Kickstarter vaporware of the day, Lifx edition - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/09/18/kickstarter-vaporware-of-the-day-lifx-edition/ <comment><USER3> The problem here is that Kickstarter is complicity allowing this sort of scam- project* to run.

They're not stupid. They know this is happening, and they're _hoping_ that it'll all magically sort itself out; that people will be smart enough _not_ to believe in the $50-you-get-a-lamborghini pledges.

I mean, it's a great scam right? If you're a con artist, you make your money in one of two ways;

1) Steal someones money and make them too embarrassed to do anything about it (classic porn on the credit card)

2) Steal a little bit of money from a lot of people, all of whom can't be bothered to do anything about it. <\--- Kickstarter.

Realistically, this is going to continue until someone sues Kickstarter for being complicit in mail fraud. That'll be a sad day, but you can already see it coming on the horizon.

* Actual project may not be a scam, but honestly there's not a huge difference between a poorly organised project that takes everyones money, tries to make something and fails, and an actual scam. If you're selling something, you're a merchant. There are laws around that.

<comment><USER4> I do not think Kickstarter projects can be viewed under legal framework of merchants and consumer protection.

A project much more like an investment prospectus than it is a sales offering.

So I would be interested in knowing if the SEC has already had a look at the Kickstarter legal setup, and if not, it may well be the next step (ie not suing Kickstarter, but refering them to SEC)

The laws around prospectus and offerings are setup very explicitly to avoid your situaton 2) - so I would be very surprised if kickstarter projects are not somehow explicitly avoiding those regulations - or if they are in fact compliant

<comment><USER5> The worst case for kickstarter is that they fall under both consumer protection laws and investment regulations.

There is no question that they fall under consumer protection laws, products are being advertised and offered, and anyone can "buy" them. I'm sure the FTC already has an open investigation or investigations.

If you create a kickstarter project, pull in $1m+, spend it all legitimately and fail to deliver the project, you could end up being named in a civil suit. In the future there will be people who lose their houses over this. Just because you made the project in 2011 doesn't mean you won't get sued in 2014.

If you create a kickstarter project, pull in $1m+, spend it all illegitimately, on personal expenses, expect to go to jail. I predict this will happen to at least 1 person.

The larger question to me is what liability kickstarter themselves have. Whatever that amount ends up being, I think they can absorb it as a cost of doing business, as long as it remains on the civil side of the law.

I like kickstarter. So far I've stuck to using it for pen and paper RPGs, something I know can be delivered on. I think the core concept around kickstarter is going to radically change the world of consumer products. Its just too new to have much of a reputation system yet (but its coming.) May be kickstarter isn't the facebook/google of pre-funding projects. If they look like they are going to take a big hit, be ready to step up.

As someone who designs business projects the whole thing sounds like a personal nightmare to me. I know first hand how the simplest of projects on paper can take 5-10x longer than estimated to complete. Add in bells and whistles to make it look attractive to a bunch of people, ouch. Easier said than done applies very much here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the first thing I do in Hacker News or Reddit when seeing sensational headlines (cancer can be cured!) is checking the posts to find out what's wrong with the claim. In most cases it's the highest voted comment. I think Kickstarter would profit from a similar moderation system. Posts where users can add flags like "will work" "won't work" and some voting system so you can easily see the highest voted comment(s) with one of those flags. Or alternatively a normal forum to allow real discussions about projects would also be a major improvement. Although there needs to be a careful decision then who can cleanup spam as you wouldn't want project moderators to allow removing all critics without any consequences.

The currently used comment system there is just horribly insufficient - it's basically impossible to have any real discussion there.

</comment><comment><USER7> The best thing Kickstarter could do to stop people from being disappointed by getting a much worse product that they were expecting when they thought they "paid for it", is to not allow the people behind the project to say stuff like "for $99 you can get the product, too".

Basically, they shouldn't mention on their page at all that they will be getting the product. So whether you're donating $1 or $100 or $1000, it's just that - a _donation_ to the cause. You're not "buying" anything. That should make things a lot more clear, although I expect the project donations to drop, but probably better than for Kickstarter to get its reputation ruined forever because most projects "don't deliver" the products people were "expecting", when they thought they bought it or "pre-ordered" it.

<comment><USER8> But that's not what Kickstarter is about. Kickstarter is not a donation page, why would I donate to someone who's trying to start an enterprise or a product? I could imagine donating to an artist, but that's about it. Nobody donated for my company either.

So Kickstarter is a "It would be awesome if this product came to existence and I'm willing to buy the alpha version even if it doesn't exist yet and may never exist" kind of thing. It's the pledge that I buy one of those, unseen and unproven because it would be cool if I had one of those. You just need to be aware of the risk and you won't feel screwed over as badly. And don't go for kickstarters that just look too good.

It's a hard to solve problem, but I think the only thing that kickstarter can actually do is to better communicate the risk.

<comment><USER9> I think Kickstarter could add a maximum cap in addition to the minimum funding requirements as some function of the minimum. This would minimize Kickstarter's risk of over-subscribed products (but would obviously make them less money in many cases) and push further sales into the regular retail world. This would keep Kickstarter closer to what I believe its true intention is - get products and art off the ground, not sell your first $10 million.

I the long term I also think this is better for the campaigns - a lot of hardware projects seem to struggle shipping if they get a significantly higher number of orders than predicted. I'm sure in the moment it's exciting to see how many orders you can pull in, but painful in the long run when it is difficult to deliver on your promise, especially if you're planning on building a long-term sustainable business.

<comment><USER10> That's actually a really important change that they need to make. If you are trying to raise $5,000 to make 200 widgets by hand, and suddenly your project takes off and you get $500,000 in pledges, then as much as everyone would like to say "that's a great problem to have!", well, it's not.

This point is counterintuitive but here it is: Assuming that there are relatively rigid time constraints, you might be able to make a profit at 200 units, and a profit at 200,000 units, but not at 20,000 units. This is because there are thresholds where you suddenly have to invest in infrastructure, and setting up infrastructure _fast_ is particularly expensive.

If you're raising capital to produce your widgets, you can lay out a business plan and predict with reasonable certainty that you need to sell X widgets before you can break even. You present that to investors and they decide if they think you can sell X widgets.

On Kickstarter, you are implying a fantasy claim of arbitrary linear production scaling that says "I need $25/widget and I will make however many everyone wants!" And hell, that doesn't even work for selling _commodities_.

So what the model _should_ be for people starting a business selling a tech product is that they say "We're developing a prototype, and if you pledge $X you can get a prototype". Then limit that to a small production run and raise enough money so everyone can involved can quit their job. Now they have time to look for investors, and a great proof of concept that the idea is marketable.

<comment><USER8> Well, that's actually possible. You can limit the number of backers for any pledge level. So you can have a maximum of 50 supporters backing you to receive a "foo" and another number of "bars" for a different price.

So the usual place where you see an unlimited number of backers is for digital products. See the Amanda Palmer or the Planetary Annihilation: They had limits on any backing that required a physical or personalized goods, but unlimited pledges for digital-only pledges - and there the assumption of "the more I sell, the more I gain" holds true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know if the Lifx guys in particular are naive, deceptive, or six-sigma outliers.

But I'm actually surprised that projects like Lifx are able to get any funding at all. A cursory thought in the direction of the project would reveal that the pitch is essentially a) others with tons of experience have invested lots of hard money in this space b) to no real success so far but c) we have the answer and only need a hundred grand to make it large. And d) actually, we don't even need $100k, it's more like $25k plus materials, so as you can see this project is really 99% done now.

This is classic hucksterism; you will see it at any business meetup in any town. Somebody has built a better mousetrap in his garage, leaping over giants, and only needs $25k/$50k/$100k to get to market. The key is they never need large sums of money, only relatively small sums to get to market; a larger sum would indicate that the project is not 99% done, which I assure you it is.

The obvious question: if you have built a better mousetrap and only need $100k to take over a major industry like lighting, why not go max out your credit cards and just build it? Or show a prototype to anyone over 50 who might be able to connect you with an angel investor? Occam's answer: because you haven't a clue how to make it work.

Again, I don't know if the Lifx guys are hucksters. But their pitch follows a classic huckster pitch to the letter.

<comment><USER12> Well, I don't think people turn to Kickstarter funding solely for the money. It's a pretty decent way to do some cheap marketing, too. If you can get $100,000 from a bank, or $100,000 from 1,000 people in your target market, it makes sense to do the latter.

I have no idea if this is or isn't the case with Lifx, but I always viewed Kickstarter as a funding/marketing package.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> After backing two projects (MySaver cables and Elevation Dock), I've given up on Kickstarter:

== MySaver ==

\- Project was delayed for over 5 months.

\- When I got the product it wasn't the colour I had requested.

\- When I contacted the project leader he told me that they didn't have any more products of that colour, so he chose the one he thought convenient.

\- False statements: "The MySaver is the only cable protector that we know of and we fully-assemble it on a OEM quality replacement dock connector to USB cable". I can't insist how false this statement is. The cables I received where assembled using some kind of industrial glue gun - by no means "OEM quality" - and they are now falling apart.

\- Contacted Kickstarter about this issue and said that "if the project gets fully funded it must be a legit business/product"

== Elevation Dock ==

\- Backed in February 2012, still waiting for the product.

\- I will be changing my iPhone 3GS to iPhone 5, but guess what? It's a different dock connector. Yes, partly my fault, but its been 8 months since funding closed and 9 months since everybody knew this project was already 100% funded.

== Conclusion ==

Many projects (primarily hardware) are very poorly managed. Project leaders, instead of being rational from a production capacity/constraint point of view, they simply want to "beat all records", and be at the top of the Kickstart funding list. This is just bad entrepreneurship and management skills. These guys are risking production, product quality and customer satisfaction over a "vanity" metric: How much is the maximum I can raise?

I've given up, I'm not backing any more projects, I'm not going to be anyone's guinea pig. I'd rather wait for the products to be available in stores at a higher retail price, where I can see their "quality" finish. I'll judge then.

<comment><USER14> I have many friends who backed and received their Elevation Docks. It's anything but vaporware. They asked for 75,000 and got 1,464,000. Scaling up that much and that fast is incredibly difficult and can't be done overnight. The system seems fine to me.

<comment><USER15> Products should really consider capping their number of backers, rather than just saying "as many as people want!" and possibly losing money on every one.

<comment><USER16> The purpose is to capture as much capital in early sales as possible. Caps would defeat this purpose.

<comment><USER13> _"Caps would defeat this purpose."_

What purpose? The purpose of delivering an obsolete product by the time it reaches customers months after?

<comment><USER16> Capturing as much capital as possible.

<comment><USER13> I totally disagree, sounds like you work in Wall Street. Your argument defeats the purpose of a minimum total pledged, and is pure internet speculation.

Companies and individuals go to Kickstarter to create great products - <USER2> can't be financed in no other way (bank debt, VC capital, etc.).

More capital (pledges) result in more orders, more inventory, higher working capital and a production/logistics nightmare. None of the hardware projects/companies I've seen to date on Kickstarter have the required infrastructure to handle "as much capital as possible" or as many orders as possible.

<comment><USER16> These businesses come to Kickstarter for the purpose of getting as much capital as possible to seed their projects.

Just because it is not implicitly stated doesn't mean that the business owners do not have that motive. Just because some business owners cannot scale effectively does not change their original motive. Just because you would personally run the businesses or the website different does not change the motive.

I'm not going to waste any more time having a speculative "internet argument" with you on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think the problem is pretty clear ... Kickstarter optimizes reach so that the teams that are best at marketing win ... A team that's brilliant with engineering and design but can't produce slick photos and catchy videos doesn't stand a chance.

I tend to think that kickstarter is a fad and that if it survives at all, it will be in a much reduced and much more controlled form. How long will it be before the authorities decide they're complicit in a fraud?

EDIT: The ScanBox project looks like something I could make for $5 in parts _and_ have fun doing over in an hour or so.

<comment><USER18> Do we know if the ScanBoxes have shipped?

Edit: The shipping date is October 12[1].

[1]: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/limemouse/scanbox- turn-y...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/limemouse/scanbox-turn-your- smartphone-into-a-portable-scann/posts)

<comment><USER19> What scares me is that they are starting a new kickstarter project when they didn't even finish the first one. I was backing this project but just ask for refund.

This actually makes me wonder: If one would want to scam Kickstarters, one could just create new project and PR their way into millions of dollars without having to deliver a single thing.

<comment><USER20> I can well believe that the scanbox is at a stage where there's simply not that much left for the guys to do except wait for the manufacturing to turn around. Why _not_ start another project if they've got the time for it?

<comment><USER19> Shipping isn't a small task, and since it will only begins in a month, it's a fair assumption to think that they still have much to do.

If the shipping was 50% done, I would agree but this isn't the case here

<comment><USER20> Well, yes. That's the point. In a month's time, they might be snowed, but until then, they're kicking their heels. If they get the timing right, they can be dealing with the shipping for scanbox while waiting for Lifx to get funded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Some old fella I knew who was a young professional as woman joined the ranks in the 60s & 70s had this useful saying: "toilet excuses" which was the whole laundry list of nonsense reasons why women couldn't be building inspectors or firemen or whatnot. "Every building site would need another toilet block and the costs would be tremendous, all to allow one dipshit 21 year old to work for 1 year, get pregnant then leave."

There is something about Kickstarter that makes HN irritable, hoping for failure. I'm not sure what it is exactly and its out of character. I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt but I can smell toilet excuses.

I'm sure that kickstarter has issues and maybe its not a big thing in the long term. But, its a nice idea. It seems to be working. Why is this mob so cranky?

<comment><USER22> I agree. Something about Kickstarter seems to inspire a lot of negativity here on HN. Perhaps because it's an alternative to the VC funding model that's such a part of the HN identity?

Personally, I love Kickstarter. I've funded a project with it myself. It's has great potential for an individual or small team with "1000 true fans" to make a living, and I think we'll see a lot of success stories come out of it.

And some notable failures, of course. But I don't see that as an indictment of the Kickstarter model. Personally, I wouldn't back Lifx. It's expensive, I'm skeptical of its ability to ship, and I don't need color-changing light bulbs. But if someone wants to spend $70 to take a flyer on something cool, more power to them.

<comment><USER21> I agree. Occasional failures don't discredit the whole thing. Fraud might, but failure doesn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I spent some time a few months ago researching integrated smart technologies like this. (I've commented before on similar topics)[1]

I very skeptical it's possible to deliver these at those price points.

Just consider as a hacker the master bulb;

They gloss over how you actually connect it to your home wifi network; it either has to interface with your laptop or phone via a cable for the initial setup, or it has to be able to create it's own wireless network you can hook onto, to then in turn tell it which is your home network, so it can hook onto that, and then relay to all other bulbs. That's a hell of a lot of technology to pack inside a groundbreaking lightbulb that's going to be running at high temperatures, at a $70 price point.

The 'smart bulb' stuff aside, a decent plain white LED bulb sets you back around $30. Have you ever tried those colour-change LED light sets you get for garden decking or under the kitchen units? Even those cost more per unit that this, and they light they put out is harsh and well bellow 10 watts; hence why they're just used for ambient highlights.

In my opinion the companies best positioned to deliver these kind of technologies are the likes of NEST[2]. They already have a constantly powered, integrated master device, it has a zigbee chip (which makes much more sense than wifi), an API, large processing power, and lots of data on the household. All they need to do is update their firmware (which they can do automatically already) and publish an API. Then any licensed 3rd party vendor from China can now deliver 'slave bulbs' using whatever technology and price points they desire. A ground up solution proposed here is short sighted, and realistically in the long run more expensive.

[1]<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3558304>

[2]<http://www.nest.com/>

<comment><USER24> Insteon is shipping $30 smart bulbs. They integrate with insteon's control stuff though, so the cost of using 1 of them is a minimum of ~$70-$80 (that's a bulb plus ~$45 for a simple switch pad).

They don't seem to have much interest in pushing for wide adoption (at least, they seem to want to sell $400 controllers, not $50 controllers).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wifi on a lamp? Really?

This _screams_ "We have no idea what we are doing"

(And those buying into the project certainly don't know a lot about it as well)

This is like saying "We are building an electric car... with shiny paint", whereas the real problem is "building an electric car!"

They probably tried to fit a RaspberryPi inside first

<comment><USER26> They could've OEM'd the lamp, for example, from Phillips. And a tiny-factor WiFi gadgets is hardly a rocket science, products like EyeFi has been around for several years. There's really nothing in the project that _screams_ what you say it does.

[0] <http://www.eye.fi>

<comment><USER25> I reread their product description and I still stand by my opinion

And even the article says (and they agree it's an OEM lamp):

"The Lifx is priced at $49 per bulb, which means that you're basically buying a basic WeMo switch and getting the LED bulb — and all the technology merging the two into one bulb-sized piece of hardware — for free. It just doesn't seem likely."

They can prove me wrong, sure, by shipping the product.

<comment><USER27> Yeah? So? The article is being disingenuous by picking a bulky and very high- priced wifi product.

<comment><USER25> Because surely a smaller and more complex device is going to cost less than a WeMo, sure

It is not overpriced if you factor the cost of electronic control of the lamp

<comment><USER27> Did you not see the earlier link of a full computer with wifi crammed into an SD card for less price? WeMo is not a good cheap benchmark. Heck, I could dissect a router and glue on a relay in a smaller package for under fifty.

<comment><USER25> The EyeFi? Yes, I saw it. Cheapest one is 39.99, let's take $5 for the 'SD' part, so it's $35

"Heck, I could dissect a router and glue on a relay in a smaller package for under fifty"

Cheapest WeMo is $50 so you're almost there already

You can try to have a homemade solution for less, sure but you'll have a small price advantage and maybe not follow all standards relating to switches (isolation, etc, it will work, though). Not counting the software work.

Now, for their lamp they would need 3 power channels, instead of one 'on-off' control, which is certainly more expensive and complex.

<comment><USER27> You're not going to take off anything for the overelaborate processor and the fact that it's smaller than we need for the light? And by under fifty I didn't mean barely. Here, look, miniature wifi for 8 dollars retail [http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833180...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833180092) The wifi component of this is not the expensive part. LEDs, LED power supply, and heatsink are going to be most of the price.

This is not a fifty dollar wifi device with a free light. This is a thirty dollar light with a ten dollar wifi device slipped in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wish someone from kickstarter would answer this question once and for all:

Is it a donation or is it a purchase?

This question comes up constantly ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4506601> e.g.) when kickstarter projects are featured here, TFA is actually about this topic more-or-less specifically. At the risk of sounding cynical: I think it's in kickstarter's financial to _not_ answer this question- they're better off with the confusion & everyone seeing the fee-paid/donation as they want it. That way it's a payment for a product when you have your wallet out- it's a "donation" when the project fails and you are left with nothing. :)

<comment><USER16> It's a donation, and you get a "prize" for donating a certain amount.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've backed a number of technology as well as art projects on Kickstarter. So far all have delivered. Only one was a disappointment. Not because they did not deliver as promised but rather because the product really wasn't as good of an idea as I thought it would be. No big deal.

Perhaps my results with tech have been good because I am an engineer with lots of experience designing and manufacturing hardware/software products. I have seen projects on Kickstarter that have me question whether or not the person fully understands what it takes to take a project from concept or prototype to a finished product. Needless to say, I don't back such projects.

The article gives a sense that making hardware products is hard and expensive. The author is most-definitely correct. A product like this light bulb could easily burn-up above US $100K in regulatory testing (UL, FCC, CE, TUV, etc.). This is particularly true if the designer isn't well versed in this area.

The article looses a little authority in my eyes when the author says things like:

> The heat sink is crucial, especially if you want to put lots of wifi > electronics into the bulb.

Which is complete and utter nonsense. WiFi has nothing to do with the requirement for a massive heatsink. If it did, you iPhone would be a huge block of aluminum with fins. No, the heatsink is required because 80% (or more) of the energy going into an LED is converted into heat, not light. This data is from a few years ago, but I suspect it hasn't gotten much better than that. Most of the power you shove into an LED converts to heat that you have to manage, hence the large heat-sink.

I did a project a while ago that managed more than one thousand one Watt LEDs in a very small space. I was personally responsible for the design of the electronics, mechanics, optics and thermal management. Thermal management alone took about six months of FEA simulations and validation through prototypes before converging on a solution. I had to design the thermal management system to handle over one thousand Watts. It was safer to assume that all input energy (and more) was converted into heat in order to have some operating margin for derating the cooling system.

I went on reading the article and thinking that, while I agreed that multi- disciplinary hardware projects are hard, this guy was being a little mean- spirited. After all, he was right in that this project required having an understanding of electronic design, mechanical design, thermal management, optical design and the myriad of manufacturing and regulatory disciplines that come with bringing something like this to market.

The author's incorrect statement about the reason for having a heatsink created a negative reaction in my mind that carried over as I continued reading the article. I knew I was biased. I tried to ignore that and continued reading. Then I came to the point in the article where he told us that the project originator was also behind another project that amounted to not much more than some folded carboard. A project that was supposed to ship in July and, as of four hours ago, hasn't started shipping yet. That was enough to change my mindset. I was, at that point, aligned with the author in sharing his skepticism. If this guy (or guys) can't deliver a cardboard box in nearly three months I can't see any hope of delivering a complex product such as the LED light bulb in six.

Keep in mind that I have always been a believer that small motivated teams can run circles around large companies with lots of money and people. Projects like this don't cost ten million dollars at a large company because that's what it costs to design the product. They cost that much because such organizations burn a lot more cash per unit of time than a small team. They have a lot more people, resources and infrastructure to support. A large R&D organization could burn a million dollars a day whether they stand still or are working on something. In sharp contrast to that, a small focused team working out of a garage or a modest environment could do the same or very similar work for hundreds or thousands of dollars per day, depending on the nature of the project.

This to say that I am not skeptical of their probability for success because the project is difficult. My skepticism comes simply from the fact that they/he have another fully funded project on Kickstarter, one that my teenage kid could probably --with some some help from dad-- execute on in a month, and they have not delivered yet. It's like proposing that you can build a house when you haven't even demonstrated that you can build a tent.

The question here is more one of execution rather than anything else. I'll estimate that if you are really frugal and have to design this from scratch you are looking at a cost of about $500K. This means real design for manufacturing, thermal design, testing, testing, testing (did I say "testing") --which includes environmental testing-- tooling, certifications, procurement, etc.

That means that, at the current funding level of $780K for a little more than 13,000 light bulbs, they have about $20 per bulb left over to manufacture, test, package and ship. Ouch.

Even if my design cost estimate is off by 100% and they can get this ready for manufacturing for $250K, that means that you only have about $40 per bulb to manufacture, test, package and ship. I am not sure that's enough unless you commit to manufacturing tens of thousands of these per month. One thing is for sure, nobody is making a dime on this one.

Remember, business costs and overhead don't stop at manufacturing. There's far more below the tip of that iceberg.

EDIT: I could say a lot more about the nature of bringing such products to market. Here's an important point that I felt warranted an edit: A product like this can burn down your house. It is imperative that its design take no shortcuts. Testing before release must be extensive and thorough. This could take dozens of iterations until a solid and reliable design is converged upon. This, again, takes money and expertise.

<comment><USER30> Did you have any opinion on the guy's previous kickstarter which has slipped 6 months and consisted of a cardboard box?

Yes that is a bit uncharitable to call this: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/limemouse/scanbox- turn-y...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/limemouse/scanbox-turn-your- smartphone-into-a-portable-scann) a foldable cardboard box, but it is a whole lot simpler than putting together a light bulb that out performs every other bulb in the market for less money.

So when someone who knows how tough putting something like this together is, sees folks buying into it, they twitch. Seems like the author of this piece twitched pretty hard.

<comment><USER29> I don't think you read my entire post. I mention the folded cardboard project as a key indicator of just how unlikely it might be for this lightbulb to get off the ground. My immediate reaction is that Kickstarter ought to put the lightbulb project on hold until, at the very least, the other project sees completion.

<comment><USER30> Your right, I totally missed that bit. And I agree strongly that the execution risk here incredible. I'll add them to the Ouya and Pebble guys of people who've bitten off way more than they expected.

<comment><USER31> Say what you will about Ouya but I believe that Pebble will deliver. Allerta isn't a fly by night maker team. They are real company and have already made a smart watch product, the inPulse smart watch. I ordered one when they offered their special pricing here on HN and was pretty happy with it. Sure it has it's short comings but it seems like a good start and I feel that Pebble will deliver.

<comment><USER32> I am also reminded or Light Table.

With an ecosystem like kick starter somethings are going to work and some aren't.

Also don't forget projects in other areas like designing, furniture, games etc.

<comment><USER30> To be completely clear here, there will be Kickstarter successes, people who raise hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars and deliver brilliantly. If only one in 10 post funding million dollar projects blows up, _that one_ will dominate the story people hear about Kickstarter. Three of four of those, especially if a couple of their big failures turn out to be fairly obviously scammy, and that will be the end of this grand experiment.

<comment><USER31> Couldn't agree more. I think this actually already occurring. I have funded 13 projects since January, 2012 and in the 9 months since I have funded those I have only received 2 of them. This already makes me hesitant to fund more projects. I think that the slow production cycle and constant push backs will cause people to fall off from funding lots of projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Kickstarter could significantly improve things by imposing a cap on the amount of money taken above the original request.

This is similar to what Groupon have had to do, because it was killing their reputation. People are estimating "Well, we could make about 500 of these", then receiving orders (and the money) for 50,000 of them. Suddenly the predicted ship dates go out 2 or 3 times as long, and people get upset.

<comment><USER34> "'Kickstarter could significantly improve things by imposing a cap on the amount of money taken above the original request."

That is your opinion, in my opinion this would be bad for KS.

I don't know why some grow ups people need someone else to put limits on the money the can spend on something, like they are dependent children who need to be controlled what they do with their own money.

Or worse, they want to tell other people what they can spend. They are totalitarian in the inside.

<comment><USER35> Well, perhaps most people want to use a website that gives some sort of sense that a large portion of their projects aren't over-hyped vaporware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Hardware development is hard, but if it's doable. Even on a budget.

A Ten years ago I started a hardware company that developed an advertising sign based on LED's. It was basically a motor with a stick of RGB LED's attached like a propeller. When you spun the stick and modulated the LED's just right you could paint full color disc shaped picture seemingly in free air. An FPGA would control and modulate the LED's (at the time it was the only affordable thing that could modulate a LED 400.000 times a second) The whole thing was online via an OEM phone module and would automatically update with ads, weather, etc. from a server where customers could buy campaigns online. Campaigns could of course be customised wo that you could get your ad only on the displays you wanted. I was in charge of getting this whole bandoogle from an idea to a product, and while it was hard I managed develop and bring it to market for around $200.000. Remember this was ten years ago where you had to tap directly into the a carriers network and hack around just to get an IP address, and five years before the iphone.

The point of the story is that sometimes small nimble companies that are set on doing something actually succeed. I'm not saying that these guys have solved all the problems, indeed it sounds from the article that there are some huge obstacles. I'm just saying that you should never underestimate the power of a small team whose only goal in life is to make something happen.

</comment><comment><USER37> Is it just me or is there something very odd about the video presentation? Phil Bosua uses just about every trick in the NLP book to persuade and cajole. Even though the project is almost certainly impossible to deliver, I ended up _wanting_ to believe it and thinking that if I did contribute, I would be making something amazing happen. I almost felt like I was being hypnotised.

If they can deliver what they say with $100,000 then the fact that they now have 10x that probably means you don;t need to contribute to see the benefit.

Mea culpa.

</comment><comment><USER38> People buy an emotion, not a product.

Some of my friends know these guys and by the sound of it this is a case of a "overnight sensation" that has been years in the making.

</comment><comment><USER39> There is an interesting typo in the article:

        The bulb on the light is quite lovely

Obviously meant to be "right", but I had to read that sentence 3 times before I read it correctly and not as "left". Seems my brain was expecting "left" or "right" and saw "left" since they start with the same letter, instead of seeing "right", the much closer word.

Sorry to be offtopic, thought that was kind of interesting.

</comment><comment><USER40> > so far there's zero evidence that it's a good way of providing startup > capital for would-be businesses

This drives me nuts. There may be insufficient evidence to say that Kickstarter is "a good way of providing startup capital...", but there's not zero evidence. If you're trying to come off as the measured, realistic alternative, flailing hyperbole doesn't help.

<comment><USER41> It's also a statement that's qualified in an absurd way: "would-be businesses".

Even then, there are at least a few very successful videogame projects that fit the bill, Al Lowe's Leisure Suit Larry and Jane Jensen's Pinkerton Road being the most prominent.

I think it's worth looking at Kickstarter for different industries in very very different ways. For hardware manufacturing (which seems to be the only thing discussed on HN), it's a huge risk. For just about everything else, it's well-established and fairly predictable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I generally agree with everything in the article, but there was a statement that caught me up, "I can't believe that Lifx has managed to solve the enormous problems that many huge companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying — and generally failing — to fix."

I don't believe that large companies with hundreds of millions of dollars are always the right people to find the solution. Isn't this something we tackle a lot of the time? Being the small fish in the big pond? I do think that we should be wary of the snakewater salesmen of the world, but don't discount someone just because they don't have a large, bureaucratic organization backing them.

That being said, it would be really nice for some sort of rating system to be put into place. Force these inventors to generate brand loyalty even if it is to them as a person.

</comment><comment><USER43> I know three of the LiFX guys personally - they're all well connected and respected in the Melbourne startup scene.

Are they naive to the challenges of deploying a hardware project? At least some of them are, but the lead engineer has been in this field for a long time. Are they trying to defraud anyone? Absolutely not.

I hadn't heard of this project until I read this article, but knowing the team involved there's just no way these guys are putting their reputation on the line over something they don't personally believe can be done.

Must have missed the memo where the Hacker News community collectively decided to stop seeking funding and shooting for the stars. Reading the tone of these comments, we should now only tackle the problems that we... sorry, you the commentator... 100% know can be solved.

<comment><USER44> If they're "naive to the challenges" (even some of them) then the chances of success are even lower than for companies who have vast expertise in this area. That they're trying to do it on a shoestring makes it even less likely to succeed - people are right to be critical.

Also, I think the major difference between funding in the usual HN startup sense and funding via Kickstarter is that startup funding is almost always classical investment whereby you get a share in the company and the rewards of their hopeful success - but Kickstart funding could well be money for nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> OK they may not ship it. If I give money to them it is because I would like to have this kind of light at home one day. Best scenario: they ship it! Worse scenario: the world will have more experience trying to build these things.

<comment><USER46> In the video, the guy literally says "For $69 dollars, you are essentially pre-ordering a LIFX smartbulb." (4:11) That's one of the major misconceptions people have about Kickstarter and these guys are playing right into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> 99 Kickstarter Problems but getting the product isn't one: Problem #1: NOT getting the product. Problems #2-#99) 98 emails updating you on the product you will never receive.

</comment><comment><USER48> Kickstarter needs to have a rule that the rewards cannot be the item being proposed.

This will perfectly enforce the realization that it's INVESTMENT with risk and not a purchase of the item.

</comment><comment><USER49> You can buy a full Android 4.0 tablet for $35. It has Wifi, backlight, screen, CPU, battery and case. The BOM for this lamp is totally doable for a dozen dollars. It's productization that's the challenge. Sometimes, a smart scrappy start-up can hit it right. The heat sink may be a concern for WiFi in the sense that a grounded metal enclosure is a concern for an antenna. Or maybe they turn the heat sink into an antenna? (Hmm, should I go patent that now? :-)

</comment><comment><USER50> Meh. I haven't had any major fails with the Kickstarters I've supported, though outside of the Ouya I don't think I've supported any hardware ones.

Some of the hardware ones I thought were the neat and obviously producible (like weird light fixtures/shades) in a short a time frame also either had stupid reward tiers, or, I guess, just weren't interesting to anyone else.

All that said, I don't really get the people who expect stuff in 6 months for hardware-based Kickstarters. Do you have any ideas about the product development lifecycle? Going from prototype to manufacturing can take quite a while, especially if you need to visit factories in China or some such.

When I back something that's more complex than 'I'll draw a picture' or 'I'll sing a song' I assume it might take a couple years, and that's been borne out at least once, though that level of expectation has also allowed me to be pleasantly surprised.

Despite the above, I'm not saying I think these LED lights are on the level - it seems like a very very poor idea to start a new project without finishing the first. But I also don't think they're as impossible to make as everyone is saying, though offhand I'd also think it'd make more sense to control the lamps with Bluetooth than with wifi.

But if I have this right, and they get the bulbs from someone else in bulk and just pop on a really cheap controller/wireless interface, it seems like the price works out, especially if they aren't worrying about making them 'secure.'

As for 'certifications' and such, I really don't expect they'll even get them, let alone know that they might need them or that they exist.

</comment><comment><USER51> Felix Salmon is a noted writer in the financial world; it seems like the context is being missed.

A few years ago the U.S. investment universe could have been stylised as two mutually exclusive sets: regulated securities available to everyone, e.g. exchange traded stocks, and loosely regulated products for sophisticated investors, e.g. hedge funds. Common to both sets is that the agent, e.g. public company CEO or hedge fund manager, has a _fiduciary obligation_ to act in the best interests of the principal, i.e. the investor. The JOBS Act muddied the line between sophisticated and unsophisticated investors but maintained what constitutes an investor protected by their fiduciary rights and what constitutes someone giving money away. Enter Kickstarter.

Kickstarter says its campaigns are donations and not investments. This is crucial as it keeps them from having to comply with securities regulations, which have a higher bar for fraud than consumer or donor regulation. For example, failing to deliver a promised product would be grounds for scrutiny into whether the company acted in "best interests" of its fiduciaries - presently, a Kickstarter campaign has loose to no fiduciary obligation to its donors. Felix Salmon argues that Kickstarter campaigns are closer to investments than not and so should be fiducially obligated to their donors/investors.

The greater debate is about who should be protected by fiduciary rights, who should be allowed to participate in what kind of investment, and how we trade off inclusion in capital gains against the risk of fraud and public disillusionment in the capital markets. Whether WiFi circuitry can reliably survive 85 degrees Celsius is a side, albeit still interesting, concern.

</comment><comment><USER52> >so far there's zero evidence that it's a good way of providing startup capital for would-be businesses

Flagged immediately for this statement. Troll journalism.

<comment><USER53> Yeah, my feeling exactly. Whenever I hear/read "there's _absolutely_ / _zero_ no evidence", it smell either ignorance or malevolence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> They're using multicolour LEDs. That's weird. Most people don't want blue or green lights. That's a niche market for accent lighting. Most people want a _nice_ bright light for lamps and spotlights.

Spending money on getting that nice warm colour would be money well spent.

Also, the video mentions photographers. I'm not sure, but I'd have thought that multiplexed LEDs would be a horrible idea for some photography.

<comment><USER55> The color changing aspect of this bulb is a cool idea, but in reality would end up as a just something neat show off. On the other hand, if they can also accurately mimic the warmth and brightness of an incandescent using this approach, I'd buy it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> > _So my feeling is that both Kickstarter and the tech blogosphere should > start being a lot more skeptical about the claims made in Kickstarter > videos, where anybody can say pretty much anything._

Isn't the problem more along the lines of "amateur investors making amateur investments"? Is it Kickstarter's fault if people believe the "pretty much anything" that can be said in a video?

<comment><USER57> No, in this case it's actually the tech news journalists' fault for believing pretty much anything that can be said in a video. I didn't see anything asking Kickstarter to shape up; the call to action was for the reporters.

And he's right. This article should have been written by, say, GigaOm. I'd want a Wired article to go into more technical depth than this one does. I'd guess that, if I found the articles that pointed to the Kickstarter, they don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Felix Salmon is an a-hole and a moron. First of all, if you're going to title the missive "...of the day" there should be more than one example per quarter and such example should actually be vapor. Beyond that, Salmon gets almost everything wrong about small teams building products and Kickstarter in general. Small teams can have huge advantages over big companies specifically because they don't need to build hug quantities fo product. And Kickstarter has a fairly well-known reputation for products from manufacturers who don't have all the answers before they are asking for money.

</comment><comment><USER59> I'm not sure why this is any sort of surprise. Ever since Kickstarter began there have been lots of great ideas, lots of awful ideas. Some of the great ideas have been clearly way too ambitious for small teams but people happily donate money. Given this isn't an investment and what you're doing is giving someone money to follow their dream, to my mind it's almost irrelevant if at the end you don't get your $30 lightbulb. You've lived vicariously through the Lifehacker in question and got to see something go to market or crash and burn.

</comment><comment><USER60> I think a web-of-trust-style reputation system would work well here, since "votes" cost money.

The reputation of a buyer is the mean of the reputations of the projects they've backed (times some confidence metric).

The reputation of a project six months after it started is 1 if they kept their promises (as measured by confirmation emails sent to the backers) and -1 otherwise.

The reputation of a project before six months is the mean of (the mean of the reputations of its backers (again times some confidence)) and the reputation of the person who started the project.

</comment><comment><USER61> that's what I thought when I watched the video and looked at the prices they wanted and the expected ship date. I've already been burned by two kickstarters for $300+.

<comment><USER62> May I ask which projects those were? Do we have any idea of the proportion of projects that get funded without any kind of result?

I know that technically you make a donation, but some of those "projects" feel like borderline scam. Can't the donors or even kickstarter themselves turn back on the project owners if they receive a huge amount of money and fail to deliver anything? Especially when they say they have working prototypes in the introduction video.

I'm really convinced that the average kickstarter donor sees their donation as a pre-order more than an "investment". I'm sure many of those who donated to a project that failed to deliver felt like they've been scammed, and that may hurt kickstarter in the long run.

<comment><USER61> here is the one I consider dead and the backer is just hoping everyone will forget. I posted it last week on HN.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4523753>

The 2nd one I'm still hoping the backers will come through or at least refund the backers. So I'll hold that one for now.

I have backed 16 projects and the first was TikTok Nano watch band which funded Dec 2010. Out of the 16 only 2 have me very concerned.

I just backed two more projects one for $1,299 which is a 3D Printer and the other $99 for 3D printer software. I will continue to back things but I look carefully at their estimated ship date. It must be within 60 days, and I will dispute any charge from a project that doesn't deliver within that window.

<comment><USER62> I remember there was a website that indexed the kickstarter projects that didn't get funded. Maybe there should be one for the projects that were funded but didn't deliver.

That might get kickstarter's attention as well.

<comment><USER61> Do you know the URL for that website that is tracking failed KS projects?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Felix Salmon's screed is poorly informed about LED bulbs and the current state of the art in wifi.

First let's go over the current marketplace:

• There are very nice 60 watt equivalent bulbs available for <$25 in quantity one.[1] Without looking directly at the bulb you will not tell them from incandescent. Single color, using phosphors to shift blue LEDs down to nicer frequencies.

• At quantities >500 LED bulbs which look like the illustration on the kickstarter page are under $10. [2] This gives a rough estimate of cost of materials assembled.

• A thumbnail sized microcontroller module with wifi is <$30 in quantity one.[3]

It certainly looks like there is room for a $50 that includes a light and a wifi enabled microcontroller. The cost model gets easier though. Each customer only needs one master bulb with the wifi, the rest only have the cheaper 802.15.4 mesh radios.

Before we look at the article anymore, lets consider what is different about the Lifx than the $10 bulb above.

• More efficient. It needs to be a bit brighter to meet the Lifx specs. This adds cost to the LEDs to run more current within the thermal limits.

• Tri color. It is going to need at least three LED colors. Ideally the sum of them is going to be a pleasing white so you get a usable color at full brightness. The other colors are achieved by running some of the LEDs at lower duty cycle. Notice they chose a bulb with a diffuser. That keeps you from getting blotchy spot light effects.

• More power switching FETs. Their total power handling will be the same, but it will be a higher component count.

• A microcontroller and radio added to the circuit board.

• Software, a couple weeks for the bulb innards.

For that they get to roughly quintuple the sale price. Sounds doable to me.

Most of the article is just an "On no! The sky is falling!" piece on Kickstarter feeling like a store. He uses some other company that took a run at the "just like incandescent" market and apparently got beaten by Philips. For some reason, he has a side-by-side set of photos which the Lifx illustration bulb and possibly the ugliest LED bulb I've ever seen. (Said ugly bulb is proclaimed indistinguishable from incandescent when inside a lamp shade, so it has a use case. Just don't let anyone see it naked.)

As the article progresses it just gets embarrassing. He declares it impossible because other smart people haven't done it and confidently predicts every negative lightbulb attribute he can think of will afflict the bulb. He throws out some ridiculous straw men for the product and imagines a huge barrier for configuration of a UI free wifi device (hint: solved long ago by many products, e.g. Apple's Airport Express) and that somehow the 0.05 watts from the wifi will overheat the bulb which is dissipating ~10 watts already.

At least it was run as "Opinion" instead of "Fact".

Here's my opinion on Lifx: The masterbulb concept is a mistake. Too confusing. Have a controller that plugs in the wall. Keeps the confusion down but also keeps people from switching off the master bulb or having to have a battery in it. They may need to give a bit on the total brightness to keep the heat under control. If they try to grow to something large, they will probably be killed by a patent lawsuit. If they make it far enough to make a nice PAR20 version (diffusion is much harder), I will happily buy 30 of them.

EOM

[1] [http://www.homedepot.com/Electrical-Light-Bulbs-LED-Light- Bu...](http://www.homedepot.com/Electrical-Light-Bulbs-LED-Light- Bulbs/Philips/h_d1/N-5yc1vZbm79Z15b/R-203406583/h_d2/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10053&langId=-1&storeId=10051#.UFiG1EI8D8s)

[2] [http://www.alibaba.com/product- gs/601830276/led_light_bulb_e...](http://www.alibaba.com/product- gs/601830276/led_light_bulb_e27.html?s=p) For ballpark reference only. Never trust the specs.

[3] <https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11395>

<comment><USER30> I think this is an excellent post. But perhaps not for the reasons jws thinks it is :-).

Look at that Phillips bulb, isn't it neat? When they won the L-prize for a bulb that could do 60W equivalent for 10W input, some of the coverage said that they had spent just over $28M developing that one bulb. They didn't open source anything they discovered in that process about making LED light bulbs. And granted LEDs have improved in the last 3 years since the Department of Energy ran its $10M 'kickstarter' campaign, the bulb linked is a 12W for 60W equivalent, and its only one color.

So one has to wonder, if it _seems_ easy but the only one company was even able to complete and entry for the L-prize, what did they know that I don't?

I wonder if it is a form of suspended disbelief, if its far enough away from your direct expertise but seems practical and one really loves the concept, one can invest a level of belief into someone saying they can do what you want.

The one that will be interesting will be a Kickstarter to bring an herbal supplement to market that stops aging. I'm sure its coming, or a perpetual motion machine, maybe a project to get the Rossi cold-fusion machine into production. They keep saying if they have a million dollars they can build a functioning power plant.

[1] [http://energy.gov/articles/department-energy-announces- phili...](http://energy.gov/articles/department-energy-announces-philips- lighting-north-america-winner-l-prize-competition)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I created something like this over the past year. I should have started a kickstarter! :) I do have questions on how lifx will execute this light bulb. Very interesting stuff. Check out the Arduino/Wireless LED lamp here [http://charlesfesta.com/post/31814601314/say-hello-to-the- jo...](http://charlesfesta.com/post/31814601314/say-hello-to-the-john-hancock- building-living-room)

</comment><comment><USER65> Here's a kickstarter that did very well (launched, great game): [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster- than...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster-than-light)

Personally I'm not worried about kickstarter being generally vaporware, although in some instances it will be.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm really surprised there haven't been any class action law suits against Kickstarter projects and/or Kickstarter. For most projects Kickstarter isn't a feel-good donation system, it's a way of pre-purchasing a product. If you promise to provide an item for someone's money and don't deliver you've broken the law.

</comment><comment><USER67> Seems as though the only thing one needs to earn money on the internet is to make a video with good cameras and be good at Computer generated 3D models of products that will never be completed. I too think that the kickstarter should stop project starters from giving out material things.

</comment><comment><USER68> First off, their goals are possible in the fact they are not hoping to build an energy efficient LED bulb but a wifi controllable one.

Also it is a little too early to be calling this VaporWare. Give them a chance to prove themselves.

</comment><comment><USER69> He's completely discounting the value of building a direct relationship to the customer that Kickstarter allows. For many startups that's at least as hard as the technology.

</comment><comment><USER70> The LiFX lead engineer had started answering questions here: <http://tech.lifx.co/>

</comment><comment><USER71> Every great achievement was once considered impossible.

</comment><comment><USER72> _These people aren't just being seduced by a clever sales pitch: they're being shepherded there by lots of very high-profile blogs, such as Wired and TechCrunch and Mashable and GigaOm._

Its funny that reuters is writing this, because, they were shepherding a lot of people on an inferior product too, The iPhone 5.</comment>


Ask HN: What tools do you use to test/review a website visually? - <AUTHOR>

Specifically I need to test a few informational websites in different browsers and versions.  Right now I'm just loading up Chrome / FF / Safari on my mac and reviewing them by hand.  However I can't do IE this way, and it's not very efficient.<p>I recently tried using [VisualDiff](visualdiff.com) but they seem to be more focused on differences between website versions, not simply screenshotting the site in different browsers. <comment><USER2> Alexa Ranks and google analytics</comment>


R-Ladies made data science inclusive - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/work/1661486/r-ladies-made-data-science-inclusive/ <comment><USER2> I think this is one of the reasons why all those blog posts about Python going to replace R are just plain wrong. R really has a unqiue community, and R-Ladies plays a big part in it. But i think it's also the fact that R is not seen a traditional software engineering language, and that makes it a lot more accessible for people that would be scared away by a regular programming language like Python. Which does not take anything away from Python trying and generally succeeding in being as approachable as possible.</comment>


Git Hacking: A Social Layer for GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/01/git-hacking-a-social-layer-for.php <comment><USER2> I think contributing to open source is more about "fixing a broken window" than a service finding me projects it thinks I should work on or that have lots of broken windows. I have more than enough things that I should work on, and when I contribute to open source its always because the tools available didn't work for me. GitHub makes it pretty easy to find projects you're interested in and pretty easy to start contributing code to those projects, so I guess I don't get it.

Why would I want to contribute to someone's project that I don't even use? What would inspire me to all of the sudden want to hack on git's internals and then not dive into the source? On one hand, yeah, finding some menial bug or documentation fix I can work on to start contributing to a project is great, but at the higher levels just presenting tasks from issue trackers for me to smash, I don't think is a great idea.

Look at the ActiveRecord/AREL rewrite, sure @tenderlove was just squashing bugs in the Lighthouse tracker but only because, as he says, "AT&T Interactive started paying me to work on Rails" ([http://engineering.attinteractive.com/2010/10/arel-two- point...](http://engineering.attinteractive.com/2010/10/arel-two-point-ohhhhh- yaaaaaa/)) If you don't dive in real deep you can't really make things better and that takes a lot of time. You end up investing a lot in the project and the people around the project. So I don't see where GitHub doesn't support this. How does your product makes any of this any easier/better/more full of awesome?

<comment><USER3> That's only part of the picture. What if you know what project you want to work on, but don't know what exactly needs doing?

An example from my experience: before I started working on Rubygems' testing infrastructure, I wanted to contribute to Rails, but didn't know where to start. The Lighthouse tracker is a bit intimidating without anyone to point you in the right direction. If there was a place I could go and find small "get your feet wet" tasks to then get to a point where I can rewrite major components, then I would have started contributing much earlier in my career. The way I got into doing things for Rubygems was via a friend: I got a direct request to help with a new project for Rubygems. I didn't know what needed to be done so I never helped out previously.

Githacking wants to be what that friend was for me: a way to contribute with no friction on either the maintainer's side or the contributer's side and a clear starting place for getting involved in a new project.

Taking that a step further: a major part of the platform will be feature requests from companies that depend on the project, not unlike the bounties large open source projects put out from time to time on a bug or feature. Companies request a feature from a project, it gets implemented, the contributer gets paid the bounty.

<comment><USER2> I like the bounty idea and it could be a way to monezite the app if you can get traction. Didn't mean to be harsh in my earlier comments I just hadn't gotten a good idea of what you guys were thinking of providing. Good luck!

<comment><USER3> Didn't take it as harsh. I appreciate when people make me think about what I'm working on, so thanks. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a great idea, and I'm surprised no one thought of it sooner. Now, if only someone would create a "social layer for Facebook" my online life would be complete. Maybe there could be some way to recommend Facebook friends, get access to some kind of news feed of things my friends are doing... you know, stuff that would really make Facebook useful in a social environment rather than just a place to host my photos.

<comment><USER3> Yeah the word "social" is not accurate, thanks for pointing that out. Githacking is about connecting developers to projects and surfacing accessible tasks to get involved in OSS. ie: I'm a developer looking to get involved in git development. Git is a very complex piece of software, so I have 2 options: dive in head first and hope for the best or find someone to help me choose a task to work on. Githacking takes the second route but removes the 'someone' from the equation.

It pulls data from repositories and issue trackers to make it easy to find projects with tasks you can do based on your preferences and confidence level.

<comment><USER4> Ok, this specific feature description makes a lot of sense (pulling data from issue trackers to find projects with tasks you can do). From having read the readwriteweb article I was left with this feeling of "but that's exactly what GitHub does".

Under the possibly totally incorrect assumption that that article is based on marketing copy from you, I will offer a key suggestion I learned on product differentiation once: you need to say things that your competitors aren't just going to claim applies to their products as well.

Example: "our shoes are comfortable" is going to be a really difficult campaign because every single company in that space is going to be claiming that. In this case, saying "social layer for GitHub" is incredibly confusing (even if it is theoretically accurate, as another responder just pointed out), as GitHub bills itself as "a social network for programming projects".

To bring it to this case, when I looked at the readwriteweb article, the general idea of "find people to work on your projects" seems to be exactly what people are already using GitHub for, so my response was "wait, wtf" rather than "oh, that's an interesting take".

In particular, I got here: "the ability to find and promote repositories, showcase developers' skills and repositories, as well as reward those who contribute", and I thought "this article could have been written a few years ago about the launch of GitHub: what are they actually doing here that GitHub isn't".

<comment><USER3> Ah, yeah, I can see that. We're a group of 4 developers who started this project this past Friday so we're still hashing a lot of things out.

Hopefully we'll get the message across clearer the next time around, thanks for the notes. I'll keep them in mind when we get more attention in future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> i always thought github.com was 'social' enough.</comment>


Julia, Python and Cython - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/julia-dev/browse_thread/thread/61fb4e3847dcc2b9

<comment><USER3> I've been playing with Julia a bit lately, but I haven't had any good reasons to write real code in it yet. I've got to say, a useful Python compatibility layer between the two languages would be _awesome_. Being able to call SciPy libraries from Julia would make it a _lot_ more interesting to start writing Julia code.

<comment><USER4> Looks like Stefan thinks this is viable: [https://groups.google.com/group/julia- dev/msg/1530301a13a0f9...](https://groups.google.com/group/julia- dev/msg/1530301a13a0f9ba)

<comment><USER5> Heh. That was the easy part. Being able to get a PyObject back from the embedded Python interpreter and manipulate it in useful ways is the real trick. But at least it's a start. And it was pleasantly easy, due to two things: how easy it is to call C functions from Julia, and the fact that Python has made it trivial to be called from C code.

(Imagine using a C++ library from any other language like this. Wait, you can't.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't mind writing cython to judiciously optimize my scientific python code when needed, but efforts along these lines, as well as Travis Oliphant's Numba project (<https://github.com/ContinuumIO/numba>) seem like promising alternatives. It's great to see some productive conversations between the Julia and Scipy-dev folks.

</comment><comment><USER6> > It's a common theme when we scientific Python users talk that we don't > really use Python for the _language_. We use it for the community and the > libraries.

This statement doesn't make sense to me. First, I use Python for scientific/numerical work, and I definitely use it "for the language" - <USER2> least, certain aspects of it that are rare elsewhere.

Second, the language, community, and libraries are all interdependent. The design of a language _strongly_ influences the tone of its community, as well as the libraries available (both the number and the types).

<comment><USER3> > _The design of a language strongly influences the tone of its community, as > well as the libraries available (both the number and the types)._

I certainly think this is true, and I think that Dag's underestimating the importance of the underlying Python language here.

At the same time, a lot of scientists I know are used to just using whatever language has the right library in it (either for functionality, or to duplicate another paper's results). I know that in grad school I used Python, Matlab, IDL, Fortran, and Java, all on the same _scientific_ project (if not the same _software_ project). I used each language less because I liked it, but because it had this one important piece that I really wanted to use.

And while that was a Frankenstein of a project, it wasn't all that unusual compared to the other researchers I knew. We weren't full-time software developers, we wanted to avoid re-implementing anything we could... so the libraries won, all the time.

<comment><USER5> This kind of frankensteinism was one of the motivating reasons for creating Julia (see this InfoWorld interview: [http://www.infoworld.com/d/application- development/new-julia...](http://www.infoworld.com/d/application- development/new-julia-language-seeks-be-the-c-scientists-190818), please ignore the misleading title). Python, although it can get you closer to single-language scientific computing, can't quite get you there because of the split language model: at the very least, libraries have to be written in C for adequate performance; often complex projects end up requiring parts written in C.

Doing practical scientific computing only using code implemented in Julia is completely unrealistic. At the very least, a lot of fast kernels (BLAS, LAPACK, etc.) are going to be implemented in C and/or Fortran for the foreseeable future. What Julia brings to the table is the ability to call C/Fortran libraries _without writing anything but Julia code_ — you can just load a .so file and call functions without compiling anything (see <http://julialang.org/manual/calling-c-and-fortran-code/>). If we could have the same level of trivial interoperability with Python, then you could potentially use scientific libraries written in Python, while still only ever writing Julia code. That helps alleviate the "frankenstein project" problem without throwing out all the excellent work that's been done by the SciPy community.

In the other direction, there are people who already have projects that are all or mostly Python. Forcing them to have some random piece in Julia just to use a nice bit of Julia functionality is making the frankenstein problem worse. If they can trivially call Julia code (perhaps via a .so, as it were just a library written in C), then that's one less frankenstein project in the world.

<comment><USER7> I think it's hard to overstate how important this is.

Consider the number of bolt-in solutions there are to get decent performance in python: numexpr, weave, pysco (dead), the emerging island of NumPyPy, theano, the brilliant/crazy chimera language cython, and now perhaps numba.

The multi-modal nature of development affects libraries (too few devs needing too many hammers) and even the very sustainability of the ecosystem -- as evidenced by myriad numpy-discussion threads in the past year [0][0.1] about core implementation issues with 100-150+ messages, but about three people [1] of those who have the requisite interest, C chops, Python and CPython API understanding, and time to do work in the NumPy core. As a result the core has been mostly stuck in a local maximum for years now.

Contrast Julia: Arrays are written in the language itself [2]. Folks practically off-the-street with single-digit weeks of Jl experience are implementing non-trivial array datatypes [3][4]. Julia appears to have the flexibility to allow the kind of fine-tuned optimizations that are seen in the guts of a BLAS library [5] while simultaneously facilitating carefree, throw- away data exploration scripts by MATLAB refugees.

If anything, I fear that Julia may be susceptible to the LISP curse if extreme care is not taken to ensure the interoperability that is needed to build an ecosystem. (The Python straitjacket is a blessing in this respect). On the other hand, maybe this time github will help balance the equation...

[0] [http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.numeric.general/44...](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.numeric.general/44820)

[0.1] [http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.numeric.general/48...](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.numeric.general/48227)

[1] [http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.numeric.general/49...](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.numeric.general/49486/focus=49487)

[2] <https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/base/array.jl>

[3] [https://groups.google.com/d/topic/julia- dev/YYRa6Iveevg/disc...](https://groups.google.com/d/topic/julia- dev/YYRa6Iveevg/discussion)

[4] [https://groups.google.com/d/topic/julia- dev/x3xFSa8iCog/disc...](https://groups.google.com/d/topic/julia- dev/x3xFSa8iCog/discussion)

[5] [https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia- dev/vETgqnpesDk/OuZaB7...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia- dev/vETgqnpesDk/OuZaB7DBqngJ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is also a project to port parts of Numpy/Scipy to pypy, which would probably give interesting results.

The following years are going to be exciting for open-source numerical work. But I fear fragmentation might ruin it for everybody.

</comment><comment><USER9> Can someene of the team or early adaptors explain to me: WHY USE "END" statement?

<comment><USER10> The syntax is inspired by/based on that of MATLAB, likely so as to be as familiar as possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think one should do something just because it is familiar syntactically. Having left MATLAB for python, there were enough compelling reasons to ditch the familiar.

<comment><USER4> Agree. The extra "end"'s makes the code look hideous.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Almost complete guide to flexbox (without flexbox) - <AUTHOR> http://kyusuf.com/post/almost-complete-guide-to-flexbox-without-flexbox <comment><USER2> Per /u/AssistingJarl's comment on Reddit [0]:

> _On the other hand the number of people who are [Flexbox] capable [1] is, at > 94%, pretty much the same as the number of people who can use the inline- > blocks or CSS tables that most of these depend on. Support for 2d transforms > is actually_ worse _at 90%, which makes the column-reverse substitute a long > trip back to square one._

[0]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/4dwkby/almost_compl...](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/4dwkby/almost_complete_guide_to_flexbox_without_flexbox/) [1]: [http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox](http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox)

</comment><comment><USER3> Or use flexbox anyway and structure your HTML and CSS to afford progressive enhancement. You'll get the full styling in the wide range of browsers that support flexbox[1], falling back to a still-reasonable styling in the older browsers when they ignore the flexbox CSS.

It's easy to forget that CSS' forgiving nature, silently ignoring future/unknown properties, can be a powerful tool for creating backwards compatible sites that gracefully degrade in older browsers.

[1] [http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox](http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox)

<comment><USER4> This idea makes more sense to me than trying to implement flexbox without flex properties.

Do you have any examples of this idea implemented well?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you need to support older browsers without Flexbox, another option is to use a tiny (less than 1kb) CSS grid system called Pocket Grid.

The grid system lets you position blocks of content side-by-side similar to Flexbox, and blocks can wrap to another line when there isn't enough space. It's not an equivalent to Flexbox, but for some types of layouts it could be used as a possible fallback.

Pocket Grid has been around since 2013, it's a shame it hasn't gained more attention:

[http://arnaudleray.github.io/pocketgrid/](http://arnaudleray.github.io/pocketgrid/)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is great.

Seeing all of the old alternatives in one place, it makes it so clear why CSS layout is such a hard concept for beginners to learn. Incredibly basic layout needs involve learning at least three or four different box models, and knowing how they'll interact together. So glad we have flexbox now!

</comment><comment><USER7> It's 2016 and most of the ways to align content involve making divs pretend to be tables again.

I'll be pouring myself another one.

</comment><comment><USER8> Most of the tricks break down as soon as you try to use them for anything. They solve a very specific problem each, and are not composable.

Flexbox is at least a bit sane.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a bit misleading. The squares, which you would think are backgrounds, are not. They are content inside the items being stretched/squished, but the content does not appear to do.

so you have your container, your item container, and your item.

What made me call this out was the "space-around." There isn't spacing around the .example__item's. They take up the whole space and the content has very specific widths.

</comment><comment><USER10> Turkish developers see English content on the blog was both strange and beautiful. :)</comment>


The Crazy Story of How Soviet Russia Bugged an American Embassy's Typewriters - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/the-crazy-story-of-how-soviet-russia-bugged-an-american-embassys-typewriters <comment><USER2> Fascinating. For those who would like to read further into this, it's called project gunman.

</comment><comment> java-man also "the Thing"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%28listening_device%29)</comment>


Ask HN: how do I promote on Hacker News? - <AUTHOR>

So I've made https://pintask.me/. Since it's a hackable task tracker, Hacker News is THE place to promote it. But how do I do that without pissing everybody off? :) <comment><USER2> You've basically done all you can do... submit it. Now wait a few months, make some improvements, and submit it again to show your improvements. Anything more often than that would be considered spam.

You could also put more information in your profile and then just participate enough that people want to click your profile to see who you are and what you do. This is probably the best long-term plan. If someone on HN wants to hire a security research firm, who do you think they are going to go to first? (If you don't know the answer, that's good evidence you need to participate more!)

Lots of products of HNers have become popular on HN because of the creator's participation. DuckDuckGo is another good example.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about writing blog posts about cool things you can do with Pintask? Or maybe even something not related to Pintask but to coding in general?

<comment><USER2> That's a good idea, but if all you submit is your own blog, you're going to get blocked at some point by the spam protection system. HN is specifically set up to prevent non-contributors from using HN to promote their content. In other words, if you want to benefit from HN, you need to let HN benefit from you and your full participation in the community. It can't go just one way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are a few subreddits in which you can advertise. I reckon there's some overlap between the community here and /r/programming or whatever the subreddit of du jour.

</comment><comment><USER4> Provide valuable content for us to read about your website.

</comment><comment><USER5> "Show HN:"</comment>


Show HN: BugMagnet v3 now available for Chrome and Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://bugmagnet.org/v3.html <comment><USER2> Firefox is typed "FireFox" in a few places.</comment>


Microsoft joins FIDO group to replace passwords with public key cryptography - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/microsoft-joins-fido-group-hoping-to-replace-passwords-with-public-key-cryptography <comment><USER2> I don't know how much they overlap, but Steve Gibson was saying recently in one of this latest Security Now podcasts that what FIDO is trying to do is inferior to his recently launched SQRL protocol. He starts talking about it at 0:56:

[http://twit.tv/show/security-now/435](http://twit.tv/show/security-now/435)

He says the FIDO spec is overdesigned, and everyone there has their own interests, it's tied to certain technologies, and it's not free. SQRL on the other hand generates the keys on the fly instead of storing them on the phone for each website. If a hacker steals your identity, you can also get it back with SQRL - you can't with FIDO. He says SQRL is also much easier to implement.

[https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm](https://www.grc.com/sqrl/sqrl.htm)

[http://www.sqrl.pl/](http://www.sqrl.pl/) (fan-made)

Also, an interesting excerpt from Wikipedia, referring to when he announced the protocol for the first time:

> Within 2 days of the airing of this podcast, both the W3C and Google > expressed interest in working on the standard.[2]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQRL](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQRL)

<comment><USER3> "Steve Gibson was saying recently in one of this latest Security Now podcasts that what FIDO is trying to do is inferior to his recently launched SQRL protocol"

Of course he was. He's Steve Gibson. He's a shameless self-promoter and he loves to make over-dramatic claims of finding security flaws in things.

His only saving grace is that SQRL actually looks pretty sound to my moderately-better-than-amateur security experience. I hate to admit it, because if it catches on as a standard, he's only going to become more insufferable. The guy is a kook, except he's a kook who maybe have actually done his homework this time. I'd still like to hear what some actual security researchers have to say about SQRL, because I'm sure as hell not going to take his word on it.

<comment><USER4> +1 on all counts. I went to Wikipedia page and looks like it was written if not by him then by his fans - it does not contain a half decent description of the protocol. Just some propaganda-like fluff.

I admit "squirrel" does sound cool. But how is it different from any other challenge-response algorithm escapes me.

<comment> guard-of-terra For example it might become different from other algorithms because it will be working and solving users' problems instead of just existing in abstract algorithm-land?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Someone needs to come up with a safe and VERY convenient way to keep one's private keys around. I haven't found a convenient way yet, even a USB key is going to be a hassle for most non-techies.

<comment><USER6> How about a ring?

[http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/google- password...](http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/google-password/)

<comment><USER7> [http://www.javaworld.com/article/2076641/learn-java/an- intro...](http://www.javaworld.com/article/2076641/learn-java/an-introduction- to-the-java-ring.html)

How about this version from over a decade ago? Regardless of what you get to run inside it (we can substitute lots of stuff for the JVM used here), the form/style of it is simple and fits with habits that people already have.

The right is nice, too, in that it's harder to accidentally leave someplace, yet CAN be removed if absolutely needed. (unlike some biometrics, where "mugging you and taking your wallet/keys/pubkey-ring" can turn into "mugging you and taking your _finger_ ".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Remember Microsoft's mantra: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish...</comment>


Astronomers observe how two suns collect matter in a binary system - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-10-astronomers-suns-binary.html <comment><USER2> I've always read that binary systems seem to be the norm and stars like our Sun the exception. Is it possible stars like our Sun form from binary protostars that form too close together and collide to form a single star? Or do we have plentiful examples of single protostars?

<comment><USER3> Binary systems are simply more popular because anything beyond two objects of similar mass can't have a stable orbit for a long-ish time.

<comment><USER3> To be clear: it's not impossible, but it's simply highly improbable.</comment></comment></comment>


Roadmap to becoming a web developer in 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap <comment><USER2> Nice.

\- [https://github.com/fkling/JSNetworkX](https://github.com/fkling/JSNetworkX) would be a cool way to build interactive schema:Thing/CreativeWork curriculum graph visualizations (and BFS/DFS traversal)

\- #WebSec: [https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/web- development#websec](https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/web-development#websec)

\- Web Development Checklist: [https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/web- development#web-develo...](https://wrdrd.com/docs/consulting/web- development#web-development-checklist)

\-- [http://webdevchecklist.com/](http://webdevchecklist.com/)

\- | Web Frameworks (GitHub Sphinx wiki (./Makefile)): [https://westurner.org/wiki/webframeworks](https://westurner.org/wiki/webframeworks) (| Wikipedia, | Homepage, Source, Docs,)</comment>


8 Tips for Attending Virtual Conferences - <AUTHOR> https://www.fosslife.org/8-tips-attending-virtual-conferences <comment><USER2> I've consumed content from three virtual conferences this summer. They've all had more or less the same format: one or more tracks of prerecorded videos with simultaneous live chat with the presenters in attendance. One event had a livestreaming DJ as a kind of afterparty.

In my experience, there has not been any difference between "attending" an event and just watching the videos later. I have not been able to capture any of the benefits of actually attending an IRL event.

Granted, I've also avoided the indignities of IRL events, such as annoying audience members, long lines for conference food, and talks that turn out to be less relevant than anticipated.

I think tech communities have lost enough aspects of IRL events that there's nothing left to lose if you just allowed people to post talks throughout the year to YouTube under some tag and maybe applying light vetting for quality.

<comment><USER3> You lose out on networking though, which could arguably be the most valuable part of conferences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I watched quite a few live sessions of MS Build this year and I really enjoyed it. My employer encouraged this during the day and I learned a lot. If not for that conference being virtual, I would not have gone. I do think you miss out on the social experience/networking, but I'd be happy to see this type of thing happen occasionally going forward.</comment>


Ask HN: Was Dropbox a good idea that looked like a bad idea? - <AUTHOR>

We've heard that the best ideas are good ideas that look like bad ideas initially. However, I'm pretty sure I always perceived Dropbox as a good idea ever since hearing about it on HN. Perhaps its because I never tried the alternatives or competitors or knew anything about the space.<p>Was there anyone serious who thought it was truly a bad idea in and of itself? <comment><USER2> Here's the original thread, when they launched: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

<comment><USER3> It's amazing how anachronistic some of those comments read today. USB drive? FTP? SVN? CVS?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a similar question. I have been watching "Steve Blank's Customer development" type videoes on youtube lately. He pitches completely validate idea before writing a single line of code.

For successfully companies/products like dropbox, google, twitter, etc. What are the "right" questions/methods to "validate" the idea before the development - without developing the product and let the massive traction do the talking?

What are the name of any of "really" successfully product/company follow that method of "validating idea" before writing a single line of code?

<comment><USER5> I actually think this is a good tactic. Basically you try to sell a product that doesn't exist to determine whether there's any demand.

Off the top of my head I can think of at least 4 large ($50M+ acq. or valuation) teams that picked their products this way.

It's pretty easy – build a well designed landing page describing the product, share it on HN/reddit/etc and gauge the response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The response to Dropbox was massive and overwhelmingly positive. Of course a few individuals tried to pick it apart. That's often just a sign people are excited about something. Bad ideas just get ignored.

It is true that some stupid investors were wary of Dropbox. There have been many failed sync and backup products. To the average Digg user it was clear as day that Dropbox was different.

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't think it was considered a bad idea. Some mentioned it had been 'done before' but Dropbox outpaced them by making it simple & actually work. Also it was considered too simple as it was really bringing the well known concept of an always-accessible network drive or 'shared docs' folder to the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER8> The idea behind Dropbox isn't a bad one. In fact, I'd argue that idea still isn't what Dropbox is, but it's relatively a minor part of it.</comment>


Rejoiner: Unified GraphQL schema from gRPC microservices - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/rejoiner <comment><USER2> We were looking at an architecture exactly like this (GraphQL front end, backed by gRPC microservices), because we liked the strongly typed interfaces of gRPC, and the flexibility of GraphQL, but we ran into some technology issues (http/2 support in our PaaS) that made it a non-starter.

We found that we could get the same benefits (minus the performance of gRPC) by just using GraphQL for all of our microservices, and dynamically stitching them together with Apollo's graphql-tools[1].

We're really high on the approach because it lets us develop independent services, each with a strongly typed interface, and then mix and match them into a single GraphQL interface on the fly.

It's been gaining a lot of traction internally at my company. We even put together a "create-react-app" for GraphQL so our teams can easily spin up new services.

[1] [https://www.apollographql.com/docs/graphql-tools/schema- stit...](https://www.apollographql.com/docs/graphql-tools/schema- stitching.html)

<comment><USER3> GraphQL for RPC is an interesting approach. What do you see as the disadvantages? It'd seem to me that not all services can be neatly represented as a 'graph', which gRPC works well for. Have you run into this?

<comment><USER4> How you model a GraphQL schema is up to you.

You can just treat it as a realitvely flat, rest-like schema that does not have much in terms of graph relations.

The Graph in GraphQL is mostly optional.

<comment><USER2> Exactly!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like slowly but surely the industry is realizing the incredible productivity penalty of microservices/fas etc, and just generally any model compared to your good old ORM in a monolithic codebase approach.

I still feel like we are way ahead with the concepts in (shameless plug alert) [https://github.com/1backend/1backend](https://github.com/1backend/1backend) when it comes to the big picture of building microservices that actually build on each other, although it's statistically very likely this is just a personal opinion :)).

Anyway, I'm generally happy that this space is advancing, as someone who spent most of his recent career in this space I almost gave up hope: simply there was not even a common vocabulary to properly discuss ideas, everybody just wanted microservices because that was the next cool thing, and looked absolutely perplexed when explained the pitfalls.

GraphQL, this, and all the different kind of faas platforms popping up nowadays all help as a point of reference.

I truly think we are on the verge of radically changing how we build applications soon - I think these technologies can be viewed as a new breed of web frameworks, a breed which has the distributed principles in its core.

<comment><USER6> Remember there's a trade-off to everything and that systems naturally move towards being distributed as they scale. Not just technical systems but all systems in nature. There's always a singular starting point and the move to distributed systems is one where trade-offs are being made to solve specific problems. Taking this approach pragmatically leads to the adoption of microservices and functions at the right time.

This library solves a specific problem at the query layer. It's definitely time we had something like this across microservices and functions. There have been other attempts but in unstructured ways.

It's likely in the long term systems architectures are multilayered. Monoliths, microservices and functions along with graphql or other query models all within the same environment.

<comment><USER5> Very nicely put. I agree it's an evolution, but I see a lot of companies waste a lot of time on the monolith -> services transition phase.

Usually what happens is that they try a complete rewrite which turns out to be rather expensive (especially in opportunity cost). They should ideally just move the pain points (ie. performance problems) to services and optimize that, but the enthusiasm towards the shiny new way of doing things that will fix their problems is so high that they opt for the riskier move of rewriting all the things.

That scenario is simply so dangerous and expensive that companies will be better off starting with a proper distributed framework - which doesn't really exists yet, but we are slowly getting there.

Anyway, this is just my 2c but I have seen this pattern of full blown rewrite at a lot of places.

<comment><USER6> The rewrite approach is definitely painful but that can at times also stem from failures in previous attempts at moving from monolith to services. The problem usually arises because there's no real definitive structure or architectural choices around the breakdown. It's a very ad-hoc thing that results in building an even more brittle system.

When you start to breakdown the monolith you may end up with 10 services all using different databases, message queues and message formats. Going the whole rewrite approach usually involves defining an architecture and single uniform approach to development which eventually leads to higher productivity since it eliminates choice and lets you focus on the important tasks.

I do however agree that not everyone who does it needs to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Note: This is not an official Google product.

<comment><USER8> Yea not directly supported by Google, but being built by Google engineer(s).

<comment><USER9> This is from the README of the project. I think the reason this was posted here because the original title of this thread was "Google released ..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks interesting, but TBH I'm still waiting for full swagger spec generation. It should be easy to go from grpc->swagger to generate REST client libs. Unfortunately in practice the swagger generator has many holes in it making it useless in several use cases. So... without being able to generate swagger specs it looks like gRPC is no use for a large number of use cases. Shame really since it has promise but still seems half-baked.

<comment><USER11> > It should be easy to go from grpc->swagger to generate REST client libs.

I theory yes, but would you want to? In my experience I've found that building REST services is very different than building a GRPC service. The contract between the client and server are totally different.

> gRPC is no use for a large number of use cases. Shame really since it has > promise but still seems half-baked.

gRPC is half-baked? You realize that the a large portion of the google backend is built on top of gRPC. Its an extremely well tested tool.

<comment><USER12> How much of the Google backend is actually built on top of gRPC? My (outsider's) understanding is gRPC was the "open-source version/rewrite" (typical Google) of Google's internal software, stubby. IIRC, _some_ of the Google Cloud public-facing APIs use it, but what else?

As a proponent of gRPC, I can say that some of the libraries, tools, docs, etc. are definitely half-baked. There are plenty of severe issues in the (confusing codebase of) grpc-go that have been open for over 1.5y.

<comment><USER13> FWIW, the primary maintainer of grpc-go left the team and it was passed on to a new maintainer. The new maintainer inherited the mess. Not justifying the project or anything, but I think that's why. Look at the Github top contributors to see what I mean.</comment></comment></comment></comment>