Google App Engine leaves preview, new pricing - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/enterprise/cloud/appengine/pricing.html <comment><USER2> The single most import reason that I like GAE is that it used to charge based on CPU usage, so that I could carefully optimize my web apps to reduce costs. This is also why I think cloud computing is a good thing: shared resources are generally efficiently used.

Now that GAE starts charging by instance-hours, however they are calculated, the drive to optimize is significantly reduced: I no longer have to worry about a web app's CPU usage if I have to wait for I/O anyway.

Some will say that's how we, as developers, should allocate our time to improve productivity, but the cloud platform as a whole just becomes a lot more wasteful.

And this change makes GAE much less appealing than AWS. If I'm gonna pay for instance-hours anyway, why not just launch some EC2 instances and kill them when I don't need them anymore? Sure it comes with admin costs, but at least I can migrate to another cloud provider much easier. Judging from the comments on this thread, migrating away from GAE seems very expensive, if possible at all.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't the perfect cloud platform be one that charges based on disk IO, disk space used, network IO, RAM space used, (Ram IO?,) and CPU used? Maybe there are other metrics I'm ignoring.

Someone should start making this.

<comment><USER4> <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing> been around since 2002, does automatic load-balancing, have most of the benefits of what people are calling "cloud-computing", makes no presumptions about language of choice, does MySQL, and is extremely competitively priced.

<comment><USER5> "makes no presumptions about language of choice"

Yes, but don't they do this by running everything as CGI scripts? That won't perform well.

<http://example72.nfshost.com/versions.php>

<comment><USER6> There's a 'pools beta' that runs your stuff in bsd jail. Worked well with mod_wsgi in my tests (I'm not using it in production though).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A key point seems to be:

""" The new pricing model charges are based on the number of instances you have running. This is largely dictated by the App Engine Scheduler, but for Python we will not be supporting concurrent requests until Python 2.7 is live. Because of this, and to allow all developers to adjust to concurrent requests, we have reduced the price of all Frontend Instance Hours by 50% until November 20th. """

Our app (python runtime) is going from about $9 a month to projected $270 a month, almost entirely due to frontend instance hours. I have to think that once python 2.7 is live and concurrent users != concurrent frontends, this will get waaay more reasonable.

<comment><USER7> Oh shit, and the $270 a month is _with_ the 50% discount:

"""The Frontend Instance costs reflect a 50% price reduction active until November 20th, 2011. Learn more about the price reduction and ways to reduce your costs permanently."""

So come winter, I'm looking at > $500 a month... here's hoping concurrent requests on the python runtime will make a huge difference, otherwise, sheesh.

<comment><USER8> you have time before the billing switches on to tune/adjust your application. check out the FAQ and tuning tips page. the prices are going up, but they are also changing, in that we're measuring things differently. most apps that are initially seeing a large multiplier are because of the latter effect, not the former. this is why we built and launched the side-by-side billing. (i'm on the GAE team)

<comment> buff-a Can you explain how on earth my app goes from 0.02 cpu-hours to 2.8 instance- hours?

Are you doing the "any part of an hour is billed as an hour" thing that EC2/Azure do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think it's unfortunate that GAE use the term instance-hour for billing, which is quite different from AWS instance-hour. GAE's instance-hour is process-instance-hour while AWS is machine-instance-hour.

The difference is quite important. In AWS, you can spin up dozens of processes in an instance. In GAE, the instance is the process. If the process is idle waiting for IO, you are still being charged. Spinning up more processes mean more instances running and more are charged.

In that sense, GAE's $0.08 per process-instance-hour is quite expensive compared to AWS's $0.085 per machine-instance-hour. "Single-thread" Python process needs multiple processes to handle multiple web requests which counted as multiple GAE instance-hours while only a single AWS instance-hour.

</comment><comment><USER10> The trouble with App Engine is that I'm now locked in to their API. They can raise prices and I have no real recourse unless I want to rewrite a _lot_ of code.

<comment><USER11> I was an early advocate of GAE but this is now my fear as well. When the new pricing was announced, the amount that they raised the service by seemed quite fair, but just the fact that it went up spooked me into being afraid of the fact that they could readjust the price at any time.

While I suspect they won't make it a habit of raising the price from here on out, the more I thought about it the more I've come to the conclusion that it makes sense to go with providers that use more standardized software stacks (despite how great not having to sysadmin is and the easy deployment from Eclipse to GAE), because that way I can take advantage of future competition of providers. If I go with GAE the costs to switchover become greater and greater the longer I'm there... so while they may never jack the price UP on me, they'll have little incentive to bring the price down due to increased competition.

<comment><USER8> we encourage you to look at appscale for app mobility. we're not interested in artificial lock-in from APIs. we're not that kind of a company. we're confident we can make the overall service superior. please note that we haven't changed the prices since we launched pricing, and GAE was in preview. that's an element to the notion of "preview". we're now taking it out of preview into a fully supported Google product. and part of that was to reprice so we have a sustainable business. after we announced the new pricing in May at I/O, we've actually seen our growth rate increase, since customers appreciate that we're committing to GAE.

<comment><USER12> AppScale deeply confuses me.

They seem to do a rare (once a year or so) push of whatever they've developed into a public source repo, and then just leave it there. No updates, no bug fixes, no community involvement, etc.

Their site looks like they're trying to sell me something, but there's no commercial product in evidence. And the whole thing seems to be done under the auspices of a university.

There's a link to their supposed development branch, bizarrely on launchpad instead of Google Code where they seem largely based, but it's empty.

I'm not really inclined to put time and effort into something whose model and motivation completely escapes and/or scares me.

<comment><USER13> We're very much graduate students and our testing cycle takes a lot of time away from doing research and publishing papers. We try to keep the main branch as stable as possible though for those who just want to get the latest and greatest. Our branches are pretty active and we do track issues/bugs and fix them, although you're right that we don't do so on our Google Code page. [https://code.launchpad.net/~appscale- maintainers/appscale/ap...](https://code.launchpad.net/~appscale- maintainers/appscale/appscale-main)

<comment><USER12> OK, that answers a hell of a lot of questions, thanks!

I also now note that there's a "Contribute" link at the very bottom of your main site.

If I may make a couple other suggestions:

* Fixing the "Development Branch" link on your page (it's in the "Download" menu) which confusingly points to this totally inactive URL: <https://code.launchpad.net/~cgb-cs/appscale/appscale>

* Making some sort of statement on the Google Code page about your development practices and the fact that the bleeding edge is on Launchpad. People like me go to a Google Code page expecting to see _the_ development site, complete with an active source tree, and get very confused when that's not what it really is.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for pointing that out. Updated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If Google had said from the beginning that their pricing was discounted for the preview, I would not have had a problem with this. But given that they didn't communicate this and that the cost of switching platforms is high, this feels more like a bait and switch tactic.

My cost is only increasing about 4x, but others in this thread are seeing 20-100x increases. Changes like this impact more than GAE -- this will make me hesitant to use any platform that I can't easily migrate away from.

</comment><comment><USER15> We (at bugsense) have about 500k requests per day and some of the are very intensive. Currently we pay $5.40 daily and it will go up to $22. So per month with the old pricing we ll be at $162, with the new pricing we ll up to $660. It's x4 increase and that makes it bit cheaper than EC2 for the same amount of data. If we subtract the administration cost it makes it cheaper. The old, cheap days are gone :( But still it compares well in comparison to other popular cloud solutions.

<comment><USER16> $22 daily after November? Without the 50% discount?

<comment><USER15> Yes without but there is a lot of space for improvement with better leverage of taskqueues and async datastore operations. We hope to reduce by 50% some some of the requests so that we spin out less instances. We also fine tuned a bit, check out our results: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2951217>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> About the huge cost increase people mention in the comments: New cost unit is IH (Instance Hour) and GAE python scheduler has a habit of revving up new instances aggressively. To lower costs one needs to lower Max Idle Instances and -maybe depending on the situation- increase Min Pending Latency, thus lowering the Instance count (and the cost).

With the price increase and very harsh cut down on API free-quotas (plus the absence of long expected SSL on custom domains) GAE no longer seems a good option for me :/

<comment><USER8> we've cut the free quotas from super-generous to just generous. we're still the only large service offer generic platform free quota with no time limit.

as for delay in SSL on custom domains, we're guilty as charged; we're not happy it's taking so long and we're working hard on it.

<comment><USER18> Costs for our app have just gone from $120 per month to $1200. Its a service we provide to users for free, we cant afford that level of hosting. That is a 10x price increase.

How many biz can get away with that sort of hike? This and how Google treats Android developers (shutting down forum, not responding to issues) is making me question why I bother building anything for your platforms.

I was on app engine from the start, I've sat though your DevFests, arranged hackathons, and told countless people they should use your platform. I've invested many hours learning your API. But this is it, its over, no more.

Anything but a tiny free app is going to cost the earth, if you want to scale use AWS or Heroku. If you are an outside developer trusting Google it will cost you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have an online store that I custom developed in Python hosted in App Engine.

I'm paying around $15 a month. With the new prices I would have to pay $450 a month.

Time to migrate :(

Any recommendations for a python hosting?

<comment><USER19> Might want to try out Heroku's Cedar Stack. It's been great so far.

<comment><USER20> Heroku currently supports Python, or is that something that is in the works? I can't find much on this...

<comment><USER21> I think it's still in the works. They don't mention it, but Heroku Cedar will happily reads and install requirements as defined in requirements.txt when you push to it. Server setup is just a simple Procfile calling whatever Python web server you want to use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow - According to their projections based on current usage, I'm seeing a 100x increase in my daily cost. I guess I will be migrating off of App Engine. I'm feeling pretty burned at this point.

<comment><USER8> some apps get high multiples because they're using resources that weren't counted before, or were counted differently; that's why we enabled side-by- side billing now (before we switch on billing). if you email me your appid (firstname.lastname@example.com) we can help. you should also review the FAQ and the tuning tips web page that we put together.

<comment><USER23> Could you define how high a "high multiple" is? 30x is too high, right? Is 3x too high?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> AWS: "We'll continue to cut our prices forever"

GAE: "Almost all applications will be billed more under the new pricing"

Pick one...

<comment><USER25> Well, they have said that this is the first and only price change to happen. They won't be increasing the price anymore after this.

<comment><USER26> Never is a long time, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm seeing going from $0 to around $1 per day (can be as low as $0.25), all of it for CPU hours. This can be seen in billing history.

That's obviously not something to be happy about but then again an argument can be made that the introductory free quota that Google gave was very generous.

This might give Go a push - as I understand it Go is the most efficient of the supported languages which should translate into less CPU hours => less money. On the other hand, other than template parsing/substitution, my code doesn't do any CPU intensive tasks. On the other hand, the CPU hrs might count the overall overhead of the platform, which for statically linked Go will be the smallest (both Python and Java have sizable runtimes that need to be initialized at startup - according to <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQtLRqqB-Kk>, Java runtime is especially bad in that regard (this is towards the end of the talk in the q&a part).

<comment><USER9> I don't think it's a matter of Python/Java being slow and GO is faster. It actually doesn't matter which language you pick. If your GO app is IO/network bound, you will be charged for the idle CPU hours in the new billing scheme.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Very disappointing. GAE for a while was for developers what Tumblr/WP.com/etc are for writers, a way to put an idea online cheaply & easily. The generous quotas made using the proprietary APIs worth it. Now it's just another PaaS.

Seems to me Google is competing in areas it'll never be really good at like social networks instead of using its core competency of running the world's biggest server farm.

</comment><comment><USER25> What the...

The cost of my app is going from $9 per month to $200 per month. This is ridiculous...

</comment><comment><USER29> I just read all of the comments and one thing that no one mentioned explicitly:

You can still use a free instance that is 6.5 hours a day, 1 gig of datastore, 1 gig each of incoming and outgoing bandwidth, etc. Low volume sites should easily be able to stay in the free zone.

Free instances had better have a low loading request time (e.g., for Java apps, use Objectify instead of JPA, etc.).

Assuming I understand the new billing correctly, I can get a paid plan for $9/month + $36/month for one reserved always on instance. I also get 24 hours/day of free on demand front end instances to handle a bit more traffic.

I think that a paid for plan still gets the other free quotas of a free plan and you pay each day for any use over each free limit. Is this right? It looks like you can have 1 always on FE instance, and 1 or 2 on demand FE instances, and a reasonable about of resource use for less than a $100/month.

<comment><USER30> I think that's the dumb part though. If you get one user per hour for 12 hours a day, you're still overflowing the "6.5 hour limit" (unless I'm misunderstanding everything).

I'd love to use GAE for the reproduceability of dev environment, but lock in, 10x+ price increases and a VERY obtuse (not honest) explanations of how pricing is measured and billed makes EC2 look much better. I'll need EC2 anyway since you can't run arbitrary binaries (ie: PDF conversion) on GAE.

<comment><USER31> You get 6.5 CPU hours free with the current model, you'll get 24 instance hours free with the new model.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I would see this as a move towards 'enterprise' (yes I know people here hate that word), but look at the url...

$9/app/month means that it doesn't really make sense for tiny hobby sites any more: it is comparable in cost to a tiny VPS host, and my VPS currently handles 19 domains.

The place where GAE makes most sense is the 'line of business' app that is basically just a set of forms backed by a database. Those kind of apps don't have any complex things going on that are going to require integration with existing code or custom server configuration: both places where the current crop of PaaS offerings risky right now.

Line of business apps currently require lots of manual labour from DBAs and IS, so paying $9/month to run the HR application is going to be a pretty good deal.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have one new app during design phase. The frontend part is going to be in GAE since I had done couple apps in GAE and familiar with it. A part of the backend will be in AWS because I need to run a custom 3rd party app. With the new pricing model, it doesn't make sense to run webapp in GAE. I'll redesign the thing to run the whole thing in AWS.

</comment><comment><USER33> The source of my disappointment is that basically, they couldn't figure out how to slice and dice page serving without dumping you with the cost of a full VM. I was hoping they were committing to researching how to make that work, so if you made an efficient application you never had to worry about the infrastructure. Now, the abstractions have leaked and we have to worry about VM's. Time to update my answer here: [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/64727/windows...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/64727/windows- azure-vs-amazon-ec2-vs-google-app-engine/64734#64734)

I guess the problem of really efficient web serving remains unsolved.

</comment><comment><USER34> I just sent some mail to my old colleagues in Windows Azure. If you're working on a cloud provider, a large one or a startup, you and your biz-dev/sales team should be out there actively trying to get people dissatisfied with GAE's announcement today (and from what I hear, that is a significant number).

</comment><comment><USER35> This pretty much confirms my reservations of investing in a closed stack. However, it's really a shame that Google didn't take the time to provide a clean migration path for people to take their apps out of the platform so they can scale up to a regular hosted or self-hosted application.

</comment><comment><USER36> App Engine seems like a great platform, but unfortunately it's a pain in the ass to switch away if you decide you want to. Unless I'm building a small/quick app I do not want to be 'locked in' to App Engine.

<comment><USER37> It's easier to switch away and not be locked-in if you develop your app using Python/Django (see my comment above).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Meanwhile, VPS and dedicated server providers are getting cheaper, faster and more competitive.

I'd imagine that the majority of the people on GAE have found that they don't actually need to scale as much as they thought when they signed up to it.

</comment><comment><USER39> The difference in features between the free and the paid ($9/app) plans are

1)Usage based pricing, 2) Infinitely scalable and 3) an SLA

</comment><comment><USER40> The biggest problem I see is that they charge per datastore operation, and last I saw they were defining each entity returned as an operation.

If you were building a social network or twitter clone using the techniques they recommend in this talk: [http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/BuildingScalab...](http://www.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/BuildingScalableComplexApps.html)

...you could easily pull back a hundred entities each time you pull someone's feed. It'd cost you a buck for every hundred pageviews or so.

</comment><comment><USER41> One app I manage is going from $0.05 a day to as high as $4.00.

That's _really_ too much.

</comment><comment><USER42> The most disappointing thing for me was that the little bit of banner advertising I have on the games is no longer going to cover the cost of the hosting. It was nice a thought that the games could sit there forever and people could enjoy them for free.

</comment><comment><USER43> It's obvious that there are many people who are upset about this price hike, how poorly it has been explained (showing "this is how much more we'll be charging you really soon!" side-by-side with the current pricing really doesn't help), and that it feels like a bait and switch given how AppEngine was originally sold on the basis of scaling against CPU usage rather than instance hours.

Telling us that Python 2.7 may reduce the cost multiplication factor by a bit just isn't very helpful.

Additionally, it also makes Google look a little bit stupid. We're supposed to accept that a world-leading company in the field of data processing, storage and server farms weren't able to determine ballpark running costs for their selling off their excess machine hours until now? Pfff.

In light of the fact that GAE hasn't exactly been the most stable platform, technical support has been untimely and poor, high priority bugs can stay acknowledged for years, a timeline for SSL support is still non-existant, and full search capabilities are only now impending at some unknown date (and how much will that cost when it finally arrives?), it really does make them look like rank amateurs.

The AWS team must be laughing.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand how the instance-hours are being calculated. One of my apps has the old 2.5 CPU-hours/day to the new 34 instance-hours/day calculation. The app is not CPU-intensive and 2.5 hours of work sound reasonable. It certainly is not hogging the CPU 34 hours the whole day. Does the new instance-hour include the process idle time of app?

<comment><USER44> Hours when CPU is ON are counted. Not actual CPU usage or cycles.

<comment><USER9> So it counts idle time. When a process is idle, it doesn't use the CPU, which can be used by other processes.

This basically punishes IO/network bound apps and favors CPU-intensive apps.

I can see why some of the web apps has 100X cost increase since they spin up a process to handle a web request which can take fair amount of network time but uses very little CPU.

The new pricing model is not web-app friendly but favors heavy CPU-intensive backend processing kind of apps.

<comment><USER45> Not really, if you enable multi-threaded request handling. While one thread/request is waiting for IO/network to complete, other threads are still handling requests. All in the same instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Just a quick note: App Engine hasn't left preview.

This[1] blog post from today says at the end: "[...]and we hope you find these tools useful as we get closer to our goal of leaving preview!"

They just rolled out the new pricing.

[1]: [http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/08/50-credit-for- ne...](http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/08/50-credit-for-new-billing- signups-and.html)

<comment><USER47> The email I received was titled "Google App Engine Leaving Preview". And it states "We plan to roll this out in the second half of September...."

The scariest part of looking at my billing history is "Frontend Instance Hour costs reflect a 50% price reduction active until November 20th, 2011"

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> After I read the email from Google, I didn't think the impact would be huge on my small app that just started gaining users, but it was a little shock, I headed to HN to find out if other people are affected or my app was badly written. I think everyone is affected.

I will be moving my app, if anyone else likes to use a freelancer, please drop me a line: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER49> If your app can survive on 1 instance, but occasionally uses 2 or more, you should immediately change your "max idle instances" to 1 so you won't be charged for the extra instances.

The new free limit for frontends is 24 CPU hours, or 1 instance. I was seeing my frontend time in the 25-30 hour range each day.

</comment><comment><USER50> Everyone is talking about huge cost increase for python applications, but I'd like to know what are the numbers for Java applications, since Java is multithreaded?

Is the price increase still tenfold, or something more acceptable?

<comment><USER51> Our Java application has gone from $240 per month to $6000. Total bait and switch. This is a business killer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is a total bait and switch. On the same day that Appengine took our site down for 18 hours with no apology(we support 3000 daily visitors with an average time on site of 13 min). They announced that costs would increase from $240 per month to $6000. SIX THOUSAND! This is truly the definition of evil if you ask me.

</comment><comment><USER52> Those who are talking about being 'locked in' to App Engine, there are solutions, like <http://www.datastorebackup.com>

The essence of your data is saved. Nothing to worry about then..

And regarding the pricing... We'll see.. I'm not sure WHEN exactly it's going to be shifted - does anyone know?

<comment><USER53> It's not only about the data, however. It's also about the x lines of code that are GAE specific. The datastore API is non-standard, and cannot easily be ported elsewhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> There has been a lot of confusion and complaining about the price increases, and this is understandable given the way it has come about. This is one of those oh so obvious things, but you just have to look at it and evaluate. Besides scalability, app engine can be a great platform from a rapid app development standpoint. It has other nice aspects in addition to the scalability.

And don't forget to look into what may be able to be done to minimize some of the quota impact. Good design changes may be able to have a noticeable positive effect there.

Have a look at AppScale if you are looking at moving off the platform. That may be a way to get 80% of the way there with less monumental changes.

<comment><USER55> "And don't forget to look into what may be able to be done to minimize some of the quota impact. Good design changes may be able to have a noticeable positive effect there."

You mean concurrency? That won't be available until November. And if it fails to save the bill, you'll be screwed big time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Migrate to EC2 with Appscale is a better way?

</comment><comment><USER57> Strange, there's no mention of the Go runtime on the pricing page. I realize it's still a beta runtime, but it's still odd to leave it out.

</comment><comment><USER58> When is Python 2.7 coming to GAE?</comment>


Ask HN: First Contract Job, what to do? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working at a "normal" company for the past 3 years. I just accepted a startup's offer to do contract-to-hire with an equity grant if the company survives the next 6 months. I've never worked on a contract basis before. What should I be aware of and do? <comment><USER2> I'm confused by this offer structure. What does the company's survival have to do with your equity grant? If the company fails, your grant costs them nothing.

A six-month contract-to-hire term is way off the market. I'm biased (I think all temp-to-perm arrangements are so far off the market that they're essentially exploitative), but my observation says "weeks" is a more typical term.

I can understand a very shaky company not wanting to assume payroll obligations that they can't meet, and respect the notion that your contacting offer is made more in a spirit of candor than in hedging, but it should be possible to get your vesting clock starting now.

Also, the 'loumf comment is golden. I'd add that you should plan on engaging an accountant, and factor that into your costs. Also, are you planning on running out your COBRA during this period? Your health insurance costs are going to go up sharply.

<comment><AUTHOR> Benefits aren't an issue for me at this point in my life (my SO gets them for us currently). Good to know on the equity grant, I'll make sure that's part of the deal.

<comment><USER2> This may be me thinking with my "hiring manager" blinders on, but what you just said shares an equivalence class in my brain with "compensation isn't an issue for me at this point". To the employer, this is just a question of fully loaded headcount cost. If your cost structure is lower, and we're in a seller's market, why does the company get to capture the surplus?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Assuming you are in the US:

You have to pay your end of FICA (the employer portion -- 6-7%) -- so factor that (at least) into your idea of your salary. Also, medical insurance -- since your job is changing, you are eligible to get insurance from the exchanges (I think) -- certainly from an agent.

Taxes aren't being withheld, so you have to file estimated tax every quarter.

What other kind of things do you want to know?

<comment><AUTHOR> Health insurance isn't an issue, my SO provides our benefits. I have to file taxes quarterly?

<comment><USER3> If you were getting regular paychecks, your company would withhold taxes and give to the government on your behalf -- on April 15, you true up against those estimates.

As a contractor, you get the full amount with no taxes withheld (but you still owe tax). Pick a reasonable number that you think you owe the government and make an estimated tax payment (to your state too, if you live in a state with income tax).

It's simple paperwork, not a full tax filing. You can do it online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the company is working to ensure that you are seen as an independent contractor, then they may require you to provide your own tools, such as computer and cell phone. You should also expect that expenses incurred independent of specific performance of the contract will not be reimbursed.

So take your target salary, add the costs of cell phone, computer, laptop, etc plus all your routine costs (internet access, cell phone, business phone, etc) plus all benefits (time off, sick pay, life insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, retirement plan contributions, etc) plus your downtime costs (it is highly unlikely you will contract 40 hours a week every week for the whole year, so you will have unbillable time while you search out your next gig).

You will have to do the math for yourself, but it probably comes to an additional 50-100% of your current salary rate. This calculator is a good start: [http://www.rakkar.org/ContractPayCalculator.html](http://www.rakkar.org/ContractPayCalculator.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> It seems a bit weird to get an equity grant "if the company survives the next 6 months." By definition if the company doesn't survive 6 months then the equity is worthless, so there's no harm in issuing the equity now.

You should talk to an employment lawyer.

<comment><USER2> What's an employment lawyer going to tell him? No employee is entitled to equity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Things I wish I had done:

1\. Thought it would last longer than one month. I assumed (still do) that they would realise I was faking it and take it all away. So I paid extra for temporary access to things (rented a car not bought). A year later I still was. Stupid. Assume you are now a contractor for five years. You probably will be these don't sound like people to stick with.

2\. Think of yourself as a business. Not a contractor - a business who needs to market and build a "sales pipeline". Who are you going to work for in six months time? doing what? How will you find them in the next three months and persuade them to wait?

3\. taxes. Oh shit taxes. Get a accountant and do not leave their office on the first day until you have written a spreadsheet and calculated your own basic tax return. know this stuff inside out. You are now running 4 tabs on a spreadsheet and carrying over from one to the other:

Business Income > Business Outgoings > Home Income > Home outgoings. Make a spreadsheet like that today. Fill it in.

4\. Blog - it's probably the best middle path for marketing yourself. But choose your story, your unique take on things. Are you techie through and through? A Brogrammer? An outdoorsy hiker, a Beethoven lover? What is your (oh god) tribe? Talk to that tribe - somewhere there is a hiring manager who is also a member of your tribe. Probably quite a few - talk to her through your blog.

5\. Never ever ever ever lie for anyone ever. Politics is a hard game especially in companies that are changing a lot, like startups. As a contractor you can have a professional armour - you have an obligation to give unbiased advice and opinion.

Not the companies problems are not your problems. Do not take on board their views of "if only we can hit this deadline we can make the sales and hit 100M..." \- you should give your real views on the state of the codebase, the likelihood of hitting the deadlines and the tech debt.

Go read the clean coder (with an r) by uncle bob martin.

5\. be your own project manager - that is track in your own system the tasks needed to achieve the requirements and the likely ship dates. Don't keep this a secret but don't rely on someone else tracking this for you. I recommend fogbugz these days (it's for pay). Don't touch Redmine with a barge pole. Basically know that the two week estimate the sprint just made is bullshit. Be clear on what your estimates are - no need to be shrill, just be clear, polite and consistent.

6\. Be calmer than everyone else and realise this all takes time.

7\. Don't take career advice off random people in the Internet :-)

<comment><USER2> This is great, but I don't think he's trying to start a consulting company; he's trying to navigate a temp-to-perm offer. :)

<comment><USER6> Sorry I got a little carried away (then noprocrast stopped me reediting.)

Anyway, if I was to give our hero here any advice, it would be to see himself not as an employee but as a consulting company - if POV at Parc Xerox was worth 40 IQ points, in our business I would say POV is worth 40k pa.</comment></comment></comment>


Codename: Svbtle by Dustin Curtis - <AUTHOR> http://dcurt.is/codename-svbtle <comment><USER2> "When I'm writing, I want to have no distractions, so I removed all of them."

When I'm reading it is the same damn thing. You have TWO flashing beacons.

<comment><USER3> I cloned it in Ruby on Rails and wrote about it here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744237>

<comment><USER4> You say "In fact, it goes against the very ethos of Hacker News.", do you think your action aligns with the "ethos of Hacker News"?

Do you think it's okay to rip-off something just because you think it shouldn't be invite only?

<comment><USER5> I do.

<comment><USER6> I kind-of agree. If someones got a thing where part of their value proposition is "invite only" curation - then that same idea with different or no curators seems to be fair game…

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how many people gave kudos to the post by mistake? I know I did and there's no way to remove the kudos you gave afterwards. User actions should be a click not a hover.

<comment><USER8> He's already received complaints and sort of laughed them away: <http://dcurt.is/unkudo>

Personally I think it's bad UX, but what do I know; I'm not Dustin Curtis.

<comment><USER9> It's definitely bad UX. Curtis tries to brush away criticism with his claim that the "kudos" number is "an otherwise meaningless number," but this argument is fatally flawed. Plenty of things that human beings use for social signaling are, when removed from context, technically "meaningless", but within context they can hold plenty of meaning. In the case of Curtis's website, the "Kudos" counter is implied to display a count of voluntary approval. By essentially tricking users into incrementing the count, Curtis violates this expectation, which is why everyone feels "cheated" by it. Subsequent visitors to the site who don't realize the counter has been gamed may take it as an indicator of how many people enjoyed the article, when in fact the numbers are inflated by other users against their will. This is not only terrible UX, but bordering on outright deceit.

In a world dominated by social media and ubiquitous "Like" counters, for someone to brush off a Kudos count as "an otherwise meaningless number" is either an incredible display of naivety or straight-up bullshit.

<comment><USER10> While I agree, my complaint with it is even simpler: hit refresh and you can ostensibly keep adding kudos without limit. If that's not the case, then it's a UI problem because it doesn't tell you as much. If it is the case, then it certainly removes whatever meaning it has the moment someone starts inflating the count.

<comment><USER11> The problem is really a combination of the two. People expect kudos to be tracked in a reasonable fashion for the reason that, if the counter exists, it must be taken seriously. The rest of the system is stripped down, leaving people with the impression that whatever is left must be important. This is a false impression, and that's what's disappointing about the feature. Dustin Curtis has taken a serious (read: pretentious) approach to the rest of the site, but he's left the kudos system hanging by a chad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "This is the blogging platform for creative, intelligent, and witty people. Membership by invitation only."

Am I the only person that laughed out loud at this?

<comment><USER13> I didn't laugh but I found that incredibly arrogant and pathetic.

<comment><USER14> Pathetic?

It perfectly accomplishes my goal: you'll remember it.

(Edit: Sigh. Now I remember why I have a rule of not commenting on Hacker News anymore.)

<comment><USER15> If your other goals were to be arrogant and elitist, you've accomplished them as well.

<comment><USER16> Maybe because in Venezuela we are bombarded with propaganda everyday about how terrible meritocracy is, it bothers me to see this sentiment here.

As geeks, don't we recognize that The Deck ads are better than Google AdWords? Isn't the MacBook Air currently _better_ than probably any other laptop? Wasn't Gmail the best thing since sliced bread for a long time?

I get it that it's part of the script in a socialist _revolution_ , but in a start-up news site?

Curtis, can be as arrogant as he wants and still have a great product (or be right). Just like John Gruber is a jackass, but one who is usually right _and_ (for the context of this site) has a successful business many us would love to have.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind helping out anybody here (or being helped), but at the end of the day, I want kick all your asses and win. And if I can hire the best of you, even better.

<comment><USER17> > Curtis, can be as arrogant as he wants and still have a great product (or be > right).

Ah, but there's the rub: Dustin doesn't have a great product and he isn't right. At best he's a good marketer: the only things he ever stands out for are his gimmicks. His best posts were gimmick posts ("watch me redesign airport passes!", "let me show you how stupid commercial graphic designers are!"); his only creations are good marketing creations ("you should follow me on Twitter here", "kudos!"). Occasionally I've seen him get halfway towards having a decent thought, but I've never seen him follow through.

Compare that to John Gruber, who's talked before about how he painstakingly selected the Daring Fireball color before he launched his blog (which has displayed his thoughts, gimmickless and unchanged, for a decade now). Greatness is a matter of finding big ideas and sticking to them; the only thing Dustin's stuck to in the few years he's been promoting himself is that people ought to remember him. But he's forgotten to create something worth remembering.

Curtis writes:

> One of my main goals for this new writing interface was to encourage myself > to spend more time writing and less time presenting.

Which is admirable, and I've noticed that his writing in this new iteration is somewhat less surface-irritating. But he contradicts this in this very thread, when he says of his jackass slogan: "It perfectly accomplishes my goal: you'll remember it." He cares about being remembered; it never seems to occur to him that there's more to writing good things than making them memorable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Points to DCurtis for shipping. That's what this life is all about and it's easy to lose sight of that.

But my own personal opinion is that I don't love it.

The UI of the published blogs is nice. I actually like the animation on the left, though I personally would only show it once per session. I think the challenge will be making this a more usable, integrated experience for the user while retaining the sparse and appealing UI. Even for "vetted" bloggers, audience reach and accessibility matters.

I'm not a big fan of the UI for the backend. I like the concepts. But the UI seems too designed. The strict use of black and white, for example, seems almost a gimmick to me.

And I really dislike the Kudos "button" and his response to the criticism.

There is absolutely no functional benefit. People know buttons. They expect buttons to work like all other buttons work: You have to press it if you want to press it. I could go on and on about why this is bad (unfriendly to touch UIs (even if it also supports clicking), people shouldn't have to be careful about where they rest their mouse, it takes 1s to "hover induce" this button and far less than 1 sec to click, etc.)

But the biggest UX blunder, IMO, is not being able to undo it.

I was less than impressed by DCurtis's response to the Kudos issue: that a kudos is meaningless. If it's so meaningless why not let people kudos the same thing more than once? Why have a kudos at all?

I hope this can be seen as constructive, because I think his project is much bigger than this critique. He worked on something, and shipped. Our industry is more of a meritocracy than most. Congrats on shipping, high-five and well done.

Now make it better, please.

<comment><USER19> "The side effect of this is that ideas I would never have written down before now become fully developed posts. It has hugely surprised me."

And all you're replying about is the look of the UI. Aren't you missing the most important bit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For future record: An article about a by-invitation closed-source blogging platform created by a self-proclaimed superhero is the top article on Hacker News on March 22, 2012 at 17:16 PST.

<comment><USER21> Also: maybe we'll see a rise in LinkedIn profiles of people calling themselves programming / designer superheros.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love the design, but shrug at the idea of vetted bloggers. I have HN and twitter and reddit and FB and many other ways to filter content for me. I don't want or need a curated brand.

I especially don't want writers on the network hesitating about whether to write low-quality material. Insay, wcatter your ideas and let "the market" decide.

</comment><comment><USER23> I like the "ideas pane" a lot. I have exactly the same workflow, except my "ideas pane" is just a text file in Dropbox. I work on posts there until they're big enough to paste into my blog.

I'm not really interested in running my blog on someone else's platform, though (I realize I'm in the minority here).

<comment><USER14> This is exactly what I used to do. It was during my attempts to move ideas.txt into the platform interface that the dual pane system was born.

<comment><USER23> I think I might like leaving my ideas in their raw form, though. I tend to create a bulleted, indented outline of what I'm writing before fleshing it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Who's vetting the bloggers invited to join the Svbtle network? Is it Dustin himself? Something about an exclusive, invite-only network for "creative, intelligent, and witty people" really turns me off.

Not that I wouldn't be interested in reading what only the best and the brightest have to say. Maybe it's just the way it's been presented, but in its current form it seems sort of like the Mensa of blogging platforms.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wait. This isn't some downloadable blogging engine? I'm disappointed. If that "creative, intelligent and witty" bit isn't sarcasm, how about the guy 'puts up' and offers the code for download?

Unless this is the guy's business plan and he just doesn't want to kill his server. But this really looks like an "I built this really cool thing for me and some friends and you can't play" kind of thing.

<comment><USER3> I re-created it: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3744237> <https://github.com/natew/obtvse>

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I expected a github link to the software, found... a snobby, invitation-only network. No thanks, amigo, I think I'll steal your idea and release it for free.

<comment><USER26> Please, seems simple and useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> 1\. Kudos Button: Why the controversy? I've always viewed it as a meaningless counter that's fun to hover over. I never took the counts seriously. Sometimes I visit your site just to send arbitrary kudos. What's most concerning about the buttons is the number of readers that feel "victimized," "deceived" or "tricked" from, well...a css element.

2\. Svbtle: There are few names I've come across in my career that are as painful as this one to read, spell or pronounce. It gives me anxiety, and what's worse is that it's inspired by Svpply. A good name is a word that you can tell someone over the phone without them asking you how to spell it. Period.

3\. The ideas panel is cool. Is there a way you could generate the list in other ways than just manually adding tags? Could you add a bookmarking tool, for example, that adds keywords to your Ideas List once you bookmark a page you find thought-provoking?

4\. The S __* Network: Your strategy to build a platform exclusive for exceptionally high-rated bloggers to use wont work for several reasons, here's just a few:

4a. I loved your site's design until I saw others on your platform using it. Then it became boring and nauseating. The design of a blog tells a story sometimes just as much as the content does. It gives the blogger personality, and the reader something fresh to look at.

4c. Top bloggers (any bloggers) not only use design to express themselves, but also to stand out. To be remembered. Eventually when you notice a site's design enough times, you realize you might want to check out who the author is.

4d. Social elements and "Sharing" buttons can look messy at times, but the fact is, bloggers like their content shared, and readers like to share content they enjoy. Removing arguably the most widely used tool on the web much poorer design that displaying a 'tweet' button after each post.

4e. Aside from 'ideas' your platform doesn't have anything that takes away the pain that enough users have to make it worth building. I add 'blogging' to pg's list of frighteningly ambitious startup ideas..

<comment><USER28> _2\. Svbtle: There are few names I've come across in my career that are as painful as this one to read, spell or pronounce._

Absolutely. I thought that "kiln" was a horrible product name (it still is) but we've set the bar lower with this.

<comment><USER29> I think Kiln is a brilliant product name for what it is: a source code repo (kilns are designed to hold quantities of things) that encourages peer review (kilns dry or harden things).

<comment><USER28> It's a good name, conceptually, but it's hard to hear and speak. It's also a fantastic product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Drafts in Wordpress work quite well for this purpose. I just click "New Post", write in some temporary title and a short description in the body, then click "Save Draft". Viewing drafts is easy too.

I find formatting to be the biggest annoyance in blogging, but I bet there's a markdown WP plugin for that which I should use.

Actually I do like this, but not for the "ideas" feature. I like it for the simplicity and hip minimalist aesthetic.

<comment><USER31> I think this is exactly the problem that lead to how he designed the ideas pane. This make me realized this is exactly why I don't blog, too. If I save my ideas as draft, it mentally force me to think I will have to publish it at one point. It's more of a subconscious thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> After reading that my impression is that the whole thing seems kind of douchey to me. Then again, I'm not a superhero with my own exclusive club so I'm not really qualified to say anything.

</comment><comment><USER33> The animation of the left sidebar on each page is really annoying.

Aside from that, it looks really clean!

<comment><USER34> Hrm, I thought it was actually kind of nice. Soft, non-obtrusive and gave a lovely "alive" feel an otherwise cold page. In fact, does anyone know of any tutorials on how to do this?

<comment><USER35> You may be talking about different things.

There is the temporary red overlay in the sidebar that is, as far as I can tell, new, and definitely a touch obtrusive (intentionally, no doubt); then, the relatively subtle circular pulse around the blog logo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I like the concept, but then I clicked through to the other blogs, and it felt wrong.

I felt like I should be reading John Collison's blog, but I keep hearing Dustin's voice in my head. The same goes when I switch to other authors.

I get what he is trying to do - by keeping it minimalist and all, but I think it gets in the way of the content and the author by not offering a distinct enough experience on each author's words.

</comment><comment><USER37> Interesting concept. Like the panes. But this seems contradictory to me:

> It really is the essence of blogging[...] no social bullshit.

> And, of course, you should follow me on Twitter here.

</comment><comment><USER38> Ah yes, this reminds me why I made QuietWrite. Except, QW is open to all: <http://www.quietwrite.com>

<comment><USER39> You're just missing the stark, black and white interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I really like it when people _thoughtfully_ scratch an itch that everyone else thinks has been scratched to death. There is a room for major improvements in every established technology area - be it a blogging platform, instant messaging, analytics or email clients.

PS. This also explains why Dustin needed a Markdown symbol back in February - <http://drbl.in/daOE>

</comment><comment><USER41> I have conflicting feelings: love the concept, love the design, but jealous I'll never get an invite. At least, happy it exists.

<comment><USER42> You could lift his CSS.

<comment><USER41> Well, yes, but that would be rude.

<comment><USER43> Just do it svbtly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> A couple of general things.

(1) Svbtle is actually a decent name (I sort of thing the 'v' is tired, but that's just a product of things I'm following doing that) Unfortunately, it's probably not appropriate for a tech audience

(2) I'm very surprised at the significant negative reaction to his 'curation' of his blogging network. I understand the feelings of condescension, but is it really that big of a deal? Many things are invite only, vetted by one person. I'm personally bothered by /other/ elitist attitudes prevalent in the industry. This is pretty consistent and he never said this was never going to be public...

</comment><comment><USER45> I think the most interesting thing about whatever Dustin does is the hype he's able to build around it—I'm consistently impressed, and wonder if he might not be as effective as a promoter as he is a designer.

<comment><USER46> I think you meant it the other way around?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Yesterday I made a quip about how 3 of the 5 members were on the frontpage of HN arguing, and how I didn't want an invite.

Insert foot in mouth.

I really like the idea of the two columns. I'd totally use this.

<comment><USER35> To indulge your tangent: They were indeed "arguing" in some definition of the word, but I think they kind of agreed a lot, and together painted a coherent picture I could agree with, and was glad to have read.

<comment><USER47> What I actually meant was that the argument was extremely narrow to the point of pedantry.

Is Rails good for an API?

It's a tool, and it has different merits depending on the situation. That's the answer to the question, and it's the answer to any question like it.

I said I didn't want an invite because I didn't want to be associated with the three of them arguing over so fine a point, and getting so much exposure for it.

It all seemed very weird to me. That was my real point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> If the domain name is invite only, is there any chance that the code will be open source so other people can run their own version of svbtle?

<comment><USER49> I'd be interested in running my own single-user version, but I'm sure there'll be a clone by the weekend (if there isn't I'll probably hack one up at my next opportunity).

<comment><USER14> Please don't copy it just yet.

I'm still working out the problems and polishing the interactions. When they're all ironed out, I'll open it to the public.

<comment><USER49> Ah, I wasn't under the impression that this would become public - I wouldn't reproduce something open to others.

Thank you for making something like this a reality - I had a blank-page type editor a while back but didn't have the chops to make it actually usable at the time (hence my interest in recreating this).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> It's very pretty. I wish I had the skill to come up with a UI as nice as that.

I wonder what language/platform it's written in?

<comment><USER51> > I wonder what language/platform it's written in?

I've recently wondered if we (devs) shouldn't adopt a standard like robots.txt/humans.txt, maybe dev.txt or something where we could put such information and opensource links (instead of polluting the UI sometimes with all the 'powered by' braggadacio).

//edit: submitted for discussion <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3742784>

<comment><USER52> The last part of humans.txt is supposed to list the technology used.

<comment><USER51> doesn't look like it <http://humanstxt.org/humans.txt> looks more like the tools, not the tech stack.

<comment><USER52> It's a choice: <http://desktime.com/humans.txt>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> He has "the eye" for design, though... everything looks effortless and kinda great... unlike when I try to make a page look good (yes I read about Mark Boulton and grids and a visual hierarchy and spacing and baseline and rhythm and UX but it doesn't do miracles...)

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm sorry, but isn't this just a reversion to late 90's style frame design? It seems all you've done is build it in the latest trendy standards and add a few little CSS tricks.

Minimalist design is supposed to be about presenting the content first and foremost. But the content is overshadowed by your frame. Your name and flashy CSS tricks are the only constants on the page and take up nearly 25% of the view, but you claim you're trying to draw attention to the content? Perhaps if the content you're presenting is you, then you have a successful design.

</comment><comment><USER55> The animating sidebar and kudos buttons are cute the first time around, but annoying when I start to try and move around the site with real intent.

Overall, it feels like the designer is wagging his/her tail in my face.

</comment><comment><USER56> _When I have an idea, no matter how developed, I throw it into the ideas pane. This creates a physical scrapboard for organizing my thoughts. I work on ideas over time, and, when one of them becomes developed or good enough, I'll publish it and it'll move over into the published column._

This is so important. I've been using SimpleNote to the same effect. I just handle the publishing part separately; I publish so rarely that it doesn't make sense for me to couple the two together.

<comment><USER57> I don't get it. What's the difference between a "draft" and an "idea"?

<comment><USER56> In my system each note corresponds to an idea, which usually starts as just a sentence or two (e.g. "You don't understand something until it's obvious."). In this note I collect links, quotes, and my own thoughts relating to that idea. At some point I may turn all this material into a draft.

<comment><USER57> Hmm OK, could still be a draft, though :) I use Evernote for similar stuff, but then I don't blog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> This is great. I've had something like this (probably even simpler) in my mind for a while, but never get around to making it.

Dustin, I just emailed you with a name suggestion.

</comment><comment><USER59> I think this system is well thought out. It has a beautiful, minimal design that actually let's you focus on the reading, once you're done playing with the kudos button.

The only criticism I have is that it relies on sites like Hacker News and Reddit or email/twitter for discussion. Blog posts may be full of errors, but readers (and maybe authors) may never find out, due to the relatively inaccessible discussion/feedback system.

<comment><USER60> Actually, I've really come to enjoy seeing a "Discuss this post on Hacker News" link at the bottom of a blog post. I've become annoyed by loading a blog post, only to discover that 3/4 of the page is just comments.

But really, the same thing could be accomplished by having the comments page be separate from the article page, yet still be hosted on the same blogging platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Awesome job, I am actually slowly building something like this myself.. Just a simple blogging platform, no fluff, just the essentials.

</comment><comment><USER62> Awesome. Beat me to it. I treat my writing the same way: like fruit on tree, adding to it slowly until it ripens.

How can I get an invite?

<comment><USER63> Be creative, intelligent, and witty. And a person.

<comment><USER20> And, of course, you should follow dcurtis on Twitter _here_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 It seems ironic for someone not interested in "social bullshit" to have what is essentially a Like button on each post.

<comment><USER64> Hmm. I wouldn't call the essential Like button "social", since it doesn't get "shared" with one's "friends" or anything like that. Still, I don't think that's an important difference - it retains the lab rat overtones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I think this is a really good example of "being famous does not mean that you are good at everything". Do not forget why you are famous. If you are really famous actor and body builder, you might be governor If you try really hard, but do not run for presidency.

</comment><comment><USER66> Am I correct in assuming the post text editor was all custom built? If not, can anyone link to a solution that is as clean as that? I love the idea of just typing on the page versus typing into a special box with a hundred buttons along the top

<comment><USER14> I didn't really custom build it; it's just a normal textarea element with the borders removed and the typography matched to exactly how it's displayed on the blog.

<comment><USER10> How do you edit? Directly into the textarea or do you toggle between markdown and preview?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> It looks weird without javascript, there's this huge slab of colour on the left, and the script eats up half of a core (Firefox 11). Are all blogs in Svbtle centrally hosted? Not just federated?

</comment><comment><USER68> Lovely, very lovely.

It looks so _usable_.

I've been irritated by lack of features in Tumblr; whilst you don't those features, it does look like you have a cleaner approach for content-creating.

Reminds me slightly of Trello.

<comment><USER69> Is your definition of usable inversely proportional with the number of features and their associated buttons? Yet you're upset by the lack of features in Tumblr?

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> It all seems _really_ snooty and lame. Not digging the attitude, dcurtis.

Sidenote: The judos thing is annoying and the design is mad plain.

</comment><comment><USER71> Amusingly, he's gone from being a "superhero" to a "villain" according to his tagline at dcurt.is

</comment><comment><USER72> Have you considered displaying a collective feed of your networks' posts on the homepage?

</comment><comment><USER73> Reminds me of Google's redesigns...</comment>


Moped Company Revel Suspends New York City Operations After Second Death - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/moped-company-revel-suspends-new-york-city-operations-after-second-death-11595955261 <comment><USER2> Here's a non-paywalled article about this: [https://gothamist.com/news/revel- suspends-operations-after-d...](https://gothamist.com/news/revel-suspends- operations-after-death-second-rider-month)</comment>


The Failure of 3D Touch (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-most-epic-product-fails/answer/Mills-Baker?share=1 <comment><USER2> I used 3D Touch all the time for one specific feature: if you did a 3D Touch on the keyboard it would turn into a touch pad for moving the cursor around a block of text.

For anyone else who was devastated to lose this feature, I was happy to learn it's still there! Now you do a long tap on the space bar to activate it.

<comment><USER3> > I was happy to learn it's still there! Now you do a long tap on the space > bar to activate it.

It's not though. The feature implemented with haptic touch only lets you long press on space bar and move the cursor. You have to use a second finger to start selection and control the bounds, and it's far less accurate.

With 3D touch, you could press down once to start cursor mode, again to start selection, and again to stop. You could also reset the selection while staying in cursor mode. I was able to, quite frequently, change entire sentences and edit text really efficiently with a single hand holding the phone. That's impossible now.

I'd be really happy if Apple went back and improved the spacebar cursor system, but right now it's objectively worse as it requires two fingers rather than one to select text.

<comment><USER4> Add one datapoint to the discoverability argument made in the article: I have had 3D Touch enabled iphones for a long time now and had absolutely no idea that the feature you're describing existed. I just tried the new long tap version of this feature on my iPhone 11 pro and it's just as you say kind of awkward because of the multi touch requirement to select, I can definitely see how 3D Touch would've made this better.

Now I wonder what other actually useful 3D Touch features I missed because I never discovered them. The only ones I did find where pretty useless and more often than not just got in the way, e.g. rearranging home screen icons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Force touch is even less discoverable than gestures. If it is used to distinguish between "simple" and "complex" actions in the way right/left click do with a mouse- as Apple attempted in several places in iOS- it's far easier to activate accidentally than intentionally. Overall the feature was a horrendous usability misstep, and it's not surprising it was quickly nixed.

<comment><USER6> Initial discoverability is overrated.

Some actions are not discoverable, but are very handy and much faster than anything discoverable could be when we are once shown or taught them.

An issue deeper than initial discoverability is "where can I do this", but this could be solved with e.g. a small mark/hue change/etc consistently shown on items that allow for force touch.

<comment><USER5> If it's a supplementary way to access functionality- a shortcut- poor discoverability is acceptable. If it's the _only_ way to access functionality, poor discoverability is bad design, full stop.

<comment><USER6> Those are not the only 2 cases.

1) supplementary way to access functionality

and

2) only way to access functionality

there's a 3rd option, which is the case here, for which is acceptable:

3) supplementary way to access _secondary_ functionality

Major functionality is still accessed by touch, menus, etc.

But even for primary functionality, I'd take fast, convenient, powerful over discoverability, any day of the week. The idea that users should not do any learning, and we should constrain our UI to stuff that's readily and immediately discoverable is incredibly limiting...

<comment><USER5> There is no such thing as a user interface which is naturally "intuitive". Discoverable user interfaces provide consistency and affordance. If a new operating system or device uses similar affordances to things a user has seen before, they can rapidly transfer their experience. This is usually what people mean when they call a UI "intuitive": conventional.

Users _always_ have to learn, and as user interface designers we must give them a _path_ for learning. If there's no path to learning about a feature, it might as well not exist, irrespective of whether you consider it "secondary".

Gestures, by design, have no afforances. Pinch-zoom is nearly the only multitouch gesture that has been so universally accepted and applied that it can be taken as given.

Pressure-based shortcuts, in the absence of corresponding visual cues (as implemented by Apple), likewise have no affordances. The 3d-touch hardware was great, and worked as intended. iOS used it in an opaque, undiscoverable manner, and the result was a total dud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One navigation paradigm I miss on iOS that is very consistent on Android (and all desktop browsers including some desktop apps like Spotify) is the back button. The strong touch - a completely new and unoccupied mode of interaction could have been consistently used to "go back", regardless of context.

<comment> yoz-y I feel that the back button is only consistent in its position but its functionality remains a mystery to me. Sometimes it goes to a previous page, sometimes to another app, sometimes to the home screen... I like that on iOS this is separated between the "go back to previous app/swiping on home indicator" and app specific buttons.

Fortunately Android 10 has introduced gestures so trying to reach the back button is no longer painful.

<comment><USER8> theres one pattern, opening google photos, pressing share, choosing facebook messenger, sending a photo to a group that ALWAYS causes messenger to get stuck at the share screen. pressing back minimizes fbm but doesnt back out of share, so when you reopen the app, you are buried back at that deep share page. (one may ask why you would ever do it this way, with android 10 many apps couldnt access the device photos directly. even though its fixed, this still serves as an repeatable example of 'back' being confusing and broken.)

the inconsistency of the back button ranks very high on my "ios to android" learning curve list.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The fact that iPad never had 3D Touch adds another argument as to why developers never truly adopted the feature.

</comment><comment><USER10> Count me in as a fan who's going to miss it. I use it extensively for a lot of things. I hope it makes a return some day.

It's a pity that it wasn't marketed/documented appropriately.

</comment><comment><USER11> But it worked, and actually kinda worked well. One more case of apple bringing a product to a market that's not ready for it.

<comment> dawg- Exactly, it's a failure _for now_ , but apple now owns the intellectual property to that forever. If anybody ever finds a better way to use it, they own it and can jump on the opportunity. That's why when you are a company like apple with mountains of cash, you can feel good about investing money developing fancy aspirational things, even if they don't pan out immediately.

<comment><USER12> _apple now owns the intellectual property to that forever_

The main patent on the 3D touch technology expires on March 3rd 2033. [https://patents.google.com/patent/US9772721B2/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US9772721B2/en)

<comment><USER13> For the record, there are 14 years between 2019 and 2033. The iPhone has only existed for 12. 14 years is basically forever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure I would classify this a epic failure. This feature was enabled, and used fairly widely. It didn't live up to it's potential, and the biggest issue may be the weight / thickness requirements that it put onto Apple products. Apple traded that weight / thickness for more batter on the current phone, which is well worth it.

I miss 3D touch with the newest IOS builds. All that said, the discoverability aspect is huge here. It either needed to be built into everything, or nothing. Lukewarm adoption here was a major issue, because it meant that users had to experiment to discover what was actually possible.

</comment><comment><USER15> Apple was not first with 3D Touch, Android had it since Eclair in 2009.

[https://pocketnow.com/force-touch-android-has-had-that- for-y...](https://pocketnow.com/force-touch-android-has-had-that-for-years)

Apple's version is novel and more robust. What doomed both is the uneven implementation across apps, lack of affordance, and differing skill of applying variable force among the population (aka 'hitting the sweet spot') Press and hold fulfills pretty much the same function, though not as elegantly.

As a UX designer, I wouldn't advocate deprecating force touch features but rather, leave them in for advanced users, work on onboarding and affordances, and let the masses 'tap tap tap..' for the same functionality. Imo, there is too much Lowest Common Denominator design out there, and advanced UX shouldn't be eliminated because some people don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's kind of a shame that 3D Touch was removed at pretty much the same time as iOS 13 made it much more useful.

<comment><USER17> What's more useful in iOS 13? Genuinely asking, I love learning about new force touch/3D touch features

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hadn't realized how much I used it until it went away.

</comment><comment><USER19> Seems like a costly mistake, surprised they didn't figure out whether this was solving a legitimate problem, and/or filling a legitimate market need _before_ the costly development cycle. I literally cannot even imagine a UI that would be made better by this feature -- so surely before all that investment, apple had _some idea_ of how it would be used that would radically transform UI forever.

Maybe this comes down to a human brain / body form thing, where the best thing is just to have a simple point-and-click interface because it aligns well with human intuition and natural behavior.

<comment><USER20> I'm a firm believer that this is a failure of educating the user rather than the feature itself. With my next iPhone I will be forced to touch and hold, causing me delays which I hate. In hindsight, it might've worked to have the 3D Touch features available by 3D Touch _and_ long press, causing users to stumble upon it by accident. I just wrote this reply on my phone and had to shake to undo, prompting a hint that I could achieve the same thing by double tapping with three fingers. Something like this would've worked for 3D Touch I'm sure. Imagine how loaded desktop UIs would be without right click context menus. This is what 3D Touch could've solved for touch UIs. Now where back to UIs that are either dumbed down or crowded. Or we have long press delays, punishing power users.

<comment><USER21> > Imagine how loaded desktop UIs would be without right click context menus.

I mean, they might have to use hamburger-menus or menubars (which are functionally equivalent), _just like desktop UIs did_ back when Apple mice only came with a single button! (and this is coming back in style, now that touchpads come with only a single physical "click" action, and no separate buttons) Why can't touch UIs do the same? It works just fine on a detachable tablet PC when running GTK+3 apps, I could easily imagine doing quite involved work there.

<comment><USER22> Haptic touch functions as right click. 3D touch is more like - what? Alt-right click?

<comment><USER20> Haptic touch replaces 3D touch so I don't understand what you're trying to say.

<comment><USER22> 3D toucj gives you the full peek-and-pop multi-strength experience. Haptic touch is single level, is it not?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I hope Apple isn't removing this from their laptop touchpads. I mapped force clicking to ⌘+click to open links in new tabs, it changed my life.

<comment><USER23> How can one map force click?

<comment><USER17> As rhinoceraptor said, BetterTouchTool. It has a ton of different trackpad actions/gestures that you can map but this one is by far my most used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think it was just an example of a feature without a use case.

The home "button"(actually just part of the screen) in my Galaxy S8 is pressure-sensitive.

I have immersive mode on, so the back, home etc. buttons are normally not visible, which becomes a problem when an app hangs, because you cannot swipe to invoke them.

Enter the pressure sensitive area - one angry push and I'm back to the home screen.

</comment><comment><USER25> This was a major decision to backtrack on this implementation. It will take a generational change before people are willing to try again. We may not see it implemented on an iOS device for 20 years now.

</comment><comment> d-sc I have an iPhone 11 Pro, the only part I don't like on it is the lack of 3D touch. The replacement tap and hold gesture is slow comparatively.</comment>