GitHub to Remove 'Master' Terminology - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/06/14/microsoft-owned-coding-site-github-replace-term-master-push/ <comment><USER3> Several discussions here in the past few days:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23500093) (138 points/224 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23518123](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23518123) (127 points/206 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23519813](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23519813) (44 points/84 comments)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23522859](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23522859) (15 points/5 comments)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd prefer it if things didn't change, including master/slave terminology (the 'master' branch doesn't even have a 'slave' in git...)

Have the words themselves become bad to use? It seems that this is a USA centric view anyway with its history (and even then it seems ridiculous--why can't these things be compartmentalised as technical terms?)

Slavery certainly still exists in the world, and has existed in most places at some point. Should we rename 'slavery' to something else too while we're at it? Or forget it exists and existed?

Certainly certain terms become antiquated over time, like the vocabulary used in Emacs (yank/buffer/etc vs cut/window/tab/...), but master/slave doesn't seem to be there yet.

I wonder if there's some way to counteract this newspeak stuff? I think it's harmful that these things happen for such frivolous reasons. Does one just have to be as loud as the minority that drives these things, to counteract it?

<comment><USER5> I think companies are just looking for ways to help, and this is what Github came up with.

I agree it's an odd reason for the change. The word "master" without "slave" has many meanings, usually but not always when one person or thing controls another.

It's used for dog owners ("a dog and his master"). A person can be the "master of their own fate" or a "master of disguise." Seinfeld joked about people being "masters of their own domain."

All of that said, I don't really mind the result, whatever the reason. I remember that the name struck me as odd when I first started with Git.

I assumed it came from "master copy," which in media is the copy from which other copies are made. But that doesn't really fit, in my view, because the whole point of a master copy is that it doesn't change. In Git the master is always changing.

The other meanings don't fit either. The "master" branch doesn't really _control_ anything, it _is_ controlled by the user.

So calling it "master" never really made sense to me. It seems like "primary," "main," "central" or a similar word fits better.

<comment><USER6> > I think companies are just looking for ways to help, and this is what Github > came up with.

Help how exactly?

This to me seems like a PR preemptive measure not to be caught in some zealous virtue signalling.

> So calling it "master" never really made sense to me. It seems like > "primary," "main," "central" or a similar word fits better.

That was always me feeling too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am black and I don't think I have ever given a thought to this. While the change might be well meaning, I truly resent the implications.

Go out into the world and train under-privileged folks on what they would need to be github employees in future that you would hire without a second thought independent of special 'diversity' mandates. Do more of that instead of focusing on trivial bs like master/slave.

<comment><USER8> Exactly.

'master' as used in git doesn't at all imply 'slave', but instead 'definitive'.

The real problem will not be solved by newspeak naming, but by actually giving genuinely equal opportunity to everyone, and perhaps more importantly, the means and environment to take up that opportunity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> All this 'removed' terminology is double standard. The entire name of the "git" project is offensive.

From wikipedia [1]

Git is a term of insult with origins in English denoting an unpleasant, silly, incompetent, annoying, senile, elderly or childish person.

GitHub - hub for gits (persons).

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(slang)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_\(slang\))

<comment><USER10> master is far more offensive especially in the United States

<comment><USER11> Are you offended the idea of a master key or say, mastering C++? Remastered albums?

<comment><USER12> Researching all that is surely somebody's Master's Theses.

<comment><USER10> more people are offended by the word master than git, I still don't think it was a good comparison, also the connotation of Master Theses, mastering C++, remastered album is also much different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've got to admit that "main" makes a lot more sense. It's the main branch where all commits are collected before getting deployed, it's not a master that bosses all the other branches around.

<comment><USER14> You're thinking of the wrong definition of master. Git's master refers to the primary copy of something from which derivative copies are made. E.g. In casting, a master is used to form new molds[1]. In audio engineering, a master tape holds the final mix of a recording[2]. (Incidentally, this is where the term remastering comes from, because you are creating a new master version.)

1\. [https://www.instructables.com/id/Two-Part-Silicone- Casting/](https://www.instructables.com/id/Two-Part-Silicone-Casting/) 2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastering_(audio)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastering_\(audio\))

<comment><USER5> That's where I assumed "master" came from. But it still doesn't fit, because a master copy is normally static. The master branch in Git is anything but static.

<comment><USER15> > because a master copy is normally static

That depends on the time scale you are considering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >I had actually started with "default", and was told it might be triggering for folks in financial trouble? I don't actually have an opinion myself

[https://github.com/git-for- windows/git/issues/2674#issuecomm...](https://github.com/git-for- windows/git/issues/2674#issuecomment-640711525)

You can't make this shit up

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't really care much about what the branches are named at the end of the day. However, I do find it concerning that we're so bothered by appearances that a term of art in multiple industries is being made to appear unsavory (and considering the general tone of the comments I've seen, it seems that is also manufactured dissent.)

If we had a master/slave situation going on I could understand an uproar. However, it's really the 'Master' copy, which basically means 'Original' or 'Source of truth'

I totally agree with Kingh32 from the reddit thread posted by another commenter below. This whole thing seems like a distraction so we can feel good about _changing something_ without having to actually solve any hard problems or make any substantial changes.

</comment><comment><USER18> 2300 comments on /r/programming -

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h8w36t/github_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h8w36t/github_will_no_longer_use_the_term_master_as/)

</comment><comment><USER19> As long as they don't rename branches silently, I don't really care what something is called.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why not "trunk"? Seems like the obvious choice to me.

* it's a tree structure, trunks are the "main" branches of trees

* trunk was used commonly in svn before git stormed the scene

<comment><USER21> Yes, this is far more accurate terminology as well. That's something I would have thought HN would value.

<comment><USER20> HN is selectively conservative based on, apparently, career length.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This change means that sufficient nagging on popular social networks can bully entire companies into submission. Where do we draw the line between technology and being offended?

The whole notion of "we are doing it to fix things" is a lie. Changing words that mean something in technology does absolutely nothing to fix the underlying problem - hatred.

The cheapest way to buy yourself conscience is to sit at home and do absolutely nothing of value, but to appear as if you "care". This is precisely what changing terminology does - it buys companies conscience.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this noble cause, I just can't wait to invest yet more time to fix all the problems caused by naming change. And yes, there's us who deal with software not working when you rename a branch. Telling me it was already broken if naming change breaks it - thanks, it magically makes it go away.

There's a huge number of us who work in maintenance field and we can't construct or design systems to satisfy every possible great practice out there - namely, we inherit old, crappy systems that no one wants to deal with and work on and we make them run.

Changing something that worked under false pretense of doing it for greater good - while jeopardizing entire jobs because of failing software - has anyone given it any thought?

Sure, someone you never saw is not offended any more by a naming convention in a field they never interacted with. But I'll be there, with many of my coworkers fixing older systems on the fly, praying nothing goes down at the wrong moment, enabling the ones who depend on that software to do their work.

While I understand the motivation behind this.. let's call it movement - <USER2> can't understand that very little thought has been given to consequences and to who will suffer because of the changes.

</comment><comment><USER23> Also relevant : [http://antirez.com/news/122](http://antirez.com/news/122)

Response from Redis developer regarding master-slave terminology.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's just... unnecessary.

BTW I think now, I know why Tom Bombadil didn't appear in the movie!

        Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow,
        Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.
        None has ever caught him yet, for Tom, he is the MASTER:
        His songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster.

</comment><comment><USER25> I never thought adding colors to emojis were useful. They just added race to it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Where is GitHub's announcement about this? (Does it exist?) I can't find anything on this and I'd like to know more about what exactly is going to go down.

</comment><comment><USER27> Sounds risky; surely this will break a lot of systems.

How is this rolled out? Are existing repos affected?

Can I keep using "master" if I choose to?

</comment><comment><USER28> Absolutely ridiculous.

<comment><USER29> Why?

<comment><USER28> Because it's an unnecessary breaking change.

<comment><USER30> It's not a breaking change.

<comment><USER31> ... uh, yeah, it is.

<comment><USER30> Nope. Any third party software that assumes a "master" branch always exists and is always the main branch was already broken.

<comment><USER24> It's not broken. It just works under assumptions applicable to the most common use cases. I know that a software engineer will sneer about dependencies of this kind, but such assumptions really simplify reality/software/whatever.

And yes, they are a pain in the ass when it comes to changes and that's why one should be careful with unnecessary changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> From 2 days ago (138 points, over 200 comments), and yesterday (126 points, over 200 comments)

</comment><comment><USER33> I hate when corporations are like "how can we pretend to care without doing anything of substance".

I know that some asshole with a fountain pen in a board room came up with this idea.

</comment><comment><USER34> Master and servant would be ok I guess.

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm honestly surprised it has taken this long. I was uncomfortable with the phrasing back in 99 when studying for my A+ exam.

<comment><USER36> Why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> For those saying that "master" as used in git has nothing to do with master/slave: Git was made to replace bitkeeper which had (has?) the concepts of master/slave repositories:

[https://github.com/bitkeeper- scm/bitkeeper/blob/master/doc/H...](https://github.com/bitkeeper- scm/bitkeeper/blob/master/doc/HOWTO.ask#L231-L232)

[https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel- list/2019-May/...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel- list/2019-May/msg00066.html)

Edit: to those down-voting ... keep hitting the down arrow, maybe reality will go away and you won't be inconvenienced by it anymore.</comment>


Self-employed are frozen out of mortgages - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122818315556971151.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm currently having this experience. Trying to buy a house, but because my income has come from a variety of sources over the years - a small consulting company, a startup, and my own independent consulting - it's going to be tough for me to qualify. Specifically, my income source changed from 2008 to 2009, and they won't accept the 2009 income at all, because the entity is new. I've had steady income - and provided steady income for employees and contractors - but that's not enough.

</comment><comment><USER2> Anyone who's self-employed should be professional about it, set up an LLC or corporation of some sort, and pay themselves a salary out of the business' net earnings. You pay taxes on the salary, but the business gets a deduction for it, so that's no excuse not to do it this way. And complaining that you can't claim the income as a deductible business expense and available to spend on a mortgage at the same time is just whining: it's a cost of doing business or it's profit in your pocket; you can't have it both ways.

If this is too complex, and you want the simplicity of being a self- proprietor, then accept the consequences, including not having documented proof of steady income.

<comment><USER3> Probably good enough advice, but the salary and tax part isn't really the key issue. It's fine to be a single member LLC and do the estimated quarterly taxes thing. As long as all of your deductions are reasonable your taxable income should be just about what you actually have. If you have multiple years of this kind of income the bank becomes agreeable to it.

It also helps to have a high income if you're going to do this, but then again that's why you do the LLC thing in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yup. Had this problem in '05. Not even going to talk about what we did to solve it --- extremely skeevey. I doubt I could have bought at all under current conditions.

Buying is overrated anyhow, though.

<comment><USER5> One way I know that people have used was to set up a corporation, put savings into the corp then hire themselves and pay whatever salary they required for a few months. Three payslips later (a common requirement until recently, at least) they could get a mortgage. To do this "legally" requires you paying the taxes on that "income" but that could be worth it.

In my case I got a mortgage in 2007 (one month before the market peaked, woo!) through a mortgage broker who convinced the mortgage company to be happy with 3 years of self employment tax returns, and it wasn't a self certified mortgage or anything crazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm actually in this situation now. I run a small consultancy organized as a single member LLC.

Does anyone know if filing taxes as an S-corp and giving myself a salary gets around this at all?

<comment><USER7> IANAL, but I'd wager that proof of taxes withheld would be the key issues (pay check stubs, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is part of the reason I'm buying in cash right now. It used to be that it was insane to buy in cash because mortgage rates were way lower than average market gain. Now that's not so much the case.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been self-employed for 2.5 years. I have an LLC. I got a mortgage last month.

</comment><comment><USER10> Oh let us all cry for those poor people that cheat on their taxes. It is very simple, the bank assumes that your income is what you put as your income on your tax return. If you cheated on your taxes and said you have no income then the bank will assume you have no income.

</comment><comment> onreact-com Try peer to peer lending instead:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=841484>

Who trusts banks these days anyways? When they go bankrupt you lose your home.

<comment><USER4> I'm confused. The bank that held my mortgage went bankrupt. Strangely enough, I still seem to have my house. Seriously, what are you talking about?

<comment> onreact-com Sorry, I don't want to explain the financial crisis to you but in short it was something like this: The financial system broke down, banks either went bankrupt or had to be rescued by tax payer money.

As a result of the financial crisis many people lost their homes. Maybe that was too complex for you to understand the connection and you still trust your bank. That's OK for you, it's your choice. Still many people don't trust banks anymore with good reason.

<comment><USER11> How idiotic can you be? "As a result of the financial crisis many people lost their homes." People lost their homes because they couldn't pay the mortgage. They couldn't pay the mortgage because they didn't have the money to pay the mortgage. The banks went bankrupt because they gave mortgages to too many people that couldn't pay them.

<comment> onreact-com "How idiotic can you be?"

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3.""

<http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

<comment><USER4> Let me try to respond more appropriately:

"Nothing you said about mortgages appears to be true".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Man vs. Squirrel- Building the Perfect Squirrel Proof Bird Feeder - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFZFjoX2cGg <comment><USER2> You mean, squirrel obstacle course.</comment>


Github 404 page - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/404

<comment><AUTHOR> I love the github guys for their attention to detail, the 500 page is also worth seeing: <https://github.com/500>

<comment><USER2> Monkey Island, perhaps? Or am I wrong?

<comment><USER3> Looks more like Wile E. Coyote

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah yes, Road Runner is what I was thinking

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Make sure you move your mouse over the image.

<comment><USER5> Woah. How do you do it? Magic?

<comment><USER6> Javascript.

<comment><USER7> Magic. Got it.

<comment><USER8> _Black_ magic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Octocat's name is Octobi Wan Catnobi (view source)

</comment><comment><USER9> The 404 page on Blippy is worth a mention too - <http://blippy.com/404>

<comment><USER10> "worth a mention!?"

It gets a golden award! My cousin and I spent a good 5 minutes poking, prodding, chasing, and otherwise abusing that poor unicorn all over the screen!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reddit has/had a good 404 ~ [http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2835213914/in/set-7215...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2835213914/in/set-72157606313082181/) though I liked their general error report better ~ [http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/98158858/in/set-721576...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/98158858/in/set-72157606313082181/) _"sorry broke: looks like we shouldn't have stopped using lisp..."_

<comment><USER12> Actually it's far more common to get the "You broke Reddit" error message. There are a couple more in rotation. I haven't seen the "9/11 changed everything" one in a while, so they may have wisely stopped using that one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For extra fun, type this in the address bar while on the github 404 page:

        javascript:var theta = 0; setInterval(function () { theta += 0.05; parallax({ pageX : (Math.sin(theta) + 1) * 1000, pageY : (Math.cos(theta) + 1) * 1000}) }, 50)

</comment><comment><USER14> Their 503 <https://github.com/503> collection of random github-approved youtube videos.

<comment><USER15> Wow, that takes me back. It's sad to see so many of those videos have been removed in the last three years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> this is the most awesome thing i've seen in 2011 so far

<comment><USER17> I was liking this page back in 2010, noob.

<comment><USER8> this is the most awesome reply i've seen in 2011 so far

<comment><USER18> I was liking that reply in 2010, noob (technically true, living in Chicago).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> All those creative error pages make me think that it might be a great "dear team, maybe you fancy hacking some funny or exciting non-related webdesign stuff in your free time. If you create something nice and want to, we can use it as our error page" motivation to have your programmers space out and hack as they like while still contributing to the project.

<comment><USER20> Or, you hire an illustrator to do a quick gig: <http://twitter.com/#!/cameronmcefee/status/20917220263600129>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is so cool! Imagine the future of web based gaming where it detects your head movement (like the mouse). So close to 3D! :-)

</comment><comment><USER22> So I tried moving my mouse left and right while closing my right and left eyes. Alternate fast enough and it really looks 3D!

</comment><comment><USER23> I thought it would present some ui allowing you to enter the code for the page. "page not found? This is github, so you write it. :)"

</comment><comment><USER24> Cute, but damn onmouseover on the iPad.... :(

<comment><USER25> I don't think GitHub markets to devices that can't run Git[Hub].

<comment><USER26> I use Git on my iPad all the time, from Cydia/Telesphoreo. Sure, it's unsupported, but it works great. (Link: <http://cydia.saurik.com/package/git>)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The 3d effect is achieved using JParallax

</comment><comment><USER28> This made my day.

</comment><comment><USER29> sorry this page doesn't seem to load for me.

<comment><USER29> ... all i get is a 404 warning. =(

<comment><USER29> it's a joke. don't forget to tip your waitress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The link seems broken, it didn't get me where I wanted.

</comment><comment><USER31> Am I the first person to go "Woah! That's cool!" then look at the code and instantly go " _WTF?!_ "?

      - Browser sniffing using `document.all` to test for IE

      - Browser sniffing at all!

      - Aborting `trace` rather than just removing it

      - In `init`, repeatedly calling `document.getElementById` with the same `id`
        instead of storing them in variables

      - Calling `document.getElementById` every time `parallax`, the `mousemove` event
        handler, is triggered rather than `init` storing them *once* in variables that
        `parallax` has access to</comment>


Incorporating my Company in the UK; no lawyer; no accountant - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@trevormydata/week-2-incorporating-a-company-in-the-uk-cost-me-15-what-s-the-catch-4a7aa954fd6c <comment><USER2> Yes, it is incredibly easy. The hardest part is thinking up of a company name. I set one up for when I considered contracting, but I ended up never using it.

Make sure you update your accounts with HMRC on time though, the fees can become quite large if you forget. This is where having an accountant would come in handy. You have to do this even if the company is dormant.

If you do find yourself in a position where there are a lot of fees, you have the option of just closing the company and they go away (unless you re-open the company).

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool. But now I'd like to see the corresponding report from India, say.

[https://www.doingbusiness.org/en/rankings#](https://www.doingbusiness.org/en/rankings#)</comment>


You have your desktop and your laptop; now get your webtop - <AUTHOR> http://www.venturesandbox.com/2010/04/you-have-your-desktop-and-your-laptop.html

<comment><USER2> I think there's really something to this, at least judging by my own experience with the iPad, and I'm not generally an early adopter.

There are really three levels of computing: desktop/laptop (full work/play), pad/slate (light work/play, for which we didn't have a plausible candidate until recently), and phone (work/play only in a pinch).

I'd call the pad/slate a couchtop, though, not a webtop.</comment>


IT auditing is painful. Read in new Sysadmin Magazine [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.netwrix.com/download/documents/sysadmin_magazine_march_2016.pdf <comment><USER2> How about me not providing you an e-mail just to read your marketing flyer?</comment>


An end to spaghetti power cables - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7575618.stm <comment><USER2> I wonder if this would have any disruption on implanted devices like pacemakers?

And I'm kind of surprised there's no mention of Tesla's legacy on his wireless power transfer experiments.

<http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_colspr.html></comment>


How to Keep Your Best Programmers (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.daedtech.com/how-to-keep-your-best-programmers <comment><USER2> "[...] and make fewer demands on management; even if they find the workplace unpleasant, they are the least likely to be able to find a job elsewhere. They tend to entrench themselves, becoming maintenance experts on critical systems, assuming responsibilities that no one else wants so that the organization can't afford to let them go."

So basically, they are people willing to do work that is needed and doing it responsibly. The work you are not willing to do and doing it without throwing temper tantrum over being too good for the work. That is why they ended up having responsibility - leadership does not have to worry that boring but needed work wont be done. He does not even have to motivate them, they just work.

I mean, I get that it is possible to asleep and not to continue learning, becoming mediocre. But if you are too good for work on critical system that needs to be done, then you have less merit then them. Merit should not be about coolness points, but about how useful you are. I agree that all this probably means leaving is a good idea for you, but the resentment towards people responsibly doing important work you are not willing to do is absurd.

Also, once you have to maintain the code for longer (or worked on old codebase), you might find that your opinions about what is clean code and what is important change - some of the stupid things if you people used to small projects routinely do are actually things that allow you not to loose sanity and control on big projects.

<comment><USER3> The same author has other blog posts regarding organizations and teams that place too much value on "putting out fires" and not enough emphasis on avoiding situations that cause fires in the first place.

He also writes about teams that reward and entrench tribal knowledge but have no notion of designing systems (when possible) such that even new hires cannot misuse them. [http://www.daedtech.com/tribal- knowledge/](http://www.daedtech.com/tribal-knowledge/)

I'm sure it is these notions that the author had in mind when writing this article, and not just people who want to skirt unpleasant/difficult tasks.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but "becoming maintenance experts on critical systems, assuming responsibilities that no one else wants" does not imply putting out fires nor bad design. Not by a long stretch. But then again, if the company has that badly written critical system, someone willing to work on it responsibly has more merit then someone who is not willing to work on it. Of course if you are able to do it better and make needed changes then it is even better, but prerequisity is you being willing to work and assume responsibility.

The part I quoted from defines merit as raw talent or something like that, not by how useful or responsible you are. He assumes that your motivation have to drop over time and if it does not, he assumes you are bad developer. That is wrong. The productivity/motivation drop itself is a fault, not a virtue. Yes, good leadership deals with it too, but if they don't need to babysit you that way they might value that alone.

It is not just skirting unpleasant tasks. Some positions are largely repetitive - if you can not deal with that you are not suitable, period. I am unsuitable for them too, but I am quite happy that I have colleagues who are suitable. It is not actually that easy to find people who will reliably do boring work. Some positions require you do deal with problems nobody managed to optimize or difficult customers or such. Again, if you can not deal with that you are not suitable and if you can, that such ability is pure merit. Quite a lot of "hackers" run away from difficult tasks that require you to understand abstractions and such - I am good at those. As much as those "hackers" can assume me to be less capable because I did not flocked to cool new language, I still have skill they don't have.

Knowing what you are suitable for is important, but as I said, all the resentment and condescension towards people who are valued for their actual contributions is absurd.

<comment><USER4> I don't believe the author is looking down on people who work on boring, critical systems.

Rather, his point is that people who go _out of their way_ to hoard knowledge on ancient systems and make themselves critical are people you want to avoid. As a single point of anecdata, the best engineers I know _want_ to democratize information - they hate tribal knowledge because it creates a point of failure and bottleneck in the Keeper of the Tribal Knowledge.

<comment><USER2> There was not a single mention of refusal to share information nor refusal to document. Just that they assume responsibilities others don't want do and that they work on critical systems.

Going out your way to learn about systems that needs to be maintained is a good thing (if that is hoarding). I want team full of people who are like that.

<comment><USER4> The original post specifically calls out hoarding:

> On the other hand, the unskilled tend to have a slightly different curve: > Value Convergence. They eventually settle into a position of mediocrity and > stay there indefinitely. The only reason their value does not decrease is > because the vast amount of institutional knowledge they hoard and create.

The quote you're addressing (from another article) is also qualified in the original source, under "Responses to comments" / "Not everyone 'left behind' is incompetent": [http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis- the-d...](http://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/11/the-wetware-crisis-the-dead-sea- effect/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Process is the enemy. Reward people for business impact, and fairly evaluate that impact, and all else will follow. When something goes wrong, don't react by adding process to prevent the thing that will go wrong.

The costs in slowed developer velocity and increased developer frustration are largely invisible, but cumulative, and they lead to unhappiness and organizational paralysis.

<comment><USER6> >Process is the enemy.

Nowhere in the article is process mentioned. So I'm not sure how you concluded that process was to blame.

Let's say that process is the cause. How would you evaluate and reward people for 'business impact', presuming we have a method of determining it? Wouldn't it be through a process?

Perhaps what you meant to say was that poorly designed processes or a process driven culture cause problems, one of which is employee boredom.

<comment><USER7> FWIW it doesn't need to be in the article for someone to provide their own viewpoint and experience

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the overall theme here is a distinction between cultivating an employee, rather than extracting value from one. Another comparison is between a long-term relationship and short-term.

A narrative is part of a long relationship, a story that evolves and grows over time, holding your interest through the climax. This works with an employee/employer relationship because it there's an evolution of learning about the different characters and environment, discovering problems and solving them.

Anytime an employer forgets that employees get something out of work aside from rewards/benefits/payment, they see only a scale with a cost center on one side and a resource to be mined on the other. And they want to mine more than they spend.

Compare that with a garden, remembering that you have to give the garden something. Yes, you provided soil, and the plants get nutrients. But do you care if they get watered, the weeds are taken care of, and the sun is shining?

Cultivate your employees. Help them grow, and you'll benefit from that growth. Eventually, harvest time will be over, and they will leave for greener fields, but you'll have enough stored up to get you through winter.

</comment><comment><USER9> Surprised an outsourcing push isn't in there; nothing demotivates more then your employer seeing you as an expense they can get cheaper if they outsource.

<comment><USER10> IME outsourcing was thought of as a way to get things done faster. It didn't seem to be a net gain and it was just viewed as a minor extra annoyance the team lead had to deal with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's really dumb and patronizing to believe that people who won't leave your organization chasing a dream are automatically your dumpy leftovers. A lack of ambition doesn't imply a lack of skill.

<comment><USER12> > A lack of ambition doesn't imply a lack of skill.

This is a very astute observation. I've worked with many really great engineers who wouldn't switch jobs even if they could command a better compensation... because they are happy with their work and compensation. Doesn't stop them from being great engineers or constantly learning/adapting to new technologies.

<comment><USER13> A lack of ambition does not necessarily imply a lack of skill but it often does, often enough to result in the "Dead Sea Effect" the author refers to. I've seen it over and over at just about every company I've worked. The people who are really good and have the best career options tend to take those options, leaving behind SOME people who are also really good, but mostly people who don't have the option to leave.

<comment><USER3> To continue the metaphor, the actual Dead See does still have some water in it.

<comment><USER3> sea

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like the description of the "Value Apex". I admit I haven't heard of that one before but it makes sense, and thinking back it's usually the reason I jump ship, and indeed is probably the way things are headed in my current company.

When you start at a company (and early in your career), you can add value Z, and get rewarded Y in proportion to your work/output X. Where Y is whatever motivates you, money, advancement, interesting work, etc. As you remain in a company, Y and Z tend to reduce over time sometimes even to zero, to the point where additional marginal work does not result in commensurate additional marginal value/reward. At that point you've hit your ceiling. You're stuck. If you have any ambition at all, you're headed for the hills, to a place where you can start expecting more proportional reward once again.

Some people don't care--they're happy to hit their position's ceiling, and just hang out there until they get bored. For ladder-climbers it's pretty much unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't see the point in being honest about why I left my last two positions.

If I was totally honest it would come across as an insult to the company and its management/HR teams I'm sure, and I've been advised never to burn bridges.

There is a slim chance my criticisms could have improved conditions for the colleagues I left behind, but I find it very unlikely.</comment>


Discussing PHP Frameworks: What, When, Why and Which? - <AUTHOR> http://www.noupe.com/php/discussing-php-frameworks.html

<comment><USER2> If you're a decent enough programmer (web development is really easy compared to other fields) and you really want versatility, coding from scratch without using a framework is still the best decision.

This is not necessarily true for non web apps. I love Cocoa for instance and the MVC pattern is great for most kinds of apps. But not for the web, IMHO. It's overkill.

There are too many unnecessary abstractions from the protocols. The LAMP stack already gives you everything you need. For instance, PHP with mod_php already is a template processor. There's no need to build another one on top of it. Unless you don't know what you're doing, which is bad anyway.

I still prefer to parse the query string myself, to define my SQL queries (and most of the times a single query can replace 4-5 queries generated from a framework so apps are much faster) and to keep the data as clean and separated from the code as I can (data is always much more important than code and it's much better if it is code agnostic).

With web frameworks there's a lot of magic and it's faster to have a web app up and running. But it's a pain as soon as you want to modify the default behaviors. At least in my experience.

<comment><USER3> I think you are thinking too small. For most small sites I agree that frameworks are overkill but once you get past that they become nearly essential to maintaining your code.

Running a web app with even over 10KLOC without some sort of framework in place sounds like a receipt for disaster. Also frameworks do not mean you have to have code generate all your queries or stick another templating language over php.

If you've never had to write or maintain a complex web application than I can understand your position but once you do I'm certain you'll change your mind.

Also saying web development is easy compared to other fields shows a lack of understanding of the complexity of large web based applications. I've worked in a number of fields and I now focus on web development and for the most part they were all about the same complexity.

<comment><USER2> I totally disagree. And I've made complex web apps since when CGIs in C where the only way to have dynamic generated content.

In fact I think it is the contrary: for small sites (and small budgets) frameworks can be ok. For big websites custom code is a must.

The idea that using a framework makes code easier to maintain is the complete opposite of my experience.

Big (serious) projects require a lot of custom logic which you should write yourself anyway. And it is a lot more painful since you have to stick to the framework logic if you don't want to break things as soon as you update the framework version or if you don't want to make the code unmaintainable.

I have made my own libraries which are designed in a modular fashion (not OO) that I constantly improve and reuse. Code is clean and you can easily understand the flow of each section.

A MVC framework is not the only way to have clean (modular) code.

Your reasoning would apply if you aren't good at designing software architecture, which is a recipe for disaster especially on big projects.

<comment><USER3> I'm not saying MVC is the only way. I've not even mentioned MVC. What I gather though is that when you hear someone mention frameworks you assume they are referring to the railish frameworks of recent. A framework to me is a set of libraries and a structure to better layout and facilitate the development of your application.

It also doesn't have to be a premade/3rd party one as you've demonstrated by essentially creating your own framework and just calling it by a different name(collection of libraries).

A recipe for disaster in my opinion would be a large project with no code structure/layout guidelines.

<comment><USER2> In this case, of course, I agree.

The term framework is almost exclusively used for object oriented designs. That's what I was arguing against.

Of course one should make, use and keep improving his own libraries.

And there's nothing wrong in using other people code either. Provided that it is built in a modular standalone fashion and so it can be easily included / replaced / updated / removed without breaking things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article could omit the words "PHP" and "web" until it starts listing the specific frameworks and still be valid.

I'm inclined to agree with the posts opposing the use of a generic framework for a very scalable or complex application; they're usually not for that. What frameworks ARE for is small to medium applications with low budgets.

I do some contract work on projects with budgets in the $500-2000 range. For projects like that, frameworks like Rails or Django save a lot of time over writing it in scratch (even in Lisp, which I've done a couple times).

<comment><USER2> Exactly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's amazing how all-over the place these comments are on frameworks! Maybe it's because frameworks vary so much in their goals, weight and architecture.

There are really 2 kinds of performance; latency and throughput. Latency is how fast a single request is served; throughput how many requests you can serve concurrently. A good framework has a noticeable but negligible effect on latency (which also goes down all the time as the framework improves and hardware gets faster), yet also makes scalability _easier_ by helping you abstract out the parts that make it scalable. If the framework you're using makes it hard to scale horizontally, that's a failure of _that_ framework, not of the concept of frameworks.

I also disagree on the size of web sites that frameworks are useful on. I see a lot of comments like "ok for small/medium sites but bad for large sites". Why would frameworks suddenly get bad on a large site? For performance reasons? Architectural reasons? If either of these happen to you then you've simply chosen the wrong framework.

The argument that "an organizational system and set of useful libraries for programming web-related tasks" all of the sudden stop working once a site reaches a certain size is bogus. It might be true for a framework, but it won't be true for all of them.

I ended up writing a php framework (<http://phocoa.com>) in order to write _less_ code. Frameworks give you leverage. They only box you in or cause scalability problems if they're architected poorly. I have really enjoyed the experience of building a framework as well as using it. I have been writing web apps, mobile apps, and desktop apps of all kinds for nearly 15 years and so I have had broad exposure to a variety of development stacks, from nothing to rich frameworks. Of course it's just my personal opinion, but in my experience a well-written framework is always better than doing it yourself, and a poorly-written one is almost always worse than doing it yourself.

</comment><comment><USER6> We use Kohana, which is a lightweight php5 port of codeigniter. we like it a lot

<comment><USER7> I'm currently looking at kohana - I use Zend FW now (been doing a long time without any of the established frameworks, only my own set of tools). Can you elaborate a bit why Kohana instead of Zend? Even if I end up using Kohana, there are several things in Zend I will keep - PDF for example.

<comment><USER6> I don't have any experience with Zend, but I've heard its just a very heavy weight install.

Kohana is super light and easily extended, though you lose a lot of the fluffy libraries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> the list he gives is very very short, here is a longer one:

<http://www.phpframeworks.com/>

</comment><comment><USER9> There's also NOLOH (<http://www.noloh.com>), which allows you to create sophisticated web sites and web applications easily and intuitively in a single development language.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of NOLOH.

<comment><USER10> Wow, that's creepy. I've just been building exactly the same thing - i even used the same keywords.

<comment><USER9> NOLOH's been around since 2005 and has multiple patents pending. Perhaps you would like to talk sometime, we're always looking for talented developers to join our team.

<comment><USER10> That's very interesting. I never understood why more people haven't made the connection between objects in the front end and PHP objects in the backend, and how it's only natural to unify those into one language instead of messing with seperate html, css, js etc. Anyhow good luck to you guys, it's the way to go, i want to keep working on more features and then maybe i'll give you a shout if i feel i've got something new worth contributing :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A small mistake: this site is writing "Codelgniter" (with L) instead of "CodeIgniter" (with I).

</comment><comment><USER12> No drupal?</comment>


Standing desks aren't going to make you healthier - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/standing-desks-arent-going-to-make-you-healthier-2016-03-19 <comment><USER2> yes they are in fact a health hazard /s

[https://thequickword.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/standing- desks...](https://thequickword.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/standing-desks-may-be- linked-to-skinny-legs/)</comment>


I made a mechanical keyboard with 3D-printed switches - <AUTHOR> https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/jesboard.html <comment><USER2> It is insane to print your own switches when you can buy extremely high quality ones for 25 cents a piece. And that level of insanity makes this a great project.

<comment><USER3> Next project idea: Pneumatic keyboard!

Kind of surprisingly, doing a quick search for that term online shows up a 1960's patent for one:

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US3034628A/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US3034628A/en)

      The advent of the fluid amplifier has led to the development
      of data processing and control systems wherein the
      processing and control functions are carried out by elements
      which operate entirely on fluid principles. That is, these
      systems contain no moving parts other than the working fluid
      which flows through the system.

      Therefore, an object of the present invention is to provide
      a pure fluid system for inserting information into a fluid
      data processing device.

If anyone wants a challenge... ;)

<comment><USER4> Hydraulic would probably be easier with the limited stroke.

<comment><USER3> That also sounds like a potentially "fun and worthy challenge" for some people. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a neat project. I printed some switches out when I saw his post on Twitter I believe. It dovetailed into work that I've been doing to figure out replacement switches, buttons, and sliders using DIY 3D techniques vs sourcing through NKK or what not. Primarily for cost since any custom switch design is like $25K for the first 100.

As others have pointed out, these keys feel "mushy". And I agree with that. It comes down to the spring constant of printed springs. It is really really hard to make it consistent from print to print. Fortunately _springs_ are actually super cheap and you can make those yourself pretty easily too if you want. So if you back off the "everything has to be printed" mantra just a bit. You can make a more consistent feeling switch. (and less deep which has some benefit on front panel stuff)

<comment><USER6> Neat! Have you actually done that? You wouldn't happen to have a design to use as a starting point?

<comment><USER5> Haven't published my progress so far. I'm ChuckMcM on Thingiverse and that is where I've been putting my designs so it will show up there eventually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Spending some time typing on my homemade switches has given me a newfound > appreciation for just how good Cherry MX switches are.

I know at least one mech keyboard enthusiast from reddit who went from cherrry mx brown -> clears -> ergo clears -> gateron brown -> zealios v1 -> zealios v2 -> custom switches -> cherrry mx brown making a full cycle.

<comment><USER8> I assume you're talking about the "feel" of Cherry switches. Which many people really like.

As for reliability, I don't know how readily available they are any more, but IMO the true "gold standard" is Hall Effect, because it's contactless.

Hall effect keyboards used to be quite common 45 years ago in heavy data entry applications (e.g. people who spent their days entering typewritten manuscripts submitted by authors, years before every writer used a word processor).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_technology#Hall- effec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_technology#Hall- effect_keyboard)

Contactless is great because there's no mechanical key bounce or contact wear. Some quick googling showed that Cherry (at least once upon a time) made hall effect keyswitches. But they're probably too expensive for most applications.

<comment><USER9> there has actually been renewed interest in hall effect switches recently. See here [https://kono.store/products/keystone-analog-mechanical- keybo...](https://kono.store/products/keystone-analog-mechanical-keyboard) and [https://wooting.io/lekker](https://wooting.io/lekker)

not quite readily available, but that may change soon

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > "I toyed with the idea of getting a PCB made up that I could directly solder > my switches to. It would certainly have made it easier to put the keyboard > together, but I thought outsourcing the manufacturing of a PCB kind of takes > the edge off making your own switches..."

Totally! There are ways to make your own PCBs using presensitized boards and exposing it to light ([1] for example) to keep it DIY

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wAer7a3tU4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wAer7a3tU4)

<comment><USER11> Also, I know people have used CNC to mill a PCB.

<comment><USER12> Or a 3D printer: [https://www.stavros.io/posts/make-pcbs-at- home/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/make-pcbs-at-home/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> With something like this, one could merge the switches with the keycaps for a potentially lower overall profile.

</comment><comment><USER14> Custom-built keyboards are very cool, but I will never understand putting all this love into a non-ergonomic design. Typing on something with no separation or tilt murders your wrists! Mechanical keyboard enthusiasts will spend ages refining & debating every possible aspect of the individual switches, then lay them out on a flat slab like it's a giveaway Dell keyboard from 2006. At least the design he chose avoids a number pad, which either makes you situate the keyboard more to one side of your body or pushes the mouse too far out to use comfortably.

</comment><comment><USER15> Good job! However, according to the wiring seems like it wouldn't be able to register something like ctrl+shift+z which is used as redo hotkey almost everywhere.

<comment><USER12> The good thing about QMK is that you can remap anything you want to anything you want. For a hobby project, I don't know how much it would matter anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is pretty sweet. One thing I've always wanted to do is embed a hardware keylogger into the keyboard itself (optionally with bluetooth or some other radio - so I can retrieve contents of logs remotely).

Seems like with one of those you could even defeat 2FA (if you were a black hat). Swap out the victim's keyboard with the one with the embedded radio keylogger. Auto-detect when they are logging into something with 2FA. Put the characters they type into the web form and submit faster than they do.

</comment><comment><USER17> Cool project, it's unfortunate that it's unpleasant to type on - what do you think the estimated lifespan of daily use be before it breaks down?

<comment><USER12> IIRC in his tests the later versions of the switches lasted at least 100k presses, so quite a long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A guy in the mechkeys discord posted a clip of his 3D printed mech switches yesterday as well. I believe he is using reed switches instead of a 3d printed leaf but its pretty cool.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwRfQ3p_jFo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwRfQ3p_jFo)

<comment><USER9> yes, this is linked in the OP! It's fantastically interesting. Uses magnets instead of springs

</comment></comment><comment> will-mortar James - first of all, well done! you say it's not a 'good' keyboard, what is your definition of good?

</comment><comment><USER19> Awesome! When I saw the switches a little while ago I was hoping you'd make a full keyboard.

</comment><comment><USER20> Looks cool but how do you clean it? The grooves will get filled up with dirt in a month or two.

</comment><comment><USER21> I love seeing stuff like this, really cool - thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER22> Oooh I'm totally gonna build this! Thanks so much</comment>


Hawaii false missile alert button pusher fired - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/30/us/hawaii-false-alarm-investigation/index.html <comment><USER2> Based on all the information I've seen about the UI of the system[1], this kind of error was more or less inevitable. Firing the poor operator for this is reprehensible.

1 [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTowcFJU0AAvtVo.jpg:large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DTowcFJU0AAvtVo.jpg:large)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Desperate damage control attempt from management.

Button pusher need to be trained and reassigned. This was not a malice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Two choices.

If you push the button and it's a false alarm, you get fired.

If you don't push the button and it's not a false alarm, you were going to die anyways.</comment>


1024 days on hacker news - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cubeofm.com/1024-days-on-hacker-news

<comment><USER2> I don't know if that was the intention, but the picture with the mountain said beautifully how it feels sometimes. So lonely... and yet there you are, you guys, who I don't even know but give me strength.. I can't wait for the day I will post a "review my startup" entry!

That was really nice, Max - Thank you.

<comment><USER3> Here's the original context of that picture with the mountain:

<http://xkcd.com/77/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice job, man. I discovered YC/HN a couple of weeks ago... Guess I have a lot ahead of me :)

<comment><USER5> It's not as tough as we think it is. When I first found this place, I thought that doing a startup would be near impossible. In actuality, given discipline, I don't think it's too hard. Also, you have a unique path; everybody pursuing their dreams has a different and unique path. I'm excited to see where you end up - ping me if there's anything with which we can help.

<comment><USER4> Cool, I will...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> git push itrealgood

Great comic. I'm now suddenly interested in the possibilities of xkcd remix comics.

<comment><USER7> There's a very long, very good thread on the xkcd forums full of them: [http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=22741](http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=22741).

Some (maybe all or close to it, I haven't been paying attention) are also up on <http://xkcdsw.com/>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Awesome portrayal, Max!! I also liked this xkcd comic very much - <http://xkcd.com/137/>

</comment><comment><USER9> We're almost the same HN age. My 1033 days on HN have seen a series of interesting jobs, mixed with the occasional panic about my visa. But not nearly as much entrepreneurial activity.

Best of luck to you.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't have a start up (yet...), but my mother, who is in her late 60's, is several years into a medical practices "start up" has really started to take off. (While remaining intentionally vague, I'll add that, no, she's not a doctor.) She and her partners have been taking on a lot of new (for them) business practices and demands -- online presence, politics, real estate purchase, etc. I've found her running problems and ideas by me, more and more. It seems that all the time I've spent particularly here as well as some other places on line -- and in the world of work outside of the medical field -- has provided me some perspective and ideas that work well for her. She takes them and considers them for herself, of course, but they give her options to consider.

So, even if you aren't currently in a start up, this place may be having more of an effect than you realize.

Thanks, HN! :-)

P.S. And you never know when that opportunity may arise.

Actually, one of her "regular job" environments was changing due to funding and politics, and she was lamenting this and speculating about starting up a private practice partnership in a year or two. I was the one who suggested, strongly, "do it now", before the top notch people being affected found other options and became too tied down consider her idea.

That same lunch, we walked by a medical practices building having sign advertising space to let. Three months or so later, it was theirs.

<comment><USER11> A startup in her 60s? That is impressive. Best of luck to your mum!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I could totally connect :-)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm 1024 days today too!

</comment><comment><USER14> Good work! Thumbs up.</comment>


FM transmitters create socializing networks in Africa - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.org/2008/07/31/fm-transmitters-socializing-in-an-offline-world/

<comment><USER2> I think it is wrong to say that there is a big lack of internet accessibility in Australia. Compare that map with the population density: [http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2001/publications/theme- re...](http://www.environment.gov.au/soe/2001/publications/theme- reports/biodiversity/images/bdfg005.gif)

<comment><USER3> Yes it's totally wrong. Something like 98% of Australians live in the cities where you have multiple suppliers of ADSL 2+ (28Mb), cable internet, HSDPA (3G wireless internet) and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hope they will sell these at a low price

</comment><comment><USER4> Voila - hand-cranked CB radio.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can we use it in Europe too?

<comment><AUTHOR> The inventor studied in The Netherlands, the concept should work everywhere! I wonder if they are legal in Europe though...

<comment><USER5> Can we buy a few and test them? Would be good content and good publicity...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Afrika?</comment>


Ask HN: As an IT freelancer how do you approach marketing and sales (survey)? - <AUTHOR> I'm an independent IT consultant and recently I've been researching how to do marketing and sales in the industry. I tried different approaches and made some experience with what works (and especially with what doesn't ...). I'd like to share this experience with other IT consultants (e.g. through tutorials, best practices and tools for supporting sales processes)
In order to get a better picture about how others in the industry approach marketing and sales I created a short survey (10 questions). If you're doing IT consulting / freeelancing I'd be happy if you participated:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RSQJWYY <comment><AUTHOR> The results are now available:

[https://bjoernkw.com/2016/01/15/survey-for-it-freelancers- ho...](https://bjoernkw.com/2016/01/15/survey-for-it-freelancers-how-do-you- approach-marketing-and-sales-the-results/)

Thanks again to everybody for participating.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'd be curious to know as well as I'm considering IT consulting/freelancing. I wonder if there's an opportunity for us to create an independent IT consulting network together to help generate new business.

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on what you mean by creating an independent IT consulting network. Informal networks (i.e. talking to other consultants, going to events, generally business networking) certainly do exist and they're as helpful as in any business. Sometimes they help you generate new leads, sometimes you'll learn about interesting new opportunities and in general knowing other people from the industry will help you learn and share useful information about how to run your business.

Then there are sales-orientied networks like Gun.io . Do you have something in mind more along those lines?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm going to release the results next Thursday (Jan, 14th).

The reason I'd like to give it time till next week is to give people who'll just be returning from their Christmas holidays next week an opportunity to participate as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm also curious to know how folks get new clients if their services are very niche.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm _very_ interested in the results. I have some of the same questions.

</comment><comment><USER4> When do you anticipate releasing the results?</comment>


The Return of the Super-Elite - <AUTHOR> http://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/income-inequality-super-rich-economic-policy-institute/ <comment><USER2> I have a better idea. How about we just assert whatever it is that we want to be true, repeat the assertion enough times and then just want until our minds become warped enough to believe it.

Say you want better healthcare. Do we really want to go down the rabbit hole of establishing metrics (infant mortality, obesity rates, whatever), having wonks work out policy, have bureaucrats turn the massive Ship of State towards that goal towards redistributing taxes and modifying lifestyles, spend years following up on all this? It's insane, people can't have democratic control over this, we can't expect them to put up with it.

Instead we can just vote in someone who'll us we'll be "beautifully covered", then we'll all get together frequently to listen to him tell us how great things are going, then we'll hype each other telling each other how great things are. Who you're gonna believe, some rando egghead on TV yammering about metrics, or your community? As long as we all believe, everything will be great. And your shitty health? Well, you did what you could. _shrug_

<comment><USER3> At this rate, we'll be left with no option but to go down your suggested path anyway.

<comment><USER4> The joke is that we are actively going down this path in the US.

<comment><USER5> We've been on that path since long before the advent of modern medicine. The rate of diabetes and diabetic complications is so ridiculously absurd among rural communities and among the poor precisely because those communities live in the _old_ culture of "<shrug> he's sick, what can we do?".

Those communities embraced interventions like vaccines because they were easy, cheap (or more often than not free), and didn't require changes to lifestyle. Lifestyle interventions are the _preferred_ mode of the bourgeoisie precisely because the poor are unable or outright unwilling to make those changes.[1]

The easy wins are over. Now we need to move the real mountains: hearts and minds of the larger population. This is a _new_ fight. The regressions we see are a regression to the mean.

But don't forget about or underestimate real wins, like cigarette smoking. That's a radical _cultural_ shift with a tremendous impact to public health and public finances, especially when you consider that through the 1980s and 1990s you saw the same conservative reactions (i.e. spiteful retrenchment) that you see these days wrt to today's social policies.

[1] Consider the flavored "tobacco" ban in SF. From a public health perspective there's very little to be gained. But the social elite were arguably more invested in that campaign than in earlier campaigns to reduce actual tobacco use precisely because it's fundamentally a lifestyle issue. And the irony that the elite are for legalizing marijuana but increasingly restricting vaping... don't get me started. I don't want to equivocate the poisonousness fatalism of the right with the zealousness of the left, but it's important to try to keep an objective perspective. Public health is a marathon. And if we let the perfect be the enemy of the better we'll all lose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To paraphrase Keyser Söze

"The greatest trick the Super-Elite ever pulled was convincing the world that inequality is a desired outcome of a properly functioning economy".

<comment><USER7> Inequality of outcomes is a requirement for incentives to improve. Correlated variance in income in return for variance in production is just. Generally, prices provide information about where more production is required, though at the cost of obscuring how that production was obtained.

What we quibble about is (a) the distribution of the income function relative to the individual's production, and (b) how much income gets distributed on the basis of mere ownership, rather than production.

The super-elite benefit much more from (b) than from (a). Mobility of capital means (b) is generally under-taxed.

<comment><USER8> >Inequality of outcomes is a requirement for incentives to improve.

What proof do you use?

<comment><USER9> I claim this is self-evident. What counterproof do you propose?

<comment><USER8> If it were self-evident, it would not need to be stated.

Imagine the game monopoly. Then, imagine a house rule that says all players receive $300 at the start of each turn.

<comment><USER7> That's not the only source of income in Monopoly though.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but the incentives improved equally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Forget UBIs and other bandaids. Just simply taxing their wealth away would transform society. Plutocratic governence won't end until there are no more plutocrats.

<comment><USER11> Unless all developed countries organize to tax wealthy people, why would wealthy people invest in countries that tax their wealth away?

If countries don't play ball with rich people, they can just move to another country that is more "business friendly" (including low taxes). What am I missing?

<comment><USER12> You are missing the fact that tax is not the only factor for people to stay. California is an expensive state by most measures but somehow it doesn't seem to have a problem keeping rich people in state.

<comment><USER13> How many big corps are incorporated in California? How many rich people control their wealth via some Cayman islands subsidiaries, etc?

Having a nice $30M home in California is likely a small expense for the ultra- rich the article talk about.

<comment><USER12> Are you saying California is not a state with a lot of people having well-paid jobs and a lot of wealthy people? Would the state do better if it decided to lower taxes for the wealthy?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not sure that it is possible to analyze this, but I'd like to see a breakdown of the >$10 million net worth range based on whether it was earned in America or not. You can change the American tax code all you want, but if it is only being used as a storage system (due to a good track record of stability and maintenance of property rights) then I'm not sure it will have much of an effect. For example, I think Venezuela was basically looted over the past few years, and I'm sure a lot of that money went into i.e. Florida real estate. I wouldn't credit any study of the super rich that is only looking at one country.

An as far as using post-WW2 as an example, I'd like to see an example of a way to reduce inequality that doesn't involve killing millions and destroying Europe.

</comment><comment><USER15> This article should mention a lot of other factors that are important, including changes in technology, automation, globalization, etc. It's too short-sighted to simply say that the problem America faces is as simple as a small group of people or laws, that if removed, suddenly would fix society's ills. There are many other factors in play that should not be neglected.

<comment><USER16> Why is it short-sighted to say if inequality or laws that cause inequality are removed, then societal ills will be fixed?

If we can make laws that cause ills then we can remove those laws and their ills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Extreme solution: wealth caps. Outlaw billionaires.

<comment><USER18> Eat cake

<comment><USER18> This downvoted comment is exactly what I expected, because as much as we have changed and advanced as a people, with all the events since the French revolution, humanity will continue to struggle against oppression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't think policy can fix this. The only peaceful solution I can imagine is a general rebellion against the use of money to organize our economy. If you are reading this you are a prime candidate to implement alternatives. Hint: bitcoin isn't it.

<comment><USER20> The elimination of money would be one of the most disruptive events in the history of humanity. It's likely that many millions if not billions of people would die in the ensuing turmoil and our society as we know it today would cease to exist.

Consider just two critical aspects of our society that require money to run smoothly and efficiently: modern medicine and industrial agriculture. Billions of people depend on them to survive, and the reason people participate in them as they do is mostly for money.

If you replace money with, say, barter, how many sheep or goats are you going to pay for a modern hospital or for a pharmaceutical factory, or the network of roads and airports needed to deliver food and other goods? How are you going to transport all those sheep and goats throughout our ever more interconnected world? At the very least, the infrastructure is just not there for us to switch to barter anywhere in the foreseable future.

Even if we could/did switch, all sorts of new power structures would likely arise and overthrow existing ones, and it's far from guaranteed that the transition will be bloodless. More likely, a lot of people would oppose it and it's not inconceivable that wars could be started over it -- especially as the change would probably not happen globally at once, but some countries would convert to barter first while others will still have money, leading to power imbalances, migration of money and the people who have it, massively influencing the economies, societies, and politics of the countries involved.

If the switch from money is not to barter, then to what? It's good to think about these things, and it's critical that our world change from the destructive course it's on now, but I for one don't see a way to extract money out of the equation without massive suffering.

My own slim hope rests on consciousness change, perhaps through education, increased communication, and maybe even psychedelics. The psychedelic renaissance has begun, and these substances are one of the most effective means of attaining radical changes in perspective and increasing creativity. Perhaps through them some solution that's not yet evident could arise, and if enough people change their mind maybe we could change our society towards a more positive and inclusive model.

<comment><USER19> Barter has never been how economies were organized, except under duress like a prison camp. If you are interested in the topic I suggest David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years. The takeaway- relationships and reputation among groups of people who know each other have organized economies far longer than money has. IMHO social media should allow us to act like a global village, and villages don't need money to coordinate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Once you have enough wealth to control the media, you've "made it". You could say that people like Putin have accomplished that. So it's not that rich people want more money because it allows them to consume more. I assume it is because more wealth allows them to control other people.

</comment><comment><USER22> A spectre is haunting...

</comment><comment><USER23> We have a minimum wage to prevent absurd exploitation, I see no reason to nit have a sane maximum wage (and networth)

<comment><USER24> Sounds like an invitation to shell games and shell companies. And exodus to more tax-friendly jurisdictions. Source: I used to be a tax lawyer.

Even if this weren't the case, people would be disincentived from working hard jobs if there were a maximum wage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Sommelier and Price found that so far during the recovery from the Great > Recession, the American top 1 percent has captured nearly 42 percent of all > income growth.

Is that surprising? The people that created the recession also benefited the most from it at the expense of everyone else. It wouldn't surprise me if the recession was created on purpose for this exact reason. Regardless, we know the solution (high taxes especially corporate taxes and regulation) that can reverse this trend peacefully. We unfortunately also know the solution that can reverse this trend violently. At this point, it's just a matter of waiting and seeing which solution the US will pick. I have my non US passport ready to go at a moment's notice. I'm pretty sure I know which solution the US prefers, the one the US has always preferred in its history: violence.</comment>


UK weather: February temperature jump was incredible, says climate expert - vanilla-almond https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/mar/02/uk-temperature-jump-february-incredible-climate-weather-carbon <comment><AUTHOR> I had lunch in the garden on 21st feb. Sitting there in the sun without a coat. It was like June. It was really nice, and also really unsettling.

<comment><USER2> I took the day off to go on a long hike it was great but all the invisible dust on the air gave me an odd pain in my chest when I went to bed then it gave me a sore throat and asthmatic conditions which has only just cleared! Turns out the dust raised the pollution level to high with people being advised not to exercise! I suppose my ten mile hike up the hills was a bad idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think in order to be fair we shouldn't use local weather as an indicator of general climate: for every "we had trees blossom in January" story they're will be a "we had ice on the lake in June, you, hoaxers" answer"

</comment><comment><USER4> To quote Scott Adams, why are people seeing a single data point as evidence for climate change, when those same people deride the alt-right for seeing cold weather in April in their town as evidence against climate change?

It's behavior like this, reeking of bias in which singular data points count and which don't that gets the other side to think climate change is just a base/faith political belief instead of something derived from evidence.

Even the article itself is editorially-suggestive. The question is posted throughout the article "what fraction is due to climate change? we don't know!". A single record-breaking 20C day above a trend of say 5C is 15C warmer, whereas the best guesses for the magnitude of human-caused sub portion of global warming is about 1C. The quote in the article say says the warm record is largely due to global warming is totally misleading in the R^2 technical sense, and even needs to be couched in the technical language of "well the trend of warmer temperatures..."

For full disclosure, I believe climate change, but also that these singular data points have very little information value.

<comment><USER5> I think that climate change absolutely is faith based and political. And we shouldn't be afraid of that. Lots of changes in human behaviour have a faith and moral component. Just think about hand washing. People don't need to understand microbiology to wash their hands. They need social pressure and a sense of morals.

Climate change deniers see environmentalism as a faith based political movement. Well it is. Even if you believe in climate change, there is nothing that says we have to do anything about it! It is perfectly reasonable to just shrug your shoulders and not do anything. The drive to protect the planet is a matter of conscience. And that is how people need to be pursuaded. Science is just not very convincing in everyday life, even among educated rational people.

<comment><USER6> I think it's dangerous to turn a complex and global issue into a binary social signaling device. We do terrible things to the planet. We should stop. Combining "should", goals, and politics only turns the majority of the planet against you. The global economy, global politics, national politics, and climate are all extremely complex systems. Ban plastic straws and cows and you may think you're helping, but end up being an example of failure to others. Make an electric car that is cheaper, more efficient, and outperforms gasoline, and you've taken a solid step towards saving the planet. When it's a binary issue, you lose the nuance of having choices. You burn witches before even figuring out if they were helping or hurting with their heresy. Is nuclear worth the risk and waste to offset carbon? Is the wind farm worth it if it destroys a bird's only habitat? Those are cost benefit questions. Believer or denier is a witch trial.

<comment><USER5> There is no scientific formula that tells you if a coal miner should loose their job, or if a wind farm should be allowed to kill birds. As you say it is complicated. We are balancing a huge range of issues that feel like a false dichotomy. Just telling people "because science" is not the answer. That is actually what makes it a binary choice because you are leaving no room for argument. By talking about morality you broaden the argument. The democratic political system is our algorithm to decide these questions and is driven by more than just fact and science. You may not like this but it is the reality. You can't answer a load of massive false dichotomy's with science. You need other avenues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Climate change people. Key word is change. We will need to get used to adapting.

</comment><comment><USER8> The politics of our day is as dysfunctional as it's ever been. Tons of people in the USA ALONE believe climate change isn't even happening, let alone man- made. They have bought into the weird myth that moving to sustainable energy will harm the economy, and therefore are motivated to deny climate change (set aside the ridiculous mental gymnastics that entails, even if true).

Our only hope for short term sustainability is a Carbon Tax and Dividend, which has been introduced as a bipartisan bill a few months ago[1]. I wish there would be more media coverage of it. It is much more realistic than the Green New Deal but the only person running for President I know that even mentions it on his campaign website is Andrew Yang.

A carbon tax redistibuted to the people would avoid the yellow vest-like protests about disproportionately falling on the poor and middle class. Instead, it would be "Climate Justice" that even _anarcho capitalists_ could support — corporations having to compensate people for polluting the common atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Such a dividend would incentivize voters to say "more carbon tax, please!" and cause electric vehicles to be produced, which represents CHOICE of energy generation instead of the fuel lock-in we have been subjected to by te fossil fuel industry since Edison designed electric cars 100 years ago (they are in the Edison museum).

Unless you think the fossil fuel industry should enjoy free externalities and lack of competition in fuel generation for cars, you have no leg to stand on to oppose this even from an economic standpoint.

[https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee- bill/](https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-bill/)

<comment><USER9> > They have bought into the weird myth that moving to sustainable energy will > harm the economy

It's actually a bit more complex, and thus less weird, than that.

On the one hand, you have blue-collar workers in the US. A significant segment of those has always been coal miners (and those in their orbit). It's not just that the shift away from fossil fuels has caused them to lose their jobs—it's that, for many such communities, coal mining was the central part of their identity. They were proud of it, and had been for several generations.

Then, on the other side, you have the oil & natural gas industry, which makes massive amounts of money, and spends huge chunks of it on propaganda, aimed both at regular people and at legislators.

The end result is a large proportion of the population that believes that renewable energy is The Enemy, an existential threat to their entire way of life—whether it's because they're coal miners themselves, because they, as working-class people, coidentify themselves with the coal miners, or because they're simply on the political right, and have been indoctrinated by the aforementioned propaganda to believe anything that tries to help the environment is Evil by first principle.</comment></comment>


Fedora RISC-V with X11 running in a web browser - <AUTHOR> https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv64&url=https://bellard.org/jslinux/fedora29-riscv-xwin.cfg&graphic=1 <comment><AUTHOR> This is quite slow to start X. The non-graphical version is a bit faster: [https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv64&url=https://...](https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv64&url=https://bellard.org/jslinux/fedora29-riscv-2.cfg)

</comment><comment><USER2> [https://bellard.org/jslinux/](https://bellard.org/jslinux/)

For a list of all of them</comment>


Show HN: Free HN User Favorites API Endpoint (MIT) - <AUTHOR> I needed a way to access my hn favorites since I use them like bookmarks. This was put together very quickly. Uses x-ray (nodejs)
API Endpoint: https://reactual.lib.id/hnfavs@dev
Example GET request for user: sbr464, 1 page (30 favs): https://reactual.lib.id/hnfavs@dev/?id=sbr464&limit=1
It currently accepts 2 query params:
id (string = '') - hn user id limit (number = 1) - pagination 30/page
Will error if you don't include an id.
I'll put it up on a more permanent URL and may move it to a different cloud function provider. I just used stdlib.com for now to get feedback.
If the url changes, I'll put the updated url in my hn profile/source and include it in the JSON response error for a while.
Link to source code (MIT):
https://github.com/reactual/hacker-news-favorites-api/tree/m... <comment><AUTHOR> Also accepts the query param offset (number, optional, default is 1). There is a 30 second timeout, so if you need older pages of favorites, just provide an offset. Usually over 10 pages, it becomes relevant (limit=10/300 favorites)</comment>


New Relic changes business model, open-sources agents and instrumentation - <AUTHOR> https://thenewstack.io/new-relic-changes-business-model-open-sources-agents-and-instrumentation/ <comment><USER2> I love NewRelic, but their pricing always baffled me.

When we added it to our QA, UAT, and Staging envs, they started wanting to bill us as if we had 3x as many "production" environments. I had to explain on a call that it doesn't make sense that environments that get .0001% of the production traffic are billed at the exact same price. Basically punishing us for having a more mature SDLC.

We also run our infrastructure with redundancy, so we got billed for every region & availability zone, they wanted it to be crazy expensive.

I'm curious how this changes things, the new "pro" pricing is not available sadly :(

<comment><USER3> This is the exact same situation my company finds itself in. We are stuck with it because they have decent APM metrics for .NET Java and JavaScript and it's nice it's all in one dashboard. The new UI is pretty difficult to use and way too bright. Currently exploring other options and would be happy to switch to a more affordable competitor.

<comment><USER4> We had a similar experience, so I'm just sharing the path we took.

We were using New Relic APM and Server Monitoring through the Microsoft BizSpark benefits for an year or two. We were even ready to pay for their licenses, but New Relic pricing for multi-server use was starkly high for a small tech company like ours. Their product was good, but their focus was more on enterprise customers.

After trying out many other commercial products (focusing on .NET Core stack in particular), and keeping long-term scalability and TCO in mind, we decided to utilize some open source solutions.

First we tried Bosun[1] (from the Stack Exchange team), but found little progress being made on it. Then, we tried Prometheus[2] collectors for monitoring, Grafana[3] for the dashboards and alerting, and Exceptional[4] for logging. One person got it all working within a week. We've never looked back, and have to hardly touch the set-up anymore (except for system updates once in a while). It has worked beautifully for almost two years now, going from 2 to a few dozen apps/servers/VMs.

Hope it helps you, and others, explore the open source monitoring route.

[1] [https://bosun.org](https://bosun.org) [2] [https://prometheus.io](https://prometheus.io) [3] [https://grafana.com](https://grafana.com) [4] [https://github.com/NickCraver/StackExchange.Exceptional](https://github.com/NickCraver/StackExchange.Exceptional)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's impressive it took them this long in the face of Datadog and who ever else pioneered the open source agent approach. It was such a clear advantage to ensure you knew what was going on your servers, or into your app in the APM case, and of course you could fix / extend it if needed.

<comment><USER6> Interestingly, Datadog's agent was a fork of Server Density's open-source agent[1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datadog#Technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datadog#Technology)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In what New Relic executives described as adjusting to a "sea change" in > open source adoption

Am I missing something or did this statement strike anyone else as wildly bizarre?

I feel like open source has been the default for the client side agents and libraries of SaaS products for 10 years. Microsoft, once the strongest opponent of open source, changed its tune like 5+ years ago. What could possibly be the "sea change" this executive is referring to?

<comment><USER8> I've mostly worked for companies that were all in on things like open source and cloud my entire career, but it's easy to forget that there are huge companies that just recently replaced their tape drives.

If I were to guess at the "sea change" discussed herein I'd say it's probably the explosion of tech around Kubernetes and the CNCF, as that created a very sudden and urgent need for better observability tooling.

\- I typed these words all by myself and they are not official New Relic words, you can tell because they're not terribly well-formed and they aren't surrounded by logos and trademarks and buzzwords. Using the haphazardly spewed opinions of strangers on the internet as investment advice is a really, really terrible idea; like "open source is a virus" level of bad. Don't do it.

<comment><USER7> Open source was taking over enterprises long before k8s. There was OpenStack, Hadoop, and obviously Linux itself has been widely adopted since before New Relic's founding (2008).

Arguably micro services have increased the need for observability tooling, but even that "sea change" is years long in the tooth. Sure large enterprises are slow to adopt such trends, but it's been happening and is hardly a sudden shocking development.

Maybe I'm just being pedantic or nit picky, but it does seem extra worrisome when the executives for a struggling company say something that sounds dramatically out of touch.

<comment><USER8> "Open source was taking over enterprises long before k8s"

True, also not related to the point I was trying to make. Executives tend to be handwavey and vague sometimes but I'm pretty sure the "sea change" they're talking about in this case is about containerization and the rapid evolution of open source projects in that space, many of them related to observability. Kubecon had 500 attendees in 2015 and 12,000 in 2019. It's hard to deny that the popularity of that community will sway popular opinion about what technologies to embrace moving forward. I think (and again, I am guessing as I have exactly zero information that the public does not have) that New Relic and other companies are in part making decisions like this because it's becoming clear they will be left behind if they don't, and quickly.

I bet the first post-covid Kubecon will have 20k attendees and be taken over by the execs and VCs who've realized that's where the devs are, just in time for the devs to stop going and start the next thing á la reInvent. Wish I had gone before it blew up.

I also feel like "struggling" is a bit of an overstatement for a company with a $4B market cap, but maybe that's just me. I'm sure most FAANG4LYFers look at that like a lemonade stand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Sadly that's not what is keep our customers off New Relic. They don't care that much about open source agent, but they do care about where the server is.

I understand the it's not triviel to develop, but there is still a huge underserved marked for on-premise APMs, and those you can buy aren't nearly as good as New Relic.

Alas developing non-saas software is not exactly en vogue

<comment><USER10> Sometimes it is. I was heavily involved with a decision between Datadog vs New Relic (plus a few others) at a former "unicorn" startup. We definitely did not want to run the server-side ourselves, but having the client libraries be open source was a major advantage for Datadog. It let us extend them to support our very old Django version and homegrown SOA framework

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a good move. I wonder why now, though? Possibly they didn't like to see things like the OpenTracing project adopting Datadog's APM libraries.

[https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/opentelemetry- instrumentation...](https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/opentelemetry- instrumentation/)

<comment><USER8> My understanding is that it has more to do with the general direction of observability. The agent code was always open, we frequently accepted PRs from the community when I was on their Ruby agent team, but they didn't use an open source license.

We're public so I probably shouldn't guess too much about the motivations beyond the explosion of interest in observability/kubernetes/cncf, but I do know there has been support for open sourcing these for a long time within the company and I'm glad to see it finally happen.

disclosure: I work at NR but my opinions are in fact cake and should not be used to make investment decisions (seriously that is a terrible idea I mostly invest in LEGOs and Magic cards)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is good news. Their host based pricing was not great. Especially when they wanted to charge half price for dev hosts.

We'll see if they can survive it though.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's stupid that it was closed source in the first place. The valuable stuff is on the server side. This is not really anything exciting, if they open sourced their servers, _that_ would be very interesting.

<comment><USER13> I agree, but they might have been scared that someone wrote a NewRelic compatible server.

<comment><USER14> Sounds to me like they are now open to the idea, that way more people use some standard that they can have input on, and then they can capture the customers that don't want to try and reinvent the wheel.

This looks great to me, often I work on projects with closed systems, they aren't allowed to ship the telemetry outside their own network, so none of the SaaS solutions will work. However I work on other projects that I can use SaaS, but I'm not going to do the work to have two solutions depending on the environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So does this change in pricing now make New Relic more affordable than DataDog?

</comment><comment><USER16> they have let the agents stagnate and are hoping to unleash some free code from frustrated customers

<comment><USER8> Stagnant seems like an overstatement given 500 commits on one of the agents alone in the last month. There is surely a way to criticize without devaluing the unread contributions of literally hundreds of developers.

I personally am much more motivated by seeing customers encouraged to add support for their favorite libraries and frameworks than scoring their sweet free codes, but I suppose there is potentially a sinister motive behind everything in life... like open source.

<comment><USER16> I suppose I am just frustrated by things like no modern solr support, no support for jenkins when datadog has a great plugin, and not great support for non-web analytics (at least with python and php which I have plugged into it).

Also you can't copy/query things in from cloudwatch; they just started supporting EFS/NFS statistics recently after losing them for almost a year when they killed the old infrastructure agent vs the new one (reduction in features on new product!)

When I brought up my frustrations with the product after coming back to it after a few years away they told me "it was all necessary to support kubernetes"

I guess my tastes in frameworks don't match theirs? They keep cashing the checks though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I might be mistaken, but I thought they open source their agents in the early days?

<comment><USER8> Didip! Long time - I'm back at NR as of a month ago after 5yrs away.

We did have all the agent code out in the open but it was more "source available" than it was open source. You could see what was happening but not build on it and use it for your own nefarious purposes as you can now.

<comment><USER17> Jonan! Long time indeed.

Well, I am glad that they are all open sourced now. It's a good decision.</comment></comment></comment>