Autopsy: Lessons from Failed Startups - <AUTHOR> http://autopsy.io/ <comment><USER4> Startup success is mostly random. I'm reminded of a quote from SMBC [1] that I've always liked:

"Doubt kills more dreams than failure...but Random Chance is like, Grim Reaper for dreams."

Success in startups (and life in general) is not the linear function that most of us want it to be. It isn't related in direct proportion to the amount of effort, intelligence, work, time, love, energy, etc that's invested. It's more of a logarithmic function. There is a minimum amount of effort and those other things that must be put in to have any chance of success. But after that the returns diminish rapidly. It's comforting to think that if we just try harder or smarter we can triumph in the end. But the fickle winds of fate have the ultimate say, and any sense of control is probably an illusion.

Saying that a company failed due to lack of product-market fit is like saying that a sports team lost due to not scoring enough points. It's always a true statement, but it doesn't illuminate the cause of the failure in a way that would be instructive to others. Most startups that were successful enough to be included on this list probably did 80% of things "right". Some times "it just didn't work out" is all that you'll be able to say.

Despite all that, I think there is a lot of value in these autopsies. Being able to learn something, anything, from the experience of others is very valuable. Knowing more about what causes failure won't guarantee success, but it sure as hell beats knowing nothing.

[1] [http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3506](http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3506)

<comment><USER5> One thought on this...

If startup success is mostly random then how can someone like Elon Musk create startup-after-startup shooting for a goal against-all-odds, but always come out on top?

Does he define the "mostly" in the argument?

<comment><USER6> A lot of what Musk is doing now is deeply dependent on government support. And if you look at all the tech giants you'll see a kernel of government subsidy from the outset. Oracle. Sun. Google. Many others got their start with a government "in". It's the open secret of capitalism: states create markets. Markets require states.

[http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/tesla-motors- fre...](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/tesla-motors-free-ride- elon-musk-government-subsidies)

<comment><USER7> This is almost a non-sensical statement as the state injects itself into every market and is by definition unavoidable. You could argue that the state subsidized Uber by handing a monopoly to the taxi industry, who's complacency created an opportunity for improvement. Doesn't mean government support is by any means required or necessary.

<comment><USER6> States are required in markets (as we understand them) _fundamentally_ for protection over the transaction. History shows if you remove the state you end up with inter tribal economies where arbitrary homicide is a "valid" outcome of exchange (organized crime is a good predictor here). Not sure what you're advocating exactly though, so you could be right on different terms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The human angle behind these stories transcends way beyond the business one. Its uncanny how these two founders articulated about the pain in almost the same way as each other:

99Dresses - Nikki Durkin:

 _Many startup folk say that failure should be celebrated. "Fail fast, fail early, fail often!" they all chant, trying to put a positive spin on the most excruciating pain any founder could experience..Let me tell you — failure fucking sucks..I travelled to my parent's place in the countryside of Australia, locked myself away in my room and cried for what seemed like an entire week._

Critica - Jason Huertas:

 _You'll hear the phrase "Fail fast" or "It's good to fail". Which is true. You can't learn without failing. But what they don't tell you is just how utterly devastating failure actually is for an entrepreneur. To sacrifice your personal relationships, finances, and health to the dream, and to still come up short. How could this happen to me? It was a very frustrating and dark place to be in._

The case of 99Dresses was an eye opener. I would beg to differ with the general sentiment in the comment section here about how co-founders lacked sense of product market fit etc.

Nikki Durkin had oodles of determination, immense grit, was a YCombinator alumni, had great product-market fit, managed decent seed funding, had good traction which many startup can only aspire to in the initial days, a team who were behind her most of the time, still..

All things being equal (actually the case showed even if they are not) fate, right-time-right-place is a factor which nobody can control, and which has decisive play in the scheme of things.

I can only wish good luck to Nikki Durkin, and I'm 100% sure that she would come out with something amazing in future.

<comment><USER9> Two things:

1) Learn to live with failure. Most of these folks sound pretty privileged, as if they never got smacked in the face with reality or had to deal with failure. Sometimes that's what happens when one is a young superstar, the odds were in their favor until it wasn't. The rest of us just learned to deal with disappointment and overcoming.

2) The real secret about success is that it's random. It's not even about luck or hard work, success is simply random. Luck is just a lottery scratcher and hard work lets you get more tickets to scratch but hard work, product fit, traction blah blah don't guarantee success. Because again, success is random. Thinking otherwise will drive you crazy trying to analyze why bad things happen to good people and good things happens to bad people. Determination is the only trait that finds success, because you just keep trying until you die. Which then calls back to my first point: learn to live with failure. It's good for you. Each subsequent time you need to cry less.

<comment><USER10> _Learn to live with failure. Most of these folks sound pretty privileged, as if they never got smacked in the face with reality or had to deal with failure. Sometimes that 's what happens when one is a young superstar, the odds were in their favor until it wasn't._

I disagree. Never learn to live with failure. Failure should be painful, and should be proportional to what you put into trying to succeed. Doing a startup should be toward the top of the list of things you should feel really bad about failing at (after failing as a parent, spouse, child). You should pour everything you have into the startup. If you do anything less then you probably deserve to fail (although you may still succeed).

If you can do a startup, fail, and then say, "no biggie, on to the next", then you're probably not someone that I would bet on.

That said, after a week of crying (and probably months prior to that of anxiety), you should be able to bounce back. Incorporate all that you learned into your next try.

<comment><USER9> Using pain as a motivation is what a monk does behind closed doors whipping himself to get to god. I offer satisfaction as the better non-masochistic alternative.

And in your scenario only a child plays that game. Because they don't know any better and at that stage it's entirely based only randomness. Today's Disney super star is tomorrow's old news.

There's also some kind of weird perversion of only wanting to place bets on those so intense that they tilt to suicide from the anxiety and shame.

Adults know better and as it turns out after adulting for awhile and living in reality only then does entrepreneurship really take shape.

<comment><USER10> It's not based on randomness. You can't field a random group of 12 men and win the NBA Championship or 53 for the Super Bowl. As composed as Russell Wilson was, he didn't immediately forget about the game.

That's the difference between those that make it and those that don't.

I'd be curious if there are virtually any successful founders (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Jerry Yang, etc) who would have been completely indifferent if they failed. I suspect that is not highly correlated with those that succeed.

And I think Floyd Mayweather would offer that failure is bad for you. You can learn as many lessons from winning/succeeding as losing/failing. Or as an ex- coach used to say, "losing teaches a lot of lessons -- most importantly, that you need to figure out how to win"

<comment><USER11> Business success is nothing like winning a sporting championship. Sports are specifically constructed to let talent and skill shine through and impress the audience. Business is practically the opposite of that.

You don't know all the skills you need in advance.

You don't have thousands of hours of live and taped competition directly between the best in the world to study.

Progress towards those skills and a championship/success isn't directly measurable.

The ground may shift out from under you overnight (few pro sports rule changes have caused players or teams to go bust or lose all hope of winning... compare that to any widely-felt economic event).

The environment facing an entrepreneur is far, far more chaotic, which is why a first-time founder without deep personal reserves is going to be far more at the mercy of luck than Lebron James or Russell Wilson.

(And even then, there are fierce debates over the role of luck when it comes to individual's career accomplishments. Drop Lebron onto MJ's Bulls, and how many titles does he win? Drop MJ onto the mid-2000's Cavs, and how many does he win?)

(Edit for fixing inconsistency between which directions I was making the comparison in.)

<comment><USER12> While I understand your point that business is fraught with unknowns, and sports is a regimented as it may be I wouldn't say the Duke of Wellington was all wrong about the playing fields of Eton. We watch professional sports as entertainment. We embrace and participate in competitive sports at all levels because they act as a microcosm of the real world, an artificial conflict in which we practice our virtues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can we vote on which ones accurately assess their failings and which ones still harbor serious delusions about them?

<comment><USER13> I am 100% serious, by the way. People have the most ridiculous ideas about why things failed and how it will totally work next time. If they just follow these ego-comforting steps that don't even begin to address the problem.

My top at-a-glance eye-roller says _" technical co-founder quit & pulled the code out from under me"_.

So completely neglectful of basic business structuring that the tech co- founder could just walk away with the code, to which you don't have copyright claim? If a non-technical co-founder can't even bring responsible management to the table, why are they at the table?

Article goes on to suggest that if the non-technical co-founder had learned to code so as to not feel so helpless, things would have gone better. Just wow.

<comment><USER14> At a startup (before traction, employees, etc.), you are pretty much doomed if your technical cofounder quits even if you've structured the company with vesting, ownership of IP, etc. All the domain knowledge, architectural knowledge, etc. goes out the window when the person who wrote all the code leaves. It's very hard to drop someone else into an unfamiliar codebase and have them pick up where the original person left off, and you probably would've made many different decisions (about product, platform, languages, architecture) with a different team.

The real fail there is poor relationship management. _Why_ did the cofounder quit? What was running through their head? Did they not really want to commit to a startup in the first place, in which case the business founder should've vetted them more thoroughly before starting the company? Or did they lose trust in the business founder's leadership, market knowledge, and integrity? Were their incentives never aligned to begin with?

<comment><USER15> Maybe the tech cofounder quit because you're a clueless asshole? Blaming your failure on the guy you drove away, I think that's what he's complaining about as delusional.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looking through the list, it seems to me like a good 90% of these (if not more) can be summarised as "lack of product-market fit", meaning that they blew their money on building something that nobody wants.

Anyone notice anything else standing out?

<comment><USER17> I see a few "we weren't in love with the idea or market", which I feel is bullshit.

You can hate lemonade, but can still make money selling it.

<comment><USER18> I've seen this all too often with co-founders I've had in the past (which didn't work out). They first love the idea and work on it with lots of passion.

As soon as they need to do the boring work (IE: 90% of the hard work involved in any business), interest is lost and they want to quit.

I call these people employees because they aren't willing to do what it takes to build and maintain a business.

<comment><USER19> they are researchers, not employees. Employees are the people you need to do drudge work in a professional manner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's interesting that so many startups listed lack of product-market fit as the reason for failure, even though another startup with an adjacent idea has been able to get traction.

For example, the first was a "same day ingredient delivery service" that "simply didn't have legs", but both Blue Apron and Instacart could be considered same-day ingredient delivery and both are growing fast.

I wonder if we can "unpack" product-market fit into a checklist of smaller goals?

<comment><USER14> "Fit" is a checklist of subtle details and features that together make up the product. I like to think of it as "When the sum total of nice touches and problems solved that make you love the product is greater than the sum total of annoyances, missing features, and usability snafus that make you fear and loathe the product." Most of these are invisible to someone reading a 1-sentence summary, but you very much notice them as a user.

That's why MP3 players and smart phones failed to get widespread consumer adoption before Apple, why Instagram succeeded where Picwing failed, why Facebook has taken over the world while Xanga is relegated to the dustbin of history, and why Google makes billions while Lycos, Infoseek, Altavista, etc. failed. Same product category, but the product itself was much better.

<comment><USER19> That's product quality, not market fit. Market fit is reaching the people who would buy your product, and meeting their needs, before you are famous enough for them to find you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Two days ago I've met this friend of mine, who's been working on a project for the last 1.5 years. He's been living off savings and he's got a couple of months of money left. The project is not ready yet and even if it were there's the huge question of how it can ever make money, being open source and all. He's been working day and night and he's so obsessed with it and the myriad of complicated technical issues that plague the project. He will not take a weekend off. He doesn't want to rest because he has a lot of work to do.

From the looks of it, he'll not make it, but how can I possibly tell him that ? How can I possibly take his dreams and hopes and break them into pieces and hope to still be a friend after that.

Sometimes failure is unavoidable, no matter how much people will warn you about it. Failure is something so personal and private that the only way to understand it is to live through it.

<comment><USER22> > From the looks of it, he'll not make it, but how can I possibly tell him > that ?

Don't tell him. Ask questions that get him to think.

<comment><USER23> > Don't tell him. Ask questions that get him to think.

That is also not easy. Poster's friend might get annoyed\offended when he will not have answers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Hey HN!

@NiralSJP here—one half of the team that put this together.

Glad you're finding it useful and we appreciate the comments and suggestions

<comment><USER25> Thanks for doing this!! (I'm one of the folks mentioned).

Something I've noticed when discussing failure is there's a class of people who are real assholes about other people's failures (focusing on blame, using very negative phrases, trying to second guess founders for who knows what reason, etc). I notice some comments in this thread are along those lines.

I'd love it if you kept that in mind as you build this, esp since some of the comments/suggestions in this thread are quite, em, unpleasant.

<comment><USER26> This will always be the case, even here on HN, the vast majority of users/commenters haven't been through a start-up, especially not as a founder. Gotta just ignore it and move on. Having been through it 3 times now (2x as a founder, 1x as first employee) I can read some of these critiques and see how maddeningly simplistic they are.

That's not to say a founder has too much more insight into the specifics of what you faced. Without being in the thick of it, it's almost impossible to really see what happened.

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth - Mike Tyson

<comment><USER25> Oh I agree. I endured and ignored a ton of assholes' simplistic reductions about my business, motivation, work ethic, etc, when we shut down. I agree.

But, as a community, we should try to builds things that don't encourage this sort of shit. If you want to promote learning from failure, it's in your best interest to make sure that you don't accidentally dissuade people from writing about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What a great database! I keep a "worry" list, things I check often, and this will certainly go on it.

Reminds me of one of the best books I ever read on SCUBA theory: a case by case description of some 30 odd fatal incidents.

Knowing what goes wrong is helpful

<comment><USER28> There is a somewhat dated but still useful book by Stephen Flowers called "Software Failure: Management Failure" that does a nice job of post-mortems for failed large-scale development projects you might find interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I whish there was a column "successful startup with similar idea". Then we could have a better understanding of the quality of realization.

</comment><comment><USER30> Partially related: Third party analyses of failures. [1] and [2] analyze Webvan's failure 14 years back.

It is fascinating to read it now and see how much of it they got right (and see how much was wrong, with the benefit of hindsight).

[1] Why E-commerce Didn't Die With the Fall of Webvan [http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/2496.html](http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/2496.html)

[2] What Webvan Could Have Learned from Tesco [http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/what-webvan- could...](http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/what-webvan-could-have- learned-from-tesco/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Absolutely invaluable. So how do we get more unsuccessful founders to add to this?

<comment><USER13> Easy. Just build more unsuccessful businesses.

<comment><USER31> Wouldn't they be successful in their failure if the goal was to give this list more data?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This one contains some solid insights, mostly about doing a better job of proving demand: [https://medium.com/@michalbohanes/seven-lessons-i-learned- fr...](https://medium.com/@michalbohanes/seven-lessons-i-learned-from-the- failure-of-my-first-startup-dinnr-c166d1cfb8b8)

But...

There is no business idea I cannot kill using a sufficiently cold and objective evaluation. I can show the demand is not there, that it doesn't solve a customer pain-point, that the price is too high, that the model won't work in this market, that the technology won't scale...

At the end of WWII Vannevar Bush, the head of the American military rocketry program, said that human beings would never go to the Moon because you'd have to take a rocket the size of a battleship, stand it up on end, and launch it into space, and this was obviously impossible.

Prediction is hard, especially about the future. Entreprenuership is fundamentally about courage, because you've got to jump off that ledge knowing the odds are you'll fail. If you dig too deeply or look too closely at the problem you may never start, because the risk is always going to be unacceptably high to any sane person.

So it's important for entrepreneurs to balance their optimism against reality, rather than just giving in to realism and sticking with the day job.

<comment><USER32> Vannevar Bush foresaw many things correctly. But the rocket thing... It was only a few years later that we were lobbing those vertical battleships into space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It might be valuable to add the ability to have discussions for each of the entries on autopsy.io, allowing people to analyze it further and include the founders in the discussion. From this it might be possible to combine the analysis of a couple of the autopsies and launch a new idea.

</comment><comment><USER34> Betting so much of one's soul into a consumer play is a risky decision. The pay-outs are huge, but the odds are enormous, as bad as a lottery. Consumers decide to use a product based on intangibles; brand recognition, emotions, entertainment. These are fleeting, like fashion, and for an entrepreneur, hard to pin down what works and doesn't. There is no repeatable model for us to experiment and learn from.

Businesses on the other hand are considerably more rational. B2B decisions are made based on value. Even when a deal doesn't go through, you get tangible data to see why. But make yet another photo-sharing app and no one uses it? That's a lot more harder.

</comment><comment><USER35> Awesome list to look through! I remember a few of these postmortems when they first posted, like the Wesabe one.

It'd be great if the table had start/close dates, or "months alive", or something.

<comment><USER36> yes some more data based analytics on metrics you could calibrate on such as months alive, rounds of funding, profit margins, basically any type of portfolio you would present to an investor for value assessment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The thing I noticed many of these startups had in common: Awful names.

<comment><USER19> Google's original name was "BackRub". Facebook was "TheFaceBook". They changed the name when it mattered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It may be interesting and important to note that some of the "failures" on this list may have simply been before their time. I see a few going back to ~2006 that might actually have a decent chance today if given another go.

Sometimes the fine line between failure:success hinges on nothing more than timing itself. The optimal time to enter a market is a variable that should be weighted almost as heavily as cash to burn.

</comment><comment><USER39> There's selection bias at play here, but anyone else notice that 99% of these are consumer plays? There's mostly photos/food/social/video/community/jobs ideas. In consumer plays, there's a lot of luck involved, since the company is essentially guessing whether the problem itself is significant, let alone their particular solution.

<comment><USER28> There's a lot of luck in everything. I've been involved in startups in remote sensing, computer-assisted surgery, medical imaging, and other areas, and while there were various reasons for the failures luck loomed large in all of them.

The medical imaging play got scooped by a patent issued to another research team a month before our patent application was ready to go (this was before applications were published.) That was pure bad luck. We were a small team who weren't publishing our work while it was in development, they were a small team who weren't publishing their work while it was in development. They started a few months before us, or long after us but had more resources, or long before us but worked more slowly, or didn't go down the same blind alley we did part way through. I defy anyone _using the information available at the time_ to pick out a better set of choices than we made without flipping a coin.

The key to understanding the role of luck is to realize how scarce information is when you are building something new. You don't know how big the market is. You don't know what customers are willing to pay. You don't know what the "killer application" will be. One company I worked with thought they were aiming for selling a service to the bottled water sector. They ended up selling it to the sewage treatment sector.

I also know people who were one decision away from success: if they had taken deal X or added feature Y they almost certainly (in hindsight) gotten rich. Given the information at the time, they made the best choice they could. That it happened to be the wrong choice was luck, and nothing else. These are people who had built successful companies during the dot-com era, mostly. If they had exited at the right time they'd be hailed as geniuses today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Most of these "startups" are boring; they are not STARTUPS, they are small businesses doing what others are doing (or have done).

They seem to lack the OMG spark of insight into how technology can be used to do something exciting. IMHO, a web site or an App (is there really much difference) is not a STARTUP--but it can be a business that generates income.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is a really great effort. It feels like a nice addendum to Sam Altman's class ([http://startupclass.samaltman.com/](http://startupclass.samaltman.com/)) - take that knowledge and use it to come up with what would you have done differently.

</comment><comment><USER42> This is a great idea. I wonder if you thought about implementing some sort of comment/discussion section, maybe with a voting system. That way people could express their opinions and maybe even give valuable advice as to how they'd deal with certain aspects of these failures.

</comment><comment><USER43> It would be neat to see some lessons from companies that still exist, but have major plans that failed, like 42floors. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9140768](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9140768)

</comment><comment><USER44> Thought this one was a neat idea: Critica: [https://medium.com/@jasonhuertas/my-startup- failed-6c54bd68c...](https://medium.com/@jasonhuertas/my-startup- failed-6c54bd68c654)

</comment><comment><USER45> RE: Elon Musk -- I see a lot on luck in the comments, and agree with most. Another aspect of luck is timing. If Musk graduated in 2002 would he have been able to start a successful company, or would capital not have been there?

</comment><comment><USER46> Would be great to also add a column for "date of death" as timing is often a major component related to failure.

While on the subject of timing, I'd add a column for years in business, but that might be getting too cluttered.

<comment><USER24> Cheers, we're going to add "Date of Autopsy".

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I tried something similar with My Startup Fail ([http://www.mystartup.fail/](http://www.mystartup.fail/)), but definitely like Autopsy's approach better.

<comment><USER48> How meta! Is there anything you wish you'd done with My Startup Fail?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I agree with feedjoelpie. One criticism I have here is that there is a lack of comprehensive data analytics from their actual portfolios before they cut the chord, and that it relies on self reported data from the founders, which is bound to be bias to some degree. Some of these failed that are exact clones of companies that were the exact same idea but implemented more quickly and ended up and still are very successful, and in those particular ideas, the autopsy of the failed companies never seems to want to admit their idea was just not that original, or not implemented as well.

Examples that stand out to me just from knowing really successful competitors of the same idea:

Bombfell Manilla Dnnr bloom.fm solorix

Overall, I value their feedback (and I am glad to see it compiled as opposed to every failed company posting on here as if they have some diamond in the ruff wisdom on why they failed) but I would prefer some more data based trends.

Overall interesting idea to start pulling more calibrated analytics from. I was also thinking someone should do the same thing for lessons learned from how VCs and Angel Investors screw over companies.

It's actually going to take some time for me to find something on this list that doesn't reek of knocking off popularized trending app ideas.

I happened to see 99 Dresses on this list, whom I saw on Shark Tank somehow (the one time I watched the show). I'm a girl and for me personally I don't really give about the idea of weddings and think its nonsense, and think it's a waste of money, but I thought it was a pretty cool idea that basically you could rent a wedding dress, and that sounded unique to me and a good niche of rent the runway, though I doubt I'll ever invest in a wedding dress myself in any capacity. Point is weddings are a billion dollar a yr industry and wedding dresses are sometimes the most expensive part aside from venue and catering. As culture becomes less traditional, it's less likely women will view their dresses as a long term investment their posterity will wear.

Additionally, I think I know of plenty of girls who would rather rent a designer wedding dress they could never afford outright (especially if their posterity is not going to wear it as culture is these days) than settle for something they like alot less because that is all they could afford to buy, that will sit in a closet. Additionally, now that we have facebook and social media, girls do not need to buy the dress (despite posterity) so it can collect dust in their closet for the sake of nostalgia. Now we have social media to document not only the dress but how the woman looked in the dress. Therefore, providing the capability to rent one of the most expensive clothing items the average woman will ever invest in, seemed like a pretty solid idea, and at least there was something a little unique about it. However, I have no idea how well she implemented the idea nor did I follow the company after the pitch.

Other than that one company, I didn't see anything I have not heard of realistically, atleast 5 times before.

</comment><comment><USER49> Findory's link links to Findery. They are two different companies that do the same thing. I find it interesting that the names are so much alike. I wonder if there is a connection.

</comment><comment><USER50> There's often considerable link rot associated with these sites, so it'd be a good idea to save autopsies as well, not just link to them.

</comment><comment><USER51> I wonder how many of these are actually related to interpersonal issues, mismanagement, or co-founder turmoil. Nobody talks about it.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a good* resource. We should have more of these. I wouldn't mind having an app with a stream of these which pop-up notification on my desktop: notification of failed dreams.

Because they are many - a lot more than in that list. And there will be a lot more of them in the future.

For every startup success story, there are about 9 silent tales of shattered hopes, financial ruin, depression and even suicides.

Success stories are so shiny an bright, that all the smart 20-somethings are blinded by them - and why not - who doesn't want to be a billionaire ?

The theme is always the same.

A really cool idea - which will totally transform, disrupt, reinvent and reimagine the world and will forever change it for the better.

Your heart beats faster, you're full of enthusiasm, you're obsessed, you talk to everybody and you infect others with your enthusiasm. They come on board, you find money, then the coding starts.

It's so fun and cool - you're on _that_ path - you're an actual startup - <USER3> coolest thing you can do with your life - sacrifice a bit of yourself for a huge payout sometime in the nearest future.

And so you put in days and nights, you replace food with caffeine, sleep with debugging sessions. You _ignore_ the wisdom of others, because they're not you - you can do it better, you will prove it in the end.

And then, suddenly, after so much work, your main coder drops the bomb that he's accepted a job at XYZ.

You now have little money, no users and a repository full of spaghetti which only your coder understands. You need to launch fast. You use duct tape and saliva to keep everything from falling apart.

And...... You launch! Version 0.1 beta. Then 0.2 beta. Then 0.3 beta. You have 231 users after two weeks. 0.4 beta. 0.5 beta. Two months in and you've still less than 500 users. According to your business plan, you're short about 49500 users by now.

More Red Bulls, it's 3 o'clock in the morning again, when did I sleep last time ? The fucking thing still crashes. Where's everyone ?

Your mother calls. "I'm fine, mom. Everyting's fine.". She knows you aren't, it breaks her heart, she tears up.

You can still do it. Look at XYZ - they've been through worse and they made it. Never give up. Never give up. Rent is due next week. Jack doesn't show up to work and doesn't answer his phone. He's burned out and he's had it, he's leaving.

I can still do it alone, I just need to re-write the whole thing and it will be much better. How long could it take ?

You're in denial, but reality knocks on your door. It's time to move out.

You've failed. You're not good enough. You disappointed everyone and yourself. You're not built for this. You will never make it. You lock yourself in your room for weeks. You put on weight. Days are nights are days are nights are...

Your girlfriend wants to really talk about something. She can't take it anymore. Fine, we split up. Maybe it was because of her anyway...

Depression kicks in. The dark place. The 'there's no escape' place. The 'i'm worthless' place. The 'I'm a failure place'. The shame, the guilt. The disappointment.

The place were all failed people go. By now, you should have been having an IPO, rubbing shoulders with the big guys. Instead, you're in that place - <USER3> silent place, the place nobody wants to talk about.

You will be there for a couple of months, maybe years, before you recover. Or you'll swallow your guilt and get a job. Any job. Maybe in another city, maybe in another country.

And then things fade, life gets better, you meet another girl, you fall in love, you recover. You're good again. You have energy. You have power. Your mind is energized.

And then ... the coooolest idea in the world pops up in your head. If you don't do it, who will ? This time you know better. You've learned from all the mistakes of the past. This time will be different.

This time you'll make it... You've got a 10% chance.

<comment><USER52> edit this down (I didn't read it.) looks OK though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Does anyone know what happened to Goldee? It was a good product with a killing web page, I don't know what exactly happened.

</comment><comment><USER54> Would be good to know how long were the founders they committed to the startup? Extra column OP? Thanks!

<comment><USER24> Thanks for the suggestions. We're looking into this. Something like "Months Alive"

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -Tolstoy

</comment><comment> travis-bickle Make it more complete crowd sourcing (with voting) Then only the list will be more useful

</comment><comment><USER56> An interesting column to add to this would be the amount of funding raised, if known.

</comment><comment><USER57> I would love it if there were a similar list for successful (or ongoing) startups..

</comment><comment><USER58> A little off-topic, but does anyone know how Plated succeeded where Dinner failed?

<comment><USER59> It could be the culture difference as the founder pointed out in his article. United States vs London.

And various other unknown factors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Thanks for doing this! I hope more people add their stories.

</comment><comment><USER61> The Valley is a Harsh Mistress

[http://www.warplife.com/tips/business/stock/venture/capital/...](http://www.warplife.com/tips/business/stock/venture/capital/misery.html)</comment>


Angry Birds IPO expected to value parent Rovio at $1B - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/angry-birds-ipo-expected-to-value-parent-rovio-at-1-billion/ <comment><USER2> Really? Wasn't that movie they made a good indicator of the public's interest? Or what happened to Zynga? Unless they have a Nintendo property in the pipeline for release near or before the IPO, they'll go the way of Snap.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unbelievable that a little Worms clone ever made it so far.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hear the "Pet Rocks" people are ramping up for a $2B IPO.

Decisions, decisions...</comment>


A Mammal's Brain Has Been Cryonically Preserved and Recovered - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-rabbit-brain-has-been-cryonically-preserved-and-recovered-brain-preservation-prize <comment><USER2> Ok, that is a bit creepy but also intellectually fascinating. Presumably most people who wish to be preserved don't need their damaged / tired out old body but if they were installed in some future "fresh" body, well that might be interesting.

Of course it could also lead to a dystopic form of slavery in the future where brains are recovered out of cryostorage by some bidder/corporation and installed in tools to work in service for the rest of their days. That could be an interesting (if scary) sci-fi book/movie.</comment>


Innovation Principle 20: Be remarkable - <AUTHOR> http://metacool.typepad.com/metacool/2010/11/innovation-principle-20-be-remarkable.html <comment><USER2> This post is typical of a lot of the self-help stuff on the web.

The author starts with a truism (no-one is going to argue that you should live your life trying to be unremarkable), and then pads it with vague generalities that could really mean anything ("A broad commitment to being remarkable reduces the friction, smooths out the bumps, and turbocharges the chuzpah we all need to bring cool thingsto (sic) life.")

You can't argue against it, because the author isn't really saying anything. There is no way you could take a post like this and make changes to your life without filling in an extraordinary amount of detail on your own.</comment>


A really slick polymerJS based Overwatch UI proof-of-concept - <AUTHOR> https://overwebs.ruph.in/main <comment><USER2> Hi, I am the author of this site.

The project started out as a test to see if the web platform is powerful enough to do complex interfaces like this. The entire site is built from the ground up using (almost) no pre-existing libraries or frameworks, trying to use platform native techniques as much as possible.

In the end I plan to document exactly what features were difficult (or impossible) to implement, so we can get an idea of where the web platform stands compared to custom rendering engines in terms of capabilities. So far I must say I am surprised how close I can get to the real thing, showing how powerful the modern web platform really is.

Disclaimer: This is a research project, so compatibility is nonexistent on the priority list. I use whatever features are available in the specs, even though most browsers do not implement them yet. At this time the latest version of Chrome gives the best rendering results, and there are no guarantees other browsers will work.</comment>


Safe and Secure Software – An Invitation to Ada 2012 - <AUTHOR> http://www.adacore.com/knowledge/technical-papers/safe-and-secure-software-an-invitation-to-ada-2012/ <comment><USER2> Use in secure DNS: [http://ironsides.martincarlisle.com](http://ironsides.martincarlisle.com)

Medium assurance demonstrator [http://www.adacore.com/sparkpro/tokeneer](http://www.adacore.com/sparkpro/tokeneer)

Use in separation kernel: [http://muen.codelabs.ch](http://muen.codelabs.ch)

Use in firmware: [http://blog.adacore.com/how-to-prevent-drone-crashes- using-s...](http://blog.adacore.com/how-to-prevent-drone-crashes-using-spark)

Use in wealth generation: [http://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html](http://www.ghs.com/products/ada_optimizing_compilers.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> SPARK-2014 fits better here: [http://www.spark-2014.org](http://www.spark-2014.org)

Well, it described in the Chapter 11.

</comment><comment><USER2> Well, that didn't get anywhere in 13 hours in this crowd. Let's try a different one: "Unsafe and Insecure Software - An Invitation to C 1989."

[http://www.physics.drexel.edu/courses/Comp_Phys/General/C_ba...](http://www.physics.drexel.edu/courses/Comp_Phys/General/C_basics/c_tutorial.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> It looks interesting, but I was amused to see the "Year => 08" where 08 evidently means 2008.</comment>


Silicon Valley Begins to Crack Visibly - <AUTHOR> http://wolfstreet.com/2017/07/02/silicon-valley-commercial-real-estate-bubble/ <comment><USER2> Insufficient data for the headline's conclusion. The market is complex; show me vacancy rates historically, along with the average rent and unemployment rates. Show me the vacancy rate for housing. Driving along a stretch of highway and seeing signs without even bothering to interview the landlords of those properties is just plain lazy.

</comment><comment><USER3> High vacancy rates doesn't necessarily mean slower hiring, it can also mean new buildings came on line at excessively aggressive rates.</comment>


Pipe Organ desk - <AUTHOR> http://www.kagenschaefer.com/pipeorgandesk.html <comment><USER3> This is a demonstration of it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5tenq55VPA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5tenq55VPA)

<comment><USER4> It's a real shame the croud is a bit... unsophisticated. The machine is an utter work of genius. People have made video games that revolved around less sophisticated and featureful puzzle boxes. And it's made entirely of wood. It's got logic gates. It plays music. It has tons of puzzle locks. It's _gorgeous_.

I think it's entirely fair that he claims on the site that it's the coolest desk in the world. I would love just to see all the things it can do - <USER2> I'd pay for that short video.

<comment><USER5> Why would you say they are "unsophisticated"?

<comment><USER4> Certainly not everyone, to be sure. Really, I'm sorta griping about that lady who's like "But can it play other songs?" It seemed remarkably ungracious. A lot of the crowd jokes were kinda lame, but that's my projection of an overly- reverential attitude about it.

My comment really does a disservice to the useful comments/questions. Like "why try to build a pipe organ?" which honestly I think we all wanted to ask.

And - full disclosure - I would have totally wasted my chance to ask something meaningful, as I woulda gone full stupid basking in the presence of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems like something I should have found in the original Myst. What an awesome thing to have. The wood grain alone without all the contraptions looks amazing. Incredible piece.

<comment><USER7> And not just the original Myst, the elegance and engineering plausibility of the puzzles were also beautifully achieved in other parts of the series. Very similar to this, for sure. The difficulty has tended to decrease slightly, but damn, Riven was _hard_.

I'm sure many puzzles in the series could be used as templates for very entertaining real-world puzzles. Just imagine an escape room based on Exile's Amateria:

[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/113350/Analysis_Puzzle_De...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/113350/Analysis_Puzzle_Design_in_the_Myst_Series.php) (some spoilers in that article)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What an amazing skill set this guy has. Woodworking, puzzle design, and programming(with wood!). I'd be interested to know who commissioned it and for what purpose.

</comment><comment><USER9> That is absolutely amazing. It reminds me of this table (though that's not really a woodworking project, more of a metal working project that is clothed in wood):

[http://fletchertables.com/](http://fletchertables.com/)

<comment><USER10> Reminded me of BS Johnsons inventions from the disk world

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Organist here, the best I have is a dresser with stop handles as the drawer pulls.

This is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER12> Goonies - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5_3XaaeRXI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5_3XaaeRXI)

If the organ's secret tune is the same as the puzzle in Goonies that would take it over the top!

<comment><USER13> It's programmable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Put this in the column of "Stuff I can't own because my small children would destroy it."

</comment><comment><USER15> This seems like something Donald Knuth would own.

<comment><USER16> I know the artist who made this. It was a commission for Darren Aronofsky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminds me of Grand Piano.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Piano_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Piano_\(film\))

</comment><comment><USER18> Can anyone reccommend any resources for learning about pnumatic memory?

I tried googling various combinations of (pneumatic|air) (logic|memory|circuts) without much luck.

I'm familiar with how logic / electronic circuts work, but I'm interested in the magic required to make it work with air/fluids.

<comment><USER19> A quick DDG [1] turned up this - [http://hydraulicspneumatics.com/200/TechZone/PneumaticValves...](http://hydraulicspneumatics.com/200/TechZone/PneumaticValves/Article/False/6455/TechZone- PneumaticValves) which looks like the first chapter of an entire html book on the topic [http://hydraulicspneumatics.com/ebooks/fluid-power-ebook- flu...](http://hydraulicspneumatics.com/ebooks/fluid-power-ebook-fluid-power- basics) (and the site also has a "Learning Resources" tab that looks like it will have even more for you when you're done with the ebook ;-) ).

[1] [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%28pneumatic+OR+air%29+%28logic+OR...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%28pneumatic+OR+air%29+%28logic+OR+memory+OR+circuts%29&t=ffhp)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Now that's fanatical woodworking. Even the screws and air pipes are made of wood.

There's a long history of pneumatic logic in pipe organs. Older large pipe organs have wooden switching units the size of an upright piano. But they're not 100% wood; they have flexible bellows and rubber or lead tubes. Doing it entirely in wood is impressive.

</comment><comment><USER21> Just beautiful. I have a friend who does incredible marquetry and builds pipe organs but I don't think he's combined the two.

[http://schurchwoodwork.com/](http://schurchwoodwork.com/)

</comment><comment><USER22> reminded me of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D5_6I8Z_LA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D5_6I8Z_LA) (creating a wooden marble track)

</comment><comment><USER23> Oh I would love one of these. That is a desk with panache.</comment>


A bunch of JavaScript idiosyncrasies to beginners - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/odykyi/javascript-idiosyncrasies <comment><AUTHOR> [https://odykyi.github.io/javascript- idiosyncrasies/](https://odykyi.github.io/javascript-idiosyncrasies/)</comment>


Reasons for UML's descent into darkness (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://littletutorials.com/2008/05/15/13-reasons-for-umls-descent-into-darkness/

<comment><USER2> I'll add this one: too formal for casual usage, too informal for any serious formal analysis. me? I prefer boxes and arrows on a piece of napkin if possible.

<comment><USER3> I agree, it is hard to beat a wireframe, functional specification document and a flow chart. UML tried to put the wrong part of the app into pretty pictures to make those who do not understand development feel comfortable. The problem is that it did nothing to help the actual project get done therefore it was rejected by developers who are generally under time constraints already.</comment></comment>


My personal fight against the modern laptop [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzmm87oVQ6c <comment><USER3> The new thinkpad keyboards are absolutely shitty. I am happy that more people are complaining about it. The classic thinkpad keyboard had nice ergonomic aspects. You can touch-type the function keys without looking down, because they are all grouped in four. The arrow keys are proper sized buttons (even the macbook has it wrong). There is a slight curvature on each key's surface that makes it easy for the finger to feel the borders. All of these are missing in the new keyboards. This chiclet design is the worst thing to happen for the thinkpads.

<comment><USER4> > You can touch-type the function keys without looking down, because they are > all grouped in four.

This is true. The new Fkeys are not grouped.

> The arrow keys are proper sized buttons (even the macbook has it wrong).

This is false, look at the linked image[1] and tell me that the arrow keys are different on the new keyboard.

> There is a slight curvature on each key's surface that makes it easy for the > finger to feel the borders.

This is also false. The chicklet keys are slightly concave and the island layout makes it extremely easy to feel the borders of each key.

> All of these are missing in the new keyboards.

Again, this is false.

> This chiclet design is the worst thing to happen for the thinkpads.

This is subjective. I have both keyboards, and I like the new style better. I'm a linux user and I use vim. I've probably pressed the Fkeys 10s of times in the years I've owned either laptop. The entire row could be removed and I probably wouldn't even notice.

It's fine if you don't like the new keyboard, but the reasons you are giving are simply not true.

[1] [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ksPFqBdMikM/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ksPFqBdMikM/maxresdefault.jpg)

<comment><USER5> Caveat: I'm entirely going off your image[1]. I have neither laptop.

>> The arrow keys are proper sized buttons (even the macbook has it wrong).

> This is false, look at the linked image[1] and tell me that the arrow keys > are different on the new keyboard.

Looks like the old laptop has a different height for Left, Right, and Down compared to Up, PageUp, PageDown. Is that really the case? If so, that'd be a pretty noticeable difference for a user of the original design.

>> There is a slight curvature on each key's surface that makes it easy for the finger to feel the borders.

> This is also false. The chicklet keys are slightly concave and the island > layout makes it extremely easy to feel the borders of each key.

Just going off the shadow from your image, there's a marked and well-defined difference between the concavity. If my fingers were used to that concavity, I'd be unhappy with the much, much flatter design.

Arguing that he's propagating falsehoods is overshooting. That said, I thought it was pretty bad-ass you had both laptops and took a photo for us.

[1] [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ksPFqBdMikM/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ksPFqBdMikM/maxresdefault.jpg)

<comment><USER4> > Just going off the shadow from your image, there's a marked and well-defined > difference between the concavity. If my fingers were used to that concavity, > I'd be unhappy with the much, much flatter design.

They are a little less concave than the older keys, but they aren't flat. The lighting in that picture isn't the same for both laptops. [1] is a better angle.

> That said, I thought it was pretty bad-ass you had both laptops and took a > photo for us.

It's not my photo, though I do have a t420s and an x230, just not an x220 :-)

[1] [http://blog.lenovo.com/images/uploads/blog/CS12KBD_180degree...](http://blog.lenovo.com/images/uploads/blog/CS12KBD_180degree_20120523_crop.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This talk expresses many of my concerns with desktop & laptop hardware over the last few years.

Recently however, Apple has changed their hardware design philosophy from a fairly open platform to a more proprietary and disposable one. They've eliminated the ability to change or upgrade components. The 3rd generation MacBooks have a battery that is glued in place, the memory is soldered directly to the logic board. Later models would come with the hard drive soldered down as well.

Lyle Wiens of iFixIt, said it best in 2012

> "When Apple dropped the MacBook Air to $999 in 2010 to match the price point > of the MacBook, they gave users a clear choice: the thin, light, and un- > upgradeable MacBook Air or the heavier, longer lasting, [upgradable], more > rugged, and more powerful MacBook. Same price, two very different products. > At the time, I wasn't very happy with the non-upgradeable RAM on the MacBook > Air, but I respected that Apple had given their users a choice. It was up to > us: Did we want a machine that would be stuck with 2GB of RAM forever? Would > we support laptops that required replacement every year or two as > applications required more memory and batteries atrophied?"

Consumers overwhelmingly voted yes, and the Air grew to take 40 percent of Apple's notebook sales by the end of 2010.

This sort of vendor-lock down and planned-obsolecence has bothered me to such an extent that the next laptop I buy won't be Apple hardware.

Meanwhile, Apple has secured an oligopoly in the market, they have such a dominant position with hardware manufacturers that they seem to be squeezing competitors out of getting access to top-quality components (or their competitors don't care about quality). These manufacturers seem to be building computers with "Apples' scraps and leftovers".

Put simply; I don't see any manufacturers building laptops at the same level of quality that Apple does, and yet, I can't buy a product that is so tightly controlled, and designed to be obsolete in two years.

<comment><USER7> I'll never understand this. If you want value for money why even look at apple? Never mind nuances like planned obsolescence.

<comment><USER8> I don't want to waste my time dicking around with drivers and other such noise - I want to get on with my tasks. An operating system linked to s fixed set of hardware provides me exactly this.

My time is worth far more to me than the cost of a Macbook.

<comment><USER9> This. I'd wager that the entire set of hardware and software tools most of us use to make a year's worth of income could be purchased with two weeks of income (or less). The laptop being the majority of it. That's pretty astounding.

So yah, did I just drop ~$2,500 on a new MBP? Yes. Did I enjoy spending it? No, but I also want the thing to "just fucking work" and it's a tiny fraction of my income considering my last Apple laptop lasted me almost 4 years... before I dropped it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He's right about the new keyboards on ThinkPads - fortunately I use mine with dock and external keyboard most of the time, but every time I am forced to use it without dock it's infuriating how much worse the keyboard is compared to older models.

<comment><USER11> Sadly yes, I'm still using my x220 rather than move to a x260 because of the keyboard.

<comment><USER12> I'm on a x200s. Except for a brighter screen, I'm not missing anything though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Personally I'd like a heavy and large desktop that fits in a typical backpack complete with batteries, with a thin ultrabook like wireless screen+keyboard, detachable like the surface. I know i'm in a very tiny minority, but eventually with streaming solutions like the TPCast for Vive it might be viable (you can diy a 12volt desktop from 18650s, but probably not a good wireless hdmi yet). Or if not, hopefully when we get lighter and less obvious AR goggles.

I'm very aware it's a pretty impractical idea but i find it fun to think about :)

<comment><USER14> If it's already in a backpack, why would you need a wireless connection to the HMD?

Understandable, though, if you want to sit the pack down but still use the system.

Probably what would be better would be some kind of wireless datalink to the HMD, and have the video processing on the HMD itself (instead of sending frame/interframe data - just send the data to render the frame, and let the HMD do the processing - essentially moving the video card to the HMD - <USER2> would, though, still require more than a bit of bandwidth, but maybe not as much as HDMI?).

<comment><USER13> Yes, basically have it somewhat stealthy, where i would use the laptop as a laptop and sit the backpack anywhere in the room. And moving the video card to the HMD wouldn't make that much sense for me because that's the main desktop part i would like to stay desktop class.

And I think Google and Microsoft are hoping to get a version of this with hololens and tango, where they run machine models and cloud resources when needed and just get the results/models to run on the mobile devices. Still very much in its infancy though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> yeah, it feels like in 2010, you had awesome mac and pc options. Snow Leopard was perhaps the best OS ever.

<comment><USER16> Snow Leopard was so stable. I went months at a time without restarting or having major bugs. I wish we could get that reliability back.

<comment><USER17> (12:46) ~/src/landedcost/main-site/app/utils [vikram7119-master] $ uptime 12:47 up 15 days, 17:26, 4 users, load averages: 2.09 2.15 1.95

Sierra has been an absolute rock for me.

My last reboot was due to an OS update.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure I'd brag about a 15 day uptime.

I found I had to reboot Snow Leopard every 30-40 days, but running 3 web browsers with a ton of tabs open will do that.

<comment><USER17> Who's bragging?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really wish they still made the x61(t)s. :( Nothing currently available at any price really holds a candle to them. :(

<comment><USER20> Yeah, I moved from an x61t that had a cracked motherboard, after however many years, to a thinkpad yoga 12 with stylus and touchscreen. After about a week of use, I was in the bath, and I wanted to do something with my laptop, and I reached over and typed something into chromium. I didn't realize that the new yoga's don't have flow through keyboards! My laptop was ruined by the water from the wetness of my hand! Now the laptop is fixed, and a few months later I can say, the screen hurts my eyes (never had that problem before), the feet on the bottom have all come unglued, battery life is acceptable but not great, battery cannot be hotswapped, that's for sure, but mostly, I feel that this new yoga just doesn't have the sex appeal of the x61t. I could hold that x61t from any corner (probably how the motherboard eventually cracked) and the laptop just felt balanced and solid. There was no creaking of plastic on plastic, no hollow "softness"... I don't know, that laptop just was so perfect, and the yoga 12 feels like they just didn't put as much love into it. When I turn on the LEDs unter the keyboard ( a new feature ) light leaks out of some keys around the edges, while not leaking out from other keys, and the leaks shine brighter than the screen, again hurting my eyes. The power and volume keys on the right edge are hard to feal, so I have to look at them to use them, hardly convenient. There are all sorts of extra bright leds on the keyboard like the FN lock light. I've taken to turning off the fn keys because that LED drives me crazy. And the new flat powerconnector is total shit when I want to change from laptop to tablet mode. I have to unplug it and replug it! Why move from a connector that could rotate "automatically" to one that gets all twisted up and will have to be replaced in a year or two? And the keyboard that is supposed to lock in tablet mode makes weird crackling noises when transitioning from one mode to the other. And the RAM is hard wired onto the motherboard and cannot be upgraded.

All this in a laptop which cost more than the x61t. WTF :( I want my real thinkpad back!

<comment><USER20> Oh, and I forgot one of my biggest gripes. There are no arrow keys in tablet mode! How the fuck am I supposed to read in tablet mode without arrow keys? Constantly reach out and touch and drag the screen? Are you kidding me?

<comment><USER20> I also forgot, that I had to UPDATE THE EUFI/BIOS to get the fan to work after ACPI resume! The origional EUFI/BIOS was actually broken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> LinuxConf... AU. Just saying :)

<comment><USER22> What is it you're saying?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> this video gave me multiple hack-gasms, it is like hacker-porn.

<comment><USER24> You are not on reddit, here's the link: [https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/](https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/)</comment></comment>


Elon Musk's Surprise Pick for Tesla CFO Is a Relative Unknown - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-surprise-pick-for-tesla-cfo-is-a-relative-unknown-11548935508 <comment><USER2> He seems pretty well-known within the company.

First joined Tesla 9 years ago, Wharton undergrad, Harvard MBA.

He's obviously qualified, what's with all the ageist comments? 34 years old is a "kid" now? On HN of all places?

Who cares if he's a "relative unknown" according to WSJ. Is notoriety an important qualification for CFO?

<comment><USER3> When the last CFO left in under 2 years, and many other senior execs seem to be fleeing, the worrisome implication is that TSLA has trouble attracting and retaining senior talent given the work pressure and thin financial margin, so they are instead turning to a relatively green home-bred 34 yo.

At the end of the day, I'm not personally worried about this and think this guy will likely do just fine, but this is sufficiently unusual that I don't think the WSJ article is odd.

<comment><USER4> Do you think they have difficulty retaining senior talent because they are underpaying or that Tesla is a shit-show to work for?

Either way, it's extremely difficult for younger people to be in CxO positions unless they start a company. I'm extremely doubtful that most can't do the job, it's just that they can't get hired.

I'm sure this person will do just as good of a job as any 50+ yo with an extra decade or two of experience. Typically people that require 10+ years of experience to perform a job are worse off than someone that is capable after only 4-5years. Lots of dumb-fuck boomers out there that had to be spoon fed every iota of information before they could perform at a high level.

<comment><USER5> Finance isn't like programming. Programming is skill-based, so it's easy to become good at a quickly.

Finance is knowledge-based, and a lot of that knowledge can only be learned by actual on-the-job experience. So, years of experience in a knowledge-based field is simply a shortcut/rubric for measuring a person's knowledge of their craft.

Typically, people in knowledge-based fields who think that they're as good at their jobs after 4-5 years as someone who has been practicing 10+ years are full of $$$$ and tend to create more problems for their clients/employers than they solve.

<comment><USER6> What the difference between skills and knowlegde in performing these two very intelectual jobs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is a huge red flag, in my opinion. A CFO is legally responsible for compliance to exchange regulations, SEC, etc. Reporting is based on judgement, regarding the interpretation of very complex rules.

I would have liked to see someone with external experience that has a frame of reference as to how other companies do things, in a high-pressure, regulated environment; a la Ruth Porat.

Musk is a big personality, with a my way or the highway attitude. Ultimately, I'd feel more comfortable with someone who could unequivocally walk away, and in doing so, would send a huge signal that something doesn't smell right.

In my experience, someone who grew up drinking the coolaide won't have the experience / ability to pull the company back from disaster. Think about all the folks at Uber. It's sad, but you need experienced and ethical leadership, that has an obligation beyond just to the CEO, in Legal / Compliance and Accounting. Especially given the wild ride at Tesla, this is more important now than ever.

<comment><USER8> I'm starting to get worried myself. Seeing finance people who would have to take responsibility for things like signing the financials over to audit leaving is not unlike seeing rats dive off the deck of a ship. Maybe they're just tired of the ride, but maybe they're aware of something the crew isn't. Either way, ignoring that sign and making excuses because of love or Tesla is a bad move. A lot of major financial implosions in the past gave off plenty of warning signs that many people ignored. Until it all finally comes out, the naysayers expressing concern about HugePopularEndeavor X are usually shouted down as pessimists or saboteurs.

Then things fall apart and suddenly everyone wants to know how it wasn't seen coming. A stream of people unwilling to sign on the dotted line for the audit is worrying. Replacing them with a totally inexperienced person for a $50b market cap company smells like burning sails and timbers to me.

<comment><USER9> In grad school I had a corporate finance professor that said when you see the CFO leaving it's almost always a bad sign. Finance guys don't leave when everything looks like it's going to be smooth sailing for years to come

<comment> rm_-rf_slash I generally agree with that assessment, but to be fair, any qualified CFO would likely have lower-risk, comparable-reward option elsewhere.

I believe in Tesla and hope to the heavens that they succeed in what they are doing, but if I were a star CFO being headhunted for this job, I would probably see myself looking at the prospect of working brutal hours with an uncertain payout, and a possible reputational vulnerability should things go south. Only true believers need apply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://outline.com/Ts4ZUj](https://outline.com/Ts4ZUj)

<comment><USER11> Thank you for this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Credentials like Wharton and Harvard mean something to the HN crowd? I'm sure this guy is fine, but Tesla - Musk - needs someone who will eat the shit on their plate.

<comment><USER13> On HN, Reddit and a number of other STEM-leaning forums, MBAs are only good if they can be used to support a position Musk takes on something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A relatively young pick motivated to prove himself in a highly visible position that others have left seems perfect to me. I think he will be a stable choice and stay for a while.

</comment><comment><USER15> There's no obvious reason he couldn't do this job. Executive roles are very culturally sensitive, and this guy knows the firm.

Given decreasing margin returns to experience, how much more experience does he need?

The guy who turned around LEGO was also in his 30s when he took over, seemed to go fine.

In case you're wondering whether I think everyone in their 30s can take a leading role, I think there's a fair chance assuming the person has been exposed to some management content.

<comment><USER5> The issue isn't that he wouldn't be great in a VP of Finance or Controller role--the issue is that he's been appointed the CFO of a publicly traded company with serious past, present, and future financial and regulatory challenges. And he has absolutely no experience dealing with the regulatory challenges, which is more than half of a CFO's job.

<comment><USER15> I don't know the details of his history, but chances are he's worked on those things under the previous CFO? I would think someone who's worked in the finance office of such a firm would know what needs to be done, even if he wasn't the head of the office.

If everyone needed to have direct experience, there'd never be anyone considered qualified.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like Musk found the fall guy.

</comment><comment><USER17> WSJ seems like they try to find every excuse possible to pick on Tesla

<comment><USER13> By providing information about the new CFO, one that the CEO didn't even bother providing a last name for?</comment></comment>


Consul, a new tool for service discovery and configuration - <AUTHOR> http://www.hashicorp.com/blog/consul.html <comment><USER2> Those guys are machines.

Usually when people release open source software, the documentation is lacking, there's no website etc... those guys absolutely nail it every single time.

Kudos for them, really!

</comment><comment><USER3> _Registered services and nodes can be queried using both a DNS interface as well as an HTTP interface._

This is very cool. Integrating with a name resolution protocol that every existing programmer and stack knows how to use (often without even thinking about it) should lead to some magical "just works" moments.

<comment><USER4> See also SkyDNS, another service discovery system: [http://blog.gopheracademy.com/skydns](http://blog.gopheracademy.com/skydns)

In common with Consul:

* DNS interface

* Operates as a distributed cluster

* Uses Raft for consensus

<comment><USER5> SkyDNS is compared to Consul here: [http://www.consul.io/intro/vs/skydns.html](http://www.consul.io/intro/vs/skydns.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So I'm mostly curious why this isn't just basically serf 2.0. Looking at serf I never really felt like it had much use in the basic form it took, with no ability to advertise extra details about the nodes in a dynamic fashion. Consul seems to build onto serf the things that serf needed to become really useful, so seems more like a successor to serf than a parallel project.

It seems like the right thing to do here would be to take the lessons of building consul into making serf something more like a library on which to build other things rather than a service in its own right.

<comment><USER7> To add to what Armon said: we always had Consul in mind when building Serf. But Serf was a necessary building block on the way to Consul: highly available, lightweight membership management. Every distributed system has a membership problem, and we didn't want to reinvent the wheel for every system we built. Serf provided an incredibly stable and well proven foundation for us to build Consul on top, as well as future products that are already in the works...

And while you may not see Serf as having much use, we've personally helped and seen Serf clusters with many thousands of nodes. Serf is very useful to these organizations for its purpose. And while some of these orgs are now looking at Consul, many don't need Consul in the same way (but may deploy it separately).

We're not stopping with Consul. We have something more on the way. But we now have some great building blocks and experience building distributed systems to keep doing it correctly without having to rebuild everything from scratch.

<comment><USER6> It would be pretty awesome if you could get some case studies out about these deployments of serf. I would really like to hear more about them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very impressed.

This coalesces a lot of different ideas together into what seems to be a really tight package to solve hard problems. In looking around at what most companies are doing, even startupy types, architectures are becoming more distributed and a (hopefully) solid tool for discovery and configuration seems like a big step in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks like a very cool tool -- could replace Zookeeper with saner admin requirements -- but I'm more interested in the tech. AP systems (such as Serf, on which Consul is built) have many advantages and I think we're only just beginning to see their adoption. I believe CRDTs are the missing ingredient to restore sanity to inconsistent data. Add that and I can see a lot more such systems being deployed in the future (and particularly in mine :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> Seriously, who does design for HashiCorp? Their site designs, though similar, always kill it.

<comment><USER11> Agreed! I also appreciate that they tend to drop with robust documentation pages already in place.

<comment><USER10> Yep. I'm kind of amazed at the level polish in their initial releases given that HashiCorp is what, 3 people? And they're up to 4 products now with Serf being released just 6 months ago and Packer not long before that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is really awesome, distributed system techniques in the real world. I'm really jealous of what they've managed to build.

I was planning to make a tool like this (smaller scale, one machine), and this will certainly serve as a good guide on how to do it right (or whether I should even bother at all).

I can't find a trace of a standard/included slick web interface for managing the clusters and agents -- are they leaving this up to a 3rd party (by just providing the HTTP API and seeing what people will do with it)? Is that a good idea?

<comment><USER5> We didn't manage to finish it in time, but it should be released in the next two weeks or so!

<comment><USER12> I can only imagine how awesome it's going to be, given the excellent design (simple, readable, content-focused) of the other work you guys are doing.

If I may ask, it seems like the design of the consul site is one step (iteration) away from the serf site (particularly, the docs pages -- some subtle changes made a large difference)... I agree with the others here, really dig the site, and big text definitely doesn't hurt deeply technical descriptions architecture page was very readable for me

<comment><USER5> You are right, the Consul site is very heavily based on the Serf site. It's actually almost entirely just a re-skin of the same site. The design is a bit cleaner however, which does make it nicer to read.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> i am constantly impressed at the hashicorp guys, who continue to release great tools. they actually released serf on the same day as we released nerve and synapse, which comprise airbnb's service registration and discovery platform, smartstack. see [https://github.com/airbnb/nerve](https://github.com/airbnb/nerve) and [https://github.com/airbnb/synapse](https://github.com/airbnb/synapse)

that said, as i wrote my blog post on service discovery ( [http://nerds.airbnb.com/smartstack-service-discovery- cloud/](http://nerds.airbnb.com/smartstack-service-discovery-cloud/) ), dns does not make for the greatest interface to service discovery because many apps and libraries cache DNS looksups.

an http interface might be safer, but then you have to build a connector for this into every one of your apps.

i still feel that smartstack is a better approach because it is transparent. haproxy also provides us with great introspection for what's happening in the infrastructure -- who is talking to whom. we can analyse this both in our logs via logstash and in real-time using datadog's haproxy monitoring integration, and it's been invaluable.

however, this definitely deserves a look if you're interested in, for instance, load-balancing UDP traffic

<comment><USER5> I think that Synapse already provides a plugin architecture. I t should be trivial to use the Consul HTTP API as a Synapse plugin. All this does is bridge the information Consul has and setup an HAProxy instance locally. If you want to go that route, should be pretty simple!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The underlying Raft implementation is brand new, and looks much improved on the goraft used by etcd. Very impressed.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is really impressive - kudos! I'm jealous - these guys are implementing extremely cool stuff in the distributed systems arena :) (serf - [http://serfdom.io](http://serfdom.io) \- comes to mind)

How much time did it take to put this together?

</comment><comment><USER16> Short question: Can I define the IP of the service in the service definition?

From the service definition[0] it looks like the IP is always the IP of the node hosting `/etc/consul.d/*` files. I am thinking about it in a scenario where each service (running in a container) is getting an IP address on a private network which is not the IP of the node.

[0]: [http://www.consul.io/docs/agent/services.html](http://www.consul.io/docs/agent/services.html)

Update: An external service is possible: [http://www.consul.io/docs/guides/external.html](http://www.consul.io/docs/guides/external.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> This sounds very impressive, at the risk of breaking the chorus of awesome: _what problem does this actually solve?_

Discovery: The consul page alleges that it provides a DNS compatible DNS alternative for peer discovery but is unclear as to what improvements it offers other than 'health checks', with the documentation leaving failure resolution processes unspecified (as far as I can see) thus mandating a hyper- simplistic architecture strategy like _run lots of redundant instances in case one fails_. That's not very efficient. (It might be interesting to note that at the ethernet level, IP addresses also provide MAC address discovery. If you are serious about latency, floating IP ownership is generally far faster than other solutions.)

Configuration: We already have many configuration management systems, with many problems[1]. This is just a key/value store, and as such is not as immediately portable to arbitrary services as existing approaches such as "bunch-of-files", instead requiring overhead for each service launched in order to make it function with to this configuration model.

The use of the newer raft consensus algorithm is interesting, but consensus does not a high availability cluster make. You also need elements like formal inter-service dependency definition in order to have any hope of automatically managing cluster state transitions required to recover from failures in non- trivial topologies. Corosync/Pacemaker has this, Consul doesn't. Then there's the potential split-brain issues resulting from non-redundant communications paths... raft doesn't tackle this, as it's an algorithm only. Simply put: given five nodes, one of which fails normally, if the remaining four split in equal halves who is the legitimate ruler? Game of thrones.

As _peterwwillis_ pointed out, for web-oriented cases, the same degree of architectural flexibility and failure detection proposed under consul can be achieved with significantly reduced complexity using traditional means like a frontend proxy. For other services or people wanting serious HA clustering, I would suggest looking elsewhere for the moment.

[1] [http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts](http://stani.sh/walter/pfcts)

<comment><USER18> For the record, Raft does mandate what happens in that split-brain scenario. Neither side will be able to elect a leader, and writes will halt. Electing a leader requires a quorum.

<comment><USER17> OK, thanks for clarifying. Still, the point being illustrated was that a drop- in solution is rarely feasible... ie. the common HA cluster feature of redundant link-layer communications paths does add significant protection against availability loss such as the situation you describe. It's not just a software thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm VERY impressed, even more impressed by the fact that it speaks DNS. I do with however that it came with a "driver" option rather running a consul client (or even just SkyDNS-like http option, although I'm unsure how you would manage membership). That way you could just "include" consul in your python/ruby/go application, and not have to worry about adding another service to your chef/pupper config and running yet another service.

</comment><comment><USER20> Consul really solves a large problem for most SaaS companies who run or plan to run a Hybrid Cloud, Multi-cloud, or Multi-data center environment

</comment><comment><USER21> This is slightly off topic but I'm curious why none of the service discovery tools run off of something like Cassanandra as the datastore?

<comment><USER12> So I think here the problem isn't really the datastore, it's more the high- availability and discovery. The main bonus that Consul seems to be providing is maintaining a logical topology of your network without you doing much.

They do this by a using gossip-based protocol and a derivative of paxos called Raft. These two things work together to essentially have the servers that run your various services (whether api or db or cache or whatever) know about EACH OTHER.

The database they use is LMDB, but I think they chose that for lightness -- you could easily replace it with a local instance of cassandra, most likely.

Also, I'm assuming you don't mean switching to a centralized cassandra instance -- why you don't want to do that should be obvious (central point of failure).

<comment><USER21> Wouldn't a centralized Cassandra cluster be reliable enough to meet that need?

I've never had a cluster completely collapse on me unless things were already screwed up enough that Service Discovery was ultimately useless since nothing else would work.

It just seems to me that losing your datastore makes your services unusable...at which point 'discovering them' isn't really the issue. Instead, everyone wants to introduce another datastore you need to rely on that its loss == can't find anyone. Even if your services themselves are still functional.

<comment><USER5> To reiterate a bit on what hardwaresofton has already said, yes you could use Cassandra. However, Cassandra like ZooKeeper is just a building block. It doesn't actually provide service discovery, health checking, etc. You could use it to build all of those, but it doesn't provide it.

We compare Consul to ZooKeeper here, but much of that applies to Cassandra as well: [http://www.consul.io/intro/vs/zookeeper.html](http://www.consul.io/intro/vs/zookeeper.html)

Internally, Consul could also use something like Cassandra to store the data. However we use LMDB which is an embedded database to avoid an expensive context switch out of the process to serve requests with lower latency and higher throughput.

<comment><USER22> I hadn't seen LMDB before. How does it compare to LevelDB? On first glance it looks like the two have similar characteristics.

<comment><USER12> Check out LMDB's page:

[http://symas.com/mdb/](http://symas.com/mdb/)

I dunno if leveldb supports acid now (or recently came to), but that's a big difference

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How does this differ from [http://www.serfdom.io/](http://www.serfdom.io/), another HashiCorp product?

<comment><USER24> [http://www.consul.io/intro/vs/serf.html](http://www.consul.io/intro/vs/serf.html)

<comment><USER6> "Serf is a service discovery and orchestration tool..."

"... However, Serf does not provide any high-level features such as service discovery..."

Hm...

<comment><USER5> That can probably be worded better. Serf operates at a node level abstraction, while Consul operates at a service level. In fact, Serf is used in Consul to power the discovery of other nodes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Can anyone care to provide some real world examples? I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around what this exactly does.

<comment><USER4> Service Discovery is about helping services find one another.

If your application relies on memcached, you need to pass the memcached location to your application somehow. For simple architectures, this may just be a hardcoded localhost:11211.

As you scale, it becomes prudent to distribute services across different servers. Your configuration could then become something like "server1.mycompany.com:11211". But what if memcached moves from server1 to server2? You'll need to reconfigure and restart your application.

More sophisticated apps will often use a dynamic approach: services are registered with something like ZooKeeper or etcd. When serviceA needs to talk to serviceB, serviceA looks up serviceB's address in the service registry (or a local cache) and makes the request.

The good news is that these often include basic health check functionality, so you get a bit of fault tolerance for free. Unfortunately, this requires services to integrate directly with ZooKeeper or etcd, adding undesired complexity.

Some architectures therefore choose to use DNS as their service registry. But instead of hardcoding a the DNS address of a single node (like "server1.mycompany.com"), they hit an address associated with the service (serviceB.mycompany.com). This usually means rolling your own system to keep DNS up to date (adding/pruning in context of health state).

Consul is a hybrid approach. It allows you to use DNS as a service registry, but operates as its own, distributed DNS server cluster. Think of it like a specialized ZooKeeper cluster that exposes service information via DNS (and HTTP, if you prefer).

Back to the memcached case. With Consul, you'd point your app at "memcached.consul:11211". If your memcached server fell over and was replaced, Consul would pick up the change and return the new address. And without any app config changes or restarts.

<comment><USER26> I am trying to figure out how Consul meshes with a configuration management system such as Puppet. There is a lot of overlap.

From what I can tell, Consul supports two registration mechanisms: Static defined services in /etc/consul.d, and dynamically defined services through the HTTP API.

For the statically-defined case, for any given node, you have to create Puppet (or Chef, or whatever) definitions that populate /etc/consul.d with the stuff that's going to run on that node. For the actual configuration itself, you still want Puppet to be the one to populate it. The question then is what you gain by doing this; if that configuration goes into Puppet, then Puppet is still the main truth where you want to centralize things, so then you have this flow of data:

        client <- DNS <- Consul <- /etc/consul.d <- Puppet

...compared to the "old" way:

        client <- /srv/myapp/myapp.conf-or-whatever <- Puppet

In this case, Consul's benefit comes from the fact that it can know which services are alive and not, so that when myapp needs otherapp, it doesn't need a load-balancer to figure that out.

The documentation makes a point about Puppet updates being slow and unsynchronized, and it's true that you get into situations where, for example, service A is configured with hosts that aren't up yet, for example. With Consul you can update the config "live"; surely you want to centralize config in Puppet and populate Consul's K/V from Puppet, and then you get the single- point-of-update synchronization missing from Puppet, but you still need to store the truth in Puppet.

So I'm counting two good, but not altogether mind-blowing benefits from using Consul with Puppet, over not using Consul at all. The overlap is looking a lot like two systems vaguely competing for dominance.

I suspect the better use of Consul is in conjunction with something like Docker, where you ditch Puppet altogether (except as a way to update the host OS), and instead build images of apps and services that don't contain any configuration at all, but simply point themselves at Consul. That means that when you bring up a new Docker container, it can start its Consul agent, register its services, and suddenly its contained services are dynamically available to the whole cluster.

The container itself contains no config, no context, just general-purpose application/service code; and Consul doesn't need to be populated through Puppet because in that way, Consul is (in conjunction with some container provisioning system) the application world's Puppet.

That, to me, sounds pretty nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Should something be happening with the bar data payload in the HTTP kv example? Or is the value encoded for some reason?

<comment><USER5> The value is base64 encoded, since JSON doesn't play nicely with binary values

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'll preface these comments by saying that Consul appears to be the first distributed cluster management tool i've seen in years that gets pretty much everything right (I can't tell exactly what their consistency guarantees are; I suppose it depends on the use case?).

What I will say, in my usually derisive fashion, is I can't tell why the majority of businesses would need decentralized network services like this. If you own your network, and you own all the resources in your network, and you control how they operate, I can't think of a good reason you would need services like this, other than a generalized want for dynamic scaling of a service provider (which doesn't really work without your application being designed for it, or an intermediary/backend application designed for it).

Load balancing an increase of requests by incrementally adding resources is what most people want when they say they want to scale. You don't need decentralized services to provide this. What do decentralized services provide, then? "Resilience". In the face of a random failure of a node or service, another one can take its place. Which is also accomplished with either network or application central load balancing. What you don't get [inherently] from decentralized services is load balancing; sending new requests to some poor additional peer simply swamps it. To distribute the load amongst all the available nodes, now you need a DHT or similar, and take a slight penalty from the efficiency of the algorithm's misses/hits.

All the features that tools like this provide - a replicated key/value store, health checks, auto discovery, network event triggers, service discovery, etc - can all be found in tools that work based on centralized services, while remaining scalable. I guess my point is, before you run off to your boss waving an iPad with Consul's website on it demanding to implement this new technology, try to see if you _need it_ , or if you just think it's really cool.

It's also kind of scary that the ability of an entire network like Consul's to function depends on minimum numbers of nodes, quorums, leaders, etc. If you believe the claims that the distributed network is inherently more robust than a centralized one, you might not build it with fault-tolerant hardware or monitor them adequately, resulting in a wild goose chase where you try to determine if your app failures are due to the app server, the network, or one piece of hardware that the network is randomly hopping between. Could a bad switch port cause a leader to provide false consensus in the network? Could the writes on one node basically never propagate to its peers due to similar issues? How could you tell where the failure was if no health checks show red flags? And is there logging of the inconsistent data/states?

<comment><USER7> Thanks for prefacing the constructive criticism with the compliment. :)

I want to clarify: Of all the buzz words Consul has, one thing Consul ISN'T is decentralized. You must run at least one Consul server in a cluster. If you want a fully centralized approach, you can just run one server. No big deal. Of course, if that server goes down, reads/writes are unavailable. If you want high availability, you run multiple servers. They leader elect to determine who will handle the writes but that is about it.

It is "decentralized" in that you can send read/writes to any server, but those servers actually just forward the requests onto the leader.

<comment><USER28> Oh, well i'm a giant ass then. I saw "completely distributed" and extrapolated decentralized from that. Still, an automatically-[randomly?]-elected leader in a distributed network is a form of decentralized network. It's effectively a toroidal network topology, since your datacenters make it multi-dimensional (though now that I look at hypercubes i'm not exactly sure which is a better fit here)

Now that i've re-read your architecture page, let me see if I understand this: the basic point behind using Consul is to have multiple servers agree on the result of a request, and communicate that agreement to a single node to write it, and then return it to the client. So really it's a fault-tolerant messaging platform that includes features that take advantage of such a network; do I have that right?

Also, your docs say there are between three and five servers, but here you're saying you only need one?

<comment><USER7> We recommend three or five because that will get you a high level of fault tolerance. Consul runs just fine with one server, but you'll have no fault tolerance: if that one server becomes unavailable for any reason, then reads/writes for your cluster will not be served.

The leader is elected using Raft as the consensus algorithm (it is linked in the internals section of the docs).

You are correct though that if you run multiple servers, the leader election will happen automatically. There is no way to manually override it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stop using Git pull, install git-up. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/aanand/git-up

<comment><USER2> > which means git push will shout at you for being behind on branches you > don't particularly care about right now.

I think that behavior has been changed in recent git, so by default it only pushes the branch you are on? (And the default is settable either way, even in slightly less recent versions).

But I can see some workflows git-up would be useful for. For me, not useful enough to deal with installing a plugin (with all that entails, including risk of bugs). Plus, while rebase is sometimes what you want, sometimes I really do want a pull, and the consequences of doing a rebase when you wanted a pull can be disastrous and hard to undo, and I'd be scared of a tool that defaulted to rebases everywhere.

<comment><USER3> >the consequences of doing a rebase when you wanted a pull can be disastrous and hard to undo

git reflog can easily rollback a rebase.

<comment><USER2> I realize it can be done, I generally don't find it easy, cause I have to remind myself how to do it, and it is a somewhat manual process of making sure you've found the right point to rollback to, etc.

And of course, if you've made subsequent commits after the rebase but before you notice the mistake -- still can be done, but less and less easy.

On the other hand, if you pull when you meant to rebase, that's somewhat easier and less error-prone to switch. For me anyway. ymmv.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why use something that's tested and known to work when you can use a plugin no one's ever heard of with a glib, vaguely insulting description and no Windows support?

</comment><comment><USER5> Merge commits from pulls really bothered me at first, but as I've used git more I've realized that the hoops you jump through to always rebase and avoid them aren't always worth it. A merge commit might clutter up your git log, but it does more accurately describe what happened.

</comment><comment><USER6> Further discussion on why 'git pull' can be considered harmful here:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15316601/in-what-cases- co...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15316601/in-what-cases-could-git- pull-be-harmful)

The top-voted answer has a pretty handy alias:

      git config --global alias.up '!git remote update -p; git merge --ff-only @{u}'

</comment><comment><USER7> "Best practice is to delete your Hacker News account before installing" you won't get a lot of upvotes...

</comment><comment><USER8> It isn't particularly hard not to use git pull,

        git fetch origin
        git rebase origin/develop

<comment><USER9> [How] is this different from `git pull --rebase`?

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure if its different, but when you call `git pull` with no extra arguments (i.e. you don't specify the remote or the branch) then it behaves differently depending which branch you're on, and what your local Git config is. So, personally, I prefer to always be fully explicit in my Git commands.

And does calling `git pull --rebase` just rebase your current branch against its remote equivalent? But usually I find myself working on a feature branch that is often rebased against a parent branch, `develop` (for example).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Or just do git fetch && git rebase origin/whatever or git fetch && git checkout origin/whatever if you just plan to use code(simple update mechanism).</comment>


Seed7 programming language - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed7 <comment><USER2> > Seed7 supports the introduction of new syntax elements and their semantics > into the language and it allows new language constructs to be defined using > the Seed7 language itself

This just sounds like Lisp macros.

<comment><USER3> [http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#lisp_comparison](http://seed7.sourceforge.net/faq.htm#lisp_comparison)

<comment><USER4> Clueless anti-Lisp diatribe in the very FAQ list for a language, penned by author. Charming!

Lisp has user-defined statements and operators which integrate perfectly into Lisp (look and feel built-in; aren't "second class" in any way). Invocations of these custom forms look like Lisp, just like user-defined Seed7 forms look like ... Seed7!

Infix can be supported as cleanly as you want it; it can be a hack, or not, and can certainly have user-defined operators with custom associativity or precedence.

This can be done without recompiling the underlying Lisp system or touching any of it.

Can we take, out of Seed-7, the ability to define user-defined operators, and put that capability back in the same or very similar form only by writing Seed-7 application code?</comment></comment></comment>