER7> I love how ``It is always possible to add another level of indirection'' is described as corollary to moving problems around instead of solving them :D

</comment><comment><USER8> Love it. Ahh, those lighter more fun days. Try getting an RFC like that in there now.

<comment><USER9> It was an April Fools' Day RFC, which they do at least one of every year:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools%27_Day_RFC>

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> April Fools Day is bad enough why are we reliving it on HN again and again?

</comment><comment><USER11> Twelve truths and a misspelling (aglutenate).</comment>


Go 1.5's vendor/ experiment - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@freeformz/go-1-5-s-vendor-experiment-fd3e830f52c3 <comment><USER2> I hate this. Go has been putting off vendoring for such a long time because they "didn't want to come up with a half-baked solution". I think that's bull, and it just wasn't a priority for the at the time Google-heavy team since they have a different dependency need (fueled partly by the NIH-syndrome).

Now, they release this half-baked solution which has no true advantages over the existing vendoring tools other than keeping our import path the same in your source file (which just makes things more confusing imho). No solution for dealing with dependency conflicts, not even tools to detect and manage them other than the compiler itself.

On top of that there's even more "magic keywords" that you need to learn which causes stuff not to behave as you expect, just like the magic comments.

I understand it is also a consequence of having a v1.0 and a backwards- compatibility guarantee, but nearly all features added after 1.0 seem to be added with as minimal effort as needed to get _something_ working, which is not a good thing. It all feels tacked on, the easy way, and not thought out.

<comment><USER3> Looks like they are trying to exhaust all possible bad ideas, before picking the solution that works.

I expect that they don't even know what works yet, because NIH and "it didn't exist in the 1970ies".

<comment><USER4> Go packaging is a black hole of sadness in light of all the experience and research that's gone on in this space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Multiple versions of the same library will cause problems ... This is a > limitation of ... but probably also a sane one

> Another issue (hat tip to onetruekarl) comes up when 2 vendored dependencies > also vendor their own copies of another depencency with the same name ...

So I still don't see why people are content with having a vendoring solution that doesn't support multiple versions of the same package and strict ASCII name conflicts. I understand this is an experiment but it begs the question why it doesn't want to at least eventually bite off doing powerful things (it seems to handwave the hard problems with a future spec that kind might solve it - seemingly something probably orthogonal to this experiment).

I have really enjoyed what NPM did with a simple package.json file and enabling recursive dependencies. It seems like if go were to add a simple file that maps package name to package URL with a decent support for different URL protocols you could build the same recursive dependency graph and depend on multiple versions of the same package and also different packages with the same name.

<comment><USER6> I think it does support multiple versions of a package, as long as the package supports multiple versions of a package. The problem is if a package registers some global name, and another copy of the package also registers the same global name, that could cause an error.

The name conflict is a compiler error message, not anything to do with vendoring.

Having a package.json file is a separate issue, but there is a proposal for that here: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang- dev/nMWoEAG55v8...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/golang- dev/nMWoEAG55v8/iJGgur7W_SEJ)

Having a file like that doesn't solve the vendoring issues though. This new vendoring scheme seems almost identical to NPM's node_modules.

<comment><USER7> _> The problem is if a package registers some global name, and another copy of the package also registers the same global name, that could cause an error._

This shouldn't cause an error, because packages can only register globals within their own namespace. You just end up with two copies of it, with different types.

<comment><USER6> That would be nice, but that is not true in Go. You can register with a function like this one: [http://golang.org/pkg/database/sql/#Register](http://golang.org/pkg/database/sql/#Register) (mentioned in the article) and run it in your init() function or any similar function that a client calls.

That will collide with any other package that also uses that registration function for the same value of 'name'.

<comment><USER7> Right, when you leak handles to package objects externally, all bets are off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is similar to node_modules + npm, in essence.

Having used node and npm on both small (~200 transitive deps) and large (~1000 transitive deps) projects, I think this is an approach that's conceptually not a good idea (outside of possible implementation issues with npm).

With vendoring, end up with a _very_ large tree of transitive vendor'ed dependencies. You have no idea or control over what's in it, and what versions of what packages are in it.

Nearly all of the time, the two allegedly incompatible versions of a library that you install separately turn out to be 2.0.13 and 2.0.14, and you only get two because well, somebody hasn't upgraded yet.

This might seem trivial, but in the end you have a project tree where every dependency gets installed separately for everything that depends on it, so you end up with something like O(number of deps * number of deps) installed libraries, which obviously doesn't scale.

You also end up with the versioning problem. Imagine there's an important reason to upgrade some package P, e.g. a security issue. Now you have to hunt down every single project in your transitive dependencies that depends on it, and ask them to upgrade or fork.

You also still have version issues. If you transitively depend on the same library C in versions Cv1 and Cv2, and you want to pass an object/data structure/... from Cv1 to Cv2 through some path, you open yourself up to all kinds of hilarious version mismatches and failures.

This isn't new - e.g. Eclipse/OSGi did the same thing with separated class loaders, and it was a mess.

I think flattening your dependency/vendor tree to only ever have one version of library C, and hoping/testing for minor version mismatches to work out, is the most viable thing to do.

<comment><USER9> The mechanism provided by the go tool is just for compilation. There will be other tools you will use to actually manage the dependencies. So you may choose to flatten out the dependencies, but maybe keep a couple separate for special cases.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely, my critique was just about recursive vendoring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Node.js (w/ NPM) is dynamic in nature and its modules are stored in the module cache by an absolute path key calculated from the relative path of the module which is being required at RUN-TIME. Go cannot do that at RUN-TIME. It must resolve all dependencies at compile time.

Are there any statically typed languages that solve the diamond dependency issue elegantly?

<comment><USER11> Java, by prioritizing API compatibility across releases and having compiler- checked types.

The result being that unless you hit a particularly crappy piece of software, it's save to just pick the later version of two dependencies and use that.

<comment><USER12> lol, you mean like the vm itself with different xml parsers between 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, and other built in restrictions in other areas. Also with allowing and then disallowing manipulation of certain namespaces (esp the core ones).

It's a problem a human has to get involved with at some point no matter what.

<comment><USER11> Anecdotal exceptions aren't proof of universal truth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > There is a strong argument to be made that libraries should not vendor their > own dependencies, but as the author of several library / command combo > packages that rely extensively on 3rd party libraries I'm not convinced of > that blanket assertion.

We ran into this with prometheus.io and godep. Vendoring in our libraries meant that types didn't match between the vendored version that the main server had and the vendored version coming form the library.

If there's a way to solve this, that'd be great but it means you're back to choosing which version is correct.

</comment><comment><USER14> That's going to be bad on Windows. 260 char limit for path.

</comment><comment><USER15> I've done this sort of thing for a while (if in a simpler, more naive way) by just tweaking GOPATH in a Makefile. In fact, I had to do it again only yesterday, for a very simple little server: [https://github.com/rcarmo/go- http-mdns](https://github.com/rcarmo/go-http-mdns)

In general, I think a solution for this is long overdue, and look forward to trying out 1.5 in earnest.

</comment><comment><USER16> Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't remote packages have the same side-effects as this experimental vendoring?

<comment><USER6> What are remote packages?

<comment><USER16> When you run `go get` and import packages from a remote Git or Mercurial repository. At least that's what Go docs call it[1].

[1]: [https://golang.org/doc/code.html#remote](https://golang.org/doc/code.html#remote)

<comment><USER6> If by "same side effects" you mean multiple versions of the same library causing issues, I don't think so. Using "go get" you will end up with only a single version of a library for a given path.

<comment><USER16> Almost, I mean you can only use a single version at a given time. An example would be if an imported library and its importer uses the same dependencies but one used an older API.

<comment><USER6> I think that is solved by the vendor thing. You can have two versions of the dependency, e.g. "vendor/dependency" and "vendor/library/vendor/dependency" and, with the caveats mentioned elsewhere (global name conflicts, similar- looking but different types, etc) it should work fine.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Recommendations on a good server? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in the purchasing phase of my startup where I'm looking for equipment.  Most people are saying to just rent space, but I very much like the flexibility and freedom of operating my own server.  Financially, I can support the move by leaps and bounds because of my connections with certain people at a local ISP.  Plus, I think it'd be great to have an extra server to test products on, roll out some sort of virtualization options and let the other hackers conduct experiments on before we go live.<p>My question is: who do you recommend for purchasing a good server machine? <comment> patrickg-zill If you are colocating the box, I recommend either HP servers with iLO or Sun machines like the v20z or x2100 etc. that have a nice Lights Out Management (LOM) feature.

With either the HP or Sun systems you can even do virtual media, where you boot the remote system off an ISO image or a CD/DVD disk stored on your laptop or desktop system,

It will save you a huge amount of time and effort the first time you are miles away from the machine and there is some kind of issue that you need to diagnose.

<comment><USER2> I'll concur on Sun. Their hardware has come down a lot, and it is _nice_.

I dunno HP gear too well. I've dealt with a lot of Dell systems, and they aren't bad at all. Get the remote console card, and you'll be pretty well set for emergency problem solving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would go for Sun servers. Sign up for the Sun Startup Essential program and get a certain percent off (40%) some hardware.

But really. Use Amazon AWS. Buying hardware is very 1999

<comment><USER4> The nice thing about AWS is it takes away many of the hassles of scaling up quickly and headaches of hardware failure, but it is actually cheaper to own and run your own server for a early stage startup as hardware costs are generally covered in the first year (there are many comparisons, Google it).

Plus if you have a good relationship with an ISP (free/low-cost hosting and bandwidth), I would go with that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> get supermicro hardware. siliconmechanics.com is a pretty good provider of pre-assembled supermicro hardware. We use supermicro servers for all of our clusters at engineyard.com

<comment><USER6> I'll add to the supermicro recommendation - I bought from ASA Computers and was happy with the service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you want to keep costs cheap, I would recommend not buying a new one and instead looking around for a bankruptcy auction. I managed to get 3 pretty decent servers for $400/ea. from a startup that was going out of business.

Other than that, I recommend HP. Dell is cheaper, but you get what you pay for, especially if you are managing it remotely.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'd recommend you not buy your hardware, and instead let someone else be your hardware guy--the competition is so fierce in the hosting industry, and they buy in such huge quantities, that you can't come out cheaper (even if nothing ever goes wrong with your system). But, if you've got some bandwidth fairy looking out for you, and colo is pretty much free, then I guess you can't resist.

But nobody else should be going into the hardware business, if you're building a software company. Seriously.

</comment><comment><USER8> seriously recommend using serverbeach or softlayer - userscripts.org gets 4M pageviews/mo (including RSS and bots I get 50K dynamic req/hour) on a $200 box from serverbeach.

softlayer is like serverbeach but a little more expensive. they are more automated though - so if you expect to add more hardware, it only a few hours for new boxes to come online.

that said, they are both monthly and have setup fees (not horribly expensive but not like AWS where you can get a server for a few hours)

<comment><USER2> We've got boxes at both, and are happy. We also have boxes at theplanet.com. Also happy there.

SoftLayer occasionally has stupidly good deals, if you watch out for them. Usually on bigger hardware, though, so if you're looking for sub-$100 it's not the place. But on really big boxes, they have some incredible deals. We rented a quad core, 4GB RAM box, with 2x250GB drives for under $200/month just a couple of months ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've gone with dell servers, which are sort of fine (cheap at least), but I guess HP with ILO is way better. The Dell lights out management is overpriced and crappier. One way or another is's very nice if you later can add exactly similar machines to take any Linux hardware surprises put of the way (if that's what you're running).

</comment><comment><USER10> If you can run your server in Europe, I would recommend hetzner.de. At least twice as cheap as the amazon web service.

</comment><comment><USER11> You may be better able to apply that money - don't buy the server just for kicks.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seriously, call serverbeach or get an AWS account.</comment>


Why Users Read Text Easier With Larger Leading Sizes - <AUTHOR> http://uxmovement.com/design-articles/why-users-read-text-easier-with-larger-leading-sizes

<comment><USER2> " this default lead ing size is not large enough to make the text legible."

Actually, yeah, it is. It could be -easier- but it's definitely legible.</comment>


Ask HN: going to USA - <AUTHOR>

I'm from Argentina and the next year I'll have some free time that I would like to spend going to USA. My idea is to stay there for about 1-3 months. The reasons are: -For fun. -Know about a different culture. -Improve my english skills. -Meet interesting people.
But going there isn't cheap because our currency is devaluated and $4(four pesos) = u$s1(one dollar). So in order to go there, I'll have to work at some place.
I would like to know if there are some companies/startups that hires people like me to work temporarily. I'm a beginner Python/Django programmer and studying Engineering Systems(4th year).
There are programs that make something like this, but I don't like the jobs that they offer to do.
So I ask you guys if this is possible or if I'm crazy.
Thanks a lot, Mariano. <comment><USER2> Mariano, unless you have left out important information such as "Although I grew up in Argentina I am a U.S. citizen by virtue of being born in the United States", you lack legal permission to work in the United States unless you get a visa which permits it prior to arriving in the US. I'll just give it to you straight: it is not likely that you will be able to do this in anything like the timeline you are currently planning.

Without legal permission to work in the U.S., you will find it extraordinarily difficult to find reputable employment.

I would counsel against illegal employment -- when I was young and stupid I worked on a cash basis for a man who "didn't want none of that OSHA paperwork nonsense", and I was forced to quit the job after he threw a 20 lb. pipe at my head. (Cleaning oil pipeline components with a toothbrush is, by the way, every bit as fun as it sounds.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your response. I forgot to mention this important issue. I'm an Italian citizen too, this could help me or it's the same as being an Argentine citizen?. All legal, there's no question about it.

So this means that if in the future I apply for Ycombinator and the application is accepted, I won't be able to participate because of the visa issues.

<comment><USER3> If you're an Italian citizen, you might consider going to live/work in Italy instead of the US. By right of citizen, you already would be legally allowed to work in that country. Also, the Italian citizenship may entitle you to work anywhere else in the EU you wish to go. While not the same as the US, you'd get nearly all the other benefits you had hoped for.

<comment> a-priori Italy is part of the EU, so Italian citizens are entitled to work most places in Europe. If you want to improve your English, I recommend working in England or Ireland instead of the US.

[Edit: removed stuff about the Schengen area]

<comment><USER4> Good luck in Ireland. You may have noticed we're in a bit of a recession here (note heavy sarcasm)... I'd wager that you'd have a difficult time finding a job in Ireland. Course both Google and Amazon have offices here so don't let me discourage you. Just be warned.

Jobs aside, I've loved the last two years I've spent here in Ireland. The people are lovely, as is the country itself. Still on the expensive side, but we're having price corrections along with the recession. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Mariano - email me at firstname.lastname@example.com. If you're going to San Diego, I know of one Argentinian company with offices there so it might be a good way to get in.

Edit: Also, if you're just going to be there for a few months, check out CouchSurfing. I've made friends with people from dozens of countries there and it's a great way to travel.

</comment><comment><USER6> I suggest you try couchsurfing. It will enable you to accomplish all your goals:. -Know about a different culture. -Improve my english skills. -Meet interesting people. at a much lower cost as you wouldn't have to pay hotels/hostels.

</comment><comment><USER7> Unless you have a work permit, the only way you could "work" would be if you come in on a B1/B2 visa for "business meetings".

But you couldn't get paid by a US office - it would have to be your Argentinian employer paying you and in their interest to have you here for business meetings (of course the US office could reimburse the foreign office for expenses, but now your salary) - that effectively means you will need to interact with a US office of the company you work for in Argentina (or an associated firm, e.g. in the case of the Big Four).

If you come for "business meetings" you should be ready to demonstrate such.

<comment><USER8> how does this mesh with paying individuals (who do not hold us work permits) while they are situated outside of the united states? i'm think in particular of small outsourced software development projects.

<comment><USER7> Read the bit about B1 on this page: <http://travel.state.gov/visa/temp/types/types_1262.html>

<comment><USER8> okay. but, under what rubric is it legal for a person without us work authorization, situated outside of the us, to be paid by a us person/organization for work done such as developing software?

<comment><USER7> If you don't have work permit, you cannot work WITHIN the US and get paid a wage/salary by a US person.

What you could do is:

\- employed by foreign company

\- visit US for MEETINGS with colleagues at a US firm - come up with an agenda (of course you can code during your month here)

\- your work cannot be directly FOR a US firm

\- the US firm cannot pay you a wage/salary

\- the US firm can reimburse your foreign employer for travel/accommodation to/from/in the US, who in turn would presumably cover your expenses while here.

The operative word is "meeting" as opposed to sitting in a cubicle and cranking out code.

What I outlined above is a very common occurrence. Many companies have foreign staff (or staff from foreign associated companies / partners) come in for business meetings.

<comment><USER8> your insights are really helpful. the situation i'm concerned about is quite convoluted (for me). no one without a work-permit has worked _within_ the us, but compensation for a software product was paid directly to the individual. this involved that individual signing a W8BEN. maybe it makes sense for me to contact a lawyer at this point. thanks again,

*edit: i don't know if anyone else is reading this thread, but references for a trustworthy lawyer who can discuss a specific situation via email would be welcome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As others have already mentioned, you can't legally do anything considered as work in the United States without a work permit.

If you still want to do it (illegally), which I would strongly recommend against, no legit company will ever hire you, because you will not be able to show the requirement documentation to prove that you're legally allowed to work in the United States. In order for you to get around that hurdle, you'd have to acquire the documents illegally. Or work for a company that hires illegal immigrants.

It's a very bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER10> Look, there's a gray area here that everyone drives a truck through. Foreigners are able to start companies in America, just not be employed or get paid. Ever wonder why immigrants have small businesses like grocery stores? Because you can buy a store as a foreigner, you can operate it, and you can keep the profits. You just can't be an employee and get paid. Got it?

It's also legal to have a business in Argentina, be an employee of that company, and come to the US to do consulting. I've never figured out exactly how legal it is, but the fact that so many companies, large and small, do this means if it's illegal it must not be very illegal. Every country allows employees to come in and do some work on tourist visas, otherwise each economy would freeze up.

For example, I was a software guy working on a hardware device being produced in China. I ended up going over and spending a week doing integration. On a tourist visa. I was working the entire time, as did all the taiwanese who came over to work with me. There was never a question of anyone getting work visas. I suspect that what we all did was illegal, but it's a gray area and I'm not a lawyer.

The dodge there is we were working for our individual companies, in china, instead of working directly for a chinese company. I've never seen a law that specifies the amount of work where "contracting in country" turns into "employed in country". Not that I know. There's a practical limit, in that at some point an official notices and you get in hot water. I suppose. China's a big country and there are only so many officials. I've done that kind of thing for weeks at a time; no one ever notices at that length.

Couch surfing can be rather pleasant. I've got an empty in-law apartment and a pile of code to write, but I'm writing code this month and next, and don't know if that'll be true past then. You will meet people, you'll learn things. You'll be paid in pizza, red bull, and experience.

If you have a friend with an Argentine-based consulting company, or you can find an Argentine-based consulting company, and say you'll drum up the business when you're in the US but you'll need them to get paid, they'd probably shrug and say "sure", although they'll want to keep part of your paycheck.

Regarding whether you can be part of YC, you should be able to start a company, pick up YC funding, and pay yourself out of the YC funding with a tourist visa. Establishing a corporation provides added ammunition in case you go in front of a judge, where claiming a sole proprietorship looks more like a visa dodge.

What you'll start realizing as you grow older is there's a difference between "management" and "workers". Management gets exceptions. Workers get the shaft. Management is invited across borders, workers are stopped and searched. The largest difference between management and workers is what you call yourself, and how you present yourself.

That's the filter they'll apply to get your US visa in the first place. You have to show enough money to support yourself for the time you'll be here. That's about the same as asking if you're "management" or a "worker".

Sounds annoying to me - if you've got an EU passport, why not just go to the EU? The exchange rate is worse is all. I might recommend Portugal. The country is very polyglot (I was in an office there doing integration and everyone switched to English for me, and they had some UK people in) and there's a number of tech businesses in Lisbon.

Do travel with one nice sports coat and a pair of good shoes, and smile a lot.

</comment><comment><USER11> The same issue bothers me as well. I don't need visa to visit the states as a tourist(I need one to work there though). What if my startup will be accepted at YCombinator, will I be able to go there and work on my startup without work permit?

<comment><USER12> Probably not. Though I am not a lawyer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Mariano -

Get your papers in order, get on a plane and come. Nevermind the naysayers, just do it. There are 2 kinds of people in the world- talkers and doers. Be a doer! Best of luck, I applaud your ambition.

<comment><USER14> This is insane, this is not an attitud question. Working ilegally in US it's a very bad idea.

<comment><USER6> I completely agree. The fact that you are a doer, does not imply that what are you doing is beneficial to you.</comment></comment></comment>


Fractal Tree Indexing - a write-optimized index with fast queries - <AUTHOR> http://www.tokutek.com/2012/12/fractal-tree-indexing-overview/#.UMDHWMY3mXc.hackernews <comment><USER2> Are you hiring?</comment>


Linux on an 8-bit micro? (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit <comment> david-given See also ELKS, which can run an (extremely stripped down and extensively rewritten) Linux kernel on a 16-bit 8086:

[http://elks.sourceforge.net/](http://elks.sourceforge.net/)

Also Fuzix, which can run a Unix-like on a variety of tiny, ancient processors like the Z80 and 6809; I've ported it to the MSP430, a modern micontroller, and I also have a half-finished port to the Raspberry Pi that I must get round to fixing one day (hilariously, the Pi has more RAM than Fuzix can handle)...

[https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX](https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX)

Both of those run natively, of course.

<comment><USER2> My final project for college grad was a unix-like 8-bit OS called picix, it worked in PIC18 and supported tcp/ip via uIP

[https://sourceforge.net/projects/picix/](https://sourceforge.net/projects/picix/)

Hey at least it doesn't take 2 hours to boot :)

<comment><USER3> I did something very similar, way back in '92, on a 68000 SBC. I pretty much copied the important bits of the Unix kernel, but all in assembler!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool project.

Personally I like the idea behind RetroBSD [1] - port of 2.11BSD Unix intended for microcontrollers.

I was thinking if a system like this powered by solar panel would be a good idea for poor countries. The idea is to have computing of the past in sustainable form available for poor. The main problem is probably to have a cheap and low energy display. Maybe epaper made in bulk would be enough? But probably such a computer can only be cheap if made in bulk. Maybe it could be cheaper than RaspberryPi? The question that remains is what about networking? Maybe they could function in similar fashion to BBS, but using shortwave radio?

[1] [http://retrobsd.org/](http://retrobsd.org/)

<comment><USER5> It sounds like you're about to re-invent the failures of "One Laptop Per Child".

The one thing people in poor countries _do not_ want is special weird incompatible systems designed for the poor. They want a solution which is adequately close to the western ones, just cheaper. Look at cellphones: [http://qz.com/451844/africas-smartphone-market-is-on-the- ris...](http://qz.com/451844/africas-smartphone-market-is-on-the-rise-as- affordable-handsets-spur-growth/)

<comment><USER4> I also think that smartphone will get there faster. Maybe Chromebooks if Google will play it nice, because of Android apps support and normal keyboard.

However I think OLPC is different from what I have in mind. OLPC targeted children with OS designed for children. I am thinking about something more like RaspberryPi with integrated power and display systems, but with external keyboard. Also I think about it to be extremely cheap. $100 laptop is already done by Chromebooks, but it is not cheap enough. It would have to be around $25 or less. It should expose GPIOs like RaspberryPi so it could be used in more settings. It would be black and white and mostly text only. Basically my pipe dream. Maybe I would just like to go back in time sometimes and I am just projecting?

It is just a loose idea, but outside of people's preferences economics of scale are certainly supporting smartphones.

<comment><USER5> Sure, that's what you'd want; is it what the target market wants? Would people be happy limited to B&W text?

For something like what you've described, the cost is driven by casework, screens, touchscreen components and batteries. Not the processing electronics. It sounds like something halfway between a Kindle with a keyboard and one of the cheap Windows tablets, now below $100. ([http://www.dx.com/p/onda-8-v820w-quad-core-dual-os-tablet- pc...](http://www.dx.com/p/onda-8-v820w-quad-core-dual-os-tablet-pc-w-2gb- ram-32gb-rom-white-436403))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something about this just gives me joy. It's so ridiculous that it's beautiful.

<comment><USER7> _> Something about this..._

I reckon it's probably the SIMM soldered to the breadboard.

<comment><USER8> It's perfboard. Now, a SIMM soldered to breadboard, that would be something ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _" It is common to see newbies asking in microcontroller forums if they can run Linux on their puny little 8-bit micro. The results are usually laughter..."_

The reason why...

 _" uARM is certainly no speed demon. It takes about 2 hours to boot to bash prompt ("init=/bin/bash" kernel command line). Then 4 more hours to boot up the entire Ubuntu ("exec init" and then login)."_

It is so slow. Btw if you ever ask about system compiles of Elm on RaspberryPi which requires Haskell, you'll get similar responses.

<comment><USER9> Well, it's not so much that as the fact that Linux requires a 32-bit architecture (and preferably an MMU).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if you could write parallelization routines that make this slightly faster with a few more atmels...

<comment><USER11> Multiprocessor AVR running Linux would be the next step, definitely.

<comment><USER12> Yea, imagine a Beow....ah, never mind.

<comment><USER13> Reminded me of Part 4 of [https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/FPGA- relatedWork/Comp...](https://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/wirth/FPGA- relatedWork/ComputerSystemDesign.pdf) . Intellasys/GreenArrays are kind of similar but only with tiny local memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Previous HN discussions :

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791812](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8791812)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5581851](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5581851)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3767410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3767410)

</comment><comment><USER15> Chrome gives some ssl-shaming for this site that I haven't seen before. An angry red warning and text that says "This site uses a weak security configuration (SHA-1 signatures), so your connection may not be private."

<comment><USER16> I'll take a look.

<comment><USER15> Didn't mean to throw shade, was just intrigued by the new blinkenlights on my screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> was reading about instruction sets a couple of hours ago, the performance bottleneck is often the memory pipeline not so much the size of the instructions

<comment><USER18> Can you give more information on that?

<comment><USER17> it takes longer studies - but possibly this is a good start [https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-...](https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-146.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't know if it's a joke, but it's hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER20> More like Linux on 32-bit ARM, but running in an emulator on an 8-bit processor. I don't think this qualifies as "Running" Linux on an 8-bit processor.

I voiced the same complaint when somebody claimed to "run" Windows 3 on an Apple watch (IIRC), which also was achieved by running a standard PC-hardware emulator, and running Windows 3 on that.

These _are_ somewhat interesting accomplishments, but the click-bait factor is high.

<comment><USER21> So Linux isn't 'running' on your x86_64 cpu because cpu is microcoded... or transmeta? Or... Linux is written in C.. so it's not running on your computer because it doesn't execute C directly?

Come on. There is a 8-bit microcontroller running a linux system, the rest is implementation details and semantics.

<comment><USER22> I think the argument is that one would expect "Linux running on architecture Foo" to imply support _in Linux_ for Foo, rather than support _in Foo_ for Linux that allows Linux to run unmodified. I certainly expected, when I clicked, to read about someone's effort to rewrite a minimal subset of the Linux kernel to use exclusively 8-bit registers and no MMU.

<comment><USER23> Linux can already run on MMU-less systems (CONFIG_NOMMU). GCC already supports AVRs, though you may have to tweak the backend a bit so ints are 32-bit wide etc.

These are not the big issues in porting the Linux kernel to an AVR. The major problem is that AVR is Harvard architecture and there's probably tons of assumptions in the kernel that code and data resides in the same memory space.

<comment><USER23> \- also ATmega1284P and ATmega644A mentioned in the article doesn't support external code memory nor changing the code memory after boot. However they do support a boot loader that can load code initially. So you would have to implement some sort of paging by resetting the cpu to give control to the bootloader to load the new code. Sound like fun. Also the kernel itself is far too large to fit in code memory, so it would constantly have to page parts in and out through this mechanism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just because you can, doesn't mean you should..

</comment><comment><USER25> Very cool (TL;DR: it's an ARM emulator for 8-bit AVR which can slowly boot Linux). Could do with a [2012] tag in the title.

<comment><USER26> Why are people TL;DRing a lot of posts recently? Surely on HN, the joy is in discovering the linked content themselves surely?

If you don't have time to read HN, and need TL:DRs then you should question why you are here in the first place.

\--

Vote down if you like, I joined HN to _get away from_ inane commentary and TL:DR nonsense that's so prevalent on other sites.

<comment><USER7> as much as tl;dr is increasingly irritating when used in this way, baiting downvotes is also not cool.

<comment><USER26> I'm not baiting down-votes. Far from it. Just voicing that TL;DR is annoying. There's a reason you can't have both text AND a url in a HN submission - it's to encourage people to actually visit the link.

Next, we'll have people just copy-pasting the entire article body as a comment ... :(

<comment><USER5> > it's to encourage people to actually visit the link.

You read the links? I'm just here for the commenting. If the comments imply the article is good enough I'll read it.

(This effect used to be very strong on the Guardian's commentisfree site, where the top comments often contained valuable correction/context to the tritness of the article)

> Next, we'll have people just copy-pasting the entire article body as a > comment

I've seen that done a few times; it's useful if it's paywalled/adwalled/unusuable-crashy-javascript-walled.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Newsweekly's Last Stand - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/news-magazines <comment><USER2> I liked the video in the article more than the article. I know it's beyond controversial, but I think there is a lot of truth in the claim that print media would have been better off not embracing the Web with reckless abandon.

It was kind of a Tragedy of the Commons inspired by fear of the Innovator's Dilemma.</comment>


On Hacking MicroSD cards (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3554 <comment><USER2> this is interesting from a data recovery viewpoint. recently, i had a card die with some photos i wanted to recover. I wrote my own recovery, but it was unable to get all the photos.

Turned out data i knew should be there was not on the card, insofar as the processor was telling me. It's likely that, if a lower level access could be achieved, i might have been able to recover the lost data.</comment>


Opera Mini for iPhone approved - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/12/opera-mini-for-iphone-approved-will-be-available-for-free/

<comment><USER2> While I'm happy that people will get to see Opera on the iPhone, I don't like to see people "rejoicing" to see the app approved; it shows that we are accepting the idea of a company acting as gatekeeper to their platform. I recognize that there is likely to be a competing open versus closed philosophy for some time, with room in the market for both, but I don't like seeing this sort of approval process as being accepted as the norm.</comment>


Ask HN: "standard" co-founder agreements? - <AUTHOR> Is there some sort of pro-forma contract setting out terms for a cofounder's equity including a vesting period? <comment><USER3> What it sounds like you are looking for is a restricted stock purchase agreement. There are various form documents out there, but terms of these agreements are not 100% standardized. And they don't exist in a vacuum - <USER2> there articles/certificate of incorporation? Board consents? Have you dealt with IP assignments for the company in connection with the equity grant?

Obviously a lawyer can help you with these things. But there are also high- quality services like Clerky that can help you make sure these things are documented correctly, assuming your fact pattern falls within the range of options Clerky has available. For more customized or complex setups, you'd want a lawyer.</comment>


Ask YC:Any PSU/IST441 students here? - <AUTHOR>

Hey- Are there any students in Dr. Giles information retrieval class http://clgiles.ist.psu.edu/IST441/index.html<p>who are reading this? If you are- Please reply if you are interested in doing something advanced. <comment><USER2> Unfortunately I am not in this class, but I am a PSU IST student. It's nice to see some other IST people here.

<comment><USER3> Weebly, a YCombinator startup, was made by PSU IST students. I was a PSU CSE student. I'm jealous.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which front-end stack is the most productive? - <AUTHOR> I am an experienced back-end developer, 15 + years.
We are developing a B2B service, essentially an integration play (right in my wheel house).  But we need a simple website for the clients to login and see the relevant information.
My question is, what front-end framework would this community recommend?
I have no preference for languages or architecture, I am only concerned with developer productivity and security.
A reactive design will be fine for now, native mobile will come later.  This is not a consumer product.
I was thinking about starting with React. <comment><USER2> Strongly recommend React and also strongly recommend TypeScript. Finding a good boilerplate to get you started with both of those is not the easiest, but there are some:

[https://github.com/rokoroku/react-redux-typescript- boilerpla...](https://github.com/rokoroku/react-redux-typescript-boilerplate) (Redux for state management)

[https://github.com/rokoroku/react-mobx-typescript- boilerplat...](https://github.com/rokoroku/react-mobx-typescript-boilerplate) (Mobx for state management)

Redux takes a few hours to wrap your mind around, but the documentation is great. As long as you just spend a few months reading their terminology, you'll have no trouble getting going.

Also highly recommend WebStorm or VS Code for this project.

<comment><USER2> spend a few minutes* not months!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Without a doubt the easiest way to start would be with next.js. Segment.io has even built a scaffolding tool to create a next.js project [https://open.segment.com/create-next-app](https://open.segment.com/create- next-app)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's interesting to see people recommend their favorite libraries and frameworks. While all of them add abstraction and complexity which can hurt productivity. Instead I would recommend to get an MVP running using small modules where obviously needed. Then review the codebase to pick needed libraries.

</comment><comment><USER5> folks, lets be honest here. There is no right answer to this question. It depends on too many variables.

react, vue, ng2, whatever they choose will work and will be mostly the same. We argue about trivia and do flamewars but all those solutions are more similar than different.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've liked Elm.</comment>


Margaret Sullivan lays out what went wrong with the local news business - <AUTHOR> https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2020/media-critic-margaret-sullivan-lays-out-what-went-wrong-with-the-local-news-business-and-how-it-might-be-fixed/ <comment><USER2> I think the gut reaction is that local news is failing because people would rather hear from a source that is more biased to their personal viewpoints. Local news is by nature unbiased (mostly).

This is true, but there are a lot of people that don't care about this and just want to hear the news.

I think that the more overlooked problem is that local news is too general. There may be a few articles/stories that I really care about, but to read/listen to them I have to sift through everything else.

With everything becoming more and more specialized, if I only care about two areas that the local news reports on, it is almost guaranteed that I will be able to switch to a separate outlet that covers only this. I only care about sports and startups? Cool - I'll subscribe to The Athletic and a TechCrunch newsletter. Now I get what I want without all the fluff around it.

This seems to be a huge problem that will be difficult for local news outlets to solve.</comment>


Ask HN: Extreme, but workable cost-cutting measures? - <AUTHOR>

Looking for new cost-reducing ideas that have been prompted by this economic crunch? Frugal business operation is a common theme here, but to be honest, until now I'd never considered power-saving light bulbs. Odd, even off the wall ideas have been circulating in my head - reselling windows licenses and moving to Ubuntu, gas/bike powered generators, positioning for tax breaks, creating a non-profit offshoot company, relocating from MA to NH etc.<p>Anyone had strikes of brilliance prompted by necessity recently? <comment><USER2> so long as you can still make money, you need to be careful with this... it is easy to spend an hour saving $10, but if you bill out at $80/hr, that doesn't make sense, unless you can't find any work at all.

Personally, looking over my personal expenses, I see I can save a lot of money eating in more. However, I think the returns diminish quite a lot when choosing cheaper raw materials over more expensive raw materials. Either way, groceries are still so cheap that it's not worth the time to optimize. (but then, I'm not really an organic/premium guy.. I guess for some people looking at that might make sense)

same thing in the business... optimizing the co-lo costs makes a lot of sense... but saving a hundred bucks per server by not using hot-swap drives is a false economy. It only takes one bad drive (and the resulting downtime) to pay for a whole bunch of hot-swap bays.

I think usually the easiest way to save money is to look for 'premium' services. If you are buying $15/Lb 'premium organic' beef, eh, you might want to think about switching to the normal steak at $5/lb. If you are going with rackspace.com, you might want to look at a less expensive hosting provider. (generally speaking, if you have to ask how much it costs, you are getting overcharged. If you have to talk to a sales guy to buy the product, remember that his salary is being added to the cost of your product.)

Another thing to point out here is the premium for renting servers. At what I pay (that is, small business prices) I can usually build servers for what it costs to rent them for two to three months. Sure, ec2 is great if the servers are only on a few hours a day, but you can save a whole lot of money by moving your core servers to dedicated boxes you own and co-locate.

"Never buy from a rich salesman. Always use a rich lawyer"

Remember that the confidence and good looks of the salesguy have zero correlation to the reliability of the service, and usually have a inverse correlation to the value for the dollar of a service. Good salesguys are expensive. If you like that sort of thing, during good times, it's fine to spend the extra money and get the guy to take you out to lunch. But during the hard times, that's a premium you maybe should look at giving up.

Let employees work from home, if you can give up the office. If you are good at communicating over the computer, think of hiring people to work from home in the midwest or the south.

Drop your recruiting firm or body shop. Hire directly through contacts, or if worst comes to worst, craigslist. Usually headhunters add little value, and they are quite expensive. (actually, my experience has been that body shops give you the resumes of mediocre people. They do cull the worst, but they also cull the best, has been my experience.) Going through resumes isn't that hard, and really it's something you can probably do better than most headhunters. The layoffs are cutting pretty deep, even people who are moderately good are getting the axe now. And fresh graduates? good god. Times are tough for them... more and more people with degrees (and even a little experience) are moving into my price range.

</comment><comment><USER3> _reselling windows licenses and moving to Ubuntu_

That's almost certainly false economy, unless you've already spent the time to switch OSes for other reasons (which is perfectly possible!) and you've got multiple Windows licenses gathering dust.

(I would never sell my last Windows license. There's this thing called "IE" that I need to test in. To say nothing of running Quickbooks, which reportedly stinks on the Mac.)

I use Macs. They're not cheap, but we're talking a few hundred bucks over the course of two or three years. Chickenfeed.

The simple cost-cutting measures are best. Power-saving light bulbs are simple. Less commuting is simple. Learning to cook is simple. Complicated tax accounting, building your own personal alternative electrical system, or switching OSes to save a couple of bucks... not so simple.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm a bit confused what you're asking for... are you, personally, in financial trouble, and looking for ways to save money? Or are you thinking of starting a business that would make money by helping people save money?

</comment><comment><USER5> Instead of cost-cutting, focus on increasing income. At best you can reduce your costs to zero. Then what?

There's no upside limit on income.</comment>


Show HN: Hackery, a Hacker News client with Tilt-Scrolling - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackery-hacker-news-stories/id1095090759 <comment><USER2> For me, Hacker News is one of the few sites where the comments are often as interesting as the article, and sometimes more so.

You've done some nice things by having very quick loading, scrolling, and a clean interface. But the lack of even being able to read the comments makes it a non-starter.</comment>