A LinkedIn Hack That Led to a $120k Investment - <AUTHOR> http://thehustle.co/the-linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000 <comment><USER2> A nitpick that is somewhat related to the thesis, but I think still relevant: I dislike how success in this context is completely centered around raising money, and nothing to do with actually running a profitable company and delivering value.

The main point of the article was to run a LinkedIn ad to get accepted into AngelPad and raise money, and that's totally fair (and commendable!).

But sprinkled throughout the article, there are quotes like:

> I've co-founded two startups that have raised ~$90 million in venture > capital (Shyp and Vungle) and have created hundreds of jobs in five > different countries.

> Vungle has grown to hundreds of employees and over $25 million in funding.

Is that really the metric of success we're going for? Give anybody $90 million and they can pretty trivially create hundreds of jobs.

I don't know what Vungle's revenue is, but if we're not in a bubble yet, raising a bunch of money, leaving the company, and touting it "hustling" isn't helping.

EDIT: I'd like to clarify briefly that I'm not downplaying raising money. Going out and fundraising is really hard (I've done it), but so aren't dozens of other tasks at a company.

+1 to anybody who is able to successfully bring in funding, but I've met too many people who have felt like their company has "made it" once they've raised money -- when in fact that's just the beginning.

<comment><USER3> Raising money is "just the beginning" for a company but for many people, including most founders and early employees who raise the funding, it's really the beginning of the end.

With funding comes outside pressure from investors that seeps into and permeates the entire venture. The pressure to show rapid growth, alone, changes what kind of people get hired, how their responsibilities are structured, and how they interact with the pre-funding team. Founders will be pushed out or replaced by career executives from the industry, early employees will be managed out or grow bored with the monotony of an established business, and anyone involved in raising the initial rounds will likely be way out of their depth by the time growth stage funding rolls around.

Let's face it, we monkeys like shiny trophies for well quantified metrics to put on our wall and taking credit for a bunch of zeroes on a check is a lot more practical than for the sum of all of the work and value added by a company that survives for years or decades after you leave it.

<comment><USER4> That is a stereotype, and a rather crude caricature of what happens after funding. Anyway, that seems to be your opinion, but out of curiosity how many companies have you personally witnessed this happen in?

<comment><USER5> Also the most valuable technology companies tend to retain their original founders in leadership positions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The best part about this 3-year old hack is that it's still working, on us this time :)

The story starts in 2012 when it was a "Adwords hack" ->

[https://pando.com/2012/05/02/vungles-co-founders-hustle- thei...](https://pando.com/2012/05/02/vungles-co-founders-hustle-their-way- to-a-2-million-seed-round/)

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/06/25/dont- try-t...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/06/25/dont-try-this-at- home-how-vungle-broke-in-to-silicon-valley/)

And the wheelworks started again in April of this year ->

[http://www.businessinsider.com/the-linkedin-hack-that- turned...](http://www.businessinsider.com/the-linkedin-hack-that-turned-a- penny-into-100000-2015-4)

I am writing the above with respect - I do the exact same thing, re-use and re-cycle great content as often as you can, it's a might harder to create the story than to perpetuate it and market it.

The basics are covered brilliantly in PG's "The Submarine" if you haven't seen it [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER7> Im really surprised this still works with the ubiquitous use of ad block in the tech circle.

<comment><USER8> Ad block isn't quite as ubiquitous as HN seems to think it is

<comment><USER9> I also don't know if it would apply here. As these are "native" ads to LinkedIn. They don't really label them as ads much. I guess if the <div> mentions ads then it might be blocked.

<comment><USER7> I dont use linkedin much but I just tested it and it blocked 4 ads on the page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > LinkedIn provides some of the most detailed targeting options of any ad- > platform I've ever seen (though I'd say that Facebook has now eclipsed it)

Someone did something similar using FB to prank their friend:

[http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation- pranking-...](http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my- roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/)

HN discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330931](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8330931)

<comment><USER9> yep, his was a funny 'hack'

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have a LinkedIn with ~50 connections, but I know of no one who uses it for anything other than an online resume. People i know might go on once every two weeks, if that. It's strange to me that someone would be active enough on here to notice an ad like this. Whose experience is abnormal here?

<comment><USER9> I think that it was especially relevant in this case as the guy running the incubator was on LinkedIn checking the profiles of all the people that were applying.

<comment><USER12> That was the entire reason I figured the guy was a good target for the LinkedIn ad. Excellent strategy -- even those who dislike LinkedIn have to be active on it to sift through 150+ resumes.

I imagine the candidates were sorted digitally at multiple points to narrow things down and share among those hiring. During the arduous process the weary workers take their glance away from the screen to relax for a second only to notice their company's name -- or bosses face in an odd place on the web page they now have memorized from screen burn-in and that's precisely when this ad is almost (IMO not almost) guaranteed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Jaksmit if you are still around responding I am curious...if only 2 people clicked your ad including the target himself, then how is it the very next day after the ad was created the target was "inundated with emails from his friends telling him to check out our landing page"?

<comment><USER9> @will_brown + @WalterGR sorry that it was unclear. This was one ad-campaign targeting just Thomas (+ 6 randomers). I ran a number of other variations targeting investors that were connected to him and others in his network. These still didn't target too many people (I'd say <100); but still got a lot of attention.

I'm also guessing that some people might have just told him they'd seen his face on a LinkedIn ad. Not necessarily clicked through to it.

<comment><USER13> Thanks, I misunderstood and thought you created 2 campaigns and only the one recieved click throughs. Anyway the epitome of working smart and not hard...although I am sure you're doing plenty of both.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's a free idea to b2b startups: before you go into a sales meeting with someone, spend some pocket money putting your ad in front of them via linkedin / facebook.

They'll likely attribute it to "frequency illusion" and you'll gain a much higher profile in their eyes.

Then close it. :)

<comment><USER15> Well, here's a better idea : create a service which let's me do that easily.

<comment><USER16> Can't you do that already with LinkedIn (and a bit of research)?

Not sure what the service would provide on top of that. Can you elucidate further?

<comment><USER17> Me (the user), I just want to tell you that I'm meeting John at PayPal next Tuesday. You (service): consider it done.

I don't want to deal with opening a LinkedIn ad account and figuring it out.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. Many (or shall I say most) people don't have the time to figure this out, especially across social networks. So, if it's reasonably priced it'd be definitely worth it, for example before a VC meeting ;).

I believe there is a service which allows you to search and find common interested with the person you're meeting, but this to me is more interesting.

If anyone wants to build this, feel free to ping me, would be happy to give feedback as well as sign up as a beta customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unfortunately, now this method will be flooded, and everyone of note in SV will be inundated with similar ads. But it is an interesting case study in how to be creative and think outside the box.

Facebook recently paid me a bounty for pointing out a problem that enabled this type of pinpoint targeting accuracy on their ad platform despite a policy that greatly limited it. It's interesting that LinkedIn doesn't consider it a privacy problem. I noticed that you could create custom audiences for ads by simply using anyone's FB vanity URL and appending @facebook.com to target by email. So if the vanity url of the target was facebook.com/mark, then you could target an ad to that person by simply adding email@example.com to a custom audience list. They have now fixed it, but this same thing the author did here could have also been done on FB until about 2 months ago (and can still be done, but now you need their actual email address to target them).

<comment><USER9> I found this exploit a while back; when I checked more recently, the minimum number of people that you need to target in order for an ad to be accepted is closer to 1000. So it's harder to replicate.

similarly, with the facebook thing. I saw that Facebook is rolling back usage of the facebook.com email addresses, so I'm not sure how long that will keep working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder how they came up with 7 as the minimum number required to target?

<comment><USER19> downvoted - really ?

<comment><USER20> Unfortunately, the ambiguity of the English language strikes again.

If by "they", you meant the article writer, then the reasons for the downvotes are likely because the article writer explained how that number was achieved.

If by "they", you meant LinkedIn, then the downvotes are likely because people thought you meant the article writer.

This is just a case where the pronoun just doesn't give enough information to keep people from being confused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Smart, but are you legally allowed to use people's photo in ads without their permission? (Not a big issue in this case and probably it would have worked even without the photo, but I'm curious.)

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure if it's 'legally' allowed. It's almost definitely against LinkedIn's terms of service I'd imagine though!

I'd think that with anything like this; if it were illegal, then likely the individual themselves would have to sue me. Hopefully they wouldn't want to take it that far once I explained to them that I was just targeting them and trying to get their attention etc. Certainly for Thomas, Vungle turned out to be quite a good investment thus far and a nice story, so I hope he wont sue me ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Lovely beginning, but the narrative suddenly goes dark 3 paragraphs from the end, with the line: "Whilst I'm no longer at the company ..."

So what happened!?!? I'd love to believe that anyone with such a clever hack could get some mileage out of whatever came next. Alas, it sounds as if this is the classic Cinderella story with only mice and pumpkins at the end. Darn! A follow-up post with the rest of the story would be very welcome.

<comment><USER9> fair point. I mainly wanted to focus here on the aftermath of the linkedin campaign.

The sequence of events basically was: \- Thursday saw the TC post, same day created Linkedin ad campaign \- Friday got a call from Thomas \- next week we got the final spot (on about a Thursday) \- about 3 days later we were on a flight to san francisco to join Angelpad (+ $120k at this point) \- about 10 weeks after moving to San Francisco we started raising our seed round. We ended up raising ~$2 mil led by Google Ventures \- about a year later raised $6.5mil Series A \- about a year after that raised $17m Series B \- after that the company kept growing and has opened offices in various countries etc

for myself personally, I moved more towards advising a few different startups.

<comment><USER23> What was your role during growth? From the outside peeking in it sounds like you were possibly pushed out. Nothing wrong with that, as you have accomplished so much regardless.

<comment><USER9> the evolution of my role at Vungle would be a bit of a longer story. I wouldn't describe it as being 'pushed out' exactly. But I feel that my business partner scaled with the company a lot better than I did personally. Me leaving certainly wasn't as dramatic/interesting as something like the Twitter founding story for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> On a more serious note, targeted ads when implemented incorrectly can lead to privacy violations by leaking information about the viewer of the ad: [http://theory.stanford.edu/~korolova/Privacy_violations_usin...](http://theory.stanford.edu/~korolova/Privacy_violations_using_microtargeted_ads.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER25> the title is hilarious. It got you traffic, good for you. The article itself is nothing but a bag of SEO? words.

<comment><AUTHOR> What words would it possibly be trying to rank for? Stop being a hater.

<comment><USER26> Not OP, but the title seems to imply the author hacked LinkedIn and got 120k out of it. Whereas the author simply figured out how specific he could use LinkedIn's ad targeting to impress someone who was giving out 120k.

Title is definitely a bit misleading, but at the end of the day, you gotta do what you gotta do to get the clicks.

<comment><USER23> Correct, but even YC classifies that as a hack. If you have ever checked out the YC Application they ask of a time where you have hacked an existing system to make it work in your favor. If this doesn't qualify as a hack then I don't know what does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm not getting how this is a hack and any different to just using LI's targeted ads as they are intended. Last time I checked the minimum was 1000 people.

<comment><USER9> yep. They recently changed it to 1000. At the time, I found out that for whatever reason the minimum number was 7.

I'm pretty sure LinkedIn ads weren't intended to have a picture of the guy's face who you're targeting as the ad though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fthehustle.co%2Fthe- linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fthehustle.co%2Fthe- linkedin-hack-that-made-me-120000)

</comment><comment><USER29> Love this article. It's always great to think outside the box, and the author of this article definitely did that.

</comment><comment><USER30> Its like this guy who was looking for a date using Adwords and Facebook ads! ha good read thanks for sharing

<comment><USER9> do you have a link to that? it sounds vaguely familiar. I know the guy that did a prank on his roommate using Facebook ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The beautiful thing about this hack is it subverts the modern consumers expectation about how advertising works. We have an assumption it is a broadcast medium - and that has changed radically, and totally.

This hack will continue to work for as long as we fool ourselves as to the new nature of the world

</comment><comment><USER32> Using something as intended is now a "hack"? (Get off my lawn!)

And wouldn't this have worked just as well if he had targeted _all_ employees of AngelPad? The CPM would still be pretty low...

<comment><USER9> @woof : I'm pretty sure that running ads with the person's face who you want to target isn't how linkedin intended their ad-system to be used!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> New extension to this idea: retarget people who visit your landing page. Frequency effect loop.

</comment><comment><USER34> cool

</comment><comment><USER35> Really cool trick. The title is misleading, it lead to $120k in investment for his company, it did not 'make him 120k'. Also it seems strange that Thomas was

>inundated with emails from his friends telling him to check out our landing page.

when later we learn only 5 people viewed the ad and 2 people clicked. Either way, cool story, the details really do get to me.

<comment><USER36> > The title is misleading, it lead to $120k in investment for his company, it > did not 'make him 120k'.

That's an important distinction. I was wondering what I was missing.

<comment><USER9> RE "The title is misleading, it lead to $120k in investment for his company, it did not 'make him 120k'"

I agree, semantically it's not a very accurate title. But actually, I'd say that in the long-run the chain of events that resulted from this hack (i.e. me moving to America and then my startup getting funded etc) has led to me personally benefiting much more than $120k. Essentially it was the main cause to making me millions of dollars. The $120k was just the most quantifiable from the initial hack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> TLDR: This guy used LinkedIn's targeted ads to target an investor and 6 of his friends to get their attention, leading to a $120k investment.

Side-note: Similar and just as amusing story, but with FB ads - [http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation- pranking-...](http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my- roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/)

<comment><USER9> yeah that's a cool article as well. I liked his similar approach.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> alot of 12's in that article</comment>


Break-in at Vudu - <AUTHOR> http://www.vudu.com/password_faq.html

<comment><USER2> Why weren't the hard drives encrypted? This should at the very least protect against a physical one-off attack such as this one.</comment>


Jeff Bezos' Annual Letter - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312517120198/d373368dex991.htm <comment><USER2> I might be shunned for beating the dead horse, but while he talks about 'True Customer Obsession', he allows counterfeit goods erode his customer's trust in Amazon. I'd argue Amazon's 'process as proxy' in dealing with counterfeits is the careless return process. 'Oh, it's counterfeit? We're sorry! Here's your money back!' does not solve the issue. Sure, thanks for the $10 back, but now I must think twice (or thrice!) before ordering from Amazon. Once my Prime membership lapses, I will not renew.

The 'process' for dealing with counterfeits is broken. When the customer has to think about "the chances of counterfeit" or dealing with the return of counterfeit products, it's NOT customer obsession.

I respect Jeff, TONS, but come on. You're talking the talk, but you're not walking the walk.

<comment><USER3> You're 1.) implying that Amazon isn't actively trying to fix it (otherwise they would be "walking the walk") and 2.) that it's a widespread issue (all I've heard about counterfeit products are from a few HNers)

<comment><USER4> TRX workout sets are notoriously counterfeit on Amazon.

Example: [https://www.amazon.com/TRX-PRO-Suspension-Training- Kit/produ...](https://www.amazon.com/TRX-PRO-Suspension-Training-Kit/product- reviews/B00A5ICP32)

More recently, I got a counterfeit fitbit charger that flat out didn't work. It got replaced, but it's still annoying.

<comment><USER5> At $199 for what looks like some elastic and metal I imagine they do pretty well on that one.

<comment><USER6> Not even any elastic. The TRX I've seen is just some nylon lashing straps, cambuckles for length adjustment, and two plastic and foam handles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You have to admire the grit and tenacity it takes to maintain that kind of ethos for 23 years straight.

What Jeff is basically saying here in this letter is that the pedal is to the metal, forever: We can't have process as the foundation because it ossifies the organization! Be nimble to the rules of the game.

When translated however, that means you are either empowering your organization to change and make new processes at scale and speed, or you have whatever the default process of solving problems from scratch each time. It's the anarchist's dilemma. That is a tough organization to live under if you aren't built for that, and one that only a certain type of people can thrive in.

I mean the majority of people, leaders even, when they get to some level of success will put the brakes on and coast, doing exactly the things Jeff describes: building processes to take the cognitive load off of decision making and making life just slightly easier. They build processes for "efficiency", so that they don't have to go back and do all the hard work of understanding the problem from scratch each time. The problem though, as Jeff points out is that "The process" becomes an 80% solution to 80% of the problems it's applied to (leading to 36% failure rate).

So just think about how you could - for 23 straight years - recruit, retain and develop a cadre of managers, engineers, interns, staffers etc... that in the majority of cases fall into the mindset of constantly sprinting - basically an Olympic marathoner running a 5 min mile marathon. As a leader I admire that ability.

<comment><USER8> By almost every account, Amazon is terrible place to work: [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside- amazon-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon- wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1)

This isn't the type of leader you want to be.

<comment><USER9> Yet by every account that mattters it doesn't, right? I understand that people who are there can certainly wish that the place and culture were different in some significant way, but the only barometer that should have some weight is the ease or difficulty that Amazon has in attracting and retaining top talent -- and that to the extent that it is harming their ability to deliver results. Which, from the outside, it certainly doesn't seem to be limiting.

The counterargument is that of course the things which makes Amazon's work culture toxic to people are orthogonal to their success and not a cause of it. My former boss was very well aware that she could sometimes be downright mean and nasty to our staff, and I cringed every time she justified it by citing what people thought the same of Steve Jobs: While true, we can't avoid the fundamental problem of causal inference, and there is no saying that had Jeff been actively striving to make a more welcoming culture, or if Steve or my former boss were nice people, that they wouldn't have experienced even greater success.

<comment><USER8> > but the only barometer that should have some weight is the ease or > difficulty that Amazon has in attracting and retaining top talent

They have terrible retention. One of the worst and in many years the absolute worst.

A few years back workers were passing out from working in 100 degree temps. They were disciplined for performance and instead of installing air conditioning, they lined up ambulances and paramedics to take falling bodies to the hospital. [https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons- ver...](https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-very-hot- warehouse/)

This is grotesque.

<comment><USER7> To be clear their retention is only bad in the fulfillment centers. Those are generally low skill, low pay, seasonal employees meant for short term stints - of which there is a near infinite supply.

For their core engineering, BD etc... teams in Seattle, retention is great.

<comment><USER8> If you are going to make those claims, please provide a source.

This is pretty good rant from the technical\engineering side: [https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

There is no need to fetishize amazon and if amazon is your model I feel sorry for your employees.

<comment><USER10> Not sure how relevant this rant is; the last time Steve Yegge worked at Amazon was in mid-2005. For reference, this was even before AWS launched publicly.

<comment><USER8> 2015 - [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside- amazon-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon- wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?_r=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I encountered "process as proxy" today dealing with Cisco. We were requesting a replacement for a defective part, they asked us for our serial number, which we provided, but then responded to us that our serial number was invalid. Likely because it wasn't registered. We were told that we had to contact our sales manager, or open a TAC with a different department because they department only deals with technical issues.

Could they not have done something to help us, maybe forwarding the ticket to the department that could register the serial number, to help us rather than just leaving us stranded? It's as though they want to follow process rather than helping the customer.

<comment><USER12> One of my most memorable customer service examples was memorable merely because it didn't go poorly.

The vibrate function on my Ericsson T39 cell phone failed. I was dreading calling support, because I knew they'd tell me to piss off. It was a grey- market phone. I bought it on eBay unlocked, shipped to my home in the US. I wasn't the first owner, for that reason. It came with a UK charger. They didn't even sell the phone in the US.

When I called support, they asked me for the serial #, plus a code next to the serial (turns out to be the production date.. Week/year).. and my address. Almost immediately shipped me a replacement with a box to RMA the old phone.

They didn't care how I obtained it. They didn't care that it wasn't sold in my country. They didn't care that I didn't have a receipt. They CARED because I was a customer who paid money for their product, it failed, and they wanted to make it right. It was so refreshing.

<comment><USER13> I had a similar experience with Sony back when I was younger. Although, I did purchase the PS2 legitimately.

Something went wrong with the disc reader after a year or so. Sony told me to send it in. Then they sent me a replacement PS2 to keep... and a couple weeks later I received my old PS2, with the disc reader fixed. All free of charge.

I've been loyal to Sony ever since that fantastic experience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you're not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you're doing the process right. Gulp."

Seems like this is exactly the kind of issue companies like United Airlines suffer from.

<comment><USER15> This is a surprisingly common trap to fall into. I worked at a startup in which the CTO criticized my dev team for not having a perfectly linear burn down chart. Every week in our retro we had the same discussion about how to improve the shape of our burn down chart; we tried putting higher valued stories at the front of the queue, involving QA earlier in the sprint, and cranking out 1 pointers mid week to tweak the graph. We rarely achieved the perfect shape. On top of this we also had one week sprints, which made it difficult to plan for the future or work on spikes, so we ended up doing very little high-level, architectural planning.

I remember one week my team cranked through their allotted stories so fast that we ran out of work two or three days into the sprint. We decided to take on a couple extra easy stories that we knew we could finish before the end of the week. Rather than being praised for doing extra work, we were criticized for "introducing volatility into the sprint". In other words, we messed up the shape of the burn down chart.

I'm currently working at a place that has virtually no process, which has it's own challenges, but I'm happy that I'm not arguing about burn down charts anymore :)

<comment><USER16> Burn down chart?

<comment><USER15> It's a common metric used in the Scrum methodology. You start off the "sprint" with a set number of "story points" (say, 30 points), and end the sprint with zero points. When you graph the team's progress over the course of the sprint, it should ideally form a linear, downward slope.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_down_chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_down_chart)

<comment><USER17> This kind of thing makes sense if you were doing something like digging a trench, where the progress can be linear because the task A is the same as task A - 1. Why would anyone think that given a variety of tasks that each would take the same amount of time?

<comment><USER15> I agree. Being on the receiving end of Scrum feels like being an assembly line worker. I totally empathize with the business people who need some transparency into what the developers are working on week to week. Software is pretty abstract. I get that. But obsessing over burn down charts is the wrong way to go about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This paragraph from his first letter to shareholders best illustrates how far Amazon has come.

 _" We established long-term relationships elationships with many important strategic partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy."_

</comment><comment><USER19> I wrote an email to Jeff suggesting that Day 2 might be started by losing control over what is sold in his shop.

I really respect the way he thinks about the company and I have bought stock in it as a reflection of that respect. My hope is that he will be able to match 'focus on the customer' with 'don't sell the customer counterfeit or shoddy crap'. With their investment in Machine Learning one would hope they could train that engine to predict where crappy product is going to come from and reject it before it gets into the pipeline.

<comment><USER20> There's a lot of talk about counterfeit goods in this discussion, but my problem is the amount of sellers selling the same thing, and using bad search terms to get their listing to the top, and generally making everything harder to find. Have you ever tried to search on something that doesn't have, like 3 or 4 really, really obvious market-leading options? And then sort by anything other than the default? It's impossible! God go with you if you ever sort by price, ascending!

I've been a Prime member for several years, but the site has become so much less useful for me that I'm about to just let it lapse. I think it's creating opportunities for more-focused competitors, like Wayfair. I used to use NewEgg for electronics, but now they've started going the same route. I have to study every listing to make sure I'm getting it from a US warehouse, and not via a slow boat from China.

I just ran into this today with a big-name monitor, even. I added 2 very- similar models to my cart, and went with the one that had free 2-day shipping. Why did the other one have free shipping, but took 5 days? I don't know! There was nothing about the listing that would have tipped me off that it was a non- Amazon retailer. I'm getting tired of playing this game.

<comment><USER19> I agree completely and in my opinion this is not a 'customer focused' way of doing business because the customer's are getting tired of fighting these fights. That was why in my email I called him out on this, and specifically said, "If you believe your highest priority is to focus on the customer, and losing sight of the customer is a precursor to Day 2, then you _must_ address the quality of the shopping experience."

I too have been a Prime customer for years, but 2 day shipping doesn't mean as much if its 2 days to delivery, then a trip to the post office to return it, and another 2 days to get the replacement, and then another week before your account is credited with the returned one. As an egregious example I bought a replacement cable modem and the one I got had a 'property of time-warner cable' sticker on it! And yet advertised as new. They replaced it quickly but really? Why should I have to be the person to sort the crap? And if that responsibility does fall to me, _the customer_ , then Amazon is not sticking to their policy of putting the customer first.

And I agree with Jeff in his letter, if he gets into Day 2, the company can ride it for a very long time into the sunset (just look at Sears!).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> From then 1997 letter:

> _We established long-term relationships with many important strategic > partners, including America Online, Yahoo!, Excite, Netscape, GeoCities, > AltaVista, @Home, and Prodigy._

Every single one of those partners either folded or fell into utter irrelevance. The only one surviving is Amazon itself.

Don't know what to make of it, though.

</comment><comment><USER22> Reposting this thought from the other discussion[0]:

 _> Third, use the phrase "disagree and commit." This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there's no consensus, it's helpful to say, "Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?" By the time you're at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you'll probably get a quick yes._

This sounds really powerful but also like it might be open to abuse (for example degenerating into passive agressiveness/half commitment). Does anyone use something similar in their own workplace? Does it work?

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14103818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14103818)

<comment><USER23> I worked at Amazon for almost five years. Like every leadership principle, this one was easily perverted. Many people I worked with took this to heart, and among peers there was often an honorable sense of "OK, I will disagree and commit on this one".

But I also spent a few years in an org where I don't think I ever saw someone more senior disagree and commit to the opinion of someone more junior. At each level of the hierarchy it was used as a way to excuse "you will do what I say". That's fine if it happens once or twice, but laughable if it's always flowing in one direction.

The other leadership principles were perverted in similar ways. You wouldn't believe the range of things I saw justified as "customer obsession".

<comment><USER24> > You wouldn't believe the range of things I saw justified as "customer > obsession".

I would like to hear some of them if you have the time and inclination.

<comment><USER23> Sure. Realizing as I go through them that all of these were from my peers in middle management; ICs tended to be much more genuine in their communication. Such is the nature of politics.

Things justified based on "customer obsession":

-Forced weekends and extra on-call assignments. This was bad managers making up for their poor planning and trying to use company values as a stick for their employees.

-Delaying the launch of a feature beta testers were raving about for six months to meet an operational metric that would clearly be made irrelevant by the launch, but for which the complainant had a goal in his commitments.

-So many similar things related to goals that someone needed to hit. Managers would say to other managers, in only slightly more words, "you are not helping my team, therefore you are not customer-obsessed". There was no consideration given as to what other impacts might fall out of the demanded action and how those might affect the customer.

-One that happened to me: I disagreed with the (clearly faulty) analysis of a dataset made by a higher-up manager. He was about to make a decision with his analysis that was going to affect several engineer-years worth of commitments, so I did a reply-all to his analysis respectfully explaining his mistake. He emailed my boss's boss (his peer) to complain that I lacked customer obsessions and to question whether I was a good fit for the team.

Essentially you can pervert anything to be about customer obsession (or any company value) if you want to. There's a fantastic book called Moral Mazes that does an excellent job of illustrating and explaining this phenomenon. It puts all of my examples above to shame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I often say that we don't need to agree, just commit together. I particularly like disagree and commit better. It seems like it would shorten time to decision as long as no one takes it personally.

<comment><USER26> I really like "disagree and commit" but I'm worried how well it would work in most corporations. I think it requires incredible alignment amongst the decision makers about the goals of the project - something that is in short supply.

<comment><USER27> I had a boss who thought he liked that idea but every meeting turned into an extra fifteen minutes of him badgering me for agreeing to disagree with plans that often blew up later. Sitting through the what went wrong meetings was an exercise in patience that I often lost.

I have no doubt at all that he would label me as a toxic employee, and was not surprised at all to be in the first round of layoffs (worked out for me, I got 27 paychecks that year and a three week vacation), but most of that would be him projecting his issues onto me.

He wanted to be a good manager but was so emotionally challenged by estimates not actually being blood oaths that it twisted every planning meeting into something ugly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As an employee of the amazon returns facility a lot of the issue is because of employee error, which is the lack of opening the box and making sure it is the right item being returned, part of the process is sending ot to liquidation to where it is sold at discount prices, warehouse deals sellable to where it becomes a sale although it has cosmetic issues, brand new sellable, and destroy. If they check the box and it is caught as being the wrong item, it is investigated on amazons part to see if it was a item sent back by mistake, an item that was sent out by mistake, or if the costumer is trying to pull a fast one. If it is the wrong item it is an easy fix as long as amazon sells the item that was returned.

</comment><comment><USER29> Day 1, no processes, pedal to the metal are great for the business owner but suck for the proletariat. Contrast this to Google where for the most part Software engineers are happy to work.

<comment><USER3> I'm a software engineer at Amazon and enjoy my job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Conspicuously missing are a couple of other ingredients of Amazon's success. There are plenty of companies out there with "customer obsession" and a "day 1" mentality. There are few others with such good investor relations that money keeps pouring in after two decades of paltry or negative earnings [1]. With this kind of "infinite runway" you can sometimes afford to lose $100 million over three months to drive a competitor out of the market [2]. You can also afford to negotiate sweetheart deals with UPS and FedEx that will offer you delivery rates and speeds available to few other companies [3].

[1] [http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/29/amazon_q4_pro...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/29/amazon_q4_profits_fall_45_percent.html)

[2] [http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_bo...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/10/amazon_book_how_jeff_bezos_went_thermonuclear_on_diapers_com.html)

[3] [https://sellerengine.com/should-you-use-amazon-discounted- up...](https://sellerengine.com/should-you-use-amazon-discounted-ups- shipping/)

<comment><USER31> He didn't start out with that kind of size. He built it from nothing, with strong competitors like Walmart who had more volume for physical goods that could negotiate better deals with UPS and FedEx for years.

AWS is beating Google, Microsoft, etc. Those companies had as much free cash flow and more engineering resources.

He has good investor relations because he produces great returns.

So, yes, your facts are correct, but you are wrong in an essential way: Investor goodwill and the market position is built by Day 1 mentality and customer obsession, not the other way around. A few bad moves will quickly erode both. Look at Blackberry, Dell, HP, Nokia, Westinghouse, Samsung etc. All these companies had massive market positions and investor confidence, with stock prices to match.

<comment><USER30> And how do you account for survivor bias? I don't think the CEOs of Blackberry or Nokia would have agreed that they cared less about the customer than Jeff Bezos. "Customer obsession" is not actual, actionable advice because it's not even measurable. It's nice rhetoric, but other companies were judged on hard metrics of profits and dividends.

<comment><USER32> Huh? Nokia and especially Blackberry failed to address "Customer obsession" and just stood in slack jawed denial while an innovative company ate their lunch. e.g. [1]

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/rim-ceo- quotes-2011-9](http://www.businessinsider.com/rim-ceo-quotes-2011-9)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Earlier thread about the letter [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14103818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14103818)

</comment><comment><USER34> Does this come across as oddly inconsistent to anyone else?

"These big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace. We're in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence."

"Another example: market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers – something that's especially dangerous when you're inventing and designing products. 'Fifty-five percent of beta testers report being satisfied with this feature. That is up from 47% in the first survey.' That's hard to interpret and could unintentionally mislead."

What about ML as a proxy for customers?

<comment><USER35> Depends on how ML is used. ML is much more than gaging customer satisfaction

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I particularly like the concept of 'Day 1'. No matter what stage you are in as a business or individual, it is still day 1 for rest of your life. Taking long term view , keeping where you want to go in focus is really important.

<comment><USER37> I always thought "it's day one" sounded like something a man says to his wife after he's been caught having an affair.

<comment><USER38> No, that is called _judgement day_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Exactly. The purpose of process is to stabilize things enough to see where systemic improvements need to be made. Not to follow it blindly as a path to success.

</comment><comment><USER40> Odd to see Bezos cite number of Oscars & Emmies as a measure of competence, as opposed to revenue. A lot of movies that win awards aren't particularly good investments.

<comment><USER41> I imagine it's a marketing tactic to accelerate the flywheel he cares about: more awards -> more talent that wants to write/sell to Amazon Studios -> more exclusive shows -> more customers -> more awards

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> With Easter just around the corner, I thought he would've at least mentioned Day 3.

</comment><comment><USER43> United can learn a thing or two from Jeff Bezos's annual letter about customer obsession. Trust your customers rather than treating them like idiots and with suspicion.

</comment><comment><USER44> All the counterfeit talk, what is out there that is less counterfeit and as convenient? Lets hear some fine alternatives</comment>


Google App Engine Cookbook - <AUTHOR> http://appengine-cookbook.appspot.com/ <comment><USER2> One of the most disappointing things by far is that things are so unfinished.

HTTPS keeps being promised, other languages, _being able to pay_ for higher quotas, etc etc etc.

Not to mention the datastore is freaking weird and painful to use. Scalablity is all well and good but I'd rather write my site quickly and scale when needed. If all I'm going to do is make an app for me and my friends, I don't want the gods of scaling to demand virgin sacrifices just to do simple things.

</comment><comment><USER3> One thing I find quite annoying about the Google App Engine is that it does not allow many slow requests. In fact, it will block your app for several hours if you have issued too many slow requests.

This can be very annoying, especially when you are trying to figure out how to speed up your requests -- it's hard to experiment.

</comment><comment><USER4> One thing that holds me back is, ironically, lack of scale options.

500Mb limits with no way to go beyond (paid or not) will have to go before I even start planning to move there. It's a pity, because automatic scale was so promising.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do browsers fetch images from other sites but don't fetch text - <AUTHOR>

Wouldn't web development be much easier if browsers could fetch pieces of text from other sites the same way as HTML tag <img> does now. Using, for instance, CSS selectors. E.g.:<p><text src="http://remote.site.com" selector="div#post123" /> <comment><USER2> We probably would have figured out solutions to cross-site-scripting (XSS) a lot sooner, that's for sure!

</comment><comment><USER3> Good point. Orthogonal. However, copy & paste isn't that hard. Additionally, one would be at the mercy of whatever changes would occur at the source. You may want that; or not.</comment>


Curiosity Finds Iron Meteorite on Mars - <AUTHOR> http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/?ImageID=6433

<comment><USER2> Looks huge; but there's no scale. So many pictures from Mars lack context like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> That reminded of this article, [http://petapixel.com/2012/09/13/1909-lincoln- penny-used-to-c...](http://petapixel.com/2012/09/13/1909-lincoln-penny-used- to-calibrate-the-mars-curiosity-rovers-camera-on-mars/) "Coin" being used for camera calibration on rovers. Not sure if they can be used to show scale too.

<comment><USER3> Funny that they chose the penny because it's classically used in geology to combat the issue of scale in photographs, which it seems is an issue in Mars too.

<comment><USER4> That's exactly why it was chosen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One edge of the metorite seems to bear the inscription 'Beagle 2'

<comment><USER6> Beagle 2?

<comment><USER7> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Lebanon"?

Lebanon because it looks bombed out? Not really PC.

Most non-PC naming by Americans since calling UBL "Geronimo"

<comment><USER9> It must be really depressing to find something offensive in the most mundane details.

<comment><USER10> Being offended gives some people a rush. He could just be an addict.

<comment><USER11> I'm offended you assumed the commenter is male.

<comment><USER10> Take it up with English, and maybe while you're at it you can invent a gender- neutral pronoun better than "zhe"

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender- neutral_pronoun#Invented...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender- neutral_pronoun#Invented_pronouns)

<comment><USER12> They?

<comment><USER10> At least in modern usage, "They" is flawed. For starters its plurality is ambiguous.

<comment><USER13> > At least in modern usage, "They" is flawed. For starters its plurality is > ambiguous.

In the cases where it is used in a gender-neutral but expressly singular sense, this is false. In cases where whether the number of the referent is ambiguous and might be either singular or plural, the use of the plural they has been acceptable longer, and has never been objected to even by the prescriptives who have tried (and are still trying, though their influence has waned somewhat from its late 19th Century height) to force generic he in place of singular they as part of their effort to impose Latin-inspired grammar rules on English.

<comment><USER10> dragonwriter had some interesting things to say. However, they used a lot of hand-wavy claims.

That sounds normal to you?

<comment><USER13> The only _structural_ problem (and its a minor one, since the resulting ambiguity is readily resolvable from context) I see with that is that there are two different possible referents for "they" in the preceding sentence; in this particular case the fact that there are both singular and plural uses of "they" is relevant to why both referents are possible, but you can run into the same ambiguity with gender and number specific pronouns.

Of course, there's no real good reason to use a pronoun there except for an excessive fondness for choppy sentences.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is it possible to have client discovery without a server? - <AUTHOR> Hi Folks,
Is there a way to do client discovery without a identity server?
I know of Distributed Hash Tables to be a way to implement this. But are there any alternative ways to do this? <comment><USER2> On a general level, what about broadcasting? This is (was) standard in SoHo ethernet networks for service discovery (also used on higher levels such as Bonjour/Avahi).

</comment><comment><USER3> ad hoc networks</comment>


Announcing Dart 2 Stable and the Dart Web Platform - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dartlang/dart-2-stable-and-the-dart-web-platform-3775d5f8eac7 <comment><USER2> Reading the few comments here is really interesting.

Every-time there is a discussion about Dart , people talk about Flutter... they very rarely talk about Dart on the Server or on the Web...

A while ago I considered using Dart to build a Web API. I was shocked by the non-existent ecosystem around this language.

The Redis package has been un-maintained for almost three years now, and Angular Dart is always a few version behind the TypeScript version and doesn't support SSR.

I was also very surprised that Google during dart conf never commented on using Dart on the server but instead always insisted on using it for their clients (Web and Mobile). I think I'm not lying by saying that a huge part of Google runs on JVM , Go or Python but definitely not on Dart VM.

For me Dart is the language that developer needed , but never wanted to use. It failed miserably when it was introduced few years ago, since then JavaScript took off and has become almost a universal language.

This is very frustrating seeing how much the language is efficient and well structured but it the same times doesn't mean much now seeing how mature JavaScript is becoming.

For me Dart took long to become what is it now , and today the only thing that would make people using this language is really Flutter.

Beside that , I'm afraid they are very little reason to use this language.

[0][https://github.com/dartist/redis_client/tree/master](https://github.com/dartist/redis_client/tree/master)

<comment><USER3> I think what killed Dart is that they emphasized their plans to make Dart a first-class scripting language of Chrome, so that you could use <script type="text/dart"> instead of JavaScript. This had a _lot_ of backlash from literally everyone, I think mostly because they were bit too hard by IE doing the exact same thing just a few years before. Only after a few years the Dart team changed courses and said "never mind about that VM-inside-Chrome thing, we're just going to compile to JS like everyone else" but it was too late and nobody cared about Dart anymore and all the excitement and enthusiasm was gone. I think people don't realize just how much excitement and enthusiasm from a potential community makes or breaks a project when it's first announced.

<comment><USER4> I'm on the Dart team and I agree with pretty much all of this.

Personal opinion time:

Lars and Kasper, the original leads and creators of the language came out very confidently with this mission to get Dart natively supported in the browser based on the assumption that the language was so good and the VM would be so fast that users would clamor it.

They had the best of intentions — they really did want to make a delightful, productive, fast language. They intended to move the entire web forward the same way V8 had when it first launched, and they believed deeply that Dart would enable that.

But I think they really underestimated how vastly different _designing and marketing_ a language is from simply implementing an already-successful one.

It's not enough to just have a good product. The way you present it is often more important. And you don't even have the luxury of defining "good product" — you must be mercenary in letting your users' needs override your personal preferences. All of that was a real struggle for them.

For what it's worth, there's been a lot of staff changes over the years since Dart first launched. Lars and Kasper have left to try the startup thing again (which I think is a better fit for their skills and desires than evolving a big open source language). The team we have now, I believe, is much better aligned with what you're saying.

It sucks that we do have this baggage, but I hope we can improve our reputation over time. I'm hopeful we can — it took Java several tries before it found its footing.

<comment><USER5> Off topic but... are there any plans to adapt Flutter for desktop apps?

<comment><USER6> I'm the lead dev on just such a project: [https://feather- apps.com/](https://feather-apps.com/)

<comment><USER5> Looks great!

I beat the Reversi app on first try. I'm guessing it's not very strong. :)

<comment><USER6> Thanks :)

Haha yes I weakened the AI somewhat compared to the original version created by RedBrogdon. It's not fun to be constantly thrashed by an opponent who takes 0.2 seconds per move! Despite my changes I still lose about 3 out of every 4 games :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I mostly spend my days writing Go (previously Python) and when I tried Dart I really liked it. Could basically start coding and be productive without even looking at language documentation (VSCode has a nice Dart plugin which tells you what to do and what not to do).

In my case, I was trying out Dart because of a Flutter (probably majority of people are now looking at Dart because of Flutter) and I found it really fantastic. I love the tooling where you can just use their CLI to build/test the application without complex IDEs like XCode or Android Studio.

If you want to try building a mobile app then definitely go for Flutter+Dart, even if you don't need to support both Android and iOS I think it's just much more easy to start with than alternatives (RN/Swift/Android Java).

<comment><USER8> How does your experience with Dart compare to TypeScript in VS Code? I haven't tried Dart yet but my TS experience sounds similar to what you described.

<comment><USER7> I tried to like TypeScript a bit more than a year ago but couldn't, maybe I should give it another chance. I mostly do my frontend development in Vue.js so even though it supports TypeScript, I never found any need for it (I use typed Props to pass data between the components) as I try to make my UI as thin as possible, just fetching some data from the backend and displaying it. You can have a look at my project- [https://webhookrelay.com](https://webhookrelay.com) (management UI is under my.webhookrelay.com), so far made it quite simple, material UI and only a little bit of JS.

Obviously coming from Go to frontend I think I would benefit a lot from TypeScript.. Maybe one day :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Congratulations to the Dart team on that important milestone! Dart is already by far the most productive cross-platform web technology I've ever worked with, and it's getting even better with each new release.

Absolutely love the language, tooling, and "batteries included" mindset. Everything "just works", and is solid, lightweight, and thought-out. Compared to many other languages/ecosystems I've worked with (not going to point fingers), Dart feels like an island of sanity and productivity.

</comment><comment><USER10> Flutter seems like the killer app that could revive Dart. In comparison:

Javascript

For mobile with React: no AOT compile. Relies on loading the entire JS VM which adds startup time and can require bundling a large library on Android. Cannot easily author customized components that render at native speeds.

C#

For mobile with Xamarin: No hot reload. Dart having its origin as a JS interpreted language had the foundations to be both dynamic and AOT. C# might not ever achieve this?

Kotlin, Java, Swift, Objective C:

Not cross platform.

C++:

Is cross platform. No hot reload. Very unfriendly to modern development and fast iteration.

I don't actively work in mobile. I just like following developments in language technologies, so correct me if I'm wrong.

<comment><USER11> The main negative with Flutter on iOS is that your app ends up looking like an awful Google app instead of something native.

<comment><USER12> There's a Cupertino theme.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > The other is an interesting quality-of-life change for Flutter developers, > which allows creating an instance of a class without the "new" keyword. The > goal of this change is to make Flutter code more readable, less clunky, and > easier to type, but the principle applies to all Dart code. There have been > plenty of other improvements happening under the hood, as can be seen in the > official changelog.

To me it seems kind of odd to design the language towards a framework. Then again, that framework is probably the only thing increasing the number of people using Dart so it does make sense to make using the framework as clean and easy as possible.

<comment><USER14> Server-side Dart is still there, but not getting a lot of support from Google, as it's not their primary focus. The renewed effort going into Dart because of flutter has also allowed AngularDart[0] to gain some of the benefits (better tooling and IDE integration). AngularDart 5 will actually be a huge quality- of-life improvement as they are killing the Dartium browser fork, and instead doing incremental-compiling to javascript with dartdevc.

[0] [https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular](https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular)

<comment><USER13> Right, I know there are still other uses of the language but it seems like the language design is focused solely on Flutter experience rather than just overall language experience. I don't recall ever seeing such a design decision in any other languages and I just find it a bit odd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dart is really interesting. It's a cool programming language, managed by some incredibly smart people. It could have been what TypeScript is today, but failed dramatically due to a lack of pragmatism and an outright loathing for JavaScript.

What soured me towards Dart is its continued history of ignoring community input. I remember when it was announced--the original "Hello World" transpiled to JS was around 70kb. 8-years later, and after all the user feedback (and shock in the original HN announcement), it's now around ~80kb.

Why do this? Why continue to play so poorly with JavaScript? Dart2js is an indefensible Rube Goldberg machine that no human being can reasonably understand or debug.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm really not a fan of Dart's type system. It feels ancient to me. From what I can tell, there's no sum types, I don't see any way to bound generics based on interface/typeclasses/traits or some other equivalent concept on the docs, it has no non-nullable types. Am I wrong? Why would I want to use a type system that lacks expressiveness?

<comment><USER4> _> From what I can tell, there's no sum types_

Paraphrasing Qc Na: Subclasses are a poor man's sum type. Also, sum types are a poor man's subclasses.

:)

But, yes, some nicer notation for declaring a sealed family of types would be nice along the lines of case classes in Scala. It's something we've talked about a bunch but haven't had time to get to yet.

 _> I don't see any way to bound generics based on interface/typeclasses/traits_

It uses the same syntax as Java:

        class Foo<T extends Bar> {
          T thing;
          method() { thing.methodOnBar(); }
        }

_> it has no non-nullable types._

Not yet. :( I hope we can get to them.

<comment><USER16> > Paraphrasing Qc Na: Subclasses are a poor man's sum type. Also, sum types > are a poor man's subclasses.

One of the great things about disjointed unions is (usually) exhaustiveness checking. Not to mention usually some form of pattern matching. Case classes would do the trick. It would be interesting to see those features in Dart, congrats on the release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is exciting. Dart is vastly underrated due to some bad press garnered around its announcement. I'm somewhat disappointed that they've reoriented to focus aggressively on front-end and dropped their custom runtime, but I understand this was mostly dictated by market realities. After they re- establish a foothold, I look forward to the return of a fully-fledged Dart environment and ecosystem.

<comment><USER18> > dropped their custom runtime

Dart VM is very much alive, nobody dropped it - it's used by Flutter to run Dart code, used by all Dart CLI tools (and Flutter CLI tools too) and on server side underneath pub.dartlang.org (and used on server by some other companies too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Anybody using only dart for their mobile apps, how has been your experience with it? Where does it triumph & fail over RN??

<comment><USER20> Pros:

* Flutter is faster. You really notice that for example the animations in flutter are much smoother than in RN

* Flutter has really fast development cycle with hot reload (< 1s)

* Writing UI only once for both iOS and Android

* Better documentation

* Better tooling support in editors (VSCode and Intellij)

Cons:

* The Flutter ecosystem is quite small, there are many lacking plugins

* The Dart ecosystem is way smaller than JS

* RN uses the native widgets, in Flutter they are mimicked and sometimes wrongly, for example the iOS datepicker

<comment><USER21> My only complaint so far is some things are not documented very well.

I started leveraging the json_serializable lib and all my responses were returning null... it took me a few days of heavy debugging to figure out it was how I crafted my constructors and how the code generators worked with it.

<comment><USER22> Thankfully, the community is really welcoming. Not like RN where issue are closed for no reason all the time..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have no experience with Dart, other than having watched a livestream of Notch recreating Doom with Dart:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p-Z6TXoN10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p-Z6TXoN10)

</comment><comment><USER24> Now that Dart 2 is final, I'm guessing we're a couple weeks out from Flutter going 1.0 -- which will mean a ramping up of the Fuchsia rumors.

</comment><comment> irq-1 > The Dart language, libraries, build system, and web development tools have > changed.

[https://www.dartlang.org/dart-2](https://www.dartlang.org/dart-2)

> ...announcing Dart 2, a reboot of the language to embrace our vision of > Dart: as a language uniquely optimized for client-side development for web > and mobile.

[https://medium.com/dartlang/announcing- dart-2-80ba01f43b6](https://medium.com/dartlang/announcing-dart-2-80ba01f43b6)

</comment><comment><USER25> I think that I would find Dart a lot more compelling if it emitted WebAssembly instead. There aren't a lot of languages that can compile to WebAssembly at the moment.

<comment><USER18> That's because compiling non-C++/Rust-like language to WASM is unpleasant and associated with completely unneccessary overheads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Who's using Dart for Web (angular dart?). I'm interested in hearing pro's / con's especially if you have any experience with react as well.

Thanks!

<comment><USER27> I work for Google on Search Ads 360 (formerly DoubleClick Search). All the frontend code I write uses Angular Dart and I love it. The best thing about it is the Intellij integration. I've never worked with an editor with semantic auto complete and jump to definition, so it's unbelievably awesome. Static analysis catches tons of errors, dev cycle is super short even for our giant codebase.

I have some experience with React. My impression is that the React model is easier to understand and use at first, but may run into issues as the project grows. I have only ever worked on solo projects from scratch in React, and only ever on multiple 100k loc projects in Angular Dart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The other is an interesting quality-of-life change for Flutter developers, > which allows creating an instance of a class without the "new" keyword. The > goal of this change is to make Flutter code more readable, less clunky, and > easier to type

Wait, not typing new accomplishes all those amazing things? Here i thought it was just three letters, which showed intent - hence easier to grok the surrounding code

<comment><USER29> You'd be surprised. In Flutter you construct new objects _all the time_ and mostly inline (think React without JSX). The `new`'s really do get tedious when you're making a tree like:

        Container(
          child: Column(
            children: [
              Text("One"),
              Text("Two"),
              Text("Three"),
            ]
          )
        )

It's not _major_ but I don't think your quote is overselling it either. It is a quality-of-life change that does those things.

<comment><USER30> I love how Container takes 'child', but Column takes 'children'.

<comment><USER31> One must be singular, the other takes a list? Doesn't seem too crazy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Flutter is going to make/break Dart. If flutter takes off, Dart is saved. Otherwise, looks bleak.

<comment><USER33> When do you think flutter will support running on a stock Linux system?

<comment><USER34> [https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop- embedding](https://github.com/google/flutter-desktop-embedding)

<comment><USER33> Thanks, not officially supported.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Dart's history of breaking on browser updates because of weird technical decisions really soured me on the idea of ever using it. It's apparently a really good language for native targets, but for the web...

[https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/13285](https://github.com/dart- lang/sdk/issues/13285)

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1027011](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1027011)

I can't really blame the language designers, but it's a good example of how if your goal is to cross-compile you have to be _very careful_ about how your language is going to interact with the realities of the platforms it runs on. The idea of my deployed websites or apps breaking every couple browser releases really bums me out. (I've had to deal with it with other cross- compilers too.)

</comment><comment><USER36> Between Javascript and TypeScript on the front end and Kotlin on the back end, I don't see any area where Dart could ever grow to a meaningful mind share.

</comment><comment><USER37> >we were able to ship a full-featured experience that is fully interactive in one second on modern devices and under five seconds on a modest mobile device on a slow 3G network

Somehow, loading a text newsfeed in less than 5 seconds is an achievement in lightweightness. Sigh.

<comment><USER38> So we are going to ignore the slow 3g network aspect in the quote you are referring to then. Sigh.

<comment><USER37> The very minimum admissible speed of 3G is 144kbps (barely faster than a 56k dialup, this is what we're talking about). The hn site should load in less than 3 seconds even on such an unrealistically slow network.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wouldn't be interested in Dart at all if it wasn't for Flutter. I can't help but wonder if there will be Flutter bindings implemented for other languages sometime.

<comment><USER40> That is the only way to keep Flutter relevant.

Right now, in what concerns iOS and Android, Qt and Xamarin also compile to native, use mature languages (JS, C++, C#, VB.NET, F#), can also target desktop and have an endless list of libraries to choose from.

Also Chrome team is quite interested in making PWAs succeed on mobile Web, and they have Microsoft on board with them, given how JavaScript has first class support on UWP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> They should de-emphasize Dart and refocus Flutter development around Kotlin and make that a first class citizen and untangle flutter from Dart. Kotlin already is the language of choice for Android development has a very similar style to Dart (as in Dart provides few if any advantages that I'm aware off). Google already supports Kotlin in Android studio and adoption over the last few years has been enormous. Providing continuity for Android developers is hugely important.

There's a Kotlin native compiler in the works that will support IOS, Android (native), servers, and WASM as outputs. This makes it a proper full stack language. Compiling to WASM to target frontend code is the sensible thing to do. As far as I can tell, Dart 2 compiles directly to javascript instead of using WASM. This does not make sense to me as a thing to push in 2018. Kotlin has one as well but they have shifted development towards their native compiler and supporting javascript vial wasm.

<comment><USER42> With Dart they can completely ditch the JVM and Oracle

<comment><USER40> Except that Google is actually part of the OpenJDK contributors.

They only have themselves to blame for Android Java.

If they actually bothered to buy Sun instead of hoping it would sink in silence, the situation would be quite different and most likely cheaper than what they already spent in lawyer wages and court expenses.

<comment><USER43> > most likely cheaper than what they already spent in lawyer wages and court > expenses.

Not really. They would have spent max 100 million dollars in Oracle lawsuit. Still lot less than billions to buy Sun with its mostly non-profitable crap assets.

Anyway I think Oracle seemed natural fit for Sun. The were already using in large number of their products and also selling licenses for turd technologies like J2EE app servers, portals, enterprise service buses and so on. Java EE was suppose to be big enterprise play and bring in lots of consulting revenue.

It is only recently they finally called it a day and dumped EE assets in Eclipse backyard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Flutter is the groundbreaking thing about Dart. Other than that it's just Java 1.5 without the killer opensource ecosystem that makes Java relevant to this day. Rust, Swift, and Kotlin all blow Dart out of the water and are much better investments unless Google wants to make Dart the only language their new OS for some weird reason.

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm very interested in Dart with Flutter being a better React-native. I have no interest in the browser, having already bet once in v1/we components. There are already great js frameworks. One thing that could win me over is if a sensible, composible layout hierarchy is used that always outputs the needed CSS.

</comment><comment><USER46> I tried 1.x and I regret for wasted time. TypeScript is better for every niche Dart is trying to fill.

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry Dart didn't work out for you, but I'm glad you found another language that's helping you. We're lucky to live in a time where there are lots of languages to choose from, each with its own strengths.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> As someone trying to make his first mobile app, I just ran through the Flutter getting started guide and it was a much better experience than getting a React-Native hello world going.

Just a couple pros I see:

* flutter doctor - what a helpful tool! * hot reload without losing state!?

If Dart can use my existing TypeScript code, I'll definitely use it.

<comment><USER48> I don't believe it exists, but in theory someone could write a Flutter plugin to evaluate JavaScript on V8 (Android) or JavaScriptCore (iOS).

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> i would have totally jumped on the flutter bandwagon except i feel flutter missed a huge opportunity by not supporting web as a target. microsoft's react-native-xp seems like the right direction. i'd love to hae a combination of dart's sound typesystem + react-native-xp's api.

</comment><comment><USER50> How's dart as a server ?

<comment><USER51> I believe that Google is now pushing Dart only for mobile development, and that the server-side Dart is dead on the vine.

I could be wrong, but that's the impression I got.

<comment><USER4> It's not _dead_ , we (the Dart team) just haven't had the bandwidth to invest much in it for a while. It's still supported. Most of our own tools — compiler, analysis server, formatter, etc. — are all written in Dart, so we are heavily entrenched in Dart being a good tool for command-line applications.

Being a good _server-side_ language is a little different because then the ecosystem needs get much larger. You need things like database bindings, logging, etc. The current ecosystem for that on Dart isn't large but I hope we get there eventually.

<comment><USER51> This is great to hear!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> c-smile I have a feeling that Dart is just D (or at least they are comparable syntax and feature wise).

So is the question: why Dart?

Or is its goal to be a Java-on-Android killer? So always to have some [inspectable] bytecodes as a delivery media and JIT those on a device? But JavaVM is already there for that purpose so is that sacramental question again...

</comment><comment><USER52> "... the new keyword is now optional...".

Why optional and not deprecated?

<comment><USER4> Deprecating it is a breaking change and would make migrating code more difficult. It's like how semicolons are allowed but rarely used in Ruby, Go, etc.

The style guide says to omit "new" [1], and our formatter can remove them for you [2], so the effect is that they are gone without the pain of a forced migration.

[1]: [https://www.dartlang.org/guides/language/effective- dart/usag...](https://www.dartlang.org/guides/language/effective- dart/usage#dont-use-new)

[2]: [https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style](https://github.com/dart- lang/dart_style)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Is it just me or do the first few paragraphs sound a bit desperate: "We're relevant, really we are!"

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of languages that haven't set the world alight that are nonetheless being used by a fair few people to do worthwhile things.

</comment><comment><USER54> Dart excommunicated server side dart. If I were someone who has already been let down once by that decision and is already frustrated by the extremely lackluster library story for server side dart, why should I use dart?

Flutter is the only reason. I don't care about mobile. Hell, if they take android to flutter-only, it'll finally give me the fire to switch to iOS. I been meaning to anyways.

I'm happy that Bracha got out of there. What a shame such a bright man's work has been so foully steeped in Google nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER55> Official announcement here: [https://medium.com/dartlang/dart-2-stable-and- the-dart-web-p...](https://medium.com/dartlang/dart-2-stable-and-the-dart-web- platform-3775d5f8eac7)

<comment><USER56> Thanks, we've updated the link from [https://www.dartlang.org/dart-2](https://www.dartlang.org/dart-2) and [https://9to5google.com/2018/08/06/version-2-of-googles- dart-...](https://9to5google.com/2018/08/06/version-2-of-googles-dart- programming-language-is-now-available/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> The Dart always was my favorite Dodge.</comment>


The Seedy Side of Reddit: Porn, Racism, and Nazi Memorabilia - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-porn-2011-3?op=1

<comment><USER2> OMG THERE IS OFFENSIVE MATERIAL ON TEH TUBES!!!

Jesus, BI - of course there is material that you dont like, one it is the interenet - two it is free speech!.</comment>


Mark Zuckerberg meets Pope Francis in Rome, gives him miniature Facebook drone - <AUTHOR> http://uk.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-meets-pope-francis-gives-him-facebook-drone-photo-2016-8 <comment><USER2> Zuckerberg thinks he is a roman emperor..so visiting the pope fits right into the universe of his mental illness.</comment>


Is that possible to sell popular but not monetized browser extension? - <AUTHOR> What do you think, is that possible to sell well-rated and unique browser extension with ~100k users monthly? Or, at least, find an investor for developing the product. The extension doesn't have any monetization right now.
I am trying to understand where is the cash-flow on browser extensions market. I'm not talking about donations because there are only a few good examples (Adblock?).
Me and my friend have an extension with a similar amount of users (100k/month), and donations are less than $30 monthly.
Direct selling, via Chrome Web Store, for example, also not so popular. Have you ever bought an extension? :D I guess, no.
Do you know any cases? <comment><USER2> Be careful with anyone who does want to buy it outright. If it doesn't have revenue, then the buyer is almost certainly going to use it as a malware or adware distribution channel ([https://www.wired.com/story/chrome-extension- malware](https://www.wired.com/story/chrome-extension-malware)), even if they claim otherwise.

Of browser extensions with no revenue, I've never heard of a legitimate buyer acquiring one. Your choices are basically: let it keep going as-is, try to turn it into a business yourself, or contact a related company you trust and see whether they'd want to adopt it (acquire it for free), possibly paying you to maintain it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeap, you right. I saw many stories about malware in sold extensions. Also, I've talked with such company, and they offered me a couple of thousands but told me straightforward that want to embed an aggressive advertisement inside. That is completely inappropriate for me because I respect my users.

I also tried to contact with companies with related business and have sent about 15-20 offering emails. But no luck: only a couple responses, which sound like "Thanks, but we are not interested." Others just ignored it.</comment></comment>


James Gosling, the 'Father of Java,' joins Amazon Web Services - <AUTHOR> https://siliconangle.com/blog/2017/05/23/james-gosling-father-java-joins-amazon-web-services/ <comment><USER2> Previously: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14396055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14396055)

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope he finds Amazon to be a much better place than he found Oracle to be. The experiences he shared while leaving Oracle were unpleasant.

"As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good."

"For the privilege of working for Oracle, they wanted me to take a big pay cut."

"In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down."

"Oracle is an extremely micromanaged company. So myself and my peers in the Java area were not allowed to decide anything. All of our authority to decide anything evaporated."

"The word came down that Oracle does not do employee appreciation events. So she forced the thing to be cancelled. But they didn't save any money because the money had been spent - so we ended up giving the tickets to charities. We were forced to give it up because it wasn't the Oracle Way.' On the other hand, Oracle sponsors this sailboat for about $200 million."

Source: [http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james- gosling-...](http://www.eweek.com/development/java-creator-james-gosling-why- i-quit-oracle)

<comment><USER4> I realize people like to hate on Oracle, and some hate justified, but there's also a reason why Oracle is one of the _extremely_ few tech companies that have survived the test of time.

Gosling is complaining about about pay and management oversight.

Has anyone wonder if overpay and no oversight is what contributed to Sun's failure.

Speaking as an insider, I can say with 100% certainty it was.

Sun had this hardware business that was printing money and then the music stopped.

I wonder if Google might suffer a similar fate like Sun. As soon as ad-revenue slows down, will they need to grow up and be managed like a real company by putting restrictions on pay and enforce management oversight.

<comment><USER5> I don't know that it's fair to say that Oracle has survived the test of time; their core business has been on a steady decline for years; now they are playing catch-up in cloud and are talking about second derivative growth like they were an undergrad startup.

The fact is that they have not grown their top line for five years(1), 70% of their business is in a dying sector and they have opted to cut R&D spending in favor of stock buybacks and dividend payouts for years(2).

I don't see how they can change course; their investors keep asking for dividends while the bulk of their competitors are either privately owned or public with strong founder/owners; point being Oracles competitors are controlled by investors that want R&D spending, Oracle is not, and Oracle sorely needs R&D to build a portfolio that'll keep them from being yet another leveraged buy-out..

        (1) https://ycharts.com/companies/ORCL/revenues
        (2) http://marketrealist.com/2016/12/oracles-share-buybacks-dividend-trend-will-run-2017/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if he had to do whiteboard coding and if the in house recruiter blindly placed him on a team.

<comment><USER7> They had him invert a binary tree on a whiteboard.

<comment><USER3> Source?

<comment><USER8> It's a little in-joke [https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en-g...](https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en- gb)

Even spoofed on a recent Silicon Valley episode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Now, I'm sure Gosling is a much smarter man than me, and I couldn't be a 10th the language designer he was, but I'm going to say something terrible:

Java was badly designed, as a language. The things that made it good came far, far too late in its lifetime. The thing that made it successful was not a good design, but big corporate backing, a free compiler, a batteries-included approach to libraries, good marketing, and good platform support.

But the language itself was bad. No custom copy-by-value objects, static typing without generics or macros to make reusable collections, a GUI library that was widely considered a bad joke, a null hole big enough to drive a truck through, checked exceptions, the frustrating inconsistency between .Equals and ==...

So many bad decisions. Many of these were mitigated over time, but it took a long time to get there. It's hard to say that "designed Java" is really a good feather in the cap.

<comment><USER10> Do not paint a picture with one-sided argument. To say Java is badly designed, is to say human is an evolution failure. It's not hard to find evidences to support both, but they hardly make a dent to both being hugely successful things in their respective fields.

Java is a great and extremely well designed language. All you mentioned are nothing but natural expansion of the language's use cases.

<comment><USER11> >To say Java is badly designed, is to say human is an evolution failure

I love lines that say so much with so little. Well said.

Java was the right language at the right time. That's why it was so successful.

<comment><USER9> > Java was the right language at the right time. That's why it was so > successful.

 _any_ moderately-usable language with a free, cross-platform compiler and a full batteries-included library for _everything_ and support for every major platform and a major vendor pushing it and the kind of global marketing PR (The Official Programming Language of Canada!) would have seen the same success as Java at the time.

The quality of the language design itself was "passable" at best, but that's all it needed to be with the forces it had pushing it and the market conditions at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Seriously not trolling, but can someone please explain why java would be a great choice of language for a modern project?

What's the sell, these days for java?

<comment><USER13> All the libraries you need. Fantastic runtime environment. Easy to hire programmers and admins who work with it. It's $HOT_NEW_THING which really needs to be sold.

<comment><USER14> Okay I buy this, and say the thing about python. It's more the ecosystem than the language.

But java has so many great languages on the JVM. That inter op flawlessly with it. Kotlin is my favorite, and allows both java and kotlin files in the same project.

The language is palpable. But I feel that there are higher level features, that can ease development and improve readability. Yes, yes the IDE can generate boiler plate. But that shouldn't be necessary.

<comment><USER15> I love Python to death, and it's my favorite language, but packaging and deploying Python apps have always been the ecosystem's Achilles heel.

It's not hard to send a Java app to a Windows user and expect them to be able to run it, which is more than I can say for Python.

And Java also has Maven, which is by far the best dependency management system I've used. It's extensible too... aside from managing dependencies, you can also have Maven perform code generation (which is wonderful if you're working with Avro) and other things (such as handling OSGi bundle metadata).

<comment><USER14> I'm mostly a python dev. But yes deployment is such a pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Amazon has been a huge user of Java, and I can't see them moving away from it in my lifetime.

I wonder what they'll have him do.

</comment><comment><USER17> Bill Vass, also formerly of Liquid Robotics is a VP at AWS, maybe had something to do with the hiring. He had James come do at least one talk while I was working at AWS, talking about the things Liquid Robotics are up to. The prohibitive cost of satellite data is just astonishing. It really emphasised to me just how much livestreaming of SpaceX rockets landing on a barge is a PR move.

</comment><comment><USER18> Maybe he'll help make Java more performant on AWS Lambda and cut down the initial startup times for the JVM!

</comment><comment><USER19> I hate oracle because in the past you need to register to download jvm. I am glad android moved to open jdk.

</comment><comment><USER20> Bored of underwater robots I guess?

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe AWS will move to Kotlin.

</comment><comment><USER21> Great, now we'll never get rid of java</comment>


Welcome C client generator as the 100th generator in OpenAPI Generator project - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/oas_generator/status/1063488038284587008 <comment><USER2> The link in the Twitter comment to save you the trip to Twitter:

[https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi- generator/pull/516](https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi- generator/pull/516)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks and here is the link to track future enhancements to the C generator: [https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi- generator/issues/147...](https://github.com/OpenAPITools/openapi- generator/issues/1473)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's Your Side Project? - <AUTHOR> It's really motivating to hear about what people are working on in the late hours at night or the wee hours of the morning.<p>So HN, what are you all working on outside of your day jobs? <comment><USER2> DevDucky, AI tool that helps engineers fully understand the company's code and product. just finished and launched the landing page. www.devducky.com I am really having fun working on this, combining my love for NLP and software engineer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow this is really freaking cool!! You just made a tool that auto documents bits of code this is incredibly useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For a while it was the Multics CPU emulator/simulator. After we got Multics to boot it was no fun anymore :-)

<comment><USER4> Getting multiple CPUs running has been quite an adventure.

<comment><USER3> Yup, sadly. I still like the idea of putting a ge635 in an FPGA. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> todo3d.app - a 3D ToDo 'list'.

Currently trying to get it working on touch screens.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hyperlocal Logistics SaaS

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you elaborate a bit more on this?

<comment><USER6> Sure. It's a courier company management tool that tracks delivery jobs, staff and clients.

We automate many repetitive tasks like order intake and have tools to surface delivery data for analysis like peak volume periods by day of the week or Geo.

The business of it has given me a venue to learn various web techs in a real production environment as well allowed me to be an active care giver to my kid and probably got me my job now considering I'm a highschool dropout.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, well good on you that sounds really good. Have a link you can share?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I Decided Not to Buy the New iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.yukarikane.com/?p=139 <comment><AUTHOR> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.yukarikane.com/%3Fp%3D139&hl=en&biw=1920&bih=955&strip=1)</comment>


Apple Just Ended the Era of Paid Operating Systems - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/

<comment><USER2> I love how Apple ended the era, when Microsoft just offered their last update for free starting last week. But enough of the Apple sensationalism, in fact, this is just not true.

The OSs are only now free as upgrades, sure this seems free from the end-user point of view, the real money is made (by Microsoft) on the licenses manufacturers and businesses pay for the OS. I suspect the 'upgrade' fees were always just a nice icing on the cake.

Furthermore, with the free upgrades, OS companies get to decide when you are forced to update your hardware. Automatically stripping the availability for hardware more than two years old (as I believe Apple have done with iOS7) means that those devices now feel ages older. Both Microsoft and Apple can play this game where devices runnning an older chip are not allowed to upgrade and possibly not allowed to run newer programs, suggesting/forcing the user to purchase new hardware.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but weren't old versions of OS 9 free back in the day?

Also, what's with the headline followed by this in the second paragraph: "And just last week, Microsoft announced that, much like Apple, it would not charge consumers who upgrade their machines to the latest version of Windows, version 8.1."

</comment><comment><USER4> MAN!

Apple is first to do everything.

First to free, first tablet, first rounded rectangle.

Amazing.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hmm, I haven't paid for a Linux distribution since I started using it over ten years ago.</comment>


Build an Ncurses UI with Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuxradar.com/content/code-project-build-ncurses-ui-python <comment><USER2> or, use <http://excess.org/urwid/> , which contains awesomeness.

<comment><USER3> Including the ability to support the colors available in modern terminals (ie, Linux, OS X). I needed to do a subtle zebra striping for an analysis tool and ncurses couldn't do the job. urwid, however, can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The last interactive cli app I wrote was on a calculator, but I might have to make one for site maintenance tasks now, just for the hell of it. I've been writing Python since 2007 and I swear I still discover a new standard library almost every day.

</comment><comment><USER5> "[Rob Pike] is a Canadian citizen and has never written a program that uses cursor addressing."</comment>


World's largest radio telescope starts formal operation - <AUTHOR> http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/11/c_138696973.htm <comment><USER2> Can someone tell me how you 'point' one of these things? It looks very 'concreted into the ground'...

<comment><USER3> The gantry moves around on the cables held by the pylons on the edges. If it were a transmitter, the beam of radio waves would shoot out in a different direction based on what part of the surface it was illuminating. However, the really clever thing about FAST is that the surface is not just a passive metal net like Arecibo, but an active surface of triangular panels. The panels reform the normally spherical surface into a parabola. So you can imagine the surface deforming as the gantry shuttles overhead to make the correct optical surface. This is pretty hard to do right, so most observations so far have been setting the surface to look straight up and leaving the gantry in place, observing a stripe as the sky passes overhead.

<comment><USER2> Ahhh, gotcha. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just for comparison: FAST has a diameter of 500m, wavelength 0.10 cm. Arecibo diameter 305m, wavelength 3 cm. Focal lengths are comparable; FAST has nearly 3 times the collecting area.

</comment><comment><USER5> What is the advantage of having one big telescope instead of 100 small "telescopes" that make one big radio interferometry telescope?

<comment><USER3> One advantage is that it is much easier to create multi-pixel receiver systems. Having two receivers at the focus is like having two telescopes! So for survey science, it is much more economical than building 50 telescopes with a total equivalent area and one receiver each than building one telescope and 50 receivers.

However the main reasons we often don't build big single dishes is that (1) it's very hard to keep the surfaces from deforming from gravity and heat (the GBT for example needs to be accurate to 0.2mm over two acres of surface), and (2) the bigger the telescope gets the bigger the sail with respect to the wind, which makes it hard to point and keep the pointing accurate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article mentions a theme park at the telescope. I'd think there is a radio quiet zone around it.

<comment><USER7> I think the interference that is caused by visitors to the theme park is limited, since the cell phone / WiFi bandwidths are around 800 MHz to 5 GHz and the operating range of the telescope is 70 MHz to (max) 3 GHz. I think the focus of most research will be in the lower part of that spectral range, i.e. the frequencies that are not emitted by consumer devices.

Edit: the directivity of such a large telescope is also big. Around 45 dBi at the lowest frequency (70 MHz). That means the telescope is not very sensitive to radiation from sources near the horizon and more sensitive to radiation coming from it's pointing direction (closer to zenith).

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately this is not the case for a few reasons. The radio observatories in the US with visitor centers nearby have substantial problems with RFI among visitors. The receivers are extremely sensitive, shoddy electronics often emit outside their regulated spectrum, and the signal can be contaminated after it's been converted from the sky frequency to an intermediate frequency inside the electronics (often around 1 GHz) despite shielding. At Kitt Peak, observations with the VLBA station during the day are often nuked (esp. 2 GHz, "S Band"), and at the VLA many large programs aren't even scheduled when there will be many visitors. However this is known and acceptable because visitors are the lifeblood of the facility! It's a bit of a catch-22, because it means the facility is less functional, but it shows citizens why they should support the facility with their tax dollars and also support science in general.

For FAST, one must understand that this could not be smaller potatoes for the PRC, as big as it is. A hundred million dollars for a government project is a rounding error. However, the excellence of the design and it being the best in the world on some metrics has engaged the Chinese public in a huge way. Consider how popular space is with the public in the US and Europe, and that the PRC has not really had a world leading facility (Hubble, Keck/VLT, VLA, ALMA, etc.) to engage that latent interest. I have heard an anecdote from an astronomer that they have gotten so much bang for their bunk in this way, that the government may simply build a second one and keep the first for tourists!</comment></comment></comment>