Show HN: I Built My Dad a SQL Consulting Page - <AUTHOR> http://sqlstanley.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, I just wanted to post this here and ask for feedback / advice.

My dad is a genius and has been working with SQL Server for almost as long as I've been alive. He recently left his last job and is considering doing consulting, so I built this page for him. I'd love any feedback on the copy or advice for him as he's getting started. I really want to see him succeed in this, and will do anything I can to help.

Thank you!

<comment><USER2> Impressive! Have you thought about charging for this as a service?

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't, at all. I assume you mean putting together consulting pages like this? Interesting idea.

<comment><USER2> > I assume you mean putting together consulting pages like this?

Indeed. I'd be interested, as I don't have time to put one together myself, and am an infrastructure engineer (and have no frontend experience).

<comment><AUTHOR> Huh, who knew.

Shoot me an email at aaron d francis at (googles email service)

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I'll have an email off to you tonight.

And regarding "Huh, who knew", while I won't go so far as to say "everything has value", if you can create value for someone else, you can charge for it.

I'd highly recommend you check out patio11's work on this: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/start-here-if-youre- new/](http://www.kalzumeus.com/start-here-if-youre-new/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great copy! My only issue is with the "How I Can Fix Your SQL Server Woes". Everything prior is the right level on the ladder of abstraction. This section needs to be more specific though since it is the last area besides the testimonials to handle potential client objections.

It needs to have actual use cases where your Dad's expertise helped these businesses. You can think of it as the bullet points in a resume. It may also help to include some kind of case study that formalizes your Dad's offering.

<comment><USER4> Speaking of copy, i would rephrase the sentence at very end: "Stanley developed a reporting utility to analyze and uncover possible issues with future clients before they became a problem."

... who became a problem? the future client? (or their data) :)

Also, whole page is 1.5MB, 1.3mb of that is a photo of subway rails on top which, while cute, adds zero value. Consider compressing or replacing that.

Great copy otherwise!

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated the image :)

Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a bit of a run-on sentence in the first paragraph - it could be revised to "You know that SQL is amazingly fast, and should be able to process massive amounts of data quickly..."

</comment><comment><USER6> I like it, good luck. Couple of things to add:

\- where are you based? I'm guessing UK based purely on the railway station image, but other countries might well use similar constructions :-)

\- does your Dad want to do onsite or remote? I'm guessing the enterprises most likely to engage him might insist on onsite

\- does your Dad want to work on projects, or is it exclusively short term troubleshooting he's keen on?

<comment><USER7> >\- where are you based? I'm guessing UK based purely on the railway station image, but other countries might well use similar constructions :-)

Dallas/Fort Worth Area according to Linkedin

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks good... well-written also</comment>


When CSS modules overlap - <AUTHOR> http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/one-module-or-two

<comment><USER2> Blog posts like this remind me how badly CSS needs to catch up to where preprocessors like Less and SCSS are at.

I read things like this:

        Just because your menus and your buttons share the same border radius
        and font size doesn't mean those styles should be
        abstracted away into some third class that gets
        applied to both elements.

and want to shout out: "Just use a mixin!"

<comment><AUTHOR> From their other writings i assume the author uses pre-processors but they also practice a form of object-oriented CSS, which is concerned with the final compiled CSS.

Mixins are great but they can still compile to overly repetitious CSS. Even with mixins, you still have to think about and decide on the structure and how much repetition should be in your CSS.</comment></comment>


The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/09/movies/the-25-best-films-of-the-21st-century.html <comment><USER2> Being less than a fifth way through the 21st Century, I would say this one is a bit premature

</comment><comment><USER3> Can't even view article without always jumping to top. Must be one of those annoying paywall features.</comment>


Ask HN: Is Your Webapp in an App Store? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> It is not 100% related but I have a premium whiteboard application on Chrome Web Store for $3.99. The volume is relatively small in comparison to folks at Apple App Store, I assume it's because many people barely know about Chrome Web Store yet. My sales figures: <http://ohboard.com/blog/10-sales- in-2-weeks/>

Though, I suggest you adding your web app to Chrome Web Store since it will not take you more than few hours and it will bring you users straight.

</comment><comment><USER3> Shopify = Well worth it. A significant amount of new signups come from Shopify. Great support & communication.

Google Enterprise = Not worth it, whatsoever. The process is horrible (it took quite a while to understand the issues for denial because of the template answers). Definitely a - ROI for us.

Feel free to email me for more details..

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Are you marketing your webapp in an app store (Google Chrome, Mozilla)? What are your results, lessons learned, and how has your experience been? Is it worth it, and should the rest of us consider doing this?</comment>


Fact-Check Yourself Before You Fact-Wreck Yourself - <AUTHOR> http://transom.org/2017/fact-check-fact-wreck/ <comment><USER2> Editing the article to remove some of the extraneous information would have made it easier to understand.</comment>


SXSW Marketing on a budget. #puppykissingbooth - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/so-fetch/sxsw-2015-b12951c57350

<comment><USER2> Way better than demonstrating against robots or driving around with a vinyl wrap on your car. You should go bigger next year.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ya it was a last minute effort. I think it had the potential to be really big and fun. People came to us. Thats a hard thing to have happen at SXSW.</comment></comment>


Hacking Frequent Flyer Programs (video) - <AUTHOR> http://anarchogeek.com/2011/03/24/ignite-oscon-2010-hacking-frequent-flyer-programs/

<comment><USER2> I remember when 'flybuys' first came out in Australia they had neglected to handle cases where goods were returned. Trampoline sales (and returns) went through the roof!

</comment><comment><USER3> Flying to Thailand and spending an entire week taking $18 flights back and forth between two cities seems like a pretty incredible cost to pay for First Class seats for a year.

I suppose if I was a consultant and flew every week, I might feel differently, but I was pretty surprised at how much (in non monetary units) you have to pay to get "cheap" upgrades.

<comment><USER4> I watched a documentary about this, and the guy that discovered this deal employed 8 or 10 locals to fly this route for 8-10 hours a day. He then got a call from the ATO, or some department similar because that was a common drug route, and the agent interrogating him asked him to set him up with it too!

<comment><USER3> You can get frequent flyer points even if you're not the one in the seat? I always thought that points weren't transferrable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been looking in to this recently and the point he makes about flying crazy routes to get extra miles is a little off. It may work for some airlines, but I know for others you earn miles for how far your start and end points are apart from each other, not how long your route actually was.

So if you're flying Los Angeles to Seattle, but have a layover in Miami, you would only earn the miles that someone flying Los Angeles to Seattle would.

<comment><USER6> Interesting, but this isn't true for any of the major US carriers (e.g, UA/CO, AA, DL), so I don't think it undermines his presentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cool - this is exactly what we're working on over at mileagebrain.com.

It is a system, and it can be hacked - I figured it quite likely that the hacker crowd would be interested in this (like I am).

<comment><USER8> And, once hacked, the airlines will plug the hole you're exploiting and there goes (part of) your business model.

Is building a business on a loophole that can easily be plugged wise?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know what kind of credit score ding one would take for opening and canceling cards (as suggested in the video)?

<comment><USER10> Credit scoring is relative and the magnitude for which most actions affect different people can vary significantly. However, directionally speaking, you may see a negative effect on your score from "churning" cards due to the following:

1) Lowering your average age of accounts. All else equal, if you have 2 credit cards open, one that you've had for 8 years and one that you've had for 6 years, the average age would obviously be 7. If you proceed to open a dozen airline cards in one year (regardless of whether you close them or not), your average age would plummet and could negatively impact your score.

2) Each time you apply for credit or a loan, a "hard inquiry" shows up on your credit report and can negatively impact your score. The scoring system is designed to account for multiple inquiries in a short period of time to allow people to shop around for a mortgage or auto loan by grouping them as one inquiry (as long as they are done in a 30-45 day period). This is not the case for credit or store card applications.

3) In addition to simply applying for credit, having numerous recently open accounts and newly available credit is also perceived as a risk and can lower your score.

The above being said, you may or may not experience a significant hit on your score through "churning." Don't assume that because someone else did it without any negative impacts that the same will be true for you. If you will be applying for a mortgage in the near future, I would advise against it. For everyone else, YMMV.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most folks who churn already have a mortgage or some don't care about maintaining a really high credit score. I was mostly talking about what you can do, what people do, not what you maybe should do.

American Airlines and Citicards right now will give you between 75,000 and 100,000 miles for opening a new card. That's a free round trip business class ticket to europe/asia/south america. $10,000 in flights for opening a card.

Mostly people churn to try and get life time status, it's how people get status without BIS, Butt In Seat miles flown.

I personally get status mostly by flying crazy routes, Uruguay to South Africa via New York and London. I also focus on purchasing tickets which will earn me maximum miles, but for flights i'd fly anyway.</comment></comment></comment>


Booking.com – Annoying yet a Genius Experience (by Ori Feldstein) - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bookingcom-annoying-yet-genius-experience-ori-feldstein/ <comment> looper-life Had an unpleasant one years ago. Just too much of everything on this page, you get lost so fast. And then the weird pricing, if in EUR and US Dollar. It has many many options, but not really user friendly.</comment>


Yahoo Groups to remove all content December 14 - <AUTHOR> https://help.yahoo.com/kb/groups/SLN31010.html <comment><USER2> I have a group I still care about. Here's how I'm archiving it:

        git clone firstname.lastname@example.com:andrewferguson/YahooGroups-Archiver.git
        python archive_group.py <group-name>

See [https://github.com/andrewferguson/YahooGroups- Archiver](https://github.com/andrewferguson/YahooGroups-Archiver) and [https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups)

<comment><USER3> trying this alternative: [https://github.com/csaftoiu/yahoo-groups- backup](https://github.com/csaftoiu/yahoo-groups-backup)

<comment><USER4> I tried this long time back. It requires a mongodb instance. I was not happy about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is horrible.

Some Yahoo Groups must be still active as mailing lists, or at least an archive for some niche communities, and they have irreplaceable, valuable information. I don't know other groups, but I know the Tektronix oscilloscope group (TekScopes) has been on Yahoo for a decade, and it's often the only source of information about vintage Tektronix oscilloscopes that dated back to the 1960s, some were former engineers with firsthand experience who can help to fix your scope or identify a replacement part, and the mailing list archive has a lot of lost knowledge that cannot be found elsewhere.

Well, fortunately TekScopes migrated to Groups.io in recent years, which is good. But just think about other groups...

<comment><USER6> I've seen several fandom wikis recently which sourced things to Yahoo Groups comments from the creators. Presumably those statements will be lost forever soon unless someone spots those things and archives them.

In the present, it feels a bit silly to mourn random posts from writers and webcomic creators as a serious loss. But when I consider the impact of past artists' letters and journals (e.g. Tolkien), it feels rather different. Some of these silly things will turn into real academic and historical sources if only they survive.

<comment><USER5> > _I 've seen several fandom wikis_

Internet subculture surfing and archaeology is my favorite hobby, I do it for fun, not for researches. I have seriously considered quit software engineering and move to social science, but it will remain as a hobby.

I've spent a long time browsing alt.folklore.computers and Usenet FAQs from early Usenet archives, or reading the long-deleted 4chan posts from Bibliotheca Anonoma [0], a repository of history and folklore from Something Awful, 2channel, 4chan, and looking up and laughing at memes that nobody remembers. Or read the early writings and thoughts of online personalities long forgotten.

The biggest frustrating in my exploration is meeting a dead link that hasn't been archived by archive.org, if it occurs, all bets are off, the journey ends officially. By erasing a webpage, parts of the collective history and culture is thereby removed.

I've also seen the death of endless small communities due to changes of circumstances, usually without a warning and happens overnight.

The lesson is that we should donate to archive.org today, just click here. [https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

[0] [https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon](https://github.com/bibanon/bibanon)

<comment><USER7> Web archaeologists, that seems fun, necessary, and something way cool in 10 years from now

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It gets better... [facepalm]

From Twitter:

      Today it was announced that Yahoo! Groups is
      shutting down, and taking with it a piece of
      critical national infrastructure:
      the Oftel Yahoo Group which is used for
      managing UK phone number assignments.
      Yes, really: See Ofcom's website

[https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/56646/s...](https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/56646/simwood.pdf)

Original tweet: [https://twitter.com/erincandescent/status/118458732359973683...](https://twitter.com/erincandescent/status/1184587323599736837)

<comment><USER9> From what I understand, it will still work as a mailing list platform, just everything on the web will shut down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Anything you post on the internet will be there forever" meme is becoming less true these days. Closed gardens that get shutdown without any notice, dead links run rampant, full reliance on cloud vendors for data storage.

<comment><USER11> I don't think the meme was ever supposed to mean it's safe to rely on the internet to preserve your data. Instead, it means you should never assume you have the power to delete data once it's out there.

<comment><USER12> Funny how this is cutting both ways. If you want it gone, expect to be disappointed... and if you want it preserved, expect to be disappointed.

<comment><USER13> An alternative formulation is that if you want it gone, just wait, while if you want it preserved, save it yourself.

<comment><USER14> That's what I tell myself as I pirate everything online. Couldn't afford to preserve everything by buying it. The only way to guarantee preservation, personally, is to save it personally.

<comment><USER15> Even if you could afford to buy everything you care about, much of it is only legally available through DRM which limits or downright removes your capacity to ensure the availability of your copy to you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Seeing this made me donate a small sum to the Internet Archive, maybe you (dear reader) want to do it too? [https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

<comment><USER17> If one is able and willing, a monthly recurring donation helps them budget for the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Don't know if it's still true, but i heard once the the UK phone number portability system was run on a yahoo group.

(a quick google shows the rumors were true.. [https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/56646/s...](https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/56646/simwood.pdf))

<comment><USER19> As an email mailing list, the Yahoo Group will continue to work. The website functionality is what's being lost.

<comment><USER20> Not trying to spam.

I'm offering a service that will extract all the yahoo group data from both private/public yahoo groups data for a fee.

My service: Includes \- Public groups backup \- Private groups extraction (will require admin credentials for the account) \- Extraction formats include excel, csv and html

Not Included in the backup \- Importing to new platform \- Data Translation/Data cleaning \- Additional post backup requests

Total cost: \- Full backup $500

Payment details: \- $250 for the first installment. \- $250 after the last sample excel file is sent

After the first payment I will start work. Once I have completed the data backup, I will send a excel file with 10% of the final backup file as verification of my work. I will send the file once the final $250 payment is complete.

If your interested, please contact me at email@example.com

\- oran c

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> [http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2848)

9 years later and still spot on. Just waiting for the day they "sunset" Yahoo! Mail and delete everything.

<comment><USER22> Yahoo Mail already recycles inactive accounts after 12 months. So if you haven't logged in for a year, they'll unsubscribe you from all the mail they can find in your inbox and delete all your mail, then let someone else sign up with your username, receive password reset emails for your accounts, etc.

<comment><USER23> dude, what? That's pretty bad... Nice way to "recover" old accounts on various sites, I guess, eh? Jeez...

<comment><USER24> fastmail.com recycles accounts too once you stop paying.

<comment><USER25> Somehow, I got upset at the thought of Yahoo! wiping accounts, but not of FastMail recycling accounts. I have some weird psychology going on there. Somehow I have the expectation that a free service would keep my stuff for me indefinitely, but not that a business would when I stop paying.

Do you know if they recycle immediately or do they give some time to catch up on payment?

What would suck is if there are services that don't allow you to change your email, which might be used to identify yourself to their services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> About a decade ago I archived many Yahoo Groups I liked with yahoo2mbox. No idea if there are any similar scripts now.

I tried using hypermail to convert some of the mbox files into HTML so I could post them online, but for some reason hypermail doesn't seem to work on any of them. Thunderbird reads the files fine, though. If anyone has any ideas about why, let me know. I could even provide a sample mbox file if you email me (address at website linked in my HN profile).

The worst part is that there's one private Yahoo Group that I never was able to get access to that apparently was important in a hobby I've participated in. I guess that one's going to the bit bucket...

Edit: Archiveteam has information about other archiving programs: [https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups)

<comment><USER27> If you can read them in Thunderbird, sometimes that's all it takes. I had to save a friend's soon-to-deleted university account. I had another IMAP account also configured Thunderbird. I was able to drag and drop from the soon-to- deleted account into sub-folders of the IMAP account.

<comment><USER26> If I understand you right, you're suggesting that I get Thunderbird to process the mbox file by moving it into another folder. Reasonable idea, as hypermail seems to work on mbox files generated by Thunderbird. I'll give that a shot if the solution posted by jefftk doesn't pan out: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21272524](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21272524)

Looks like this Python script can generate HTML files, so no need to use hypermail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's the point of Yahoo at all anymore? Finance? I am at a loss of what it is they still even do.

<comment><USER29> Not sure about how the rest of the company does, but in the iOS App Store, the Gmail app has 147K reviews and Yahoo Mail has 2.1M reviews. I think that's a decent proxy to tell us that Yahoo Mail is _hugely_ popular still.

<comment><USER30> Note that app developers can choose to "reset" their reviews whenever they publish a new release, so those numbers might not be representative of the number of users each has.

<comment><USER31> The number of reviews can also depend heavily on whether and how often the app asks a user to review it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Archive team[1] has some tools for archiving groups (if you've got some you care about.)

[1] [https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!_Groups)

<comment><USER33> Thanks for the link.

I'm into hardware synthesizers and there was a lot of groups exchanging patches, utilities, fixes, repair tips, mods and what not in these groups, a LOT of extremely useful information is going to be lost, unfortunately.

This is a terrible news.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is what I fear will happen some day to Stack Overflow (and other members of the Stack Exchange network), with HN, and with Reddit.

There's too much great content in private hands.

<comment><USER35> Stack exchange puts their data dumps into the Internet Archive [1]. Others have done the same for HN and Reddit. I'm slowly archiving all of Imgur and Reddit's image hosting system. ArchiveTeam is typically on top of these sorts of things though, unless a major web property goes dark unexpectedly.

[1] [https://archive.org/download/stackexchange](https://archive.org/download/stackexchange)

<comment><USER36> > archiving all of Imgur and Reddit's image hosting system

that's a huge task? where do you have funding for that?

<comment><USER6> Archive Team routs its collected data to the Internet Archive, with tools that I believe any individual could apply independently. As far as storage, apparently the Internet Archive has a $10M budget, which will go quite a long way if you accept slow or even offline storage for the content.

But I'm still not sure how an individual would extract the images fast enough. Archive Team's largest project was ~1.5 petabytes of Google+. In _2012_ , Imgur had 300M images uploaded, which at 5MB per image would be 1.5PB. Simply keeping up with daily throughput would be an enormous undertaking, much less digging out all of the historical content.

<comment><USER37> Given the fact 10 years ago Y! Groups had over 4 Petabytes of data this might be a record for them

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The writing has been on the wall for years. I use Yahoo Groups for several local community organizations and features would just randomly break for weeks at a time. There was zero support from Yahoo; it's obvious they no longer had any engineering resources assigned.

Is Google Groups the only practical alternative now? (Some people don't have Facebook accounts so that's not an option.)

<comment><USER39> Or just an email list Depending on your needs. Though SPAM has made that harder without a real commercial service.

<comment><USER40> Spam isn't really a problem for email lists you have to sign up for unless you have a really large number of subscribers. Spammers need zillions of addresses to make it worth their while to do anything.

It isn't a problem at all for closed lists...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> So Yahoo doesn't do their directory any more, they don't do groups, and they don't have their own search engine. Why are they still keeping the lights on?

<comment><USER42> Yahoo Finance. Yahoo Sports (including Fantasy and there's also Rivals which isn't under Yahoo banner). Yahoo News. Yahoo Mail. Yahoo Search isn't their own but it's still decently widely used when comparing it to everyone outside Google and Baidu.

The Yahoo overall domain and site is still a top 10 visited worldwide site. I doubt it'll drop out of the top 20-25 for a while especially if you exclude porn sites.

Yahoo combined with AOL is still a top 5 web advertising company. Google, FB are clearly ahead. Amazon is pulling ahead. Microsoft is there. Then it's mostly relatively speaking smaller operations like Verizon Media rounding out the rest that have close to or above 1% share.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The announcement is confusingly worded, but if I'm parsing that right, Yahoo intends to nuke _everything_ except the ability to mail a defined bunch of people from Groups? So no more web UI with message history, much less attachments, files, etc.

</comment><comment><USER23> Pretty sad news. I get the feeling that, in general, no company wants to give users a way to share free-form content and have ownership over that content. Every new "social media" platform that pops up allows sharing only a very strictly-defined set of data, shared only in a limited way.

A lot of the open-ended nature of sharing on the web has gone by the wayside, while extremely narrowly-focused sharing methods take their place.

Flickr for example feels like some kind of relic, a holdover from an earlier time, where you can actually _join groups_ and share photos (incl. metadata!) in there and have discussions in those groups. I'm very thankful it still exists, and I dread the day it is shut down.

I used to spend a ton of time browsing Flickr groups related to my interests (R.I.P. "Macintosh" group!) as it was a perfect way to find great photos and some interesting discussion you cannot find elsewhere. I've tried to do the same on Instagram over the years, and it's just not the same. Browsing everyone who tagged their stupid coffee photo #macintosh is not even close to the same experience, and sharing a conversation with people is simply not possible in that context.

Not sure what else to say. It's just another casualty of the web I grew up with. The web I watch slowly disappear. :\

<comment><USER44> Of course no company wants to, because more money is made through a combination of online targeted advertising and data mining. This of course has encouraged walled gardens. Since this is where the money is, this becomes where the marketing is and where the effort to capture new users through friendly methods and appearances are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's amazing to believe at one point, this used to be the de facto source of a lot of the information I would search for on the net. Oh how the times have changed.

RIP Yahoo Groups

</comment><comment><USER46> The last traces of tech-centric Internet are being done away with... Only the ad-ridden cesspool remains. Sigh

<comment><USER47> Dunno if I'd call Yahoo! Groups "tech-centric."

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> There goes a lot of collective history... I hope archive.org is able to snapshot it.

</comment><comment><USER49> Why does Yahoo always shut down their most useful products? They shut down Yahoo Boss Geolocation services, which at the time was among the most accurate geolocation services (look up an address, and get a latitude/longitude position). Besides Google which was more accurate, but had a restrictive license on their API, it was the best out of all we tested.

</comment><comment><USER50> Back around 2000, I used yahoo groups a ton. Good times, now most of those groups (synthesizers) are on Facebook.

<comment><USER51> I really dislike how so many groups are now Facebook based. I miss being able to have emails from groups. Some were important enough that they went to my inbox, some had specific folders so I could check them when I needed. And my email is something that's already a part of my life. It's so much less efficient to use Facebook groups.

<comment><USER50> I agree. I have had a folder in gmail for synthesizers for probably 15 years now. I am able to research topics this way and it feels fabulous.

Facebook being so closed is a real problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Is there any value left in Yahoo!'s services at this point? This is a genuine question.

<comment><USER53> Yahoo missed the boat in terms of their real asset, which was identity.

Microsoft, Google and Facebook ran with it. The rest of Yahoo is just an irrelevant husk.

<comment><USER47> They also had a friend network in Yahoo! Messenger, but no one was able to turn that into a true social network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> They killed off all of the chat rooms on a mid-December as well. In fact, December 14, 2012. Curious. Watching Yahoo wither slowly over the course of so many years is fascinating in a morbid sense.

I am told that they had some very interesting technological endeavors, but this was not sufficient to save them, apparently. One clue has been watching their home page and the frantic amounts of "partnering" they've done, to the extent that they pushed much of it even out to the chat clients. That isn't the whole of it, but it does seem to point to a kind of desperation on their part.

</comment><comment><USER55> Based on the yahoo post Groups is not going away, they are just disabling all the features except the ability to be a web only no email private group forum. Previously you could upload files to common areas, have polls, subscribe by email. The groups will still be there, but will be much less useful for many people. However the functionality will be similar to say here, people can create accounts and post messages.

Disabling links is unclear. Each Groups I think can have a list of links to things, but maybe they are saying they intend to filter all posts to remove any url references?

<comment><USER56> It seems like email is staying, too.

<comment><USER55> It's weird because it says "Email Updates", "Message Digest" and "Message History" will go away.

As I understand it, email updates is when you get the emails sent to you from the list, message digest sends several at once rather than one at a time, but what is message history? Is that the archives on the web site? So you can be invited, you can join, you can send emails, but no one can receive them and there's no archive of them apparently? That can't be it. Their description of what is happening is completely unclear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> There seems to be a general trend from public to private / limited-group discussion platforms, at least among major providers. See also the G+ shutdown.

Any Yahooligans able to comment?

<comment><USER43> I'd posit Reddit as a counterexample. Discovering and participating in extremely niche group communities has never been easier.

<comment><USER57> Reddit is comparatively (revenues, staff) tiny.

Large firms are behaving in more risk-averse ways, it seems.

At least some are.

<comment><USER43> As of last year, Reddit is (was?) the 3rd-most popular site in the US, surpassing Facebook.

[https://wersm.com/sorry-facebook-reddit-is-now-the-third- mos...](https://wersm.com/sorry-facebook-reddit-is-now-the-third-most-popular- site-in-the-us/)

Although today's rankings place it at #6, just behind Facebook at #5 and Yahoo at #4 (srsly?).

[https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US](https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US)

<comment><USER57> By users and visits, yes. By revenues and valuation, no.

Users and visits pose little loss risk. Revenues do.

[https://www.feedough.com/reddit-make-money-reddit- business-m...](https://www.feedough.com/reddit-make-money-reddit-business- model/)

2019 Revenues: ~$100 million.

[https://marketingland.com/reddit-us-ad-revenues-could- top-10...](https://marketingland.com/reddit-us-ad-revenues-could- top-100m-this-year-amid-added-focus-on-ad-products-258969)

FB 2018 revenues: $55 billion.

<comment><USER43> Your original post was about a trend of users moving to private communities. I don't see why revenues and valuation matter for this?

<comment><USER57> No, my original comment was about _major providers_ shifting to non-public channels.

G+, or its G-Suite successors, still exists, but as closed networks. Similarly Yahoo Groups.

In looking at G+ Community size, open vs. closed participation was a huge factor in membership. Simply open vs. closed (mod approved) membership had a substantial impact:

[https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%...](https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Migrating_Google%2B_Communities#Google.2B_Community_Characteristics_and_Membership)

<comment><USER43> So you're arguing that Reddit is not a "major provider", but G+ is/was...?

<comment><USER57> Yes.

As I'd hoped I'd been sufficiently clear on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Yahoo Groups came from the acquisition of eGroups.com, one of the very early VC-backed pure internet services. Sold to Yahoo for $432m (in stock, sadly for them).

<comment><USER59> TBF Yahoo stock performed very well at some points since then so it might have worked out well for them if they sold at the right time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Not that this is a the best example of this, and I'm asking this as an honest question: at what point should we be OK with data being ephemeral and legacy services dying? With things like Yahoo! Groups, AIM, etc., the world has mostly moved on, and while these announcements bring back some memories, I don't necessarily see them as a huge loss, either.

</comment><comment><USER60> Does anyone have any suggestions for a free alternative? In an ideal world I'd be looking for a paid one but I'm a member of a community group with no real affiliation, so there's no mechanism by which everyone could chip in. Plus, the obvious free alternative is a Facebook group. I'd like to suggest an alternative if I can.

<comment><USER61> A couple old groups that I'm a part of have migrated off of yahoo to [https://groups.io](https://groups.io) I think it's a step up in usability and interface.

<comment><USER62> What about forum software like Discourse or Flarum [https://flarum.org](https://flarum.org)? However Discourse is a bit expensive.

In addition, I'm creating a Pay-what-one-wants alternative to FB gropus and Meetup and email lists ... It's sort of a cross between StackOverflow, Slack, HackerNews: [https://www.talkyard.io](https://www.talkyard.io) (open source).

What do you like the most about Groups.io? if I may ask

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> To do this without providing any tool for exporting data is proof of a lack of good engineering culture.

</comment><comment><USER64> Ah snap. I have very fond memories of the HP DE100C Linux based console mp3 player group helping me troubleshoot problems back in the day, even an HP employee hooking me up with a new remote. It's sad to see them shut down.

</comment><comment><USER65> trying to use yahoo-group-archiver,

hard coded some data into the yahoo.py file :

cookie_Y = '...'

cookie_T = '...'

and later assigning them :

        args.cookie_y = cookie_Y
        args.cookie_t = cookie_T

before calling the function YahooGroupsAPI

and using my username / password

getting these error messages :

logging in...

Exception raised on uri: [https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v1/groups/alesis- ion/messages](https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v1/groups/alesis-ion/messages) {"ygError":{"hostname":"gapi1.grp.bf1.yahoo.com","httpStatus":500,"errorMessage":"Internal error: UDB Failed","errorCode":1001}} ERROR: Couldn't download message; 403 Client Error: Forbidden for url: [https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v1/groups/alesis- ion/messages](https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v1/groups/alesis-ion/messages) Exception raised on uri: [https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v2/groups/alesis- ion/files](https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v2/groups/alesis-ion/files) {"ygError":{"hostname":"gapi15.grp.bf1.yahoo.com","httpStatus":500,"errorMessage":"Internal error: UDB Failed","errorCode":1001}} Traceback (most recent call last): File "yahoo.py", line 485, in <module> archive_files(yga) File "yahoo.py", line 154, in archive_files file_json = yga.files() File "c:\Users\ITD\Documents\Python Scripts\yahoo groups 3\yahoogroupsapi.py", line 96, in get_json raise e requests.exceptions.HTTPError: 403 Client Error: Forbidden for url: [https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v2/groups/alesis- ion/files](https://groups.yahoo.com/api/v2/groups/alesis-ion/files)

tried it on another group, same result.

Has someone encountered these messages ?

</comment><comment><USER66> Im confused. Does this mean Yahoo Groups is shutting down?

<comment><USER67> That's what I thought too, but it looks like it's just getting restricted to private groups and disallowing media/content uploads.

It's probably to push people off so they can shut it down later.

<comment><USER68> All messages will stop on Yahoo groups (last one of the bullet points.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I wonder how much this has to do with GDPR and other data regulations? Presumably Yahoo Groups has too little activity to be worth keeping in an active state. But even in a static, archival state, Yahoo would still be obligated to fulfill data requests for it, right?

<comment><USER37> Too little activity ?

When I worked on it back in 2010 the sheer volume of email sent was staggering.

The issue with groups always was and always will be monetizing it.

<comment><USER69> Fair enough. But what is it these days compared to Facebook, Reddit, Google Groups, or even Tumblr? Yes I know that the latter platform is suited for types of content much different than Yahoo Groups, but I'm thinking Verizon cares mostly about it in terms of engagement metrics (userbase, page views, potential ad space, etc).

<comment><USER37> Keep in mind groups is 18 years old. It started as an email list and I can tell you we had 12 email servers and they sat at around 2k message a second... steady. We didn't even alert until they hit 20k in the queue.

The photos in Groups was also an interesting thing. We once had a "hacker" create groups called shard1 shard2 .. etc etc. He put his porn in there and deep linked to it. We found out when we got the internet bill for the overseas bit. We were pumping out 8GB a second to China and didnt even notice the traffic until we got the bill :)

Yes, I am sure Facebook/ reddit has eclipsed it by far in data sets now, however the volume in groups isnt matched by many other.

When I left they had ~4 Petabytes of data... around 8 years ago

<comment><USER69> Very interesting context, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> Geocities all over again.. Why can't they go into readonly mode? Or even a downloadable archive? How much storage could it possibly be?

</comment><comment><USER71> It's situations like this that the idea of a 'permanent web' like IPFS resonates.

</comment><comment><USER72> what could be the reason ?

<comment><USER32> Posts are down to their lowest levels since the 90s (if I'm reading this graph right).[1] Also, someone at Y! probably figured out how much it cost to run the infrastructure and maintain the code.

[1] [https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=File:Yahoo_group...](https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=File:Yahoo_groups_post_date.png)

<comment><USER68> That graph is biased in that it only covers discovered groups and only half have been discovered (older groups are likely more likely to have been discovered). Assuming it's NOT biased something happened in the 2nd half of 2014 to destroy traffic to Yahoo Groups.

<comment><USER73> > Assuming it's NOT biased something happened in the 2nd half of 2014 to > destroy traffic to Yahoo Groups.

That is the time when Yahoo! Groups fucked up their DMARC implementation:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.support.thun...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.support.thunderbird/lZoquwntw_M)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Paging /r/datahoarder

</comment><comment><USER75> Ignore the below; I was wrong.

~~Note that list content isn't going away as the headline implies, but instead all the files uploaded to groups.~~

<comment><USER76> What exactly is going away and how do we know? There's contradictory information and it's confusing.

Under "what features will go away?" it includes: links, conversations, email updates, message digest, message history. That sounds like more than just files uploaded to groups.

<comment><USER75> Yah, I'm striking my comment. Saying "no longer able to upload content"\-- I assumed it was limited to files.</comment></comment></comment>


Steve Jobs: the difference between superb programmers vs. average ones is 25:1 - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1836987/steve-jobs-the-payoff-of-a-great-employee <comment><USER2> Steve wasn't exactly a man of science. He pulled that number out of his ass and everyone here seems to think it smells great! Why not 100:1?

I'm pretty sure you can find 100x spread in developer compensation at Google. The ones who got in early vs. the ones who came after the IPO. They got in early because they were amazing, not because they were lucky. Not.

<comment><USER3> I mean what would Steve Jobs know. He surely hasn't met many decent developers managing the Macintosh or NeXT teams or as CEO of an IT company with 100K+ employees.

Did it ever occur to you that 25:1 number might come from being in a unique position to compare the relative output of multiple engineering teams of similar sizes at Apple ?

<comment><USER2> As I said, why not 10:1 (a commonly repeated, equally unsupported ratio) 50:1 or 100:1? So no, the 25:1 number came from being in the unique position to spout precise-sounding, unsubstantiated numbers in an environment where nobody would argue with him. What did occur to me is there are no significant digits in that number.

<comment><USER4> Being pedantic, but I definitely have seen developers with zero productivity: so everyone else productive is infinitely better...

Excepting, there are also programmers and teams with negative productivity - work out the ratio!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My boss tried to pull this quote out when he was trying to justify his defense against me saying we need to unit test.

His question to the developers was "why does it seem like when we make small changes things seem to break?"

My answer "we do not test, we need to cultivate a culture of testing. It takes some upfront effort, but it saves in the long run."

His response "that is what separates average programmers from rockstars..."

I cut him off because I knew he was going in the wrong direction, "yeah, the good ones unit test."

Him: "Well you should be able to know that if you make a change, it will have an affect on everything else, so you should test that out manually"

Me: "Unit tests cover every possible case that we can think of programatically. We can easily push a button and see if my change broke some obscure piece of code somewhere."

Him: "The difference between ...."

I tuned him out and lost a little respect. Oh, we develop a mess of a php app.

<comment> eric-hu Your boss must be a good developer right? So he should be able to manually go through the code of 25 developers and know what changes are going to affect everything else. If that seems naive, stupid or obviously unreasonable, this is what your boss is asking for, EXCEPT he's also asking you to produce code.

It's hard enough doing this with your own code, let alone collaborating with others. I'm taking the verbose route to say the same as the other replies:

Quit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the Jobs 25:1 people - Jean-Marie Hullot. A French Lisp Programmer who studied at INRIA under Gerard Huet. He invented Interface Builder.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marie_Hullot>

EDIT: For the backstory on Steve Jobs, NeXT, Jean-Marie Hullot, Interface Builder, Tim Berners-Lee, and the WWW this is a good read <http://fds.oup.com/www.oup.co.uk/pdf/0-19-286207-3.pdf>

<comment><USER3> I like Avie Tevanian (one of the original developers of Mach kernel and CSTO of Apple) and Dave Hyatt (architect of WebKit). Both have really helped change the industry.

<comment><USER2> I like Bill Atkinson, creator of QuickDraw and HyperCard. I don't debate that Steve Jobs was able to find and get the best work out of highly talented people, I just think the 25:1 ratio is nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This has long been known about the programmer/developer profession, that the standard deviation of performance between practitioners is extremely high compared to many other fields.

The more interesting part to me is why don't wages for this profession follow this spread. Except for the rare cases of striking it rich on equity, the compensation spread between mundane developers and excellent top notch ones with the same skill acronyms and seniority is 3-4x at best and that is probably an extremely generous estimate.

<comment><USER8> I think it's simply that code written to be 25x cleaner, shorter, and faster, will not bring 25x the revenue to the company. Coding skill is only one factor in the ultimate fate of a product.

A company I worked at has this business model where they recruit extremely cheap interns (mostly from France) and have them develop products. In their eyes it's not profitable to pay more for a better coder, since the quality of the final product doesn't have much impact on their bottom line; they sell to big business so there's no review site rating their products and clients don't talk to each other.

<comment><USER9> You can also be a 25x developer and have net-negative product designers and biz dev people on your team that completely negate or at least greatly attenuate the value you contribute.

Besides people, you also have the value of the solution as well. A top developer creator an overkill solution for a trivial problem doesn't create much value either. The value of a solution is proportional to the cost of the problem.

<comment><USER9> gahhhhhhhhh... I hate autocorrect. It results in typos that make you look like a non-native writer in the language and produces more interference in the mind of the reader, not less, because it's easier to read over a simple typo than incorrect diction.

"A top developer creator an overkill solution..." would have read better had whatever typo that had lead to "creator" instead of "creating" had remained in my original text.

At least red underlines instead of autocorrect highlights the error and prompts you to go back and choose the correct word (<\-- perfect example... while writing this previous sentence, "word" originally had a typo and was changed to "work")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> 95%'ish of every professional in every profession are just tired demotivated people who just wanna get whatever done and go back home. They'll just do the bare minimum that won't get them fired.

Programmers are just not an exception to this rule. Nothing to see here.

<comment><USER11> A good waiter will never be 25 times better than a bad waiter.

A fast construction worker will never be 25 times faster than a slow one.

Programming is fundamentally different.

<comment><USER12> > A fast construction worker will never be 25 times faster than a slow one.

I actually sort of doubt this. Fields like construction often require quite a bit on-site problem-solving and quick thinking, simply because making large physical objects stick together in an ordered way is fairly complicated. When you consider also that construction work is a team-oriented profession, it becomes imaginable that the right worker could make the whole team far more effective.

And actually, even the waiter example, I'm not sure. A great waiter makes the customer feel like an honored, highly-ranked guest of royalty. A bad one fills people with hatred for the restaurant and anyone involved in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This 25x thing correlates well with the "reality distortion field"

Also 250% of all statistics make 66% sense -5% of the time.

</comment><comment><USER14> Steve also says in this recording that he thinks the talent gap is only about 2:1 for hardware engineers. I'd like to hear from anyone in that field on whether or not they agree.

<comment><USER15> Really bad hardware engineers make very expensive, hard to test, shitty designs that fail intermittently. I think HOW horrible productivity comes out in HW is different than software.</comment></comment>


'Numerous' Adds Channels for Google Sheets, Tesla, and Events Like SpaceX Launches - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2015/02/25/numerous-google-sheets-tesla-celestial-events-channels/

<comment><USER2> Can't wait to have Numerous on the Apple watch... Is that in the plans?

<comment><USER3> Funny you should ask. Working on it as we speak!

<comment><USER2> Sounds like a great idea!</comment></comment></comment>


One Year After Steve Jobs: Apple's Evolution - <AUTHOR> http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/one-year-after-steve-jobs-apples-evolution <comment><USER2> Well said, John. I don't blame you for not doing the radio interview that night. It hit me a lot harder than I expected, as well. I realized the stuff that I'd used since I was about 10 years old was all influenced or even created by him. But mostly I was sad for him and his family -- here he had worked so hard for everyone else's benefit all his life, and never got to fully focus on or enjoy his family life. Sad.</comment>


Gource – A version control visualization tool - <AUTHOR> http://gource.io/ <comment><USER2> There are some interesting things that can be done with gource beyond version control. Here's someone using it to visualize OpenBSD pf(4) firewall logs!

[http://www.echothrust.com/blogs/monitoring-pf-logs- gource](http://www.echothrust.com/blogs/monitoring-pf-logs-gource)

</comment><comment><USER3> Even though Gource isn't new, it's fantastic software that people should be aware of!

</comment><comment><USER4> I wasted the whole day looking at the history of various repos. WARNING, this is addictive...

To install on Mac OX X, run:

        brew install boost glm glew sdl_image
        ./configure
        make

<comment><USER5> It's even easier than that:

        brew install gource

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone one know what type of tree diagrams these are? I'd love to generate a file system directory structure in that style of tree diagram

<comment><USER7> Force directed graphs. D3js has a solid implementation

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome tool and easy to get started. Made a quick vis of a hackathon I did last year. Recorded using this gist ([https://gist.github.com/qiaoxueshi/5910150](https://gist.github.com/qiaoxueshi/5910150))

[https://youtu.be/BLX764QP1oQ](https://youtu.be/BLX764QP1oQ)

</comment><comment><USER9> It is very easy to install this on Ubuntu 16.04.

apt-get install gource

Full instructions [https://www.devmanuals.net/install/ubuntu/ubuntu-16-04-LTS-X...](https://www.devmanuals.net/install/ubuntu/ubuntu-16-04-LTS- Xenial-Xerus/how-to-install-gource.html)

<comment><USER10> For Arch, it's just

        pacman -S gource

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have used it and it is awesome. Check out their Web server log visualizer.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is not new. I remember trying it 4 years ago.

<comment><USER13> Any impressions to share? Useful, pretty, neat but ... ?

<comment><USER14> Pretty neat, not that useful because non-interactive video visualizations rarely are. Also can be used to visualize other things. I've used it to show forum activity for example.

<comment><USER15> Non-interactive video visualizations were useful for decades before interactive ones became available, and still are when done well (which isn't as rare as you imply). They also reach a much wider audience.</comment></comment></comment></comment>