Ask HN: Where do you get your cheap servers? - <AUTHOR> As per the title, where do you guys get your cheap servers? I mean subscription-based, not server hardware. I'm a student and I'm looking for something cheap for hosting personal experiments and websites. Thought that people on HN might have the answer and be interested in the answer, too. <comment><USER2> There are at least 5 providers that will rent you a $5/month server: DigitalOcean, Lightsail, Linode, UpCloud and Vultr. There's a guy that publishes benchmarks of their $5 instance regularly

[https://joshtronic.com/2019/09/02/vps-showdown- digitalocean-...](https://joshtronic.com/2019/09/02/vps-showdown-digitalocean- lightsail-linode-upcloud-vultr/)

DigitalOcean is by far the most popular. Personally, I like Vultr because they also have $2.50 IPv6 only instances and you can upload your own ISO file if you want to try a less popular Linux distribution. Both services have similar user interfaces that are pretty good.

That being said, $60/year is still a lot. If you can get away with just a static site, try GitHub pages [https://pages.github.com/](https://pages.github.com/). You only get one (unless you create GitHub organizations) but it's free. You can still have your own domain pointing to it with TLS (free through Let's Encrypt). You miss out on the fun of managing a Linux server unfortunately.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Yep. I use DO and it's been just fine for low traffic websites. They've been great to work with and very easy to use. But I only host personal projects and internal tooling projects with them. Can't speak to scaling but my experience has been positive.

<comment><USER3> For cheap hosting, nearlyfreespeech.net is where it's at, cheap and full shell access on bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> core-questions It's all about the pre-cloud hosting providers.

Check out the Black Hat SEO forums - the people there generally are running all manner of sketchy services, bots, crawlers, etc. that need the cheapest compute available.

The old hosting providers often have deals that can get you more power than the equivalent Amazon machine for the same price. If you're looking to be able to host something that other people might use, this is a solid way to go; just make sure you build something that it's easy for you to re-deploy elsewhere (i.e. at the very least have all your code in a separate revision control system, and some mechanism to back up any databases / locally created files to your home machine).

If you're really just looking for something dirt cheap for personal projects that won't see use beyond yourself, the free / up to $5/mo tier of the big cloud providers is a reasonable thing to check out. [https://vncoupon.com/5-usd-vps-compare-linode-vs-vultr-vs- di...](https://vncoupon.com/5-usd-vps-compare-linode-vs-vultr-vs-digitalocean- vs-amazon-lightsail/) is a bit old now, maybe there's a newer article helping you sort that out.

<comment><USER4> Also look at webhostingtalk.com (that's where all the BHW vendors are buying from anyway)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google cloud free tier gives everyone (not just students) one 'always' free vps instance. It works great for me.

Oracle promised 2 instances but got an error 'out of capacity' error instead. Support staff confirmed they dont have hardware in my region.

<comment><USER6> Just remember Google only gives you 1GB of egress network traffic free, per month. This might be enough for a small personal project, but even a low traffic website will easily surpass that - doing a Show HN or something will blow through that quickly.

<comment><USER7> Put CloudFlare in front. Works fine for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hetzner.

They offer VMs with 1 vCPU and 2GB RAM for 3€/month. Quite a deal.

<comment> ar-jan I second Hetzner. Their smallest VPS has been reliable for me and is even a bit cheaper than OVH. More importantly, should something go wrong or you have a question, you can expect a quite fast reply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> OVH, Hetzner, and the whole Low End family

[https://lowendstock.com/](https://lowendstock.com/)

[https://www.lowendtalk.com/](https://www.lowendtalk.com/)

[https://lowendbox.com/](https://lowendbox.com/)

But nowadays you can get servers for free. AWS, Google, and even Oracle have free triers:

[https://aws.amazon.com/free/](https://aws.amazon.com/free/)

[https://cloud.google.com/free/](https://cloud.google.com/free/)

[https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/](https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/)

<comment><USER10> IIRC, at least the Amazon EC2 free tier is limited to the first 12 months. There was a point at which I got billed for the instance that was free before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Lowendbox, lurk 3+ years offers during blackfriday and you'll pay 1-5 dollars/year for a 2gb ram VPS with unlimited traffic in a non 13-eyes country. Payable in bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER12> I use digitalocean.

Not because they are cheap but because they are great. It just so happens they have a $5 / month plan for a 1 CPU core / 1GB of memory / 25GB SSD server.

<comment><USER13> agreed. I also use AWS for certain projects... IMO- Don't put all your eggs in one basket

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Heroku is free if you don't need constant uptime (it shuts down your server when it's idle for a while and starts it back up when a request comes in). Then the cheapest paid tier is $7.

It's also really pleasant because you deploy by just pushing your code; no SSHing or cron jobs. You do _code_ an entire server process; you just don't manage it. So it's like halfway-serverless.

The downside, other than being $7 instead of $5, is that that's only for a single process; you can't run multiple low-compute servers within that $7. The file system also gets wiped whenever you deploy, so it's not appropriate for a database.

</comment><comment><USER15> AWS, azure, and digitalocean all give free credit to students

[https://education.github.com/pack](https://education.github.com/pack)

vultr, hetzner, and OVH have sub-$5/month VPS plans

Personally, I use digitalocean.

</comment><comment><USER16> Just get a Hetzner. Costs very little, good exercise to set it up with a usable config. I even have one that I barely ever use.

</comment><comment><USER17> You can find cheaper options than Linode, but honestly you can host lots of stuff on a single $5/month instance, and you get the benefit of their infrastructure and support. I remember being a student and paying $20/month for a SliceHost VPS with a fraction of what you can get today for much less.

</comment><comment><USER18> OVH, Hetzner, Digital Ocean

</comment><comment><USER19> Had an account on asmallorange ([https://asmallorange.com](https://asmallorange.com)) for a while. Can't vouch for their compute power, but if barebones shell access is what you're after, they do well.

<comment><USER20> A Small Orange was acquired by EIG (Endurance International Group) in 2012[1] and has reportedly gone downhill since[2].

[1] [https://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/site- updates-n...](https://www.webhostingsecretrevealed.net/blog/site-updates- news/the-who-what-when-of-endurance-international-group-eig/) [2] [https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and- fall-o...](https://reviewsignal.com/blog/2016/01/19/the-rise-and-fall-of-a- small-orange/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm using scaleway.com. For $3/month you get 2vcpus, 2GB RAM and 20GB ssd.

<comment><USER8> I've tried Scaleway once when I applied for their 500€ 1-month credit campaign, but they demanded a CC and to add insult to injury charged me an activation charge that wasn't given back. Twice.

Can't say I recommend them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> LowEndTalk offers

Very cheap but don't be surprised if a supplier goes out of business/disappears so strategize accordingly.

Plus then of course all the major cloud provide a intro credit. So that should cover about 3 years worth of basic VPS

<comment><USER23> I love the lowendbox/lowendtalk forums. Dig in and you learn all kinds of inside information about the various discount hosting companies and their bizarre drama. You also learn how to spot actually reliable, professionally managed services, versus the fly by night people just looking to take your money and bail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Assuming the question is an XY problem and you are really looking for a very simple solution for an Internet server you operate: Have a look at FFTH.

If fiber is offered for your home then you can host your server in your bedroom. This is what I do for my websites, and this is really liberating. Hell, you could serve from a RaspberryPi or if you think this is too extreme, from a mini PC like Gigabyte Brix.

If fiber is not offered, but you plan to relocate anyway, try to optimize for FFTH. This is what I have done, I moved more than a year ago and specifically looked for FTTH.

</comment><comment><USER25> [https://prgmr.com/](https://prgmr.com/)

I have been using their VPSs for about 10 years: it's one of the best services I've ever had the pleasure to use.

</comment><comment><USER26> VPS:

\- [https://bytemark.co.uk](https://bytemark.co.uk) (VPS, colo and leased physical by competent & responsive folks (in Manchester IIRC))

\- [https://linode.com](https://linode.com) (more than just Linux)

\- [https://pair.com](https://pair.com) (24/7 phone support in North America, has FreeBSD offerings too, been in business a long time)

Bonus: And physical servers: [https://unixsurplus.com](https://unixsurplus.com)

</comment><comment><USER27> I have my important VPSs on Linode since 2008, good experience, almost zero downtime in 10+ years, very reliable, great customer support. They have a $5/mo Nanode 1CPU, 1 GB Ram.

</comment><comment><USER28> Vultr: 1 vCPU / 512MB RAM / 500 GB bandwidth for $2.5 a month [0]. I ran a VPN with them, once.

[https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud- compute/](https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/)

For webpages, I have been using [https://1mb.site](https://1mb.site) (free custom domain and TLS) and [https://netlify.com](https://netlify.com)

</comment><comment><USER29> I've been on Digital Ocean for a few years, pretty happy with them and have no plans to move on. I was on Hetzner before them, but moved away because the pricing was essentially the same yet Hetzner's control panel (at least back then - I'm talking before 2015) was a bit of a pain, and DO's is all shiny, and I find what I'm looking for quickly, most of the time. Hetzner's admin panel might have come a long way since then though?

</comment><comment><USER30> Great experience with Amazon Lightsail. The smallest instance is only $3.50 a month, and you can add a swap file if you need a bit more than 512 MB of RAM.

Lightsail is like swimming in the shallow end of the AWS pool. Doesn't have a drop down with 50 services like AWS, but has enough to run a small or medium sized web app.

</comment><comment><USER31> There are many options mentioned already and one I haven't seen so far is [https://www.ssdnodes.com/](https://www.ssdnodes.com/) been using it for some time, fares well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Time4vps has some of the best prices I can find for storage. I've been using one for a could years with no problems.

Virmach seems to have comparable prices, but I haven't used them.

</comment><comment><USER23> For websites, just use GitHub Pages. It's totally free, very reliable, and extremely easy. It feels like a nerdier GeoCities, but without the composing tools.

</comment><comment><USER32> If you're looking for really cheap, then use the free servers. Google, AWS provide free tiers that are more than enough for a hobbyist.

</comment><comment><USER33> Linode. Cheap but not too cheap, still reliable.

<comment><USER34> My choice too. Been pretty reliable and perform well. Easy to find a $20 credit for new customers on podcasts and other ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Take advantage of student credits!

Even when you run out of credits, all cloud providers have a pretty generous free tier.

For example see haveibeenpwn.com's cost breakdown for running a hugely popular api for less than a dollar a month: [https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to- the-max-doing-big-thi...](https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max- doing-big-things-for-small-dollars-with-cloudflare-workers-and-azure- functions/)

</comment><comment><USER36> Netcup, very cheap and reliable [https://www.netcup.de](https://www.netcup.de)

</comment><comment><USER37> I use netcup.eu , a German Provider. They have cheap hour based plans so that you can cancel your plan everytime.

</comment><comment><USER38> Sounds crazy, but the Orcale free tier might work for you. Enough to run two small Linux VPS instances free.

<comment><USER39> Do you mean Oracle Cloud?

<comment><USER40> I think this thing [https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/FreeTier/resource...](https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/FreeTier/resourceref.htm)

some forum discussion [https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/160260/oracle- cloud-fr...](https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/160260/oracle-cloud-free- tier)

seems ok though slowish I/O

<comment><USER22> Faster io than the free GCP

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> OVH, their cheapest brand is Kimsufi. From five euros a month. i.e. your own box for the price of a VPN.

</comment><comment><USER42> Below the cheapest and most reliable VPS providers.

Europe => Hetzner, Scaleway

USA => Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode

</comment><comment><USER43> Also check to see what free stuff you can get through your school!

</comment><comment><USER44> In France: OVH. Their kimsufi lineup is hard to beat.

</comment><comment><USER45> Hetzner is great. Cheap for what you get.

</comment><comment><USER46> AWS EC2 reserved instances, pay upfront for 3 years, it works out cheaper than digitalocean/linode.

</comment><comment><USER47> scaleway.com and hetzner.com

</comment><comment><USER48> Now, you are asking for subscription-based, but have you considered that it is perfectly possible to host on your own hardware at home perfectly fine for experimental/personal stuff? Just buy the cheapest Raspberry Pi (or a clone or whatever) and hook it up at home, that's certainly going to be cheaper than any of the cloud providers being thrown around here, only the cheapest lowendtalk offers might be cheaper still.

</comment><comment><USER49> I know you aren't interested in server hardware, but you should be. You can get extremely cheap used servers from eBay, Craigslist, or government auctions, and you can get extremely cheap rackspace in colocation centers.

<comment><USER50> That's unlikely to be "cheap" compared to what a student needs for the first few experiments.

<comment><USER49> That would depend entirely on the nature of the experiments.</comment></comment></comment>


The Embedded Toolchain – Tools of the Trade - <AUTHOR> http://embedded.fm/blog/2016/3/22/embedded-tools <comment><USER2> Most of the issues in embedded programming involve asking "what's going on in there?" In small embedded work, you usually can't print, you may not have a display, everything is time dependent, and you're directly connected to hardware. Debugging may involve an oscilloscope and a logic analyzer. Using a debugger means halting the machine, and isn't helpful if the problem is timing dependent.

For some jobs, you need a simulator that lets you debug in a more friendly environment. There's one for an entire Android phone, for example.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article offers a high level description of the various parts. While a decent read for the curious, I don't think it's necessary even for those going into embedded work.

My experience jumping into some point-of-sale work after college is that anyone with even minimal programming experience can pick this stuff up as they go. Even the worst platform I developed for had built in guides and an IDE.

<comment><USER4> Depends on how deep down the embedded rabbit hole you want to go.

Personally, an article like this, with its main diagram and high level descriptions, would have been _enormously_ useful back when I was just starting to learn the dark arts of computer programming.

If your Point of Sale systems are running some embedded form of Linux, and all HW access is abstracted away from you, then you're probably right.

On the other hand, if you are writing code that deals with external HW signals, performant memory access, ISRs, an RTOS and their many features, etc, then this article serves as a good basic foundation for the "software" side of things. Ie what actually happens when you hit the "build" button in your IDE.

From, a long time embedded software engineer

<comment><USER5> Also depends on which rabbit hole you choose.

I'm an electrical design guy, dilettante wrt embedded software. 8-bit AVR controllers were a breeze to work with at a bare-metal level.

Now that I'm attempting to acquaint myself with the STM32 environment and the requisite libraries, I'm finding the toolchain and environment a lot more challenging than what I remember from working with AVR.

<comment><USER4> True, to an extent.

I'm assuming you are referring to the Arduino family when you say "8-bit AVR controllers"? If yes, they do in fact do a great job at making things somewhat easy for the dabbler, and have many resources available online to peruse for help.

Taking the next step to full-on embedded development (STM32 in this case), as you are finding out, is quite a big leap. Not that it can't be done, but that it really is challenging.

Guess it depends on your background and your familiarity with software development and/or hardware in general.

<comment><USER6> Not really challenging at all. ST subsidized the release of Keil IDE with a pretty decent amount of functionality. Use uVision Core[1] and you get a _Crazy_ amount of control over _everything_ (CMSIS is worth paying for, and if you're an academic, discounts are offered.). No licensing fees at all. Works with the standard ULINKs. What used to cost tends of thousands of dollars for a bond-out chip in the 80s.

The Cortex M3 (and any of the other ARMs that offer ETM[2]) is as good if not better than any debugger I've ever used[3], software, hardware, micros, CPLD's, FPGAs. You need to throw a few hundred down for the ULINKpro, but the Segger ST everyone uses I think speaks ETM. Making the jump from Arduino to UL certified production run consumer products with injection molded custom casing holding your 6 layer board has never been easier.

ST even offers documentation on how to use FreeRTOS[4] if you need hard scheduling requirements (though I'd go with Micrim, Wind River, or one of the usual suspects that has already been vetted if you're going to market in, say, the medical device industry).

[1] [http://www2.keil.com/coresight/](http://www2.keil.com/coresight/) [2] [http://www.ecnmag.com/article/2010/07/debug-code-arm- cortex-...](http://www.ecnmag.com/article/2010/07/debug-code-arm- cortex-m3-mcus) [3] Cincom Smalltalk notwithstanding. [4] [http://www.st.com/web/en/catalog/tools/PF260200](http://www.st.com/web/en/catalog/tools/PF260200)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This set of tool chain is typical and will work successfully, particularly for a simplistic system. For a more complex system, the tool chain could get more complicated. You could add

* A unit test framework for unit testing the software modules before integration. ie Cmocka or Ceedling

* A graphical state machine design tool. Useful for generating application code. ie MathLab's Simulink tool.

* many more.

It all depends on what industry you are working in, how much money you have and how many engineers is in your team working on the project.

</comment><comment><USER8> A lot of embedded debugging is either using a debugger (if you're lucky) or using various side-channels to infer the state of the machine. For example, you could make a task toggle a pin on the device and hook it up to a scope to figure out if it's being scheduled properly.

If you're interested in electronics, embedded.fm and theamphour.com are both fantastic podcasts.

</comment><comment><USER9> A very superficial description of embedded development but a view that isn't presented in many places...

(BTW: the podcast is worth a listen tho).

<comment><USER6> LadyAda (of Adafruit, former design engineer of AVR) went into a recent amount of detail w/r/t low-volume production runs/programming rigs/custom testing jigs[1] where it's not budget-friendly for you to design a bed-of-nails against TPs after all's reflowed and ready to go into your enclosure. Most of the EE vlogs/podcasts, minus a few episodes (e.g. TheAmpHour with guests that actually challenge Dave, like The Signal Path[2] founder/milliwave RF lead engineer for Bell Labs NJ, or the EEVblog episode with Jack Ganselle/the episode where he interviews some guy who made his own spectrum analyser) are really pretty lacking in insight. The episodes where you get 45 year old (usually with PhD's) engineers talking is where the real interesting engineering podcast porn is found (e.g. mikeselectricthings, The Signal Path[PhD], AvE[PhD], Applied Science[no idea, but Ben rules either way]).

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EIaDxSIBYw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EIaDxSIBYw) [2] [http://www.theamphour.com/228-an-interview-with-shahriar- fro...](http://www.theamphour.com/228-an-interview-with-shahriar-from-the- signal-path-quisquous-quivering-quadripole/)

<comment><USER9> I'll give them a listen... but Dave@TheAmpHour is one of the more annoying podcast hosts, he's very under-educated on anything but his specialist subject and semi-depressing most of the time.</comment></comment></comment>


At Last: 10x better Electric Sheep client for Mac - <AUTHOR> http://community.electricsheep.org/node/509

<comment><USER2> Years ago my roommate emailed you when he was excited about rendering a particular sheep at high-res to make a print out of, and your only response was to refer him to your art dealer. Almost immediately the sheep in question was removed from the collection, which led to a serious _WTF Dude_ moment.

It seems like you're planning on getting more communal involvement in the project besides free compute time, and I approve.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow what blast from the past. That was a requirement for working with that dealer. I have had really mixed reactions and interactions with the art world. That relationship went really far south, unfortunately, and i no longer work with him. And to be clear, the selection of the sheep was mine, not your friends.

Initially i refused to make any of my work available under anything but open source licenses. Alas, that turned out not to pay so well. since then i've tried various compromises between my philosophy, and engaging with society in order to change it (and to make the electric sheep self sustaining). Pulling a handful of genomes out of the many thousands was one. Making limited edition works like hifidreams.com and the just-finished Blu Ray is another.

The next big step is a subscription/freemium model for the screensaver. You can read some about it here: <http://community.electricsheep.org/node/492>

<comment><USER2> It was just a random unfeatured sheep in the slush pile, and it disappeared from the site after he mentioned it.

I guess now that you're employed by Google you won't have to make such compromises for funding.

You really need to be extremely careful about profiting directly from the users' work -- not just their CPU time, but the design of and selection pressure on the sheep themselves. It's especially awful to curate the work of users for private / limited edition works, especially if reserve that privilege for yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> 1) I am sorry that you have been misinformed. The only genomes I ever pulled was a group of about 6 about 4 years ago, a group that I selected exhaustively from about 100000 myself to make large format prints. And the archive pages for those sheep still stand, including their ancestry. I don't know why your friend thinks otherwise, but I'm sure it's a simple miscommunication. If you can point at the "hole" in the archives, I would be more than happy to take a look at it.

2) My work at Google has nothing to do with it. If anything my time is worth more now because I am so much more busy.

3) You are right I have to be extremely careful. And I have been, and my user base is quite happy as a result, both voters and designers. My big problem is server overload. We just did a survey and of the 836 respondents, 98% would recommend Electric Sheep to their friends, and only a fraction of a percent objected to me making money from it ("making" is a dream, for now I just want to recoup my investment). Nearly everyone recognizes that I have and continue to put an inordinate amount of time effort and money into this. Donations have spiked with the traffic I have received from this announcement. Because people love it and they support me.

I hope you will reconsider.

Thank you, -sp0t

<comment><USER2> I am pretty sure we are remembering the exact same incident, it would have been around this time four years ago. I just asked my roommate about it, and your stories line up:

He saw a picture of an awesome sheep on your site featured as a print, but with no prices. He emailed you about the prints, you referred him to your art dealer, and she quoted him outrageous prices that were totally out of scale with costs. When he went later to download its 'genome', it had been just removed for that sheep specifically. The capriciousness of the whole exchange really pissed us off, and we later ended up ceasing to use electricsheep in the school's CS labs because of it.

I saw the survey, and the whole thing seemed really weird. Of course you're going to get an extremely favorable response when sampling from your hardcore fanbase.

The point about your job at Google was that you don't need to extract a paycheck from electricsheep to get by. Your constant focus on art-world monetization is extremely off-putting -- it's one thing to take the money on the table from patrons, and another to artificially limit the audience for your work. All the 'limited edition' shit seems all the more ridiculous when there's zero opportunity cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> i downloaded this thing and installed it. it looks kind of interesting.

then i started poking around in the config settings, and discovered that it was saving tens of megabytes of mpeg movies to disk. i resent it taking up that much disk space for a screen saver. so i fiddled with the config settings, trying to get it to not save them. after that, it didn't make fractal screen images anymore, just a static image that's primarily an ad for the website. so i deleted the screen saver and all its mpg files.

perhaps there's some bigger purpose to this thing that i'm not getting, but whatever it is, it's not worth tens of megabytes of disk space to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been using Electric Sheep as a screensaver for a long time.

Often, I'll catch myself on the couch watching the screensaver instead of commercials. Really beautiful stuff.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> These fractals are absolutely stunning! Who created them and where can I find the equations?

<comment><USER6> Scott Draves and <http://electricsheep.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> btw i am looking for iPhone and Android developers.</comment>


Ask HN: Kubernates on Vsphere - <AUTHOR> We are developing a php/mysql app and it will involve lot of apis and be used by a large group of employees however this is not a public facing internet scale website.
We are using containers (Dockers) so we were looking to setup the system so it is ready with HA/LB/Scale ready from the start.
So we evaluated docker swarm but docker seems to have brought a half cooked swarm mode into mix and its needs it time to become stable/usable.
We wanted to try Kubernates and since our servers are all Vmware ESXI , we gave its Vsphere deployment a go but it didn't work as advertised also looking at their github issues it seems like its maintained by a single person so not sure its the way to go.
We are now looking to evaluate the Baremetal kubernates but running them in the VMs instead but we dont see how to setup the loadbalancer?
Is that even possible?
Also do you believe Kubernates going to support vmware/baremetal and other deployments going forward or they are only going to support the GCE/AWS/DO ? <comment><USER2> Generally you have to figure out a way to do the load balancing.

Once way is like haproxy in front that has each of the k8 nodes behind it.

How I did it in AWS since I didn't want k8 to create ELBs is

ELB->nginx (on the node outside of k8) -> k8 service nodeport

A nodeport is a type of service that opens the same port on all the k8 nodes to send traffic from the outside to inside the cluster. Even if a node doesn't run the container it can forward traffic to a node that does.

There are also now ingress controllers you can look at that do a lot of the work for you to reload what I did with nginx as soon as you create a service in k8.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you know if this situation of figuring out the LB ourselves is going to change anytime soon? We are happy to wait if you know there is something on the works.

I believe it is possible to wire up service discovery system to add the ips of the backend webservers to the haproxy/nginx but it requires knowing the kubernates internals/api a lot more than now.

However I was looking for a lazy/ just works kind of solution - haha may have to wait or get hands dirty.

<comment><USER2> no there is no way to do a LB how its handles in AWS/GCE.

You'd have to wire up something yourself to long poll etcd and construct like haproxy/nginx as a LB. Or use a tool like

[https://github.com/vulcand/vulcand](https://github.com/vulcand/vulcand)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for your time i will take a look at vulcan.:)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Checkout Rancher. From your tone, I guess like Kubernet is complicated for you. Rancher has Kubernet support plus nice GUI and many application templates LAMP stack friendly. Also, load balancer is backed in.

[0] [http://rancher.com/](http://rancher.com/) (open source)

<comment><AUTHOR> I did indeed give it a trail run on all its modes Rancher/Kubernates/Docker swarm however I didnt feel like its production ready yet but it is certainly interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> k8s LoadBalancers are designed to be used in the cloud: AWS GCP etc...

As a workaround you can create a service and then tunnel/proxy the service ClusterIP from the master

Kubernetes absolutely supports baremetal. It's one of it's greatest strengths, no lock-in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey thanks for the response, will look into it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the percent of the Kickstarter  backer pledge cancellation? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Six days since the end of my project (tgf.fm/ks), 15 of my 1044 backers haven't gone through. I think a bunch have fixed credit card errors over the last week. Three of the nine biggest pledges had their cards declined, likely because of the giant charge to an unfamiliar vendor—but those folks have been in touch directly to resolve the issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wish they showed you here: [https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats](https://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats)

</comment><comment><USER4> I only had about 2 of my roughly 500 pledges that didn't go through when it came to the time to collect the cash.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did anybody cancelled before you finished your campaign?

<comment><USER2> Two out of 1044. Eight people also decreased their pledges after we hit our goal, which took me aback for a moment—before it made me retroactively extra grateful that people had given beyond their comfort zone just to help me cross the finish line.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is not bad . But I am still wondering once you pledged for a campaign what makes you cancel?

<comment><USER5> I'd imagine some of them are impulse followed by "that's not really in my budget this month".

<comment><USER6> I actually canceled a sizable ($1000) contribution early in a campaign. I got excited, pledged, and then talked to a buddy who actually has subject area knowledge in what the campaign was trying to do. He raised a bunch of good questions and I never got any good answers back from the campaign, so I didn't feel comfortable it wasn't vaporware and I withdrew the pledge. In retrospect, they were focused on the gee-whiz signed photo and coffee mug level prizes whereas I was interested in the actual end result hardware for science, and I think whomever was running the campaign just didn't communicate well.

I would feel _very_ awkward waiting until the last minute and certainly if they were on the edge of the goal, but in that campaign's case I canceled in the first two weeks and they made their stretch goal anyway.

I'm a hardware engineer so I'm just incredibly suspicious when really cool hardware pitches can't answer follow-up questions with sufficient details. Lesson learned: I'm an impulse buyer so I'm not allowed to pledge money on Kickstarter without waiting twenty-four hours and talking to a subject matter expert.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I suspect that some people back a project without knowing too much about how the final product is supposed to work.</comment>


Uber rolls out in-app tipping - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr-gridlock/wp/2017/06/20/uber-rolls-out-in-app-tipping-for-drivers/ <comment><USER2> I am so unhappy about this change. I tip well everywhere it is expected, restaurants, bars, cabs etc. I hate the system but it is factored in to the price and there's nothing I can do about it.

What I loved about Uber when it started was there was no ambiguity. Prices were predictable, as were wait times.

Zero cognitive overhead. No guilt or internal debate.

Over time every little thing I loved about Uber was taken away in the name of lowering prices. Agitation about driver wait times. Wildly fluctuating cost of rides. Wildly varying rider wait times. Drivers canceling undesirable trips.

And now tips.

It's just one little thing, but it's the death of what I valued in their service.

What if instead of all these nitpicking changes, they kept the fares a bit higher and simply paid the drivers a bit more? I guess in their calculus that was unsustainable.

So basically the people who were penny pinching trying to get the cheapest rides drove lower prices so now I will tip (probably too well) and underwrite those same people who will likely also not tip because they will decide it is optional.

<comment><USER3> +1

And Uber is... gone (from my phone). I hate tipping with a passion and despite Uber's questionable practices I was prepared to use it instead of Lyft based solely on tipping.

So now I, as a user, have to concern myself with issues like: is the driver actually getting the tip? Or is Uber taking a cut? Does this mean Uber is paying the driver less because they can now get a tip?

I don't want to have to concern myself with issues like this. I really don't.

<comment><USER4> Yeah this is stupid. I'm not sure what I'm tipppng for anyway,"good driving" a "clean car"? These are the comments I can see being assigned to tips. Can I just, please, have a fixed priced service without frills to get me to and from places. It's not an experience I care enough about to optimize the time with my service operator, by bribing them to treat me better than others.

I'm glad it's summer, less taxis and more biking!

<comment><USER5> Assuming you're in NYC (based on the last sentence), you should check out Juno. They take a smaller percentage of revenue for the trip, and that makes me feel far better about not tipping.

<comment><USER4> Toronto :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This new direction is backwards.

Pay the drivers what they are worth. How hard is that? Seriously. How hard is it to just give an honest wage for honest work?

WashPo: "[Uber] recast itself as a company with a conscience and a heart."

Correction: Uber is passing the conscience and heart part onto its users so that it doesn't have to. Now I am going to feeling like jerk when I don't give someone a tip. That was my favorite part about uber. Don't make think about taxes and tip. How silly would it be if Uber was a restaurant? WashPo: "Restaurant shows magninimity by allowing patrons to supplement the low wages of the restaurant with a tip of their own!" Progress.

<comment><USER7> For Uber's price structure -- very hard. Uber's "farebox recovery" is a lower percentage than most public transit agencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why not just raise the prices a bit again? Now I'm worried I'll get down- starred for not tipping on Uber, which is just kind of annoying. I feel like not requiring a tip is Uber's biggest differentiator

<comment><USER9> You answered your own question. Why raise prices and risk losing customers when they can just use widely accepted social pressure to coerce you into subsidizing their cost of doing business for free?

<comment><USER10> It's not like they're fooling anyone though...regular users of uber will know the average outlay from using an uber is $X, whether it's through the fares charged or a lower fare plus expected tip. I would much rather have a higher fare than the stress of figuring out how much to tip. I could just decide on a tip to always give, but what about those times when the service is really shitty? Do I "get back" at them by leaving no tip? Isn't that the whole purpose of the tipping process? But that makes me feel like a shitty person, and the cognitive outlay in thinking about all of this is just annoying.

<comment><USER11> I'm gonna guess they'll keep the tips secret until many hours after the journey (and when both driver and passenger have left star ratings). They might even aggregate tips for the week/month.

That way, if you leave no tip, it can't come back and bite you.

<comment><USER10> But it will come back to bite me in a psychological way. I don't want to feel like the sort of person who doesn't tip when tipping is expected, I want to use a service where I don't have to think about tipping and can feel like a decent person. If that service has to cost more then so be it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well, there goes my last reason for using Uber. I had been really excited that they were the one oasis pushing back against the tipping culture[1].

Particularly troubling is the framing:

>Uber is enabling passengers to tip its U.S. drivers with a tap on its ride- hailing app for the first time, part of a push to recast itself as a company with a conscience and a heart.

What? As if anyone preferring that a service be upfront about prices is "heartless"? Anyone who doesn't want tip jars at the grocery store checkstand or bus farebox is heartless? All of Europe and Asia are heartless?

As if all of the alternatives for increasing driver compensation are heartless? (Higher payouts or the Sidecar drivers-set-prices model.)

[1] Before anyone says it, yes I know you have to pay more for a tip-free service; I'm not an idiot. I'm fine with that. I'm not fine with the lack of consistent, clear, compatible expectations it involves, and being stuck in the position of either a) overpaying, b) making a silent faux pas, or c) having negative feedback misinterpreted as stinginess.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, all the tipping advocates are probably not aware that most countries don't have tipping. Restaurant staff are paid according to local wages. So a racial minority won't be paid less than someone from the majority race. European and Australian restaurant staff aren't depending on arbitrary tips. They know exactly what they are going to make at the beginning of their shift. They don't feel like they're working for peanuts for rolling napkins or putting chairs on tables.

It's probably not a bad idea to just select the $0 option when the tip screen shows up... until drivers start insisting on seeing you enter your tip before awarding your 5-star rating.

<comment><USER14> I think most restaurant staff split tips, so no one will be paid less than anyone else if they get low tips.

<comment><USER13> I don't know what percentage of restaurants do that. From my anecdata, few restaurants do it. Also, California law prohibits it.

<comment><USER15> I believe CA law prohibits sharing tips with the kitchen staff, not pooling tips among the front-room staff.

And pretty much every bar/restaurant I know of pools tips, not the opposite as you suggest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It is sad that companies like Uber are being pressured into making these stupid decisions because of "social justice".

For me the main benefit of using Uber (as well as all other on-demand services like Doordash, Caviar, etc.) was that everything is included and I don't have to think.

Companies like Uber should be focused on building a product that consumers want and nothing else. These decisions are nothing more than the company being bullied (by the media and activists) into making politically correct decisions that brings NO benefit to any parties involved, including the drivers.

If anyone thinks this will eventually be beneficial for the drivers they're short-sighted. It's just turning Uber into a Taxi experience.

<comment><USER17> If they're being bullied into this decision (and I don't think they are), it's not because they're too timid to stand up to the media. It's because their customers might leave them, because their customers prefer companies that act more justly.

You're arguing that a company should act only in its own rational self- interest. That's a reasonable point of view. But there's zero evidence that this is not in Uber's self-interest.

EDIT: I saw your comment in response to smt88. I do want to pay more for a taxi. I want to be able to control how much I pay according to how good of a service was provided, and I want to feel like the taxi driver is getting a decent pay rate. That's one of the reasons I typically use Lyft, and if it weren't for a terrible experience with Uber customer service, this decision would make me more likely to use Uber again.

<comment><USER18> Pressuring consumers into paying more than the negotiated price isn't 'acting more justly'

<comment><USER19> There isn't much of a negotiation though.

Somebody else said than an early version of the Uber app let customers define their tip in the app and it was automatically applied. Maybe they should bring that back and also give drivers the ability to filter on that value.

<comment><USER18> I made a poor choice of words: I mean the agreed price.

No tips. The price is the price and being begged by some asshole won't make the experience better.

<comment><USER19> You and I have clearly had vastly different rideshare experiences.

I wouldn't describe any of the drivers I've had as being assholes. Every single one of them was at least friendly. Most were helpful, some extremely so. Rather than begging for a tip, I was happy to give them a little bit extra. They appreciate it and I feel good about it. It's win-win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Posting on a throwaway because of tipping stigma.

I take close to 1,000 Uber trips per year.

The biggest disappointment about this change to me is that I won't be having conversations with Uber drivers anymore.

Uber drivers will now be obligated to make pleasant conversation with me. I have no interest in speaking to somebody who's obligated to make pleasant conversation with me.

When you add tipping, you're essentially attaching a financial penalty to sincerity.

All economic arguments aside, it's just not right to penalize someone for being in a bad mood that day or not wanting to talk to you. We force these workers to maintain these totally fabricated upbeat emotional states and we act like it's normal. It's not normal anywhere else in the world, and I can't stand it.

Every time I see someone making conversation with a waiter or waitress, it honestly seems rude to me. They have to talk to you, they have to agree with you, they have to smile and laugh at your joke. By having a conversation with them you're forcing them to do all of these things, and if they don't, you're going to take money off their tab. That is just rude.

Uber will have access to all the data related to tipping, the fare splits will be adjusted accordingly, and Uber drivers' pay will normalize to exactly what it already would have been without tipping.

<comment><USER21> As someone who literally works for tips, I've found that I make more tips when I am sincere with guests (of the hotel that I work at).

<comment><USER15> That makes sense; most people can tell if you're just making conversation in order to suck up to someone vs. are genuinely interested in talking to them. So if you genuinely do care about a person and show that through your interaction with them, they'd be likely to appreciate it more, and show that appreciation.

I'm curious, though: if you have nothing to say to a person, and don't say anything, do you get more or less of a tip than if you were to (insincerely) attempt to make polite conversation?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The most important feature I liked in Uber relative to lyft was no tipping. Why not spike the price up a little and compensate them.

When they have started, the motto was, "Uber - Your private driver" and it was truly like that until today I tip the driver like every other service you get.

<comment><USER22> Why are people up in arms over this? Being able to tip on Lyft is one of my favorite parts and from what I've read and understood, it generally favors the drivers. You don't need to tip immediately, a nice little dialog pops up with pre-configured amounts, and you can go above and beyond if you had good service

<comment><USER23> Because tipping is racist, sexist, and classist --- tips don't correlate with levels of service and reduce predictability in working and using a service.

<comment><USER24> > Because tipping is racist, sexist, and classist

Surely this has to be facetious? If not I would love to hear you elaborate?

<comment><USER25> [http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...](http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=articles)

> consumers of both races discriminate against black service providers by > tipping them less than white service providers

<comment><USER24> This is hardly a scientific study and does nothing to prove that the practice of tipping in itself is racist/sexist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I don't use Uber or Lyft, but if I was, this would drive me away from Uber.

From what I hear from my friends who use Uber, 1 reason they love it is because all the charges are through the app and there is no "obligation" to tip, so it's 1 less decision them have to make, i.e. calculate how much to tip, keep wondering if you tipped the driver too much, or too little, what's a "fair" tip for the ride etc etc.

<comment><USER27> There's still no obligation to tip whatsoever. After your ride, when you next open the app (which could be days later) you are presented with a screen asking you to rate your driver (this already occurs). I think if you give a 5 star, then the option to give a "compliment" is given, which is similar to a badge or a Facebook like. As well, now, a tip button is also presented. You don't have to click on it if you don't want to.

I will never tip with zero guilt.

<comment><USER15> > I will never tip with zero guilt.

I suspect you're in the minority. Most people (in the US, anyway), when presented with an explicit option to tip, will do so out of a sense of obligation, or out of a desire not to be seen as a cheapskate -- even if the decision whether or not to tip is anonymous! Unfortunately that's how ingrained tipping culture is here.

<comment><USER28> This 'feeling' doesn't exist in Europe or a big part of Asia.

<comment><USER15> I'm well aware of that and acknowledged I was only talking about the US, which is where Uber is (at least initially) rolling out this mis-feature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Now I'm going to start using Lyft again. The tipping model is terrible and given the option I'll always shy away from it. Even though Lyft has the same feature, they pay better, so I don't feel bad for not tipping them.

Also having to deal with some of the shadier/creepier drivers expecting tips sounds like something I'd rather not deal with.

<comment><USER30> You're going to switch to Lyft, which has had a tipping model for ages, because a competitor is just now adding tipping?

<comment><USER31> Sure. If Lyft is otherwise better, and Uber is getting rid of the one thing that keeps me using it, doesn't it make sense to switch?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> For something that is supposed to be friction free, tipping really runs against that.

We all know that next there are going to be the subtle and not-so subtle encouragements from drivers to tip. Then the expectation to tip.

This move seems to only confuse me as a consumer, create something else for drivers to be annoyed about (the tips they receive vs what uber claimed they'll see), and adding an additional cognitive layer in payments.

I don't see the lasting benefit here. Just increase prices or increase driver share of payout.

<comment><USER33> Lyft seems to have nailed it - the tip is not necessarily immediate (and can be added 3 days later), and the payout to the driver is in a single anonymized chunk, so it's not easy (or too late) to track the rider to the tip amount.

<comment><USER34> Uber is giving you 30 days to tip the driver . They will also be giving single aggregated chunk at the end of day or week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I used to abhor the in-app tipping option in Lyft. But increasingly I would be asked to tip cash by drivers when I used Uber. My rating started to get lower as the cultural expectation to tip cash took hold.

It turns out the Lyft model, where the driver doesn't know whether or not the rider tipped, is better for the rider. The rider doesn't have to carry cash in order to avoid getting extorted for a 5-star rating.

Tipping culture in restaurants is subsidizing substandard wages for servers. Tipping culture for taxis and the gypsy cab apps (Uber, Didi, Lyft, etc) doesn't have to take hold. Maybe now that the option is in-app, riders will eventually stop using it.

I hope, at least, that the tipping option is confined to U.S. rides. The rest of the world doesn't need to get infected with it.

<comment><USER35> I usually avoid making comments like this, but I'm surprised I had to go down so far to find a mention of Uber's existing tip culture. It's far better for passengers for tipping to be app integrated, and thus optional with less pressure from the driver, rather than Uber's prior system which resulted in many drivers effectively begging for cash tips.

<comment><USER36> > I usually avoid making comments like this, but I'm surprised I had to go > down so far to find a mention of Uber's existing tip culture

This may be because of the markets that HN readers are skewed towards and the fact that they may not have this culture at all. I live in San Francisco, have used Uber for about 5-6 years (since well before UberX), and have probably taken hundreds of rides: I've literally not once ever had a driver ask me for a cash tip, let alone the ridiculous experiences others on this thread are describing of drivers holding your rating hostage until you tip.

<comment><USER13> It wasn't until 2016 until I was actively asked by drivers for cash tips.

Just wait until you want a ride into Sausalito or Oakland.

Either that or you'll get a text from the driver pretending to be official Uber/Lyft:

        Notice: this driver's area is restricted to [geographical area].
        Cancel this ride and request again or face a $5 cancellation fee.
        --Lyft/Uber dispatch"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Don't Make Me Think. Charge me more if you must, but don't make me think.

<comment><USER38> Exactly. Add $1 to every fare and remit that without taking a cut. There!

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Not having to deal with tips is THE reason I never bother checking Lyft. Now I guess I have no reason not to check both. Smart move Uber?

Aside from that, this is terrible news to me. The tip system is so flawed. 99% of people in America do not consider tips optional, but service here is no better for it. I want to pay a fair wage. I don't want to tip. Is there simply no market for this?

</comment><comment><USER40> Tipping sucks because then the driver wants to build a relationship with me instead of letting me just zone out or check email or something. I don't want to have a single serving friend every time I need to go somewhere.

<comment><USER41> I actually really enjoy talking to my driver. They usually have a very different background than me. Maybe they recently immigrated from another country, for example. And it's neat to hear a bit about their life.

If you think of interacting with another human as a chore, then it will be a chore. But if you think of it an an opportunity to learn, then it can be very rewarding I think.

<comment><USER42> I enjoy talking to my uber drivers as well but I don't want them to be obliged to talk to me. I'm an extroverted person and I enjoy chatting, but there are times when I'm busy and want to check my email etc; but with tipping there'll be more drivers who start the conversation and it'll be rude to not reply.

Honestly though, I don't see the need for tipping to make people interact with each other. I've been taking uber for years (both in southern California and Singapore) and I don't see the need for this.

<comment><USER41> I use Lyft, which has always had tipping, and I don't find this to be an issue. Usually I am the one that starts the conversation. And I'm no fan of tipping in general, but there's a lot more to a ride besides conversation that someone might want to tip for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I have gleaned - from such authoritative sources as TV - that tipping appears to be a large part of customer service culture in the USA. (Though I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it varies by region. Because the USA is just New York and California, right?)

I think this will have a negative effect on the experience of both driver & rider in countries where tipping is unusual, due to the increasing ambiguity of the fee. Especially if ratings become contingent upon tip.

It also seems to not fit the model. In a dining establishment there is a three party arrangement (restaurateur, customer, and server) and the assumption that the best way to motivate servers is to create a separate financial relationship between them and the customer. Uber already has well defined payments for all three parties, and channels for rating drivers and riders.

<comment><USER44> My impression and experience is that it's pretty widespread in the US, although I've heard that the specific per-service expectations vary. I've never been anywhere in the US where tips weren't expected for sit-down restaurant waiters.

<comment><USER45> Extremely fancy restaurants are moving away from tipping. Everywhere else in the US, tips are expected and depended on by restaurant staff.

In California workers are at least paid minimum wage, ignoring tips, but in most states, restaurant workers are almost entirely dependent on tips to earn a living wage.

It's a terrible system for a variety of reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This seems like a complete inversion of the service incentives. The initial reason to use Uber was huge convenience and service quality. Uber Lux/Exec (or whatever they call it now) offered a vastly superior service to taxis for a ~20% price increase. Service is kept honest via ratings, prices are acceptable for that quality increase. Drivers were polite and looked after you (no music, water etc.). Uber X then comes in to compete with mainstream taxis (fair enough) but overall quality drops across the entire service.

Now _you_ get rated (for sitting?) and must compete with other passengers on tipping, whilst service quality continues to drop. Not tipping for bad service lowers your rating dramatically, so you have to tip for mediocre/bad service and sneak in a bad rating, which increasingly has little effect. It used to be that I could not find an Uber with less than 4.8, because you couldn't last like that as a driver. I now regularly getting mediocre service from ~4.5.

My immediate feeling is that I should stop using Uber almost completely, risk normal taxis ripping me off occasionally (knowing your city helps) and only use Uber when really needed (no taxis around, urgent etc), tipping then.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm happy for drivers but not a fan of this change.

In Los Angeles I booked a ride and the driver never showed up. After cancelling the ride I got the $5 charge and luckily their support took care of it.

But tipping is something that needs to go away. I liked Uber despite their troubles because I was paying for a service and the minimum viable product is that the driver gets me from point A to point B safely.

Now what's in a fare? An opportunity to get in a car to pay more money for them to do their job.

</comment><comment><USER48> Tipping in the US is guilt driven and has very little to do with service.

This is Uber's attempt pass on the burden of compensation to their passengers. Uber rides just got a little more awkward.

<comment><USER49> ..and apparently originated with slavery. [http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/04/restaurants-t...](http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/04/restaurants- tipping-racist-origins-saru-jayaraman-forked/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I hate, hate, hate tipping!

Just charge me what it costs to give them a living wage and I'm happy!

</comment><comment><USER51> I really don't like our tipping culture and enjoyed avoiding it with Uber. I'd be happy to pay 20% higher prices across the board in order to avoid tipping.

<comment><USER14> You can just tip 20% every time, its done through the app so its not really any more work, maybe one additional finger tap when you're rating the driver.

<comment><USER52> and that removes the social pressure how?

<comment><USER14> Maybe I'm just oblivious but this isn't a problem for me.

<comment><USER52> welp, time to pack our bags, if it's not a problem for wcummings, then clearly it's not a problem for anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Tipping culture needs to die. It's gross and unfair to put the burden of payment on the customer. It does not improve service, only lets business owners skate by with paying their employees like dirt.

Restaurant workers, drivers, doormen, valets, whatever - they are doing real work and should paid as such. If they have a bad attitude then they should be fired. It should be not up to the customer to 'reward' good behavior.

Uber was already dead in my eyes. I don't love that Lyft even has a tipping option, but at least it's optional. Why not cut the salaries of the execs (who, as it's been proven, are worse than useless) and compensate the workers better?

<comment><USER54> > Why not cut the salaries of the execs

I'm afraid that's an executive decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I love this tidbit

> Riders will be charged by the minute if they keep an Uber car waiting for > more than two minutes.

And will riders also be reimbursed for waiting for drivers? it seems all to frequent now that Ubers arrive significantly after their estimated time. Other times I get drivers that somehow don't move for 5 mins after reserving and yet accepted a ride.

And there is now no way to cancel out of this within 5 mins. Now you need to do so within two mins.

<comment><USER49> I encounter this problem all the time in the suburbs. Finally a driver let slip why: He was asleep. They park their car outside their homes, and they go to sleep. Then when the phone alerts them to a fare, they open their eyes, accept the fare, then they get dressed, etc. go put gas in the car, maybe some breakfast, and then come and get you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Tipping does not increase the service you get from someone. It just makes the customer feel guilty or pay more. Look at Publix: Rated No. 1 in the Temkin Customer Experience Ratings and No. 2 for Customer Service. But Tipping their baggers, even if they help you out to your car, is against company policy.

</comment><comment><USER56> How do people describe Uber? Hey look, it's an app. You push a button and a car shows up. There's no fooling around with calling a company, figuring out a tip, carrying the correct change, worrying about the quality of the ride. You just push the button.

They are destroying their unique selling proposition. I can already push buttons and screw around with cab companies and drivers. I was looking for better than that. Uber's supposed to be no hassle. What the fuck, guys?

</comment><comment><USER57> I ask this because it is my understanding that drivers can and do rate passengers on Uber(not sure about Lyft.)

Is it possible that someone who doesn't tip what the driver believe is enough or if they don't tip at all they will receive a bad passenger rating now, even if they are courteous and respectful?

I had some hope that the tipping parts of the world would maybe move away from the practice and just pay people what they are worth:

[https://www.eater.com/2017/1/12/14250128/danny-meyer- tipping...](https://www.eater.com/2017/1/12/14250128/danny-meyer-tipping-hoax- slavery)

<comment><USER58> Usually these systems are set up so the driver rates before they find out what the tip is

<comment><USER57> I see, that would make sense. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> They're charging teens more?? The people who earn the least if any at all... is there a special teens services that I'm not aware of?

And who asked for tipping besides drivers? Hate the concept. Charge us more or split the fare with them better.

<comment><USER60> The Uber driver in my neighborhood complained that the teens call up the cab to go 2 or 4 blocks. They are trying to emulate their parents and seam like a baler to their friends.

<comment><USER61> They need to raise the minimum fare for that then. Making teens pay more seems ridiculous to me.

<comment><USER60> I don't know if that is the cause of it; it's just one data point I heard (last year).

I'm actually curious what drove the increase. Since they are still in cost undercutting and competing mode I doubt it's just "because they can". I wonder if it has anything to do with economics (higher insurance rate) or what. According to this article: [https://www.geekwire.com/2017/uber-drivers-sound- alarm-teen-...](https://www.geekwire.com/2017/uber-drivers-sound-alarm-teen- rider-program-call-additional-protections/)

"Uber says teen rides will only be booked with experienced drivers who have received consistently positive reviews."

So maybe the pool of drivers is smaller for teen accounts.

Also, teen accounts are not teens paying for it. But an account a parent can designate for the teen and they pay for it.

<comment><USER59> Drivers have to retain a 4.5 star rating to remain drivers I thought. I think that's a good enough bar. But I guess understandable if they're limiting to 4.9s+

It would be a good business model, like women can request women only would be a premium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I used Uber to move across the city recently. Since I don't have much, I just needed a few SUV trips.

Each time the Uber driver got out and helped me load up his car, and then he helped me unload. I tipped them with cash except in one case where I just didn't have bills small enough (wasn't thinking).

This is nice.

<comment><USER63> I agree that this is nice. I travel often with big luggages and always appreciate when drivers got out and helped loading in and out of the car. Tipping via the app makes my life easier as I don't need to worry about carrying small bills anymore. But if I have small bills, I will give them cash instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Terrible decision. Tipping is harmful culture in the long term. It leads to employees (drivers in this case) being paid less than they should be "because they will be tipped anyway" and it gives customers anxiety about tipping. Plus, the employees will start to _expect_ tipping or treat you badly, especially if their employers consider tipping as part of their salary.

Just a lose-lose situation.

</comment><comment><USER65> One of my favorite things about Uber was not having to deal with tipping. Pay them a fair wage with fair prices.

</comment><comment><USER66> The main reason I use Uber is so I dont have to get into this weird passive- aggressive social situation with drivers over tips. Just raise the prices. Tipping my uber driver is like tipping my McDonalds teller. If pay is an issue just raise prices.

Tipping is just something abused to keep base prices low. It makes no sense outside of dishonest pricing schemes.

Also do these drivers really want me to base my tip on the quality of their driving? I find most uber and cab drivers are unsafe and frankly, shitty drivers.

</comment><comment><USER67> I don't like the idea. Many will feel like they have to tip.

This is one of the orginal features that helped drive customers away from cabs.

</comment><comment><USER68> This is a really terrible idea.

It's not that the drivers don't deserve money- far from it. It's that you now have a company that is desperate for cash, and it is the one who tells the drivers how much they made in tips. What's to stop them from skimming the tips? Oh, not too much, not enough that anyone can really point it out, but just a _little_ bit, right?

And let's not all pretend that a company as morally grey as Uber isn't willing to do it either. They'll write some legal bullshit into the contract, force all drivers to either agree to it, or stop driving, and then claim that everything they did was legal and therefore ethical.

<comment><USER69> They don't need to skim off the top of tips, just follow what restaurants do, and cut back on wages, since 'they get tips too'

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> A rhetorical question: what would it take to build a not-for-profit but 'capitalist' platform like Uber with all the features that exist today (reviews, ratings, scheduled rides etc) where drivers just pay a monthly subscription fee (say $25-100 based on earnings?) and take the entire earnings of the ride?

I understand the marketing costs of getting drivers and riders on the platform but end of the day, if the drivers are going to make more and riders get a similar experience, it would be an obvious choice to switch, wouldn't it?

Put another way, why isn't anyone doing it? I hardly believe that Uber/Lyft's model has a wide defensible moat.

<comment><USER11> It does have a wide defensible moat: Critical mass. Drivers won't use the app if there are only a handful of rides per day, and passengers won't use the app if the nearest car is 15 minutes away.

<comment><USER70> It appears as a wide moat but I'd wager that in reality it's not. The key factor being unlike most networks, economics rule Uber and Lyft's platforms. That's a massive incentive. If as a rider, I can get a $5 ride for $4 with a similar experience and the driver knows he can make every last penny of that $4 (instead of $3), I don't see why eventually it wouldn't convince them to switch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> I really liked Uber's no-tip policy as it really did make the whole experience frictionless.

That being said, I believe Lyft pools tips from riders to avoid a tit-for-tat ratings, and drivers to not know if a rider tipped for a particular trip. If Uber follows that model, then perhaps this is a reasonable middle ground.

</comment><comment><USER72> Unpopular opinion: I hate the tipping culture but I love this change. Here's why: I never rate the drivers right after the trip unless the ride is REALLY good or REALLY bad. If it's really bad, I want to express my anger. If it's really good, I want to give the driver compliments. 90% of the times when I get out of an Uber, I just ignore the app until next time I use it. So to me personally, this is completely different from regular tipping.

</comment><comment><USER73> I always preferred Uber to Lyft because of no tips.

<comment><USER74> I agree - like many commenters here I'd rather see higher prices than tips.

<comment><USER49> Wasn't there some court case where Uber was told they could not ban tips?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-allen I think I'd just rather 'tip' the taxi directorate instead. This completely changes the Uber experience.

</comment><comment><USER75> Ah. Tipping enforcement everywhere. And those who oppose the compulsion are branded cheap.

</comment><comment><USER76> If you've ever talked to a driver this is the thing they always say they want Uber to change. Props to Uber for listening, even if it took them a while.

<comment><USER65> What if they just got paid more?

<comment><USER76> Tipping, if done right, is a better solution. Some fraction of customers today want to tip without being prompted as an expression of gratitude or appreciation. Some fraction of those customers don't have cash and are then unable to tip their drivers because the app didn't provide a mechanism to do that.

This gives riders that option without hurting Uber's bottom line. Paying drivers more is all well and good, but an increase in fares on the rider side would reduce marketplace demand and might actually hurt drivers more than it would help. The alternative is for Uber to eat the cost of paying drivers more, but that simply isn't viable for a company that's already losing as much money Uber does. Put simply, Uber is a business that can't really afford to pay drivers more.

There's a lot that could go wrong with tipping and it remains to be seen whether Uber rolls this out everywhere, but it's possible that this could end up being a feature where everyone wins.

<comment><USER77> Everyone wins except the riders. And possibly the countries where there's no absurd tipping culture and that starts to encourage it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> If this is Uber's way of being more like Lyft I don't think it will help.

<comment><USER19> It can't hurt. The ability to tip was the first reason I started using Lyft. Uber being a terrible company is the reason I stayed there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> Because of political restrictions of the number of taxi medallions to only 13,000 for a city of 8.5 million, taxi rates in NYC were extremely high compared with the rest of the nation. Taxi medallions were worth $1.2 million benefiting owners of medallions and credit unions that offered mortgages on them.

For example, Uber is 90 cents per mile in Chicago, but twice that at $1.75 mile in New York.

When Uber/Lyft came along to relieve the politically induced shortage while easily able to improve customer value by offering more vehicles and at lower prices, the value of medallions went to $700,000 or less and drivers stopped driving Yellow Cabs choosing Uber/Lyft instead.

Apparently, people are not required to tip, nor can they receive a bad score if they don't.

But Uber sold customers a bill of goods which said that tips were automatically included in the fare, not that there are no tips.

</comment><comment><USER80> screw this; charge a fair price and pay people a fair amount. Relying on the random generosity of customers to pay your employees/contractors/indentured- servants a fair wage is a bullshit business model (yes, I am aware this is how the restaurant industry in the US survives).

</comment><comment><USER81> Tipping is the consequence of making your working class earn below the living wage.

</comment><comment><USER82> Look, you can't have demand based pricing AND tipping. If you think I'm adding 20% onto a 2.5x surge fare, you're out of your damn mind.

The pricing is dynamic based on supply and demand. If the fares are too low, that means there's too many drivers and not enough riders. So, if it's not worth it at that time...don't drive. Prices will go up until drivers decide it's worthwhile to drive. If they're out they're driving, that means they've decided the price available at the time is worth it to them.

</comment><comment><USER83> This news has ruined my day. The sooner we get autonomous cars the better.

</comment><comment><USER84> Just to get this straight: people were OK with the abductions, assault and stalkings; opposition research and personal threats against journalists; distasteful and probably illegal practices against competitors like booking fake rides; illegal surveillance of officials charge with regulating them; predatory surge pricing; classifying workers as independent contractors to avoid paying benefits or following fair employment laws; ties to Trump; rampant sexual harassment and toxic bro culture...

But tipping is a deal breaker.

</comment><comment><USER85> "Why Tipping Should Be Banned", by Adam Ruins Everything is worth watching if you are of the school of thought that tipping is bad: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_vivC7c_1k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_vivC7c_1k)

The gist of the video is that if you're tipping, then a waiter/waitress for example is not being paid enough, and tips are deliberately designed to bolster their unfair income.

</comment><comment><USER86> This change probably won't make me any more or less likely to use Uber. The main thing that keeps me away from Uber is their terrible UX.

Getting a ride is way too streamlined - every single time I have used the Uber app (infrequently), I was not sure if I had committed to requesting a ride yet. This is the most annoying thing. Also there is no obvious means of scheduling a pickup time.

Lyft UX is a lot better and the company seems to not be run by assholes, so I like to support that whenever I can.

</comment><comment><USER87> How does this make Uber the nice guy if the riders tip drivers, not Uber? Uber still takes a cut of up to 25% of the fare. Anyway, riders can always tip drivers with small cash.

</comment><comment><USER88> Hate this as a consumer.

</comment><comment><USER89> I can see this potentially leading to a lot of poor ratings for riders who don't tip enough. And "enough" in cities like New York is IMO totally skewed.. I hope they implement it in a way that prevents this behavior; e.g. show aggregate tip stats to drivers, make tip amount visible only after rider rating.

</comment><comment><USER90> Then there will be a "suggested tip". Then Uber will try to take a cut.

</comment><comment><USER91> They were winning by just screwing the drivers out of tips -- it was never actually factored into the fares. I have no car and always use Uber so this is not good for me but it is less unfair to Uber drivers.

</comment><comment><USER92> Was tipping included for Uber Eats? That's where it was definitely needed. I don't think it's a great feature for the ride service, though.

</comment><comment><USER93> Is there a non-washingtongpost link?

The fact they block their entire site if you use an ad-blocker is ridiculous and makes me want to have an alternate source every time.

<comment><USER94> I don't think they do? I use ABP and the only time I can't view their site is when I've used up my 10 free articles for the month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> In restaurants, when a waiter is tipped, the kitchen gets part of the money. How would that work with Uber? Will programmers receive part of the tip money?

<comment><USER96> >In restaurants, when a waiter is tipped, the kitchen gets part of the money.

That practice is highly dependent on the restaurant and locale. In many places, it's illegal to require the waitstaff to pool tips with the kitchen.

[https://www.eater.com/2016/2/26/11119264/restaurants-tip- poo...](https://www.eater.com/2016/2/26/11119264/restaurants-tip-pooling- banned-ruling-court)

<comment><USER49> Not always. Depends on the restaurant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> Awful, absolutely terrible.

Translation:

"We will no longer pay our drivers, we will guilt you into doing it."

</comment><comment><USER98> Wow. There are a lot of people in here that have never worked in the Services industry or done the math for an Uber driver's take home pay after taxes/gas/maintenance.

It's ironic how the same people who say they don't mind paying a higher price vs tips, are choosing Uber because they are cheaper than a Lyft/Taxi.

<comment><USER99> I'd easily use NYC taxis if they had an app and payment system as convenient as Uber's. I HATE having to tip, but wouldn't mind paying higher to have it included in the price; I also abhor the taxi TV nonsense blaring in NYC cabs.

<comment><USER14> I never used Uber when I lived in NYC, its actually more work than hailing a cab there IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Well, there goes the only thing I thought Uber did better than Lyft.

</comment><comment><USER101> Tipping ruins the rating system. Just flat out destroys it.

</comment><comment><USER7> If people want to tip -- use cash.

</comment><comment><USER102> Now that we can track driving habits, would it not make sense to put them all on salary and set standards for employment?

<comment><USER103> After thousands of uber tips, 100% of my drivers have said they enjoy the freedom and ability to work when and where they want without commitment. Employment destroys all of that and would mean many of them would lose this income source.

If people do want to drive full-time, that job already exists. There are numerous places to work as a commercial driver. In fact, Uber Black leverages exactly this and is routinely serviced by companies that employee full-time drivers.

The fact that many drivers don't choose to be full-time professional drivers is far more telling than the tiny but whiny minority that seem to not realize what rideshare driving is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> Cute little narrative you got going there but I don't see any evidence from the article to support it.

Since tipping is not actually "politically correct," it's racist, sexist, and classist (1), it's a big lose for the advocates you blame.

It seemed they were under pressure from regulators, not social justice activates. I think this is the money quote

>Conigliaro said the guild forced the introduction of tipping by putting pressure on regulators. New York's Taxi and Limousine Commission is weighing a proposal that would require in-app tipping, and is expected to hear reaction from riders and drivers at a public hearing on July 13.

They also introduced some sort of surcharge for teens as part of this change, so you believe thats also the fault of "social justice" too?

(1) [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/18/i-dar...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/18/i-dare- you-to-read-this-and-still-feel-ok-about-tipping-in-the-united-states/)

[http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...](http://scholarship.sha.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=articles)

[http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/minimum-wage-activists- cal...](http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/minimum-wage-activists-call-tipping- racist/article/2619073)

<comment><USER16> I think you make great points, thank you.

Only regrettable thing is the phrase "cute little narrative" you used. The comment would have been excellent even without pulling me down.

I think the point i was trying to make was that it's sad that Uber is making decisions that are against user experience. They used to be able to push through all this because users loved the product. But nowadays they've lost a lot of power because of all the controversies. The reason Uber became popular in the first place was because they built something that was great for the users. If they cared about these little regulations back then, they wouldn't be here and we would still be stuck with the shitty taxi system.

I remember when startup people used to look up to Uber as the poster child for being ruthless just to provide great user experience. Now the narrative has changed even though they are not doing anything different. The new narrative is that Uber is a law breaking sexist organization, and everybody likes to hate Uber.

If Uber still had the same reputation as back then, I don't think they would be introducing features like this, which a lot of people will hate.

<comment><USER97> You're the one who started with unjustly accusing a completely unrelated group of _bullying_ , of all things; you deserve to be called out for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> WOW! This must've taken a monumental amount of effort, thought, and engineering. Why else did it take so long to add tipping? Bravo, Uber. Still goes to show a massive startup can still innovate. -slow clap-

</comment><comment><USER104> I've already been tipping Uber/Lyft drivers in cash since I first used either service.

I'm not sure how I feel about Uber being able to collect data on tip collection.

</comment><comment><USER105> I'll break-down tipping for the neophytes.

Yes, by George Orwell's account, tipping was considered repugnant by no less than the anarchist defenders of Catalonia in the Spanish Civil War. But you feel bad not tipping when expected and you want to know what to do.

1\. Tip your bartender at least $1/drink. Maybe tip $3 if you got two drinks. Maybe $2 for one of it's something fancy. 2\. In SF, tip your waiter 20% for good service, 15% for adequate service. 3\. Tip at least $5 for delivery. If a bartender gets $1 for handing you a beer, the delivery person deserves $5 for driving to your home and bailing you out of cooking. 4\. Tip $2 for an adequate Lyft/Uber. $1 if you feel pinched.

When to tip more? Like being in love, you'll just know.

<comment><USER105> Trying to decide if you should talk to your driver? Let them take the lead. If they launch into talking, and you feel like talking too, go for it! If they're quiet, let them work. Worried they're only talking to you for the money? Try to find out what their interests are and engage them. None of this should impact your tipping decision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER106> Tipping helps people who need it.

It is simple. Voluntary. Binary.

A $1 or $2 tip may not seem like much, but if it gets saved (which often tip receivers do) it adds up. Like found money.

Do uber drivers make a lot? Could $1 $2 $3 help them?

It is not about guilt. It's not about service quality. It is not about greater things. It is about helping someone who most likely needs it.

You could get on a high horse and make grandiose statements - all for a few dollars!!

Tip receivers know the types that never tip. And types that tip big. And types that cant afford to tip.

Dont over think Tipping.

I never wish anyone financial hardship but if you ever experience it you will know how greatful a small or large tip helps.

<comment><USER107> I wish this comment was higher.

I think it's a bummer to see developers who make way over the national median income complain they "don't want to think" about maybe giving a couple extra bucks to people who could use it.

<comment><USER108> It's not about a few extra bucks, that's not the big issue with tipping. I would be completely fine if a service costed 30%-50% more if that meant the employees would get paid a decent wage.

The onus should be on the employers -- not on the employees and the customer to figure it out.

I hate tipping. The whole experience of it just sucks in every way. It doesn't bring joy to anyone. Both parties lose. The service provider constantly has to worry about tips and have no consistency in income. If they were paid a normal livable wage, then they wouldn't have to worry about this. For the customer, the whole process of purchasing a product is made more painful and more complicated - unnecessarily.

<comment><USER107> It's literally tapping one extra button in the app UI. I'm really surprised at how hard this seems to people.

<comment><USER77> How do I know what to tip? How do I estimate before getting an uber how much it's going to cost? Tipping is the worst part of visiting the US. You go to restaurant and the menu for your meal says $x, but it's not $x, it's $x plus taxes plus tips. As a consumer I just want to know up front how much something is going to cost. No other country in the world makes this as ridiculously hard. And if you screw it up your "cheapskate".

<comment><USER107> This thread is full of people who work in technology, who think of themselves as smart capable people, complaining bitterly about choosing between 15%, 20%, or 25% in an app.

Just tap the middle option. You can't go wrong, and your driver will have a slightly better life than otherwise.

<comment><USER108> Why not just increase prices by 30% and pay the driver more? That was it's a better exper for everyone involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> I find it quite ironic that the majority of comments here seem to be against this addition and switching more people to Lyft who haven't already switched for moral reasons. By trying to become a better company and treat drivers better, they scared off the customers who didn't care about that. I'm sure this will get downvoted because I'm implying that people already should have switched for moral reasons, and a lot of people don't care apparently, even when many here can financially afford to pay more.

All of these anti-tipping comments clearly have not used Lyft. The Lyft culture versus Uber's from a passenger perspective is so much better. No, you don't have forced conversations like people here think will happen. People forget that Lyft was originally pushing being the more authentic company from the start. In my experience, the drivers respect this too, and almost every driver I've talked to prefers Lyft riders (even when I'm taking an Uber due to Lyft unavailability).

The tipping option means I can pay my driver more if he helps me unload a bunch of luggage/boxes (I've had to take an Uber to a storage facility years ago and had to use a 3rd party credit swipe app to tip my driver for all the extra work) or some other scenario. There's no tipping mention in Lyft rides, while I've seen it often in Uber rides. It's there for when you need it, and isn't something I really consider much. Is 1 second of thinking really too much? Efficiency isn't that important people.

I agree that tipping ambiguity is a pain sometimes. The remedy is taking the 3-5 min to learn the culture for common tipping scenarios. If you spend that time, the answer is pretty clear here. The feature comes in handy far more than it causes pain, speaking from the epxerience of myself and others.

<comment><USER36> > By trying to become a better company and treat drivers better

If you actually read the complaints here, the vast majority are against the manner of the pay increase, not the increase itself. If you're going to pretend that complaints against this are complaints against drivers' benefit, you need a reason that an across-the-board, no-Uber-commission pay rise wouldn't have done the same thing without making the product shittier.

<comment><USER109> I did read the complaints here, and many seem to be missing the point of why they added this. I don't think it was to increase driver pay directly, but to add a feature that Lyft has that many enjoyed. That and probably a perception of treating drivers better for PR reasons. Obviously they could also pay them better, but this is a positive step.

A better tipping system is better than nothing at all. A drop in the bucket far too late, but as a Lyft user, I find the tipping system to be better on both sides.

Furthermore, a lot of comments are just against tipping in general, and a worse experience on both sides with tipping in this case. My post is arguing against that notion from experience.</comment></comment></comment>


Healthcare.gov Lines of Code Comparison - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexmarchant.com/blog/2013/10/22/healthcare-dot-gov-lines-of-code-comparison.html <comment><USER2> Yeah newsreaders are really bad at single sourcing a quote without qualifying the source. And then repeating it. Endlessly.

That is basically how we got into the Iraq War, Cheney fed some nonsense to the NY Times which printed it, then Cheney went on the news the next week and quoted the NY Times and everyone started repeating the NY Times, when the original source of the nonsense was him.

By the way, is an opening/closing bracket on its own line a "line of code"? What if there are 200 million of them? Is that like double spacing your term papers in large fonts and wide margins to cheat the page requirement?

<comment><USER3> My general rule of thumb with unnamed sources is to completely disregard what they have to say. With named sources, my general rule of thumb is to assume they have ulterior motive for speaking to the press, usually apparent by looking at their job title. My general rule of thumb with all news is to wait for some distant period of time for the real facts to shake out of the mess of people talking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code."

And you guys believe that so call "specialist" without any proof?...What happened to HN? :/

<comment><USER5> It was good enough for the New York Times though?

<comment><USER6> It's disheartening to think they actually took that statement and printed it without verification. This simple chart illustrates how foolish that was.

<comment><USER4> They will print anything for views

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines of software code."

I call bullshit. Facebook is 62 million KLOC on the main site, excluding the backend. And I'll argue that Facebook is one of the most complicated sites out there, feature-wise.

I wonder if this is actually combining all 50 states' health exchanges (and their third-party insurance API connectors), which MIGHT make sense, given an average of 10 million lines per state site.

<comment><USER8> 62 million KLOC = 62,000 million lines of code. I'm calling bullshit on that.

<comment><USER9> I presume they meant 62 MLOC.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know the esteemed New York Times made the half-billion-lines of code assertion, but if you read the actual article, this claim is buried at the bottom. And this is the context:

> _According to one specialist, the Web site contains about 500 million lines > of software code. By comparison, a large bank's computer system is typically > about one-fifth that size._

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen- nee...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/21/us/insurance-site-seen-needing- weeks-to-fix.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&&pagewanted=all)

So "one specialist" figured it out? So who is this unnamed software-whisperer that the Times reporter picked out? It could be anyone from Linus Torvalds to an SEO expert, or maybe some doofus consultant who's an expert at getting gov't contracts and delivering terrible systems (on second thought, that person probably _would_ know best).

If you consider the other articles written about this, which claim that contractors only started work anywhere from 7 to 12 months from now...how is it even physically possible to write 500 million lines of code?

OK, yes, you can do it with copying-pasting, which clearly was part of the problem (lorem ipsum makes a few appearances in the production JavaScript)...but who knows what that number actually includes? Just actual source code? Comments? If the system includes, technically, some distro of Linux, is that counted?

Speaking of the Linux distro, here's an article from 2008, referring to a study that found that Fedora 9 had roughly 200 million lines of source code, and was equivalent to about $10.8 billion worth of dev work:

[http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/publications...](http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/publications/estimatinglinux.html)

So hey, if we're treating lines of code as fungible quantities, it sounds like the Feds got quite the deal! (except for the part of it not quite being reliable)

</comment><comment><USER11> As someone else pointed out there are about 380M people living in the US so perhaps the code is :

       if (name == "alice adams") {
       } else if (name == "betty adams") {
       ...
       } else if (name == "mark zuckerberg") {
       } else {
           open_dialog("Are you sure you are a US Citizen?");
       }

Sillyness I know. I actually agree with many people that someone likely pulled the "500M" number out of a hat during a stressful moment needing a "really big number" not thinking about what it meant if that was in fact the number.

<comment><USER2> It is also possible they are including the insurance provider database rows as "code".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps 317 million lines are a hardcoded list of every man, woman, and child in the U.S. That would leave only 183 million.

</comment><comment><USER13> That 323 million lines of code for Debian 5.0 also counts all the packages included with debian. The debian codebase by itself is only 68 million lines of code: [http://www.ohloh.net/p/debian](http://www.ohloh.net/p/debian)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch, I'll update this soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Looking through the source code posted elsewhere, it appears to make heavy use of AndroMDA internally, which appears to generate Java classes from UML diagrams. I think that's important to keep in mind when judging the 500m figure, as 500m computer generated code != 500m human code.

<comment><USER15> Have you found marketplace backend code anywhere? The frontend code is easy to find and there's at least one repo with it (see my previous code) but I'd be very interested to see backend code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you look at the code, e.g.

[https://gist.github.com/adamnemecek/7112729/raw/deb521f699d3...](https://gist.github.com/adamnemecek/7112729/raw/deb521f699d35df9758305a5191a6283e07e37dc/registration.js)

500 million LOC seems less unrealistic.

/s

<comment><USER2> That is the FRONT end which is open-source. Made by different people.

The BACK end is closed source, made by CGI and others.

<comment><USER17> Of course, but I would be shocked if the backend was more than even 3-5 million lines.

<comment><USER2> The back end is the entire API.

But I tend to agree the size claimed has to be way off.

They might be including database rows as "code" who knows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This post is garbage and perpetuating this false statistic is useless noise.

</comment><comment><USER19> Someone must be practicing enterprise coding. See also: [https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...](https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpriseEdition)

</comment><comment><USER20> The entire site is generated via Jekyll with every possible permeation. I just made that up. But it does use Jekyll.

[https://github.com/greggersh/healthcare.gov#install- jekyll](https://github.com/greggersh/healthcare.gov#install-jekyll)

<comment><USER3> The front end does, that was built by Development Seed. The problems have seemed to come from other contractors, such as CGI Federal, though I'm loathe to trust anything I've read in the news about this clusterfuck so far. The reporting has been so bad it rivals Healthcare.gov itself in its awfulness.

<comment><USER15> The craziest part has been the hysteria about the healthcare.gov repository going down. It never contained any files that were useful to anyone - it was just the blog / landing page. It's like Microsoft promising to open-source their operating system and all you get is the software that generates the help files.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why? Literally, how could this be? I think they must be counting every dependency twice.

</comment><comment><USER22> Jesus, it's disappointing that HN is focused on this silly statistic instead of actually talking about the problem stalling millions of Americans right now from enrolling. Considering HN is kind of, like, the epitome of technical talent on the Internet. They would know best how to solve HealthCare.gov's problems.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6596981)

</comment><comment><USER23> seeds orange apple apple Apple applesauce [rooty tooty fresh and fruity breakfast]

</comment><comment><USER24> import *; // so much work, almost 500 millions lines of code

</comment><comment><USER25> Ah, it all makes sense now. For about a dollar a line, I wouldn't give a shit either.

</comment><comment><USER26> ...

HAHAHAHA!!!</comment>