Ask HN: ImLocated.com Domain Free For Best Concept - <AUTHOR>

I registered the domain ImLocated.com a while back, but never used it. I'd be happy to let it go to someone who is going to use it for a project. If you're interested, track me down (I'm not hard to get in touch with) and send me a message with your idea (general terms, no specifics necessary). I'll give it away over the weekend to the person with the most interesting concept (by my standards at least). <comment><USER2> A web site where people stranded on a deserted island can let the world know where they are - and to send help immediately.</comment>


New Startups Form in Private Conversations - <AUTHOR> https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2020/06/19/new-startups-form-in-private-conversations/ <comment><AUTHOR> New startups form in private conversations: here are some ways to make it easy for potential cofounders to find you based on the problem you are working on or customer need you plan to address. Some number of these random conversations will propel your startup forward.

Write about what you are working on, exposing your thinking and the problem you are trying to solve. You don't have to share your "secret sauce." Your goal is to attract co-conspirators who are also interested in working on the same problem or meeting the needs of a specific kind of customer.

Writing includes blogging, tweeting, and posts on LinkedIn or other social media.

Talk about what you are working on. This can be "lightning talks" or impromptu talks at unconferences, this can be 20 seconds of your introduction when you meet someone new or are asked to introduce yourself in a new setting.

Post your presentation or a transcript so that other entrepreneurs working on a similar challenge can find you when rummaging through Mr. Google's basement.

Ask folks you meet if they know of others working on the same need or problem. If they say they do, then ask for an introduction.

Join groups that are focused on the same challenge or issue that your startup addresses.

If the chat is open on an online meeting or webinar, post one short note with a link to more information that highlights your focus.</comment>


Ask HN: What are the best obscure/less well known jobs? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Morticians, I heard they make a killing.</comment>


Ask HN: Who Has a Contract Template for Bug Fixing? - <AUTHOR> Just needs terms for Hourly rate, with some NDA language, and a term that says we will deliver a stable fully tested product. thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> feel free to upload it to Docracy.com ;-) thanks!</comment>


Swiss-Based Cloud VPS – For Developers Who Care - <AUTHOR> https://www.cloudscale.ch/?id=open-now <comment><USER2> As a Swiss citizen myself, I am not convinced that hosting in Switzerland is any better privacy-wise than e.g. in Germany. New laws like BÜPF and NDG seem to get us closer to where the EU is in terms of what the government is allowed to access, and what providers are forced to log.

This talk is a good intro on what's going on in Switzerland right now [https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7205-netzpolitik_in_der_schweiz#...](https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7205-netzpolitik_in_der_schweiz#video)

<comment><USER3> Internationally wise, it's not. We have a long history of doing whatever other big countries ask us to do. Especially when the request comes from the United States. (I'm Swiss as well)

Switzerland has been hosting Onyx [1] for fiteen years now ;)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_(interception_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_\(interception_system\))

Edit: typo

<comment><USER4> Post-2008 (i.e., the final turning point re: the IRS was when the former UBS employee spilled his beans, but I'd be willing to bet Swiss cooperation post 9-11 just by some heavy-handed Homeland Security Agents in poorly tailored suits storming in discourteously) even grandfathered numbered accounts have no security in them for foreign nationals. As I understand it, if you're an MNC you transfer price and lodge your funds in the most tax-friendly domicile (Ireland) and retain those earnings without any remittance. For US nationals, the best way to engage in tax avoidance is to play a game of seashells in the Seychelles (oh god I'm sorry for the pun) with shelf-companies and auxiliary signatories, and keep on routing around until you eventually land up in HK. The only thing a US citizen gain from a Swiss bank account from is protection domestic civil litigation, i.e., divorce claims. Swiss nationals, as I understand it, still retain their anonymity but who really knows.

Fun fact: It's not the Caymans, Switzerland, or HK that is the largest tax shelter in the world - it's the US banking system.

<comment><USER5> I've heard that for nationals outside US, US is very good place to store your wealth. Because they give zero information outside. However practically all financial institutions outside US are very dependant on US finance infrastructure. That means they will comply hard with US data requests, which means that US citizens outside US have hard time hiding their assets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If a company's tag line is "For Developers Who Care", I'd expect more than a blatant rip-off of DigitalOcean's home page.

The first part of the page is dominated by the demo on the right on both and the tag-line and signup on the left. The workflow for creating a VPS is basically the same right down to selecting an SSH key. Even the demo video is surrounded by the same minimalist OS X-like window. It isn't a standard library that they both share, but rather a visual copying.

It seems tacky to use the same home page. More than that, I've used a bunch of different providers (Vultr, DigitalOcean, Linode, AWS, Rackspace, OVH) and they all have very different control panel interfaces showing distinct development. It seems like they simply copied DigitalOcean's interface as much as possible.

Going back to the home page, the second part is a three column bit with info about the service and each column is dominated by a giant icon, just like DigitalOcean. Next comes the pricing boxes on each. Both have a "what people have said about" section. Both put another signup box right before the footer. Both have the same grey footer. Even the headers in the footer (like "PRODUCT") are all-caps like DigitalOcean. The whole home page is just a rip off of the whole flow and style of DigitalOcean.

The fact that they simply ripped off DigitalOcean's user interface seems to discredit their claim that they're "For Developers Who Care". They don't care enough to do more than blatantly copy a competitors design (and then charge a premium by mentioning the name "Swiss" a lot). Cloudscale - For Developers Who Like Making Blatant Rip-Offs?

That might sound harsh, but DigitalOcean has worked hard to gain its reputation and trust in the community. To have someone with no reputation (yet) simply copy their design, possibly out of a combination of laziness and trying to ride DigitalOcean's coattails, seems really crappy (especially when they're trying to claim that they're for people that care).

<comment><USER7> So, you're saying:

1\. DigitalOcean is a good product people trust.

2\. They copied everything about it.

3\. So, it's a bad product that we can't trust?

What am I missing aside from an ethical argument? If it's _operationally_ like DO, then that's already an argument in it's favor. If it's just appearances, then it's a knock-off that ain't worth shit. I'm ignoring ethics of copying interfaces for now in favor of quality of service as many businesses will. Clearly, the interface will do just fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would prefer moving some of my many VPS to a local provider but Exoscale and this one have a minimum of around CHF 30 which doesn't make it worth it for me. I run many small instances not just a few big ones.

In addition I would like to know which datacenter this is in and who is providing the uplink? Many datacenters in Zürich are foreign owned. Equinix alone has 5 running and will have 7 soon.

EDIT: BTW Swisscom offers application hosting ([https://developer.swisscom.com/pricing](https://developer.swisscom.com/pricing))

<comment><USER9> Just a small heads up: Swisscom is the ex-monopolist and very anti net- neutrality and even went as far as to dream about demanding money from startups who want priority of their data.

<comment><USER7> So, on the flip side, the availability will probably be good for the near and long term? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> WOW that's expensive for no good reason. I can get a server like this for about 10% of the price at for example OVH. Apart from being based in Swiss which I'm sure you're not the only host, what does this have to offer that's worth the 1000% higher price?

<comment><USER11> It's in Switzerland, which is one of the most expensive countries.

<comment><USER12> Switzerland is expensive, true, but it's not 10x more expensive than France.

<comment><USER4> It's a great marketing ploy for those who are paranoid of the MPAA and want to tunnel their torrents or add an additional extra node between them and a Silk Road. He could commoditize it directly and sell SOCKS 5 proxies for 10 dollars a month and make a killing just because of the false perception that the Swiss government won't release information at the request of US federal agencies. People are way better off using US-hostile-ish countries like China, Russia, or Yemen (though I'd imagine a Visa charge to Yemen might add a whole new set of watch-list problems for a US national).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Simple pricing. No need for a calculator.

And then you quote prices in swiss franks instead of US dollars as its common in hosting industry.

I don't have currency converter in my head nor I know USD->CHF rate

<comment><USER14> If you are looking at their website using a browser connected to the internet, you don't need to do currency conversions in you head and memorise the exchange rates every morning, you can just use that same browser to ask for a currency conversion from any of a number of sites, e.g.

[https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?#q=1%20chf%20in%20usd](https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?#q=1%20chf%20in%20usd)

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1chf+in+usd&ia=currency](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1chf+in+usd&ia=currency)

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+chf+in+usd](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+chf+in+usd)

If they are charging in CHF, then it's in both their and their customers' interests to quote in CHF, otherwise fluctuations in currency markets and variations in the exchange rates offered by their customers' banks will invalidate those quotes.

<comment><USER15> You do have a point, but it still would be more convenient if the website showed the price in USD\other currencies as well.

<comment><USER16> The problem is that exchange rates vary. Showing the current rate would be misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> CHF 30 (approx $30 USD) is quite steep for the base offering, compared to US- based providers (DO, Linode, AWS).

What specific guarantees do I have regarding data privacy that I wouldn't get of I hosted in the US? That's something I'd like to see listed prominently on the site, so I can determine if the extra cost is worth it.

<comment><USER4> I'll save you the trouble - no it is not. I read the entire (very short) TOS just to see if this was mentioned. They mentioned their _Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung_'s address of operation, a few indemnification clauses re: natural disasters and the right to TOS you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> OT: Not to sound negative, but I always find it strange to see these 'popular' banners on these (now standard) pricing pages. I'm sure for such a new product no pricing plan is yet 'popular' or do they already have so many customers?

<comment><USER19> I've seen enough pricing pages to know that "popular" really means "recommended", but with the added benefit of social proof.

<comment><USER20> Wow, you actually believe that? To me 'popular' means 'has the best margins for us'.

<comment><USER21> For me these popular badges always were much more about anchoring [1].

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

<comment><USER20> Sure, but that's just the means, the margins are the ends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I once rented servers from Switzerland. I guess mainly based on the image of them being secure, privacy-oriented etc. It was not cheap, of course, but I was fine with that.

Turns out that they had really lousy security practice, their staff was probably some idiots. The granted access to our servers to some random dude with simple social engineering hack. In addition they never admitted their mistake, although it was clear from the admin console what had happened (I guess they didn't even research it).

The company in question was Private Layer Inc. Never use their services. I will personally never trust anything Swiss on any IT-related.

<comment><USER22> If you use that kind of measure, I guess we'll all have to create our own countries to make sure we don't use services from a country that once had a company with bad practices?

<comment><USER23> Yeah, that doesn't work out as well as you might think.

<comment><USER22> I wondered if you would comment on that ;)

Wasn't really meant as a practical suggestion though

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What about putting the prices in EUR or USD?? I know it only takes a google search to find out. But you see, other than Swiss no one really cares, thinks, calculates or anything in Swiss francs.

</comment><comment><USER25> Is Bitcoin and/or paysafecard an payment option? all that talk about privacy is kinda silly if can not pay with (Semi)private payment methods

edit: why downvote? is this not a valid concern for a service that is marketing privacy as its main pro?

<comment><USER22> Presumably it is not about the operator's privacy, but about keeping the data stored/processed private. Protecting your users' data, not you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> On-topic but not for this particular company...

What is an ideal host for privacy? Been doing research for a potential security product and that particular question is one of the still-open problems to be solved.

</comment><comment><USER27> Unfortunately CH gave in to the US -- look e.g. at the banks, or at the EU, especially DE blackmailing tiny CH to give up privacy.

Iceland is a country worth investigating when it comes to hosting.

</comment><comment><USER28> Comparing with DigitalOcean (seemingly CloudScale's model), what's missing here for me is a dirt-cheap, let's-spin-a-VM-for-a-single-webpage option. I want something like CloudScale to exist so I'll definitely give it a try.

Edit: had a comment about previous performance, but I had mistaken CloudScale for one of their competitors, woops.

</comment><comment><USER29> Is there still a market for providers that only sell bare bone private servers?

I wish more would look into cloning Heroku in terms of features and ease of deployment.

It's not just easy to create, deploy and manage but it's easy to add a slave or replace Memcached with Redis.

<comment><USER30> > Is there still a market for providers that only sell bare bone private > servers?

Are there still sysadmins out there who would prefer that their servers run only the softwtare they themselves installed on it, no more?

There's something to be said for turnkey solutions like Heroku, but there will always be those who want more control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Instead of advertising your "simple control panel", advertise your "simple and secure API".

</comment><comment><USER32> This is very expensive. I have the exact same spec from a German provider for 10% of the price.

</comment><comment><USER33> I'm the founder of SSD Nodes, a US-based cloud provider, and we have special HN pricing where you can get 1GB RAM instances for only $2.99/mo

[https://www.ssdnodes.com/hn/](https://www.ssdnodes.com/hn/)

* You can upgrade with zero downtime to a larger server (it will live resize)

* 100% uptime SLA

* Fastest SSDs (we've achieved over 200K write IOPS and 1GB/s writes)

* Direct support from engineers

* Bitcoin payments accepted

* 7-day no-hassle refund guarantee

/plug

<comment><USER34> What virtualization do you use? OpenVZ, KVM, XenPV, XenHVM?

<comment><USER33> Across the company we use all of them, because our enterprise clients all have different needs. For this deal we use OpenVZ, with our own proprietary workload balancing algorithm that migrates containers so that each gets optimal performance.

<comment><USER34> Thanks. Like most technically-minded people, I wouldn't be interested in OpenVZ even at $2.99 a month.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


In Hong Kong, flats really are cheaper when they contain the number 4 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dataguru.hk/2018/07/10/hong-kong-higher-floors-are-more-expensive-and-4-is-avoided/ <comment><USER2> In the states it's quite common to number the floors of a building by avoiding the number 13. I think this is pure madness. 10, 11, 12, 14, 15...

All of that because of a fantasy book where people had supper and they happen to be 13 at the table.

Edit: Here's an example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_(number)#/media/File:Many_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13_\(number\)#/media/File:Many_buttons_\(4187599550\).jpg)

<comment><USER3> The same on planes. There is never (I've never seen it anyway) row #13. It goes straight from row #12 to #14.

<comment><USER4> Qantas to the rescue of all that is rational.

[https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/Qantas_Airways/Qantas_Airw...](https://www.seatguru.com/airlines/Qantas_Airways/Qantas_Airways_Boeing_737-800.php?flightno=833&date=2018-07-10)

<comment><USER5> And they have a great safety record. Maybe 13 is a lucky number after all?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the number N is considered unlucky to the point that it is skipped, then shouldn't people be worried that they are living someplace that _should_ have the number N, even if it was labeled N+1?

<comment><USER7> In this case it seems the bad luck is attributed to how the number four is spoken. So if you avoid saying it you avoid the bad luck. Looks like this superstition works differently from how 13 works where the count itself is unlucky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another funny old news about superstition is that a public research institute located in Hong Kong Science Park used HK$180,000 (~USD $23,000) on fung shui consultation[1].

[1]: [https://www.scmp.com/article/595459/value- money](https://www.scmp.com/article/595459/value-money)

<comment><USER9> You'd love the HSBC building in Hong Kong. HSBC own a large open space immediately in front of the building purely because its good feng shui to have an open view of the water [1]. It's a completely open space in the most premium area of down town Hong Kong island, right next to the ferry terminal. It must be worth so much money.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC_Building_(Hong_Kong)#Feng...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC_Building_\(Hong_Kong\)#Feng_shui)

<comment><USER10> This seems like a good example of how "feng shui" can be just "good atmosphere". A open view over the water is worth a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's becoming common to build condo towers without fours in markets intended to appeal to buyers from Asia.

Floors:...11,12,15,16....33,35,36,37,38,39,50,51,52,53,55...

Units: 1,2,3,5,6,7...

</comment><comment><USER12> A lot of the less upmarket (older) buildings don't omit the number four which could factor in. Older buildings, although bigger, tend to have high maintenance fees and are less desirable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I didn't normalise for age/grottiness of building. But isn't it interesting that it's the older/grottier buildings that didn't skip the number 4?

But this doesn't really explain the difference in prices even for floor 44...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In Japan also frequently parking spaces skip the number 4. House numbers too. And probably assigned phone numbers limit the number of 4s you get at once. Its a little silly.

</comment><comment><USER14> So the number 4 in Cantonese sounds like the word for death. Though a different tone is used.

Thing is the number 9 sounds just like the word for dog, why doesn't that cause a problem?

<comment><USER15> 4 is being actively avoided. And combines with other numbers, like 14(to die), 174(going to die) make it a very ominous number indeed.

<comment><USER16> 174 sounds more like "dying together". How about 54 "not dying"?

<comment><USER15> 1 can pronounce as 一(yi1), but sometimes can be also pronounce as 幺(yao1). The latter sounds similar to another character 要(yao4, meaning command to do something), and together represents as 要去死(something like you are going to die).

As to 54, maybe you are referring to 勿死(wu4 si3)? Its meaning is closer to, please don't die, than not dying, and though I am not sure, but 勿 uses to negating another word seems kinda ancient and outdated.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're explaining with Mandarin, but Hong Kong is mostly Cantonese-speaking. [http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/468/](http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/468/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Its a bit surprising to see this. I thought they go for using '3B' instead of an outright '4'

<comment><AUTHOR> I only include integer floors in this analysis, but there very few flats with regex \d\w. Or you're surprised there are 4s at all?

<comment><USER18> As seen in Sydney: [https://antontsau.livejournal.com/291486.html](https://antontsau.livejournal.com/291486.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> 4-containing houses and apartments sell for a discount even in Australia. Been to quite a few auctions, 0 Asian punters for 4s vs at least 5 for non-4s. Some apartment buildings are already built without level 4 altogether.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author of this post and the founder of dataguru.hk, AMA

<comment><USER19> Very interesting work! Just a quick note, for this kind of evenly spaced, discrete X data, stairs plots are usually better. For instance this highlights better the 13th floor issue, which in the line plot was obscured: [https://i.imgur.com/cSjT5xx.png](https://i.imgur.com/cSjT5xx.png)

<comment><USER20> I agree that a stepped line graph is better that a line graph, but since the data is discrete and not continuous a lollipop chart or maybe a bar chart would convey it better.

Monty from xiph.org learned me that: [https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml](https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml) @ 5:57

<comment><USER19> Also a good option, although they seem a bit "busy" for my taste when Y values are very close: [https://i.imgur.com/4ePNXbp.png](https://i.imgur.com/4ePNXbp.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Stupidity tax.

<comment><USER22> Please don't post snarky one-liners.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment>


Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work - <AUTHOR> http://kentnguyen.com/ios/what-does-it-take-to-make-an-ios-app/ <comment><USER2> This is a general problem with custom software, not just iOS apps.

Most businesses outside major corporations didn't start commissioning custom software until the rise of the commercial use of the internet in the late '90s, when all kinds of small and medium sized businesses wanted their own website. Websites were relatively simple back then, and the people willing and able to make them cheap. Hell, even though I was already a professional programmer for years, back in 1994 the idea that someone would pay a few hundred bucks me to make a "homepage" was just cool enough in itself.

Websites became more complicated applications, no longer something hobbyists could do on the side, and became more diverse, including apps for specific platforms like iOS. The cost of having an online presence has multiplied many times in less than a decade because of the sheer amount of work involved, and the level of professionalism required these days.

But most businesses don't commission software ever few months, or even every few years. So every time they want a new app, or a refresh of their website, they are suddenly faced with a shockingly high price tag compared to the last time they wanted something similar (or at least similar from their perspective).

And we're only just getting started. The shortage of decent developers has only begun to translate itself into higher costs. Most employers are still rather conservative in the current economic climate, and developers are notoriously bad at selling themselves.

<comment><USER3> There are 2 points we also have to consider when specifically talking about the custom development market, one is that advertising development houses are not helping the issue by putting out teaser ads like _Get your iPhone app idea built for $5000_. It sets pricetags in peoples minds that are unrealistic. When you get down to the fine print, if the app requires communicating to REST service or design work that numbers is out the door even with the advertiser.

The second being many times custom development shops don't weigh customer needs with COTS. For example in our shop we many times have customers that come in looking for a web presence. When we analyze their needs, it is apparent that Wordpress and a template will fit the bill and get them to market the quickest. I am not a huge fan of PHP on a personal level, but if Wordpress fits the bill I would be doing my client a disservice to not steer them down that path. I think for quite a few custom development shops everything looks like a custom development problem. I think if they would take the time to learn some of the cheaper solutions that will work for lower budget clients, then they can offer a product portfolio that matches the budgets of the client.

<comment><USER2> The latter is exactly what we regularly do. It's still a pain though, talking a client down from their original ideas (sometimes piles of paper with all kinds of ambitious features) to something that matches their needs within their budget.

Plus, these often turn out to be not particularly desirable clients that take up a lot of time, and there isn't sufficient margin on simple WordPress jobs to give such clients the same amount of attention as on major custom projects. It's very hard to make these clients happy with off-the-shelf solutions yet still make a bit of profit.

COTS helps, but it doesn't cover the gap between client expectations and reality. It's more of a "better-than-nothing" solution.

And don't even get me started on the cost of maintenance and upgrades. You don't want to have a few dozen outdated leaky WordPress sites in your portfolio, let alone a hacked site associated with your name.

<comment><USER3> For us, we have a guy that manages all of these type of contracts. It's kind of like an entrepreneur in the making kind of arrangement, for him. I agree on the hacking issue, which is why we personally don't host Wordpress sites and the person that handles Wordpress size clients makes it very clear that Wordpress provides the platform, security and all, that we provide the design, customization of template, SEO, analytical, etc.

While there are a lot of pain-in-the-rear small clients it is not unique to them nor are all of them pains. We have had a lot of small clients turn into large clients as well, we have had a lot of small clients refer us to large clients. How we personally made it worth while was to find a person that wanted to grow a company, but offered them the advantage of doing it from within a current company. This person is now, managing Wordpress (Drupal and a few others) for several shops like ours. He also receives a commission when one of his clients outgrows him and is ready to move into custom development. It has worked well for us, but it is by no means the bread and butter, but it does save a lot of time by not spending cycles with people that just flat out can't or won't spend the money to pay for custom software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a "business person" I need to know three things to hire someone:

1) how much did it cost other people to build similar apps (comparative analysis) 2) that you are able to build the product successfully (reducing technical risk) 3) that the price is low enough that the estimated Rev will produce a return (ROI)

\- If you can present those points clearly you will be in a much better position to make more money with less frustration

<comment><USER3> I don't disagree with you but I think ROI is a business owners case to make. You know your projections and it is up to you to take what I say it cost to fairly compensate me and see if it matches with your expected ROI, if it does not, we can negotiate, if the numbers are not there, then they are not there. But I don't think it is on me to prove out your ROI. Chances are you already know this number, before you even start soliciting bids. Now if I come to you with the idea, sure I would expect to have to prove the case as to how it will benefit your company.

<comment><USER4> Agreed. You can help the business person pay more for development if you can help them maximize revenue or lower marketing costs (or some other outside expense)

If you think of development as using technology to scale down cost or scale up revenues there is plenty you can add as a developer to the ROI discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a message on NY Tech meetup mailing list, from about a half hour ago. All I could do is shake my head.

_____________

I am seeking a telephony app. builder that can deliver a PhoneGap lie ( non- native) inexpensive app. for a telephony project.

pay is:

$350 \+ 1% equity stake in a newly formed Delaware Corp. and 2.5% on all residuals. possible board seat (future paid projects)

if you can deliver an additional investor, you can get 5% of the transaction on the capital raised through you contact.

<comment><USER6> This is the worst I have seen. In the past I have been proposed around 1000$ but this wins, hands down! The world is getting crowded of last minute entrepreneurs...

<comment><USER7> There are far worse. If you live in NY, you've surely run into Eric Leebow of FreezeCrowd:

[http://nationaljobs.washingtonpost.com/a/all- jobs/list/q-fre...](http://nationaljobs.washingtonpost.com/a/all- jobs/list/q-freezecrowd)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQx_pJyyyxc>

"Unpaid iPad Intern wanted to build a facebook killer."

<comment><USER8> The depressing thing is that I suspect someone will actually take him up on his "offer".

Isn't that pretty much illegal anyhow? Unpaid interns are not supposed to actually create products.

Edit: It almost certainly is; part of the conditions for unpaid internships are that "the employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer's operations may actually be impeded", and this is clearly false in his case. In other words, that job posting is not only immoral, but illegal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Multiple reasons for this:

First, too many stories along the lines of "I built this app for $1,000 in India and it is making me $50K per month".

Second, kids who don't know how to value their time who'll work like slaves for $2,000.

Third, bad programmers who deliver product cheaply enough, however, the underlying code is an absolute mess. They charge nothing, throw it together and move on.

Fourth, people tend to come up with an idea of what it is that they want to pay for something and try to fit that something to that number. When it comes to software that's like the square-peg -> round-hole problem. I've been to countless meetings where the other side says things like "We'd like to do this for no more than $10K" ... and then they describe an intense six-month, four- person job.

You can always try to educate. Sometimes that works. It can be painful. What you don't want to do is be the educator and have someone else walk away with the work for less (even if it is 1%) than what you would charge. So, don't invest any time unless you know that there's a really good probability of getting the deal.

<comment><USER10> > Second, kids who don't know how to value their time who'll work like slaves > for $2,000.

That's not always the case - if you manage to work $2000 /8h/day/month in my country , you're already being paid in the top .. 10% programmers.

Money has a different value based on location.

<comment><USER11> > Money has a different value based on location. I have a hard time > understanding the mentality behind statements like that. While currency may > have different values based on location, time, effort, knowledge, experience > shouldn't be so different in value. Don't you agree? I don't want to single > out any countries, but just as an example, let's say American developers > typically charge ~US$100 per hour, why would Indian developers charge > US$15.00 (or vice-versa) for the same work? Doesn't that kind of "race to > the bottom" simply de-value the profession and make things harder all > around? If you have made the investment of getting educated, learning the > technology, learning the business and can produce; you should be charging > and getting paid accordingly, depending on the market, not your local > currency or local minimum wage. When dealing with your local market, you > will need to take local rates into consideration, but I don't see any reason > to apply local rates and limitation to an international (Internet) market. I > would genuinely like to know if I am completely off base, and if anyone has > more insight on this.

<comment><USER12> You can live like a king in India for a few thousand dollars a month. In San Francisco, you'll be lucky to pay your rent. As a result, those developers in India are happy to ask for less if that results in them getting the work since $2K/month in India buys them the same (or better) lifestyle as $2K/week in San Francisco.

Besides which, they're competing against all the other workers in their country. If someone charges $50/hour and gets a lot of work for a similar skill set as you, wouldn't you try charging $45/hour to get the business? If the supply of workers is high and the demand for those workers is low, it does become a race to the bottom. Additionally, they must charge less than their American counterparts because of the inconvenience of being in a timezone where the start of the day in India comes after the end of the day in the US, the language/culture barrier, legal considerations (if someone rips you off, you have better legal options available if they're not half a world away with a foreign court system), and so on.

I'm sure if they could still get the work and charge more they would. However, consider an American-based company wanting development work done. If they have a choice between a $100/hour American worker and a $100/hour Indian worker, odds are very good the American will get the work for all the above reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Our app (shameless plug: itunes.apple.com/us/app/little- heroes/id477247738?ls=1&mt=8) cost $15K to make by a Toronto-based developer. We were able to keep the costs that low (I think that's a pretty good price for a better than average iPad app) because (1) all of the art was done in house and (2) all of the server side functionality was done in house. Our app developer _just_ had to wire up the various pieces. (I say _just_ sarcastically, it was still a lot of work).

If you have to outsource the entire cost of development, and you want a good looking, well functioning app, it's very expensive. And then there are the inevitable upgrades, improvements etc.

<comment><USER14> So $15k was the cost the iOS developer charged you?

What was the cost of having the art assets and server side functionality done in house?

Adding that to the $15k seems to be the actual cost of the app.

Also how much time was spent designing the app before art assets were made or server side programming started?

<comment><USER13> Right, that's the point I was making - if you had to pay for those services to an external party, the cost goes up, quickly.

I did the server side work, my co-founder did the artwork, both at a > 0 opportunity cost I'm sure.

We designed the app ourselves, again, at some non-zero opportunity cost.

<comment><USER14> But what is the app worth? This sort of creative accounting is the problem that this article is trying to highlight.

If you strip out all the bullshit making an iOS app is going to be expensive because you can't cheat time and everyone's time is worth something.

If you mention to someone that you made your app "for only $15k" this just compounds the problem because that person has a skewed perception of what an app is actually worth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This problem not only isn't unique to iOS dev work, it's not even unique to programming. _Any_ custom work, from carpentry to bespoke tailoring to artwork, is more expensive than most people expect, even when they account for custom work being expensive. For instance, I knit, and have been asked more than once if I'd accept a commission (for, say, a pair of socks)---and when I decline, and say they couldn't afford it, they almost invariably throw out a number like $60 or $80, very expensive for a pair of socks but _a small fraction of minimum wage_ for something that could take thirty hours or more.

The problem is that so much of what we buy is mass-produced that we forget just how expensive person-time is, especially creative person-time, since for most modern products this gets amortised over hundreds or thousands or millions of units. Even user-facing software has this issue, since the programmers do their work once and then the marginal cost of each additional copy is pennies or less. But custom work? There the cost is borne entirely by the one commissioning the work, and if it's an individual, or a small business or startup that has never had to purchase enterprise or custom software, they simply have no analogous experience, with software or anything else, of bearing the entire cost of everything.

<comment><USER16> My wife crochets and several times we have looked into what it would take for her to run a side-business with her talent. We always get stuck on the task of selling these at a price that makes sense given the time and effort involved. Others make it work, for example on Etsy, but I can't help but wonder if they're practically giving away their works or if there really are those who can throw together a blanket in a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I agree with the overall sentiment of the page. A few questions to seasoned iOS devs:

"With websites, you can simply add one more page, then create a link to that page when you needed. However, you can't do that with iOS app, everything has to be set in the beginning, any changes might result in significant other changes that you might not be able to understand why."

Isn't this what the Navigation Controller is for? You just push a view controller onto the stack, and pop it when you're done.

Regarding the UITabBar: "if you want colors icons instead of the blueish tint, the change in code is substantial!"

I have been using this method, which is not really complicated: <http://sugartin.info/2011/07/01/customizing-tab-bar/>

You need to make images for the bar in both orientations (if you need it). The only time-consumer is the "more" button, for which you'll have to create a custom UITableView -- and still not have the handy "edit" command to rearrange the tab bar buttons.

...unless this is the wrong method to use, in which case I would love to see an example of the right way to do it.

<comment><USER18> I believe he might be talking about modifying a view, as he presents the example of adding an email button or a facebook one.

It still doesn't make sense as you can use tools such as Interface Builder. The only thing that applies, you could still be building the view programmatically or need custom animations. That needs coding. And of course a facebook button needs to handle things such as authentication than an emailing one does not.

About the UITabBar, you can always use the black one. Or use this little trick for greater effect which is less demanding on custom images: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/571028/changing-tint- back...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/571028/changing-tint-background- color-of-uitabbar)

I also do apps for a living and it is true that business has unreasonable expectations on time and cost. Not to speak of the myriad of people that want a whatsapp clone for 500$

<comment><USER19> _It still doesn't make sense as you can use tools such as Interface Builder._

I was bitten by this on my first major contract iOS app, so I think I know what he means. Interface Builder will get you most of the way fairly quickly, which is deceptive.

Then you start refining to try and match the photoshop mock-up for visual design, and find the built-in UI classes don't handle this. Buttons not supporting labels below an image by default, or multiple buttons next to each other on the navigation bar, or a background that moves with a table view, etc. etc. [1]

You get to work on custom subclasses (or adapting some open source ones). Interface Builder doesn't let you set properties of custom views, so your view controller starts being filled up with all sorts of stuff that really should be in the nib file.

Then you find out that actually, various labels and text views need to support multiple lines of text. This messes up your beautiful layout from IB. Struts & Springs are now useless for half your screen elements, and you put custom layouting code in a custom container view's _layoutSubviews_ method or your view controller just to push stuff down the screen and resize your scroll view's _contentSize_. The complexity of this layout code grows for every supported orientation and device type.

Your NIB files are now a mere shadow of their existance at the beginning of the project, so at this point, making a change to move some views to a different screen (is that only on iPhone/iTouch or iPad too?) is no longer a trivial exercise at all.

Yes, it's all manageable. But there's a whole range of sudden complexity bumps at "80% done" where the existing tools leave you stranded. If you originally quoted for functionality covered by IB but then need to customise it, that will take a lot of time, and you'd better have budgeted for it.

[1] The situation has improved somewhat with iOS5, which makes supporting iOS4 (let alone 3) devices the IE of iOS development.

<comment><USER20> Thank you for this description. I've done a bit of Android work, but no iOS work yet. Most of my career I've done web apps, and my recommendation to my company is to do web apps instead of native apps for all of our mobile projects. You've reconfirmed my suspicion that native apps get into a lot of hidden complexity that's not apparent from the "Hello World" tutorials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Most enterprise projects don't want to pay for usability. That's the bottom hard cold fact.

Enterprises want to move fast, if they can, but they can't because of the mistakes they've done in the past were covered with more processes to make sure that 1) it didn't happen again and 2) if it happened, we can blame the process.

Sometime engineers don't understand 2 facts:

1) You will get fired if you made mistakes

2) You will make mistakes

So people tend to hide and blame "processes" to avoid firing.

CEOs are cold blooded firing squad. Just like "Businesses". What matters are profits.

Business people will wear a very thick layer of skin and try to pull unimaginably stupid statements to push the price down ranging from "I thought Facebook was done in a weekend" to "It shouldn't take a day or two to fix a 'simple' Database issue. You just go there and change the data"

<comment><USER22> > Database issue. You just go there and change the data

I have heard stories of how very large financial institutions never ever delete a database column from a table, they just keep adding columns. They will not delete a data column for the very real fear that mission critical applications will stop working properly or fail silently.

<comment><USER23> Which is a very wise policy. It's not like deleting apparently unused code that you can get back from version control if you turn out to be wrong. The cost of carrying a hundred unused columns around forever is negligible compared to the cost of deleting one that turned out to be still used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> ios is a lot of work, programming in general is a lot of work. It is 2012 not 1992, business people in all fields should know programming is not cheap. Business people who do not do the research, don't bother with them. Avoid them at all cost. I've learn the best clients are the ones who value your work and are willing to pay for it. Their is a shortage of great programmers.

<comment><USER25> > It is 2012 not 1992

On the other hand, think of what you could accomplish with a weekend of work in 1992 and compare that to 2012. Our abilities as developers/designers/etc are vastly improved due to improved infrastructure, tools, communications, resources, etc.

You _could_ build a distributed photo hosting and viewing application back in 1992. But you'd probably be writing it in C++ and it might take you a long time to get something that even works, much less looks reasonably okay and attracts an audience.

Now in 2012, you could hack that together in a weekend. To make it a real project may take a few weeks or months, of course, but the pace at which we can build things is indeed speeding up.

<comment><USER26> The problem is that once we make 80% of the process vastly more efficient, all it does is throw a spotlight on the remaining 20%. (This is the unheralded dark side of the Pareto principle. ;) Not _everything_ about building an app gets more efficient with time.

You can now throw together a photo-hosting and viewing application in a couple of days. But that doesn't necessarily yield a site that runs itself. Teaching the customer to use the code still takes about the same amount of time. Editing the theme over and over again, iterating a design cycle that incorporates emails and meetings between you and the customer and the designer, still takes about the same amount of time. The process of moderating the uploaded photos to screen out the spam and porn still takes about the same amount of time. Usability testing still takes the same amount of time.

(And even in the enlightened year of 2012 there are still standard things that all sites could use, like proper reverse-proxy caching and solid backups, that over half the Wordpress blogs on earth seem to be lacking. Apparently we're not even done automating the things that could be automated.)

The other problem is that if the customer steps off the well-worn path they will fall into a very deep pit lined with invoices. If Wordpress does it out of the box, it's cheap. If Wordpress _almost_ does it out of the box but it requires even the smallest amount of custom coding, it's expensive. And knowing what things are expensive and what are standard requires skills that customers don't have, so they have to pay a programmer to advise them, and _that_ is itself inefficient and expensive...

<comment><USER27> > The problem is that once we make 80% of the process vastly more efficient, > all it does is throw a spotlight on the remaining 20%. (This is the > unheralded dark side of the Pareto principle.

I think this might be better referred to as the well-known outcome of Amdahl's Law: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahls_law>

<comment><USER26> Agreed, but if I'm going to jokingly but inaccurately name-check a principle involving the number "80%" I might as well pick on poor Pareto. He's used to it by now. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is completely false. Only a decent iOS app takes a lot of work. A crappy one can be done very quickly and cheaply.

<comment><USER13> I think it's a safe assumption to make that the author was talking about building high quality apps that one can be proud of.

<comment><USER29> > building high quality apps that one can be proud of.

And that's the problem right there. The developer is not being paid to do that, they are paid to finish the app that was asked for as quickly and cheaply as possible, at least from the client's perspective. Of course they _want_ a high quality app, but are not willing to pay the price, so most development ends up being shovelware. But it is work, just not the most glamorous work that one can dream of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I get where OP is coming from, but I think this sort of overstates the case. A well designed app would leverage the existing APIs and UI kit.

The iOS and Cocoa Touch APIs are really robust, and with libraries like RESTKit, it's not _that_ big of a deal to whip up an app that works well. Indeed, I've done it a few times myself.

The problem is that no one is ever satisfied with the UI kit that Apple provides. Browsing Navigation views of Tables, and doing simple CRUD to a simple backend (e.g., Rails on Heroku), is a weekend project, IMO.

I think OP is really talking about how unrealistic people's expectations/requirements are – not how difficult it is to make a working iOS app.

</comment><comment><USER31> So there is high demand for iOS apps (the "business people" are clamoring for them) and "50%" of the project (the backend) is a total PITA. This is the recipe for Parse/Stackmob/Cloudmine/etc for ruling the world.

</comment><comment><USER32> The author hints at, but doesn't push the issue that the cost is all really in the customization. If you were to build an app using only standard apple components, the cost would be significantly less (at least 2x). Those custom components take a lot of effort, particularly when you end up hacking Quartz.

A quick example, I implemented a very good looking custom badge system for an app. The result looked just liked design, could be generated programmatically, and worked like a charm. It also took me a couple of days to implement the whole thing in quartz. If I were doing this as consulting, that's a $2-3000 feature. These things add up very quickly, particularly if someone wants to "try a few out."

</comment><comment><USER33> I have no experience designing iOS apps. Could someone explain briefly why they are so inflexible?

 _Tightly integrated code: With websites, you can simply add one more page, then create a link to that page when you needed. However, you can't do that with iOS app, everything has to be set in the beginning, any changes might result in significant other changes that you might not be able to understand why. The way iOS codes are structured is like a breadboard, everything is hard-wired, you still can change a few things here and there, but if you change the wrong wire, the whole board might stop working. Even extremely well structured code does not increase the flexibility by a lot. Adding an additional email button to 'About' screen might only be worth a few more lines of code, but adding a Facebook Like button on the same page is a different story, don't expect that to be done in a few hours._

<comment><USER34> The author may be overstating how rigid they are. iOS apps can be much less dynamic than web apps, mostly because you're working at a "lower" level in the GUI stack. Instead of having a layout engine that recalculates the positions of your UI elements for you (eg, HTML and the box model), you mostly have to manage the position and sizes of everything yourself.

You could create your own layout engine, but most developers choose not to, especially since the consistency of iOS hardware means they can predict screen sizes easily. Your other option is to make your app a thin wrapper around a Webkit view, but that tends to produce poor results (see the Netflix iOS app for an example).

<comment><USER35> > Instead of having a layout engine that recalculates the positions of your UI > elements for you (eg, HTML and the box model), you mostly have to manage the > position and sizes of everything yourself.

I'm not sure that is strictly true. The autoresize model[1] will cover a lot of cases. The place where it does break down, and where HTML does shine, is with variable sized data such as paragraphs of text. However, that is starting to encroach on document territory anyway – meaning you'll probably want to use something like UIWebView to display that data.

Anyway, not trying to point out the obvious. I've just noticed that not all iOS devs are even aware of the autoresize functionality, so I figured it was worth noting.

[1] [http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/...](http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/CocoaViewsGuide/WorkingWithAViewHierarchy/WorkingWithAViewHierarchy.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40002978-CH4-SW12)

<comment><USER34> I'm definitely aware of the autoresize tools, but like you said, as soon as you start to have variable sized data it all sort of falls down. Then you wind up having to switch to using a UIWebView, which means redoing a lot of work. It can also be a huge headache to support both portrait and landscape mode with only the autoresize tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > These APIs must be in existence before you can proceed to make the iPhone > app.

I disagree. Yes, it's nice to have everything in hand when you start, but I've built multiple apps concurrently with the backend development. The trick is to isolate your networking in the model layer (a good practice regardless of whether or not the API is already done). This allows you to stub or use dummy data until things come online.

<comment><USER37> You're right. The APIs don't need to be implemented, just documented.

I'll go you one further. It's better to work without a functioning API. With stubs and dummies, you can tightly control inputs and test way more effectively. If you're developing against an active api, you add a whole level of complexity that makes it that much harder to debug. I don't know how many hours I've wasted trying to find bugs that turned out to be outside the scope of what I was working on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> My company builds enterprise grade apps (meaning they tie into enterprise systems) and what often is missed is the amount of time (money) required to get usability correct. What often is missed is why usability is important. They think their web application or on-premise application can simply be ported over to mobile very easily.

WRONG. Mobile applications supplement existing solutions, which means they generally are a subset of features tailored to a handheld device. Enterprises generally don't adapt a lean methodology. For example they just assume that the current Facebook app you see today was birthed in a weekend...as Facebook itself was. Which, as we know all know here, is simply not true.

</comment><comment><USER39> In any business where you're contracting directly with clients, especially performing technical work for less- or non-technical people, dealing with a wide variance in expectations and being prepared to (calmly, patiently) explain your LOE estimates is just as important as being able to code/design/etc.

It's not their responsibility to know the market they're trying to consume; it's yours. Be prepared to quote market rates for varying levels of experience, and have examples to explain why your time is priced in whatever tier you consider yourself to be in.

</comment><comment><USER40> I wonder how much of this is because iOS apps are typically priced so cheaply. The thinking goes something like "If you can buy quality apps for $1.99 then how much could they cost to make?". Of course some apps make a lot of money at this price point, but it's widely reported that the vast majority make a loss on the developers' time. I suspect even the majority of non-junk apps (which rules out a lot of apps!) make a loss in this sense. If developers aren't valuing their work correctly, how/why would the people hiring them?

</comment><comment><USER41> This might be a stupid thought, but I wonder if there's a psychological issue at play for iPhone apps in particular where people subconsciously think small form factor = pretty simple = pretty cheap.

Of course, the reality is usually exactly opposite.

<comment><USER42> You're absolutely right. "Simple to use, simple to build" is another thought in people's minds. They don't realize it's actually harder to build something that's simple to use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It's the same problem on Web Development. It's actually worse. As JavaScript and the DOM are quite hard to handle (cross-browser issues too) to build the simplest features and interactions.

I found out that it's not worth it to mingle with offline-small business. Their budget is usually $1,000-$2,000. That's barely enough to buy a stock template, a couple of plug-ins, setup WordPress and customize it a little.

The problem is not with small or medium businesses. You need businesses that works on the web. Their web presences is everything they are. They know how web dev. is hard and expensive and they also value it. Highly.

If you are a freelancer, find a few of them. Make a good relation. That's it. They'll make you a good salary.

<comment><USER44> > It's the same problem on Web Development. It's actually worse.

For me, on average, the same type of UI / interaction in iOS takes about 3-5x more to develop versus web.

<comment><USER45> He didn't say the time needed to develop an app was the same, he said the problem was the same. The problem seems to be that people undervalue programming/design work, and web development is not exempt from this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Peoples' "Amazing app idea!" is the new "Amazing screenplay/TV show idea!".

Like creating quality TV/Film content, crafting mobile applications takes time, talent, and money and one day this will be better understood by the mainstream.

</comment><comment><USER47> I can't tell you how many VCs and angels, all of whom should know better, would ask "why did it take so long to build your iPhone app" and "why did it cost so much to build" when they're not including the weeks/months it took to design it, plus build out a very complex backend of servers ingesting licensed data, all the application logic on the backend, all the API calls on the backend and corresponding API connections on the app end, and on and on. It's a big complex project.

The idea that you can whip up a very complex iPhone app "in a weekend or two" is naive and, dare I say, bubblethink.

</comment><comment><USER48> I think one issue is the word "app" and how it's thrown around so easily these days by people who don't fully understand what an app is. It sounds so simple... "just make an app" or "there's an app for that". While devs know that "applications" are hard to write and take much planning, design and infrastructure to build and deploy and support, business people only hear the one syllable word "app" and they equate that that word with "easy and convenient". So bringing their expectations in line with reality is a challenge.

</comment><comment><USER49> Worst. Article. Ever. Having just been in the situation of being a large corporation client trying (successfully) to hire a firm to do this, I'd like to point out that everything you've said about the prep here is just wrong.

(1) Big infrastructure needed: Seriously, if the client is not picky, you should be able to build a working basic infrastructure for the back end in a week. And that's generous.

(2) You need a way to communicate: The claim that there is no standard way to do it is just plain wrong. There is absolutely a standard way, its how everyone with a brain does it these days, and its easily supported through every device SDK - you use HTTP

(3) Design the API: No, design the app. Then determine what question it needs to ask the server, and figure out how to make the server answer them. Designing the API first is a very engineer thing to do - if you're the only user for the API its just a flat-out wrong approach

(4) Pay for it: Sure, but I'll pay for the amount of time it should take to do this. Which is a week. Engineers that want me to pay for them to sit and write 200 page requirements specifications need not apply. I want to work with the people that want to build something on day 1, and then keep tweaking it.

<comment><USER6> How do you know it takes a week to do it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I didn't actually read the blog. Why am I commenting? I want to share the reason why I didn't read the blog.

I judge books by their covers. In fact, I don't know anyone who doesn't outside of trying very hard to convince others they do not.

The layout of the blog draws my attention to your picture and subsequently your "download my resume" link. I clicked since I was interested in learning a little about the author, his background, and what may have caused him to write such an article.

As soon as that link opened, I knew I would not read the blog post because the resume layout rendered the content difficult to read. Why does that bother me so much? The answer is simple: it ruined your brand for me before I even had a positive impression. Right off the bat, I'd give 2 suggestions to clean up your resume a little:

1) Do something about the half bar headers you are using as it currently divides the page when viewed, this wouldn't be an issue if you actually had a 2 column design which lined up, but it doesn't.

2) Never and I mean NEVER use justified alignment unless you're publishing a newspaper.

Sorry if I seem a bit harsh, but being that you're fairly young and these are very simple mistakes to correct, I thought I'd point them out.

Best of luck!

<comment><USER50> So I lied, I did end up skimming the post.

The problem is that you are generalizing way too much. Does every app need to communicate with a server? Nope. In fact, you don't even need to host the app download or transaction as it's done for you via itunes.

Additionally, even if client / server communication is necessary, what's to say the server doesn't already exist? Who's to say there's currently no communication with the server through web clients? If that's the case, you simply have to implement or expand the current interface...

Summary: Don't generalize....

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I recently made an Android app for $150. Ad supported. Now with 1 million users. That's about 1/30th of what it has earned so far.

Hard way to learn to value my own work more.

<comment><USER52> Ouch. Go to patio11 for counsel, collect $15k. ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Depends on the app and the expectations of the business stakeholders.

For example, my company focuses on building media-based apps. We have a platform and internal SDK that allows us to build these apps quickly and afford-ably (and not just on iOS -- we can release simultaneously on Android, Blackberry, WP7 and others too).

There are other services that make developing apps for mobile smartphones cheaper as well.

It's a fresh market and the consumers in this market don't know the options. Not every app is a unique, bespoke snowflake that requires a massive budget and a team of highly-specialized engineers. Once they do though I think we'll see a lot of these budgets come back down a bit.

</comment><comment><USER45> As a full-stack web developer with particular strengths in server-side development, this whole discussion has opened my eyes to a whole new potential clientele: iPhone developers. Building a nice RESTful API is something I enjoy doing and that I'm good at. I never imagined that I would end up marketing my services to other developers, but clearly there is a market there. I'll have to start hanging around mobile development forums, at least until Parse.com and its competitors put me out of business.

</comment><comment><USER54> From the referenced SO question [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/209170/how-much-does- it-c...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/209170/how-much-does-it-cost-to- develop-an-iphone-application) on apps costing $50-150-250K to develop.

Is there really enough money made from apps, to justify this cost?

</comment><comment><USER55> While trying to describe a rather large system change an SVP in a large company once told me:

 _it's just an 'if' statement_

<comment><USER56> I found the best answer is to respectfully state the logic the change needs, the inputs to the logic and where they come from, and any trouble spots in implementing that. If the reason for their view was ignorance, this will solve that.

If it was malevolence, they'll refuse to budge and you'll know to run. Fast.

<comment><USER44> I would think to run in either case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I'm learning iOS development. I won't start this now, as there's alot more of iOS to learn, but what are the main languages/frameworks are being used server side to interface with iOS apps?

<comment><USER58> Ruby on Rails... Python... anything really that supports REST

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I tend to agree with what you have said. But then, it is unavoidable that high costs would push businesses to other solutions (e.g. outsourcing) for costs savings.

</comment><comment><USER58> Not to mention dealing with provisioning profiles and certificates. Creating an adhoc distribution version was one of the most frustrating experiences.

<comment><USER60> Please check out <http://hockeyapp.net>

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Thank you for using simple language-I found this article to be really accessible.

</comment><comment><USER62> I wonder how much of the server aspect is reduced with the existence of parse.com. You still have to build your model, but I would imagine a lot of the server setup and "data format" concerns are no longer valid.

<comment><USER63> It doesn't appear to help me. I need to develop an app that pulls data from an ERP system with an Oracle DB back end. The ERP system does not have an API. And authentication has to be done through Active Directory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Please raise your hand if you're approached by on a weekly/monthly basis by some bright-eyed, overly optimistic, non-technical person who wants you to build them an "app", of any kind, for the quoted price of somewhere between $10K - $20K.

That's the price of a demo.

<comment><USER41> Sorry, but I think you're being a little overly dramatic. I'm relatively new to iOS development (just over a year of doing it full-time) and I've built quite a few apps for clients for <$10k and for somewhere between $10k and $20k. There is a LONG list of apps that can be delivered in 100-150 hours. At $95-125 / hr, that puts you solidly in the $10k - $20k range.

<comment><USER36> I agree - 100-150 hours is a large enough bucket IF the app is somewhat self- contained or has very limited server interaction (e.g. just consuming an API). I've built dozens myself that fell in that range.

Once you start having to send data in the opposite direction and keep it in sync, however, you'll quickly find yourself spending far longer than 150 hours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Thank you this is one of my biggest pet peeves as a developers business people thing it is so easy.</comment>


Meet The Citigroup Trader Who Gets Prostitutes To Pose For Him - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-the-citigroup-trader-who-gets-prostitutes-to-pose-for-him-2012-2 <comment><USER2> Check out the flickr stream. The stories are haunting. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/41042736@N07></comment>


Ask HN: Please help with feedback on my app (Adioso for vacations) - <AUTHOR>

I finished an app (www.sunscanner.co.uk) a few days back after 2 weeks hard at work that that tries to address the problem of "I've got a week and amount X to spend for vacation, where can I go?". A lot like Adioso, or Kayak Explore.
I'd love some feedback on it from the HN community because I'm frankly at a loss as to what to do next. I spent $30 to advertise on Stumbleupon last week, obviously 300 users isn't a lot but the bounce rate (75%+) told me it's not really hitting the right note.
Grateful for any thoughts and constructive criticism. <comment><USER2> Hey Wriggler,

I wouldn't base too much on that poor bounce rate. What you need is to target UK folks who are actively looking for holidays, I'm not sure Stumbleupon is a great way to do this.

Here's my thoughts UI wise

1\. You need to learn more about your market, or maybe you already know this but have yet to put it into practice.

Start with one particular user, let's say John. John is an Adwords guy in Google. He is 28 and wants to go on a summer trip with his girlfriend. By an exercise left to the reader John has found your site. John needs to go away in August as that's when downtime is for his team, and he's hoping spend about £400 or thereabouts, though he will pay more for a better place.

Based on John alone, here are a few random thoughts.

1\. It's a bit funky to drag end of the slider on top of another just to say "August". Also I think you should consider handling custom date ranges.

2\. Sliders aren't a great mechanism in my opinion, as they don't tell you what you're missing out on. Possibly a histogram behind them would help. (See Year or Price on this page <http://www.carzone.ie/> to see what I mean)

3\. People don't book package holidays in isolation. John should be able to input "10th of August for 7 nights, less than £600" and then send this to his girlfriend, or post it to Facebook, or do whatever so that John and his group can make a decision. (This is especially true for package holidays)

4\. Ditch the sliders (hey I said these thoughts were random). You must realise your slider for selecting stars was a bad idea when you were coding it.

5\. Spent more time on designing your search results page. Basically when someone clicks the little bubble and gets a list of 5 packages, they inevitably have to bounce into and out of each of them to assess them. This isn't a great experience. The more info you can offer up front the better.

Overall great job, I think you've done some good work, and the stuff I've wrote about is relatively minor in comparison to the significant challenge of getting the traffic you need.

Best of luck, Des

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the really insightful comments. UI-wise, I can probably fix most of these (e.g. dates).

As you say, the real challenge is getting the traffic. Stumbleupon users are far from my target, but at least a cheap way to see how people interact with the site. Google Adwords is most likely best for targeting ready buyers, but without an idea of the expected value of each customer, may be too expensive at this point.

Thanks again for taking the time to comment in such depth, appreciated.

<comment><USER3> As an occasional stumbleupon user myself, I can say I'm not in the prime mood to book a vacation while using it. You probably prefer 10 people in vacation shopping mode than 300 people in lol I'm bored -mode.

<comment><USER2> Definitely true. This is my main concern with things like Facebook ads. I've seen folks buy them by the dozen, and rarely see their money back.

I'd say try your next $30 on Google adwords like "package holidays" etc and see how that traffic performs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think your site is neat. StumbleUpon users, in my experience, tend to show a high bounce rate (often not waiting long enough for a site to load), so they are not a good test case.

If you're still looking to advertise, Adwords might be a better bet, though your niche, as you know, is extremely competitive.

Aside from that, I have a couple of comments on the UI:

1\. After clicking a price tag, you get an overlay which looks to be draggable (hand icon) but is not. It also exhibits a disconcerting zoom in/out effect when you zoom the map with the overlay visible.

2\. Personally I think the logo wouldn't be totally out of place on a tub of margarine. No offense intended. Objectively, it doesn't match the colour scheme of the site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ha, I actually thought the logo looks similar to a cheap hotel/motel chain I saw when I was in the States, can't remember its name but it's not a good association :)

Sadly this is the limit of my photoshop skills for the time being.

Will update my JS to close the overlay on a zoom event, thanks for the tip.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea, but going to your site I can't see your value proposition.

Your key differentiator is that you combine hotel+flight prices and you should make that more clear. Also it's not clear if your hotel prices are per person (with the assumption that there's two of you sharing) or per room.

I also agree with several of the other comments that you need to focus on your target audience much more. I'd recommend targeting 20-30 year olds without kids with disposal income who are looking for somewhere to go for the weekend.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Imran,

I think you're right that the value prop isn't made explicit enough at the moment - I could use adding some kind of introductory text to make it clear what the site is about, question is where to put it.

To me, the value proposition is that 1. it shows you the absolute cheapest dates to go somewhere if you have the flexibility and 2. that it shows great deals to places you might never have thought of otherwise - all much easier to spot because the results are mapped.

Good suggestion re. target audience. Assuming you're talking about changes to the site itself (rather than its advertising) I'd be interested to hear what changes or additions you would make to go about that, i.e. to specifically target the 20-30 singles demographic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks nice and definitely a site I would use. My thoughts:

* Include more airports (US).

* You state your problem is "I've got a week.." but your UI forces you to supply a relatively broad, non-specific date range. I would use it for "I have next weekend free" or the "3rd week in April free". I think a more traditional date picker option would be better here.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice, will look at options for being more specific on dates - although I suppose what I am really trying to offer here is an opportunity to see the absolute best prices on packages for those who have flexibility around their travel dates.

Thanks again!</comment></comment>


Who will provide a cheap cv translate? - <AUTHOR> I need to translate my curriculum vitae in spanish language. Can anyone suggest a best services for translating my cv in spanish language ? <comment><USER2> We perfectly and accurately translate your resume to whatever country language you are targeting to apply and finally achieve your dream job. With the way we translation resumes or CVs, you are guaranteed to earn that overseas job faster and will surely create that lasting impression.-[https://academictranslationservices.com/cv- translation.php](https://academictranslationservices.com/cv-translation.php)</comment>


The (lack of) testing death spiral - <AUTHOR> http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/mar-08/software-quality-death-spiral.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I've seen one and a half startups fail because of this. (The second one isn't dead yet, they still have paying customers, but they were losing significant amounts of time to fixing regressions and incurring corresponding customer dissatisfaction.) For that matter, I've noticed that Reddit's had many more regressions lately, and that things that used to be rock-solid (eg. pagination) now seem to break disturbingly often.

</comment><comment><USER2> This article made me suddenly realize that news.YC does not have a "Send to a friend" feature!

<comment><USER3> I did not realize, until you said that, how much time I've been spending emailing article links + comments links to my friends who don't yet read Hacker News. This feature would be a great help!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to find software developer mentors willing to mentor? - <AUTHOR> how do i find one? how to engage them? Pay them? cookies? <comment><USER2> Have you tried codementor.io?</comment>


Why are there no Googles, Microsofts, Twitters, Facebooks etc from UK? - <AUTHOR> http://network.businessofsoftware.org/forum/topics/why-are-there-no

<comment><USER3> I think its partially due to the size of the market.

Most British startups start out building products for the British market. So they have a 10-20 million target. Once they achieve major success, they figure they'll go overseas.

U.S. startups start out building products for the American market, so they have a 300 million target. And since our version of English is much more prevalent online that target is even higher.

Since growth rates are more or less the same, you have British companies at a disadvantage. While a US company might have 10 million users after 5 years, the same exact company in Britain would only have 100K users.

The market share may be the same, but due to the sheer size of the market, the U.S. company has a lot more customers. And once those customers start paying, the U.S. company has a ton more $$$ to play with to grow even further.

There are obviously a number of exceptions, British companies doing well in the American market. But those are the culturally aware companies, that realize that the British culture is different from the American one.

<comment><USER4> While you are correct that the population of the USA is around 300 million, the population of the UK is roughly 60 million. Of course both numbers are presumably more than the "target" you are talking about, but I think it's safe to say that Great Britain is about 20% of the size of the USA.

Also, I don't understand the growth-rate math. Why would the UK company have 1/100th the number of users?

How much would the variety of English you use on a website alter your traffic? I'm asking because I really don't know. Does anyone have research on this?

<comment><USER5> I can't point you at research but I've recently found that it does seems like my American friends have a much tougher time understanding British-English than I do as a non-native English speaker and from my experience non-native speakers don't care what version is used as long as it's consistent (for those that care a little at all). Personally I don't really notice if I'm reading American or British English, I only notice when it's pronounced.

I too would love to see research.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For Google, Twitter, and Facebook, the main reason is that there are fewer and more conservative investors in the UK. Google and Facebook in particular seemed super risky at first, and were only able to raise money from angels, even in the Valley.

Microsoft is a different case. They're a generation older, and didn't rely on investors. They were in the US because the microcomputer revolution happened mainly in the US. The reasons for that are complicated, including the fact that the British government interfered with (in both the British and American senses) the British computer industry, and that getting rich was effectively banned in the UK at the time the startup was being invented in the US.

</comment><comment><USER7> In my own limited experience with brits I've found that culturally they love creativity but only within conventional constraints. If you try to do something that is really subversive I've gotten this "who do you think you are?!" kind of attitude. They just generally don't share this American sense of "you can be anything you want to be!" Just a contributing factor.

<comment><USER8> Just want to point out Banksy and his _best selling_ Wall and Piece. Shows the depths of the "subversive" art scene here in the UK. From what I can tell the creative industries here in the UK are not as few and far between nor as obsequious as it might seem. I think it's harder to access and with less momentum, but then that's in comparison to a trundling behemoth shouting "Follow me!!!" at the top of it's voice....

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The US strikes me as having less aversion to financial risk than any other nation.

It's how they get into trouble (economic downturn) but it's also how they pump out true innovation.

The US also has an overall aversion towards the distribution of wealth. If you make money, you keep more of it there than in many other countries.

That attracts the people who want to be financially successful. And when you have more of those people around, the more likely something good is going to happen.

Go big or go home? They live it.

Clearly they have societal issues, but the US is a great place to be if you've got money and talent. If you don't have those things, live somewhere else. . . .

</comment><comment><USER10> Spotify are UK / Swedish. I think they'll be bigger than Twitter.

<comment><USER3> not when they block U.S. ips due to licensing issues

<comment><USER10> So did Apple when iTunes first came out. They'll make the deals and resolve each territory step by step.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a Brit who moved to the US, I blogged my personal take on this a few days ago: [http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/07/you- cant...](http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/07/you-cant-fail-if- you-dont-try-or-why-i-left-the-uk.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> IMDb is, well, a worldwide collaboration, but if pressed I'd say the driving force was primarily British. (With help from America, Italy, Australia, Germany, and a few other geeks of the day.) I suppose obsessive data gathering is consistent with the stereotypical British mindset.

(It's been long since bought by Amazon, an American company, but a large portion of IMDb employees are still in the UK.)

All things considered, though, my guess is that it has a lot less to do with national character, and a lot more to do with the fact that the Valley is an oddity. It's a great place to find exactly the right mix of people to make a startup work, from potential smart employees to investors to experienced folks who can give key advice. A startup in San Jose has a better chance at making it out alive than one in London. And a fair number of entrepreneurs head to the Valley from around the world for just that reason - the statistics are hard to gather, but if you were to figure out what percentage of startup _founders_ were British, of successful companies, the gap would narrow considerably.

I'm currently at an awesome company in the Washington DC area (thinkgeek.com, a Hacker favorite!) and we're having a real hard time finding competent senior Perl people who are willing to live out here. I'm sure we'd have no problems in Palo Alto. (I lived there for most of the 90s. And would again, happily.)

</comment><comment><USER13> Can't speak for the UK. In the Netherlands we have Hyves instead of Facebook, Marktplaats instead of eBay, bol.com instead of Amazon, and even the most popular search engine was Dutch for a long time (ilse). The problem is it's hard for these companies to enter foreign markets with such a limited base.

</comment><comment><USER14> Last.fm is/was British

<comment><USER15> With an Austrian co-founder; employees were a European/international hodgepodge; so, not necessarily brits in a strict sense.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps so, but based in Britain (London, to be precise).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As for Google, Autonomy had Kenjin.

I think in the UK people are just after a career, and I know people who wouldn't work on a speculative software project without applying for grants (eg, free money).

The other problem is that VC's will probably only give to Cambridge/Oxford grads.

I read in some place: "You need a PhD to turn research into a product" (in the UK).

<comment><USER17> All quite true. I like the British and lived there a long time but there's a bias against startups and small companies which makes it hard to get the ball rolling. Also, it's true that the grant culture is heavily embedded - <USER2> because of the social system, but also because the cost of living in the UK is relatively high. Remember that in the UK as with most other European countries, sales tax is close to 20%. In general, I'd say living in London is about 50% more expensive than living in San Francisco.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think it is pretty much for the same reason why there are relatively little startups in Ohio or Wisconsin or South Dakota or younameit compare to the bay area. There's a nice piece from PG online where he counts the most common reasons why people do not start startups. The first 10 are, on my view, very personal: 1\. Too young 2\. Too inexperienced 3\. Not determined enough 4\. Not smart enough 5\. Know nothing about business 6\. No cofounder 7\. No idea 8\. No room for more startups 9\. Family to support 10\. Independently wealthy

The last 6, which apparently are the most powerful inhibitors, are rather "social" IMO

        11. Not ready for commitment
        12. Need for structure
        13. Fear of uncertainty
        14. Don't realize what you're avoiding
        15. Parents want you to be a doctor
        16. A job is the default

I believe these latter are particularly influential in most European countries.

</comment><comment><USER19> Many British entrepreneurs travel to California, like many other entrepreneurs from around the world and like many non Californians within the USA. Brits and other non Americans are well represented at the places mentioned and other Valley start ups.

</comment><comment><USER20> At least one of my most admired companies, Autonomy, is UK based.

</comment><comment><USER21> pg wrote an excellent article on "Why Startups Condense In America" <http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html>

</comment><comment><USER22> They already invented the web.

<comment><USER10> I think that was the Swiss.

<comment><USER10> Ah there you go, TBL is English. I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Legal might be part of it. UK/EU libel laws, etc.

<comment><USER20> I don't think litigation risk is greater in Europe than in the US at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Apricot Computers was awesome. ARM, BBC Micro, Acorn.

<comment><USER16> Definitely Psion in there too!

Oh, and Symbian is the British 'iPhone/Smartphone'.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can you use apache cache for templating engine? - <AUTHOR> For a while I built websites by copying the same files/folders into directories... seems pretty wasteful for example if every page uses the same layout.
Now it occurs to me I can echo out MySQL data that has the website itself in there as text. But even that is slow, I think it could be as long as 300ms, I should test it... I was looking at this briefly watching the network console tab in Chrome.
I am somewhat aware of templating engines like Twig. I know I'm working with ancient tech regarding LAMP.
I have not touched webpack/node yet.
I was just starting to read up on Apache's cache and I was wondering if this was a dead end/not the right way to go. I saw that you could load files something about "stale"...
My question doesn't really make sense because you still have to inject the content. My one attempt regarding PHP/MySQL echo was to concatenate the parts like: head-section + body/modular + close document. It works, though I have to see how fast/if it's better. It is better in not having redundant code. <comment><AUTHOR> I'm also trying to get over my stubbornness. I have mixed feelings with adopting every new technology that comes along seeing as many come out quite frequently. There's the learning curve/brief slow down in productivity like trying to learn Vim.

Still I'm starting to see the flaws in my ways especially with being inefficient/slow to deliver. Hence not being employed in this field full time. Anyway, I'll find out I guess. At the time I'm not deploying large scale or anything this is mostly for myself. I'm still based on a cheap single-core VPS with domain-mapping.</comment>


Barcodes for the rest of us - <AUTHOR> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/barcodes-0724.html <comment><USER2> Uses the Bokeh (japanese for fuzzy) effect that you see with an out of focus camera, for encoding information. The idea being any cell phone camera would be able to read these codes by viewing the tag with focus set to infinity (or for us with autofocus cameras, I guess we just hold it really close to the tag)

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems to be much cheaper than RFID and much better than visual Augmented Reality tags. Many new kind of products can be developed as soon as boko tag readers are available.

<comment><USER2> The idea of the technology is that boko tag reader hardware is available now. It's just your camera. It just requires software and you're done. You could do an iphone app today.

The problem is passive vs active illumination. Currently, each tag needs an LED behind it. They're still working to get them to work with your camera flash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I didn't understand how you are supposed to read all the info in the tag.

It would be a hassle having to take many pictures. The article (video) says each pattern has some repeated info, but I think that's just some basic small amount of information.

How can you read the whole tag (all the patterns) at once?

</comment><comment><USER5> Given that there are already camera-readable visual tags out there, I don't see this being a huge breakthrough. It is true that it can encode more information in a smaller space, but the reality is it is trivial and more robust to simply have the reader unit (cell phone camera, ect.) access an online database for details about the product. There's no upward limit to the data that can be stored that way and it can be easily updated.

<comment><USER6> You can read these from a distance and read multiple codes at the same time.

E.g. point your phone to the cereal shelve in the supermarket and have it point out which one has the most fiber, even visually via augmented reality — this isn't possible with current bar codes (without scanning them one-by-one and no augmented reality).</comment></comment>


Git rebase workflow is not better for conflict resolution  - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/457927/git-workflow-and-rebase-vs-merge-questions/11219380#11219380

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the author of this answer on StackOverflow. It seems to me like everyone in this post on SO is united in something that just seems very wrong to me. I'm clearly the minority here, but am I wrong? I'd like to hear your thoughts.

<comment><USER2> Don't worry, I'm not united! I agree with your conclusions. If I were still on SO, you'd get my upvote. But I'm not, so you'll have to have one here.

I gave up on git rebase after getting exactly the problem you describe, when trying to rebase my temp branch (with new stuff, including files that were entirely commented out in one commit then deleted in the next) on top of my main branch (with fixes to stuff the temp branch deletes or changes). I'd rebased things before, mostly because I'd heard it was what you were supposed to do, and it hadn't been a problem those times, but this time was awful!

Lots of tiresome conflicts, as git kept badgering me about merge conflicts due to one branch commenting out what another branch had changed, all in a file that would be deleted by the next commit. Of course, none of this crops up during a merge, because it only needs to consider the results rather than each intermediate step - so the merge ended up being much neater. (I think there ended up being fewer merge conflicts across the whole merge than there were in one file in the first step of the rebase.)

The idea behind this was that I'd rebase, then use rebase -i to remove the separate cleanup steps, then I could merge into the main branch, and it would be a nice fast-forward. I don't like the idea of using rebase -i until I've got something rebased as it stands, but it seems that git isn't always going to make that easy.

Since then, I've stuck with git merge, and indeed I've come to quite like seeing where the merges are in the history. That was something I found useful about Perforce's Revision Graph display, too.</comment></comment>


Fully automated dockerized Let's Encrypt reverse proxy - <AUTHOR> https://advancedweb.hu/2016/05/10/lets-encrypt/ <comment><USER2> For those not running apache, or afraid of messing with their front end settings. I found the DNS verification system for Let's Encrypt to be a breeze, especially when your DNS provider has an API of some sort (CloudFlare, Route53, etc.)

<comment><USER3> Do you have any links or tips for getting DNS verification working? Is it simply setting a token on the domain's DNS, then having LE issue a cert with all requested subdomains?

<comment><USER4> I use the lego[1] client for DNS verification and it works pretty well so far (more deets[2]).

[1]: [https://github.com/xenolf/lego](https://github.com/xenolf/lego)

[2]: [https://disjoint.ca/til/2016/03/26/lets-encrypt-tls- certific...](https://disjoint.ca/til/2016/03/26/lets-encrypt-tls-certificates- using-route53-dns-verification/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Using a reverse proxy with LE is pretty nice as you can have the proxy centralize everything for both local and downstream hosts (I presently do this with the OpenBSD tools). You get a single cert with all the domains used over the entire system. You use the reverse proxy to redirect the challenge location to the local system. LE thinks it is challenging a bunch of different systems but it is just going to the same place over and over again.

Some things don't work all that well behind a TLS proxy. For those systems you need to generate a new outgoing TLS session. You don't need to check the validity of the certificate in most cases and can just use something self signed. I use a never renewed LE cert for convenience.

<comment><USER6> I seem to remember that Wordpress used a similar approach - a single cert for multiple hosts, any downsides to that?

<comment><USER5> You would have to trust the proxy to not redirect to the wrong host as you would not get a certificate warning in that case. The proxy can redirect to any host, anywhere, so that doesn't seem to be an issue that could cause extra worry.

In general, all the trust for all the domains would have to rest in the proxy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is there an Nginx version already? If not, I'm interested in building one.

This is a great idea!

<comment><USER8> I use 2 containers to accomplish this:

[https://github.com/jwilder/nginx-proxy](https://github.com/jwilder/nginx- proxy)

[https://github.com/JrCs/docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy- compa...](https://github.com/JrCs/docker-letsencrypt-nginx-proxy-companion)

Since both are long running processes, it makes sense to keep them in separate containers.

<comment><USER9> I had various issues with that combo, and also didn't like the repetition of VIRTUAL_HOST and LETSENCRYPT_HOST, so I combined the docker-gen and letsencrypt portion[1]. Still BYO nginx.

I also wrote a tool for deploying and managing static servers and application servers during development[2][3], but it's not ready for a Show HN yet. But the idea is ...

        b3cmd --project foo static-scaffold
        b3cmd --project foo static-put public/ /

... and you'll have a docker-compose project accessible at "foo-- master.example.com" and a static server at "foo--master--static.example.com", all HTTPS ready.

[1]: [https://github.com/mikew/docker-gen- letsencrypt](https://github.com/mikew/docker-gen-letsencrypt)

[2]: [https://github.com/mikew/b3cmd](https://github.com/mikew/b3cmd)

[3]: [https://github.com/mikew/b3cmd-server](https://github.com/mikew/b3cmd- server)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The container utilises Supervisor to start and manage the different > services.

That violates the one container, one process design principle, if that's a concern.

Caddy[1] is an interesting single binary cross-platform web server and reverse proxy with built-in Lets Encrypt support.

[1]: [https://caddyserver.com/](https://caddyserver.com/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've used haproxy a number of times for reverse proxying service requests and terminating SSL. The SSL setup is quite easy, basically just cat the keys together and put the file in a specific place. I'll definitely take a look at this, but I'm honestly not eager to replace haproxy with apache.

</comment><comment><USER12> SSL Proxy.... terminating ssl... sort of breaks the idea of ssl

<comment><USER13> No it does not.

Traffic to an "SSL protected appliction" actually stops to be protected at the edge of the web server. Inside everything is in cleartext. An SSL proxy just breaks this cleartext part between two servers.

Of course you need to control both of them and ensure trust between them.</comment></comment>


How people use, and lose, preexisting biases to make decisions - <AUTHOR> https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-08-people-preexisting-biases-decisions.html <comment><USER2> Just a test: [https://write.as/r40qkz6e2bne42vf.md](https://write.as/r40qkz6e2bne42vf.md)</comment>


Try to impeach this? Challenge accepted - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/karim_douieb/status/1181695687005745153 <comment><USER2> Non American here. Doesn't the electoral college system screw with this?</comment>