First issue: "Please delete this repository" - <AUTHOR> I share a Javascript library and in the first issue they tell me to delete it because it makes HTML dirty. What happened to the freedom of Opensource and giving room for innovation? I am deeply disappointed.
https://github.com/tanrax/FFNM/issues/1
I don't know if I'll ever share new prototypes or keep them to myself. <comment><USER2> Who gives a shit? Close the issue, then block the guy and move on with your life.

There will always be haters and trolls. Don't let them drag you down. Don't expend energy and emotion on them. You are not ding anything to hurt them.

</comment><comment><USER3> First: please don't abandon sharing your code on GitHub because of this issue. Other people may find your code useful; some may raise issues that help you further develop the code.

Second: my approach to receiving bad feedback - and, as a poet, I have wide experience of this[1] - is to thank the person for their time, and then move on. For example: "Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to poem X. Best wishes, Rik". Never, ever, argue with the critics! In this case, assume the person raising the issue was having a bad day (which is a better assumption than deciding they're just a jerk/troll/nasty person) - thank them for taking the time to look at your concept and then close the issue as "won't fix".

Hope this helps.

[1] My favourite 'review' of one of my (love) poetry chapbooks was: "Don't buy this book. My friend bought this book and now she's broken up with her boyfriend" ... if only my words had such power!

</comment><comment><USER4> > _" I don't know if I'll ever share new prototypes or keep them to myself."_

Please keep open-sourcing your work, everyone benefits including you. This is incredibly rare in my experience, and you can see from the reactions that it is not acceptable behaviour.

On the plus side, many people opensource complex projects to get no feedback at all, so at least you're rattling a few cages! ;)

</comment><comment><USER5> Friend, let me first say that I'm not a js coder, I don't know whether the criticisms in that issue are justified or not. It is certainly an unkind response, if someone doesn't like a library they could suggest improvements or just ignore it. You would be justified in closing the issue with the comment "this is not an issue".

That said, even though the words were unkind, you would be wise to ask yourself if there is any truth in them; do some research on the criticisms that this guy made. If there is grounds, then you have an opportunity to improve your library, and more importantly your skills, if not then you have a coherent argument as to why your approach has merit. Don't do this immediately, leave GitHub alone for a week and come back to it when you've had a pause to reflect.

<comment><USER6> There is some merit to the criticisms, though they were given with a total lack of tact. Web standards are important and define multiple ways you can provide custom attributes while still working with valid code and not stepping all over the platform namespace. By using invalid HTML this makes the job of web standardization harder, plus users of this code have to practice writing invalid code and hope the tool fixes it. There's just simply nothing gained from this design choice when making it valid and future proof would have been just as easy.

I totally agree with the "ignore the haters" attitude, but I am also in agreement with the criticism. Maybe this can be an opportunity to improve it and have it work with valid HTML and then even more good comes from this mis- handled issue!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Don't be disappointed. I personally admire people who try anything open source. Remember that you always have some loud mouthers on the internet who think they know it better. Do what you need to do and keep going. You will ultimately always have more people supporting you than idiots like that. Don't give up because of that 1 guy.

Btw, your response to him was way more dignified than I would have replied if it was my project :). Close that issue and move on. You will have plenty of constructive feedback coming your way.

</comment><comment><USER8> Professional magicians are perfectly happy using gimmicks and props if it makes their magic more magical, and helps their shows go off without a hitch (indeed, that huge machine on the stage probably isn't a real body-destroying saw, and the roulette gun probably isn't actually able to shoot real live rounds!). Elitist beginners simultaneously snub their noses and brag about how they only use the hardest possible methods, because they're just that good, and they love that there are so many others that'll chime in along with them.

But really it's because they don't really have an audience to worry about whether their routines are stable and will work reliably every time. They're only concerned with telling you and everyone in earshot/eyeshot how great they think themselves to be. It's an opinion of _person_ rather than the quality of work they do. He's the equivalent of a heckler - nothing to add, no reason to entertain their opinions.

Comments like his, which are meant to deter people from sharing anything, are what dirties the water. Not the choice of other peoples' tools.

Anyway, it's the wuh wuh wuh. You'll never see the end of useless naysayers. Like professional magicians, you just shrug them off in the most hospitable / tactful way you can, and keep doing what you're doing, knowing that you do actually have an appreciative audience.

Besides, buddy has "marketing" in his name, but he's clearly lacking in people skills to pull that off. Don't take advice from people who prove themselves to be lesser than you.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thank you for your work, and sharing openly. Please continue to do so. Remember that most people in the world are kind and appreciative. Don't read too much into what the toxic vocal minority says. We can't prevent the vocal minority from being toxic, but we can learn to ignore them. But it is easier said, than done, I know. Wishing you all the best!

</comment><comment><USER10> Illegitimi non carborundum - don't let the bastards grind you down - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum)

You are doing great. Thanks for sharing. Keep it going! ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> Really getting tired of the everyone-who-doesn't-think-like-me-is-wrong culture.

<comment><USER12> I really don't see the "culture". This is just someone being an overbearing asshole on the internet. They had people like this back in Usenet days.

<comment><USER11> Another example is job interviews where the interviewers often think that anyone who's good in tech XYZ should know some obscure facts UVW.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >What happened to the freedom of Opensource and giving room for innovation? I am deeply disappointed.

Averages do not describe the individuals.

I'm sorry the first response to your project was negative, but you are on the public internet. This kind of thing will happen, there are no barriers or boundaries strong enough to prevent people from occasionally being disagreeable or unpleasant.

</comment><comment><USER14> You don't need to delete it. They have their own opinion that they don't like it, but you can write it and share it anyways; that they want to delete it is just their opinion.

</comment><comment><USER15> Let's check some of his projects to see if we can give some feedback.

</comment><comment><USER16> Honestly I kind of like your library! I'm going to look more into it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Some people are asshats!

</comment><comment><USER18> From the bottom of their personal site:

"If you're wondering, I hand-wrote the HTML, CSS, and Javascript for this website (without using any JS libraries)."

Sounds like they are really fun at parties.

...I apologize for the use of ad-hominem in this comment.

<comment><USER19> It's funny, because their website is horrendously broken on mobile.

Now, hmm, I wonder what would've fixed that.

<comment><USER17> CSS?</comment></comment></comment>


How "The Fighter" shot 35 days worth of fight scenes in only three days - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2840-how-the-fighter-shot-35-days-worth-of-fight-scenes-in-only-three-days <comment><USER2> Hah. Sounds like my current job working in government IT. What would take weeks or even days in the private sector, can take years in the government.</comment>


A Framework for K-12 CS Education [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://k12csdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/k-12-cs-framework-draft-march-18-2016.pdf <comment><USER2> Call me pessimistic, but I mostly expect myself, my children, and probably their children, to all be retired/dead before CS makes it into K-12 curriculum. That said, I really like this proposal. No language is named or suggested in the first few pages (and maybe the whole document)...as it _should_ be, just like a proposal to teach reading and writing wouldn't specifically mention English and Hemingway. Rather, the focus is on teaching recognition and decomposition of computational problems, something that could feasibly be done by pen and paper (though it wouldn't be much fun, to be honest).

As someone who teaches programming in the digital humanities/journalism field...it's been hugely disconcerting to me how the word "algorithm" is used as a kind of de facto adjective to certify the correctness of a hypothesis/process, e.g. " _I have a revolutionary algorithmic process that can tell when a politician is lying to you!_ "...In my opinion, it'd be a huge victory to be able to make the word and concept of "algorithm" so commonly understandable in mainstream thought, that the phrase, " _You, using a pen and paper, can do anything a computer can_ " wouldn't have to be a concept stated explicitly in a publication written for business leaders and professionals.

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is- cod...](http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/)

<comment><USER3> I have reason to be optimistic. Over the last few weeks I've been attending "TeachMeets" [1], where teachers, in their own free time, meet up and share 7 minute talks about things they're trying in the classroom.

The number of teachers bring coding into the classroom is way higher than I expected. And not just senior school either: this teacher [2] is teaching coding in K-2 classrooms. So kids as young as 5 years old. And she's not the only one.

What is cool is also seeing some of them talk about exactly what you mention: teaching computational concepts without necessarily getting in to coding. Teachers are figuring out ways to do this, in games, activities, and hands-on projects that kids enjoy. Teaching students computational thinking, and then algorithms. Then when they start writing code, it makes a lot more sense.

Seeing teachers doing all this over the last month has left me feeling way more optimistic...

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeachMeet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeachMeet) [2]: [https://twitter.com/GeekyAusTeacher](https://twitter.com/GeekyAusTeacher)</comment></comment>


Show HN: REST 2.0 - adding real-time & offline sync without breaking the rest - <AUTHOR> http://objectfabric.org

<comment><USER2> This is more logically a protocol built on REST. To call it REST 2.0 is like saying TCP is IP 2.0 ...

</comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting, anyone porting it to node.js?

<comment><USER4> There seems to be support for Javascript. Check this out [https://github.com/objectfabric/objectfabric/tree/master/obj...](https://github.com/objectfabric/objectfabric/tree/master/objectfabric.examples/js/src/main/webapp)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes but it was client side only</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Updatefy – Create Embed Widgets Out of Google Sheet - <AUTHOR> https://updatefy.co/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN!

I made this platform to create widgets out of Google Sheet data. This is an example of the spreadsheet [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WvDuA_rN0aVe1dZGrWo_...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WvDuA_rN0aVe1dZGrWo_qk5UMEBGiuTRdrJ70taC9FM/edit) and this is the final result [https://updatefy.co/updates](https://updatefy.co/updates)</comment>


What people actually do at WeWork - <AUTHOR> http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/money/a14443776/wework-sriracha-is-for-closers/ <comment><USER2> It seems like articles about WeWork take one of two tacks:

1\. Isn't this "gig economy" thing weird? Isn't it strange that people don't have stable long term employment? What's up with that? Is it good?

2\. Look at these weird people trying to make dating apps for dogs. This is so weird. Instead of working in a trading or ad shop and getting drunk at 3, they work for a tiny "internet company" and get drunk at 3. The sacrilege!

This seems to be a mix of both, though the article is definitely not trying to paint millennial entrepreneurs in a positive light, you can tell by the choice of focusing on a GS alumni.

I do think that anyone who complains about the WeWork aesthetic or whatever should try to rent their own short term office space (that isn't WeWork). It's fucking grim. You wind up in some ancient building with spongy floors, dodgy elevators, and signs in the bathrooms about how the pipes are bad so please basically don't flush anything. Or in a strip mall above a dentists office. Or the attic of a converted condo.

The WeWork goal seems to be to provide some space with decent amenities for a slight premium. What's wrong with that? Maybe their locations will vanish in a puff of smoke when demand dries up, but no one's asking you to invest your money in the future of WeWork. Would you go to a new restaurant opening and say "well yeah the food is good but most restaurants fail"? Who cares! Eat the food. Enjoy it while it's here.

<comment><USER3> We were in WeWork in Chicago --- there's 3 of them here, we were in West Loop --- for about a year. We left and rented an office, maybe 1100sqft?, about a 7 minute walk away. It has parking, relative (to WeWork) quiet, high ceilings, a kitchen, 2 private bathrooms, and conference rooms we don't need to reserve in a weird app or barter with friends for/with. We're 4 people (in this office). We pay less per person than we did at WeWork.

WeWork is useful! I think it gets a bad rap (though the atmosphere and the general vibe of the clientele probably does not).

But unless you're in SFBA or Manhattan, office space is just not that expensive. As soon as you're making payroll, it's pretty insignificant. If I start from 1-2 people again, I'll probably consider WeWork again. But I'll get out of WeWork much faster next time, too.

<comment><USER4> I have used Regus. Very economical, clean, and professional with small private offices. Given the price, for our needs it was perfect.

<comment><USER5> I worked in a Regus facility. It got the job done, but it just felt extremely corporate and uninspiring, especially when I compare it to WeWork. If you're a solo entrepreneur, or small team it's really nice being able to have the perks you'd get in a bigger firm's office space.

<comment><USER6> Regus has converted many of its offices to a new modern style and call it "spaces": [https://www.spacesworks.com](https://www.spacesworks.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The lavatories at the WeWork at 524 Broadway in Manhattan, incidentally, are > terrific—enclosed stalls with clever toile wallpaper featuring a repeating > print of surveillance cameras partially obscured by roses and leaves.

This. The toilet stalls in US are the worst. No privacy whatsoever. Seems like their design is meant to oppress. Hurry you back to _work_ , grunt!

In WeWork I can go to a quiet dark room, with moody music, and take a shit, in peace.

<comment><USER8> In our new office, our stalls are laid out in such a way that you can make eye contact with the person shitting across from you.

Aside from all the other myriad god-awful decisions that someone didn't think through, this one weirds me out the most. I know it's hard to see these things on blueprints, but it's as if these people never shit.

(I know, I know - the correct answer is, "this is the cheap best-practice way of installing toilet stalls". Fuck you; I'm glad I have a private unisex bathroom I can typically use to handle private bodily functions.)

<comment><USER9> I've been in casinos where the bathrooms had mirrors on the ceilings. I'm not talking about in-room bathrooms, either.

It's very weird that someone would design something like that.

<comment><USER10> It's for security to check for sex and drug use.

<comment><USER11> Many casinos have two-way mirrored ceilings for observation. Hopefully it's a normal mirror in the restroom ceilings, otherwise I'm not sure how legal it would be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I ran a coworking space in downtown Los Angeles for about 3 years, at the same time that WeWork was rising. I'm also older, I was in my late 40's while operating the CoWorking space called DropLabs. I noticed that the people who preferred WeWork and similar LA coworking spaces were young, under 30, with family money they did not value, so the prospect of a trendy coworking space with lots of other young people for 2-6 times what we charged, seemed really odd to me. So, I tried working there for a week to see what the attraction is - it is all the other young people, WeWork's atmosphere, in the Hollywood one at least, felt like a high school dance, with a surprising amount of flirting and partying between the people at the space. I felt, perhaps a half dozen people out of the nearly one hundred there were actually trying to get work done. the majority behaved like they had no idea what work is. After that week, I returned to my non-fancy coworking space downtown and operated it for another year before closing. WeWork, in Los Angeles at least, captured all the young, flush with family cash "entrepreneur wannabes" and sucks their cash. WeWork is 1.5 to 2x the cost of a office. They figured out youth will pay to be around other youth, creating a "entrepreneur play zone" where they reinforce the idea they are not really wasting their family's money nor their lives.

</comment><comment><USER13> I remember in early 2000 Newsweek did a whole "tech" issue. In it was a story about a woman who charged $600 an hour helping fledgling startups buy furniture for their offices. This article gave me the same vibe as that one. These tenants don't sound profitable (I could be wrong, they could all be wildly successful) and WeWork is expanding aggressively expecting their to be more of them. When they stop paying the rent, wework stops paying the mortgage.

<comment><USER5> It's not that dire. They simply wind up renting out entire floors of their real estate to "legacy" companies. Sure they can't charge the premiums that come from leasing small spaces, but they're a real estate firm which makes them a little more resilient to a startup downturn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I worked at a startup that used WeWork (Denver) for about 9 months. When I first walked into the lobby, I wondered if I was in the right place, because it felt like a clothing-retail store, complete with constant runway-music playing from overhead.

My first impression was "how am I supposed to work here?" I loved that they had cold-brew and beer on tap, a clean working-space, and interesting events. They seemed really optimized to provide a workspace that was fun.

The problem was, I wasn't there for fun, I was there to get stuff done and for that I needed a place that was peaceful, quiet, with few distractions. The environment at WeWork wasn't optimized for that kind of long, deep work and in fact seemed to actively fight against it.

If your work tasks consist mostly of light, interruptible "busy" tasks, like responding to email, or participating on Slack, WeWork is probably fine. If your work consists of long, deep-dive tasks, I'd recommend getting your own office space until WeWork starts providing an atmosphere that better accommodates peace, quiet, and isolation.

<comment><USER15> To be fair, a lot of tech company offices are not much quieter than a WeWork e.g. open plan office/many places I've seen put engineers right next to people that have to be on phones all day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Drink, a lot.

And i don't just mean those floor hopping beer parties that start Friday around noon, but the weekly get togethers that are nothing less than cheap alcohol ragers.

That place is impossible to get stuff done in (but a lot of fun to visit).

<comment><USER5> You can get noise cancelling headphones. It's like working at an open office floor plan at a big tech company. Also in California they're no longer allowed to have beer on tap; something about underage drinking (for those outside the U.S., the drinking age is set at 21). I'm surprised this hasn't become an issue in other states that are even more conservative.

<comment><USER17> Active noise cancelling doesn't really help with the type of noise you get from a lot of people talking in a space, and the best passive noise canceling headphones are generally not comfortable enough to wear for long periods of time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm resisting googling this Hater app because reading the whole tale of Brendan reads like the greatest satire of the startup world, ever. But I'm afraid if I Google it I'll find out it isn't satire...

<comment><USER19> Sometimes I wonder if there is a class of startup founders who are basically only doing what they are doing for their own personal brand building and after a few years or whatever you become semi well known enough in tech circles to parlay that into something else or an acceptance into some b-school and go back to a real job.

<comment><USER20> That's exactly the vibe I got from the "cofounder" who is Head of PR. At 2% equity and $1,500 a month, that has to be the rawest deal I have heard of for someone who is essentially responsible for all of the company's traction.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, not sure how you live on $18k/year salary in NYC unless you're being supported by your family, which is what I'm guessing is happening here for both of them. Not many people have a network of exclusively friends and family to fund their seed round to the tune of a few $100k...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "...to coincide with some canny PR stunts—coverage on The View, Good Morning America, CBS's Sunday Morning, and Fox & Friends; features on seven blogs embargoed for the same day; a viral public- art installation depicting Trump and Putin nude and locked in an embrace."

Please could someone on HN tell me how the hell one organises, gets funding and pays for this type of PR. I can dev the apps but I am just unable to promote.

Any help or information is appreciated, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER22> This article briefly touches upon what people actually do at WeWork. Nothing more.

<comment><USER23> I bailed after the 2 paragraphs of filler intro about his morning time and coffee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wow, this article is insufferable.

<comment><USER25> The content or the style?

<comment><USER26> A bit of both. There's nothing here specific to WeWork itself. You could say a lot of these things about practically anyone who works their day job at any kind of co-working space. It feels like a bunch of anecdotes about freelancers and small business owners who happen to work under the same roof. There wasn't much actual substance and it was hard to tell whether any conclusions were going to be drawn at the end (I'll admit to giving up halfway).

<comment><USER27> Maybe that was the point? There really wasn't any substance. Just some people killing time while playing with other people's money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> We started our company at WeWork and moved to our offices when we were around 7 people. It was a very convenient solution for a young company that just want to concentrate on what is important (the product). We never participated in any social activities and hardly knew out neighbors (if at all). I'd do it the same way again.

</comment><comment><USER29> I was looking for a twice a week office in Berkeley and tried out the WeWork. Unless you get the all access package with assigned seat, their offering is absurd. I literally could only hang out in the cafe, which had diner seating or some other awkward arrangements.

Seemed all hip and no utility.

</comment><comment><USER30> I feel like for WeWork style business, it should be a race to the bottom (in terms of prices). Once the idea is validated, there would be (as there are) lots of local clones that would try to make a more cool indie version of WeWork. The resulting price-cutting and heavy competition make business rather difficult.

As such, I'm not sure where the economy of scale will come from and why should this be a sustainable business? To be fair, Starbucks and other coffee/restaurant chains also have similar general business characteristics.

Along this note, I don't understand why WeWork is a venture-backed business as opposed to a normal bootstrap business (with more emphasis on early cash-flow and less on growth) as it's usually the case with the above type businesses.

<comment><USER31> There's a certain network effect, at least for some people: you can just take your business on the road and work in a different city every week.

With the name recognition they're getting, they may also get really good deals on office space: I've personally witnessed a co-working space gentrifying a whole city block. The whole block was also owned by the same investor, who apparently gave them a 50% rebate on a ten-year contract. She has easily gotten a 10x ROI on it, since rents in the rest of the buildings tripled within two years.

<comment><USER30> That's a great point. Hip, cool, modern entrepreneur types can easily work as agents of gentrification which as you pointed out can lead to massive increase in wealth for nearby properties owners (at the expense of previous occupants/patrons, some will argue).

<comment><USER32> The decreased wealth of occupants is the entire source of the landlord's increased wealth when rent increases, are there really people who will argue that isn't the case?

<comment><USER30> I guess purely logically, you are right. But I would be against the underlying theme behind that general type of thinking. If you take that line of thought and extrapolate it, it starts getting close to a socialistic/anti-economic progress point of view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow that guy from Hater is REALLY good at PR.

</comment><comment><USER33> Who is renting this space? Do people not have wifi and desks in their homes?

</comment><comment><USER34> any idea how to unsubscribe from their mail list? this week I got at least three spasms from this shady company, yet I font remember providing them with my email address and they are missing unsubscribe link in e-mail, so my whole impression of this company summed to two keywords - shady spammers

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't decide whether the article is a pile of garbage or, somehow, smart and cunning and I just don't get it

</comment><comment><USER35> >> "Our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue."

This is their CEO being quoted. If this isn't Silicon Valley pixie dust I don't know what is.

<comment><USER36> For a pre-revenue or just recent revenue product, that's _exactly_ what valuation is based on. In a word: team.

<comment><USER37> How the hell is WeWork "pre-revenue" or even "recent revenue" — they have been around since 2010.

Yet the CEO is admitting that the valuation is pretty much bullshit; how can "spiritually" make a single note but of difference for how much a company is worth? Imagine if a company said they were highly valued because they were committed to prayer and going to church every Sunday.

<comment><USER9> You've got to hand it to this CEO of WeWork. He's a better businessperson than the investors...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> And if you're over 45, you don't belong there.

Their next venture should be WeDie, a chain of euthanasia centers for disposing of people who've outlived their sell-by date.

</comment><comment><USER39> "Plenty of big companies are now tenants with their own floors or wings in WeWork: Microsoft, IBM, GE, Spotify, Bank of America, NBC Left Field, a fledgling unit of the network aimed at cord-cutting millennials." I personally find this trend problematic. Getting in to WeWork is not a challenging task. ONLY requirement is that you are able to pay your daily/weekly/monthly dues. If all of this is being done by large corps. for PR purposes than I can understand the whole "connect to Millennials bandwagon aspect". But of it is being done to actually hire "good" talent then I am not sure if it is always guaranteed that 3 out of 20 WeWork-ers are more than "good" coders. For me WeWork is like that coffee shop that never closes, there is always a table available for the coder in you and you have to paya premium price for average coffee.</comment>


GRPC: A high performance, open source, general RPC framework - <AUTHOR> http://www.grpc.io/ <comment><USER2> It's a bit buried in the announcement, but this is also using a new version of protobuf [0] (3.0) which fixes a number of long-standing complaints about the format:

        * No more required fields
        * Now supports maps (a huge pain point)
        * A canonical json encoding
        * Wider official language support

[0] [https://github.com/google/protobuf/releases](https://github.com/google/protobuf/releases)

<comment><USER3> Personally, I'm very disappointed that we've lost immutability, along with support for nullable fields (e.g. Protobuf3 now assumes that 0 == null).

<comment><USER4> Immutability is still there. You get to choose whether you want it or not.

For when you actually want a nullable field, I think the idea is that it is easy to have a wrapper message (just like boxing in languages). Such wrappers could even be made standard and provided by protobuf.

<comment><USER5> > Such wrappers could even be made standard and provided by protobuf.

They will be: [https://github.com/google/protobuf/issues/159#issuecomment-7...](https://github.com/google/protobuf/issues/159#issuecomment-76240356)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is what I've been looking for! Generated code on a production quality server (Netty), with no faffing around with JSON, etc. It would be sweet to see that Java server ported to scala though (or some docs to show me how to plug scala into the Java server), and also front-end javascript clients (I saw that was a work-in-progress).

If this would work with juniversal[0], and if that's actually any good, then this might actually give a quick way of churning out cross-platform apps.

[0][http://juniversal.org/](http://juniversal.org/)

<comment><USER7> +1. I'd been looking for a while for a production quality RPC solution, especially one with Scala bindings.

Regarding the gRPC release, I've looked at the examples in the repo and only found this: [https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/tree/master/integration- te...](https://github.com/grpc/grpc-java/tree/master/integration- testing/src/main/java/io/grpc/testing/integration). While it's a great showcase for the power of gRPC, having a "hello world" example with, hopefully, not a whole lot of boilerplate, would help a lot selling this to my team.

<comment><USER4> The Java examples are in the examples folder: [https://github.com/grpc/grpc- java/tree/master/examples/src/m...](https://github.com/grpc/grpc- java/tree/master/examples/src/main/java/io/grpc/examples)

The examples folder references a tutorial at [https://github.com/grpc/grpc- common/blob/master/java/javatut...](https://github.com/grpc/grpc- common/blob/master/java/javatutorial.md)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Shedding more light on this. [http://googledevelopers.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/introducing-g...](http://googledevelopers.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/introducing- grpc-new-open-source-http2.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> What HTTP/2 features make it desirable for general RPC (no browser involved)?

In the past I've found HTTP (1.1) to be okay, but not great for server->server RPC. The semantics are fine (but overkill) and the overhead sort of sucks. With HTTP/2 I guess the performance should be a lot better (with a binary protocol); I'm still unsure about the HTTP semantics in a general RPC context. Anyone with deeper knowledge of HTTP/2 care to enlighten me?

(Following up on a twitter conversation I had with @bradfitz: [https://twitter.com/calebspare/status/571049339541270529](https://twitter.com/calebspare/status/571049339541270529))

<comment><USER9> gRPC uses the following features from HTTP/2: Framing (needed to multiplex different RPCs on the same TCP connection), Flow Control (both intra-stream and connection-wide), HPAC (for compressing metadata that tends to be common across requests), and GoAway (to gracefully drain backends).

<comment><USER8> Thanks! This is a good list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Curious how this compares to Capn'Proto? Speed differences? Any functionality that's in one that's not in the other?

<comment><USER11> This is an interesting an complex topic.

Kenton does a pretty good job discussing this here [https://capnproto.org/news/2014-06-17-capnproto- flatbuffers-...](https://capnproto.org/news/2014-06-17-capnproto-flatbuffers- sbe.html)

and rightly mostly focuses on the message-encoding aspects. Performance will vary by use-case & platform and should be traded off against the suitability for the given use-case (platform support, schema evolution, fidelity of representation, maturity vs bleeding edge)

Cap'N'Proto has some interesting RPC features (promise-pipelining, pass-by- reference) that may be valuable to some.

FYI it would be perfectly reasonable to use Cap'N'Proto messages with GRPC as the transport layer to get HTTP2 support. GRPC was explicitly designed to allow for this.

Protobuf has better platform coverage than FlatBuffers and it's schema is easier to evolve but neither of these may matter for your use-case. As in all things it depends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12>
        Automatically generate idiomatic client and server
        stubs for your service in a variety of languages.

        gRPC has libraries in ... C# [0]

Aweso-

        This gRPC C# implementation is work-in-
        progress and is not expected to work yet.

[0] [https://github.com/grpc/grpc/tree/master/src/csharp](https://github.com/grpc/grpc/tree/master/src/csharp)

</comment><comment><USER13> And more details [http://corner.squareup.com/2015/02/grpc.html](http://corner.squareup.com/2015/02/grpc.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Awesome, now they can get to work on making the security portions of QUIC the basis for SSL 2.0 with PFS, EC and SSH like fingerprinting with user agent pinning, as well as multi-tiered CA (so a CA can only sign certs for a certain domain) and something resembling DANE but without the mandatory DNSSEC dependency.

</comment><comment><USER15> There seems to be a semantic overlap between streaming data with HTTP/2 vs streaming websocket frames back and forth.

Does this have a distinct advantage over websockets, does it supersede it or is completely different?

To put it another way, could gRPC have worked via websockets (or maybe some long-polling fallback mode).

<comment><USER11> HTTP2 is superior to WebSocket at the transport layer because it adds explicit framing support and other things. Websocket-over-HTTP2 is coming, but it's not here now.

While HTTP/1.1 was a poor transport for high-perf RPC there are many parts of it that make sense semantically (headers, trailers, mime-types, virtual- hosting, content-encoding specification etc). HTTP2 lets you continue to use those in a form everyone is familiar with, with Websocket you would have to invent them again.

<comment><USER16> Does HTTP2 have guarantees that the connection is really reused for multiple requests or could a user agent (or HTTP library) silently use multiple connections for different requests?

I think this makes a major difference for RPC applications, because with a single connection you have a guarantee that all messages will be retrieved in the same order that they were sent.

E.g. with a persistent websocket connection I have the guarantee that all messages will be in order. With mulitple HTTP/1.1 requests I don't have it. Don't know about HTTP/2.

And of course the requirements about such a thing depend on how you design your RPC API (stateless or not).

<comment><USER4> HTTP/2 has the concept of streams. Each stream is independent, but within a stream data and headers are ordered. Each HTTP request would be on a new stream.

gRPC maps calls to streams so calls can proceed at different rates, but you still receive the information on a particular call in order. So conceptually each call is completely separate, but we can use a single HTTP/2 connection for all the calls to a particular destination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's a little hard for me to understand what if anything this presents. At first I thought perhaps Protocol Buffers didn't have an RPC layer, and that this was bringing Protocol Buffers up to a comparable level of competitors like Thrift. Checking the Protocol Buffers docs though, I see they do already have services.

Is this simply a consistent, cross-language looking interface for authoring/consuming Protocol Buffers services? What makes this different from other Protocol Buffer implementations?

<comment><USER5> Just to add to a11r's comment:

\- this is not a new Protocol Buffer implementation. It uses the existing Protocol Buffers implementation for serialization/deserialization.

\- this is actual implementation for the service declarations you could write in .proto files already (previously Protocol Buffers could only generate interface stubs, without implementation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What are the benefits of using HTTP rather than TCP directly? I guess one of them is easy to pass firewalls. Anything else makes HTTP better than raw TCP for RPC?

<comment><USER19> Not having to worry about calculating the length of the message before transferring it?

<comment><USER4> gRPC actually still has to calculate the length of a message before transferring it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is great, but the asymmetry here is not. Specifically, if you are a company and you use this and contribute to it, you have to sign this license: [https://cla.developers.google.com/clas/new?kind=KIND_CORPORA...](https://cla.developers.google.com/clas/new?kind=KIND_CORPORATE&domain=DOMAIN_GOOGLE)

Which has these clauses:

 _Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to Google and to recipients of software distributed by Google a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works.

Grant of Patent License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to Google and to recipients of software distributed by Google a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by You that are necessarily infringed by Your Contribution(s) alone or by combination of Your Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If any entity institutes patent litigation against You or any other entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that your Contribution, or the Work to which you have contributed, constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to that entity under this Agreement for that Contribution or Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed._

But Google doesn't grant you the same perpetual right to use and patent licenses back to you if you use gRPC. So I worry that if I start using this code, and Google decides to pull it, they can, even if some of it came from work that I did on it.

Now before someone says "But Chuck, they wouldn't do that ..." I want to remind you that licenses and contracts are not written to cover the 'good' time where everyone likes everyone, they are written to cover the 'bad' time when for one reason or another (often entirely unrelated to a particular API) that people stop liking each other so much.

The fix is simple however, Google could put in their license just a bit of additional text, which replaces

"Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:"

With

"Redistribution, use, and sub-licensing for this code in source or binary form, with or without modification, is granted, without cost, non-exclusively, and in perpetuity, provided the following conditions are met:"

Is there someone from the project reading this that can get that wording updated?

<comment><USER21> 1\. These clauses are actually not ones we wrote, they are from the Apache CCLA, widely used across the industry :)

2\. "But Google doesn't grant you the same perpetual right to use and patent licenses back to you if you use gRPC"

Sorry, this was actually just human error.

They forgot to add the file I gave them.

I'll get it added to the repository post-haste.

(The patent grant is identical to the Go one)

<comment><USER22> We've just added the Patent Grant to all the repos. Thanks for pointing this out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How does performance compare to XDR and ONC/RPC?

</comment><comment><USER24> Can anyone find benchmarks? I can't spend much time looking at it unless they back up their claims.

<comment><USER9> Benchmarks are under development: you can see the code in [https://github.com/grpc/grpc/tree/master/test/core/fling](https://github.com/grpc/grpc/tree/master/test/core/fling) and [https://github.com/grpc/grpc/tree/master/test/cpp/qps](https://github.com/grpc/grpc/tree/master/test/cpp/qps) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> How is concurrency handled in this RPC server for blocking operations?

<comment><USER4> It varies based on language: some languages use async callbacks, some use futures/promises, some block and require threads, and some support multiple forms. The intent is that programmers in that language would handle concurrency however they would normally handle concurrency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> exicting

</comment><comment><USER27> > A High performance

> Define your service using Protocol Buffers,

Erm...

</comment><comment><USER28> If you are advertising it as a high performance RPC, you shouldn't be using protobufs.

Cap'n proto and flatbuffers are much faster.

<comment><USER4> When people might be comparing it to REST with JSON, it is fast.

gRPC can be used with flatbuffers and similar. The experience has been targeting protobufs, but at its core it just expects a serialized message. Other formats can be made to work with relatively low effort. So if protobuf is the issue, try swapping to your favorite marshaller.</comment></comment>


Googlers Expose Sketchy SEO Company - <AUTHOR> http://www.seroundtable.com/sketchy-seo-company-google-12786.html

<comment><USER2> This is how I want to go out.

In a giant long-winded incoherent unwinnable flame war against the best minds in my industry, hiding behind a flimsy mask of anonymity and dragging my business empire down further with every post until there's nothing left. Perfect. Beautiful.

I'm just biding my time until the right person calls me out...

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sure this gets said by thousands of geeks every day, but Matt Cutts is a cool guy. That was hilarious.

<comment><USER4> The funny (sad?) part is that I had a lot more material I could have used. The point was clear though, so no need to be mean.

<comment><USER5> My favorite line from the exchange:

 _I also was not able to find Matt Cutts in the Google employee directory._

Clearly the words of a true expert in Search...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> bruben25's posts are remarkable in how they string together phrases that seem coherent in isolation, but when taken together are long, rambly, and impossible to follow. Skimming them, I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about half the time.

<comment><USER7> I would guess that maybe English is not their primary language? I would also imagine that they wrote each reply with their heart racing/eyes twitching as they realized the ship was going down at the hands of Google reps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the real take-away from this is to just stay legit. Don't try to do anything shady because it will most likely come back to bite you in the ass. The guy is actually pretty dumb for not realizing they could figure out who he was while using a handle that contains his real name.

<comment><USER9> I would hope that apart from staying legit, another take away from this be to know the market that you are in, know of some of the key people at those companies, or perhaps being able to find said information?

From the article it seems that the bruben25 SEO guy didn't do any research as to who Matt was, where as Matt quickly found out quite a bit of (public) information on who the SEO guy was.

Now who's the better Search expert?

<comment><USER8> Indeed, everyone should learn who the key people are in their industry. It's almost unfathomable that bruben25 didn't know who Matt Cutts is, though. B Ruben seems to be on another plane of obliviousness. Everyone knows who Matt Cutts is. I think this speaks more to the fact that the guy really didn't do any legitimate SEO. People who are legitimate in SEO generally keep up with the trade publications, talk to people, and make connections.

<comment><USER10> Did you manage to read through the whole wall of text? Distinct impression of crazypants...

<comment><USER8> If you're asking if I read the entire article, yes I did. I don't know if the guy (bruben25) is actually crazy, but he certainly doesn't come off as the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Edit: I see what you're pointing to now (bruben25's wall of text in the Google Webmaster Central thread). I didn't actually read that but I'm checking it out now.

<comment><USER9> I looked at that original thread, and oh boy is that a lot of text. Obviously someone really wanted to defend their position and thought a lot of text would help make their point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For a second there I thought that google decided to sink Demand Media before the IPO.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why does this side load assets from twitter for _every_ page scroll I do?

</comment><comment><USER13> Googler's Exposé Of Sketchy SEO Company

or

Googlers Expose Sketchy SEO Company

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, just noticed that typo. Too late to edit that title now though, but either of those two work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Which "SEO companies" aren't sketchy?

<comment><USER15> I don't know if this is a snarky, rhetorical question, but there are many legitimate SEO companies out there. SEOMoz is a good example. A general rule is, if they guarantee certain rankings, avoid them, if they offer "directory submission" services, avoid them.

<comment><USER14> As soon as they start talking about "link building" my spam sense tingles. The same for "social media optimization".

So what is left? Glorified mod_rewrite hackery?

/edit: That's not a flame. I'm just interested what non shady SEOs do. The last time I looked into SEO it was all about rearranging your HTML so the spider would get to the content fast. And to put nofollows on your links to get the juice flowing the way you wanted.

But this wasn't that complex that it justified hiring an expensive SEO company. Sure, they all did that link building stuff too - but as noted above to me that's shady (it was mostly about spamming digg-like sites with top 10/5 articles).

<comment><USER16> Link building has all to do with making content that people find interesting enough to link to/talk about on social networks, and designing it to get links from certain types of sites with certain types of anchor text. As far as I know, Google is quite happy with that particular part of the SEO process, and it's firmly white hat.

<comment><USER14> > Link building has all to do with making content that people find interesting > enough to link to/talk about on social networks

Shouldn't that be the aim of any website? Being interesting so people like the site and talk about it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> most boring read in a long time. i think the last jersey shore was more interesting.</comment>


A wider choice of mates reduces people's reproductive output. - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10640683

<comment><USER2> The real reason: people in rich countries have been tamed to be orderly cells inside larger and longer-lived organisms -- the nation, the culture, a religion or class or movement, a corporation, whatever.

Within a larger organism, there's no surprise individual cells don't wildly reproduce in the organism's warm, safe, nutrient-rich environment. That's against the conditions of formation/inclusion. When it happens, it's often a cancer that threatens the whole.

</comment><comment><USER3> what do rich cultures have in common? they are civilized enough to get rich. they have good enough values that let them cooperate peacefully with others, etc

the sort of good values that make societies richer include caring about your children individually and spending much more money per child, instead of just trying to have a lot of kids and use them for cheap labor.

also, our culture considers children a pain in the ass. then people wonder why we aren't having as many as we used to? because more people are doing what they want instead of blindly following tradition.

<comment><USER4> some parts of our culture think that. Other parts think children are something with a high cost and an immeasurably high return in happiness! :)

<comment><USER3> umm, yes. a high cost. not just in money, but in "hassle". our culture, almost entirely, also thinks that kids have a high return. yes. i wasn't denying that. though i do think that set of opinions constitutes the wrong attitude to have.</comment></comment></comment>


Debt is coming to the tech industry - <AUTHOR> https://alexdanco.com/2020/02/07/debt-is-coming/ <comment><USER2> > Debt is going to finally come to the tech industry

Bear in mind that the tech industry exists in all countries with a population greater than 10. Also consider that this:

> When people in tech want to sound smart, one name you can drop is Carlota > Perez.

... is probably nonsense or at best pointing out another point of view.

Not all companies work the way you think they do. Not all companies want to be yoked with the burden of continuous economic growth, always beholden to the irksome shareholder. My little company is about 20 years old now. We have never been in debt apart from a mortgage that we could pay off tomorrow (probably, cough ... ish) We will never set the world on light and you will never hear of us. We have 20 odd employees now and in five years time probably 20-40.

A few years back the UK decided to cede the union with Europe (c'est la vie.) The pound slid south about 30% rather quickly and IT stuff became 30% more expensive nearly overnight. We import nearly everything IT here in the UK. I can't say that my company noticed any downturn in trade, actually we have just hit £1M t/o two months early this year.

I hate this sort of article. Maybe in the US all companies are multi billion t/o setups. Here in the UK we are all simply "shop keepers" (Emperor Napolean said so) and fucking proud of it.

<comment><USER3> Thank you. I read this article twice, thought I was completely missing something. No, it's a pretty obvious statement wrapped around pseudo- intellectual ideas of Carlota Perez and presented in an Emperor's New Clothes style where if you disagree with it you're an idiot ("Maybe not all investors get this, but the smart ones do").

Alex was previously at Social Capital, a fund with amazing PR and huge egos combined with very mediocre financial results and awful morals. It would not surprise me at all to see him get back into the game by starting a fund using drivel like this post to sucker LPs into writing him checks.

<comment><USER4> The article seemed pretty straightforward. Perhaps a bit too excited. But the fundamental thesis that the predominance of equity financing in tech is an aberration and will likely come to an end, seems rather plausible.

<comment><USER5> This is not new though. Robert Smith pioneered the idea that while software companies didn't have tangible assets, they had stable cash flows.

In the public markets, data providers like IHS Markit, MSCI, etc. have used some debt to rise the returns on equity.

At the end of the day, it's more about where you define "tech" as cutting edge, or as a software or data business.

<comment><USER4> Yes.

And the elephant in the room is differing tax treatments for returns on equity vs returns on fixed income. Most jurisdiction allow you to pay interest with pre-tax income but profits are taxed and then used to pay dividends or buy back stock.

(Which is pretty silly and self-contradicting, if you combine it with regulation _against_ leverage. Government, please make up your mind which capital structure if any you want to prefer.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Furthermore, in the Bay Area Founder-VC scene, FK/PK tension simply isn't > perceived as a problem. Founders increasingly think of themselves as capital > allocators who think in bets, and the angel investing scene has brought > founders and VCs together as social peers. There's no FK/PK tension between > investors and founders. They all want the same thing, and they all hang out > at the same parties. The tension has simply been redistributed, largely onto > employees. The greatest trick VCs ever pulled was convincing founders, > "you're just like us."

Recommend reading the whole article if you're curious about the nuance in this. It flies above the current milieu.

<comment><USER7> I can say in the New York scene the opinion seems to be quite the opposite. There is a non-trivial amount of wariness when it comes to VC money.

<comment><USER8> A lot of that is sour grapes. The majority of people who loudly explain that they wouldn't want a large VC round are people who aren't in a position to raise a large VC round.

<comment><USER9> Maybe. I'm not in that geo these days, so I have no way to gauge relative percentages. Do you think that is right?

I've raised large rounds in the past, both corporate and VC, and I've learned to be wary about misaligned incentives.

Now - I don't go around saying: "Don't raise VC ever!", but I'm a little more attuned to the trade-offs than I used to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Any one customer may be unknowable, but cohorts of customers can be modelled and understood decently well."

Just substitute "mortgage" in this sentence, think back on events of the last decade, and you can see what is horribly wrong with this article.

Lots of debt, all given to tech startups, which will almost all go bust with the first recession. Let's see, what does that remind me of?

Of course, if you believe that the government would step in to take the downside, then you could just get the upside in the time between now and when the downturn comes.

<comment><USER11> Yeah but unlike a mortgage (secured against one static asset i.e. a house), the article assumes most of this debt will be issued against the strength and quality of a company's various recurring revenue streams (even speculating that different components of this could be financed separately to try and account for the varied risk).

Just need to make sure you don't end up with financers/banks/rating agencies colluding to bundle multiple companies together and sell tranches of the debt (all with a phony A+ rating) to investors/funds...

<comment><USER12> The article seems to advocate for exactly what you're warning about:

 _Why not go straight to securitizing senior tranches of your recurring revenue, and moving it off your balance sheet?_

... (one paragraph later) ...

 _On the other side, imagine how much investor interest you could get in a diverse basket of recurring revenue from, say, 10 different startups that've all raised from Tier 1 VCs. People talk about how great it would be to invest in a unicorn basket; this would probably be even better._

<comment><USER13> Except for the part about everyone colluding to get good risk ratings. If that collusion did happen, then yes, these would be the equivalent to MBS'. That can happen regardless of what is being securitized.

It still wouldn't get to the level of the housing crisis until those securities were packaged into much larger CDOs and refinanced based on the fraudulent risk ratings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The biggest problem with this idea is that it doesn't really have a good market space. If your company revenue is too small, your subscription backed debt is just an inferior financial product compared to equity, which handles risk much better. If your company revenue is large enough, you have plenty of financial tools to keep your company fiscally healthy. The only time I can see it being useful is if you want to trick rich non-investors to give you money by pretending that your startup has value when it doesn't (similar to an ICO).

Let's say you had a subscription user base and the retention / LTV data to convince finance people to treat it as a security. That usually is the sign of a successful startup, and you'd also likely have access to venture capital as well.

As a founder, is it worth your time to come up with a new financial product and convince people to buy it? In my opinion, you're probably better off doing a round because it will close much quicker and you'll know what to expect, and you can focus on growing your business instead of convincing everyone of your non-standardized, not well understood financial product offering. Good luck closing a group of institutional investors with that.

Now, why do finance people create new financial products? One reason is to investment larger amounts of money all at once - so create asset classes and then buy them in bulk because you have a $5b dollar fund and can only afford to look at $500m deals or more.

This is probably the only reason why you'd want to create a subscription backed debt - collect them up and allow people to participate in returns on startups without becoming a VC. But this is much more likely to be a repeat of the mortgage crisis rather than being actually beneficial to the economy.

<comment><USER15> I read it the other way around. If BigCash, co. advertises "we securitize your growth - get free money to grow based on your business metrics!', and you're a startup founder - would you be interested, or would you say "nah, I think I'll just do another round"?

OTOH I'm not sure I understood it well :D

<comment><USER14> Good point - there are a ton of SMBs that have good business metrics, usually as a result of being around for a long time. I would think that these companies would be the primary audience for this - they would use the flexibility that a securitized revenue stream allows them to smooth out any cash flow problems they had.

The majority of startups use investment to get to profitability / stability. This is why I think debt is a poor choice in general for the startup and tech market. I'd hope BigCash, co. models out default rates, not just SaaS metrics, and the adage, 9 out of 10 startups fail, while a bit harsh on revenue generating startups, doesn't bode well.

If offered, I can see a very well positioned startup who has access to VC preferring to raise debt to avoid the hyper growth push of VCs and grow at their own pace.

But also if offered, I can see a lot of high default risk companies use it to get cash because other options are not available, and the riskiness is why I didn't even think of an institution offering it in the first place - or just a repeat of the mortgage crisis.

<comment><USER15> A repeat of the mortgage crisis is possible - even likely - if such an instrument is successful. But you need to have some level of success first (for both sides). We're not there yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Debt helps you grow faster; debt helps you die faster."

\- someone said this to me early in my career and it has stuck with me.

<comment><USER17> Ditto for equity

<comment><USER18> ?

<comment><USER11> Sky high valuations that limit your options/exits, potentially pushing your company down a path it shouldn't take.

<comment><USER18> ... based on false and unrealistic promises?

When did the discussion about "financing structure" become a discussion on ethics? Or are you already taking the "bullshit business hockeystick promises" as a "given in the industry"?

Why are fraudulent business practices the first thing that come to your mind?

If you told me about WACC and how equity is like actually really expensive way of financing: ok, I get it, some cool discussion on a provocative questionmark.

Kind a telling on the industry in a sense :-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Debt financing would be wonderful (note to non-business-savvy readers: this is not even remotely the same kind of thing as personal credit card debt or whatever other completely unrelated thing is making you sanctimoniously kneejerk that "debt is bad". Can we please have an informed discussion of debt as a part of a business capital structure?) for software businesses, which have very predictable capex costs.

The issue was always that bankers don't want to lend for, basically, cultural reasons. When it actually starts becoming possible and there start being standard diligence scripts, etc., it will be much more favorable than equity financing for basically anyone who can get it.

<comment><USER20> I don't think it's _only_ cultural, software businesses also have very few assets that could be liquidated. Volkswagen might finance 2/3 of everything it does with debt, but if it just stopped tomorrow and sold all production facilities then lenders would get more than half their money back. If a typical software startup stops operating and sells off all its assets it gets a bit of spare change and the lenders leave with close to nothing.

<comment><USER21> The users paying each month are the assets in this article's thesis. As long as when a company shuts down, they transition their users to a new entity (since they are valuable reoccurring revenue), the lenders will get paid.

<comment><USER22> Are you imagining a successful company with a large book of users generating a healthy ARR? If that's the situation, the lenders will get paid, because the business will keep running.

The more likely risk to a bond holder is that the company fails to generate a healthy business, pays most of the loan out in salary while trying, and now the lenders own the company which is a couple of two year old laptops and a few thousand per year in ARR that cannot be profitably served.

<comment><USER23> The essay is explicitly talking about the former. Rather than sell a bunch of dilutive equity at Series B, a company with decent recurring revenue could collateralize that revenue stream and sell it.

<comment><USER24> In what situation would you opt for a dilutive series B where you had enough revenue that a bank would collaterize it for you?

If you are profitable, then it's probably wiser to not take the dilution round. If you aren't, your revenue is likely worthless as I can't imagine a bank would have the risk appetite to turn a money losing venture into a profitable one by taking it over

<comment><USER21> You need the money to scale sales operations to the level of revenue.

<comment><USER24> Right, but if you were profitable and, I'm assuming the reason you needed the money was sound; you'd have to be incredibly unlucky if the only outside capital you could raise was a down round.

You usually only hear downrounds from companies that are struggling to keep the lights on

<comment><USER21> Selling equity dilutes, whether it is an up or down round. That sold equity is potential appreciation that the firm selling won't participate in.

With debt, you promise a fixed rate of return instead, so the benefits are capped for the purchaser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Aside from the other conclusions and assertions in this long article, this particular bit resonates with me:

"Here is a widely believed cause-and-effect relationship I bet you've never thought to invert before: because most startups fail, therefore equity is the best way to finance them. Have you ever considered: because equity is how we finance startups, therefore most startups fail?"

At the very least, this lines up perfectly with my startup experiences and many other case studies I've seen - investors simply are not willing to accept reasonable growth or reasonable returns, they want massive scaling and massive growth. Sometimes that approach works out but very often you get expensive bets that never deliver on the level they need to and the startup flames out or ends up stuck constantly trying to clean up the mess left by the last big bet while trying to execute on a new one. A revolving door of new executives and new business strategies.

<comment><USER26> Meh, straight debt (not convertible) isn't available to risky startups.

The venture debt industry depends on tight relationships with VCs to ensure reasonable repayment rates. In some cases they reduce risk by reselling part of the debt. In all cases, they're themselves leveraged, lending money from limited partners and not just themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Debt is like medicine: useful to cure certain conditions but nothing to be burdened with your entire life. Once the condition is cured the medicine is no longer needed.

It is also like medicine in that it has a tendency of ending up being worse than the condition it was meant to cure when taken irresponsibly or in too large a dose.

There's another way in which debt resembles medicine: those who sell it are wont to sell it as widely and at as high a price as possible, no matter whether it is the right medicine for the condition at hand.

When used responsibly debt can be a net positive. When allowed to run amok it is a burden upon society. Maybe debt, like medicine, should only be allowed to be taken with a prescription?

<comment><USER28> > Maybe debt, like medicine, should only be allowed to be taken with a > prescription?

Isn't it though, really?

The bankers determine your "need" and price it according to the risk of you defaulting -- which would seem to put a kink in TFA's argument since most startups fail, the interest rate would be astronomical if true risks were priced in.

<comment><USER27> Bankers both 'prescribe' as well as sell debt, this is - in theory, at least - different from medicine where the prescriber is not related to the seller.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Less any bright eyed startup founder take this post too seriously, I'll spell it out: venture debt is bad.

Debt issued to established companies is an essential mechanism to bridge working capital needs - like GM procuring millions of pounds of sheet metal before selling thousands of cars. This is not controversial.

Venture debt issued to startups by bankers, especially by the kind of bank who fancy themselves as a Bank for Silicon Valley, and the types of bankers who, after a few too many cocktail parties with VCs, fancy themselves venture capitalists. It's just these pseudo-venture capitalists have the risk tolerance of...bankers.

If you pioneer a new space, particularly in consumer electronics with high working capital needs and you are initially successful you will be offered venture debt. If you take it, you will be more successful and you will have copy cats. Some of those copy cats will be FAANG companies.

When this happens the bankers will freak out and pull your working capital. Or exercise a clause that forces a premature sale. Or...or..or.

Woe to you if you were banking on that to make this years Black Friday/Christmas demand.

Alex's post highlights a need in the space. Don't confuse it with the services currently offered.

<comment><USER30> > _When this happens the bankers will freak out and pull your working capital. > Or exercise a clause that forces a premature sale. Or...or..or._

How is this different than the "next round" of a venture raise vaporizing and being left with no money?

<comment><USER29> Time horizon. Capital gives you 18 months. Your debt instrument can be pulled overnight.

<comment><USER31> Depends on the instrument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Debt and VC are just sides of the same (multi-sided) coin. The money has to come _from_ somewhere - domestic savings, commercial profit or sovereign wealth.

The unicorn phenomenon is easier to explain this way - if you are already a company that can consume huge amounts of debt (you have a business model, product and route to market and just need to replicate) then you used to have one choice - take on debt. Now, where the returns on money as debt is so low, the money may choose to be VC just to gets return.

As such the only likely way "debt is coming" is if interest rates climb, giving money an alternative to VC.

However what drives global interest rates as very little to do with tech sector (I think).

So - yes huge tech plays are going to become more and more common because software is eating the world and we are basically going to replace all our business has governmental processes with new software ones.

Those will need huge investment - but whether that is debt or VCor something inbetween (looking at you government bonds) - is more likely to be a function of interest rates than anything else.

My prediction - the next YCombinator will take VC sized money and deploy it at bank level scale - small and medium sized companies at non-unicorn stages, because with good software and models it will be feasible to deploy at smaller levels.

Debt may not be coming so soon

<comment><USER33> > As such the only likely way "debt is coming" is if interest rates climb, > giving money an alternative to VC.

Surely that's backwards: a lot of money really wants to be invested in debt, and is only doing VC because the returns to debt investing are so bad. Offer those investors a better alternative - comparable returns to a second-tier VC fund (which is not actually that hard), with something they can pretend is a security backed by something (they want to believe, you don't have to give them much), and they'll beat a path to your door. Much easier to offer market- beating "startup user bonds" while interest rates are low than when (if) some decent bond investing opportunities come back.

<comment><USER34> I'm not sure entering the bond market is possible. These "startup user bonds" would be unrated, beyond junk, accessible only to accredited investors, etc. The debt would probably take the form of some type of a CLO or ETN wrapper? I'm just speculating here. Anyone with better insight?

<comment><USER35> That's still an enormous potential pool of capital that's currently making very little.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm really not sure what's the point of the article. The idea that there is no debt yet in "tech" isn't even true. Uber, WeWork, and especially Tesla have been raising capital via debt. Not to mention Brex which covers the tail end of the startup market with "debt backed by revenue". I'm putting it in quotes because it's a ridiculous idea.

<comment><USER37> As far as I can tell Brex literally just "lends" money to people that already have money. They lend based on cash in the bank and have the right to debit cash straight from the bank account. It hasn't been clear to me that they're even involved in any kind of actual issuance of debt in a meaningful sense at all.

<comment><USER38> > As far as I can tell Brex literally just "lends" money to people that > already have money. It hasn't been clear to me that they're even involved in > any kind of actual issuance of debt in a meaningful sense at all.

It's exactly the same as Chase lending an individual Google engineer $5k for free for the month on his Visa card despite the engineer having $50k in his savings account already.

They make money on the interchange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I frankly didn't understand this article. First there's already VC debt, and Silicon Valley Bank is also a big lender. There are lots of shops out there that will loan against revenue streams (often we see this tied to hardware). Also the idea that a basket of debt is going to have some enormous payoff Is just painful to listen to. Your upside is capped and you can have ruin. Who wants to invest in ultra junk bonds. The reason equity financing works for startups is the promise of an enormous outsized outcome That pays back all of your losses.

</comment><comment><USER40> Great read, but I had a sneaky suspicion the entire time he was going to just say 'securitise revenue streams', which he finally did.

I just don't think for the most part this will happen in any meaningful way, because high growth companies that need the money just don't have the track record to really underpin the value of said revenue streams.

As for more established tech companies ... surely they must have been doing or at least trying to do this already?

</comment><comment><USER41> I commented a few weeks ago on startup ideas saying there was a gap in SaaS financing models. VCs have been abuzz about the opportunities in slow-burn SaaS businesses that have generated predictable recurring revenue streams. This created two classes of potential VC investment - pre-revenue moonshots for billion dollar unicorns and post-revenue SaaS businesses with healthy balance sheets. I lamented that left a gap for pre-revenue slow-burn SaaS businesses in unproven markets.

I can imagine debt being a potential gap filler but only in established markets where lenders have points of comparison. This article skews on the side of pushing VC money out of the post-revenue slow-burn SaaS space. To be honest, if I was a founder running a healthy SaaS business wishing to grow then I would probably prefer debt compared to handing out equity.

But if I am starting from complete scratch and my goal is to build a slow-burn SaaS business (maybe even of a lifestyle business scale) I don't know I would jump onto debt as my first choice for funding. The only viable options I see other than personal savings are friends/family, government entrepreneurial grants and potentially crowd sourcing.

</comment><comment><USER42> Think of debt as a way to gain market leverage. Leverage is good if you are reasonably certain of the outcome.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20942950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20942950)

<comment><USER43> Is there any reliable metric to know what reliable means here?

<comment><USER42> not sure of one specific number. Say you have achieved product market fit and the lifetime value of your customers (LTV) is less than three times the cost of acquisition, you probably be better of getting leverage from debt and gain marketshare. Depends on the market you operate though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> If you open graphs over inflation and interest rate since 1971 you will understand why debt is not coming again in nominal terms until the dollar goes away; that is in real value compared to something that you cannot borrow to buy:

[https://www.whythings.net/Images/Inflation_chart.jpg](https://www.whythings.net/Images/Inflation_chart.jpg)

[https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/legacy/static/folio/mortgag...](https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/legacy/static/folio/mortgage/chart.jpg?token=1496685693)

Technology; like money, can't change physics. Just like when you hit a ball; what goes up must come down.

While looking at the graphs, consider that the personal computer and the internet were invented in the 70s. We went to the moon then too.

Virtually nothing in technology has changed since the 80s.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think this article is trying to make something out to be more than it actually is. Debt financing is a specific vehicle that can be used tactically for a relatively mature business (Series A area +) with predictable revenue for specific growth I do not see it as this magical solution to the current issues of VC capital because alignment is often really out of wack in the early-stages before established product-market fit with high dilution and higher investor leverage.

In a mature business investors and founders are likely to be more aligned anyway because the founder's model has been working and has some length of history and predictability with regards to forecasting further growth and outcomes. To put it plainly while you can get screwed in the later stages you're much more likely to get screwed in the early stages of running a company.

With that in mind, one of the main benefits, as stated in the article that the debt investment is not dilutive, is still nice at the later stages but I wouldn't say people should exclusively decide to go with debt based on that reason alone because the largest dilution (and by consequence chance to be screwed) typically happens in the earlier rounds (unless you're getting bailed out) anyway.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's been here since the beginning?

"Apple received its first big investment, a guaranteed bank loan of $250,000 from Mike Markkula in 1977 (the equivalent of over $1.1 million)" [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/steve-wozniak-on-steve- jobs-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/steve-wozniak-on-steve-jobs- personality-shift-as-apple-co-founder.html)

also vc covenants etc?

</comment><comment><USER11> Can't find it now but I remember reading about a recently launched Seedcamp or Point Nine portfolio company that is doing this for B2C SaaS companies I think. You let them plug into your stripe metrics etc. and they then give you debt based financing (using AI/algos to determine amount and rate based on your numbers: churn, growth, recurring revenue etc.)

<comment><USER46> Stripe themselves are also doing it now [https://stripe.com/capital](https://stripe.com/capital)

The sums are pretty small right now, but the basic model is there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> "When you acquire some customers and they start yielding revenue that behavior sounds an awful lot like buying a fixed income instrument..."

This is so intellectually dishonest. He even goes on to equate recurring revenue with cash flow. Not the same! So often companies point to ARR as success without acknowledging other structural cost issues in their businesses.

"It's basically AAA debt. Now give me a 30x revenue multiple." -SaaS investor who wants it both ways

SaaS is just one of many recurring/contractual revenue categories, but VCs talk about it like its a revolutionary business model that should yield some extra reward from the capital markets. Recurring revenue has been around forever in more traditional industries.

Yes, reliable recurring revenue (with +FCF) can support leverage, but claiming that it looks and acts like debt is either ignorant or deceptive. It is 100% equity risk and that kind of magical thinking is just vulture bait.

</comment><comment><USER48> The post is predicated upon assumptions surrounding the risk to recurring revenue cash flows from SaaS customers. I'm not sure why the author thinks these cash flows can be well understood enough to securitize to support lending -- it'd be good to understand what's changed recently (given that the first SaaS companies are more than 20 years old) that lead one to believe debt markets can now suddenly price risk on these revenue streams now.

In other words, why should we expect this now, if it hasn't happened already? If we suddenly saw debt markets becoming attracted to startups, I'd put just as much weight upon it as a cultural norm shifting than fundamental analysis showing a change to the risk profile. And you know what that means: if it's a cultural change, not justified by new evidence, it's either a late realization (safe, and regrettable) or irrational (incredibly dangerous.)

</comment><comment><USER49> debt and intellectual property do not mixup since by definition there is nothing to back up the debt (unlike real estate or any other industry outside of software).

The author suggests to backup of the debt with a revenue stream, but those :

1) depend on the churn rate. 2) Are stable only for mature companies. Post product-market fit.

<comment><USER50> Well, there is something to back up the debt - but not something that can be seized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> IIRC there is at least one Silicon Valley example of this already: Zappos pre Amazon acquisition, debt from Wells Fargo. It was forced upon Zappos b/c VC fundraising dried up, not a deliberate choice, but ended up working out well b/c its GMV was both growing and becoming predictable.

<comment><USER52> I believe this article is focused on a different type of debt - "recurring revenue securitization" (focused on companies w/ a SaSS business model).

This type of financial instrument is different from a traditional venture / bank debt instrument in a couple ways:

1\. it can be more favorable to startups by making payments a % of revenue instead of a fixed amount (ala ISA's)

2\. the lender can earn higher interest by "securitizing" (e.g. pooling together) multiple loans and selling them. this allows the lender to move some debt off the balance sheet and in turn deploy the cash for higher yield

3\. over time, the lender could provide more favorable terms by creating more accurate risk models by ingesting data from sources like Stripe and Shopify across companies and then building proprietary data sets to manage default risk. I believe Clearbanc does something similar today.

One potential downside of this model is the interest the company receiving the load would have to pay as stated here - [[http://www.adventurista.com/2009/01/true-cost-of-venture- deb...](http://www.adventurista.com/2009/01/true-cost-of-venture- debt.html\]\(http://www.adventurista.com/2009/01/true-cost-of-venture- debt.html\))

Would love to see this model work though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Odd that the article mentions startups 14 times and hedge funds zero. If a significant percentage of a profitable tech company with established customers and a revenue stream derived from long-term contracts with customers is owned by hedge funds, the hedge funds will flex their muscles a little and convince the company to start borrowing money so that it can buy back some of its stock and pay higher dividends. If such a company does not have a significant constituency of shareholders among its shareholders and has little or no debt, its managers will realize that their company is one that hedge funds are likely to want to own and influence, and that the best way to discourage the hedge funds is to take on debt to buy back stock and raise dividends. Q. E. D.

</comment><comment><USER54> >> And when founders really get a taste of that credit? That sweet, sweet taste of dilution-free capital, flowing freely to and from a continuous growth vehicle

At that point, cryptocurrency prices will start rising fast as fiat currencies start hyperinflating; free money is worthless money.

People will dump the old fiat currencies and start buying up cryptocurrencies with their free debt-fueled fiat.

Companies will no longer need debt; to raise capital, they will be able to create a new cryptocurrency and list it on Decentralized Exchanges; then they will use the profits from their business operation to buy-back coins from investors at a predetermined rate. Companies could even use open source code to operate their own decentralized exchanges so that there would be no intermediaries between a company and its investors.

</comment><comment><USER55> My background in financial engineering is limited to trying to make sense of articles like this so maybe someone more in-the-know would be kind enough to help me understand. But when you securitize an asset, isn't it typically an asset that has intrinsic value, e.g. property of some sort that can be easily liquidated? It seems to me that recurring revenue for a service only has value as long as that service exists. So if some startup selling dog food subscriptions stops providing that service, the subscriptions are worth exactly zero.

To take the example further, would said startup now be unable to sell the book of business to someone else before going broke?

<comment><USER56> I'd imagine that's how you end up with companies like Verizon taking over services like tumblr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> At the moment, way more VC money is going into later stage deals as companies stay private longer... that is the chunk that if securitisation becomes mainstream , where VCs will have competition. The impact of this could be really fascinating - VCs would be forced to go even broader in their earlier stage investments, or VC's own funding will start to reduce as it won't be possible to deploy the capital at the same return. Maybe it'll turn out that funding more pre seed companies will be successful - why stop at YC's 200 every six months. The switchover period would be an entertaining time to be a founder, that's for sure!

</comment><comment><USER58> Isn't this essentially a different way of doing what Earnest Capital is already doing?

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

</comment><comment><USER59> Debt is a liability to be served, having returns and margins winning over growth, adding a not-so-silent participant to the mission. Welcome to the real world.

</comment><comment><USER60> Sort of thought the whole point of SaaS businesses with lots of employee frills and perks was to eventually attract the activist investors, leveraged buyouts, asset strippers, and other private equity managed debt, as a way to deploy institutional and pension money. Maybe it was cynical, but the point is to generate a long term trickle of ARR that is greater than the interest payments on a debt financing of control of the company, which at a product level is why you need sticky APIs that get baked into institutional customer infrastructure that will yield 10-15 years of locked-in revenue.

One of said vultures above raises debt from group of funds, buys a SaaS company, installs managers who understand cost optimization with no concept of growth, and hollow it out. Their nut is paying the interest back to their pension fund creditors, and their yield (after fees, naturally) is the delta between what they can squeeze out of cost reductions and making that nut.

I won't name the companies I think will be those targets, but speculating about privately held security companies as an example, it sounds like there is a clear exit sized at 10-15x revenues for anyone with traction, an API, and an office that has free snacks and a climbing wall.

</comment><comment><USER61> Whilst I broadly agree with the article it did remind me of mini bonds, a UK centric concept perhaps.

[https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/mini- bonds](https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/mini-bonds)

These havent been getting good press recently due to a number of failures.

</comment><comment><USER62> Interesting article. The reality is places like Silicon Valley bank do provide debt financing. If your SAAS cash flows look like fixed income, that's a better way to finance them. There is downside to this too.

The irony is many traditional businesses that use debt (retail?) really should be equity financed.

</comment><comment><USER63> "The VC model we've honed to perfection over decades"?

</comment><comment><USER64> I'm already here

<comment><USER65> The call is coming from inside the vault

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Aren't SAFEs effectively debt?

<comment><USER67> no. you're thinking of convertible notes.

<comment><USER66> That's "effectively debt" - it converts to equity upon a new round but if the company fails or doesn't raise then it's more like debt than equity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py if you have structured settlements and you need cash now

call JG wentworth if you need cash now

</comment><comment><USER68> How to securitize SaaS cash-flow nowadays ?

</comment><comment><USER69> Someone tldr it please

</comment><comment><USER70> Debt is dumb. The childish glee coming from this author should be ignored. 2008 is coming again soon and debt holders will suffer. Please get/keep your financial house in order. Business debt is just as dangerous as personal debt.

<comment><USER25> How do you propose solving problems like "buy a house" and "buy a car" without debt? The average person who needs to drive to work has no way to buy a car in cash, at least not early on. If you drop all your savings on a new car and suddenly end up with a hospital bill, that car isn't going to pay for it.

I say this as someone who had enough saved to buy a car in cash: Buying it via a loan was the right choice. It boosted my credit rating and more importantly when emergencies came up I had that cash on hand.

<comment><USER70> Look up the word "savings". It is possible to rent a cheap apartment, buy a used car, and wait until you can afford better things. Obviously some people are going to run into financial difficulties if they have unexpected extraordinary bills. The vast majority of things in life are however, expected. Nothing is new under the sun. The overwhelming debt of the world increases costs. Additionally, debt temporarily tricks most people into thinking they have more than they actually do. I think more people would be interested in working harder for better jobs or opportunities if it wasn't so easy to get whatever you want by signing a piece of paper.

<comment><USER25> How do I rent a cheap apartment and buy a used car without a job? The job I need a car to drive to? What am I supposed to save, exactly? The allowance I get from my presumably rich parents?

In my case, my first job (at 14) required getting a ride to from a coworker with a car. Getting to university for my job working in the computer lab + my courses required either a car ride from a neighbor or 3 hours on the bus. After I moved away for my first salaried job, I needed a loan (thankfully a personal one and not from a bank - both of which are things many people don't have access to!) to cover my first month of expenses so I could move and actually start getting paid and building measurable savings, since the move already exhausted the savings I had left over after uni.

Money doesn't come out of thin air. Not everyone starts their working life with access to enough money to just buy a car (even used!) and rent an apartment.

<comment><USER70> >How do I rent a cheap apartment and buy a used car >without a job?...

You answered your question with the second paragraph...?

>In my case, my first job (at 14) required getting a ride to from a coworker with a car...

You chose to go to university in lieu of financial stability. That is how savings is not acquired. Save the money, then go to school. Buy things you can afford, including school.

>Money doesn't come out of thin air. Not everyone starts their working life with access to enough money to just buy a car (even used!) and rent an apartment.

Babies are born without jobs or means to clothe and shelter themselves, but we have what are called families, communities, and society. Each melds together to form a fabric of civilization that provides in one way or another the necessities of life. Start working as young as possible, save up, spend thrift.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Schools are closing. Advice on teacher's communication with students? - <AUTHOR> We've just been informed that my daughter's middle school is closing as of next week. Everything will be done online but teachers are scrambling at the last minute to setup various programs with which they are painfully unfamiliar. The two platforms to which they have defaulted are Edmodo and Remind. Are there any others with more robust features but relatively easy to set up for the nontechnical person. Are Slack and Discord appropriate technically for the middle school group? Recommendations for more involved solutions are also welcomed, including any for K-12 in general. <comment><USER2> I believe Zoom was made free for K-12 now, so at least for video conferencing this could be used, maybe in combination with Slack.

</comment><comment><USER3> Loom just announced that education accounts are free. Forever. [https://www.loom.com](https://www.loom.com)

</comment><comment><USER4> Gradefinity is a testing solution/micro LMS which accommodates online and in- person testing: [https://gradefinity.com](https://gradefinity.com)

It was primarily built to serve as a Scantron replacement, so classroom management features are limited to online testing and course announcements.

Full disclosure: I work a full-time job (at least for now, save for any layoffs) so support would be somewhat limited. I can also take down the paywall for as long as needed for any schools affected by Covid-19

Other free options:

\- Moodle (more technically involved, needs to installed/hosted by someone and setup can be challenging)

\- Canvas (I haven't personally used this, but it seems to be growing in popularity. From what I understand it is somewhat similar to BlackBoard)</comment>


Understanding the IoT Journey to design your serverless architecture - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/understanding-the-iot-journey-to-design-your-serverless-architecture-d41b2def56d7 <comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to hear your comments.</comment>