Which is better: Many customers at low price-point or few at high price? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.asmartbear.com/price-vs-quantity.html

<comment><USER2> eh, for me? I am type A mostly because I don't enjoy negotiation and hard sales. If you have an expensive product, at least in my sector, you are expected to negotiate, sometimes for months on price. Then you are expected to give a discount to the customers that waste the most of your time.

With low-value products? Here is the price. want it? If you want to change the price, sure, sometimes you need to do that, but you change it for everyone. (In fact, in the VPS sector, It is traditional to change the price for existing customers as well as new customers. Linode deserves some of the credit for making that traditional. In the co-lo or bandwidth business, where it's all negotiated? it's traditional to offer like 50% better deals to new customers and to squeeze your old customers until they leave, like it is in real-estate leases. I recently lowered the price on my low-end co-lo and gave the lower price to all my existing customers, to much surprise. )

Right now, I'm trying to move some products that are traditionally sold with lots of negotiation (Like co-location) into the "here is the price, you want it?" model, which is really in everyone's interest except the salesguy. And salesguys in this industry make a lot of money; two big local co-lo salesguys have contacted me; I know they are good, and that they can bring me customers, as I know a bunch of people that bought through them. The problem? they want 10% of the revenue from the customer for the life of the customer. 10% isn't far from my own target margin for co-lo, and some plans, I don't even make that much. And for the life of the customer? through any upgrades down the road? it seems like a bookkeeping nightmare.

The other advantage of having lots of small customers is that if someone wants something that you don't want to do? (in my case, for instance, people that want password auth to my infrastructure, or people that want to run windows) it's pretty easy for me to say "That's not what I do. Here is a refund; I hear that provider X can help you out" - whereas if that customer was 1/10th of my revenue? I'd be spending all night trying to get a microsoft system working, or cleaning up after a script kiddie broke into a weak password and got into the customer's management interface.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a data point I have about 900,000 customers to service (iPhone apps). I've also had times in my career where I have had one customer (department of defense). I'm much happier with the 900,000. I think an assumption Jason makes that i would contest is that you need to provide the same level of service to 10,000 people that you would provide to 10. When your app is at a low price point, you aren't competing on customer service anymore. So why try? Just use a virtual assistant to handle level one service requests, have a FAQ, etc.

<comment><USER4> Are there not perhaps thousands of people who would be using your product under the umbrella of the Department of Defense?

<comment><USER5> Those people aren't making purchasing decisions, ergo they're not customers but users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My favorite part of this article was the first half of the summary:

"If you want happiness and fulfillment from a small company, strive for B"

$10,000/mo revenue with only 10 customers to keep happy vs. 1000 customers to service? Yes, please.

Company B could have just as much potential for growth as company A. Sure A has the potential to have more brand evangelists bringing in new customers but B has more time to devote to totally babying their 10 customers and making sure they will be likely to recommend the product/service to others in their industry. Company B only needs 1 referral to make another $1,000 per month whereas company A would need 100 referrals.

Also think about upselling down the road, if a company can afford $1,000/mo for your base product they will probably be willing and able to pay for upgrades that will make their work easier or more efficient.

I'm not arguing that B is better than A, but I think that B could have just as much growth with less stress.

<comment><USER7> On the other hand you need just one cost-cutting round or one unforgivable support foul-up to lose 10% of your revenue overnight. Model A likely won't see that kind of volatility.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. People who are paying $5/month have a much lower threshold before they leave than an enterprise paying $20,000/month. Also larger more expensive services tend to end up with more business integration and the cost of moving to another service is typically substantial.

<comment><USER9> +1.

Also, consider setting a price that cuts out the vast majority of demanding cheapskates but keeps it salient for the rest. $200 is a good starting place. You can also achieve this by charging for the entire year up front instead of monthly billing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Let me tell you (a bit from experience)

It has to be low, but it shouldn't be too low!

\- Early adopters really don't mind paying more

\- If the app has some intrinsic corporate value it can be priced higher

\- Pricing "sets the tone" of the product

For example, a regular user won't mind paying $1 compared to a $0.10 product. So charge $1

And think of how many copies you have to sell more at price X to profit like price Y.

Suppose an exageration: price X is $1 and price Y is $100. Is selling at price X really 100 times more difficult than at price Y?

Selling 5 units at Y price may be difficult but selling 500 units at price X may be harder

You don't want to celebrate 1000 sales at $1, you're still starving at the end of the month.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've worked for 2 company Bs so far and can honestly say that I think I'd much rather prefer a company A instead.

Both company Bs are a little over 10 years old, and still run the same software they started out with. They both have had a history of having a few very large customers each year, each of them demanding a lot of customization. It could be the way the each company B handled it, but it shows. The codebase and system architecture is a mess, full of quick fixes and patches because big customer x was requesting feature y.

It's made for an extremely frustrating system to work with. I'm sure a lot of it could have been avoided, but at the same time things sometimes needed to be done quick and dirty, and the software team probably didn't have the resources to do things the "right way." It's easy to criticize looking back. Probably one of those things easier said than done.

If you are running or working at a company B, please please please think of the future, the business scalability/maintainability, and the sanity of your employees/peers.

</comment><comment><USER12> I work for a company that has only tens of clients (banks) but each pays us in the hundreds of thousands to millions range, an extreme example of B. Just one of these customers takes up to a year to acquire.

On the plus side, things can move more slowly and in a well thought out way. Also, there's no worry around your usual "web scale" issues. There's also a lot of freedom around exploring new ways to do things because of the slower pace.

On the down side, the customers sometimes put insane requirements in our contracts. Security audits, source code in escrow, huge amounts of insurance, long weekly meetings. The culture of bureaucracy bleeds if you're not careful. Also, income is lumpy and one client can end up costing more than they're paying you if you're not careful.

All in all I think it's the best kind I've experienced so far. That's probably because my employer has done a great job of insulating me from the down sides though :).

<comment><USER13> Having been on both sides of the Fortune 100 sales cycle, it was always a fun game, as a buyer, to see how close we could get to being written off during the courtship process. Drinks at lunch are the norm, but maxing out the champagne costs, getting box seats at games, etc.

Once (if) the sale closed though, it was down to business, and doing our damnedest to maximize both our time and the vendors. I've never worked with or for banks, but I can't imagine them being TOO terribly different from federal IT, so I definitely sympathize with your plight. It seems as though all they really want you to do is acknowledge, in every way possible, how happy you are to have their business, and how lucky you are to be in meetings with them all day every day.

<comment><USER12> Funny thing is, we're a 25 person company and most of our competitors are much much bigger. However, they're so slow, inflexible and outdated tech wise that we just blow them out of the water with our offering (we charge 2-5x the going rate).

The biggest insight that contributed to our success came from our CFO who realized that big corporate IT is where dreams go to die and that we should route around them as much as is possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Strive to get many customers paying a high price for your product. Apple computers and IBM mainframes are two of the most profitable product lines in IT history.

Personally, I love the high stability of a broad consumer base. However, you can architect a successful business either way.

<comment><USER9> I'm surprised with the amount of Apple love in startup-land, more startups don't attempt to emulate their pricing strategy. Instead, we are A/B testing our way to local maxima with products that are supposedly changing the world.

<comment><USER15> I agree. I'm also a little surprised at the false dichotomy presented in this thread. Using hand-wavy or made up numbers is not a meaningful way to have this discussion.

Every business has a different decision to make. It feels like this thread is thinking of it like maximizing an equation (FindingMaxRevenueGivenPriceSensitivies()). Instead, some products lend themselves to low cost support; sell those more cheaply. Some products require insurance-like support contracts -- those are going to be enterprisey. Some products will lend well to cheap inexpensive versions and high end enterprise versions, without changing the product (the value prop is really high to a business, esp if it's a service that can automate out the cost of a person's salary).

This thread and the obsession with A/B testing result from a hyper focus, like you said, on finding local maxima. I think it's often useful to take a step back and find the high level factors and built a pricing model around that.

(Of course, nothing excuses you from talking to customers.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Uniformity and automation.

With only 10 customers, the customers are less likely to be uniform than with 1000. With 10 customers automation is overengineering, but you can only get to 1000 customers if your processes are automated.

So the 1000 customer company seems more attractive to an investor (or candidate employee) than the 10 customer company.

</comment><comment><USER17> Easy...both.

Keep the $10/mo plans for consumers. And offer the $1,000/mo enterprise plans for enterprise.

That way your cheap customers will drive a lot of your high end sales.

<comment><USER9> Maintaining two product lines for two segments is a recipe for lack of focus and serving two masters. In the end you will choose to focus on one at a time and may never do both.

<comment><USER17> it's up to you to define your product line.

nothing is stopping you from just limiting the products.

Normal Accounts? Max 5-20 users.

Enterprise? Unlimited Users

no real difference between the products except for a single value

<comment><USER9> It's fine to have two products for different segments within the consumer or business markets, but having one product for consumers and another for businesses is not as simple as changing a single value. Very different customers with different needs, demands, and expectations of your product.

<comment><USER18> So why differentiate, other than with a value that clearly segments them?

This is not unlike Apple's laptop plan - before it was retired, the plastic unibody 13" macbook and 13" aluminum macbook pro had almost no distinctions to a consumer aside from exterior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am currently close to releasing an app on the iPad and I have done lots of internal debating as to which price to choose. Here is my situation:

-I am entering a smaller addressable market, so I know I won't be able to grow forever and therefore I am focusing on building brand loyalty and getting repeat customers.

-I am planning on releasing new apps at a steady cadence, probably 1/month (it doesnt make sense in my situation to release new content within the app itself).

So with these two things combined, it seems logical to go at a low price- point. A low price point should gather initial customers and then be small enough to keep them coming back month after month. So I am currently leaning towards $1 per app.

But I have heard enough about the app market pricing and from people on this board to give me second thoughts, specifically:

-early users are insensitive to price-point

-ipad app purchasing is very elastic (ie you get the same revs depending on whether you sell it at $1 vs $4 etc)

I've thought a lot about releasing it at a higher price point, $2, maybe even $3. The biggest reason I am leaning towards $1 is the fact that I intend to release many apps and I see each as a microapp and therefore a micropayment. So even though I think one app may be worth more than $1, I think the value of each app over time is logarithmic. Therefore its better to sell 5 at $1 than 2 at $2, etc.

The apps themselves are interactive ebooks focused on military history. (a vague description, but unfortunately I am a few days away from having my website up)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is simply a restatement of what Philippe Kahn showed the world and more particularly Microsoft. The Borland compiler came pretty much from no where and became a serious competitor for the powers that be. While the IDE was quite impressive, the major difference lay in the price. As I remember it, Borland was very near $100 while Microsoft was much closer to $500. Details (some) here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippe_Kahn> More elsewhere by way of Google or your favorite search engine.

<comment><USER21> What is even more impressive was that while Borland began its rise without venture capital to 500 million dollars in sales Kahn himself was an illegal alien.

[http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Borland- Int...](http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Borland- International-Inc-Company-History.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I view the acquisition as a tradeoff in whether you'd like to exert a lot of effort upfront or down the road.

If you exert a lot of effort upfront, you can collect a few high-paying customers and provide more tailored support to their needs. Of course the fewer customers you have means each has a greater proportional influence in affecting the direction of your product. That is, assuming customer feedback is something you're interested in, which I acknowledge is not necessarily always the case.

If you would rather exert effort more "constantly" and gradually down the road, than the many customers approach is good. Many apps which end up in this situation do so because of a massive user spike at the point when their app "goes big". In that case, the short-term growth is clearly not gradual, but the long-term growth leading up to that point may be.

My personal preference would be a small to medium customer base to provide more tailored support.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think having to please fewer customers could be great, but you run a greater risk of someone undercutting you and taking them away. Though, if you have 10 customers vs 1000, it's a lot easier to personally try convince those 10 to stay.

<comment><USER24> Welcome to HN.

In general, people (especially businesses) do not make decisions based on price. This is one of the most common misconceptions of new software/startup founders. Indeed, for higher paying customers, they are often _shockingly_ price insensitive, assuming you are genuinely delivering value to them.

More on this topic in my Microconf speech in, oh, 7 hours or so, but I'll try to hit the highlights in a blog post or something in the coming week.

<comment><USER25> This depends if you are dealing with public sector organizations or not.

In many cases these organizations _have_ to review their contracts every X years and _have_ to take the cheapest deal (unless they can provide evidence that the supplying cannot produce what they have promised etc).

I have spoken to a few people now who were supplying various government departments and had excellent supplier/client relationships (they were going out of their way on weekends to fix problems etc) where under any ordinary circumstances this would continue. However they got to the end of some review period and another supplier (who is known for providing very mediocre service) undercut them by some small amount that they were unable to match so they were unable to continue the relationship despite every stakeholder being happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I would always, always

— always —

prefer a higher margin and fewer customers.

</comment><comment><USER27> Just tossing it out there, but isn't the price point of a product also a big director in consumer expectations? Not that I support making a crappy product, but consumers who pay a lot more generally have higher expectations about what they're spending their money on (rightly so, at times). If you have a 1000 people who figure it's the price of a soda so who cares vs 10 people who won't get off your case about some pet feature they want. It's all hypothetical, but maybe something to keep in mind.

<comment><USER24> You'd be surprised! In my experience, folks who pay A WHOLE NINETY NINE CENTS OF MY MONEY have very shockingly high expectations of polish / quality / feature selection (but no desire to e.g. read what the software actually does), whereas if someone signs e.g. a contract for $X0,000 for enterprise software, it lacks a feature, and they ask for it, "Thanks for the feedback, we'll consider adding that in a later release. In the meanwhile, I suggest ... as a work around" makes them _absurdly happy_.

For more on this topic, go to HNsearch.com and look for [patio11 pathological customers].

<comment><USER28> Given that a 99c app will attract a _much_ larger user base, chances of running into those users who expect to sit on the front row seat for free also increases.

The nice thing is, they can be ignored, as long as you do it tactfully. If you lose them as a customer, it's no big loss. A single extremely high demanding big customer that pays in the ten to hundred thousands is hard to ignore. In fact, their high demands can run your business into the ground, if you're not careful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If your product needs zero rework for each sale (and scales easily), many customers is the obvious way. If it requires a sales process (even if it's as simple as signing a contract), less customers (paying more) is the way.

Personally, I prefer the "less customers" approach. I find it much easier to pleas everyone and feel like I'm not "working for free" when "everyone" is a relativelly small group and the payback is still high

</comment><comment><USER30> $1,000/mo. is fine except if it becomes a mainstream need, then competition turns up with it's $100/mo. product (or even free) and you can't drop the price because the sales cycle costs too much, product requires individual integrations etc.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've definitely concluded that work hectic is proportional to the number of clients to keep happy, but I imagine this only kicks in above a certain price point.

<comment><USER32> How clearly and "piss easy" your product or service works makes a big difference too. I run e-learning ventures since a few years and just changing the starting page of a course area can have dramatic influence on the amount of customer support you have to take care of.

After some time having a rather expensive product that is still popular is the best of both worlds and it can work out, especially if you are in a market where people need what you offer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Many customers gives you more flexibility. Your incremental return goes up with fewer customers, meaning losing 1 hurts more the fewer you have.

<comment><USER9> True, but keep in mind this logic has diminishing returns. What if we were comparing 1,000 paying $1,000 per month or 100,000 paying $10?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The optimal price is obtained by maximizing price * number clients.

</comment><comment><USER35> establishing a huge user base first is definitely better than scoring a few customers, who might unsubscribe at anytime because of the high price

</comment><comment><USER36> It all depends on the elasticity of consumption.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm not an expert in this topic, but I would say that the many customers at the low price-point are more important than the few high-price one. If you have only 5 high-price customers, which generate the most of your income and they decide to break up the business relations with you, than you have probably a big problem and loose a lot of money. So, I think it's better to have a lot of low price customers, because if some of them break up the business relations with you, then it doesn't matter that much. You have enough low-price customers left, which generate the most of your money and some high- price customers on the top of it, which generate a lot of money as well. So the risk to loose money is probably lower. SAP is a good example. They first produced products for the big and important companies, but they figured out that the middle-class customers generate a lot of money as well. I guess it can differ, but I think it's probably the better decision.</comment>


Slaying The Protein Myth - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@richroll/slaying-the-protein-myth-edf53585e778 <comment><USER2> I don't enjoy getting into arguments about claims in a blog which does not cite appropriate scientific journals/papers to back up their argument.

At least the bodybuilding camp (extremely high consumers of protein) cites such papers, and you only need to go to reddit/r/fitness, or 4chan/fit, or even bodybuilding.com.

Edit: reworded.</comment>


Ask A Startup Sales Guy Any Question - <AUTHOR> http://blog.salestie.com/2011/03/ask-a-startup-sales-guy/

<comment><USER2> Why are you collecting people's emails rather than having a simple thread to ask and answer questions?

<comment><AUTHOR> Daimyoyo, I made a change on the blog to reflect your concern, which I fully understand. I left the form up for people who want to keep their question private (for example, we're thinking of firing our head of sales.) but anybody that is fine with a public forum can just post a comment.

Thanks for your input.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Rangiano – Arduino instrument for playing melodies by changing distance - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/efojs/rangiano <comment><AUTHOR> Hi! This is my first Arduino project. I went to components store, bought some random set of sensors aiming to experiment. When I finished checking and playing with each of them individually, I thought that Now I need to make something by joining it all.</comment>


Tree Oriented Programming [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://foswiki.cs.uu.nl/foswiki/pub/Swierstra/ResearchTalks/tree-oriented-programming-slides.pdf <comment><USER2> This slide deck is incredible. Slide 8 "Language evolution" compares LISP vs Haskell to a rotary telephone vs a cell phone, then the next 80 code-packed slides are spent re-inventing s-expressions, but more verbose and harder to use.

<comment><USER3> I have never seen a gloriously snarky, incredibly accurate, incredibly concise synopsis of something before. This comment should be chiseled in stone and buried for future post-nuke earthlings, so they will know just how capable we used to be.

Thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> On the slides for quick-sort, the author asks:

> Why don't they teach it like that in the algorithms course?)

I'm sure they do sometimes. However, it is incorrect because quick-sort is an O(nlogn) in-place sort. This is a best-case O(n^2) sort (due to the linked- list appending) and is not in-place. If you got taught this as quick-sort ask for a refund... ;)

\---

Honestly, there's isn't anything very interesting in these slides assuming you already know basic functional programming. The dissing of Lisp was odd given the functionality of Haskell that was used was approximately the intersection of Haskell and whichever-Lisp, plus basic static typing (which you can get in various Lisps as well: [https://docs.racket-lang.org/ts- guide/](https://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/) )

<comment><USER5> Quicksort is actually O(n^2) in degenerate cases but as you note its expected to operate in-place. Proper in-place algos written in Haskell read like the imperative versions. This sort code made it into FP lore as a quicksort equivalent which it isn't. It's just neat.

In this case it is not clear the author intended to claim their code has quicksort properties. The "why don't they" question at the bottom could be read as "Or is it quick-sort?" Hey I'm being generous because reading just the slides is bound to miss subtext.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I wasn't being very generous. However, naming the function "qsort" is pretty dishonest. I agree that the proper quick-sort implementation is going to look pretty imperative (and involve mutation) which is why I get a bit annoyed at fake-quick-sort being used to demo how pretty FP makes your code...

(I agree that this implementation is neat. I think it's a great way to explain sorting.)

(naive qsort is O(n^2) in the worst case (with pivot selection it is Theta(nlogn), though,) but the functional-linked-list-sort is O(n^2) in all cases... :))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone interested in this might also look into "term-rewriting" languages used similarly. Long line of research exists in that.

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXL_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TXL_\(programming_language\))

[http://strategoxt.org/](http://strategoxt.org/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMS_Software_Reengineering_Too...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMS_Software_Reengineering_Toolkit)

<comment><USER7> And my all time fave -- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system)

<comment><USER6> I remember running into that studying Artificial Life. It was neat how the simple rules let drawings of plants emerge. Really mind-blowing.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To generalize this beyond programming languages parsing. That's basically what Model-Driven Engineering boils down to.

You take a model, transform to another model (if you need to), then use it to generate stuff (basically reports and/or code).

A model is just a tree that respects a set of structural properties (the metamodel), just like a program is a text file that respects a grammar.

This should be nice and clean, but it's been just a few months since I started meddling with MDE (because academia) and it seems bloated beyond salvation. Maybe we could take the good parts and rehash them in a functional setting.

<comment><USER9> I came up with a pretty simple way of doing what I believe is the same thing that you're describing. The approach I take is to represent 'program models' as paths through the 'metamodel', which is a graph of 'program constructs'. So program models just end up being nested lists of numbered graph edges. [http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/how-to-make-view- indepe...](http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2015/06/how-to-make-view-independent- program.html)

I haven't tried an implementation yet, but probably will at some point this year. Would be curious if you had any comments!

<comment><USER8> That was an interesting read :)

There are lots of similarities between what you describe and the Model-Driven approach I was talking about, except that the latter aims to be much more generic.

Indeed, if you go ahead with the implementation, my suggestion is: take a look at what you've found about the program graph, and see what you could generalize to _any_ graph of that kind.

And by the way, you could even be able to describe the structure of all such graphs (made of entities, atoms and edges with cardinalities) as a graph.

If you want to check previous work in the Model-Driven field, look for:

* Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF); * Ecore, a language to describe metamodels; * OCL, a different language that can be used to add constraints to an EMF metamodel.

While I was writing this, I came up with a question re:your graph structure. Java and Python allow for inner classes (ie. a class definition inside another class), and Python also allows for nested functions. Can a graph such as those in your article describe self-containing constructs?

<comment><USER9> First off, thanks for taking the time to read and reply—I appreciate it.

> _take a look at what you 've found about the program graph, and see what you > could generalize to _any_ graph of that kind._

This sounds interesting to me, but I may be missing something. I've taken a brief look at EMF and Ecore, and it sounds like Ecore has done this generalization you speak of.

The counterpart to this shows up in a somewhat odd way in my project: if I've been correct so far on the role of Ecore, the analog in my system would sort of be the definition of EBNF grammars (since grammars are analogs of metamodels and EBNF defines what valid grammars are).

This was a somewhat arbitrary choice on my part, and to be honest I haven't thought very much about what should constitute this meta-metamodel (i.e. the Ecore analog). What I do at the moment is parse EBNF grammars and use knowledge of their semantics to form a graph representing relationships between rules which refer to one another. The nice thing about this is I can take any existing EBNF grammar (in the ANTRL format), automatically parse it and get one of these graphs (because when I was originally doing this it was just to make a new kind of general purpose program editor; not new kinds of languages).

I believe this implies an answer to your question also:

> _Can a graph such as those in your article describe self-containing > constructs?_

Yes. I have actually generated a graph for the Java language and wrote a little program that automatically walks around it, following the restrictions of these operators * , ?, and + to determine when it must follow an edge, or only optionally etc. —and since Java has nested classes, there's a kind of construction proof here.

Back to " _see what you could generalize to _any_ graph of that kind._ " —thanks for the suggestion. This does seem like an interesting thing to consider, rather than borrowing my somewhat ad hoc carryover choice of parsed EBNF grammars ;)

> you could even be able to describe the structure of all such graphs (made of > entities, atoms and edges with cardinalities) as a graph.

I have a suspicion that's somewhat on the lines of what I would do. My guess at the meta-metamodel is: any graph with edges having cardinalities, and optionally having associated ?, * , and + operators.

<comment><USER9> Also, to clarify about the self-containing constructs: they just end up being cyclic sections in the graph. For instance, in Java we start with a node for classDeclaration, and the path to an inner class looks like classBody -> classBodyDeclaration -> memberDeclaration -> classDeclaration. (That's using this grammar for java: [https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/blob/master/java/Java.g...](https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/blob/master/java/Java.g4))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We created and successfully use [http://nianiolang.org](http://nianiolang.org) for this type of tasks. Higher order functions intoduced more problems in the transform phase for our use cases (transforming complex application state of [https://instadb.com](https://instadb.com)). Imperative syntax works well with strict value passing semantics.

<comment><USER11> AST-based editor: [https://medium.com/cirru-project/stack-editor-programming- by...](https://medium.com/cirru-project/stack-editor-programming-by- functions-a961f1d9555c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> From the title I thought it might have been

[http://strlen.com/aardappel-language](http://strlen.com/aardappel-language) "which computes by concurrently reducing trees (using a form of tree- rewriting) which sit together in tree-spaces (bags) and communicate amongst eachother (exchanging parts of themselves, in Linda-like fashion"

</comment><comment><USER13> Many problems in the real world aren't like that, but like this:

 _[ messy input data with no formal grammar ] --process-- > [ output text ]_

That was a big part of the original motivation for TXR.

</comment><comment><USER14> That flip phone makes me think this is about 15 years old? No date on it though, anyone have any more information?

<comment><USER15> 2006.

[http://foswiki.cs.uu.nl/foswiki/Swierstra/ResearchTalks](http://foswiki.cs.uu.nl/foswiki/Swierstra/ResearchTalks)</comment></comment>


Six ways to make Web 2.0 work - The McKinsey Quarterly - <AUTHOR> http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Business_Technology/Application_Management/Six_ways_to_make_Web_20_work_2294 <comment><USER2> I have always had a feeling that McKinsey is hyped.

I am amused that the bought into the hyperbole that Web 2.0 is. Especially when the noise around Web 2.0 is dieing down and the dust settling.</comment>


Ask HN: Crawler for my app. Please suggest - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I am planning to write an app what requires web pages to be crawled. Could you pls suggest one?
Thanks in advance. <comment><USER2> Have a look at import.io as long as you're dealing with a small set of pages, e.g. ecommerce.

(I note you asked about git 2 weeks, then which programming language to use, then native vs html app, then which test framework to use, now which crawler to use. It makes it sound like you didn't do research on your own)

</comment><comment><USER3> You could try out [http://scrapy.org/](http://scrapy.org/).

</comment><comment><USER4> Not sure what you are asking for, a crawler, or a website to be crawled.</comment>


The Dumbing Of America - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502901.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

<comment><USER2> The mass media promotes the "dumbing down" of America more than anyone else. As smart people increasingly get their information from smarter places, the "dumb" places get even dumber. They no longer have to cater to the more educated crowd, so they don't.

</comment><comment><USER3> This story was too long to read, so I only skimmed it.

But really, now. "The erosion of general knowledge?" Pfft. Everyone knows it's beaches that get eroded, not Generals.</comment>


Sign in with Apple on Website - <AUTHOR> https://sarunw.com/posts/sign-in-with-apple-4/ <comment><USER2> I'm sorry, I meant to mark another submission as duplicate. I reverted my change but the title still says "[dupe]" for some reason.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem.</comment></comment>


High performance real-time search, indexes store in Redis for Rails application - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/huacnlee/redis-search Features<p>Real-time search High performance Segment words search and prefix match search Support ActiveRecord and Mongoid Sort results by one field Homophone search, pinyin search Conditions support <comment><USER2> By the way, picky does something similar and has a redis backend as well:

        http://florianhanke.com/picky/details.html

The website also explains the difference to full-text-indexers like SOLR and elasticsearch.

</comment><comment><USER3> I could see such solutions used in cases where:

1\. you are already using Redis for some other part of the application

2\. you don't want yet to have Lucene/Solr/ElasticSearch

3\. you don't need to support too advanced searches

On the other hand while building such a library could be a good learning exercise, I think that before using it in an application you should look for other already existing libraries and try to collaborate with the original authors.

\--

All things NoSQL: <http://nosql.mypopescu.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> Two questions pop in my mind. How does it compare to Solr ? What's wrong with Solr ?

<comment><USER5> After skimming the doc (in Chinese), here're my two answers, Sir:

* It offers way fewer functionalities than does Solr

* There is nothing wrong with Solr, just that someone wants to try something new that fits his/her needs</comment></comment>


Is Sony's clawback of functionality legal (and/or strategically sound)? - <AUTHOR> http://internationalbs.wordpress.com/2010/03/31/but-ive-already-paid-sony-innovates-around-willingness-to-pay/

<comment><USER2> Something I wonder about: For various reasons (e.g., the 2005 CD rootkit episode) the name "Sony" has very negative associations in my mind. Even before reading this article, if I were in the market for a game console, I wouldn't get a PS3; that "Sony" on the box is a real turn-off. And there might be lots of people like me.

And so I wonder whether this move of Sony's might very well be strategically sound. I don't know whether it will achieve whatever goals Sony has, but I suspect that it will not offend very many customers. The people it would offend are people like me; but they already stay away from Sony, and so do not own a PS3.

On the other hand:

> I am curious as to the legality of altering a product offering ex post, ....

So am I.</comment>


Korea's Plagiarism Problem - <AUTHOR> http://thediplomat.com/2014/08/koreas-plagiarism-problem/

<comment><USER2> I didn't find much in the linked article I hadn't heard before, except "dry labbing", which means faking research -- describing outcomes of studies not actually conducted.

[http://www.answers.com/Q/What_does_dry_labbing_mean](http://www.answers.com/Q/What_does_dry_labbing_mean)

Nice coinage. But guess what? It's more complicated than that -- it can also mean using a mathematical simulation to stand in for a physical model:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_lab](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_lab)

The second link covers both meanings -- the mathematical simulation as well as the fraudulent meaning.</comment>


A command-line fuzzy finder written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/junegunn/fzf <comment><USER2> I have been using this for months now and would feel very unproductive without it, considering how often I use it for searching shell history. I would highly recommend anyone to give it a shot.</comment>


Tunnel Splitter: Accelerating a single TCP connection over multiple ISPs - <AUTHOR> http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/tunnel-splitter-accelerating-a-single-tcp-connection-over-multiple-isps/

<comment><USER2> Check out this simple way to do it with what's already on your linux box _from before the turn of the century_. <=(spooky conan music with flashlight)

<http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.loadshare.html>

6 15Mbit connections from the same cable provider isn't likely to be much faster for you than 2 or 3. They'll all be on the same segment.

Also, I don't know if its improved any in 7 but up until windows XP, the packet reordering this setup will generate makes connections slower than the slowest link. Unless you've got a non-windows os, this will make it worse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea I've never even tried this on windows, if I wanted to use windows with it I'd set it up on a linux box and route my windows machine through that in which case you wouldn't have the issue you described. EDIT: Ah I just realized what you meant about windows and packet reordering. It's actually not an issue with tunnel splitter because all packets will come in order. Tunnel splitter uses N standard TCP connections to tunnel through. The actual data will come to tunnel splitter out of order and it will deal with reconstructing the data, not the OS.

As for the 6 15Mbps connections those were just arbitrary numbers I picked. I'm currently stuck with sucky slower connections which is what I'm using it with. And DSL not cable. I'm not sure what you say about cable is true though since most cable modem speed cap is on the modem itself not at the ISP. At least that used to be the case. Also if you were using different ISPs that wouldn't be an issue, as long as they aren't sharing their network.

In terms of the pure linux routing solution, that is pretty interesting... Does it require that the remote machine has two physical interfaces or could you do the same with virtual interfaces like eth0:0 and eth0:1. Either way there are a few drawbacks with that solution. It will send 100% of your traffic through it rather than being able to selectively proxy. Also it only round robins so there is no intelligent load balancing as there is in tunnel splitter.

<comment><USER2> _In terms of the pure linux routing solution, that is pretty interesting... Does it require that the remote machine has two physical interfaces or could you do the same with virtual interfaces like eth0:0 and eth0:1. Either way there are a few drawbacks with that solution. It will send 100% of your traffic through it rather than being able to selectively proxy. Also it only round robins so there is no intelligent load balancing as there is in tunnel splitter._

Ahh.. read the mighty and mysterious tome of lartc just a bit deeper and all will be revealed. The teql becomes an interface all its own and with the black arts of packet-mark-itsu, and route-fu all this and much more can be accomplished.

I actually tried to write a packet reordering buffer but one of my connections had a pretty big latency so added together, my rtt became huge. My solution was actually to use windows less, and route small interactive stuff like DNS on the low latency, but slow connection.

Oh and virtual interfaces and vlans will both do just fine. I only ever had one nic in my main box, my direcway modem and dialup-box were hooked to it via a little switch.

Yes, I load-balanced a satellite link and a phone modem.

<comment><AUTHOR> cool, i'd be interested in hearing more on your setup, do you have your routing scripts up anywhere?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> " _Tunnel splitter also provides transparent redundancy if ISPs go down. It uses a custom protocol on top of TCP to make sure all packets get delivered. If 10 packets have already been sent out through ISP1 before it is determined that it went down, they will be resent out through another link, so your tunneled TCP connection will not drop._ "

This is absolutely INVALUABLE to online poker players where if they disconnect in a big pot they can lose hundreds or thousands of dollars.

</comment><comment><USER4> At first glance, this sounds similar to Horde: [http://www.usenix.org/events/mobisys05/tech/full_papers/qure...](http://www.usenix.org/events/mobisys05/tech/full_papers/qureshi/qureshi_html/horde- mobisys.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> yea it does look similar, can't get their source downloads to work... have any links?

<comment><USER4> I probably should have posted this URL instead of the one I did: <http://nms.csail.mit.edu/projects/horde/download.html></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are .io domains out of style? - <AUTHOR> Today, I noticed that draw.io - my favorite diagram tool - changed its name to diagrams.net.
Is the .io wave of 2016-ish already gone? The only .io domain I use often is github.io, but that isn't even their main domain.
Was .io a fad and did it already pass? <comment><USER2> draw.io made it clear why they changed: They have ethical concerns with how the .io domain is owned, and security issues with how it is managed: [https://www.diagrams.net/blog/move-diagrams- net](https://www.diagrams.net/blog/move-diagrams-net)

I think there's been a few .io registry issues over the years that have lead people to reconsider using .io as part of business critical infrastructure. I think it's not really gone out of style yet though. I imagine some of the new gTLDs will start to take precedence over .io like .app and .dev, and a lot of people will just go back to the venerable .com.

<comment><USER3> How does each country register with ICANN? Or do they assign the domain themselves?

<comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top- level_domain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain) states that IANA (part of ICANN) is responsible for determining the correct steward for each ccTLD.

I imagine a new country would submit a request to IANA for an assignment?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see a lot more .co than .io now. I prefer to go with a .com and compromise on name.

</comment><comment><USER3> I would say the .ly domain may have been a fad. The high cost of the domain likely was because of the countries origin - Libya. .io is assigned to the British Indian Ocean.

</comment><comment><USER5> diagrams.io is taken..probably squatted..it was likely very expensive. diagrams.co seems to be $10,000. diagrams.com is $20,000 at least.

The hip domain is .so Somalia</comment>


Mark Shuttleworth: It's a solvency problem, not a liquidity problem - <AUTHOR> http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/220

<comment><USER3> Interesting read, but where does he support the assertion that it's a solvency rather than a liquidity problem.

That may be true, as a number of assets (particularly mortgage-backed) have dropped in price dramatically, thus potentially making some banks which relied on them insolvent, but it may only be so in the short term, as the price for those securities is unrealistically low at the moment.

In any case, I'm always one for supporting the point that I make in the title, somewhere in the article.

<comment><USER4> Yes, but those assets are held by banks, who would otherwise be lending that money back out into the economy. Even a modest drop in total loan values across a very broad market (in this case, the US real estate market) means that a _huge_ amount of money just isn't there any more. So you can't borrow it to fund your startup, or business expansion, etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like his idea of a 7-year waiting period on executive bonuses. Anything that gets us out of the quarter to quarter short-term mind set would be an improvement.

<comment><USER6> I don't understand that kind of thing. Shouldn't a company be allowed to be whomever they want however much they want? If not, why not? I know about the incentives for risk taking, but what would be the point of creating a law about it? If banks figure out that a particular "bonus construct" is harmful in the long run, they can change it by themselves.

<comment><USER7> The problem is that it is not necessarily harmful to them, but harmful to others (and encourages behavior to that effect.)

<comment><USER8> > The problem is that it is not necessarily harmful to them, but harmful to > others (and encourages behavior to that effect.)

It's only harmful to others who decide to make the same mistake. It's useful to (different) others who observe and conclude "wow, that's dumb in 3D".

Someone else doing something different is a free (to you) learning opportunity. If it works, you can copy. If it doesn't work, you can avoid.

There are CEOs who are worth $240M/year in specific circumstances. Laws are unlikely to make the right call but the market will, rewarding folks who get it right and punishing those who get it wrong. What can be better than that?

<comment><USER7> But do those who do it wrong get punished, or do they get to keep the $240M? I've seen a lot of incompetent CEOs walk away with substantial golden parachutes, while employees harmed by their actions got nothing but two week's noticw...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If the USA is entering a recession, how come the dollar is now recovering relative to the euro? Can anybody explain it?

[http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=1&from=EUR...](http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=1&from=EUR&to=USD&submit=Convert)

<comment><USER10> Currency prices aren't affected by recession as much as they are by interest rates. The ECB has held really high interest rates through the past few years (which probably wasn't a good economic policy looking back). So, if you buy Euros and deposit them in a European bank, you get higher interest than if you buy dollars and hold them in an American bank. That increases the demand for Euros and when you increase the demand for something, the price goes up.

Recently, most central banks (including the European Central Bank) coordinated a rate cut to prevent the economy from collapsing even more than it already has. That means that European banks won't be offering such high interest as they used to and it means that the demand for Euros falls.

So, it's not the economy so much as a change in interest rate policy at the European Central Bank. The high price of Euros over the past few years wasn't a vote of confidence in the European economy as much as it was the high interest rates you could get in European bank accounts (when compared to American bank accounts).

<comment><USER11> It's been an interesting trade off. I've not tracked the reasoning behind it, but just from watching how things have played out the strong rates managed to establish the euro as a significant foreign reserve currency, while on the other hand hurting european exports. For the latter reason I'd (again, mostly just uninformedly) expected a rate cut for a while.

<comment><USER10> A lot of people have grand theories of how their government is hurting them by things like this. Most of it is just bunk because it just swaps ends.

For example: a strong Euro makes European exports expensive. However, a strong Euro makes it cheap to import things. So, VW has a hard time exporting Jettas, but they have an easy time importing the parts they need to make Jettas.

It's also one of those situations where that increased demand for Euros would eventually need to be spent. Lots of foreigners put their money in Euros raising the price of Euros, but eventually they'll want to spend it and if their buying power is higher in the US or other non-Eurozone places, they'll dump the Euros for that currency which lessens the demand for Euros.

Economics tends toward equilibriums. Lots of things push it out of equilibrium, but not over the long-term.

The one thing that higher interest rates tend to do is discourage investment. The profits of non-financial firms doesn't depend on interest rates and I think it's safe to assume that the average firm sees about 10% growth per annum. So, if you (as an investor) can get a guaranteed 6% from a bank or a potentially risky 10% in stocks, stocks look less attractive than when your bank is giving you 2% interest. The reward for the risk of stocks diminishes as interest rates are higher.

Likewise, on the loan end, higher interest rates make it less attractive for businesses (or individuals) to borrow money to start a company or buy a house since it diminishes their potential profit and makes it riskier that they will even achieve a profit since their costs are higher.

That's not to say raising interest rates is a bad thing in all cases - <USER2> fact, during boom times you want to do that in order to manage the economic growth. But when faced with an economic crisis, it's good to get the money flowing more freely (by having lower interest rates).

<comment><USER11> Yep -- and nice commentary. I'm not one of the conspiracy theorists. :-)

The strong euro definitely hurt the software industry and I suppose other fields where there were "soft" products targeted at international markets. There wasn't a lot to import, but revenues went down with the dollar and salaries were still paid in euro.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> TL;DR: Econmeez fuct.

Next topic, please.</comment>


Samsung secures self-driving car testing permit for California roads - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/31/samsung-secures-self-driving-car-testing-permit-for-california-roads/ <comment><USER2> Their corporate/technical solution towards my exploding washing machine was to just cover up the Heavy Duty and Bedding cycle selectors with a sticker.

Their corporate/technical solution towards their exploding phones was to remotely brick them if they weren't returned by a certain point.

My enthusiasm for their entrance to this market is very low.

<comment><USER3> To be fair on #2 how else can you enforce a recall? Enough communication was sent out and people where still using them.

<comment><USER4> I'd rather have the choice myself—after all, it is incredibly unlikely your phone would actually catch fire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Welcome to the club.[1]

Volkswagen Group of America

Mercedes Benz

Waymo

Delphi Automotive

Tesla Motors

Bosch

Nissan

GM Cruise LLC

BMW

Honda

Ford

Zoox, Inc.

Drive.ai, Inc.

Faraday & Future Inc.

Baidu USA LLC

Wheego Electric Cars Inc.

Valeo North America, Inc.

NextEV USA, Inc.

Telenav, Inc.

NVIDIA Corporation

AutoX Technologies Inc

Subaru

Udacity, Inc

Navya Inc.

Renovo.auto

UATC LLC (Uber)

PlusAi Inc

Nuro, Inc

CarOne LLC

Apple Inc.

Bauer's Intelligent Transportation

Pony.AI

TuSimple

Jingchi Corp

SAIC Innovation Center, LLC

Almotive Inc

Aurora Innovation

Nullmax

Samsung Electronics

[1] [https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testi...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testing)</comment>


Ask HN: What should be the next letter in FAANG? - <AUTHOR> Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google.  What should be the next letter in the FAANG acronym? <comment><USER2> Microsoft is a trillion dollar tech company.

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18515623/microsoft- worth-...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/25/18515623/microsoft- worth-1-trillion-dollars-stock-price-value)

<comment><USER3> FAMANG?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> S for Stripe

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is alibaba not in there?</comment>


Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5B - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/salesforce-is-buying-mulesoft-at-enterprise-value-of-6-5-billion/ <comment><USER3> One year after their IPO? I don't get this. Why didn't they buy it last year paying a premium over the 17 USD a share of their public offering instead of paying a premium over the current 33 USD (or 40 USD I guess)? I don't understand the rationale behind these deals.

<comment><USER4> That's like asking why didn't Yahoo, Google, Apple, Amazon etc. acquire Netflix after the Qwikster debacle when the stock imploded down to $7.x / share losing ~80% of its value (now $317 / share).

As irrational as it sounds (and it is), companies overwhelmingly prefer to chase strength in acquisitions. It makes everything about it look and sound better. They don't care about the cost difference, it's not their money/value being vaporized. They care about protecting their job, so they want positive optics, something that is perceived to move the needle on value.

<comment><USER5> It's not irrational. Integrating an acquired knowledge work company is a costly and risky effort in terms of management bandwidth, culture clash, and business model alignment. Unless you are buying pure assets, it rarely makes sense to acquire a questionable company and risk poisoning your own. That's why most acquisitions are of companies too small to jeopardize the acquirer or healthy enough to be a low risk and worth the effort.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This reminds me of when Oracle purchased BEA for their Weblogic platform 10 years ago. Oracle destroyed that product and company. Importantly it didn't solve their integration problems as all the best people left within the year as they discovered how hard it was to get anything done in a company of that size.

It does confuse me that Mulesoft, a tool that only the best java developers can get value out of, would be purchased by a company that focuses on ease of use or no software. Salesforce likely has its own internal integration problems and needs an enterprise class platform to integrate its own clouds. In which case Mulesoft would be a good choice. I do not see Mulesoft causing much of a problem for the leaders like Informatica or Boomi. Maybe the Salesforce reps will force Mulesoft down their customers throats but not everyone can manage a java based ESB.

Price wise, its obscene at 22x, so congrats to the mulesoft exec team for getting out while the going was good. I know they were struggling to grow beyond being a 1 product company and many execs/staff were burnt out from staying ahead of Wall St. There has been a lot of attrition from the company over the last year. I know because I hired many of their PMs.

Maybe Salesforce fell for the cool aid of Blockchain, as there was a rumor Mule had some kind of blockchain based tech they were working on.

</comment><comment><USER7> Makes me wonder if we will see a Zapier IPO soon. It's a crowded space, integration as a service, and in need of consolidation. Zapier doesn't have MuleSofts enterprise street cred because IMHO weak B2B marketing, but the infrastructure is there.

<comment><USER8> > IMHO weak B2B marketing, but the infrastructure is there

Two very different product sets. Zapier falls over as soon as you want to bring in customized data structures/flows/etc, which frankly every enterprise biz does. It also doesn't integrate with the big on-premise stuff (SAP/Oracle/etc) in a customizable/graceful way.

This is, by the way, not a bad thing.

<comment><USER7> Not at all true.

1\. Zapier is very flexible if you're willing to write a bit of Python code.

2\. Zapier integrates with really any API that supports webhooks, and even those that don't via a CLI and custom language support.

I don't work for Zapier (sadly). But I do use the product every day and have customized it to some pretty unique needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am still trying to wrap my head around why is Mule needed. There is a large push at several companies because of: Enterprise Service Bus to help integrate applications, REST API design specing and testing (Mule AnyPoint platform), and API gateways for throttling and applying security policies on API consumption.

1\. But there are other message middleware in place, brokers like Kafka, Tibco etc. Is an ESB really needed ? What is the actual benefit ?

2\. Do web developers really benefit from using Mule's API design software ? Are there other powerful and free alternatives (technically Mule Community is free but lacks funcationality) or better tools ?

3\. What do you lose out if you towards the Mule-way (ESB, API first strategy) ?

<comment><USER10> No modern company is pushing esb anymore. It's an architectural failure still being pushed by vendors and has been architects.

I use it as a canary to know if a company is technically inept.

<comment><USER11> I've worked with MuleSoft and the ESB really isn't an "ESB". It's really about having the ability to write APIs with specific standards.

It allows you to write micro services without pushing up your own instances, use kube8, or anything of that nature.

It internally uses raml as its service definition that is analogous to OpenAPI/Swagger.

Think of a number of good yet annoying things you have to do when interacting with other businesses when writing APIs.

Certs set up, QoS depending on customer, key rotation, API throttling, authentication, authorization, HA, etc. You essentially push up a lambda onto their service and config.

The power isn't necessarily just that as well, but because they have raml, they publish and support an ecosystem of "connectors" which is mostly just a pretty version of an API and has a UI that allows non devs to do ETL on data although almost no one does that. It allows low level engineers to do it though.

Imagine having an Ubuntu machine(s) doing APIs vs an iPhone using apps. It's packaged nicely for simple API development rather than spinning everything else up that you can.

Mind you, I'm not saying to go out and use it today as it is not cheap but there really is a business case for it.

Lastly, we integrated a lot with Rabbit to help with work that can be done asynchronously. Otherwise your bill from them would be even more expensive.

Would I use it again? Yes, if the company wanted to have the cheapest engineers or use tech savvy product managers and wanted as little DevOps as possible to maintain their code (again think of it like as nicer lambda). Just remember to fork over $200K a year for the bare minimum for what I would call a production grade set up.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the detailed reply. I think I need to wrap my head around this more as I am not (fully) getting the benefits and cases you explained.

From their website, their simple definition of Mule ESB is that is used to "integrate" applications so they can talk to each other, even if using different communication protocols:

Mule, the runtime engine of Anypoint Platform, is a lightweight Java-based enterprise service bus (ESB) and integration platform that allows developers to connect applications together quickly and easily, enabling them to exchange data. It enables easy integration of existing systems, regardless of the different technologies that the applications use, including JMS, Web Services, JDBC, HTTP, and more. The ESB can be deployed anywhere, can integrate and orchestrate events in real time or in batch, and has universal connectivity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This seems strange to me since Salesforce already has an ownership stake in the chief competitor to MuleSoft, Informatica Cloud. Salesforce was one of the four companies that took Informatica private [1] three years ago but it seemed like Salesforce was still treating Informatica, MuleSoft and the other cloud data integration solutions equally. Now if Salesforce fully owns MuleSoft, I expect them to prefer it over the other solutions.

It seems like they are cutting their own throat in a bid to gain more data integration revenue, except the other companies will reduce their partnership with Salesforce so the total revenue decreases over time.

[1] [https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/07/informatica_buyout_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/07/informatica_buyout_closes/)

<comment><USER13> Seems more likely that they want the database connections than the revenue. Everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem is writing Integrations into other platforms and if they make it easier to ingest data in Salesforce and keep you there it will be more sticky.

<comment><USER14> As someone who just finished a custom caching solution for Salesforce-backed data I couldn't agree more. There are a number of solutions out there that attempt to mirror salesforce to i.e. Postgres, but they are expensive. Plenty of people want to leave Salesforce but are caught in by the cost of exfiltration.

That said Salesforce isn't _THAT_ bad. There are plenty of edge cases, dark spots in documentation, shitty pricing tiers, BUT there's also a lot of cool stuff you can do with it and most of the cool stuff is incredibly well geared for solving common business problems.

<comment><USER15> Salesforce deserve a lot of credit for staying online for 15 years or so while upgrading and expanding the platform every six months, while minimising breakage to customers' customisations. Imagine how most projects would look if you tried that, the developers would usually want to scrap it and re-write after 18 months or so.

<comment><USER16> Also, massive credit for being a pioneer of SaaS per se. IMHO that's the most profound and impressive aspect to their success and legacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A lot of these companies - Boomi, Informatica, Snaplogic were banking on low end integration to cloud via the salesforce channel. Salesforce will package mule and then out go all these low end integrations channel for these other companies

On an average about 5- 10% sales was coming via these channels for the companies listed above.

Nice strategic move by Salesforce.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think that MuleSoft is a really great business, although I wouldn't use it personally just due to not being in the right industry.

For back-office environment with tons of point 2 point integrations, it just seems to make sense.

Business model is good. Once you're in, going out is really tough. This is exactly like the SFDC app cloud.

<comment><USER19> I'm in the right business and I still don't understand why I'd ever need this kind of software.

<comment><USER20> I'm in the right business too, and one of the things I've realized is that it's not about building software developers need. It's about building software that people authorized to spend a lot of money think the enterprise needs. It's dazzling to listen the Mulesoft folks talk about experience APIs and system APIs while dragging and dropping stuff. I can see why people would go for it.

<comment><USER21> At my previous job I had to write code to consume mulesoft APIs. Was miserable project, Mulesoft is literally hot garbage.

<comment><USER9> Can you explain? It's being pushed heavily as an api spec, api catalog and middleware, and it's notclear to me why we really need it.

<comment><USER20> A huge part of the benefit of software like Mulesoft's is being a common standard. If your the type of company that will have 50 developers working on your ESB and services that's big. So is the expectation that in 30 years you can hire a new batch of developers that will quickly grok your ESB because Mulesoft will still be a thing.

Mulesoft does have a lot of cool functionality, but my impression is that unless you are the type of organization with dozens of systems, decades long timespan, and dozens of developers that Mulesoft isn't worth the money.

<comment><USER19> I think microservices obviates ESB. If you have a legacy system that you can't replace, build a shim layer. Or, better yet, take the money you had allocated for building an ESB and spend it deprecating your legacy systems.

<comment><USER20> What is an ESB if not a collection of shim layers? What you said in the second sentence is one of the purposes of Mulesoft. Creating a unified and consistent shim layer for all of the legacy systems you can't replace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> BTW, somewhat relevant (since MuleSoft had/has an Enterprise Service Bus - <USER2> ESB, as I remember from checking the company out some time earlier):

There is an ESB for Python called Zato - zato.io . I had interacted with the creator, Dariusz, earlier, and he seemed dedicated to making it a success, and recently I visited the site again, it seems to have got some traction.

</comment><comment><USER23> What will happen to there API Management System?

</comment><comment><USER24> We have found a successful niche for doing simple integrations without all the platform bloat and the best part is that it all runs on the Salesforce platform.

[https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listing...](https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N3000000DpzWaEAJ)

</comment><comment><USER25> salesforce offers its api on swagger/openapi format and MuleSoft was promoting RAML. hope MuleSoft starts offering openapi tools in its new avatar.

<comment><USER26> The RAML just ends up generating the usual swagger/openapi stuff now

<comment><USER27> Mulesoft have been moving away from RAML I believe, although it is still petty core to their product.

[https://blogs.mulesoft.com/dev/api-dev/open-api-raml- better-...](https://blogs.mulesoft.com/dev/api-dev/open-api-raml-better- together/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> $MULE is up 22% on this news.

<comment><USER29> As it should be. The deal spread seems kind of wide, though. I wonder why.</comment></comment>


The British Nationality Act as a logic program (1986) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~sok/papers/s/p370-sergot.pdf <comment><USER2> Very interesting. The demo on pp 376 looks useful.

From the conclusion:

> The British Nationality Act 1981 has also proved to be a rich source of > problems for the use of logic for knowledge representation. It has > highlighted problems with negation as failure and counterfactual conditions > in particular. We believe that the formalization of legislation and the > development of computer systems to assist with legal problem solving and > decision making provide a rich domain for developing and testing artificial > intelligence technology. More tentatively, the accumulated experience of > managing complex systems of law may teach us something about the maintenance > of large bodies of complex software.

Here's another paper by one of the authors, "Legislation as Logic Programs" from 1991: [http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/law.html](http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/papers/law.html)

> In addition to the resemblance between legislation and programs, the law has > other important similarities with computing. It needs for example to > validate legislation against social and political specifications, and it > needs to organise, develop, maintain and reuse large and complex bodies of > legal codes and procedures. Such parallels between computing and law suggest > that it might be possible to transfer useful results and techniques in both > directions between these different fields. One possibility explored in this > paper is that the linguistic structures of an appropriately extended logic > programming language might indicate ways in which the language of > legislation itself could be made simpler and clearer.</comment>


Routers treat HTTP and HTTPS traffic differently - <AUTHOR> http://markmaunder.com/2009/routers-treat-https-and-http-traffic-differently/

<comment><USER2> This article is based on a false premise.

 _Because HTTPS clients and servers set the DF or Do Not Fragment IP flag on packets and regular HTTP clients and servers do not._

There is nothing anywhere in any standard that requires DF to be set for HTTPS traffic. There are certain links on the Internet that will set DF on your traffic in transit because it is more expensive to forward and even more expensive to do deep inspection on fragmented IP packets, but there is no reason this would be done for HTTPS and not for HTTP.

EDIT: For completeness: links to RFC 2246 for TLS 1.0 and one of the draft specs for SSL 3.0 (it was never an official standard). There is nothing about setting the DF bit in the IP header in either document.

TLS 1.0: <http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2246.txt>

SSL 3.0: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-ssl-version3-00>

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's how you set dont-fragment on a socket:

<http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jaunty/man7/ip.7.html> See: IP_MTU_DISCOVER

This premise isn't taken from an RFC. It's based on my own real-world observations of what is crossing the wire. Grab wireshark, fire up tcpdump and form your own opinion - and please do share what you find with us.

Mark.

<comment><USER2> On Linux (at least recent kernels), there are a number of variables that can determine whether or not DF is set on outgoing packets. I ran a few tests with (Ubuntu Hardy) firefox and it seems largely to vary based on the value of /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_no_pmtu_disc. If 1, no DF. If 0, DF set. But it has this behavior regardless of whether I'm using HTTPS or HTTP.

I understand your objection: standards do not often reflect the real world. But the title of your post is misleading. Saying that routers treat https differently than http is just incorrect. When I read it, I thought you were trying to imply that routers were doing some sort of deep inspection, or at least looking at the TCP port numbers.

What is true is that you can't expect PMTU discovery to work reliably over the Internet (another case of standards not reflecting the real world). I work at an ISP and it's a constant source of frustration. In general though, it's something that needs to be fixed on the client side (or at least on the client's ISP side), rather than on the server side.

<comment><AUTHOR> So you're saying that with ip_no_pmtu_disc set to off (the default value), your HTTPS server does not set the DF flag on packets?

What I've seen is that all HTTPS servers (that I've observed) set DF on their data packets. No HTTP servers (that I've observed) set DF for their data packets.

What I would like to know is why SSL servers set DF on their data packets. As you've observed there's nothing in the FAQ and I've googled the socket options and couldn't find any recommendations. I'm curious if an underlying API like openssl is simply so widely used that it's a de facto standard.

<comment><USER2> Also, when you say "HTTPS servers set DF," are you observing from the server or from the client? Over the Internet, it's likely that you'd see different values for DF on opposite sides of the connection. Any router can set or clear the DF bit on your packets for any reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is setting off alarms in my head. He's talking about path MTU discovery, but for some reason he doesn't actually use that term. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_MTU_discovery>

Also, I've never heard of a system that sometimes uses PMTUD and sometimes doesn't. I can imagine that those SSL offload boxes may be doing weird stuff; maybe that's where the author saw this problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks wmf I should have included the reference and have added it. There's a lot more that I don't cover e.g. PMTUD black hole routers, etc. But the article is targeted at an intermediate level audience, so leaving those out for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just tried tcpdump of http vs https, and both had the flag unset :/ (As I'd expect)

Would have been nice if the OP had included some example logs showing the issue.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi axod, on request from a commenter on my blog I've described how I captured packets and analyzed. I'm interested that you saw the DF flag for non-HTTP traffic. Can you tell me which OS and client or browser you used? I used Ubuntu 9.04 and curl, but have seen the same df/non-df behavior with a variety of other clients on the same OS.

Mark.

<comment><USER5> You don't need to greet the user you're replying to, and you sure as hell shouldn't sign your comments.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but you don't need to be so harsh about it..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tinkering with your network cards MTU just to try to access a web site is probably a bad idea in most cases!</comment>


Paul Graham at Startup School (2008) (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc

<comment><AUTHOR> I have read all of PG's essays and have seen some of his videos. This one is awesome. The way he uses the slides or I should say the way he doesn't uses the slides during the talk is how it should be. Whenever, I read about him and see what he is doing, it makes me wish, can I be like him 10-15 years down the line and have my own YC kind of thing in India.

</comment><comment><USER2> What an excellent presentation. Benevolence not because it is good but because it works.

</comment><comment><USER3> 3? 2:

 _Make desirables_

<comment><USER4> Supply demand.</comment></comment>


Mathematical Concepts: How Do Mathematicians Jump to Conclusions? (1998) - <AUTHOR> https://www.edge.org/conversation/verena_huber_dyson-on-the-nature-of-mathematical-concepts-why-and-how-do-mathematicians <comment><USER2> >How come we jump to CORRECT conclusions? Even if the guess was not quite correct, it usually was a good hunch that, properly adjusted, will open up new territory.

How much does survivor bias play into this idea that all hunches are at least on the right track? For example, I once wanted to study mathematics in grad school and spent my free time looking for interesting patterns. I ended up only doing one not very interesting presentation as an undergrad. Because of that and a middling score on the GMAT, I decided a math Phd wasn't a good choice for me.

But shouldn't people with a similar experience still included when looking at how "mathematicians" guess? Are mathematicians just more likely to have been people that _had_ a good guess and therefore decided to keep studying mathematics?

So what I want to know is: how good are their guesses _beyond_ their first big win? Maybe even in a topic unrelated to their previous work? That'd be the more useful question if you want to find productive habits or traits.

And examining famous outliers isn't very helpful except for a biography.

Disclaimer: I haven't finished the article. It's long and rambling, so I might not finish it.

<comment><USER3> I'm an applied mathematician. I don't do much theorem proving in my day to day work, though I have worked closely with people who do. In my experience, the "guessing" is just half of what makes really good mathematicians really good. The other part is verification: taking intuition and turning it into proof. Most of the time the proof works out exactly as one would expect, occasionally one discovers something -- maybe a technical wrinkle that can be overcome with a bit more effort but requires a new idea, maybe a major conceptual gap overlooked before. I'm not a professional programmer or an electrical engineer, but I've been around people who were very good at those things, and being able to think simultaneously at a conceptual level and dig down to the nitty gritty details are both important.

In short, good mathematicians make correct guesses because they've been down the wrong path many times, and know where their intuition may lead them astray.

The thing about math (and most other subjects) is that at the undergrad level, we teach mostly the nitty gritty stuff. In PhD courses we gradually start to teach how to think at a more conceptual level. But the part that I find both hardest and most rewarding -- taking vaguely understood ideas and giving them precise mathematical formulation -- isn't done much in math departments.

Edit: I know I'm not addressing your point directly, which I think is a good one. More clarifying some of the points raised in the article from my perspective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something I found useful and related was George Polya's book series "Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning" [1]. It goes into how we make "good" guesses in mathematics and how to improve the way we recognize patterns. If you are curious about this subject and want to improve your "mathematical intuition", this series helped me tremendously.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Plausible-Reasoning- Two-V...](https://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Plausible-Reasoning-Two- Volumes/dp/1614275572)

</comment><comment><USER5> He's hanging a lot on the taxicab story, but it turns out that he had done some investigation of that class of numbers some years before, and had written down 1729 in one of his notebooks in that context. It's just as plausible that he just remembered it.

<comment><USER6> > Now return to Ramanujan and see how the first thing that springs to the > naive eye beholding the number 729 is that adding 81 = 9^2 turns it into 810

The article is bewildering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This subject is discussed (although from a different angle) at length in Douglas Hofstadter's book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. [0]

There's also good reading to be done around this subject as it pertains to the problem of induction. [1]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_An...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_Concepts_and_Creative_Analogies) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is the idea behind intuitionism.

</comment><comment><USER9> Verena was my teacher, one the biggest influences in my life, and a good friend.</comment>


How to name your startup in 3 easy steps - <AUTHOR> http://www.policygenius.com/blog/owl-name-3-steps-naming-your-startup/

<comment><USER2> This is really solid advice. Here's the Archimedes reference in case you didn't remember it immediately like me: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_(word)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_\(word\))

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats, guys. I think this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Also great to see this hit HN front page.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment Kyle. We really struggled with this, so hopefully people can learn from our mistakes

</comment><comment><USER4> Fantastic read, thanks a lot</comment>


Why Apple Won't ARM the MacBook - <AUTHOR> http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT050911220752

<comment><USER2> Some big assumptions there that I'm not so sure about, like emphasis of processing power over battery life. And also treating MacBooks as Apple's main product, while iOS devices appear to be the more important segment.</comment>


SimplyBox is like Google Notebook - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2009/01/14/simplybox-lets-users-organize-info-images-snagged-from-the-web

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

 _The obvious rival here is Google Notebook, the search giant powered plugin that also lets you select text and images from the web as you're browsing and organize them into neat categories. But SimplyBox is surprisingly more pliable and intuitive. First off, Google Notebook doesn't take a screenshot of how info looks on its page of origin — rather, you highlight the content you want with your cursor and it's converted into a standard format (much like blog posts are in Google Reader). You also need to designate labels for each item you note (Paris Vacation or otherwise), whereas with SimplyBox, you just drag your screenshot to the appropriately labeled box._

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm not seeing it. SimplyBox is more cluttered and doesn't offer the sharing and integration that Notebooks did with other Google products.</comment>


Only 6 of the 20 largest software companies are in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://scotchi.net/2009/07/only-6-of-the-20-largest-software-companies-are-in-silicon-valley/

<comment><USER2> Eliminating the word "Only" in the title, you get "6 of the 20 largest software companies are in Silicon Valley!"

<comment><USER3> And no other metro area has more than 1.

<comment><USER4> Maybe not on that list...but the Seattle area does have Microsoft, Amazon, and Nintendo...all very large companies.

<comment><USER5> Also Boeing which doesn't sell software but has more programmers and software engineers than most companies that do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This list is shit.

CSC, Capgemini, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and ACS don't sell software. They sell consulting, of which actual software coding is but a part.

<comment><USER7> The same could be said about Google. For the most part, it sells advertising.

<comment><USER6> Google's fascinating when it comes to categorization. I think it's pretty clear that they make software. What's awesome is that they, as you say, don't monetize that s/w by selling it (like 37signals or whatever other internet company); they do so through the sale of advertising space. They're the biggest dichotomy between core competencies (software engineering) and monetization (ads) that I can think of, perhaps in history.

<comment><USER8> GE: Core competency = training middle management. Monetization = jet engines, locomotives, formerly household appliances, etc.

Berkshire Hathaway: Core competencies = Warren Buffett, AAA credit rating, willingness to keep former owners on as managers. Monetization = insurance, furniture, candy.

WalMart: Core competency: Logistics management, supplier bargaining power. Monetization: every household good imaginable.

Nike: Core competency = advertising. Monetization = sneakers & sportswear.

Actually, seems like companies with wildly disparate core competencies and monetization schemes tend to do pretty well. Or maybe it's selection bias, and the ones that do well do _really_ well but the rest fail miserably. Either way, I'm waiting for some company to close the Google -> Nike loop by leveraging their expertise in sneakers and sportswear to sell lots of software.

<comment><USER9> Looking at it in a slightly different way, Nike+ uses expertise with shoes and expertise with interaction design to sell a decent amount of hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Silicon Valley is not the best place to have an enormous software company. Its the best place to have a startup.

<comment><USER6> But it's no worse than any other place. Meaning that if you had to pick anywhere, you'd pick the Valley.

<comment><USER11> Well, a large software company has varying needs, some of which may not be met well in the Valley. For example, Zappos started in SF, but moved to Las Vegas for the lower cost of living.

<comment><USER6> No, sir, they moved to Vegas to avoid sales tax on shipping to CA residents. They no longer have a CA nexus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This list is incorrect. The author asks "just where have most of the great software companies been started?", and proceeds to list headquarters. Three corrections, for US companies (yes, I checked the entire list):

      2. Microsoft: Albuquerque, New Mexico
      6. First Data: Omaha, Nebraska
      11. Computer Sciences Corporation: El Segundo, California

So make that 7, for what it's worth. The list really isn't worth looking at, though. The other problems mentioned here are trivial, compared to the problem of a sample size of 20 being _too damn small to have any meaning_.

I hate lists like this, and the stupid conclusions drawn from them. Exercise for the reader my ass.

</comment><comment><USER13> I should restate. Most of these companies have a presence in the Valley. Here's where they are.

1\. IBM, Almaden 2\. Microsoft, 85 and 101 3\. Oracle, Redwood Shores 4\. Google, next to Microsoft 5\. Softbank, partner with Yahoo 6\. SAP, Palo Alto 7\. Accenture, San Jose, next to Adobe 8\. Computer Sciences Corporation, haven't seen them 9\. Yahoo, next to Moffet Field 10\. Capgemini, Cupertino

</comment><comment><USER14> What's a "location"? I have friends who work in: Intel, Haifa, Israel; Google, New York, NY; IBM, Gaithersburg, MD; etc.

This "location" is, apparently, the location of the headquarters. Who works at the headquarters? Top management? Or is it about where the company started? A startup is normally a small company, and a small company is unlikely to spread wide (although these days it is far from unusual to find a company with management and the sales department in the US and development in the Ukraine). But when one deliberately selects a large company, I would expect them to explain how they define the location and for what purpose. I did not get it from the article.

(Aside: "one selects... them explain": modern English?)

<comment><USER15> as location becomes ever less important for running a business governments will hopefully be forced into competing more strongly for business with sensible tax structures.

<comment><USER14> Can we have a distributed government outsourced to India to reduce costs?

<comment><USER8> Sure. It's called exile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not sure that the "largest" companies are even relevant in a discussion about the valley since the larger companies all tend to be outliers in one way or another.

About 10% of the INC 500 are based in California. Higher than anywhere else? Maybe, I don't know.. but not exatly earth shattering.

</comment><comment><USER17> Except that, I notice, aside from IBM, Microsoft and SAP, I've only ever heard of the companies on that list that are from California.

</comment><comment><USER18> he's missing a few, notably electronic arts.

</comment><comment><USER19> The money is in the valley.

</comment><comment><USER20> Alternatively, "30% of the 20 largest software companies are in SV".</comment>


Ryan Davis, 1979 - 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/ryan-davis-1979-2013/1100-4685/

<comment><USER2> I've been listening to Ryan Davis on the Giant Bomb podcast every week for the last several years. It's often a _long_ podcast, so this is literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of having this guy's voice in my head.

I once noticed how intimate a medium podcasting can be when one of the Giant Bomb guys visited Seattle and I was deeply offended that someone who _felt like a very close friend_ came to town and didn't even bother to visit me.

This morning, when I got the news that he died, I felt it in a way that I haven't felt for years.

<comment><USER3> Plus all the videos and live streaming. This is a horrible day. Ryan Davis left us all too soon.

<comment><USER4> Same here.. With the podcasts and quick looks and all the video content (I'm a premium GB subscriber), these guys have been a constant part of my life for a few years now, and I was affected much more deeply than I expected when I saw the news today..

[http://thanksryan.com/](http://thanksryan.com/) was put up by a friend of his, and I think it sums up Ryan Davis quite well.. He would have laughed..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ryan Davis was a cofounder of giantbomb.com. He died on the 3rd during his honeymoon.

He's been prolific in games press for a long time and will be missed by other members of the press, fans of the site, and developers of games.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the clarification. So weird. Was this just a random thing? Does anyone know?

<comment><USER5> No cause of death has been given.

The common speculation floating around is a heart attack, but there isn't any solid evidence I know of for this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not the same Ryan Davis as [https://github.com/zenspider](https://github.com/zenspider).

</comment><comment><USER8> He will be missed by a big community, that always enjoyed hearing his voice and witty banter on the podcast and in the videos on giantbomb

<comment><USER9> I've stopped playing games regularly, but I still listen to Ryan and the bombcast crew on my commute because they create such an enjoyable podcast. I'm sad to hear the news about Ryan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Absolutely tragic. He always brought life to the various video's and podcast's on giantbomb. He will be missed.

</comment><comment><USER11> I used to watch his video reviews on GameSpot around 10 years ago. Extremely sad news.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'll miss the duder.</comment>