Ask HN: How often do your projects miss deadline - <AUTHOR> I just missed another deadline on a project.  I think over the course of a ten year career this has happened basically EVERY single project I've been on.  I am feeling particularly bad about it right now so I want to ask the general hacking public: how does this compare with your experience?  Are your projects usually delivered on time neatly wrapped in a bow, or like me are they usually late. <comment><USER2> In 16 years of professional software experience, I would say Deadlines are like Promises. They are meant to be broken, almost always.

The reason is simple. The ability to define and specify scope/requirements is a really hard problem. Stakeholders change all the time, they change priorities all the time, scope items themselves can be too vague or requirements poorly drafted or the requirements completely change during the lifecycle etc etc.

Deadlines are missed mostly because they are not realistic. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have deadlines but we should use them as a ballpark/placeholder to measure output.

PS: I have only met deadlines in my projects when I was the stakeholder myself :). Every other time, it is technically a miss or "extension". Fun fact: I have worked on many 4 week deadline projects that went for months, may times. I have worked on 6 months project that went for years (looking at you major investment banks :)). Not just because of me but because of incorrect expectations, scoping and assumptions from the stakeholders. Our job is to obviously setup the right expectations and lock down scope as much as possible but in real world, it is frikin hard.

</comment><comment><USER3> Our shop is probably ~700 devs. I lead one little team as a dev.

Here's what the late projects look like:

No project kickoff with the business and architecture. High visibility. Deadlines coming from people outside my hierarchy, with no explanation around who did it or why. Massive, massive scope increases. Estimates turned into "commitments" by my manager. Stress and pressure put down onto to team. The c-levels peering in. The team stressing out about the pressure. Managers creating more stress while I'm trying to promote can-do comrade and keep the morale up, even though I stress-drink at night.

We missed our deadline today too. The business is in an arm wrestle to operate more like them, which we would call waterfall.

But like my therapist said, who used to work in IT: "A deadline is missed. A cloud passes by. A squirrel climbes up a tree."

I need to keep with my chill self, know for myself personally that I bust ass, and gladly accept that corporate compensation.

<comment><USER4> > _But like my therapist said, who used to work in IT: "A deadline is missed. > A cloud passes by. A squirrel climbs up a tree."_

1\. Reminds me of a guy whose blog I used to read. He's a former lawyer, turned therapist, who has a lot of patients who are lawyers. (His blog is [https://thepeoplestherapist.com](https://thepeoplestherapist.com) \- but it doesn't seem to be active anymore.)

2\. Based on that memorable quote, your therapist may also be a Zen master.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a product manager. Deadlines are 100% my responsibility and I would never blame an engineer for missing one.

If someone on my team misses a deadline it means that I wasn't able to predict the level of effort properly. It means I changed the spec too much and caused chaos. It means I didn't communicate with the engineer well enough to chart out their progress and anticipate the delivery date. It means I wasn't keeping a close enough eye. It means I didn't parallelize the task properly.

</comment><comment><USER6> This will help - [https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Deadline](https://dilbert.com/search_results?terms=Deadline)

</comment><comment><USER7> In the past 4 years I have been working for the same company and my team delivered around 20 or so projects and didn't miss a single deadline.

Before that, in previous companies, the same thing happened. Lots of projects and no missed deadlines.

I believe it's due to a simple thing: expectations.

Project expectations must not be around specific implementations or features, but around problems solved.

That gives the project team room to learn and adapt to changing conditions which is especially valuable when you are doing something for the first time.

For the customer, that is having his problem solved, it doesn't matter if a button is white or blue or if it is actually a button. It matters that a specific problem gets solved when it needs solving.

Everything in addition to that is waste.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but don't you solve problems by implementing features?

<comment><USER9> Not always. The best code is no code. Sometimes you can clarify requirements (and realize the request is redundant with existing capabilities), adapt workflows, combine existing features, etc.

If someone has a request, the first instinct shouldn't be to write more code, it's to clarify what they are trying to accomplish.

"How do I get the last 3 letters of a file? I need a feature for that."

"Are you trying to get the file extension? We have that in the metadata."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any one of these is a bad sign and things get exponentially bad the more you have: Poor expectations management, poor milestone creation/definition, inflexibility, poor specification, poor testing. Plenty more.

Wordplay for profit: Have "due dates" and "milestones" instead of "deadlines". "Due dates" imply on the day after that something new has arrived and needs to be supported.

We've found most late projects were actually late _before they started_. The slippage was just a symptom of underlying issues within the team, local environment or external ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER11> About 40-50% of the time I guess. And presumably another so many percent of projects end up completed long before the deadline instead.

Either way, the reasons are as follows:

1\. The timeframe provided for the project has no correlation to reality, and either under or overestimates the time needed.

2\. The client/customer needs to do something... then puts it off a few days/weeks/months.

3\. Feature/scope creep kicks in.

That's just the work related ones. Personal projects get sidetracked all the time.

</comment><comment><USER12> On time. Business pushes unfinished and partially tested features out all the time. And they get concerned when there are production support issues. It's a compounding issue, to the point everything is a rush and an emergency. Pure chaos every single day.

</comment><comment><USER13> I read that most govt projects are always ~40%late and over budget. This is because bad deadlines makes project manager look attractive and then you can always blame skipped deadline on change in requirement. And requirement always changes

</comment><comment> non-entity At work I've had a number of projects delayed mostly because of ambiguous business requirements constantly redefined or accidentally discovered and feature creep pushing back and slowing testing time.

<comment><USER14> I'll add another one, borne painfully of recent experience: projects are often delayed because people aren't interested/capable of providing meaningful input on things until the critical moment is imminent, and that's usually late in a project, and then you have a pile-up of critical moments yielding real input.

Moreso in bigger organizations where you have very little influence on the participation and quality of input by cross-domain team members.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a small startup, we never miss deadlines.

When I was in a small team at a larger org, we always missed deadlines.</comment>


Google will kill Python 3, and it might be a good thing - <AUTHOR> We know that there are issues with the Python echosystem at large [1]. Google is heavily invested in Python 2, and thus created Grumpy [2], which is a new Python 2 runtime, in Golang. A company like Google, stepping in, will inevitable lead to the sorting out of many of the issues [1], and introduce new developments for Python 2. The Golang backend of Python will enable the development of many benefits we see in Golang (built in concurrency?, speed?, easy package management?) This would mean that the community will gravitate towards python 2. What do you think?<p>[1] * Fragmentation of package managers: Pip, Conda, etc.. * Fragmentation of runtime: Pypy, CPython, Jython, Cython, etc.. * Golang (and probably Grumpy in the future) doesn't suffer from these issues, because a central entity (Google) is leading it.<p>[2] https://github.com/google/grumpy <comment><USER2> Google isn't going to "kill" Python 3. This is a relatively niche use case (grumpy only converts Python 2.7 code into Go code, and it's not 1:1 as it's missing features like decorators), and there doesn't seem to be any intention on adding new Python features into grumpy. My guess is that this was made more for Google's purposes of migrating some of their legacy Python 2.7 code to Go, in an effort to move towards Go internally. It also doesn't run Python code directly, it trans-compiles Python to Go code, which wouldn't work for some workflows. For this to have any possibility of becoming another Python runtime, it would at the very minimum have to support every feature or have a real reason to not support the specific feature in Python 2.7.

The other thing, arguably more important, is that there isn't really a community around grumpy, whereas there is around Python 3 (the latest nontrivial commit was 3 weeks ago for grumpy, whereas the latest nontrivial commit was 6 hours ago for Python). Even if Google did try to build a community, many people worry that Google will just abandon software when they want to, so people would be hesitant to work with this software long term, which means developers wouldn't want to build any software for it; the majority of developers developing new Python code are doing it in Python 3, and those that aren't are most likely using six rather than only 2.7 unless they're supporting a legacy codebase that either they don't want to or cannot upgrade to Python 3 or to upgrade using the six library.

Python 3 may, however unlikely, "die", but this and Google won't be the death of it.

<comment><USER3> you're right,

the following url holds a good writeup about the intensions of developing grumpy

[https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/01/grumpy-go- running-...](https://opensource.googleblog.com/2017/01/grumpy-go-running- python.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i totally disagree with your view. Python 3 of today is fantastic and the community is fully behind it.

Yes there will be legacy code that will remain on python2 for ever, but this is normal.

I am personally loving the new features of python 3.6 in particular and would not want to look back.

Google has a lot of code in python2 they want to move to go. It would be bizarre to see anyone start a new project in python 2 because of grumpy.

Love the python community. The future is python3. Enjoy!

<comment><USER5> With due respect, if the community was fully behind Python 3, it wouldn't still be controversial. Clearly it still is.

That said, my personal feeling is that with awesome new toys like curio, Python 3 is finally starting to be worth the pain of cutting over.

<comment><USER6> > With due respect, if the community was fully behind Python 3, it wouldn't > still be controversial. Clearly it still is.

Personally, as of PyCon last year, I do not think it's controversial anymore. If anything still doesn't support Python 3, it's at the service, such as AWS Lambda. The libraries have all transitioned by now [1].

[1]: [http://py3readiness.org](http://py3readiness.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems to be based on the false Python 3/2 dichotomy.

Python 3 is popular enough that it is effectively unkillable. For exactly the same reason Python 2 is also unkillable.

Language adoption is never a zero sum game.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the choice of title for HN is unfortunate: it implies (for me) some inside knowledge about what is (or will) happen to Python. Casual HN readers will see the death of Python as a done deal, whereas the truth is "the reports of [Python's death] are much exaggerated".

</comment><comment><USER9> Not true at all. Python3 evolved in leaps and bounds in the last few years gaining many essential features for a modern programming language. Things like async/await, new frameworks showing up all the time shows a growing ecosystem. The fact that Google prefers Go is understandable and does not mean that python's importance is diminished in any way.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ha, no. Google can continue toiling away in the caves of antiquarian history if they like, but anyone with half a brain will be using Python 3. All the things mentioned, built in concurrency, speed, easy package management, are all in Python 3. I have no idea why Google doubled down on Python 2.7 years ago. I mean, generally they are competent technical folks. But 2.7 is littered with all kinds of obtuse mis-steps in the development of the language. And it's missed out on the last several years of feature addition to Python 3 (asynchronous primitives among other things). Why would one plant their flag in something like that? And I mean come on... print as a keyword? How can anyone not spit at that?

</comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of an old question on reddit after their HPHP compiler was announced and someone said asked if it was going to take erlangs role.

The answer is no, purpose built runtimes do not uproot established projects in another domain, and a proprietary corporate project to migrate legacy code will not fix issues of fragmentation. In fact, it just kinda piles it on.

If you want to see how effective Google has been in fixing long standing python issues, check out the history of the Unladen Swallow project.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's bad that the runtime is fragmented. Google will fix it by creating a new runtime

</comment><comment> git-pull (One topic I see being brought up when it comes to runtimes, python 2 and 3 is C API stuff. It still bubbles up to the top now and then. This isn't related to grumpy specifically, but the FUD I've been witnessing)

Maybe I'm far underestimating the amount of custom C API being used in production at places or been hanging out in the wrong places. I just doubt that intention is to kill off anything. Even by unintended side effect.

A great deal of the python code I see with C extensions already is Python 3 compatible and even has wheels for them. I think it used to be numpy and libraries that pulled it in as a dependency. We're at the point where compatibility from 2 and 3 is so darn good in libraries we pull in I hardly notice it anymore. [1]

I do write Python 2 + 3 compatible code. The differences in the syntax itself are trivial. A compat module [2] will do the trick assuming you have your own custom C extensions, which most don't.

(Going off on a bit of a tangent) There has been some deliberation of what has to be done to get around GIL: The other thing is I haven't been convinced of is the idea being thrown around at conferences and on mailing lists that breaking the C API is this world-ending scenario. Yeah I understand the disruption, but what % of the code, assuming you're in the minority of python developers doing custom c extensions, that you can't update some API signatures?

[1] [https://python3wos.appspot.com/](https://python3wos.appspot.com/)

[2] [http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/5/21/porting-to- python-3-redux/...](http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2013/5/21/porting-to- python-3-redux/#write-a-compatibility-module)

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the argument for runtime fragmentation and package fragmentation is a bit exaggerated. Most people use pip. Most people use CPython. People make tradeoffs when they need to use another interpreter for performance reasons [1], but CPython is _the_ reference implementation. Just because alternative options exist for specific cases doesn't mean there's fragmentation in the ecosystem at large.

[1]: [http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/starting/which- python...](http://docs.python-guide.org/en/latest/starting/which-python/)

</comment><comment><USER13> this is all about confusion and fud, not grumpy of course, the way it's presented in this thread, sucks to be a n00b in 2017.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is another python 2 fork that reading this reminded me of: [https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon](https://github.com/naftaliharris/tauthon)

</comment><comment><USER15> Python's primary value is the ecosystem. With a general agreement to move to Python3, Google would just be handicapping themselves. An interoperable Py2/3 interpreter seems more likely.

</comment><comment><USER16> Better come over to Perl before it's to late guys ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> How do you explain the fact TensorFlow targets Python 3 for speed, features, etc.?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not true. TensorFlow also supports 2.7 first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Google culture is all about arrogance and elitism. Their coder/snobs are definitely not pro python any version. They have their own internally developed ivory tower languages with horrible tooling and features to champion.</comment>


Nassim Nicholas Taleb Sees Worse Tail Risks Than in 2007 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2017-05-18/taleb-sees-worse-tail-risks-than-in-2007-video <comment><USER2> tl;dr his main point re the markets is that they are priced higher than 2007 so have further to fall. He implies unhedged stock ownership is not rational at this point.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is there a text summary of his point somewhere?

I absolutely _hate_ video for this sort of thing.

<comment><USER4> Just open the network summary in the developer tools and find the XML request that gets sent when you turn on closed captions.

Taleb's speech, summarized & cleaned up a little, for the lazy:

Donald Trump is the fellow who never had a supervisor in his life. No boss. So he does not know how to express things in a way that a supervisor can understand. You have to translate what he says. The reason he fired James Comey is he [trump] does not collude with the Russians.

There are a lot of things that Trump came to do that are substantial. The first one is after 32 years, fixing the tax code. The tax code is something that is metastatic. Unless someone cuts the whole thing, you need someone aggressive. Number two is obamacare is a disaster. The real train wreck is globalization; I wrote about it in "the black swan." unfettered globalization leads to a conflagration of companies. He wants to fix some of the things in the system that are not sustainable. That is the third point. The fourth point is we have a problem with what we call the pseudo-elite. Last 10 years it's been swelling. Not just Obama, although it accelerated greatly under Obama. The pseudo-experts, I describe them as incapable of finding a coconut on coconut island but because they have an ivy league degree, they are given a position. You need to replace these people, with do-ers. Number five is Trump came on a platform of non-interventionism. In terms of foreign policy. I am anti-metastatic bureaucracy running stuff like that. You need someone to fix the system. He is aggressive enough on this platform but he may not deliver and I am very worried that this is not what I see from his recent actions.

The thing I disagree with Donald Trump on is he came in with the market on a high. Trump should disassociate himself from the market. Trump is claiming credit on the market he is getting, he is buying it on the highs. That is not rational. He should disengage himself in the market because he hasn't inherited a good situation. Obama has artificially stabilized the market for the past 8 years. Claiming credit for the rise in the market makes Trump vulnerable, if that Novocain is removed. In my opinion, we have risk today we did not have before; everyday it gets worse. You have a huge, considerable rise in the stock market. I would tell you today that if you own stocks without a hedge, it's not rational. The last time we were here I explained my research. If you are exposed to tail risks, you are alpha and future returns will be divorced from the return of the market. People don't realize that. It's like buying a house without insurance. You cannot really look at what will happen to your house based on the housing market, unless you are hedged.

\--

I didn't bother including the title quote about 2007, it seems out-of-context and kind of irrelevant. The interviewer put words in Taleb's mouth and Taleb didn't reject them out of hand. It's not Taleb's main point by any stretch, and 2007 is too specific a date for the kinds of trends Taleb is discussing.

Tail hedging strategy is explained in many places, e.g. [https://www.thefelderreport.com/2016/08/15/worried-about- a-s...](https://www.thefelderreport.com/2016/08/15/worried-about-a-stock- market-crash-heres-how-you-can-tail-hedge-your-portfolio/) [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-23/mark-spitznagel- val...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-23/mark-spitznagel-value-tail- hedged-equities) I don't really know enough about finance to evaluate it.

<comment><USER5> If Taleb had published the Black Swan and then retired, he would have been a legend. Instead he keeps talking and it becomes clear that there isn't much difference between him and someone like Peter Schiff.

<comment><USER6> It appears his claim to faim was 2008, which imo wasn't a black swan event at all (to anyone watching private sector indebtedness figures).

<comment><USER7> That's a very small pool of people.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazing photography + projector reversal called Dual Photography - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4p4XUZYfp4

<comment><USER2> The best part was at the last where a card was reconstructed just by measuring the diffuse pattern on a book. Amazing stuff.</comment>


Pictures from a developer's life - <AUTHOR> http://martinvalasek.com/blog/pictures-from-a-developers-life <comment><USER2> Does anyone know the name of the movie for the "When my regex returned exactly what I expected" scene?

</comment><comment><USER3> Sooooooo true.</comment>


Show HN: Curated SaaS Inspiration List - <AUTHOR> https://saasinspire.com <comment><USER2> Good work. This is pretty cool and looks really clean. As someone currently work on a SaaS product, I find sites like this super useful to find design inspiration without spending a lot of time hunting for good examples. Out of curiosity, what exactly do I get by subscribing - a curated list of new additions on some recurring basis? (might be worth clarifying on the site)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Right now I haven't planned what kind of information exactly I am going to provide for subscribers yet. However, I am thinking about creating some useful information about saas product creation not only from design perspective, but also from development, maybe update subscribers about new listings added (Although I think this would be little bit bland), also there are some ideas about growth case studies. So there are a lot of things and I will try to experiment and see what people who subscribe really like.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I need equity advice. - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN! My company recently got funded by a prominent YC-like incubator (will not name for now, but they're closely tied to YC). I'm having trouble figuring out "deserved" equity for each of my team members.
To preface, I started working on this project two years ago. It was not a business, just a side project with no funding. It gained 3000 users and I decided to take it on full time. I made this decision nine months ago.
Enter Jake. I had a feature for my product that I wanted built and he was perfect for the part. He has worked with me for the past 4 months and we just received our incubator funding. I offered him 10% of the company (vested) when we first started. Some people have told me that I should have offered him 1-3%...what are you thoughts on this? Not that it matters, I'm locked into this agreement now but...
On the other hand, we have my friend John. John hasn't touched a line of code in our project so far (he just finished up his year in college), but he is an obvious choice to us because we need another talented programmer on our team. I offered him 5% to join us if we got funded. After the successful interview, he said he wanted 7.5% because he's leaving school to come and work for me (and his parents aren't particularly happy with that).
I feel like 7.5% is way too much for someone who is joining after we have been accepted into an incubator. The risk is now so much lower than before. Did I give Jake too much? Is John asking for too much? HELP!
UPDATE: Thanks for all the replies. I got the answer I was looking for and feel validated in my decisions. I'm going to leave this thread here for future founders to look at; the comments are gold. Thanks again HN :) <comment><USER2> Working without a salary, pre angel funding = co-founder

You should be giving them 20%+ equity. If you treat them like employees, they will act like employees. At this early stage in the startup you need dedicated fanatics who will obsess about the project 24/7 and work 70 hours a week. With 5-10% equity, it's not rational for them to do so.

</comment><comment><USER3> You are omitting critical information. Are you paying these people a salary, or just equity? If you're paying them a salary, then 1-3% is reasonable. If you're not paying them a salary, then they are pretty much cofounders. Getting into a non-YC incubator does not really reduce your risk by much, nor does getting 3k users as a side project.

<comment><AUTHOR> No salary. So 7.5% is reasonable post-acceptance to incubator?

<comment><USER4> At no salary, 7.5 is small.

What you should do is come up with fair salaries and rate each person's work accordingly. What I mean is this. Let's say that you're 30 and fairly senior with a moderate amount of team lead experience-- $150,000 / year-- and have been working for 18 months. Your junior co-founder, who's just out of college-- $80,000 / year-- has been working for 12 months. So your investment (opportunity cost) is $225,000 and his is $80,000. The market valuation of the company may or may not be $305,000... it could be effectively zero, or it could be an order of magnitude higher, but this gives you a sense of what the proportions should be. The younger person should have 80/225 of what you have. If he stays longer, that number should evolve in his favor, which is one of the things vesting is for.

Of course, it's not clear what these time-of-stay amounts will be from the outset, which is why you need vesting and other provisions.

In your situation, rate yourself around $120,000/year (intermediate seniority with a promising product) and a promising, out-of-college programmer around $90,000/year. You're not going to actually pay these amounts to anyone, but these numbers should be the basis for equity amounts. Also scale for above- board effort, giving a 1.5 multiplier on people who really give their all (set aside some equity for this).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised no one linked to this, it being HN and all: <http://www.paulgraham.com/equity.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> One other thing to consider, besides the rational aspects to equity assignment, is fairness. People will talk about their equity allocation sooner or later and if there is a major differential between people who perceive themselves as similar (e.g., similar skills, similar job, came on board around the same time), it could hurt productivity and morale. People know the world isn't fair but they still get angry/demotivated when they are on the wrong end of the perceived unfairness.

<comment><USER7> this is brilliant point that many founders underestimate. fairness and motivation. it happens left and right when inexperienced tech founders just "calculate" equity. it might be calulated 100% corectly and co-founder might agree with it, but something will "not feel right" for him and greatly affect his performance. please pay attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> And also, are you profitable? Because 7.5% or 50% of 0 is zero.

And what work still need to be done? Is it a next 5 years of 20h/day full-time commitment or it's just a "small contract"?

</comment><comment><USER9> 7.5% sounds reasonable, may be even too little if he is truly valuable candidate.

Don't forget that everything you give should vest over time (for obvious reasons), giving 10% vested like you did is not a good idea.

Also, timely 83(b) election is your friend.

<comment><USER4> _7.5% sounds reasonable, may be even too little if he is truly valuable candidate._

Equity numbers are weird. Some times, 10% equity means the other founder has 90% and any dilution is going to hit that... meaning that a 20% grant to someone else moves the split to 72/8/20 not 70/10/20. So it's important to know what events can trigger general dilution. If the option pool is not set aside, that will trigger dilution too.

Sometimes, 10% means "I'm giving you 10 but I'm only giving myself 25 and the other 65 is for new talent, option pools, and to offset investor dilution". Other times, it means, "you're subject to all dilution, the only constant being that I have 9 times as much as you do". Two entirely different things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The risk is still quite high. Incubator funding != VC funding.

7.5% is not "way too much" at this point. Are you paying $85-100k for a fresh out-of-college developer? If no, then he's putting capital at risk (opportunity cost) and 7.5% is a quite reasonable slice.

Really, though, it comes down to this: does hiring him (and getting N years of his work, where N is the vesting period) make the company 7.5 percent more valuable? If yes, then you're not really giving anything up by cutting him a 7.5% slice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perfect advice. Thanks so much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also, please do vesting for this next guy. It not only protects you, it protects them. The guy you gave 10% could be gone tomorrow and he has 10%. Do a 4 yr vesting, 1 yr-cliff, monthly thereafter.</comment>


The man who built the online attendance system for India's government officials - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/277897/meet-the-man-who-built-the-awesome-online-attendance-system-for-indias-government-officials/

<comment><USER2> When I saw the screenshots of this article, it reminded me how much stress my indian colleagues were dealing with, a year ago. We have worked some time together on a project with Indian people (still friends with them, awesome people) and the way they explained their working environment was not really appealing at all unfortunately.

They were indirectly forced to worked more than eight hours a day (around 9 to 10), and was required to report everyday to their managers about the progress done during the day in a stylesheet. Their managers were trying cut off financially as much as they can to save some more money in the department so that managers can get extra money at the end of year depending on the savings.

This caused employees more stress, more work, less comfort and less time with family. Since there are already a lot of people waiting to get job out there, they did not have much choice but accept the companies' rules..

I am hoping for a more trust oriented employer-employee relationships for my indian fellows..

<comment><USER3> You are spot on. As an Indian I can confirm this behavior. Managers consider people as "resource" and treat them as "slave" (not an exaggeration). I hear lot of my friends use this exact word (slave) and I by myself felt the same way. They ask people to work for 10-12 hrs. (During 2007/2008 recession, companies like infosys/tcs increased working hours -8 hrs to 9 hrs -, even today, its the same hours).

Unless you are close to the manager (do some shoe-licking), working on Indian IT services is a hell,if you have conscience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see this system as a force that compels people to work longer hours than is neccesary. Public access to this data will make people name and shame particular individuals in the bureaucracy who might consistently clock in a little bit late, even though the reason behind the lateness might be legitimate (caring for others in family or long term illness). This is not transparency it just makes bureaucracy worse.

<comment><USER5> Many indian government employees don't even work 2 hours a day. This system will definitely help in changing the culture before it becomes an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "In all, it costs around Rs3 crore ($490,000). "It's still in the trial stage," said Sharma, "And we are still getting feedback on it."

While the website looks sleek, I'm not sure the what the expected ROI is on the 3 crores spend. What are we to expect of this system ? That government officials can be held accountable for not maintaining attendance ?

It reminds me of the very first job I held. Work would be allotted to me and I'd finish it in 5-6 hours and head home. I'd work an hour or two on researching how to improve our existing systems and implement them the next day. At the end of the week a manager pulled out a report that said I'd clocked low hours and I was punished for it. Those who stayed back to have tea and a late supper clocked more hours and were considered `hard working`.

Attendance != productivity or progress

</comment><comment><USER7> While I agree that attendance is a bad measure, knowing the Indian bureaucracy I welcome anything that makes it more accountable. Most of the organizations are filled with employees who have no interest / motivation in performing their duties, are unaccountable to their bosses or public and have no fear of loosing their job's for ANY reason.

</comment><comment><USER8> If you measure attendance, you will get attendance. However, there's no value in attendance.

<comment><USER9> Well they are government jobs (not necessarily programming/creative but say registrars) where attendance does make a difference

<comment><USER10> I can't say for sure about the Indian government, but the US government employs a lot of programmers. So not necessarily not programmers, either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The real interesting part of this story was barely discussed: That one person could build an entire system like this for the country.

10 years ago it would have taken a 100 people

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice idea for taking the class attendance register at College/school.

Just mild concern about the biometric data being stored centrally.

<comment><USER13> They probably chose the biometric data option over ID cards to prevent buddy punching.

<comment><USER12> If they packaged this up and provided an optional ID card scanner front end could be useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hmmm, can be quite useful to thieves. Is this guy at work now? Yeah, than it's time to steal some stuff from his home.

</comment><comment><USER15> Biometric based attendance system is violation of privacy.

</comment><comment><USER16> Seeing the implementation would be a interesting, but certainly it can be powerful and bring transparency.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can someone point to the visualization libraries being used in the attendance website?

<comment><USER18> Seems to me like this [http://www.almsaeedstudio.com/preview](http://www.almsaeedstudio.com/preview) \- a free template.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> checkout the "Attendance In-Time Statistics" pie chart on main Dashboard .. 33% are coming to office after 11 AM ,almost at lunch time.. great isn't :)

</comment><comment><USER20> Url changed from [http://scroll.in/article/683083/Meet-the-man-who-built- the-a...](http://scroll.in/article/683083/Meet-the-man-who-built-the-awesome- online-attendance-system-for-India%E2%80%99s-government-officials), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER21> How come there are no concerns about privacy? Most of the people's email ID and personal phone numbers are visible in that site

<comment><USER22> They are public officials and those are public contact details.

<comment><USER23> If you look at the data.gov site, you will find datasets from Chicago police department that contains official names and how much salary they withdraw, everything public.

<comment><USER24> Similarly, the salaries of every employee of the state of Texas, by name: [http://salaries.texastribune.org/](http://salaries.texastribune.org/)

Teachers, police, politicians, everyone.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


David Pogue: Dropbox Will Simplify Your Life - <AUTHOR> http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/dropbox-will-simplify-your-life/?src=twr

<comment><USER3> From the article...

"I realize that not everybody works on such elaborate file-shuttling projects. But try Dropbox for its ability to keep your important files everywhere at once. Or try it as an automatic, silent, encrypted backup of your essentials. Or try it so that you can get at your computer's files from your phone."

When will Dropbox implement client-side encryption? Dropbox is a pleasure to use. Recommending Dropbox as a backup of certain documents is fine. Recommending Dropbox as a backup for important/essential documents where privacy is a concern is not ok.

<comment><USER4> Dropbox is just a regular directory on disk. There is no magic. There just happens to be a process watching that directory for changes. (or not. you can always kill the dropbox process, and your files are still accessible)

Of course most users don't encrypt their local file systems in the first place, so whether dropbox has something for local security is irrelevant.

For people interested in securing files on disk the same solutions you would use without dropbox are the same ones you can use with dropbox. In a nutshell, either encrypt your whole volume or mount a file-based volume.

Personally I use a Truecrypt volume, and I placed my drop box folder inside it. I do this so I can still access all the files from the web and mobile and have the versioning. Alternatively you could place the volume's data file itself in the dropbox folder to be synced. You would of course lose the per file granularity, but you do get a "snapshot" feature since you can restore your whole volume with the versioning.

Keep in mind that if you place a trucecrypt volume inside drop box, then it will only get synced when it is unmounted.

<comment><USER3> Truecrypt is not an option for the majority of users. You've gone from a slick user experience to one of..."Why not just keep things on my USB stick again?"

These are solved problems as evidenced by other providers like Spideroak and Wuala where encryption happens by default on the client's device.

At the very least, Dropbox can offer this as an option. With the recent funding, if they are planning to offer business plans...surely encryption will be default there at least?

<comment><USER5> A little more sophistication in their Selective Syncing would be nice as well. And maybe some response to questions on the forums, at least for paying customers.

I'm a paying customer, but I'm not a happy paying customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Dropbox is in PR heaven (and rightfully so). At this point all they have to do is execute. Congrats to Drew, Arash, Ivan and the rest of the Dropbox team. Not only is the product awesome and useful, the dudes are very smart and nice as heck!

<comment><USER7> They probably paid good money for this.

<comment><USER7> Since this offhand comment seems to hit a nerve: My thinking was that there has been a slate of pro-Dropbox stories (I am a happily paying user of their service) which looked like it was carefully choreographed by a PR firm, no doubt sparked by their fundraising.

That being said, saying that they paid him was a bit over the top and I hereby retract that theory.

<comment><USER8> Paying off a reporter is very different then paying for good PR. Just read what pg has to say: <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

Don't be so nieve as to think all this good press just happens, well all still live by C.R.E.A.M. And it's not a bad thing, I love DB, but you can bet they did, indeed, pay good money for this. Did they pay the reporter? no. Did they pay for all this press? yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> David Pogue is a great tech journalist and I don't see him taking money from Dropbox to write something positive.

I like this piece - Dropbox deserves all of the great PR it's getting. My favorite Dropbox quote is Michael Wolfe's answer to this Quora question - [http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular- tha...](http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other- programs-with-similar-functionality)

Also, just one note to David Pogue - be careful about giving the impression that Dropbox solves "version hell." It's not a version control system - <USER2> user still has to have their own version control system, like his editor did by adding her initials to the file name.

<comment><USER4> No, David was kinda right. Dropbox has built-in version tracking. Only 30days of history is saved by default. Of course there are no commit messages, but it happens any time the file is changed, and the web ui presents it in a pretty clear way for non-techy users, by timestamp and author.

I think the specific version-hell he perceives is the where any member of the team does not have the latest version. So in his case it is the auto sync that scratches that itch, and not the explicit version tracking.

As for the "editor's initials" part. I think you might have misunderstood what he meant. The editor did not make another copy with a new name, she just renamed the file, as a signal to the team that her work was complete. Alternatively she could have just communicated by some other means, and left the filename in tact, but this is what they chose.

they sell a "packrat" feature with paid subscriptions for unlimited version history

<comment><USER9> Hmm interesting. Yea I knew what he meant with the initials thing, I didn't know about the timestamp/author thing in the web app. Can users download old versions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What amaze me is how this same problem was solved years ago by programmers.. Hell, even dropbox used svn behind the scene. I remember when Dropbox was just starting, some friends and me were talking about useless it was. "Duh, if I want to host a svn server, I'll just host mine." ;)

It's also important to look at all the competitors dropbox had and currently have.. and still, they're extremely successful. So, basically, they found a nice problem to solve and _solve_ it. The goal there wasn't to be able to sync all possible folders.. just one little folder where anyone would put their stuff inside and that'd just _work_.

And, more importantly, it makes me thing about what tools we use every day that the no-techy don't know about.

In my opinion, there's really something to do with the terminal. It's such a crazy productivity boost and, if implemented correctly, might be way more intuitive. For instance, everyone knows people that are scared by all the buttons/windows/popup dialog/etc. For us, geeks, it's so easy.. we see the screen and automatically abstract everything and focus on right part; but for _them_ , it's impossible to abstract so many new things at once.

A terminal, _IA_ based, could make it so easy for no-geek to use a computer. Obviously, I'm not talking about _BASH_ but something that could pretty much understand beginners commands. I.e _send a email to bob_.. which could guide the user through various questions.

Yeah, it's probably stupid. But hell, I'm sure they're hundreds of product as useful as Dropbox.. we just have to think about it.

<comment><USER11> Having started my computer career in the 1980s, I strongly disagree. If the command line were all that, GUIs wouldn't have have taken off like a rocket in the first place.

<comment><USER10> WHen you say you _strongly disagree_ ; I'd assume you mean about the command line example. My point was more about how simple tools used every day by geeks might be useful to no-techny if made simpler and more accessible.

And when I say terminal, I don't mean it in "bash" or unix prompt.. A total new way to design it with a strong focus on simplicity and AI.

<comment><USER11> It's been attempted, many many times. We ended up with some really good text adventure parsers, but none that developed into productivity tools. If you do want to pursue this line of thought, do some searching on Magnetic Scrolls' approach to command parsing, I think a lot of that eventually got open- sourced.

<comment><USER12> That's a thought.. Isn't Siri really a command line with Text-to-Voice and Voice-to-Text?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > You can also consider Dropbox a simple, automatic backup system. After all, > anything that sits on multiple computers simultaneously is, by definition, > backed up.

Well, it's a backup system, but the author's reasoning is wrong here, right? If you make a mistaken change to a file (like deleting it) and don't notice it before Dropbox is able to sync with your other computers, then all the copies are changed. The _real_ backup lies on Dropbox's servers, where they store previous versions, not your computer.

<comment><USER14> Dropbox has built-in version control and undelete functionality: <http://www.dropbox.com/help/11>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why is dropbox suddenly getting a slew of coverage? Did this article get written because got a big feature in Fortune? Did they just hire someone to interact with the press?

<comment><USER16> Most likely paid PR. Journalists are lazy and they already written articles.

<comment><USER17> Somehow I doubt a public relations agent on Dropbox's payroll wrote up a piece specifically from David Pogue's point of view, in the unique writing style of David Pogue, so that David Pogue could simply submit it to the New York Times, claim it as his own, and collect two paycheques.

I'm all for healthy skepticism, but not purely speculative conspiracy theories.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Client-side encryption or a self-hosted version could be useful. I'm pretty sure I'm violating a privacy law somewhere when I keep student grades in a Dropbox folder.

</comment><comment><USER19> Agreed. Working on multiple machines and files not friendly to g docs, makes dropbox indispensable. When I upgraded to Lion and iOS5, I didn't even think about using iCloud. iTunes integration w/ iCloud may change that but I doubt it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I use TrueCrypt on my Dropbox volume, but it really would be nice to have an integrated solution. Many non-technical users may not realize they care about this, but they do.

<comment><USER21> FYI -- SpiderOak and Wuala do meaningful encryption natively.

(I cofounded SpiderOak in 2007)

<comment><USER22> All these systems are doing it wrong. I don't want online backups, I want an infinite, encrypted, online filesystem. I should be able to mount it and treat it like any other hard disk. The local disk should just be used as a huge cache. I can't find a service that does this. Why the hell not?

<comment><USER20> But it's unclear if this is what "everyone else" wants as well. The most interesting group, I think, is not the mostly tech-illiterate who want to store their garden pictures and videos in the cloud, nor the tech-elite who are willing to trust online storage with large swaths of their lives and businesses.

It's the group in between that is the most interesting to these companies right now. Those who are relatively well informed about major technologies and their uses. Do they really want to have their information mostly stored off- site, or do they simply want larger and larger local storage mirrored by online back-up for peace of mind and easy sharing?

I would guess that this is the largest (apparent)consumer market and one of the reasons why this is where most of these companies have their focus right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For his usecase (multiple people editing with automatic version control) pity he didn't try Google docs which I think is better for this. No appending initials to the file to indicate review completed, full tracking of changes and indication of who did what. Office.live and few other similar services also would have been better.

<comment><USER24> I would love to use google docs.

But it doesn't give complex formatting, you MUST have inet, you don't get a native directory - with asymmetrical directory structures on multiple clients, VISIO VISIO VISIO, all must have gmail... etc.etc.etc

Dropbox, for me, is the best tool I have for team collaboration.

We are an active and very early Same Page user (UX sucks ass) I've used Atlassian, Groove and other collaboration tools.

Dropbox is hands down the most efficient - because it requires ZERO THINKING on the part of ANY user.

They just edit files on their machine, shared directories between users are auto-updated.

There is NOTHING to do on any end.

If you cant figure out how to manage directory structures across your team, then you shouldn't be on a team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Especially if you plug in a service like 300milligrams: 300.mg

It basically gives you a stream of updates so you can track what is happening across a whole host of platforms. One of the guys creating this was at YCNYC.

</comment><comment><USER26> Wuala, so much better..

</comment><comment><USER27> This just makes me so sad. The author's work flow cries out for sharing, not syncing, perhaps augmented by some sort of notification system. This is a problem my filesystem colleagues should have solved years (decades?) ago. Arguably they did so at a technical level, but the user and administrator experiences were so horrific that people abandoned those solutions. Instead they turned to things such as Dropbox and its (too) many imitators, which put the right interface on top of the wrong solution instead of the other way around. Now there's so much storage and bandwidth wasted storing copies insecurely on services such as Dropbox, when it should be going directly between users' systems with no middle man to pay for compromising security. It's a business model that shouldn't even exist. What a waste.

</comment><comment><USER28> Meh...As other commenters have noted, Dropbox is not for anyone who values their privacy. Your files are not secure from Dropbox staff snooping, and they'll fink you off to the flimsiest government request to paw through your stuff. I use Spideroak because they have true zero-knowledge encryption. Only the account holder has the encryption key, and they cannot get into your files. Of course this is sad for people who cannot track their passwords and always need the vendor to look out for them. And Pogue's entire workflow is goofy.</comment>


GitHub removes IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT repository from Trending - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/upend/IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT/issues/88 <comment><USER2> Like I posted on that Github issue, they've been editing opposing opinions to call themselves "trolls." It's known that abusive repos get removed from trending/explore, and that's as clear cut as abuse as you can get.

EDIT: 2\. Content Restrictions

You agree that you will not under any circumstances upload, post, host, or transmit any content that:

1\. is unlawful or promotes unlawful activities;

2\. is or contains sexually obscene content;

3\. is libelous, defamatory, or fraudulent;

4\. is discriminatory or abusive toward any individual or group;

5\. contains or installs any active malware or exploits, or uses our platform for exploit delivery (such as part of a command and control system); or

6\. infringes on any proprietary right of any party, including patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, right of publicity, or other rights.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree that editing other people's comments isn't the best thing to do, but the README clearly states that those types of comments weren't welcome.

In addition, serious opinions like issue #60 weren't edited, only issues like #77, which literally said:

"Dear Beef, Beef. Thanks, Beef" \-- [https://github.com/upend/IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT/issues/7...](https://github.com/upend/IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT/issues/77)

EDIT: ... and IMO calling an obvious troll a "troll" isn't defamatory. What GitHub is doing is clearly censorship, nothing short of it.

<comment><USER3> Wait a second. Repository owners can edit people's comments on their issue tracker? That's insane.

<comment><USER4> Yes, normally to fix the formatting when they post long sections of code/logs which are otherwise very difficult to read. And not just repo _owners_ either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't get what's the fuss about? I always thought "Trending" repositories is for code not for airing your opinion.

Someone else can create a "IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_IN" and probably have thousands of stars as well because the topic is itself binary in nature: you are either in or out. And then what? What would that prove? Is this some sort of popularity contest about who gets more stars? If your intention is to air your opinion, you have social networks for that. But this looks more like a misuse of the platform to me.

Github is a company not a public service institution. They have their reasons for selling to Microsoft. You may agree or disagree with the decision and you have all the reasons to chose to stay or leave. Heck, you might even go for their competitors or create one yourself. But this is honestly just immature.

</comment><comment><USER6> My guess is it's removed for all the toxicity and hate being spewed in the issues.

For instance this comment about the new CEO: _" Why are you such sniveling waste of human excrement and what original sin did humanity commit to deserve you?"_

Why would anyone want to read such stuff when browsing "trending"?

From the readme: _As ironic as it may seem, it makes sense to keep this evacuation center right here on GitHub. For now at least. If they shut this down, it will only validate our exodus._

It's like they want to flamebait in order to be shut down.

</comment><comment><USER7> The repo appears to be actively seeking conflict/flamewar. So while it doesn't disappear it isn't promoted. That seems sensible even if not everyone will agree.

It is also precisely the same approach to the problem the HN is taking.

<comment><USER8> Requiem for GitHub (2016)

[http://hintjens.com/blog:111](http://hintjens.com/blog:111)

<comment><USER9> I don't really see how that article is relevant here?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Stop giving this GH repo attention and let it die already.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm guessing the reason the repository is so popular is that people are worried about what Microsoft might do after acquiring GitHub. Things like... censoring content they disapprove of, for example.

<comment><USER11> Do you think Microsoft ordered them to remove this repo, or that their existing moderation team did?

<comment><USER2> It seems likely to me that a few people might have reported the issue editing stuff to GitHub, and that could've triggered this honestly.

<comment><USER10> If I could figure out how I would report the repo.

<comment><USER2> I imagine: [https://github.com/contact/report- abuse](https://github.com/contact/report-abuse)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Good on them. The response to this has been really, sadly as expected, immature

</comment><comment><USER13> This should be removed from HN. If you dislike Github because Microsoft acquired it, then migrate to GitLab. There is no point on this fanatic and paranoid dramatization; It adds nothing to the Open Source productive community.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sigh...

The repo's readme is melodramatic and entitled. If you don't agree with GitHub's direction, and have already made your objections known to them, then move somewhere else. Or you know, perhaps pay to host your own source control and ticket system.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's really disappointing how childish the response to this purchase has been.

</comment><comment><USER16> Yet another proof that giving people something for free never pays off. People will always complain, and developers are the worse.

<comment><USER17> Just because it's free doesn't remove our right to complain about it.

Complaining isn't the best outcome however. Learning how to use git in a distributed environment probably is the right option.

<comment><USER16> I'm not disputing your "right to complain". I'm sure there's some N-th amendment for that. If to quote more authoritative sources: "You're not wrong, you're just an A __hole " [0].

[0] I'm not referring to "you" but to whoever created that clownish repo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This tweet is interesting:

[https://twitter.com/UpEnd_org/status/1003936552840515584](https://twitter.com/UpEnd_org/status/1003936552840515584)

<comment><USER19> The difference between the old ceo and the new ceo is pretty stark, at least on a superficial - just looking at the profile pics & names - level. Like the original CEO uses an IRCish internet handle and a bad picture taken on a webcam, unshaven and wearing oakleys indoors. The new guy uses his full name and he has a professional photograph and is well manicured.

I've never paid much attention to Github's political struggles over the years and have been a loyal (paying) customer for a very long time, so I can't say if the new guy will be worse than the old guy or not. But I will say this: One of these guys looks like he runs a website for coders based on the version control system invented by the linux guy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It has begun.

</comment><comment><USER21> In other news; water is wet.

This is GitHub after all, it's not like they're new to censorship.

<comment><USER6> I can see the repo, it's not censored.

<comment><USER22> Who's saying you can't see the repo?

<comment><USER6> Everyone here and in the issue complaining about censorship, duh

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Sick people.

<comment><USER23> [https://github.com/upend/IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT/issues/7...](https://github.com/upend/IF_MS_BUYS_GITHUB_IMMA_OUT/issues/79)

Fighters!</comment></comment>


Show HN: Simplifying searching on Android - Bean Search - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.beanify.beansearch

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm the developer of this app. I made this app to basically meet some of my searching needs. Please let me know if you have any interesting features/suggestions.</comment>


A computing scientist's approach to a once-deep theorem of Sylvester's (1988) - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1016.html

<comment><USER2> The Wikipedia article is also interesting. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester%E2%80%93Gallai_theore...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester%E2%80%93Gallai_theorem)

</comment><comment><USER3> Béla Bollobás "The Art of Mathematics" has a very nice treatment of this problem (the history, multiple proofs) as problem number 33. And Aigner, Zeigler "Proofs from THE BOOK" also has a good treatment.</comment>


Creating a TikTok bot with Microsoft playwright - <AUTHOR> https://www.martinmcgee.dev/automating-tiktok-bot-with-playwright/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here:Using playwright is a breeze. Twas pretty easy to get passed TikToks captcha</comment>


The 10x developer is Not a myth - <AUTHOR> http://brikis98.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-10x-developer-is-not-myth.html

<comment><USER2> This repeats the misconception that the 10x is the difference in productivity between average or median developer and the best developer. However the actual statistics is difference in productivity between the best and worst developer.

Judging from my personal experience and I would imagine that the median developer is a 3-4xer. With the wrost developers delivering a third as much, and other developers delivering 3 times as much.

<comment><USER3> The worst developers are a drain on any project. Delivering negative 'productivity' by producing code with a wide range of issues. Bugs, unmanageable code, non-performant code, memory issues... a maintenance nightmare.

10x's is not nearly enough.

The top programmers leverage many things. Existing libraries, past experience on failed/successful projects, OOP, design patterns, multiple programming languages (right tool for the job at hand), code generators if it makes sense. And best practices they have learned from others. And more.

Nathan Myhrvold former CTO at Microsoft had this to say about the differences:

'The Top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10x or 100x or even 1000x but by 10,000x.'

<comment><USER4> _Nathan Myhrvold former CTO at Microsoft had this to say about the differences:_

So if the ousted dilettante[1] head of a struggling division of some fading megacorp says it, it must be true?

[1] See, for example, his positions on patent trolling, and his quack cures for global warming.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Erlywarn, Clever Uptime Monitoring. Any thoughts? - <AUTHOR>

We launched an early version of our uptime monitoring service Erlywarn to the public this week.
http://erlywarn.com
The project was scratching an itch that monitoring services would only alert you if your site went down and not if they started responding slowly or erratically.
So we built Erlywarn to keep track of the response times and allow it to send notifications if your site responds unusually, as this is often an early warning sign that something is starting to go wrong.
It's only been 2 weeks from conception to this, so feedback would be most welcome, especially:
Would you consider using the service yet, what are we missing?
Prices are currently in GBP (while we sort out a merchant account) is this a big turn off for the US?
Would $1/per site/month we good value to you?
Thanks for any help
ps: written in Go for those that find that sort of thing interesting. <comment><USER2> Looks nice!

However, a couple of points:

* The £1/site/month is too low. I won't trust you to be able to rent and manage a network of decent machines for that price point, so I wouldn't trust your results. You're also going to eat costs trying to support cheap one-site-owners. Try a price point like "£5 for 5 sites a month!" so that even if you have one site, you pay at least £5 a month.

* Show me your (hopefully) geographically dispersed network. Like a map showing where your machines are with fancy lines and all that. I want to know you know what you're doing and at the very least you should have a network of independent machines, geographically spread. Tell me you're using independent datacenters/cloud hosting for maximum availability.

* I don't know the current state of Go, but as a potential customer I'm questioning the logic of using an experimental language (as I see it) for an uptime monitoring system. Presumably you want to have the highest uptime as possible, and maybe Go interpreters/compilers have bugs that will affect you. I would not advertise the fact you're using Go.

* Link me to a dashboard where I can see the statusses of your service, and any maintenance messages you might have had. This might strike you as odd, but I would trust you more if you had a public page where you can show past incidents and how you resolved them, or at least a table full of green lights showing all your stuff is up. Some things can fail (without losing uptime), and I'd like to see you being open about it.

I understand you're just beginning so cherry pick from this comment what you like :) Either way it's a nice looking landing page.

<comment><AUTHOR> RE price. I found the "plans" where you pay for things you didn't need rather off-putting from other services, especially in our pay-for-what-you-eat CPU/bandwidth/etc "cloud" ( _cringe_ ) world. Higher price -> trust is a tricky one.

RE network & dashboard: Good plan. It does seem silly not to show we are using it too.

RE go; go is really not experimental anymore, and has been an excellent choice for this kind of concurrent problem. We had something similar in Erlang (internally) and this has been so much faster to build and is much simpler. I get your point and wouldn't normally mention it, but if anyone would be interested it's here :)

Thanks for your feedback.

<comment><USER3> You're using Go...but...it's ERLywarn. So how can it possibly be written in anything but Erlang. See ErlyWeb, Erlware, etc.

I'm sorry but the name of your product needs to change to Gowarn. I don't make the rules, I just enforce them.

(Best of luck, looks good and not overpriced like some freemium alternatives)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Last time I checked, the price separator that other monitoring sites used -- in particular between free and paid accounts -- is frequency of checks. E.g., free accounts include checks every half hour (or 15 min), and paid accounts could be as often as every 30 seconds.

With that in mind, the frequency of checks (or: "how long will my site be down before you tell me?") is an important thing to mention; I couldn't find that info, scanning through.

The pale grey text costs some effort to read, as well, so I'd also suggest increasing the contrast there.

Looks like a good site, and simple, though it may prove a bit too easy for the major existing monitoring sites to copy your distinguishing feature. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks great, always good to see a UK based company innovating.

I've been using wasitup.com and just the other day I was thinking why aren't there any reasonably priced monitoring services for small single site owners? You've filled that gap and innovated at the same time. Congrats, I wish you every success.

Think you have a typo, search about section for Earlywarn instead of Erlywarn.

</comment><comment><USER6> eh, I'd ignore people who say that low prices make you look less reliable. Being new makes you look less reliable. In the infrastructure market, it's traditional to start at the low end and work your way up, and SysAdmins are some of the cheapest people you could ever meet, so having a fully functional low-end product is a good thing. If you want a reputation, you need to earn it.

That said, SysAdmins are also an inquisitive bunch. As someone else pointed out, you need to document where the test servers are, and what happens when one test server can reach the site but another can not.

If you only have one location doing the checking, or if you can't handle the case of the site being accessible from one place but not another, well... that's a very important feature. Additional servers are cheap; but you will have to do something sensible when one monitoring site says it's up and another says it's down, and that's a moderately difficult interface problem you need to solve (and one that most monitoring software does badly.)

<comment><USER4> I tend to agree on this pricing comment -- being new means no one will have much faith you'll still be online a year from now. But you're cheap enough that if you look interesting enough, lots of folks will add you as a backup monitor.

From that point your foot is in the door, and it's up to you how to find the leverage to become their primary monitoring service. You can raise the price (possibly for new fancy features only) as you develop more features and get some history of reliability behind you (which is a feature in and of itself, of course...).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Clickable: <http://erlywarn.com>

Typo on the front page: "Recieve"

<comment><AUTHOR> ah thanks... I seem to have lost spellcheck in vim

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Reading that text on the website in light gray was kind of painful. I get that you need to differentiate some blocks of texts but those lines look like they are fading. Oh, and maybe a lightbox with prev-next buttons? Nice work tho, best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER9> The site looks good, although I prefer the low price you may be signalling low quality with 1£. BTW, it's nice to see that twitter's bootstrap framework is being used by alot of new projects. They sure filled a gap for non-designers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm actually not too bad at design, and really enjoy it – my other startup <http://www.pacpacs.com> was designed by me which I don't think is too bad :-)

... where bootstrap really shines is that I had a working basic version of the app running and looking pretty good about 6 hours after the idea, I would have spent longer than that in photoshop staring at color swatches. It's the perfect prototyper.

<comment><USER9> Looks good, although takes ages to load. Having design and coding skills is a dead combo! Keep up the good work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Purchased! We already use Pingdom and NewRelic so feel free to get in touch for feedback and use case support. First comment is you need to add https support to the adding a domain UI.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We'll be making lots of improvements over the coming weeks so if you feel anything is missing drop me a note.

yeah I had though about https not being clear, it will accept your https url, but your right there's no indication that it's ok to type it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> nice service with a frictionless signup. very cool.

</comment><comment><USER12> what does this do that keynote does not?

<comment><AUTHOR> keynote is aimed very much at monitoring and fine tuning a single large application or organisation. It's very powerful but also quite complex. So isn't really suitable for someone with little technical knowledge.

We're aiming for more of a fire-and-forget approach where Erlywarn learns what is acceptable/unacceptable behaviour – next week the notification emails will have a "don't warm me like this" type button in them to help you train the alerts. When monitoring 100's of sites you have some that are more sensitive than others, and we want to remove the "setup" from this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This looks really cool.

As a student I love your pricing of a buck per site, but as relix has mentioned, that might seem too cheap to a lot of people so a small package of a few websites would also work.

What happens if for whatever reason the site only starts behaving erratically for a class of users? Say, my servers are in Europe and the whole of US can't access my site, but it all looks fine from Europe?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

At the moment that would be flagged as "problem" and you would be alerted. Very soon (few days) the notifications will be much more informative and tell you exactly where and what kind of problem.</comment></comment>