Object Storage: AWS vs Google Cloud Storage vs Azure Storage vs DigitalOcean - <AUTHOR> https://www.chooseacloud.com/objectstorage <comment><USER2> This is great, but I'm disappointed Backblaze B2 isn't included. That seems like an oversight unless someone can point out how B2 doesn't hold its own with these options in a glaring way. There are tradeoffs, but B2 seems to be very competitive overall.

B2 is cheaper than every option here for both storage ($0.005/GB) and egress ($0.01/GB).[1] Their transaction pricing is also cheaper.[2] Despite being cheaper, it's still hot storage, so you can immediately download buckets, in whole or in part. I've personally used it to backup (and restore) terabytes of data for over a year. I doubt it has an SLA like GCP or AWS, but DigitalOcean doesn't either, yet it's listed here. I find the B2 API documentation to be very readable as well.[3]

I've used AWS S3, Glacier and GCP Nearline, Coldline. I can't think of a specific thing that has disappointed me about B2, and the reliability has been excellent. The nature of my work is that I have very large datasets, and B2 becomes extremely competitive when you're backing up tens of terabytes or more.

_________________________________

1\. [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage- pricing.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html)

2\. [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/b2-transactions- price.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/b2-transactions-price.html)

3\. [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/docs/)

<comment><USER3> I really wanted to like B2. I love the docs and super-clean interface. But B2 was just too "weird" when it came to uploading an object. You can't replace an object key, so you always get a new object key when uploading. This is unlike any normal object store, where you can just upload to an existing key.

Also, if you upload an object with the same name (e.g. myphoto.png) it creates a new version, and there's no way to stop this. I don't want or need a new version!

I have a feeling this restriction is in place because of the underlying "vault" implementation.

<comment><USER4> If you upload an object with the same 'name' to S3, you also get a new version.

When you say 'key', do you mean the opaque object ID granted to objects in B2 which object stores like S3 doesn't have at all? I don't understand the rant here. S3 only operate by 'name' (key).

I have had no problem integrating B2 side-by-side with S3 and GCP in the products I have written. Their high-level models are largely compatible.

<comment><USER5> S3 versioning is optional and off by default. Writes (including rewrites) to S3 are also atomic, so you'll never see partial writes.

<comment><USER4> Ah, fair enough. I have oddly enough never in my life written to the same key twice, so I hadn't noticed it was off by default for S3.

Just to clarify you statement about atomicity: All writes to S3 and B2 are 'atomic' (and B2 can also verify the hash and reject on failure for an extra layer of security). The difference you mention is just that you can superficially "disable" versioning for S3, so that each key only stores one object version at a given time.

The only difference to the upload when S3 versioning is disabled is what happens during the metadata update: With versioning, a version is appended. Without, the version is replaced.

For B2, simulating disabled versioning is two operations: Upload a new object, and delete the old one. As long as the object is only referenced by name, this will also be atomic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Shameless Plug :)

I wrote recently a series of articles comparing most of those providers and explaining how to use them with JavaScript:

\- Amazon S3: [https://medium.com/@javidgon/amazon-s3-pros-cons-and-how- to-...](https://medium.com/@javidgon/amazon-s3-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it- with-javascript-701fffc89154)

\- Google Cloud Storage: [https://medium.com/@javidgon/google-cloud-storage- pros-cons-...](https://medium.com/@javidgon/google-cloud-storage-pros-cons- and-how-to-use-it-with-javascript-ea9ce60a94c0)

\- Microsoft Azure Blob Storage: [https://medium.com/@javidgon/microsoft- azure-blob-storage-pr...](https://medium.com/@javidgon/microsoft-azure-blob- storage-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-with-javascript-ca5aaf5d5ffd)

\- Backblaze B2: [https://itnext.io/backblaze-b2-pros-cons-and-how-to-use- it-w...](https://itnext.io/backblaze-b2-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-it-with- javascript-8c2d2a9a69d9)

\- DigitalOcean Spaces: [https://medium.com/dailyjs/digital-ocean-spaces-pros- cons-an...](https://medium.com/dailyjs/digital-ocean-spaces-pros-cons-and-how- to-use-it-with-javascript-1802559ce2bd)

\- Wasabi Hot Storage: [https://medium.com/@javidgon/wasabi-pros-cons-and-how- to-use...](https://medium.com/@javidgon/wasabi-pros-cons-and-how-to-use-with- javascript-fa528c3779a2)

<comment><USER7> shameless request :)

trying comparing performance: latency, bandwidth up/down and scalability in the face of many concurrent requests. And then do that wrt. compute resources in various locations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was really excited about DO spaces. I compared every major Object Storage (OVH,B2,Wasabi,S3,Azure). DO spaces came out much ahead. I did dozens of hours of research. I was a customer (and I still am). But I am less excited now.

Basically, there are loads of issues with rejected requests because of rate limiting (returns a lot of 503 "slow down" responses). Basically, I don't recall ever receiving this from S3. You can check the forums to see more in- depth discussion.

The good part: This is a solvable problem, and I hope they relax these limits very soon.

Another great anecdote: their API is 99% compatible with S3. In fact, the official recommendation is to use the AWS SDKs on the server, which I am doing!

<comment><USER8> S3 will sometimes return a "503 temporary error" response if you start writing lots of files per second. From my understanding, if they see that your bucket has a constant high write rate they'll make some configuration changes in the background to accommodate the higher write rate.

That being said, last month I wrote over 60 million files to S3 and the number of failed writes were tiny (solved by simply retrying the write)

I've not used DOs spaces yet, I'd love to know if they guarantee read after write consistency. I know S3 has some issues with that depending on use case. Maybe it's time for another look at spaces.

<comment><USER3> Yes, DO spaces is very strict about both GET and PUT. I did a benchmark requests-per-second (literally just fetching a URL a bench of times). I get about ~180 requests per second, after which all requests failed.

Amazon S3 is much better in the sense that there IS dynamic scaling if it notices spikes.

To the defense of DO, they are newer and their business model is "cheap,cheap,cheap", so they can't compete at the same level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> (*) for a particular use case.

The example is 200GB storage with 2000GB data transfer (out) every month. That's a LOT of data going out every month, so I am guessing the scenario is if you are hosting a photo library and lots of people are downloading every month.

If however you are just using the service as an online storage to hold <100GB of data as backup (i.e. mainly only transfer in), then S3 turns out way cheaper than DO.

Not knocking either service - I actually use both, for different use cases.

<comment><USER10> Plus the SLA is different. It probably should be compared to at least AWS S3 reduced redundancy storage.

<comment><USER11> right and what are the penalties when AWS breaks SLA?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Cool site, but noticing an error: This compares AWS S3 single region pricing ($0.024/gb) to GCP GCS multi-region pricing ($0.026/gb) rather than GCP GCS single region pricing ($0.020/gb). Hopefully the creator/author will correct the discrepancy... Disclosure: I'm a pricing dweeb at Google Cloud

<comment><USER4> I sincerely hope your business card says "Pricing Dweep, Google Cloud Products".

If not, you need to get this fixed.

<comment><USER12> New Card Order: Submitted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The bandwidth egress charges on AWS (and GCP/Azure) are way too high. It almost seems cartel like.

Bandwidth costs have dropped by a huge factor over the past few years; but none of this has been passed on.

I really hope backblaze and/or DO manage to cause the big three some hurt on this and get them to reduce prices significantly; 7c/GB is really high these days.

<comment><USER14> What are bandwidth costs? This comes up again and again, people see HE.net / Cogent / Level3 / Hibernia / NTT whatever offering 10gig handoff IP transit at a colo neutral location for X per month and somehow determine the true cost. When I suspect the reality is that much of cost is invested in routing equipment both internally and externally, evolving SDN and all the goodness it affords, being able to offer SLA per instance in terms of mbit that can be pushed, being able to mitigate DDOS, hiring top network engineers and researchers, being fully redundant across multiple providers and protected circuits rather than just a lonely hand off - or in GCP case building out the network themselves with multiple SLA tiers, being able to mitagate network issues quicker than a PagerDuty alert at a banwidth blender. Granted I'd say there still probably cushioning in there but judging network costs by comparing to a 10gig handoff at a random colo neutral, or blender, or OVH/Hetznet commodity servers, or Linode/Vultr/DO seems unfair in my opinion.

<comment><USER15> I met a network engineer for amazon about a year ago and I brought up the prices since I had heard about them being expensive here on hacker news. He laughed about it and said it was one of their most profitable departments with like a 90% margin.

<comment><USER16> Gotta be able to negotiate wiggleroom somewhere when the Netflix-types come knocking

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I work for a company that has to provision hosted products for customers across all the clouds and the one that has been impressing me the most lately is Azure. The load balancers are also the gateways (sound network topology), so there is no need for elastic IPs, NAT Gateways, or proxy protocol. The other thing I like about Azure is they have storage classes that automatically cross region replicate. The automatic storage encryption is a bit of an issue, but I know they were working on it, last I checked.

You can't beat the offerings of AWS, but there are definitely some compliance scenarios that are easier to fulfill on Azure.

We rarely get customer requests for Google Cloud. Seems like it's mostly Azure and AWS (at least at the enterprise level).

<comment><USER18> You don't need any that for load balancing on any cloud. Google Cloud has the best load balancer with a global anycast address that will route to the nearest DC with instances and free capacity.

For automatic cross-region replication for storage, are you talking about Azure's GRS class? That's the same as GCP's multiregional class and AWS allows you to setup entire bucket replication to anywhere else in a few clicks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Can we include Wasabi[1] in the comparison? They seem to have a really compelling offering when it comes to Object Storage and their pricing.

1\. [https://wasabi.com/](https://wasabi.com/)

<comment><USER20> Their pricing looks great. Has anyone used them?

<comment><USER21> Pricing has recently changed to remove egress costs completely. The speeds were ok. Nothing special. But this is most likely better used for long term data storage? With a CDN it would suit well as a large media store for video/image delivery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This uses the pricing for multi-regional GCS, which is geo-redundant across two or more locations separated by at least 100 miles.

Regional GCS is the storage class equivalent to standard S3 and is $0.02/GB.

<comment><AUTHOR> Corrected.

<comment><USER12> Woo, thx!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a rather simplistic comparison. These object storage services have several tiers and features that you need to take into account like zone vs regional replication, strong-consistency listings, bandwidth and access depending on where your compute is, integrations like notifications and functions, etc.

That being said, the clouds are great if your compute is co-located in the same place because the transfer fees are waived. Otherwise DO or B2 are probably better options for less usage or more neutral network locations and egress.

</comment><comment><USER23> What is the durability objects stored with DO? S3 offers 11x9s of durability.

Likewise what is the replication story? Can you get event notifications when objects are uploaded/deleted? Is there versioning? Static website hosting? Lifecycle management?

<comment><USER24> _S3 offers 11x9s of durability._

So they say, but the SLA doesn't make any promises about durability. [https://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/)

<comment><USER23> The SLA governs availability.

Details of durability here [https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/DataDurabili...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/DataDurability.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Sia [1] could be even cheaper, coming out at $1.10 for a TB [2]. Although this price might not be forever, and I'm still not sure about the reliability.

In theory it should be more reliable, as it's decentralised and your data gets split among multiple servers around the world. The question remains what if the Sia network itself stops being profitable and people all exit at the same time. Although the same could be said for Amazon?

Sia will actually soon be adding a backend to Minio too [3].

The only thing that has stopped me using Sia is you have to have the blockchain running on the machine.

1\. [https://sia.tech](https://sia.tech)

2\. [https://siastats.info/storage_pricing](https://siastats.info/storage_pricing)

3\. [https://blog.sia.tech/introducing-s3-style-file-sharing- for-...](https://blog.sia.tech/introducing-s3-style-file-sharing-for-sia- through-the-new-minio-integration-bb880af2366a)

<comment><USER9> Curious as to why you edited your post to remove mention of the other service that you had listed originally?

<comment><USER25> Sorry @cyberferret. I previously listed Storj [1] but did a bit of research and it didn't actually look cheaper when you consider bandwidth cost.

$0.015 per GB per month

$0.05 per GB downloaded

[1] [https://storj.io/](https://storj.io/)

<comment><USER9> Cool thanks! I presumed that it didn't meet some sort of criteria that was being discussed here. I just wanted to make sure there were no issues with the service itself per se.

<comment><USER26> They're in closed BETA. I looked into them but they are not that good for long term storage. Plus their payment system is centralized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The main cost seems to be bandwidth (speeds). If you've ever tried Spaces, you know it's a real slog uploading and downloading (even with good client-side speeds). DropBox has similar specs to Spaces, and does it for only $10. OneDrive has the same thing with $7 for 1TB. And there's another Chinese company, Tencent, that gives you 10TB for free (except it's slow and it's all in Chinese).

The problem I have with this article (very brief table), is that the author is comparing two "enterprise" solutions to a consumer solution. With "enterprise" solutions, you get guaranteed uptime and speeds. With Spaces, and the rest I've mentioned, you don't get any of that. Only that your data will still be there as long as you pay out.

<comment><USER24> Spaces may be slow (never tried it), but it's still a different offering that Dropbox/OneDrive, which are not designed for massive public access. For example, Dropbox has a traffic limit of 200GB/day, which can't be increased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Is there any open source S3 compatible software? I know Riak Cloud Storage ([http://docs.basho.com/riak/cs/2.1.1/](http://docs.basho.com/riak/cs/2.1.1/)), but I think it's not maintained anymore.

<comment><USER10> OpenStack Swift or Ceph with Ceph Object Gateway. Don't use minio, it's a toy for testing.

<comment><USER24> I've never used it in production; in what ways is minio lacking compared to Swift and Ceph?

<comment><USER10> S3 is an abstraction that gives you a limited amount of operations with limited guarantees (e.g. eventual consistency, can only replace whole files). What you get in return is easier scalability and performance. If you use an S3 API to store files (like minio does) you give up power and gain nothing. So you are better off using NFS, samba, webdav, ftp, etc. Additionally minio doesn't seem to sync files to the file system, so you can't be sure a file is actually stored after a PUT operation (AWS S3 and swift have eventual consistency and Ceph has stronger guarantees).

<comment><USER24> That's curious, because the OpenStack Swift docs say "Objects are stored as binary files on the filesystem with metadata stored in the file's extended attributes (xattrs)".

As far as I know, the advantage comes from exposing a course-grained API over the network, which is generally more efficient and reliable than doing many small operations. It would be hard to implement Minio's distributed mode using the filesystem API.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Maybe I'm missing something, but where is the Azure data?

<comment><USER30> Also missing the SoftLayer/IBM S3-compatible offering. We use it very lightly (our IoT firmware builds from CI are going up there) and pay nothing, their free limits are quite generous.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How does Digital Ocean compare in terms of reliability and compatibility with existing tools? I haven't used it, so genuine question.

<comment><USER32> From their documentation.

Spaces provides a RESTful XML API for programatically managing the data you store through the use of standard HTTP requests. The API is interoperable with Amazon's AWS S3 API allowing you to interact with the service while using the tools you already know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Would be nice to add things like: \- Consistency \- First byte latency \- Limits on requests \- Max upload size \- Extra features

<comment><USER34> Yes, for example GCP does not have S3's "eventual consistent" behavior. When data is written to GCP, it's available to read immediately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> One of the neat features of Microsoft's storage service is that you can append to existing files.

It surprised me that this isn't standard on other services.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/rest/api/storageservices/un...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/rest/api/storageservices/understanding-block-blobs--append-blobs--and-page- blobs)

</comment><comment><USER21> Wasabi storage has unlimited egress now. So spaces with its rate limiting doesn't seem that much of a big deal.

Storage is something that won't make much money in a few years I believe. I think the Egress overcharging maybe finally seeing decent competition.

[https://wasabi.com/pricing/](https://wasabi.com/pricing/)

<comment><USER16> "unlimited" \- It looks like if you actually try to use unlimited you get limited, it's closer to a Dropbox competitor than an s3 competitor

> If your use case creates an unreasonable burden on our infrastructure, we > reserve the right to limit your egress traffic and/or ask you to switch to > our Legacy pricing plan.

> Wasabi's hot cloud storage service is not designed to be used to serve up > (for example) web pages at a rate where the downloaded data far exceeds the > stored data or any other use case where a small amount of data is served up > a large amount of times

<comment><USER21> Oh, well that puts a kink in that. They had an example of 1PB costing $90,000 to download from S3. On their old plan it would be $40,000 (quick math). I think if the company was that large S3, comes across as a much better offering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> NodeChef's object storage is very attractive option especially with no data transfer charges. Available in two regions. [https://nodechef.com/s3-compatible-object- storage](https://nodechef.com/s3-compatible-object-storage)

<comment><USER18> At $1/GB, it's the most expensive option mentioned on this page by far. Even with GCP's pricey storage, you would have to download your data 10x for this to make sense (or 88x with DO), and that's before considering cross- cloud/transit costs.

Also since you're the cofounder of nodechef, you should add a disclaimer when mentioning your own product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Azure storage is available in way more than 10 regions FYI: [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global- infrastructure/serv...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global- infrastructure/services/)

</comment><comment><USER38> .. but with a monthly fee, which kind of breaks the idea of "pay as you go", atleast for my purpose

<comment><USER39> Haha, yes.

But I have to admit, the $5 fees some of these new offerings have is probably to filter out some type of customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> You can negotiate lower S3 prices if you're a heavy user. I assume the other companies will as well. By heavy I mean exceeding the lowest price tiers significantly.</comment>


What's Your Secondary Language? - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/215.html <comment><USER2> Secondary? I cannot imagine using less than a dozen.

And, btw., what's wrong with ECL on iOS?</comment>


The End of Full Disclosure - <AUTHOR> http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2014/Mar/332

<comment><USER2> So, what happened here?</comment>


Thinking About Hitstop (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://sourcegaming.info/2015/11/11/thoughts-on-hitstop-sakurais-famitsu-column-vol-490-1/ <comment><USER2> Hitstop can actually affect gameplay once you get beyond mashing. SFV season 1 Ken had less hitstop on all his normals and so when Ken's attempted tick throws, defenders teched too late. Also his frame traps and abare were more effective. The difference was only 2f but it was enough to throw off muscle memory in comparison to the rest of the cast. His hitstop was adjusted to normalize the values.</comment>


Don't look for a UX guy, be a UX guy - <AUTHOR> http://blog.factlink.com/post/23308427848/dont-look-for-a-ux-guy-be-a-ux-guy

<comment><USER3> Often I see UX boiled down to this quote from the article:

"To build a great UX, one has to step back and think about what's most important, try to come up with the most simple and shortest path to get there, build, analyze what works and why(not), measure, test, rinse, and repeat."

This is the "left-brained" part of UX, while there is the forgotten "right- brained" portion, which is typically based on the psychological impact of copy, typography, and visual polish.

For example, I worked for a company that wanted to remove all "distracting copy" from the form page so that the submit button was above the fold (and fewer distractions, etc.). We ran multivariate tests swapping copy, removing copy, rephrasing copy, you name it, to figure out what our visitors were actually responding to.

Our original "assurance copy" (letting the user know what the information is for, what's going to happen next, etc.) more than doubled our average time-on- page metric. However, our conversion took a ~27% _drop_ when we removed it entirely, and incrementally better the more copy we had.

The users that _did_ convert spent half the amount of time on the page (they were already committed to purchase by that point), but the rest of the users obviously needed assurance in the process, not necessarily the cheapest process.

<comment><USER4> _This is the "left-brained" part of UX, while there is the forgotten "right- brained" portion, which is typically based on the psychological impact of copy, typography, and visual polish._

What you're referring to is the UI, the aesthetic design, layout and features that lends itself to an effective UX. They work hand-in-hand; like the OP had stated (paraphrasing), coming up with the simplest and shortest path to your goals that works, is important for the UX, and knowing your goals and how you want to reach them will help guide the UI.

It's tough to find someone who can focus on UX or to find someone who can translate the UX to a great UI. But it's the toughest to find someone who can do both. It's even harder to become that person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > I think the greatest companies of the next few years will be build by teams > that consist of people that can program AND can do UX.

I couldn't disagree more. I have never met anybody who can program AND do UX _well_. Maybe there are very very rare exceptions, but these two skills are pretty much mutually exclusive.

First of all, you need completely different modes of thinking while coding and while doing UX. Left/right brain, and all that. But more importantly, to be a good UX person, you need tons of training - design, marketing and psychology being three main areas. To be a great programmer, you need completely different set of training. Both UX and programming require single-minded attention, dedication and years to master.

To expect someone to do both of those things well is not only unrealistic, but plain WRONG.

<comment><USER6> It's hard to meet people like this because of attitudes like this. I have three designers on my team who are also world-class engineers, yet they often don't advertise themselves as such because they run into the "well if they do both they can't be good at either" attitude.

No-one bats an eye when an engineer also turns out to be a fantastic musician, or when an engineer drives great product decisions, yet somehow being able to code and understand design is an impossibility?

We're here to build great things - code and design are mutually-beneficial skills in your toolbox; your brain is not zero-sum.

<comment><USER5> I would agree with you if these were _complimentary_ skills we're talking about. However, programming and UX design are almost contradictory.

For programming, you need a mathematical inclination, attention to detail, willingness to sit down and focus on one concrete task at a time, etc. For UX (and any kind of other) design, you need more an ability to _create art_ \- paint with broad strokes, look at the big picture, etc.

This is my opinion, YMMV, feel free to disagree, etc

<comment><USER7> No, you're incorrect.

UX (User Experience) is about designing exactly that - an experience. It's about being extremely detail oriented, mathematical inclination (sifting through metrics, a/b testing data, CTR, bounce rates, etc.), willingness to sit down and focus on one concrete task at a time, sifting through hours of user video seeing how people interact with an application and then finding solutions to make the UX more smooth. Sound familiar to what you wrote about your "programmer"?

Not so different after all it seems.

EDIT: Everyone seems to confuse UI design with UX design. They are very different, and in some cases are different job descriptions.

<comment><USER8> UX is about empathy. Understanding how other people think and the emotions they feel. All those tools you mention are metrics to keep score, but without an understanding of how your users think you are playing a fun game of guess and check. Sure with enough iterations and metrics you can figure out anything, but your users won't give you that many chances. Someone who can get the initial design in the right ballpark and use metrics to fine tune it is your UX guy. As I programmer I really struggle putting together a viable initial UX, and I don't think I'm unique in that struggle.

Quite frankly, it's because I think very differently from most people and have trouble understanding their thought process. I'm not introverted or especially socially awkward or any of those engineering stereotypes. Everything from my ability to creatively approach problem solving to my subtle dry sense of humor is because of my different way to think about things. But when I need to think like everybody else, I just can't do it. That's why I need a UX guy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> You can try, but it's tough

Seeing Google try different shades of blue automatically, just goes to show that _they don't know what they are doing_

"To build a great UX, one has to step back and think about what's most important, try to come up with the most simple and shortest path to get there, build, analyze what works and why(not), measure, test, rinse, and repeat."

This is very important. But get this: measuring and refining _won't_ fix big errors.

So work with a designer and don't BS him trying to do "live genetic programming" your site with your A/B tool.

<comment><USER10> _Seeing Google try different shades of blue automatically, just goes to show that they don't know what they are doing_

Why does that show that "they don't know what they are doing"?

<comment><USER9> Forgetting for a moment all the theory of color and contrast /equilibrium in a design:

1 - different people see different shades (difference in monitors)

2 - Unless there is a glaring problem with the shade of color chosen (like something most designers wouldn't approve), changing shades is one of the least important areas of improvement possible

3 - The current redesigns of GMail / G+ / GReader (among others) are very showing that Google is thinking like "engineers" and not like UX experts

<comment><USER10> (1) Can't that be accounted for in some manner, especially when you have so much data? Typically when I design tests at work, it is not unusual to add many rules and exceptions to make sure the data is as accurate as possible.

(2) This is where it becomes tricky. You have to understand that these decisions are made at a very local level by small teams with specific goals(for example, "bump revenue from sidebar links by x%"). Also, it is unrealistic to suggest that a company the size of google can _only_ work on super big items when at Google's volume, small improvements can add up and result in hundreds of millions in additional revenue.

(3) Not a fan of the new gmail but using their blue shade experiment as supporting evidence for why their design sucks isn't very powerful.

<comment><USER9> 1 No, you really can't account that. You can't account for people's eyes as well. You may make a guess (maybe on display resolution) which is not precise at all.

2 Google does an can certainly work with whatever they want, but they should try the big improvements first. Their work with page loading times is great, and that has been shown to correlate with earnings. But trying to tune the shades when there are more important things to be worked is pointless

3 It goes to show they don't understand design. In some aspects they do (like GMaps) but it seems to be declining

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "To build a great UX, one has to step back and think about what's most important, try to come up with the most simple and shortest path to get there, build, analyze what works and why(not), measure, test, rinse, and repeat."

This is true, but in my experience, the best UX people are even more excellent at figuring out what is NOT important and getting rid of it (or not investing any time in those things at all).

Also, just as the "learn to program" meme does not, and can not, apply to everyone, "be a UX person" does not apply to everyone. A significant part of what makes great UX comes from the right-brain and some of us simply are physiologically weaker there.

When I shifted my customer focus from developers to consumers in 1999, after 10+ years of building products, I made a conscious decision to become a "UX guy". I spent YEARS working on that skillset. I even had some pretty strong successes.

But I still suck, compared to my UX idols. I like to think I know good UX when I see it, and I can guide others to do it, but when I'm on my own I struggle.

<comment><USER4> _This is true, but in my experience, the best UX people are even more excellent at figuring out what is NOT important and getting rid of it (or not investing any time in those things at all)._

I believe that's what the OP implied when he stated _most simple and shortest path to get there_ , simplifying the UX/UI is based on deduction, archetype development and enough experience/knowledge to start off with a barebones wireframe instead of a bloated mess. Loosely basing the method of delivering an effective UX on Occam's Razor, a philosophy that states if you base your decision on the path with _the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect_ , that's usually the best route to take.

The most simple path is one that only relies on what's important to your goals and skips all the bloated "data" and "ideas" that would hurt the UX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think there's another factor. Even if you have talent for both programming and UX, it's hard for the same person to do both those things well on the same project. To program well you have to know the implementation inside-out. But to do UX well you need to see the places where implementation complexity is leaking through and confusing users. For that, it's helpful _not_ to know too much about how the sausage is made (not sausage in general, but this particular sausage). Once you are habituated to the internals, many details will feel natural and obvious to you that are anything but natural and obvious to users.

The best thing, of course, is to have the program's internal model and the user's mental model be the same. Eliminate contradictions rather than hiding them with complex mappings. ("Design is how it works".) But even then, there will always be much complexity that the user should not have to know about.

</comment><comment><USER13> "to step back and think about what's most important, try to come up with the most simple and shortest path to get there, build, analyze what works and why(not), measure, test, rinse, and repeat"

This is more than just UX - you're talking about product design, usability testing, reviewing quantitative data, then reworking features & design (UX/UI + dev) - the whole thing.

Sounds like you're saying that the UX principle of, "being really persistent in iterating and discovering what works" is essential to product - yea, agreed - that's called working towards product market fit. That kind of analysis and iteration is definitely good but not a novel idea.

Also, a suggested revision to title: "Don't look for a UX person, be a UX person." There are women on here too, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER14> I find it slightly odd when developers resist caring about UX stuff, because in lots of ways we're already doing it whenever we code. When coding we worry about how to communicate the code's behaviour well, and whether it will work intuitive for other devs. In UX's and in code we strive to build a shared, useful and elegant mental model of the world. An API is just a UX for devs.

Apart from that, the ultimate purpose of our code is to serve the people in the world. Well, kind of, often it's just for fun. But generally the aim is to have a user using something; to exist as an entity in their lives and minds. Surely this means studying the user doing their using is just inherently fascinating? (If a dev codes in a forest, and no-one is around to use it ...)

I'm all for specialist UX folk, if resources can accommodate, they've put the time into their discipline, and will obviously do a better job than those who haven't. But when resources don't stretch, developers' brains won't explode if they start thinking about UIs and UXs. There's enough transferable skills there (methodical approach based on evidence, iterations, model building, communication), that I think it's something a lot of devs could get passably good at and enjoy without diverting too much energy away from their principle specialisation. In fact I've found that my experiences with UX stuff has improved my dev work.

</comment><comment><USER15> After seeing yesterday's Show HN post on Habit List, <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3998894>, this post really hits home. I have a similar app in the store and their UI/UX is just at a higher level than mine. It's so much easier to focus on the implementation details and not give the UI/UX the attention it deserves. Especially when you're much more confident in your programming knowledge than your design knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER16> Said shortly: if you want to build a great product, you have to really understand at each level what makes a great product.

</comment><comment><USER17> "To build a great A, one has to step back and think about what's most important, try to come up with the most simple and shortest path to get there, build, analyze what works and why(not), measure, test, rinse, and repeat. Sounds a lot like B doesn't it?"

Sounds a lot like anything you can iteratively improve. Could also be applied to marketing, cold-call-sales, making a great coffee, ...

</comment><comment><USER18> Just as importantly, if you're a UX guy, you'll have a much harder time honing your skills and convincing others that your solution is right without some basic graphic design and coding skills, at least enough for prototyping.

</comment><comment><USER19> So, let me quote a bit of this submission, add some facts, and then take this to its logical conclusion.

> _The current meme going around Silicon Valley and startup land is that any > founder needs to be a technical founder and be able to program. Don't look > for a technical co-founder, be a technical co-founder. Even more, every > employee at an internet startup needs to be able to program...For those who > are all-in on these ideas, I would like to raise the bar and say: don't look > for a UX co-founder, be a UX co-founder. Don't look for a UX guy, be a UX > guy_.

So much for the quote, and the amount the author wants to raise the bar by. Fair enough.

But why not raise the bar to the top?

Instagram had 13 employees when it sold for a cool billion. (Thanks, Gabriel Weinberg. [http://www.gabrielweinberg.om/blog/2012/04/how-many- employee...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.om/blog/2012/04/how-many-employees-do- you-have.html))

So, why not raise the bar to the top: single founder, no employees.

Let's say there is no aspect of founding your business that you can't get down to 30 hours per week by that role. If you are ready to commit up to 120 hours in an _exceptional_ week (7 hours of sleep every day, but otherwise get up and work), in what way should you not be ready to fill up to four cofounders' roles?

Raise the bar? Why not do it all?

Here is one recipe.

Role 1: (30 hours) Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, 8-6. This is business development, including networking, scoping out employees, liaising, negotiating terms, finding a scalable business model, doing market and product research, finding competitors and seeing what features they have, talking to users. While the company is very small, you also do customer service. You don't necessarily have to have business experience, but you should have been involved in a small company that expanded greatly or closed a round while you were on board.

Role 2: (30 hours) This is pure uninterrupted coding, Monday, Saturday, and Sunday, 8-6. You should be a full-stack developer well-versed in databases, cloud services (e.g. amazon), front-end and back-end languages, version control, etc. Role out the features that you yourself scope out above and below (role 1 and role 3), or from actual mockups in photoshop that you design Wednesdays or occasionally (see role 3) tweaked betwen 7-11PM the night before. Liaise with talent that business development (you on Tuesdays, Thursays, and Fridays) throws your way. Work from mockups you yourself create (Wednesdays and some late evenings). Of course, you have 10 years worth of coding experience and are an expert in Git, Python, PHP, Javascript, databases, etc, and hopefully a couple of fully coded Android and iOS apps that you have done by yourself.

Role 3: UX and UI. Wednesday, all-day. (Meaning 7-7, though this is creative work and does not have constrained output, can include showing work to others, etc). This includes a break, thinking deeply about what you're really doing, looking at other web sites, and then laying out in photoshop the UX and UI that you will be coding up during the rest of the week. You are, of course, an expert in photoshop and all aspects of UX and UI design and should have a professional-quality portfolio that extends from logos currently being seen by hundreds of millions of people to animations and Cannes-festival shorts, though this can be a relatively short stint in your career due to the low amount of money that you were making. However, you should be confident in your portfolio, and be very quick and competent in Photoshop so that you can execute your vision as a visual 'spec' to code from later. Besides the 12-15 hours (loose, it does involve creative work) that Wednesday comprises, every day between 7 PM and 11 PM you should be prepared to add to this creative output, which adds another up to 18 hours. Your entertainment in these evenings should also be creative and related to your output. Whether that means watching documentories on art, or reading such books, the point is that this is 'fun' for you and your lifestyle in the evenings is somehow related to UI/UX and the types of questions that come with it.

Role 4: This is the most flexible role: it consists of counting money. The accounting role should be able to performed quickly from 11 PM to midnight every day when you don't have much money coming in (7 hours in a week), and extend up to 2:30 AM or 3-3:15 AM every day - another 17.5 to 23 hours - <USER2> you do. This extends into the hardest and most awake and alert "all-nighter" period that a coder may think is best reserved for coding. Not so. To truly grow on sales, you should devote your greatest attention with the most quiet and fewest distractions to the bedrock of your business, which is counting money. You should be very at ease with numbers, have a deep understanding of accounting, to the point of nearly having a degree in the matter, and should definitely have handled all aspects of a business's books in the past (short of being an in-house accountant). This is where having run your own business, any business, by yourself, including being a freelancer who had to invoice themselves, will truly help you. However, when there aren't many accounts and there isn't much money coming in nor accounts payable, nor a current round underway or end of the month or quarter there may not be much to do here. Get some rest.

Role 5: (And you thought I could only fit 4 roles in here!) In the morning before 7 or 8, other than Wednesdays, when you're focusing on design from first thing in the mroning, you can answer various quick emails, including non-actionable customer emails, review any news or feeds - like hackernews, have breakfast and generally start your day. Ideally, on normal days you sleep from midnight to seven, and do various quick things like this from 7 to 8, when you start your role of the day. You should be sociable and love getting a bit of time every morning to do this stuff! It hardly feels like a role, just something to break up the chore of boring stuff that you do all day every day.

Why not. Anyone who meets the criteria of the roles above should be able to get a business off the ground as a sole founder and get a very far way along as a sole employee.

As the business expands, you can get help with the accounting (to get more sleep), then help with the programming - especially after all the initial architecutre is set up and major features have been planned and begun to be roled out - a very professional designer just as you yourself are, and finally you will be left to meet with VC's all day to sell the company that you built up all by yourself.

It is, after all, the logical conclusion to the present submission :) Note: I have only proved the above possible, not tried it myself...

<comment><USER20> such a schedule has burnout written all over it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ummm... No, no thanks. We're not all UI designers. We just hired a UX guys because I, as a systems engineer, am more valuable creating hardware interfaces than user interfaces. You still need guys like me making things work behind the scenes and that's where my time is best spent.</comment>


Show IH: Chrome extension that adds a hide post feature to Indie Hackers' forum - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ezekg/chrome-indie-hackers-hide-post-button <comment><AUTHOR> As the Indie Hackers community has grown, I've unfortunately found myself not visiting the forum that often because the discussions are usually not very relevant to where I'm at, and when relevant discussions do crop up, they're incredibly hard to find and even harder to keep track of to follow the conversation. (Not the fault of IH -- the community is just growing fast.)

I created this extension to allow myself to filter out the things that don't interest me so that I could get more value out of the community.

The 'hide' button works the same as it does on HN and Reddit.

The extension internals consist of hacks upon hacks, hooking into Ember's model and component lifecycle to filter out certain records. The filtered IDs are saved in local storage. Might be a better way, but it works for its intended purpose. (PRs are welcome, of course.)

Thought others might be interested since IH is popular around here.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just realized I put "Show IH" instead of "Show HN"...

/facepalm</comment></comment>


PostgreSQL Wins 2019 O'Reilly Lifetime Achievement Award - <AUTHOR> PostgreSQL was awarded the second lifetime Achievement Award last night at OSCON. Come by the booth and check it out! <comment><USER2> Postgres seems to me one of the more amazing pieces of server software, open or closed source.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://twitter.com/oscon/status/1151902202073534464](https://twitter.com/oscon/status/1151902202073534464)</comment>


AERO 3D Bird Flight Game with Bill Nye and GameDesk - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/181123828/aero-3d-bird-flight-game-with-bill-nye-and-gamedes

<comment><USER2> For what it's worth, a top comment on reddit:

"FYI: I worked for this company for awhile. The project is almost 18 months overdue, employee turnover is nuts and they've blown through 150k+ already. Their other projects are also way past schedule. We used to get huge grants, but everyone was ridiculously underpaid. Turnover was insane, interns were used as free labor, but they'd leave and we'd have to retrain a new batch every like 3 months. We went through multiple producers in 6 months. We blew at least 4 deadlines in the time I was there. It was supposed to be shipped in March, then May, then August, then November. Now there's a Kickstarter."

[http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/13y1p4/bill_nye_is_r...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/13y1p4/bill_nye_is_running_a_kickstarter_to_make_an_ipad/)</comment>


Data mining without prejudice - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/large-data-sets-algorithm-1216.html? <comment><USER2> Original paper (no paywall): [http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/turnbaugh/Papers/Reshef_Scienc...](http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/turnbaugh/Papers/Reshef_Science2011.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you want to play around with the actual goods in addition to reading the paper there is a jar file and a R wrapper for same at <http://www.exploredata.net/Mine/index.asp>

If you are paywall-blocked you can get the paper at <http://turnbaugh.openwetware.org/Publications.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> I wonder how much of the $15.00 it costs to rent this article for 24 hours the authors of this paper will receive.

<comment><USER5> Is that a serious question? In any case, the answer is 'none'. The way academic publishing works, authors of papers do not get paid at all (though they may have to pay "page charges" to the publisher in some cases). That's one of the reasons so many of us think the whole system is ripe for reform.

<comment><USER6> People often think that academic journals are providing the service of 'publishing' but they are in fact providing a reputation management and curating system. Not a great one, mind you. The fact that the end product is a journal is just an artifact.

Actually come to think of it, small record labels provide a similar gatekeeper, tastemaker kind of role.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So.. they ran mutual information on a correlation network with an window optimizer. Did I miss something?

It looks like a neat tool, but how does this rate `Science`? (as anything other than a section in a broad review of non-parametric data exploration techniques - of which there are many)

</comment><comment><USER8> This boils down to a following old algo: 1. plot all possible scatterplots 2. order them due to an area of white space left 3. claim the top-whatever novel exciting relationships. This way it is anti-robust and produces too much false-postives to be seriously useful.

<comment><USER9> I think you can correct for the false-positives to some extent. I am more skeptical of the computational load of basically testing all sorts of relationships. They have an approximate algorithm for doing that.

<comment><USER8> Yeah... do it exact and no hit will survive; do it with Bonferroni and nothing will really change. And in fact it is only checking two-way relationships, which is already a minor fraction of "all sorts".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love these techniques but wish they'd market themselves differently. This is hardly able to detect true relationships between variables---the false positive rate will likely be astronomical even with their MCMC _p_ -value table on the website---but it is a more efficient way of exploring a high- dimensional data set than just comparing it blindly.

I think put in the camp with Hadley Wickham's Grand Tour methodologies, this is pretty interesting. Outside of that, it's just a well-marketed method jut waiting for failure.

</comment><comment><USER11> Fascinating read, can't wait to look into it more closely. So far this approach seems somewhat similar to CHIRP [1] in that both concepts use bins or grids to find the most effective pairwise feature combinations.

[1] [http://users.cis.fiu.edu/~lzhen001/activities/KDD2011Program...](http://users.cis.fiu.edu/~lzhen001/activities/KDD2011Program/docs/p6.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER12> I believe the full paper that this article is based on can be found here:

<http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6062/1518.full>

</comment><comment><USER9> duplicate of an older thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364077>

</comment><comment><USER13> Tried this on a set of data that I have been looking at recently, and was not impressed. The software actually assumes all fields contain numerical data. Why not handle nominal data? Also doesn't handle temporal data. Maybe this is theoretically interesting but practically it is useless.

<comment> brown9-2 Is it possible to transform the temporal and nominal data into something with a numerical scale? For example, seconds since a certain date, or number ranking of the numerical data.</comment></comment>


What Sushi And Programming Have In Common - <AUTHOR> http://www.floopsy.com/post/32986121865/what-sushi-and-programming-have-in-common

<comment><USER2> Agreed. Although the same could be said for any skill worth mastering.</comment>


How to measure the cost of an A/B test? - <AUTHOR>

At my past few companies, there has been heavy investment into live A/B tests on the customer population. However, for bigger companies that have more exposure, I have a worry that we may not be able to have the proper ways to measure the real cost of an A/B test that may 1) Have negative PR or branding effects 2) Conflict with the objectives of other features.<p>Sure we can measure customer drop off or engagement, but given the number of tests and projects at any given time, there are too many confounding factors to isolate those measures to a particular test. I'd love to hear from Hackernews suggestions! Thanks! <comment><USER2> For #1 if customers are assigned to groups that get a certain set of variants for each test and you have enough groups to run the full combination of tests that are active, you should be able to correlate drop off with certain tests.

For #2: That's much harder. How do you handle this for larger products that you don't A/B test? I'd bet this isn't a unique issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> For #1, the issue is actually that even the awareness of Test A might effect Test B. I'm curious if there's anyway to capture that then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How do you measure PR and branding effects?

If you aren't controlling for variables, it isn't very scientific. It's possible to run multiple tests at the same time and test different things, but you need to be able to isolate what you're measuring and be able to measure something that's statistically significant.

<comment><AUTHOR> Pretty much every test we run has the potential to effect user engagement, so I would suspect unless isolated it's a lost cause. What's more interesting to me is how to measure perhaps how bad branding has lost consumer confidence and the effect on sales thereafter.

It's easy to measure drop off in a funnel, but harder to measure customers who refuse to even enter the funnel due to bad brand. Is there some way of capturing that?</comment></comment>


Retire.js - identify JS libraries with known vulnerabilities in your application - <AUTHOR> http://open.bekk.no/retire-js-what-you-require-you-must-also-retire <comment><USER2> "As vulnerabilities are discovered in JavaScript libraries, it is vital that we update our dependencies. Retire.js is a command line scanner that helps you identify dependencies with known vulnerabilites in your application. Using the provided Grunt plugin you can easily include Retire.js into your build process. Retire.js also provides a chrome extension allowing you to detect libraries while surfing your website."</comment>


Ask HN: Startup - best way to promote? - <AUTHOR>

Hello Everyone!
We just launched our site at http://www.cbuy.tv
From experience, what is the best way to get traffic to a new site, aside from SEO and PPC?  Your suggestions would be a huge help.
P.S. Feedback through our onsite feedback tab would be a huge help if anyone is willing! Please share the site too:)
What we do: CBuy makes it easy to dress like a star. Ever wonder what your favorite celebrity was wearing in the latest paparazzi photo or in your favorite TV episode? If so, you can buy it at CBuy - see it, buy it! <comment><USER2> Are you guys blogging? Start writing posts about what the celebrity is wearing and maybe talk about the dress and the call to action at the bottom can be to go to buy the dress.</comment>


Reddit will no longer be Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://betanews.com/2017/09/04/reddit-open-source-changes/ <comment><USER2> "Hey guys, thanks for helping us get successful, now piss off"

</comment><comment><USER3> > Open-source makes it hard for us to develop some features "in the clear" > (like our recent video launch) without leaking our plans too far in advance.

Basically, "Reddit will no longer be open source because we don't want you to see our awful design decisions and implementations."</comment>


World's first animal was a pancake-shaped ocean dweller - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06767-6 <comment><USER2> Oldest known* not first. If this was the first then you're saying there was a major jump from single cellular to billions of cellular animals. Oh accuracy of headlines...

<comment><USER3> Would you call single-celled organisms (or anything that came before Dickinsonia) animals?

<comment><USER4> As far as I know, Animalia currently only includes multicellular organisms by definition, but maybe different definitions are used for the distant past.

<comment><USER5> I don't know about the definition you're using, but _taxonomically_ speaking there is at least one single-celled organism that's _indisputably_ part of (as in descended from) Animalia: Canis lupus incertae sedis[1][2], a infectious disease that evolved from dogs[3]. (On further wiki-walking, there also appear to be similar diseases evolved from devils, hamsters, and clams[4].)

There are also choanoflagellates[5], which might have reverted to single- celled life after a stint as multicellular, or might not, but are in any case more closely related than the opisthokont[6] common ancestor of animals and fungi. (These are rather more relevant to the context of "were there single- celled animal ancestors?". If opisthokonts already formed differentiated clonal colonies, then there was no point in the main [modern normal animals] lineage that was defensibly already animal but not yet multicellular. Apoikozoa[7] allegedly formed colonies, but it's not clear to what extent they were differentiated and/or obligate.)

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

2: [https://www.quora.com/Has-a-complex-organism-like-a-dog- ever...](https://www.quora.com/Has-a-complex-organism-like-a-dog-ever-evolved- into-a-single-cell-organism/answer/Israel-Ramirez)

3: [https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gde.2015.03.005](https://sci- hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gde.2015.03.005)

4: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_cancer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_cancer)

5: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choanoflagellata](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choanoflagellata)

6: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opisthokonta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opisthokonta)

7: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoikozoa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoikozoa)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if one day we will have technology that does a comprehensive scan for fossils without having to dig them up. Right now it's surprising that they find anything considering how manual and hit and miss the process is. i can't even imagine how much good stuff we will never find with current methods.

</comment><comment><USER7> Oldest discovered != first

<comment><USER8> Yep. Since it is unable to be observed it cannot be proven.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wouldn't the world's first animal be prehistoric by default? I mean, I assume the priority of any first animal on any planet is not going to be scribbling things down for posterity.

<comment><USER10> If we allow that humans and other extant creatures are not prehistoric, then it is possible (though not at all likely) that the first animal is one that is still with us and therefore not prehistoric.

<comment><USER11> Some humans were prehistoric. Others were not.</comment></comment></comment>


I Quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dvassallo/only-intrinsic-motivation-lasts-92c0497cf97c <comment><USER2> why not working let's say 10hrs/week @ 125K/year while doing something else?</comment>


Quebec resident to fight charge for not giving up phone password at airport - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/m/news/canada/nova-scotia/quebec-resident-alain-philippon-to-fight-charge-for-not-giving-up-phone-password-at-airport-1.2982236

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9153786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9153786)</comment>


Tokyo sends a clear message: stop monster-on-child rape - <AUTHOR> http://life.icrontic.com/article/tokyo-sends-a-clear-message-stop-monster-on-child-rape/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure if this is link bait, a repost, or just hilarious.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't know what link bait is. It's not a repost, we just published the article today. It's... just plain legit news from Tokyo.

<comment><USER3> Not really HN material, eh?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I thought this was an Onion article at first.</comment>


Wind-Powered Car Travels Downwind Faster Than The Wind - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/06/downwind-faster-than-the-wind/ <comment><USER3> A good visual analogy:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7vcQcIaWSQ&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7vcQcIaWSQ&feature=related)

<comment><USER4> [http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=JJVsoLcdGMY&feature=rela...](http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=JJVsoLcdGMY&feature=related)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> General explanation of how this is possible:

[http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/sailing-into-the- wi...](http://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/sailing-into-the-wind-or- faster-than-the-wind/)

<comment><USER6> I remember that one. And this comment:

 _The author does a good job of taking a complicated subject and explaining in such a way that it becomes extra extra complicated._ [ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1323665> ]

which still seems accurate to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can see why it's a hard thing to come up with, but I'm puzzled as to people's problem accepting it.

The blades create backward-thrust, pushing against the wind, accelerating the car, creating more thrust, pushing harder against the wind, etc. It stops a seemingly-endless increase when you hit the break-even point.

The reason it goes _faster_ is because, when it finally catches up to the speed of the wind (which is obviously possible), the blades are _already spinning_ , thrusting the car forward beyond just the wind speed. If they weren't spinning at all, 1x wind speed would be the max, fairly easily approached (though not _achieved_ ). This video is particularly telling of this effect: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgHBDESd38M&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgHBDESd38M&feature=related)

<comment><USER7> In this case you could surpass it momentarily but the average speed of the vehicle would still never go faster than the wind speed, like one of the posters mentioned above.

<comment><USER6> Both the article and the linked video would imply the exact opposite. And I see no such post. The propeller generates thrust, and _both_ result in faster- than-wind movement.

It's not a momentary burst of acceleration - the propeller spins relative to your wheels. If it's going fast enough to burst you, it will _stay_ at that burst speed because its speed is tied to the craft's.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems like they're using the propeller as a combination flywheel / accelerator. If you're allowed to store energy as rotational momentum, why not in a battery?

<comment><USER9> There is no stored energy involved in the acceleration -- it is all powered by slowing the air down relative to the surface(as all wind powered craft do).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the article: "I thought people would say, 'That's cool,' but they didn't. They said, 'Wow, you're an idiot.'"

If I had a dollar for every time I heard that ...

<comment><USER11> I have learned to quickly sort people out by telling them about whatever is the most improbable project I'm fiddling with at the moment. The project is unimportant; what is telling is their response. I get one of three responses, no interest, that's cool, or you're an idiot. Quickly tells me whether they're worth further time or not.

<comment><USER12> Which ones do you keep around? The yes men, the indifferent, or the naysayers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> No explanation within the article. That was annoying.

Any ordinary sailboat sails faster than the wind when going roughly perpendicular to the wind direction. But this is apparently something different.

<comment><USER14> No, it is the same thing. What is counter-intuitive is that the body of the car is going directly downwind. The thing is, the _sails_ of the car (the propeller) are _not_ going directly downwind, they have an angle of attack relative to the wind because they are angled relative to the car body. Ignore the car body and draw a propeller blade, the actual wind, and the apparent wind WRT the blade.

An iceboat is a better example than a sailboat. They go substantially faster than the wind. They can do this because their sails are very efficient in terms of being able to sail a very low angles of attack and because they have very low friction WRT their motion.

According to this article, [http://www.idniyra.org/articles/IceboatSailingPerformance.ht...](http://www.idniyra.org/articles/IceboatSailingPerformance.html) the iceboat in question could sail 8 degrees off the wind and achieve a speed 7 times the wind speed.

Picture the propeller of the vehicle being a sail at a very small degree angle of attack (e.g. 8 degrees) while it is "sailing" in circles. Rather than pushing the vehicle body directly like with an iceboat, the energy is coupled to the wheels to drive the body at an arbitrary (but fixed for the vehicle in question) angle relative to the "sail" angle of attack.

<comment><USER15> Could you shed light on how well this vehicle would perform 'sailing into the wind' as it were? (Obviously with modifications to its transmission)

<comment><USER9> It is likely that the team from San Jose State University will use this vehicle to answer that very question during the next academic year, but it will involve a bit more work than just transmission changes.

While it is true that with only ratio changes the vehicle can be made to drive directly upwind, it would not be all that efficient as the airfoils currently on the vehicle are propeller blades and not turbine blades. A set of properly cambered blades will need to be fabricated and installed and then the test could be done.

One thing to remember is that when traveling upwind, the apparent wind over the chassis will be higher for any given multiple of wind speed. Upwind at 1x WS gives the same apparent wind as going 3x downwind.

The current 'record' for directly upwind is ~64% of wind speed.

[http://www.gizmag.com/the-first-race-for-wind-powered- vehicl...](http://www.gizmag.com/the-first-race-for-wind-powered- vehicles/9953/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When I follow this link in my iPhone I get redirected to wireds mobile site. Is anyone else experiencing this?

It really grinds my gears when websites do this! Grrr

</comment><comment><USER17> _" Yes, it's possible that SJSU, Google, and Joby Energy are all being hoaxed here. What do you think?"_

Could be, especially considering the video linked on this page to the treadmill demonstration. I'd like to see this "blackbird" actually "spread its wings" on more than a short sprint, after a thorough inspection. I suspect its average speed would end up below that of the wind.

<comment><USER9> @Semiapies:

A: if the vehicle can accelerate under the power of the wind to several multiples of the windspeed, what would suddenly make it slow down? Are you suspecting stored energy is being used somehow?

B: How long of a run would convince you?

<comment><USER17> A) It _is_ admittedly using stored energy - the propellers are spun by the wheels, which are spinning due to the vehicle's forward motion. I suspect that they may have come up with a clever trick to manage a burst of speed before slowing down back below the speed of the wind. The treadmill demo video shows the model speeding up, then slowing down.

B) I'm not sure how long the temporary burst of speed would last on a larger model; I'd prefer an engineer coming up with that. My WAG would have that period be rather less than an hour.

I'm reminded of perpetual motion scams, especially by someone creating a login to start defending them and demanding what would convince someone. Trying to put skeptics on the defensive and trying to force them to disprove the remarkable claim put forth is a classic shtick.

And I think the perpetual motion bit is fair - if we take the treadmill video on its face, this is a vehicle that, in still air, _would go uphill under its own lack of power - and even accelerate for a while_ after an initial push. This has nothing to do with apparent wind velocity.

<comment><USER9> @Semiapies:

>It is admittedly using stored energy - the propellers are spun by the wheels, which are spinning due to the vehicle's forward motion.

I'm sorry, but by that logic your car is also "admittedly using stored energy" to accelerate (as the wheels and other parts are turning due to the vehicles forward motion) and we know this isn't the case. Just because there _exists_ stored energy in a system, doesn't mean that this stored energy is being used and in fact, as the vehicle accelerates, _more_ energy is stored rather than energy being used.

In the case of this vehicle, it _can't_ be using the stored energy in the propeller without it turning progressively slower and the videos show the propeller simply continuing to spin faster as the vehicle accelerates.

The gearing between the prop and the wheels is fixed ... there's no way to slow the prop down and speed the wheels up -- that would require a variable ratio between the two.

Semiapies: <<Trying to put skeptics on the defensive and trying to force them to disprove the remarkable claim put forth is a classic shtick.

I don't recall attempting to force you to disprove anything. I simply asked period of time would convince you. You can call it "shtick" if you like -- I call it attempting to learn your position.

<comment><USER17> _"it can't be using the stored energy in the propeller"_

Note that I didn't say it was. Sorry to get you off-script.

 _As claimed by the builders_ , the propeller is powered by the wheels. Assuming no other stored energy source, the stored energy is the motion of the vehicle after it's been started off by the wind. I'm not clear how they do it, but going from the treadmill video, I suspect they manage a temporary burst of speed followed by a slowdown.

 _"I don't recall attempting to force you to disprove anything"_

You rushed in to try to get a layman to give explicit parameters for disproving it. That's a common tactic, usually followed by assurances that this system can _totally_ do that, and we'll see video of it doing exactly that Real Soon Now.

At this point, I'm waiting for the normal course of events: the other shoe will drop months from now and hardly make a blip on the blogs and other venues currently hyping this story.

<comment><USER9> Me: "it can't be using the stored energy in the propeller"

You: "Note that I didn't say it was. Sorry to get you off-script."

Wow -- you make a clear claim and then two posts later are denying you even said it. I'll refresh your memory: This is you claiming that the vehicle uses stored energy: "It is admittedly _using_ stored energy - the propellers are spun by the wheels,"

You: "You rushed in to try to get a layman to give explicit parameters for disproving it."

Nope -- I merely asked what would convince you -- big difference.

<comment><USER17> Two posts? You're contradicting yourself within your single post, right here.

I _never_ said the energy was stored in the propeller. You even just quoted me saying exactly the opposite, twice!

Real, working projects don't have shills - sorry, _evangelists_ \- running around here and other forums trying to shout down people who are dubious about the very physical possibility of what they've made. They don't have to - <USER2> have working machines!

<comment><USER9> Wow -- just wow.

Moving on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> A helpful way to understand sailing into the wind (for me at least) is to think of a stationary wind turbine producing eg. 2MW of power. Now if you were to mount that turbine on the roof of your electric car, that 2MW is more than enough to power the car at great speed in a windward direction. This seems to be the same concept except with a pure mechanical linkage.

<comment><USER19> Not really. Here the propeller isn't generating the power, but doing the acceleration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This seems to be the same issue as horsepower: If the engine has horsepower doesn't that mean it can only go as fast as horses do?

Of course not, that's the intuitive "apples and oranges" type mistake, the two numbers aren't really correlated like that. It's like leaving your foot on the gas at the same level will keep it accelerating until it hits the most it can do with that much gas.</comment>


Guangdong state gov to subsidize replacement robotics with $150B+ over 3 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/technology/science-research/article/1754165/robotics-industry-booming-guangdong-insiders

<comment><AUTHOR> It is difficult to believe. Are there other confirmations that this is happening (besides the written material that is being quoted in the business press)?</comment>


1M Java questions have now been asked on StackOverflow - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/java?sort=newest&pageSize=50 <comment><USER2> ... and 999999 of them immediately got closed and marked as "unhelpful/off- topic"</comment>


Show HN: My Newest iPhone Game - Dummy Defense - <AUTHOR>

The game is Dummy Defense. It launched yesterday and is currently at #41 top overall in the US app store. I did some heavy promotion yesterday with a large email list, and FreeAppADay is promoting my other app, SimplePhysics, which is driving quite a few sales. I'd be glad to hear your feedback about the game as well as answer any questions regarding the development or marketing efforts.
Here's the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzk5WVb3JcE&feature=player_detailpage
Here's the app store page: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dummy-defense/id460832678?mt=8 <comment><USER2> Should be obvious but put it up on Reddit too, free marketing. Though it's kind of pot luck whether your submission will draw attention, although somebody else might copy your submission and that may get better attention. And hey who cares? As long as it climbs, no reason why it couldn't see the front page.

Also Android plox. Or browser based version at least.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. What subreddit would you post something like this on?

<comment><USER2> r/gaming in my opinion, very good demographic, they're aren't just PC/console nuts, but actual game enthusiasts who will have an interest in games across every medium they have access to which will include iOS. Be prepared for them asking about Android though.

Found your Android sign up thing too, good idea, excellent for grabbing emails. Throw that in all your messaging too though, don't leave people to find it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Direct Links Trailer: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzk5WVb3JcE&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzk5WVb3JcE&feature=player_detailpage)

App Store Page: [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dummy- defense/id460832678?mt=...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dummy- defense/id460832678?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks great, was it built with any engines like Cocos2D? What email list did you use? How many downloads is it getting now?

Why did you decide to go with a 99c price point when you could have gone freemium, give away a few levels and do a 99c unlock? Thanks

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually used a home-made framework that I have been kludging together since my first app, BridgeBasher. Back then, Cocos2D and Unity3D weren't as awesome as they are today. It worked out well though, having my own framework really lets me dig into the nuts and bolts and change any aspect that I need.

I have an email list of about 80k subscribers that I've accumulated from my other apps. About 28% have opened, and about 25% of those who opened actually clicked the link.

Yesterday I clocked 3879 downloads and landed at #52 in the charts. I'm not sure how many downloads I've gotten today.

I decided on the $0.99 price point because of the large e-mail list.

<comment><USER4> Congratulations on your game, it looks pretty smooth, nice graphics too. According to <http://topappcharts.com> your game is #36 today, is that accurate? dummy defense is climbing the ladder, would be interesting to know the downloads per position in the charts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yesterday I climbed from 51 to 36 in the US app store and received 4,119 downloads.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Work aversion disorder - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_aversion_disorder

<comment><USER2> This is the type of article that should really be nominated for deletion from Wikipedia. Someone made this phrase up less than two years ago and tossed in a couple smart-looking citations to news articles and books that do not actually ever use the words "work aversion disorder" to make it sound credible. It belongs in Urban Dictionary at best.

I don't know what the motivation for submitting this to HN was, but if there's a discussion to be had on feeling averse to working, I don't think this wiki page adds anything to it.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you its silly. But as parody on the various 'syndromes' I think it is humorous. I had a manager at Intel who said "If it was fun it wouldn't be called 'work.'" which is both true and not true. Its true that work implies that there are things to do that are not something you'd rather be doing, but like going skiing which is 'fun', there is the drive up, the lift tickets, the planning. So those are elements that are 'not fun' that lead up to 'fun'. When you are working on something that either you are passionate about, or is really fun, then the 'not fun' parts can more easily be powered through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, there seems to be a name for every situation and condition these days. The problem is, with the coming unemployment due to increased automation and robotics, people may need actual diagnosable reasons to gain living subsidies from the powers that be so they don't starve. The world is changing and we will need to adapt somehow, and the idea of everyone working is going to slowly come to an end; I don't think Soylent Greens is really an option.

</comment><comment><USER5> Are you posting this because you think the article is rubbish, or because you think it applies to you?

I guess it applies to me. But I never thought of it as an illness. Who would work in paradise anyway? It is rather the source of disease. The pressure of trying to be of worth to other human beeings combined with beeing unable to find motivation and commit to change is an unbearable combination.

<comment><USER6> "Who would work in paradise anyway?"

It depends on what you mean by "work".

I would write code without pay. In fact, I'd very much enjoy being able to just write whatever I wanted, with no economic consideration involved.

Now, if you're talking about cleaning toilets...

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is browsing HN in the middle of the workday a symptom of this?

Guilty as charged!

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not lazy, I have _Work Aversion Syndrome_!!!1 Right...

</comment><comment><USER9> I've seen this many times. Mainly due to burnout.

Some of the more fast paced "big consultancies" in the UK tend to do this to their staff (I'd name names but I'd get sued) resulting in resentment towards employment. They literally beat every last drop of energy and life out of their staff every day, threaten their jobs constantly with outsourcing and then chuck them on the street when they get wise or ask questions (usually protecting themselves by threatening to sue them if they didn't sign a legal wavier). One outfit I had the misfortunate of contracting some work for informally described their team leads as "whipmasters".

We had a couple of guys on from one of these outfits and they're doing well "in rehab" with us.</comment>


A Curated Repository for Tools, Articles and Jobs for Front-End Devs - <AUTHOR> http://frontendtools.com <comment><USER2> As someone a bit intimidated by the baffling array of front-end ... things (I work on embedded devices, but I know enough angular to just scrape out a POC), this is a great resource. I'll be spending some time here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for your feedback. If you have any ideas to make it better, let me know :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I didn't see knockout.js - might be worth adding (speaking as a maintainer )

<comment><AUTHOR> I just added it under Front-End App Frameworks, next to angular and the others. Thanks :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey cool!!! This has a lot of depth and breadth.

Much appreciated :) Bookmarked

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have any suggestions on how to improve it?

<comment><USER4> Sure, I'm happy to help.

I think the tools section is mostly good to go, I'm on mobile and there is a lot of scrolling involved for each section. Perhaps make it even more modular and collapsable?

For the Jobs, I would suggest sorting and filtering like how Angel List provides.

It is cool to see a list of front end jobs, but it would be good to sort and filter by company size, location, etc if available.

What is your ultimate vision for the site?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're absolutely right. I'm working on a redesign to make each section easier to explore, and, yeah, specially the mobile version needs a lot of work. As for my vision, I would like to make it more collaborative and generate more engagement in the future. Thank you very much for taking the time to give me feedback!

<comment><USER4> Thanks!

If you want to send me your contact info, I'd be happy to stay in touch and collab on anything you have in mind :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


17 High-Tech Gizmos From 1927's Version of CES - <AUTHOR> http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/17-high-tech-gizmos-from-1927s-version-of-ces-1493282802

<comment><USER2> A lot on washers and driers in here. I firmly believe that the three types of devices that have saved the most labor in history are clothes washers, power excavators, and powered field equipment for farming.

Also interesting that so many of these "gizmos" are more-or-less current today. We still use most of this stuff.</comment>


Why All Employees Should Be VIPs At Your Company - <AUTHOR> http://blog.holler.com/why-all-employees-should-be-vip-at-your-company-2011-09

<comment><USER2> It appears to me from afar that Facebook has forgotten one of the most important rules of the Valley. When you start ignoring the contributions of developers the better ones leave.

[http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle- eart...](http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle- earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/)

<comment><USER3> This article is almost insinuating that only the developers work hard, but the other people at facebook are just coasting on the developers hard work. The fact is, other people can bring a lot to a company as well. Where do the developers think the money comes from, not from writing great code, but getting advertisers interested.

<comment><USER4> An argument can be made that the product, and the underlying code that comprises it, is what actually brings advertisers in. Not salespeople.

<comment><USER5> And the other 99% of the time sales is king.

The users that use and the advertisers that advertise don't care 1 bit about the backend.

<comment><USER6> Wow really? So they would use a completely terrible product too if that's what it was? I don't see too many people clambering to advertise on Myspace

<comment><USER7> You'd be amazed at how many terrible products stay afloat simply because they get the job done, people don't know about alternatives, are too lazy to change, and the cost of change isn't worth it. Especially in enterprise. I'd venture to say it's way more common than not.

<comment><USER6> I completely agree, though I find that reality quite sad, but yes bad products often do succeed in spite of themselves.

What I'm just saying there is definitely huge value, sales wise, in having a good well built product. The bold statement the parent made that the backend of Facebook doesn't matter to the people or advertisers who use it is flat wrong. If it was slow, constantly crashing or down it would become a ghost town relatively quickly. In the end sales cannot compensate for a bad product, the product is always king in the end.

As to your comment, I like to use the analogy of a land rush to describe the software technology landscape right now. There is a lot of open land and so many people get away without having to seriously compete, particularly if they are solving niche problems. There is still a lot of land out there, this is also a reason that makes forming start-ups so attractive right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's nothing wrong with having private events -- sometimes, you really don't have room for everybody at the party.

Whatever you do, though, don't host a public event with a separate area for the VIPs.

A private party is just that -- a private party. The only people that know about it are the invitees, and I certainly wouldn't feel excluded if I wasn't given an invite to a small gathering because I wasn't in-group.

I'd be damned insulted if you hold a public hoo-hah with some big names on the playbill, and then whisk said big names away to some sort of private, exclusive party, where I can't go, because I'm not one of the cool kids. Not because the exclusive gathering was, well, exclusive, but because the open-to- the-public side of things had some massively false pretenses.

<comment><AUTHOR> You've effectively articulated my exact thoughts. There's a right way and a wrong way to do things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Small non-exclusive company rails against big companies who shield their developers / have become exclusive, news at 7._

I'm all for companies that can keep developers and engineers up at the front, being deeply technical involved and interacting with their communities. But that's not going to be all companies, and Facebook in particular is one of those companies that is by their nature a closed system that builds itself not out in public (ala, say Mozilla), but through the proxy of press releases and new features dropped onto users' and 3rd partys' laps.

The other big factor I'd pitch would be consistency: how much technical content is there, and what amount is appropriate for a developer to be showing off? If the event is not inherently a technical event, a fifteen or thirty minute segment from a developer might seem really out of place. Developers are to be respected, but Facebook isn't a technical company, it's a networking company.

<comment><USER10> Facebook is a closed system?

I'm not one of their employees and yet I know how their build system works, how they store more photos than the rest of the internet combined (Haystack), how they process their analytics and likes (HBase counters + scribe + ptail + puma), how they store messages (HBase), how their data centers are built (open compute), the list just goes on and on.

As far as large internet companies goes Facebook has one of the most open engineering departments I've ever seen.

<comment><USER9> Facebook's infrastructure is open, but their product I would not hesitate to label as closed, even if it has APIs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have never had any desire to go to any conference, ever. What I tend to find is that talking gets very little done, and often not much is learned beyond a few truisms. If I want to talk to people I do it online, it is just more time- effective. At a conference, I don't necessarily know who a given person is, but online I have full access to their information (typically), and I only talk to the people I want to.

If I want to get into a good party (which is seldom), I go to whatever club is the current flavor of the month and shove a filthy wad of cash in the bouncer's hand. I could give two shits about an "exclusive" SV party, and I would hope most Facebook employees feel the same way.

<comment><USER12> I'm right there with you. I can learn more from a good book and an online chat than I can from a conference. As a developer, I never expect to get work done as a result of attending a conference because I feel that they are strictly social events.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There are quite a few hacker events with more of a flat-hierarchy, open-to- all-comers ethos, but yeah, you probably won't find them attached to these more high-profile media events (there are exclusive sponsored after-parties associated with events like WWDC and GDC as well, to add more examples). There's fortunately the whole other parallel world of stuff like Noisebridge, DevHouse, etc...

<comment><USER14> There are certainly plenty of exclusive events hosted by third parties at WWDC, but as far as I know, all of the official Apple events are open to all attendees, as well as (I believe) all employees who are able to attend the conference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How much of this kind of thing is a by-product of marketers as well? I've seen more then a few events where the people who actually did the development were excluded to accommodate business partners and clients. It's not that marketing necessarily wants to exclude developers, but space and resources are limited, and socializing is an important tool in the marketer tool kit. Not that I condone this (having been on both sides of this equation), but it does speak to the shifting sands of prioritizing the goals of these kinds of events (is it a company celebration to thank employees, or a marketing event?)

<comment><USER16> all of the major developer conferences (IO, f8, etc.) have been hijacked by marketing, PR and BD people.

they forgot what these conferences are supposed to be about

<comment><USER17> FWIW that wasn't my experience for the past two IOs. I mostly met real developers and entrepreneurs, even at the after-parties. To be sure, the lure of free phones makes for a few fanboys and denies some deserving developers. But it was overwhelmingly a developer conference and the sessions certainly reflected that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This guy has obviously never worked for Facebook, and so has no idea how Facebook treats its engineers. Not getting invited to a particular f8 afterparty (which sounds like it was Spotify's deal and not Facebook's), is peanuts compared to the level of respect and power they are given within the company every day.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that developers are given a lot of power. Trust me that I know of the company well as I covered it daily for four years. That doesn't mean community events should be divided.

<comment><USER19> You have to separate business events from community events. I never take offense to not being invited to a business event, even one held in-house, where management is looking to schmooze with potential investors, partners and clients. Management rehearses what type of interaction they're going to have, with whom, for how long and what the content of the conversation will be (or at least they should be rehearsing), and to be honest, those plans need not be shared with developers nor should developers/sales/support/operations be rubbing elbows in the same room with prospects.

It's a business, not an egalitarian democracy. We all know some numbnuts will get drunk and embarrass themselves and the company. It's easier to avoid the potential of that happening by restricting the invite list to only the strategically important people. As a developer, I never considered myself to be such. Also, I never invite my boss to any of my parties, so whatever.

As far as the marketing/biz dev/party planner people us concerned, they're a necessary evil who more often than not display asshole behavior of the kind described in the post, but as a developer you should ask yourself if your life is worth working with/for people who's great idea is a car-sharing service with the need for a VIP room.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Facebook hardly represents all of Bay Area tech.

And it certainly doesn't represent startups (at all).

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. The same thing isn't limited to Facebook though. I only gave two examples (one of TC Disrupt, and the other of FB) but there are plenty of other events where this happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've never been to Silicon valley, in fact I've never been to the US but I personally feel that this picture the author draws of "old" SV is very idealized. This rant contains high amounts of nostalgia and therefore does not seem to be entirely rational. I would love to know if SV used to be like O'Neill describes it in his article.

<comment><USER22> I live in SV for two years now (moved from NY, and from Ukraine before that). You can send a cold e-mail to almost anyone here asking for advice, and if you're polite, sound intelligent, and have sensible expectations, nine times out of ten you'll get a meeting. I'm talking about people whose bank accounts are as large as budgets of some small countries. These folks do it because they genuinely love the startup world and want to help out. This sort of openness is unheard of in the finance world in NY, for example.

Some people are inaccessible (you likely won't get a meeting with Steve Jobs by sending a cold email), but it's an exception rather than the rule. I also suspect it has more to do with his schedule than his attitude (unlike other parts of the world).

That being said, people will be people, and there's plenty of VIP-type nonsense going on here. The thing is, you can't think of these things in absolutes - you have to compare with the rest of the world, and SV is by far the most open place I've ever seen. That being said, I'd really like the culture of disrespect for the respectable here to get even stronger: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kirzr6lnSs&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kirzr6lnSs&feature=player_detailpage#t=106s)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great video

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> _"Why All Employees Should Be VIPs At Your Company"_

Been visiting Lake Wobegon recently I see.

<comment><AUTHOR> Love that show!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The reality of the situation is that a party with 10, 100, 1000, 10000, and 100000 people feel completely different. With social dynamics being what they are it's difficult to invite _everyone_ and still retain the atmosphere sought by the planner. I have no insight into the mindsets of the planners but I have a feeling the situation is probably the result of the realities of party planning rather than a desire to exclude certain individuals, or a class of individuals.

The situation with the B-list party could probably have been handled better with regard to musical talent and an obvious discrepancy between the talent invited.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ultimately both parties weren't planned by the same people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I skimmed the headline at first and thought it said "How The "IT Crowd" Hijacked Silicon Valley". Boy was I in for a disappointment.</comment>


Trump Order to Keep Meat Packing Plants Open - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/67cb4bad7ffe500beabdf8e7e7efea5d <comment><USER3> Honestly, this is the kind of stuff that freaks me out. Even if you don't eat a lot of meat - the last thing we need right now is food to start disappearing off of shelves. And this is likely just the squeakiest wheel of a tenuous food supply chain.

I've heard that this summer's produce harvest is going to be a massacre - <USER2> migrant workers farms rely on won't show up. And if they do, the temporary housing available is incredibly dangerous.

<comment><USER4> The silver lining is that most of the more fragile and complex food products are "luxury" products, relatively-speaking. The farming of grains and the like is heavily automated at this point; I don't think we need to worry about actual starvation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Processing the carcass after the animal has been killed is very labour intensive and you need to have the skill and the demeanor for that kind of job.

You are not going to send in the national guard to man these plants if the workers get sick or walk off the job.

</comment><comment><USER6> This article is short on explaining the consequences. What steps will be taken to prevent virus from spreading at the facilities, people from getting sick and, as a result, ending up dead? I really hope that this doesn't boil down to "Trump ordering people to die for the meat industry".

</comment><comment><USER7> What does the language in this order actually accomplish?</comment>


Ask HN: I Need a Data Structures & Algorithms Mentor/Tutor - <AUTHOR>

Background: I'm a recent MIS graduate with a software dev internship under my belt. I've been able to land a few  interviews (most notably with Microsoft's IT/Operations group), but my curriculum didn't cover any data structures/algorithms material. I'd like to increase my chances of getting hired and not embarrass myself during the interviews, so I'm looking for some help.
What I'm Looking for: Someone to point me to some good DS&A resources (I've looked at a number of Open Courseware lectures, but I've found the quality of the video makes it difficult to follow the slides/code). Also, some good practice problems and answers to the occasional question. Any general insight into the interview process would be greatly appreciated.
What you get: A bright, eager pupil, the satisfaction of helping your fellow hacker and an unlimited supply of gratitude. Or I could do some free web dev work for you. Your choice :)
I would also be willing to write up and share the process with the community, for anyone else that might be in this situation in the future.
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> I'd recommend Algorihm Design (Jon Kleinberg and Eva Tardos) and as suggested by ejanus, stanford course <http://www.algo-class.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestions. I've already signed up for the stanford course. I'm looking for immediately available resources, since I'll be interviewing soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The Cormen book "Introduction to Algorithms" and the book "Programming Interviews Exposed" should bring you up to a solid level.

</comment><comment><USER4> Stanford will offer free Algorithms and Data structures course early next year, maybe you should enroll.

</comment><comment><USER5> I can help you out. Shoot me an e-mail and let's talk some more.</comment>